Redefining the grotesque body: Alice’s curious appetite and laughter.

Lewis C. Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are novels that through their distortions of the real diverge from mainstream Victorian realism. By foregrounding the discrepancy between the grotesque universe of Alice’s Wonderland and the harsh lived reality of Victorian society, these novels can be used to offer perspectives into an alternative world that is reflected of the grotesque to expose the Victorian society’s refusal to acknowledge reality. Carroll uses both grotesque imagery and modes of expression to mock the frivolity of the Victorian obsession for body alteration and appearance-based identities by subverting what is normal into an anomaly. The grotesque physicality and emotionality Alice encounters, her bodily metamorphosis and breakdown of fixed identities––seen as a rebellion against Victorian values, remains a continuous metaphor that is also absolutely essential for both the mental growth and development of any young innocent Victorian girl child into womanhood. On the whole, the grotesque rendering of the Alice novels allows us to revisit and re-examine Victorian ideology and its modes of representation in ways that rebel against the hyper logical, giving new perspectives on the everyday reality of life.Bachelor of Art