Grow Up, Alice: Identity Development through Nonsense in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

In 1865 and 1871, Lewis Carroll wrote two novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, that would be read and analyzed continually. The readers fell in love with Alice’s curious young character. Critics have written about her extensively, but have yet to recognize just how much of an influence her social and linguistic encounters in each of the three worlds (Alice’s ordinary world, Wonderland, and the Looking Glass world) represented within the two novels have had her identity development. In order to illustrate how Alice’s nonsensical social and linguistic educational experiences have influenced her identity development upon returning to her ordinary world, this paper provides three detailed chapters that explicitly highlight the relationship between society, language use and communication, and Alice’s identity development