Alice in Wonderland is a famous book that asks what is real and what is not. What is reality. To look past the words used, and understand there meaning. A very psychedelic story about a child who falls asleep while reading a book and has many strange encounters with different animals and substances. When she consumes the substances such as drinks or mushrooms, she controls her growth. When she talks to the different animals they speak to her with madness like the Mad Hatter or wise philosophy such as the Cattapillar who sits on a "magic mushroom" and smokes his hookah. Each character has thier acute part in helping Alice gain mature wisdom, and get past childish nonsense .
             The meaning of words is a huge part of this book. If you pay attention you pick up on the metaphors.
             Food is the used in this novel as a metaphor for growth. The author is literalizing the old idea that food helps you grow big and strong, that food is the path to adulthood. Ironically, Carroll is also pointing out that growing up is only half the way to adulthood. Alice can control her size and therefore her position as an adult with the food provided by the Caterpillar, but it isn't until the Cheshire Cat shows her the dangers of adulthood that she is able to be truly adult. Food can make you big in Wonderland (as in life) but only compassion and experience can make you wise.
             Red is the symbol of adulthood (literally it can be taken to refer to menstrual blood, and thus fertility and vigor). The Queen and Alice are on opposite sides of this color, Alice just growing into her adulthood, the Queen just growing past it. It is over this place, this wise middle ground, that the novel fights. Red is, hopefully, a place (or an age) of balance between rules and mercy, between young and old, between wisdom and nonsense.
             The author's usage of words and metaphors creates this coming of age story. Alice must learn that
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