Fiction For Children Second World Fantasy
Through the Looking Glass as Second World Fantasy Fantasy, as Edmund Little contends in his study The fantasts: Studies in J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peak, Nikolay Gogol and Kenneth Grahame, is almost impossible to define as a literary genre. According to Little, all fiction is a fantasy, even when it claims to be objective or when it seems realistic to the mind's eye (Little, 3). Adopting Tolkien's view of the fantastic, Little argues that, in a fantasy, the reader is introduced to a Secondary World, as opposed to the Primary World which is the universe as we know it. These two terms are used so as to avoid the word "reality", which is obviously only an arbitrary definition. The main requirement is that this Secondary World have "inner consistency"(Little, 2), so as to be probable. Through the Looking Glass continues Alice's adventures in another wonderland, this time the world in the mirror, or the looking glass. As Little emphasizes, the otherworld represented in a fantasy is necessarily related to the Primary World in some way. In Through the Looking Glass, the connection is given by the mirror itself, which serves as a medium through which Alice passes from one reality to another. Following an exact although ma
Its main feature is the reversed logic, designed to contradict all the known laws of the Primary World. "(Carroll, 25) The series of paradoxes continues, as the Queen offers Alice a dry biscuit after the race, to soothe her thirst. Carroll's work is clearly not an allegory or a satire, as Gulliver's Travels is for instance. "(Little, 52)Thus, Carroll's fantasy is a Secondary World which contradicts the Primary World, by reversing all its features. The structure of the otherworld only seems chaotic, when in fact it emulates the perfect logic of a game of chess. When she finds herself on the train, Alice is told that she is traveling the wrong way, and in fact everything that is happening to her seems to be 'wrong': "At last he said, `You're traveling the wrong way,' and shut up the window and went away. An interesting thing about this Secondary World described by Carroll is that besides the eerie feeling it produces, it always conveys a strange impression of anxiety, obviously determined by the fact that everything contradicts logic and comes as a surprise or a wonder to Alice. The child is caught in a wonderful world, but she does not know its rules, and, as in her previous adventures, she is frequently baffled. "(Carroll, 28) Next, when Alice meets a Gnat and converses with it she discovers that he becomes incredibly sad when he hears a joke or even tells it himself: "`You shouldn't make jokes,' Alice said, `if it makes you so unhappy. The wood where a nothing and no one bear a name is a trope for this idea: the things we are so used to may not be so easily and concretely defined: "`This must be the wood, she said thoughtfully to herself, `where things have no names. As Little puts forth, the world in the looking glass is governed by a "controlled illogic"(Little, 52). '"(Carroll, 35) Alice's world is thus filled with reversed or twisted effects and reactions, seeming completely absurd at times. The fiction thus provokes the audience to play with the elements of the Primary World as we know it and re-imagine it. While there are no traces of magic as such, this Secondary World is obviously a charmed and charming territory in which most of the things are the reverse of what we find in the Primary World.
Common topics in this essay:
Secondary World,
Primary World,
Gulliver's Travels,
Looking Glass,
Red Queen,
World Carroll's,
Garden Alice,
Lewis Carroll's,
According Little,
World Little,
primary world,
looking glass,
secondary world,
world looking glass,
structure otherworld,
world looking,
world mirror,
traveling wrong,
chess board,
game chess,
alice's world,
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Acceptance Essays
