Youth, Identity, and Growing Up Theme Analysis

Though written several years after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass picks up a mere six months after Alice's first experience in a nonsensical, dreamlike world. Now "seven and a half, exactly," Alice falls asleep one November day while playing with her kittens, climbs through the mirror over the fireplace, and finds herself in Looking-glass House and the giant chessboard surrounding it. Once Alice gets her bearings and joins the chess game—first as a pawn, but with the goal of becoming a queen—she symbolically starts to come of age and eventually reaches a version of adulthood when she's crowned queen. However, Alice's journey makes it clear that navigating childhood on the way to adulthood is a lonely process, and the end goal—adulthood—is, at best, a questionable one.

Because Through the Looking-Glass is seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice's dream, it's possible to read Alice's struggles and anxieties in Looking-glass World as reflections of her anxieties about growing up in the real world. In many cases, Through the Looking-Glass suggests that being a child and growing up are lonely states of being. The novel opens with Alice talking to her cats, Dinah, Kitty, and Snowdrop. While the narrator mentions Alice's sister at several points in passing, Alice appears to be very much alone with the cats and, eventually, with the beings that spring into existence in her mind. Even when Alice does find herself in the company of other people, she remains lonely: in Looking-glass World, Alice feels unable to voice many of her thoughts to others in an attempt to remain polite and in others' good graces. The reader, for instance, is the only one privy to the fact that figuring out how to shake hands with Tweedledee and Tweedledum is an intensely difficult experience: what if she offends one by shaking the other's hand first? Even characters who insist they're there to help her, like the Gnat or the White Knight, don't provide much support and Alice is still effectively left to her own devices to navigate the chessboard and the larger project of growing up.

The novel also suggests that reckoning with one's rapidly changing identity is a key part of growing up, even (or especially) when others aren't much help in this process. At several points, Alice has to think critically about who she is and, more broadly, what the names of things are even for. When Alice and the Gnat discuss the names of different insects, the Gnat demands to know whether the insects in Alice's world respond to their names. Upon learning that they don't, the Gnat is shocked. Alice, however, suggests that there's more to a name than referring to an individual: a name, she proposes, will help others figure out who or what something is. With this, the novel suggests that identity goes two ways: it's both something personal to an individual, and it helps other people fit that individual into their conception of the world.

Similarly, Humpty Dumpty is derisive when he learns Alice's name: in addition to declaring it "stupid," he suggests that names must mean something. According to Humpty Dumpty, his name refers to his shape, while "With a name like [Alice], [she] might be any shape, almost." To him, "Alice" tells him nothing about who the child in front of him is. This episode in particular (especially when considered alongside Alice's experience in a wood in which travelers forget all nouns, including their names) suggests that childhood is a state of potential. A child can grow up to be anything or anyone, but the novel also suggests that the results of this potential aren't always positive. After Alice leaves the wood, for instance, the Fawn who helped her heartbreakingly remembers its own identity, and consequently that it's supposed to be scared of humans like Alice. The Fawn's experience of learning its name leads to fear and isolation, a turn of events that foreshadows Alice's unsatisfying reign as queen at the end of the novel. For both Alice and the Fawn, remembering their names represents a form of self-knowledge—but in this case, that self-knowledge closes doors, rather than opening them or giving Alice more power to interpret or move through Looking-glass World.

Though Alice wants to be a queen throughout the novel, actually becoming a queen is far less rewarding than she likely anticipated. Upon crossing into the Eighth Square, Alice discovers that there's a crown on her head, signifying her royalty—but it's not comfortable, and Alice struggles to figure out how to move and balance with it. Further, Alice is denied all the food at a dinner party in her honor, and the party itself takes place under questionable circumstances: the Red Queen and the White Queen both insist that Alice is the one throwing the party, while Alice, upon arriving at the location of the party, can barely figure out how to get into the building. Taking the party as a metaphor for adulthood, Alice's experience suggests that while adulthood may look desirable to children, and while childhood may simultaneously seem anxiety-inducing and difficult, being a child might be better on a whole: upon waking, Alice happily resumes chatting to her cats with wonder and nostalgia about her time in Looking-glass World. With this, Carroll seems to suggest that part of the joy of being a child is dreaming about what adulthood might be like, without having to actually tackle the hardships and difficulties that come with the territory. Similarly, adults would do well to take adulthood less seriously and remember the joys of childhood at every opportunity.