Dreaming (and) Insanity: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Through the Looking-Glass of Victorian Psychology

This article compares Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Victorian medical essays from Carroll's library to show how the novel's nonsense—linguistic and cognitive incongruities, identity confusion, forgetfulness, and distorted time—draws on mid-nineteenth-century psychological ideas about the similarities between sleeping and madness. It demonstrates that before psychoanalysis emerged in the 1930s, Victorian writers of psychology used Alice's Adventures to illustrate their theories. The article explores the two-way influence between the novel and Victorian psychology, arguing that Carroll portrays Wonderland as a place where childhood dreaming and adult insanity converge, offering escape from everyday reality into the absurdities of nonsense.

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Abstract

Comparing Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) with medical essays found in Carroll’s private library, this article argues that an examination of Alice’s Adventures “through the looking-glass” of Victorian psychology can generate new perspectives of the novel. It demonstrates that Carroll’s literary treatment of nonsense—illustrated by the characters’ linguistic and cognitive incongruities, identity issues, forgetfulness, and altered perception of time—builds upon mid-nineteenth-century psychological investigations of the similarities between sleeping and madness. This article also shows that while little is known about the meanings that psychology and psychiatry bestowed upon the novel before the emergence of psychoanalysis in the 1930s, Alice’s Adventures supplied Victorian writers of psychology with a means of illustrating their ideas. My exploration of the two-way influence between Alice’s Adventures and Victorian psychology aims to shine a light on Carroll’s representation of the madness that characterizes Alice’s dreamworld of Wonderland. By likening Alice’s behavior to that of the “mad” characters in the novel, Carroll portrays Wonderland as a place where childhood dreaming and adult insanity converge in their capacity to provide escape from dull, everyday reality into the absurdities of nonsense.