Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

German psychologist Sigmund Freud would not invent psychoanalysis until the end of the 19th century, nearly 35 years after Wonderland’s publication. Nevertheless, critics have fruitfully used psychoanalysis to analyze the novel.

Freud developed psychoanalysis as a means to treat his patients’ psychological suffering. The theory emphasizes childhood development as the primary factor contributing to both normal and aberrant adult behaviors, and it focuses on repressed traumas and desires that exert a powerful influence in the unconscious mind. His first truly psychoanalytic publication was The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899. The book analyzes and explains various examples of dream logic.

Wonderland is a perfect text for Freudian analysis because, first of all, its scenario—a story about a young girl in a fantasy land—resonates so well with Freudian concerns, especially in the early days of psychoanalysis. In Wonderland, a young girl on the verge of puberty has a dream that leads her on a symbolic journey through a fantasy world. Secondly, as is mentioned in the section of this guide on the motif of irrational space and time, both Carroll and Freud approached dreams from uniquely modern perspectives. Both were interested, although in different ways, in the idea that a kind of logic underlay or was intertwined with the illogic of dreams. Thirdly, psychoanalytic theory’s understanding of language and pleasure created an influential paradigm for understanding the attraction and the meaning of nonsense and wordplay.

Psychoanalytic interpretations are, in general, “symptomatic” interpretations. This means that the text isn’t read in terms of what the author meant to convey, but in terms of how it works—its language and its sense—in light of psychoanalytic theories about the mind. In the same way that genre analysis invites an interpretation of the book in terms of coming-of-age narratives, psychoanalysis invites interpretation in terms of developmental theory and the psychology of childhood. Themes in the book such as identity, Alice’s confusion, her struggles for mastery, and changes in her size all lend themselves to this framework of interpretation.

Some of the elements of Wonderland that are considered to have Freudian connotations are: first, the rabbit hole, a long, dark tunnel representing the womb; second, Alice fanning herself and the pool of tears as masturbatory imagery; third, the Caterpillar and his hookah, phallic symbols that present Alice with the threat of male sexuality; and fourth, the garden and the white roses painted red, representing female sexual development.

The Freudian theory of ego development has also provided an important framework for understanding the pleasure of nonsense language and wordplay. In the theory, the development of the ego or the “I” occurs through suppression of the id, in balance with and under the influence of the superego. The id seeks pleasure and anarchic freedom, while the superego consists of all the punitive and regulatory (and sometimes rewarding) forces of adult authority and morality. In psychoanalytic linguistic theory, the pleasure of nonsense and wordplay is the pleasure of the release of impulses from the id, a bodily experience of words as physical things. From this interpretive vantage, Wonderland’s interest in nonsense and wordplay, like its use of dreams and dream logic, is a site for the dramatization of eruptions of the id.

This idea is also touched on in the analysis of wordplay and the deconstruction of meaning in the Themes section. Recall that Alice’s first attempt to orient herself in Wonderland is by reciting a poem called “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” a didactic poem about hard work and self-control—in psychoanalytic terms, the values of the superego. However, Alice rewrites the poem in such a way that id elements predominate: Her version goes, “How doth the little crocodile,” a poem about a crocodile who sits idly as fish swim into its open jaws. Alice’s subversion of the poem celebrates enjoyment and easy pleasure and even a kind of happy violence, rather than self-control.

Psychoanalysis, then, can be said to have a privileged place in readings of Wonderland. It isn’t the only valid approach by any means, but the theory accounts in interesting ways for elements in the book as diverse as its focus on dreaming and dream logic, its story and plot elements, and its use of word play and language.