Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Essay Prompt: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland offer its readers many ways of imagining the struggles and difficulties of childhood. What kind of lessons, if any, does Alice learn? What is the usefulness of the learning she has whilst in Wonderland? Her escape from the normative world into the fantastical one is through dreaming: consider the role of make-believe imagination, fantasy, and dreaming in this novel; what do we make of these things, relative to education or social etiquette? Why are there conflicting logics in this novel- the logic of emotions conflicts with that of math and reason- and what are we to make of these conflicts, whether for a child or especially for a girl? How does carroll’s novel attempt to proscribe gender roles to girls and engender the idealized girl?