Incognito : transcending dreams in Alice’s adventures in wonderland, through the looking-glass and a christmas carol.

Abstract

This paper focuses on transcending dreams in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I will explore how dreams come to create a space for subversive desires in a morally uptight Victorian society guarded by strict codes of conduct, and how it threatens Alice's and Scrooge's authority to express themselves as individuals through words language. The issue with Authority and how it is closely intertwined with the concepts of Language and Identity is also explored, where we see language as a tool both allowing and disallowing the formation of Identity, as we shall see from the characters’ famous who and what are you related questions. The technique of using the dream as an interpretive device to uncover the “dreamer’s desires” revolves around both characters having a repressed want to possess a certain feature of their lives which they are deprived of. In the case of Alice and Scrooge, what they seek to possess is authority over their own lives. Language hence comes to play an essential role in the establishment of both characters’ sense of self, and a direct dictation of how much power one has over oneself and others.