Broken Mirror: Dissolved Community in 'Alice in Wonderland' does”” (Carroll 62). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Whimsical and fanciful, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland depicts a place where community rules and shared understandings dissolved. The inhabitants of Wonderland fail to form a community even though they share a common space. Interpersonal relationships lack the mutuality to which Alice is accustomed, and individual trajectories do not seem to alter even when they intersect. As Richard Kelly argues: “Everyone is alone and isolated in Wonderland” (77). The “madness” that Alice perceives has its roots in this pathological individualism; where personal freedom is taken to the extreme at the interpersonal level, a pervasive arbitrariness materializes. Unlike the wise and helpful creatures found in fairy tales and folklore, the inhabitants of Wonderland appear to be warlike and self-righteous. Ironically, Alice is more right than she thinks when she wonders if she will "fall through the earth...[to] antipathies" (Carroll 21). As Alice later observes: “It's really dreadful...the way all the creatures argue. It's crazy! (Carroll 60). Yet the creatures' failure to provide a support network for Alice is only symptomatic of an even more confusing phenomenon: their inability to form a cohesive social unit that the protagonist can perceive. Carroll frees the inhabitants of Wonderland from any obligation to behave in a certain way not only towards Alice, but also towards each other. Freed from the social conventions that dictate how individuals must interact with others, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare thus find themselves arbitrarily "trying to put the Dormouse in a teapot" (Carroll 75) during a tea party – a setting traditionally embodying etiquette and propriety. Rules and norms provide an infrastructure for the community and social cohesion dissolves in their absence. This dissolution gives rise to a high degree of personal independence, but consequently causes the creatures of Wonderland to interact "in a confusing manner" (Carroll 35). As the Caucus race illustrates, disorder reigns when there are no common rules: the creatures "started running when they wanted, and stopped when they wanted, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over” (Carroll 35). ). As Richard Kelly notes in “Dream Child,” “the caucus race can be read more significantly as a metaphor for the whole story” (79), in that individual creatures behave according to their own whims. To the extent that community involves "sharing, participation, and companionship" (The American Heritage Dictionary) in the norms that orchestrate behavior, the creatures of Wonderland seem to revel in the anarchy of their individualism. Because that the community depends on common agreement to uphold certain standards, individual freedom must be sacrificed for it Yet, even when it comes to law, the creatures of Wonderland fail to trade in personal freedom. against justice and order When the king asks: “Give your testimony” (Carroll 108) during the trial of the Knave of Hearts, the cook.responds, “I won’t” (Carroll 108). The chaos of the trial demonstrates the arbitrariness of the law – or lack thereof – in Wonderland. Although the trial somewhat resembles a courtroom proceeding with a judge, jury, and witnesses, no "good" evidence is ever provided and the case does not move forward. The anarchy that Alice perceives does not only come from an absence of shared consensus. rules, but also of a dissolution of the very logic on which the rules are based. This fundamental logic of causality dictates that positive consequences arise from following the rules while negative consequences arise from non-compliance with the rules. Yet, “in Wonderland, where Alice is repeatedly freed from the difficult situations in which her recklessness has entangled her, the theory of natural reward and punishment…collapses completely” (Mulderig 324). Actions lose their normal causal potential and are freed from the obligation to produce effects. Although the cook "set to work throwing everything within her reach at the duchess and the baby --- the irons... the pots, the plates and the dishes [---]... the duchess paid no attention to it, even when they hit her… [and] it was quite impossible to say whether the blows had injured him [the baby] or not” (Carroll 61). As critic Gerald P. Mulderig notes, “The most curious fact about life in Wonderland…. is that we are never held responsible for our actions. Falls into burrows end with a slight jolt. The cook can act as she pleases, as she is neither reprimanded nor even noticed for her actions. Although throwing objects at others normally elicits negative reactions, the cook's actions possess no such causality. Throwing things is just throwing things; no causality transforms him into hurting others or being punished. When each person's actions do not impact others, individuals are free from each other. Furthermore, in this world where “everyone minds…his own business” (Carroll 62), the tyranny of causality no longer reigns; Individualism erases the logic familiar to Alice, leading her to diagnose the events of Wonderland as arbitrary. Even when actions produce consequences, arbitrariness corrupts the causal relationship. In Wonderland, consequences are not fixed; even if the same action can be repeated, there is no guarantee that it will produce the same effect. Before her discovery of the mushroom, Alice consumes various foods and drinks that change her physical size in unpredictable ways. Alice is “only ten inches tall” (Carroll 24) the first time she drinks from a bottle labeled “DRINK ME” (Carroll 23). However, upon drinking the second bottle, labeled the same way, she quickly grew taller and found herself "her head pressed against the ceiling and had to duck to keep her neck from breaking" (Carroll 41). If Alice had known that she would be stuck in the White Rabbit's house after drinking this drink, she probably wouldn't have done it. But because of the impossibility of even predicting the effects of an action, potential consequences do not function as concrete incentives or obstacles. In essence, the destruction of causality frees Alice from the past. As Kelly notes, “the language, characters, and scenes of Wonderland are essentially discrete. Attempts to merge them lead to misunderstandings. Therefore,... Alice cannot evaluate past experiences and can only look forward to new ones..." (80 ). Arbitrariness characterizes the relationship between the past and the present. Consequently, the demystification of theCausation invalidates the past as a repository of guidelines for future action and allows Alice to act without being inhibited by what happened before. Free to act according to her whims, Alice comes to respect the principle of individualism which guides behavior in Wonderland. Without realizing it, she has become as “crazy” as the other creatures. The “crazy” individualism of Wonderland behavior is found at the linguistic level; the creatures refuse to cede linguistic freedom for the benefit of community understanding. Dialogues, for example, often sound like two monologues spoken simultaneously, because the participants' words seem unrelated. At the Mad Tea Party, for example, the Hatter responds, "Your hair wants to be cut" (Carroll 68) after Alice notes, "I didn't know that was your table...it's set for well over three people. » (Carroll 68). It's as if the Hatter hasn't even heard Alice, because his response seems to be a completely arbitrary non-sequitur. Uninhibited by verbal customs, the Hatter is free to say what he wants when he wants. The Hatter demonstrates what Gordon Hirsch describes as "an inability or unwillingness to share levels of communication... Whatever the cause, the characters' problems in creating a conversational world in which words, phrases, and sentences have common communicative meanings are clear and striking. (88). Individualism dominates the language of Wonderland not only in the sense that verbal exchanges are free from shared traditional protocols, but also in the sense that the language itself is often produced freely according to personal and private processes. Conventional language is established through a community process in which a group of individuals agree on the associations between words and what they mean. Individuals can only be understood by others if both parties participate in the same communication process. “Carroll was well aware of the essentially arbitrary nature of the relationship between the linguistic sign and its referent long before Ferdinand se Saussure showed that such a principle is axiomatic for all linguistic systems” (Baum 69). In Wonderland, however, individual creatures often assign subjective meanings to words and speech, rather than coming together to agree on arbitrary associations. Personal expression finds its way into personalized language, rather than being channeled through predefined linguistic conventions. The exchange preceding the Caucus Race illustrates this individualist phenomenon: . . said the mouse. ". . . Edwin and Morcar . . . found it advisable ---" "Found what?" said the Duck. “I found it,” replied the mouse, rather irritated: “of course, you know what “it” means.” “I know pretty well what “it” means, when I find something,” said the Duck: "It's usually a frog, or a worm". . . (Carroll 34) Carroll highlights the subjectivity of the Duck's definition of "it" by italicizing the Duck's "I" and following it with qualifications specific to the Duck's diet. Although the Duck and the Mouse refer to the same word, their interpretations of "that" do not coincide. This exchange highlights “creatures’ inability to focus on shared ideas and feelings, so much so that communication between individuals is significantly disrupted” (Hirsch 87). Language becomes arbitrary to the extent that individuals give contradictory meanings to the same linguistic vehicles. Every creature opts for freedom from the perspective of others. InAccordingly, Carroll delights in puns because they exploit the subjectivity of language so effectively through their ability to convey more than one meaning simultaneously. This is how Alice does not understand how “the mouse's tail [(tale)]” (37) can be “sad” in addition to “long”. Although puns are also used in conventional English, they are normally followed by tacit understanding. In Wonderland, however, the listener does not notice when words are used as puns, and the speaker cannot understand the listener's confusion. The listener and speaker fail to participate in each other's linguistic system. Even when the creatures of Wonderland participate in the same language, no shared linguistic register exists between them and Alice. For example, when Alice asks the Duchess: "Please, could you tell me... why your cat smiles like that?" (Carroll 61), she receives the following response: "He's a Cheshire cat...and that's why" (Carroll 61). The creatures define a smiling cat as a "Cheshire Cat", but Alice is unaware of the other couples in their personal language. Thus, during the “crazy tea party” (Carroll 68-76), Alice cannot understand the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse, even though all four exchange words at the same table. As Alice reflects, “the Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no meaning, and yet it was certainly English” (Carroll 70). In “Double Binds and Schizophrenogenic Conversations: Readings in Three Middle Chapters of Alice in Wonderland,” Gordon Hirsch makes a revealing comparison between Wonderland interactions and “patterns of thought and communication” (86). Fragmented, ambivalent, and full of double meanings, schizophrenic language and Wonderland language are used "in expressive and personal ways rather than to communicate shared meaning or engage in genuine dialogue" (Hirsch 97). While language is generally used to establish common ground or bond individuals, the language of Wonderland paradoxically has an alienating and anti-communal effect. His visit to the March Hare's house is so strange that Alice leaves in disgust: "It's the stupidest tea party. I've always been there all my life!" (Carroll 76). Creatures are so excessive in their own individualism that they do not recognize the separate individualism of other creatures. While normal communities allow individual freedom to the point that it does not infringe on the freedom of others, this qualification does not exist in Wonderland. Rather, creatures fail to respect or even recognize the validity of identities outside themselves. Hirsch notes the egocentrism that arises from this excessive personal freedom exercised during the Mad Tea Party:. . . centerpiece of social life in this culture [the life of the English middle class of the 19th century], the tea ceremony offers above all the opportunity to overcome an egocentric vision of personal relationships. . . [Yet] it is clear that at the Wonderland tea party, no one will give Alice her own cup of tea or recognize her as a real person with whom there could be meaningful communication and interaction based on mutual respect. (100) It could be argued that the "madness" of Wonderland does not stem from exaggerated individuality but rather from a simple lack of logic or reason. Yet while the actions may seem illogical at first, they actually seem to make sense in a way that is simply unknown to Alice. "Carroll's absurdities are not nonsense, that is to say devoid of.

Essay / Broken Mirror: Dissolved Community in 'Alice in Wonderland' does”” (Carroll 62). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Whimsical and fanciful, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland depicts a place where community rules and shared understandings dissolved. The inhabitants of Wonderland fail to form a community even though they share a common space. Interpersonal relationships lack the mutuality to which Alice is accustomed, and individual trajectories do not seem to alter even when they intersect. As Richard Kelly argues: “Everyone is alone and isolated in Wonderland” (77). The “madness” that Alice perceives has its roots in this pathological individualism; where personal freedom is taken to the extreme at the interpersonal level, a pervasive arbitrariness materializes. Unlike the wise and helpful creatures found in fairy tales and folklore, the inhabitants of Wonderland appear to be warlike and self-righteous. Ironically, Alice is more right than she thinks when she wonders if she will "fall through the earth...[to] antipathies" (Carroll 21). As Alice later observes: “It's really dreadful...the way all the creatures argue. It's crazy! (Carroll 60). Yet the creatures' failure to provide a support network for Alice is only symptomatic of an even more confusing phenomenon: their inability to form a cohesive social unit that the protagonist can perceive. Carroll frees the inhabitants of Wonderland from any obligation to behave in a certain way not only towards Alice, but also towards each other. Freed from the social conventions that dictate how individuals must interact with others, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare thus find themselves arbitrarily "trying to put the Dormouse in a teapot" (Carroll 75) during a tea party – a setting traditionally embodying etiquette and propriety. Rules and norms provide an infrastructure for the community and social cohesion dissolves in their absence. This dissolution gives rise to a high degree of personal independence, but consequently causes the creatures of Wonderland to interact "in a confusing manner" (Carroll 35). As the Caucus race illustrates, disorder reigns when there are no common rules: the creatures "started running when they wanted, and stopped when they wanted, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over” (Carroll 35). ). As Richard Kelly notes in “Dream Child,” “the caucus race can be read more significantly as a metaphor for the whole story” (79), in that individual creatures behave according to their own whims. To the extent that community involves "sharing, participation, and companionship" (The American Heritage Dictionary) in the norms that orchestrate behavior, the creatures of Wonderland seem to revel in the anarchy of their individualism. Because that the community depends on common agreement to uphold certain standards, individual freedom must be sacrificed for it Yet, even when it comes to law, the creatures of Wonderland fail to trade in personal freedom. against justice and order When the king asks: “Give your testimony” (Carroll 108) during the trial of the Knave of Hearts, the cook.responds, “I won’t” (Carroll 108). The chaos of the trial demonstrates the arbitrariness of the law – or lack thereof – in Wonderland. Although the trial somewhat resembles a courtroom proceeding with a judge, jury, and witnesses, no "good" evidence is ever provided and the case does not move forward. The anarchy that Alice perceives does not only come from an absence of shared consensus. rules, but also of a dissolution of the very logic on which the rules are based. This fundamental logic of causality dictates that positive consequences arise from following the rules while negative consequences arise from non-compliance with the rules. Yet, “in Wonderland, where Alice is repeatedly freed from the difficult situations in which her recklessness has entangled her, the theory of natural reward and punishment…collapses completely” (Mulderig 324). Actions lose their normal causal potential and are freed from the obligation to produce effects. Although the cook "set to work throwing everything within her reach at the duchess and the baby --- the irons... the pots, the plates and the dishes [---]... the duchess paid no attention to it, even when they hit her… [and] it was quite impossible to say whether the blows had injured him [the baby] or not” (Carroll 61). As critic Gerald P. Mulderig notes, “The most curious fact about life in Wonderland…. is that we are never held responsible for our actions. Falls into burrows end with a slight jolt. The cook can act as she pleases, as she is neither reprimanded nor even noticed for her actions. Although throwing objects at others normally elicits negative reactions, the cook's actions possess no such causality. Throwing things is just throwing things; no causality transforms him into hurting others or being punished. When each person's actions do not impact others, individuals are free from each other. Furthermore, in this world where “everyone minds…his own business” (Carroll 62), the tyranny of causality no longer reigns; Individualism erases the logic familiar to Alice, leading her to diagnose the events of Wonderland as arbitrary. Even when actions produce consequences, arbitrariness corrupts the causal relationship. In Wonderland, consequences are not fixed; even if the same action can be repeated, there is no guarantee that it will produce the same effect. Before her discovery of the mushroom, Alice consumes various foods and drinks that change her physical size in unpredictable ways. Alice is “only ten inches tall” (Carroll 24) the first time she drinks from a bottle labeled “DRINK ME” (Carroll 23). However, upon drinking the second bottle, labeled the same way, she quickly grew taller and found herself "her head pressed against the ceiling and had to duck to keep her neck from breaking" (Carroll 41). If Alice had known that she would be stuck in the White Rabbit's house after drinking this drink, she probably wouldn't have done it. But because of the impossibility of even predicting the effects of an action, potential consequences do not function as concrete incentives or obstacles. In essence, the destruction of causality frees Alice from the past. As Kelly notes, “the language, characters, and scenes of Wonderland are essentially discrete. Attempts to merge them lead to misunderstandings. Therefore,... Alice cannot evaluate past experiences and can only look forward to new ones..." (80 ). Arbitrariness characterizes the relationship between the past and the present. Consequently, the demystification of theCausation invalidates the past as a repository of guidelines for future action and allows Alice to act without being inhibited by what happened before. Free to act according to her whims, Alice comes to respect the principle of individualism which guides behavior in Wonderland. Without realizing it, she has become as “crazy” as the other creatures. The “crazy” individualism of Wonderland behavior is found at the linguistic level; the creatures refuse to cede linguistic freedom for the benefit of community understanding. Dialogues, for example, often sound like two monologues spoken simultaneously, because the participants' words seem unrelated. At the Mad Tea Party, for example, the Hatter responds, "Your hair wants to be cut" (Carroll 68) after Alice notes, "I didn't know that was your table...it's set for well over three people. » (Carroll 68). It's as if the Hatter hasn't even heard Alice, because his response seems to be a completely arbitrary non-sequitur. Uninhibited by verbal customs, the Hatter is free to say what he wants when he wants. The Hatter demonstrates what Gordon Hirsch describes as "an inability or unwillingness to share levels of communication... Whatever the cause, the characters' problems in creating a conversational world in which words, phrases, and sentences have common communicative meanings are clear and striking. (88). Individualism dominates the language of Wonderland not only in the sense that verbal exchanges are free from shared traditional protocols, but also in the sense that the language itself is often produced freely according to personal and private processes. Conventional language is established through a community process in which a group of individuals agree on the associations between words and what they mean. Individuals can only be understood by others if both parties participate in the same communication process. “Carroll was well aware of the essentially arbitrary nature of the relationship between the linguistic sign and its referent long before Ferdinand se Saussure showed that such a principle is axiomatic for all linguistic systems” (Baum 69). In Wonderland, however, individual creatures often assign subjective meanings to words and speech, rather than coming together to agree on arbitrary associations. Personal expression finds its way into personalized language, rather than being channeled through predefined linguistic conventions. The exchange preceding the Caucus Race illustrates this individualist phenomenon: . . said the mouse. ". . . Edwin and Morcar . . . found it advisable ---" "Found what?" said the Duck. “I found it,” replied the mouse, rather irritated: “of course, you know what “it” means.” “I know pretty well what “it” means, when I find something,” said the Duck: "It's usually a frog, or a worm". . . (Carroll 34) Carroll highlights the subjectivity of the Duck's definition of "it" by italicizing the Duck's "I" and following it with qualifications specific to the Duck's diet. Although the Duck and the Mouse refer to the same word, their interpretations of "that" do not coincide. This exchange highlights “creatures’ inability to focus on shared ideas and feelings, so much so that communication between individuals is significantly disrupted” (Hirsch 87). Language becomes arbitrary to the extent that individuals give contradictory meanings to the same linguistic vehicles. Every creature opts for freedom from the perspective of others. InAccordingly, Carroll delights in puns because they exploit the subjectivity of language so effectively through their ability to convey more than one meaning simultaneously. This is how Alice does not understand how “the mouse's tail [(tale)]” (37) can be “sad” in addition to “long”. Although puns are also used in conventional English, they are normally followed by tacit understanding. In Wonderland, however, the listener does not notice when words are used as puns, and the speaker cannot understand the listener's confusion. The listener and speaker fail to participate in each other's linguistic system. Even when the creatures of Wonderland participate in the same language, no shared linguistic register exists between them and Alice. For example, when Alice asks the Duchess: "Please, could you tell me... why your cat smiles like that?" (Carroll 61), she receives the following response: "He's a Cheshire cat...and that's why" (Carroll 61). The creatures define a smiling cat as a "Cheshire Cat", but Alice is unaware of the other couples in their personal language. Thus, during the “crazy tea party” (Carroll 68-76), Alice cannot understand the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse, even though all four exchange words at the same table. As Alice reflects, “the Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no meaning, and yet it was certainly English” (Carroll 70). In “Double Binds and Schizophrenogenic Conversations: Readings in Three Middle Chapters of Alice in Wonderland,” Gordon Hirsch makes a revealing comparison between Wonderland interactions and “patterns of thought and communication” (86). Fragmented, ambivalent, and full of double meanings, schizophrenic language and Wonderland language are used "in expressive and personal ways rather than to communicate shared meaning or engage in genuine dialogue" (Hirsch 97). While language is generally used to establish common ground or bond individuals, the language of Wonderland paradoxically has an alienating and anti-communal effect. His visit to the March Hare's house is so strange that Alice leaves in disgust: "It's the stupidest tea party. I've always been there all my life!" (Carroll 76). Creatures are so excessive in their own individualism that they do not recognize the separate individualism of other creatures. While normal communities allow individual freedom to the point that it does not infringe on the freedom of others, this qualification does not exist in Wonderland. Rather, creatures fail to respect or even recognize the validity of identities outside themselves. Hirsch notes the egocentrism that arises from this excessive personal freedom exercised during the Mad Tea Party:. . . centerpiece of social life in this culture [the life of the English middle class of the 19th century], the tea ceremony offers above all the opportunity to overcome an egocentric vision of personal relationships. . . [Yet] it is clear that at the Wonderland tea party, no one will give Alice her own cup of tea or recognize her as a real person with whom there could be meaningful communication and interaction based on mutual respect. (100) It could be argued that the "madness" of Wonderland does not stem from exaggerated individuality but rather from a simple lack of logic or reason. Yet while the actions may seem illogical at first, they actually seem to make sense in a way that is simply unknown to Alice. "Carroll's absurdities are not nonsense, that is to say devoid of.

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