What is the significance of mirror as a symbol of language,imagery and illustrations in Through The Looking Glass?
Answers
Explanation:
Six years after sending a curious girl through a land of mathematics, dream, and logic in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll returned to the story of Alice in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.
In some ways, the book is a direct opposite of its predecessor: starting indoors, rather than outdoors, Alice stepping boldly through the looking glass instead of following a rabbit and falling down a rabbit hole. In nearly every other way, the book is a direct continuation: with Alice entering a world of logic and confusion and nursery rhyme and twisted poetry—only this time, I’m not quite as certain that she has entered fairyland, or a fairyland.
What I had forgotten is that Through the Looking Glass starts on a note reminding us that Alice is both an imaginative and (possibly) a very lonely child. The sister from the previous books is nowhere to be found. Alice’s initial companions are Dinah, her cat, too busy washing kittens to pay much attention to Alice, and a black kitten. The text tells us that her sister and her nurse don’t like Alice’s games of Let’s Pretend, and also that Alice plays chess with herself—pretending that her kitten is playing on the other side. This in turn leads to boredom—and curiosity—and Alice stepping through the looking glass to the strange world on the other side.
As before, Carroll makes it clear from the outset that Alice is in a dream: she floats down staircases instead of walking, for instance. But where Alice in Wonderland followed the strange logic of dreams, of finding yourself unexpectedly in one place when you were heading elsewhere, of growing smaller and bigger, of constantly trying to reach a location only to find, once you reach it, that what you need to do there makes no sense, Through the Looking Glass follows a different, more precise logic, since Alice is not just in a dream: she is in a chess game, and in a world that reflects rather than distorts her own. And if in the last book Alice followed no set path, in this book her route is clear: through the looking glass, down the stairs, through a garden of talking flowers and into the giant chessboard on the other side of the mirror, where, just like any pawn, she finds herself progressing square by square. Each square may be different and strange, but her journey is remarkably straightforward and logical—especially for a dream.