Through the Looking Glass: another Alice

I have posted twice about Alice simply to slice apart the twinned Alice books.

Alice enters the Looking Glass world by climbing through her living room mirror. This world is a reflection or double of the world Alice leaves. Therefore everything is backwards; objects, people and places are at once similar and opposing. The initial recognition or familiarity of the Looking Glass world becomes unfamiliar when we take a closer look. It is this strange combining of the familiar and unfamiliar which makes the Looking Glass world unnerving and uncanny. By entering this world Alice becomes her own reflection. She can now move autonomously without being watched or copied by the mirror reflection. There are two Alices but which are we dealing with?

Freud describes in The Uncanny that ‘what is Heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.’ By entering the mirror Alice is situated in her home but also not her home, as it is a reflection of or the opposite of her home. Home is both home and not home. Comparable to the way the word Heimlich can mean the same as and also the opposite of unheimlich. This inversion and double meaning, or things meaning both the same and the opposite is bound into the fabric of the Looking Glass world and also the feeling and concept of the uncanny. The uncanny is different and the same, it is a happening but also an un-happening of things, disturbing our sense of what has or hasn’t happened: a questioning.

A feeling of strangeness comes from the Tweedles insistence that Alice is only a part of the Red Kings dream and so she is not real. In Wonderland her size changes and she questions and forgets who she is. This strange questioning of the self is pushed further in the Looking Glass, when her materiality is made uncertain. Is she real? The Tweedles’ answer is no, and that if the Red King woke she would ’go out-bang-like a candle.’ This image draws on her already questionable materiality. She fears ’going out altogether, like a candle,’ her physical presence is no more solid than an exposed, flickering flame. Alice’s effect on the Looking Glass world is challenged, as the Tweedles assert she couldn’t wake the King as she is in his dream. What an odd feeling to be consciously aware of yourself in another’s dreaming mind. She is unable to justify her realness, she cant make herself real either through action (crying) or language (stating ‘I am real‘)

The Tweedles continually talk in negatives, no-one nobody nowhere nothing. These express the absence of something. Negative speech here goes around defining. Speaking in negatives is a circumlocution that evades meaning, this is the effect of the Tweedles’ speech on Alice. This creates confusion, if everything is expressed or described by what it isn’t. Alice would apparently be ‘nowhere’ if the Red King woke up but can you actually be nowhere? And where is this nowhere if this is where she will be?

Language and meaning in the Looking Glass are both powerful and effective or circular and fail definition. Language can initiate action in the book, making things happen. For example the Queen turns into a sheep through the augmentation of the word better into a bleat. Language is at once active and passive; Alice feels, most palpably, the uncanny failure of language to affirm the absence of the presence of something (her). Freud states that the double has become a vision of terror, a terror Alice becomes acutely aware of as it defines the absence of herself. The slipperiness of meaning makes Through the Looking Glass a strangely resounding text. The text is haunted by the parallel world which is the other side of the mirror and the questions suspended in uncertainty.