『거울나라의 앨리스』에 나타난 판타지의 문학성

Abstract

Lewis Carroll’s fantasy, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There(1871) was written in the mid-19th Century, during the golden age of children’s literature, in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, it has the literary traits of fantasy works such as those of John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens, all of which were written in folk fairytale form, whether in structure or motif. Also, it contained criticism of life which had been absorbed by writers of Realism during that period. The United Kingdom entered into a rapidly changing era which was caused by the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century. The intellectuals, such as Matthew Arnold believed that he had lived through a chaotic era because the old order had fallen. Carroll agreed with him and represented it into Looking-Glass. However, not until modern times did critics find out the meaning of the work. Carroll’s Looking-Glass was written in the structure of fairytale, home－leaving－adventure－home, which represents the cultural anxiety in the mid-19th century. Carroll and his contemporaries who shared his upper-middle-class ethos had witnessed inexorable cultural changes. They had also faced a rapidly accelerating erosion of their conservative, rather static life-styles and class privilege. Carroll dramatized this subject as a search for love in Looking-Glass. White Knight and Alice represent two upper-middle-class Victorian generations. Carroll himself embodies the elderly and impotent White Knight, who loves young Alice but has to say goodbye to her, for time makes her leave him and become a queen. It serves not only as a powerful symbol for the evanescence and preciousness of all love and life itself, but also as a painful recognition of cultural and moralistic loss. Carroll’s fantasy Looking-Glass is not simply a narrative supplying pleasure for reading but more importantly literature which represents and satires life during the Victorian era. Thus, fantasy is a genre that doesn’t escape or delude real life but has a literary message for adults as well as children in the end.