Looking Glass American Dream Essay

In the story, The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor, the author writes a spin on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The story begins with Princess Alyss Hart whose life is turned upside down when her Aunt Redd takes over the queendom forcing Alyss into hiding.Eventually Alyss returns home, claims her throne and restores peace to the queendom.Beddor puts a new spin on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a variety of themes like,determination.This is shown throughout the book by many different characters like Alyss,Hatter,and Queen Genevieve.

The American dream is a rhetoric of hope and mobility to reach the heights of economic sustainability that you wish to achieve. The idea is that the amount of effort you put forth will emanate the amount of success you can produce as a byproduct of American society. This concept however couldn’t be further from the truth, as many have tried to work up for years but only got slightly better at best then they say what they were nearly a decade ago. Many researchers have demonstrated that not only has the American Dream often times been influenced by our socioeconomic roots, but that to progress out of it is like a dime in a dozen. Since education provides students the material to move onto the larger job industry, and because the disparity between high school graduates and college graduate has increased so drastically, Americans are clamoring for college now more so than ever before. Student debt has been an issue that has kept many Americans in the lower end of the social class spectrum to miss out on utilizing college resources. Many financial aid programs have been established to attempt to decrease this tendency, particularly the Pell grant having the most success. Unfortunately, despite the initial success of the Pell grant program, it still has its limitations on how much help it can provide to underprivileged students. An incentive based scholarship program such as the Performance-based scholarships where attendance rates, passing classes, and student involvement

While his famous novel is more in depth, with much more expanding action, it is equivalent to his poem, Jabberwocky. To begin with, in Through the Looking- Glass, is more of a whimsical type of literature. While Jabberwocky, is primarily set to focus on the death of the vicious monster, Through the Looking-Glass, is focused on realizing the difference between dreams and reality. "Not you!" Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream” (Tweedledee, 168). Here we have Alice trying to figure out whether she is real or just a pure figure within someone’s dream. If she is within a dream, then she knows her actions are being controlled by dreamer. Just like in the poem, Carroll emphasizes on an idea, by adding it twice within a text. “There’s no use trying,” she said “one can’t believe impossible things” (White Queen, 177). This quote is ironic because in both the poem and novel, impossible things are occurring from side to side. Lewis Carroll is known for making the impossible seem possible. It was a nice touch adding this quote to the novel because this quote shows that sometimes it is okay to believe what the mind cannot comprehend. In both works of Lewis Carroll, it is highly encouraged to let the imagination run lose and believe in the impossible. In the novel we get Alice, who is a pure reflection

     Carroll’s use of the chess board is also important in Alice’s transition to adulthood. Her journey across the chess board from being a pawn to reaching the status of Queen represents the growth of being a child to becoming an adult. This emphasis is conveyed primarily in Through the Looking Glass and Carroll conveys this through the encounters that Alice has with the various characters, mainly the Queens and the Kings. The Queen always seems one step ahead of Alice, similar to what a child feels in an “adult” world. Carroll continues to express the tyranny of adulthood through Alice’s encounters and journey. She soon learns that becoming a Queen was not all

By Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars, he retells the story of Alice in Wonderland by putting it in the perspective of Alyss as the princess of Wonderland, when she is forced to flee Wonderland when her Aunt Redd (Queen Genevieve’s sister) comes to retake her throne. Alyss ends up in Victorian London and is separated from her keeper Hatter Madigan. Beddor changes the story to provide good significance and inspiring themes to give good imagery throughout the story. For example, in the story Queen Genevieve, Hatter, and Alyss forget their own survival to sacrifice themselves for the good of others.

In The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor, the story of Alice in Wonderland is retold, but with a twist. Instead of Alice going to Wonderland because she wants to live in a different place, Alice (Alyss) lives in Wonderland, and the book was written about her life. Alyss experiences many obstacles in her journey to the real world. She ends up in England where she is then convinced that Wonderland isn’t real and that it was all just her imagination. However, to her surprise, she ends up back in Wonderland and back in the same troubles in which she left behind. By changing the plot of the story, the themes of the original story have been tweaked. One of the major themes in this book is love and sacrifice. This theme is shown mainly through three

The classic story of Alice in Wonderland was given it’s own twist in Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars . The story centers around Princess Alyss Heart of Wonderland, and how she escapes her Aunt Redd and finds refuge in London. She soon returns the defeat her Aunt and reclaim her throne. The Looking Glass Wars is filled with many themes that progress throughout the story.

Alice and Wonderland is a classic tale of a whimsical fantasy of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole into another dimension or so many people thought. In Frank Beddor’s Through the Looking Glass tells the story of Alice and Wonderland with a completely different take. In this version Alyss is a free spirited princess whose mother (Queen Genevieve) rules over wonderland with help from her husband, King Nolan. After the queendom is taken over by the queen's evil older sister Redd everything goes from light to dark.

During the trial of the Knave, Alice takes the stand in a very confident manner and stands up for herself before the King and Queen. “At this moment the King...read out from his book, ‘Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.’...’I’m not a mile high,’ said Alice. ‘You are.’ said the King. ‘Nearly two miles high,’ added the Queen. ‘Well, I shan’t go at any rate,’ said Alice: ‘besides that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.’”(112). At this point in the book, the reader sees that Alice is no longer the little girl who cried when she did not fit through the door. She is now a confident girl who stands up for herself. This moment in the book shows the pinnacle of Alice’s growth as a person and the growth of her mind frame. Throughout Through the Looking Glass, Alice becomes more comfortable in standing up for herself and knowing how to figure out the situations thrown her way. “But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled ‘Pudding-----Alice: Alice-----Pudding. Remove the pudding!’ and the waiter took it away so quickly that Alice couldn’t return its bow. However, she didn’t see why the Red Queen should be the only one to give order; so, as an experiment, she called out ‘Waiter! Bring back the pudding!’”(230). Alice wanted to see how the Red Queen would react to others ordering people around.

The Victorian Era was a time where not many ethical ideals and moral standards were sustained. Yet, it is also an Era in which modern society uses to make advancements in both humanity, and philosophy. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, was a novelist who wrote pass his time. He wrote further in the future of the "common" Victorian Era. The ideology he presents in Alice in Wonderland is conducive to an individual attempting to bring attention to the deteriorating mental health and humane conditions in Victorian-Era England. Alice is representative of a normal child in everyday-Victorian England. This child, Alice, has not been exposed to the likes of diversity, but instead solidarity. The type of solidarity that is all too prevalent throughout the Victorian Era, primarily in the upbringing of children during this time. Children in Victorian Era England were taught to be followers of the norms already established by adults, and to ask no questions. These types of parameters placed restraints on children growing-up during this time; not only physical restraints, but also mental restraints, such as their imaginations'. Carroll was no stranger to this ideal or the likes of this concept; In fact, he constructed Alice in The Wonderland with this in mind, to defy the imaginative 'norm' of Victorian-Era England. He created a character that dreamt of falling down a rabbit hole into another universe. This dream or imagination becomes so vivid in his novel that the

Published in 1862 by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass has irrevocably weaved its way into every child’s heart--the curiosity and imagination piqued by a seven-year-old falling down a rabbit hole has spawned several adaptations actually, ranging from dark twisted versions to lighthearted “realistic” matters. On a personal note, Alice in Wonderland was appealing for the riddles, though reality was questioned in more senses than reason and imagination alone. Theory of Knowledge forced me to look for “existential crises”, essentially. However, because fantasy is one of my favorite things, the concurrent “twisted” reading of Frank Beddor’s The Looking-Glass Wars furthered stretched

'Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll seems a first a simple fairy tale, but in fact its meaning is a lot more profound. This novel criticizes the way children were brought up during the Victorian era. Carroll presents the readers with the complications these offspring must endure in order to develop their own personalities/egos, as they become adults. For Alice, Wonderland appears to be the perfect place to start this learning adventure. A way to understand her story is by compering it to the world as if being upside-down. Nothing in Wonderland seems to be they way it’s supposed to. The first lesson, Alice must learn in this peculiar journey through Wonderland is to achieve separation from the world around her and to stop identifying herself through others, in order to discover who she

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are both widely thought to be books filled of nonsense by adults because adults search for meaning in the wrong places. People are taught from a young age to analyze books in a “traditional” way, which is identifying the five stages of plot (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution) and to look at the story one part at a time, slowly analyzing the whole book. This method becomes ingrained in their minds and they do it subconsciously. This frame of thought causes most adults to be unable to see the true meaning of Lewis Carroll’s two books, but at the same time helps adults obtain more than originally intended: “Although we can never hope to explain fully what these books mean or how they have secured their high place in the world’s literature, our efforts in this regard can yield many important insights about them and about their meanings for us,” (Rackin, 18). Adults are also taught there is always main plot that slowly builds towards the end, revealing a central theme. But in these books there is no main plot and Carroll uses the central theme to go back and give meaning to the rest of the events in the books. The themes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are conveyed through the structure of the book, rather than the theme. The theme must also be read with the perspective with that of a child rather than an adult to fully understand these books.

Carroll has referred to Alice's knowledge on several different occasion in order to take the story beyond the typical fairytale"(Carroll 1-4).

Through the Looking-Glass is a children’s novel by Lewis Carroll. The novel was written in 1872 as a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The main character, Alice, is a lonely young girl with a wild imagination; she often forgets what is real and what is imagined. Alice lives in England during the Victorian era. In the novel, Alice falls asleep while playing a game of chess in the drawing room. Her dream takes her to the looking-glass world where chess pieces talk and poems are backwards. In Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll expresses identity development and maturation in Alice through the exploration of chess, control of her dreams, and poetry.