An Analysis Of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland With Psychoanalytic View

The British author Lewis Carroll, who is famous for the two Alicebooks---Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and WhatAlice Found There, spent his whole life with children, and he never lost childlikeinnocence.Since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published, the novel has arousedmost scholars’ great interest. Literary criticisms about the novel are countless.Scholars have interpreted the novel from many different aspects, such as from theaspects of mathematics, social problems, culture, illustrations, comparison betweendifferent translation versions and so on.But there are few people who interpret the novel as fairy tale withpsychoanalytic view. Therefore, the author of this thesis tries to interpret Alice’sAdventures in Wonderland with Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic theory.Bettelheim who was a famous American child psychologist published his ownliterature critical work---The Use of Enchantment. And the theory applied in thisthesis is contained in the book. In Bettelheim’s opinion, a child is fond ofexternalizing his personality and feelings, and splitting people into several parts. Andthese are exactly what Alice does. For Bettelheim, a good fairy tale consists of fiveelements, which are threat, fantasy, recovery, escape and consolation. The Alice fairytale unfolds the five steps.The thesis starts from literature review and theoretical framework. Foreignstudies contain nearly every aspect that has been mentioned above. For instance,Rubin Wilson interpreted the novel from the aspect of mathematics and logics.Different from Wilson, Rachel Lawton put emphasis on social problems. Jeffrey C.Callen focused on the Alice movie. Because of the differences between China andBritain, a large number of domestic scholars are interested in the translations of theAlice novel. Such kind of interpretation has been popular for many years. Somescholars tried to interpret the Alice novel in different ways. The recent studies aresimilar with foreign researches, Long Yin found mathematics in the novel as well. Jiang Ping revealed social problems reflecting in the Alice novel. Besides those,Chen Ming studied the connections between the text and the audio-visualdemonstration.The thesis applies Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic theory which contains theintegration of personality, projection, splitting, externalization and children’s dreams.Based on foreign and domestic studies, the thesis demonstrates Bettelheim’spsychoanalytic theory in the Alice novel. Alice externalizes her personality, and aftershe experiences a series of dangers and adventures, her personality achievesintegration; what’s more, Alice externalizes her feelings, and projects them into somefigures; besides, Alice is fond of splitting herself into two totally different people; inaddition to this, she splits her own mother into three people. The reason that Alicedreams is that separation anxiety captures her. She needs a way to get recovery. Inher dream, she keeps escaping from dangers. When she wakes up, she gets ultimateconsolation.From the standpoint of Bettelheim, fairy tale can assist children to relievinganxiety, and put children’s chaotic inner world into order. The author of this thesishopes that the research can provide an effective way for parents and educators tounderstand children better.