Alice

Alice, the clear-eyed center of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is a child shaped by curiosity and a stubborn sense of fairness. Bored by polite Victorian order, she follows the White Rabbit not out of recklessness but out of a principled need to know. Carroll gives her little backstory; instead, he builds her in motion—observing, testing, and trying to fit new experiences into the tidy drawers of schoolroom logic.

In Wonderland, Alice treats nonsense the way a young scientist treats a strange specimen. She measures, questions, and compares, even as language loops and rules contradict themselves. Her sudden shifts in size feel like a physical metaphor for childhood: one moment too small to be taken seriously, the next too large for the space she’s been given. Throughout, she keeps her manners—saying “please,” offering corrections, attempting conversation—as if civility might coax order from chaos.

Her encounters with Wonderland’s residents—inscrutable cats, argumentative duchesses, tyrants who love rules more than justice—draw out her best qualities. Alice is no rebel for rebellion’s sake; she is a negotiator of sense, challenging authority when it is arbitrary and refusing to accept meanings that don’t hold. She can be prim, even comically self-scolding, yet the primness is a kind of courage: an insistence that words should mean what they say and that games should follow the rules they announce.

By the end, Alice hasn’t “learned a lesson” so much as affirmed a temperament. She discovers that her own clarity—her questions, her appetite for reason, her willingness to speak up—can withstand absurdity. The world may grin without a cat, but Alice keeps looking for the cat; that is her quiet heroism. She emerges not older exactly, but steadier: a child who knows that imagination and logic aren’t enemies, and that both can be used to make bewildering places livable.