Literal and Figurative language in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll

    ‘They were obliged to have him with them,’ the Mock Turtle said: ‘no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.’

    ‘Wouldn’t it really?’ said Alice in a tone of great surprise. 

    ‘Of course not,’ said the Mock Turtle: ‘why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going on a journey, I should say “With what porpoise?”’

    ‘Don’t you mean “purpose”?’ said Alice.

    ‘I mean what I say,’ the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone.”

   This time, it is the Mock Turtle who ends the discussion, a bit rudely, when Alice’s questions threat to deconstruct his misuse of the word ‘porpoise’. The play here lays between the common sense perspective that all journeys should have a purpose, a plan, a goal, and the existence of porpoises, small dolphins which cohabitate with turtles and all sorts of fishes in the sea. Thus, though the Mock Turtle uses the word ‘porpoise’ – belonging to the semantic field of sea –, the implied meaning, highlighted by Alice’s comment, does bring to mind the word ‘purpose’, thereby creating another comic situation,(another pun).

       In addition to puns, the order of words-Anastrophe- (inversion) used by Carroll) in a sentence and the processes of word formation are also pretexts to play with language in Wonderland. A superb example of both these techniques can be found in the Mock Turtle schooling description:

  “‘We had the best of educations – in fact, we went to school every day –’

    ‘I’ve been to a day-school, too,’ said Alice; ‘you needn’t be so proud as all that.’”

  We see examples of anastrophe in English poetry. Let us see for example, the third verse of Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, in order to better understand of the use of this figure of speech in “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”:

     “He holds him with his skinny hand,

     ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.

     ‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

     Eftsoons his hand dropt he.”

     Turning back to the above quoted fragment from Wonderland, it is Alice who misapprehends the Mock Turtle’s comment about going to school everyday, by introducing the concept of day-school, which is not all the same thing. Her rather childish desire to compete with the Mock Turtle leads to a reversal in the words order and, consequently, in the words sense.

     The subjects taught at school are a subterfuge to further competition:

  “ ‘Ah! Then yours wasn’t a really good school,’ said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief. ‘Now at ours they had at the end of the bill, “French, music, and washing – extra”.’

    ‘You couldn’t have wanted it much,’ said Alice; ‘living at the bottom of the sea.’

    ‘I couldn’t afford to learn it,’ said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. ‘I only took the regular course.’

    ‘What was that? enquired Alice.

    ‘Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the different branches of Arithmetic  – Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision.’

    ‘I never heard of “Uglification”,’ Alice ventured to say. ‘What is it?’

   The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. ‘What! Never heard of uglifying!’  it exclaimed. ‘You know what to beautify is, I suppose?’ 

    ‘Yes,’ said Alice doubtfully: ‘it means – to – make – anything – prettier.’

    ‘Well, then,’ the Gryphon went on, ‘if you don’t know what to uglify is, you must be a simpleton.’”

     Amidst the wide range of thematic subjects presented by the Mock Turtle, some are quite conventional – ‘Arithmetic’, ‘Music’,  ‘French’ –, but others are rather unexpected – ‘Ambition’,  ‘Distraction’, ‘Derision’. The one that puzzles Alice the most is ‘Uglification’. We don’t need a dictionary to understand the meaning of the word. The game-like process is simple. We take a recognisable everyday word, such as ‘ugly’, and, using the rules of word formation, we turn it into a verb, ‘uglify’, or a noun, ‘uglification’. Grammar rules are at the mercy of creative writers, such as Carroll or Lear, who are able to challenge and subvert them, recreating language one word at the time.

     The figurative language in the tale makes the Wonderland more fantastic as it is. Carroll uses a large number of metaphors and similes to make comparisons between Alice and the world around her.

     A simile is used when Alice hopes she could shrink herself like a telescope:

     “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”

     Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the source of one of the most famous similes ever written, namely:

       “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

There are of course many more:

     “There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind...”

     or

     “The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way...”

     In order to understand the following similes, the reader must be familiarized

with the meaning of the words: Jack-in the-box- a toy consisting of a clown-like puppet that springs out of a box when the lid is activated, and sky-rocket- a firework that ascends high into the air where it explodes in a brilliant cascade of flares and star-like sparks.

“...all I know is, something comes at me like a Jack-in the-box, and up I goes like a skyrocket!”

     The similes are used to show the transformation (becoming big than small) through which Alice passes and the horror it creates to the other characters. This figure of speech is one of the most used ones. Often met in Robert Burns’ works, similes are used to make comparisons between human body, or feelings and elements from nature:

     “She had lips as red as cherries.”

       (Lips are parts of the human body; cherries are fruits of a tree.)

       “Oh my love's like a red, red rose…”

       (Love is an emotion.  A rose is a plant.)

     Similes abound in popular works as well:

       “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.” (popular song)

       Or

     “Kisses sweeter than wine….” (popular song) 

       “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is: a Metaphor. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reflects Victorian era in many aspects by describing and criticizing it. The Queen of Hearts represents the Queen Victoria in England at that time. The country was governed by a female, not a male. Female dominance is displayed in this work. The Queen of Hearts overcomes the King both physically and mentally and the Duchess controls the household. The Victorian insistence on punctuality is reflected in the White Rabbit’s response to his lateness: “I’m late; I’m late, for a very important date.”(Additionally, the notion of superior or inferior class was portrayed in some chapters of this book. For instance, “I’m older than you, and must know better” was told by Lory to Alice. The idea of older people own better knowledge than younger people is shown obviously here.) 

     Metaphors often occur in the text. For example in order to express the fear for cats of the Mouse, Carroll uses a metaphor:

     “Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things!” 

     In fact the sentence comprises other figures of speech, besides the metaphor. These are epithets that make up the metaphor- “nasty, low, vulgar”-, and are used to describe the cats. The author also uses here a synecdoche “our family” which stands for mice, as all mice are afraid of cats. 

     This figure of speech is often met in the tale. Another example of the usage of this figure of speech is in the following passage:

     “It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there were a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.”

     The word party here stands for the animals and birds that entered the hole. But it may be interpreted as well as a metaphor, if we compare the curios animals to a somehow noisy party.

     The author appeals to metaphor and when compares Alice to a “tinny, little thing”.

     Carroll’s work “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has given birth to a metaphor that is used till our days: Going "down the rabbit hole". It has become a common metaphor in popular culture, symbolizing everything from exploring a new world. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rabbit hole is the place where it all begins. It's Alice's unthinking decision to follow the White Rabbit that leads to all of her adventures. The pop culture version of this symbol perhaps doesn't take into account the "unthinking" nature of this choice quite enough. After all, Alice's decision is pretty foolhardy; if this weren't a magical fantasyland, she'd probably be killed by the fall, and she has no idea where she's going, what she's facing, or how to get home. You may also notice that going down the rabbit hole is a one-way trip – the entry, but not the exit, to the fantasy world.

     “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is: a huge political allegory. This tale has confounded scholars through the years as they try to invent a systematic interpretation of symbols and themes in the book.  Their failure to do so has become a large part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s success.  No one really knows what to make of it.  The bottom line is:  Carroll wrote the story as a labor of love to entertain his child-friend, Alice Liddell. 
 Of course, allegory and metaphor abound in Carroll’s book, used to make fun of the Victorian Age.  He had the unique perspective of observing it from outside the mainstream. Carroll pokes fun at royalty, the justice system, social mores, misuse of logic and language, but he does it all in a light-hearted manner.

     Animals here think and act like human beings. From the very beginning the author introduces the reader to the anthropomorphic White Rabbit, who is always in a hurry, saying “I’m late, I’m late”.

     All the characters in the tale stand for real persons from Carroll’s time. Their thinking and behavior characterizes the Victorian period. The King and Queen of Hearts and their playing-card courtiers comprise only one example of Carroll’s extensive use of anthropomorphism in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

     Dinah is a strange figure. She is the only above-ground character whom Alice mentions repeatedly, almost always in terms of her eating some smaller animal. She seems finally to function as a personification of Alice's own subtly cannibalistic hunger, as Fury in the Mouse's tale is personified as a dog. At one point, Alice fantasizes her own identity actually blending into Dinah's:

     “‘How queer it seems,’ Alice said to herself, ‘to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah' ll be sending me on messages next!’ And she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: ‘Miss Alice! Come here directly, and get ready for your walk!’ ‘Coming in a minute, nurse!’ But...”

     While Dinah is always  in  a  predatory  attitude, most  of  the Wonderland animals  are  lugubrious  victims;  together,  they  encompass  the two sides  of animal nature that  are  in Alice  as well. But as she falls down the rabbit  hole, Alice senses the complicity  between eater and eaten,  looking-glass  versions  of each other(That is the motif of another of Carroll’s tales “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There”.):

     “ ‘Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice  in  the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do  cats eat bats, I wonder?’  And here Alice began to  get  rather  sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy  sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do  cats eat bats?’ and  sometimes, ‘Do bats  eat  cats?’ for,  you  see,  as  she  couldn't answer either question, it  didn't matter which way  she put  it.”

     Personifications are absolutely crucial to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and are just as important to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the idea of the wonderland itself. In fact, without personification, or anthropomorphism, it can be said that wonderland wouldn’t be all that interesting.

     The personification of Alice’s feet is another of her fantasies:

      “‘Oh,  my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can; —but I must be kind to them,’ thought Alice, ‘or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.’”

      As we have mentioned above things and actions in wonderland are exaggerated: common things become smaller or bigger as they are in reality. This is about Alice’s tears, which turn into a big sea. The “gallons of tears” (hyperbole) are used to show Alice’s helplessness.

      A fantastic world full of imagery is expected to have scenes of humour, which are sometimes ironical:

      “She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, ‘Which way? Which way?’, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.”(irony)

      Alice gets so used to the “out-of-the-way things”, that ordinary things from real life seem strange and even “dull and stupid”.

      After the analysis of some of the main figures of speech used in “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” we conclude that this is a masterpiece of children's literature and a major contribution to "nonsense" writing, which uses language according to the rules of play rather than the rules of poetry or prose. Such writing disconnects words from their usual meanings and calls attention to language as an artificial system of communication. In “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” the reader is entertained by the ridiculous creatures Alice meets and challenged by them to understand words in new and unusual ways.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

     2.3Literal Language versus Figurative Language Used in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and their Romanian Translation.

     There is a division between literal and figurative language. As is true of any period in English, there exists a highly literal style at one end of the spectrum and an equally figurative style at the other end, but in between there are so many gradations that it is difficult to draw a precise boundary between them. Today literature is traditionally regarded as both an exclusive and an evaluative source where these two types of literal and figurative languages are used; works which lack an aesthetic structure or an emotional appeal are readily dismissed as being not literature.

       “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is such a kind of literary work where figurative almost replaces the literal, and nonsense replaces the common things. It is very hard to find a sentence in the work that has no figure of speech in it. Lewis Carroll uses and confuses the meanings to create nonsense and humor.

     This is the case of the numerous puns used by the author. For example:

     “There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m grown up now,’ she added in a sorrowful tone; ‘at least there’s no room to grow up any more here.”

     The pun here is on the two different meanings of the word ‘to grow’:  ‘to become bigger or taller’, ‘to develop into an adult’. There is a grammar peculiarity that distinguishes these two uses of the same word: the second meaning is of the phrasal verb ‘to grow up’. Alice’s knowledge of the English grammar is very low; the author uses this fact in the tale inventing new and new such interesting and funny situations where are used various word-plays.

     Yet there are some cases when the literal usage is necessary and inevitable. These are the sentences when the author describes Alice and explains the reader the motives of her behaving in a certain manner (all these passages are usually taken into brackets):

     “Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and behind them a railway station.”

     Though the language in the text is literal, there can be distinguished some characteristic features of the enumeration: different things that can be met on the English coast and these things are enumerated to the reader.

     The same is about the Romanian translation:

     “Alice fusese o dată la mare şi ajunsese la concluzia că, oriunde te-ai duce pe coasta britanică, o să găseşti câteva cabine de ştrand, câţiva copii săpând în nisip cu cazmale de lemn, apoi un rând de căsuţe închiriate iar în spatele lor o gară.”

     Another example is the following:

       ‘…she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word…’

      All the words in the sentence, are used in there literal meaning. The small explanations introduced by Carroll are some of the moments when he appeals to rational and to the literal meaning of the words.

     ‘…de data asta era mai de grabă bucuroasă că nu avea ascultători pentru că nu reuşea de loc să găsească cuvintele potrivite…’

     The Romanian variant of this passage is a literal translation. All the words are used in their literal direct meaning.

     Other examples of the literal use of language are the sentences where the author introduces a small description or the speech of one of the characters:

     “There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again.”

     “Cum nu avea altceva de făcut, Alice începu iarăşi să vorbească.”

     Literal language is more often met in small sentences than in large ones. To convince ourselves, let us see some examples:

     “Dinah was the cat.”

     This sentence presents to the reader a real fact: Dinah was a cat and that was its name. The author introduces another character of the tale, though implicit, not less important.

     The translated text shows us the same thing; in small utterances it is easier to preserve the literal meaning of the words: