‘Drad was he never’: A re-reading of Sir Gawain 

Gawain, hero of Arthurian legend and romance. A nephew and loyal supporter of King Arthur, Gawain appeared in the earliest Arthurian literature as a model of knightly perfection, against whom all other knights were measured.The lines below are taken from the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is considered one of the masterpieces of Middle English literature.

In Through the Looking Glass both the reader and Alice are transported to Looking-Glass world: a distorted reality in which language loses meaning, identity is fluid and your moves are numbered in an invisible game of chess. Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass is often regarded as Wonderland’s darker and more sinister counterpart , but whilst direct comparison between the two is useful, I intend to isolate Looking-Glass from Wonderland, so that “looking-glass world” might stand on its own.

For Carroll to depict a ‘dark world’, a universal understanding of what it entails must be considered. A ‘dark world’ holds connotations of the unknown, the malicious and the melancholy, although its exact nature will vary with the fears of the individual readers. The word ‘dark’ itself indicates blindness; things that cannot be seen. More difficult to define is the ‘nightmare’ or the ‘dream’, for these are personal to the dreamer, a concept Alice herself ponders in the closing pages: ‘Let us consider who it was that dreamed it all’ (Carroll 239). Fear dictates whether the experience is a ‘dream’ or a ‘nightmare’; a nightmare being a dream in which one experiences fear, anxiety and a loss of control, or agency. Again, the exact nature of the nightmare is personal because we all fear different things. In this way, all nightmares have the potential to be dreams and all dreams, nightmares, dependent on the dreamer. The term ‘dream’, meanwhile, can mean that same suspension of reality or be a synonym for ambition. This allows ‘dream’ to additionally represent Alice’s ‘dream’ to become a Queen. Alice’s dream reveals her desire to obtain adult power, but for adult readers this depicts the aggressive and corrupting reality of the adult world and the loss of innocence. Carroll reflects a grown up reality back to the adult reader within a children’s book thus a melancholic tone throughout the novel is almost unavoidable.

This essay, therefore, addresses not only whether Through the Looking Glass can be seen as more akin to a ‘nightmare than a dream’, but to whom the nightmare belongs. Looking-Glass world is a world where nothing is certain, where objects you thought were tangible morph before your eyes and where a name can be lost and forgotten in moments. If we consider ‘dark’ to mean blindness, the unknown, to describe Carroll’s ‘looking-glass House’ as a ‘dark world’ is entirely plausible. One could argue that the world is ‘dark’ and confusing for Alice because it destabilises everything she knows. At the centre of this is language. In Looking-Glass world Alice becomes trapped by language; ‘“I am so hot and thirsty!”’ (Carroll 143) she cries, only for the Red Queen to ‘good-naturedly’ (Carroll 143) offer her a dry biscuit. Here then, the world is ‘dark’ to Alice in both senses: it is the ‘dark’ unknown, in that it is impossible for her to communicate when language does not mean what it is supposed to; simultaneously it becomes the threatening ‘dark world’ of a nightmare as Alice is ‘choked’ by the dry biscuits. This supports the concept that nightmares are personal, and distinguishable from dreams only by what the individual actually experiences. The point at which the dream turns into a nightmare in this scene is when the curious subversion of language presents the nightmarish prospect of a choking and unquenchable thirst. It could be argued then that the ‘dark’ unknown world depicted by Carroll has the potential to cause nightmarish consequences through Alice’s inability to understand it. The world itself is not akin to nightmare, it is Alice’s interactions with it that cause it to be so. This can be phrased in another way: that Alice causes the dream to evolve into the nightmare. Lionel Morton observes the role of memory in the Alice books, and suggests that it is through Alice’s vivid memory of nursery rhymes that the characters and scenes within them are brought to life in her dreams:

‘Alice remembers them so well in fact that the rhymes, all in the past tense and ostensibly about past events, come alive before her, so that somehow she has gone backward in time’. (Morton 296)

This is important because Looking-Glass world is a place where language is active, just as a scream pre-empts pain, Alice’s recital of nursery rhymes pre-empt the characters’ actions. For example, Tweedledee and Tweedledum do not begin ‘to have a battle’ until Alice recites the rhyme ‘she could hardly help saying…out loud’ (Carroll 157) and likewise Humpty Dumpty does not have his ‘great fall’ until after Alice has ‘repeated to herself’ (Carroll 182) the verse. It appears that Alice is indeed the cause of these events, yet as Morton highlights:

‘what becomes present to her is still fixed as if by the rhymes: it does not have the freedom of the present but is determined like clockwork or like a nightmare’. (296)

Morton is suggesting that Alice cannot control the memories she has summoned into her dreams, the rhymes are fixed and therefore: ‘the Crow comes, the Lion and the Unicorn are drummed out of town, and Humpty Dumpty falls forever’ (296). The characters perform for Alice’s entertainment, as nursery rhymes exist to amuse children: ‘but in order to amuse them they have to suffer, and…their suffering is Alice’s fault’ (Morton 296). Morton’s vision is of a nightmare land in which characters suffer forever in order to amuse the child Alice. In these scenes too, Alice does not show any sign of remorse or pity, Humpty Dumpty falls and the Unicorn and the Lion are drummed out of town yet Alice has little time for them as she is focused on her over-arching dream of becoming a queen. So far then we have two interpretations of Carroll’s fantasy world. One, a world which is ‘dark’ to Alice because it resists her understanding and therefore creates scenes of nightmarish fear as she struggles to communicate. And, two, the idea that Looking-glass world is ruled by Alice’s ambition, and that in her quest to become a queen her interactions with the characters she meets creates suffering, creates the nightmare. This nightmare is experienced not only by the nursery rhyme characters that Alice creates and punishes, but by the adult readers. This effect is established in two ways. First, is the visual nightmare, the imagery that Carroll paints. Nursery rhyme characters brought to life through a child’s song is a haunting and powerful image; its effectiveness is endorsed by the use of children and children’s tales in horror films throughout that medium’s history. More significant, however, is the manifestation of the nursery rhyme characters themselves. The rhyme is no longer just a rhyme, it becomes fact. In a rhyme, Humpty Dumpty having a ‘great fall’ (Carroll 182) is something funny; in reality Humpty Dumpty is dead. The underlying truth is morbid and unattractive. The second way that Alice’s fantasy world becomes a nightmare to adult readers is psychological.

‘William A. Madden has argued that the dream narratives instruct…the reader as dreamer in the night- marish nature of reality’ (Gilead 282).

We have established, then, that Through the Looking Glass can be read as a nightmare belonging both to the characters within the novel with whom Alice interacts and the adult readers themselves. Looking-glass world is not, however, a world which pre-exists as a ‘dark’ one. I would argue that it becomes a dark world as Alice interacts with it. It becomes dark for Alice because her interactions do nothing to explain it to her, at every move she encounters that which she cannot understand. For the adult readers it becomes a dark world because every move made by Alice brings her closer to being crowned Queen; signifying a loss of innocence and childhood, tainting any nostalgia that the novel brings. Furthermore, although a dark world for Alice in the sense that she cannot understand it, I argue that it cannot be a nightmare for Alice because in reality it is a representation of her dream to grow-up, arguably a representation of every child’s dream to grow up. Alice cannot understand the world because it is an adult world, her focus is on the end goal, to grow up - to become ‘Queen’ - and therefore she does not notice the corrupting nature of her journey. The adult readers on the other hand recognise the flaws that come with power and adulthood that Alice cannot, therefore it is them for whom the nightmare exists. Through the Looking-Glass is Carroll’s work, the ‘dark world’ within it is Alice’s, but the nightmare belongs to the adult.