Do the surreal, dream-like parts of Alice have Freudian meanings?
There’s an edition of the Alice books called The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner and it’s annotated in Freudian terms. It’s very convincing and successful but I’m not such a thorough-going believer in psychoanalysis that I think it’s the only meaning. For me, Freud is another way of telling a story and you can certainly imagine that some of the ordeals and encounters that Alice has have Freudian meanings. The descent into the rabbit hole and her quite aggressive and hostile encounters with adults have elements that you can certainly psychoanalyse. But I don’t think it limits the meanings. The symbols used have some relationship to tradition but Carroll’s not a traditional symbolist at all, which is one of the reasons why Alice In Wonderland is not really a fairytale. There are no castles, or ogres, it’s not “once upon a time long ago in a faraway land”. It’s now, in Alice’s house, and in her garden, and it’s the result of a dream that takes place in the present tense on the river in
