English Question
When Alice tumbles down the rabbit-hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), she enters a fantasy realm that is quite different from her world of the here-and-now:
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. “Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!” (Dinah was the cat.) “I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. 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 much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of dry leaves, and the fall was over.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With Forty-Two Illustrations by John Tenniel (New York: D. Appleton, 1927; University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, 1998), chap. 1, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CarAlic.html.
Her adventures are described as a dream, and she exclaims after the fall that it was all “Curiouser and curiouser!”
The dream in Looking-Glass Land seems more a nightmare for Alice, for she is scared that she is merely a figment of someone’s dream, their imagination—that’s an idea that might bring us all to tears!
We all have dreams, and we recognize that dreams often mirror the oddness and nonsense that Alice encounters in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land. Dreams, in fact, are central to psychoanalytic literary criticism and have become the stuff of popular psychology, where dream interpretation continues to be a lucrative industry, as seen at Dream-Books.net (dream-books.net/popPsychology-dream-books.html).
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, famously defines dreams as the “road to the unconsciousness” in his monumental work The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
So let’s enter the wacky and wonderful world of psychoanalytic literary criticism.
Fairy tales and myths are some of the oldest surviving works of literature in any culture. All fairy tales have fantastical elements, settings, or characters, yet people continue to read them because they capture something important about our common humanity. Select one story, and then write a discussion post in which you describe a realistic human experience reflected in your chosen story. Maybe a character reminds you of someone you know, or a setting reminds you of a place you’ve been. Perhaps you recognize a commonplace scenario, or even a common stereotype.
Instructions:
To complete this assignment you should:
Complete ONE of the assigned readings below
Select one fairy tale you want to write about
Answer three questions from this list provided below
Write a post of about 250 words
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS: Choose three questions
What are the internal conflicts that this character is struggling with? Where is the evidence of these internal conflicts in the character’s internal monologue?
How are the conflicts in the story affecting the characters’ external actions and behaviors?
What could be the potential cause of these internal conflicts? What do you know about the character that might explain this?
What do you think this character is repressing? What outward defense mechanisms are they showing?
Where is there evidence of the character being driven by their Id (base instincts)? Where is there evidence of the character being driven by their Superego (conscience and societal expectations)? Where is there evidence of the character being driven by their Ego (attempting to balance the competing parts of their psyche)?
What is the character’s relationship like with their mother and/or father? Does it reflect the dynamics from Freud’s Oedipus Complex?
Does the novel depict the character’s dreams? What symbolism is present in these dreams? How does that reflect the character’s internal conflicts?
Readings/Watching-Choose ONE:
Charlotte Gilman Perkins; The Yellow Wallpaper – short storyLinks to an external site.
Little Red-Cap [Little Red Riding Hood]Links to an external site.
CinderellaLinks to an external site.
Snow WhiteLinks to an external site.
Alice in Wonderland MovieLinks to an external site.
Purpose:
This assignment is designed to take a small step towards interpreting a fictional work. At its core, an interpretation expresses something that a literary work reveals about human life. By identifying and articulating a realistic human experience reflected in a fairy tale, you are developing foundational skills that you will use later in your literary analysis essays.
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