Miklos
« Je donne mon avis non comme bon mais comme mien. » — Michel de Montaigne

Click to enlarge. Source: Whisk

In Sussex once lived Alice Liddell,
Who’d had enough of lace and tea.
She traded bows for boots that fit well,
And changed her name to Alec Lee.
 
He trimmed his hair, he squared his jaw,
He told the mirror, “Here I go—
No more croquet, no more faux pas,
It’s time to run my own mad show!”
 
He stepped straight through the glass with flair,
In boots too big and pants too tight.
The Queen of Hearts gave quite a stare:
“You’ve changed!” she gasped. “You gave us fright!”
 
The White King blinked and took a swig—
“I say, he’s her but quite a chap!”
Tweedledum said, “That’s rather big!”
Tweedledee just clapped his cap.
 
The Jabberwock, once full of dread,
Now wore a vest and served him tea:
“You’re Alec now? Respect,” it said.
“We love a twist in identity.”
 
Humpty Dumpty said, “Dear sir,
You’ve broken shells and social norm!
But that’s the point of who we were—
We’re made to hatch, not just conform.”
 
The Red Queen raged, “A king must fight!
Get on the board! We’ll duel at noon!”
Alec declined. “I knit at night.
My sword’s a spoon. I fight with spoon.”
 
They gasped, then laughed, then bowed with glee—
The looking-glass was full of cheer.
For Alec was, quite simply, free—
A knight, a knave, himself—and queer.

— ChatGPT

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Where mirrors lined the walls en masse.
She twirled and grinned—a grand display—
But not herself looked back her way.
 
In one, the Hatter sipped his tea
While time stood still (at half past three).
In two, the Queen screamed, “Off with head!”
Then tripped and stomped her royal tread.
 
Another pane began to chatter—
The Cheshire Cat (just teeth, no matter).
His grin was wide, his tail askew,
He winked and said, “I’m more real than you.”
 
She peered again—no Alice there,
Just Tweedle twins in underwear.
And in the next (oh, what a fright!),
The Jabberwock was brushing teeth at night.
 
“Where am I gone?” young Alice cried,
“Have I become all mirrorfied?”
The Caterpillar puffed with flair:
« You’re just the thoughts that fill the air. »
 
She tapped the glass—it giggled loud,
The March Hare danced, absurdly proud.
A looking-glass, it seemed, could lie—
Or tell the truth when dreams pass by.
 
Then up she climbed a mirrored stair,
And saw herself—but with white hair!
« Too much nonsense warps the view… »
She shrugged and said, “Well, that will do.”
 
And off she went, quite unconcerned,
While every pane behind her turned—
Each one a tale, a trick, a jest,
Of stories that had left her vest.
 
The end? Oh no. The glass still plays—
It traps our dreams on rainy days.

ChatGPT

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English version here.

Cabinet feutré, silence pesant. Tic-tac d’une horloge bien trop sonore. Alice est allongée sur un divan trop grand pour elle. Elle tripote une boucle de ses cheveux. Sigmund reste dans son fauteuil derrière elle, invisible comme il se doit.

Alice : Donc… voilà. Je suis passée de l’autre côté du miroir.

Sigmund (voix neutre) : Mmh.

Alice : C’était un monde bizarre. Tout était à l’envers. Les fleurs parlaient. Le temps marchait à reculons. Et les gens insistaient pour jouer aux échecs avec moi. Honnêtement, je n’avais rien demandé.

Sigmund : Et qu’est-ce que vous en ressentiez ?

Alice : Comme une pièce dans une boîte à casse-tête. Sauf que la boîte me posait des devinettes au lieu de m’aider à sortir.

Sigmund : Vous vous êtes sentie piégée ?

Alice : Pas exactement. Plutôt… reflétée. Vous savez, comme quand on vous montre un miroir grossissant et que vous découvrez que vous avez des pores. Beaucoup de pores.

Sigmund : Intéressant.

Alice : Oui, et ce n’était que le début. J’ai rencontré une Reine qui me disait que pour arriver quelque part, il fallait courir très vite pour pouvoir rester sur place. Je crois que c’est comme le système scolaire.

Sigmund : Et cette Reine… elle vous faisait penser à quelqu’un ?

Alice : Oui. À Maman. Ou à mon institutrice. Ou peut-être à moi quand je joue à la maîtresse avec mon chat.

Sigmund : Donc à une figure d’autorité.

Alice : Ou de contrariété.

Sigmund (note) :« Figure de contrariété. » Intéressant.

Alice : Puis il y avait Tweedledum et Tweedledee. Ils m’ont dit que je faisais partie du rêve d’un roi endormi. Alors j’ai passé toute la matinée à me pincer. J’en ai encore les marques.

Sigmund : Vous vous êtes fait du mal pour vérifier votre réalité ?

Alice : Non, j’aime juste pincer. Et puis au moins, dans le rêve du roi, il y avait du gâteau. Ici, il n’y a que des biscuits secs. C’est une forme de punition, vous croyez ?

Sigmund : Que ressentez-vous en ce moment ?

Alice : J’ai envie de demander au miroir s’il me trouve jolie. Mais il ne répond jamais. Il se contente de me renvoyer une image que je ne comprends pas. Parfois je suis une petite fille, parfois une vieille âme fatiguée avec un ruban.

Sigmund : Peut-être que le miroir montre ce que vous ne pouvez pas encore voir vous-même.

Alice : Alors il est encore plus arrogant que la Reine Rouge.

(Silence. Sigmund ne relève pas.)

Alice : Vous croyez que j’ai rêvé tout ça ? Ou que je suis une construction symbolique en quête de sens dans une fiction victorienne absurde ?

Sigmund : Mmh.

Alice : Vous dites souvent “mmh”, vous savez ? On dirait que vous êtes un chat déguisé en psychanalyste.

Sigmund (sèchement) : Et ce chat… il aurait un sourire fixe, par hasard ?

Alice (se redresse un peu) : …Vous aussi vous l’avez vu ?

(Silence lourd. Sigmund note rapidement quelque chose.)

Alice : Qu’est-ce que vous écrivez ?

Sigmund : « Transfert félin. »

Alice (soupire) : Vous savez quoi ? Je crois que je préfère encore les miroirs. Eux au moins, ils me renvoient ce que je veux fuir, pas ce que je dois comprendre.

Sigmund : La séance est terminée.

Alice (se lève) : Très bien. Puis-je emprunter votre miroir ? Je crois que j’ai encore quelque chose à me dire.

A softly lit consulting room. Heavy silence. The ticking of an unnecessarily loud clock. Alice lies on a couch far too big for her. She’s fiddling with a curl of her hair. Sigmund sits out of sight, behind her, scribbling in a notebook, saying as little as possible, as is proper.

Alice: So… right. I went through the mirror.

Sigmund (neutral voice): Mmh.

Alice: It was a strange world. Everything was backwards. The flowers talked. Time walked in reverse. And everyone insisted on playing chess with me. Honestly, I never asked for that.

Sigmund: And how did that make you feel?

Alice: Like a piece in a jigsaw box. Except the box kept asking me riddles instead of helping me out.

Sigmund: You felt trapped?

Alice: Not exactly. More like… reflected. You know, like when someone hands you one of those magnifying mirrors and you discover you have pores. A lot of pores.

Sigmund: Interesting.

Alice: Yes, and that was just the beginning. I met a Queen who told me that to get anywhere, I had to run very fast just to stay in place. I think that’s basically the school system.

Sigmund: And this Queen… did she remind you of anyone?

Alice: Yes. Mother. Or my teacher. Or maybe me when I play school with my cat.

Sigmund: So, an authority figure?

Alice: Or a contrariety figure.

Sigmund (writes): “Figure of contrariety.” Interesting.

Alice: Then there were Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They told me I was part of a sleeping king’s dream. So I spent the whole morning pinching myself. Still have the marks.

Sigmund: You hurt yourself to test reality?

Alice: No, I just like pinching. And anyway, in the king’s dream there was cake. Here, there are only dry biscuits. Is that some kind of punishment, do you think?

Sigmund: What are you feeling right now?

Alice: I want to ask the mirror if it thinks I’m pretty. But it never answers. It just shows me an image I don’t understand. Sometimes I’m a little girl, sometimes I’m a tired old soul with a ribbon.

Sigmund: Perhaps the mirror shows you what you’re not yet ready to see.

Alice: Then it’s even more arrogant than the Red Queen.

(Silence. Sigmund does not comment.)

Alice: Do you think I dreamed all of this? Or am I just a symbolic construct seeking meaning in a wildly absurd Victorian fiction?

Sigmund: Mmh.

Alice: You say “mmh” a lot, you know? You sound like a cat pretending to be a psychoanalyst.

Sigmund (sharply): And would this cat… happen to have a fixed grin?

Alice (sits up a bit): …You saw him too?

(Heavy silence. Sigmund rapidly writes something down.)

Alice: What are you writing?

Sigmund: “Feline transference.”

Alice (sighs): You know what? I think I still prefer mirrors. At least they show me what I’m trying to run from, not what I’m supposed to understand.

Sigmund: That’s the end of the session.

Alice (stands): Very well. May I borrow your mirror? I believe I still have something to tell myself.

ChatGPT

Click to enlarge. Source: Whisk.

Focusing on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, particularly his concepts of the mirror stage, the Imaginary, and the fragmented body, allows us to deepen our understanding of Through the Looking-Glass and Alice’s confrontation with multiple reflections of herself.

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Alice and the Lacanian Mirror Stage

In Lacan’s theory, the mirror stage is a foundational moment in the development of the ego. It occurs when the infant, between 6 and 18 months, recognizes its image in a mirror and identifies with it. This marks the emergence of the “I” or moi. However, this identification is misrecognition: the image is perceived as whole and coherent, but the infant’s internal experience is fragmented and chaotic.

When Alice steps through the looking-glass, she symbolically returns to the mirror stage. However, unlike the infant who sees one reflection and forms a unified ego, Alice is confronted with multiple, shifting, unstable reflections of herself: through characters, distortions, transformations, and paradoxical roles (child/queen, subject/object, dreamer/dream). This creates not cohesion but alienation.

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The Imaginary and the Multiplication of Selves

Lacan’s Imaginary order, dominated by images and illusions of unity, is at play in the world behind the mirror. Here, the visual field is deceptive, relationships are dominated by rivalry, and identity is projected rather than known. Each character Alice meets could be read as a reflection or specular double—not a true other, but a displaced version of herself, refracted through fantasy:

• The Red Queen reflects Alice’s inner authoritarian voice or her imagined future adult self.
• Tweedledum and Tweedledee represent a binary split—twins that mirror each other, and in turn, mirror Alice’s struggle with duality and opposition.
• The chessboard landscape represents the structuring function of the symbolic order—but it too is warped, unstable, and surreal.

These multiplying mirrors destabilize the sense of a core self. Instead of a stable “I,” Alice is confronted with a series of images, none of which provide grounding. In Lacanian terms, she is caught in an endless play of signifiers.

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Fragmented Body and Symbolic Castration

In the mirror stage, before the illusion of unity, the subject experiences the body-in-pieces (corps morcelé). This fragmented body is a primal experience of disunity, chaos, and vulnerability. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice’s physical transformations—changes in size, age, logic, and role—are symbolic of this return to fragmentation.

She becomes disoriented, often questioning not just her environment but her ontological status: “Am I real? Or am I the Red King’s dream?” This evokes Lacan’s idea of the subject as a lack, always in search of wholeness but never attaining it.

The scene at the end where Alice “becomes queen” could be seen as a false moment of mastery, a fantasy of unity. But even here, the world falls apart: food becomes inedible, ceremony becomes nonsense, and the table turns into chaos. Lacan would read this as the collapse of the Imaginary under the weight of the Real—that which cannot be symbolized.

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The Uncanny Multiplicity of the Self

Alice’s repeated confrontations with different versions of herself—mirrored, transformed, or externalized—evoke Lacan’s idea of alienation through language and image. Her self is not a sovereign center but a sliding point in a network of signifiers. The question “Who am I?” is unanswerable because the subject is fundamentally split between the image it identifies with and the lack at its core.

Lacan insists that the ego is an illusion sustained by misrecognition. In Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll dramatizes this illusion. The mirrors multiply, but none show the “real” Alice—because, from a Lacanian perspective, there is no real, whole Alice to be found.

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Conclusion: Alice as Subject of the Unconscious

Through the Lacanian lens, Alice is not simply a character in a dreamlike adventure—she is a subject confronting the structures of the psyche:

• The mirror is the scene of misrecognition.
• The multiplicity of reflections reveals the instability of ego.
• The mirror world is the Imaginary, always seducing and deceiving.
• The symbolic order (chess, rules, language) is absurd, failing to stabilize identity.
• The Real breaks through in moments of confusion, rupture, and loss.

Alice’s journey thus stages a philosophical and psychoanalytic drama: the impossible search for a unified self in a world of mirrors that only multiply the void.

ChatGPT

Click to enlarge. Source: Whisk

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This imagined or derivative cartoon—where Sir John Tenniel’s Alice is posed like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, embracing the White Rabbit—presents a striking fusion of classical portraiture and Victorian whimsy. Though Tenniel himself never created such a composition in his original illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this modern pastiche or reinterpretation invites a layered critique, both stylistic and symbolic.

1. Compositional Echoes of da Vinci

The reference to Mona Lisa is overt: Alice is seated frontally, her hands calmly folded (or, in this case, gently cradling the White Rabbit), and she gazes directly at the viewer with an enigmatic expression. The background—if consistent with the Mona Lisa—might show a stylized dreamscape or the surreal terrain of Wonderland, echoing da Vinci’s atmospheric sfumato but populated with impossible landscapes or chessboard rivers.

This juxtaposition elevates Alice from a mere literary character to a figure of Renaissance mystery and contemplative depth. The White Rabbit, clutched close to her, could symbolize her entry into the surreal and irrational—an object of affection, curiosity, and obsession.

2. Tenniel’s Line and Texture

If the drawing mimics Tenniel’s cross-hatched penwork, it marries the exacting Victorian illustration style with Renaissance chiaroscuro. The tension between rigid linework and the ethereal mood of da Vinci’s composition results in a curious harmony—just as Wonderland blends nonsense with logic.

Tenniel’s Alice is known for her aloof composure, even amid chaos. Here, that detachment becomes contemplative. Her usual sense of bewilderment is replaced with something more quietly knowing—a nod, perhaps, to da Vinci’s study of psychological depth.

3. Symbolism and Irony

By placing Alice in a canonical art pose, the piece satirizes how we elevate children’s literature into academic and cultural canon, and yet underscores how deserving it is. Alice cradling the White Rabbit recalls Madonna-and-Child iconography—but distorted through a secular, absurdist lens. She’s not holding salvation; she’s embracing confusion, time-anxiety, and escape.

The rabbit, usually harried and anxious, appears calm, even comforted—reversing roles. It’s no longer a herald of disorder but a passive object, suggesting perhaps that Alice has conquered Wonderland in her own mind.

4. Psychological Reading

Positioned like the Mona Lisa, Alice seems arrested in a moment of reflection. Is she dreaming, or is she awake and remembering? Is this portrait a moment after her adventures, where Wonderland has become internalized—a part of her soul?

Her gaze, like Lisa’s, is ambiguous: innocence tinged with experience, and childhood edged with knowledge. The viewer is left to wonder what she has seen.

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Conclusion

This cartoon—if truly in Tenniel’s manner—becomes more than a clever pastiche. It’s a cultural palimpsest, layering literary nonsense over Renaissance gravitas, and infusing a child’s surreal journey with the haunting stillness of high art. It plays not only with aesthetic style but with the very nature of meaning, memory, and identity—exactly as Alice in Wonderland itself does.

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