Reflections on Alice’s reflections
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
