The Fantastic and the Feminine Sublime of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

The study presents a close analysis of the immersive yet disorienting textual space of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in order to explore its sublime aesthetics. As a piece of portal fantasy, the work enables readers to enter into the transcendent sphere of uncontrolled imagination via the adventures of the prophetic Dream Child, eliciting what David Sandner has defined as both a reformulation and an extension of the Romantic sublime: the fantastic sublime. A more favourable attitude towards the elusiveness of meaning in the text lies in Barbara Claire Freeman’s feminine sublime, which prefers the excessive and unrepresentable to exclusion and control.