Analysis
The White Rabbit’s status as an authority figure forces Alice to adjust her perception that humans sit at the top of the animal hierarchy. Alice wonders if her experiences in Wonderland will affect the way she conducts herself when she gets back home, since she imagines that she will have to start taking orders from her cat Dinah. Alice accepts the inversion of the natural order with the same faith that she might accept new information in her normal day-to-day life. Wonderland breaks down Alice’s beliefs about her identity and replaces those learned beliefs and understandings of the world with Wonderland’s nonsensical rules. Alice understands this identity displacement in terms of a fairy tale. She states, “When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” Fiction has intruded on her own sense of reality, and she finds herself unable to keep the two separate. Alice is no longer the Alice she knew at home and is not altogether sure of who she is anymore.
Alice continues to have problems with her size, which exacerbates her confusion over her identity and once again alludes to the painful transition from childhood to adulthood. In Chapter 1, her changing size became a source of anxiety for Alice, revealing her desire to remain a child and avoid the pressures of adulthood. In this chapter, she identifies as a growing girl too large to be shut in by forces that seek to constrict and repress her. The focus on physical space in Chapter 4 emphasizes a child’s emerging feelings of claustrophobia as he or she grows and changes. The house represents domestic repression, an idea underscored by the fact that Alice enters it as a servant girl. When Alice literally outgrows the house, her body manifests her desire to transcend the boundaries of her confined existence.
When Alice meets the puppy, she finally discovers a Wonderland creature that behaves in a way that she expects. Unlike the other creatures Alice encounters in Wonderland, the puppy behaves the way a puppy would in the real world. Alice isn’t the only one who recognizes this aberration in the logic of Wonderland. In a later chapter, the Cheshire Cat tries to prove to Alice that it is “mad” by comparing itself to a dog, which it views as being quite normal. The fact that the dog is the only thing in Wonderland that resembles Alice’s reality at home may be a function of the fact that Carroll hated dogs. Carroll reveals his disdain for canines by giving the dog none of the magical qualities of the other animals in Wonderland.