게임의 규칙과 거울의 의미

The Rule of the Game and the Meaning of the Looking-Glass: A Study on Through the Looking-Glass

This paper tries to explain how Lewis Carroll expresses objectification and reflection through the logic of looking glass and the game of chess in Through the Looking-Glass. The text borrows the structure and image of the traditional looking-glass books but inverts the theme and contents of the traditional books. Although Alice maintains her didactic and admonishing perspective into the looking-glass land, the imaginative literatures and their characters in the book invert the didactic and admonishing perspective. The plot of the book is framed by a form of culture contact between the culture of a Victorian girl and that of the looking-glass land. The looking glass functions as perspective of objectification and reflection and provides the possibility of objectification and reflection for the biased and unilateral perspective of Victorian culture and human society. Railway scene shows that Victorian life was transformed by mechanization, commodification and uniformity. Garden of live flower scene shows that live flowers evaluate Alice’s face, feature and color. The scene inverts the fact that humans always take the position that they can evaluate, appraise and classify all other living things to their taste and convenience. Eventually Lewis Carroll portraits himself through White Knight as impractical and purely theoretical. He represents himself as objectified and parodied through the device of the looking-glass. The game of chess also involves opponent checkers looking opposite direction occupying the half of the chessboard. The game of chess reflects the structure of the looking-glass, too. The last chapter “which dreamed it?” asks an important question: whether Alice dreamed all or she just belonged to Red King’s dream. Although the narrator leaves this as a question in Alice’s mind and readers’ at the end, the question shows the human existential quest through the logic of the looking glass.