The passage I’ve chosen from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is as follows:
“‘I’m sure I’m not Ada,’ she said, ‘for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little! Besides, she’s she, and I’m I, and—oh dear, how puzzling it all is! I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn’t signify: let’s try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome—no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try and say “How doth the little—“’ and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do:—
‘How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
‘How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!’
‘I’m sure those are not the right words,’ said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, ‘I must be Mabel after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh! ever so many lessons to learn! No, I’ve made up my mind about it; if I’m Mabel, I’ll stay down here! It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying “Come up again, dear!” I shall only look up and say “Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else”—but, oh dear!’ cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, ‘I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!’
This passage raises a rather interesting question, particularly toward the end. Can our concept of identity possibly stay the same from social situations to isolation? Or, perhaps more simply, does our concept of identity change when we’re totally alone?
To understand this question, we must first examine what Carroll does to evoke this question from the passage. This question mostly comes to be from the ending of the passage, where Alice laments about how tired she is of being alone. It seems that a part of her confusion as to who she is (as she’s constantly trying to figure out whether she is herself, or someone else, in the case of this passage, Mabel) comes from her own feelings of isolation in Wonderland. Even as she is surrounded by bizarre and often whimsical creatures, she still feels totally alone, as she reveals to us in this passage. It seems to be this feeling of being alone that makes her unsure of her identity. What I find particularly interesting about this is that, despite how unsure Alice is in her own identity, she seems quite sure in her feelings and desires. She is so overwhelmed with loneliness that she bursts into tears as she announces to the world how deeply she wishes someone from her home would appear in Wonderland alongside her.
The passage seems to toy with this question almost before it even arises. In the beginning of the passage, Alice lists off friends of hers by defining characteristics that she sees as their identifying characteristics. To Alice, the core of Mabel’s identity is her stupidity, but if Mabel was in isolation, and had nobody around to point out how intellectually inferior she is, would stupidity still be key to her identity? Additionally if Ada, the first girl Alice mentions, decided to change her hair style so that it no longer “goes in such long ringlets” would she, to Alice at least, cease to be Ada? The passage seems to toy with the idea of social versus individual identity before the passage even raises the big questions of “Is Alice feeling lonely because she’s questioning who she is, or is she questioning who she is because she’s finally alone?” and “Has Alice’s identity changed now that she’s away from the constant influence of her society?”
While the passage doesn’t seem to say for certain how this question should be answered, it does give us some hints as to how Alice tries to answer it. To Alice at least, people in her society are defined by one or two simple traits that sets them apart from others, and that’s it. But in the world of wonderland, everyone is so drastically different with such extreme personalities that their identities cannot be boiled down to one or two traits that deviate from the norm, as almost all the traits of every character in wonderland deviate from what’s thought to be normal in Alice’s society.
In short, the passage I’ve selected both introduces and toys with the question of whether or not our individual identity is the same identity we have in social settings.