Legend In Wonderland Character Analysis

Neville and Helena are twin brother and sister originally from Ceylon, brought to Cloisterham in order to further their education. Mr.Crisparkle becomes Neville’s tutor, and Mis. Twinkleton takes in Helena to her boarding school for girls thus she lives there with Rosa Bud, who becomes her closest friend. We do not know the race of the twins because Dickens deliberately avoided defining it clearly. At some phase of his writing he was considering the idea of a “mixture of Oriental blood — or imperceptibly acquired nature — in them (Paroissien, xxiv)” but in the fragment their race is not specified, suggesting that the idea was perhaps abandoned or that this information was part of the solution and was therefore important to be withheld.

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Alterity is always in the eyes of the beholder and Helena and Neville are a perfect example of that because the town does not see them as equal. If nothing else, they are seen as less English because not raised in the Victorian spirit. Dickens presents them through the eyes of other people; they are not the agents, but the objects of the action. That is particularly true in Neville’s case because, although he is innocent, Jasper’s Machiavellian plan ruins his life, especially the social part of it, to the point that, shunned by the town he rarely even leaves his room. Neville did not do anything bad, something bad was done to him, but he cannot influence the way people see him because Jasper had already taken care of that. The original plan included Helena’s demise too, she “will be guilty by association to Neville as they are one in the same, and therefore will be forced out of Rosa 's life as well leaving her soul vacant for Jasper to penetrate (Cavanaugh 15)” but it seems that, according to Forester, Dickens decided not to go through with it and have Helena marry Mr. Crisparkle. The same source has it that in Dickens’s original plan Neville was ‘to have perished in assisting Tartar to unmask and seize the murderer (Forster and Lang, 453) , in other words he is sacrificed for the greater good, while Helena embraces her Englishness. Their sense of self is constantly under attack in the novel, but while Helena manages to rise above the perception of the others, Neville, accused of Edwin’s murder is in a much worst