Examples Of Heroism In Alice In Wonderland

According to Carl Jung, for a character to be considered as an archetypal hero, there are three criteria that he must pass through: a quest; an initiation which is further divided into separation, transformation, and return; and a sacrificial scapegoat (Guerin, 2005).The hero must venture into a quest full of danger and struggles. He must be separated from the world he used to live in, and return home transformed into a completely changed and different person. Lastly, he must learn to sacrifice his life or something really important for him for the betterment of others. We believe that these criteria are all found in Alice, the protagonist and main character of Lewis Carroll’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice is a seven-and-a-half-year-old prepubescent girl from England during the Victorian Era, who explored the nonsensical

From her fear of the unknown in a place such as Wonderland, she managed to set aside her sense of order to assimilate in the rules of this place and thus, achieving the power over Wonderland. With this paper, we will break down Alice’s characteristics and the happenings in the novel that would support and further explain how Alice is indeed an archetypal hero. In the first part of the story, Alice seemed to be bored in life. This is because she grew up in a wealthy English family and was raised with manners and education. She was not exposed with difficulties or any other source of excitement and so she yearned for an adventure; this yearning led her to Wonderland. The quest begins when the hero had crossed over the first threshold. In Alice’s case, her quest began the moment she jumped into the rabbit hole while running after the White Rabbit. A certain line in the book, “… or she fell very slowly,” (Carroll, 1994) was enough of a hint to the readers that Alice’s journey will be a very long one. Her quest continued as she roamed around the corners of Wonderland. As she stayed in the