Wonderland Vs Neverland

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Everyone looks at growing up differently. Some wish to hold onto their childhood innocence, whilst others have lost it, struggling to find a more mature identity. The literary works of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie each tackle one side of the transition between childhood and adulthood. For Alice, the world of adults is confusing, but she wants to fit in, wants to be older, and is tired of being treated like a kid. She strives to be older by acting the part of a mature young woman, her world of Wonderland reflecting this fact, as its older, contains more adult themes and concepts, and ultimately helps little Alice through her child to adult transition, allowing her to find herself. Peter is quite the opposite. For him, growing up is a definite no, and he holds onto his innocence at any cost. His world, Neverland, portrays this, as things are strictly good or evil, black or white, with an obliviousness to see the fine line in between, and allows Peter to know exactly who he is. These young protagonists are surrounded by a cast of characters that help outline which side the separate authors take on growing up, and how such things as innocence, maturity, identity and escapism all play parts in these coming of age tales.

Alice is seven-years-old. While most kids her age are playing “with a range of toys from wax dolls to toy soldiers and train sets” and enjoying their youth, Alice is reading, learning vocabulary from her sister, and thinking about the day’s weather (Lambert). Quite a bit more grown up than the other kids in the 19th century, Alice believes herself to be an adult, acting far beyond her age, and facing challenges with a far more mature attitude. Although confused and a little frazzled when falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, she immediately sets herself goals and explores, pushing herself on with an air of experience. When faced with the bottle that says “DRINK ME”, she shows herself knowledgeable, letting readers know she’s heard all about different kinds of poison, and knows that “if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later” (Carroll 8). The promotion of her supposedly vast knowledge-beyond-her-years and maturity continues throughout the novel, as Alice points out several occasions to several of the Wonderland characters such as the Caterpillar and later, the Mad Hatter and the Queen, that she’s not just a child, and that’s she’s much more grown up than they think. Numerous instances in the novel show that Alice perceives herself to be older and more mature than she is, and show readers just what side Carroll seems to be taking on the issues of growing up. With the Caterpillar, it seems not to faze her at all that he’s sitting on a mushroom smoking, which isn’t something that typically occurs in a children’s novel, nor should she be exposed to. Secondly, one should note that the mushrooms and potions Alice must eat or drink to grow bigger to smaller are comparable to drugs of the real world, as they alter a person’s perception, much like how they affect Alice’s perception of the already whacky Wonderland. In addition, her constant growing and shrinking mirrors a child or adolescent undergoing changes through puberty and inability to adjust before going through a bit of self-discovery. The only problem is that no matter how grown up Alice thinks she is, and can act, saying she knows just about everything, her meeting with the Duchess, who comments that Alice “[doesn’t] know much, and that’s a fact” causes her to realise she in fact knows nothing, and still has a great deal to learn from both Wonderland and her own world in order to grow up (Carroll 45). The more mature setting of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shows readers he clearly identified with children growing up, making the transition from innocent child to mature adult as quickly and independently as possible. In contrast to this, a book meant for kids, Carroll’s subjects, themes and symbols are far more mature than J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

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Some children simply refuse to grow up when it is time. They don’t want that responsibility, they don’t want to change, and they don’t want to become an adult. They wish to remain “gay and innocent and heartless”, and that’s exactly what Peter plans to do by staying in Neverland forevermore (Barrie 111). He tells Wendy right from the start that he ran away from home because he overheard his parents “talking about what [he] was to be when [he] became a man” and decided that he wanted to “always be a little boy and to have fun” (Barrie ...

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