LMLiterature Meanings

Characters

16 characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice

Protagonist

A curious, plain-spoken child whose sense of manners and logic repeatedly collides with Wonderland’s elastic rules. Her failed recitations (“How doth the little busy bee” becoming the crocodile verse) dramatize the breakdown of rote learning. She tests instructions through experiment, especially with the mushroom, and comes to distrust procedures that demand obedience without reasons. In the courtroom she rejects “sentence first,” shifting from polite participant to critic of institutional language. Scholars read her clear-sightedness as Carroll’s antidote to Victorian didacticism, aligning childhood with inquiry rather than submission.

Queen of Hearts

Performative Sovereign (Antagonist)

A caricature of absolutism who orders beheadings at every turn during croquet and the trial. The Gryphon notes she “never executes nobody,” revealing terror as theater rather than practice. Her authority relies on fear and on subordinates who translate bluster into routine. She distills capricious rule—the sovereign will without justice—that Alice ultimately names and dismisses.

Alice’s Sister

Framing Observer

The waking listener whose lap receives Alice at the end, and whose daydream projects a future in which Alice retells her adventures. She converts a private dream into cultural memory, bridging childhood play and adult storytelling. Her reverie frames the text as a dream-vision, legitimizing nonsense through affection and remembrance. She anchors the transmission of imagination across time.

Bill the Lizard

Working Creature and Institutional Pawn

A compliant laborer shuttled from chimney-sweep in the Rabbit’s house to juror in the court. He is ejected up the chimney by a kick and reappears taking notes as instructed. His mobility across roles highlights how ordinary subjects are conscripted by absurd systems. He marks the depersonalizing reach of procedure.

Caterpillar

Cool Examiner and Tutor-Parody

Seated on a mushroom with a hookah, he interrogates Alice’s identity—“Who are you?”—and offers precise yet limited advice about size. He transforms growth into an empirical task: small bites from different sides produce different outcomes. As a figure who will himself metamorphose, he ironically polices identity while embodying its instability. Critics read him as a parody of the authoritative Victorian tutor.

Cheshire Cat

Sardonic Guide

A smiling skeptic who can appear or vanish at will, sometimes leaving only a grin. He acknowledges arbitrariness, telling Alice that any path works “if you only walk long enough,” and points her to experiential tests (Hatter or March Hare) rather than fixed answers. His detachable head triggers a legal quandary about execution without a neck, exposing law’s absurd literalism. Critics see his grin as a sign outlasting substance, emblematic of Wonderland’s semiotic play.

Dodo

Satirist of Procedure

Leader of the caucus-race who declares universal victory and universal prizes, parodying elections and committees. Often read as a self-caricature of Dodgson’s stammer (“Do-Do-Dodgson”), he inserts authorial presence into institutional satire. His decision dramatizes results detached from criteria. He frames the book’s early critique of process without purpose.

Dormouse

Somnolent Storyteller

A dozy raconteur whose tale of three sisters in a treacle-well literalizes nonsense by treating language as self-circling talk. His sleep interrupts narrative exactly as Wonderland interrupts logic, turning story into ceremony. He resists questions about meaning and insists on his own narrative terms. He satirizes storytelling used to fill time rather than convey truth.

Duchess

Moralizing Parodist

A volatile noblewoman who spouts inverted maxims (“Flamingoes and mustard both bite”) amid flying crockery and clouds of pepper. Her baby becomes a pig, collapsing domestic order into grotesque transformation. Later she gushes over Alice at croquet, demonstrating how social behavior pivots with context. She skewers the emptiness of moral platitudes popular in didactic verse.

Gryphon

Brisk Guide and Drillmaster

A heraldic creature who hustles Alice from the Queen’s game to the Mock Turtle’s lessons. He treats education as performance—“You may not have lived much under the sea”—and values display over understanding. His impatience turns learning into drill. He embodies the conversion of curiosity into spectacle.

King of Hearts

Pedantic Proceduralist

A small-minded judge who treats law as cards to be read and rules to be recited regardless of relevance. He eagerly pushes toward verdict without coherent evidence and offers trivial maxims as legal guidance. His quiet commutations undercut the Queen’s bluster, exposing a system that preserves appearances over justice. He personifies empty legalism.

Knave of Hearts

Token Defendant

The silent center of a sham trial, surrounded by meaningless evidence—a nonsensical letter read as confession. His passivity reveals a court that manufactures guilt through form rather than fact. He is less a character than a function of institutional language. His predicament underscores the book’s legal satire.

Mad Hatter

Agent of Stalled Time and Empty Riddles

A host locked in eternal tea because he “quarrelled with Time,” turning etiquette into loop. He poses riddles without answers and dodges meanings through pedantic word-splitting, parodying instruction that prizes form over understanding. His “madness” has been linked to the period phrase “mad as a hatter,” sometimes associated with mercury exposure in hat-making, giving a historical edge to his mechanized ritual. With the March Hare he polices conversation by house rules rather than sense.

March Hare

Ritual Enforcer at Tea

The Hatter’s partner in endless tea-time whose rudeness takes the form of procedural insistence—“move round” instead of cleaning cups. He treats etiquette as a dominance game and shifts topics to avoid conclusions. His house rules mirror the Queen’s state rules on a domestic scale. He exemplifies how social custom can become compulsion.

Mock Turtle

Melancholy Parodist of Schooling

He mournfully recounts an underwater education—“Reeling and Writhing,” “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision”—that lampoons Victorian curricula and verse. His sentimentality clashes with the absurd content, exposing nostalgia for rigor as theater. The Lobster Quadrille codifies motion as instruction, all ceremony and pun. Annotated editions have traced these parodies to specific improving texts.

White Rabbit

Catalyst and Bureaucrat

Anxious herald whose watch and lateness inaugurate Wonderland’s distorted temporality. He alternates between officiousness and panic, calling Alice “Mary Ann” and ordering her to fetch gloves and a fan. His house episode exposes how offices and schedules can exist without sense. As a court functionary he embodies procedure detached from understanding.