47 pages • 1 hour read
Lewis CarrollThrough The Looking Glass
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1871A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Looking-Glass House”
Seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice is playing with her kittens in the living room alone. A black kitten, Kitty, is misbehaving by getting tangled up in yarn. Alice chastises Kitty for tangling the yarn, as well as not letting his mother cat clean him earlier. Even though Kitty disobeys the rules, she kisses him and talks to him as though he can answer her. Alice pretends she and Kitty can play chess together.
She then imagines that there is a “Looking-Glass House” on the other side of the mirror over the fireplace. Alice thinks the Looking-Glass House would have everything the same as their world but mirrored. Alice climbs up on the mantle of the fireplace, which has a mirror on top. She says the mirror is melting, bringing her into the Looking-Glass House. She steps through the portal that leads to the mirror world.
In the alternate world, she is also in a living room, but the chess pieces are alive. The White Queen is crying for her daughter, who is up on a table. Alice tries to talk to them, but she realizes they cannot see or hear her. She picks up the White Queen to bring her to her daughter Lily on the table. The quick movement from an invisible hand makes the queen lose her breath. Alice brings the king up more slowly; the couple talks about the strangeness of floating through the air.
The White King starts to write in his journal about the mishap, but Alice holds the pencil over his shoulder and writes the “Jabberwocky” poem. After writing the nonsense poem, Alice leaves the house to go outside.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Garden of Live Flowers”
Outside in the fresh air, Alice spots hills and a garden of flowers. She tries to reach the beautiful garden, but every path leads her back to the house. Finally, after turning to walk toward the house, she reaches the garden, which has a giant Tiger-Lily tree in the center. As Alice admires the flowers, they suddenly start speaking to her. They think she is a flower too, but an “ugly” one. The Tiger-Lily protects them all, even though she says the Daisies are rude. Alice chats with the flowers, asking how they can talk. They reply that the soil is harder here, so flowers stay awake. The flowers say she looks like another flower with nine thorns on her head.
The Red Queen rushes by, and Alice tries to find the path to reach her. She eventually turns around, and the path leads her straight to the queen. The Red Queen greets her, asking her to curtsy and providing her with knowledge of the country. She tells Alice the world is made of fields, hills, and rivers that separate each square of land like a chessboard. Alice wishes to be a pawn, or better yet, a queen. The Red Queen replies that Alice can take part in the great chess game, and then they can both be queens.
The Red Queen explains each plot of land. She tells Alice that Tweedledee and Tweedledum will be in the Fourth Square and that the Seventh Square is all forest, but a Knight will help her across it. The Queen advises her that the fastest way across the first square is to take a train. Alice thanks her, and the Queen rushes away, waiting for Alice to make her move. Alice feels like a pawn, but her goal is to get through the chess-like land and become a queen.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Looking-Glass Insects”
Alice looks over the land from the mountain she stands on. She notices a little village with elephants inhaling nectar from flowers. She wants to investigate the giant insects later, but she needs to catch the train. The Guard scolds her for not having a ticket, and Alice explains she did not know how to get one. The passengers sing choruses about her wasting time, but they let her ride the train as a piece of luggage. Alice sits beside a goat and a beetle, among other odd passengers. The train hurries along while a gnat buzzes in Alice’s ear, telling her silly jokes. The horse pulls his head out the window and says the train is coming to a river. The train will jump right over it, which worries Alice. Luckily, the train makes the leap.
Suddenly, Alice finds herself sitting beneath a giant oak tree. The gnat from the train is much larger now, talking with her about other insects. Alice names some insects, such as a horsefly, and Gnat describes similarly named (but very different) insects. For instance, instead of horseflies, they have Rocking-Horse Flies, which are made of wood and eat sawdust and sap. Alice and Gnat talk about the significance of names, remarking that if they were to lose their names, they could not be called or known. Alice is curious about the insects, but she must continue her journey.
She travels into nearby woods. Alice cannot think of the name for trees, and she realizes she is in a place Gnat talked about, where names disappear. She forgets her own name, thinking it begins with an L. Soon, an adorable fawn jumps through the brush, asking what she is called. She cannot remember her name, and neither can Fawn, but the animal knows the way out, where their memory will return. Fawn leads her to the wood’s edge, and they remember their names.
Fawn hops off while Alice takes a road with two signs that point the same way. One sign is marked “TO TWEEDLEDUM’S HOUSE,” and the other reads “TO THE HOUSE OF TWEEDLEDEE” (122). Alice realizes they must live in the same house. She nearly collides with the two little men.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Through the Looking-Glass falls under the genre of a portal story. “Portal fiction” is defined as “a subgenre of speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy) centering on characters that move from their present reality to another world via a ‘portal’ of some kind” (“Portal Fiction Defined: 10 Stories Featuring Magic Portals.” MasterClass, 31 Jan. 2022). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, along with The Wizard of Oz and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books, are often cited as standard examples of portal stories. Alice never remains in her own world, entering a secondary landscape through a rabbit hole in the first book, and the looking-glass in the second. The looking-glass world features environments, customs, and characters that invoke aspects of Alice’s everyday life—for instance, the existence of trains and chess—but the logic that governs this world is foreign and surprising. A parallel world that transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar is a central quality of portal fiction.
Alice’s attempts to understand the events and characters she encounters in the looking-glass world prompt Reflections on Imagination, Growth, and Maturity. One of Alice’s major conflicts—balancing imagination with logic—is tested by Navigating a World With Nonsensical Rules. Alice is a highly imaginative child, always playing make-believe: “‘Kitty, dear, let’s pretend—' And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase ‘Let’s pretend’” (97). Yet when she enters the looking-glass world, she often questions the bizarre events and behavior she encounters. For instance, although she is fascinated by the talking flowers, she also wants to know why they can speak when flowers in her world cannot. A very curious child, she wants to learn how and why things can happen. She cannot help but question the mechanics and meanings of things. Alice’s balance of imagination and inquisitiveness reflects the unique perspective of children, whose imaginations flow more freely than grown-ups’, and to whom the world can be a confusing place, ruled by the often-inscrutable rules of adults. Like many children, Alice processes her world through a combination of imagination and reason. More things are possible in a child’s world than an adult’s—talking flowers, for instance—but like any other phenomenon she encounters, Alice tries to figure out how to fit it into what she already knows.
In this way, Alice’s journey through the looking-glass world mirrors the way the real world is already one of nonsensical rules that she must navigate on her way to maturity. The game of chess is a multi-layered symbol of order, power, and aspiration that intersects with the theme of Reflections on Imagination, Growth, and Maturity (see Symbols and Motifs for further analysis). The Red Queen calls her a pawn at the start, and Alice repeats it: “Alice began to remember that she was a Pawn, and that it would soon be time for her to move” (113). Alice’s goal is to transition from a pawn to a queen, reflecting underlying themes of transformation, identity, and maturity. To achieve her goal, she must follow the rules of the game, even when those rules are esoteric or nonsensical. If she does, she will achieve power and authority over herself and her world—a reflection of a child’s fantasies about adulthood.
In an example of Carroll’s hallmark Exploration of Language, Wordplay, and Meaning, he builds the chessboard itself into the text using asterisks to represent every time Alice crosses into a new square, matching the content (the text on the page) with the context (the symbolic chessboard setting). The asterisks give readers a visual clue that Alice is moving from one part of the map to another in this altered mirror world. Every time she gets closer to her goal, the asterisks appear as a visible symbol of Alice’s plot points. The first chapters of the novel also include Carroll’s most famous poem, “The Jabberwocky,” which is composed largely of nonsense words. Carroll plays with the sound and syntax in “Jabberwocky” to convey feelings that make the poem’s meaning comprehensible despite all its made-up words.
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