Through the Looking Glass as Second World Fantasy
             Fantasy, as Edmund Little contends in his study The fantasts: Studies in J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peak, Nikolay Gogol and Kenneth Grahame, is almost impossible to define as a literary genre. According to Little, all fiction is a fantasy, even when it claims to be objective or when it seems realistic to the mind's eye (Little, 3). Adopting Tolkien's view of the fantastic, Little argues that, in a fantasy, the reader is introduced to a Secondary World, as opposed to the Primary World which is the universe as we know it. These two terms are used so as to avoid the word "reality", which is obviously only an arbitrary definition. The main requirement is that this Secondary World have "inner consistency"(Little, 2), so as to be probable.
             Through the Looking Glass continues Alice's adventures in another wonderland, this time the world in the mirror, or the looking glass. As Little emphasizes, the otherworld represented in a fantasy is necessarily related to the Primary World in some way. In Through the Looking Glass, the connection is given by the mirror itself, which serves as a medium through which Alice passes from one reality to another. Following an exact although mad logic, the world in the mirror is an upturned representation of the Primary World. The structure of the otherworld only seems chaotic, when in fact it emulates the perfect logic of a game of chess. While there are no traces of magic as such, this Secondary World is obviously a charmed and charming territory in which most of the things are the reverse of what we find in the Primary World. As Little puts forth, the world in the looking glass is governed by a "controlled illogic"(Little, 52). Lewis Carroll's works are actually filled with mind-games that actually hint at some of the most important philosophical and scientific problems posed by mankind. The Sec...