Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
             Like pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers
             Pluck'd in a far-off land.
             Lewis Carroll's greatest fear is of all his "child-friends" growing into mature women. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a desperate attempt to create a world where his innocent pre-pubescent female friends mustn't grow up. From the outset Lewis Carroll focuses on pre-adolescence, on the innocent childhood of his child-friend Alice, on a time when gender differences, societal order, sexuality and conventions subsist as malleable conditions. By prefacing Alice's adventures with the above poem, we witness an effort to preserve time, prevent any change, or specifically maturation to take place. The ultimate endeavor is to preserve Alice's pre-pubescent state and prevent her from becoming one of "them."
             Alice's Adventures in Wonderland begins with Alice 'sitting by her sister', appropriately representing the iconic Victorian image of a young innocent middle-class girl. Although the story swiftly takes on a dreamy nature and we shift to Wonderland, the way we get from "reality" to Wonderland is through the rabbit-hole, 'straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down.' This journey vividly resembles a baby's birth, as it travels from its fetal position inside the mother's comforting body to the external world, as an isolated individual who needs to assert herself; Alice falls from the world of her family and caring adults into a wild world where everyone she meets requires her to assert herself, make a case for her autonomous existence. Only a couple of pages onward, we find Alice herself expressing a desire to 'get out of [the] dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers
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