Carroll And Gulliver's Travels: A Comparative Analysis

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll and “Gulliver’s Travels: A Voyage to Lilliput” by Jonathan Swift present the reader with two microcosms to aid in a de familiarization of the narrative. The secondary world is painted in extreme contrast to the primary world, therefore allowing the reader to see the customs, traditions and characters in the secondary world as separate from themselves. This allows them to judge the morality of their actions without their own cultural bias acting as a filter. The portal fantasies of Alice and Gulliver lead the reader into an unknown place, and ask them to learn of a secondary world, not unlike their own. The aim of these portal fantasies are to eventually allow the two worlds to bleed together,
Carroll uses the Queen of Hearts to comment on abuse of power, and abuse of justice. She treats lower classes in Wonderland and her own servants with an immediate assumption of guilt. Charles Matthews in his article “Satire in the Alice books” argues that
“Effective nonsense keeps one foot on the ground; fantasy needs a realistic background, a frame of familiar reference. A tour of Wonderland without the practical, very English little Alice to serve as norm would be tedious indeed. But the presence of Alice as norm, as the embodiment of Victorian practicality and industry, suggests that the Alice books may have satiric implications. (Matthews 109).
Alice’s narrative voice serves as the vehicle through which the adult readers are able to judge the queens justice system and understand the ludicrousness and archaic nature of it in a way that its younger readers would instead find comical or scary. Her extreme measures force the adult reader to think about their own political justice system, and wonder if it is just compared to hers. In this way, Carroll has made his text timeless. Even if he isn’t commenting on his own justice system, his story becomes relevant when looking at other forms of government and justice systems all over the world regardless of the time
They are trained in this art from their youth, and are not always of noble birth, or liberal education. When a great office is vacant, either by death or disgrace (which often happens,) five or six of those candidates petition the emperor to entertain his majesty and the court with a dance on the rope; and whoever jumps the highest, without falling, succeeds in the office” (Swift, 42).
The adult reader can easily identify with the ludicrousness of the scene. Politics, rationality and morality do not seem to be compatible in Lilliput. “The Role of Gulliver” by John Brooks Moore argues that “Swift, obviously enough, desires to communicate his own thoughts and passions regarding human beings to the readers of his book” (451). Moore feels that Gulliver is the medium through which Swift is able to comment on the Lilliputian systems of government and electoral processes as a method of commenting on real life scenarios of the same