In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol, the main character, Alice, dramatically changes size twelve times over the course of the story. These changes prove to dramatize Alice's growth in intelligence and imagination. The changes that she experiences seem to characterize the maturity Alice is beginning to experience in her life. Eventually, her last change in size somewhat represents the culmination of her growth. Perhaps Carroll's obsession with changes in size stemmed elsewhere; "Another contributing determinant to Charles Dodgson's concern with body size and changes lay in his repeated observation of his mother's pregnancies, with inevitable notice of her sudden changes from obesity to thinness."" (Rackin, pg. 314) The changes that she experiences seem to characterize the maturity Alice is beginning to experience in her life, after she falls in to a fantasy world full of chaos and opens the reader's eyes to a whole new perspective.
In the beginning of the story, Alice encounters her first change in size when she comes across a vial marked "Drink Me-. She drinks it in hopes of growing tall enough to reach the key to door leading to the garden, and grows to be over nine feet tall. She becomes very overwhelmed and upset and cries, making a pool of tears. She then begins thinking about why and how this is happening to her, and thinks she must be a poor girl named Mabel who is not a very bright student. Frantically, Alice tries to convince herself that she is smart and hasn't been transformed into someone else. "Let's try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome "no, that's all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for Mabel!- (p. 9, ch. II) She doesn't like the conclusion she came up with, so she decides to stay down in the hole until she becomes someone that she would rather be. Alice was using her vivid imagination when she began to believe she was someone else.
