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Get every literary device explanation for Through the Looking-GlassPlus so much more...
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Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Fabulous Monsters:
In Chapter 7, Alice meets a Unicorn who is surprised to meet a real-life human child. The Unicorn uses a twist on an idiom that helps convey a sense of situational irony:
“This is a child!” Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her, and spreading out both his hands towards her in an Anglo-Saxon attitude. “We only found it to-day. It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!”
“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn.
The phrase "as large as life, and quite as natural" often refers to renderings of the real world in art. Realism was a major art movement in the mid-19th century: artists tried to paint the real world just as they saw it. The idea of a painting as "large as life, and quite as natural" is complimentary, meaning that the painting is a faithful, successful reproduction. Here, the Unicorn calls Alice "as large as life, and twice as natural." This phrase, which became something of an idiom in its own right after Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass, suggests that the unicorn sees Alice as a work of art that has come to life. She is almost supernatural, eerily giving movement to the images of human children the Unicorn has only seen in art.
It is ironic that the Unicorn sees Alice as a work of art come to life because, to Alice, the Unicorn itself is a living manifestation of a mythical creature she has only seen in paintings and in her imagination. The idea that Alice is the strange, fantastical creature in this situation is an example of the many inversions of the Looking-Glass World. Not only is this a strange and fantastical world for Alice to explore, but it also reflects the "real" world and makes it look just as bizarre. This exchange raises the question of what "reality" really is. Does each one of us have our own version of reality?
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