Exploring the innocence of children

    Today's assignment is to talk about what we learned from our class discussion yesterday with Professor Lynda Sexson. First off, I would like to say that she is an amazing speaker and definitely knows here stuff about Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. In this one class period, we covered so many topics that there is no way that I can even begin to explore them all in one blog. However, we didn't expressly talk about the subject that captured my interest was the subject of children and their roles in fictional works.

    Before reading Through the Looking Glass for the first time this week, all I knew of Alice was what I saw from the Disney movie. Beyond the actual book, I knew nothing of Lewis Carroll. or Charles Dodgeson.    The part of Charles' life that interested me was his apparent fascination with children specifically as characters in his novels. When thinking about this I started to wonder, why are children used so often as mirrors, symbols of terror, or of hope respectively? Why is that often in horror movies, are children used to inspire such fear? And going even further on in this vein of thought, why does the idea of children being evil create such fear in the ones that I have been watching? In the past few weeks, I have been watching a lot of TV, especially the show Supernatural. Here is a clip to illustrate how the horror increases when the evil creatures are children. 

    This clip shows a compilation of children in various shows that are currently popular or else shows that have been popular in the last decade. The music is pretty creepy but it definitely conveys the point I am trying to make here. Everything seems much creepier when children are involved! But on the flip side, when put into stories that have a hopeful or happy bent, children supercharge whatever emotion is trying to be conveyed. 
    In my opinion the scary factor rises because children are like mirrors in the fact that they are able to bridge  the gap between Wonderland and reality. Their "bridginess" comes from their ability to still believe in the supernatural and the impossible. Creepy children are especially horrible because in them we see not only them but ourselves when we were younger. 
   The next thing that bears scrutiny is the innocence that children possess.The key here is innocence that has not been tainted by a lifetime of hearing that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and Harry Potter aren't real. No story, myth, or fairy tale can exist without the existence of innocence, both within the story and in the people who either are listening to the story, telling the story or reading the story. Innocence has untold power and potential. The power and potential of Through the Looking Glass is magnificent. Alice's power comes from her ability to readily accept the strange and unusual. She finds it odd that flowers talk, that animals can converse, and that she is able to become a queen but she doesn't let it stop her from accepting this as her new reality. I think that this is what Carroll found so great about working with and studying children. It isn't just fictional children that have this ability but normal human children as well. So instead of finding Carroll to be creepy maybe we should look at him for inspiration of where to look to find the true possibilities for our reality. 
    If we look around us, we will find that the presence of innocence is everywhere. It can be found in books, poems, and even within literature majors. We were called to this area of study because we look for the innocence and how to create it ourselves. None of us choose to be literature majors just because we like to read, even though that does add into it. The real reason that people chose to be Lit majors is because the idea of being able to figure out how to understand innocence. We want to capture it and use it to help us understand how the world works.