CHILDHOOD AS MORAL METHOD: BRITISH FANTASY, AMERICAN REALISM, AND THE READER’S ETHICAL AWAKENING IN ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND AND THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
CHILDHOOD AS MORAL METHOD: BRITISH FANTASY, AMERICAN REALISM, AND THE READER’S ETHICAL AWAKENING IN ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND AND THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the moral function of childhood perspective in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although the two works belong to very different literary traditions—Victorian fantasy and American realism—they share a striking narrative strategy: both place a child at the center of a world whose adult systems of meaning have become unstable, absurd, or morally compromised. Carroll’s Alice enters a world in which language, authority, and social rules repeatedly lose coherence. Twain’s Huck, by contrast, moves through a recognizable social landscape where law, religion, custom, and conscience have been shaped by slavery and racial injustice.The article argues that neither text offers a simple moral lesson. Instead, both works involve the reader in the difficult labor of moral interpretation. Drawing on reader-response theory, particularly the work of Wolfgang Iser and Louise Rosenblatt, the study suggests that the ethical force of these novels lies in the interpretive activity they require. Alice and Huck do not merely represent childhood innocence. They function as narrative instruments through which readers are invited to confront the absurdity of authority, the corruption of inherited values, and the instability of moral judgment itself.

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