Character of the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”

Introduced as one of the queens in Looking-glass World, the White Queen is a fictional character who appears in Lewis Carroll's 1871 fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass.

Prior to the game, the White Queen along with her husband the White King first appears to be an animate chess piece of normal size in the drawing room looking for her daughter Lily just beyond the titular looking-glass and, for whatever reason, cannot hear or see Alice after she passed through the eponymous looking glass. Alice, not realising this, picks both her and the White King off the floor and places them on a table, leading them to believe that some unseen volcano blew them up there.

Upon her first arrival, Alice finds the White Queen extremely perplexing and not particularly queen-like. She does not meet her as a human-sized character until the Fifth Square. The White Queen is portrayed as an elderly woman who is very aware of her situations and what is going to happen next. She looks untidy with a comb stuck in her hair and a shawl that is not pinned properly. The White Queen is an anxious woman, because when Alice met her, she looked at her in a frightened way whispering “Bread and butter” to herself. She could predict the future and was worried about it, which explains her anxiousness. The White Queen was going on and about a thunderstorm that happened on the last set of Tuesday, and while she continued a story, the Red Queen apologised to Alice for her behaviour and explained that the White Queen was not brought up well. She may be from the lower class of Victorian England, that is why she was not brought up well with manners. She creates a role reversal for Alice, demonstrating her that adults also need to be taken care of too, and she felt how is it like being an adult. Her role in the story is to explain and tell the properties of Looking-Glass land. 

The White Queen introduces Alice to the idea that a person can remember in both directions—that is, remember the future and the past. As an example, she says that a man is currently being punished for a crime he has not committed yet, but when Alice asks what will happen if the man does not commit the crime, the White Queen offers a disturbing answer: that punishments are unequivocally good, whether someone committed a crime to deserve them or not. 

The White Queen can move very quickly around the chessboard and Alice sees her running hard at one point. She appears with Alice and the Red Queen once Alice reaches the Eighth Square to give Alice another lesson in logic, riddles, and how to carry herself as a queen. According to the Red Queen, the White Queen came from humble beginnings and so sometimes says silly things. Upon waking, Alice believes that her cat, Snowdrop, appeared as the White Queen in her dream, and that the White Queen was so disheveled throughout the dream because Snowdrop was in the middle of a bath. 

In conclusion, characters from fantasy fiction are so appealing to the audience because people mostly focus on the powers they obtain and their odd-looking features. Also, they serve as a guide to the protagonist and they resemble people in society. Characters in fantasy fiction are relatable to the audience as they reflect our culture and society, and as a result, characters do not count as purely fictional that merely makes sense in the author or audience’s mind. The character of the White Queen proves important in this respect.