Character Analysis: The Looking Glass Wars

How can challenges change people throughout their lives? Challenges shape people in many different ways, whether it be for good or bad. The effects of these challenges make people who we are, and shapes the characters found in stories and novels. The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor showcases change in characters through Alyss Heart, a young princess in Wonderland. Beddor uses these conflicts to convey how Alyss changes as a character throughout the novel.

In the beginning of the novel, Alyss is characterized as ingenious, spirited, and exalted. Alyss is always making things interesting, like when she stated “‘It’d be more fun if it had fountains of water coming out of it’... immediately the hoop was spurting water from the tiny holes

In the beginning, she was an ingenious, spirited, and exalted young lady. Now, she is beginning to lose some of those characteristics, like when Queen Genevieve spoke to her and said “‘Never forget who you are, Alyss”, and Alyss cried ‘Shut up!’... and threw a pillow a pillow at the looking glass” (Beddor 150). This shows how that she is beginning to give up on who she is. She no longer believes that anyone will believe her story, and begins to stop believing it herself. After this transition, Alyss is seen as a “a thought, well read woman with opinions on a variety of topics…” (Beddor 163). Alyss is beginning to try and forget about Wonderland and conform to this world. She is now an intelligent young woman that knows much about the topics in this new world, such as Britain’s military, commerce and industry under a monarchy, and how to care for the poor. Later in Part Two of the novel, it seems that she does not completely let go, like at her wedding, she “had a strong desire to glance toward the left balcony where she imagined the scarred man to be standing, a man whose name she had with great effort tried to erase from her memory” (Beddor 202). A small part of her still wishes that what she said was true. She has tried so hard to forget about Wonderland, but she just cannot let it