Origins
The Queen is believed by some to be a caricature of Queen Victoria, with elements of reality that Dodgson felt correctly would make her at once instantly recognizable to parents reading the story to children, and also fantastical enough to make her unrecognizable to children.
Her identity was hammered home for the purposes of popular culture in the 1966 live-action film, where she and the King of Hearts are portrayed without any attempt at fantasy, or disguise as to their true natures or personality.
The Queen may also be a reference to Queen Margaret of the House of Lancaster. During the War of the Roses, a red rose was the symbol of the House Lancaster. Their rivals, the House of York, had a white rose for their symbol. The gardeners' painting the white roses red may be a reference to these two houses.
Read more about this topic: Queen Of Hearts (Alice's Adventures In Wonderland)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)