Superego Depicted In Mock Turtle's The Grapes Of Wrath

Additionally, Alice matures by way of her ego growing to fulfill the id’s requirements without sacrificing the superego. After Alice checks herself from saying she eats lobster at dinner time, the Mock Turtle asks her to describe how she knows what the lobsters are like. Alice responds thoughtfully, ‘“I believe so,’ Alice replied thoughtfully. ‘They have their tails in their mouths--and they’re all covered in breadcrumbs’” (79). The Mock Turtle responds, stating that she is wrong about the breadcrumbs, but he does not suggest that he understood that Alice was alluding to the fact that lobsters are food in the real world. Consequently, Alice says it in a way that only she can understand, as if she was a mature parent would explain something that they don’t want their child to fully understand. Her id wants herself to say that she knows about lobsters, which comes from the need to identify with the group to avoid social anxiety. However, her superego, societal influences, and morality still state that it is not okay to scare these animals by suggesting their place in society’s food chain. Consequently, her ego matures and although she doesn’t “check” herself from stating the truth, she finds a way to satisfy both the id and the superego to get to a place in her unconscious where she can identify with the other characters, avoiding regression for the characters in this encounter by exposing their place as food …show more content…
Her unconscious signifies that she has to project her own defenses and her dysfunctions onto other characters in order to overcome them herself. Thus, she has to have agency in Wonderland as the only being who understands the real world and its implications to subconsciously work through her fear of