I had read these books in several edited childish versions between the ages of five and ten, only getting to the real Lewis Carroll versions after sixteen. I think I was interested in different aspects of the stories in the second round of reading, such as the clever use of language and the subtler messages coming through about people and places; the influences of both magic and believability has shifted in the adolescent angst I was then experiencing.
The third recent reading brought back memories of my responses from both, my childhood and teenage years. And oddly I see that my connection – earlier in the form of likes and dislikes, later in the form of questions and judgments (Why did she say that? What did he mean?; or, That was so dumb! She could have said/done this instead), remained pretty much the same.
A lot of people have not read the books, only seen the Disney movie. Lewis Carol wrote the book in 1865 and 1872, and Disney produced its own animated version of Alice in Wonderland I think maybe in the 60s. The Disney production aimed at a very young audience, shows Wonderland as a colorful place, full of flowers, trees and an impressive garden, but did not show other layered aspects of the story, aspects that give the books a complexity richness. Perhaps it’s because it was meant for a younger audience; but Disney sanitized and prettified this one and many others it made movies of, rather more than any of the stories deserve.
Much of what I recall from my readings first had to do with identity, then with finding answers or meanings.
I know there have been many interpretations about not just the books but of the author’s life and philosophy and tendencies, but from a personal perspective, identity and the confusions about the process of finding out about yourself stands out.
There were a whole lot of really delicious lines to rediscover in this connection:
Very early on when she had shrunk after drinking the contents of the bottle, we read : for this very curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one …”
And:
‘Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar. … Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
And:
‘I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is--Be what you would seem to be - or if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'
Alice In Wonderland is not really a fairytale. There are no castles, or fairies or giants, though there are far more strange characters. Rather than about once upon a time, far far away , it is about now, in Alice’s garden. We know where we are – or so we think; yet that familiar place opens into the strange.
I think most people have at some point read these books, so I make a quick recap of some features and a few main (for me) characters.
Alice is based on Lewis Carroll's real-life friend, the young Alice Liddell. Alice, in the novel, is a girl growing up, displaying the mix of sureness and unsureness that marks this in-between stage on the way to adulthood. Throughout, Alice is "trying on" her adult self. She speaks in a learned manner, even when she isn't quite sure what she is speaking about, and she often creates in her own mind an adult personality to check her childish impulses. This comes through in her ‘falling’ to a place like none she has ever known. Descent, in fact, for Alice comes through her curiosity. She follows the White Rabbit down his rabbit hole, but loses him almost immediately.
The White Rabbit is the character that reappears to get things moving again when things need to take a new turn. He is a sort of guide, or more a device for indicating the changes Alice comes to, as he is too preoccupied with his own stuff to really be directly guiding her.
The Cheshire Cat, a smiling cat who can disappears and reappears at will, reveals to Alice how, after you have mastered the rules, then rules can start to master you. He propels her to the Mad Hatter and then to the Queen showing what happens when the rules get out of hand: illogical madness, a sort of childhood for adults.
The crazy tyrant who rules Wonderland, The Queen of Hearts, is best seen as an older person, an adult, who uses her rank and position arbitrarily, and has become full of impulsive and contradictory commands and unintelligible responses. In a sense, she is really an overgrown child who just happens to be old. The story highlights this by the changes in both Alice and the Queen -- as Alice grows stronger and more reasonable, the Queen degenerates into frailty and madness.
… And of course there’s The Mad Hatter, The Caterpillar, The March Hare, The Doormouse and other characters whom we meet later in many other allusions and books by other writers and references in all kinds of writings of all kinds of people.
Change is all around; change from form to form, from moment to moment. Alice changes shape and sizes, but there are also all these talking creatures, like the caterpillar smoking on his mushroom, Humpty Dumpty, and the Walrus and the Carpenter, halfway between creatures and people, yet quite believable.
Carroll sees to it that Alice starts out a child, but comes out of Wonderland now prepared to be an adult. She has learned that to be an adult is to honor rules, but not blindly. That there must be rules for a game to mean something, but the rules must be interpreted with a sense of justice and mercy, or they are as meaningless as no rules at all.
Most importantly, Alice has learned that to be old, or big, is not necessarily to be an adult.
In his other book, Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll gives us an Alice who imagines going into the Looking-glass House behind the mirror - an engaging tale of a child's journey into a world unlike any other.
It is my lesser liked book of the two; I found it more ‘childish’ before, and now I see why – unlike in the first book where you accept all the strange happenings naturally, here I feel you are more led or encouraged to do it, and it gets irritating at times.
It is told that the writer asked the ‘real’ Alice to his home where she saw a tall mirror standing in one corner. He put an orange in her right hand, asked her to look into the mirror, and then asked her which hand held the orange. She replied "The left hand." Baffled she said "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?" Carroll laughed, saying “That's the best answer I've had yet."
So the ‘reversals’ of a mirror give space for all kinds of other reversals. Carroll's imagination takes readers with Alice into Looking-glass House, with situations from the ordinary to the extraordinary, the staid to the silly, using the game of chess as the setting. Carroll juggles a heady mix of fantasy and reality to create a believable looking-glass world. He does it with such craft and skill that none of it seems incongruous.
In this mirror-image chess world, we encounter nonsense verse, nonsense words and writings, and meet other memorables - Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, (of the famous: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to means; neither more nor less.") and the White Knight and Red Knight.
In both books, Carroll juggles with linguistic conventions, making use of puns and playing on multiple meanings of words , even inventing words and expressions and developing new meanings for words. Anything is possible in Wonderland, and Carroll’s manipulation of language reflects this sense of unlimited possibility. In the second book his playing with language gets more intense. In Looking Glass, he uses his expertise in nonsense verse, rhymes, humor, and puns to create songs, jokes, and stories throughout.
I remember that the silly words games, the quite terrible schoolgirl level jokes were aspects of the book I enjoyed. Which young girl who had a love for words wouldn’t laugh like crazy at the silliness of the talking flowers?
Alice goes: “Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?”
"There's the tree in the middle," said the Rose. "What else is it good for?"
"But what could it do, if any danger came?" Alice asked.
"It could bark," said the Rose.
"It says 'Bough-wough!'" cried a Daisy. "That’s why its branches are called boughs."
Carroll explores the conflicts and tensions inherent in a child's world. Humpty Dumpty's severe tone, as well as the Queens' judging attitudes, reflect common ‘adult’ responses, requiring Alice to stand up for herself and believe in herself. The White Knight aids Alice in feeling protected and confident. Tweedledum and Tweedledee's kindness and compassion support her and teach her the same. As Alice deals with loneliness, awkwardness, and other interpersonal conflicts, she evolves and matures.
Alice moves along a make-believe, magical chess board. Successfully completing of her journey, she celebrates with the Red and White Queen as she becomes “Queen Alice”.
Overall, if the books teach a meaningful lesson, I think it is this: that meanings can change in changed contexts, certainty will be challenged, that we must expect the unexpected – not just in bookland but in everyday life.
The certainty and security a young person longs for even as she or he longs for change are brought out here perhaps better than any other story. In Wonderland, Alice finds that her lessons no longer mean what she thought, as she botches her multiplication tables and incorrectly recites poems she had memorized while in Wonderland. Even Alice’s physical dimensions become warped as she grows and shrinks erratically throughout the story. Wonderland frustrates Alice’s desires to fit her experiences in a logical framework where she can make sense of the relationship between cause and effect.
In both books, Alice encounters a series of puzzles that seem to have no clear solutions, which imitates the ways that life frustrates expectations. Alice expects that the situations she encounters will make a certain kind of sense, but they repeatedly frustrate her ability to figure out Wonderland. Alice tries to understand the Caucus race, solve the Mad Hatter’s riddle, and understand the Queen’s ridiculous croquet game, but to no avail. In every instance, the riddles and challenges presented to Alice seem to have no purpose or answer.
Even though Lewis Carroll was a logician and mathematician, he deftly plays around with riddles and games of logic that have no logic! Alice learns that she cannot expect to find logic or meaning in the situations that she encounters, even when they appear to be problems, riddles, or games that would normally have solutions that Alice would be able to figure out. Carroll makes a broader point about the ways that life frustrates expectations and resists interpretation, even when problems seem familiar or solvable.
Alice’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass world are really what she – and we – will encounter, not in falling through a long tunnel, but stumbling along our everyday lives wherever we are.
May you learn to be comfortable with uncertainty and learn to expect the unexpected! Marguerite Theophil
“Of course it’s true,
but it may not have happened.”
(~ a wise grandmother storyteller)
but it may not have happened.”
(~ a wise grandmother storyteller)