Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland reminds us that childhood is simultaneously wonderful and scary. It’s a period of time associated with play, innocence, and minimal responsibilities. It’s also a period of time when the world can be an especially confusing and dangerous place. Ideally, a child is able to enjoy the wonderful aspects of childhood without feeling completely vulnerable and helpless when faced with the scary aspects.
In this story, Lewis Carroll asks us to follow the whimsical adventures of Alice after she decides to follow the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole into another world. The story is told from Alice’s point of view, which allows Carroll to show the delight that children experience when discovering new things. For instance, at one point, Alice is given instructions to eat some cake; she eats it in the hopes she will grow back to her normal size after having been miniaturized by a potion she drank earlier. When she remains the same size, the reader is told,
To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so
much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it
seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way. (Carroll 12)
Alice seems to be more in curious anticipation of what will happen next than fearful; her primary emotion seems to be disappointment when nothing happens to her after she eats the cake. By this time, Alice thinks it is “common” that she is a miniature version of herself, which perhaps hints at children’s ability to adapt to new situations no matter how unusual they may be. Through Alice, Carroll demonstrates that children are intelligent, curious beings with certain logic patterns of their own.
Carroll’s use of dreams is where he shows how sensitively he has considered this story from a child’s perspective. Wonderland is a dream-like place where, as the perpetually grinning Cheshire-cat points out, everyone is “mad” (Carroll 51). At face value, Carroll’s story is delightfully insane – it’s a place where frogs can be doormen and the aforementioned Cheshire-Cat, who, in addition to his grinning, can reappear and disappear at will; it’s a world where Alice can change size just by eating and drinking different items.
Yet, despite the fact that dreams throw the world of Wonderland into chaos, it also presents a sense of safety in the book. In Alice in Wonderland, dreams are a method used to remove reality from a situation. In her article, “Fairy Tales for Pleasure”, Gillian Avery states,
By treating the world of lessons and governesses with such playfulness, Lewis Carroll
reduces it from the terrifying place it must sometimes have seemed to a manageable
absurdity. (Carroll 326)
Although she makes this observation while discussing a scene in Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, the idea of “manageable absurdity” can easily be applied to Alice in Wonderland, such as a scene where a Dodo bird and various animals are running a race in circles and everyone wins a prize because everyone has won the race. The confusing rules of an adult world are reduced to silliness.
Also, Carroll uses dreams to remove Alice as well as the reader from a situation when it threatens to become too dangerous. At the end of the novel, an angry Queen of Hearts orders a group of playing cards to attack Alice, but before the situation becomes too frightening for Alice or the reader following her, Carroll wakes her up and prevents the scene from going any further. By doing so, Carroll has allowed the book to become a substitute imaginary space for dreams. What Hartmann claims dreams expresses, Carroll has expressed in the space of a book.
Read more:
Introduction
Approaches to Children's Dreaming
History of Children's Literature
Alice in Wonderland
Suggested Readings, Links and Images
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