Curiosity Killed the Alice
December 2, 2009Oh, Alice. She is a dare devil. Falling down rabbit holes and getting lost in a mysterious world is not the normal agenda of a 7 year old. Didn’t Alice’s mother teacher her anything? When we’re little we are told ‘don’t talk to strangers’ and ‘don’t walk down dark alleys at night’ (in this case it would be a dark rabbit hole). Alice must have missed this little lesson on life because she has no inhibitions. She’s out there talking to any old animal she meets on the street AND all with out adult supervision. Tsk, tsk, shame on Alice. She thinks more of the short-term and not the long-term consequences of her choices.
Just like a child who wants a cookie before dinner, they don’t think of what they’ve done until they are sitting there with a mouth full of chocolate chip and their hands caught in the cookie jar. Somewhere down the road in Wonderland between the creepy caterpillar doing drugs and the queen obsessed with execution, Alice must have regretted her decision. Even with all that regret, she didn’t have the slightest hesitation with going deeper into Wonderland. She may have worried a bit, but she never faltered on her decision to keep moving forward.
I’m surprised her curiosity outweighed her fear of this strange place she’s now stuck in, but at the same time I’m not. This has been a common theme for stories for so long. Children get carried away by their overwhelming curiosity and end up in some terribly scary situation that they somehow get out of by good luck and some secretly acquired knowledge. Like that little story Hansel and Gretel, where the kids get lost in the forest. They innocently make the mistake of going deeper into the dark woods until they’ve reached the point of no return. They get into a sticky little predicament where a witch is trying to secretly kill them and stick them in an oven, but with their child-like form of intuition-esque knowledge and know-how they escape the witch with their lives and they all lived happily ever after…
Do you see the similarities?
Christian Long
Katherine H.
Melissa H
Rivu D.
Alex E.
Sylvia A.
I think Alice’s curiosity drives her down the rabbit hole and through wonderland. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, though. I was always a curious child and I believe it put me in new situations and exposed me to new things always resulting in good. I learned so much from my curiosity. I don’t see how anything bad came from Alice’s adventure. I understand your point about how Alice should not talk to strangers, etc. but it’s a dream. What she does in her dreams doesn’t dictate what she does in real life. I have had dreams where I talk to stangers and take candy from them, but I would never do this in real life.
See I agree with you that Alice is, in a sense, a ‘bad’ child, but there is a reason why. At the end, we learn that Alice is in a dream. Dreams are never logical and neither are our decisions. The fact that Alice is in a dream changes everyhting for me. We can not think logically because it is a dream; it can not be logical. Dreams can not have logic, and this throws the story ‘out the window.’ We can not take this story’s events with much detail and reason because it is a dream. How can we? Alice is bad because no dream has logic. Alice acts illogical because dreams know no difference.
I love this blog Sylvia! It made me laugh out loud. I love how you laid everything out on the table. It really made me think also. I wonder if she did regret any of this? But then again how could she techincally regret any of it, if it’s a dream? I think that a lot of the movies and stories for younger kids show this happening where they don’t listen to their parents or where they make a mistake so they end up making a mistake. Are the directors of these shows and movies trying to make a point? Are they trying to teach kids a lesson, I don’t think kids would really get the point at such a young age though. But props on the blog once again, it was very interesting. By the way, I like the pictures. Yes I can see the similarities.