A Disappointing Ending?

Lewis Carroll may have started a trend with his ending to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I for one have seen quite a few negative reactions to how Carroll intended his wonderland to all just be a dream. I found it slightly anti-climactic myself. The ending has also been accused of being unoriginal and being a sort of cheap way to get out of finishing the story. These days, quite a few stories end in such a manner, and most are met with a negative reaction. But I think there is a reason that Carroll ended his book the way he did, and Ill try my best to explain it.

When reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland you have to keep in mind that this book was published about 144 years ago. That’s a very long time, and since then, our society has changed multiple times as a whole. That being said, dream endings these days are somewhat cliché you could say. They aren’t necessarily loved by the mass population. But what about 144 years ago? Ending a story in such a manner would have legitimately shocked the reader and it was somewhat of a breakthrough concept. Obviously the idea of ending something in a dream was popular back then, because everyone copies the idea today to the point where its become so cliché that some people who read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland today actually expect the book to end in a dream.

If the idea of ending a book in a dream was such a new and breakthrough concept back when Carroll pioneered the idea, then you really can’t accuse Carroll of ending the book in a dream just to get out of making a legitimate ending. Carroll was incredibly original with his idea, in fact he started a trend with it. You can find quite a few movies and books that end in the exact same manner today, and you might be able to blame Carrol for that. But there is another, more significant reason I believe that Carroll wanted to end his book the way he did.

If you were to give this book a purpose for its existence, the first thing you would probably say is that its sole purpose was to exist to entertain Alice Liddell, and if you want to broaden that statement you could say it exists to entertain children and adults alike. Now if you were to give this book a focus, many people might say the focus of the book is Alice. However lately I’ve been wondering how the book is such a success if the focus were to be Alice, because if you ask me she’s somewhat devoid of a personality. Then I came to the realization that the focus of the book isn’t Alice, it’s the wonderland shes in. If the focus of the book is wonderland, then why does Carroll really need to show how Alice gets out of it when he can just end it in a dream? Lets face the facts, if Alice were to  just find a way to escape wonderland, which would mean it actually existed, it would leave a plethora of plot points that Carroll would have to clear up, and that takes away from the focus of the book. Alice’s sister would ask where she was, Alice’s family would be concerned and who knows, they might go looking for the rabbit hole that Alice fell down. All of this would be completely pointless to Carroll’s story. He most likely realized this, and honestly he wasn’t really left with any option BUT to end it in a dream.

Whether you like the ending or not, Lewis Carroll was on to something 144 years ago with his finish to Alice’s adventure. If you think the ending is just a cheap way to get out of thinking of an actual ending, then that might be because today’s society has molded your mindset because the idea was actually somewhat of a breakthrough 144 years ago. And to be honest, if you don’t want wonderland to be something that doesn’t exist, Carroll did you a favor and wrote a sequel.

Your Dream World and the Real World are One and the Same

Many people have brought up different thoughts about dreams and reality and how they are connected, or in some cases how they aren’t connected at all. If you were to ask me however, there is only one world, the real world, and dreams are apart of the real world and not a separate entity entirely. That’s not to say that there isn’t another wonderland somewhere far off in god knows where, but dreams are a part of reality, albeit a rather quirky part of reality.

Have you ever had a nightmare where you fell from something? Its a fact that most people have, but the more interesting thing is that most people physically experience the sensation of falling. Dreams are something limited to your mind, but the thing that fascinates me is that before waking up from a nightmare in which there is something involving falling, one actually feels like he or she is falling.

But the most interesting thing about dreams is that you don’t remember almost any of them which is almost common knowledge. Everyone at some point has attempted to recollect the humorous events of what happened in there own dream, but they fail to clearly remember it, and for some reason you just cant explain, as time goes by, you forget more and more of the dream. Well if you forget the majority of your dreams, then isn’t it possible that your living an entire other life as someone else but your just forgetting it? And there’s an interesting flip side to that story, maybe the other you in the dream world dreams about being you and he forgets those dreams as well. As an interesting aside, it is a scientific fact that the thoughts in your subconscious often lead to what you dream about. If that’s true, then dreaming and reality are not two different worlds, but worlds that go hand in hand, a world within a world.

So my questions to you are do you think that dreams are another world entirely or that they are just a part of the real world? and would you believe it to be possible that you are living another life that you just don’t remember or is that simply too crazy of an idea for you to believe?

Congratulations Disney, You Failed.

I am certain that many a Disney fan boy or fan girl only opened this post to disagree with me based on the title of the post, but you should keep in mind that this post is more factually oriented than the title suggests and is not simply my ridiculous opinion on why Disney failed in making a decent reproduction of Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Keep reading fan boys and fan girls, you may find out some surprising things about that movie you loved so very much as a little child.

Almost everyone has heard of, if not seen, at some point in there lives, Disney’s 1951 production Alice in Wonderland, heavily based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was produced by the famous Walt Disney himself, and that brings me to my first little fact. When the film was first released, it suffered heavily at the box office. This isn’t something that unique, seeing as how many a film fails to meet monetary success.  However what is unique is Walt Disney’s reaction to the films monetary failure, as he was quoted saying that Alice was a poor choice for a lead movie character because Alice had no “heart”. I for one, would have to completely agree. If there is one thing about Lewis Carroll’s tale that really puzzles me, it’s the fact that Carroll really left Alice devoid of personality. Personally, I have never really become attached to Alice as a character. In books such as Golding’s Lord of the Flies one feels attached to the boys on the island, especially the protagonist Ralph, and it feels as though he is an actual character, not just a vessel to show us a wonderland. However when one looks at Alice, it seems as though Alice as a character is 90% symbolic of obscure things in Carroll’s personal life and 10% developed character that is just there to show us the quirky oddities of wonderland. Would you, as a viewer, really like the protagonist not to have a fully fleshed out personality? Of course not, and Walt Disney realized this, albeit a little too late. It seems to me as if Alice is an incredibly hard protagonist to feel connected to, even for little kids, and that was possibly one of the reasons the movie was a flop back in its time.

The fact that the movie didn’t make very much money and received ridiculously critical reviews brings me to the second reason why I would deem everyone’s beloved Alice in Wonderland somewhat of an overrated production. When it was initially released at the box office, the film performed horribly, but admittedly later picked up ever so slightly. The movie at the time, frankly, was a flop. In addition to monetary failure, the movie was highly criticized for being an over “Americanized” version of one of the great literary works of England. It was also criticized for being overzealous at times in certain scenes and failing to appeal to two different audiences, something that the book manages to pull off absolutely stunningly.

There are also many animation and technical errors in the movie. Admittedly the movie was made in 1951, but the technology to make these errors non-existent was definitely there, as Walt Disney did not become a success with movies littered with shoddy animation. To start things off, when the movie was first made, Lewis Carroll’s name was misspelled in the opening title scene, which you may realize is quite the mistake. There were also many instances of mis-synced audio, such as the musical number in which Alice sings with flowers, as the flowers would be singing at the time Alice’s mouth would be moving, and this happens once again when Alice is going through one of her infamous size changes, as she can be heard talking to herself, but her mouth isn’t moving. In addition, when Alice first talks to the cards in the garden, the numbers on there persons appear and disappear at random times.

The only reason I am even doing this post is because I was under the impression that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland was a movie that was a mega hit, along the lines of Disney movies such as Peter Pan. When I found out the movie was not the giant success that I had first imagined it to be, I was curious as to why. If you were to ask me, the answer would be based heavily on the fact that Alice isn’t really likable. It’s not that Alice is a unlikable character. It’s just that it seems to me that Carroll seemingly never puts any effort into making the reader feel attached to Alice, and that she is more of a way to show how fantastic wonderland is, which is perfectly fine for a book. However, for a movie, not having a protagonist you want to cheer for often leads to monetary failure, but to give credit where credit is due, the movie has somehow managed to become a classic in the hearts of many, despite the flaws that it brings to the table.

Forcing an Answer

The Hatter, or the Mad Hatter as many of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fans so affectionately call him, is one of the more well-known characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland due to his rather unique personality. Then again, everyone in wonderland has a unique personality, so you could then argue that the Hatters personality is completely normal, but that’s another story. One of the more well-known if not the most well-known thing about the Hatter is that he asks Alice a perplexing riddle, a riddle that he says has no answer. A riddle without an answer isn’t something that would be considered so very shocking when compared to the other peculiar occurrences in wonderland, but what is a bit more curious is how some people in the “real” world decided to give the unanswerable an answer.

In the introduction to The Annotated Alice Gilbert Chesterton expresses concern over how he fears Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will eventually end up being over analyzed by literary analysts and scholars looking to find meaning behind a simple children’s story. This is a perfectly legitimate fear, as if the book were to be  over analyzed, the simple message of the book might be lost. Perhaps his fear has been realized, seeing as how in The Annotated Alice there seems to be an annotation analyzing the hidden meaning of almost everything. In fact, the frequency of annotations and hidden meanings makes me wonder how many of the annotations actually have any merit to them. For example, lets take the Hatters riddle, “why is a raven like a writing desk?”. Lewis Carroll himself said that he did not intend for there to be an answer to the riddle, but nevertheless puzzle experts and analysts alike forced answers upon the riddle, finding answers such as “Poe wrote on both”, a reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s infamous poem The Raven. Carroll himself gave the answer “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!”, with the misspelling of the word never being a play on the word raven. However he only gave an answer after his readers demanded one of him; in a sense, an answer was forced upon the riddle.

The question that then comes to mind is how many of the symbols, references, and hidden meanings that are mentioned in the annotations are merely forced concepts that Carroll never even intended to be there?

When reading many of the annotations in The Annotated Alice, it always manages to shock me as to how obscure some of the symbolism and hidden meanings in the annotations are. It doesn’t feel as though Lewis Carroll actually intended for there to be a connection between some of the events in the book and some of the events in his own personal life as many of the annotations say, but it seems more as if  though scholars and analysts merely found vague and obscure connections between Carroll’s life and what he was writing and then decided that Carroll was being symbolic and referencing his own personal life in his story.

The question I suppose being asked in the end then is, how many of the annotations that depict hidden meanings and references are actually real? Are all of the hidden meanings, references, and symbols that the annotations point out really put in by Lewis Carroll or were they simply made by analysts who found coincidence? Needless to say there are some obvious symbols in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that The Annotated Alice points out just fine and that are quite clearly true, but there are others that seem to me as if they are like the answers to the Hatters riddle, completely forced and out-of-place.

All Hail The Queen Of Hearts!

The Queen of Hearts is not the most likable of characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She often issues execution orders on what can be called a whim and she is the very ruler of the wonderland Alice is trying so desperately to understand. Clearly the protagonist of the story is Alice, and every protagonist needs an antagonist for a story to not be devoid of substance. The undesirable role of antagonist has often been given to the Queen of Hearts. However the most interesting and perhaps ironic thing about the Queen is that even as the antagonist, she is the one character in the book that is similar to Alice. Perhaps saying that they are similar would be going a bit far, because it is not necessarily that they are similar, but more that they are not different. Characters such as the Hatter, The March Hare, and the Cheshire Cat aren’t similar to Alice in any way, shape, or form, and are in fact very different from her as they are all completely mad. Or perhaps Alice is the one that is truly mad, and the March Hare, Hatter, and Cheshire Cat are merely the voices of reason, but either way these characters are very different from Alice, but the Queen of Hearts on one hand, is not.

Out of all of the quirky and eccentric characters in wonderland, which one is most similar to Alice?

If you look at it close enough, you will find that character to be the Queen of Hearts, the very character that Alice is in opposition to near the end of the book. But how is the Queen of Hearts, the character that is often looked at as Alice’s opposition in the tale, the one most similar to her? The answer to that is simply because unlike the many subjects over which she rules, the Queen isnt mind numbingly illogical. She may have a ferocious temper, often exclaiming “Off with their heads!”, but she also doesn’t show signs of being completely mad, as the rest of wonderland so clearly is. The Queen of Hearts is not as infatuated with nonsense as say the Hatter or March Hare, and her personality is more developed in the tale than characters such as the Gryphon or Mock Turtle, just like little Alice.

Alice is faced with many challenges in her foray through wonderland, but there never really is a true situation where Alice experiences fear until she meets the Queen. Sure, in the very beginning of the tale Alice experiences sadness due to her changes in size, but this is when she has just been introduced to wonderland. As she grows more accustomed to the nonsense of the world, she learns to cope with it better. That is, until she meets the Queen of Hearts who doesn’t seem to adhere to that same nonsense as her subjects that Alice has become used to, and instills fear in Alice, something that she hasn’t really experienced in wonderland yet. However when the Gryphon tells Alice that the Queen of Hearts has never actually followed through on any of her executions, Alice realizes that the Queen of Hearts is merely a playing card and is as empty and hollow of a shell as the very threats she so frequently orders.

It’s interesting to see how when Alice comes to the realization that the Queen is merely a playing card, her adventure finishes. It’s as if once she sees that her logic can actually be applied in wonderland, her illogical world disappears, as she proceeds to wake up from her rather curious dream after realizing that wonderland “doesn’t matter a bit”. Perhaps Carroll is insinuating that dreams are a way of equalizing our existence, as we live one life embodied by logic, the “real” one, and we live another embodied by what our mind creates, or our own personal wonderland.

It’s Creepy, but Why?

A question that many people have asked themselves is why does Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book written for a little girl, have numerous underlying morbid references?

Most books written for children aren’t so, to put it bluntly, creepy. To give credit to Lewis Carroll, the quirky, eccentric, and decidedly weird characters do have a way of not only capturing but keeping the reader’s attention.  But perhaps all of this “creepiness” is merely a misconception by the people of our day. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, meaning it was intended for an audience of almost one hundred and forty-five years ago. A hundred and forty-five years is enough of a time span to provide an audience with different cultural beliefs, and this audience was the one Carroll was writing for, not the more overprotective society we have today. My point is, perhaps what would be considered inappropriate and morbid for our children today, would be considered more along the lines of normal for children of back then.

The book was published during the Victorian Era in The United Kingdom, a period of time generally considered a very prominent period of The United Kingdoms history. However, during the particular period of time that the book was published, the 1860′s, The United Kingdom was going through a rather low point of the Victorian Era due to the death of Prince Albert. Queen Victoria refused to show herself in public for many years, and when she did go out in public, she would wear a widow’s cap instead of the traditional crown. This may seem utterly insignificant, but the Queens morose attitude for the few years following the princes death would indeed affect the mood of the entire country.

Also, 19th century The United Kingdom was undergoing an incredible increase in population which was most likely spurred by the Industrial Revolution. When a countries populace is faced with a rapid increase, the availability of jobs decrease and wages are decreased. During the particular period of time that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published, many people were faced with extreme poverty.

Even though The United Kingdom itself was saddened by the Queens morose attitude and the increase in poverty, there is absolutely no denying that the Victorian Era was an incredibly prominent time, as most of the middle class developed skills in literature and arithmetic, a skill that before was reserved for the elite. But how does the Victorian Era relate to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Because they seem to follow the similar trend of being incredibly prominent in the case of the time period and childish in the case of the book but having slight underlying problems in the case of the time period and subtle negative references in the case of the book.

The book was intended for children, and the children of 1865 were very different from the children of today. Perhaps that sentence is a bit misleading, because it wasn’t the kids themselves that were different from the ones of our day, but it was the way they were looked upon. In today’s society, children are considered a priority. There are numerous examples of this, from public education starting from a young age to the restrictions put upon them, such as the age limits put on things such as driving, drinking, and buying miscellanea. However, this was not so much the case back then. In fact, something that would never be tolerated today in the year 2009 was widespread in 1865. During the Victorian Era, there was something known as child labor, which almost all people in today’s society would find appalling. However it was commonplace during The Victorian Era in The United Kingdom. But what does this say? It says that children were not treated with the same protection that they are today.

Finally, to the point. Many people say that there are many things that would be considered too mature or inappropriate for children in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, maybe that is only true for the children of today. Children back then were not treated with the same protection as they are today, and perhaps Carroll was not concerned with putting in references to drugs or death when he knew perfectly well that his audience, the children, were themselves working in factories and possibly being mistreated and that they were more than likely mature enough to handle the references if they even understood them in the first place.



Poison, Death, and Drugs: The Unholy Trinity

By now it should be apparent that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is more than just a simple children’s book. If one looks at it, it is embedded with dark underlying themes, symbols, and references that would be deemed inappropriate for the children of our day. That is, if they weren’t so subtle. Most children would not identify or understand the metaphors and references that are embedded into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but perhaps a more mature mindset can. On the contrary, some of these references are indeed incredibly apparent, perhaps even to children. They may or may not be blatantly apparent, but one can surely say they are there.

Even in the first chapter, there is a reference to poison. This reference is not subtle at all, as it is written in the very text itself that Alice fears being poisoned by the bottle labeled “DRINK ME”. It seems a bit ironic that Alice would follow a white rabbit in a waist coat murmuring to itself without two thoughts but hesitates to drink from a bottle that says “DRINK ME”. A little girl would most likely be more concerned about returning back to what she is familiar with than being poisoned and killed. Why does Carroll make references to poison so early in the book if it was intended for Alice Liddell, a little girl? The text itself states that Alice had

 ”read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that, if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”

 Why would a girl who had previously displayed no caution all of a sudden have such unusual paranoia?

There are also many subtle references to death in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. According to The Annotated Alice, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole and compares it to falling down the stairs in her house,  a “death joke” is being made. It may be a bit extreme to say this, but perhaps falling down the rabbit hole itself is a metaphor for death. Another subtle reference to death is where Alice claims that she will drown in her own tears. This could possibly be symbolic of how the lack of control of ones own emotions can lead to ones ultimate downfall. However, the most obvious thing in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that can be related with death is a key plot point itself, the plot point being the actions and statements of the queen of hearts. The queen is known to issue death sentences oh her own personal whims if something displeases her, possibly a reference to the “Reign of Terror” in France, as it is assumed by many that Lewis Carroll made many references to the French and their language in his tale. Her catch phrase is “Off with their heads!”, a line implying the intent to kill. Notably, the king of hearts often gives pardons and the queens sentences have a tendency to not get carried out. Perhaps this is a nod to both of Carroll’s audiences, the mature and the young.

There is also a subtle reference to drugs in the form of the caterpillar. It claims that he is smoking a “hookah” which is a long tobacco pipe. Tobacco is not something illegal, but it seems slightly out of place for being in a children’s book. What is more significant than the fact that the caterpillar is smoking from a hookah is that the caterpillar doesn’t seem to be in a state of normalcy. From reading the text of the book one can get the idea that Alice has an aversion to the caterpillar due to this seemingly out of world state, and perhaps also because of the fact that the caterpillar gave Alice incredibly short replies and kept repeating itself when asking Alice questions.

Poison, death, and drug references aren’t the first things that come to mind when one hears “children’s book”. Then why would Carroll put in so many underlying, negative references? Unfortunately, the only absolute answer to that question belongs to a man who has long passed away, so for now, one can only wonder.

This Blog Entry was influenced by the following posts by Melissa H. and Brendon L. about some of the negative ideas brought up in the book.

Anthropomorphism: Banned

This blog entry is a reaction to this post by Melissa H.

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Sometimes, due to political, cultural, or social reasons, things such as books, poems, and other forms of literature, get banned or ordered out of print, no matter what time period or era. However sometimes, there are other, more ludicrous reasons for the banning of literature, such as a persons own pride. In the instance of the banning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a harmless book originally written for a little girl, this pride belonged to the Chinese governor of the Hunan province all the way back in 1931, about 70 years after the book was published.

The governor of the Hunan province was quoted saying “animals should not use human language” and that putting “animals and humans on the same level” was a very wrong and immoral thing to do” and that it was “disastrous”.

The idea that “animals should not use human language” automatically kills one of the most used and most effective literary devices, anthropomorphism, or giving animals human like characteristics. A literary device closely related to anthropomorphism is personification, or giving inanimate objects human characteristics. It can be safely be assumed that the vast majority of works that fall under the genre of fantasy use personification or anthropomorphism. Why would one single out a specific book for being anthropomorphic when there are so many others like it that should also be banned at the same time but arent? In fact, China’s own history is very animal oriented. To give an example, the Chinese refer to different years as “the year of the rat” or “the year of the dragon”, or other animal oriented names.

The book was intended for a little girl, and what child doesn’t want to get a meaningless laugh out of thinking about the idea of a talking white rabbit with a waistcoat or a cat telling a little girl about the madness of a land that has no rules? Anthropomorphism and personification are absolutely crucial to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and are just as important to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the idea of the wonderland itself. In fact, without personification, or anthropomorphism, it can be said that wonderland wouldn’t be all that interesting.

But what is so wrong about anthropomorphism? According to the Hunan province governor it “puts animals and humans on the same level”. For one, its questionable that it actually puts animals on the same level of intellect and stature, for two, what the governor is arguing against is one of the genre of fantasy’s key elements and not something specific to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and for three, is there anything actually wrong with an animal being equal to a human? Does humanities pride still extend as far as to look down upon what is deemed inhuman?

To answer Melissa’s question “Do you think it was right to ban the book for putting animals on the same level as humans?”, I would say that the answer is a clear and rather blunt no. What the governor was banning was not simply Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; what he was banning was one of the most commonly used literary devices in the genre of fantasy. It seems that if you were to ban Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland then there should be many other books, including some from China’s own culture, that should be banned as well.

Two People and Four Personalities

When one looks at Lewis Carroll and his character Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, one can begin to see that each of them has two distinct personalities, perhaps conflicting. Lewis Carroll’s personality  can be divided into two basic groups. One of them being that of an author of fictional children’s books and a lover of children, and one being the sickly Oxford mathematician. Why does this matter? Because Alice seems to have two personalities as well, the little girl who uses reason and logic and the little girl who believes in and follows the rules of a  magical wonderland. But why does this all matter?

An interesting point to make about these two personalities before going on is that they mirror each other perfectly. The Oxford logician mirrors the Alice who uses her mind to figure out puzzles that are thrown her way, while the author of fantasy children’s books mirrors the Alice who is willing to believe in the happenings of a wonderland, such as her rather calm reaction to the white rabbit.

The Alice that is willing to believe in wonder and magic can be seen from the very start of the book. On page 11 of The Annotated Alice it says that Alice did not “think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear!” Oh dear!” I shall be too late!”, a sign of her childlike belief in the mystical.  But, on page 17 of The Annotated Alice Alice seems to display a very non childlike albeit logical fear of being poisoned. The fact that a little girl would follow a white rabbit down a rabbit hole but would then fear being poisoned seems to contradict itself a bit. But why would Carroll inject a little girl with two sides to her personality, one sensible and one non nonsensical? Especially since the book itself was first told orally to  little Alice Liddell, a child herself, who would not necessarily understand any of the symbolism Carroll injected into his tale.

People often ask the question of why Alice has two sides to her personality. Perhaps the answer is simply because her creator seemingly had two sides to his personality himself. If one looks at it closely, the two parts of Carroll mirror the two parts of Alice, and this leads one to wonder exactly how much of a childrens story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland really is.

Going Once, Going Twice, Going Twelve Times

This blog entry was influenced by this post by Benedikt Kroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a tale full of interesting symbolism and themes. However, how does one determine what the theme of a book is? Could the themes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be things as obvious as the concept of two different worlds, or could they be something as obscure as say, a child’s loss of innocence?

On page 17 of The Annotated Alice, when Alice goes through her first change in size, the tenth annotation states that -

“This is the first of twelve occasions in the book on which Alice alters in size. Richard Ellmann has suggested Carroll may have been unconsciously symbolizing the great disparity between the small Alice whom he loved but could not marry and the large Alice she would soon become.”

I had thought nothing of Alice’s changes in size until reading this annotation. The part of the annotation that struck me was not the part mentioning Carroll however. It was the part stating that there were twelve instances in the book in which there is an instance of change in size for Alice. If something happens twelve times in a story, it clearly has significance and one can assume the author is trying to show you or tell you something. The Annotated Alice’s interpretation of the frequent size changes seems a bit ludicrous to me; marriage with a little girl is a proposition that is not so easily believed. Thankfully, there are other interpretations.

An interpretation by Benedikt Kroll states that “with her [Alice] growing, her perception of the world has changed”. Benedikt goes on to mention the aspects of puberty and the stages between childhood and adulthood. He brings up a very interesting point, the point being that Alice is “saddened by her growth“, like so many other people in the “real” world simply going through the process of growing up.

My personal interpretation deals with the idea that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a full fledged coming of age story, with Alice growing not only physically, represented by the frequent changes in size, but also mentally. Perhaps the size changes also represent how Alice’s mind is growing and accepting new ideas, ideas that would be considered crazy in the world away from her wonderland. The ideas of a talking white rabbit for example, or a grin without a cat, or a riddle that has no answer. Maybe what Carroll was trying to show by integrating not one, not two, but twelve size changes in his tale was that he was showing how Alice herself was growing up to accept new ideas along with the frustrations that come with being a teenager.

Perhaps Gilbert K. Chesterton’s fear has been fully realized and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been over analyzed, and that Carroll never intended for the frequent size changes to represent anything and he just used them as a plot point to entertain little Alice Liddell. But if one were to look at reasons for so many instances of changes in size, then all of these could suffice as explanations.