Appunti "Alice in Wonderland"

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Introduction

Alice is a 7-year-old kid sitting on the bank of the river getting really bored. Her sister is reading a book without pictures. She doesn’t know how to spend her time. She was in a meadow full of daisies when she saw a weird rabbit. She follows it across an edge and then she falls into a hall.

Chapters 2 to 7

From chapter 2 to 7, Alice comes across a number of questions and riddles: she doesn’t know who she is, she doesn’t know how to speak her language and falls into strange creatures telling her nonsense. She meets all these animals, explores her own knowledge. There is a kind of disorientation taking place; she’s giving up all the knowledge.

Chapter 8

In chapter 8, she arrives in a garden that she saw from the very beginning but she couldn’t enter it. In this garden, there was the Queen of the Heart. She had enough of nonsense, e.g., she says “you’re just a pack of cards.” That means she is becoming what she is, her identity. She had grown up and become aware of herself.

The Political Aspect

Alice is a very political novel. Situations of the period: Indians were turned into a sort of citizens (official citizens of the British crown). They became part of the homeland. How did the English come to terms with these people? The social issue was that they were really different. There was a deep political relation among the countries but not a real social relation between people.

Alice's Journey

Alice is getting bored on the bank of the river while her sister is reading a book without pictures. She falls into a hall and begins her travel in Wonderland. She tries to enter into a garden, and it takes some effort getting into it. She gets confused, has an identity crisis, has strange meetings with strange creatures. At the end, she becomes herself and becomes able to use the power that she has always had and rebels against the Queen of the Heart.

The Poem's Perspective

The poem explains the situation: how the writer decided to write this book. He’s in a boat and writes it to please his friend’s kids so we can understand the kind of atmosphere. The three cruel kids ask him to tell them a story and they know exactly what they want: they want a nonsense tale, they dictate everything. The kids have decided the perimeters of the story and they want it in that moment. In this way, the tale of Wonderland grew. He is telling the story all day long and the conclusion is that the fairy tale is going to remain in everybody's memory; it’ll be a contribution to the English tradition. Therefore Alice is an adult, but this story will pass to the next generations because it is a message for the adults, not a simple fairy tale.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting with her sister on the bank. She was thinking about what’s the use of a book without pictures or conversations. She was considering whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking daisies, when suddenly she saw a White Rabbit taking a watch out of its waistcoat pocket and then hurried on. It went in a rabbit-hole, never one considering how in the world she was to get out again. She fell very slowly and wondered what’s going to happen next. Looking at the sides of the walls, she noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves. She took a jar labeled “orange marmalade” but it was empty. She didn’t drop the jar for fear of killing somebody but managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it. She thinks she must be getting somewhere near the center of the earth and took the opportunity for showing off the knowledge talking about Latitude or Longitude even if she had not the slightest idea of their meaning. She would have seen where she was written somewhere. If she had asked it, they’ll think her to be an ignorant girl. She misses Dinah, her cat. If Dinah was with her, it might catch a bat, that’s very like a mouse.

She asks herself: “Do cats eat bats?” or sometimes “Do bats eat cats?” because she couldn’t answer the question. It didn’t much matter the order of the words.

She came upon a three-legged table, all made of glass: there was nothing on it but a tiny golden key. The passage was no larger than a tiny rat-hole and Alice says “I wish I could shut up like a telescope” and when she drinks from a bottle labeled “drink me,” it really happens. She forgets the key on the table, she tries to climb it but it is too slippery. Then she eats a small cake and she grows.

She finds a marmalade jar and tries to avoid a disaster while she’s falling down herself into the tunnel. She doesn’t like disaster; she knows how things have to look like and where they have to stay. She’s an upper-class girl, she knows, she knows the things so she’s kind of upset in this nonsense world.

Language plays a big role in this world (the Antipathies: world on the other side of the world). She asks herself how other people are like; imagining them weird (it is the traditional English mentality). The strangeness to her may have to do with geographical places and areas.

Drinking and eating is a metaphor: the way we feed our mind has a direct impact. She enters in this world that doesn’t have any sense at all and she tries to deal with it and come to terms but she can’t.

The Pool of Tears

She thinks she must be kind with her feet or they won’t walk but they have to manage the best way they can, because they were getting so far off. “How funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s feet for Christmas! And how odd the directions will look!” Alice begins crying, continuing shedding gallons of tears until there was a large pool round her.

Alice asks herself if she was the same when she got up that morning. She almost thinks she can remember feeling a little different. She’s not the same, so who is she? She begins thinking over all children she knew that were of the same age as her, to see if she could have been changed for any of them. She thinks she is Mabel because when she repeats “How doth the little busy bee” her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words didn’t come as they used to do. When her parents will come to rescue her she’ll say “Who I am? Tell me that first and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.”

She was going on shrinking rapidly: she soon found out that the cause of this was the Rabbit’s fan that she was holding and she dropped it just in time because she was near to disappear.

Then she made out she was in the pool of tears and she meets a mouse who didn’t like cats actually. In the meantime their conversing, the pool was getting very crowded with the birds and animals that had fallen into it: there was a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures. Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the shore.

The main question was how to get dry again. They do the Caucus-race. The Dodo marked out a race-course and said that the exact shape didn’t matter, and then all the party was placed along the course. They began running when they like and after half an hour were dry again. They couldn’t know who the winner was. Everybody won and the prizes were Alice’s comfits.

Alice then meets the Rabbit again and heard it muttering to itself. He was looking for the pair of white kid gloves. When the rabbit noticed Alice, he thought she was Mary Ann, his housemaid. In his house, she finds a little bottle but there was no label this time. Alice starts growing and there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room. She says “There ought to be a book written about me,” it would be a best-seller, she thought. “Shall I never get any older than I am now? That would be a comfort but I would have so much to study” and she keeps taking first one side and then the other making quite a conversation altogether.

There was Pat, a lizard digging for apples who said there was an arm that filled the entire window. There was Bill, who had another ladder. The Rabbit said they must burn the house but Alice said she’ll set Dinah at them. Then she heard a shower of little pebbles rattling in at the window. The pebbles were turning into little cakes and she swallowed one of the cakes and was delighted to find that she began shrinking directly.

Alice meets an enormous puppy: she tried hard to whistle but she was frightened at the thought it might be hungry.

Over the edge of the mushroom, she sees a large blue Caterpillar sitting with its arms folded quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or something else. Alice says to the Caterpillar that being of different sizes in one day is very confusing but it seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind. She said also she can’t remember things as she used. At the end of the conversation the Caterpillar said that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make her growth shorter.

Her neck grows and as there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. A large pigeon flew into her face and beat her violently with its wings. It thought Alice was a serpent looking for its eggs. When she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height, she came upon an open place with a little house.

Alice is desperate because her neck is really long. She looks like a telescope. She’s a little monster but she doesn’t know she is the British explorer equipment. When she’s a giant she cries and creates a pool of tears and then falls into it. She may cry and be desperate but she is still a monster.

“Who in the world am I?” she’s not aware of her own power and then she’ll meet a mouse and a pigeon who’ll tell her what a kind of monster she is. She tells the mouse about her cat and for her is normal. She has to get dry so does a very strange race: a caucus-race.

The language is constantly having a double meaning. In fact, it is becoming a problem for her. From the very beginning, she lost the command on her own language but she’ll get back her strong command of the language.

The blue Caterpillar is the idealization of the English idea of Indians. He knows well the kind of creature she is; she represents the English race. The pigeon sees her like a serpent. Alice has a natural strength, she says she eats eggs and she admits the kind of monster she is.

Alice becomes aware of it, she doesn’t change. Through her adventure, she realizes her power when she comes to the garden. In the garden, there are the same customs and manners as the English but it is strange like it is strange for the English to see their uses and traditions in India (in Wonderland e.g., they play croquet but they don’t know how). At the end, she becomes aware of her tradition, she hasn’t changed but has grown up and finally becomes the brute as she always has been “you’re only a pack of cards.” She wakes up and goes back into her house, the heart of English. Her sister makes a point that this story will continue. It is a really deeply ideological story.

Pig and Pepper

There were a Fish-footman and a Frog-footman. Alice knocks but they’re making such a noise inside howling and sneezing and no one could hear her. The footman says that there might be some sense in her knocking if they had the door between them so he could let her enter. Then he says that he would sit there for days and days and in the meantime she could do anything she likes.

The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other: the Duchess was sitting on a three-legged stool in the middle, nursing a baby: the cook was leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to be full of soup.