Alice in Wonderland: What Intriguing Message Does it really Hold?
88I dug deep to find out what Alice in Wonderland was really about.
The story, Alice in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll,
has been part of many children’s lives and seemed like a simple fairy tale, but
it goes much deeper than that. According to Charles Frey and John Griffin, “Alice is engaged in a romance quest for her own
identity and growth, for some understanding of logic, rules, the games people
play, authority, time, and death,” (Frey). The events that occur in the story actually have a direct
correlation with how one grows and progresses through childhood and
adolescence.
In the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, Alice daydreams and is unable to pay attention while her mother reads an advanced novel to her. This shows how child-like Alice’s mindset it. She then begins to piece together the perfect world of her own while her imagination runs wild. Later, Alice notices a white rabbit created by her imagination and sparks her curiosity. “Alice follows the rabbit because she is "burning with curiosity." Soon she finds things becoming "curiouser and curiouser," (Frey). It is usually children who have the most curiosity; they are the ones who are always eager to learn more.
Later in the story, she is told the tale of the Curious Oysters by Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum which is about how curiosity can lead to terrible things. This bares a strong resemblance to how adults will often tell children to grow up, destroying a child’s sense of imagination and curiosity. From this deduction, we can assume that Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum symbolize parents and are trying to keep Alice in check.
Later in the book, Alice gets in more trouble because of her curiosity. The white rabbit tells Alice to run into the house to quickly fetch his gloves. While searching for the gloves, she opens a cookie jar only to find a cookie with ‘Eat Me’ written on it. Without thinking twice, she consumes the cookie. “We view children as needing gentle guidance if they are to develop emotionally, intellectually, morally, even physically,” (Henslin). It becomes apparent that she is still in her childhood stage and needs an adult figure to guide her. There are two very important things that this situation represents.
The first is, again, how curiosity gets one into trouble. She eats the cookie after being told the tale of The Curious Oysters. This shows how a child will disobey a parent after being told it is wrong. By doing this, she demonstrates Kohlberg’s first theory of moral development, stage one of the preconventional level, which states that “right is whatever avoids punishment or gains reward,” (Wood 253). Because there was no one around, she curiously took a cookie.
This situation possibly stands for peer pressure as well. Inside the cookie jar, were many cookies with different labels such as “Eat Me”; essentially, they were all telling her what to do. Just like everyone does at some point, she gives into the peer pressure. As a consequence, she grows rapidly into a giant. The white rabbit, as well as a few other characters she encountered, perceive her as a monster instead of a little girl. This possibly represents how society perceives people who give into peer pressure as monstrous. For example, if a person were to give into peer pressure and smoke marijuana, there are some that would consider that person monstrous for doing something that was a faux pas.
There are many occasions where Alice shows her true colors of child-like thinking and confusion. One specific example of this is when Alice first falls down the rabbit hole and is confronted by the door. When she gives herself “some good advice,” she says “For if one drinks much from a bottle marked poison, it is almost certain to disagree with one sooner or later,” the door responds “I beg your pardon,” with a confused look on his face. This occurrence shows the relationship between a young child and an adult because adults are often unable to comprehend the logic of a child. It isn’t until the formal operations stage, at age 11 or 12, that the child is able to “apply logical thought to abstract, verbal, and hypothetical situations,” (Wood 248). Obviously, Alice has not yet achieved this level of thinking.
Shortly after Alice enters Wonderland, she encounters something else that makes no sense to her. When she is extremely wet after being washed to shore, she listens to a dodo bird who tells her to run in a circle with everyone else in order to dry off while the water keeps engulfing them. What he is telling her to do makes no sense whatsoever but she continues to do it anyway. By blindly obeying the adult figure, she exposes her child-like ignorance.
On another occasion, later in the book, Alice is confronted with another confusing situation. “The White King is waiting for his messengers and asks Alice to look along the road to see if they are coming: “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light”,” (Holmes). This somewhat exemplifies the preoperational stage which includes symbolic function; which means that one thing can stand for another (Wood 248). Apparently, the author is trying to get a point across that “nobody” can stand for a person as well as “nothing.” Again, this portrays the relationship between adults and children, but this time, it seems easier to comprehend for her and makes, surprisingly, more sense than Alice’s previous realization. This shows how she is mentally progressing towards the formal operations stage little by little.
As Alice progresses through her dream, she loses her sense of identity just as most people do when they hit adolescence. “When the Caterpillar asks Alice, "`Who are you,'" and Alice can barely stammer out a reply, "`I--hardly know'" then Carroll is exposing the quintessential vulnerability of the child whose growth and knowledge of self and the world vary so greatly from day to day that a sense of answerable identity becomes highly precarious if not evanescent,” (Frey). At this point in the story, Alice has reached an age where she has lost her identity, adolescence.
“In the industrialized world, children must find themselves on their own… they attempt to carve out an identity that is distinct from both the “younger” world being left behind and the “older” world that is still out of range,” (Henslin). The caterpillar doesn’t ever give her direction and she is now forced to find out who she is on her own. “[She] is rarely aided by the creatures she meets. Whereas in a tale of Grimms or Andersen or John Ruskin, the protagonist's meeting with a helpful bird or beast would signal his or her charity toward the world or nature,” (Frey). This crucial evidence shows how, unlike other fairy tales, the story represents a child’s true progression through life, one that paints a picture of how real life functions and how one will have to figure things out on their own.
In sociology, there is a stage which is called transitional adulthood. This is a period where they “find themselves… young adults gradually ease into responsibilities… they become serious,” (Henslin). By the end of the story, Alice learns to deal with her problems and gains sight of her identity. The queen, who loses her temper and wants to kill Alice, is Alice’s obstacle which finally helps her to become an adult. To leap over this obstacle, she reaches into her pocket to find a mushroom from earlier, eats it, and grows to an enormous size. This most likely represents how she is facing her fear and taking on responsibility or “growing up.”
Alice in Wonderland is a perfect, down-to-earth example of childhood through adolescence. Just as a child’s life is filled with good and bad choices, hers is too. As most do, Alice learns from her experiences and ultimately becomes more mature. Alice in Wonderland has many connections to how one grows and develops from childhood up through adolescence. Alice matures emotionally by how she thinks, how she deals with her problems, and how she perceives different situations, all of which are encompassed in the progression of a child.
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I'm glad you liked it!
Loved it really. Hope you have more coming out soon!
I NEVER KNEW THIS STUFF! Great job!
it's her sister reading to her not her mother!
Regardless of WHO was reading it, it was an excellent way to open up the depth of one of my favorite childhood stories!
I thought the movie was drug related because of all the "hallucinations" and the fact that she is eating a cookie that makes her in a different state of mind, and a drink that makes her change as well... also the caterpillar that is smoking from a hookah, who seems to be talking rather differently or seems to react as if he were "high"... I dont truly know what this movie is about but I know that was alot of confusion on it so I just thought i should put that out there.
I do still think the book and the old movie need A LOT of work. But the new alice in wonderland looks super cool! Cant wait 2 c it on sunday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
there was a link on facebook and you had to become a fan than you had to send it to friends then take a stupid quiz just to waste 5-10 mins of my time
From what I have heard, this movie is based upon an Acid trip.
I wouldnt argue with that, I mean seriously ... this movie is trippy! AWSOME but trippy.
but all that stuff I just read is insane!
but all in all I am pretty sure at least a majority of this movie is soposed to be based off an acid trip.
the movie alice in wonderland was change to a lil kids movie to a non lil kids movie it was stewwpid and madhatter creeps the hell out of me
@sewsew: The book needs a lot of work? Seriously? Are you dense?
Alice in wonderland is based on drugs. the cat says "u must b mad for coming here" meaning: wonderland is when your trippin and youd have to be mad(crazy) to go there(do drugs LSD/Acid/etc. he sayd "everyone here is mad" meaning everyone there is crazy for entering wonderland(getting drugged up) "10/6" (the numbers on the hatters hat) are from a different currency where instead of $0.00 they go by l/s/d(LSD)(that last statement i read somewhere bt im goin with it lol) AND the Cesshire Cat is smokin a hookah or a bong....The queen yelling "off with the head" is symbolizing a bad trip. The whole theme of "alice"(a young girl) is symbolizing a young lady going down the road of drugs. When Alice first gets to wonderland she is small then big then small and etc.....symbolizing a drug trip(u feel small and big and fuzzy and blah blah blah etc.) Chairs are moving, animals are talking, cards are dancing around and bein creepers...the rabbits got really red eyes(just look at the picture on the emoticon bar on the left lol) and theres a a ton more evidence bt my hands are tired. And any theory of what wonderland is about could be true...
Just loved this hub
great write
instafan
kimberly
I enjoyed this read also. Love Lewis Carroll generally. His humour is so great.
Love and peace
Tony
Nothing at all to do with acid trips and drugs. Silly, silly, silly. It is simply a children's story from a time when people actually had imagination. But if the most you can imagine is drugs, then I doubt you will be convinced by this.
Alice in Wonderland was originally written as a political satire - all the 'drug' theories are there to distract us from the true meaning. The new movie is particularly telling now that the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified in Europe. 'Underland' is like the Land of Oz where nothing follows the laws of the 'real' world that we think we live in. It appears to be beautiful and desirable at first but is actually more out of control, frightening and cruel than the 'real' world. It is a world of madness and unhappiness. The few good people to be found in it, such as the Mad Hatter (or Good Witch of the North) are ineffective and powerless. Alice has lost her sense of identity (just as Dorothy was lost) and only the Mad Hatter is absolutely sure but becomes angry when he realises how much she has changed. He tells her she has lost her "muchness" and that she used to be "muchier" - the correct adjective should be "great" in that she has lost her greatness. This refers to Great Britain of old. The new movie was banned by the Odeon Cinemas in England, Ireland and Italy. The group known as 'Faction 1' controls these countries and also Germany and Austria. This group is represented by the Red Queen who is ridiculed in the movie - she is big-headed, likes her pies, her pig and her fat boys. She is an egotistical tyrant who mercilessly kills people by cutting off their heads (significant) but all the time is surrounded by sychophants who are terrified of her. Alice, the symbol of the old Great Britain is helped by the red-headed (also significant) Mad Hatter who represents Faction 2 who control Scotland and America. He is impoverished, powerless and cannot be himself in this land controlled by the Red Queen, but he can't help his true nature coming out when he is angered and he changes to his true Scottish accent. The poem he recites angrily in a Scottish accent with Alice/Britain on his shoulder as he marches towards the Red Queen's Palace, is like a war-cry. He is remembering the old days and the story of George and the Dragon - a time when Great Britain was much "muchier". It is a great shame that Tim Burton has had to shroud this call-to-arms in such a way that people don't understand it - at a time when the Europeans so desperately need to understand that they are heading into a full-on political nightmare.
love it
That realy opend up the story to me i did'nt know what it realy meant until i read this tanks alot.
This is DEFINITELY one of the more thought provoking online essays and is a very creative interpretation of Alice!
You have given us much food for thought! Well done!!
u r so great!!!! i am 12 yrs. old and i get it. and all of u haters are retarded
It's about abstract MATH, you morons
a good read is definately "Alice: Tales From the Underground" this is a little different from the published version of Alice in Wonderland, but more of like a rough draft he did before all the changes he later made...plus it includes artwork done by lewis carroll himself...
The recent movie was terrible. I liked the cartoon and past movies that were made though. It has always been one of my favorite stories since I was little, for sure. And nice comparison, Absolutely Alice--I LOVE the Oz series. Great stories, Harry Potter doesn't compare :)
Good stories and poems provides unlimited possibilities of interpretation. No matter how you interpret it, it is right in ts own way. Each time you read, you will get new meanings for them. There is a saying, "You cannot cross flowing river twice", because each time you cross, you are crossing a new river(water). Same is the case with great stories/poems like this(Alice in wonderland).
she eats one n she gets bigger, metaphor for an upper, then she drinks more n she gets smaller metaphor for a downer the catepillar is the truth and "absolute" the entity of reality and ultimate wisdom, the writer of the story was a english priest as far as i know who smoked opium hence the catepilla yes it was about growth, but growth and expanding your mind with drugs. being a psychadelic fisherman trying to pull a middle sized idea back onto shore to share with the world, thats wut its about
Lewis Caroll was into Mysticism. I believe that the story is about the journey of the soul and it's fall into exile, into the forgetting of it's true identity, and it's yearning to get back to the "GArden" of Unity and oneness again
(Alice trying to get to the Garden of Live Flowers). It's about a spiritual journey thru the underworld of the unconscious to confront the dark powers that be and emerge a liberated and empowered person who knows who she is. Alice could also be a stand-in for the person of Sophia of Gnosticism, the Goddess who is pulled into an exile in the underworld, tortured by the demiurge, and ultimately defeats him (the Jabberwocky/aka Satan/Aka powers of darkness in her own being and in the power structure at large. The Red Queen is like the dark mother, and like the system that keeps people cowering in fear of death without thinking for themselves. Alice defeats all these forces, returns to oneness with nature in the garden, and becomes Queen, Sophia Queen of Heaven where she is free of the b.s. of people who don't recognize her once and for all.
Alic in Wonderland is not about drugs! Lewis Caroll was a mathematicion who wrote the book about abstract math. He also wrote this for a little girl, the child of a friend, named Alice Liddel. That's why the characters are fun for kids.
He also wrote the book in the 1865 and LSD wasn't even synthesized until the 1930's so he obviously had no idea what an acid trip even felt like. I really liked this essay. We are doing the children's play this year with our youth group and one of the board members said that she hates Alice in Wonderland because it doesn't make any sense. I am glad I found this essay because now I can tell this board member that there can be a very good lesson taken from this story.
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From the title that has been used, 'Alice in Wonderland', I am assuming this essay is about the first book which goes under the full title of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', and not the second book 'Through the looking glass and what Alice found there'.
Therefore, your paragraph about Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee is misplaced, as it insinuates that they appear in the first book, and not the second. However they are only in 'Through the looking Glass and what Alice Found there'
However they often appear in film adaptations entitled 'Alice in wonderland' or variations thereof.
Even so, in the fourth and fifth paragraphs, which are focused on Alice's adventures in the White Rabbits house, when she is collecting his gloves, and eats the cake to get bigger, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are again referred to in past tense, along with their story of the Curious Oysters.
"She eats the cookie (in the White Rabbit's house) after being told the tale of The Curious Oysters." This is wrong, as Alice does not meet Tweedle Dum and Tweedle until the second book, and so hears the story of the curious oysters some time after eating the cake, about 6 months later, as she is 7 in the first book, and 7 and a half in the sequel.
Also, Lewis Carroll probably was not on drugs when he wrote the Alice books, as if he was it would probably read as a random mash of events, and not how it does. However, parts, at least, are about drugs, or make references to them. Aspects of the story are mocking the drugs that were socially acceptable to use in that time, Victorian England. Lewis Carroll wrote most of Alice on a boat with the Liddell children so he definately wasnt on drugs when he thought up the majority of the story.
Most of the peculiar characters are just quirky in that way, as it was written for children and so is entertaining for them. But, as Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a very good mathematician a lot of the story is based on logic and maths. The first book is loosely based around a pack of cards, and 'Through the looking Glass' takes its inspiration from a chess game.
The scene in the first book where Alice meets the caterpillar is a reference to drugs, as he is smoking a hookah and sat on a mushroom which Alice eats from to change her size (Magic Mushrooms, anyone?) but also parodies the first purely symbolic system of algebra, proposed in the mid-19th century by Augustus De Morgan, a London math professor. De Morgan had proposed a more modern approach to algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results like the square root of a negative number, which even De Morgan himself called “unintelligible” and “absurd” (because all numbers when squared give positive results).
The word “algebra,” De Morgan said in one of his footnotes, comes from an Arabic phrase he transliterated as “al jebr e al mokabala,” meaning restoration and reduction. He explained that even though algebra had been reduced to a seemingly absurd but logical set of operations, eventually some sort of meaning would be restored.
Such loose mathematical reasoning would have riled a punctilious logician like Dodgson. And so, the Caterpillar is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah — suggesting that something has mushroomed up from nowhere, and is dulling the thoughts of its followers — and Alice is subjected to a monstrous form of “al jebr e al mokabala.” She first tries to “restore” herself to her original (larger) size, but ends up “reducing” so rapidly that her chin hits her foot.
Alice has slid down from a world governed by the logic of universal arithmetic to one where her size can vary from nine feet to three inches. She thinks this is the root of her problem: “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” No, it isn’t, replies the Caterpillar, who comes from the mad world of symbolic algebra. He advises Alice to “Keep your temper.”
In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed — as in “tempered steel” — so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion, even if she can’t “keep the same size for 10 minutes together!” Proportion, rather than absolute length, was what mattered in Alice’s above-ground world of Euclidean geometry.
In an algebraic world, of course, this isn’t easy. Alice eats a bit of mushroom and her neck elongates like a serpent, annoying a nesting pigeon. Eventually, though, she finds a way to nibble herself down to nine inches, and enters a little house where she finds the Duchess, her baby, the Cook and the Cheshire Cat.
That became longer than I was intending.
Also, it is just a story, and as the metaphors used in it are primarily creative metaphors then the meaning can vary from reader to reader, and the interpretations are virtually infinite.
Any meaning, explanation, or view a reader has on the story is correct, as he never wrote that "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland mean THIS".
Another view is that it is based around the politics of Britain at the time.
Ihave read most of the comments here on "Alice" and am truly amazed at the different ways that people are interpreting what is supposed to be nothing more than a children's story. It's hard to believe the "drug" theory in that Carroll lived in an era alien to drugs. I say this hearing all the groans from people who are reading this remark. The "groans" are from readers who state to me "don't you know that people have always "used" something or other?" Yes, probably, but really? for a children's story? But it is interesting in that so many parallels to drug use can be outsourced from the story. The fact that an intelligent adult wrote this story might be a clue to the origin of so many intellectual and varied interpretations of it. Harper Lee stated that people have told her that with each reading of "Mockingbird", they "see" something different. That's the mark of an artist. Their art which they perceive on one plane, can take on a life of its own, that the artist never even conceived of. To me, that is the quintessential definition of any good creative genius, his or her work presents in various interpretations to different people just as when someone takes a prism and shines it to the light.
Go Alice Weatherwax!! As i was reading the hub i also noticed the strange order in the events the writer was describing. I believe he used the Disney movie to interpret and not the book...
For the record, the movie is about Monarch Programming.
A form of mind control used mostly on children in the early fifties.
Alice in wonderland was not a children's story at first.
I know this after watching an interview, if you will with Lewis Carroll.
He was a mathematician.
The movie shares meanings to that of The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan etc.
This Hub has taught me more than Wikipedia. Just as I thought, Alice in Wonderland is mainly about children and their stage of adolescence as well as the real world being much more difficult than children's lives. I personally think 'children are not even born yet.' As much as I want to explain that, I really can't in someway.
Lewis Carroll is an extremely inspirational person in this world, and I can't see how anyone could at least not enjoy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; they are just very well written in all ways.
Here is a curiouser analysis, for the Wonderland fans. I might have agreed with you by stretching the experiences of adolescence. But my theory, is that Alice's bump on her head when she stumbled and fell, is a major part of the whole experience of forgetting, and mixing words, and having extraordinary encounters while trying to get her muchness back. I have to tell you, it happened to me, and it exactly describes a traumatic brain injury, and sequence of consquences and struggles to recovery. I wonder and am very curious if anyone knows whether Lewis Carroll or someone he knew very well, had a traumatic brain injury. Curious?
Lovely, Alice in Wonderland is like a puzzle within a puzzle.
I enjoy this story always and this article was nice at analyzing this.
Some people don't always realize how deep things they are looking at are.
Sometimes I feel this and the Labyrinth are on the same parallel.
.... not to be rude but where's the deep message of insanity???
this is NOT about math, NOT about drugs (LSD wasnt even invented until 1898!). I just took a COLLEGE course on this. if you want the REAL answers email me stnr@iup.edu
who is Charles Frey and John Griffin?
This article is idiotic and clearly doesn't know the difference between the books and the Disney cartoon.
I grieve for the preceeding commenters who feel they have learned something from it.
Insanity does come into play at cirtain points in the original book , though it is hardly shown in the Disney version of the tale, which angers me but the choice of not setting insanity in a child's mind is understandable. Want the true facts? Read the true tale.
I love it Hope you have more coming out soon!
Mind control programming is what the movie is really doing illuminauti
You are right Lydia
clear explanation thanks
The only book i actually agreed/enjoyed to read in middle school because of it's whismical theme and the fact that her imagination is similar to getting high or stoned...:D the other book i read was Killing A Mocking Bird in middle school cause my ex-boy-friend told me that the story or the plot consist of black people rapping and child molester, but after reading it i found out there are more then what my idiot ex-boyfriend explained....god boys and their Imaginations could have made another Alice in the Wonderland...-____-
Nice Explanation :)
The only book i actually agreed/enjoyed to read in middle school because of it's whismical theme and the fact that her imagination is similar to getting high or stoned...:D the other book i read was Killing A Mocking Bird in middle school cause my ex-boy-friend told me that the story or the plot consist of black people rapping and child molester, but after reading it i found out there are more then what my idiot ex-boyfriend explained....god boys and their Imaginations could have made another Alice in the Wonderland...-____-
Nice Explanation :)
Paper Moon 3 years ago
I loved the hub. Many of the classic stories and fables have a much deeper meaning. I have been enjoying looking at many of the dark fairy tales of late. And it may not be a good idea to eat psychedelic mushrooms to grow up!