Alice's adventures in wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) dedicated and got inspired for the book: Alice’s adventures in Wonderland by the daughter of his professor, at the University of Oxford, the young: Alice Liddell. It is said that writing this book was done at the request of Alice for a story, and he wrote it between 1862-1863, being published in November 1865.

The story starts with an Alice sitting beside her sister, on a riverbank. The status quo is interrupted by a rushing white rabbit, constantly arguing to himself about being late. She follows him down the rabbit hole (hence the expression of “going down the rabbit hole”) and she falls.

She gets into a surreal situation, where through a tunnel she discovered at the end of it, a long hall with multiple locked doors. The key she found would manage to open the smallest door, but in order to fit she needs to drink from a bottle labelled: “Drink me”. Now she is small enough but can no longer reach the key. Luckily a cake labelled “Eat me” makes her grow once more, too big though, becoming a giant for the hall. She starts to cry about the continuous mismatch of dimensions. Her tears become a pool that shrinking once more she can dive through the pull. On the pool, she encounters multiple animals: a mouse, a dodo bird among them.

The white rabbit reappears and asks Alice to fetch him his gloves from the rabbit’s house. In here Alice through eating another cake grows once more too much, filling up the entire house of the white rabbit. While the white rabbit and some of the aids are throwing pebbles at Alice trying to remove her from the house, the little stones turn into cakes which eventually diminish Alice’s size once more, that now flees to a nearby forest.

Here she meets a caterpillar on top of a mushroom. Questioned about who she is, she realizes that it is now difficult for her to remember her true self and to remember a nursery rhyme from her childhood.

From the forest, she approaches a small house, where a Duchess is invited to a croquet tournament hosted by the Queen of Hearts. But inside there is an even stranger image, as the Duchess is nursing a semi-baby, semi-pig infant while the cook makes the whole situation more unbearable spraying large quantities of pepper everywhere, making the duchess angrier at the baby, which eventually does turn into a pig.

Outside of the house, Alice encounters the Cheshire cat, that has the capability to vanish, who instructs Alice on the direction of the two paths in front of her, but regardless of which one she would choose, the cat says that everyone who she will encounter will be crazy, as she is.

Alice takes the path taking her to the March hare, who is having tea with the Mad hatter. Through a riddled discussion among the three, the main topic of discussion is time. As the discussion becomes too much for Alice, she leaves this place also and stumbles upon a small door in a tree. Pushed by curiosity and by eating some shrinking mushroom piece, she goes through to a beautiful garden. It is this garden destination that she was aiming for all along.

In the garden, the people attending are cardboard card-shaped that are very preoccupied with the bushes of roses, their colour, being very scared of the queens’ arrival.

Indeed, the queen is very temperamental, by ordering on every occasion for the person who she would think guilty of petty offences to be beheaded. Her attention then is drawn towards Alice who she requests to join her in a game of croquet that makes the use of flamingo birds, hedgehogs and even some of the cards-gardeners.

While the Cheshire cat causes some trouble, Alice goes to see the Gryphon and the Mock-turtle, but once more when she tries to speak the story of herself, her identity she skips and can’t remember some of the rhymes of her childhood songs.

The calmness is rapidly disturbed by the Queen of hearts who wants to start the Knave trial. The King of Hearts is the judge, while the courtroom is filled with the characters that Alice has met so far. The witnesses are rapidly succeeding one another, finally reaching Alice but she is once more growing while she speaks in the Knave defence. The queen is angry and wants to reach faster the already decided verdict. Alice however continues to grow in stature, but through the events, she passed through she is now much more confident and stands up for her beliefs, arguing with even the queen.

The trial and her whole journey come to an abrupt halt, as she is waking up, on the riverbank where it all started, near her sister, remembering her whole adventures.

One of the main themes of the story is the constant issue of growing up. Symbolizing the fact that once children are growing up physically, they will go through certain mental changes, they might sometimes feel unfit, and they will tend to forget some of their childhood experiences. A change in priorities, moving from nursery rhymes to more mature topics of discussions will finally build confidence in the children that are growing up towards adulthood.

Alice mirrors her perception of adults like rude people, like the Duchess, that are too preoccupied with their own views to listen to other opinions, like the hare or Mad hatter, or are too drastic and strict, like the Queen of hearts. The contradiction and hypocrisy of the adult world, as Alice sees it, seem to scare Alice into the thought she inevitably will become an adult, yet not desire these traits. This causes her to several times, question herself, question her identity, who she is and who she will become once she becomes a woman and no longer a little girl.

Read more about: Lewis Carroll

Subjective opinion:

While today’s children might not be that frightened of growing up, the issue for little girls growing up to become women might still cause some fear. And that is because when we think of the time of Lewis Carroll, the 19th century, we tend to think of it as not giving equality, rights to women. That is because we compare it to what we think is today, a time of absolute freedoms.

Which could not be further than the truth. While in absolute general terms, we may accept that in today’s day there are more legal rights for women, yet if we dive into the matter, things will look differently.

We know that in 2015 women heads of states were only 21. While there are almost 200. In the Parliaments of 2015, a bit above 20% was represented by the female population.

A UN estimative statistic says that 1 in 3 women have faced throughout their lives at least one experience of physical or sexual violence.

If we come to the main focus of this website: literature and extending that to literacy, we know that in 2020 there were over 780 million illiterate adults in the world. Out of this number 2/3 are women.

In countries of Africa and Asia, child brides are still very much an actual, day to day occurrence. Every year in these countries, 12 million girls are married before they have reached the age of 18.

Multiple studies, including some from 2020 continue to analyse the risks of an increase in pornographic or over-sexualization in music videos, movies, commercials. Similar studies analyse the impact that this has on young men, modifying their perceptions and views of women, and objectifying them, as an increased number of rapes, increasing murder cases where the victims are teenage girls, and the aggressors are boys under the age of 18.

In the UK, the 2021 annual figure of over 61,000 rape offences was the highest number ever recorded as an annual figure. During the pandemic restrictions and lockdown measures, domestic abuse (where women were victims) increased by 6%, those are recent figures.

So, it lets us think. Are we living in a gender-equal society? Sure, we have some laws that say so, but what about the general mentality, what about the increase in certain “innovations” like social media, pornography at a click distance, are those helping in shaping a better equal view between genders?

Is society today actually heading towards a world in which women will not be afraid to grow up?

Just an opinion. Just a thought. Just Steven J. Scott.