"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Caroll

A question lingers in my mind as to why one would read a children’s book, if one is not, any longer, of a child’s age?  Lewis Caroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” remains a definitive example of a children’s book.  What could prompt an adult to open its pages and dive into the story?  Why did I make that leap forward?

Part of my own curiosity must have emerged from my own lack of awareness to the story.  I knew of the little girl Alice, and the Cheshire Cat, and the White Rabbit, and the Hatter’s Tea Party, of course; but that was it.  I never saw the classic Walt Disney animated film based upon the book.  I had no clue as to what the actual story might be.  Why was Alice in Wonderland?  Who were all these characters?  What purpose did they carry to advance the plot?  Was there a noble purpose?  If Alice was the protagonist, who was the antagonist?  How did the conflict erupt between the two? 

Most books I read will often start off with a measure of introduction for the characters, a basic laying of the setting, and perhaps some earlier allusions to the plot, if not also, the theme, so as to draw a reader further into the pages with an idea, or a character, they find appealing.  Carroll opens this story with none of that.  There is no explanation as to who Alice is beyond a bored and tired little girl spending time with her sister along the bank of some river.  She spies the White Rabbit with a waist coat and a pocket watch, and her curiosity compels her into following, eventually tumbling down the rabbit hole.

The rabbit hole leads Alice into a fall down an endless well lined with cupboards and bookshelves, and maps and pictures.  She reaches to sample a jar of marmalade from one of the cupboards, only to find it empty, and she attempts to configure how far she had fallen into the center of the earth based on the location in her fall she believed she might actually be.

She considered how she should behave if she fell all the way through the earth into New Zealand or Australia.  Then she thought about her cat.  She thought about bats – and whether cats would eat bats, or bats eat cats.

When fall finally came to its end, it was a pile of sticks and some dry leaves to stop her long tumble.  Then the chase for the White Rabbit was on, as it never got far from her sight.

Alice followed it down a long hall where she came upon a little table of glass supporting a tiny golden key that opened a single door behind a curtain.  The door was far too small for her to fit herself through, but no worries – a bottle of liquid rests upon the glass table now with instructions for Alice to drink.

Alice, being the good little girl she is, knows it is not wise to drink out of a bottle without checking first to see whether it is marked, “Poison”.  After all, children who did not follow the rules were liable to be burned; and Alice did not wish to suffer their same fate.

When she determines the bottle is not poison, she drinks from it as instructed, and it shrinks her to a size where she can now walk through the tiny open door.

This practice of drinking, or eating, is a habit she used, at various points in the story, to change her size, and even her shape on one occasion where her neck extends like a telescope, to meet whatever circumstances arise.  I read all of these incidents and find myself totally befuddled at the ease with which Alice accepts her strange happenings.  The oddity of being able to change her size on nearly a whim, or speaking with a variety of animals as if they were neighbors from next door, or even encountering some environments where some animals acted like they were humans and inanimate objects were animate with personality, it all came across as rather normal from Alice’s reactions – or lack thereof.  Any shock she may exhibit comes entirely from the practicality of the matter (when her body stretches out like a telescope to recover the key she left behind on the glass table, she frets over who will now put on her shoes, since they were too far away for her to ever reach) rather than the impossibility of the situation itself!

I am reading all of this, and I don’t get it.  Why is she not reacting to all these insanely wild scenarios with stunned disbelief?!  There was no logical progression to any of her adventures.  None of the characters she met, none of the situations she encountered, made any sense.  Who were these creatures?  Why was Alice there?  What was to be the purpose of it all?

Then, with my dismay, I happened upon the moment where Alice meets the Duchess.

The Duchess sits in a room, on a three-legged stool, with a baby in her lap.  The baby is wailing – possibly from the excessive amount of pepper in the air, causing it, as well as the Duchess herself, into intermittent sneezes; most likely, because it is a baby who simply enjoys wailing.

The pepper comes from the cook, standing on the opposite side of the Duchess, preparing a cauldron of soup over an open fire, where pepper seems to be the main ingredient.

On the floor, somewhere near the fire, though not too near, lied a cat, the Cheshire Cat.  Upon the countenance of this cat was a grin; and it was this grin which exposed the hilarity of the setting in which Alice found herself.  When I understood that much, I suddenly understood all.

There was no plot.  There wasn’t any theme to suggest a grander purpose.  There was never a conflict Alice was magically brought from the surface to Wonderland to resolve – unless, of course, one wishes to claim the theft of the Queen’s tarts, which would be ridiculous.  This story was nothing more than a wild romp through a child’s imagination.  My problem, from the start, was viewing it through the maturity of my adult eyes.

I developed a theory once that the classics children are instructed to read, as children, can never be fully appreciated by them until they have actually lived a bit of life themselves, so as to be able to relate.  The reverse reigns true here.  Adults can never fully appreciate a whimsical tale like Alice’s and her Adventures in Wonderland without remembering what it was like being a child themselves, the days when imagination ran free and unencumbered, taking one anywhere and everywhere; where nothing was impossible, and belief squelched disbelief in a rousing battle of competing ideologies.  Remember those days when the world was huge, and every step became an adventure into some new world to explore.  Remember what it was like as a child and you will treasure this story, living happily every after…