Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland provides a physical removal from reality by creating a fantastical world and adventure in the mind of a young girl. In this separation, Carroll is able to bend the rules of the temporal world. Although this is self-evident in Alice's physical transfigurations, language and conventions provide additional means to test if a world can defy the rules which are didactically fed to children and become second nature to adults. Perhaps it might be an inescapable outcome given that Carroll has been educated in a world that operates within structured set of rules, but the "wonderful dream" seems to be peculiarly similar to the "dull reality" which Carroll attempts to escape (98). Fantasies seem to be forever bounded by what reality allows the mind to imagine.

The opening scene provides a possible metaphor for Carroll's artistic endeavor in the face of these constraints:

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of the dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not get her head through the doorway (10).

Alice seems quite capable of seeing that a more beautiful world exists beyond the confines of her environment. By making a distinction that it is her head, the physical location of the mind, which prevents her from proceeding, Carroll suggests that the mind provides the barrier to entering the Eden-like grounds of pure beauty. Alice's subsequent struggle to physically transform herself to squeeze within these boundaries mirrors Carroll's endeavor to gain entry into the unbounded imagination. Adult consciousness becomes comparable to the "rat-hole" in which Alice finds herself trapped. By grounding the narrative in the eyes and imagination of Alice, who is just beginning to be inculcated with lessons and physically removing her from the temporal world, Carroll adjusts the conditions of his adult world to explore if childhood presents the only opportunity or the "key" to the access the imagination. Yet even as he changes the parameters of the world and the eyes of the beholder, his endeavor appears doomed to failure; when Alice finally locates the garden, she finds that her conception of perfection is tainted. As the gardeners paint the red rose-tree white, Carroll's vision of beauty becomes subject to the same forces that dominate reality.

Alice's youth creates the possibility of viewing an alternate world through eyes not completely corrupted by the social conventions of reality, but her efforts to retain Victorian manners when her new environment creates no pressures to do so, suggest how deeply the rules of the world are impressed upon the mind during childhood. Alice's language is steeped in the artificiality of her world. Her stilted words, "You sh'n't be beheaded," reflect that the training of her schooling is not even abandoned in a moment of apparent crisis (65). In many instances, Alice even tries to transfer her conception of proper manners to this new environment. She finds it "decidedly uncivil" that the Footman looks up at the sky all the time he is speaking (46). She seems to be almost willing to forgive his rudeness if only he could answer her question, "But what am I to do?" (46). Alice's rejection of the Footman's response, "Anything you like," represents Alice's willingness to exchange one set of behaviors for another under the condition that she is told how to behave and act, indicating that it is not the actual manners that she values but the freedom from deciding what to do (46). It is at this moment that Alice seems to be rejecting the opportunity for freedom of the imagination and instead opting for the safer boundaries created by the dictates of reality.

Although Carroll succeeds in altering the content of Alice's new education, her systematic attempt to recall her schooling further indicates that her mind has become so conditioned to being told how to act and respond to situations, that it is unable to break out of this trap, even when the possibility presents itself. Just after Alice recalls, "When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that this kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me," she realizes that "there's no room to grow up any more here" and concludes that this means that will always "have lessons to learn" (29). The transition of Alice's thought from fantastic stories directly to lessons and books suggests that her imagination is never able to escape the confines of a instruction; she believes that as a child it is her duty to be concerned with schooling (29). She even self-imposes lessons as she "cross[es] her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons and began to repeat it." (16). Perhaps Alice will achieve grown-up status when she has been so conditioned that the mantras of the educational systems become immediate responses. It is almost as if in projecting his conception of a nonsensical world, that the child, simply by being a product of what Carroll despises, namely a world of socially constructed regulations, forms an obstacle to escaping reality.

Carroll faces a difficulty in allowing his own imagination to escape reality. He creates a mocking parody of the lessons of Alice's reality in the Mock Turtle's informative speech of the educational material of the Wonderland, but never is able to transcend the idea that a world must be ruled by instruction. Carroll's new world might study "Reeling and Writhing" or "Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision," instead of the traditional subjects, but inhabitants of Wonderland are still trapped by the process of rote which removes free thought from the educational experience (76). The rules, as the lessons, are certainly different in this imaginary place, but only to be replaced by an entire set of new ones. The croquet game epitomizes how Carroll can only create an alternative reality by constructing a world based upon oppositions to that in which he lives. For instance, in normal croquet there are distinct rules, whereas, in Wonderland "they don't seem to have any rules in particular: at least, if there are, nobody attends to them" (67). The new rules consist of disobeying the old ones. Perhaps fantasy can never escape man's tendency to use his own experience as a starting point to craft change. In this case, an author's imagination as well as those