Deeper, Hidden Meanings and Themes in Alice in Wonderland
A Quest Leading out of Childhood
The book Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, has been part of many children’s lives. It seems like a simple fairy tale, but it goes much deeper than that.
The events in the story correlate with the steps in a child's growth and progression through childhood and adolescence. According to editors 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." When you approach the book with this idea in mind, it offers interesting and meaningful interpretations of the events and characters in the story.
“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.
The Journey Begins with Curiosity
At the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, Alice daydreams and is unable to pay attention while her sister reads an advanced novel to her. Alice’s mindset is childlike, distractible. While her imagination runs wild, she begins to piece together a perfect world of her own. That's when Alice notices a white rabbit, a manifestation of her imagination that sparks her curiosity.
“Alice follows the rabbit because she is 'burning with curiosity.' Soon she finds things becoming 'curiouser and curiouser.'"
Children are usually the people with the most curiosity; they are the ones who are always eager to learn more.
Later, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum tell her the tale of the Curious Oysters, which is about how curiosity can lead to terrible consequences. This shows how adults often use stories to control children with fear and to destroy children's sense of imagination and curiosity by telling them to quit asking questions and grow up. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum symbolize parents who are trying to keep Alice's imagination in check.
If it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.
Alice gets in trouble because of her curiosity. The white rabbit tells her to run into the house to quickly fetch his gloves. While searching for them, she opens a cookie jar only to find a cookie with "Eat Me" written on it. Without thinking twice, she consumes the cookie.
Alice is still in her childhood stage and needs an adult figure to guide her. At this moment, there is no such figure. “We view children as needing gentle guidance if they are to develop emotionally, intellectually, morally, even physically.” (Henslin)
Alice's eating of the cookie represents two very important ideas. The first is, again, how curiosity gets one into trouble. She eats the cookie after being told the tale of the Curious Oysters, because a child will sometimes disobey and do something even after being told it is wrong. By eating the cookie, 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). Because there was no parent or adult figure around, curiosity prevailed against better judgment, and she ate the cookie.
This situation may also be about peer pressure while growing up. Inside the cookie jar were many cookies with labels with different instructions; the cookies were all telling her what to do. Just like everyone does at some point, she gives in to peer pressure. As a consequence, she grows rapidly into a giant. The white rabbit and other characters she encounters perceive her giant self as a monster instead of a little girl. A society may perceive youngsters who give into peer pressure, for example who take drugs or experiment in other reckless ways, as monstrous.
On many occasions, Alice shows her juvenile nature, her child-like thinking, and confusion. When she first falls down the rabbit hole and is confronted by the door, she gives herself “some good advice,” saying, “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 its face. In a relationship between a young child and an adult, the adult is often unable to comprehend the child's logic. 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). 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 wet after being washed up onto the shore, she listens to a dodo bird who tells her to run in a circle with everyone else in order to dry off. What he is telling her to do makes no sense whatsoever, because the water keeps engulfing them, but she continues to do it anyway. By blindly obeying the adult figure, she exposes her childlike ignorance.
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,” says 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." This somewhat exemplifies the preoperational stage of childhood which includes symbolic function, meaning that one thing can stand for another (Wood). Apparently, the author is trying to get a point across that “nobody” can stand for a person as well as “nothing.” Here is another lack of understanding between adults and children, but this time, the adult's statement seems easier to comprehend for Alice, and makes, surprisingly, more sense than her previous realization. This shows how she is mentally progressing towards the formal operations stage, little by little.
I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!
"Who Are You?" "I —Hardly Know."
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: that is, 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 Alice any 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). In Alice in Wonderland, unlike other fairy tales, the story represents a child’s true progression through life. In real life, in the industrialized world, a child has to figure things out on her own.
In sociology, there is a stage called transitional adulthood. This is a period where young adults “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 regains sight of her identity. The queen, who loses her temper and wants to kill Alice, is the obstacle that finally helps Alice 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 example of childhood through adolescence. Just as a child’s life is filled with good and bad choices, Alice's is, too. As most do, she learns from her experiences and ultimately becomes more mature—emotionally, in how she deals with her problems, and in the way she perceives different situations, all of which are encompassed in the progression of a child.
“I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?”