Alice and The Duchess

“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise” (Carroll 105). This and advice of this kind are often dispensed by the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Alice, and like the transition from child to adult, the advice is generally rarely fully understood if not confusingly difficult to wrap logic around. Many illustrators have undertaken the task of conveying a clear picture of the struggle that Alice goes through in order to triumph over childhood and nonsense into the realm of adults and logic. Angel Dominguez shows Alice’s struggle to grow up and out of childhood, a major theme of the text, in such a way that the audience can almost feel her anxiety. The use of the body language of Alice, the Duchess and the supporting animals, in addition to compositional elements such as proximity and framing, is a principal mechanism of Dominguez in evoking Alice’s anxiety and emphasizing the uncomfortable passage into maturity on one’s own while dealing with the pressures and advances of an adult world.

Dominguez prevalently uses facial expressions to convey emotions in his illustrations, and that of “Alice and the Duchess” is no exception. The looks on the Duchess and Alice’s faces are stark contrasts of each other. While the Duchess seems delighted in having a companion, Alice is wrought with consternation over the closeness of a person who once told her “If everybody minded their own business the world would go round a deal faster than it does” (Carroll 71). The Duchess’s genuine grin, given away by the crinkling of her eyes, shows her pleasure at being so near Alice w...

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...ted advances of the Duchess, but also it exhibits the trapped nature that many adults feel when thrown into the “Adult world” of work and responsibility. The hedgehogs show the ability to escape from the world of responsibility and work that many children take for granted trying to run toward the world of adults and the flamingo evokes the suffocating hold that maturity entails when in a world that places it on a pedestal from an early age.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis, and Tan Lin. "The Mock Turtle's Story." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; And, Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. Print.

Straker, D. "Social Distances." Changing Minds and Persuasion -- How We Change What Others Think, Believe, Feel and Do. 12 Sept. 2004. Web. 07 Feb. 2011. .