In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the animal characters are very strange. In audience’s expectation, Lewis Carroll was supposed to guide Alice throughout the traditional fairytale world she has created, but instead they were negative influences on this child. Do the animal characters in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland disobey the animal characters in traditional fairytales? The animals in Alice argue with her, confuse her, and tell her upsetting stories instead of guiding her through the fairytale world she has created. This is parallel to Del Toro’s Pan Labyrinth because the main animal characters, fairytales, faun, and paleman, have the weird physical features.
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland message to us is that there’s nothing wrong with living free with your own imagination or bend the rules. In my opinion, I believe imagination is important but using it too much can leave you detached from reality Alice in Wonderland is a departure from this. Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever disguise, are meditations on life. Nowadays stories that were made to instruct children on how to acquire happiness have now been replaced with stories that teach children how to be in control of their life by including diseases, physical anomalies, and death to assure them that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
However Alice does not know exerting power is difficult when the world is consumed of “nonsense”. Thus she has different qualities that contributes to her vague identity. She believes life would be different in her world. Also Disney strives to reveal Alice’s incentive of Wonderland by introducing pictorial wonders such as singing flowers and surrealistic insect, making it seem as a dream. The movie progresses in the same route as Lewis Carroll’s book by focusing on her immature thinking of Wonderland.
These characters make us laugh, and wish for a place like Wonderland. To a child this place would be wonderful ! But they would never understand the true meaning of the story. Lewis Carroll created metaphors throughout the story, so the viewers would have a better understanding of life, and the relationships they hold. Alice created Wonderland to make up for the lack of imagination in the real world.
Within each novel, time is perceived differently when entering and exiting the portals which will be further discussed. The two novels start off with a young girl entering a world that isn’t their own. In Alice in wonderland, Alice chases a little white rabbit causing her to fall down into a rabbit hole entering wonderland and in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the youngest child Lucy stubbles into Narnia because her curiosity got the better of her with the wardrobe. Both young girls were confused at first, not knowing where they were. Alice finds a little doorway not much larger than a rat hole and Lucy stubbles upon a lamp post.
Part of the appeal may be that the books can cause the books to mean what the reader wants or needs because of the dream like state. Alice’s appeal could be her identity, which even then inhabitants of Wonderland struggle to understand (Sigler). ----However, it is not simply a dream for “poor Alice”, but more of a night terror. For example, in the novel Alice says,” ‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought poor Alice, ‘when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole-and yet-and yet-it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life’” (Carroll, 43)!
Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Oliver from Oliver Twist represent the characteristic Victorian children who are naturally good and appeal to the sentiments of the reader when facing difficult situations that aid in finding who they are. The children are required to decide between two conflicting ideas such as childhood and adulthood in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and even good versus evil in Oliver Twist while they search to find where they belong in the natural order of society. Death and horrible outcomes hover around Alice and Oliver as they are shoved into different social situations without their approval. Alice and Oliver’s identity crisis, while they are at a stage of limbo, are evident in the obstacles they must face including repressive new secondary environments which parody and mirror real life struggles imposed on them, being vehicles to aid in adult’s favor as they pull the children in varying directions and the inability for Alice and Oliver to take control of their lives their own hands. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the secondary environment behaves as a parody of Alice’s primary world or the larger, universally known, typical outline for Victorian society.
The most prominent interpretation of Alice is the theme of fantasy versus reality. The story continuously challenges the reader’s sense of the “ground rules” or what can be assumed. However, with a more in-depth search, the adult reader can find Carroll may have indeed implanted a theme relative to the confusion Alice goes through as well as the reader. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll uses not only his love for children and logic but his linguistic playfulness to create a story in order to show the psyche of a child. Moreover, Carroll makes fun of the way Victorian children were raised.
Children should be told the truth so they can be prepared for the real world before they grow up. I’m no parent, but I have been around children who do not know how to act in public places because their parents seclude them from the world. The violence in the classic fairy tales can be explained why it happen and ways children can learn what to do and what not to do. Parents can elaborate that not all step mothers are evil and that when hard times come they will not abandon them. The reality if the world would not be misleading if parents took the time to explain to their kids how things work in the real world.
They cause the mind to go off into a place where the child is actually with the characters, and not just reading about them. Having and creating a healthy mind involves several aspects. One should not expect their child to gain anything positive from a violent and evil fairy tale, except fear. Fear will not teach the child how to deal with or handle their problems. A contemporary fairy tale will teach them how to deal with their problems without scaring the children that heard or read these fairy tales.