A Very Merry Unessay

The following is a transcript of the video essay.

Hello! I’m Anika AKA PIxie. Today I’m presenting a very merry unessay on the topic of word and image interactions in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 

Introduction

Alice in Wonderland is one of the most famous and most familiar stories in the world. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There are said to be the most quoted works of English literature. There are thousands of editions, adaptations, translations, and remediations. I’ve collected a tiny fraction for this presentation and there are still too many to share. Alice is ubiquitous and beloved. 

A Very Brief History

  • Charles Dodgson was a born storyteller. In childhood he told his brothers and sisters fantastic tales, made up word games, and collaborated on a family magazine. Later his poetry and short stories were published in national magazines. In 1856 he started using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll for his non academic works.
  • Dodgson first told the story of Alice falling down the rabbit hole to three sisters during a boat ride on the Thames in July 1862. Ten year old Alice Liddell asked him to write it down for her.
  • In November 1864 he presented her with a bound manuscript titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. This manuscript included Dodgson’s own drawings. The final book was published in 1865 as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with illustrations by John Tenniel.
  • Alice was an immediate success and an instant classic. The book has never been out of print and has been adapted for the stage and screen, presented as ballet, opera, musical, marionette and radio play, appeared in theme parks, board games and video games, inspired songs, music videos, fashion lines and photoshoots, analyzed by scholars from a wide variety of fields and translated into 175 languages.

Thesis

Given how well known and how widely known Alice’s story has become, it seems impossible to  alter it with even a novel approach to image. But there would not be thousands of illustrations by thousands of artists, and more literally every day, if that were true. Art can change the story’s tone, pace, setting, or even meaning. It can add, or remove, depth, and reference times, people, ideas, other stories, other artists, or other works. To explain what I mean, I have three examples. 

Evidence

Example one: she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high

Early on in the story Alice is swept away in a pool of her own tears. 

“I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”

I’ve always found this passage to be incredibly evocative. To me it’s a powerful metaphor for being trapped by your own emotions and reactions, as might happen to someone with anxiety, depression, or other mental illnesses. That interpretation is nowhere in the text and the classic illustration is descriptive— Alice in deep water, looking surprised and perhaps worried, but not panicked. The text and image tell us she is resilient and curious, with little hint of fear or sorrow.   But in Disney’s animated adaptation the scene is overtly emotional to the point of melodrama. The room fills with water as Alice sobs and after she’s dropped into the potion bottle she emptied to shrink back down Alice is depicted as delightfully sullen. Finally in this stunning illustration by Stuart McLachlan Alice is so overwhelmed she hides her face and curls into herself. The way her dress pools around her creates the suggestion of a flower floating on the water. And the ripples tell us Alice is the catalyst, the cause of her predicament, which also touches the animals reflected in the top right. This striking image sets a tone of fragility that is counter to the traditional conception of Alice as a plucky heroine. 

Example two: who are you?

Here Alice encounters a caterpillar who asks her to explain herself. Alice is quite mixed up by this point and answers honestly that she is uncertain. 

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

This is one of my favorite Tenniel illustrations. Alice’s shyness and uncertainty is very clear in her expression peeking over the mushroom and I love the way she’s pulling herself up on tiptoes. Japanese artist Tonomi Sakuba’s illustrations are a playful take on a textbook, which is particularly clever in the interaction with the caterpillar. Alice is labeled so even if she’s not sure who she is, Sakuba’s illustration makes it clear to the audience. In the illustration by Hungarian artist Katalin Szegedi the caterpillar is poet Edward FitzGerald and portraits of Alice Liddell hang behind them. Both the images play with references to Tenniel’s original drawing and to historical works in order to add layers of meaning similar to Carroll’s use of wordplay and puzzles. They use the art to answer the caterpillar’s question ‘who are you?’

Example three: off with your head!

The quick tempered Queen of Hearts shouts this at her court, and at Alice herself, throughout the final chapters of the book.

The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarreling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.

Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,” thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”

This is actually quite dark! Six year old Alice should not be fretting about losing her head to a monarch’s whims! But the book is so full of wordplay, the Queen is so broad, and there is such a veil of unreality to Wonderland that the reader is distracted or even trained by the text to think of the command as absurd not scary. Alice is unbothered in Tenniel’s illustration. But in this page by Italian artist Davide L. Marescotti Alice is worried and trying hard not to tumble the house of cards. The Queen is depicted as a dominatrix. But David Hall takes it to a direction that is both extreme and obvious. He includes a guillotine. These images change the tone of the text by making the threat of violence explicit. They are also broad and over the top but they do not allow us to forget the severity of the text. 

Now that we understand how image can affect text I’ve chosen one passage to examine in depth.

Evidence

In chapter four, “The Rabbit Sends in Little Bill”, Alice once again sips an unknown liquid that transforms her body. She grows so large she fills the Rabbit’s house.

She went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself “Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What will become of me?”

While trapped by the house, Alice wonders if the excitement and adventure of going down the rabbit hole is worth all the confusion and danger. She argues with herself back and forth. 

“When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone; “at least there’s no room to grow up any more here.”

“But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!”

Alice is a young girl, but the book ends with a passage about her future as a proper Victorian woman keeping house for her family. Her size fluctuates throughout the story and in this passage is explicitly linked to growing up, both physically, as with puberty, and socially. The Rabbit, with his white gloves, his maid, his business and his anxiety about rules, evokes a Victorian gentleman, the type Alice might marry. And here she grows so big so fast the Rabbit’s house constrains her movement and her happiness. Trapped, quite literally restrained by the structure of the house, and swinging wildly between a desire to grow up and a desire to stay young forever, Alice wonders what will become of me?

Dodgson’s sketch features Alice folded up, her knees at her chest, her arms closed in. She takes up the entire page but she is actively trying to be smaller, to take up less space. Tenniel’s classic illustration is clearly based on this sketch but his Alice is less closed, more cramped. In Tenniel’s drawing Alice is constrained by the house, not the page and not herself. The differences between these two images are subtle and can be explained as differences in skill. Tenniel’s is a more direct representation of the text. But I prefer the original. It suggests that the book itself is the Victorian House that traps Alice’s curiosity and will. 

And so it does for some time. The intense popularity of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provides Alice longevity and notoriety but not without a cost. Curious and willful Alice will never grow up and write a book from her own point of view, nor will she grow up to fight or accept her place in society. In both cases the story is already written by the men who rule and shape her world and the choice was made to trap her within the becoming, to disallow her to grow up at all. Alice is an amalgam of real little girls and Wonderland is an inverted fantasy of Victorian England. In Wonderland Alice is free to question, to argue, to plot to write her own story, and to be “mad”— but only within the confines of the book. Carroll captures that tension of young womanhood in the text and in his sketch: that feeling that we are giant vessels of possibility trapped by the strict parameters of a society that wants to control our bodies and our selves.

The other classic illustration of this scene is from the exterior of the house. The original sketch and Tenniel’s version show Alice’s giant arm reaching out the window toward the Rabbit. Alice is thus depicted as a monster. In Victorian times gender was strictly delineated and any suggestion of women’s empowerment was considered a danger to society. In response, art often depicted women with power as dangerous and monstrous. In Wonderland every time Alice grows large she becomes destructive: creating the pool of tears that traps animals and herself, making the Rabbit’s house unlivable, scaring the pigeon and disturbing the forest, displacing the animals at the trial and finally breaking out of Wonderland entirely. When Alice has power she is a danger to herself and others.

Disney’s animated film Alice in Wonderland premiered in 1951. Disney’s Alice references the Tenniel illustrations but extends the classic scenes and fills in the spaces between them. Disney’s Alice grows and shrinks in real time and in this scene ends up wearing the house. Over the past seventy years the Disney take has become as prevalent as the classic Tenniel interpretation.

Summary

The Rabbit’s House incident is centered on space, and so are traditional gender roles. Girls are socialized to take up less space. Alice is a clever and imaginative child whose innate curiosity causes most of her adventures. But she is polite and generally obedient. She enters the Rabbit’s House on orders to retrieve his gloves and fan because the Rabbit mistook her for his servant, Mary Ann. This suggests that girls are interchangeable to busy gentlemen. But Alice doesn’t correct him and despite her expressed annoyance at being ordered about, she accepts the task. Moreover, only when the Rabbit decides to burn the house down to get rid of the “monster” does she even raise her voice loud enough for the Rabbit to hear her. Alice is conditioned and constrained by the mores of her society to stay small and quiet. Alice gets increasingly frustrated as she goes about Wonderland and experiences more and more situations that do fit in with her traditional understanding of the world. There is safety and comfort in order and rules. But again only by finally shouting and fighting back against the absurdity of the Queen’s trial does Alice escape. There is a constant contrariness built into the story and into Alice herself that inspired many artists over the last 150 plus years.

Discussion 1: Space

Willy Pogany’s “Flapper Alice” does not fill the space as much as Tenniel’s does. She is clearly too big for the house, but it’s because her limbs are ungainly and she’s not sure where to put them. This Alice seems older than six and is a closer representation of puberty. Flappers, too, represented the “new women” who openly opposed conventional standards of behavior, choosing to be more visible, to take up more space than was allotted them by society.

Ralph Steadman’s Alice comes across angry due to her sharp expression and slanted eyebrows. Although covered by her hair, there is the hint of a pout in her expression. Her hair is loose and long and her full dress takes up space. In the window there’s an ad for a room rental. This one detail adds new color to her story. Instead of a Victorian Household, Alice is renting a London flat, presumably by herself, and yet is still not free. Now she has to practice “adulting” on her own. 

Camille Rose Garcia’s colorful take makes her monstrous and trapped at once. She is destructive and distraught, with mascara tears or are they living lashes? The pattern of her underskirts create the effect of a vortex, a rabbit hole within the rabbit hole, and the butterfly in the top right corner could also be a scaly dragon (or Jabberwocky) wing coming out of Alice’s head. These three images directly reference the original and present as nearly the same frame, yet they deliver a completely different vibe. 

These two examples of Alice in the midst of growing display a sense of movement despite the still image. Peake’s Alice is contracting. She looks up at the ceiling and realizes she’s going to hit it so she makes herself smaller in order to accommodate the space provided to her. Haun’s Alice is expanding, filling the space and knocking over the furniture. They depict the same moment in similar styles but hint at different themes. Published in 1946, Peake’s contracting Alice brings to mind women being let go from their wartime factory jobs to make way for men returning from the front. Haun’s expanding Alice was published in the midst of second wave feminism and she takes up more space, and pushes against the walls of the house and the Rabbit’s patriarchy.

Here again the structure of the art is the same but to different effect. Brøgger’s illustration is an excellent expression of puberty. Her Alice is all limbs and discomfort and she’s actively pushing against the wall. Clark’s Alice, like Peake’s and Carroll’s, is folding herself up and her expression is passive, especially compared to the others. Sison’s manga-styled Alice stares out of the page directly at the reader, conveying a sense of urgency. This image was created 150 years after the original sketch but it evokes the same tension. The house is the book is society and regardless of how the rules governing the lives of girls and women change, she will always be trapped within them. 

Finally, as a bridge to our next theme, here are three artists who depict Alice explicitly within the frame of the house. These images highlight that Alice is fully trapped in an uncomfortable position. 

Discussion 2: Monstrosity

Our first “monstrous” Alices recreate the classic illustration. Newell’s take is focused on the Rabbit and Bill and Alice is not a threat, merely large. All the others depict Alice as an active participant in the scene. Often she is a direct threat to the Rabbit. Dali’s take includes a caterpillar and butterflies, a kind of mashup of the scenes about Alice’s growth. His colors are incredible here and convey femininity and potentially sexuality.

It’s not uncommon for Little Bill the lizard’s ejection from the chimney to show up in the art. I especially like the line of anthropomorphic animals gazing on Alice-stuck-in-the-house as if she was a zoo animal depicted in the Canzi illustration. 

Alice ‘wearing’ the house is also a popular take that can be presented in many different ways to different effect. It can be charming. Grandin’s Alice might as well be walking a fashion runway while Nott’s could be having a picnic. Or it can be alarming. Emeriau’s and Venezia’s Alices are trapped while Cabrera’s House looks alive.

These two again show Alice completely constrained by the House’s frame and unable to move from an uncomfortable position. Taken from the feminist point of view, she is not only trapped by her house(hold), she is carrying it on her back. 

Finally, Bašić’s Alice is crowded not only by the House, but also by the text, the book. The page is chaotic—Alice breaks the frame as well as the fence and shoots Bill the Lizard right out of the book. But while Alice is the center of the chaos, and the center of the page, her expression is sad and diminished. This reflects the argument Alice has with herself: she’s trapped as the monster. 

Discussion 3: Point of View

Illustrations can also be used to challenge our conception of the text by altering Alice’s default identity as a young, white, upper-class girl. Altering Alice’s race, gender, age, social class or other identifying features can in turn alter the societal frame and story she’s trapped within, and how she interacts with them.

Race

Alice in Wonderland Remixed by Marlon McKenney features a young Black Alice. His illustration of Rabbit’s House is traditional. But like Pogney’s illustration, this Alice does not take up the whole space and represents young women who are marginalized. Remixed Alice is also surrounded by elements of Black culture and history.  These images are empowering but also create a dissonance: society is holding Alice back but only by interacting with it on their terms can she truly gain power. 

Cavin Jones’s Alice is a middle aged Black woman. We see her from the front, and she appears more tired than disoriented. She’s resigned because she understands what’s happening to her. She’s not trapped by her clothes, they are comfortable compared to the traditional pinafore, but they match the walls— striped bars that suggest prison, that are even visible in the mirror. This Alice does not even have the options of interaction or assimilation that McKenney’s younger and more idealistic Alice does. But she has a distinct and engaging point of view. 

Gender

Ciel in Wonderland is a two part original video animation that casts a boy as Alice. The manga Black Butler and its anime adaptation takes place in the Victorian age and centers a curious child so adding Wonderland makes perfect sense. Throughout the OVA Ciel is referred to as Alice and the narration and other characters use female pronouns for him. Ciel is not explicitly genderqueer, but Black Butler plays with gender and gender norms throughout its run. In the first arc of the series serial killer Jack the Ripper is revealed to be a woman, Ciel’s aunt who then portrays the Queen of Hearts in the Wonderland story. Ciel’s backstory includes disenfranchisement, sexual assault, witchcraft, and a tall, dark, and handsome stranger coming to his rescue, all plots points that are more traditionally associated with women. In the Rabbit’s House scene of Ciel in Wonderland, Alice completely destroys the house and is able to walk away from it as a giant. This is a clear example of how playing with gender in the illustration can alter the subtext of the story: an Alice who was raised as a boy is not contained by the house. 

However, she is restricted, stuck wearing the Eiffel Tower. This is meant to be a reference to Ciel’s forgotten true name — ‘Ciel’ translates to ‘Sky’ in French. The OVA plays with the audience’s knowledge of both Alice in Wonderland and Black Butler to tell a story about Ciel recovering his identity.

The Alice character is also a boy in Ever After High. Alistair is the original Alice’s son, destined to follow a white rabbit to another world just as she did. Alistair’s rabbit can shapeshift into a girl, whom he falls in love with. Thus Alice and Rabbit build a household together, a cheeky take on the Rabbit House incident. The series is focused on these second generation characters’ attempts to break free from the stories their parents wrote for them. Alistair and Bunny do enact Alice’s fate, but Carroll’s story is altered by genderswapping Alice and the Rabbit. 

Discussion 4: Transformation

In Sakura Kinoshita’s manga adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alice looks like a completely different girl in each chapter. 

Alexey Fedorenko includes two wildly different takes on the Rabbit House incident. He portrays Alice from the exterior as a full monster with many arms that wield magic and hair that moves like a Medusa’s. Monstrous Alice is not constrained by the house she wears and her expression is naughty and happy. Contrariwise his interior Alice is trapped, tied to the walls by shadowy tendrils. She’s naked and powerless.

Leonor Solans Gracia and Hiroko Hanna used photographs of Alice Liddell to model their illustrations.  Gracia’s image mimics the original Dodgson sketch, but is a photorealistic painting of Alice created for the 75th anniversary of Liddell’s death. Hiroko presents a version of the traditional image, but uses perspective to make Alice look quite small despite being trapped by the house. Her other illustration similarly presents Alice as still smaller than the whole of the house, but here she has broken it and sits as if on a throne with a cheeky expression turned to the audience. 

Anna Hellsgård and Christian Gfeller created an art page for each chapter of the book. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill is very abstract but the pieces of the scene are there. 

Adriana Peliano has created many works based on Alice and on the Rabbit’s House scene. These three each provide a different take on the story, using Tenniel’s art as well as photography and collage. The Penrose triangle is an optical illusion that can be depicted as a perspective drawing but cannot exist as a solid object. Peliano places Tenniel’s Alice in the center of it. Her other Alices are models. On the left Alice is fully trapped in the house, folded up on herself and hiding her body, her face. On the right Alice is stuck in a small space, but she is open and surrounded by light and images of transformation. To me, both of these takes read as analogies for puberty. Left Alice is scared and ashamed, Right Alice is interested and excited. 

I find Anna Gaskell Solomon’s photograph disturbing, but riveting. There are three Alices jumbled together in a pile that could be innocent or could be an assault. This absolutely plays with the idea of Alice as a metaphor for puberty and all the physical and emotional changes it brings. 

Alice makes for a playful photoshoot. The first two examples are traditional, recreating the original illustrations. The second two make more of a statement. Both Kok’s and Walker’s Alices are displaying power. Kok’s Alice is mimicking Tenniel’s art, but her blank expression and the way she creeps over and through the house lends a dangerous sheen. To me she seems diabolical, perhaps murderous. Walker’s Alice, meanwhile, is taking up space, purposefully making herself wider, bigger. And she has the same nonplussed expression, dreamy even. 

“Hysteria” was the most frequently recorded mental illness of women during the Victorian period. The list of diagnostic symptoms was long and broad. Examples include faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, emotional lability, speaking out of turn, and my favorite a “tendency to cause trouble for others”. To sum up: any behavior that does not befit a woman in society. 

Hysterical Alice is another version of Monstrous Alice. She is a danger to the status quo. The modern sequel series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland begins with a young adult Alice locked in an asylum. She is confined to one room, trapped as in the Rabbit’s house. Alice has grown up too big for her society.

The first season of Star Trek: Discovery is another modern retelling of Wonderland. Protagonist Michael Burnham is the pawn that crosses the board to become a queen. She travels by way of magic mushrooms that create portals through time and space and must cross over to a mirror universe and back in order to save her reality. She is consistently punished by her society (Starfleet) for a tendency to cause trouble for others. 

These images were used to promote their series and they directly reference Alice being constrained by her size in relation to her surroundings. 

Presentation

Finally, my son and I each created our own art to reflect Alice in the Rabbit’s house in relation to ourselves. I hope that these images speak for themselves.

  • King Alice, art by Cassius Milik
  • Alice has grown too big., short film by Anika Dane

References

  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with illustrations by John Tenniel, 1865

All of the illustrations included in my video essay were found online and belong to the artists.

Images

Film

  • Alice in Wonderland (Disney, 1951)
  • Něco z Alenky (Condor Films, 1988)
  • The Matrix (Warner Brothers, 1999)
  • Alice in Wonderland (Disney, 2010)
  • Touch of Evil (New York Times, 2011)
  • Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (Disney, 2013)
  • Black Butler (A-1 Pictures, 2008-2017)
  • Ever After High (Mattel, 2013-2017)
  • Star Trek: Discovery (Paramount, 2017-2024)

Music

  • The Nutcracker, Op. 71 (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1892)

Articles

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