Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Written by Lewis Carroll
The most well known and widely loved story of its kind, no one knows how to fall down a rabbit hole like Alice. Such grace! Such precession! My first descent into Wonderland was through Disney’s rendition of Lewis Carroll’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Many children loved this colorful tale, but I found it terrifying. Ten-plus years later, I decided to grab my spelunking gear and travel once more down the rabbit hole to see what I might find, and so I brought the original book home, read the first line, and fell.
Alice is a girl just seven years old who is bored with reading a book without pictures or conversation when she first spies a rabbit famously running late. It’s no wonder that she abandoned her book to follow such a peculiar creature; I imagine most would do the same. She follows this rabbit, without hesitation, down a rabbit hole. Her fall isn’t fatal, but it does transport her to a new and curious world.
In this newfound world, Alice does not react how we would expect her to—none of these young heroines ever do—for Alice asks questions, worries, and explores like a young girl filled with curiosity and a mind unburdened with expectations. When she is confronted at the bottom of her fall with a small bottle with the message “Drink me” on it, she is suspicious, but only enough to check to see if it reads “poison” as well before drinking it. She is not surprised by the drink’s presence and she is not surprised by its shrinking effects, even when she stands only 10 inches high. She carries this adaptability and accepting nature with her as she traverses Wonderland.
I respect this book and its ability to display amazing feats of bedlam while instilling in me a feeling of acceptance that superseded my instinct to blurt out, “What the hell?” as mock turtles sang, roses were painted red, and dodos raced for thimbles. The key to understanding Wonderland is Alice herself. Without her gumption and endless curiosity, Lewis Carroll’s novel would not have lasted more than a century. It’s an incredible gift to turn the ordinary into extraordinary, but even more amazing to turn the extraordinary into the ordinary and accept the fact that, “We’re all mad here.”
Published in The Independent: http://theindependentmag.org/the-arts/down-the-rabbit-hole/