Once upon a time: Alice in Wonderland (Part 3 of 3)

The fantasy of a childhood in a mad, mad world

Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll, Part 3 of 3

Today, I share the last part to my adventure through the original Alice in Wonderland story, Chapters 3 and 4. In Part 2, I shared about feeling big and small at the same time, navigating unknowns and uncertainties while the clock ticks, and how I felt close to Alice, for the first time.

In this final part, I share my reflections on girlhood, Victorian childhoods, and adult gazes.

Alice Liddell, by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1872

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“Certainly we enjoy the walk with Alice through Wonderland, though now and then, perhaps, something disturbing almost causes us to wake from our dream.”
—The Times

Chapter 3

Alice is now in the woods. She’s three inches tall and wishes to be her right size.

She meets a big puppy and she’s scared of getting trampled or devoured.

She escapes it to find a giant mushroom with a large blue caterpillar on top of it. The caterpillar is smoking a long hookah. It asks who she is, and she doesn’t know how to answer.

“I’m not myself, you see.”
”I can’t understand it myself, and really to be so many different sizes in one day is very confusing.”

The caterpillar doesn’t understand her confusion, and claims that going from caterpillar to butterfly is not confusing at all. Alice becomes irritated and stands up to it.

Alice in Wonderland, 1951

“I can’t remember the things I used to know.”

She takes bites of the mushroom and her body shrinks. Then, her neck becomes long. A pigeon calls her “serpent”. She then becomes her right size, once more. She wonders how to get to the garden she first saw in Chapter 1. She sees a door in one of the trees. She eats another piece of mushroom and is 15 inches tall. She enters the garden.

Chapter 4

My favorite illustration of the book, illustrated by author Lewis Carroll

Alice is now in the garden. She sees a tree with white roses, and three gardeners, who also happen to be a deck of cards. They’re painting the roses red.

Someone had accidentally planted the wrong tree of roses, and they feared getting beheaded by the Queen.

Alice is invited to play croquet with the Queen, with hedgehogs as the balls, ostriches as the mallets, and the Queen’s soldiers as the arches.

Alice then meets a Gryphon, an odd creature, which leads her to The Mock Turtle, another odd creature. They have a conversation.

There’s a trial and they go to it. Alice shouts “you’re nothing but a pack of cards! Who cares for you?” The cards jump on her and she wakes up in her sister’s lap. She’s home. She believes to have had a dream, a “wonderful dream”.

Alice’s sister stays to watch the sunset to then, too, dream: an ancient city, a quiet river, a boat with cheery children on board, including Alice. Alice is listening to a tale told to her, the tale of Alice’s dream.

“Then she thought, (in a dream within the dream, as it were,) how this same little Alice would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman: and how she would keep, through her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood…”

The Fantasy of a Childhood

I had always heard that Alice in Wonderland was simply the story someone wrote while being high. Magical drinks, smoking caterpillars, beheading Queen of Hearts. I went in expecting a twisted, odd magical world. Instead, I found a very real, dark Victorian Wonderland.

I wrote in Part 1 about Lewis Carroll’s odd obsession with Alice Liddell, and the Victorian era’s strange normalities around children. Like the way children were photographed in costumes posing as adults.

Remember Bella Baxter? I’ve already brought her up a few times. Poor Things’ depiction of Bella outraged many of us, because she was a child in an adult’s body. It outraged us because it didn’t feel normal—at least not anymore.