Ah, a children’s classic. I was really excited to read this book as I had only watched the Disney animated movie as a child over and over again because I loved it so much. What I loved most about the book was the nonsense aspect of it. Nothing makes sense, the entirety of Wonderland is one big universe of nonsense. As much as I love the story as a whole, I never considered any meaning behind it nor hidden messages, so when discussing the book with other readers in my class I was baffled at the conclusions we had drawn.
First, we looked at the theme of innocence. When discussing this, concluded that while Carroll does tackle innocence, the focus is on the loss of it. In the book, Alice experiences so many changes to her body which makes her uncomfortable. This reminded us of the changes every young adult goes through during puberty. The way she grows and shrinks by eating or drinking magic cakes or fluids, Carroll paints a picture of the way a child could feel when their body starts growing when they hit puberty.
Then, we looked at symbolism. We discussed the Mad Hatter and concluded that he probably suffers from dementia but I wanted to do my own further research on the matter because the Hatter wasn’t the only character we had identified with an illness. I found a very interesting article which revealed that the majority of the characters seem to have various psychological disorders although mental health is not explicitly mentioned in the book. Characteristics given to the heroes we know and love are symptoms of their disorders, for example, the Mad Hatter is associated with symptoms of bipolar disorder as well as PTSD (Miclau, 2017). Alice herself seems to show symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia (Miclau, 2017).
When reading this, I had a totally different view of my favorite part of the book in which the Mad Hatter asks:
“Have I gone mad?” to which Alice responds, “I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” (Carroll, 1865). And that’s not the only quote I have changed my view on! The following excerpt has made it crystal clear to me that Alice was schizophrenic.
“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.” (Carroll, 1865). This shows a clear identity crisis, a clear cut sign of her mental disorder.
When looking at the adults in the book, it is clear that whenever an adult was present in the book, their advice and orders for Alice were absurd, ridiculous – even cruel, for example the Duchess saying “Off with her head!”. What’s interesting about this, is while I was reading Appleyard’s insights on the young reader’s world (Appleyard, n.d.), he mentions that a child has to construct a meaningful world out of experience different from what they are used to in their early childhood – such as schooling. The child then leaves a familiar environment of family and is suddenly places in a social world of peers and non-familiar adults. Here, the child encounters the adult world and its rules. I would say when reading Alice in Wonderland, this would be difficult for the young reader. The adult world is utter nonsense in this book.
Finally, I thought of the age group and took a look at Erikson’s stages. Firstly I looked at Alice and decided she fit in the fourth development stage, in which there is a battle between industry vs. inferiority. A child in this stage is between the age of 6 and 11 years old. School and social interaction is a vital part of the child’s life (Erikson, n.d.). In the book, Alice talks about the importance of school quite a few times but she also is learning how to interact with everybody around her.
Looking at the target audience of the book, I found the book hard to follow sometimes. Sometimes the sentence structure could be unclear to a second language learning student at that age because of its complexity. The story as it is could be too ridiculous for teenagers and so they most probably wouldn’t take it seriously. Personally, I wouldn’t use it for my own students.
I enjoyed reading the book nevertheless.
Literature II: Marianna's blog 