Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  Will you come with me on my adventure?

  CURIOUSER

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

  by Lewis Carroll

  When I think of Alice, it’s Sir John Tenniel’s pictures that come to mind. The caterpillar smoking his hookah, the sheep knitting, the disappearing Cheshire cat. And Alice herself: so grave, so dignified. She seemed entirely unchildlike, a miniature adult, and yet I never had any trouble identifying with her. She never just played. She seemed to have a job to do. It was to get about, to meet and to observe and to try not to get lost, and to puzzle out what was going on, which is what a child does in the world. But it could sometimes be a sad and lonely and terrifying business: she shed a lake of tears.

  I once went to a school fancy-dress parade as Alice, with the headband, apron and striped stockings. For a painfully self-conscious child like myself, it felt just fine. I was Alice, after all. I’d been to Wonderland, met all those bizarre creatures. Alice talked to them pretty much as I would do: politely and sometimes impatiently, because they could be so condescending and infuriating.

  “We’ve had hundreds of Alice books illustrated by different artists; twenty-two direct film and TV adaptations; many more for stage, opera and ballet; comics and anime; parodies and pornography; songs and cyberpunk; Tim Burton’s films; computer and video games.”

  The most unsettling thing was the way Alice kept changing size. It could be something she ate or drank, but it could also happen all by itself, so it was very hard to control. It made me feel dizzy, and the picture of Alice’s neck growing long and serpentine made me feel a little ill.

  There are of course two Alice books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871. I read them at about the same time and as I usually can’t remember who or what was in which book, it seems best to write about them together. But Alice has had many other incarnations. We’ve had hundreds of Alice books illustrated by different artists; twenty-two direct film and TV adaptations; many more for stage, opera and ballet; comics and anime; parodies and pornography; songs and cyberpunk; Tim Burton’s films; computer and video games. Heston Blumenthal did a gourmet Mad Hatter’s tea party. The Australian Ballet toured the country in 2017 with a blockbuster production of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Melbourne in 2018, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image staged the world premiere of Wonderland, an immersive exhibition based on more than forty cinematic odysseys inspired by the Alice stories. And words such as ‘chortle’ and ‘galumphing’ have entered the language.

  In 2015, I was thrilled to see the very first Alice: the children’s librarian at the State Library of Victoria showed me the library’s newly acquired rare copy of a first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, handsomely bound in red, with beautiful marbled endpapers. It was joining a collection of more than 300 different Alice books. In 2006 I went to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and admired the Australian artist Charles Blackman’s forty-six solemn and radiant images of Alice, the White Rabbit, teapots and flowers. He began to paint them when his blind wife Barbara was pregnant, going through her own marvellous changes, and after he listened to her talking book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  Despite all these later interpretations, it’s the original stories, characters and pictures that come back to me – so readily that it’s almost impossible to recapture the disorienting feeling of reading them for the first time. Certain haunting moments stay with me, however, and they are just small moments, not the big scenes, like the trial, or the Mad Hatter’s tea party (which I read over and over again and thought the height of wit). There was a dark, cluttered little shop, and some object Alice could never quite see on the crowded shelf behind the knitting sheep’s back; every time she tried to focus on it, it quietly slipped onto another shelf. That felt like something that could really happen.

  “I always turned the page very quickly when I got to the Jabberwock, one of the great fearsome images of my childhood.”

  The walrus and the carpenter poem was breathtakingly cruel, and made me feel betrayed. The oysters wandered around the walrus and the carpenter on the beach on their little legs like trusting children, and the big beasts wept as they ate them alive. I wonder now why it didn’t put me off the whole book.

  I always turned the page very quickly when I got to the Jabberwock, one of the great fearsome images of my childhood. It was so huge and so hideous and the Alice-like fellow wielding the sword was so tiny, and the curious fact that the Jabberwock was wearing a waistcoat only made things worse. I loved the poem, though. It seemed to make its own sense.

  When I was sixteen, our English teacher wanted us to write a long essay about a great book. Most of my schoolmates chose Jane Austen, but I went back to Alice. All would have gone well if I hadn’t found a certain book about Lewis Carroll at the local library, which I found mesmerising. Apparently Mr Carroll (or the Reverend Charles Dodgson, as he was in reality) was a shy man who was very fond of little girls. Too fond, some said. There was a great deal of analysis of his life and his writing along those lines. I’m not sure I’d even heard the word paedophilia in those days, but I got the general drift, and I thought the book was pretty smart, so I plagiarised my essay from it. My teacher was going to be so impressed.

  She gave me the worst mark I had ever received for an essay. She wrote at the end: ‘Very good, until you try to be too clever.’ A short diatribe followed to the effect that it was not for us to question genius. I felt indignant and wounded – I wasn’t the only person with these opinions – but I never said a word to her about it: that would have meant revealing my plagiarism.

  “my abiding memory of Alice’s adventures is a kind of sweet sadness and an elegiac darkness, a foreboding”

  Although the two books are hope-lessly muddled in my memory, I do recall that the second seemed an altogether darker story to me, in a minor key. The melancholy and emaciated White Knight reminded me painfully of Don Quixote, the hero of a book from my parents’ shelf that I was also trying to read because I liked the grotesque Victorian-era illustrations. But I didn’t understand it at all. Don Quixote seemed to me a romantic and entirely serious hero, not at all a figure of fun, and I was in agonies of embarrassment on his behalf because he was so misunderstood and mocked.

  But getting back to Looking-Glass: the spookiest scene is the one where the Red King is asleep and Tweedledee and Tweedledum suggest to Alice the possibility that he is dreaming, that she is a character in his dream, and that when he wakes up she will disappear. This is absolutely the antithesis of the reassuring Wonderland, which all disappears when Alice wakes.

  Here was my first brush with a philosophical concept I found very frightening.

  Indeed, my abiding memory of Alice’s adventures is a kind of sweet sadness and an elegiac darkness, a foreboding, that all the funny antics and the jaunty 1951 Disney version, with Alice as a wasp-waisted blonde, never quite dispelled. We always seemed on some precarious edge of meaningless change; or worse, a sudden descent into nothingness. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Alice’s adventures were always at or very near the top of my favourite book list, and I re-read them many times. They grew more familiar, and yet they never lost their strangeness.

  Alice in Wonderland was the most memorable tale in the string of books I was obsessed with as a child – books where ordinary kids suddenly found themselves in magical worlds. Unsurprisingly, my reading taste then was the manifestation of my desire to escape my childhood. My younger years unfolded within the dreary reality of the last decade of the Soviet Union and I spent a lot of my time then either in the hospitals undergoing various surgeries, or in my sick-bed. Those books’ suggestion that one day I could simply step into some completely different existence comforted me immensely.

  Alice in Wonderland was my ultimate fantasy, not because Alice’
s Wonderland was that enticing, but because it was at once foreign but also sort-of-familiar. The nonsensical speak, the arbitrary cruelties of rulers, the unpredictable transformations and secretiveness of some inhabitants all mirrored in some ways the realities of the Soviet Union and of my dissident family’s life. When I read Alice in Wonderland I felt at once distracted away from my own life but also understood, and at that time of my life this combination was life-saving.

  Lee Kofman

  When I wanted to read Alice’s adventures again, I couldn’t find a copy I already had, so I ordered a second-hand one online: The Penguin Classics edition from 1998, with an introduction and notes from the editor, Hugh Haughton. In a very Alice-like way, my original book then turned up: a battered old edition from the Modern Library of New York, no publication date, priced at ninety-five cents, with an introduction by Alexander Woollcott. So I had the bonus of two learned gentlemen to guide me. I decided I would read the stories first and the explanations afterwards.

  “We’re into the Wonderland story very quickly, and the first thing that strikes me is a sense of horror.”

  I was amazed how quickly I read them. Even taking notes, each story took me no more than two hours to get through. In my memory they had become vast tomes: you could lose yourself in them for weeks. As I had thought, the Looking-Glass story was less chaotic, and darker in tone, but they were so similar that again I decided to think of them both together, and that’s the way I’m writing about them now.

  We’re into the Wonderland story very quickly, and the first thing that strikes me is a sense of horror. Alice is falling down the rabbit hole, she is falling and falling forever, she has plenty of time to think… but where is the panic, the screaming as she falls to certain death? Of course she lands completely unscathed, like a cartoon character. I knew she would, and yet for a moment I had felt an adult’s vertigo, that I never felt when I read the story the first time. In the many intervening years, I have learned a different kind of fear than the kind I had felt when faced with the Jabberwock.

  “I recognise myself and my internal stream-of-consciousness voice, although I’ve never gone quite so far as to box my own ears. Just like that, I’m Alice again.”

  Meanwhile, Alice is being her characteristic self. I’d completely forgotten what a chatterbox she is, and no more so than when she doesn’t have an audience. She talks to herself, as to another person; she gives herself a running commentary on what’s happening, and what it might mean; she reassures herself by remembering what she can of her lessons; she scolds herself to the point of tears; and I am informed that this ‘curious child’ had once boxed her own ears for cheating herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself. Not curious at all – I recognise myself and my internal stream-of-consciousness voice, although I’ve never gone quite so far as to box my own ears. Just like that, I’m Alice again.

  And that, ultimately, proves to be the strangest experience of all in my re-reading. How can a twenty-first-century woman in her sixties identify with a nineteenth-century girl of seven? Easy. That voice gets me there. Virginia Woolf was wrong when she said ‘The two Alices are not books for children’ but she was dead right when she continued ‘they are the only books in which we become children.’ Everything that Alice does, I do. Everything that happens to her, happens to me. I am polite, but I can be cheeky. I am proud of my learning. I am very fond of animals, and anxious to stop others hurting themselves. I get very annoyed by the condescending, rude, bossy inhabitants of Wonderland and Looking-Glass World – and how jaw-droppingly awful they are, much worse than in my memory – but I am a child, and they aren’t, so I know I have to put up with it. Up to a point. Don’t we all reach that point, where we want to say ‘Who cares for you, you’re only a pack of cards,’ or ‘I can’t stand it any more,’ and when you say those words of pure defiance, everything rises up and falls in chaos?

  “The Jabberwock no longer terrifies me: it’s just one of Sir John’s splendid drawings, in which dense thickets of lines and cross-hatchings make the dream world dark and solid, with great depth.”

  And yet it’s different this time round. Again, I am fearful, but fearful of different things. The Jabberwock no longer terrifies me: it’s just one of Sir John’s splendid drawings, in which dense thickets of lines and cross-hatchings make the dream world dark and solid, with great depth. Also I’d forgotten that Alice never has to confront the Jabberwock, she just reads a poem about it. What is far more scary now is the puppy, which had never worried me before. It doesn’t talk, it’s just an ordinary friendly puppy, but she meets it when she has shrunk to a very small size, so it’s a giant. It only wants to play, and she throws sticks for it to chase until it gets worn out, but I am so aware of the jaws that bite, the claws that catch. Similarly, I am unexpectedly horrified by the scene where the Duchess roughly dandles a baby and the cook throws things at them, and eventually the baby is tossed to Alice. Is this the adult in me, a maternal urge to protect the child? It reminds me of an embarrassing moment many years ago when I was reading The Little Match Girl to my son as he sat on my lap. Dry-eyed, curious, he turned to me as the match girl was dying of exposure and neglect and said ‘Mummy, why are you crying?’

  “I am unexpectedly horrified by the scene where the Duchess roughly dandles a baby and the cook throws things at them, and eventually the baby is tossed to Alice. Is this the adult in me, a maternal urge to protect the child?”

  Why doesn’t anyone look after little Alice, I want to know. Here she is wandering around on her own, as no nicely brought up girl should have to, in possibly dangerous terrain, but no-one thinks to ask her where her mother is, or her nurse. None of these creatures take her under their wing. They are quick to ask hostile questions, or to put her in her place, or to contradict her, or tell her to hold her tongue, or to recite poetry at her, or to give her nonsensical advice, but they seem to have no compassion. Sometimes they don’t even recognise her as a little girl: to the pigeon, she is a serpent; to the unicorn, a fabulous monster. So she just has to fend for herself in a disorienting world.

  And how very disorienting it is. Worst of all this time round is the growing and shrinking in Wonderland, and now it seems far more sinister than it did before. Sometimes it happens because of what Alice ate or drank, and sometimes it just comes on by itself, for no apparent reason. It’s like some recurring disease of swelling and wasting. And it doesn’t happen in proportion: the thought of Alice’s neck swaying above the trees, or her chin banging into her shoe, is horrific to me. She grows until she just fits the White Rabbit’s house, with one arm out the window and one foot up the chimney; what would have happened if she had grown any more? Or what would have happened if she had shrunk any more?

  “Worst of all this time round is the growing and shrinking in Wonderland, and now it seems far more sinister than it did before.”

  Which leads me back to my original fear of the Red King’s dream. This time round, I notice with painful frequency that both stories seem full of Alice’s fears that she, not the world around her or anyone in it, is the one who is different, who is changing, who is not the person she had once thought she was, and her ultimate fear that she might cease to exist, go out like a candle, either through extreme shrinkage or because the person dreaming her wakes up. Like a person my age or older who fears that memory or personality will fade in some irrevocable physical change, she worries that whenever she tries to remember some schoolroom learning, or recite some improving verse, it turns into nonsense. She enters a wood where she can’t remember the name of anything, not even her own name, and blunders along with her arms round the neck of a beautiful little fawn for comfort. The fawn can’t remember anything either: but once out of the wood, it knows with delight what it is and what she is – and then it is frightened and has to run away. So even in relief and revelation, there is fear.

  “Alice is nearly always serious, but the stories make me laugh, both as a child and as an adult.”

&nb
sp; There are moments, then, when Alice’s adventures grow very dark indeed, overshadowed by this persistent fear of annihilation, where identity, physical being or consciousness will be snuffed out. These are moments when I have to ask myself: Why is this considered a fun read for children? But as I remembered it the first time round, it was definitely fun, of a slightly chilling and dangerous kind, which is probably the best kind.

  Alice is nearly always serious, but the stories make me laugh, both as a child and as an adult. The Wonderland and Looking-Glass creatures are so palpably ridiculous, and yet they are quite convinced that they are perfectly sensible and correct; or if they know they are mad, that madness is a sensible and correct state to be in. Much of the fun lies in the dialogue and verse, in the absurdities and logical contradictions and obvious groan-making puns, which as a child I intuitively loved; the more sophisticated aspects of Carroll’s wordplay and mathematical teasers went completely over my head, but it didn’t matter. I suspect I took the characters more seriously the first time round: Humpty Dumpty looked very silly, but he had a dignity and certainty about him that persuaded me he had offered the only possible correct interpretation of ‘Jabberwocky’.

  “She’s always up for adventure and experience, and while there are moments when she’s lost and sad and angry, all the frustrations and disappointments can never defeat her. If you’re looking for a good role model for girls, you can’t beat Alice.”

  The other aspect of the Alice adventures that saves them from all-pervading gloom is Alice’s re-silience. Carroll writes elsewhere with a sentimental nostalgic glow about the joys of childhood and the nature of the real Alice, ‘her perfect assumption of the high spirits, and readiness to enjoy everything, of a child out for a holiday…we look before and after, and sigh for what is not; a child never does this.’

  Well, actually, in the Alice books, the child looks before and after quite a bit; and she does not only sigh for what is not, she weeps a pool of tears. And yet there are also the ‘high spirits, and readiness to enjoy everything’. She is intensely curious, always looking forward to the next encounter, always hoping to reach the beautiful garden or become a chess queen. She misses her pet cat Dinah, but not her family. When she first gets into the looking-glass house, she can’t wait to go outside, because if she stays in the house she might have to go back through the mirror to normality again. She cries when Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her she isn’t real, she’s just a sort of thing in the Red King’s dream; but a moment later she brushes away her tears and tells herself they are talking nonsense. She’s always up for adventure and experience, and while there are moments when she’s lost and sad and angry, all the frustrations and disappointments can never defeat her. If you’re looking for a good role model for girls, you can’t beat Alice.