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Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

#76: Nov. - Dec. 2009 (Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

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It's hard to decide whether "Alice" attracts us because of "deeper meaning" that a child wouldn't see, or because it always awakens the child in us. The first chapter is the most magical in the book. I tend to see it as maybe the most successful evocation in literature (as far as I've read) of the dream state, with its illogicality and random but important meanings. Also I see it as reflecting the child's concerns about identity, which Carroll was perhaps the first to really think about. He took children seriously, in that sense.
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oblivion

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Re: Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

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Yes! Children are always concerned with identity, teenagers even more so. But you know what struck me? When the griffon and the mock turtle are carrying on their discussion, there is a rather humourous disclaimer from Carroll not wanting to be connected with the book. Gee, will have to look up that quote as I don't have it in my head at the moment. And actually, I love the whole chapter with its puns and word-play.
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Re: Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

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DWill wrote:It's hard to decide whether "Alice" attracts us because of "deeper meaning" that a child wouldn't see, or because it always awakens the child in us. The first chapter is the most magical in the book. I tend to see it as maybe the most successful evocation in literature (as far as I've read) of the dream state, with its illogicality and random but important meanings. Also I see it as reflecting the child's concerns about identity, which Carroll was perhaps the first to really think about. He took children seriously, in that sense.
Thanks Bill, this is a sound and astute analysis of the dream-like quality of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Deconstructing the meaning of the dream images, we can see that the 'Drink Me' bottle of size-altering magic potion stands for the emergence of modern chemistry and physics, both the transformative power of chemicals and the recognition of orders of magnitude in physics, from the atom to the universe. Old Father William is my favourite. Hailing from the Antipathies deep below Wonderland, Bill lives upside down, standing on his head for his health. The walrus and the carpenter are archetypes of the colonial experience. The walrus is fat colonel blimp, while the carpenter is his practical sidekick. They eat the oysters without noticing, much as England ate the world by establishing the British Empire.

Analysis of the dream visions of Alice in Wonderland requires entry into a child-like naivete and innocence, a theme we discussed here on Booktalk as appearing strongly in the famous English children's story The Secret Garden.

__________ 27 Dec 2009 07:39 __________

The theme 'Down the Rabbit Hole' provides a memetic English appropriation and reflection of deep old myths of descent into the earth.

The Greeks have the descent of Odysseus and of Orpheus into Hades to meet Pluto the God of Death. Christianity has the descent of Christ into hell after his death on the cross.

The meme of the descent into the earth comes originally from the shamanic practice of lucid dreaming to imagine tunnels into the earth as a main method of traditional medicine.

Religion and fiction find a need to incorporate this idea into their stories. Lewis Carroll represents a Victorian British perspective, where tales of primitive tribes were circulating among anthropologists, and the idea of descent also had a respectable orthodox imperial pedigree in the stories of Christ and Ulysses. Carroll borrows the mythic meme of the tunnel into the earth to provide a framework for his imaginary satire.

I get the feeling that this mythic resonance is a big part of why Alice in Underland strikes such a popular chord.
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cakeheart222
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Re: Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

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I don't think I started "emotionally" connecting with Alice until I became an adult and developed panic disorder. I liked this story as a child, as one of the posters above said, it's a fun story. When I read it as a child, I could come to the story with a childlike (non panic) perspective so it was a fun story for me at that point. My panic disorder makes me have periods of unreality and there is a lot (IMO) of unreality in this story. You know periods where Alice is confused and everything seems backwards or somehow not quite right. These parts effect me strongly now where they didn't hold any particular meaning for me before.
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mrymkjoe

Re: Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

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I agree with cakeheart222 in finding the book to be much more emotional when read as an adult. I re-read this when my son was 5 yo and found it too surrealistic and disturbing to be considered a "children's book". I ended up reading it to him on a boring, rainy afternoon when he was 6 and he loved it, obviously seeing this and Through the Looking Glass as wonderfully fun and silly. The idea of escaping down the rabbit hole sounds like a great adventure to many six year old children, and reading this again with a child helped me to appreciate the fun and not focus as much on the anxious feelings I had had earlier.
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Re: Alice Chapter One Down the Rabbit Hole

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mrymkjoe wrote:

The idea of escaping down the rabbit hole sounds like a great adventure to many six year old children, and reading this again with a child helped me to appreciate the fun and not focus as much on the anxious feelings I had had earlier.
I never felt this way about 'Alice', but Peter Pan and Wendy is definitely on two levels, and as for 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens' - a great book, I think, especially illustrated by Arthur Rackham, but definitely quite sinister.
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