Wonderland

This last weeks book was Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I have to add that the Disney 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland scares the crap out of me, or at least my child self. I haven't had the heart to watch it since I was in the single digits. I watched the newer version of Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp. It might have been my recent completion of a study on Victorian ideals and female Scottish miners but I saw the 2010 version full of picks at Victorian society. I thought it was really interesting that Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge (his pseudonym is based off the Latin for his real name), wrote this story down for a real Alice. He had started telling this young Alice and her sister stories and then they begged for these stories to be written down. Thus, we now have Alice in Wonderland!


The movie might have been full of a lot of imagery, but the movie was really quite different. Alice's story was more about growing up, and this mostly came up at the end when Alice's older sister is revelling in the stories her sister was just telling her and reliving her youth. I think it was their symbolically through Alice's growing and shrinking throughout her time in wonderland. She had to shrink to fit into the wonderland and then she had to grow and shrink to fit into different places in wonderland. Before she returns to "reality," she can't control her growing. She is forced to grow up and pushed out of wonderland. The King and Queen ban her from the court because she's "over a mile tall". I'm sure I missed a ton of imagery, but I am feeling a bit rusty on my Victorian! Sometimes I wish I could have lived then - I'd flip to have seen the things Albert and Victoria were doing! I would have loved to have been their maid at Balmoral :D The story is pretty good over all, and it doesn't take long to read Alice's adventures.