“I can’t explain myself because in not myself, sir… everything is so confusing”

Leeann Barrett

The Story of Alice in Wonderland I never paid too much attention to because I was told that it was a story about a child who is potentially on narcotics. But this theory about her being on narcotics actually feeds in to what is said on page 55 of “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination” by Deborah Ross. It says, “From that time till the present, conservative authors have used romances and novels to teach girls that their dreams are dangerous and of little relevance to their daily lives.” Being taught that Alice is really having this fantasy, because she is drunk and on mushrooms and that the caterpillar in the story is actually smoking opium, is justification of this being a story to teach me that my fantasies will get the best of me.
The story begins with Alice not wanting to do her studies. He aunt I believe gives her a book which she is supposed to read for school. Alice doesn’t want to read the book and in attempting she falls asleep and this is when the ‘delusion’ begins. Alice starts with singing a song about this magical world that would be the perfect place to live and it will be called “Wonderland.” This is the world that she believes that she should live in where things go as she will like. She sees this white rabbit that leads her into a whole that just happens to be the passage to her fantasy world.
While in Wonderland all the male characters are ridiculed from the start. The rabbit that is always late for nothing, the mad hatter, the caterpillar and twiddle de and twiddle dumb are all portrayed as babbling fools who just talk but never actually listen to what Alice is saying. However the twiddle twins tell her a story which is supposed to be the lesson of the story I believe. Alice would be the Oysters who follow the walrus where their mother tells them that they shouldn’t. This is what will happen to Alice if she does not conform. Its funny how the twiddle twins are the only males that she names out rightly as dumb actually are the ones who feed onto the idea of dreams of another world will be dangerous. The oysters wanted to go to land because the walrus filled their minds with fabulous things. They then started to think about how the outside would be. And in thinking and fantasizing about it they ignored their mothers request for them to stay. In the end they were eaten. So in Alice’s case, if she did not escape and if she did not learn her lesson she would be killed.
The women in the story are seen as mothers, the posh and self- centered ladies of society and the in essence the future Alice. The mother figures always appear when Alice gets a little ahead of herself most obviously with the mother bird. She calls her a serpent because she is too tall after eating the mushroom. For her to call her a serpent is like calling her a demon of some sort. This is something that no one wants to deal with or have in their midst. Something with the self- centered woman of society. The flowers ask her what garden she is from and as soon as they find that they have no clue what she is, they label her as a weed. A weed is something that destroys gardens. The Queen treats her husband as a child and continuously says that thing mush always be “my way”. This echoes Alice’s song at the beginning of the movie. Alice wants everything to be her way but as the cashmere cat says “everyone is crazy here.”
To just lay off Alice’s Wonderland and call it and everyone in it crazy is like saying that she he self is crazy and that this dream that she is having makes no sense and will never be. Woman will never rule, men always make sense even when you may think they don’t and children should listen to the things that their parents tell them. Alice says twice in the story, once in the beginning and right before her third song while sitting on the rock, she always gives herself good advice but she always fails to listen. She might think that this is her giving herself advice but what she is actually doing is echoing something her parents may have taught her.
Ross says “She is saved, not by facing them down with dawning maturity and confidence, like the “real” Alice, but by waking up (57). Alice never gets too save herself. The queen is still running after her. Alice waking up is a symbol for her conforming to society and getting rid of her silly dreams. During the dream she realizes that what she wants is not right for her and the story is conditioned that way. Nothing ever seems to go right in the story. The only thing that goes right is when she learns how to eat the mushroom and judge what will make her tall and how tall (Ross mentions this too). If more events in the fantasy went right, like the queen being nice and the flowers not kicking her out, then I’m sure Alice would have rather stay there than to wake up. Alice would have died if it wasn’t for the door knob, which is a masculine figure also. All the males in the story help her along the way to get this idea that what she is dreaming is bad while the females all help it along.