“I’m very much afraid I didn’t mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book.” – Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the tale of a young girl lost in the symbols, intellect, and games of adults. The story follows as Alice falls down a rabbit hole, meets a smoking caterpillar and enters a place called Wonderland, and then returns to her normal existence, much changed for the experience.
Much of the text is filled with notions of the subconscious and dreams. The story was understood by Carroll and the readers of the time to be the tale of a young girl’s dream upon a summer outing by the river. Dreams have been defined by different writers and researchers over the years as fulfilling wishes that cannot, or should not, be acted out in real life. In an attempt to escape the rules and watchful eyes of her sister, Alice follows an itinerant White Rabbit down a hole that is filled with confusion, odd locales and strange characters. Alice’s inner desires are manifested in the form of creatures who at odds with their own existence or the rules that existence hands down arbitrarily.
The act of falling down the hole is ripe with sexual imagery and metaphor. Dreams of falling have been interpreted as reflecting out of control sexual desires and fears. The fall in the tunnel is also symbolic of birth as well as the sexual act of penetration. The story of Alice can therefore be read as the undeveloped psyche of a child being confronted with her impending path to adulthood in general, as well as her womanhood in specific. Alice changes size no less than twelve times in the original story, she also has trouble using items that are not at the same scale as her. She has trouble opening a door because of her size and the size of the key, but when she eventually passes through the portal she is presented with the image of a garden. Gardens have traditionally been used as images and symbols of womanhood and sexual processes in general, seen in the phrase ‘the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees.’
The change in size can also be symbolic of Alice growing up or not yet being mature enough to understand exactly what is going on around her in Wonderland. She is constantly being confronted with puzzles or maths beyond her ability or being the incorrect size to interact with normal items and situations.
Are the caterpillars and mushrooms symbols of sexual gratification or simple creatures encountered in any park or back yard? It all depends on the context of the reader and her age.
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