ALICE and the meaning of “WONDER”
So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
For anyone familiar with the classic book ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’ and read of all the strange, bewildering and more than slightly intense things that the titular heroine experienced on her eponymous adventures, including those of its sequel ‘Through the Looking Glass’, you would probably think this a strangely contradictory line for the main character to exit her story with, right? Going purely by the Oxford Languages modern definition of the adjective “wonderful”; to inspire delight and admiration, one would assume that Alice had not being paying attention to her own dream. Confrontational characters with aggressive tendencies, existential crises, dwindling autonomy, constant size changes bringing the repeated threat of shrinking away into nothingness and logistical situations that prove frustratingly obtuse even when they’re accepted as the norm.
Both novels also have Alice deal with a lot of identity issues as she is routinely mistaken for other people or even other kinds of creatures, leaving her to ponder if she’s even the same person she used to be the day before, all while her mind is unconsciously tied up in knots just by the nebulous influence of the place she inhabits. Come to think of it, very few characters involved in her story ever refer to Alice directly by her real name, only cementing her immense feelings of isolation and loneliness. The very moment immediately before Alice woke up in her sister’s lap, she was seemingly trapped in a temporally shifting landscape miles from her home being attacked by an army of sentient playing cards. This all does little to suggest the presence of what the average modern reader would consider to be “wonderful” at face value. The fact that it was all a dream is irrelevant; nightmares still have a traumatising effect on all humans even after they stop to think about it after the fact.
Sure, the books are also overtly comedic in nature and there may admittedly have been a few moments in which Alice was able to distance herself and have a laugh or even relax for a bit, but the key phrase there is “a bit”. But then it must have been a “wonderful dream” surely, if television, Hollywood, royal theatre and hundreds of book illustrators all convey it that way? Colourful pastel landscapes, a prim little rose-cheeked protagonist expressing dull surprise at most everything, elaborate ornate decorations furnishing various dreamy locales and a soft, rated PG at most aura surrounding a cast of young fantasy-grade characters, some plucked from the verses of literal nursery rhymes. But then, why does it still seem so off? On the whole, there’s a strange dissonance between the events playing out in the books and the word used as a descriptive umbrella to put them under. What really was so “wonderful” about Wonderland? Why use that word to describe her dream and not a more apt descriptor such as “enlightening”, “traumatising”, “trippy” or the like? After a few days of research, pondering and reflection, I’ve determined that maybe this is the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe the problem is not with the word itself, but how we view it. Let’s instead then try to challenge that earlier question by asking another question: why use the word “Wonder” to describe the twelve plagues of Egypt?
I thought about it myself ever since I saw ‘The Prince Of Egypt’ for the first time; when God spoke to Moses a little quote paraphrased from the book of Exodus, “I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all my Wonders”. Note that God wasn’t talking about making Pharaoh docile with puppy dogs and wild flowers; God was talking straight-up terrorising as many of his citizens as possible until he had no choice but to set the slaves free, the same way Thanos made plain his intentions to dust half the universe with superpowers extracted from the magical macguffin stones. But nobody ever refers to the Infinity Gauntlet as the “Wonder Glove” or anything like that, because his character was created during the much more serious bronze age of comic books when the more outlandish elements of the Gold and Silver ages required a more consistently serious tone, in which Wonder Woman was given a sterner expression and a Wrestling Federation-style ‘Double-W’ logo. What I’m trying to get at here amid my wanton sacrilege and shallow summary of comic book trends is that “Wonder” clearly meant something quite a bit different to people at least as far back as Victorian times, compared to now when many seemingly tend to associate the word with treacly rainbow glitter tiny tot plastic play sets. So how differently was “Wonder” used before and can it help us understand its use in the Alice books better? To get a clearer picture of that, let us first turn to philosophy!
René Descartes in writing ‘The Passions of the Soul’ way back in 1649 detailed six primary “passions” from which all other emotions derive via selective combinations like a short game of ‘Doodle God’: Love, Hate, Joy, Sadness, Desire and Wonder. Descartes writes a whole bunch about one’s “spirit” and flow of blood as they are “stirred” by these passions. Most of these passions have direct polar opposites to each other, but not “wonder”. It doesn’t inherently mean that whoever feels a sense of wonder would want to consciously seek something out or avoid it. Wonder does not apparently affect the blood or the heart, because all it involves is a desire to know more about something: to inquire, ponder, theorise or deliberate on a subject with even the slightest of abnormal qualities. Though it can affect the mind at many scales of surprise, be they “what superpower is God going to pull on us next” or “is that a boil on my leg or a mosquito bite”, it’s only the knowledge gained from the answers which brings about the other passions; the initial Wonder is neither positive nor negative by its own nature, because the knowledge has not yet been gained. Until we do, we remain curious.
Curiosity can be expressed just as much in terms of that which is “admirable” and that which is “morbid”, or even just that which is surprising by itself. Descartes also says Wonder, being the first of all the “passions”, is vital in helping humans gain knowledge and insight about the world around them but in great excess, the “disease” of blind curiosity can cause even the most intelligent among us to miss the forest for the trees. Wondering too much, that is to seek out new things only to invent ideas about it from thin air instead of actively engaging with logic and reason, can cause one to find novelty in the mundane and become distracted by wild unfettered imagination.
Alice doesn’t just express curiosity; she “burns” with curiosity. Lewis Carroll himself described her character in an article reacting to a stage adaptation of his works as “wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names–empty words signifying nothing!” We know from that very same article of his that Alice is also “trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know”, which lines up with all her theorising and impromptu games of “let’s pretend” that occur whenever she’s left to her own devices. We also know that this tendency towards curiosity can frequently get her into trouble a lot of the time, even when she isn’t following a walking talking rabbit to who knows where. She commonly projects an imaginary voice onto house pets or inanimate objects and failing that, will simply pretend to be two people at once. She will think out loud to herself in back-and-forth conversations on her own, even playing games like chess or croquet with the imagined second party, sometimes cheating at them too.
It is through this second party voice that “She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)”, distracting herself during one train of thought for ‘Through The Looking Glass’ to think of what would happen if all her reprimands over the course of a year were added up to make one big super-punishment at the end of it. She pokes her nose around in her sibling’s text books, priding herself on all the information she absorbs despite misinterpreting quite a few pieces of key information whether she knows it or not. Though she will do her best to tolerate it and swallow her anger, she is absolutely not fond of being criticised even when she knowingly does so to herself. What was (and is still to this day) so refreshing about Alice as a fantasy character is how all the various intricacies of her prepubescent behavioural qualities are allowed to flourish and thrive amid the kind of encounters very much atypical for even a Victorian adult. The writing provides her such tangible shape and definition that she almost seems to leap right off of the page even as the readers place themselves in her shoes. The most memorable characteristic naturally is her curiosity which is what motivates Alice to pursue many of her adventures in the first place and that makes a dream world of her own unwitting creation the perfect comic foil to use against her.
Based on what has been established so far, how do we define a “Wonderland”? In simple terms, wonder is an outward expression of curiosity in all its manifestations, with curiosity by itself being a desire to attain knowledge. However, by satisfying that desire and “feeding the mind” as it were, all curiosity is thereby sapped from the subject and the wonder inherent to it is lost. The mystery of darkness evaporates the very instant we shine a light into it. A supposed “Land of Wonders” then, would need to inspire wonder as much as possible and as often as possible, never giving up any sensible answers whatsoever to anyone lest it no longer be so wondrous as it was from the outset. Indeed, a running joke of Alice’s dreams is that the search for answers will mostly turn up inconclusive results, either because no answer exists or because the logic of the question itself leads to a confused recursive cycle of fallacies and contradictions. Even questions that do get an answer and seem to satisfy Alice mentally only raise further questions that end up flying right over her head. It’s as though Wonderland unto itself were a distinct character of its own along with all its inhabitants therein. Basically what I’m saying is, Wonderland is to Alice what Silent Hill is to James Sunderland.
I believe this is why some people say they remember feeling uncomfortable while reading the book or watching some of the films based on the Alice books; because those people likely had their impressions coloured by the expectations of a fun and fancy free fairy tale, as did many other artists and visual storytellers with their own interpretations of the source material. Doubly galling is when an adaptation or property referencing the books for the sake of symbolic callback such as the Alice in Borderland manga adaptation on Netflix, is outwardly trying to “invert” said expectations of “wonderland” to present a dark and gritty take reserved for only the most beloved of children’s stories. In reality, the original books were already designed to subvert fairy tale expectations anyway, especially during their time of publication.
‘Alice’s Adventures Underground’ was originally conceived on the fly by stuttering logician Reverend Charles Dodgson on a day out with Robinson Duckworth to entertain three daughters of the Liddell family during a row-boat trip, one of whom also happened to be named ‘Alice’ herself. Of all the tales he made up for them, they considered this the best yet and when pushed to expand upon it in manuscript form under the pen name of Lewis Carroll, he made more and more additions to give it depth enough so that anyone young at heart could enjoy reading it, let alone just kids. Despite critics at the time not knowing what to make of it, they eventually softened towards it and even Queen Victoria apparently expressed her admiration for Alice’s dream adventures.
Rather than see wild curiosity as a “disease” the way that René Descartes did, Carroll saw it as a sign of potent imagination, especially in children whose minds hadn’t yet been dulled by the harsh truths and trials of the great wide world ahead of them. In his adult years, Carroll treasured this sense of “innocence” above all other things; when it seemed as though anything could be found down every new road, whether it led to joy, sadness or confusion. There would always come a point however, when there would be no new questions left to ask, when all the ways of the world had been mapped out and all would finally change to dull reality. When you know all the answers, nothing surprises you and the truth cannot be re-hidden once it’s been demystified. A story like this then, absolutely needs to go out on the “it’s was all a dream” ending, as to keep such a monstrously feverish testament to imagination locked up and preserved. It simply cannot end any other way.
So, let’s go back to reassess that “what a wonderful dream” quote and assume that instead of looking back in abject fondness over a brief flight of fancy, Alice’s mind is now a flurry of questions in desperate need of answers that she knows she’ll be forced to fill in with her yet to be quelled imagination. What once seemed harrowing, strange and maybe even frightening at times can now be looked back upon safe in the knowledge that the danger was quite literally all in her head. Alice herself describing the adventures in Looking Glass World for the sequel as “a nice dream” can perhaps be looked upon in a similar light; “nice”, not because of the events that she experienced, but because of the thoughts and ideas they conjured up in hindsight. In addition, she’s had one dream like it already and might even have been aware of the smoke and mirrors this time, so she’s able to distance herself from it more readily as she scoops up her kitten for a kiss.
Lewis Carroll’s goal with the use of “wonder” was ultimately to provide youngsters of all ages with something to always be thinking and asking questions about, even as he himself admitted that there was no moral or hidden meaning within the machinations of the story he had written. So, at what point did that idea get steam-rolled into hollow sentimentality delivered through hammy over-acting amid Grant Kirkhope’s rejected demo tapes? To be fair, there are absolutely exceptions to this; lavish productions that manage to communicate at least some of Carroll’s concepts fairly competently, alternative perspectives that reframe and even expand upon certain scenes or pieces of dialogue and even a few of the bad versions will boast at least one neat looking visual idea or a surprisingly fun song to make it worth tolerating for a little bit. Mostly though, I feel that most Alice interpretations fall into the same pitfall that some Shakespeare adaptations do: every word is spoken as though it’s been directed through a game of telephone with everyone involved going through the motions without much thought going in to what those words were originally trying to suggest. Now, emotionally contradicting presentation certainly wouldn’t be an invalid technique to use when adapting Alice’s stories as, being dream-centric themselves, even they aren’t beyond using it themselves for some sly dark humour in places, but this likely didn’t occur to most people trying to honestly adapt Lewis Carroll’s stories. One example that springs to mind is the infamous mushroom growth scene.
Alice changes size so often in the first book that she starts to believe she is no longer the same person who woke up that very same morning. Now at three inches in height, a hookah-smoking blue caterpillar tells Alice that the mushroom he’s sitting on can make her shorter or taller upon eating from one of two sides. Not being told which side does which unfortunately, Alice is forced to experiment and finds out the hard way, with the effects of both sides occurring so suddenly that Alice’s body contorts and bends in more unnatural ways than before. First, her legs and body crumple up so her chin directly hits her feet and after that, her neck grows so long that it becomes like a stalk stretching out over the treetops with her arms and hands a great long way out of reach from her head. Very few adaptations, even audio versions and radio plays ever dare to do full justice to these strange moments, aside from some animated or illustrated versions for which the cartoonish abstraction might soften the impact somewhat. This is likely because such moments go at odds with the “magical” tone that the creatives associated with them and feel as though they are expected to adhere to, despite the fact that such scenes were absolutely intended to feel weird, because it is weird! Those that blunder on anyway in spite of the dissonance, such as the chroma-key puppetry heavy Anglia production broadcast on ITV in 1985 come off as tonally jarring as a result, especially when the acting from all involved lacks the much-needed impact.
The fact that both Alice books are built on very loose episodic structures, contain heavy lyrical and musical elements, take place largely in woods or forests populated by talking animals and involve eccentric monarchs to some degree would suggest to the uninitiated modern reader that they share the same ground as the fairy tales or nursery rhymes that they simultaneously intend to make a mockery of. Some of the verses being parodied have become so obscure now in fact, that they have become culturally supplanted by the parodies themselves. What also doesn’t help matters is that another term for the moralistic “Fairy Tales” as seemingly preferred by most folklorists even today, is “Wonder Tales”. Obviously most people back then were still sticking by the old definition of “Wonder” as implied by the insight of Monsieur Descartes a few paragraphs ago but clearly, something must have changed at some point between then and now, however gradually, to associate wonder with admiration and delight. Bear in mind that “Wonder Tales” were not averse to dark, depressing and even violent subject matter and did not by themselves imply sunshine, rainbows and the trope of “happily ever after” that society was keenly aware of even before the Alice books hit the scene.
Supposedly, pamphleteers and newspapers in England during the course of the industrial revolution really liked to use the term “wonder” to refer to any new and exciting invention coming down the pipeline. Considering how long the revolution lasted and how often new inventions would pop up and accelerate productivity, “wonder” likely started to become as commonplace as the inventions themselves until slowly, the dictionary definitions started changing to reflect its use as the 19th century rolled on. With “wonder” still being synonymous with fairy tales, that’s probably what led to the modern interpretation of “wonder” colouring most peoples impressions of any stories even tangentially associated with the genre, leading to all the tamest stories being coloured with rose-tinted glasses even disregarding the Brothers Grimm hammering the tales into shape for mass consumption. This included Alice’s adventures too.
Author L. Frank Baum, writer of his Wonderland-adjacent ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ published in 1900, said of his book in the introduction, “it aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out”, going so far as to refer to the “wonder tales” explicitly by name. Unofficial Alice sequels also started to appear around this time, presenting events and encounters somehow even less coherent than the original books, but with little of Alice’s recognisable and endearing character qualities to hold them together engagingly enough. Since she had been through two chaotic dreams already, a third wouldn’t give her much else to meaningfully ponder or react to. Then in 1934, just a year after Paramount’s first major Hollywood stab at the story bombed at theatres, ‘Winter Wonderland’ hit the radio waves and any notion of nuance or subtlety was thrown out the window.
More than forty times the word “Wonder” is used in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz including the introduction and not including the chapter titles. Eighteen of those times, the word is applied to a place, a situation, a character or their talents in an unambiguously positive light. It’s worth noting the use of the word “terrible” as it is used to describe other events and places as an antonym for “wonder”, including characters such as the Wizard of Oz himself. This means he can be both wonderful and terrible, but never are the two descriptors seen as potentially equivalent to each other the way they were when the Book of Exodus was written. “Wonder” is naturally used several times throughout both of Lewis Carroll’s books by various characters along with the author’s descriptions remarking on all manner of events in the text itself for the effect of humour, dread, confusion, uncertainty and even despair. The closest any of those descriptions come to resembling the tone of vacuous delight thrust upon it by most mainstream readings of the text is one instance from the first chapter of ‘Through The Looking Glass’. Alice on the verge of sleep is looking at the snowfall outside her house and personifying the seasons themselves, imagining them as cycles of day and night so they wake up to dress in green and dance in the summer winds before laying under a bedsheet of snow to sleep for the winter: “I WONDER if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently?”
In finding appeal with multiple generations of readers at once, Lewis Carroll himself probably also contributed to speeding up this approach to the saccharine when he rewrote a new version of the book in 1889 to be read for children under the age of seven called, “The Nursery Alice”. The subjectivity of Alice’s perspective was paired back and remarked upon in saccharine, overly sweet and loving tones that despite not catching on, still doubtless contributed to, or at least was informed by the shifting attitudes towards “wonder” as a descriptive. Fast forward to my childhood in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Being an autistic child who was really stringent regarding tastes towards comedy, adventure, TV contests and craft shows to the point of terrifying my parents whenever they heard the theme music for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, I loved to see living breathing people being pitted in exciting and unpredictable scenarios with fluctuating stakes and every chance that one or all could lose out.
A story with a title so twee and stomach churning as “Alice In Wonderland” seemed to me at the time to be the complete antithesis of everything I claimed to value from the entertainment I consumed. Such were my thoughts whenever I laid eyes on the VHS cover for Disney’s animated version of the story from 1951, always lurking in the depths of our living room tape cupboard. The artwork on the cover sleeve didn’t do it any favours either. Prim little doe-eyed child in a poofy skirt? All-too friendly-looking hosts? A talking bunny? Flowers? Tea? Colours everywhere? What kind of syrupy, bargain-bin Care Bears malarkey am I looking at here?
I would occasionally get a few glimpses behind that clamshell case curtain in the form of trailer previews on other video tapes, still images on the internet, references in the media, a school play or two, recitations of ‘Jabberwocky’ in class and most vividly, a Disney-themed After-Dark screensaver program for our family’s Apple Macintosh. Among Dalmatians and pirates chasing after flying pan-pipe troublemakers, it featured a giggling disappearing purple cat creature that always left it’s grin behind. I do have vague memories of watching bits of the Disney movie itself, though with my dismissive mentality that wouldn’t even tolerate The Little Mermaid, I’m certain such viewings never lasted long. I’m not very proud when I say that I held a lot of other classic pieces of media in contempt for this reason.
Needless to say, I was averse to all things flowery and “Wonderful” despite a reference or two being dropped in or alluded to in one or two bits of media I otherwise respected enough to deem it worthy of my attention. It wasn’t until Tim Burton’s version was close to hitting theatres and everyone on the internet started reminiscing over Disney’s first try at the story that I seriously decided to give it an honest reassessment. As the tape lay in that cupboard gathering dust for years, I felt that the story of Alice had always been lurking in the background of my own mind for years, provoking my own sense of curiosity in the process. Imagine my surprise when I found the all-new at the time hero’s journey Burton version to be vastly inferior in every respect to the animation that I had trained myself to despise on sight for years.
After that, I read the books. Multiple times. Front to back. I haven’t stopped reading them either. Then I bought the annotated editions. Then I found another movie adaptation to watch. Then another. I sought out more stylistically unique illustrations and art pieces, reinterpretations, unofficial sequels, stage translations, video games, radio plays, reviews, essays, the works. Now there are very few corners left that I haven’t sought after in exploring the fullest extent of the classic text itself. Unbeknownst to me until then, a lot of my favourite creatives were inspired heavily by the original story in ways I wouldn’t truly come to understand until I properly re-acquainted myself with Disney’s animated adaptation that I had steered clear of for so long. Slowly but surely, all the ways that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass influenced the media I grew up with came to dawn on me. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? The Matrix? Hayao Miyazaki? Salvador Dali? Terry Gilliam? Shigeru Miyamoto? Guillermo del Toro? The animation arm of the Walt Disney Company? Freaking Batman? All the “ways” belonged to Alice and it opened the doors of my mind to media that I never would have otherwise touched with a ten foot barge pole.
Needless to say, I was Wonder-struck.
It wasn’t until I watched that Disney film with a clear and judgemental mindset though, that I discovered contrary to my clouded expectations, it was one of the good ones. It also serves as an indication to how much of a disservice the cover art was doing for the film. My initial ignorance for the classic tale was initially steeped in that misinterpretation of “wonder” that I believe permeated many expectations in the minds of popular culture to the point that said misinterpretation has demonstrably seeped into and has been directly inverted by many subsequent adaptations. The Disney adaptation was also one of the few to recognise the sense of curiosity fundamental to Alice’s character and uses Wonderland as a vehicle for some genuinely creative laughs at the child-hero’s expense. This was enhanced further with varied performances, a few scenes that were almost completely improvised during the live animation reference rehearsals and some of the most vibrant and stunningly intricate hand-drawn cel animation ever seen from the studio at the time. The kind of expressions and motions that Alice exhibits would so rarely be seen on any other painstakingly rotoscoped animated human and are utterly hilarious in motion.
With a theatrical release sandwiched between Cinderella and Peter Pan, it also served as a sharp contrast to the two, deliriously upending Disney’s own “dreams come true” formula just as the classic Lewis Carroll books did to the moral-driven Wonder Tales of old. Considering how far Disney were willing to go even as far back as the release of Snow White in taking their Alice In Wonderland down a stranger, wilder and sometimes darker path, even tapping Aldous Huxley at one point, it’s a shame that even they now sanitise their own successful creation in marketing and promotional material just as others have done for the classic books themselves.
When looking into any unwatched interpretation of the books, I tend to use the rabbit hole scene as something of a barometer to judge how favourably I’m going to react to the rest of it. Regarding the animated Disney version in particular, it’s certainly crafted with more thought and consideration than some detractors would give it credit for, as it reflects the tone conveyed in the book far better than other attempts which merely settle for a stiff monologue while swaying against a green screen. More preferable in my opinion to shoot for something that translates the spirit of the original in an exciting and different way than try to follow it exactly and end up bland across the board.
Alice’s nonchalant reactions in falling down the rabbit hole as portrayed by twelve year old Kathryn Beaumont were strangely appropriate in their inappropriateness despite, or indeed because of the ultimately superficial liberties it takes with the source material. This little girl is taking an impossibly glacial plunge past twisted man-made structures that stretch underground for miles at a time and all she can think about is marmalade and proudly boasting about school lessons to nobody but herself. In fact, it goes on for so long in the book that she actually gets bored and takes a nap while she’s still falling! It’s the equivalent of the Star Gate scene from the ending of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ if David Bowman took a good hard look around at the monolithic seams of cosmic reality unfurling before his eyes and just remarked casually “Huh, this certainly beats playing with a plastic kaleidoscope”, before he pulled a Magic 8 Ball out of his space suit and began asking it questions.
I once thought that all there was to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a whimsical fantasy and I couldn’t be happier to have been proven so utterly wrong. Lewis Carroll wrote the stories of Alice to bottle up the explosive energy of pure nonsensical imagination and he did so in such a way that even many decades later, people are still celebrating and talking about its sheer wealth of ingenuity; it’s a perpetual motion machine of enigmatic thought written in verse and printed onto page. I believe we do such books a disservice when people adapting the stories underestimate or ignore its more malleable qualities and thus limit its potential by painting between the lines that we carved out for it. It’s a shame when a film version from 1972 starring Michael Crawford as the White Rabbit with James Bond’s John Barry as composer and A Space Odyssey’s Geoffrey Unsworth as cinematographer should seem so wonderfully average on the screen. Other versions have come thick and fast over the years for many different mediums, but they have only recently begun to start stretching their legs.
Attempts like the USSR’s Gilliam-style animated versions of both books from the early 1980s show even without a word of English exactly how much creativity can be afforded with even a modicum of freedom from expectations. If anything, the differences between translations can open up possibilities to even more kinds of word play and creative visual gags. In 1988, Jan Švankmajer sacrificed the word play for brilliantly nightmarish taxidermic stop motion with unnervingly disjointed narration provided exclusively by Alice herself. The Royal Opera House commissioned a very loosely adapted and more romanticised three act ballet in 2011 by Christopher Wheeldon with music by Joby “So Long And Thanks For All The Fish” Talbot. Damon Albarn went even looser, using the story’s identity crisis thread as a jumping-off point for the internet-connected musical drama that was ‘Wonder.Land’ in 2015. Did you know there are currently four Operas based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? FOUR.
The BBC is also no stranger to Carroll’s stories themselves, producing the almost Lynchian Johnathan Miller-directed stream of consciousness in 1966 with music by Indian composer Ravi Shankar. Twenty years later while Doctor Who was on hiatus, the broadcasting service produced a more traditionally minded version starring Kate Dorning with inventive lyrics and a mild cabaret quality that is equal parts amusing, foreboding and melancholy all at once. They even produced an audio version without even a narrator to guide the events, carefully rewriting and rearranging events to flow in a manner that still managed to feel as energetic and entertainingly delivered as the book, complete with a Duchess kitchen scene that brings to mind the chaos and destruction reminiscent of TV shows like The Young Ones.
That right there is the true meaning of Wonder; that it’s not just associated with any one type of feeling. You can have your dainty Cbeebies pantomimes being performed in a public park and at the ready on iPlayer if you like and that’s perfectly valid, but it’s far from the only fitting way to tell the story. Likewise, if Tim Burton and Linda Woolverton’s epic revisionist take for Disney appeals to you, that’s fine as well; it only becomes a problem when those revisionist takes start flooding the market on the ‘SyFy’ channel, on low-fi Spotify playlists or under the Dark Horse label at the comic book store front to the point of burying everything else in the heap of popular culture. Just because I happen to enjoy some of the stage versions for their more Python-esque approach to dialogue and fourth-wall breaking doesn’t mean that should be all there is to it. Remember: “Wonder” is neither good nor bad by itself. The technology has never been better and the artistic possibilities have never been more wondrous, so in that spirit, I invite you to engage your sense of curiosity to close out this year. Go off and try something you’ve never done before. Poke and prod at the corners of your taste and see what tickles your fancy even slightly. Embrace it too; if you don’t explore, you’ll never discover. Even if it wasn’t ultimately worth your while, it will still have been something “wonderful” anyway.
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
“A wonderful dream” after all? I’m inclined to believe so.
Hey, my name is George Cheal. I also make video games. Recently wrote a fan-made sourcebook on a game ideal for the end of October times.
Check it all out here: The Bonsai Treehouse - itch.io, drop me a line on Twitter too and I’ll see you in the next one.
SOURCES:
- Wonder (emotion) — Wikipedia
- The Evolution of ‘Wonderful’ | Merriam-Webster
- Industrial Revolution — Wikipedia
- The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
- René Descartes ‘The Passions of the Soul’ Part 1
- René Descartes ‘The Passions of the Soul’ Part 2
- Wonderland etymology in English | Etymologeek.com
- wonder — Dictionary Definition : Vocabulary.com
- Vocabulary.com — Learn Words — English Dictionary
- What Is a Wonder Tale? (katefarrell.net)
- Top 5 Tales for Halloween — The Darkest, Saddest and Most Gruesome (pookpress.co.uk)
- Exodus 3:20 So I will stretch out My hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders I will perform among them. And after that, he will release you. (biblehub.com)
- The Costume Evolution of Wonder Woman (wondercostumes.com)
- Alice in Wonderland.net (alice-in-wonderland.net)
Image credits given in the alt-text descriptions