Alice in Wonderland For the CSET

smile behind; goes to a never-ending tea party; plays a bizarre variation on croquet with an anthropomorphised deck of cards; goes to the shore and meets a Gryphon and a Mock Turtle; and finally attends the courtroom trial of the Knave of Hearts, who has been accused of stealing some tarts. Eventually Alice wakes up underneath a tree back with her sister.

Themes

The central theme of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is Alice’s struggle to adapt to the rules of this new world; metaphorically, it is Alice’s struggle to adapt to the strange rules and behaviors of adults. The rabbit, with his watch and his concern for schedules and appointments, is a representative of this adult world. Alice’s story starts when she follows him down the hole.

Carroll paints the world of children as a dangerous one. Not knowing the rules, however foolish or arbitrary those rules may be, is a source of great peril. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is shadowed by hints of death, and death is a recurring theme. The first hint of mortality comes with Alice’s concern about the marmalade jar; her worry shows that Wonderland is not an escape from all of the limitations of the real world. Death is still a possibility. When Alice is falling, she takes pride in her composure: “Well!’ thought Alice to herself, “after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!’” The narrator adds, “Which was very likely true.” The narrator agrees with Alice, but not for the reason she might think: after falling off a house, the reason why she would not say anything is because she would be dead. Foreshadowing is used when Alice peers into the tiny door. She realizes that she cannot even fit her head through the opening, and even if she could, her head “would be of very little use without my shoulders”. She is referring, unknowingly, to her own decapitation. At the end of the book, the Queen of Hearts will try her best to separate Alice’s head from her shoulders. In Alice’s treatment of the little drink, we are reminded of the specific perils that face children. Carroll writes: “. . . [F]or she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up be wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them”. The challenge of mastering the “simple rules” is going to be Alice’s main struggle in Wonderland, and this passage hints at some of worst consequences of not knowing the rules. Childhood is partially a state of peril, and Carroll names a few of those perils directly: poison bottles that the child cannot read, falls, burns, wounds from blades that the child is too young to handle. Not least of these dangers is an adult world that baffles and confuses. Alice is trained enough