Kelsea Husar

Mythologies

Dr. Michael Sexon

26 April 2005

Mythological connections in Alice in Wonderland

“Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:/ Thus slowly, one by one,/Its quaint events were hammered out-/And now the tale is done,/And home we steer, a merry crew,/Beneath the setting sun.” Thus grew the tale of Mythology class:/Thus slowly week by week,/Its quaint events were Sexoned out-/And now the year is done,/And home we steer, by flight or car,/Beneath the Bozeman glow. Its not a tale we have heard before, or is it? I was beginning to get very tired of sitting by my computer. There were no pictures, or conversations, just words upon a page of literary analysis. Was it I, or was it Alice, who “was beginning to get very tired of sitting[…]it had no pictures or conversations in it[…]”(1).

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland begins as any other book would begin. Alice is revealed as the girl who reads the story. A girl who looks at a book and sees naught but words on a page and hundreds of pages beyond that. But then, why does this girl continue to read this book. Why, because it is the story of girl who falls down a rabbit hole (damn trickster) and comes out the other side changed. How could she not be changed; she wove a mythical tale of rebirth, ratiocination, and revelation. As Anais Nin once said, “We do not grow chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward…we are made up of layers, cells, and constellations.” But how did it all begin? It began with an archetypal feminine, a trickster, a shaman, and many characters to add along the way. There is a beginning and at the same time a call to adventure as Alice “went after it [the rabbit] never once considering how in the world she was to get out again”(26). Disney’s Alice follows the white rabbit, who we all know at once to be the trickster, and begins to mold the story that has been told throughout time.

Walt Disney produced Alice in Wonderland in 1951, loosely based on Carroll’s collection of Alice’s adventures (Schwartz). The proto-psychedelic movie contains vivid images: primordial images that we know and relate with emotionally and mentally. The owl with an accordion neck, the Bird with its cage body, the dog with his broom beard, and the pencil-headed birds all evoke images of our childhood and things we could never conjure, except in our dreams (Walt Disney).

Alice faces the beginning and encounters her next hero plight: the return. But before she can go home, Alice unknowingly eats a magical candy heart, an enticing enlarging potion, and two sides of a house-sized mushroom. It is hard to suspect, but to eat these tantalizing treats, maybe at a party, would be bad news. The passage through the doors is the first step of the journey and in order to enter (or leave) Alice must first make the decision: Swallow the mysterious purple pill or drink the shot poured by the stranger.

These adventures are stories within stories. But isn’t that what life is all about. Mr. Dodo bird, in the Disney film, cries out, “You have to run with the others,” as Alice attempts to keep up. Whoever heard of fish, an owl, lobsters, a pelican, and a toucan running amiss crashing waves and a singing Dodo bird. Alice whispers, “I wonder which way I ought to go now?” after the broomed-faced dog sweeps away the path. Even stranger, however, she runs into a hookah-smoking caterpillar shaman, who although is not much help, supplies a few wise words and then turns into a butterfly, symbolizing the changes in Alice as she ventures on into Wonderland (Walt Disney).

Returning home is as difficult task for Alice as it is for the Argonauts. She is chased by evil incarnate, the domineering Queen of Hearts, and tears confusingly through a maze (appropriate) until she reaches the spot of where she started. During the chase, before reaching the door, Alice hears Mr. Dodo sing out, “No one ever loses and no one can ever win.” She escapes the demons of her id, and wakes up to find herself resting against a tree.

Alice undergoes separation, suffers initiation, and desperately grasps her return; the hero’s life. She endures the pain and rejuvenation of change and growth. Things that each person must embrace. The classic hero has been once again revealed in a great novel and the cycle has gone round once again: “But, the time has come, to talk of other things, of shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings.”