The Dangers of Wonderland

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter6)

Every character that Alice encounters in this twisted novel is set in place to confuse her, ask riddles with no answers, create rules that are followed with orders of beheadings; even the best of the characters offer Alice no answers and seem to answer questions with questions leaving the little child confused.

Since I was small enough to remember, the world seemed to be a place full of “mad” people; the term now would be more like crazy or senseless individuals. Alice is not entering wonderland but a place where insanity reigns and madness is the norm. Many critics have mentioned that this novel represents a passage into adulthood; this rational, should terrify any reader or film follower. Alice finds herself in a land with unjust trials, riddles, crazy makers, and what appear to be a small army of hallucinogens. Anyone who finds this film to be a story of maturity and passage into the adult realm; should rethink puberty, this novel represents the mind of a predator and the creation of the world they give to children. I find the correlation to the fact that Michael Jackson named his fairy tale of a home, “Wonderland”, very odd indeed.

In the opening chapter of the novel, Alice catches a glimpse of a beautiful garden, which begs the question; Is this reference to the Biblical “Garden of Eden?” When Alice finally enters into the garden she has been trying to reach, she assumes this is the best place to be in wonderland; poor misguided Alice. This garden proves to be a mad judicial system with a King and Queen that have created a place that creates anxiety and fear in this little girl whose last hope was this garden. While Alice had grown accustomed to a distorted hierarchy, and being treated as an inferior by unstable animals, Alice can no longer accept this reality when she realizes that the Queen, who is a ruthless ruler, is a playing card. This is too incredulous even for the child’s mind. The Queen while only a card uses live creatures for her every whim and yet she is an inanimate object; this is the opposite of the real world we inhabit.

I often wondered why it was that just because adults were taller than me, their rules ruled. In a perfect world, these adults would make rules we could follow but even our judicial system seems run by the King and the Queen of Hearts - fraudulent authoritarians that abuse their power.

As I too learned as a child, Alice learns, that the only truth in “wonderland” is that it will be bewildering, threaten her existence, and at any time the rules can be changed and the powerful individuals introduced, just another offense to the mind. Children are vulnerable, just as Alice was, because whatever reality is provided to the child is what they have to accept as logic because this is the reality that is created for them, and Alice tries as we all have, at some point, to make sense of a senseless situation.

In regard to our previous blog where a precious child lost her life due to the injustice of our judicial system, wonderland seems more like the world we live in. That little girl could not wake up from a reality that was so inexplicably sad. Could we truly understand the depths of her heartbreak, we ourselves would take justice on her oppressors. Madness is in this world and the devil its father, this is wonderland, but far more horrific, the players aren’t cards they are monsters dressed as humans. My father was one of them. He created a reality of riddles, rules, punishments - unfairly meted out, and a reality that shattered my looking glass. So maybe this wonderland is an example of maturity when a child is sexually or physically abused, because at the very least Alice would have ended up with several personality disorders and PTSD when she arrived back from her trip (no pun intended). Yet this is one of the books the world has esteemed and read third to the Koran and the Bible! Why would this be? I still haven’t figured it out. Does anyone have the answer for this question, not quite a riddle? But the novel does not leave me with any love for the author Lewis Carroll; he himself has been linked in several instances to being a pedophiliac himself, and Alice had what could be interpreted as an out of body experience associated with sexual trauma...food for thought?

Sorry this was random, it was meant to cover a few basic premises of the novel and film, before the madness. Any feedback is greatly appreciated, even if it differs greatly from ours. There are grey areas. Everyone has a different truth and insight can always be gained by others’ point of view. Lastly I do not think this novel or movie is for a child or adult of any age. It is grotesque and represents the predators and the prey while tying it all up in the lie that it was all but a dream.