![]() ![]() They offer a triumph of wit over brawn… in which the leading character is not a muscular warrior or mysterious god but an ordinary little girl. Or, as Douglas-Fairhurst puts it: "The Alice stories are about a different kind of heroism. Named for his dotty demeanor and oversized, green top hat, he is an elderly man that Alice encounters in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter is a character from Disneys 1951 animated feature film Alice in Wonderland. For the version from the 2010 film, see Tarrant Hightopp. When I was hit in the face by a teacher rather like the Red Queen (this kind of thing being commonplace in the 1960s), Alice was the one who showed me that bullies are "all a pack of cards". This article is about the 1951 films version of the character. Encountering that sort of dauntlessness is something you never forget. She won't hold her tongue, especially not in a court of law that wants to impose "sentence first – verdict afterwards". Alice never loses her sense of curiosity, her manners, her truthfulness or her sanity – though as she says, "the way all the creatures argue… It's enough to drive one crazy!" No matter what happens, she remains the same clever, dreamy, indomitable little girl who is never afraid to answer back. Language slips and flips into puns, Alice's body shrinks and grows in a parody of puberty, white roses are painted red, flowers as well as animals speak and almost everyone is offended, rude, patronising or angry. ![]() But Alice's trials underground are unique in being experienced alone, and for her the adventure is just beginning Traditionally, this journey is climactic and characters are re-born the stronger for it. Curdie and Irene in The Princess and the Goblin, Jill and Eustace in The Silver Chair and Colin and Susan in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen – as well as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit – are all put to what every reader instinctively recognises as a kind of supreme test of courage. Alice is the first children's protagonist to go into a different world, and to do so by going underground. Nowadays, we are so used to the idea of a magical land that its originality is hard to recall, but before Alice, children had little but adult novels (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, The Pilgrim's Progress), the Bible and fairy tales to entertain them. Whatever else he was, Charles Dodgson (Carroll's real name) was a keen observer of what Robert Macfarlane calls "Childish", the language particular to the creativity of children. For a child to encounter this in a fictional child is astounding, even if children can, and do, talk to themselves all the time. She is the first fictional character in children's literature to possess what academics now call "interiority". Some of the oddest of these are the conversations that Alice holds with herself. As Douglas-Fairhurst says: "Carroll's stories would permanently alter how readers thought about children on and off the page." Her adventure is not the kind of boring book she (and we) ought to be reading, ("'What is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'") and her own story, by contrast, is full of both pictures and conversations. The image of Alice has been so overlaid by Sir John Tenniel's drawings of her as prim that it's easy to miss how challenging she is. This interview has been condensed and edited.One of Sir John Tenniel's drawings of Alice He got into circles he never would have gotten into being lower middle class. It just became legal for people to take photographs in a movable form right around 1850. Probably the only reason Lewis Carroll, who was a lowly mathematics don at the college got any contact with her was because he was a photographer. They lived in the deanery, which during the English Civil War, was where the king lived. Acland, who was Regius Professor of Medicine, but also was Queen Victoria's doctor. The White Rabbit is Alice Liddell's doctor, Dr. The Caterpillar is very much in De Quincey style and approach. However, one of his favourite authors was Thomas De Quincey, who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. People think Lewis Carroll was taking a lot of drugs, but there's no indication of that. They turn kind of bad at the end because Carroll had an argument with her family because they wouldn't let him see her any more. He's the King of Hearts, his wife is the Queen of Hearts. The real Alice, Alice Liddell, was the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College, Henry Liddell. (Liam Britten/CBC)All the creatures are people at Oxford at that time. David Day's new book is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |