What is "Alice in Wonderland" Actually About?

A tumble down the rabbit-hole with Alice.

“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
~ The Duchess

“Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”
~ Also the Duchess

I’m convinced that there exists a thing we can call a good reader. There also exists the good reader’s opposite — and if we don’t want to call them bad readers, then we can fairly describe them as basic readers. They are those people who fail to take much more from a book than an understanding of the mechanics of plot. A basic reader takes the advice of the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

The basic reader sees how the author got him from beginning to middle to end, with maybe a few surprises along the way. You can spot a basic reader in the same way C. S. Lewis spots an unliterary person, in that “he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work”. The basic reader is interested in a solution to a puzzle, in a singular answer to the only question they ask — some variation of “What will happen next?” or “How will this end?”

A good reader, however, asks questions of the novel and wonders what the novel is asking of her. Having a comfortable familiarity with irony, she sees that a book (to borrow from Alice) doesn’t always mean what it says, even when it says what it means. Perhaps the basic reader has it right and all there is to a novel is a straightforward reading. Or maybe there are rabbit holes hiding between the lines, buried within words, waiting for a reader to come tumbling down to the discover the Wonderland there in the depths.

As regular readers of Art of Conversation will know, I think Alberto Manguel is one of the great readers. I first met his writing in an essay about his relationship with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. His copy contained the same illustrations mine carries, the John Tenniel sketches that are almost impossible to divorce from Carroll’s words without doing violence to the story.¹ “There was much,” Manguel writes, “that I didn’t understand in my first reading of Alice — but that didn’t seem to matter.”

“I learned at a very early age that, unless you are reading for some purpose other than pleasure (as we all sometimes must for our sins), you can safely skim over difficult quagmires, cut your way through tangled jungles, skip the solemn and boring lowlands, and simply let yourself be carried by the vigorous stream of the tale.”²

This is where we start as basic readers, like Alice who begins her adventure unable to see the use of a book “without pictures or conversations”. This is how I used to approach Alice’s Wonderland travels, accepting them as they were presented to me, depictions of a world that I didn’t believe actually existed, yet I knew (as Manguel puts it) “was made of the same stuff as my house and my street and the red bricks that were my school”.

A child is a strange kind of purist when it comes to reading. What matters is what’s immediately there, what’s visible to the innocently ignorant eye, not any of the tricksy subtextual stuff our teachers instruct us to seek out. A kid with a book is like Alice speaking the words “Latitude” and “Longitude”, without the “slightest idea” what they mean, simply because “she thought they were nice grand words to say”.

Adult readers, meanwhile, are always on the lookout for how the trick is done. We don’t want to be “fooled”, and certainly not by a children’s book. Ever since the publication of Alice’s first adventures in 1865, grown-ups have argued that Alice is actually an elaborate allegory about the social mores of the time, or a sharp satire of the contemporary politics Carroll concerned himself with, or a book-length metaphor of the topsy-turvy transition from childhood to maturity.³

Alice is very much like the riddle posed by the Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The Hatter himself hasn’t “the slightest idea” what the answer might be, but that hasn’t stopped readers offering a catalogue of proposed answers. Some of Alice’s first readers suggested a raven is like a writing desk in that neither can climb a tree. True, albeit trivial. My preferred answer is “because Poe wrote on both”. Carroll offered an answer in his preface to later print runs:

“I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz. ‘Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!’”

More interesting than this tepid solution is what Carroll adds immediately after — that “the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all”. What if there’s no answer to the question of the novel itself? What if it has no deeper meaning? That certainly absolves basic readers who share the King of Heart’s relief when Alice tells him there’s no meaning to a piece of nonsense verse: “If there’s no meaning in it,” the King says, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.”

If that strikes you as too easy, as an excuse not to look too hard or think too deep, I’m with you. A good reader asks probing questions of the book in hand and wonders what it’s saying beneath what it says. So, what is a reader to do with a book like Alice, which revels in mischief, which doesn’t lend itself easily to a unified, singular interpretation, and which delights in entertaining myriad, contradictory readings?

This is where a good reader can become a great reader. It comes down to this: continually asking questions, while remaining aware that no answer will ever be final, no picture of the novel complete. There will be no synopsis to describe, once and for all, what the books is “about”, in every sense of the word. This is in part because good books never remain the same over their lives, or over the lifetime of a single reader.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that “a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.” That is precisely what Alice is — a great children’s story, as proven by its longevity in the culture, its durability in the lives of readers as they grow up, and the passion it still excites in new readers. Alice lasts because it changes as we ourselves grow.

For children, Alice captures something of the confuddling world of maturity into which they tumble, inarticulable by themselves yet expressed eloquently by a real-life Peter Pan who never lost the Eden of childhood within. Carroll remembered what childhood wonder was like, which is a mix of both meanings of the word wonder, to feel curious and to feel amazed. This is why Alice remains so engaging to grown-ups. As Virginia Woolf put it in an essay for The New Statesman in 1939:

“Since childhood remained in [Carroll] entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do: he could return to that world; he could re-create it, so that we too become children again.”

Alice allows readers to glimpse something just beyond their reach but from different directions depending on where one is in life. When I was a child, the book articulated the world of maturity waiting for me on the other side of my travels in which I would grow up and retreat into my individuality, just as Alice shrinks and grows. As an adult, the book brings me so close to the childhood I’ve left behind, and which I frequently forget, that memory seems almost like present perception. I don’t so much recall being a child as I am that child again, for as long as there are pages left to turn.

Like the inquisitive caterpillar, I find myself asking Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Who are you?”

Sometimes, Alice is about the high-wire act of the adolescent mind balancing between nascent knowing and blissful ignorance, like Alice thinking that a remark from the Hatter seems “to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English”.

Sometimes, Alice suggests some commentary on the roles of women in Victorian society, a satire of stifling domesticity detectable in Alice’s growing much too large for the White Rabbit’s house (where, not incidentally, she is mistaken for a maid), a critique of motherhood in her being saddled with a pig-baby she soon abandons.

Other times, Alice is about the shifting nature of identity, as captured in Alice’s saying to herself, “Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

And other other times, I realise that all of these ideas are actually the same idea, as viewed from different angles.

Every time, though, Alice is simply and complicatedly, and always wonderfully, a pleasure to read. Some things need not change.

---

1. Twice, Carroll explicitly references Tenniel’s illustrations, as if pre-empting postmodern tomfoolery. In Chapter IX, Carroll introduces a Gryphon and parenthetically advises the reader that if they “don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture”; in Chapter XI, Carroll tells us to “look at the frontispiece if you want to see how” the King wears his crown over his judge’s wig.

2. “A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood”, in Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Alberto Manguel (1999)

3. In the introduction to my edition of Alice, Roger Lancelyn Green says that there’s even a book arguing that Wonderland is “a completely pointless mish-mash of Jewish religious symbolism”. Imagine the pointlessness of taking a whole book to suggest such a theory.