Summary
In a large house in the English countryside, a small girl, Alice, spies on her father, Charles Kingsleigh, talking to a group of men about shipping routes. The men are dubious about Charles’ grand claims, but he is confident that big progress can only be made through big risk-taking.
When he sees Alice in the hall, he asks if she’s had another nightmare, and she tells him she has. He excuses himself to tuck her into bed, and Alice tells her father that she fell down a dark hole in her dream and saw strange creatures, such as a rabbit, a dodo, and a smiling cat. He feels her forehead and tells her she is mad, but that all the best people are. “It’s only a dream, Alice. Nothing can harm you there. But if you get too frightened, you can always wake up like this,” he says, pinching her.
13 years later, we see Alice in a carriage with her mother, on their way to a garden party. Alice’s mother is agitated to find that she is not wearing a corset or stockings. “I’m against them!” Alice says. “What if it was agreed that wearing a codfish on your head was proper? Would you wear it?” Alice asks her mother, who becomes exasperated with her wayward daughter. “Father would have laughed,” Alice says, telling her mother that she could not sleep well the previous night, kept awake by the same dream she has always had. “Don’t most people have different dreams?” Alice asks her mother. Her mother puts her necklace around Alice’s neck and tells her to smile.
They arrive at an elegant garden party where a severe woman tells Alice that a boy named Hamish is waiting to dance with her. When Alice goes to the dance floor obediently, the woman chides Alice’s mother for being so late, before rushing off. The woman’s husband tries to comfort Mrs. Kingsleigh, telling her that Charles, her late husband, was “a man of vision.” The man is one of Charles’ business partners, and Hamish is his son.
On the dance floor, Alice dances with Hamish, a rather priggish young man who relishes in mannered customs. When Alice describes an amusing vision she has of all the women in trousers and men in dresses, Hamish tells her to keep her visions to herself as they continue to dance. When Alice bumps into someone, Hamish tells her to focus, and she tells him she was thinking about what it would be like to fly. Hamish cannot understand why anyone would waste their time thinking about impossible things, and Alice informs him that her father used to think of many impossible things.
Hamish tells Alice to meet him under the gazebo and takes his leave. Two girls approach Alice, giggling and considering telling her a secret, but deciding against it. When Alice threatens to tell their mother that they swim naked in a nearby pond, the girls become worried and tell her the secret: Hamish is about to ask Alice to marry him. Alice’s sister Margaret pulls Alice aside and tells her that this party is her engagement party, and that she will have to say yes to Hamish. Alice doesn’t think she wants to marry Hamish, but Margaret insists that, as she is almost 20, Alice’s “pretty face won’t last forever,” pointing out a sad spinster, Aunt Imogen, nearby at the party.
Hamish’s mother approaches Alice and invites her on a stroll through the garden. “You know what I’ve always dreaded?” she asks Alice on their walk. “The decline of the aristocracy?” Alice asks. “Ugly grandchildren,” Hamish’s mother clarifies. Suddenly, she is disturbed to see that the gardeners have planted white roses in her garden instead of red ones. When Alice suggests she paint them red, Hamish’s mother is puzzled, before continuing her encouraging speech about Alice’s imminent engagement to her son.
Alice sees a rustling through a nearby bush, a rabbit on the run, and excuses herself. Coming out of a hedge, Alice runs into Aunt Imogen, and tells her that she thinks she is going mad. Imogen fans herself and tells Alice she is waiting for her fiancé, a prince who tragically cannot marry her. Alice takes her leave and goes around the corner through a trellis, where she finds a man, Lowell, Margaret’s husband, kissing another woman. He begs Alice not to say anything to Margaret. As Alice turns around, Hamish is waiting for her.
At the gazebo, everyone assembles to watch Hamish propose to Alice. She takes his hands as he goes to propose, before noticing a blue caterpillar climbing along his shoulder, which she picks up and puts nearby. Hamish proposes, but Alice tells him she cannot accept. As she goes to give an explanation to the crowd assembled, Alice sees the rabbit from before in the corner of her eye and pursues it, running through the yard after it.
The rabbit is wearing a waistcoat, and looks at its pocket watch before climbing into a hole in a nearby tree. Alice follows and looks down the hole, when suddenly she loses her balance and goes falling into the hole, which goes much deeper than one might expect. She falls and falls, passing a bookshelf and then a piano that seems like it might fall on her. Instead, it plays a song, and she keeps falling.
She bounces off a bed, then crashes through the floor of a room and onto a ceiling. For a moment she stands on the ceiling, her hair falling upward and gravity reversed, before falling onto the ground below. She gets up and looks around the room and goes to open a series of doors, finding them all locked. Suddenly she notices a glass table with a key on it, which she tries in each lock to no avail. Then, she finds a very small door which leads to the outdoors. The key opens it, but she cannot fit through.
Turning around, Alice notices a bottle on the table with a label that says “Drink me.” “It’s only a dream,” Alice says, taking a swig from the bottle, and instantly shrinking. She runs to the door, but finds she’s left the key on the table, which is now too tall for her to reach. Through the keyhole of a nearby door, some strangers spy on Alice, remarking on the fact that she doesn’t remember what to do from her dream. One of the spies asks if it’s the right Alice, and another insists that it is. After she is unable to climb back up to get the key, Alice notices a pastry in a tiny box nearby that says “Eat me,” which she does. Suddenly, she begins to grow larger and larger, hitting her head on the ceiling.
Alice grabs the key from the table, then drinks from the bottle again. When she is small again, she opens the door with the key and wanders into a large and unusual garden, filled with strange plants and animals. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she says, before running into the group of companions who were spying on her through the keyhole: the rabbit, two oversized twins, a small mouse, some talking flowers, and a dodo bird. They debate whether she is the right Alice, when suddenly Alice asks them, “How can I be the wrong Alice if this is my dream?”
The twins introduce themselves as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. When the Dodo says they should consult Absolem, the flowers agree, and the Tweedles grab Alice to take her there. They go to a large mushroom on top of which sits a large blue caterpillar, Absolem, who smokes a pipe and asks Alice, “Who are you?”
Absolem tells the other creatures to unroll a scroll, “the oraculum,” which details everything that has ever happened in Wonderland. Alice sees an illustration of herself looking at the scroll in the scroll itself, as the caterpillar tells them to show her “the frabjous day.” The Tweedles explain to Alice that the “frabjous day” is the day that she is meant to slay the Jabberwocky with a “vorpal sword.” Alice looks at an illustration of her slaying a large monster with big talons. Alice insists that she is not the right Alice, and Absolem agrees.
Analysis
Alice is distinguished by her attachment to her own fantasy life. When we first see her as a little girl, she is haunted by her nightmares, driven out of bed by visions of Wonderland—strange phantasmagoric scenes and bizarre creatures. Her father, an adventurous explorer, is encouraging of Alice’s “madness” and assures her that though she may be crazy, “all the best people are.” Alice is a playful girl with a big imagination, both haunted and enchanted by the strange places her mind can take her.
13 years after the first scene, Alice is still highly unusual, kindling the same dreamy attitude of her childhood, with the addition of a rebellious spirit and strong personal convictions. On their way to a garden party, Alice’s mother notes that Alice is not wearing stockings or a corset and scolds her for it, but Alice is forceful in her refusal to do so, sure in her belief that standard etiquette is more confining than elegant. Without her father around to affirm her quirks, she maintains an obstinate belief in her own ability to refuse the stuffier elements of adulthood as a way of keeping alive his memory.
It turns out that the garden party they are attending is more of a trap than a leisurely affair, and the priggish and unattractive Hamish plans to propose. Alice and Hamish could not be less alike—where Hamish is loyal to conventions and highly conservative, Alice is dreamy, distractible, and irreverent towards polite society—and Alice cannot mask her disgust at the thought of being pinned to the boy for life. Stakes rise when she is cornered at the gazebo by all of the attendees of the party, coerced into a proposal that she has no interest in accepting.
Alice escapes from the corner into which she is backed by Hamish’s proposal by employing the madness that her father once told her was her chief virtue. Looking for a way to delay her answer to Hamish’s proposal, Alice follows the waistcoat-wearing rabbit along a path and down its rabbit hole into a world of fantasy and imagination. Alice’s refuge from the stuffiness and expectations of society life is a wild and lawless world in which any number of improbable things can happen. It is the stuff of her nightmares, but it also a dream that delights and excites her, filled with new discoveries and the kinds of adventures her father would have enthusiastically encouraged.
Ironically enough, as soon as Alice arrives in the fantastical world of “Wonderland,” she has to answer to a number of beings who want something from her, particularly answers. It is not so different from the stuffy and confining world from which she is coming, only instead of businessmen and society ladies, the people in charge are: oversized twins in boyish clothes, dormice, dodos, and caterpillars. In her world, Alice uses her imagination to free herself from the confines of the expectations imposed on her, and her desire to conjure the impossible is something of an escape fantasy. In Wonderland, she has escaped the orderliness of the world, but there are still a great many impositions and inconveniences with which she must contend.
