ALICE IN WONDERLAND
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is probably one of the most analyzed works of juvenile literature in the Western world. In the 1960s readers focused on the hallucinogenic drugs the shy mathematics professor/author must have taken to achieve his flights of fancy. In the 1970s they turned to possible pedophiliac elements of the author’s character. In the 1980s it was his heroine’s turn to be scrutinized, as scholars looked for traces of feminism. In the long run, however, these revisionist interpretations revealed more about current academic fashions and icons than about the psychology of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, whose stories were composed not for any heterogeneous mass market but for one child firmly positioned within his own time, place, and social circle.
Carroll’s restricted universe, coupled with the intellectual density of his prose, is precisely what makes Alice’s adventures so foreign to modern juvenile audiences. How much sympathy can they muster for Alice when she’s unable to recite “How doth the little busy bee” when they don’t know Isaac Watts’s saccharine little ditty or that any schoolgirl of the 1860s would have memorized it? What can a culture ignorant of afternoon tea make of the eternal four o’clock rituals of the Mad Hatter? And what is a “hatter” anyway to wearers of ski caps from K mart and baseball caps from Wrigley Field? An adaptation that retains too many of these period details will certainly not hold a four- or five-year-old’s attention. But too little of such detail will transform the story into a whole new tale entirely.
