La fin du temps by Magritte

 René Magritte (1898-1967)

Alternative Alices

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Subverting Wonderland

A New Alice in the Old Wonderland

Anna M. Richards

Anna M. Richards

"An anonymous reviewer for the Dial describes Richard's work as a "hazardous experiment" because of its daring appropriation and transformation of the settings, characters and themes of the original Alice novels. Richards challenges the original books not by reinventing them, but by invading them with her "new Alice", Alice Lee. Alice Lee is, however, a new kind of female hero who maintains power over her own fantasy, rather than allowing herself to become its victim". p.146

Amelia and the Dwarfs

Juliana Horatia Ewing

George Cruikshank

"Described as a counter-fantasy to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this vivid and wryly observed tale is most memorable for its early domestic scenes, which lampoon idealized feminine decorum. Unlike the anxiously polite Alice who, like a good Victorian child, attempts to please and placate adults, Amelia is powerful and agressive." p.28

Speaking Likenesses

Christina Rossetti

Arthur Hughes

Arthur Hughes

Arthur Hughes

"Though it does share certain similarities with Alice in Wonderland - the dream-fantasy form, violent and threatening talking animals and animated objects, and abrupt changes in size and location - peaking Likenesses is a highly original work that aggressively critiques and satirizes not only the conventions of the Victorian fairy tale and domestic fiction, but the gender conventions that inform them." p.50

Wanted - a King

Maggie Browne

Harry Furniss

"Carroll himself owned a copy of Wanted - A king as part of his collection "of books of the Alice type". (...) Unlike Carroll's Alice, who attempts to survive in the Wonderland and Lokking Glass worlds by adapting and acquiescing, Merle is encouraged to "Defy, Deride, Desist, Deny, / Heed not a growl, or scrowl, or sight." the constantly shifting identities of Endom'd vharacters enable Browne playfully to explore and challenge social and gender roles, as Merle's successes reveal the ways that nonsense and imagination can oppose socially imposed expectations and constraints." p.79

The didactic Looking Glass

From Nowhere to the North Pole

Tom Hood

W. Brunton and E.C. Barnes

W. Brunton and E.C. Barnes

"Though very much "a fantastic story in the style of Alice's adventures" as another reviewer described it, Form Nowhere to the North Pole is also very much in Hood's own comic style, full of puns, grotesque imagery, and wild slapstick humor. Hood's spoiled and destructive protagonist, Frank, is whisked away to Fairydom by PRince silverwings to face the result of his thoughtless selfishness in such places as Teumendtland, where broken toys recuperate, the land of the Wild Wallpaperites, where Frank meets the grotesque creatures with wich he has adorned his bedroom wallpaper, and Frog-land, the domain of a pompous and opinionated frog. These early chapters relate Frank,s continuing adventures in the realms of Fairydom." p. 206

Down the Snow Stairs

Alice Corkran

Gordon Browne

"Corkan's revision of the dream-fantasy plot construction is strongly moral and didactic, and she is clearly interested in utilizing the idea of a dream "wonderland", which she has turned into such realms as "Naughty Children Land" and "Punishment Land", for the purposes of self improvment; however, her work offers fascinating insights into some of the ways that evangelical victorian women writers - such as Corkran, susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hesba Stretton - appropriated and transformed domestic literary conventions as a means to larger social reform, and as part of what Jane Tompkins has called "a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the woman's point of view." p.223

Sentimental Re-creations

The Wallypug of Why

G.E. Farrow

Harry Furniss and Dorothy Furniss

"George Edward Farrow was a popular and commercially successful British author of at least thirty works for children, including Alice like fantasies and adventure stories, as well as poetry. (...) Girlie's adventures in the land of why (where all the questions and answers come from), feature His Majesty the Wallypug (a kind of King, governed by the people instead of governing them") and are not only lively and engaging, but full of comic inventiveness." p.243

New Adventures of "Alice"

John Rae

John Rae

"Alice's new adventures begin as she's reading Mother Goose Rhymes to her kittens, and include encounters with conventional nursery rhyme characters, though Rae's version of Alice dream world is often more chaotic and surreal than Carroll's." p. 268

Uncle Wiggily in Wonderland

Howard R. Garis

Edward Bloomfield

"Garis was the author of over three hundred books, including more than thirty five Uncle Wiggily books. It is little wonder, then, that Garis often turned to the work of other writers for inspiration, including that of Lewis Carroll. Uncle Wiggily, like Alice, has remained an important and enduring icon in children's literature. Though the tales in Uncle Wiggily in Wonderland are not as complex and original as many of the other literary responses to Carroll's Alice books, they are notable in their reworking of the Alice tales to agree with Gari's and Uncle Wiggily lively optimism and good humor, as well as with Garis's consciousness of the war in Europe, which the United States would enter the next year." p.289

David Blaize and the Blue Door

E. F. Benson

H. J. Ford

David Blaize was one of the most prolific and popular writers of the Edwardian era. He wrote three books about David Blaize that became a classic in the British gay community. "After discovering a small blue door beneath his pillow, six years old David Blaize goes in search of "the real world lying somewhere just below the ordinary old thing in which his father and mother and norse and the rest of the fast asleep grown up people lived". Searching for answers to important questions that adults dismiss as nonsense, David finds behind the door a Wonderland like realm where nonsense is taken seriously by the inhabitants." p.299

Political Parodies

The Westminster Alice

Saki

Carruthers Gould

"Through the sketches in Alice in Westminster specifically reflect British uneasiness with the Boer War in south Africa, they antecipate Saki's later work in a number of respects, satirizing the smug complacency of the English upper class, using a child to reveal social hypocrisy and delusion." p. 331

Clara in Blunderland

Caroline Lewis

Stafford Ransome

"Caroline Lewis" was a collaborative team of Harold Begbie, J. Stafford Ransome and M. H. Temple who together wrote two Alice inspired political parodies, Clara in Blunderland and Lost in Blunderland. (...) Like Saki's Westminster Alice sketches, Clara in Blunderland reflects British anger at the government's failure to resolve the Boer war." p.340

Alice in Blunderland

John Kendrick Bangs

Albert Levering

"Bangs sought more to entertain and delight with his good-natured wit than to satirize. (...) His Alice in Blunderland pokes fun at familiar issues from high taxes and bureaucratic ineptitude to the greediness of giant business." p.348

Sue Johnson’s Curious Cabinets

Jennifer Cognard-Black

Early on in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice drains a bottle labeled DRINK ME, which causes “a curious feeling” as she shuts up “like a telescope.” (1) She then finds a small cake with the words EAT ME written in currants. As she nibbles it, she exclaims, “Curiouser and curiouser!,” and immediately opens out “like the largest telescope that ever was,” her throat stretching in John Tenniel’s iconic illustration like the neck of a swan. (2) While Alice’s transformations seem to result from typical childhood appetite and inquisitiveness, it is significant that Carroll describes her reactions to them as “curious,” for this term had specific overtones in Victorian England.

Originally, the Latin curious meant “full of care”—that is, paying close attention. In the Renaissance, the word came to mean “inquisitive,” especially about unusual matters. During the Enlightenment, a “curiosity” was an object made with careful skill, while a “curioso” was someone who inquired into esoteric matters, whether of science or art. Such people collected “curios”—scientific specimens or objets d’art that were rare or strange—and cabinets of curiosities became quite popular, kept by private collectors or exhibited in museums and displaying such items as horns, nautilus shells, or boxes made of bone. (3)

Yet by the Victorian period, “curious” had become associated with both imperialism and deviance. Curiosity shops, kept by curiosity-mongers, aimed to entice curiomaniacs—collectors who sought objects from the far East, especially items made from animal skins and ivory. A “curiosity” also came to suggest the bizarre and the forbidden; “curiosa” was a euphemism for pornographic books or photographs. Thus Alice, who first feels curious and then curiouser, is not merely articulating an innocent wish to learn. She is also expressing a darker longing to know things that she should not know, particularly firsthand knowledge of Wonderland’s exotic creatures.

Calamity Kim

In Moore Adventures in Wonderland, Sue Johnson plays upon these multiple meanings of the curious by merging the curiosities of Carroll’s Wonderland with the unconventional, curioso poetics of Marianne Moore. Drawing upon scenes and themes from Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Johnson has selected, arranged and photographed items from Marianne Moore’s collection of curios held by the Rosenbach Museum and Library. In the exhibition, these photographs are then contained within large boxes resembling eighteenth-century specimen cabinets—although it takes a keen eye to recognize that the cabinets contain photographic assemblages rather than three-dimensional collections of curiosities. In addition, in many of the cabinets, Johnson has painted directly onto the photographic surface, adding various creatures reminiscent of Carroll’s own as well as imagistically connected to Moore’s poetry and poetic process. As such, the cabinets ask viewers to imitate Alice by tumbling “down a rabbit hole” of thought and suggestion in order to appreciate such provocative combinations.

Sue Johnson

Indoor Garden | 2009

Indeed, in a gallery directly above Moore Adventures in Wonderland, Marianne Moore's Greenwich Village living room is permanently installed at the Rosenbach. Thus, Johnson invites viewers to enter a literal as well as an imaginative “free-fall” between Moore’s living space above and Johnson’s fantastic space below. But instead of finding bookshelves and jars of orange marmalade as Alice does falling between worlds, Johnson’s viewers encounter ever more of Moore’s own, odd objects: an air-mail envelope, a set of dove-decorated postage stamps, a wind-up mechanical crow from Germany, a stuffed bird, Scottish pins made from real feathers, an angel suspended in a glass paperweight, calling cards with cockfighting poses, and a painted silhouette by Johnson herself recalling John Tenniel’s rendition of the Jabberwocky. This particular grouping, arranged in “Things that Fly,” is one of Johnson’s more associative cabinets, evocative of the metaphor of flight. Perhaps as we viewers “fall,” we glide in our mind’s eye, catching the tailwind of an airplane with air-mail in its belly, remembering places we’ve traveled, either real or fantastic. Perhaps we remake ourselves as imaginative birds, bone-light and plumed, able to look down upon all kinds of wonderscapes passing beneath our wings. Or perhaps we feel afraid of flying, of that raucous rush and soar—especially with the specter of the jabberwocky like a small but significant shadow representing childhood fears of flight.

Sue Johnson

Things That Fly | 2009

By curating Moore’s personal objects into such inventive combinations, it becomes clear that the Modernist poet didn’t merely think like a curioso; she lived like one. Moore’s living room contains its own associative collections, including purposeful arrangements of gifts from other Modernist poets, perhaps most famously a footstool from T. S. Eliot and a yellow rose painted by E. E. Cummings, as well as numerous animal-shaped figurines, including a small replica of Dürer’s rhinoceros and an elephant made by Malvina Hoffman inspired by Moore’s poem, “Elephants.”(4) Moore also tucked diverse clippings into her numerous books, creating mini-assemblages in word as well as object. And while she never wrote directly about Lewis Carroll, she owned all of his children’s books and saved within their pages a wondrous assortment of essays pertaining to his legacy—often newspaper articles announcing new editions of Alice or containing comments from still-living women who had known Carroll as children. In this manner, Sue Johnson’s aesthetic directly mirrors Moore’s own.

Yet Moore Adventures in Wonderland brings to light additional connections between Carroll and Moore as well, emphasizing the curious fact that, in terms of process, both writers acted as their own authorial “curators”—gathering bits of language and imagery from diverse cultural sources to construct their poems and novels. For her poetry, Marianne Moore culled found language and imagery from sources as eclectic as advertisements, National Geographic, Chinese philosophy, and displays at the American Museum of Natural History, aligning such disparate elements within her poems to engender, like Johnson, her own new “animals” from certain bones. (5) Thus, Moore Adventures in Wonderland offers a similar artistic process as well as a parallel site of productive interaction in which artist and viewer co-create meaning. Ultimately, the fixed and tagged objects in the pseudo-scientific boxes are not static at all but are in dynamic interaction with each other. As such, Johnson’s groupings ask viewers to take on an inquisitiveness that recalls both Carroll’s and Moore’s own by contemplating embodied, visual “poems” made from curated objects.

Lewis Carroll's watch.

Marianne Moore's Gloves, 1983.

Dye transfer print, 20" x 16".

Courtesy Peter Blum, New York.

In “Tea Party,” for example, Johnson suggests Carroll’s characters through objects selected from the Moore archives: the Mad Hatter appears as a tiny green top hat, the Dormouse as a small toy. Alice becomes the famous tricorne hat sported by Moore herself, while the March Hare is represented by a painting recalling Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated hare. (6)

Sue Johnson

Tea Party | 2009

Here, the viewer encounters an ironic commentary on Carroll’s original Wonderland tea party, where a staid Victorian institution is transformed into a curious event indeed: the rude Hatter buttering his pocketwatch, the somnambulant Dormouse getting stuffed into a teapot, and the foolish March Hare offering Alice wine when there is none to be had. Initially, these transgressions confuse Alice, but when the creatures insist that she’s not “very civil,” she stalks off from what she calls “the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!” (7) Thus Carroll implicitly critiques Victorian conventionality, for British ambassadors were not always open to the curious customs of the wondrous lands under their control.

John Tenniel

In Johnson’s version, “Tea Party” offers another layer of critique—this time, an analysis of an artist’s relationship to the materials of his or her art. Specifically, “Tea Party” transforms the viewer into a scientist peering down into clinically neutral space where specimens can be scrutinized, categorized, and deconstructed. Yet as viewers continue to look, the objects become less and less neutral. In keeping with Alice’s shifts in size, here the economies of scale are out of joint: the Dormouse’s shadow looms larger than its body, and the obnoxious Hatter has been reduced to a tagged, miniature metonym. The tea cups are empty and the creatures largely absent. Instead of a party, we see the material detritus of Moore’s life—her gloves, cups, and hat. The curious on-looker confronts what he or she perhaps shouldn’t learn: an assemblage of the dead, objects that have outlasted a poet’s life and are no longer in human motion.

Sue Johnson

Installation view | "Moore Adventures in Wonderland"

Like Moore’s poetry, however, “Tea Party” also suggests an opposite movement from death to life. At first glance, this assemblage appears serene; each object is separate and distinct, seemingly at rest. Yet their juxtaposition produces a dynamism that transcends their individual forms. The painted hare reminiscent of Dürer’s reveals how Johnson’s assembled curios actually exceed the cabinet, in part through allusion; in part through Moore’s own fascination with Dürer that connects this grouping to even more poems and images; and in part because it is a painted item—not a photograph skimmed from the real. (8) As a painted creature, Johnson’s hare is completely of the imagination: it is immaterial and, therefore, in perpetual movement, ever-changing.

Dürer, Young hare.

All of Johnson’s cabinets invite viewers to experience this supple dynamism by combining their memories of the Alice books with their own curious connections. In “Humpty Dumpty,” a split geode is evocative of that cracked egg who told Alice how “provoking” it is “to be called an egg!”(9) In “The Mock Turtle and The Gryphon,” the statue of a winged lion stands in for the mythological beast that instructs Carroll’s Mock Turtle—in this case, a pin cushion. And in “The Mouse’s Tale,” Donald Duck and Pooh the Bear join a cohort of creatures listening to a Carrollean mouse, including a bust of Moore as yet another Alice figure exercising her curiosity. (10) Johnson’s viewers thereby absorb Moore’s Modernist mindset: a logic of juxtaposition by which bits of culture are combined to form new, coherent wholes. Akin to Moore, Johnson “curates” disparate raw materials into new statements and fresh ideas.

Sue Johnson

Mouse's Tale | 2009

Whatever our wondrous minds concoct as we fall into this space and peer into Johnson’s cabinets, the resulting transformations make us all authors, all artists, all Alices. Just as Moore’s typewriter looms over the tiny Walrus figurine in Johnson’s “The Walrus and the Typewriter,” we—like Moore, like Carroll, like Johnson—create a kind of curious mental assemblage that is larger than the sum of its parts. For both writing and art-making, after all, are wonderful kinds of magic. Hash marks on a page or the X’s and O’s that make up the pixels of a photograph translate in the human mind into new ideas, new visions, new Wonderlands.

As such, the interplay of the curious is ever in flux in Sue Johnson’s Moore Adventures in Wonderland. With each ensuing inspection, her work demands curiouser and curiouser applications of viewers’ own insatiable and elastic curiosities.

___________________________________________________________________
(1) Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There; The Hunting of the Snark, ed. Donald J. Gray, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992) 11.
(2) Carroll 13.
(3) The term “cabinet” was used in sixteenth-century England to designate a case for storing small articles, including biological, antiquarian, or curio collections. By the seventeenth century, “cabinet” could also mean a secret room for storing treasure or a room for exhibiting artworks in a museum. As a curioso herself, Marianne Moore often wrote poems about unusual objects displayed in private collections or museums; see, for example, “The Jerboa” or “Tippoo’s Tiger.”
(4) Hoffman, a personal friend of Moore’s, was a well-known sculptor and author who worked for a time with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
(5) See, for instance, Moore’s “Comment” in The Dial from May 1927. Moore was the editor of this literary magazine from 1925 to 1929.
(6) Dürer’s “Young Hare,” 1502, is now at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna.
(7) Carroll 55, 60–61.
(8) Dürer is best known for his woodcut of a rhinoceros in which he represented this exotic animal by depicting its armor—a visual language recognizable in Dürer’s time. For two centuries, the woodcut was copied and became the visual definition of “rhinoceros” to Europeans. Moore kept a reproduction of Dürer’s rhinoceros on her writing desk and made direct reference to his work in poems such as “Apparition of Splendor.” Intriguingly, Dürer has been a touchstone artist for Johnson as well. In 1996, fascinated with the legacy of Dürer’s rhinoceros, Johnson created a print in dialogue with the history of this famous image, entitled "Reversed Rhinoceros with Gauntlets, after A.D."
(9) Carroll 159.
(10) Moore’s presence among the listening creatures in Johnson’s “Mouse’s Tale” is delightfully apt. Her only known direct use of Carroll’s writing is a verbatim transcription of “The Mouse’s Tale” from Alice’s Adventures under Ground—his original manuscript of the Alice stories presented to the real-life Alice Liddell in 1864. As a young woman, Moore copied out Carroll’s original rendering of “The Mouse’s Tale” as part of a mock newspaper, called “The Daily Scale,” that she and her mother assembled in 1911 while embarking upon a Grand Tour of Europe.

Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black is an Associate Professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where she specializes in transatlantic Victorian literatures and fiction writing. Her publications are eclectic, encompassing critical articles, short fiction, a symphony text, popular essays, and three books, including Kindred Hands: Letters on Writing by British and American Women Authors, 1860–1920.

Go Ask Tim Burton

Elena Kalis

Adriana Peliano

Translation Daniela Carvalho

When the caterpillar asks Alice who she is, she does not know how to answer, after changing herself so many times in that very same day. When Alice sees her sister’s book, she can not understand “what is the use of a book without pictures or dialogues?”. With pictures, dialogues and all kinds of transformations a story can be created for Alice. A story that came from a Victorian England going through the 20th century until our present days.

Alice has already been the dream child, the perfect kid, who has been shown through Carroll’s pictures and in his inspirational drawings Pre-Raphaelite (1862). Tenniel’s classical illustrations (1865 / 72) had achieved its iconic representation and also had become a basic reference and a safe path to everyone.

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

John Tenniel

Alice woke up from a dream inside a dream and had become a dark nightmare in Rackham’s illustrations (1907). It has been lots of nightmares since that one, reaching the insanity of the serial killer Alice McGee (2000). Balthus (1933) and Nabokov’s mirrors (1955) showed us a latent sexuality from our heroine, in dialogues with ambiguities that can be noticed in those eye-contact moments between Carroll and Alice Liddell.

Arthur Rackham

Alice Mc Gee

Balthus

Alice had oneiric fantasies with the Surrealists and skipped rope among Salvador Dali’s overflowing dreams (1969). Grace Slick in White Rabbit’s song (1967) played by Jefferson Airplane, sang a psychedelic trip of a girl and invited us to call Alice among pills and mushrooms just to feed our heads. I do not know another seven-year-old girl who has traveled throughout so many kinds of pictures, movies, songs, plays, new representations, developments and proliferations, in all her constant changing and her multiple dialogues with several kinds of arts.

Salvador Dali


I went to watch Tim Burton’s movie with all this background. I am not that kind of person who claims fidelity to the original work. Alice is transformation, multiplicity. And the movie began. Despite being extremely in love with Alice, I could not enjoy the movie. The movie, itself, is very boring. I like the actress that plays Alice, as in the same way, I think her independent and questioner attitude with a feminist aspect had a great potential. I also like that the movie presents a dark counterpoint related to the Disney classic one, bringing back the other part of illustrators. Such as Rackham, they tried another path, not only the childish enchantment, but also, the dark-nightmare one.

The scenery, the costume design and the art direction show us charming and poetry. The most fascinating part is when Alice fell into the hole and, all of a sudden, in a kind of unusual and inverted game, she stops on the ceiling upside-down, with an amazing development. Her arrival in wonderland is also magic and ludic. However, the movie put aside the “mood” and the “reflection” from the book, going directly into action and battle scenes. Of course, that explains the 3D effects, which could not be made by smart or long dialogues.

Nevertheless, the movie has nothing related to Alice, besides its characters and some free quotes from the book put in the movie in another context. As I said before, I am not the kind of person who claims fidelity to the original work. My favourite Alice is the one from Svankmajer (1988), she is crazy, weird, speechless, dark, a movie that we can only find logic and language games. It could have been a disfigurement, but it is not. And, it is not, because, it gets down into the character unconscious during all her passages / moments, with her fear, her growth anxiety and her sexuality. The discussion is not about the movie being faithful or not to the book, but it is about having an important contribution.

 

Svankmajer

 

  As an Alice illustrator who has been studying Alice with love and passion, I like all the versions that change the sweet and reductionist Alice from the books. In this way, another great contribution from the movies to the Alice’s imaginary is the Jonnathan Miller’s one (1966). His Alice is melancholic, grumpy, sad, a girl living a crisis, just like the Alice from the book. The experience from wonderland is essentially an uncomfortable experience in relation to herself and a non sense world. Of course, Alice is an invitation to dream and imagine, but with no doubt it is not a happy dream.

Jonnathan Miller

In Miller’s movie there are no fantasies, or childish characters, which would look like puppets from an amusement park. All his characters are human beings and it is a black and white movie, which is an opposite view from the colourful and joyful Alice from Disney. The human characters show exactly in which way Carroll’s characters reveal his cutting remarks to all the values and behaviours from his Society. They also represent, the “kind of person” that used to belong to that society. Therefore, as in Svankmajer’s movie, everything that goes far from the book has a special reason, it is just to open up our view from the book, which has the opposite meaning in Tim Burton’s, who has lost Alice, instead of daring her. Tim Burton’s Alice loses itself in fantasy film clichés. There is a little bit of Narnia here, a little bit of Lord of the Rings there, and the characters seem to be out of place, coming from other stories and not knowing why they are there. It brings stereotypical patterns from the journey of the hero. It has been said here in an inconsequent text that Alice has become a kind of Joan of Ark, but the movie is essentially Manichaean, Carroll’s Alice has no moral, which was one of its greatest innovations regarding children’s literature of the Victorian period. While Carroll was able subvert the rules and conventions of the strict and repressive Victorian society, Tim Burton returns to the moral lessons and the orderly confrontation between good and evil.

Owing to this, the characters are burlesque and linear. Alice is more adult, but loses the anguish and conflicts of the original Alice that make her so fascinating. Instead of seeing her entire adventure as part of her own dream as in Tim Burton’s film, Carroll’s Alice is actually afraid of being inside the dream of another person. Her identity is constantly questioned. In the film, her role as a heroine is much more linear and obvious. I believe that the conflict of Burton’s Alice is very revealing in this sense: is she the same Alice who is returning to Wonderland? Alice has in fact returned to Wonderland many times, always with a different face. Alice is truly mutant and metamorphic, but why do we continue to demand that she be “our” Alice or Lewis Carroll’s Alice? At the same time I ask myself: if Alice is always changing, does that mean that all changes are equally valid? Where is the limit between transforming and losing one’s identity?

 

Expectations only get in the way. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that if we expected too much, it was because too much was promised. The film could be a radical re-reading of the Victorian Alice, inserted in our world and also in search of a new sense. A multiple and plural Alice questioning all fixed identities. In creating another story, Tim Burton threw himself in a well, but instead of the his expected reinvention, he found Disney-like clichés and stereotypes. He didn’t dare to dare, and I even go so far as to say that if he read the book, he didn’t like Alice. Why else would he go out of his way of telling another story that still has many figures but very few dialogues, with everything Alice conquered and represents in out culture? It seems that Tim Burton got tired of Alice along the way and decided to talk about something else. Besides being mentally unchallenging, the film does not even provide a good time. Alice’s self-knowledge journey becomes, in the film, an alienation journey, and the nonsense becomes senseless. However, in the end I must thank Tim Burton and Disney for investing in the marketing of the film, which strengthened the presence of Alice in the contemporary, collective imagination as never seen before. It is not about what the film shows, but what it does not show. New creative and existential possibilities may arise from our insatisfaction. With the film, we had the chance to read the book once again, research images with different languages, produce new visions in different arts, share interests, find other Wonderland lovers, feel emotions, discover new items such as less-known versions of the book, and finally dive, each person in his or her manner, into this absorbing world that still challenges us for new adventures, since the caterpillar’s question will never be answered.

Elena Kalis