I was 17 when I read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
- Calvin Stevens
- Mar 13
- 9 min read
Strangely enough, it prepared me more for adulthood than any other book.
The first book I read as a child, the first “big book” — you know, those full-length novels that so-called adults read and that, could you believe it, contained no pictures! — was Gerald Durrel’s The Talking Parcel.
The book captured my imagination so much that, thereafter, I became a voracious reader and have been ever since.
I devoured the likes of How to Train Your Dragon, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lorien Legacies before shifting my view of “adult books”.
In fact, the term nowadays actually sounds like a reference to erotic, so I guess you could say my view has changed once again. But, rest assured dear readers, for 12-year-old me, I can vouch, was blissfully unaware of the notion of porn, let alone the notion of porn-in-a-book. Instead, by this time, he was a connoisseur of finer, more seductive words, namely the imbued in The Lord of the Rings.
Needless to say, I saw myself as “an adult reader” and refused to go back and read anymore of those “childish books”.
Out of my own pride and self-righteousness, I never got the chance to read some of the classics.
Treasure Island, Charlotte’s Web, The Wind in the Willows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz… all were never to meet my eyes or penetrate my mind.
That is, until I was 17.
It all started in an AP English class
During my high school years, I took an AP English class — having become the local bookworm, the option seemed obvious, and those classes were certainly some of the most fun I ever had in high school.
Anyway, by the time our final exams were looming on the horizon, our class was in full preparation mode, focusing particularly on the “Independent Reading” section.
I had taken it upon myself, and thought it worthy, to pay my respects to the genre that had single-handedly got me into reading: the fantasy genre. I wanted to string my essay together with an underlying theme of fantastical elements. But the problem, you see, was that I couldn’t use anything too modern — Pratchett was about as contemporary as I was granted permission.
So, on top of Pratchett, my repertoire consisted of Tolkien and Le Guin; but I still needed a fourth.
And, unfortunately, my time was running low.
I tossed around ideas with The Odyssey and Don Quixote. Having read them, the brash thought tempted me; but I eventually (under good rationale) decided against the idea, for I rightfully felt I was ill-equipped to handle those monsters and, quite frankly, I had no idea how to properly integrate them with the other texts at the time.
Thus, with the clock ticking, I scoured the list of fantasy classics hoping to find something I could feasibly read and prepare for.
And then I spotted a white rabbit.
My teacher, I knew, would’ve advised me against journeying into the realm of Wonderland on the grounds that, like my own thoughts were telling me of a children’s classic, there wouldn’t be anything substantial to write on.
Desperation, however, was setting in, and I made the decision to read it anyway — it would be a quick, easy read, I told myself — with the hope of catching lightning in a bottle and finding something that would persuade my teacher otherwise.
What I didn’t expect was to read something so oddly profound.
I suspect that the magic of Wonderland must’ve breached my mind, somehow, in ways that I was not prepared for. More than just lightning was caught in a bottle during that excursion; it was like a tiny star exploded in my head.
I wrote a draft essay, thereafter, to show my teacher, to convince her.
To this day, I still smile and periodically look back on the comment she inscribed.
“Usually, I would hesitate to guide my students to a book like this — I think a certain level of bias will be embedded in the minds of the markers, one that might suggest you are taking a low punch — but, under these circumstances, your exceptional analysis of Alice has changed my mind, and I implore you to go further.”
Down the rabbit hole
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.― Lewis Carroll
There’s something about the rabbit hole that is intrinsic to all of us, I believe. It’s that leap of faith, that leap of curiosity, we all take when move from one great phase in life to another.
In part, I do think that Alice’s journey through Wonderland is somewhat emblematic of puberty; after all, Carrol came up with the story when telling it to two 8-year-old girls.
Puberty aside, however, Alice’s journey can be applied in many instances of life. Simply put, it is a journey of great change, particularly denoting change which, at first, seems entirely illogical.
Just think of the White Rabbit and its numerous symbolic appearances in other media since — the Matrix has my favourite reference thereof, marking Neo’s descent (or ascent?) into a seemingly illogical world.
Perspective, wonder, and confusion
Ironically, when Neo is removed from the Matrix, the line between reality and dream become increasingly blurred. When you’ve been living your life in a dream for so long, how can you not distrust what is reality?
Likewise, for Alice, her return home is uprooting in the sense that she momentarily has to remind herself how to assimilate back to a “normal” state.
One of my favourite aspects of the book is the ending: you never really know whether Alice had dozed off and simply dreamed up Wonderland or if her journey down the rabbit hole was real. It’s left up to us, the readers, to decide.
Personally, Wonderland will always be real to me.
Nevertheless, Alice’s initial tumble down the rabbit hole completely takes her out of her depth. The continual process of shrinking, growing, lengthening, and shortening to get through a series of doors leaves her quite distraught.
And then animals start talking.
In fact, they have better English than her.
Oh, and they sound smarter than her.
Now she’s really upset because everything she had been taught previously — including her knowledge of history, etiquette, and her brother’s grammar book — seems to have been a lie. The transition between her world and Wonderland utterly defamiliarizes her.
All she wants to do is go home, but she eventually manages to collect herself and persist.
What’s remarkable, thereafter, is her uncanny ability to adapt. In fact, if Alice ever taught me one thing about life, it is that we need to continually adapt; and, surprisingly, we do just that all the time.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where -’ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.”
Soon, the notion of magic and talking animals becomes familiar and “normalised”. The next challenge for Alice is to assimilate with the politics, etiquette, and logic of Wonderland.
And that is no easy task.
Laws are seemingly random.
‘Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.’
Everybody looked at Alice.
‘I’m not a mile high,’ said Alice.
‘You are,’ said the King.
‘Nearly two miles high,’ added the Queen.
‘Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,’ said Alice; ‘besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.’
‘It’s the oldest rule in the book,’ said the King.
‘Then it ought to be Number One,’ said Alice.
The King turned pale and shut his notebook hastily.
Etiquette is different from her own.
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.
And logic is, well, illogical…
“And how do you know that you’re mad?"
“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”
… or is it?
“We’re all mad here.”
For as Alice rightly discovers and concludes, the “illogical” aspects of the world are only illogical to her; in the case of Wonderland, which is already seemingly nonsensical in its own right, these things are perfectly normal.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
“I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
And that, really, is the beauty of Alice’s journey: she learns to simultaneously accept that it is she who is seemingly out of place in Wonderland — not the other way around — and that, despite being out of place, she is neither “strange, weird, off, nor crazy”.
She simply has a different view of the world; “normality” and “abnormality” are mere illusions and distinctions we tell ourselves.
In reality, there is no such thing.
Particularly in these strange times of ours, I can’t help but feel as though that sentiment rings truer day by day.
The loss of innocence and identity
I don’t remember the exact content of that high school essay I wrote, but I do have the vague recollection of the question pertaining to innocence, journey, and identity.
As you can imagine, Alice is the perfect character in this regard.
Oddly enough, I happened to read this book during a time of confusion myself — I was going to turn 18 (an adult supposedly), and I was on my last year of high school, the big wide world looming tall and fast.
And yet I was still uncertain about myself let alone my future.
Alice, despite being an 8-year-old girl walking a very different road in life, spoke to me in ways you wouldn’t expect to have much of an impact on a 17-year-old boy.
“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night. 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!”
I resonated with Alice and her quest to find herself much more than I cared to admit. The story is deceitfully disguised as a quest to return home but, in actuality, it is so much more.
Through hardships, trials, and tribulations, Alice undergoes profound changes that change her view of the world; but through it all, in spite of Wonderland and its inhabitants being pitted against her, the outsider, she overcomes the challenges thrown her way while, most importantly, remaining true to herself.
By the end of the story, Alice is still the same Alice she was before she clambered down the rabbit hole, but there’s something different about her.
She’s more sure of herself.
She’s more perceptive.
She’s more… mature.
But she is still Alice. Wonderland did not corrupt and transform her into somebody else; the journey merely strengthened her core identity which shines, in all its confidence, when she returns once more in Alice Through the Looking Glass.
“Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.”
Like Alice, I found a strange sense of direction through Wonderland. Her story opened my eyes to the scary world of adulthood that was approaching.
From then on, I knew what to expect from the world: absurdities beyond even my wildest imagination; and this has held true! The world is a curious place and as much as we brush the likes of Wonderland off for being too outlandish, I sometimes look at world events and think: “Not even Wonderland could make this up.”
I may not have found my true identity — I believe I’m still searching, and perhaps I will be for all eternity — but I know now not to let the world get in the way of my quest.
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