Tim Burton's film of 'Alice in Wonderland' proves he is an original with an understanding of the heroine's odd, subversive creator, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY
JOYCE, KAFKA, Zamyatin, Nabokov, Mervyn Peake, James Stephens, and don’t overlook Orwell, never mind the European Theatre of the Absurd as headed by one Samuel Beckett, owe an incalculable debt to an eccentric Victorian, Lewis Carroll. His influence is, in common with the Cheshire Cat’s grin, everywhere; in daily life, ordinary speech, literature, theatre, film. Hollywood first grappled with Lewis Carroll in 1933 in a travesty which featured WC Fields as Humpty Dumpty and Gary Cooper as the White Knight, a Carroll alter ego.
The 13th animated film from the Disney Studios in 1951 was Alice in Wonderland. Long considered a pioneering animation classic, it is sharp, in brilliant colour, offers a no-nonsense Alice intent on satisfying her curiosity and a cast of wilful characters, few of whom could be described as conventionally nice. But then, what has "nice" got to do with anything? It is funny, only not as grotesquely funny as the books and nowhere as sophisticated, because Carroll's wordplay is so exact. When Alice says to the king, "I see nobody on the road", the king replies: "I only wish I had such eyes. To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too!"
Now Disney has returned to Wonderland with Tim Burton, an original with an understanding of Carroll's genius. There are differences; Burton, who began his career at the Disney studios, has done his own thing but, most importantly, his lush re-imagining has not lost sight of the original works. True, it is not as frightening as the John Tenniel illustrations, except for Burton's Jabberwocky, which is brilliant. Alice is older, more bewildered, but game and on the run from her own problems. The Mad Hatter has become less crazy and more tormented, a romantic hero. In Burton's version, Alice is carefully packed into a teapot by the gallant Hatter, whereas Carroll has a disgruntled Alice abandoning the tea party, only to glance back as the dormouse is being stuffed into one. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen recalls Queenie in Blackadderand the Burton Cheshire Cat is far kinder, as is the Caterpillar, who adds gravitas to the question, "Who are you?". Yet Carroll, to Burton's credit, reigns supreme – and his devotees can ask no more.
In the books the prevailing message is that nothing is as it seems. Carroll's philosophy was framed by melancholy filtered through an awareness of how funny and futile life is. The Walrus weeps for the oysters, but he does eat them. The White Rabbit knows he is late "for a very important date", he just doesn't know what that appointment is. Carroll, the quiet, Oxford University maths don, who never married and was wary of Wuthering Heights– "it is of all novels I ever read the one I should least like to be a character in myself" – created a surreal world rooted in logic and shaped by a prevailing sense of order and an awareness of menace that comes from within.
When Alice, attempting to deflect the Mad Hatter’s remark about her never having spoken to Time, replies, “I know I have to beat time when I learn music”, the Hatter counters triumphantly: “Ah! That accounts for it. He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner.”
The Hatter has the measure of Alice, a clever, inquisitive child who enjoys riddles. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” he asks. It is a tough one, reducing the self-possessed Alice to silence. She “thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.”
Few works of literature are as logical as the companion novels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland(1865) and Through the Looking Glass(1871), initially told, off the cuff, on a summer's day, July 4th 1862, by Charles Dodgson (Carroll's real name), then 30, on a river in the company of 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters, Lorina (13) and Edith (seven). Dodgson, who, owing to a speech impediment, tended to introduce himself as "Do-Do-Dodgson", hence the Dodo, was devoted to his childhood, a glorious period of fun and nonsense in which Dodgson's father, an archdeacon, was a central player.
The eldest son in a family of 11 children, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832, was a happy child and never quite recovered from having to grow up. When his childhood ended, it was in tragic circumstances: two days after his arrival at Christ Church, Oxford, his adored mother died suddenly, at the age of 47.
There he was, caught between childhood and the adult world. As the son of a well- connected churchman and as a scholar in his own right, Dodgson found sanctuary in the life of an academic. This business of growing up remained a difficulty. Luckily for him, his imagination helped solve his problem, as did a succession of young muses, the most important being the real-life child he immortalised. Alice Liddell would remain haunted by her childhood self until her death, aged 82, in 1934. And all because, as her granddaughter would write, she had once been “a little girl to whom a shy, clever don had enjoyed telling fairy stories”.
Dodgson had last photographed Alice when she was 17. Perhaps, although he was 20 years older than her, he had wanted to marry her and had waited? When she did wed, a Reginald Hargreaves, in 1880 and had children, she had asked Dodgson to act as godfather to a son, but he refused. They lost contact.
When her husband died in 1928, the widow, then 75, was faced with death duties. Dodgson himself had been dead for 30 years. She sold the original handwritten Alice manuscript, Alice's Adventures Underground, which had lain, ignored, for years in her home.
It was sold at auction in Sotheby’s, at almost four times the reserve and went to the US. In 1945, the then owner of the bound manuscript Dodgson had presented to Alice in November 1864 with the dedication, “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in memory of a Summer Day”, died and it was again offered at auction. It was purchased by Luther H Evans, librarian of the Library of Congress, and presented by him as a gesture of post-war solidarity to the British Museum in November 1948.
Aliceis a very English fantasy, complete with parodied etiquette at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The hatter, the hare and the drowsy dormouse make no attempt to welcome Alice. "The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: 'No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. 'There's plentyof room!' said Alice indignantly." A battle of wits begins.
Alice is an unusual heroine, bossy but also brave. Dodgson always regarded small boys as “rather a mistake”. As a Victorian, he saw little girls as magic. Within a generation this would change, and by the time of his death in 1898, Edwardian writers such as JM Barrie and Kenneth Grahame had decided that boyhood was the miracle to be celebrated. Boys, it was assumed, were more adventurous. This is interesting considering that Alice’s adventures equip her for the role of action hero.
While manners are central to the Alicebooks, social class emerges more obviously as a theme in Barrie's Peter Panand, particularly, in Grahame's The Wind in the Willows(1908).
Physical size is another theme. Alice is constantly battling height; she grows too big, only to shrink dramatically and then grow again; expand, contract. Her neck stretches into a tower, then she is the size of a mouse. Carroll sees chess as a battlefield, his stories are confrontational. If the queen objects to the colour of roses, you paint them. If curiosity is what drives the stories, subversion is the emotion.
For a child, reading the Alice books is a liberation. They are stories that are not afraid to take on the unpleasant, and they have no moral. There is no polemic. Instead there are talking creatures and a range of sub-plots. The key, and keys are important in Wonderland, is imagination. Above all, one needs curiosity. Not for nothing is the word “curious” so vital; curious is used in the sense of strange and odd, yet it is ultimately curiosity that matters.
The tone is middle-class, rather formal. The characters refer to good manners, but everyone is poised for a fight. Just as the creator of Alice spent his life dreaming of his lost childhood, Tim Burton, too, appears to have spent his trying to recover from his less pleasant early years. Their imaginations have coalesced in the magic that is Wonderland. This movie will inspire readers to go to the works of Lewis Carroll, to play the word games, to hear his language, to see the images, and to wonder what is and isn’t – and there’s the mystery.
Alice in Wonderlandis on general release from tomorrow
