"I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! You're a human child."
I finally finished these Alice pieces I’ve been laboring over.
“What do you call yourself?” the Fawn said at last. Such a soft, sweet voice it had!
“I wish I knew!” thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, “Nothing just now.”– Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carrol
The Dodo solemnly presented the thimble-
A beautifully illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass sent me off on my current Alice trip. It has several color plates of the classic illustrations by John Tenniel, which I find completely riveting. There’s just something about them….for instance, Alice’s very adult face. Such seriousness, intensity.
She’s not really the Alice of the story, she’s the Alice that the adult reader becomes as they travel that landscape. He does this for each of Carroll’s creations, teasing out the essence of them until we believe that that’s how we’d imagined them all along. The officious, ludicrous Rabbit. The haughty, horsefaced Queen. The tragic, silly Mock Turtle. And Humpty Dumpty, the quintessential politician, who has the King’s warm assurances that he will be put back together again. At all costs.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a scornful tone, “It means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”
In this way, Humpty Dumpty prepares Alice for his learned lecture on the meaning of the poem “Jabberwocky“. For instance, we learn that “slithy” is a portmanteau meaning “lithe” and “slithy,” and that toves are notably slithy. Toves? They are “something like badgers, and something like corkscrews.” You can see the motley cast of characters that populate the wabe (area around a sundial) in Tenniel’s illustration below. This picture inspired a Jabberwocky themed collar.
Inhabitants of the Jabberwocky Universe
And they gyre and gimbol in the wabe!
But perhaps the most eerie and beautiful images of Alice ever produced come from Czech stop motion master Jan Svankmajer. His work incorporates bones, meat, furniture, insects, toys–real nightmare fuel, but stunning nonetheless. And his Alice is, for me, the definitive Alice. He ignores the details of the narrative in favor of exploring its imagery in the dark and sooty caverns of the collective mind. The claustrophobic, illogical spaces are just about the closest thing to dreams on film that I have ever seen. I’ve put the “bone creatures” scene here, but please check out the whole film. Trust me, it’s worth it just for the scene with the sock caterpillars.
My handmade Alice creations are available from my etsy store, along with my other goodies.
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