In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll brilliantly defies all expectations. The form alone is very different from the standard Victorian novel and its content is even more foreign. In fact, to Alice and her readers, everything is foreign in Wonderland. Language is contorted, reason and logic appear senseless, and no previously learned schemas or scripts can be applied to aid our understanding of Wonderland and its inner-workings. This is demonstrated repeatedly throughout the book.
For one, animals do not talk or wear clothing in reality. But in Wonderland’s reality, they do. When Alice first unfurls this nuance in meeting the Rabbit, “it all seem[s] quite natural” that the Rabbit runs around talking to itself, but when she thinks about it afterwards “it occur[s] to her that she ought to have wondered at this” (2). Here the lines of expectations and reality are blurred. Alice is a smart girl who has a strong sense of how the world works, but at this particular moment she allows a foreign reality (this Other reality in which animals audibly talk to themselves) to supersede any expectations or preconceived notions of the facts of her existence.
Once Alice is deeper into Wonderland, she defines her expectations and reality much more clearly. For example, when Alice enters the Duchess’s house she is appalled that the cook would throw pots and pans at the Duchess and her baby, but “the Duchess took no notice of them even when they hit her” (48). In Alice’s preconceived schema for what a home should look like, throwing pots and pans certainly does not jive. But the scene does not phase the Duchess— she does not flinch or consider herself a victim of domestic violence as Alice assumes. There is an obvious tension between Alice’s expectations of reality and the Other reality within the Duchess’s home.
I call Wonderland the Other reality because it exists in the book as a reality that exists alongside Alice’s perception of reality while also opposing it. The Other reality is an unexpected reality whose credibility Alice chooses to accept or deny.
We can explore another example of the Other reality in examining Jean-Paul Jamin’s engraving, “Tragedy of the Stone Age.”
Upon first glance, this painting seems not unordinary, much like how the Rabbit did not appear unordinary to Alice. After some time though, the Other reality reveals itself more clearly. The first thing I see when I look at this painting is that the lion has killed a woman– not a terribly common situation, but it is not surprising either– which would explain the man’s anguish and grief. But then I notice that the man is a hunter, too– a predator of does. Knowing this, the man’s expression shifts from one of grief to one of aggression. And now a parallel reality is unveiled; the Other reality here is the reality in which man and lion are peers of lust, power, and strength and the woman and the doe are their victims. But it is up to the viewers to consider their own expectations and realities, like Alice, in order to actively accept or deny this Other reality.
I think this is an interesting painting to pair with your reading of Alice in Wonderland (I personally would not have thought to compare the two works). You kind of skirt around what I think is the most obvious and striking connection between the novel and the painting: both depict a connection between humans and animals. You mention a “blurring” of the line between “expectations and reality.” Might there also be a blurring of the line between human and animal/ civilization and the wild/ between the colonizer and the colonized?