Alice in Wonderland

letteratura inglese

Alice in Wonderland is the title of one of the best productions realized by the Walt Disney Pictures. This is the way in which the majority of people knows this story, considered a tale for children, even if Carroll  Lewis ( 1832-1898 ), the author of the book, hid there, with the help of metaphors, some constructive teachings useful in the whole world.

At the beginning Alice felt asleep during a lesson of history and she started to dream. when she saw a White Rabbit with a watch in its pawn who was running close to her saying "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late! The strange animal represents the curiosity of the children and, in fact, Alice began to followed him also through a hole in a tree, which took her in a magical world full of bizarre situations, landscapes and inhabitants. At the end of the gallery she found herself in a room with a very little locked door at the end, that portrays the obstacles you must face during your whole life. So, to pass trough it, she had to drink a liquid whose task is to reduce in size the drinker. But the talking door, before it, forgot to tell her that the key is on the table, which was very tall respect to Alice. For this reason she had to eat a biscuit that transform her in a giant, although she realized that in this way she cannot go by the other side of the door, where there is the White Rabbit. She started to cry, literally, a "see of tears": in fact this is another of Carroll's metaphor which meaning is that we live in a world based above all on the conventions, the way in which something is done that most people in a society expect and consider to be polite or the right way to do it, like for example the English tradition about the tea. After that the door suggested her to drink another time from the bottle: so she found herself  25cm tall and, even if she had not got the key, she could pass trough the door because of the see of tears she made. Alice's situation, reduce her seize and then enlarge, represents the fear she had got about the changes of her body, thanks to her growth. Then she saw the White Rabbit and she followed him going in a huge forest, symbol of the perdition, like in the Divine Comedy of Dante, an Italian author. There she met two twins, very stupid and fat, who, to catch her attention, started to tell her a story about some oysters and their curiosity; so Alice stopped to run to listen to the tale whose teaching is that trust is good, do not trust is better. After this meeting she knew some flowers that, seeing her very different from them, began to joke Alice: Carroll, in this circumstance, wanted to move a criticism against the society of his time, where it was more important the physical aspect, and above all the belonging to a social classes, than the real personality of a person. Then Alice was acquainted with other strange creatures like the Blue Caterpillar, which made the protagonist of the history feel uneasy and angry more than all the other creatures of Wonderland because of his curiosity about her nature; the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, very mad persons who took all literally, for example when the hare wanted only an half cup of tea, the Mad Hatter cut it into two halves. They also demolished the conventions on celebrating the not-birthday, instead of the real day of the birthday; then Alice met the Cheshire Cat, a cat whose characteristic is to succeed in being invisible, except for his bad smile, which indicated her the way to go to a castle, trough a hole in a tree. This passages across a lot of doors, portrays her period of changes: she is not a child, not yet a woman, and she felt lose without the security of her task and her body. From the other side of the tree the Queen of Hearts ruled everywhere: she is a very strange character, very similar to the adult world: she is authoritarian, she wants to be always right, she changes very often her mood