![]() ![]() At first I thought by A. Howard was simply going to be a re-imagining of, but it ends up being a reasonably original story, and a Girls Underground example in its own right. Alyssa, 16, is living with the legacy of being descended from the original Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s muse. Insanity runs in her family, and for years she has been able to hear the conversations of insects and plants. She suddenly begins to recover lost memories of a boy who would come to her in dreams, and to uncover signs that perhaps Wonderland is actually real. When her institutionalized mother is sent for shock therapy, Alyssa believes that going down the rabbit hole like Alice did will make things right. She is accidentally accompanied by Jeb, her long-time crush. A journey through the Wonderland of NYC. Alice is a young woman reaching a crossroads in life when she happens upon a world. Alice Underground (1999). Wonderland is indeed real, but is not quite what Carroll described – all the elements are there, but much more sinister. Alyssa is simultaneously trying to break her family curse, save Wonderland, and save her mother. She is alternately helped and challenged by Morpheus, the one from her childhood dreams, who seems to be a companion but eventually is revealed as her Adversary, albeit a complicated one. In the end she must face his lies, defeat the Red Queen, and rescue her love. She returns home a very different girl than the one who left. As I mentioned in my last post, I just spent two weeks in England, and of course on the top of my list of places to see was Oxford, birthplace of Alice in Wonderland. Right off the bat when we arrived in the city, we started seeing Alice references: Then we began our Alice tour in earnest. ![]() ![]() We visited Folly Bridge, where Lewis Carroll and the Liddell girls set off on their boat ride down the Isis that fateful day, and Carroll began spinning the tale of Wonderland. We stopped at, a wonderland of souvenirs set in the very same shop that Alice used to visit when she lived there,. And then we went across the street to Christchurch College, where Lewis Carroll (under his real name, Charles Dodgson) studied and taught, and where he first met Alice, the daughter of the dean, Henry Liddell. Guided by a booklet we picked up at Alice’s Shop, we toured the campus and found many Alice-related things. Stained glass with portraits of Carroll and Alice The next day, I got my long-awaited Alice-themed tattoo. After mulling over many possibilities in the months beforehand – including some of the Tenniel illustrations of my favorite scenes, and even some of Carroll’s own illustrations of the characters – I finally decided on just a simple bit of text (as I’ve got text tattoos for my other favorite stories). To encapsulate the Girls Underground theme, I chose “Down, down, down” – obviously from Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole – written in Lewis Carroll’s own handwriting from the original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground manuscript, along the curve of my ankle. The tattoo shop I chose just happened to be across the street from Christchurch College, and the studio was on the second floor, so as I had his words tattooed on me forever, I got to look out over the buildings Lewis Carroll himself lived and worked in. It was pretty amazing. Here it is: And a scan of the original text: And thus completes my Alice adventure in Oxford. Is almost here again! To celebrate the day Alice went down the rabbit hole, I always set aside a few days to watch Alice movies, dress up, make Alice-related culinary concoctions, and live in a state of non-stop intoxication. The association between Alice and altered states of consciousness is pretty old, for obvious reasons (DRINK ME). Many people associate the with the stories, but it was never actually depicted specifically in the original illustrations of the caterpillar. In any case, here are a few animated gifs which mash up Disney Alice frames with popular intoxicants (attribution unknown). My little obsession here has caused me to read many a book, and watch many a film, that I didn’t particularly like but fit the archetype too perfectly to ignore. (As a side note, I may have to stop doing that and raise my standards a bit now that every other YA novel is some kind of Twilight-y knockoff featuring a dark, sinister male lead that the girl falls for but is scared of – something that seems to fit the story but really just skims the surface – and they are all too awful to read.) was not a very good movie (perhaps it was a better video game?), not even very scary for a “horror” movie, but it is indeed a Girls Underground story.
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March 2018
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