Alice tends to offend everybody
Not My Role Model
Honestly, I still don't understand what all the fuss about Alice is. I can see how her journeys through the rabbit hole and the looking glass can be representative of anyone's journey into a new environment on some level, yet I definitely don't see Alice as someone I would like to emulate or follow (neither a role model or a hero, in other words). As much as I can identify with her situation (purely in a metaphorical sense, obviously) she really does not react that well to her surroundings, in my opinion. She is constantly offending and disagreeing with the world's inhabitants, shifting sizes in an attempt to fit in (metaphorically AND literally!), lacks a purpose or reason throughout most of her wanderings, and is unable to use her knowledge of the 'real world' correctly.
The very first creature Alice converses with in her strange new world discovers Alice's unfortunate habit of offending anyone she talks to. The mouse swimming alongside her in the ocean of tears is offended multiple times by Alice's prattling on about cats' and dogs' wonderful ability to catch and kill mice. She continues to offend this world's inhabitants with a curious regularity. Although the nature of their conversations seems rather ridiculous all around, Alice seems to find some way of making a rude remark, interrupting a story, or straight-out arguing with those she meets. It seems to me that a good role-model would attempt to learn from and get along with (at least co-exist peacefully with) the people around them, and a leader actually needs to be able to lead the people around them, which Alice can certainly not even hope to do.
Alice also tends to make very arbitrary decisions about what she will and will not accept or believe. Falling super slow down a rabbit hole, for instance, she seems to accept without much question, however when she can't recite a childhood poem correctly from memory, she determines that something must be horribly wrong and perhaps she has, in fact, changed into a completely different child. Her actions are also quite willful, and they often end up harming those around her. When she stands up after her recent growth spurt at the trial, she completely knocks all the jurors onto the ground, and when Bill the lizard comes climbing down the chimney to see what has gotten into the White Rabbit's house, Alice kicks him right back out through the chimney (for no good reason that I can fathom). When I think of a role model or hero, I think of someone who acts responsibly, and for the good of others, not someone who wanders around aimlessly and tends to hurt rather than help those around her.
The only way in which Alice even comes close to existing peacefully within her new surroundings is when she shifts size to do so, but even that goes awry more often than not. Even after learning how to manipulate her size carefully, and just when it seems that she's been fitting in for quite a while (at least physically), her body starts to grow right in the middle of the knave's trial of its own accord! Her constant shifting of size seems to indicate that she is not really at home in this world, or with herself - a thought that is echoed in her inability to 'explain herself' or answer the question 'who am I?'
As we've been studying in this class, the question 'Who am I?' can be answered in part by finding our purpose and passion. Alice does not seem to have much of a purpose throughout most of her adventures. When the Cheshire Cat asks her where she wants to go, Alice vaguely responds " ' I don't much care where - so long as I get somewhere'" (Carroll 65). Sometimes her mind flits back to the idea of the beautiful garden behind the small locked door, but most of the time she wanders aimlessly. A problem I personally always had with the Alice in Wonderland book was the disjointed feeling that arose from this lack of purpose. This certainly doesn't describe the adventures of a role-model or hero, who we admire for their determination to accomplish a goal and the passion they have for a certain cause or ideal.
Unfortunately, I feel like my own life can look like Alice's a lot of the time: disorganized, disjointed, unfocused, and more than a little crazy! I do understand how we, as college students, can relate to her. Just as Alice "is plunged into a peculiar world of its own rules, its own logic, and its own language," so have we entered a new world with new rules, new boundaries, and new possibilities (Dougill 275). Alice's identity crisis and lack of purpose is also unsettlingly familiar, as we are searching for our own passion and meaning to life and struggling to establish our beliefs and attitudes about the world for ourselves now that we are away from old authority figures. And probably the most similar link between Alice's fantasy worlds and our own new college world is simply the loss of the norm. What we were used to seeing and doing, the rules and beliefs we took for granted, and the people we knew have changed. The world does look a little crazy right about now. In spite of how much I can identify with Alice, though, the way I see her react to her surroundings in Carroll's books does not make me want to classify her as my role-model or hero. I would prefer to learn from her mistakes so that I can hopefully make more sense of my own crazy world, since we cannot simply wake up from our dream.