The Missing Link between Mad and Real

While reading, I did not feel connected with the world Carroll created. All of its inhabitants, the preoccupied hare, the mad hatter, the queen of hearts, the mock turtle, and others, never really struck a connection with me (besides some parts of the hare who’s crunched with time). For this reason, I believe that there is a necessary link that should be established between the “mad” world and ours. Alice is the connection because of her ability to leap from one side to another, never remaining on either.

There are some times when she may seem too “mad” or dimwitted to be likable in our society. Even though she is a child, our society today would frown upon the way she acts, given the standards that we hold so high. In our world, we already begin to shape the minds of our children from the day they learned to talk. To some extremes, some parents may even have already begun preparing their six year old kids for the SATs. That is why Alice is different. While some of us may even diagnose her with a severe case of attention deficit disorder, she is not like us today. We are considered “tame” and “civilized”—almost to a point where we lack sympathetic imagination and a connection with our surroundings. She is something else.

An example that can be used to compare Alice to ourselves is the instance where she joins the Mad Hatter, Hare, and the Dormouse in a tea party. While the dormouse tries to tell a story, Alice interrupts him with questions. When the dormouse is irritated and refuses to tell his tale, Alice quickly apologizes and promises: “No, please go on! I wo’n’t interrupt you again.” However, when the animal continues with his story, he is interrupted again by Alice, “quite forgetting her promise.” (Carroll, 76) If we were to put ourselves in Alice’s situation, it would be safe to say that we’d listen intently and stick to our word. Alice is “madder” than we are.

Though she is madder, she is not mad enough to match the rest of the characters in Wonderland. In fact, if one were to compare her with them, they would say that she is more like us instead of “mad.” In her first confrontation with the Queen of hearts, she is asked about the three gardeners were faced downwards. When Alice replies that she doesn’t know, the queen orders her decapitated. Immediately, Alice shouts that the order is “‘Nonsense!’ very loudly and decidedly.”(Carroll, 82) If Alice were “mad” like the others in Wonderland, one would argue that she would not really have very serious take on the subject of death. While the inhabitants of Wonderland show a kind of apathy towards dying, Alice acknowledges that it is almost a grave matter. She expresses this near the beginning of the first book when she is afraid of dropping the Orange Marmalade jar “for fear of killing someone underneath.”(Carroll, 13) Alice’s cognizance of death sets her apart from the rest of the Mad world. Thus she does not belong their either.

So where does Alice end up on the real to mad scale? She’s in the middle. She is the link between us and the mad world and vice-versa. Alice is too mad to exist in our world and too reasonable to exist in Wonderland.