The Strange Minds of Wonderland

Photo by Gustavo Alejandro Espinosa Reyes on Unsplash

I have been reading Lewis Carroll again. Not for the first time, maybe its the 3rd time, but with different eyes — the eyes of someone who has been thinking rather too much about people lately, about the way we behave and why, about the strange machinery that runs beneath what we say and do. And I have to tell you: what I found is not a children’s book. Or rather, it is a children’s book in the way that a very deep lake looks shallow when the water is clear. The clarity is part of what makes it deceptive.

What Carroll built, I am now convinced, is a map of the human mind. Not a tidy map — not the kind with clean borders and a legend in the corner — but the kind you might sketch at three in the morning when the dream is still fresh and you are trying to capture something before it dissolves. It is a map of anxieties and rages and frozen griefs and shattered identities, all dressed up in talking animals and absurd croquet games. I want to tell you about some of the characters, because I think once you see them through this lens, you will not be able to unsee it.

Let me begin with Alice herself, because she is the one I find most affecting. I think about her question — “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” — more than I probably should. She asks it after she has been shrinking and growing uncontrollably, after the world has stopped obeying the rules she was given, and she has been left with nothing stable to stand on. I recognise that feeling, don’t you? That moment when everything you were certain about yourself starts to feel provisional — when you realise that the self you carry around so confidently is actually something you assembled from other people’s expectations and now you are not sure it belongs to you at all.

What Carroll does with Alice is so precise it almost hurts. She clings to her times tables, to her geography lessons, to all the rote knowledge she has been given, because that knowledge is proof that she exists in an orderly world where she has a place. When the times tables come out wrong in Wonderland, when four times five is no longer twenty, she does not laugh — she panics. That is not a comic detail. That is a portrait of a person whose psychological security depends entirely on the world behaving as it was promised to.

And yet she fights. That is what I love about her. Every time Wonderland tries to absorb her, to convince her that its nonsense is the only reality, she pushes back. She argues. She corrects people. She insists on the legitimacy of her own perspective even when every creature she meets tells her she is wrong. I think Carroll was doing something quite brave in making his protagonist like this — a girl who will not be gaslit by an entire world conspiring to confuse her. When she finally shouts that the Queen and all her court are nothing but a pack of cards, I always feel something catch in my chest. That is not a child waking up from a dream. That is a person finding themselves.

Now, the White Rabbit. I want you to think about people you know who are always rushing, always late, always consumed by the terror of failing some invisible deadline. The Rabbit is them — distilled, made fur and whiskers. He is not running toward anything. He is running away from the disapproval of some authority whose opinion has colonised his entire inner life. He does not stop to think about whether the appointment matters, whether the Duchess or the Queen actually deserves his frantic deference. He simply runs, because the alternative — stopping, questioning, perhaps being found wanting — is unthinkable.

I find him rather sad, I confess. He is the one who tumbles Alice into Wonderland, who sets everything in motion, and yet he gets so little from it. He is too busy being anxious to notice that he lives in a remarkable place. There is something in that which I think is worth sitting with.

The Cheshire Cat, on the other hand, I find immensely comforting, which perhaps says something worrying about me. He is the only character in the whole book who seems to see things clearly, and the price of that clarity is that he barely exists — he fades in and out, leaving only his grin behind. I have been thinking about what that means. A smile without a face. Affect without a self. It sounds nightmarish when you describe it that way, and yet in context it is almost peaceful.

He tells Alice we are all mad here, and he says it without distress. He has made his peace with it. I think that is what genuine wisdom looks like sometimes — not the elimination of chaos, but the capacity to observe it without being consumed by it. When Alice asks him which way to go, he does not give her an answer. He gives her the question beneath the question: where do you want to get to? That is the only honest response. Direction requires intention. You cannot navigate without knowing what you are moving toward.

I think about that exchange more than is probably warranted. It has the quality of something someone once told me that I did not appreciate at the time.

The Mad Hatter is where I find myself getting genuinely troubled, and I want to try to explain why.

He is frozen. That is the thing. He has quarrelled with Time and Time has abandoned him at six o’clock, and so he sits at his tea party forever, moving from cup to cup, repeating the same circular social ritual without end. Carroll frames this as whimsy, but I cannot read it that way anymore. What he is describing is the structure of trauma. The person who cannot move forward in time because they are anchored to a moment — who replays and replays without resolution, who sits at the same table setting the same scene hoping that this time it will end differently.

The Hatter is rude to Alice and it used to bother me, but now I think I understand it better. He has been sitting with his own catastrophe so long that he has no patience left for someone else’s confusion. He is barely present. His wordplay and his riddles are not really communication — they are the performance of someone who has forgotten how to connect but still remembers the motions. I find that deeply, quietly heartbreaking.

The Queen of Hearts I understand perfectly well, and I suspect you do too, because we have both worked for people like her. The permanent fury. The disproportionate punishment. The certainty that any failure in the world is a personal affront engineered by enemies. Her croquet game is rigged so that she must win, and yet she still accuses others of cheating. You will have noticed that people like this are always, beneath the bluster, frightened. The rage is the armour. What she cannot bear — what none of them can bear — is the possibility of being seen as ordinary, as fallible, as just a person like anyone else.

She shouts Off with their heads! and her court trembles and her husband the King quietly pardons everyone behind her back. That detail used to read to me as sweet. Now I think it is the most damning thing in the book. The people around her have learned to survive her rather than change her. That is what happens around that kind of personality eventually — everyone becomes a kind of diplomat, managing the volcano rather than pointing out that volcanoes are dangerous places to build a home.

Alice is the only one who eventually refuses to manage her. And that is why Alice gets to leave.

I want to say something about the Caterpillar, because I think he is underrated in discussions of this kind. He sits on his mushroom smoking his hookah and demanding to know who Alice is, and everyone reads him as pompous and hostile. He is both those things. But consider: he actually knows who he is. Completely. Without anxiety or qualification. He has a settled, untroubled sense of self that Alice envies and cannot understand.

And here is the irony Carroll plants so quietly that you might miss it. The Caterpillar is about to transform. He is days away from ceasing to exist in the form he currently occupies, from dissolving and reconstituting into something else entirely. His certainty is about to be spectacularly undone. Carroll is pointing, I think, to the way the people most aggressively certain of who they are tend to be the ones nearest to a transformation they have not yet admitted to themselves. I have known a few people like this. The certainty is a defence against an upheaval that is already beginning.

I want to mention the Mock Turtle briefly, because I find him the most melancholy figure in the book, which is saying something. He weeps constantly over the education he once had, over things he has lost, over the courses that no longer run and the lessons that are done. The Gryphon dismisses his sorrow as fancy. And that exchange — between the one who cannot stop grieving and the one who refuses to acknowledge grief at all — seems to me one of the most human moments Carroll ever wrote. We have all been one of them at some point. Some of us have been both.

The trial at the end is where I think Carroll shows his full hand, and I want you to think about it not as a parody of the legal system but as a study in collective irrationality. The jury writes things down because that is what juries do. The witnesses say whatever the atmosphere of the room seems to demand. The King pretends to preside while the Queen has already decided. Evidence is not weighed; it is performed. And everyone in the room goes along with it because the alternative — admitting that the whole proceeding is a farce — would require a courage that none of them, except Alice, turns out to possess.

I have sat in meetings that felt exactly like that courtroom. I imagine you have too.

So here is what I have been trying to say, in this long and perhaps self-indulgent letter. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a book about the mind — about what it feels like to have your sense of self destabilised, to encounter authority that is arbitrary and cruel, to move through a world that operates on rules you were never given and that change without notice. It is about anxiety and grief and rage and the exhausting, necessary work of remaining yourself in the face of all of it.

Carroll wrote it for a child — for the real Alice Liddell, on a golden afternoon on the Thames — but I think he was also writing it for himself. He was a man who understood what it was to feel slightly out of step with the world’s logic, to find the social rituals of Victorian England faintly absurd, to prefer the company of children to adults because children had not yet learned to pretend that the absurdity was not there.

Alice’s final act — naming the cards for what they are, refusing the authority of a court whose authority was always only a performance — is the act of someone who has travelled through her own unconscious and come back knowing something she did not know before. Not comfortable knowledge. Not the kind that makes life easier. But the kind that makes you, undeniably and irreversibly, yourself.

I hope you will read it again sometime. I think you might find, as I have, that it reads quite differently now than it did when we were young.

— A fellow traveller down the rabbit hole

P.S. I have not yet made up my mind about the Duchess. There is something in her that I find genuinely unsettling — the way she wraps cruelty in the language of moral instruction — and I think she deserves her own letter entirely. Perhaps another time.