Today’s class really got me thinking about the all of the comparisons that can be made between Alice and Dorothy. The two child heroines both enter a whole new world that is drastically different than our own. They make their way through the strange land in search of their goal (to become a Queen, to go home) and in the process meet many strange characters. We are only able to interpret Wonderland and Oz through the eyes of the protagonists, who filter their surroundings through a lens of their own reason. (Alice keeps trying to apply her logic to the chess game and Dorothy sees Oz in stark contrast to the grey farm.) In the film adaptations, they even dress similarly, with their blue and white dresses showcasing their youth and innocence.
However, what’s even more interesting is the ways that they’re different. Alice is always very clearly an outsider in Wonderland. All the characters she comes across seem to find her strange, and she clearly doesn’t understand how the others think, feel, and interact with one another. Dorothy, on the other hand, is immediately assimilated into Munchkinland as soon as she arrives. She puts on the silver slippers and they revere her as a stranger. There is also an interesting contrast in their attitudes towards being in this new place. Alice finds Wonderland to be very strange and confusing, but she seems to enjoy being there overall and at least is not concerned with how to get out. Dorothy is nearly the opposite. She seems to take everything in Oz in stride, whether it be witches or munchkins or talking animals. However, what she wants most of all is to leave Oz and find her way back home to her aunt and uncle. This struck me as curious since you would think the one who was less out of place would also have fewer qualms about staying.
I think the reasons they have different feelings on staying in the respective worlds is more a reflection of how they feel about their own realities than how they feel about the new fantastical places. Alice is bored at home and only has her cats to play with. Her reality isn’t somewhere she especially wants to be. Dorothy, on the other hand, loves her Aunt, Uncle, and Toto despite the grayness of that reality. So while Dorothy connects with people easily in Oz, it’s her connection to people in Kansas that drives her to want to leave.
You draw on some interesting points that I too noticed in this book (and also wrote about in my post). While Dorothy and Alice are in similar situations (going from their home and arriving in this alternate world), their perspectives and ultimate goals are very much different. Thinking back to Wednesday’s class discussion (as well as to previous ones about Through the Looking Glass), Alice is a well off and privileged child, while Dorothy’s family is working class, trying to make ends meet during the time of the Depression. She also represents every man. It makes sense for their perspectives to be completely difference, as Alice is bored at home, and thus she dreams of entering a world in which she is able to become queen. On the other hand, that is not Dorothy’s reality, and even when the Munchkins view her as a good sorcerer, she humbly accepts it and continues on her journey. In other words, it seems as though their responses to being in these alternate worlds are reflective of who they are in their actual realities. Therefore, although Dorothy is placed in the the marvelous Land of Oz, her desire to return to her family in gray Kansas shows how family oriented she is (which can be a result of her working class upbringing and being apart of a family, even if everything is gray and gloomy). On the other hand, Alice seems to live a happy childhood, but without having any responsibilities simply finds herself bored, and thus when she arrives into The Looking Glass House, she is simply able to escape her boring actual reality and embark on this quest to become a a queen.