impossible things: an investigation of madness as resistance in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

Jeffrey C. Callen Knave of Hearts: You're all mad! The March Hare: Thanks very much!

Madness, it might seem, is not as uncommon an occurrence as one might imagine. Certainly one would prefer that it was uncommon— a seemingly common appearance of imagined madness might challenge the sanity of one observing the madness…

…well, at least it seems observing that one is surrounded by madness would inspire upon the observer either affirmation or a questioning of ones sanity… which is itself either self-reifying or self-questioning and if it is the latter then one is lunging into an infinite regression and madness has surely ensued — reflexivity that questions reflexivity has no where else to go! How does one distinguish the madness of the other from one's own madness?

The question of where madness resides is endemic to Tim Burton’s adaptation of Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland— which is actually Underland and not Wonderland and Alice really is just hardly, or at best mostly, Alice until she leaves Underland and… well it’s confusing.

Transitions can be so awkward… Let us, let me, begin with Alice the story and perhaps… if time and space permits… I will say a few words regarding Alice the person and this thing called madness.

Alice Kingsley: Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. The Mad Hatter: That is an excellent practice.

Lewis Carol’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a well known story published in 1866 first illustrated by John Tenniel. The story “… represents a once-for-all opportunity for Victorian adulthood to renew itself, an opportunity which it cannot, dare not, grasp” (Graham, 1973). Disney’s 1951 adaptation focusses on the childhood wonder and extends many of Tenniel’s imagery. Varying TV and movie adaptations, sixty-six since 1903 (Eliot, 2010), have surfaced over the years. Jefferson Airplane's retelling in the song White Rabbit departs from traditional values of childhood in their telling of the experiences of illicit drug use. Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice (Mia Wasikowska), the Alice whom is the Alice of this essay, is on the cusp of adulthood and through references to the “last time” (referring to the child Alice depicted in the 1951 Disney version when she thought of Underland as Wonderland) is about Alice finding her “muchness” as the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) describes, or her Alice-ness prophesied by a blue caterpillar (Alan Rickman), and filling the role of the White Queen’s (Anne Hathaway) champion. This story of Alice is one of coming to terms, of filling her shoes, and not one of finding her place— “… she is remarkable: stubborn, brave, non-girlie... “An Alice with gravity’” (The Independent, 2010). This is not the 1951 Disney version in which Alice, overwhelmed with the surrounding madness begins to cry and wakens herself through fear of the madness. Burton’s Alice, screenplay written by Linda Woolverton, seems to consider madness to be intrinsic to being a good person. But, this madness is not nonsense. Madness is very much non-nonsense, or perhaps it is un-nonsense… in any case… Alice in Wonderland is not a story of Alice finding her way back home as it is becoming a “self” through being with madness.

Alice is a subject constituted through practices of imagining the impossible, challenging authority, and intentionally nurturing her creativity. She is a dreamer, assertive, pragmatic, fearless, intelligent, all traits that bring her to a point of liberation, a liberation from oppressed to privileged, as she takes the general role that her father played... An international business man [sic]. Alice boldly claims that she is going to leave the path that the oracle of Underland has foretold as her destiny, “I make my own path,” which, of

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course, is the very path that is foretold— to slay the Jabberwocky. Variance in one’s destiny appears futile when dealing with oracles.

Lady Ascot: Do you know what I fear most? Alice Kingsley: The decline of the aristocracy? Lady Ascot: Ugly grandchildren.

Alice is to be wed and is not pleased. In the brief scene leading to the proposal, Burton lays down the framework of the oppressive system in which Alice is embedded. The marriage is arranged. The future mother in law’s greatest fear is ugly grandchildren and she enjoys sicking her dogs on white rabbits. Alice’s brother in law is cheating on her sister and he is holding Alice to keep it a secret. Her future mother in-law is so wretched she deserves to be mentioned again. Alice's mother is concerned with what is proper pushing Alice to at one point respond “Who’s to say what is ‘proper’? What if it was agreed that “proper” was wearing a codfish on your head? Would you wear it?” Alice is continually reprimanded for being creative, curious, and imaginative. Hamish, the son of Lord Ascot— Alice’s deceased father's business partner— proposes to Alice at a gazebo in front of hundreds of people and Alice responds that she doesn’t know… She sees the white rabbit and leaves Hamish, pursuing the rabbit, into the rabbit hole, into Underland.

The Mad Hatter: There is a place. Like no place on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger! Some say to survive it: You need to be as mad as a hatter. Which luckily I am.

Lewis Carol’s words, which are clear in the Disney (1951) telling is that madness is nonsensical, “Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English” (Carol, 1866). But, “If we don’t actually think of Wonderland creatures as lunatics, despite the insane language habits… it is because so much of their affective and intellectual behavior makes acceptably good sense. Even, ultimately their “insane” utterances. There may be no obvious motive for the kind of statement... but in the larger perspective the key to all such anti-communicative behavior is fear” (1973, p. 88). But, The Hatter in Burton's adaptation is not nonsensical! The madness in Underland is not an insanity but a necessary condition for freedom under the tyranny of the Red Queen.

But it is simply not fear as Graham argues— it is fear of the sovereign: the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and her henchman, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover). To understand this difference is to see madness as resistance.

To consider forms of resistance against the Red Queen is to also consider the positions and relations of power in Underland. A Red Queen who has “a regrettably large head,” who has issues with normality, despises her kind-hearted sister, the White Queen, and who uses supernatural creatures and a faceless army steadfastly commanded by The Knave. She ordered the Jabberwocky to burn the countryside into wasteland; Her soldiers and the Knave ripped families apart leaving the remaining people of Underland scattered about. As the Red Queen says to the Knave, “It is far better to be feared than loved.” Her power only is used to increase fear— It is absurd, nonsensical, and arbitrary. Reason has no pull when cruelty rules the land, leaving madness as the means of resistance.

The Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad? Alice Kingsley: I’m afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.

Another madness exists contrary to the madness of Underland. Alice’s aging aunt is briefly introduced in the scenes leading up to Hamish's proposal to Alice. The aunt is mad— she has an un-relinquished love; She waits for her prince to give up his crown and marry her. She is a negative oracle, the destiny that awaits Alice, the consequence if Alice follows her own path in Victorian England. Alice’s sister is the voice of this oracle... “Your pretty face won’t last forever. You don't want to end up like Aunt Imogene.

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And you don’t want to be a burden on Mother, do you? So you’ll marry Hamish.” Aunt Imogene is still dressed for her wedding though decades have passed, her mind deteriorated, her body becoming decrepit, a degenerative momentum that parallels the words of Alice’s sister— an equivocation of the aunt’s degenerated condition to Alice’s unsureness in wanting to marry Hamish. Alice and her father shared the traits of an active imagination which was seen as an abnormality by their contemporaries. The sister’s words play Aunt Imogene’s madness alongside her father to mark Alice as a possible degenerate: “A child who carries the traces of his parents or ancestors’ madness…” (Foucault, 2008, p. 223). In this instance, resistance to degeneration, to madness, is conformity.

The story of Alice is played in the in between space between this negative prophecy uttered by apparently sane English characters, Be yourself and you will be mad and a magical Underland oracle affirmatively interpreted by utterly mad characters, You are our champion, Be Yourself! In the world of England, Alice is to marry a Lord and be forever imprisoned in his manor. In Underland, Alice is to slay the Jabberwocky, the war-machine of a tyrant, and liberate a world.

Perhaps another oracle deserves some attention here. Well before Burton’s production of Alice, it is written that the oracle at Delphi instructed Diogenes “to change the currency” which Foucault (2011) interprets the “slogan as a mandate to revalue all values, to change one’s life so as to change society as a whole” (Hardt, 2010, p. 158). With this in mind, madness is the resistance not against The Other but resistance along the border of what constitutes the Other. It is a transgression in the in-between space that destabilizes, deterritorializes, the privileged position and in turn “revalues all values.” Madness is when one dwells in the in-between space of self and other, a space haunted by specters of liberation, where one forgets what is impossible. It is in this space that one may be called mad, if viewed from the dominant discourse, but it is the same space from which resistance to that discourse can emerge. Matuštík, in describing Judith Butler’s contributions to critical theory, describes that “The subjects of liberation live at a border. Their liberating specters are neither fully constructing nor constructed. Border subjects exist in temporal spaces, within the performances of liberating possibilities” (1998 p. 114).

Blue Caterpillar: You're almost Alice.

Alice's realization that her childhood dreams are not dreams but memories of her childhood visits to Underland flattens the possible and impossible— the imagined possibilities of a dream are unveiled to be what is actual. Shortly after the realization that she is not dreaming Alice becomes “almost Alice” and soon volunteers to be the White Queen’s champion… to battle the Jabberwocky. During this battle she describes herself through her father’s practice of imagining six impossible things— she gives a biographical account of her time in Underland, “Count them, Alice. One, there are drinks that make you shrink. Two, there are foods that make you grow. Three, animals can talk. Four, cats can disappear. Five, there is a place called Underland.” Each of these recount an episode earlier in the movie, episodes of which she now avows as facts and not experiences. Her inventory is an inversion of confession which is an “…account of one’s own life… an essential component… in all those processes of taking charge of individuals and disciplining them” (Foucault, 2008, p. 158). On the other side of the rabbit hole, in Victorian England, this confession would “…have a performative characteristic in the game of the cure” (p. 159) but instead for Alice her words establish madness as a fact, as a necessary condition for Alice to become Alice, to regain her muchness, to be fully Alice, to be the champion, to be the best person Alice’s father encouraged her to be in the opening scene and fills her father’s prophecy that “…the only way to achieve the impossible, is to believe it's possible.” Which brings us to “Six. I can slay the Jabberwocky.” This, the sixth impossible thing, is that which “changes the currency” it is the very momentum to inverse the conditions. For Alice “…to kill the Jabberwocky is to kill nonsense” (Elliot, 2010, p. 194). But, in the slaying Alice revalues her values “…when Alice returns to the Victorian world, she harshly denounces her aunt’s fantasies as delusive and tells her to go into therapy. Suddenly, it seems that the best people may not be mad after all and that they despise fantasy” (Elliot, 2010, p. 199).

Here is the problem: Are the liberating possibilities of resistance only successful when subsumed by the dominant discourse? The closing scene of the movie, Alice is standing on the bow of a ship named

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Wonder about to sail to Imperial China where her “… militant feminism in Underland metamorphoses to colonizing capitalism in Overland [England]” (Elliot, 2010, p. 199). When madness is the resistance that “revalues all values, to change one’s life so as to change society as a whole” (Hardt, 2010, p. 158) is acting on liberating possibilities simply a therapeutic performance creating a line of flight where The Other no longer has to fly along the periphery nor live in the borderlands? Is society reformed… or are individual subjects reformed?

Works CitedCarol, L. (1886). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: MacMillan and Co. Elliot, K. (2010). Adaptation as Compendium: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Adaptation, 3(2), 193–

201.Foucault, M. (2008). Psychiatric power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Foucault, M. (2011). The Courage of Truth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Graham, N. (1973). Sanity, Madness, and Alice. A Review of International English, 4(2), 80-89. Hardt, M. (January 01, 2010). Militant Life. New Left Review, 64, 151-160.The Independent. (February 25, 2010). Burton's Alice – a role model for girls of 2010.Matuštík, M. J. (1998). Specters of liberation: Great refusals in the new world order. Albany: State

University of New York Press.

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