The main idea of the story Alice in Wonderland
is the search for self-identity and for one's purpose in the world. We know,
from the beginning of the story, that there is a gap between Alice and her sister in
terms of age and interests. We can infer from the story that Alice has no peers, and
that she is in a pre-adolescent stage with a special intuition that separates her from
the others. Concisely, Alice in Wonderland is the symbolic journey
of a young woman through a world that she is beginning to analyze and see differently.
It is an allegory to what we experience when the world becomes bigger, or smaller, than
what we expected.
Alice's own isolation also comes from her
belief that she has become another person, and that this is the reason why she landed
in Wonderland. In other words, she is saying that she has changed, and that her change
makes her feel as if she is in "another world" because she no longer feels
like herself. This is another allegory to the isolation one feels during adolescence and
development.
To make matters more complicated, the rabbit
continuously mistakens Alice for his maid, Mary Ann, and other characters seem to have a
similar tendency of confusing Alice with someone else. This is another stage of
adolescence in which the individual feels that nobody understands who they are. Hence,
allegorically, Alice does not feel like she is "fitting in" anywhere she goes. She does
not fit in with her family and she does not fit in in Wonderland. She feels as if there
is no specific role for her anywhere she goes. This causes isolation and
loneliness.
Concisely, we can say that Alice is, indeed, a
special young woman who, like every adolescent, is trying to find her identity. She is
the typical curious, adventurous, and emotional girl who wishes to know what her role in
the world will be. This is what sets Alice aside from the rest: She is in a
developmental process of self analysis and contemplation which is best done in some form
of meditative isolation.
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