Lessons from 'Alice in Wonderland' Characters

The Oddly Inspiring Characters of Lewis Carroll

By Paul Asay

Wonderland is an odd place. Why else would director Tim Burton want to visit it? The land is filled with talking animals, disappearing cats, nursery-rhyme characters, hookah-smoking caterpillars and truly mind-altering mushrooms. Why, one would almost "wonder" whether this land makes any sense at all!

But for all its oddities, Lewis Carroll's imaginative Wonderland—a place many of us will revisit in Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," opening March 5—is home to a veritable tear-filled ocean of life lessons and advice that we can all learn from. So take a moment to dive into the world of Wonderland. Just be careful what you eat there.

Photos: Walt Disney Pictures

Alice: Be Flexible

Poor Alice. One minute she's taking an innocent tumble down a rabbit hole, and the next she's shrinking, growing, fetching gloves, swimming in her own tears, carrying pigs, drinking tea and—at several junctures—threatened with beheading. Wonderland? This place is more like Bewilderland for the poor girl.

But no matter how many times she grows, how many verses she recites or death sentences she endures, Alice rolls with the madness all around her with a sense of dignity and goodwill. And in the end, she finds her way home safe and sound, all without losing her head once.

In many ways, Alice's travails aren't that different from our own. Sometimes it can feel like we're the only sane people in a world gone mad. How nice for Alice to give us a template for how to muddle through: Acknowledge the insanity of it all, but push onward anyway. And even if some of your travails never make sense, at least they'll make for a good story down the road.

The White Rabbit: Chill Already

"Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" These are the first words we hear from the White Rabbit—the first magical animal Alice meets in Wonderland, and one of the most nervous. Indeed, the bunny's so high-strung that he's positively hare-brained: He's terrified of Alice the first time they meet, then mistakes her for his housemaid (Mary Ann) the next. In a world gone cheerfully mad, the White Rabbit stands out for being neurotic.

Carroll himself believed that his frenzied bunny was the antithesis of Alice's level-headed pragmatism—a character forever nervous, forever overreacting to everything. If Prozac were available in Wonderland, the White Rabbit would be a prime candidate for a lifetime prescription. He does illustrate an important truth, though: Worrying by itself never solves anything.

The Dodo: Have a Plan

When Alice floods Wonderland with her own tears and swims ashore with a cadre of other creatures, she (and they) wonder how they'll ever get dry. The Dodo suggests the best solution would be to hold a caucus race, and so he marks out a course (a "sort of circle," Carroll writes), sets the animals around it, and tells them to start running. After a half-hour or so, he declares the race over.

And who won?

"Everybody has won, and all must have prizes," the Dodo declares. It's up to Alice, of course, to forage in her pockets for suitable prizes for everybody.

This sort of caucus race is all well and good if the goal is to dry off. But in real-world contests, be they personal or professional, it helps to know where you're starting, what your goal is, and to have a strategy to get there. Because without a plan, you run the risk of some dodo telling you to stop before you're truly done and handing you a thimble for all your troubles.

The Duchess: Teach Your Children Well

Wonderland's resident Duchess will probably never get a "World's Best Mom" coffee mug. When Alice meets her, she's shaking her baby, tossing him up and down, and singing, "I speak severely to my boy/I beat him when he sneezes/For he can thoroughly enjoy/The pepper when he pleases." Then the Duchess, realizing she must play croquet with the queen, flings the baby to Alice and exits, leaving Alice to care for the infant.

Which is all just as well for Alice, who takes the baby with her when she leaves—figuring if she doesn't, the poor thing might be dead in a couple of days. But she doesn't have the infant for long. The baby turns into a pig and runs off into the woods.

It's a harrowing reminder of how important it is to love, raise, and properly care for our children: If we take our most precious job too lightly, we run the risk of losing them to the wilds beyond.

Editor's Note: The Duchess from Carroll's book does not appear as a separate character in Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland." In the film, Burton combines aspects of this character and the Queen of Hearts with the Red Queen.

The Cheshire Cat: Keep Smiling

Alice first meets the Cheshire Cat at the Duchess's house and discovers the feline can vanish and reappear at will—sometimes leaving his grin behind. He is, in some ways, one of Wonderland's most sensible residents. So naturally, his mere presence at the croquet match infuriates the King and Queen of Hearts, and the Queen calls for the creature to be decapitated. But when the cat makes most of its body disappear, an argument erupts as to whether a creature consists only of a head can be—well, beheaded.

The cat's special skill served him well with the King and Queen (he eventually vanished entirely, thus terminating the argument). But perhaps his unflappable cool and even-keeled good humor are just as important. The Cheshire Cat greets every challenge with self-control and a bemused smile, and he becomes the only creature in Wonderland whom Alice calls a "friend." A friend of Alice's? Now, that's something to grin about.

The Hatter: Don't Kill Time

The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse are stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-like tea party: It's always 6 p.m. around their table, which means the three can never escape. Why must they endure this particular cuppa fate? Apparently, the Hatter was reciting a bit of poetry to the Queen of Hearts one day, but the queen got bored and declared that the Hatter was "murdering time."

"And ever since that," the Hatter tells Alice, "he [Time] won't do a thing I ask!"

Clearly, Time does not take kindly to would-be assassins—which should have us all shaking in our shoes a bit. After all, we're all sometimes guilty of wasting and abusing our time—even though, out of all the precious commodities we have, it's the only one which we never seem to have enough of.

The Queen of Hearts: Keep Your Head

It's good to be Queen. And, in Wonderland, it's bad to be anyone but. The Queen of Hearts is obsessed with more heads than the Coors family, and she's likely called for the execution of every citizen of Wonderland multiple times. Granted, the King quietly pardons them behind the Queen's back—perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, if nothing else. I mean, once everyone else is gone, whom will the Royal rage turn on next?

"I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless fury," Carroll is reputed to have said, which makes the character a study in irony: She loses her head more often than any of her subjects, making her an extremely poor role model. Indeed, one must wonder whether Wonderland might prefer level-headed Alice in the throne—even with her propensity for growing and shrinking all the time.

Flowers: Image Isn't Everything

Though Lewis Carroll's talking flowers were featured in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" and will appear in Tim Burton's new film, these aromatic orators were actually found in Looking Glass Land in "Through the Looking Glass." Perhaps they were replanted there because they were simply too rude for the comparatively civil confines of Wonderland.

"I don't care about the colour," a talking Tiger-lily says, referring to Alice. "If only her petals curled up a little more, she'd be all right." Indeed all of the flowers are quite critical of the girl—demeaning her hue and shape and demeanor.

'Course, if these flowers had any scents—er, sense at all, they'd see that Alice has quite a bit going for her—not the least of which would be her ability to walk around and such. The lesson here: It's often best to nip our preconceptions in the bud, lest they sprout out of control.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee: It Takes Two to Tangle

Two more residents of "Through the Looking Glass" that made the trip to Burton's Wonderland, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are as alike as two brothers can be. They look alike, talk alike, even think alike: Indeed, it'd be almost impossible to tell them apart if their names weren't stitched onto their collars. But that doesn't stop the pair of them going to virtual war against each other over a broken rattle—even though neither of them seems to want to fight very much.

Sometimes we find ourselves in fights that, to a sensible person like Alice, might not make a lot of sense. Maybe the quarrels are our own fault, or maybe not. Often we don't want to fight at all. But fight we do, over a sense of pride or fair play or simply because someone's rattle was broken.

Now, granted, we all have personal battles we need to wage at times. But there's something to be said for picking them. Sometimes it's better to head home and eat dinner than risk getting whisked away by a giant crow.

Humpty Dumpty: Watch Your Language

Looking Glass Land's most famous egg has a lot of issues. He hangs out on dangerously high walls, for one thing, and he places too much faith in the King's horses and men, for another. But perhaps his most egregious fault is his rather cavalier attitude toward the English language. He tells Alice that "glory" means "knock-down argument," and when Alice insists glory means no such thing, Mr. Dumpty boils a bit.

"When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less," he says. And then he launches into a recitation of "Jabberwocky," arguably the most nonsensical poem ever written.

While many of us take liberties with language now and then, its main purpose is quite simple: To make ourselves understood. And very often, when we speak too soon or too rashly, sometimes true "understanding" gets buried in our language. And that can leave us—as it eventually left Mr. Dumpty—feeling rather scrambled.

Editor's Note: As far as we can tell, Humpty Dumpty does not make an appearance in Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland."