Beware the White Rabbit: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and A. G. Howard’s Splintered as Gothic Cautionary Tales for Young Girls Cover Image

Beware the White Rabbit: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and A. G. Howard’s Splintered as Gothic Cautionary Tales for Young Girls
Beware the White Rabbit: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and A. G. Howard’s Splintered as Gothic Cautionary Tales for Young Girls

Author(s): Auba Llompart Pons
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Gender Studies, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Comparative Study of Literature, Film / Cinema / Cinematography, Philology, British Literature
Published by: Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: adaptation; A. G. Howard; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Alice in Wonderland; children’s and young adult literature; fantasy; Gothic; Lewis Carroll; rewriting; sequel; Splintered; Tim Burton

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to speculate on the meaning that Lewis Carroll’s (1865, 1871) Alice’s journey through dark Wonderland has acquired in two examples of contemporary YA fiction, Tim Burton’s 2010 film adaptation and A. G. Howard’s 2013 Splintered novel, both depicting Wonderlands that are more dangerous and threatening than what Carroll himself envisioned in his novels. The study shows how Alice’s gender and the fact that she is now portrayed as an adolescent affect her narrative. Among other reasons, the author of the paper argues that the fact that Carroll’s books feature a girl protagonist who wanders alone in a strange land, together with a long-standing tradition of warning girls against doing precisely this, has resulted in the proliferation of YA narratives that turn Carroll’s ‘golden afternoon’ into a Gothic nightmare.

  • Issue Year: 2/2020
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 61-77
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: English