The Quest

http://derrickbang.blogspot.com/2010/03/alice-in-wonderland-its-wonder.html

 The idea of the hero’s quest is one that fascinates me, and has fascinated many others, with the Alice books.  To inherit the culture that we are born into is to inherit the idea of a hero, and we seem to embellish the ideas ourselves before passing it on. Thus, the hero is an archetype, one that is almost universal, in world literature. Joseph Campbell points out a few characteristics that great heroes, especially in the Western literary tradition, share. They begin by showing signs of a vocation, then by refusing to carry it out until their conscience, or a divine being, has interfered and told them to do so. Then there is the inevitable journey that they embark upon, the trials they face and the sacrifices they make, before they are able to return to the fold of the community they left. Their actions have consequences that are far-reaching, and very significant to their own literary words. They are the heroes that are ever-present in the popular imagination, like David, who killed Goliath, or Odysseus, whose quicksilver mind turned the tide of war on foreign shores. However, sometimes, this archetype had been subverted in literature to create a new type of hero, in a different paradigm. Subversion such as this forces readers to step outside of the hero paradigm they are familiar with and examine these works in a new light. Most importantly, it leads to the questioning of the ‘hero’ archetype in itself, and why it is an important archetype for the human imagination.

The idea of a hero is present within the Alice book,s and becomes meta-textual in Through The Looking-Glass. Alice, like the hero in the poem Jabberowocky, is cast in the mould of  a subversive hero, almost an anti hero. In the poem, the hero kills the Jabberwock, but that in itself has no far reaching consequences. The first and the last stanzas of the poem are essentially the same, which means that his heroic act of killing the Jabberwock has done absolutely nothing to change the world that he lives in. Indeed, in order to be a hero, he had to leave his world and seek the world of the woods. Similarly, Alice, in escaping first to Wonderland and then the Looking Glass World, is trying to claim the identity of a heroine. Her social paradigm in the real world prevent her from being a hero. The thing that comes closest to being heroic in either of the books in the Real World is Alice untangling the yarn. In order to be a hero, Alice needs to enter a different, fantastical world. She needs the liminal space that the Carnivalesque offers to claim this identity. And why is that important? Because it is an initiation rite. The argument that I wish to make here, then, is that Alice, in order to grow up, needs to undergo a hero’s quest as an initiation rite, and can only access these rites in worlds that are not her own. Her wish to become a queen, or her assertiveness in the courtroom are all manifestations of the completion, of sorts, of her hero’s quest. Her own world is static, with no fluidity or movement. Thus, for any sort of growth to occur, she needs to leave this world and come back to it after having grown up. Moreover, these fantasy worlds becomes spaces for the fulfilment of wishes that cannot happen in Alice’s world. These fulfilled wishes don’t always come with desirable consequences, hence the nightmarish quality that pervades the fantasies, but they happen, which is more than can be said for the real world.