Religious Significance?
First off, I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. In fact, this idea came to me while I was eating Thanksgiving dinner:
Perhaps Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland symbolizes how a person is born, lives their life, dies, and (if you so believe) goes on to either Heaven or Hell.
Alie is ‘born’ when she enters the Rabbit hole. Not only is this physically similar to being born, but is also similar in the way that she is entering a whole new world that she had never been exposed to before. As she has her adventures throughout Wonderland, she learns about the world, just a newborn baby does, and about the people in it. If babies had the same intellectual power that grown person does, wouldn’t the real world seem like a Wonderland to them? If you had never experienced the world before, everything would seem strange and out of place, just as it did to Alice when she entered Wonderland.
And finally, her ‘death’. Of course, she does not actually die in the story, but perhaps her waking up from the dream represents her ‘death’. Since she woke up from her dream unharmed and in a happy state, maybe she has actually gone to Heaven. If she had made bad decisions during her time in Wonderland, maybe she would have died there, or at least, never woken back up.
What do you think?
Our Own Wonderland 
So those points you make are good ones to explain the timeline in a similar fashion to the process for a Christian. What items can you pull out of the story that are symbolic of Christian ideas, events, or characters of the Bible?
Is Jesus hidden in there somewhere? Someone pure, wise, and the ultimate “life giver”?
Or what about Paul? Someone who was the disdain of society as a tax collector, saw the light when he met Jesus on his way to Damascus, and then was born again and lived his life out being persecuted trying to get others to live the life that pleases God?
While I think your point that this has some parallels to religion (Christianity), I wonder if you find them as strong as in, say, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series?
Maybe I am reading too much into your post. Maybe what you are really getting at is that the story could equal the human life cycle, not necessarily directly tied to religion. I am just trying to think my way through what you are seeing in the story.
Hi Mr. Floyd,
I was initially trying to connect the story with the human life cycle, and I thought that if I tied that to religion (even if the connection was tangential), I may get some interesting responses.
I am intrigued by your more specific comments re: religion, though. I will admit I do not have an answer right now… I’ll think about it 🙂
Thanks for commenting on all of our blogs, by the way. It really means a lot for us to see our posts having an effect on people of the real world, and not just in our school.
One of my greatest enjoyments in my English classes (took Honors Eng. in college and even taught Victorian Age one semester for credit) was being challenged by my professors and those in the class who connected so well to literature. It forced me to think deeper about the content and ties to many different things. Some of it is ludicrous, I admit. Still, it is what makes literature so engaging: trying to find hidden meanings throughout.
You’re making a nice start with your thoughts. Keep enjoying what you read. I have to say, you will start to see your own writing become more developed and more interesting. You can start playing with story lines and characters. What becomes more of a game seems less like work.
Thanks for sharing your project and your thoughts with the rest of us. I know I will be sharing it all with my high school English staff. Mr. Long has done a wonderful thing by letting you guys decide your own learning like this because that is real life.