Ignorant Alice

 

While reading the Alice books, all I could think about was how whiney and ignorant Alice seems. She seems completely out of touch with the nature se encounters around her. When she first meets the mouse in the puddle of her tears, she begins to speak of the two main predators of a mouse. The mouse says, “Would you like cats if you were me?” (Carroll 26), yet she continues with her rambling praise of Dinah. It seems to me that almost anyone who is relatively intelligent would understand that a mouse would not like to hear a cat being praised for causing the death of others of its species. It is not only Alice’s encounter with the mouse that leads me to believe she is completely unaware of the natural world around her. Almost every “peculiar and idiosyncratic creature” (Dougill, in Bump 274) she meets, she does not understand or offends in some way. She is “distraught in the alien world” (Dougill, in Bump 276).

1 Alice offends the mouse with her ignorance

 

So why is she in the Oxford museum next to the Dodo bird? Most of my classmates have argued that there is a large nature component in Alice, and I completely agree. Alice strives to seek refuge in the garden and is actually able to orally communicate with other species, but it seems like there is more. It seems to me that Alice is in Oxford as a reminder – a reminder that we as humans are “nature” too. We are all connected to nature, and “as much as [we] attempt to remove ourselves from nature, a part of [us] still wants to be one with it…Nature is real: it leads me to the beliefs in my life that are hard to find in the mall, campus, and even at church” (Emily Beck, Ranch writing).

 

2 We as humans think we can control nature when really we are just a part of it

 

We are part of nature. We may build skyscraper and perform life saving surgeries, but we are still animals, just like the cats, mice and rabbits Alice encounters. There is an aspect of nature that we cannot control or even begin to fathom. Our universe is filled with black holes and the possibility of other galaxies and life forms. Nature is diverse and unique, as evidence by the fact that no snowflake is identical to another. But if we try to cut ourselves off from nature, or are ignorant like Alice, we are cutting ourselves off from part of ourselves and from uniqueness and creativity. We can never be completely whole or truly understand ourselves if this necessary “nature” piece is missing. So, for me, Alice stands in Oxford as a reminder to not only remain one with nature but as a reminder to remain whole. If we remain connected to nature and whole, we remain connected to diversity and creativity and can therefore develop our sympathetic imaginations to the fullest, understand the world around us, and most importantly, understand ourselves.

 

3 We can't even begin to understand every aspect of nature