Alice for the Modern Audience
The series of popular video games based on Lewis Carroll’s work -- American McGee’s Alice and its sequel Alice: Madness Returns -- pick up on the traces of madness and darkness present throughout the beloved original novels and magnify them to their most disturbing and sinister extremes. We see Alice not as a curious, precocious child, but as a sword-wielding patient in a mental asylum who returns to Wonderland to conquer her own disturbed mental state, donning blood stains on her signature blue-and-white dress and guided by a skeletal Cheshire Cat. The eccentric denizens of Wonderland have become dark, distorted phantoms of themselves that Alice must battle in a quest to regain her own sanity. It is a reinterpretation of Alice that, as literary critic Cathlena Martin argues in her article “Wonderland’s Become Quite Strange: From Lewis Carroll’s Alice to American McGee’s Alice,” perfectly exemplifies the “versatility and mutability of the story across time and discourse.
The game’s narrative follows Alice as a teenager in 1860s London. She had been admitted to a mental asylum years earlier, after surviving a house fire that killed her parents, and spent several years institutionalized in a catatonic state. When she mentally retreats to Wonderland, she finds it in a state of decline due to the Queen of Hearts’ oppressive rule, and after a series of quests and challenges, Alice defeats her and restores Wonderland to its former whimsy. Consequently, Alice’s mental state is restored as well, so that she is able to come to terms with her trauma and leave the asylum at last.
For all its countless interpretations, Alice in Wonderland benefits uniquely from the medium of video games in that it allows the player to become truly immersed in the world in a way that literature and even film cannot quite capture, as the player gains a sort of firsthand experience exploring Wonderland through Alice’s eyes. It is important to note, though, that the game series takes significant liberties with the source material and with the original intent of Carroll’s narrative. Wonderland is transformed from a nonsensical -- but largely benign -- dreamland into a violent, hellish figment of Alice’s deteriorated mental state. The nonsense of the world becomes actively malignant, rather than merely frustrating, in order to both raise the narrative stakes and explore themes of mental illness, grief, and survivor’s guilt. In doing so, the games frequently create clear visual links between Wonderland and the inside of an asylum.
In examining this adaptation, one must consider narrative conventions in video games and how these conventions seem to lie in direct opposition to Carroll’s original, intended narrative structure (or, rather, the lack thereof). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is unstructured, dreamlike, as a young Alice flows from one event to the next, mirroring the experience of childhood. Seven-year-old Alice simply explores without clear motivations or stakes, both of which are required of a video game narrative. Alice, then, needed to be arranged into a strict linear plot, in which the player must complete a specific sequence of tasks that advances him or her toward a specific goal. While this does eliminate much of the “nonsense” that makes Carroll’s novels so memorable and completely undermines the intent of Alice as a story for children, it appeals to modern audiences who have come to expect this archetypal narrative form: the classic “Hero’s Journey” structure, its clearly defined stakes, its struggle of protagonist vs. antagonist. These high stakes naturally invite the system of rewards and consequences that comprise a game. Along with these rewards and consequences comes the importance of choice and character agency in video games; in the source material, Alice is led through Wonderland not by a particular goal or by conscious decision, but largely by her curiosity or by outside influences and events. In this modern adaptation, we see a shift from a more passive Alice to a young woman who in some way shapes the fate of Wonderland and, by extension, shapes her own life and future. Interestingly, these aforementioned narrative conventions of video games are also conventional in modern popular films and genre fiction -- in this way, American McGee’s Alice is but one example of the most common methods modern creators have used to adapt Alice in recent decades.
In addition to American McGee’s Alice, several other readings of Wonderland in recent years have also framed it in psychopathological terms (Alice in Wonderland even lends its name to a neurological disorder that affects one’s perception of size and time) as awareness about mental health concerns increases, thus illustrating how older texts often must be adapted to reflect contemporary issues in order to appeal to modern audiences. Adaptations that span generations allow for a broadening and deepening of a story’s themes and characters and spark new conversations about the meaning and nature of said themes and characters. Each adaptation should, ideally, provide a new reading of its source material, reflect generational and cultural concerns, and explore increasingly complex topics.
While American McGee’s Alice, Alice: Madness Returns, and most other contemporary readings of Alice are not strictly “faithful” to the source material, or how Carroll intended his work to be read and interpreted, they nonetheless deepen and enrich the story, giving rise to new scholarly, social, and narrative debate. The absurdity and complexity of Wonderland demands a slew of fresh readings and insights -- it is a near-limitless playground onto which new creators can impose their own imaginative possibilities. As the story is continually retold and refreshed, Alice continues to reassert its relevance to both literary discourse and popular culture.