I woke up at 4-ish in the morning, to the weird orange that the streetlights bounce off the snow and in through the thin cracks of our white plastic blinds. My Husband was still awake in the other room but he was oh-so-very quiet, and I thought, "I don't even have to pee, so why am I even awake?" And then I felt something unpleasantly poky in my hip, and I checked to see what it was, and what it was was a bit of broken porcelain. A fingernail tip's worth of white broken tea-cup, to be very precise; and what I couldn't figure out was how or why there was a bit of broken tea-cup in my bed, so I just said, "yes, of course" and put it on the nightstand and tried to go back to sleep.
In that dreamy mostly-sleeping-but-still-thinking sleep, when you feel little and big, both at the same time, I was thinking, "You only think finding a bit of broken tea-cup in your bed at 4 am, when it wasn't there when you got into bed at midnight is perfectly normal because of you read so many Alice stories when you were a child."
See, sometimes I think that there are 3 different types of Girl Heroes that you encounter as a kid, and that whichever one you identify with most as a girl will sort of determine your outlook and approach to life.
The first one is the Princess type, which is to say very loved and often of the elite class. The only misfortune she seems to encounter usually has nothing to do with her personally, but is more likely a circumstance of her privileged birth. She is brave and sweet but usually has a lot of help, which is fair, because nothing that happens to her is really her fault. In the end, she always end up married, usually to a king or a prince, and happily ever after, which is only what she deserves after suffering so patiently the slings and arrows of aristocracy.
Next, there is the Lone Girl against the Scary World type, like Gretel (lets face it, Hansel was fairly useless), Red Riding Hood, Thumbelina, or Gerta in the Snow Queen. She is usually impoverished. She doesn't encounter misfortune so much as flat out danger, and because she is usually still young and tiny, it is pretty much by her wits and charm that she survives. Interestingly, the danger that befalls her seems to be in equal measure from the world at large, which is well known to be an evil and dangerous place, and from her own poor or misinformed decisions. By relying on cleverness and eventually escaping danger and completing her mission, she usually has learned something very important, and comes out of things wiser and sometimes a little bit richer. Depending on story versions, she may still need help from big strong men along the way, but it is less because she is a girl, and more because she is a child. Though marriage is a possibility for the end of her story, it is not compulsory. The important thing here is not the ever-after, it is the lesson that will allow her to continue to grow into whatever sort of an adult clever, survival-savvy poor people grow up to be.
The last sort is probably the most interesting, but certainly the most problematic. Alices. Socio-economic background has little or no effect on determining an Alice. Instead, all Alices are highly precocious and vaguely dissatisfied with the world as is. An Alice will go on the most fantastic adventures, but any mischief that befalls her is purely of her own making. Her natural curiosity makes it impossible for her not to meddle in the affairs of others,which is where most if not all of her trouble comes from. Consider Alice herself, Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz, Lucy from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Sarah in
The Labyrinth, Sallie in
The Adventures of Baron Von Munchhausen, and Ofelia in
Pan's Labyrinth.
Now, Princess stories pretty much hinge on fate. There is a curse or a prophecy, typically. There is a tragedy that acts as catalyst. The princess is never scared or shaped by the tragedy, only the world around her is. The fatalist princess stays serene and on track, intrinsically knowing that somehow, with or without her efforts, everything will work out. Magical help is offered, the princess always accepts it blindly, the pieces fall in place, true love conquers all, and the end.
The Lone Girl's story hinges on her own wits. Is she clever enough to get out of whatever she got into in the first place? Magic help may be offered, but the wise child has to be skeptical and wary, and identify whether the offered assistance really is help, or just a trap. Logic and vigilance are her primary resources. Things that happen are often unfortunate, but always make sense, and can be avoided or overcome with smarts.
Alices have different sorts of adventures. Contrarian adventures. Everything can be helpful, and everything can be a trap. Rules, when they exist, are paradoxical, or contradictory, and often force the Alice to hold two opposing beliefs at the same time. The worlds the Alice finds herself in, or the people she finds herself interacting with, are often completely mad, with that vague, nonsensical, unpredictable sort of madness that defies all diagnosis. It is the madness of fools, which means there is wisdom in it, but you have to be wise enough or foolish enough to sort out the sense from the nonsense, and, once you've gotten that far, you still have to worry about traps and deceptions. No one and nothing can be trusted. Food isn't safe. Physics is unreliable at best.
To offset all these trials, the Alice is given a motley group of wayward companions. They are flawed, but their failings are immediately obvious, and though at any given moment one of them may turn treacherous, it will always be because of the known weakness, and in the end their shame and the kind understanding of the Alice will always turn them round to do the right thing. So that is a comfort. .
The main problem with the Alice then, is What Happens After?
The Princess gets her happily ever after.
The Lone Girl survives, learns her lessons, is rewarded in some way, and grows into womanhood.
The Alice very rarely has a lesson to learn. If she does, it is something like, "There is no place like home," or "I will not take these things for granted." While that is certainly wisdom of a sort, it doesn't lead to any significant change in the life circumstances the Alice left at the start of her adventure. When she returns, The Alice is changed with some profound (or profoundly trite) existential enlightenment, but nothing and no one around her is any different. The outcome is always that Alices come back a little peculiar.
Literature has never really dealt with what happens to an Alice when she grows up, but I suspect it goes something like this: She gets a normalish job, but, she inevitably will stumble upon a secret room, a hidden treasure, a lost diary, or an elevator with an extra button.
She may get married, but on her honeymoon she will have to deal with hotel ghosts, fairies hiding her shoes, or her lover being ensnared by a witch or a troll.
Eventually, she may have children of her own. She will have to actively work to avoid winding up with a changeling and having her baby stolen by fairies, goblins, or gypsies. She will also constantly worry that her own child may turn out to be an Alice, or worse yet, a Peter Pan.
In daily life, objects will regularly appear and disappear from her house. On her routine about the town, she will encounter doors to nowhere, gates to nothing, trains that go to unlisted destinations, and strangers that seem to know too much.
She will often have unwelcome and difficult house guests.
She will always notice plants growing out of season, fences around wild woods, messages coded in the architecture, alchemical formulae in library books, freak incidents of extreme weather, and the general misbehaving of time.
And inevitably, she'll find broken bits of tea-cup, inexplicably, in her bed.
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