“But I’m grown up now”:

Alice in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In new interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in films, graphic novels, and videogames, the controlled menace of the original is transformed into outright violence, insanity, and sexual threat; Wonderland becomes unsuitable for children. In order to negotiate this hostile terrain, Alice must grow up; she is portrayed as a teenager or a young adult. The removal of the actual child from this children’s classic demonstrate the anxieties that move from the margins to the centre of the narrative and suggest much about contemporary preoccupations surrounding the perils of growing up in the new century, but the motivations and outcomes are not always the same. I will examine this trend in representative works in various media including film (Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland), videogames (the 2011 Alice: Madness Returns), and graphic novels (Raven Gregory’s 2009-11 Return to Wonderland)