Adventure Girls: Alice

This is the second post of a new series of adventuresses."Adventure Girls" are about different heroines from fairytales, story books, folklore and legends.

They're girls who've been on exciting adventures, and many of them had to survive or overcome their fears. Tough girls, and always seeking quests.

Some have been led down scary sinister paths, or taken to other lands outside of their control, but soon regained their courage to get what they want.

Many of these girls are pretty famous favourite characters from fairy stories. Others are not so well known but whose stories of adventure and magic have been around for a long time.

The inspiration of doing this new project is an extension from other projects of mine, covered here on this blog, with the titles "Power of the Goddess" (focusing only on Norse and Germanic goddesses) and "Fairytale Gromoire" (there are 8 of those altogether).

Adventure Girl Part 2 = Alice
Appears in - "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll.
Pets - Cats called Dinah, Snowdrop and Kitty.
Other info - A birthday girl who follows a strange white rabbit on a weird journey.

Alice has a charm about her. She is both pretty intellectual and witty. She's intelligent and tries to rationalise everything when she's in a dreamlike state. She has conversations and debates with talking animals, plants, inanimate objects and bizarre creatures that she meets in the other world. She enters this strange topsy turvy place after falling down a massive tunnel, lined by household items and an anti-gravity breeze that makes her free fall become a pleasant experience. Nothing makes any sense and apart from the magic food that alters her shape and size, there are obscure doorways, secret corridors, houses and a royal palace garden that has a life of its own. Paths and clues work against her.

As I mentioned in the first post of Adventure Girls, all these heroines meet death. In Alice's adventures, death is in the form of a queen of hearts. The queen resembles the heart queen belonging to a pack of cards. But Her Majesty isn't a card. She's a dangerous tyrant with a severe temper who insists "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!" Her army of sword carrying soldiers are nothing more than a pack of cards. Alice reasons this way to divert her fear, by looking at them as they are: cards. Bits of paper. Paper with divining properties and the power to make money. Later she encounters a bad red queen, similar to the red queen of chess.

Alice's most famous friends she meets in Wonderland include the white rabbit, the grinning Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and March Hare, the opium smoking caterpillar, Mock Turtle, Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-Dee, the White Knight and the White Queen. These and many of the story's characters are based on actual historical people.

Alice herself was a real person too. She was a real girl named Alice Pleasance Liddell, a daughter of an Oxford university dean. The real Alice (1852-1934) soon grew up to be beautiful and dated a prince, married a cricketer and had children. Two of her sons died as heroes in the First World War, and her third remaining son lived to have descendants. Alice visited the United States and was made a Doctor in Literature by Columbia University.

Actresses who played and voiced "Alice":

May Clarke (1903)
Gladys Hulette (1910)
Ruth Gilbert (1931)
Charlotte Henry (1933)
Kathryn Beaumont (1951)
Anne-Marie Mallik (1966)
Fiona Fullerton (1972)
Natalie Gregory (1985)
Elisabeth Harnois (1992-1995)
Tina Majorino (1999)
Mia Wasikowska (2010)
Sophie Lowe (2013)

More on Alice:

Alice in Wonderland site