After Alice

Given the original's famous obsession with wordplay of all sorts, the title of Gregory Maguire's After Alice is appropriately punny.  Chronologically, the novel is, indeed, "after" Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and Through the Looking-glass, which it also invokes), but the novel is also "after" Alice as we might say one work of art is "after" another.  Inspired by; a copy of; related to.  Within the novel, the characters are all after Alice, in the sense of pursuing her, but they also arrive at all the Wonderland and Looking-glass episodes after Alice does.  As a result, the familiar Alice's Adventures encounters have all been contaminated, as it were, in some respects, as the various characters respond to our protagonists in the context of their earlier responses to Alice.  For that matter, After Alice's own return to Carroll's worlds has also been infiltrated by the ghosts of previous adaptations: the Dormouse dozing away in the teapot is suspiciously animated Disney-esque, and the Jabberwock contraption (in reality, our heroine's back brace) is straight out of the Jan Švankmajer film.  In other words, like many adaptations, this one is two days slow.  

After Alice divides its action between the above- and underground worlds, each a funhouse mirror of the other.  (One character gets something in their eye above ground, and the same happens in Wonderland.) Our protagonists in the magical world are Ada Boyce, a young girl whose twisted spine requires a painful iron back brace to correct it, and Siam, an escaped slave who has been touring with an abolitionist, Mr. Winter.  When back in the real world, the plot focuses on Miss Armstrong, Ada's put-upon and marriage-minded governess, and Lydia Clowd, Alice's very adolescent older sister.  The real world is a thing of sourness.  Mrs. Boyce is an alcoholic with an ineffectual and inattentive husband; Mr. Clowd is a widower and rather hands-off parent.  The servants are snappish, the children ailing (Ada's younger brother parallels the Duchess' wailing child, here viewed only in pig form), the parents unhappy and preoccupied.  Ada herself, who primarily exists to be sent out of the way, is regarded with disgust by Miss Armstrong (who describes her as a "glum, spastic heifer" [13]) as well as by herself; she looks in the mirror and sees a "rotten packet of fairy" (9), not a pretty child.   Siam, who has suffered a "merciless existence" (150), is treated with contempt, then threatened with punishment for taking a "black ebony pawn" (149)--a chess piece suggestive of his own treatment by Mr. Winter.  But Wonderland, as in Carroll's original, is often harsh and unwelcoming, instead of being a happy escape from above-ground cares.  Although the White Queen is pleasant enough, and a couple of characters relatively helpful, the Wonderlanders in general are as uninterested in (or hostile to) Ada as they were in Alice.  If anything, one gets the sense that Alice's appearance has not predisposed the Wonderlanders in Ada's favor.  The characters frequently subject Ada to insults, from mildly negative ("you are extremely odd-looking," remarks the Cheshire cat, rather less pleasant than in Alice's Adventures [72]) to quite vicious ("that other revolting thing" [171]), that echo the above-ground responses to Ada's body.  

In fact, the striking thing about our protagonists' bodies is that they don't undergo the kind of transformations familiar from Alice's Adventures.  Ada, although she finds herself able to move more freely than she did above, is still "lopsided" (40), and does not otherwise grow or shrink.  Siam, similarly, remains physically unchanged.   Instead, the characters reformulate their understanding of how their respective ways of living in their bodies have been shaped by their particular histories.  Ada has been trapped by her iron cage (a rather obvious figure for gendered life in Victorian England), which, we are told early on, she has actually outgrown; Siam, the former slave, bears scars from being tortured by his owners.  What both discover in Wonderland is the possibility of physical, and therefore subjective, autonomy--the possibility of, for the first time, truly making their own choices.  Siam rejects the above-ground world entirely and opts to return to the Wood of No Names, even though he had earlier decided that "[a] forest that makes you forget the names of things is a dangerous place to hide" (189-90).  Opting to erase the trauma he had confessed to Ada, Siam chooses Wonderland precisely because above ground, there is no way of magically transforming his body to liberate himself: "Change of mind, change of heart.  What I need, change of skin" (256).  Siam, whose understanding of evil is beyond Ada's grasp (as she is uneasily aware), opts for a kind of reverse Fall, in which he returns to the woods in order to cease knowing good and evil.  In the Wood of No Names, there is also no history and no consciousness of difference--just a perpetual being.  By contrast, Ada returns above ground with Alice by literally seizing control of the brace that had once controlled her, appropriating Miss Armstrong's words ("You'll never be much, but you'll be better than you are now" [265]) the better to choose adulthood.  Transformation, in other words, occurs not just physically, but through new relations to language, whether by quoting or forgetting.   The rebirth imagery that marks her and Alice's journey to the surface leaves Ada in a slightly improved body--"straighter than she'd ever managed before" (270)--and ready, now that she has brought Alice back home, to accept the responsibility of being a "big sister" (270).  If not as mature as Siam, Ada is at least now more self-conscious about the possibility of doing something.   But intentionally or not, both choices are, in some respects, depressing, not triumphant.  Siam's case is more obvious: his decision to remain in Wonderland tacitly admits that the above ground world cannot be redeemed of its racism.  But Ada, having shucked off her back brace, prepares to skip back to a very muted destiny; no heroic life, just being "big sister" in a rather dysfunctional family.