The potential imperial metaphor in Alice in Wonderland had never really occurred to me before, but Tim Burton’s oddly formulaic,and formulaicly odd 2010 remake stumbles into it. In this version, Alice’s father is a visionary merchant, who dies organizing trade to Sumatra. Alice is trapped in a conventional life and arranged marriage, until she falls down the rabbit hole into a strange backwards monarchy, which she saves before returning to her own land and setting off on an adventure to China. Adventure in the colonies gives white women scope to escape their limited lives; freedom means both freedom from England’s restrictions, and freedom to be a white savior somewhere else.

The connection between freedom and non-white people is emphasized at the end of the film when Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter performs the goofy Futterwacken: i.e., break dancing. Alice when she returns to the mundane world takes a shimmy about with the same dance herself, demonstrating she’s also a free spirited white woman who is down with black culture (somewhere Miley Cyrus was watching.)
 

 
So how much of this imperial dynamic was there in the original Alice? The connection between the colonies and freedom wasn’t there; Wonderland isn’t a venue for self-actualization in Carroll’s original story. Alice doesn’t get to be the hero slaying the Jabberwocky; nor does she find delightful friends and allies. In Carroll’s version of the tale, everyone Alice meets has their own impenetrable agenda, and treats her with impatience and rudeness when they don’t ignore her all together. Really, the Carroll Wonderland has less in common with Burton’s Underland than it does with his just plain old regular Britain, where Alice’s relations and friends casually bully her for not entirely clear motives, and demand she play their games without telling her the rules.

Still, in nineteenth century England, any trip to a strange and exotic land has to recall the greater imperial context. The Red Queen wandering around shouting off with their heads is of course a joke in part because Queens didn’t have that sort of authority in England any more—though in the colonies it was another issue. The way in which British customs are parodied and warped in Wonderland —that eternal tea time—also suggests a kind of other who both is and isn’t the self, like the colonized people conforming and yet not, quite.

Carroll’s Wonderland ultimately has a not very buried undercurrent of nastiness and cruelty; everyone casually despises Alice, and she doesn’t much like them either. There’s an authoritarian violence that lingers everywhere, treated as a joke, but never really dispelled. In Burton, the colonies are an exciting adventure, and a chance for exotic triumph. In Carroll, invading that distant land is less of a dream, and more of a nightmare for everyone.