Alice (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
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Alice is a fictional character in the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, which were written by Charles Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
The character has been said to be based on Alice Liddell, a child friend of Dodgson's. However Dodgson himself said several times that his 'little heroine' was not based on any real child, but was entirely fictional. The pictures certainly do not resemble Alice Liddell. 'Alice' is portrayed as a quaintly logical girl, sometimes even pedantic, especially with Humpty Dumpty in the second book. According to Through the Looking-glass, she is seven years old but seems to conduct herself like a somewhat older child.
Alice is popularly depicted wearing a pale blue knee-length dress with a white pinafore overtop, although the dress originally was yellow in The Nursery "Alice", the first coloured version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Her blonde hair is held back with a wide black ribbon, and in honour of Alice, such hairbows are sometimes called "Alice bands", particularly in the UK.
As Alice was first drawn in black & white her colors would vary from artist to artist; it was Disney who made blue the most popular color for her dress and blonde for her hair. However, Alice has been colored by Tenniel in a blue dress, with white stripes at the bottom. Her pinafore is outlined in red.
Tenniel drew Alice in two variants: for "Through the Looking-glass" she was shown in striped stockings, an image which has remained in much of the later art.
Besides the books, Alice has appeared in many other works, perhaps the most famous one being the Disney film version. There have been many other films, spinoff novels, comic book adaptations, and other forms of the story. Alice is also featured in the Playstation 2 game Kingdom Hearts, in the Wonderland level. In the game, Alice has been found guilty by the Queen of Hearts, and is put on trial. In the 2000 PC game, American McGee's Alice, Alice is portrayed as an older, dark-haired girl with green eyes. This is a nightmarish version of the Alice story, featuring twisted, aggressive versions of the original characters. The Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer retold the story in a very dark 1988 film titled simply Alice. Woody Allen also called a film Alice, and while it was not a direct adaptation it did follow a woman who has a series of surreal adventures. Alice also appears as a college-attending teenager alongside Wendy Darling, Dorothy Gale and C.S. Lewis' Susan Pevensie (or is it Lucy Pevensie?) (The Chronicles of Narnia) in Chicago of 2005 and 2006, in the comic book series, The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles.
In all English Disney productions (excluding the Disney Channel original show, Adventures in Wonderland, where she was done by Elisabeth Harnois), Alice is voiced by Kathryn Beaumont. American McGee's Alice has Susie Brann voicing the titular character, while Kristýna Kohoutová portrayed her in Svankmajer's Alice (her English dub was done by Camilla Power). In the Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts, she was voiced by Mika Doi.
Scholars have long speculated on Carroll's sexuality and the erotic symbolism they see in the story, and Alice has inspired many overtly sexual works. There have been at least two porn films based on the story, one in 1970 and a much more elaborate, musical one in 1976. Adult versions of Alice, (J.M. Barrie's) Wendy Darling (Peter Pan) and (L. Frank Baum's) Dorothy Gale were featured in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's controversial erotic graphic novel, Lost Girls, published in serial form through the '90s and collected in 2006. Alice's old-fashioned, feminine dress has become a popular and often rather sexualized Halloween costume for adult women, and forms of it are often featured in lingerie catalogs.
