Alice Hindman and Alice in Wonderland

Adventure: an exciting or very unusual experience/participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises/a bold or risky undertaking/to risk, to dare, to venture.

 

Alice Hindman, a quiet girl with a large head and a slight body, is the main character within Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Adventure” in Winesburg, Ohio. The name Alice brings us memories of grinning Cheshire cats and long, winding rabbit holes that lead to a wonderland of disproportion and riddles. Anderson’s “Adventure” compares with Lewis Carroll’s originally named Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to reveal the skewed self images that women hold.

Alice Liddell, a play on the word “little”, holds a confused sense of self. She constantly shifts sizes, from being too small to too large, representing her wavering ideas of whom she is. Similarly, Alice Hindman is described as having a large head that “overshadowed her body” (93). These disproportional bodies reveal the lopsided views that these women have of themselves. Alice H.’s head is way too large, suggesting self-consumption, while Alice L’s wavering body size, which at one point reaches up to one mile high, hints at insecurity. Any appearance that is not considered average draws attention from others, oftentimes leading to a lack of confidence. Alice’s fluctuating height is simply a representation of her already present insecurity that caused her to dream up a fantasy world as an escape.

Anderson displays how one who is lacking fulfillment in life will search out an outlet for that empty feeling. Alice Hindman is “betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life”, similar to how Alice Liddell is sucked down out of her dull and mediocre life into the world of impossibilities and adventures. This wonderland is what Alice H. experiences in her relationship with Ned Currie, the young man that grows to symbolize the concept of adventure for Alice. Their relationship was young, passionate, and dangerous. “A risky undertaking”, if I do say so myself. After he leaves, that loss that she feels is not heartbreak towards the city-bound man, but despair over losing what made her feel alive. She essentially “dies” when he leaves; losing the part of her that was awakened during their affair under the moon. This could be taken in both the sexual and the emotional sense. When Ned and Alice are intimate they spiritually become one, and her feelings of never being able to give herself to another man imply that she feels impure. Several religious allusions within this story demonstrate her attempts to find fulfillment. Wildly running naked through the rain is symbolic of the baptism that she desperately undergoes to seek renewal. However, no matter how many baptisms and “new beginnings” Alice Hindman goes through, she remains empty, still lacking the wonderland that she saw in the love of another.

Anderson’s “Adventure” and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland describe the empty void that humans feel and the ways in which we seek to fill them. Both Alice’s enter their wonderlands and experience an inexplicable loss when they “wake up”. Their adventures reveal the part of themselves that was dormant and gave them ephemeral fulfillment.