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W're all mad here.
- The Cheshire Cat to Alice'
The first draft of Lewis Carroll's iconic text was called Alice's Adventures Under Ground, and recalling this early title unearths some fascinating metaphors. Consider: Alice's journey was, quite literally, groundbreaking in positing a child heroine in a subterranean fantasy world, where the surreal clashed with overt real-world satire and nonsense was imbued with disturbing meaning. The creation of an imaginary realm that is indeed 'below the surface' invites exploration of the language we need to describe such a space. In being subterranean, an underground world is 'subtext' made manifest: it is the secret place under the world/ word that explains reality in subtle ways, the buried meaning for which one must dig. By its very location it is subversive because it truly undermines the real world.
While Alice's adventures have permeated fantasy fiction since they were first pub- lished, cinematic fantasy and science fiction have been particularly enamoured with Carroll's literary heroine in the last few decades. She is all grown up in The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999, 2003, 2003) and Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2002, 2004, 2007) series and reinvented for Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986), MirrorMask (Dave McKean, 2005) and Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005). Recently Pan 's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) is particularly conscious of its sororal relationship with Alice and its re-imagining of a W(under)land, and with the way events below the surface of the world and the text inform reality and meaning.
Feminizing the underworld
In classical mythology, traditional depictions of an Underworld were emphatically masculine and adult space: Hades was the land of the dead, named for the Greek god who ruled over it. To journey there' was a descent into hell and thus the central and climactic destination for questing heroes from epic poetry. In contrast, Alice's Wonderland is emphatically matriarchal, feminized (with tea parties, croquet and poetry) and anthropomorphically lively. From the outset, Pan's Labyrinth also usurps the traditional male space of the Underworld, displaces it, and designates it a female realm: the questing hero is the runaway princess Ofelia (Ivana Baquero); lies, pain and 'death' occur outside its borders; and the ultimate desire is to return to this netherworld as home rather than...