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Despite being 1 50 years old, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) remain goldmines for pop-cultural references and re-imaginings. What in part makes the works so fascinating is thatthey appeal to adults and children equally. Martin Gardner suggests that Carroll's 'doing away with morals' opened up an entirely new genre for Victorian children (Gardner 2000: 62). When compared to children's tales written by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, Carroll's books are relatively moralfree. Bad people are not necessarily punished and even good ones may be morally ambiguous. Both groups, furthermore, are subject to the violence common in Victorian children's tales (cf. McGeorge 1 998: 1 09-1 7), and to beheading in particular. Gardner points to a tension between depictions of physical violence, and perceptions of real-world emotional or psychological violence: the Queen of Hearts' 'constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. [...] My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least' (Gardner 2000: 82).
This tension is at the heart of the Spicy Horse game Alice: Madness Returns (2011). The game is a sequel to American McGee's Alice (2000), which put the player into the mind of the catatonic Alice Liddell after she had witnessed the death of her family members in a fire assumed to have been caused by her cat, Dinah. The game begins in 1875, approximately ten years after these deaths, with Alice confined in the Rutledge Asylum. The goal of the 2000 game was for Alice to fight her way out of her catatonic state and back into the functioning world through levels starting with Dementia and ending with Heart of Darkness, where she defeats the Red Queen so that Wonderland can shed its nightmarish overlay and be restored as the place of Alice's childhood fantasies. At the end of the game, an apparently healed Alice finally leaves the asylum with her copy of Adventures in Wonderland underarm.
The sequel takes place one year after the events of its predecessor. Alice is now...