This week I am reading the Alice in Wonderland unit.
A bored girl named Alice saw a rabbit one day. The rabbit
pulls out a pocket watch and mentions that he is late and disappears down a
rabbit hole, where Alice follows him. Alice begins to fall for a very long time
and talks nonsense to herself the entire time.
She finally lands in a pile of leaves. She catches a glimpse
of the rabbit and follows him further down the hallway. She finds a golden key
that unlocks a tiny door and enters it. Crawling through the tunnel, she finds
a bottle that has a “drink me” label and after pondering she chugs the whole
thing.
Shortly after, Alice shrinks to a very short height from the
liquid she drank. When looking for the gold key again she sees a cake with an
“eat me” label. This time, what she consumed made her grow to a preposterous
height and her head hits the ceiling. Looking around for something to make her
normal sized, she sees a tall mushroom and peeks on top of it, where she sees a
caterpillar that is smoking hookah.
The caterpillar begins to talk to Alice and she gets
frustrated because he is not giving her any information. After quite a long
dialogue, he asks her to recite a story and then tells her she did not do it
correctly. Alice is upset that she keeps changing heights so rapidly and the
caterpillar asks her what height she would like to be. He leaves and as he’s
going away he tells her that “one side makes you larger and one side makes you
smaller,” referring to the mushroom.
After trying lots of different bites of the mushroom, Alice
finally returns to normal size. She sees a small house but decides to make
herself smaller before she visits so she does not scare them.
After talking to a man at the door and getting confused,
Alice decides to just walk into the house. Inside is a Duchess with her baby,
which is a pig, and there is also a cook and a Cheshire cat. This is another
strange situation, with the cook throwing things all around the house and the
baby pig being mishandled. The Duchess goes to play croquet with the Queen,
leaving the baby pig with Alice.
Alice decides to drop the pig and let it run into the woods.
She then sees the Cheshire cat and asks it where she should go. The cat tells
her one way is a mad hatter and another way is the March Hare. Alice decides to
go towards the house of the March Hare and leaves.
The Mad Hatter and March Hare were sitting on a Dormouse
together in front of the house. Alice invites herself to the table and sits
down with the two, which starts an intense conversation. After lots of talking
about mostly nonsense, Alice realizes that the Mad Hatter’s watch is very
strange and he says it keeps the day but not the time.
After more of talking nonsense, Alice makes another realization
about the strange place she is in: it’s always teatime and that’s why
everything is tea-themed. Then more talk of nonsense continues.
Eventually Alice gets upset that the Dormouse keeps being
rude to her and she walks away from the tea party. On her way out, she sees a
tree that has a small door and it leads back to the hallway with the golden key
and small door. She retraces her steps and on the way eats the mushroom until
she is only a foot tall and then winds up in a garden.
The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
Once inside the garden, Alice meets three gardeners who are
shaped as playing cards. They all talk in fear of being beheaded by the Queen
and then the King and Queen of hearts enter the garden with the rest of the
playing cards. The Queen is a very angry woman and after Alice is rude to her
the Queen demands that Alice gets beheaded. The Queen gets distracted by the gardeners,
who she also wants beheaded. Alice helps hide the gardeners and is then invited
to play croquet with the Queen.
The game of croquet is very strange, as live animals are
used for the mallet and balls and the soldiers make the arches. The more the Queen
orders for people to be beheaded, the quicker Alice wants to escape. She sees
the Cheshire cat in the sky and begins to talk to it, but once the King sees it
he orders the cat to be beheaded, but the head of the cat disappears and nobody
can find it.
The story skips ahead and the King is now a judge and is holding a
trial for the Knave of Hearts for apparently stealing the Queen’s tarts. The
Mad Hatter is called as a witness and does a very poor job and eventually gets
shooed out of the court. The cook from the house earlier is called as the next
witness and then, surprisingly, Alice gets called as a witness.
The people of the court continue to babble on about useless
things and Alice claims she doesn’t know anything. I’m still not sure what the
Knave actually did wrong, which I think is the point. Alice tries to argue that
the Knave is innocent but the Queen continues to get more angry. Eventually the
pack of cards swarm the Queen and Alice wakes up to leaves falling on her head.
Alice’s sister tells her how she has been asleep for a long time and Alice
decides that it was a “wonderful” dream.
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