Ground Rules of Fantasy
Eliza Brownell '97 (English 61 1993)
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Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet ground in her life:
it was all ridges and furrows: the croquet balls were live hedgehogs, and
the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves
up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches. . .
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The players all played at once, without waiting for turns, quarreling all
the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs, and in a very short time the
Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting 'Off
with his head ! ' or 'Off with her head!', about once a minute. (p. 67)
This passage from Alice in Wonderland perfectly illustrates why
Alice's adventures are true Fantasy. The relationship between the mad croquet
game in the world of the Red Queen and a normal croquet game in Alice's
world in many ways parallels the relationship between Fantasy and Reality.
According to Eric Rabkin, (Quoted by George P. Landow in the web) Fantasies
may be generally distinguished from other narratives by this: the very
nature of the ground rules, of how we know things . . . the problem of
knowing infects Fantasies on all levels, in their settings, in their methods,
in their characters . The very nature of the ground rules at the Queen's
croquet party is strange indeed, totally unlike anything Alice or any other
dweller in the world of Reality has ever seen. In fact, Alice cannot ÒknowÓ
the rules of the game, or of the country at all, no matter how she tries,
for to her they appear to be utterly arbitrary and inconstant. The characters
also keep Alice firmly planted in the fantastic. The people she encounters
are talking animals, mythical beasts, and playing cards who follow a code
of conduct unique to their homeland and totally foreign to Alice. The Queen
is fond of sentencing her subjects to death for no particular reason, and
(although not at the croquet party) babies turn into pigs, cats disappear
but leave their smiles behind.
The Queen's party is a perfect summary of the way in which unusual
settings, methods, and characters in this strange kingdom are what set
Alice in Wonderland so sharply apart from realistic modes, and what make
it the epitome of fantasy.
http://www.sgt.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/carroll/brownell.html