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 know 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.