Abstract
Since its publication 150 years ago, Alice in Wonderland has been a popular story all over the world, and Lewis Carroll’s celebrated work has been the inspiration for various adaptations. Searching for a possible future for Alice, this thesis presents a Deleuzean reading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871), as well as of Tim Burton’s film adaptation Alice in Wonderland (2010). Both of Carroll’s Alice books end up with Alice waking up from her weird dreams. The abrupt ending provokes me to speculate on the future of Alice, and how the dreams impact on her. I will first examine Carroll’s depiction of Alice’s dream as an ironic contrast to the reality upon the ground, which I consider to be a line of flight to escape the reality. In Burton’s film I will focus on its feminist ending since Burton fictionalizes a revolution for Alice and deals with what Carroll has left behind, and I will discuss if Alice has successfully deterritorialized in the end of the film. This thesis understands Alice in Wonderland as a line of flight leading to a becoming. Through the re-imagination of Carroll’s work from the view of the twenty-first century, Alice is endowed with the power to make decisions, and seeks out the possibilities of the oncoming future.