Alice underground is the first version of
Aline in the wonderland by
Lewis Carroll. The original manuscript, illustrated by Carroll himself, was given to the little
Alice Liddell for Christmas in 1864 and picked up the story that he had told to Alice and her sisters
Lorina and
Edith during a summer's afternoon, precisely on July the 4th, 1862. This first version of the
carrollian fantasy novel is, ultimately, a restricted version of
Alice, where various characters and episodes completely absent in
Underground are added, such as the
Duchess or the team composed by the
Mad Hatter, the
March Hare and the
Dormouse.
The intial, interesting considerations about
underground is about the importance of the trees and the doors: following the suggestion by
Adele Cammarata(3), we can assume that the tree and the door that Alice cross to enter the garden of the
Queen of Hearts, completely absent in
Wonderland, is linked with the
Celtic tradition. Indeed the oak is one of the sacred trees of the druids, symbolizing a link between heaven and earth
(1). In this way the oak, which in Celtic was called
duir, is a real door that connects people with the gods, but also ourselves with our inner part. So, from an etymological point of view, a carved door in a tree trunk is a Celtic symbol used to identify the Alice's passage towards a more stable phase after the size's changes of the previous scenes.
These changes in size, alluding both to the transition to adulthood, in perfect connection with the Druidic symbolism, and with the more classic
homothetic transformations, i.e. the transformations which, without changing the proportions of a geometric figure, change its size. All these changes remain unchanged in the transition to the second version, including the meeting with the
Caterpillar, who continues to ask Alice:
Who are you?
