Milky white witch Alice in Wonderland is a captivating concept that combines the enchanting world of witchcraft with the whimsical setting of Alice's adventures. In this unique twist to the classic tale, Alice finds herself in a surreal realm where everything is completely white, from the trees to the sky. The milky white witch is a mysterious character who possesses extraordinary powers and serves as a guide for Alice in this mesmerizing land. She appears to be elegant and ethereal, with long flowing hair and a radiant white gown that glows in the moonlight. Her delicate features and mesmerizing presence make her both alluring and somewhat unsettling. As Alice embarks on her journey through this dreamlike world, she encounters various challenges and whimsical creatures, including talking animals, eccentric characters, and magical events that only seem possible in a fantasy world.
Enchanted gardens, enchanted forests – can’t get enough of it.
She later notices the present Red Queen being turned into rust, followed by the past version of herself and Queen Elsemere the latter being turned into rust. The magic of magic lies in its being treated as fact, and Tenniel s painstakingly cross-hatched and hard-edged style, no different in manner from his equally famous political cartooning, captures the Looking Glass world because it so acidly renders our own.
As Alice embarks on her journey through this dreamlike world, she encounters various challenges and whimsical creatures, including talking animals, eccentric characters, and magical events that only seem possible in a fantasy world. The milky white witch guides Alice through her adventures, offering wisdom, spells, and enchantments to help her overcome obstacles and learn valuable lessons about herself and the world around her. The contrast between the milky white witch and the vibrant characters and scenery adds an intriguing layer to the story.
Who Can Be Finished With Alice?
The supremacy of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books—the 1865 “Alice in Wonderland” and its still better successor, “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There”—among children’s books, and comic-philosophical literature generally, is by now, I suppose, pretty generally accepted. Carroll isn’t just big in the little way that Beatrix Potter is big; his bigness is as universally agreed upon as the bigness of Mozart or Molière or Wayne Gretzky. There is hardly a puzzle or a predicament that has fascinated intellectually minded people that is not captured and held, with wild gaiety and complicated understanding, in the books. Whether showing the true nature of the way we use words—Humpty Dumpty is a deeper philosopher of language than Wittgenstein—or achieving, in the Red Queen, the perfect description of the Carly Fiorina-type of boss, “Alice,” once read, is always there. (Indeed, the entire present Republican Party is on display in Carroll’s pages. When Ted Cruz recently explained to the head of the Sierra Club that there can’t actually be a scientific consensus on global warming, since scientists are supposed to be critical—so that if there is a consensus, it can’t be science—he was producing a piece of logical-seeming absurdity, of mindless mindfulness, that the Duchess, or Humpty himself, would have been proud of.)
The supremacy of the book persists despite being vandalized by Disney in the dreadfully sweetened and stupid fifties cartoon version (a kind of trial run for his even more thorough bowdlerization of the second-greatest English children’s book, P. L. Travers’s “Mary Poppins”). Of all the monuments to the Alice books, the finest has long been one of the best literary pas de deux in English, Martin Gardner’s “The Annotated Alice.” First appearing in 1960, it was revised in 1990 and then again in 1998, and is just now being republished by Norton in a vastly expanded edition, with the notes heavily revised, amended, and amplified by the Carroll scholar Mark Burstein.
The new edition has many lovely things in it. Reading it with the two previous editions near at hand, one realizes how relatively scant Gardner’s first set of annotations was, especially after fifty subsequent years of other annotated classics, all of which Gardner inspired. One or two small notes fill the pages of the first edition, where the current edition so crowds the text with peripheral illuminations that many pages are taken up with nothing but the annotations. The riches of the new volume are too many to itemize. The trick in an annotated classic is to know the difference between a deepening and a distraction. Some volumes of annotated books spend most of their time exasperatingly missing the point, as with the “Annotated Sherlock Holmes,” where the editor gets so caught up in the tiresome Baker Street Irregulars’ game of pretending that the make-believe world is a real one that he obsesses over details of chronology which obviously were not of a second’s interest to Conan Doyle. When it comes to annotations, a drudge can’t do the job, and a fanatic shouldn’t. Like other passionate tasks, it requires absorption but not obsession. (Absorption can satisfy two people; obsession only one.)
Burstein knows the difference. When we learn that all five basic ballet positions occur in John Tenniel’s illustrations of “Wonderland”—the lobster in the “Lobster Quadrille” is in the first position—or are shown a connection between a passage from Pascal’s “Pensées,” which Carroll admired, and the “flow” of things in the shop in the “Wool and Water” chapter, our understanding of the books is truly expanded. And, where Gardner’s original edition included only the Tenniel illustrations, Burstein offers a cornucopia of alternate imagery, with everyone from Ralph Steadman to Salvador Dali shown trying to realize a scene from the world underground or on the other side of the mirror. This is not an unmitigated artistic acquisition: Tenniel was not just first but best, instinctively understanding that, just as debates intended to be amusing never are, so illustrations intended to be surreal or fantastic must above all be true, literal. The magic of magic lies in its being treated as fact, and Tenniel’s painstakingly cross-hatched and hard-edged style, no different in manner from his equally famous political cartooning, captures the Looking Glass world because it so acidly renders our own. Rendered by later artists in ways more self-consciously surreal—or, sometimes, deliberately “poetic,” not to say pathetic—the scenes from Alice become less uncanny. Poetry depends on precision, and fantasy in art on a faith that the narrow rendering of fact will be odder than anything we can imagine. The literal-minded political satirist has a larger arsenal of the truly strange than the Surrealist can hope to find. (Sadly, unless I have missed them, Carroll’s own excellent, sober illustrations for the first draft of “Wonderland,” “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” which he prepared for Alice and her sisters alone, are not used in the new volume.) [Burstein writes to confirm my suspicion that I might be missing something, pointing out that there are a few images from the original manuscript illustration reproduced in the book—though they are, to be sure, so small in scale and so discreetly marginalized that I suspect they will be as easily missed by others as they were by me.]*
Burstein’s new annotations have the virtue, as well, of broadening as they deepen. Where Gardner was almost exclusively preoccupied with the logical and mathematical intricacies of the book—fair enough as a gift from one logician and mathematician to another—Burstein lets his annotations travel a little more horizontally, including references from the huge scholarly literature on Carroll that expands each year. (Horizontally enough, indeed, to include a family discovery, the original yew that inspired the tree with a door Alice passes through after leaving the mad tea party, credited to my sister Alison Gopnik and her husband, Alvy Ray Smith.)
But the new edition inevitably waters down, just a bit, the charm of the original. The special power of the original “Annotated Alice” was that it was a dialogue between Gardner and Carroll—and Gardner was, in his way, as thoroughly an eccentric and original, if less poetically inspired, figure as his subject. His opinionated presence was felt on every page, and, as the new notes expand in reference, some of the crabby charm of Gardner’s tone gets diluted. A grumpy reference to Kerouac’s “On The Road” as “forgettable,” has, I see, been excised—though a second search shows that it was out already in the 1990 edition. (One suspects that Gardner landed on that put-down casually, as one knock among many—and, rather deliciously, realized that the one derogatory epithet that simply won’t work for Kerouac’s novel, after all this time, is that one.) What was originally a dialogue between two ornery originals now feels slightly more institutional and official.
Gardner was obviously prone to favor the philosophical-mathematical readings of Alice. We learn about the actual physics of looking-glass milk, and of how the White Knight’s wonderful list of nested titles for his poem “adopts the convention of a hierarchy of meta-languages” (After the Knight tells Alice that the name of his song is “Haddock’s Eyes,” their exchange continues: “ ‘No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, looking a little vexed. ‘That’s what the name is called. The name really is “The Aged Aged Man” ’ ”). But there is, in the eighteenth-century sense, a “sentimental” reading of the book that recommends itself as well, and somewhat escaped Gardner’s mathematical-modelling mind. It rests on the basic drama of the books: the interaction of a child who represents not innocence but common sense with a world that has none. The Alice books are about the ambivalence of our experience of intellect. The same habits of mind that produce arbitrary and absurd chains of reasoning also produce the theories that splendidly annihilate our ordinary notions of time and space and logic. The indulgence we give to imagination to follow a line of reasoning to its end is what gives us the triumphs of philosophy and physics; it is also what gives us the Walrus and the Carpenter. The indulgence we give to intellect is also demanded by those who can no longer distinguish between an absurdity and an argument. The two kinds of reasoning are so finely related, and only distinguished case by case, that we can’t protect one without indulging the other, which is why we give tenure to the very people who exasperate us most. And then Alice is the representation of every woman: a whole set of annotations could be added tracing Alice imagery and Alice imitation in women’s fiction, from Cathleen Schine to Virginia Woolf. (Every man identifies with Hamlet, it has been said, since every man imagines himself a disinherited monarch; every woman identifies with Alice, since every woman sees herself as the sole sane person in a world filled with lunatics who imagine themselves disinherited monarchs.)
With all of its horizontal expansions, the new “Annotated Alice” fails to include what is perhaps the most widely disseminated, if hidden-in-plain-sight, of all Alice resonances. I mean the reproduction of the White Queen’s rising cry of “Better, better, better!” as the climax of the most successful of all Beatles singles, “Hey, Jude.” Lennon and McCartney’s obsession with the Alice books is familiar to all Beatlemaniacs. “I was passionate about ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of the Jabberwocky. I used to live Alice,” John said once; Paul’s enthusiasm was equally intense: “Both of us loved Lewis Carroll and the Alice books.” (The Alice characters on the picture sleeve of the single “The Ballad of John and Yoko” apparently belonged to him.) The Beatles singing Alice provides us, if not with a note, then at least with one more grin without a cat, a resonance without a reference. It may be odd not to find it in this compendious store of resonances . . . But then, who can be finished with Alice? We see her, sense her, hear her, everywhere.
*This post has been updated.
In this show, the White Queen is the good persona of the ex-Red Queen Anastasia. Alice mentions her, when reading to her daughter.
The witch's contributions are often shrouded in mystery, leaving readers and viewers wondering about her true intentions and ultimate role in Alice's quest. She embodies the dualism of good and evil, light and darkness, which adds depth and complexity to the narrative. Furthermore, the milk-white theme serves as a metaphor for purity, innocence, and the unknown. It evokes a sense of tranquility and curiosity as Alice navigates through an unfamiliar land, where the rules of logic and reality no longer apply. The milky white witch symbolizes the embodiment of this mysterious ambiance, with her graceful presence and enigmatic powers. Ultimately, the milky white witch Alice in Wonderland brings a fresh and enchanting twist to the beloved tale, capturing the imagination of readers and viewers alike. Through her captivating character, we are immersed in a surreal world of magic and wonder, igniting our sense of adventure and curiosity..
Reviews for "The Significance of Milky White Witch Alice in Wonderland's Plot"
1. Samantha - 1 out of 5 stars
I was extremely disappointed with "Milky White Witch Alice in Wonderland." The storyline was confusing and disjointed, making it hard to follow and comprehend what was happening. The characters lacked depth and development, leaving me disconnected and uninterested in their journey. Additionally, the dialogue felt forced and unnatural, making it difficult to engage with the story on any level. Overall, I found the whole experience underwhelming and would not recommend it to others.
2. Michael - 2 out of 5 stars
"Milky White Witch Alice in Wonderland" had potential, but it fell short in execution. The production value was lacking, which was evident in the set design and special effects. The acting was subpar, with many of the performers delivering their lines with little emotion or conviction. The pace of the play was also inconsistent, with some scenes dragging on for far too long while others felt rushed. Overall, I found it difficult to fully immerse myself in the world of Wonderland and left the theater feeling unsatisfied.
3. Emma - 2 out of 5 stars
I had high hopes for "Milky White Witch Alice in Wonderland," but unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations. The adaptation took too many liberties with the beloved classic, resulting in a convoluted and confusing storyline. The performances were lackluster, with the actors failing to bring their characters to life. The costumes and set design were also disappointing, lacking the whimsy and magic that one would expect from a production inspired by Wonderland. Overall, I was left feeling let down by this rendition and would not recommend it to fans of the original story.