Introduction

More than a century-and-a-half since their publication, Charles Dodgson’s (Lewis Carroll’s) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) remain two of the most widely adapted works of Victorian children's literature. The critic Catherine Siemann in fact names Alice a “culture text:” one that changes with the cultural paradigms and in which “every new edition, adaptation, parody, or sequel derives from an implicit critical perspective” (176).1 While Disney’s 1951 animated film is often cited as the most culturally significant, adaptations since the late twentieth century have shifted toward darker and more mature Wonderlands that have eroticized Alice and placed her in the context of psychological and bodily horror. Two such adaptations—American McGee’s video game Alice (2000) and its sequel Madness Returns (2011)—offer particularly compelling case studies of this trend, as both present Alice as an asylum patient whose trip down the rabbit hole becomes a descent into the underworld of trauma-induced mental illness. Although prior research has emphasized the games’ potential as female empowerment narratives, such claims seem shortsighted when we consider that both games essentially pit Alice against the monsters of her mind. In this paper, I argue that, due to their interactive format, Alice and Madness Returns use the conventions of horror gaming to draw attention to the kind of psychological, Dantean “tortures” to which Carroll subjects Alice in the original texts. Considering McGee’s games within the context of contemporary adaptation scholarship also raises significant questions about adaptation and authenticity while demonstrating the culture-bending potential of adaptive media.

Alice in Horrorland

To begin, we should note that only since the latter part of the twentieth century have scholars favored darker readings of Alice.2 Will Brooker, for example, points out in Alice’s Adventures (2004) that most nineteenth-century readers believed the texts were innocent fun and that only recently have critics recognized “that any modern adaptation failing to recognise [the texts’] deeper, darker nature has actually missed the point” (Brooker 71-2). While this change in opinion perhaps reveals as much about our culture as it does about the texts themselves, the number of sinister adaptations that have appeared in the twenty-first century makes the texts’ darkness difficult to ignore. Two factors that seem to have influenced McGee are an increased fascination with Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell and the “reverse influence” of Disney’s cartoon.

This first factor can perhaps best be summarized by a point made by Helen Pilinovksy in her essay “Body as Wonderland” (2009), wherein she notes “that Alice’s maturation is based in an uneasy fascination with the circumstances surrounding the composition of the original story and…relationship with Lewis Carroll,” leading contemporary adapters to “[age] Alice…in order to excuse that interest” (176). Kali Israel makes a comparable point in “Asking Alice” (2000), wherein she notes that transferring Alice’s names to more mature or “erotic” characters suggests an “awareness about [Carroll’s nude photographs of Liddell] and questions about sexuality and agency” (272). While critics remain divided on the degree to which the games sexualize Alice, her age in McGee’s games—eighteen and nineteen, respectively—makes her more “nubile” a character than the seven-year-old Alice we find in the stories.

The second factor relates to the way McGee’s aesthetic contradicts Disney’s. As Brooker notes, McGee “sets up [his games] in distinction the 1951 animated version, implicitly acknowledging that this Alice will have shaped most players’ perception of the character and her mythos, and provided the dominant popular image of what ‘Alice’ means” (249). Because a desire to be un-Disney-like might offer grounds for “horrifying” Alice independent of a legitimate call for revised readings, we should note that, in addition to countering Disney, McGee has described at least the first game as a more accurate interpretation of Carroll’s text.3 In a making-of video about the game, McGee notes that “[his] Alice will make your rethink everything you thought you knew about Wonderland” and that the “dark Victorian look and feel to the characters and environments…is actually more what Wonderland was supposed to be than, say, what the Disney version was.” This is not to say that judging an adaptation based on its fidelity is always pragmatic, but that being aware of how McGee intends for his games to be interpreted offers insights into how we should analyze the games and—by extension—the stories themselves.4

We should note, as well, that the horror and violence in McGee’s games may not be as transgressive as more “traditional” or “Disneyfied” Alices have led us to believe. In The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Noel Carroll uses the term “art horror” to describe the “emotional state” that is “the product of a genre that crystallized…around the time of the publication of [Mary Shelley’s ] Frankenstein [1818]…and that has persisted” through the present (13, 15). To distinguish horror from the related phenomenon of terror, Carroll notes that horror signifies through the presence of monsters that are “disturbances of the natural order:” viz, that are both “threatening and impure” (15, 28). While we could debate the extent to which the cavalcade of fantastic beings we read of in Wonderland satisfy these criteria (some creatures, like the Jabberwock from the eponymous Looking Glass poem, are truly monstrous, whereas the Gryphon and Mock Turtle who appear in Alice’s Adventures could be perceived as more benevolent) that Carroll’s texts are rife with examples of anomalous beings is beyond argument. That many such beings might be described as the kind of “integral, spatio-temporally unified individual” Noel Carroll describes as “horrific beings in fusion” (44)—a hallmark of the genre—only increases the stories’ horror potential.

Even more salient are the thematic and structural elements the Alice stories share with horror narratives. While readers of Alice are no doubt familiar with the themes of curiosity and knowledge underpinning the texts—“Curiouser and curiouser” Alice says at the beginning of the second chapter (L. Carroll 13)—they may be less aware that such themes also provide the backbone of many horror narratives.5 In The Philosophy of Horror Noel Carroll notes that “horror stories are predominantly concerned with knowledge as a theme” and that “to a large  extent, the horror story is driven explicitly by curiosity” (127, 182). The related idea that “[h]orror relies on the unknown and the unknowable; pleasure comes from discovery” seems an apt way to describe the experience of reding  Alice (N. Carroll 184). Much the same is true of plot structure, with the “sort of complex discovery plot” Noel Carroll describes as a typical feature of horror—one that “[comprises] onset, discovery, confirmation, and confrontation” with the monster—seems applicable to the Alice texts, as well, even if her monsters are not always as “threatening and impure” as those of more “purely” horrific texts. Thus, we can establish that, independent of McGee, the texts themselves ae rife with horror potential.6

A Little History of Horror Gaming

With these points noted, we should note, as well, that many of these same conventions of horror also coincide with those of video games more generally, demonstrating the medium’s potential to explore narratives of psychological torment. Here, a brief history of horror and horror gaming will inform our analysis of McGee. Although the origins of horror can be traced as far back as eighteenth-century Gothic novels—with  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) commonly recognized as the genre’s first formal example—Carroll points out that horror literature and (especially) film did not “enter the mainstream” until the 1970s (2, 4). The first video game to incorporate horror themes—Haunted House (1972), which featured a ghost who hid treasure—appeared within that same decade (Stobbart 12 – 13). Taking cues from horror films and choose-you-own-adventure stories, horror games grew more popular throughout the 1980s, with games like the text-based Zork (1980) and Haunted House (1981) paving the way for later horror film-to-game adaptations likeAtari’s Halloween (1983; adapted from John Carpenter’s 1978 film), an NES version of Friday the 13th (1989; based on Sean Cunningham’s 1980 film), and such iconic horror games as Resident Evil (1996), Silent Hill (1999), Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002), Manhunt (2004), F.E.A.R (2005)., and Dead Space (2008) (Perron, “Introduction”  5; Rouse 15; Stobbart 12). While such games have since been eclipsed by more recent, popular games, the turn of the twentieth century seems to mark the apex of a sort of “first wave” of horror gaming and deserves much of the credit for the genre’s longevity. Dawn Stobbart, for instance, names Silent Hill and Resident Evil as the two franchises most responsible for the genre’s survival (15).

That the emergence of horror gaming coincides with that of gaming, more generally, is hardly coincidental. In “Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games” (2009), Richard Rouse III notes that “[g]ames have inhabited the horror genre for almost as long as they’ve been in existence” (15). While it is unsurprising that games, in general, take many of their stylistic cues from the cinema, we should note that horror seems particularly suited to the gaming medium. For example, in “Games of Fear” (2009), Bernard Perron notes that, although “game creators’ fascination for cinema has played a decisive role in shaping the general evolution of the medium…the connection does seem even more palpable in the case of horror games” (33).  Similarly, Rouse notes that “the goals of video games and the goals of horror fiction directly overlap, making them ideal bedfellows” (15). While the reasons for this “coupling” are  various, we can begin by noting that—by nature of their genre—games enable gamers to “put themselves in the player character’s shoes significantly more  than they might in any book or film” (Rouse 22).

Such investment Linda Hutcheon describes more formally in A Theory of Adaptation (2006), wherein she describes gaming as a “participatory mode” that allows players to “‘become’ one of the characters and act in their fictional world” and “immerses us physically and kinesthetically” in the experience (11, 22). For Rouse, additional factors that unite horror and gaming include the shared “‘kill to survive’ motivation,” worlds that appear “familiar…but…fantastic and special,” and their reliance on the emotions of “tension and fear” (15 – 17). As is the case for horror more generally, young males account for the largest demographic of horror gamers (N. Carroll 193; Rouse 18). As Rouse points out, this audience’s tendency to “spend a lot of time playing video games” leads, almost necessarily, to the expansion of the genre (18). This aspect of horror gaming also makes the medium the ideal for exploring mental illness  narratives, as many players are apt to more fully “live” the gaming experience.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Press “Play”

As games that draw heavily upon the conventions of the horror genre, McGee’s Alice games create a Carrollian-Dantean simulation of a psychological hell. Although McGee is not the first to forge a link between the writings of Dante and Carroll—Marya Hornbacher, for example, uses a similar strategy in her memoir Wasted (1999)—the conventions of gaming, as has been noted, afford consumers of the genre with a more immersive experience. Writing of the Alice games, specifically, Stobbart praises horror gaming for “[allowing players] to sense a modicum of the emotional abuse and the helplessness that is suffered…by real children who are subjected to [abuse]” (75). Thus, such observations as the one Rachel Falconer makes of Hornbacher’s memoir in her article “Underworld Portmanteau” (2009)—that “[Dante’s and Carroll’s] underworlds are ‘portmanteau-ed’ together to convey how a patient experiences the journey through an often frightening and bewildering period of mental ill health” both “authorizing and radicalizing, punishing and (potentially) ludic” (3)—seems more applicable to McGee’s games, whose participatory format allows players to experience the Dantean imagery and “punishing and…ludic” aspects of Alice’s mental illness.

The first Alice game begins in 1874: three years after the publication of Through the Looking Glass and, according to a “making of” video about the game, “several years after the events of Carroll’s stories.” While McGee’s decision to conflate Alice Liddell with the Alice from the stories results in a historical impossibility, we might conclude that McGee’s depiction of Alice results from the cultural fascination with Carroll-as-predator.7 While the game is quick to plunge players into the inferno, gamers can learn additional story details via a doctor’s “journal” including in the gaming manual. From the journal, we learn of a childhood fire that has destroyed Alice’s house and killed her parents. Though ancillary to gameplay, the diary provides useful background information supportive of the “Wonderland hell” idea. Some of the entries, for example, inform players that Alice’s “prognosis is not promising,” that “she languishes in a trance-like dementia [and is] blind to all stimulation,” and that “she is far, far gone” (23 – 4). Likewise, Alice’s sketches in the diary preview characters in the game (e.g., the Tweedle Twins, who “double” as hospital orderlies, as well as the Cheshire cat and White Rabbit, both of which face gruesome deaths before the endgame). Alice’s awareness of these characters in their horrific guises before the game begins again calls for updated readings of the stories, as the premise that Wonderland is more memory than dream suggests that the horrors players experience are figments of Alice’s diseased mind. Thus, what the doctor in the manual describes as “depiction[s] of her nightmare of Hell” and “a world of sheer, chaotic terror and unmitigated bloodshed…[populated with] hellish creatures” (28, 35) represent the places she visited in Carroll’s stories.

Like the journal in the game manual, Alice’s opening emphasizes the inferno into which Alice descends. The fully-rendered gaming video shows a younger Alice in her bedroom, surrounded by books and family photographs. To the sound of a ticking clock, we hear dramatized passages from a book chapter called “A Reunion Tea Party”—a “pseudo-sequel” text that becomes fused with gameplay. When Alice’s kitten knocks over a lamp and starts a fire, the characters scream while a new chapter—“Smoke and Fire”—surrealistically mirrors the events in the game. As the voices plead for help, Alice’s bedroom—including her books, notes, family photographs, and (tellingly) a book of Dante’s poems—erupt in flames. Significantly, many of the family photographs show (impossibly) Alice’s memories of walking through the “inferno” of her house during the fire, thereby demonstrating her damaged memory and presaging her later descent into psychological torment. Later in the sequence, players see Alice and her stuffed rabbit in her bed at Rutledge Asylum. When the rabbit cries for help, Alice finds herself tumbling into the “Wonderland” of her mind—a place where, a la Falconer, “there is no salvific principle and no otherworldly vision of…paradise…to convey…readers”—or players—to deliverance (14 – 15).

When the game begins, conventional and narrative aspects of gameplay work together to emphasize the mental underworld experience. Alice (and its sequel) is a third-person, action-adventure platformer with a heavy dose of psychological horror (Brooker 229; Stobbart 10, 72). From the standpoint of player-character relationships, the games’ third-person point of view is worth analyzing. Regarding gaming perspective, Jonathan Sharp notes that third-person games can make it difficult for players to identify with their avatars insofar as the perspective “is neither [purely] subjective or objective,” but rather “understood objectively through the information provided by the game…[and] subjectively through the player’s control of their character” (15).8 His point that the third-person perspective separates the player from the character to the point of “making the avatar more of a ‘puppet’ in the player’s hands” applies to Alice, as well, insofar as players obtain a sense of the loss of agency Alice experiences as she navigates the Wonderland of her mind.

On the level of narrative, the game’s hell motif works alongside these more formal elements. As in the Inferno, the game world comprises nine different subworlds players must complete. The emaciated, darkly-witted Cheshire cat Alice meets at the start of gameplay, for example, serves as her feline Virgilian guide (see Figure 1). Likewise, the mix of comic and sadistic moments that populate the game—croquet mallets that double as Billy clubs; a Minotaur-like Mock Turtle (see Figure 2); a Duchess “mini-boss” who literally sneezes her head off; a Mad Hatter well over nine feet tall who straps his tea pals to torture racks but takes his afternoon brew at 6 pm sharp; a White Queen whose cartoonish decapitation is equal parts “ludic” and horrific—also emphasize the cyclical ups and downs of Alice’s illness. Falconer’s notes on the “portmanteau” again become relevant here. As in Hornbacher’s memoir, the game creates an “underworld space” that “can be harsh and punishing, but…is, of course, a ‘wonder’ land” in which the Dantean desire for salvation competes with the Carrollian longing to remain “‘fixed’ in the fantasy worlds” of mental illness (7).

Saving Wonderland is the game’s central mission. Players accomplish this task by battling the monsters of Alice’s memory and collecting pieces of the Jabberwock’s “eye staff” to prepare her for the final face-off against the totalitarian Red Queen we learn in the end game is none other than Alice herself. That Alice ultimately fights against herself once more emphasizes the “hell-of-mind” with which players engage. From early in the game, non-playable characters (NPCs) hail Alice as a “savior,” though we soon realize she is also her own antagonist. For example, when Alice meets the Caterpillar midway through the game, she learns that “Wonderland is severely damaged” and that “[her] mind is fouled by self-deception” and “wracked with guilt” for surviving the fire that killed her parents.

Alice’s realization at the end of the game that, as Wonderland’s destroyer, “only [she] can repair it” therefore primes players for the final two boss fights that offer the game’s most explicit examples of Alice’s underworld battle. In the cutscene that precedes Alice’s fight with the Jabberwock (see Figure 3), a serpentine representation of her guilt, he accuses her of “play[ing] in dreamland with [her] friends” while her parents perished “in an inferno of incredible horror.” Similarly, in the battle with the Red Queen—the most explicitly “self-torturous” moment in the game—a cutscene shows the Queen killing the Cheshire cat, thereby destroying the “guiding light” of Alice’s psyche. In a later cutscene, the Queen peels back her face to reveal Alice’s features underneath (See Figure 4). Thus, when players beat the game by killing the Red Queen, they are effectively “killing off” a piece of Alice herself.

Given this ending, we should also note the way the game’s cutscenes function to emphasize Alice’s helplessness, as well as the impact of these moments on players. In gaming studies, the notion that players lose control of the avatar during cutscenes is well-recognized (Perron 80 – 1; Klevjer 302).9 Perhaps less understood is a point that Tanya Krzywinska brings up in her article “Hands-On Horror” (2002), wherein she notes that by removing players’ agency, “the cut-scene wrests control away from the player and reinforces the sense that a metaphysical ‘authorial’ force is at work” (211). For Krzywinska, the “evocation of helplessness in the face of an inexorable predetermined source” that characters experience during cutscenes is essential for horror gameplay, whose suspense and pleasure rely on the game’s ability “to allow players to experience a dynamic between states of being in control and out of control” (“Hands on Horror” 208, 211; original emphasis). Thus, we can observe parallels between the way players lose control of the avatar and the way that Alice’s illness strips her of agency. Intriguingly, the loss of power and sense of confinement Alice “feels” in these situations transfers both psycho- and physiologically onto the players. In her later article “Reanimating Lovecraft” (2009), Krzywinska notes that “[p]layers must respond to the [onscreen] events…in a timely and well-judged way” (285). In moments of panic, “control is diminished—our performance impaired. Claustrophobia…is also felt through our ability to act…which further connotes a lack of agency” (285). This potential for transfer between the players and the characters again demonstrates the experiential potential of horror games. 

Another point worth considering is that gamers typically must satisfy a set of pre-determined outcomes if they want to beat the game. In Alice, for example, the Cheshire cat informs Alice that “only one path will bring [her] to the end game,” effectively telling players that free will is illusory, and that Alice is “destined” to confront herself at the end. Arguably, this idea of false choices has much in common with predeterminism, which Krzywinska notes also robs players of their agency (208). While Krzywinska notes that the flux of command and control provides one of the more distinct pleasures of horror gaming (208, 211, 217), I would add that games’ pre-determined outlook bears frightening implications for the state of Alice’s mental health. If we take the Cheshire cat at his word—that all roads in Wonderland are essentially a single road through hell—and agree with Kryzwinksa that “plotline and story are prescripted, with little variation or outcome” we might conclude that the game’s mechanics likewise suggest that Alice’s illness is somehow pre-determined (“Reanimating Lovecraft” 271). This idea of a pre-determined mental hell becomes almost Calvinistic if we extrapolate the idea that souls outside the mentally-fit “elect” are destined to suffer the damnation of their minds. The Queen’s monologue at the end of the game thus underscores Alice’s predicament: “If you destroy me, you destroy yourself. Leave now, and some hollow part of you may survive. Stay, and I will break you down; you will lose yourself forever.” Players who turn off the game abandon Alice to purgatory. Those who follow the desired outcome take part in the cyclical self-abuse of Alice’s illness. Knowing in advance of the game’s sequel gives a much darker cast to Alice’s departure from Rutledge at the endgame, as the way the camera lingers over the asylum’s gates recalls a pair of similar gates, with their grim injunction to “Relinquish all hope, ye who enter here” (Alighieri 859).

The existence of a sequel game again supports the self-abusive cycle of Alice’s mental illness. Beginning roughly a year after the conclusion of the first game, Madness Returns thrusts players through the hell-gates of the Houndsditch Home for Wayward Youth, where a slightly older Alice (see Figure 5) now lives under the “care” of the hypnotic and pedophilic Dr. Bumby. Like in the first game, the opening cutscene in Madness Returns sets the tone for Alice’s next “adventure.” Presented as a session of psychological hypnosis led by Bumby, the scene depicts Alice having a riverboat tea party with characters from Carroll’s stories. The party ends abruptly when the head of one of the characters erupts in a geyser-like jet of blood and an ominous darkness overtakes the screen. Shortly after the explosion, Alice screams to Bumby that she is “in hell” and insists that what she is experiencing is “not a dream, [but] a memory…[that] makes [her] sick.” As in the first game, players journey through a mental underworld of Alice’s memories. Having returned from the (un)dead, the Cheshire cat again serves as Alice’s quasi-Virgilian guide (see Figure 6). The apparent Dante reference we find in one of the cat’s first comments to Alice—that she should “abandon [the] hope” of not becoming frightened—again recalls the mental inferno into which she has plunged. Also like the first game, Madness ends with Alice’s passing through the gates of an institution. Here again, however, we find the hint of a future descent into the madness, as the Cheshire cat’s final words—“Forgetting pain is convenient. Remembering it, agonizing…And our Wonderland, though damaged, is safe in memory…for now”—is as revealing as it is ambiguous.

In considering the degree of agency Alice exercises in the game, the fact that Alice kills Bumby not once, but twice at the end of the game—once in Wonderland and once in the “real world” of Victorian England—raises interesting questions about Alice’s illness and the potential for deliverance (see Figures 7 and 8). Though my contention remains that the games, in fact, strip Alice of her power by presenting her in a very vulnerable position of ill mental health, I should acknowledge that Alice’s killing of Bumby has been a latching-on point for more hopeful-minded critics. Christina Fawcett, for example, argues that Madness enables “vicarious catharsis” by allowing players to “engage in the idea and process of recovery through a safe, distant lens” or “experience the arduous process of recovery while avoiding the initial trauma” (499, 501). For Fawcett, Alice becomes a “victor” by the end of the game (510). Similarly, Siemann calls Alice “an empowered heroine” and notes that her real-world “hopelessness and despondency are turned on their head in the fantasy world, where she is powerful and observant” (186 – 188). Though Siemann’s appraisal of the game’s conclusion is more nuanced than Fawcett’s—she notes, for example, that “Alice cannot go home again” and that, though “[s]he has empowered herself, [she] can only move forward into a new and unknown world” (189)—she seems still to overlook that, even when Alice seems to be “in command,” she remains always in a battle with herself.

For these reasons, I find it difficult to agree with hopeful-sounding appraisals of either game. Rather, I find common ground in points raised by Sara Khan in her article “Cultivating Virtual Feminist Violence in Alice-Madness Returns and Inferno” (2018), which also links the works of Dante, Carroll, and McGee. While noting that the sequel game is empowering insofar as it features a female protagonist, Khan criticizes the game for its depictions of violence against women and perpetuation of negative female stereotypes. Women in the games, she argues, “represent conventional weaknesses of the society,” with Alice becoming “a production of negativity…in the society” because she is “a victim of mental illness” (179). Though Khan, also, seems to overlook the degree of self-inflicted violence we find in Madness, one of her final criticisms about the game—that it “depicts women perpetuating violence [sic] acts” (181)—is not dissimilar from my own take. Here, I would again stress that however “empowered” Alice seems to become, both games emphasize the utter and at times ridiculous helplessness of her mental state. Alice’s journey, the games suggest, is self-destructive and intrinsically without glory. Players who beat the games should recognize Alice as a victor-victim whose deliverance is short-lived and whose descent into madness seems destined to be repeated.

Through a Game, Darkly

Thus far, I have examined the twenty-first-century “dark Wonderland” phenomenon and analyzed how American McGee’s two Alice games present an intriguing subcategory of that trend. Because the games present themselves as follow-ups to Carroll’s texts, reading the games as such thus demands that we look more closely at the original Alice stories and take note of the comparably “game-like” inferno Carroll creates. To begin, we would do well to acknowledge the often-overlooked point that the original Alice story does, in fact, feature a trip into the underworld. Notably, when Dodgson first told Alice and her two sisters the story in 1862, he called the tale “Alice’s Adventures Underground”—no doubt a more explicit underworld reference than “Wonderland.” Other researchers have also pointed out underworld tie-ins. For example, in The Annotated Alice (1972), Martin Gardner calls Dante’s Divine Comedy a “lesser-known tour of Wonderland by way of a hole in the ground” (124 n.). Similarly, Carroll biographer Donald Thomas notes in Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1996) that the underworld journeys in “Book XI of the Odyssey and Book VI of the Aeneid” influenced Carroll “beyond proof” (157 – 8). Likewise, in her article on the fantastic beasts of Wonderland, “Alice’s Journey Across the Globe into Mysterious Realms” (2015), Celia Brown notes that “Carroll…follows various stories from antiquity about mortals entering the underworld,” with “her escort, the White Rabbit…[becoming] a guide of souls like the jackal-headed Anubis or his Greek counterpart Hermes” (280 – 2). From these examples, we can see from where McGee’s idea of a Dantean “Wonderland hell” might arise.

More to the point, however, is that the games’ hell motif draws attention to the way that Carroll treats Alice in the texts. As we have seen in Falconer’s essay, Carroll tends to be “ludic” in his writing. Similarly, James Kincaid notes in Child Loving (1992) that Carroll is the “true child” in the stories (and Alice the false one) who inhabits “the world of play” and “enters…[the stories]  as the Dodo, gnat, or White Knight (196, 276). A point that Carroll himself makes in Through the Looking Glass is that a “chess problem…underlies the book’s action” (170 – 1). Given his apparent tendency to “play games,” that Carroll might do so again on a more implicit level is perhaps to be expected. More surprising is that—like McGee’s games—Carroll’s treatment of Alice hinges upon a form of “ludic” torment. If we recall the doctor’s diary that prefaces the first game—in which Alice (Liddell) seems to have been traumatized by Wonderland prior to the game—we can observe that both games push us toward updated readings. 

The texts themselves are replete with examples of the ways that Carroll “tortures” Alice throughout her adventures. That each of the first three chapters of Wonderland shows Alice crying—when she changes in size; when she cries a Pool of Tears; when, after the Caucus Race, she feels “very lonely and low-spirited” at the thought of her cat (L. Carroll 25)—seems indicative of the way Carroll treats Alice for much of the book. This is in addition to how rudely or cruelly many of the characters treat Alice. What Alice tells the Mad Hatter when he offers her (nonexistent) wine—that it “wasn’t very civil of [him]” (52)—might well be applied to her interactions with most of the characters in the book—including the Red Queen and her “dreadfully savage” (55) mantra of “off with her head” (62, 65, 71, 95).

Carroll’s treatment of Alice in Looking Glass is, if anything, crueler still. That the book opens with Alice lecturing her cat about punishments—“You know I’m saving up all your punishments for Wednesday week. Suppose they had saved up all my punishments?” (L. Carroll 106)—reveals the way that Carroll seems to take pleasure in tormenting Alice. Later, we find the Tweedle Twins driving Alice to tears by insisting that “[she is] not real” or Humpty Dumpty telling her with grim gallows humor she’d have been better off “[leaving] off [living] at seven” years old instead of seven and a half (142, 160). Such abuse culminates at the book’s end, when—with a shout of “I ca’n’t [sic] stand this any longer!”—Alice “[seizes] the tablecloth with both hands” and brings “plates, dishes, guests, and candles…crashing down together in a heap on the floor” (203). After surviving Carroll’s ludic underworld for as long as she can stand, Alice ascends by waking up.

Alice’s Adventures ends with Alice fending off a pack of cards that amount to nothing more than a pile of dead leaves. The sequel adventure concludes with an even larger mess. If we equate these shambles with Alice’s mental state at the story’s end, we find striking parallels between these “innocent” disasters and the disastrous condition of Alice’s mind in both games. That is, by presenting themselves as continuations of Alice’s story, the games emphasize the torture already present in the books. At the same time, by conflating Alice the character with Alice the “real” child McGee prompts us at least to consider Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell. That Carroll may have been in love with Liddell has been widely acknowledged by critics (for example, Brooker 2 -3, 19; Gardner vi). That Carroll’s relationship with his childhood friend ended poorly is also generally recognized, as is the fact that—in the years prior to Alice’s Adventures (specifically, 1862 – 1864)—Carroll’s diary entries reflect an immensely guilty conscience (Brooker 17, 26). Taken together, these themes of hell and love and guilt make for a precarious ménage à trois under almost any circumstances. Such is particularly true, perhaps, in the mind of a theologian and artist. Which leaves us to wonder: might Carroll have tormented a character modeled on his child-friend because he was likewise tormented by his romantic feelings for her? McGee’s interpretation, at least, suggest the answer could be yes. While we may never answer the question definitively, now that the stories have lost their innocence and, as Brooker notes, “become a twisted myth,” Carroll’s legacy has become shrouded by darkness (Brooker 51 – 2). If the trajectory of recent adaptations provides any preview of how the texts will be read in future decades, it seems unlikely that representations of the stories—not to mention the cultural impression of their author—will, as Siemann suggests, remain anything but “grown up.”

Conclusion

In closing, I should like to consider what the impact of McGee’s games suggests about the authenticity and cultural significance of literary adaptation. As we have seen, despite their “transgressive” aspects, McGee’s Alice games have more in common with Carroll’s stories than we might expect. Furthermore, the so-called “fidelity” of an adaptation arguably has little bearing on its success because it is a separate artform.10 Linda Hutcheon, for example, describes adaptations as “inherently ‘palimpsestuous’ works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts” and becoming “[their] own palimpsestic [things]” (6, 9). Whether an adaptation is, strictly speaking, “authentic” is therefore less a question of “fidelity” than of audience and expectation. An audience familiar only with Disney’s Alice, for example, is likely to be less receptive of a work like McGee’s than an audience familiar with darker adaptations or the texts’ troubling backstory. Alternatively, an audience who plays the game with little to no prior knowledge of either the originals or their adaptations will have an altogether different definition of authenticity since what Hutcheon calls “the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest,” or the ability to experience multiple adaptations simultaneously, becomes inaccessible to players who play the games merely as games—not as adaptations (116).11 

This discussion of reception also raises questions about what constitutes an “authentic” adaptation. Film scholar Dudley Andrew’s section on adaptation (pp. 96 – 106) in Concepts in Film Theory (1984) is worth consulting insofar as the rhetoric surrounding an adaptation’s “borrowing,” “intersecting,” or “transforming” its source material also speaks to the relationship to the source text, though fidelity still seems to be a point of reference. More recently, Ryan Borochovitz’s editorial for the 2023 Association of Adaptation Studies Conference concludes that authenticity is a transient, ambiguous concept often conflated (incorrectly) with fidelity (437 – 438). While Andrew uses compatibility with the so-called “‘spirit’ or “letter” of the text” as a rubric for a successful adaptation, Borochovitz finds more in common with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” as discussed in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” (Borochovitz 436; Dudley 100; see Benjamin pp. 103 - 4). Also helpful is the discussion of authenticity offered by Yosr Dridi in her 2023 article “Beyond Historicity: Aesthetic Authenticity in Cinematic Adaptations of Non-/Anti-Realist Fiction.” In addition to finding Dudley’s notions of the “spirit” and “letter” of the text outdated (295), Dridi disputes the tradition that presupposes that “authentic” adaptations must abide by historical verisimilitude (296)—as is the case, for example, of many period dramas. Rather, Dridi argues that even anti-realistic fiction achieves

“aesthetic authenticity” by becoming (1) “recognizable as an adaptation of previous narratives through explicit and implicit metareferential clues,” (2) “experientially authenticated…and diegetically immersive,” and (3) “medially conscious,…[or] aware of the representational affordances of both the filmic and literary media” (299). Such conditions are of some relevance to Alice adaptations, as well. Not only do American McGee’s Alice games arguably align with these stipulations, but they also exemplify the culture-bending power of adaptations-as-culture-texts through the “metareferential clues” that exist between different adaptations.12 A point Dridi makes about the many adaptations of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818)—that few if any are faithful to the “letter” of the text and thus “[invalidate] all discussions of fidelity and problematize all considerations of authenticity, given the purposeful marginalization of the source text” (307), resulting in “filmic reconstructions of a cultural myth rather than faithful adaptations of a literary narrative” (308)—is also quite true of adaptations of Alice. That is, many audiences become familiar with the stories via cultural absorption, in which the various Alice adaptations communicate metareferentially, rather than through engagement with the source text. Thus, understandings of “authenticity” of any given adaptation will also be shaped by one’s relationship to the source material, the metareferential and culture-textual representations of the material, and the adaptation itself.

By satisfying Dridi’s criteria for “aesthetic authenticity,” McGee’s games arguably also maintain the “spirit” or “aura” of the original stories—psychological torment, fears of growing up, themes of knowledge and curiosity. That the games have shifted from a purely textual to an audiovisual, experiential medium provides another layer of difference, yet this difference need not detract from the games’ “authenticity.” Writing of Tim Burton’s 2010 film adaptation, Anna  Kérchy argues that “the intermedial conjoining of verbal and visual nonsense” we find in Burton’s absurd combinations of computer-generated and live-action images allows for the “[cinematic] translat[ion]” of Carroll’s literary-verbal nonsense (par. 30, 37). A similar point can be made of the games’ treatment of the texts “violent” and “ludic” aspects, with the medium allowing for a more playful and immersive experience. At the same time, the games become independent or “palimpsestuous” works by incorporating elements from Carroll while simultaneously drawing upon other sources both adaptive (e.g., Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 horror stop-motion Alice) and non-adaptive (Dante). Players aware of these relationships can therefore experience adaptations “doubled pleasure” to its fullest extent. 

This idea of adaptation-as-palimpsest draws attention both to the specific influence McGee’s games have had on contemporary representations of Alice as well as, more generally, the culture-shaping potential of adaptive media. That McGee has significantly altered twenty-first-century representations of Alice is hardly contested at this point. Brooker, for example, devotes a large section of his study to an analysis of the internet communities that arose in the wake of the game’s release (see 249 – 262). Siemann, more succinctly, describes McGee’s Alice as “[p]erhaps the most influential of the more recent dark Wonderlands” and notes the successful merchandising tie-ins with the “weapon-wielding teenager” version of Alice (178). One need only survey a handful of  adaptations that have appeared  after McGee to intuit that such has been the case: from Paul W.S. Anderson’s loosely-adaptive zombie-horror film Resident Evil (2002), to Raven Gregory’s gratuitously violent series of graphic novels, Return to Wonderland (2007), to Tim Burton’s more recent “dark Disney” adaptation)—a film McGee accused of “straight-up stealing major plot points from [his] Alice games” in a 2016 Tweet—such adaptations feature a degree of violence and sexual content far less common to Alice works before the games’ release. As we have seen already, Siemann names Alice a “culture text” due to its infiltration of popular media. Similarly, Kérchy describes the contemporary Alice “as a visual product sprung from…Walt Disney, American McGee, Hello Kitty, or Tim Burton,” as well as movies, video games, merchandise, and amusement parks (par. 1). We should also note that—in addition to countering Disney—McGee, via Burton, played a part in the company’s rebranding. Writing of the merchandising tie-ins with Burton’s film, Kamilla Elliott writes that the influence of Burton’s Gothic aesthetic persuaded Disney executives to “[allow artists] to redesign [Disney’s] own image, brand, and logo…emblematized by the Gothic recasting of the Disney logo”  in the film (205; original emphasis). That McGee influenced Burton who in turn influenced Disney to the point of rebranding their image is not trivial in a capitalist society. While demonstrating on one hand that McGee’s anti-Disney rhetoric has, in a sense, come full circle, this phenomenon demonstrates the potential for adaptation to redefine our media, our culture, and our economy.