ALICE IN WONDERLAND. What is Alice afraid of?

In James Cameron’s Titanic, there is a breathtaking scene that perfectly mirrors Alice in Wonderland. It captures a stifling sense of stagnation and internal unrest. At breakfast, Rose sits at a table with her mother, who is speaking to finely dressed first-class friends about her daughter’s upcoming wedding. She discusses sending out invitations, how college is for finding a husband (and Rose has done just that!), the search for a wedding dress, the banquet, and the menu. Rose sits politely beside her, but her mind drifts far away. Her gaze moves across the other tables, and at one, she notices a little girl mimicking elegant gestures (holding her pinky just so while sipping tea, spreading her napkin just so, sitting perfectly straight). Rose sees a reflection of her younger self.

And then something inside her breaks. She realizes that she has lived in a cage since birth. Now, she is beginning to suffocate. Rose knows she never truly belonged to this world.

Most likely, every child, like Alice, would follow a white rabbit in a waistcoat into a burrow. Curiosity about the unknown is often too strong. Many adults, too, would wake from sleep in terror after nightmares of Wonderland. The magnetic force of Alice in Wonderland stems from its accumulation of visual oddities, narrative paradoxes, and surreal depictions of living and inanimate things. Its broad interpretative range and the potential for multifaceted readings give Walt Disney’s adaptation layers of subtext (though forgive me for focusing on just one here). This vision begs to be called narcotic… or at least mad. Yet such terms may be too extreme for the adventures dreamed up by a school-age girl.

Alice drifts into a nap in a meadow, under idyllic conditions. A gentle spring breeze, soft green grass shaded by a massive tree, and an almost cloudless sky. Nightingales sing overhead, and the air is filled with the aroma of wildflowers. Alice was lulled to sleep by a dull history lesson from her private tutor. The titular character is a girl from a good, wealthy family. Her future is planned, written, and paid for. A sense of security—perhaps not yet fully conscious at her age—is her daily reality. A high standard of living and comfort are not luxuries but routine. It’s an ideal life, a bubble-like existence. Naturally, young Alice hasn’t yet had the chance to learn much about the real world.

The episodic, fragmented narrative of Alice in Wonderland may not form a cohesive story, and the forest path Alice carefully treads is riddled with dead ends—sometimes even swept away by a broom-dog. Subsequent threads do not follow logically from one another. Instead, they create a mosaic of peculiarities and mysterious locations. The only unifying element is the rabbit, always running toward the unknown, connecting each place: a reminder that we are still exploring the same territory. However, we are not on the other side of a mirror but inside Alice’s mind. In this absurdly grotesque and deceptively credible dream, many fears and unspoken aversions of the protagonist find representation. Alice, after all, seeks to step out of line, avoid being boxed in, and live boldly, defying conventions.

What is Alice afraid of? She is troubled by (and increasingly will be as she ages) the rituals of the aristocratic class she represents. In her dream, the props, places, and characters that surround her daily life—symbols of order and luxury—manifest in exaggerated and sometimes menacing forms by contrast. A cute kitten in reality becomes a traitorous cat in her dream; an elite, elegant game of croquet transforms into a corrupt and sadistic “entertainment”; a fairy-tale kingdom turns into a hotbed of lies and totalitarian rule. It starts with subtle symptoms: an ornate but dungeon-like room beyond the rabbit hole, the feminine trappings of a dressing table, pink upholstery in the rabbit’s house, a birdcage-shaped golden stomach on an actual bird, and tea sets.

Small impulses later evolve into complex events. The traditional English tea party hosted by the March Hare and the Mad Hatter becomes an absurd, exhausting carnival of pranks and mischief. Playing cards (likely for bridge) turn into armed knights serving a despotic queen. Surrounded on all sides, Alice flees from everything she knows so well. In the finale, the protagonist arrives at the royal court. The enraged queen unjustly puts her on trial. Alice is to face execution first and hear the verdict later. This is too much for her. All that remains is escape—first, merely from an innocent dream. The more significant steps will come in the not-so-distant future.

The girl hides her true self from us (and still shyly from herself). For now, it is suppressed and unexpressed, but it is slowly coming to the surface. This is not merely a case of youthful rebellion—that stage is still at least a few years away—but of entirely different needs and a strong personality. The protagonist refuses to be confined by rigid social frameworks and the predetermined role of a well-mannered young lady with a dowry. The reflection of these feelings and doubts is Alice’s vision. Alice in Wonderland is not a hymn to the magical power of imagination but an unconscious cry from a girl foreshadowing her future independence.

Rose and Alice are twin heroines, coming from similar backgrounds and plagued by similar doubts (would Alice grow into as much of a frustrated woman as Rose?). Both experience pivotal moments in their lives—though at different stages of development—that establish a new, yet identical, hierarchy of values. The heroine of Titanic was set on a new path by a romance ending in traumatic separation. Alice didn’t have to sacrifice as much but gained an equally valuable lesson. She had the chance to discover a truer version of herself.

In the finale, Alice wakes up, her kitten napping on her lap, and the idyllic meadow looks just as it did before her journey through Wonderland. She jumps to her feet, happily heading home for dinner. At first glance, nothing has changed. Yet Alice is richer for one dream—a liberating dream.