Slaying the Jabberwocky: Trauma, madness and identity in Alice’s Wonderlands from Carroll to Burton

This article explores how Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) reinterpret madness, trauma and imagination as evolving forms of cultural resistance. It argues that Carroll’s Victorian text anticipates the medicalization of the mind that culminated in the diagnosis of hysteria, transforming the era’s anxieties over moral control and female imagination into acts of creative defiance. Through an examination of nineteenth-century psychological discourse including the works of Bain, Spencer and Sully, this study situates Alice within the intellectual climate that sought to regulate emotion and imagination. It then traces how these discourses re-emerge in Burton’s adaptation, where madness is reframed through a post-traumatic lens. Burton’s Alice returns to Wonderland not as a dreamer but as a survivor, confronting grief, repression and patriarchal expectation through a symbolic psychodrama of integration. By combining feminist theory, trauma studies and adaptation theory, this article argues that both Carroll and Burton construct madness as a language of protest that transforms pathology into empowerment. In doing so, Alice in Wonderland becomes a cultural continuum that charts the shifting boundaries between imagination and insanity, resistance and recovery, from the nineteenth century to the present.