My name is Deana Craighead and I am the Curator of Art at Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas. In the spring of 2024, the museum opened Dali’s Wonderland, an exhibition that features a limited-edition copy of Alice in Wonderland from the personal library of local philanthropist Sybil B. Harrington, illustrated by the artist Salvador Dali.
Salvador Dali was a member of the surrealist art movement which emphasizes the unconscious and the dreamlike. In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll immerses the reader in a dream-state through which Alice experiences suspended reality, limitless curiosity, and altered states of the body, a perfect pairing for surrealism. So much so that in chapter one, we meet Alice as she begins her journey to Wonderland by falling through a rabbit hole, a fall so long that “time seems to stop” and she begins to daydream.
It is also in the first chapter that Alice becomes disassociated from her physical body, finding a potion which she drinks it all at once and begins to shrink in size. This establishes a recurring theme of being “too big” and “too small” that continues throughout the book. As Alice’s adventures in Wonderland continue, her frustration drives her to tears. Again, almost as if in a dream, Alice becomes small and is dwarfed by the pool of the tears she has cried and almost drowns. As the story continues, Alice stumbles upon the White Rabbit once more. Mistaking her for his housemaid, he sends Alice to his house where she finds yet another potion and quickly grows too large, forcing her head against the ceiling and her arm extending out the window.
In his paintings, Salvador Dali often depicts bodies stretched, twisted and pulled in unnatural ways. Dr. Gisela Carbonell, art curator and writer, describes these incomplete bodies as representative of anxiety and charged with meaning. In the context of surrealism, Dali is creating a visual language for an inner dream world. This visual language emphasizes the anxiety-inducing elements of Wonderland where Alice has lost control of everything, including her physical body.
As we resume the story, Alice meets the languid caterpillar, whose hookah implies the psychedelics often associated with surrealism. Agitated and confused by their conversation, Alice begins to eating from opposite sides of his mushroom, growing so small that she fears disappearing altogether. Like a caterpillar, Alice is undergoing a metamorphosis of her own, a surreal transformation from a naïve girl into an inquisitive young woman, much like the change from caterpillar to butterfly observed in nature.
Finally, Alice is called to testify in the case of the stolen tarts, but begins to grow again, upturning the jury box with her once again large, and quite awkward body. As she grows, however, her physicality is now a metaphor for her burgeoning adulthood, becoming less afraid and more confident with her growing size, inciting a riot which rouses her from Wonderland.
Alice wakes with her head in her sister’s lap as leaves fall from the tree above. As if to underscore the connections between the dreamlike worlds of wonderland and surrealism, at the center of Dali’s illustration for this final chapter is a bright red poppy, representing death, renewal and life, a fitting metaphor for Alice’s surreal journey through Wonderland.
