I know some of the fairy tale scholars (and some casual fans) are sniffing a bit at the idea of "Alice" being lumped in with fairy tales. Spoilers for the episode indicate that Wonderland is going to be another alternate world and not just another country in Fairytale land; I think that is a nice nod to the idea that the place Alice goes when she steps through the Looking Glass or falls down a rabbit hole is *not* the same place that Snow White grew up. However, I don't have quite the same problem taking Alice and Cinderella in the same breath that some people do. I think part of the fact is that I'm simply a lover of variations on a theme and am greedy enough to take new tellings of my favorite tales where I can find them. And Alice is one of my very favorite colors to see storytellers paint with. (Indeed Carroll/Dodgson is also one of my favorite "characters" to see reworked as I have a bit of a pet hobby of tracking down books that feature fictionalized versions of this fascinating man.) I'm rather old-fashioned in that I tend to prefer reading new tellings of my favorite stories to reading tales that are (well, that try to be) totally new and original.
One of the things that hit me very hard during the Jabberwocky fight of during Tim Burton's Alice movie was the fact this is a story that originally came out of one man's head. And it just floored me as someone who spends a lot of time surrounded by fairy and folk tales. Sure, Carroll didn't pull the story from thin air, but we know who wrote the Alice stories in a way we certainly don't know who first told a Cinderella story. And it amazes me that these images that carry so much mental and imaginative weight with me--the Cheshire cat's smile, the Mad Tea Party, the fall down the rabbit hole--can clearly be traced back to one author (and illustrator to give Tenniel his due).To think that such a collection of magical moments can be traced back to one man living in Oxford rather than a thousand and one men, women and children sitting around fireplaces in a a thousand and one lands! To have the chance to watch these two books enter the culture through all the different movies/theater productions/short stories/tv shows/fanfics is just fascinating to me. It's interesting to see what particulars of the original are magnified and which are discarded in each new telling! I can't help but wonder if this is what it is like to watch a folktale being born.
And I think that this distillation and dissemination of story elements is one of the things that is letting me consider Alice, and the Hatter, and Cheshire Cat as fairy tale characters. While we know who came up with these characters, they've been re-envisioned and retold in so many ways in the years since Carroll's publication. With the OUAT previews, already people are bringing up the SyFy "Alice" Hatter of a few years back. In fact, I think I've seen the Andrew Potts Hatter referenced more than the Carroll/Tenniel Hatter. That version of the character has become more "real" to some people than the original. And to me personally that is not only one of the best things about fairy tales but one of the defining things about them--the fact that there are many different versions that are accepted as the "true" version.
This is actually one of my favorite things about the internet and one of the reasons that I intellectually believe that fanfic is a positive cultural artifact--not something to be tolerated (or worse yet outlawed). I believe that with the advent of the printing press, and especially as books became cheaper and literacy grew more widespread came a decline in the art of oral storytelling. And as people came to look to books, radio, TV, and movies as their sources of "story" entertainment, I think that we all started getting a bit more passive about our interaction with tales and their telling. When we read Cinderella out of a book we are consuming the tale in a less active way then if we were telling our friends a version that combined the "Cinderella" our grandmother told us with the "Cinderella" our best friend liked (and maybe throwing in a bit of our favorite "Beauty and the Beast" for good measure.) I'm not saying that people have stopped telling children stories all together and that people weren't pondering alternate endings to stories well before the internet. But the sharing and conversing that goes on over ff.net and blogs makes me think of people sitting around taverns and fires in the (perhaps mythic) past and distilling out the parts of stories that most resonated with their own towns and lives.
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