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The inventive world of Wonderland and Alice’s journey in to her own imagination is more then merely a children’s story. Looking deep at the symbols and structure of the story one can see that it becomes more complex and abstract as Alice gets deeper and deeper in her journey in Wonderland. Lewis Carol wrote the book in 1876 and Disney produced its own animated version of Alice in Wonderland no more then twenty years ago. The Disney production aimed at a younger audience, shows Wonderland as a very colourful and vibrant place, full of flowers, trees and a majestic garden of wonder and glory. Although Disney is successful at doing that, it fails in showing the hidden aspects of the story, the aspects of the novel that need to be dug into to comprehend. This is most likely because it was aimed a younger audience. The symbolism that is used helps to create a deeper understanding of the true meaning of the story. When just watching or reading the story one may think that from the looks of it, the story about Alice falling through a rabbit-hole and finding herself in a silly and nonsense world, is fairly guileless as a tale. The underlying story, the one about a girl maturing away from home in what seems to be a world ruled by chaos and nonsense, is quite a frightening one. All the time, Alice finds herself confronted in different situations involving various different and curious animals being all alone. She hasn't got any help at all from home or the world outside of Wonderland. This represents a theme of abandonment. The main theme of the story is Alice’s identity crisis and her journey to find her identity. This young girl's journey is symbolic of universal growth and self-discovery. As Alice learns a great deal about herself with each new encounter in Wonderland, she begins to realize that these experiences weaken and even distort her previously stable self-image. Accepted norms now seem foreign to Alice, and in many ways she becomes an outcast. In one situation where Alice discovers this, is when she is confronted by the caterpillar, who is one character who cannot accept Alice's lack of self awareness, or at least what he considers self-awareness to indicate. When he asks Alice to divulge her identity, Alice cannot respond with confidence and suffers the caterpillar's reprimand.
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