Alice objectified?:21st-century Retellings of Alice in Wonderland

This thesis analyses two recent film adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in order to determine why the protagonist has frequently been transformed into a young woman in visual media adaptations during the last two decades. In the original books, Alice was a seven-year old girl, but in all major retellings of the story published since 2000 the character has been aged to a woman in her twenties. The adaptations that were chosen for closer analysis were the film Alice in Wonderland from 2010 and a two-part miniseries called Alice from 2009. The hypothesis is, that the character of Alice has been made older in order to be more sexually attractive rather than to give her more agency. The primary material was analysed using feminist and postfeminist theories, with an emphasis on the way women and especially the protagonist were represented visually, what their agency was like and what roles they were given. In addition to the analyses, the thesis discusses why the films’ and series’ approaches are problematic from a feminist point of view, as the covert messages in these productions reinforce harmful and limiting stereotypes for women while appearing feminist on the surface The results were largely in line with the hypothesis and it could be argued that changes in societal norms in the twenty-first century put more and more pressure on girls and women to be sexually attractive objects, while at the same time expecting them to appear empowered and highly individual. Therefore, this thesis claims that these works fall into a postfeminist sensibility, with their emphasis on individual responsibility while complying with traditional feminine roles and a preoccupation with youth and appearances