“The past is not dead. It’s not even the past”: Neo-Victorian Chaos, Order and Identity in Alice: Madness Returns

Year 2025, Volume: 19 Issue: 2, 382 - 392, 29.12.2025

Merve Bekiryazıcı

https://doi.org/10.47777/cankujhss.1667831

https://izlik.org/JA97SL89PD

Abstract

Among the most celebrated works of the Victorian era, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland stands out as a timeless classic with its fun and mad characters in a world of randomness and nonsense. The videogame adaptation of this well-known world in American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns (2011) reintroduces the story with a much darker edge. In Alice: Madness Returns, Alice is now a young lady and she is traumatized by her past as she lost her entire family in a fire and blames herself for this tragic event. This article aims to analyse this new version of Alice from a neo-Victorian perspective, taking Alice as a reflection of the postmodern self in her quest of order in a chaotic world. In her struggles to recover and find the true meaning, Alice needs to restore her memories; and this article further aims to show the need for returning to the past in the process of healing and what this may mean in our connection to Victorian past.

Keywords

neo-Victorianism , chaos , order , videogame , identity

“Geçmiş ölü değildir. Hatta geçmiş bile değildir”: Alice: Madness Returns’de Neo-Viktoryen Kaos, Düzen ve Kimlik

https://izlik.org/JA97SL89PD

Abstract

Lewis Carroll’ın Alice Harikalar Diyarında adlı eseri, rastgelelik ve saçmalıklarla dolu bir dünya içerisindeki eğlenceli ve deli karakterleriyle Viktorya döneminin en bilinen ve sevilen eserlerinden birisi olarak öne çıkmaktadır. Herkesçe tanınan bu dünyanın American McGee tarafından oluşturulan Alice: Madness Returns (2011) adlı bilgisayar oyunu uyarlaması ise hikayeyi bu defa çok daha karanlık bir şekilde ele alır. Oyunda genç bir kız olan Alice, bütün ailesini bir yangında kaybetmiştir ve bu olayla ilgili olarak kendini sorumlu tutması sebebiyle geçmişine ait travmalar altında ezilmektedir. Bu makale, kaotik dünyada düzen arayışı içerisinde olan postmodern bireyin bir yansıması olarak bu yeni Alice’i neo-Viktoryen bir açıdan incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. İyileşme ve gerçek anlamı bulma yolculuğunda Alice’in oyunda hafızasını geri kazanması da gerekmektedir ve bununla ilgili olarak makalenin diğer bir amacı da iyileşme sürecinde geçmişle olan diyaloğun önemini ve bu durumun Viktoryen geçmişle olan ilişkimiz açısından ne anlama geldiğini analiz etmektir.

Keywords

neo-Viktoryenizm , kaos , düzen , bilgisayar oyunu , kimlik

References

• Atwood, M. (1998). In search of Alias Grace: On writing Canadian historical fiction. The American Historical Review, 103(5), 1503-1516. https://doi.org/10.2307/2649966.
• Ayres, B. (2024). Victorian women’s hysteria and neo-Victorian women’s madness. In B. Ayres & S. E. Maier (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of neo-Victorianism, (pp. 427-445). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Beer, G. (2016). Alice in space: The sideways Victorian world of Lewis Carroll. The University of Chicago Press.
• Beller, A. M. & O’Callaghan, C. (2002). (In)Appropriating Alice: The neo-Victorian sexualization of Carroll’s Wonderland. In A. Sanna (Ed.), Alice in Wonderland in film and popular culture, (pp. 217-233). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Blake, K. (1974). Play, games and sport: The literary works of Lewis Carroll. Cornell University Press.
• Carroll, L. (1994). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Penguin Books.
• Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative and history. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Fawcett, C. (2016). American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns and traumatic memory. The Journal of Popular Culture, 49(3), 492-521. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12414.
• Gordon, J. B. (1971). The Alice books and the metaphors of Victorian childhood. In Robert Phillips (Ed.), Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s dreamchild as seen through the critics’ looking-glasses, (pp. 93-113). The Vanguard Press.
• Hayles, N. K. (1991). Chaos bound: Orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science. Cornell University Press.
• Heilmann, A. & Llewellyn, M. (2010). Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the twenty-first century, 1999-2009. Palgrave Macmillan
• Hutcheon, L. (2011). A theory of adaptation. Routledge.
• Kohlke, M.L. (2011). Neo-Victorian childhoods: Re-imagining the worst of times. In M. L. Kohlke & C. Gutleben (Eds.), Neo-Victorian families: Gender, sexual and cultural politics, (pp. 119-48). Brill Rodopi.
• Kohlke, M. L. & Gutleben, C. (2010). Introduction: Bearing after-witness to the nineteenth century. In M. L. Kohlke & C. Gutleben (Eds.), Neo-Victorian tropes of trauma: The politics of bearing after-witness to nineteenth-century suffering, (pp. 1-34). Brill Rodopi.
• Kohlke, M. L. & Gutleben, C. (2011). Introducing neo-Victorian family matters: Cultural capital and reproduction. In M. L. Kohlke & C. Gutleben (Eds.), Neo-Victorian families: Gender, sexual and cultural politics, (pp. 1-42). Brill Rodopi.
• Kohlke, M.L. & Gutleben, C. (2015). Troping the neo-Victorian city: Strategies of reconsidering the metropolis. In M. L. Kohlke & C. Gutleben (Eds.), Neo-Victorian cities: Reassessing urban politics and poetics, (pp. 1-40). Brill Rodopi.
• Kohlt, F. (2012). ‘Review of American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns and The Art of Alice: Madness Returns’ and ‘Interview with American McGee’. Lewis Carroll Review: The Reviewing Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society, 48, 1-12.
• Laub, D. (1992). Bearing witness, or the vicissitudes of listening. In S. Felman & D. Laub (Eds.), Testimony: Crisis of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, (pp. 57-74). Routledge.
• Lecercle, J. J. (1994). Philosophy of nonsense: The intuitions of Victorian nonsense literature. Routledge.
• Lovell-Smith, R. (2003). The animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll’s reader. Criticism, 45(4), 383-415. https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2004.0020.
• McGee, A. (2017, August 10). American McGee plays Alice: Madness Returns [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzpOjbnOxRc.
• McGee, A. (2011). Alice: Madness Returns [Videogame]. Electronic Arts (EA).
• Murphy, R. (2012). Darwin and 1860s children’s literature: Belief, myth or detritus. Journal of Literature and Science, 5(2), 5-21.
• Sewell, E. (1952). The field of nonsense. Chatto and Windus.
• Shuttleworth, S. (1997). Natural history: The retro-Victorian novel. In E. S. Shaffer (Ed.), The third culture: Literature and science, (pp. 253-268). De Gruyter.
• Susina, J. (2009). The place of Lewis Carroll in children’s literature. Routledge.
• Wolfreys, J. (2015). “Part barrier, part entrance to a parallel dimension”: London and the modernity of urban perception. In M. L. Kohlke & C. Gutleben (Eds.), Neo-Victorian cities: Reassessing urban politics and poetics, (pp. 127-47). Brill Rodopi.
• Zipes, J. (1984). The age of commodified fantasticism: Reflections of children’s literature and the fantastic. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 9(4), 187-190. https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.0316.