Salvador Dali’s 150th Anniversary volume of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” contains a thorough introduction that informs the reader about the elements of Dali’s art that represent and reflect Carroll’s ‘Alice’. According to the introduction, “Dali’s drippy, trippy, hypersaturated pictures are far removed from the photo(sur)realism we associate with him; they feature an enigmatic icon of Alice whose arms form part of a circle that is complete by what could be a jump rope, a mirror, or the edge of a rabbit hole…its hermeneutic ambiguity was certainly intentional. (And in none of the representations is the girl wearing anything that would remotely permit her to actually jump rope, even in a dream.)” (Burstein xi). Apparently, “This image was a rather significant, if long unused, trope for Dali, which first appeared as a sketch (later completed as a painting, The Nostalgic Echo)…from this image evolved the silhouette of a girl in a long pleated dress, her outstretched arms forming a circle above her head, in the foreground” (Burstein xi). The introduction continues with “The Icon, emblematic rather than human, is also manifested in many of Dali’s paintings through the mid-1940’s but does not seem to have caught his attention again for a quarter century, after which he very much associated with Alice” (xiii) therefore indicating the existence of a personal relationship between Dali and Lewis’s Alice, and further indicating the significance that Alice plays (as a literary figure) in Dali’s life, as he uses his emblematic ‘little girl’ figure to carry through to Carroll’s Alice.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis, and Salvador Dali. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 150th Anniversary Edition ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015. Print.