Metamorphosis, Bodily Distortion and Loss of Identity in "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" and "Le Avventure di Pinocchio"

This essay looks at the way Alice and Pinocchio, in very different contexts and literary traditions, refashion the tropes of body distortion and metamorphosis. Wonderland is populated by grotesque eccentrics – who also abound in Collodi’s book. Eccentricities are, of course, distortions from the norm, and Alice and Pinocchio suffer from both distortions of themselves and distortions of the worlds around them. Both Alice’s Adventures and Pinocchio’s Avventure stage vulnerable child bodies in surreal, dangerous, and often quite violent adult worlds. Both undergo forms of devolution into inferior species which challenge their already unstable identities. For Alice, growing in size is not as natural as growing up, while Pinocchio for most of his adventures feels and behaves like a human being, but is denied the possibility of growing up. In their journey towards body normalization, they witness all sorts of grotesque and painful transformations. In Alice, from the dodo to the gnat to the fawn, creatures reflect the same degree of vulnerability and mutability that she has discovered in herself. In the cautionary adult-controlled world of Pinocchio and the metamorphic anxiety-ridden world of Alice, human pain and animal pain are not so distant after all. In both books the child’s journey towards identity and stability is nothing but linear. Its trajectory is undermined and distorted by trials, pitfalls, dilemmas, but especially, by the constant mutability of forms.