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

Authors : Merve Bekiryazıcı

Pages : 382-392

Doi:10.47777/cankujhss.1667831

View : 61 | Download : 526

Publication Date : 2025-12-29

Article Type : Research Paper

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

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