In the 2010 Alice in Wonderland film, Tim Burton introduces a small but wonderful character, Aunt Imogene, played by the incomparable Frances de la Tour, best known for her role as Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Imogene is Alice and Margaret Kingsleigh's aunt, an old maid whose manner of dress is both inappropriately young and far too dated. We see Imogene early in the film (and its novelization), just after Alice has seen the White Rabbit and is trying desperately to flee Hamish's public proposal in the gazebo. Alice bumps into Imogene, quite literally, and complains of seeing a rabbit in a waistcoat.
"I can't be bothered with your fancy rabbit now," Imogene said, patting her ridiculous curls. "I'm waiting for my fiancé."
This was strange enough to distract Alice from the rabbit for a moment. "You have a fiancé?"
A sudden flash of white darted past her and she whirled around. "There! Did you see it?" she cried. Her gaze searched the tangled shrubbery frantically, but everything was still again.
"He's a prince," Imogene simpered, ignoring Alice's last question to go back to the story of her fiancé. "But, alas, he cannot marry me unless he renounces the throne. It's tragic, isn't it?"
Alice gave her a skeptical look. "Very." Perhaps Imogene had lost her mind. She certainly sounded madder than Alice right now. Alice smiled and nodded politely, backing away from her aunt. Imogene had her hands clasped under her chin and was gazing off into the distance, waiting for her imaginary fiancé to appear.
It's interesting to me that Aunt Imogene can take on such a grand role in such a short amount of time. She is the embodiment of the decaying dream, a recurring theme throughout this version of the story; Alice's father's dreams of eastward expansion of trade routes, her sister's ideal marriage that's really not, and Victorian society's expectations that Alice marry up to be successful in life, are all crumbling at the onset of the story.
We don't know if Imogene ever really loved a prince, and it's ultimately irrelevant. Her prince is the last remaining hope she has for fulfilling the expectations of others. She is trying desperately to hang on to the lucid dreams of her youth, now yellowed and faded but dressed up in garish blush.
Alice, of course, escapes her own potential fiancé by falling down the rabbit hole on her return visit to Underland. She has her adventure with the Mad Hatter, her strange and sexually-charged encounters with Stayne the Knave of Hearts, and the battles of ego with both the Red Queen and the White Queen. After Alice slays the Jabberwocky on Frabjous Day and bids her farewells to her friends, she returns to the garden party at the Ascot estate.
One by one, she gives her youthful, unabashed truths to the party-goers of note. She declines Hamish's proposal, she tells her sister to butt out of her life, and she warns her brother-in-law against infidelitous behavior. She rids herself of Lady Ascot's judgments of her, she establishes herself as an adult (and as her father's daughter) to her own mother, and she engages Lord Ascot in a continuation of her late father's business dealings, defining herself as confident, competent, and capable.
In the midst of her parade of proclamations, Alice pauses to address her aunt a final time:
"There is no prince, Aunt Imogene. You need to talk to someone about these delusions."
The irony, of course, is that Alice has just come back again from a world of delusions that have shaped her since her childhood. Alice is able to let the delusory events happen and wash over her and pass away without being caught up in them day after day. Aunt Imogene, however, has been mired in her dream for so long that she can't see how her life has become stuck in her own psychic muck.
One of my favorite songs ever is "The Side of the Road" by Concrete Blonde. Johnette Napolitano sings over her banjo, "It's hard recognizing a dream that's gone dead." That's exactly what's happened to poor Imogene. She has never been able to wake from her dream and either carry it forward to fruition, or to let it fade into the twilight.
I'm not one to advocate giving up on a dream, certainly; sometimes your dreams just have to be delayed until a more appropriate time. But then there are the dreams that you have to look at in the harshest of lights, to see that they will never come to pass, no matter how much you doll yourself up for them. When that time comes, you just have to put your party dress away, take down your pin curls, and wash the bright pink muck off your face, ready to face a new day and grab a new dream.
Possibly my favourite character in the film! I appreciate your reflection on the character and her purpose in the film.
- Sam
Posted by: Sam | Sunday, April 22, 2018 at 04:16 AM