So you've got yourself a little story about a
more than ordinary young girl who's
not fully satisfied with the
status quo. Perhaps she yearns for a place where the
Grass Is Greener, her parents dote on her every whim, or
she's a princess. Just
Go Ask Alice: she's unsatisfied. She either visits or
finds herself trapped in some sort of
Alternate Universe (potentially a
Dark World) where
bizarre creatures and
The Fair Folk are common inhabitants. The heroine will often encounter
various parallels between this strange place and her former reality. She may undergo trials through which she
learns a lesson about
herself or her place in the world. There will be enough strange goings on to make you wonder if
the creators were on something, so expect potential
Nightmare Fuel from even the more lighthearted variants. By the time she makes it home, many viewers will
wonder if it was
All Just A Dream.
Crawling through tunnels, descending underground, and getting stuck in confined spaces are all unusually common (though not required) in these works. The symbolism is usually one of separating the real from fantasy world with a physical barrier that can not be crossed from elsewhere on the real world side. The presence of so many long, narrow tunnels in what are usually
coming of age stories may also make you wonder if
Freud Was Right. The underground stuff may well be as much a case of
Closer To Earth (in more than one sense) as it is a dwelling for
The Fair Folk.
This has been
evolving through various adaptations of the story:
Alice goes literally down the
Rabbit Hole (and finds herself
stuck in odd places), while
Chihiro and
Coraline both cross over through comparable tunnels.
Sarah gets trapped in an
oubliette which is but a part of the long confined path that is the Labyrinth itself, and then you have
David Bowie crooning about the Underground.
Ofelia experiences this phenomenon the most; she meets the Faun at the bottom of a pit at the end of (another) labyrinth, crawls through the mud under a tree, and encounters the Pale Man beneath a bedroom floor. In one very distinct version,
Dorothy doesn't go through a hole— she's dropped into Oz
by a tornado (which one could view as a free-standing hole due to its "hollow" structure).
Christopher Booker categorizes this plot structure under
Voyage and Return, which he identifies as being most suited to children's stories (not that it can't be used for adult ones as well). The hero (usually) can't bring anything back from the world of journey other than
personal growth. Another distinction is that the world doesn't conform
Real World logic. In fact, because the hero can't trust logic as a guide, she has to use intuition, a good heart, and an ability to acquire allies (though she may be unsure who to trust).
If the hero spends
too long expecting the world to make sense and
complains when it doesn't, you may have a character who doesn't really belong in these types of adventures. Sometimes that's half the fun for the audience. Usually, the main character adjusts before the craziness kills her.
Even when the work is critically acclaimed, at least one reviewer is still likely to accuse the creators of "lazy and haphazard" storytelling for trying to create a world where anything can happen.
Also a specific variant of
The Hero's Journey. Contrast
Up The Real Rabbit Hole. Compare with
Trapped In Another World.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
Films
- Alice
by Jan Svankmajer is the most spiritually faithful deranged and incomprehensible adaptation that I've seen, with it's stop-motion animation, and mostly silent script.
- It doesn't happen in the book, but James and the Giant Peach has the boy crawling into the center of the peach through a hole that he ate, where the film detours from live-action into the stop-motion animated portions of the film.
- Labyrinth.
- The Matrix, Keanu Reeves starring as our darling Alice. White bunnies mentioned.
- Mirror Mask: Word Of God is that the Henson company asked Neil Gaiman for a movie that was "whatever genre Labyrinth is".
- The same applies with Helena as with Anna in Paperhouse. Helena is in essence, the creator of her world. Compare with Jareth's god-like qualities in Labyrinth. Also note that both Helena and Jareth juggle, thus inverting the power dynamic. Helena is also a classic circus brat, which makes this a brilliant mix of tropes, especially when compared with the already established Circus Of Fear trope, which brings the wonderland to you.
- Pan's Labyrinth: Notable for inverting the origin of the heroine and where she's trying to return to.
- Also notable for not making "Real Life" so mundane. The main character's troubles don't just start as soon as she makes a naive mistake. Ordinary humans are not so innocent, and real life is often more evil than fantasy. A successful mix of genres, if you will. Or a subversion of a trope.
- Paperhouse: "Anna is becoming lost in the loneliness of her own world when she discovers she can visit another, a house she has drawn herself and occupied by a young disabled boy. But as she discovers more of the links between her fantasy world and the mundane present, she is drawn only deeper into a dream turning into a nightmare. "
- Includes the drawing element, also found in Mirror Mask. The girl draws, and thus creates, the world herself, thus implying that she can effect the world around her.
- Although we don't follow her there, Carol Anne's sojourn on the Other Side in Poltergeist may qualify, particularly as she doesn't seem to remember much of what happened to her. Plus, the way her closet tried to drag her back again matches the "rabbit hole" imagery ... if it's a carnivorous rabbit with an extradimensional esophagus, that is.
- The Company Of Wolves is about a girl's dream, with lots of fairytale references, as well as sexual symbolism.
- Forbidden Zone parodies this, with the "Rabbit hole" being a giant mouth which you're later defecated into the sixth dimension.
Music
- Fiona Apple's song "Sleep to Dream" subverts this trope.
- Gwen Stefani's song and music video of "What You Waiting For?" uses this trope.
- Oomph!'s music video for "Labyrinth" mostly references the usual Alice In Wonderland tropes but throws in a wardrobe, a labyrinth, and extra underground descent for good measure.
Literature
- Alice In Wonderland. Trope Namer and probably the Trope Maker.
- Coraline.
- Narnia has elements of this. Apt since each book has at least one girl hero. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has plenty in common with regard to Lucy, up until the other children become involved on the other side.
- Milo in Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth certainly undergoes this, for a male character.
- The Wizard Of Oz.
- Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott, is about a two dimensional character who goes to many different dimensions. The main character is clueless, of course.
- The Spin Offspring sequel, Flatterland: Like Flatland Only More So, by Ian Stewart, is even closer to the trope, since its protagonist is A. Square's independently-minded granddaughter, Victoria Line. (A. Square himself, of course, is given the first name of Albert).
- The Forbidden Game trilogy by L. J. Smith features a girl, who, with a group of friends, gets sucked into the shadow world. Features a Persephone-like love story.
- Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the main character becomes invisible to those around him, and has to travel around in London Below to find a way home.
Myths and Legends
- Persephone's abduction myth.
Theatre
- Clara in The Nutcracker. Clara's journey isn't scary once the Mouse King is dispatched, none of the places she goes are confined or underground and she has no tasks to complete.
- Deconstructed in Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, where a character says she thinks the cliché of a young girl going on a journey in a surreal world where she's acted upon but rarely gets a chance to act on the setting is overplayed, and she refuses the call to adventure and goes home "In the name of Alice, Dorothy, Wendy and all the others".
- In The Phantom Of The Opera, Christine goes underground with the Phantom. Includes masquerades, mirrors, and masks.
- In the original book, naive and childlike Christine literally interprets her descent to the Opera's cellars as transition to a mystical underworld and describes the Phantom in terms reminiscent of The Fair Folk. In the book the Opera's cellars actually have other inhabitants almost as peculiar as the Phantom himself, almost composing a miniature world in themselves, though it's more mundane than it seems to her.
Video Games
Web Original
- This site is all about this trope. It calls it "Girls Underground". Also features a number of examples.
- Cheshire Crossing. Alice Liddell, after years of being sent to insane asylums because of her delusion, ends up at a new place, run by Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford, who has figured out that she isn't crazy. She meets two other girls: Dorothy Gale and Wendy Darling, who also have been assumed to be insane. Their nanny is a woman named Mary Poppins who turns out to be a really powerful witch. Hilarity Ensues.
