1st draft

Yuriel Espinal

In Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, one can diagnose the character, White Rabbit, with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). As one of the first characters we meet in the story, the White Rabbit, sets a certain tone and gives the reader an idea of the different characters that Alice, and the reader, will soon meet. If one looks deeper into the characters and their actions it is easy to determine that the majority of them have some sort of psychological disorders. The White Rabbit is just one example.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), or General Anxiety, is essentially the constant anxiety over almost everything. Symptoms include being restless or “on edge” , irritability, being socially uncomfortable, and a few more. This is also commonly mistaken as the stage before a panic attack, which is a completely different form of anxiety altogether. The White Rabbit shows these tree symptoms very often throughout the novel.
When we first meet the White Rabbit, he is very restless and jumpy. On page 7, it reads “and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it.” We still do not know why he is hurrying but it seems as though he is very nervous. On page 17 it reads “he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself…” Clues from the text leads me to believe that he was very wound up, so much so he began to mutter to himself. Also, when he began to mutter, it made Alice desperate enough to ask to help. I can infer from the reading that he was so jumpy it made Alice want to help immediately.
The White Rabbit also displays an immense amount of irritability. He is a lot more assertive with people that are “inferior” to him. He is a lot more stern with his slaves and workers. He gets irritated very easily with them as well. On page 49 it says “Sure, I don’t like it, yer honor, at all at all. Do as I tell you, you coward!”. This shows that he gets upset extremely easy. He is irritated with the simplest things. The anxiety kicks in at this point in which he begins to scream and order around all of his workers. His irritability is taken up a notch when he decides that the only way to get Alice out of his house is to “burn the house down!” (pg 52).
Early on, the White Rabbit shows signs of being socially awkward as well. He seems to be very nervous around people he has never met before. It seems that way because on page 18, the narrator states “The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid gloves and the fan, and scurried away into the darkness as hard as he could go.” When he had first seen Alice, he immediately drops everything and runs as fast as his legs could take him. This is evidence that he is socially uncomfortable, especially around people he has never met or seen before.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice on the Stage he states “And the White Rabbit, what of him? Was he framed on the ‘Alice’ lines, or meant as a contrast?”. According to Carroll, it is unclear to the reader whether or not the White Rabbit was intended to be portrayed the way he is. Lewis goes on to say “I’m sure his voice should quaver, and his knees quiver, and his whole air suggest a total inability to say ‘Boo’ to a goose!” Lewis Carroll clears it up and essentially tell us that the White Rabbit was meant to be the way people portray him to be.
Evidence in Alice in Wonderland can lead us to believe that the characters have some sort of psychological problem. Each of them act differently, so to put all of them under one title would be irrelevant. This shows that there is more psychological meaning to this story than it just being a kids book. Everything in this story is significant, and has more meaning than what it seems.