Alice is not insane, the people around her are the ones who are insane.
Alice is not insane, the people around her are the ones who are insane. After the last post regarding Alice and her emotional state, I want to go deeper with this.
I've talked about this in DWRP settings but I never talked about this here.
So, in the games (and even out of the games), Alice is always referred to as "insane" and I personally, have always disagreed with that.
And the reason for that is that if Alice was treated in modern society, she would have been in intensive in-patient treatment in hospital at her worst times and given out-patient services upon release. Alice would have access to medication, like maybe even benzos, SSRIs, and anti-psychotics. I, myself, am diagnosed with C-PTSD, so I speak from personal experience when I say this. You see therapists that specialize in trauma (if you're lucky, in some cases) that handle people like Alice.
The real reason why Alice is considered insane because Victorian society didn't have the knowledge to treat psychosis and severe C-PTSD. Things in the modern era are not 100% perfect, but we have things that have come to light to treat C-PTSD, even after the release after AMR.
So, from my last post, I talked about two different things that I want to delve deeper into:
People underestimate Alice's self-regulation and control. She is high-functioning with her psychosis.
Alice is not an inherently violent person unless she has to defend herself.
Throughout the games, Alice remains really level-headed, she is a very collected person. She is rational (although, again, some may call her irrational), thoughtful, and more of a realist than an idealist. If you have a chance to read Lewis Carroll's original work, even a younger Alice is a realist while the Wonderland inhabitants are the most irrational people who act based on their emotions. Alice doesn't always do this.
Although, if she is put underneath enough duress, Alice will react with her emotions. In certain circumstances, like exploitation, manipulation, and blackmail, Alice will lose her cool. She'll lash out at others (like the meltdowns Pris, Wilson, Nanny, and Radcliffe mention specifically) and it will trigger her psychosis as well as other PTSD symptoms. But she never lashes out violently -- even in the past, she's turned that violence onto herself. I won't get into details but you can read some more in Dr. Wilson's Casebook.
I would say outside of Nanny, who is arguably the most supportive and caring to Alice, everyone expects Alice to act out violently. She never does, unless pressured. People already have this mental image of Alice as an unstable, violent, and delusional person and they do not go beyond that, they don't have conversations with her. Nanny may to a degree, but Nanny is also guilty of assuming Alice is unreachable, despite her being the only person who cares for her.
It seems like everyone is pining to get Alice back in Rutledge Asylum and I submit the reason why is not out of care or understanding of mental illness is because they are not emotionally equipped to address even the most basic confrontation. They are also unwilling to put the work in to understand Alice that she is her own person, with her own thoughts. You only see a glimpse of it from one of the police officers who remarks how he admires Alice's confrontation with Jack Splatter.
Now, onto Nanny, she has her own issues and I'm sure having to be forced to work as a prostitute and being left desolate has had an emotional effect on her. So Nanny can only be there for Alice so much, she's not able to cope with the complexities of Alice's mental illness because of her own issues.
Then Pris Witless, who I would argue has some sadist tendencies, who doesn't care for individuals that were left under care as a nurse. She delights in tormenting Alice -- and we do know that she was physically abusive to her. She shows glee in a memory of Alice talking about what they did for executions. So whatever underlying mental illnesses she has is only made worse to her addiction to alcohol. Additionally, Pris does seem to be a bit delusional. She thinks she's doing the right thing in misconstruing Alice (who was a CHILD by the way) thinking the fire was her fault.
Pris has more of a social standing because she was a nurse and people are going to put her word over Alice because she was her nurse. I'm sure that's only amplified for the genuine disdain these people have for children, much less a teenaged Alice. Alice lives in constant fear, I feel like she knows to a disagree that if she spoke up about Pris, no one is going to believe her. Maybe even to some extent, Pris likely had prior knowledge that Bumby was a predator but ignored this and pushed Alice to him.
Of course, we have the opportunists, Dr. Wilson and Radcliffe. Like Pris, Dr. Wilson thinks he's doing right by Alice, he wanted her to stay with him for the rest of her life. He thought he would obtain recognition and fame by treating a case like Alice. He made her psychosis and trauma worse,making excuses or downright ignoring the abuse Alice endured. He even enables it. But when Alice is "cured" (when she finally manages to figure out how to manage her psychosis) he is upset that Alice leaves Rutledge. Doctor Wilson doesn't care about his patients, he wants the fame and likely has a streak of sadism by watching his patients suffer. And don't get me started on the twins...
Radcliffe is like right underneath Bumby because we learn in the Asylum script that he was a co-conspirator in the sex trafficking involving minors, maybe even women. He is trying to take Alice's inheritance away and I do believe, to some extent, he knows Alice isn't as unstable as some say. But then he thinks her obsession to get to the truth is a sign of her having some pyromania... but excuses. He may have had some contempt for her parents, showing how indifferent he was having to identify the other Liddells post mortem. And he is a predator as well -- he doesn't really seem at all bothered that his daughter is going to be abused and doesn't care that Alice is too. He is in it for the money, detached from reality.
Again, another person who thinks he's doing right -- but he is entitled, sees himself as superior. He sees himself as an intellectual superior to Alice and he's not very smart, I say Alice is smarter than him. He pokes and prods Alice, he holds her rabbit because he knows it upsets her, it's the only thing she physically has left of her family outside of the portrait. He half expects her to become violent but she never does.
And I think at this point, we all know Bumby and I don't feel like going into a Ted Bundy/BTK deep dive.
Does Alice ever show any violence? No. She will if she has to defend herself or, in the case with Bumby, she knew that there was no other way. You have this small group of people that others will take their word over Alice. It's a combination of Alice's history and misogyny as well as classism. You cannot talk about this without acknowledging how single women Alice's age were treated. Marriage and motherhood provided a safety net and Alice is not fond of any physical touch, for a good reason, and has been out of this society for 11 years that she doesn't readily accept societies standards.
She knows she hallucinates -- she even admits to it. So, Alice is able to tell when she is hallucinating, at times. She acknowledges that it might be problematic to want more to disassociate (i.e. "Is it mad to pray for better hallucinations). She knows deep down on a subconscious level the fire doesn't make any sense and there's more to it. She's met with countless roadblocks and resistance to her plight, but she keeps going.
This makes Alice far more logical than the others. She makes her choices based on what she knows, not just emotions. She connects the dots in her mind without recording it and does her own investigation, even if with limited means. She knows what to say or even what buttons to push. She will criticize people if she feels the need.
And Alice's empathy makes her far more stable than the others. She might feel guilty for not seeing the signs of what was happening -- but that's not her fault. I know she thinks it is her fault, but Bumby spent six months making her psychosis and PTSD worse to the point that Alice was struggling to remember who she was. But her empathy puts her on the right path and makes her exceptionally level-head compared to others. Her creativity allows her to think outside of the box and therefore, step out of the assumptions and role that keeps being forced on her.
So, no, she's not insane to me, she never was. That's the real tragedy. And the tragedy is people like these characters, like Bumby, are still getting away with their crimes because of people's stigma towards mental illness and their misogyny.
PERIOD!
being fr , alice is the example realistic female who has been described and developed humanly, I love the way it is imperfect, because within the trilogy, despite her irresponsibility with children and dollmaker a.k.a angus bumby, within the development of the third installment at least, she took charge of her actions, despite not being aware and carrying the guilt and ptsd, the character empathizes much more by putting yourself in her shoes, she is not just any protagonist who is in charge of developing her, or at least from what I have seen, and facing her fears and fears despite the harsh reality that awaits her, accepting her knowing that you have peace on the one hand and the bittersweet reality of knowing what happened, it is not easy to assimilate and that within chapter 6 that her unconsciousness led her to be unconsciously an accomplice, and that the third installment despite the fact that it was canceled and carried out to pay the What she did and fixing her irresponsibility makes her very human, it is a clear example that not even a good person is saved from the consequences, and must pay for them, I LOVE IT
