Alice in Wonderland originated from stories told to Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddel, the three daughters of the college dean. He was particularly attracted to Alice who was then about seven years old. He has photographed her in a pose which in its sensual innocence reminds one of pictures of Greuze. His interest in his child friends usually ceased when they were about fourteen and he exchanged correspondence with them when they grew older. In his numerous diaries there is not the slightest suggestion of erotic interests. His friends, interviewed by Reed, testify in the same direction. He was prolific in writing letters to little girls in which he tried to amuse them. Some of his poems addressed to little girls are not very different from love poems. The dedication of Through the Looking Glass reads:

Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!

Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

The dedication of the Hunting of the Snark reads:

Inscribed to a dear Child: . . .
Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,

Shy with adults, he easily got in contact with little girls whom he amused by story telling and mechanical toys.

He seemingly was generally kind in his contacts with adults but extremely pedantic concerning the illustrations of his books and did not get along very well with his illustrators. He was interested in photography. He had considerable gifts for mathematics and wrote several books on the subject under his real name which, although not outstanding, won considerable acclaim. He was dry and uninspiring as a teacher. He was religious. He intended to write down some of his sermons, of which one on eternal punishment was dearest to him.

This material is scanty. We have therefore to turn to his work if we want to get deeper information.

One is astonished to find in his pleasant fairy stories the expression of an enormous anxiety. Alice in Through the Looking Glass (from now on shortened to L. G.) is "standing bewildered." "She does not know what to do." "She does not even know her name." "She cannot find the word 'tree'." When she wants to repeat a poem "another poem comes out, to her distress." "She moves and comes back to the same place."

Most of her anxieties are connected with a change of her body (body image). It is either "too small" or "too big." When it is too big she gets "squeezed," or she "fills the room" [for instance the end scene in Alice in Wonderland (W.)]. She feels "separated from her feet." "She does not find the gloves of the rabbit." She is frightened when she hears continually "about cutting heads off." She is "threatened by the duchess and by the Queen of Hearts." "Time either stops" (W.) or "goes in the opposite direction" (L. G.). She has "not the right ticket in the train." "Animals pass remarks about her" (L. G.). "The mutton she wants to eat starts talking." "The food is taken away from her" and the banquet scene (L. G.) ends in an uproar in which she is "threatened by the candles, by the ladle and by the bottles which have become birds." These are indeed nightmares full of anxiety. We are accustomed to find such dreams in persons with strong repressions which prevent final satisfactions. Alice, although bewildered, remains passive. "Things happen to her." Only towards the end she revolts against the King and Queen of Hearts (W.) and she even "shakes the red queen which turns out to be the black kitten" (L. G.).

It is perhaps remarkable that she is never successful when she wants to eat. When she eats or drinks, she becomes merely bigger or smaller. Although she would like to cut the cake for the lion and the unicorn she encounters great difficulties and finally she has no cake for herself. There are severe deprivations in the sphere of food and of eating. Alice does not get anything at the mad tea party. (W.) Oral aggressiveness is found everywhere. The poem of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" is of an astonishing cruelty. The "lobster is cooked." Alice herself "frightens the mouse and the birds by tales of devouring." There is also "an owl to be devoured by a panther." The "crocodile devours the little fish." Father William, as an old man "eats the goose with the bones and the beak since his jaw got so strong by arguing with his wife." (It is remarkable that the little girls invited by Carroll got very little food.)

We find, also, preponderant oral sadistic trends of cannibalistic character.

There is no dearth of other cruelties. "The queen of hearts wants to chop off almost everybody's head." There is a serious discussion whether "one can cut off the head of the Cheshire Cat" when it appears alone. It is the fear of "being cut to pieces" which comes again and again into the foreground. The "head of the Jabberwocky is cut off too." (L. G.) The prisoner (the messenger) "is threatened with death" (L. G.), as is the knave of hearts.

Thus there is a continuous threat to the integrity of the body in general.

I have shown lately that an extreme aggressiveness finally distorts space. The loss of the third dimension plays an important part in Carroll's work. In Sylvie and Bruno, the warden's brother calls a boy a nail which stands out from the floor and has to be "hammered flat." In a letter written to a little girl about three cats which visited him, he tells that he knocked the cats down flat as a pancake and that afterwards they were quite happy "between the sheets of blotting paper." It is perhaps in this respect remarkable that many of the figures in W. are taken from cards and are reduced to cards again in the final scene. I have mentioned the distortions of Alice's body. The egg shaped humpty-dumpty "falls" finally from the wall with a "crash."

The stability of space is guaranteed by the vestibular apparatus and by postural reflexes. The stability of space is continually threatened in W. and L. G. Alice is "going through the rabbit hole" which functions like a chute. The white king and the white queen make "rapid flights through the air." A "wind blows" which carries the red queen. "Bottles start to fly." "Candlesticks elongate." "A train is jumping over a river." It is an uncertain world. In addition, right and left are changed by the mirror. The king's whole "army tumbles and falls." So do the red and the white knight (L. G.). Father William (W.) "balances on his head." There is not much certainty in such a world. One does not wonder that Alice is rather afraid she might be a dream of the red king.

Time does not escape distortion. It "stands either still (W.) or goes even in opposite direction" (L. G.) although it is even difficult for Carroll to persist with such a distortion for a very long time. One of the letters he wrote to one of his little friends starts with the last word of the letter and finished with the first; a complete reversal. After all, Carroll was a mathematician. It may be that ruthlessness towards space and time belong to the characteristics of the mathematical talent.

One may raise the question whether there is not a somatic basis for Carroll's pleasure in mirror writing (the first part of the "Jabberwocky" ballad is printed in mirror writing) and reversals, since he was a stammerer. Orton (especially in his Salmon lectures, 1936) has pointed to the organic basis of such combinations. However, left and right disorientation and reversals are very often symbolizations for the inability to find a definite direction in one's sexuality and for a wavering between the hetero- and homosexual component impulses.

There is an inexhaustible play with words in both Alice tales. "Pig" is misunderstood as "fig." As counterpart to "beautification" the word "uglification" is introduced. The shoes in the sea are made of "soles" and "eels." The whiting makes the "shoes and boots white." No wise fish would go anywhere without "purpoise." The tale about the fury and the mouse is arranged in a form of a "tail."

We know this phenomenon very well. It occurs when the word is not taken merely as a sign but as of a substance of its own. What the word signifies (the referent) diffuses into the sign. The sign becomes the object itself quite in the same as Pavlow's dogs react to the signal alone with salivation, which should be the reaction to the actual food. The word is handled as a substance, as any other substance. A "rocking horsefly" is invented; it is made of wood. Humpty Dumpty can therefore say very well that he "lets the words work for him." Humpty Dumpty is furthermore right when he says that the "words have the meanings he gives to them." Whenever one starts playing with words, the problem of negation and the problem of opposites will soon emerge. Alice (L. G.) "sees nobody" and the king admires her that "she can see nobody at such a distance." Humpty Dumpty prefers "unbirthday" presents, since there are 364 days in a year where one can get unbirthday presents more often. The red queen says that "she could show hills in comparison with which the hills seen could be called a valley." The sign function of language is substituted here by the most primitive attitude towards the sign function on the basis of which no real orientation is possible and Alice remains bewildered.

The "Jabberwocky" poem uses new words which remind one of the language of dreams and of schizophrenics. Slithy lithe and shiny; mimsy flimsy and miserable; wabe way before and way behind; gyre to go around like in a gyroscope; gimble to make holes like a gimlet.

The "Jabberwocky" ballads first few lines were published about ten years before the appearance of L. G., with a slightly different interpretation. Five years later in the Hunting of the Snark, Carroll explains the principle of portmanteau words. These are words which combine two words by what today we call condensation. We find these condensations when the forces of the system of the unconscious come into play. This is a rather ruthless treatment of words. They are handled without consideration. It depends "who is the master," says Humpty Dumpty. Words are "cut to pieces" and the pieces are arbitrarily united. Such an attitude towards words is found in early stages of mental development. In childhood there is an experimental stage by which the child tries to become clear about the sign function of words. In schizophrenia, such a treatment of words signifies the wish of the individual to give up definite relations to the world which is after all a world of regular sequences and of meaning.

Lewis Carroll is considered as the master of "nonsense literature." One of his biographers even calls him the founder of nonsense literature. The red queen says, after having made nonsensical remarks, "but I have heard nonsense compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary" (L. G.). The walrus and the carpenter "go out in sunshine when it is night." The White Knight delights in nonsensical inventions. He carries a little box upside down so that "rain cannot come in," but the "clothes and the sandwiches have fallen out." (Play against gravitation.) He has a "mousetrap on horseback." (The play with spatial relations.) Anklets around the feet of the horse protect against the bite of sharks. (Contraction of space.) Freud says justly that nonsense in dreams and so-called unconscious thinking signifies contempt and sneering. We may expect that nonsense literature is the expression of particularly strong destructive tendencies, of very primitive character. No wonder that persons faced with so much destructive nonsense finally "do not know whether they exist" or whether "they are part of a dream and will vanish." Many things vanish, the fawn, the beard of a passenger, and in the Hunting of the Snark, the baker disappears, faced by a snark which is a bojum. The scene in the store of the sheep changes suddenly. The figures in W. taken from cards become a pack of cards again. The figures of L. G. are in reality unanimated chess figures.

This is a world of cruelty, destruction and annihilation. Alice, constantly threatened, still emerges bland and smiling. The kings and queens, the duchesses and knights are "reduced to nothingness." Perhaps it is this final outcome which is gratifying to the child and the adult reader and listener.

It is perhaps worth while to take a glimpse into the world of the child. It experiments continually with the qualities of space, with the shape of its own body, with mass and configuration. This is particularly obvious with children who are between three and four years old, as studies of L. Bender and myself have shown. But it can also be observed in younger and older people. It is interesting to compare the mother goose rhymes with W. and L. G. There we find a "crooked man who went a crooked mile, a crooked cat and a crooked mouse." "The cats of Kilkenny disappear." "A woman loses her identity after a part of her skirt is cut off." "The sheep leaves their tails behind them." The king of France merely "goes up and down a hill with 20,000 men." "Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, Bess are four persons and still one person." The similarity is obvious. George Saintsbury in the Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 13, p. 186, has stressed this similarity too, and remarks about Carroll "there is something of the manipulations of mathematical symbols in the systematic absurdity and the nonsensical preciseness of his humor." It seems to me that the destructiveness of Carroll's nonsense goes further than the experimentation of the Nursery Rhymes.

What does all this mean? How did Carroll come to this queer world? It is a world without real love. The queens and kings are either absurd or cruel or both. We would suspect that Carroll never got the full love of his parents. In large families children feel very often neglected. We may suspect that Carroll who shows so often feelings of guilt in his diary and who wrote the sermon on eternal punishment had been educated rather strictly. He must have looked with suspicion at the many children who came after him. Are the kings and queens "symbols" for his parents? Alice also complains very bitterly that the "animals order her around so much." Are some of the animals also representatives of the parents?

All kinds of disagreeable animals appear in the two fairy tales. Carroll liked to play with toads and snails and earthworms. Alice is in continuous fear of being attacked or blamed by the animals. Do the insects represent the many brothers and sisters who must have provoked jealousy in Carroll?

We have at any rate the hypothesis that the demands of Carroll concerning the love of his parents were not fully satisfied. He may have found consolation in the one or the other of his siblings, especially in his sisters. It is remarkable that Alice does not report her adventures to her mother but to her sister. It is also remarkable that Carroll talking about her future refrains from picturing her as a mother who tells stories to her own children. He lets her merely gather about her little children who are strangers. It is, by the way, also reported that Carroll showed jealousy when one of his former little friends married. We may suppose that Carroll expected the love which he could not get from his mother from one of his sisters. The biographical material at hand is not sufficient to decide this question.

We may furthermore suspect that he did not feel sure that he could get this love as the oldest brother and that he felt he might get this love if he would take the place of the parents and especially the place of the mother. It may be also that he identified himself with one of the older sisters. He was, by the way, particularly sensitive towards the impersonation of females by males on the stage and resented it. Is this a defense against the unconscious wish to play the part of a woman, especially the part of the mother and a sister?

What was his relation to his sex organ anyhow? Fenichel has lately pointed to the possibility that little girls might become symbols for the phallus. Alice changes her form continually; she is continually threatened and continually in danger. There may have been in Carroll the wish for feminine passivity and a protest against it. He plays the part of the mother to little girls but the little girl is for him also the completion of his own body. The little girl is his love object, substituting the mother and substituting the sister. These are complicated discussions and are not fully justified since we do not know enough about the fantasy life of Carroll and probably shall never know about it, but on the basis of other experiences we are reasonably sure that the little girls substitute incestuous love objects. Besides this object relation there must have existed a strong tendency to identification especially with female members of the family. As in all forms of primitive sexuality, the promiscuity in Carroll's relation to children is interesting. He seemingly tried to get in contact with a very great number of children and to "seduce" them in his way.

It is obvious that such object relations loaded with insecurity and feelings of guilt cannot remain satisfactory and must be accompanied by hostile and negative tendencies. These hostile tendencies did not find any open expression in Carroll's life. A strong superego and a strong moral consciousness protected him. The strength of the repression may be partially responsible for the depth to which the regression took place. All the hostile tendencies had therefore to come out in the particularly severe distortions in his work. It is possible that the mathematical ability and the constitutional difficulties to which I have pointed before may have something to do with the type and the depth of the regression. Since we do not know enough about the early history of Carroll we cannot appreciate fully the relation between constitutional and individual factors in the type of regression, which is obvious in his work and in the structure of his love life. Most of the biographers stress the difference between the official personality of Carroll and the personality expressed in his literary work. Carroll himself has pointed this way by choosing a pseudonym and holding Charles Lutwidge Dodgson strictly separated from Lewis Carroll. We can understand his motives to do so. However, his stern morality, his dryness, his mathematical interests, are not separate parts of his personality but are the reaction and the basis of the tendencies which he expressed in his work.

I suspect that nonsense literature will originate whenever there are complete object relations and a regression to deep layers involving the relation of space and time on the basis of primitive aggressiveness.

Carroll appears to the writer of this essay as a particularly destructive writer. I do not mean this in the sense of a literary criticism, which does not concern us here. We may merely ask whether such a literature might not increase destructive attitudes in children beyond the measure which is desirable. There is very little in Alice in Wonderland as in Through the Looking Glass which leads from destruction to construction. There is very little love and tenderness and little regard for the existence of others. Maybe we can have confidence that children will find a way to construction for themselves. At any rate, the child may be led to a mental experimentation which although cruel may sooner or later lead to a better appreciation of space, time and words and so, also, to a better appreciation of other human beings. Problems of this type have to be decided by experience and by experimental approach.

What do children do with Carroll's work? We know very little about it. Preliminary impressions in adults who have read Carroll's books in childhood make it probable that the child uses Carroll's nonsense verses and anxiety situations in a way similar to the manner that the child uses Mother Goose Rhymes. They take them as an ununderstood reality which one can hope to handle better after one has played and worked with it. In comparison with other fairy stories the dissociation resulting from extreme cruelty is more obvious in Carroll's work. One may be afraid that without the help of the adult, the child may remain bewildered and alone may not find his way back to a world in which it can appreciate love relations, space and time and words.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

The following entry presents criticism of Carroll's stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). See also, Lewis Carroll Criticism.

Classics of children's literature, Lewis Carroll's richly imaginative fantasy stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have earned a reputation as serious works of art. The stories, as Donald Rackin has said, "often say to us more than Carroll meant them to say." Alice's dream-world adventures have since the 1930s been read by many scholars as political, psychological, and philosophical metaphors, and as literary parodies. Widely translated, quoted, and adapted for various media, the Alice books are considered enduring classics whose ideas, disguised as "nonsense," are provocative enough to enthrall critics and philosophers alike.

Biographical Information

The son of a country pastor, Dodgson led a quiet childhood, showing a precocity in mathematics and parody. He went to Oxford at age eighteen, and was made a fellow of Christ Church two and a half years later. He was to remain there for the rest of his life, lecturing in mathematics and writing an occasional parody on a local political matter. A bachelor in the serious, male-dominated world of Oxford, Dodgson liked to entertain young girls with his story-telling; he invented toys, mathematical games, and puzzles for their enjoyment, and he maintained a whimsical correspondence with young girls throughout his life. The "Alice" of his stories was Alice Liddell, daughter of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church. On a boat trip up the river Isis with Alice and her two sisters on July 4, 1862, Dodgson invented the story which he later published, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1871, following the great success of the first story, Carroll published its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. He died early in 1898 and is buried in Guildford, Surrey.

Plot and Major Characters

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice falls into a rabbit hole and emerges in the imaginative world of Wonderland, where she soon discovers that the solid, logical laws of science no longer apply. In Wonderland, Alice grows and shrinks, animals talk, and language makes little sense. She meets a peremptory hookah-smoking Caterpillar, a dodo, then a Duchess with an ever-smiling Cheshire Cat. The Cheshire Cat directs Alice to a tea party with the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse. The Wonderland Queen—a playing-card Queen of Hearts—introduces Alice to the Gryphon, who takes her to the Mock Turtle, and, after telling Alice about the Mock-Turtle's education, the two perform a dance, called the Lobster Quadrille. Alice then finds herself at a trial where she has to give evidence. Finding the trial absurd, she tosses the playing-card participants into the air. Her dream comes to a sudden close, and she finds herself awake on a river bank with her sister. In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Alice steps through a looking-glass and into the backwards world she has seen from her drawing-room. The Looking-Glass world resembles the chess game Alice has been playing with, and Alice herself becomes a pawn for the White Queen. She meets other live chess pieces, a garden of talking flowers, and insects that resemble her toys. She again encounters a series of fantastic characters who entertain her as well as test her patience. Alice finds herself variously in a railway carriage, in the woods, and in a little shop. She is introduced to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who relate to her the verse tale of the Walrus and the Carpenter, and to Humpty Dumpty, who invents meanings for words and explains the nonsensical poem "Jabberwocky." She encounters the Looking-Glass equivalents of the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, named Haigha and Hatta. After witnessing a fight "for the crown" between the Lion and the Unicorn, Alice meets the White Knight. Finally, Alice herself becomes a Queen, and her dream ends at a banquet where the food talks. The banquet soon degenerates into chaos, and the Red Queen turns into Alice's black kitten. Suddenly Alice is back in her drawing-room, awake.

Major Themes

Alice's chaotic nonsense world, originally invented by Carroll to entertain a young child, has yielded a variety of thematic concerns. As children's stories, the Alice books relate the dream-world adventures of a young girl with a number of obstinate animals, insects, and the imaginary characters Carroll has taken from the worlds of playing cards and chess. As James R. Kincaid (1973) has noted, an important theme of the Alice books is "growing up." In addition, the insanity of Alice's dream world has been considered a satire on the ordered, earnest world of Victorian England. Readers have also found references to Darwin and to mathematics, and have seen in Alice's repeated encounters with meaninglessness and absurd authority the darker, existential dilemmas of the human, and especially modern, condition.

Critical Reception

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was well received from the outset. The collaboration between Carroll and John Tenniel, the illustrator of Alice, was an enormous success, and the demand for the book exceeded all expectations. The enormous popularity of the work, published at a time when most children's books were designed to instruct rather than entertain, prompted the sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Throughout Carroll's life and into the early twentieth century, the Alice books received little serious critical attention; however, beginning in the 1930s, essays by such respected figures as William Empson established the stories as complex literary works that would reward close interpretation. The field was thus opened for a wide variety of approaches to the stories. Philosophical readings have addressed the absurdity of Carroll's world and examined the author's treatment of space, time, logic, lawlessness, and individual identity. Donald Rackin's 1966 essay on the search for meaning in a disordered world is often cited as one of the most significant essays on the subject. Several critics have analyzed the books with respect to the development of children and their movement from a disordered, primitive state to a state of reason and consequence. Focusing on the character of Alice, commentators have addressed her various roles as a child, mother, and queen, and disputed whether or not she is truly "innocent." Other critics, particularly Paul Schilder (1936), have expounded on Carroll's incorporation of violence, identifying incidents of aggression, brutality (the Queen wishes to chop everyone's head off, for example), and destruction. Scholars have explored the relationship between these elements and Dodgson's personal life, and investigated the effect of these violent episodes on young readers. Provoking much critical debate also is the problematic "nonsense language" in both Alice books; scholars have speculated that Carroll used nonsensical language and situations in order to break free from the rational, ordered world of his own reality and to transcend his own personal distress. Other topics of critical study include Carroll's fascination with and incorporation of games and puzzles, and his use of humor, parody, and satire.

SOURCE: "Psychoanalyzing Alice," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 144, No. 5, January 30, 1937, pp. 129-30.

[Krutch is regarded as one of America's most respected literary and drama critics. A conservative and idealistic thinker, he was a consistent proponent of human dignity and the preeminence of literary art. In the following essay, he rejects Paul Schilder's psychoanalytic reading [reprinted above] of the Alice books.]

Most readers of The Nation must have seen in their daily paper some account of the adventures of Alice in the new wonderland of psychoanalysis. Many years ago the late André Tridon undertook to explore the subconscious mind of the same little lady, but Tridon was something of a playboy while Dr. Paul Schilder, research professor of psychiatry at New York University, was presumably in dead earnest when he warned his hearers at a recent meeting of the American Psychoanalytical Society against exposing children to the dangerous corruptions of Lewis Carroll. All of Carroll's ten brothers and sisters stammered; "this fact might have made the author unhappy"; and in any event his superficially pleasant fairy stories are the expression of "enormous anxiety."

According to the account of Dr. Schilder's speech printed in The New York Times, most of Alice's adventures are "calculated to fill her with anxieties" of a pernicious nature. "She feels separated from her feet, she is stuffed in and out of small holes, and she never knows from minute to minute whether she will be small or large. . . . There are severe deprivations in the sphere of food and drink. . . . The poem of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" is of an astonishing cruelty. The Lobster is cooked. Alice herself frightens the birds with tales of devourings. . . . The fear of being cut to pieces comes again and again into the foreground. The head of the Jabberwock is cut off. There is a continuous threat to the integrity of the body in general." Even, worse, apparently, is the fact that Carroll plays fast and loose with language and the conception of time. The innocent child may never recover from the shock of "mimsey" or "wabe." "This is a world of cruelty, destruction, and annihilation. . . . One may be afraid that without the help of the adult the child may remain bewildered in it and may not find his way back to the world in which he can appreciate love relations, space, time, and words." Personally I have never heard of a child who confessed to being dangerously terrified by "Alice," or of an adult who attributed his downfall to a trauma received from the book in infancy. But no doubt that proves nothing. The fears inspired are subconscious also.

Now there is not, so it seems to me, any reason for doubting the large general assertion that Lewis Carroll had "complexes" or that his fantasy was to some extent, at least, an expression of them. Even if we leave such esoteric matters as "threats to the integrity of the body" in the hands of specialists like Dr. Schilder, it ought to be evident that his nonsense, like so much nonsense and so much wit, was a device by means of which his intelligence protested against various kinds of cant which his priggish and conventional temperament would not permit him to flout openly. I see nothing far-fetched in the assumption that queens are absurd puppets in "Alice" because Carroll outwardly accepted the absurd legend of Victoria, or that the farce of the trial is largely unconscious satire of the pompous procedure of courts. Nor do I see how anyone can ponder the dilemma in which Alice is placed when she tries to choose between the Walrus and the Carpenter without perceiving a submerged La Rochefoucauld in the mild-mannered don who found his chief delight in photographing little girls. Alice, it will be remembered, thought she liked the weeping Carpenter best because he seemed a little sorry for having betrayed the oysters. But when she was told that it was he who had eaten the most and tried to shift her sympathy to the Walrus, she got a crushing retort—the Walrus had eaten as many as he could get. Only a man who had hidden somewhere in his soul a very cynical conception of human behavior could, I submit, have conceived that incident.

If we go that far we may also, I suppose, take it as a matter of course that Alice's fantastic adventures are none of them quite sane. But that is not the point. Why, of all people, should a psychoanalyst be shocked to find complexes in an artist, or afraid to have children ("polymorphically perverse" by Freudian premise) introduced at an early age to a literature the very secret of which is its successfully playful catharsis of certain all but universal obsessions? As for the satire and the cynicism which Dr. Schilder does not mention, I should say that any child is ready for it as soon as he is capable of recognizing its existence and that he is never too young to begin to laugh at those morbid fears which, the psychoanalyst himself is ready to assure us, he is never too young to feel.

In America the philistine used to be above all else a moral man. The arts had nothing to fear from his fury except when he could discover that they were "impure." Nowadays he is more likely to discover in the most unexpected places some defiling trace of either "bourgeois prejudice" or "psychological abnormality," and to look askance upon anything which does not combine the obsession of a social worker with the "normality" of a boy scout. Some years ago when I first met a certain distinguished psychoanalyst I told him that I had observed in his many books what appeared to me to be a rather serious non sequitur: the first eight chapters were usually devoted to showing how abnormal most of the distinguished people of the world had been, while the last always concluded with a "therefore let us endeavor to be as normal as possible." I asked him if he did not suppose that a too thorough psychic house-cleaning might be undesirable for those who aspired to be something more than merely "normal," and I received a remarkable if somewhat pompous reply. "I would not," he said, "like to give a categorical answer to that question, but I will say one thing. Dr. Freud and I are the only two prominent psychoanalysts who have never themselves been analyzed—and I think we have made the greatest contributions to the science."

Bibliography

Fordyce, Rachel. Lewis Carroll: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988, 160 p.

An annotated critical bibliography of general and scholarly commentary on Carroll's life and works, including editions, biographies, criticism, reminiscences, and unpublished dissertations.

Guiliano, Edward. "Lewis Carroll: A Sesquicentennial Guide to Research." In Dickens Studies Annual 10 (1982): 263-310.

Described by Guiliano as the "first prose guide to publications on Lewis Carroll"; includes sections on editions, stage and screen adaptations, psychoanalytic approaches, philosophy, and the language of the Alice books.

Weaver, Warren. Alice in Many Tongues. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964, 147 p.

A study of the translations of Alice, with a chronological checklist of translations. Includes an essay on the difficulties of translating Alice, and samples of illustrations from foreign editions.

Criticism

Ackroyd, Peter. "The Road to Wonderland." In The New York Times Book Review C, No. 46 (November 12, 1995): 13.

Favorably reviews Morton N. Cohen's biography Lewis Carroll, which examines the private life of Charles Dodgson, documenting the circumstances surrounding his fondness for young girls and his dual successes as a children's author and respected instructor.

Bivona, Daniel. "Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland." In Nineteenth Century Literature 41, No. 2 (September 1986): 143-71.

Places Alice's Wonderland adventures in the context of Hegelian philosophy and British Victorian imperialism.

Blake, Kathleen. Play, Games, and Sport: The Literary Works of Lewis Carroll. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974, 216 p.

General discussion of the influence of games, symbolic logic, and play on Carroll's imaginative works. Individual chapters are devoted to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Cripps, Elizabeth A. "Alice and the Reviewers." In Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Seminar on Children's Literature and The Children's Literature Association 11 (1983): 32-48.

Surveys early critical and popular responses to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Gardner, Martin, author of notes and introduction. The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970, 352 p.

Annotated scholarly edition of the Alice books. Includes an introductory essay and a brief annotated bibliography.

Graves, Robert. "Alice." In Collected Poems: 1975, pp. 31-32. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1975.

The noted English novelist, classical scholar, and poet makes a poetical commentary on Alice's "queer but true" adventures in Through the Looking-Glass.

Gray, Donald J., editor. Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971, 434 p.

Critical edition of the Alice books with a brief introductory essay and a selected bibliography. Edition includes related Carroll material and several critical essays.

Henkle, Roger B. "The Mad Hatter's World." In The Virginia Quarterly Review 49, No. 1 (Winter 1973): 99-117.

Discusses the appeal of the Alice books for adults and suggests that the "madcap behavior" readers find in Alice offers an escape from the restrictions of adult reality.

Johnson, Paula. "Alice Among the Analysts." In Hartford Studies in Literature IV, No. 2 (1972): 114-22.

A brief survey of psychoanalytical approaches to the Alice books.

Kurrick, Maire Jaanus. "Carroll's Alice in Wonderland." In Literature and Negation, pp. 197-205. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Explores the problem of language and subjectivity in Alice.

Phillips, Robert, editor. Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dreamchild As Seen through the Critics 'Looking-Glasses, 1865-1971. New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1971, 450 p.

A collection of essays organized by critical approach, and a checklist of selected criticism from 1865 to 1971. Includes sections on "Language, and Parody, and Satire," "Freudian Interpretations," and Alice "As Victorian and Children's Literature."

Polhemus, Robert M. "Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871): The Comedy of Regression." In Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce, pp. 245-93. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Places Carroll's work in a literary tradition linking comedy and religion; focuses on Carroll's comic vision and his regression to childhood in Through the Looking-Glass.

Priestley, J. B. "The Walrus and the Carpenter." In The New Statesman LIV, No. 1378 (August 10, 1957): 168 p.

Contends that the Walrus and Carpenter episode in Chapter Four of Through the Looking-Glass is intended as political symbolism.

Pudney, John. "The Publication of Alice in Wonderland." In Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, edited by Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, and L. F. Ashley, pp. 238-43. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1980.

A brief account of the illustration and publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Pycior, Helena M. "At the Intersection of Mathematics and Humor: Lewis Carroll's Alices and Symbolical Algebra." In Victorian Studies 28, No. 1 (Autumn 1984): 149-70.

Establishes a precedent for Dodgson's combination of humor and mathematics, and traces the influence of symbolical algebra on Dodgson, contending that its emphasis on "structure over meaning" is satirized in the Alices.

Rackin, Donald, editor. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: A Critical Handbook. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1969, 371 p.

Incorporates facsimile editions of the Alice books, a collection of the major critical essays from 1930 to 1966, and a selected bibliography. Donald Rackin's essay "Alice's Journey to the End of Night" (1966) is included in the entry above.

Shires, Linda M. "Fantasy, Nonsense, Parody, and the Status of the Real: The Example of Carroll." In Victorian Poetry 26, No. 3 (Autumn 1988): 267-83.

Explores the problem of reality in Carroll. With the help of "psychoanalytic and linguistic theory," discusses Dodgson's employment of fantasy, nonsense, and parody to "reverse .. . the real and the unreal" in Alice.

Additional coverage of Carroll's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Volume 2; Children's Literature Review, Volumes 2 and 18; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 18; Discovering Authors; and Yesterday's Authors of Books for Children, Volume 2.

SOURCE: "Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland," in The New Invitation to Learning, edited by Mark Van Doren, Random House, 1942, pp. 206-20.

[Van Doren, the younger brother of the poet Carl Van Doren, was one of America's most prolific and diverse twentieth-century writers. Van Doren's criticism is aimed at the general reader, rather than the scholar or specialist, and is noted for its lively perception and wide interest. In the following excerpt, Van Doren chairs a discussion of the Alice books with American novelist Katherine Anne Porter and English philosopher Bertrand Russell. The discussion was originally broadcast nationally on Columbia Broadcasting System radio.]Van Doren: Miss Porter, you may wonder why you were asked to come this morning to discuss Alice in Wonderland. One reason I might give you is this: I was curious to know whether you, like other women of my acquaintance, were horrified by this book rather than made happy by it when you were a little girl.

Porter: I was. It was a horror-story to me; it frightened me so much, and I didn't know then whether it was the pictures or the text. Rereading it, I should think it was the text.

Van Doren: Even without Tenniel's drawings you would have been scared?

Porter: Oh, yes. It was a terrible mixture of suffering and cruelty and rudeness and false logic and traps for the innocent—in fact, awful.

Van Doren: This must have been partly because you believed the story.

Porter: I believed it entirely. The difference between it, I think, and the other fairy stories (because we had an appetite for the most grim and grisly horrors; nearly all stories written for children in the old times were horrible and we loved them, because we knew they weren't true; they couldn't happen, they were mere stories) is, that all this takes place in a setting of everyday life. The little glass table with the key on it, and the furniture and the gardens and the flowers, the clock—they were all things we knew, you see, familiar things dreadfully out of place, and they frightened me.

Van Doren: Well, Mr. Russell, you also might wonder why you are here, and the reason might be another reason altogether. But I'm tempted to ask you whether anything like this was your experience.

Russell: No, I never had any feeling of horror about it. I have heard other women say the same thing, that they felt a horror about it. The reason I didn't was that after all it was a girl who had all these troubles, and boys don't mind the troubles of girls.

Porter: I'm afraid that's true.

Van Doren: You mean that boys don't mind if girls are treated rudely?

Russell: They don't mind a bit. No, they think it's what they deserve.

Van Doren: I wonder if that is because boys themselves are in the habit of being treated rudely by girls with no ability to strike back. Did you read the book at an early age?

Russell: Oh, yes. I was brought up on the two books, both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Through the Looking-Glass was published the year I was born, and they were still comparatively recent books when I was young. I was brought up on the first editions, which I had in the nursery. It didn't occur to anybody that they had any value and I just had them to wear out. I knew them by heart from an early age.

Van Doren: That was true of other children in your generation, I dare say.

Russell: Yes, they all knew them by heart. And I don't think that I can remember any of them being horrified. I'm a little surprised by what Miss Porter said. I don't remember any of them thinking of the stories as possibly true.

Van Doren: I was talking recently to an acquaintance of mine—a man—who said that he now feels a horror in reading the book which he did not feel as a boy. You remember the occasion when Alice is growing in the little house and she has grown so large that she has to have one arm out of the window and one leg up the chimney. Well, little Bill, you know, who comes down the chimney to see if he can do something about it, is suddenly kicked by her so that he flies out and is badly hurt, and she hears everyone outside say: "There goes Bill." Now this friend of mine, as a boy, roared with laughter over that. He and his brothers thought it was the funniest thing in the world. But now it doesn't seem funny to him that Bill was hurt. So apparently conversions can take place.

Russell: That is true. I think people are more merciful than they used to be, and I think old fun often strikes us now as rather brutal; anyway, it didn't in those days.

Porter: It is curious about cruelty, because Bill didn't seem to worry me much. A thing I accepted, which I know now is extremely unkind, was putting the dormouse in a teapot headfirst. But I remember reasoning to myself even then that the dormouse was asleep anyhow and didn't care.

Van Doren: No. And the dormouse seems on the whole to want to be some place where it is warm and wet.

Russell: It never occurred to me that the dormouse minded. The only thing that occurred to me was that the teapot was too small.

Van Doren: The dormouse when he was pinched and squealed didn't hurt you, then, vicariously? Does all this mean that the book for you was a perfectly satisfactory children's book? And that it perhaps is still?

Russell: It was then. I don't regard it now as a perfectly satisfactory children's book. I've been rereading it with a view to this broadcast, and I think there are many objections to it as a children's book. In fact, I should like to label it "For Adults Only." I don't think it's a suitable book for the young.

Van Doren: I wonder if the young these days actually do like it as much as children used to like it.

Russell: My experience with them is they don't, and I think this is because there are so many more children's books now and because, when I was young, it was the only children's book that hadn't got a moral. We all got very tired of the morals in books.

Van Doren: This very book makes fun of books that have morals, doesn't it? Remember, the Queen is always going about saying: "The moral of this is—" and then some preposterous statement comes out such as "Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves."

Porter: But don't you think, too, that it is because children really seem to be much more realistic; that is, they do like a graphic, factual kind of story? Even the fantasies written for children now are nearly always something grotesque and not deep, something that doesn't touch their emotions. Like the comic papers, you know. And then their stories all seem to be about quite ordinary living children. Rather extraordinary but not fabulous adventures occur, which might very well occur to any child.

Van Doren: To me that is highly unfortunate. I am aware of the truth of what you say, that children prefer these days, or at any rate are assumed to prefer, matter-of-fact stories. But every now and then a story which is not matter-of-fact has a great success among children, such as the books about Mary Poppins. Have you read those?

Porter: Yes. Well I would never know whether the children really like that sort of thing or not. Perhaps like grown-ups, they take what is given them because they aren't given anything better.

Van Doren: Do we really mean that Alice in Wonderland has declined as a children's book because of its cruelty?

Russell: Partly, I think, but partly also from competition with other books. Grown-ups always tend to think of children with a certain contempt as dear little things, and when a child feels that element in a book he resents it. If he can get a book that doesn't regard him as a dear little thing he's very pleased. But grown-ups will always buy that sort of book and give it to children unless the children educate them.

Van Doren: Are you implying, Mr. Russell, that Alice in Wonderland assumes children to be dear little things? Alice is pretty well kicked around, isn't she? And she's rudely treated, she's interrupted, she's rebuffed.

Russell: Yes, but she's always treated rather as a figure of fun, and nobody quite likes to be treated that way.

Van Doren: Yes, she is assumed to be absurd because she has a little habit of talking to herself, reasoning with herself, holding conversations with herself, because she remembers her homework and tries to bring that into this new world she finds herself in. Remember when she meets the mouse. She doesn't know how to address the mouse except by saying "O Mouse," because she had learned the vocative case in Latin.

Russell: All that, I think, is a little absurd, because as a matter of fact she's an extremely Victorian child and very different from most modern children that I know, and certainly no modern child would think of saying "O Mouse." It wouldn't occur to it. All the lessons that she has had at home are different lessons from those the children have now.

Van Doren: That is true. And I'm admitting that occasionally, perhaps regularly, she is treated like a little prig, a little girl who has no ability whatever to imagine other experiences than those she has had. But I suppose the interest of the book to lie very largely there, either for children or for adults. It is a rebuke to those who cannot imagine as possible other experience than that which they have had.

Porter: You've spoken of the children being fed so much realism today; never being given any experience beyond something that might possibly happen to them.

Van Doren: Yes. Now, for instance, to me a very salutary answer to the proverbial question of a child's "Why?" is the answer once given to Alice: "Why not?"—without any explanation at all. It seems to me one learns a great deal by that.

Russell: May I come back to what I said a moment ago, that this book ought to be labeled "For Adults Only"? What you're recommending is a very suitable education for adults, but much too difficult for children. The whole book is much too difficult for the young. It raises metaphysical points, very interesting logical points, that are good for the older ponderer, but for the young produce only confusion.

Van Doren: Of course Alice was always confused. But you imply, Mr. Russell, that adults, these days or perhaps any day, stand in need of metaphysical instruction arid logical sanitation.

Russell: I'm professionally bound to think so.

Van Doren: I agree with you heartily, as a matter of fact. Does the book still seem to you of interest on that level?

Russell: It provides, of course, the sort of things a philosophical lecturer can bring in when he wants to seem light. It is very useful to a philosophical lecturer who wants to liven up his stuff; it is full of philosophical jokes which are quite good for philosophical students. But I think you oughtn't to read the book before you're fifteen.

Porter: I wonder. Probably that's true. You were talking about the sentimental Victorian attitude toward children as dear little things. I think Lewis Carroll quite definitely made a bow in the direction of the dear-little-creature attitude in his poems of dedication to Alice and the other children. In the story I think he said what he really believed and what he really meant—and it was pretty grim!

Van Doren: Neither one of you would agree with me, perhaps, that the best children's book is always a book which should be labeled "For Adults Only." My own experience with children, my own children included, is that they really enjoy most those books which they don't wholly understand, which leave them perhaps only slightly bewildered, but nevertheless bewildered.

Russell: Well, I think the young should read some books that adults think of as for adults only, but that's because the adults are always wrong about it. The books the adults think suitable for the young are certainly not.

Van Doren: I'm glad to hear you say that.

Porter: I've always believed that children should read adult literature, should read far beyond their years, and perhaps not read anything that was cold-bloodedly written for them.

Van Doren: Yes, because it has never been clear enough that adults do know what children are like; they're always merely assuming that they know what they're like. I quite agree with you that when they're most sure they're most likely to be wrong. Mr. Russell, I want to come back to that question of the value of the book, if any, on the metaphysical and mathematical level. I was interested in your saying that philosophers quoted it only when they wanted to introduce a light touch. Now, that after all wouldn't be saying much for the book, would it? Or would it?

Russell: Yes, I think most of the most instructive things are jokes. Quite a number of important things have originated as jokes because if you can put it in that form it isn't so painful. Now, for instance, when they discuss whether they're all parts of the Red King's dream and will cease to exist if the Red King wakes—

Van Doren: This is in Through the Looking-Glass.

Russell: Yes, it is. Well, that is a very instructive discussion from a philosophical point of view. But if it were not put humorously, we should find it too painful.

Van Doren: But you really mean that it is instructive?

Russell: I think it is worth considering, yes.

Van Doren: It is more than just an illustration of a point? It contains a point of its own?

Russell: Yes. I think he was very good at inventing puzzles in pure logic. When he was quite an old man, he invented two puzzles which he published in a learned periodical, Mind, to which he didn't provide answers. And the providing of answers was a job, at least so I found it.

Van Doren: Do you remember either of those puzzles?

Russell: I remember one of them very well. A boy is going with his two uncles, and one of the uncles says he's going to be shaved, and he's going to a shop that is kept by Allen, Brown, and Carr. And he says: "I shall get shaved by Allen." And the other uncle says: "How do you know Allen will be in?" And he says: "Oh, I can prove it by logic." "Nonsense," says the man. "How can you do that?" "Well," he says, "you know there has to be always one man to mind the shop, so if Allen is out, then, if Brown is out, Carr will be in. But Brown has lately been ill, and so he can't go out alone, and he's quarreled with Allen, so he only goes out with Carr. So if Brown is out, Carr is out. Now if Allen goes out, if Brown is out, Carr is out, and if Brown is out Carr is in. That's impossible, so Allen can never go out."

Van Doren: That sounds like a syllogism, doesn't it?

Russell: Of course it's a fallacy, but showing up the fallacy is difficult.

Porter: A lovely illustration of all this extraordinary, oblique, fallacious logic that was a trap for Alice all the way through two books.

Van Doren: There are many outrageous syllogisms here, such as this in skeleton form: "Alice, you like eggs; serpents like eggs, therefore you are a serpent." And there is another form of logical fun which seems to me important here; I think you would call it a conversion, would you not? That is to say, Lewis Carroll was constantly playing with a subject and predicate converted. Alice is asked why she doesn't say what she means. And she says: "Well, at least I always mean what I say." So she converts the terms cats and rats. Do cats eat rats? Perhaps rats eat cats. Which is true? And she finally forgets which is the important question to ask. She says she has often seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. I'm not at all sure that that doesn't lead us to a conversion which it is possible to make on the title of the book. The title of the book is Alice in Wonderland. Possibly it should be Wonderland in Alice, because Alice is constantly in a state of wonder at something which, in this particular world where she is, she shouldn't wonder at at all. For instance, she eats a piece of cake—after twenty or thirty pages—and she suddenly says to herself: "Isn't it strange that I don't get any bigger from eating this cake?" Lewis Carroll very gravely remarks: "That is what usually happens when you eat cake." She is never able to adjust herself; she is never able to remember the relations which exist in this new life.

Russell: That is quite true, but I still think there is a great deal in his books that is meant to be suitable to the young and isn't. Like when they say "threaten a snark with a railway-share." No child has the vaguest idea of what that means.

Van Doren: But again I wonder if children don't like to read books—if they don't today, that's all there is to it, but my own experience as a child, and my experience of children these days, is that they often do—which they don't totally understand. They come to a railway-share. Well, they want to know what it is, and find out; or they develop in their mind some grotesque notion of what it is, which is quite charming. Students in colleges like best on the whole those lectures which, as we say, are a little over their heads.

Russell: That is perfectly true, but then what puzzles them ought to be something serious that when they understand it they will see to be serious. It ought not to be a mere joke.

Van Doren: But, if, as you say, these jokes are oftentimes cloaks for philosophical, even metaphysical, points, then the book at bottom is serious. I think I've been trying to say that the book is at bottom quite serious and quite edifying. Alice is always learning—her experience is less than it might be—she is always learning that something that she has supposed to be grotesque is not, as a matter of fact, grotesque. She says to the caterpillar once, you remember, on the mushroom: "It's really dreadful always to be changing one's shape." He says: "It isn't dreadful at all." And we immediately remember that the caterpillar changes his shape at least three times in his life.

Porter: And of course she really changes hers too, not into an entirely different form, not from one thing to another, but she's changing and growing all the time; she's not the same person today that she was yesterday by any means. But she doesn't understand that.

Van Doren: As when she is carrying the Duchess's baby. For a while she thinks the baby is ugly because it has a nose like a pig. Then when she determines that the baby is a pig, she thinks the nose is quite beautiful.

Porter: The nose is very becoming, and she's glad it's a handsome pig. But I was thinking her confusion was due to the setting aside of all the logic of experience. Because there is a certain sort of progression of experience that I think we can depend upon a little, and this is all removed, you see, from her when she falls into this Wonderland. There isn't anything that she can refer to as a certainty. And then there's another thing that's very important: Alice's state of mind is a fine example of the terrific sense of uncertainty and insecurity of childhood trying to understand an adult world in which very little provision is made for the young. This was true in those days much more than now. I think now perhaps that the family plans are made a little bit too much around the child.

Van Doren: I think so myself.

Porter: But Alice was at a terrible disadvantage, struggling with an adult, alien, and apparently hostile world, which had set traps for her, or so it appeared, purposely to trip her up.

Russell: Perhaps that is why the book was better liked then than now. That particular kind of bafflement was one to which children were accustomed, and it didn't strike them as it does now. But now, I think, the modern child is simply bewildered by all this and feels: oh, this is horrid! At least some do.

Van Doren: I wonder which is the better procedure for the human race—to endeavor to make children understand adults or to endeavor to make adults understand children.

Porter: Do you know, I think one of the great troubles is that too many persons are going around painfully trying too hard to understand. I wish we could relax a little.

Russell: I quite agree. If you could take children more naturally and spontaneously and not bother so much about child psychology, it would be very much better I think.

Van Doren: Certainly. And likewise children should be relieved of the necessity of understanding adult psychology.

Porter: Well, I think one of the most sinister things I ever heard was a little boy, a small child about four years old, weeping bitterly by himself. His parents found him and tried to discover what had happened to him. He wept for a while and finally he blurted out: "Oh, I do want to be happy."

Van Doren: Mr. Russell, I should like to ask you, because of your own distinction in the field of logic and mathematics, whether Carroll is thought actually to have any importance in that field today.

Russell: His works were just what you would expect: comparatively good at producing puzzles and very ingenious and rather pleasant, but not important. For instance, he produced a book of formal logic which is much pleasanter than most because, instead of saying things like "all men are mortal," which is very dull, it says, things like "most hungry crocodiles are disagreeable," which is amusing, and that makes the subject more agreeable. Then he wrote a book of geometry which is pleasant in a way, but not important. None of his work was important. The best work he ever did in that line was the two puzzles that I spoke of.

Van Doren: And are those better in that line than anything in either Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass—I mean to say, considered as contributions?

Russell: Oh, certainly, because there is nothing in Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass that could conceivably be thought a contribution. They offer only pleasant illustrations for those who don't want to be thought too heavy.

Van Doren: But for children perhaps? I mean, could one seriously say that a child might learn a little bit to be logical from reading these books?

Russell: I shouldn't have thought so.

Van Doren: That was a very heavy question, and you should have rebuked me for it. But the famous error that is made (I don't know whether this is a logical error or not) when it is said that butter should not have been used in the works of a watch and the answer is: "but it was the best butter"—is that amusing to a child?

Porter: That was frightfully amusing. That was funny always.

Van Doren: Or the demonstration that, since a dog is not mad because when he is happy he wags his tail and when he is unhappy he growls with his throat, therefore a cat which when it is happy moves its tail and growls is mad.

Porter: I think we understood that all very well, don't you?

Russell: How about the treacle well?

Porter: Yes, I liked the treacle well.

Russell: Do you remember, they drew treacle out of the treacle well? "But I don't understand," said Alice, "they were in the well." "So they were," said the dormouse, "well in."

Porter: That was funny, too.

Van Doren: They were drawing treacle from the well, and the dormouse explains: "Well, we were just learning to draw; we didn't draw very well." And suddenly they're talking about drawing pictures—drawing pictures of things the names of which begin with the letter M. "Why with the letter M?" "Why not?"

Porter: But do you remember the lessons they had? Was it the eel, or some underseas creature, who had lessons in drawling and stretching and fainting in coils? You know, we were never told how to translate that and we didn't need to. We thought those tricks were funny in themselves.

Van Doren: And the exercises in reeling and writhing.

Porter: We didn't get on to that for a long time.

Russell: I found the only thing that my boy really liked, my small boy, was the poem about Father William. He looked at me with a grave face and said: "Father William was very clever although he was old."

Van Doren: How old is the boy, by the way?

Russell: Four and a half.

Van Doren: A shrewd remark. Now we have not referred often enough in our conversation to the presence in this book of some very famous poems which are of course parodies. I think the poem about Father William is the most interesting. Would you agree?

Russell: I agree—yes.

Van Doren: Miss Porter, would you like to read that?

Porter: I'll swing along as we used to when we read it as children.

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back somersault in at the door—
small>Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box,—
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet.
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I've answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"

SOURCE: "Wonderland Revisited," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Autumn, 1965, pp. 591-616.

[Levin is an American educator and critic whose works reveal his wide range of interests and expertise, from Renaissance culture to the contemporary novel. In the following essay, he provides a centennial re-assessment of the Alice books and of their author, Charles Dodgson (Carroll).]

In the twentieth century's commemoration of the nineteenth, we have reached the centennial of Alice. Not uncharacteristically, the date has been somewhat blurred. The author, whose fussiness has endeared him to bibliophiles, was dissatisfied with the first edition, so that Alice in Wonderland was not publicly issued until 1866. Moreover, if we wish to celebrate the occasion on which the tale was first told, we must look back to that famous boating party of three little girls and two dons on July 4, 1862. That "golden afternoon," as Lewis Carroll describes it in his introductory poem, was actually—as modern research has discovered—"wet and rather cool." Fancy has been at work from the very outset. The rain that had overtaken the same group of five picnickers during an earlier expedition on June 17 seems to have inspired the pool of tears, wherein Alice's sisters Lorina and Edith are immortalized as the Lory and the Eaglet, while their companions Duckworth and Dodgson appear as the Duck and the Dodo. But the date specified in the story is May 4, Alice Liddell's tenth birthday; and, since the heroine of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There is exactly seven and a half just six months later, perhaps her adventures should be predated at 1859.

At all events, the fantasy has now lasted 100 years. What is more surprising, it has withstood the stringent test of translation into forty-seven languages (by the reckoning of Dr. Warren Weaver, whose collection, ranging from Finnish to Swahili and from Chinese to Esperanto versions, should harbor an independent interest for cultural anthropologists). Excerpts have been quoted in, and out of, every conceivable context. Clearly the Alice books must embody certain archetypes, they must touch off some of the deeper responses of human consciousness, in order to have penetrated so far beyond their immediate period and culture. Yet, looking back to them from our present distance, we may also note that they were deeply embedded in their mid-Victorian matrix, that they remain as distinctively English as their heroine's name. Now the English have no monopoly on nonsense—or, for that matter, on common sense. However, it may be no accident that they have excelled so conspicuously in both. It may be that the one is the price paid for—or else the bonus gained from—the other, that a hard-working sense of practicality gets its recreation from the enjoyment of absurdity. The nonsense of Lewis Carroll has been defined by a French fantast, André Breton, as "the vital solution to a profound contradiction between the acceptance of faith and the exercise of reason."

It was the voice of reason that spoke through the tongue of Edmund Burke, when he remarked: "Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of night and day, yet darkness and light are on the whole tolerably distinguishable." What could be more pragmatic, more empirical, more thoroughly British? Yet such reasoning could never have satisfied the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. From his adolescent magazine, The Rectory Umbrella, to his Oxford lecture, "Where Does the Day Begin?," he preoccupied himself with precisely this problem, and stood ready to pursue the sunrise around the world in order to prove his point that such distinctions were wholly arbitrary. No wonder we experience some hesitation in putting a finger on Alice's anniversary! We live by those convenient strokes which separate night from day, sleeping from waking, and madness from sanity. But imagination, poetic or scientific—and in Dodgson's case it was both—cannot afford to take anything for granted. It is continually entertaining the most improbable assumptions, following non sequiturs through to their logical consequences, or—like Dodgson—hopefully working out pi to an ever larger number of decimals. Speculating in his diary, he asked himself:

Query: when we are dreaming and, as so often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality. "Sleep hath its own world," and it is often as lifelike as the other.

If this be madness, it is closely allied to the genius of Hamlet, and there is pith in the Gravedigger's observation that the Prince has been sent to England because "there the men are as mad as he." The Cheshire Cat should not shock us when it observes of Wonderland: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." The Cheshire Cat itself seems sane enough, so detached from the frenetic proceedings it comments upon that it fades away to a mere head and finally a phosphorescent grin. But if it ends by becoming a mouthpiece, a mascot, a kind of tribal totem for British humor in its imperturbable discernment of oddities, then the episode that follows affords us a glimpse of Oxford—a mad, an endless tea-party, with pointless anecdotes and answerless riddles and feline small talk, presided over by two certified madmen, a Hatter modeled on a local character and a Hare whose watch has stopped at 6.00 o'clock. Tea-time is over, but nothing seems to lie ahead. Three little girls stay forever at the bottom of a treacle well, in the interrupted story of the Dormouse. That "Ancient City," which Dodgson refers to directly in his original manuscript, has constituted an ideal breeding ground for the cultivation of licensed eccentricity and for the humorous interplay between select intelligence and encrusted observance.

When Dodgson characterized himself as the Dodo, the reduplicated syllable echoed his stammer even while pronouncing his own surname, and the extinct bird attested his incompatibility with larger and freer worlds. When "Lewis Carroll" won unique and sudden fame, his donnish self refused to acknowledge the pseudonym that he had contrived by twisting and reversing his first two names. As conservative in politics as he was orthodox in religion, he was attached for almost 50 years to Christchurch, which is a cathedral as well as a college. An unordained cleric, a prim hobbyist, a shy devotee of lost causes and parlor tricks, he passed through a completely institutionalized career. Professionally he was—from what we gather—a mediocre mathematician and a dull teacher, supremely unconcerned with undergraduates and rather difficult in the common room. "There never was such a place for things not happening," he complained of Oxford to one correspondent. To another—another little girl—he confided: "But the great difficulty is that adventures don't happen! Oh, how am I to make some happen, so as to have something to tell to my darling Enid?" The adventures in his otherwise uneventful life were his friendships with hundreds of little girls, an avocation which we are inclined to view as either insipid or suspect.

All his other hobbies—games, puzzles, contraptions, album-leaves, holiday trips, and not least storytelling— were directed single-mindedly toward that end. Since he was remarkably skilful as a portrait photographer, photographic exposure seems to have taken the place of carnal seduction at the happy climax of these courtships. His flirtations sometimes met with rebuffs from mammas and governesses, and he confessed to a cousin with wistful bravado that he lived "on the frowns of Mrs. Grundy." But there was not much cause to be alarmed. His inamoratas were too prepubescent to have interested Humbert Humbert (though it is worth noting that Vladimir Nabokov's first book was a Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland). The biographical record, which is stuffy if not sticky, lends itself to the cruder naïvetés of the psychoanalysts. Its symbolic effect on his writing has been summed up in two or three succinct pages by William Empson—who, as a Cambridge man, was in a special position to elucidate an Oxonian case history. Mr. Empson's essay ["Alice in Wonderland: The Child as Swain" (1935)], though slightly distorted by the effort to fit it into his thesis on pastoral convention, is the most illuminating study we have of Lewis Carroll, for all the bibliographers, antiquarians, and analytic philosophers who have made an oracle of him.

The light it throws upon Dodgson's motivation, though by no means irrelevant, is incidental. In some notes for an unpublished article on dress in the theater (now in the Houghton Library at Harvard), Dodgson wrote: "Base of argument lies in relations of sex, without which purity and impurity would be unmeaning words." One cannot overlook the sexual charge in his celibate cult of his little darlings; but the outcome, by definition, seems rather pure than impure. He once planned to edit a Girls' Own Shakespeare, in which he proposed to purify the text of such gross expressions as Bowdler had not excised. The demure Eros of Lewis Carroll was a Victorian ideal of delicacy, feminine yet neither female nor effeminate. We may appreciate it better if, recalling his miserable school days at Rugby, we compare Alice with Tom Brown, and with that admixture of cant and brutality which passed for what the Victorians liked to call manliness.

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes. . .

In the endeavor to make things happen, the escape from the monotonous quadrangle of his own existence, Dodgson's chosen companion—indeed his surrogate—was the Dean's daughter, the second one, the one that kept tossing her head back to keep her hair out of her eyes and, when her sisters asked him for a story, hoped "there will be nonsense in it."

Alice, "Child of the pure unclouded brow," with her eager, expressive face, her long, straight hair, and her pinafore that adapts to so many sizes, is the eternal ingénue who combines Miranda's reaction to the wonders of a brave new world with Daisy Miller's resolve not to miss the tourist attractions. No novelist has identified more intimately with the point of view of his heroine. Except for parenthetical comments, which occur less and less frequently, the empathy is complete. "The sole medium of the stories is her pellucid consciousness," as Walter De la Mare has pointed out; this forms the medium for as elegant an exercise in the Jamesian technique of narration as What Maisie Knew. Since Alice is in the habit of talking to herself, there can be a good deal of monologue. When she falls silent the narrator, like a good contemporary of Flaubert, can employ le style indirect libre: "Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? 'I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud." Alice began by tiring of her sister's book because it had no pictures or conversations in it. Her chronicles are not lacking in those amenities. Each adventure brings a conversation with a new and strange vis-à-vis.

As for the pictorial presentation, it is an integral part of the author's design. He started with his own sketches, chose his illustrator with the utmost concern, and worked with Tenniel in the most indelible of collaborations. Consequently, there is little description in Dodgson's prose. It is all the more convincing because he simply assumes that the sights are there, and that we visualize them through the eyes of his beholder. Instead of describing the Gryphon, he enjoins us parenthetically: "If you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture." Picture and text join forces to align the reader's awareness with that of Alice. Her inherent responsiveness is controlled by the consistent gravity of demeanor imposed upon her by the inhabitants of Wonderland. After the aimless competition of the Caucus-Race, when she is compelled to supply the prizes for everybody, including herself: "Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could." So it is that children learn to suppress their native instinct for laughter in the company of adults. "He talks just as if it was a game!" says Alice of the Red King. But, though it may be a game for her, he is in dead earnest.

Alice soon gets used to the tone of desperate seriousness in which she is greeted by all the creatures she meets, with the exception of the Cheshire Cat, and we get used to the plethora of exclamation points. She is sustained through their dead-pan dialogues by the sense of wonder, the sort of curiosity that animates great poets and scientists. "Curious" is the adjective with which she responds again and again. "Curiouser and curiouser!" is her apt, if ungrammatical, response to the sequence of events. "It was a curious dream," she tells her sister afterward, and that motif is taken up repeatedly in The Nursery Alice, the version that Dodgson rewrote for "Infants from Nought to Five." He did not hesitate to tell them how to react:

Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Alice: and she had a very curious dream.

Would you like to hear what it was that she dreamed about?

Well, this was the first thing that happened. A White Rabbit came by, in a great hurry; and, just as it passed Alice, it stopped, and took its watch out of its pocket.

Wasn't that a funny thing? Did you ever see a Rabbit that had a watch, and a pocket to put it in? Of course, when a Rabbit has a watch, it must have a pocket to put it in; it would never do to carry it about in its mouth—and it wants its hands sometimes, to run with.

In this elementary reduction, which may serve to emphasize the sophisticated artistry of the work itself, the rabbit does not talk at all and none of the conversations is reported. The textus receptus, by accepting the apparent naturalness of the situation, gains credence for its basic preposterousness. Alice's reactions are delayed. With her, we behold no more at first than a white rabbit with pink eyes:

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In an article on the dramatic adaptation, Dodgson made clear that the contrast between the audacity and directness of Alice and the nervous shilly-shallyings of the White Rabbit was intended to stress the invidious comparison between youth and age. Significantly, since he is so worried about his costume, and since he heralds the whole adventure for Alice, the Rabbit is dressed as a herald when he makes his last appearance. Without lingering over the prenatal symbolism of the rabbit-hole or the pool of tears, we may observe that Alice's principal problem—determining her relationship with the others—is the question of size. This, in turn, becomes a question of eating and drinking, properly or improperly, as every child has been reminded so often that the reminder punctuates the very rhythm of infancy. Alice's enlargements and diminutions are stimulated by a magical succession of eatables and potables. Like Gulliver, she finds herself out of scale with her fellow beings; but she is less concerned with Lilliputians or Brobdingnagians than with her own person and growth: "I never ask advice about growing." Dodgson himself has drawn a haunting illustration of Alice cramped within the Rabbit's house. "How puzzling all these changes are!" she exclaims.

Confused by such dizzying transformations—in short, by nothing more or less than the physiological metamorphoses of girlhood—she undergoes what modern psychologists would term an identity crisis. "Who are you?" the Caterpillar asks. In spite of its assurance, no caterpillar can be quite sure who it is, after all. "Who in the world am I?" Alice asks herself. Can she be Ada or Mabel? Or is she the White Rabbit's housemaid, Mary Ann? And would some other name confer on her a different personality? "Remember who you are," the Red Queen commands. Yet there may be some advantage, the Gnat whispers, in losing one's name. When Alice's neck grows so long that—in a pigeon's-eye view—she looks like a serpent, the Pigeon asks: "What are you?" She replies, rather doubtfully, "I—I'm a little girl." We can hardly blame the Pigeon for retorting: "A likely story indeed!" When she finds herself in the imaginary sphere of the Unicorn, it is he who calls her a fabulous monster. But suspended disbelief is willing to strike a bargain: he will believe in her, if she believes in him. The Lion wearily inquires whether she is animal, vegetable, or mineral. But the Messenger has already presented her credentials: "This is a child! . . . It's as large as life, and twice as natural!"

One of the most touching episodes, and possibly the profoundest, takes place in the wood where things have no name. This is truly that selva oscura where the straight way is lost, that forest of symbols whose meanings have been forgotten, that limbo of silence which prompts a cosmic shudder. Less traditionally, since Dodgson was among the pioneers of symbolic logic, it could represent—in W.V. Quine's phrase—"the gulf between meaning and naming." There Alice comes across an unfrightened fawn, who momentarily allows itself to be stroked. Happily they coexist for a time, undivided by identities or classifications. But the moment of self-recognition introduces a shock of alienation.

"What do you call yourself?" the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had!

"I wish I knew!" thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly: "Nothing, just now."

"Think again," it said: "that won't do."

Alice thought, but nothing came of it. "Please, would you tell me what you call yourself?" she said timidly. "I think that might help a little."

I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on," the Fawn said. "I can't remember here."

So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And, dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

A universe where the self has no labels or signposts to go by, in Dodgson's account, seems less estranging than a familiar environment which casts us in suspicious and hostile roles. Just as Hawthorne's faunlike protagonist regains the language of the birds and beasts when he returns to the countryside, so childhood has the faculty of communicating with nature spontaneously. Adulthood, on the other hand, superimposes its artifice, and Alice's experiences run increasingly counter to nature.

Seeking to avoid the Queen of Hearts' displeasure, her three gardeners paint her white rose-trees red. The Queen's peculiar game of croquet, by using flamingoes and hedgehogs as mallets and balls, reduces animal life to the inorganic. Alice likewise converses with the flowers, thereby allowing Dodgson to burlesque a pathetic fallacy echoed from Tennyson's Maud. Her royal mentors end by putting her on social terms with the inanimate objects that make up the bill of fare at the banquet: "Alice—Mutton: Mutton—Alice." Her relations with the animals are far from idyllic. Though they are never he or she but always neuter, most of them are highly anthropomorphic. They argue with her, exhort her to mind her manners, and order her around for all the world as if they were grown people. They seem to bear less resemblance to the benign household pets of Sir Edwin Landseer than—as Madame Mespoulet has shown—to the satirical caricatures of J. J. Grandville, who had provided some notable illustrations for the beast fables of La Fontaine. Lewis Carroll's bestiary is post-Darwinian in its vistas of universal struggle for survival, from the obsolescent Dodo to the suppressed guinea pigs. "Do cats eat bats?," Alice muses, or, "Do bats eat cats?"

No matter. All species prey and are preyed upon, and the domesticated are worse than the wild ones. The predatory crocodile replaces the busy bee, from the Divine Songs for Children of Isaac Watts,

And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

So many of her poems, as Alice retrospectively realizes, have been about fishes or other forms of sea food. The impasse of communication, the exchange of ultimata, and the warfare between two mutually antagonistic realms of creation are haltingly and laconically rendered in "I sent a message to the fish." Doubtless the most memorable of these piscatories is the affecting ballad of the Oysters' betrayal, "The Walrus and the Carpenter"; for the stage version of Alice Dodgson was persuaded to soften this stark tragedy with an afterpiece, wherein the ghosts of the Oysters exact a nightmarish revenge upon their sleeping destroyers. Alice's mythical mount, the Gryphon, though it might well claim heraldic connections, chats with her in the vulgar idiom of a hackney-coachman. His partner, the Mock Turtle, is a spurious animal, a sort of zoological back-formation; but it is a genuine dish and may therefore sing, with the greatest propriety, its lugubrious song to the evening soup—originally the evening star.

Alice's unflagging and versatile appetite leads to certain embarrassments in her encounters. Yet she proves tactful enough to stop herself from admitting that her previous acquaintance with lobsters and whitings has been on the dinner table and not in the ballroom. Her shrinkages have taught her to look at matters from the other side, from the animals' vantage point. She may scorn to be three inches tall, which the Caterpillar naturally thinks is "a very good height indeed." But she learns the hard way from her initial mistake of boasting about her cat Dinah, which hurts the Mouse's feelings and drives the birds away. Cats and kittens, conceivably because of their totemic relation with human beings, are set apart from their fellow creatures ("creatures" being the term that, for Dodgson, embraces both birds and animals). When the offended Mouse consents to tell its tale, this turns out to be a typographical oddity, a calligrammatic poem in the shape of a mouse's tail. The villain is another pet, the dog Fury, who with cold-blooded brutality undertakes to be prosecutor, judge, and jury, like the Snark in the Barrister's Dream. Alice gains a taste of what it feels like to be under such jeopardy when, in her miniature state, she is nearly crushed by a monstrous puppy—a realization made vivid by Dodgson's hatred of dogs.

The fulfilment of the Mouse's caveat is the trial scene. Here the tables are turned, in the sense that the jurors are twelve good creatures and true. One of them is Bill the Lizard again, just as ineffectual with his squeaky pencil as he was in going down the chimney; but, at least, he can write. Alice gains the upper hand again by re-enacting a mishap of a week before, when she had upset a goldfish bowl at home; the reenactment exemplifies how the dreamwork has been conditioned by daily actualities. Through her divagations she has been sustained by the vision of a delightful garden and her hope of attaining the right size to enter it. Entrance to it is implicitly equated with growing up, which is bound to be somewhat disillusioning. When she eventually gets there, instead of dallying among the fountains and flower beds, she is pressed into service for the crazy croquet game. There have been some previous intimations—the Rabbit, the Duchess, the Fish and Frog Footmen—that, when she reached that enchanted terrain at last, she would find it the precinct of high society. The ugly Duchess, erstwhile so formidable in her own kitchen, has become an affable dowager, who measures an increase of height by resting her chin on Alice's shoulder and insists on pointing out a moral in everything Alice says. How tiresome can they be, these grownups?

In the manuscript, there is but a single matriarchial figure, who bears the compound title "Queen of Hearts and Marchioness of Mock Turtles." Noting in retrospect that this queen is "a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury," Dodgson reminds us of the Mouse's warning against the litigious dog Fury, and of the rage that now and then breaks out in his "frumious" (i.e. fuming and furious) personages. The Queen's habitual ukase, "Off with his head!," is the peremptory exercise of grownup authority. Her face-card features scarcely reveal the rounded lineaments of Victoria Regina, yet Alice could never have set forth upon her adventures from any other realm than a constitutional matriarchy. In Through the Looking-Glass, she is shuttled back and forth by two matrons even more sharply differentiated in Dodgson's intentions: the White Queen, who is "all helpless imbecility," and the Red Queen, who is "the concentrated essence of all governesses." The final examination through which they must put her, before she can become a queen in her own right, has its counterpart in the prior volume, when Alice is sent to be interviewed by the Mock Turtle, and recognizes—with due allowance for sea change—the curriculum that she has studied at day school.

Thence we are wafted not back to the garden party but to the culminating trial: a recapitulation of events and a convocation of characters to which Alice reacts with no Kafka-esque passivity. The charge as stated in the nursery rhyme, the theft of tarts, seems to be a breach of the domestic proprieties. We never reach the second stanza, where the Knave gets punished like a mischievous boy undergoing parental discipline. For Alice has been growing steadily—"a very curious sensation"—until, when she takes the witness stand, she towers above the denizens of Wonderland. She is no longer the spectator but the cynosure. Before she had met anyone, she could soliloquize: "Oh dear, what nonsense I'm talking!" The thin-skinned Mouse could expostulate with her: "You insult me by talking such nonsense!" But it is the others, more and more, who insult her by talking nonsensically. At their first encounter in the garden, "crimson with fury," the Queen of Hearts had ordered her decapitation, and Alice had retorted boldly: "Nonsense!" Having now attained full stature, she repeats the retort with emphasis: "Stuff and nonsense!" When the Queen repeats her furious sentence, Alice dispels the whole nonsensical phantasmagoria with the sensible exorcism: "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

She is a little girl once more when she awakens, and she must retraverse her adolescence by another route in the sequel. There we soon find her contradicting the Red Queen: "That would be nonsense—" To which the Red Queen majestically replies: "I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!" At a parallel stage to the exorcism of the card-pack, the second finale, Alice qualifies for her crown by the Queens' catechism: "What dreadful nonsense we are talking!" At her coronation, once more she tells the phantoms off and brushes them away, pulling out the tablecloth from under them and stirring the hall into pandemonium—as, Mr. Empson conjectures, Dodgson would so have liked to have done with the high table at Christchurch. We must stay with Alice, however. Consciously she seems to rouse herself, as we do when our wishdreams threaten to turn into nightmares. Deliberately she shakes the diminishing Red Queen until the figure dwindles into her black kitten. This has all been a dream, too, like the first one, which ended with Alice's older sister Lorina drowsing off into her own dream of Wonderland, and with the soft noises of the river-bank providing their oneiric sound effects. "There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!" as Alice has been conscious from the beginning.

Her second dream propels her farther into the stratosphere of metaphysical speculation, where she is informed that she is nothing but a figment of the Red King's dream. Awakening, she speculates with her kitten as to who was the dreamer and which the reality. "He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!" After the disappearance of the Lion and the Unicorn, she all but dismisses them as a dream within a dream, when she notices the plate for their plum-cake at her feet and meditates an existential challenge.

"So I wasn't dreaming, after all," she said to herself, "unless—unless we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's my dream, and not the Red King's. I don't like belonging to another person's dream," she went on in a rather complaining tone: "I've a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!"

The Hunting of the Snark has been philosophically interpreted as a fruitless search for the Absolute; the ultimate object of man's quest is foredoomed to vanish away softly and silently; it was the last line of the "Agony" that occurred first to the agonizing poet: "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Q.E.D. Theirs not to reason why. Just what a Snark might happen to be and why the ill-sorted crew should ever have embarked on the ill-fated undertaking are never explained; and, though the dénouement is not unexpected, it is all the more horrible because it remains unspecified. That selfevident "you see" is the hollowest of ironies. Sylvie and Bruno carries Dodgson's mood of subjective idealism toward the evanescent conclusion of Shakespeare and Calderón. "Is life itself a dream?" the narrator wonders. And the terminal acrostic of Through the Looking-Glass concludes: "Life, what is it but a dream?"

The stuff of dreams is as illusory as those scented rushes which lose their fragrance and beauty when Alice picks them. Yet Dodgson catches the cinematographic movement of dreams when the grocery shop, after changing into the boat from which she gathers the dream-rushes, changes back into the shop which is identifiable as an Oxford landmark. The next phase is the egg on the shelf, which becomes Humpty Dumpty on his wall. The narration, with its corkscrew twists, carefully observes the postulate that Dodgson formulated in his seriocomic treatise, "Dynamics of a Particle": "Let it be granted that a speaker may digress from any one point to any other point." Alice proceeds by digression through Wonderland, since it does not really matter which way she goes. In the Looking-Glass Land, which is regulated by a stricter set of ground rules, she is forced to move backward from time to time. Dodgson had given himself his donnée by sending her down the rabbit-hole "without the least idea what was to happen afterwards." What extemporaneously followed seemed to consist, as he subsequently recounted it, "almost wholly of fits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves." Though it may have been obsession which gave them a thematic unity, it was artistry which devised their literary form.

Symmetrically, each of the two books comprises twelve chapters. Both of them conflate the dream vision with the genre known as the voyage imaginaire; in effect, they merge the fairy tale with science fiction. The journey, in either case, is not a quest like The Hunting of the Snark—or that log-book it almost seems to parody, Moby-Dick. Rather, it is an exploration—underground, in the first instance, and so originally entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground. This relates it to a wealth of symbols for the claustral limits of the human condition, from Plato to Dostoevsky. Falling can betoken many things: above all, the precondition of knowledge. Subterranean descent can land in an underworld, be it Hell or Elysium or the other side of the earth, the Antipodes, which Alice malapropistically calls "the Antipathies"—not so exact an opposite to our side as the Looking-Glass Country, but a topsy-turvy-dom of sorts like Butler's Erewhon. As we approach it, it seems to be a juvenile utopia, what with its solemn games and half-remembered lessons and ritualized performances of nursery rhymes. Before we leave it, it becomes an unconscious Bildungsroman, projecting and resisting the girlish drama of physical and psychological development. "What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? [fumes the Red Queen.] Even a joke should have some meaning—and a child's more important than a joke, I hope."

As for the looking-glass, that has been a traditional metaphor for narcissistic self-absorption, for art's reflection of nature, and—more abstractly—for the reversal of asymmetric relationships. Scientific commentators may see in it an adumbration of up-to-date physical theory regarding particles and anti-particles. Much more prosaically, it might be suggested that any child who grew up in a semidetached house, and had played in the adjoining house, would take as a matter of course the reversed arrangements of rooms. Dodgson, who liked to write backward, wanted to have some pages of his book printed in reverse. His fondness for inverting standard patterns is humanly personified in the mirrorimage twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For him, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had been a discovery, an improvisation, a series of serendipities; whereas Through the Looking-Glass, seven years later, was faced with the usual difficulty of sequels. It made up in systematic elaboration for what it lost in spontaneous flow. If it is less organically imagined, it is replete with brilliant paradoxes, some of which do anticipate modern science. On these aspects especially, Martin Gardner has compiled a lucid and suggestive commentary in his Annotated Alice, to which I must express a comprehensive debt of gratitude.

Inasmuch as surprise is of the essence, there is little recurrence from book to book. We hardly recognize the Hare and the Hatter of Wonderland when they are metamorphosed into the messengers Haigha and Hatta of the Looking-Glass. The later story takes place indoors during the autumn; its predecessor took place outdoors in the spring. Alice has been impelled underground by a swift train of circumstances; she dissolves the looking-glass, for herself and her kitten, with the hypnotic formula: "Let's pretend." She is more self-conscious on her first trip, and we are more interested in what happens to her. On her second, we tend to accept her and to look around with her, as if we were accompanying her through Disneyland or the World's Fair. The shift from identity to duality is a transference from self to otherness. The presiding figures from the game of cards are as remote as epic deities until the end of Part I. Their counterparts from chess are more regularly present throughout Part II, which is framed by a chess problem—not a very deliberative one. Alice becomes a pawn, replacing the Queen's daughter Lily, and looks ahead to being queened; whereas—except for her disappointed wish to arrive at the garden—her earlier wanderings, through cavernous passages and quasi-Elysian fields, had no set destination.

The excursion shifts from time to space, from an impressionistic continuum to a more static outlook, as she crosses the chessboard landscape. Above its checkered topography looms the presence of the geometrician who laid it out and manipulates the chessmen. What is happening has happened before and will happen again, at predictable intervals as long as folklore persists. Tweedledum and Tweedledee will fight; the Lion and the Unicorn will be drummed out of town; Humpty Dumpty will fall from his wall and, though not reconstructed by all the King's horses or men, will somehow be enabled to re-enact the performance. Now, all fairylands, utopias, paradises, and other imagined worlds—whatever improvements they may have to offer—are bound to draw their inspiration from the one world that their imaginer knows at first hand. It would be unlikely if Dodgson's creations were not liberally sprinkled with local and topical allusions. Sir John Tenniel, who was mainly a political caricaturist, occasionally injected an overt touch: in his drawing of the Lion and Unicorn we discern the features of rival candidates, the Earl of Derby and Disraeli. The latter also seems to have posed for the traveler dressed in white paper, peculiarly appropriate for a Prime Minister, who sits opposite Alice in the railway carriage.

This locale, a favorite with Dodgson, invites a passing glance at nineteenth-century technology. The chorus of voices that Alice hears, while a passenger, chants a commercial refrain where everything is evaluated at £1000. Since the train is going the wrong way, according to the guard, it escapes to the domain of fancy from the workaday world to which it belongs. Dodgson would try to encompass those two worlds, together with a pious romance, a whimsical tract, and divers other polarities, within the two volumes of Sylvie and Bruno. Therein, by means of psychic transitions, the narrative is systematically transposed from the Commonplace to the Marvelous—from Outland, the regime of conspiratorial adults, "Through the Ivory Gate" to Elfland, the preserve of cloying juveniles. The happiest feature of this ambitious scheme is a device which is used to modulate from one plane to the other. At the transitional moment, a Mad Gardener sings a song whose pattern becomes familiar:

"He thought he saw an Elephant
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
'At length I realise,' he said,
'The bitterness of Life!'"

If Dodgson had been a romanticist, his daydream might have turned that conjugal letter—that grimly realistic slice of life—into a missive from a fair stranger. Instead—and this is what spells the difference between romance and nonsense—life is made less bitter by the spectacle of a tootling elephant. The transformation is made explicit by the Professor, who is the Carrollian mentor of Sylvie and Bruno, when he persuades the Gardener to unlock, for the three of them, what is tantamount to the gate of fantasy:

"He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a Key:
He looked again, and found it was A Double Rule of Three:
'And all its mystery,' he said,
'Is clear as day to me!'"

Alice thought she saw a host of chimeras. She looked again, and found it was only a pack of cards or a set of chessmen. There is nothing, of course, so extraordinary in that. Dodgson's achievement was to prolong her reveries, and to lend their figments every appearance of solidity. Occasional echoes recall to us those matter-of-fact details from Alice's waking life—the fishes, the fire irons—which have been transmuted into fantasies. Unlike those of Sylvie and Bruno, wherein the two states are kept apart, her imaginative processes blend them together. "So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible." That state of mind in which everything seems possible can be maintained by preserving the conventions in the most absurd situations. Alice practices making a curtsy, like a properly brought-up little girl, even while she is falling down the rabbit-hole. In one of Dodgson's magazine sketches, his hero thought he saw a signboard advertising "Romancement." He looked again, and was informed that two words had inadvertently been run together: that the sign advertised a much humbler and harder commodity, namely "Roman Cement." Meanwhile, a displaced word could act as an incantation to conjure up a prospect of Elfland.

This transfiguration of commonplace objects and familiar landmarks is largely a verbal process. The slightest variation in spelling or pronunciation can effect a drastic change, but the Cheshire Cat would be equally unsurprised if the baby turned into a pig or a fig. Alice becomes uncomfortably aware that something odd has been happening to her Weltanschauung when her memorized arithmetic comes out scrambled and her geography seems to be disoriented. But the real test is—as it should be—poetry, and the transforming device is parody. Periodically she is called upon to recite, or else listen to, a selection of gems from the repertory of the nursery, dimly recognizable but strangely transmogrified. "Some of the words have got altered" in her recollection of Southey's parable about Father William, so that the cautionary elder has become an impenitent prankster, rebuffing the youth's curiosity with a threat to kick him downstairs. This is, by implication, a rebuff to the perpetual questioning from Alice herself. Watts's verses for infants, which are as oppressively moralistic as the Duchess, are released from their didactic burdens in the retelling: the ubiquitous lobster turns ventriloquist and obtrudes itself into "The Voice of the Sluggard."

The distinction between sense and nonsense, in the poem read into the record as evidence against the Knave of Hearts, is obliterated by the omission of proper names. As a result, the reader gropes from relative pronoun to relative pronoun in a game of grammatical blindman's buff:

They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him . . .

The resulting disorientation foreshadows the wood of namelessness or Humpty Dumpty's doctrine that names confer meaning. Alice dismisses the poem as meaningless, though the King endeavors to explicate it, not very successfully. On the other hand, the whispering Gnat succeeds in creating new subspecies of insects by extrapolation from names of existing flies. The Rocking-horse-fly and the Bread-and-butter-fly are worthy subjects for Tenniel's unnaturalism. But the artist firmly balked at the author's notion of a wasp in a wig; that was, he objected, "beyond the appliance of art." It is significant that, when Dodgson composed his ballad about the Walrus, he let Tenniel decide whether the deuteragonist should be a carpenter, a baronet, or a butterfly. Since all three were metrically equivalent, and none required rhymes, the choice was left to depend upon their graphic possibilities—no richer, one would think, for an ostreophagous butterfly than for a periwigged wasp. Verbal considerations were secondary to visual for the nonce.

But, as the Dormouse shrieks when its anecdote trails off into nouns beginning with M, "Did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness!" Ordinarily, the word precedes the thing. Façons de parler regain their primitive magic by being taken literally. Thus, to answer the door is to assume that the door has spoken first. Expressions like Time and Nobody cast off their abstractness and take on the misplaced concreteness of personalities. Metaphors, such as "feather" and "catch a crab" when Alice is rowing, can be all too easily hypostatized. Puns are means of unexpected propulsion, because they change the subject so abruptly: they switch fortuitously from one theme to another, with trees that bark like dogs or books so tedious that they dry you off when you get wet. The key words, in Alice's recipe for bread, have a misleading significance for the White Queen:

"You take some flour—"

"Where do you pick the flower?" the White Queen asked. "In a garden or in the hedges?"

"Well, it isn't picked at all," Alice explained: "it's ground—"

"How many acres of ground?" said the White Queen. "You mustn't leave out so many things."

Such redundancies must not be left out, if vital information is to be conveyed. The pun, or any other type of wordplay where relevance is determined by the chance of two sounds coinciding, is a standing invitation to absurdity for better or worse. Insofar as it frees us from the responsibility for being rational, it can be a source of relief. One of the unmistakable marks that make the Snark so inevitable a quarry is its general lack of humor and its particular resistance to punning:

"The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun."

It seems characteristic of Lewis Carroll that the most touchingly serious of his lyrics should be the acrostic on Alice Pleasance Liddell. Alliteration, as a variant of rhyme, can be meaningful but is often farfetched. The crew that sails after the Snark is so utterly miscellaneous because it is made up of occupations which alliterate with the Bellman: the Baker, the Butcher, the Broker, the Banker, the Barrister, the Bonnet-maker, the Billiard-marker, the Boots, and the Beaver. Alice shows us how to mix things up by affecting the letter, when she plays the word game, "I love my love with an H." Nonetheless, given the semi-rationality of the human mind, even a jumbling together of incongruities must be patterned by some principle of order—if only by an initial consonant. The Walrus talks

"Of shoes—of ships—of sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—"

and sealing-wax is one of the ingredients of the White Knight's pudding (perhaps for personal reasons connected with Dodgson's voluminous correspondence). "It's not easy to be nonsensical," said Marcel Duchamp, the veteran of cubism and surrealism, in a recent interview, "because nonsensical things so often turn out to make sense." Striving for sheer random heterogeneity, one is much more likely to produce an unconscious association of ideas or a deliberate juxtaposition of opposites:

"And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings."

The value of verse, in this respect, is that its formal constraints are constantly pressing toward a dissociation of sound and sense. The serious poet must struggle against the current; the nonsense poet may float along with it, gurgling happily down the stream. And though there are many varieties of nonsense poetry, which Alfred Liede has earnestly surveyed in his two substantial volumes, Dichtung als Spiel: Studien der Unsinnspoesie an den Grenzen der Sprache, "Lewis Carroll is the most enigmatic of nonsense poets." The poem that both illustrates and demonstrates the enigma for us is bound to be "Jabberwocky," which—as its title obscurely hints—seems to be a heroic lay about language. Alice has discovered it in a book, at the outset of her second expedition, and it has filled her head with ideas; but she does not comprehend them until the midpoint, when she encounters Humpty Dumpty, whose onomatopoetic name fulfils his linguistic theories and asserts his cavalier nominalism. "The question is," as he expounds it to Alice, "which is to be master—that's all." The ancient nursery rhyme from which he derives his being was once a riddle rhymed in many languages. The answer is a symbol with many meanings, from the egg that germinates life to the fall that shatters it.

Hence he is fully qualified to be Dodgson's philosopher and philologist; from the precarious eminence of his hybris, he dominates the problems of interpretation; and, after his lecture to Alice on semantics, he sets forth an exegesis of "Jabberwocky" which is a model for higher and newer criticism.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Dodgson, at the age of twenty-three, had lettered this opening quatrain in pseudo-runic characters into his family periodical Mischmasch, under the caption "Stanzas from Anglo-Saxon Poetry," and with a commentary anticipating Humpty Dumpty. It was wise of him to leave the Anglo-Saxon attitudes to the King's Messengers in Through the Looking-Glass, since the lines have little in common with Old English, except for the alliterative pairing of "gyre" and "gimble," plus a certain profusion of gutturals. As a matter of fact, the metrical scheme is one which could evoke reverberations from a nearer monument:

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Humpty Dumpty puts on a dazzling exhibition of his mastery over words, in glossing the unfamiliar nouns and verbs and adjectives. Some of these are no more than archaisms; others, which interest us more, are neologisms; and the most interesting, among the latter, are those composites which Dodgson invented and patented as portmanteau words for the diction of dreams.

Leaving them opaque, together with the "very curious-looking creatures" that they denote, we are swept along by the firm syntactic and rhythmic structure, which frames the ineffable adventure and makes it perfectly credible, whatever it may mean. That outline is reinforced if, experimentally, we substitute obvious phrases for obscure ones:

'Twas April, and the heavy rains
Did drip and drizzle on the road:
All misty were the windowpanes,
And the drainpipes outflowed.

Lacking the dim suggestiveness of those slithy toves and mome raths, this is much too flat and prosy; but it indicates, with diagrammatic sharpness, how the exotic colors have been applied within the convertional contours. Let us intensify the experiment by pitching it in a more apocalyptic key:

'Twas doomsday, and the rabid curs
Did yelp and yodel in the void:
All strident were the trumpeters,
And the big guns deployed.

This approaches nonsense again, since the very rigidities of syntax and meter—the need to meet formal requirements while sustaining a certain tone, but not necessarily advancing any thought—make nonsense very difficult to avoid and sense extremely easy to neglect. James Joyce, Humpty Dumpty's professed disciple, did not relax these rigidities when he wrote Finnegans Wake in prose; rather, he extended them, since his distortions of speech were posited upon correct inflections and set rhythms. Dodgson's surprises, like Joyce's, depend on the calculated subversion of well-established expectations. Order has been artfully deranged to create the illusion of chaos.

"Jabberwocky," despite the double talk of its somnambulistic vocabulary, conforms to all the conventions of balladry. Childe Roland to the dark tower comes; Jack ends by killing the Giant; and, if the Snark proves a Boojum, it is not permitted to vanish away. Grappling with the nameless terrors that menace us all, Dodgson might have boasted, like his insomniac Baker:

"I engage with the Snark—every night after dark—
In a dreamy delirious fight . . ."

The White King is similarly obsessed with Bandersnatches, who can never be caught or stopped, but who would seem to be lesser evils than the Jabberwock. The slaying of that dread apparition marks a rite of passage for the beamish boy, whoever he may be. Tenniel depicts him sturdily planted like David before Goliath, confronting a dragon-like foe who is not less terrifying because—like our timid friend, the White Rabbit—he is wearing a waistcoat. The picture was conceived and executed as a frontispiece to Through the Looking-Glass. However, it proved so horrendous that Dodgson feared it might frighten his child readers. Accordingly, he went to the other extreme; after conducting a private poll among their mothers, he decided to replace the hobgoblin with a good genius; and so the book opens with Tenniel's equestrian portrait of the "gentle foolish face" and the ingeniously cumbersome panoply of the White Knight, accompanied by a pedestrian Alice.

Her belated champion deserves the honor; for he is the kindliest of her guides and advisers, indeed the truest hero of her story; and it is their encounter, we are told, that she will always remember most clearly. After the preparatory rounds between Tweedledum and Tweedledee and between the Lion and the Unicorn, there is a climactic battle when the Red Knight cries "Check!" and the White Knight somehow manages to rescue Alice, with the noise of fire irons clanking against the fender not far away. With the loping move of the knight in chess, falling off his horse every pace or two, he escorts her to the square where queenship awaits her. Their farewell is as poignant as Dante's from Vergil at the upper boundaries of Purgatory. But the Knight has a closer precedent in Don Quixote, whom he emulates with his uncertain horsemanship and his headful of chimerical plans. His memorable song, which functions as a kind of cadenza to the work as a whole, parodies Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," where the dejected poet is revivified by the example of the old leech-gatherer playing his humble trade on the lonely moor. An earlier version of Dodgson's burlesque had been separately published, and he drew the character of the Knight to suit the speaker in it. Therefore it is a portrait within a portrait. As Mr. Gardner suggests, Dodgson set up a looking-glass across from his looking-glass.

The image reflected from the one to the other ad infinitum is thus a self-caricature: Dodgson as Lewis Carroll as the White Knight as the speaker of the poem as its interlocutor,

an aged aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.

Dodgson admitted as much in a later memoir, "Isa's Visit to Oxford," when he referred to himself as "the Aged Aged Man." No doubt many voices in the two stories are primarily his own: the grumpiness of the Caterpillar, the amusement of the Cheshire Cat, the pedagogy of Humpty Dumpty. In the amiable eccentric who sings the song—and even more in the useless ingenuities, the woolgathering projects, and the endearing crotchets of its quixotic protagonist—Dodgson has offered us his apologia pro vita sua. Virginia Woolf discerned that he had preserved a child within him intact; meanwhile his outer self had become a pedant, who measured everyone's words with a literalness which exposed the contradictions by which they lived; yet, in the dialogue between the incongruous pair, childhood took the measure of pedantry. Understandably the White Knight is disappointed when Alice sheds no tears at his recital. But the game is virtually over. Alice has only to leap across the brook, be crowned, and wake up to a less adventurous actuality. The storyteller, folding his chessboard and putting away the pieces, can voice the satisfaction of a demiurge who has populated a cosmos and set it in motion, with the White Knight's vaunt: "It's my own invention!"

SOURCE: "Alice's Journey to the End of Night," in PMLA, Vol. LXXXI, No. 5, October, 1966, pp. 313-26.

[Rackin is known as a leading Carroll scholar. In the following essay, he explores the theme of chaos and order in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, calling the work "a comic myth of man's insoluble problem of meaning in a meaningless world."]

In the century now passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, scores of critical studies have attempted to account for the fascination the book holds for adult readers. Although some of these investigations offer provocative insights, most of them treat Carroll in specialized modes inaccessible to the majority of readers, and they fail to view Alice as a complete and organic work of art. Hardly a single important critique has been written of Alice as a self-contained fiction, distinct from Through the Looking-Glass and all other imaginative pieces by Carroll. Critics also tend to confuse Charles Dodgson the man with Lewis Carroll the author; this leads to distorted readings of Alice that depend too heavily on the fact, say, that Dodgson was an Oxford don, or a mathematician, or a highly eccentric Victorian gentleman with curious pathological tendencies. The results are often analyses which fail to explain the total work's undeniable impact on the modern lay reader unschooled in Victorian political and social history, theoretical mathematics, symbolic logic, or Freudian psychology. It seems time, then, that Alice be treated for what it most certainly is—a book of major and permanent importance in the tradition of English fiction, a work that still pertains directly to the experience of the unspecialized reader, and one that exemplifies the profound questioning of reality which characterizes the mainstream of nineteenth-century English literature.

The fact that Carroll's first version of MAlice's Adventures in Wonderland was called Alice's Adventures under Ground is surprisingly prophetic. Perhaps even the final version would be more appropriately entitled Alice's Adventures under Ground, since, above all else, it embodies a comic horror-vision of the chaotic land beneath the man-made groundwork of Western thought and convention.

Alice's dogged quest for Wonderland's meaning in terms of her above-ground world of secure conventions and self-assured regulations is doomed to failure. Her only escape is in flight from Wonderland's complete anarchy—a desperate leap back to the above-ground certainties of social formalities and ordinary logic. Her literal quest serves, vicariously, as the reader's metaphorical search for meaning in the lawless, haphazard universe of his deepest consciousness. Thus, the almost unanimous agreement among modern critics that Alice is a dream-vision turns out to be far more than a matter of technical classification. If it were merely that, one might dismiss the work (and some critics have) as simply a whimsical excursion into an amusing, child-like world that has little relevance to the central concerns of adult life and little importance in comparison to the obviously "serious" works that explore these concerns. But if "dream-vision" is understood as serious thinkers (ranging from medieval poets to modern psychologists) have so often understood it, as an avenue to knowledge that is perhaps more meaningful—and frequently more horrifying—than any that the unaided conscious intellect can discover, then it provides an almost perfect description of the very substance of Carroll's masterpiece.

Merely to list the reverses Alice encounters in Wonderland is to survey at a glance an almost total destruction of the fabric of our so-called logical, orderly, and coherent approach to the world. Practically all pattern, save the consistency of chaos, is annihilated. First, there are the usual modes of thought—ordinary mathematics and logic: in Wonderland they possess absolutely no meaning. Next are the even more basic social and linguistic conventions: these too lose all validity. Finally, the fundamental framework of conscious predication—orderly Time and Space—appears nowhere except in the confused memory of the befuddled but obstinate visitor from above ground. Alice, therefore, becomes the reader's surrogate on a frightful journey into meaningless night. The only difference between Alice and the reader—and this is significant—is that she soberly, tenaciously, childishly refuses to accept chaos completely for what it is, while the adult reader almost invariably responds with the only defense left open to him in the face of unquestionable chaos—he laughs. Naturally he laughs for other reasons, too. But the essence of Alice's adventures beneath commonly accepted ground is the grimmest comedy conceivable, the comedy of man's absurd condition in an apparently meaningless world.

If Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, then, is best viewed as a grimly comic trip through the lawless underground that lies just beneath the surface of our constructed universe, what gives the work its indisputable relevance to that universe, what keeps Alice itself from becoming formless, inconsistent, and confusing? The answer to this question is at once an explanation of Alice's literary nature and a tentative glimpse at a fundamental problem of modern man.

Let us begin at the beginning. Alice enters upon her journey underground simply because she is curious: she follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, "never once considering how in the world she was to get out again." With the fearlessness of the innocent child, the intellectual and spiritual recklessness of a heedless scientist or saint, Alice takes her gigantic and seemingly irreversible leap into the world beneath and beyond ordinary human experience.

Significantly, Alice brings along with her a number of things from that old world above ground, the most important being her beleif in the simple orderliness of the universe. For example, in the midst of her long fall she retains her old belief in regular causal relations and puts the empty marmalade jar back into a cupboard in order to avoid "killing somebody underneath," whatever "killing" may mean to her. She wonders, as she falls and falls, about many things—all in terms of the world she has left behind, as if she had not really left it at all. She wonders what latitude or longitude she has arrived at, even though "latitude" and "longitude" are meaningless words to her and meaningless measurements under the ground. She wonders whether she will come out on the other side of the earth, where people called "The Antipathies" walk with their heads downwards (a prophetic pun, for the majority of the "people" she will meet will be truly "Antipathies" to Alice).

Already a pattern is discernible: Alice's assumptions are typically no more than her elders' operating premises which she maintains with a doctrinaire passion that is almost a caricature of immature credulity. For her, these premises are empty words, yet her faith in their validity is almost boundless. Carroll thus economically establishes one important facet of his protagonist before her adventures and her quest for meaning begin in earnest: she has reached that stage of development where the world appears completely explainable and unambiguous, that most narrow-minded, prejudiced period of life where, paradoxically, daring curiosity is wedded to uncompromising literalness and priggish, ignorant faith in the fundamental sanity of all things. With a few deft strokes, Carroll has prepared us for Alice's first major confrontation with chaos.

She is ready to cope with the "impossible" in terms of the "possible," and we are ready to understand and laugh at her literal-minded reactions.

To all of us the concept of constant or predictable size is fairly important; to a child of seven or eight it is often a matter of physical and mental survival. However, since Alice wants to pass through the tiny door into the "loveliest garden you ever saw," she herself wishes the destruction of the principle of constant size: she wishes she could find the way to shut up like a telescope. Fortunately, "so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately" that she has "begun to think that very few things indeed [are] really impossible." Here Alice's mind is operating along logical lines established before her arrival in the confusing underground. She deals with the impossible as if it had to conform to the regular causal operations of her old world above ground. But the adult reader knows better: in addition to recognizing the fallacies of Alice's reasoning in terms of traditional above-ground logic, the reader also realizes that in an under-ground world where "impossibility" is, as it were, the rule, Alice has no right to assume that the old logic itself still applies. The fact that Alice's illogical reasoning holds true in this case merely indicates that if Wonderland operates on any firm principle, that principle most certainly runs counter to the normal logic of the everyday world.

In any event, Alice is comparatively successful this time—her apparent logic seems to hold true. No doubt her first limited successes and her ability more or less to control events at the beginning serve to make her later setbacks all the more perplexing. Besides, although her ability to change her size at will is at first pleasurable (as it well might be to children, who often equate size with power), it soon becomes a mixed blessing. Although she "had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way," rapid, almost haphazard changes from ten inches to nine feet are usually accompanied by downright dangerous circumstances like deep pools of tears and frightfully cramped quarters. Nevertheless, even here Wonderland still bears some relationship to above-ground causality: growing big or small still seems to have predictable effects. Amidst all the comedy, however, the ominous destructive process has begun: two reasonably constant aspects of ordinary existence—natural growth and predictable size—have already lost their validity. Whether or not Alice recognizes it, a wedge has been driven into her old structure of meaning.

It is only natural that in such circumstances of confusion, a child would try to relate himself to the secure stability of the past. Alice soon says, "Dear, dear! How queer everthing is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual . . . if I'm not the same, the next question is, 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!" This fallacious and ironically comic "in-the-world" approach bears watching. Earlier Alice followed the rabbit, "never once considering how in the world she was to get out again." Alice typically persists in fruitless attempts to relate her truly "out-of-the-world" adventures to her previous "in-the-world" assumptions. Perhaps sensing that her above-ground identity rested on arbitrary, constructed systems like arithmetic, she attempts to re-establish it by reciting her rote-learned lessons: "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!" But Alice is in Wonderland, where old assumptions—that rabbits cannot talk, that longitude and latitude can always plot position, that size and growth must be fairly regular—have already proven ridiculously invalid. Of course, her arithmetic (as some specialists have pointed out) still makes sense, but only to a relatively sophisticated mind; and even then the sense it makes only serves to strengthen a vision of the arbitrary nature of common above-ground approaches to meaning. Alice herself has an intuition of this truth when she asserts, "However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography." But even before she begins her confused geography recitation ("London is the capital of Paris," and so on), the reader suspects that she is again headed for failure, since the ordinary concept of Space, too, is already on its way to oblivion.

Directly after these amusing arithmetical and geographical setbacks, Alice attempts to establish her previous identity by reciting Watts's moral verses about the busy bee and Satan's mischief for idle hands. Once again it is all wrong. Even her voice sounds "hoarse and strange," as if taking some uncontrollable, demonic delight in the parody ("How doth the little crocodile"). In this one short comic poem, another above-ground principle is subverted. For regardless of the patent sentimentality of verses like "How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour," they are for many a child the only morality he yet knows (indeed, the very triteness of such verses reflects a truth about the seemingly more sincere moral aphorisms of adults). Alice's comic recitation also subverts the sentimental convention that animals are innately moral, and this subversion ties in neatly with Alice's later encounters with the animals of Wonderland: for the most part they will not be like Watt's busy little bee; they will be more like Alice's nasty crocodile. Hence, moral precepts, like orderly growth, are meaningless or cruelly twisted in Wonderland. And with so many familiar, comforting concepts already lost, Alice naturally begins to sense her isolation. She wishes that those she left above ground would call her back because she is "so very tired of being all alone here!"

A number of psychoanalytic interpretations of Alice stress the importance of this motif of self-identity. Psychoanalytic techniques, however, seem rather superfluous in this case: most adult readers easily recognize that this most crucial above-ground convention—the nearly universal belief in permanent self-identity—is put to the test and eventually demolished in Wonderland. Alice is constantly perplexed with the same question: "Who am I?" When, in the fourth chapter, the White Rabbit orders her about like his servant Mary Ann, Alice (attempting, as usual, to relate her adventures to some orderly pattern applicable to above-ground experience) accepts the new role and imagines how the new identity will follow her back to her old world, where her cat Dinah will order her about in the same fashion. In addition, her continuing changes in size represent a variation of the self-identity theme, since to a child differences in size represent definite changes in actual identity. Alice's tortured "What will become of me?" in reaction to her apparently uncontrolled growth and her fearful acceptance of the role as servant to a rabbit are, then, more than the amusing responses of a little girl to general confusion. They are her reactions to the destruction of three basic above-ground asumptions—orderly growth, the hierarchy of animals and men, and consistent identity.

Not only is Alice's previous identity meaningless in Wonderland; the very concept of permanent identity is invalid. A pack of cards can be a group of people, a child can turn into a pig, a cat's grin can exist without a cat. Even inanimate objects like stones lack simple consistency; in the fourth chapter, when the White Rabbit and his group throw pebbles at Alice, who is trapped by her enormous size in the house which is now far too small for her, she notices "with some surprise, that the pebbles [are] all turning into little cakes." Well schooled in the above-ground principles of regular causality and by now quite determined to assume that the same principles are operative in this Wonderland of impossibilities, Alice proceeds in her doggedly logical manner: "If I eat one of these cakes .. . it's sure to make some change in my size; and, as it can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose." It is the "I suppose" that humorously hints at what may be happening somewhere deep within Alice. Pedestrian as her mind is, she is beginning to get a glimmer of the "principle" of Wonderland—that it operates on no principle whatsover. Yet her subsequent eating of the pebbles that are now little cakes represents her stubborn determination to act as if her above-ground order still obtains.

From the very beginning of the underground adventures, anothr worldly convention—that verbal communication is potentially logical and unambiguous—has been surreptitiously assailed. Finally, when Alice and the strange animals emerge soaking from her pool of tears, linguistic order dissolves completely, appropriately in a dramatized pun. The Mouse announces in all seriousness that he will dry them: his method is to recite a passage from a history textbook, the "driest thing" he knows. Here Wonderland, through the comic agency of the Mouse and his "dry" history lesson, subverts a fundamental principle of everyday language. His confusion of symbol and object has far-reaching metaphysical significance, but all we need note here is that this confusion is one more contribution to the clear pattern of destruction running through all of Alice's adventures.

Much of the humor in this chapter, which begins with the semantic mix-up over the word dry, is based on similar linguistic mayhem. The assembled creatures cannot accept language on its own grounds. They want it to do what it cannot do. For one thing, they want it to be logical. When the Mouse states in his "dry" tale that Stigland "found it advisable," he is interrupted by the Duck, who wants to known the antecedent noun for "it" before the Mouse has a chance to continue. Here is a twist in Wonderland's destructive strategy: instead of contradicting the validity of man-made constructs and conventions by merely carrying on without them, Wonderland manages in the very act of using them to be far more subversive. Actually, the Duck's demand is a dramatic reductio ad absurdum of traditional grammar. He implicitly puts above-ground linguistic assumptions to the test by asking language to do what is finally impossible—to be consistently unambiguous. Such a new turn in strategy enriches the complexity of the humorous attack on above-ground convention and our illusion of cosmic order. By demanding that language be consistently sequential, Wonderland, so to speak, destroys the false logic of language with logic itself. This new strategy demonstrates one more weapon in Wonderland's comic arsenal: whenever the world above ground claims to be strictly consistent—as in Space, size, or mathematics—Wonderland is, by its very operations, maddeningly inconsistent. But whenever the world above ground is admittedly inconsistent—as in grammar—then Wonderland strenuously demands complete consistency. Such an oblique attack forces the reader to remember what he always knew—one cannot expect ordinary language to be unambiguous like mathematics. However, the urgent, rude insistence of Wonderland creatures (like the Eaglet's cry "Speak English!" or later the March Hare's "say what you mean" with its implication that language is not reversible like mathematical equations) neatly satirizes the common world's illogicality; and so, in the midst of all the fun, one more conventional prop of order begins to crumble.

As Chapter iii progresses, this conventional prop finally distintegrates. When Alice asks the Dodo what a Caucus-Race is (that is, when she asks him to define a word with other words) and thereby unwittingly tests a fundamental aspect of language, his only answer is "the best way to explain it is to do it." When the Mouse asserts that his "is a long and a sad tale," Alice replies, "It is a long tail. . . but why do you call it sad?" When the Mouse says "not," Alice thinks he refers to a knot. Here, then, another above-ground assumption (one that perplexed Charles Dodgson all his life)—that ordinary language, whether written or spoken, has at least the potential to be univocal—dissolves as swiftly and easily as the smiling Cheshire Cat. And as Alice's adventures continue, this comic subversion of linguistic convention increases in both scope and intensity.

In Chapter v, "Advice from a Caterpillar," the destruction of the above-ground hierarchy of animals and men obviously steps up in intensity. This chapter also continues the attack on Alice's belief in orderly language and relates that belief to another set of worldly conventions, the customs of social etiquette. The Caterpillar plays a role similar to Humpty Dumpty's in Through the Looking-Glass. Although he is by no means the incisive, dictatorial critic of language that Humpty Dumpty is, he is just as rude in his disparagement of Alice's linguistic habits. The Caterpillar also demonstrates by his actions that the conventions of etiquette in social intercourse are meaningless in Wonderland. Alice has already suffered the rudeness of the White Rabbit, but the brusque orders of that timid authoritarian are almost polite in comparison to the barbarisms of the Caterpillar. Alice's own politeness to the Caterpillar increases at first in practically inverse proportion to his mounting rudeness. As his demands upon her patience reach fantastic heights, she makes it a point to address him as "Sir" and to reply "very politely" to his ridiculously unfair criticisms of her speech, "swallowing down her anger as well as she [can]." This amusing reaction by Alice, occurring as it does in many places in Wonderland, is another example of her attempt to find an order underground that somehow corresponds to the order of her previous life. Certainly, in that life it is sometimes the most impolite, imperious people who command the most respect and obedience; and to a child under the domination of inscrutable adults such a paradox may appear to be orderly and right.

The most impolite remark of the Caterpillar is his very first laconic question. Its crudeness is magnified when he repeats it contemptuously—"Who are You?" With characteristic comic understatement, the narrator observes that "this was not an encouraging opening for a conversation." Indeed, in the light of Alice's many previous troubles about self-identity, the direct question becomes far more than a matter of ordinary impoliteness.

Alice responds with another attempt to recall a rote-learned, moralistic poem from her past. This time she recites in response to the gruff commands of the Caterpillar, but the results is the same—it comes out all wrong. "You are old, Father William," the lively parody of Southey's didactic verses, is, like "How doth the little crocodile," more than a humorous poem. It is, in this context of outlandish impoliteness, a kind of versified paraphrase of the almost immoral rudeness of the Caterpillar. Alice's Father William seems the antithesis of Southey's pious, temperate old man who has come gently to the end of his days. Her Father William has the air of an impolite old rake, and a conniving one at that:

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

The Caterpillar is thus closer to the truth than Alice is when he tells her that her recitation is not, as she says, merely wrong because "some of the words have got altered"; it is, as he asserts, "wrong from beginning to end," because it runs counter to the whole moral spirit of the original poem. Again in a recitation, Alice has yielded to that uncontrollable imp within her and joined willingly in the comic destruction of above-ground convention.

The rudeness of the Caterpillar contributes to the continuing antipathy between Alice and the creatures of Wonderland. Generally, she is met with condescension or mistrust, and most of the creatures she encounters are quick to contradict her. No doubt there is an element of fear in their authoritarian rudeness: they probably suspect that Alice, somewhat like an adult with children, holds the power of life and death over them. She can reject them, seemingly destroy them with a few words like "nonsense" or "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" But whatever their motives, these creatures of Wonderland are, according to all of Alice's acquired standards of social decorum, extremely discourteous (in fact, since they are strangers and Alice is something like a guest, they should be more polite, not less). Alice, clinging to her above-ground code of behavior, is either assiduously polite or ignorantly determined to educate them in her old etiquette. Significantly, most of her rules consist of "don'ts," obviously laid down by adults and now taken on complete faith by this literal-minded and priggish child. At the Mad Tea-Party, for example, Alice says to the Mad Hatter, "You should learn not to make personal remarks. . . . It's very rude." But here again, as in Wonderland's attacks on her illogical language, Alice's conventions are wittily turned upon themselves: when she violates her own dogmatic principle of decorum and rudely says to the Hatter, "Nobody asked your opinion," he "triumphantly" retorts, "Who's making personal remarks now?" And poor Alice finds herself at a new impasse: she does "not quite know what to say to this." She has been tested by her own principle and has been discredited, and she is, significantly, at a loss for words.

In the same chapter with the Caterpillar, Carroll touches so lightly upon another absurd "impossibility" that it almost escapes our attention the way it completely escapes Alice's. The Caterpillar leaves Alice with a rudeness so blatant that it is funny. He "yawned once or twice . . . got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking, as [he] went, 'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter'." Alice, in a quandary, thinks to herself: "One side of what?" And the Caterpillar says, '"Of the mushroom,' . . . just as if she had asked it aloud." No more is said of this unusual occurrence, but readers may well be impressed by such clairvoyance. For it is still one of our cherished above-ground beliefs that communication between separate minds necessitates some exchange of tangible symbols, and, even if we admit the validity of extrasensory phenomena, we do so with some wonder. But the Caterpillar, naturally, accepts his clairvoyance as a matter of course—there is not the slightest trace of wonder in his nonchalant attitude. The fact that Alice fails to relate this extraordinary occurrence to her pre-Wonderland experience is, in part, explained by the nonchalance of the Caterpillar: she obviously misses the significance of his mental feat. However, this unwitting acceptance by Alice may also mark an incipient change in her motivation. Perhaps at this point she has begun unconsciously to sense that Wonderland is not in any way like her old world above ground, even though she will vainly attempt in later adventures to find or construct a meaningful connection.

In Chapter vi an important aspect of the chaos is that the creatures here, like the clairvoyant Caterpillar, rarely consider their environment or their actions as anything but normal. To them there is certainly nothing wonderful about Wonderland. This is made explicit when a large plate comes skimming out the door, barely missing the Frog-Footman's head, and we are told that the footman continues what he is doing, "exactly as if nothing had happened." This acceptance of chaos by the inhabitants of Wonderland has at least two significant relations to the book's whole meaning. First, it serves to pique further Alice's curiosity about the "rules" of Wonderland. Since the creatures do not think their lives and world are in any way strange or disorderly, Alice takes this attitude—albeit incorrectly—as a sign that there has to be an order. In general, she fails to consider consciously the possibility that the very anarchy of their realm may be directly related to their own heedless and irrational behavior—that they live in chaos and thus act accordingly. Indeed, her reason, ordering mechanism that it is, is totally incapable of functioning outside the bounds of some kind of order. Second, the creatures' acceptance of chaos can be viewed as a fantastic parody of what happens every day in the world above ground. Here, in fact, may be the correlation between the two worlds that Alice seeks but never fully discovers. The creatures above ground, with their constructs and arbitrary conventions, act in the same way. If the Frog-Footman, say, were to visit the London of the 1860's, would not the average Englishman's nonchalant acceptance of such preposterous notions as orderly Time and Space strike him as insane? This gently comic exposure of the relativity of order that we find in Lewis Carroll's fiction has been discussed by a number of critics, but none has pointed out its organic function in Alice. It is an important component of the book's vision of universal anarchy; for what mankind (or Alice in her Wonderland) typically desires is not an adjustable frame of meaning, but an unambiguous and permanent order. Alice's reaction to the Frog-Footman's argumentativeness is representative of her total reaction to this universal anarchy: "It's really dreadful .. . the way all the creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy!" Like her previous "I suppose," the key words "dreadful" and "crazy" subtly reveal what is happening to Alice without her knowing it: she is slowly coming to an unconscious perception of Wonderland's maddening—and dangerous—nature.

Soon Alice meets the Duchess, whose hilarious rudeness surpasses even the Caterpillar's. Alice again responds with her best manners. The Duchess, like the Frog-Footman, takes no notice of the bedlam around her: surrounded by the howling of the baby, the kitchen utensils thrown by the cook, and the general disorder, the Duchess single-mindedly persists in her barbarous treatment of the baby and her guest Alice. Her "lullaby" is another of Wonderland's subversive parodies. For example, a verse of the original poem by David Bates reads:

Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild—
It may not long remain.

The Duchess sings:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases

This parody, like the earlier ones uttered by Alice, actively denies Alice's previous moral code. The Duchess, so fond of aphorisms, here recommends what Alice's world would call sheer cruelty. Moreover, the Duchess practices what she preaches, constantly shaking and tossing the baby as she sings her "lullaby." The baby soon turns into an ugly, grunting pig—right in Alice's hands. Such a dramatized reversal of the conventional sentimental attitude towards children (the Duchess even shouts "Pig!" at the baby) is something besides a hit at above-ground morality—it is more like a denial of a customary emotional response. We may note here that Carroll himself, usually so fearful of committing any social impropriety, could not in his letters and conversation always restrain his deep-seated disgust with all babies. But such information merely corroborates what any adult reader easily perceives: the baby-pig episode humorously portrays the arbitrary nature of conventional attitudes towards infants. We need go no further than the text; Alice herself muses about "other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs."

In this same chapter, Alice has her famous conversation with the Cheshire Cat. In the light of Wonderland's increasing destruction of the common world's principal foundations for sanity and order, the Cat's remarks become especially important. He is the one creature who explicitly presents Alice with an explanation of the chaos that surrounds her. When Alice asserts, "I don't want to go among mad people," the Cat replies, "Oh, you can't help that. . . we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." Alice answers, "How do you know I'm mad?" And the Cat says, "You must be .. . or you wouldn't have come here." Through this brief exchange, the amused reader—not Alice—gets a tentative, fleeting glimpse at the "meaning" of Wonderland that Alice instinctively seeks. In addition, the enigmatic Cat, who vanishes and appears as easily as he smiles, here intimates that Alice's curiosity is madness or at least the motive-power behind her mad act—her leap into this insane land. That Alice is, as the Cat states, just as mad as the natives of Wonderland is still difficult for the reader to admit, indeed even to perceive. For Alice comes from and alone represents the ordinary reader's world, which, for the sake of his existence as well as hers, must appear sane. The narrator says, "Alice didn't think that [his syllogism] provided it [her madness] at all," and the reader laughs and tacitly agrees, forgetting that the Cat's reasoning can be just as valid as Alice's. For Alice, the Cheshire Cat, and the reader are all now in Wonderland. Alice apparently learns nothing from the Cat's important revelation. While she is "not much surprised" at his vanishing—for she is "getting so well used to queer things happening"—she still fails to perceive Wonderland's meaning for those who live by the illusory principles of above-ground order. Furthermore, after being told specifically by the Cheshire Cat that the Hatter and the March Hare are both mad, Alice, when she meets them in her next adventure, remains uninstructed and stubbornly persists in her attempts to relate their disordered actions to her old notions of sanity.

Is it because Alice is a child that she fails after all this to see Wonderland for what it is? Is it her youthful ignorance that makes her miss the dangerous significance of a grin without a cat—an attribute without a subject? All she can think at this point is: "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin, . . . but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!" But this represents the response of most adults, too. In a sense, we arer all childishly ignorant in the face of supreme danger; for woven into the whole complex fabric of implications in this laughable colloquy with the Cat is one implication that esily escapes our attention: another above-ground operating principle—the seemingly indestructible bond between subject and attribute—has been gaphically subverted by the appearance of a cat's grin without a cat.

In Chapter vii Alice's old concept of Time dissolves, in one of the funniest and yet most grimly destructive scenes in the book. While many other common bases of order continue to be subverted in this adventure, "A Mad Tea-Party" focuses on Time, one major above-ground system that still appears to have some validity. Up to this point, the attack on Time has been only incidental and certainly not overwhelming, and Time still has had some meaning because the narrative itself has progressed through a vague chronological framework.

In the beginning of "A Mad Tea-Party," Alice comes upon a situation that apparently has had no temporal beginning and probably will never have an end. The March Hare, Mad Hatter, and Dormouse sit at a tea table, engaged in a truly endless succession of tea and pointless conversation (perhaps a representation of a child's view of polite mealtimes). In the midst of all the disconnected talk, the Hatter suddenly asks Alice, as if it were a test, "What day of the month is it?" and, like the White Rabbit, looks at his watch "uneasily." This question opens a whole series of ridiculous comments on watches and Time. These comments themselves seem pointless; and their complete lack of coherence or sequence intensifies the chapter's pervasive atmosphere of timelessness (especially since Alice, like the ordinary nineteenth-century reader, still clings to her old conception of Time as linear and progressive).

When the Hatter admits that his riddle about the raven and the writing desk has no answer, Alice sighs, "I think you might do something better with the time . . . than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers." The Hatter replies, "If you knew Time as well as I do . . . you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him." This nonsensical personification of Time continues in the conversation that follows. Amidst the by now familiar puns that tend to destroy linguistic order like those on beating or killing Time, Time itself, like a person, is revealed as malleable, recalcitrant, or disorderly. Such a view of Time as finite and personal, of course, comically subverts the above-ground convention of Time's infinite, orderly, autonomous nature. This finally puts Time in its proper place—another arbitrary, changeable artifact that has no claim to absolute validity, no binding claim, in fact, to existence. Since Time is now like a person, a kind of ill-behaved child created by man, there is the unavoidable danger that he will rebel and refuse to be consistent. That is exactly what has happened in this Wonderland tea-party: the Hatter says Time "won't do a thing I ask! It's always six o'clock now"; that is, it is always teatime. Time is thus frozen, and one of the most important concepts of common human experience is laughed out of existence.

Wonderland seems to compensate for this frozen Time by substituting Space—the creatures move around the tea-table in a kind of never-ending game of musical chairs. We might takes this substitution of Space as Carroll's hint at a more accurate conception of Time; but, like the underlying accuracy of Alice's confused multiplication in Chapter ii, this subtle hint at the reality of "reality" is a bit too sophisticated for most readers, as it certainly is for poor Alice. Besides, the concept of Space, as we have seen, has already been demolished. At this midway point in the narrative, then, the destruction of the foundations of Alice's old order is practically complete.

Alice (in Chapter vii) has almost reached rock bottom in her descent into chaos—betokened by the work mad which is part of the title of the chapter, part of the name of one principal character, and part of the common epithet applied to another ("mad as a March Hare"). Her dramatic experience of the subversion of the above-ground system of meaning seems complete, but there is at least one foundation of that old system that remains intact. Despite the fact that inanimate objects like stones have lost stable identity, they have up to Chapter viii remained within the class of inanimate objects—with the possible exception hinted at in Chapter vii that tea-trays can fly like bats.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat"—Carroll's charming parody of Jane Taylor's nursery rhyme "The Star"—occupies a rather pivotal position in the pattern of destruction I have been tracing. First, the poem uses, as parodies do in general, the original verses as part of the total context. Carroll's substitutions (bat for star, at for are, you fly for so high, and tea-tray for diamond) must be considered in the light of Jane Taylor's poem. Viewed this way, Carroll's poem becomes a compressed statement of much of the destruction that has already taken place in Wonderland, as well as a gentle hint at what is to come in the next chapter. A bat represents to most readers ugly nature—active and predatory; a star, on the other hand, usually connotes beautiful, remote, static nature. Moreover, "what you're at" and "fly" intensify the Darwinian, predatory, gross struggle image and increase the humorous incongruity between Carroll's lines and Miss Taylor's. All this harks back to the earlier comic subversion of the sentimental view of animal morality seen in such verses as "How doth the little crocodile," another hit at false piety and false natural history in popular nursery rhymes. This, in turn, leads the reader's mind back to the original star, whose moral connotations have now been subverted: it no longer seems to deserve the purity implied by "diamond." In addition, "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat," with its delightful mix-up of animate bat with inanimate star and flying tea-tray with flying bat, serves as an appropriate transition to Chapter viii where the fabricated separation between animate and inanimate objects is finally destroyed.

Immediately after the highly subversive Mad Tea Party, Alice meets in Chapter viii a whole new set of creatures—playing cards that are alive, so alive, in fact, that one has become one of the most well-known "persons" in English literature, the furious Queen of Hearts. Carroll's method of making these cards appear human is an example of his technical ability throughout Alice. For one thing, he skillfully employs devices which make their conversations with Alice seem natural. Almost immediately, one of the gardeners, the two of spades, speaks in a slight dialect (dialects have been attributed previously to a number of animals). Carroll also carefully indicates the volume and emotional quality of the dialogue—a kind of humorous reversal of the above-ground notion that speech is a primary distinction between animals and men. Some card-characters merely "say" their lines, others "shout" or "roar"; some are "silent," or speak in "a low, hurried tone"; Alice herself gives "a little scream of laughter," and the Queen sometimes speaks "in a voice of thunder." Another device for making these inanimate objects appear human and their scenes realistic is the inclusion of already well-established characters like the White Rabbit and the Duchess whose "humanness" is now taken for granted and who here respond to the playing-card Queen as if she were supremely vital.

In this way another above-ground principle—that there is a distinct cleavage between the animate and inanimate worlds—is humorously overthrown. One thing, however, remains constant: these card-creatures are just as irrational and chaotic as all the previous animal inhabitants of the insane underground. Indeed, the chaos is compounded, when these inanimate-objects-turned-human treat the normally live creatures of Alice's former existence as inanimate artifacts. Wonderland has again turned the tables, hereby using live animals like hedgehogs and flamingoes for croquet balls and mallets. Alice, still clinging to her "in-the-world" approach, says to the Cheshire Cat, "you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive." The Cat, of course, has no idea how confusing it is, since he neither possesses nor is possessed by Alice's old, above-ground standards of regularity. Moreove, this appeal to the Cat marks another step in Alice's slowly disintegrating sense of order: although she still clings to her old constructed concepts of reality, she forgets completely what the Cat is and where he dwells.

Since Alice rarely relinquishes her notions of order without some struggle, it is fitting that in "The Queen's Croquet-Ground" she should try to remind herself of the above-ground distinction between live and inanimate entities. When the Queen of Hearts rudely demands, as so many other creatures have demanded, that Alice identify herself, Alice "very politely" says: "My name is Alice, so please your Majesty," but adds to herself, "Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!" At this point, Alice is not yet prepared to say such a thing aloud. Nevertheless, this silent comment may indicate that Alice is beginning to sense the final danger inherent in Wonderland—her own destruction—and is beginning to fall back on her only defense against this ultimate devastation which has lurked ominously beneath all the rest of her problems. She is falling back on those now inoperative above-ground principles which, illusory or not, can preserve her sanity and her very existence.

Alice has many reasons for such subversive thoughts. She has certainly been cheated: the Queen's Croquet-Ground—with its painted flowers, its exasperating and insane game, its wild and dangerous creatures—is that same "beautiful garden" she has been seeking from the outset. Perhaps it is the realization that her arduous journey beneath the grounds of her old, dull, constricted world of rote-lessons and unexplainable, arbitrary adult rules has brought her, not to "those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains," but to a chaotic place of madness ruled by a furious Queen who orders executions with almost every breath—perhaps it is the realization of all this that encourages Alice to begin her rebellion.

A more important reason for Alice's drift toward rebellion is that she has begun to sense that her quest for unambiguous meaning and immortal order is fruitless. Haphazard as her trip may at first seem, Alice has nevertheless been moving towards the grounds of Wonderland which correspond to the grounds of her old world. The rulers of Wonderland (the King and Queen of Hearts) and their "beautiful garden" have been Alice's spiritual goal almost from the beginning, and it is appropriate that the rules and court of Wonderland should hold the secret of their realm's meaning and be the ultimate source of its order. The fact that they are court cards and hearts emphasizes their central, vital position, as does the fact that they are introduced with names written all in capital letters, a device stressed by Carroll in his revisions. Ironically, Alice is for once correct in judging Wonderland on the basis of her previous "in-the-world" experience. But what do these repositories of meaning and order turn out to be? Mere abstract, manufactured, and arbitrary symbols—just a pack of cards, pictures of kings and queens, men and women. Their grounds of meaning turn out to be croquet-grounds and their principles the rules of an insane, topsy-turvy game.

Alice's first realization that she need not be afraid because, "after all," she is dealing with a mere pack of cards has an effect, although an impermanent one, on her subsequent behavior. Immediately after her brief insight, she is extremely rude to the Queen, so rude that Alice herself is "surprised at her own courage." She interrupts the Queen's repeated "Off with her head!" by saying "Nonsense!' . . . very loudly and decidedly." The King's and Queen's immediate reaction to this single word is significant: the "Queen was silent" and "the King laid his hand upon her arm and timidly said, 'Consider, my dear: she is only a child!'" Among other things, this reaction of the rulers of Wonderland is a humorous, metaphorical equivalent of the above-ground world's reaction to the ridiculous challenge of a Wonderland. When either is named for what it is, it is left, as it were, speechless. Paradoxically, by the power of one of the most artificial constructs of all—the word—these rulers are rendered powerless, that is, without words. That the child Alice has had this supreme power all along goes without saying. Alice, however, does not realize the potency of her weapon or, for that matter, that she even has a weapon. Hence, even though she can say to herself that "they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!" she soon reverts to her seemingly unwarranted fear: "Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, 'and then,' thought she, 'what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here: the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'"

From this point to the end of the adventures, it is the main business of the narrative that underlies all the fun and gay nonsense to trace Alice's preparation for her final, overt denial of Wonderland, the destruction of her fearful vision for the sake of her identity and sanity. To gain strength and courage for that act of denial, Alice seeks the aid of allies (meanwhile, of course, she continues to play what she has already viewed as a crazy game). In Chapter vii she makes the mistake of assuming that the Cheshire Cat is such an ally. She spies his grin in the air and says, "It's the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to." But when Alice, "feeling very glad she had some one to listen to her," complains to the Cat about the game she is playing—saying "they don't seem to have any rules in particular"—his only reply is the apparent non sequitur, "How do you like the Queen?" He, of course, sees no fault in a game without any rules but a mad queen's; if he were to play the insane games above ground with their many arbitrary "rules," he would probably find them as disturbing as Alice finds the mad, seemingly rule-less croquet game of Wonderland.

In much the same way that she mistakes the Cheshire Cat for an ally, Alice mistakenly assumes that "logical" rules still have validity. At the very beginning of the next chapter ("The Mock Turtle's Story"), she meets the Duchess again, and, finding that previously irascible creature in good humor, assumes that her anger was merely the result of the pepper in her soup. "Maybe it's always pepper that makes people hot-tempered," Alice muses. And she begins to extrapolate from her new-found hypothesis, "very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule." Here, although there is the prominent "Maybe," Alice reveals that she still stubbornly believes there is a cause-effect order in Wonderland and one that can be applied to her own world too: this in spite of all the mounting evidence to the contrary. The Duchess herself is the personified reductio ad absurdum of Alice's attitude toward rules: the Duchess finds a "moral" in everything. Alice is faced with a new curious problem: once again Wonderland forces her above-ground assumptions to the final test, and once again it laughs them out of existence. Poor, dogged Alice, however, is unable to see the "moral" in the Duchess's preoccupation with finding morals; that is, Alice fails to perceive that such remarks as "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it" are essentially satirical counterthrusts at her own determination to find the rules in Wonderland.

Finally, Alice meets two creatures who seem capable of serving as allies—the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, two of the most fantastic characters in Wonderland's whole laughable gallery. For both of these animals, nonsensical as they are, seem to see Wonderland for what it is, at least for what it is to Alice. When Alice recounts to them her adventures, the Gryphon says, "It's all about as curious as it can be." When Alice attempts to recite another moralistic Watts poem ("Tis the voice of the sluggard") and again twists it into a cruel, amoral, survival-of-the-fittest commentary on nature, the Mock Turtle asserts that "it sounds uncommon nonsense" and says, "It's by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!" Their words "curious," "nonsense," and "confusing" are drawn, of course, from Alice's vocabulary.

This sympathy for Alice, it should be observed, is not as simple as it first appears. For one thing, the solicitude of the Gryphon and Mock Turtle is—as their names suggest—undoubtedly false. Both creatures are palpable sentimentalists: the Mock Turtle's mawkish song about beautiful soup, sung in "a voice choked with sobs," is the measure of their sentimentality. Once again Wonderland tests an above-ground convention by carrying it to its extreme: here, instead of attacking one particular kind of above-ground sentiment such as the common emotional response to babies or to stars and bees, Wonderland comically overthrows sentiment itself. Alice cannot hope to find genuine sympathy and real allies in the Gryphon and Mock Turtle. In any event, she has no time to react, for the great trial (of the last chapters) is about to begin.

Before turning to that trial, we should try to assess the full function of the Mock Turtle and Gryphon in the Wonderland motif of subversion. After the Queen's Croquet-Game, no remnant of ordinary above-ground order remains intact. The only order poor Alice can possibly perceive in Wonderland is the consistent antipathy of all the creatures towards her and all her previous assumptions. Now, Chapters ix and x serve to subvert and finally destroy the "order" of Wonderland itself, because here the two sentimental friends, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, argue neither with each other (as most of the other creatures do) nor with Alice's above-ground as sumptions. In a sense they are the allies she seeks: they take her side, seeing her adventures and reverses as she sees them. This sympathy—whether genuine or false—breaks Wonderland's pattern of antipathy and is perhaps the ultimate destruction: order, as Alice once knew it, is now so hopelessly snarled that she must, in literal self-defense, take that inevitable leap back to her own insane, illusory, but livable world of arbitrary logic and convention.

If "The Queen's Croquet-Ground" has convinced Alice that her quest for Wonderland's principle of order in the personalities or games of Wonderland's playing-card rulers is pointless, the last two chapters of the book reveal that even beyond these rulers and their mad croquet-ground there is no fundamental law, save perhaps the furious Queen's "Off with his head!"—and even that persistent demand, Alice has been told by the Gryphon, is never obeyed: "It's all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know." At the end, Alice is finally brought to what should be the last refuge of order—the court of law.

Chapter xi begins with a crowd scene. As the chapter progresses, we realize that many of the creatures Alice has encountered from the beginning are assembled here. This strengthens the impression that the trial is the final test of Wonderland's meaning, the appropriate conclusion of Alice's quest for law and order. What is on trial here is not really the Knave of Hearts. What is on trial is the "law" itself, whether it be the law of Wonderland or, by extension, the law wherever it is encountered. Alice has already lost faith in her own search for the law of Wonderland, but then she forgets even that loss. In the final trial, where her forgotten suspicions return to become a frightful apperception of the total intransigent chaos underlying her artificial world, Alice is moved to her only salvation—a complete and active denial of the horrible, unacceptable truth.

In these last two chapters, after all the destruction of the old bases of order, all that is left is the hollow form of things. The trial now appears in its true light: since the world in which the trial takes place is without order or meaning, the trial is a pointless formality, another game without rules and without a winner. And when Alice is herself forced to participate and is again drawn into the mad proceedings, her rebellion is inevitable.

That Alice at the beginning of the trial has not yet abandoned her old cherished faith in order is revealed in a number of ways. The narrator tells us that "Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there." Once more, Alice persists in viewing the underground bedlam from an "in-the-world" perspective. Part of the witty comedy here, naturally, derives from the fact that many adult readers have been in a court: they know that this Wonderland court is an outlandish travesty (especially when it is called a "court of justice"). Yet they also sense that at the core there is a great deal of similarity between "real" trials above ground and this insanely unjust trial of the Knave of Hearts. They also sense the significance of Alice's comfort in finding that she can name the items in the court—another illustration of Wonderland's incessant attack on man's groundless linguistic habits, intensified when the narrator ironically remarks that Alice was rather proud of her ability to name everything in the court, "for she thought, and rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it all." An even more important result of Alice's "in-the-world" approach to the trial is that she will again be frustrated, this time by the fact that while the Wonderland trial is similar in outward form to "real" trials, it characteristically ignores or subverts all the significant principles.

The last chapter is called "Alice's Evidence." The title itself has a multiple meaning. Literally, Alice is forced to participate actively in the insanity of Wonderland by giving "evidence," even though she has now grown so large that she can at any second rebel if she so desires. More important, Alice in this last scene acquires the "evidence" she needs in order to make her decision about Wonderland. At first, Alice reacts with fear; when she is called to the stand, she cries out, "'Here!' . . . quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes." Along with this fear, however, is a growing sense of the meaninglessness of the trial (and thus, she thinks, of all Wonderland). When she looks over the jurymen's shoulders and sees the nonsense they are writing, Alice says to herself, "it doesn't matter a bit." Here she is becoming just as subversive towards Wonderland as Wonderland has been towards her and her above-ground principles. Soon Alice is courageously contradicting the King and Queen openly:

"That proves his guilt, of course," said the Queen: "so, off with—."

"It doesn't prove anything of the sort!" said Alice.

And after the White Rabbit reads his major piece of evidence against the Knave of Hearts, the mad poem full of unclear pronoun references, Alice daringly states aloud:

"If any one of them [the jury] can explain it," . . . (she had grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn't a bit afraid of interrupting him [the King]), "I'll give him sixpence. I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it."

Finally, when the Queen asserts, "Sentence first—verdict afterwards," Alice says loudly, "Stuff and nonsense!" The Queen turns purple with rage, Alice actively denies the Queen's demand to be silent with a forceful "I won't!" and the whole underground adventure explodes and disintegrates.

We see here, with the progression from Alice's thinking "to herself to her final words said "loudly" and her absolute refusal to keep silent, that part of her rebellion rests on her growing ability to speak the necessary words—to give the necessary "evidence." In Chapter viii Alice was outwardly polite while she inwardly said, "they're only a pack of cards, after all." At the end, she is completely open, and she terminates her nightmarish adventure with her own weapon of destruction, her loudly proclaimed, "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

Alice's final, overt rejection of Wonderland, her flight from the frightful anarchy of the world underneath the grounds of common consciousness, is a symbolic rejection of mad sanity in favor of the sane madness of ordinary existence. Perhaps it is best to view the normal conscious mind as an automatic filtering and ordering mechanism which protects us from seeing the world in all its chaotic wonder and glory—at least it seems best to view the mind this way when we attempt an explanation of the serious theme that emerges from the delicious, sprightly wit and humor of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice at last names her tormentors a pack of cards and thereby ends her underground journey, her mind, by that very assertion, imposes an artificial but effective order upon that which can never be organically ordered. By the time Alice and the reader reach this last scene in Wonderland it should be quite obvious to all that language itself is an inadequate construct. Yet it is by this construct that Alice preserves her sanity and identity. She uses words to put all Wonderland into a category of manufactured, non-human, arbitrary entities—"a pack of cards." Insane as her act may be in terms of what Wonderland has demonstrated, it provides her with the means to dispel her vision and thus protect her from the dangers of complete perception. Alice has thus come full circle: her mad curiosity led her to the vision of absurdity; her failure led her to dismay; and her instinct for survival, assured identity, and sanity led her to escape from her final horrifying perception.

It must be remembered that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is not a piece of formal philosophy; it is, instead, a comic myth of man's insoluble problem of meaning in a meaningless world. Thus, the fact that Alice herself is unaware of the significance of her journey to the end of night and unaware of her reasons for finally denying the validity of her vision is by no means a flaw in the book. Alice, as the mythical representative of all her fellows above ground, acts appropriately and appropriately is unaware of the meaning of her actions. Although Alice's quest for meaning is unfulfilled, and she consciously learns nothing, she does survive because an instinctual "lesson" takes over at the moment of supreme danger. Unlike the artificial, illusory lessons of her nursery reading, schoolroom, or elders, the innate and unconscious drive for identity and self-preservation cannot be perverted by either Wonderland or the world above. The question is not whether this drive is a valid principle, but whether it is pragmatically sound. In Alice it is. And upon its pragmatic soundness rests the validity of all the other illusory principles and conventions. Alice's quest for reasonable experience whisks her back to her only possible, albeit artificial, world where the ultimately irrational makes life sane.

Thus, the book is paradoxically both a denial and an affirmation of order—a kind of catharsis of what can never be truly purged but what must, for sanity's sake, be periodically purged in jest, fantasy, or dream. The Wonderland creatures and their world are not a pack of cards, after all. They are, so to speak, more "real" than so-called reality. But waking life, as most of us know it, must function as if they are unreal, as if chaos is amusing "nonsense."

On the surface, then, Alice is clearly not true to ordinary experience. Indeed, it is destructive of the very groundwork of that experience. Yet the book is certainly true to an extraordinary experience familiar to us all, the dream. For the apparently nonsensical elements of Alice, like timelessness, spacelessness, and fusion of discrete entities, are, as modern psychology has demonstrated, what lie just below the surface of rational consciousness and what we experience every night in the dream state.

I began this essay by pointing out the similarity between Alice and the traditional literary dream-vision. Some may argue that Alice would be better classified as a "nightmare-vision" because a nightmare is an unsuccessful dream, while a dream is a method whereby the dreamer successfully works out and solves in dramatic form a deep-seated problem, often a problem whose existence the conscious faculties will not allow themselves even to admit. Certainly Alice does deal with and dramatize what is by nature and definition outside the awareness of the everyday conscious intellect; and some readers assume that Alice's dream does not come to any satisfying conclusion, that the problem of the disorder beneath man-made order is left unsolved; but I have argued here that this is not so, that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland solves the problem by a kind of alogical dreamwork affirmation of man's artificially constructed universe. Whether or not every reader's unconscious can be satisfied with this extra-rational solution is, it seems to me, an unanswerable and finally an irrelevant question. Alice's unconscious is what matters; and it is here that we can be sure the conclusion is satisfactory. After waking, she runs off for tea because "it's getting late" (and this after the timeless Mad Tea-Party), "thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been," completely at ease in her mad but possible world above the chaos of Wonderland.

SOURCE: "White Rabbit," by Grace Slick, in The Poetry of Rock, edited by Richard Goldstein, Bantam Books, 1969, p. 113.

[Slick was a cofounder and lead singer of the San Francisco-based rock band Jefferson Airplane (later Jefferson Starship, then Starship). Her 1966 song "White Rabbit, " reprinted below, celebrates the Alice books of Carroll and the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s.]

White Rabbit

One pill makes you larger
  And one pill makes you small.
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall.
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call.
Call Alice
When she was just small.

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go.
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low.
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know.

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's lost her head

Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head.
Feed your head.
Feed your head."

SOURCE: "The Language of Nonsense in Alice," in Yale French Studies, No. 43, 1969, pp. 128-44.

[In the following essay, Flescher provides a close analysis of the complex "nonsense language" of Alice, concluding that the work "can be read with the freshness of a child or the critical mind of an adult. "]

Nonsense bears the stamp of paradox. The two terms of the paradox are order and disorder. Order is generally created by language, disorder by reference. But the essential factor is their peculiar interplay. Elizabeth Sewell, in a penetrating analysis of nonsense, stresses the idea of dialectic. Yet her analysis deals almost exclusively with the formal structure of order. Emile Cammaerts, on the other hand, defines nonsense poetry as "poetry run wild." This divergence clearly points to a danger: that of neglecting one dimension. An adequate definition must embrace both language and reference, order and disorder. The nature of their interaction must be underlined. Cross references and occasional repetition are therefore unavoidable. Moreover, the problem cannot be stated in simple terms. It is complex and elusive and constantly calls for qualification.

The first qualification concerns language. It is generally, though not necessarily, one of the forces at work. The backbone of nonsense must be a consciously regulated pattern. It can be the rhythmic structure of verse, the order of legal procedure, or the rules of the chess-game. Implicitly or explicitly, these three variations are all present in Alice. "Sentence first, verdict afterwards" implies a knowledge of the normal sequence of events. Running backwards is a reversal of conventional order, legalized by the mirror; and the chess game provides a structural setting for inconsequential behavior. It is the existent or implicit order which distinguishes nonsense from the absurd. It is the departure from this order which distinguishes nonsense from sense.

But language is constantly asked to provide the conscious framework. It is used more readily because it affords more possibilities of variation. The usual way of upsetting the conventional order of events is by reversal. This simple pattern is repeated constantly: "Hand it round first, cut it afterwards," "What sort of things do you remember best? . . . O, things that happened the week after next." In this simple reversal, there is an implicit awareness of conventional order. If a character is simply caught up in a series of unconnected events which he cannot understand or control, or if he himself performs a series of actions of which one can determine neither the cause, purpose, nor inner relationship, we enter the realm of the Absurd: the hero of Kafka's The Trial is the victim of absurdity because he is trapped in a series of events which can be explained neither by their cause nor by their inner logic. So much for the distinction between nonsense and the absurd.

Language offers endless possibilities of upsetting the order of behavior, because it can establish a coherent system in a variety of ways. Provided that the backbone of such a system stand out clearly, it can act as a regulator for the most disorderly examples of behavior. The pattern of nonsense in this case is no longer one of simple reversal. It is a clash of opposing forces. The relationship between these two poles can best be described by an analogy: the content of nonsense is to its form what the content of poetry is to its metrical framework.

But rhyme and rhythm do not only provide an analogy. They are the very stuff of nonsense. An ordered system of language can by and large take two forms: inner relationship or serial progression (alphabet, declension, etc.). Metric pattern belongs to the latter category. In the following verse from "The Walrus and the Carpenter," two elements contribute to a sharply defined order. These are rhythm and alliteration:

The time has come, the walrus said,
To talk of many things,
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
Of cabbages and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings.

The metrical pattern stands out clearly because of its regular character. The alliteration in lines 3 and 4 reinforces the rhythmic pattern by accentuating the stressed syllables more heavily. Once the pattern has been so sharply defined, shoes, ships, and sealing-wax can co-exist happily, and cabbages and kings live side by side. Alliteration is widely used; assonance and internal rhyme are almost absent. The initial position of the stressed letter and the emphasis on consonants distinguish one rhythmic unit from another. Had Carroll exploited assonance, with emphasis on vowels, he would have weakened the function of the serial order.

It is the pattern provided by verse that makes verse a suitable vehicle for nonsense. But a similar pattern can also be attained, simply by exploiting a particular letter:

... and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M.

"Why with an M? said Alice.

"Why not?" said the March Hare.

—that begins with an M such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness . . . did you ever see such a thing as the drawing of a muchness?

The letter M is chosen at random, but is subsequently repeated, and forms a pattern. Within this pattern, a free association of totally incompatible elements can be made: mouse-traps, the moon, memory, and muchness. Of course, this use of a simple letter assumes an autonomy of its own and eventually demands obedience from the author.

The game "I love my love with an H" is based on a similar association:

"I love my love with an H," Alice couldn't help beginning, "because he is Happy. I hate him with an H because he is Hideous. I fed him with Ham sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives . . ."

"He lives on the Hill," the king remarked, without the least idea that he was joining in the game.

The process is exactly the same as in the previous example. The underlying principle of organization is the repetition of the letter H. It is the only link between "Happy, Hideous, Ham and Hay." Capitalization of the initial H's adds emphasis in the same way that alliteration reinforces the metric pattern. But the point of Carroll's formal arrangement is made clear in both the "M" and "H" examples by a final contrast. In the first case, the coined word "muchness" is isolated from its formal pattern in the question, "Did you ever see such a thing as the drawing of a muchness?" The effect, divorced from the repetitive pattern, is total absurdity. In the second case, the king unknowingly contributes to the formal pattern by joining in the game. The isolation from the formal context in the first example, the unconscious continuation of the formal context in the second, bring out by contrast the impact of the system.

Endless variations of this game can be found, ranging from the declension "A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—O mouse!" to the rules of division and subtraction: "Divide a loaf by a knife—what's the answer to that?" "Take a bone from a dog: what remains?" The last two examples no longer show a serial relationship but an internal one.

The most complex example of a formal relationship in Alice is the "Jabberwocky" poem. Both the serial pattern of rhyme and rhythm and the internal grammatical structure are here combined. The poem does not easily lend itself to analysis. However, a juxtaposition of the first verse of the original and a recent parody of it might clarify peculiarities inherent in "Jabberwocky":

T'was brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
T'was boodberg and the sliding tones
Did hojer and haugen in the wade
All semene were the homophones
And emeneaus outgrade.

The parody maintains all auxiliary verbs and conjunctions found in the original. The nouns, adjectives, and infinitives provide the variation. The author of the parody has simply kept the words indicating a relationship in the grammatical structure and varied the terms of the relationship. Humpty Dumpty's comment on words is revealing in this respect:

They've a temper some of them—particularly verbs: they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with but not verbs ... "

Humpty Dumpty, Lewis Carroll and the critics have attempted exact interpretations of the meaning of the words of "Jabberwocky." The variety of their conclusions perhaps indicates the futility of the enterprise. What critical analysis can stand the challenge of the following interpretation, which was made by a child: "It means a bug that comes out at night with a light on its tail and a sword between its beak. That's what a jabberwalkie is." Another child gave a valuable key to the relationship between form and meaning: "He wrote it in language that almost makes sense when you read it. The words sound and are spelt like normal words in English, but the poem is imaginary in its physical language."

Providing the sounds and the grammatical relationship survive, the sentence structure is not lost. It is, on the contrary, reinforced by the strong stress pattern and rhymes. Within this scheme, one can indulge in the wildest fancies without abandoning form. The portmanteau words are significant, not so much because of the specific meanings which they suggest, but because they embrace two disparate elements.

Meaning, however undefined, is nevertheless suggested. Preoccupation with meaning is constant throughout Alice, sometimes to an extreme degree. The whole range of relationships between word and reference, from total coincidence to exclusion of one of the two terms, can be found:

"My name is Alice, but—"

"It's a stupid name enough," Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"

"Must a name mean something?"

"Of course it must."

Just as the obvious, matter-of-fact statement is common to the logic of the nonsence world, so the literal meaning is solicited where none exists:

"Found what?" said the Duck.

"Found it", the Mouse replied rather crossly. "Of course you know what it means."

Whereas Humpty Dumpty tries to invest a name with meaning when none is implied, the duck looks for reference in a word that only has grammatical function. Where figurative or functional meaning is intended, concrete significance is sought or understood. When the caterpillar asks Alice to explain herself, she shifts from the figurative to the literal meaning in her reply:

"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid sir, because I'm not myself you see."

Meaning is intensified so that language is always in the foreground.

Language can be emphasized, either by closing the gap between word and meaning and tightening the relationship, or, on the contrary, by widening the rift and weakening the relationship. In either case the balance between word and meaning is upset and the function of language becomes more apparent. Whenever Alice recites verses, she feels that the words "are coming different."

... her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come as they used to do. . . .

. . . "I'm sure those are not the right words," said poor Alice and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on. "I must be Mabel after all."

The problem of personal identity is closely connected with the idea of estrangement from language. Alice's immediate conclusion on "not finding the right words" is that she can no longer be herself. This preoccupation with loss of identity is a recurrent one. But Alice views it with varying emotions. The complacent thought of sending her feet a pair of boots for Christmas is very different from the melancholy realization that she has just escaped from "shrinking away altogether." In the first case she humorously wards off her anxiety, in the second she is overcome by fear. This raises an interesting problem. At what point do we step outside the field of nonsense? The distinction between the two worlds is a finer one than critics have acknowledged.

When Alice loses the objective control that enables her to view her problem of personal identity calmly, the mood becomes too disquieting to be "nonsensical." On using the word "juror," she feels proud of the extent of her vocabulary. The word "antipathies" is pronounced with misgivings. But both in her uneasiness and in her pride, Alice remains conscious of language and is able to control it; only when words betray her is the safety of her nonsense world threatened.

Insistence on speaking English is a safeguard against this threat:

"Speak English," said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words and what's more I don't believe you do either."

Again and again, coherence and meaningful language are identified with the English tongue. French is resorted to when English is inadequate:

"Perhaps it doesn't understand English," thought Alice. "I daresay it's a French mouse . . ." So she began again, "Où est ma chatte. . . ."

The queen advises Alice to "speak French" when she can't think of the English for a thing.

In "Looking Glass Insects," safeguards are removed and relationships between language and reference are completely broken down:

"I suppose you don't want to lose your name?"

"No indeed," Alice replied, a little anxiously.

When she reaches the wood where things have no name, her anxiety grows:

"This must be the wood," she said thoughtfully to herself, "where things have no names. I wonder what will become of my name when I go in."

She unconsciously draws a parallel between the impossibility of naming things and the fear of losing her own identity:

"I mean to get under the—under the—under the this, you know," putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name—why to be sure it hasn't!"

She stood silent for a minute thinking: then she suddenly began again: "Then it really has happened, after all! And now who am I?"

In this moment of discovery, Alice feels the compelling power of things without a name. At the same time, she loses her hold on things. The exclusion of language immediately takes us beyond the playful level of argument. In her anguished monologue as in her compassionate relationship with the fawn, we are aware that she has become humanly vulnerable. Pride and self-control are forgotten. When she finally leaves the wood, she is relieved to have recovered her name, and hence her identity.

In "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," a reversed process may be observed. Things continue to have names, but the reality of the things rather than the names are questioned:

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

"I am real," said Alice, and she began to cry.

But the reality of Alice's tears is also questioned:

"I hope you don't suppose those are real tears."

When either language or reference is threatened or destroyed, the playful argument of nonsense is abandoned. Alice no longer tries to "keep up her end" of the conversation. Her violent self-defense is an attempt to protect her identity.

So far, we have dealt essentially with the formal structure of nonsense. Clearly, the main concern is with relationship, whether it be serial or internal relationship between words, or the relationship between word and meaning. But nonsense is not simply a formal structure. Structure here runs counter to content. And content must be defined in its turn. We are immediately faced with a series of paradoxes. Order dominates the formal pattern, yet disorder seems to dominate reference. The characters are constantly preoccupied with meaning; yet their conversation is essentially meaningless. How can we account for this apparent contradiction?

To explain the divergence, we must once more go back to language. "When I use a word," says Humpty Dumpty, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more, nor less." When the king uses a word, he tests it out in an undertone: '"important—unimportant—important—,' as if he were trying which word sounded best." In both cases, the choice of meaning is arbitrary. Attributing a meaning to a word is an end in itself. "I'm sure I didn't mean," Alice says. "Well, you should have meant. What do you suppose is a child without meaning?" As shown previously, the weaker the link between word and meaning, the more nonsense is compromised. Total coincidence of word and reference is at the core of nonsense. Hence the frequency of the obvious fact and the literal meaning. Both arbitrary and obvious meaning are characterized by immanence, a kind of en-soi in the Sartrean sense. Meaning is often purely physical or factual. It leaves no room for speculation or suggestion and therefore refers to nothing beyond itself. It is in a sense self-contained. In spite of the necessity to mean, the power of meaning is reduced to a minimum.

The problem can be extended to conversation. Conversation, or more precisely, argument, is the essential vehicle of nonsense in Alice, but it is conversation of an unusual kind. It is based neither on sustained discussion nor on coherent reasoning. The description of the caucus race immediately comes to mind:

There was no "One, two, three and away!" but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over.

Many of the conversations and arguments in Alice are structurally reminiscent of this race.

What, in fact, determines the end of an argument in this context? Once more, it is a question of words. "The question is," says Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master, that's all." Since the argument is not founded on logic, it leads nowhere. The sole aim of the characters involved is "having the last word." Within these arbitrary limits, how does the conversation develop? The principle is one of deflection. No argument is ever developed. It is immediately undercut, often by a misinterpretation. The word which is misinterpreted acts as a pivot and leads the conversation in a new direction. The pun is invaluable as a pivot for redirection:

"Mine is a long sad tale," said the Mouse, turning to Alice and sighing. "It is a long tail certainly," said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; "but why do you call it sad?" .. . "I beg your pardon," said Alice very humbly, "you had got to the fifth bend, I think?" "I had not" cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily. "A knot!" said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her. "O do let me help to undo it."

The two puns tale-tail, not-knot, provide a level of figurative meaning and another level of literal meaning. By taking the literal and not the intended meaning, the conversation is automatically channeled into a new direction. No sooner has it taken a new turn after the first pun, than a new pun sets it off in yet another direction. So the arguments are undercut before they can lead anywhere. Meaning remains at the surface; it can develop neither in depth nor in sequence. Unlike formal structure, which stresses relationship, referential structure destroys them. Random arguments proliferate on all sides, not as digressions diverging from a central meaning but as offshoots from language itself.

Puns are one way of deflecting meaning. Deliberate contradiction is another. Deliberate contradiction in Alice follows a recurrent pattern: a character will voice a basic refrain, with variations every time he is addressed:

"I've seen gardens, compared with which this would be a wilderness."

"When you say hill . . . I could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley."

".. . You may call it nonsense if you like, but I've heard nonsense compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary."

Each new statement is met with a contradiction. The same basic refrain is used throughout: here, the modification simply consists of challenging a new word with its exact opposite. In "Looking Glass Insects," the chorus makes a brief comment after each stage of Alice's conversation with the guard. The comment is immediately followed up by the refrain, suitably modified to relate to the new situation:

"Why his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute."

"The land here is worth a thousand pounds an inch."

"Why the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff."

"Language is worth a thousand pounds a word."

The same process is used by the Duchess in "The Mock-Turtle's Story" when she finds a moral to match each one of Alice's statements.

The dogmatic finality of the contradiction or the refrain puts an end to the argument. Once more, development of ideas is evaded by deflection of meaning. The refrain emphasizes both the arbitrary character of the contradiction and the lack of progress in the conversation. Argument can either run in all directions or be repetitive. In either case, logical expansion of an idea is avoided:

"You, said the Caterpillar, "who are you?" which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation.

But absence of progression is concurrent with absence of depth. As coherent reasoning is cut short, so graver issues are kept at bay. Serious questions are interpreted as riddles and conversation is treated as a game:

"However, this conversation is going on a little too fast: let's go back to the last remark but one"

says Humpty Dumpty. And in the same tone, the Red Queen suggests:

"Make a remark, it's ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding."

If conversation must remain superficial, arbitrary and literal, how is it integrated in the fantasy of Alice's wonderworld? Again, the answer seems to lie in paradox. Meaning is literal, but language is imaginative. It is language which governs meaning and determines the creative process:

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied, "at least I mean what I say, that's the same thing you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter.

The Hatter's objection is more significant than it appears. As we have noted, language in the nonsense world of Alice imposes a rigid order on the disorder of action and the incoherence of reasoning. This order is, however, essentially one of fixed relationships. Within the grammatical or metrical framework, vocabulary can be used with total freedom.

Puns, we noted, are a vital part of the creative process in Alice. But play on words can take different forms. The shift from figurative to literal meaning has a functional value. It redirects the conversation. The process of analogy and expansion sustains the conversation. It ensures the progression where rational meaning fails to do so:

" . . . I only took the regular course."

"What was that?" enquired Alice.

"Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision."

A whole area of experience is here transferred to a new context. Reality is undermined by the fantasy of the coined words. Yet it is implicitly alluded to in the analogy of sound. Here again, we touch on a crucial point. Reality remains implicit behind every manifestation of nonsense, but it is never explicitly represented. The nonsense world is a world of fantasy which shies clear of reality, yet indicates its existence.

The Mock-Turtle adds to his previous analogy:

"The Drawling master: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils"

and the Classical master taught "Laughing and Grief." The whole passage on education has a metaphoric value. An organic unity is created with an imaginative interplay of vocabulary which refers back to a concrete area of experience. A variation on this technique is the process of analogy whereby one keyword is used with different compounds and grammatical functions:

"You can draw water out of the water-well," said the Hatter, "so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well-eh, stupid?"

"But they were in the well," Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark. "Of course they were," said the Dormouse: "well in."

The word "well" engenders a kind of proliferation. An imaginative progression is achieved through language; it is an example of language perpetuating itself. The same process accounts for the birth of the "snap-dragon-fly":

"And there's a Dragon-fly."

"Look on the branch above your head," said the Gnat, "and there you'll find a Snap-Dragon-fly. Its body is made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly leaves, and its head is a raisin burning in brandy."

"And what does it live on?" Alice asked as before.

"Frumenty and mince pie," the Gnat replied; "and it makes its nest in a Christmas box."

The initial image is built on a compound word: Snap-dragonfly. The coined word creates a new image composed of prosaic concrete elements which are woven into a thing of pure fantasy, set in the solid context of Christmas festivities. Prosaic reality and fantastic creation combine in this paradoxical creature of the nonsense world.

In nonsense, paradox is clearly found everywhere—in the relationships between language and meaning, order and disorder, formal pattern and imagination of language. But paradox must be qualified further. The relationships between the two terms of a paradox can be one of tension or of incongruity. Incongruity rather than tension prevails in the nonsense world. There is no conflict between language and reference. They follow divergent paths. We said earlier that the content of nonsense is to its form what the content of poetry is to its metric pattern. The analogy can be extended and qualified to bring out the distinction just made.

I. An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
(W. B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium")

II. Prompt at the call, around the Goddess roll
Broad hats, and hoods, and caps, a sable shoal:
Thick and more thick the black blockade extends,
A hundred head of Aristotle's friends.
(A. Pope, "The Dunciad")

In these two examples the rhyming words are analogous in sound and divergent in grammatical function. The first shows a relationship of tension between the two rhyming words, the second of incongruity.

Incongruity brings us to the problem of humor. Is humor, as Elizabeth Sewell argues, really incidental to nonsense? An absolute judgment cannot be made. But incongruity in Alice is certainly a key to its humor. Children's comments have been particularly revealing in this respect. A survey conducted among children aged ten to fourteen showed that a majority of children over thirteen found the Alice books both "unrealistic" and "stupid." The children who appreciated the fantasy also tended to appreciate the humor. A child of twelve made this apt distinction: "The words are silly but not stupid: they are ridiculous in a way that I like."

Carroll's humor is of a particular kind. It is sheer, unadulterated fun, free from both topical allusion and from wit. It is intimately linked to the world of fantasy. Hence the kinship of nonsense with surrealism. The fetters of reality are broken and liberation is found in fantasy or laughter.

This blending of imagination and humor might well explain the fact that while isolated examples exist in France, nonsense has not become part of the literary tradition as in England. The greater propensity for whimsy of the English might well account for this difference in taste. With their emphasis on "esprit," the French tend to accept more reluctantly a gratuitous world that resists rational explanation.

Nonsense can be read at different levels. Like most great children's books, it is not simply a book for children. It can be read with the freshness of a child or the critical mind of an adult. Yet, in a way, a full appreciation of nonsense requires "a willing suspension of disbelief." The reader of the Annotated Alice has, in a sense, outgrown Wonderland.

)

SOURCE: "Alice Our Contemporary," in Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Seminar on Children's Literature and The Children's Literature Association, Vol. 1, 1969, pp. 152-61.

[In the following essay, which focuses on a theatrical adaptation of Alice, Jorgens considers the relevance of Carroll's stories to twentieth-century society.]

In his discussion of the fairy tale, W. H. Auden nicely sums up the stereotypical view of children's literature. The world of the fairy tale, he says, is an unambiguous, unproblematic place where appearance reflects reality. It is a world of being, not becoming, where typical, one-dimensional characters (either good or bad) behave strictly in accordance with their natures, and always receive the appropriate rewards or punishments. It is a predictable world where events occur in fixed numerical and geometrical patterns. And above all, it is a world without intense emotion or awareness where even the most violent acts are viewed by characters and readers with detachment, as not horrible but somehow fun, playful. But children's books are written by adults, not children, and one need not be a frequent contributor to American Imago to see that they reflect not only the author's ideals of what children ought to like and be, but his own fears and fantasies. The sense of freedom many writers feel when they are addressing an audience that they consider to be more imaginative and more innocent than any other often leads to works which are strange distorting-mirror images of social problems and upheavals, personal compulsions, and philosophical dilemmas. The fanciful is also the uninhibited and the unrepressed.

The limitations of the stereotype of children's fiction become clear when one applies them to the greatest of such works—Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. In them we find not only the typical characteristics, but negations and parodies of them as well. Alice is at once simple and complex, predictable and unpredictable, sentimental and tough-minded, escapist and realistic, humorous and satirical, melodramatic and tragic. Carroll took the problems children face while growing up—their dreams, their imaginary worlds, and their games—and combined them with the problems of adult life: the labyrinths of conflicting values, the struggle to meet the demands of society and self, the coming to terms with mortality. All these he fused in an imagination heated by intense pressures within him—his sexual longings, his seizures of "unholy thoughts", and his despair. In Alice (written for the little girls he was so attracted to) Carroll embodied both the quest of modern man for meaning in what seems to be a grotesque nightmare and his personal quest for the still, quiet center.

The success the Alice books have had with children grew out of Carroll's profound understanding of children and their problems. On those innumerable afternoons of tale-telling and games with his young friends, he learned just how to delight them, how to frighten them and then provide release in laughter, and how to warp or exaggerate life until it became ridiculous or wonderful. To children, who have constantly to adjust to the new, Carroll often presents a world of wish-fulfillment where the heroine is skillful enough to adjust to any situation, or powerful enough to shape it to suit herself. If the spectre of school becomes too much, let it be transformed (as it all too often is) into reeling, writhing, ambition, distraction, uglification, derision, mystery, seaography, drawling, stretching, fainting in coils, laughing, and grief. If books with no pictures or dialogue bore us, or a winter's afternoon makes us lonely, let us chase a rabbit down his hole or walk through a mirror into another world. Let all those dull poems with morals at the end be re-written. Let them tell us how crocodiles eat the little fishes rather than how the industrious bees demonstrate that idle hands are the devil's tools. Let our poems tell us that old people are, among other things, crazy, fat, ugly, slack-jawed, not just that if you are careful of your health and remember God you will have a golden old age. Let them tell us that the prudent "lobster" speaks contemptuously of the "sharks" only in their absence, not that sloth is a thing to be abhorred. Let adults recall how it feels to be ruled by people whose time is always worth a thousand pounds a minute. Let them recall the pain, the disorientation, and the embarrassments of growing up—the difficulty of keeping up with inconsiderate long-legged adults, the shyness and self-consciousness, the perplexing fact that our feet do not want to go in the same direction we want to, and the dilemmas resulting from the outgrowing of old selves or of burying them within new selves so that ".. . it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." Let them remember the ogres that haunted our dreams—the Jabberwock, the Bandersnatch, and the Snark—and our fear of the darkness, but also that we take delight in things like Mr. Tenniel's surrealistic scene with the toves, borogroves, and raths wandering about a sundial, his grinning cats, and his strange, horrible beast the Jabberwock. Let them see how ludicrous it is that they justify themselves by crying "I'm older than you, and must know better," and how inexplicable to a child an adult's lightning changes in mood are: "the Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming, 'Off with her head!'"

Of course the adult reader's view is more complicated than the child's. We see Alice from two perspectives—the child's and the adult's—and are therefore sometimes amused at her naivete and her parroting of her parents. Part of her charm for adults is the mixture of her stern, sensible, "adult" side (cf. her concern for eating and drinking the right things) with her mischievous, insecure "childish" side (frequently the two selves separate and talk things over between them). It is amusing to observe (and recall) the smugness of a six- or seven-year-old who knows that all questions have answers and all answers questions, that the world is an orderly and logical place and that what she has been taught to be good and right is good and right. We smile as Alice flaunts her moral superiority on her journeys just as she flaunts her knowledge and her big words. It is not so amusing, however, to feel with Alice what it is like to hear, "didn't you know that?" or "it's my opinion that you never think at all" or, from the White Queen, described by Carroll as "cold and calm . . . formal and strict . . . Pedantic to the tenth degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!", "I don't know what you mean by your way . . . all the ways about here belong to me. . . ." Least comforting of all is what Alice dreams of doing to adults when she fulfills the wish every child has of being bigger than anybody: she would behead us, as she threatens to do with the flowers—"If you don't hold your tongues, I'll pick you"—or blow us all away like a pack of cards, or play cat-and-mouse with us: "Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone!"

As a number of literary critics have recently pointed out, Carroll's Alice books are much more than skillfully written vehicles for childish revenge and adult complacency. This new appraisal grows largely from our realization that many of the problems of modern man are really extensions of those of children (hence the growing interest in early development), that myth and the unconscious cut across the lines dividing children from adults. William Empson pointed out a number of important themes and patterns in the course of his well-known discussion of Alice as Swain. He reveals that there is in Alice a curiously Darwinian retelling of Genesis where Alice is born out of her own sorrow (her salt tears are the amniotic fluid), and a whole Noah's ark of animals emerge from that "sea" as man, according to evolutionary theory, did long ago. There are, beside the parodies of snobbishness, politics, progress, and industrialization, recurring death jokes, and a persistent linking of puberty with death. There is Alice's growth in her womb-house where she feels cramped and fears that her food and air will be cut off. In addition, there is the curious zoo of post-Darwinian animals which represent facets of Man (the Cheshire cat = intellectual detachment, abstraction, an inner world), and demonstrate the vicious natural struggle for survival in which man is involved (Alice often squeamishly shies away from some proffered "naked lunch").

Out of the links Empson made between Carroll's life and his books grew Phyllis Greenacre's Freudian biography which establishes that Dodgson, like Verlaine and Joyce, poured his inner life into his works, and in doing so touched the universal. Far from limiting herself to the listing of suggestive holes and elongated objects, the author makes several penetrating observations including the basic one that the world of Alice, with its disorientations of time and space, mysteries of cause and effect, confusions of animals and humans with the inanimate, its amorality, threats of extinction, and frightening female authority figures, is a reproduction of the stage of child development from about fifteen to thirty months—the stage in which crude sensory awareness and primal demands complicate themselves into memory, anticipation, self-awareness, and self-criticism. She links Carroll's female-dominated upbringing with the powerful females of his books and the singular lack of strong, well-respected adult males. And (to mention only her major points) she demonstrates how Carroll's passion for order and dismay at the aging of his young friends led to his attempts to preserve them for all time in his photographs and books. She shows how his fear of loss of memory, consciousness, and sanity (he kept careful records of his voluminous correspondence and carefully filed all his photographs and negatives) is incorporated in, and lends power to, Alice's journeys.

Building upon Empson and Greenacre, Donald Rackin in "Alice's Journey to the End of Night," has skillfully shown how Alice in Wonderland may be viewed as ".. . a comic horror-vision of the chaotic land beneath the man-made groundwork of Western thought and convention." When Alice goes "below ground," she seeks meaning in terms of the rules and conventions of Victorian society and when they fail her, she is so terrified that she flees back to her comparatively safe, logical world "above ground." In the course of her journey, "practically all pattern, save the consistency of chaos, is annihilated" including mathematics, logic, social convention, language, time and space. Alice for Rackin, is a grim comedy in which our laughter grows not from self-assurance, but from our fear of meaninglessness. Alice's "curiosity" is madness—it leads her to a dream world of black humor where, when man seeks to know reality through symbols, he manages only to become lost among them.

To the historian of literature, what is interesting about Carroll as seen in his books is the tension between his restrained, rational, conservative "Victorian" self and his wildly imaginative, satirical, "romantic" self. To critics who are concerned primarily with what meaning literature has for us today, what seems important about works such as Alice and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is not their undeniably forgiving qualities—their gentle humor, wonder, and playfulness. Rather it is their absurdist traits, their dark ironies, their grotesqueness. Carroll's works have been extremely influential among avant-garde writers since the turn of the century. Their "warping, stretching, compressing, inverting, reversing, distorting" of the world, reflected in Tenniel's illustrations of the Jabberwock and the Toves around the sundial placed them solidly in the tradition of Surrealism. As Gardner points out, Lear and Carroll, the leading nonsense poets of their time, were precursors of the Dadaiste, Italian Futurists, Gertrude Stein, and Ogden Nash. Journeys underground, journeys to the end of night or into mirror-worlds proliferate as writers like Celine and Genet despair of finding meaning in the world. The fall of Humpty Dumpty achieves mythological status in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, and one could easily mistake Alice's train ride or the trial of the knave of hearts for Kafka's work. Vladimir Nabokov's first book was a translation of Alice into Russian, and his nymphet-loving hero Humbert Humbert resembles Carroll not a little. Echoing T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges has noted in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors" that "every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." If this is so, then Borges, the author of so many "fictions" about dreams within dreams, doubles, mythological creatures, and voyages to strange worlds, "created" Alice as part of his own tradition. From the first, Alice was recognized as a forerunner of the theatre of the absurd with its syntactic dead ends, philosophical mazes, and grotesque, cartoon-like characters. Alice even has its own "Catch-22"—"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

As important as these critics and creative artists have been in discovering the contemporary Alice, I believe it has been most skillfully brought into focus by a group of actors who humorously called themselves The Manhattan Project, under the direction of Andre Gregory. Because the production so graphically illustrates, in their original context, the aspects of Alice that have attracted modern artists and critics, it is an important bridge between the critical world that describes Alice and the artistic world that draws upon it.

There have, of course, been numerous stage versions of Carroll's works (the earliest having as collaborator Carroll himself), and films have been made by Paramount (1933) and Walt Disney (1951), but only in this production was the importance of Alice to our time made clear. The mode Gregory has chosen for his Alice is the strenuous one evolved by groups such as the Open Theater and the Performance Group. From Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty he borrowed moments of savage eroticism, violent physicality, anarchic humor, and a burning focus on the actor. For a decor he chose the rags and junk of Grotowski's Poor Theatre which stripped the production of all gaudy, slick, showmanship. When we entered the tiny, crowded lobby of the small converted church, we were swept like Alice through a rabbit hole and a long corridor and bunched up on risers with old chair seats nailed to them (at random so nobody fit very well). From there we looked down on a small square stage which looked like somebody's old attic or a seedy pawn shop. This playing area, "half circus—half nursery," had a torn canvas floor, an old parachute spread out over it for a roof, a stack of chairs, a bench, and table, a ladder, an old gramophone, and a curtain at the back made of old newspapers.

As in Weiss's Marat Sade, the play was acted out by a mad chorus. All save Alice were insane, hopelessly wrenched out of "normality", swept into forgetfulness and euphoria, or smashed against each other by fits of rage. Their chaotic costumes reflected their minds: a tattered, soiled petticoated dress with an apron (like the one shown by Tenniel) for Alice, a coat and tails grubby overalls for the White Rabbit/March Hare, a stack of hats and old suit coat for the Mad Hatter. The White Queen and the Narrator/"Balloon Prince" wore quilted shirts and pants which through dream-transfer mirrored the padding from a bed or (to us) invisible walls of an insane asylum. The sound effects, which like the setting and costumes provided little sensual pleasure, were raucous and harsh. Marches and tunes from the twenties were shouted by the chorus or blared out over the old gramophone. The air was full of groans, whistles, ticking clocks, long agonizing silences, cuckoo birds, foghorns, bells, and screams (of pain? delight? terror?). Through this world travelled Alice, "homeless, forgetful, nostalgic, fragmented, emotionally and physically warped."

There was no break in the production and the acting was exhausting to watch—as exhausting as trying to read Alice with close attention to everything in it. Hewes, like many spectators, admired the "totally engaged life-and-death ensemble playing of the actors that gave their confrontations the desperate urgency of a nightmare." The atmosphere was hyperactive, frenetic, compulsive, and the silences and pauses seemed to grow out of exhaustion. It was an atmosphere which provided a perfect dramatic representation of Carroll's intense Wonderland/Looking-Glass world which constantly assaults Alice and pressures her into readjusting to it through questions, insults, and dream-like changes of scene. Within these cycles of feverish energy and fatigue Gregory captured the book's rich and varied humor, whimsical, grim, farcical by turns. Barnes underscored this variety, yet accurately listed that "humor is not the play's purpose. The purpose is fear. Mr. Gregory noticed a very, very obvious fact. We laugh when we are afraid."

When working on Marat Sade, Adrian Mitchell and Peter Brook were struck by the play's ability to force the audience to repeatedly shift their focus, opinions, and emotions, to make them reformulate their ideas about what is happening and what it means. As in Shakespeare, the impressions come too fast to permit relaxation. "A good play sends many such messages, often several at a time, often crowding, jostling, overlapping one another. The intelligence, the feelings, the memory, the imagination are all stirred." The Alice books have that quality, and it is a measure of the success of Gregory's adaptation that playgoers were stirred by "states of dread, of sexuality, of absurdity, of bewilderment, of wonder, of fear, of giddiness, of giggliness, of madness, of contraction, of elevation, of 'growing pains,' of terror, of playfulness, of ecstacy."

Both of Carroll's books have idyllic openings. The feeling in Looking-Glass is one of comfort and security, as Alice sits by the fire in a snug, warm chair and watches the snow kissing the windows and covering the trees and fields beyond. Wonderland begins with a leisurely, dreamy journey down the Thames as Dodgson spins tales of fantasy to three little girls on a golden afternoon. Yet I have always felt these openings are deceptive ones—as deceptive as the pictures of Dodgson with his boyish face, or accounts of his quiet, professorial life at Oxford. One cannot deduce the nature of Alice from its beginning any more than one can deduce what kind of book a stammering, shy bachelor who preferred the company of little girls could write. The production made both these points economically and powerfully.

The virtue of Gregory's production was its ability to string together great theatrical moments which skillfully elucidated the book. An anarchy of hair and padded bodies and junk would suddenly clarify itself into beautifully honed sequences from Carroll. In the opening scene, we hear back in the darkness the slow, excruciating tearing of a hole in the newspaper screen, and a clump of characters mumbling "Jabberwocky" enter. Alice in her tattered "little girl" dress comically struggles to escape this sticky blanket of nonsensical sounds, this group-grope, when suddenly the scene disintegrates and, after a silence accompanied by the ticking of a clock, it re-forms itself into the river scene at the start of her first journey. In a deep, confident voice, the narrator begins the prefatory poem "All in the Golden Afternoon" as a kneeling actor mimes paddling the boat down the Thames, imitating vocally the leisurely sh-h-h, sh-h-h, sh-h-h of the paddle. But slowly the compulsions and repressed drives most readers sense beneath idyllic narrative come to the surface. Carroll stumbles over his part, collects himself, begins again, stumbles again until he becomes totally confused and forgets everything. As he sweats and strains his memory, the paddling becomes more vehement, goes faster and faster until in a crescendo of violent exertions of mind and muscle, the scene explodes and suddenly we are confronted with Alice's tortuous journey down the rabbit hole. She is tossed, twisted, flung, rolled, assaulted by members of the chorus; the descent is a blend of sexual initiation, dizzying nightmare, madness, and death. Our journey into Carroll's mind has begun.

The Alice of Gregory's distinctly adult version was a modern kind of innocent, not the priggish little Victorian Miss of the original. In order to involve us in Alice's journeys (who can identify with a snobbish little prude?) Gregory gave us a much more earthy, sympathetic heroine, naive and curious but able to look out for herself, a tomboy—unrestrained, "assertive, ornery, and often rude." There was much less distance between this likeable tomboy and the audience than there is between the reader and the Alice of the original; when we are taken to the edge of madness with a tough, sensible girl who is in touch with her own feelings as much as any of us were when we were young, we cannot shrug it off so easily.

Through Alice, much of the playfulness and humor of the books is preserved. As long as she remains untouched by her "adventures" or at least is able to spring back from them, we can enjoy Gregory's elaborations on Carroll's fantasy world. Two good examples are the mirror-double of Alice, who mimics all her motions and perversely gives her the wrong answers to mathematical problems, and the "dirigible prince" who eludes her shrinkings and growings, who when punctured "skitters to the floor like a deflating balloon, twisting every which way." Often however the fun becomes uncomfortable. We chuckle at the hilarious caucus race, with the whole cast running in place until they collapse in exhaustion, but the scene ends with a cruel little turn: out of revenge, the birds who "choked and had to be patted on the back" gleefully make Alice eat her thimble. While we are amused by the mouse's body, which curves and sways as he narrates the mouse's "tale" of Fury's arbitrary hatefulness pursued out of boredom, the sense of claustrophobia becomes overwhelming as the "house" (made of actors) closes in on Alice.

The caterpillar scene was also both funny and unsettling. Atop several actors forming a mushroom, the thoroughly stoned caterpillar (in the book he speaks in a "languid, sleepy voice" and is "quietly smoking a long hookah and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else") inhales on the arm of one of the actors with long ecstatic breaths and eventually gets Alice silly/high. But his persistent questions about metamorphosis and identity shake her deeply, and like Carroll we are not so secure about who we are as to remain untouched.

Alice survives the duchess' crazy kitchen, the (boy, naturally) baby's transformation into a pig, and the grinning Cheshire Cat, but in the marvelously conceived mad tea-party Gregory makes it clear that Alice moves near the abyss, and does not recover as easily as she does earlier. The sinister, threatening Mad Hatter with three hats stacked on his head, rules the scene with barely preserved calm. Violence erupts when he is ridiculed by Alice and as he fixes her in a ferocious stare, he murderously squeezes a stick of butter in his fist. The Dormouse, wearing a World War I helmet, takes crushing farcical blows on it from the Mad Hatter. He stuffs his mouth with bread until he cannot speak, and turns the stomach of every one on and off stage by cramming a whole stick of butter into his mouth and eating it. The jittery, panicked March Hare nibbles his bread frantically. His actions are totally disjointed: he suddenly juggles three pieces of bread, plays footsie with Alice, waltzes her around the room, and then tries to rape her.

After some Marx brothers antics (actors scrawl "LEWIS LIKES LITTLE GIRLS" on a wall, the paranoid Queen of Hearts pops front-row spectators on the head with a huge plastic hammer, and a croquet game is played with human mallets and balls), we enter a weird, quiet land where trees (actors with ragged umbrellas folded down over their heads) sway in the dark, the wind whistles, and the gently, lyrically mad White Queen dances and spins verbal mazes about us. A tattered umbrella throws a swirling speckled light over the whole errie scene. Here Alice is lured toward the beauty, the quiet still place of madness—the misty place where distinctions between past, present, and future are obliterated, where memory becomes the future, where crime follows the punishment and trial, and where one cries out in pain before the wound is inflicted.

Alice confronts in Humpty Dumpty the chaos of words breaking loose from their agreed upon meanings. And all the while Humpty Dumpty, like Jerry in Albee's Zoo Story, is secretly thinking not about his "opponent's" dilemma, but about how to time his suicide correctly, how to play the game. This cynical philosopher-gamesman constantly catches Alice in word traps, treats the world as a riddle (which, Alice is learning, is true), insults her, and argues that even if communication were possible, it is irrelevant. He, like the Red King, "means what he says," but chooses any word he likes and makes it mean exactly what he wants it to. Humpty Dumpty dismisses Alice's (and our) questions about whether he can do such a thing with the definitive statement on the matter: "The question is which is to be master—that's all." Alice is staggered. When he suggests a suicide pact to her, she is upset enough to consider it seriously, but things are not allowed to go any further. Tottering on a pile of chairs, held up by four imaginary guy ropes which are held with great difficulty by straining actors, Humpty Dumpty falls to the ground crushing an egg against his forehead as he strikes the floor. We feel Alice is free, but we are wrong. She stares in horror, and it dawns on us that she thinks it was she who was responsible for his death (again like Zoo Story). The trap has snapped shut.

In the following (final) scene, the White Knight brings Alice to a crisis. He is a summing up and intensification of all that has come before—a kaleidoscope of hate, fear, love, desire, disgust, wild imagination, and fearsome literalness. He violently assaults Alice and then becomes a child whose head must be cradled in her lap. The frank, friendly, flirtatious, good humored, little hoyden—conventional but curious, naively vulnerable—is destroyed by this Thomas Edison gone berserk. The humor is gone, and with it the release of laughter, [as we] watch a man conscious of his madness and pathetically struggling to escape it, but being sucked back into chaos by his weakness, his fear of the "sane" world, and his fatal attraction to the flashing jewel, madness. Alone in his maze of inventions and visions, he needs desperately to draw Alice in with him. The agony and attraction becomes unbearable for her, so she flees and awakens, taking back to the world above ground the dreamer's incredible knowledge—knowledge like Leda's knowledge of the Swan, or Cassandra's knowledge of the future to which we all are doomed.

As the more perceptive critics, writers, and theatre artists of our time have shown, far from being isolated from the world, Carroll's "children's books" lead us to its heart; they are a microcosm of it. We too are caught up in that intense nonsense played according to arbitrary rules which is unfortunately not confined to games. (Alice, like most of us, is a pawn until the end of the dream. The paradoxes of "Underground" and the "Looking-Glass World" are painfully contemporary. In the midst of a print explosion and cursed with the shifting sands of memory, which of us does not run as fast as we can to stay in the same place? In our world too, walking directly toward something only carries you further away from it—progress breeds regress, punishments become worse than crimes, inhumanity is proposed as our only humane course, and the last thing we can do to alleviate poverty (we are told) is to give money to the poor. What thoughtful observer of governments today can doubt that in deciding what words are going to mean, the only question is who is master? All too many "world leaders" respond in a crisis as the White King does: "You alarm me! I feel faint—Give me a ham sandwich!" Carroll's alarm and sense of loss at the aging and coarsening of the little girls he adored serves as a metaphor for all the effects of time: weakness, forgetfulness, inconstancy, disease, death. And the ironic twist is there too. Just when in despair we learn the melancholy lesson that time washes away loyalty, friendship, love, that the rushes we pick up will, like Alice's, fade and lose all their scent and beauty, we are confronted by the Red Queen who screams "When you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences."

SOURCE: "Satire in the Alice Books," in Criticism, Vol. 12, Winter, 1970, pp. 105-19.

[In the essay below, Matthews considers the recurrence of satire and literary parody in the Alice books.]

Criticism of Lewis Carroll's works usually runs to extremes. There is a tough-minded school largely made up of psychoanalytical critics who take a no-nonsense attitude toward Carroll's nonsense. Some useful criticism, such as William Empson's characteristically stimulating and unsound essay, has been produced by the tough-minded approach. At the other extreme are tender-minded critics like G. K. Chesterton, who insist that the Alice books were written for children and therefore should not be approached with either reverence or scepticism—in short, that they should not be subjected to literary criticism. Some tender-minded critics seem to try to mask the fact that they are criticising by playing Carroll's own games of fantasy and word-play in their studies. Harry Morgan Ayres invokes Humpty Dumpty in his little book on Alice, but his Humpty Dumpty inevitably suffers from comparison with Carroll's. Florence Becker Lennon's useful biography is marred by such gratuitous cleverness as her reference to Dodgson as "the don with the luminous prose" in the midst of an otherwise straightforward account of his acquaintance with prominent people.

The fault with both extreme approaches (and most critics partake of both to some degree) is that one loses sight of Alice and her adventures while the critics indulge themselves in either excessive Carroll/Dodgson consciousness or excessive self-consciousness. The works of Lewis Carroll are, to be sure, children's books, and they were indeed produced by a man whose mind, like most men's minds, was complex and at times disturbing, but the fascination for adults of the books themselves, wholly apart from the fascination of the author's personality, is undeniable. Carroll was an adult (most of the time), and he was doubtless aware that other adults would read his books, if only to their children. The books inevitably express some of his own ideas, for only the simplest and most elemental children's books—the "Dick and Jane" readers inflicted by educationists on generations of American children, for example—are wholly devoid of intellectual content and literary merit.

Perhaps there is also a barrier to intelligent discussion of the Carroll books in the fact that they are "nonsense." "High seriousness" still makes us suffer moral qualms about devoting our attention to literature that seems designed for "mere" enjoyment. And in writing about nonsense literature, the critic finds himself in danger of committing self-parody, of coming forth with something like one of the choicer essays in The Pooh Perplex. But perhaps in these days when distinguished critics are writing perceptive articles on the lyrics of John Lennon, criticism has widened its view of the realms of art sufficiently for one to write about Lewis Carroll without more than a normal amount of bathos.

"Nonsense" is, after all, a Victorian word for a Victorian genre. Its basic connotations are pejorative, as pejorative now as in 1846 when Edward Lear placed it in the title of his first book of verse. But as the name of a genre, perhaps it can be purged of these connotations. For neither Carroll's nor Lear's nonsense fits a dictionary definition like "devoid of sense"; their nonsense is as carefully structured as any of the sensible works with which it is contemporary, and it follows in many ways a more rigid decorum than, for example, the novels of Dickens. Furthermore, there are qualitative differences between the nonsense of Carroll and the nonsense of Lear. There are no real people in Lear. There are, to be sure, scores of Men, Ladies, and Persons, both Young and Old, but they have no more resemblance to human beings than the Pobble or the Jumblies. Alice, on the other hand, is a very real little girl, and the rather pallid Victorian adults in Sylvie and Bruno, though hardly "round" characters, are realistically portrayed. The Alice books are closer to Gulliver's Travels and Erewhon, and Sylvie and Bruno to The Water-Babies, than either to the works of Edward Lear. Only The Hunting of the Snark and some of the poems in the Alice books really approach the purity of Lear's nonsense.

One of the essential characteristics of Carroll's nonsense is its self-consciousness. From the moment on the golden afternoon when Secunda requests "nonsense" in the tale being told her, we are aware that nonsense is incidental, not continuous in Alice in Wonderland. Alice always tells us when something is nonsensical. The first time she begins to grow, an extraordinary but not a nonsensical occurrence, she speculates on how she is to exercise control over her feet; she determines to woo them with Christmas presents, properly addressed and sent by the carrier, but suddenly comes to her senses and exclaims, "Oh dear, what nonsense I'm talking!" She soon learns two principal types of nonsense: linguistic and logical. Nonsense arises from linguistic confusion when she misunderstands the Mouse's emphatic negative and immediately offers to help him untie his knot; "You insult me," he replies indignantly, "by talking such nonsense!" Nonsense arises from logical incoherence at the Mad Tea Party:

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. "What a funny watch!" she remarked. "It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!"

"Why should it?" muttered the Hatter. "Does your watch tell you what year it is?"

"Of course not," Alice replied very readily: "but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together."

"Which is just the case with mine," said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.

Alice has learned to distrust her own language, a very valuable lesson. Actually, the Hatter's remark is only temporary nonsense; Carroll, with his characteristic love of puzzles, postpones the clarification for three pages until it is revealed that it is always six o'clock for the Hatter since the Queen accused him of murdering the time. The careless reader almost certainly misses this elucidation; perhaps Alice misses it too, for she fails to learn another important lesson: that nonsense is relative. In Through the Looking Glass, she is advised to walk in the opposite direction to reach the Red Queen: "This sounded nonsense to Alice, so she said nothing, but set off at once towards the Red Queen. To her surprise she lost sight of her in a moment, and found herself walking in at the front-door again." She has forgotten that the laws of motion, like everything else in Looking-Glass Land, are reversed. The function of such nonsense is to illuminate the nature of sense: to explore both the limitations and potentialities of language and logic. Compared with Lear's nonsense, almost nonsense for nonsense's sake, Carroll's is as sensible as a dictionary, as the Red Queen rightly observes, and almost as sensible as that of the greatest twentieth century nonsense-writer, James Joyce.

The decorum of nonsense deserves a more extensive treatment than we can give it here. Carroll was especially severe in his standards of taste; easily offended by even the innocent blasphemies of children, he was known to caution his friends not to tell tales of such things in his presence. This sensitivity led him to change the passion-flower in the talking flowers episode of Through the Looking Glass to a tiger lily when he learned that the name refers to Christ's passion. But there is a further decorum which determines what one can and cannot do in a fantasy. Tenniel's collaboration with Carroll provides us with some suggestions of these limitations. Tenniel was given the option of illustrating a poem about a walrus and either a butterfly, a baronet, or a carpenter. Any of the three fits the meter, and there is no rhyme problem. Tenniel wisely chose the carpenter, of course, for though the baronet would have been equally acceptable, the mind boggles at the concept of an ostreophagous butterfly. Nonsense has to undergo a severe pragmatic test; some things, especially visual absurdities and grotesqueries, are better left to the imagination. The illustrator's role serves to indicate the limitations of description. Tenniel chose not to illustrate the gnat "the size of a chicken" and Carroll avoids any further description of it, thereby retaining a funny idea without touching off the frisson that one gets at the contemplation of creatures under the microscope. Henry Holiday's illustrations for The Hunting of the S nark, on the other hand, are too detailed and realistic, and Carroll was especially wise to reject his portrait of the Snark itself. But Tenniel's Jabberwock is successful because he indulged in the visual nonsense of putting a waistcoat on the horrendous creature. (The more squeamish Carroll, however, after a poll of mothers, removed the Jabberwock from its position as frontispiece for fear of frightening young readers.) Nonsense illuminates sense, but sense gives structure and coherence to nonsense. The first stanza of "Jabberwocky" is a case in point. It is utter nonsense, but the structure given it by the English words and the slightly archaic English syntax make the nonsense words resonate with potential meaning. "Outgrabe" has a nice Germanic sound to it, "slithy" and "mimsy" look like real adjectives, and "toves," "raths," and "borogoves" must be there in force, for the endings are obviously plural. Alice's reaction to it is the universal one: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't know exactly what they are!" But if the English words are eliminated and other nonsense words substituted for them, the result is unreadable gibberish:

Flob brillig, yabble slithy toves
Ag gyre ib gimble umlog wabe:
Oof mimsy zod nit borogoves,
Ropil mome raths outgrabe.

Effective nonsense keeps one foot on the ground; fantasy needs a realistic background, a frame of familiar reference. A tour of Wonderland without the practical, very English little Alice to serve as norm would be tedious indeed.

But the presence of Alice as norm, as the embodiment of Victorian practicality and industry, suggests that the Alice books may have satiric implications. For as Northrop Frye says of satire, "its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured." And in actuality, we should be surprised not to find satire in the books. Dodgson was a man of firm opinions and he was also one of the finest parodists in a golden age of parody. Frye sees the parodistic tendency as an indication of the satirical nature of the Alice books:

Most fantasy is pulled back into satire by a powerful undertow often called allegory, which may be described as the implicit reference to experience in the perception of the incongruous. The White Knight in Alice who felt that one should be provided for everything and therefore put anklets around his horse's feet to guard against the bites of sharks, may pass as pure fantasy. But when he goes on to sing an elaborate parody of Wordsworth we begin to sniff the acrid, pungent smell of satire, and when we take a second look at the White Knight we recognize a character type closely related to Don Quixote and to the pedant of comedy.

But the objects of satire in the books are less clear than we could wish. There is no apparent political satire in them, except for the caricatures of Disraeli which Tenniel inserted, and—a more significant exception—the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Even in the case of the trial, however, one suspects Carroll's innocence of the implications of this great scene. He cannot have foreseen its applicability to the totalitarianism and witch-hunting of the twentieth century. Our interpretation of it is enhanced by having read Kafka, and the cartoonist Walt Kelly found Carroll's trial so suited to his own satirical purposes that he reprinted it in one of his books, illustrating it with his own cartoon characters, including a King of Hearts with a striking resemblance to the late Senator Joseph McCarthy.

But what satire the Alice books contain is directed less at institutions than at individual human foibles. Harry Morgan Ayres has made the interesting suggestion that the Alice books form "a satiric view of the world with which the child finds itself confronted," that they constitute a fantastic Bildungsroman. The Victorian age, dominated by a status-seeking middle class rather than a pace-setting aristocracy, was the great age of the etiquette book, of Guides for Young Men and Young Ladies. Children were especially subjected to regimentation. Young Dodgson, though he grew into one of the most methodical of men, seems to have been particularly annoyed by the rules imposed on him. Two poems included among the juvenilia indicate this. "My Fairy," dated 1845 when Dodgson was thirteen, tells of a nuisance of a fairy who pursues him with prohibitions. The last stanza is a paradox worthy of the Alice books:

"What may I do?" at length I cried,
Tired of the painful task.
The fairy quietly replied,
And said "You must not ask."
Moral: "You mustn't."

"Rules and Regulations" written about the same time, is a less negative variation on the same theme. Some of the rules are obviously nonsense items included for the rhyme: "Drink tea, not coffee; / Never eat toffy. .. . Don't waste your money, / Abstain from honey. . . . Drink beer, not porter. / Don't enter the water / Till to swim you are able. . . . Starve your canaries, / Believe in fairies." But the arbitrary nonsense of these rules is perhaps a comment on the general arbitrariness of etiquette, an idea which crops up in the Alice books. The final rule on the list, "Be rude to strangers," could almost be the cardinal principle for conduct in Wonderland.

Several of the poems in the Alice books are parodies of the sort of didactic poetry young Dodgson may have had in mind when he wrote these early verses. "How doth the little crocodile" takes off Isaac Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief." Dr. Watts is also represented by '"Tis the Voice of the Lobster," a parody of "The Sluggard." There is normally no malice in Carroll's parodies, as he draws on some of his favorite poets, such as Wordsworth and Tennyson, but in the case of Dr. Watts there is a suggestion of healthy dislike founded on a childhood overexposure to the Divine Songs for Children. The suggestion is borne out in Sylvie and Bruno by Arthur's contemptuous remarks about

"Dr. Watts, who has asked the senseless question
'Why should I deprive my neighbour
Of his goods against his will?'

Fancy that as an argument for Honesty! His position seems to be 'I'm only honest because I see no reason to steal.' And the thief's answer is of course complete and crushing. 'I deprive my neighbour of his goods because I want them myself. And I do it against his will because there's no chance of getting him to consent to it!'"

Other didactic poems parodied include Southey's "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them," which becomes "Father William," and G. W. Langford's "Speak Gently," the Duchess' "Speak Roughly." The latter parody makes one think of the fabled strictness of Victorian parents such as Theobald Pontifex.

Alice herself apparently had the usual Victorian childhood. She is extremely, though not morbidly, self-conscious, even when she is falling down the rabbit-hole:

"I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The antipathies, I think—" (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) "—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please Ma'am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?" (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke—fancy, curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) "And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere."

She frequently assumes the roles of parent and child simultaneously: "She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears to her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people." Alice's precocity places her on a higher level than the childish adults of Wonderland.

Alice's first significant encounter with Wonderland creatures comes in the Pool of Tears and Caucus-Race episodes, and it is there that we see how Carroll is to turn the rules of etiquette topsy-turvy. What, for example, is the proper way of addressing a mouse? The answer is found not in the etiquette books but in Alice's brother's Latin grammar: "A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!" The mouse turns out to be a very respectable beast, so Alice's concern for protocol is not wasted, though she very soon lapses from her good start. She is forced to apologize for bringing up the subject of the mouse-catching Dinah, and agrees that

"We won't talk about her any more if you'd rather not."

"We, indeed!" cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end of its tail. "As if I would talk on such a subject! Our family always hated cats: nasty, low, vulgar things! Don't let me hear the name again!"

But Alice blunders on, and manages to offend the other creatures by talking of Dinah's habit of eating birds.

This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party. Some of the birds hurried off at once: one old Magpie began wrapping itself up very carefully, remarking "I really must be getting home: the night-air doesn't suit my throat." And a Canary called out in a trembling voice, to its children, "Come away, my dears! It's high time you were all in bed!" On various pretexts they all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.

The wonderful tone of gentility in both of these speeches places us among the higher levels of Wonderland (read Victorian) society, where the forms of etiquette are used to dissemble and even to excuse rudeness. The Mad Tea Party (a parody of a very English custom) includes this exchange:

"Have some wine," the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. "I don't see any wine," she remarked.

"There isn't any," said the March Hare.

"Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it," said Alice angrily.

"It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being invited," said the March Hare.

Apparently one rude turn deserves another.

Alice has a precocious sensitivity to the "game" of polite conversation, however, and the conversational gambit is one of the major motifs of the book:

"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. . . .

"I didn't know that Cheshire-Cats always grinned; in fact, I didn't know that cats could grin."

"They all can," said the Duchess; "and most of 'em do."

"I don't know of any that do," Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation. . . .

Alice did not much like her keeping so close to her; first because the Duchess was very ugly; and secondly, because she was exactly the right height to rest her chin on Alice's shoulder, and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not like to be rude: so she bore it as well as she could.

"The game's going on rather better now," she said, by way of keeping up the conversation a little. . . .

The White Queen only looked at her in a helpless frightened sort of way, and kept repeating something in a whisper to herself that sounded like "Bread-and-butter, bread-and-butter," and Alice felt that if there was to be any conversation at all, she must manage it herself. So she began rather timidly: "Am I addressing the White Queen?"

"Well, yes, if you call that a-dressing," the Queen said. "It isn't my notion of the thing, at all."

Alice thought it would never do to have an argument right at the very beginning of their conversation, so she smiled and said "If your Majesty will only tell me the right way to begin, I'll do it as well as I can.

The most trying encounter of this sort is the one with Humpty Dumpty. Seeing him seated motionless on his wall, Alice comes to the conclusion that he is a stuffed figure and remarks on how egglike he is. Humpty Dumpty takes umbrage:

"It's very provoking," Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, "to be called an egg—very!"

"I said you looked like an egg, Sir," Alice gently explained. "And some eggs are very pretty, you know," she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment.

"Some people," said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, "have no more sense than a baby!"

Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to her; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree.

Humpty Dumpty is the master of language, however, and conversation must follow his rules:

"Yes, all his horses and all his men," Humpty Dumpty went on. "They'd pick me up again in a minute, they would! However, this conversation is going on a little too fast: let's go back to the last remark but one."

"I'm afraid I can't quite remember it," Alice said, very politely.

"In that case we start afresh," said Humpty Dumpty, "and it's my turn to choose a subject—" ("He talks about it just as if it was a game!" thought Alice.)

A game indeed, for Alice's remark is ironic, since the several quotations above show that she has been doing precisely the same thing: manipulating conversations for their own sake rather than for the sake of any interchange of ideas. Her final verdict on Humpty Dumpty—"of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met"—is a telling one. Humpty Dumpty is unsatisfactory because he is so self-centered: words mean precisely what he decides they shall mean, and people exist only to gratify his ego (Carroll might have said "egg-o"). He stands in contrast with Alice's beloved, bumbling White Knight. Humpty Dumpty's existence is, at least from his point of view, completely ordered—Alice is baffled because she is not privy to the rules of the game; the White Knight's is random and chaotic, like the erratic moves of the chessman he is. But Humpty Dumpty's ordered, self-centered existence is shattered by his fatal fall; the White Knight falls constantly but perseveres. The Duchess would draw a moral from that.

We are reminded several times that etiquette, like all attempts to impose order on existence, contains paradoxical and arbitrary elements. Encountering Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Alice is confronted with a problem of protocol which she resolves with an aplomb worthy of a Foreign Office functionary.

"You've begun wrong!" cried Tweedledum. "The first thing in a visit is to say 'How d'ye do?' and shake hands!" And here the two brothers gave each other a hug, and then they held out the two hands that were free, to shake hands with her.

Alice did not like shaking hands with either of them first, for fear of hurting the other one's feelings; so, as the best way out of the difficulty, she took hold of both hands at once: the next moment they were dancing round in a ring.

The decision to favor either would be perfectly arbitrary, but it could have serious consequences, as Alice has already learned several times over. Here, once again, we see a familiar social custom reduced to an absurdity. The arbitrariness of most etiquette is revealed in exchanges like this one:

"You!" said the Caterpillar contemptuously. "Who are you?"

Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the caterpillar's making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, "I think you ought to tell me who you are, first."

"Why?" said the Caterpillar.

Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and the Caterpillar seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.

Not only is Alice frequently placed in the dilemma of having to find an objective justification for her conduct—a rather uncomfortably Sartrean plight, particularly for a Victorian heroine—she often suffers the consequences of blind adherence to what, in Victorian society, would be good manners. The Red Queen, learning after their frantic run that Alice is thirsty, kindly offers her a biscuit (remember that reversal of the laws of nature in Looking-Glass Land): "Alice thought it would not be civil to say "No," though it wasn't at all what she wanted. She took it, and ate it as well as she could: and it was very dry: and she thought she had never been so nearly choked in all her life." Even when she becomes a Queen, etiquette gets into her way. Invited to carve the mutton at her banquet, she hesitates because she has never had to carve a joint before:

"You look a little shy: let me introduce you to that leg of mutton," said the Red Queen. "Alice—Mutton: Mutton—Alice." The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice! and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused.

"May I give you a slice?" she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.

"Certainly not," the Red Queen said very decidedly: "it isn't etiquette to cut any one you've been introduced to. Remove the joint!"

Alice faces the alternatives of impoliteness or starvation, and quite sensibly chooses the former. She has learned one valuable lesson in her travels: when doubtful about a point of etiquette, let common sense be your guide. In the Queen of Hearts' croquet ground, she comes upon the procession of the King and Queen, whereupon the three gardeners fall on their faces. "Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; 'and besides, what would be the use of a procession," thought she, 'if people had all to lie down on their faces, so that they couldn't see it?' So she stood where she was, and waited." And encountering the Red and White Queens after she has been crowned, Alice scores one of the few points she makes against all of the people she meets in her travels:

"Please, would you tell me—" she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

"Speak when you're spoken to!" the Queen sharply interrupted her.

"But if everybody obeyed that rule," said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, "and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that—"

"Ridiculous!" cried the Queen. "Why, don't you see, child—" here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation.

Carroll's concern with social behavior carries over to Sylvie and Bruno. But the change in point of view—from Alice's childish reaction to adult conduct reduced to an absurdity, to that of the adult narrator of Sylvie and Bruno who is engaged in the action of the book—gives the satire, when it occurs, a sharper focus. (But one questions whether a sharper focus, given the rather trivial nature of what is satirized, is worthwhile.) Where the satire in the Alice books deals with the forms and patterns of social behavior, in Sylvie and Bruno it is directed at certain types of boors and bores, as they appear in their natural habitat, the dinner party or the picnic. There is, moreover, the same preoccupation with conversation; the Professor known as Mein Herr says:

"That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running short—not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation."

"In an English dinner-party," I remarked, "I have never known small-talk run short!"

"Pardon me," Mein Herr respectfully replied, "I did not say 'small-talk.' I said 'conversation.' All such topics as the weather, or politics, or local gossip, are unknown among us. They are either vapid or controversial. What we need for conversation is a topic of interest and of novelty. To secure these things we have tried various plans—Moving-Pictures, Wild-Creatures, Moving-Guests, and a Revolving Humorist."

He proceeds to describe some elaborate devices, worthy of the White Knight, for keeping the conversation at a steady flow.

Among the bores and cranks attacked in the book are amateur art critics, teetotallers, and wine connoisseurs, and there is an amusing parody of late Victorian aestheticism. The chief voice for much of the satire is Arthur, who is a virtuoso wit when the humor takes him. Unfortunately for Sylvie and Bruno as a whole, the wit is submerged in sentimentality. Arthur's antic disposition is revealed in a confrontation with a pompous man; Arthur asserts, in the context of another discussion:

"The number of lunatic books is as finite as the number of lunatics."

"And that number is becoming greater every year," said a pompous man. . . .

"So they say," replied Arthur. "And, when ninety per cent. of us are lunatics," (he seemed to be in a wildly nonsensical mood) "the asylums will be put to their proper use."

"And that is—?" the pompous man gravely enquired.

"To shelter the sane!" said Arthur. "We shall bar ourselves in. The lunatics will have it all their own way, outside. They'll do it a little queerly, no doubt. Railway-collisions will be always happening: steamers always blowing up: most of the towns will be burnt down: most of the ships sunk—"

"And most of the men killed!" murmured the pompous man, who was evidently bewildered.

"Certainly," Arthur assented. 'Till at last there will be fewer lunatics than sane men. Then we come out: they go in: and things return to their normal condition!"

We might compare the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat:

"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

This premise of universal irrationality lends Wonderland its charm; it is also the point, ultimately, of its satire. If Sylvie and Bruno could sustain Arthur's "wildly [and Wildely] nonsensical mood," instead of lapsing into sentimentality, we might have a true satirical portrait of Victorian society. But both Sylvie and Bruno and the Alice books are satire manqué. Carroll obviously has something to say about the misuse of etiquette and the pretensions of men in social gatherings. But these satirical motifs are incidental to the complex of the books. Still, one senses from an awareness of Carroll's opinions as expressed in these works something that Freudian critics overlook about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's preference for the society of little girls, children whose manners, however rigidly disciplined, were not used to dissemble, whose conversation was artless. The only good tea party was a mad tea party in company with Alice or Sylvie.

SOURCE: "Alice's Invasion of Wonderland," in PMLA, Vol. 88, No. 1, January, 1973, pp. 92-99.

[In the following essay, Kincaid addresses the complex mix of innocence and aggression in Alice and argues that Carroll's books are, "above all, about growing up. "]

In the fifth chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is alarmed to find that her neck has stretched to such "an immense length" that her head is above the trees. The narrator adds, however, that the alarm soon passes and that she "was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent." This simile, like other Wonderland similes, is more than ornamental; it suggests a critical and subversive perspective on Alice. Though this perspective is generally submerged, it is present in both of Lewis Carroll's great studies of the joys and dangers of human innocence, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The ironic viewpoint comes to the surface in this case as a Pigeon flies out of the trees screaming "Serpent!" while desperately trying to defend her eggs. When Alice claims to be a little girl and not a serpent, the Pigeon applies the only test that matters: "I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!" The jokes that follow pick up and make explicit the dark meaning of the narrator's quietly suggestive simile:

"I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice, who was a very truthful child; "but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know."

"I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, why, then they're a kind of serpent: that's all I can say."

All the aggression behind this wit is directed at Alice, the clear representative of all little girls—or serpents. As the Pigeon says, "You're looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a serpent?" From the perspective of all those whose values are ignored and whose emotions are plundered, it doesn't matter if Eden is destroyed by purposeful malignity or by the callous egoism and ruthless insensitivity that often pass for innocence.

But Wonderland and the world behind the Looking-Glass, certainly, do not always remind us of Eden, and Alice is the object of love as well as fear. The best interpretation of the Alice books, in fact, argues that she is "the reader's surrogate on a frightful journey into meaningless night," where "practically all pattern, save the consistency of chaos, is annihilated." Donald Rackin further sees the most basic and important impulse of the work as a rejection of this chaos and an affirmation of "the sane madness of ordinary existence." But in rejecting this disorder Alice is rejecting not only the terrifying underside of human consciousness but the liberating imagination as well, not only the ironic world of Kafka but the exuberant and expansive world of Don Quixote. The "pattern" with which Alice finally identifies may be necessary, but Carroll is by no means unequivocally in support of her affirmation of a restricted and regularized "sane madness." For flexibility, surprise, and disorder are at the root of comedy as well as terror, and Wonderland shows Alice not only rootless hostility but free and uncompetitive joy. The Mad Tea-Party surely does not so much prefigure The Trial as it recalls the wonderful scene where Ben Allen, Bob Sawyer, and Mr. Winkle join to convert the commercial apparatus of a chemist's and surgeon's shop into vessels for punch and get happily drunk in midafternoon. Both scenes assault in mad and gay absoluteness all our sense of the orderly, the proper, and the restrictive. Only in Wonderland and in the world of Mr. Pickwick is it possible to say "it's always teatime." To some extent, the life behind the Looking-Glass and in Wonderland is really far less frightening than the one assumed by Alice. As Elizabeth Sewell's brilliant study has made clear, nonsense, in its pure form, is not frightening but deeply reassuring, since it only appears to be disorderly and actually establishes so many structures and limits that it functions to keep disorder in check. Though in general Carroll does not conform very strictly to this model, Alice very often does upset a beautiful comic game by introducing the alien concepts of linear progression to infinity, nothingness, and death. Therefore, though the Queen of Hearts is a frightening symbol of unregulated hostility, it is a hostility that leads nowhere; no one is really beheaded, since no logical consequences hold. To all pigeons, hence, and all others who have something to protect and cherish, it is Alice's matter-of-fact world, with its serene acceptance of predation and murder, that is truly awful.

The child's hostility to comic values and her insistence on limited sensibleness suggest the great complexity of the books' tone and point of view. For all its diversity, however, the criticism of the Alice books agrees on one point: that Alice, if not actually a surrogate for Lewis Carroll, is a surrogate for the reader and represents a favored perspective. Despite the light thrown by this criticism, it seems to me that it has left one large area of the works dark and has oversimplified both Carroll's rhetoric and his vision. Certainly Alice sometimes appears as a child taking a well-earned revenge on adult silliness, as, for instance, when the Lory pompously insists, "I'm older than you, and must know better." But the purity of the world she finds just as often acts to expose her own corruption. The Alice books are, above all, about growing up, and they recognize both the melancholy of the loss of Eden and the child's crude and tragic haste to leave its innocence. Further than this, though, there is often present a deeper and more ironic view that questions the value of human innocence altogether and sees the sophisticated and sad corruption of adults as preferable to the cruel selfishness of children. Alice reenacts the betrayal of innocence, here qualified by a concurrent sense that innocence is both cute and dangerous. The attitude toward her, then, is very complex. She is both pitied and blamed, fawned over and secretly despised. Most adults and, according to several sources, a good many children, have detected the presence of almost uncontrolled aggression in these books. Some of the children who, as the stories go, screamed in fright at the Alice books may well have been reacting not only to the extreme malice but to a sense that a good part of this malice hits directly at their own representative.

On another level, the Alice books recount a betrayal not so much general as deeply personal. Particularly in Through the Looking-Glass, the sense that, as the prefatory poem says, "No thought of me shall find a place / In thy young life's hereafter" becomes increasingly prominent. The self-pity and the submerged bitterness of the verses collect most clearly around the image of the White Knight, abandoned by the child who can't wait to join the adults. But very often Alice appears not so much as the generalized child as a representative of humanity, carrying the unconscious values and assumptions of us all into a freer and more questioning land so as to expose their full viciousness. In either case, Carroll ironically undercuts her favored position as protagonist and invites our hostility and aggression. Much of this aggression, it is true, surfaces in laughter and therefore need never be admitted consciously, but it nonetheless helps to create the split which often occurs between the book's important values and its central character. The necessarily ambivalent attitude toward Alice reinforces a rhetoric which shifts the direction of its hostile wit and therefore, as in Gulliver's Travels, makes it impossible for the reader to find a consistent position or a comfortable perspective. Along with the warmth and sentimentality is a truly dark cynicism and a point of view which can only be called misanthropic. I would like to discuss one aspect of this mixture, not to refute but to complement earlier analyses and to get closer to a few of the secrets of this baffling work.

The first point to make in relation to this complexity is that Alice is, as we have said, both child and adult—and a person in transition. She is not only the steady innocent but the adolescent continually asking, "Who in the world am I?" and the corrupt adult as well. She wants desperately to grow up—and in one dark sense she already has. Even when she appears most childlike, she is attacked for the betrayal to come.

As Alice drops down the rabbit hole, the narrator introduces very quietly the first death joke: "'Well!' thought Alice to herself, 'after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! . . . Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!' (which was very likely true)." Though the joke works largely on the principle of economy, turning our potential fear for Alice's safety into laughter, there is a barely disguised element of aggression that initiates a series of subtle attacks on the child and her values. The narrative aside throws Alice's sweet childishness into an ironic perspective and invites a hostility typical of the many death jokes throughout. Perhaps the most startling is the hint which comes up several times in Through the Looking-Glass that Alice is only a part of the Red King's dream and that, as Tweedledum says, "If that there King was to wake . . . you'd go out—bang!—just like a candle!"

A good deal of the rudeness that Alice encounters at the hands of Wonderland creatures is either so witty or so richly deserved that, I submit, it gains the secret approval of both the reader and the narrator. Even the Caterpillar's scornful attacks on Alice's pretenses to identity—"Who are You?" he asks twice, with contemptuous emphasis on the last word—are bound to appear at least partly fitting. Moreover, by the time we reach Through the Looking-Glass, it is Alice who is consistently rude.

Most often, however, her role is very hard to fix, sometimes shifting within a single episode. In the scene with the Duchess, for instance, though it at first appears that the child might be endangered by this violent and tyrannical adult, the Duchess becomes something of a foil to Alice, both parodying the child and highlighting her defects. Her violence is mainly a burlesque of real violence; she and the cook only sneeze, miss each other with frying pans, and toss vigorously a thing which turns out to be a pig. It is Alice who often seems the real adult here, more coyly sentimental than the Mock Turtle—"Oh, there goes his precious nose!"—and more a governess than any other figure. "Very glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her knowledge," she spouts, "You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn around on its axis—." The Duchess' punning response has behind it the central impulse of the book at this moment: "Talking of axes . . . chop off her head!" Finally, the Duchess' lullaby, "Speak roughly to your little boy," attacks one of the most gruesome of the parody originals, "Speak Gently," which rests on the happy argument that one should "speak gently to the little child," for "it may not long remain." The Duchess' version asserts a vigorous and confident life-force, quite at odds with Alice's pedantry and deathlike caution. In the end, this episode is climaxed not so much by the child's becoming a pig, but by Alice's reflection that she knew other children "who might do very well as pigs." So, the quiet suggestion runs, do the narrator and the reader.

Even the Queen's Croquet-Ground, which one is tempted to identify with an adult world ruled by a capricious and mad executioner, not only threatens the child but condemns her corrupt adult assumptions. The Queen, first of all, is no real executioner; the Gryphon even says that her threats, combined with the fact that "they never executes nobody, you know," provide great fun. The croquet they play confuses Alice because it is too literally alive, without rules, order, or sequence. She is upset, in other words, by the absence of rigidity and hates the fluidity of this comic game. Even a clearer indictment is suggested by the affection of the Duchess, whose absurd rage for categorizing and labeling—"Everything's got a moral, if you can only find it"—burlesques Alice's own need to reduce things to the most mechanical level. By the end of Alice in Wonderland, though, most of this ambivalence disappears and Alice establishes herself clearly as an adult, ironically pretty much at home at the grotesque trial and "quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything [in the courtroom]."

To a certain extent, Through the Looking-Glass takes Alice up at this point, but, though it too presents a central theme of initiation, there are several differences. The entire work seems, first of all, more deliberate; it is much more carefully structured and apparently self-conscious. Alice, similarly, has much clearer goals here: she knows from the start that she wants, above all, to be a Queen, and her development is more clearly away from the important values. A drawing of the White Knight is used as a frontispiece, indicating the central focus of this book: the gentle and comic values Alice is leaving behind. Since Alice is, from the very beginning, a figure of power in the looking-glass world and is never subject to the sorts of ominous physical threats so common in Wonderland, we are seldom asked to pity her. As a result, the laughter is less mixed and the aggression more clearly directed. Through the Looking-Glass is, as the prefatory verses indicate, about the '"happy summer days' gone by, / And vanish'd summer glory—." But these things are gone largely because the child is, as before, so obsessed with death, predation, and egoism that she fails altogether to recognize the beauty of the White Knight or the danger of the powerful Queens. As a matter of fact, Alice is very largely the Queen of Hearts as she steps behind the mirror.

Even the elaborately wrought warmth of the opening paragraphs seems so excessive as to touch on irony and establish not so much Alice's darling primness as her potentially callous sentimentality. In comparison with the melancholy tone and concentration on age and death that mark the narrator's frame poem, Alice's treatment of the images of death and age seems evasive and cruel: "I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently?" In any case, there are quiet hints here that the Wonderland Alice, whose deepest impulses involved power and aggression, has not changed: "Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone!"

This time she enters the garden more easily, and immediately and instinctively sides with the vicious tigerlily, as the natural ally to her own sense of power. The other flowers dislike her and begin a new stream of death jokes directed at her: they discuss the fact that her petals are "tumbled about": '"But that's not your fault,' the Rose added kindly. 'You're beginning to fade, you know—and then one can't help one's petals getting a little untidy.'" The Red Queen then arrives to give Alice preliminary instructions on how to become a Queen. Unlike the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen is neither frightening nor really alien to Alice. Of all the figures on the other side of the mirror, in fact, the Red Queen seems the only one to command Alice's respect. "Curtsey while you're thinking what to say. It saves time," says the Red Queen in an absurd burlesque of thrift and manners. But, instead of laughing, Alice desides, "I'll try it when I go home .. . the next time I'm a little late for dinner." In one sense, then, the Red Queen, that "concentrated essence of all governesses," as Carroll said, is a model for Alice, a symbol of what the child will become. But there is at least one significant way in which she touches areas of experience closed to the child. The Red Queen's refusal to accept words as definite and final explanations of experience—when you say 'hill' . . . / could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley"—not only contributes to an important theme which involves just this relationship between the abstractions of language and the vitality of real experience, but also affirms a reality beyond the confines of a dictionary and Alice's common sense: "I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!" The Red Queen, like nonsense itself, can be seen as a last and rather desperate defense of the life of the imagination. Nonsense is a form of the poetry of experience, affirming in the face of common reality a more vivid life available to the imagination. But Alice responds only to the power of the Queen and eagerly and unimaginatively joins hands with the governesses.

Consequently, the most consistent attacks on Alice focus on the specific fault of governesses, or adults: evasive, and ultimately vicious, sentimentality. Tweedledee's parody poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter," prompts Alice into revealing just how much she has grown up. She ignores the victims of the poem, the oysters, and immediately searches for one of the power figures with whom to identify: "I like the Walrus best . . . because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters." Tweedledee adroitly blocks this reaction: "He ate more than the Carpenter, though. . . . You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise." Alice at once switches sides and again the twins check her:

"That was mean!" Alice said indignantly. "Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus."

"But he ate as many as he could get," said Tweedledum.

As the narrator says, "This was a puzzler." She is finally forced to admit that "they were both very unpleasant characters," but not before she has exposed the same false sympathy and cruelty that the poem emphasized:

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick.
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

The Walrus is a very apt caricature of Alice.

Even more direct is the attack issued by Humpty Dumpty, who not only mimics the presumed linguistic and mental precision of all humans but also provides the clearest indication of the deep aggression directed at the protagonist:

"Seven years and six months!" Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. "An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked my advice, I'd have said 'leave off at seven'—but it's too late now."

" . . . one can't help growing older."

"One can't, perhaps," said Humpty Dumpty; "but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven."

Humpty then continues the attack of the Red Queen and the Gnat on the autonomy of language and the notion that its understanding gives power. In his wild assertion that man can be absolute master of the meaning of the words he uses, he joins with the other characters in attacking Alice's smug linguistic certainty in order to maintain the integrity of the individual personality. But Alice remains untouched, and Humpty Dumpty finally expresses the impatience of the narrator and the reader at the rude child: "You needn't go on making remarks like that . . . they're not sensible, and they put me out." He ends, then, by defining Alice's role: "You're so exactly like other people." Alice, finally, is more than a representative of the naïve child; she is all human adults—judged and found wanting.

She carries with her the chief barriers between human beings and comic existence: an implicit belief in a world ruled by death and predation and a relentless insistence on linear progression and completions. At the very beginning of Alice in Wonderland, while still falling down the rabbit hole, she displays her most distinctive preoccupation: '"Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it." The joke is a neat disguise for the real point, which has to do not with Alice's knowledge but with her serene acceptance of the centrality of death. Her single definite response to "Jabberwocky" in Through the Looking-Glass repeats the same joke, offering the deceptive reassurance that we can, after all, count on some clarity, even in such a confusing poem: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate—." In Alice's world, murder is the one certainty. Later in this first chapter, after Alice reaches the end of her fall, this perspective is attacked in an even more startling form: as the child shrinks she wonders what will happen if the process continues, '"for it might end, you know . . . in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out." Her linear mind insists always on completions, even when the completion implies her own annihilation, and the irony turns sharply back on her.

These anticomic and adult failings are nowhere more fully or subtly realized than in her poems, which, she says, come to her automatically without her conscious control. The first of these, "How doth the little crocodile," brilliantly serves two functions, but both functions reflect ironically on the unconscious girl. First, the poem attacks the anticomic stuffiness and prudence of Watts's "Against Idleness and Mischief (and, of course, the stuffiness and prudence of Alice herself) and promotes by implication the important values of comic anarchy. In addition, the poem reveals the darkest parts of Alice's mind: the crocodile "welcomes little fishes in, / With gently smiling jaws!" The death joke which immediately follows, then, in which Alice again nearly shrinks away completely, is doubly appropriate.

Later, on orders from the rude Caterpillar, Alice repeats to him the most subversive of all her parody poems from the unconscious, "You are old, Father William." It attacks Southey's vision of wise prudence—'"In the days of my youth,' father William replied, / 'I remember'd that youth could not last'"—a prudence whose corollary notions of limits and completions are exactly Alice's own. Even more functional, however, is the way in which Alice's parody circles back to attack the rudeness of the young. Alice's old man not only stands on his head and balances an eel on the end of his nose but, more wonderfully, turns on his son with retaliatory rudeness exactly parallel to the creatures' rudeness to Alice: "'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,' / Said his father. 'Don't give yourself airs! / Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? / Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'" The poem attacks prudence and, at the same time, manages to support age. By a very subtle shift, comic values (and potency) are associated with the old; and the rude, impertinent young are booted downstairs. Only a few paragraphs later, Alice demonstrates the application of the poem to herself:

"Well, I should like to be a little larger, Sir, if you wouldn't mind," said Alice: "three inches is such a wretched height to be."

"It is a very good height indeed!" said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

The only difference between the rudeness of Alice and that of Father William's son is that Alice's is marked by the forms of politeness. It is thus an instinctive rudeness, rooted in self-absorption and running much deeper than the boy's open hostility.

Finally, Alice's " 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" manages to indict Alice's world just as solidly as the other parody poems, adding in addition a touching sense of what it is that world has lost. Her grim poem, the second verse of which begins with an Owl and a Panther joined in comic trust and "sharing a pie," ends with the Panther "eating the Owl" (the omission of these last three words makes the poem all the more gruesome). The fact that the poem moves from mutual joy to death not only specifically reverses the comic impulse just celebrated in the Mock Turtle's song ("Will you walk a little faster") but also recalls by contrast the great nonsense songs of Edward Lear, where natural enemies join in a lovely comic image, the Owl and the Pussycat dancing in the moonlight "on the edge of the sand" or the Spider and the Fly playing "for evermore / At battlecock and shuttledore." Alice's inversion is a dark twisting of the main point of comedy.

Indeed the most interesting complexity attending Alice's role is that she is often seen, as she is here, as an invader disrupting a warm and happy world. It is a world connected by a series of episodes running through both books, episodes which, taken together, establish an alternate image by which we measure the limits of Alice's world—and of our own.

The first and in many ways the most important of these comic images is the Caucus Race in Chapter iii of Alice in Wonderland. Alice has, in the preceding chapter, met a mouse, whom she has frightened nearly out of its wits by her instinctive aggressiveness: "Où est ma chatte?" she says, trying to find a common language. Sorry "that she had hurt the poor animal's feelings," she switches to soothing talk of her own lovely cat, Dinah, but soon returns to the same point: "she's such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!" Anxious to change the subject, Alice begins eagerly talking about a neighbor's dog, but even it "kills all the rats." All subjects lead to aggression and death. Even Alice's good intentions reveal her dark instincts, and the Caucus Race stands as a contrast and a rebuke to her and her world. Here we see clearly the joyous side of anarchy, which parodies the disciplined organization of political committees and presents a world where there are no rules: "they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked." The Dodo's verdict on the race, "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes," comes straight from the heart of the comic vision and parodies not only Darwinism but all systems of regularized death. Alice cannot understand this world, however, and ironically complains that the creatures are too easily offended. She finally destroys the party by frightening the birds as she had earlier frightened the mouse: "And oh, I wish you could see [Dinah] after the birds! Why, she'll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!" In Alice's world, which frames both books, Dinah is a warm symbol of friendly cuddliness, but in Wonderland she is a monster. When the sentimentality is removed by the creatures' reactions, Alice's smugness appears as unconscious brutality.

Connected to this initial image of comic union is the episode of the Mad Tea-Party. The grand comic trio found there symbolize a dedication to pure joy as well as an ability to defend the comic life. They instinctively recognize Alice as an enemy and ridicule her most elementary concerns. When she worries about the time they are wasting in unanswerable riddles, the Hatter responds, "If you knew Time as well as I do . . . you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him." Alice's prudence and desire for order are blasted again and again, but here, as elsewhere, she is ineducable, and she disrupts the comic joy with her linear perspective of finality. Since it is always teatime, the three creatures explain, they simply move round and round the table. Alice's sanity is again destructive: "But what happens when you come to the beginning again?" The creatures then turn on her and especially her "great interest in questions of eating and drinking," assaulting her insistence on logic and order but, more important, her preoccupation with destruction. Their rebukes to her rude, interrupting questions become more and more pointed, and the aggressive laughter is directed more and more openly at her: '"You can draw water out of a water-well,' said the Hatter; 'so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?'"

The final comic interlude in Alice in Wonderland, involving the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, pictures Alice as a good deal more than stupid. Here again, the creatures parody a silly and dark adult world, one, moreover, with which Alice specifically identifies:

"We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—"

"I've been to a day-school, too," said Alice. "You needn't be so proud as all that."

"With extras?" asked the Mock Turtle, a little anxiously.

"Yes," said Alice: "we learned French and music."

"And washing?" said the Mock Turtle.

His attacks, then—"Reeling and Writhing, of course"—strike not only at repressive tyranny but at its present representative, the pompous Alice. She then exposes anew her most deadly limitations: the perspective of completion and nothingness (the Mock Turtle's lessons—or lessens—decrease every day, and Alice naturally pushes ahead to the zero day) and the preoccupation with the details of predation. When asked if she had ever been introduced to a lobster, she responds, "I once tasted—". The comic contrast and rebuke to Alice come in the form of the Lobster Quadrille, a poem and dance of mutuality, joy, and more somersaults. It not only parodies the gruesome poem on death and prudence, "The Spider and the Fly," but, like all great comedies, introduces a hint of death only to triumph over it. When the snail is told that one of the dance's figures requires that he be thrown out to sea, he turns pale and tries to leave the dance for fear of drowning. The response of the whiting, "his scaly friend," transforms this fear to a wild comic victory over death and a very elemental reassurance:

"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied.

"There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

The further off from England the nearer is to France—

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance."

But Alice is, characteristically, more than just unresponsive, saying of whiting, "I've often seen them at dinn—."

The picture of Alice as an alien in a fragile and beautiful world is continued in Through the Looking-Glass, but it becomes much more melancholy. The attack is both more flexible and more quiet. In Chapter iii, for instance, Alice meets a Gnat, the shrewdest and most devastating questioner with whom she comes in contact. Beginning by insidiously begging the child to make even bad jokes, since they are, at least, some sign of community, he proceeds to ask a question that shatters the pretenses of Alice's world: "What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?" Again, one thinks of Lear and the symbol of the communion of humans and animals, of the "old man on the Border" who "danced with the cat and made tea in his hat" or the "Young Lady whose bonnet, / Came untied when the birds sat upon it: / But she said, 'I don't care! all the birds in the air / Are welcome to sit on my bonnet!'" Alice's bleak response, "I don't rejoice in insects at all,'" fully justifies the Gnat in his relentless attack which follows. When Alice says she can tell him the names of some of the insects in her world, the key subversive theme again comes up:

"Ofcourse they answer to their names?" the Gnat remarked carelessly.

"I never knew them to do it."

"What's the use of their having names," the Gnat said, "if they won't answer to them?"

"No use to them" said Alice; "but it's useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?"

For the Gnat, names allow for recognition, establishing community and personality; for Alice, they are impersonal categories, useful only insofar as they give power to those who know the names. The Gnat soon fades away and Alice enters the Wood of No Names, where we again celebrate the possibilities of joy and revivification in the trust and fearlessness of the gentle fawn. When they leave the protection of the wood and the fawn learns that she is really "a human child," however, it flees in terror, suggesting the cruelty of humans but also the cruelty of the stock responses that lie behind names and the terrible impersonality of the useful language Alice had just defended.

The true climax of Through the Looking-Glass and of the theme of betrayal of comic values comes in Chapter viii, where Alice meets her potential rescuer, the White Knight, carrying with him suggestions of all the important values. But she turns her back on him. She is cold to him from the beginning and responds to his notions of glorious victory with the prim "I want to be a Queen." Nothing, now, will keep her from this goal, but the reader recognizes here for the last time just what she is leaving. The White Knight seems at first to be an unconscious figure at whom we can easily laugh. When Alice asks him if he has broken any bones in falling, he responds, "'None to speak of . . . as if he didn't mind breaking two or three of them." It turns out, however, that he truly is a sad and sensitive figure, whom we must take seriously, more seriously, in fact, for having so readily laughed at him. He is extroverted and deeply kind; noticing that Alice is sad, he offers to sing a song to comfort her. But Alice is again unreceptive: "Is it very long?" She simply—and only—wants to be a Queen. The Knight proceeds with the song, however, first suggesting that Alice will surely respond with tears, "but no tears," the narrator says, "came into her eyes." The song is not only a fine parody of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence" but creates an image of unresponsiveness—"I cried 'Come, tell me how you live!' / And thumped him on the head"—that exactly parallels Alice's. The point of the poem is the cruelty of self-absorption, precisely the same self-absorption that allows Alice to joke about the disappearing friend—"It won't take long to see him off, I expect"—and then skip away thoughtlessly: "and now for the last brook, and to be a Queen! How grand it sounds!"

She is now Queen Alice and joins with the other two in an image of mindless power. The book ends with a wild and disturbed scene of predation, where the pudding and mutton speak and threaten to change places with the guests and begin to eat the eaters. To avoid this, Alice breaks up the looking-glass world and in a final act of destruction affirms her own world of chaos and brutality. She cuddles her kitten at the end and promises, "All the time you're eating your breakfast, I'll repeat 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' to you; and then you can make believe it's oysters, dear!" We are back where we started, and the closing question then significantly returns to the issue of whether or not Alice is only a part of the Red King's dream.

The last words address the reader with this same dilemma and appear to ask him to decide on the existence or annihilation of the child: "Which do you think it was?" But the complexity of the image of Alice makes the choice impossible, perhaps because Carroll's final point is not so much aggressive as deeply and profoundly sad: "We are but older children, dear, / Who fret to find our bedtime near." The cruel impulses in Alice are only impulses in all of us, and we spend our lives fretting about death. As a result, we are none of us able to rejoice in insects.

SOURCE: "Sanity, Madness and Alice," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2, April, 1973, pp. 80-89.

[In the following essay, Graham considers the function of the insanity theme in Alice.]

One of the most interesting characters in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the Cheshire Cat. Unlike most of the creatures, the Cheshire Cat is sufficiently detached from his environment to be able to comment, in a fast, facetious sort of way, on the characters who share Wonderland with him, and one of his more challenging comments in particular deserves attention.

He tells Alice that everybody in Wonderland is mad. The exchange occurs after Alice has left the Duchess's kitchen and has had her dream-like wrestle with the pig-baby. She sees the Cheshire Cat on the bough of a tree and asks it what sort of people live around here:

"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

Leaving aside for the moment the unlikely question of whether Alice is mad, the problem is to know how far the Cat is justified in attributing insanity to Wonderland creatures. As a group, the creatures do strike us as a pretty odd crew (although very immediate to us and ultimately likeable because childish) but is it really correct to call them mad? The Cat's remark seems to be too sweeping to be helpful, and yet its very breadth is tantalising too. Even if Carroll could not have justified it in precise philosophical terms (that is now my task), he must have written it in response to some positive sense he had of his creatures. I believe that the Cat is actually right and that a good deal of the charming, and strangely worrying, quality of Alice is due to the fact that some of the utterances of some of the creatures are, from a certain standpoint, insane. But insanity is a dubious notion nowadays, in view of the arguments of R. D. Laing and others for its abolition, so it will be as well for me to start by making clear what that standpoint is.

In the beginning of Mark Twain's novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, Wilson makes a remark whose style and reception are intriguing. He has just arrived at the little township of Dawson's Landing and made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when there is an interruption:

.. . an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud—

"I wish I owned half of that dog."

"Why?" somebody asked.

"Because I would kill my half."

The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him.

Two things seem to need elucidation here: first, the peculiar character of Wilson's actual statement, "I wish I owned half of that dog, because I would kill my half," and second, the disturbed response of the citizens to it.

The words and concepts which go into the making of the statement, the concepts of "owning," "half," "dog" and "kill," are all perfectly well understood concepts, and they are strung together by Wilson with perfect grammatical propriety, and yet there is something strange about it nevertheless. We want to echo Alice's feelings at the Tea-Party when she is confused by a remark of the Hatter's: "Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English." Wilson's remark too is certainly English but it appears, in some respects, to have no sort of meaning in it, to be nonsensical, and I think we can locate the nonsensicality quite quickly. Wilson says he wishes to own half the dog, but that is impossible. It is possible, perhaps, to own a half share in a dog, but impossible to own half of it, for where would you divide it? While it lives a dog would seem to be indivisible. Similarly, to talk about killing half a dog is too difficult an idea. To kill half is automatically to kill the whole. So it would seem that what Wilson is doing here is applying the concept of half to the concepts of owning a dog and killing it quite inappropriately. And, of course, unnecessarily. All he need have said was, "I wish I owned that dog, because I would kill it," which would be rough justice, but at least it would have fitted the circumstances.

So the remark can be called nonsensical, but why does it disturb the citizens of Dawson's Landing so? In the first place, it refuses to be tamed. It won't fit into their accustomed patterns of thinking. So they search Wilson's face for some sort of clue as to what he meant by it and are made even more anxious when they cannot find one. His expression is unreadable, and this seems to be the point. Wilson utters a nonsensical statement and yet, as far as the citizens can judge from his face, he himself is unaware of this fact. Or if he is aware of it he is giving nothing away. His motive, in other words, for making the statement is obscure, and when we cannot understand the motivation of others we are angry or anxious or hysterically amused.

What sort of motivation might Wilson have had? He might have been wishing to make a joke. This is the usual reason in our culture for making nonsensical statements. The jokester takes liberties with meaning under cover of the comic, exploiting contradiction for cathartic effect. Recognizing his pose we may safely laugh. The person who uses nonsense structures (of which I take Wilson's remark about the dog to be one) can be assimilated into our understanding because he is aware of two standards, but the person who is unaware of using nonsense structures cannot be so assimilated. Aware only of one standard, his own, such a man may seem to be mad. The difference between the jokester and the madman in this respect is that the jokester can step out of his joking role at will, whereas the madman cannot. We shall see presently that Wonderland creatures rarely fall into the category of the jokester. As people they are strangely serious, and since they deploy nonsensical statements of one kind or another doubts arise as to their sanity. But where does Wilson stand? He is clearly not joking (the citizens can find no sort of expression in his face which would have given them permission to laugh). Is he then insane? The citizens partly think so for they go on to label him "Pudd'nhead," a gentle form of "idiot" or "fool"; and this is their way of defending themselves from the threat presented by his apparently motiveless use of the irrational.

It seems to be the case that those who use language in a sufficiently nonconformist fashion in any society are ostracised, whether in the friendly manner of Pudd'nhead Wilson or more ferociously as lunatics. The absent-minded professor is isolated by suspicion masquerading as tolerance. Shakespeare's fools are called fools and (for the most part) rigidly confined by their superiors within the limits of the jester role in order that their insights may cut less ice. Society cannot tolerate more than a minimum of nonconformity in the matter of language as in everything else and this is not surprising, for a base of semantic conformity is a prerequisite for meaningful communication between people. If nonsense were the norm (a contradiction in terms) and no motivation for statements expected or required, then the result would be the loss of standardization in meaning, that is, in the last resort, a kind of collective insanity (another contradiction in terms).

In any particular interpersonal situation, if we are going to feel safe with our interlocutor, we need to be able to believe that he had a motive for uttering. In most cases this is self-evident. But if his statement was markedly unconventional (like Wilson's) then we need to be able to believe that he was making a joke or a mistake or that he had some other acceptable motive for speaking as he did. If we cannot discover a motive we lose contact with our interlocutor who may come, as a result, to appear insane. The attribution of insanity is clearly a relative one and says more, perhaps, about the relationship between me and my interlocutor (namely that contact has been lost) than about him alone, but it may still have its uses.

Let us now turn to Alice and consider some of the characters in the light of this relation between motive and sanity. First, the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. In the famous virtuoso section from "The Lobster-Quadrille" in which the two of them converse with Alice about life under the sea they employ a succession of puns (or quasi-puns) and what is fascinating about their use of this device is the impossibility of it. They tell Alice about a fish called the whiting and the Gryphon asks her:

"Do you know why it's called a whiting?"

"I never thought about it," said Alice. "Why?"

"It does the boots and shoes, " the Gryphon replied very solemnly.

Alice was thoroughly puzzled. "Does the boots and shoes!" she repeated in a wondering tone.

"Why, what are your shoes done with?" said the Gryphon. "I mean, what makes them so shiny?"

Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. "They're done with blacking, I believe."

"Boots and shoes under the sea," the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, "are done with whiting. Now you know."

"And what are they made of?" Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.

"Soles and eels, of course," the Gryphon replied, rather impatiently: "any shrimp could have told you that."

It is clear that the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon have no conception of what a pun is and yet their punning ability is superb. Alice goes on to refer to a song about a whiting which the Mock Turtle has sung a little while back (a song with a porpoise in it) and this provides the Mock Turtle with food for more punning:

"If I'd been the whiting," said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, "I'd have said to the porpoise, 'Keep back, please! We don't want you with us!'"

"They were obliged to have him with them," the Mock Turtle said. "No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise."

"Wouldn't it, really?" said Alice, in a tone of great surprise.

"Ofcourse not," said the Mock Turtle. "Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say 'With what porpoise?'"

"Don't you mean 'purpose'?" said Alice.

"I mean what I say," the Mock Turtle replied, in an offended tone.

That "in an offended tone" indicates that the Mock Turtle genuinely does not make in his own mind the distinction implied by a pun. He takes it for granted that Alice will know what he means by the words he uses and is impatient when she does not. There is no question of his deliberately trying to confuse Alice—he is a very serious-minded old gentleman—nor of his using puns as a joke or by mistake, any of which motivations would reassure us that he had the same semantic standards as we have. No, we are confronted instead with the extraordinary phenomenon of a character able to use puns yet unaware of the aberrative nature of puns. The reader in this situation is unable to identify the thought processes which govern his speech for those processes are literally inconceivable, and he is, as a result, both charmed and perplexed. In the context of Alice the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon may safely excite laughter, but in the real world the man who used puns without realising that he did so would disturb us deeply, so much so that we might be tempted to label him insane, or a prodigy .. . but then we would never meet him.

The Hare and the Hatter present similar problems. They welcome Alice to the Tea-Party with the cry, "No room!" though there is, in fact, all the room in the world, on the face of it a strange thing to do. The context is familiar. Alice comes upon a table set out under a tree at which the March Hare and the Hatter are having tea with the Dormouse between them.

The table was a large one, but the three were crowded together at one corner of it. "No room! No room!" they cried out when they saw Alice coming. "There's plenty of room!" said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

Alice exposes the literal untruth of their statement by sitting down, but this may be to miss the point. Why did they say "No room!"? No reason is suggested or even, I think, implied. And it is this, not the facts or otherwise of the case, which intrigues. As with Wilson's remark about the dog, their remark is impossible to reconcile with the reality to which it is supposed to refer, a largely empty table; it lacks a rationale, and a mystery is thereby located in the minds of the Hare and the Hatter, just as a mystery was located in the minds of the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon as a result of their impossible use of puns. Essentially it is, again, a question of motive, or the lack of it. Without the assumption of motive in speech, meaning is in jeopardy, just as without the assumption of motive in morals, responsibility ceases to exist and justice disappears. Sanity is dependent on an orthodoxy of motive and in this case the Hare and the Hatter flout it with fine unconcern. They go on to offer Alice wine when there is none and to ask her riddles which have no answer, and yet they see nothing odd in either of these behaviours. I do not believe we have cause to attribute to them a joking motive or a mistaken one, or even an aggressive one, consequently, on the definition I am touting, they are insane.

As, of course, is the Caterpillar. The Caterpillar is an ill-mannered, petulant character who, from the safety of his perch on the mushroom, treats Alice with notable disdain. He terminates the interview without warning and, as he's walking off through the grass, throws over his shoulder the remark, "One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter." He refers, of course, to the mushroom. But mushrooms don't have sides, they are round, so this confuses. The Caterpillar's advice seems not to match the reality to which it is supposed to refer, and the interesting thing about this mismatch is that it does not, as far as we can judge, interest the Caterpillar. We cannot, therefore, know why he said what he did say, consequently we are mystified, perhaps to the point of laughter. Evidently in Carroll's Wonderland the creatures do not always have discernible motives for making unconventional statements so that we are cast adrift.

Consider the Tea-Party again. The Dormouse tells a story, in between bouts of sleeping, about three little girls at the bottom of a treacle well. They drew all manner of things, says the Dormouse, everything that begins with an M: '"Why with an M?' said Alice. 'Why not?' said the March Hare. Alice was silent." And well she might be. The March Hare's "Why Not?" actually recommends contingency and there is no easy answer to such a recommendation. Contingency is fine in theory but awkward in practice. If it were universal nothing would hold and the distinction between sanity and madness (among others) would disappear. Insanity is only meaningful in the context of sanity, just as nonsensical statements are only remarkable in a society which habitually speaks sense. But there is excitement in playing with insanity in a basically sane context, and that is partly what Alice is doing. The context is sane. The book is in English and written in such a way that most of it invites our understanding on one plane or another. If we don't actually think of Wonderland creatures as lunatics, despite the insane language habits which I have isolated, it is because so much of their affective and intellectual behaviour makes acceptably good sense. Even, ultimately, their "insane" utterances. There may be no obvious motive for the kind of statement we have been looking at but in the larger perspective the key to all such anti-communicative behaviour is fear. At bottom, Wonderland creatures are afraid of Alice and the one meaningful explanation it is possible to give for a context-antagonistic utterance like "No room!" is that the Hare and the Hatter cannot face the reality of Alice's approach. Alice is a real live girl-child, dedicated (though she wouldn't put it thus) to the exposure of humbug, open, direct and largely unafraid, and for the insecure adult figures who people Wonderland these qualities represent a major threat. Who knows but Alice might see through them! They remain solitary because their mode is the defensive mode. One can almost discern a conspiracy operating to prevent Alice getting onto their wavelength, and it is certainly successful for contact is never established and Alice has no compunction about dismissing everybody at the end. There is pathos in this failure, sustained throughout the book, for Alice represents a once-for-all opportunity for Victorian adulthood to renew itself, an opportunity which it cannot, dare not, grasp.

The idea of fear (and fear is at the root of insanity) provides a general context within which to interpret the solipsistic speech habits of the creatures in Alice, but there are no guidelines in the field. Alice, down among the almost-madmen, has a genuine communication problem on which, it could be said, her life depends, but because she sees no problem she is unaffected. Indeed, her incorruptible good sense acts as a buffer both for herself and for us against the illicit language habits of Wonderland creatures. If Alice's linguistic and philosophical rectitude diminish her as a person, they nevertheless provide the necessary foil to the dangerous aberrations of the creatures. A less fixed personality-type would have run the risk of entering, and sharing in, the mad mind of Wonderland. As it is, Alice saves it for us.

SOURCE: "Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child," in Victorian Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, September, 1973, pp. 31-47.

[In the essay below, Auerbach considers the genesis and development of the character of Alice.]

"What—is—this?" he said at last.

"This is a child!" Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her . . . "We only found it today. It's as large as life, and twice as natural!"

"I always thought they were fabulous monsters!" said the Unicorn. "Is it alive?"

For many of us Lewis Carroll's two Alice books may have provided the first glimpse into Victorian England. With their curious blend of literal-mindedness and dream, formal etiquette and the logic of insanity, they tell the adult reader a great deal about the Victorian mind. Alice herself, prim and earnest in pinafore and pumps, confronting a world out of control by looking for the rules and murmuring her lessons, stands as one image of the Victorian middle-class child. She sits in Tenniel's first illustration to Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There in a snug, semifoetal position, encircled by a protective armchair and encircling a plump kitten and a ball of yarn. She seems to be a beautiful child, but the position of her head makes her look as though she had no face. She muses dreamily on the snowstorm raging outside, part of a series of circles within circles, enclosures within enclosures, suggesting the self-containment of innocence and eternity.

Behind the purity of this design lie two Victorian domestic myths: Wordworth's "seer blessed," the child fresh from the Imperial Palace and still washed by his continuing contact with "that immortal sea," and the pure woman Alice will become, preserving an oasis for God and order in a dim and tangled world. Even Victorians who did not share Lewis Carroll's phobia about the ugliness and uncleanliness of little boys saw little girls as the purest members of a species of questionable origin, combining as they did the inherent spirituality of child and woman. Carroll's Alice seems sister to such famous figures as Dickens' Little Nell and George Eliot's Eppie, who embody the poise of original innocence in a fallen, sooty world.

Long after he transported Alice Liddell to Wonderland, Carroll himself deified his dream-child's innocence in these terms:

What wert thou, dream-Alice, in thy foster-father's eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving, first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know of no earthly love so pure and perfect), and gentle as a fawn: . . . and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names—empty words, signifying nothing!"

From this Alice, it is only a step to Walter de la Mare's mystic icon, defined in the following almost Shelleyan image: "She wends serenely on like a quiet moon in a chequered sky. Apart, too, from an occasional Carrollian comment, the sole medium of the stories is her pellucid consciousness."

But when Dodgson wrote in 1887 of his gentle dream-child, the real Alice had receded into the distance of memory, where she had drowned in a pool of tears along with Lewis Carroll, her interpreter and creator. The paean quoted above stands at the end of a long series of progressive falsifications of Carroll's first conception, beginning with Alice's pale, attenuated presence in Through the Looking-Glass. For Lewis Carroll remembered what Charles Dodgson and many later commentators did not, that while Looking-Glass may have been the dream of the Red King, Wonderland is Alice's dream. Despite critical attempts to psychoanalyze Charles Dodgson through the writings of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was too precise a logician and too controlled an artist to confuse his own dream with that of his character. The question "who dreamed it?" underlies all Carroll's dream tales, part of a pervasive Victorian quest for the origins of the self that culminates in the controlled regression of Freudian analysis. There is no equivocation in Carroll's first Alice book: the dainty child carries the threatening kingdom of Wonderland within her. A closer look at the character of Alice may reveal new complexities in the sentimentalized and attenuated Wordsworthianism many critics have assumed she represents, and may deepen through examination of a single example our vision of that "fabulous monster," the Victorian child.

Lewis Carroll once wrote to a child that while he forgot the story of Alice, "I think it was about 'malice.'" Some Freudian critics would have us believe it was about phallus. Alice herself seems aware of the implications of her shifting name when at the beginning of her adventures she asks herself the question that will weave through her story:

I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!

Other little girls traveling through fantastic countries, such as George Macdonald's Princess Irene and L. Frank Baum's Dorothy Gale, ask repeatedly "where am I?" rather than "who am I?" Only Alice turns her eyes inward from the beginning, sensing that the mystery of her surroundings is the mystery of her identity.

Even the above-ground Alice speaks in two voices, like many Victorians other than Dodgson-Carroll:

She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.

The pun on "curious" defines Alice's fluctuating personality. Her eagerness to know and to be right, her compulsive reciting of her lessons ("I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things") turn inside out into the bizarre anarchy of her dream country, as the lessons themselves turn inside out into strange and savage tales of animals eating each other. In both senses of the word, Alice becomes "curiouser and curiouser" as she moves more deeply into Wonderland; she is both the croquet game without rules and its violent arbiter, the Queen of Hearts. The sea that almost drowns her is composed of her own tears, and the dream that nearly obliterates her is composed of fragments of her own personality.

As Alice dissolves into her component parts to become Wonderland, so, if we examine the actual genesis of Carroll's dream child, the bold outlines of Tenniel's famous drawing dissolve into four separate figures. First, there was the real Alice Liddell, a baby belle dame, it seems, who bewitched Ruskin as well as Dodgson. A small photograph of her concludes Carroll's manuscript of Alice's Adventures under Ground, the first draft of Wonderland. She is strikingly sensuous and otherworldly; her dark hair, bangs, and large inward-turned eyes give her face a haunting and a haunted quality which is missing from Tenniel's famous illustrations. Carroll's own illustrations for Alice's Adventures under Ground reproduce her eerieness perfectly. This Alice has a pre-Raphaelite langour and ambiguity about her which is reflected in the shifting colors of her hair. In some illustrations, she is indisputably brunette like Alice Liddell; in others, she is decidedly blonde like Tenniel's model Mary Hilton Badcock; and in still others, light from an unknown source hits her hair so that she seems to be both at once.

Mary Hilton Badcock has little of the dream child about her. She is blonde and pudgy, with squinting eyes, folded arms, and an intimidating frown. In Carroll's photograph of her, the famous starched pinafore and pumps appear for the first time—Alice Liddell seems to have been photographed in some sort of nightdress—and Mary moves easily into the clean, no-nonsense child of the Tenniel drawings. Austin Dobson wrote,

Enchanting Alice! Black-and-white
Has made your charm perenniel;
And nought save "Chaos and old Night"
Can part you now from Tenniel.

But a bit of research can dissolve what has been in some ways a misleading identification of Tenniel's Alice with Carroll's, obscuring some of the darker shadings of the latter. Carroll himself initiated the shift from the subtly disturbing Alice Liddell to the blonde and stolid Mary Badcock as "under ground" became the jollier-sounding "Wonderland," and the undiscovered country in his dream child became a nursery classic.

The demure propriety of Tenniel's Alice may have led readers to see her role in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as more passive than it is. Although her size changes seem arbitrary and terrifying, she in fact directs them; only in the final courtroom scene does she change size without first wishing to, and there, her sudden growth gives her the power to break out of a dream that has become too dangerous. Most of Wonderland's savage songs come from Alice: the Caterpillar, Gryphon and Mock Turtle know that her cruel parodies of contemporary moralistic doggerel are "wrong from beginning to end." She is almost always threatening to the animals of Wonderland. As the mouse and birds almost drown in her pool of tears, she eyes them with a strange hunger which suggests that of the Looking-Glass Walrus who weeps at the Oysters while devouring them behind his handkerchief. Her persistent allusions to her predatory cat Dinah and to a "nice little dog, near our house," who "kills all the rats" finally drive the animals away, leaving Alice to wonder forlornly—and disingenuously—why nobody in Wonderland likes Dinah.

Dinah is a strange figure. She is the only above-ground character whom Alice mentions repeatedly, almost always in terms of her eating some smaller animal. She seems finally to function as a personification of Alice's own subtly cannibalistic hunger, as Fury in the Mouse's tale is personified as a dog. At one point, Alice fantasizes her own identity actually blending into Dinah's:

"How queer it seems," Alice said to herself, "to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah'll be sending me on messages next!" And she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen: '"Miss Alice! Come here directly, and get ready for your walk!" "Coming in a minute, nurse! But I've got to watch this mousehole till Dinah comes back, and see that the mouse doesn't get out."'

While Dinah is always in a predatory attitude, most of the Wonderland animals are lugubrious victims; together, they encompass the two sides of animal nature that are in Alice as well. But as she falls down the rabbit hole, Alice senses the complicity between eater and eaten, looking-glass versions of each other:

"Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?" And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, "Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?" and sometimes, "Do bats eat cats?" for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't matter which way she put it.

We are already half-way to the final banquet of Looking-Glass, in which the food comes alive and begins to eat the guests.

Even when Dinah is not mentioned, Alice's attitude toward the animals she encounters is often one of casual cruelty. It is a measure of Dodgson's ability to flatten out Carroll's material that the prefatory poem could describe Alice "in friendly chat with bird or beast," or that he would later see Alice as "loving as a dog . . . gentle as a fawn." She pities Bill the Lizard and kicks him up the chimney, a state of mind that again looks forward to that of the Pecksniffian Walrus in Looking-Glass. When she meets the Mock Turtle, the weeping embodiment of a good Victorian dinner, she restrains herself twice when he mentions lobsters, but then distorts Isaac Watt's Sluggard into a song about a baked lobster surrounded by hungry sharks. In its second stanza, a Panther shares a pie with an Owl who then becomes dessert, as Dodgson's good table manners pass into typical Carrollian cannibalism. The more sinister and Darwinian aspects of animal nature are introduced into Wonderland by the gentle Alice, in part through projections of her hunger onto Dinah and the "nice little dog" (she meets a "dear little puppy" after she has grown small and is afraid he will eat her up) and in part through the semi-cannibalistic appetite her songs express. With the exception of the powerful Cheshire Cat, whom I shall discuss below, most of the Wonderland animals stand in some danger of being exploited or eaten. The Dormouse is their prototype: he is fussy and cantankerous, with the nastiness of a self-aware victim, and he is stuffed into a teapot as the Mock Turtle, sobbing out his own elegy, will be stuffed into a tureen.

Alice's courteously menacing relationship to these animals is more clearly brought out in Alice's Adventures under Ground, in which she encounters only animals until she meets the playing cards, who are lightly sketched-in versions of their later counterparts. When expanding the manuscript for publication, Carroll added the Frog Footman, Cook, Duchess, Pig-Baby, Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Dormouse, as well as making the Queen of Hearts a more fully developed character than she was in the manuscript. In other words, all the human or quasi-human characters were added in revision, and all develop aspects of Alice that exist only under the surface of her dialogue. The Duchess' household also turns inside out the domesticated Wordsworthian ideal: with baby and pepper flung about indiscriminately, pastoral tranquillity is inverted into a whirlwind of savage sexuality. The furious Cook embodies the equation between eating and killing that underlies Alice's apparently innocent remarks about Dinah. The violent Duchess' unctuous search for "the moral" of things echoes Alice's own violence and search for "the rules." At the Mad Tea Party, the Hatter extends Alice's "great interest in questions of eating and drinking" into an insane modus vivendi; like Alice, the Hatter and the Duchess sing savage songs about eating that embody the underside of Victorian literary treacle. The Queen's croquet game magnifies Alice's own desire to cheat at croquet and to punish herself violently for doing so. Its use of live animals may be a subtler extension of Alice's own desire to twist the animal kingdom to the absurd rules of civilization, which seem to revolve largely around eating and being eaten. Alice is able to appreciate the Queen's savagery so quickly because her size changes have made her increasingly aware of who she, herself, is from the point of view of a Caterpillar, a Mouse, a Pigeon, and, especially, a Cheshire Cat.

The Cheshire Cat, also a late addition to the book, is the only figure other than Alice who encompasses all the others. William Empson discusses at length the spiritual kinship between Alice and the Cat, the only creature in Wonderland whom she calls her "friend." Florence Becker Lennon refers to the Cheshire Cat as "Dinah's dream-self," and we have noticed the subtle shift of identities between Alice and Dinah throughout the story. The Cat shares Alice's equivocal placidity: "The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt it ought to be treated with respect." The Cat is the only creature to make explicit the identification between Alice and the madness of Wonderland: '". . . we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' Alice didn't think that proved it at all. . . ." Although Alice cannot accept it and closes into silence, the Cat's remark may be the answer she has been groping toward in her incessant question, "who am I?" As an alter ego, the Cat is wiser than Alice—and safer—because he is the only character in the book who is aware of his own madness. In his serene acceptance of the fury within and without, his total control over his appearance and disappearance, he almost suggests a post-analytic version of the puzzled Alice.

As Alice dissolves increasingly into Wonderland, so the Cat dissolves into his own head, and finally into his own grinning mouth. The core of Alice's nature, too, seems to lie in her mouth: the eating and drinking that direct her size changes and motivate much of her behavior, the songs and verses that pop out of her inadvertently, are all involved with things entering and leaving her mouth. Alice's first song introduces a sinister image of a grinning mouth. Our memory of the Crocodile's grin hovers over the later description of the Cat's "grin without a Cat," and colors our sense of Alice's infallible good manners:

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

Walter de la Mare associates Alice with "a quiet moon" which is by implication a full moon. I think it is more appropriate to associate her with the grinning crescent that seems to follow her throughout her adventures, choosing to become visible only at particular moments, and teaching her the one lesson she must learn in order to arrive at a definition of who she is.

Martin Gardner pooh-poohs the "oral aggressions" psychoanalysts have found in Carroll's incessant focus on eating and drinking by reminding us of the simple fact that "small children are obsessed by eating, and like to read about it in their books." Maybe his commonsense approach is correct, but Lewis Carroll was concerned with nonsense, and throughout his life, he seems to have regarded eating with some horror. An early cartoon in The Rectory Umbrella depicts an emaciated family partaking raptly of a "homoeopathic meal" consisting of an ounce of bread, half a particle of beer, etc.; young Sophy, who is making a pig of herself, asks for another molecule. Throughout his life, Carroll was abstemious at meals, according to his nephew and first biographer, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood: "the healthy appetites of his young friends filled him with wonder, and even with alarm." When he took one of his child-friends to another's house for a meal, he told the host: "Please be careful, because she eats a good deal too much." William Empson defines his attitude succinctly: "Dodgson was well-informed about foods, kept his old menus and was wine-taster to the College; but ate very little, suspected the High Table of overeating, and would see no reason to deny that he connected over-eating with other forms of sensuality." To the man who in Sylvie and Bruno would define EVIL as a looking-glass version of LIVE, "gently smiling jaws" held teeth which were to be regarded with alarm; they seemed to represent to him a private emblem of original sin, for which Alice as well as the Knave of Hearts is finally placed on trial.

When the Duchess' Cook abruptly barks out "Pig!" Alice thinks the word is meant for her, though it is the baby, another fragment of Alice's own nature, who dissolves into a pig. The Mock Turtle's lament for his future soupy self later blends tellingly into the summons for the trial: the lament of the eaten and the call to judgment melt together. When she arrives at the trial, the unregenerate Alice instantly eyes the tarts: "In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them—'I wish they'd get the trial done,' she thought, 'and hand round the refreshments!'" Her hunger links her to the hungry Knave who is being sentenced: in typically ambiguous portmanteau fashion, Carroll makes the trial both a pre-Orwellian travesty of justice and an objective correlative of a real sense of sin. Like the dog Fury in the Mouse's tale, Alice takes all the parts. But unlike Fury, she is accused as well as accuser, melting into judge, jury, witness, and defendant; the person who boxes on the ears as well as the person who "cheats." Perhaps the final verdict would tell Alice who she is at last, but if it did, Wonderland would threaten to overwhelm her. Before it comes, she "grows"; the parts of her nature rush back together; combining the voices of victim and accuser, she gives "a little scream, half of fright and half of anger," and wakes up.

Presented from the point of view of her older sister's sentimental pietism, the world to which Alice awakens seems far more dream-like and hazy than the sharp contours of Wonderland. Alice's lesson about her own identity has never been stated explicitly, for the stammerer Dodgson was able to talk freely only in his private language of puns and nonsense, but a Wonderland pigeon points us toward it:

"You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!"

"I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice, who was a very truthful child; "but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know."

"I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, why, then they're a kind of serpent: that's all I can say."

This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two . . .

Like so many of her silences throughout the book, Alice's silence here is charged with significance, reminding us again that an important technique in learning to read Carroll is our ability to interpret his private system of symbols and signals and to appreciate the many meanings of silence. In this scene, the golden child herself becomes the serpent in childhood's Eden. The eggs she eats suggest the woman she will become, the unconscious cannibalism involved in the very fact of eating and desire to eat, and finally, the charmed circle of childhood itself. Only in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was Carroll able to fall all the way through the rabbit hole to the point where top and bottom become one, bats and cats melt into each other, and the vessel of innocence and purity is also the source of inescapable corruption.

Alice's adventures in Wonderland foreshadow Lewis Carroll's subsequent literary career, which was a progressive dissolution into his component parts. Florence Becker Lennon defines well the schism that came with the later books: "Nothing in Wonderland parallels the complete severance of the Reds and Whites in Through the Looking-Glass.In Sylvie and Bruno, author and story have begun to disintegrate. The archness and sweetness of parts, the utter cruelty and loathsomeness of others, predict literal decomposition into his elements." The Alice of Through the Looking-Glass, which was published six years after Wonderland, represents still another Alice, Alice Raikes; the character is so thinned out that the vapid, passive Tenniel drawing is an adequate illustration of her. Wonderland ends with Alice playing all the parts in an ambiguous trial which concludes without a verdict. Looking-Glass begins with an unequivocal verdict: "One thing was certain, that the white kitten had nothing to do with it—it was the black kitten's fault entirely." Poor Dinah, relegated to the role of face-washer-in-the-background, has also dissolved into her component parts.

Throughout the books, the schism between Blacks (later Reds) and Whites is developed. Alice's greater innocence and passivity are stressed by her identification with Lily, the white pawn. The dominant metaphor of a chess game whose movements are determined by invisible players spreads her sense of helplessness and predestination over the book. The nursery rhymes of which most of the characters form a part also make their movements seem predestined; the characters in Wonderland tend more to create their own nursery rhymes. The question that weaves through the book is no longer "who am I?" but "which dreamed it?" If the story is the dream of the Red King (the sleeping embodiment of passion and masculinity), then Alice, the White Pawn (or pure female child) is exonerated from its violence, although in another sense, as she herself perceives, she is also in greater danger of extinction. Her increasing sweetness and innocence in the second book make her more ghost-like as well, and it is appropriate that more death jokes surround her in the second Alice book than in the first.

As Carroll's dream children became sweeter, his attitude toward animals became increasingly tormented and obsessive, as we can see in the hysterical antivivisection crusade of his later years. In one of his pamphlets, "Vivisection as a Sign of the Times," cruelty to animals, which in the first Alice was a casual instinct, becomes a synecdoche for the comprehensive sin of civilization:

"But the thing cannot be!" cries some amiable reader, fresh from an interview with that most charming of men, a London physician. "What! Is it possible that one so gentle in manner, so full of noble sentiments, can be hardhearted? The very idea is an outrage to common sense!" And thus we are duped every day of our lives. Is it possible that that bank director, with his broad honest face, can be meditating a fraud? That the chairman of that meeting of shareholders, whose every tone has the ring of truth in it, can hold in his hand a "cooked" schedule of accounts? That my wine merchant, so outspoken, so confiding, can be supplying me with an adulterated article? That my schoolmaster, to whom I have entrusted my little boy, can starve or neglect him? How well I remember his words to the dear child when last we parted. "You are leaving your friends," he said, "but you will have a father in me, my dear, and a mother in Mrs. Squeers!" For all such rose-coloured dreams of the necessary immunity from human vices of educated men the facts in last week's Spectator have a terrible significance. "Trust no man further than you can see him," they seem to say. "Qui vult decipi, decipiatur."

"Gently similing jaws" have spread themselves over England. The sweeping intensity of this jeremiad shares the vision, if not the eloquence, of Ruskin's later despairing works.

As the world becomes more comprehensively cruel, the Carrollian little girl evolves into the impossibly innocent Sylvie in Sylvie and Bruno and Syvie and Bruno Concluded, who is more fairy or guardian angel than she is actual child. Here, the dream belongs not to Sylvie but to the strangely maimed narrator. Any hint of wildness in Sylvie is siphoned off onto her mischievous little brother Bruno, whom she is always trying to tame as the first Alice boxed her own ears for cheating at croquet; and any real badness is further placed at one remove in the figure of the villainous Uggug, an obscenely fat child who finally turns into a porcupine. Uggug's metamorphosis recalls that of the Pig-baby in Wonderland, but in the earlier book, the Cook let us know that Alice was also encompassed by the epithet—a terrible one in Carroll's private language—"Pig!"

Like Alice's, Sylvie's essential nature is revealed by her attitude toward animals. But while Alice's crocodile tears implicated her in original sin, Sylvie's tears prove her original innocence. In a key scene, the narrator tries to explain to her "innocent mind" the meaning of a hare killed in a hunt:

"They hunt foxes" Sylvie said, thoughtfully. "And I think they kill them, too. Foxes are very fierce. I daresay men don't love them. Are hares fierce?"

"No," I said. "A hare is a sweet, gentle, timid animal—almost as gentle as a lamb." [Apparently no vision of the snappish March Hare returned to haunt Lewis Carroll at this point.]

"But, if men love hares, why—why—" her voice quivered, and her sweet eyes were brimming with tears.

"I'm afraid they don't love them, dear child."

"All children love them," Sylvie said. "All ladies love them."

"I'm afraid even ladies go to hunt them, sometimes."

Sylvie shuddered. "Oh, no, not ladies!" she earnestly pleaded.... In a hushed, solemn tone, with bowed head and clasped hands, she put her final question. "Does GOD love hares?"

"Yes!" I said. "I'm sure He does. He loves every living thing. Even sinful men. How much more the animals, that cannot sin!" [Here the whole Wonderland gallery should have risen up in chorus against their creator!]

"I don't know what 'sin' means," said Sylvie. And I didn't try to explain it.

"Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries."

"Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child.

Sylvie's weeping over a dead hare is an unfortunate conclusion to Alice's initial underground leap after a live rabbit. Dodgson has been driven full circle here to embrace the pure little girl of Victorian convention, though he is ambivalent in this passage about "ladies." But his deterioration should be used as a yardstick to measure his achievement in the first of the Alice books, which a brief survey of some typical portraits of children in nineteenth-century literature may help us to appreciate.

Victorian concepts of the child tended to swing back and forth between extremes of original innocence and original sin; Rousseau and Calvin stood side by side in the nursery. Since actual children were the focus of such an extreme conflict of attitudes, they tended to be a source of pain and embarrassment to adults, and were therefore told they should be "seen and not heard." Literature dealt more freely with children than life did, so adult conflicts about them were allowed to emerge more openly in books. As Jan Gordon puts it:

The most amazing feature of, say, Dickens' treatment of children, is how quickly they are transformed into monsters. Even Oliver Twist's surname forces the reader to appreciate the twisting condition normally associated with creatures more closely akin to the devil! One effect of this identification with evil adults .. . is that the only way of approaching childhood is by way of the opposite of satanic monstrosities—namely, the golden world of an edenic wonderland whose pastoral dimension gives it the status of a primal scene.

In its continual quest for origins and sources of being, Victorian literature repeatedly explores the ambiguous figure of the child, in whom it attempts to resolve the contradictions it perceives much as Syvie and Bruno does: by an extreme sexual division.

Little boys in Victorian literature tend to be allied to the animal, the Satanic, and the insane. For this reason, novels in which a boy is the central focus are usually novels of development, in which the boy evolves out of his inherent violence, "working out the brute" in an ascent to a higher spiritual plane. This tradition seems foreshadowed by the boy in Wordsworth's Prelude, whose complexity undercuts the many Victorian sentimentalizations about Wordsworth's children. The predatory child in the first two books, traveling through a dark landscape that seems composed largely of his own projected fears and desires, has in fact a great deal in common with Carroll's Alice. Carroll is truer than many of his contemporaries to the ambiguities of Wordsworth's children, but he goes beyond Wordsworth in making a little girl the focus of his vision. Wordsworth's little girls tend to be angelic, corrective figures who exist largely to soothe the turbulence of the male protagonists; his persona in the Prelude is finally led to his "spiritual eye" through the ministrations of an idealized, hovering Dorothy.

David Copperfield must also develop out of an uncontrolled animality that is close to madness—early in the novel, we learn of him that "he bites"—and he can do so only through the guidance of the ghostly Agnes, pointing ever upward. Dr. Arnold's Rugby, which reflected and conditioned many of the century's attitudes toward boys, was run on a similar evolutionary premise: the students were to develop out of the inherent wickedness of "boy nature" into the state of "Christian gentleman," a semi-divine warrior for the good. In the all-male society of Rugby, Dr. Arnold was forced to assume the traditionally female role of spiritual beacon, as the image of the Carlylean hero supplanted that of the ministering angel. Thomas Hughes' famous tale of Rugby, Tom Brown's School Days, solves this problem by making Tom's spiritual development spring from the influence of the feminized, debilitated young Arthur and his radiantly etheral mother: only after their elaborate ministrations is the young man able to kneel by the Doctor's casket and worship the transfigured image of the-Doctor-as-God. Women and girls are necessary catalysts for the development of the hero out of his dangerously animal state to contact with the God within and without him.

Cast as they were in the role of emotional and spiritual catalysts, it is not surprising that girls who function as protagonists of Victorian literature are rarely allowed to develop: in its refusal to subject females to the evolutionary process, the Victorian novel takes a significant step backward from one of its principle sources, the novels of Jane Austen. Even when they are interesting and "wicked," Victorian heroines tend to be static figures like Becky Sharp; when they are "good," their lack of development is an important factor in the Victorian reversal of Pope's sweeping denunciation—"most women have no characters at all"— into a cardinal virtue. Little girls in Victorian literature are rarely children, nor are they allowed to grow up. Instead, they exist largely as a diffusion of emotional and religious grace, representing "nothing but love," as Dodgson's Sylvie warbles. Florence Dombey in Dickens' Dombey and Son may stand as their paradigm. Representing as she does the saving grace of the daughter in a world dominated by the hard greed and acquisitiveness of men—the world that kills her tender brother Paul—Florence drifts through Mr. Dombey's house in a limbo of love throughout the book, waiting for her father to come to her. She ages, but never changes, existing less as a character than as a "spiritual repository into which Mr. Dombey must dip if he is to be saved." Dickens' Little Nell and Little Dorritt are equally timeless and faceless. Though both are in fact post-pubescent—Little Nell is fourteen, Little Dorrit, twenty-two—they combine the mythic purity and innocence of the little girl with the theoretical marriageability of the woman, diffusing an aura from a sphere separate from that of the other characters, a sphere of non-personal love without change.

We return once more to the anomaly of Carroll's Alice, who explodes out of Wonderland hungry and unregenerate. By a subtle dramatization of Alice's attitude toward animals and toward the animal in herself, by his final resting on the symbol of her mouth, Carroll probed in all its complexity the underground world within the little girl's pinafore. The ambiguity of the concluding trial finally, and wisely, waives questions of original guilt or innocence. The ultimate effect of Alice's adventures implicates her, female child though she is, in the troubled human condition; most Victorians refused to grant women and childdren this respect. The sympathetic delicacy and precision with which Carroll traced the chaos of a little girl's psyche seems equalled and surpassed only later in such explorations as D. H. Lawrence's of the young Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow, the chaos of whose growth encompasses her hunger for violence, sexuality, liberty, and beatitude. In the imaginative literature of its century, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland stands alone.

SOURCE: "Assessing Lewis Carroll," translated by Mireille Bedestroffer and Edward Guiliano, in Lewis Carroll Observed: A Collection of Unpublished Photographs, Drawings, Poetry, and New Essays, edited by Edward Guiliano, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1976, pp. 74-80.

[In the following essay, Gattégno considers Carroll as a children's author and linguistic innovator.]

It is not necessary to reestablish Lewis Carroll. Today he is neither unknown nor underrated. Yet perhaps we should try to determine his true place, which may not necessarily be the one we had thought. For those who see him only as "the author of Alice," the forerunner of the new and unusual, modern marvelous, it is advisable to stress, as many articles in this book have done, that he was a logician and, even in his day, a linguist, and to see his work as casting a new look at language. For those who are inclined to consider him primarily as a scientific innovator, it is wise to recall that Alice was considered revolutionary from the moment it was published, and that its intended audience, i.e., children, had every reason to see it as a new kind of literature written especially for them. In pointing out these two aspects of Carroll's work, the linguistic side and the child-oriented side, I do not claim to synthesize two possible interpretations of these books. Rather, I intend to underline the richness of his works, which are not reducible to just one approach.

Still, all is not said by noting these two important aspects. The technique used in the adventures in Alice, Sylvie and Bruno, and The Hunting of the Snark is not just concerned with language and childhood; the place of dream and reality also deserves careful consideration and is not limited to either one of these two aspects. Finally, we might have to think about the enigma that the Carroll/Dodgson relationship poses and which neither attempts at psychoanalysis (such as Phyllis Greenacre's) nor "historical" research (such as A. L. Taylor's) have completely succeeded in resolving.

The common point among the diverse views and readings of Carroll's work must emerge from within and appear throughout the work itself and not in some center external to it. Language is not its subject, but it is a key for deciphering it.

II

When Alice appeared it caused astonishment and seemed to be what it still is today, if only read without preconceived ideas: a revolution in children's literature. We must not overlook the fact that the story was told and then written down for children, and was meant to appeal to them first and foremost. In what sense is it revolutionary? First, because it was the first time that a little girl was not simply the heroine but the focal point of a story. Everything that occurs happens to Alice, and everything is understood through her. Her gaze imparts life to the entire unusual world that inhabits Wonderland and Looking-Glass land and which, at all other times, is utterly still in an eternal slumber. It animates the White Knight of the Queen of Hearts for an instant—a dream instant—and enables them to make real what was only virtual in them. Alice is half-god in her adventures. Without her, the cats Dinah, Kitty, and Snowdrop would only be cats; thanks to her, they change into characters that express Alice's secret wishes and are at the same time, in themselves, new realities. The Cheshire Cat and Humpty Dumpty are both characters and individuals—characters because they become flesh from Carroll's creative words (voicing a type of language that had in part antedated Carroll), and that it is in their speech that they are firmly delineated. They are individuals in the sense that, even a hundred years after their creation, they still seem like real creatures and can be set side by side with other real beings and people, historical or ordinary.

Alice enters this world and sets it in motion, as a collector does with his music box or mechanical toy. Berkeleyan solipsism? Perhaps in part. But it is also the magic power of children's speech, which brings to life whatever it speaks of. This is the all-powerful, eternal life-giving force of which, among mankind, the child is simply the freest interpreter and the truest. Thanks to Alice—and Carroll—the subject's unconscious desires, the childhood freedom lost then found again, the long-repressed animistic beliefs, all reemerge. And the little seven-year-old girl who strolls through these two unusual worlds carries within herself all the violence of her untrammeled outlook. In this violence the grown-ups are the clearly marked targets in an animal form that is merely the reverse side of the animal state to which they attempt to reduce the child—as is demonstrated by the scene between Alice and the Unicorn. . . . In spite of everything that happens to Alice, the aggravations and mishaps, she is never a victim. And although she has to wait until both her adventures are over to prove her triumph to everyone, and primarily to herself, she never lets down for a moment.

The victory of the child over the adult is attested to in all of Carroll's work; the psychological richness revealed in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is sufficient proof of this victory. Carroll painted his heroine from within, not that he "was" Alice, but he allowed the child within him to speak, the child that he had been and wished to be—in short, the uncensored part of him that had not been destroyed in the process of growing into an adult. Furthermore, today when we are assured that children do not enjoy reading Alice, we believe it since grown-ups tell us so, just as we believe the learned people who, in the seventeenth century, affirmed that fairy tales were nonsense. Indeed, nothing demonstrates the subversive nature of Carroll's work better than the insistence on the part of "serious" critics to regard it primarily as the expression of a neurotic. In this way, in order to strengthen their biographical point of view, they can rid themselves of the problem of Carroll's language, the uninhibited speech of the child that renders adult speech ineffectual.

III

All this by itself would have been enough, both in Carroll's time and in our own, to guarantee Carroll lasting value; liberated speech appeared in the nineteenth century, and he was one of its initiators. But there is more here than just uncensored children's speech. There is also a new vision of language and speech that causes the logic of wishes to triumph over the logic of words. Alice continuously runs up against a mode of speech that those with whom she is speaking consider to be "coherent," that is, logical, and which always turns into a "non-logic," another kind of logic, that Alice cheerfully names "non-sense." Little Bruno in Syvie and Bruno is in this respect the reverse of Alice, a specialist in non-sense, whereas his sister Sylvie and the Professor are unable to do anything about it. The inversion of characters is not significant; only the discourse is of importance, not Alice or Bruno as speakers. The degree to which the adventures of Carroll's characters, obviously starting with Alice, are inscribed in speech and are closely dependent upon it should be recalled. One has only to consider the role played by nursery rhymes, of which certain Carrollian episodes represent the "turning into action"; the use Carroll makes of certain vernacular expressions (mad as a hatter or a March hare) whereby the unreal subject is brought to life. Alice herself asserted it even before her dream: "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?"

What is attested to in this language that the reader constantly comes up against in Carroll's work? First of all, the absolute arbitrariness of human language through the split in the "human" relationship signifier/ signified; the signifier is a form that no man has ever consciously decided on at a particular moment. In spite of what is too often believed, Humpty Dumpty's role is not to emphasize to Alice and the reader the all-powerfulness of the speaker through his authoritative formula, "the question is [to know] which is to be master—that's all." His role is to reveal to Alice the arbitrariness of the relationship in question. The professorial assurance he shows when "explicating" "Jabberwocky" scarcely conceals the essential subjectivism of his interpretation. As Carroll himself emphasizes in the preface to the Snark, a portmanteau word is a personal subjective compound peculiar to the person speaking; and had Judge Shallow (in Shakespeare's Henry IV) chosen to say "Rilchiam" for "Richard + William," no doubt someone else could just as correctly have chosen to say "Wilchard." It is Bruno who truly expresses Carroll's viewpoint. After someone objects to his saying "a mile or three" since it isn't usual, Bruno replies that "it would be usual—if we said it often enough." Better still, in his Symbolic Logic Carroll is firm on this point: "I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorized in attaching any meaning he likes to any word or phrase he intends to use."

This is also the shattering of the opposition between "sense" and "non-sense." Gilles Deleuze [in Logique du sens (1969)] has shed remarkable light on this outstanding feature of the adventures of Alice, who "undergoes and fails in all the adventures of common sense," and who "always goes in both directions at once." The opposition one constantly finds in Carroll's work is not between non-sense and "sense," which would be its opposite, but between two kinds of sense, paradoxially linked, and of which it can only be said that one is the reverse of the other. To Alice's constant question, "In what sense?" Deleuze answers, "The question has no answer, because a characteristic of sense is not to have any direction, and not to make 'good sense,' but always to have both at once." The March Hare and the Mad Hatter embody this; they live in apparently opposite directions that in fact indicate the same point, the common territory of both characters. The frequent paradoxes in Carroll's work are the reverse not of sense but, at the very most, of what is erroneously called "common sense."

This is why logic is so important in Carroll's work. It is not certain, as I myself have been inclined to assert, that his theoretical works are the formalization of the richness contained in his fictional works. It is valuable to recall, in the first place, that Carroll started his research in logic seven years before he related Alice as a story. In fact, in 1855 he noted in his diary: "Wrote part of a treatise on Logic, for the benefit of Margaret and Annie Wilcox." His research had ample opportunity to find material for exploration and discovery in the adventures of a little girl outside the universe of "common sense." How would it be possible not to discern, from the constant presence of intuitions relating to methods of reasoning which one finds in all the work from Alice to Syvie and Bruno (from 1865 to 1893), the persistence of a thought process about which we may certainly say that the unconscious speaks more freely through it than in a treatise on logic, but not that its expression needs a particular emotional environment in order to emerge? It is true, as Ernest Coumet points out . . . that it is the paradoxes and even Carroll's conception of symbolic logic that anticipate certain discoveries of modern logic. But the whole Carrollian mode of expression attests to the existence and strength of another kind of logic, no longer that of "sensible" expression but that of the unconscious, and therefore of desires. Carroll was one of the first to allow these to emerge and to assert themselves.

It is perhaps in this respect that the surrealists, in considering Carroll as one of their distinguished forerunners, had true insight. Carroll's writing deals with dreams in a way that has nothing in common with the dream literature of which Coleridge and De Quincey are the most famous examples in England. It is true that Alice's adventures are two "dreams," whose dream nature is described, affirmed, and authenticated at considerable length by the author at the end of Alice and at the beginning and end of The Looking-Glass. It is also true that the structure of various episodes, as well as the nightmare atmosphere of several scenes, become intellectually satisfying once one knows that it was a dream. However, this is not what is essential, but rather the digressions that Carroll permitted himself reveal more than an intention to reproduce a state of almost complete freedom. For example, when Alice dreams about characters who are dreaming about her, this is not another paradox but the expression of a consciousness trying unceasingly (and in vain) to look on itself objectively, at the same time that it feels and knows it is caught in its own subjectivity; not a triumph of solipsism but, on the contrary, an effort to escape from it. Or when in Syvie and Bruno the character that is the Narrator sees two forms of the same character: Sylvie, who belongs to what he calls the dream-world, and Muriel, who belongs to his real world; and when he feels tossed between the two universes, the characters of the one progressively invading the other, we are not simply witnessing a game the schizophrenic allows himself to play. Rather, we see in this process (even if both interpretations are compatible) an effort to express the infinite richness contained in each word, each meaning, each reality. Sylvie is Muriel, although each one is exclusively herself. In the same way, little Bruno points out to his father that the two jewels he had offered to Sylvie to choose between were only one and continues: "Then you choosed it from itself. . . . Father, could Sylvie choose a thing from itself?" She certainly could in a world where the identity principle would not be the norm of norms, where A could be A and also non-A. And, for the moment, only the world of wishing, and of absolute contradiction, permits it.

IV

At least one other problem still has to be raised: who is speaking in Alice or in the Snark? In Sylvie and Bruno it is an "I " who tells the story, at times as an all-knowing novelist and at other times as an actor and character within the "story" that is told to us. Should we think it is the same person as the one who tells, and lives, Alice's adventures, but asserts himself more freely? And what should we think of the person who states in the Symbolic Logic: "If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, 'Let it be understood that by the word "black" I shall always mean "white, " and that by the word "white " I shall always mean "black, " ' I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it"?

The question is not purely rhetorical. Especially in the last example, the "I" cannot be simply the "author's," but necessarily encompasses a number of persons who share the attitude defined by the sentence in question. This attitude, we have seen, is also found in Alice. The spoken words therefore refer back to a person who might well be the same. However, this evidence has not yet been proved. Too often a distinction is made between Dodgson the mathematician, whose logic has become the sole interest of academicians, and Carroll the author of Alice and the Snark, concerned about preserving anonymity in his "private" life and growing angry at any intrusion by one world on the other, to the point, during the last year of his life, of refusing to accept any mail sent to "Lewis Carroll" at Oxford. We have seen that this necessary overlapping of two worlds is the very same problem the Narrator in Sylvie and Bruno has. Therefore no one will question that an element of schizophrenia is always present. But it does not divide two entities, "the man" from "the writer," or even the "serious writer" from "the writer of nonsense." On the contrary, it is their point of encounter because it is the point at which the Carrollian mode of expression (Dodgson's or Carroll's) surges forth. Indeed, in his treatise on Euclidian geometry (Euclid and his Modern Rivals), signed "C. L. Dodgson," Carroll does not say much and is generally satisfied with paraphrasing Euclid, at the most with humor. However, here and there are characteristic Carrollian sentences, typical attitudes of "Lewis Carroll," such as this warning in the "prologue" (preface):

I have not thought it necessary to maintain throughout the gravity of style which scientific writers usually affect... I never could quite see the reasonableness of this immemorial law: subjects there are, no doubt, which are in their essence too serious to admit of any lightness of treatment—but I cannot recognize Geometry as one of them.

The sharp distinction between style and content leads us unerringly to a constant of which there are frequent examples in Alice. All the same, Carroll spoke out elsewhere; as soon as censorship could be at least partially lifted, thanks either to the anonymity of the numerous pamphlets Carroll produced in Oxford over a few years, or to his pseudonym, it was the Carrollian essence that truly began to speak out. This [unconscious] essence could be either a subjective carry-over from childhood or, more profoundly, that which it expresses in a quasi-phylogenetical manner. It is neither accident nor neuroticism that in these circumstances there would be no human being corresponding to "Lewis Carroll" and that C. L. Dodgson still maintained this even shortly before his death. It is, rather, the expression of the intangibility of the speaker, who is not a person but the speaking subject. The language in Carroll's writings is that of the Subject and not of a subject, whose mode of expression is outspoken and which Deleuze, in discussing humor, calls the "fourth person singular," a subject associated with "esoteric language, which in each instance represents the overthrow, deep down, of ideal language. . . ." It is to this language that we should listen.

SOURCE: "Carroll's Alices: The Semiotics of Paradox," in American Imago, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 86-108.

[In the following essay, Baum explores the linguistic and philosophical complexities of the Alice books.]

When the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was buried, in 1898, Lewis Carroll was set free behind the Looking Glass to continue his interminable game of chess with Alice, the heroine of his first two fairy tales, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. During the century since their game began, the Alice books have played to a larger reading audience than most traditional folktales. Even while Dodgson lived, Wonderland and Looking Glass could be found alongside the Bible on the top bookshelf of practically every Victorian nursery. Carroll's first biographer, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, claims that the Alice books became primers for many Victorian children and that lines from them were cited in the daily press as often as lines from Shakespeare. If the popularity of the tales among children has since been eclipsed by cartoons manufactured in the television studio, the adventures have nevertheless maintained the status of cultural myth in the adult world. Much of that popularity is due to the sophisticated problems in physics, metaphysics, logic and semantics which surface during the course of Alice's wanderings. As fiction, the books have presented readers and critics with an equally formidable problem of decodification. The Duchess insists to Alice: "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it." Yet, attempts to sift a consistent frame of meaning from the texts have met with success as uncertain as the quest for a Boojum in Carroll's nonsense ballad, The Hunting of the Snark, and the course Carroll charts through the Alices uses the same map employed by the Bellman to navigate the Snark expedition: "a perfect and absolute blank."

The author has also been an elusive quarry. Dodgson's affinity for young girls has prompted a number of attempts to exhume the spectre of unnatural desire from the texts. Like their folktale counterparts, Carroll's narratives abound in the imagery of sexual fantasy—rabbit holes, magic potions which produce bodily metamorphoses, decapitation threats, desires to become a queen—yet the imagery itself is no more prolific than we would find in any fairy tale. If we accuse Carroll of aberrance in his fantasies, we would similarly have to charge human society, as collective author of the world's traditional literature, with neurosis or sensationalism.

The heterogeneity of approaches to Carroll's Alices is sanctioned by the overdetermination of semantic possibilities in the texts. Yet, there have been few attempts to discover a structural pattern in the narratives which would integrate various hermeneutic models. Perhaps it is just as well. The longevity of the tales is guaranteed by their enigmatic quality. The sense of the adventures is analogous to all of the "riddles with no answers" they contain: their aesthetic value lies in their insolubility. And if Alice were to find a solution either to the riddles or to her own motives for journeying into the imaginary world of unconscious possibility, the rationale for her nonsense adventures would go out like a candle. However, Carroll's fiction deserves critical attention precisely because it fails to offer solutions, a semantic context. It illustrates the importance of paradox in human language, generally, and the complex interrelations of the linguistic sign and its referent in symbolic discourse. Carroll's Alices have also played mid-wife to a genre of modernist fiction which has continued to nurture paradox. In this century, the narrative tradition from Joyce to Beckett, from Borges to John Barth, has taken Carroll's experiments in nonsense more seriously than Dodgson himself ever dreamed.

In form the Alice narratives most closely resemble traditional Märchen (Carroll himself called them fairy tales), except that they are explicitly framed in dream contexts. In authentic folktales the adventure cannot expose itself as a dream because its signifying function would be destroyed. The same is true for dreams. Only psychoanalysts may take them seriously as signifying systems. If the dreamer were conscious of his dream's significance, or even of the fact that it is "only a dream," he would not be "dreaming." The dream, like folktales and much modern absurd fiction, must put the hero's adventure in the context of lived experience. Any paradoxes or contradictions of physical law intrinsic to dream adventures must go unquestioned while the dream unravels. By the same logic, the nonsense of the dream experience must become apparent enough upon awakening so that a distinction between the two states of consciousness may be made (a function less absurd in non-literary experience than one might assume and one which is essential to signification in narrative structures). In fairy tales and dream fiction, the hero's acceptance of the impossible is not merely an ironic device, but it serves to indicate to the audience that the surrealistic episodes are meant to be understood metaphorically. Alice never questions the reality of the worlds underground and behind the looking glass; she even agrees to believe in the Unicorn if he will believe in her. As in actual dreams, it is her literal existence above-ground which is in question throughout the narratives. The absurdity of Alice's adventures points up the absurdity of waking experience (if only during the time of the dream). Although she protests that "one can't believe impossible things," she accepts the fact that she is speaking to an impossible White Queen who, when Alice's age, used to practice believing six impossible things before breakfast.

Like all fairy tale heroines and all dreamers, Alice must eventually awaken to discover that she has been "only dreaming." Yet even after the return to consciousness, Carroll forces the reader to believe one more impossible thing—Alice's sister redreams the Wonderland adventure exactly as Alice had dreamed it—a supreme paradox which characterizes the constant occlusion of boundaries between the two worlds. Similarly, behind the Looking Glass, Alice is presented with the dilemma of deciding whether she is part of the Red King's dream or he is part of hers. It is that old, insoluble paradox of idealist philosophy, one which continues to haunt Alice even after she awakens, since there are no grounds for proving that her return to consciousness is not also a part of the dream. Alice is, after all, "only a sort of thing" in Carroll's dream, one who would indeed be "nowhere," as Tweedledee remarks, if the dreamer left off dreaming. Carroll's interest in perpetuating the ambiguity is even more poignant in Looking Glass, the sequel to Wonderland, which is full of shadows and sighs of nostalgia for Carroll's "infant patron," Alice Liddel, who had then reached the period in her life "where the stream and the river meet," as Dodgson characterized the boundary of pubescence when he customarily took leave of the young girls he had been visiting.

Carroll remarks in his diaries that the world of dreams seems as "lifelike" as the other, and he suggests that there is little basis for calling one reality and the other fiction. In conjunction with Carroll's observation, Martin Gardner notes the appropriateness of Plato's dialogue in which Thaetetus proposes to Socrates that it may be only the greater amount of time spent awake which leads us to favor waking experience as 'true' and dreaming as 'false.' arroll must have wondered what authenticity dreams might assume if the times were reversed. If daydreams were counted, the reversal might be an accomplished fact for most of us. Certainly Carroll makes a prime candidate for the role of the sleeping Red King since much of his own waking life was spent dreaming-up adventures and amusements for his child friends. Among these amusements was the first journey through Wonderland, composed ex tempore on one of Dodgson's excursions up the Isis river (from "Folly Bridge") with the Liddel children and Reverend Duckworth, and written down subsequently (as "Alice's Adventures Underground") at the request of Alice. Thus Carroll's professed motive for the creation of his adventure into Wonderland was merely to entertain his child audience. However, in deference to the many readers who had attempted to make sense of his tales, Dodgson remarked in one of his last letters: "I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant." Carroll is speaking of The Hunting of the Snark, but the suggestion is appropriate to the Alices. Equally appropriate is Carroll's confession, in response to requests to know whether The Hunting of the Snark were an allegory or a political satire, or whether it contained some hidden moral, that he frankly did not know.

It is plausible to discover certain latent meanings in Carroll's nonsense at various points in the narratives, but it is unreasonable to assume that he could have unwittingly composed a complete allegory. The Alice books provide the reader no consistent system of extratextual reference. As ingenious as some attempts have been to wrestle allegorical meanings from them—whether the reading is political, archetypal, or ecclesiastical—the systems have either fallen from their own weight, like a tower of Babel built out of a pack of Carrollian playing cards, or they have restricted severely the suggestiveness of the original. Shane Leslie's exegesis of Alice in Wonderland as a "secret history of the Oxford Movement" is a notorious example, although it is scarcely as zealous as Abraham Ettleson's "decodification" of the Alices as companion pieces to Judaic scripture. At the opposite hermetic pole are the many psychoanalytic studies which exploit the intra-uterine fantasies and castration complexes dominant in the work to demonstrate that Dodgson was arrested at the anal stage of development or that he labored all of his life under the oppressive shadow of an "infallible" father. Such readings do more justice to the ingenuity of their authors than they do to the genius of Carroll's nonsense, its power of suggestion. They appear as critical tours-de-force, moreover, because they assume that where there is fantasy there must be allegory, at least at the level of narrative content. Such interpretations press the sign into service as emblem, substituting a one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the signified for a relation which normally is unbound in ordinary speech, and one which Carroll attempts to dissolve even further in his narratives.

Carroll was well aware of the essential arbitrariness in the relation between the linguistic sign and its referent long before Ferdinand de Saussure was to illustrate that such a principle is axiomatic to all language systems. One of the most obvious effects of Carroll's nonsense is to demonstrate the range of arbitrariness in the relation. The text of the Alices poses a problem of locating the linguistic context. It is similar to the dilemma faced by the Baker in his quest for the Snark: having left his name ashore, along with his portmanteaux, the hero is obliged during the expedition to answer to any name, such as "Fry me," or, "Fritter my wig!" Through an exploration of ambiguities inherent in English, primarily figurative expressions and homophones, and through neologisms and paralogisms of his own devising, Carroll develops a narrative code governed by the rationale of free association. The signifying axis of the text keeps reflecting upon its own ambiguities until those violations in the code become the rule. The linear development of the discourse is constantly interrupted (as was the first telling of the tale, through the importunity of the Liddel sisters) with the result that the rule of logical implication is cancelled out, and the "message value" (information) of the texts is nullified. The logos of the narratives is reflected in the Mad Hatter's riddle: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" It is another insoluble conundrum, as Alice discovers later, yet an answer appropriate to the mood of the narratives would be: "Because they both begin with the letter R."

Elizabeth Sewell [in The Field of Nonsense (1952)] has remarked that the Alices are primarily commentaries on nonsense. More specifically, one could argue that are metacommentaries on the nonsense of conventional English usage. Whatever consistent meaning attaches to the texts is less allegorical than it is metaphorical, or metalinguistic. Wonderland represents the underground of language, its literal self-reflection which is always present but disguised. Carroll examines chiefly those equivocal gaps in the code forced by an idiomatic parole, conventionalized poetic license whose ambiguities cannot be regulated by rule but only by precedent. The narratives serve to illustrate that 'meaning is not an entity, but a relation,' as Gilles Deleuze has suggested. But they carry the game a step further in allowing the signified to collapse into the signifier. Deleuze observes that in Carroll's nonsense 'everything happens at the boundary of things and propositions,' as in Chrysippus' remark: "When you say something, it comes out of your mouth; now, when you say a chariot, a chariot comes out of your mouth." In the same mood, the Duchess hurls the epithet "Pig," at the infant she is nursing during Alice's visit; and, having received the baby as a gift from the Duchess, Alice discovers later as she carries it away that indeed it has become "neither more nor less than a pig."

On the other hand, such metamorphoses indicate that Carroll's nonsense is not non sense, that is, devoid of meaning. Merleau-Ponty has remarked that even the face of a dead man is condemned to express something. Certainly no utterance is insignificant; even silence has message value, as Alice's responses to the nonsense of her interlocutors indicate. Despite the apparent anarchy of words and things in the Alices, there is method evident in the madness. The pig's transmutation is actually a superb piece of logic, depending on one's point of view. Alice admits that as a child, her charge was "dreadfully ugly," but, she thinks, "It makes rather a handsome pig." And from Dodgson's point of view there was little distinction to be made between pigs and little boys, for whom, according to Collingwood, he had "an aversion almost amounting to terror." But there is a more profound implication in the episode which suggests that the word can become the thing. Language underground is not a process of classifying the physical universe, it is a means of creating a psychological universe. The inhabitants of Wonderland and the Looking Glass invert the Duchess' advice to "take care of the sense and let the sound take care of itself." Invariably they force the sound to take care of the sense. Either the signifier swallows the signified, or the bond between them is severed, with the result that the sound image floats free to attach itself to any other sound with which it has the slightest association. "Did you say 'pig' or 'fig,'" asks the Cheshire Cat, after Alice has told him of her encounter with the Duchess. The question points out that the pig-baby is only a phonemic breath away from another metamorphosis; or that, from the Cat's point of view, the subject of Alice's anecdote is indifferently pig and fig at one and the same time.

The language spoken here is not the language of dream allegory but the language of real dreams. The major parameters of dream codification (according to Freud's model of the dreamwork) are also instrumental to the structure of Carroll's narratives. Freud observes for example that words are often treated in dreams as things. Thus when composite images are formed in dreams, as when a child might appear with an extended snout, or might grunt, like Alice's infant, the dream is creating a metaphoric association appropriate to its "deep-structure" or latent content. To Carroll, pigs, male infants, and figs are all fat and inarticulate, like the Uggug of Sylvie and Bruno, and thus indistinguishably distasteful (Dodgson was an ascetic vegetarian who despised overindulgence, apparently in all but story telling). The work of condensation in dreams is carried out also through portmanteaux word formations (such as those in Carroll's "Jabberwocky"); through puns, verbal and visual (e. g., the "Mock" Turtle who is represented by Tenniel as part turtle, part calf); and through distortions of syntax, primarily teleological reversals which have the effect of making any expression equivalent to its converse.

While free-falling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, Alice falls asleep pondering the question, "'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see," the narrator explains, "as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it."

Other mechanisms of the dreamwork are equally apparent in the Alices. Freud suggests, for example, that logical relations in dreams are represented either through metaphorical constructs or through episodic sequences. In general, logical connections are reproduced in the form of simultaneity. One element juxtaposed with another is sufficient to indicate that they are associated in the dream thought. This is, of course the basic structure of metaphor. In dreams the composite is usually in images, as visual representation requires, although condensation may frequently appear in dream utterances. In the Alice narratives, the association is usually based on phonological and morphological affinities. Describing to Alice how he would get stuck in his sugar loaf helmet, the White Knight says, "I was as fast as—as lightning, you know." Alice objects, "But that's a different kind of fastness." The Knight shakes his head and replies, "It was all kinds of fastness with me, I can assure you!"

Freud argues also that the "either—or" relation cannot exist in dreams. Whenever an alternative is presented within the dream, even when the terms are mutually exclusive, the relation may be read as one of conjunction. This is the basic structure of paradox, and much of Carroll's nonsense depends on it. "The Walrus and the Carpenter" begins with the sun and the moon jockeying for position over the sea, and concludes with a paradox of 'acts versus intentions,' as Gardner points out, in Alice's attempt to decide whether the Walrus is less culpable because "he was a little sorry for the poor oysters," or the Carpenter, because he ate fewer than the Walrus (who had sneaked some under his handkerchief), although Tweedledum observes that he nevertheless ate "as many as he could get."

The relative nature of judgements and definitions is argued similarly during Alice's first meeting with the Red Queen. In reply to the Queen's request to know where Alice has come from and where she is going, she says she has lost her way, only to be corrected by the Queen: "I don't know what you mean by your way. . . . all the ways about here belong to me." Alice discovers soon after that those ways include the definition of words. The Queen has seen gardens for example compared with which the one they are in would be a wilderness, and hills which, by comparison, would make Alice call the one she is trying to climb a valley. "No, I shouldn't," said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: "a hill ca'n 't be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—." "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," says the Queen, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"

In fact, the Queen's nonsense is not far removed from a dictionary which must define each of its lexemes in terms of others which in turn must be defined in terms of others, until, theoretically, each word would have to be used in its own definition. As a logician himself, Carroll was well aware of this essential semantic teleology in language, and he makes good use of it throughout the Alices. While the nursery rhyme about the Tweedle Brothers is running through Alice's mind, Tweedledum remarks: "I know what you're thinking about, but it isn't so, nohow." "Contrariwise," continues Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." In Wonderland similarly the Duchess admonishes Alice: "'Be what you would seem to be'—or, if you'd like it put more simply—'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" Alice suggests quite sensibly that she might understand better the Duchess' moral if it were written down. In this case, of course, it would make little difference. The message reaches a threshold of vanishing returns in the course of its logical development and eventually cancels itself out. It is a paralogism similar to the classic 'simple liar' paradox. For example, a card is presented which reads, "On the other side of this card is a true statement," and when the card is turned over, the message on it reads, "On the other side of this card is a false statement." Naturally, Carroll is aware of the pedagogical value of paradoxes for illustrating errors of reasoning to his students. The fundamental "error" of paradoxical propositions resides, of course, in the multiplicity of meanings which are forced to co-exist through an overdetermination of predication. When Carroll isn't reversing the order of syntax, or causing it to fork into mutually exclusive paths through a double entendre, he produces an interminable sequence of implication which nullifies the message. For example, 'taking care of the sound and letting the sense take care of itself,' the White Queen tests Alice's ability to do Looking Glass sums by asking her to add "one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one."

If syntax is a major problem for Alice, it implies also a problematic of time and space relations, since the propositional calculus serves to reinforce the interdependence of reason and a Newtonian universe in which all matter is identifiable in terms of its orderly relations in the space-time continuum. Thus the difficulty Alice has with the language code of her dreams is intimately bound to the problems she has with her existence in space and time. Her initial fall down the rabbit hole, as Gardner observes, would have the effect, if the shaft went through the center of the earth, of keeping Alice forever in suspended animation. From that moment until she encounters the suspended enigma of the dreamer's identity behind the Looking Glass, Alice's self-image is continually called into question through paradoxes of logic or physical law.

Even the syntactic chain of narrative episodes is without rhyme or reason. Carroll admitted that he had originally sent Alice down the rabbit hole without the least idea what was to happen to her afterward; and he contended that he pieced the narratives together from "bits and scraps," ideas that came to him "one by one at odd moments of reflection." Behind the Looking Glass Alice follows her moves systematically across the chessboard from pawn to queen, but the significance of the journey is less logical than it is metaphorical. Waking from the dream implies not only a return to the rules of consciousness, but it sets in motion, toward Alice's "coming-of-age," the hands of the intractable clock on the near side of the mirror. In the prefatory poem Carroll reminisces that Alice's crowning presages a "summons to unwelcome bed" of the "melancholy maiden" from whom he will ever be "half a life asunder." The distance between them, and the race it would take to bridge it, reminds one of so many of the races run in the narratives: the Caucus Race which has no real start or finish; the Mad Hatter's and March Hare's Odyssey around the table in their hopeless race against 'tea-time;' the White Queen and Alice racing to remain in the same square on the chessboard; Alice's futile attempts to catch the 'motes' on the periphery of her vision—the things in the "Wool and Water" shop (including Humpty Dumpty in egg form) which move perversely to a different shelf when Alice focuses her attention upon them. Later, during her boat ride with the shop's proprietor (the Sheep who is the erstwhile White Queen), Alice tries to pick some "dream rushes" along the shore, the prettiest of which are always beyond her reach, while those she does gather melt away like snow in her hands. Gardner's suggestion that the rushes may symbolize Carroll's child friends is a compelling one. The episode underscores the problems Alice has throughout the narratives with 'being and time.' She exists in a Heideggerian universe which is created totally in the space between consciousness and the world, and which thus depends for its signification upon consciousness examining its own representational processes. Alice's bodily metamorphoses in Wonderland are mirrored by the violations of spatio-temporal law behind the Looking Glass. Those violations are, of course, characteristic of fairy tales. They serve in part to sanction the fantasy that permits one to be any size one wants to be, as the Caterpillar intimates to Alice, or that permits him to be any place at any time he wishes. From the author's point of view, on the other hand, the violations of natural law and logic would allow Carroll to "hold fast" little Alice, as he puts it in the prefatory poem to Looking Glass, with his "love gift of a fairy tale" by permitting him control over her size, age, and identity. After Alice tells Humpty Dumpty she is seven years and six months of age, he suggests that she might have done better to quit at seven. When she protests, "One can't help growing older," he remarks, "One can't, perhaps, but two can. With proper assistance you might have left off at seven." Quick to catch the implication, perhaps, Alice redirects the conversation, thinking to herself, that she had "had quite enough of the subject of age." Gardner and other commentators have drawn attention to the grim under-current of the adventures exemplified in these periodic "death jokes." Yet the implication of the jokes is only as serious as any child's desire to get control over time—to hold it in check and make it do his bidding, as the Mad Hatter and Carroll attempt to do.

It is reasonable to suppose that Carroll's fantasy reflects his concern to turn back his own clock. His argument with time continues throughout his work, to culminate in the "Outlandish Watch" of Sylvie and Bruno which, by analogy to the Looking Glass, reverses the order of events. Equally effective for the perpetuation of his relationship with Alice Liddel would be the attempt to hold her fairy tale surrogate in symbolic limbo. Throughout the narratives, therefore, Alice is suspended in the phenomenal moment, outside of time and space, and in continual ambivalence about her identity, until she eventually becomes "too big" for the dream, as she must, both literally and figuratively. While trapped inside the White Rabbit's house, Alice reflects:

It was much pleasanter at home .. . when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't come down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one—but I'm grown up now .. . at least there's no room to grow up any more here.

But then . . . shall I never get any older than I am now? That'll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman.

Such a pun on 'growing up' indicates, moreover, where much of Alice's difficulties arise—in that problematical space between the literal and the figurative. Thus the existential dilemma Alice faces is bound up with the dialectical interrelation of the signifier and the signified.

At first glance, it seems hardly a flattering monument to Carroll's affection for Alice Liddel that her fairy tale persona should be put through the ordeal of playing pawn to an implacable semiotician. Alice eagerly exiles herself from the Empire only to find herself in a country which shamelessly abuses the Queen's English; and, as the champion of Victorian idiom, Alice is scarcely amused. She plays the role of adult Pharmakos caught up in a child's tangled web of free-association where the thing is continually sacrificed to the word and all words (and all things) are potentially analogous. Humpty Dumpty's defense of unbirthday logic concludes with the remark:

"There's glory for you!"

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you.'"

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

The only response appropriate to such one-sided conversations is silence, and Alice is forever rendered speechless by her communicants. She persists, nevertheless, in her search for the code which governs dream communication. Even after waking from her Looking Glass dream, when Alice tries to get an opinion on the adventure from her pet kitten, she finds problems with the rules governing dream discourse: "If they would only purr for 'yes,' and mew for 'no,' or any rule of that sort. .. . so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?" In response to Alice's request for clues the kitten only purrs, of course, and it is impossible for Alice to guess whether it meant 'yes' or 'no.' Alice is similarly caught between affirmation and disconfirmation in her adventures. The space she occupies is mediate between the languages of the dream and waking life. Alice herself acts a catalyst to illustrate that the two languages are really interfused, whether one is awake or dreaming. She is like the sign itself, caught in the paradoxical space of the flame after the candle is blown out.

That space is objectified from the first moment in Wonderland when Alice is seized by the impulse to chase after the magic White Rabbit, to the last moment in Looking Glass, when Alice enlists her uncommunicative kitten's help in trying to decide who has been dreaming. Alice's initial fall is like the fall of man from a state of undifferentiated grace into a universe of hierarchical systems, constituted on a base of infinitely embedded oppositions, each of which requires a decision process for its articulation and its comprehension. In her free-fall through the rabbit hole (which is lined, like Carroll's study, with bookshelves, maps, and pictures) Alice seizes a jar of orange marmalade. Finding it empty, she debates whether she should replace the jar on the shelf or drop it on the inhabitants below, the "Antipathies" she calls them, although "it didn't sound at all the right word." Her encounter with the marmalade, of course, contradicts the laws of falling objects—she would have been unable to take the jar in the first place, and she could certainly neither replace it nor drop it, since she would be falling at the same rate of speed as the jar. It is one lesson in relativity among many in the books which look forward to Einstein's reduction of the distance between matter and energy. In the Alices, moreover, space and time are not only relative to each other but to language as well, an interdependence revealed, for example, in the decreasing number of hours spent by the Mock Turtle at his 'lessens.' Such punning follows on the heels of Achilles and the turtle in the paradoxical race proposed by Zeno of Elea where distance and time implode just a hair's breath from the finish line, or in the caucus race where the goal does not exist in space but in the time it takes to dry out. Outside of his narratives, Carroll was also preoccupied with the interrelation of laws governing language, space, and time. While Dodgson was defending Euclid's axiomatic approach to the world, in lectures considered by at least one of his students to be "as dull as ditchwater," Carroll was probing into space and discovering 'black holes' everywhere. In his essay, "When does the Day Begin," we find him ready to race around the earth, clinging to the sun like Alice cleaves to her marmalade, in order to demonstrate just how relative human chronometry really is.

That Alice's dream friends go to non-Euclidean schools is further evidenced by the arrivals and departures of the Cheshire Cat. He goes so far as to tender his head to the Queen of Hearts minus a body from which to sever it, thus throwing the threat of decapitation (or castration) into a hopeless quibble over terms. The Cat himself could exist only as a figure-of-speech: to 'grin like a Cheshire cat' was a current idomatic expression even in Carroll's day. Alice corroborates her friend's low existential profile in her remark that she has seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat. The Cat's grin is surely no more ubiquitous than that of Carroll himself, who delighted in hounding a pun until either the words or his child audience were exhausted. The Cat reveals also that Carroll's sorcery is sleight-of-hand sophistry. When Alice solicits advice which direction she ought to go, the Cheshire Cat replies:

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where—" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"—so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Alice's problem is that to get 'somewhere' in her dream, she could never walk long enough. Just as one can never get 'there' from 'here' since, linguistically, there would become here once he arrived, so Alice discovers that somewhere is not located in the continuum of space and time but that of syntax-semantics.

Because language itself serves in large part to "locate" the speaker, to permit him to reaffirm that he continues to exist, physically and psychologically, we might expect Alice's problems with directionality in her dreams to be mirrored also in her problems with the direction of discourse underground. During her freefall to Wonderland, Alice tries to calculate the distance she has traversed in terms of the latitude and longitude she has gotten to, not that she has the slightest idea what those terms mean, the narrator reveals, "but she thought they were nice grand words to say." Like the Cheshire Cat, Alice exists in the interstitial space betwen physical and linguistic realities. It is a province again charted most accurately in Hunting of the Snark by the Bellman's map which dispenses with those "Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines," since, "the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, 'They are merely conventional signs'." In the Wonderland of dreams and fairy tales a blank map is ideal since it permits the traveller to take any route to his destination, or it allows him not to move at all, since he would be already where he wanted to go.

Traditional maps represent a semiotic system directed toward the pole of least syntactic ambiguity. If roads bifurcate and intersect, or if there are alternate routes to a certain city (there are no roads to "the country" which, like Wonderland, has no boundaries), those roads are clearly marked on the map, and all routes are discovered by the system (except the inconsequential footpaths). The map thus exhausts its semantic potential, since it assigns one value, consequently equal value, to each of its signs. Only the traveller (from the country) can create ambiguity in the system through his chronic hesitation between choosing the road which is straightest or that which promises some adventure, however slight. In Alice's search for adventure she finds herself continually at crossroads whose signposts reverse the order of things by reversing l'ordre des mots. The sign which points the way to the house of Tweedledee and that which directs Alice to the house of Tweedledum are mounted on the same post and point in the same direction. Sings which should have different referents keep turning Alice into the same semantic road whose signposts and milestones are puns, paradoxes, parodies, paralogisms, and portmanteaux words, each of which switches the code from the axis of syntactic contiguity to the axis of semantic analogy, or paradigm. They are the same highway markers Freud discovered on the 'royal road to the unconscious' in dreams (e. g., the processes of condensation, which forces two or more signifieds into one signifier, and displacement, in which one signified generates multiple signifiers), and in those mechanisms which produce the psychopathology of everyday life: parapraxis, paramnesia, and paraphasia. In fact, the Alices could serve as guide-books to the grammar which permits the unconscious to break through the 'frozen sea of consciousness.' The best model of both the dreamwork and the structure of the Alice narratives is the "rebus" which Freud used to demonstrate the interchanges taking place between language and image in the formation of a manifest content (the signifier) appropriate to the articulation (symbolic cathexis) of the latent dream thoughts (the signified). Freud assumes that the primary function of the interfusion is to produce a representable (visual) content, but it is surely as much a question of "presentableness"; the dream-censor would best be circumvented by the diffusion of boundaries between word and thing. The signifier must be divorced from conventional meanings before it may be allowed to seek new reference, mutatis mutandis, in the semantic pool appropriate to the latent thoughts. The ultimate effect of these operations is the desocialization of the discourse. Humpty Dumpty reveals that substantives—nouns and adjectives—are very impressionable and easily manipulated while verbs are more recalcitrant. This is, of course, the case in language above ground; because the copula establishes the spatio-temporal link between subject and object, thus their relative identity (which is the only identity they have in the speech act), it is, as Humpty Dumpty says, the "proudest." Nevertheless, Humpty argues, "I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!" Whatever else Humpty himself may signify, surely he is very much Carroll, the master of nonsense, in this scene.

Carroll's investment in the impenetrability of a linguistic universe such as Humpty Dumpty describes is doubtless reflective not only of his role as poet and magician (where he began entertaining his sisters and younger brothers as a child), but of his desire to master language, particularly verbs, which at once served to represent the wall between himself and his young friends, and at the same time, one of his few sanctioned bonds with them. If Humpty Dumpty's language is inpenetrable to Alice, it is nevertheless not "his own invention," as the White Knight would say, despite the 'extra wages' Humpty is willing to pay words to do his bidding. The language he describes is, on the contrary, ever present in waking life as the looking glass reflection of social discourse—its alter ego, the subconscious. It is precisely the anarchy of association which social language must attempt to repress, since language is the primary vehicle through which preconscious desire may articulate itself. Thus, social discourse zealously governs syntactic continuity, or diachronic expectation. The language of the pre-conscious is forced to ride under speech somewhat like Odysseus, clinging to the belly of a sheep, rides under the watchful eye (now blinded) of Polyphemus who would search him out and swallow him. Just as the guise assumed by Odysseus is that of "No-man," so in Carroll's adventures, Alice is in constant danger of losing her identity. The Queen of Hearts standing over her gardeners, trying to decide which among them is guilty of painting her white roses red when they all have their redundantly signifying backs turned toward her, is also a model of Cyclopean syntax—her response to everything is "Off with his head!" Happily, the Queen would as likely recognize the discourse of this preconscious and to 'suppress its evidence' as she would be able to cut off the head of the Cheshire Cat without his body being present. The view of language created here is one in which the signifier of consciousness is merely an excuse for the articulation of the latent signified—a view shared of course by Freud and by Carroll, if not by the Reverend Charles Dodgson.

In all archetypal struggles—whether social, oneiric, or mythical—the repressive process is marked by code 'displacement,' in the Freudian sense of the ego's creation of symbolic gratification for prohibited desire. In the Alices as in myth, the agonistic confrontation is foreordained through the prophetic word of the oracle because the contest is 'fixed' beforehand—the goal is not to win but to represent the struggle itself since, like the two halves of the sign, neither desire nor social demand may ever be eliminated because each is covertly trying to accommodate its demands to the other. Thus the battle is as redundant as that between the "Lion and the Unicorn" or "Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Language itself is ultimately the arbiter, or mediator. Logical development of many episodes in the Alice books is prescribed in those oracular nursery rhymes which Alice repeats, almost as an incantatory formula, for calling into existence the creatures of her dreams. Like the Cheshire Cat, almost all of them owe their existence to language—Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, The Mad Hatter and The March Hare, the King, Queen, and Knave of Hearts— all are literal incorporations of literary tropes or figurative expressions. Thus the confrontation of codes governing Alice's and her dream creatures' discourse is a parable doomed to the redundancy of expression found in the puns and paradoxes they articulate.

That redundance emphasizes the ritual nature of the narratives. If Alice is pharmakos it is because she too is doomed, (like Dionysus, the 'twice-born,' or anyone who stands midway between the world of consciousness and the unconscious) to recurrent sparagmos, in which the victim's words are torn asunder and scattered over the earth only to permit regeneration through a new synthesis. Carroll's dalliance with Alice's size and direction in the narratives is analogous to the sport he takes with her language. She becomes his Spielzeug in the archetypal game of Fort! Da! in which, according to Freud, through the ritual discarding and retrieving of an object the child gains some metaphorical control over his separation anxieties, or more generally, over the concepts of 'presence' and 'absence' so essential in their various forms to his physical and psychological survival. In the Alices, the threat posed by the protean language games is directed toward Alice's 'syntagmatic' existence. Progression in the discourse is continually sacrificed to proliferation of choices which become available at each step in the spoken chain, a problem revealed in Alice's lament to her kitten that you can't talk to someone if they always say the same thing.

Coupled with her language problems, Alice finds it difficult to remember who she is. The Red Queen, who is fond of admonishing Alice to "Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk—and remember who you are!" suggests also that Alice speak when she is spoken to. Alice protests that if the rule were strictly obeyed nobody would ever speak—it is one of the few debates which she wins. The implication is that speaking and being are interdependent. Alice finds that she is continually losing herself in the language of her dreams—most dramatically in the "Wood-where-things-have-no-names" where the boundaries between nature and culture are temporarily occluded solely through the loss of the nominal function of language. Symbolization of such boundary transgressions is characteristic of traditional literature. Through the deconstruction of the linguistic code which allows 'predication' of the ego, the ritual infrastructure of this kind of discourse permits semantic overdetermination in the content, thus the metaphorical proliferation of identities.

The Cheshire Cat exploits Alice's manner of speaking to prove that she must be insane or she would not have come to Wonderland where everyone, as if by definition, is "quite mad." Alice suspects a tautology in the Cat's reasoning, but she finds herself enmeshed in its syllogistic network. The Cat would accept no contradictions, of course, even if Alice could find them—particularly those dependent upon the chronology of his utterance. Like the White Queen, he would see nothing anachronistic in taking as many as five days and five nights together—"for warmth"—she maintains, even though they would be five times as cold by the same logic. The Cat would concur also with the Queen's dismay over Alice's manner of thinking: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," she remarks. One advantage of "living backward" according to the Queen, is a memory which works "both ways." In strict observance of the rules of order behind the Looking Glass, one's memory should only work forward; but in that case, the reversal of directions would have little effect on the functional processing of experience into linear chains by memory. Once Alice had gotten used to living backward, a memory which worked to anticipate events would seem only natural in a world where events, as in a film running in reverse, were going the same direction. On the other hand, a memory such as the one described by the Queen would be no 'memory' at all unless, of course, it worked forward and backward at will. Anyone who enjoyed the dubious gift of the Queen's memory would either suffer the phenomenological shock of total recall and projection, and would have to take to his bed, as the hero does in Jorge-Luis Borges' short story, "Funes, the Memorious"; or, he would suffer perpetual amnesia, each moment of his existence would demand a new phenomenal self. While such a memory would prove inexpedient to physical survival, it is a fantasy frequently projected in myth as the chief attribute which separates mortals from immortals.

When threatened, Alice tries to recover her identity by appealing to her own poor excuse for a memory. On those occasions she discovers that the "words did not come the same as they used to do," a consequence of being in a metaphorical world, and each attempt to remember ends in a parody of the systems that governed her former life; below ground she finds the syntax has remained the same while the content is completely changed. Parody depends upon the occluding of the decision process which ordinarily permits distinction between two speech acts. While the code remains constant there is again a proliferation of possible contents which, theoretically, could go on forever. Like puns, parody exemplifies the irony that the progressive dimension of signification is only an illusion of syntactic chaining which masks the ultimate redundance of those contents. It is a pardox similar to that of man's development of a system for measuring his progress in linear time based upon the endless revolutions of stellar bodies around each other in absolute space. Like all heroes of myth and dreams, Alice must only suffer the ordeal of relativity in space-time in order to realize phantasized psychological selves. After tasting the magic cakes marked "Eat me!" she attempts to measure how much she has grown by placing her hand on top of her head, "quite surprised to find that she remained the same size." Carroll adds: "To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out of the way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way." Like everyone who dreams, every night, Alice walks on the surface of a globe too large to allow her to discover that the journey through language and space may be the same journey. No matter which direction she takes, all exits from the "hall of locked doors" lead into the edenic garden of paradox, the key to which is language itself. Yet Alice can comfort herself with the thought that if the cake makes her larger she can reach the key she forgot on the table before shrinking to her present size, and if she grows smaller she could creep under the door—"So either way," she concludes, "I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!"

For Carroll as well as for Alice, the garden is paradise because it does not exist in space and time, but only in the uncharted space of his fairy tale, "Once upon a time ... " And for the rest of his audience, the tales mitigate the paradox of existence in a linear narrative in which like the Knave of Hearts, we are all condemned to death, ab ovo after all, long before the evidence has been heard.

SOURCE: "Fear and Trembling: From Lewis Carroll to Existentialism," in English Romantic Irony, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 165-84.

[In the following excerpt, Mellor addresses the philosophical implications of Alice's world, and compares and contrasts Carroll's "romantic irony" with Seren Kierkegaard's Existentialism. ]

[Like other romantic ironists] . . . , Lewis Carroll conceived the ontological universe as uncontrolled flux. But unlike the others, this Victorian don was frightened by this vision. Lewis Carroll shared his upper-class contemporaries' anxiety that change was change for the worse, not the better. The Reform Bill of 1832 had initiated a political leveling of English society; the Industrial Revolution had created a society whose highest priority was materialistic prosperity rather than spiritual growth and freedom; the new Higher Criticism of the Bible propounded by David Friedrich Strauss and Joseph Ernst Renan had undermined the fundamentalist Christian belief in the divinity of Christ; and Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) had argued that "progress" could be equated with a brutal warfare resulting in the survival of the fittest. Lewis Carroll responded to these changes with the strategies of romantic irony. Eagerly, he tried to impose man-made systems onto this flux. At the same time, he forthrightly acknowledged the limitations of such systems as language, logic, and games. But unlike the romantic ironist who engages enthusiastically in a never-ending process of creation and de-creation, Lewis Carroll felt, and felt intensely, that one must commit oneself wholly to one's created systems. Giving up such heuristic systems, he believed, is tantamount to sacrificing both rational thought and moral behavior—and plunges one into bestial violence.

Personally, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was a withdrawn, shy, obsessively neat man, a man who felt alienated from society in general, a man who apparently had very few close friends and no lovers, a man who was afraid of intense emotional relationships. His sense of his own inability to cope with the world—and of the necessity therefore to learn methods of controlling his environment—had probably been acutely intensified by his excruciating boyhood years at the Rugby School, where this stuttering, scholarly child was generally ostracized. Only at Oxford, where Dodgson could live a retired life as a confirmed bachelor and a mathematics don, did he feel comfortable. His closest friendships, as we know, were with prepubescent girls who could threaten him neither intellectually nor sexually.

Frightened by the shifting sands both of the sociopolitical world and of adult, passionate relationships, Dodgson tried desperately to deny the chaotic flow of life by transforming all human realities into a structured game, a game whose rules he alone understood and that he alone could win. Even as a child, Dodgson had relished creating complicated games for his sisters that are remarkable for their ruthlessness, as in the Railway Game in which "All passengers when upset are requested to lie still until picked up—as it is requisite that at least three trains should go over them, to entitle them to the attention of the doctor and assistants." As a mathematician, he delighted in constructing mathematical puzzles (Pillow Problems) which he alone could solve; and he spent years developing a symbolic logic which strictly divided all statements into real versus imaginary, and into assertions of existence versus assertions of nonexistence. By reducing the complexities of human interactions to a set of statements which could then be equated with grey and red checkers on a two-dimensional chart of circumscribed squares (what he called "the game of Logic"), Carroll could successfully force a rigidly closed and completely rational system upon the world. Dodgson/Carroll then taught these puzzles and logic-games in girls' schools. At such times, the introverted don lost his stutter and became eloquently and emotionally involved in logical arguments. Apparently, Dodgson channeled most of his repressed emotional and sexual energies into creating and then authoritatively imposing his logical or mathematical systems (games) upon his obedient female students. Significantly, in the published Symbolic Logic, Carroll explicitly refers to the Problem-poser as the "Inquisitor" and to the Problem-solver as the "Victim." Carroll's fierce desire to control his students' minds, by painful force if necessary, is revealed both in his metaphor and again in his refusal to guest-teach in any but girls' schools. He naturally preferred to educate young girls, who were, on the whole, more submissive, deferential, and easily manipulated—as well as more sexually appealing to Carroll—than young boys. As the Duchess tells Alice, one must "speak roughly to your little boy"—and her boy promptly turns into a pig.

Carroll's obsession with photography, a hobby to which he devoted thousands of hours between May 1856 and July 1880, again reveals his compulsion to force his own order upon the chaotic flux of time. Photography is an attempt to seize and fix a passing moment in a static, spatial image. Significantly, as Helmut Gernsheim comments, Carroll's real talent as a photographer lay in his sense of arrangement: he was a "master of composition" who "did not aim at characterisation, but at an attractive design." By forcing his models—generally either famous men or, more often, little girls—to stand still and pose while he photographed them, Carroll could capture and preserve the past (time would thus stand still, forever frozen on his collodion plate). And he could force the present moment into the shape he wished it to take for eternity. He preferred to photograph his young female subjects either in costume (and thus metamorphose them into the figures of his own imagination—see, for example, his photographs of Agnes Grace Weld as "Little Red Riding Hood" and of Xie Kitchin as "A Chinaman") or in the nude (and thus preserve for all time their innocent, unconscious sexuality, uncorrupted by mature female anatomy, desire, or experience). Art thus functions, for Carroll, to deny the passage of time, to deny flux, to deny chaos. (Appropriately, in order to persuade his very young models to remain absolutely still during the two-to-three-minute exposures of collodion-plate photography, Carroll would tell them stories, again using art to control the normal flux of motion in time. That this control was felt to be painful is documented both by his models' recorded resentment and by Carroll's reference to them as his "photographic victims.") The photographic image calculatedly selects a single arrangement of human experience, a single expression upon a child's face, and defines that image as the truth for all time. As Carroll's poem accompanying his photograph of Alice Murdoch insists, photography is an attempt to seize the glorious "celestial benizon" of her childish innocence and to preserve it forever, despite the ravages of the future, "those realms of love and hate, / . . . that darkness blank and drear." Dodgson's lust for order extended to every aspect of his compulsively regulated life. As Michael Holquist tells us,

when he had packages to be wrapped, he drew diagrams so precise that they showed to a fraction of an inch just where the knots should be tied; he kept congeries of thermometers in his apartments and never let the temperature rise above or fall below a specific point. He worked out a system for betting on horses which eliminated disorderly chance. He wrote the Director of Covent Garden telling him how to clear up the traffic jam which plagued the theatre; to the post office on how to make its regulations more efficient. And after having written all these letters (more than 98,000 before he died), he then made an abstract of each, and entered it into a register with notes and cross-references.

By transforming every aspect of his daily life into a rigidly ordered system or game, Carroll could gain the psychological security of living in a totally controlled world; in Elizabeth Sewell's phrase, he could play at being God. For in his own games, Carroll alone knew the rules; he alone determined the winner; he was all-powerful. Derek Hudson has traced Carroll's obsession with using the imagination to control a disorderly universe back to his father's equally egotistical and comically sadistic fantasies. Commissioned by his son to purchase an iron file, a screwdriver, and a ring, the Rev. Charles Dodgson wrote to the nine-year-old Carroll:

.. .I will not forget your commission. As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers, Ironmongers. Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment—fly, fly, in all directions—ring the bells, call the constables, set the Town on fire. I WILL have a file and a screwdriver, and a ring, and if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds, I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole Town of Leeds, and I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it. Then what a bawling and a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies, rolling in the gutter together—old women rushing up the chimneys and cows after them—ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases. At last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard, and stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the Town.

Carroll's most famous attempts to force a system of his own making upon the chaos of the universe are his two nonsense books, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Nonsense is of course a kind of game with its own rules, "a carefully ordered world, controlled and directed by reason, a construction subject to its own laws," in Elizabeth Sewell's definition. Wonderland, then, is a game played with words. In this book, the professional mathematician Charles Dodgson builds a closed system, not out of numbers, but out of words. It is a linguistic structure, which, although it denies or distorts customary vocabularies, grammar, syntax, and the usual order of events, nonetheless maintains an absolute control over the relation of order to disorder. Like all of Lewis Carroll's games, the game of Wonderland attempts to impose an overtly man-made, rational system upon a chaotic universe. In the process, Carroll draws attention both to the underlying disorder of the noumenal world and to the irrationality of other men's systems, most notably language itself. By undermining the logical and hence the moral authority of previous game-systems and hence destroying his readers' faith in the objective reality of their belief-systems, Lewis Carroll tries to construct a game—or nonsense—world in which he alone is the master.

The game of Wonderland is based on a rigorously logical and systematic reversal of normal human assumptions. Here Carroll, like Schlegel before him, conceives the universe in terms of a non-Aristotelian logic, in which p = not-p. But unlike Schlegel, Carroll's protagonist Alice—with Carroll himself—responds to this world of irrational becoming with more anxiety and fear than unmitigated wonder and delight. As Donald Rackin has argued [in "Alice's Journey to the End of Night," PMLA (1966)], the book originally entitled Alice's Adventures under Ground "embodies a comic horror-vision of the chaotic land beneath the man-made groundwork of Western thought and convention."

In the non-Aristotelian logic of Wonderland, p is not p. Alice has no permanent identity; she gets big or little at will or in accord with what she eats; and in the external world, things constantly metamorphose. Inanimate objects move of their own accord (a tea tray flies through the sky, a deck of cards plays croquet); animate objects function as inanimate objects (hedgehogs are used as croquet balls, flamingoes as mallets); and babies turn into pigs. Space and time, two a priori Kantian categories of phenomenological experience, are systematically distorted. Alice cannot maintain stable geographical relationships ("London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome," she murmurs); places change unpredictably; and the characters inhabit a systematically displaced space (Pat, the White Rabbit's gardener, is "digging for apples"). Time is experienced not as duration or an orderly chronological sequence of events but as a naughty young person who has had to be "beaten" and subsequently "murdered" by the Mad Hatter.

Mathematical and social systems are turned upside down in Wonderland. Alice can't count to twenty because, as Alexander Taylor points out, she changes the scales of notation at differing intervals: "the scale of notation was increasing by three at each step and the product by only one." Social relationships defy conventional expectations. In Wonderland, animals rule over human beings (the White Rabbit orders Alice/Mary Ann—all little girls look alike to a rabbit—to fetch his gloves) and fathers behave like children. Political systems based on a distinctly differentiated hierarchy of power and on earned rewards are replaced in Wonderland with a contradictory caucus-race in which everyone runs in circles and everyone must have prizes. The legal system is similarly inverted: Fury eats the mouse after a trial that has had neither judge nor jury, while at the Knave of Hearts's trial the sentence is pronounced before the verdict. And the moral codes that prevail, however tenuously, in Alice's English society are overturned. The sentimental notion that animals are loving and lovable is undone by the Darwinian Lobster Quadrille, while genuine feelings of compassion and love are reduced to mere sentimentality in the Mock Turtle's love song to "Beau—ootiful Soo-oop." The very concept of morality is rendered ludicrous by the Duchess's meaningless maxims: "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

Most disturbing to Alice, however, is the fact that even rational thought processes are distorted in Wonderland. There are no logical connections between events. The law of causality becomes an absurdity in Alice's meditation: '"Maybe it's always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,' she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, 'and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered'." Communication can take place in Wonderland without the use of objective signs: the Caterpillar responds to Alice's unspoken thoughts with extrasensory perception.

Then it [the Caterpillar] got down off the mushroom, and crawled away into the grass, merely remarking, as it went, "One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter."

"One side of what? The other side of what?" thought Alice to herself.

"Of the mushroom," said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

In Alice in Wonderland, Carroll does more than create a systematically coherent nonsense world based on non-Aristotelian logic. He also demonstrates the illogicality of the most important game we play, the game of language. Carroll shows that both the grammatical structures and the lexical content of the English language are often irrational. He further denies that any necessary relationship exists between words and things; well before Ferdinand de Saussure, Carroll insisted upon the arbitrary motivation of words and upon the role of cultural tradition and agreed-upon convention in determining the langue. As he wrote in 1880 in an article for The Theatre, "The Stage and the Spirit of Reverence,"

.. .no word has a meaning inseparably attached to it; a word means what the speaker intends by it [Saussure's parole], and what the hearer understands by it [Saussure's langue], and that is all.

I meet a friend and say "Good morning!" Harmless words enough, one would think. Yet possibly, in some language he and I have never heard, these words may convey utterly horrid and loathsome ideas. But are we responsible for this? This thought may serve to lessen the horror of some of the language used by the lower classes, which, it is a comfort to remember, is often a mere collection of unmeaning sounds, so far as speaker and hearer are concerned.

And again, in the "Appendix, Addressed to Teachers" that concludes his Symbolic Logic, Carroll insists upon the arbitrary nature of word-meanings, particularly when used by individual language-speakers:

.. . I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to any word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and that by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.

Many of Carroll's wittiest jokes play on the irrationality of the English language. He exploits the confusions inherent in homonyms (the Mouse's tail/tale) and in the fact that a single word can have very different meanings (dry is the antonym both of wet and of exciting). His frequent use of puns and portmanteau words challenges the notion that one word can signify only one thing and draws attention to the ambiguity of the English language. He emphasizes the arbitrary nature of syntax: a change in word order can effect a change in meaning, since the converse of a statement does not necessarily share its truth value (as in Alice's famous and erroneous insistence that "I mean what I say" is the same as "I say what I mean". Moreover, syntax itself can be ambiguous, as in the Mouse's dry tale, where

"Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him; and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—"

"Found what?" said the Duck.

"Found it," the Mouse replied rather crossly; "of course you know what 'it' means."

The Duck's inability to determine what "it" means results from the syntactic ambiguity caused by his interruption (the subordinate clause to which "it" refers has not yet been uttered), as well as from the potentially confusing capacity of a pronoun to refer to a multiplicity of things. More often, Carroll's wordplay focuses on the disjunction between words and meanings, between the signifier and the signified. Language-speakers can use signifiers that have no meaning for them, as when Alice, in falling down the rabbit-hole, expects to arrive at the "Antipathies"; or when the Dodo tells Alice he can't "explain" or define a Caucus-race, he can only do it. Anticipating the logical positivists, Carroll asserts that questions that cannot be answered are meaningless: "Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it."

Increasingly, in Alice in Wonderland, Carroll insists that there are no necessary connections between words and things-in-themselves. The traditional realist assumption that words "point at" things is thus drawn into question. In Wonderland, for instance, attributes can exist without a subject to which they refer: Alice sees "a grin without a cat." Labels, or signs, have no fixed relationship to the things they purportedly designate; they are "empty symbols." When Alice opens a jar labeled "orange marmalade," she finds nothing in it; when she tastes the contents of a bottle, which has no "poison" label on it, it almost destroys her by shrinking her down so far that she wonders nervously whether she might not be going out altogether, "like a candle." Furthermore, in Wonderland the sum of a subject's attributes do not necessarily constitute the thing itself. The pigeon who deduces from Alice's long neck that she must be a serpent makes the same error we make when we assume that an attribute defines a thing.

Finally, then, when Alice exchanges Wonderland for the above-ground world, she is only exchanging one nonsense-world for another. She is only replacing one language-game, the Queen of Hearts's "Off with her head," with another language-game, "You're nothing but a pack of cards." Carroll forces us to recognize that both Wonderland and our conventional "reality" are arbitrary game-systems created by the human imagination and imposed on other minds by mental will or physical force. Alice's language-game prevails at the end of the story only because she literally grows bigger; her will can therefore master the Queen's will and her arbitrary definitions of signs or parole can triumph.

But Carroll subtly insists upon the linguistic relativity of Alice's language-game even as he ends the tale with a comforting description of the future. Alice's sister's dream of present and future time is as much a narrative based on fantasy and unmotivated signs as the nonsense of Wonderland:

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy—and the sneeze of the baby, shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs .

Alice's sister's definition of "dull reality" is as arbitrary and fictional as Carroll's description of Wonderland. Her description of the "real world" is a sentimental pastoral idyll culled from literary tradition ("tinkling sheep bells," "the voice of the shepherd boy," "the busy farm-yard," "the lowing of the cattle"). As such, it is as much a denial of the chaos of noumenal becoming as is Wonderland. She attempts to control the flux of future time with a narrative structure or language-game:

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

But her narrative is as doomed to linguistic relativity as Carroll's own attempt to reshape the past into the arrangement he preferred. Despite his emphatic assertion that the tale of Alice's Adventures under Ground was composed "all in a golden afternoon" on July 4, 1862, we know from the British Meteorological Office that the weather was "cool and rather wet" in Oxford that day.

Alice in Wonderland thus embodies Carroll's recognition that the apparently well-ordered and meaningful reality we take for granted is not absolute and that all linguistic and moral systems are but arbitrary games whose authority rests solely upon tradition and convention. Carroll, of course, uses comedy to distance himself and his audience from the frightening implications of this ontological chaos. But his fear of living in such a disorderly world pokes its ugly head through his best comic defenses. Alice never knows who she is (is she Mabel? or a serpent?); she is frequently left alone in a hostile world (the Mouse swims away from her, while the Queen of Hearts wants to chop off her head); and she responds to the aggressive chaos of her environment with an equally violent aggression, sometimes directed at others (she kicks Bill the lizard out the chimney) and sometimes at herself (on several occasions, she almost kills herself, as when she drinks the "poison," holds the fan too long, and almost drowns in her own tears). Despite the charming wit of Carroll's nonsense, Alice's bland response to the violence and cruelty of the chaotic world she has experienced—to dismiss it as a "wonderful dream"—is a patently inadequate psychological and rhetorical response to the uncertainties and anxieties, the "scream, half of fright and half of anger," she has endured. The overt sentimentality and self-conscious "fictiveness" of Carroll's concluding fantasy of Alice's future only draws attention to his own inability to live comfortably with the illogical, chaotic universe that he discovered lying just under the linguistic and social games men call reality.

In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Carroll takes Alice directly into this noumenal realm. When Alice climbs through the looking-glass, she enters a world where things and relationships are mirror images of the normal world. She also enters a house of mirrors where signs or words only reflect or refer to each other. Here things are only words, words are things, and things behave as arbitrarily as words. In the Looking-Glass world, the connections between words and things are broken; and order and meaning necessarily dissolve.

The question that Through the Looking-Glass poses is no longer which game shall we play, but rather, what is reality? What does lie beneath the social conventions, the logical systems, and the linguistic structures that we perceive as reality? Carroll offers two possible answers to these questions. Beneath the phenomenological realm of structured experience may lie an ultimate harmony of things coexisting in a loving peace. When Alice enters the forest where things have no names, where no nouns are spoken and hence no divisions made between one thing and another, she and the fawn can unite in perfect friendship. "So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn." But this idyllic communion is abruptly destroyed by the return of names or linguistic signs: "they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. 'I'm a Fawn!' it cried out in a voice of delight. 'And, dear me! you're a human child!' A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed." Not only do linguistic classifications break up this noumenal harmony, but Carroll seems not to believe it exists. He places this vision at the beginning of the book where it is overwhelmed by the nightmare vision that follows it and concludes the story.

For Carroll, like Schlegel, finally conceives of noumenal reality as pure chaos. But in contrast to Schlegel, Carroll sees this chaos as wholly self-destructive; it is a predatory jungle where "Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd." In Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll takes us deep into this violent chaos in an attempt to convince us that if we do not play his games we will be eaten up.

On first entering the Looking-Glass world, Alice finds a seemingly orderly world, a predictable mirror image of conventional reality. True, the clock has a face, but it is smiling—no danger there. And while the "Jabberwocky" poem has an unfamiliar vocabulary, it can be translated into English and it does obey normal syntax—Alice is sure at any rate that "somebody killed something." It is when Alice steps outside the house that life becomes difficult. Certain rules of reversal still pertain: to go forward, you must move backward; to stand still, you must run as fast as you can; and time moves backward (the White Queen screams first, and is pricked second). A more fundamental rule of the Looking-Glass world is that signs are completely motivated: words are things; phrases are real situations; poems are events. The trees "bark" with a "boughwough;" the flowers are awake and talking because their beds are hard; and Alice sees the substantive "nobody" on the road. Alice's word-play, "I love my love with an H," becomes a phenomenological reality: the Haigha ("Hare") is hideous, eats ham sandwiches and hay, and lives on the hill. The people Alice meets are nursery-rhyme characters; their lives are determined by the narrative plots of their respective poems. Tweedledee and Tweedledum fight over a rattle and are frightened by a black crow, while the unicorn and the lion fight for the crown, eat plum-cake, and are drummed out of town. In this universe of motivated linguistic discourse, whatever words one invents become existing things—for example, Alice's "Bread-and-butter fly." But since these things are only words, they cannot invent words—the "weak tea with cream" they need to survive—and hence they die. As the Red Queen tells Alice, "when you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences."

If words are things and linguistic structures are actual events, then what are things-in-themselves? In the nominalist universe of the Looking-Glass world, the answer is obvious: things without words or names are no-things, nonidentities, part of a constantly metamorphosing flux. Alice begins to experience the chaos upon which all man-made systems are so precariously constructed as soon as she begins to play her second game, the chessgame. To play two games simultaneously (chess and looking-glass) is to be caught between two conflicting systems and thus forced to recognize the merely relative authority of each set of rules. At this point, logic begins to break down in the book and pure metamorphosis to prevail. Having jumped over the brook, Alice suddenly finds herself in a railway carriage without a ticket, with insects who "think in chorus"; equally suddenly and illogically, the carriage leaps into the air and Alice finds herself sitting quietly under a tree. Frightened by the crow that flies overhead during Tweedledee and Tweedledum's battle, Alice hides under a large tree and catches the shawl that flies by her. After a-dressing the White Queen in her shawl, Alice suddenly realizes that the Queen is a sheep and that she is in a shop. Asked to buy something, Alice notices that the shelves, although filled, are never static: "Things flow about so in here," she complains. The sheep's shop, the book's climactic image of noumenal reality, is in constant flux, never in shipshape order. No "thing" exists long enough in one shape to be named or identified; every thing is in a process of becoming, changing, and vanishing, even right through the ceiling. Alice's own identity becomes unstable: "Are you a child or a tee-totum?" demands the Sheep. Alice suddenly finds herself rowing through a sticky river, picking rushes, catching crabs; only to be back again in the shop buying an egg.

The egg is of course a person, Humpty Dumpty, who plays his own games with linguistic signs, forcing words to mean just what he chooses them to mean, neither more nor less. Humpty Dumpty is the auteur, a persona for Lewis Carroll himself, writing and translating "Jabberwocky''/nonsense. As an author and game-creator, Humpty Dumpty shows us one way to deal with a frightening chaos (and it is perhaps the only way that Carroll himself could imagine): to force signs to mean what you stipulate they mean, to impose a self-referential linguistic system upon a resisting chaos. And there's the rub: "The question is, which is to be master," as Humpty Dumpty himself acknowledges. For Humpty Dumpty is clearly not the master of his game. His arrogance leads only to a fall from which all the King's men cannot rescue him. For Humpty Dumpty, like all signs, is trapped in the linguistic system that alone assigns him significance and power. His attempts to assert control over that system fail ("But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected), for the langue is always more powerful than the parole. Moreover, his attempt to move from motivated to unmotivated signs only renders his own existence (as a completely motivated sign) arbitrary. Both linguistically, then, as a member of an established and self-enclosed system of signs (the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall"), and ontologically, as a newly "arbitrarily motivated" signifier, Humpty Dumpty must cease to exist as a noumenal thing-in-itself; he must fall off his wall into chaos.

The last character Alice meets, the White Knight, also attempts to impose order on chaos, to invent practical ways of coping with a disorderly reality. But his attempts (to stop his hair from falling out by making it grow up a stick; to invent a pudding made of blotting-paper, gunpowder, and sealing wax) are manifestly futile. Alice leaves him still tumbling off his horse; while the White Knight leaves her with a song that denies any hope for a moral meaning or coherent rational pattern in life. The Knight's song is a vicious parody of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence." It ironically undercuts Wordsworth's romantic moral code, which Carroll sees as an overly naive faith in man's ability to endure hardships and old age with courage and generosity in an ultimately benevolent nature. More important, Carroll's parody denies the very existence of an absolute moral order. The White Knight's song reduces the old leech-gatherer to a blathering fool and all moral or religious systems to absurdity. The narrator achieves not a self-affirming "apocalypse by imagination" but merely a "design / To keep the Menai bridge from rust / By boiling it in wine." And the old man becomes not a heroic figure of solitary dignity and humanistic courage but a "mumbling crow" with a mouth "full of dough."

Immediately after Alice encounters this vision of moral codes as arbitrary and of noumenal reality as pure chaos, she wins the game and becomes queen; the pawn is now the most powerful piece on the chess-board. But Alice soon realizes that she still has no control over reality: the other queens arrange her dinner-party, the footman won't let her in to attend her own party, and most frightening of all, the mutton and pudding refuse to be eaten. Alice suddenly finds herself in the midst of a nightmarish world in which she is unaccountably rising into the air, the candles are growing up into the ceiling, and the bottles are becoming dinner-birds.

At this moment she heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. "Here I am!" cried a voice from the soup-tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the Queen's broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup.

In this world of total confusion, of aggressive chaos ("Already several of the guests were lying down in the dishes, and the soup-ladle was walking up the table towards Alice's chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of its way"), words are no longer sufficient to establish order. Alice must act, and quickly. And, for Lewis Carroll, the only possible action left to Alice is an act of sudden, destructive violence. Alice pulls the cloth out from under the creature-dishes, throwing them in a crashing heap upon the floor, and then turns "fiercely" upon the Red Queen in order to shake this now-diminutive doll-like creature into a harmless kitten. Alice, the innocent child, has apparently become an uncivilized savage who reacts to the inherent chaos of reality with a primitive violence. Carroll here implies that if we refuse to play games, to submit to the logical and linguistic systems that our human reason and imagination construct, we shall turn into vicious, brutal panthers, wholly possessed by the murderous impulses of our primal passions—those very emotions that terrified the repressed bachelor don.

"Which Dreamed It?" Alice certainly hopes that her frightening vision is her own dream. Much better that this nightmare be her own, that the Red King be a creation of her own mind, than that she be a figment of his imagination. But Alice can get no confirmation: the kitten refuses to answer her, just as earlier Tweedledee and Tweedledum refused to believe she was "real." And Carroll, too, refuses to answer; he ends the book with the open question, "Which do you think it was?" In a noumenally chaotic world, all signs and systems, all answers are arbitrary; hence all questions must remain open.

The concluding poem, "A boat, beneath a sunny sky," restates Carroll's view that everything we call reality (the entire phenomenal world) is only a dream, a construct of the fictionalizing and rationalizing mind:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream ?

Carroll thus leaves us with his private horror: a vision of a world without order, reason, or meaning, a world that he can endure only if he can transform it into a game of which he is the sole master.

Psychologically, Carroll needed to invent games that he alone could win in order to control his changing environment. He wanted to master time itself and thus be able to prevent Alice (and his other little girl friends) from growing up and leaving him. He therefore tried to build his own future into Through the Looking Glass, to triumph over the destructions of time by becoming the White Knight. Alice's response to the White Knight is Carroll's paradigm for his own impact upon his child-friends:

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through the Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song.

Again, Carroll invokes a spatial image ("like a picture," like a photograph) in his desire to arrest time, to arrange the chaotic flux of becoming into a composition of which he is the central figure, a composition much admired and never forgotten by his child-love.

Carroll's personal attempt to control time extends beyond his own future to Alice's life as well. In the opening poem, "Child of the pure unclouded brow," he builds Alice's future into his dream. She will either die a virginal death or live to regret an unhappy marriage:

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed,
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

The concluding metaphor (adults are children whose anxiety-provoking death is a "fretful" bedtime) encourages us to read Alice's own "unwelcome bed" on several levels. The "voice of dread" is literally the voice of Alice's nannie, summoning her away from the bedtime storytelling hour to sleep; but it is also the voice of death summoning a still virginal "melancholy maiden," as well as the voice of the dreaded lover / husband summoning his reluctant and still chaste bride.

Lewis Carroll's attempts to stop the flux of time and space by fixing them within a self-serving linguistic system failed on the personal level: his little girls always grew up and left him for fuller lives elsewhere. But his vivid vision of the chaos lying beneath our merely relative social and linguistic axioms—and of the anxiety and terror that such a romantic-ironic vision can invoke in a sexually repressed person and culture—remains an enduring witness to that point, philosophically and historically, where romantic irony gives way to existentialism.

In the same decade in which Carroll wrote his Alice books, the first of the great existentialist thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard, directly attacked the affirmation of becoming and an abudant chaos that is inherent in romantic irony. Kierkegaard's influential studies of irony argued that the romantic-ironic mode of consciousness is a condition of existential despair, from which man must turn with deliberate loathing and fear. As a young man, in rebellion against his bourgeois father and conventionally Christian society, Kierkegaard had himself experienced the exhilarating freedom of romantic irony or what he called the "aesthetical life." But by the time he published his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony, in 1840, Kierkegaard had concluded that the psychology inherent in romantic irony could only produce an individual filled with anxiety, melancholy, boredom, and despair. In Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard portrays the romantic ironist as A, the aesthete whose life is arbitrary and thus without purpose or historical actuality. As A himself acknowledges, he is a member of the Symparanekromenoi, the "fellowship of buried lives" or the living dead.

Why did Kierkegaard equate romantic irony with anxiety and despair? In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard distinguished between a positive or "Socratic" irony and a negative or "romantic" irony. Socratic irony is, in a phrase Kierkegaard borrowed from Hegel's Aesthetics, "infinite absolute negativity": "It is negativity because it only negates; it is infinite because it negates not this or that phenomenon [but all phenomena qua phenomena]; and it is absolute because it negates by virtue of a higher which is not . . . It is a divine madness which rages like Tamerlane and leaves not one stone standing in its wake." As the historical embodiment of this idea of "infinite absolute negativity," Socrates systematically denied the absolute truth of every object or concept that his contemporaries believed to exist, including the value of life itself. And he did so without recourse to a "higher" divine being or absolute law. He spoke only in the name of a "truth" which knows only that nothing can be known, that the phenomenon or external is never the essence or internal. Socrates' ironic questioning functioned positively, Kierkegaard argued, in freeing the mind from overly limited or false conceptions of the self or society and thus opening the way for new thought and action. But Socrates himself did not create anything new, unlike Plato whose mythologizing advanced the human conception of the divine Idea. Hence Kierkegaard concluded that Socrates, as the purely ironic subject, had become estranged from existence and lacked "historical actuality." From Kierkegaard's religious viewpoint, the self can be realized and enjoy a positive freedom only through a lived commitment to the phenomena of a particular time and place. Irony's pure freedom is therefore finally self-destructive: as Kierkegaard insisted, "Irony is free, to be sure, free from all the cares of actuality, but free from its joys as well, free from its blessings. For if it has nothing higher than itself, it may receive no blessings, for it is ever the lesser that is blessed of a greater." And because the ironic self can never become engaged in a concrete historical context, it can never act morally.

At this point, Kierkegaard shifted his attention to negative or romantic irony. The artistic ironist or aesthete who always lives at a distance from his own feelings and actions is completely destructive, both of his own selfhood and of his society. "Because the ironist poetically produces himself as well as his environment with the greatest possible poetic license, because he lives completely hypothetically and subjunctively, his life finally loses all continuity. With this he wholly lapses under the sway of his moods and feelings. His life is sheer emotion." And because this emotion is the pawn of external events, it is arbitrary and contradictory, wholly without permanence or meaning. Hence, Kierkegaard concluded, feeling itself finally has no "reality" for the aesthete, and "Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has." As opposed to the Christian whose feelings grow out of and support an ongoing sense of identity and purpose, the romantic ironist can only undermine his own and others' possible spiritual development. When Kierkegaard commented on Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, he virulently denounced it as "a very obscene book," an "irreligious" book in which "the flesh negates the spirit" and the ego that has discovered its own freedom and constitutive authority finally arrives not "at a still higher aspect of mind but instead at sensuality, and consequently at its opposite."

Kierkegaard concluded his attack on romantic irony by insisting that such irony must be mastered. The religious life must include irony, for irony "limits, renders finite, defines, and thereby yields truth, actuality, and content; it chastens and punishes and thereby imparts stability, character and consistency." But irony must not be permitted to negate all moments: "on the contrary, the content of life must become a true and meaningful moment in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul desires." Thus becoming must finally yield to being: "true actuality becomes what it is, whereas the actuality of romanticism merely becomes." Similarly, "faith becomes what it is; it is not an eternal struggle but a victory which struggles still. In faith the higher actuality of spirit is not merely becoming [vordende], but present while yet becoming [vorder]."

Kierkegaard's critical portrait of the romantic ironist as the aesthete A in Either/Or became the literary prototype of existentialist man living in an absurd universe. Since A denies all necessary connections among past, present, and future, he lives wholly for the immediate moment. He rejects all commitments, all social engagements such as marriage, friendship, work. He is free to do as he likes, but since he ironically reflects upon his desire even as he experiences it, he can never lose himself in pleasure. His present life is "empty," ''idem per idem," and only the forever-lost past of his youth seems desirable. Hence he is melancholic and bored. As A asserts in one of his Diapsalmata or Schlegelian fragments, "I do not care for anything. I do not care to ride, for the exercise is too violent. I do not care to walk, walking is too strenuous. I do not care to lie down, for I should either have to remain lying, and I do not care to do that, or I should have to get up again, and I do not care to do that either. Summa summarum: I do not care at all." And because all action in a chaotic, arbitrary world is meaningless, one can only "regret" everthing that one does. A's "ecstatic lecture" can equate intense passion only with regret: "If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both." Nameless (because he possesses no individuality), his papers discovered and arranged "by chance," the victim of contradictory moods, A is the seducer who can never be satisfied with a merely actual object, who must constantly "change fields" according to his Rotation Method, who in his melancholy defines himself as The Unhappiest Man. From the viewpoints of the ethical man (B or Judge William) or the religious man (the Priest of Jutland whose "Edification" concludes Either/Or), A can know only boredom and dread. Kierkegaard, through B and the Priest, here rejects the privileging of freedom over belief that is inherent in romantic irony. Instead these spokesmen argue that in a chaotic world, in order to escape despair, one must choose. One must totally commit oneself, without irony, to a man-made structure or system—to lasting relationships (such as marriage), contractual obligations, a stable personal identity. But this sense of self, as we are told by the Priest, who corrects B's overly sentimental conception of marriage as completely fulfilling, must be founded on a conviction of spiritual inadequacy: "as against God we are always in the wrong." For Kierkegaard, the self-restraint of romantic irony must become a specifically religious dread, a deep sense of guilt and personal inadequacy. This is the redemptive fear and trembling before God that Kierkegaard described in his later theological, "upbuilding" treatises. Such a religious experience is the result of an emotional commitment to faith in an arbitrary, absurd universe; and only such a leap of faith can give value to human existence.

While not all existentialist philosophers would endorse Kierkegaard's demand that the self make a "leap of faith" into a Christian being, they do agree that the self must, through the passing of time and the ongoing experience of its own phenomenological existence, move toward an ever fuller realization of its own being (what Heidegger called Dasein, what Jaspers called Existenz, what Sartre called l'être pour soi). Unlike Friedrich Schlegel, who celebrated an always changing, always becoming self, these thinkers argue that an authentic self, an "essence," comes into being as a result of willed choices and commitments in a chaotic, absurd world: "Existence precedes essence." The romantic-ironic self that "hovers" midway between self-creation and self-destruction comes to seem to these existentialist thinkers to be a self without reality. Its ontological lack of being, they argue, is psychologically experienced as free-floating anxiety or even, as Sartre and Heidegger suggest, as overwhelming nausea or intense deprivation. Thus the existentialists, like the philosophers who preceded Schlegel, ultimately value being over becoming, even though they place far greater emphasis on the process by which the self gains its being.

By the end of the nineteenth century, then, Schlegel's concept of a self always becoming and always free, hovering exultantly over a chaotically abundant Fülle, had given way to a self obsessed with its lack of permanence and continuity, a self that experiences such pure freedom as anxiety, dread, or despair. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that existentialism is the negative view of romantic irony. Existentialism and romantic irony share an ontological vision of the universe as chaotic and incomprehensible. But whereas the romantic ironist embraces this becoming as a merrily multiplying life-process, the existentialist sees it as absurd or benignly indifferent, without inherent meaning for man. In the face of such chaos, the romantic ironist enthusiastically creates and decreates himself and his myths. But the existentialist engages in this same process with anxiety and even fear. Disturbed by the relativity of his self and his systems, he struggles for some sort of permanence or authentic existence in an arbitrary world, either through an irrational leap of faith or through sustained personal and political commitments. For the existentialists, such heuristic behavior is usually accompanied by angst (since man can choose not to complete his projects as easily as he can choose to complete them). Thus romantic irony and existentialism confront the same incomprehensible universe, but with very different emotional responses: the romantic ironist delights in its creative possibilities, while the existentialist anxiously seeks to establish at least one still point in the turning world, namely his own identity or essence.

SOURCE: "Solving the Mad Hatter's Riddle," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 457-68.

[In the essay below, Birns explores the theme of eating and cannibalism in Alice.]

Even a cursory glance at Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will reveal one of its obsessive themes, namely, eating, or more darkly, cannibalism. Most of the creatures in Wonderland are relentless carnivores, and they eat creatures who, save for some outer physical differences, are very like themselves, united, in fact, by a common "humanity." The very first poem found in the text establishes the motif of eating and being eaten:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

Later on, the eaten object is not simply "eaten alive," eaten, that is, when it is still sentient, but is endowed with affective and intellectual attributes—a "soul" that resembles that of the creature eating it. For instance, in Through The Looking Glass, the Walrus and the Carpenter, after talking of many things with their walking companions, the Oysters, decide the time has come to dine:

'Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.'
'But not on us!' the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
'After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!'

Earlier, after the "Lobster Quadrille" in which various sea creatures are flung, or rather appear to fling themselves, into the maws of waiting sharks, and directly before the Mock Turtle sings his sentimentally existential song "Turtle Soup," Alice herself recites the following poem:

I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by—"

This is a poem Carroll allows the reader the fun of completing, as well as the frisson that comes with the realization that in completing the poem we are also allowing the Panther to conclude his banquet by eating the Owl. This darker tone comprises the emotional core, the "heart" of Alice, where our most unadmitted needs can be gratified. As Elizabeth Sewell in her useful study The Field of Nonsense has shown us, Carroll's nonsense has at its core something unbalanced and even humorless. Not only does his "ludic discourse" subvert the reader's logocentric expectations, it threatens him viscerally with imagery that invites us to experience heretofore inhibited oral fantasies. As we explore the text of Alice and build to a solution of the Hatter's riddle, we will see that Wonderland invites the reader to participate in the same compelling regressions found not only in its creatures, but in Alice herself. For Alice is not all good form and superior manners, although that side of her that acts as a defense against the often intensely oral aggressions of Wonderland is generally celebrated as a hallmark of the ideal British character. Although she shows the best "good form" in the novel, Alice can also let down her hair by not only happily reciting the cannibalistic poem about the owl and the panther, but by suggesting a game to her nanny:

Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena and you're a bone!

In identifying with Alice, the reader may be astonished to find himself slipping enjoyably into a similar level of primitive oral fantasies. While Nurse does not take kindly to Alice's suggestion that she become the object of her eating wishes, there are in Wonderland creatures whose identity is completely defined by their function as food. There are creatures that are granted only that much autonomy necessary to express a desire to be eaten ("Eat Me!") or drunk ("Drink Me!"). There is in Wonderland a pudding that insists upon a formal introduction before it will allow itself to be consumed, and an even more autonomous clam, which though caught and cooked, will not permit itself to be eaten at all:

For it holds it like glue—
Holds lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle.

Food in these examples is given an animating spirit, suggesting the survival of a soul in what one must eat. Books, food and people are interchangeable. For instance, in the last chapter of Through The Looking Glass Alice

. . .heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. "Here I am!" cried a voice from the soup-tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the Queen's broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup.

Just as food can become human, human beings can become food. But in spite of these fantasies, which suggest an awareness that the eaten object is, like oneself, "human," all the creatures of Wonderland suffer little diminution of appetite, and some eat quite heartily:

"I like the walrus best," said Alice: "because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters."

"He ate more than the carpenter, though," said Tweedledee. "You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise."

"That was mean!" Alice said indignantly. "Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus."

"But he ate as many as he could get," said Tweedledee.

These fantasies of voracious and unscrupulous appetite may, in part, reflect the influence of Charles Darwin's theories. Darwin's ideas about the laws of survival can supply a plausible intellectual subtext for the ruthless way in which the creatures of Wonderland pounce on each other, and may account as well for their general contentiousness. The issues Carroll is raising through his fantasies have an emotional and not simply theoretical impact, however, particularly when the biological imperatives of Carroll's creatures are complicated by the great pleasure they take in eating their fellow creatures. Their pleasure becomes part of the horror of their existential situation, creating that self-contradiction that comes with the mixing of opposites, a phenomenon knit into the texture of Alice's adventures. Paradox is the essence of Wonderland. For instance, the creatures of Wonderland are both human and animal. They are also both adult and childlike, at times seeming to satirize the rigid and authoritarian personality of the Victorian parent, at other times capering like incorrigible children. The story itself pulls in opposite directions—Alice goes down the rabbit hole into the wonder world of childhood, not wishing to grow up into a world where she will have to endure books "without pictures or conversations," and yet she is destined to outgrow Wonderland, master its irrationality and assume the authority of a sensible adult, as she does when she announces that the Red Queen and her retinue are "nothing but a pack of cards." Alice herself is made up of opposites, since she functions in Wonderland both as an adult and as a child, at times the prim schoolmistress, at other times the chastened schoolgirl.

Similarly, ravens and writing desks, which seem to have nothing in common and which will be revealed to be in fact opposites, are united in the Mad Hatter's Riddle, and by a hidden principle Alice is asked to discern. Let us briefly return to Carroll's contentious tea party, where Alice is about to undergo one of her many transformations from prim schoolmistress to chastened schoolgirl:

"You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said with some severity. "It's very rude."

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles—I believe I can guess that," she added aloud.

Carroll himself claimed the riddle had no answer at all, but this has not prevented numerous attempts to solve it. Francis Huxley's The Raven and The Writing Desk includes some of the cleverer solutions, having to do with notes, bills, tales and Edgar Allan Poe. But none of these answers, while technically correct, are emotionally satisfying. What unites the raven and the writing desk must fit into the overall emotional and intellectual pattern Carroll has carefully established through his other rhymes and riddles; otherwise, clever as the solution may be, it will not give us that sense of aesthetic Tightness, or "fit" necessary to make it fall so naturally into the narrative as to seem as if it had always been there. But before supplying my answer to the Hatter's riddle, let us remind ourselves that this riddle is posed at a tea party, an event which is normally comprised not only of tea, but of other delectable foodstuffs. It is at the tea party that Alice poses a question whose subject haunts many of the rhymes found in the narrative. When the Dormouse begins his story of the three little girls who lived at the bottom of a well, Alice interrupts, asking "What did they live on?" Carroll goes on to note that Alice always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking, and when she is told by the Dormouse that the little girls lived only on treacle and were as a result very ill indeed, we are reminded by inference of the kinds of foods we must in fact eat in order to live well. Beneath the solution to the riddle is not simply the material in the tea party chapter, however, but as well many of the other rhymes and riddles that refer to the eating habits of the creatures of Wonderland. With all this in mind, we are ready for a solution to the riddle. But although Alice, with characteristic self-assurance, believes she can solve the riddle, the answer is better left to one of the denizens of Wonderland, and even more appropriately to one of the members of the tea party. Either the bossy Hatter or the put-upon Dormouse will do, depending upon whether the riddle's answer is to be told from the point of view of an aggressor or a victim. My own choice is the Hatter, who, soon after posing the riddle, hints at my answer when he says, "Why, you might as well say that I see what I eat' is the same thing as I eat what I see!'" Let us imagine that it is the Hatter, then, who reminds Alice of certain hidden but home truths in the following solution to the riddle: "A raven eats worms; a writing desk is worm-eaten."

It is this solution that touches on the large themes that inform the seemingly trivial and nonsensical surface of the Alice books. The image of the raven eating the worm recapitulates the theme of voracious or "ravenous" appetite that is a major psychological and existential theme in Alice. The raven's "sadistic oral incorporation" of the worm also reminds us of the story's Darwinian theme of life feeding on life, the life-force of the raven necessarily contingent on the life-force of the worm. The raven is another example of the predatory, amoral, natural world of Wonderland, seemingly removed from the culture and civilization objectified in the writing desk. We can now perceive that the raven and the writing desk are not simply absurdly juxtaposed, but are logical opposites, representing, respectively, the age-old conflict between nature and culture, instinct and reason. But the writing desk, like the raven, also has a relationship with the worm; here, the worm turns, and instead of being food for others, feeds on the writing desk. As the raven's ingestion of the worm represents the fact of life, the law of survival, so the image of the woodworm infesting the writing desk suggests the fact of mortality. Something as seemingly solid and as impervious to time as a writing table is being devoured slowly, is being eaten away. To some degree a worm-eaten casket or corpse is suggested: the worm-eaten desk points to what E. M. Forster in Passage to India has called the "undying worm," an image of the inevitability and reality of death, even as the worm's life-force is affirmed in its ability not only to be eaten, but to eat others. This particular solution to The Mad Hatter's Riddle, then, mixes life and death in such a way as to render them interdependent rather than opposing; even more, the solution supplies that aforementioned frisson that gives the Alice narrative its special edge, that dark quality that can terrify as many children as it enchants, and that has made Alice one of the patron saints of the modernist movement. The riddle thus answered becomes a reverberation of that endless, circular dance of life and death, of death-in-life and life-in-death, that is one of the deep subjects of the Alice books. In the loss of a Divine Plan or Purpose, in the wake of Darwinism, life is reframed as a giant "lobster quadrille," in which one's own life and death are part of nature's larger life-and-death cycle, in which one is both walrus and oyster, both raven and worm, both worm and writing desk.

Like Forster's undying worm, which was both phallic and phanatotic, Carroll's worm both gives life and takes life away. But although in this solution to the riddle the worm serves the raven's life-principle, the second half of the solution seals the fate of both raven and writing desk (and its Maker, Man). The solution of the riddle suggests that nature and its life-forces bring not only individual death, but transcend the laws and values of civilization, imaged here as the writing desk. It is that lack of purpose beyond a Nature red in tooth (or beak) and claw—a lack of "higher" purpose—that is responsible for the anarchic circularity of not only the Mad Tea Party but of such episodes as the Caucus Race. We can see now that the hidden principle that unites both raven and writing desk is the law of nature. Both the writing desk and the raven are subject to the rule of appetite, of an eat-or-be-eaten ethos.

The eaten and eating worm I have introduced into the Mad Hatter's riddle fits well into a narrative that is literally riddled with anxiety. The image of the raven eating the worm reiterates the anxiety about eating that appears consistently in the Alice books, an anxiety that includes death as a form of eating, eating as a form of death. This anxiety may be interpreted as the product of Wonderland's general regression to what Erich Neumann, in his The Origins and History of Consciousness, would call a primitive "maternal uroboros." "On this level," Neumann points out, "which is pregenital because sex is not yet operative and the polar tension of the sexes is still in abeyance, there is only a stronger that eats and a weaker that is eaten." In this early phase of human consciousness, hunger is experienced as the prime mover of mankind, and the laws of the alimentary canal reign supreme. Since all life comes under the archetype of being swallowed and eaten, death in this stage of consciousness is also experienced as a devourer. Such fantasies, concerning a stronger who eats and a weaker that is eaten, permeates Alice.

While the creatures of Wonderland swim amorally in what Neumann called a "swamp" stage of consciousness, where every creature devours every other, Alice herself does not. At times, indeed, Alice comes close to a feeling of revulsion, as in Through The Looking Glass's final banquet:

"Meanwhile, we'll drink your health—Queen Alice's health!" she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces—others upset the decanters, and drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table—and three of them (who looked like kangaroos) scrambled into the dish of roast mutton, and began eagerly lapping up the gravy, "just like pigs in a trough!" thought Alice.

The overall tone of this passage communicates a sense of pleasure-in-horror or horror-in-pleasure, in the paradoxical way discussed earlier, and as such helps raise the level of anxiety. Alice herself, however, is less ambivalent and more moralistic when observing the ravenous guests, who seem to be reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature. Alice's attitude can, perhaps, be traced back to Carroll's own abstemious, or even anorexic behavior. Carroll, like many anorexics, seemed to wish to be above the state of worm or raven, preferring instead the more ethereal identity of metaphorical "writing desk." Writing desks, of course, don't eat, although they are not completely "above" nature, since like God's creatures they can, significantly, be worm-eaten. Alice's own prim nature has often been compared to Carroll's, and there are those who feel that Lewis Carroll and his Alice represent one of the strongest examples of a psychological alliance between author and character to be found in literature.

At this point it is possible to bring forward another solution to the Hatter's riddle, one that points not so much toward the text, calling attention to certain important themes in the narrative, but toward a solution that would refer to Carroll himself. Before supplying this second solution, let us remind ourselves that Alice has just admonished the Hatter about his rude remarks. The Hatter, by way of rejoinder, comes back with the riddle. The riddle, as a response to Alice's charge of rudeness, suggests the following solution: "A writing desk and a raven both make rude remarks."

A raven makes rude noises through his caws and cackles; a writing desk makes rude remarks through the medium of the author. In this solution to the riddle, the writing desk, of course, stands metonymically for the writer. The rude remarks of the Hatter and the March Hare are, therefore, made by the writer, who is in this aspect like a raven in his rudeness. The creatures, the riddle hints, are the products of Carroll's own writing desk, which is really making the rude remarks for which Alice has chastised the Mad Hatter. In this way, the Hatter is shifting the blame to his maker, the writer, or writing desk. Writers will make rude remarks, the Hatter reminds Alice. The raven is not only like a writing desk, but, more darkly, the writing desk is like a rude raven.

In twinning the writing desk and the raven, Carroll is up to his old trick of indicating through the joining of seeming opposites a hidden identity. Mild and intellectual, the writing desk, or writer, is twinned with a bird of evil omen, a bird with habits that are not very nice, are in fact rude and predatory. Carroll himself, giving toys to little girls on the beach, taking pictures of them, entertaining them with delightful tales, seemed an avuncular writing desk. The twinning of the raven with the writer, however, points to less altruistic and more emotionally ravenous aspects to Carroll's behavior, and his "tales" for us are tailed with appetites more carnal in origin. In this riddle Carroll's splitting of himself into raven and writing desk, and then twinning the two, indicates a covert confession on Carroll's part that he may have possessed aspects of the Victorian dissociated personality. It is this personality type that gave rise to a multitude of nineteenth century novels featuring hypocrites and split personalities, such as that of John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood or of Dr. Jekyll in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One might even say that modern psychoanalysis was created to deal with dissociations such as those symbolized here by the riddle of the raven and the writing desk.

The answer that solves our riddle with rude remarks is not so very far from the more resonant themes evoked through the introduction of a worm into the riddle.

Both solutions remind Alice of the existence of a ruder, lower self, a self that Carroll is suggesting may have more powers over the idealistic higher self of Victorians than they cared to admit. Throughout her stay in Wonderland, Alice is reminded by other creatures that she is not "above" her lower self. She is often informed that she, too, is a creature, or not better than a creature—and therefore not only prone to appetite, but also vulnerable to the appetites of others.

To be a victim of others' voracity is perhaps the ultimate insult in a Wonderland where insult and incivility are the rule. The breakdown in civility in Wonderland, a place where rude, powerful figures can ride roughshod over the autonomy of others, is mirrored, or even troped, in the eating behavior of the creatures, whose appetites constantly victimize other creatures. Often, Carroll will present the matter from the victim's point of view, as in the self-pitying lament of the Mock Turtle, or in the complaint of the feistier pudding, out of which Alice has just cut a slice:

"What impertinence!" said the Pudding. "I wonder how you'd like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!"

The Pudding not only reminds Alice that she, too, is a creature, subject to all the laws of creaturedom, but also is quick to characterize Alice's behavior as rude. Since Alice must eat, and must slice the pudding in order to eat it, Carroll seems to be suggesting that life itself is extremely rude.

At this point, in fact, let us go back to Alice's admonitory words to The Mad Hatter at his Tea Party:

"You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said with some severity, "It's very rude."

To which the Hatter replies, his eyes opening very wide in a familiar signal that, especially in genteel English circles, indicates that somehow one has gone too far: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" If he had gone on to supply Alice with either of our solutions, she would have seen that he was, indirectly, responding to her charge of rudeness. While his riddle nonsensically deflects Alice's task-taking, our first solution, which unites the raven and the writing desk through the introduction of a worm, comes right back to the themes Carroll has been exploring throughout the narrative. A raven eats worms, a writing desk is worm-eaten. When life itself, with its worms and ravens, is so very rude, what can the manners of a Hatter matter? Far from being particular to the Hatter's tea party, incivility is actually what makes the world go round. While the Hatter is breaking Alice's rules of etiquette, he is observing the laws of nature. Rudeness is so much a law of life in Wonderland, that, as our second solution to the Hatter's riddle suggests, writers of riddles can be rude as ravens, if they choose. The Hatter is telling us that he, the riddler, or riddle-writer (at his writing desk) is not other than a rude raven, but is, in fact, none other than a rude raven. His widened eyes tell us, furthermore, that Alice herself has been a bit of a raven herself in her admonishing of her host, breaking the laws of civility she is asking him to observe.

Similarly, the Pudding's reaction to Alice's quite natural, creaturely attempt to eat it reminds Alice that she has in fact "rudely" failed to respect the Pudding's right to autonomy, to selfhood, to existence itself. In being of necessity bound to the laws of nature, she has broken the rules of civility, which puts her in rather a double-bind. The Pudding's separate identity must clearly be rudely ignored and discounted by Alice if she is to eat well. Many of the creatures in Wonderland engage in a struggle, often vainly, for their autonomy. Characters such as the Pepper Duchess and the Red Queen crush independence by psychologically devouring those around them, especially those they perceive as oppositional "others." Other creatures are eaten alive in a more literal manner—although these episodes often suggest metaphors of sadistic domination, in which the autonomy and integrity of the eaten object is denied or disallowed.

Food in Wonderland is like oneself in its creatureliness, but it is clearly something other than oneself as well. A differentiating process takes place when creatures eat creatures. It is, in fact, Alice's even more advanced differentiation of herself from the world of the creatures around her which will enable her to grow up and out of this underground society altogether, and, not incidentally, keep her from being (quite rudely) beheaded by the punitive Red Queen. Alice literally and figuratively outgrows the creatures of Wonderland; her differentiation from them and sense of power over them saves her from being their victim. Alice's rational faculties, combined with her self-control, transcend the more primary, impulsive underground world with its ruthless principle of eat-or-be-eaten, providing her adventures with a happy ending. Alice returns to terra firma, regaining consciousness just in time to run along to tea in her normal, well-run household. It is a measure of Carroll's genius, however, that he leaves us with the strong conviction that the more authentic reality does not reside in Alice's placid life above ground, but in the far more formidable and terrifying dreamworld of ravenous worms, worm-eaten writing desks, dark birds of prey.

SOURCE: "Framing the Alices," in PMLA, Vol. 101, No. 3, May, 1986, pp. 362-73.

[In the following essay, Madden addresses the genesis and function of the three poems that "frame" Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.]

Over the past thirty years Lewis Carroll studies have both altered and generally enhanced the reputation of Carroll's two Alices. Yet from early on in this reevaluation process one feature of these famous stories has posed a persistent critical problem. I refer to the three poems, one prefacing each of the Alice books and the third concluding Looking-Glass, that, together with the prose ending of Wonderland, frame the central tales. The problem is raised in acute form by Peter Coveney in his influential study of the figure of the child in nineteenth-century English literature: praising the central Alice dream tales as triumphs of "astringent and intelligent art," he detects in this frame material evidence of what he describes as "almost the case-book maladjusted neurotic." Subsequent critics who have mentioned this feature of the Alices have for the most part been similarly dismissive, implying, at least, that the Alice frames are best ignored in discussions of the masterpieces they enclose.

The issue has important implications. For one thing, the reputed failure of the frame poems, as I will call them, has sometimes been used as evidence that Carroll's genius was psychologically crippled. Given Carroll's eccentricities, biographical speculation postulating a pathological Dodgson/Carroll personality split may seem a plausible explanation for the apparent erratic working of his acknowledged genius. But the entanglement of an essentially literary question in a nonliterary preoccupation with Carroll's private habits and mental health confuses an issue that needs to be dealt with on literary grounds. While several modern critics have praised the Alice frame poems, no one has advanced an extended analysis to support either a favorable or an unfavorable reading, and until the poems' literary status is clarified our estimate of the aesthetic integrity of the Alices and our understanding of the books must remain in doubt.

It will be useful at the outset to call attention to a feature of the Alice frame poems that helps explain the negative response of modern readers. The three poems are devoid of qualities that the educated reader has come to expect in lyric poetry, qualities summarized by one literary historian as "colloquialism of style and rhythm, realistic particularity, toughness of sensibility, the complex and often dissonant expression of tension and conflict, the resources of irony, ambiguity, paradox, and wit." The alteration in taste that has led us to value such characteristics was already evident in the work of Carroll's contemporaries Browning and Hopkins, indeed in Carroll's own parodic verses in the Alices, but not at all in the frame poems, where these qualities are conspicuous by their absence.

These poems are characterized, rather, by the conventional diction, metrics, and syntax of the main English poetic tradition—revitalized early in the century by Wordsworth—which still shaped the poetic style of those Victorians whose poetry Carroll most admired: Keble, Tennyson, and the Rossettis. The idea of poetry upheld by this tradition—"how it should sound ("beautiful'), what it should utter ('wisdom')"—was one that Carroll unquestionably shared. Generically, too, the Alice frame poems conform to conventions established early in the century. The prefatory poem to Wonderland, for example, with its localized setting, feelings originating in a specific event, and a presupposed listener, has affinities with a poem like Tintern Abbey and, in its evocation of a dream mood, with the Coleridgean "mystery" poem, whereby "the spellbound reader sees visions and hears music which float in from a magic realm." Compared with such prototypes, or with most twentieth-century English or American lyrics, the Alice frame poems seem bland indeed—competent minor poems at best and, at worst, symptoms of an exhausted tradition self-indulgently exploited.

It is necessary to concede the surface tameness of the poems in order to avoid defending them on the wrong grounds. I propose an alternative reading that I believe vindicates Carroll's inclusion of them as an integral part of the Alices. It is not mere paradox to assert that their conventionality provides an interpretive clue. Modern readers who respond negatively do so, I would argue, because they either fail to recognize the conventions at work in the poems or, recognizing them, mistake Carroll's purpose in adopting them. Writing in a late Victorian climate for a special audience, Carroll adopted a form and idiom familiar to that audience, through parody in the dream tales but directly in the frame poems. While the parodies have been increasingly admired, his direct use of conventions in the frame material has been met in recent years with either indifference or dismay. Since we know that Carroll was a knowledgeable and careful craftsman, it is not unreasonable to assume that he employed a familiar lyric form and idiom for a particular purpose.

He chose the "Tennysonian" idiom, I would suggest, because his age regarded it as proper to "serious" poetry, and he thereby signaled to his audience the serious purpose underlying his books of "nonsense." His choice of a familiar form of the Romantic lyric likewise had a specific purpose: not to create self-standing lyrics but to frame a substantial narrative. In this respect the relevant prototype for the Alice frame poems would be the lyric frame in a poem like "The Eve of St. Agnes" or, to cite a more nearly contemporary prose analogue, the narrative frame provided by Lockwood's dreams in Wuthering Heights, which transform the reader's sense of reality at the outset and color the reader's response to everything that follows. On the one hand, the Alice frame poems record an experience of lyric transformation that induces the dream tales that follow, the tales from this perspective serving as sustained extensions of an initial lyric moment. On the other hand, since the dream tales articulate and define the meaning of this initiating lyric experience, the poems remain incomplete, indeed virtually contentless, apart from the tales. It is the mutual interdependence of the frame poems and the dream tales that needs to be recognized if we are to understand why Carroll attached such importance to these poems, never allowing the Alices to appear without them and never allowing the frame poems themselves to appear separately.

A clue to how and why Carroll expected this material to serve as a frame is suggested by the provenance of the Wonderland text. In a hand-printed manuscript that Carroll gave privately to Alice Liddell as a Christmas present, entitled Alice's Adventures under Ground and containing the text that Carroll later expanded into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, there is as yet no prefatory poem but a narrative prose ending of great interest. Because of its importance and relative unfamiliarity I quote it in full, from the point at which Alice awakens:

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream of fright, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some leaves that had fluttered down from the trees on to her face.

"Wake up! Alice dear!" said her sister, "What a nice long sleep you've had!"

"Oh, I've had such a curious dream!" said Alice, and she told her sister all her Adventures Under Ground, as you have read them, and when she had finished, her sister kissed her and said, "it was a curious dream, dear, certainly! But now run in to your tea: it's getting late."

So Alice ran off, thinking while she ran (as well she might) what a wonderful dream it had been.

But her sister sat there some while longer, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and her Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:

She saw an ancient city, and a quiet river winding near it along the plain, and up the stream went slowly gliding a boat with a merry party of children on board—she could hear their voices and laughter like music over the water—and among them was another little Alice, who sat listening with bright eager eyes to a tale that was being told, and she listened for the words of the tale, and lo! it was the dream of her own little sister. So the boat wound slowly along, beneath the bright summer-day, with its merry crew and its music of voices and laughter, till it passed round one of the many turnings of the stream, and she saw it no more.

Then she thought, (in a dream within the dream, as it were,) how this same little Alice would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman: and how she would keep, through her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather around her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a wonderful tale, perhaps even with these very adventures of the little Alice of long-ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own childlife, and the happy summer days.

This passage bears witness to Carroll's impulse, even at an embryonic stage in the evolution of the Alices and in what was still essentially a private communication, to go beyond the mere transcription of the original tales that Alice Liddell had requested. It is clearly meant to remind Alice Liddell of the original narrative occasion, but the noticeable alteration in style from that of the preceding narrative suggests a shift in perspective explicitly marked by Carroll's inked-in bar setting off this concluding passage from the central narrative. Up to this point in the Under Ground version nothing in the prose approaches the meditative rhythm and lyric heightening of the style adopted in this narrative conclusion, the stylistic contrast expressing a change in perspective that already gives this brief prose ending something of a "frame" function. The shift in focus from Alice to her older sister, and specifically to the effect that Alice's report of her dream has on her sister—inducing a trancelike "dream within the dream"—gives the reader the sense of having entered a different realm of experience.

In attaching this narrative epilogue to his tale Carroll obviously intended to communicate to the real Alice Liddell something important about the adventures that he had written down for her. What this was can be inferred from the substance as well as the tone of the passage, and Carroll made it explicit in the wording he adopted when he revised this initial account of the older sister's response in the expanded conclusion to the Wonderland text. Among other changes, Carroll added the following significant clause: " . . . and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister's dream." The language here approximates the description of the effect attributed to "mythtexts," texts designed to force us into modifying our conventional understanding of reality. The point of such texts, in the words of one analyst, is to erase the artificial barrier between the "real" and the "unreal" that readers inevitably bring to a text, so that "we gaze back suddenly upon the myth that we unknowingly entered. All at once, in retrospect, we realize that we have not been alive until now; that, by comparison, all that has gone before has not been real." This wording, echoing Carroll's own wording in the expanded Wonderland version, describes the effect that Alice's dream adventure has on her older sister. From the model offered by such texts we can infer that in providing a frame for the Alice books Carroll sought to erase the artificial barrier between the everyday world of Victorian realities and the unreal world of "nonsense" that he had created. The overwhelmingly vivid reality of Alice's dream shatters her older sister's conventional view of the world.

In starting our exploration of the Alice frame poems from the nucleus of lyric material contained in the prose ending to Under Ground we are in effect following Carroll, for when he decided to revise Under Ground for a wider readership his major concern would naturally have been to provide guidance for the uninitiated child reader, who, unlike Alice Liddell, could neither have known him personally nor have been present at the original telling. For Carroll knew what the response of many sensitive children has made evident—that the tale itself can be threatening—and it was therefore important, if that strange world was to be properly perceived (not to mention entered), that it not be frightening to the child reader encountering it for the first time. In this context, both what Carroll changed and what he retained when elaborating the Under Ground prose ending into the full-fledged frame of the Wonderland version prove illuminating. The major change was the addition of an entirely new prefatory poem ("All in the golden afternoon") to replace the original brief prose dedication in Under Ground ("A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day"). This poem incorporates elements from the original Under Ground prose ending and adds significant new elements as well, the old and new material alike now being rendered in lyric verse.

For purposes of convenience and clarity, I simply list the substantive changes that Carroll introduced into both the beginning and the ending of the Wonderland text. Revised opening: (1) dedication to Alice Liddell dropped, (2) occasion of tale telling moved to front and put into verse, (3) three children named and characterized, (4) storyteller characterized (effort in composing stressed), (5) concluding advice to "Alice" added. Revised prose ending: (6) allusion to ancient city and stream dropped, (7) dream images repeated in sister's mind (violence of dream stressed), (8) Alice described as telling her dream (not listening to it being told), (9) contrast of dream and "dull reality" added.

The older sister's response remains the focus of the revised prose ending, and her linkage of retelling and "simple and loving heart" does not change. The alterations that Carroll made in the substance as well as the form of this frame material are all consistent with the function of a myth frame: to transform the reader's perception of "reality."

The reason I suggest for the way Carroll framed the Alices finds confirmation in the internal evidence provided by the overall structure that governs the relation of the frame poems to the larger texts. . . . This schema shows that the positioning of the poems is strategically important, constituting them as an outer frame. The apparent anomaly of Wonderland ending with a prose narrative and Looking-Glass with a lyric poem disappears when we recognize that the Wonderland prose ending forms part of the outer-frame structure of which the three frame poems are complementary components. The schema also calls attention to the fact that both books contain inner as well as outer frames, each of which presents a waking Alice in a prose narrative of a kind we might find in a realistic novel. The structure of each book encompasses shifts in the narrative mode, allowing the narrative voice to move into and back out of the central dream tales by modulating from lyric, to realistic fiction, to dream vision, back through realistic fiction, to a final lyric statement.

This organizing structure is similar to that of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and what has been observed of Keats's poem—that "it is the way we are taken into the world of the poem, what happens to us there, and the way we are let out again that matters"—exactly fits our experience of the Alices, indicating the importance of all three phases of the complex experience that is built into the books' structure. The major difference is that the Alice frame structure initiates a double rhythm of entry into and withdrawal from the central experience. The reader undergoes at the outset a lyric transformation that anticipates the similar transformation that Alice experiences. A series of transitions—from the reader's ordinary reality to the reality of the restless boat children, through the everyday reality that bores the waking Alice, into the chaotic world of Alice's dream—gradually awakens the reader to a nightmare world that proves to be the reader's ordinary world transformed by a startling perception regarding that reality. Responding to this double rhythm, the reader, too, experiences a "dream within a dream." The central dream tales thus take on their full meaning in relation to this double frame, all three elements together—outer frame, inner frame, and dream tale—embodying in their reciprocal interactions the total vision of the Alice books.

I suggest. . . how the inner frames function within this larger structure. Here, however, I want to stress the answer to the question of why Carroll framed the Alices as he did: to establish in the reader a proper orientation toward the central narratives. The lyric effect of the tales themselves is evidenced by the frequent references commentators make to their dream quality, which Walter De la Mare identifies as "the sovereign element in the Alices," which Edmund Wilson alludes to in linking the tales to certain works of Flaubert, Joyce, and Strindberg, and which Peter Coveney acknowledges when he observes that "in a strange way indeed, the 'dream,' the reverie in Dodgson, becomes in Alice in Wonderland the means of setting the reader's senses more fully awake." Carroll's skill in adapting the poetic conventions of his day to serve his narrative strategy—to induce and reinforce in the reader a necessary state of "reverie"—emerges clearly from an examination of the frame poems individually and as they vary according to their place and function in the overall structure of the two books.

II

The most complex of the Alice frame poems is the prefatory poem to Wonderland, which, in occupying the privileged place of inauguration, plays a key role in alerting the reader to the special nature of the Alice experience. Through image, character, and event, the first six stanzas embody the fundamental lyric transaction, the seventh stanza constituting an epilogue to and commentary on what has transpired in the earlier stanzas, including the narrating of the tale that the reader is about to encounter. The opening three stanzas present an idyllic setting ("such an hour . . . such dreamy weather") that is rudely disrupted ("cruel voices") by the three children in the boating party (neutrally designated at this point as Prima, Secunda, and Tertia) demanding that their apparently languid and abstracted companion-attendant entertain them. (It is Secunda who specifically requests "nonsense.") The next three stanzas describe the silence that ensues as the spellbound children are caught up in the storyteller-companion's narrative of a dream child's adventures, interrupting only to demand more whenever the storyteller shows signs of growing weary. This simple plot concludes with the "crew's" merry return home, as the sun is setting, after the tale has been completed to everyone's satisfaction. Imagery of oars, wandering, a journey, and a return home suggests a quest motif, but the "wandering" of the actual boat is aimless, the children's efforts to guide its course futile. Their journey takes on purpose and significance, that is, only with the commencement of the storyteller's narrative. It is thus the imaginative journey on which the narrator's "dream-child" takes the children that carries through the quest motif and sends the children home happy.

What the plot of the poem stresses—once fate, in the guise of the children's request, has issued its command—is the storyteller's initial reluctance and subsequent weariness in attempting to respond to the children's relentless demands. We are made conscious of the speaker of the poem watching his storytelling self, presenting this self as a somewhat feckless, slightly comic figure. The child reader of Wonderland can both laugh at and perhaps feel a bit sorry for this imposedon and seemingly well-intentioned figure but, like the children in the boat, can quickly forget him when the strange adventures of the dream child begin to unfold. Finally, the subdued silence and intense absorption of the original listeners set up in the reader appropriate expectations of excitement and pleasure. That the ending of each story—the dream child's and that of the boat children who hear her adventures—is a happy one can be inferred from the children's merriment as they return home. Exactly what they have heard and why they are "merry" the reader does not yet know, but even the harried storyteller-poet seems content with what has taken place.

These basic elements of plot, imagery, and characterization remain subordinate, however, to the central purpose, which derives from the poem's function as the point of entry into the main story. The lyrical quality and thrust of the poem, the eerie sense of transition the poem both embodies and effects, is essential: the experience is of a transformation that erases the barrier between the "real" and the "unreal." The poem engages us at this deeper level, modifying our approach and hence our response to the dream tale itself. The lyricizing of this originating moment endows a seemingly ordinary boating excursion, involving an inconsequential skirmish between three children and their languid companion, with a visionary quality. The poem achieves this transformation primarily through a subtle variation and interplay of verbal tenses, manifesting the characteristics of what has been aptly named the "lyric present." A past event is rendered as though present ("we glide," "little arms are plied''). Simple physical gestures, in this case rowing, activate a timeless mental event (the emergence of the dream child). Present-tense verbs portentously carry the reader forward ("flashes forth, " "hopes") even while the poet is looking to the past ("thus grew the tale"). We observe the poet watching himself in the act of creating ("And faintly strove that weary one / To put the subject by"). In stanza 6, place and time are finally elevated into a historical present ("and now the tale is done, / And home we steer''), the scene becoming endlessly renewable as the action resumes each time we read the poem. The crucial event appropriately occurs at the center of the poem, in the pivotal fourth stanza, in which the "dream-child moving through a land / Of wonders" mysteriously appears, leading the boat children (and the reader) across a threshold through a lyric estrangement that transforms the children and the storyteller alike. When the children cry, "It is next time," we find ourselves in the alogical and atemporal realm of desire, the realm in which the tale is both told and heard.

The seventh and final stanza of the poem is an epilogue in which the storyteller, who now becomes obliquely identified with the poet, directly addresses "Alice" (so named for the first time) in a more serious tone, gently instructing her regarding the proper disposition of the tale she has just heard. The concluding stanza concentrates the themes and transformations of the previous six stanzas in a single conventional image, the one rhetorical figure that Carroll allows himself in the poem:

Alice! A childish story take,
And, with gentle hand,
Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
In Memory's mystic band.
Like pilgrim's wither'd wreath of flowers
Pluck'd in a far-off land.

The opening apostrophe, followed immediately by a shift to the imperative mood, sets off this stanza from the previous six. It is further set off by a slightly weightier cadence and by the relative complexity of the concluding simile. The two main protagonists now emerge: "Alice" as a transformed "Secunda" (the two names are linked by the common epithet gentle) and the poet as a transformed storyteller. It was Secunda who had asked for "nonsense," and it is to her, now renamed and thus identified with the dream child (whose name the reader will soon discover), that the poet turns, singling her out to suggest to her the implications of the adventures that had held her and her companions in thrall and sent them home happy. By placing the message in the actual present of the reader about to read the tale, the imperative mood establishes an implicit identity between the reader and the "Alice" addressed. The poet informs "Alice," in effect, that he has given (will give) her something more than the "nonsense" she has asked for (expects); thus he indicates at the outset what the original Under Ground ending foreshadowed: the narrator's desire to give Alice Liddell something more than a simple transcription of the original oral tales.

This something more is conveyed through the trope of the pilgrim's wreath, which distills the essence of the lyric action embodied by the poem as a whole and delicately hints at the motive (hitherto hidden) for the narrator's willingness to "hammer out" the story. This image integrates the several dimensions of time evoked in the preceding stanzas, extending backward to the past as a memorial of a sacred occasion ("pilgrim's wreath") that gave birth to the tale and forward as an image of the tale itself, a wreath of words woven into artistic form, a circular image of the promise of eternity and—in the present—a lover's gift, a bouquet ("wreath of flowers"), for all the Alices who will read Wonderland. Real time—linear, irreversible, redolent of death—is recognized in the poem: the sun is setting as the boat journey comes to an end, and the wreath itself is already "wither'd" even as the poet presents it. But the linear dimension along which the boating excursion takes place and the spontaneous appearance of the dream child at a particular moment in time are alike arrested in an oneiric timelessness, a vision with roots "twined / In Memory's mystic band." Thus the wreath embodies the three dimensions of linear time: a reminder of the meaning and identity that derive from memory's link with the past, a token of love that redeems the present and gives it value, and an emblem of an artwork with the power endlessly to renew a timeless present in which it always is next time. Properly understood, the concluding stanza declares, the tale will return the reader to the source ("a far-off land") of wholeness and health and sanity, to the psychic origins of the true human identity of which the dream child is an emblem.

We can now see that Carroll revised the Wonderland narrative ending to reinforce the lyric thrust of the prefatory poem. When Alice awakes from her dream, the brief inner frame, basically unchanged from the Under Ground version, gives a straight-forward three-sentence account of Alice's report of her dream to her older sister, after which she obediently runs off to tea, the narrator simply concurring in Alice's final feeling that the dream was "wonderful." In what follows, the topical allusions in Under Ground to the scene of the boating excursion are gone; the dream events, their violence now emphasized, are recapitulated by the sister; and the description of Alice reporting her dream is expanded to suggest that Alice herself has been brought alive by her dream (Alice now tells the dream instead of, as in Under Ground, listening to it being told). Moreover, two substantial added passages make explicit the older sister's acute awareness of how "dull" everyday reality seems, appearing to her in a new and disenchanting light, as "the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard." Her perception has been altered by her exposure to the perspective that informs a dream epitomized by the prefatory poem, in the emphatic rhyme words of its pivotal stanza, as a vision to pursue, a vision both new and true.

Carroll's retention of the Under Ground final paragraph virtually unchanged is equally instructive. The older sister instinctively links the motif of retelling the dream story with Alice's "simple and loving heart," clearly implying that the adventures deserve retelling because they reveal a simple and loving heart. In thus discerning in the behavior of Alice's dream self an exemplary manifestation of human identity and meaning, the older sister guides the reader in interpreting the dream. In her status as an "elder" she perceives a paradoxical warning that she must keep becoming a child, that a simple and loving heart requires perpetual maintenance in the face of the corrosive pressures of reality, whether these pressures take the form of biological laws of physical survival or, as in the later Looking-Glass, of cultural laws of social preferment. The Wonderland dream tale becomes, in this context, a reminder to the reader of both the need and the possibility of transcending the debilitating decorums of ordinary existence through a renewal of perception that is the central effect of Wonderland itself when the reader fully experiences it.

III

Before considering the Looking-Glass frame poems, I want to note briefly the structural significance of the inner frames of the Alices, relative to the schema I present above. Although most readers perceive the two Alices as parts of a single work, many commentators have detected a difference between the books, which they define in terms of polar opposition: passive/active, outdoors/indoors, spontaneous/self-conscious, anarchic/rule-governed, identity/duality, adventure/journey, and so on, with Looking-Glass generally perceived as a "darker" book than Wonderland—more pessimistic, more bitter, more melancholy, and, for some, more neurotic. Often they suggest that this difference is attributable to some undefined "decline" in Carroll. The inner frames make clear that, while there is a discernible change in the poet's relation to Alice, the alteration is due to a change in her, not in his vision.

The difference in both tone and content between the two Alice dreams is accounted for by the shift, which the inner frames describe, in Alice's psychological posture just before she falls asleep. The symbolic change in Alice's age from seven to seven and a half, about which we learn later, during the second dream, is anticipated in the Looking-Glass inner frame by the shift from May to November and, more significantly, by the alteration in the waking Alice's attitude. In Wonderland Alice is passive, lethargic, and bored when awake; in Looking-Glass she is active, aggressive, and ambitious. Although in both books she is intensely curious and eager to escape an unsatisfactory present, the images that initiate the dreams differ significantly: in Wonderland the initiating image is that of a regressive fall, in Looking-Glass that of a progressive climb. The implied change in Alice becomes evident early, since at the beginning of the Wonderland dream it is the White Rabbit who is in a hurry, whereas in Looking-Glass it is Alice.

Despite these differing contextualizations, both dreams end in frustration: the two paths of escape that offer themselves to Alice in her dreams—the way back to the beautiful garden in Wonderland and the way forward to queenhood in Looking-Glass—prove either unattainable (the garden) or unsatisfactory (the golden crown of queenhood, Alice discovers at the end of Looking-Glass, is "something very heavy, that fitted tight all around her head"). Regressive longing, on the one hand, and aggressive ambition, on the other, are exposed as equally dangerous, equivalent manifestations of misdirected desire. Whether Alice is seven or seven and a half, the fundamental purpose of her life remains the same, even if the direction from which her essential being is threatened has changed. She is instructed by both dreams that she already possesses all that she needs. When she awakens, though her outward behavior is not apparently affected in either book, the inner restlessness evident in both books before she falls asleep has been appeased; her perception of what is necessary to happiness is not so much advanced as confirmed at the deepest level. Both dreams, variously described as "curious," "wonderful," "strange," and "nice," move in a single direction, toward Alice's restoration to and confirmation in the wholeness and sanity that is her true identity even as she continues to grow and her circumstances to change.

Turning now to the Looking-Glass prefatory poem, we can note first that, while the poem reflects a change in "Alice," its primary function is identical to that of the Wonderland frame: to evoke a past communal event by creating from it a lyric present that will guide the reader through the dream tale to follow. Like Wonderland, the tale is both a memorial to and a renewal of "happy summer days," a phrase that Carroll incorporates into the Looking-Glass poem from the prose ending of Wonderland. Since the originating event and its first fruits are already on record, as it were, in Wonderland, the poet can now content himself with reinvoking the appropriate mood by referring to the earlier story. The Looking-Glass poem is therefore less complex than its Wonderland counterpart, the major change deriving from the speaker's more intense time consciousness, rooted in his sense both that the originating event is retreating into the past and that "Alice" is growing away from him. The pressing reality of time is again acknowledged ("though time be fleet"), its emotional effect now overtly expressed ("the shadow of a sigh / May tremble through the story"), and this acute time consciousness makes the speaker's presence more directly felt and the poem's imperatives more urgent than in the Wonderland frame material. But if the sense of time irresistibly passing and of absence becoming permanent is strong, so also is the speaker's will to transcend time through a conscious renewal of the original event. Recognizing and accepting the inexorableness of time and change, the poem reasserts the transforming power of the dream child, whose renewable presence the second dream tale is about to enact.

Carroll employs a slightly modified version of the stanza used in the Wonderland prefatory poem, so that the Looking-Glass prefatory poem's form and language serve as a bridge between the two Alices. The poem's structure, unlike the simple plot-cum-epilogue of the Wonderland poem, is a series of strophic contrasts, each stanza juxtaposing the temporal and the atemporal, the passing and the enduring. In each stanza the quatrain renders the experience of transience and loss or of anticipated decline or separation; the falling trochaic beats at the end of the second and fourth lines convey a mild feeling of pathos, and each quatrain is balanced by a strong affirmation in the concluding couplet. From the confident invocation of the child muse in the opening lines ("Child of the pure unclouded brow / And dreaming eyes of wonder!") down to the end of the fourth stanza the rhythm oscillates between the sense of time past and passing, on the one hand, and the poet's will to affirm, on the other, with a diminuendo in a "though . . . yet still" movement that reaches a low point in the quiet, almost prosaic statement at the end of stanza 4: "We are but older children, dear, / Who fret to find our bedtime near." For the "melancholy maiden" addressed in these lines there is the early prospect of the "little death" of the marriage bed, and for maiden and poet alike the inevitable grave awaits. But a counterfeeling of hope, rooted in the poet's faith in the power of his visionary gift to redeem the time, emerges with fresh strength in the concluding couplets. The conclusion of stanza 5 invokes the power of the poet's art to protect the maiden against the madness raging outside "childhood's nest of gladness" ("The magic words shall hold thee fast: / Thou shalt not heed the raving blast"), and the terminal couplet of stanza 6 asserts the capacity of the dream tale to render time itself powerless to alter "Alice": "It shall not touch, with breath of bale, / The pleasance of our fairy-tale."

Imagery of frost and fire is related to the deep structure that underpins the stanzaic pattern of strophic oppositions that organize the poem. The natural fire of "summer suns" has departed, but it is replaced by the humanly created fire of a hearth, in the presence of which the poet can retrieve and renew a primordial "now" that is "enough," if the listener will but "hail" his gift and "listen" to what the story has to say. "Come, harken, then" is this poem's imperative. Generative of light and warmth, the fire dispels time's wintry depletions, serving as an emblem of the love that is openly declared in a couplet that simultaneously invites and expresses a hope for an appropriate response: "Thy loving smile will surely hail / The love-gift of a fairytale." Against the surrounding night of frost and blinding snow and the temporal prospect of an "unwelcome bed," the poet sets the image of the fire that Alice will find burning on the other side of the mirror in her dream. In offering this second tale as a "love-gift," the poet offers love itself as the only "nonsense" that can effectively confront the surrounding darkness.

The Looking-Glass end poem embodies the poet's final statement regarding the Alice experience. The poem functions, at one level, as the equivalent to the prose narrative ending of Wonderland, with the reader moved once again out of a nightmare that provokes Alice's violent reaction, through the self-questioning of the inner frame, into final lyric affirmation. It differs from the Wonderland ending in that the poet now addresses the reader directly instead of merely reporting the older sister's response, a change prepared for in a closing inner frame significantly more substantial than the Wonderland equivalent. This time the response to the dream tale is that of the awakened Alice, who poses a series of questions to herself that lead to a final question: was it she or the Red King who dreamed the dream? The dream, that is, has shaken Alice out of her preoccupation with attaining queenhood into serious reflection about the nature of reality. In the final sentence of the inner frame, the narrator addresses the question directly to the reader—"Which do you think it was?"—thereby drawing the reader into the dream and into Alice's radical question, a question that makes all human perspectives relative. In this context the Looking-Glass end poem implicitly offers the Alice experience as the answer to this ultimate metaphysical question, a "dream" that contains not only Alice, the Red King, and all the other dream characters but finally the reader and the poet as well.

Structurally, the seven-stanza Looking-Glass end poem symmetrically balances the seven-stanza prefatory poem to Wonderland, but Carroll now adopts a highly concentrated verse form, a rare trochaic trimeter in triplets, that gives to the end poem a terseness that reinforces the sense of closure. The initial letters of the twenty-one lines of the poem form an acrostic that places "Alice Pleasance Liddell" within the poem, figuratively incorporating Alice Liddell into the books that she inspired and thus assuring her of immortality. While the real Alice Liddell has grown up, the poet rescues and fixes his "Alice" by a process that had begun when Alice Liddell became Secunda and Secunda became Alice in the opening Wonderland poem, was carried forward in the allusion to pleasance in the middle Looking-Glass prefatory poem, and is now brought to completion in her total naming. Whereas the Alice of the Wonderland prefatory poem had been near and real and the Alice in the prefatory poem to Looking-Glass could still be imaginatively evoked, remaining at least virtually real and present, in the Looking-Glass end poem she has been transformed into poetry, the elements of her dismembered name becoming an integral part of the poetic vision that Alice Liddell had inspired long before by awakening the poet's love for her and for what she represented to him.

The opening stanzas go back one last time to the moment of origin, evoking through reverie the benign weather, the boat, and the eager listening children of that long-ago July "evening" (as the poet now autumnally calls it), and for two brief stanzas the scene is again dreamily present. But the third stanza scatters the memory of that moment with shocking finality:

Long has paled that sunny sky:
  Echoes fade and memories die,
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Then in the pivotal fourth stanza, in a stunning second reversal, the poet shifts to the lyric present, concentrating the entire Alice experience in a central three-line stanza that is as concise as it is definitive:

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

The dream Alice is finally apotheosized, fixed in the firmament of the poet's poetic universe, reigning there as an emblem of wholeness and integrity perpetually set over against all that we ordinarily assume to be "real." The fifth stanza, echoing the prose ending of Wonderland, anticipates the reembodiment of this lyric vision in works of verbal art capable of making the experience new again and again for "children yet" (both the children to come and those who remain childlike) who listen attentively. As time—that other and more transient dream—moves on, days go by, and other summers die, and we drift down the irreversible stream of time, we can, the concluding stanzas assert, by an act of poetic faith, linger in—await, harken to, renew, take hope from—the "golden gleam" embodied in narratives inspired by an extraordinary visionary experience.

IV

In their conventionality and deceptive simplicity the Alice frame poems no doubt lend themselves to neglect or misreading. My point is simply that the central tales, however, brilliantly achieved, are not the whole story of the Alices. The dream tales themselves simply interrogate a reality that is revealed, over and over, as incapable of yielding answers. Their purpose, unlike that of the usual fairy tale, is disenchantment with reality as we normally perceive it, that is, with the reality "grown-ups" accept and seek to exploit out of one or another neurotic impulse. Like certain types of myth, the Alice dream tales serve as inverse social charters, subverting our everyday notions of what is important, portraying worlds of potential madness that close in on Alice inexorably, leaving her nowhere to turn. The great danger to which Alice, like every other human being, is exposed (physical extinction is never felt to be an imminent threat in either dream) appears in the pathological behavior that she observes in the dream characters: cowardice in the White Rabbit, furious passion in the Queen of Hearts, calculated aggression in the Red Queen, evasive conformity in the White Queen, melancholy resignation in the Gnat, self-pity in the Mock-Turtle, insouciance in the Gryphon, arrogance in Humpty Dumpty, madness in the Hare and Hatter, sterile inventiveness in the White Knight, and so forth.

The danger that imperils Alice as she grows up is a fatal loss of courage, simplicity, and openness through succumbing to the spiritual death represented in the various dehumanizing forms that she encounters in her dreams, which are ultimately messages from Alice to herself. Her heroism consists in preserving her innate decency against the confusions and dislocations of her dreams through the courtesy and courage that her sister perceives in her dream behavior and that she manifests in her steadfast refusal to submit to absurd or threatening situations.

Carroll's unsentimental view of human nature is pointed up in the realistic inner frames. They show the seeds of spiritual death to be latent even in the innocent Alice: at the opening of Wonderland in the form of boredom, self-pity, and an impulse to regressive withdrawal; in Looking-Glass in the form of role-playing, manic aggressiveness, and ambition ("Let's pretend we're kings and queens"). Even the child harbors disturbing potentialities ("Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone!"). The frame poems lead us into, through, and out of this dark central vision, providing the perspective that enables the reader to judge the "mistery of pain," as Joyce glosses the dream world of the Alices, and thereby converting the potential nightmare of ordinary existence into a profoundly instructive comedy. It is by their means that we cross the threshold from irreality to reality, from spiritual sleep to intense wakefulness, returning, if we have read the tales attentively, with our vision cleansed. To be awake in the usual sense, the Alice books tell us, is to dwell in an absurd kingdom absentmindedly presided over by the Red King sleeping his fatal sleep. To be truly alive we need to dream the Alice dream—to perceive, nurture, and transmit a vision rooted in the heart's deepest desire.

SOURCE: "Dreams of Power in Alice in Wonderland," in Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, Cornell, 1990, pp. 55-61.

[In the following excerpt, Thomas explores the themes of power and linguistic mastery in Alice's dreamworld.]

I do hope it's my dream and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream.

—Alice

Lewis Carroll's dream-child Alice dreams of the adult world as a chaotic, crazy realm, but also as a territory she wishes to enter and possess as her own. Dickens's Scrooge turns that dream wish around. He dreams of his childhood innocence and desires to repossess certain features of it in his old age. Common to both dreamers is the wish to bring the experience of childhood together with that of adulthood, to see life whole, to transform what threatens to be disjointed and meaningless into a coherent narrative rather than a series of timeless moments, as Wordsworth sought in The Prelude. Scrooge and Alice want to take possession of time, and they begin to do so by taking control of the dreams that threaten to dominate them. In both cases, this take-over is an empowering and curative act for the dreamer, as the endings of their two dream narratives reveal. Both end with the dreamers' accession to power, an achievement that is made possible when they translate their mysterious dreams into a language of political or economic mastery.

Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) both question whether Alice "belongs" to another person's dream or the dream belongs to her. The answer is contained in Alice's response to her dreams when she awakens from them and takes verbal control over them. The Alice books are often read as political or psychoanalytic allegories. But their politics and psychology are both joined in their concern with the power of language. In her dreams, Alice is repeatedly faced with linguistic challenges—contests of storytelling, riddle guessing, remembering a rhyme, interpreting a confusing text, identifying herself, or simply engaging in an argument. These contests usually take place between Alice and some figure of political authority, such as a king, a queen, a duchess, or a judge. And the power of those figures invariably rests in their mastery of some verbal maneuver or trick. The connection between the exercise of power and the control of language is made quite explicit to Alice in her conversation with the masterful figure called Humpty Dumpty. "When / use a word," he tells Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," Alice responds, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," Humpty Dumpty corrects her, "which is to be master—that's all."

Language is a game of political mastery, and it is presented to Alice in her dreams as just that. When she is told by "the chorus of voices" that she is better off saying nothing because language is too valuable to squander, being worth "a thousand pounds a word," she responds by thinking to herself, "I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall." At this point, Alice begins to acknowledge that the value of language and the mastery it offers to the speaker are the subjects of her dream and the basis of her identity. But it has taken her a long time to realize this. A word is worth a thousand pounds, and as Freud would quite plainly say in The Interpretation of Dreams, the pictorial images of any dream will grant the dreamer a purchase on them only when they are converted into the currency of language. The images of Alices's dream are constantly trying to silence her, and as long as she says nothing, she will be powerless to own or disown those images. This is what she dreams about, and what many of the dispossessed dreamers in nineteenth-century fiction dream about. When Freud described his method of dream interpretation as the "translation" of the images of our dreams into language, he also described the task set before Alice in her confusing dream of Wonderland.

Early in Wonderland, Alice feels as if she is lost in a book of fairy tales. This idea leads her to express an important wish: "There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one." Being grown up is defined here as writing a book about oneself, as opposed to being "in" a book written by someone else. And if Alice in Wonderland can be construed as a dream about growing up, it construes growing up as taking authority over one's own life story, as writing a book "about me." Alice's escapes from certain verbal and physical structures form the central episodes of her dream. She is continually being imprisoned in and breaking out of a room or a house or a joke or a poem in which she does not fit. This pattern also forms the larger structure of the text. The whole adventure begins when Alice drifts off to sleep because the book that her sister was reading had no pictures and no conversation. Alice escapes from the mastery of this text by "falling" into the images of her own dream and then arising to tell her own story. When Alice wakes to recount that story to her sister, she provokes the sister to dream the very same dream. But the sister's version of it ends with a significant difference—a vision of Alice as a grown woman telling "many a strange tale" of "the dream of Wonderland long ago" to a group of children, "remembering her own child-life." The dream becomes the book "that you have just been reading about," a book of Alice's own which replaces the one that was being read to her. In Wonderland, Alice moves from a child being told a story to a young woman telling her own story, remembering the images of "her own child-life." She converts her dream into a book about herself.

The episode within the story itself which most explicitly dramatizes this point is the Mad Tea Party. There, the sleeping Dormouse is clearly intended as an image of Alice. Like her, the Dormouse is both present at the party and absent from it because it is alseep and dreaming throughout the event. The significance of the episode lies in its confrontation of Alice with a narrative problem: time has been "killed" here; it is always the same time, always the present. There can be no progress, only eternal repetition and confusion. As Freud would later indicate, this sense of the eternal present is a characteristic of dreams. The temporal confusion springs in part from the absence of narrative time. The dream expresses its logical connections not by sequence but by simultaneity and juxtaposition, combining recent memories with old ones. The task of the dreamer, therefore, is to reconstruct the narrative connections that have thereby been obscured in the dream work.

After Alice detects the pattern of the constant movement of guests from seat to seat around the table in a never-ending tea party, she takes up this task within her dream, inquiring what happens when they all get around to the "beginning" again. The Mad Hatter suggests at that point in the conversation that they "change the subject," and he asks Alice to tell them a story. This exchange implies that part of the "work" of this dream is to "change" the dreaming subject by making her into a speaking subject. The dream of Wonderland eventually serves to bring Alice to a place where she can end the risk of madness and confusion by telling the story of the dream. Then she can answer the question that the dream poses to her over and over again: "Who are you?" But at this point, Alice claims to have no story to tell, and the sleeping Dormouse is called upon to do the telling instead. Alice is not yet prepared to tell her story; she is not yet in possession of it. So the Dormouse replaces her in this function and becomes a double for her. He tells her story.

When the mouse is awakened and begins to spin a story out of the confusion of its dream, that story turns out to be a coded version of Alice's dream as well. The mouse's story concerns three children (one of whose names is an anagram for Alice) who lived in a well of treacle (Alice's adventures began when she fell down "what seemed to be a very deep well"). But the tale soon becomes a story about language, as the children learn to "draw" from the well things that have a common linguistic property: "everything beginning with M"—mousetraps, the moon, memory, and finally, muchness. When Alice protests that one can't "draw" things like memory or muchness from a well, she begins to assert her speaking voice in the episode; but her protest also indicates a failure to recognize something equally important. She has not realized that the material drawn out of the well of a dream is a memory, and it has a logic that the dreamer imposes upon it through recollection in language. Alice does not yet recognize this story as a coded version of her own experience—as her dream to master and to tell. "If you can't be civil," the Dormouse challenges her as she interrupts him with complaints about the truth of his story, "you'd better finish the story for yourself." "Finishing the story" is defined here as not being "civil"—not obeying, that is, but commanding. This is precisely what Alice eventually will do, but not yet. She will finish the story for herself and command its characters when she declares it finished at the trial. She will do so again when she wakes up and tells it as her story to her sister just before she takes her tea at home. But first, Alice must see that this dream is about her ability to be the master of her words; she must draw them from the well of her own desire and finish her story for herself.

Many of Alice's adventures in Wonderland are trials she must endure in which the control over her own body, her own desires, or even her own psychic health depends upon her ability to interpret coded, confusing information. An actual courtroom trial, presided over by political figureheads whom she must defy, therefore, is an appropriate culmination to Alice's adventures in Wonderland. The key piece of evidence in the trial, brought against the knave accused of stealing, is a document apparently without meaning, without signature, and without author. The document turns out to be another series of verses that weave a confused narrative, the characters of which are pronouns with no specific referents, identities that tumble together in nameless ambiguity. Like Alice's confusion before the caterpillar's inquiries about her identity, the confusion of the poem continues throughout until it ends with a pronouncement about the impossibility of deciphering it: "For this must ever be / A secret kept from all the rest, / Between yourself and me."

This mysterious document repeats the intepretive problem of the entire dream and is, therefore, the central "text" of it. Knowledge of the secret may be had "between yourself and me," in the place where the self recognizes and defines its difference from the other. Alice is right when she declares that there is no meaning in the text. The meaning resides in the one who assigns meaning to it, the one who tells the secret. The king will attempt to do just this. He explicates the document by identifying certain of its pronouns with the defendant, testing how well the words of the text "fit" the characters in the plot as he has told it. Assigning this significance to the words will guarantee the knave's guilt and simultaneously preserve the king's authority. The king's power is defined here as an interpretive authority. He seeks to impose a meaning on a text that has no meaning in itself and to silence any other interpretation of the case. This is the penultimate act in Alice's dream. The last is her take-over of the power and interpretive language of the king. She declares the figures of this trial to be "nothing but a pack of cards." This act usurps the interpretive power of the king because it recognizes, that like the poem, the dream is a text and the figures in it are figures—signs signifying something other than what they appear to be. They are part of a kind of political game, a language it is her responsibility to master. In order to be free from the power the dream holds over her, she must see that there is not an atom of meaning—or power—in those figures beyond what she confers upon them. When she realizes as much and acts upon the realization, Alice can awake and tell "these strange Adventures that you have just been reading about."

In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice's development is extended along just these lines. From the beginning of the sequel, Alice realizes she is involved in a world defined by game playing, a world of signification which she deliberately enters rather than falls into. She is not put on trial and interrogated by the figures in this world as she was in Wonderland; she tries and interrogates them. She does not refuse or interrupt the game of chess as she does the game of cards; she plays it and wins. She becomes a queen herself and puts the opposing king in check. The text repeatedly suggests that this self-assertion can occur only when Alice recognizes the linguistic aspects of her dream as political power plays. One of her initial acts in this dream is to take the pen from the White King and start "writing for him" in his own memorandum book. This act of mastery over the king's book is immediately followed by an act of interpretive mastery when Alice is confronted with another indecipherable poem just as she had been at the end of Wonderland (this time, the text is the "Jabberwocky"). Instead of being defeated by the text's apparent meaninglessness as she was at the trial, here she takes control over the words on the page. Alice holds the book up to the mirror, literally turning its words around; and though the book is "rather hard to understand," "somehow," Alice says, "it seems to fill my head with ideas." She may not be sure of what all those ideas are, but one thing is very clear to her about the content of this book: "somebody killed something." The one meaning that Alice can confer upon this text is that it is the scene of a life-and-death struggle—a place where somebody lives and somebody dies.

The dream of Alice and the metaphorical dream of life both present the same problems of desire, mastery, possession, and authority. One reason for the refusal to answer the question of whose dream it was at the end of the book may be that the book is an expression of Lewis Carroll's dream-child; it is the means by which he possesses the little girl Alice Lidell and tells her story. Carroll may be the still-threatening, still-dreaming Red King who competes with her for possession of the dream and her definition of herself. But the action of the Alice books moves toward the breakdown of that possibility and the refusal by Alice to be possessed, as is substantiated by the rules the text itself has set up for interpretation. The dream belongs to Alice because she has the last word—because she asks the question of ownership and mastery, because she expresses the desire. The Red King is check-mated by Alice; he is silenced in his sleep, and he is therefore only a part of her dream. He remains on the other side of the looking glass while she emerges into the realm of consciousness to assert her authority. At the end of Looking-Glass Alice becomes a figure of authority herself, in literary and political terms. The reversal that takes place in the looking-glass world for Alice is a completion of the action begun in Wonderland. The final question of this text is not who dreamed it but who tells it, who gives it—or withholds from it—its meaning, who writes the book about "me"? "The question is," as Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, "which is to be master—that's all."

SOURCE: "A Tale of Two Alices in Wonderland," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, 1991, pp. 29-44.

[In the following essay, which focuses on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Conroy discusses the connections between Alice's identity as a middle-class Victorian child and her dream experiences,.]

Thanks to the Freudian moment in modern literary criticism, it has been for years quite permissible to view the dream world presented to the reader in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as if it in fact bore some relation to actual dream structures and significances. While some have traced such structures rather hastily to the author's own psychology (a not inexplicable move given what is known of the author, perhaps), the more fruitful vein of inquiry has focussed rather upon the oneiric quality within the text itself, and has revealed its kinship with the mechanisms Sigmund Freud imputes to the dream work. At the same time, one finds critics who stress the way the Alice books confront and rework the cultural givens of Victorian childhood. The odd thing is, though, that very few readers of Alice in Wonderland have taken cognizance of the profound linkage between these two facets of the tale. A close look at the connection between the quasi-Freudian structure of Alice's dream and the process of growing up and socialization that constrains the dreamer will improve the chance of finding the zone of reference of the character in Wonderland who is in some ways the most elusive of all: Alice herself.

Readers' initial glimpses of Carroll's fictional protagonist have generally revealed a thoroughly conventional, almost blank young girl, who seldom acts but often comments blandly on the action, and who appears to be Wonderland's "real-life" character largely by default. She is shunted here and there throughout Wonderland, and of course blunders in by falling down the rabbit-hole in the first place. Her general state is one of bemusement at best. She asks of the Cheshire Cat:

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

I don't much care where—" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go." said the Cat.

This exchange is indicative of Alice's indecision. Her function seems to be to serve as a locus for the otherwise disparate activities, and to register the appropriate shock and surprise at the things that are thrown at her. Thus it is that her most active role seems to be that of impartial witness. When the King, Queen and executioner are debating whether to chop off the head of the Cheshire Cat, all three appeal to Alice to settle the question. Characteristically, she refers them to the Duchess, since it is her cat. She is also a witness in the trial of the Knave of Hearts; and again she at first takes no position, has nothing to report.

Alice is as much of a cipher as the other creatures in Wonderland, perhaps more so since at least the other creatures suggest a positive signification, whereas Alice comes across as a negative signifier: a normative void, perhaps, but still a void. Clearly there is more to Alice than this: she is, after all, the heroine of Dodgson's book. With this fact in mind, it may be that even the apparent blankness that is the Alice of Wonderland can be read, and as blankness is itself a clue to the Alice who dreamed the other Wonderland creatures as well as herself.

That Wonderland may be read psychoanalytically is now a given of the criticism of the Alice books. There has been considerably less attention given to the way the dream-structure of the first book dictates the presentation of Alice's character, however. Critics who have no trouble deciding that Alice's dream bears most of the earmarks of dreams in general tend to forget that in assessing the curiously aseptic Alice the reader confronts within that dream. Even Empson, so useful in other ways, fails one here, calling Alice "the most reasonable and responsible person in the book" and letting it go at that. Other critics tend to perceive the protagonist on her own dream terms as the Victorian victim of outside forces, of the violence represented in the Wonderland world. Even Nina Auerbach, who understands that Alice's "demure propriety . . . may have led readers to see her role .. . as more passive than it is," still reduces most of the tension in her dream to infantile introjection, by focusing on the cannibalism among the animals in Wonderland.

As useful as these interpretations have been, they tend either to reduce Alice to a mere product of outside forces or a compendium of sexual symbolism. To account best for what is active in Alice's character, we have to go deeper than these analyses have been content to go. Alice is in fact a quite active character in at least two ways that will detain us here: she is active in constructing her dream work; and on its evidence, she is also active in confronting the adult who is already urging her to join it. She is far from eager to do so, and her resistance provides much of the tension in her story. The fact that desiring not to grow up may be interpreted as preferring passivity to activity only serves further to complicate Alice's conflicted relation to growing up and to socialization. The very instability of Alice in Wonderland—the way she grows and shrinks by turns—may be one of her few significant features. She is, indeed, so very conflicted that it may seem as if there were two Alices here, not one. If so, it should not surprise that a dream is used to present this conflict; for in a dream, there are always two subjects anyway.

Theorists of the dream have acknowledged this doubleness for a long time. Roughly speaking, the distinction can be rendered in terms similar to the conventional literary one between the "I" who narrates a given story and the "I" whose experiences and actions are narrated within the story: a distinction between the sujet de l'énoncé and the sujet de l'énonciation. Of course, in these linguistic cases, the difference is chiefly temporal. The "I" who says "I went there last week" is a week older than the "I" being discussed. With a dream, the distinction between the dreamer and the person's dream-image is almost of the same sort—but not quite. For her the disjunct is not only formal but also symptomatic.

As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan formulates it, a dream is a message for which the dreamer is at once sender and receiver. When this message is transmitted, its form is deliberately distorted so that the receiver cannot fully comprehend what the sender has produced. Dreams alleviate the anxieties of a subject's night-thoughts without producing too direct, and therefore unacceptable, a version of them; otherwise, the dreamer awakens. As the unacknowledged fulfillment of a repressed wish (or deflection of a repressed anxiety), the dream-message must make such wishes and anxieties unreadable, largely by removing such feelings from the figure of the dreamer's "stand-in" and investing them instead elsewhere. This move is essentially the "displacement" in Freudian displacement and condensation. It is by this bad faith that the dreamed Alice can always be quite properly appalled at the grotesque spectacle which Alice the dreamer is busily producing. The method by which a dream-message "jams" its own reception results in a split in the sujet; it also represents, in this case as well as any other, an already existing split, a tension within the dreamer.

There are, in other words, two Alices in Alice in Wonderland: the one who acts in the fantasy and the one who dreams it, performer and playwright/director. Alice the dream-image, by herself, does little and means little; but Alice the dreamer produces everything and intends more than she, or her creator, may know. But what does she intend? Since we have already granted that the dreamed Alice is more decoy than character, we need to approach that question not by looking at her directly, but first by observing the other creatures in Wonderland, and Wonderland itself.

We get some hints throughout the text that events in Wonderland have correlates in the world beyond Wonderland, in the familiar tricks memory plays on the dreamer. Her pool of tears may recall the British seaside, for instance, or the jurors she upsets with her skirt may put her in mind of gold-fish spilling out of a bowl. In addition, though, to these innocuous echoes, which have something of the air of a private joke, there are more importantly the school lessons Alice tries frantically to remember in an attempt to establish another glimpse of normal life. School is a motif throughout Alice, not only because as a young girl Alice goes to school, but also because it is so key to social training of the young. It is significant that even Alice's dreamed stand-in, when called upon to recite the Isaac Watts poem "Against Idleness and Mischief," confuses the words: "her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do." Indeed they do not: the "busy bee" of the Watts poem, industriously improving her cell, becomes a crocodile who "welcomes little fishies in, / With gently smiling jaws." A poem such as this was a weapon in the Victorian arsenal of good breeding. The third stanza, for instance, runs: "In works of labor or of skill, / I would be busy too; / For Satan finds some mischief still / For idle hands to do." In radically misconstruing the words of that poem, Alice is miscoding the message it contains as well. Yet her misreading seems to take place outside of herself, in a voice not her own. Even where the dreamed Alice threatens to confront the anxieties of the dreamer more directly, an alibi saves her.

The alibi also works where Alice is called upon by the Caterpillar to recite "You Are Old, Father William," which comes out as a parody of the Robert Southey poem "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them." The original is a counsel to moderation and respect for the Deity, which takes the form of a catechism: the young man asking questions and the old man offering wise and eloquent answers:

"You are old, Father William," the young man cried,
"And pleasures with youth pass away;
And yet you lament not the days that are gone:
  Now tell me the reason, I pray."
"In the days of my youth," Father William replied, "I remembered that youth could not last;
  I thought of the future, whatever I did,
That I never might grieve of the Past."

In Alice's rendition the old worthy becomes a rather sinister figure of fun, offering to sell the young man some ointment he claims makes it possible for him to turn somersaults. In the final two stanzas he becomes belligerent and threatening: "I have answered three questions and that is enough," he announces, and tells the boy to "Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!" The catechetical format, satirically recast by Dodgson, becomes a point of aggressive struggle rather than a scene of instruction. The warm, paternal authority figure of the Southey poem has become a thoroughly repulsive ogre, especially by the end.

In addition to Dodgson's satirical points, which become quite obvious once the originals can be compared to the versions he makes up, the scenes present the clearest danger to the fragile integrity of Alice's dream. For a start, these are some of the few moments before the dream's climax where the dreamed Alice is doing something; and whereas a faux pas committed at the Tea Party or the Croquet Game can seem like trouble with alien Wonderland ways, here these poems present themselves explicitly as part of her schooling. In failing, first for herself and then under orders from the Caterpillar, to recall and transmit them, she distorts their pedagogical message: the injunction to maturity.

Again, though, in each instance of this distortion, the agency of the distortion is displaced; onto the words themselves, for example. The Caterpillar, in a way a Father William figure himself, chides her for reciting it incorrectly:

"That is not said right," said the Caterpillar.

"Not quite right, I'm afraid," said Alice timidly: "some of the words have got altered."

By using the passive voice, Alice deflects responsibility to some alien force for misconstruing the words, thus retaining the split in the sujet and allowing the dream to continue. Thus have two messages, in the Caterpillar scene, been successfully distorted: first the pious message of the Southey poem is twisted by the dreamed Alice, and then the fact that she has done it on behalf of the dreaming Alice is also displaced.

The striking thing about these poetry recitals, though, is chiefly the rarity of Alice taking center stage within the dream. Her more usual stance is a reactive one: and at least during the Caterpillar scene, even the recital is something she is called upon by someone else to perform. More characteristic are the many scenes where Alice tries to conform to the pointless social rituals of Wonderland (always with limited success), and confronts the grotesque authority figures those rituals feature.

Those authority figures, who tell her where to go and what to do, are indeed grotesque: the enormous Duchess; the Queen of Hearts; the Mad Hatter; even the Caterpillar, imperiously smoking his hookah. They pursue illogical and obsessive enterprises with adultlike precision and logic. (The figure Alice follows down the hole at the outset, the White Rabbit, exemplifies both the precision and the illogic of the adult world, with his obedience to a tyrannical timepiece.) The Cheshire Cat, who tells Alice it does not matter where she goes, is the exception to the rule here; and indeed, Alice is eager to conform to rules in general throughout Wonderland, even as she wonders how to escape. Similarly, the social games such as the Tea-party of the Croquet match find Alice eager to join in; yet the illogic of them puzzles her. She unburdens herself to the Cheshire Cat about the Croquet Game: '"I don't think they play at all fairly . . . and they don't seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them.'" She goes on to remark "how confusing it is all the things being alive." Alice here is objecting to the use of live flamingoes and hedgehogs by the court in their game; and so outré is this behavior that Alice cannot be thought churlish for her reluctance.

Her objections take the form of traditional English concern for rules and fair play. But it is noteworthy that such social rituals as the Croquet Game and the Tea-party are almost in the nature of rites of passage for entry into the world of adult authority. Croquet is something a member of Alice's class would surely want to learn; and indeed, when asked whether she can play croquet, she proudly says "Yes!" It could very well be that in drawing back from these events, Alice represents her dreamer's drawing back from socialization into the ranks of adults. But the stated reason is always some concern for the niceties of protocol. (It is a revered commonplace about children that they are always insistent on such niceties anyway, which may strengthen the plausibility of this concern as an alibi for opting out of such games.)

In the same fashion, the figures of authority also come in for distortion in the Wonderland world. Such distortion of those figures really works in two helpful ways here. First of all, distortion caricatures, and ridicule is surely an aim throughout this satirical text, whether one chooses to impute that aim to Alice the dreamer or Dodgson the writer; but secondly, it also conceals, and for Alice the dreamer (at least), that is an equally important aim. A character like the Duchess acts in a manner so unbecoming of her class and out of keeping with her moralizing speeches that she cannot be confused with a "real" Duchess except in name. (That "except" is crucial, though, because the tension between the characters as imaginary figures on the one hand and their symbolic status on the other is one way the dream-message can jam its own reception.) By her grotesquerie, the Duchess presents a sufficient variance from "real-life" authority figures the dreaming Alice would have known or heard of that, in being appalled, the dreamed Alice is not dissociating herself from the social hierarchy which the Duchess symbolizes through her titled name. At the same time, the overtly unpleasant if not hideous behavior of the Duchess distorts the fact that in her waking life, Alice is learning to emulate the people for whom the Duchess herself is a symbolic stand-in. Thus the question of Alice's relation to authority, in being raised, is effectively covered over by the same stroke: the Duchess, because she is so grotesque, appears not really to be a condensation of Alice the dreamer's desire, and since Alice seems not to be implicated in what the Duchess does in the first place, she does not really have to reject her either. She can object to the Duchess because she is an ill-bred person, not because she is a Duchess. (Indeed, Alice herself speaks of the day "[w]hen I'm a Duchess.")

Just as a Croquet match with odd rules cannot be a real Croquet game, so an ill-bred Duchess cannot be a proper Duchess. In each case, a potentially subversive reaction (on the symbolic or linguistic plane, at least) is also covered over by appealing to the status quo. Even when Alice contemplates stealing the Duchess' pig-baby—surely a transgression of the social order whether underground or above it—she reasons that "If I don't take this child away with me . . . they're sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?" (This dilemma is resolved in time, of course, when the baby changes into a pig.)

Since Alice the dreamer is who is effectively dispersed into these other signifiers in the first place, the dreamed Alice's shock at their behavior is at bottom one of recognition. But the fantastical setting allows Alice the sender to conceal the fact from Alice the receiver, even while revealing its symptoms. The dreamed Alice would then seem to be almost a decoy, a duplicitous sign, her fundamental desire made alien from her, displaced onto other signifying fields and then thrown back to her unwilling gaze. Even her constantly reiterated desire to get back to the garden could at least theoretically be served admirably by just waking up but the dreaming Alice does not wish to do so. Is it enough, though, merely to call the dreamed Alice a marker of some deliberate naivete of a dreamer unable to face what she herself has made?

That is only part of the narrative dynamic, and indeed as we showed above with the poems, the two Alices get further apart and closer together by turns throughout the text. Nor is it correct to assume that the dreamed is simply shocked by what the dreaming Alice produces. Although she is more reactive than active, and though her refusals are couched in conservative forms, her very gestures of refusal are threatening enough to the dream structure to make these suppressions necessary. There are several points where the alibi herself needs an alibi, in short.

The poetry recitals mentioned above are instances where the dream-image gets actively implicated in what the dreamer produces, always a threatening development. But the point where the two Alices get closest together is at the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Not surprisingly in this fairly plausible rendering of a dream, the closing of the gap between the two Alices brings about the dream's destruction.

When the King and Queen of Hearts first approach, Alice looks around, "eager to see the queen." At this point she is awed and reverent toward this prestigious couple, and even thinks herself "doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners." Yet even at this juncture, when the Queen of Hearts can be viewed as a figure of Alice's own displaced desire for social esteem, there is a subversive hint:

"My name is Alice, so please your majesty," said Alice very politely; but she added, to herself, "Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!"

This thought, of course, is a presage of the end of the dream; but at this stage, it is only a thought. Alice may not really believe it herself since she is obviously afraid enough of them not to say it aloud.

It is in the trial that these hints become fuller-blown realities. The trial proceeding is, of course, in a class by itself among social rituals. The other activities—the Quadrille, mealtime, Croquet, even school to an extent—operate as self-reinforcing sign systems. On the superficial level, they do not imply a social structure or a purpose but are simply ways of passing the time. A trial, on the other hand, has an overt function as social control: to confront a threat to the order and to contain or get rid of it. The dreamed Alice is only a witness to the trial, but it is arguable that the dreaming Alice is both the Queen of Hearts and the Knave of Hearts. These two characters of the Queen and the Knave represent obverse sides of Alice's own implication (unacknowledged) in the social order, both as subject to authority's rules and pressures, and as identifying herself with the authority. Because it commands Alice to give her evidence, the trial puts into question her status as witness, and hence also the epistemological status of what she has seen. Ironically enough, she cannot remain an observer once she is called as a witness. The dreamed Alice and the events of the dream are both beginning to totter: the dream will not last much longer.

Since the trial is the playing-out of Alice's entanglement in the process of socialization, it is small wonder that she is more of a nuisance here than anywhere else in the text. For one thing, she grows to the point where the king orders her out of the court, reading from his rule-book that those over a mile high must leave the court, according to rule forty-two:

"I'm not a mile high," said Alice.

"You are," said the King.

"Nearly two miles high," added the Queen.

"Well, I shan't go at any rate," said Alice: "Besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now."

"It's the oldest rule in the book," said the King.

"Then it ought to be Number One," said Alice.

Alice is able to talk back to the King himself, more cheek than she has displayed thus far. But here again, she scores him off on a point of procedure; the King has not played by the book. A potentially subversive move once more becomes a plea for the orderly conduct of business. However, Alice here has fought to remain in the courtroom, suggesting that what happens there is of some importance to both dreamed and dreaming Alices (even though Alice herself is not on trial).

Finally the court is about to settle the verdict when the Queen says: "Sentence first—verdict afterwards":

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!"

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.

"I won't!" said Alice.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

"Who cares for you?" said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

It is by this gesture that the card-people—the most fulsome symbols of authority in Wonderland—become truly empty signifiers; Alice has now effectively "deconstructed" her own dream, since it is only her belief in their symbolic power that has provided the tension of the dream. Her statement, now no longer kept to herself but made functional within the dream, is an act of de-mystification. The card-people are now clearly her own product, animated by her own desire and fear.

It is true that one view of this gesture would be that the dreamed Alice's statement "You're nothing but a pack of cards" represents the dreaming Alice's realization that she is indeed only dreaming. In that case, the fact that the card-people are only empty signifiers would mean that they have ceased to symbolize genuine authority figures to Alice, and so her rejecting of them could not be seen as a reflection of the authority structures they had seemed to symbolize. There may be a bravado in her statement that allows such a reading. But in the next paragraph the pack of cards rises in the air and flies down upon Alice. Although the cards be deprived of social legitimacy by Alice's impiety, they seem not to have lost their power to frighten her. In their move to subjugate her, they are not merely a "pack of cards" but some possibly internalized force of repression.

Their act is the symbolic equivalent of any situation where a class' claim to legitimate authority is shown up: the fallback for lost authority is always some sort of force. (The Queen of Hearts, of course, has not been loth to employ force throughout.) As she moves toward fulfilling Alice the dreamer's wish to be out from under the socializing process, the dreamed Alice has also caused her own most imminent (and immanent) peril; and the dream cannot continue. The unmasking of the authority structure's symbolic emptiness also endangers Alice's own existence. Thus, the attack of the cards does not have to be straightforward act of suppression; it rather indicates the depth of Alice's implications all along in the socializing process figured in Wonderland, and why it took her so long to declare it false.

The fact that the figures attack Alice after she has declared them parts of a game—a "pack of cards"—implies that although, yes, the authority figures are a fiction in a sense, they are also her fiction. In dreaming them, she has endowed them with what psychological power they have, and that power persists even though it seems to have been defused or de-mystified. Alice has attacked their legitimacy but not their psychological force, because among other things she herself is slowly joining their ranks.

But this process of socialization is not carried out by one person alone. Others strive to repair any damage to it for us, and this her older sister proceeds to do, in the crucial final pages of the text.

Upon awakening, Alice recounts to her sister the curious dream she has had, "all these Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about:"

and when she had finished, her sister kissed her and said, "It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your tea; it's getting late." So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

The narrative focus then shifts to Alice's sister. Again, Alice becomes the character in a dream, but it is her sister's daydream ("after a fashion"). Alice seems physically present: "the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tone of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head." Thinking of Alice recalls the dream the sister has just heard described, and strangely the sister begins imagining the characters of Wonderland as Alice has related them. She seems to hear the March Hare and the Queen of Hearts, the Gryphon, the pig-baby and the Duchess. In a scene, two movements are delineated here: on the one hand, Alice's dream seems to be internalizing itself in her sister, becoming more "real"; on the other hand, since even the telling of a dream alters its contents in some way, Alice's dream is now twice domesticated, now that her sister is imagining what Alice in her waking state reported. It is not surprising that the characters are rendered in a rather elegaic manner as they file past:

she knew she had but to open [her eyes] again, and all would change to dull reality .. . the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheepbells . . . and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farmyard—while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's heavy sobs.

The fantasy of Alice, as dreamed by her sister, is banished now by "dull reality," a move which, though sad, seems necessary. (Reality may be dull, but it is still reality.) Her sister's dream, because it is a daydream, recognizes its own nature as fantasy, and in that recognition it succeeds only in abolishing the dream of Alice. However, Alice's dream is then reborn, in a final domestication that her older sister prophetically imagines:

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman;... and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long.

Just as those things of a child are put away as Alice's dream fantasies yield to dull (but safe) reality, so the child Alice herself is finally replaced with a vision of the adult Alice, who in telling her dream story integrates it fully into the common cultural heritage. The vision of Alice's sister both preserves the fantasy and makes the Wonderland adventures, so disturbing as dreamt, into elements of a future social ritual: a story to be told to succeeding generations of children. The dream has not been simply annulled, rather "co-opted."

We as readers may be in much the same position as Alice's older sister, reading a description of a fantasy and feeling content to appreciate it as a curious story. No doubt there is a certain comfort in treating a dream as a "story told upon awakening." Once a dream is retold, it ceases to signify the immediate tension of the subject encountering fear or desire; it becomes merely narrative. It is only as a story told upon awakening that Alice's dream, freed of its subversive overtones, can be incorporated into affirmative culture. (The general tendency to treat the Alice books as amusing children's stories and not much more would suggest the sister's prophecy is fulfilled.) That we can sense it is something more than simply a curious story owes not only to the evident satire of some of the sequences, but, as I have been arguing, to the dream format of the story as well.

Like all dreams, even daydreams, there is distortion in domestication; and in the daydream of Alice's sister, the Wonderland adventures lose in truth what they gain in transmissibility. To the extent this happens, the dream returns to the surface level and the creatures and rituals become truly "empty forms." Thus is the sister's daydream Dodgson's way of retaining his child's fantasy without its disturbing possibilities: taming that begins with her sister's kind gesture of brushing from Alice's face the dead leaves, those last visible remnants of her dream.

SOURCE: "The Alice Books and Lewis Carroll's World," in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 3-12.

[Rackin is known as an authority on Lewis Carroll. In the following essay, he places the Alice books in their Victorian social context.]

This study rests on the premise that appreciating Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1862-72) does not require extensive knowledge of their historical setting. Their continuous popularity among large and varied audiences for the past 120 years shows how accessible they are: lay readers seeking to experience and understand their power need not acquire a vocabulary of outdated words and unfamiliar historical facts, of obsolete concepts and attitudes. This does not mean, however, that the Alices are unrelated to their original cultural matrix: like all other artifacts, they are products of their era, bearing inscriptions of numerous transactions with the material and ideological contexts from which they first emerged. So while the Alices provide readers with what often seems a glorious escape from time and place—from historical context itself—some of their most memorable effects depend on tangible connections to their specific historical milieu.

However, because Lewis Carroll's world of the 1860s bears many resemblances to middle-class life in developed countries today, these connections are often relatively easy to understand and appreciate. In their daily lives, Carroll and his first readers experienced intimately the changes produced by industrialism, laissez-faire capitalism, and limited representative democracy, and familiar features of that familiar context often appear in Alice's dream fantasies. The sense of life in an unregulated, rapidly expanding, free-market economy in a secularized and fragmented society whose various power arrangements, competing classes, goals, and values are rapidly changing in response to numerous technological, economic, demographic, and political changes is a sense of life we share with Carroll and his contemporaries. Indeed, because the Victorian bourgeoisie were experiencing our world in its nascent state and because many of them still knew directly and yearned earnestly for another, much slower-paced, more coherent world of serene certainties and secure social values, their reactions to such unprecedented change are frequently fresher, more passionate, and more vivid than are our comparatively blasé or resigned reactions to similar cultural phenomena.

When, for example, Alice discovers herself in a looking-glass railroad carriage, modern readers should find the scene's references to the details of public rail travel generally familiar. Even more familiar will be the scene's hyperbolic representations of time as an industrial construct, of time's ridiculous but actual connection with money and by extension with a frenzied getting-and-spending capitalist system—a dream subject directly relevant to the wide-awake anxieties suffered by Victorians as a result of the rapid expansion of consumerism, a cash economy, machinery, and mechanically measured time as dominant forces in their daily lives. Taken together, the extremely fast-paced Alice adventures caricature a paradigmatic shift in the very conception of time, a shift greatly accelerated in the nineteenth century by major discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology, and by technological achievements like the rapid development during the first half of the Victorian age of the factory system, railways, steamships, and telegraph lines—four of the period's many contributions to commerce, transportation, and communications that radically changed the relations between time and space and the way people live in them (a central topic of the Alices).

The rapidity of change occurring almost everywhere during the period, the dizzying pace of life in a multifarious, mechanized mass society is reflected in Alice's fast-paced, crowded, discontinuous dream adventures. So too is the sense of speedy motion, not for the sake of progress toward a definitive goal, but simply for its own sake. Thus, the Red Queen's frequently quoted response to Alice's assertion that "in our country .. . you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing" is especially relevant to the empty bustle of urban existence in Carroll's mid-Victorian England, an England suddenly coming to question its own faith in inevitable progress and the benefits of mechanical invention. "Now, here," says the Queen, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

"Tickets, please!" said the [railway] Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everyone was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.

"Now then! Show your ticket, child!" the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together ("like the chorus of a song," thought Alice), "Don't keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!"

The anxious dream-satire of the Looking-Glass railway scene is directed, in part, at the improbable regimentation and commercialization of what was until then considered beyond such strict mechanical control and quantitative measurement. In Alice's dream of the railroad carriage, time and space are measurable by a new mechanized, monetary standard. Money, not inherent worth, now determines value; now "time is money" (the insubstantial "smoke alone," according to the awe-inspired consumers in Alice's carriage, "is worth a thousand pounds a puff!"). Tickets the size of human beings represent with surreal clarity the way various social and commercial institutions, like mass transportation, had during Carroll's childhood and youth grown to the point of dwarfing, dominating, even crowding out the people they were meant to serve, quickly turning the recent masters of the machines into the machines' clockwork "chorus" of harried, cramped, but worshipful servants—a process that deeply troubled many intellectuals among Carroll's earnest contemporaries, including the famous literary prophets of social disaster, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Carroll's friend John Ruskin.

The frantic railway scene is but one example of the numerous allusions in the Alices to the mechanization, commodification, and acceleration that were transforming Victorian life. The first character Alice meets is the harried White Rabbit, a desperate slave to his watch and busy schedule. Moreover, many of the humanoid creatures in her adventures are actually mechanical things playing mechanical parts—cards, chessmen, set figures from traditional nursery rhymes—inflexible cogs in an unprogressive, incomprehensible but perpetual, all-consuming social mechanism.

In the world's great age of machinery, England was the very center of the Industrial Revolution, "the world's workshop" and the epitome of the modern shift from manual to mechanical labor. Effecting an enormous transformation in the quality of everyday life, this triumph of materialism and machinery was celebrated by many Victorians, especially those in the newly rising classes; but it was at the same time often deplored in a variety of Victorian literary texts, perhaps most powerfully in the fantastic, often bitter satire of Charles Dickens (one of Carroll's favorite authors and popular among all literate classes), who in a series of best-selling novels in the 1850s and 1860s created a large, funny, but macabre gallery of caricatured Victorians dehumanized by the system into manufactured, automatic, scurrying things.

CULTURAL ANARCHY

In the same years as the publication of Alice's anarchic adventures, Matthew Arnold, the leading literary/cultural critic of his time, warned in his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy (1869), of the ways the British worship of machinery was quickly leading to anarchy: "Faith in machinery is . . . our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom but machinery? What is population but machinery? What is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organizations but machinery?"

For many conservative, establishment figures like Arnold and his fellow Oxford don Carroll (both were also graduates of Rugby as well as sons of upper-middle-class Church of England clergymen), "machinery" could be a heavily fraught symbol for the loss of traditional humane values, for cultural anarchy, even for imminent political revolution:

For a long time . . . the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to look beyond machinery to that end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put into practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy.

The Victorian mechanical revolution, then, was part of a broad context of interdependent revolutions—intellectual, scientific, economic, political, social, religious, artistic—in an age of revolution. The revolution in biological theory, generally attributed to Darwin but actually begun earlier in the century, generated among Victorian intellectuals a frightening vision of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson, In Memoriam) and of themselves as no more than one of countless, dispensable species in an inescapable biological mechanism governed (like laissez-faire capitalism) by survival-of-the-fittest instincts. Soon, numbers of earnest thinkers were seeing themselves and their follows as mere selfish, appetitive apes thinly disguised as altrustic, humane, respectable Victorian ladies and gentlemen. This materialistic, God-less vision profoundly affected philosophical thought, religious belief, and political action—almost every area of social concern. Moreover, the revolutionary notion of inevitable class warfare—linked to nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, mass industrialization, laissez-faire economics, a large and growing proletariat, urbanization, cheap labor, unionization, cycles of inflation and depression, and devastating poverty in the midst of immense wealth—created for the elite, privileged, once-secure class of Arnold and Carroll the frightening prospect of literal anarchy and revolution. (Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was based on firsthand observations of the deplorable conditions of workers in Manchester; with Karl Marx, Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, translated into English in 1850.) Despite several Parliamentary Reform Bills during the period that gradually granted voting rights and some political power to larger, less privileged segments of the population, and despite other social reforms that ameliorated the worst horrors of an unregulated capitalist system, England seemed for much of the period dangerously close to the political upheavals that had periodically rocked Europe since the days of the bloody French Revolution. "The fear of revolution," as one leading Victorian scholar puts it, "had almost become part of the collective unconscious."

A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

These revolutionary tendencies of the period and the anxieties they provoked often lie close to the surface of Alice's dreams. In a sense, the Alice books are about revolution in that they present a funny but anxious vision of an entire middle-class world turned upside down: two topsy-turvy, "backwards" places where the sensible child of the master class acts as servant, and the crazy servants act as masters; where inanimate, manufactured playing cards and chessmen have seized control, giving rude orders to a real, live, polite human representative of the ruling class that had but recently manipulated them as inert counters in games of her class's devising; where time itself will no longer "behave" its erstwhile governors so that in the Mad Tea-Party it is always six o'clock (quitting time for many factory workers); where the old, comfortable, seemingly unchanging social fabric has been so unravelled that each atomized creature now lives in its own, completely self-centered, disconnected world, freed from the fabricated "rules" and traditions of bourgeois community, rank and order.

The once sacrosanct, relatively static class system that had served, primarily, the interests of a small minority of privileged Anglican gentlemen like Arnold and Carroll was therefore deeply threatened by change in an increasingly materialistic, competitive society, increasingly driven by mechanical innovation and the volatile, mechanistic standards of the market. For adherents of the bourgeois ethos like Carroll or like his adored heroine Alice, daughter of Dean Liddell of Christ Church College, Oxford, such revolutions represented a threat to personal identity itself: "What will become of me?" is a question Alice often asks, in various forms, throughout her adventures. Given its historical context, the question deals with far more than her physical nature: it carries for her class broad and sinister implications. So too does Gilbert and Sullivan's hilarious comment on this social aspect of their revolutionary age as that age drew to a close: "When every one is somebodee, / Then no one's anybody!" (The Gondoliers, 1889).

Carroll's mature lifetime was passed in an age of burgeoning technology that rapidly increased the spread of new material goods, ideas, and ways of doing things; of unprecedented population concentrations in cities; of enormous factories and serious environmental pollution; of great shifts in the distribution of wealth and power; of Karl Marx's Das Kapital (the first volume, written in England, appeared in 1867) and the rise of English socialism; and, in general, of the zenith and incipient decline of the bourgeois hegemony in politics and culture. Beyond England's shores, it was also the heyday of the British Empire—arguably the greatest empire the world has ever known, but an empire already threatened by violent revolutions against imperialism as well as by peaceful but irreversible evolutions toward colonial independence (Canada, for instance, became essentially self-governing in 1867).

It was, moreover, the period of Freud's youth (Freud was 13 years old when Wonderland was first translated into German in 1869), of impressionism in the arts, of a growing fascination with dreams and other workings of the inner life—with what Walter Pater, the age's leading aesthetician, characterized just three years after the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as the individual "mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." At the same time, it was also the period that witnessed among the middle-classes a wide dissemination of earlier Romantic views of child psychology and of the child as the innocent, near-divine "father of the Man." These views, in turn, fostered a burgeoning body of children's literature (like the Alices) aimed at nurturing young readers' precious innate creative imaginations rather than beating out their natural savagery or filling their blank-tablet minds with didactic, cautionary tales.

It was, in addition, an age of intensified sexism and misogyny (critic and reformer John Ruskin's notorious "Of Queens' Gardens" [1864-71] is often cited as the paradigm of the patriarchal "woman's place in the home" and "on the pedestal" ideology that permeated the culture). But at the same time it witnessed the public emergence of successful, celebrated women intellectuals, among them the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And it was the first age of organized, revolutionary feminism—a feminism that in some ways overshadows that of our own period (John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women, a major philosophical formulation of modern feminism, was published in 1869).

Carroll's contemporaries also experienced a revolutionary crisis of faith perhaps unparalleled in modern history. Not only was the period plagued by bitter, destructive sectarianism among warring Christian denominations, it was also an age in which many of the best minds had already lost all religious conviction. It is of course no coincidence that in his 1869 indictment of his materialistic, mechanistic society, Arnold repeatedly uses such terms as faith, religious, and worship. Newly secularized, scientized England was, as Arnold suggests in a celebrated 1855 poem about faith and doubt, "wandering between two worlds, one dead, / One powerless to be born." For Arnold and many other mid-Victorian thinkers, the fear was that England, now bereft of its "dead" world of a common religious faith, an established church, and a secure system of mystified bourgeois values, was quickly becoming a totally secular political entity, nothing more than a collection of self-serving factions and individuals lacking any true vitality, any agreed-on center of transcendent belief and ethical principles. As Arnold writes in "Dover Beach" (1867),

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
  Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Soon, it seemed, England would be merely a free-floating political aggregate held together by nothing more glorious than money or (enlightened) self-interest, devoid of its once-cherished cultural and spiritual landmarks—a godless place not unlike the chaotic underground into which poor Alice falls in her first adventure, or the "backwards" world she discovers just behind the comforting bourgeois looking-glass.

VICTORIAN EARNESTNESS

Victorians are often noted, sometimes ridiculed, for their irrepressible optimism and earnestness. Despite the grave doubts generated by the massive revolutionary changes that characterized their age, many of them continued to believe passionately in progress and in the efficaciousness of their earnest efforts to make their world better. Arnold himself, as if obeying Thomas Carlyle's Calvinist injunctions to dispel doubt by hard work in the concrete world, became in middle age a reforming commissioner of public education. In earnest do-it-yourself manuals like Self-Help (1859), Lives of the Engineers (1861-62), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), Samuel Smiles became one of the period's bestselling authors by preaching to the lower-middle and working classes a no-nonsense, humorless gospel of personal industry and unabashed get-ahead, commercial success.

But Victorians also knew how to make fun of their own earnestness, their middle-class reverence for work, money, and social respectability, as well as numerous other foibles of their complex, disturbing world. A number of the writers cited here—Carlyle, Dickens, and Gilbert and Sullivan most obviously; the Brontës, Eliot, and Arnold in more subtle ways—are noteworthy for their humorous treatments of the most serious social issues of their day. Victorian literature includes a wide variety of other writers who showed their age how to laugh at itself—among them, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Lear, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, and the young George Bernard Shaw. The Alice books, like their earnest and very respectable author, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll), thus fit for another reason rather predictably into their historical context—an age of great comedy made in spite and at the expense of great earnestness. It should come as no surprise that the period ends with another earnest Victorian making wonderful, irreverent fun of respectability and earnestness, putting Victorianism in its final place, as he so often did, with epigrammatic and telling wit. Even in its title, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) sounds the keynote of this admirably earnest age of revolution, bourgeois anxiety, and playful laughter.