Jumat, 04 Maret 2011

Through The Looking Glass XI -- THE WASP IN A WIG

If you haven't yet read "The Wasp in a Wig" episode, and/or the publishers of your edition didn't deign to include it, read it here.

  1. A male wasp in an interesting choice for character.  The males are sting-less and impotent, especially compared to females, and so with chess kings and queens--except chess pieces are not so universally loathed as, well, wasps.
  2. It's unlikely that Carroll is the Wasp, at least by intention, like he was the Knight, as this Wasp is but a lower-class drone (indicated through his language, his species and gender, and even to a degree his wig) and Carroll prided himself on being a Victorian gentleman.  Martin Gardner posits that the Wasp acts as a ventriloquist's puppet here, voicing Carroll, as the animal's character and age, both particularly significant if taken in their close contextual proximity to the White Knight, so closely resemble Carroll and other characters whom he's "inhabited" through the book.
  3. PUN (one among so many, of course, but this one perhaps more subtle than the coming comb): This wasp has the newspaper--the paper, paper being, of course, the substance employed for the crafting of a wasp's nest.
  4. Yellow is a classic symbol for age.
  5. Word play: a lack of neck-bending, stiff-neck, and conceit.  Will Alice soon have the stiff-neck of a chess queen to go with the typically queenly conceit?  
  6. Contrast Alice's attitude going into the episode with that of her leaving at its conclusion.

The most important question is this:  Should the chapter have been suppressed at all?  Did Carroll ere, permitting as he did Tenniel to talk him out of its inclusion?

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