Alice in Wonderland XV -- chapter 11 & 12: ALICE GROWS UP

Portrait of Alice Liddell,
by Charles Dodgson

The trial is the final scene before Alice awakes and book ends.  While there are some points of interest through the course of the trial, the real discussion begins at its completion with the few paragraphs of epilogue of the older sister's dream of Alice's dream.  It is here in this final moment that Carroll makes another anonymous appearance, this time seemingly to wave goodbye.

1. Wonderland is not a large place.  Nearly all of its characters are present in the trial, or appeared, also recently, at the croquet game.
2. Alice imagines the the animals out of the juror box will not survive, as surely as goldfish out of their bowl will not survive.  This is very much like the creatures of Wonderland and the "bowl" of Alice's dream.
3. Alice's growth through the second half of chapter 11 and through the end of the trial in chapter 12 is unmotivated by any contrivances of the dream.  She is growing on her own.  As Carroll controls the elements of the dream and Alice is growing independently of it and him, might this not symbolize the very maturing of Alice that Carroll dreads?  The Dream--his dreams of her, his wish for a different reality--will inevitably conclude.
4. In Carroll's eye, is Alice perhaps the guilty one--the one who committed, and as unwittingly as any Wonderland creature, the crime? tarts and hearts, and whoever stole them?
5. (42 is a bit of a magic number for Carroll and other writers, including Douglas Adams.)
6. The verses read by W. Rabbit (or maybe Herald/Harold?) is the second layer of parody of a near-thoroughly buried original song (below), the first of which was published by Carroll as "She's All My Fancy Painted Him."
7. Notice that in Tenniel's final illustration (of which there are 42, by the way) W. Rabbit has lost his costume, and the cards, with the exception of a few noses, have lost their personifications.
8. What is the determining factor (for it's not the trial) that wake's Alice?
9. Alice's older sister, I think, is channeling Carroll here at the end.  She re-dreams (remembers fondly, really) Alice's experiences and adventures, and is generally idealized by her.  Remember, this book was written as a gift for Alice.  The dream seems to me to be a dramatization of time spent together by Alice and Carroll.  Unfortunately, and no matter how beautiful, wonderful, confusing, or terrible, dreams end; and dreams like this tend to end most commonly when their subject grows up.  The beauty of a pleasant dream is that it is forever idealized (like Carroll's own idealization of it through the here-unnamed older sister) by she who had it.  Alice will remember it fondly forever, regardless of what may or may not happen through her future within reality.  (Interestingly, the way its all put together, and appropriately so, the dream is more Carroll's than Alice's, yet it is Alice who ends it.)

from John Shaw's booklet 

(I don't know more about it than this)

She's all my fancy painted her,

She's lovely, she's divine,

But her heart it is another's,

She never can be mine.

Yet loved I as man never loved,

A love without decay,

O, my heart, my heart is breaking

For the love of Alice Gray.

Drawing by Carroll in his hand-penned
copy of Alice's Adventures Underground

This portrait of Alice
was pasted into the
original book over
the drawing above.

Alice in Wonderland XII -- chapter 9: MORALITY LESSO/ENS

In such a reading as this of Alice in Wonderland, it's clear that a great deal of the reader is inscribed on/to the subtext.  I mentioned before that it's not always important what the author intended (if indeed he/she intended a subtext at all) at the writing of the text, but that an interpretation needs to temper itself at least somewhat against who the author is, and not go directly and flagrantly astray.  That said, I think there's a great deal we can learn--or guess, really--about Carroll as a person and how he viewed Alice, himself, and his relationship with her via these books.  I think it's important to remember that this first of two was written for Alice's entertainment and pleasure (more on the second when we get there).  If we assume he was successful, we can also learn a lot about Alice, whom Carroll likely knew better than most anyone else, as well as a--though likely at least partially skewed--perspective on what Alice thought of Carroll, or how Carroll hoped/wanted Alice to see him.

1. Alice assumes that a person's temperament is at least somehow connected to what they eat or are exposed to (nurture over nature).  This being the case, it makes sense perhaps that the baby boy was so ill-tempered, augmented of course by the ill temper of the others in the kitchen with him, affected as they all were surely by the airborne pepper.  It's only upon leaving the source of "hotness" that he calms and turns into a pig.  Maybe boys are simply polar creatures: hot-tempered or piggish.  So what happens when they're fed candy?
2. "When I'm a Duchess...."
3. Does the finding of morals in everything separate children from adults, or join or distance Carroll from Alice?  Does he moralize his tale or leave it to the reader to find the automatically intrinsic morals?  (Carroll said in his "The New Belfry of Christ Church Oxford," "Everything has a moral if you choose to look for it.  In Wordsworth a good half of every poem is devoted to the Moral: in Byron, a smaller portion: in Tupper, the whole.")
4. The making of the world go round is most commonly done in literature and song by Love.  So what of Minding One's Own Business (and might there be a riddle in the connection between it and Love amounting to "much the same thing")?
5. "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves."  Sense and Sound is Carroll's own development.
6. Once again, from a child's perspective, adults are all mad; their words are gibberish, their morals bologna, and their motives an utter conflux of misappropriations.  I love the literal realization of this here in the scene Alice shares with the Duchess.  By combination of this and a nightly observation of my family's house cat, Jesse (who feels it her duty to, in turn, accompany my children, in turn--the first until she falls asleep, at which point she offers a perfunctory lick to the face, and then moves to the second), the evident sanity of the Cheshire Cat has come to make a little more sense.  Adults often have a hard time with cats, because cats are independent, disobedient, haughty, etcetera--seemingly insane, really (I like my cat for this very reason: I don't have do anything but feed it!).  However, kids love cats.  Kids get cats.  At least my kids do.  I did when I was a kid.  There's nothing mysterious or insane about cats from a child's perspective.
7. The Gryphon is the emblem of Oxford's Trinity College.  It is also the mythical guardian of ancient goldmines and is meant as a symbol of utmost vigilance.  Finally, medievally it was a common symbol of the union between God and man (how so, I'm not really sure, but there you go).

New thought (new to me, anyway): The griffin pulls a chariot carrying Beatrice in Dante's Purgatorio, and the final lines of Paradiso run thusly (Longfellow translation): "Here vigor failed the lofty fantasy: / But now was turning my desire and will, / Even as a wheel that equally is moved, // The Love which moves the sun and the other stars."  This final line follows the same pattern as the Duchess' "Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"  Now that I'm looking, there are striking parallels between The Divine Comedy and the Alice books.  There are tours, guides, episodes underground, fits, bizarreries, torments, ecstasies, and so on.  Especially, there is a female character highly idealized by the author.  Thoughts?

Alice in Wonderland XI -- chapter 8: CALVINBALL or CROQUET?

The BIG QUESTION of chapter 8:  Yes, Alice enters a garden, and at the end of chapter 7 she even identifies it as the garden; but is this indeed the garden which she spied first through the little door?

I humbly acknowledge that these questions are asked remarkably inefficiently but declaim irresponsibly that I intend not to change them.

1. More (see question 2 on "The Great Ugly") on the importance of appearances here, as three cards--gardeners--frantically paint mistakenly-planted white roses red.  Is this a parallel case to that of the previous post?
2. Disregarding Tenniel's illustration, what does it mean to "be-head" a non-face-card (impertinent question)? 
3. What would be the difference between Alice laying on her face (contrary to what may be minimally proper) like the cards?  What are the cards--gardeners--attempting to do, really, by prostrating themselves?  This introduces an interesting issue (and this also ties into the next question): what is going on with the utter lack of variety when their backs are turned: "she could not tell whether they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children."
4. The general community of Wonderland is very diverse, and I've never thought of it as one inclusive group until now, perhaps fittingly, having just finished Jane Eyre.  Describe this community in terms of how it fits within the format of a typical Victorian region and/or countryside.  Which type of people perhaps have more substance than others, and what commentary is Carroll making?  (Grammatical aside (trick question, subject to grammatical subjectivity): is there a way to rewrite "what commentary is Carroll making" without splitting the infinitive, "is making," and without going into the dangerous waters of The Passive?)
5. Interesting choice of words: "How should I know?  It's no business of mine," which, of course, comes across as rude; couldn't she have simply referred (*another ridiculous verbal split*) to the impossibility of distinguishing them in such a state.
6. Apart from the primary argument at hand (in chapter, in book, in "series"), are the Alice books inappropriate for children?  Gardner humorously offers: "'I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts,' Carroll wrote in his article 'Alice on the Stage,' 'as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion--a blind and aimless Fury.'  Her constant orders for beheadings are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones.  Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation.  As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche.  My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis."
7. Is there any way for the King of Hearts to be other than timid in the face of his spouse?  (Poor man!)
8. What is Carroll doing to/with/by Alice when he writes her as contradicting, and effectively so, the Queen? Consider also that the Queen shifts from ordering the offing of her head to inviting her to play Croquet.
9. "The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot."  I expect there's a fair level of bigotry between the four suits of cards in the deck.
10. "Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!"
11. How do you suppose W. Rabbit feels now that Alice has been invited to play?
12. Is it such a "great wonder," as Alice believes, that there are any members of the deck of cards yet alive?
13. Notice the King's lack of ability--or authority--in the removal of the cat and his subsequent deferment to his wife.
14. What of the court's petition to Alice to solve their problem?

by Bill Waterson: Calvinball