Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  “I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.

  With this, Carroll gives us a mathematician’s solution to the ancient unsolved riddle of the Cheshire Cat’s grin:

  RIDDLE: What kind of cat can grin?

  ANSWER: A Catenary.

  We are not yet quite done with the Cheshire Cat. If we revisit the classical and mythological allusions in this chapter, Carroll appears to link the smiling, enigmatic Cheshire Cat with the smiling, enigmatic Sphinx at Delphi. How does this figure into the story of Alice’s adventures?

  The Sphinx is closely linked to the oracle of Delphi in myth and in history. The largest single surviving sculpture discovered at the sanctuary of Delphi is a gigantic statue of a Sphinx that once stood on a pillar and guarded the sacred path that led to the oracle in the Temple of Apollo. The motto engraved above the temple’s entrance, “Know thyself,” provides a link to both the Sphinx and Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat.

  In classical mythology, the Sphinx—like the Cheshire Cat—poses riddles to unwary travellers at a fork in the road. Most famously, it encountered Oedipus, a hero whose tragic fate as a child had been predicted by the prophetess at Delphi. In an attempt to change that fate, his mother had abandoned her baby in the wilderness, but Oedipus survived, and was wise enough to answer the famous riddle of the Sphinx. However, he could not change his fate, because he remained confused about his identity. He was doomed because he failed to “know thyself.”

  Similarly, Alice is confused about her identity and finds she cannot make fully informed choices that will permit her to control her fate. Nor, despite her best efforts, can she save the abused baby from its fate of becoming a pig, and like Oedipus’s mother she abandons the pig-child in the wilderness.

  Original riddler: The Sphinx, as sculpted in marble circa 560 BC.

  Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. “I’ve seen hatters before,” she said to herself; “the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.

  “Did you say pig, or fig?” said the Cat.

  “I said pig,” replied Alice; “and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.”

  “All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

  “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”

  Also, just as Oedipus encountered the riddling Sphinx at a fork in the road, Alice encounters her riddling Cheshire Cat at a similar junction. There she discovers that no matter which road she chooses to take, she will end up at the same destination, because both paths lead to the same tea party. (A worse fate was to greet Oedipus at the end of his journey.)

  By means of his allusions to the Delphic oracle, Lewis Carroll was attempting to make one final point about Oxford. The ancient Delphic oracle, inspired by the sun god’s celestial fire, induced divine prophecy, whereas the Wonderland oracle’s domestic fire brought about sneezing fits. In Wonderland, inspired wisdom is reduced to cookery in the Duchess’s kitchen temple. And this was exactly Carroll’s view of Oxford’s new liberal academic system. He frequently described reforms to modernize and standardize teaching at the university as replacing scholarship with a very base form of cookery.

  One example of this is found in his novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in which Carroll has an old professor speak of the remarkable lack of inspired art and literature to be found in any of the great universities: “All the original genius … by which our fore-fathers have so advanced human knowledge, must slowly but surely wither away, and give place to a system of Cookery, in which the human mind is a sausage, and all we ask is, how much indigestible stuff can be crammed into it!”

  A SOCRATIC CAT The Cheshire Cat’s mythological identity as the Sphinx is intertwined with its identity on the philosophical level as SOCRATES (469–399 BC). Certainly, the riddling Sphinx had something in common with that ever-questioning philosophical gadfly. Then, too, the Sphinx is linked to the oracle of Delphi through the legend of Oedipus, while Socrates is linked to the oracle through Pythia’s proclamation “Socrates is the wisest of mortal men.”

  Socrates gained this reputation by questioning everyone and everything. The Cheshire Cat has a similarly inquiring nature. Socrates proudly described himself as a gadfly provoking the Athenian state—like a lazy horse—into action. In this he is comparable to the Cheshire Cat, whose floating head in the royal garden provokes everybody—including the King and Queen of Hearts as the heads of state. Socrates was sentenced to be executed, and so is the Cheshire Cat.

  Described by Plato as “homely, with a snub nose and protruding eyes,” Socrates might easily be said to resemble the Cheshire Cat. However, Carroll most closely links the Cheshire Cat to Socrates through his discussion with Alice about the nature of madness and dreams. This discussion is derived from Plato’s Socratic dialogue Theaetetus.

  Socrates: Was he a philosopher, or did he just dream he was one?

  In this dialogue, Socrates asks: “How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” It seems that the Cheshire Cat is the only creature to understand that Wonderland is a dream world and that madness is related to the dreaming and waking states of consciousness: “We’re all mad here.”

  Furthermore, the Cheshire Cat’s argument that dogs are sane and cats insane is resonant of another Socratic dialogue, in which Socrates presents an equally absurd logical fallacy that “proves” Euthydemus’s father is a dog. And in yet another dialogue, Phaedrus, Socrates—like the Cheshire Cat—establishes himself as an authority on insanity in a discussion of the idea of “divine madness” as the source of inspiration for poetry, prophecy, love and philosophy.

  In Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat gives Alice her choice of madnesses at this fork in the road: one path supposedly leading to the March Hare and the other to the Mad Hatter. This proves to be no choice at all. Fate has decided otherwise, and despite choosing one, she discovers herself in the company of both.

  She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house of the March Hare: she thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high: even then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself “Suppose it should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Hatter instead!”

  Chapter 7: A Mad Tea-Party

  “But what happens when you come to the beginning again?”

  A SOCIALIST TEA PARTY “ ‘Have some wine,’ the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.” This is a strange offer to make to the seven-year-old child who has just sat herself down at the table for a tea party. Offering to get a child drunk at a garden party is hardly something the upright Reverend Charles Dodgson would approve of. The offer is immediately nullified, but one must still ask why Lewis Carroll would choose to introduce wine into this fairy tale, unless it was to make a specific point or allusion.

  Just as Darwinian evolution was the target of Carroll’s satire in the Duchess’s kitchen, so the rise of the Christian Socialist Movement is being parodied at the table of the Mad Tea-Party. The movement was established in 1848 to address the grievances of the working class concerning voting rights, working hours, factory conditions, basic education and child labour. Among the most prominent Christian Socialis
ts were authors of socially conscious novels as well as popular Christian tracts, and many were also members of a secret Cambridge University society known as the Apostles.

  A MAD TEA-PARTY.

  There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

  The table was a large one, but the three were all 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.

  “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.

  As a caring Christian, Lewis Carroll had some sympathy for their views, but as a conservative he found their impassioned public debates hare-brained and a threat to the stability of the nation. In making them participants of the Mad Tea-Party, Carroll aligns them with the disastrous consequences (as he saw the American Revolution) of the Boston Tea Party.

  Carroll conceives Wonderland’s tea party as a mad symposium of quarrelling Cambridge philosophers belonging to the Christian Socialist Party—all of whom are avowed teetotallers. This explains why Alice, after being offered wine, is told there is none. Carroll’s little joke here is that this symposium (from the Greek for “to drink together”) is a philosophers’ (wine) drinking party, but the Christian Socialist philosophers’ (tea) drinking party is one entirely lacking in spirit. Also, in a phonetic pun on “Mad Tea,” Carroll further confirms his opinion of the Christian Socialist party as an “M.T.” party—or an “empty” party offering only empty promises.

  The Mad Hatter was CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819–1875), a Cambridge Christian Socialist, clergyman and author of numerous popular socially conscious novels. Kingsley’s vivid portrayal of working-class squalor in the clothing trade in novels such as Yeast: A Problem (1848) and Alton Locke (1850) awakened the middle classes to the tragic human consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

  Among these victims were the hatters. Widespread use of mercury in the shaping of hats resulted in dementia that often manifested in uncontrollable trembling and raving speech, like that of Wonderland’s Mad Hatter. “Mad as a hatter” was a common expression long before Carroll’s time, but we can easily appreciate why the ultra-conservative Carroll would wish to portray the excitable socialist Kingsley as a ranting and raving Mad Hatter.

  “I didn’t know it was your table,” said Alice; “it’s laid for a great many more than three.”

  “Your hair wants cutting,” said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.

  “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.

  “Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

  “Exactly so,” said Alice.

  “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

  “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

  Charles Kingsley: An excitable but not mad socialist.

  Kingsley was one of the few clergymen to embrace Darwinian evolution and introduce its ideas into his novels. He was the author of the immensely popular Water-Babies, a children’s book that was also a satire in support of Darwin’s theories. As already noted here, The Water-Babies depicts Sir Richard Owen (the Duchess’s cook) examining a water baby in a flask alongside his opponent in the evolution debate, Thomas Huxley.

  One very publicly disputed point between Huxley and Owen was whether the brains of apes had a hippocampus minor (now known as the calcar avis), which was thought to set human brains apart. Kingsley satirized the “great hippocampus question” in The Water-Babies as the “great hippopotamus test.”

  It seems likely that Carroll already had the Kingsley satire in mind when Alice initially mistakes the Mouse swimming in the primordial soup of the Pool of Tears for a hippopotamus. Although Carroll remained a sceptic on the subject, his library contained many books on or about Darwinian evolution. Furthermore, Carroll was sufficiently provoked by evolutionary ideas that he invented a board game called Natural Selection.

  “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

  “You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

  “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

  “It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

  The Hatter was the first to break the silence. “What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

  Alice considered a little, and then said “The fourth.”

  “Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!” he added looking angrily at the March Hare.

  Quadrangle of Trinity College, by William Westall and John Bluck, 1815: Most Apostles came from Trinity, King’s and St. John’s.

  Julius Hare: Clue is in the name.

  The Mad Tea-Party’s model for the March Hare was JULIUS CHARLES HARE (1795–1855), a leading Christian Socialist theological writer. Hare, who had met Goethe and Schiller in his youth, was a bibliophile with a vast library. He was a prolific author who—like the March Hare—was so painfully fond of hair-splitting digressions that he found it necessary to append a two-hundred-page footnote to one of his publications. Julius Hare’s maxim, “Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are,” might have been good advice to the Wonderland Alice in her own quest for identity.

  It appears that Carroll may have been “splitting heirs” in this characterization: Julius had an equally eccentric brother, Augustus William Hare, also a Christian Socialist, and a nephew, Augustus Cuthbert Hare, who read early drafts of Wonderland and was a common-room friend of Carroll’s at Oxford.

  “It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.

  “Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”

  The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”

  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,” Alic
e 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.

  The Dormouse, the third member of the Mad Tea-Party, was also a famous Christian Socialist: (JOHN) FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE (1805–1872). Through his thoughtful sermons and his writing, Maurice became a provocative and immensely respected Christian thinker, and was the founder of both the Apostles and, with Kingsley, the Christian Socialists. Indeed, Maurice’s book The Kingdom of Christ (1838) became the theological basis of the movement.

  Maurice’s other-worldly focus and mild-tempered nature are reflected in his portrayal as the narcoleptic Dormouse. The animal’s sleepiness is easily explained. The dormouse is a nocturnal rodent; its name is derived from the French dormir, thus “sleeping mouse.”

  Maurice believed that theology should be a source of unity, not a division, but—like the Dormouse stuffed into the teapot—this mild-mannered church mouse’s liberal principles got him into hot water with charges of heresy. However, after a lifetime of controversy, Maurice eventually became a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge.

  Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand you,” she said, as politely as she could.

  “The Dormouse is asleep again,” said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

  The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, “Of course, of course: just what I was going to remark myself.”

  “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

  “No, I give it up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”