Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded
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Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep “Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle—” and went on so long that they had to pinch it to make it stop.
“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” said the Hatter, “when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’ ”
“How dreadfully savage!” exclaimed Alice.
“And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone, “he won’t do a thing I ask! It’s always six o’clock now.”
A bright idea came into Alice’s head. “Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” said the Hatter with a sigh: “it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.”
John Duns Scotus: Despite the cap, he was known as the Subtle Doctor.
A SYMPOSIUM OF DUNCES Although broadly satirizing the Cambridge Christian Socialists, much of the philosophizing at the tea party relates to a very different tradition. A champion of the discipline of logic, Carroll was immensely proud of Oxford’s golden age of Scholastic philosophers—its famous thirteenth-century Schoolmen. And as the author of Symbolic Logic, a text that he laboured over for thirty years, Carroll saw himself as part of the intellectual tradition that over the centuries improved and advanced Aristotle’s system of syllogistic logic.
“Dodgson had to a certain extent missed his age,” wrote Thomas Banks Strong, a colleague of Dodgson’s, and eventual bishop of Oxford. “He ought to have lived in the Middle Ages in the palmy days of Scholasticism. His peculiar gifts of mind would … have enabled him to rout all other Schoolmen, and to produce subtleties and dialectical terms which would have beaten and confounded the whole of Europe.”
Strong’s opinion of Dodgson’s talents is especially compelling if we view the Mad Tea-Party as a satire of a philosophers’ symposium made up of Oxford’s three greatest medieval thinkers: John Duns Scotus, William of Occam and Roger Bacon.
The greatest of these three medieval Oxford Schoolmen, the Scots-born JOHN DUNS SCOTUS (1265–1308), is Lewis Carroll’s philosophical Mad Hatter. Wonderland’s illustrator John Tenniel gave the Mad Hatter a nineteenth-century hat, but it soon becomes clear that what Carroll had in mind was the distinctive conical hat worn by the Franciscan Dunsmen—the Duns cap or dunce’s cap.
During the Wonderland trial, the judge—the King of Hearts—rebukes the Hatter with the rhetorical question, “Do you take me for a dunce?” The Hatter twice pleads, “I am a poor man”—a further clue, for as a Franciscan friar Duns Scotus has taken an oath of poverty. Nor is this the only time this Duns-dunce appears in Carroll’s writing. He pops up in Through the Looking-Glass, Sylvie and Bruno, Phantasmagoria and “Ode to Damon,” in which Damon is a “dunce” and the “prince of all dummies.”
A deep thinker, an original mind and a sharp critic, Duns Scotus was anything but a dim-witted dunce. He was known as the Subtle Doctor for his finely distinguished points of logic. However, in the fifteenth century a new wave of Renaissance Neoplatonism swept away Scholasticism as unfashionable and irrelevant. For humanists and reformers, “Dunsman” or “dunce” became a term of abuse—and the dunce cap became a humiliating symbol for those incapable of learning.
Duns Scotus as the Hatter is also appropriate on a deeper, psychological level. One celebrated Scholastic problem was “individuation”—how do we tell one thing apart from another? As Duns Scotus’s answer was “form,” it is understandable that Carroll might characterize him as a maker of hats—a profession entirely concerned with form.
“Then you keep moving round, I suppose?” said Alice.
“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted, yawning. “I’m getting tired of this. I vote the young lady tells us a story.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know one,” said Alice, rather alarmed at the proposal.
“Then the Dormouse shall!” they both cried. “Wake up, Dormouse!” And they pinched it on both sides at once.
The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said in a hoarse, feeble voice, “I heard every word you fellows were saying.”
The Hatter’s identity also fits in with Plato’s explanation of the nature of archetypes, in which he stated that “the maker of anything” must have in his mind an ideal model. The Hatter’s hat is a model based on such an archetype. When the King tells him to remove his hat, the Hatter nervously replies, “It isn’t mine.… I keep them to sell.… I’ve none of my own. I’m a hatter.” His hat is what Plato calls “a likeness of an eternal model,” or an eikon—from which we derive our word icon.
The March Hare is WILLIAM OF OCCAM (C. 1288–C. 1348), an English Franciscan friar who became known as Doctor Invincibilis: the unconquerable debater and peerless teacher. He is most famous for the principle of Occam’s razor, or the law of economy, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. This razor was the Occam/Hare’s most effective means of dealing with Scotus/Hatter’s notoriously complex, hair/hare-splitting logic. It also accounts for the Hatter’s rude interjection to Alice: “Your hair wants cutting.” That is, the Occam/Hare wants to cut through Alice’s chatter and have her get to the point.
Through the introduction of diabolical alliterative puns, the March Hare reappears numerous times in Carroll’s work. In Through the Looking-Glass, both the Hare and the Hatter appear as the messengers Haigha and Hatta. In Sylvie and Bruno, a lunatic German professor known as Mein Herr complains “Mine head’s for hair.” Elsewhere, we may discover a “March of the Mind,” wherein “Mine Host” is to “March Here” to the tune of a “March Air.”
Roger Bacon: Polymath and prodigy.
William of Occam: He was unconquerable.
The Dormouse is ROGER BACON (C. 1215–C. 1292), the eldest of the Oxford Schoolmen. Known as the Angelic Doctor, Bacon was an English Franciscan Scholastic philosopher who was among the first to lecture on the newly discovered works of Aristotle. Much of the scholarship of the other two Schoolmen rested on Bacon’s pioneering work (particularly in the field of logic), which may explain why the Hare and the Hatter were using the Dormouse “as a cushion.”
Bacon was a polymath and a prodigy who matriculated at Oxford at the age of thirteen. Later, as a master at Oxford, he lectured on dialectics and syllogistic logic. Like the Dormouse in the teapot, Bacon found himself in hot water—and both were called up before the courts. In Bacon’s case, this resulted in a ban on publishing, lecturing and teaching.
Curiously enough, Friar Bacon’s study was a tower that once stood at Folly Bridge—the departure point for Alice Liddell on that fateful boat trip that sparked the telling of the Wonderland tale.
“Tell us a story!” said the March Hare.
“Yes, please do!” pleaded Alice.
“And be quick about it,” added the Hatter, “or you’ll be asleep again before it’s done.”
“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”
“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.
THE MACHINERY OF LOGIC Throughout the tea party, Lewis Carroll involves his characters in the chief Scholastic philosophic debates of the Middle Ages. These related to questions about the nature of reality. This became known as the “problem of universals” as examined through dialectics and syllogistic logic. His characters satirize the three major approaches to this problem: nominalism, conceptualism and realism.
Nominalists held that universals—the quality of an entity (i.e., the redness of an apple or the beauty of a child)—are merely names; that is, words ra
ther than existing realities. Conceptualists held that they are mental concepts; that is, the names are names of concepts, which do exist, although only in the mind. And realists believed that universals had a “mind-independent” existence; that is, independent of what we think, they exist and are there to be discovered.
These concepts of reality change frequently in the surreal territory of Wonderland. Carroll is constantly shifting the ground beneath our feet—first taking one view, then shifting to another. Abstract concepts and names become real things, and real things become objects. Wonderland, we discover, is just the product of the manipulation of language.
The problem of universals is first apparent in the tea party debate set off by Alice’s indecisiveness over whether she says what she means or means what she says. When the March Hare tells Alice, “You should say what you mean,” he is taking the position of the conceptualist, for whom meaning something is one thing and saying it is another. Meanwhile, the Hatter insists that meaning what you say is distinct from this, and implies that it is words that mean; he is taking the position of the nominalist.
Reading Wonderland on this level, we must be aware of key words in the formal language of the logician. In fact, Charles Dodgson has actually supplied us with his “dictionary” of key words and definitions in his text Symbolic Logic. Words such as terms, things, sentence, name, sound, trial, expression, heap, jump, some, all, not, sort—all these have specialized meanings to logicians.
“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.
“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have been ill.”
“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”
Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary ways of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: “But why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.
“Who’s making personal remarks now?” the Hatter asked triumphantly.
Alice did not quite know what to say to this: so she helped herself to some tea and bread-and-butter, and then turned to the Dormouse, and repeated her question. “Why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, “It was a treacle-well.”
Carroll frequently employs logical-linguistic tricks to comic effect. The most obvious case is revealed when the Hatter berates Alice: “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.” The Hatter treats the abstract concept of time as if it were a person called Time. The humour comes from the constant shifting of the portrayal: wasting time, beating time, murdering time, musical time, managing time and quarrelling with Old Father Time.
As a logician, Dodgson/Carroll obviously delights in baffling and amusing Alice and his readers. However, as Alice walks away from the tea party, she seems somewhat wiser for the experience. She acknowledges that “I’ll manage better this time.” And finds that she is now quite capable of navigating through the logical maze of Wonderland.
Alice is beginning to learn how to “master the machinery” of logic as Dodgson describes this process in Symbolic Logic: “It will give you clearness of thought—the ability to see your way through a puzzle—the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form—and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art.”
“There’s no such thing!” Alice was beginning very angrily, but the Hatter and the March Hare went “Sh! Sh!” and the Dormouse sulkily remarked, “If you can’t be civil, you’d better finish the story for yourself.”
“No, please go on!” Alice said very humbly; “I won’t interrupt again. I dare say there may be one.”
“One, indeed!” said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he consented to go on. “And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw, you know—”
“What did they draw?” said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
“Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all this time.
“I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.”
He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him: the March Hare moved into the Dormouse’s place, and Alice rather unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the only one who got any advantage from the change; and Alice was a good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset the milk-jug into his plate.
Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began very cautiously: “But I don’t understand. Where did they draw the treacle from?”
“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?”
A MOVABLE FEAST In The White Knight: A Study of Lewis Carroll, A. L. Taylor explains that on May 4, 1862 (the real-life Alice’s 10th birthday), there was exactly two days’ difference between the lunar and solar calendar months. Taylor speculates that the lunatic Mad Hatter’s calendar-watch runs on lunar time, and this explains why the watch is “two days wrong.”
Martin Gardner, in his Annotated Alice, takes note of this speculation, but concludes: “The conjecture is also supported by the close connection of ‘lunar’ with ‘lunacy,’ but it is hard to believe that Carroll had all this in mind.” However, it is difficult not to side with Taylor in this, for it is almost impossible to believe that Carroll—whose uncle was the Commissioner in Lunacy—hadn’t intended this connection, and a good deal more.
Carroll was obsessed with timetables and systems for calculating hours, days and months of the year on a variety of solar and lunar calendars. In 1856, he entered into a running debate in The Times concerning the rotation of the moon. In 1857, he began research into the life of St. Cyril, who had produced a Paschal Cycle calendar of ninety-five years, from AD 437 through 531. This research, according to the editor of his diaries, Edward Wakeling, “resulted in his later interest in calendars and calculating the Christian feast days such as Easter.”
Given Carroll’s obsessive personality, it seems impossible that the point of this entire episode involving the watch and the Mad Hatter’s tea party is not connected to Carroll’s calculations related to the co-ordination of solar and lunar calendars.
There are three calendar dates that matter in Wonderland. July 4 is the date of the boat trip that inspired the fairy tale. May 4 is Alice Liddell’s birthday. And March 14 is the date the March Hare went mad. Playing with the traditional explanation of the March Hare’s “madness” during the spring mating season, Carroll presents us with a curious passage in the Wonderland trial wherein the Mad Hatter attempts to give an exact date of March 14, although the Hare and the Dormouse argue it is the fifteenth or sixteenth.
These dates are significant to Greco-Roman history. The timing roughly coincides with the variable dates of the ides of March and, more significantly, the bacchanalian festival’s mad wine party—a festival so mad and wild that it was deemed such a threat to the status quo that the Roman senate in 186 BC attempted to suppress it with brutal military force. March 14 was also the date in the ancient Roman calendar for the beginning of the festival of Hilaria, a celebration of the legend of Attis—the lover of the Earth goddess Cybele—who, like the March Hare, was driven mad.
“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.”
This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.
“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “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.
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’—did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”
“Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t think—”
“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.
Since medieval Christian times, as well, there has been a mid-March festival known as Mothering Sunday, which falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent. This was a kind of tea party celebration as it was marked with a respite from Lenten fasting, and cakes and refreshments were served. This in turn was followed by Easter Sunday, another celebration that can be seen as a kind of tea party.