Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded

by David Day

  “I don’t think they play at all fairly,” Alice began, in rather a complaining tone, “and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can’t hear oneself speak—and they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them—and you’ve no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive; for instance, there’s the arch I’ve got to go through next walking about at the other end of the ground—and I should have croqueted the Queen’s hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it saw mine coming!”

  “How do you like the Queen?” said the Cat in a low voice.

  “Not at all,” said Alice: “she’s so extremely—” Just then she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening: so she went on, “—likely to win, that it’s hardly worth while finishing the game.”

  The Queen smiled and passed on.

  “Who are you talking to?” said the King, going up to Alice, and looking at the Cat’s head with great curiosity.

  “It’s a friend of mine—a Cheshire Cat,” said Alice: “allow me to introduce it.”

  “I don’t like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.”

  “I’d rather not,” the Cat remarked.

  “Don’t be impertinent,” said the King, “and don’t look at me like that!” He got behind Alice as he spoke.

  “A cat may look at a king,” said Alice. “I’ve read that in some book, but I don’t remember where.”

  In Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts arbitrarily invites and dismisses whomever she wishes. So when she discovers the uninvited Duchess playing croquet with Alice, she immediately kicks her out of the garden. This hints at the fact that the Oxford Duchess—the bishop of Oxford—was welcome at the Deanery only on invitation by the Liddells. Christ Church was the only college in England in which both the college and the cathedral were under the authority of the dean. (The only part of Christ Church that the bishop controlled was the great kitchen.) But as a conservative opponent of the dean, the bishop Samuel Wilberforce was tolerated only on special occasions. And just as the Queen of Hearts banished the Duchess at will, Mrs. Liddell could on a whim decide to banish Wilberforce from her croquet garden parties.

  “Well, it must be removed,” said the King very decidedly, and he called the Queen, who was passing at the moment, “My dear! I wish you would have this cat removed!”

  The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off with his head!” she said, without even looking round.

  “I’ll fetch the executioner myself,” said the King eagerly, and he hurried off.

  Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game was going on, as she heard the Queen’s voice in the distance, screaming with passion. She had already heard her sentence three of the players to be executed for having missed their turns, and she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.

  The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog, which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one of them with the other: the only difficulty was, that her flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden, where Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up into a tree.

  By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back, the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight: “but it doesn’t matter much,” thought Alice, “as all the arches are gone from this side of the ground.” So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for a little more conversation with her friend.

  A rather different scenario presented itself with the disturbing appearance of the floating head of the Cheshire Cat over the croquet ground. Neither the King’s nor the Queen’s commands to have the head removed are met with success. The Oxford Cheshire Cat was the Reverend Edward Bouverie Pusey, who as a Christ Church canon could not be removed as a college head by the dean. Viewed by Carroll and other conservatives as the spiritual guardian of the college, Pusey kept a watchful eye over the Deanery—just as the Cheshire Cat watched over the Queen’s garden.

  The floating cat’s head is also suggestive of the haunting spirit of the founder of Christ Church, the fifteenth-century Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who—like the Cat—was also threatened with beheading. It is Wolsey’s cardinal’s hat with its broad brim and long tassels that surmounts the cats’ heads on Christ Church’s coat of arms, and it is his spirit that Carroll saw as watching over the college. Indeed, years later, in his squib The Vision of the Three T’s (1873), Carroll humorously conjured up the ghost of the college’s founder: “one of portly form and courtly mien, with scarlet gown, and broad brimmed hat whose strings, wide-fluttering in the breezeless air, at once defied the laws of gravity and marked the reverend Cardinal! ’Twas Wolsey’s self!” Carroll had this vision of Wolsey’s spirit arise in protest to attack the dean’s uninspired design for Christ Church’s newly erected belfry.

  The cats and the hat: Christ Church’s coat of arms.

  When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to find quite a large crowd collected round it: there was a dispute going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent, and looked very uncomfortable.

  The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to settle the question, and they repeated their arguments to her, though, as they all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed to make out exactly what they said.

  The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life.

  The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren’t to talk nonsense.

  The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t done about it in less than no time she’d have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious.)

  Alice could think of nothing else to say but “It belongs to the Duchess: you’d better ask her about it.”

  “She’s in prison,” the Queen said to the executioner: “fetch her here.” And the executioner went off like an arrow.

  The Cat’s head began fading away the moment he was gone, and, by the time he had come back with the Duchess, it had entirely disappeared; so the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down looking for it, while the rest of the party went back to the game.

  Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle’s Story

  “She wants for to know your history, she do.”

  RUSKIN AND THE GRYPHON The Ugly Duchess greets Alice in the Queen’s croquet ground by tucking “her arm affectionately into Alice’s,” and then agreeing with everything she has to say. Alice finds this (rather forced) affection perplexing and blames the Duchess’s former bad temper on the fact that her kitchen was filled with pepper. Alice then attempts to construct “a new kind of rule” for determining temperament. She concludes that pepper makes people hot-tempered, vinegar makes them sour, camomile makes them bitter and barley-sugar makes them sweet-tempered.

  Alice has essentially re-invented the ancient theory of the four humours—the four types of human temperament: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. The ancient Greek school of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, held that all illness was the result of an imbalance in the body of the four humours, fluids that in health were naturally equal in proportion. The four humours were believed to be blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. An imbalance (dyscrasia, or “bad mixture”) made a person ill. Hippocratic therapy was directed toward restoring balance. For example, citrus was thought to be beneficial when phlegm was overabundant. Or in Alice’s comic version, barley-sugar should make one “sweet-tempered.”

  THE MOCK TURTLE’S STORY.

  “You can’t think how gla
d I am to see you again, you dear old thing!” said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately into Alice’s, and they walked off together.

  Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and thought to herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had made her so savage when they met in the kitchen.

  “When I’m a Duchess,” she said to herself (not in a very hopeful tone though), “I won’t have any pepper in my kitchen at all. Soup does very well without—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. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—”

  She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear. “You’re thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can’t tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit.”

  We still use the terminology of humours to describe psychological aspects of the human character. Individuals with sanguine temperaments are extroverted and social; choleric people have energy, passion and charisma; phlegmatic temperaments are characterized by dependability, gentility and affection; and melancholics are creative, kind and considerate.

  The four humours as emblematic themes have been adapted many times in art and literature. Carroll himself wrote a satirical poem, “Melancholetta,” about a muse-like figure who appears to be a comic take on Dürer’s famous meditative and highly symbolic alchemical engraving Melencolia I.

  We might conclude that in Carroll’s view, the behaviour of the real-life Duchess, the “Holy Terror” Bishop Wilberforce, depended more on context than temperament. On his own ground in the great kitchen, Wilberforce could be confident, intimidating and argumentative. But on entering the garden of the Christ Church Deanery, painfully aware he was there by invitation only, he became fawning, agreeable to all and subservient to the authority of the dean’s wife, who on a whim might arbitrarily banish him from Oxford society.

  “Perhaps it hasn’t one,” Alice ventured to remark.

  “Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” And she squeezed herself up closer to Alice’s side as she spoke.

  Alice did not much like 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 upon 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.

  “ ’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is—‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!’ ”

  “Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!”

  “Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, “and the moral of that is—‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.’ ”

  “How fond she is of finding morals in things!” Alice thought to herself.

  “I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist,” the Duchess said after a pause: “the reason is, that I’m doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?”

  “He might bite,” Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried.

  “Very true,” said the Duchess: “flamingoes and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is—‘Birds of a feather flock together.’ ”

  “Only mustard isn’t a bird,” Alice remarked.

  The Duchess falls over herself with inventing absurd reasons for being agreeable. Clearly this is a parody of some of the Victorian parlour games familiar to Alice and her sisters. The Duchess recites puns, malapropisms and muddled clichés, and then attempts to extract morals from them (as in a popular parlour game called Proverbs). When the Duchess proposes the nonsensical moral “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves,” she is reciting a warped version of the proverb “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.”

  Alice tries to apply logical categories to the Duchess’s nonsensical sayings—“It’s a mineral, I think”; “It’s a vegetable”—and in so doing reinvents another well-known parlour game, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. In this, a player must guess what thing the other has in mind by asking up to twenty yes-or-no questions, starting with “Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?”

  After enduring the cloying presence of the Duchess for some time, Alice witnesses the arrival of the Queen of Hearts, who disposes of the Duchess “in about half no time.” The Queen then removes Alice from her croquet ground and leaves her in the care and domain of two monsters.

  The Queen’s action is made clear within the context of Greek mythology. The Greek underworld—like Wonderland’s royal garden—was divided into discrete regions. Beyond the Garden of Elysium, where those judged to be the blessed played at games, there was another realm, in which the souls of the damned were tortured and set upon by monsters. This Greek hell was known as Tartarus.

  “Right, as usual,” said the Duchess: “what a clear way you have of putting things!”

  “It’s a mineral, I think,” said Alice.

  “Of course it is,” said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said; “there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is—‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’ ”

  “Oh, I know!” exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, “it’s a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.”

  “I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘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.’ ”

  “I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”

  “That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,” the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone.

  “Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,” said Alice.

  “Oh, don’t talk about trouble!” said the Duchess. “I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.”

  “A cheap sort of present!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they don’t give birthday presents like that!” But she did not venture to say it out loud.

  “Thinking again?” the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.

  “I’ve a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.

  In the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, in Theodore C. Williams’s translation, the Sibyl guides the Trojan hero Aeneus in his descent into the underworld: “Here comes the place where cleaves our way in twain. Thy road, the right, toward Pluto’s dwelling goes, And leads us to Elysium. But the left Speeds sinful souls to doom, and is their path To Tartarus th’accurst.”

  Not wishing to unduly frighten children, Carroll made the punishments in Wonderland’s Tartarus somewhat milder and its monsters less ferocious. Consequently, Alice moves from the Elysium-like croquet lawns where games go on forever to a region where a child must endure for eternity the torture of school lessons.

  “Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly; and the m—”

  But here, to Alice’s great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away, even in the middle of her favourite word “moral,” and the arm that was l
inked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm.

  “A fine day, your Majesty!” the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.

  “Now, I give you fair warning,” shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground as she spoke; “either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!”

  The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.

  “Let’s go on with the game,” the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the croquet-ground.

  The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were resting in the shade: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay would cost them their lives.

  All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the other players, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.

  Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

  “No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

  “It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.

  For a child, what could be more like paradise than eternal games? What could be more like hell than eternal school lessons? What could be more comically monstrous than the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, Carroll’s two ridiculous parodies of pedantic schoolmasters who relentlessly torment Alice by engaging her in a barrage of never-ending lessons?