All this may be true, but I am convinced that if the episode is read carefully, then reread several times on later occasions, its merit will steadily become more apparent. First of all it is unmistakably Carrollian in its general tone, its humor, its wordplay, and its nonsense. The Wasp’s remark “Let it stop there!” and his observation that Alice’s eyes are so close together (compared with his own, of course) that she could have done as well with one eye instead of two are both pure Carroll. The wordplay may not be up to Carroll’s best, but we must remember that he frequently had a book set in type long before he began to work in earnest on revisions. If the Wasp episode was removed from the book before Carroll began to polish the galleys, that would explain why the writing seems cruder at times than elsewhere in the book.
Two features of the episode impress me as having special interest: the extraordinary skill with which Carroll, in just a few pages of dialogue, brings out the personality of a waspish but somehow lovable old man, and Alice’s unfailing gentleness toward him.
Although Alice is usually kind and respectful toward the curious creatures she meets in her two dreams, no matter how unpleasant the creatures are, this is not always the case. In the pool of tears she twice offends the Mouse, by telling him that her cat chases mice and that a neighbor’s dog likes to kill rats. A short time later, after the Caucus-race, she forgets herself again and insults the assembled birds by remarking on how much her cat likes to eat birds. And remember Alice’s sharp kick that sends Bill, the Lizard, out the chimney? (“There goes Bill!”)
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice (now six months older) is not quite so thoughtless, but there is no episode in the book in which she treats a disagreeable creature with such remarkable patience. In no other episode, in either book, does her character come through so vividly as that of an intelligent, polite, considerate little girl. It is an episode in which extreme youth confronts extreme age. Although the Wasp is constantly critical of Alice, not once does she cease to sympathize with him.
Need I spell it out? We are told how much Alice, the white pawn, longs to become a Queen. We know how easily she could have leaped the final brook to occupy the last row of the chessboard. Yet Alice does not make the move when she hears the sigh of distress behind her. When the Wasp responds crossly to her kind remarks, she excuses his ill-temper with the understanding that it is his pain that makes him cross. After she has helped him around the tree to a warmer side, his response is “Can’t you leave a body alone?” Unoffended, Alice offers to read to him from the wasp newspaper at his feet.
Although the Wasp continues to criticize, when Alice leaves him she is “quite pleased that she had gone back and given a few minutes to making the poor old creature comfortable.” Carroll surely must have wanted to show Alice performing a final deed of charity that would justify her approaching coronation, a reward that Carroll, a pious Christian and patriotic Englishman, would have regarded as a crown of righteousness. Alice comes through as such an admirable, appealing little girl that Professor Guiliano discovered to his surprise that reading the episode altered a bit his response to the entire book.
The old man, with his waspish temper and his aching bones, is also, of course, a genuine insect. Female wasps (queens and workers) prey on other insects, such as caterpillars, spiders, and flies, which they first paralyze by stinging them. With their strong mandibles they remove the victim’s head, legs, and wings; then the body is chewed to a pulp to give as food to their larvae. It may not be accidental that Carroll’s insect belongs to a social structure that includes fierce, powerful queens, like the queens of chess and many former queens of England.
In contrast, male wasps (drones) do not sting. In some species the male, if you seize him in your hand, will try to frighten you into dropping him by going through all the movements of stinging. (John Burroughs likened this bluffing to a soldier in battle who tries to frighten the enemy by firing blank cartridges.) Male wasps, like Carroll’s Wasp, although they look formidable, resemble the kings of chess. They are amiable, harmless creatures.
Except for a few hibernating queens, wasps are summer insects and do not survive the winter. During the hot months they work furiously to provide for their offspring; then they stiffen and die with the approach of autumn’s cold winds. This is how Oliver Goldsmith phrases it in his marvelous, now-forgotten History of the Earth and Animated Nature:
While the summer heats continue, they [wasps] are bold, voracious, and enterprising; but as the sun withdraws, it seems to rob them of their courage and activity. In proportion as the cold increases, they are seen to become more domestic; they seldom leave the nest, they make but short adventures from home, they flutter about in the noon-day heats, and soon after return chilled and feeble. . . . As the cold increases they no longer find sufficient warmth in their nests, which grow hateful to them, and they fly to seek it in the corners of houses, and places that receive an artificial heat. But the winter is still insupportable; and, before the new year begins, they wither and die.
Like so many elderly people, the Wasp has happy memories of a childhood when his tresses waved. In five stanzas of doggerel he tells Alice about his terrible mistake of allowing friends to persuade him to shave his head for a wig. All his subsequent unhappiness is blamed on this foolish indiscretion. He knows his present appearance is ridiculous. His wig does not fit. He fails to keep it neat. He resents being laughed at. The Wasp is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “last leaf,” enduring the community’s ridicule as he clings “to the old forsaken bough.”
Although the Wasp pretends not to want Alice to help him in any way, his spirits are lifted by her visit and the opportunity to tell his sad tale. Indeed, before Alice leaves he has become animated and talkative. When she finally says good-bye he responds with “Thank ye.” It is the only thanks Alice gets from anyone she meets on the mirror’s other side.
The fashion of wearing wigs reached absurd heights in France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During Queen Anne’s reign almost every upper-class man and woman in England wore a wig, and one could instantly tell a man’s profession by the kind of wig he sported. Some male wigs hung below the shoulders to cover both back and chest. The craze began to fade under Queen Victoria. In Carroll’s time it had all but vanished, except for the ceremonial wigs of judges and barristers, the wigs of actors, and the wearing of wigs to conceal baldness. The Wasp’s wig is clearly a mark of his advanced age even though he started wearing it when young.
Why a yellow wig? If the Wasp’s ringlets were yellow it would be natural for him to substitute a yellow wig, but Carroll seems to emphasize the color for other reasons. He calls it “bright yellow.” And when Alice first meets the Wasp his wig is covered by a yellow handkerchief tied around his head and face.
Both Alice books contain inside jokes about persons the real Alice, Alice Liddell, knew. It is possible, I suppose, that Carroll’s Wasp pokes fun at someone, perhaps an elderly tradesman in the area, who sported an unkempt yellow wig that resembled seaweed.
Another theory has to do with the yellow color of many wasps in England. The American term yellow-jackets, for a large class of social insects that were (and are) called hornets, may have been in Carroll’s mind. The term had spread to England, and numerous varieties of British wasps have bright yellow stripes circling their black bodies. Wasp antennae are composed of tiny joints that also could be called ringlets. A young wasp’s antennae would certainly wave, curl, and crinkle, as the poem has it. If cut off, perhaps they would not grow again.
There may have been wasps in Oxford, familiar to Carroll and Alice Liddell, with black heads circled by a yellow stripe that would look for all the world like a yellow handkerchief tied around the insect’s face. Even aside from a yellow stripe, a wasp’s face does resemble a human face done up in a handkerchief, the knot’s ends sticking up from the top of the head like two antennae.* Professor Heath recalls having had just such thoughts himself when he was a child in England.
A third theory is that the Wasp, with his yellow handkerchief above a yellow wig, parallels Alice after she becomes a queen—the gold crown on top of her flaxen hair.
A fourth theory (of course these theories are not mutually exclusive) is that Carroll chose yellow because of its long association in literature and common speech with autumn and old age. Yellow is the complexion of the elderly, especially if they suffer from jaundice. It is the color of fall leaves, of ripe corn, of paper “yellowed with age.” “Sorrow, thought, and great distress,” wrote Chaucer (in Romance of the Rose), “made her full yellow.”
Shakespeare frequently used yellow as a symbol of age. Professor Cohen reports that Carroll, at least twice in his letters, quotes the following remark from Macbeth: “My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf.” These lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 are particularly apt:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold . . .
Through the Looking-Glass opens and closes with poems that speak of winter and death. The dream itself probably occurs in November, while Alice sits in front of a blazing fire and snow is “kissing” the windowpanes. “Autumn frosts have slain July” is how Carroll puts it in his terminal poem, recalling that sunny July 4 boating trip on the Isis when he first told Alice the story of her trip to Wonderland.
Although Carroll was not yet forty when he wrote his second Alice book, he was twenty years older than Alice Liddell, the child-friend he adored above any other. In the book’s prefatory poem he speaks of himself and Alice as “half a life asunder.” He reminds Alice that it will not be long until the “bitter tidings” summon her to “unwelcome bed,” and he likens himself to an older child fretting at the approach of the final bedtime.
Carroll scholars believe that Carroll intended his White Knight—that awkward, inventive gentleman with the mild blue eyes and kindly smile who treated Alice with such uncharacteristic courtesy for someone behind the mirror—to be a parody of himself. Is it possible that Carroll regarded his Wasp as a parody of himself forty years later? Professor Cohen has convinced me that it is not possible. Carroll prided himself on being a Victorian gentleman. Under no circumstances would he have associated himself with a lower-class drone. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Carroll could not have written this episode without being acutely aware of the fact that the chasm of age between Alice and the Wasp resembled the chasm that separated Alice Liddell from the middle-aged teller of the story.
I am persuaded that Carroll, perhaps not consciously, spoke through his Wasp like a ventriloquist talking through a dummy when he has the Wasp exclaim—in a way that seems strangely out of place in the dialogue—“Worrity, worrity! There never was such a child!”
Where Carroll intended the episode to appear
(reproduction of first edition).
*The White Knight, so far as Carroll’s text alone is concerned, could have been a young man in his twenties. Tenniel, with Carroll’s approval, drew him as an elderly gentleman, though certainly not as old as the “aged aged man” about whom the Knight sings.
*Lewis Carroll’s library at the time of his death included a book by John G.Wood called A World of Little Wonders: or Insects at Home. The chapter on wasps describes a common variety of social wasp as having antennae with a first joint that is “yellow in front.”
The Wasp in a Wig
. . . and she was just going to spring over, when she heard a deep sigh, which seemed to come from the wood behind her.
“There’s somebody very unhappy there,” she thought, looking anxiously back to see what was the matter. Something like a very old man (only that his face was more like a wasp) was sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree, all huddled up together, and shivering as if he were very cold.
“I don’t think I can be of any use to him,” was Alice’s first thought, as she turned to spring over the brook:—“but I’ll just ask him what’s the matter,” she added, checking herself on the very edge. “If I once jump over, everything will change, and then I can’t help him.”1
So she went back to the Wasp—rather unwillingly, for she was very anxious to be a Queen.
“Oh, my old bones, my old bones!” he was grumbling as Alice came up to him.
“It’s rheumatism, I should think,” Alice said to herself, and she stooped over him, and said very kindly, “I hope you’re not in much pain?”
The Wasp only shook his shoulders, and turned his head away. “Ah, dreary me!” he said to himself.
“Can I do anything for you?” Alice went on. “Aren’t you rather cold here?”
“How you go on!” the Wasp said in a peevish tone. “Worrity, worrity! There never was such a child!”2
Alice felt rather offended at this answer, and was very nearly walking on and leaving him, but she thought to herself “Perhaps it’s only pain that makes him so cross.” So she tried once more.
“Won’t you let me help you round to the other side? You’ll be out of the cold wind there.”
The Wasp took her arm, and let her help him round the tree, but when he got settled down again he only said, as before, “Worrity, worrity! Can’t you leave a body alone?”
“Would you like me to read you a bit of this?” Alice went on, as she picked up a newspaper which had been lying at his feet.3
“You may read it if you’ve a mind to,” the Wasp said, rather sulkily. “Nobody’s hindering you, that I know of.”
So Alice sat down by him, and spread out the paper on her knees, and began. “Latest News. The Exploring Party have made another tour in the Pantry, and have found five new lumps of white sugar, large and in fine condition. In coming back—”
“Any brown sugar?” the Wasp interrupted.
Alice hastily ran her eye down the paper and said “No. It says nothing about brown.”
“No brown sugar!” grumbled the Wasp. “A nice exploring party!”4
“In coming back,” Alice went on reading, “they found a lake of treacle. The banks of the lake were blue and white, and looked like china. While tasting the treacle, they had a sad accident: two of their party were engulphed—”
“Were what?” the Wasp asked in a very cross voice.
“En-gulph-ed,” Alice repeated, dividing the word into syllables.5
“There’s no such word in the language!” said the Wasp.
“It’s in this newspaper, though,” Alice said a little timidly.
“Let it stop there!” said the Wasp, fretfully turning away his head.
Alice put down the newspaper. “I’m afraid you’re not well,” she said in a soothing tone. “Can’t I do anything for you?”
“It’s all along of the wig,”6 the Wasp said in a much gentler voice.
“Along of the wig?” Alice repeated, quite pleased to find that he was recovering his temper.
“You’d be cross too, if you’d a wig like mine,” the Wasp went on. “They jokes at one. And they worrits one.7 And then I gets cross. And I gets cold. And I gets under a tree. And I gets a yellow handkerchief.8 And I ties up my face—as at the present.”
Alice looked pityingly at him. “Tying up the face is very good for the toothache,” she said.9
“And it’s very good for the conceit,” added the Wasp.
Alice didn’t catch the word exactly. “Is that a kind of toothache?” she asked.
The Wasp considered a little. “Well, no,” he said: “it’s when you hold up your head—so—without bending your neck.”
“Oh, you mean stiff-neck,”10 said Alice.
The Wasp said “That’s a new-fangled name. They called it conceit in my time.”
“Conceit isn’t a disease at all,” Alice remarked.
“It is, though,” said the Wasp: “wait till you have it, and then you’ll know. And when you catches it, just try tying a yellow handkerchief round your face. It’ll cure you in no time!”
He
untied the handkerchief as he spoke, and Alice looked at his wig in great surprise. It was bright yellow like the handkerchief,11 and all tangled and tumbled about like a heap of seaweed. “You could make your wig much neater,” she said, “if only you had a comb.”
“What, you’re a Bee, are you?” the Wasp said, looking at her with more interest. “And you’ve got a comb.12 Much honey?”
“It isn’t that kind,” Alice hastily explained. “It’s to comb hair with—your wig’s so very rough, you know.”
“I’ll tell you how I came to wear it,” the Wasp said. “When I was young, you know, my ringlets used to wave—”
A curious idea came into Alice’s head. Almost every one she had met had repeated poetry to her, and she thought she would try if the Wasp couldn’t do it too. “Would you mind saying it in rhyme?” she asked very politely.
“It ain’t what I’m used to,” said the Wasp: “however I’ll try; wait a bit.” He was silent for a few moments, and then began again—
“When I was young, my ringlets waved13
And curled and crinkled on my head:
And then they said ‘You should be shaved,
And wear a yellow wig instead.’
But when I followed their advice,
And they had noticed the effect,
They said I did not look so nice
As they had ventured to expect.
They said it did not fit, and so
It made me look extremely plain:
But what was I to do, you know?
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books) Page 37