Alice in Wonderland (2) Overview of chapters 1-6

Nonsense: Order and Disorder The ‘transformation of the bee in children’s texts: from Bunyan’s ‘Upon the Bee’ (1686) to Isaac Watts’ “Against Idleness and Mischief” (1715)... ... to Carrolls’ Alice in Wonderland...

Poem from chapter II How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale! How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws!

Another parody of didacticism “You are old, father William,” the young man cried, “You are old, father William,” the “The few locks which are left you are young man said, grey; “And your hair has become very white; You are hale, father William, a hearty And yet you incessantly stand on your old man; head -Now tell me the reason, I pray.” Do you think, at your age, it is right?” “In the days of my youth,” Father “In my youth,” Father William replied William replied, to his son, “I remember’d that youth would fly “I feared it might injure the brain; fast, But now that I’m perfectly sure I have And abus’d not my health and my none, vigour at first, Why, I do it again and again. That I never might need them at last” Robert Southey

Lewis Carroll

A Manifest Tribute to Lear’s The Book of Nonsense (1846)

Tenniel’s illustration

Carroll’s own illustration

Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole

Falling asleep on the river bank with her sister (and a boring book with no pictures), Alice follows the White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole, falls down a vertical line, ends up in a hall of doors she can’t open, and shrinks to ten inches (= about 25 cm) in height.

Down the Rabbit Hole: the beginning of Wonderland There is a confidential relationship between narrator and narratee (e.g. there are many parenthetical remarks that explain or comment on the story). There is right from the start a change in the natural order of things: the white rabbit speaks and has a waistcoat Alice falls for a long time and is not hurt

Down the Rabbit Hole: Humour Much of the humour comes in the story from Alice’s attempt to use her school knowledge and the rules of social conventions in Wonderland. Also, she is a nice little girl, well aware of the importance of proving herself clever and wellbehaved: “Alice had learnt several things of this sort in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over.”

The ‘nice little stories’ When Alice is about to drink from the mysterious bottle, she recalls the influence of Victorian cautionary tales. “she had read several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts”: Carroll’s irony? (Victorian moral tales are BY NO MEANS nice!) ... or Alice’s ingenuity? (AND, implicitly, moral tales as ineffective)

Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears Alice grows to more than nine feet (= about 2,7 m) tall, frightens the White Rabbit, shrinks to two feet (= 0,6 m) and swims in a pool of her own tears with a Mouse.

The Pool of Tears School knowledge is displayed: Multiplication Table, capitals of countries, edifying poems, declension of nouns in Latin grammar. But Alice finds out that her inability to recall her school knowledge is linked to the loss of her identity in Wonderland: “I must have been changed for Mabel!”

The Pool of Tears: Loss of Identity “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them. “I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine doesn’t go in ringlets at all; and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little! [...] I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: [...] London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome - no, that’s all wrong, I’m certain! I must have been changed for Mabel!”

The Pool of Tears: disorder Wonderland brings about disorder: the poem on bees’ industrious activity becomes the sinister celebration of a crocodile eating fish. the idiom “to be drowned in tears” (=crying incontrollably) becomes literal as Alice changes her size, and actually risks drowning in her own tears.

Chapter 3: A Caucus Race Alice participates in the Caucusrace together with a number of animals, in order to get dry. She confuses a long sad tale (= ‘story’) with the tail (= ‘coda’) of the Mouse, and frightens many birds by mentioning the skills of her cat Dinah.

A Caucus Race: Language and Humour Linguistic humour is used to make the reader aware of the conventionality of human communication: the same word has two distant meanings: ‘dry’ = ‘not wet’ but also ‘boring’ (in Italian the pun is translated as asciutto/arido, ‘seccante’) the same sound generates two different words: tale/ tail (and Alice imagines the tale in the form of a tail) fixed expressions such as ‘find it advisable’ make no sense if taken literally: “Found what?” “Found it [...] of course you know what ‘it’ means”

A Caucus Race: Parody A ‘Caucus Race’ is an expression related to a political assembly, but in Carroll’s book it becomes an absurd competition: although it’s supposed to be a ‘race’, the animals go round a circle there are no rules, and everybody wins The Dodo is a parody of Carroll himself: DoDodgson (Carroll used to stammer) AND it is an extinct animal speaking pompously (like Oxford academics)

Chapter 4: The Rabbit sends in a Little Bill Inside the White Rabbit’s house, Alice grows so large that she can’t get out and survives attempts to free her. She shrinks back to a smaller size and escapes from a group of angry animals as well as from a large and over-friendly puppy.

The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill This is a rather disturbing chapter, where Alice is confronted with serious threats to her identity and also her life: The rabbit mistakes her for his governess and rudely gives her orders; The rabbit and other animals plot to burn Alice in the house; Alice herself nearly kills Bill the lizard... ... and risks being killed by the large puppy.

Metatextuality “It was much pleasanter at home,” thought poor Alice, “when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole - and yet - it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of things never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one - but I’m grown up now! [...] at least there’s no room to grow up any more here.”

Chapter 5: Advice from a Caterpillar Alice meets a disagreeable Caterpillar smoking a hookah pipe and sitting on a mushroom; she gets some advice from the caterpillar, is mistaken for a serpent by a Pigeon, and comes to a small house.

Politeness: distancing In English, politeness is generally expressed through indirect language and distancing. Compare: Are you free this evening? (direct) I wondered if you were free this evening. (more polite) It would be better if you would go that way. (more polite than: You have to go that way)

Advice from a Caterpillar and the rules of conventional conversation This chapter is very important for the disruption of the Victorian assumptions about polite conversation: The caterpillar uses direct speech, the very opposite of politeness in English: “You! [...] who are you?”/ “Explain yourself” vs Alice’s “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir” The caterpillar ignores the rule of cooperation in conversation: [Alice] “Is that all?” [Caterpillar] “No”.

Advice from a Caterpillar: disorder and identity Alice is repeatedly asked to ‘explain herself’ but finds she is unable to do so because the changes in her size undermine her sense of identity: “being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing” when she grows bigger, the Pigeon takes her for a serpent: “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it”.

Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper Alice finds herself in front of a closed door together with a fish-footman. After getting into a noisy kitchen filled with the smell of smoke and pepper, Alice meets the Duchess, looks after a baby that turns into a pig, and meets the grinning Cheshire Cat.

Pig and Pepper: inversion of social order Alice (the child) is the only polite character in a world of adults who are either foolish (=the footman) or rude (=the duchess). Every social role is disrupted: the footman is a fish doing nothing, the Duchess does the work of a housemaid, the cook throws things around the kitchen. If the use of animals as human-like characters is common in children’s literature, here we have a human baby turning into a pig, a disturbing image of darwinian regression.

The Cheshire Cat The Cheshire Cat is an example of how, in Carroll’s text, language does not reflect reality, but actually creates it. “Grin like a Cheshire cat” was a common phrase in Carroll’s time, although it is not clear where the phrase came from. Carroll makes the reader become aware of the arbitrariness and conventionality of everyday language.

The Cheshire Cat

The cat slowly vanishes until only the grin stays. This is perhaps linked to the moon, which was associated with madness (or ‘lunacy’...). The Cheshire Cat proclaims ‘we are all mad’, a view connected to the Victorian psychological discourse: in certain mental states the distinction between sanity and madness is subtle (dreaming as a temporary and reversible form of madness). Alice seems disturbed by the cat’s vanishing, but he is one of the few friendly characters of the book.