Resumenes y Analysis del Libro Capitulo por Capitulo

Chapters 1-3


The book begins with a poem about a golden afternoon spent rowing on a river; the speaker of the poem is pressed by three girls (Prima, Secunda, and Tertia) to tell them a fantastic story. Each time he tries to take a break and leave the rest for "next time," the girls insist that it is already "next time"; in this way, the speaker tells us, the story of Alice's adventures in Wonderland took shape.



Young Alice is sitting by the river bank with her older sister, feeling bored; her sister's book has no pictures or conversation, and thus holds no interest for Alice. Suddenly, a white rabbit scampers back, proclaims that it is very late, and pulls a pocket watch out of its waistcoat. Though she initially does not notice the strangeness of a talking rabbit, when she sees the rabbit's clothes and watch, she becomes very interested. She follows the rabbit, hopping right down a deep rabbit hole after him, giving no thought of how she plans to get out again.



She seems to fall quite slowly, having time to observe the things around her. There are shelves and maps and pictures hung on pegs; at one point, she picks up a jar of orange marmalade and puts it back into place on another shelf. She seems to fall for an interminable amount of time, and begins to worry that she might fall straight through to the other side of the earth. Although she has no one to talk to, she practices some of the facts she learned in school: she knows the distance from one end of the earth to the other, and she says some of the grand words she has heard in her lessons. She worries about missing her cat, Dinah, at dinner. Finally, she reaches the bottom of the hole. She is in a long hallway, and she is just in time to see the white rabbit hurrying away.



The hallway is lined with doors, but all of them are locked. On a three-legged table made of glass, Alice finds a key, but it is far too small for any of the locks. Then, Alice finds a tiny door hidden behind a curtain. The key works, but the door is far too small. Through the door there is a miniature passageway, leading to a lovely garden; the sight of the garden makes Alice more determined than ever to find a way to get through. Alice goes back to the table, where a little bottle has appeared. The label says "DRINK ME," and after checking to see if it marked "poison," Alice drinks it all. She shrinks to a size small enough for the door, but she soon realizes that she has left the key on top of the glass table. She is now to short to reach it; seeing her dilemma and fooling foolish for her mistake, she begins to cry. But she then finds a piece of cake, on which is a little slip of paper that says "EAT ME." Alice eats, and waits for the results.



Analysis:



The poem at the beginning of the book is a reasonably accurate account of how the book came to be. The three girls in the boat are the Lidell sisters, of whom Alice is the second oldest. Carroll often entertained the girls with fantastic stories he made up on the spot. On Alice Lidell's insistence, he took one of his longer tales and wrote it down.



The central theme of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is Alice's struggle to adapt to the rules of this new world; metaphorically, it is Alice's struggle to adapt to the strange rules and behaviors of adults. The rabbit, with his watch and his concern for schedules and appointments, is a representative of this adult world. Alice's story starts when she follows him down the hole.



She is characterized as a bright child who often says or does foolish things; in other words, Alice has much in common with any child who is trying to behave like someone older than she is. Her blunders come about because of unfamiliarity rather than stupidity. She is also an unusually conscientious child; note the moment when she is falling down the hall, and she puts the marmalade carefully back on the shelf for fear that the jar might kill someone if she were to drop it.



As Carroll sees it, the world of children is a dangerous one. Not knowing the rules, however foolish or arbitrary those rules may be, is a source of great peril. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is shadowed by hints of death, and death is a recurring theme of both of Carroll's books. Through the Looking Glass, the second book about Alice's adventures, is an even darker story; in Through the Looking Glass, reminders of death are inescapable. But even here, at the start of Alice's adventure, we are reminded of the frailty of humans and of children in particular. The first hint of mortality comes with Alice's concern about the marmalade jar; her worry shows that Wonderland is not an escape from all of the limitations of the real world. Death is still a possibility. A moment later, Carroll treats us to a very macabre joke. When Alice is falling, she takes pride in her composure: "ŒWell!' thought Alice to herself, Œafter such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!'" (13). The narrator adds, grimly, "Which was very likely true." The narrator agrees with Alice, but not for the reason she might think: after falling off a house, the reason why she would not say anything is because she would be dead. Alice makes another unknowing allusion to her own death when she peers into the tiny door. She realizes that she cannot even fit her head through the opening, and even if she could, her head "would be of very little use without my shoulders" (16). She is referring, unknowingly, to her own decapitation. The moment is both an allusion to death and a bit of foreshadowing. At the end of the book, the Queen of Hearts will try her best to separate Alice's head from her shoulders.



In Alice's treatment of the little drink, we are reminded of the specific perils that face children. Carroll writes: ". . . [F]or she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up be wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them" (17-8). The challenge of mastering the "simple rules" is going to be Alice's main struggle in Wonderland, and this passage hints at some of worst consequences of not knowing the rules. Innocence is closely connected to ignorance: in this book, it is not an idealized or safe state. While we are charmed by Alice's blunders and know that she will make it home in the end, Carroll is constantly reminding us of the consequences of not knowing the rules. Childhood is partially a state of peril, and Carroll names a few of those perils directly: poison bottles that the child cannot read, falls, burns, wounds from blades that the child is too young to handle (18). Not least of these dangers is an adult world that baffles and confuses. Alice is trained enough to read the bottle before she drinks it. She knows the simple rule in this case, and knows well enough to avoid the label "poison." Her challenge will be to learn more complex rules, reading not only labels but also situations and people as she makes her way through Wonderland.



Chapter 2: The Pool of Tears



Summary:



As the cake takes effect, Alice finds herself growing larger. This time, she keeps growing until she is the size of a giant. Now, getting through the door to the garden will be more difficult than ever, and Alice begins to cry again. The white rabbit comes scurrying down the hall; at the sight of him, Alice dries her tears and tries to talk to him, but one look at Alice and the rabbit runs away in terror. He leaves behind his fan and his white kid gloves. Alice begins to wonder how so many strange things could happen to her. Yesterday was a day like any other, and Alice begins to consider the possibility that she might have changed during the night. If she has changed, there's no telling who she might be. She wonders if she's been changed into Mabel, a girl who is less affluent and less bright than Alice: when she tries to recite her lessons and fails, she fears that she must be Mabel.



Suddenly, Alice realizes that she has put on the rabbit's gloves: if they fit, she must be shrinking again. She soon learns that the cause is the fan that she is holding, which she drops hastily before she shrinks away completely. She is now the right size for the door to the garden, but she has left the key, once again, on the glass table. She soon slips and falls into a vast body of salt water. It is the pool of tears that she cried when she was a giant. She sees a mouse swimming through the little sea, and tries to talk to him, but she unintentionally offends and frightens the creature by talking about her cat. The mouse can talk. Alice offends him again by bringing up a dog that kills rats, and the mouse seems to be swimming away, but when Alice calls out to him and apologizes, the mouse swims back and tells her to swim to shore with him. He promises to tell her his story, after which she will understand why he hates and fears cats. They swim towards the shore, and Alice finds herself swimming at the head of a curious party of animals who have fallen in the water: a Duck, a Dodo, a Lory, an Eaglet, and a few other animals.



Analysis:



Alice's shifts in size and inquiries into her own identity reflect the difficulties of growing up. Just as children on the verge of adulthood sometimes find themselves too small for adult privileges while being forced to talk on the no-fun world of adult responsibilities, Alice finds her body thrown back and forth between two extremes of size. The abrupt, almost violent physical changes might also suggest the sudden physical changes that come with the onset of adolescence.



Her inquiries into her own identity parallel a child's search for herself as she grows older. Alice worries that her identity has been displaced; her fears parallel any child's uncertainty about her place in the world. Note that Alice loathes the idea of being Mabel not only because Mabel is less bright, but because Mabel is less affluent. Alice is aware of differences in wealth, but she is still a young child; she sees class only in terms of how many material objects a little girl is allowed to have.



Chapter 3: A Caucus Race and a Long Tale



Summary:



The animals and Alice make it to the shore, wet and grouchy. The mouse tries to dry them off by telling a dry story: he recites English history in flat, uninspired prose. At some point, he uses the word "it" without an antecedent, which causes confusion as the animals argue about what "it" is. The Dodo suggests another method of getting dry, as everyone seems to be as wet as over. The animals are initially reluctant to follow the Dodo's advice, as his speech is full of grand words that the other animals don't understand: the Eaglet convinces the Dodo of not understanding them either.



The Dodo suggests a Caucus Race. Alice and the animals line up and race around in circles, starting and stopping whenever they please. After a half-hour or so, they are all quite dry. The Dodo declares that they are all winners. Alice is charged with the responsibility of giving prizes to all of them: all she has is a container of little candies. She gives them one candy each. For her prize, the Dodo awards her the thimble that was in Alice's pocket. She thinks it's all totally absurd, but she dares not laugh for fear of offending them.



She asks the mouse to tell his tale, and he begins. But Alice is transfixed by the mouse's tale, and she looks at it as he speaks. Her impression of the tale is merged with her impression of his tale, and on the page the mouse's story, in verse, is written in the shape of a mouse's tail. The mouse accuses her of being inattentive, and wanders off in a huff. Alice is quite upset, and admits that she wishes that Dinah were with her. Dinah could fetch the mouse back so that he might finish his story. The birds ask who Dinah is, and Alice, eager as always to talk about her cat, talks about Dinah's many talents and virtues as a pet. She mentions that Dinah is quite good at catching birds, and at this bit of news the birds all begin to leave. Alice feels quite lonely, and begins to cry again. Soon, she hears the sound of little footsteps coming towards her.



Analysis:



Puns abound. The two meanings of "dry" are played on at the start of the chapter, as the mouse recites from Havilland Chapmell's Short Course of History. Carroll's taste for puns and the playful side of language is a constant source of amusement throughout the book. The mouse quotes a passage where the antecedent for the word "it" is missing (though the meaning is still quite clear), and the result is general confusion among the animals; this is one of many moments where the creatures of Wonderland create confusion by taking language at absolute face-value. They allow themselves to be confused by pronouns without antecedents; they also take figurative language literally, or confuse homonyms. Much of one's ability to understand language comes from the ability to ignore its inconsistencies and incoherencies: for example, the listener can understand the meaning of "it" without hearing its antecedent. The creatures of Wonderland are not merely silly: they always have their own logic, a certain sense and reasoning behind their absurd behavior. Their strange reactions to language point out the potential pitfalls of English, and their bizarre rules and sensitivities parallel the arbitrary nature of any culture's customs and habits. Alice's adventures are wonderful training for adapting to the absurd behavior of adults.



The Caucus Race parodies political process: the participants run around in confused circles, never accomplishing anything. If we can take Alice as a symbol for the average citizen, we see that the Race does very little to benefit her. At the end, Alice is forced to give everyone a prize. Although Alice also receives a prize, she is given something that she already had. More humor comes from the contrast between the animals' sober faces and Alice's secret conviction that the whole process is absurd.



Carroll puns with the homonyms "tale" and "tale," as the shape of the mouse's tail becomes the shape of the mouse's printed story. The pun is playful, and Alice's fascination with the animal's tale makes for a charming moment: the charm of her wandering attention, the shape of the printed words, and the rhyme scheme mask some of the darkness of the mouse's story. He is talking about being cornered by a dog and forced to go on trial. The dog (whose name is Fury) wanted to be prosecutor, judge, and jury; he also wanted to condemn the mouse to death. We never hear the end of the story, as the Mouse, realizing that Alice is paying less than total attention to the meaning of his words, runs off in a huff.



Alice makes more unknowing allusions to death, this time to the death of others. She wishes her cat Dinah was there, so that the cat might fetch the mouse back to finish his story. She seems unaware of the fact that this would mean the mouse's death. And she unthinkingly talks about Dinah's amazing talent for catching birds, not realizing that this kind of talk will offend all of her new avian friends.


Chapters 4-6


The White Rabbit comes, fretting about his missing things and the wrath of the Dutchess. Alice looks around for the White Rabbit's gloves and fan, but everything has changed: she sees that hall with its many doors have disappeared completely. The White Rabbit sees Alice and mistakes him for his maid. When he orders her back to his home to fetch his gloves and fan, she hurries off without correcting him. In the White Rabbit's house, she finds a fan and gloves and a tiny bottle, similar to the one she drank from before. There is no sign instructing her to drink, but she begins to drink anyway. Suddenly, she has grown so large that she can barely fit in the house. There is no apparent way out. She hears the rabbit outside the house, calling for Mary Ann. The door is blocked, so the rabbit resolves to go in through the window. Alice, nervous about being caught in her present state reaches out the window with her hand and makes a grab at the air. She hears a shattering of glass; the rabbit must have fallen through a cucumber-frame. The rabbit calls for one of his servants, Pat, and demands that the arm be removed. Alice makes another grab at the air, and this time she hears both animals crash down into a cucumber-frame.



The animals decide to send Bill, another servant, down the chimney. Alice manages to wedge her foot into the chimney, and when she hears Bill scuttling down, she gives a good solid kick. Bill goes flying. The animals and Alice are at a standoff. When she hears them planning to set the house on fire, she calls out that they'd better not. Before long, the launch a barrowful of little pebbles in through the window, some of which hit Alice in the face. But after they land, the pebbles turn into little cakes. Alice eats one of them, and it shrinks her down to the size of the little animals; she runs as fast as she can out of the house and beyond. As she runs away, she sees Bill (who is a lizard) being supported by two guinea pigs.



She finds herself in a dense forest, and she decides to search for something to restore her to her normal size, after which she will go and find that lovely garden she saw through the little door (Chapters 1-2). Suddenly, Alice finds herself face-to-face with a puppy. She starts to play fetch with it, but she soon realizes that at her present size, the puppy poses a considerable threat. Alice barely manages to escape being trampled.



Wandering through fields of giant flowers and blades of grass, Alice searches for something to eat or drink that will restore her to her full size. She comes upon a mushroom, on which is sitting a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah.



Analysis:



More growing. The story plays again with the definition of "growing up." Alice talks to herself when she is stuck in the house, and resolves to write a book about her strange adventures when she is grown up, but then realizes mournfully that she is "grown up" already, in terms of size. In Chapter 2, she made a similar statement when she berated herself, "a great girl," for crying so much. But Alice's size is juxtaposed to her naïve comments and worries; these moments emphasize that growing up is more than a matter of size.



In fact, many of Alice's victories come when she is small, and being large is often a great hindrance. Against the puppy, Alice has nothing but her wits to help her against the animal. She manages to escape. And note that in the house she is impeded by her giant size, and is only able to escape when she shrinks down again. Size doesn't matter as much as adaptability, and Alice's true "growing up" comes with her adaptation to each new challenge.



A recurring theme is Alice's desire to see the garden. Wonderland is in this way similar to dreams with an unfulfilled desire. But the garden itself merely structures Alice's journey: after each new adventure, she presses on toward the garden, but it is the incidents along the way that are making her into a wiser person.



Chapter 5: Advice From a Caterpillar



Summary:



The Caterpillar asks Alice who she is, and she can give no satisfactory reply; she has changed so many times in one day that she feels she can no longer answer the question with certainty. The Caterpillar tells her it is not so confusing to change. They have a conversation in which the very mellow Caterpillar gives important advice to the irritable Alice: she must keep her temper. He asks her to recite "You are old, Father William," which Alice does, although afterward they agree that she recited incorrectly. He also tells her that she will grow accustomed to the sensitivity of the animals. Alice expresses a wish to be larger. The Caterpillar contradicts Alice repeatedly, with absolute composure. After a while he crawls off through the grass, telling her that one side of the mushroom will make her grow taller, and the other side will make her grow shorter.



Alice is not sure which side is which, so she bites into one morsel. She is suddenly squashed down, her chin against her feet; she hastily eats the other morsel, and her body elongates tremendously. Her neck becomes so long that she cannot see her shoulders, and she finds she can use her neck as if she were a serpent. Her head makes its way through the lives of a tree, and she happens on a Pigeon, who mistakes Alice for a serpent. The Pigeon fears for her eggs. Alice tries to assure the Pigeon that she is not a serpent, but Alice must answer truthfully when the Pigeon asks if she has eaten eggs. The Pigeon argues that even if Alice is a little girl, if little girls eat eggs then they must be a kind of serpent. Alice is silenced by the novel idea. After some more arguing, the Pigeon shoos Alice off.



Alice eats from each of the mushroom bits, using them to balance each other, until she brings herself to her normal size. She feels strange to be her correct size again, but she is pleased that one part of her plan is now complete. She resolves to go find the garden, but she comes across a charming miniature house. Alice wants to go inside, and she considerately opts not to frighten them with her normal size; she eats mushroom until she is nine inches high.



Analysis:



The conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar is worth a close look, and makes for an excellent paper topic. The discussion brings into focus the themes of change and growing up; for the Caterpillar, for whom dramatic transformation is a natural part of life, change is neither upsetting nor surprising. He is unshakably calm, with the exception of when Alice complains of being only three inches tall (the Caterpillar is exactly three inches tall). He also seems to be less belligerent than many of the creatures of Wonderland, even though he contradicts almost everything Alice says. He is a sage-figure, whose mysterious silences and terse responses provide a sharp contrast to Alice's exasperation and confused replies. The game in Wonderland is change and transformation, and the Caterpillar understands the game that Alice is trying to learn how to play.



The poem Alice recites, "You Are Old, Father William," is a parody of "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them," by Robert Southey. The poem is in line with the theme of change and growth: a young man asks his father how he has maintained so many astounding abilities despite his old age.



The Pigeon's classification of little girls as a type of serpent is one of many humorous logical exercises by the creatures of Wonderland. Remember that Carroll was a mathematician with a love of logic puzzles. The creatures of Wonderland always have a reason and a method to their nonsense. They are constantly reasoning their way to absurd conclusions, to the reader's delight and to Alice's confusion.



Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper



Summary:



As Alice looks at the house and tries to decide what to do next, a fish dressed as a footman arrives and knocks on the door. A frog dressed as a footman answers, and the Fish-Footman delivers an invitation from the Queen to the Duchess to play croquet. When the two footmen bow, their curls become entangled, and Alice laughs so hard she has to leave; when she returns the Fish is gone and the Frog-Footman is sitting on the ground. When Alice goes to knock on the door the Frog-Footman tells her that it's no use. Alice tries to talk with him, but she finds him quite contrary, and so she goes into the house herself. She's now in the kitchen, where the Duchess is sitting in the middle of the room, nursing a baby, and the cook is busying herself over a large cauldron of soup. There is also a cat, sitting on the hearth, grinning widely. The air is full of pepper, and the baby is crying.



Alice asks why the cat is grinning, and the Duchess responds that he grins because he is a Cheshire cat. Alice tries to talk to the Duchess, but the Duchess is quite rude. The cook begins to throw everything within reach at the Duchess and the baby, and the Duchess takes no notice, even when the objects hit her. Alice is terrified for the child, but the Duchess tells her to mind her business. Alice answers her smartly. The Duchess begins to throw the baby into the air, singing a song about beating children, before she finally tosses the baby to Alice and tells her to nurse the child herself if she likes. The Duchess heads off to get ready for her croquet match. Alice, concerned for the child's welfare, takes it with her when she leaves the house, but before long the baby has turned into a pig. She puts it down and it trots away into the woods.



Alice soon runs into the Cheshire cat, whom she asks for directions. He points the way to the Hatter's home, and to the March Hare's place, but he warns her that they're both mad. He also says that everyone around these parts is quite mad, including himself and Alice; if she weren't mad, she wouldn't have come. They talk, the Cheshire cat disappearing and reappearing the whole while. He finally disappears a final time, tail first and grin last. Alice decides to go the March Hare's place, but she feels a sense of foreboding when she reaches his home. It is covered with fear and has two great ears. She uses the mushroom to rise her height to two feet, but she still feels quite anxious as she enters.



Analysis:



Alice shows a considerable amount of composure in this chapter. She never breaks down crying, and she somehow manages to keep her temper despite the argumentative creatures she meets. The theme of growing up works its way through this chapter. We meet the Duchess, who almost at first glance tells Alice that she knows very little (71); Alice is quite displeased by the insult, but she holds her own. A moment later, she shows she is adapting to Wonderland's logic when she answers the Duchess smartly. The Duchess says pointedly that the world would go around faster if everyone minded his own business; Alice responds, in Wonderland fashion, that the world going around faster would not be a good thing. The days would become too short. She literalizes the figure of speech and wins another little victory.



Some more of the risks of growing up are apparent in the transformation of the little baby. One of the greatest dangers of making the transition from childhood to adulthood is growing into a disagreeable adult. The child's transformation into a pig (the pig being a symbol for an unpleasant person) is played on for it's full value as a metaphor. The Cheshire cat asks also what became of the child; when Alice tells him that the baby turned into a pig, the cat responds coyly that he thought it would. When the pig trots off into the woods, she thinks of other children she knows who might make good pigs.



Many characters take their names from old expressions. The Cheshire cat's name comes from the phrase, "to grin like a Cheshire cat," an expression of uncertain origin. The March Hare is insane; an old phrase is "mad as a March hare," referring to the animal's wild behavior during mating season. The Hatter's madness makes allusion to the real-life tendency of hatters to go mad; hatters sometimes went insane because of the poisonous mercury used to cure felt.



Chapters 7-9


Alice finds the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse sitting all together at one end of a large table. The Dormouse sits between the other two, fast asleep. They are disagreeable from the start, and Alice's conversation with them is confusing even by Wonderland standards. They contradict Alice at every turn, correcting her with confusing arguments that have their own strange logic. Much of the conversation is about time. The Hatter's watch, which only tells the day of the month, is broken. The Hatter also tells Alice that Time (which he talks about as if it were a person) stopped working for him about a month ago, when the Queen of Hearts accused the Hatter of murdering the time. Since then, it's always been six o'clock, which is why they sit at tea all the time. All the places at the table are set, because they don't have time to do the dishes. When they want a clean plate, they just move to another spot.



The Dormouse begins to tell a strange story about three sisters who live in a well; Alice's questions and contradictions anger the Dormouse, and the Hatter and March Hare grow increasingly rude to her. Finally, Alice leaves, disgusted, turning around as she goes to see the Hatter and the Hare trying to stuff the Dormouse into a pot of tea.



Alice wanders in the woods until she finds a tree with a door in it. She goes inside, and finds herself in the long hallway again. This time, she's prepared: she takes the key from the table and unlocks the door to the garden. She then eats just enough mushroom to step through the door, and she finds herself in the lovely garden.



Analysis:



The Mad Tea party is an important scene, as the logic/illogic of the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse reveals some of the peculiarities of language. They are some of the most argumentative of the creatures Alice meets in Wonderland, and their strange remarks show Carroll's talent for word games and logic puzzles. (The readers should take a moment to look at some of these important scenes up-close, as analyzing every pun and bit of mad reasoning would be too time-consuming for this summary. Of particular note are the scenes with the caterpillar, the Cheshire cat, and the Mad Tea Party.) The illogic of language and the relationship between sense, nonsense, and words is an important theme of the book. At one point, Alice protests that she says what she means, or at least, she means what she says. She insists that the two are the same thing. But the creatures correct, using examples of similar flipped sentences where the meanings are totally different. (Example: "I like what I get" and "I get what I like.")



Alice is participating in that most adult of activities, a tea party, and she comes up against some of the most difficult creatures she has ever met. But she generally maintains her composure, holding her own against the three tea-takers and managing to anticipate some of their conclusions and rules. She also is smart enough to leave when she's had enough.



The themes of growing up and learning the rules come up in Alice's triumphant entry into the garden. Unlike the first time, when she cried and couldn't maintain control of herself, she remains calm and uses her head to get to the garden.



Chapter 8: The Queen's Croquet Ground



Summary:



Alice enters the garden and finds three gardeners, shaped like playing cards, hurriedly painting the white roses of a rose tree. Alice asks why they are painting the roses red, and one of the gardeners (the Two) admits to her that the tree was supposed to be a red rose tree. If the Queen learned about the error, she would cut off their heads.



The procession of the queen arrives. There are a good many soldiers shaped like cards, like the gardeners; there are also the royal children, various guests, and the white rabbit. Last come the Knave of Hearts and the King and Queen. The procession stops opposite of Alice, and the Queen demands to know Alice's identity. Alice politely introduces herself, but she thinks boldly that she has nothing to fear: they are only a pack of cards. Her replies to the Queen are sassy, and she refuses to be intimidated by the Queen's bluster. The Queen demands to know the identities of the three gardeners, who have thrown themselves, facedown, onto the ground. She has the unfortunate gardeners turned over, so that their numbers and suits are revealed, and when she sees the roses she orders their beheading. The soldiers come forward, and the gardeners run to Alice for protection. Alice secretly hides them in a large flowerpot.



The soldiers report that the gardeners are gone, and the Queen seems to forget about them. She invites Alice to play croquet. Alice follows the Queen and talks to the White Rabbit: from him, she learns that the Duchess is under a sentence of execution. Alice soon learns that croquet in Wonderland is quite difficult. The balls are live hedgehogs, the mallets are live flamingoes, and the hoops are the card-people, bent over so that their bodies make arches. No one is waiting their turn, and the Queen is soon in a fury. Alice begins to worry that the Queen's fury will be turned against her.



The head of the Cheshire cat appears, to Alice's relief. Finally, she has someone civil to talk to. She complains to him about the quarrelsome players and the difficult game. When the cat asks how she likes the Queen, Alice admits she doesn't like her much at all. When Alice notices that the Queen is eavesdropping, she smoothly makes a save and the Queen walks away, satisfied. The king asks whom Alice is talking to, and from the start the King and Cheshire cat don't get along. The king demands its execution and goes to fetch the executioner himself. Alice tries to play croquet some more, but finds it hopeless; she returns to find the executioner, the King, and the Queen arguing, with the Cheshire cat calmly watching. The executioner argues that since the cat is only a head, he cannot be beheaded. The king argues that anything that has a head can be beheaded. The Queen threatens to behead everyone if they don't find a solution. They ask Alice to mediate, and Alice recommends that they fetch the Duchess; it's her cat, after all. By the time the Duchess is brought forth, the cat has vanished.



Analysis:



Alice initially faces the Court of Cards with great confidence; she boldly says to herself that they are only a pack of cards, and she has nothing to fear. She is much stronger than when she first arrived in Wonderland. Her confidence comes through when she saves the lives of the three gardeners.



But Alice soon realizes that although the people of the Court are only a pack of cards, their nature does not make them any less dangerous. The Court of Cards, like people of power in real life, rely on rank and costume for their status. Carroll turns rank and costume into a game, mocking it; however, he does not deny that ridiculous people can be frightening or dangerous. Alice begins by thinking she has nothing to fear, but as she spends more time with the Queen of Hearts she becomes increasingly anxious.



The theme of games, and learning their rules, is central in this chapter. Alice is learning to get along in a social set of powerful people; Carroll makes this adaptation into a kind of game by turning the court into a deck of cards. Alice also has to adapt to a very difficult game of croquet. Part of her problem is realizing that no one else is paying any attention to the rules; sometimes, learning to play means more than learning the rules.



The argument about beheading the Cheshire cat is more fun with nonsense, as the king argues that anything that has a head can be beheaded and the executioner argues that being beheaded actually requires having a body. Alice is composed enough to mediate.



The Cheshire cat is one of the few animals in Wonderland who treats Alice with courtesy. He is a figure similar to the Caterpillar, in that he seems tranquil and unbothered by the confusion of Wonderland. He is unimpressed by the King's threats, and he easily escapes when his safety is threatened.



Chapter 9: The Mock Turtle's Story



Summary:



The Duchess is strangely civil to Alice; she walks with her and engages her in conversation. Alice finds it quite unpleasant, as the Duchess keeps digging her sharp chin into Alice's shoulder. The Duchess also talks almost exclusively in cliché morals; she manages find a moral in everything Alice says or notices. They reach the Queen, who tells the Duchess to run off or lose her head. The Duchess runs. Alice returns nervously to the croquet game. The Queen keeps shouting "Off with her/his head," and within half an hour, all of the other players have been taken into custody and put under sentence of execution. Since the Card-Soldiers were acting as the arches for croquet, there are no arches left. The Queen announces that they shall go find the Mock Turtle (the kind of turtle one uses to make Mock Turtle Soup) so that he can tell Alice his story. As they leave, Alice hears the King quietly pardon all of the prisoners.



Alice and the Queen come upon the Gryphon, whom the Queen wakes. She orders the animal to take Alice to the Mock Turtle. The Queen goes back to see after her executions, and the Gryphon assures Alice that they never really execute anybody. She comes to the Mock Turtle, whose eyes are full of tears. He begins to tell his story. Once, he was a real turtle. He and the Gryphon digress and talk about the strange school that they went to at the bottom of the sea. The description is full of puns. Alice's questions irritate the Gryphon and the Turtle, who are at times quite disagreeable.



Analysis:



The Duchess seems different, but her change in behavior actually reflects how Alice has changed. She is no longer the intimidating figure who acted imperiously to Alice; she is instead a rather silly woman, full of cliché wisdom that degenerates into nonsense. Alice is now able to see her clearly. The Duchess' tendency to find a moral in everything satirizes the simplistic moralizing children's literature of Carroll's time; but now, Alice has grown enough to view the Duchess critically.



Mock Turtle is another game with language. Mock turtle soup is actually made of veal, which is why the original illustrations for the book show a turtle with a calf's head. The description of the school is full of puns, with several moment of real cleverness. The Mock Turtle says that the turtle who taught the others was called a Tortoise; Alice asks why he was called a Tortoise if he was a Turtle. The answer is that he was called a Tortoise because he taught the others. This joke is actually an illustration of the disconnection between sign and signified; language, in other words, is arbitrary. Tortoise is an arbitrary sound, and it need not mean the animal. To the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, teaching is part of the definition of "Tortoise." The French thinker Derrida writes about this quality of language, and his work has had a great influence on linguistics and literary theory.


Chapters 10-12


The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon talk with non-stop puns. They talk to Alice about the dances they used to have: among them was the Lobster Quadrille, a dance that sounds somewhat like a square dance, except everyone has a lobster for a partner. They demonstrate for Alice, without using the lobsters, and Alice attends politely but is quite relieved when it's all over. They explain some of the parts of the song, puns raging out of control, and then they ask Alice to tell them about her story. When she gets to the part about not being able to recite her lessons correctly, they ask her to recite; as before, the poems come out completely different from how they were when she memorized them. The Mock Turtle sings a song about Turtle Soup, tears in his eyes the whole while. He is about to repeat the chorus when they hear someone shouting that the trial is about to begin. The Gryphon takes Alice by the hand and runs off to watch the trial. As she is dragged off by the Gryphon, she can hear the Mock Turtle continue his song.



Analysis:



The puns are two numerous to go through here; the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle are good characters to examine if writing a paper on language and wordplay. The sea where they grew up is a place where every possible pun is exploited.



Alice continues to show how she has grown. When she first arrived in Wonderland, she managed to offend everyone by talking about how her cat catches and eats certain animals; although she almost mentions that she has eaten lobster to the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, she catches herself just in time. She also stops herself from saying that she has had whiting for dinner. She has learned from her previous mistakes, and so she is able to keep things civil between her and her peculiar entertainers.



The Mock Turtle is a strange figure. He is always crying, although the Gryphon says confidentially to Alice in Chapter 9 that the Mock Turtle's sadness is mostly in his own head. But his tears coupled with his song make for a rather eerie moment. Perhaps his sadness comes from the fact that Mock Turtle is meant to be consumed; in real life, it only exists as part of the name of a soup, and in Wonderland Mock Turtles only exists to be made into soup. Remember that the Mock Turtle tearfully told Alice that he was once a real turtle. Though a real turtle need not be eaten, a Mock Turtle probably knows how he will end up. The Mock Turtle's song is about beautiful turtle soup, and even as Alice runs off to the trial she can hear his melancholy chorus. The song is yet another moment that touches on the theme of death.



Chapter 11: Who Stole the Tarts?



Summary:



The King of Hearts is the judge, and the jurors are various animals, some of whom Alice has already met. The White Rabbit recites the nursery rhyme about the knave of hearts stealing tarts from the Queen of Hearts; this is the accusation against the defendant.



The first witness is the Hatter. The king threatens the Hatter all through the cross examination, and that Hatter becomes more and more nervous. During the cross examination, Alice feels herself starting to grow. Also, two guinea pigs, at different points, make noise and are suppressed. The narrator explains that "suppressed" means being stuffed into a large sack and then sat upon. Alice is quite glad to witness it, because she had read the word many times in newspapers and never knew what it meant. The Hatter is excused, and he takes off to go back to his tea. When he gets outside, the Queen calls for him to be executed, but the Hatter manages to escape.



The Cook is the next witness. She is most uncooperative. The Dormouse pipes up during the Cook's cross-examination, and the queen furiously calls for the Dormouse's suppression, expulsion, beheading, etc.; during the scuffle involved in turning the Dormouse out of court, the cook escapes. The king asks the queen to conduct the next cross-examination. The White Rabbit calls the next witness: it's Alice.



Analysis:



Carroll's explanation of "suppression" is another amusing moment of wordplay. He takes advantage of the word's broad range of meanings, as played off against the very specific meaning the word has in the context of newspaper articles reporting trials. Alice makes the mistake (as children often do) of using a very specific example of "suppression" as the best definition of a word.



The proceedings of the trial are obviously unjust, and Carroll is lightly satirizing the justice system. It is not a specific satire of justice as it existed in Victorian England; it can more accurately be read as a satire of some of the dangers involved in trials. The judge and the ever-present queen are tyrannical; the jurors are simpletons who barely know their own names. Alice is appalled by the injustice of the proceedings; it is one of the marks of her basic compassion and her growth as a person that she will refuse to be intimidated or won over by the workings of this court. The theme of growing up is central here. Note that without eating any mushrooms, Alice begins to grow. She also barely notices it. Her growth here is a metaphor for gradually growing into an adult. She entered Wonderland as a tiny version of herself, but she will leave a giant.



Chapter 12:



Summary:



Alice gets up, forgetting how large she has grown; she knocks over the jury box by accident. She puts the box upright again, and puts all the jurors back into place. The king begins to cross-examine her, bombarding her with bad logic; but Alice remains completely composed, and is able to point out some of the inconsistencies in what he says. The White Rabbit presents a completely ambiguous poem, in an unmarked letter that purportedly was written by the Knave of Hearts. The letter is unsigned, and the characters and objects in the poem are only referred to in pronoun form. What's more, the situation does not seem to fit the Knave's situation. But the King and the others interpret the letter as damning evidence against the Knave.



Alice speaks up through the presentation of this evidence. She denies that there is any meaning in the letter, and she refuses to pipe down. When the Queen calls out for her beheading, Alice declares that she is not afraid; after all, they are only a pack of cards. Suddenly all the cards rise up and fly into her face . . .



And Alice wakes up, with her head in her older sister's lap. She has been dreaming. She tells her sister about all of her strange adventures in Wonderland, and then runs into her house to have her tea.



Her sister remains, half-dosing, dreaming herself about Alice's adventures in Wonderland. She also dreams of Alice in years to come, a grown woman who will retain her childlike goodness and compassion. The adult Alice will have children of her own, and perhaps she will entertain them with the story of Wonderland.



Analysis:



We see Alice at the trial as one who cannot be intimidated, or even outreasoned. She manages to fight her way through the king's poor reasoning, and she also stands up against the unjust evidence. She has grown, in all senses: in size, but also in her capacity for thinking independently. She also has a sense of justice, and she refuses to tolerate the terrible proceedings of the unjust trial. The letter, with its poem full of pronouns, plays again with the ambiguity of pronouns. It also satirizes the use of evidence, not only in trials, but in all situations; as people often do in real life, the people in the trial extrapolate the conclusions they want from evidence that is far from sufficient.



The dream ends darkly, as the cards rise up and fly into her face. Although Alice is then a giant and perhaps has little to fear, this moment still hints at some of the difficulties of the world. Alice makes enemies of the Card Court because she refuses to play their games as they want her to; in a book where Alice learns game after game, this final game is one where Alice must learn the rules but then subvert them. In refusing to be bound by the unjust proceedings of the court, she comes into her own as a developed person with a sense of justice and a capacity for independent thought. The final moment of the dream suggest difficulty, but also Alice's ability to stand up for herself. When the cards fly in her face, she screams, but Carroll tells us that the scream is half-fear and half-anger. The attack is frightening, but Alice is prepared to fight back. The waking world continues with this theme of growth, as Alice's sister imagines Alice in the years to come, a strong adult who retains some of her child-like innocence and compassion.