The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Rose Lovell-Smith

Alice herself, by kicking Bill the Lizard up the chimney (an incident memorably illustrated by Tenniel in a very funny picture) and by looking on approvingly while the guinea pigs are so unkindly treated in court, inverts the theme of kindness to animals established in more orthodox children's literature like Maria Edgeworth's tale of "Simple Susan," where a girl's pet lamb is saved from the slaughterer's knife. (15) In Alice in Wonderland there is humorous delight in the misappropriation of the creatures in the croquet scene, and there are many other versions of a cruel carnival in the book: for instance, Alice imagines herself being set to watch a mousehole by her own cat. She also resents "being ordered about by mice and rabbits" (46)--a phrase that suggests the "world upside down" of carnival but which might also be taken as summing up the new evolutionary predicament of humanity. Fallen down the rabbit hole from her lordly position at the top of the Great Chain of Being, Alice instead finds herself, through a series of size changes, continually being repositioned in the food chain.

The importance of the theme of predation, "the motif of eating and being eaten," is such that it has attracted a number of commentaries. It is fully described by Margaret Boe Birns in "Solving the Mad Hatter's Riddle" and by Nina Auerbach in "Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child." (16) Birns remarks in opening her essay that "Most of the creatures in Wonderland are relentless carnivores, and they eat creatures who, save for some outer physical differences, are very like themselves, united, in fact, by a common 'humanity.'" Birns therefore even cites a crocodile-eating fish as a case of "cannibalism," (17) quoting in support of this idea Alice's "Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena and you're a bone!" (Looking-Glass, 8). She also remarks that Wonderland contains creatures whose only degree of self-definition is expressing a desire to be eaten or drunk, and offers other comments on scenes in Through the Looking-Glass where, as she puts it, "food can become human, human beings can become food." (18) I do not always find "cannibal" readings supported by the parts of the text in question. Auerbach also makes claims about cannibalism, but a little differently, referring the idea of "eat or be eaten" back to Alice, her "subtly cannibalistic hunger," (19) the "unconscious cannibalism involved in the very fact of eating and the desire to eat." (20) Auerbach associates this interpretation with Dodgson's own attitude to food. But textual support for the quality Auerbach calls Alice's cannibalism seems lacking. Alice does not really eye the other animals in her pool of tears with "a strange hunger" as Auerbach suggests, (21) nor do the Hatter and the Duchess "sing savage songs about eating" as Auerbach claims. (22) To describe a panther eating an owl as cannibalism, Auerbach (23) must assume (like Birns) that the creatures in Alice are definitely to be read as humans in fur and feathers. My argument is that they need not be so read: the point might be their and Alice's animal nature. Nor does the food at Queen Alice's dinner party at the end of Through the Looking-Glass "begin to eat the guests" (24) as Auerbach claims, although food does misbehave in Looking-Glass and the Pudding might have this in mind (Looking-Glass, 206). Overall, however, in my view the preoccupation of Alice in Wonderland with creatures eating other creatures is much better accounted for by the "more sinister and Darwinian aspects of nature" (25) which Auerbach and Birns (26) also recognize as a part of the Alice books.