Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) | Margaret Boe Birns (essay date 1984)
Margaret Boe Birns (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "Solving the Mad Hatter's Riddle," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Autumn, 1984, pp. 457-68.
[In the essay below, Birns explores the theme of eating and cannibalism in Alice.]
Even a cursory glance at Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will reveal one of its obsessive themes, namely, eating, or more darkly, cannibalism. 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." The very first poem found in the text establishes the motif of eating and being eaten:
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...
[The entire page is 4507 words long]
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