Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

When Alice arrives at the March Hare’s house, there is a tea party underway. The Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse are crowded together at the end of a long table. When Alice approaches, the cry “No room!” though most of the table is empty (89). Their conversation is argumentative from the beginning. The Hare offers Alice wine, though there isn’t any, and the Hatter tells her that her hair needs cutting. Alice reminds him not to make personal comments and tells the Hare it was uncivil to offer wine when it had none.

The Hatter replies with the now-famous riddle: Why is a raven like a writing desk? (91). Alice believes she can guess the answer. When Alice says that saying what she means is the same as meaning what she says, they begin a conversation about syntactical logic. They contend that her phrases are not equivalent and give other examples, such as “I see what I eat” being the same as “I eat what I see” (91). The conversation further pushes the limits of sense and turns logic into a game of words, rather than an absolute standard for reasoning.

In this passage, Carroll makes the distinction between words and sense, meaning and language: “The Hatter’s remark seemed [to Alice] to have no sort of meaning, and yet it was certainly English” (93). Throughout the novel, the rhymes and songs that Alice and the other characters recite have no logical meaning, even though the words are arranged in a logical and grammatical order. This tension between words and their (lack of) meaning is an important feature of the literary nonsense genre. Wordplay and the deconstruction of meaning is discussed in this guide in the Themes section and again in the section on psychoanalytic motifs.

The tea party continues with a series of wordplay conversations about Time; an argument the Hatter had with Time accounts for why it is always six o’clock—teatime (96-97). The Dormouse tells a story, but it is fraught with interruptions, and in the end, Alice leaves in disgust.

She comes upon a tree with a door. When she enters, she finds herself in the hall of doors. This time, she takes the key from the table and eats just enough of the mushroom to fit through the door and enter the garden.

Alice finds three gardeners—who are playing cards—hastily painting a white rosebush red. They tell Alice that they need to paint them before the Queen arrives so that she does not realize they planted the wrong kind of rosebush.

Just then, the Queen’s retinue arrives; first the soldiers, who are clubs; then the courtiers, who are diamonds; then the children, who are hearts. The White Rabbit and Knave of Hearts accompany the King and Queen of Hearts. The Queen stops in from of Alice and demands to know who she is.

Alice replies, and the Queen demands to know the identity of the gardeners. Alice says she does not know and puts them into a flowerpot to hide them from the Queen. The Queen invites Alice to play croquet, which features live hedgehogs as the balls, flamingoes as the mallets, and the playing-card soldiers bent into arches. The Cheshire Cat appears in the air and asks Alice how the game is going. Alice explains that the game is chaotic and begins to say something negative about the Queen, but stops when the Queen passes. The King does not like the look of the Cheshire Cat and recommends to the Queen that they should behead it. However, as the Cheshire Cat is only a head hovering in the air, there is no body from which to separate it. By the time the King, Queen, and executioner finish arguing, the Cat is gone.

The Duchess greets Alice affectionately, and Alice thinks that maybe all the pepper in the kitchen had made the Duchess angry on their previous meeting. As they walk, the Duchess turns each of Alice’s observations into a nonsensical moral. The Queen approaches and the Duchess runs off.

The Queen asks Alice if she has met the Mock Turtle. When Alice says no, the Queen takes her to a Gryphon and orders it to take Alice to see the Mock Turtle. The Gryphon—a mythological creature with a lion’s tail and body and an eagle’s wings and head—leads Alice to a ledge where the Mock Turtle is sitting and weeping. The Gryphon tells Alice that the Mock Turtle does not have any real sorrow, it is “all his fancy” (127). The Gryphon introduces Alice and tells the Mock Turtle that she would like to hear his story.

The Mock Turtle says it is sad because it used to be a real Turtle. The story it tells is full of puns and other kinds of wordplay. The Mock Turtle and Gryphon went to school together under the sea, and they share stories about their teachers and classes. Alice is interested in their lesson schedule, which lessened each day, but they change the subject to talk about their games (132).