The title of this poem “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass” is ironically the most relative and concise title that this poem could have had. The irony comes from the idea that the entire poem is based upon entirely in concise and abstract ideas that are completely unrealistic, yet allow the readers to view this piece of art in relation to real world moral and ethical dilemmas. Similarly, each title of the chapters of the poem meet a hidden meaning to the “tea” (pun intended) and could not be more fitting to the ideas that the poem is centered around (Advice from a Caterpillar”, “A Mad Tea Party”(479, 488)). When instructed to write a blog about eating animals in the Alice books, I was dumbfounded as to where in this Disney story was there any relation to eating animals and, in actuality, what kind of serious ideas could be emphasized and coupled with such a seemingly childish story. It was not until after reading the annotated Alice stories that I realized that this is not a story about a little girl getting lost and eventually finding her way, but rather, in large part, about the human race being ignorantly and naively lost within their own human world that they unconsciously choose to ignore the world’s of those non-human lives around them.
Alice is placed in a situation in which the roles of animals versus human are essentially reversed. She is thrown in an unfamiliar place, in which she is aware that she is not at home, but rather “down here…” where “nobody seems to like her…” (477). In the familiar human world, humans take precedence over animals in nearly all aspects of life. Carroll’s desire to place Alice in the position of an animal is evident throughout his poem through his use of capitalization and pronouns. While human names are capitalized here on earth, in Wonderland, the animal’s names are capitalized, such as “Mouse” and “Caterpillar” (467, 480). The pronoun usage made very clear to me that Alice was the inferior species when Carroll, as the Lory, refered to Alice as an “it” (477). Alice’s ideas are not heard, not understood or merely not acknowledged, similar to the way the thoughts and ideas of animals go unnoticed in the human world. Animals have no choice as to where they live, who their company is or what they eat. At a meal with the Duchess in this “Wonderland”, Alice’s has a meal involving soup that has “certainly too much pepper..!” (483). Living amongst humans, animals are often robbed of their integrity and sense of “self”. Carroll again emphasizes the idea that Alice symbolizes the animal in the human world when the Duchess tells her, “’You don’t know much…and that’s a fact’” (483).
Carroll may have emphasized the vast differences in the way that animals are treated versus the way that humans are treated in our world in order to make his audience aware that animals may feel out of place and different here, therefore they require that much more empathy from the ruling species demographic (humans). In agreement with David Daniel, Carroll allows the reader to watch as Alice is forced to “learn to empathize with those who are different from her in order to grow up” (Daniel 538).
“Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up; if not, I’ll stay down here till somebody else’-but, oh dear!” (467). This poem truly forces the audience to consider what kind of person they are in the way in which they treat others who are different than themselves. Through Carroll’s strategic use of animals as the majority in the Alice poem, treatment of animals, specifically, may be acknowledged, evaluated and potentially changed in result of putting oneself in the outsider’s uncomfortable shoes.
http://browngrrrl.wordpress.com/2009/05/
http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/suffering.asp
http://www.mixpod.com/forums/view-topic.php?id=7336&page=1
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