Giddiness and Girlishness

In addition to acting the part of scientist-taxonomist, Alice, especially in Through the Looking-Glass, is also a kind of reluctant anthropologist, perpetually engaged in a game of catch-up and trying her best to do what is “civil,” to figure out whenever possible what the other characters want from her and comply with their wishes when they seem reasonable without losing her moral certainty about her own cultural practices. (The scene where she slices into the talking pudding seems to me to be a perfect example of this—she knows she’s not supposed to serve the pudding, but that doesn’t stop her from doing things the way she was taught.) Particularly in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice meets many characters who challenge her values and ideas with whom she doesn’t really share a common vocabulary (in addition to the feast scene, consider her conversations with Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, and the Lion and the Unicorn). One term she does share with those in both Wonderland and Looking-Glass House is “giddy.” Despite their differences, Alice and the other characters share the belief that giddiness is to be avoided—but none of them can in fact avoid it.

In Wonderland, Alice uses the term “giddy” to refer to her reaction to the Cheshire Cat’s repeated appearances: “I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!” (59). Clearly, giddiness is to be avoided; Alice wishes the cat would stop. What I think makes “giddy” such an appealing term here is that can describe the physical sense of dizziness or light-headedness and the emotional sense of excitement or madness and the cognitive sense of confusion. I think Alice’s reaction here, and her adventures in Wonderland more broadly, trouble the idea that these are separate definitions (as they are in the OED). The physical, intellectual, and emotional blend, as Alice’s experiences of growing and shrinking most clearly exemplify. Looking away and looking back toward the cat could cause the physical dizziness—Alice prepares herself to leave and the cat pops up again, forcing her to look around. And certainly, the cat’s ability to appear and reappear could bring on intellectual confusion. Alice is also pleased to have made an unusual friend, which offers an emotional explanation as well.

But while this works fine for explaining the way Alice’s dream breaks down the boundaries between these ways of experiencing the world, what is striking is that the Queen uses the term herself a few pages later. She chastises the errant gardeners for their incessant bowing: “Leave off that! […] You make me giddy” (72). Interestingly, the Queen personalizes her experience of giddiness in a way Alice does not—she uses “me” where Alice uses “one.” This seems to me to be tied to the Queen’s excess emotionality and imperiousness: it doesn’t matter if others are made giddy, just if she is. The Queen experiences giddiness in its emotional variety of excitement/madness. I’m interested by the way Carroll ties Alice to the Queen in this way because the Queen is a figure of such excess, a figure, moreover, of feminine excess, as we see the King going around quietly pardoning her victims. Alice, on the other hand, is the queen of manners and civility. Why yoke the two together?

I think the use of “giddy” in Through the Looking-Glass sheds some light here. Alice herself experiences giddiness twice more, when she floats down the stairs (134) and when she must run with the Red Queen (142). And two more characters also call themselves giddy: the Sheep and the White Queen. The White Queen explains how “living backwards” “always makes one a little giddy at first” (171). The White Queen is a different sort of figure of feminine excess: she’s taken two hours to dress and is still in a shambles. Her clothing, and loss thereof, intellectually disorients her. If she doesn’t prick herself with her broach, she’ll lose her sense of time. The Sheep uses the term to chastise Alice for spinning around in the shop, asking her if she is a child or a top. “You’ll make me giddy soon, if you go on turning round like that” (176). If the Queen in Wonderland has an excess of emotionality and the White Queen has an excessive focus on appearance, the Sheep has a feminine excess of a different sort. Alice cannot conceive of how many pairs of hands the Sheep currently has engaged in knitting, which forces Alice to row the boat herself. (Interestingly, the OED has an additional nineteenth-century entry for how giddy applies to sheep: lambs and sheep are giddy when they start turning around aimlessly. When they are killed, they are referred to as “giddy mutton.”) And the Sheep experiences her giddiness physically—watching Alice turn literally makes her dizzy. Each of these figures of feminine excess, then, only experiences giddiness in one dimension, whereas in Alice’s character all three aspects—the physical, the cognitive, and the affective—are combined. This reflects her experience in her fantasy worlds as a challenge to body, mind, and spirit, deeply intertwined, but what of Alice back in reality (well, textual reality)? Does Alice’s sense that giddiness—physical, emotional, and cognitive confusion—is to be avoided hold for the “real world?” I read this as one of the lessons that Alice brings from the “real world” into her fantasy worlds that Carroll would like her to un-learn. While the Queen, White Queen, and Sheep are certainly not role models, in each of their examples of feminine excess Alice can see the effects of dis-integrating the physical, emotional, and cognitive and foreclosing confusion. These negative role models, parodies of femininity, are to help Alice unlearn imposed adult norms by exhibiting them to her in the extreme. That Alice has learned her lesson—both that confusion has value and that femininity must be tempered—is clear from the ending of Through the Looking-Glass, in which we see her planning to educate her kitten-children to think in the alternative schemas offered by her fantasy worlds.