On the Origin of the Looking Glass

It probably won’t make for the most original post, but I thought that I’d go ahead and draw some parallels between the worldview implied by Through the Looking Glass and that implied by On the Origin of Species. Admittedly, we already did a rather thorough job of using Darwin to think about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but I hope that there are some insights still to be gained by applying Darwin to the second Alice book.

Long ago, in a conversation that I once shared with the great cultural historian Stephen Kern, Dr. Kern told me that over the course of Western Intellectual History, man has suffered three primary blows to his ego. They were: Copernicus informing man that he was not the center of the universe, Darwin informing man that he was not even the center of the earth, and Freud informing man that he was not even the master of his own house—that his subconscious mind actually shaped much of his life. The second blow to man, the Darwinian one, gets a rather brilliant dramatization in both of the Alice books, books that show their human protagonist being ordered around by animals and being cowed by animals’ superior grasp of the environment and of language. My favorite moment of this dramatization comes early in Through the Looking Glass, when even the flowers claim their superiority over Alice. “It’s my opinion that you never think at all,” the Rose tells the little girl. “I never saw anybody that looked stupider,” adds the Violet (138). More important than the flowers’ general disdain for Alice, however, is the way in which they express it. Lines like the Tiger-lily’s comment, “If only her petals curled a little more, she’d be all right” (137), are extremely significant because they reveal a kind of flora-centrism. The flowers think of Alice’s hair in terms of petals and they judge her person on the basis of whether or not she makes a good flower. I’d like to argue that while the absurdity of the flowers’ comments may raise a chuckle, that chuckle should be one of discomfort, for their “absurd” procedure is simply the mirror image of man’s anthropocentric efforts to judge all of nature from his own vantage point. Like Darwin, Carroll routinely challenges any example of man’s grand pretension. Indeed, implied in the flowers’ contention that they can talk, “As well as [Alice] can […] And a great deal louder” (136) is the idea that mankind’s view of the world has no more right to be privileged than a flower’s perspective. They are both equally valuable; or, perhaps, both equally absurd, equally full of distortion, and equally worthless.

Another part of Carroll’s critique of anthropocentrism can be found in Chapter 3, when Alice and the Gnat discuss the fact that insects don’t seem to answer to their names:

“What’s the use of their having names,” the gnat said, “if they wo’n’t answer to them?”

“No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”

“I can’t say,” the Gnat replied. “Further on, in the woods down there, they’ve got no names.” (149)

Here I am more than tempted to read “names” as “species names.” Why do animals have species names? Because those names are “useful to the people that name them.” But those names are of no use to the animals themselves. The animals don’t “answer” to those names—indeed, as Darwin tells us, a species name refers to a population whose borders are difficult to define and always changing.

Deeper in the woods, in places where man has not ventured, the animals have no names (and no doubt do fine even without them). What’s more, when Alice does actually travel to these woods, she loses her own name and subsequently her identity. These woods, then, are a deeply Darwinian space. They are a place where species are defined less simplistically and where, as a result, man loses his sense of identity. In this forest man can no longer see himself as the being capable of naming and separating all of the animals. And as a result he can no longer see himself as wholly set off from those animals.

In a sense, Darwin voids the gift that God gave to Adam, the absolute gift of being able to name all of the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth. Carroll follows suit in returning the gift, and likewise does an admirable job of tracing out the implications of man’s losing this particular privilege.