“Suppose they had saved up all my punishments?”

In Through the Looking Glass, and perhaps in Wonderland too, Alice seems to have a special relationship with punishment that has to do with a kind of folded or ‘backwards’ temporality often referred to in the narrative, and actually evinced by its structure of events. Though Alice often referred to ‘lessons’ and school in Wonderland, we first see her mentioning punishment in Looking Glass when she threatens to discipline her ‘wicked’ black kitten for its faults, which are, crying out when being washed (being heard and not seen/being childish), pushing the other kitten away from the milk saucer (being selfish/not displaying good manners), and unraveling the worsted when Alice wasn’t looking (causing mischief to someone else’s property). Of course, it’s easy to think about the kitten’s faults as Alice’s, that she’s ventriloquizing threats made to her by her parents, sister, or nurse when she’s behaved badly to the kitten. Indeed, early on in Chapter 1, we receive the information that Alice “had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before” because Alice had decided to pretend to be kings and queens: an impropriety, since, according to her sister there are only two of them and Alice’s suggestion makes four at least. But I might suggest that, perhaps taking a cue from Chris’s presentation last week, that Alice’s relationship to punishment somehow bends time, and though it would be easy to think of Alice as simply punishing herself by punishing the kitten for wrongs committed earlier, we only get a sense of Alice’s wrong(s) at the very moment when it’s hardest to tell if she’s in the Looking Glass house or her own house, when the narrative folds into itself. Much like the end of Wonderland, where all Alice has to realize is that the figures insulting/bothering her are “only a pack of cards,” (Queen) Alice’s Looking Glass feast of guests devolves into a carnivalesque, chaotic frenzy, the Red Queen and the rest shrunken and hiding in food dishes, and Alice only able to come back to ‘reality’ by “shak[ing] her [the Red Queen] into a kitten.”

At first, the feast it self seems to be full of Alice’s ‘faults’ and wrongdoings that should be punished. She’s rude and displays poor manners by being late and misses the first course. She commits a grave offense and impropriety to the bodies of her guests when she tries to cut up the mutton she’s just been introduced to, and goes one step further when she actually does serve up pieces of the pudding after she’s met it formally. She fails at every moment to know when to speak and what to say, ‘leav[ing] all the conversation’ to the injured pudding, and has to be reminded when she should give thanks to her guests. Finally, she completely loses her temper and grabs the Red Queen, shaking her “backwards and forwards with all her might.” If we’re thinking in terms of Victorian etiquette and manners, Alice certainly fails at this feast, which would seem to further cement that she’s reliving wrongdoings and punishment in the Looking Glass world. But I’d like to suggest that it is actually the moment in between Alice shaking the Red Queen and the kitten, that provides her offence at the end, if only to be read ‘backwards’ through the Looking Glass narrative. The blurring between the body of the Red Queen and the black kitten being shaken by Alice seems traumatic: it dissolves the boundary between dreaming and waking, compressing both kinds of time into one, and effectively makes Alice’s wrongdoing, the shaking of this body so wrong as to be outside of time altogether, yet structuring the time of the narrative in a suitably ‘backwards’ or ‘wrong’ way. Whether it’s a kitten or the Red Queen or something else, the event of the shaking seems to be the signifier that (retroactively) gives the rest of the narrative shape (never mind that chess metaphor). If I were more comfortable or knowledgeable about it, I might furnish this argument with some actual Lacan to involve the figure of the mirror and the form of the dream work in the Looking Glass since I’m kind of implying a Lacanian reading, but this will have to do for now. This might also go with arguments other people might make about math and the Looking Glass, another one of my other major weak points.