This was kind of hard for me for a couple of reason. First of all, when I thought about the animals in Alice, I didn't see them as animals. I mean, think about it. The White Rabbit has a waistcoat pocket, OK? And he's worried about being late. I don't even worry about being late, and I'm actually a human. He's out-humaning me, I tell you! It's utterly preposterous. And the Lion and Unicorn in Looking Glass, fighting over the kings all-powerful crown? Seems like a pretty human desire. Not to mention the Cheshire Cat. What kind of cat sits around grinning and exclaiming to small human girls that “[everyone] is mad” (Carroll, 66)?
Doesn't this rabbit look ridiculously human to you?
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Anyway, so I sat around confused for about a half an hour, trying desperately to reverse the humanization that Carroll, through Alice, had so liberally bestowed upon the animals in Wonderland before realizing that THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT! Through this humanizing, Carroll was showing:
how we dehumanize animals just because they don't communicate and act the same way as us and therefore allow ourselves to treat them unethically, although lack of understanding for animals is not a “good and sufficient cause” (Anthology, 329) for this unethical treatment.
the astounding difference in Alice's treatment of animals that arises when they DO communicate and act like humans. I think that animals possess a lot of the same traits as us, but we fail to recognize these similarities because we are blinded by what separates us, such as the ability to talk. Take my dog, for example. Last weekend he had a little happy heart attack when I let him walk with me to the mailbox. In fact, it was astonishingly similar to the the happy heart attack my sister had when I took her with me to the movie store. The only difference between their happy heart attacks was that my sister jumped up and down shrieking “MOVIEMOVIEMOVIEMOVIEMOVIE”, while my dog jumped up and down yelping “YAPYAPYAPYAPYAP”. In Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Alice find it time and time again easier to act ethically towards those animals which Carroll has given the power to act and communicate in familiar and human ways.
This is about what my sister looked like when she found out we were getting a movie.
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One of the major ways in which Carroll proves these two points is by contrasting the way in which Alice treats those animals he has humanized to the way she interacts with those who are in their more natural state, namely the pig, the dog and the cooked animals at her feast in Looking Glass when she becomes a queen. I thought the pig was probably the most interesting of all, because it started out as a child. Alice, when the pig is a baby, tries to save it from the abuse it is experiencing with the duchess, exclaiming that “if [she doesn't] take this child away with [her]... they're sure to kill it” (Carroll, 63). However, Alice is annoyed with the “child” as soon as it begins acting in unhuman ways. She tells it not to grunt because grunting is “not at all a proper way of expressing [oneself]”. After awhile, Alice tells the pig-child that “if [it is] going to turn into a pig... [she'll] have nothing more to do with [it]” (Carroll, 63). Once it becomes a pig she simply sets it down. But here's the thing: isn't the pig still potentially in danger? Tenniel drew. So how is it supposed to protect itself in the dark forest of Wonderland? Honestly, I think it was ethically unsound of Alice to let the pig go off on its own, when it was really only slightly better prepared to deal with the dangers of the world than the baby was. As for the dog, I didn't necessarily think that Alice behaved unethically towards it, but she didn't make much of an effort to be civil to it, just throwing a stick at it and then scurrying away. This could be partially explained by her fear of the dog because it was much larger than her, but Alice felt a certain fear of the duchess as well and left her in a somewhat more civil manner, taking her “baby” to play “nurse” with it at the duchesses request. When Alice is confronted by the mutton at the feast, she “[takes] up the knife and fork” and makes an effort to cut it. Though the mutton is not a living animal, it represents an animal that was once living, and Alice has no knowledge as to whether it died a “painless death” (Carroll, 329) which makes her effort to eat it border on the unethical.
Alice's treatment of these animals can be contrasted to her treatment of the humanized animals in Carroll's classic tale. When the White Rabbit asks Alice to fetch his fan and white gloves, she immediately goes to do so. Though the Caterpillar is short with Alice, she stays and talks with him for quite awhile. This animals interaction in particular is important because Alice gains the ability to choose her own growth from it, showing that if we take the time to listen to and understand animals we can learn valuable lessons. In Looking Glass, Alice rows the queen-turned-sheep in the little boat, something she probably would not have been so ready to do had the sheep not been able to talk.
It seems like Alice doesn't have the same respect for all animals that Jude, in the excerpt from Jude the Obscure, shows. Jude lets the birds eat from the farmers field he's supposed to be scaring them away from, telling them to “make a good meal” (Anthology, 320) even though he knows that he could be fired. I thought this was brave, but I also thought it was possibly an unnecessary sacrifice, because the birds could probably have gotten food elsewhere. I thought it was interesting how Jude was “struck with... [his] own rattle,” the very instrument he used to drive away the birds. I feel like Alice got a taste of her own medicine in Wonderland as well. When she is small, Alice is forced to see things from the perspective of smaller animals, like the mouse. The mouse expresses fear of dogs, something that Alice is unable to understand until she is confronted by a dog in her new mouse-ish size. Though Carroll never explicitly says so, I think this experience helped Alice better understand the mouses aversion to dogs. Once she was back in the real world, she probably never looked at dogs in the same way.
Alice is significantly smaller then the dog, which may have helped her understand the mouses fear of dogs better.
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So how does this all relate to me? I'm not sure, actually. I think, though, that what I most appreciated about the animals in Alice was that, though in some cases their human-qualities were exaggerated to the point where they no longer seemed like animals, there were times when I felt like they were simply animals with the ability to speak. I kind of felt like this brought to life the bond that humans share with animals. I'm always telling people that we're the same person whenever we have anything in common. We both like chocolate? SAME PERSON. Both have brown hair? SAME PERSON. If I apply this foolproof logic to humans and animals, I'd say they're the same as well.
Humans and animals both have deep emotions? SAME PERSON.
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