Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Decoded
Page 25
After noting the children’s movements almost daily so far, Dodgson mentions the Liddells only twice over the rest of the year. In one of those entries, on December 5, he reports seeing them at a distance: “But I held aloof from them, as I have done all this term.” Although he had finished writing Alice’s Adventures Under Ground before this incident in June, Dodgson did not complete illustrating (with his own drawings) and binding the handwritten manuscript until November, when it was sent as a gift to the Deanery.
No note of thanks or acknowledgement was forthcoming from the Deanery, neither for the single handmade copy of the story nor for the first published copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland sent two years later, for Christmas 1865. The breakdown in relations was permanent. Dodgson had been exiled. Except for occasional—and usually painful—formal encounters, Charles Dodgson was banned from the Deanery and the company of Alice and her sisters.
What is known is that Dodgson was summoned before Alice’s parents just after the June 25 outing. In that encounter with the dean and Mrs. Liddell, a decision was made that it would be inappropriate for the Oxford mathematics don to have any further sustained contact with Alice or her sisters.
The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a low voice, “Your Majesty must cross-examine this witness.”
“Well, if I must, I must,” the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, “What are tarts made of?”
“Pepper, mostly,” said the cook.
“Treacle,” said a sleepy voice behind her.
“Collar that Dormouse,” the Queen shrieked out. “Behead that Dormouse! Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!”
For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared.
“Never mind!” said the King, with an air of great relief. “Call the next witness.” And he added in an undertone to the Queen, “Really, my dear, you must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!”
Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list, feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like, “—for they haven’t got much evidence yet,” she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name “Alice!”
Obviously, something occurred on or after the outing that provoked this sudden break—something sufficiently dramatic for one of Dodgson’s nieces to find it necessary to cut several pages from his normally emotionally reticent diaries. There have been many speculations on this issue. Although a number of theories abound, the most common hold that something inappropriate occurred during the journey home, or that at the Deanery meeting, Dodgson made a proposal of engagement to Alice that was rudely rebuffed.
Enough is known about Dodgson’s temperament to understand that—true or not—he would have reacted angrily to any suggestion of improper conduct. As demonstrated by his many feuds, Dodgson was incapable of letting any slight on his moral integrity or personal honour pass without taking grave offence.
EGYPTIAN HOUSE OF CARDS The theosophists of the fourth century AD in Alexandria were strongly influenced by the Egyptian Mysteries. These Egyptian rites were revived by the Freemasons, who wished to trace their origins to history’s first architect, Imhotep, the builder of the Step Pyramid. Consequently, Egyptian motifs—especially those relating to the gods Isis and Osiris—are to be found embedded by Carroll in Wonderland from the opening prelude poem right through to its culmination with the trial of the Knave of Hearts.
It is also noteworthy that Carroll was not only familiar with the British Museum Egyptian collection, but was a frequent visitor to the famous Egyptian Hall and Museum in Piccadilly, as were many artists and writers of the time. Besides displaying Egyptian antiquities, this establishment had exhibition halls for work by contemporary artists. It also became a meeting place for those—like Carroll—who were fascinated with the occult.
Isis, of course, is also the name of the branch of the Thames River upon which Lewis Carroll took the real-life Alice and her sisters on that fateful boating expedition. And just as Isis descends into the Egyptian underworld by way of a boat on the river Nile, so in the prelude poem Alice and her sisters descend into Wonderland by way of a boat on the River Isis.
In the Egyptian underworld, called the Duat, everything is a reverse of the living world. This matches Alice’s anticipation as she falls down her rabbit-hole: she thinks she may end up in the “Antipathies” (instead of the antipodes). She is not entirely wrong, for everything and everybody she encounters is contrary to her expectations.
Many other aspects of Wonderland would be strangely familiar to the ancient Egyptians. Wonderland’s underground hall with its many doors resembles the many doors to Egyptian underground halls where—like Alice—the wandering soul is interrogated before it may pass on toward its final trial in the Hall of Justice. The Egyptian doorkeepers with the heads of animals and the bodies of humans are eerily similar to the doorkeepers of the Duchess’s kitchen: the Frog-headed and the Fish-headed Footmen. Then, too, there is the mysterious Cheshire Cat, the riddling Sphinx of Wonderland.
Also, closer examination of the Pool of Tears episode reveals that it is more than a joke about a child drowning in her own tears. As discussed earlier, “a great girl like you” makes perfect sense if we understand that Alice has taken on the identity of the great goddess Isis, whose tears are the source of the Nile. This convincingly explains how she could be carried away in the flood of her own tears and the rather sinister rhyme about a crocodile in “the waters of the Nile.”
The Wonderland trial of the Knave of Hearts is strongly imitative of the trial of the soul and the weighing of the heart as famously portrayed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Pyramid Texts.
In the Wonderland underworld, the trial takes place in the court of the royal house of “the King and Queen of Hearts … seated on their throne.” In this court the judge “was the King,” and the royal herald and scribe directs proceedings and stands with “a scroll of parchment” in one hand. The trial is witnessed by a jury of animals and birds, and set before all is “a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it.”
In the Egyptian underworld, the trial took place in the court of the royal House of Hearts, where the King and Queen of the Duat were seated on their thrones. In this court the judge was King Osiris, and the royal herald and scribe directed proceedings and stood with a scroll of parchment in one hand. The trial was witnessed by a jury of animal-headed and bird-headed gods. And set before all was a table with the cakes of immortality upon it—the promised reward at the end of the trial.
The procedure of the trial is clear in this “weighing of the heart” passage taken from the Book of the Dead: “May my heart be with me in the House of Hearts. May my heart be with me, and may it rest there, or I shall not eat of the cakes of Osiris … nor shall I be able to sail down the Nile with thee.”
The Weighing of the Heart is the most famous and most commonly reproduced scene in all Egyptian art. This was where the human soul, or spirit double of the deceased person (or one’s “immaterial essence,” as Carroll phrased it), descended into the underworld to be judged. There the heart was placed on the great scales of justice, where it was weighed against the feather of truth.
Alice’s adventures culminate in the court of the house of hearts, where the judge-King of Hearts sits in judgment of the Knave of Hearts. Similarly, Isis’s adventures culminate in this court wherein the judge-king Osiris sits in judgment of the human heart. As we’ll see in the next chapter, it is significant that the judge-King of Hearts puts great stock in his all-important Rule Forty-two (which Alice rejects), because for the judge-king Osiris there were forty-two crimes that must be denied by each soul before judgment was delivered.
Three of these declarations seem to relate directly to the trial of the Knave of Hearts who stole the tarts:
“I have not stolen the cakes of the gods.
“I have not stolen the cakes of the Child.
“I have not stolen the cakes offered to the Soul.”
If the soul was innocent of all forty-two crimes, the weighed heart would be as light as the feather of truth, and the soul would be rewarded and nourished with the cakes of immortality and would be—as the theosophists claimed—“reborn to eternity.” However, if the heart was heavy with guilt for violating any of the forty-two rules, then oblivion was the person’s fate and their heart was fed to the terrible monster Ammut, the Devourer of Hearts who stood by the scales of justice. On the theosophical level, it might reasonably be argued that the judge-King of Hearts is judge-king Osiris, and the heartless Queen of Hearts is Ammut, the monster of retribution.
Meanwhile, Alice, who has been accused of growing “a mile high,” is once again that “great girl”—the goddess Isis—who stands as witness to Osiris’s judgment. But, as the great goddess, she now is capable of overruling the judge-King and defends the Knave of Hearts. And in this Egyptian tableau, the Knave of Hearts is Horus. For just as the Knave of Hearts is the son of the King of Hearts, so the young god Horus is the son of the king Osiris.
Because Alice rejects Rule Forty-two, she also forfeits her right to the cakes of immortality and will have to return to the everyday world of her ordinary life. After all, she is a dreamer passing through this underworld, not yet ready for the real test awaiting her in the afterlife.
As seen by the Knave: Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell.
Chapter 12: Alice’s Evidence
“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!”
Minos presiding, in one of William Blake’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy, circa 1824–7.
A HOUSE OF CARDS Wonderland’s final chapter begins with Alice being called to provide evidence in the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Surprised at being called as a witness, Alice jumps up and—forgetting she has grown so large—“tip[s] over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt … reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset a week before.” The exactly worded account and the fact that “the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head” suggests that here Carroll is teasing Alice Liddell (possibly to the amusement of her sisters) by introducing a mildly embarrassing real-life accident with a fish bowl in the Deanery.
Of course, in Wonderland, this will not be the last time Alice literally upsets the court. It foreshadows much of what is to come, and the matter of her great size—physically and metaphorically—suggests her growing power and influence in Wonderland.
ALICE’S EVIDENCE.
“Here!” cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before.
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.
“The trial cannot proceed,” said the King in a very grave voice, “until all the jurymen are back in their proper places—all,” he repeated with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said so.
In Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background, Donald Thomas draws a number of comparisons between Wonderland and the Greco-Roman underworld kingdom of Hades. Thomas theorizes on the influence of Virgil when it comes to legal matters: “That Dodgson intended a parallel or was conscious of being influenced by his reading [of the Aeneid] is beyond proof. He certainly used figures from Virgil’s account in Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879), when two of the judges from the courts of Hades in the Aeneid, Minos and Rhadamanthus, act as mathematical examiners in a dream of contemporary Oxford.”
Thomas finds particular evidence of Virgil in the courtroom scenes and procedures of Wonderland. “The Queen of Hearts would have been peculiarly at home in Virgil’s underworld. Minos and Rhadamanthus preside over the courts of the dead, but hand over the guilty to Tisiphone, Queen of the Furies, for punishment. Virgil describes the procedure of the court of Rhadamanthus. ‘Castigatque auditque dolos,’ he chastises them and then listens to the account of their crimes.”
THE LAWS OF THOUGHT
GEORGE BOOLE (1815–1864), a British mathematician, philosopher and logician, was the author of An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. The development of Boolean logic coincided exactly with Lewis Carroll’s academic career and seems to have influenced every aspect of his intellectual and imaginative life. In a mathematician’s Wonderland, George Boole would be the most obvious candidate for the King of Hearts.
Before the publication of Boole’s first work on symbolic logic, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, in 1847, logic had advanced little since Aristotle’s time. However, in that work—and in his Laws of Thought in 1854—Boole showed for the first time how algebraic formulae could be used in logic to reveal (in his own words) “those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning” and “to give expression to them in the symbolic language of a Calculus.” The early twentieth-century mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell believed it to be a major event in the history of mathematics: “Pure mathematics was discovered by Boole, in a work which he called The Laws of Thought.”
A contemporary of Lewis Carroll’s was John Venn (1834–1923), the Cambridge logician who created a simplified notation system of Boolean logic involving interlocking circles known as Venn diagrams. As a measure of Carroll’s enthusiasm for Boolean algebra, he published what he believed was a better notation system, using interlocking squares.
George Boole: A major influence on mathematics and Carroll.
“Beyond six letters Mr. Venn does not go.”
CHARLES DODGSON
Carroll’s contemporary John Conington, the first professor of Latin at Oxford and editor of The Works of Virgil in three volumes, remarked that “this legal procedure of Rhadamanthus … was ‘hysteron proteron,’ that is to say putting the second thing first.” Thomas points out that this is the same procedure employed when “the Queen of Hearts insisted, ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’ Dodgson’s Wonderland and Virgil’s underworld have strikingly similar judicial systems.”
Dodgson knew Conington well, and in his alphabetical squib “Examination Statute” wrote: “C is for [Conington], constant to Horace.” Thomas observes that Conington published his edition of Book VI of the Aeneid, with his comment on the justice of the underworld, “including this judicial dictum of the Queen of Hearts,” a few years in advance of Dodgson’s publication of Wonderland. He adds that perhaps not coincidentally, “another Oxford classicist, Arthur Sidgwick, a younger friend of Dodgson’s, remarked that Virgil’s was ‘a famous line from its inversion of the natural order of justice.’ ”
Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. She soon got it out again, and put it right; “not that it signifies much,” she said to herself; “I should think it would be quite as much use in the trial one way up as the other.”
As soon as the jury had a little recovered
from the shock of being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the court.
“What do you know about this business?” the King said to Alice.
“Nothing,” said Alice.
“Nothing whatever?” persisted the King.
However, the trial of the Knave of Hearts is clearly the product of the mind of Charles Dodgson the mathematician and logician. Dodgson’s most extensive mathematical work was Symbolic Logic. It was dedicated “to the memory of Aristotle,” the father of logic, and states its primary mission was to give its readers “the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces flimsy illogical arguments.” And although Symbolic Logic was not written for children, the teaching of logic to children was a hobby horse Dodgson rode for his entire life. He frequently gave talks at girls’ schools on this discipline. And two decades after Wonderland, he published The Game of Logic: rules for a board game for children played with a set of counters in which logic is expressed in terms of symbols, syllogisms and sorites.
The trial of the Knave has elements of a logical game played in accordance with certain rules or axioms and employing a specific formal language. The challenge for Alice is to discover the rules and the nature of the game. This is a difficult task, as the formalist’s concerns are not with everyday truths but rather with formal proofs that may be totally independent of reality and meaning in terms of everyday language.
Game theory: The board and counters of Carroll’s Logic.
Or, as Dodgson explains in the preface to his The Game of Logic: “It isn’t of the slightest consequence to us, as Logicians, whether our Premises are true or false: all we have to make out is whether they lead to the Conclusion, so that if they were true, it would be true also.” Why, we may ask, does Carroll set up this game in a courtroom as a trial? The answer is that Aristotelian logic had its origin in the education of lawyers and politicians with the practical aim of sorting out valid from invalid arguments. Since Aristotle, logicians have tried to formulate rules that, when followed, will ensure that only true conclusions are drawn from true premises. These are called “the rules of true argument.”