Complete Alice in Wonderland - L. Carroll [97]
Good Kitten, Bad Kitten: Alice’s kittens are quite contrary in nature. The white kitten is slow, patient and well-minded, while the black kitten is energetic, hasty and mischievous. As will be seen, the white kitten reflects the nature of the White Queen, and the black kitten mirrors the Red Queen. (The black kitten’s name, by the way, is Kitty, while the white one is named Snowdrop.)
“Do You Know What To-Morrow Is?”: The date is November 4th. The following night (“Remember, remember, the fifth of November”) is Guy Fawkes Night, on which celebratory bonfires are burned to commemorate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. There is a winking allusion here to the idea of monarchy and revolution. Alice defied the Queen of Hearts in Wonderland; now, as she is growing up, she seeks to become a Queen herself and will be challenged by the Red Queen to see if she is worthy.
Telling Kitty’s Faults: When Alice is chiding the black kitten, she is playing with the idea of authority. Some of this is a matter of maturity, but the rest is simply transference, with Alice eager to make light of her own punishments (surely received from her father, mother and Miss Prickett, the governess).
“When We Were Playing Just Now”: The person Alice was playing chess with is not made clear. Considering Carroll’s diary’s however, and his interest in the game, it is very likely that she was playing against Lewis Carroll himself, and that he had just departed the moment before Through the Looking-Glass began. (This would also explain why the book of poetry featuring “Jabberwocky” is present, since Carroll wrote the poem, and was in the habit of giving books to Alice as gifts.)
“Let’s Pretend”: Here, Carroll is re-establishing the nature of Alice and her sister. The “very exact” sister in question is no doubt Lorina, who was also featured in the beginning and end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice’s offer to be more than one person is an echo of her fall down the rabbit-hole, when we learned that she was in the habit of pretending to be two people. And of course, Alice’s quite shocking declaration to her nurse gives us an early taste of the subversive, predatory and morbid humor for which Alice is always known!
“You’re the Red Queen, Kitty!”: Alice’s desire for the unreal is so strong that she can turn fantasy into reality. We first discovered this in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when she made the glass table appear in the Hall of Doors. Here, Alice’s simple “Let’s pretend” appeal has similarly made it so. From this point forward, the black kitten and the Red Queen are the same creature, represented differently in different worlds.
“All My Ideas About Looking-Glass House”: In the same manner, Alice creates the physical laws of the Deanery on the other side of the mirror. Looking-Glass House thus becomes a “dimensional threshold” of sorts, a gateway between Looking-Glass Land and reality.
A Bright Silvery Mist: It is interesting that the prefatory poem of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was about the “golden afternoon,” while the poem in Through the Looking-Glass speaks of “silver laughter” and the mirror turns into “silvery mist.” A parallel can be drawn to the ideas of a Golden Age and a Silver Age, which go all the way back to Hesiod in the 8th century BC. To Hesiod, the Golden Age was the time of human innocence, and the Silver Age was the time when mortality was enforced by the gods, when people were less noble and more concerned with the fear of death.
The Face of a Little Old Man: The entity in the clock is actually Father Time, who we last saw in the Hatter’s watch. He grins at Alice, perhaps to let her know that time is passing quickly for her,