“Pig and Pepper” in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Cheshire_Cat (March, 2012)

As the title suggests it, the subject of this commentary is the sixth chapter “Pig and Pepper,” one of the twelve chapters that compose Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which has a sequel published in 1971 under the title Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written as a gift from Carroll to one of his little friend, Alice Liddell, to whom some hold the suspicion of having inspired the character of Alice in the author’s work of fiction. Even though it is conceived as a book for children, the story deals with complex topics; for instance, it strongly criticizes the strict education children received during the Victorian Period. Teachers were rude and the children’s governors, generally women, were very rude, too. Therefore, in chapter sixth “Pig and Pepper,” Carroll may represent this rudeness in the Duchess, one of the characters Alice meets in this chapter, and which might be inspired by Alice Liddell’s own governess in real life.

The complete story is about a little girl named Alice who falls asleep and dreams about what she has inside but cannot show. As she is going into puberty, she is faced with complications to adapt to the world of grown-ups. Adaption is not easy and so she has to go through considerable trouble. Therefore, we will focus on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as it presents the reader with the hardships of a girl's acknowledgement of her own maturation, which are reflected in a dream that takes most part of the story.

Chapter six, “Pig and Pepper,” is relevant for the development of the central argument of the story as it deals with people’s adaptation to chaotic situations—even when they get hurt within this chaos—, violence children receive from super parental figures, and the absurdity of some allegedly logically driven human practices, which are minor issues in the system of themes of the novella but which contain great part of the essence of the story: In "Pig and Pepper" Alice meets the Cheshire Cat, who lets her know that worrying about methods is unimportant if the purpose is yet to be defined.

As in all the chapters making up the story, the events in chapter six, “Pig and Pepper” are linearly arranged. As the term “linearly” suggests it, the plot structure is classic, for events are arranged straight forward into an introduction, a development, a climax and a solution, in such consecutive order. Thus, every chapter means an advance in the plot in order to get to the end of the story, which makes it easier for children—along with the rest of the readers—to understand and adds some sense of order into the chaos resulting from the communion of nonsense, illogicality, absurdity and fantasy.  Let us say, then, that the complexity of this work of fiction is definitely not in the layout of its plot, but in its meanings.

In “Pig a Pepper,” the author presents the fact that people can adapt to different situations in real life although some of these situations are chaotic as the ones presented in the chapter.

Adaptation into chaos is represented by a Frog-Footman’s carelessness toward the disaster surrounding him; he is always distracted and cares little about the things that happen inside the Duchess’ house, where the cook is always throwing different objects up in the air without caring if she hits somebody, including the Duchess’ baby.

The cook is generating chaos. She uses too much pepper in the meals, making the Duchess and the baby sneeze. The baby is always crying and sneezing, which annoys her mother and makes her be really rude to him; she even calls it a Pig. The narrator explains that “she said [pig] with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped.”

Maybe the Frog-Footman is not a distracted person. Let us say that this can be the result of avoiding the awful situations inside the Duchess’ house. After realizing that the Frog-Footman always seems to be talking more to himself than to her, Alice feels irritated and desperate and so she ends up saying, “Oh, there’s not use in talking to him… he’s perfectly idiotic” (29). The narrator lets us learn about the Frog-Footman’s distraction by saying, “He was looking up into the sky all the time he was speaking,” to which Alice replies, “… But perhaps he can’t help it” (29), Alice tries to justify the Frog-Footman’s absent mindedness, as he has his eyes so up to his head that it was inevitable for him not to look up to the sky. Even though this is a logical reason provided by the girl, these eyes so up to the Frog-Footman’s head can be alluded to the adaptation explained before, because looking up to the sky is the reaction he takes about the craziness presented inside the house, making him give more importance to irrelevant things like thinking where to sit and the duration of it. To show readers that the Frog-Footman is better off not noticing—or pretending not to note—the disaster surrounding him, the narrator presents us, for instance, with the following scene: While he is talking to Alice, “the door opened and a large plate came skimming out, straight at the Frogman’s head: it just gazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees behind him” (29), but he did as if nothing happened and remained composed, instead. It is possible to think that he has been hit several times with one of the objects that the cook throws, and now it is very normal for him to get hurt, and so it is for everyone else in the house because they are too blinded by routine as to notice the chaos they live into, which, on the contrary, is perfectly visible for Alice. Alice’s ability to observe these flaws in the people at the Duchess’ makes her somehow of a superior understanding and sensitivity.

One may see through a satirical intention in the chapter, as to critically allude to the vices of education in the Victorian period, when children received a strict education from authoritarian teachers who would have them memorize contents like historical and scientific facts and difficult poems they might not even understand and towards which they could not express their own ideas or feelings. In this chapter, this rude teacher can be represented by the Duchess who is very violent with her baby; also this baby is associated with a pig because in two moments of the chapter the Duchess calls the baby so and when Alice nurses him, he turns into a pig and goes away. At this moment of the chapter when Alice meets the Duchess, we can see the way the Duchess treats her and cares little about what Alice would feel or think. The narrator describes the Duchess’ talking to Alice as a “hoarse growl” (29). Just as teachers made children think they were inferior in knowledge and therefore inferior as people, for educators know best, the Duchess makes Alice sharp remarks to get her to feel that she is ignorant: “You don’t know that much… and that’s a fact,” says the Duchess as she recriminates Alice for her being surprised at the grinning cat in the house (29).

Victorian teachers were allowed to treat their students with severity in order to keep them disciplined. This issue can also be represented by the Duchess’ calling her baby a pig and tossing it up in the air, clearly ill-treating it:  “while she sang a the second verse of the song, a lullaby she may often sing to her baby, she kept tossing her baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear…” (30).

The last moment that is important to the development of the chapter is when Alice speaks with the Cheshire Cat. The direct dialogues between them make the reader feel more empathic toward both Alice and the Cat and so have a vicarious advantage of the moment. The little relevance children give to knowing where exactly they are going is represented in this chapter. As a child, Alice is asking for directions so she can get there wherever “there” is. The Cheshire Cat makes Alice realize that she must think first where it is that she is supposed to go in order to decide on a path. As readers, we may have well to consider the fact that in Victorian times—as well as arguably in much of the present education—a child was never shown the meaning of all the studying, literally “where” it (what they were learning) was going to get them to, wherever their teachers were leading them. The Cheshire Cat’s wise words work as a wakeup call although Alice is probably not ready yet to take the hint:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

That depends a good deal on where you have to get to.

I don’t much care where.

Then it does not matter which way you go” (30).

As we can see, this is the moment in the conversation from where readers should learn that taking on a specific path, a metaphor for following clear cut directions, is pointless if the destination is either irrelevant or unknown to the traveler.

Finally, we can see how through a dream, Alice expresses her deepest feelings about the injustice and uncertainty derived from her lifestyle. Telling all the events as happening within the boundaries of dream is an effective narrative strategy used by the author to make readers realize that children were too repressed by the strict education they received; indeed, deep down they must have thought it ironic and pointless memorizing stuff without really knowing their uses, more when they had to suppress their own ideas. Carroll portraits children’s cleverness in the character of Alice and children’s inner awareness in the character of the grinning Cheshire Cat; for this and more, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is always going to be a classic.

Works Cited

Carroll, Lewis. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The Complete Stories and Poems of Lewis Carroll.  New York: Penguin. Print.