In “Vivisection as a Sign of the Times,” a letter addressed to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1875, Lewis Carroll attacked the infliction of pain on animals as a manifestation of British moral turpitude, which he referred to as “unmitigated selfishness.”Footnote 1 He blamed this cultural decline on “a purely secular State education”:Footnote 2
How far may vivisection be regarded as a sign of the times, and a fair specimen of that higher civilisation which a purely secular State education is to give us? In that much-vaunted panacea for all human ills we are promised not only increase of knowledge, but also a higher moral character.
Clearly, the Oxford don’s attention to moral instruction was of significance to him, and this translated into his fiction. In fact, I contend that Carroll’s Alice books—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872)—demonstrate anxieties surrounding the moral quality of humane children’s literature, a genre that had been growing alongside—and intersecting with—the broader category of children’s literature, which rose to prominence in the eighteenth century.
Although animals had long been used in children’s literature, going as far back as Aesop’s Fables (sixth century bce), I refer to the humane literary tradition in Britain as a historical literary genre that to some degree encouraged children to treat animals well (although, crucially, the definition of “well” varied between authors and texts). Harriet Ritvo has outlined how humane ideologies were incorporated into children’s literature in the eighteenth century; in the earlier part of the century, this was subtly woven into natural historical children’s literature, while humane themes became a more overt focus in the later part of the century when authors like Sarah Trimmer, who authored the popular Fabulous Histories, later renamed The Story of the Robins (1786, but reissued in the late nineteenth century), became preoccupied with what was believed to be the child’s “propensity to torture” various animals.Footnote 3 The genre expanded in the nineteenth century, and with the growth of the humane movement and the formation of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, otherwise known as the RSPCA and granted the “Royal” prefix in 1840, humane literature eventually took periodical form when a journal, the Band of Mercy Advocate, with the purpose of disseminating ideas regarding proper treatment of animals to child readers, began publication in 1879 and continued into the early twentieth century.Footnote 4 That the Alice books were published after works like Trimmer’s, but before the RSPCA’s Band of Mercy Advocate, suggests that Carroll was writing at a pivotal moment within the genre’s trajectory of growth. Placing the Alice books within the humane literary tradition resituates the works’ place of importance among children’s literature that used animals, while it also clarifies the text’s moral complexity in the context of childhood development and upbringing.
Placing Carroll within the humane literary tradition requires recognition of both the entertaining and pedagogical functions of the Alice books. Carroll’s initial success with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been viewed as seminal in the timeline of children’s literature as the text helped usher in the genre’s golden age, a period that focused on entertaining the child reader.Footnote 5 However, there is agreement in current scholarship that the Alice books also contain instructional material. For instance, John Goldthwaite insists that Alice is not intended “solely to give pleasure” but that the books also contain “seriousness, lessons, and morals.”Footnote 6 Jan Susina also groups Carroll—along with Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald—as taking part in the “well established British tradition of religious didacticism for children.”Footnote 7 For Susina, Alice exemplifies a moral heuristic as she is “an idealized version of the Victorian girl: thoughtful, good-mannered, generous, honest, and polite.”Footnote 8 The behavioral ideal that Susina notes, however, is the trait that famously gets Alice into trouble with the animals in her dreamworlds. Thus, instead of merely upholding an ideology of good behavior, I argue that Carroll is delving into the nature of Alice’s upbringing, and even more specifically, the texts critique how she has learned to conceptualize animals through this upbringing. While recent scholarship has called attention to the ways that Carroll demonstrates a concern for the epistemological formation of the human/animal divide, I suggest that a recategorization of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as works of humane literature—and not simply pedagogical—clarifies and brings urgency to Carroll’s ideology concerning the subjectivity of animals and human children.Footnote 9 Catherine Elick has recently claimed that she does not see Carroll “actively pursuing an animal-rights agenda,” nor does she view Carroll as “necessarily advocating for children’s rights in the face of adults who deny them autonomy.”Footnote 10 However, I claim that Carroll’s work actively participates in discourses surrounding the conceptualization of both children and animals, directly engaging with moral concerns and teaching serious lessons about subjectivity, in ways that call into question the discursive mode of humanist subject formation questioned by recent posthumanist scholars.
The notion of a subject/object dichotomy is fraught as scholars have noted its instability as a humanist binary in which violent, faulty epistemology reinstates a view of the nonhuman-animal as a merely abject, negative, and oppositional concept that props up the idea of the “human,” furthermore remaining bound up with racist and ableist notions.Footnote 11 This is why Jacques Derrida famously critiqued the implicit anthropocentrism in the Heideggerian and Cartesian views of the objectified animal in his lectures that were later published as The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) and The Beast and the Sovereign (2009–10).Footnote 12 Scholars like Susan McHugh and Cary Wolfe have posited other terms like “animal agency” (McHugh) and “intrahuman” (Wolfe) to avoid such epistemic violence when characterizing nonhuman and human animals.Footnote 13 I use the terms “subject” and “object” here as a means of characterizing the way I see Carroll’s texts rejecting such an objectification of animals and considering animal subjectivity by recognizing their autonomy and sentience. Such a perception of animal subjectivity is consistent with readings of literature in a post-Darwinian context where animals were newly understood to exhibit sentience as a “higher trait,”Footnote 14 while considering animal subjectivity also reflects recent thinking in the broad field of human-animal and literary animal studies as a means to rethink human entanglement with animals.Footnote 15 Furthermore, although “animal rights” has been critiqued as an ultimately humanist endeavor,Footnote 16 Kari Weil suggests that the “ethical turn” in the humanities can become “an attempt to recognize and extend care to others while acknowledging that we may not know what the best form of care is for an other whom we cannot presume to know.”Footnote 17 Carroll, who we know took a stand in the antivivisectionist movement, appears to have viewed animal subjectivity in a similar way to Weil’s modern-day approach, where the animal’s otherness is respected even as their protection serves as a concern for humans.
However, such a view of animal subjectivity was not often reflected in the humane literature of the period leading up to the publication of the first Alice book in 1865, and such literature most likely did not satisfy Carroll’s animal advocacy, nor his views on childhood ability. Humane educational materials, like other aspects of the nineteenth-century animal rights movement, were woefully imperfect, and I argue that Carroll’s work satirizes this literary tradition while suggesting, imaginatively, a revised pedagogy that could subvert the typical speciesist indoctrination of the Victorian child. In the Alice books, humane education leads to positive interspecies relations and provides children and animals with opportunities to model a robust humane framework for Victorian adult society, ultimately pushing for a view of children and animals not as subordinate to their adult (human) counterparts but as autonomous beings not lacking in subjectivity.Footnote 18 Carroll’s work forcefully uses animal figures to discuss not only the child’s role but also nonhuman animals themselves through childhood lessons focused on antispeciesist humaneness.
1. An Anthropocentric Humane Tradition
Scholarship on the subject reveals that much of the humane literature produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presents as didactic tools that disseminated anthropocentric discourse and taught social lessons about good behavior while weaving in essentialist and classist notions.Footnote 19 Ritvo observes that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century natural history books for children often reinforced the status of animals as below the human while the animal was used to instill a diverse array of didactic lessons. Lessons include the animal’s use value to the human, as seen in the anonymous The Animal Museum (1825), while others exploited a metaphorical use where “animals represented subordinate human groups” such as in Mary Trimmer’s A Natural History of the Most Remarkable Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Serpents, Reptiles, and Insects (1825).Footnote 20 Even as she points to the contributions that women made to the humane movement throughout the period, Diana Donald writes that, in part, an intention of some humane texts was moral reform of the lower classes, as seen in works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries like Sarah Trimmer’s The Two Farmers (1787), The Oeconomy of Charity (1787), and Joanna Baillie’s A Lesson Intended for the Use of the Hampstead School (1826).Footnote 21 Like Tess Cosslett, Roxanne Harde explains that the genre’s goal was to bring about a “lasting social investment,”Footnote 22 although Cosslett adds that such lessons simultaneously drew attention to the theme of compassion toward animals.Footnote 23 Furthermore, humane educational methods for children sometimes relied on the same methodology that the RSPCA used through production of their Annual Reports (which were published after the end of each annual summer meeting from 1832 on): violent examples of animal mistreatment, which was more focused on condemning human behavior, not on drawing sympathy for nonhumans.Footnote 24 Alongside literature published for adults, as already mentioned, the RSPCA published the Band of Mercy Advocate for children. While the publication’s content has recently been praised by Alysa Clapp-Itnyre for empowering children and animals, Monica Flegel has aptly critiqued this iteration of the genre as reliant on a narrative that fetishized and objectified both the child and the animal based on their assumed sameness, while at times disciplining children into their place above the animal and reinforcing the notion of human superiority.Footnote 25 Throughout the growth and flux of the genre during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britan, this body of scholarship shows that while not entirely devoid of considering animal welfare, the genre overall fell short in shifting conceptualizations of the animal from object to subject.
Looking to the nineteenth-century canon of humane literature demonstrates the human exceptionalism with which Carroll’s Alice would have been familiar. Popular educational materials from the previous century such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778, reissued 1869) and Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories remained the canonical texts for children regarding animal treatment. Both texts were owned by Carroll, and according to Charlie Lovett’s extensive catalog of the books within Carroll’s private library, Carroll owned both the original and the reissued, renamed copy of Trimmer’s The Story of the Robins.Footnote 26
Trimmer’s story can be read as a work in favor of inhumane treatment toward animals as the adult authority figure of the text (Mrs. Benson) repeatedly and unapologetically instills in her fictional children the need to kill and eradicate animals when deemed necessary or convenient. The anthropomorphized robins do not necessarily stand as direct representatives of human behavior, but more accurately, they are anthropomorphized to better reveal themselves as beings who are accepting of their supposedly inferior position. As Donald states: “The birds’ combination of roles gives the clue to Trimmer’s intentions: kindness to domestic beasts and birds should be tempered by consciousness of natural hierarchy, linking in Burkean fashion, the family and the nation, and relegating animals to a lower dependent situation.”Footnote 27 Cosslett stresses a more positive reading of Trimmer, stating that the anthropomorphism in the text becomes a “way to develop a child’s moral imagination with regard to animals,” but she also suggests that the book “is to some extent pulled in two directions” as the humane value of the robins’ story is undercut by the book’s lesson that “benevolence can be practiced on animals, but is more important in regard to humans. […] Mrs. Benson is keen not to let sympathy for the robins and other animals get out of hand and upset her hierarchical system.”Footnote 28 Humaneness in Trimmer’s narrative hinges upon the notions of anthropocentrism and speciesism, most notably in its message that certain animals should be killed or caged and treated well only in the context of disciplining children into good behavior.
Barbauld’s version of humane literature is similar to Trimmer’s in its valuation of human exceptionalism. Scholarship on Barbauld has recently gravitated toward her attention to nonhuman value and appreciation, especially in the context of her poem “The Caterpillar” (1825). However, as Melissa Bailes has astutely noted, when it came to children’s literature, Barbauld did not think poetry an appropriate vehicle for the dissemination of lessons. In fact, Barbauld’s own views on children’s literature include the ideal that poetics should not be “lowered to the capacities of children,” while she also believed the intention of children’s literature to be that of religious didacticism.Footnote 29 Bailes’s analysis points to an important distinction in locating Barbauld within the context of humane literature for children; while Barbauld’s poetry might reveal ways for thinking about nonhuman animals ethically, her children’s literature uses the figure of the nonhuman animal as a pedagogical symbol for educating children into disciplined religious subjects, hierarchically superior to the rest of the animal kingdom.Footnote 30 Some have noted that Barbauld’s fables (cowritten with her brother John Aiken in a text called Evenings at Home, or The Juvenile Budget Opened, published in six volumes from 1792 to 1796 and reissued throughout the nineteenth century) bring awareness to an animal’s point of view in a humane move.Footnote 31 However, I suggest that even in the fables, while Barbauld suggests that animals have viewpoints, these remain within a metaphorical context of didactic lesson. If animal figures are serving in a metaphorical role to disseminate lessons about human behavior (unrelated to animals), the role of these texts as humane should be noted as relatively minimal, and in part 3 of this essay I will provide an example of a fable for comparison with Carroll.Footnote 32
In part 1 of Lessons for Children, Barbauld’s text doubles as a reading primer and a narrative about animals directed at little boys. The text evokes some sympathy for animals, such as the hare that “must be caught” by horses,Footnote 33 but the text also features images celebratory of human control over the nonhuman. While the boy-reader is directed to envision control over a horse through simple sentences such as “Here is a whip, whip away. Make haste horse,”Footnote 34 the text also promises that the boy “Charles” will someday “have a pretty little horse of his own, and a saddle, and a bridle, and a whip” in a lesson of human dominance that will come to fruition through increasing age for the male subject.Footnote 35 Cosslett finds value in Charles’s preference to describe rather than define the horse, while the animal ultimately “functions as the object of both scientific categorization and poetic description.”Footnote 36 While this point is helpful in recognizing Barbauld’s views on childhood curiosity, the horse’s role in the text belies a mere object functioning to teach about taxonomical categorization as well as the human actions of whipping and owning animals, lessons in direct opposition to a consideration of animal subjectivity. Carroll’s use of humane lessons is quite different from this trend as his version of humane literary education asks children to consider animals as full subjects, worthy of respectful treatment.
2. A Troubled Upbringing: Alice’s Indoctrination
The Alice books satirize and thus critique the traditional humane educational model (such as upheld by Trimmer) by condemning learned models of anthropocentrism and speciesism and showing the way that Alice appears as a victim of such childhood training.Footnote 37 There is a piece of evidence suggesting that Carroll even drew from Trimmer, perhaps in a direct critique of her messages for children. For example, Alice’s first recited rhyme in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a revised version of Isaac Watts’s “Against Idleness and Mischief,” the original reading: “How doth the little busy bee/Improve the shining hour,/and gather honey all the day/From every opening flower.”Footnote 38 The rhyme is also used by Mrs. Benson, the mouthpiece for Trimmer’s text, when she uses bees as an example when teaching her children to be obedient:
If such little insects as these perform their daily tasks with so much alacrity, surely it must be a shame for children to be idle, and to fret because they are apt to learn things which will be of the utmost consequence to them in the end, and which would indeed conduce to their present happiness, would they but apply them with a willing mind.Footnote 39
Mrs. Benson next asks her children to recall Watts’s poem. Following this anecdotal scene is one of the many “lessons” she teaches about the limits of the humane treatment of nonhumans. After Mrs. Benson has inquired on the ethical matter of killing insects, the character Mrs. Wilson instills one such lesson in Benson’s children: “Caterpillars and snails, it is true, we are obliged frequently to destroy, on account of their devouring fruits and vegetables.”Footnote 40 Humane limits are a popular refrain throughout the text, so it is noteworthy that Carroll also uses Watts’s poem but instead allows Alice to reinvent the rhyme to depict violence against children, pitting them against animals such as crocodiles: “How doth the little crocodile/Improve his shining tail,/And pour the waters of the Nile/On every golden scale!/How cheerfully he seems to grin,/How neatly spreads his claws,/And welcomes little children in,/With gently smiling jaws!” (26). In revising the same poem used in a key humane text for children, Alice’s lines seem to critique the violence that is justified in Trimmer and other childhood texts regarding animal treatment. In Alice’s violent recollection, Carroll playfully suggests that a text like Trimmer’s does not encourage peaceful and respectful relationships between species but rather violent interchanges.
However, the example of the crocodile proves even more complex in Carroll’s mode of satire. While I agree with Goldthwaite that “Carroll is satirizing the practice of forcing children to memorize and recite instructional verse,” I disagree with his following suggestion that Carroll “objected not so much to the content, but to the manner in which teachers and parents forced young children to memorize instructional verse.”Footnote 41 On the contrary, many of Carroll’s rhymes evoke mistreatment of the nonhuman animal, which emphasizes and satirizes the hegemonic lessons of violence underpinning the originals in the traditional humane texts. In addition, some of Carroll’s rhymes imagine the suffering of children who fall victim to animals’ retaliations against their own objectification (where the children are portrayed as oppressors). As this latter paradigm indicates a complex level of the violence that Carroll saw in humane literature, I surmise that Carroll was especially concerned with the content of childhood lessons. Alice’s frustration (“‘I’m sure those are not the right words,’ said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears”) suggests that Alice, in the role of anthropocentric oppressor of animals, is liable to become a victim of the crocodile’s resistance, hyperbolized through the image of consumption (26). Alice’s own tears thus expose the message of human superiority that she has taken from the typical humane lesson, leaving her a victim to animals such as the revised version of Watts’s crocodile.
Carroll uses humor and irony to paint a picture of a polite girl making social mistakes in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World, but these mistakes serve to highlight serious moral issues concerning encounters with the nonhuman in the real world, serving as a new kind of humane lesson that underscores the stakes implicit in a speciesist paradigm. Alice’s many faux pas demonstrate the danger of an approach to the nonhuman that is based on human exceptionalism and views the animal as exclusively food or an object. As readers of the text will recognize, Alice stops herself midperformance as she enacts what she has learned; she must often “check herself hastily” or “beg pardon” when it comes to insulting and unwittingly threatening the lives of nonhuman animals, all pointing to her previous acculturation in the waking world (121, 30). At the outset of the first book (chapters 2 and 3), Alice is most oblivious to her threats. When she speaks to the mouse in the pool of tears, she describes her cat Dinah as a predator: “and she [Dinah, the cat] sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice” (30). The casual way with which Alice refers to the death of mice demonstrates the way that she is comfortable with observing the death and pain experienced by certain creatures and not others. In voicing this acceptance of speciesism to a creature who is a member of the species that is the target of bias, Alice demonstrates the way she has been taught to accept such ideas and repeat them without deeper consideration. Next, after the caucus race, surrounded by birds (the Lory, the Dodo, etc.) and the Mouse, Alice continues to describe the dangerous scenario in what seems to be an innocent discussion of her beloved pet. However, her mistake conveniently includes a threat to the present company and their species: “Dinah’s our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice, you ca’n’t think! And, Oh, I wish you could see her after birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!” (41).Alice’s blunders expose that she has been trained to puppet inhumane rhetoric. However, at the same time these teaching moments also expose speciesism as the inhumane rhetoric is spoken to those nonhuman animals directly threatened by it.
Furthermore, the stakes of Alice’s anthropocentric indoctrination become exposed as threatening to the children of animal species, which serves to demonstrate the emotional complexity of objectification for nonhuman animals who bear young. For instance, when Alice meets the Pigeon, her mistake proves a serious lesson as the Pigeon notes that her young are in danger because of Alice’s mindset. Alice admits that she is a potential predator of the Pigeon’s offspring: “‘I have tasted eggs, certainly,’ said Alice, who was a very truthful child: ‘but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know’” (67). The young nonhuman lives are directly threatened through Alice’s mention of the common practice of ingesting eggs. The Pigeon also knows that species distinction means little when her young may be at risk, and as Alice tries to explain that she is not a serpent, the Pigeon clarifies that the danger to her eggs remains, regardless of species: “You’re looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?” (67). While the text is meant to entertain, these scenes develop humane lessons that directly question and critique objectification of the nonhuman animal, usually considered to be prey or food for the human or other animals.
While Alice’s speciesism is exposed through these scenes, I argue that these narrative scenarios do not serve merely as an admonishment of the poor behavior of children like her. Carroll, playfully using his audience’s assumptions about children, suggests that Alice demonstrates a child’s naïveté when she “checks herself.” However, as Alice confuses her memorized lines again and again, these moments more accurately reveal her role as the puppet of a speciesist ideology that has been woven throughout her traditional “humane” education. This becomes highlighted when a mother crab tries to use Alice as a didactic example, showing her offspring what happens when one “loses their temper.” However, it is the young Crab who adjusts the lesson, retorting: “Hold your tongue, Ma…. You’re enough to try the patience of an Oyster!” (41). The young Crab—unlike the young Alice—learns what he is supposed to learn from Alice’s mistakes: that one should “hold their tongue” and resist posing a speciesist threat. The young Crab clearly sees that Alice will need to readjust her practiced approach to the nonhumans surrounding her. The extent of Alice’s indoctrination is made apparent as she continually utters speciesist threats, while the young Crab emblematizes the adjustment of the humane lesson to one that rejects anthropocentrism. These depictions ask readers to consider why Alice must keep stopping herself, as she is portrayed as a victim of her upbringing and a humane education that has left out important details about truly considering nonhuman lives. The child’s ostracization and continual impediments “to learn” humane ideas show that her thoughts on animal objectivity are deeply ingrained even as she resists them.
By displaying the pitfalls of a speciesist education, the Alice books point to the ways that children like Alice were left ill-equipped when it came to humane learning, but the texts also highlight that the child who learns to voice and enact anthropocentric ideals suffers as well as the animals. For instance, when the Pigeon mistakes Alice for a serpent, she attacks her: “a large pigeon had flown in her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.”Footnote 42 The predatorial function that Alice has learned to embody leaves her open to the Pigeon’s physical violence. Alice’s learned sense of morality and good behavior have not taught her to consider the ethics of egg-eating, so she sees nothing wrong with admitting she does so: “‘I have tasted eggs, certainly’ said Alice who was a very truthful child” (67). Although Alice does not “check herself” as she does with the Mouse and the panoply of birds at the caucus race, she must painfully feel the failure of her Victorian breeding, and with the Pigeon, this failure is punished physically. While Barbauld’s didactic material uses the potentially violent image of the boy and his whip, Carroll’s Alice instead becomes the one punished for wielding human power as she is left ill-equipped to live compassionately in an interspecies world. Alice responds to the Pigeon’s physical blows with a seemingly ignorant response that suggests an inability to consider the Pigeon’s perspective: “but I’m not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want yours: I don’t like them raw” (68). Alice’s reaction demonstrates that she has been socialized to threaten the Pigeon’s young, which is so far entrenched in the discourse she puppets that she is shocked and readily admits that the problem with eating the eggs would be their rawness, and not the fact that they are potential children. Alice’s role as predator ironically demonstrates a victimization not just of the Pigeon and eggs but also of children like herself. Nina Auerbach suggests that the eggs point to three things about Alice: first, “the woman she will become”; second, “the unconscious cannibalism involved in the very fact of eating and the desire to eat”; and finally, “the charmed circle of childhood itself.”Footnote 43 Thus, for Auerbach, Alice’s appetite is an indicator of her own—lifelong—violent desires. However, I suggest instead that the admission of egg-eating serves as another display of Alice as the victimized child, as one who has been raised in a rigid culture that tells her to obey and to objectify animals without questioning or considering such acts. Reading Alice’s interaction with the Pigeon as a humane lesson shows that it presents a new concept for her, making apparent that Alice’s previous enculturation in “humaneness” did not cover the conceptual framework that she is now confronted with in Wonderland. This new concept leaves her liable to punishment. which further serves to demonstrate the violence implicit in human exceptionalism to which Alice is now vulnerable.
As Alice repeatedly describes herself as a consumer of animal bodies, the first book crucially describes the advanced level and deeply ingrained nature of Alice’s indoctrination as Alice continually commits faux pas. However, this book also suggests that Alice eventually considers the subjectivity of the animals as she attempts to stop herself from predatory language. When the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon ask Alice if she’s ever been “introduced to a lobster,” Alice stops herself midsentence after remembering the lobster, not as a personage in Wonderland, but a dish on the plate: “Alice began to say ‘I once tasted—’ but checked herself hastily, and said ‘no, never’” (117). Alice discusses whiting fish after they are sung about as characters, not food objects, in the Mock Turtle’s song:
“Oh, as to the whiting,” said the Mock Turtle, “they—you’ve seen them, of course?”
“Yes,” said Alice, “I’ve often seen them at dinn—” she checked herself hastily.
“I don’t know where Dinn may be,” said the Mock Turtle; “but if you’ve seen them so often, of course you know what they’re like?”
“I believe so,” Alice replied thoughtfully. “They have their tails in their mouths—and they’re all over crumbs.” (121)
The horror of both Alice as she begins to speak and the animals, whose lives are threatened because of her speciesism, causes the reader to consider human exceptionalism from a nonhuman point of view and to recognize that although a child, Alice has begun to deeply consider her own education concerning animals. Although there is a difference between the utterance of a threat and acting upon it, the shift in Alice’s verbiage from her initial entrance into Wonderland—where she seems oblivious to her threatening the life of the Mouse, for instance—and this later iteration of self-control (from chapter 10) suggests that Alice has considered the effects of her anthropocentric speech in Wonderland. While it is possible that Alice might simply be refraining from speaking so as not to face the animals’ anger and retaliation, it is also just as likely that Alice has sensed that discourse and epistemology shape interspecies relations and that she has begun to critique anthropocentrism herself while faced with the nonhuman animal in her dreamworld.
3. Fetishizing and Naming the Animal in Humane Literature
In the second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll continues to satirize the tradition of humane literature, but instead of refraining from offending animals, Alice is presented as a figure aligned with nonhuman animals, allowing Carroll to complicate his satire and present a more mature Alice who has now reflected on her anthropocentric indoctrination. When Alice enters a wood where names and human-imposed discourse cannot function, Alice and a Fawn seem to evoke a meaningful humane curriculum, yet the typified humane tropes of the era that are mimicked again point to the insufficiency of traditional humane education. When the Fawn asks Alice to continue walking together, the text describes an interconnection based on mutual affection, described through the body language of the two figures: “So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn” (209). Since Alice and the Fawn are unaware of species boundaries and other operative categories in the wood—which we know from the Fawn’s exclamation when leaving the space: “I’m a Fawn! […] and you’re a human child!” (209–10)—then the loving embrace that the two share in the wood appears to be a form of brief but genuine affection between two equal parties.Footnote 44
The scene presents the ways that anthropocentric discourse can hinder meetings between species. Once the two step out of the wood, the Fawn—like many other nonhuman animals in Wonderland—immediately sees Alice as a potential threat:
here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. “I’m a Fawn!” It cried out in a voice of delight. “And, dear me! you’re a human child!” A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. (209–10)
I agree with Zoe Jaques here that Carroll comments on “naming” as something that “limits the communion that can take place between Alice and the creatures she encounters—a consequence of Adamic man’s institution of names as an act of power and separation.”Footnote 45 The hegemonic categorization that is evaded in the wood reflects the inhumane tenets that Alice has struggled with in her dreamworlds. Thus, it is no surprise that Carroll’s image of the deer and Alice peacefully walking through the wood subverts and satirizes the Victorian stereotype that drew from the Romantic “child of nature” paradigm and that was later adapted into humane literature.Footnote 46
Considering the humane tradition that Carroll is satirizing, the scene between the Fawn and Alice mocks the popularly cloying interspecies pairings between animals and children that did not truly dismantle inhumane socialization. Thus, we see Alice and the Fawn’s loving embrace mimicking—and correcting—the tradition of using young, furry animals for humane literature as fetishized objects that could be easily associated with the also fetishized child. Carroll chooses a young “innocent” fawn and not an adult deer for the embrace. Such a view aligns with Monica Flegel’s critique of the nineteenth-century conflation of young children and young animals in humane periodicals such as those produced by the RSPCA: Animal World (began publication in 1869) and Band of Mercy Advocate.Footnote 47 Flegel suggests that such literature drew from “continual linkages between child and animal as loved members of the family” only to show a Victorian aestheticization of such “possessions.”Footnote 48 Although the trope proliferated in at least the Band of Mercy Advocate after Through the Looking-Glass, we can nevertheless see the trope going back further, even in popular educational materials like Barbauld and Aiken’s Evenings at Home (1792–96). For instance, in Barbauld and Aiken’s canonical text, a similar embrace occurs between a young girl named Sylvia and a kidling in one of the fables found in the first volume from 1792. When Sylvia discovers the “deserted” creature, the two vulnerable subjects appear in an embrace: “It [the kidling] was bleating piteously, and was so benumbed with the cold, that it could scarcely stand. Sylvia took it up in her arms, and pressed it close to her bosom.”Footnote 49 The tale turns out to be another childhood lesson, not in providing genuine, humane care for the nonhuman, but in useless childhood expectations. In this tale, the young kid runs away, and Sylvia ends up learning from her mother that she should “Take care then […] how you get your heart upon rovers again!”Footnote 50 The initial image of the interspecies embrace, in this predecessor to Alice, then, relies on the romanticization of the child and animal, presenting both Sylvia and the kidling as “innocent” beings who similarly require instruction but also provide an image that appeals to Victorian sentimentality. While the kidling is suffering when Sylvia finds it, her connection and soothing embrace serve to join and conflate the two, in an image that could potentially serve an adult gaze in its idealization of the two peaceful, innocent figures, ultimately objectifying the kid and Sylvia. Carroll’s satirical use of the trope demonstrates that the objectifying image is ineffective. It is not the pairing of a child and animal that makes Carroll’s scene fruitful in an ethical sense; rather, it is the erosion of epistemological species barriers that challenge notions of human superiority. Alice is prompted to consider the animal’s ontological closeness to the human (and/or her own animality), prompting the ideological shift that such thinking necessitates. The scene’s abrupt ending exposes the inefficacy of the usual trope and presents an alternative paradigm for thinking about human and nonhuman-animal interaction.
4. Alice Revises the Humane Curriculum
While I contend that Carroll’s works engage in a critique of Victorian childrearing, Alice should not be characterized solely through her insufficient moral upbringing, nor as pitiable and ignorant. Rather, I suggest that in the second book we see Carroll reinventing the tradition of humane education by demonstrating how a child like Alice could recognize the animal as subject, stepping into the role of pedagogue. In this way, Carroll’s work stands in contrast with the humane tradition of the time, which suggested that kindness to animals was merely a way to practice good behavior and nonhuman suffering was often deemed acceptable. In other words, humane literature from the period followed a Kantian, rather than Benthamite, morality. According to Tom Regan:
Kant […] recognizes only indirect duties to nonhuman animals; for example, we should not treat them cruelly not because doing so wrongs them but because it can lead us to be cruel to one another. In contrast, utilitarians from Bentham to Singer recognize direct duties to nonhuman animals themselves, apart from how humans will be affected.Footnote 51
Alice’s pedagogy is exemplary when considered as an example of Benthamite morality, which accomplishes two things. First, unlike Mrs. Benson’s ignorant children who need to learn how to approach the animal kingdom, Alice’s character proves that children may be subjects capable of considering moral issues independently of adults. Second, the scene I focus on here suggests that the lives of animals like oysters are valuable and should not be objectified for human desires and viewed merely as food delicacies to be eaten and served. Categorizing the Alice books as humane literature reveals the text’s significant pedagogical function and clarifies its place within a matrix of entertaining and didactic frames as a meaningful piece of satiric, engaging, and complex philosophic thinking on human-animal interaction. While in the first book, we see evidence that Alice contemplates and adjusts her thinking on animals (as she goes from inadvertently threatening the Mouse when she first arrives, to cutting herself off midsentence when she speaks to the Mock Turtle about consuming marine life), in the second book, Alice returns to a dreamworld not only as an older child but also as one who has considered animal subjectivity and is ready to voice her thinking on the subject. According to my reading, both Alice books can be approached comprehensively as a panoramic viewing of Alice’s moral growth with the interspecies interactions afforded her in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World.
After Tweedledee and Tweedledum tell the tale of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” featuring the consumption of oysters, Alice steps into the role of humane pedagogue as she proves herself fully capable of measuring and critiquing adult sensitivity toward nonhuman animals. The titular creatures of the tale ultimately consume every one of the small creatures:
“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
Yet before the oysters are consumed, the Walrus displays some remorse for the eating of his prey whom he—along with the Carpenter—has fooled:
“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,
“To play them such a trick.
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!”
The Walrus’s sympathy for the oysters is juxtaposed with the end of the rhyme, the lack of sympathy indicated in the Carpenter’s initial silence, heightened by his attention to the condiments accompanying the creatures now objectified as food:
The Carpenter said nothing but
“The butter’s spread too thick!” (222)
After the tale is finished, Alice proves a capable judge of morality as she states: “I like the walrus best […] because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters” (223, emphasis in original). Able to recognize and measure the Walrus’s sympathy, Alice demonstrates her ability to judge humane gestures. Although Alice notes that she prefers the Walrus’s reaction, her honesty draws attention to the fact that his sympathy is minimal; through her note that he is “a little sorry,” readers might surmise that this sympathy is insufficient. Another reading of these lines may suggest that Alice approves of this small amount of sympathy without any need for expanding upon it. However, the emphasis on the word “little” proves suggestive of Alice’s tone. The emphasis on the amount of sympathy creates a rhetorical effect, revealing that Alice is comparing the two creatures and searching for some redeeming quality. She only finds moral value in the Walrus in comparison to the dearth in the Carpenter’s approach to the oysters. In looking for something of value in moral lessons, Alice searches and finds that at least one of these characters has shown some sympathy. Carroll uses the child’s voice, not to display the one who needs to be taught, but the one who can teach and expose inhumane treatment of the other.
Furthermore, Alice steps into the role of humane pedagogue even as she is challenged by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, demonstrating again the child’s moral prowess, but also confirming her judgment of both characters’ cruelty. Tweedledee and Tweedledum provide a riposte to Alice’s judgment, reminiscent of an adult pointing out what the child supposedly cannot recognize: “‘He ate more than the Carpenter, though,’ said Tweedledee. ‘You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise’” (223). After this truth is unveiled for Alice, she adjusts her judgment: “‘That was mean!’ Alice said indignantly. ‘Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.’” Again, Tweedledum complicates the scene for Alice: “‘But he ate as many as he could get,’ said Tweedledum.” Carroll, who reveled in any kind of logical conundrum,Footnote 52 continues by providing a unique view into Alice’s indirect thoughts in addition to her direct response: “This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, ‘Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—’” (223). This scene illustrates Alice’s vulnerability, but what marks it as different from other scenes of humane literature is the way that Alice (as a child) condemns the adult characters (the Walrus and the Carpenter) and teaches a moral lesson about animal treatment to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who serve as the adults in the scene. Jaques suggests that Alice’s “conclusion seems sound enough, but […] does little to reconcile these wasteful animal deaths,” ultimately reminding Alice that “animals too can be predatory toward humankind.”Footnote 53 However, while Tweedledee and Tweedledum attempt to confuse and complicate the story for Alice by continuing to add details and point out new facts, in both instances Alice is able to judge predatory behavior as she declares the “meanness” and the “unpleasantness” of both the Walrus and the Carpenter. Gillian Beer notes that Alice is “outraged” after the telling of the tale: “The trusting little oysters, who share Alice’s eagerness and curiosity, are betrayed by Walrus and Carpenter. The reader is guiltily amused by the neatness of this turn.”Footnote 54 While this may be true, Alice and the oysters do not neatly conform to a Rousseauian frame in this scene, as unknowing innocents not yet corrupted.Footnote 55 Rather, Alice shows an ability to judge the moral aptitude of both adult predators from the story as she shows precocity and not innocence: “Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—” (223). In judging both Walrus and Carpenter “unpleasant,” Alice turns the characterizations of the Walrus and Carpenter into a judgment of their moral choices to eat the living beings, reversing the roles of student/teacher and child/adult. In opposition to Anna Feuerstein’s view of Alice as learning from animals through “devil’s advocacy” or David Rudd’s view of Alice learning through the ironic anthropomorphism in Through the Looking-Glass, which works “by shifting our perspective,” here Alice steps into the role of humane pedagogue, becoming the teacher drawing our attention to the immorality of viewing nonhuman life as expendable.Footnote 56
However, we have missed the point of Alice’s humane lesson if we do not value both the moral lessons she imparts and the oysters’ own subjectivity as they communicate their wish to live. The oysters also perform the role of pedagogue in a desperate plea for humane thinking that takes speciesism seriously, preserving the life of “the other.” The child-oysters, who (unlike “the eldest oyster” that will not “leave the oyster-bed”) scamper after the predatory Walrus and Carpenter (220). While naïvely following the Walrus and Carpenter, the oysters do not remain fully subservient to the Walrus and Carpenter’s demands as they use anthropomorphic voices and subtle, affectual body language to resist. For instance, when the Walrus initiates the feast: “Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear;/We can begin to feed,” the oysters respond strongly, judging the moral actions of their predators, just as Alice does: “‘But not on us!’ the Oysters cried,/Turning a little blue./‘After such kindness, that would be/A dismal thing to do!’” (221). This is not the first time that meaningful color-changing takes place in the Alice books. It occurs when Alice meets the flowers at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass and is surprised that they can speak. Here Carroll satirizes Alice’s surprise as he imagines that vegetal life can communicate even without verbality: (“There was a silence in a moment, and several of the pink daisies turned white”) (188). A similar example appears in the song “The Aged, Aged Man” sung by the White Knight to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass: “I shook him well from side to side,/Until his face was blue” (288). The song creates a parallel between an elderly man and a haddock, here the blue face revealing a loss of oxygen, and communicating the interchangeability between the fish, pulled out of the water and unable to breathe, and the aged man, shaken and out of breath. These places in the text demonstrate biosemiotics as a form of communication not bound by human-imposed speech. The oysters anticipate their death—if we are to read turning blue as a physical loss of air supply—while the change in appearance also demonstrates a mode of bodily storytelling where they communicate their own suffering at the hands of predators. The young oysters are not just narrative objects used to teach kindness to animals but seem to thoroughly understand the violent threat of the carnivore as they communicate a poignant message against the infliction of pain and the killing of the nonhuman, even for animals commonly used as sustenance for humans. This was certainly not the usual subject for the genre of humane children’s literature in the era. The scene with the Walrus and Carpenter presents Alice and the oysters as subjects capable of teaching humaneness to adults while the humane lesson they teach extends a truly nonanthropocentric paradigm with the potential to challenge common Victorian ideals about animals used as food.
Conclusion
While the typical Victorian humane education remained ineffective at best and violent at worst, Carroll’s animal advocacy may remain his greatest legacy. Approaching the Alice books as part of the humane literary tradition—both in the form of entertaining satire and serious pedagogical revision of the anthropocentric paradigm the genre often relied upon—reveals the potentiality that the Alice books have in overturning preconceived notions about animal and child status as mere objects. Carroll envisions an intricate portrayal of a new humane framework, reliant on the acceptance of new subjectivities where children are considered capable of forming moral judgments, and animals may move beyond their usual didactic roles that often symbolized strictly human concerns. Carroll’s animals become pedagogical figures that teach about the child’s place in the domestic sphere as well as the treatment of animals themselves.
When Alice enters Wonderland, she exposes her inadequate training in approaching the nonhuman. Alice represents a Victorian child who would have been given texts like Trimmer’s to understand not that animals are sentient equals but that animals must sometimes be caged, killed, and consumed, all under the guise of “humane education.” On the other hand, Carroll demonstrates Alice redefining what it means to be humane by approaching the animal as a fellow subject in Through the Looking-Glass. Alice voices humane pedagogy, suggesting not only an antispeciesist framework for approaching the nonhuman but also demanding recognition of a child’s moral ability. The Alice books demonstrate that educational animal figures could be used to challenge the violent treatment of real animals, which was often overlooked or explained away, and that children, although often placed at a disadvantage in learning speciesist norms, could also recognize animals as subjects when given the opportunity and space to make their voices heard.
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