Week 11 Essay: Wisdom in the Looking-Glass

This week after reading the Through the Looking Glass Unit, I decided to focus my Essay topic on the idea of wisdom. I also throw some random ideas in about the idea of wisdom as we age.

Throughout the stories, especially in the last stories QueenAlice and Shaking and Waking, we see where the idea of wisdom is tested through riddles. The Red and White Queen are constantly asking Alice questions of what should be simple addition and subtraction but they add a twist to it. A dig minus a bone is a temper. Because when a dog loses his bone he is angry and what is left is his temper. The frog in this story also tricks Alice when she is trying to have someone open the door when she knocks. The frog replies by asking what the door is asking for it to need to be answered.

These concepts stretch our idea of wisdom. We often get stuck in the tradition wisdom that addition and subtraction are easy athematic equations. Rarely would someone answer a subtraction problem in the way that the Queens present them to Alice in this story. It goes to show that we can often become so narrow-minded in our interpretation of certain things. We let our wisdom be filtered or focused on the real and not the abstract. I think the riddles in these stories try to show us that: that we have wisdom and imagination but we must stretch ourselves to think in that abstract way. It is not natural to us.

I also found it interesting as I was reading the story to think about the wisdom I gain from the story now vs. when I was a kid. As a child hearing about Alice in Wonderland I thought about a magical cat and this great kingdom, which was pretty. Now, I realize the depth of the story and the message it was trying to convey. It is interesting to see how our perspectives change as we age. 

Alice in the dream-like world, illustration by John Tenniel

Week 11 Storytelling: The House

Crying Baby, Source: flickr

Out of the blue, there came a loud crying from across the room.

The mom turned around just in time to see her daughter Lilly flailing about and crying hysterically. She was helpless and alone. The mom needed to be by her side immediately in order to comfort her daughter. She flew to the other side of the room so swiftly it was as if she floated. It was all a blur; she did not even know how she got from one side of the room to another. She was only concerned with comforting her crying daughter. Apparently, she had managed to knock down her husband in the process. He was not happy and covered in dust from the fall. The mom called to her husband that he must come to their daughter’s side as quick as he could.

The dad made his way to the daughter’s side, a little more slowly than the Queen, as he was recovering from the fall. On his way to the other side of the room, he noticed how filthy he was from the dust. He was appalled at the thought of a man being so filthy. His face squished together in a look of most discontent as he began to clean his clothes, skin, and hair of the dirt.

As he made his way to his daughter’s side, he could see why Lilly was crying. He took one look at her, and he was so shocked he fell over again.

The dad finally recovered from fainting and looked again at his daughter and then to his wife. The look in his eyes told his wife everything. They both looked at each other completely frightened.

Lilly had been crying for quite some time now. And rightfully so. Her body was covered in red dots all the way from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She was rubbing all over as if she was trying to get out of her own skin.

Luckily, the dad was a doctor. The mom advised him to take notes on what he saw. He pulled out a pen and pad of paper to write down his observations. He noted the feverish look to her pale skin. Next, he wrote down where and how many red dots covered each portion of Lilly’s skin. He kept writing until it was clear he had no more to write.

The mom looked at his notes and was thoroughly confused. It all seemed like gibberish to her. The words could have been written backwards or in a different language for all she could make out of what her husband wrote. She was intrigued by his observations of their daughter and how he would cure her, but she could not comprehend any of the scribbles on his page. She just had to have faith that he knew the meaning.

 

Author’s Note: I decided to take the story of The Looking-Glass house and recreate it to be a realistic story. In the original there is a King and Queen chess piece who make their way to the Pawn (their daughter Lilly) and try to comfort her. Alice carries the Queen to the pawn, and because the Queen cannot see Alice, she is surprised how she gets there so quick. The King falls into ashes (falls into dust) and Alice then tries to clean him. He is again appalled at being in the air and cleaned by something he can’t see. The King decides to document his story in a memorandum of his feelings (doctors notes) and then writes the JABBERWOCKY poem. But, because it is in a looking-glass house the writing is backwards and Alice can’t understand it (just like the queen can not understand the medical notes). My story stretches the original but has the same essential plot line. My story just removes the “mystical” element that the Alice stories encompass and makes it a common story. 

Bibliography: The Looking-Glass House. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871).

Week 11 Reading Diary: Looking Glass Unit

This week I decided to focus on the Looking Glass unit and specifically the story entitled the Looking-Glass House. It seemed the most interesting to me how Alice ponders this glass house and how it appears.

Illustration by John Tenniel

She is explaining to her cats how she wishes she could see what was behind the fireplace. She ponders “I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never CAN tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too — but that may be only pretense, just to make it look as if they had a fire.” You can really imagine the young Alice debating these ideas. When we are young our imagination is vast and you can see that as Alice tries to find any explanation for the smoke. She also finds it amazing how when she holds up a book. They hold up one in the other room. She does not understand the concept of a mirror, as many children don’t, and believes some other people are on the other side doing exactly as she does.

I took the time to look up the definition of looking glass and there were multiple. 1. A mirror  2. Being or involving the opposite of what is normal or expected. The first was an obvious one. But I think the second is important to this story too. Nothing in the story of Alice in Wonderland or Alice and the Looking Glass is normal or expected.

Her imagination continues as she melts into the looking glass room and explores what is in there: talking pawns, and kings, and queens. The fire in the fireplace is not just a fire but a volcano! The king and queen cannot see or hear her which I found interesting. The words of the poem are backwards as I expected from the looking glass element of the room. 

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The Queens, Illustration by John Tenniel

One of my favorite quotes comes from the beginning of the story Queen Alice. It reads: “if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for YOU to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything.” I love this quote for the message it presents. If you always ask for permission to speak, then nothing ever gets spoken. The Queen then later makes another point about speaking that is very important. Alice tries to change her answer to a question but the Red Queen replies: 'when you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.” It is true that, although, we can apologize for the things we say, we can never truly take them back. We must face the consequences of our words.

The story continues with these types of riddles where the Red and White Queens quiz Alice on her mathematics skills and trick her with their cleverness. When you subtract a bone from a dog, Alice said nothing is left but the queen says that, the dog will be mad and therefore his temper will remain. An unusual answer to a mathematics question. The riddles continue with a frog who is perplexed when Alice asks who is to answer the door. The frog asks “What’s the door been asking of?” and at first I did not understand this riddle. But, then I realized the frog was spinning the wording to mean that if someone is to answer the door then the door must ask something. I enjoyed this story for the play on words and riddle-like aspect of it. It made me realize we often look so one-sided at things and do not realize the many ways that different people can interpret the same thing.