Chapter 10: Carroll's Cake
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Chapter 10: Carroll's Cake |
At the time of Lewis Carroll's death in 1898, his book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland[1], was the most popular children's book in England. Like his American contemporary Alice Earle, who created a sociological document of the life, habits and expectations of children in the United States, Carroll weaves together a compendium of information, in parody, of child culture in England in the latter half of the 19th century.
After tumbling down a rabbit hole, Alice finds herself in a hallway lined with doors, a metaphor for unlimited opportunity. She sees a gold key, gold, mind you, on top of a glass table. It fits none of the doors. On second inspection she finds a little door behind some curtains which the key fits. She opens the door onto a beautiful garden which she can only glimpse down a tunnel that resembles a rat hole. She's far too big to gain access to the garden through this door. Now she sees a bottle on the table. John Tenniel's illustration from the original publication shows a corked bottle with a label tied around its neck upon which "DRINK ME" is written. Limited logic tells her that the liquid in the bottle is not poison; otherwise, it would be marked poison. So, she drinks it and becomes quite small, small enough, in fact, that she can no longer reach the key which she left on the table top and which she needs in order to unlock again the small door through which she had decided to pass. She tries climbing the glass table leg to reach the gold key but finds that her effort is fruitless, the leg is too slippery. "...and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried."
Carroll has set a metaphor in our way that characterizes the difficulty we mortals experience in locating and then acquiring the key to "the door" to opportunity and success. In Alice's case, her discovery of the right door and her attempt to reach its key comes to failure even after a valiant try. Thwarted, Alice cries, bringing the metaphor of the human search for admission to success to an appropriate close. The first attempt at gaining the key by straining, an attempt that matches many such mortal attempts, fails. But wait. Under the table in a glass box is an escagraph, a cake with "EAT ME" spelled out on it in currants.
The escagraph is not difficult to reach even though she is only 10 inches high at that moment. Alice doesn't hesitate or question it. She eats it. She eats all of it because she is obviously familiar with food with writing on it. The escagraph was already transparent to her just as I pointed out earlier that they have become transparent to us. By giving Alice an accepting approach to the cake escagraph, Carroll is telling us that children in the mid-Victorian era were perfectly familiar with them. Children, we know, were exposed, to a cake called The Twelfth Cake before and during Alice's time. Twelfth Cakes were made for the celebration of Epiphany and here follows a description of one that a boy trades for a doll to give to his sister in Memoirs of a London Doll, written by Richard H. Hornne[2].
See! What a beautiful frost work of white sugar there is all over the top and sides! See, too, what characters there are, and made in sugar of all colours! Kings and queens in their robes, and lions and dogs, and Jem Crow, and Swiss cottages in winter, and railway carriages and girls with tambourines, and a village steeple...
What is missing in this description is any mention of writing on the cake. There is only an elaborately detailed sugar scene with the full panoply of child "dreams" and social implications on it. Alice would have been familiar with Twelfth Cakes, coming into existence, as she did, in 1865, so she would not have been taken by surprise by an elaborately decorated cake down the rabbit hole although what she found was a simply decorated one with writing in currants as its only decoration, spelling out "EAT ME." The undisturbed, evenness of mind and temper, the composure which Carroll gives to Alice on finding such a cake makes us secure in the knowledge that she saw nothing disturbing in it. She bypassed the limited logic test she had run on the bottle (if it isn't marked poison, then it isn't poison) and, instead, upon seeing the cake, instantly reached a decision and spoke it (standard win-win logic):
"Well, I'll eat it," said Alice "and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key, and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: So, either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!"
Upon eating the cake, Alice grows to a stature which would allow easy access to the key she sought but instead of having her reach for it, Carroll sets the stage for a lesson via parody of the dangers of attaining social prominence. She is now large (a metaphor for social prominence which we learned the escagraph or the gold key could give) and is unsure how to cope with it. The White Rabbit reappears and drops kid gloves and a fan at her feet. The elasticity of thin leather kid gloves was a 19th century mark of an accomplished person, a person unacquainted with work. Alice's stature (her social stature), gained as a result of the escagraph she has eaten, now stands in her way to entering the garden, a literary simile for denied access to that world where people respect one another, an Eden before the fall. She has grown in social stature, why else would kid gloves be dropped at her feet? Carroll has also laid a fan before her. She picks up the fan and the gloves, fans herself, because the hall now seems hot to her (she has become socially prominent - a warning to those who make it their work to attain it) and the effect of fanning herself reduces her size. How often is the fan a prop in literature for the grand dame who is asking for her comeuppance or is just silly? What better object to use to remind us of the dangers of gaining social prominence? She discovers she is shrinking when the White Rabbit's kid gloves, with which she fiddles, finally fit her hands. What we have witnessed is the rise to social prominence which an escagraph can cause and the attainment of the props of power (kid gloves and a fan). The props can become the very objects which play a part in the cause and measure of his/her decline. Having advised us of the dangers of the rise to social prominence, especially if handled clumsily, Carroll puts Alice in a complex social situation made up of three conditions:
Alice is shown to be able to become accustomed to dealing successfully with these complex social circumstances involving the creatures down the rabbit hole. Carroll has pointed out the right kind of social prominence to have, the complicit sort he gives Alice.
To nail that idea, Carroll very soon has the White Rabbit refer to Alice by the name Mary Ann, an English euphemism for servant girl, indicating to us that he has matured under the wrong approach in rising to social competence. He gives her a sharp order: "Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!" he insists, even though he is otherwise characterized as timid, a biting social comment reflecting many people of prominence. The gloves and the fan are objects which he laid at Alice's feet only a page or two earlier and now, like the thoughtless manager he is, sharply orders her to fetch. In possession of her new social power, Alice runs off to do his bidding without trying to explain the mistake that he has made, clearly demonstrating her social superiority.
Martin Gardner[3], who has supplied the annotations for The Annotated Alice, makes two observations about the gold key Carroll gives to Alice to open a door. "A gold key that unlocked mysterious doors was a common object in Victorian fantasy," and then he notes that in his notes for an Oxford edition of the Alice books, Roger Green links the gold key to the magic key to Heaven in George MacDonald's famous fantasy tale "The Golden Key."
Does the gold key play any part in the metaphor that Carroll handed us at the beginning of Alice's adventures? Yes, but I believe that Carroll has not made the key the answer to Alice's dilemma but uses the gold key, the hard to reach "open sesame" to the world we want, as a tool for measuring the escagraph. If the key can only be reached, it will make progress towards success and desire easier. And there was the means for acquiring it, under the table, ready for her, un-noticed until now. But, Alice knew on sight that the escagraph was the genuine answer to her dilemma that it could and would offer her its power and magic, for which escagraphs have come to be the signifiers, and give her access, but not to the key because, after eating the escagraph, the key is forgotten. She turns instead to complex relations with the creatures who surround her. Here, Carroll, the Victorian moralist has put into perspective the futility of magic symbols like gold keys for solving life's mysteries and instead offers Alice the social power which the escagraph can give her, just as the soteltie had impressed the people at the King's banquet hall that he was to be reckoned with socially and economically. The escagraph makes her stronger, more adept at dealing with people, but in the right way. And, anyway, now she is much too big to go through the door.
In the final analysis, is magic a part of solving Alice's dilemma? I believe it is, but it is not the magic of expectations and desires attained without effort (gold keys), but more like the magic that is attainable through care for the creatures who surround you and your appreciation of them.
Carroll was aware of the powerful symbolism surrounding cake escagraphs (the reach for social status and power) and used it to open a parody of the pitfalls connected with its attainment. Was the "EAT ME" cake sweet? You can bet is was. Certainly the currants were. And we know that Carroll was ever mindful of the power of language which he combines with sugar, and then parodies by immediately showing us how others react to social attainment.
He played with language endlessly. Who can not recite at least two lines of his Jabberwocky. It shouldn't surprise us that he combined language with sugar in order to effectively get his reader to see where that combination could lead if one weren't cautious.
The parody is a strong literary device. It assumes the audience is aware of the circumstances you parody else the parody doesn't work. Carroll's use of so few words to describe the condition he is about to parody tells us that he knows that his readers know the social elements and effects of sweet language and decorated cakes. He puts the escagraph cake within easy reach and captures what he knows the children know in two short words, "EAT ME," not as descriptive text but as the writing on the cake which makes it an escagraph in the first place.
Which is the safest way to attain social prominence, a gold key or an escagraph? Both have their pitfalls. Rise to social prominence is dangerous however it is achieved I believe Carroll tells us. The White Rabbit accomplished it and bossed Alice around, gave her exasperating orders and dropped the symbols of attainment (kid gloves and a fan) at her feet, waiting to see how she might use them. She graciously accepts the White Rabbit's mistaking her for a servant and his demand that she fetch his gloves and his fan. She doesn't cavil or argue that she isn't a servant. She goes for the gloves and the fan even though she is in possession of those symbols of prominence. Does she do that because she has risen to prominence because of eating an escagraph rather than using a gold key? I doubt it. She's just a good kid.
Carroll put the escagraph in league with gold keys and, without prejudice for either, parodied the possible outcomes.
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