Eating in Wonderland

Consumption and edibility play a large thematic role in both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and also figure largely in adaptations of the text. From the very beginning, the story is structured as a journey of ingestion. On the way down the rabbit hole Alice grabs a jar labeled "ORANGE MARMALADE," but finds it empty, "to her great disappointment" (10). Moments later she finds herself wondering whether cats eat bats, then the inverse. She soon stumbles upon objects which demand to be eaten ("DRINK ME," "EAT ME"), and soon discovers eating to be a transformative act.

Eating becomes a primary conduit of agency for Alice, whose tumultuous changes in size are actually conscious decisions to partake in physically altering substances (with the exception of her rapid growth in the courtroom, which seems to happen spontaneously). Yet the agency of ingestion comes without moral purpose, and has a tautological kind of justification: one eats to stay alive, and then one continues to eat. By populating his fantasy worlds with creatures that ruthlessly devour one another while spouting poetry, and food that speaks, Dodgson seems to recognize that eating is essentially amoral—if not immoral–because it requires the taking of another life. Eating, and thus living, is only justifiable using a moral calculus that values human lives above the lives of others. While the "real world" (both Dodgson's and our own) assumes such a moral framework, his imagined ones do not. The result is a place which on the surface appears to mimic human society, but more closely resembles the amoral confusion of the "natural world."

"The Walrus and the Carpenter" serves as an interesting nexus of the themes of consumption and society, and appears in both the original text ("Through the Looking Glass") and the 1951 Disney adaptation, slightly modified. What makes this poem stand out is not just the titular character's unmerciful devouring of the oysters, but that the oysters are in fact young children, and are illustrated (or animated) as such. The Disney adaptation stays fairly close to the original; it mostly modifies the poem to shorten it and remove language that might be unfamiliar to its audience. Interestingly, it changes the silent "eldest Oyster" of the original to an elderly mother oyster who cautions her children not to go, making their subsequent abduction and death even more disturbing. Yet at the decisive moment, it does not allow the Carpenter, the only human character, to partake in the feast. Instead the Walrus greedily eats them all, only to be chased out of the scene by the enraged carpenter, in what seems to be a conflict thought up by the Disney writers to distract from the unsettling event that has just occurred. After all, it's not often that the cute animal characters of Disney films are eaten alive–it would seem unbearably gruesome if the scene ended with the two devourers satisfied, talking to the oysters who are no longer there, as it does in the original. Only the Walrus cries, though his tears must be disingenuous (earlier the carpenter cried at the sight of sand on the beach).