Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Alice continues to play by the rules of the trial. Even though she knows that the jurors are useless as jurors—that they can't even remember their own names—it is important to her that they be in the right place (and right side up).

The King repeats the words “important” and “unimportant”, considering which to use, even though they are opposites, showing that he really has no concept of meaning as Alice understands it. To him, a word that it only two letters different must be very similar.

With the King's sudden new rule about height and the court, suddenly Alice is the subject of the arbitrary nature of the court. In response, she makes a major step: she refuses to obey the rules, having now recognized just how arbitrary the rules are, how much they are designed simply to maintain control and not to offer any kind of fairness.

The way things appear and sound is far more important in Wonderland than the meaning behind them, for example when the King suggests that the Knave’s not signing the letter proves his guilt, because an honest man would have put his name to it, he receives applause from the court because it sounds like an intelligent comment even though it is actually illogical.

Alice has spent the novella trying to figure out and play by the rules of Wonderland in order to understand it. But now as the trial reveals the full illogic of those running the court even as a character's life hangs in the balance, Alice asserts that there is no meaning to the poem read at the trial. It is unclear if she feels emboldened to make such a proclamation because of her great size, or if her size is a function of her gaining the understanding that Wonderland is meaningless and that she, as its dreamer, can see that meaninglessness.

The way the King and Alice pick apart the piece of evidence, which on the face of it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Knave stealing the Queen’s tarts, is reminiscent of a kind of literary analysis of a poem or a difficult piece of text. Each phrase can be fit to the situation at hand. The King fits each “I” and “she” and “they” to characters in the court but this connection is entirely invented. Working in such a way, the King could connect any text to the circumstances of the trial, picking and choosing evidence that "fits."

The Queens bloodlust comes out, wanting to perform the sentence before guilt or innocence is even decided upon. At this, Alice recognizes that the trial is a nonsensical sham. The Queen responds by trying to control Alice through threats, but Alice—now fully grown—responds to the threat by finally recognizing that all of Wonderland is a sham by telling the cards that they are just cards, refusing to play along any longer. She grows up above the nonsense of the King and Queen, both literally by continuing to grow and fill the court, and figuratively, as she realizes that she needn’t be scared and the illusion of the dream is broken.,

The novel ends with Alice's sister's perspective, someone not yet an adult but in a kind of in-between place between full adulthood and childhood such as Alice's. She represents the older version of Alice, she is motherly towards Alice, sending her off for her tea. She is young enough to enjoy Alice's dream, and yet while Alice was stuck in the dream and had to fight herself out, her older sister has to willfully hold on to it: she knows it will disappear when she opens her eyes. Further, Alice's sister's experience of the dream is suffused by a kind of nostalgia for childhood and not at all by the anxiety that Alice experienced in the dream. To Alice's sister the dream is a cute example of the pleasures of being a child. In this way, Alice's sister's thoughts confirm the concerns that Alice pondered through her adventures in Wonderland—that you really do change in life as you grow up, even as you stay the same person you also become another one, and this new person has only limited access to or understanding of who you were as a child.