Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The ridiculousness of a frog and a fish as footmen is just plain funny, first of all. But so is the idea of the two footmen delivering identical invitations to each other—it is as if both the Duchess and the Queen want to be able to take credit for the croquet event that both of them are going to, both want to be host. This again foregrounds and parodies the way that adults jockey for position, and try to make themselves look and be powerful, at each other’s expense (even as they give lessons to their children to not act that way at all).

A number of times Alice has wished to go home when she was confronted by the strange rules or isolating failure to communicate when in Wonderland. Here is a Wonderland home—a domestic scene—but the comfort Alice expected to find in a “home” is missing. As if to hammer that home, the frog reverses the conventions of inside and outside, suggesting knocking to get out instead of in.

The scene inside is very domestic...

…until you encounter the comically grotesque details of it, with the cook producing a soup so peppery people can barely breathe much less eat it, and the Duchess shouting insults at her baby. Meanwhile, the Duchess acts like an “adult” toward Alice, voicing judgments about her knowledge. The way the Duchess deals with the chaos around her suggests the image of a matronly woman, but she actually has no control, as the cook’s actions indicate.

The Duchess tells Alice off but uses nonsensical proverbs that alert us to the fact that she has shoddy knowledge herself. She is also a terrifying mother. She does all the typical maternal things, singing and scolding, but in a ridiculous and careless way.

The Duchess’s relationship with the pig/baby is a mockery of all the kinds of mothering that Alice has learned is appropriate for mother/child relationship. It also seems likely that the pig/baby may not actually be related to the Duchess. Wildness and domesticity have become confused here, and Alice, always eager for things to belong to the right categories (as she’s been taught that they should), does the right thing in her eyes by replacing the pig to its natural environment. At the same time, Alice recognizes that she knows many children who themselves have piglike attributes—in thinking this she is confusing categories of pig/child in much the same way as the pigeon confused the categories of girl/serpent.

When Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which way she should go she is making an assumption that the Cat will understand that she is looking to go to the best or right place. The Cat, though, refuses to grant such an assumption or to privilege one place over another. In so doing, it makes clear the assumption Alice was originally making. The Cat proclaims that Alice must be mad because everyone in Wonderland is mad, and she is in Wonderland, has the formulation of a logical statement and yet it comes to an illogical end.

The social etiquette of Wonderland is reminiscent of that in the real world—with get-togethers and invitations—and yet completely counter at the same time, in that the invitations don’t actually seem to matter.

Proverbs, sayings and idioms have an interesting place in Alice in Wonderland. Alice takes them very literally, as a lot of children do when they are learning how to use their expanding vocabularies, and these literal meanings control and shape to a large extent how things appear in Wonderland. The March Hare is a good example. The phrase “mad as a March hare” comes from the behavior of hares at mating season, in March, but in Wonderland, this creature is permanently mad.