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Fallacy
Chapter 1: Looking-Glass House
Explanation and Analysis—Alice and Kitty:
Alice and Kitty can be read as foils. In Chapter 1, Alice scolds Kitty like a child:
["]What have you got to say for yourself? Now don’t interrupt me!” she went on, holding up one finger. “I’m going to tell you all your faults. Number one: you squeaked twice while Dinah was washing your face this morning. Now you ca’n’t deny it, Kitty: I heard you! What’s that you say?” (pretending that the kitten was speaking). “Her paw went into your eye? Well, that’s your fault, for keeping your eyes open—if you’d shut them tight up, it wouldn’t have happened.["]
Kitty has been interrupting Alice by playing with the ball of yarn Alice has been working with and generally causing disruptions. This is all within the normal realm of kitten behavior, but Alice decides to give her a lecture. Alice's scolding is not a very practical way to handle a kitten who is causing a nuisance. She keeps "pretending that the kitten [is] speaking" back to her, when in fact Kitty can do no such thing: this is the real world, not yet the Looking-Glass World, and cats don't have language. This passage puts on display not only Alice's active imagination, but also the ways she herself has been spoken to by adults. She is borrowing her script for lecturing Kitty from somewhere. It seems most likely that adults in her own life have listed all her faults while telling her not to interrupt. Kitty gives Alice the chance to play at being a parent or other "responsible" adult, talking to a "child." The lecture is unfruitful, as it probably has been when directed at Alice.
As the novel goes on, Kitty transforms into the Red Queen. Alice and the Red Queen have a fraught relationship. Alice sees her as a guide to the Looking-Glass World, and the Red Queen speaks to Alice condescendingly, just as adults do in the real world. But Alice slowly recognizes that the Red Queen's behavior and logic in fact make no sense at all. Alice finds it increasingly difficult to reason with her and finally jolts herself awake so that she will not have to try so hard to fit into the Red Queen's nonsensical world. Alice immediately recognizes that Kitty was the Red Queen. While she continues to fuss about Kitty's behavior (for instance, telling her that she shouldn't keep licking her paws), this criticism is much more lighthearted than it was in the first chapter. Rather than trying to reason at length with Kitty about her behavior, Alice now wants to know her opinion on what just happened in the Looking-Glass World. Alice seems to learn from Kitty that children, adults, and even cats will not always understand one another or like one another's behavior. Just as she wakes up from her dream and decides to be content as a child once more, Alice learns to appreciate Kitty as a kitten.
Related Themes:
