The Wasp in a Wig

. . . a nd she was just going to spring over, when she heard a deep sigh, which seemed to come from the wood behind her.

“There’s somebody very unhappy there,” she thought, looking anxiously back to see what was the matter. Something like a very old man (only that his face was more like a wasp) was sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree, all huddled up together, and shivering as if he were very cold.

“I don’t think I can be of any use to him,” was Alice’s first thought, as she turned to spring over the brook:—“but I’ll just ask him what’s the matter,” she added, checking herself on the very edge. “If I once jump over, everything will change, and then I can’t help him.” 1

So she went back to the Wasp—rather unwillingly, for she was very anxious to be a Queen.

“Oh, my old bones, my old bones!” he was grumbling as Alice came up to him.

“It’s rheumatism, I should think,” Alice said to herself, and she stooped over him, and said very kindly, “I hope you’re not in much pain?”

The Wasp only shook his shoulders, and turned his head away. “Ah, dreary me!” he said to himself.

“Can I do anything for you?” Alice went on. “Aren’t you rather cold here?”

“How you go on!” the Wasp said in a peevish tone. “Worrity, worrity! There never was such a child!” 2

Alice felt rather offended at this answer, and was very nearly walking on and leaving him, but she thought to herself “Perhaps it’s only pain that makes him so cross.” So she tried once more.

“Won’t you let me help you round to the other side? You’ll be out of the cold wind there.”

The Wasp took her arm, and let her help him round the tree, but when he got settled down again he only said, as before, “Worrity, worrity! Can’t you leave a body alone?”

“Would you like me to read you a bit of this?” Alice went on, as she picked up a newspaper which had been lying at his feet. 3

“You may read it if you’ve a mind to,” the Wasp said, rather sulkily. “Nobody’s hindering you, that I know of.”

So Alice sat down by him, and spread out the paper on her knees, and began. “Latest News. The Exploring Party have made another tour in the Pantry, and have found five new lumps of white sugar, large and in fine condition. In coming back—”

“Any brown sugar?” the Wasp interrupted.

Alice hastily ran her eye down the paper and said “No. It says nothing about brown.”

“No brown sugar!” grumbled the Wasp. “A nice exploring party!” 4

“In coming back,” Alice went on reading, “they found a lake of treacle. The banks of the lake were blue and white, and looked like china. While tasting the treacle, they had a sad accident: two of their party were engulphed—”

“Were what?” the Wasp asked in a very cross voice.

“En-gulph-ed,” Alice repeated, dividing the word into syllables. 5

“There’s no such word in the language!” said the Wasp.

“It’s in this newspaper, though,” Alice said a little timidly.

“Let it stop there!” said the Wasp, fretfully turning away his head.

Alice put down the newspaper. “I’m afraid you’re not well,” she said in a soothing tone. “Can’t I do anything for you?”

“It’s all along of the wig,” 6 the Wasp said in a much gentler voice.

“Along of the wig?” Alice repeated, quite pleased to find that he was recovering his temper.

“You’d be cross too, if you’d a wig like mine,” the Wasp went on. “They jokes at one. And they worrits one. 7 And then I gets cross. And I gets cold. And I gets under a tree. And I gets a yellow handkerchief. 8 And I ties up my face—as at the present.”

Alice looked pityingly at him. “Tying up the face is very good for the toothache,” she said. 9

“And it’s very good for the conceit,” added the Wasp.

Alice didn’t catch the word exactly. “Is that a kind of toothache?” she asked.

The Wasp considered a little. “Well, no,” he said: “it’s when you hold up your head—so— without bending your neck.”

“Oh, you mean stiff-neck,” 10 said Alice.

The Wasp said “That’s a new-fangled name. They called it conceit in my time.”

“Conceit isn’t a disease at all,” Alice remarked.

“It is, though,” said the Wasp: “wait till you have it, and then you’ll know. And when you catches it, just try tying a yellow handkerchief round your face. It’ll cure you in no time!”

He untied the handkerchief as he spoke, and Alice looked at his wig in great surprise. It was bright yellow like the handkerchief, 11 and all tangled and tumbled about like a heap of seaweed. “You could make your wig much neater,” she said, “if only you had a comb.”

“What, you’re a Bee, are you?” the Wasp said, looking at her with more interest. “And you’ve got a comb. 12 Much honey?”

“It isn’t that kind,” Alice hastily explained. “It’s to comb hair with—your wig’s so very rough, you know.”

“I’ll tell you how I came to wear it,” the Wasp said. “When I was young, you know, my ringlets used to wave—”

A curious idea came into Alice’s head. Almost every one she had met had repeated poetry to her, and she thought she would try if the Wasp couldn’t do it too. “Would you mind saying it in rhyme?” she asked very politely.

“It ain’t what I’m used to,” said the Wasp: “however I’ll try; wait a bit.” He was silent for a few moments, and then began again—

“When I was young, my ringlets waved 13

And curled and crinkled on my head:

And then they said ‘You should be shaved,

And wear a yellow wig instead.’

But when I followed their advice,

And they had noticed the effect,

They said I did not look so nice

As they had ventured to expect.

They said it did not fit, and so

It made me look extremely plain:

But what was I to do, you know?

My ringlets would not grow again.

So now that I am old and gray,

And all my hair is nearly gone,

They take my wig from me and say

‘How can you put such rubbish on?’

And still, whenever I appear,

They hoot at me and call me ‘Pig!’ 14

And that is why they do it, dear,

Because I wear a yellow wig.”

“I’m very sorry for you,” Alice said heartily: “and I think if your wig fitted a little better, they wouldn’t tease you quite so much.”

“Your wig fits very well,” the Wasp murmured, looking at her with an expression of admiration: “it’s the shape of your head as does it. Your jaws ain’t well shaped, though—I should think you couldn’t bite well?”

Alice began with a little scream of laughter, which she turned into a cough as well as she could. 15 At last she managed to say gravely, “I can bite anything I want.” 16

“Not with a mouth as small as that,” the Wasp persisted. “If you was a-fighting, now—could you get hold of the other one by the back of the neck?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Alice.

“Well, that’s because your jaws are too short,” the Wasp went on: “but the top of your head is nice and round.” He took off his own wig as he spoke, and stretched out one claw towards Alice, 17 as if he wished to do the same for her, but she kept out of reach, and would not take the hint. So he went on with his criticisms.

“Then your eyes—they’re too much in front, no doubt. One would have done as well as two, if you must have them so close—” 18

Alice did not like having so many personal remarks made on her, and as the Wasp had quite recovered his spirits, and was getting very talkative, she thought she might safely leave him. “I think I must be going on now,” she said. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, and thank-ye,” said the Wasp, and Alice tripped down the hill again, quite pleased that she had gone back and given a few minutes to making the poor old creature comfortable.

1. The abrupt changes of scenery that take place whenever Alice leaps a brook resemble the changes that occur in a chess game whenever a move is made, as well as the sudden transitions that occur in dreams.

2. Worrit was a slang noun in Carroll’s time for worry or mental distress. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Mr. Bumble (in Dickens’s Oliver Twist ): “A porochial life, ma’am, is a life of worrit and vexation and hardihood.” Worrity was another form of the noun commonly used by British lower classes.

3. If any insect had a newspaper it would be the social wasp. Wasps are great paper makers. Their thin paper nests, usually in hollow trees, are made from a pulp which they produce by chewing leaves and wood fiber.

4. “brown sugar”: Wasps are fond of all kinds of man-made sweets, especially sugar. Morton Cohen points out that the Wasp’s preference for brown sugar is characteristic of Victorian lower classes, who found it cheaper than the refined white.

5. “Engulph” was a common spelling of “engulf” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was occasionally seen in Carroll’s time, and the Wasp may be voicing Carroll’s personal dislike of the spelling. Perhaps it is Alice’s incorrect pronunciation, “en-gulph-ed” (three syllables instead of two), that the Wasp finds so outlandish. Donald L. Hotson suggests that Carroll may here be playing on a university slang expression of the time. According to The Slang Dictionary (Chatto & Windus, 1974), gulfed (sometimes spelled “gulphed”) was “originally a Cambridge term, denoting that a man is unable to enter for the classical examination from having failed in the mathematical. . . . The expression is common now in Oxford as descriptive of a man who goes in for honours, and only gets a pass.”

6. “all along of”: all because of. Another lower-class expression of the day.

7. “worrits”: The word was also vulgarly used as a verb. “Don’t worrit your poor mother,” says Mrs. Saunders in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. The Wasp’s speech marks him clearly as a drone in the wasp social structure.

Carroll not only identified his cantankerous aged man with a creature universally feared and hated, he also made him lower class, in sharp contrast to Alice’s upper-class background—facts that make her kindness toward the insect all the more remarkable.

8. A yellow silk handkerchief, colloquially called a “yellowman,” was fashionable in Victorian England.

9. Tying a handkerchief around the face, with a poultice inside, was in Carroll’s time believed around the world to provide relief from a toothache. Persons who considered themselves good-looking must have frequently been seen in this condition, and their appearance surely would not have strengthened their conceit.

10. A stiff neck is a bodily ailment as well as the bearing of a haughty, proud, or conceited person. Perhaps the Wasp is warning Alice of the danger of becoming a haughty Queen, as stiff-necked as an ivory chess queen. Indeed, as soon as Alice finds the gold crown on her head she walks about “rather stiffly” to keep the crown from falling off. In the last chapter she commands the black kitten to “sit up a little more stiffly” like the Red Queen she fancied the kitten to have been in her dream. Compare also with the “proud and stiff” messenger in Humpty Dumpty’s poem.

Professor Cohen observes that the Wasp reverses history when he calls stiff-neck a newfangled name. It is a much older word than conceit. “You are a stiff-necked people,” the Lord commanded Moses to tell the Israelites (Exodus 33:5).

11. “bright yellow”: The phrase is used again by Carroll in Chapter 9, where it is also associated with advanced age. A “very old frog” is dressed in “bright yellow.”

12. “comb”: another pun. Note that if Alice is a bee, she is about to become a Queen bee.

13. Is this poem, like so many of the others in both Alice books, a parody? Many poems and songs of the time begin “When I was young . . .” but I could find none that seemed a probable basis for this poem. Carroll may have been aware that the phrase “ringlets waved” occurs in John Milton’s beautiful description of the naked Eve (Paradise Lost, Book 4):

She, as a veil down to the slender waist,

Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved

As the vine curls her tendrils . . .

And there is the following line from Alexander Pope’s “Sappho”:

No more my locks, in ringlets, curled . . .

However, since ringlets always curl and wave, the parallels may be coincidental.

It may be worth pointing out that the word ringlets usually refers not to short curls but to long locks in helical form, like the vines mentioned by Milton. As a mathematician Carroll knew that the helix is an asymmetrical structure which (in Alice’s words) “goes the other way” in the mirror.

As mentioned earlier, it is no accident that the second Alice book is filled with references to mirror reversals and asymmetric objects. The helix itself is mentioned several times. Humpty Dumpty compares the toves to corkscrews, and Tenniel drew them with helical tails and snouts. Humpty also speaks in a poem about waking up fish with a corkscrew, and in Chapter 9 the White Queen recalls that Humpty had a corkscrew in hand when he was looking for a hippopotamus. In Tenniel’s pictures the unicorn and the goat have helical horns. The road that leads up the hill in Chapter 3 twists like a corkscrew. Carroll must have realized that the young (perhaps then conceited?) Wasp, admiring himself in a mirror, would have seen his ringlets curl “the other way.”

Any way you look at it, the poem itself is a strange one to appear in a book for children, though no more so, perhaps, than the inscrutable poem recited by Humpty in Chapter 6. The cutting off of hair, like decapitation and teeth extraction, is a familiar Freudian symbol of castration. Interesting interpretations of the poem by psychoanalytically oriented critics are possible.

14. In the Pig and Pepper chapter of Alice in Wonderland, Alice at first thinks that “Pig!,” shouted by the Duchess, is addressed to her. It turns out that the Duchess is hurling the epithet at the baby boy she is nursing, who soon turns into an actual pig. The use of “pig” as a derisive name for a person, says the OED, was common in Victorian England. Surprisingly, even then it was an epithet often used against police officers. An 1874 slang dictionary adds: “The word is almost exclusively applied by London thieves to a plain-clothes man.”

J. A. Lindon, a British writer of comic verse, suggests that it is the Wasp’s baldness (cf. the baldness of the Duchess’s baby) that prompts the epithet; and he recalls the association of pig and wig in “piggywiggy,” which the OED says is applied to both a little pig and a child. In “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Edward Lear writes:

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,

With a ring at the end of its nose.

15. Alice changed her “little scream of laughter” at the Wasp to a discreet cough. A short time before she had tried unsuccessfully to hold back a “little scream of laughter” at the White Knight. We cannot be sure, of course, that all parallels such as this were in the original text. After removing the Wasp episode, Carroll may have borrowed some of its phrases and images for use elsewhere when he polished the rest of the galleys.

16. Alice once frightened her nurse by shouting in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!” (Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1).

17. This somewhat terrifying scene, a large wasp reaching out a “claw” to remove Alice’s hair, recalls three other episodes in the book. The White Knight, mounting his horse, steadies himself by holding Alice’s hair. The White Queen grabs Alice’s hair with both hands in Chapter 9. And, in a reversal of ages, Carroll planned to have Alice seize the hair of an old lady sitting near her when the railway carriage jumps the second brook, as we know from Tenniel’s letter.

18. Unlike Alice, wasps have bulbous compound eyes on the sides of their heads and large strong jaws. Like Alice’s, their heads are “nice and round.” Other Looking-glass creatures (the Rose, the Tiger lily, the Unicorn) size up Alice in similar fashion, in the light of their own physical attributes.

Tenniel, at the age of twenty, lost the sight of one eye in a fencing bout with his father. The button accidentally dropped from his father’s foil, and the blade’s tip flicked across his right eye with a sudden pain that must have felt like a wasp’s sting. One can understand why Tenniel might have been offended by the Wasp’s remark; if so, it could have colored his attitude toward the episode.