“We’re all mad here.”
Inspirational vapours: The Priestess of Delphi, by John Collier, 1891.
THE KITCHEN ORACLE Apollo, the god of knowledge, was the divinity most frequently portrayed in art, architecture and literature in Oxford. Apollo was also the god of prophecy, and his sanctuary at Delphi was the most respected oracle of the ancient world. Consequently, it was something of an Oxford tradition for classically educated students and dons to make comic allusions to the Delphic oracle in political pamphlets and squibs.
One such pamphlet was Lewis Carroll’s “The Elections to the Hebdomadal Council,” published only a few months after Wonderland. It portrays the university’s governing council as an absurd and disastrously inept Delphic oracle. Pointedly quoting one of the council’s more convoluted proclamations, Carroll compares it to the obscure and ambiguous prophecies of Delphi, and concludes: “So says the oracle, and, for myself, I / Must say it beats to fits the one at Delphi!”
For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish)—and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
In Wonderland’s Duchess’s kitchen, Lewis Carroll has created a comic parody of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi gone badly wrong. Here and elsewhere (as in The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits), Carroll uses the word fit in its archaic sense of “a fragment or part of a poem or song,” but of course the word also implies its common meaning of “a seizure or convulsion.”
In the ancient temple at Delphi, a prophetess called Pythia sat on a three-legged stool and inhaled vapours from a great cauldron filled with a fragrant broth of laurel leaves and narcotic herbs. The cauldron was tended by the priestess of Hestia, goddess of the hearth. These vapours inspired Pythia to speak in tongues, and from these utterances came the enigmatic, riddling verses that were the prophetic “fits” of the oracle.
In Wonderland’s kitchen, the Duchess sits on a three-legged stool inhaling the smoke and pepper from a great cauldron filled with a noxious broth. The cauldron and hearth are tended by the cook. These vapours of smoke and pepper inspire the Duchess to utter nonsensical riddling verses that are more like fits of rage than prophesies.
The Duchess and the cook have the opposite temperaments expected of the spiritual and inspiring priestess of Apollo and the gentle and caring priestess of Hestia. And yet the Duchess is comparable to Pythia in many ways. The title Duchess also suggests a pun on the official name of the ancient Greek high priestess Dadochos (meaning “the torch-bearing priestess”), who reveals the mysteries. And the cook and Hestia’s priestess are certainly similar in their mutual duties of tending the hearths in the inner sanctums.
Most significantly, the Duchess is a prophetess of sorts. And her baby can easily be interpreted as a manifestation of her predictions. When the Duchess screams “Pig!” over her curious backward-evolving child, it does indeed become a pig.
Nor is this child-pig or pig-child allusion arbitrary. The most common offering made by supplicants to the oracle at Delphi was a pig, and when the sacrificial pig was offered up, it was ceremonially identified as “a child of the hearth of Athens” (or Corinth, etc., depending on the origin of the supplicant).
Beyond these allusions to the Delphic oracle and to classical history and mythology, Carroll’s contemporaries would have recognized contemporary events and individuals being satirized in the episode in the Duchess’s kitchen.
The real-life Oxford counterpart of both the temple of the oracle at Delphi and the Duchess’s kitchen is one of the most easily identified landmarks portrayed in the fairy tale. This is one of the oldest buildings at Oxford: Christ Church’s great kitchen. Built by Cardinal Wolsey during the reign of Henry VIII, the kitchen is considered one of the ancient wonders of Christ Church. For most of its history, it had a massive hearth for the roasting of entire pigs, and like the Duchess’s kitchen was poorly ventilated and frequently filled with smoke.
Samuel Wilberforce: Oily and argumentative.
The great kitchen was also the one part of the college that fell directly under the authority of the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (the son of the anti-slavery Great Emancipator, William Wilberforce). The bishop was one of the most vociferous ecclesiastic orators of his time and became popularly known as Holy Terror Wilberforce. To political pundits and parliamentarians, on the other hand, he was known as Soapy Sam, after Benjamin Disraeli’s devastatingly erudite description of his debating style as “unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous.” And as Soapy Sam, Bishop SAMUEL WILBERFORCE (1805–1873) was the perfect model for the logic-chopping, moralizing, argumentative Ugly Duchess. In 1860, Wilberforce took a leading role in a historic event in intellectual history, comparable to the confrontation between Galileo and the Pope over the nature of the universe. This was the famous Oxford evolution debate, in which the anti-evolution Wilberforce locked horns with the pro-evolution Thomas Henry Huxley.
Two views of Richard Owen: Tried to stir up debate.
The Duchess’s cook is based on one of the leading anatomists of the day, Sir RICHARD OWEN (1804–1892), who served as the bishop’s adviser. It was Owen who cooked up the anti-evolution arguments for Wilberforce. Much to Owen’s irritation, though, the bishop failed to comprehend and coherently argue Owen’s position on Darwin’s theories.
Famous as the anatomist who coined the word dinosaur, and later the founder of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, Owen was sufficiently celebrated to be caricatured regularly in the press. He appears not only in Wonderland but in another children’s classic of the time, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies.
Owen was an influential figure in the scientific establishment, but an extremely disagreeable character. In Darwin, Owen and Wilberforce had a common enemy; however, Owen was no friend of the bishop, and was as likely to be in dispute with Wilberforce as with Darwin. In his fantastic “Kitchen of Creation,” Carroll has the cook and the Duchess arguing about the contents of a mad biological soup.
In this kitchen oracle, evolution has gone berserk. Fish-frog-footmen in livery seem to have just stepped out of the primordial ooze. A constantly shape-shifting baby appears to demonstrate survival of the fittest by preferring beatings to affection. Strangest of all, Alice’s attempts to nurse this child result in a reverse form of evolution: from a boy into a pig.
This surreal transformation is a typical Carrollian riddle and charade. Carroll is playing a word-chain game that he himself invented (and later published in Vanity Fair) called Doublets. Two words of the same length are chosen, and the player must make one word evolve into another by means of link (or “missing link”) words created by changing a single letter to form each new link-word.
In Vanity Fair, Carroll asked his readers to “Evolve MAN from APE,” then supplied the answer: APE-are-ere-err-ear-mar-MAN. Among the multitude of Doublet transformations were “Change FISH to BIRD,” “Save LION from LAMB,” “Crown TIGER with ROSES,” and “Change GRUB to MOTH.” The rules of Doublets are like those of genetics, by which one species evolves into another by one small change after the other in a chain of DNA molecules.
Owen and Huxley as depicted in The Water-Babies.
Carroll also gives the reader an obscure hint of the nature of his game when the Duchess chants her witch’s spell over the child that ends in “Wow! wow! wow!” This is a cryptic phonetic pun on the word Doublets: wow spelled out aloud is “Double-you oh double-you.” And with this she predicts the verbal evolution of boy into pig; that is, BOY-bog-big-PIG.
Speaking in tongues: Detail from Consulting the Oracle, by John William Waterhouse, 1884.
HE WAS THE BOMB The theosophical candidate for the Ugly Duchess is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka PARACELSUS OF ZURICH (1493–1541), a Swiss physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer and occultist. Paracelsus gained a reputation for being arrogant toward his colleagues, and some writers suggest that “Theophrastus Bombastus” is the source of the word bombastic to describe a pompous, pretentious, verbose and self-aggrandizing character. This certainly describes the Ugly Duchess, but perhaps it is best to allow Paracelsus to speak for himself:
“I am Theophrastus, and greater than those whom you liken me; I am Theophrastus, and in addition I am monarcha medicorum and I can prove to you what you cannot prove.… You are not learned or experienced enough to refute even one word of mine.… Let me tell you this: every little hair on my neck knows more than you and all your scribes, and my shoe buckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.”
Paracelsus: This is a copy of the portrait by Matsys, now lost.
FACE OF THE DUCHESS The National Gallery, London contains the extremely grotesque An Old Woman (c. 1513), by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys (1466–1530), that in the twentieth century has become widely known as “The Ugly Duchess” because it is believed to be John Tenniel’s model for his illustration of that Wonderland character. Although it has been frequently argued that the portrait is of Margaret Countess of Tyrol (1318–1369)—a.k.a. Margarete Maultasch, “the ugliest princess in history”—this is unlikely. To begin with, it was not a portrait drawn from life as it was painted a century and a half after Margaret’s death. Furthermore, chronicles written during the countess’s lifetime describe her as being beautiful.
The Countess’s scandalous epithet “Maultasch” literally translates as “bag mouth” and carries the meaning “ugly whore.” This slander was spread by enemies who wished to usurp her lands, and used their influence to have her excommunicated as an immoral woman for divorcing her first husband. Over time the nickname and others like it resulted in folk tales about an ugly and deformed countess that were eventually recorded in Jacob Grimm’s German Sagas (1816).
Nonetheless, although Matsys’s painting is not a portrait of the last Countess of Tyrol, there is a convincing case for claiming it as the inspiration for John Tenniel’s drawings of the Ugly Duchess. And strangely enough, another of this Flemish artist’s paintings is directly linked to our theosophical candidate for the Ugly Duchess. Quentin Matsys was commissioned to paint a portrait of his famous contemporary: the celebrated alchemical doctor Paracelsus of Zurich.
An Old Woman: More Duchess than Countess.
Alice’s first view of the Duchess’s kitchen is from its door, where she observes those two bizarre examples of evolution gone wrong: the Fish-Footman and the Frog-Footman. Their names are literal descriptions of the creatures: one is half fish and half man, the other is half frog and half man; both measure one foot in height.
Carroll’s first hint is perhaps found in the initial exchange at the kitchen door: “The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to the other.” This sounds perilously close to a restating of the rules of Doublets.
Not wishing to make the charade too obvious, Carroll has the Frog-Footman, when he twice says what the letter is about, “changing the order of the words a little” (rather than changing the letters). For, by passing “a great letter, nearly as large as himself,” the Fish-Footman could easily be verbally transformed into the Frog-Footman: FISH-fist-fiat-flat-flag-flog-FROG.
The power of Carroll’s word game is forcefully demonstrated with the sudden dramatic reappearance of the Cheshire Cat after Alice sets the pig free in the woods. Carroll’s game of Doublets goes some way toward explaining the Cheshire Cat’s ability to vanish and reappear from head to tail and back again. In fact, in his introduction to his collection of Doublets, Carroll provides his readers with exactly this example of changing Head into Tail.
And so, in Wonderland, the appearance and disappearance of the Cheshire Cat is manifest in the word chain HEAD-heal-teal-tell-tall-TAIL. We can solve the conundrum of the cat’s slowly vanishing from tail to grin with the word chain TAIL-tall-tell-teal-team-tram-trim-grim-GRIN and his final reappearance from a grin to a floating head with GRIN-grim-trim-tram-team-teal-heal-HEAD.
Still, cats at Oxford are not hard to find. Christ Church’s coat of arms is adorned with four guardian cat faces looking down on the gardens of academia. To differentiate the Christ Church colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, Oxford employs the abbreviation Ch.Ch. Consequently, Carroll and his colleagues commonly referred to themselves as Ch. Ch. men; meanwhile, the Ch.Ch. canons (as represented by the cat faces on the coat of arms) by tradition became known as the Ch.Ch. cats: the watchful moral guardians of the university.
It is not a huge leap from “Ch.Ch. cat” to “Cheshire Cat,” but this still doesn’t tell us which Ch.Ch. canon is the definitive Cheshire Cat. Alice supplies us with a clue by rather formally addressing the cat as “Cheshire Puss.” Why the capital on Puss? Why Puss at all? Only one Ch.Ch. canon, as Alice observes, “would like the name,” because his name was Pusey.
Edward Bouverie Pusey: Awarded Carroll a lifetime position at Christ Church.
Christ Church’s coat of arms: The blue cats are leopards, representing the de la Pole Dukes of Suffolk. See this page for the full coat of arms.
The Cheshire Cat was the Reverend Dr. EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY (1800–1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew and Lewis Carroll’s mentor and patron. Canon Pusey was the ecclesiastical and political focus of ultra-conservatism at Oxford. And just as the Cheshire Cat was the Duchess’s cat, so Pusey was nominally under the authority of Oxford’s Duchess, Bishop Wilberforce. Pusey and Wilberforce were the two most influential figures in the Anglican clergy at Oxford. As a friend of Carroll’s High Church father from their own student years at Christ Church, Canon Pusey awarded—through the old system of privilege and patronage—the young Charles Dodgson a lifelong position at Christ Church before he’d achieved his bachelor’s degree.
The Catenary and the Cat.
In his pseudo-mathematical satire,“The New Method of Evaluation, as Applied to π,” wherein people take on geometric identities, Carroll investigates “the locus of EBP [Edward Bouverie Pusey]: this was found to be a species of Catenary, called the Patristic Catenary.” Today the term patristic catenary (meaning “chain of the fathers”) is obscure, but it was not so in Carroll’s time, when its Latin translation, catena patrum, referred to quotations from the church Fathers commenting on scripture. Canon Pusey was famously the greatest authority on the teachings of the Fathers of the church, and widely celebrated as the ultimate “patristic catenary.”
Even more revealingly, in geometry, a catenary is a curve made by a chain suspended between two points at different levels, such as one finds in a suspension, or catenary, bridge. Not only has Carroll with this clue provided us with proof of the identity of Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, but the shape of a catenary is almost perfectly described by Alice as “a grin without a cat!”
With this, Carroll gives us a mathematician’s solution to the ancient unsolved riddle of the Cheshire Cat’s grin:
RIDDLE: What kind of cat can grin?
ANSWER: A Catenary.
We are not yet quite done with the Cheshire Cat. If we revisit the classical and mythological allusions in this chapter, Carroll appears to link the smiling, enigmatic Cheshire Cat with the smiling, enigmatic Sphinx at Delphi. How does this figure into the story of Alice’s adventures?
The Sphinx is closely linked to the oracle of Delphi in myth and in history. The largest single surviving sculpture discovered at the sanctuary of Delphi is a gigantic statue of a Sphinx that once stood on a pillar and guarded the sacred path that led to the oracle in the Temple of Apollo. The motto engraved above the temple’s entrance, “Know thyself,” provides a link to both the Sphinx and Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat.
In classical mythology, the Sphinx—like the Cheshire Cat—poses riddles to unwary travellers at a fork in the road. Most famously, it encountered Oedipus, a hero whose tragic fate as a child had been predicted by the prophetess at Delphi. In an attempt to change that fate, his mother had abandoned her baby in the wilderness, but Oedipus survived, and was wise enough to answer the famous riddle of the Sphinx. However, he could not change his fate, because he remained confused about his identity. He was doomed because he failed to “know thyself.”
Similarly, Alice is confused about her identity and finds she cannot make fully informed choices that will permit her to control her fate. Nor, despite her best efforts, can she save the abused baby from its fate of becoming a pig, and like Oedipus’s mother she abandons the pig-child in the wilderness.
Original riddler: The Sphinx, as sculpted in marble circa 560 BC.
Also, just as Oedipus encountered the riddling Sphinx at a fork in the road, Alice encounters her riddling Cheshire Cat at a similar junction. There she discovers that no matter which road she chooses to take, she will end up at the same destination, because both paths lead to the same tea party. (A worse fate was to greet Oedipus at the end of his journey.)
By means of his allusions to the Delphic oracle, Lewis Carroll was attempting to make one final point about Oxford. The ancient Delphic oracle, inspired by the sun god’s celestial fire, induced divine prophecy, whereas the Wonderland oracle’s domestic fire brought about sneezing fits. In Wonderland, inspired wisdom is reduced to cookery in the Duchess’s kitchen temple. And this was exactly Carroll’s view of Oxford’s new liberal academic system. He frequently described reforms to modernize and standardize teaching at the university as replacing scholarship with a very base form of cookery.
One example of this is found in his novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in which Carroll has an old professor speak of the remarkable lack of inspired art and literature to be found in any of the great universities: “All the original genius … by which our fore-fathers have so advanced human knowledge, must slowly but surely wither away, and give place to a system of Cookery, in which the human mind is a sausage, and all we ask is, how much indigestible stuff can be crammed into it!”
A SOCRATIC CAT The Cheshire Cat’s mythological identity as the Sphinx is intertwined with its identity on the philosophical level as SOCRATES (469–399 BC). Certainly, the riddling Sphinx had something in common with that ever-questioning philosophical gadfly. Then, too, the Sphinx is linked to the oracle of Delphi through the legend of Oedipus, while Socrates is linked to the oracle through Pythia’s proclamation “Socrates is the wisest of mortal men.”
Socrates gained this reputation by questioning everyone and everything. The Cheshire Cat has a similarly inquiring nature. Socrates proudly described himself as a gadfly provoking the Athenian state—like a lazy horse—into action. In this he is comparable to the Cheshire Cat, whose floating head in the royal garden provokes everybody—including the King and Queen of Hearts as the heads of state. Socrates was sentenced to be executed, and so is the Cheshire Cat.
Described by Plato as “homely, with a snub nose and protruding eyes,” Socrates might easily be said to resemble the Cheshire Cat. However, Carroll most closely links the Cheshire Cat to Socrates through his discussion with Alice about the nature of madness and dreams. This discussion is derived from Plato’s Socratic dialogue Theaetetus.
Socrates: Was he a philosopher, or did he just dream he was one?
In this dialogue, Socrates asks: “How can you determine whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” It seems that the Cheshire Cat is the only creature to understand that Wonderland is a dream world and that madness is related to the dreaming and waking states of consciousness: “We’re all mad here.”
Furthermore, the Cheshire Cat’s argument that dogs are sane and cats insane is resonant of another Socratic dialogue, in which Socrates presents an equally absurd logical fallacy that “proves” Euthydemus’s father is a dog. And in yet another dialogue, Phaedrus, Socrates—like the Cheshire Cat—establishes himself as an authority on insanity in a discussion of the idea of “divine madness” as the source of inspiration for poetry, prophecy, love and philosophy.
In Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat gives Alice her choice of madnesses at this fork in the road: one path supposedly leading to the March Hare and the other to the Mad Hatter. This proves to be no choice at all. Fate has decided otherwise, and despite choosing one, she discovers herself in the company of both.
