Niya Williams

Alice In Wonderland

When you think of Alice In Wonderland you immediately think of the red queen. I mean she is a very important character in the text (if not the craziest) that has the most power. You can tell from the beginning that she is the only one in charge and knows she is the ruler. If Carroll hasn’t made it clear enough from the illustrations of the queen of hearts gigantic head, you know she is taking all of the power she has and controlling wonderland with just one word. She is most defiantly in power, and she knows it.

The queen of hearts is the bloodthirsty ruler of Wonderland. Her solution to every problem is to order a beheading before the day is out. Fortunately, as the Gryphon explains, her orders never seem to get carried out, because her husband, the King of Hearts, is right behind her, quietly canceling her orders. Though she doesn’t know it (Like everyone else around her does) her beheadings are totally ridiculous and have no meaning. I am not sure if she thinks killing off people can just solve and problem, or if she thinks that just because she can do it, she should be able to, it is still the most terrible thing I have ever read in the book. Thank goodness her husband is there to call off every single one of the beheadings.

 Like the belligerent Red Queen in the chess game in Looking-Glass World, the Queen of Hearts is an aggressive woman who tries to dominate everything around her. Critics sometimes try to connect these two overbearing Queens to the historical Queen Victoria, implying that Carroll was satirizing his country's ruler. However, this interpretation doesn't get us very far, since there are few points of resemblance between the Wonderland queens and their real-life cousin. Queen Victoria was strong-willed, to be sure, but she was also extremely proper and dignified. If anything, the queens that Carroll imagines are the opposite of Victoria – an example of what could happen if a Queen were rude and quirky instead of straitlaced. 



What's not usually dismissed is the observation that Carroll's fantasy villains tend to be women, whose power has made them shrill and aggressive. Their husbands are passive: the King of Hearts quietly countermands his Queen's orders, the White King simply watches his wife rush around the game board, and the Red King just sleeps. Meanwhile, the Queens have to do everything themselves – they're forces to be reckoned with, but alarming ones. It's not hard to see that Carroll, who never married and preferred the company of little girls to that of adult women seems to have, well, issues with women.