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.