solving the mad hatter's riddle

The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Solving the Mad Hatter's RiddleAuthor(s): Margaret Boe BirnsSource: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 457-468Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089579 .

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Margaret Boe Birns

Solving the Mad Hatter's

Riddle

What did they live on? said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

T^VEN A CURSORY glance at Lewis Carroll's Alice's

^Adventures in Wonderland will reveal one of its obsessive themes, namely, eating, or more darkly, cannibalism. Most of

the creatures in Wonderland are relentless carnivores, and

they eat creatures who, save for some outer physical differen

ces, are very like themselves, united, in fact, by a common

"humanity." The very first poem found in the text establishes

the motif of eating and being eaten:

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws!

Later on, the eaten object is not simply "eaten alive," eaten, that is, when it is still sentient, but is endowed with affective

and intellectual attributes?a "soul" that resembles that of

the creature eating it. For instance, in Through The Looking Glass, the Walrus and the Carpenter, after talking of many

things with their walking companions, the Oysters, decide

the time has come to dine:

'Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed.'

'But not on us!' the Oysters cried,

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The Massachusetts Review

Turning a little blue. 'After such kindness, that would be

A dismal thing to do!'

Earlier, after the "Lobster Quadrille" in which various sea

creatures are flung, or rather appear to fling themselves, into

the maws of waiting sharks, and directly before the Mock

Turtle sings his sentimentally existential song "Turtle

Soup," Alice herself recites the following poem:

I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye, How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie: The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,

While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat. When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon, Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon: While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl, And concluded the banquet by?"

This is a poem Carroll allows the reader the fun of com

pleting, as well as the frisson that comes with the realization

that in completing the poem we are also allowing the

Panther to conclude his banquet by eating the Owl. This

darker tone comprises the emotional core, the "heart" of

A lice, where our most unadmitted needs can be gratified. As

Elizabeth Sewell in her useful study The Field of Nonsense has shown us, Carroll's nonsense has at its core something unbalanced and even humorless. Not only does his "ludic

discourse" subvert the reader's logocentric expectations, it

threatens him viscerally with imagery that invites us to expe rience heretofore inhibited oral fantasies. As we explore the

text of A lice and build to a solution of the Hatter's riddle, we

will see that Wonderland invites the reader to participate in

the same compelling regressions found not only in its crea

tures, but in Alice herself. For Alice is not all good form and

superior manners, although that side of her that acts as a

defense against the often intensely oral aggressions of Won

derland is generally celebrated as a hallmark of the ideal British character. Although she shows the best "good form"

in the novel, Alice can also let down her hair by not only

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Solving the Mad Hatter's Riddle

happily reciting the cannibalistic poem about the owl and

the panther, but by suggesting a game to her nanny:

Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena and you're a bone!

In identifying with Alice, the reader may be astonished to find himself slipping enjoy ably into a similar level of primi tive oral fantasies. While Nurse does not take kindly to Alice's

suggestion that she become the object of her eating wishes, there are in Wonderland creatures whose identity is com

pletely defined by their function as food. There are creatures

that are granted only that much autonomy necessary to

express a desire to be eaten ("Eat Me!") or drunk ("Drink

Me!"). There is in Wonderland a pudding that insists upon a formal introduction before it will allow itself to be con

sumed, and an even more autonomous clam, which though

caught and cooked, will not permit itself to be eaten at all:

For it holds it like glue? Holds lid to the dish, while it lies in the middle.

Food in these examples is given an animating spirit, sug

gesting the survival of a soul in what one must eat. Books, food and people are interchangeable. For instance, in the last

chapter of Through The Looking Glass Alice

. . . heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was

the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. "Here I am!" cried a voice

from the soup-tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the

Queen's broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over

the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup.

Just as food can become human, human beings can

become food. But in spite of these fantasies, which suggest an awareness that the eaten object is, like oneself, "human," all the creatures of Wonderland suffer little diminution of appe tite, and some eat quite heartily:

"I like the walrus best," said Alice: "because he was a little sorry

459




for the poor oysters." "He ate more than the carpenter, though," said Tweedledee.

"You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise."

"That was mean!" Alice said indignantly. "Then I like the

Carpenter best?if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus."

"But he ate as many as he could get." said Tweedledee.

These fantasies of voracious and unscrupulous appetite

may, in part, reflect the influence of Charles Darwin's theor

ies. Darwin's ideas about the laws of survival can supply a

plausible intellectual subtext for the ruthless way in which

the creatures of Wonderland pounce on each other, and may account as well for their general contentiousness. The issues

Carroll is raising through his fantasies have an emotional

and not simply theoretical impact, however, particularly when the biological imperatives of Carroll's creatures are

complicated by the great pleasure they take in eating their

fellow creatures. Their pleasure becomes part of the horror of

their existential situation, creating that self-contradiction

that comes with the mixing of opposites, a phenomenon knit

into the texture of Alice's adventures. Paradox is the essence

of Wonderland. For instance, the creatures of Wonderland

are both human and animal. They are also both adult and

childlike, at times seeming to satirize the rigid and authori

tarian personality of the Victorian parent, at other times

capering like incorrigible children. The story itself pulls in

opposite directions?Alice goes down the rabbit hole into the

wonder world of childhood, not wishing to grow up into a

world where she will have to endure books "without pictures or conversations," and yet she is destined to outgrow Won

derland, master its irrationality and assume the authority of a

sensible adult, as she does when she announces that the Red

Queen and her retinue are "nothing but a pack of cards."

Alice herself is made up of opposites, since she functions in

Wonderland both as an adult and as a child, at times the prim

schoolmistress, at other times the chastened schoolgirl.

Similarly, ravens and writing desks, which seem to have

nothing in common and which will be revealed to be in fact

460




opposites, are united in the Mad Hatter's Riddle, and by a

hidden principle Alice is asked to discern. Let us briefly return to Carroll's contentious tea party, where Alice is about

to undergo one of her many transformations from prim schoolmistress to chastened schoolgirl:

"You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said

with some severity. "It's very rude."

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

"Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad

they've begun asking riddles?I believe I can guess that," she added aloud.

Carroll himself claimed the riddle had no answer at all, but this has not prevented numerous attempts to solve it. Francis

Huxley's The Raven and The Writing Desk includes some of the cleverer solutions, having to do with notes, bills, tales and

Edgar Allan Poe. But none of these answers, while techni

cally correct, are emotionally satisfying. What unites the

raven and the writing desk must fit into the overall emotional

and intellectual pattern Carroll has carefully established

through his other rhymes and riddles; otherwise, clever as the

solution may be, it will not give us that sense of aesthetic

rightness, or "fit" necessary to make it fall so naturally into

the narrative as to seem as if it had always been there. But

before supplying my answer to the Hatter's riddle, let us

remind ourselves that this riddle is posed at a tea party, an

event which is normally comprised not only of tea, but of

other delectable foodstuffs. It is at the tea party that Alice

poses a question whose subject haunts many of the rhymes found in the narrative. When the Dormouse begins his story of the three little girls who lived at the bottom of a well, Alice

interrupts, asking "What did they live on?" Carroll goes on to note that Alice always took a great interest in questions of

eating and drinking, and when she is told by the Dormouse that the little girls lived only on treacle and were as a result

very ill indeed, we are reminded by inference of the kinds of foods we must in fact eat in order to live well. Beneath the

461




solution to the riddle is not simply the material in the tea

party chapter, however, but as well many of the other rhymes and riddles that refer to the eating habits of the creatures of

Wonderland. With all this in mind, we are ready for a solu

tion to the riddle. But although Alice, with characteristic

self-assurance, believes she can solve the riddle, the answer is

better left to one of the denizens of Wonderland, and even

more appropriately to one of the members of the tea party. Either the bossy Hatter or the put-upon Dormouse will do,

depending upon whether the riddle's answer is to be told

from the point of view of an aggressor or a victim. My own

choice is the Hatter, who, soon after posing the riddle, hints

at my answer when he says, "Why, you might as well say that

T see what I eat' is the same thing as T eat what I see!'" Let us

imagine that it is the Hatter, then, who reminds Alice of

certain hidden but home truths in the following solution to the riddle: "A raven eats worms; a writing desk is worm

eaten."

It is this solution that touches on the large themes that

inform the seemingly trivial and nonsensical surface of the

Alice books. The image of the raven eating the worm reca

pitulates the theme of voracious or "ravenous" appetite that

is a major psychological and existential theme in A lice. The

raven's "sadistic oral incorporation" of the worm also

reminds us of the story's Darwinian theme of life feeding on

life, the life-force of the raven necessarily contingent on the

life-force of the worm. The raven is another example of the

predatory, amoral, natural world of Wonderland, seemingly removed from the culture and civilization objectified in the

writing desk. We can now perceive that the raven and the

writing desk are not simply absurdly juxtaposed, but are

logical opposites, representing, respectively, the age-old con

flict between nature and culture, instinct and reason. But the

writing desk, like the raven, also has a relationship with the

worm; here, the worm turns, and instead of being food for

others, feeds on the writing desk. As the raven's ingestion of

the worm represents the fact of life, the law of survival, so the

image of the woodworm infesting the writing desk suggests

462




the fact of mortality. Something as seemingly solid and as

impervious to time as a writing table is being devoured

slowly, is being eaten away. To some degree a worm-eaten

casket or corpse is suggested: the worm-eaten desk points to

what E. M. Forster in Passage to India has called the "undy

ing worm,'' an image of the inevitability and reality of death, even as the worm's life-force is affirmed in its ability not only to be eaten, but to eat others. This particular solution to The

Mad Hatter's Riddle, then, mixes life and death in such a way as to render them interdependent rather than opposing; even

more, the. solution supplies that aforementioned frisson that

gives the Alice narrative its special edge, that dark quality that can terrify as many children as it enchants, and that has

made Alice one of the patron saints of the modernist move

ment. The riddle thus answered becomes a reverberation of

that endless, circular dance of life and death, of death-in-life

and life-in-death, that is one of the deep subjects of the A lice

books. In the loss of a Divine Plan or Purpose, in the wake of

Darwinism, life is reframed as a giant "lobster quadrille," in

which one's own life and death are part of nature's larger life-and-death cycle, in which one is both walrus and oyster,

both raven and worm, both worm and writing desk.

Like Forster's undying worm, which was both phallic and

thanatotic, Carroll's worm both gives life and takes life away. But although in this solution to the riddle the worm serves

the raven's life-principle, the second half of the solution seals

the fate of both raven and writing desk (and its Maker, Man). The solution of the riddle suggests that nature and its life

forces bring not only individual death, but transcend the laws

and values of civilization, imaged here as the writing desk. It

is that lack of purpose beyond a Nature red in tooth (or beak) and claw?a lack of "higher" purpose?that is responsible for the anarchic circularity of not only the Mad Tea Party but

of such episodes as the Caucus Race. We can see now that the

hidden principle that unites both raven and writing desk is the law of nature. Both the writing desk and the raven are

subject to the rule of appetite, of an eat-or-be-eaten ethos.

The eaten and eating worm I have introduced into the Mad

463




Hatter's riddle fits well into a narrative that is literally riddled with anxiety. The image of the raven eating the worm reiter

ates the anxiety about eating that appears consistently in the

Alice books, an anxiety that includes death as a form of

eating, eating as a form of death. This anxiety may be inter

preted as the product of Wonderland's general regression to

what Erich Neumann, in his The Origins and History of Consciousness, would call a primitive "maternal uroboros."

"On this level," Neumann points out, "which is pregenital because sex is not yet operative and the polar tension of the

sexes is still in abeyance, there is only a stronger that eats and

a weaker that is eaten." In this early phase of human con

sciousness, hunger is experienced as the prime mover of

mankind, and the laws of the alimentary canal reign

supreme. Since all life comes under the archetype of being swallowed and eaten, death in this stage of consciousness is

also experienced as a devourer. Such fantasies, concerning a

stronger who eats and a weaker that is eaten, permeates A lice.

While the creatures of Wonderland swim amorally in what

Neumann called a "swamp" stage of consciousness, where

every creature devours every other, Alice herself does not. At

times, indeed, Alice comes close to a feeling of revulsion, as in

Through The Looking Glass's final banquet:

"Meanwhile, we'll drink your health?Queen Alice's health!" she screamed at the top of her voice, and all the guests began

drinking it directly, and very queerly they managed it: some of them

put their glasses upon their heads like extinguishers, and drank all that trickled down their faces?others upset the decanters, and

drank the wine as it ran off the edges of the table?and three of them

(who looked like kangaroos) scrambled into the dish of roast mut

ton, and began eagerly lapping up the gravy, "just like pigs in a

trough!" thought Alice.

The overall tone of this passage communicates a sense of

pleasure-in-horror or horror-in-pleasure, in the paradoxical

way discussed earlier, and as such helps raise the level of

anxiety. Alice herself, however, is less ambivalent and more

moralistic when observing the ravenous guests, who seem to

be reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature. Alice's attitude

464




can, perhaps, be traced back to Carroll's own abstemious, or

even anorexic behavior. Carroll, like many anorexics, seemed

to wish to be above the state of worm or raven, preferring instead the more ethereal identity of metaphorical "writing

desk." Writing desks, of course, don't eat, although they are

not completely "above" nature, since like God's creatures

they can, significantly, be worm-eaten. Alice's own prim nature has often been compared to Carroll's, and there are

those who feel that Lewis Carroll and his Alice represent one of the strongest examples of a psychological alliance between

author and character to be found in literature.

At this point it is possible to bring forward another solu

tion to the Hatter's riddle, one that points not so much

toward the text, calling attention to certain important themes

in the narrative, but toward a solution that would refer to

Carroll himself. Before supplying this second solution, let us

remind ourselves that Alice has just admonished the Hatter about his rude remarks. The Hatter, by way of rejoinder, comes back with the riddle. The riddle, as a response to

Alice's charge of rudeness, suggests the following solution:

"A writing desk and a raven both make rude remarks."

A raven makes rude noises through his caws and cackles; a

writing desk makes rude remarks through the medium of the

author. In this solution to the riddle, the writing desk, of

course, stands metonymically for the writer. The rude

remarks of the Hatter and the March Hare are, therefore, made by the writer, who is in this aspect like a raven in his

rudeness. The creatures, the riddle hints, are the products of

Carroll's own writing desk, which is really making the rude

remarks for which Alice has chastised the Mad Hatter. In this

way, the Hatter is shifting the blame to his maker, the writer, or writing desk. Writers will make rude remarks, the Hatter

reminds Alice. The raven is not only like a writing desk, but, more darkly, the writing desk is like a rude raven.

In twinning the writing desk and the raven, Carroll is up to

his old trick of indicating through the joining of seeming opposites a hidden identity. Mild and intellectual, the writ

ing desk, or writer, is twinned with a bird of evil omen, a bird

465




with habits that are not very nice, are in fact rude and preda

tory. Carroll himself, giving toys to little girls on the beach,

taking pictures of them, entertaining them with delightful tales, seemed an avuncular writing desk. The twinning of the

raven with the writer, however, points to less altruistic and

more emotionally ravenous aspects to Carroll's behavior, and

his "tales" for us are tailed with appetites more carnal in

origin. In this riddle Carroll's splitting of himself into raven and writing desk, and then twinning the two, indicates a

covert confession on Carroll's part that he may have pos sessed aspects of the Victorian dissociated personality. It is

this personality type that gave rise to a multitude of nine

teenth century novels featuring hypocrites and split personali

ties, such as that of John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood or of Dr. Jeky 11 in Dr. Jeky ll and Mr. Hyde. One might even say that modern psychoanalysis was created to deal with

dissociations such as those symbolized here by the riddle of the raven and the writing desk.

The answer that solves our riddle with rude remarks is not

so very far from the more resonant themes evoked through the introduction of a worm into the riddle. Both solutions

remind Alice of the existence of a ruder, lower self, a self that

Carroll is suggesting may have more powers over the idealis

tic higher self of Victorians than they cared to admit.

Throughout her stay in Wonderland, Alice is reminded by other creatures that she is not "above" her lower self. She is

often informed that she, too, is a creature, or not better than a

creature?and therefore not only prone to appetite, but also

vulnerable to the appetites of others.

To be a victim of others' voracity is perhaps the ultimate

insult in a Wonderland where insult and incivility are the rule. The breakdown in civility in Wonderland, a place

where rude, powerful figures can ride roughshod over the

autonomy of others, is mirrored, or even troped, in the eating behavior of the creatures, whose appetites constantly victim

ize other creatures. Often, Carroll will present the matter

from the victim's point of view, as in the self-pitying lament

of the Mock Turtle, or in the complaint of the feistier pud

466




ding, out of which Alice has just cut a slice:

"What impertinence!" said the Pudding. "I wonder how you'd like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!"

The Pudding not only reminds Alice that she, too, is a

creature, subject to all the laws of creaturedom, but also is

quick to characterize Alice's behavior as rude. Since Alice

must eat, and must slice the pudding in order to eat it, Carroll

seems to be suggesting that life itself is extremely rude.

At this point, in fact, let us go back to Alice's admonitory words to The Mad Hatter at his Tea Party:

"You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said

with some severity, "It's very rude."

To which the Hatter replies, his eyes opening very wide in a

familiar signal that, especially in genteel English circles, indicates that somehow one has gone too far: "Why is a raven

like a writing desk?" If he had gone on to supply Alice with either of our solutions, she would have seen that he was,

indirectly, responding to her charge of rudeness. While his

riddle nonsensically deflects Alice's task-taking, our first

solution, which unites the raven and the writing desk

through the introduction of a worm, comes right back to the

themes Carroll has been exploring throughout the narrative.

A raven eats worms, a writing desk is worm-eaten. When life

itself, with its worms and ravens, is so very rude, what can the

manners of a Hatter matter? Far from being particular to the

Hatter's tea party, incivility is actually what makes the world

go round. While the Hatter is breaking Alice's rules of eti

quette, he is observing the laws of nature. Rudeness is so

much a law of life in Wonderland, that, as our second solu

tion to the Hatter's riddle suggests, writers of riddles can be

rude as ravens, if they choose. The Hatter is telling us that he, the riddler, or riddle-writer (at his writing desk) is not other than a rude raven, but is, in fact, none other than a rude

raven. His widened eyes tell us, furthermore, that Alice her

self has been a bit of a raven herself in her admonishing of her

host, breaking the laws of civility she is asking him to observe.

467




Similarly, the Pudding's reaction to Alice's quite natural,

creaturely attempt to eat it reminds Alice that she has in fact

"rudely" failed to respect the Pudding's right to autonomy, to

selfhood, to existence itself. In being of necessity bound to the

laws of nature, she has broken the rules of civility, which puts her in rather a double-bind. The Pudding's separate identity must clearly be rudely ignored and discounted by Alice if she

is to eat well. Many of the creatures in Wonderland engage in

a struggle, often vainly, for their autonomy. Characters such

as the Pepper Duchess and the Red Queen crush indepen dence by psychologically devouring those around them,

especially those they perceive as oppositional "others." Other

creatures are eaten alive in a more literal manner?although these episodes often suggest metaphors of sadistic domina

tion, in which the autonomy and integrity of the eaten object is denied or disallowed.

Food in Wonderland is like oneself in its creatureliness, but it is clearly something other than oneself as well. A

differentiating process takes place when creatures eat crea

tures. It is, in fact, Alice's even more advanced differentiation

of herself from the world of the creatures around her which

will enable her to grow up and out of this underground

society altogether, and, not incidentally, keep her from being

(quite rudely) beheaded by the punitive Red Queen. Alice

literally and figuratively outgrows the creatures of Wonder

land; her differentiation from them and sense of power over

them saves her from being their victim. Alice's rational facul

ties, combined with her self-control, transcend the more

primary, impulsive underground world with its ruthless

principle of eat-or-be-eaten, providing her adventures with a

happy ending. Alice returns to terra firma, regaining con

sciousness just in time to run along to tea in her normal, well-run household. It is a measure of Carroll's genius, how

ever, that he leaves us with the strong conviction that the

more authentic reality does not reside in Alice's placid life

above ground, but in the far more formidable and terrifying dreamworld of ravenous worms, worm-eaten writing desks,

dark birds of prey.

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solving the mad hatter's riddle

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