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Chapter 2: "The Pool of Tears"
In this chapter, Alice has fallen down the rabbit hole and into a corridor that leads to a room adorned solely with a coffee table, a few cakes, a mysterious potion, and a mouse sized door. It is here that she begins to question her grasp on reality; she grows frustrated while improperly reciting her school rhymes; she questions her present self in comparison to the person she was earlier that morning; confused and shocked, Alice even starts to wonder if she is one of her friends, since she is obviously not herself. After trying both the shapeshifting foods, she begins to cry uncontrollably and fills the room with gargantuan tears. She stops to better solve the issue of the door and readjusts her size to more easily fit through. Once she is just under two feet tall, Alice slips off of the table and swims through the brackish water towards a mouse, who, despite her amiable introduction, takes offense at the girl's love for cats. The chapter concludes with Alice mid swim towards shore with numerous other animals, who she talks at length with in the next chapter.
This chapter's importance is due to the initial exposure both the reader and Alice have to the strange, ironic place she has entered. Along with the ability to physically alter her body, Alice's psychological state fluctuates the moment she enters the rabbit hole. Concrete aspects of her past, such as her identity and life experiences, seem like fragmented illusions. Her lessons become incomprehensible groupings of words without intent. The majority of her fundamental characteristics and thoughts change without control, and it is this transformation that peaks our curiosity. Wonderland has a melancholic ambiance that remains unexplained throughout the entirety of the novel, and it is very interesting that Carroll decided on this episode to introduce this milieu.
To introduce our discussion of chapters from the novel, I want to take an in depth look at the importance of Alice's pool of tears and the mouse she commiserates with. Upon first inspection the theme seems obvious, what with the numerous other literary examples of man-to-vermin symbolism we can recite (Steinbeck, Kafka, etc.). While there do exist these texts, however, Carroll's use of metaphor is effective due to his choice in concurrent action in the chapter. I personally believe that Alice's ability to shape shift is indicative of the numerous ways individuals undergo psychological maturation throughout their lives, and there is good cause for this belief.
Though the novel was written before the advent of Freud and the innovation of Psychological sciences, "Alice in Wonderland" has many themeatic elements that pertain to childhood development and philosophical discussion of behavior.
People often feel anxious and small throughout their early years, because of the pertinent role of their newly formed social identity. When this anxiety becomes normalized and we are able to consciously adapt to varying situations, our first reaction is to fortify our confidence and ability to effect our environment. For lack of a better identifying noun, the ego grows and organizes its core values to better resemble what it believes to be a formidable, legitimate worldview. In Alice's case, an immediate shift to small stature is indicative of our anxieties, because she is shrinking without control and becomes more helpless as a consequence. This helplessness prompts her to eat the cake that causes an inverse transformation. It seems only proper that, once she realizes that her choice has exacerbated the situation, Alice breaks down in tears. Her impulsive and half-baked decision to eat the cake has hindered her ability to change to the size of the door, which was the cause of her size experimentation to begin with. When she finally reaches the proper size, Alice has a choice to make: whether to drown in her sorrows or push on towards the shore. It is only proper, then, that she comes into contact with a mouse, a paranoid character whose small stature and tragic personage have resonated throughout the literary world.
At this point, before I go on further with this analysis, I would like to open the topic up to discussion. What symbolic role does the mouse have? Do you feel that it plays into the aforementioned theme? What are your thoughts on the second chapter?
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As always, happy reading!
