Lee - Eating Things - Alice and ANT

Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other Life Forms in Lewis Carrolls Alice BooksAuthor(s): Michael Parrish LeeSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 68, No. 4 (March 2014), pp. 484-512Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2014.68.4.484 .Accessed: 08/07/2015 01:06

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Eating Things: Food,Animals, and Other LifeForms in Lewis CarrollsAlice BooksM I C H A E L P A R R I S H L E E

What can we learn from the Duck, thischaracter in Lewis Carrolls Alices

Adventures in Wonderland (1865) who conflates things with ani-mals and food? The Duck distinguishes itself as an emphatic Ithrough its simultaneous possession of knowledge and status asan eater: I know what it means well enough, when I finda thing, said the Duck: its generally a frog, or a worm.1 Asan edible animal, however, the Duck resides in the very foodchain of its and things upon which its subjectivity seems torest. While, to a certain extent, this ensnarement of self andthing fits within the ontology of thing theory where thingsseem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like,2

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 68, No. 4, pp. 484512, ISSN: 08919356, online ISSN:10678352, 2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content throughthe University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. DOI: ncl.2014.68.4.484.

1 Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, in his Alices Adventures in Won-derland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: The Centenary Edition,ed. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 25 (emphasis in original). All fur-ther page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

2 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 13.

484


these Wonderland animal-things hint at an anthropomorphismlurking in thing theory. By the Ducks definition, things are notobjects that appear uncannily human, but edible life-forms thatpresumably have appetites of their own. As Lewis Carrolls Aliceputs it, how confusing it is all the things being alive (AlicesAdventures in Wonderland, p. 75). Of course, thing theory hasproduced some fascinating discussions of the liveliness ofthings, but when we extend this field of discussion to eatingthings, we must take the life of things more literally and thinkseriously about their corporeality and survival. Moreover, wefind that the realm of things now enlarges to include nonhumananimals, those things that eating so often positions at the contactpoint between agent and object, living and dead. Attempting toexpand the investigation of things beyond a human/thingdichotomy, this essay draws on the actor-network-theory (ANT)of Bruno Latour to explore the entanglement of humans, objects,animals, and appetites that generates so much of the wonder inLewis Carrolls Alice books. I argue that these texts attempt toreconcile the Victorian destabilization of discrete human andanimal categories facilitated by evolutionary theory with anincreasingly commodified culture where everything and every-one seem potentially consumable. Carroll presents a world thatis both fully social and thoroughly objectified, where humans,animals, and objects trade, share, and fight for positions in a net-work of edible things.

I therefore hope, through reading the Alice books, to com-plicate thing theory by using eating as an invitationalthoughpotentially a violent oneto the world of nonhuman animals.To do this is also to put a bit of pressure on the two main strandsof thinking about things that have taken hold of current literarystudies. The first is the Heideggerian model of thing theory,articulated most famously by Bill Brown. This strand of thoughtconcerns itself with, in the words of Jonathan Lamb, the differ-ence between objects that serve human purposes and things thatdont.3 Such theory is, for Brown, invested in sacrific[ing] theclarity of thinking about things as objects of consumption, onthe one hand, in order to see how, on the other, our relation to

3 Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,2011), p. xi.

lewis carrolls alice books 485


things cannot be explained by the cultural logic of capitalism(A Sense of Things, pp. 56). In order to differentiate the seem-ingly reductive object from the more uncanny, or even sub-lime, thing, thing theorists attempt to remove the thing fromany kind of circulation or exchange that seems capitalist orhuman. According to Brown:

As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to seewhat they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture. . . .We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stopworking for us . . . , when their flow within the circuits of produc-tion and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has beenarrested, however momentarily.4

But although, for thing theory, capitalist logic is too narrow tocontain the liveliness of things, Catherine Gallagher has morerecently argued that nineteenth-century conceptions of capital-ism were foundationally concerned with organic Life itselfas the ultimate desideratum and the energy or force that circu-lates through organic and inorganic nature.5 An investigationof Victorian things in particular, then, might lose more than itgains by granting the life of things a status of exception from thenineteenth-century economic concerns with issues of life anddeath stemming from the thought of Thomas Robert Mal-thus (Gallagher, The Body Economic, pp.4,3)developed initiallyin An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)6and concentrat-ing not only on modes of production and exchange but also onthe interconnections among populations, the food supply, andtheir impact on life forms generally (Gallagher, The Body Eco-nomic, p. 3).

Moreover, for all the efforts of thing theory to outrun thehuman, it operates, as Steven Connor suggests, through a covertanthropomorphism.7 It is only by escaping from the realm ofhuman circulation that these things become themselvesas if

4 Bill Brown, Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), 4 (emphasis in original).5 Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political

Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), p. 3.6 See Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Geoffrey

Gilbert (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).7 Steven Connor, Thinking things, Textual Practice, 24 (2010), 2.

486 nineteenth-century literature


human circulation were the only kind. I would suggest that thefocus of such theory on the singularity and alterity of thingscauses it to miss out on the networks that things form, networksthat mid-Victorians like Lewis Carroll, haunted by Charles Dar-wins tangled bank of interspecies relations,8 found it difficultto ignore. It is important to remember that the Victorian rise ofcommodity capitalism was a rise that occurred in the age ofevolutionary theory, when concerns about human/object rela-tions would have been enmeshed with concerns about the en-tanglements between humans and other life forms.9 Accordingto Andrew H. Miller, with the nineteenth-century triumph ofcapitalism, there was a mid-Victorian anxiety that the social andmoral world was being reduced to a warehouse of goods andcommodities, a display window in which people, their actions,and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetitesof others (Novels Behind Glass, p. 6). And as Nancy Armstrongnotes, objects in Alices Adventures in Wonderland are neitherinert nor speechless (The Occidental Alice, p. 559). But forCarroll, in the midst of the Darwin debates, the experience of thisworld of economic appetites could not be severed from thebodily appetites of the biological Struggle for Life betweencreatures remote in the scale of nature, [but] bound togetherby a web of complex relations, all feeding on each other (Dar-win, Origin of Species, pp. 648, 101, 102).10 For Carroll, capitalist

8 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preser-vation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Modern Library, 1998), p. 648.

9 For discussions of the Victorian rise of commodity capitalism, see for exampleW. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 18501914 (Hamden, Connecticut:Archon Books, 1981); Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:Advertising and Spectacle, 18511914 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990); Lori AnneLoeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,1994); Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); and Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability ofHuman Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,2000). Nancy Armstrong has discussed the influence of consumer culture on AlicesAdventures in Wonderland, with particular reference to eating, in The OccidentalAlice, in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, Fourth Edition, ed.Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 53764.

10 For discussions of Darwins influence on Carroll, see Morton N. Cohen, LewisCarroll: A Biography (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 35052; WilliamEmpson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), pp. 25455;Rose Lovell-Smith, The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carrolls Reader,



circulation was not simply a matter of ownership and property; itwas also about surprising interspecies affiliations and relations, inwhich all parties can slip between the roles of subject, object,predator, and prey. In the Alice books, to be a thing is not totranscend circulation, interconnection, or the condition of beingpotentially utilizable or consumable by others; rather, it is to bepart of such networks when these networks reach beyond thedomain of the human.

Of course, Brown is not a Victorianist, and in fact the sec-ond, more object- and circulation-friendly strand of thinkingabout things in literary studies has strong Victorianist represen-tation by scholars such as John Plotz and Elaine Freedgood.11

These thinkers represent a looser thing trajectory influencedless by Martin Heidegger than by Arjun Appadurais editedvolume The Social Life of Things (1986).12 They are more com-fortable with things as property, as objects of consumption, andas telling stories about human history and culture. These think-ers, however, risk looking through things to what Freedgoodcalls the ideas in things (The Ideas in Things, p. 76), and theirthings are very much objects in the way that Lamb and Browndescribe objects, remaining quite human, or at least circum-scribed by human identifications, values, and use values. I wantto suggest that, without quite letting us have our things and eatthem too, Lewis Carrolls Alice books can productively mediatethese two strands of thought. They give us the surprise, thestrangeness, the irreducible excess, and the tangled relation-ship between subjects and objects of thing theorys uncannythings, but without throwing circulation or consumption out

-Criticism, 45 (2003), 383415; Rose Lovell-Smith, Eggs and Serpents: Natural HistoryReference in Lewis Carrolls Scene of Alice and the Pigeon, Childrens Literature, 35(2007), 2753; Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Min-neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 13739; Mervyn Nicholson, Food andPower: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others, Mosaic, 20, no. 3 (1987), 3755; andMargaret Boe Birns, Solving the Mad Hatters Riddle, Massachusetts Review, 25(1984), 45768.

11 See John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Prince-ton Univ. Press, 2008); and Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning inthe Victorian Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).

12 See The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appa-durai (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).



the window or falling back on humanist objects. While thingtheory remains rooted in Heideggers vision of things as inde-pendent and self-supporting,13 the Alice books give us thingsin networks, but networks that supersede, and have utilitybeyond, the human. Eating, I propose, is our way into thesenetworks.

What kind of a thing is food? According toE. M. Forster, food in fiction is mainly social. It draws charac-ters together, but they seldom require it physiologically, seldomenjoy it.14 Forsters assertion, I have suggested elsewhere,points to the way in which nineteenth-century British novelsoften obscure the material side of eating linked to bodilyappetite and sensory pleasure in favor of a version of eatingthat is more purely, or narrowly, social, usually at the serviceof the marriage plot.15 Lewis Carroll, however, in focusing onchildhoodwhich earlier nineteenth-century novels tended tomarginalize as an uninteresting space of alimentary appetite16and entering fully into the subject/object merging occasionedby nascent commodity culture and the human/animal slippagehinted at by evolutionary theory, pries open the conventionalnovelistic social to discover a world animated by the foods andeating processes that might otherwise function as background,symbols, or structuring devices. Alice occupies a world thatmakes her confident that something interesting is sure to hap-pen . . . whenever I eat or drink anything (Alices Adventures inWonderland, p. 32; emphasis in original) and asks us to considerthe narrative implications of it being always tea-time (p. 64)always mealtime for someone or something. Following Aliceslead, critics of Carrolls texts have always t[aken] a great interest

13 See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (NewYork: Perennial, 1971, 2001), p. 164.

14 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, and Related Writings, Volume 12 of The AbingerEdition of the Works of E. M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold,1927, 1974), p. 37.

15 Michael Parrish Lee, The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the FoodPlot, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 45 (2012), 368.

16 See Lee, The Nothing in the Novel, pp. 379380.



in questions of eating and drinking (p. 65). And while I amcloser to critics such as Nina Auerbach, James R. Kincaid, Mar-garet Boe Birns, and Rose Lovell-Smith who read Wonderlandeating as expressing a vision of predation than to those such asArmstrong, Carina Garland, and Carol Mavor who read it as re-flecting anxieties about control,17 I want to suggest that the Alicebooks deploy eating more radically to remap the novelistic social,merging literary character, and indeed the human, with thethings that, for Brown, comprise the stage on which humanaction, including the action of thought, unfolds (A Sense ofThings, p. 3). Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through theLooking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) open up a spacein which food and eating refuse to behave themselves as stage,backdrop, symbols, or empty vessels for any kind of preexistingsocial. Instead, Carroll offers us the opportunity to see the socialitself as something that is assembled, at least in part, so that we,and others, might eatbut also, if paradoxically, as somethingthat is assembled by food.

So, first and foremost, food in Alice is socialbut not in theway that Forster means. Food is not simply an object utilizedby social subjects. Anticipating Jane Bennetts theorization offood as a form of agency,18 Wonderland foods are cocreatorsof human character, as hinted by Alices contemplation:Maybe its always pepper that makes people hot-tempered . . .and vinegar that makes them sourand camomile that makesthem bitterandand barley-sugar and such things that makechildren sweet-tempered (Alices Adventures in Wonderland,p. 78). Moreover, Carroll gives us a world in which subjects andobjects are not essentially different and where everything andeveryone is potentially on the menu. For Carroll, food is a social

17 See Nina Auerbach, Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child, Victorian Studies,17 (1973), 3147; James R. Kincaid, Alices Invasion of Wonderland, PMLA, 88(1973), 9299; Birns, Solving the Mad Hatters Riddle; Lovell-Smith, The Animalsof Wonderland; Lovell-Smith, Eggs and Serpents; Armstrong, The OccidentalAlice; Carina Garland, Curious Appetites: Food, Desire, Gender, and Subjectivity inLewis Carrolls Alice Texts, The Lion and the Unicorn, 32 (2008), 2239; and Carol Mavor,For-Getting to Eat: Alices Mouthing Metonymy, in The Nineteenth-Century Child andConsumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 95118.

18 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 2010), p. 41.



thinga thing that associates and socializes. For instance, nearthe beginning of Wonderland, Alice drinks from a bottle labeledDRINK ME (p. 13) and eats a cake on which the words EATME [are] beautifully marked in currants (p. 14). These food-things function both partly as objects and partly as subjects. Theycan be picked up and consumed as objects, but they also makethe requests that lead to their ingestion, making them the partialagents of their own consumption. I say partial agents becauseAlice, who eats and drinks them (pp. 15, 1314), must also bea partial agent of their consumption. But the very acts of inges-tion that might seemingly secure Alices status as a consumingsubject over and against consumable objects render Alice object-like, making her a tool through which the food-things realizetheir consumption. Such ingestion also causes Alice to experi-ence herself as an object, first shutting up like a telescope! (p.14), and then opening out like the largest telescope that everwas! (p. 16). The meeting of Alice and the edibles thus makeseach party inhabit and overflow the position of subject andobject at once, becoming uncanny things, but hardly indepen-dent or self-sufficient ones. They become things through asso-ciation and collaboration, things operating together as bothpartial agents and partial objects to form a network of consump-tion. In Alice, one never eats alone.

Eating, for Carroll, is a particularly vivid intersection ofmultiple agencies, bearing resemblance to the theory of actionput forth by Bruno Latour. Action, Latour suggests, is nottransparent and is not done under the full control of con-sciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, anda conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies, or ac-tors, forming an actor-network.19 In the instance above,Alice forms a network with the following actors:

1. The DRINK ME drink constituted by the bottle and the liquidwithin that relies on Alice to drink it and causes her to shrink. (WhenAlice tastes the liquid, we encounter a resulting sub-network ofmixed flavour consisting of still more actors: cherry-tart, custard,

19 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (NewYork: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), p. 44.



pine-apple, roast turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast [Alices Adven-tures in Wonderland, pp. 13, 14].)

2. The EAT ME cake that relies on both the drink to shrink Aliceto a size where she can find the cake under the table and Alice toeat the cake, causing Alice to grow.

But as Alice grows, this network expands to include anotherpair of actors:

3. Alices feet. Growing taller upon eating the cake, Alice experi-ences her feet as separate actors, bidding them Goodbye; won-dering who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now,dears?; worrying that if she is not kind to them they wontwalk the way I want to go (p. 16); and contemplating sendingthem presents (pp. 1617).

Rather than giving evidence of spiteful attempts of the maleauthor to suppress and control Alices agency (Garland, Curi-ous Appetites, p. 22) or being part of an effort to representthe body as something already out of control, something alwaysin need of regulation (Armstrong, The Occidental Alice,p. 551), the consumption of the DRINK ME-EAT ME itemsdramatizes Alice as an actor reassembling, dividing, and realign-ing through her incorporation of other actors that are them-selves presumably reconfigured through Alices ingestion anddigestion of them. Latours actors have more ontological flexi-bility than either conventional objects or the things of thingtheory. They can include humans, animals, objects, concepts,and, in the case of Alice, food and body parts. But with suchversatile actors at hand, why hold onto things at all? First,I would suggest, because Carroll himself makes frequent andimaginative use of the term thing. Second, because, while theAlice books anticipate Latours sense of the multiplicity anddislocated nature of agency (Reassembling the Social, p. 46;emphasis in original), Carrolls things are actors caught up ina historically specific imagining of objects, people, and animalstrading positionsactors embodied within a social network ofDarwinian commodities mobilized by eating.

Upending the conventional nineteenth-century novelisticmodel that defines deep human character and narrative



interest against the interest in food,20 this sequence shows Car-roll reworking literary form. Alices consumption of other actorssimultaneously moves the story along and quite literally trans-forms her. Undoing distinctions between eating and reading,21

the sequence also stands as a particularly self-reflexive instanceof the texts participation in the mid- to late-nineteenth-centuryconceptualizations of reading as a bodily experience discussedby recent criticism concerned with the relationship betweenaesthetics and corporeality.22 But the tendency for such criti-cism to underplay the alimentary dimensions of embodiment23

points to the enduring relegation of gustatory taste to the lowerrungs of what Carolyn Korsmeyer describes as the hierarchy ofthe senses, a hierarchy informing the modern aesthetic mod-els24 that influence so much nineteenth-century narrative.25

Carroll breaks with these models, grounding literary form andreading alike not simply in the body, but in the potentially ani-malistic domain of bodily appetite. Alices network with theEAT ME-DRINK ME thingsat once objects, characters,edibles, and textspresents appetite eliciting and shaping liter-ary interest, which functions here not as a demonstration ofdeep interiority26 but as a bodily vector of association with het-erogeneous things in Carrolls expansion of the social.

We see a more aggressive example of the social life of foodnear the end of Through the Looking-Glass, when Alice attends

20 See Lee, The Nothing in the Novel.21 See Mavor, For-getting to Eat, p. 101.22 See for example Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science,

and the Form of Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007); and BenjaminMorgan, Critical Empathy: Vernon Lees Aesthetics and the Origins of Close Reading,Victorian Studies, 55 (2012), 3156.

23 Exceptions include Jennifer L. Fleissner, Henry Jamess Art of Eating, ELH, 75(2008), 2762; Michael Parrish Lee, Reading Meat in H. G. Wells, Studies in the Novel,42 (2010), 24968; and Matthew Kaiser, Paters Mouth, Victorian Literature and Cul-ture, 39 (2011), 4764.

24 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca: CornellUniv. Press, 1999), p. 5.

25 See Lee, The Nothing in the Novel, pp. 368, 376.26 Deidre Shauna Lynch argues that the turn of the nineteenth century saw the rise

of reading practices in which literary characters became the imaginative resources onwhich readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interiorresources of sensibility (Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and theBusiness of Inner Meaning [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998], p. 126).



a coronation feast where she is to be officially recognized as aqueen, surely the top position in the Looking-Glass food chain,a position defined as all feasting and fun!27 But the feastenacts a radical and pervasive unraveling of the division of thehuman and the inhuman,28 and the would-be objects of con-sumption turn the tables on their would-be consumers. Alice isintroduce[d] to a leg of mutton that ma[kes] a little bow toher (Through the Looking-Glass, p. 229), and upon announcingher wish to slice the leg, Alice is informed that it isnt etiquetteto cut any one youve been introduced to (pp. 22930). She isthen introduced to a Pudding, and must conque[r] her shynessby a great effort to cut a slice of it, after which the Puddingsays, in a thick, suety sort of voice, What impertinence! . . . Iwonder how youd like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, youcreature! (p. 230). Soon consumers and objects of consump-tion trade positionsthe leg of mutton sitting in the WhiteQueens chair, and the White Queen disappear[ing] into thesoup (pp. 23233), the guests lying down in the dishes, andthe soup-ladle walking up the table towards Alices chair, andbeckoning to her impatiently to get out of its way (p. 233). Thisrevolt of food-things puts pressure on Browns claim that thetale of possessionof being possessed by possessionsissomething stranger than the history of a culture of consumption.It is . . . a tale not just of thinking with things but also of trying torender thought thing-like (A Sense of Things, p. 5). Possession,Alice shows us, is richer and stranger than consumption only if wetake consumption in a rarefied economic sense. What if we dont,as Carroll doesnt, separate consumption from the condition ofhaving a body, of needing or wanting to eat and surviveand,perhaps inevitably, to cut, to killof being part of a food chain?Alice occupies worlds in which both subjectivity can becomething-like and the things she would consume are already subjects.

27 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in his AlicesAdventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There,p. 144. All further page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text.

28 Sara Guyer, The Girl with the Open Mouth: Through the Looking Glass, Angelaki,9, no. 1 (2004), 160.



The coronation scene also shows how thethingness of foodthat which makes it overflow the categoryof objectis at least in part due to its position at the borderbetween life and death, and to its evocation of the violence ofconsumption. For Carroll, consumption is haunted by animalsand the violence done or always on the verge of being done toanimals. As Sara Guyer notes, the leg of mutton and the suetyPudding respectively are and bear the remains of slaughteredand cooked animals (The Girl with the Open Mouth, p. 162).And even some of the less-fleshy inhabitants of the table assem-ble into animal form: As to the bottles, they each took a pair ofplates, which they hastily fitted on as wings, and so, with forks forlegs, went fluttering about in all directions: and very like birdsthey look, Alice thought to herself, as well as she could in thedreadful confusion that was beginning (Through the Looking-Glass, p. 232). This confusion that nearly overwhelms Alicessubject-defining ability to think is as much a rebellion of ani-mals as of food, which is perhaps fitting for a feast consistingmainly of animal products and attended by animals andbirds (p. 229). Lewis Carrolls things override the status ofmere objects not only through becoming (human) subject-likebut also through being or becoming animal-like, or simplythrough being animals, as in the case of the Wonderlandcroquet-ground where the croquet balls were live hedgehogs,and the mallets live flamingoes (Alices Adventures in Wonder-land, p. 73).

If Carrolls lively things are partly a response to the sub-ject/object confusion resulting from the sense of a commod-ified human world under Victorian capitalism, then they alsosuggest that this confusion was interwoven with concerns aboutthe commodification of animals. Besides bearing witness to theevolutionary theories that blurred the boundaries between hu-mans and animals, the nineteenth century saw an acceleratedobjectification of animals through the advent of zoos, realisticanimal toys and the widespread commercial diffusion of animalimagery,29 along with the more abstract process of [animal]domination implicit in both popular zoology and the scientific

29 John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, 1980), p. 26.



work it reflected and distilled.30 The Victorian period also sawthe very visceral objectification of animals by the meat-canningindustry and vivisection,31 a practice that, as Jed Mayer notes,Carroll himself became an outspoken critic of.32 In the Alicebooks, animals frequently occupy the positions of objects foruse and consumption while simultaneously troubling their roleas objects through their very animalism in a world where ani-mals often command the subject-announcing power of speech.As we have seen, the things that the Duck designates are ani-mals that itanother animalregards as edibles. The Queen ofHearts describes the Mock Turtle as the thing Mock Turtle Soupis made from (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 81; emphasisadded). The Mock Turtle in turn sings a song in which one of thecentral characters is a whiting, and when the Turtle asks Alice ifshe can describe whiting, she responds by describing them asfood, with their tails in their mouthsand theyre all overcrumbs (p. 90). In Through the Looking-Glass, well before theanimal-food-things of the coronation feast, a talking Gnat showsAlice a Snap-dragon-fly with a body made of plum-pudding,wings of holly-leaves, and its head a raisin burning in brandyand a Bread-and-butter-fly whose wings are thin slices ofbread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump ofsugar (Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 150, 151)both at onceliving creatures and novel objects of consumption.

Yet more elusive things seem to trouble this world of ani-mal objects in a Looking-Glass shop run by a Sheep. Alice finds:

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious thingsbutthe oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at anyshelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelfwas always quite empty, though the others round it were crowdedas full as they could hold.

Things flow about so here! she said at last in a plaintivetone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large

30 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 11.

31 On the meat-canning industry, see Colin Spencer, British Food: An ExtraordinaryThousand Years of History (London: Grub Street, 2002), p. 282; on vivisection, see Ritvo,The Animal Estate, pp. 15865.

32 See Jed Mayer, The Vivisection of the Snark, Victorian Poetry, 47 (2009), 42948.



bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimeslike a work-box, and was always in the shelf next above the oneshe was looking at. And this one is the most provoking of allbut Ill tell you what she added, as a sudden thought struckher. Ill follow it up to the very top shelf of all. Itll puzzle it to gothrough the ceiling, I expect!

But even this plan failed: the thing went through the ceil-ing as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it. (Through theLooking-Glass, p. 176)

I quote at length because this scene seems to present things attheir most Heideggerian. Much to a prospective thing theoristsdelight, Alice faces the refusal of these things to be pinneddown and reduced to concretely identifiable objects of con-sumption. The things seem uncannily alive precisely in theirability to evade human categorization and use and their conse-quent ability to render Alice thing-like. For, as Alice turns aboutto try and see these things, the Sheep asks if she is a teetotum(p. 176) or spinning top.33 We find, however, that the elusive,metamorphic qualities of these things are not due to their tran-scendence of capitalism, but rather to their embodiment of it.The Sheep says to Alice: plenty of choice, only make up yourmind. Now, what do you want to buy? (Through the Looking-Glass,p. 178; emphasis in original). The dream logic of these thingsthat refuse to stay still or hold a single form reflects the dizzyingphantasmagoria of overwhelming consumer choice and desiremore than it reflects pure thingish alterity. Once Alice learnsthat the things are for sale, she decides that she should like tobuy an egg to eat (p. 179), bringing us back into a domain ofbodily consumption where the thing to be consumed is ananimal product (and potential source). Yet the egg resists easyconsumption. Alice finds that the egg seems to get further awaythe more [she] walk[s] towards it (p. 180), and then that itgrows larger and larger, and more and more human (p.181), until it becomes HUMPTY DUMPTY (p. 181). Thishumanized egg thus occupies the intersection between food,person, animal, and purchasable object that a Darwinian con-sumer culture made available to an imagination as vivid as

33 See Hugh Haughton, note to Through the Looking-Glass, p. 343, n. 10.



Carrolls. And if Humpty Dumptys desire to be master ofwords and their meanings (p. 186) seems to place him insis-tently on the subject side of the subject/object dichotomy, thenthe shattering fall of his well-known story, played out here ina heavy crash (p. 193), reaffirms the Wonderland slippagebetween subject and object as well as the fragile corporeality thathaunts all of Carrolls actors, whether human, animal, object, orsome combination of the three. In the end, the shop of elusivethings shows us how animals produce and animate Carrollsobjects. Not only do things materialize as eggs, but the shop is,of course, presided over by a Sheep who sells these consumablegoods and whose persistent knitting (pp. 17578) drives homethe objectification of animals.

This is not to say that all of the things or even all of thefood-things in the Alice books are animals or directly bear ani-mal remains, but rather that animals mobilize the networks ofthings, especially when eating is at stake. It is, after all, whilechasing a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole that Alice encountersthe EAT ME cake and DRINK ME bottle, the burningcuriosity that initially motivates her adventure (Alices Adven-tures in Wonderland, p. 10) arising in relation to an animal andquickly becoming indistinguishable from the appetite she showsduring her interaction with the edibles. And what promptsAlices curiosity about the White Rabbit is its waistcoat-pocket and its watch (p. 10), objects for human use that renderthe Rabbit a novel thing that blurs the boundaries betweenhuman and animal.34 Alices response to this thing is to blur herown species boundaries and take to the rather predatory ani-malistic activity of chasing a rabbit down a hole.

The network of actors that we began to trace in the previoussection now grows more complex. Even before Alice enters intoassociation with the DRINK ME drink, she forms a networkthat consists of her and the Rabbit. And while she loses sight ofthe Rabbit during her interactions with the food and drink, theRabbit soon reappears to help further multiply actors. To our

34 See also Lovell-Smith, who notes that, in John Tenniels illustration, the rabbitoccupies a point between animal and human, simultaneously both these things andneither of them (The Animals of Wonderland, p. 384).



provisional list of: 1. The DRINK ME drink, 2. The EAT MEcake, and 3. Alices feet, we can now add the following:

4. The White Rabbit. The initial animal-thing that Alice chases intothe rabbit-hole now reappears. Alice attempts to address the Rab-bit whopossibly alarmed by the advances of a creature that hasbeen chasing him and has now grown in size dramaticallyre-sponds by start[ing] violently, dropping its gloves and fan, andskurr[ying] away into the darkness as hard as he could go(Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 17).

5. Mabel. After growing and reencountering the White Rabbit, Alicehas an identity crisis and is no longer able to tell if she is herself orsomeone else. She wonders if she has been changed in the night(p. 17); asks, Who in the world am I? Ah, thats the great puzzle!(pp. 1718; emphasis in original); and worries that she has beenchanged for Mabel! (p. 19).

6. The little crocodile. Worrying that she has been changed forMabel, Alice tries to remember all the things [she] used to know(p. 18). She attempts to recite Isaac Wattss 1715 poem AgainstIdleness and Mischief,35 but it comes out as a poem about a littlecrocodile (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 19; emphasis inoriginal).

7. Little fishes. In the poem, the little crocodile welcomes little fishesin, / With gently smiling jaws (p. 19; emphasis in original).

If Alices initial consumption of the edibles is an example ofcooperative network building, then the reintroduction of theWhite Rabbit expands this network to include the more violent(if smilingly social) consumption of fish by crocodile, replayingbut inverting the initial invitation from the EAT ME-DRINKME things to Alice to ingest them. This entry and reentry ofanimals into an apparent human/thing-only club shows ani-malseven when forgottenmobilizing and making possiblethe interactions between humans and things, especially thethings that people eat.

35 See Haughton, note to Through the Looking-Glass, p. 302, n. 6.



Alices identity crisis and inability to remem-ber accurately the things she used to know opens up anotherdimension of Wonderland things. As she later tells a hookah-smoking Caterpillar, Alices sense that she is not [her]self isdue to the fact that she does not keep the same size for tenminutes together! and that she cant remember things as[she] used (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, pp. 41, 42; empha-sis added). Alices sense of selfhood is thus reliant on things: theedible things that change her size and the things that shecannot quite remember. And similarly to the case of the Ducksthing, these latter denoted things turn out to be animals.36

When the Caterpillar asks Alice, Cant remember what things?she replies: Well, Ive tried to say How doth the little busy bee, butit all came different! (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 42;emphasis in original). Alice is referring to her earlier recitationof the poem about the little crocodile (beginning How doth thelittle crocodile [p. 19]). Her feeling of not being herself, then,comes from forgetting things not so much as abstract entitiesor units of information but as specific animals with specific rela-tions to food. Alice has forgotten the productive bee and remem-bered instead the predatory, consuming crocodile. The text thusexperiments with a model of identity that is not based on a recall-able human selfhood or body of knowledge but configured byre-membering: by participating in the assembling and reassem-bling of a diverse network of actors, including animals andfoodsby accepting membership within what Latour calls theParliament of Things.37 Alice feels as though she has beenchanged for someone else (Alices Adventures in Wonderland,

36 Gilles Deleuze understands denoted objects in Carrolls work as always con-sumable or recipients of consumption (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V.Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale [New York: Columbia Univ. Press,1990], p. 26). He points out that the Duck understands it as a denoting term for allthings, state of affairs and possible qualities (an indicator). It specifies even that thedenoted thing is essentially something which is (or may be) eaten. Everything denotedor capable of denotation is, in principle, consumable and penetrable (The Logic ofSense, p. 26). While Deleuze is right about the consumableand usually ediblenatureof Carrolls things, he seems to forget their animal dimension, a dimension that theDuck insists on.

37 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 144.



p. 17) because she has entered into association with an unfamil-iar network comprising the White Rabbit and the EAT ME-DRINK ME items and cannot, through memory, align herselfwith the correct animal-things. As Lovell-Smith suggests, inWonderland humans are the creations of animals, it appears,just as much as animals are the creations of humans (Eggs andSerpents, p. 43). But is Alices alignment with the fish-eatingcrocodile instead of the bee really a mistake? After all, critics likeEdmund Wilson, Auerbach, and Kincaid have regarded Alice aspredatory and aggressive.38 And this little crocodile mightindeed mirror the hungry Alice. But I think that its appetitepoints instead to another misremembered fish-loving predator:Alices cat, Dinah.

I want to suggest that the most crucial things in the Alicebooks are Alices cats. In conjunction with Alice, they are thepivotal actors assembling the network of Wonderland. For La-tour, action is borrowed, distributed, influenced, dominated,and translated (Reassembling the Social, p. 46), and Alice, I wouldargue, similarly borrows and translates the appetite and predatoryaspects of her cats. Several critics have touched on Alices con-spicuous affinity with cats (Nicholson, Food and Power, p. 50)and the somewhat puzzling centrality of Dinah and the CheshireCat in Wonderland (Lovell-Smith, The Animals of Wonderland,p. 408). For example, noting the Cheshire Cats long claws anda great many teeth, Empson argues that Alice is particularly athome with [the Cheshire Cat]; she is the same sort of thing (SomeVersions of Pastoral, pp. 27374). Gilles Deleuze writes that Aliceidentifie[s] herself with the Cheshire Cat (The Logic of Sense,p. 235). Auerbach points out that the Cheshire Cat is the onlycreature in Wonderland whom [Alice] calls her friend, andsuggests that he is the only figure other than Alice who encom-passes all the others (Alice and Wonderland, p.38). Auerbachalso makes telling connections between the Cats ability to dis-solve into his own grinning mouth, the grinning crocodile, andthe centrality of Alices appetite (Alice and Wonderland, p.39).

38 See Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties andThirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), pp. 54344; Auerbach, Alice andWonderland, pp. 3537; and Kincaid, Alices Invasion of Wonderland, pp. 9596.



The fleeting critical comments on Alices pet cats bring us evencloser to the mark. Florence Becker Lennon opened up the pos-sibility of thinking about the significance of the real cats of theAlice books to the world of Wonderland by suggesting that theCheshire Cat is Dinahs dream-self and a sort of guardian impand liaison officer between the two worlds.39 Kincaid writes: InAlices world, which frames both books, Dinah is a warm symbol offriendly cuddliness, but in Wonderland she is a monster(Alices Invasion of Wonderland, p. 97). More recently, Mavorconnects cats to memory, suggesting that it is the catperhapsonly the cat, whether it takes the form of Dinah, or the metamor-phosed form of the Cheshire Cat, or the form of a black kitten ora white kitten as birthed by Mother Dinahthat Alice misses(For-getting to Eat, p. 101). Most evocatively, Auerbach picksup on Lennons connection between the Cheshire Cat and Dinahbut claims an additional shift of identities between Alice andDinah, noting that Dinah is the only above-ground characterwhom Alice mentions repeatedly, almost always in terms of hereating some smaller animal, and positing that Dinah seemsfinally to function as a personification of Alices own subtly can-nibalistic hunger (Alice and Wonderland, pp. 38, 36). Yeteven Auerbach underestimates the central role that Alices catsplay in structuring the world of Wonderland. And while there isindeed an entanglement of identity between Alice and Dinah, thetext avoids reducing Dinah to a personification. Rather than mak-ing this animal stand in for an aspect of this human, Carroll ex-plores an interspecies model of identity in which humans andanimals are each others co-creators and mediators, borrowingfrom, translating, feeding, and feeding off each other.

If the burning curiosity that drives Alice to chase theWhite Rabbit at the beginning of Alices Adventures in Wonder-land seems to borrow and translate the exploratory and preda-tory instincts of her cat (that most notoriously curious species),then her entry into the world below is marked by her concernfor Dinahs food supply. As she falls down the rabbit-hole, Alicewonders if, in her absence, anyone will remember [Dinahs]saucer of milk at tea-time, and she muses: Dinah, my dear!

39 Florence Becker Lennon, Lewis Carroll (London: Cassell and Co., 1947), p. 121.



I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in theair, Im afraid, but you might catch a bat, and thats very likea mouse, you know (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 11).This only seemingly absent feline appetite becomes a palpablepresence when Alice, attempting to communicate with a mouse,says, Ou` est ma chatte?, causing the mouse to give a suddenleap and quiver all over with fright (p. 21)a reaction notwholly different from the White Rabbits fright at Alice. AlicesresponseI quite forgot you didnt like catsis met with themouses reply, which at once makes explicit a version of thesocial that is a predatory food chain and invites Alice to imagineherself occupying the mouses place within this chain: Not likecats! . . . Would you like cats, if you were me? (p. 21; emphasisin original). But Alice continues to evoke her cats appetite.Among an assorted group of creatures (including birds), Alicesays: Dinahs our cat. And shes such a capital one for catchingmice, you cant think! And oh, I wish you could see her afterthe birds! Why, shell eat a little bird as soon as look at it! (p.29), a speech that sends the creatures hurrying away. Lovell-Smith has noted that it is through her series of size changesthat Alice finds herself continually being repositioned in thefood chain (The Animals of Wonderland, p. 406), butAlices position in this chain also depends on her associationwith Dinah. Alices references to Dinah modify her social rela-tions with the creatures of Wonderland, putting them in theposition of potential food objects. And just as Alice eventuallylearns to eat and manipulate her size more strategically, shealso begins to use her references to Dinah more deliberately tovie for power among the creatures of Wonderland. After Alicegets stuck in the White Rabbits house, the Rabbit concludesthat he must burn the house down, and Alice responds: Ifyou do, Ill set Dinah at you! (Alices Adventures in Wonderland,p. 36). That said, Dinah hardly insures Alice a secure position atthe top of the Wonderland food chain, as we see when Aliceshrinks and participates in the rather cat-like fear of becomingprey for a relatively enormous puppy (p. 37).

Alices journey through Wonderland thus developsa model of being in which identity is less a fixed essence thana position on a food chain that varies through association and



diet. After her run-in with the puppy, Alices earlier, Who inthe world am I? Ah, thats the great puzzle! (pp. 1718; empha-sis in original), soon gives way to her comment: Id nearly for-gotten that Ive got to grow up again! Let me seehow is it to bemanaged? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other;but the great question is What? (pp. 3839; emphasis in orig-inal). And upon eating a bit of Caterpillar-given mushroom thatmakes her grow tall, Alice meets a Pigeon, who further assertsthat questions of fixed identity are secondary to questions ofwhat one eats and eats like. The Pigeon identifies Alice as a Ser-pent trying to steal its eggs (pp.4748). Alices protests that sheis a little girl rather than a serpent prove irrelevant when thePigeon points out that if, as Alice says, little girls eat eggs quiteas much as serpents do, then little girls are a kind of serpent,a notion that is such a new idea to Alice, that she [is] quite silentfor a minute or two (p. 48).

If Alices silence signals some recognition of her role as ananimalistic eater, then we should recognize that such a roledoes not simply mark Alice as an individual consumer, but asa node in an interspecies network of consumption. We shouldnot read Alices references to Dinahs appetite and hunting skillsas mere evocations of Dinah or personifications of Alices hun-ger, but rather as extensions of and forms of contact with Dinah.While Alice deploys Dinah as a kind of tool to help her movethrough the social world of Wonderland, she also imagines her-self becoming a tool for Dinah, that Dinah might begin sending[Alice] on messages, or errands, including watching a mouse-hole (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, pp. 31, 32). Such think-ing invites us to imagine humans as servants or instruments inanimal meals and hints that Alices adventures are not just herown, but also act as messages for Dinah and Dinahs kittens.

Utilizing Dinahs appetite to effect her position on thefood chain of Wonderland, Alice also functions as a kind offeline prosthesis, imagining meals on behalf of her cats andreturning to feed them. Much as Alices descent into Wonder-land is marked by her concern about when Dinah will be fed(Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 11), her journey throughthe looking-glass is brought on by Alices conversation withDinahs black kitten and her desire to pretend that the kitten



is the Red Queen and marked by her concern over whether thekitten will get milk through the looking-glass (Through the Look-ing-Glass, pp. 124, 127). Once Alice is through the glass, it is theRed Queen who proposes to her that they be queens together,a position that, as we have seen, she defines as all feasting andfun! (p. 144). And at her royal coronation, Alice remarks tothe Red Queen: its a very curious thing, I thinkevery poem [inthe Looking-Glass world] was about fishes in some way (pp.230231; emphasis added), a point that could also be madeabout most of the poems in Wonderland. When Alice asks theRed Queen, Do you know why theyre so fond of fishes, allabout here?, the Queen somewhat evasively but tellingly re-sponds, As to fishes, and suggests another poem about fishes(p. 231). Once the feast has turned against the Queens, Aliceshakes the Red Queen (who she supposes is the cause of all themischief [p. 234]), turning her back into a kitten and wakingfrom her dream.

As Jacques Derrida notes, the entire penultimate chapterof Looking-Glass consists in a single [partial] sentence: andit really was a kitten, after all.40 Critics of the Alice books tendto pass over this emphatic commitment to the revelation of thekittens identity, and even Derrida points it out mainly tooppose his contemplation of the potential responsiveness ofanimals to Alices apparent certainty that one cannot speakwith a cat on the pretext that it doesnt reply or that it alwaysreplies the same thing (Derrida, The Animal That ThereforeI Am, p. 8; see Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 238). Alicesfrustration that whatever you say to [kittens], they always purr,however, does not in fact stop her from talking to her kitten(Through the Looking-Glass, p. 238; emphasis in original). Nowawake, Alice says to her kitten: You woke me out of oh! sucha nice dream! And youve been along with me, Kittyallthrough the Looking-Glass world. Did you know it, dear?(p. 238). But when the kitten only purrs in response, Alice notonly keeps talking but also moves from asking for language as

40 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), in his TheAnimal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York:Fordham Univ. Press, 2008), p. 7; Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 236 (emphasisin original).



response to offering it as a gift: if only youd been really with mein my dream, there was one thing you would have enjoyedI hadsuch a quantity of poetry said to me, all about fishes! To-morrowmorning you shall have a real treat. All the time youre eatingyour breakfast, Ill repeat The Walrus and the Carpenter toyou; and then you can make believe its oysters, dear! (p. 239;emphasis in original). Alices inability to differentiate her kit-tens vocal responses and thus to know the extent to which thetwo of them share a language does not drive Alice to contem-plate philosophy (as Donna J. Haraway notes that Derrida doesunder the silent gaze of his own small black cat),41 but rathermoves her to reshape her language into a form that she knowsher kitten will enjoy if not understand in human terms. Insteadof continuing to inquire about the truth behind identity (Con-fess that [the Red Queen] was what you turned into! [Throughthe Looking-Glass, p. 238]), Alice offers a narrative about foodthat she translates into the material food that she feeds herkitten.

The animals in Alice at once do and do not fit Ivan Kreil-kamps claim that animal characters are fundamentallyminor, in the sense defined by Alex Woloch,42 functioningas subordinate beings who are delimited in themselves whileperforming a function for someone else.43 On one hand,Wonderland animals can be even more explicitly functionalthan Wolochs minor human characters, sometimes occupyingthe positions of objects and meat. But on the other hand, thehuman Alice, ostensibly the narratives central protagonist, her-self performs functions for and acts as an extension of her cats,who are only delimited in a superficial way. Her cats troubleWolochs concept of minor characters; without occupyingmuch obvious narrative space, they crucially structure thedream worlds of Wonderland and Alices own character, to the

41 See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,2008), p. 20.

42 Ivan Kreilkamp, Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations, in Victorian AnimalDreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. DeborahDenenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 82.

43 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonistin the Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), p. 27; quoted in Kreilkamp,Dying Like a Dog, p. 82.



point where it is never quite clear where they end and Alicebegins. Instead of a character-system, or a distributionalmatrix in which the discrete representation of any specificindividual is intertwined with the narratives continual appor-tioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limitedspace within the same fictive universe (Woloch, The One vs. theMany, pp. 17, 13), Carroll brings us tangled interspecies net-works assembling and reassembling as humans, objects, andanimals exchange, share, and create new positions. Fictionalspace in these texts cannot be dominated by the human ormapped with accuracy by human-centered reading practices;instead, the nonhuman territories of things and animals extendbeneath and beyond the conventional spaces of readerly atten-tion. Shaping the networks of Wonderland are animal bodiesand appetites that draw us in not simply as readers but as socialthings inhabiting a food chain.

Alices interaction with her kitten also takes us beyondDerridas concerns with animal alterity and human/animalslippageconcerns that have become touchstones for the fieldof animal studies44toward something closer to Harawaysconcept of becoming with, a mode of species interdepen-dence in which the partners do not precede the meeting;species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject-and object-shaping dance of encounters (When Species Meet,pp. 3, 19, 4). Far from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattarisecstatic notion of becoming-animal45 (which Haraway arguesshows a profound absence of curiosity about or respect for andwith actual animals [When Species Meet, p. 27]), becomingwith resembles Latours actor-networks, involving interspeciesbeings-in-encounter that gather up those who respond tothem into unpredictable kinds of we (Haraway, When SpeciesMeet, p. 5). The we assembled by Alice and her kitten is a

44 See for example Cary Wolfe, introduction to Zoontologies: The Question of theAnimal, ed. Wolfe (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. ix-xxiii; Morseand Danahay, introduction to Victorian Animal Dreams, pp. 112; and Matthew Calarco,Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 2008).

45 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 242.



network strengthened rather than weakened or brought intocrisis by the gaps in communication created when humanspeech provokes feline purring. Whether or not Alices exten-sion of make believe to her kitten is itself an anthropomorphicfantasy, such extension is an offer rather than a demand, and ithas both the material consequence of enhancing Alices enthu-siasm for feeding the kitten and the narrative-shaping effect ofanimalizing Alices fantasy life. The edible sea life in both Alicebooks seems at least as much a feline fantasy as a human one,even if such a fantasy is the product of eating practices andappetites that develop through cats association and cohabita-tion with humans. And what is The Walrus and the Carpen-terin which the eponymous characters talk of many things:/ . . . / Of cabbagesand kings / And why the sea is boiling hot /And whether pigs have wings in order to lure oysters to theirculinary deaths (Through the Looking-Glass, p. 161; emphasis inoriginal)but the story of an interspecies alliance betweena human and an animal using language and make believe inorder to eat together? Fantasy and fiction, for Carroll, are nothuman tools for writing over animals or animal necessity, butcoinventions with animalsmodes of becoming with thatremain rooted in bodily needs and pleasures and that shape theidentities of human and animal inventors together.

After offering to repeat The Walrus and the Carpenter,Alice further draws our attention to the question of make-believeand invention by asking her kitten to help her understand theorigin of Wonderland, saying, Now, Kitty, lets consider whoit was that dreamed it all (Through the Looking-Glass, p. 239).Alice is referring back to something that occurs after she firsthears this poem (pp. 15863) from the mouth of the some-times fish-resembling Tweedledee (p. 167), when Tweedle-dee says that Alice is only a sort of thing in [the Red Kings]dream! (p. 165). The text follows up this idea in a chaptertitled Its My Own Invention in which Alice wonders whetherwere all part of the same dream, adding: Only I do hope itsmy dream, and not the Red Kings! I dont like belonging toanother persons dream (p. 205; emphasis in original). ButAlices anthropocentric contemplation of the potential dream-owners is interrupted by two battling Knights and their horses



(p. 205). The victorious White Knighta self-declared greathand at inventing things (p. 211)proceeds to show anddescribe his inventions to Alice. These inventions mainlyinclude things that come into being at the intersection ofhumans and animals. They include an upside-down box emptiedof the things (clothes and sandwiches) it is designed to hold(p.207) and hung on a tree in hopes some bees may make a nestin it and create honey (p. 208); anklets that the Knight putsaround the feet of his horse to guard against the bites of sharks(p. 208); a helmet like a sugar-loaf used in case the Knight fallsoff his horse (p. 211); and a song in which the speaker makesbutterflies into mutton-pies and haddocks eyes into waistcoat-buttons (pp.215,216; emphasis in original). We learn that, of allthe strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through TheLooking-Glass, the sight of the Knight singing this song and thehorse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on hisneck, cropping the grass is the one that she always rememberedmost clearly (p. 214). In other words, when it comes to reassem-bling Looking-Glass networks, it is not just the Knight who inventswith and for animals that makes such a memorable impression onAlice, but the strange pair of man and horse (p. 214). Thequestion of who is dreaming the dream thus lodges betweena poem about one human-animal alliance and the spectacle ofanother, and reemerges when Alice offers to repeat the poem toher kitten. In this way, the text hints that we all might be thingsin a dream, inventions becoming with and belonging to oneanother in an interspecies network. The returning oysters of TheWalrus and the Carpenter remind us, however, that becomingwith has its victims; networks have their prey. Like so many otherWonderland animals, the oysters are at once food objects andsocial things, the never fully digested remains of fiction andinvention.

Thing theory is fascinated with the irreduc-ibility of things, as is Carroll. Brown, imagining things as whatis excessive in objects, makes a point that is as inescapable as itis evocative (Thing Theory, p. 5). But Brown, looking for this



excess of things in the void constituted by the jug and theemptiness at the center of the Real (A Sense of Things, p. 7), getsso sidetracked by the allure of nothing that he misses out on theliving things that teem within and behind the seemingly emptyspaces of the human world. One way to remember things is toforget animals, but this is not the remembering that Carroll hasin mind. As I have been suggesting, Wonderland things do notexceed object status by concealing a mute unknowable core ofpure potential but rather through the networks they createwith other objects and life forms. What might at first seem likethe amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the(ap)perceiving subject (Brown, Thing Theory, p. 5) in theLooking-Glass shop of elusive things is already a network of con-sumable goods mobilized by a Sheep, and it is only invisible tothe human Alice because she has not yet learned how to join it.For Carroll, the main things that make things excessive areanimals. And, whether in the form of food, or companions, orsome combination of the two, when the networks of Wonder-land begin to unravel, animals are what remain.

Alices Adventures in Wonderland approaches its end with a trialover stolen tarts (Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 96) duringwhich the Queen of Hearts sentences Alice to beheading, utter-ing her famous cry, Off with her head! (p. 108). The Queen,a card woman, is a particular kind of Wonderland thing:a human-object hybrid. Her sovereign power over life and deathseemingly suggests a world in which commodity objects havetaken control over human existence.46 Yet Alice in turn seemsable to reduce the Queen and her card men minions to objectsfor human use. Alice escapes the trial and wakes up from Won-derland by declaring, Youre nothing but a pack of cards!(Alices Adventures in Wonderland, p. 108), ostensibly turningthese subject/objects into mere objects and reaffirming thepower of human imagination to animate and control the objectworld. The card men now become a pack of cards that r[ise]up into the air and fl[y] down upon Alice (p. 108) but resolve

46 See also Armstrong, who suggests that Alices farewell to the cards could besaid to echo a Marxist vision of society under conditions of late capitalism in whichrelations among things determine relations among people (The Occidental Alice,p. 551).



into even more innocuous dead leaves when Alice wakes withher head in the lap of her sister (p. 109). But in the end, humanimagination proves as much a failed tyrant as the Queen ofHearts. After Alice tells her older sister of her curious dreamand then exits the narrative to have her tea, her sister experi-ences the whole place around her bec[oming] alive with thestrange creatures of her little sisters dream, including theWhite Rabbit, the Mock Turtle, the frightened Mouse, andthe rattle of the teacups as the March Hare and his friends sharedtheir never-ending meal (p. 109). Despite this contagiousimmersion in the life of Wonderland, Alices sister kn[ows] sheha[s] but to open [her eyes] again, and all would change to dullreality (p. 110). Such reality, however, is not a strictly humanworld: the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells,and the Queens shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd-boy . . . ,and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to theconfused clamour of the busy farm-yardwhile the lowing of thecattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtlesheavy sobs (p. 110). In other words, what remains of the curiousthings of Wonderland is a reality assembled by the traces of ani-mals and human-animal relations.

Such traces are all the more visible in Through the Looking-Glass, which ends with Alice waking from the revolt of food-things as she shakes the Red Queenthis time a human-chesspiece hybridinto her kitten (Through the Looking Glass, pp.23437). In the wake of the dissolving meal, Alice offers herremaining animal the narrative animal remains of The Walrusand the Carpenter and tries to persuade her kitten to help hersolve the riddle of who it was that dreamed it all:

This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go onlicking your paw like thatas if Dinah hadnt washed you thismorning! You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the RedKing. He was part of my dream, of coursebut then I was part ofhis dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, mydear, so you ought to knowOh, Kitty, do help to settle it! Imsure your paw can wait! (pp. 23940; emphasis in original)

But the provoking kitten responds with what looks like coysilence, beg[inning] on the other paw, and pretend[ing] it



hadnt heard the question (p. 240). The text then turns thequestion of the dream to the reader, asking, Which do you thinkit was? (p.239; emphasis in original). I take the fact that the texthere places the silent reader in a similar position to Alices kittenas an invitation to think beyond the human options that Aliceprovides. To the question of who dreamed the Wonderlandworlds, I would venture that the answer is Alice and catstogether, forming a network, a food chain in which everyone isedible and every thing is social.

University of Nottingham

A B S T R A C T

Michael Parrish Lee, Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other LifeForms in Lewis Carrolls Alice Books (pp. 484512)

This essay tests how Lewis Carrolls Alice books might bridge four potentially disparateapproaches to literary analysis: thing theory, animal studies, actor-network theory, andfood studies. Expanding the investigation of objects and things in literature beyonda human/thing dichotomy, I draw on the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latourto explore the entanglement of humans, objects, animals, and appetites that generatesso much of the wonder in Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Throughthe Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). I argue that these texts attempt toreconcile the Victorian destabilization of discrete human and animal categoriesfacilitated by evolutionary theory with an increasingly commodified culture whereeverything and everyone seem potentially consumable. The Alice books give us thingsin networks, but networks that supersede, and have utility beyond, the human. Eating,I propose, is our way into these networks. I show how Carroll presents a world that isboth fully social and thoroughly objectified, where humans, animals, and objects trade,share, and fight for positions in a network of edible things.

Keywords: Lewis Carroll; Food and eating in literature; Animal stud-ies; Thing theory; Actor-network theory



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Lee - Eating Things - Alice and ANT