6. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

(1) Eat Me Cake

Everyone knows Alice in Wonderland. The Victorian story has become a huge success in reprints, theatre, and film. The story of a girl who finds herself in a bizarre fantasy world. My focus is immediately after this: the Eat Me, Drink Me scene. Though these don't constitute fatal poisons, they represent unwanted manipulation of the body - both substances cause Alice's body to change in size. If these are interpreted as 'poisons', it lends an intriguing flavour to the text (no pun intended).

(2) Book cover

"It was all very well to say 'Drink me', but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. 'No, I'll look first,' she said, 'and see whether it's marked 'poison' or not'; for she had read several nice stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: […] she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison', it is almost certain to disagree with you later." (9)

Alice's deliberations over whether to drink from the bottle are quite entertaining. The innocence of the child and the systematic way in which she is instructed contrasts the possibility of poison itself. The innocence is further highlighted by the text's coy refusal to acknowledge the fatality of poison, simply admitting that it "disagree[s] with you" (9). 

Her sensible distrust of the bottle is contrasted with her recklessness with the cake, easily convincing herself to eat it:

"Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake on which the words 'EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. 'Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice,' and if it makes me grow larger, she can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'" (12)

This impulsive choice presents her naivety in a more realistic view of a child. It also illustrates cultural difference in perception between food and drink. Children are more often instructed to fear poison in strange liquids than food.

Film

In the 2010 film version shows the White Queen making a reversal potion so Alice can turn back into her original size. However, the choice of ingredients - worm fat, buttered fingers, and three coins from a dead man's pocket - all suggest a form of fatality with unpleasant effects from drinking it.

Works Cited
(1) Annie's Hidden World. Eat Me Cake. 2011, n/a. Blogger. http://hiddenworld-annie.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/who-knows-how-to-bake-upelkuchen.html. Accessed March 2017.
(2) PanMacmillan. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 2017, UK. Pan Macmillan Publishing. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/lewis-carroll/alice-s-adventures-in-wonderland. Accessed March 2017.
Caroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. London, Macmillan. 2015. Print.

2. Context: Poison and Food, Why?

(1) Bottle of Poison

Before we get our teeth into the poison in novels, we must understand what its use accomplishes - why it is so frequent in mystery fiction. An excellent essay on food and poison is Toxic Encounters: Poisoning in Early Modern English Literature and Culture by Catherine E. Thomas, congruent to this blog's idea of poison and food as an invasion of security and endangerment of a living need.

Thomas explores poison in literature as something with multiple meanings: ‘So what made poisoning so fashionable as a subject during the period? Simply put: it made good theatre, whether onstage or off. But more significantly perhaps, poisoning offered a sufficiently rich network of meanings to express key cultural concerns of the time.’ (48). Therefore ‘Poisoning, an act defined by the physical bodies and intimate desires of individuals, illustrates how early modern authors conceptualized subjectivity with respect to gender, sexuality, class, race, and nationality.’ (49).

Poison in food can explore a variety of traits such as empowerment of women: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, presents a female protagonist who controls her home with the threat of plant-based poisons, killing off her family if she was slighted. I will be analyzing this book in a later post. Thomas continues, ‘She classifies poisoning as a method of murder that upsets traditional early modern domestic hierarchies and allows women to gain power over the men in their lives (either by killing them off or manipulating them).’ (50).

Thomas ends with an insightful description of the metaphorical implications of poison: ‘Poisoning as an act invokes questions of wilful versus unsuspecting ingestion. […] narratives about poisoning, fictional or not, cogently express how English writers thought about its power and pervasiveness in bodies both natural and political.’ (51). Therefore, poison in food is more than a murder weapon but symbolic as showing thematic values of power, gender and societal views in literature. With these in mind, can we understand the value of poison in each text that will be analysed in this blog. 

Works Cited

(1) Chantal, Julie. Bottle of Poison. 2013. Canada. Julie-Chantal. <http://julie-chantal.deviantart.com/art/Bottle-of-Poison-386595328> Accessed February 2017.

Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Live in the Castle. London: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Thomas, C. E. (2012), Toxic Encounters: Poisoning in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Literature Compass, 9: 48–55. 2012. Web. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00861.x/pdf> Accessed February 2017.