Dum...Dee...Dum...Dee...

 

My niece came over last night (her parents were going out of town and how could my sister resist the munchkin’s requests for quality time with her fav auntie?) and brought along with her enough stuff to sink a cruise ship. All this for a weekend away? I swear the child has enough toys, books, clothes, and sundries to last out the coming ice age!

To continue, she wanted a bedtime story, and I grabbed the first chapter book I saw...an old edition of Alice Through the Looking Glass. After Janet slipped off into the proverbial land of Nod to the tune of four chapters and three glasses of water, I took Alice out to the couch and kept on reading. I hadn’t thought of Alice in years, not since watching ten minutes of that cheesy remake on TV, and sitting there with the original in my hands brought back all sorts of memories. Strangely, none of those memories seemed to be in the book I held.

Flipping through the pages I found confusion, madness, violence, deceit, and fear. Where were the dancing flowers and grinning cats? The helpful caterpillar and the happy tea party? I found the cat of course with his misleading grin, but all he sang about was beating children and putting pepper in people’s eyes. And there was the caterpillar, but his drugged out advice was more along the lines of “lay back and enjoy it, cause we’re all gonna die”. And the dancing flowers? Well, they’d all been trampled by the chessmen during the fight between the lion and the unicorn. Alice was lost and alone and waiting for the White King to wake up and put an end to everything.

The part that really got ot me though was Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. I remembered them as the rolly-polly bouncy twins who liked to boss people around but were mostly full of hot air. I even had a little figurine of the two (though I lost it somewhere around, oh, early adolescence). However, sitting on my sofa at two in the morning, I realized that these twins were far less cute, and much more menacing, than I had remembered. The story goes that one or the other of these insane twins stole the other one’s rattle. They then decide that they’ll have to fight to the death in order to determine who going to get said rattle, which is broken and probably not worth fighting over anyway. During the fight they are both destroyed by a third party and the silly little broken rattle just sits there in the forest, all alone. 

Now if only Alice had happened along a little sooner, or if she could have found a way to choose, Solomon like, between the two claims. Should Tweedle Dee get the rattle? Or should Tweedle Dum? Should the rattle have been taken away altogether (like I took away Janet’s amazingly obnoxious Rock and Roll Boom Blocks)? Would it have made more sense for Dee and Dum to have been sent to their rooms and the rattle given to the monster that would have eaten both combatants had they been running around loose? Carroll’s story asks some odd questions (or it seems to at three in the morning). Running as fast as you possibly can only leaves you in the same place and believing three impossible things before breakfast might be the only way out of the White King’s Dream.

Janet is still asleep as I write this, and I’ve skimmed through Alice, hoping to find that happy ending I remembered. I’ve realized though that Carroll left the story, like he left Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, half finished. The reader has to come along and decide which way the story will go. Was Alice dreaming? Was wonderland real? Did the knave really steal the tarts or was he framed? Can you trust the Red Queen’s court or should you believe the Mock Turtle’s tears? And of course, which one gets the rattle in the end? Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum?

I guess Carroll was trying to say, “the choice is yours”. And that’s more responsibility than you might expect from a children’s story.

 

Tracy 'Firefly' Madison grrl-e-grrl.com contributor