Forcing an Answer

The Hatter, or the Mad Hatter as many of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fans so affectionately call him, is one of the more well-known characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland due to his rather unique personality. Then again, everyone in wonderland has a unique personality, so you could then argue that the Hatters personality is completely normal, but that’s another story. One of the more well-known if not the most well-known thing about the Hatter is that he asks Alice a perplexing riddle, a riddle that he says has no answer. A riddle without an answer isn’t something that would be considered so very shocking when compared to the other peculiar occurrences in wonderland, but what is a bit more curious is how some people in the “real” world decided to give the unanswerable an answer.

In the introduction to The Annotated Alice Gilbert Chesterton expresses concern over how he fears Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will eventually end up being over analyzed by literary analysts and scholars looking to find meaning behind a simple children’s story. This is a perfectly legitimate fear, as if the book were to be  over analyzed, the simple message of the book might be lost. Perhaps his fear has been realized, seeing as how in The Annotated Alice there seems to be an annotation analyzing the hidden meaning of almost everything. In fact, the frequency of annotations and hidden meanings makes me wonder how many of the annotations actually have any merit to them. For example, lets take the Hatters riddle, “why is a raven like a writing desk?”. Lewis Carroll himself said that he did not intend for there to be an answer to the riddle, but nevertheless puzzle experts and analysts alike forced answers upon the riddle, finding answers such as “Poe wrote on both”, a reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s infamous poem The Raven. Carroll himself gave the answer “Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!”, with the misspelling of the word never being a play on the word raven. However he only gave an answer after his readers demanded one of him; in a sense, an answer was forced upon the riddle.

The question that then comes to mind is how many of the symbols, references, and hidden meanings that are mentioned in the annotations are merely forced concepts that Carroll never even intended to be there?

When reading many of the annotations in The Annotated Alice, it always manages to shock me as to how obscure some of the symbolism and hidden meanings in the annotations are. It doesn’t feel as though Lewis Carroll actually intended for there to be a connection between some of the events in the book and some of the events in his own personal life as many of the annotations say, but it seems more as if  though scholars and analysts merely found vague and obscure connections between Carroll’s life and what he was writing and then decided that Carroll was being symbolic and referencing his own personal life in his story.

The question I suppose being asked in the end then is, how many of the annotations that depict hidden meanings and references are actually real? Are all of the hidden meanings, references, and symbols that the annotations point out really put in by Lewis Carroll or were they simply made by analysts who found coincidence? Needless to say there are some obvious symbols in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that The Annotated Alice points out just fine and that are quite clearly true, but there are others that seem to me as if they are like the answers to the Hatters riddle, completely forced and out-of-place.