Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? The Mad Tea Party. View source. History Talk 0. She delightfully explains: "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles — I believe I can guess that.
Alice's confidence is shaken: "I do," she says, "at least — at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing you know. But here, of course, Alice is speaking in the context of time's absence.
There is no time. This is, even in Wonderland, "another world. Alice cannot make the creatures understand this, however, and finally she sighs. It's him. Time is thus suddenly personified and becomes the source of much punning and comic relief. Alice participates in this nonsense in all seriousness, saying that she has to "beat time" when she learns music, even though she has "perhaps" never spoken to "him.
Then the Mad Hatter launches into a satirical parody of another, famous children's verse: "Twinkle, twinkle little bat! The Mad Hatter explains that his fight with Time and accusation of murder happened the last time that he was reciting that verse.
So the disaster with Time is closely related to the Mad Hatter's distortion of the nursery rhyme. Filling his version with bats and flying tea-trays, the Mad Hatter's rhyme increases the comic personification of Time. The Mad Hatter has animated the inanimate star as a bat and has made an inanimate object live.
The Mad Tea-Party is filled with atrocious puns in conversation. The pun is determined by the coincidence of two words that sound so alike that relevant information is muddled. And here the play on words is a way of freeing meaning from conventional definition. The Dormouse, for instance, tells a story about three sisters who lived in a treacle well and were learning to "draw" treacle molasses.
Alice asks: "But I don't understand. Where did they draw treacle from? The Dormouse's illogic continues to frustrate Alice. Playing on words that begin with the letter M, the Dormouse describes the sisters as drawing "all manner of things — everything that begins with an M such as mousetraps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness — you know you say things are 'much of a muchness' — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness!
With that rude remark, Alice storms away in disgust. She has still not succeeded in getting any closer to the reality she seeks. At the tea-party, she has not even received any tea or food.
Alice goes back to the table with the key and uses the mushroom to grow to a size that she can reach the key, then to shrink back to the size that she can fit through the door.
She goes through the door and at last arrives at the passageway to the garden. When Alice discovers that Time is a person and not merely an abstract concept, she realizes that not only are social conventions inverted, but the very ordering principles of the universe are turned upside down. However, the party has not moved past the month of March, the month during which the March Hare goes mad. The riddle seems to have no answer and exists solely to perpetuate confusion and disorder.
In Wonderland, chaos is the ruling principle, but a strange sense of order still exists. Though riddles need not have answers, language must retain some kind of logic.
The Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse point out to Alice that saying what she means and meaning what she says are not the same thing. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
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