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The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll's Reader
Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Rose Lovell-Smith
Despite the evident connection between many Tenniel illustrations and Carroll's own illustrations, then, this is clearly Tenniel's own interpretation. But if this is so, what is to be made of it? My thesis in this paper is that through his animal drawings, Tenniel offers a visual angle on the text of Alice in Wonderland that evokes the life sciences, natural history, and Darwinian ideas about evolution, ideas closely related by Tenniel to Alice's size changes, and to how these affect the animals she meets. (8) As I will show, this is partly a matter of Tenniel's "drawing out" an underlying field of reference in Carroll's text. I will also argue, however, that when Tenniel's approach to his animal subjects is compared to that in earlier and contemporary illustrated natural history books, the viewer is conscious of resemblances which indicate that Tenniel's pictures are best situated and read in that context. The effect of the initial sequence described above, for instance, is that as chapter 3 unfolds Alice's encounters with various different creatures, the illustrations begin to re-create Alice itself as a kind of zany natural history for children. Our post-Freudian view of Alice in Wonderland tends to be of a private, heavily encoded, inward exploration or adventure. But Tenniel's reading, I would argue, offers us an outward-looking text, a public adventure, a jocular reflection on the natural history craze, on reading about natural history, and on Darwin's controversial new theory of natural selection. I will return to Tenniel as reader later, but in order to establish that this interpretation is no mere add-on but a genuine response to the text, I must first deal with science, natural history, and evolutionary ideas as themes that Carroll himself originates.
Interest in contemporary ideas about the animal kingdom is signaled early on in Alice in Wonderland, in chapter 2, when Alice finds that the well-known children's recitation piece "How doth the little busy bee" has been mysteriously ousted from her mind by new verses that celebrate a predator, the crocodile. Carroll's parody of Isaac Watts's pious poem for children (9) thereby establishes his book's reference to a newer, more scientific view of nature--approaching a controversially Darwinist view. It does this by mocking and displacing the worldview often called natural theology. According to natural theology, a set of convictions much touted in children's reading, God's existence can be deduced from the wondrous design of his creation. The universe is benign and meaningful, a book of signs (like the industrious bee) of God's benevolent and educative intentions just waiting to be read by humans. Carroll's crocodile, all tooth and claw, signifies other things: amorality, the struggle for existence, predation of the weaker by the stronger.
