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Serpentine Alice

“Little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know." 
"I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, why, then
they're a kind of serpent; that's all I can say."

 

Critical Notes

Alice’s meeting with the pigeon is one of the least famous scenes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Although the scene appears almost word for word in Carroll’s original Alice’s Adventures Underground, many illustrators, filmmakers and other adapters leave this scene out.  One reason for this might be the practical difficulty of portraying Alice with the long neck in live-action film versions. Another reason could be that leaving this short, seemingly unconnected scene out makes room for including more elements of Through the Looking Glass. 

On the other hand, although this scene is not as famous in popular culture as many of Alice’s other encounters, many critics have attempted to interpret the odd little exchange.  Rose Lovell-Smith has written a very interesting article, “Eggs and Serpents: Natural History Reference in Lewis Carroll’s Scene of Alice and the Pigeon,” in which she outlines many of the critical perspectives that this scene has prompted.  Some persistent interpretations include the religious, the psychoanalytic, and the natural historical.  The religious interpretation connects Alice’s transformation into a serpent with the Biblical serpent in Genesis, who tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.  This interpretation equates Alice with the role of temptress, perhaps reflecting Carroll’s (possible) temptation to view Alice as a sexual object (12).  However, this interpretation has often been criticized as flimsy, for, considering Dodgson’s devout Christianity, it seems unlikely that he would cast his heroine even for a moment in such an evil light.  The Psychoanalytic approach sees the Serpentine Alice as a moment of masculinization; her long neck, of course, being interpreted as a phallic symbol (and indeed Carroll’s own drawing is rather suggestive).  Finally, Lovell-Smith’s own interpretation emphasizes the importance of the Victorian era’s penchant for natural history.  She argues that “the natural history context of this scene and the Pigeon mother’s mis-identification of Alice’s species imply that Alice here is displaced from the position of human observer of nature to that of an observed—and somewhat puzzling—fellow creature” (1-2).  This scene is also strongly connected to Alice’s search for her identity and her anxiety connected with change.

Images

Click on an artist from the right hand column to see how "Long-neck Alice" has been portrayed by different illustrators over the years. Note that some prominent illustrators (such as Tenniel) leave this scene out of their editions. One likely reason for this is that some illustrators, who allotted only so much space and time to Chapter 5, chose to illustrate the "Father William" set and leave out this scene. Other critics have speculated that Tenniel left out the "Long Neck" Alice to avoid "anything that might unintentionally suggest an indecent [i.e. phallic] meaning" (Lovell-Smith 35). Yet, while it is possible that phallic imagery could be read into this scene, it seems to me that Carroll's Alice looks more like a tree than anything else.

 

Media

Although the 1951 Disney version does include Alice's encounter with the Pigeon, the animators chose to depict her growth as affecting her whole body, instead of simply her neck. Unfortunately I could not find a clip to post here.

 

See Also

Lenny's Alice in Wonderland Site also offers an interesting explanation for the Long Neck Alice.

 

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