47 pages • 1 hour read
Lewis CarrollThrough The Looking Glass
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1871A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Tweedledum And Tweedledee”
Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who are standing motionless. They have “DUM” and “DEE” embroidered on their collars, but otherwise, they look like twins. Alice wants to see if the word “Tweedle” is on their shirts’ backs, but they suddenly move and tease her that they aren’t wax statues. Alice shakes both their hands so that they will not feel like she picked a favorite boy. She recites a poem about the Tweedles fighting since they love to wrestle. Before they fight, Alice asks for directions out of the woods, which she wants to get out of before dark, but they keep ignoring her.
They recite a long poem called “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (125). In the poem, a walrus and a carpenter are walking through sand, lamenting that the sea has dried up. They invite baby oysters to join their walk but end up eating the friendly oysters in the end. Alice says she likes the Walrus better since he cried over eating the oysters, but the Tweedles say he ate the most oysters. She picks the Carpenter next, but they explain he ate as many as he could. Alice is confused by what the twins call the logic of the poem.
The Tweedles then gather their gear to fight. They don rugs, helmets, and pillows in preparation to box. The boys complain of ailments like toothache as excuses if they lose. Alice notices a large crow, who flies down toward them. Alice and the Tweedles hide in the trees while the crow kicks up a tornado, sending someone’s shawl flying.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Wool and Water”
Alice grabs the shawl and spots the White Queen, looking disheveled. Alice gives the Queen her shawl back and untangles her messy hair. The Queen admits she needs a maid to take care of her, then informs Alice about more strange things, like how you can have jam tomorrow and yesterday, but not today. Alice is confused by this, but the Queen says she has a backward memory. Alice questions her about this unbelievable memory; with a backward memory, the Queen explains, can predict the future. The Queen starts shouting about how she is going to prick her finger on her brooch. She cries about the pain, but when it actually happens, she has already reacted.
The Queen tells her she is 101 years old, which Alice cannot believe: “‘There’s no use trying,’ [Alice] said: ‘one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. [...] ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’” (139). The White Queen’s shawl soars in the wind, but she catches it this time. Then she turns into a ball of wool, and Alice is suddenly in a cramped shop.
The wool-ball is a sheep who is knitting. The sheep asks her what she is going to buy. When Alice looks at the items in the shop, they turn blurry; she can only see the shelves around them, not the items themselves. The sheep asks if she can row, as they are suddenly in a boat on the river. Alice rows them past beautiful rushes, picking many of them, though the prettiest ones are outside her grasp. She gathers the plants, then they are back in the shop.
Alice purchases an egg, but the sheep makes her reach for it on the shelf. The egg keeps moving away from her, turning into tree limbs as she climbs further back into the shop.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Humpty Dumpty”
The egg Alice is following increases in size and looks more and more human until it becomes Humpty Dumpty. He is talking to himself and does not address her until she greets him multiple times. She asks him questions, which he takes as riddles, about why he is sitting on such a narrow ledge. Humpty Dumpty is indignant, thinking her riddles are easily answered, since he has great balance, and the King promised he would send men to fix him if he ever fell. Alice knows Humpty’s story from the classic nursery rhyme, so she laughs at this.
Humpty Dumpty tries to ask her riddles, such as what she said her age was when she never told him. When the subject of language and poetry is mentioned, he says he makes words mean whatever he wants them to. He also knows every line of poetry, so Alice asks him to help her analyze “The Jabberwocky,” the poem from Chapter 1. She recites the beginning verse for him, and he explains that “brillig” means four o’clock, the time for boiling dinner; “slithy” means lithe and slimy; and “toves” are a creature like a badger, lizard, and corkscrew.
Then, to Alice’s dismay, Humpty Dumpty starts reciting a poem. At the end of the poem, Humpty abruptly tells her goodbye. Not wishing to be rude, Alice says her farewells, but he replies he won’t remember her if she returns, since she looks just like anyone else. Alice huffs under her breath that he is an unsatisfactory person, walking off and hearing a crash that shakes the forest.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The theme of Navigating a World With Nonsensical Rules continues from the moment Alice enters the looking-glass world to when she leaves. In this section, the Tweedles and the White Queen offer Alice many strange statements to consider. Tweedledee and Tweedledum confound her definition of logic when they both make arguments about the meaning of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” that seem plausible. Alice feels as though they cannot both be right, but neither can she say which is wrong. The poem does not have one correct interpretation, which challenges Alice’s assumption that poetry should convey an objective truth. The poem’s moral ambiguity makes Alice uncomfortable. As another test of her beliefs, the Tweedles try to get her to be the referee for their fight. Alice does not approve of violence and does not see why they have to fight, again questioning the rules of this weird land: “‘Then you’d better not fight to-day,’ said Alice, thinking it a good opportunity to make peace. ‘We must have a bit of a fight [...],’ said Tweedledum” (132-33). Alice thinks their fight is ridiculous since they are fighting over a rattle, so she tries to stop their fight and make them feel “a little ashamed of fighting for such a trifle” (132). Though it seems natural for the Tweedles to recite fabled poems and physically attack each other, these actions confuse and shock Alice.
Both the Tweedles’ poem and their fight point toward truths about the world that adults tend to take for granted. In most situations (and poems), there is no single, objective truth or answer, especially when it comes to questions of morality. Likewise, the Tweedles’ fight over the rattle mirrors both the minor spats that siblings engage in as children and the petty disputes that often underlie violent conflict in the real world. Alice’s inability to understand moral ambiguity or petty violence reflects her youthful perspective, but the questions she raises also critique the hypocrisy and immaturity of the ostensibly mature adult world. The episode with the Tweedles suggests therefore that there is a cost to growth and maturity.
The White Queen tests Alice’s ability to adapt new and confusing information to her understanding of the world. The Queen’s backward memory is surprising to Alice. The more the White Queen explains how her memory works in “both ways”—enabling her to predict things before they happen because they have already happened in her memory—the more disoriented Alice becomes. She cannot fathom how the queen can interpret backward time, but she also cannot deny that she is telling the truth when the Queen predicts pricking her finger before it happens. Knowing that harm is coming, Alice wants to stop the Queen from hurting her finger in the first place, but the Queen states she cannot because it has already happened in the future. Again, Alice’s confusion rises. The scene exemplifies the theme of Navigating a Nonsensical World, with an emphasis on nonsense. When Alice refuses to believe that the Queen is 101 years old, the conversation leads to one of the most famous quotes in Carroll’s oeuvre: “‘There’s no use trying,’ [Alice] said: ‘one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. [...] ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’” (139). Alice’s encounter with the White Queen highlights that part of her character growth requires her to accept the existence of the seemingly impossible events, rather than striving to decipher them. Alice must expand her imagination to encompass ways of encountering time and causality outside of her experience.
Poetry is at the heart of Alice’s encounters with the Tweedles and Humpty Dumpty. Carroll uses these poems and Alice’s engagement with them to experiment with wordplay and textual formatting. Humpty Dumpty, himself a character from a poem, explicates “The Jabberwocky” for Alice, giving her a foothold in the poem’s apparent nonsense, which helps Alice gain confidence in a land of surprising and unfamiliar creatures, rituals, settings, and characters. Humpty’s explanations suggest that the meaning of words like “brillig” and “slithy” lies in their evocative sounds rather than in dictionary definitions (102): “brillig” shares “b” and “g” sounds with “boiling,” one piece of its denominative meaning, just as “slithy” shares “sl” and “y” sounds with “slimy” and the “th” sound with “lithe.” The poem’s wordplay suggests that meaning can be intuitive, rather than objective, pointing to a way of decoding the world different from the one Alice habitually uses. The fact that Humpty Dumpty, a character from a children’s poem, explains the poem to Alice also echoes the ways that children absorb language through stories and nursery rhymes, learning its rules and meanings through context rather than textbooks.
Related Titles
By Lewis Carroll
