ABSTRACT
Given Carroll’s ideological commitments to traditional notions of human sovereignty over animals and his resistance to Darwinian concepts, and given further that these commitments undergird his obsessive jokes about nature, animals, and eating in the Alice books, is it possible to be a modern Darwinist and otherwise to hold modern attitudes about animals while still enjoying Carroll’s jokes? I would argue that this is certainly possible. However, if the reader is not sympathetic to Carroll’s anti-Darwinian worldview (and most readers will not be), then the resulting comedy will necessarily seem much bleaker than Carroll designed. This blacker black humor is unavoidable, given contemporary sensibilities; for instance, it seems impossible for modern readers to simply laugh at Alice’s flamingo-as-croquet mallet, as Alice does, without sympathy for the flamingo’s plight, being held upside down as it is and repeatedly concussed against the prickly hard bodies of fractious hedgehogs. We also feel for the hedgehogs, though, again, Alice does not. The Alice books have enjoyed undiminished popularity since their first publication, but they have become darker texts than they were when Carroll first wrote them or drew his first Mock Turtle. Each year that passes makes “The Walrus and the Carpenter” an increasingly disturbing comedy. There may be a point at which the Alice books become too painful altogether for modern readers, and especially modern children, but that point has not yet been reached; contrariwise, we may simply expand our capacity for dark humor and thus continue to laugh at the relish with which the child-oysters are polished off, even if we come to develop a far greater sympathy with oysters than that held by the Victorians or Carroll himself.
