critique of alice essays

There are a few problems with the arguments made in David Daniel’s essay on Alice. One section that I found particularly problematic was the analysis on Alice’s encounter with the Mouse. David asserts that the Mouse “understands both French and English” (444). However, after Alice uttered a question in French, “the Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water” (Carroll). Despite this leap, the claim is never explicitly made that the mouse understood what Alice was saying. Rather, the Mouse could have merely been startled by any noise that it heard. Moreover, David Daniel connects this conversation to a broader claim that Alice is inconsiderate about the feelings of other individuals: “Alice demonstrates very quickly that she is unable to imagine what it is like to live in the world of the mouse, or indeed, any world but her own” (444). I feel like this claim is relatively unwarranted. The context of the conversation given by Lewis Carroll presents Alice as a more innocent character, with his description of her “soothing tone” of voice while she talks to the mouse (Carroll). Moreover, the Mouse later claims that he will tell Alice his “history, and you'll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs” (Carroll). If Carroll was presenting an argument about whether or not Alice could empathize with the animal, it seems likely that the Mouse would attribute its hatred for cats and dogs to a natural relationship shared amongst all mice. Instead, the Mouse attributes this fear to a personal history, implying that it is reasonable for Alice to be unaware of the context of the Mouse’s dislike for cats and dogs. Because of this, it seems unfair to expect Alice to be aware of the Mouse’s dislike for cats or dogs.

There are also problems in Bump’s essay about Alice. When referring to the croquet scene, Bump likens the flamingo’s pain to the face of the Other as described by Levinas. This presents the ethical dilemma central to Carroll’s book, that the “face of the other says, “Don’t kill me.” (453). However, I believe that the invocation of Levinas’s understanding of ethics undercuts the broader critique of speciesism presented in the beginning of the essay, which alludes to the animal kingdom as being a component in a broader family that we are all members of. This all-inclusive form of ethics in the opening of the essay seems incompatible with being fixated on the face of the flamingo, considering Zizek argues that “every preempting of the Other in the guise of his face relegates the Third to the faceless background” (Zizek). After all, “justice as blind thus means that, precisely, it cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other's face” (Zizek). It seems reasonable to assert that focusing ethics upon the face of the Other will always relegate the suffering of other entities into the background. While the animal’s suffering is viewed as an a priori issue, instances of environmental degradation and human poverty seem impossible to grasp with. In order to attain the type of familial ethical stance towards animals, it seems that ethics can not be situated around the shock and awe of an individual animal’s suffering. Instead, justice must truly be blind to alleviate the suffering of everyone.

Slavoj Zizek. “Smashing the neighbor’s face”. http://www.lacan.com/zizsmash.htm.