Queen of Hearts

The Queen of Hearts is Carroll’s caricature of absolutism: a sovereign made of cardboard bravado whose power consists almost entirely in shouted sentences. On the croquet lawn of Chapter 8, she commands a game whose rules mutate at her whim—flamingos for mallets, hedgehogs for balls, soldiers for arches—so that winning means pleasing the monarch rather than obeying stable rules. Her language is pure performative force: the repeated order “Off with his head!” is less a legal penalty than a reflex that sustains an atmosphere of fear. Yet that fear relies on intermediaries who translate bluster into manageable routine. The King fusses over procedures and often commutes her decrees; the Gryphon whispers to Alice that the executions never actually happen. The result is an authority that looks absolute but functions only as show.

Carroll threads this performative sovereignty through scenes that test the limits of language and law. When the Queen commands the decapitation of the Cheshire Cat, the executioner, King, and Queen entangle themselves in a logical dispute about beheading a head without a body; the problem dissolves only when the Cat vanishes. In the courtroom, she pushes the King toward a verdict foregone by terror rather than evidence. Against this, Alice’s growing poise lets her ask what the shouting is for. The Queen’s sovereignty, exposed as a game sustained by spectatorship, becomes the foil that clarifies Alice’s maturing judgment.

Introduced midbook on the croquet ground, the Queen initially overwhelms Alice with volume and caprice. Every slight misstep—by card-gardeners, by hedgehogs, by guests—earns a death sentence. Yet the scene also supplies counterevidence: sentences are announced faster than they can be carried out, and the King’s procedural meddling dilutes them. The Cheshire Cat episode sharpens the point. Here the Queen’s command runs aground on the grammar of bodies and heads, and authority stalls in argument until the sign of resistance—the Cat’s grin—simply withdraws from the jurisdiction.

Her dominance returns in the trial of the Knave of Hearts, where she urges “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” The court mirrors the croquet lawn: rules exist to gratify the throne, not to search for truth. Witnesses (the Hatter, then the Cook) supply noise; a nonsense letter is treated as proof; jurors scribble their names to avoid forgetting themselves. As Alice literally grows during the proceedings, she becomes proportionate to the fraud she perceives. The turning point is not a clever rebuttal but a change of premise: she refuses to treat the court as real justice. By naming it “nothing but a pack of cards,” she collapses the spectacle; the Queen’s last resort—more shouting—cannot reassemble authority once the audience withdraws assent. The Queen’s arc thus moves from unchecked noise to silenced pageantry, teaching that sovereignty founded on terror and mutable rules depends entirely on collective pretense.