“Come, there’s no use in crying like that!”
Why does Alice tell herself “there’s no use in crying,” and what does this self-admonishment reveal about her early approach to Wonderland’s challenges?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole
Analysis
After chasing the White Rabbit and tumbling down the well, Alice finds herself in a lamp-lit hall lined with locked doors. A tiny golden key fits a fifteen-inch door that opens onto a beautiful garden, but she is too large to pass through. She drinks from a labeled bottle, shrinks to ten inches, and then realizes she has left the key on the glass table above her. Unable to climb the slippery leg, she becomes overwhelmed and begins to cry. In the middle of those tears, she abruptly checks herself and says, “Come, there’s no use in crying like that!” The narration adds that Alice often gives herself good advice, though she seldom follows it, recalling even attempts to “box her own ears” when playing games against herself.
What the line means
Self-governance amid bodily chaos
Placed between a loss of bodily proportion and a practical impasse, the sentence dramatizes Alice’s emerging self-governance. Her body has become alien—shrunk beyond ordinary use—so she compensates by adopting a supervisory stance over her emotions. The phrasing “there’s no use” frames feeling in utilitarian terms, measuring tears against outcomes, a comic echo of her schoolroom “rules” (e.g., about poison) that she invokes earlier. Irony undercuts the effort: her tears soon become the literal pool that complicates her progress, showing that tidy moral injunctions don’t reliably map onto Wonderland’s physical logic. The moment also foreshadows later scenes where Alice’s composed judgment hardens into open critique, as in the courtroom when she rejects “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” Here, the habit begins as private self-talk; later, it becomes public resistance. Carroll thus links interior regulation to the growth of critical independence.
Alice cannot control size or space, but she can try to control response. The admonition is a stopgap technology: regulate tears to regain agency. Its partial failure—tears soon cause problems—exposes Wonderland’s mismatch between tidy advice and unruly consequences.
Carroll underscores that Alice “was very fond of pretending to be two people.” This line is one half of that split: the governess-voice scolds the child-voice. The scene turns internal dialogue into character development, showing growth through self-argument rather than external instruction.
Themes and character links
- Identity and growing up: Alice tests adult-sounding maxims against experience, learning that willpower alone cannot master Wonderland. - Bodily change and autonomy: Her self-command compensates for a body that won’t cooperate. - Education and mock pedagogy: Earlier, she checks for “poison” by rote; here, she applies a moral maxim. Both prove only partly helpful, pushing her toward experimentation (later refined by the Caterpillar’s mushroom). The White Rabbit catalyzes the chase that lands her here; the sister’s calm frame on the riverbank contrasts with Alice’s practical self-talk inside the dream.