Good-bye, feet!
Why does Alice say “Good-bye, feet!” and what does this comic address reveal about her changing body and sense of self in Chapter II?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Analysis
Immediately after exclaiming “Curiouser and curiouser!” Alice begins to grow rapidly, “opening out like the largest telescope that ever was.” As her feet recede from view, she jokingly bids them farewell and imagines sending them boots by carrier, complete with a mock address label: “Alice’s Right Foot, Esq., Hearthrug, near the Fender.” The humor is cut short when her head hits the hall’s ceiling. Though she snatches up the golden key and hurries to the tiny garden door, her new size makes entry impossible. Frustrated, she scolds herself for crying—and then weeps so copiously that she creates the pool of tears that will soon sweep her and various creatures along. The remark “Good-bye, feet!” occurs at the threshold of this growth crisis, when control over her body (and, by extension, her agency) begins to slip away.
What “Good-bye, feet!” means
Bodily autonomy, social ritual, and the self split
The quip compresses several of Chapter II’s concerns. First, it visualizes autonomy under strain: the fear that her feet might “not walk the way I want to go” foregrounds a will/body disconnect that recurs until the mushroom teaches calibrated self-regulation. Second, the mock address (“Esq., Hearthrug, near the Fender”) satirizes Victorian forms—postal etiquette, gift-giving calendars, and polite titles—by applying them to a nonsensical situation. Carroll converts moral-social machinery into a child’s management game, foreshadowing the later caucus-race’s empty procedure. Third, the telescope simile and farewell anticipate the chapter’s cause-effect spiral: growth leads to blocked passage, to self-scolding, to a literal flood of tears. The humor therefore carries consequence, pointing to how Wonderland turns minor linguistic play into material predicaments. Finally, the moment dovetails with the chapter’s identity questions (“Who in the world am I?”): once the body fragments into parts with imagined wills, the unity of “I” becomes negotiable, priming Alice’s later struggle to name and measure herself.
By treating her feet as independent recipients of gifts, Alice admits she may not command them. This comic distance literalizes a child’s fear of losing control over her own body as she grows and changes.
The mock address and Christmas-boot plan transpose rigid social rituals onto nonsense, suggesting that etiquette can become mechanical logistics—no more meaningful than Wonderland’s arbitrary rules.
Links to themes and characters
The quote anchors bodily-change-and-autonomy by dramatizing loss of control, and it feeds identity-and-growing-up through the split between “I” and body parts. Its postal joke aligns with logic-language-and-nonsense and foreshadows rules-games-and-social-performance scenes (the caucus-race; the trial). It centers Alice; the nearby reappearance of the White Rabbit underscores her reactive, pursuit-driven movement while size fluctuations keep thwarting her goals.