How cheerfully he seems to grin,
Why does Alice say “How cheerfully he seems to grin” during the crocodile parody, and what does this cheerful grin reveal about Wonderland’s language and morals?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Analysis
In Chapter II, after growing to nine feet and then shrinking because she fans herself with the White Rabbit’s fan, Alice is stranded in a hall, frustrated by the locked garden door and her fluctuating size. Confused, she wonders if she has “been changed in the night,” tests her memory, and finds her schoolroom knowledge scrambled: multiplication and geography come out wrong. To reassure herself, she attempts to recite a familiar moral poem, but what emerges is a transformation into “How doth the little crocodile,” a sly parody of Isaac Watts’s industrious bee. The quoted line, “How cheerfully he seems to grin,” comes as Alice realizes even her lessons have turned strange, just before she cries again and eventually ends up swimming in the literal pool of her tears, where her misapplied knowledge continues to mislead her.
What the cheerful grin means
From moral verse to linguistic skepticism
Placed after Alice’s botched multiplication and geography, the crocodile stanza dramatizes the collapse of rote learning under Wonderland’s conditions. Carroll directly parodies a widely memorized Victorian didactic poem, shifting its emblem of virtue (the bee) to a carnivorous emblem of deception (the crocodile). The “cheerful” grin is verbal irony: the tone contradicts the act it accompanies, inviting “little fishes” to their doom. This moment pushes Alice toward methodological doubt about language: if a familiar verse can invert itself, then signs—smiles, lessons, labels—cannot be trusted without inquiry. The grin also foreshadows the Cheshire Cat’s detachable smile, where expression floats free from body and intention. Between this crocodile’s friendly mask and the later Cat’s disembodied grin, Wonderland repeatedly asks Alice to question whether appearances communicate truth or merely perform a social script. The quote marks an early turn from memorized morality to experimental interpretation.
By replacing Watts’s industrious bee with a grinning predator, Carroll ridicules moral lessons learned by repetition alone. Alice’s “cheerful” crocodile exposes how polished surfaces—shining tails, smiling faces—can cover self-interest, urging her to interrogate lessons rather than recite them.
This grin prefigures Wonderland’s unstable expressions, culminating in the Cheshire Cat’s standalone smile. A smile here doesn’t signify kindness; it’s a tool. Alice must separate social nicety from genuine meaning.
Themes and characters in conversation
- Identity-and-growing-up: As Alice’s schoolroom verses warp, she confronts the fragility of the self defined by lessons and recitations. - Logic-language-and-nonsense: The line is a case study in ironic language—“cheerful” meaning the opposite of safe. - Education-and-mock-pedagogy: The parody critiques Victorian didacticism, showing how memorized virtue can be hollow. - Parody-and-intertextuality: Carroll’s intertext with Watts underwrites the joke’s bite. - Forward links: The grin anticipates the Cheshire Cat’s ambiguous smile and the Queen’s polite-seeming court procedures that mask arbitrary power.