How queer it seems to be going messages for a rabbit!
What does Alice mean by calling it “queer” to be “going messages for a rabbit,” and what does this reveal about her identity and social roles in Wonderland?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
Analysis
After the pool of tears and the caucus-race, Alice encounters the White Rabbit again. Panicked about his missing gloves and fan, he mistakes Alice for his maid, Mary Ann, and orders her to fetch them. Startled and still unsure of her standing in Wonderland, Alice runs to a small house labeled “W. Rabbit.” On the way in—and before discovering the unlabeled bottle that will make her outgrow the room—she reflects on the oddity of doing errands for a rabbit. This moment precedes the farcical siege of the house, with Bill the Lizard sent down the chimney and a hail of pebbles that turn to cakes. The quote captures the instant when Alice’s curiosity and compliance slide her into a subordinate role she recognizes as absurd.
What the line means
Identity, authority, and social satire
This moment crystallizes Carroll’s satire of arbitrary authority and social performance. The Rabbit’s misrecognition (“Mary Ann!”) functions as a naming that tries to fix Alice’s identity; she temporarily acts the part because the situation’s urgency and her curiosity override her skepticism. The line exposes how roles can be conferred by command rather than by essence—an echo of Victorian class dynamics and domestic hierarchies. Textually, the house scene will flip the power relation: after drinking from the unlabelled bottle, Alice’s expanded body blocks doors and windows, and she fends off the Rabbit’s crew with a single kick that launches Bill “like a sky-rocket.” The quote thus anticipates a lesson Alice keeps relearning in Wonderland: external labels and rules are unstable, and authority often rests on bluff and procedure rather than reason. Her wry self-commentary is the seed of the firmer resistance she will voice in the courtroom: questioning orders before obeying them.
By naming the errand “going messages,” Alice recognizes she has stepped into a servant’s role for an animal master—a comic reversal that exposes how easily social identities can be assigned and accepted.
The self-aware remark precedes Alice’s literal overgrowth in the Rabbit’s house, hinting that her physical changes will disrupt the very hierarchies she momentarily upholds by obeying the Rabbit’s command.
Links to themes and characters
The line connects to identity-and-growing-up via Alice’s self-scrutiny, and to rules-games-and-social-performance through her temporary adoption of the maid’s script. It brushes against arbitrary-authority-and-justice: the Rabbit’s command carries unearned power, later echoed by the Queen’s “Off with his head!” The episode also anticipates the Caterpillar’s “Who are you?”—Alice’s roles are contingent until she claims agency. With Bill the Lizard and the Rabbit’s labor gang, the scene parodies household procedure, bridging to the book’s broader critique of ritual, titles, and empty commands.