I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears!
What does Alice mean by fearing she’ll be “drowned in my own tears,” and how does this line frame her early crisis in Wonderland?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Analysis
Moments earlier, Alice has grown to more than nine feet high, scolded herself for crying, and then wept enough to flood the hall. After the White Rabbit drops his fan and gloves, she picks them up; fanning herself, she unknowingly shrinks rapidly until she is tiny again. Rushing back to the garden door, she finds it shut and the key atop the glass table. As she laments her situation, she slips and splashes into a pool—the very tears she shed while gigantic. Floating in this salty miniature sea, she reflects ruefully on her earlier outburst, imagining a grimly comic punishment tailored by her own excess: to be drowned by what she has produced. The line crystallizes this moment of helplessness amid wildly unstable size and mood.
What the line means
From moral causality to experimental thinking
Alice’s language—“punished”—projects Victorian didactic expectations onto Wonderland, but the scene undercuts that framework. The pool exists not as a moral sentence pronounced by an authority, but as a consequence of scale and timing: she cried while enormous. The line prefigures the book’s recurrent collisions between inward states and outward absurdities (failed recitations, the caucus-race, the trial). It also foreshadows the later courtroom, where “punishment” is arbitrary rather than earned. Here, however, the peril is self-generated and comically literal, urging a shift in strategy. Shortly afterward, Alice stops moralizing and begins trying practical approaches (e.g., testing objects’ effects, later calibrating the mushroom). The quote marks that hinge: a child’s punitive self-talk proves useless in a world governed by unpredictable transformations, pushing her toward empirical adjustment rather than guilt-driven restraint.
What reads like a figure of speech becomes a physical hazard. Carroll converts sentimental excess into setting, satirizing moral melodrama while letting Alice experience its consequences in slapstick, not sermon.
Alice frames the problem as deserved punishment, but the real issue is lost bodily autonomy: her size swings spawn hazards (the pool) that moral resolve alone cannot fix.
Links to themes and characters
The line threads bodily-change-and-autonomy (her tears magnified by size), identity-and-growing-up (self-rebuke and confusion), and logic-language-and-nonsense (metaphor made literal). It anticipates arbitrary-authority-and-justice in the final trial by introducing “punishment” language early. Alice’s encounter with the White Rabbit’s fan precipitates her shrinking into the pool; the ensuing crowd of creatures (Dodo, Lory, Eaglet) leads to the caucus-race, extending the satire from private emotion to communal procedure.