CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Quick Facts
- Word Count
- 2,093
Summary
In Chapter II, Alice’s body and language slide out of reliable proportion. After the “EAT ME” cake takes effect, she shoots up “like the largest telescope,” bids farewell to her distant feet—addressing them as “Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.”—and retrieves the golden key, only to find that her new size still bars entry to the garden. Rebuking herself, she cries until she produces a literal pool of tears. The returning White Rabbit drops his gloves and fan at Alice’s timid address; fanning herself, Alice suddenly shrinks, deduces the fan as the cause, and drops it just in time. Rushing to the tiny door, she slips and falls into the pool she made earlier. Swimming, she questions who she is—botches arithmetic and geography—and her recitation morphs into the parody “How doth the little crocodile.” Surmising Wonderland’s odd rules, she attempts diplomacy with a talking Mouse, addressing it first with Latin-case logic (“O Mouse”) and then in French (“Où est ma chatte?”), both disastrously invoking cats. After offending the Mouse again by praising Dinah and then dogs, she changes tack, promising to avoid both topics. The pool fills with creatures—a Duck, a Dodo, a Lory, an Eaglet—and Alice leads them toward the shore, carrying forward the consequences of mismanaged scale and misapplied lessons into a nascent social scene.
Analysis
From misproportion to method: body, language, and trial-and-error
Chapter II ties Alice’s bodily volatility to her faltering schoolroom logic, converting both into an experimental curriculum. Her hyperbolic growth—“opening out like the largest telescope”—produces comic estrangement as she drafts a parcel label to “Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.”: a joke about social address doubled as a crisis of agency, since her feet may no longer obey. This misproportion immediately bears consequences: though she grasps the golden key, she still cannot pass through the garden door. The rebuke—“You ought to be ashamed of yourself”—fails, and tears become a material hazard, anticipating Wonderland’s rule that emotion without calibration makes the world unmanageable.
When the White Rabbit returns “splendidly dressed,” his bureaucratic panic (“the Duchess… will be savage”) reintroduces anxious timekeeping, but the crucial discovery belongs to Alice: fanning herself shrinks her. She performs a miniature experiment—observe, infer, act—dropping the fan “just in time.” This is the chapter’s hinge from helpless fluctuation to causal testing, foreshadowing the Caterpillar’s mushroom methodology.
Identity interrogation intensifies through language. Attempting to verify the self, Alice mangles facts (“London is the capital of Paris”) and recitation, producing the crocodile parody in place of “How doth the little busy bee.” Carroll’s nonsense does more than amuse: it exposes rote learning as brittle under altered conditions. Her pragmatic blunders with the Mouse—vocative Latin (“O Mouse”), then French (“Où est ma chatte?”)—show grammar without audience-awareness becoming aggression by accident; “cat” functions here as a live semantic trigger, not a neutral vocabulary item. Yet Alice adapts: she retracts the topics (“We won’t talk about her… Are you fond of dogs?”) and, after another misstep, promises to avoid both. That shift from correctness to consideration marks early growth in social reasoning. The pool, filling with a Dodo and other creatures, literalizes the residue of prior errors while assembling the cast for the caucus that will satirize procedure next chapter. In sum, Chapter II relocates the problem of growing up from moral maxims to iterative adjustment—of body, of words, and of attention to others.
By noticing she has a Rabbit glove on and “measuring” against the table, Alice deduces the fan’s shrinking effect and drops it. This evidences a shift toward empirical problem-solving rather than wishing for a rulebook.
Her self-check—tables and capitals—fails (“four times five is twelve,” “London is the capital of Paris”), and her hymn turns into the crocodile verse. Carroll converts memorized virtue into punning predation, casting identity as revision under pressure.
Addressing the Mouse via Latin grammar (“O Mouse”) and French (“Où est ma chatte?”) provokes fear, then anger. Alice’s quick promise to avoid cats and dogs shows emerging ethical attention to context, not just correctness.
Scale changes and thresholds in Chapter II
- Grows to “more than nine feet,” retrieves the golden key, still cannot fit the door; tears accumulate into a pool.
- Shrinks rapidly while fanning; recognizes the fan as causal and discards it “just in time.”
- Slips into the pool of her own tears; swims with a Mouse and birds, then leads the group toward shore.