Most of Alice’s non-human interlocutors (chess pieces, mice, eggs, toads, walrus, lion, unicorn, flowers), however, seem to be playing a different game than Alice. They claim to not know what Alice “means” or else proclaim, as Humpty Dumpty does, that a word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less” (p. 219). Alice’s conversations, when they don’t end unsatisfactorily in silence, tend to go in a circle.

For the child, the ability to have and share feelings might even be inversely related to language acquisition, so that paradoxically the more skilled the child is in language, the less able she is to express the intensity of her first feelings, which are by definition primal and non-verbal. The creatures of Wonderland, from kittens to mad hatters, constitute a kind of mute allegory for the things like hunger, love, and sex that Alice feels, and they seem difficult to communicate to her interlocutors. An unsure speaker is simply one whose words don’t feel real. But in Alice what is real and what is fantasy? Language enables the child to name the world and exert mastery over it; but in relation to feelings, language can seem impoverished, like a starving of one’s desires. The language of one’s own dream may not be all nourishing, after all. After waking, Alice’s sister tells her to run in and have some tea. And in Looking-Glass, Alice promises the kitten a breakfast accompanied by a tale of the Walrus and his oysters—as if poetry were nourishment.

In Alice tears are shed, creatures are taken for a stroll and then devoured, and Queens scream their heads off. Yet if strong feelings and unreasonable desires abound in the Alice books, understanding the feelings of others is scarce. In chapter I of Looking-Glass, the Queen, after looking at the King’s memorandum book that Alice has written in, proclaims to the King: “That’s not a memorandum of your feelings!” (p. 163). After the mouse tells his sad tale of persecution, Alice asks, “But why do you call it sad?” (p. 36). Having feelings is one thing; understanding someone else’s is another. After hearing Tweedledee and Tweedledum’s story of the Walrus and the Carpenter, even the compassionate Alice says: “I like the Walrus best . . . because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters” (p. 195). Alice is uncertain what amount she should feel, which is to say her feelings feel like guesses. Alice first spied the Mock Turtle

sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock. . . . She pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon. And the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know.” . .