Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

The court looks real and official to Alice—just as she thinks it should look based on the things she's learned and read. She seems to think, too, that it will run like a real court, dispensing justice impartially, providing a logic and fairness—a rules were rules exist and are followed—that are absent in the rest of Wonderland. That the King is the judge clues the reader in that this will certainly not be the case. By presenting a trial that Alice thinks will finally provide order and justice, and then making that trial ridiculous, Carroll suggests that law in the real world, too, may not operate as purely and cleanly as Alice naively and innocently thinks it does.

The image of the jurors writing on their slates conjures the idea of serious people taking notes in order to ensure they are ready to give a fair verdict. The reality that they are writing down their own names puts the lie to that initial image, and severely outrages Alice's sense of how a trial should be. Alice steals the one jurors pencil in order to maintain the decorum of the trial, to make the trial seem more like what she thinks a trial should be.

The trial begins normally enough. But with the Hatter's entrance as a witness the sense of the trial as a logical, justice-infused affair immediately disappears. First the King and Hatter become confused over the word "his," which the Hatter interprets over-technically. Yet the King's response is over-the-top and impossible—to threaten to behead someone if they act nervous is certain to make them nervous, of course.

Alice’s growing is no longer determined by her eating and drinking or by some other catalyst object like the White Rabbit’s gloves, her body suddenly grows of its own accord – this is the scary part of growing up for any child, the feeling of being out of control of your own body. Meanwhile, the animals such as the Doormouse are all anxious to avoid drawing attention to themselves while the Hatter becomes visibly nervous on the stand and the March Hare proactively defends himself against what seems like it will be a false implication from the Hatter to save himself—in other words, the very violent "justice" promised by the court warps the testimony of those in the court.

The Hatter’s difficulty in remembering and recounting the events of a particular tea party reminds us of Alice’s own difficulties remembering. Just like nightmares tend to do, this dream world shows Alice her anxieties exaggerated. This time, she feels acutely the danger of forgetting and being removed from the rhymes and innocence of childhood when the Hatter is told that if he doesn’t remember, he’ll be killed. At the same time, those running the trial again turn to violence as the means of controlling the actions of witnesses (even if the witnesses themselves can't control those actions).

The cook and the Doormouse offer a moment of levity in the trial—the cook with her characteristic obstinacy (which shows the King's constant threats of violence to be all show and no actual bite) and the Doormouse's characteristic trait of seeing treacle as the only meaningful detail. The comedy of the situation also serves to make it more impactful when Alice is suddenly chosen as the next witness. As a witness, Alice will be not just a watcher of the trial. She will be part of it, experiencing its administration of "justice."