Through The Mad Hatter

The Mad Hatter is one of the only characters to appear in both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass where he appears as Hatta. Hatta is both very similar and very different to the Hatter just as Alice is very different from her Wonderland self. Everything in Wonderland is composed of pieces of Alice’s personality, “the dream that nearly obliterates her is composed of fragments of her own personality” (Auerbach 318). Since this is true every character in the Alice books is a reflection of Alice. Both Alice and the Mad Hatter are more mature in Through the Looking Glass than they were in Wonderland and this is seen in their interactions with the other characters and each other. Alice begins her journey in Wonderland as very immature
and childish. She is obsessed with adult things like manners, rules, and being polite. She calls others out on these things more than she does herself. Alice does not realize that this new place does not follow her old Victorian customs. Alice tumbles through Wonderland with a childlike curiosity and innocence. At the Mad- Tea Party she wants to know why the other people there do not make any sense when they are talking. “Alice tries to piece together the Dormouse’s story with the logic that she has carried over from the real world, a language that does not translate well into the apparent madness that the Hatter and the Hare speak fluently” (Beckman). Since she does not understand the story, she rudely interrupts the Dormouse periodically to ask questions without letting the Dormouse finish his sentences. Alice, as a child, would not consider this rude because she is curious and needs to know all of the details. However, she is outraged when the Hatter interrupts her in the middle of her sentence and “This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great discuss, and walked off” (Carroll 58). This shows the level of immaturity that Alice has in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter at the Mad Tea Party is at his most free.
He is imprisoned at teatime because he attempted to murder Time when he sung “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Bat.” The Hatter, March Hare, and Dormouse cannot escape the psychological prison of the time being six o’clock because they feel compelled to always be at tea. Ironically the Hatter seems the most free at this time. He says what he wants to and acts how he pleases; he does not care whom he offends. He is free to do anything except finish his tea. The Hatter is the ringleader of the little group stuck at teatime. He gets onto the March Hare for getting the wrong butter and the March Hare is upset and meekly replies “It was the best butter,” (Carroll 53) but the Hatter does not care. The butter does not suit the works and that is all that matters, so he yells at the March Hare as if the March Hare is beneath him. Also both the Hatter and the Hare push the Dormouse around. It is like how children (like Alice) can get away with things because they are children and supposedly do not know any better, but as soon as they leave their childhood behind they lose that
freedom. At the Knave of Heart’s trail, both Alice and the Hatter are different than they had been previously in the novel. Alice is bolder and more willing to call the Queen of Hearts out on her cruelty while the Hatter is meeker and scared. He runs like a frightened child because he is terrified of the Queen and what she might do to him even if she never carries out her sentences. In a sense Alice runs too when she says “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (Carroll 95) and leaves Wonderland. The Hatter reflects Alice’s fear of the Queen of Hearts and what a part of her wants to do when she gets to the witness stand. However, she gets super frustrated and just takes it out on the Queen and her court instead of running, but only because she is bigger than then and knows that there is nothing that they could do to hurt her. Because of this and the frustration they are causing her she destroys them for no reason other than they do not follow the same logic she does and therefor are unjust and wrong. This outburst shows yet another aspect of Alice’s immaturity. In contrast, when Alice gets to Looking Glass World she is more grown up. She does not get frustrated as easily. In addition she also does not make many of the characters angry at her and gets along with the citizens of the Looking Glass World fairly well including Hatta. In Wonderland, Alice and the Hatter did not necessarily get along because each thought the other to be rude. However in the Looking Glass World they actually get along fine. They do not call each other out for being rude and they do not argue at all. In fact, Alice does not seem to recognize the Hatter as Hatta. “They placed themselves close to where Hatta, the other messenger, was standing watching the fight, with a cup of tea in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other” (Carroll 172). Then Haigha (the messenger whom Alice meets first) says, “He’s only just out of prison and he hadn’t finished his tea when he was sent in…” (Carroll 172). Name changes generally show a significant change in a character and the Hatter is defiantly different in the Looking Glass World as Hatta.
When the Hatter changed his name, he became more somber and more mature in a way, but he lost his freedom. He can no longer do whatever he wants at a Mad-Tea Party that he created, but now works for the White King as a messenger. He may have escaped the Queen of Hearts and his prison of the Mad- Tea Party, only to lose the freedom that he had in his madness. He no longer can say whatever he wants or offend other people for no reason. Hatta has to conform to society. When the King tells him to talk he must answer. “‘Speak won’t you!’ cried the King. ‘How are they getting on with the fight?’ Hatta made a desperate effort, and swallowed a large piece of bread-and-butter. ‘They’re getting on very well,’ he said in a choking voice: ‘each of them has been down about eighty- seven times’” (Carroll
173). Alice is also much more grown up in the Looking Glass World, but also she is not as free and innocent as she was in Wonderland. Alice’s childhood ended at the end of Alice in Wonderland and while she retains some childlike qualities she is more grown up in Through the Looking Glass (Roth 25-26). She pursues becoming a queen like an adult climbing the corporate ladder. She obeys the Red Queen immediately because that is what is required of her to get up to the top. She helps the White Queen put herself back together only to follow her across the brook and find out more about how the Looking Glass World operates so that she can actually know the rules in this adventure unlike Wonderland where she stumbled blindly through. Alice takes the time to learn the rules and how things work and it is all to become a queen. After she accomplishes her goal the reader gets to see a glimpse of the old Alice as she is at her coordination and the food starts talking and she cannot eat any of it. She gets frustrated and beings to offend creatures (or food) because the rules do not make any sense to her at all. When she cut was introduced to the pudding and then the Red Queen sent it away. Alice called back the pudding and cut it and it yells at her (Carroll 200). Alice at this point becomes her defiant, confident, but lost self that she was in Wonderland. Alice becomes the Alice she was previously for a moment. It is like how the Hatter completely changed between the Mad-Tea Party and the Knave of Heart’s Trial. At the Mad-Tea Party, Carroll tries to destroy our perception of time. The Hatter and the Hare talk about Time as if he were a person. It illustrates the immaturity of both the Hatter and Alice. The Hatter allows himself to be trapped in teatime because he is stuck at six o’clock. Alice allows herself to get frustrated with the people there and never even tries to learn the rules of the game. As for Time, she is confused the tea party seems perpetual like it has been going on forever and will go on to eternity. Rackin says, “In the beginning of “A Mad Tea-Party,” however, Alice comes to a situation that has no temporal beginning and probably will never have an end” (54). However, that is only how the Mad Tea-Party appears. The Hatter tells Alice how it started with him “murdering the time” and then Time froze him at six o’clock. If something has a beginning then it must have an end and the Hatter got out of his metaphorical prison to become Hatta, a messenger to the White King. Since the tea party was stuck at six o’clock because of the Hatter’s crimes against Time, it would have ended as soon as the Hatter had left because the March Hare and the Dormouse did not do anything to warrant a punishment from Time. Alice and the Hatter both grow between the two books and their interactions with other characters show how they grow up and become more mature. Alice loses her childlike qualities to become “eerie specter of her former self” (Roth 27) by the end of her trip to the Looking Glass World. The Hatter also changed and became a new more mature person too and he got a new name to go along with his new self. The eerie order of the Looking Glass World does its best to show how Alice has changed and Hatta is there to be an exaggerated example of Alice’s change. The poem that begins Alice in Wonderland foreshadows this change in Alice and Roth interprets it as “… Alice, whom Carroll addresses anxiously from his vicarious position outside the poem’s action, surrender her as a child/native in a dream(ing) world that is now far off an inaccessible” (27). The poem that ends Through the Looking Glass, shows that things must age and grow old and that Alice cannot stay a child forever.