Morals?
November 25, 2009In class we were instructed to ‘play student’ and write an in-class essay using one of the Duchess morals in chapter 9 to explain Alice’s journey through Wonderland. We were told the prompt before the in-class essay and we were allowed to pick six quotes to improve our essay.
The night before the in-class essay I sat in front of the book and stared at it dumbfounded. I examined each quote and couldn’t find anything that made sense in the essay. I didn’t know what to do. Time was ticking and I was not clicking. Finally I decided to take a break and go onto Facebook.
There I started to talk to one of my peers about it. He helped me realize that maybe the quotes were not supposed to make sense. I took the information my peer provided me with and added on to it.
“Maybe the quotes are not supposed to make sense” were the exact words I needed to hear. It was all starting to make sense now. I decided to use the quote “everything has a moral” as the Duchess’s moral and say that may be not everything has a moral. After the Duchess is trying to think up a moral to one of the statements Alice said “maybe there isn’t one” I believe that Carroll uses Alice to tell his readers that maybe everything doesn’t have a moral. This makes me think of another thing.
I am curious what is your take on the Duchesses morals? Do you agree with my theory?
If not I would be pleased to hear another perspective.
The "Liddell" Things 
I agree, sort of. You can’t make a moral out of everything. Well you can, but it doesn’t make sense and it’s not really a moral. There are many moral that the duchess came up with that made no sense, but if you looked at them long enough and took them apart you could make something of it. That’s what we had to do with a lot of Alice’s story, we had to find things. It’s possible that all the lessons and morals we see don’t really exist, and we just make things up to fit our need for answers to this odd story.