A Fly's Lifespan

“‘And what does it live on?’

‘Weak tea with cream in it.’

A new difficulty came into Alice’s head. ‘Supposing it couldn’t find any?’ she suggested.

‘Then it would die, of course.’

‘But that must happen very often,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully.

‘It always happens,’ said the gnat.

After this, Alice was silent a moment or two, pondering” (134).

The above quote occurs in Through the Looking Glass, and is a discussion of the bread and butter fly, that gorgeous thing in the picture above. Death often remains a threatening, shadowy presence through Alice in Wonderland.  We see it in the poems, in the discussions of animals dying, in the Queen of Hearts’ constant calls for decapitation. Yet the absurdity of these examples often belies the gravity of death. This quote is curious in the frankness of its comment on death and the tone with which it is delivered.  The line, “It always happens,” is a very true but also striking comment on the inevitability of death. But despite the acceptance of death it demonstrates, our tragic gnat speaks this line with a certain amount of sadness, and Alice’s silence after suggests the seriousness of this remark.

There are two great deaths in Alice in Wonderland to which this view of things is particularly applicable, that being the deaths of the two dream-worlds at the end of each story. There is no option of return to these dreams. The first is clearly Alice’s dream, and the second is either Alice’s or the red king’s dream. Both dreams, however, cease to exist when Alice awakens from them. In other words, they die.

These two dreams, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, share many qualities with the bread and butter fly: they are similarly absurd, made of familiar qualities arranged in new, strange ways, and also have a quality of fragility to them. They each thrive on a certain delicate fare—the bread and butter fly, its weak tea with cream, and the dreams, the imagination of a young girl. The life of the bread and butter fly acts as a metaphor for the dreams as a whole, its death the dream’s ending. Death is not near as much of a threat in Wonderland as the fact that Alice will age. And in doing so, she will lose the power to create these worlds. There will come a time when the dreams run out of sustenance and so must die. Though this is certainly inevitable—the gnat, after all, speaks of acceptance—the death of these dreams comes with a certain amount of pain. The vision of adult Alice at the end of Wonderland is happy, but the idea of “happy summer days” carries the suggestion of the end of those days (99). The poem ending Looking Glass is much more explicit in its sense of tragedy: “Autumn frosts have slain July” (209). There is sadness in the end of dreams just as there is in the death of the bread and butter fly.

Life and dreams become one in the final line of the ending poem of Through the Looking Glass. “Life, what is it but a dream?” (209). In their endings, there is essentially no difference between life and dreams. Life is a dream, from which we will eventually awaken. That awakening is our death. It is curious, perhaps, that if this is so, Alice awakens from one dream into another, but of course, death is guaranteed, life is not.

~Savannah Worth

Also, who doesn’t want a bread and butter fly t-shirt?