Find out the truth behind the Ugly Face Carroll satirizes the social classes by manipulating the themes in chess and cards to represent the social hierarchy at the time making a parody of the English culture and social classes. In Alice, Carroll controls the cards theme by using spades and making his characters “lesser” people, peasants, and poor. He does a parody on the English court system in his poem “Tail”, The Fury says to the mouse to go to court with him, and basically the Fury says that the verdict, regardless, will be that he will “condemn [him] to death”, because “for really this morning [Fury] [has] nothing to do.” In other words, Fury plays the Queens position and because the Queen sees that her job as a judge and the jury is just entertainment. This is why Carroll plays around with the saying “off with your head” for things like a simple disagreement between the Queen and her subjects like executing the gardeners for planting white roses instead of red. Carroll also said that the gardeners were the 2, 5 and 7 of spades, so there he inverts playing cards as people and the king and queen are the king and queen of hearts. Carroll also toys around with the image of the Duchess. Though the madam herself was rather un-attractive, he makes her and the aristocratic classes look like bad parents and also that they indulge themselves in riches. He also throws in some man-characteristics into her face including the chin and the heavy wrinkles, even a mustache. Though the room is filled with pepper, an indication of the excess of riches, the baby is crying and its receiving blows from the terrible cook, and the Duchess blames all of this on her little boy, “speak roughly to your little boy,”… ‘he only [sneezes] to annoy you.” Later on, the boy does turn into a pig, Carroll does this to signify that the duchess’s parenting only lead to her son becoming a heartless, indulgent, and dirty person; a PIG! Another example of aristocratic parodies is about the Panther and the Owl. The Panther, the aristocrats, “took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat while the Owl,” --the peasants-- “had the dish as its share of the treat.” Carroll is describing the aristocrat’s ways of taking things from peasants because they can’t defend themselves, like the Owl. They’re vicious as panthers and they eat everything and leave neither rights nor food for the poor. In Through the Looking Glass, Carroll parodied the Walrus and the carpenter like he did with the panther and the owl. In the poem, the Walrus and the Carpenter befriend the oysters, they sing “O Oysters, come and walk with us!” out of the beach, where the oysters didn’t know they would eventually run out of water
