The Alice books written by Lewis Carroll have a theme of identity that recurs throughout both novels. One such question of identity is in the use of a name. What is the purpose of a name? What is the relationship between a name and what it identifies? A particular passage of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass presents this question to the reader as Alice enters the woods where nothing has a name:
‘What do you call yourself?’ the Fawn said at last. Such a soft sweet voice it had!
‘I wish I knew!’ thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, ‘Nothing, just now.’
‘Think again,’ it said: ‘that won’t do.’
Alice thought, but nothing came of it. ‘Please, would you tell me what you call yourself?’ she said timidly. ‘I think that might help a little.’
‘I’ll tell you, if you’ll move a little further on,’ the Fawn said. ‘I can’t remember here.’
The question emerges from the process of both Alice and the Fawn ‘losing their names,’ so to speak. One way to attempt to discover the purpose of something is to see what changes when you take it away, and what changes when you put it back. And as Alice and the Fawn regain their names, and interesting interaction occurs indeed:
So they walked on together though the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arms. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight, ‘and, dear me! you’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.
Alice and the Fawn get on pretty well without their names, which seems normal – especially in so extraordinary a world as Alice is venturing in. But when the Fawn recalls what it is, and more importantly what Alice is, only then does it get stricken with fear and run away as, say, a real-life fawn would typically do if a human were that close. What does this mean, though? What function, then, does a name serve?
Earlier in the chapter, the Gnat defines this function as a means to grab attention. It inquires what the use is in a name if no one answers to it. The problem with this resolution is that there are many things we give names to without them ever responding to their title. Think of trees, for example, or flowers. Squirrels, or grasshoppers. Under the Gnat’s presumption, there is no purpose to the titles we give them.
It’s Alice who directs the reader to what may be the answer that lies in the passage about the Fawn. “‘[Having names] is no use to them,‘ said Alice; ‘but it’s useful to the people who name them, I suppose.'”
We use names to categorize; to generalize things into groups. For the Fawn, it didn’t know what to assume of Alice until it could remember that she was a human, and humans mean danger. Humans mean predators. Humans mean run away. This is the function we use names for, much of the time. This doesn’t quite get into the purpose of given names (like ‘Alice,’ for example), but perhaps those are titles that better suit the purpose that the Gnat proposed.
Now, then, this passage evolves the concept of a name into both a question as well as a problem. What happens when you overgeneralize? That’s where stereotypes lie. That’s where biases lie. Though it was safe and adaptive for the Fawn to make a break for it the moment it knew Alice was human, it’s still true that Alice didn’t mean any harm. This is alright when we make it a situation between child and fawn, but what about between humans? What about the labels we use on other people, and the assumptions that these labels generate? That, that is where the real problem is.