White Queen (Through the Looking Glass)
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The White Queen is a fictional character who appears in Lewis Carroll's fantasy novella Through the Looking-Glass. With a motif of Through the Looking-Glass being representations of the game of chess, the White Queen could be viewed as a protagonist and ally to Alice, although she is perhaps less helpful than the Red Queen in terms of the information she divulges. Her ability to move so swiftly away from enemies, leaving the White King far behind, reflect on the abilities of a queen in chess, as well as serving as a contrast for the Red Queen's habit of confronting enemies head on.
[edit] Plot
Along with her husband the White King, she is one of the first characters to be seen in the story. She first appears in the drawing room just beyond the titular looking-glass as a regular-sized animate chesspiece unable to see or hear Alice. The Queen is looking for her daughter Lily, and Alice helps them by lifting the White Queen and King onto the table, leading them to believe they were thrown up by an invisible volcano.
When Alice meets the Red Queen and joins the Chess game, she takes the place of a white pawn, Lily being too young to play. She does not meet the White Queen as a human-sized character until the Fifth Square. The White Queen, curiously, lives backwards to a degree, due to the fact that she lives through the eponymous looking glass. Her behaviour is odd to Alice; she screams in pain until, rather than because, she pricks her thumb on her brooch, and tells Alice of the King's messenger who has been imprisoned for a crime he will later be tried for and perhaps (but not definitely) commit in the end. The White Queen, aside from telling Alice things that she finds difficult to believe (one being that she is just over a hundred and six years old) says that in her youth she could believe "six impossible things before breakfast" and counsels Alice to practise the same skill. The meeting ends oddly, with the Queen seeming to turn into a bespectacled sheep who sits at a counter in a shop as Alice passes into the next square on the board. The Sheep is somewhat different from the Queen in terms of personality and gets "more like a porcupine every time [Alice] looks at her" because she knits with several knitting needles all at once. Two of these needles turn into oars when Alice appears in a boat, and then the two of them appear back in the Sheep's shop, where Alice purchases an egg which becomes Humpty Dumpty as she moves to the next square.
Later, in Chapter 9, the White Queen appears with the Red Queen, posing a series of typical Wonderland/Looking-Glass questions ("Divide a loaf by a knife: what's the answer to that?"), and then celebrating Alice's promotion from pawn to queen. When that celebration goes awry, the White Queen seems to flee from the scene by disappearing into a tureen of soup. In Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice he remarks that the White King was at the time in check from the Red Queen, and the White Queen's move is rather wasteful, though characteristic of her stupidity. However, since neither side acknowledges the check, it is not (according to Gardner) illegal. Alice proceeds to 'capture' the Red Queen and checkmate the Red King, ending the game, so the White Queen is not seen again, except as one of Alice's white cats, whom Alice speculates may have influenced the dream.
[edit] Popular Culture
- In Resident Evil, the Red Queen and White Queen are computers of immense artificial intelligence and have a nemesis named Alice.
- In Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, after listing half a dozen impossibilities surrounding all aspects of the titular restaurant, the following slogan from their advertising firm is included: "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliway's—the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!"
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