The Queen of Hearts is a fictional character from the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by the writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, in which she appears as the primary antagonist. She is a foul-tempered monarch, that Carroll himself describes as "a blind fury", and who is quick to give death sentences at the slightest offense. Her most famous line, one which she states often, is "Off with their heads!" Meanwhile...With a motif of Through the Looking-Glass being a representation of the game of chess, the Red Queen could be viewed as an antagonist in the story as she is the queen for the side opposing Alice. Please enjoy, happy reading and Halloween! --KatDon
Hearts and Reds
We all know Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. But we're not here to talk about Alice, today we are talking about the queens. That's right, the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen! See for yourself on what you will discover: Queen of Hearts is a fictional character from the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by the writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, in which she appears as the primary antagonist. She is a foul-tempered monarch, that Carroll himself describes as "a blind fury", and who is quick to give death sentences at the slightest offense. Her most famous line, one which she states often, is "Off with their heads!" Alice observes three playing cards painting white roses red. They drop to the ground face down at the approach of the Queen of Hearts, whom Alice has never met. When the Queen arrives and asks Alice who is lying on the ground (since the backs of all playing cards look alike), Alice tells her that she does not know. The Queen then becomes frustrated and commands that her head be severed. She is deterred by her comparatively moderate husband by being reminded that Alice is only a child. One of the Queen's hobbies – besides ordering executions – is croquet; however it is Wonderland croquet, where the balls are live hedgehogs and the mallets are flamingoes. This is presumably with the aim that the birds' blunt beaks should strike, but, as Alice observes, it is complicated by the fact that they keep looking back up at the players- as well as the hedgehogs' tendency to scuttle away without waiting to be hit. The Queen's soldiers act as the arches (or hoops) on the croquet grounds, but have to leave off being arches every time the Queen has an executioner drag away the victim, so that, by the end of the game in the story, the only players that remain are the Queen herself, the King, and Alice. Despite the frequency of death sentences, it would appear few people are actually beheaded, the King of Hearts, quietly pardons many of his subjects when the Queen is not looking (although this did not seem to be the case with The Duchess), and her soldiers humor her but do not carry out her orders. The Gryphon tells Alice, "It's all her fancy: she never executes nobody, you know." Nevertheless, all creatures in Wonderland fear the Queen. In the final chapters, the Queen sentences Alice again (for defending the Knave of Hearts), and she offers a bizarre approach towards justice: sentence before verdict. The Queen is believed by some to be a caricature of Queen Victoria, with elements of reality that Dodgson felt correctly would make her at once instantly recognizable to parents reading the story to children, and also fantastical enough to make her unrecognizable to children. The reference is explicit in Jonathan Miller's 1966 television version where she and the King of Hearts are portrayed without any attempt at fantasy, or disguise as to their true natures or personality. The Queen may also be a reference to Queen Margaret of the House of Lancaster. During the War of the Roses, a red rose was the symbol of the House Lancaster. Their rivals, the House of York, had a white rose for their symbol. The gardeners' painting the white roses red may be a reference to these two houses.
With a motif of Through the Looking-Glass being a representation of the game of chess, the Red Queen could be viewed as an antagonist in the story as she is the queen for the side opposing Alice. Despite this, their initial encounter is a cordial one, with the Red Queen explaining the rules of Chess concerning promotion — specifically that Alice is able to become a queen by starting out as a pawn and reaching the eighth square at the opposite end of the board. As a queen in the game of Chess, the Red Queen is able to move swiftly and effortlessly. Later, in Chapter 9, she appears with the White 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, Alice turns upon the Red Queen, whom she "considers as the cause of all the mischief", and shakes her until the queen morphs into Alice's pet kitten. In doing this, Alice presents an end game, awakening from the dream world of the looking glass, by both realizing her hallucination and symbolically "taking" the Red Queen in order to checkmate the Red King. The Red Queen, of course, is one of the chess pieces in the grand game of chess that Alice plays in Looking-Glass World. Because Alice is a White Pawn, you might expect her to regard the Red Queen as an enemy. But although the Red Queen can be bossy, she actually gives Alice a lot of helpful advice and arranges for Alice to take part in the game. Examining the character of the Red Queen, we realize that Carroll's attitude toward matronly women seems to have softened since the first Alice book. Unlike the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen doesn't abuse her power, keeping violence to a minimum and trying to help events unfold as smoothly as possible. She's overbearing, but she's trying to help Alice if she can. The Red Queen's pragmatism about the battle being fought between the chess pieces reminds us that all conflicts are somewhat arbitrary. At the end of the book, the Red Queen turns into Alice's black kitten, Kitty. We can't really find any deeper meaning in this, except that Carroll is reminding us of the connections between real life and Looking-Glass World. She is commonly mistaken for the Red Queen in the story's sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, but in reality shares none of her characteristics other than being a queen. Indeed, Carroll, in his lifetime, made the distinction of the two Queens by saying: "I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury.The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm – she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!" But what if I tell you that this theory could reveal that the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts could be the same person? It could be possible that the Queen of Hearts may have a split personality disorder as she must switch from different identities. The Red Queen is cold, calm, formal, strict and unkindly woman while the Queen of the Hearts is a blindly angry and aimless woman with an unstoppable woman. Perhaps after her rage; she calms down and switches to the Red Queen persona.
Evil Queens and Furies
So I did some digging around and here's what I found: As stated by Lewis Carroll, he'd imagine the Queen of Hearts as a 'blind, aimless Fury' where she always screamed: "Off with their HEADS!!!" and the Red Queen is another Fury who is 'cold, calm, strict, formal and unkindly'. If memory serves; the Furies were female chthonic deities of vengeance; they were sometimes referred to as "infernal goddesses". A formulaic oath in the Iliad invokes them as "those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath". According to Hesiod's Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes--which they are called in Greece--as well as the Meliae emerged from the drops of blood when it fell on the earth (Gaia), while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an even more primordial level—from Nyx ("Night"), or from a union between air and mother earth. Their number is usually left indeterminate. Virgil, probably working from an Alexandrian source, recognized three: Alecto or Alekto ("endless"), Megaera ("jealous rage"), and Tisiphone or Tilphousia ("vengeful destruction"), all of whom appear in the Aeneid. Dante Alighieri followed Virgil in depicting the same three-character triptych of Erinyes; in Canto IX of the Inferno they confront the poets at the gates of the city of Dis. Sounds ghastly? Yes it does. But here's more into their background: The Erinyes live in Erebus and are more ancient deities than any of the Olympians. Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants - and to punish such crimes by hounding culprits relentlessly. The Erinyes are crones and, depending upon authors, described as having snakes for hair, dog's heads, coal black bodies, bat's wings, and blood-shot eyes. In their hands they carry brass-studded scourges, and their victims die in torment.
Where am I going with this? Which Furies are similar to the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. Well my friends, take a look, at Tisiphone. was one of the three Erinyes or Furies. Her sisters were Alecto and Megaera. She was the one who punished crimes of murder: parricide, fratricide and homicide. In Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, she is described as the guardian of the gates of Tartarus, 'clothed in a blood-wet dress'. In Book IV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, she is described as a denizen of Dis who wears a dripping red robe and who has a serpent coiled around her waist. At the behest of Juno, Tisiphone drives Athamas and Ino mad with the breath of a serpent extracted from her hair and a poison made from froth from the mouth of Cerberus and Echidna's venom. According to one myth, she fell in love with a mortal, Cithaeron, but was spurned; in her anger she formed a poisonous snake from her hair, which bit and killed him. In Book I of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde", the narrator calls upon her to help him to write the tragedy properly. Tisiphone could be the Red Queen herself. And what about the Queen of Hearts? Let's go back to Alecto: According to Hesiod, she was the daughter of Gaea fertilized by the blood spilled from Uranus when Cronus castrated him. She is the sister of Tisiphone (Vengeance) and Megaera (Jealousy). Alecto is the Erinys with the job of castigating the moral crimes (such as anger), especially if they are against other people. Her function is similar to Nemesis, with the difference that Nemesis's function is to castigate crimes against the gods. In the Aeneid, Juno commanded Alecto to prevent the Trojans from having their way with King Latinus by marriage or besiege Italian borders. Alecto's mission is to wreak havoc on the Trojans and cause their downfall through war. To do this, Alecto takes over the body of Queen Amata, who clamors for all of the Latin mothers to riot against the Trojans. She disguises herself as Juno's priestess Calybe and appears to Turnus in a dream persuading him to begin the war against the Trojans. Met with a mocking response from Turnus, Alecto abandons persuasion and attacks Turnus with a torch, causing his blood to "boil with the passion for war". Unsatisfied with her work in igniting the war, Alecto asks Juno if she can provoke more strife by drawing in bordering towns. Juno replies that she will manage the rest of the war herself: You're roving far too freely, high on the heavens' winds, and the Father, king of steep Olympus, won't allow it. You must give way. Whatever struggle is still to come, I'll manage it myself. Perhaps Alecto could be the Queen of Hearts however Megaera, the second of the Furies, could be the White Queen or another part of the Queen of Hearts.
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