The White Queen has a cheeky offer for Alice and this is her quote:
“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.”
– The White Queen
The White Queen promises Alice to pay her two pence a week and jam every other day if she was to become the Queen’s maid. But of course this means that Alice would never get any jam, since today is always the “No jam” -day!
Have you ever wondered what is actually the White Queen’s role in the Alice in Wonderland saga?
As you might already know, the White Queen appears in Through the Looking-Glass book, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll. The White Queen is one of the chess piece characters Alice encounters in the mirror world. She rules the White side of the chessboard kingdom alongside the White King.
The White Queen is famously “scatter-brained and helpless” as she can’t pin her own shawl or do basic things without difficulty. She embodies the living backwards -logic of the Looking-Glass world, famously saying she sometimes believes
“as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
She practices a weird thing called “reverse memory” when she remembers things that haven’t happened yet. Yes, the future events, but at the same time she can not remember the past ones. A whimsical example of this is that she screams before she pricks her finger, and stops once the prick actually happens. This illustrates perfectly the topsy-turvy logic of her world.
In the original Carroll’s plot The White Queen transforms into a sheep when Alice looks away! Later the two queens (White and Red) appear together at Alice’s chaotic dinner party near the end of the story.
The White Queen became iconic in Tim Burton’s 2010 movie Alice in Wonderland where she was portrayed by Anne Hathaway as an ethereal, pacifist queen who cannot commit acts of violence.
[Image credits: Alice and the White Queen Art by John Tenniel (1865), Public domain, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen in Tim Burton’s 2010 adaptation, By Disney.com, Fair use]