Alice's Cake

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table; she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself “Which way? Which way?” holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing; and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size. To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I recently finished a wonderful book; Cake: A Global History by Nicola Humble. It’s way too short and I finished it way too quickly, even with stopping to study every beautiful illustration and reading e x t r a  s l o w l y. I’m a fast reader anyway and when it’s a book I’m really enjoying or a guilty pleasure (hello, rock and roll bios) I have to force myself from devouring the thing in a single sitting. I’ve been like this since I started reading (not that I remember a time when I couldn’t) and freely admit I have no self-control when it comes to those extra-delicious and inviting books. It was a habit that especially annoyed my mother when I was a teenager. I have not been blessed with the ability to sleep anywhere (airplanes, for example) but I can read anywhere, provided the book is good enough, and completely drown out the world around me. This used to irritate my mother no end when we were supposed to be having “family time.” For instance, when we took a five-day train trip across the country (much luggage and five of us kids, one of whom was barely a year old at the time) and I fell into whatever paperback it was I was fascinated with at the time and ignored everything else. At the end of some rope or other, my mother finally just snatched the book out of my hands and tore it in half, Incredible Hulk-style. Luckily, I had a back-up. Those get-lost-in-another-world books are farther and fewer between for me these days, unfortunately. On the other hand, reading is also my job now so some of the blush is off the rose.

But I digress.

What I was getting to was the chapter in Cake titled “Literary Cakes.” The choices here were interesting, I thought, and not necessarily ones I’d have chosen. She started of course with Proust’s eternal madeleines (even though madeleines aren’t really cakes and in any case he was talking about dissolved crumbs) and moved on to Miss Havisham’s petrified, moldy wedding cake in Great Expectations. (The quick bit of analysis there was consumed vs. not consumed, by the way.) To be honest, I’ve never liked Dickens (a sentiment that did not go over well in any of the English classes I’ve ever taken and I was an English major so that accounted for quite a few) though I really have tried. The only Dickens I have ever enjoyed, in fact, was Great Expectations and I never read it. Rather, it was read to me. I was in sixth or seventh grade (my family moved often and usually in the middle of the school year so some of the exact dates are lost to me now), in school in upstate New York and we got a long-term substitute to replace our regular teacher. The substitute was small, blonde, pretty, and from Georgia. She made a point, in fact, of telling us she was from Georgia and she had the slow, soft, honey buttered accent to prove it. She was mesmerizing. Miss Georgia decided to read Great Expectations to us out loud every day. No teacher before or after ever did such a thing. In my memory, she turned the classroom into a hot Southern afternoon just by reading. I was fascinated by the story but it was because of her delivery that it really captivated me. Miss Havisham’s dress, for example, was “yella” with age. Really, it was Dickens meets Margaret Mitchell. So that grotesque uneaten “weddin’ cake” really stuck in my imagination.

Humble runs through many other literary confections, covering Cranford, Emma, and Madame Bovary to name just a few, but the most compelling for me was her discussion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This was the first real chapter book I ever read all the way through (somewhere between the ages of five and six) and, along with Through the Looking Glass, may still be my favorite. There is so much wonderful in these books that it is difficult to know where to begin or end—so I’ll just discuss the cake.

The little cake that Alice finds when she’s very small—the one that demands to be eaten—has always had a special place in my memory. When I was young, the story had a very vivid and literal appeal. I was, myself, very small and the thought of eating something that would make me grow to a reasonable size was very appealing. I’d not yet learned that cake could make you “pudgy,” so there was still delight and guiltlessness in eating sweet things. Alice was trying to get into the garden—and I loved to play in the garden. As a proper English girl, I had all sorts of mossy, fairy-inhabited gardens at my disposal. But it didn’t take long for the story to take on all kinds of metaphoric significance. The traditional Jefferson Airplane tripped-out-go-ask-Alice interpretation prevailed for a long time (I mean, please, she ate magic mushrooms!), but gradually something else crept in. Over the last few years—and maybe the baking has something to do with this—I’ve come to see this passage and the eating of the cake as symbolic of my approach to writing. I’ll eat it—the idea, the concept, the process—and see what happens. Because something will happen, and whether I become small or large, I’ll get into that garden (*real toads to be discussed at a later date). 

Alice's Cake