Through The Looking Glass

Picking up where Chapter 9 ended, Alice is shaking the Red Queen from the feast table. She shakes the little queen until she transforms. She gets fatter, rounder, and has green eyes and fur.

The Red Queen is a kitten in Alice’s hands, after all, the same black kitten from the beginning. She is holding Kitty.

Alice wakes up from her dream. She asks if Kitty knew she was in the looking-glass world with her. She then lovingly scolds Kitty about being the Red Queen. She takes the red queen chess piece, badgering Kitty to “confess” she turned into the Red Queen. The kitten looks away and purrs, which Alice thinks implies she must have been the Red Queen. The mother cat, Dinah, is cleaning off Snowdrop, the white kitten. Alice thinks Snowdrop was the White Queen and Dinah was Humpty Dumpty.

Alice keeps conversing with Kitty about the dream world. She asks if she was the one dreaming, or if the Red King was. The story ends by asking the reader whose dream they think it all was—Alice’s or the Red King’s.