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Cheshire Cat
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The Cheshire Cat is a fictional cat appearing in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice first encounters it at the Duchess's house in her kitchen, and then later outside on the branches of a tree, where it appears and disappears at will, engaging Alice in amusing but sometimes vexing conversation.
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The Cheshire Cat is a fictional cat appearing in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice first encounters it at the Duchess's house in her kitchen, and then later outside on the branches of a tree, where it appears and disappears at will, engaging Alice in amusing but sometimes vexing conversation. The cat sometimes raises philosophical points that annoy or baffle Alice. It does, however, appear to cheer her up when it turns up suddenly at the Queen of Hearts' croquet field, and when sentenced to death baffles everyone by making its body disappear, but its head remains visible, sparking a massive argument between the executioner and the King and Queen of Hearts about whether something that does not have a body can indeed be beheaded.
At one point, the cat disappears gradually until nothing is left but its grin, prompting Alice to remark that she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat.
Cheshire is not an actual breed of cat, but an English county famous for its cheese, salt mining and silk, and with no special notability in the area of cat breeding. However, it has been speculated that the Cheshire cat was intended to be a British Shorthair, as that is the cat breed that Carroll saw on a label of Cheshire Cheese.
Inspiration
The phrase first appears in print in John Wolcot's pseudonymous Peter Pindar's "Pair of Lyric Epistles" in 1795: "Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin."
Cheese moulds
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says grinning like a Cheshire cat is "an old simile, popularized by Lewis Carroll". Brewer adds, "The phrase has never been satisfactorily accounted for, but it has been said that cheese was formerly sold in Cheshire moulded like a cat that looked as though it was grinning". The cheese was cut from the tail end, so that the last part eaten was the head of the smiling cat.
Dockyard cats
Another origin for the story concerns the cats that lived in the port of Chester. Until the late 1970s, a monument to the Cheshire Cat stood beside the River Dee, where there had formerly been a cheese warehouse. It was said that cats sitting on the dock would wait for the rats and mice to leave the ships transporting Cheshire cheese to London and were the happiest cats in the kingdom – hence their grins. The monument was destroyed when Copfield House, which stood on the site of the warehouse, was demolished in 1979.
Cats from a dairy county
A yet simpler explanation and one widely believed in the area itself is that, Cheshire being famed as a dairy county, its cats enjoyed copious amounts of milk and cream and in consequence displayed a contented grin.
Church carvings
There are reports that Carroll found inspiration for the Cheshire Cat in a carving in a church in the village of Croft-on-Tees, in the north east of England, where his father had been rector. Another view is that the cat is based on a gargoyle found on a pillar in St Nicolas Church, Cranleigh, where Carroll used to travel frequently when he lived in Guildford. The cat is named after Carroll's home county, Cheshire. Others attribute it to a carving on the west face of the tower at St Wilfrid's Church, Grappenhall, Warrington, Cheshire.
Grosvenor family
A rival theory finds the Cheshire cat in the coat of arms of the area's Grosvenor family. What started out as a lion on the crest came to resemble, in the bumbling hands of the Cheshire sign painters, an inebriated alley cat.
Popular culture mention
The Cheshire Cat is one of many iconic characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that have become enmeshed in popular culture. Depictions of the Cheshire Cat have appeared in many media, from political cartoons to television. The Cheshire Cat's grin is reminiscent of the vagaries of human character or of a trickster nature.
Prior to the release of the Walt Disney animated production Alice in Wonderland, scholars observed few specific allusions to this character. Martin Gardner, author of the The Annotated Alice, wondered if T. S. Eliot had the Cheshire Cat in mind when writing Morning at the Window but notes no other significant allusions in the pre-war period.
Images of and references to the Cheshire Cat cropped up more frequently in the 1960s and 1970s, along with more frequent references to Carroll's works in general. The Cheshire Cat appeared on LSD blotters as well as in song lyrics and popular fiction. For example, in the Star Trek episode Who mourns for Adonais?, Kirk and Chekov argue over the origin of the "vanishing cat" and Chekov amusingly alleges that it came from Minsk.
An exhibit called The Cheshire Cat at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, created by Bob Miller in 1978, features a mirrored eyepiece that allows visitors to look at a picture of the Cheshire Cat's face with one eye while the other eye sees a reflection of a white screen to the side. When the visitor waves a hand in across the white screen, the cat image starts to disappear. If the visitor focuses on the cat's smile while doing this, the smile will remain while the cat disappears. The general phenomenon of a moving stimulus presented to one eye causing a static image to disappear from the other eye is called the Cheshire Cat effect, named after this exhibit. The effect is part of a broader visual phenomenon called binocular rivalry.
In the book The Lottery (Beth Goobie), Sal Hanson, main character of the book and this year's lottery victim of the shadowy organization of shadow council, referred in her description of The Shadow president's Willis Cass as the Cheshire cat, because of his glamorized smile.
In a Garfield comic, Garfield sneaks into Jon's room at night and gives a wide grin (which is all that can be seen in the pitch black, making it appear that the rest of his body is missing). After turning on the lights, Jon comments to him, "You've been reading Alice in Wonderland again, haven't you?"
Punk rock band, Blink-182, entitled their debut studio album Cheshire Cat.
The band Radiohead have the lyrics, 'The walls are bending shape, you've got a Cheshire Cat grin' in the song Jigsaw Falling Into Place from the 2007 album, In Rainbows.
Ted Nugent's Free for All contains the lyrics, "See you there with your cheshire grin, I got my eyes on you"
In DC Comics, the New Goddess Malice Vundabar, niece of the villain Virman Vundabar who resembles Alice, controls a carnivorous creature called Cheshire that looks like nothing more than a grinning face. Cheshire is also the codename of the human assassin Jade Nguyen who has a daughter with the heroic archer Roy "Speedy" Harper. Though the comic version bears no similarity to the Cheshire Cat, the Cheshire from the Teen Titans Animated Series wears a mask of a grinning cat.
In the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, the Cheshire Cat is an overseer in the Great Library, a library within the "book-world" which contains copies of every book ever written. However, due to "boundary changes", the Cat is renamed the "Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat". Thursday has a conversation with the Cat identical to that between the Cat and Alice, which she later notices. The Cheshire Cat of this series, however, is not only sane but helpful to some extent as an active member of Jurisfiction, the metafictional justice agency for characters within books.
In the movie Coraline, there is a cat that is able to talk in the Other World, and is even able to appear and disappear at will.
In the Peanuts comic trip, Snoopy has shown the ability to perform the Cheshire Cat's signature dissapearing act, but has gotten stuck several times
In the Playstation 2 version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent there are 2 exclusive levels that were put in as a way to draw sales for the title which was deemed a lesser option compared to releases on other formats. In the second level entitled "bunker" Sam is kidnapped and must escape through gas filled chambers etc. In one instance he's asked how he's doing, Sam replies "I feel like I'm being followed by the Chesire Cat but other than that I'm fine". This is a reference to him hallucinating from the gas.
In the Laserdisc game "Dragon's Lair II", The Cheshire Cat appears only as a Head, reciting the Jabberwocky poem while trying to make a meal out of the hero "Dirk the Daring".
Depictions
In the Disney movie the Cheshire Cat is depicted as a villain voiced by Sterling Holloway and later by Jim Cummings after Holloway's death. The Cheshire Cat first appears to point Alice towards the Mad Tea Party, but not before confusing her with misinformation. The cat later steers Alice in the direction of the Queen of Hearts and provokes the Queen's anger by pulling pranks on her during a croquet match and making it seem Alice was the perpetrator. Holloway was originally going to sing "I'm Odd" as the Cheshire Cat, but instead sang "Twas brillig" in the final film due to Walt Disney's concerns and opinions of the deleted Jabberwocky scene but wanting to keep a part of the original poem. In the 2004 DVD release of Alice in Wonderland, Jim Cummings sang "I'm odd". In Kingdom Hearts, the Cheshire Cat offers Sora, Donald and Goofy clues to prove that the Heartless attempted to steal the Queen of Hearts' heart and not Alice, along with the blizzard spell (In the manga, the Cheshire cat grants Sora the ability to perform all types of magic, not just blizzard). After Alice goes missing, the Cheshire Cat summons the Trickmaster heartless after the heroes, and tells them that she's been taken by the Heartless once they seal Wonderland's Keyhole. The manga reveals that Maleficent made him the same offer she made to other villains (Such as Pete, Jafar and Oogie Boogie), but unlike the others, he turned her down.
In the video game American McGee's Alice (2000), the Cheshire Cat is portrayed with an emaciated, almost skeletal appearance, with overgrown incisors and wearing an earring. His voice was provided by Roger L. Jackson, who also voiced the Mad Hatter and The Jabberwock in the game.
In Frank Beddor's Looking Glass Wars, the Cat is Redd's nine-lived assassin.
Quotes
- "Please, would you tell me," said Alice, a little timidly, ... "why your cat grins like that?"
- "It's a Cheshire cat," said the Duchess, "and that's why."
- "But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
- "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
- "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
- "You must be," said the Cat, "otherwise you wouldn't have come here."
- Alice didn't think that proved it at all: however she went on. "And how do you know that you're mad?"
- "To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"
- "I suppose so," said Alice
- "Well, then, " the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."
- "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
- "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
- "I don't much care where –" said Alice.
- "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
- "– so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
- "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
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