The Mother-Killer

For almost a century Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, Jabberwocky, has crept deeper and deeper into mankind's unconscious. It now ranks as the most prominent example of this art form. The poem occurs in Through The Looking Glass () at the point where Alice observes the White King fainting after the Queen rebuked him. While upon her charitable enterprise of resuscitating fallen royalty, Alice picks up a book written in “some language I don't know.” Recognizing it, finally, as a volume in looking-glass script, she holds it up to a mirror and reads what has subsequently been memorized by thousands of children and adults.

Thus far, it seems to have escaped commentators on this work that in little it presents an epic statement of the matricidal legend which has been part of man's heritage ever since he first rose from the theriomorph. The archetypical myth upon which the poem is based, however unconsciously by Carroll, takes us back to Sumerian religious reenactments of the replacement of the matriarchy by filiar-chal forces in the form of Enlil (Marduk) slaying the great mother-monster Tiamat.

Carroll's first stanza we may classify as an overture of the primordial, primeval amorphous situation at the dawn of time, rather like the chaotic chords introducing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which remind so many expositors of the Creation. But once we are past those lines we find a simple story:

A male, whose relationship to the boy he advises is given as that of a father to a son, incites the young hero to take his sword and slay the Jabberwock, although couching his directive ambiguously. He enjoins him to beware the monster, “the jaws that bite, the claws

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that catch!” (a vaginal terror). And further, to shun certain companions of the Jabberwock, namely the Jubjub bird and the Bander-snatch. There is a trinity of terror against which the hero is to labor in order to bring happiness to his father image. The hero then takes his sword and waits for his opponent to appear under a “tum