What Did You Dream About Last Night?

That the cat is traditionally feminine is clearly relevant in these stories which compensate for patriarchal one-sidedness. Bloomingdale comments on the Cheshire Cat:
The mad grin of the appearing and disappearing gargoyle,
which literally ‘hangs over’ the heads of the participants in
the game of life, is an insane version of the enigmatic smile
of the ‘Mona Lisa,’ the mask of the Sphinx--supreme
embodiment of the riddle of the universe. (385-86)

The smile thus symbolizes superior, hidden, psychic knowledge. Like Merlin’s laugh, the grin “is the result of . . . more profound knowledge of invisible connections” (E. Jung, The Grail Legend 363). “We’re all mad here,” the Cat tells Alice (Oxford Alice 58). Everyone seems mad because they are in the realm of the collective unconscious where everything seems crazy to the rational, conscious mind. Empson is correct to say the Cat stands for “intellectual detachment . . . it is the amused observer” (273). The Cat’s ability to appear and disappear at will demonstrates the autonomy of the archetype--one can not produce an archetypal image at will. The different forms the cat takes in Alice and the Cheshire Cat’s different shapes as it appears and disappears are manifestations of what Nicholas J. Saunders refers to as “the magical shape-shifting that has always been associated with cats, both large and small” (29). Hence, like Merlin, the cat is also a trickster.