A crucial and under-examined aspect of “The Walrus and the
Carpenter” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is
the relationship between euphemism and atrocity in the dealings
with the anthropomorphised entities that are – or are in danger
of becoming – food. Based on a close reading of the poem,
this article explores how aesthetics and ethics work in
considerations of form and courtesy, which impact the lives of
such anthropomorphised entities. Situated at the intersections of
anthropomorphism studies, animal ethics, and Carrollian scholarship,
it is argued that nonsense, heightened by anthropomorphism, is a
powerful means of aestheticizing contradictions. Regarding food
anthropomorphism as both rhetorically and ethically invested reveals
the contradictions between aesthetic forms of society and the grisly
truth of human intraspecies relationships and human-animal
relationships from the imperialist context to the contemporary
situations of meat eating.