Hearts on Fire

Before I return to the snail fallacies, let me show a line drawing of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland for a quilt design. Cuddly, no?

 I didn't ape any one popular rendering of the queen, though costumes are influenced by engravings of Queen Elizabeth I. Of course, I ran a background check on the Red Queen before starting.

Behold: two red queens populate Lewis Carrol's/Charles Dodgson's literature. The Queen of Hearts of Alice in Wonderland is more obviously ill-tempered, given as she is to bellowing "off with their heads" and cheating at croquet. Of course, she's a dominant playing card, and an allegory to Queen Victoria of England.

The Red queen in Through the Looking Glass is a chess piece who presents an exaggerated evolutionary hypothesis: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," or that it takes a constant effort and adaptation to maintain a competitive position. Similarly, "Red Queen" marketing involves creation of a new product or service that fills the role of one that already exists. 

Carroll distinguished the queens like this:

I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion - a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm - she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses! 

Both the Disney and the Tim Burton versions (actually both Disney, I guess) of the film conflate the queens, chafing Carrollian scholars. However, because both queens are feisty in their own ways, both merit Tim Burton's character name: Iracebeth of Crims.

Her name is taken from the world "irascible," meaning quick to anger, hot-tempered. I associate the term with my intro to philosophy course. In Plato's The Republic, Socrates used the word to designate the competitive or spirited part of the mind, figuring that a part of society with mostly irascible minds should compose the military. In Socrates's ideal republic, the irascible form a middle layer within a hierarchy, governed by the rational, and enforcing governance of the concupiscent peasantry, whose appetites make them dependent on leadership from the spirited and rational. I suppose that in Tim Burton's version of Alice, we could interpret Iracebeth as the irrascible, who has usurped the more rational, beaker-twirling White Queen, Mirana. The bovine concupiscent? Maybe it's we of the audience, munching popcorn and hoping the theater attendants won't make it to the middle of the row to ask that we put our feet down.

Later uses of "irasicble" in literature grew less serious:

 O bury the hatchet, irascible Red,

  For peace is a blessing," the White Man said.
      The Savage concurred, and that weapon interred,

  With imposing rites, in the White Man's head.    

~ The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

I think that Iracebeth would enjoy this poem, less for the satire of colonialism than for the head severance.

DESIGN NOTES

In a nod to irascibility, I etched the red queen in her namesake color on a cool background for contrast.

Despite its monarchical subject matter, this is perhaps the most democratic illustration I've completed, for I appealed to Facebook friends for advice on two points in the drawing process. I drew two character designs, one of which veered more in the traditional playing card direction (more Queen of Hearts than Red Queen):

but popular vote steered me in the direction of this version, which I prefer anyhow. This face is a little insect-like, definitely possessing a Tilda Swinton factor--more like the second Red Queen, who is likened to a strict governess.

My client requires only a line drawing,
but I planned to color a version graphic-novel-style for posting online. However, a few simple duochrome printmakers convinced me to maintain the line drawing. I decided to create a rough Photoshop selection of my sketch based on color, then to smooth the selection, filling it with solid color. This emboldened wispy artifacts, partially-erased* lines that were invisible before the selection, and gave the design a slightly mussed, printshop look. And my blog title is appropriate one again.