Answer:
Example of Independent Critique of Alice in Wonderland.
What does Dinah represent in Alice in Wonderland?
A cat.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar—the sentiment is correct, even if Freud probably never said it. Not everything in a symbol.
If you look closely at Dinah’s appearances—and I will include Through The Looking-Glass—you will see that she first appears as Alice is falling down the rabbit hole. From Chapter 1:
“Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. ‘Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!’ (Dinah was the cat.) ‘I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, ‘Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?’ when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.”
Alice was clearly fond of her cat, and concerned about her since she (clearly) did not expect to be back by tea-time. The “cat-bat” association shows up later in the mad tea-party with the Mad Hatter singing “Twinkle, twinkle little bat / how I wonder what’s you’re at”—Chapter 7. Dinah shows up again at the end of Chapter 2 in the conversation with the Mouse:
Not like cats!’ cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate voice. ‘Would you like cats if you were me?’
‘Well, perhaps not,’ said Alice in a soothing tone: ‘don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you’d take a fancy to cats if you could only see her. She is such a dear quiet thing,’ Alice went on, half to herself, as she swam lazily about in the pool, ‘and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!’ cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended.”
