ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into the spatial logics of Carroll's fictions, fleshing out the changing relationships between space and time and the conditions of movement staged in his stories as keys to how we experience space. There are many aspects of the stories that evoke measurement and quantification, sometimes to the point of absurdity, weakening the reader's sense-making tools. The discussion begins in the series of rooms that Alice experiences in Wonderland, framed around the passage of the trotting White Rabbit and the troubled relationship between the Mad Hatter and the March Hare who quarreled with Time. Then, the analysis moves to the gridded and planar space of the looking-glass world, where Alice is rendered a pawn and her moves are foretold as the White Queen plants little pegs in the ground. The two Alice stories are read in tension, with a focus on Carroll's use of nonsense to bring the paradoxical, as a philosophical tool, to bear on acts of meaning-making—about things, and about the world. Informed by Carroll's writings on geometry, my reading uncovers his critique of changing approaches to the concepts of space and time in the Late Victorian context. This chapter closes on Carroll's lesser-known piece, “What Achilles Said to the Tortoise.”
