Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

In the dream logic of Wonderland, the spatial relations between places are, at times, impossible to map. It isn’t only that cardinal directions are never specified or considered important; there is a confusion of spatial logic that even affects the boundaries between outside and inside. For instance, when the White Rabbit runs back into the hall and orders Alice to fetch the gloves and fan, she follows his direction until she reaches his house. At some point, the dark hallway must have ended, but Carroll does not specify where. Next, she walks to the Caterpillar’s mushroom, then through a small forest to the Duchess’s house. The Cat gives Alice the choice of two directions, in which to walk, but his gestures are vague: “‘In that direction,” the Cat said, waving his right paw round, ‘lives the Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare” (85). He waves rather than points, perhaps indicating general, rather than specific directions.

There is an aleatory quality, as well, to the events in the book that matches the illogic of Wonderland’s space. Alice’s encounters follow, at best, a dream logic. The aleatory quality of the narrative aligns it with the literary tradition of the picaresque, comic stories that string together episodic adventures of a hero (usually somewhat of a rogue).

Carroll’s contribution is to foreground the illogic of dreams as the essential factor for the picaresque adventures of Alice. To cite another example, the doorway in the tree that she finds after leaving the “Mad Tea Party” brings her back to the hall with the doors and the glass table. This time, she successfully enters the door to the garden, which turns out to be on the palace grounds. From the palace grounds she moves to the croquet playing ground, and then the Queen walks her to a Gryphon, who leads her to the sea. Alice sees the Mock Turtle on a rock ledge far away, but the next paragraph begins: “So they went up to the Mock Turtle” (127). They must have traveled a long distance in a short time, or Carroll did not find it important to make the relationship between time and space operate as it does in the real world.

Another relevant literary corollary besides the picaresque is the dream vision narrative, an ancient and medieval genre in which a protagonist falls asleep and encounters people in a dream. Carroll’s difference from stories of this nature is, again, in the way that he accentuates the illogic of the dream space and the dream time. To consider dreams as exemplifying distinctly illogical kinds of logic is a modern preoccupation. In this regard, Alice in Wonderland looks forward to Freud’s analysis of the logic of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899.