Carroll's Alices: The Semiotics of Paradox

Time who sees all has found you out against your will.

When the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was buried, in 1898, Lewis Carroll was set free behind the Looking Glass to continue his interminable game of chess with Alice, the heroine of his first two fairy tales, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.1 During the century since their game began, the Alice books have played to a larger reading audience than most traditional folktales. Even while Dodgson lived, Wonderland and Looking Glass could be found alongside the Bible on the top bookshelf of practically every Victorian nursery. Carroll's first biographer, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, claims that the Alice books became primers for many Victorian children and that lines from them were cited in the daily press as often as lines from Shakespeare.2 If the popularity of the tales among children has since been eclipsed by cartoons manufactured in the television studio, the adventures have nevertheless maintained the status of cultural myth in the adult world. Much of that popularity is due to the sophisticated problems in physics, metaphysics, logic and semantics which surface during the course of Alice's wanderings. As fiction, the books have presented readers and critics with an equally formidable problem of decodification. The Duchess insists to Alice: “Everything's got a moral if