{"id":2287,"date":"2025-04-02T15:09:26","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T15:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2287"},"modified":"2025-04-02T15:09:26","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T15:09:26","slug":"oh-dear-oh-dear-how-time-flies-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/04\/02\/oh-dear-oh-dear-how-time-flies-by\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Dear! Oh Dear! How time flies by!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear readers,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We can generally agree that Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland has some questionable scenes and even more mind-boggling dialogue. The characters are mad, Alice is lost, and Wonderland is one big psychedelic fever dream. But don\u2019t let the oddness get to you. I\u2019d like to propose that to an extent, there is form beneath the surface craziness. To be specific, I want to examine how we make sense of time through the setting, Alice\u2019s internal thoughts, and the chapter titles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of these key scenes takes place at the beginning of the book where Lewis Carroll wastes no time (haha) giving the audience a taste of what\u2019s to come later on. The chapter title \u201cDown the rabbit-hole\u201d already gives away the \u201cwhere\u201d of the setting yet readers don\u2019t know \u201cwhat\u201d to expect. Our \u201cwhat\u201d ends up coming from Alice as she falls \u201cDown, down, down.\u201d (which is repeated twice in this chapter) and \u201cvery slowly\u201d (Carroll 2). She has thoughts like \u201c \u2018I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down\u2019 \u201d and \u201c \u2018I wonder if I shall right <\/span>through <\/span><\/i>the earth!\u2019 \u201c (Carroll 3). So we get direction, speed, and an exaggerated sense of distance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Something else I noticed that I thought was interesting was Alice\u2019s thoughts. Yes, she\u2019s a child and that much is clear through the inaccuracy and imagination of the centre of the earth, but there is rationality. Since readers are experiencing Wonderland through Alice, we also have to think how we would react if this was real life. If I fell down what was supposed to be a rabbit hole that somehow fit me with plenty of space to spare and I was falling for that long among other objects that shouldn\u2019t be found in a rabbit hole, I would start to question where it was going too. And then it wouldn\u2019t be crazy to entertain the possibility that it<\/span> could<\/span><\/i> go near the centre of the earth. Having said that, that\u2019s another beauty of Alice\u2019s thoughts. They\u2019re entertaining and so provoking of the readers\u2019 own thoughts that they make time fly by as suddenly as it does for Alice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Alucard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear readers,\u00a0 We can generally agree that Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland has some questionable scenes and even more mind-boggling dialogue. The characters are mad, Alice is lost, and Wonderland is one big psychedelic fever dream. But don\u2019t let the oddness get to you. I\u2019d like to propose that to an extent, there is form beneath … Continue reading Oh Dear! Oh Dear! How time flies by!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4770,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4770"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}