What are the spatial rules governing Wonderland? Is there a system of physical or spatial properties that replaces or stands in for the physical laws of the waking universe?

Alice’s Wonderland is marked by four primary spatial characteristics: 1) spaces are confined or limited in scope, 2) there is an instability of size, 3) scenes abruptly shift and dissolve and, 4) object are displaced.

When Alice finally thumps down in Wonderland she finds herself in a round hall surrounded by locked doors – her first encounter with one of Wonderland’s many confined or limited spaces.  Alice discovers that the only way out of the hall is through a rat-hole-sized doorway that leads to a beautiful garden, through which she is much too large to pass. Space in Wonderland is often confining or restricting – and Alice is often searching for ways to leave it. The opening scene in the hallway presents the quintessential moment of Alice’s spatial anxiety: “She knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway.” Some scenes later, Alice enters into a “neat little house.” Anxiety causes her to run upstairs and into a room where she drinks a potion and immediately expands in size. The result is that she becomes much too big for the room. The space again becomes confining and restricting. “Before she had drunk half the bottle,” we read, “she found her head pressing against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being broken…. She went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled around her head. Still she went on growing, and as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself, ‘Now I can do no more, whatever happens.’” Other confined spaces follow: the kitchen full of pepper, the tea party with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the trial of the tarts. 

Part of Alice’s discomfort in Wonderland spaces is caused by her continual shifting of size, which makes the scenery around her either abnormally small or large. We encounter the issue of size instability in the opening Wonderland scene in the hall, where Alice drinks a potion and grows in size and then eats a cake and shrinks. With each change in size, her relationship to the space around her changes. A small doorway becomes a grand gate. A little glass table assumes mountainous proportions. Creatures who would ordinarily exist at her feet (like a mouse) become spatial equals or even loom above her. Her shape shifting determines her options. When small she is able to converse with a caterpillar and a mouse. When large, she finds her head in the trees where she is accused by a pigeon of trying to steal its eggs.

Alice’s size and the overall proportionality between Alice and her environment is not the only spatially unstable element in Wonderland, for the spaces themselves are deeply unstable and all but disappear or cease to exist once Alice leaves them behind. Wonderland spaces, one could say, exist only for Alice and always for a particular moment. The principles of unstable spaces and dissolving past come into clear view in the sequence of scenes that enfold upon entering Wonderland. First, Alice finds herself in the hall. Then she is swimming in a pool of her own tears. Next, Alice goes to shore and engages in an assembly on the bank. When Alice is abandoned by the other participants, Alice overhears the White Rabbit looking for something, which she assumes he has dropped back in the main hall. We read: “Alice guessed in a moment that it [White Rabbit] was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen – everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.” Alice eventually finds her way back to the hall, though purely by chance, entering it through a door she encounters after leaving the “Mad Tea-Party.” This is the only space – the entry-point space – that Alive enters twice.

Instead of moving from one scene deliberately into the next, Alice haphazardly or randomly enters and exits spaces. In most cases, Alice seems to lack all volition even though she feels and tries to exert her will. Alice’s most fervent wish is to enter the beautiful garden she spies through the small door directly after entering Wonderland. This wish is long forgotten and only reanimated when she finds herself quite accidentally back in the hall. The entry into the garden represents yet another caesura in the dreamscape, for her passing through the little door brings her into the domain of the tyrannical Queen of Hearts. 

The final spatial characteristic of Wonderland’s landscape is object displacement. Pigs are confused with babies, flamingos are used as croquet mallets, hedgehogs stand in for croquet balls, the tarts are made of pepper, a caterpillar smokes of hookah, and so on. Once in Wonderland, Alice is little bothered by the cognitive dissonance caused by the strange use and existence of objects.