Lewis Carroll: “The Mad Tea Party” from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
When Alice arrives at the house of the March Hare (hoping that because it is May, he won’t be too insane) she finds him sitting at a table set for tea with the Hatter and a sleeping Dormouse. A rather combative conversation begins and leads to the Hatter posing the following riddle for Alice to answer: why is a raven like a writing desk? Alice is flummoxed by the question and even more so by the tangential nature of the ensuing conversation. As she finally stops to consider the two objects, raven and writing desk, the Hatter breaks in with another question concerning time.
“What day of the month is it?” he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.Alice considered a little, and then said, “The fourth.”“Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works,” he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.
For the first time since Alice’s descent through the rabbit hole, she is confronted with the issue of temporal displacement. The dislocation is only increased as the scene progresses.
“It was the best butter,” the March Hare meekly replied.“Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,” the Hatter grumbled: “you shouldn’t have put it in with the bread-knife.”The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, “It was the best butter, you know.”Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. “What a funny watch!” she remarked. “It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!”“Why should it?” muttered the Hatter. “Does your watch tell what year it is?”“Of course not,” Alice replied very readily: “but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.”“Which is just the case with mine,” said the Hatter.
Alice’s puzzlement about time steadily increases as the scene unfolds, each successive fact or exchange driving it forward. The initial and fairly simple disagreement between Alice’s idea about the date and that displayed on the Hatter’s watch has now developed into a disagreement about how an individual should track time itself: by the hour? the day? the year? The watch, repaired with a butter knife and butter, symbolizes the breakdown of “time” as mechanistic and orderly. The very fact that the watch is broken seems to have made impossible any objective understanding of time as a constant.
Key Documents:
John Stuart Mill: August Comte and Positivism (Click on "Remove this header" on following page to view document)
Additional Resources:
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