Use Of Satire In Alice In Wonderland

Mathematical satire in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
”Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” are probably one of the most analyzed-in-class books ever written. It does not take a lot of research to realize that there are numerous different approaches to fully understand that book. In this essay I chose to look at it through a prism of Lewis Carroll’s profession and passion – mathematics. Lewis Carroll, or rather Charles Dodgson was an oxford mathematician and was known in particular for being stubbornly conservative and unable to adapt to the changes occurring in the fields of mathematics in the nineteenth century. As a fan of pure, simple mathematics he in particular valued “Euclid’s Elements” as the epitome of mathematical thinking. “Euclid’s
Meanwhile, nineteenth century was a turbulent time for mathematics. Many new and controversial concepts such as symbolic algebra or imaginary numbers were being proposed and widely accepted in the mathematical community. Dodgson considered all of the changes nonsense and would even refer to all the mathematicians who weren’t as rigorous as him as “semi-colloquial” or even “semi-logical”. When looking at “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in this perspective one could argue that the author used some of the stories to satirize the increasing abstraction in Charles Dodgson’s favorite subject. Inspired by Martin Gardner’s book “The Annotated Alice” I believe that many of the scenes are a reflection of his skepticism of those radical new ideas. To prove my point I will be analyzing three passages from the book – the caterpillar smoking the hookah (chapter 5), the Mad Hatter’s tea party (chapter 7) and
One of Dodgson’s main complains about the ongoing changes was that even a concept as stable and basic as arithmetic does not apply in all the cases, hence in Alice addition, subtraction, multiplication and division becomes ambition, distraction, uglyfication and derision. We read “Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!” which is an example of uglyfication. Why can’t Alice ever get to twenty though? There seems to be logic in the way she is counting. Four times five is twelve in a base 18 system, four times six can indeed equal 13 if counting base 21, four times seven is fourteen when base we change the base to 24 etc. Following this pattern twenty would have to be expressed as four times thirteen base 42, however that is already expressed as the letter F rather than a number. Therefore, it is impossible to get to twenty when changing rules if we would want to stick to good old