Through the Looking-Glass: “Full of All Manner of Curious Things”

Abstract

This article focuses on Lewis Carroll's repeated examples of “curious things” in Through the Looking-Glass, that is, curious in the double sense of Alice finding the things to be curious and the things finding Alice to be curious. In doing so, it employs several different critical approaches to the overlapping and problematic natures, orders, functions, contexts, and agencies of Carroll's curious things. These include flow theory's account of literally floating signifiers like the “large bright thing” in the Sheep's shop, carnivalesque gay matter like the White Queen's shawl, Freudian, Derridean, and Lacanian approaches to fort/da phenomena like Tweedledum's rattle, transitional objects like the looking-glass itself, liminal sacra like the Sheep's woolly yarn, thing theory's critical treatment of things like the egg that morphs into monstrous Humpty Dumpty, and new materialism's analysis of “things” like the Leg of Mutton who/that questions the binary separating humans and things. Finally, the article considers the significantly self-involved and ambivalent role of the reader-critic in discussing what Alice discovers to be “so many … curious things to think about.”