Curiouser and curiouser!
What does Alice mean by “Curiouser and curiouser!” and how does this exclamation frame the novel’s play with identity, language, and bodily change?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Analysis
Early in Chapter II, Alice has just drunk a potion and suddenly stretches upward—“opening out like the largest telescope that ever was.” In the surprise of this bodily surge she cries, “Curiouser and curiouser!” and even notes she has forgotten “how to speak good English.” She jokes about sending boots to her distant feet, then bangs her head on the hall’s roof, snatches the golden key, and crawls to the tiny door, only to find that entry to the garden is still impossible. Frustration spills into tears that soon flood the hall. This moment launches a chain of scale mishaps—Rabbit, fan, shrinking, and the literal pool of tears—that dramatize how Wonderland destabilizes ordinary proportions, etiquette, and learned certainties.
What the exclamation means
Language as barometer of identity in flux
Carroll uses Alice’s ungrammatical exclamation to externalize her inner dislocation. Immediately after “Curiouser and curiouser!” Alice acknowledges her English has slipped, then her knowledge slips too: “four times five is twelve,” “London is the capital of Paris.” The breakdown of correct forms—grammar, arithmetic, geography, recital—tracks with the loss of bodily proportion. The line thus foreshadows Chapter V’s “Who are you?” by the Caterpillar: if words and measures won’t hold, the question of “I” becomes unsettled. Yet the tone is not tragic. The comic address to her feet and the playful parcel label (“Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.”) treat instability as a puzzle rather than a crisis. Curiosity becomes a resilient habit of mind, preparing for later controlled experiments with the mushroom. The exclamation is both symptom and strategy: it registers the strangeness and models a flexible, observing self who can adapt without fixed rules.
The line cues a methodological shift. Right after exclaiming, Alice stops relying on correct answers (“good English,” tables, capitals) and starts testing, watching, and naming what happens. Wonderland rewards this experimental stance more than schoolroom accuracy.
Her malformed comparative matches her malformed size. As she lengthens like a “telescope,” English stretches too. Carroll aligns bodily change with linguistic play, turning error into a diagnostic of a world where systems—measurement, manners, meaning—refuse to stay stable.
Themes and characters in orbit
The exclamation ties Alice to the theme of identity-and-growing-up by dramatizing how physical growth disturbs self-conception. It anchors logic-language-and-nonsense through playful error that nonetheless communicates precisely. It anticipates bodily-change-and-autonomy, as curiosity will guide her later size-calibrations via the mushroom. The White Rabbit’s anxious formalities contrast with Alice’s elastic curiosity; later, the Caterpillar’s question sharpens the identity crisis that begins here. Across the book, this phrase becomes a touchstone for treating absurdity as data, not doctrine.