I must be growing small again.
What does Alice realize—and what does it reveal about identity and control—when she says, “I must be growing small again” after the Rabbit’s glove fits?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears
Analysis
After drinking and growing enormous, Alice retrieves the golden key but cannot enter the little door and cries a flood of tears. The White Rabbit returns in a panic, drops his fan and kid gloves, and scurries away. In the stifling hall, Alice absentmindedly fans herself while fretting that she might have become another girl. She misrecites lessons and tries to steady her sense of self. Glancing down, she finds one of the Rabbit’s gloves on her hand and realizes it now fits. She infers she is shrinking, checks herself against the glass table, and estimates she is about two feet high. She quickly deduces the fan is causing the change and drops it “just in time,” averting the risk of vanishing, and dashes back toward the shut garden door.
What the line means
From passive marvel to experimental control
The remark arrives just after Alice’s failed recitations and tearful loss of composure. Here she pivots: instead of lamenting, she interprets a sign (the glove), measures, and acts, dropping the fan “just in time.” This cause-and-effect reasoning anticipates the Caterpillar’s later instruction to use the mushroom’s two sides deliberately, foreshadowing Alice’s development from overwhelmed dreamer to experimenter. Stylistically, the mild understatement—“I must be growing small”—ironizes the extremity of her situation and comically normalizes the impossible. The unidiomatic phrase echoes her earlier “Curiouser and curiouser,” where she “forgot how to speak good English,” tying linguistic slippage to bodily flux: as her size wavers, so does her syntax. The glove is a metonym of social measure—kid gloves signal delicacy and etiquette—so its sudden fit signals how external props in Wonderland recalibrate who Alice can be. The moment crystallizes the book’s thesis: identity is negotiated through mutable bodies, language, and tools, not fixed essence.
The Rabbit’s kid glove functions like a measuring stick and a social marker. Its fit tells Alice her new scale and implies that roles and manners in Wonderland hinge on exterior trappings as much as on inner identity.
By linking the shrinking to the fan and dropping it in time, Alice conducts her first successful experiment. This small victory foreshadows later size management with the mushroom and her growing confidence in reasoning.
Themes and characters linked
The line connects to identity-and-growing-up through Alice’s shaky sense of self under rapid bodily change; to bodily-change-and-autonomy via her emergent control over size; and to logic-language-and-nonsense in the playful diction “growing small.” The White Rabbit catalyzes the moment by providing glove and fan, while the Caterpillar’s later lesson on calibrated growth echoes this early hypothesis-testing. Together these episodes sketch Alice’s evolution from passive participant to critical inquirer.