“What a curious feeling!” said Alice; “I must be shutting up like a telescope.”
What does Alice mean by “shutting up like a telescope,” and how does this shrinking moment shape her developing sense of identity and method in Wonderland?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole
Analysis
Having fallen down the rabbit-hole and entered the long hall of locked doors, Alice discovers a tiny door that opens onto a beautiful garden. She cannot fit through, but later finds a bottle on the glass table labeled “DRINK ME.” Cautious from moral tales about poison, she checks the label, tastes, and then finishes the liquid. The drink causes her to shrink to about ten inches high. As the shrinking begins, she narrates her own sensation with the image of a telescope being collapsed. The moment is both thrilling and worrying: she briefly waits to see if she might shrink away entirely. Only then does she realize she has left the key on the table, now far out of reach, turning her new size into an immediate practical problem.
What the metaphor means
Identity, scale, and the ethics of experiment
The telescope image foreshadows Wonderland’s recurring question, later voiced by the Caterpillar: “Who are you?” Alice’s body becomes adjustable hardware, and identity feels contingent on size, context, and tools. Yet she is not passive; she audits labels, recalls schoolroom lessons (however fuzzily), and treats herself as both subject and observer. This is a proto-scientific posture: test, watch, infer. The metaphor also toys with social meaning. Shortly after, Alice worries there’s “hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person,” tying bodily scale to Victorian respectability and self-coherence. Practically, her controlled reduction does not grant mastery; it creates a new constraint—the unreachable key—illustrating that changes meant to solve a problem can generate fresh ones. The line therefore inaugurates Wonderland’s logic: control is provisional, language is a tool for coping, and identity stretches and contracts with circumstance.
By comparing herself to a collapsible telescope, Alice turns a frightening, magical shift into a mechanical process. The familiar instrument lends order and measurability, reflecting her habit of translating bewilderment into manageable, thinkable terms.
This first shrink prefigures later crises—Caterpillar’s “Who are you?”, mushroom calibration, and courtroom growth—where shifts in size unsettle confidence, agency, and social standing, forcing Alice to test methods rather than trust rules.
Themes and character links
The quote anchors bodily-change-and-autonomy: Alice experiences transformation but immediately assesses risk and effect. It intersects with logic-language-and-nonsense, since she uses metaphor to stabilize meaning amid absurdity. Her method anticipates education-and-mock-pedagogy: school facts (poison labels, geography) appear as half-useful scripts that she must adapt experimentally. The White Rabbit’s hurry catalyzes the setting where such experiments begin; the Caterpillar later challenges the identity implications of these changes. The moment also gestures toward rules-games-and-social-performance: size will later map onto “respectability” and courtroom authority, exposing how social order depends on arbitrary measures of stature and voice.