Rules, Games, and Social Performance

Wonderland’s races, croquet, and courtroom show rules as mutable performances wielded to assert rank. Games change mid-play; procedures gratify authority rather than fairness. The social script—etiquette, judgment, education—appears as theater. Alice’s competence emerges as the capacity to name the game and refuse its premises.

Central Question

How does Carroll turn games and procedures into theatrical performances that expose authority as contingent and teach Alice to exit unjust rules rather than master them?

Quick Facts

Work
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Related Characters
0
Key Manifestations
4

Theme Analysis

Overview: Rules as Theater, Authority as Costume

Across Wonderland, procedures behave like costumes: they dress up arbitrary will as order. The Dodo’s caucus-race makes frantic motion a substitute for purpose, ending with the fiat that “all have won and all must have prizes,” a verdict detached from achievement. The tea-party freezes time at six o’clock, and etiquette becomes compulsion—cups are shuffled instead of washed, riddles lack answers, and conversation polices form rather than meaning. Croquet escalates this logic: flamingos and hedgehogs transform a game into spectacle, while the Queen’s “Off with his head!” turns rule enforcement into sovereign display. In the courtroom, rules lose any pretense of inference; the King’s procedures and the nonsense letter masquerade as proof, preparing the final absurdity of “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” Against these performances, Alice develops a counter-competence: she experiments (the mushroom’s measured bites), questions premises, and finally refuses participation. Calling the tribunal “nothing but a pack of cards,” she collapses the stage itself. Carroll aligns social scripts—parliamentary procedure, school curricula, polite conversation—with games whose rules can be rewritten mid-play. The theme shows that authority in Wonderland does not rest on law or reason but on collective pretense; it persists only while participants accept the terms. Alice’s achievement is not winning the game but diagnosing it as a game and stepping outside its frame.

Development: From Being Ruled to Ruling the Rules

Carroll sequences encounters so that Alice moves from rule-taking to rule-reading. Early, she attempts to recite lessons and obey decorum, yet her verses misfire into parodies and her size fluctuates beyond social proportion. The Dodo’s race offers the first tutorial in procedural emptiness: rules are invented after the fact, and prizes are distributed to gratify authority rather than merit. Having seen procedure untethered from purpose, Alice meets the Hatter and March Hare, who operate a ritual without telos. Their quarrel with Time freezes the clock at six, and etiquette hardens into a loop of seat-shifting. Alice’s irritation—her decision to leave rather than solve the unsolvable raven riddle—marks a new skill: exiting a bad game is better than perfecting its manners. In croquet, Carroll folds violence into play. The Queen’s threats reveal that the sovereign can always rewrite rules as punishment. The King counters with pedantic by-laws, but his interventions—like asking for evidence that cannot matter—expose procedure as delay rather than justice. The Cheshire Cat’s lingering head prompts a miniature legal dispute about decapitation without a neck, sharpening Alice’s sense that law here is wordplay draped as authority. The Gryphon and Mock Turtle extend the satire to schooling: lessons become dances, and curricula (“Uglification,” “Derision”) parody instruction as drill. By the trial, Alice has learned to test premises. Growing physically as the court shrinks morally, she rejects “sentence first—verdict afterwards” and names the court a “pack of cards.” The declaration punctures collective make-believe and ends the performance. The book’s arc thus teaches procedural literacy: recognize scripted authority, question its goals, and refuse the stage when it cannot be reformed.
Analysis

The Caucus-Race as Prototype of Procedural Emptiness

The caucus-race condenses the theme into a comic experiment. No starting line, no finish, no criteria—only motion. The Dodo’s concluding judgment, “all have won and all must have prizes,” satirizes decisions that retrofit justification to desired outcomes. The move mimics institutional habits: reward distribution masks arbitrariness as fairness by invoking procedure. Alice participates in good faith, but the race teaches her that legitimacy does not follow from form alone. The prize economy (she supplies the thimble she then receives) exposes exchange as pure ceremony. The episode becomes the template for later institutions: the tea-party’s circular etiquette, the Queen’s rigged croquet, and the court’s foregone verdict. Carroll suggests that when rules are plastic and authority declares victory by definition, the ethically intelligent response is not improved compliance but changed participation—observing, naming, and, when necessary, departing.

Analysis

Law as Stage: From Evidence to Spectacle

In the trial of the Knave of Hearts, legality is choreographed performance. Jurors write their names to remember themselves; the White Rabbit reads a nonsensical letter as evidence; the Hatter’s testimony is a digression masquerading as relevance. The King brandishes procedure as a prop, proposing rules that produce conclusions already preferred by the Queen’s “Off with his head!” The maxim “sentence first—verdict afterwards” bluntly states the court’s reversal of means and ends. Alice’s growth during the scene literalizes moral enlargement: as she expands, the court’s stagecraft contracts, and the power of naming—calling the court a “pack of cards”—terminates the show. Carroll’s legal farce is not merely antic; it diagnoses how institutions can convert process into ornament. The scene invites readers to distinguish between rule following and justice seeking, and to consider refusal—withdrawal of assent—as a serious civic act.

Alice’s Competence: Naming and Exiting Bad Games

Alice’s progress is not mastery of Wonderland’s rules but literacy about rules themselves. She tests premises (mushroom), leaves circular rituals (tea), resists sovereign fiat (croquet), and finally dissolves the court by declaring its fiction. The ethical skill is procedural skepticism coupled with strategic withdrawal.

Who Performs the Rules? Characters and Symbols in Concert

Alice learns procedural literacy by testing each arena. The Dodo models fiat rulership through invented race rules; the Hatter and March Hare police etiquette while avoiding purpose; the Queen weaponizes rules as threat, and the King buries decisions under petty by-laws. The White Rabbit ushers Alice into bureaucratic spaces without providing meaning, while the Gryphon and Mock Turtle turn education into drill and dance, revealing pedagogy as pageant. Symbols clarify this performance: playing-cards visualize rank without depth; the perpetual watch and tea-time freeze process into loop; the mushroom and size-changing food translate self-governance into calibrated experiment; the Cheshire Cat’s grin separates sign from office, preparing Alice to distrust embodied authority; the golden key and garden hold out a measured ideal that requires proportion, not obedience. Together, characters and symbols show that rules acquire force only when participants accept the script—and that a child’s clear naming can close the show.

Manifestations

The Dodo invents a race with no rules and declares “all have won and all must have prizes,” turning procedure into arbitrary distribution.

Time is fixed at six; etiquette replaces cleaning with endless seat-shifting, and riddles lack answers—ritual without purpose.

Living equipment and moving arches make fair play impossible as the Queen’s “Off with his head!” converts rules into sovereign threat.

Curriculum becomes parody and dance; instruction is drill and costume, teaching Alice to read pedagogy as performance.

The trial elevates spectacle over proof—nonsense letter, meddling rules, and “sentence first—verdict afterwards”—until Alice ends the game by naming a