Science Fiction & Fantasy Asked by ferjsoto42yahoocom on March 13, 2021
Most readers are aware of the rotational movement around the table in A Mad Tea-Party, yet in the episode prior to this, the one with the Cheshire Cat on the branch, the feline had directed Alice towards the Hatter’s and Hare’s house, by using these strange words:
“In that direction,” the Cat said waving its right paw round, lives a Hatter, and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare.” (italics around the words “that” are Carroll’s).
The reader is soon told that:
Alice waited a little…and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live.
After this particular “walk” Alice finds herself looking at exactly the same tree branch and Cat, from what appears to be exactly the same perspective and distance! (For this refer to Tenniel’s two pictures of the event.) Therefore Alice must have walked around her own axis, just as the earth was said to “turn round on its axis,” leading to the Duchess’s axis/axes pun.
Alice then tells the Cat, who now vanishes from tail to head:
…I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.
In this case, as in similar ones in Wonderland and Looking-Glass, Carroll uses the word “giddy” overwhelmingly when there is some rotational movement occurring and someone is feeling giddy or dizzy. For Carroll use of the word “giddy,” see A Kwic Concordance to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, p. 163)
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