Ivan Luana

Master Studies, English Language and Literature

2nd year

Sojas concept of Thirdspace applied to Lewis Carrolls Alice in

Wonderland

By definition, Sojas Thirdspace, explained by the author himself as an

encouragement to think differently about the meanings and significance of the
inherent spatiality of human life (place, location, locality, landscape,
environment, home, city, region, territory and geography) is based on the growing
awareness that we have always been intrinsically spatial beings, active
participants in the social construction of our embracing collectively created
spatialities.

Soja's Thirdspace has arisen from the spatial crisis that has been
spreading all over the world ever since the late 1960s and has been described as a
product of a 'thirding' of the spatial imagination, the creation of another mode of
thinking about space that draws upon the material and mental spaces of the
traditional dualism but extends well beyond them in scope, substance, and
meaning (11). Regarded as simultaneously real and imagined and more (both
and also ) by Soja, he posits that the exploration of Thirdspace can be
described in journey to 'real-and-imagined' places.

Such an example of a journey to real-and-imagined places is Alices

fantastic trip to Wonderland, as she travels to it by means of climbing down the

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ladder of her own subconscious, of her own dream. The theory of Thirdspaces
main tenet is that "everything comes together subjectivity and objectivity, the
abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the
unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and
body, consciousness and the unconscious []. Once Alice falls through the
rabbit-hole into Wonderland, the reality that surrounds her undergoes profound
change while her strategies for dealing with that reality do not. So she brings her
own reality that she had experienced before into the fantasy world that she is now
facing, although her reality does not coincide with the dystrophic world that is
unfolding in front of her. In accordance with the thirdspace theory, the dichotomy
between contrasting parts is brought together in one place, at the same time.
Wonderland itself presents Alice with a myriad of shifting categories; boundaries
such as those between animal and human, decorum and rudeness, order and
chaos are continually violated.

Alice in Wonderland is especially demonstrative of the fantasy genre

because Alice, a stranger to Wonderland, realizes the fantastical nature of the
world that surrounds her and must constantly work to navigate and understand it.
So her constant struggle to understand the world around her is contrasting with the
absolute nonsensical reality in Wonderland, she tries to understand a world that, in
itself, refuses to be elucidated. One example of absurdity and of paradox is when
she has to learn to walk away from a place in order to reach it. Here we have not
only the fail to understand the world of Wonderland, but also the extreme
antithesis between two absurd components: like having to walk away from a
destination in order to achieve it. Lewis Carroll demonstrates the lawless nature of
Wonderland through fantastical inversions of logic (though the irony here is that
Carroll was truly a logician) and of nature, like a rabbit which can talk and wear a

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waistcoat. Alice further tries to apply the logic of schoolroom geography that she
has learned in the real world to Wonderland when she describes her understanding
of the inversion, the turning upside-down, that she experiences falling.

Moreover, Carroll uses the White Rabbit, instead of the dream, to

introduce Alice and the reader to the fantastical nature of Wonderland. The White
Rabbit is, by far, the most human of the characters Alice will encounter
underground (Carroll first shows the Rabbit's humanness by capitalizing White
Rabbit like a formal, human name). What surprises Alice most about the Rabbit is
not that it speaks (such an imaginative child as Alice likely hears animals talk all
the time in her mind) but that it has human accoutrements. The fact that the White
Rabbit talks materializes the fantastic world inside Alices head, meaning that
everything is possible in Wonderland and that imagination comes hand in hand
with reality, contrasting but also complementing each other.

As a continued idea of the thirdspace, Eric Rabkin upholds the usefulness

of fantasy to the reader:

There is nothing, however, wrong with escape. If one is imprisoned, the desire to escape
is sane and valuable. If the real world oppresses a reader . . . a fantastic world that handles
his fears for him or, at least for the time of reading, clarifies his confusion, is a world that
offers not escape but liberation. [23]

So fantasy and reality embrace the idea of thirdspace in Alice in Wonderland by

being there at the same time, in the same place, co-existing not only in Alices
world, but also in the world of the reader, because the reader himself feels like
escaping the world of fantasy due to its peculiarities and dangers that it has upon
the human mind, but also through fantasy, we can escape routine so we, as readers,

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still embrace the idea of fantasy as soon as it gets us distracted from the
unscrupulous world surrounding us.

To conclude, the theory of thirdspace in Alice in Wonderland coincides

with exactly Alices dream world, Alices state of unconsciousness, the thirdspace
exists as long as Alice falls into deep sleep, we could say it is a virtual thirdspace
where antithetic concepts intertwine with one another, becoming a single entity.
This temporary liberation from the mundane of the real world revivifies how the
reader thinks and often shows him that reality itself contains more fantastical
elements than one would expect.

Bibliography:
Rabkin, Eric. Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales and Stories. Cary, NC: Oxford University Press,
1979. 15 December 2007.
http://www.victorianweb.org