Alice through the Posthuman Glass

This chapter establishes the Alice stories as proto-posthuman texts. It is structured around key thematic axes that reveal the non-anthropocentric ethics prevalent in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world: first, it critiques Victorian taxonomy and scientific rationalism by exploring how the question of classification permeates the stories, but categorisation is repeatedly undermined by all characters including Alice herself. Next, it turns to Carroll's technological imagination and explores the implications of the animation and agency acquisition of inanimate objects and technological artefacts, anticipating later developments in object-oriented ontology and new materialism. Subsequent sections explore Alice's dream-state as a posthuman temporality, where the question of agency becomes central. Alice's posthuman becomings—child, animal, object, heroine—are tracked through affective encounters, political games, and acts of resistance. The affective networks in which all characters find themselves entangled are then discussed, with a focus on games of survival and becoming, such as the Queen's game of croquet or the Caucus race, which become tableaux of animate/inanimate convergence. Last, the chapter examines how Carroll's Alice stories, through themes of death, animality, and blurred species boundaries, interrogate the violence inherent in humanist thought and advance a posthuman critique of power, subjectivity, and ethical relations with nonhuman life.