Discuss the chess motif in Through the Looking Glass.

The entire book is structured in the form of a chess game. Conventionally, chess is taken to be a game for the adults since it involves certain well-defined rules and thought-out irreversible moves. Learning chess is an important stage in maturation since it is based on unchanging moves. The use of chess as a motif is also reminiscent of the fact that Carroll taught chess to the Liddell sisters and even invented the traveller’s chess. The chess motif that runs throughout the text becomes a key to the narrative. The game represents a map for the entire book and can be read at multiple levels: at the physical level, at the metaphysical level, and, at the dream world level of the looking glass. Ostensibly, the world of the looking glass is laid out in the form of a chess game, where the land itself is in the form of a giant chess board with rows separated from each other and divided by brooks and hedges. Alice looks down from the hill and finds that “it is a huge game of chess that’s being played – all over the world”, and wishes she “could be one of the chess pieces… (and) wouldn’t mind being a pawn… though of course I should like to be a Queen best”(22). It is here that Alice finds herself a chess piece— a white pawn—herself a part of the bigger chess game that Carroll is playing by constructing the narrative. While, in the middle ages chess was played on enormous fields with human beings as chess pieces, Carroll borrows from this idea and presents it as a laid out path for Alice to move on. Given that it is a fantasy narrative, the text only loosely subscribes to the rules of the game of chess. The kings remain fixed and dormant while the two queens move/scurry about. Alice is a mere pawn who progresses from square to square before she reaches the last square and becomes a queen. The game of chess is conflated with fantasy and produces a nonsensical narrative. At the physical level, chess becomes a symbol of Alice’s journey through life where she begins as a young white pawn and eventually becomes a queen. Her unidirectional progress on the chessboard and its linearity presents her ageing and maturation where she has to leave behind her childhood and emerge a woman. This development fits in with the actual rules of the game of chess, where, upon successfully reaching the last row of the chess board, a pawn may become any piece the player desires (which is usually a queen, the most powerful of all chess pieces). As mentioned earlier, the game of Chess represents Alice’s journey to maturation. She is entrapped in the “adult space” of the world of the chess game, where “each square is a progression in successive stages of maturity”, with her “arrested movement symbolized (by) the word ‘checkmate’” (Gordon, 162).

 

The narrative also carries a metaphysical dimension with the structure of chess delineated as a metaphor of the world with all its rules. We see the influence of religion on Carroll as an ordained man of the church who raises philosophical question on the nature of our existence. The Chess motif presents a deterministic concept of life. It explores the idea of us humans as pawns, as a part of the bigger game of chess, journeying through the predetermined plot of life and moving according to what has been already planned for us. Just as Alice’s journey in the world of the looking glass is guided by a set of rules that lead to a preordained conclusion, our lives are akin to an illogical game of chess, with us being a part of God’s dream. This idea is presented through Tweedeldee, who informs Alice that she is living the Red King’s dream. It is the Red King who controls the dream and Alice is but a figment of his dream following a preordained path already set for her. Life is often drawn as a game of chess where we are mere pieces in a higher game of chess. According to Martin Gardner, the game of chess becomes an allegory of life itself (AA, 10). Alice can move freely but only within the confines of a square and has no real agency, just as we too are living out the dream of some God. It draws upon the idea of humans as mere chess pieces on earth with limited influence like Alice’s movement on the board where things happen to her and she has no real agency. The chess motif helps Carroll throw light on the predeterministic nature of the universe where free will is an illusion and we humans are merely pawns being moved by an invisible hand. In the next section we shall look at the two queens in the novel.

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