Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1884

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Sections 1-6

Part 1, Sections 7-12

Part 2, Sections 13-17

Part 2, Sections 18-22

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

The Unreliable Nature of Knowledge

Throughout his academic and authorial careers, Edwin A. Abbott expressed anxiety about the limits of knowledge, even knowledge gained through rigorous scientific exploration. In Flatland, even the most intelligent characters struggle with a similar problem: despite witnessing extraordinary events with their own eyes, they do not believe what they have seen, and when they do finally accept these perceptible truths about the world, they are likely to misinterpret them. This suggests that scientific observation is not always the surest path to an accurate understanding of the world.

This phenomenon first manifests in Flatland in the Square’s dream of Lineland. The Square emphasizes the King of Lineland’s extremely limited perspective, but the king insists that he can accurately see everything: “Such a life, with all vision limited to a Point, and all motion to a Straight Line, seemed to me inexpressibly dreary; and I was surprised to note the vivacity and cheerfulness of the King” (45). Despite the Square’s genuine wish to enlighten the king about his condition—to give him “common sense”—the latter feels a kind of rapturous love for his kingdom and refuses to accept any scientific evidence offered by the Square (47). He goes so far as to suggest that the Square has hallucinated his own position in the world, saying, “‘You must have seen a vision; for to detect the difference between a Line and a Point by the sense of sight is, as every one knows, in the nature of things, impossible” (48). From the king’s perspective, material evidence indicates a very different truth about the world than the truth in which the Square believes. Moreover, his understanding of the universe is rooted in “the nature of things”: It is fundamentally true, embedded in the most basic structure of life itself, and yet it diverges completely from what the Square knows to be true. This disjunction between the two men’s experience of knowledge illustrates the novel’s larger vision of truth as unreliable, subjective, and ever-changing.

Of course, the Square eventually occupies a position very similar to the one occupied by the King of Lineland: When the Sphere arrives to bring him new knowledge, he dismisses it repeatedly, arguing that he already knows the truth about dimensionality. The two men argue over the nature of basic scientific concepts like the nature of space and the definitions of north and south. This suggests that even the most rigorous empirical investigations of concepts like these might not always yield consistent results. By the end of the novel, the Square doubts the truth of his own material experiences, despite having previously believed so fervently in the truth of those experiences that he was willing to go to prison for it. Ultimately, the text raises questions about whether knowledge can ever be completely reliable, and thus whether it can ever serve as a dependable way to organize our perceptions of the world.

The Relationship Between Science and Religion

As Abbott was both a mathematician and a theologian, and like many 19th-century thinkers, he was deeply invested in finding ways to reconcile the two epistemological fields. One way he does this in Flatland is by noting the importance of imagination in both scientific and religious understandings of the world. For Abbott, both a scientific imagination and a religious imagination existed, and both required a willingness to move beyond popular or accepted ideas about how the world worked. In Flatland, The Relationship Between Science and Religion is most evident in moments when characters use their imaginations to grasp a heretofore “impossible” scientific idea—like the existence of more than two dimensions—and in so doing, have pseudo-religious emotional reactions. In other words, science and religion overlap when they allow characters to transcend physical, spiritual, or intellectual limitations.

In order to convince the Square of the scientific truth of the three-dimensional world, the Sphere lifts him up into Spaceland, stimulating a highly emotional reaction in which the boundaries between rationality and ecstasy become blurred: “I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was not Space: I was myself, and not myself [...] I looked, and behold, a new world!” (64). Although what the Square is looking at is, in fact, a geometrical shape—he is looking at the Sphere’s interior—he experiences this vision almost as a religious conversion. He prostrates himself before the Sphere as though worshipping a deity and addresses him as “divine ideal of consummate loveliness and wisdom” (64). Soon thereafter, The Square’s new scientific knowledge leads him to declare that he is also a god, and for the rest of the novel, he refers to his own task in religious terms: he wants to “enlighten” his fellow Flatlanders by descending from the heavens and considers himself an apostle of this new gospel (67). The end of the novel relies heavily on the notion that science can have the same kind of emotional impact that religion can have, thus further confusing the divisions between the two structures of thought.

However, Flatland presents as equally plausible the idea that science and religion can be harmful and destructive in similar ways. The sudden decision by Flatland’s government to imprison or execute anyone claiming to have received revelations from otherworldly beings speaks to their fear of being challenged: not only do they not want their scientific understanding of the universe’s fundamental structure to be challenged, but they do not want any creatures who could be perceived as deities to bring new religious ideas to Flatland. Thus, the novel suggests that religion and science, when denied their imaginative potential, can both be wielded as cudgels against nonconformity, pluralism, and dissent. This is certainly true for the Square, who is persecuted for the causes of both scientific and religious enlightenment.

The Radicalization of Marginalized Groups

While much has been said about Flatland’s satirical critiques of Victorian social structures, less has been said about its discussion of how marginalized groups are or could be radicalized to rise up against unjust rulers. While the novel evinces some anxiety about revolutionary violence, the sections dealing with the Colour Revolt and its aftermath depict revolution as a generally positive force, specifically when motivated by small, everyday occurrences in individual people’s lives.

The incident that led to the Colour Revolt was not something that appeared special or significant on its face: rather, it was the accidental creation of color by a single Polygon, Chromatistes. Chromatistes’s first action upon discovering color is to paint his own house and the people in his immediate vicinity. While this eventually makes him famous, the fact that his first rebellious act is a personal and domestic one further emphasizes the revolutionary potential of the ordinary individual.

The first institution to be seriously affected by the Colour Revolt is the education system, where the appearance of color threatened the aristocracy’s stranglehold on learning. Perhaps the most marginalized group in Flatland, the “Criminal and Vagabond Classes,” will no longer let themselves be abused, tortured, and killed for the sake of educating the nobler classes: Refusing to send any more “tributes” to the schools, “[they] waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden” (28). Moreover, “the Soldiers and Artisans began more vehemently to assert—and with increasing truth—that there was no great difference between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now they were raised to an equality with the latter” (28). In other words, the criminals, soldiers, and middle-class artisans are all radicalized as a direct result of the oppression they have faced and their glimpse of what the world could be like if they no longer faced these oppressions. In the context of the Colour Revolt, abstract ideas about freedom and equality are less important than the material changes that came about because of Chromatistes’s discovery of color (however brief those changes proved to be).

The Square also becomes radicalized through his experience of how the world could and should be. As soon as he accepts the truth of the third dimension’s existence, he aspires to improve the conditions of his fellow Flatlanders by changing the social structure as radically as the Colour Revolt sought to do: “I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity” (70). While the principal goal of the Colour Revolt was to erase political and cultural distinctions and give all Flatlanders equal rights, the Square hopes to radically alter their awareness of the world in which they live: and, as the Flatland government’s persecution of the Square suggests, this kind of thought rebellion can be as dangerous to authority as any physical rebellion.