Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Chapter Outline

Abbott divided the book into twenty-two numbered sections in two Parts, a treatise called This World and a narrative called Other Worlds, and this outline follows his order and his headings. Each entry tells what happens or is argued and where the section leaves the reader, and the Preface, which Abbott wrote for the second edition and set before the text, comes first here too, though it looks back over all that follows. Nothing is held back.

Preface. The Editor, a Spacelander, speaks for the Square, who is now old, forgetful and in prison, and answers two objections to the first edition. The first, that a visible Line must have some thickness, the Square meets by granting the fact and denying the inference, since a dimension that never varies can be neither measured nor noticed, and Flatlanders simply call their height brightness. Both worlds lock up their prophets. To the second, that the Square is a woman-hater, the Editor answers that he wrote as a historian and has softened in prison. The Preface closes by asking for readers who will neither deny what lies beyond experience nor claim to know all about it.

Part I. This World

§ 1. Of the Nature of Flatland. The Square asks the reader to imagine a vast sheet of paper on which figures move freely but can never rise above its surface or sink below it. Seen from within the plane, every figure, Triangle or Circle, looks like a straight line, as a penny does to an eye lowered to the edge of a table, or a distant coast to a sailor. The obvious question, how Flatlanders tell one another apart, is deferred. The section sets up the book’s governing device, the reader’s own eye brought down into a lower world, and drops two quiet hints, that the narrator’s mind has lately been opened and that he has been in Spaceland.

§ 2. Of the Climate and Houses in Flatland. A slight attraction to the South and rain that always comes from the North give Flatland its compass, and good manners require a man to give a Lady the North side of the way. Houses are windowless, since light falls everywhere from no known source, inquiry into its origin having been banned after it filled the asylums. Here the Square makes his strangest claim, that he alone knows the truth about light and is mocked as a madman for it. Then he returns to houses, which are pentagonal, with a small door on the East for the Women and a larger one on the West for the Men. Triangular houses were forbidden centuries ago, and square ones later in the towns, because their sharp corners endangered careless passers-by.

§ 3. Concerning the Inhabitants of Flatland. The classes are set out by shape, from the Women, who are Straight Lines, through Isosceles soldiers and workmen, Equilateral tradesmen, professional Squares and Pentagons and noble Polygons, to the priestly Circles. A male child normally has one side more than his father, though not among the irregular lower orders, whose angle widens only slowly, and the rare birth of an Equal-sided child to Isosceles parents is celebrated. The child is taken from them for ever. The Square admires this Law of Compensation as proof that aristocracy is divinely ordained, and closes on the hundred and twenty rebellions that have all ended in the rebels’ slaughter.

§ 4. Concerning the Women. A Woman is a needle, all point, and nearly invisible end-on, so that to run into one can be fatal. The Code obliges her to use a separate door, to keep up a Peace-cry in public, and to be destroyed if she suffers from involuntary motions, and well-bred ladies sway their backs as a warning to those behind. The Square describes Women as brainless, forgetful and furious, kept in apartments built so that they cannot turn round, and calls their condition deplorable while praising the wisdom that leaves them no memory of it. A Woman’s lot, he says, is fixed by Nature for ever. This is the chapter that drew the charge answered in the Preface, and Abbott’s own note ties the separate door to the clergy of his day.

§ 5. Of our Methods of Recognizing one another. Flatlanders know one another first by the voice, which an Isosceles can feign, and then by Feeling, the touch of a single angle, which serves as the common form of introduction. He tells how an ancestor with an angle of 59° 30′ started while being felt, transfixed a Polygon, and set the family back by five generations, until the Square’s own Grandfather won four votes out of seven and became Equal-sided. Children learn their angles on Specimens, low Isosceles fettered in the schools, starved, and replaced every month, a practice the Square defends as dearer than feeding them but in the end the truer economy. A third method, sight, is promised.