She’s “Off with her head”: Alice’s ‘trip’ into Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel ‘Alice in Wonderland’ may seem like a mystical tale of adventure, childhood innocence and magical tea-parties, but what if Carroll’s own psychological trauma inspired a deeper meaning behind the story? The tale includes a recurring theme of consumption and addiction, following 7-year-old Alice’s journey through the rabbit hole.
Wonderland is a psychedelic, surreal and excitingly dangerous world full of strange places and creatures, arguably a metaphor for the descent into the psychological disruption caused by drugs. The 19th century was defined as a period of medical experimentation and drug addiction; cocaine was described as the ‘wonder drug’ for its hallucinatory effects. Alice’s confusion in unknown places, her observation of otherworldly creatures and the distortion of time and place are all dramatized effects of substance abuse, whilst her struggle to escape Wonderland alludes to the restrictive cycle of addiction.
The eccentric, unserious and impossibly daft Mad Hatter may be associated with teacups and cakes but among this could hide a darker backstory. Hatters in the 18th and 19th centuries suffered from chronic mercury poisoning from the felt making process causing hallucinations, tremors and memory loss, creating the idiom ‘mad as a hatter’.
The caterpillar also alludes to psychedelics, smoking a large pipe and blowing smoke into Alice’s face. Disney’s animation depicts letters made from smoke floating around Alice as she grows increasingly confused, suggesting her intoxication. The wise caterpillar also instructs her to eat from a giant mushroom that makes her grow and shrink, a suggestion to the disorientating effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
This scene is depicted in the 1967 song ‘White Rabbit’ by American rock band, Jefferson Airplane. The lyrics play on the Queen of Hearts infamous line “off with her head” as well as “remember what the dormouse said, feed your head” which links to Alice’s psychological instability throughout. Alice eats and drinks several mysterious substances on her journey, all with strange and psychedelic effects. Her growing and shrinking throughout the story could be a metaphor for consumption and increasing reliance on substances for security in Wonderland.
The period of scientific transformation, that came with the Industrial Revolution, triggered a surge of both medical and recreational drug use in Victorian England. Artists and poets of the Romantic movement believed in the power of drugs for creative and academic insight, with writers like Lord Byron and Bram Stoker both using the opium derivative, Laudanum, for its narcotic and disorientating effects creating the addiction referred to as the ‘Romantic Legacy’. Stoker also included the theme of drugs in his writing as well as novelists like Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde bringing awareness to the secret double life of the respectable upper class Victorian gentleman. Wilde. In Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ 1890, Dorian enters an opium den in his journey to depravity, demonstrating audience familiarity and intrigue for recreational drug use.
Whilst Lewis Carroll doesn’t explicitly mention drugs in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, the dark fantasy, surreal nature of Wonderland embodies the effect of opiates. Opium was used across the spectrum of psychological diagnoses, but primarily for ‘hysteria’, a disease of the female brain resulting in anxiety and fainting. Alice’s adventure could therefore be a product of hallucinations caused by opium prescribed for her ‘hysteric’ daydreaming, that threatened her societal conformity. Whilst later discovered to be psychological trauma, hysteria was thought to have been caused by ‘Wondering Womb’. ‘Wonderland’ could be derived from this, suggesting the novel could be a metaphor for Victorian perception of feminine expression and the intoxicating results of society’s pressure to conform to rigid structures.
Kersten Davies
