Week 11 Essay

Alice in Wonderland and Drugs

Alice in Wonderland poster. Image Information.

A lot of people I know like to say that Alice in Wonderland is all about drugs or at least that Lewis Carroll was on a lot of drugs when he wrote it. Personally, I think that is taking a great piece of work and reducing it to something lesser. It is a shame when someone takes something that an artist has worked on very hard and they say, "well I could've done that too if I was that high." It is said so much that a lot of people think you need drugs to "expand your mind," or to be truly creative. 

The book was written about 150 years ago, but that does not mean there were not drugs. However, the drugs then were opiates and were not generally hallucinogens. I know that everything in this story is like you are "trippin," at least from what I have been told, but the intention of the book was to recreate the overactive imagination of a child. I think I get overly protective of the story because when I was little, the stories and places that I came up with while playing were way weirder than Wonderland.

My favorite game was one called mirror land and I would jump through this old, rusty frame of a large mirror to be transported there. Basically everything was backwards there, so I had a different name, a different family, and there were different rules of physics. The rules of physics were broken via trampoline. At some point, I decided you must also talk backwards, and to this day, I can say entire sentences completely backwards almost as fast as I can say them forward. Of course there are different rules of pronunciation when talking backward, but they can be learned.

I understand that it may be a possibility that the author was high. And I know that the candy makes her grow or shrink. In fact, after changing shapes so many different times, she has an identity crisis because she says that there is no way she can be the same person she was before she changed size so many times. The part about the mushrooms also having weird effects, like making her neck so long that she is basically a snake and gets attacked by birds in the air, definitely points to something weird going on. If you wanted to make this into a story about the consequences of drugs, it would not be difficult. But to me, you are taking a very innocent piece of art and making it into something very bad. 

So, the fact that kids can actually think of awesome worlds and stories on their own means that everyone is creative at some point in their life, and I believe that saying things like, "he must've been so high when he wrote that," limits your own creativity.

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