CAN I WATCH ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS FULL
In fact many critics are convinced that the whole story is so full of references to the city that it should be viewed as an elaborate Oxford in-joke. There are many other local references: there is a real treacle healing well near Oxford in the village of Binsey, and Alice also plays a grotesque version of the croquet games she would have enjoyed in Christ Church. For example, the Duck, Dodo, Lory and Eaglet are walk-on parts for Duckworth, Dodgson and Alice’s sisters Ina and Edith, while the description of them emerging “dripping wet, cross and uncomfortable” from the pool of tears is a distorted echo of an earlier boating trip during which they were caught in a thunderstorm. Some parts of Carroll’s story assume a degree of local knowledge. But for many people, the hookah-smoking Caterpillar and his magic mushroom remain far more closely associated with the 1960s than the 1860s. Actually there is no evidence that Carroll ever tried drugs beyond some alarming-sounding homeopathic remedies, which included dosing himself with “aconite and arsenic” to cure a stubborn cold. Songs such as Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (“Remember what the Dormouse said / Feed your head, feed your head”) have encouraged a whole generation of readers to think of Alice’s journey underground as another kind of trip. DrugsĮven more popular is the theory that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a thinly veiled allegory about drug use. His defenders point out that such interpretations probably reveal more about our own fears than they do about Carroll. Alice’s attempts to move aside a curtain and squeeze through a little doorway have also attracted comment, particularly when viewed alongside Carroll’s history of child friendships.
William Empson gleefully pointed out that Alice is “a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid”. Psychoanalytical interpreters have seized on it with particular relish. While the story invites us to step inside Alice’s head, some readers have wondered if it reveals more about her creator.
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