The True Meaning Of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland.

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Sigmund Frued

That quote is attributed to the famous neurologist and founder of modern psychoanalysis, Sigmund Frued. Although there isn’t any actual evidence that he ever said the words, once you understand him and his theories, it becomes clear as to why he was given the credit for saying them.

Frued was known for frequently using references to sex in his explanations about human behaviour. Therefore, according to his theories, smoking a cigar might represent an oral or phallic fixation that emerged during an impeded stage of psychosexual development.

He was also known to regularly have a cigar in his hand or mouth, so it makes sense that some people attribute the phrase to him.

But how about when an author writes a book? If an author simply intends for a work to entertain children, do we have any right to infer a deeper meaning or interpretation from it, different from what the author meant? Or is sometimes a story just a story?

When asked about The Lord of the Rings, the author J.R.R Tolkien, had this to say:

“As for any inner meaning or ‘message,’ it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical…. “

So why do scholars still claim that his inspiration for orcs came from Nazis, or that he was making references to WW1, or that the One Ring represents the atom bomb? The last one is particularly puzzling, considering the books were written several years before the manhattan project.

Intelectuals have been debating this topic for hundreds of years. Some even go so far as to say that the “author is dead”; meaning that only the text matters. They claim there will be things that will be revealed about an author and the world they live in regardless of their intentions. One of the proponents of such an idea wrote the following in his essay, The Death of the Author:

“Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”

Roland Barthes

The point is, can we always trust the authors? Does what they say even matter? Could it be that they want their true intentions or inspirations to remain unknown, or perhaps that they aren’t even aware of them? Maybe their ego or pride gets in the way of their true meaning; as if admitting outside inspiration would undervalue their perceived creative genius. Or maybe there was a stigma attached to admitting that their inspiration came from a contemptible source.

Lewis Carroll is someone who might have disagreed with all that and admitted that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” It’s commonly said that his beloved classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was just a story written for the entertainment of three young girls.

That could be true, but I think there’s much more to it than that. And I have good reason to think so. So pack some snacks, we’re going down the rabbit hole.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

When I was ten years old, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS), or Todd’s Syndrome. Named after the British psychiatrist, Dr. John Todd, who first recorded symptoms of the syndrome in 1955.

The following is from Wikipedia:

People (with AiWS) may experience distortions in visual perception of objects such as appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or farther (teleopsia) away than they actually are. Distortion may occur for other senses besides vision as well.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AiWS) is often associated with migraines, brain tumors, and psychoactive drug use. AiWS can be caused by abnormal amounts of electrical activity resulting in abnormal blood flow in the parts of the brain that process visual perception and texture.

Interestingly, AiWS is most common among children, with the average age of the sufferer being 6 years old, many of whom don’t have symptoms that carry on into adulthood. I’ve also read that the distortions most commonly happen at night.

This is from Wikipedia again:

A person affected by Alice in Wonderland syndrome may also lose a sense of time, a problem similar to the lack of spatial perspective brought on by visual distortion. Time may seem to pass very slowly, akin to an LSD experience, and the lack of time and space perspective can also lead to a distorted sense of velocity. For example, one could be inching along ever so slowly in reality, yet to an affected person, it would seem as if one were sprinting uncontrollably along a moving walkway, leading to severe, overwhelming disorientation.

I can remember experiencing deja-vu on what seemed to be a daily basis, it being another symptom of (AiWS). It’s one of the strangest sensations I’ve ever felt. Characterized by the unshakable feeling that a specific moment in time happened once before. Everything about it feels exactly the same, your thoughts, your movements, your location, all of your senses replaying to you a strangely familiar part of your past.

All of this happened so long ago, and I haven’t had any symptoms since I was a teenager, so I decided to request my medical records to see if I could find some more information.

The following has been taken verbatim from a letter I acquired from the child psychologist that I saw in May of 1999. I was ten years old:

“I am writing in regard to this young boy who was referred to me due to some concerns about him hearing voices and having a sense of derealization. He described to his mom that he had heard voices talking in his head, people laughing and that on occasion while riding his bike and staring at the spinning front wheel he felt like he was far away from the situation and everything looked like it was going faster. On the other occasions he has noticed especially in his room at night that he will feel very far away from things and feel very small. He describes how sometimes his homework looks like it is far away as well. Review of other symptoms of depression and other mood disorders anxiety, OCD and psychotic symptoms show that these really are the only things that have been noticed. They are quite disturbing to this young boy, however, there has been absolutely no change in school behaviour or his behaviour at home and in fact had he not told his
parents they wouldn’t have noticed any difficulties in their son.”

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland

If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you might be wondering about the connection between the book and the syndrome. The story is about a young girl and her adventures after she chases a rabbit down a hole. She eats and drinks things that make her shrink and grow, she meets and has conversations with various strange characters, and experiences a number of absurd and unusual incidents.

To put simply, all of the symptoms of AiWS are experienced by Alice in the book, hence the condition’s name.

The first symptom is given to us on the very first page:

“Nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, `Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural)”

She talks to animals and objects throughout the entire book, highlighting the symptom of auditory hallucinations, much like my own.

When Alice is falling down the rabbit hole, the narrator describes her sensations:

“Either the well was very deep or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time, as she went down, to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.”

This is the first glimpse into the temporal distortions in the book. Later at the tea party with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, the concept of time comes up again:

“‘What day of the month is it?’ he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
Alice considered a little, and then said ‘The fourth.’
‘Two days wrong!’ sighed the Hatter.”

Later, the Hatter and the Hare disclose to Alice that they quarrelled with Him (Him being Time), who won’t, “do a thing I ask. It’s always 6 o’clock.”

“A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that the reason so many tea-things are put out here?’ she asked.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the things between whiles.'”

Theres the deja-vu.

Alice experiences the most common symptom of AiWS when she drinks an ominous bottle marked “drink me”:

“`What a curious feeling!’ said Alice; `I must be shutting up like a telescope. ‘ And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high…”

Later she eats the cake labeled “eat me”:

“`Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); `now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!’ (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off).”

Could Carrol’s book just have been the consequence of an over active imagination, or could he have been the sufferer of the rare neurological condition?

According to scholars like Barthes, the text is all we need to answer questions like that, but things get far more interesting when we have a look into the authors life.

Charles Dodgson

Charles Dodgson, Carroll’s real name, was a teacher of mathematics at oxford, as well as a deacon of the anglican church. He grew up in a household with 11 children, telling his brothers and sisters stories, writing magazines for them, and creating games for them to play.

When he entered college, he took a vow of celibacy and remained living at the college, unmarried, for the rest of his life. There, he befriended the three daughters of the dean of the college. One of the girls, Alice Liddell, is assumed to have inspired the “Alice” in his book. Although he denied it later in his life.

Dodgson’s relationships with children is shadowy. He was a photographer, and he took thousands of photos, half of which were of children, some of them even nude or scantily dressed.

Photography was a relatively new technology when he began the hobby in 1856, and many parents understandably wanted their children’s likeness captured for posterity.

But the sensibilities of Victorian tastes were much different back then. Childlike innocence and purity was characteristic of fine art. We don’t look back now on a painting of Michelangelo’s, and think that all the naked cherubs are pornography.

Still, some argue that Dodgson might have had sexual desires, only he never acted on them. Others speculate that action was indeed taken, as evidenced by a series of pages ripped out of his diary after a boating trip taken with the three Liddell girls and the subsequent falling out with the family.

Some even, encouraged by the popularity of Frued’s theories in the 1930’s, use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as proof of his erotic tendencies. Citing the rabbit hole to be a symbol of sexual intercourse, among others.

But what intrigues me more than anything, is that he was know to suffer from migraines, a common symptom of AIWS. Could this also explain his fondness for children? Perhaps the stigma attached to mental illness in the Victorian age encouraged him to find more naive listeners for his strange tales of shrinking and growing.

Even when I was growing up, I must have been reluctant to tell people that I was hearing voices. It actually wasn’t until I received that letter from my doctor that I even remembered that I had auditory hallucinations at all. I must have forgot because I wasn’t repeating that part of my story over the years. I remember having no problem telling friends that I had experienced visual distortions, to me that seemed to be less psychotic.

It should be also be noted that Dodgson had a speech impediment. Maybe he found that children were more compassionate and unconcerned with his embarrassing stammer.

Conclusion

So could it be possible that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an autobiographical account of the authors undisclosed neurological condition, expressed in an inconspicuous way that might have kept him out of a mental institution?

Or can we admit that Dodgson created the story solely to entertain, while at the same time accepting that his inspiration came from AiWS?

Or is sometimes a cigar just a cigar?

I think it’s for us to decide, and if you’ve read the book, you know how much Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, appreciated ambiguity.

“‘Mine is a long and sad tale!’ said the mouse turning to Alice and sighing.”

“‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail, ‘but why do you call it sad?'”

Lewis Carroll

Thanks for reading.