so ties in the Victorian time period, which Lewis Carroll lived during, to Alice. Trying to clarify one’s identify or explain oneself generates confusion, significantly reduces the effectiveness of religion, and creates a more disorganized worldview (Polisner).Richard Kelly refers to Alice’s Wonderland as “a world made up of contradictions, violence, jokes, anxiety, puns, puzzles, rudeness, rules and anarchy shaped by a dream vision” (Kelly 78). He also feels that “Alice’s Adventures is a work of nonsense and as such lacks the coherent structure of more conventional literary works” (Kelly 79). This may be true because the Victorian time period affected Carroll and his works. Five out of every six families used opium habitually in the Victorian time period (Connell). The atmosphere Alice is set in is easily compared to a mind-altering drug experience. The idea of eating a mushroom or drinking from a bottle that causes one to feel altered in some way parallels drug experience. The idea of a caterpillar Alice encounters smoking a hookah seems to be some form of drug use, “at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice” (Carroll 73). This part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland clearly shows that the caterpillar was using some type of drug by smoking it and his languid, sleepy voice is an effect of the hookah.Infant mortality was a common use of the narcotic (Connell). This applies to the duchess’s baby that she hands to Alice:The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no doubt that it had a very turn-up nose, much more like a snout than a real nose; also its eyes were getting extremely small for a baby. Altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at all. ‘But perhaps it was only sobbing,’ she thought, and looked into its ...
