If a Mushroom Was a Mushroom.

“Many readers have referred me to the old book, which Carroll could have read, that describe the hallucinogenic properties of certain mushrooms. Eating fly agaric mushroom poduces hallucinations in which time and space are distorted”

-The Annotated Alice

“We might surmise that neither Tenniel nor Carroll wanted children to emulate Alice and end up eating poisonous mushrooms.”  -Robert Hornback

These annotations really caught my attention. The whole story thus far is based on Alice’s strange encounters. In the beginning, she had difficulty gripping what was going on in this strange place. Wouldn’t eating a poisonous mushroom make it difficult for someone to decifer normality? The annotation states that Carroll may have in fact read books that describe the effects of certain mushrooms if ingested. This may mean that he wrote into the story Alice’s mushroom predicament in order to subtly justify just a fraction of her peculiarity. Throughout the story there has been multiple hints as to why Alice is experiencing these strange situations, or ‘normal’ considering she is in Wonderland.

Hornbeck explains that Tenniel and Carrol did not want the children to imitate Alice after reading the story. Isn’t the story almost an imitation of children in general? True, children do not eat cake and magiacally change sizes. Children do, however, have imaginations. They imagine peculiar occurences, such as things that have actually happened to Alice. When children read this story, they may actually go out and eat a cake, then wait for themselves to change. When children read about Alice changing size as she ate pieces of a mushroom out of either her left or right hands. Tenniel did illustrate the mushroom as a non-poisonous mushroom, however Carroll may or may not have instructed Tenniel to illustrate a specific kind of mushroom. Alice’s experiences seem to concur with the hallucinations present with the ingestion of poisonous mushrooms.