- Amy MacKinnon
Why Is Alice in Wonderland So Weird?
Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Alice in Wonderland is a weird story.
It’s because the story is so weird that it’s been misunderstood and become fodder for some conspiracy theorists.
Grace Slick’s song, White Rabbit, makes a direct reference to Lewis Carroll’s, Alice in Wonderland:
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.
Although in the story Alice doesn’t take pills, she does drink potions to change her size. On the archive for the Jefferson Airplane website, I found the following:
Grace has always said that White Rabbit was intended as a slap toward parents who read their children stories such as Alice in Wonderland (in which Alice uses several drug-like substances in order to change herself) and then wondered why their children grew up to do drugs.
It seems that Grace Slick also misunderstood what was happening in the story. I think it’s common for people to misunderstand both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and that’s partly because they don’t know much about Lewis Carroll (or that his Alice stories were not deliberately encouraging people to take illicit drugs).
Did you know...
First, Lewis Carroll is not his real name.
Lewis Carroll is his pen name.
Second, he was also an ordained minister.
His real name was Rev. Charles Dodgson, and he was a professor of math and logic at Oxford.
So far as I know, Lewis Carroll was the first one to take Aristotelian logic and gamify it. He even did this on the tests he created for his students in his classes. As Jason Rosenhouse said, “While Aristotle properly gets the credit for inaugurating the study of formal logic, it can be fairly said that Carroll created the field of recreational logic” (Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles).
But did you know that you can thank him for introducing word problems to math and logic teachers and students?
I didn’t!
I only found out while I was doing research for this blog post!
Yes, every kid struggles with figuring out word problems in school, but those word problems are intended to help kids learn to think logically, with a side effect of potentially seeing some of the practical applications of math (depending on the question).
I’ll show you two examples of how some of those “weird” things in Alice stories are logic puzzles, because when you figure out the puzzle, then you’ve also discovered that you were able to work through the logic within it.
It’s Weird Because It's a Puzzle!
I’m going to give you a small glimpse that will help you see how Lewis used wordplay to teach logical concepts in his Alice stories. Here are the two examples that I’m going to use:
“Tall or small, I’m still Alice!”
The Cheshire Cat at the end of the tea party: “Everything disappears but the grin”
Tall or Small, I’m Still Alice!
At first, this comment by Alice seems obvious to us: we start out very small as babies and then, as we mature, we grow into our adult height. Throughout that process we change as we develop, but we’re still the same person even if our appearance is very different from when we were babies.
Alice’s words have a slightly different context because she’s just entered Wonderland, and she’s drinking a potion that makes her taller, and another one that makes her smaller.
The concept behind Alice’s comment is that of substance and accidents.
It’s normal for a child to grow and develop, and that means a change in appearance and abilities. Babies can’t read or write---yet! But as they grow and their bodies develop into adult bodies, their minds are also developing their ability to grasp more complex ideas.
Throughout that whole process of development, the person (the “who”) doesn’t change. My size, shape, mental faculties, and appearance are all very different from when I was a baby, but I’m still Amy!
The Cheshire Cat: Everything disappears but the grin
This comment is made by the narrator at the end of the tea party. The queen’s “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” comment is not in Alice in Wonderland, it’s in Through the Looking Glass.
In Disney’s cartoon version of AW (which gave me nightmares for several days as a child!) and every other attempt to act out AW, this part of the story is never conveyed well. In fact, it can’t be conveyed well, because this statement is an impossible thing!
It would be easy to know that and then dismiss it as something nonsensical, but Carroll was a professor of logic and this is one of the many logical concepts that he’s worked into the story. It’s definitely harder to figure out than the concept of substance and accidents. I’m going to use water as an example, and then explain the concept Carroll is playing with in Cheshire Cat’s grin:
Water can have three basic forms:
Gas
Solid
Liquid
Gas or Steam
If water is hot enough to become steam, it’s in this state. "While there are different types of steam, as a quasi-liquid, most scientists consider cold steam wet." (This quote and the quotes below on the forms of water are from this website: Is Ice Wet?)
Solid as Ice
Ice is still considered to be wet:
Ice is wet because it forms a small quasi-liquid coating during the transition of water from ice to steam or from steam to ice. This liquid layer is considered metastable, which means it can usually exist in a state of near equilibrium with its surroundings. Dry ice, water, snow, and steam are wet.
Liquid
Yes, water in its liquid form is definitely wet. Since this one is really obvious even to the casual non-scientific observer, I don’t see a need to explain it 😊. However, substances like Mercury and motor oil that have a liquid form don’t have water , and they’re not considered to be wet (so as far as I understand).
The point of these examples is that they serve as an example of the concept of a property inhering in something else. “Wetness” doesn’t exist on its own. We can say that clothes are wet, a floor is wet, paint is wet, etc. but while we can talk about clothes, floors, and paint, they aren’t necessarily wet.
I’ll use color as an example: you never see just a color.
You only see things that are a particular color. You can have a red shirt, a white table, blue house, etc. Each of these has a different color, but you could easily have a shirt that is a different color from red, a table that is not white, and a house that is not blue. In those examples, changing the color of the object doesn’t change what the object is. Each one of them could still have the same shape, structure, and function but have a different color (or multiple colors) and not change the function of the shirt, table, or house.
So you could have just a shirt, table, or house, but can you just have a color?
Have you ever seen just red?
Not something that IS red (crayon, paint, shirt, etc.), but just the color red.
Is your brain breaking trying to find “red” or any other color without an object that is that color?
It’s because it’s impossible to have something that is just red, even though we can imagine what the different colors are in our minds. Even colored lights are lights that allow us to see a particular color, but there can be lights that are a different color.
The idea behind this is that there are some things that don’t exist on their own, they only exist IN something else. This is why we never see just red, blue, yellow, etc. Instead, we say that colors only exist when they inhere in something else.
Lewis Carroll's Logic in Wonderland
I know it’s a lot to think about, but it’s the concept that Carroll was playing with when he wrote about the Cheshire Cat’s disappearance after the tea party that “everything disappears but the grin.”
But you can’t have a grin if you don’t have:
A mouth
Lips
You need something that forms the shape of a grin in order to grin. A mouth doesn’t need to grin, but a grin needs a mouth to be a grin!
So a grin only exists when it inheres in something else: a mouth.
When Carroll said everything disappears but the grin, he was playing around with Aristotelian logic, because a grin without a mouth is an impossible thing! We can think of a grin in our minds, but it’s still a mouth forming the shape of a grin.
This idea of playing around with Aristotelian logic was the basis of the ideas that led to all of the puzzle games that we have today!
There were always riddles to figure out, such as the Riddle of the Sphinx for Oedipus in Greek mythology, but that wasn’t a game to play—it was a matter of life or death!
Carroll was using Aristotelian logic, not just riddles, to play with in the Alice stories so that readers could enjoy the story while also being challenged to figure out the puzzles he put into them. That’s where the word problems in math come from as well (you can find some of his examples of this on Gutenberg.org)
This is why Jason Rosenhouse said (yes, I’m repeating this from above), “While Aristotle properly gets the credit for inaugurating the study of formal logic, it can be fairly said that Carroll created the field of recreational logic.”
That “recreational logic” includes games such as:
Sudoku
Cryptograms
Jigsaw puzzles
Crossword puzzles
Math squares
Using symbols and shapes to teach math (which serve as an introduction to algebraic equations
Most of the games that we play today are derived, at least in part, from Lewis Carroll’s works. Since the games are based on logic, they help prepare kids even at young ages to think logically. Even the silliness in the stories will point to the logical concept underneath. Kids, especially very young kids, may just laugh at the silliness, but as they grow and learn more, they’ll wonder about it more. Parents and teachers who are aware of that can help them avoid the mistake of thinking that the stories are simply nonsensical and help them figure out the underlying puzzles.
And yes, this is why I’m creating so many different kinds of puzzle games for kids (and will keep creating more!), to help them learn to think logically while having fun and being challenged! Without their realizing this can happen, they’ll still be learning how to think through ideas in a logical way, even if they never study logic formally.
Christmas Cryptograms Bundle:
O Antiphons in English and Latin
Favorite Christmas songs including:
Silent Night
Deck the Halls
White Christmas
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
White Christmas
Feliz Navidad
For Kids Ages 4-8
Includes:
Color by Number
Spot the Difference
Explainers of some Christmas Traditions
Hidden Objects
Coloring Pages
Each puzzle is unique
The same shapes are used, but represent a different number in each of the puzzles
Helps develop abstract thought
Teaches logical deduction
Counting
Sorting
Comparing
For kids ages 4-6
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