4. Suspiria de Machina

De Quincey’s Body and the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

In writing his original Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey had to negotiate a fundamental conflict between his subject matter and his narrative authority.^[1] As we have seen in the previous chapters, any early-nineteenth-century narrative of a personal history filled with painful sensations raises questions about the narrator’s present clarity of mind. Thomas Trotter demonstrates that the suffering of excess sensibility produces a characteristic form of first-person narrative, one that an educated segment of the middle class could and did interpret as the verbal equivalent of a nervous fit. In this historically conditioned paradigm of reading, the narration of one’s own past suffering is a symptom of bodily disorder rather than a rational critique of social disorder. Thus it can be discounted as a product of the material body rather than a willed production of the intellect. De Quincey’s narrative is filled with descriptions of his suffering—his starvation in London, the ongoing nervous complaint in his stomach, the despair surpassing words of his opium habit—and so the writer’s central problem is how to avoid implicating the narrator within these events. He has to negotiate the paradox of the nervous narrative before he can produce a personal tale that is not dismissed as a product of his material condition. His strategy is to rigidly police the boundary between body and voice, past and present, experience and consciousness, in order to prevent the narrator’s body from entering into the narrating voice.

The Confessions, as its essential claim, asserts the narrator’s gradual achievement of this independence from the body. It describes opium addiction as a past condition wherein the narrator was entirely contained within and defined by his material being; his escape from that state is the precondition to his narration. Though his is an experienced voice, one that has suffered deeply, it differs from the characteristically sadder but wiser voices of Godwin’s, Wollstonecraft’s, and Hays’s narrators. These earlier narrators describe an ongoing condition of indebtedness to their past, as the history of each admittedly lives on within his or her bodily condition, damaging the authority to speak. In comparison, the narrator of the Confessions has a more robust voice, one that asserts a more complete independence from its material condition. He tells us that he has broken the chains of addiction, and his escape indicates a severing of the ties that once bound him to his body and compromised his authority. Through his past suffering, he has acquired a body with a story to tell, and in the relation of his progress through addiction he tells its story. But he is not defined by that body. Through this escape he has become a “transcendent philosopher,” one whose authority to speak is predicated on his intellectual independence from his material condition.

From the time the Confessions was first published to the present day, De Quincey’s autobiographical claim to independence has been disputed.^[2] The author contributed not a little to the problem by continuing to use opium habitually until his death in 1859, at the advanced age of seventy-four. In this century there has been a continued debate about how the material effects of opium worked their way into his writing.^[3] M. H. Abrams holds that opium creates specific images and that there is a characteristic content in opium writing. Elizabeth Schneider takes a relativist position, arguing that opium intensifies elements that are already present in the writer as an individual but has no absolute effects. Alethea Hayter places less stress on the individual’s psychology and more on the range of culturally specific images available to the writer. Opium influences a writer’s selection from among these predefined images, she argues, and therefore similar images recur in opium writing, but not for the deterministic reasons that Abrams describes.^[4]

This twentieth-century debate on the extent to which De Quincey’s narrative is or is not a product of his material condition reproduces the earlier assumptions about narrative authority and the body that define the problem of the early-nineteenth-century nervous narrative. At stake within each of these three accounts is the authority of the narrator. Is this a trustworthy, autonomous individual? Or is there a controlling dependence at work, in which the material realm inserts itself into the narrator’s speech? In each case, the amount of authority continues to depend upon the narrator’s independence from the assumed contamination of the body. Implicit within this debate are several large assumptions that need to be questioned: first, that there is indeed a type of materiality that expresses itself in words; second, that this “body-talk” should be discounted; and, third, that there is a kind of self-expression that is not “body-talk.” These assumptions are based on the same gendered distinction between competing forms of discourse that has been explored in the previous chapters. They valorize a “masculine” discourse predicated on the speaker’s independence from the distorting influence of the body. And they discount a “female” discourse defined by the speaker’s immanence in her or his material condition. Rather than providing yet another assessment of De Quincey’s indebtedness to his body, this chapter looks at De Quincey’s construction of the body and the strategies he devises to escape it.

The paradox of the nervous narrative gives us a starting point, for it demonstrates a generic problem with first-person narratives of personal suffering that compelled writers to adopt new and creative strategies in order to avoid implicating themselves within their own stories. This is a generative paradox in that it forces change within narrative form and thus keeps it unstable yet alive and growing. But De Quincey’s narration presents new problems because it is also autobiography and because he was an inveterate tinkerer who could never leave off commenting on and revising this, his favorite production. In addressing the problem of narrative authority in the Confessions, we have to consider the original narrative and how it constructed a position of authority from which the narrator could tell his own story. But we also must look at his later writing for the same polite audience, because he modified the statements he made in the Confessions in a way that alters his earlier claim to authority. In 1856 he completely revised the Confessions, and the new narrative takes an entirely different approach to the problem of narrative authority. What emerges from this discussion as the quintessential De Quinceyan narrative strategy is his development of a fiction of independence that grows out of a self-conscious strategy to erase his body from his narrative, transforming a body-centered narrative into an intellectual product. Thus he makes over his suspiria de machina into a suspiria de profundis.

De Quincey’s essential claim in the Confessions was that he had been a habitual user of opium and lived to tell about it. The significance of this claim changed during the course of the nineteenth century as the cultural construction of opium and its patterns of usage changed. Even by the time of his 1856 revision of the Confessions, opium had become a different cultural object than it was in 1821. Not until the early twentieth century did the modern view of opiates begin to take shape, and since then nineteenth-century assumptions have been wholly obliterated by the remarkably powerful and extended state discourse on drugs.

Opium was one of many new commodities that became increasingly popular in Britain during the eighteenth century as the colonial empire expanded and international trade made new “luxuries” readily available. British supplies of opium came mainly from Turkey and were imported under the Renaissance-era monopoly granted to the Levant Company, which it maintained until 1825. In De Quincey’s day, opium was wholesaled at auction in London’s Mincing Lane, where trade in most British pharmaceuticals was concentrated. The Society of Apothecaries was the largest single buyer, but the majority of the product went to suppliers for small retail shops, mostly grocers. Imports steadily grew during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as opium became both an increasingly popular home remedy and an important element of the official materia medica. The most popular of the over-the-counter opium preparations was laudanum, the mixture of alcohol and tincture of opium that was De Quincey’s drug of choice. But it was also the main ingredient of the best-selling patent medicines, such as Godfrey’s Cordial.

Opium in early nineteenth-century England was in common use. As one historian notes, usage of the drug was “quite normal,” for it was “freely available and culturally sanctioned.”^[5] There were no legal restrictions on its sale or use, and its popularity increased steadily during the first half of the century, with the government’s blessing. In 1826 the import duty on opium was relatively low at 9s per pound, and it steadily declined until 1860, when it was eliminated entirely. This policy encouraged its importation and kept the price low, so it was both cheap and in good supply. It was used by people of all classes and was routinely resorted to as a remedy for everyday aches and pains. Mild preparations were the only available anodyne for the discomfort of menstrual cramps, toothache, and influenza. It helped insomniac adults get some rest, and in lozenge form it soothed persistent coughs. A sedative for crying babies, known as Infant Quietness, was one of the leading preparations. And opium offered welcome relief for women in labor as well as for people with chronic pain and severe injuries. Because of its constipating effect, it had a therapeutic value in the treatment of cholera, which tends to kill through dehydration. The majority of usage was self-administered—that is, the individual used it without the involvement of a medical professional. Because of the expense of consultations, this practice was prominent among the working class, and it was a firmly established part of the traditional folk medicine that served as the primary treatment for the poor. In the Fens district, where opium was locally grown, poppyhead tea was a popular remedy for common maladies.^[6]

It also formed a prominent part of the official materia medica, for it was the strongest drug available to the physician. The medical works of Thomas Sydenham, the seventeenth-century English physician who invented laudanum, were a standard part of British medical education well into the nineteenth century, and his adulation of opium as a providential gift was frequently repeated. “I cannot but break out in praise of the great God, the giver of all good things, who hath granted to the human race, as a comfort in their afflictions, no medicine of the value of opium…. Medicine would be a cripple without it; and whosoever understands it well, will do more with it alone than he could well hope to do from any single medicine.”^[7] The Edinburgh physician John Brown gave it a central role in his influential medical theory, contributing greatly to its rise in late-eighteenth-century medical usage. His praise was effusive: “[I]t banishes melancholy, begets confidence, converts fear into boldness, makes the silent eloquent, and dastards brave.”^[8] It was also used in the early century as part of the new nonrestraint therapy practiced in model insane asylums such as the York Retreat, where it was as effective as chains in controlling hysterics and melancholics, although it was said to have an adverse effect on maniacs. There is little to wonder at in the consistent praise and widespread use of opium, for it was the only significant painkiller available until the late nineteenth century. It could calm and comfort a person at the extremities of physical pain, when all else was ineffectual. And it could relieve the despair of mental anguish, giving respite to the suicidal. In its various preparations, it served the many functions now reserved for aspirin, cold medicines, sedatives, and morphine.

Until the 1870s, the habit-forming qualities of opium were not a significant component of the English construction of the drug’s effects. “[D]ependence on opium went largely unrecognized,” claims one study. Another writes of addiction, “It was, for the most part, a non-issue. Medical men wrote about it rarely; popular writers almost never. And when people thought about it at all, they thought that addiction was a relatively infrequent, if unfortunate, by-product of the therapeutic use of an important drug.” As John O. Hayden notes, De Quincey’s London reviewers disputed his claim about the extent of addiction among the English, arguing that it was not a problem.^[9]

The invisibility of addiction, at a time when opium was in wide use, had several causes. If a person regularly used opium to treat a chronic complaint, such as rheumatism, his or her habituated us-age was not considered noteworthy. Nor was it necessarily evident in the user’s condition. As Parssinen mentions, “when opium was taken at relatively modest levels, it did not necessarily lead to health problems other than mild constipation” (Secret Passions, 47). He cites examples such as a Victorian doctor who described how he carried on a strenuous practice while using laudanum daily for nearly half a century. De Quincey himself would later be cited as a similar example.

As the nineteenth century progressed, this benign view would slowly change. The preliminary challenge came during the Earl of Mar life insurance trial in 1829. After the earl’s death, the insurance company refused to pay on his policy, contending that his habitual opium usage had shortened his life. Their refusal was debated before the court by medical professionals, and the case demonstrated the widespread lack of consensus on whether or not addiction damaged the user’s health. Whereas the Earl of Mar trial addressed the issue of opium’s effects on the body of aristocrats, its effects on the working class were debated during the public health movement in the 1860s. Campaigners for the reform of living conditions in the urban slums represented opium as an intoxicant that was primarily used as a cheap substitute for gin during periods of low wages. The alarmist claims of the sanitarians stand out because, apart from the Confessions itself, reports of the recreational usage of opium among laborers were exceedingly rare. As several writers have pointed out, during this same time period medical discourse is filled with reports on the recreational usage of ether, chloroform, and nitrous oxide but silent on any similar use of opium, suggesting that the specter of working-class indulgence was raised by the sanitarians as further justification for their plan of social intervention.^[10]

This image of the working-class addict contributed to the relatively welcome political reception that greeted proposals by the Society of Apothecaries that their profession be given exclusive control over the distribution of opium. By having it classified as a dangerous poison, the apothecaries hoped to remove it from the corner grocery store and increase their own base of professional authority. The 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act was the first law regulating opium retail sales, but it was a weak statute with few practical consequences.^[11] The ubiquitous patent medicines were exempted from regulation, and there was no effective provision for enforcement of its other restrictions. Nonetheless, the ongoing campaign of the apothecaries, along with that of the sanitarians, contributed to an increasingly guarded popular assessment of opium during the period from 1870 to 1910.

The development of the hypodermic syringe in the 1870s also affected the perception of addiction. When taken orally, morphine has little difference in effect from opium, and so although it had been isolated from opium in 1815, it was little used. Given intravenously, however, it delivers a much higher opiate dose than that derived through oral consumption, and so injected morphine is significantly more addictive. Because of its expense, this form of usage had an almost exclusively middle-class clientele. In the popular image, “morphinomaniacs” were predominantly women. These new addicts were still relatively rare, and because they were middle class, they were viewed sympathetically.^[12] During this period there was an overall decline in the use of opium because of the development of aspirin and barbiturates. As medical use continued to decline in the early twentieth century, opium became increasingly viewed as an inexpensive recreational drug. Between 1910 and 1930 it became associated with the urban working class, especially the idle unemployed. And through opium’s association with this socially disaffected class, the modern construction, in which narcotics are seen as a social menace, finally came into being. Thus, one hundred years after De Quincey wrote his Confessions, the benevolent image of opium had been completely reversed.

De Quincey’s readers were already familiar with opium as an everyday article of commerce. Indeed, they could hardly have avoided encountering it. It was in the grocers, the drapers, the circulating libraries, and the bookstores; it was probably for sale in the very store where they purchased the Confessions.^[13] De Quincey’s readers had been given it to quiet them as children, had given it to their own children, and had used it, much as De Quincey initially used it, on the advice of a friend, to allay a nagging complaint. Few of them, however, had experienced opium in quite the way that De Quincey described it. Instead of a slight euphoria and pleasant respite from pain, De Quincey experienced a sublime profundity, an overwhelming psychic upheaval, at his first encounter. For eight years his usage was completely recreational, with no medical utility. And when his use became habitual, it enslaved him mentally and physically instead of being a minor nuisance. As the New Edinburgh Review noted, De Quincey described “a new or unusual vice.”^[14] He presented an alternate view of the experience of opium, one that differed qualitatively from the prevailing view held by his audience, and the uniqueness of his literary representation of that experience needs to be explained.

De Quincey’s experience draws on a second opium construct that was circulating at the time, one that was seen in travel literature but rarely applied to the English themselves. Derived from the British colonial context, this Eastern model differed markedly from the benign model of domestic use. As one historian notes, “Fears voiced about the immoral consequences…of opium were based largely on reports from missionaries returning from overseas.”^[15] The image of the degraded Asian opium-eater was present in popular eighteenth-century travel writings such as Baron de Tott’s Memoirs of the Turks and Tartars (1786), in which opium is represented as a sensual luxury rather than as a medical drug, and so it had implications of heightened sexuality and a degraded, debauched existence.^[16] Very rarely, this same view of opium addiction as a moral corruption also appeared within the official discourse of colonialism, and not just in the moral discourse of the missionaries. The most significant example appears in the writing of Sir Thomas Raffles, the former lieutenant-governor of Java, who published his History of Java in 1817.^[17] This intimate study of Javan culture and agriculture, written with the objects of colonial exploitation in mind, condemns the British introduction of opium into the island, arguing that it is immoral to trade in such an “abominable poison” (1:115). Raffles’s harsh description of opium’s effects on the human body sharply contrasts with the mildness of the domestic British model:

The effect which it produces on the constitution is different, and depends on the quantity that is taken, or on other circumstances. If used with moderation, it causes a pleasant, yet always somewhat intoxicating sensation, which absorbs all care and anxiety. If a large quantity is taken, it produces a kind of madness, of which the effects are dreadful, especially when the mind is troubled by jealousy, or inflamed with a desire of vengeance or other violent passions. At all times it leaves a slow poison, which undermines the faculty of the soul and the constitution of the body, and renders a person unfit for all kind of labour and an image of the brute creation. The use of opium is so much more dangerous, because a person who is once addicted to it can never leave it off. To satisfy that inclination, he will sacrifice every thing, his own welfare, the subsistence of his wife and children, and neglect his work. Poverty is the natural consequence, and then it becomes indifferent to him by what means he may content his insatiable desire after opium; so that, at last, he no longer respects either the property or life of his fellow-creature….

…Most of the crimes, particularly murders, that are now committed, may be imputed to opium as the original cause.

In Raffles’s Asian model of addiction, opium is primarily defined as a physical agent that produces a moral disease. As this “slow though certain poison” destroys the physical body, it similarly poisons the physiological site of morality in the body, the “faculty of the soul,” which has a specific material locus in the brain.^[18] Opium’s definitive physiological effect is its action on this locus, destroying the individual’s capacity for moral, self-willed action and replacing it with an “insatiable desire” for more of the drug.^[19] Opium destroys the will, and without that primary human faculty the addict becomes dehumanized as “an image of the brute creation.” Whereas the domestic model of addiction is characterized by its benignity and mildness, the colonial model describes an all-consuming condition of moral corruption.

In addition to serving as an example of this second model of addiction, Raffles’s description is also significant, paradoxically, because of its uniqueness. Discussions of opium’s effects are rare within governmental and mercantile discourse on the colonial trade in opium. This silence is all the more remarkable in light of the immense volume of the India-China trade, its crucial importance to the British economy, and the British public’s thorough ignorance of it all.

During the eighteenth century, the British East India Company had a monopoly on the sale and production of all opium grown in India. Cultivation was centered in Bengal, where the company compelled Indian to plant poppies as their primary, and often their only, crop. Its principal market was China, although the company had to smuggle it into Canton through private merchant ships because the Chinese banned the importation of opium in 1723. The British government renewed the company’s monopoly in 1789 and again in 1814, despite the obnoxiousness of monopolies to its own laissez-faire economic policies, and this renewal emphasizes the importance to the British treasury of the revenue produced by the opium trade. Indeed, until it began selling opium to the Chinese, Britain had been suffering a severe outflow of British bullion to China because of the demand for Chinese tea. The British love affair with tea grew enormously during the eighteenth century, from 1 million pounds in 1730 to 20 million pounds by 1789. The Chinese, however, were uninterested in British textiles or manufactured goods, and so the tea trade was draining British reserves. The opium trade gave the British a commodity to sell to China in exchange for tea. The trade became essential to the national economy; the government’s ability to fund the war against France after 1793, for example, depended on the sale of Indian opium to China, and thus Parliament continued to renew the company’s monopoly. Inglis remarks, “As it held the controlling interest, parliament, in a sense, had become the chief shareholder in the opium business” (Opium War, 52). Between 1780 and 1819, the amount of opium smuggled into China was restricted to 4,000 chests per year in order to keep prices high, but competition and falling profits led to steady growth, first to 10,000 chests annually in 1830 and then a skyrocketing increase. When the first Opium War broke out in 1839, the trade had risen to 35,000 chests per year.^[20]

The effectiveness of the official silence on the character of this vast trade can be gauged by the surprise that accompanied the reports in 1839 of the Chinese seizure of British opium that immediately preceded the first Opium War. The religious forces were quick to raise the morality argument against the trade, and in one of the first and most influential of these books, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China (1838), the Rev. Algernon Thelwall opens with a description of this public ignorance. “ ‘The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China?’ methinks I hear some one exclaim, on reading the title of my book: ‘I never heard before that we carried on any such traffic; much less that any iniquities were connected therewith.’ This ignorance ought not to surprise me: for I was, till very recently, equally ignorant myself.”^[21] As Inglis points out, until newspaper reports appeared on the events of 1839 in China, “people in Britain had scarcely been aware of the existence of the opium traffic, let alone its scale” (Opium War, 126). De Quincey himself became one of the leading conservative apologists for the trade; his two articles on the Opium War, written for Blackwood’s in 1840, are saber-rattling homages to British pride, and they stress the extraordinary patience with which the nation had submitted to the Celestial Empire’s insulting arrogance.^[22] But, like Thelwall, he notes the general unfamiliarity with the trade and even provides readers with a history of it.^[23]

The reason for this public ignorance is easy to locate. The British colonial reports and the parliamentary debate on the subject self-consciously elided the term “opium” from the discussion.^[24] This concerted silence suggests an awareness by the mercantile elite and its governmental supporters of the basic difference in the meaning of opium as a commodity within the domestic and colonial contexts. In Britain, opium had a clearly defined use-value connected with its medical properties; thus, when addiction did occur, it was assumed to have followed on the treatment of a medical condition, as both De Quincey and Coleridge report. But there was no medical utility present in the context of the China trade. Instead, opium’s only use-value in this exchange was defined by the British East India Company as its unique ability to create an escalating demand for itself in the consumer. The British directors of the company had invented a new economics of addiction, for the whole trade was predicated on the belief that opium could create its own market and that the Chinese, once habituated to it, would pay anything to get more. Thus, the practiced silence by those engaged in the trade can only be explained by the assumption that Raffles’s views on the all-consuming nature of opium addiction were fundamental to the opium trade itself; those views were only exceptional in that they contained an objection to the practice and found their way into print.^[25]

There were, then, two very opposite cultural constructions of opium’s effects in circulation in early nineteenth-century Britain: a dominant model of domestic medical usage and a subordinate one of moral enslavement deriving from the Asian context. De Quincey’s own representation of addiction derives from the discourse of the Asian colonial trade, not from the British context. The sources of his insights into this version of addiction and the reasons his representation of addiction varied so remarkably from the British version can be located in his family’s connections to the opium trade. In the Confessions, he mentions the favorite of his five guardians, the one who “lived at a distance” and “was more reasonable, and had more knowledge of the world than the rest” (OE, 36). This was his namesake Thomas Penson, his mother’s brother.^[26] Penson was in Bengal, where he was a colonel in the military service of the East India Company. In 1802 this “bronzed Bengal uncle” was visiting De Quincey’s mother, Mrs. Quincey, after ten years in India, when her seventeen-year-old son returned home after running away from the Manchester Grammar School.^[27] Penson intervened with Mrs. Quincey to allow the truant to explore Wales rather than being summarily returned to the school. When De Quincey returned from London in 1803, Penson was still present and supplied him with the £100 per year that enabled him to enroll at Oxford in the winter of 1803.^[28] As Lindop points out, “During the summer of 1803 De Quincey had spent much time at the Priory debating with his Uncle Thomas the rights and wrongs of British rule in India…. That such arguments could have been carried on without reference to the opium trade is not credible” (Life, 124). By the time of this visit, De Quincey had certainly encountered the colonial version of addiction that he would incorporate into his narrative. But he had other opportunities as well. His mother’s family was intimate with Col. Henry Watson, one of the early proponents of smuggling Bengal opium into China. Watson made a fortune in the trade during the 1780s, and at his death it went to his daughter, De Quincey’s beloved Lady Susan Carbery, the anonymous friend who supplied him with the initial money to run away from the Manchester Grammar School (Lindop, Life 124). Through Penson and Carbery, De Quincey was economically dependent on opium before his first physical encounter with the commodity. At an early age, then, De Quincey had the opportunity of encountering the assumptions of the colonial discourse of addiction, and these were the assumptions he used in his representation of addiction in the Confessions, giving it its unique and definitive characteristics.

At the beginning of the Confessions, De Quincey claims to have “at length, accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man—have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me” (OE, 30). For De Quincey’s audience, this was a remarkable claim, for it was well established that one could never give up opium once addicted to it. There was disagreement over opium’s effects, as we have seen, and addiction itself was thought to be a rarity among the British, though not among the Asians. But where it did occur, it was considered inescapable. The physician John Jones, who wrote the first significant British treatise on opium, The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d (1701), hails it as a “noble Panacea” when used moderately, but in a chapter titled “Effects of sudden Leaving off of the Use of Opium, after a long, and lavish Use thereof,” he warns of the “Great, and even Intolerable Distresses, Anxieties and Depressions of Spirits, which in few days commonly end in a most miserable Death, attended with strange Agonies, unless Men return to the Use of Opium” (Jones, Mysteries of Opium, 31).

The same belief is part of Raffles’s comments on opium use in Java. It is still the basic assumption in the 1836 comments of a British merchant in China, who disdains De Quincey’s writing on opium as fanciful but nonetheless asserts as an unadorned fact that addiction is inescapable:

There is no slavery on earth to name with the bondage into which opium casts its victim. There is scarcely one known instance of escape from its toils.…We need not appeal to the highly-wrought narratives of personal experiences on the subject, which have of late years come before the public: they rather invite distrust than otherwise, by the exaggeration of their poetical style. But the fact is…that there is in opium, once indulged in, a fatal fascination, which needs almost super-human powers of self-denial and also capacity for the endurance of pain, to overcome.^[29]

Indeed, the reviews of the Confessions in the medical periodicals—where it generated considerable interest—took issue with many other aspects of De Quincey’s representation of opium but agreed that “persons who accustom themselves to it can by no means live without it.”^[30] In literary publications similar remarks appeared; the reviewer for The Imperial Magazine described De Quincey’s success in breaking the chains as “a victory that has never been attributed to any other person.”^[31] Thus, although De Quincey presented a novel view of the felt experience of addiction, there was nothing novel in his basic claim about the tenacity of the habit. Nineteenth-century readers readily agreed with his assertion that he had never heard of anyone having escaped addiction to opium. Except for De Quincey himself, they had never heard of anyone having done it, either.

De Quincey’s claim to have broken the chains of addiction, then, was a remarkable one, and although twenty years later he would claim that he was in fact on an opium binge as he wrote the Confessions^[32]—a matter we will consider later—the narrator’s assertion in 1821 is critical to appreciating the original reception of his narrative and to understanding the work’s formal structure. For it is only because he has broken these supposedly unbreakable chains that the narrator can justify his basic narrative project of revealing the felt experience of opium addiction. The self-exposure of his Confessions, he recognizes, entails a fundamental violation of the code of propriety within “the decent and self-respecting part of society” (OE, 29). He announces at the outset that his narrative will violate “that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that ‘decent drapery,’ which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them” (OE, 29). Although embracing this rule, he explains his violation of it by pleading for the “useful and instructive” value of his narrative (OE, 29): “[T]he benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule” (OE, 30). His act of confession, he concludes, is justified by “the service which I may thereby render to the whole class of opium-eaters” (OE, 31). It is by virtue of his unique position, as the only one who had discovered a means to break the chains, that the narrator is able to render this particular service. De Quincey promises to reveal the fundamental secret of how he has broken the chains and been restored to his place within the “decent and self-respecting” society, to whose feelings and sensibility he is so acutely alive. Teaching others how he escaped the addiction, then, is the specific “benefit” to society offered by the narrative.

There has been a thorough confusion in criticism of De Quincey on this point. Most writers assume, like Ian Jack, that “the professed object…is to warn the public of the dangers of opium eating.”^[33] But, as Jack recognizes, this interpretation cannot account for the narrative’s praise of opium unless the conflict is viewed as evidence of an authorial “uncertainty of intention” (“De Quincey Revises,” 124). This conflict disappears, however, when we recognize that De Quincey describes two entirely separate types of opium usage—recreational and habitual—and that he praises one and warns against the other. Twentieth-century readers have difficulty recognizing the gulf that separates these two forms because, in the “social menace” model of addiction, the two forms are part of a continuum, the first shading inevitably into the second; in practice they are barely distinguished. So there is little credit given to De Quincey’s repeated denials of any causal relationship between his recreational usage and his later addiction. Yet in his section on “The Pleasures of Opium,” he describes an eight-year period of recreational usage, an extended period designed to show that occasional usage is safe and can continue indefinitely. De Quincey is telling his readers, both explicitly and implicitly, that amateur usage does not inexorably lead to habituation. The danger is caused not by recreational usage but by extended medical usage for chronic conditions, such as his stomach complaint, where occasional use gives way to daily doses. This distinction lies at the heart of his otherwise enigmatic disagreement in the Confessions with the physician Awsiter, who wrote of opium, “[T]here are many properties in it, if universally known, that would habituate the use, and make it more in request with us than the Turks themselves” (OE, 32). De Quincey replies, “In the necessity of this conclusion I do not altogether concur” (OE, 32), because he does not agree that the pleasurable qualities of opium will, of themselves, lead to such habituation. Thus, he is not ultimately inconsistent, for he can praise opium itself yet warn against the daily use that produces addiction. He has, then, two separate “services” to perform: a caution for nonhabituated users to maintain their moderation and advice for addicts on how to escape the chains.

Because De Quincey uses the colonial version of addiction, his breaking of the chains is a fundamental precondition for the production of his narrative. As we have seen, Raffles describes Asian addiction as a destruction of the individual’s capacity for self-willed action.^[34] De Quincey describes addiction, similarly, as an absence of agency, and he expresses this idea through the terminology he uses. When he refers to opium as a “fascinating enthralment” (OE, 30), he describes an experience of enslavement combined with the power of magic. He uses the term “fascinate” in its primary sense—to bewitch or cast a spell—and in its more specific sense of depriving one of the power of escape, a sense illustrated by the image of the snake fascinating its prey and ensnaring it through an irresistible influence.^[35] De Quincey, like other writers of the period, also uses the term “addiction” in reference to opium; this word’s primary meaning was not then, as now, a negative sense of physical dependence but a juridical sense of being made over or bound to someone or something by legal restraint or moral compulsion. To be addicted, to be fascinated, to be enchained—each means to become subject to an alien power and thus to be deprived of the ability to act as an independent agent in the world.

The two forms of opium usage De Quincey describes have opposite relationships to the issue of agency. In “The Pleasures of Opium,” he takes opium occasionally, and because he is not habituated to it he retains his ability to act as an agent in the world. He demonstrates this free will through his mobility: He walks around freely after taking opium, enjoying the Italians at the opera and visiting the districts of the working poor. These images emphasize his power for independent action. In contrast, the habituated form of usage described in “The Pains of Opium” produces total immobilization that deprives him of all power to act in the world but leaves intact his desire to participate in it:

The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations: he wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and night-mare: he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love:—he curses the spells which chain him down from motion:—he would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.

De Quincey thus represents the lived experience of addiction as a disease of the will that prevents him from entering into the social scene around him. This moral disease is closely related to the colonial model of addiction. But his description differs significantly from that of Raffles in one particular. Whereas the Asian user is seen as “an image of the brute creation,” De Quincey inserts a perfectly constructed, fully developed middle-class sensibility into the torpid material body of the addict. In doing so, he makes explicit what is always implied in the Eastern version of addiction. The primary difference between the Asian and British addict, at least until De Quincey, had been that the Asian was more susceptible to absolute moral enslavement than the British addict, who retained the ability to act autonomously. That resistance, we can assume, was evidence of the superior British racial inheritance.^[36] Within this assumption of an inferior agency in the depiction of the colonial subject was the subtext of middle-class values, which insisted on the power of individual self-making as the essential condition of human status. By this valorization of the individual’s ability to make his own way in the world, the middle class buttressed its own untitled place in the social order, elevating itself morally above an entrenched aristocratic power. The representation of colonial subjects as lacking in this quality reaffirmed the moral superiority of the mercantile colonists. And it had the secondary utility, within the British context, of representing those who did not participate in this new ideology of self-making as suffering from a pathological corruption of the body associated with racial inferiority. Thus, the subject of Asian opium habituation was transformed into a cultural metaphor for the failure of individual self-making.

Each of De Quincey’s opium dreams is centrally concerned with this issue of lost agency. The resonant but enigmatic cry “Consul Romanus” that rumbles through De Quincey’s dreams of immobility, for example, is a reference to the Roman penchant for action and for domination over the material realm. These were the primary racial qualities he attributed to the Romans, as he described them in his “Letters to a Young Man,” written within months of the Confessions. The Romans possessed “the energy of the will victorious over all passions”, he explains, and his primary example is that of Marius, the original Consul Romanus.^[37] In another dream—the climactic nightmare, from which he awakens screaming, “I will sleep no more!” (OE, 113)—the narrator faces a day of “final hope for human nature,” which is on the verge of extinction (OE, 112). Again he wants desperately to intervene but explains, “[I] had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt…. I lay inactive” (OE, 113). A second dream describes a descent “into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascended” (OE, 103). The sensation of being buried alive—which bleeds over into his waking life—shows up again in a third dream, when he is “buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids” (OE, 109). Each image repeats his fundamental description of the felt experience of addiction: lying immobilized, alive to the world around him, yet unable to participate in it.^[38]

When De Quincey adapts this colonial image to describe the condition of a paragon of British middle-class sensibility, he constructs a powerful and horrifying picture in the eyes of the “decent and self-respecting part of society.” De Quincey’s narrator is one who embraces, as naturally virtuous, all the fundamental middle-class values. Above everything he values self-making, seeking to make his way in the world by virtue of his own merits. Robinson Crusoe–like, he leaves the Manchester Grammar School, with its authoritarian and incompetent headmaster and subservient fellow students, because of an irrepressible urge to embark on a course of independent action in the world. Throughout his “Preliminary Confessions,” he fears nothing so much as new and varied forms of enslavement to his guardians’ will. The money lenders, he imagines, plan “to entrap me, and sell me to my guardians” (OE, 55), as though he were an escaped slave about to be put on the auction block. To represent such an individual as subject to an invisible and incomprehensible set of restraints is to express one of the great cultural fears of the new middle class.

That sense of failed agency carries with it gender connotations of effeminization. The sensation De Quincey describes, as he lies helpless on the bed, is laden with the cultural experience of the female. His sense of being restrained from action, of being prevented from intervening in the unjust events around him, of being reduced to a silent, ineffective raving at them—these attributes bear less resemblance to the writing of William Wordsworth than to that of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, who, like him, find themselves unable to enter into the social sphere, even to protect their loved ones. When De Quincey describes the “Circean spells” that “chain him down from motion,” he suggests an effeminization of his body, as if he has been contaminated by the Circean touch and transformed into not a pig but a woman.^[39]

When De Quincey presents himself, then, to his middle-class readers as one who has broken the chains, and when he promises to instruct those readers in the secret process, he is making a larger claim for the social function of his narrative than the simple medical utility of freedom from a particular addiction. His narrative proposes to hold out a hope of restored social agency for a readership that implicitly lacks it. It promises to remasculinize an audience that has become effeminized, precisely as Godwin’s Caleb Williams does, by teaching them to shed their metaphorical chains and become independent actors on the social stage.

The importance of this claim to the form of the narrative is that the Confessions proves the narrator’s success, for simply by virtue of its existence as a narrative in social circulation it enacts his claim to a renewed social agency. The ultimate proof that the narrator no longer lies immobile on his bed, unable to act or to speak, is the narrative the reader of the London Magazine holds in his or her hands.^[40] Here is a vital new voice, released from the spells that chained it in its slavish silence, entering into the arena of middle-class discourse. The narrative as a formal object embodies the social agency the narrator claims to have regained, and how can the reader doubt his success?

De Quincey has a second, related obstacle to overcome in order to find his way into the public arena of polite discourse. He not only has to break the chains of opium enchantment in order to speak but also must commit “a breach of the general rule” (OE, 30). His essential subject matter—the physical body, its sensual qualities, and his own immersion in them—lies outside the realm of polite discourse, and thus he begins his narrative with the apology to his audience for raising the subject of his own “errors and infirmities.” As he clarifies, having such flaws does not constitute the “breach” so much as the act of removing the “decent drapery” of British “reserve” by which all readers keep them to themselves. Thus, the impropriety lies in the confessional act of talking about his infirmities and bringing them into discourse. More specifically, the fundamental impropriety at the center of the Confessions lies in the act of making the flawed physicality of the narrator’s own body into the subject of his narrative.

Underlying this exclusion is the problem of the nervous narrative, that self-reflexive speech produced by the nervous condition. Talking about the sensual aspects of one’s own body implies a narrow, antisocial perspective, for it suggests the solipsistic outlook of one whose isolated physical sensations assume an undue importance in shaping his or her view of the world. A person who talks excessively about his or her body is a person whose interests do not extend beyond the perimeter of the skin, and because this narrow experience substitutes for the whole, an excessive interest in one’s body implies an inadequate engagement with the external world.

De Quincey, careful to guard against this impression, frequently expresses a reluctance to describe the actual nature of his physical condition, focusing instead on the intellectual consequences of his material addiction. Where he does describe physical symptoms, he provides a careful and repeated explanation of his socially useful purposes, differentiating himself from the nervous narratives of the hysteric or hypochondriac. As he explains in the 1822 Appendix to the Confessions:

These were my reasons for troubling my reader with any record, long or short, of experiments relating to so truly base a subject as my own body; and I am earnest with the reader, that he will not forget them, or so far misapprehend me as to believe it possible that I would condescend to so rascally a subject for its own sake, or, indeed, for any less object than that of general benefit to others. Such an animal as the self-observing valetudinarian I know there is: I have met him myself occasionally; and I know that he is the worst imaginable heautontimoroumenos; aggravating and sustaining, by calling into distinct consciousness, every symptom that would else perhaps, under a different direction given to the thoughts, become evanescent.

Such body-centered speech he then denounces as an “undignified and selfish habit” that he could never “condescend to.” Although he appears to be overly concerned with his body, the appearance is deceiving, for his case is qualitatively different. He allows that he once had the “disease” of meditating too much on “the suffering” of his past life, and except for extraordinary “remedies” he “should certainly have become hypochondriacally melancholy” (OE, 82). But, as De Quincey observes, “No man, I suppose, employs much of his time on the phenomena of his own body without some regard for it; whereas the reader sees that, so far from looking upon mine with any complacency or regard, I hate it” (Writings, 3:472). The urgency of his denial suggests an awareness of how closely his narrative resembles the nervous narrative that was regarded suspiciously as a product of bodily disease. The Confessions run a continual risk of displaying “a selfish desire of engrossing the sympathy and attention of others to the narration of their own sufferings,” to return to Thomas Trotter’s list of symptoms of the nervous temperament (NT, xvi). De Quincey’s narrative flirts with the danger of undermining its own narrative authority every time the narrator turns to the improper subject of his suffering body.

As discussed in chapter 1, this conflict is a gendered one between a “masculine” independence from the physiology of the body and a “feminine” or “effeminate” incarceration within it. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays both try to demonstrate an intellectual independence from their biology, but the conservative De Quincey perpetuates the ideological position that women write from their bodies rather than their minds. The highest praise he can bestow on a woman writer is to make her an exception to this general pattern, and this he does when describing his mother, as if to reassure his readers of his own physical inheritance. “For though unpretending to the name and honours of a literary woman, I shall presume to call her (what many literary women are not) an intellectual woman: and I believe that if ever her letters should be collected and published, they would be thought generally to exhibit as much strong and masculine sense…as any in our language” (OE, 61–62). He does not perceive female writers, presumably novelists, as “intellectual” because they are defined by their material condition, their constitutive nervous bodies. For his narrative to be associated with his physical condition implies a similarly effeminized form of discourse rather than an exercise of “masculine” understanding, such as that which he praises in his paean to political economist David Ricardo: “Thou art the man!” (OE, 100).

Nor is this restriction strictly limited to those conditions we now define as physical. The common conditions of hysteria and hypochondria are seen not as “mental” diseases but as physical ones because they result from a functional disorder of the nervous system. The effeminization attributed to body-centered narratives includes the wide-ranging symptomatology of nervous conditions, particularly the expression of abjection, overwhelming despair, or bleak unhappiness of the sort that appears in Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Maria, in Hays’s Emma Courtney, and in Godwin’s Caleb Williams. It appears, of course, in the Confessions as well, in the image of De Quincey lying helpless on the bed, tortured by his inability to protect a loved one. De Quincey’s masculine authority, however, remains intact because he frames the experiences within the physical fetters of opium addiction, and so he safely brackets it at a distance from the narrating voice. On the one hand, he acknowledges the physical basis of the experience, allowing it to rise out of his material condition, and thus it is gendered female. On the other hand, he has found a unique way out of that condition and so has become remasculinized and can write intimately about his prior personal tragedies in an authoritative voice of intellectual detachment. He has thus “broken the chains” that heretofore have precluded the appearance of this type of narrative voice from polite British literature, a voice we can now define by its two most salient gender characteristics: a “masculine” analytic mode combined with a “feminine” experiential content. His is an intellectual narrator relating a sensual experience, a masculine narrator telling a feminine story.

The idea that this narrating voice is independent of the body—that it is not constituted by the material impressions of the events it relates—is central to his definition of himself as a philosopher. He explains that a true philosopher needs to combine both a “superb intellect in its analytic functions” (OE, 33) and an exquisite sensibility to the experiences of others in the world. “For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor limitary creature…filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and education” (OE, 33); he or she must also be able to sympathize with, and so understand, the pains and pleasures of those from other classes, as De Quincey illustrates in his relationship with the prostitute Ann. As we have already seen in the work of Thomas Trotter, this sensitivity to others invites the dangers of nervous collapse because it leaves one defenseless against the repeated impressions—particularly from the lower class—of a world filled with the pain and suffering of widespread misery. This dangerous sympathetic ability is the birthright of the female, explaining why nervous disorders are predominantly female-identified. De Quincey argues the necessity of this sensibility for the male philosopher, precisely as Trotter made it central to the work of the physician. As a defense against its material ill-effects, he stresses the power of an independent intellect trained to resist these dangerous sensations:

I do not often weep: for not only do my thoughts on subjects connected with the chief interests of man daily, nay hourly, descend a thousand fathoms ‘too deep for tears’; not only does the sternness of my habits of thought present an antagonism to the feelings which prompt tears—wanting of necessity to those who, being protected usually by their levity from any tendency to meditative sorrow, would by that same levity be made incapable of resisting it on any casual access of such feelings:—but also, I believe that all minds which have contemplated such objects as deeply as I have done, must, for their own protection from utter despondency, have early encouraged and cherished some tranquillizing belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings. On these accounts, I am cheerful to this hour; and, as I have said, I do not often weep.

De Quincey’s stern “habits of thought” allow him to resist the flood of impressions that would otherwise produce that “utter despondency” characteristic of nervous collapse. He possesses a masculine independence from his bodily sensations. When he mentions, in this passage, others whose “levity” leaves them ultimately incapable of resisting this despondency, he has in mind indulgent sensualists, such as the young men he describes in “The Daughter of Lebanon,” who are given over to their drink and debauchery and thus are vulnerable to the immediacy of their sensations.^[41] The contrast between himself, as a philosopher, and these indulgent bacchanalians is crucial to his self-representation as a philosophical opium-eater. For though he experiences opium’s sensual qualities, his detachment from physical sensations ensures that his joy will derive from its “intellectual pleasure,” as he calls it, rather than from the gross sensuality of the body, which would expose him to despair. De Quincey’s solution to the problematic immersion within sensibility, then, is to maintain an intellectual detachment from his sensations and to study them from afar in order to escape their constitutive effect. As he explains, “[T]he calamities of my noviciate in London had struck root so deeply in my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot up and flourished afresh,” but he is able to resist their deleterious effects “with a fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a maturer intellect,” because of that philosophical detachment from the body that defines his narrative authority (OE, 67). His attitude toward his own sensations is that of the naturalist conducting an “experiment,” as he explains in the 1822 Appendix, and thus he avoids being trapped within the constitutive nature of his sensations by treating his body as a detached intellectual object. It is from this dynamic that the oppositely gendered characteristics of his narrative—the male voice and its feminizing experiences—arise.

The strong antimaterialist bias of his philosophy underscores his claims to have “broken the chains” and developed an agency that is finally independent of his physical body. His opium nightmares, however, could be called images of the revenge of materialism. He is tortured by the tables and sofas in a Chinese house that “soon became instinct with life” (OE, 110), as if the material realm were suddenly growing a monstrous crocodilian idea of sentience in its wooden brain.^[42] His persistent dreams of “silvery expanses of water” seem in themselves placid and pastoral; yet they torture him, he explains, because “I feared…that some dropsical state or tendency of the brain might thus be making itself (to use a metaphysical word) objective; and the sentient organ project itself as its own object” (OE, 107).^[43] If his brain produces images of water because of its own waterlogged condition, then what appears to be an independent product of the intellect is in fact a representation of the materiality of the body. Thus, his nightmares suggest a fear that his transcendence is a delusion masking his actual immanence. These dreams of consciousness incarcerated within the material realm express a fear of the dependency of the intellect on the body.

They are related to the primary addiction dreams discussed earlier through the connecting issue of agency, for most of De Quincey’s dreams represent the internment of a once-autonomous agent within a determinate material condition. Whereas De Quincey’s narrative authority hinges on his independence from the body, his narrative content describes the horror of entrapment within it, both through the specific entrapment of his middle-class sensibility within the body of the addict and through the more general representation of consciousness defined by its material structure. In each case, he describes the presence of a male voice trapped within a female body, and it is the gendered dynamic that he has implicitly overcome.

Given the formal and metaphorical importance of De Quincey’s promise to teach his readers how to break their chains, it comes as a surprise when he changes his mind at the conclusion and decides not to fulfill his promise. “It now remains that I should say something of the way in which this conflict of horrors was finally brought to its crisis. The reader is already aware (from a passage near the beginning of the introduction to the first part) that the opium-eater has, in some way or other, ‘unwound, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which bound him.’ By what means? To have narrated this, according to the original intention, would have far exceeded the space which can now be allowed” (OE, 113). This is all to the good, he decides, for “on a maturer view,” he believes that such “unaffecting details” would “injure…the impression of the history itself” and “injure its effect as a composition” (OE, 113–14). And so he abandons his “original intention” and sets aside the whole business of explaining his escape from his material fetters: “Medical account, therefore, of my emancipation I have not much to give: and even that little, as managed by a man so ignorant of medicine as myself, would probably tend only to mislead” (OE, 115).^[44] Instead of the promised advice, he substitutes a cautionary injunction warning the reader against the danger of entering that bondage in the first place: “If he is taught to fear and tremble, enough has been effected” (OE, 115). The distinction here is between an audience of occasional users, for whom caution will have some benefit, and habitual users, who cannot benefit from such instilled fear. Implicitly, the latter are abandoned by De Quincey’s newly defined purpose.

Most of De Quincey’s editors agree with him in the decision to move away from detailed instruction in opium withdrawal; they, like him, regard references to drops, grains, specific symptoms, and bodily effects as unwelcome intrusions of medical discourse into an imaginative work. There is an uneasy relationship in the Confessions between these two forms of discourse, which De Quincey calls the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, and his final turn away from the subject of the body and toward Romantic aestheticism seems to resolve this conflict in favor of the poetic function of the narrative.^[45] Reading the Confessions in this way, however, has led to an undervaluing of the importance of De Quincey’s original claim about breaking the chains, and thus there has been slight consideration of its relationship to the structure of his narrative or to the imagery of his dreams. For the same reasons, this approach also has led to a consistent dismissal of the 1822 Appendix, in which De Quincey returns to that “original intention” and supplies the physical details of how to renounce opium. At best, his editors reprint the text of the Appendix but label it a “disfigurement,” primarily useful as an illustration of his capacity for “ingenious rigmarole when he was hard pressed for something better” (Writings, 3:10). At worst, they begrudgingly include a few excerpts, and this abridgement is buried among other miscellaneous comments on the work, as though it had no more formal claim to inclusion in the text of the original Confessions itself than any of De Quincey’s later reflections on his most famous work.^[46]

The Appendix was written for the first edition of the Confessions in book form in 1822.^[47] After the initial reviews of the two periodical installments in 1821, De Quincey promised his London Magazine audience to write a “Third Part” elaborating on the pains of opium, as his reviewers had noticed an overbalance on the side of its pleasures.^[48] He never completed the task, but he included the Appendix as a substitute, and it makes good on his promise to elaborate on the pains of opium by describing his physical sensations of withdrawal. Hence, there is no bibliographical ambiguity over the integral place of the Appendix in the text of the Confessions. Objections to its conclusion are solely based on value judgments about its content. It includes, for example, a most unpoetic table of figures giving the weekly schedule of his dosages, and it describes such banal symptoms of withdrawal as his incessant sneezing and profuse sweating. Yet, precisely because of these details, it clearly represents a reconsideration of that avoidance of physicality that marks the end of the main narrative. Because the first two parts fail to explain how the narrator recovered from his immersion in the Circean spell of opium, they leave open the issue of how he became able to write the narrative, of how he found his way into discourse. So there remains a distinct hollowness at the center of the narrative, one caused not by the incompleteness of his psychological profile, as is most frequently noted, but by the absence of his physical profile.^[49] As De Quincey explains, “being the hero of the piece, or…the criminal at the bar, my body should be had into court” (OE, 96).^[50] In the self-representation of the narrative, this is literally what has not been done. The narrator’s body—his physical condition, his material being—disappears from the end of the narrative as thoroughly as that of the mercurial druggist near the Pantheon, who after selling him opium “evanesced, or evaporated” (OE, 71). The Appendix is the moment in which De Quincey finally, reluctantly drags that body into court, thus fulfilling his original narrative promise. Hence it needs to be considered an integral part of the overall work on both textual and substantive grounds.

The Appendix emphasizes and exaggerates the same claims to narrative authority made in the main narrative. Parts One and Two, as we have seen, assert a clear relationship between the writer’s escape from the material fetters of opium and the act of writing. He acknowledges as much in the Appendix: “Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them with the impression that I had wholly renounced the use of Opium. This impression I meant to convey” (Writings, 3:467). As he goes on to explain, this escape is the fundamental condition of speech that enables his narrative: “[T]he very act of deliberately recording such a state of suffering necessarily presumes in the recorder a power of surveying his own case as a cool spectator, and a degree of spirits for adequately describing it, which it would be inconsistent to suppose in any person speaking from the station of an actual sufferer” (Writings, 3:467). An “actual sufferer” cannot speak authoritatively about his or her own body because he or she is implicated within it; authority flows from the rationality of the “cool spectator,” one who is situated outside the body and thus can talk about it as an object.

This is the basis of De Quincey’s transcendent philosophy, as we have seen. He is never more literally transcendent than in the medically oriented language of the Appendix itself. He denounces his “worthless body” as “a base, crazy, despicable human system,” a “wretched structure” not even worthy of “any respectable dog” (Writings, 3:467). As a final proof of his contempt for it, and as his concluding rhetorical flourish, he offers his body to the Royal College of Surgeons for public study, explaining, “it will give me pleasure to anticipate this posthumous revenge and insult inflicted upon that which has caused me so much suffering in this life” (Writings, 3:472).^[51] Indeed, by finally introducing that body into a discourse designed to make a contribution to “medical history,” De Quincey gives his text and his body parallel functions; both are now made available for the purpose of “inspecting the appearances in the body of an Opium-eater” (Writings, 3:467, 472). De Quincey brings his body into court only to wash his hands of the troublesome thing, as if he were already detached from it. He needs that extraordinary detachment in order to speak, at last, about his own suffering in the intimate physical terms required of him by his original promise without being implicated within that suffering.

These extreme claims to independence are made necessary by the surprising revelation he makes: He was unable to write the promised Part Three because he had, in fact, never quite gotten free of his body. He was still addicted to opium, without quite realizing it, as he was writing the Confessions. He explains that he had originally thought, with good reason, “that the victory was in effect achieved. In suffering my readers, therefore, to think of me as of a reformed Opium-eater, I left no impression but what I shared myself” (Writings, 3:467). De Quincey is using a familiar technique here, pointing to a lack of correspondence between external appearances and internal motivation; thus, although it appears he lied, in fact he was honest. Fortunately, he tells us, in the months since then he has—really and truly—reached this goal. The “foremost purpose” of the Appendix is to “communicate this result of my experiment,” as he calls his late escape, so that “Opium-eaters in general” may “benefit” from his account (Writings, 3:470). This time he makes that beneficial conclusion explicit: “[I]t establishes, for their consolation and encouragement, the fact that opium may be renounced, and without greater sufferings than an ordinary resolution may support” (Writings, 3:470). Thus, he belatedly fulfills his “original intention” in writing the Confessions and is able to invoke closure.

In typical De Quinceyan fashion, however, this fulfillment raises more questions than it answers. For it redefines the central relationship, which was established in the first two parts, between the narrator’s voice and body. No longer is the speaker of the main narrative an independent agent; although he believed himself to be free, he had in fact spoken while still in thrall to the Circean spell. The Appendix reframes the preceding narrative and reveals its central claim to narrative authority to be founded on a self-delusion.

This paradoxical delusion of independence from his material condition is what places De Quincey’s Confessions within the problematic form of the nervous narrative. Like Godwin in Caleb Williams and Hays in Emma Courtney, De Quincey describes a condition in which his triumphant moment of rational self-possession is subsequently revealed as a moment of complete self-delusion. In each case, the narrator describes a two-stage process. First he or she discovers a freedom from the body and its distorting passions and diseases and uses that freedom as the basis for independent speech. In the second stage, there is a recognition of that apparent freedom as a product of self-delusion. As such, the assertion of independence is recontained as a sign of the narrator’s continued immanence within the body rather than an escape from it. Thus the narrator’s “independent” speech loses its fundamental claim to authority, for it expresses—through its central assertion of self-possession—the narrator’s lack of self-possession, becoming instead evidence of the speaker’s unwarranted faith in his or her own transcendence.

These two stages interact with one another. They form a dialectical pattern, producing a third stage, in which a new narrative authorization arises out of the conflict between the escape from the body and its recontainment as an illusion of escape. Caleb Williams responds by disowning his past narrative and asserting a negative agency. Similarly, Emma Courtney denounces her prior actions, disavowing her words as, in effect, not hers but products of her body. Unlike these speakers, De Quincey continues to own his narrative after recognizing his earlier self-delusion. It is the uniqueness of the Confessions that its narrator never adopts the humbled, sadder-but-wiser tone of his predecessors. Instead, he stands behind it as written and uses his new authority in the Appendix—after further trials he at last has succeeded where all others have failed—to attest to the fundamental accuracy of his prior writing. He reauthorizes it, so that narrative authority in the Confessions comes retrospectively. It flows not from the narrating voice itself—which, like the other personal narrators, was, in the end, deluded in believing it had the authority to speak—but from a later voice that looks back on the narrative with the necessary detachment.

This retrospective approach to the problem of agency, however, does not eliminate the problem of authority so much as it holds it perpetually at bay. For De Quincey’s second claim to independence invites the same question of self-delusion as his first. The second time around, his claim does not possess the absolute authority it had in the first case. His Appendix suggests an unending sequence in which the sense of freedom from the material is always going to be illusory when considered in retrospect; the only question is how much one is trapped within that illusion of freedom. It is, however, a pragmatic strategy that can be used to reauthorize his writing—as long as he maintains it as the outermost framing device. So he maintains and perpetuates this illusion of agency, one that is always going to have within it a hint of self-delusion, and this becomes the source of his discursive authority.

Later years would modify De Quincey’s solution to the problem of agency in the Confessions, culminating in a complete restructuring of the issue within the 1856 revision. But prior to that, in his 1838 “Recollections of Charles Lamb,” he published a remarkable description of how he had written his narrative in 1821. He explains that opium addiction made it nearly impossible for him and for Coleridge to write. But he discovered that “when I…had armed myself by a sudden increase of the opium for a few days running, I recovered, at times, a remarkable glow of jovial spirits. In some such artificial respites it was from my usual state of distress…that I wrote the greater part of the Opium Confessions in the autumn of 1821” (Writings, 3:75). Far from being “almost” free of his chains, let alone having “triumphed,” De Quincey now claims that he developed a conscious strategy of bingeing on opium in order to write the Confessions. This admission reframes his narrative as an unambiguous product of his material condition rather than of the transcendent intellect. As he points out, opium disturbs “the intellectual system, as well as the animal, the functions of the will also no less than those of the intellect” (Writings, 3:77), and it was only by prostrating himself before this Circean enchantment that he was able to produce the story of his liberation.

Though he finally abandons any claims to an intellectual independence for the narrating voice, De Quincey still does not necessarily abandon his newly defined narrative, despite its dependence on his material condition. He leaves the problem overtly unaddressed in the essay on Lamb, but he turns immediately to a suggestive anecdote on the nature of bodily speech and the relationship between a speaker and his unwilled utterances. He tells us that at the time he was writing the Confessions he labored under two burdens. “Pecuniary embarrassments” dictated that he remain in London, unhappily separated from his family and engaged in loathsome “literary toils” (Writings, 3:71). Combined with this bleak social predicament was a separate, physical condition: His opium use had damaged his liver, the organ of the body he identified as the source of all despair and madness.^[52] His dire social circumstance “strongly cooperated with the mere physical despondency arising out of the liver” to produce a particularly deceptive type of speech, one that mirrors the dependent speech of the Confessions:

[T]his state of partial unhappiness, amongst other outward indications, expressed itself by one mark, which some people are apt greatly to misapprehend, as if it were some result of a sentimental turn of feeling—I mean perpetual sighs. But medical men must very well know that a certain state of the liver, mechanically, and without any co-operation of the will, expresses itself in sighs. I was much too firm-minded, and too reasonable, to murmur or complain. I certainly suffered deeply, as one who finds himself a banished man from all that he loves…. But still I endured in silence. The mechanical sighs, however, revealed, or seemed to reveal, what was present in my thoughts.

Entirely disconnected from his will, De Quincey’s suspiria de machina represents a purely mechanical form of discourse, one that, because it comes from the materiality of the body, is gendered female.^[53] Thus, the image of De Quincey wandering behind Charles and Mary Lamb sighing over and over again is a feminized representation, not a masculinized one. Furthermore, these sighs evoke the Lambs’ sympathy by drawing attention to De Quincey’s suffering, and so they epitomize that particular form of feminized speech that constitutes the nervous narrative. Propriety demands that De Quincey demonstrate an intellectual detachment from his body’s “physical despondency” by not referring to it in company. Instead, he must display his disregard for his body’s sensations, and the only masculine alternative, as the episode indicates, is to endure “in silence.” Within these gendered terms, the expression of despair will always be gendered female, and so it is prima facie deprived of its claim to narrative authority.

De Quincey disclaims any willful authority over his suspiria de machina. This same distancing between the speaker and the act of speaking is the outcome of his redefinition of the Confessions as a product of his material, rather than intellectual, condition. The Confessions is ultimately as improper as the sighs themselves, and for the same reason. However, De Quincey asserts an ambivalent relationship to these sighs and, by implication, to his earlier narrative, for he does not entirely disown them. Instead, he points out that he was indeed suffering and that he was grateful for the sympathetic treatment he received from the Lambs, who responded kindly to his sighs. As his audience, the Lambs reacted as he seems to suggest that his readers ought to react to the redefined Confessions. For although he acknowledges the impropriety of the expression, and although he maintains the masculine standard of virtuous silence, he allows the sighs to function as a viable representation of his intellectual condition, which, though it could not will them, was nonetheless filled with the despair they imply. Within the dictates of the situation he describes, these alienated signs of the body become the only form of nonincriminating self-expression open to De Quincey. This is how his readers are to view the similar self-expression of the Confessions.

De Quincey finally abandoned this ambivalent posture toward narrative authority in his 1856 revision. As his career as a writer and as an addict grew long in the tooth together, his representation of addiction as an all-consuming ascendance of the material over the independent intellect grew untenable. Indeed, after his comments in the essay on Lamb, the whole fictional structure of authority in the Confessions threatened to collapse, for there was no longer even the “decent drapery” of a claim to self-delusion that he could hide behind, and the integrity of his text as a philosophical autobiography was permanently damaged. It could stand as a brilliant work of fiction, but it ceased to have any viable referentiality to the writer’s life.

In his final revision De Quincey addresses this problem in dramatic fashion by completely severing the link between addiction and agency, thereby putting a period to the entire issue. In doing so, he also removes his narrative from the paradox of the nervous narrative form, for there ceases to be any connection between body and speaker. In a new, lengthy apostrophe introducing “The Pains of Opium” section, he explains that he was mistaken when, in the first edition of the Confessions, he attributed his sense of helpless immobility to his opium addiction. In fact, he was simply in need of physical stimulation:

all was due to my own ignorance, to neglect of cautionary measures, or to gross mismanagement of my health…. I sank under the lulling seductions of opium into total sedentariness…. The account of my depression, and almost of my helplessness, in [The Pains of Opium], is faithful as a description to the real case. But, in ascribing that case to opium, as any transcendent and overmastering agency, I was thoroughly wrong. Twenty days of exercise…would have sent me…into regions of natural and healthy excitement, where dejection is an impossible phenomenon.

He compares his earlier belief in opium’s “overmastering” power to the exaggerated fears produced by fairy tales, and so the Circean spell becomes a mere childish fantasy, which the mature man has now put aside. After a lengthy clarification of the medical properties of opium, he concludes, “The reader will infer, from what I have now said, that all passages, written at an earlier period under cloudy and uncorrected views of the evil agencies presumable in opium, stand retracted; although, shrinking from the labour of altering an error diffused so widely under my own early misconceptions of the truth, I have suffered them to remain as they were” (Writings, 3:429). De Quincey thus jettisons his earlier view of addiction based on the colonial model, for there are no “evil agencies” in opium. At last he has embraced the milder British domestic model of a benign dependency with few serious effects.^[54] Because of this change, the basic difference between the two versions of the Confessions lies in their opposite approaches to the narrator’s delusions about his own agency. In 1822 he suffers from a delusion of freedom while still enslaved to his material condition. But in 1856 the reverse is true: Instead of a delusion of freedom, he suffers a delusion of imprisonment. He has always been free of his material condition; he just did not know it in 1822. And he has never been trapped in an effeminized body; this was just a childish fear.

By severing the link between addiction and agency, De Quincey diminishes opium’s significance to the narrative. No longer is breaking the chains essential to the act of writing. Instead, it becomes an adjunct to writing by palliating the lifelong sufferings the narrator feels as a result of his “boyish follies” (Writings, 3:413). Drawing on the basic model of sensationalism, he writes that the impressions of starvation and exposure are permanently etched into his nervous fibers and manifest themselves in his ongoing stomach complaint. The moral of the 1856 version is a warning to “fear and tremble” against the youthful excesses that caused his lifelong suffering, not against the “evil agency” of opium. A graphic consequence of this shift in perspective is his drastically altered description of his escape from the Manchester Grammar School, the original moment when he embarked on his youthful journey. No longer does the incident express his self-reliant independence from the tyranny of an outmoded social authority. Instead, the schoolmaster is rewritten as a sympathetic and benevolent man, and the young De Quincey is given “every possible indulgence” (Writings, 3:270). His elopement becomes an “inexplicable” and “fatal error,” which he attributes to the madness produced, like the mechanical sighs, by a disordered liver (Writings, 3:271).^[55] Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the reduced significance of opium and the increased significance of his youthful impetuosity lies in the revision’s new proportions. As Ian Jack points out, opium becomes the focal point of the narrative before the middle of the book in the 1822 version.^[56] In the 1856 rendition, the section on De Quincey’s early life is expanded to four times its original length, and more than two-thirds of the narrative elapses before opium comes onto the stage.

Because addiction loses its connection to agency and to writing, the issue of breaking the chains becomes part of an inconsequential sidelight to the more conventional story of the narrator’s life. The emancipation from addiction is subordinated to De Quincey’s new posture as an expert on opium who, after “something more than half-a-century” of habitual use, is issuing his “final report” on its “good and evil results” (Writings, 3:414–15). Whereas his narrative authority in 1822 is based on his freedom from opium, in 1856 it is based on the expertise accumulated by his continued use. The issue of breaking the chains is thus merely a residual one, although De Quincey does maintain his expertise on that subject as well. After all, he has done it more than once. Admittedly, each time he has “returned, upon deliberate choice (after weighing all the consequences on this side and on that), to the daily use of opium” (Writings, 3:414 n. 1). The fact that this admission seems rather to testify against itself no longer really matters, for the whole claim has become an insignificant addition to his knowledge of opium, a subject that is itself superfluous to the main theme of his history. Having lost their structural function, De Quincey’s new and expanded lectures on the physical properties of opium form a separate medical discourse interspersed within the autobiography, and so De Quincey’s two discursive genres—the literature of knowledge and the literature of power—coexist within the 1856 Confessions without effectually intersecting, as they did in 1822.

Ultimately, De Quincey’s solution to the problem of agency and the body in the Confessions returns to that familiar strategy adopted by Caleb Williams so many years before. For by arguing that he was originally in error when he thought opium had robbed him of agency, he is in effect disowning the earlier narrative as a product of his misconception. His new narrative is now meant to take its place.

But we can also see a second consequence of his revision, one that is far more original and suggestive of the broader evolution of narrative strategies for overcoming the restrictions of material determinism in the relation of personal narratives. This second approach hinges on the one part of the narrative that De Quincey must leave substantially untouched, the representations of his dreams. He prefaces the explanation of his “error” to the segment of the narrative describing those dreams and points out that this error is so diffuse that it remains uncorrected. Of course, that error involves a misinterpretation of the tortures inflicted on him as he lay helpless on his bed. In effect, his error was in ever having imagined himself to have been effeminized, and in no place is this error so widespread as within that final section, all of which is predicated on his sensation of immobility and immersion within his own materiality. There is no longer a place for this segment, with its feminized narrator suffering under the pains of opium, when De Quincey has reverted to a model of addiction that has no pains, has no Circean spell, and does not destroy agency.

What, then, to do with those familiar dream sequences, so well known and so wrong, in which his helplessness is most forcefully expressed? De Quincey cuts them off from their reference to his body and allows them to flow forth as purely imaginative products of his intellectual sensibility. He aestheticizes them by retaining the dreams but denuding them of their connection to the effeminized body of the dreamer. Their primary interest thus comes to rest in their status as independent products of the Romantic imagination, not in the materiality of the body or in the social experiences impressed upon it. Thus, his dreams at last float free from the materiality of the body. With this change, they also become the centerpiece of the new narrative, for he now revises his rationale for the work and explains that the dreams are “the true objects—first and last—contemplated in these Confessions” (Writings, 3:233). And so, in De Quincey, the aesthetic comes into being out of the compelling force for personal narrative to disavow its connection to the materiality of the body.

Notes