2. The Body Talks

2. The Nervous Narrator’s Paradox

William Godwin and Caleb Williams

William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) contains an intricate representation of the nervous body in the novel. Because that body belongs to the narrator, the novel also illustrates the particular narrative act that was associated with nervous conditions. “All is not right within me,” Caleb reports, and he tries to explain what has gone wrong within his body by looking back over the sequence of impressions it received.^[1] Because he is isolated by the point late in the story where he begins to construct his narrative, he addresses an unknown future reader, one who will “render me a justice which my contemporaries refuse” (CW, 3). He rehearses for this imaginary but sympathetic audience the litany of social injustice that caused his condition, and this retelling helps him to endure the intoler-able present: “I derive a melancholy pleasure from dwelling upon the circumstances which imperceptibly paved the way to my ruin” (CW, 123). Trotter describes precisely this form of narration in his sparse, reluctant list of nervous symptoms, discussed in chapter 1: “a selfish desire of engrossing the sympathy and attention of others to the narration of their own sufferings” (NT, xvi). The nervous condition, then, does not only stem from a narrative within the body; it is also associated, in early nineteenth-century culture, with a characteristic narrative act.^[2]

Because the nervous narrative was viewed as the product of the speaker’s disease, what is remarkable is not that it was routinely discounted because of its formal qualities but that—quite the reverse—it was routinely deployed by writers in the late Georgian period. William Godwin, after using it for Caleb Williams, used it again in his next novel, Fleetwood (1805). Mary Hays also used it for Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft for Maria’s memoir in The Wrongs of Woman (1798), Maria Edgeworth for Harrington (1817), Mary Shelley for Victor’s narrative in Frankenstein (1818), Thomas De Quincey for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), and James Hogg for Colwan’s half of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In each case, the first-person narrative begins with the narrator’s nervous body and sets out to explain the specific social conditions that produced it. The opening words of Caleb Williams typify the narrative stance that characterizes these nervous narrators: “My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity. I have been a mark for the vigilance of tyranny, and I could not escape. My fairest prospects have been blasted…. I have not deserved this treatment” (CW, 3). The balance of the narrative will expand on this statement, restaging the exact conditions of the calamity, and it will denounce those conditions on the basis of the narrator’s illness.

This form proved inviting to writers of the period, despite its suspect nature, because people widely believed, as our nervous doctor did, that the social and physical environment had a determinant effect on individual development and, more generally, that it shaped the character of the English as a “race”—that is, as defined by a distinctly English physical body. The late Georgian period saw the beginning in England of the utopian faith in reform-oriented institutions based on the effects of control over external impressions.^[3] York Retreat, the Quaker asylum for the insane founded by William Tuke in 1792, was a significant practical manifestation of this new faith. One of the earliest of the new breed of institutions, it eliminated physical restraint and punishment in favor of a new therapeutics based on the beneficial effects on the mind of a domestic physical environment combined with a carefully structured model of social interaction.^[4] Prison reformer John Howard, whose 1777 book on the conditions within England’s prisons is cited within Caleb Williams, also contributed to the new focus on the power of environmental conditions to shape individuals (CW, 181).^[5] Institutional structures were given a utopian power to remake inmates in a predictable fashion, and this trend led to the appearance of the new reform-oriented institutions—penitentiaries, insane asylums, orphanages—that characterized the early to mid-nineteenth century. Novels such as Caleb Williams utilized this larger cultural paradigm.

However, this social critique produces an inherent paradox within this narrative form. For although the narrator’s illness condemns the social conditions that produced it, that same illness also constructs the narrating voice. Without it, there would be no narrative, for the illness enables—in fact, compels—the narrative act. So the literary genre of nervous narration promotes, in its formal structure, the same disorder it cautions against. In this, it reenacts the paradox that Trotter’s writing exemplifies in its attack on excess sensibility, for like him the novelist relies on the same condition he or she condemns. Trotter makes sensibility the center of the doctor’s interpretive skill. In the novel, the narrator who criticizes sensibility does so from the position of experience, testifying to its terrors. The result is a conflict of narrative authority within the sizable group of first-person novels attacking sensibility that appeared at the same time sensibility was being medicalized by writers such as Thomas Trotter. How does the speaker of the nervous narrative criticize the sensibility that forms the basis of his or her authority to speak without negating that authority? By founding their critique on their own suffering bodies, these narrators invite the diagnosis of Trotter that the narrative itself is an expression of their disorder and hence not to be trusted. Similarly, the more compelling and admirable this narrative’s aesthetic qualities, the more it valorizes the disorder that produced it. The more it succeeds, the more it fails in its critique.

Because there is no firm ground on which to base narrative authority within such a dynamic, novelists attacking sensibility must devise extraordinary strategies to develop some alternate foundation for their criticism, distancing the nervous speaker’s narrative from the disease it criticizes. Godwin wrote two separate endings for Caleb Williams, and the changes he made directly respond to this nervous paradox, as he tried to avoid implicating his hero in the disease he constructed.

Although they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum in counterrevolutionary England, the radical Godwin shared with the conservative Trotter basic assumptions about the body’s responsiveness to its social environment.^[6] In his major philosophical work, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin goes even further than the nervous doctor to argue that all disease is caused by social factors. He predicts that in the future, when social power is rationally distributed, all disease will disappear. He even holds forth the ultimate possibility that, freed of the prejudices and errors that produce social conflict and disease, people will no longer age, and so we might realize “the possibility of maintaining the human body in perpetual youth and vigour.”^[7] Thus, both writers interpret illness as a product of external impressions on the body, impressions that are defined as originating in the social structure. Godwin expands the role of social events further than Trotter, because he more fully enfranchises the working-class body in the new nervous democracy. The doctor allows for the presence of nervous disorders among some servants and laborers, but he preserves a partial role for inheritance in the production of the nervous body. Godwin, however, dismisses all theories of inherited sensibility as “the refuge of indolence” (PJ, 107). In the mold of Locke, he regards sensibility as entirely a social product: “In fine, it is impression that makes the man, and, compared with the empire of impression, the mere differences of animal structure are inexpressibly unimportant and powerless” (PJ, 107). Thus, the nervous body expands more noticeably across class lines in Godwin’s writing than in Trotter’s. It shows up in a rustic servant such as Caleb as well as in his aristocratic master, Squire Falkland.

Godwin’s novels pointedly expose the specific machinery at work in the relationship between the social body and the individual. The author afterward said of Caleb Williams that he was primarily interested in “recording the gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particu-lar way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.”^[8] Like Trotter, he focuses on the relationship between an observable sequence of events in the external world and its consequence in the individual, trying to demonstrate a cause-and-effect explanation for present, inexplicable behaviors—the murder of a rival, the fickle behavior of a stock trader—in the body’s intercourse with its social environment. This accumulation of impulses, because it represents that external social order, forms a social narrative of incidents, a narrative first produced by the order of society, then impressed on the inscribable body of the individual, and finally enacted in that individual’s conduct.

The entire structure of Caleb Williams revolves around the problematic of the inscribable body and the social narrative that impresses itself upon it.^[9] The novel ends with the nervous body of the narrator. It begins with the nervous body of Falkland. And it follows the story of the unnecessary conflict the social narrative creates between these two fundamentally honorable individuals. Falkland’s story forms only the principal case history nested within the narrator’s own case history. Within Falkland’s tale lie further histories, each stressing the accumulation of sensations, the cascade of unwelcome shocks that lead to a given physical manifestation, either in action or illness. The squire Tyrell, a petty tyrant, is subjected to a series of “innumerable instances that every day seemed to multiply, of petty mortifications” (CW, 23). He is “accumulating materials for a bitter account” and “[s]marting under a succession of untoward events” (CW, 23). The farm boy on trial for murder commits the act only after being harassed with “a course of hostility” by his brutish victim (CW, 129). The sentimental heroine, Emily Melvile, uninured to hardship, develops a fatal fever due to unremitting persecution. These bodies, including Falkland’s and Caleb’s, are reservoirs for the social narrative, which is gradually written upon them and hoarded in the structure of their nerves. Each is the product of a slowly accumulated sequence of sensations rather than of a single catastrophic event. As the steward Collins asks of his master, Falkland, “Did any man, and least of all a man of the purest honour, ever pass in a moment from a life unstained by a single act of injury to the consummation of human depravity?” (CW, 103). Within the assumptions of the novel, the answer is in the negative. Despite Falkland’s guilt, he is not traduced “in a moment” into the act of murder but is led into it, ineluctably, through a lifetime of socially acquired conventions, particular incidents, and recent aggravations that finally accumulate to produce the disordered fit that constitutes murder itself.

Godwin believed that his novel was going to do more than just critique society. Indeed, he wrote it immediately after completing the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, with the stated intention of broadcasting his ideas to a broader readership through a more accessible representation of British social life. But Godwin felt that, in addition to conveying his philosophy, his novel was going to change the society it represented by changing the readership. “I will write a tale,” he explained, “that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before” (Fleetwood, ix). The statement contains three assumptions that need to be addressed: first, the reader is male; second, this male is somehow in need of change; and third, the novel can remedy this reader’s problem.

That reader’s problem is that he is not quite male enough. Godwin’s nervous body is always, like Trotter’s, an effeminate one. In his utopian philosophy, he describes the ideal future as one in which “[t]he men…will probably cease to propagate. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation” (PJ, 776). With the elimination of disease, longevity will be infinitely extended, and reproduction, no longer necessary to the survival of the species, will cease.^[10] ( In this disease-free utopia, then, the female body, as the site of reproduction, disappears, along with its inherent nervous inscribability.^[11] In Godwin’s progressive history, that utopia is egalitarian but also entirely masculinized, much as the savage past is masculinized in the conservative history of Trotter. In both cases, the present body represents an effeminate deviation from a healthy and masculine ideal.

Godwin’s presentation of Caleb reflects this gendered ideology. The critical problem posed by Caleb Williams is that the narrator has become effeminized. Godwin describes Caleb’s body as riddled with the delicate “flutterings and palpitations” of his feminine sensibility (CW, 153). His ruling passion is an “ungoverned curiosity” that is itself gendered female (CW, 133). “Caleb Williams was the wife,” wrote Godwin, drawing an analogy to the story of Bluebeard, “who in spite of warning, persisted in his attempts to discover the forbidden secret” (Fleetwood, xii). His curiosity represents the ascendancy of female nerves within his body; similarly, Falkland’s sensibility and hypochondriacal fits suggest his own effeminacy, within the older aristocratic model. What Caleb narrates is the process of his own gradual effeminization, as his abject position makes him increasingly nervous. He attributes that gendering process to the impressions produced in him by the irrational social environment. Caleb thus tells the story of how he acquired the body with a story to tell; and through Caleb, Godwin tells the story of how the narrative of social events produces female bodies. Within Godwin’s philosophy, the population as a whole possesses an overly inscribable body, one that carries within it the narrative inscribed by the social environment, and this narrative is the reader’s problem. So all readers, to some degree, are sick like Caleb Williams.

Caleb’s sensibility also has a positive side to it: It gives him a heightened “involuntary sympathy” (CW, 133) that, like the sensibility of Thomas Trotter, makes him “a competent adept in the different modes in which the human intellect displays its secret workings” (CW, 123). His role within the first half of the novel closely resembles that described by the nervous doctor. The enigma of Falkland’s secret hypochondriacal fits—in which the reserved but gentle squire has to hide himself as he begins to turn brutish, palsied, and violent—motivates Caleb to investigate, like a fictionalized Thomas Trotter, the elaborate history of the nervous body and to reconstruct the story behind it. At the climax, when he breaks into his master’s chest and glimpses Falkland’s autobiography, it is as if he is prying into Falkland’s own breast to discover the narrative hidden within.^[12] His narrative curiosity, his desire to know the story, combines the same two elements that structure Trotter’s work: a need for the interpreter to construct narrative explanations and the feminization required by the work of interpretation. The ability to uncover the “secret workings” and move beyond what is made available on the surface is associated by both writers with the exquisite sensibility of the female body.

Godwin adds a new element in the relationship between narrative and the body, however. Although the problem of Caleb Williams is the social narrative that produces conflict between individuals like Caleb and Falkland, the solution to that problem lies in a new type of narrative, the narrative of reason. In Godwin’s philosophy, the individual is a reasonable creature who always behaves rationally within the faulty dictates of his or her situation (PJ, bk. 4, chapter 7). It is impossible for any person to persist in an action he or she knows to be based on erroneous beliefs.^[13] As he points out, “there is no conduct…the reasons of which are thus conclusive and thus communicated, which will not infallibly and uniformly be adopted by the man to whom they are communicated” (PJ, 136). Thus he establishes the principle, evident in each of his novels, that “[s]ound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error” (PJ, 140). Because erroneous assumptions create the prejudice and blind traditionalism that cause the world’s distress and illness, the cure for these bodily disorders is rational explanation and discussion.^[14]

Caleb Williams repeatedly illustrates the compelling power of narratives based on “sound reasoning and truth,” representing in fictional form the real power it claims to possess over its audience. Emily and Falkland both move, briefly, the emotions of the “unfeeling” tyrant, Squire Tyrell, through their direct appeals to his reason. Like Godwin, they reject eloquent conventions of speech, using a “plain-spoken” narrative to say what would otherwise remain politely unsaid. There is a teasing motion throughout the novel wherein the power of plain-spoken truth confronts the artful prejudice that characterizes the social narrative and, like a genie constantly threatening to break out of its bottle, almost overcomes it—but not quite. Caleb almost succeeds in persuading the guard to free him. He almost succeeds in the pastoral interlude with Laura. Not until the concluding scene, when Caleb tells his story to the court, does the narrative of truth finally emerge triumphant over the prejudice produced by the social narrative. Then Caleb’s “naked” analysis of the joint errors that destroyed his friendship with Falkland, the “best of men,” proves irresistible, even to an audience predisposed against him because of his reputation for having the charming eloquence of a charlatan. The “artless and manly story you have told,” reflects his former persecutor, “has carried conviction to every hearer” (CW, 324). Caleb’s story is gendered male by Falkland because it is a clear expression of reason, and so it functions as a harbinger of Godwin’s male utopia of reason, when all discourse will take this form. Godwin’s concept of the “manly story,” or the narrative of reason, envisions a narrative form in which the first-person description of personal suffering is no longer bound by its constitutive association with the female body.^[15]

To Godwin, reason is less a theoretical abstraction than a physical force. As he describes it, reason operates through the same mechanism as sensations. Caleb’s climactic story has the power to move his audience to tears because Godwinian reason is experienced as a felt condition. It has a pronounced sensual element that distinguishes it from error: “Our perceptions can never be so luminous and accurate in the belief of falsehood as of truth” (PJ, 133). Truth for Godwin is always embodied truth, rather than disembodied abstraction. It “possesses an undisputed empire over the conduct” (PJ, 144) because it duplicates the physical mechanism of sensation and so has the same determinant effect as do physical impressions in Trotter. As a consequence, Godwin’s concept of rationality contradicts the principle of independent free will; he describes bodies as responding with the same mechanical predictability to rationality as to sensations.^[16] Caleb’s own language best represents the conflation of the mechanisms of reason and sensation: “I conceived that my story faithfully digested would carry in it an impression of truth that few men would be able to resist” (CW, 303–4). Truth operates through “impressions” precisely as sensations do, as a form of writing on the body, and thus Godwinian truth opposes the determinist power of external sensations with a similar model for reason. It competes with the social environment for control of the body of the individual, offering an antidote to the effeminizing effect of the social narrative, one that will lead a world of effeminized bodies forward to a masculine utopia. The difference between these two forces, then, is simple: whereas the social narrative produces female bodies, Godwin’s narrative of reason produces male bodies.

Caleb Williams was written as a narrative of reason, and it was on this basis that Godwin imagined it could transform the reader. But he encountered a problem late in the process of writing the novel. Four days after finishing the manuscript, and with the first volume already being set in type, he went back to the novel, canceled the original ending, and wrote an entirely different conclusion.^[17] The differences between the two are critical, because the two endings frame the preceding narrative in opposite lights. In the conceit of the first-person narrative, Caleb does not sit down to write his story until almost the conclusion of the novel’s action, during the two-year period when he is most discouraged. Ostracized, incessantly hounded by Falkland’s agent, he suffers a progressive mental collapse even as he writes the history of that collapse. When the narrative arrives at the present moment, Caleb makes a final, journalistic entry in which he decides to bring the charges of murder against Falkland. Because this decision holds the danger of imprisonment for him, he entrusts his written narrative to Collins, hoping it will vindicate his actions should the trial end unfavorably and his voice be permanently silenced. This self-vindicating manuscript, then, is the body of Caleb Williams, and it includes all of the novel except the brief trial scene itself, which is framed as the postscript to the narrative proper.

As first written, the postscript has the trial going against Caleb, and he ends up under physical restraint in a madhouse controlled by Falkland.^[18] In notes smuggled out to Collins, he explains that his overly impassioned testimony at the trial was “alarming to my hearers” and that the magistrate dismissed his story with the peremptory command, “Be silent!” (CW, 330). Caleb thus is situated as a nervous narrator, with the magistrate in the position of a Thomas Trotter, dismissing the speaker’s narrative as a proof of disorder and thus one that begs to be silenced. In his last note from the madhouse, drugged and virtually inarticulate, Caleb can remember nothing: “I had something to say—but I cannot think of it” (CW, 333). He is finally deprived of his ability to construct a narrative out of the sequence of events: “[T]here is one thing first, and then another thing, and there is so much of them, and it is all nothing” (CW, 334). Although the magistrate does not believe Caleb, the reader knows his testimony to be truthful. Thus Caleb’s voice is suppressed, and his fugitive narrative, wisely entrusted to Collins, becomes the recovered voice of resistance to tyranny. The narrative stands as Caleb intends it, as a narrative of reason vindicating him and exposing the tyranny of the social narrative which, in an extreme form, the asylum restraint symbolizes.

The cancellation of this ending is particularly significant because Godwin conceived it first and then designed the rest of the novel to explain the sequence of events leading up to it.^[19] By eliminating it, Godwin did more than excise a supplement; he apparently had located a problem in the novel’s central rationale. The revised ending supports this view. In it, Caleb succeeds in the trial through his triumphant speech but suddenly disavows the entire narrative. “I began these memoirs,” Caleb says in his final words, “with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate” (CW, 326). Instead of letting his story stand as a first-person narrative seeking sympathy, in the nervous form, Godwin reframes it as a documentary of Caleb’s own errors. And so, like the medical patient described by Trotter, the nervous narrator of the novel is recontained as an object of study rather than a subject, as one whose diseased and effeminized body speaks and who, in the act of speaking, delegitimizes the content of his speech.

Godwin’s retrenchment might suggest a fear that Caleb’s original narrative would be routinely dismissed as the product of hysteria. But the need to contain it more convincingly suggests the reverse: that there is something transgressive in the original form, something that needs to be neutralized. This is the larger problem raised by the nervous narrative in the novel and autobiography. In a medical setting, the effeminate nervous narrator is a noisy object whose body must be disciplined into healthy silence. But in a novel, the speaker’s effeminization becomes formally desirable as a necessary condition for the production of narrative. Without that nervous body, there would be no narrative launched into the world, not even to warn readers against the social conditions that brought it into being. In these narratives, the nervous condition transforms the narrator into a speaking subject, one who does the disciplining through his or her body’s nervous critique. In Caleb Williams, the problem is not just that the speaker has become effeminized and needs to be restored to a non-nervous condition but that the narrative depends on this effeminization as the basic condition of its production. In its formal quality, the nervous narrative inevitably promotes the nervous condition it claims to warn against.^[20]

It has been argued that Godwin canceled the first ending because it was overly doctrinaire and he had tired of his own dogmatism.^[21] In terms of what Godwin called the “moral” of a text, or its “ethical sentence,” this explanation makes sense.^[22] However, Godwin differentiated the intended moral from the rhetorical effect of a text; he distinguished between the contained authorial statement and the uncontained constructions that could be made of it by the reader, which he called the “tendency” of the text. At the level of this larger and less containable statement, the basic problem with the original ending is not that it is overly doctrinaire but rather that it is not doctrinaire enough. Godwin’s social critique has the tendency of investing those faulty social conditions with the positive quality of generating narratives like Caleb’s. Indeed, his novel presents a picture of a comprehensive system of social power whose most extreme manifestation is located in the very production of the nervous narrative itself. Thus, to criticize that system for the nervous body it generates is simply to reaffirm, at a higher level, that system’s value, for it is a system that makes Caleb into a speaking subject. Although the “moral” of Caleb Williams is a condemnation of the injustices in British social life, its “tendency” contradicts that moral by ascribing a creative function to the same social oppression. And so Godwin must recontain Caleb’s narrative. Otherwise, his social criticism inevitably valorizes the system he wants to change.

In making his revision, Godwin does not entirely surrender the ideal of a new first-person narrative form, one that is to be gendered male instead of female. When his narrator disavows his narrative, something new happens. He becomes a different type of speaker, one defined by his resistance to the essentially feminine act of narration rather than by his original indulgence in its pleasure. His narrative is reframed as a protest against the compulsion of the body to speak.

This resistance to narrative appears at two critical junctures of the narrative. In the final trial scene, it constitutes the main change in Caleb’s attitude toward the trial and his own part in it. The success of Caleb’s testimony hinges on his paradoxical repudiation of the act of speaking. He narrates the story of all the forces that brought him to the fatal moment of his testimony, describing the “dreadful mistake in the train of argument that persuaded me to be the author of this hateful scene” (CW, 320). His “manly tale” indicts the sequence of events that brings it into being, and it works through the paradox of criticizing its own narration: “Would to God it were possible for me to retire from this scene without uttering another word!” (CW, 320).^[23] He concludes, “Never will I forgive myself the iniquity of this day” (CW, 323). In the trial scene, the narrative of reason is carefully bracketed within this act of negation, in which the speaker denounces himself for speaking. The “manly” quality of the tale comes not from within the tale itself but rather from the narrator’s negation of his own misguided act of speech. Narrative, that is, remains a feminized act. The existence of a “manly” narrative of reason is only revealed through the narrator’s resistance to his essentially feminized impulse to tell his own story.

The postscript reframes the fugitive narrative in exactly the same way. Given the change of heart Caleb undergoes in the new trial scene, the function and status of his narrative need to be redefined, for its publication—we are, after all, reading it—contradicts the new narrative conceit, in which Caleb no longer seeks to clear his own name. In the final words of the postscript, Caleb redefines his intentions, adopting a biblical tone and addressing himself to Falkland as though to a saint: “I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood; and that, if those errors of thy life be known which thou so ardently desiredst to conceal, the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale” (CW, 326). The original nervous narrative, then, written to clear the name of Caleb, becomes redefined as the narrative of Falkland’s vindication. What was initially written as a self-vindication becomes recast as a self-denunciation, and through this transformation the narrative itself is redeemed, not as a rational narrative but as a protest against its own existence.

Because it is redefined as a vindication of Falkland, Caleb’s narrative finally comes to occupy the position of the narrative that he imagines is hidden within Falkland’s trunk:

The contents of the fatal trunk from which all my misfortunes originated, I have never been able to ascertain…. I am now persuaded that the secret it incloses is a faithful narrative…written by Mr. Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst, that, if by any unforeseen event his guilt should come to be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation…. If Falkland shall never be detected to the satisfaction of the world, such a narrative will probably never see the light. In that case this story of mine may amply, severely perhaps, supply its place.

By rededicating his own narrative to redeem Falkland’s reputation, Caleb’s narrative does finally “supply its place,” establishing a formal association between itself and the imaginary narrative in the trunk. That unseen manuscript of the new Saint Falkland perfectly symbolizes the masculine narrative of reason, a dreamlike narrative that can only exist hypothetically and comes into language itself only through negation.^[24] The formal effect of the postscript is to reposition the reader, who now duplicates Caleb’s action within the novel and peers into that trunk at Falkland’s narrative.

Thus, the narrative of reason proves elusive in the novel. Caleb Williams is not, in the end, such a narrative; it only points to the presence of such a narrative elsewhere, outside the novel, through the final protest against its own feminized act of narration. Although Godwin can theorize a new male narrative, because of the nervous narrative paradox he cannot tell it. He can only point to it through the speaker’s protest against the compulsion to speak, through the narrator’s healthy resistance to the disease that produces narration.

In reading the nervous narrative, then, emphasis needs to be given to the moment of the speaker’s resistance to the act of speaking, a resistance that is evident not just in Caleb Williams but more famously in Frankenstein, with Victor’s reluctance to narrate his past, or less familiarly in Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, where the narrator protests against having to revisit her painful past. The resistance points to a subject that is conceivably distinct from the socially determined subject whose narrative is itself an act of capitulation, an acquiescence in the system it condemns. In a culture that believes widely in the determinant forces of external events, there is no safe “outside” from which to criticize its effects. Self-negation at least enables a subject to recontain her or his own uncontrollable tendency to give value to an oppressive social order, and if this resistance is not exactly self-expression, nor even descriptive of an alternate mode of being, it is nonetheless the only available sign of social condemnation available to the nervous narrator. Made into a critic by an unjust society, the social critic must necessarily practice a self-criticism—more precisely, a criticism of the hystericized impulse to criticize.

Notes

3. Narrative and Self-Violence

Framing Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Caleb Williams posits a particular relationship between the narrator and the narrating body, one in which the impulse to speak is itself identified as a product of the speaker’s nervous disease rather than a response to it. His speech, initially seen as outside the structure of his disorder, is ultimately defined as its very essence. Two years after Godwin published his novel, Mary Hays revisited this narrative problem in Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). In this novel, the young and philosophical Emma writes a memoir of her relationship with Augustus Harley, a man she falls in love with but who is secretly married. This memoir is in turn framed within the remarks of an older Emma. She sees her earlier justifications as the outpourings of a diseased mind. She presents the narrative as a cautionary tale to her adopted son, who is in love with a married woman, a relationship he has justified through the same kind of reasoning Emma had practiced earlier. Hays’s use of this narrative structure, however, differs significantly from Godwin’s. The most evident difference is in her narrator’s intense relationship to the earlier narrative. Whereas Caleb Williams has lost all interest in narration, Emma Courtney experiences it as a violation: “Rash young man!—why do you tear from my heart the affecting narrative?” are her opening words.^[1] She is wounded by the necessity of retelling her story, and that retelling requires an involuntary self-violence that stands in stark contrast to Caleb’s lack of narrative affect. This narrative position can be directly tied to the novel’s representation of a social experience for women that differs from that of men. This experience produces a distinct relationship between the narrator and her nervous body, and it is this distinction that leads to the premium Hays places on this narratorial self-violence.

Hays was an outspoken feminist and English Jacobin in London’s polarized political environment of the 1790s.^[2] She is most known today as the woman who introduced Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin and who shared with Eliza Fenwick the sad duty of nursing Wollstonecraft through her final illness. Her publications include a second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and a collection of nonfiction writing, Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793). Her philosophical book on the condition of women, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), resembles Wollstonecraft’s Vindication in its major outlines. Katharine M. Rogers identifies Wollstonecraft as the more theoretical and decisive of the two in her break with sentimental ideology, whereas Hays’s strength lies in her practical illustrations of the everyday hypocrisy that is inevitable within the patriarchal home under the ideology of sentimentality.^[3] Despite the terror of the counterrevolution, Hays continued productive writing, publishing two works on distinguished women in history, Female Biography (1803) and the Memoirs of Queens Illustrious and Celebrated (1821).^[4]

Although the philosophy in Mary Hays’s first novel has been seen as derivative, a product of her “blind discipleship” to Godwin, her borrowings from Godwin are a means of pointing out the limitations of his ideas rather than an imitation of them.^[5] The borrowings themselves are overt and frequent. In her preface to Emma Courtney, Hays cites Godwin’s novel as one of her models and figuratively aligns Emma with Caleb by arguing that her work similarly explores the consequences of “one strong, indulged, passion,” in this case the heroine’s romantic passion for her enigmatic lover, Augustus Harley (EC, 1: Preface 5). Emma also quotes directly from both Caleb Williams and Political Justice, citing them in footnotes for the reader.^[6] The most substantive reference to Godwin is his inclusion in the novel as a character, the philosophical Mr. Francis, who befriends Emma and corresponds with her. His letters are recitations of specific elements of Political Justice, and their inclusion in the narrative is a means of importing Godwin’s voice and philosophy directly into the novel. This fictionalized correspondence also reproduces an actual correspondence between Hays and Godwin.^[7]

Emma’s relationship with Mr. Francis suggests an ongoing debate over the position of women in Godwinian philosophy. The crux of this debate can be identified at a particular moment three-quarters of the way through the narrative, when the Godwin double disappears. Because of a combination of untoward circumstances, Emma finds herself in London in what she labels “my present unprotected situation” (EC, 2:146). A variety of factors lead to this predicament. She has too little fortune to live independently because of a consistent pattern of patriarchal improvidence, and she has no living family to rely on. An older female friend, Mrs. Harley, the mother of Augustus, serves as a substitute mother for Emma and provides her with a home, but when she dies Emma has only one option: she travels to London, where she takes a room she cannot afford, in the hope that Mr. Francis, her sole remaining friend, will offer her his help. She sends him a note on her arrival and waits, but for once he does not reply. His house, she soon learns, is tightly shuttered, and he is far away, on the continent, his date of return uncertain. Out of options, she contemplates for a brief moment two unpalatable alternatives: the “degradation of servitude” or a life of prostitution (EC, 2:149).

The sudden and unexpected departure of the Godwin double from the narrative—he does not reappear, nor is his name even mentioned after this disappearance—is similar in effect to the death of Mrs. Harley, for Mr. Francis, too, plays a sustained parental role. His ongoing correspondence with Emma on philosophical issues is a substantial part of the novel, as the letters are transcribed at length. Within the confinement of her monotonous existence, the younger Emma welcomes his philosophical letters as a rare and vital source of intellectual stimulation. He is also significant as a sympathetic listener; her letters to him are the only means she has to voice her complaints about the enforced idleness in her life, which stifles her ideals of virtuous and socially useful activity. Mr. Francis’s replies, paraphrases of Political Justice, urge her to sharpen her powers of reason and resist the idleness that breeds excess sensibility and its hysterical manifestations. So his sudden absence opens a large hole in the web of Emma’s life. But Mr. Francis, unlike Mrs. Harley, is not dead. Instead, at the moment Emma most needs him, he is nowhere to be found.

Emma occupies a position in which Godwin’s ideas no longer apply, and so his character’s permanent departure for regions unknown is symbolic. Godwin’s philosophy, we have seen, elides the question of sexual difference by looking forward to a uniformly masculine utopia where reproduction is eliminated. Although he maintains a commitment to equality, any concept of woman as distinct from man disappears. However, in her unprotected situation, Emma occupies a distinctly gendered social position. Rather than an experience common to both men and women, her unprotected situation is typical of the social position specifically imposed on women, one that makes women’s social experience distinct from that of men. Emma Courtney, then, describes a social narrative that is unique to women rather than one predicated as universal and hence male, as in Caleb Williams. The very moment at which Emma enters on this gendered terrain of a compulsory female dependency, when she faces the choice between service and prostitution—at that moment she discovers that the male voice of Godwinian reason resides in a foreign land. She is “alarmed by this silence” (EC, 2:147), and well she should be. What had once seemed so near and helpful, an unconventional and hence reliable friend for an unconventional woman, appears now remote, alien, and inaccessible.

In the last exchange of letters between Emma and her Godwinian mentor, immediately preceding his disappearance, his failure to account for woman’s social experience is specifically addressed, so the relationship between the letters and the incident is that of theory and practice. The exchange takes place at the dramatic climax of the story, immediately after Emma learns that Augustus is secretly married. She has actively pursued him, even against his stated wishes, and finally proposes to live with him without the ceremony of marriage because she believes that he returns her love, and reason tells her to proceed.^[8] She is right about him. When she discovers that he has a wife and children, however unloved, she concludes that her pursuit of him has in fact been an act of passion, not reason. In lengthy epistles to both Harley and Mr. Francis, she had carefully justified that pursuit in Godwinian terms, reasoning through the thicket of social proscriptions that prohibit women from actively pursuing men. But in retrospect she sees her actions differently. She was in fact the most deluded at the moment she felt most convinced of her rationality. As a result, her letters to Mr. Francis after the discovery are written in a state of wholly ungrounded perception, for she has come to doubt her basic ability to distinguish desire from reason, fantasy from reality. In this state, she initiates the final correspondence with Mr. Francis, and what she writes is substantial: the narrative of her life that we later read as the Memoir.

His critique of her narrative is blunt. Her pursuit of Augustus, Mr. Francis opines, was a “moon-struck madness,” which “the smallest glimpse of sober reflection” would have brought to an end (EC, 2:99). With this, Emma is in full agreement. But he goes on to claim, in a perfect paraphrase of Godwin, that her “disappointed love” is not one of the “real evils,” such as “bodily pain, compulsory solitude, severe corporal labour” (EC, 2:99). By indulging her excess sensibility, she has created an imaginary pain, a form of self-inflicted violence caused by “hunting after torture” (EC, 2:99). He explains: “Evils of this sort are the brood of folly begotten upon fastidious indolence. They shrink into non-entity, when touched by the wand of truth” (EC, 2:100).

At the center of this self-indulgent condition is the social dependency that leads to such indolence. It is not excess sensibility itself that is at issue in this hunt for torture so much as the underlying social dependency that generates the tendency to inflict wounds on oneself. “May every power that is favourable to integrity, to honour, defend me from leaning upon another for support,” he writes; “…I will not be weak and criminal enough, to make my peace depend upon the precarious thread of another’s life or another’s pleasure. I will judge for myself” (EC, 2:100–101). He faults Emma for allowing her happiness to depend on the emotional whims of Augustus, thereby surrendering her independence.^[9] This kind of emotional dependency impedes the independent function of reason, and that is why Mr. Francis calls it “criminal,” for all rational judgments are disinterested, in his view, and not prejudiced by the needs or desires of others. “The first lesson of enlightened reason,” he emphasizes, “…is independence” (EC, 2:100), without which reason itself is not possible. Because she has surrendered her independence, her wounds are self-inflicted.

But it is precisely this independence that is systematically denied women in Emma’s narrative. Her “unprotected situation,” at the moment of Mr. Francis’s disappearance makes manifest the compulsory social dependency that all women face. As she states the problem, when alone in London, “[a]ctive, industrious, willing to employ my faculties in any way, by which I might procure an honest independence, I beheld no path open to me, but…the degradation of servitude” (EC, 2:148–49). Servitude is inherently degrading because it entails the surrender of independence. It is not that she does not share Mr. Francis’s view on dependence but that there is no “path” to independence for women. This is the point on which she directly challenges Godwin’s philosophy in her last letter to his double: “Why call woman, miserable, oppressed, and impotent, woman—crushed and then insulted—why call her to independence—which not nature, but the barbarous and accursed laws of society, have denied her? This is mockery!” (EC, 2:107). Because women are denied independence by their social condition—that is, because dependence is part of the social narrative written into women’s bodies—Emma’s pain is not self-willed, as Mr. Francis would have it, but a genuine social evil. As she twice asks, quoting Godwin against himself, “Are we, or are we not (as you have taught me) the creatures of sensation and circumstance?” (EC, 2:104). Mr. Francis’s refusal to accept as “real” the pain she experiences is a refusal to acknowledge the gendered condition of women, for his philosophy treats women as if they had equal access to independence and, with it, the rationality that would cure her romantic love and her pain at its disappointment.

Self-violence, as Janet Todd points out, is the definitive characteristic of this (as well as Wollstonecraft’s) fiction.^[10] It is also a characteristic that is constantly under interrogation in the Memoir and one that the frame story shares with the inner narrative. As we have seen, through its opening words the novel connects self-violence with the basic coming-into-being of the narrative. Within the narrative, self-violence is explicitly under discussion in the exchange between the female and male philosophers, but it is implicitly always under discussion, for the competing interpretations of Emma’s painful actions—that they were avoidable, that they were unavoidable—are the issues at stake in the story of her life. Self-violence is both the specific issue in the break between Emma and Mr. Francis and the general issue against which the question of a distinctly gendered woman’s social experience is formulated.

The disappearance of Godwin, as Mr. Francis, reflects a general pattern in the novel in which Emma’s relationship to reason—and not just to its metonym—is marked by a tenuous unpredictability. Emma goes through three separate cycles in which she appears to recover from a distemper, acts in what she believes is a rational manner, and then rediscovers that “my own boasted reason has been, but too often, the dupe of my imagination” or that her philosophy “was swept before the impetuous emotions of my passions like chaff before the whirlwind” (EC, 1:84, 1:85). For Emma, the certainty of her own rationality becomes the primary symptom of its absence. Whereas reason in Caleb Williams is a present, palpable force, in Emma Courtney it is itself bracketed as an object of desire, a shadow that one wants to embrace but that always eludes one’s grasp. There is no triumphant moment for the narrative of reason to rival that in Caleb Williams. There are moments in which rational truth should have this compelling force, as when Emma proposes a completely rational discourse with Augustus: “Let us walk together into the palace of Truth, where…every one was compelled by an irresistible, controuling, power, to reveal his inmost sentiments!” (EC, 1:180).^[11] But such moments, including this, are consistently redefined as products of passion, suggesting that she does not know her own “truth.”

Hays’s version of self-delusion is more insistent than Godwin’s, a characteristic that can be traced to differences between her framing device and that of Caleb Williams. Godwin’s novel uses only a closing frame, in the postscript, to reveal the narration as a self-delusion, and so it is only in retrospect that the reader comes to perceive the extent of the narrator’s distemper. In contrast, Hays fully frames her novel, opening it with the letter (and its defining self-violence) from Emma to her adopted son, making it clear from the start that the narrative is a cautionary tale. The author’s preface reinforces the framing perspective, explaining that “the errors of my heroine were the offspring of sensibility” (EC, 1: Preface 8). The story itself is littered with apostrophes in which the older Emma labels her younger writing as “reasonings, so specious, so flattering, to which passion lent its force” (EC, 2:54). In extended quotations from the letters, the older Emma inserts footnotes warning against the rhetorical force of the diseased writer’s reasoning. At a particularly dark philosophical passage in one letter, for example, a footnote cautions, “This is the reasoning of a mind distorted by passion” (EC, 2:94 n). It is not that the novel fails to celebrate Godwinian reason; it clearly does. But these multiple framing devices make reason significantly less accessible to the subject in Hays’s novel than in Caleb Williams. In consequence, the novel has a more pronounced emphasis on the female’s incarceration within her nervous body than does its male predecessor, Caleb Williams.

That incarceration is represented as an inescapable product of woman’s social condition. Emma’s story details the evolution of her disorder as a form of excess sensibility in the protagonist, one that is explicitly compared to Caleb Williams’s uncontrollable curiosity. But the conditions that create the protagonist’s “distempered imagination” (EC, 1:89), as Emma calls it, are explored in much greater detail in Emma’s narrative than in Caleb’s. Whereas Caleb’s early years are sketched in a few paragraphs, Emma gives a sustained history of her childhood and adolescence, methodically demonstrating the wholly ordinary events that, one after the other, with compelling force, produce the excessive sensibility that finally compels her distempered condition. An educated narrator, Emma approaches the topic of her past scientifically, delineating the sequence of impressions—being weaned, being overly indulged as a child, reading romantic novels, being deprived of stimulating companionship—that molded her mind and made her susceptible to her romantic despair.^[12]

The central moment in this development occurs when she falls in love with a portrait of Augustus, before ever meeting him, and his idealized image becomes all-in-all to her.^[13] As she explains, “Cut off from all the society of mankind, and unable to expound my sensations, all the strong affections of my soul seemed concentrated to a single point” (EC, 1:113). She floods the representation of Augustus with desired qualities and invests him with a fairy-tale aura of perfection. She also recognizes that she is in love with “an ideal object” of her own making, but, she concludes, it “was in vain I attempted to combat this illusion; my reason was but an auxiliary to my passion, it persuaded me, that I was only doing justice to high and uncommon worth; imagination lent her aid, and an importunate sensibility…completed the seduction” (EC, 1:116). Where Godwin would identify this delusion as self-inflicted, she represents her romantic love as if it were as inevitable as an infection, to which she later compares it: “[A]rgue with the wretch infected with the plague—will it stop the tide of blood, that is rapidly carrying its contagion to the heart?” (EC, 2:103). To her, the condition is an occupation of the subject by a compulsory and unwanted sexuality. Her romantic feelings signal her containment within the female social narrative.

The causes of her disease are represented as conditions typically experienced by middle-class daughters, implying that her distemper is a general condition for women, not one unique to the heroine. In a pattern similar to that outlined by Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and later by Florence Nightingale in Cassandra, she identifies the underlying condition as the restricted social role of women and an economy of energy in which enforced female passivity leads the mind to turn inward:

While men pursue interest, honour, pleasure, as accords with their several dispositions, women…remain insulated beings, and must be content tamely to look on, without taking any part in the great, though often absurd and tragical, drama of life. Hence the eccentricities of conduct, with which women of superior minds have been accused—the struggles…of an ardent spirit, denied a scope for its exertions! The strong feelings, and strong energies…forced back, and pent up, ravage and destroy the mind which gave them birth.

Emma Courtney is thus less one woman’s story of disappointed love than an examination of how late Georgian social conditions create a psychology that is unique to women and that results in a debilitating form of romantic love. Once created, it remains permanently etched in Emma’s body, “written upon my own mind in characters of blood” (EC, 1:2), constituting an irresistible part of her nervous physiology.

In Emma’s distemper, her entire being becomes focused on the object of desire to the exclusion of all else. It causes her body to tremble and blush; she feels faint in his presence; her passions run out of control. Hays’s representation of excess sensibility constructs female sexuality as a diseased product of woman’s social condition. Trapped within bodies that are sexualized by their early education and by restrictions on social activity, women become immersed within an isolated and overpowering sensibility. Sexuality in Emma Courtney perpetuates that isolation by subverting women’s rational social ties, which are abandoned in the face of a selfish and individualized passion. Thus Emma refers to her passion for Augustus as “an excess, perhaps, involving all my future usefulness” (EC, 1:116), because it compels her into self-centered, and self-indulgent, forms of behavior rather than enabling outward-directed, socially useful activities. This prediction is realized during her marriage to Montague. Having spent her passion on Augustus, she has none left for Montague, whose offer of marriage ultimately resolves the problem of her “unprotected situation.” She marries him in the same way that the spent Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility marries the spent Colonel Brandon. And that’s good. The early period in Emma’s marriage becomes for her a time in which “every hour was devoted to active usefulness, or to social and rational recreation” (EC, 2:164). This outward-directed activity contrasts favorably with Emma’s previous transformation from enforced idleness to romantic incapacitation. Like Austen’s Marianne, she develops a rational friendship with her husband. Montague “became more dear to me” after the birth of a child, and her capacity for controlled emotion seems to recover. Emma feels “new and sweet emotions” and tastes “a pure, a chaste, an ineffable pleasure” in watching a maternal tableau of husband caressing child (EC, 2:165).^[14] At the sudden reappearance of Augustus, however, her new social relations evaporate into nothingness, as the old passion reemerges. “For a moment,” she tells us, “conjugal, maternal, duties, every consideration but for one subject faded from before me!” (EC, 2:174). As if she were back before the portrait, all else fades from view when this isolating sexuality—permanently inscribed in her nervous body—directly conflicts with her participation in any outward-directed activity.

Although Emma’s memoir represents as unavoidable her confinement within this debilitating social condition, the fact of the memoir’s existence threatens formally to undermine that claim. Because the memoir exists as a form of social intercourse, Emma appears to have the social agency she represents as being categorically unavailable to women. And so Memoirs of Emma Courtney raises a problem for narrative agency similar to that raised in Caleb Williams: how to construct a subject-position for a narrator who articulates her own lack of agency without contradicting that statement through the agency involved in being a narrator.

Hays constructs two distinct subject-positions, the younger and the older Emma, and each has a different claim to narrative agency predicated on a distinct relationship between narrative voice and narrating body. The narrative, as has been noted, is initially written when the young Emma learns about her lover’s secret marriage and her distemper is at its height. She writes as a self-justification to Mr. Francis, her intended reader. Looking back, the older Emma explains, “I drew up a sketch of the events of my past life, and unfolded a history of the sentiments of my mind (from which I have extracted the preceding materials)” (EC, 2:96). Like Godwin’s novel, then, the narrative is originally produced by a disordered mind as a supposedly rational explanation for the narrator’s actions. Writing the narrative at the time is therapeutic, she explains, for “[w]hile pouring itself out on paper, my tortured mind has experienced a momentary relief” (EC, 2:95). The original act of narration soothes her nerves, as it relieves Caleb’s, by releasing the story written within her body and giving it voice.

The younger Emma, in her letters and in the remnants of the earlier “confessions” (EC, 2:115), writes as if she has the status of an agent, as if she possesses a basic independence and, with it, access to reason, despite all the suffering to which she has been subjected. She writes, that is, as if her body is not real—a heavy, physical presence—but is instead a transparent and distant object whose inscriptions do not bear on her narrative authority. Combined with her remarkable role as a sexualized agent in pursuit of the passive Augustus, this seeming detachment gives her the bearing of an intelligent, independent-minded woman who rebels against her own incarceration within the constricted female role. Thus, it is possible to read Emma Courtney as a transgressive narrative of female agency founded on desire, one that is not effectively contained by the “modicum of damage control” represented by the framing devices.^[15]

But in terms of the feminist philosophy that Hays and Wollstonecraft shared and promoted, the younger Emma’s actions are problematic, because they tie her agency to her culturally constructed sexuality.^[16] In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft articulates the ideological nature of female sexuality and shows it to be, first, socially constructed and, second, used against women as though it were a natural attribute of the female body.^[17] Wollstonecraft, like Godwin, defines sexuality, particularly female sexuality, as a social disease, one that has no place within a rational marriage, in which partners have a more intellectual appreciation of one another and can better perform their social obligations as parents: “In order to fulfill the duties of life…a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion. I mean to say that they ought not to indulge those emotions which disturb the order of society, and engross the thoughts that should be otherwise employed” (Vindication, 114). It is because, paradoxically, Emma does not have a romanticized love for Montague that the marriage becomes for her an interlude of social usefulness.

Unlike Godwin, Wollstonecraft separates this disruptive sexuality from the female body’s reproductive capability. Whereas Godwin predicts the eventual disappearance of the distempered female body, with its interrelated feminine nerves and sexuality, Wollstonecraft constructs a future body in terms of maternity rather than diseased sexuality. Because of this theoretical distinction, she is able to articulate a separate social role for woman that is still founded on biological difference but is no longer limited by a disabling sexuality. By recurring to the image of the widowed mother, charged with the duty of caring for and educating children single-handedly, she argues the social necessity of educating women; they will need to assume an independent, socially useful maternal role as educators of the next generation of rational citizens, ready to contribute to social improvement.^[18] Thus, Wollstonecraft divides the concepts of female sexuality and reproduction in order to justify an active social role for women that preserves difference, and she does it by grounding that social role in a nonsexualized concept of the maternal.

Hays’s novel incorporates Wollstonecraft’s argument as the symbolic form of the narrative’s structure. The memoir is originally produced as a history of Emma’s sexuality, recording its production in her body’s excess sensibility and expressing it through her diseased reasoning. This original narrative is also a nervous narrative, one written to Mr. Francis as an appeal for sympathy, drawing attention to the narrator’s pain, and so it is also the product of the sexuality it records. In the frame story, Hays redefines this narrative precisely as Wollstonecraft redefines the female body: by discarding an agency based on sexuality and substituting one based on reproduction. The older Emma produces the narrative as the fulfillment of her maternal duty to her child, and so she gives it a clearly defined, outward-directed social function, treating its sexuality as a disease produced by an oppressive society and locating its social value in the sphere of reproduction. Thus, Hays constructs a narrative that formally enacts the redefinition of the social place of woman it proposes in its content.

The maternal Emma’s voice, with its characteristic self-violence, is complex because Emma Courtney is not a utopian novel; the heroine cannot, by an act of philosophical insight, transcend the narrative that has been written on her body. Thomas De Quincey makes that claim an integral part of his Confessions, but Emma Courtney’s immanence in the material does not allow escape. She cannot not be sexual, cannot recreate herself as a rational being, certain of the reason she does not have access to, because she can never differentiate between reason and the past sexuality that remains inscribed on her body. As it reemerges at the sight of Augustus, so too it is revisited in the act of telling the story, which recalls him to mind and brings his image again before her.^[19] This sexualized past lives on in the shape of a present and tangible pain caused by the act of narration. This is why this maternal narrator describes her narration again and again as self-violence: “It has been a painful, and a humiliating recital—the retrospection has been marked with anguish…my lacerated heart…has been again torn” (EC, 2:218). So she chastises her son and figurative reader for the “inconceivable misery” it causes her (EC, 1:1). “[I]t will cost me some pain to be ingenuous in the recital…and I feel an inclination to retract…. But…you entreat me to proceed” (EC, 2:2).

The difference between the younger and older Emmas resides precisely in the opposite relationships they assert between narrative and body. The younger Emma feels pleasure as she writes: “While pouring itself out on paper, my tortured mind has experienced a momentary relief” (EC, 2:95). Writing is a means “to beguile my melancholy thoughts” (EC, 2:95), and so it eases her feeling of despair and brings her comfort when nothing else will. This early act of narration accedes to the demands of her sexualized body; she yields to her sensations in the act of writing, and so it is a pleasurable and a sexualized act. In contrast, the older Emma defines her narration as a maternal act of “sacrifice” (EC, 1:6) in which she must overcome the demands of her body in order to tell her story. This new act is predicated on resistance to the sexualized body and its demands, and this resistance produces her pain.

Given the way Hays has described the condition of women—as uncertain of reason, denied agency, and unable to trust their own feelings—the only available sign of narrative authority is this narrator’s pain. It does not guarantee the presence of reason. It simply implies that her reason is no longer the “dupe” of her desires. That pain is the closest Emma can come to a position of intellectual disinterestedness and, so, to Godwinian rationality. Hays has created a structure that paradoxically valorizes female self-violence, not as a plea for sympathy but as a sign of a woman’s right to speak. It appears to be an agency of self-effacement or subordination—that is, a self-contradicting subject-position in which the only time a woman can know she has something to say is when her body tells her not to say it. But this pain also needs to be recognized as a sign of resistance, for what is effaced is not the female subject but the corporeal effects of an oppressive society. That resistance does indicate, obliquely, the persistence of another subject somewhere within this frame narrator’s voice, one who distinguishes herself from her body and whose presence, however tentative and unstable, is nonetheless more substantial than the fiction of agency in the younger Emma’s illusions. This complex, incarcerated voice, which can only indicate itself by turning on itself, ignoring its feelings and undermining its earlier assertions, is the consistent and larger response to Godwin and his symbolic disappearance from Emma’s story.

Notes

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

5. Harrington’s Last Shudder

Maria Edgeworth and the Popular Fear of the Nervous Body

The circumstance that gave rise to Harrington (1817) is one of the more well-known facts about one of Maria Edgeworth’s least-known tales.^[1] In a “Note to the Reader” prefacing the story, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, explains that it “was occasioned by an extremely well-written letter, which Miss Edgeworth received from America, from a Jewish lady, complaining of the illiberality with which the Jewish nation had been treated in some of Miss Edgeworth’s works” (TN, 9:iii).^[2] In response, Edgeworth composed a tale about prejudice against Jews that features an idealized Jewish gentleman, Mr. Montenero, and a narrator who must overcome his childhood anti-Semitism.

The tale is also a nervous narrative. Harrington tells the story of “the strange nervous fits I had when a boy” (TN, 9:197) and their repercussions in his adult body. His nervous fits are specifically anti-Semitic. They originate in the misguided actions of his childhood nurse, Fowler, who instills in him such a pronounced fear of an old-clothes seller, Simon the Jew, that as an adult he retains an unfortunate and uncontrollable tendency to faint at the recollection of Simon’s stereotyped Jewish face. And so he refers to his own narrative as a study of “the affair with my nerves and the Jews” (TN, 9:7–8).

This is an affair that he necessarily overcomes. His last fit occurs, fittingly, in the last scene of the tale. The acutely perceptive Montenero intentionally provokes it by uttering the magic word, “Fowler!” (TN, 9:207). The name of the maid who threatened to give him to Simon the Jew causes a predictable, outwardly visible reflexive action in Harrington’s body: “I shuddered and started back” (TN, 9:207). This shudder is one in a long series of such shudders in the adult Harrington. When he earlier encounters a face reminiscent of Simon the Jew’s, he reacts similarly: “[A] nervous tremor seized me in every limb. I let the purse, which I had in my hand, fall upon the ground” (TN, 9:132). At another moment, he is made speechless in mid-sentence by an “involuntary shudder” at the sight of a face identical to Fowler’s (TN, 9:182).^[3] In these incidents, although he says he does “my utmost to suppress my feelings” (TN, 9:131), he finds that he cannot.

The last shudder matters because it is the last shudder—that is, his final nervous response. Montenero provokes it to make a point, using the shudder to insist that Harrington take the final step in exerting the “power over yourself” that has progressively cured him of the residual effects of his childhood nervous fits (TN, 9:208). “[Y]ou have given proofs that your matured reason and your humanity have been able to control and master your imagination and your antipathies,” Montenero points out (TN, 9:208). It is because of these proofs that Montenero has finally welcomed a marriage between Harrington and his only daughter, Berenice. Told to master this last somatic response, Harrington determines, “I will conquer myself.” (TN, 9:208). And so he does, not just in learning to forgive the maid Fowler but in becoming the self-controlled, authoritative voice that narrates his own nervous past from the subject-position of a detached natural historian. His shudder at the mention of Fowler is the dying gasp of a nervous inscription that he completely erases. Harrington’s is thus the nervous body that is now no longer nervous.

Because Harrington tells the story of how he gradually overcomes his disorder rather than dwelling on its sequential creation, his narrative departs significantly from the pattern of the nervous narrative. Both Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Hays’s Emma Courtney utilize an abject narrator, one who continues to be defined by the nervous condition he or she describes. Harrington is told through a wholly authoritative narrator who has escaped from the condition and so has no need to appeal to the reader’s sympathy. Instead, he presents “this history of the mental and corporeal ills of my childhood” (TN, 9:8) for their scientific value, as “experiments” (TN, 9:9) that can illuminate the hidden mechanisms of the mind. The stance is comparable to De Quincey’s opening narrative strategy, but Harrington is more consistent in its construction of a subject-position identified with narrative objectivity, one that has no need for the kind of subsequent renegotiations that characterize De Quincey’s Confessions. Harrington is an unambivalent representation of escape from the constitutive nervous effects of early experiences. As a direct result, the nervous body is redefined as more resilient than had been previously thought. The tale describes the same nervous mechanism with remarkable precision, using the same physiological psychology found in Thomas Trotter’s work.^[4] This body remains highly susceptible to being written on, but it is now capable of being unwritten, too. Freed of his somaticized past, this narrator not only theorizes Caleb Williams’s “manly tale,” he also tells it.

Maria Edgeworth originally wrote a different passage for Montenero in the episode of the last shudder. In the 1817 edition, the fo-cus is not on Harrington’s capacity for self-control but on the unforgivable nature of Fowler’s interference in the course of true love between Harrington and Berenice, Montenero’s daughter. “Conspiring against more than my life—my love,” Harrington cries.^[5] In removing such references, Edgeworth shifts the emphasis away from the sanctity of romantic love to the overriding importance of rational self-control, which becomes the subject of Montenero’s new speech. Edgeworth’s late effort to buttress the tale’s emphasis on self-mastery—that is, on Harrington’s capacity for being cured—suggests a perceived need to clarify her representation of Harrington’s escape from his nervous body. Her revisions imply an awareness of and an anxiety about how internal inconsistencies—such as the final, conventional speech elevating the passion of love above life itself—might weaken the clarity of Harrington’s escape from a body ruled by its passions.

Nonetheless, in the revised tale, reinforced and more consistent in its valorization of reason than the first edition, there remains a trend that works against the tale’s claims for Harrington’s escape and that Edgeworth does not eliminate. That trend flows from the precision with which Harrington defines the nervous body and the redefinition that body undergoes late in the narrative in order to produce the narrator’s cure. By considering that disorder, we can see that the cure has two contradictory effects: It produces the narrator’s rationality, but only by sacrificing the foundation on which the tale’s concept of rationality is based. Harrington’s narrative objectivity, though apparently more stable than that of the other nervous narrators discussed here, is ultimately the least stable of them all.

Harrington describes the origin of his disorder in the first chap-ter, using the language of physiological psychology.^[6] In the tale’s opening scene, he is six years old, an age of delicacy and impressionability because of the small size of nervous fibers in the child’s body. It is 1761, the end of his first day in London, and he observes that his “senses had been excited, and almost exhausted, by the vast variety of objects that were new to me” (TN, 9:1); his body has overaccumulated stimulating impressions. In such a state, it requires a strong new stimulus to arrest his attention, and this is provided by the inexplicable appearance of “star after star of light” approaching. When he finally perceives the nearing lamplighter, he reacts as a child-scientist, experiencing “as much delight as philosopher ever enjoyed in discovering the cause of a new and general phenomenon” (TN, 9:1). His attention is then arrested by an even stronger novelty when the lamplighter’s torch “flared on the face and figure of an old man with a long white beard and a dark visage, who, holding a great bag slung over one shoulder, walked slowly on, repeating in a low, abrupt, mysterious tone, the cry of ‘Old clothes! Old clothes! Old clothes!’ ” (TN, 9:1–2). When the peddler, Simon the Jew, looks back at Harrington, the narrator receives the impression that becomes the focal point of his hysteria.

That face, initially perceived by Harrington as “good-natured,” is redefined by the maid Fowler as a threat in order to compel the child’s obedience.^[7] “If you don’t come quietly this minute…I’ll call Simon the Jew there…and he shall come up and carry you away in his great bag” (TN, 9:2). This redefinition produces instant obedience, but the terror it causes in the enervated and vulnerable child’s body has long-term consequences. Beginning that night, he suffers the pains of excessive sensibility as the face of “Simon the Jew and his bag, who had come to carry me away in the height of my joys” (TN, 9:2), appears and reappears to him. In the following weeks, Fowler repeats the threat, having discovered its efficacy. However, in the standard pattern of excess sensibility, the stimulus needs to be continually escalated in order to have the same effect. When “by frequent repetition this threat had lost somewhat of its power” (TN, 9:2), she adds increasingly gruesome details to the story of Simon and his bag, until it is fully revealed as a variant of the ancient anti-Semitic blood libel.^[8]

Above all others, there was one story—horrible! most horrible!—which she used to tell at midnight, about a Jew who lived in Paris in a dark alley, and who professed to sell pork pies; but it was found out at last that the pies were not pork—they were made of the flesh of little children. His wife used to stand at the door of her den to watch for little children, and, as they were passing, would tempt them in with cakes and sweetmeats. There was a trap-door in the cellar, and the children were dragged down; and—Oh! how my blood ran cold when we came to the terrible trap-door. Were there, I asked, such things in London now?

Oh, yes! In dark narrow lanes there were Jews now living, and watching always for such little children as me.

This escalation writes a mechanical response into Harrington’s young body that causes him to suffer an “evening attack of nerves” (TN, 9:10) each time he hears the peddler’s nightly cry.

Harrington’s symptoms respond to the content of this blood-libel narrative. Every night for the next year and a half, he explains, “I lay in an indescribable agony of terror; my head under the bed-clothes, my knees drawn up, in a cold perspiration. I saw faces around me grinning, glaring, receding, advancing, all turning at last into the same face of the Jew with the long beard and the terrible eyes: and that bag, in which I fancied were mangled limbs of children—it opened to receive me, or fell upon my bed, and lay heavy on my breast, so that I could neither stir nor scream” (TN, 9:3–4). The dark maw of the trapdoor, in Fowler’s narrative, and Simon’s bag, in Harrington’s imagination, become synonymous, both functioning as great orifices in which the body of the child is contained and transformed. He imagines this bag as a weight pressing on his breast, a symptom that reproduces the “globus” associated with hysteria, and the effect of this weight is a bodily paralysis and an inability to speak. What Harrington experiences, in his hysterical moments, then, is his own containment within the bag, a sensation that manifests itself in his adult fits as a sense of suffocation, speechlessness, and immobility. His body responds as if it were literally confined, and thus his symptoms are consistent with the content of his fear.

Once written into his body, however, this hysterical condition persists long after its rational basis is removed. Fowler, who soon tires of tending to the hysteric she has invented, tries to undo the damage by confessing her fabrication to Harrington, explaining that the bag contained only clothes. But “to undo her work was beyond her power” (TN, 9:4). As an empirical proof, she brings Simon into the house to open his bag, but Harrington’s “imagination was by this time proof against ocular demonstration” (TN, 9:5). Instead of curing his disorder, the meeting produces a new instance of it. This gulf between rational understanding and hysterical response grows during the narrative, as he retains traces of this response even as he acquires an adult sympathy for Jewish characters. He develops a friendship with Jacob, the son of Simon the peddler, and is introduced by him to a group of highly educated Jews, including a scholar he studies with at Cambridge, the art collector Montenero, and his daughter, Berenice, with whom Harrington falls in love. Yet whenever he encounters an image reminiscent of Simon the Jew, he grows faint.

Edgeworth is positing a particular theory of hysteria, one that is characterized by a slippage between signifier and signified of the sign “Jew.” Initially, the content associated with this sign is threatening, and it produces a response in the body that is linked to this content. As Harrington matures, the content of the sign “Jew” changes from foe to friend, but his body continues to respond to the signifier as if it possessed the earlier meaning. Harrington’s body is thus a hostage to the letter, as the signifier persists in its mechanical effects long after the signified that initially accounted for those effects has disappeared. The conflict is between Harrington’s autonomy, as a rational subject, and his body’s unwilled and uncontainable response to the sign “Jew.”

Because the tale treats anti-Semitism as a social phenomenon, Harrington’s disorder is one example of a generalized problem, a collective disorder that is represented as endemic to British social life. In the tale’s thematization of group behaviors, which she calls “party spirit,” Edgeworth articulates the mechanism by which disorders such as Harrington’s are communicated and even come to dominate entire societies.^[9] Edgeworth wrote about “party spirit” before the modern concept of a mass psychology had been formulated. Contemporary ideas about crowd behavior developed in the later nineteenth century and were most fully articulated by the French natural historian Gustave LeBon, who developed a theory in which political leaders could control populations through a form of mass hypnotism.^[10] Edgeworth’s ideas about crowds belong to an earlier paradigm of crowd behavior, one that has roots in Renaissance ideas about sympathetic imagination and its communication between individuals. Harrington names those sources in the opening of the tale following his description of the origin of his Jewish “antipathy,” when he connects his own “history of the mental and corporeal ills of my childhood” (TN, 9:8) with the natural histories of Francis Bacon and the lesser-known Kenelm Digby, a seventeenth-century natural philosopher and gentleman scientist who wrote on the powers of sympathy and antipathy. Harrington defines his “experiments” as a continuation of studies begun by Bacon (who was “successfully followed” by Digby), studies that are “equally necessary to the science of morals and of medicine” (TN, 9:8). He adopts the anachronistic language of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum; or, A Natural History when he defines his narrative as “my experiments, solitary and in concert, touching fear and of and concerning sympathies and antipathies” (TN, 9:9).^[11] “Solitary and in concert” is an adaptation of Bacon’s two most frequent phrases in Sylva Sylvarum, “experiment solitary” and “experiments in consort,” used to differentiate singular from multiple observations on a stated topic.^[12] And he returns to the language of Bacon to state the fundamental topic of his narration as “ ‘the history of the power and influence of the imagination, not only upon the mind and body of the imaginant, but upon those of other people’ ” (TN, 9:8–9).^[13] His narrative, then, is not only about his individual experience but also about the communication of “imaginary” objects between minds and the consequences that follow.

Kenelm Digby calls this process of communication the “unpleasing contagion of the imagination,” and he explains it through the mechanism of sympathetic imitation.^[14] Discussed in the works of both Bacon and Digby, the concept was still in circulation in the late eighteenth century. In 1779 it appeared, for example, in the first sustained entry on sympathy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Sympathy, too, is often an imitative faculty, sometimes involuntary, frequently without consciousness: thus we yawn when we see others yawn, and are made to laugh by the laughing of another.

This imitative act is based on the idea of an exchange, but one that operates without any rational activity, occurring instead as a purely mechanistic imitation. According to Digby’s early description of contagious laughter, in Two Treatises (1644), the laughing of one man will set another laughing, “though he know not the cause why the first man laugheth.”^[15] Digby draws a clear distinction between the first man, who knows the joke, and the second, whose laughter is a mechanical imitation of the first, distinct in that it is devoid of any ideational content. The second man’s laughter is more reflexive than reflective. Digby illustrates this same mechanical imitation in reporting the case of a hapless roofer, which is today cited as the first known description of “echopraxia,” the disease of compulsive imitation:^[16] “I have heard of a man…that when he saw any man make a certain motion with his hand, could not choose but he must make the same: so that, being a tyler by his trade, and having one hand imployed with holding his tooles, whiles he held himself with the other upon the eaves of a house he was mending, a man standing below on the ground, made that signe or motion to him; whereupon he quited his holdfast to imitate that motion, and fell downe, in danger of breaking his necke” (Two Treatises, 335).

Digby’s report expands the concept of sympathetic imitation from the commonplace to the pathological. In this example, it overwhelms any willful attempt at self-restraint, despite the immediate danger involved. This action takes place independently of the reason or will of the subject. An example of the power of sympathy, from Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, illustrates the complete disjunction between this category of bodily response and the subject, as it records evidence of sympathetic reaction in a corpse: “It is an usual observation, that if the body of one murthered be brought before the murtherer, the wounds will bleed afresh. Some do affirm, that the dead body, upon the presence of the murtherer, hath opened the eyes.”^[17]

Digby explains the psychophysiology in living bodies of this extrarational mechanism as follows: “All these effects, do proceed out of the action of the seen object upon the fantasy of the looker on: which making the picture or likenesse of its owne action in the others fantasy, maketh his spirits runne to the same parts; and consequently, move the same members, that is, do the same actions (And hence it is that…whatsoever a good oratour delivereth well, (that is, with a semblance of passion agreeable to his wordes) rayseth of its own natur like affection in the hearers” (Two Treatises, 335). In both cases, the key element is the effect the “fantasy” has on the body of “the looker on” or “the hearers.” What appears in the imagination, whether seen or orally represented, has a mimetic consequence in the body.

These consequences can be permanent, as is graphically illustrated in the 1797 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia appeals to sympathetic imitation as the explanatory principle for the presence of human bodily deformity in the world.^[18] In its description of the process by which “monsters”—defined as people with bizarre or deformed limbs—come into being, the Encyclopaedia uses an incident from Paris, originally described in Malebranche, to illustrate how sympathetic imitation in the body of a pregnant woman can produce monstrosity in the child (3d ed., s.v. “monster”). Observing that “the view of a wound…wounds the person who views it,” Britannica differentiates between the effects of viewing a public execution on “vigorous men” with firm fibers and on the more “weak and delicate” fibers of women. Britannica extends the scale of vulnerability to “children still in their mother’s womb,” whose fibers are “incomparably finer than those in women.” Thus, the child’s body becomes the most sensitive register of effects that are present in varying degrees in all bodies. In the specific example cited, a pregnant French woman views a criminal’s limbs being individually broken, and “every stroke given to the poor man, struck forcibly the imagination of the woman…. [T]he violent course of the animal spirits was directed forcibly from the brain to all those parts of the body corresponding to the suffering parts of the criminal.” Through the same echopraxic mechanism described by Digby, the woman’s body mimics the scene before it. Whereas “the bones of the mother were strong enough” to sustain the impression, the child’s body is more vulnerable. The “spirits” follow the identical course in the fetal body, whose fragile bones and nervous system are both destroyed. Its limbs are snapped by the contractions, and its brain is “quite ruined” by the “shock of those spirits…enough to deprive him of reason all his lifetime.” The child is born “a fool, and with all its legs and arms broke in the same manner as those of criminals.” And thus, concludes the Encyclopaedia, can “the phenomena of monsters be easily accounted for.”

Within this example, when the mother’s body mimics the body of the criminal, it responds to the image of pain as if it were its own. The material effects of this sympathetic mimesis are dramatized in the body of the child, who is born a copy of the broken body of the criminal. The larger danger represented by the ontological novelty of the monster’s body, however, is not that it reproduces the body of the criminal but rather that it embodies—it literally gives a body to—the mother’s imagined experience. The monster is the realization, in material fact, of the “fantasy of the looker on,” not of the viewed execution. Any occasion that were to present this image forcefully enough to her mind would produce the same consequence. The “looker on” does not have to be witnessing an external event. Similar effects can follow from a later recollection of the execution, reading an account of an execution, or even fantasizing such an execution, as long as the idea of the execution is vividly present. Within such a scheme, any distinction between realities and representations is lost, as representations have the ability to cross over into the status of realities.^[19]

In Alexander Crichton’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798), the central assumption of the physician’s study of the physiology of delirium is that the body does not distinguish between impressions from actual objects and impressions from imaginary ones.^[20] He claims that the “sensorial impressions” of fictional representations “pervade our frame in the same manner as the impressions of the objects themselves, had they been real, would have done; the only difference being in degree” (Inquiry, 2:149). He illustrates this claim by asserting that “Homer’s description of the girdle of Venus, and of the Elysian fields; Milton’s description of Eve; Spenser’s description of the residence of Acrasy…gratify the senses” as if the reader experienced the fictional objects as fact (2:149). Such ideas tend to produce the same physiological actions in the body as the things they represent. Thus, “if an absent person imagines himself engaged in controversy, his lips move as if in conversation; if his subject of thought be an object of any passions, as anger, jealousy, envy, hatred, or love, his countenance and gestures betray the emotions natural to these passions” (2:6). Crichton explains this phenomenon in a manner similar to Digby, asserting that mental impressions are “conveyed to the extremities of those nerves of external sense by which the object, had it been a real one, would have been naturally received” (2:37–38). In this way internal impressions reproduce, in their physiology, the effects of external impressions. This physiology provides an explanatory underpinning for the belief that the physical effect of an idea is identical in kind to the physical effect of the thing for which it substitutes. This long-standing belief contributes to the climate of fear about the effects of fictional representations, such as those in novels, on younger, impressionable readers.^[21]

Whereas ideas have “corporeal effects…that are exactly similar in kind to what the real object would have,” these effects are normally “weaker in degree” (2:112). However, under certain circumstances this difference in degree disappears, and ideas can have a corporeal effect even greater than that of objects. Chief among these circumstances is repetition. “Representations of the mind,” Crichton claims, “when frequently renewed by acts of the imagination, at last acquire a degree of vividness which surpasses those derived from external objects” (2:65). Brooding over an idea—as Harrington does late in the tale, when he fears he will lose Berenice and secludes himself “[t]o feed upon my thoughts in solitude” (TN, 9:178)—threatens the subject’s health, because mental impressions grow in strength through repetition. Lingering repeatedly over the memorized images of a novel or romance poses a real danger, because the visitor to an immaterial adventure may return with a very material disorder. As Crichton observes, in pleading for a more compassionate attitude toward suicides, “Once an idea, by its being often presented to the mind, has gained such a degree of force and vividness as to command belief, it is of no consequence as to its effects, whether it originated in a real or an imaginary cause” (TN, 2:197).^[22]

Edgeworth represents this transition from imaginary to real in the character of Mrs. Harrington. In her youth, we learn, she affected a belief in “presentiments and presages, omens and dreams” as a fashionable snare “to interest her admirers” (TN, 9:37). Repeating the ruse for years, she eventually became in earnest the nervous victim in earnest of the excess sensibility she had imitated, “so that what in the beginning might have been affectation, was in the end reality” (TN, 9:37). Harrington’s own disorder makes the identical transition. As his childhood fits in response to Simon the Jew become more pronounced, he becomes an object of popular curiosity, and there is public debate over whether or not his fits prove the existence in the Christian body of a natural racial “antipathy” to Jews.^[23] As he explains in retrospect, this popular interest exacerbates his condition: “Between the effects of real fear, and the exaggerated expression of it to which I had been encouraged, I was now seriously ill. It is well known that persons have brought on fits by pretending to have them; and by yielding to feelings, at first slight and perfectly within the command of the will, have at last acquired habits beyond the power of their reason, or of their most strenuous voluntary exertion to control. Such was my pitiable case” (TN, 9:8). In both Harrington and his mother, the illness has finally been inscribed on the body and now exists outside the reach of “reason” and “voluntary exertion”—that is, beyond any possibility of self-mastery.

Sympathetic imitation was further used to explain why individuals exhibited behaviors in large groups that they would never exhibit singly. The leading lecturer on crowd phenomena was the Scottish empirical philosopher Dugald Stewart, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Edgeworth was in an excellent position to become familiar with his ideas. Stewart was a family friend of the Edgeworths and the tutor of two of Maria’s brothers.^[24] Even before meeting him, she sketched Stewart as Dr. Campbell, the tutor for the protagonist, in Forester, a novella-length story Edgeworth published as part of her Moral Tales (1801). She stayed with the Stewarts during her visit to Edinburgh in 1803. Afterward, she wrote of him, “I never conversed with any one with whom I was more at ease,” and she expressed an interest in his ideas when she complained about not being allowed to hear his lectures because of her sex.^[25] She corresponded for many years with Mrs. Stewart and last visited the family in 1823, when Dugald Stewart was quite elderly.

Stewart uses the “contagion of sympathetic imitation” to explain the unique behavior of crowds (Works, 3:147).^[26] He specifies, in introducing the concept, that he is not interested in “any instinctive or mysterious process”(Works, 3:108), nor in the kind of willful imitation that occurs when one author forms his taste in writing by imitating another. “The Imitation of which I am here to treat, and which I have distinguished by the title of Sympathetic, is that chiefly which depends on the mimical powers connected with our bodily frame; and which, in certain combinations of circumstances, seems to result, with little intervention of our will, from a sympathy between the bodily organizations of different individuals” (Works, 3:108–9). He argues that emotions are spread from one person to another through the same “irresistible tendency to imitation” as yawns or laughter (Works, 3:136). As an example, he hypothesizes someone who imitates exactly the external stance, gestures, and expression of someone else in an extreme emotional state. The mimic, he claims, will internally reproduce the same feelings exhibited by the original. Because of the natural tendency to imitation, everyone is like this mimic to varying degrees, and so “something of the same kind happens to every man, more or less, when he sees any passion strongly marked in the countenance of another” (Works, 3:136). When a group of like-minded people come together for a common purpose—he gives the example of attendees at either a carnival or funeral—their sense of shared purpose creates a special social environment in which individuals express their emotions more freely than when alone. These strongly marked external displays combine with the bodily tendency to sympathetic imitation, resulting in a rapid escalation of emotionality: “[T]he effect is likely to be incalculably great; the mind at once acting on the body, and the body re-acting on the mind, while the influence of each is manifested by the inexplicable contagion of sympathetic imitation” (Works, 3:147). An individual’s feeling of grief is increased by a reflexive imitation of the signs of grief in another, and this produces stronger grief in others of the crowd, so that the group produces a unique and “greatly augmented” emotionality (Works, 3:147), which is felt by each member as his or her own but which cannot exist apart from the membership in the crowd. Stewart thus provides an explanation for a specifically crowd psychology—that is, for a new kind of psychological state that is qualitatively different than the sum of its individual parts. The group emotion is felt by all, “even among characters whom the event in question would, in their solitary hours, have scarcely affected with any emotion whatsoever” (Works, 3:147). Thus, individual subjectivity becomes subordinated to the new crowd subjectivity, which pushes it aside and occupies the space of the subject in each member.

In Harrington, Edgeworth’s exploration of party spirit uses assumptions similar to those of Stewart, in particular the assumption of a direct relationship between crowd formation and a contagious imitation that overwhelms the rational autonomy of the subject. Numerous incidents in the tale—the dinner party organized by Harrington’s father, the schoolboy dispute, the riot of soldiers at Gibraltar, the later Gordon riots—are thematically related as explorations of the mechanism of party spirit. The first incident defines the basic terms that the rest will utilize. Harrington’s father, a Member of Parliament, hosts a dinner party to lobby the local gentry against the pending Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753.^[27] Harrington notes that his father attempts “to convince them, that they were, or ought to be, of my father’s opinion, and that they had better all join him in the toast of ‘The Jews are down, and keep ’em down’ ” (TN, 9:15). The room divides into opposite parties. Because “[t]he feeling of party spirit…is caught by children as quickly as it is revealed by men” (TN, 9:15), young Harrington takes a side, but he is “incapable of comprehending their arguments” on the topic (TN, 9:15). His response is specifically divorced from a rational engagement with the issue, a fact made explicit when his interest, unusual for a child, is questioned by the adults.

“And what reasons did you hear?” said a gentleman in company.

“Reasons!” interrupted my father; “oh! sir, to call upon the boy for all the reasons he has heard—But you’ll not pose him: speak up, speak up, Harrington, my boy!”

“I’ve nothing to say about reasons, sir.”

“No! that was not a fair question,” said my father; “but, my boy, you know on which side you are, don’t you?”

“To be sure—on your side, father.”

“That’s right—bravo! To know on which side one is, is one great point in life.”

“And I can tell on which side every one here is.” Then going round the table, I touched the shoulder of each of the company, saying, “A Jew!—No Jew!” and bursts of applause ensued.

Because he does not comprehend the pros and cons of the naturalization bill, taking a side, regardless of content, is the only issue. His attention is solely focused on the signifier, “A Jew!—No Jew!” apart from its signified. Harrington’s act of labeling the guests is applauded because it so perfectly embodies the essence of party spirit: a perfect lack of comprehension of the signified combined with a perfect loyalty to the signifier.

Harrington’s father, the principal exemplar of party spirit in the tale, further illustrates this principle:^[28] “My father was a great stickler for parliamentary consistency, and moreover he was of an obstinate temper. Ten years could make no change in his opinions, as he was proud to declare” (TN, 9:14). In this inflexibility, Mr. Harrington offers a related example of action divorced from reason. He suspends autonomous judgment in favor of a rote “consistency,” and thus his definitive feature is an “adhesion to a preconceived notion or purpose” that reduces his actions to blind repetitions of earlier judgments (TN, 9:35). Such is the pattern for his most singular characteristic: “Now it was well known in our house, that a sentence of my father’s beginning and ending ‘by Jupiter Ammon’ admitted of no reply from any mortal—it was the stamp of fate; no hope of any reversion of the decree: it seemed to bind even him who uttered the oath beyond his own power of revocation” (TN, 9:17). His trademark oath transforms him into a prisoner of his own once-rational decisions, so that what begins as purposeful ends up as mindless repetition. The leading example is his oath that his son shall be disinherited if he marries a Jew. By the narrative’s end Mr. Harrington’s attitude toward Montenero and his daughter Berenice is completely altered, yet he finds himself unable to release himself from his prior decision.

Mr. Harrington’s oath operates in the same manner as the son’s nervous shudder. In their first use, the words “by Jupiter Ammon” refer to an explicit meaning; the signifier has a strong relationship to its signified. But subsequently that relationship becomes secondary in importance to the speaker’s consistency. One whose oaths bind him “beyond his own power of revocation” is one who is bound by a signifier that has been divorced from its signified, so that the power of the letter takes precedence over the thing for which it stands. Ultimately, the juvenile Harrington perfectly embodies party spirit precisely because he has “nothing to say about reasons.” This absence of reason raises the question of why Harrington, or anybody, chooses one party over another. At the dinner party, it appears his choice is an expression of loyalty to his father. But filial loyalty does not account for his basic fascination with the discussion itself, a fascination so unusual it attracts the notice of the adults (particularly after his boyhood friend, Lord Mowbray, grows fidgety and leaves). As he explains, “[a] subject apparently less liable to interest a child of my age could hardly be imagined; but from my peculiar associations it did attract my attention” (TN, 9:14). His fascination stems from that prior anti-Semitic condition whose social origin Edgeworth has carefully defined. The debate touches a chord in him; it moves him because of his disorder. He catches the spirit—whereas Mowbray does not—because he is predisposed to catch it. Within the mechanism of party spirit, then, the tale questions whether the choice of sides is freely made. In this opening example, Harrington’s choice is no more rational or autonomous a judgment than his nervous shudders because it is predicated on an extrarational, embodied response, one that resembles nothing so much as the man noted by Digby who, without knowing the joke, nonetheless feels moved to laugh.

The subsequent incident of the Gibraltar riot works in an identical fashion.^[29] The story is told to Harrington by Jacob, the son of Simon the Jew, who is employed by a Jewish merchant supplying provisions to the garrison during the siege. Jacob’s description of the initially peaceful and profitable enterprise is part of a pattern in the tale in which Jewish characters describe scenes of unprejudiced societies where Jews and Christians live in harmony. The most notable example of this utopian vision is Montenero and Berenice’s America, but this harmonious utopia is not limited to place, appearing as well in repeated references to the liberal-minded English upper class. The Gibraltar peace is destroyed by Lord Mowbray, who is posted to the garrison as an army officer and raises a party against Jacob and his employers. Just as Harrington “caught” party spirit, Mowbray’s subordinates catch his anti-Semitic labels for Jacob: “ ‘Lord Mowbray’s servants heard, and caught their lord’s witticism: the serjeants and soldiers repeated the colonel’s words, and the nicknames spread through the regiment, and through the garrison; wherever I turned, I heard them echoed: poor Jacob was called young Shylock by some, and by others the Wandering Jew. It was a bitter jest, and soon became bitter earnest’ ” (TN, 9:76). Jacob is already known to this community, and yet the repetition of these words, as they echo through the garrison, have the power to remake him, in their eyes, as rational social relations are transformed into extraordinary fear: “ ‘The common people felt a superstitious dread of me: the mothers charged their children to keep out of my way; and if I met them in the streets, they ran away and hid themselves’ ” (TN, 9:76). These mothers, in assuming that Jacob threatens their Christian children, are reenacting the same blood libel narrative with which the tale opens. Jacob is thus placed in the same position as his father, Simon, with his bag. This connection to the archetypal opening scene is an important part of the Gibraltar episode’s rhetorical force. Because Jacob is the one telling the story, structurally it is as if the tale returned to the archetypal scene and allowed Simon to speak about the injustice of it. The “common people” of the garrison similarly substitute for the young Harrington; his individual history is simply generalized to society as a body. Every body has previously been written on by the narrative of blood libel, and they respond with the same kind of extra-rational reflex as young Harrington at the dinner party.

Edgeworth’s most extreme representation of party spirit in action is the Gordon riots. They begin in a manner resembling Mowbray’s manipulation of the crowd at Gibraltar or Mr. Harrington’s lobbying efforts at the dinner party, but they make a qualitative leap to raise the spectre of a party spirit that has escaped the control of its leader. It begins, like the other incidents, with a group of loyal partisans ready to accept anything that fits within their prior assumptions, no matter how irrational: “[T]hey were ready to believe any thing against the ministry, and some who, for party purposes, desired to influence the minds of the people, circulated the most ridiculous reports, and excited the most absurd terrors” (TN, 9:148). The riot begins with an incident of anti-Catholicism rather than anti-Semitism, one taken directly from an example in Bacon:^[30] “It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he having been seen in disguise in a gold-flowered nightgown on St. James’s parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, had been actually taken by the Bath mob for the Pope; and they had pursued him with shouts, and hunted him, till he was forced to scramble over a wall to escape from his pursuers” (TN, 9:148).

It is along equally implausible lines that Edgeworth builds a bridge between the historically anti-Catholic Gordon riots and the anti-Semitism of her tale. Thomas Holcroft’s widely read account of the riots, written at the time, includes only a single mention of Jews in London, but there is no crowd sentiment against Jews. Instead, Holcroft reports that Jewish families, along with all the other Londoners, were so terrified of the rioters that they wrote “this house is a true Protestant” on their shutters so that their homes would not be thought to belong to Catholics.^[31] Edgeworth, normally attentive to exactly this kind of historical detail, is unusually inventive in this case: “[W]ithout any conceivable reason, suddenly a cry was raised against the Jews: unfortunately, Jews rhymed to shoes: these words were hitched into a rhyme, and the cry was, ‘No Jews, no wooden shoes!’ Thus, without any natural, civil, religious, moral, or political connexion, the poor Jews came in remainder to the ancient anti-Gallican antipathy felt by English feet and English fancies against the French wooden shoes” (TN, 9:149). Edgeworth’s episode is remarkable in that, for all the detail provided on how and why the anti-Catholic cry could become anti-Semitic, the antagonism to Jews and the slogan itself serve no plot function in the narrative. The mob that descends on Montenero’s house is not after him because he is Jewish. In fact, they are not after him at all; they are pursuing Mowbray’s relations, Lady de Brantefield and Anne, whom they mistakenly identify as Catholics in the company of an imaginary priest. Thus, the entire assault on Montenero’s home leaves the question of his Jewishness and the crowd’s anti-Semitism beside the point. We are left to wonder why Edgeworth bothered to incorporate such an apparently unnecessary, convoluted, and implausible rationale into the narrative.

This anti-Jewish cry arises “without any conceivable reason,” a consistent element in the party spirit mechanism. But in the earlier incidents of party spirit, the crowd is always influenced by a named leader, who introduces ideas for his own purposes. Young Harrington follows his father; the soldiers follow Mowbray. Even the initial fears of the Gordon mob about the Pope are instigated by specific leaders who have something to gain. This new cry against Jews is qualitatively different. It comes into being “without any natural, civil, religious, moral, or political” rationale, independently of any leader. The distinction between this cry and the earlier ones is that, rather than being an echo of a leader, as at Gibraltar, it arises from within the crowd as a direct manifestation of the crowd’s enthusiasm, and in this the crowd takes on the quality of an independent mind.^[32] The cry, “No Jews, no wooden shoes,” signifies the point at which the crowd assumes a life of its own, with its own voice, its own rules, and its own slogans. This slogan, though marked by an absence of any association at the level of its content, works through the association at the level of its sound, by rhyming “Jews” with “shoes.” Thus, the defining characteristic of this crowd mind is that it generates its own truths through the materiality of language. For Edgeworth, the problem posed by the crowd mind is that, like Harrington’s shudder, it operates entirely through this logic of the signifier rather than the signified.

To the person within the crowd, however, such associations appear perfectly reasonable. Harrington, in recollecting his subjective experience of party spirit, explains that he was “carried away in the tide of popular enthusiasm” (TN, 9:20). Though in retrospect he wonders how he “could be so inhuman,” then he had no doubts:“ [A]t the time it all appeared to me quite natural and proper; a just and necessary war” (TN, 9:20). There is thus no clear dividing line for the subject between participation in the crowd and the stance outside of it. Although each member of the crowd, by definition, has surrendered the ability to exercise an independent judgment, the crowd’s members believe themselves to be freely engaged in making precisely those judgments. Harrington’s participation is predicated on his extra-rational antipathy to the sign “Jew,” but his experience of participation is accompanied by a sense of rationality, in which his actions are “proper,” “just,” and “necessary.” Although he responds to the signifier, he believes himself to be evaluating the signified. One final and inescapable element of party spirit thus is a collective delusion of rationality, one Harrington once participated in but has since overcome.

Edgeworth’s crowd psychology is not limited to scenes of party politics and violent riots. These are the most clearly labeled moments in a phenomenon that extends to all instances of group behavior. Lady Anne’s devotion to fashion and to the tastes of the fashionable crowd represent an enslavement to signifiers, as her paean to the virtues of the French “pouf” illustrates (TN, 9:46). Fashionability itself is a type of party spirit, in which Lady Anne takes the opinions of the group for her own autonomous judgments. Similarly, Lady de Brantefield’s rigid adherence to a family past is a counterpart to Mr. Harrington’s adherence to his own past doctrines. The tale reserves its most systematic exploration of party spirit, however, for the variety it locates in the relationship between art and its audience. In a series of scenes including a painting exhibition, an art auction, and a performance of The Merchant of Venice, the tale explores the reactions of spectators to the manipulation of artists in terms that evoke the relationship between a party and its leader.

The parallel treatment of crowds and audiences can be seen by comparing two related incidents: a school yard assembly, in which Mowbray raises an anti-Semitic party, and the staging of Shakespeare’s play. In the grammar school incident, Mowbray is the leader of a party raised against the Jewish vendor Jacob. As leader, his job is to create the crowd as a crowd, rather than a group of individuals. Edgeworth represents this process as a theatrical one. Mowbray asks the boys to assemble and promises to “show them some good sport,” so the crowd is immediately defined as the audience to an organized spectacle (TN, 9:23). The schoolboys form a ring, and there is an upper gallery of boys looking on, reproducing the physical space of a theatre: “[T]hey had by this time gathered in a circle at the outside of that which we had made round Jacob, and many had brought benches, and were mounted upon them, looking over our heads to see what was going on” (TN, 9:25). On the stage created by this circle, Mowbray represents Jacob as an outsider against whom the schoolboys can identify as a group. He insists that, as a Jew, Jacob cannot possibly possess the feelings of love for his Jewish father that the Christian schoolboys feel for their fathers, and the boys cohere into a group, insulted by the comparison.^[33] Mowbray’s job, as author of the crowd, is to identify the outsider that constitutes the crowd through its difference, and Edgeworth represents this process as a performative staging of the Other. In this particular instance, Mowbray’s staging is amateurish. He displays a juvenile cruelty that transforms Jacob into a sentimental icon of the victimized Man of Feeling, making him someone to be sympathetically identified with rather than antipathetically rejected.^[34] But Mowbray’s technique improves with experience, and by the time of his posting to Gibraltar, he is clearly more adept at managing his audience through the same anti-Semitic performance.

The result of a more skillful staging of the Jew as Other, in the presentation of The Merchant of Venice before an adult audience, is less equivocal. In the central role of the Jewish Other is Charles Macklin, the eighteenth-century actor who rose to fame through his performance of Shylock. Prior to the performance, the audience is atomized and chaotic; Harrington’s aristocratic companions are irritated by the middle-class vulgarians in the next box, so that the theatre is initially a setting for the reinforcement of social distinctions. But by the end of the first act, this conflicted crowd is transformed into a fascinated body with a unified voice that breaks out in sudden “thunders of applause” (TN, 9:59).

Harrington is a representative member of the audience, and his reaction explains this transformation. After the curtain lifts, he explains, “the Jew fixed and kept possession of my attention…. I forgot it was Macklin, I thought only of Shylock. In my enthusiasm I stood up, I pressed forward, I leaned far over towards the stage, that I might not lose a word” (TN, 9:59). His initial “enthusiasm” raises a question because it directly contradicts his character development. He has already learned to sympathize with Jewish characters, yet his reaction embraces the stereotype of Jewish villainy. The incident is structured as a contest between two extremes. The quintessential art object—the performance unites the greatest writer’s drama with the world’s greatest actor—competes with the matured reason of Harrington, now enlightened and apparently rid of his childhood antipathy. In the contest, his shudder resurfaces as enthusiasm, and he becomes fascinated precisely as he was fascinated at his father’s dinner party, temporarily unable to recognize the anti-Semitic content of the stereotype on stage.

The mechanism by which this art object moves Harrington and, by extension, the rest of the audience follows the same logic as Harrington’s nervous shudder. In a subsequent discussion of the play between Harrington and Montenero, Harrington argues that Shakespeare did not realize what he was doing; he gives a “general apology for Shakspeare’s severity, by adverting to the time when he wrote, and the prejudices which then prevailed” (TN, 9:66).^[35] But Montenero disagrees. “[A]s a dramatic poet, it was his business…to take advantage of the popular prejudice as a power—as a means of dramatic pathos and effect” (TN, 9:66). Montenero’s Shakespeare is a more self-conscious artist than Harrington’s. Far from being controlled by the prejudice of his day, his artistic “business” is manipulating the prior beliefs of his audience, and it is on this manipulation that aesthetic effect depends. To Montenero, the critic, Shakespeare is “the greatest poet that ever wrote,” but he draws a clear distinction between “power” and “truth” (TN, 9:65). Shakespeare, he argues, reversed the characters in the original story, where a Christian demanded his pound of flesh from a Jew. Montenero notes that “we Jews must feel it peculiarly hard, that the truth of the story…should have been completely sacrificed to fiction” (TN, 9:66). Nonetheless, he concludes that “Shakspeare was right, as a dramatic poet, in reversing the characters” (TN, 9:66). Montenero, then, judges the play in two distinct ways: in terms of purely rhetorical artistic criteria, in which case the play is “right,” and in terms of factual content, in which case it is wrong. This distinction is a consistent part of Montenero’s critical commentaries on art; it recurs in his discussion of the Spanish paintings, which he collects, and again in evaluating the crude painting of torture, “The Dentition of the Jew,” which he destroys. It is exactly this distinction between aesthetic effect and content that is lacking in the popular response to the play, as well as in the other moments of crowd behavior. This implication is present within Montenero’s comment that “we poor Jews have felt your Shakspeare’s power to our cost” (TN, 9:66). The sense of “power” in this phrase is distinct from the “dramatic pathos and effect” of the play. It refers to the way Jews become defined in social life as Shylocks through the fictional representation on the stage, as the riot at Gibraltar illustrated. Whereas Montenero differentiates dramatic “power” from factual “truth,” society in general does not. When moved by dramatic power, society elevates representation to the status of truth.

This aesthetic theory operates through a conservative logic, for if art works through its appeal to prior beliefs, it reinforces ideas to which the spectator already subscribes. Rather than convincing the audience of a new idea, it brings out what is already present, convincing spectators of the justness of what they already feel. Art that appeals to emotions activates previously inscribed social attitudes, rather than natural or universal feelings, and so perpetuates the “prejudice” of party spirit.

This conservative model of art also appears in Ormond, the tale Edgeworth published together with Harrington, but there it is illustrated with the novel reader rather than the playgoer. Like Harrington, Ormond experiences the dramatic power of art first as an arrested attention.^[36] A good-hearted young Irishman but lacking a formal education, Ormond idly opens a copy of Tom Jones. Though not much of a reader, he finds he “could not shut it,” and “he read on, standing for a quarter of an hour, fixed in the same position” (TN, 9:286). His experience of reading, and that of his friend Corny, is called an “enthusiasm,” in which the power of art overcomes the reader’s ability to differentiate between representation and factuality (TN, 9:295). Ormond “believed the story to be true, for it was constructed with unparalleled ingenuity, and developed with consummate art” (TN, 9:287). When he next takes up Sir Charles Grandison, the same thing happens: “Indeed, to him it appeared no fiction, while he was reading it” (TN, 9:294). Corny’s experience as a reader is similar: “Fictions, if they touched him at all, struck him with all the force of reality; and he never spoke of the characters as in a book, but as if they had lived and acted” (TN, 9:295).

To be “touched” and “struck” in this manner is literally to experience art through the body, and it is this somatic experience that generates an intellectual belief in its truth as a representation. Ormond believes “the story to be true” and Corny that the characters “lived” for the same reason that Harrington forgets Macklin is an actor. Harrington’s momentary enthusiasm is explained by a susceptibility within his body, and a similar explanation is given for the novel readers in Ormond. Though the young Ormond attributes his experience to qualities in the art object—“ingenuity” and “consummate art”—the narrator uses the incident to illustrate a kind of readerly naïveté and points instead to qualities within the reader that produce this susceptibility. Ormond identifies with the two different protagonists because, like him, each has a basically “generous” nature, and the narrator explains that “young readers readily assimilate and identify themselves with any character, the leading points of which resemble their own, and in whose general feelings they sympathize” (TN, 9:287). The difference between Ormond’s experience and Harrington’s is the difference between sympathy and antipathy, two closely related variants on the same bodily phenomenon. As Montenero connects dramatic power with the exploitation of a preexisting antipathy, the narrator of Ormond connects it with a preexisting sympathy. The underlying mechanism is the same. Ormond and Corny’s convictions of the truth of art place them in the same position as the audience at the Merchant of Venice, and so their enthusiasm can be seen as a version of Harrington’s nervous shudder. Like him, they become convinced of the justness of their own extra-rational beliefs.

This body-based model of art is one of two competing aesthetic models in The other, represented by Montenero, is a critical model that exists outside the dynamics of party spirit. Montenero’s ability to differentiate “dramatic pathos” from “truth,” or experience from fact, allows him to evaluate art without becoming subservient to its dramatic power, and so Montenero is the only character in the tale entirely outside the rule of the letter. Called a man of “calm and proud independence” (TN, 9:81), he controls his acute sensibility with philosophy, and so he stands for a detached, analytical consciousness. “[C]alm had become the unvarying temper of his mind” (TN, 9:82), and thus he is able to interpret representations as personally repellent as The Merchant of Venice and The Dentition of the Jew with an unimpaired judgment. “[M]orbid sensibility…incapacitates…the exercise of independent virtue” (TN, 9:83), he lectures Berenice, complaining of her sensitivity to expressions of anti-Semitism. He himself has no such morbidity. He is the most idealized character in the tale, and his idealization lies in the way he eludes the paradox of sensibility. He is represented as capable of great sensitivity; small slights, such as the polite refusal of Mrs. Harrington to enter his house, “hurt his feelings much” (TN, 9:81). The detail is significant because it is represented as commonplace in the life of a Jew, being to Montenero one more in a long series of slights. Yet, unlike Godwin’s characters in Caleb Williams, he becomes neither inured to the slight nor constituted by it. He retains his vulnerability to the world without being written upon by it, and so he escapes the pattern of prejudice and enthusiasm that leads to the larger crowd’s immersion in party spirit. Though the crowd believes itself to be judging for itself, it is always imprisoned within the prejudice written on its body by prior representations; the crowd is always the prisoner of representation rather than its critic. Montenero’s critical ability is what sets him apart from the crowd; his judgment is “independent.” He represents the same subject-position that Harrington occupies after his last shudder, when he begins to tell the story of his emergence out of the crowd and into the space of the independent critic, able at last to narrate his body’s past without becoming implicated in it.

This independence also characterizes the implied audience of Harrington. The narrator addresses an enlightened reader who, like him, is wholly free of prejudice and enthusiasm. “We all know,” he tells the reader (TN, 9:148). His narrative presumes a wise, rather than a naive, reader, one distinctly different from the kind of reader illustrated by Corny and the young Ormond. “In our enlightened days,” Harrington apostrophizes, it “may appear incredible” that a child could be taken in by a story like Fowler’s (TN, 9:3). Though he speaks only of his own childhood, a period twenty years previous to the narrating present, he describes those unenlightened days as part of an earlier developmental stage in English social life, when it was still ruled by stories like Fowler’s: “I am speaking of what happened many years ago: nursery-maids and children, I believe, are very different now from what they were then; and in further proof of the progress of human knowledge and reason, we may recollect that many of these very stories of the Jews, which we now hold too preposterous for the infant and the nursery-maid to credit, were some centuries ago universally believed by the English nation, and had furnished more than one of our kings with pretexts for extortion and massacres” (TN, 9:3).

Like the infant Harrington, the social body of this early era was “[c]harmed by the effect” of anti-Semitic narratives (TN, 9:3), and leaders took advantage of the public prejudice. Being “charmed” in this context suggests the experience of being placed under a spell rather than merely being entertained. Harrington defines “the effect” of these narratives on him as a deprivation of agency, claiming that Fowler repeats her story “to reduce me to passive obedience” (TN, 9:2). In the same manner, this charming effect was used by “kings” in the past to control the nation. Harrington’s individual development is thus paralleled by a progressive social development that moves through these same stages from readerly naïveté to critical distance. Harrington describes a past era in which all of society functioned through party spirit, as an all-encompassing crowd, deprived of agency yet “universally” believing in the justness of its irrational beliefs. But the age of the crowd is gone, and in the narrating present the new, enlightened audience belongs more to the utopian communities described by Montenero—free from all prejudice, ruled by independent merit—than to the audience shaped by The Merchant of Venice. This narrative addresses a reader who, like Harrington, has already found a way to escape the crowd and become like Montenero.

Harrington tells the story, then, of how he escaped the nervous body and its socially constructed responses to become objective. Thus, his cure—the process he follows, the regimen he adopts, the mode of getting from inside to outside the nervous body and its confinement—promises to have instructive merit. That cure is as central to the logic of Harrington as De Quincey’s cure is to his Confessions. But the claims in Harrington are far greater, for it is not only Harrington’s escape that is being narrated but the transformation of an entire society from one ruled by the nervous body of a mobbish past to an enlightened utopia ruled by objectivity. Because of the precision with which the tale defines the nervous body, Harrington’s escape has a heroic quality to it, as it is a virtually impossible act. His nervous shudder is “involuntary” (TN, 9:182). His condition is “beyond the power” of his “most strenuous voluntary exertion, to control” (TN, 9:8). Montenero himself claims the condition is “difficult, scarcely possible, completely to conquer,” and he fears throughout the tale that it “might recur” (TN, 9:81). Thus, the method that Edgeworth devises to extract Harrington from this tenacious body merits serious attention. On that method the narrator’s voice depends, as does the community of enlightened readers it presupposes.

Given what is at stake and the represented difficulty of attaining it, the cure is decidedly anticlimactic. After proposing to Berenice, Harrington receives an ultimatum from Montenero. He has discovered an unnamed “obstacle” to the union (TN, 9:142), and he insists that Harrington’s only hope is to demonstrate a thorough ability to control himself and his emotions, without knowing the nature of the obstacle. Should he prove incapable “of this necessary self-control” (TN, 9:143), he will never see Berenice again. That night, says Harrington, “I felt the nervous oppression, the dreadful weight upon my chest” (TN, 9:145), and he is visited by the figure of Simon the Jew, who has the voice of Montenero. “My early prepossessions and antipathies, my mother’s presentiments, and prophecies of evil from the connexion with the Monteneros, the prejudices which had so long, so universally prevailed against the Jews, occurred to me. I know all this was unreasonable, but still the thoughts obtruded themselves” (TN, 9:145, emphasis original). To gain control over precisely such hysterical thoughts, Harrington finally adopts a tried and true course the next morning: “to take strong bodily exercise, and totally to change the course of my daily occupations” (TN, 9:145). Through horse riding and an all-male fishing expedition to the country, he explains, “my ideas were forced into new channels” (TN, 9:147), and the old ideas are suspended. “I thus disciplined my imagination at the time when I seemed only to be disciplining an Arabian horse” (TN 9:146). In this manner, “I…medicined my mind” (TN, 9:146, emphasis original). Though he faces subsequent trials and several dangerous moments of isolation at which his hysterical thoughts recur, this incident is the turning point; by practicing a sustained antidote of bodily exercise and outward-directed activity, he grows increasingly like Montenero and less like his younger, impressionable self. Rather than an actual cure of the nervous body, this narrative redefines it. Edgeworth’s illustration of the consequences of representations for the nervous body are extreme, as we have seen. And so this cure poses a new problem. Harrington’s hysteria is initially defined as a permanent inscription on the body, one that constitutes him in the same way that Mrs. Harrington’s excess sensibility has come to constitute her. Thus, although he describes a condition that is beyond self-control, that condition ultimately proves not to be so. He masters his nervous shudder through a simple exercise of self-will and without any of the dramatics described by De Quincey. In consequence, the initial attitude toward his hysteria and its permanence is called into question. Harrington believed his twitch to be “involuntary,” but it never really was; his disorder was not, in fact, permanent.

Because of this redefinition, the problem represented by the tale is not ultimately Harrington’s nervous shudder, which is always containable. Instead, the problem lies in the popular assumptions about nerves, the ones that led Harrington and everyone around him to assume that his shudder was “involuntary” when in fact it was within his power of self-control. In retrospect, those initial assumptions are recontained as unwarranted fears, for Harrington’s body proves far more resilient that anyone believes possible. Many popular prejudices are relegated to the unenlightened past by Harrington. The most prominent is the myth of the nervous body that, once written on, is never free of its nervous inscription. Edgeworth cures the nervous body by situating the theory of nervous inscription as one of the leading examples of crowd delusion.

This redefinition of the nervous body as itself a popular delusion is the centerpiece in the tale’s hidden plot. Many apparent coincidences in the narrative turn out to have been manipulated by Lord Mowbray. He reveals, in a deathbed confession, that he has staged his most elaborate performance, and in it he has positioned Harrington as the Other. In this drama, Mowbray manufactures an extensive sequence of events designed to convince Montenero and Berenice that her young suitor still suffers from his childhood affliction. Among other stage devices, he encourages in Harrington an appearance of excess sensibility in a visit with the Monteneros to the Tower of London, and he arranges to have Fowler dress up as Simon the Jew to induce an apparent nervous fit during the visit to the synagogue. Harrington’s fits have been reactions to the sight not of actual Jews but of actors made up to appear like his image of Simon and thrown in his way at strategic points.^[37] In his most convincing scene, Mowbray arranges for Montenero and Berenice to overhear a staged conversation in which Harrington’s childhood apothecary confides his knowledge of the boy’s ineradicable insanity and mentions the family’s efforts to hide it from the public. Harrington’s disorder thus constitutes the hidden obstacle to marriage raised by Montenero. It is, of course, one of two such “obstacles”; the other is Mr. Harrington’s empty objection to his son’s marrying a Jew. The resolution of these obstacles is frequently mentioned as an avoidance of the conflict rather than an engagement with it. Berenice is unmasked at the last moment as a Christian, and so the marriage can proceed.^[38] The other obstacle is removed in identical fashion. As Montenero concludes, the marriage can go forward because Harrington does not have a hidden “Jewish insanity”; instead, he has only had an “apparent insanity” (TN 9:202). Harrington’s cure is therefore never itself at issue, for he is never really sick. His disorder is misconstrued by a public that is overly willing to believe in the anachronistic fiction of the nervous body.

Although this solution to the problem of Harrington’s cure solves one obstacle to his emergence into the space of objectivity, it creates a new problem. By recontaining the nervous body, Edgeworth compromises the opposite position of critical objectivity. The two positions exist in the tale as interdependent binary opposites, so that one is either a “nervous” embodiment of socially constructed subjectivity or objective and outside the reach of social constructs. This idea of the nervous subject is essential to the idea of an exterior position, because the nervous body, through its definition, brings into being the space of objectivity that it delimits as its non-nervous opposite. For example, Simon’s bag operates throughout the tale as a metaphor for the imprisonment of the socially constructed body. Harrington’s confinement in the bag is figured as both bodily antipathies and uncontrolled sympathies, and it is structured in a binary relation-ship with a position of nonconfinement, a stance outside the now delimited sphere of socially constituted perceptions. Harrington’s confinement in the bag brings into being a space outside the bag, a space of objectivity in which the subject is free from the constitutive force of representations and thus free of the crowd. Without Harrington’s clearly defined hysteria, Montenero’s objectivity is vulnerable to collapse, which is exactly what the narrator describes.

Montenero’s character as the ideal critic is based on his ability to differentiate the real from the represented, the historical fact from the rhetorical effect. His astuteness is indispensable in the criticism of art. But Montenero is also the central example in the tale of the “fear” that Harrington’s hysteria “might recur.” His astuteness fails when he confronts the enigma of Harrington’s body, and this is a failure of singular magnitude, for on this one critical evaluation rests the future of his only child.

The enigma of Harrington’s insanity—the confusion over whether it is real or staged—needs to be seen as the object of an interpretive competition between the dramatist Mowbray and the art critic Montenero, who are engaged in a fight for control over the text of Harrington’s body. In the contest, the critic discovers only after the fact that “he had been strangely imposed upon” by “Mowbray’s artifices” (TN, 9:201), as a result of which he is taken in, finally succumbing to the dramatic power of the performance. Though he is represented as the one character who stands outside the crowd, in misreading Harrington’s body he yields to the crowd’s fear of hysteria, and so his stance of objectivity is undermined at the end.^[39] Indeed, his imminent departure for America with Berenice, to escape Harrington, is itself a perfect example of crowd psychology in action: an hysterical act performed by one who mistakes his own capitulation t0 popular fear for reason. By failing to see through the artifice of Mowbray’s performance and being moved instead to confuse its dramatic power with factual truth, Montenero is finally defined as one of the crowd at Mowbray’s final play, the staging of Harrington’s insanity. The ideal critic is repositioned in that schoolboy gallery or at a seat in the theatre along with the rest of the audience.

Because the tale undermines the nervous premise for objectivity, Harrington’s status as narrator needs to be reevaluated. His narrative insists on its own objectivity, even as it undermines the nervous body that defines its borders. Thus, there is no stable ground on which his narrative authority can rest. This instability surfaces in the contradiction between the narrative’s construction of his cure and his position as the narrator. As the narrative nears its close and the moment of Harrington’s formal ascendance to the throne of the narrator, he grows increasingly reticent to discuss his subjective state. “My heart did certainly beat violently; but I must not stop to describe, if I could, my various sensations” (TN, 9:200). Up to this point, his narrative has been devoted to exactly that kind of description and the minute details of the consequences of his sensations. “I must add a few lines more—not about myself” (TN, 9:207), he claims very near the end. The surest narrative sign of his cure is precisely this new attitude, and that is why his narrative is at its end. For the narrator has learned to stop talking about himself and to take other objects for his subject. But this concluding narrative stance is not the one that opens the story of Harrington’s nervous body. It is as if the narrator is emerging out of his condition even as he tells the story of that emergence, and being cured only through the act of describing his cure. The post-cure narrator hurries himself off stage, too focused on the demands of events outside himself to talk any longer about those within. Because this is the tale’s concluding sign of narrative health, the opening narrator’s interest in his own sensations, his insistence on their narrative value as scientific “experiments,” is problematic. For although he insists on his objectivity, that claim itself is also characteristic of the victims of party spirit, most notably the narrator’s mentor, Montenero. The narrator’s claim to objectivity is being recontained through the events he describes, and ultimately his narrative act can never be differentiated from the nervous shudder itself. Of course, those shudders no longer matter. Through an act of will, they can be overcome. And they are overcome—but only by Harrington’s hurrying himself off the narrative stage and calling an end to his earlier nervous narrative.

Notes