Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism

10. Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge's Editing of Biographia Literaria

229 10 Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s Editing of Biographia Literaria Donelle Ruwe When Sara Coleridge Coleridge received her copy of the 1847 Biographia Literaria coedited by her husband Henry Nelson Coleridge and herself, she painstakingly marked minor errors: an incorrect accent in a Greek quotation, a misspelling of Eschenmayer as Eschenmeyer, and an inaccuracy in an indirect quote in a footnote. She also crossed out the adjective nerveless from her description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The nerveless languor, which, after early youth, became almost the habit of his body and bodily mind, which to a great degree paralysed his powers both of rest and action, precluding by a torpid irritability their happy vicissitude,—rendered all exercises difficult to him except of thought and imagination flowing onward freely and in self-made channels; for these brought with them their own warm atmosphere to thaw the chains of frost that bound his spirit.1 Coleridge’s second thought about describing the nervous condition of her father indicates more than her trademark meticulousness in editing, for Victorian audiences, her father’s reputation as well as his writings. She attends to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s nerves because in the medical rhetoric that haunts this passage, her children’s books, her incomplete autobiography , and her private essay “Nervousness” (1834), the imagination is embedded in the physical body.2 One cannot be nerveless and still have an imaginative faculty. Coleridge’s sentence punctuates the artificial split of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s body and mind—on one side of her sentence’s dash is her father’s bodily mind, and on the other is the warmth of his thought and imagination.3 Editing the Biographia Literaria allows Coleridge to explore her physical inheritance from her father even as she uses her physical experiences to critique his metaphysics. In effect, Coleridge, a lifelong opium addict and the daughter of the opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge, uses her research into opiates, laudanum, and nervous disorders to further her own literary ambitions as she analyzes the flawed work of her father. Coleridge ’s own nervous response to her father’s excess—as both a verbose and overdetermining Meta-Physician as well as an opium addict—is not to control him through editorial excision but to address, instead, his bodily disease. Coleridge uses her superior control over opium as a way of critiquing her father’s metaphysics. By contrasting her father’s excessive opium use to her own controlled doses, Coleridge proves that her own understandings of the interaction of the body and the mind are superior to her father’s theories. In a larger context, Coleridge’s editorial commentary on Biographia Literaria models a successful strategy by which women authors can locate literary authority within a study of their own physical limitations . As Isobel Armstrong indicates in her studies about women Romantics, such editorial projects allow women to construct their own discourses of knowledge through interaction with numerous competing discourses, both medical and metaphysical: “A politics, an epistemology, an account of knowledge, and an understanding of language can be derived from women’s questioning of a number of discourses—aesthetic and philosophical, socioeconomic, medical, and legal.”4 In essence, I am arguing that Sara Coleridge constructed a Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was a nerveless (⫽ nervous), problematically embodied and feminized father, a father who provided a space for his daughter’s authorial activities. When Coleridge critiques her father’s construction of the primary imagination, she does so according to her own understanding that the imagination is part of the body and bodily mind. She replaces S. T. C.’s highest level of the creative imagination with something resembling his lowest level, fancy, that faculty associated with materiality and femininity . Most importantly, by locating imaginative authority within the body, she escapes her father’s potentially overbearing intellect, particularly when she insists that she can control her body in contrast to her father’s acknowledged lack of control over his own. Coleridge recasts her father’s construction by presenting the imagination as that which moves con230 Donelle Ruwe stantly between the body and the mind, not as that which elevates the spirit beyond the body. She presents the imagination as an interval, a continual coming-and-going that she links, as I will argue, to the sensorium and the nervous system. Coleridge initiates her definition of the imagination in a private essay about her own body, “Nervousness...