Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature

Notes

243 NOTES j Introduction: Addiction and History 1. Describing his relief from eye pain, Harley reported, “The feeling the opiate produced was heavenly. It lifted me from purgatory into paradise, and I made to myself a vow never to be hard upon an opium-­eater after having myself tasted of its bliss. Once having begun the sleeping-­draught, I took regularly 1 ⁄6 grain of morphia with 1 ⁄2 grain of quinine every six hours, so that I was always more or less under the influence of the drug, sometimes being sound asleep and at other periods in a state of conscious divine beatitude. What a blessed change from the torments of the damned that I had previously suffered!” See Mrs. Alec Tweedie, George Harley, F.R.S.: The Life of a London Physician (London: The Scientific Press, 1899), 176–79. 2. John R. Reed, Victorian Will (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 83–84. 3. John W. Crowley and William L. White, Drunkard’s Refuge: The Lessons of the New York State Inebriate Asylum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 41. Crowley and White are quoting Edward Turner’s History of the First Inebriate Asylum in the World (New York, 1888), which, in turn, quotes physician and temper-­ ance activist Reuben Dimond Mussey. 4. For a similar story involving amputation, see W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 199. 5. Henceforth, I use addict and addiction to include a compulsive habitual rela-­ tionship to alcohol, except where noted, for the sake of convenience. 6. Oxford English Dictionary, Third Online Edition. 7. Sarah Stickney Ellis, “A Voice from the Vintage,” in Guide to Social Happiness (New York: E. Walker, 1850), 145. 8. For an analysis that distinguishes between the non-­profit, decentered fellow-­ ship of twelve-­step philosophy and the celebrity-­ and expert-­driven discourse of the recovery movement, see Helen Keane, What’s Wrong with Addiction? (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 160. For critiques of the recovery move-­ ment, see David Forbes, False Fixes: The Cultural Politics of Drugs, Alcohol, and Addic-­ tive Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), esp. ch. 8; and Helena Michie and Robyn Warhol, “Twelve-­Step Teleology: Narratives of Recov-­ ery/Recovery as Narrative,” in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 327–50. 9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 130. 10. The overwhelming historical and cultural-­studies consensus is that addic-­ tion is a side effect of modernity. Richard Davenport-­Hines assesses opium use in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, but like most other drug historians, dates the emergence of addiction to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Davenport-­ Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics (New York: W. W. Nor-­ ton, 2002), 30–32. The immense and detailed research of Virginia Berridge also establishes the modernity of addiction; see especially “Dependence: Historical Con-­ cepts and Constructs,” in The Nature of Drug Dependence, Society for the Study of Addiction, Monograph No. 1, ed. Griffith Edwards and Malcolm Lader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–18; “The Society for the Study of Addiction, 1884–1988,” special issue, British Journal of Addiction 85 (1990); and, with Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use and Drug Control Policy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England, rev. ed. (London: Free Association Books, 1999). See also Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxi-­ cation of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); David Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-­ versity Press, 2001); Geoffrey Harding, Opiate Addiction, Morality and Medicine: From Moral Illness to Pathological Disease (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Barry Mil-­ ligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-­Century British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Terry Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies: Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820–1930 (Manchester: Manches-­ ter University Press, 1983); Dolores Peters, “The British Medical Response to Opi-­ ate Addiction in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Medicine 36:4 (October 1981): 455–88; Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” in Tendencies, 130–42; Maria Valverde, Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and, most recently, Timothy Hickman, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United...