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

Most cultural historians agree that while drugs have been with us a long time, the addict is a modern phenomenon. Departing from this premise, Susan Zieger traces the anglophone literary representation of the addict from Thomas De Quincey to the early twentieth century. Along the way she tells us a good deal about a lot of other things—including empire, manifest destiny, slavery, the New Woman, and modern sexuality—to show how different historical moments called into being specific variants of the figure of the addict. While literary texts are her primary focus, Zieger also keeps in sight other forms of writing in which the addict takes shape, from temperance sermons to medical treatises. And while she produces new readings of canonical texts from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), she also assembles a new canon of narratives of addiction from Britain and North America that features some less-well-known titles, such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (1857), Rita’s Queer Lady Judas (1905), David Garnett’s Dope-Darling (1919), and D. F. Macmartin’s Thirty Years in Hell (1921).

Before delving into the literary-historical material Zieger spends some time highlighting the paradoxes of present-day accounts of addiction that veer between voluntarist and materialist accounts: the addict is seen as a weak-willed person who must get some purchase on his or her own life and as a patient who must be treated; in a curious reworking of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), jail and clinic are both possible fates. Zieger argues that to obtain some perspective on such antinomies of agency, and to understand why addiction has come to be such a keyword of our historical moment (when sex and current affairs can be the objects of addiction as much as opiates or alcohol), we need a genealogy of the figure of the addict. In the six chapters that follow she considers a series of texts and historical moments where this figure is deployed. In the earlier period moral explanations for addiction enjoy a greater ascendancy. But as this account shows through careful readings of De Quincey and such American disciples as Ludlow, the inner journeys of the addict, however much they may seem an escape from the world as well as from morality, are shaped by what the dominant culture values: empire in De Quincey, the frontier in the North American context. In a discussion of the figure of the drunken slave-driver in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Zieger looks at the closely intertwined histories of abolitionism and temperance, noting that slavery provided a rich source of metaphor for nineteenth-century writers on alcohol: slavery to the bottle could be represented as a greater evil than actual chattel slavery; critics of chattel slavery could likewise deplore social addictions to its products—sugar and rum, for example. In the work of Frederick Douglass and others, Zieger locates a different linkage of the two themes: for Douglass, modernity itself was in an ethical stupor it needed to shake off.

Subsequent chapters follow the increasing medicalization of addiction as the biological sciences came to enjoy greater and greater prestige. While the evils of drink did not fade from popular or elite consciousness, new addictions, and new addicts, came to the fore. In chapter 4, Zieger discusses the new figure of the mendacious female morphine addict, armed with her hypodermic needle. Such fictions as Richard Pryce’s An Evil Spirit (1887) and Rita’s Queer Lady Judas titillated by hinting that self-administered injections were a form of subversive sexual pleasure, but they also seemed to announce an end to the moral mission of the mid-Victorian Angel in the House: how could she act as the moral better half of...