"How Far am I Responsible?": Women and Morphinomania in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain

And my arm was pricked. The drug ran through my veins. I felt the colour come into my cheeks, and instinctively I knew that a feverish sparkle was in my eyes. I had been haggard and my face drawn and bloodless, now a warmth and brilliance came to me, and the pain died, and then came sleep.

Now answer me my question. Did my responsibility begin then? (2: 71–72)

An Evil Spirit (1887)

When the governess Isabel Gordon recounts her introduction to the hypodermic injection of morphine in Richard Pryce's novel An Evil Spirit, she poses a challenge to the readers of her fictional diary. By requesting them to assign her responsibility for her morphine habituation to a precise moment in her narrative, the text defies them to assign responsibility to her at all. The idea that someone might not be responsible for such actions, but rather the victim of an illness, was new to Victorian readers. In the 1870s and 1880s they were learning of a new disease afflicting the upper classes of European society, especially women. Variously termed "morphinomania" and "morphinism" in Britain, it was the compulsive, clandestine use of new hypodermic technology to inject morphine, a recently isolated alkaloid of opium. This illness differed significantly from the habitual opium ingestion represented as an eccentric, visionary delight and tormentby Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium- Eater (1821). Whereas De Quincey's text advertised his masculine scholastic and empirical authority to supply the deficiencies of a scanty medical literature, texts about women's morphinomania were largely written by medical men whose analyses mixed scandalized morality with scientific suggestion as they began to articulate a disease model of inebriety and later, addiction. Isabel's challenge to her readers thus cites a larger cultural shift in the perception that drug addiction, from morally dubious peccadillo to morally dangerous disease whose sufferers nevertheless deserved sympathy and care.¹

This shift was uneven, drawing issues of gender, self- representation, medico-scientific and cultural authority, and even women's rights into complex relation. Histories of addiction in British culture by Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Terry Parssinen, Dolores Peters, Richard Davenport-Hines, and others limn these episodes without fully investigating the politics of representation that inform them. Berridge and Edwards report that "conventional ideas about the weakness of the female sex were also soon linked with the spread of morphia use" (145). A major feature of this weakness was deception. Morphine users, especially female ones, were routinely described as liars who would say anything to obtain a dose. Physicians, keen to absolve themselves of responsibility for having prescribed hypodermic morphine and therefore having turned their patients into addicts, described the individual's inability to represent herself straightforwardly as pathological. Telling lies, most obviously to conceal the habit, became a physical symptom of the compulsive use of alcohol, opium, and morphine. Testifying before a Parliamentary committee, the Scottish psychologist Alexander Peddie stated that the habitual drunkard "will tell the most shameful lies, for no truth is ever found in connection with the habitual drunkard's state. I never yet saw truth in relation to drink go out of one who was a dipsomaniac" (qtd. in Report from the Select Committee 49). Of opium-eaters, a physician wrote, they are "given to romancing, exaggeration, wide and wild assertions or absolute falsehood" (Browne 49). And in popular periodical pieces, the claim was repeated often enough to become a maxim: "Untruth is second nature with them" (Sharkey 339). Although all addicts were characterized as liars, this deficiency of self-representation had special resonance for female addicts, since it reproduced a conventional fascination with women's deceptive potential. Some of these writers broadened this commonplace into an argument against women's collective self- representation. Nineteenth-century British texts that describe key features of an emergent disease model of addiction also vehemently refute...