Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in 19th-Century British Culture (Victorian Literature & Culture (Univ Va Paperback))

184 Pages·2003·8.067 MB·English

by  Barry Milligan

Throughout the nineteenth century,
while Britons were taking their culture to
the East, they were also bringing back
exotic commodities and ideas, inviting the
Orient to enter English terrain, bodies, and
consciousness. This mixing is both mediated
and mirrored by opium, an Oriental com¬
modity that enters and alters the English
body and mindset, thus confusing the direc¬
tion of Anglo-Oriental power dynamics.
As Barry Milligan demonstrates in
PleMure^) and Paind, this confusion occasions
both anxiety and enjoyment in the literature
of the centuiy. Coleridge portrays Oriental
commodities as an infection, but the conse¬
quent erosion of national, racial, gender, and
individual identity proves liberating as well
as threatening. For Thomas De Quincey,
opium becomes the axis of a conflict
between two paradigms of national identity,
suggesting that the Orient is both other and
origin. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,
opium is a crucial factor in the power of
putatively Oriental cultural elements to
seduce and dominate English conscious¬
ness and insidiously intertwine themselves
with English culture. The final two chapters
of Pleodured an? Paind consider ambivalent
English responses to the influx of Oriental
1860
immigrants in the s, when popular
journalists and fiction writers began to por¬
tray London’s East End opium dens as
miniature Orients within the heart of the
British Empire.
(continued on back flap)

PLEASURES AND PAINS
Opium and the Orient in
Nineteenth-Century British Culture
Victorian Literature and Culture Series
Karen Chase, Jerome J. McCann, and Herbert Tucker, General Editors
PLEASURES
AND PAINS
opium and the Orient
in Nineteenth-Century
British Culture
Barry Milligan
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA
Charlottesville and London
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA
Copyright © 1995 by the Rector and Visitors
of the University of Virginia
First published igg^
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Milligan, Barry.
Pleasures and pains : opium and the Orient in nineteenth-century
British culture / Barry Milligan.
p. cm. — (Victorian literature and culture series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8139-1571-6
I. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Narcotic addicts’ writings—History and criticism. 3. Opium
habit—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Great Britain—
Civihzation—Oriental influences. 5. Great Britain—
Civilization—19th century. 6. Authors, English—19th century—
Drug use. 7. English literature—Oriental influences. 8. Opium
habit in literature. 9. Exoticism in literature. 10. Orient—In
literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR468.06M55 1995
820.9'92o8—dc20 94-24140
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
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