Book Two- Chapter 3 Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium- Eater Romantic Prose
Romantic Non-Fictional Prose Essay Thomas De Quincey s autobiographical essay Confessions of an English Opium Eater first appeared anonymously in The London Magazine in 1821. Its final version appeared in his 14 volume collection of essays in 1856. The publication of this essay started De Quincey's career as a professional journalist. He used the persona of the opium eater in many other publications.
Thomas De Quincey He was an admirer of Wordsworth and knew him and his family. He tried to be a poet; he even lived in Dove Cottage for a while but he had to work as a journalist to make a living. De Quincey represent the failure of the Romantic self. He could not be as great as Wordsworth and Shelley because of personal and social reasons
The Romantic Author and the marketplace 1820s was the beginning of a growing market for journals and publications. Two basic magazines were famous Blackwood s Edinburgh Magazine and The London Magazine. The shift from patronage to market-driven readership had a minor influence on Shelley and Wordsworth who were worried about their readers and their role as poets. It became more influential in 1820s and totally affected De Quincey s.
The rise of the market for magazines Literature is becoming a commodity rather than a vocation
The shift from the author to the reader The passage from an anonymous essay published in The London Magazine entitled Fugitive Literature explains how the value of literature has changed. The focus is no longer on the author as a genius but on the reader s likes and dislikes. The essay is about the author who meets a baronet who collects fragments of letters, poems, wills, ballads. The baronet rescues these from being thrown away as garbage. The poets now are like factory men working to satisfy the public and make money.
The London Magazine This magazine published different types of writing: essays, information, poems, reports and almanac. Most of the publications are anonymous. De Quincey wrote in this journal so he could not be the solitary romantic genius like Wordsworth or Shelley. He could not write poems because the magazine preferred publishing occasional essays (essays inspired by specific occasions). He had to please the reading public.
The essay as literary form The essay is a lower hybrid form that was experimental. It was the magazine not the writer who decided how to write and what to be written. De Quincey creates the opium eater as the first person narrator of the essay. The I telling the story is not De Quincey himself although he was a drug addict. He mainly created this PERSONA ( Assumed Character) to make money and to interest the readers.
Confessions of an English Opium Eater : Being an Extract from the Life of a scholar The Essay is a long essay divided into two parts: each part is divided into sections: The essay has the narrator, the opium eater who is telling his story ever since he was young and how he became an addict and how he recovered from addiction. The essay has a fragmented form with flashbacks and flash forwards, dreams, memories and nightmares.
The structure of Confessions It is divided into six sections across two parts Part 1 is divided into two sections: To the reader and Preliminary confessions Part 2 is four sections: the introductory section to part 2 ; the pleasures of opium, introduction to the pains of opium; The pains of opium
The Structure The confessions are connected by flashbacks and flash forwards, by memories and by dreams repetitions and combinations of memories Grevel Lindop, the critic, says that the structure is like the fall of Adam in Milton s epics or the bible. Part 1 describes the innocence and part 2 the experience of the fall. The essay ends by 2 final dreams which echo Milton s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
Confessions of an English Opium Eater Reading 3.1 pp230-306 Part 1 To The reader The opium eater addresses the reader directly to the reader and says that the reader wants to read what is interesting, useful and instructional. He appeals to the reader s curiosity and promises him a pleasant reading where human errors are exposed but not in a vulgar way The essay starts with many quotations and classical allusions which shows that the readers will be men of high level of education to understand these allusions.
Examples of allusions and quotations The aim of using these allusions is to show the speaker- opium eater- is a scholar and a philosopher. Reference to Richard Mead, a famous physician, and a quotation Awsiter Essay on the Effects of Opium (1763). He uses Greek and Latin words and references to scholars
Part 1 Section 1: To The Reader in Confessions The opium eater presents himself as an English scholar, a gentleman and an intellectual. He uses a lot of references to French, Greek, Latin and German to show his good education. He is not writing for money but he is writing a scientific useful and instructive essay that has a moral. He uses statistics to show that he is an expert on opium addiction.
Part 1 Sec1 : To The reader in Confessions De Quincey distances his confessions from two types of writings : First: Jean Jacques Rousseau s Confessions which included passionate references to Rousseau's love stories and were totally self indulgent. Second: Memoirs written by prostitutes that include scandals and affairs like Harriette Wilson s Memoirs. Both types were known to the English readers.
Part 1 Section 2: Preliminary Confessions De Quincey will narrate how he came to be addicted to opium and will provide a key to his later dreams. The readers are going to be interested in knowing the details of the adventures and dreams of the opium eater. He starts with his childhood and how his father died when he was 7. He was very well educated till the age of seventeen but his guardians refused to pay for college education so he started his adventures with 12 pounds in his pocket
Examples from preliminary confessions section The opium eater always speaks of himself as a great man who did not have the chance to show his greatness because he was shy and because of his personal misfortune. He had a terrible childhood where he was often hungry but he is a strong person because he could save himself from addiction after being addicted for 10 years.
Part Two in the Confessions The opium eater is a philosopher who combines the abilities of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth. Like these great poets, he has the power of vision to see the mysteries of human nature. He is comparing himself to these great romantic English poets. He describes himself as the son of a merchant who has been abandoned by all family. He is proud of his origin but he has the ability to talk to men and women from all social classes. For example he is the friend of a 10 year old girl (Ann) and the Oxford Street prostitute.
Confessions Part Two He is also nostalgic to the past especially when he visits his childhood house on oxford street. the darkest- cold- silence- and desolation of that same house eighteen years ago when he used to live there is contrasted with its happy state now with the respectable family occupying it. He had a lonely sad childhood. He engages in a conversation with the reader trying to flatter the reader and arouse his curiosity. He uses suspense when he describes the painting of his cottage s interior and refuses to be painted so that each reader will fancy him as he wants.
The dreams The essay is filled with narrations of dreams and nightmares while under the effect of opium. These dreams are visions but they are not the great visions of W and Shelley or Coleridge; these are not the super imagination that allows the sublime. The final two dreams in the essay show the horrors of opium
The Final two dreams pp302 The first dream is on Easter Sunday and Ann, the 10 year old child which he met 17 years ago is lying dead in church. She will ascend to heaven. The second is about sin and death threatening to end it all. He dreams of the fall of Adam. It is this nightmare which makes him decide to quit opium. The closing lines are also from Milton s epic Paradise Lost speaking about Adam and Eve fall and looking back at heaven s gates with dreadful faces throng d and fiery arms..
De Quincey s identity and the opium eater It is difficult to decide the type of character that the opium eater is. He is the hero, and the criminal. He is the solitary genius and the anonymous narrator.
De Quincey s style His sentences are very long and complicated using parallel clauses (eg. with a fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a maturer intellect). He uses a lot of repetitions and elaborations and many colons and semicolons (eg. The storm which I had outlived seemed to have been the pledge of a long fair weather; the premature sufferings which I had paid down, to have been accepted as a ransom.
De Quincey s style The voice is grand so he uses archaic (old ) words. His rhythms echo King James Bible. His vocabulary is emotional contrasting opposite emotions in the same sentence (eg. Sighs, sufferings, sorrow are contrasted with fair-weather, immunity, serenity, peace of mind) He uses a poetic style to write prose using personification (eg Oxford -street stonyhearted step-mother ). This style is part of his desire to be a poet.
De Quincey s style He contrasts (juxtaposes) subject, tone and image so he switches between the humorous, the sentimental, the satiric, the conversational, the suspenseful, the bawdy (vulgar), the refined and the sublime. (an example of humor is the trunk of books falling on the stairs in part 2 section 1) This style was used to engage the new readers who had a shorter attention span than the highly educated readers of poetry.
De Quincey and Wordsworth- Basic points De Quincey was influenced by Wordsworth whom he admired and knew personally. He tries to Imitate him To critique his greatness To lament that he did not became as great as W Confessions imitate the Prelude- Wordsworth s epic poem : Both discuss vision/imagination, dreams and memories
Comparing De Quincey to Wordsworth The opium eater imitates Wordsworth s The Prelude in which Wordsworth addressed his friend Coleridge. De Quincey also says that he is writing in solitude like Wordsworth He does not want his picture shown because he is not writing a public confession but a private whispering in the ears of his readers. he quotes W s humbly to express/ a penitential loneliness
De Quincey and Romantic autobiography = Wordsworth De Quincey greatly admired Wordsworth and his Confessions is an attempt to imitate the Prelude especially the parts where Wordsworth confides in his friend Coleridge. His claim that the opium eater is a philosopher is an attempt to be like Wordsworth and Coleridge and not a journalist writing to earn money.
De Quincey and Wordsworth The opium eater refers to an episode in which he wanted to go to Westmorland on personal account. In reality, De Quincey did go to meet Wordsworth so he mentions this event in his essay. Another reference to W: He moves with the volume of his favorite poet in his pocket which is Lyrical Ballads. He refers to his dream to have the wings of a dove, that way I would fly for comfort. There are many references to Wordsworth s poetry in the opium eater and two direct references to Wordsworth himself.
Wordsworth influence on De Quincey Critic Grevel Lindop analyzed the references to Wordsworth in the opium eater and concluded that they provide a model of visionary writing. De Quincey formulates the idea of the literature of power which depends on Wordsworth s Model: the literture of power is a writing that makes us feel vivid, excited and with vital consciousness and emotions that are not found in ordinary life.
The literature of power According to De Quincey, Wordsworth poetry achieves this effect of the literature of power. impassioned prose can also achieve the same effect. Therefore, the function of writing is to arouse sleeping modes of feeling within the reader. De Quincey writes in prose what Wordsworth writes in verse. Confessions, like the Prelude, trace the process of memory and the power of imagination to change the relation of the self to the world.
Comparison between Confessions and the Prelude Confessions like the Prelude is an unfinished work about a mind worried about its memories and his greatness although De Quincey is not as famous or great as Wordsworth
Confessions and the Prelude The Prelude refers to spots of time that inform the adult poet s imagination. Confessions refers to involutes = (a confused combinations of concrete objects which encode compound experiences that carry our deepest thoughts and feelings) The opium eater narrates dreams and nightmares that act as involutes that preserve emotions just like Wordsworth s childhood memories.
Confessions as a Critique of Wordsworthian Romantic self Compare the two passage on page 86-87 one from the prelude and the other form confessions Wordsworth s self is nourished through the voluntary activation of childhood memory while De Quincey s childhood memories are activated involuntarily in dreams and nightmares. He sees forgetting as desirable.
Wordsworth versus De Quincey The power of the Wordsworthian poet is contrasted to the powerless opium addict. The opium addict critiques Wordsworth s cult of self.
The opium Opium has three connotations: Besides being a pain killer It is a metaphor for the romantic imagination ; it allows for the f=dream vision It has a political reference as a marker of empire since it was the main product of trade with Indian and China.
The pleasures of the opium Opium is described as a complex compound which brings pain and pleasure. The dullness of life in London is contrasted to the sublime, immortal effects of opium. It is a commodity to be bought but it is also the secret of happiness. Opium also heightens the mental faculties and expands the heart The opium eater feels the diviner part of his nature, his majestic intellect and his cloudless serenity. It allows him to stand at a distance from life
The pleasures of opium The harmony and soothing effect of opium allows all sense of guilt and anger and sorrow to disappear; HOWEVER, opium also disintegrates and confuses the eater.
Dove Cottage in Confessions p282 First Interpretation Charles Rzepka analyses the incident in Dove cottage where the opium eater visits the Malay to whom he gives opium saying that it is an example of De Quincey s failure as a poet. He is 36 years old and has written nothing and he is sitting at Dove Cottage where Wordsworth produced most of his great works. The Malay exposes the opium eater s failure and his pretentions to be a scholar.
A second Interpretation of Dove Cottage incident The opium eater constructs himself as a dark double of Wordsworth. He, like Wordsworth post 1800 poems is also meeting strangers and writing about the inability to communicate with people. It also stresses the touristic aspect of the place
A third Interpretation of Dove Cottage Incident John Barrell and Nigel Leask read this episode as showing De Quincey's anxiety over the idea of empire especially when he suspects that he poisoned the Malay with the opium he gave him. The foreigner Malay threatens the English self ; he is the enemy who has been feared for month but he is also pitied for his simplicity.
Summary of comparison of De Quincey and Wordsworth Wordsworth Self is sustained through memory Memory is voluntary Romantic poetic vision is stressed The self as sublime Strong domesticity in a national strong English landscape De Quincey Self is haunted and destroyed Memory is involuntary visionary addiction The self as Sick body The landscape is haunted by the terrors of the mind and the threats of empire
conclusion The opium eater is a dysphoric (depressing/sad) version of Wordsworth s Romantic self. It is different from both Wordsworth and Shelley who wanted an elevated grand poetic, moral and political prophecy whether developed in domestic seclusion or European exile towards supra world. De Quincey offers a nightmare of urban and imperial reality.