SOURCE: “Prodigal Narratives,” in A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 76-89.

[In the following essay, Clej analyzes De Quincey's confessional narratives and essays through the trope of prodigiality and the figure of the pariah.]

The prodigal narrative that stands at the center of De Quincey's early confessions is his reckless flight from school, the “fatal error” that will follow him throughout his life and for which he can find no excuse. This youthful act of disobedience estranged him from his family (and from his mother's financial support) and left him to fend for himself. This he soon did by squandering his small trust fund (a large sum went as an anonymous gift to Coleridge), which brought him to a state of insolvency that he maintained more or less consistently for the rest of his life. Although he tried occasionally to measure his “debt” (or “delinquency”) against that of Coleridge, and sometimes shifted his debts onto him (the anonymous donation inaugurates this practice), De Quincey preferred to accumulate debts as part of his way of embracing prodigality. On a symbolic level De Quincey's confessional narratives, which are by no means limited to the Confessions, constitute his main form of prodigal expenditure. As a compulsive narrator, De Quincey can constantly solicit and outrun the credit of his audience.

The relatively simple scenario put forth in the Confessions, which explains away De Quincey's prodigality as a matter of juvenile whimsey, is complicated in Suspiria de Profundis and the Autobiographic Sketches through an additional scenario. In the chapter “The Affliction of Childhood,” which appears in slightly different versions in both texts, De Quincey's act of disobedience described in Confessions is anticipated by the dark period of despair that followed Elizabeth's death—the moment when the six-year-old De Quincey suddenly realizes that “Life is finished!” and that the “lamp of Paradise” kept alive by her “reflection” has been irrevocably extinguished (CW, I: 36). This episode inevitably modifies the first impression conveyed in the early Confessions by giving a deeper meaning to De Quincey's childish behavior. His desperate flight from school, his “inexplicable error,” could now be viewed as a reenactment of his previous experience of sudden separation and loss. There are also many indications in De Quincey's work that he was never able to complete his mourning and that his mysterious attacks of melancholia, not to mention his opium addiction, were partly related to this initial loss. Yet this excuse, with the mitigation it may offer, is never produced in the first edition of Confessions.

Critics have generally assumed that De Quincey was driven out of his childhood paradise by the tragic event of his sister's death, which also ended an ideal state of innocence and harmony between self and world.¹ De Quincey's prodigal narratives are seen as an attempt to come to terms with this “original” trauma and the “psychic wounds” it left behind, on the implicit assumption that autobiography represents a rewriting of the subject's existential trials.² The omission of Elizabeth's death from De Quincey's early Confessions is at the very least intriguing. It suggests either an extreme reticence on De Quincey's part or the desire to leave the impression of an unsolved mystery. Or perhaps the elements of the famous deathbed scene were simply not available to De Quincey when he was writing his first confessions. At any rate, the image of an original purity and happiness in the writer's life prior to his sister's death is largely a fictional construct. As De Quincey remarks, undermining this idyllic phase in his life, “No Eden of lakes and forest-lawns, such as the mirage suddenly evokes in Arabian sands … could leave behind it the mixed impression of so much truth combined with so much absolute delusion” (CW, I: 55). Furthermore, it is De Quincey who leads us to believe he was not simply hurled into the world of experience by his tragic loss, but rather “launched” himself in it by reenacting the Fall.

In Suspiria de Profundis, as in his later Autobiographic Sketches, the famous scene in which De Quincey “steals” into the room where his dead sister is laid out in order to see her one more time is clearly described as an act of transgression. Inside the room the child experiences a visionary trance that ends as he imagines or actually hears the sound of footsteps on the stairs—an image that, like the reverberating echo in St. Paul's Cathedral, will haunt him throughout his life. The child is “alarmed” lest he be “detected” and forbidden access to the room. He therefore slinks away like “a guilty thing,” after hastily “kiss[ing] the lips that [he] should kiss no more” (S: 107).

The nature of the transgression is obscured by a complex set of associations. In one sense the child appears to violate an original mystery. The hushed chamber communicating through an open window with the infinity of the summer sky creates a sacred space in which the mysteries of death and life are symbolically conjoined. The funeral room bathed in sunlight becomes related through a digressive association with the scene of Christ's death and resurrection in Jerusalem, the “omphalos of mortality,” where “the divine had been swallowed up by the abyss” (S: 104-5). From this perspective the violation could refer to the mystery of the Host.³ Some critics have also suggested that De Quincey's transgression is related to an incestuous longing that makes him feel partly responsible for his sister's death.⁴

In either sense (pagan or Christian) the child's intrusion is immediately censured by a sinister omen, a “hollow, solemn, Memnonian wind” that rises in the sky, boding lasting banishment from divine grace.⁵ “A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I in spirit rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and flew away continually” (S: 105-7). The vision of endless pursuit and infinite regress, which mirrors De Quincey's prodigal economies, seems to be inaugurated by this imaginary instance of violation. Because of the imminent sound of steps outside the room, De Quincey's last contact with his sister is “mutilated” and “tainted” with fear, marred by a sense of incompleteness and misdoing. He is left with an irremediable sense of guilt and longing, arguably the “sorrow” that constitutes the professed, voiceless—and unvoiceable—object of his confessions, the “wound in [his] infant heart” that cannot heal, the loss that he may be secretly mourning.

From a psychoanalytic point of view one could establish a parallelism between the child's “wound” and the figure of the “crypt” in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's interpretation of this psychoanalytic emblem. According to this view the “crypt” or the gaping wound points to “a memory … buried without legal burial place,” a “segment of painfully lived Reality, whose unutterable nature dodges all work of mourning.”⁶ Whether autobiographical facts justify De Quincey's sense of guilt or his persistent melancholia is in practical terms impossible to determine because De Quincey is the main source for his early biography.⁷ What concerns us here is the play of guilt as a signifier in De Quincey's narratives of prodigality. His writings accumulate and exchange the marks of guilt, what in psychoanalytic terms would be called the symptoms of repression. How does this accumulation and exchange function, and what is its purpose?

Characteristically, in evoking his guilt, which the address “To the Reader” shows is not openly acknowledged, De Quincey avoids a specifically Christian frame of reference. His description of his fault in terms of physical stigmas (“worm” or “wound”) conjures up an archaic sense of evil, that of defilement, defined as “a ‘something’ that infects, a dread that anticipates the unleashing of the avenging wrath of the interdiction.”⁸ At the same time, expressions like “sorrow” and “grief” used to describe the same obscure fault bring it closer to the Greek notion of hamartia, which was conceived as a “fatal error” or “tragic blindness” and ultimately an “excusable fault.”⁹ The implicit identification with Oedipus—who like De Quincey is sustained in his later torments by “the sublime piety of his two daughters”—allows De Quincey to play on the ambiguity of his own guilt by confusing the distinction between voluntary and involuntary acts. In his essay “The Theban Sphinx,” De Quincey maintains that “Oedipus was loaded with an insupportable burthen of pariah participation in pollution and misery, to which his will had never consented” (CW, 6: 142) in the same way that the Opium-Eater is overwhelmed by the “burthen of horrors” brought upon him by the darker side of his addiction (C,: 62).¹⁰ This fatal predicament makes Oedipus the epitome of what De Quincey calls piacularity, which, like “hereditary sin,” denotes “an evil to which the party affected has not consciously concurred,” but which, unlike “hereditary sin,” “expresses an evil personal to the individual, and not extending itself to the race” (CW, 6: 142).

The idea of an external, quasi-material contamination of evil, emphasized by De Quincey's notion of piacularity—a fault for which the individual bears little or no responsibility—seems perfectly suited to the Opium-Eater's ineffable sense of guilt.¹¹ From this perspective opium appears to embody the very idea of the alien (and alienating) nature of evil. One could say that by deliberately ingesting the drug (the pharmakon), sometimes in excessive quantities, De Quincey constitutes himself as pharmakos, as criminal and scapegoat.¹²

The archaic understanding of evil as a form of possession by alien, uncontrollable forces, or in the Greek sense as possession by a fatal destiny, may explain De Quincey's treatment of his “original” transgression as a form of misfortune for which he is as much to be pitied as blamed. De Quincey's use of the words “sorrow” and “grief” to refer to the pain that allegedly afflicted him long after his sister's death is marked by the ambiguity of the Greek hamartia, a fault either “suffered” or “done.” Moreover, sorrow, grief, or passion—the express objects of De Quincey's confessions (“impassioned prose”)—carry the same ambivalence as their Greek equivalent pathos. They can refer to the violent act of the perpetrator or the passive suffering of the victim; De Quincey can adopt these two postures at once without apparent contradiction.

Through his trials De Quincey seems to enact some form of sacrificial drama that “draws the superabundance of grace from the abundance of sin,” to use Ricoeur's phrase, but one in which “grace” has a dubious value. This is apparent in De Quincey's use of Christ's passion to allude to his own suffering. But in his version of the Christian topos of imitatio Christi the elements of the sacred story become sorely confused. In the episode of his swoon in Oxford Street during a nocturnal walk, De Quincey describes himself as a dying Christ. He had reached, he says, “the crisis of [his] fate” and would have “sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent … would soon have become hopeless” if it hadn’t been for the “saving hand” of Ann (the streetwalker) (C: 22).

His hyperbolic agony is alleviated by “a glass of port wine and spices” (as opposed to the biblical vinegar) administered by Ann, his “benefactress” and “Magdalen.” In this inverted image the prostitute becomes the savior (the “saving hand”) and the instrument of resurrection, while De Quincey performs the role of a helpless Christ. At the end of a period of enforced withdrawal from opium, he describes himself as “agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, shattered; and much, perhaps, in the situation of him who has been racked” (C: 78). Yet “the most innocent sufferer,” with whom De Quincey compares his torments, is not Christ, as one might have expected, but a civilian traveler of the time of James I, a certain William Lithgow, who gives a powerful account of his sufferings on the rack at Malaga.

De Quincey's obsessive assumption of suffering (and guilt symptoms) or debts (he is a “debtor for life”) may “imitate” Christ's passion, but it has none of the redemptive value that such an “imitation” traditionally has in religious confessions. In his case excessive suffering and abjection are not the prelude to a rebirth of the self, but turn out to be yet another posture through which he tries to market his confessional self. In the absence of the climactic moment of conversion (the transcendence of the sinful self), De Quincey's prodigality circles upon itself by a self-contained mechanism that produces as much as it tends to efface the confessional subject. In the end confessing reckless expenditure becomes a form of self-investment in which “interest” (the “thrilling interest” of the confession) is generated as a gratuitous though calculated by-product of an economic regulation of the self.

The excesses of the Opium-Eater transform him into an “exemplary sufferer” in much the same way as a monstrous criminal may acquire an almost sacred aura. In a draft of a political essay De Quincey comments on the particular advantages of being an indicted criminal:

Standing in that position, he becomes sacred to us all. … What a lull, what an awful sabbath of rest is created for him in the midst of his own wicked agitations, and by his own agitations! For it is his own crimes which have procured him this immunity. It is because he had become too bad to be borne, it is because he has become insufferable, and from the moment when the outraged law has laid her sacred hand of attachment upon him, that she will suffer no one to question him but herself.¹³

The Opium-Eater grounds his glory in the dubious act of violating and flirting with the law. Throughout his writings De Quincey effectively conflates the image of the scapegoat with that of the Byronic hero-criminal. Given his understanding of pathos, De Quincey can sympathize with or impersonate the victim and the criminal and often plays both roles in his endless meanderings through the world of experience.¹⁴

De Quincey's favorite image for this ambiguous figure is the pariah, whose degradation and marginality are the result of an obscure taboo and whose miserable fate generates a special kind of pathos. Pariahs, from the early Pelasgi and the Jews to medieval lepers, gypsies, and the Pyrenean Cagots, occasion a kind of sacred awe produced by “some dreadful taint of guilt, real or imputed, in ages far remote” (CW, 1: 101). According to De Quincey pariahs can also be found in modern times, except that most people ignore their presence due to their “sensuous dulness.” “In the very act of facing or touching a dreadful object, they will utterly deny its existence,” like the hardened unbelievers denounced by the Scriptures: “Having ears, they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand” (CW, 1: 101). De Quincey's impassioned appeal to faith has nothing to do with religion, however, but is directed instead to newspaper accounts and to what De Quincey calls the “horrible burden of misery” that they contain—to the pathos of everyday life. This somewhat banalized pathos, framed by an aura of magnificence, best exemplifies De Quincey's understanding of “impassioned prose.”

In his writings De Quincey identifies with a wide range of pariah figures: Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, bound on an “endless pilgrimage of woe” (CW, 1: 43); Oedipus, trudging along public roads, “aged, blind, and a helpless vagrant” (CW, 6: 146); Ann, the streetwalker with whom De Quincey, the “peripatetic” philosopher, associates in his night rambles through London (C: 20). In all these variations on the theme of exile and estrangement De Quincey is at once the outcast and the repentant prodigal son.

When trying to explain De Quincey's curious involvement with pariah figures, we first need to remember the extent to which his middle-class audience shared his sympathies. In the effusiveness with which he embraces—at an imaginary level—the fate of the underdog, De Quincey is no doubt a creature of his times. Compassion, the emotional expenditure, often displaced to isolated or “picturesque” victims (beggars, gypsies, or prostitutes) served throughout the nineteenth century to assuage the social guilt produced by the widespread exploitation of both indigenous and colonized workers.¹⁵ De Quincey's persistent identification with social outsiders is by no means a sign of enlightened tolerance; if anything, it constitutes the counterpart of his class prejudices and racial intolerance.¹⁶ The “dreadful taint of guilt” of the pariah, whose source remains a “secret,” is but a reflection of De Quincey's (and his readers') own bad conscience and vague fears of the masses, an ideological malaise that may explain the Romantic (Gothic) infatuation with tales of crime and revenge.¹⁷

Nothing seems to suit De Quincey's sensibility better than the idea of being haunted by invisible enemies. Like a pariah (Oedipus), De Quincey is plagued by an obscure curse (if not the “curse of the Law” itself). He appears to relish the feeling of persecution and punishment, like all melancholiacs do.¹⁸ This dubious pleasure is particularly evident in his masochistic surrender to the cruel fantasies of his elder brother described in Autobiographic Sketches or in the impish enjoyment he derived from being harried by creditors. According to his daughter: “It was an accepted fact among us that he was able when saturated with opium to persuade himself and delighted to persuade himself (the excitement of terror was a real delight to him) that he was dogged by dark and mysterious foes.”¹⁹ De Quincey's excitement and delight in terror—the hallmark of the sublime—inform both his confessional writings and his Gothic stories, which are related in more ways than one.

De Quincey's prodigality contaminates a whole range of characters both real and imaginary, and the story of estrangement and loss that articulates his confessions reemerges in various guises throughout his writings. The curious figure of the innocent criminal is omnipresent in De Quincey's prodigal narratives, which irrespective of setting or historical context tell the same story of inexplicable woe. One temptation is to find the “real” object of De Quincey's confessions, the “original” fault that explains his addiction, concealed in the fictional texture of these repetitive narratives. Another temptation is to see in them a “mythical” rewriting of De Quincey's childhood “afflictions” and adult phobias.²⁰

The problem is that De Quincey both encourages and thwarts these critical impulses by undermining the distinction between truthful and fictional discourses.²¹ The risk of confusion is made particularly explicit in De Quincey's postscript to “The Spanish Military Nun,” a picaresque tale set in Spain and South America at the beginning of the sixteenth century and purportedly based on the memoirs of a young nun turned soldier.

There are some narratives which, though pure fictions from first to last, counterfeit so vividly the air of grave realities that, if deliberately offered for such, they would for a time impose upon everybody. In the opposite scale there are other narratives, which, whilst rigorously true, move amongst characters and scenes so remote from our ordinary experience, and through a state of society so favorable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they would everywhere pass for romances, if served from the documents which attest their fidelity to facts.

(CW, 13: 238)

To illustrate these paradoxes, De Quincey recounts the case of an “artless young rustic” (by all appearances De Quincey's future wife Margaret) who after having read The Vicar of Wakefield (which De Quincey had lent her) imagines that all the characters in the novel are real and hence can “sue and be sued.”

De Quincey's novella, “The Spanish Military Nun,” raises the question of fictionality and deception in more ways than one. The heroine's literal travesty, which disguises “the two main perils [of] her sex, and her monastic dedication,” offers ample opportunity for both illusion and imposture. Catalina, or Kate, as De Quincey often calls her, maybe thinking of Kate Wordsworth, is twice in a position of becoming a bridegroom, and the second time the bride to be is so lovely that had Catalina been “really Peter [Diaz],” as she pretended to be, and not just a “sham Peter,” she would certainly have been smitten with that “innocent child.” The situation is even more confusing when after killing the Portuguese cavalier, she “becomes falsely accused (because accused by lying witnesses) of an act which she really did commit” (CW, 13: 218).

The same absurd situation appears in the Confessions, where De Quincey finds himself “accused, or at least suspected,” by his Jewish creditors of “counterfeiting his own self” (C: 55). But if De Quincey was able to provide proof of his identity, Catalina could not reveal “the secret of her sex,” which would have exonerated her from the crime, without shedding light on the other dubious “transactions” in her life that would have attracted the attention of the Inquisition. De Quincey not only identifies with his heroine's guilty predicament—“I love this Kate, bloodstained as she is”—but also defends her acts against the background of “the exaggerated social estimate of all violence” that appears to “translate” the “ethics of a police-office” into that of God-fearing people. There is in De Quincey's eyes something perfectly legitimate about Catalina's violence, whose errors he maintains “never took a shape of self-interest or deceit” (CW, 13: 199).

In spite of the overall frothy tone De Quincey uses to retell Kate's story, there are many intimations of doom in which an attentive reader could easily recognize the lineaments of De Quincey's own prodigal narrative. Catalina's escape from the convent is curiously similar to De Quincey's elopement from Manchester Grammar School. Like De Quincey, who wakes up to the morning “which was to launch [him] into the world” and expose him to a “hurricane, and perfect hail-storm of affliction” (C: 9), Catalina “pull[s] ahead right out of St. Sebastian's cove into the main ocean of life” to embark upon “her sad and infinite wanderings” (CW, 13: 165). Also like De Quincey, Catalina suffers from an “afflicted conscience” and “fearful remembrances”—the death of De Quincey's sister paralleling the killing of Catalina's brother—and is beset by nightmares.

The most remarkable parallel, however, is between Kate's collapse after her ascent of the Andes, when she finds herself “in critical danger of perishing for want of a little brandy” or a draught of laudanum, and De Quincey's swoon in Oxford Street. For a moment it is unclear “whether the jewelly star of [Catalina's] life had descended too far down the arch towards setting for any chance of reascending by spontaneous effort,” that is, “without some stimulus from earthly vineyards” (CW, 13: 206). In the same way, De Quincey describes in his Confessions the “crisis of [his] fate,” the conviction that “without some powerful and reviving stimulus” he would have “sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent … would soon have become hopeless” (C: 22). Ann offered the providential “glass of port wine and spices” that saved his life.

On even closer inspection Catalina's story, with its ups and downs dramatically figured by her symbolic ascent and descent of the Andes, reveals the fluctuations of De Quincey's prodigal economy, the “oscillating experience” of the opium eater and perpetual debtor. Although opium makes only a fleeting appearance in the story, the obsession with debts and credits pervades the whole narrative. America appears from the very beginning as an inexhaustible source of profit for the Spanish hidalgos and for storytellers like De Quincey:

And with a view to new leases of idleness, through new generations of slaves, it was (as many people think) that Spain went so heartily into the enterprises of Cortez and Pizarro. A sedentary body of Dons, without needing to uncross their thrice-noble legs, would thus levy eternal tributes of gold and silver upon eternal mines, through eternal successions of nations that had been, and were to be, enslaved.

(CW, 13: 160)

In the meantime aristocratic daughters could be pawned away, “quartered … for life upon nunneries,” so “their papas, being hidalgos,” could make the “magnificent purchase of eternal idleness” (CW, 13: 160). As a result, Catalina, whose life has thus been brokered, is always ready to compensate herself for this original injustice by attacking or slaying any personal offender (unfortunately, she could not dispatch her father, as he well deserved). She also levies money on her uncle for assuming to bore her “gratis” and on the king of Spain's contingency box to repay herself the trouble of having to leave his sinking ship and swim to the shore of his majesty's colony. As the bookkeeper of a Peruvian draper, she serves two clients, one who has “credit unlimited” and one who has “no credit” and whom she ends up killing in a duel. As a way out the draper offers her marriage to the relative of the deceased man, that is, the client who happens to have unlimited credit, a solution Catalina spurns to pursue her adventures.

The paradox that informs De Quincey's prodigal economy is by now apparent in Catalina's extravagant story—there can be no recovery without loss, no hope of return without previous estrangement. Catalina's many losses are requited in the end by her lavish reinstatement as a heroine in her home country, and her trespasses will all be forgiven by Christ, the ultimate bearer of human debts. In the meantime De Quincey has indebted himself to his readers for being unable to complete his story in two parts as he had originally promised and for having to protract the narrative into a third part.

That De Quincey could picture himself as a woman comes as no surprise given his biographical profile. Like Catalina, who became the “wee pet” of the St. Sebastian nuns, De Quincey was doted on as a young child by his female entourage. When De Quincey has Catalina put on a pair of trousers for the first time, he mentions how at age four he was still “retaining hermaphrodite relations of dress as to wear a petticoat above [his] trousers” (CW, 13: 167). It is not the first time that De Quincey exchanges identity with a woman, nor will it be the last. In “The Spanish Military Nun” De Quincey takes clear advantage of Catalina's superior “energy and indomitable courage” to pay back some old debts. The “female servant” of the convent whom Catalina pierces with a dreadful look for having “wilfully” given her a push recalls the female servant at Greenhay who treated little Jane harshly a couple of days before her death. The brother whom Catalina kills by mistake may be seen as a double of William, the tyrannical brother whom De Quincey resented but was unable to subdue. And the lavish welcome bestowed upon Catalina by the pope and the king of Spain on her return from the New World may be read as an imaginary compensation for De Quincey's measly treatment by his mother and guardians after his youthful escapade.²² At the same time De Quincey insinuates that prodigal extravagance in the name of the empire can always be forgiven.²³

This biographical reading is complicated by one further fictional layer. As De Quincey tells us in a digression, while Kate is left suspended on the high ridge of the Andes, struggling alone with her “afflicted conscience,” the heroine's condition actually resembles the plight of the “Ancient Mariner” in Coleridge's poem. According to De Quincey “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” offers three models of interpretation (CW, 13: 195). For the unsophisticated reader the Mariner's story is just a “baseless fairy tale.” A more advanced reader will see in the Mariner's visions not mere inventions, but the result of an actual delirium caused by a “pestilential fever.” Only the wise reader can see beyond the signs of “bodily affection” to the real source of the Mariner's troubles—his “penitential sorrow,” which echoes the “penitential loneliness” evoked in Wordsworth's White Doe.

The Nemesis that follows the Mariner, “as if he were a Cain, or another Wandering Jew,” is the result of his reckless killing of “the creature that, on all earth, loved him best”—the albatross. Catalina's curse turns out to be the same as that of the Mariner. “She, like the mariner, had slain the one sole creature that loved her upon the whole wide earth; she, like the mariner, for this offence, had been hunted into frost and snow—very soon will be hunted into delirium; and from that (if she escapes with life) will be hunted into the trouble of a heart that cannot rest” (CW, 13: 196).

Oedipus, Catalina, the Ancient Mariner, and De Quincey thus seem to share the same persecution syndrome for an unwitting crime, an accident of fate that transforms them into eternal exiles or pariahs. The difficulty of assessing the significance of De Quincey's fictional personae is certainly not that of finding analogies between De Quincey's prodigality as described in his confessions and that of his characters; the true difficulty is establishing a causal relation between these analogues. Is De Quincey attracted by the story of Oedipus and the Ancient Mariner because of his own prodigal experiences, or are his experiences inspired by these fictional characters? If so, is De Quincey's curse opium or literature, more specifically Coleridge, whose addiction De Quincey emulates?

De Quincey does his best to confuse his readers as to the “real” origin of his stories. The travesty in “The Spanish Military Nun” applies not only to the nun, but to De Quincey, who had freely adapted Catalina's story as told by Alexis de Valon from the Revue des deux mondes without mentioning his source. The Frenchman's presence is visible only in the figure of Catalina's anonymous detractor, whom De Quincey vehemently upbraids in the passionate defense of his heroine. In its complex mixture of fact and fiction, the case of “The Spanish Military Nun” seems to challenge the very limits of the reader's credulity. De Quincey is defending the character of his imaginary Catalina, which is based on the purloined portrait of a supposedly historical person, while effacing all traces that could support his defense.

As David Masson observes in his explicatory note to “The Spanish Military Nun” De Quincey never saw Catalina's memoirs on which the Frenchman's story was presumably grounded and obviously could not invoke them as evidence for her character. The origin of De Quincey's story has been effectively erased in the same way that Catalina symbolically disappears in De Quincey's epilogue to “The Spanish Military Nun” swallowed up by the sea or as Oedipus vanishes at the end of “The Theban Sphinx,” leaving “no trace or visible record” (CW, 6: 150). In the meantime, however, De Quincey's dream of perfect invisibility has been punctured by his editor, leaving the reader to muse on De Quincey's own stake in travesty and “bloodstained” pariahs.

Notes

1. See Miller, pp. 18-23.

2. Barrell assumes that De Quincey reconstructs his childhood experiences through a series of narratives (“narratives of trauma” and “narratives of reparation”) in which his “nursery afflictions” and adult phobias are both reenacted and transcended (pp. 20-22).

3. For a parallel interpretation of this scene see Black, “Confession, Digression, Gravitation.”

4. See Barrell, pp. 26-28.

5. For the Romantic reevaluation of the legendary figure of Memnon, see Hayter, p. 85.

6. Abraham and Torok, “A Poetics of Psychoanalysis,” p. 4.

7. The existing accounts of De Quincey's life draw extensively on his own writings for documenting his childhood and youth.

8. Ricoeur, p. 33.

9. See ibid., pp. 114-16.

10. Both Antigone and Oedipus tend to view Oedipus's crimes as unfortunate acts that the hero has “suffered” rather than “done.” Oedipus declares at one point: “I have burdened myself with an alien misfortune; yes, I am burdened with it in spite of myself. Let the divinity be witness! Nothing of all that was purposed [authaireton].” Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 522-23.

11. In The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, Barrell discusses at length images of pollution and contamination as indicative of De Quincey's fear of the Orient. This exotic evil covers a much more familiar one.

12. See Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy,” pp. 128-34.

13. Thomas De Quincey, The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, England.

14. De Quincey's strange fascination with murder—of which the half-ironic, half-serious essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” is a quizzical proof—gives a certain lurid tinge to his fatal predicament.

15. For an in-depth historical analysis of the emergence of philanthropy in England and western Europe see Haskell.

16. For a discussion of De Quincey's attitude toward Muslims and Jews see Barrell, p. 69.

17. See ibid., pp. 3-8. See also Praz, The Romantic Agony, pp. 95-186.

18. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 246.

19. Quoted by Eaton, p. 374n. De Quincey's attacks of anxiety were not without practical benefits. As his daughter comments, the persuasion that he was terrorized by invisible enemies “gave a sanction to his conscience for getting away from the crowded discomforts of a home without any competent head.” Terror, like opium eating, is a convenient escape from the constraints of reality. In the same way, assuming the identity of the eternal debtor delivered him from all financial obligations. This strategy of denial can be traced back to De Quincey's childhood. “Professing the most absolute bankruptcy from the very beginning,” a tactic he used in defending himself against his elder, tyrannical brother, William, was also a way of making sure he “never could be made miserable by unknown responsibilities” (CW, I: 60). In a similar way, as a child De Quincey “had a perfect craze for being despised” and doted on what he called his “general idiocy” in order to gain “freedom from anxiety” and to be left alone.

20. See Barrell, pp. 20-22.

21. See Searle's distinction between “serious” and “nonserious” statements in terms of the speaker's commitment to the truth of his or her utterance. “What distinguishes fiction from lies,” in Searle's view, “is the existence of a separate set of conventions which enable the author to go through the motions of making statements which he knows to be not true even though he has no intention to deceive” (pp. 65-67).

22. In his discussion of this story Barrell discovers similar parallelisms and attributes them to De Quincey's desire for “liberating himself from all guilty thoughts towards Elizabeth and William” (pp. 78-80). I am questioning in this chapter the biographical validity of De Quincey's guilt.

23. Two of De Quincey's sons had served in the British army overseas—Horace in China, where he died of a fever in 1842, and Paul Frederick in the Sikh War.

Abbreviations

Works cited frequently have been identified by the following abbreviations:

Works by Thomas De Quincey

C Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). In Grevel Lindop, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

C1856 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Author's Revised and Enlarged Edition of 1856. In David Masson, ed., The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 3. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1890.

CW The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey. David Masson, ed. 14 vols. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1889-90.

D A Diary of Thomas De Quincey (1803). Horace A. Eaton, ed. London: Noel Douglas, 1927.

M De Quincey Memorials. A. H. Japp, ed. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1891.

PW The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey. A. J. Japp, ed. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann, 1891.

RL Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets. David Wright, ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.

S Suspiria de Profundis (1845). In Grevel Lindop, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

UW The Uncollected Works of Thomas De Quincey. 2 vols. James Hogg, ed. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892.

Works by Others

AC Augustine. Confessions. R. S. Pine-Coffin, trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961.

BL Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, eds. 2 vols. Bollingen Series, no. 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Hogg De Quincey and His Friends. James Hogg, ed. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1895.

Japp Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings. A. H. Japp, ed. London: John Hogg, 1890.

OC Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres complètes. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

P Wordsworth, William. The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind (1805). Ernest de Selincourt, ed., 2d ed. Rev. Helen Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. This edition was corroborated with The Fourteen-Book Prelude by William Wordsworth. W. J. B. Owen, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

PE Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. James T. Boulton, ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

PL Milton, John. Paradise Lost. In John Milton, The Complete Poems and Major Prose. Merritt Y. Hughes, ed. Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957.

Po. Aristotle. Poetics. Richard Janko, trans. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

PWW Wordsworth, William. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

SE Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74.

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. “A Poetics of Psychoanalysis: ‘The Lost Object—Me.’ ” Sub-stance, no. 43: 3-18.

Barrell, John. The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.

Black, Joel D. “Confession, Digression, Gravitation: Thomas De Quincey's German Connection.” In Robert Lance Snyder, ed., Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, pp. 308-38. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato's Pharmacy.” In Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 61-173. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols., vol. 14, pp. 237-59. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74.

Haskell, Thomas L. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility.” Parts 1 and 2. American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339-61; no. 3 (June 1985): 547-66.

Hayter, Alethea. Opium and the Romantic Imagination: Addiction and Creativity in De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire and Others. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, Eng.: Crucible, 1988.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. New York: Meridian Books, 1956.

Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.

Searle, John. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” In Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, pp. 58-75. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.