Blood Streams, Cash Flows and Circulations of Desire : Psychopharmacological Knowledge About Opium in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Fiction

Abstract

Early nineteenth-century women’s fiction about the domestic use of opium—whose effects were frequently understood within a Brunonian medical framework—cannot be read without perceiving more global reverberations. This essay looks at the way opium circulates in blood streams as well as in economic channels, and the way that the logic of these circulations intersects with the social construction of gender, race and class. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), for instance, documents the ways in which the psychological impact of opium betrays the intertwinements of the cravings of the body and the structures of gendered suppression. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) reveals opium addiction to be a crucial relay between individual desire, empire and domesticity. The novels represent the characters’ knowledge about opium’s effects on mind and body and illustrate the wider sociocultural contexts in which the drug plays a role, thus reflecting on the cultural politics of the drug’s psychopharmacology.