Opium - Literary Cultural References

Literary Cultural References

There is a longstanding literary history by and about opium users. Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), one of the first and most famous literary accounts of opium addiction written from the point of view of an addict, details the pleasures and dangers of the drug. De Quincey writes about the great English Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), whose "Kubla Khan" is also widely considered to be a poem of the opium experience. Coleridge began using opium in 1791 after developing jaundice and rheumatic fever and became a full addict after a severe attack of the disease in 1801, requiring 80–100 drops of laudanum daily. George Crabbe is another early writer who wrote about opium. "The Lotos-Eaters", an 1832 poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, reflects the generally favorable British attitude toward the drug. In The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) by Alexandre Dumas, père, the Count is assuaged by an edible form of opium and his experience with it is depicted vividly.

Edgar Allan Poe presents opium in a more disturbing context in his 1838 short story, "Ligeia", in which the narrator, deeply distraught for the loss of his beloved, takes solace in opium until he "had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium," unable to distinguish fantasy from reality after taking immoderate doses of opium. In music, Hector Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique (1830) tells the tale of an artist who has poisoned himself with opium while in the depths of despair for a hopeless love. Each of the symphony's five movements takes place at a different setting and with increasingly audible effects from the drug. For example, in the fourth movement, "Marche au Supplice", the artist dreams that he is walking to his own execution. In the fifth movement, "Songe d’une Nuit du Sabbat", he dreams that he is at a witch's orgy, where he witnesses his beloved dancing wildly along to the demented Dies Irae.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, references to opium and opium addiction, in the contexts of crime and the foreign underclass, abound within English literature, such as in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), where it is used to attempt to uncover the jewel thief. Opium features in the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens's 1870 serial, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1891 Sherlock Holmes short story, "The Man with the Twisted Lip". Opium is also one of the main subjects in a more recently written Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz. In Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), the character Passepartout is lured into an opium den by the detective Fix, which causes him to become separated from Phileas Fogg, his employer. Opium likewise underwent a transformation in Chinese literature, becoming associated with indolence and vice by the early twentieth century. Perhaps the best-known literary reference to opium is Karl Marx's metaphor in his "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'," wherein he refers to religion as "the opium of the people." (This phrase is more commonly quoted as "the opiate of the masses.")

In the twentieth century, as the use of opium was eclipsed by morphine and heroin, its role in literature became more limited and often focused on issues related to its prohibition. In The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Wang Lung, the protagonist, gets his troublesome uncle and aunt addicted to opium in order to keep them out of his hair. William S. Burroughs autobiographically describes the use of opium and its derivatives. His associate, Jack Black's, memoir You Can't Win, chronicles one man's experience both as an onlooker in the opium dens of San Francisco, and later as a "hop fiend" himself. The book and subsequent movie, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, may allude to opium at one point in the story, when Dorothy and her friends are drawn into a field of poppies, in which they fall asleep. Stephen Maturin, the naval physician in the Jack Aubrey series of nautical novels by Patrick O'Brian, is portrayed as being favorably disposed towards laudanum as a panacea. He claimed to be in control of his own usage, principally as a soporific, which reached as high as 1,000 drops. Opium is also repeatedly mentioned in the novel, The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer. The plot revolves partly around the poppy flower and opium drug. In George R.R. Martin's novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, a drink referred to in the books as "milk of the poppy" is often used to relieve pain. A 1986 autobiography entitled Poppies: Odyssey of an Opium Eater by Eric Detzer was later made into a film called The Opium Eater. The story explores how Detzer would go about acquiring dried opium poppy pods from flower shops and wild gardens in the Pacific Northwest to feed his opium addiction.