A pharmacy of her own: Victorian women and the figure of the opiate

This dissertation locates underexamined representations of female characters using opiates in Victorian literature in order to explore a surprising trend: while male drug users are typically depicted as destructive both to self and society, the figure of the opiate for female characters often serves as a catalyst for exploring agency and straying, if only temporarily, from a conventional narrative trajectory toward marriage and motherhood. Because the opiate in these texts accompanies the figure of the writing woman, this dissertation is as much about the nature of writing as it is about drug depictions; to this end, I take Derrida's formulation of the pharmakon as my theoretical framework. In "Plato's Pharmacy," Derrida figures writing as the pharmakon, the Greek word for "drug" that simultaneously means "poison" and "remedy." The pharmakon describes the seductive, dangerous play of the text, which "makes one stray from one's general, natural, habitual paths and laws" (70). Accordingly, the figure of the opiate in the texts discussed here represents the disruptive seduction of writing and reading for female characters.; My first chapter, which discusses Wilkie Collins's Armadale and Charlotte Bronte's Villette, reveals how the figure of the opiate in domestic literature complicates Victorian ideals about marriage by contrasting a stimulating opiate with a stultifying romantic relationship. In my second chapter, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" illustrate how drugs figure for the queerness of girlhood and language. The final two chapters focus on texts written after the 1868 Pharmacy Act and which therefore reflect more contradictory attitudes toward drugs. The third chapter examines how Bram Stoker's Dracula shifts the pleasurable and exploratory effects previously associated with the opiate away from the drugs administered by doctors and onto the vampire, a figure for monstrous addiction. The final chapter considers the marketing strategies of Marie Corelli's Wormwood in order to bring Derrida's formulation of the pharmakon full circle by considering how Corelli figures her anti-drug tirade as a drug itself.