Linda Cristal

            On Monday I woke up in the early morning and started to feel like I had a cold coming on. My spit was thick and uncomfortable.

Later I compared my edition of Thomas de Quincey's The English Opium Eater with the digital version that I have. My electronic copy is the same as that recommended by the syllabus so I wanted to see how many pages apart the different titles are in each edition. I found that page 1 in my book is the beginning of “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” while that corresponds to page 50 in the recommended text. The English Mail Coach is also about fifty pages difference and so when Professor Weisman calls out a page number I should just be able to subtract by 50 in order to find it.

            Before class started I told Gabriel about the guy from Kenya who'd said that he couldn't believe people live in a place as cold as Toronto. The professor commented, “He should visit the west to find out how cold it can get. I suggested that it's a dry cold in the west but she scoffed and said that's just something people say but when there's wind chill of 30 below it will burn your face off just as fast whether it's dry or humid.

            We learned that our exam is on April 17.

            Confessions of An English Opium Eater grows from English magazine culture and the hunger for information about science, medicine, other cultures and the empire.

            Frankenstein uses specialized knowledge with a poor commitment to dissemination in order to benefit the common good. This ties in with our research essay because we are required to us scholarly research that has been vetted by other scholars. There is a background of scholarly conversation.

            Frankenstein is also an engagement in the idea of the dark side of Romanticism.

            In “The Dejection Ode” Coleridge flees from his own imagination. Frankenstein flees from his creation.

            The Romantic ideal of consolation and comfort in nature, and a mental landscape are the value terms for Romantic ideology that De Quincey appropriates.

            Professor Weisman again recommended Suspiria Profundus for when we are finished with the course material.

            How to constitute a recuperative moment.

            Ideas about inner psychology were beginning to spread.

            De Quincey is writing journalistic prose for polite magazine culture. His audience is literate, educated and upper class but not fully in the bubble of aristocratic isolation. London Magazine was liberal and unlike the conservative quarterly review that rejected Keats.

            De Quincey constitutes a persona that it's hard to make sense of. He presents himself as an articulate intellectual on the one hand and then as a gothic freak show character on the other. His prose is gentleman scholarly like Shelley's Defence of Poetry.

            “I am” is on first publication all there was to identify him, as his name was not included.

            Confessions of an English Opium Eater is in the tradition of the autobiographical or confessional narrative that dates back to The Confessions of St Augustine. He is distinct from the life that he is describing. Rousseau's Confessions were an influence on the Romantics. In his case there was no disconnect between writer and past self. It was shocking at the time.

            Opium was a subject of interest. It was not illegal; it could be purchased over the counter. It was not understood and opium addicts were considered to be weak.

            De Quincey first used it for a toothache and afterwards took it recreationally in moderation. Later though when poverty led to extreme stomach problems he began taking more and got more and more addicted. He needed to withdraw.

            Coleridge for his addiction was later in life taken care of by and lived with a doctor and his wife.

            Confessions of an English Opium Eater is about forbidden pleasure and playing on the brink with a whiff of danger. His writing about opium is not just about the growth of understanding of the body. It is also political and social.

            Opium was produced primarily in India by the East India Company. The company ruled much of India on behalf of the colonialist British Empire. It was exported to China in exchange for tea, porcelain, etc.

            This was the era of travel literature and the genre made opium a part of the English imagination. Orientalism presented the east as exotic and expansive.

            Orientalism was the name for describing a body of work that exoticizes the East. It was neither complimentary nor straightforward. It is misrepresentative but evokes a western desire to understand exotic realms and their populations that live differently from the British social norm. Orientalist discourse presents the East as other.

            Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe has discourses about Arabians and Jews. The protagonist falls in love with a Jewess. The Arabian woman is Frankenstein is taught western ways.

            Catholics in Britain did not have civil rights until 1829.

            The depiction of the Orient is problematic in Confessions of an English Opium Eater. De Quincey gives the Malay enough opium to kill a regiment because he figures that since he is from the east he must know about opium and how to portion it out. It would not have been polite to go after him and induce vomiting in order to save his life.

            This story is not sensationalized like a lot of material on the same subject. He insists upon his own persona of English decency. This is written as a record and a warning for the public good of polite culture but not a confession of guilt.

            De Quincey, presenting a fictionalized persona of the pious philosopher, kicked his addiction in writing but never in real life.  He self-depicts as a gothic hero who goes to forbidden extremes. He makes friends with prostitutes, the most excluded members of society, but he is not a john. If he wanted to pay for sex he was too poor. When he faints he is raised up by the compassionate sex trade worker who gives him a chalice of wine. There are Eucharistic allusions. Sincere love without bread or wine turns cold.

            He escaped grammar school at seventeen because he was smarter than everyone and his guardian was petty and shallow.

            She asked us, "How does Part II connect with canonical Romanticism?"

            I said that it’s a bit of an urban echo of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”. Oxford Street remains and anchor of memory like Tintern Abbey. He remembers himself as he was before but now with more fortitude and from a more mature intellectual perspective as he walks the same street.

            Also comparing the text with Tintern Abbey someone pointed out that “stony hearted stepmother” reflects Wordsworth’s depiction of the abbey as a womb substitute.

            The not comforting but authentic London streets are the obverse of the rustic scenes. The urban underworld is not the gentle pastoral but rather hardcore life on the margins.

            His compassion does not fully relieve him.

            I talked with Professor Weisman about how De Quincey sets himself up as Christ in this section of the story and she said that the prostitute Ann is definitely meant to represent Mary Magdalene.

            It was considerably colder riding home than it had been riding to class. I stopped at Freshco and bought grapes, raspberries, hummus, baba ganouj, honey and a jug of vinegar.

            I worked on getting caught up with my journal as I always fall behind when I’m writing the review of a poetry reading.

            I cut up a half frozen chicken and roasted it. I made some chicken gravy. I had a piece of chicken with a boiled potato and gravy while watching the final episode of the first season of Rawhide.

            In this story Rowdy comes across a beautiful woman named Louise sitting apparently all by herself in the middle of nowhere. She says she is a Mexican countess and that she had been the lady in waiting to the king and queen of Mexico. She shows Rowdy that she is not alone but is part of a camp of women, some of whom look like they are starving. One of them is preparing to eat a lizard that she caught. Rowdy feels sympathy for them and says he’s going to bring them some food.

            Meanwhile there have been sightings of a wild man in the hills keeping pace on foot with the drovers on horseback. These are at first dismissed as the viewers having been in the sun too long but the not so wild man named Bain finally arrives at their camp. He’s been severely beaten and they put him in the supply wagon to recover.

            Rowdy takes back some bacon and bread to the poor women. Louise tries to give Rowdy an expensive silver mirror but he says it’s too much. She secretly slips it into his saddlebag. Suddenly some bandits arrive who seem to be forcing these women to be their servants. Outnumbered, Rowdy leaves.

            When Bain recovers he warns the drovers that comancheros are waiting to ambush them for their cattle. Comancheros are bandits that trade with the Comanches. It is said that killing a comanchero is the only murder one does not hang for. In reality comancheros were more traders than violent bandits as they are depicted in westerns. They did trade firearms to the Comanches in exchange for slaves and other things though.

            The drovers go into town for supplies. Rowdy discovers the mirror that Louise had slipped into his saddlebag. When the trading post clerk sees it he recognizes it as having belonged to a family that was slaughtered by comancheros. Rowdy is accused of being a comancheros and that upsets him because it’s a reputation one can never live down. He goes back to the comanchero camp to get Louise to explain that she gave him the mirror but he is captured. He hears that the comancheros plan to attack the flank of the drovers’ herd. They tie Rowdy up and then just leave him with the women as they go off to attack the herd. It seems stupid to leave him unguarded with people that don’t care if he escapes. Louise sets him free and she rides away with him on the back of his horse, which was strangely still where it had been when he was captured. Bain leads the drovers to where the comancheros are but then he confesses that he had led them into an ambush because had been holding his son. This was meant to be a distraction so the main body of comancheros could attack the herd. They manage to get to the herd ahead of the comancheros and ambush them, managing to kill at least twenty and send them into retreat. The town now love the drovers for killing comancheros and Louisa finds refuge.

            Louisa was played by Argentinean actor Linda Cristal, who was a star of the High Chaparral TV series. She was a movie star in Italy and Mexico and returned to Argentina in 1985 to star in the popular soap opera “Rossé”

            Rawhide was mildly entertaining but not enough for me to bother watching the second season.