ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology

ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology Spring 2018 Dr. Greg Fraser, Professor Department of English & Philosophy Printed on campus by UWG Publications and Printing. LIT TABLE OF CONTENTS Opium, Cocaine, and the Fall of an Empire: Drug.......................pg. 5 Addiction and Medical Outcry in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes by Cassarah Blackstock Living and Dy(lar)ing Under the “Poisoned Sky” in ........................pg. 12 Don DeLillo’s White Noise by Sydney Bollinger Depression and the Fairer Sex: “The Yellow Wallpaper”........................pg. 25 as a Reaction to Gendered Psychiatry by Kati Bowden Different Medicines, Different Results: Exploring........................pg. 38 Ways to Cure Racism in A Raisin in the Sun by Anya DeLaremore Sublime Madness: An Exploration of Anorexia, God,........................pg. 45 and Aesthetic Sublimity by Megan Fogg Trauma and the Suppression of Critique in Dalton ........................pg. 71 Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun by Jill Geyer “I think you guys are going to have to come up with ........................pg. 83 a lot of wonderful new lies”: Literature as Medicine in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five by Chyna Gowen Rewriting the Narrative: Cancer, Colonialism, and .....................pg. 95 Loss in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body by Tasha Hayes “Erroneous Deductions:” The Undermining of the......................pg. 105 Physician in Sherlock Holmes by Mary Lyndall Hunt The Feud with Freud: Mocking Psychiatry in Lolita........................pg. 116 by Trevor Johnson Curing the Sentimental Novel: Literary Illness in Jane ......................pg. 126 Austen’s Sense and Sensibility by Keri Jones Exploring Health Care and Social Injustice in Toni ......................pg. 138 Morrison’s Song of Solomon by Tamaya Williams Rx Opium, Cocaine, and the Fall of an Empire: Drug Addiction and Medical Outcry in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Cassarah Blackstock INTRODUCTION eaders of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes are hardly clue- Rless to the detective’s somewhat odd behavior and almost aloof way of speaking to others, particularly his roommate and friend, Dr. John Watson. The stories are mostly written from Watson’s point of view, with four or five exceptions. In “A Study in Scarlet,” we are given a lengthy view of Watson’s background as a doctor, which includes graduating from the University of London in 1878. Watson, having just returned from the Afghans, is search- ing for lodgings and, when an old friend says he might know someone, becomes intrigued. The friend, known only as Stamford, tells Watson that Holmes is “a little queer in his ideas” and that “His studies are very desul- tory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge” (Doyle 16). Sherlock’s personality, however, is not his only flaw—the bril- liant detective is also addicted to cocaine and morphine, which Britain was importing from Turkey. Watson, being both friend and doctor to Holmes, sees the effect that these drugs have on the detective and makes it obvious that he does not approve. If Holmes’s mind and intellect are his strengths, the drug addiction is Holmes’s weakness—one that he almost overcomes, but ultimately doesn’t. We are first introduced to the detective’s weakness inThe Sign of the Four. Holmes’s “vice” is not explicitly stated, but it is shown through Watson’s observation of him as he “[takes] his bottle from the corner of the mantle- piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.” Disgusted, Watson attempts to make Sherlock see reason, “not only as one comrade to Senior Seminar, Spring 2018 5 Cassarah Blackstock another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.” Watson sees Holmes as both a friend and a patient, someone for whom he feels responsible. In a time when British colonialism was at the start of its decline, it was not uncommon for men of a certain social standing to partake of drugs such as cocaine and opium. During the mid-1880s, cocaine was considered a medicinal miracle, and in his essay “Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four,” Christopher Keep states that “Cocaine’s medical popularity had its corollary in the commercial sector: the alkaloid was added to wines, sher- ries, ports, teas, lozenges, and soda drinks—Coca Cola included cocaine as an active ingredient until 1903.” Keep goes on to note that “British medical journals were overflowing in their praise of cocaine’s medicinal properties, and Conan Doyle, himself a practicing physician at the time, is also known to have experimented with the drug” (Keep 209). Doyle’s own experience with cocaine is perhaps what fueled his desire to write about a detective who also enjoys the narcotic for the effects on his mind and ner- vous system—which is not only euphoric but also offers a reprieve from the constant barrage of thoughts that plague him. The drug, in Holmes’s view, prevents him from stagnating. It is clear that The Sign of the Four is not the first time that Watson has witnessed Holmes use the drug, though it is the first time for readers of the series. While Holmes does not see an issue with taking the drug, Watson sees it as an addiction and sets out to keep Holmes from damaging his mind. Addiction, however, was not something that the Victorians considered for several decades. In her essay “Victorian Opium Eating: Responses to Opiate Use in Nineteen-Century England,” Virginia Berridge opens with the statement that “Addiction was not seen as a pressing social problem in England, nor did it become a matter of public policy until 1916” (437)— right at the height of Sherlock Holmes’s popularity and publication. Even so, as England’s colonization of India grew, so too did the number of opiates being exported primarily to the Orient, specifically China. In his essay, Christopher Keep states that “opium was a major export commodity for Britain’s largest colony, India, and the British government was very sensi- tive to the profits that could be realized through the sale of the drug. The single largest market for opium and its derivatives was China” (Keep 207). According to Keep, China, which distrusted Britain, attempted to limit the number of opiates entering its country, which lead to the Opium Wars, the first of which lasted from 1839 to 1842 and the second of which ran from 1856-58. Keep argues that there is also a homology between Britain and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Sherlock’s dependence on cocaine and morphine. He states that “Just as the nation struggles with a foreign conspiracy that has 6 Senior Seminar, Spring 2018 Cassarah Blackstock been belatedly released into its blood stream by the events of 1857, so too Holmes is represented as dangerously ‘occupied’ by a drug with distinct orientalist overtones, one which threatens his physical health as surely as the Mutiny threatened the health of the empire” (Keep 208). After the Mutiny, Britain’s hold became tenuous and, after WWII, it faltered alto- gether, with lack of funds to keep what remaining colonies it had. During Britain’s colonization of Africa and India, however, there was a fear of the “other,” which Susan Canon Harris discusses in her essay “Pathological Possibilities: Contagion and Empire in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes,” which focuses on Holmes’s poisoning in “The Dying Detective.” Harris states that when “Watson visits Holmes’s sickroom he finds the tool Culverton Smith intended to use to infect Holmes—an ivory box concealing a spring like ‘a viper’s tooth,’ and the disease becomes both a poison and a weapon, transmitted by this device identified with Africa (ivory) and Asia (home of the Indian swamp adder)” (448). Perhaps then, this is the true crux of Sherlock’s addiction. If Sherlock represents a “sick” England—an England afraid of stagnation yet unwilling to accept any other means of stimulation—then Dr. Watson is the means to restore health by rehabilitating his friend, weaning him off the very substance that—while euphoric—offers nothing but ill effects down the line. This is the focus of this essay: to observe not just Holmes’s addiction but how Watson, as a doctor, responds to it, and what Doyle hopes to convey with this doctor-patient relationship. THE ADDICTION Sherlock’s addiction is one that causes consternation in his friend. Yet Sher- lock doesn’t seem to care at all about the ill effects that the drug has on him. On the opening page of The Sign of Four, Watson asks Holmes to consider the long-term effects od his drug use, and while he expects Holmes to be angry with him, Holmes is not. Holmes’s answer is that “[His] mind rebels against stagnation. [He] can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But [he abhors] the dull routine of existence. [He craves] mental exaltation” (Doyle 89-90). Sherlock’s mind, which he takes great pride in, is the equivalency of the British Empire, in that the Empire was interested in bringing in the exotic spices and drugs to stimulate Britain’s subjects. Like Sherlock’s craving for puzzles which is abated only with a foreign substance, so too did the Empire long to expand its outside horizons and settled for exotic drugs and spices from India, Africa, and Turkey. While they had these colonies—before the mutinies and Britain’s loss of control and funds for them—Britain sought total control over them, just as Sherlock seeks control over the drugs he puts into his body. Despite his brilliance, however, Sherlock’s personality seems detrimental, often described as “eccentric” and Senior Seminar, Spring 2018 7 Cassarah Blackstock Bohemian, which the University of Glasgow’s Douglas Small, in his essay titled “Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine: A 7% Solution for Modern Profes- sionalism” argues “demonstrates his ‘counter-culture’ status [.

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