Under the influence: Literature, drugs, and modernity in France (1870--1914)
Abstract
This dissertation examines fictional representations of drugs and addiction in France between 1870 and 1914. Specifically, it attempts to elucidate the cultural and literary influences working on and through narratives of addiction concerning morphine and ether, two substances with known medical applications whose recreational use increases during the era. The literary corpus surrounding these drugs includes numerous popular texts as well as the fiction of a major decadent author and journalist, Jean Lorrain. Arising from naturalist and decadent literary trends and informed by contemporary discourses in medicine and science, these texts help complete the picture of the literary and cultural imaginary of the fin de siècle and Belle Epoque. As I argue, morphine, ether, and the associated problem of addiction serve as ideal narrative vehicles for the anxieties of an era of scientific progress and pessimism that begins with the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and ends with the outbreak of World War I. In describing the influence of drugs on individuals and society, these stories consistently invoke scientifically-based notions of influence related to contagion, heredity, and degeneration, all of which subtend a common vision of France as a nation in decline. I attempt to show how the addiction narrative of this period conveys a broader narrative of societal illness and deterioration according to both naturalist and decadent ideologies. These texts illuminate the complex affiliations of science and literature as well as the wider repercussions of nineteenth-century ideas of contagion. The latter inform a modern notion of subjectivity apparent not only in the naturalist and decadent fiction of the era, but also in the surrealist endeavors that would inherit from them.
Subject Area
Romance literature
Recommended Citation
Laura Spagnoli,
"Under the influence: Literature, drugs, and modernity in France (1870--1914)"
(January 1, 2002).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3054998.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3054998
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