Fearful Spaces: Thomas De Quincey’s Sino-Anginophobia

Abstract

From his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater to his later political essays on China Question dating from 1840s and 1850s to his revised and expanded Confessions of 1856, orientalist rhetoric of Thomas De Quincey reveals persistent vacillation between virulent John Bullism and an anxious, indeed fearful, entrancement with Orient and its powers of possession and imaginative expansion. John Barrell has argued that De Quincey's writing seems entirely between these modes, which he glosses as repudiation and identification (155), yet I will suggest that barrier of separation is rather more permeable. The Orient in its unfathomable otherness and intimate familiarity leaves De Quincey, in his own words, loathing and fascinated (Confessions 321, emphasis added). The apparent inseparability of these emotions is captured most vividly in his description of his oriental dreams, which, as he notes, filled me always with such amazement at monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed for while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came reflux of feeling that swallowed up astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in and abomination of what I saw (Confessions 321). For De Quincey, Orient, whether as inner or outer reality, is ultimate complexio oppositorum; it elicits astonishment and hatred simultaneously, one emotion relying on other to give it shape. The Orient as concept thus appears to take upon itself, as its nature, these same bifurcations and paradoxes. (1) It is surprising therefore that modern criticism has tended to focus almost exclusively on extreme manifestations of De Quincey's emotional responses--the bipolarities--rather than fluxes and refluxes, inherent interweaving or hybridity, of his orientalist rhetoric. Like Barrell, for example, Charles Rzepka adroitly extracts [t]he Tory jingoism, crude orientalism, and imperialist apologetics from De Quincey's political writings and sets them at distance not only from narrative of opium addiction but also from the portrait of artist commonly derived from his confessional works--the portrait, that is, of bullied and humiliated ... child, [who] declares his sympathy with pariahs and scapegoats of all lands (38). What emerges thus is image of divided body of writing and of divisions rooted specifically in childhood trauma. As Barrell maintains, for De Quincey the worst of oriental horrors can be represented only by being connected with ... personal traumas (149). More recent analyses of De Quincey's oriental horrors have tended to adopt Barrell's psychoanalytic rhetoric and methodology, with traumatic bewilderment (Faflak 183) of childhood becoming predominant and often exclusive lens through which adult fear is read. Dianne Simmons, for example, sets out in The Narcissism of Empire to establish link between [De Quincey's] childhood losses ... his opium use, and ... his project of demonstrating sub-human nature of Chinese (29). Her conclusion, that De Quincey relives in his Opium War essays the fury of child at cold, withholding omnipotence of parent (43), reiterates Rzepka's account of author's displaced Oedipal struggle (40). Even where analytical focus ostensibly transcends Freudian narrative of psychic trauma, as in Joel Black's illuminating engagement with geopolitics of nineteenth-century temperance movements, De Quincey's anti-Chinese animus (159) is as a classic instance of projection ... screening [his] own masochistic abuse (158). Such conclusion--what Daniel Sanjiv Roberts characterizes as worrying tendency in De Quincey studies to read broader cultural phenomena as psychological aberrations (42)--in effect neutralizes threat that Orient, and specifically China, appears to pose for De Quincey by reinterpreting and displacing it elsewhere. Fear becomes neurotic, even pathological, response to unresolved psychic trauma; it serves no other purpose than to insulate self by projecting its energies, what Freud characterizes as its repressed instinctual impulses (Pleasure Principle 14), onto others. …