“I have not a word about my own sensations”: Intoxication, Trauma and Imperialism in The Moonstone

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between intoxication, trauma, and imperialism in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, exploring how altered states of consciousness recuperate and repress the shameful secrets of colonial history. Throughout the novel, the characters attempt to explicate the violence of empire by retracing the past through textual fragments, such as journals, letters, and diary-entries. However, in doing so, they succumb to quasi-narcotic states of unconscious cerebration, psychic repression, and automatic action. As such, the process of detection becomes a painful, and even traumatic, experience in which psychical information is forgotten, yet never erased. Thus, while the novel attempts to formulate a critique of the British Empire, its critical voice remains regulated by the psychosomatic logic at work, simultaneously concealing and revealing the traumas of colonial dispossession. Drawing upon the work of Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Jill Matus, and other contemporary trauma theorists, as well as Victorian theories of addiction, unconscious memory, and psychic shock, this article suggests that while Collins frames the imperial project as both “trauma” and “intoxication,” demonstrating how political violence creates a disturbance in memory and consciousness, the novel occupies an ideologically ambivalent space, unable to assimilate fully the horrors of British imperialism.