Commodification and Personal Value in the Moonstone and the Picture of Dorian Gray - Essay Example

The relationship between commodification and personal value in the Moonstone and the Picture of Dorian Gray The war with China has begun, and already several hundred Chinese have been murdered by our cruisers, because the government of China will not allow us to poison its subjects; in which poisoning, it appears, we have obtained a vested right. An expedition is fitting out at Plymouth to “destroy Canton if necessary”; and Pekin also, it appears, if the Emperor “does not do us justice”. Was there ever such an atrocious proceeding? It is enough to raise up all Asia to “do justice” on the English, for their centuries of crime, misrule and oppression in the East (Darling 1840 cited in Morgan 2000, 745). “Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats” (Priestly 1949 cited in Smith 2005, 111). The early history of detective fiction is saturated with narcotic drugs. Wilkie Collins was a laudanum addict, and opium circulates through The Moonstone. However, not only there. The constellated concerns of opium, subjectivity, empire, and the Gothic recur frequently in texts throughout the nineteenth century, from Wilkie Collins and Dickens to Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray. Just as early detective fiction is deeply, perhaps constitutively, steeped in drugs, it is also associated with empire, and this connection is constitutive. In this fiction, crime is the dark side of conquest and imperial rule returning to pollute the metropolitan homeland. Exactly these fears and uncertainties about the human self and its coherence in the 1890s are reflected in Oscar Wilde’s treatment of the double theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray, though from a markedly different perspective. Wilde uses the tale of a beautiful young man who is granted his wish to remain young while his alter ego, a portrait, ages, to explore ideas about art and life. The novella derives from Wilde’s interest and commitment to the Aestheticism of Walter Pater and Decadence of Baudelaire and Huysman. The innocence of Gray is framed alongside the morality of the tormented artist, Basil Hallward, who paints the portrait and is clearly in love with its subject, and the irresistibly cynical dandy, Lord Henry Wooton, who teaches Gray that the only proper object in life is the pursuit of beauty. As Gray succumbs to the temptations supplied by Wooton, he is led into a life of decadence, an immorality the signs of which mark his portrait but not his person. On this downward slope of decadence Dorian is able to continue his life of revelry without revealing his murderous deed, but is now driven by another force, his hunger for opium. His name bears significance again here, especially when a woman in the opium den identifies him as "Prince Charming," and Sybils brother nearly destroys him because of that revelation. The woman also notes that "Prince Charming" made her what she is. Back in polite society, Dorian enters a conversation where Lord Henry toys with the idea of rechristening everything and everyone with new names. Dorian objects to Lord Henrys reminder that he was once christened "Prince Charming". Interestingly, the next comment touches upon an occult practice that of controlling a person with pins. Near the end of the novel, Dorians acknowledgment that he is tired of his name implies that he is tired of himself. Shocked by his own cruelty and enraged by the power of the portrait, Gray finally dies in an attempt to destroy it. Much of the novella’s power resides in Wilde’s depiction of the hypocrisies of Victorian society as wealth and status cloak vice and immorality, as well as the fatalistic logic of human sin. The Moonstone is a novel that is both filled with opium and fixated on its connection with treasure from India: “Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond. … Who ever heard the like of it—in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution?” (Wilkie cited in Sutherland 2000, 204) Collinss novel begins by invoking both the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the presentation to Victoria of the legendary Koh-i-Noor diamond that had been won as booty in the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1848–49. “Imagine then,” writes a critic, Nunokawa Jeff, “after this inaugural of formal imperial authority, the provocation of a tale mired in bloodshed for which an English army officer, not a native soldier, is culpable. Imagine, too, the further provocation of linking that culpability to the great matriarch herself, as the final paragraph of Collins Preface explicitly does”. Invasion from the colonies took a variety of forms in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British writing, like “the rage for Chinoiserie in fashionable decor, Chinese gardens on the best estates”, or “Byron and Southeys Oriental Tales on the bookshelves of those in the know” (McCollister 1995, 17). A sinister form of invasion was the persistent mythology of colonial acquisition as a disease or drug infecting the metropolis. Ezra Jennings, the English opium-eater of The Moonstone, is dying of a disease that is implicitly attributed to “the mixture of some foreign race in his English blood” (Clausson 2003, 339). In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial invasion literally took the form of Oriental drugs that disrupted metropolitan life by overstimulating or debilitating it, by causing its citizens either to run amok or to become immobilized. Detective fictions are primary evidence for such anxiety of empire. English opium-smokers were even Orientalized by narcotic use. Thus, drugs in detective fiction are obvious symptoms of this invasion from the colonies, and yet the connection between the drugs and imperial adventure is haphazard. Drug-taking is a Western, not an Eastern phenomenon (Morgan 2000, 745): the opium in The Moonstone is firmly located within the context of Western medicine. Detective fiction, then, begins high on drugs and fully informed by imperial anxiety. By the 1920s, these associations have disappeared. Is there a British crime in the nineteenth century that could be imagined to impose such constraints on a new branch of fiction, so much so that it could even be considered the “crime” of detective fiction? Ashish Roy, remember, reads Collinss preface to The Moonstone as a confession of English culpability (Jolly 2002, 19). If we choose to understand detective fiction as a collective Anglo-Saxon fantasy formed in reaction to some originating event, the Anglo-Chinese Opium War(s) of 1839 to 1860 would be the prime suspect. After “the great debriefing that has accompanied the dismantling of the British empire,” Clausson Nils writes, the opium wars are left as “the only episode in imperial history that is generally seen as unambiguously wicked”. At the time, William Gladstone said of them that “a war more unjust in its origins, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and have not read of” (cited in Adams 2001, 827). In a letter to the American Congress in 1840, Caleb Cushing, the U. S.commissioner to China, described it as a war motivated by “base cupidity,” which aimed “to coerce the Chinese by force of arms to submit to be poisoned” (Childers 1998, 761). The war was fought to protect the British trade in opium, which was grown in India and sold in China, because there was no other way for England to balance its trade payments except by creating a population of addicts and then catering to their desire. “The occasion of this outbreak,” Karl Marx wrote in 1853, “has unquestionably been afforded by the English cannon forcing upon China that soporific drug called opium” (Childers 1998, 765). England imported enormous amounts of tea from China, for by the nineteenth century tea had become Englands drug of choice, relieving the British of the necessity of drinking ale in the morning. “What a curious thing it was,” Leigh Hunt wrote, “that all of a sudden the remotest nation of the East, otherwise unknown, and foreign to all our habits, should convey to us a domestic custom which changed the face of our morning refreshments” (cited in Seagroatt 1998, 741). By the early 1800s, the new drink had become so popular that annual consumption amounted to 12,000,000 pounds. Samuel Johnson confessed that he was a “hardened and shameless Tea-drinker … whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the Midnight, and with Tea welcomes the morning” (cited in Helsinger 2006, 901). The English dependence on Chinese products was burlesqued in a letter that Commissioner Lin Tse-Hsu wrote to Queen Victoria during the hostilities: he threatened that “by cutting off the export of tea and rhubarb [the Emperor] … could deprive his enemies of their principal source of pleasure and their only relief from constipation” (Sutherland 2000, 50). Rhubarb and opium are rhyming commodities, like opium and tea, but, unlike rhubarb, opium slows intestinal action and is one of the principal antidiarrheals in the Western pharmacopia. The solution was simple, John Keay writes in his history of the East India Company: “Redirect the Indian surplus to finance the China deficit”. Medical historians Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards put it another way: England had perfected the “technique of growing opium in India and disowning it in China” (cited in Clausson 2003, 341). The opium trade with China was a source of great individual fortunes and generated profits enough to pay a substantial part of the cost of administering Englands Indian empire. As Marx wrote in a New York Tribune editorial in 1858, “The Indian finances of the British Government have, in fact, been made to depend not only on the opium trade with China, but on the contraband character of that trade” (cited in Smith 2005, 112). Figures differ as to the profitability of this trade once called “the largest commerce of the time in any single commodity,” but in 1838 the value of opium sold in China was estimated as the government of Indias third largest source of revenue (McCollister 1995, 19). In its conquest of India between 1729 and 1800, Britain acquired vast poppy fields in Bengal. In 1773, Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, took over a limited Indian opium trade and expanded it greatly: Hastings actually initiated the Anglo-Chinese opium trade by switching a consignment to Canton when war with the Dutch temporarily closed the market for opium in their East Indian colonies. By the time the company was investigated by the Crown and its monopoly ended in 1833, this operation had become too profitable to be shut down. Thereafter, the opium traffic was run as a British government enterprise, and this included raising and harvesting the crop, preparing the opium, licensing the smuggling operations, and laying out necessary bribes in China (Helsinger 2006, 904). When the Chinese government tried to enforce its prohibition against opium smuggling, Britain treated this as a provocation and declared war against a militarily enfeebled power. In addition to the human cost of the addiction, the military cost to the Chinese was extremely high: in the Battle of Chapu, for example, the casualties were 1,200 to 1,500 Chinese and 9 British (ibid.). The wars were fought over opium, but that fact was rarely mentioned in the attendant discourse of war and diplomacy; the Treaty of Nanking that ended the first Opium War does not even mention the drug. According to Nathan Allen, the real cause of all these troubles—the opium trade—was as much as possible kept out of view. … Men who had so great interests at stake, whose characters also were implicated, would of course employ the best talents and all possible means that money could command—writers, attorneys, and orators, to make the “worse appear the better cause” (cited in Adams 2001, 830) Officially, the war was fought against the kowtow, fought, as Marx phrased it, for “an alleged infringement of the fanciful code of diplomatic etiquette” (cited in Adams 2001, 832). The demand that free-born Englishmen prostrate themselves to the Emperor of China as a condition of doing trade with him was declared insupportable, a dire violation of the national character. De Quincey declared that if Lord Amherst had made kowtow, “the next thing would have been a requisition from the English Factory of beautiful English women, according to a fixed description, as annual presents to the Emperor” (for more details see Sutherland 2000). Lord Amherst refused to kowtow, feeling sure that the Chinese saw “that superiority which Englishmen, wherever they go, cannot conceal”. The Opium Wars were supposedly fought to repudiate the Chinese assumption of cultural superiority. The kowtow alibi may have been put in place by the British to obscure the immorality of the opium trade, but it was more a sign of similarity than otherness between the two cultures: it betokened a recognition that China had preempted the Manichean epistemology of the West just as the West was completing its own racist global project. By referring to all Westerners indiscriminately as “barbarians,” the Chinese mocked Britains own linguistic practices: “In various [Chinese] documents the Western barbarians are described as cunning and malicious, impatient and without understanding of values, inconstant, insatiable, avaricious, thinking only of profit and … inscrutable” (Sutherland 2000, 85). The images of immigrant Chinese and opium dens in Victorian fiction should have been at least double-edged, since a vocal temperance opposition in England made it clear at the time that the English were contaminating the Chinese, not the other way around. Nevertheless, in a new genre of popular fiction, China invaded England through the East End opium den and proceeded to turn its citizens into addicts. The imperial adventure was inverted, and the Anglo-Chinese opium wars were written in reverse in a corner of London. “This Chinese control of Britain would be anxiety-inducing enough,” Jolly Roslyn writes, “even if it were limited to the marginalized population of the East End”. But in fact the opium masters influence extends horizontally beyond the East End to more central districts of London and vertically all the way to the uppermost echelons of the empire. Besides attracting “lords and dukes and even princes and kings, ” one opium master claims to have been visited by no less than the Prince of Wales himself, who allegedly was moved to invite the master and his wife to come directly to the palace to “smokee pipe wi me” (see Seagroatt 2005, 114). Tea and opium were an imperial binary, a trade-off. Both are drugs but one was “civilized” and “mild”, the other barbaric and strong. Both were identified with their consumers rather than their producers, so that opium that was British-produced and illicitly sold to China soon became the demonic Chinese product par excellence, and tea, which was Chinese and sold to the English, very soon came to constitute Britishness itself (ibid.). Unlike the majority of his countrymen, John Quincy Adams felt that the fuss about opium was a distraction in a civilizing mission against China that the West was bound to carry out one day or other. He was aware of another resonance between opium and tea and between the two Indian empires, the one in the east and the one in the west. In China, chests of opium were dumped into Canton harbor and become the occasion of the first Opium War. In the American colonies, chests of tea were dumped into Boston harbor and become the signal of the American War of Independence (McCollister 1995, 20). In the subsequent history of detective fiction, one of the first elements to undergo censorship was the connection between crime and empire. When detective fiction became a genre system in the 1920s, a relatively tight province of writing under official control, rules for writing produced by authors like S. S. Van Dine and authors organizations like the Detective Club dictated that this link could never again be mentioned: never again might the criminal be a gigantic ourang-outang, nor might three Indians in London dog the steps of the Imperialist plunderers. Well before this “golden age” of detective fiction, however, even The Moonstone only teased the reader with an imperial solution. According to one recent critic, “to make the point absolutely clear that any political motives in this novel are to be understood as a disguise for something else, the culprits corpse is discovered in the disguise of a dark-skinned East Indian sailor, only to be unmasked by the police for the [white, Western] philanderer he is” (Nunokawa 1996, 358). Drugs were suppressed in the text of detective fiction as they had been in the text of empire. It is fitting that opium should be present in The Moonstone but unconnected to the meaning of the crime. Johanna Smith points out a moment in the novel when Rachel Verinder puts “the Indian diamond in the Indian cabinet, for the purpose of permitting two beautiful native productions to admire each other,” but he wisely suggests that the two native productions locked in mutual support are actually the diamond and opium: opium is the only commodity in the imperial traffic that can justify the novels hyperbole. In Dorian Gray, the drugs are in a “large Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony, and inlaid with ivory and blue lapis” in a “Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought” (Wilde 1998). Opium can carry the weight of both commodities, since it really was the source of fabulous wealth, and Elizabeth Helsinger suggests that the novels fabulous gem is a screen for opium dreams: “When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable … as the heavens themselves”. In The Moonstone, Franklin Blake is not only acquitted of the theft of the diamond but also absolved of smoking opium. In one set of rules for detective fiction by Ronald Knox, entitled “A Detective Story Decalogue,” the fifth commandment reads “No Chinaman must figure in the story”. Monsignor Knox (who also wrote detective stories) then told us that he did not know why this should be: “I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, you had best put it down at once; it is bad” (cited in Seagroatt 1998, 744). In the reformulated genre, guilt became so subtle and unmarked as to be virtually indistinguishable from innocence. The purpose of the ongoing detective story would be to mystify guilt, to make it exquisitely fine and intricate, hard to detect, painstakingly rarified. But the guilt of smuggling opium and then covering that crime with a declaration of war is not at all hard to detect, except in the actual history of AngloChinese relations. The literary crimes of the detective novel would move as far as possible from crimes of empire and crimes of class. WORKS CITED Adams, James Eli. "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century." 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