"Monstrous craving" : corporeal hybridity, transgressive desire, and the female morphine addict in Fin-de-siècle visual culture

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, concerned with a rise in women who opposed contemporaneous misogynist societal norms, the Western male establishment began, what Bram Dijkstra argues, an all-encompassing “cultural war on woman.” During this turbulent time of industrialisation and urbanisation, a ubiquitous societal increase in literacy rates, mass media, literature, and artistic production supported the sexist slander, ridicule, and negation of women who sought emancipation and freedom from pervasive restrictive, depressing, and prosaic bourgeois domestic roles. Vilified as hysterics, substance abuse addicts, and nymphomaniacs, perhaps no other figure personified fin-desiecle angst as well as the female morphine addict. Consequently, literary figures, physicians, the press, and artists fanatically invented the morphinomane. This dissertation aims to reveal why symbolism of addiction, madness, misogyny, (mental) illness, and death frequently exist on the same picture plane in turn-of-the-century depictions of the morphinomane, how these images were contemporaneously received, and why artists felt compelled to paint them. In examining these pictures, I have leant heavily on the work of gender theorists such as Dijkstra, Jan Matlock, and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, all of whom propose that the fin-de-siecle female body was a socially constructed site of displaced fear. I aim to further their discourse by employing different methodological devices, including iconography and semiotics, to show that the body of the morphinomane functioned as a complex site of meaning – encompassing, amongst other attributes, gynophobia and a Foucauldian power differential.