Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

these women carries the spirit of the medusa: “to life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries, it does not hold back, it makes possible.”⁶⁴

However, not all female drug literature resonates this alacrity and cheerfulness about addiction. Women who have unsuspectingly found themselves addicts, at the hands of ignorant medical doctors or their own naïveté, tell a different story. Woman’s “need” of medication, the concept and expectation of the medicated feminine, is positioned within similar binaries of control—that is, “strength” (male)–“weakness” (female). Kendall alluded to the “reasoning” behind this:

Throughout recent history, women have been thought to need “special protection” and regarded as less able to bear pain and psychic discomfort, whether because of “women’s diseases” and “neurasthenia,” as in the Victorian era, or the modern-day stresses of running a busy household, competing in a male-dominated workforce, or attempting to conform to society’s slender, youthful ideal.⁶⁵

Huxley’s Linda in Brave New World exemplifies the typical societal acceptance of the provision of licit drugs for women who need to be “civilized.” However, female drug literature that “deals” with this form of licit/medicated addiction does not portray the female characters with the passivity of Linda, but with resoluteness, anger, and subversion. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was described by Palmer and Horowitz as a “fairly typical nineteenth century medical junkie. Opiated medicines, laudanum and morphine, were routinely prescribed by her doctors during several long illnesses.”⁶⁶ The following excerpt from her poem “A True Dream,” written in 1833, is purported to describe an opium dream she experienced:

I had not an evil end in view,
Tho’ I trod the evil way;
And why I practised the magic art,
My dream it did not say.