Boucher, Abigail (2022). “Dabbling in Delicate Drugs”: Aristocracy, Darwinism, and Substance Abuse in M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 142 , pp. 65-84.
Abstract
Shiel’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Purple Cloud (1901), offers Darwinian commentary on the suitability of upper-class socio-political rule, depicting the aristocracy’s struggles for basic survival despite their privilege and supposedly superior breeding. Through characters’ recreational use of narcotics, Shiel interrogates “survival of the fittest,” adaptability, sexual selection, and hierarchies in the animal world as they are perverted by human class structures. For Shiel, class is a product of luck or chance: aristocracy largely results from the right bodies existing in the right environment at the right time. This discussion triangulates Shiel’s thorny points of substance abuse, survival, and class and, in that triangulation, finds a more cohesive if pessimistic argument regarding the role of luck in the origins and future of humanity, and in the class structures that organize society.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.2022.0008 |
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Divisions: | College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities ?? 53981500Jl ?? College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > English Languages and Applied Linguistics College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Centre for Health and Society |
Additional Information: | Copyright © 2022 by the Ohio State University. This is an accepted manuscript of an article published in Victorians: a Journal of Culture and Literature. The published version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.2022.0008 |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Shiel,The Purple Cloud,Substance Abuse,long Nineteenth Century,post-apocalyptic fiction,class studies,Darwinism,evolution,aristocracy,Medicine and science in literature,addiction,General Arts and Humanities,Literature and Literary Theory,General Arts and Humanities,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) |
Publication ISSN: | 2475-6741 |
Last Modified: | 01 Aug 2024 07:32 |
Date Deposited: | 08 Dec 2022 13:56 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
https://muse.jh ... /article/872830
(Publisher URL) |
PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2022-12-14 |
Accepted Date: | 2022-11-14 |
Authors: |
Boucher, Abigail
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