The Conflicting Poetics of Antiquity in De Quincey’s Autobiographical Works: Orestes, Oedipus and the Expression of Trauma

Abstract

Thomas De Quincey was a distinguished classicist who appropriated the Greek antique heritage in his works, both formally and thematically. Some of his texts are informed by rhetorical and oratorical models, as had often been the case for didactic essays from the early 17th century onwards in Britain. But De Quincey’s originality lies elsewhere, since this rhetoric, as an instrument ensuring measure and (self-)control, is at odds with his groundbreaking (and uncanny) resort to Greek tragic models (Sophocles and Euripides, in particular) in his autobiographical texts. He pioneered the use of the Greek tragic heritage as the expression of dysfunctional family relationships, personal emotional trouble and trauma. The figure of Orestes in The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and above all that of Oedipus which literally haunts his autobiographical works and even features in some of his essays, represent his own uncanny doubles―explicitly in the case of Orestes, and in a barely disguised way in that of Oedipus. This diverting, or even twisting, of the classical heritage for introspection purposes was quite unprecedented but is also deeply illuminating. Stylistically, thematically and ideologically, the “law of antagonism” that was the cornerstone of De Quincey’s conception of existence, also shapes his works, with a permanent tension between balance and control (achieved through classic rhetoric) and the emotional violence, and the threat of disintegration (expressed by the Greek tragic paradigms). The paper highlights the radically new use of the (fantasized) tragic figures of Orestes and Oedipus as autobiographical vehicles, showing how they serve as the filters through which the author revisits his painful childhood and youth, his disturbed relationship with his mother, and represents them reticently and obliquely.

Keywords

• Classical heritage
• autobiography
• rhetoric
• Greek tragedy
• Orestes
• Oedipus