Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar: Katherine Brandt Sartain, English “A Devilish Indian Diamond: Empire, Emplotment, and Opiates in The Moonstone”

This paper will address both the explicit and implicit representations of addiction in The Moonstone as well as the existing ideologies and systems of power that inspired those representations and the larger discourses surrounding addiction. All this is to show how Collins reimagined Romantic conceptions of drug use for a Victorian audience. Important to note is how The Moonstone figuratively associates opium with the nefarious foreign influence of the Orient. The text abounds with references, both explicit and implied, to drugs and alcohol, particularly laudanum (a mixture of the two). More salient even than the clear references to substances and addiction to them are the subtler ways in which the novel utilizes and converses with broader themes of addiction and displays through its emplotment, production, and reception, along with its characterization and style, the cultural-historical factors that create these varying portrayals of addiction.

Katie Brandt Sartain holds an MA in English literature from SFSU (2017) and is currently a doctoral candidate (ABD) in critical English studies at UIC. She was chosen as an Institute for Humane Studies fellow for 2025, a HASTAC Scholar 2025-2026 cohort inductee, and was awarded an Honorable Mention for the NCSA Emerging Scholars prize. Her work has been published in Victorian Popular Fictions Journal. Her dissertation, Addictive Practices: Realism and Substance Use in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, focuses on the construction of the addicted subject in the nineteenth-century novel and how the conventions and form of the Victorian novel are reliant on themes of addiction.

The seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated paper. To request a copy of the paper ahead of time and/or for accessibility requests, please email huminst@uic.edu.