SOURCE: Wallen, Martin. “Body Linguistics in Schreber's Memoirs and De Quincey's Confessions.” Mosaic 24 (spring 1991): 93-108.

In the following essay, Wallen discusses Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater as “straightforward and careful descriptions of real experiences.”

Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs was written by a man confined for three years to a padded cell, and Thomas De Quincey's Confessions by an opium addict. Neither text comfortably belongs in the literary category into which it has been fitted; as a result, instead of being regarded as authentic accounts of genuine personal experience, Memoirs is seen as a document of psychosis and De Quincey's Confessions is seen as the product of drug-induced delirium. Thus when Margaret Ganz compares the Memoirs to the autobiographies of Wordsworth, Carlyle and Mill, she concludes that whereas these British writers' “consciousness of reality harnesses imagination and intellect sufficiently to...