A Study in Charlotte

Because of Charlotte’s addiction, drugs are found at multiple points in the story. They symbolize a loss of self-control and relate to the theme of Mind and Heart. As brilliant as Charlotte’s mind is, it can be either her greatest resource or her greatest weakness. She lacks the ability to turn off her thoughts. Since she has been trained from childhood to ignore emotion and focus intensely on observing everything around her, she has lost the ability to tune things out. At one point, she tells James, “I was too soft on the inside, you see. No exoskeleton. I felt everything, and still everything bored me. I was like…like a radio playing five stations at once, all of them static” (251).

When her boredom became too acute, she used cocaine as a stimulant, and when her thoughts raced too wildly or conjured painful memories, she used narcotics to calm herself. Heroin was initially her drug of choice until she switched to oxycodone, which allowed her to fall prey to Dobson, setting Bryony’s criminal plans in motion. Drugs and other chemicals also factor into the novel as plot devices. Dobson is poisoned with arsenic and snake venom.