Abstract
Drunkenness has long been a criterion of manliness: men keep their excesses secret from women; they describe their escape into a jovial male world in a coded language of euphemism and humour designed to shelter men’s pleasures and to keep women at bay. During the Romantic period a number of women novelists ceased to regard this secret world as a boyish indulgence, and spoke out against the damage that drunkenness caused in marriages and estates. Thus men and women developed very different approaches and tones of voice when speaking of men’s drunkenness, while the reality of drunkenness among women themselves was still almost unspoken, and the wry bitterness, the residue of years of defeat, such as that of Jean Rhys in the first epigraph to this chapter, was just beginning.1
‘But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.’
— Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1974)
‘He stalls above me like an elephant’
— Robert Lowell, “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage” (1959)
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Notes
See John W. Crowley, The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), for the beginnings of a study of the difference between male and female drinking as depicted in literature. George Crabbe in Hester, as we saw in Chapter 1, was an early observer of drunkenness among women.
The Rochester-Savile Letters, 1671–1680, ed. John Harold Wilson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1941), letter III, p. 33
cited in Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660–1750 ( Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984 ), p. 58
See also Carole Fabricant, ‘Rochester’s World of Imperfect Enjoyment’, JEGP 73 (1974), 348, for Rochester’s anxiety about impotence
In 1932 the psychiatrist Karen Homey asked, ‘Is it not really remarkable (we ask ourselves in amazement), when one considers the overwhelming mass of this transparent material, that so little recognition and attention are paid to the fact of men’s secret dread of women?’ (’The Dread of Woman’, in Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold Kelman [New York: W. W. Norton, 1967 ], p. 136 ).
Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 ), p. 140
Virginia Spencer Davidson, ‘Johnson’s Life of Savage: The Transformation of a Genre’, in Studies in Biography: Harvard Studies 8, ed. Daniel Aaron (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 57–72, noted in Chapter 2, examines Johnson’s interest in Savage’s self destruction as a tragic circularity, where this tragic hero experiences no recognition of his own responsibility.
Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (2 vols, 1858; reprinted New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 2, 328.
Canto 2, stanza CLXXIX, Don Juan, ed. Leslie Marchand (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1958 ), p. 99.
Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 169. In this chapter on Maginn, the editor of Frazer’s Magazine crony of Thackeray, and opponent of ‘Puff’, Moers cites Maginn’s epitaph: ‘A randy, bandy, brandy, no Dandy,/Rollicking jig of an Irishman!’
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Country Wife: Anatomies of Male Homosocial Desire’, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 49–66, argues (p. 50) ‘that the men’s heterosexual relationships in the play have as their raison d’etre an ultimate bonding between men; and that this bonding, if successfully achieved, is not detrimental to “masculinity” but definitive of it.’
Circe’ is her name in the homosocial community of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, where the manly drinking group, headed by the castrato, Jake, who may or may not be more manly than the non-drinker, Robert Cohn, is happiest without women. The happiness of men in groups is noted poignantly at the end of the fishing trip when Harris says ‘I’ve not had much fun since the war’ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), p. 129
Two opposing associations - of ‘manliness’ with healthy temperance and of ‘manliness’ with bellying up to the bar - conflict in twentieth-century American literature, as John W. Crowley demonstrates, with special reference to The Sun Also Rises, in The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 32–5. Crowley discusses the ironies of homosocial bonding and drink, pp. 57–62
See also Mark Spilka, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990 ).
Sedgwick’s work on homosocial groups is far more refined and subtle than early theories that alcoholism results from latent homosexuality. A. A. Brill, Lectures on Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 266, states this now outdated theory plainly: Under the influence of alcohol, one, as it were, ‘forgets his troubles’ or can realize one’s wildest wish-phantasies. In studying such cases we find that the patients invariably wish to run away from heterosexuality. Every chronic alcoholic studied by me either never attained genitality and object-finding or there was some noticeable weakness in his development which sooner or later led to a regression to the oral autoerotic phase. Some gave histories of bad experiences with women, unhappy marriages or love affairs for which they invariably blamed the women. Their excuse for excessive drinking is that they are lonesome and seek companionship in bar rooms or clubs. And, as is known, the homosexual element is glaringly displayed in such gatherings whether they are of the upper or lower strata of society
Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1945), p. 379, is even more reductive: ‘The unconscious impulses in alcoholics typically are not only oral but also homosexual in nature. It is only necessary to call to mind the numerous drinking customs to find confirmation of this fact.’
Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 ).
The Journals of Thomas Moore 1818–1841, ed. Peter Quennell (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1964), pp. 181–5.
The Early Poems of John Clare 1804–1822, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 2, 401–2.
J. W. & Anne Tibble, John Clare: A Life (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), pp. 48–51, 54–6, 66–70
For the accusations against him, see The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 65–7, where he writes, ‘I have often been accusd of being a drunkard & of being ungrateful towards friends & patrons by a set of meddling trumpery to whom I owe none.’
Some of these theories are set forth by Karl A. Menninger, ‘Alcohol Addiction’, Man Against Himself (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938 ), pp. 160–84.
Letter to John Scott, 11 June 1816, The Letters of William Wordsworth, ed. John Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 190–1, on Burns; to Basil Montagu, 29 July 1829, p. 239.
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 72–3,22 December 1801.
Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 101,15 June 1809.
For a full study of Finch’s place as a shadowy figure in eighteenth-century brightness, see Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine ( Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988 ), pp. 105–26.
Selected Poems of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Katharine M. Rogers (New York: Ungar, 1987), p. 44.
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (London and New York: Pandora, 1986), shares her outrage at the fates of many women novelists forced to scribble against time to support families abandoned by irresponsible men.
Patient Joe; Or the Newcastle Collier’, in Women Romantic Poets 1885–1832: An Anthology, ed. Jennifer Breen (London: Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1992), pp. 20–2. Breen’s anthology bears on its cover a reproduction of ‘Bacchante’, ‘copy after Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842)’, curiously promising a bacchanalian feminism, a promise undercut by this poem, More’s other temperance poem, and a number of other poems in the volume.
M. G. Jones, Hannah More (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 86–8, and 272–3, for a list of ‘Cheap Repository Tracts attributed to Hannah More’.
George Cruikshank, The Bottle (1847), a series of eight plates influenced by Hogarth’s Rake series, presents the melodramatic disintegration of a family
Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 124–41, shows how these narrative plates became tableaux for theatre. Cruikshank, himself a drunkard, after a long struggle with the bottle became a teetotaler.
Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, introd. Judith Phillips Stanton ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 ), p. 148.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans, ‘The Sceptic’, The Domestic Affections, The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy… ed. Donald H. Reiman ( New York: Garland Publishing, 1978 ), pp. 6–7.
Mellor’s thesis is expanded from different directions in ‘On Romanticism and Feminism’, in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor ( Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988 ), pp. 3–9
Mellor’s ‘Why Women Didn’t Like Romanticism: The Views of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley’, in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990 ), pp. 277–87
Mellor’s ‘A Criticism of Their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics’, in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 29–48, where Carol Gilligan’s idea of women’s distinctive ‘ethic of care’ characterizes the woman’s community of writing.
The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 79–80 and 132–66.
Ralph M. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951; reprinted Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp. 5–7, writes of Mary’s father, Edward: As his family grew larger, his expenses increased, and his inheritance dwindled. Gradually his temper grew morose, and he solaced himself by drinking heavily and tyrannizing over his docile wife.… When drunk, Wollstonecraft could shift abruptly from extravagant fondness to brutality, and his wife and children learned to be prepared for either extreme. Sometimes Mary was obliged to rush between her parents to protect her mother from injury. And nights when she feared an outburst from her father, she used to sleep on the landing outside her mother’s bedroom so that she could protect her from harm if Wollstonecraft flew into a rage…. [H]owever much anguish it may have cost her, her experience with her father did much to shape the strongest qualities of her character in later life. By suffering his tyranny and combating it, she learned an abiding hatred for tyranny of all sorts and a fearlessness in fighting it.
Ramona M. Asher, Women with Alcoholic Husbands: Ambivalence and the Trap of Codependency (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), observes in many case studies the wives’ gradual realization that their husbands had turned into hostile, impotent strangers, leading them to doubt their own worth as persons.
Tilottama Rajan, ‘Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney’, SIR 32 (Summer 1993), 149–76, describes the complex of narrative layers in Maria (160–71).
Jacqueline P. Wiseman, ‘The Malevolent Pendulum: Drunken and Sober Behavior of an Alcoholic as Perceived by his Wife’, The Other Half: Wives of Alcoholics and their Social-Psychological Situation (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 93–161; 170–2, cites interviews with wives about sex, anxiety, economic fears, and the contagion of drinking
Alcoholism Problems in Women and Children, ed. Milton Greenblatt and Marc A. Schuckit (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1976), pp. 19–20, mentions the anger of wives of alcoholics briefly.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985 ), pp. 116–17.
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, introduced by Eva Figes (London and New York: Pandora, 1986 ), p. 37.
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 ), pp. 30–9.
George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), ed. David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 350, describes the ‘crushed’ weakness of the wife brutalized by an alcoholic husband: ‘there was a darker shadow over her life than the dread of her husband - it was the shadow of self-despair.’
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ( New York: Penguin, 1979 ), p. 323.
Clara Lucas Balfour, ‘The Female Drunkard’, Glimpses of Real Life (Glasgow: Scottish Temperance League and London: Houston & Wright & W. Tweedie, 1859 ), pp. 5–85
See Sheila Shaw, ‘The Female Alcoholic in Victorian Fiction: George Eliot’s Unpoetic Heroine’, in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 171–9, for additional female alcoholics suffering from detailed delirium tremens and withdrawal symptoms.
Temperance Hymns and Songs for Public and Temperance Meetings, compiled by Revd E. Beardsall (Manchester: J. Brook & Co., 1844), p. 137.
D. G. Paine, Temperance Lays and Poems ( London: Paternoster Row, 1841 ), pp. 26–7.
Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, ed. John Clubbe (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 301–3. Notes record that Alfred Mynn (1807–61) was a ‘famous cricketer, then at the height of his career’.
John Clubbe, Victorian Forerunner: The Later Career of Thomas Hood (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), pp. 48–9,53–4.
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© 1999 Anya Taylor
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Taylor, A. (1999). Bacchus contra Venus: Alcoholic Husbands and their Wives. In: Bacchus in Romantic England. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377202_8
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