| One of the most contentious pleasures enjoyed during the 19th century in England was a fondness for alcohol. During this era the serious individual and cultural problems wrought by drinking became unavoidable, but were still largely closeted and unmentioned. This atmosphere of denial is also reflected within much of the literature of the time: female characters in middle- or upper-class positions are not usually shown sharing the same vices as their lower-class counterparts. Drunkenness, especially among women, is most commonly associated with the absolute dregs of society. What I have established in this study is that these largely stereotyped figures are not the only women positioned as drunks within English literature---there are, in addition, largely unexplored and unique female drinkers: women with titles, status, and reputations at stake. In analyzing the presence of these generally ignored female characters---who I have classified as non-traditional female drunks---I show how they come to function as agents of social change. These characters are deliberately intended to epitomize different facets of social failings: the existence of middle-class domestic abuse; the pitiable state of home health-care in England; the crisis of the growing numbers of unmarried and unemployable women at the turn of the century; and, present in all the works, the extreme gender-based hypocrisy of a judgmental society. While excessive drinking by both men and women is shown as being destructive, female characters' drinking is consistently more culturally vilified.;In my examination of these characters in the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, and Leonard Merrick, I argue that by creating complex women who have a real indulgence in alcohol (and for some, a physical dependency upon it), these authors were confronting social standards of decorum, asserting that the realm of female alcoholism was not solely populated by lower-class women, and thereby articulating clear challenges to both gender and class boundaries in nineteenth-century British society. My analysis of these non-traditional females shows that they function not only as original and engaging literary characters, but also as calculated agents of social critique, social condemnation, and ultimately, social transformation. |
