5. 5
The Rhetoric of Addiction
From Victorian Novels to AA
Robyn R. Warhol
The goal of this chapter is to explore the intersections among narration, subjectivity, identity, and addiction to alcohol in canonical mid-Victorian Wction and in the discourse of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I'm interested in continuities and discontinuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of alcoholism in and through narrative, and in the imbrication of rhetoric and recovery in British and American culture. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this volume, I want to emphasize that I will not be making a traditionally "historical" argument here, in the sense that I will not argue for a cause-and-effect relationship between the models of addiction and recovery to be found in Victorian novels and in AA literature. I am interested instead in identifying the structures of the stories of alcoholism these texts present to the twenty-Wrst-century reader. Furthermore, as a literary critic who focuses on narrative structure, I do not approach the stories of alcoholics in novels or in AA's books as if they were the biographies of "real people": I try to remain actively aware that the "alcoholics" I am writing about are Wgures created in and by texts. I focus particularly on canonical Victorian novels because the stories they tell have been so widely circulated for the past century and a half, playing a part in shaping cultural attitudes toward addiction. My argument proceeds from the belief that the narrative forms framing alcoholism and recovery in these texts influence contemporary ideas of what addiction is and how it operates. It is no coincidence that my chapter's title echoes Wayne Booth's classic analysis of narrative perspective, The Rhetoric of Fiction, because like that venerable literary formalist, I will end up arguing that just about everything—specifically beliefs and values, including and especially our understanding of identity and recovery—depends on (narrative) point of view.
As Helena Michie and I have argued in a recent essay called "Twelve-Step
In AA stories of recovery from alcoholism, the narrative point of view and the mode of closure are closely connected. First-person accounts within AA are always structured as euphoric, because no matter what difficulties the speaking subject may be experiencing in his or her life at the time of speaking, the story reaches closure in the fact that the person is not, at the present moment, drinking, but rather is speaking of his or her recovery at an AA meeting, or writing about it for inclusion in the Big Book, or talking about it to a suffering alcoholic during a "twelve-step call."[3] It is unlikely that any AA group would invite someone to speak who had gotten drunk just moments before walking into a meeting, but even if they did, the act of speaking could be understood as the beginning of another iteration of the drunk's sobriety story. In the contrasting mode, AA members hear the dysphoric narratives of alcoholism only at secondhand, as third-person stories circulate in AA communities about alcoholics who "went out" of AA or who "died of this disease." No alcoholic can tell his or her own dysphoric story in the Wrst-person, because if he or she is telling the story in the context of an AA event, there is still hope for euphoric closure, for the happy ending of eventual recovery.
Within both the euphoric and the dysphoric stories of AA, alcoholism is called a disease, but there is a certain degree of rhetorical slippage in the way this term is used. The Big Book insists that addiction to alcohol is a condition of the body as well as the spirit and mind, calling it, for instance, "an illness of this sort—and we have come to believe it an illness" (18). The discourse of disease is not consistent, however, even in the Big Book itself. In the
In AA discourse, "being alcoholic" goes beyond being sick or allergic; being alcoholic is an identity, as opposed to a behavior. It is not about what you do or even what you have done, it is about who you are. When a recovering person introduces himself at a meeting, saying, "Hi, I'm Bill and I'm an alcoholic," he is adopting a specific subject position, an identity ascribed to him by AA rhetoric. (Bill might also be, for instance, a father, a brother, a construction worker, a college professor, a homeless person, a gay man, a neo-Nazi, a Chinese American, a Catholic, but in AA the primary marker of his identity is his addiction, modified sometimes—as in "I'm a cross-addicted alcoholic" or "I'm a grateful recovering alcoholic"but always indicating his "powerlessness over alcohol" as the operative fact of his identity.) To adopt the identity of "alcoholic" within AA rhetoric is to assume the Wrst-person perspective on a story about a drunk who stopped drinking. That identity is reinforced for the individual speaker through the continual retelling of the story. And the retelling is—as Michie and I have argued— what constitutes recovery. The belief that the addicted drinker must never pick up a drink is directly related to the belief that alcoholism is an identity: because of who the alcoholic is, drinking is "not an option," no matter how the drinker might seek to change his or her behavior. So long as the recovering person keeps telling that euphorically structured Wrst-person story of misery and redemption, the recovery remains intact, provided the person does not drink.
Both the euphoric and dysphoric narrative models are present in Victorian novels about alcoholism. Details of the lives and deaths of alcoholics in the novels of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope are in many cases consonant with what AA teaches will be the fate of the alcoholic who does or does not recover. (There are some memorable examples of alcoholics in canonical novels from the late nineteenth century by Thomas
The history of the disease model of alcoholism, as recounted by psychiatrists Norman Miller and John Chappel, helps explain this correlation between mid-nineteenth-century novels and AA, founded in 1935. According to Miller and Chappel, physicians held that alcoholism was a disease—characterized by the drinker's inability to control his or her intake of alcohol—as early as the eighteenth century, and "physician-scholars" accepted that view throughout the period of the novels I am citing. "The Wrst inebriate asylum in the world was founded in 1857," in the middle of the period in question, and "in 1870 [a year before the publication of the latest novel I will discuss] a physician group established the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates."[5]
However, the ideology of temperance, which understood excessive drinking as a moral failing, came to dominate mainstream culture through the end of the nineteenth century, culminating in the era of Prohibition, when—according to this account—the disease model of alcoholism all but disappeared from the medical establishment. "When the concept of alcoholism as a disease was dropped by American medicine in response to political pressure during Prohibition, a vacuum was created and … replaced by psychoanalysis," which reads alcohol and drug addictions "as symptoms of underlying conflict" in the personality.[6] In the traditional psychoanalytic model, alcoholics "self-medicate" for psychological problems that are the root of their condition.
When the founders of AA revived the idea that alcoholism is a disease, they did so in the context of a culture that insisted that drunkenness was the result of a moral failing or a psychological complex, or both, and that alcoholism is a behavior born of circumstances. The slippage between disease and self in AA discourse, then, reflects the ambiguous status of alcoholism in early-twentieth-century culture. I Wnd that AA's practice of treating alcoholism as an identity and recovery as a process of recounting conversion narratives is already present in Victorian narratives of alcoholism, colored as they are by both the medical account and the temperance account of alcoholism operating in the mid-nineteenth century.
As in AA narratives, whether an alcoholic's story in a canonical Victorian novel ends happily or tragically is directly correlated with the narrative point of view the text takes on the drinker's experience. The protagonists of dysphoric stories—the pathetic minor characters who drink themselves into
Dysphoric stories about alcoholics in Victorian novels follow a trajectory that closely parallels the AA master-narrative of those alcoholics who do not recover. My examples in this category include Sir Roger Scatcherd and his son Louis in Trollope's Dr. Thorne (1858); Esther, John Barton's sister-in-law, in Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848); Raffles in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72); Hindley Earnshaw in Emily Brontës Wuthering Heights (1847); Arthur Huntingdon in Anne Brontës The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848); "Mr. Dolls," Jenny Wren's father, in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65); Mrs. Stephen Blackpool in Dickens's Hard Times (1854); and Mr. Dempster, Janet's husband, in George Eliot's Janet's Repentance. Each of these characters embodies the story of the alcoholic who cannot or will not stop drinking. Each of them is supposed to have begun with a high tolerance for alcohol, and each progresses in his or her drinking to the point of physical debility and death. For a few, the motive for drinking anticipates the psychoanalytic concept of "self-medication" (Esther drinks to numb the pain of having been seduced and abandoned, now that she is a penniless prostitute alienated and isolated from her family; Hindley's drinking escalates with his despair over Heathcliff's mounting efforts to wrest away his family legacy). For most of these characters, though, the motivation to drink excessively is obscure, as indeed, it is in AA's Big Book. In these stories, drunks are not drunks because of what has happened or is happening to them, but because of who they are.
In some of the Victorian plots, drinking increases despite outward successes in life. Sir Roger, for instance, is a phenomenally productive engineer who has ascended from a working-class background to national prominence and great wealth; Arthur is a pampered member of the leisure class whose material desires have never been thwarted; Raffles is an opportunist who could blackmail Bulstrode indefinitely in order to support himself, but whose uncontrollable addiction to alcohol interferes with his scheme; and Mr. Dempster is a powerful small-town lawyer whose drunken driving eventually
Nor can they recover because the narrative frameworks they function within do not permit it. Most of the drunks who die in Victorian novels are never in a narrative position to tell their own stories from their own point of view. Hindley Earnshaw's binges, for example, are narrated at two removes, as Lockwood reports what Nelly Dean tells him about the Earnshaw family history. Arthur Huntingdon's drinking and demise are similarly narrated in journals written by his wife, Helen, which are transcribed in letters by the novel's narrator, Gilbert Markham.[8] In heterodiegetically narrated novels (with "omniscient" narrators and shifting focalization that travels from one character's consciousness to another's throughout the text) the hopeless alcoholic is seldom granted a subject position; much more often he or she is objectified by the text. The most striking examples of this are in the Dickens novels, where the drunks are the objects of ridicule and scorn (like Jenny Wren's father, whose own daughter treats him as a wayward child, and who is the source of much merriment among minor male characters) or of fear and loathing (like Mrs. Stephen Blackpool, whose spouse lives in dread of her return to their home). The novels’ narrative structure grants the drunken characters no subjectivity, no speaking position from which to tell the story of their addiction.
The objectification of the alcoholic in these dysphoric plots is most vividly illustrated by Dickens's narrative habit of referring to the hopeless drunk not as "he" or "she," but as "it." This practice doubly objectifies the drunken characters by recounting their stories from a third-person perspective while assigning to them the impersonal pronoun appropriate to objects that have no subjectivity. The narrator of Hard Times, for example, focalizes through Stephen Blackpool the scene of encountering his drunken wife at home:
He stumbled against something. As he recoiled, looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a sitting attitude.… Such a woman! A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor, while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled hair from her face, that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon it. A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes, but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful thing even to see her. [9]
Note the rhetorical positioning of the passage: Mrs. Blackpool enters the scene as an object, "something," an "it" that is revealed to be "a woman," but that more personal term quickly gives way to the word "creature," repeated twice. Throughout the passage the narrator never once says "she," never assigning a subject position to the drunken woman. Her hand has some agency ("trying to push away her tangled hair" [Hard Times, 52]), but the only pronouns referring to the woman herself are "it" and possessive or objective uses of "her." The narrator says—presumably because Stephen feels—it was a shameful thing even to see her" (Hard Times, 52), but here and throughout the novel, the text never allows for any perspective on her besides that of the voyeur: there is no glimpse of her story from her point of view.
The narrative treatment of Jenny Wren's father in Our Mutual Friend is more extensive and much more comic in tone, but it maintains the pattern of objectifying the hopeless drunk in telling his dysphoric story. When Jenny Wren confronts her "bad old boy" for the Wrst time in the novel, the narrator assigns neither gender nor personhood to the father:
The shaking Wgure, unnerved and disjointed from head to foot, put out its two hands a little way, as making overtures of peace and reconciliation. Abject tears stood in its eyes, and stained the blotched red of its cheeks. The swollen lead-coloured under lip trembled with a shameful whine.… The very breathing of the Wgure was contemptible, as it laboured and rattled in that operation, like a blundering clock.[10]
As in Hard Times, the narrator presents the inebriated alcoholic as a revolting spectacle, an object placed on view by the narrative perspective. In a subsequent scene, the narrator sarcastically remarks of Jenny's father that "in his worse than swinish state (for swine at least fatten on their guzzling, and make themselves good to eat), he was a pretty object for any eyes" (Mutual, 595). Later in the same scene, the narrator insists on the spectacularization of this "object" by framing him in the narrative point of view of Eugene Wrayburn, who is indulging in a bit of flanérie on a London street. Eugene was "lounging on again, when a most unexpected object caught his eyes. No less an object than Jenny Wren's bad boy trying to make up his mind to cross the road. A more ridiculous and feeble spectacle than this tottering
What Dickens does with these two drunken characters is only a more extreme version of what Victorian novels in general seem to do with the Wgure at the center of a dysphoric narrative of alcoholism. Mrs. Blackpool is an object for Stephen's view, Jenny's father is an object for Eugene, and both become objects for the reader. The pattern holds for the other dysphoric drunks in these texts, not just those—like Hindley Earnshaw and Arthur Huntingdon—whose stories are told in other characters’ voices. In Middlemarch, George Eliot's narrator departs from her usual practice of granting at least a momentary subjectivity to every recurring character in her novel by presenting the drunken Raffles from the perspectives of Bulstrode and also of Dr. Lydgate, but never from his own point of view.
In Trollope's Dr. Thorne and Gaskell's Mary Barton, the drunken characters’ thoughts are only fleetingly rendered by the omniscient narrators, though they do get the opportunity to tell their own life stories to relatively sympathetic listeners within the text. Still—like Hindley, Arthur, Raffles, Mrs. Blackpool (presumably), Jenny's father, and Dempster—they die from drinking. In Victorian Wction, as in AA discourse, a subjective speaking position for the alcoholic is not quite enough to ensure that the story will be about recovery. Evidently, though, without that Wrst-person perspective on the drunkologue, there is no hope for the alcoholic: in this respect, the dysphoric narrative in AA and the dysphoric narrative of alcoholism in Victorian Wction are in accord.
Turning to Victorian plots that do not end in the drinker's demise, we Wnd stories of addiction to alcohol in Victorian novels that do not correspond with AA master-narratives. These narratives are the traces of cultural assumptions about alcoholism as a moral failing or as a behavior, rather than an identity, assumptions that compete with AA's conflicted model of alcoholism as both an identity and an incurable disease. One of these competing notions is the idea that a good marriage and a happy home life can save a man from drinking himself to death. Victorian Wctions, like eighteenth-century novels, retain the Wgure of the reformed rake whose youthful alcoholic binges give way to responsible behavior after marriage, like Lord Chiltern in Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869) and in Phineas Redux (1874). Often, though, the idea that a happy family life would save the alcoholic is presented only hypothetically, as if the texts were anticipating AA's assertion that such "cures" for alcoholism are mythological, at best. For example, Trollope's narrator says of Louis Scatcherd, Sir Roger's alcoholic son who is also killing himself with drink, "To do him justice it must be admitted that he would not have been incapable of a decent career had he stumbled
The alcoholic whose daily drinking never leads to a tragic end is a Wgure who is absent from AA's master narrative but present in Victorian Wction in, for example, the character of Grace Poole, Bertha Mason's caretaker in Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre (1847). Grace's habitual drinking of porter leads Jane to accept the suggestion that Grace is the one who is emitting Bertha's nighttime howls and cackles, though Jane does Wnd Grace's stolid appearance puzzling, given her habit. Anne Brontës Tenant of Wildfell Hall presents another model of alcoholism that AA orthodoxy would not endorse, by suggesting that alcoholic drinking is a learned behavior that can be stopped through something like aversion therapy. Helen Huntingdon shocks her new neighbors by explaining to them that she has taught her little boy to loathe alcoholic drink by adding an emetic to it and forcing it on him until he gets sick. She does not explain why, but the novel eventually reveals that she wanted to spare her son from his father's alcoholic fate. In that same novel, Lord Lowborough becomes what AA would call a "whiteknuckle" or "dry" drunk, resisting his craving for alcohol in order to be a good father to his children. Lord Lowborough's marriage to a faithless woman is bad enough to lead to legal separation, and his bearing—especially after he stops drinking—is always grim. Still, he manages to stay "dry" despite concerted and even malicious temptations from his former drinking buddies, in a way that AA's master-narrative would present as highly unlikely. For Lord Lowborough, personal willpower is enough to achieve long-term sobriety; he is the opposite of "powerless over alcohol," whose sobriety is a personal triumph of human will over human moral failure—though it is certainly not Wgured as a source of any joy or satisfaction to him.
Of course, AA discourse maintains that neither domestic bliss, nor aversion, nor willpower can conquer alcoholism. The only solution, within the AA master-narrative, is a spiritual program based on the Twelve Steps, and the "promises" associated in the Big Book with that solution point the recovering alcoholic toward a "new freedom and a new happiness" (Big Book, 83) that Anne Brontës dry drunks never achieve. In Janet's Repentance, by contrast
Your evil habits, you feel, are too strong for you; you are unable to wrestle with them; you know beforehand you shall fall. But when once we feel our help-lessness in that way, and go to the Saviour, desiring to be freed from the power as well as the punishment of sin, we are no longer left to our own strength.… As soon as we submit ourselves to his will … it is as if the walls had fallen down that shut us out from God, and we are fed with his spirit, which gives us new strength. (Janet's, 361)
Here are the roots of the Twelve-Step program expressed in a Wctional representation of evangelical Christianity: if Janet can admit she is powerless over her "evil habits" (Step One), "come to believe that a power greater than [herself] can restore her to sanity" (Step Two), and "turn her will and her life over to God" (Step Three), she can follow Tryan's example and move toward recovery. Steps Four and Five are paralleled by Tryan's confessions, Wrst to his friend and now, again, to Janet, as well as the drunkologue that Janet tells him in response. The reconstruction of character represented by Steps Six through Ten occurs in Tryan's change of life, from youthful reprobate to self-denying minister. He recommends Step Eleven ("praying only for the knowledge of [God]'s will for us and the power to carry that out") when he asks Janet to "pray with me," "Not my will, but Thine be done" (Janet's, 363). Step Twelve—having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we carried this message to alcoholics and practiced these principles in all our affairs"is clearly illustrated in Tryan's ministry to Janet.
Following Tryan's example, Janet, too, has a spiritual awakening. Having been tempted once again to drink, and having confessed the temptation to
The temptation which had so lately made her shudder before the possibilities of the future, was now a source of confidence; or had she not been delivered from it? Had not rescue come in the extremity of danger? Yes; Infinite Love was caring for her. She felt like a little child whose hand is Wrmly grasped by its father, as its frail limbs make their way over the rough ground; if it should stumble, the father will not let it go.
That walk in the dewy starlight remained for ever in Janet's memory as one of those baptismal epochs, when the soul, dipped in the sacred waters of joy and peace, rises from them with new energies, with more unalterable longings. (Janet's, 398)
Janet's story is, of course, a conversion narrative, grounded in Christian tradition. In Eliot's version of that narrative, however, it is the human connection Janet feels to Mr. Tryan that makes her conversion possible. Eliot's famous humanism, then, is a precursor to the agnosticism that AA orthodoxy can accommodate. What the founders of AA did, in effect, was to remove the specifically Christian references from a conversion narrative like Tryan's or Janet's to create the master-narrative of recovery contained in the Twelve Steps.
Centrally important both to Eliot's version of this euphoric plot and to AA's version is the idea that the suffering alcoholic needs to tell her own story, from her own perspective, not just to God but to "another human being" (as Step Five puts it) who can identify with that story. Esther, in Mary Barton, tells her story to the entirely upright Jem Wilson; Sir Roger, in Dr. Thorne, tells his to the nearly faultless eponymous hero. Although Esther's and Sir Roger's narratives open up a space in those novels for a sympathetic readerly response—in a way that Dickens's objectification of drunks, for instance, does not—they nevertheless do not result in the characters’ eventual recoveries. In Victorian Wction, as in AA, a Wrst-person perspective on the experience of addiction is crucial to recovery, but it can only work when there is a second person inside the narrative frame who can hear the story, identify with it, and affirm it. In this sense, AA's discourse can be read as a revival—or maybe even a survival—of the Victorian emphasis on communitarian values, living on in the fragmented-alienated-individualist modern and postmodern periods through the practice of those who have found relief in the telling and retelling of their recovery stories.
Whether there is any hope for an alcoholic in a Victorian novel is a matter, then, of narrative point of view, of the opportunities afforded to the drunk not just by the plot but also by the narrative structure of the text. When the drunk is granted subjectivity, the possibility for the audience's sympathy opens up; when that subjectivity is received by a kindred consciousness
One might object that the two forms of discourse are fundamentally different, in that novels make no pretense of referring to material persons’ individual lives, while AA stories are conventionally intended and understood as individual people's sincere representations of "what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now" (Big Book, 58). My point is not that "real" recovering alcoholics are as Wctive as characters in novels, nor that Wctitious Victorian characters are somehow subject to the same social and psychological processes as real people. I am suggesting instead that the ideas about alcoholism that shape the recovery and the identity of the contemporary real-world alcoholic are created and circulated through narratives that have had currency in our culture for at least 150 years. Victorian novels and AA do have one important thing in common: both are driven by storytelling. And stories are always shaped by their internal momentum toward closure. The teleology of narration requires that the selection of details in any given narrative add up to the resolution of those details that constitutes the story's ending. Victorian novels shape their accounts of bodily experience—of alcoholism among the myriad other kinds of experience they describe—to Wt the exigencies of narrative discourse; they hurtle toward closure, and—eventually, in a matter of four hundred or eight hundred or thousands of pages—they come to an end, even though their closure (as D. A. Miller, Marianna Torgovnick, and others have noted) is ambivalent, contingent, and conflicted.[12]
AA narratives are different in at least two important ways: their closure cannot afford to be ambivalent, contingent, or conflicted, because the individual subject's sobriety (and AA Wgures that as a life-or-death matter) depends on the story's euphoric end, and the closure they deploy exists only at the moment of the story's enunciation. The narrating subject walks away from the act of narration and into the next chapter of his or her life. AA orthodoxy insists that even the longest standing members are only a drink away from their next drunk, and that no one is immune from the danger of slipping, no matter how often (or how effectively) he or she has told the recovery story with the euphoric ending. The recovering alcoholic has to "keep coming back," to hear and retell the story over again. Recovery in AA can be seen as a triumph of the discursive over the bodily: the recovering alcoholic keeps telling the story and, in doing so, Wnds a way not to swallow another alcoholic drink. The structure of the AA program itself seems to mirror the Victorian novel's acknowledgment of the monumental power of narrative, while evading the earlier form's inevitable need to come to an end.