Intemperate Women: Female Inebriates, Temperance Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine

Abstract

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• Intemperate Women:Female Inebriates, Temperance Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine
• Gale Temple (bio)

I. Introduction

Some of the most influential scholarship on nineteenth-century American temperance fiction has focused on the ambivalent complicity of temperance plots with the repressive norms of a burgeoning middle-class social order. In other words, if it's true that the middle class "forged itself" through the "collective repression of alcohol," then we might view the fictional drunkard's relentless thirst as a potentially redemptive expression of desire for the repressed or as-yet-unrealized intimacies and associations that middle-class normalcy only ever imperfectly foreclosed.¹ Michael Warner, for example, reads Whitman's Franklin Evans (1842) as a tentative map for a gay urban subculture that could not "be openly avowed" but that was "nevertheless coming to expression."² Similarly, Christopher Castiglia connects the allure of the barroom in temperance fiction to the promise of "intemperate sociality," or the unsanctioned pleasure of intimate communion with other men, free from the systematized humiliation, pressure, and competition of the corporatized public sphere.³ Although Glenn Hendler focuses on the figure of the "reformed and transformed drunkard" rather than the symbolic allure of the tavern, he nevertheless connects the Washingtonian temperance movement's emotionally overwrought public bonding rituals to "new social formations only then being preliminarily experienced by the white working-class men and artisans who largely made up the movement."⁴ For Hendler, male homosociality and drink were symbolically interchangeable, and the Washingtonians promoted sobriety and class solidarity by fulfilling the former desire while demonizing the latter. [End Page 1]

In readings such as these, temperance fiction invites the critic to trace the imposition of repressive middle-class norms, but more pertinently to interpret the drunkard's misguided impulses and predilections as powerful symbols for what would ultimately evolve into recognizable (and more self-affirming) countercultural, sexually transgressive, or class-affiliated male associations. In what follows, I'll argue that this formula for reading temperance fiction—in which the drunkard's desire serves either as a foil for the norms of proper citizenship or an encrypted expression of forbidden longing—applies imperfectly when the central character is not a man, but rather a respectable woman who falls victim to drink. I'll focus primarily on Mary Spring Walker's The Family Doctor: Or, Mrs. Barry and Her Bourbon (1868), a rare temperance novel that dramatizes the alcoholic demise of a formerly genteel and exemplary wife and mother.⁵ Although Mary Spring Walker is largely unknown today, she was a significant contributor to the temperance fiction of post-Civil War America. She published five temperance novels in her lifetime, as well as a handful of shorter pieces in magazines such as the Christian Advocate and the New York Evangelist. In addition to The Family Doctor (1868), which was reprinted in both Canada and England in 1870, she wrote The Rev. Dr. Willoughby and His Wine (1869), Both Sides of the Street (1870), Down in a Saloon (1871), and White Robes (1872). All five of Walker's novels are set in Connecticut, and all deal with the theme of irresponsible authority figures whose advocacy for alcohol use reverberates into the community, affecting those who weren't typically thought of as the primary subjects of temperance reform such as women and children.⁶

The Family Doctor's plot is fairly simple. Lizzie Barton, who narrates the story, is hired as a lady's maid to Mrs. Clarissa Barry, a beautiful but delicate woman who suffers inexplicably from anxiety and fatigue, symptoms that impair her ability to fulfill her social and domestic roles. The new doctor in town, the arrogant and pedantic Dr. Sharpe, prescribes bourbon for Mrs. Barry as a "stimulant," which was a common medical practice in the mid-nineteenth century.⁷ When taken in moderation the bourbon relieves her symptoms, but she craves ever-increasing amounts, becomes a full-fledged inebriate, and finally drinks herself to an ignominious death. Mrs. Barry's tragic demise is thematically counterbalanced by Lizzie's triumphant account of her own socioeconomic ascent. She marries her childhood sweetheart, a hard-working fellow Christian and temperance crusader named Frank Stanley, and by the...