"A degraded man, […] a half-civilized savage": Shame and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Irish Temperance Literature (1840-1878).

Abstract

In Ireland, nineteenth-century iterations of the temperance movement operated within a politically charged discourse that insisted upon a direct link between Irish identity and ritualized alcohol consumption. This article uses temperance literature, a critically neglected genre of Irish fiction, to demonstrate the adaptation of the "drunken Irishman" stereotype to emerging nineteenth-century medical frameworks using highly gendered imagery and tropes. Drawing on fictional as well as medical works, it demonstrates the ways in which writers like Anna Maria Hall, William Carleton, and Marion Clarke reinforced the idea of the drinker's shame by positioning the male drinker as embarrassingly emasculated and the female drinker as grotesquely defeminized. It argues that these portrayals of male violence, poverty, and neglectful mothering mask darker anxieties over the threat that the lower classes supposedly posed to the social order, providing an insight into Irish writers' engagement with ideas of a national predilection for alcohol that supposedly enhanced hypermasculine and effeminate traits.