Alcohol and Sexual Desire in American Literature, 1880-1915

Alcohol & Sexual Desire in American Literature, 1880-1915

Candidate Number: DN590

Even in an increasingly science-led society, elements of evangelical preaching remained strong in the minds of many fin de siècle Americans. Lyman Beecher, the leading ‘father’ – both literally and figuratively – of late nineteenth century Protestant preaching and religious-tinged reform, gave high priority to Biblical scripture in his warnings against alcohol use. Alcohol and sexual desire are implicitly linked in his rhetoric. He claimed, quoting from scripture, ‘they that tarry long at the wine…hath wo (sic) [and] sorrow’, for alcohol leads the eye to ‘strange women’.1 The link between alcohol and immoderate sexual desire gained even more strength in the oft-quoted book of Revelation, where forbidden pleasures are encased within a figurative ‘Babylon’, in whom ‘all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication’.2 This association remained strong into the twentieth century, perhaps via the strength of evangelical rhetoric. It thrived particularly in the gritty realistic detail of naturalist fiction, however, which suggests that it was more a social reality than simply a theological concept.

In William Dean Howells’ The Landlord at Lions’ Head (1897), Alan and Bessie Lynde are siblings who display the tie between sexual and alcoholic desire.34 Alan is a hopeless alcoholic, while Bessie finds herself consistently flirting with ‘jays’. The predilections are strongly linked. Bessie likens the men she flirts with to ‘some very common kind of whiskey’, whereas she ought to be targeting ‘champagne’. The siblings are aware of their weaknesses, and similarly lament their apparent incapacity for change. Alan warns his sister ‘you can’t give way to that sort of thing…with the gravity of a man feeling the consequences of his own errors’. The filial likeness is noted by Dr Lacy, who declares

1 Lyman Beecher, (quoting Proverbs 23:29-35), ‘The Signs of Intemperance’ (1826) in David F. Musto (ed.), Drugs in America: A Documentary History, (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p53. 2 King James Version, Revelation 18:3. 3 William Dean Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, (New York: Dover Publications, 1983). 4 John W Crowley, The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp9-12. that they are ‘both keyed up pretty sharply by nature’. Lacy gives his own explanation for their propensities, firstly supporting Bessie’s earlier claim that it is driven by desire for ‘excitement’. He quickly corrects himself, postulating that it could be ‘to escape the excitement’. Bessie and Alan, both members of the urban upper classes, feel overwhelmed by the stimulation of city life, and wish to escape. In Bessie’s words, they ‘want to get away from [them]selves’.5

Dr Lacy’s revised statement fits soundly with the concurrent thoughts of George Miller Beard and Henry James, who highlight the increasing complexity and daunting nature of fin de siécle urban life in America. The might of the ‘monstrous’ city, to James, aimed to become ‘some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws’, ‘laced’ together in an incomprehensible, unprecedented complexity.6 To Beard, civilization is the primary cause of what he calls ‘nervousness’, which counts among its symptoms an over-sensitivity to stimulants. Significantly, in Beard’s chart of the ‘evolution of nervousness’, ‘inebriety’ is placed just above ‘sexual’ nervousness, tantamount to ‘insanity’.7 (Jack London supported the proximity of inebriety to madness when he exclaimed ‘is there a greater maker of madness of all sorts than [alcoholic alter ego] John Barleycorn?’)8 The first impulse of the American in response is to escape or, in the case of alcohol, to abstain.9 Escape seems a peculiarly American tendency, following what James celebrates as his country’s ‘famous escape… from King George and his works’.10 There are subtle differences between the thoughts of Lacy and Beard. Lacy avers that Alan escapes civilization by immersing himself in alcohol, while Beard claims that Americans were fleeing alcohol itself. Rather than contradicting each other, the combination of these two statements paints a fuller, more troubling picture. Americans sought to evade modern civilization through alcohol. Finding alcohol inadequate and ineffective as an escape route – it is simply another facet

5 Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, pp232-4, 267-270. 6 Henry James, The American Scene (1907), (Penguin Books, 1994), p59. 7 George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), title page. 8 Jack London, John Barleycorn (1913), (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p92. 9 Beard, p31. 10 James, p154. of civilization - they found themselves both ‘addicted’ and terrified of James’ ever moving ‘organism’.11

Alan and Bessie Lynde’s predicament raises questions over gender restrictions. Dr Lacy, when Bessie asks why she does not follow Alan’s lead in drinking, suggests that ‘it isn’t the habit of your sex’.12 Many Americans held drinking to be a peculiarly male phenomenon. Leading temperance activist Eliza Jane Trimble Thompson’s husband dismisses her work as mere ‘tomfoolery’.13 Women were seen as the main threat to public drinking, so much so that anti-temperance men simultaneously fought the enfranchisement of women. In J.W. Holton’s popular song, ‘it’s goodbye whiskey, beer and rum/If they let the women vote’.14 Jack London, in his fight to rid himself of his alcoholic ‘twin’ John Barleycorn, supports female suffrage for, as he claims, ‘when the women get the ballot, they will vote for prohibition’.15 London’s depictions of saloons are male-only, for ‘drink was the badge of manhood’.16 In Stephen Crane’s short story ‘George’s Mother’, as George Kelcey ‘drank more beer [he] felt his breast expand with manly feeling’.17 Deeper study shows that alcoholism along lines of gender was not always the case, however. As Bessie Lynde is quick to point out, ‘sometimes women do get drunk’.18 Kate Chopin’s first novel, At Fault, pictures the travails of alcoholic Fanny Hosmer and the effect of addiction on her marriage.19 Jimmie and Maggie’s ‘mudder’ in Crane’s Maggie is a raving alcoholic who, her husband warns, ‘better let up on the bot’… or [she]’ll git done’.20 These instances were, of course, exceptions rather than the rule. Female inebriety was more alarming than male inebriety to American society, for it threatened all the qualities of the Victorian feminine ideal. ‘A drunken woman became a particularly heinous, almost unthinkable phenomenon’. Often readers assumed that authors who wrote of alcohol addiction were speaking from experience. It was therefore

11 James, p65, 59. 12 Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, p267. 13 Eliza Jane Trimble Thompson, ‘Hillsboro Crusade Sketches’ (1896) in Musto (ed.), p88. 14 J.W. Holton, ‘Don’t Let The Women Vote’ (1888) in Musto (ed.), p96. 15 London, p4. 16 London, p31. 17 Stephen Crane, ‘George’s Mother’ (1896), in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and other tales of New York, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p103. 18 Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, p267. 19 Kate Chopin, At Fault (1890), (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2001). 20 Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, p10. very difficult for a female author to write from anything but a pro-temperance point of view. It is no surprise that authors who took anything less than a strictly condemnatory view, such as Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Stoddard, failed to gain commercial success in their lifetimes.21

The apparently chaotic civilization as described by James, echoed in Henry Adams’ description of the self – ‘a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or vibration’22 – intimidated the genders in different ways. Chopin’s At Fault describes the story of Thérèse Lafirme, whose blossoming relationship with David Hosmer raises barely veiled events of his past. Hosmer marries Fanny Larimore, a girl of twenty who loves the social life. Hosmer, devoted to his ‘business’, finances her desires but otherwise leaves her alone. When Hosmer returns home early with his sister Melicent, they find Fanny lying on the sofa. Fanny looks at them ‘wildly and in striving to get up grasped aimlessly at the back of a chair’. Hosmer is, significantly, unable to decipher the situation, and relies on Melicent’s clear assertion that ‘she’s been drinking’. Fanny is an alcoholic; yet Hosmer, through a combination of absence and lack of perception, does not know. Fanny’s alcoholism confuses and perplexes Hosmer, so that he is ‘helpless’. 23 It is the same overwhelming feeling that James encounters when he returns to New York in the face of its ‘bigness and bravery and insolence’, a ‘great intricate frenzied dance’.24 Hosmer marries Fanny under the same glorifying intimidation. ‘Inveigled’ into a river excursion, Hosmer meets Fanny, ‘all pink and white and merry blue eyes and stylish clothes’, and finds that ‘every word and movement of hers had an exaggerated importance for [him]. [He] fancied such things had never been said or done quite in the same way before’. Two weeks later, they were married, knowing ‘nothing of each other’s character’. 25 Hosmer’s weakness is not gendered; Thérèse sighs ‘you were in love’ during his story’s retelling, assuring the

21 Nicholas O. Warner, ‘Forbidden Fruit: Nineteenth-Century American Female Authorship & the Discourses of Drink’, in Sue Vice, Matthew Campbell, Tim Armstrong (eds.), Beyond The Pleasuredome: Writing & Addiction from the Romantics, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), pp301-3. 22 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002), p347. 23 Chopin, At Fault, pp32-33. 24 James, p59. 25 Chopin, pp31-32. reader that she is familiar with his feelings. Melicent’s ability to decipher Fanny’s alcoholism seems less an observation of her sex than of her individual strength. Melicent later toys with Grégoire’s amorous affections, dismissing sexual desire as a mere temporary plaything. In Beard’s terms, she has more ‘nerve force’ than most. She is an exception to Beard’s modern epidemic of ‘nervousness’. Most Americans were, according to public perception, sensitive to such stimulation. Alcohol, civilization and sexual desire are bound together in this. Perplexed and intimidated by the stimulating symptoms of civilization, Americans were nevertheless drawn to them, apparently placing them in an inescapable degenerating cauldron.

Women did, of course, drink, but often only when with men. Cases of female-only drinking or even a woman drinking alone, as with Fanny Hosmer, are rare. Situations where men and women drink together are described in very different terms than the male preserves that prevail in the work of London and Crane. Harold Frederic describes in The Damnation of Theron Ware a communal ‘picnic’, where ‘gallant young men’ carried ‘glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls’. The scene is friendly and lively, where violence only arises in the group of men at the bar. There is, however, something stilted in the apparent camaraderie, as the ‘pretty girls’ stand ‘on the fringe of the crowd’ apart from the men at the bar. 26 Similar scenes are found in the autobiographical John Barleycorn when London describes himself swapping masculine saloons for the unknown world of courtship. Befriending Louis Shattuck, London discovers an ‘entirely new phase of existence’ of ‘gorgeous girl-adventure’. When with girls, Shattuck and London do not drink, but the tamales and ‘five cents’ worth of red- hots’ that they do partake in have the same innocuous flavour as the ‘harmless’ lager at Frederic’s picnic. The atmosphere for London is stilted also. London courts Haydee, a girl whose ‘scant skirt just reached her shoe-tops’, sitting ‘on a bench in the starlight’. Acutely aware of the ‘foot of space’ between them, London quivers in ‘the agony of apprehension and doubt’. The code of etiquette is unknown to him, and is far less easy to deduce than in the emotive solidarity of the saloon.27 In the alcohol-driven ‘mud puddle’ of Maggie gender relations are also far from graceful. Even with the encouragement of

26 Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1997), pp218-27. 27 London, pp105-110. ‘two beehs’(sic), Pete and Maggie’s conversation stands out as particularly superficial in a story full of superficial dialogue. Silent inferences and watching eyes are only rarely interrupted by the inconvenience of conversation. Courting relationships fail to replicate the glowing amity of the saloon.

It would appear that women disrupt the inherently male flow of alcoholic fellowship. There is, though, more to consider. There is something that flows between the couple in the absence of conversation. Despite the lack of conversation, Maggie’s ‘cheeks were blushing with excitement and her eyes were glistening’ in the company of her ‘beau ideal of a man’. Her idolization of Pete is matched by the tangible sexual desire of his gaze as he watches Maggie. Pete’s evening is absorbed in ‘drinking beer and watching Maggie’. It is no surprise that he asks her to kiss him at the end of the evening. That her naivety prevents her from having the courage to comply does not diminish the fact that she earlier considered him as a ‘lover’. Pete and Maggie’s sexual ‘conversation’ is marked by misfirings; Maggie watches the show while Pete watches Maggie, Pete wants a kiss while Maggie disagrees – ‘dat wasn’t in it’.28 Despite this, they both revel in the atmosphere. Alcohol played a different role in male-female relationships in fin de siécle America. Rather than producing the warm emotional camaraderie of the male saloon, alcohol heightened sexual desire between men and women. It might be argued that a similar homoerotic urge might be found in the case of the saloon; however, I find that it is only inferred evidence that could support such an assertion.

The respective codes of etiquette in the saloon and in courtship are different. A gender gap seems to confuse the translation of these codes; men can understand the code of the masculine saloon, but are bemused by courtship. The relationship between Hilma Tree and Buck Annixter in Frank Norris’ The Octopus is initially marked by misfiring confusion on both sides. In John Barleycorn, Haydee is comfortable in courtship, but only because ‘she had known boys all her life’.29 Here lies the key. The gender gap may slow the comprehension of appropriate etiquette, but experience overcomes any difficulty. Shattuck is comfortable in courtship because of his experience. Similarly,

28 Crane, Maggie, pp25, 31-34. 29 London, p110. London takes time to understand the rules of ‘treating’ in the saloon. Adapting to the saloon and to courtship requires knowledge of their respective codes. The presence of alcohol may smooth over initial mistakes, but it is experience that ultimately builds the bonds of amity.

These bonds are also made between the individual and alcohol through experience. Jack London flaunts his long association with alcoholic alter ego John Barleycorn, averring that it is by this ‘friendship’ that he became an alcoholic. By training, ‘a left-handed man can become a right-handed man,’ and the same applies to alcoholism. London asks, ‘had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice, become an alcoholic?’30 Long experience drinking in sociable situations – it is inferred that society, that requires alcohol, is a type of syrup that smoothes the consumption of alcohol – trained London’s body to not only stomach alcohol’s power, but to enjoy its taste. Similarly, Kelcey in Crane’s ‘George’s Mother’ ‘had been obliged to cultivate a talent for imbibing [beer]’. Society had forced him to conform, for ‘he understood that drink was an essential to joy’.31 London ‘drank for the sake of sociability’, despite initially loathing the taste.32 Mark Twain’s essay, ‘Corn-Pone Opinions’, states that ‘it is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist’. Twain goes further. ‘A new thing in costume appears…and the passers-by are shocked…Six months later…the fashion has established itself; it is admired’.33 Over time, through experience, humanity conforms. London and Kelcey conform to conventional sociability, with alcohol in tow. Their bodies conform to alcohol, and they become addicted. The inference is that they were ‘obliged’ to follow this course by modern civilization.

The similar paths of Crane’s Maggie and Frank Norris’ Minna Hooven lay further parallels between alcohol and sexual desire. Both are driven to prostitution by forces that might be bracketed under ‘civilization’. Maggie and Minna are far from the popular Victorian concept of the brazen, unscrupled women of low principle who choose sexual

30 London, p170. 31 Crane, ‘George’s Mother’, p135. 32 London, p155. 33 Mark Twain, ‘Corn-Pone Opinions’, in Charles Neider (ed.), The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, Inc: 1963), p584. ‘immorality’ as their lifestyle. Naïve and simple in their ways, they are compelled to leave their homes and fend for themselves. Maggie is abandoned by Pete, her mother and brother. Minna, a victim of the insatiable thirst of the railroad, becomes separated from her mother and sister in unfamiliar urban San Francisco. Left without alternative, they both wander the streets until they fall into the prostitution trade. Both were enacting a tale that was familiar to urban readers. An article in Arena magazine spoke of young women ‘dragging themselves from dirty, vermin-thronged beds…being blackguarded and beaten by drunken parents, being tempted by rakes whose very lust seems a haven of refuge to them’.34 The social move to prohibit prostitution linked closely with the temperance movement. As historian Paul Boyer remarks, ‘the brothel and the saloon were widely perceived as the great bastions of urban vice’ and thus required eradication.35 The ‘moral diseases which lead to misery and crime’ incorporated both prostitution and alcoholism.36 They went hand in hand, both in popular perception and reality. The modern label of ‘hooker’ for a prostitute probably emanated from ‘Hooker’s Division’, the notorious red-light district of Washington DC, named after the Civil War general who had confined prostitutes to that section.37 It is no surprise then to discover that ‘hooker’ later came to denote a ‘drink of strong liquor’ in Canada.38 Norris and Crane’s sympathetic portrayals of prostitution helped contribute to the less condemnatory attitude towards these ‘vices’.

The late nineteenth century saw a change in how Americans viewed the concept of ‘vice’. The ‘old model’, as John Crowley put it, was religiously inflected, deeming the overuse of alcohol and sex (amongst other things) a sin that an individual chose to make. The fault was in the mind, and blame placed itself squarely upon the individual. Reform movements grasped this concept, condemning the ‘weak’ individuals who fell to such immoral depths. A different paradigm began to appear, though, as the scientific

34 ‘The Woes of the New York Working Girl’, in Arena (1893), quoted in Larzer Ziff, ‘Introduction’, in Crane, Maggie, p xi. 35 Paul Boyer, Urban Masses & Moral Order in America 1820-1920, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p191. 36 Watch & Ward Society (Boston), quoted in Boyer, p201. 37 Boyer, p192. 38 Eric Partridge, A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Paul Beale (ed.), (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989), p222. revolution took hold. The concept of ‘disease’ began to take hold, where predilection for vice was an inherent condition of the body. Americans could not help being addicted to alcohol and sex. Bessie and Alan Lynde are clear examples of this model. There was no clear divide between these paradigms in turn-of-the-century America. To Crowley, in the disease model, ‘addiction was not located exclusively in the substance; it was inseparable from defective “character”, for the proper building of which Victorians held each other morally responsible.’39 It was an outlook that avowed scientific objectivity, while permitting condemnation. Reformers used science to support already-established attitudes towards prostitution and alcoholism. The perception was, however, ambivalent. Theodore Dreiser declared in Sister Carrie that man was yet to be fully guided by free will and still partially under the influence of instinct. In the transition of evolution, man could not be judged while he was still a victim of his primitive nature.40 Righteous condemnation still held control; yet what emerged was a decidedly more sympathetic view.

Scientific efforts to understand addiction produced several different theories of explanation based on the concept of split personality or alter ego. Alcohol was a poison, a substance inherently destructive to the body. Temperance activists avowed that ’the blistered nose, burnt brain, and parboiled stomach of the drinking man are nature’s perpetual object lesson to illustrate the face that alcohol must be the redoubtable enemy of an organization made up as the human being is’.41 Once in the system, scientists reasoned, this alien influence manifests itself in a changed or alternate personality. ‘Men who when sober are quiet and kind, are changed by [alcohol] into wild beasts…It can change a man into something worse than a beast.’42 In William Dean Howells’ The Lady of the Aroostook, Mason describes another’s addiction to drink as a ‘tiger’, following the ‘beast’ metaphor.43 The tendency to change personality is plainly apparent in Chopin’s At Fault, where Fanny is transformed by drink from her normal self-absorbed, morbid self into a cheery, ‘lively’ character. At the beckoning of a glass of punch, Fanny is

39 Crowley, p5. 40 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Donald Pizer (ed.), (New York: Norton, 1970), pp56-57. 41 Frances E Willard, ‘Scientific Temperance Instruction in Schools’, in Musto (ed.), p105. 42 William Thayer Smith, ‘Primer of Physiology and Hygiene’, in Musto (ed.), pp99-100. 43 William Dean Howells, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), quoted in Crowley, p6. found by Hosmer ‘laughing gaily’, though Chopin assures us she is a woman without ‘the slightest sense of humor’. Later, a ‘toddy’ encourages her to laugh ‘good-humouredly’, with an imperious talkative self-confidence that is almost an inverted version of her normal self.44 Fanny’s condition seems to jar with Willa Cather’s attitude in short story ‘On the Divide’. Cather describes Norwegian Canute Canuteson, whose particular form of ‘insanity’ – a quality inherent to all those on the ‘Divide’, or frontier – is alcoholism. Cather asserts that ‘alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration’. The transformation produced by alcohol is not a separate, different personality, but a mere ‘exaggeration’ of the native character. ‘A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar…[Canute] was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the hells of Dante.’45 Cather’s opinion does seem to contradict the popular position. Cather accounts for the degenerates – the foolish, bloody and coarse – of society, but she says nothing for perceived ‘good’ men who get drunk. A public convinced that alcohol has nothing but destructive consequences could not accept the notion that a good man could become better by drinking. London’s alter ego John Barleycorn is at once a reflection of himself and a universal being that effects all who drink. Rather than, in Cather’s view, the effects of drink depending on the nature of the man, Barleycorn adjusts his methods to fit the man to achieve the same results everywhere. Barleycorn seems to control London’s will, repulsing and destroying his body while inhabiting his mind. Barleycorn is nothing like London – he is a separate being - but through familiarity and experience persuades London to think like him. To all intents and purposes, London while drunk is Barleycorn – for he follows Barleycorn’s will without hesitation. London mistakenly believes himself to be following his own will, while he is actually following his ‘twin’ Barleycorn.

Sexual desire is also addictive, and effects a ‘transformation’ in the self. In Frank Norris’ The Octopus, Buck Annixter initially derides the influence of ‘feemales’ - ‘Rot! There was a fine way for a man to waste his time and his good money, lally gagging with a lot of feemales’ - but only because ‘he was a very bull-calf of awkwardness in feminine

44 Chopin, pp59, 65, 82-85. 45 Willa Cather, ‘On The Divide’, in The Short Stories of Willa Cather, (London: Virago, 1989), p12. surroundings.’46 Annixter is inexperienced with women, with only one stilted affair behind him. His dairymaid, Hilma Tree, affects him strongly. Hilma is the picture of natural untainted feminine beauty, as Norris’ lengthy sensual descriptions attest.47 To Annixter’s surprise, ‘he found himself thinking of her after he had gone to bed’, ultimately finding that ‘the idea of the young woman was with him continually’.48 Annixter later admits to Hilma ‘seeing you around every day…why, it just got all inside of me somehow, and now I can’t think of anything else.’ The feeling is mutual, for Annixter begins to ‘occupy [Hilma’s] mind’ too.49 They are mentally addicted to thinking of each other. Their marriage brings the once self-willed argumentative Annixter on ‘the verge of a mighty transformation’. Norris promises the reader that Annixter, once the ‘intolerant selfish man,…should become tolerant and generous, kind and forgiving’.50 Like Chopin’s Fanny, Annixter becomes an inverted version of himself. His will is changed by his desire for Hilma; like London and Barleycorn, the addiction drives his actions.

To fin de siécle America, alcohol and sexual desire controlled the will of the mind. Certain factions also used alcohol as a persuasive element. It is initially surprising to find how strongly linked socialism is to alcohol. There are, however, elements in the effect of alcohol that match the nature of socialism. Alcohol is a social leveller. According to Beard, susceptibility to inebriety was particularly prevalent amongst the upper classes. In Howells’ The Landlord at Lion’s Head, policemen ‘clapped their hands together, and smiled’ at each other when Alan Lynde is escorted home, drunk. ‘There were none of them sorry to see a gentleman in that state’.51 To working classes, then, alcohol was a tool that, in the tradition of socialism, despises the concept of individual privilege. There is a violence about socialism that is reflected in alcoholism. In The Octopus, saloonkeeper Caraher is an ‘anarchist’, a ‘red’. He uses alcohol to ‘win disciples’, coaxing Dyke and Presley to his ‘way of thinking’. Caraher raises Dyke to an ‘honest

46 Frank Norris, The Octopus, (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p27. 47 Norris, pp82-4. 48 Norris, pp80, 225. 49 Norris, pp331, 327. 50 Norris, pp497-498. 51 Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, pp247-248. rage…[that] thicken[s] and sink[s] to a dull, evil hatred, a wicked oblique, malevolence’.52 Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes pictures Berthold Lindau, a fiery German immigrant socialist whose heavy accent becomes exaggerated as he works himself into righteous anti-capitalist rages. He is drinking beer when Howells introduces him, and later it is drink at a meeting of Every Other Week (the journalistic enterprise upon which the novel centres) that raises Lindau’s socialist fervour to a startling pitch. Violently condemning capitalist Dryfoos, Lindau thunders ‘it is infamous – infamous! What kind of man is this? Who is he? He has the heart of a tyrant!’53 Heightened emotion, violence and alcohol are intertwined within socialism in a potent mix. Even London himself claimed to be a socialist. Socialism’s association with alcohol was no accident.

Heightened emotion also, of course, plays a part in sexual desire. This is no clearer than in the late-night Dionysian musical revelry that Theron and Celia Madden enjoy in The Damnation of Theron Ware. Immersing himself in the poetic strains of Chopin, Theron listens to Celia playing upon the piano and fancies he hears the ‘pure, liquid, mellifluous melody of a soft-throated woman singing to her lover’. He is affected powerfully by the melody, and finds a ‘trouble about breathing, [while] the mosaic floor seemed to stir under his feet’.54 Theron is drunk with the sensual passions of lust and wonder. Held within the thrall of classical antiquity (as embodied by the fiery redhead Celia), Theron’s self-deception is palpable. His ultimate collapse is caused by the implosion of his intellectual vanity. Attracted by the soulful colour and sociability of a modern secularised Catholicism, in preference to simple self-flagellating Methodism, Theron is deceived by the vibrant exterior. Thinking the emotion to be the substance, Theron ignores the realities of his actions.

The self-deception in Theron’s infatuation with Celia is reflected in alcoholism. London’s professed socialism, though sometimes contradictory, only highlights his own self-denial. He claims ‘it was the PEOPLE, and no thanks to John Barleycorn, who

52 Norris, pp356, 464. 53 Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p310. 54 Frederic, pp178-188. pulled me through my long sickness’. It is unlikely that London could have ever claimed to have ‘pulled through’ his alcoholism – he died not three years after the publication of John Barleycorn. His is the ‘classic study of the drunker in denial’.55 Alcohol’s quality of self-deception was clear to temperance activists: ‘an anesthetic…that hides the pain and poisoning effect, alcohol fools you and leaves the craving behind.’56 Self-deception is prominent in sexual desire also. In At Fault, Fanny’s ‘merry blue eyes and stylish clothes’ blind Hosmer, convincing him to marry.57 In Crane, Maggie’s naïve yearning for Pete leads her to ‘marvel at him and surround him with greatness.’58 Maggie’s social destruction and ultimate death is akin to London’s near suicide. Barleycorn persuades London that he had seen all there was to life, and that it would be a ‘man’s way to die’ to swim until he drowned of exhaustion.59 Barleycorn, London avers, ‘is lying all the time. He offers false strength to the body, false elevation to the spirit, making things seem what they are not and vastly fairer than what they are.’60 Alcohol makes socializing appear ‘fairer’ it is, papering over quarrels and disagreements; ‘if one chose to momentarily assert himself, the others instantly submitted.’61 Sexual desire elevates others in the mind’s eye to impossible heights. Experience, though useful in the application of alcohol and sexual desire, never has the strength to warn against its dangers and its deceit. They always remain enticing and addictive, in spite of past mistakes. There lay the perceived predicament of fin de siécle Americans, as they stood hopelessly addicted to what they believed would destroy them.

55 Linda Schierse Leonard, Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, quoted in Crowley, p20. 56 Richmond Pearson Hobson, ‘Testimony by Representatives Hobson & Mann’ (1914), quoted in Musto (ed.), p114. 57 Chopin, p32. 58 Crane, Maggie, p26. 59 London, pp70-73. 60 London, p139. 61 Crane, ‘George’s Mother’, p104. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2002). Beard, George Miller, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881). Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses & Moral Order in America 1820-1920, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Cather, Willa, ‘On The Divide’, in The Short Stories of Willa Cather, (London: Virago, 1989). Chopin, Kate, At Fault (1890), (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2001). Crane, Stephen, ‘George’s Mother’ (1896), in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and other tales of New York, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Crane, Stephen, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). Crowley, John W, The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie, Donald Pizer (ed.), (New York: Norton, 1970). Frederic, Harold, The Damnation of Theron Ware, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1997). Howells, William Dean, A Hazard of New Fortunes, (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). Howells, William Dean, The Landlord at Lion’s Head, (New York: Dover Publications, 1983). James, Henry, The American Scene (1907), (Penguin Books, 1994). Lilienfield, Jane & Oxford, Jeffrey (eds.), The Languages of Addiction, (Oxford: St Martins’ Press, 1999). London, Jack, John Barleycorn (1913), (New York: The Modern Library, 2001). Musto, David F. (ed.), Drugs in America: A Documentary History, (New York: New York University Press, 2002). Norris, Frank, The Octopus, (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). Partridge, Eric, A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Paul Beale (ed.), (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989). Twain, Mark, ‘Corn-Pone Opinions’, in Charles Neider (ed.), The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, Inc: 1963), pp583-7. Vice, Sue, Campbell, Matthew, & Armstrong, Tim (eds.), Beyond The Pleasuredome: Writing & Addiction from the Romantics, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994).