English Literature

https://brill.com/abstract/journals/sbt/31/1/sbt.31.issue-1.xml

Abstract:

This article gives a close-reading of Beckett's letters to Barbara Bray, focusing on the years between their first meeting in 1956 and Bray's move to Paris in May 1961. In this correspondence Beckett grappled with the difficulties of "human conversation", as the letters raised questions regarding the construction of the self in dialogue and the (in)ability of language to bridge distance between two individuals. I propose that Happy Days, written between October 1960 and June 1961, emerged from this fraught epistolary process, and that the play can be read as a dramatization of the letter writer's address to their absent interlocutor. The connection is supported by Beckett's use of draft fragments of the play-text within the letter exchange itself.

Reviewers and critics have denigrated Joyce’s letters for their financial preoccupations, distinguishing Joyce’s practical concerns from life-writing that gives access to psychological interiority. This essay challenges such distinctions, basing its argument on a close reading of Joyce’s letters to his brother Stanislaus from Rome (written from July 1906 to March 1907). These letters are replete with requests to borrow money, projections of income, and accounts of expenditure on food and clothing. I demonstrate that Joyce refracts his subjective experience and affective ties through the prism of financial need. Joyce’s epistolary self-accounting reflects his inability to live within his bank clerk’s salary, but it also demonstrates the level of quotidian detail typical to epistolary life-writing, as distinct from retrospective autobiography. Writing these letters was a formative experience for Joyce, one that inflected his later representation of selfhood and subjectivity in Ulysses.

Published in the James Joyce Quarterly 57: 1-2 (2019-2020), 'The Art of Joyce', guest-edited by Scarlett Baron, Ronan Crowley, and Dirk Van Hulle.

Despite the significance of Paris to Joyce’s adult life and literary career, Catherine
Flynn’s James Joyce and the Matter of Paris is the first book-length study
of his relationship to the city and its presence in his fiction, a welcome intervention
in Joyce studies and wider scholarship on modernist literature and urban
modernity. Joyce moved to Paris in December 1902, aged twenty and without
having yet written much to justify his considerable self-confidence. [...]

Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Partial Answers, Volume 20, Issue 2, June, 2022, pages 378-382.

https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2022.0023

In this paper I shall examine the way in which Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his gothic fiction to reflect not only the anxieties in his society regarding alcohol itself but also the crumbling class hierarchies of the late 19th Century. Stevenson utilises the established hierarchical drinking patterns of the early 19th Century to represent the widely held opinion that spirits were damaging the working classes who should be encouraged to drink wine instead. Perhaps surprisingly, given his bibacious reputation, Stevenson repeatedly advocates moderation through the ‘play’ (Memories and Portraits, P. 268) of his fiction. Fascinated by the corruption that excessive drinking could cause to the body and the soul, Stevenson assigns grotesque physical aspects to characters who drink spirits, particularly rum. Discussing The Body-Snatcher, Stephen Arata argues that ‘Macfarlane is compelled to look into the face of his own moral degradation’ (Edinburgh Companion to RLS, P. 63) when beholding the ‘rum and sin’ (The Body-Snatcher, P. 184) displayed on the prematurely aged face of Fettes. Alcohol, damnation and class subtly interact in many of Stevenson’s texts to produce a mesmerising warning leaving the reader with a sense that your choice of drink is mixed with your fate.

In this paper, I shall examine the treatment of suicide and its relationship to alcohol and alcoholism in terms of two representative Trollopian suicides; Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (serialised 1874-5) and, a little more contentiously, Sir Roger Scatcherd in Doctor Thorne (1858). Trollope was fascinated by the destructive power of alcohol on the human body. His graphic descriptions of the internal melting and swelling resulting from long-term heavy drinking reflect the medicalised approach of contemporary newpaper reports . His descriptions are also surprisingly playful in parts; he invents a medical term - 'periporollida' (Doctor Thorne, p. 281) - for his mocking depiction of the dubious medical treatment of the alcoholic, Roger Scatcherd by Rerechild. The characterisation of both Melmotte and Scatcherd not only reflect the famous suicides of his era, particularly John Sadleir, but also foreshadow, in fictional terms, the commons traits shared by alcoholics and suicides described by suicidologist, Karl Menninger, in Man Against Himself (1938). Trollope's plotting of the two suicides compares closely with Jean Baechler's hypotheses on toxicomania in the 1970s, particularly in relation to the supposition that alcoholism is a form of self-annihilation and can be considered a means of 'gradual suicide' (Baechler, Suicides, p. 315).

In this paper I shall examine the way that Robert Louis Stevenson uses alcohol in his novel, Treasure Island and the colonial adventurers (sometimes known as pirates) who inspired him to do so.  With more than 50 mentions in a relatively short novel, rum almost constitutes a character in its own right.  Stevenson paints a wide variety of characters but the divide between good and bad is starkly black and white. In drawing this opposition, Stevenson uses alcohol as a key feature. Rum is drunk exclusively by the sailors and pirates. Brandy, usually cognac, is the drink of the ‘good guys’. This is emphasized by the position of the cunning and ambiguous character of Long John Silver who stands between the two and, as he moves from one group to the other, changes his drink to suit his company. When he is with the pirates, he drinks rum, when he is with the ‘good guys’, he drinks cognac.
In relation to this emphasis on rum, I shall examine the impact of the Navy’s decision to change the beer ration to rum in 1655 following the capture of Jamaica. This decision came, in part, from the increasing distances that the Navy were travelling as their colonial explorations and routes grew longer. However, it also seems to have created a taste for rum among the sailors which they retained even if they left the navy and joined less salubrious crews. It is significant that an entry in Blackbeard’s journal describes ‘such a day, Rum all out: -our company somewhat sober: -a damn confusion among us! Rogues a plotting; -great talk of separation. - So I look'd sharp for a prize; - such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damn'd hot, then all things went well again.' So even Edward Teach (on whom Stevenson’s Captain Flint is supposed to have been based) talks about rum specifically as essential to the smooth running of a ship. The implication in Treasure Island is that rum softened the difficult circumstances of the sailors but also shortened their lives. Rum clearly played a very important part in the forging of the British Empire and in the creation of Treasure Island but at what cost?

In this paper I shall examine the idea of the emergence of the post human subject in Alfred Bester’s work. I shall explore the idea of the human evolving into something post human, the motivation for that evolution (must it be the threat of death that forces us to change or to find the potential waiting within us), the way that machines are, and are not, used in his work and the importance of making his characters fit for survival in the 24th Century and beyond. 

Alfred Bester cannot allow technology to develop faster than the men manufacturing it. In Bester’s version of the future, man’s evolution is as rapid and extreme as the technology he is developing around him. In Tiger! Tiger! human beings are developing the ability to teleport, known as jaunting in the book,  while in The Demolished Man, telepathy has become so common that a Guild must be created to separate and control the new sub-set of humanity. In the 1950’s Bester was writing against a tide of literature, which predicted the destruction of the human race by natural (The Kraken Awakes, The Day of the Triffids) or alien catastrophe (The War of the Worlds, The Midwich Cuckoo), through its technological advances (A Canticle for Liebowitz, The Chrysalids) or the triumph of the machine, particularly the robot (The Complete Robot). In the desperate and violent action of Bester’s Science Fiction, we are presented with a difficult but potentially hopeful alternative future. But to what extent is his vision a positive one? The punishments of the societies he depicts revolve around the loss, the control or the rebuilding of the mind and the powerful controlling forces of corruption and greed he draws, reflect the society he saw around him and which we still see today.

Whether it be drinking in public or the public’s drinking habits, public drinking was taken seriously in the nineteenth century. The day explores the paradoxical status of alcohol in the period both as social enabler and source of pleasure, and cause for social and personal concern. The event will enable networking between scholars working in different subject areas to develop this dynamic field of study.

We invite papers to explore the spaces, habits and discourses of social and anti-social drinking. Speakers may discuss representations of drinking practices, drunks and drunkenness in fiction, theatre, periodicals, medical literature, art and the wider culture, and the afterlives of nineteenth-century drinking. We are open to international influence – rum, vodka, curaçao and absinthe are as welcome intellectual stimulation as British beer, whisky and gin.

Abstracts (300 words max.) should be sent to Pam Lock (pam.lock@bristol.ac.uk) by
16 December 2013. More details will follow at http://bristolunidrinkconference14.wordpress.com/ or follow us on Twitter @UoBrisDrinkConf

This paper discusses the symbiotic relationship between the Brontës' novels and public discourses of alcoholism in the 1840s. I focus on two novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The harmful drinking in these novels is commonly interpreted autobiographically in relation to their brother Branwell’s problem drinking. However, this paper argues that the pivotal role of alcoholism, as it came to be known, in the Brontë sisters’ writing is a product, not only of personal experience, but of prominent medical and social discourses of harmful drinking.

The first half of the nineteenth century, the period in which these novels were produced and published (1847-8), represents a development in the active public discourse on problem drinking. New and contradictory medical and religious approaches to the figure of the individual in cases of habitual drunkenness featured commonly in newspapers and journals, published sermons and political rhetoric. The conflict represented by the polarities of these theories, habitual drunkenness as either vice or disease, produces tensions in both novels. For example, Anne Brontë's Arthur Huntingdon is both the undisciplined playboy lacking the self-control to regulate his propensity for drink and also the afflicted son of a hereditarily dissipated family whose organ of veneration, left unchecked, phrenologically dooms him to a life of self-destruction.

This paper examines the decline and deaths of the alcoholics Arthur Huntingdon and Hindley Earnshaw within the larger public discourse on alcoholism, its causes and treatment.

Science Fiction authors are fascinated by the monstrous humanoids that their human characters create.  These creatures are, almost without exception, given artificially short life-spans (eg. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) or retain their lives only at the whim of their creators (eg. Never Let Me Go). But what makes the authors insist on this control?

In this paper I will examine the representation of unhuman characters in Karel Capek‘s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written in 1920 (which introduced the word ‘robot’) and Jenny Stevens’ radio play Jefferson 37, written as a special for BBC Radio 7.

Capek’s robots are made from artificially produced flesh and organs to be cheap workers for the world. Stevenson’s clones are grown using human umbilical cord from their originals in artificial womb sacks. The robot’s maximum life-span is twenty years before they wear out while the clones only function is to provide spare parts for their rich ‘originals’ and they are not legally human so they can be terminated at the will of the doctors. Both robots and clones are made monstrous by their dislocated similarity to humans.

Like Frankenstein, the creators in both plays are punished not for creating unhumans but for making them monsters through their inhuman treatment. Capek’s play prophesizes a posthuman reality when the robots kill all but one human on earth because ‘Slaughter and domination are necessary if you would be human beings. Read history.’ Stephenson’s play explores the impossibility of a docile humanoid.

But what do these monsters represent? I will argue that these authors are suggesting that a posthuman future is inevitable. If we must die out then the only way for humanity to cope is to ensure that that future will at least retain our shape. For, as Terry Pratchett suggests, ‘…if an intelligent creature takes a human shape it starts to think human. Form defines function.’ (The Time Thief) But facing the dominant species of the future makes humanity shudder, especially when it looks so like us.

In this paper I shall examine attitudes to female drunkenness in 1850’s fiction with particular attention to Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and Janet Dempster in Eliot’s ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857). These detailed character studies express the new ideals of the realist movement inherited from the ‘Condition of England’ novels of the 1840s such as Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). I will assess the relation of these fictional portrayals to attitudes to women and alcohol in contemporary newspapers and magazines and particularly in the growing temperance press (Alliance News (1853-present), the Temperance Record (1856-1902) and the League Journal (1857-1922)).
Dickens relies upon misogynist stereotypes in his depiction of Mrs Blackpool the labourer’s wife, ‘so foul’ in her ‘tatters, stains, […] and […] moral infamy’. In contrast, the drinking of Eliot’s Janet Dempster, a wealthy lawyer’s wife, is justified by her mistreatment by her abusive husband and tempered by a reputation for kindness among her peers and the poor. Is class bias the only explanation for why the working-class Mrs Blackpool is left begging money for drink at the end of Hard Times, while, with Mr Tryan’s support, the middle-class Janet achieves abstinence and salvation?

Behind the degeneration of Stephen Blackpool’s unnamed wife to a ‘dead woman’ lies an untold history, an unexplained transition so stark as to leave ‘no trace’ of the woman he married eighteen years before. Here habitual drunkenness has possessed a woman’s body and mind, changing her from a young bride to a wasted and tormenting ‘it’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dickens chooses female drunkenness to create the most foul and morally bankrupt woman he can imagine to support his argument for legislation to give access to divorce to the working-classes in Hard Times (1854). In contrast, Eliot’s portrayal of Janet Dempster in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Scenes from Clerical Life, 1857) focuses on Janet’s motives for drinking excessively and her route to abstinence through the support of a Rechabite preacher, Mr Tryan. I will examine how the social hierarchies of drinking in the mid-nineteenth century complicates gender readings of these female drunkards.
Eliot’s sharp critique of Hard Times in The Westminster Review (Oct. 1854) nonetheless praises his ‘least cultivated’ characters as his ‘most successful’, while Dickens, in his famous first letter to Eliot (Jan. 1858) commends the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy’ of her stories. But what is meant by truth is this context? For example, Eliot used her friend, Nancy Buchanan and her husband, as the inspiration for the Dempsters. I will ask what implications biographical and documentary sources have for the verisimilitude and authenticity of the characterisation of drinking women in these fictions.
I will compare these openly fictional portrayals to the often equally fictional accounts of female drinkers presented in contemporary newspapers and magazines, particularly the growing temperance press. I will examine how these character studies relate to the long-standing cultural idea in Britain that women’s drinking, as James Nicholls argues, is ‘morally and economically ruinous’.