‘They all know what I am. I’m a woman come in here to get drunk’: shame, femininity and the literature of intoxication

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the intersection of femininity, shame, and alcoholism, considering the particular shame of the woman who drinks via a reading of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering (2018). Suggesting that any study of women writers and their relationship to, and representation of, alcoholism raises questions about female embodiment, morality, visibility, sexuality, and the gendering of shame, the article identifies the stigmatisation of female alcoholism found in both popular and scientific discourse. It then offers an extended reading of Good Morning, Midnight, attending to the novel’s treatment of drunkenness as both pleasure and pain, both submission to and critique of a hostile world; as expression of, temporary antidote to, and ultimate compounding of a deep-seated female shame. The text’s formal disruptions and fragmentariness are also read, in relation to the disorientation of intoxication and the inexpressibility of shame. The closing analysis of The Recovering analyses Jamison’s more recent, more self-reflexive take on the myth of the heroic drunk male author, which considers the narrativisation of intoxication and recovery and the persistent shame of the woman who is ‘nothing but need’.

KEYWORDS:

• Literature
• shame
• alcoholism
• Jean Rhys
• Leslie Jamison
• femininity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the longer version of this argument, see Mitchell (2020).

2. E.g. Lewis (1971; 1987a; 1987b).

3. See, for example, David Plante’s representation of Rhys (Plante, 1979), which opens with a garish account of his first encounter with her (in 1975), during which she becomes increasingly drunk, dishevelled and confused. See also Wedge (1998: 22–33).

4. Valverde notes that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘the British focus on the nefarious social and biological consequences of maternal drinking resulted in a situation where the vast majority of habitual drunkards put away under the [Habitual Drunkards/Inebriates] Acts were women, and most of those were in turn mothers charged with child neglect through the surveillance work of the [NSPCC].’ (1998: 53)

5. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, which is the manual of the American Psychiatric Association, and the main reference tool in the identification and treatment of mental illnesses (including ‘substance-related disorders’, as addictions are now termed) in and beyond the US.

6. See also Wedge (1998).

7. This preoccupation is evident also in Rhys’s autobiography, Smile Please (Rhys, 2016), the title of which alludes to one of her earliest childhood memories – being asked to smile by a man who is taking her photograph. In this, and in her early intimations that she is ‘not pretty’ – she says of a young man who is a friend of the family ‘When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God let me be pretty when I grow up’ (40) – we see a recurrent anxiety about how others see her and a paranoid projection of her own insecurities onto/through the gaze of others. She is, above all, an object to be looked at – and in her own estimation she continually falls short.

8. Silvan Tomkins argues, regarding the ambivalence of the ‘shame response’, that ‘in shame I wish to continue to look and be looked at, but I also do not wish to do so.’ See Tomkins, 1995: 137.

9. As Nardin laments, ‘The agonizing repetitions that mark Sasha’s experience could not be more different from the life-affirming sexual rhythms that characterize Molly.’ (2006: 68).

10. The other key examples are: Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring (Laing, 2013), which approaches her own family history of alcoholism obliquely and cautiously, via the histories of various canonical, male authors who drank (John Cheever, Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Tennessee Williams, and Ernest Hemingway); and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (Liptrot, 2016), a more obviously confessional text, which documents Liptrot’s growing problems with alcohol and her move back to the Orkney Islands, where she had grown up, in a bid to sustain her sobriety. The Outrun is part memoir, part nature writing, moving between descriptions of Liptrot’s London life (‘I was in a dangerous loop, now consciously drinking to ease the shame of what I’d done while drinking the night before’, 55), and lengthy accounts of the birds and other wildlife of the far north of Scotland.

11. Coincidentally, the basic text of AA, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, authored by ‘Bill W.’, was published in 1939 – the same year as Good Morning, Midnight, but AA had not yet permeated the global consciousness, so it would have been unavailable (as idea or practical process) to the protagonists of Rhys’s 1930s novels.

12. She is here alluding to Duras’s comment about women who drink; see the citation earlier in this article.

13. This leads Manion to suggest that for Freud, shame is ‘a feminine characteristic’. (2003: 22)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaye Mitchell

Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester and Co-Director of the Centre for New Writing. She is the author of two books – A. L. Kennedy: New British Fiction (Palgrave, 2007), and Intention and Text: Towards an Intentionality of Literary Form (Continuum, 2008) – and editor of a collection of essays on the British author Sarah Waters (Bloomsbury, 2013) and of a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing (OUP, 2015) on experimental women’s writing. She is co-editor of British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Her new monograph, entitled Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), deals with the politics and poetics of shame in contemporary literature. She is the UK editor of the Oxford University Press journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing and is on the editorial board of Open Gender in Germany.