Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:17:55.833Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“AN INFERNAL FIRE IN MY VEINS”: GENTLEMANLY DRINKING IN THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Gwen Hyman
Gwen Hyman*
Affiliation:
The Cooper Union
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Drinking was a serious preoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , September 2008 , pp. 451 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adler, Marianna. “From Symbolic Exchange to Commodity Consumption: Anthropological Notes on Drinking as a Symbolic Practice.” Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History. Ed. Barrows, Susanna and Robin, Room. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. 376–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1979. Trans. Richard, Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. London: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Burnett, John. Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1966.Google Scholar
Cadogan, William. “A Dissertation on the Gout, and all Chronic Diseases, jointly considered, as proceeding from the same causes, what those causes are; and a rational Method of Cure Proposed. Addressed to all Invalids.” London, 1771. William Cadogan [His Essay on Gout]. Ed. Rurhah, John. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1925.Google Scholar
Cannadine, David. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clapp, Alisa M. “The Tenant of Patriarchal Culture: Anne Brontë's Problematic Female Artist.” Michigan Academician 28.2 (1996): 113–22.Google Scholar
Craik, W.A. “The Brontë Novels.” 1968. The Brontës. Ed. Bloom, Harold. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 37–56.Google Scholar
Danelson, J.Edwin, M. D.Dr. Danelson's Counselor with Recipes: A Practical and Trusty Guide for the Family and A Suggestive Hand-Book for the Physician. New York: A. L. Burt, 1883.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854. Ed. Schlicke, Paul. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Ellwanger, George H. Meditations on Gout. 1897. Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1929.Google Scholar
Federico, Annette. “I must have drink: Addiction, Angst, and Victorian Realism.” Dionysos 2.2 (1990): 11–25.Google Scholar
Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and their Food. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew.” The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. , Gallagher and Laqueur, Thomas. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 83–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.Google Scholar
Harrison, Brian. Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1971.Google Scholar
Jackson, Arlene M. “The Question of Credibility in Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” English Studies 63.3 (1982): 198–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kasson, John F. Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. 1980. Trans. Roudiez, Leon S.. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Langland, Elizabeth. Anne Brontë: The Other One. London: Macmillan, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupton, Deborah. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage, 1996.Google Scholar
Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. 1985. 2nd ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996.Google Scholar
Porter, Roy and Rousseau, G. S.. Gout: The Patrician Malady. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. 1980. Trans. Jacobson, David. New York: Pantheon, 1992.Google Scholar
Shiman, Lilian Lewis. Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England. London: Macmillan, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waters, Karen Volland. The Perfect Gentleman: Masculine Control in Victorian Men's Fiction, 1870–1901. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.Google Scholar