Alcohol and art in nineteenth century American fiction: Studies of Poe and Stowe

The ideas and events that surround alcoholism in American literature constitute grounds for a reevaluation. To make a modest dent in this subject, I have narrowed my focus to a small body of canonical works by Edgar Allan Poe and Harriet Beecher Stowe. My chief area of inquiry is how alcohol as a topic, as structural motif, and as metaphor serves these writers\u27 literary productions. A subordinate aim is an investigation of the inadequacy of criticism on the subject, and what contribution our current understanding of alcoholism, its moral, environmental, and hereditary shadings can make to a reinterpretation of major works by these two writers. The biographies in chapters one and three that precede the interpretive work in chapters two and four permit me to address the vital intersection of the respective writer\u27s life and work, specifically each artist\u27s concern with alcohol and its place in his or her oeuvre. With a twentieth century social and scientific understanding of alcoholism, its wide ranging traits, often invisible because of its gradual progressiveness, and the drinker\u27s denial syndromes, this study decodes, in many instances, the fiction writer\u27s deliberately masked discussion of alcohol and character. The dissertation indicates how an alignment of alcohol and art with scientific and socio-historic thought in the nineteenth century contributes significantly to our textual understanding of the work of Poe and Stowe, how the short story and (or) novel were their testing grounds for the subject of drink, and how it devilled, drove, and confounded their fictive characters