The Hangover and the Outsider: Self-fashioning, Shame and Defiance in Twentieth- and Twenty-first-century Fiction

Chapter 6 explores the way the hangover is used in drinking narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to understand the figure of the existential, drunken outsider. It considers the ways in which the most defiant of rebellious figures are undermined by the physical and emotional assault of the hangover. The chapter looks at the different kinds of scrutiny that male and female problem drinkers come to bear, usually in relation to sexual conduct, and the increased presence of inexplicable ‘hangxiety’, often less easily defined than related emotions such as shame and guilt. There is close analysis of fiction from the US and the UK, including works by Jack London, Alan Sillitoe, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Rhys, Charles Bukowski, Helen Fielding and A. L. Kennedy. The chapter concludes by arguing that memory loss is perhaps the most compelling way in which the rebellious outside can cheat the socio-cultural determinants of a Traditional-Punishment response.

Isolating, Placing and Contextualising the Hangover

This chapter identifies and isolates some of the prominent features of a hangover. It demonstrates the kind of physical phenomena that usually occupy quantitative studies of the hangover in the sciences before elaborating on the way these are linked to affect – often negative, although not exclusively – such as guilt, self-disgust and anxiety. It does this through contextualised, close literary analysis of hangover descriptions in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe and Kingsley Amis. These readings demonstrate the way that hangover symptoms can both reveal and conceal larger socio-cultural concerns and how hangover consciousness is informed by the experience of transgressing social values. It also traces the etymology of the word hangover, reflecting on some of the vernacular used to describe hangovers in the early twentieth century, and introduces the Traditional-Punishment and Withdrawal-Relief responses that can disclose continuities between periods.

‘The Nausea of Sin’: The Early Modern Hangover

The chapter pursues the representation of the hangover in poetry and drama, religious and political writing and in the culture wars of the seventeenth century in England. It begins by exploring why the hangover has been obscured in writing about early modern depictions of drunkenness through a study of Anacreontic verse by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace. Hangovers, it contends, are more prominent in other forms of literature such as Protestant tracts and sermons and in bawdy verse and drama of the Restoration. They also feature regularly in what the chapter terms ‘anti-symposiastic’ verse written by Whigs in the 1690s. The chapter argues throughout that the hangover – whether leading to feelings of guilt and shame or defiance – takes us beyond studies of male fellowship and tavern culture, increasing our understanding of the way that the body becomes a route to discuss moral and spiritual failings in this period. It also gives examples of the way Withdrawal-Relief recovery methods – sometimes known as the hair of the dog – became associated with defiance.

‘Baneful to Public and to Private Good’: Hours of Illness and Idleness in the Long Eighteenth Century

Chapter 3 retains focus on the moral aspects of a hangover but links them specifically to debates in the long eighteenth century about work and idleness. It maintains that the hangover undermined Britain’s identity as an industrious trading nation. Hangovers disclosed social anxieties about civic duty, the real level of industriousness of the British workforce and the moral status of the unoccupied man and woman of means in the long eighteenth century. The chapter makes this argument through analysis of the propaganda of the ‘gin craze’, depictions of marital tensions in poetry, drama and prose and in a study of the figures of the bachelor and the socialite.

Moral Sensitivity and the Mind: Tired and Emotional Victorians

The Victorian period is often remembered as a morally severe one, associated with rectitude, propriety, temperance and self-help. This chapter argues that hangover literature provides an important means to understand the social and cultural values that drinkers were perceived to have transgressed. Nevertheless, the tendency in Victorian literature was to humanise the figure of the drunkard and hangovers were a part of this. Through analysis of depictions of hangovers in works by Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the chapter argues that Victorian novelists demonstrated many reasons why drinkers felt shame but also – drawing on better medical understanding of the nerves and the mind – their emotional complexity. It shows that they reversed some of the more straightforward condemnation of inebriates commonly found in temperance literature.

Introduction

The introduction argues that while the hangover has often been the subject of medical and psychological studies, it is a neglected topic in the humanities. In the emerging field of drinking studies, the hangover tends to be overlooked in favour of studies of intoxication, sociability and ritual. Yet, as argued here, a literary study of the hangover contributes significantly to our understanding of many of the issues given prominence in drinking studies such as the relationship between the drinker and their environment, the politics of controlling alcohol consumption and the ways in which alcohol affects perception and cognition. The introduction establishes the historical range of the study from the Renaissance to the present day and argues that the hangover as a socio-cultural phenomenon is best witnessed when we consider the continuities and contrasts in its representation at different times.

Odes to Dejection: Romanticism and the Melancholy of Self-knowledge

This chapter explores the hangover as the aftermath of the heightened Romantic state of intoxication. It argues that British Romantic poets used the hangover to explore the interiority of the drinker, seeking through the imagination and the feelings new ways to surmount or compensate for the Traditional-Punishment hangover reaction as seen in earlier periods. It examines hangover consciousness and penitent’s rhetoric, which is reminiscent of the seventeenth century, but argues that the penitential sincerity is compromised by the mode of melodrama and self-pity. The chapter offers close analysis of hangovers in poetry from Robert Burns and S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats alongside a discussion of the Romantic drunken confession penned by Charles Lamb.