“A degraded man, a half-civilised savage:” Shame and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Irish Temperance Literature [1840-1878]

An article based on Fionnula Simpson’s first case study for the Drinking Cultures project has been accepted by the journal for the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs and will appear in a forthcoming issue under the title “‘A degraded man, a half-civilised savage:’ Shame and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Irish Temperance Literature.”

The article uses temperance literature, a critically neglected genre of Irish fiction, to demonstrate the adaptation of the “drunken Irishman” stereotype to emerging nineteenth-century medical frameworks using highly gendered imagery and tropes. Drawing on fictional as well as medical works, it demonstrates the ways in which writers like Anna Maria Hall, William Carleton, and Marion Clarke reinforced the idea of the drinker’s shame by positioning the male drinker as embarrassingly emasculated and the female drinker as grotesquely de-feminized. It argues that these portrayals of male violence, poverty, and neglectful mothering mask darker anxieties over the threat that the lower classes supposedly posed to the social order, providing an insight into Irish writers’ engagement with ideas of a national predilection for alcohol that supposedly enhanced hyper-masculine and effeminate traits.

The pre-print version is available here: