While moral and medical perspectives have dominated addiction discourse for the past two centuries, addiction specialists and theorists have recently developed ecological alternatives that cross disciplinary boundaries and treat the addicted person holistically. My dissertation excavates a deep history of ecological thinking on addiction in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charles Dickens, Frank J. Webb, and Lydia Sigourney countered traditional moral conceptions of intemperance by materially linking mental and physical states to environmental conditions, social structures, and economic systems. In doing so, they combined multiple discourses—ranging from psychology, political and domestic economy, proto-thermodynamics, and physiology—to envision a new ecological model of selfhood that challenged Enlightenment notions of self-mastery and liberal subjectivity. This process included not only the pathologization of addiction but the emergence of a networked self.
My dissertation moves chronologically from the Early Republican period to the eve of the Civil War; it focuses on novels (particularly sentimental genres), but also includes poetry, sermons, journalism, and visual artifacts. Chapter 1 explores the intersections of mind, republican politics, and intemperance in the writings of Brown and Benjamin Rush. Chapter 2 contends that lady drunkard narratives by Sigourney and others troubled domestic ideology by embedding addiction in the spousal dynamics, traumas, and medical practices of the home. Focusing on Davis and Dickens, Chapter 3 investigates how agency and addiction pathology were reimagined in the toxic urban-industrial environments of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 argues that Frank J. Webb and the African American press resisted early racialized formations of addiction by depicting drunkenness and white supremacy as conjoined pathologies. The ongoing opioid crisis in the U.S. underscores the importance of not just engaging these early histories to better understand the construction of addiction, but the necessity of balancing networked complexity with the lived experience of those who suffer. I believe that literature is well suited for this task, as it affords psychological, somatic, and social approaches that neuroscience and medicine cannot handle alone. / 2026-02-09T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48059 |
| Date | 09 February 2024 |
| Creators | Bjornson, Eric |
| Contributors | Lee, Maurice, Howell, William H. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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