Character under the influence in eighteenth-century Britain

I argue that alcohol, as a paradigmatic mind-altering substance, becomes a test case for the eighteenth-century development of fictional character because of the challenge that it poses to Enlightenment models of personhood. In this period, thinkers like John Locke had begun to explicitly define a person in philosophical, economic, and legal terms through continuous consciousness, possession of one’s body and its labor, and a will that could be held liable for transgressions. Drunkenness could disrupt all three of these criteria: blacking out memory, taking control of the body, and influencing the will to the point that it was no longer clearly the drinker’s own. From the comparisons of drinkers to animals in seventeenth-century sermons and satires to Henry Fielding’s mock-hydraulic accounts of intoxicated minds at work, writers of this period wrestled with how to describe people whose behavior seemed determined by a chemical influence rather than a rational will. These descriptions of drinkers thus wind up highlighting the differences between fictional character and personhood as means of conceiving identity: instead of autonomy and continuous consciousness, the discourse of character defines a person through an inner nature that can change over time, as a repeated behavior becomes a characteristic habit.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference