Reading Alcoholisms

With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.

With Reading Alcoholisms, Jane Lilienfeld has produced a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf. Each of these authors was directly affected by the alcoholism of a family member or mentor, and Lilienfeld shows how the effects of alcoholism organized their texts: through the portrayal of a protagonist in The Mayor of Casterbridge, through the denial of parental alcoholism and its silent presence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and through codependent reactive patterns of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. With the remarkable empathy Lilienfeld has for human dimensions of alcoholism, she demonstrates that "the narrative strategies in each of these novels at times mimic the behaviors and feeling states often arising from alcoholism." Without an understanding of the multidimensional nature of alcoholism and the transmission of its effects across generations, any analysis of the work of these three literary giants is incomplete.

Library Journal

In three essays, Lilienfeld (English, Lincoln Univ.) uses the techniques of literary criticism and the sociology of addiction to study three modern writers. Thomas Hardy was raised in a hard-drinking rural culture and wrote explicitly about it in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In James Joyce's semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Joyce's alcoholic father, John Joyce, who drank away the family's fortunes, appears as Simon Dedalus. Lilienfeld postulates that the Joyce family's strategies for dealing with John Joyce, which were similar to those of other alcoholics' families, are responsible for the famously elliptical plot of Portrait. However, she does not deal with James Joyce's own alcoholism. The weakest of the essays covers Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; the only addiction seems to be Woolf's grandmother's possible addiction to morphine and the codependent personality it created in Woolf's mother. All of the essays require close familiarity with both the critical literature of the author and the literature of addiction and codependence. For specialized collections.--Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Jane Lilienfeld is Associate Professor of English at Lincoln University.