Accompanying this diminished, trivializing regard is a prevailing, bootstraps mentality dictating that women should be able to gracefully handle trials of any sort, come what may. But in nearly every corner of our lives, we are reminded that the world was neither built for our welfare nor our benefit. As a matter of course, we sometimes learn to self-medicate with the materials available to us: it’s a numbing act of self-preservation, even survival. And certainly, it’s no surprise that these practices are generally figured in terms of moral failing in the face of trying circumstances. Women are not simply dragooned into complying with society’s dictates, but also compelled—no matter how archaic the expectation—to serve as exemplars of virtue and domestic femininity. Boys will be boys, and so their leisure and comfort has always been integrated into the cultural context: an intimate gathering to guzzle whiskey, inhale in public smoking rooms, and gawk and leer at strip clubs, the brunt of which are significantly reliant on women’s labor. Even the opium dens of the nineteenth century were, however controversial, preserved as secluded, exclusively masculine spaces for indulgent repose. A little temptation never hurt a proper gentleman, so long as he was discreet in the appropriate ways. Women, on the other hand, have struggled to seek solace—from poverty, from sexism, from racism, from men—and have been condemned for the extreme measures they sometimes take for relief.
The lure and stigma of self-medication becomes all the more fraught for those who, even in a more egalitarian world, would struggle to wrangle their roaring brains or brimful hearts. After all, the use of any numbing substance can function as a palliative measure for the pains inherent to too muchness. At the end of my first marriage, exhausted and heartbroken, I began to drink heavily at night, always alone, as I padded across the cool floor of my studio apartment. Certain substance-based coping mechanisms might be unhealthy in any case, but for women they are damning. Leo Tolstoy’s titular Anna Karenina misuses opium when she is plagued by the burdens of a nineteenth-century infidelity scandal, harpooning what little social dignity she has retained. It’s dangerous stereotyping to imply that because a woman is passionate or inclined to intense emotional expression, she will be more likely to turn to drugs or alcohol, but Anna’s increasingly debilitating paranoia and jealousy, coupled with her social isolation, render her vulnerable to any available means of relief. As for those witnessing her mental and emotional disintegration: they would just as soon turn a blind eye to her suffering.
* * *
We don’t often read about Victorian women’s substance abuse, and with good reason. In the nineteenth century, a temperance movement loomed large in Great Britain. Men who drank were considered lowlifes, but women who drank were nothing short of fallen, that is to say, abandoners of the virtuous life they were expected to diligently follow. Engravings like “The Clew,”32 by Charles Keene, published in the March 8, 1879, edition of Punch magazine, illustrate with brevity Victorian society’s condemnatory view of female alcoholism. Our eyes are directed to the diminutive and ragged figure of a little girl, her hair shorn haphazardly, as if someone had attempted to cut it while reeling in drunken delirium. She is barefoot and, based on the wrappings of those surrounding her, vulnerable to the English chill. What’s more, Keene’s shadowing seems to imply grime as much as it supplies dimension to her small person. A policeman, together with a small crowd of concerned passersby loom over her, their gazes re-emphasizing our focus on the little girl and the policeman who has bent toward her and taken her hand. The corresponding text reads:
The child was evidently lost!—cried bitterly—could not tell where its Parents lived, or whether she was an Orphan, or what her Father was—or where she went to school.—Enter Intelligent Policeman.
Policeman (in a friendly whisper). “Where does your Mother get her Gin, My Dear?”
[And the mystery was solved.]
British cities, namely London, teemed with destitute children like the one rendered here, and to be sure, their plights—homelessness, the perils of factory labor, grave illness—were urgent social matters that demanded attention. And to a paltry extent, they did. In 1833, the Factory Act or Children’s Charter33 tightened child labor regulations so that children under nine could no longer work in factories, with the exception of silk mills. Children under the age of thirteen could work no more than nine hours a day, or forty-eight hours a week. Other similar reforms were devised during Queen Victoria’s reign, and while they might have improved conditions that were previously even more ghastly, the strident poverty that made it impossible for Londoners to feed their children and brought about the alcoholism gestured to in “The Clew” ran evermore rampant through British manufacturing cities.
The caption to Keene’s engraving assumes, without considering extenuating circumstances, that this child has turned street urchin because her mother, in taking to drink, has divested herself of maternal responsibility. Poor women are drunk women, it dangerously implies: they forget their children and dose themselves with gin until the pubs close. Abusive and neglectful parents have existed for as long as our species has procreated, and Victorian literature abounds with ill-treated children. But when it comes to considering mothers who were less responsible, or less kind, the emotional strains of privation go unmentioned. Indeed, this example urges an alliance between child and law enforcement that insinuates, however obliquely, that the gin-drinking mother belongs in jail and that the child would do better under institutional care. But in all likelihood, a child with parents too drunk to feed her would not have been spirited away by a benevolent bureaucracy; probably, she would have died in an alley.
Charlotte Brontë’s biographer and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell focused her novels more squarely on the working class of northern England, and in so doing attended to the consequences of lives strained by grim toil, punishing working conditions, and protracted hunger. In Mary Barton (1848), set in 1840s Manchester, Gaskell introduces us to a minor, albeit significant character, Esther—wayward aunt to the titular Mary. At the start of the novel, we learn that Esther has run away from home; later we learn that she had fallen in love with a naval officer she expected to marry, but who in short order impregnated and abandoned her. She turns to prostitution in a desperate effort to save her ailing baby, but to no avail: the child dies, and, bereft, Esther languishes on the streets of Manchester, oscillating between sex work and prison. As she explains to one character, she cannot merely return home, for her fall has been too definitive, not because of her sex work, but because of her burgeoned alcohol addiction:
I must have drink. Such as live like me could not bear life if they did not drink. It’s the only thing to keep us from suicide. If we did not drink, we could not stand the memory of what we have been, and the thought of what we are, for a day. If I go without food, and without shelter, I must have my dram.34
Gaskell’s rendering of self-medication turned addiction is not wholly unsympathetic, but it reifies Victorian conceptions of fallenness: that those women who have resorted to prostitution or engaged in illicit affairs or premarital sex are either unrepentant or appropriately self-loathing. In Esther’s case, she drinks because she cannot “stand the memory of what we have been, and the thought of what we are”; that is to say, her bygone purity is intolerable to contemplate in her current, squalid circumstances.
Gaskell’s narrator nudges us to be a little indulgent, but every bit as punishing as cultural gender expectations dictate: “Maybe I would drink too if I had become so filthy and hated myself so much.” What the novel does not sufficiently acknowledge is that Esther’s misery is largely manufactured by cruel, prevailing forces that deny a woman the right to make a mistake, especially when that mistake is falling in love with the wrong person and even more so when, dazzled by that love, you become sexually intimate prior to the legitimizing bonds of matrimony. And as literary critic Deborah Logan points out, despite this presentation of “extenuating circumstances,” Gaskell preserves the “drunken-prostitute stereotype” by ignor
ing one key fact: gin, or the “dram” to which Esther refers, cost far less than bread. One could also acquire it more easily, and rely on it to stave off hunger for longer periods of time. “Thus,” Logan posits, “alcoholism, like prostitution, among the poor and working classes was generally more a matter of economics than of sensuous self-indulgence or inherent moral depravity.”35 But what if there were “sensuous” enjoyment in drunkenness after a chilly, starved night? In our perpetual quest for the Good Victims, we are determined to rewrite marginalized narratives so that every act of desperation is neither motivated by a desire for pleasure nor productive of it. We want to believe that Esther drinks not because she likes it, but because it ushers in a welcome impassivity in the face of her dismal circumstances and, what’s more, offers the deranged practicality of cheaply safeguarding against hunger. She cannot, after all, be a victim if she smiles, if she for one evening does not grapple with remorse, or with the desire to escape the life that now unravels before her like tar-soaked cloth. It’s seductive—the possibility of smudging out the day and all its discontents. After all, this world was not made for us, and it can be a damned bitter task to live in it. But this existential incompatibility has never been considered a sufficient “extenuating circumstance.” We cannot accept respite unless it manifests in its most virtuous forms, unless it abides by the ideological notion that indulgence—particularly in alcohol or drugs or other items marked as “unhealthy”—is always an index of moral weakness.
In the context of a novel, we typically understand and are frequently encouraged to sympathize with a character as she self-destructs. But without a narrator reminding us of context, we’re often inclined to isolate drug use and alcoholism, rather than treating them as symptoms of impossible circumstances. And when it comes to addressing substance abuse as a broader issue—the “war on drugs,” as Richard Nixon pronounced it in 1971—we’re also far more likely to target women of color. Unlike white women, whose too muchness is stigmatized only when it manifests through action, the distorted light of prejudice proffers women of color as excessive according to fundamental racial attributes. Held in suspicion by default, the American criminal justice system is ever ready to pounce. As Andrea Ritchie reports in her book Invisible No More, “Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women make up a grossly disproportionate share of women incarcerated for drug offenses, even though whites are nearly five times as likely as Blacks to use marijuana and three times as likely as Blacks to have used crack.”36 These shamelessly racialized disparities are provoked by the illusory but damning stereotypes that not only yoke drug use to poor, nonwhite femininity, but also deny them the paternalistic coddling that is more often afforded to white women who break the law. Too muchness is thrust upon women of color as a stigmatizing, permanent condition before they have the opportunity to claim it as something less vituperative. And so, we fling assumptions—self-indulgent, outsize cravings for drugs and sex—and punish extravagantly. As Ritchie argues,
Law enforcement interactions with women of color are informed by perceptions of their bodies as vessels for drugs ingested, swallowed, or concealed and of women of color as “out of control” unfit mothers, community members dependent on drugs and men, or coldhearted “gangsta bitches” prone to inhuman violence.37
In America, the “war on drugs” has not been waged in affluent fraternity houses or in the homes of flush white executives who celebrate a weekend in the Hamptons with lines of cocaine. Rather, Ritchie reminds us, it has ravaged the communities of impoverished people of color, resulting not only in wildly skewed statistics, swollen with racism, but in assumptions of guilt based upon the landscape and the lurid character sketches that censure women of color for their behavioral excesses whether or not they have ever resorted to substance abuse. In a white male-dominated society that purports to diagnose the reasons for racialized poverty without shouldering any blame, women of color become the focal point of condemnation. And there is no space—no sympathy—to be supplied if a woman claims her right to indulge. If she drinks a vodka tonic after a backbreaking, miserable day, she fails as a maternal figure and is, on the contrary, an “‘out of control’ unfit mother.” Hegemonic forces might argue that she neglects the burden of hoisting her community from poverty. Her vulnerability is thus interpreted as a racially specific moral failing, one that will confine black and brown children to poverty in perpetuity. Like the fallen women of Victorian fiction, she is execrated as irredeemable, but not merely for her own alleged shortcomings. Instead, the fallen women of color is weaponized as both thesis and justification: the particulars of her life explain, according to a specific, prejudiced logic, the degradation of an entire race while divesting complicit systems from social responsibility. If she is beyond hope, so must her children be.
Hollywood’s overwhelming whiteness has resulted in most famous depictions of impoverished, addicted women of color being crafted by white people. But in 2016, director Barry Jenkins intervened with his semiautobiographical film Moonlight, in which Naomie Harris performs the supporting role of Paula, a mother struggling to raise her son, Chiron, as she succumbs to the unremitting wrench of a crack addiction. Harris’s Paula is terrifying and feral and, at times, ruthless, but she is never, as others have observed, a pat trope. K. Austin Collins writes, “Paula is not merely a ‘crack-addicted mother,’ as the stereotype typically goes, but a fully imagined woman who loves her son and tries to hold down a job and to raise him, even as she struggles with addiction.”38 Her maternal affection and her suffering are as visceral—and demand the same attention—as her drug-addled rage. As Paula, Harris dares viewers to reduce her to a fallen woman, someone who is only deserving of censure, to whom the luxury of empathy ought not be extended.
When Juan (Mahershala Ali), the crack dealer who has become something of a paternal figure to Chiron, chides Paula for her addiction, the film presses upon its resistance to easy assumptions. It’s funny, in its gloomy way, for a dealer to scold a potential paying customer, but as Paula defends herself, her throaty drawl crackling with hostility, she spits Juan’s condescension in his face while simultaneously reminding the audience that she cannot be flattened into that ubiquitous type: the addict mother who loves getting high more than she loves her son. “Who the hell you think you is? Huh?” she demands of Juan. “What, so you gonna raise my son now?…You ever see the way he walk? You’re gonna tell him why the other boys kick his ass all the time? You ain’t shit.” Paula may not be the mother she hoped to be to Chiron, but she sees him with lucidity—she pays attention. “By the end, we’ve been reminded,” Collins concludes, “[that] she’s Chiron’s mother. And Juan is no better than she is.”39 Paula is not inured to her responsibilities as her son begins to navigate the world as a gay person, even if her addiction yanks her off course. And the only person to whom she ultimately holds herself accountable is Chiron, with whom she reconciles after getting clean. Together, Jenkins, Harris, and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney give body to a character who will not be interpolated as this or as that: the business of apprehending and naming her excesses—and they are deadly excesses—is hers alone.
* * *
So-called “troubled celebrities” like actress Lindsay Lohan and pop star Demi Lovato exist at the opposite end of the privilege spectrum from women like Paula, and the impoverished alcoholic women of Victorian narratives, but their respective examples of addiction elaborate upon the cultural reception of women’s substance abuse. The media has pilloried Lohan for her drunken antics since they first began circa 2007, when she was arrested for multiple DUIs. She is the child star gone wrong par excellence, the sweetheart swallowed whole by Hollywood’s hedonism—a fall that has lately become increasingly complicated by her culturally and politically tone-deaf behavior.
Certainly Lohan’s wealth and fame have affected her use of influence and platform in some gruesome ways, from her reckless habit of driving while intoxicated to deeply ignorant outbursts in the face of Middle Eastern refugees. But wheth
er or not Lohan is a sympathetic case—or, for that matter, a decent person—it’s notable, if not surprising, that the larger response to her struggles with alcoholism has been one of scornful amusement. A sexist logic motivates this reaction: we delight in “messy” female celebrities with an affected knowingness, as if their strife was somehow predictable, that their moral weakness, their too muchness, has merely risen to the surface. We elide discussions of mental health and mystify Lohan’s famously difficult childhood in condemnatory discussions of her addictions. The media seems particularly eager to lampoon former female child stars like Lohan who struggle to maintain emotional equilibrium. They perform sympathy, but it’s drenched in derision.
As a result, a famous woman who publicly narrates her addiction must perform the struggle in a diligently precise way, so as to circumvent widespread mockery and her reputation’s ruin. Singer Demi Lovato, who, like Lohan, is a child star and Disney alumnus, was drawn in by Hollywood’s ready offerings of cocaine and booze. She claimed to give it all up, only to later reveal that while shooting the 2012 recovery documentary Stay Strong she had been using cocaine. It seems as if she did break with substance abuse not long after that point, but relapsed in August 2018, at age twenty-six, after six years of sobriety.40
Lovato’s fans learned the news not because of a panting TMZ report, but because she announced it by releasing a new single, “Sober,” and, to the extent that she could, grabbed the narrative reins before they fell into the grasp of bystanders and speculating bloggers. The lyric video, which she posted on her Instagram account on June 21, 2018, recreates the sizzling granular snow of a broken television, the verses spelled out against its backdrop, like a retrieved epilogic message. At its beginning, oversaturated footage of Lovato flashes before us, spliced with, among other items, closeups of a liquor bottle, a dingily impersonal hotel room, and a pair of strappy stilettos toppled to the side, like hope overturned. All of this is evidence, the video seems to indicate, and it is also the past. The song’s premise is stated quite plainly, but in the chorus, Lovato makes no bones about what she needs to express: “Momma, I’m so sorry I’m not sober anymore / And Daddy, please forgive me for the drinks spilled on the floor.” It wasn’t long after releasing “Sober” that Lovato overdosed: thankfully, one of her assistants found the singer passed out and, though she was initially feared dead, swift action revived her. Lovato entered rehab, and on August 5 posted again to her Instagram account a brief note, now deleted, the first paragraph of which read: “I have always been transparent about my journey with addiction. What I’ve learned is that this illness is not something that disappears or fades with time. It is something I must continue to overcome and have not done yet.”
Too Much Page 16
