Romantic Intoxication

          The opening lines of John Keats’ famous “Ode to a Nightingale” state, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk/ Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains” (1296, 1-3). Employing the simile of intoxication to describe his emotional state, the poet takes part in a tradition typifying much of the Romantic oeuvre. By using rhetoric associated with the effects of intoxication, authors can investigate how outside intoxicants—from actual alcohol to lovers and hypnotic despots—affect the autonomy and integrity of individuals. Because these foreign influences are by definition outside the corporeal body, they represent the historical and social contexts from which each works stems, such as the issue of Irish drinking in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent or the problem of false indoctrination in Blake’s “The Little Black Boy.” Paralleling the gamut of human mortality, the effects of intoxicants are temporal and have a definite rise, peak, and decline across a spectrum dictated by time. Cognizant of this range, Romantic authors chose to depict characters at different levels of intoxication, varying from Myrrha’s utter devotion to her lover in Byron’s Sardanapalus to the speaker’s newfound freedom from Napoleon’s spell in “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.” Whether still under the influence of an external force or reflecting on its previous power, these Romantic figures reveal the intoxicating effects not only of drinking but also of the political and social institutions driving the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

            As knw states in her post http://romanticismandthepast.blogspot.com/2012/02/punch-drunk-castle-rackrent.html, “alcohol serves as both the cause of and the veil for the corruption, weakness, and wretchedness that plague each successive generation of Rackent heirs.” Unwilling to attend the pressing needs of their family, the Rackrent men assume the stereotypical role of the Irish drunks—well-liked and humorous but complete slaves to the bottle. Edgeworth’s almost parodic portrayal of this family falls at a crucial point in the history between Ireland and England, a fact her father notes in the Preface by stating, “When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humored complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence” (63). This initial passivity toward a possible union with England becomes complicated by Edgeworth’s final lines of the novel, which state, “Did the Warkwickshire militia…teach the Irish to drink beer? or did they learn from the Irish to drink whiskey? (122). Noted in my earlier post http://romanticismandthepast.blogspot.com/2012/02/warwickshire-and-impending-english.html, the issue of beer taxation was raging in 1800: the English wanted to remove the tax on beer while the Irish saw this as a furtive means to weaken their country through further amplified drunkenness. Scholar Marjie Bloy provides additional information here http://www.victorianweb.org/history/ireland1.html about the political timeline of the Union between Ireland and Great Britain that occurred under the reign of King George III, who ironically had been “amused” by Castle Rackrent and was the reason for its fame (Butler 1).

            The Irish’s nostalgia for a jovial alcoholic past is mirrored in Robert Burn’s “John Barleycorn. A Ballad,” which manipulates a drinking song into a laudation of Scotland’s identity and history. Composed in fifteen stanzas of ballad meter, the poem traces the transformation of John Barleycorn into the drink itself, which “’Twill make your courage rise./ ‘Twill make a man forget his woe;/ ‘Twill heighten all his joy” (356-357, 52-54). Although this version was published nearly eighty years after Scotland’s union with Great Britain, the same desire remains to preserve a nationalistic identity, a tendency supported by the name of the collection itself: Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. Just as Edgeworth’s father predicts the Irish will fondly remember their independent days, Burns presents alcohol and the legend of John Barleycorn as a vehicle to escape England’s present political domination over the once-great nation of “old Scotland!” (357, 60).

            The issues of intoxication and national identity reappear in Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus through the figure of Myrrha, one of the Assyrian king’s enslaved Greek concubines. Whereas the men in Edgeworth and Burns use alcohol as a means to strengthen and honor their nationalistic ties, Myrrha struggles to negotiate the divide between her Greek heritage and her impassioned love for Sardanapalus. In the post http://romanticismandthepast.blogspot.com/2012/04/myrrhas-conflicted-character.html, Ivy cites the slave’s willingness to abandon her Greek identity for her lover as the “female weakness,” a characteristic differentiating her from the Irish and Scottish figures, and she quotes the following passage: “"Why do I love this man? My country's daughters/ Love none but heroes. But I have no country/ the slave hath lost all save her bonds. I love him" (641-643). By portraying Myrrha’s susceptibility to love her very enslaver, Byron taps into the reigning social constructs regarding English marital tradition, which delegate women strictly to domestic spheres. Mary Wollstonecraft elaborates on this phenomenon in her essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when she compares English women to flowers, stating, “for like the flowers planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty… I attribute [this] to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men…considering females rather as women than human creatures” (74).

            While Wollstonecraft highlights the dehumanization of women typical of English society, Byron resists such a stark dichotomy between the sexes by allowing Myrrha to regain some agency in the midst of her intoxication for Sardanapalus. In the article “Sardanapalus and ‘Effeminate Character,’ ” Susan J. Wolfson explains that Myrrha “along with Salamenes, despairs of the civic and political consequences of Sardanapalus’s negligent luxury: although her motive is love rather than nationalism, she, too, urges care for ‘thy past father’s race’ ” (870). Although Myrrha serves as a rational voice persuading the king to take precautionary measures, this act of nationalism stems not from her dedication to Greece but rather from her overwhelming devotion to her love—an intoxicant that ultimately fuels their mutual death in the final scene of the play.

            Whereas Byron approaches slavery within the context of a foreign, ancient land, William Blake composes the poem “The Little Black Boy” to tackle the mores surrounding the institution of slavery as it directly relates to English practices. In Sardanapalus, Myrrha is acutely aware of her shackles, proclaiming they are the only things she has yet to lose, but the protagonist in Blake’s work fails to recognize the direness of his situation as a young slave because he blindly accepts the social excuses used to indoctrinate obedience and acceptance of the chattel system. The two plates below illustrate the original way in which Blake presented this poem in his collection Songs of Innocence, as combinations of text and etched designs.

             In her post http://romanticismandthepast.blogspot.com/2012/02/racial-commentary-in-little-black-boy.html, Ivy points out Blake’s distinction between white and black children, noting line 4: “but I am black as if bereav’d of light.” Like Wollstonecraft’s earlier assertion that society views women as an entity separated from humanity, the little boy’s blackness is characterized only as an absence, which is a supposition more dehumanizing than equating the darker race with human evil or ignorance. To explain his reasoning in the first stanza, the little boy presents his mother as the source of his knowledge, stating in the second stanza, “My mother taught me underneath a tree” (5). A direct parallel to the poem’s opening line, “My mother bore me in the southern wild,” both lines give the mother agency over her son (1). To stress the influence of the mother’s words on her son, Blake composes stanzas 3-5 in her voice but does not insert quotation marks, ensuring the reader understands this moment not as a memory but as the son’s recapitulation of his mother’s reasoning. Blake demonstrates the child’s utter intoxication by presenting the passage of knowledge as an activity in memorization versus critical interpretation—a point Alex discusses in her post http://romanticismandthepast.blogspot.com/2012/02/lamb-and-its-implications.html concerning Blake’s poem “The Lamb,” which is also in Songs of Innocence. Like the accepting attitude of the boy in “The Lamb,” the little black boy is completely enslaved in the system—the child never thinks to question the authority of his mother and mimics her by repeating his understanding to the white child, stating, “Thus did my mother say and kissed me./ And thus I say to the little English boy,” (21-22). In her article “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,” scholar Anne K. Mellor relates Blake’s visualization of continual ignorance to Wollstonecraft’s claim that English women are enslaved in a “perpetual childhood,” explaining they are “not educated but rather trained to be pleasing to their masters…no different in character from a dependant slave,” an interplay demonstrating the highly-debated nature of these social issues. (365).  

            The placement of the tree on the second page of the poem also illustrates the protagonist’s inability to escape neither his shackles nor his misunderstanding of his role. Because the mother rationalizes their blackness by looking to their future reward in Heaven, the tree can be understood within Christian iconography as the Tree of Knowledge, the natural form from which Adam and Even gained the ability to think rationally. In this plate, the tree’s branches dangle directly above the black boy’s head, but the child is so deeply embedded in the system of slavery and false education that he remains completely unaware of even the possibility to grasp true knowledge. Instead, he stares lovingly at the central white adult figure, whose slumped back mimics the leaning position of the Tree of Knowledge. By conflating the two images, Blake imbues the central figure with characteristics of false religion and education: not only is this figure aware that he is intoxicating the little black boy, but he does so complicity to maintain the status quo of slavery in English society.

            As the antithesis of Blake’s little black boy, the speaker in Byron’s poem “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” recognizes the former controlling power the emperor commanded not only over the speaker but also over the entire European population. In the second stanza he proclaims, “By gazing on thyself grown blind/ Thou taugh’st the rest to see” (896, 12-13). Undoubtedly, the artist behind the political cartoon below had been part of “the rest,” who, after becoming disillusioned with the Corsican, quickly satirized his reign. 

            Translated into English, the caption reads “The Great Man,” an ironic statement since his only subjects are now mice. This cartoon’s German origins illustrate the extent to which Napoleon had captured the attention of Europeans far outside France, which can be further investigated on the interactive timeline of his reign here, http://www.napoleon.org/en/essential_napoleon/dates/index.asp. Acknowledging the ruler’s supreme authority over his subjects, the speaker proclaims, “With might unquestion’d—power to save/ Thine only gift hath been the grave/ To those that worshipp’d thee” (896, 14-16). The comparison of Napoleon’s former status to that of a deity emphasizes his intoxicating hold on the French people, who, like Blake’s little black boy, never even questioned his autonomy. By referencing the graves of fallen soldiers, the speaker highlights the consequences of the people’s wholehearted faith in the emperor: much like a typical hangover, the citizens must now deal with the pain brought on by their spurt of intoxication. Although the state of France was reeling after the ruler’s forced abdication, Byron’s speaker recognizes the value within the terrible experience, stating in stanza three, “Thanks for the lesson—it will teach/ To after-warriors more/ Than high Philosophy can preach” (896, 19-21). This moment typifies a mode of education that, unlike the false progress of knowledge in Blake, actually affects its listeners. The first-hand experience of intoxication and the subsequent return to reality convinces the people of truths concerning political and social structures that been “vainly preached before” but were ineffective because of their abstract nature. To end his discussion of Napoleon’s former authority over his constituents, the speaker concludes, “That spell upon the minds of men/ Breaks never to unite again,” to illustrate the people’s newfound awareness of underhanded, despotic intentions (896, 23-24).

            From the bondages of slavery and false education to the reign of Napoleon and John Barleycorn himself, the modes by which Romantic figures become intoxicated varied immensely. Their symptoms, however, have similar characteristics, such as the denial of current realities and the mental escapades to more blissful places, whether in the past or future. By employing rhetoric associated with the loss of autonomy through an exterior force, authors integrated their works into the cultural contexts of their times, affixing their characters to specific times, places, or people to impart the overwhelming effect of such factors on the daily existences of people living in the Romantic Age.

Works Cited

Blake, William. “The Little Black Boy”, copy B, sectors A, C. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 26 April 2012. <http://www.blakearchive.org/>

Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent. Ed. Marilyn Butler. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

George Gordon, Lord Byron. Sardanapalus (1821), Works of Lord Byron, Ed. E. H. Coleridge. (London, 1898-1904), Online edition, Ed. Jeffrey D. Hoeper, Arkansas State University             <http://engphil.astate.edu/gallery/sardan.html>. 26 April 2012.

Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” In British Literature: 1780-1830. Ed. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996.

Mellor, Anne K. “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft.” Huntington Library Quarterly , Vol. 58, No. 3/4, William Blake: Images and Texts (1995), pp. 345-370.<http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/stable/3817572>

 “The Great Man.” Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. Ed. Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt. 26 April 2012. <http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/sitefaq.html>

Wolfson, Susan J. "A Problem Few Dare Imitate": Sardanapalus and "Effeminate Character." ELH , Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 867-902. <http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/stable/2873285>

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft [electronic resource]. Eds. Janet Todd and Marrilyn Butler. Charlottesville, V. A.: InteLex Corporation, 2005.