AA and the Redeployment of Temperance Literature

Abstract

This essay is an examination that, primarily comparativist in its approach, links publication materials from the temperance and Prohibition periods with the Big Book to show how AA's narrative antidotes to the traumas of modernity (sited in alcohol abuse) were as much the product of premodernist and turn-of-the-century hysteria as they were an attempt to write a new chapter in America's relationship with alcohol based on contemporary medical and social research.

After Alcohol: Gender and Sobriety Counterstories in Two Contemporary Novels

“…Philip McGowan, for example, shows that William G. Wilson's book Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (the so-called Big Book) is indebted to earlier temperance literature for its themes and approach. 11 He notes "distinct similarities between AA literature and its temperance forerunners" 12 and suggests "AA's narratives . .…”

“…recycle central motifs of temperance-era stories." 13 Therefore, he argues, while the foundation of AA in 1935 represented a "change of emphasis in America's understanding of alcohol," it "did not mark a revolution in writing about the subject," 14 especially as "AA's acceptance that alcohol dependency is a progressive disease which, if not checked, will lead to inevitable death was a straight transposition of later temperance propaganda." 15 Robyn Warhol underscores the ubiquity of this narrative when she highlights the similarities between nineteenth-century novelsnot specifically temperance fictions, but rather more canonical novels that deal with alcohol-and the rhetoric of AA.…”

“…But the novel's scrapbook form also includes emails from Ottila's best friend Grace, which employ the idea of happiness to defend and promote heavy drinking as a means of inhabiting modern feminine freedom. Ottila chooses to stop drinking in order to be "so happy it hurts" (12), yet, at the same time, the novel also reveals one of the problems associated with this individualistic language of self-improvement: it can be applied to anything, in a way that can quickly become contradictory.…”