"Uneasy corners of consciousness": addiction as dis-ease in Victorian realism

This project will focus on the portrayal of alcoholism and addiction in the works of two major Victorian realist novelists, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Specifically, my reading centers on Eliot's Middlemarch and Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Rather than focusing on the societal or moral ramifications of addiction in each novel, this paper will illuminate how the characters of Tertius Lydgate and Jude Fawley personify highly selfaware, self-conscious thinking subjects whose excess of consciousness manifests in their addictive behavior. Moreover, through a close reading each author's language as well as conversation with Victorian, modern, and contemporary criticism on the texts, I will address the importance of self-consciousness in these portrayals of addiction and in the construction of the realist novel. As a final thought, I will also draw connections between Eliot and Hardy's addicted characters and the thousands of people who flocked to selfhelp recovery groups in subsequent years. The ubiquity of twelve-step recovery from the turn of the nineteenth-century to the present, along with the fact that it is marketed as "self-help," illustrates that Hardy and Eliot recognized not only the bodily components of addiction, but also that a moralizing approach did not suit their characters; rather, they acknowledged the critical import of the novel in exploring the role that the self and the soul play in the behavior of addicted persons.