ABSTRACT
A number of cultural historians and literary critics have insisted that madness in the nineteenth century was predominantly a female disease. In her seminal study The Female Malady, for instance, Elaine Showalter explains that ‘madness is a female malady because it is experienced by more women than men’ and because ‘women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind’. This chapter explores the relationship between madness and masculinity with particular reference to drunkenness. It also discusses the discursive construction of alcohol -induced insanity as essentially a male disorder and the ways in which it destabilized normative accounts of masculinity by transforming men from previously healthy, industrious and powerful patriarchal figures to idle, impoverished and emasculated madmen, incapable of providing for their families and managing their financial affairs.
