![\"cover](\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/248\/2021\/02\/HaywoodCover.png\")
<\/a>The novelist Eliza Haywood\u2019s 1750 pamphlet A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking<\/em><\/a> should be understood as an attempt at such a language, not as evidence of a settled paradigm. The word \u201caddicted\u201d is tellingly among the smallest on the title page, functioning not as a positive diagnosis but as a stand-in for the still-hazy relationship between persons and their habits. Haywood\u2019s \u201cPresent\u201d to drinking women is more or less an intervention, a plea to those not too far gone to quit: \u201csuch as are barely touch\u2019d therewith, rather through Custom or Compliance, than any Inclination of their own to so dangerous a Practice.\u201d That gap between \u201cCustom or Compliance\u201d and \u201cInclination\u201d is something Haywood keeps coming back to in different ways, trying to tease out where the point of no return is and why.<\/p>\nThe claim that there isn\u2019t quite an addiction or disease concept here is not to say that Haywood puts physiology to one side. She does suggest a medical (or proto-medical) understanding of why one drink begets another: \u201cThe Habit of Drinking, as we every Day observe, entirely alters the Constitution, and at last brings it to such a pass, that the Evil becomes necessary, the very Nature of a hard Drinker being so entirely Changed by that pernicious Practice, as to become more akin to that of a Salamander, than of a human Creature, by deriving its Strength and Nourishment, not from simple and wholesome Nutriment, but from Fire and Flame.\u201d The morally charged rhetoric, the belief that salamanders fed on fire, and the implicit Galenic concept of vital heat all mark the gap between Haywood\u2019s paradigm and modern addiction science, but we can see here an interest in how addiction changes the relationship between the addict and the substance, turns a toxin into a necessity and an escape into a prison.<\/p>\n
This general trajectory is laid out early on, and the rest of the pamphlet consists of variations on the theme: representative examples of how women of every class and marital status might succumb to drinking and the particular dangers it holds for each. (The question of why she targets women only is an interesting one for another piece!) The social cataloging is relatively encyclopedic and exhaustive. For instance, in the section on single women \u201cThe Daughter of a rich Tradesman\u201d is followed immediately by \u201cthe Daughter of a middling Tradesman\u201d and \u201cthe Daughter of a common Tradesman\u201d; the section on married women repeats the same formula for wives.<\/p>\n
Reading these in quick succession is a strange experience: drinking is represented as uniquely and especially dangerous for each group, to the point that the document as a whole starts to seem almost internally inconsistent. This is a Lake Wobegon approach to public health, where everyone\u2019s vulnerability is above average. But reading it in this way might be a mistake. Instead of a sociological survey, this is really a series of character sketches \u2013 and the profile of each character emerges from her characteristic vulnerabilities and temptations. The hope is that readers will recognize themselves, and Haywood\u2019s taxonomy, comprehensive as it may seem, is hence open-ended: \u201cDiscourses of the same sort,\u201d she tells anyone planning an intervention, \u201cwith proper Variations, according to the Circumstances, Age, and Quality [i.e. social status] of the Person, must be used, in order to reclaim any who have fallen unaware into this pernicious Custom.\u201d To take it one step further, if drinking is a habit that comes to define particular characters, then recovery means both identifying with those characters and forging a new character for oneself by different habits. The inertia of recovery, Haywood hopes, might even come to mimic that of the decline. \u201cAs this Vice strengthens by Practice, so the contrary Virtue may also be rendered a Habit,\u201d she writes. It\u2019s worth noting here that \u201chabit\u201d has the double sense in this period of a repeated action and a characteristic garb (like a nun\u2019s habit). Changing one\u2019s habits starts with assuming a sort of habit; or, to put it more plainly, changing one\u2019s character starts with assuming a character, identifying with a character.<\/p>\n
What Haywood is advocating for might even be considered a sort of distant cousin to the Library\u2019s Reading for Recovery (R4R) project. R4R, like A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking<\/em>, offers stories \u2013 fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between \u2013 as a way of working through the issues of addiction and recovery. We don\u2019t follow Haywood\u2019s strict classification by \u201cCircumstances, Age, and Quality,\u201d but we do aim to provide people with situations they can relate to, opportunities to recognize something of themselves in what they read. The works we curate are more complex and idiosyncratic than her broad-brush cautionary tales, but we share her focus on addiction as a kind of form, the way it interacts with and shapes both characters and plots. In fact, the goal of R4R is something like that of Haywood\u2019s Present<\/em> as a whole: to think seriously about what addiction is and how it works, and to use narrative as tool of recovery.<\/p>\n