Concerns about the social effects of drink during the nineteenth century, especially in its closing decades, need to be examined against the backdrop of changing attitudes to poverty that occurred a result of the processes of industrialization, urbanization and population growth. At a time when a threatening working class had began to emerge, drinking, particularly excessive drinking, came to be seen as a vice associated with the undeserving working classes and their undisciplined and ungovernable behaviour. The perception of drunkenness as a major threat to social stability led to its being described as the major cause of poverty and its attendant social evils, such as mendicity, criminality, insanity, prostitution, domestic disorder, absenteeism from work, unemployment and subversion. Moreover, drink came to be regarded, towards the end of the century, as the main factor driving the perceived degeneration of the race. This chapter first identifies and examines the ‘controlling’ discourses that were produced around the issue of drink at the time and how these are dramatized in Fortunata y Jacinta; and, secondly, focuses on the links drawn during this period between drink and the burning issue of the degeneration of the race, clearly echoed in Angel Guerra. The issue of working-class drinking in relation to gender – a notable feature of both Fortunata y Jacinta and Angel Guerra – is also discussed by examining the contrasting attitudes adopted towards male and female alcoholism.

Drink and Social Stability: Discourses of Power in Fortunata y Jacinta

Although several studies have addressed working-class characters in Fortunata y Jacinta, these have tended to concentrate on the figure of Fortunata and her relationship with the bourgeois world. Little has been written in detail about other working-class characters in the novel, especially those situated at the bottom of the social scale – those with whom antisocial, debauched behaviour such as excessive drinking and drunkenness tends to be associated. The character in the novel who appears most closely associated with drunkenness, Mauricia la Dura, has generally been viewed from a moralistic standpoint; by some as a symbolic character rather than a complex and ambiguous one.