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SUMMARY:'Yankees\, Toffs and Miss Quixote: Drunken Bodies\, Citizenship an
 d the Hope of Moral Reform in Nineteenth-Century Mexican Literature' - Dr.
  Deborah Toner (University of Warwick)
DTSTART:20100224T173000Z
DTEND:20100224T190000Z
UID:TALK23294@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:17696
DESCRIPTION:This paper examines the relationship between representations o
 f drunkenness\, morality and citizenship in early to mid-nineteenth centur
 y Mexican literature.  During this period the body was conceptualised in m
 oralistic terms\, informed by Enlightenment philosophy\, so that educated\
 , civilised and virtuous individuals were expected to exercise reason in o
 rder to avoid indulging in vices like drunkenness as the consequence of th
 eir bodies’ irrational and sinful desires.  José Joaquín Fernández de
  Lizardi\, Manuel Payno\, Nicolás Pizarro Suárez and Juan Díaz Covarrub
 ias all portrayed enemies of the Mexican nation as irrational\, vice-ridde
 n bodies in their fiction to highlight what needed to be expunged or defea
 ted in order to make Mexico a rational\, enlightened and modern nation.  F
 ernández de Lizardi and Pizarro Suárez\, moreover\, also used their fict
 ional characters to show that the good Mexican citizen would be formed thr
 ough the process of conquering vice\, and the vice-inclined body\, through
  the application of reason\, the acquisition of education and the obedienc
 e to the laws of a civilised society.  If certain vices\, such as drunkenn
 ess\, gambling and indolence\, seemed to be more prominent in Mexico among
  the lower class\, mixed race and indigenous populations it was simply the
  result of government failures to provide these social and ethnic groups w
 ith the necessary access to education and good moral example.  This provid
 es an interesting contrast with prevailing opinions towards the end of the
  nineteenth century\, when a more medicalised understanding of the body an
 d alcohol’s effects upon it helped many intellectuals and politicians to
  conclude that certain social groups were biologically and hereditarily pr
 edisposed to moral failings.
LOCATION:Latimer  Room\, Clare College Old Court
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