American Confessions: Addict Self-Fashioning and the Problem of Addiction, 1840-1940

Team Members/Contributors

Katherine A. Chavigny University of Chicago Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

American Confessions traces the history of a unique body of first-person testimony produced by American recovered alcoholics and addicts from the 1840s when such narratives first appeared, through the early 1940s, when Alcoholics Anonymous developed techniques of group narration. I argue that addiction narratives represent an authoritative, vernacular tradition of self— interpretation, grounded in a fundamentally religious belief that such disclosure benefits both speaker and audience. Addiction narrators in the nineteenth century adapted forms of speech, such as lay exhortation, testimony, and confession, that became a part of public religious practice during the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Their narratives relied on the power of revivalist modes of speech to transform speakers and hearers. Medical knowledge and expertise played a distinctly subordinate role in the public narrations of experiences with substance abuse. My study charts the patterns of initial resistance to and growing acceptance of addiction narrative as a therapeutic possibility for middle class Americans in this period. Addiction narratives, by appealing to popular confidence in the capacity of ordinary people to change their lives, have become increasingly prevalent in the twentieth century. Such Protestant confessional practices constitute a significant resource for Americans trying to understand the problem of substance use and users.