“THEY ALL KNOW WHAT I AM”: LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN AND ALCOHOL

Drink literature is something which has been drawing critical attention for a few decades. This is most transparent in the number of studies concerning various attempts to literarise alcohol, in whatever form or genre. What is immediately striking, though, is that most literary works fitting this thematic context are written by male writers, to mention Malcolm Lowry or Charles Jackson, and they usually feature male protagonists. Women seem to be inconspicuous here, both as authors and as literary characters, the latter usually limited to marginal figures who are victims of male drunkenness. This article targets the ‘neglected’ gender in the fictional representations of alcohol by briefly surveying the motif in the literature written on the British Isles and then focusing on two women writers, Jean Rhys and A.L. Kennedy.