Intoxication and Representation: A Visual Culture of Absinthe, 1859-1915

Absinthe was an alcoholic liqueur produced from the essence of the wormwood plant and distilled alcohol that appeared in France during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The drink was an essential component of social life in modern Paris, and around its use coalesced issues of the city's spaces, artistic life, visual production, consciousness, and commodity culture. This dissertation analyzes the visual culture of absinthe in Paris from the mid-nineteenth century until the drink's prohibition in 1915. Drawing on a variety of visual sources including canonical paintings, popular illustrations, advertisements, and temperance imagery, as well as a wide range of textual evidence (city guides, novels, plays, medical and scientific studies), the dissertation argues that absinthe-and, more broadly, a culture of intoxication and narcotics-is closely tied to the ways in which modernity defines itself, functions, and is represented. Because of its prominent and public presence in Paris, absinthe was uniquely positioned to operate as a metaphor for the experience of the modern city and moreover, to perform an active role in structuring the conceptual premises upon which modern life was understood. With its myriad rituals and preparations, colouristic variations and transformations, and allusive state of intoxication, absinthe and its corresponding visual culture dramatized a range of encounters with the modern world-alienation or empathy, disorientation or lucidity, spectacle or stimulation, transgression or excess-and accommodated a range of intentions, social forces, and meanings. The drink and its image were intimately connected to the spectacular character of modern Paris, but increasingly took on a look of estrangement and anomie visualized by a classed (lower) and gendered (female) drinker. By the early twentieth century, the image of absinthe came to be dominated by two forces-those promoting the liquor and those seeking to prohibit it-and intoxication and representation alike were displaced onto the experience of the commodity and a culture of consumption.