Sodium antimonite tartrate

Tartar emetic is the substance Helen secretly introduces into young Arthur’s drinks to make alcohol repulsive to him. In a domestic struggle against the habits Arthur has absorbed from his father, it becomes an instrument of deliberate conditioning: Helen uses the child’s repeated experience of nausea to build an aversion she hopes will outlast her control over him.

Use in Helen’s Campaign

Helen says she gives Arthur as much wine as his father ordinarily permits, and even as much as the child wants, while secretly adding a small quantity of tartar emetic to each glass. The dose is calculated to produce nausea and depression without causing outright sickness. Rather than forbid alcohol, she makes its indulgence repeatedly lead to an unpleasant consequence, then presses the drink upon him more insistently as his reluctance grows.

Once wine has become hateful to him, Helen lets Arthur try brandy-and-water and gin-and-water. She extends the same strategy to those drinks, aiming to make every intoxicant equally repellent. Arthur eventually says that their taste, smell, or sight is enough to make him sick; Helen regards this response as evidence that the aversion has taken hold.

Training Through Repetition

The substance’s effects are not confined to the initial deception. Helen sometimes threatens wine or brandy-and-water as punishment for misbehaviour, making alcohol serve as an object of fear as well as a drink associated with nausea. When Arthur is ill, she has him swallow a little wine-and-water without tartar emetic as medicine. She does not claim that this treatment is physically beneficial: she continues it to strengthen the association between alcohol and unpleasantness.

Helen’s method depends on repetition and reversal. She gives Arthur the very drinks he desires, but alters what follows their consumption; then she renews the offer when he begins to shrink from it. The strategy aims not merely to prevent access while he is young, but to make the desire itself lose its attraction.

Purpose and Moral Tension

Helen has struggled to undo the bad habits Arthur acquired from his father, including foul language and an excessive fondness for intoxicating liquor. Remembering both her own father’s misfortune and Arthur’s, she fears what an early taste for alcohol may lead to. She therefore presents the aversion as protection against a vice that could otherwise be renewed by his father or his father’s companions.

The episode places maternal protection beside covert control. Helen’s aim is to safeguard Arthur, and she explicitly seeks to enlist association so deeply that his aversion will endure into adult life. Yet that intended permanence rests on secretly administering a substance and manipulating the child’s experience. Tartar emetic is thus both a practical means of temperance and the instrument of a morally complicated education, in which protection is pursued through deception and carefully engineered disgust.