Poverty, Addiction, and Social Marginalization in Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain

Abstract

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020) portrays the lives of working-class people in 1980s Glasgow against a background of industrial decline, unemployment, inadequate housing, and limited social support. Focusing on Agnes Bain and her son Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, this paper examines how poverty, alcoholism, and social marginalization reinforce one another. Using Marxist literary criticism as its principal framework, the study considers the relationship between material conditions and personal suffering, the alienation experienced by Agnes and Shuggie, and the ways class and gender expectations shape social identity. Agnes’s alcoholism is interpreted not simply as an individual moral failure but as a destructive response situated within loneliness, economic insecurity, gender inequality, and the absence of reliable support. Shuggie, meanwhile, experiences exclusion because his sensitivity and mannerisms conflict with dominant ideals of working-class masculinity. The paper also explores how poverty affects housing, food, clothing, family relationships, and educational experience, and how social stigma reduces complex individuals to labels such as “drunk” or “different.” The analysis argues that Stuart exposes the structural conditions that intensify suffering without removing the characters’ capacity for dignity, attachment, and resilience. Although the novel depicts a cycle in which poverty contributes to stress and addiction, and addiction further deepens poverty, Shuggie’s devotion to his mother reveals the emotional complexity of life at the margins. The novel ultimately challenges readers to understand working-class suffering through both material circumstances and human relationships.