Through the bottom of a glass darkly: narrative, alcohol, and identity in temperance and Prohibition-era texts

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Content THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF A GLASS DARKLY: NARRATIVE, ALCOHOL, AND IDENTITY IN TEMPERANCE AND PROHIBITION-ERA TEXTS by Kevin John Frank Pinkham A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2010 Copyright 2010 Kevin John Frank Pinkham ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Chapter 1. “Our Country: Its Dangers and Destiny”: Positioning Prohibition-Era Writers Against the Backdrop of the Temperance Narrative 1 Chapter 2. “But Go With Me, For You Can Suffer No Harm”: Altering the Male Reader through the Temperance Narrative 52 Chapter 3. “Simultaneously Enchanted and Repelled”: The Great Gatsby and the Temperance Narrative 111 Chapter 4. “Deliberately Ignoring the Highballs”: Signifyin(g) Race, Alcohol, and the Temperance Narrative in the Harlem Renaissance 156 Chapter 5. “When a Fellow is Drunk, He Will Dream Queer Things”: Queering the Temperance Narrative in The Young and the Evil 206 Works Cited 256 iii Abstract Most narratives created by the temperance movement in the mid-to-late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries focused on the construction of the drunkard as violent social outcast. Ostensibly the role of the temperance narrative was to reform drunkards and to prevent the creation of future drunkards. However, many temperance narratives were less concerned with the drunkard than with propagating an ideology that juxtaposed teleological narratives about alcohol with American identities. With the passing of national Prohibition, it was easy to assume that the ideologies of the temperance movement had emerged triumphant, but in the wake of World War I and with the advent of American Modernism, a suspicion of all things Victorian arose. Modern suspicion encouraged a closer look at the ideologies of temperance, especially the movement’s juxtaposition of narrative, alcohol, and identity. This dissertation will explore the ideologies of the temperance movement as they were expressed through a selection of temperance narratives, including Luther Benson’s Fifteen Years in Hell, Dave Ranney’s eponymous Dave Ranney, or Thirty Years on the Bowery, Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans, T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There, and George Dutcher’s Disenthralled: A Story of My Life. The dissertation will then examine the ways that various texts written during Prohibition responded to the form and ideologies of the temperance narrative. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, and Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and The Evil form the core for this exploration of Prohibition-era responses, providing a model for future readings of Prohibition-era texts. As Prohibition came to a close and the influence iv of the temperance movement waned, these Prohibition-era texts problematized the form and assumptions of the temperance narrative, changing Americans’ relationships with alcohol and freeing alcohol from the teleological ideologies that the temperance movement had sought to ensure. 1 Chapter 1. “Our Country: Its Dangers and Destiny” 1 : Positioning Prohibition-Era Writers Against the Backdrop of the Temperance Narrative On June 19, 1926, Representative Fiorello LaGuardia broke the law in Washington D.C. Or perhaps he didn’t. Early in the day, Representative LaGuardia had planned to give a demonstration in a meeting of the House Committee on the Alcoholic Liquor Traffic. Of the ten committee members, he was the only “wet,” that is, a person in favor of drinking alcohol and repealing Prohibition. The meeting lacked a quorum, however, so he invited all who attended to his office, just a few blocks from the headquarters of the Anti Saloon League, an organization that had been a driving force in passing Prohibition. There, in the presence of a number of witnesses, media representatives, and around twenty photographers, LaGuardia produced a “well-iced” pail filled with six bottles of malt extract, a medicinal concoction that contained 3.76 percent alcohol, and six bottles of near beer, i.e. beer that met the legal limits of one half of one percent alcohol content. Announcing dramatically to the crowd that he was about to begin, LaGuardia threw out a little joke that eased some of the tension in the air: “You needn’t feel anxious,” he told them, banking on the hope that some of the onlookers might be concerned about witnessing what some Prohibition supporters would construe as an illegal act, “There will be at least a little for all of us.” Mixing two thirds of the malt extract with one third of the near beer, LaGuardia produced a brew that, according to a New York Times reporter, looked like beer, thick foam and all. LaGuardia handed a 1 This chapter title comes from a speech found in The Temperance Speaker: A Collection of Original and Selected Dialogues, Addresses and Recitations, for the use of Temperance Organizations, Schools, Bands of Hope, Anniversaries, etc. (1870), a collection of poems, essays, and skits to be used in the temperance fight against alcohol. 2 mug of the brew to Julian Richards, a former brewer with fifteen years of experience, whom LaGuardia had called in as an expert. LaGuardia rather ceremoniously intoned, “Now I hand you this glass and ask you to taste its contents.” Richards drained his mug, and pronounced the brew “delicious” and “indeed just the thing.” Then, adding salt in varying proportions, LaGuardia asked Richards to comment on the differences in flavor that were produced. Richards quickly identified the flavors in the different recipes, claiming they were reminiscent first of a Pilsner, then a Wurtzberger, and finally a Stout. Mugs of the brew made their way around the room, and the crowd sampled willingly, declaring that the stuff tasted just like the beer produced in the time before Representative Andrew Volstead of Minnesota sponsored the eponymous act that would enforce national prohibition. LaGuardia’s purpose in staging the stunt was threefold, as he explained: First, I want to show that 2.75 per cent. beer is absolutely harmless. Second, I want to show that it is possible, under the rulings of the prohibition unit, to obtain good 2.75 per cent. beer without violating the law. Third, if the rulings of the prohibition unit permit one to obtain beer in this round-about way, why not be sensible about it and permit the brewing of a 2.75 per cent. beverage? I want to make it clear that I claim no credit for originating this process. Both beverages are legally on sale in the open market. I believe, however, that by showing how this can be done the American people will realize that it is about time that we had action legalizing a 2.75 per cent. brew. (“LaGuardia Makes 2.84 Beer in Office” 2 ) Asked to comment on the price, LaGuardia indicated that making the beer at home would cost about fifteen cents a glass. 3 2 The Times assessment of the alcohol content of LaGuardia’s brew and his own assessment are not in complete agreement. 3 The purchasing power of fifteen cents in 1926 would be roughly equivalent to the purchasing power of $1.76 in 2007 (Officer and Williamson). Although we do not know the size of the glass LaGuardia was pricing, assuming he envisioned a twelve-ounce glass, his cost estimate comes in at around forty cents a quart, about half the cost of bootleg beer, which two years later in 1928 cost eighty cents a quart (Panel on 3 LaGuardia’s guerrilla brewing challenged the limits of acceptable alcohol content, demonstrating his opinion that a beverage containing only 2.75 percent alcohol was not harmful, contrary to the beliefs of anti-liquor activists; however, Wayne Wheeler, general counsel of the Anti Saloon League, was not amused. In an official statement, he accused LaGuardia of breaking the law; the same judgment would be passed on anyone who mixed the malt extract with near beer to produce a beverage that contained more than the legal limit of one half of one percent alcohol. Dismissing LaGuardia’s stunt, Wheeler indicated that the mixture was an old bootleg recipe, and that druggists in North Carolina had done the same thing and had promptly been arrested. Wheeler was quick to point out that the Anti Saloon League had already warned of the dangers of allowing the malt extract on the market, but admitted that the malt extract “ha[d] not been in great demand as a medicine.” He hinted, however, that if it became more popular as an ingredient in illicit beverages, then it would be suppressed (“LaGuardia Makes…”). Weighing in on the debate, General Lincoln C. Andrews, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition enforcement, announced that no action would be taken, claiming that the “beer” produced by LaGuardia’s recipe was “unwholesome” and would never become a popular drink. The chief chemist of the Prohibition Unit, James Doren, dismissed the brew as a viable beverage because it contained about twenty percent solids. 4 He claimed that by drinking this brew, one was likely to get sick long before one Alternative Policies Affecting the Prevention of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism 165). If LaGuardia had a sixteen-ounce pint glass in mind, the cost would be even cheaper, at thirty cents a quart. 4 “Solids” are the suspended remnants of the solid ingredients of beer: barley malt, yeast, and hops. Today, solids are usually filtered out of most mass-produced beer, but some microbrews may contain trace 4 would get intoxicated (“LaGuardia Makes…”). This claim gives one pause: if Prohibition was to many people about regulating intoxication, why not allow such drinks? One assumes the sickness with which Doren appears to be concerned would be enough motivation to terminate drinking before intoxication set in. However, as many critics have pointed out, Prohibition was about much more than regulating mere intoxication, which was only the surface preoccupation of a movement concerned with much more profoundly shaping American identity, a preoccupation I will return to later. The New York Times followed this story’s developments over the next few weeks. LaGuardia’s performance drew the ire of the Prohibition Enforcement office in Albany, which warned that anyone using the “LaGuardia formula” would be in violation of the law and subsequently arrested. Never one to back down from a fight, LaGuardia picked up the Prohibition Enforcement Office’s gauntlet. On June 22 nd , he declared that he would repeat his performance in New York City: “[O]n my next visit . . . I will walk up to a soda fountain in a drug store in my district and order a bottle of tonic and one of near-beer and drink it there and then.” Along with this defiant statement, LaGuardia extended an invitation to Prohibition Enforcement officers and members of the Anti Saloon League, exclaiming, “If the Prohibition Department desires to test the law I will give them the opportunity.” The story continues with LaGuardia’s return to the Bronx on the evening of July 4, 1926. The next day he announced in an interview with the Times that he would repeat his performance sometime soon in a soda fountain in his district. Calling Prohibition amounts of solids. Many homebrewed beers can still contain roughly two to five percent solids, according to Roger Gribble, former professional beer maker (qtd. in Gribble). 5 Enforcement’s bluff, he declared that a member of the Prohibition unit had warned that anyone making beer by this method would be arrested, and he said that he was willing to risk arrest as part of a test; what kind of test he does not say, but based on his past statements and declarations still to come, it is clear LaGuardia desired to publicly test how serious Prohibition agents were about enforcing the law, both Prohibition in general and their more specific claims about the illegality of making beer from easily obtainable legal ingredients. The New York Times records LaGuardia’s claim that hundreds of thousands of people were using similar homebrewing recipes daily, and the Government knew about it. LaGuardia, unlike the hundreds of thousands of home brewers, risked Government sanction not because he made real beer from malt tonic and near beer, but because, he claimed, he had the audacity to make this knowledge public. The Times article recording LaGuardia’s statements concludes with yet another discussion of the battle of authenticity waged over LaGuardia’s formula. When told that General Andrews still held fast to his claim that LaGuardia’s synthetic beer was “unpalatable,” LaGuardia replied that Andrews simply did not want the public to know that the malt tonic and near beer recipe produced a much better beverage than the “ether- like beer” that bootleggers had placed on the market. Ever defiant, LaGuardia continued to insist that Andrews and other Prohibition enforcement agents relied upon the credulity of the public, hoping that the public would honor Prohibition enforcement agents’ position as public servants and take their word as truth (“LaGuardia Ready For Beer Test Here”). 6 Although far from finished, this story climaxes in LaGuardia’s public performance in New York City, an event with which some readers may be more familiar. On July 17 th , 1926, LaGuardia stood on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 115 th Street, in front of Leo Kaufman’s drugstore. 5 Arriving at promptly 9:00 in the morning, accompanied by Major Michael Kelly of the old Sixty-ninth Regiment and Representative John M. Morin, Republican, of Pennsylvania, LaGuardia mixed his brew in front of rolling cameras and a crowd of reporters, supplied with near beer and Liebig’s Malt Extract by Murray Dubner, soda clerk in Kaufman’s store. One drink the cameras recorded was given to Charles Ross, a truck driver for the J. M. Horton Ice Cream Company, who provided appropriate photogenic lip smacking. LaGuardia’s most triumphant moment came when John Mennella, a policeman walking his beat, came to investigate the cause of the crowd that had formed in front of Kaufman’s store. LaGuardia told Mennella that he was making beer, to which Mennella replied “All right.” Asked by LaGuardia why Mennella wasn’t arresting him, Mennella replied that arresting LaGuardia was really a Prohibition agent’s job. LaGuardia replied, “Well, I’m defying you. I thought you might accommodate me.” Apparently befuddled by LaGuardia’s actions, Mennella retreated to the other side of the street, where he discussed his options with other patrolmen who began to arrive at the scene. They were pondering the merits of arresting LaGuardia for obstructing traffic when the Congressman concluded his demonstration and the crowd dispersed, ostensibly after 5 While located in East Harlem, also known today as Spanish Harlem, Kaufman’s store was, in 1926, part of what was then known as Italian Harlem, named so for the predominantly Italian population, and was a district LaGuardia represented in Congress. 7 contributing to increased sales of malt tonic and near beer (“LaGuardia Brews; Policeman Amiable”). When the reporters went to Prohibition headquarters, an administrator, Major Chester P. Mills, dismissed LaGuardia’s performance, repeating the Prohibition agent’s line that a drinker would more likely get nauseated than drunk from drinking synthetic beer. When informed of the sales of malt tonic, Mills finally took some administrative action, saying that perhaps a Prohibition violation had actually occurred, but if it had, then the violator was Kaufmann for distributing the ingredients, not LaGuardia for mixing them. Mills was also quick to point out that the Liebig company had worked very closely with Prohibition agents in the past, agreeing that their product would be marketed only for medicinal purposes. J. L. Weinberg, owner of the company that distributed Liebig’s, stated that his company adhered to Prohibition law, but they could never be completely sure that a customer was actually intending to use Liebig’s for medicinal purposes. The company had, in fact, asked LaGuardia not to continue with his public demonstrations. Declaring that they would not want any new customers on account of LaGuardia’s stunt, Weinberg added that his company had been known to buy back a drugstore’s stock of Liebig’s to prevent the manufacture of synthetic beer (“LaGuardia Brews…”). This Times article gives LaGuardia the last word. He declares the experiment a success, in that it demonstrated that Prohibition authorities were afraid of him. More importantly, it also established that making synthetic beer was now legal, by dint of a 8 lack of action on the part of Prohibition agents who had formerly blustered so vigorously about the illegality of such an act. LaGuardia’s stunt contains elements that can contribute to what I prefer to think of as a post-Prohibition romanticized notion of that era. On the surface, separated from context, LaGuardia’s tale is an amusing story about one politician who fought the law of the land. For many twenty-first century popular culture adherents, Prohibition was an era during which, as Alva Johnston remarked, perhaps prematurely, “a narrow religion” made its “last great effort . . . to regulate human existence” (vi). Since the end of Prohibition, films, novels, even roleplaying and board games have abounded in which the idea of the Roaring Twenties is bandied about as an era of growing freedom and resistance to an unfair law, in which heroes such as Eliot Ness confront villains (or are they anti-heroes?) such as Al Capone on the frontlines of the war against alcohol, in which legislative Crusaders like LaGuardia sought to overturn the 18 th Amendment, and in which most Americans who wanted a drink could get one anyway, gleefully thwarting the law. While there is an element of truth to all of these stereotypical views of Prohibition, what many people have forgotten is that there was an underlying narrative form, propagated by the Temperance movement, that led to Prohibition. This oft- neglected narrative form is glossed over by many critics and historians, presumably because of, as critic John Crowley describes it, the relief Americans often feel about the end of Prohibition (Introduction Drunkard’s Progress 1). The hegemonic narrative form of the temperance movement demands to be sussed out in order to more deeply 9 appreciate the cultural work that writers during the Prohibition era performed in their texts. Kate Drowne articulates her sense that readers have long overlooked the fact that these texts written during Prohibition must be doing something significant when the authors write about alcohol and drinking. Her excellent study proceeds to delineate the ways in which life during Prohibition was represented in such works as The Great Gatsby, Nigger Heaven, The Wet Parade and a number of other novels and short stories. For Drowne, drinking in these novels demonstrates that there was a culture of scofflawism rising in the United States at the time, and that these novels serve, to some extent, as a cultural record of the drinking lifestyles of Americans in the 1920s and 30s. Her goal in writing her book Spirits of Defiance is to identify and explain elements of Prohibition culture that permeate literary texts produced during this era. Bootleggers, moonshiners, and revenuers seldom populate twenty-first-century fiction, but they were familiar—sometimes even stock characters in the fiction of the 1920s and early 1930s. . . However, few of today’s readers are sufficiently attuned to the culture of Prohibition to recognize subtle connotations associated with these characters. . . . By clarifying these sometimes obscure elements of everyday life during Prohibition, Spirits of Defiance will help readers achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the literature produced between 1920 and 1933. (4-5) In other words, Drowne is interested in creating a sort of readers’ guide to Prohibition, in which texts written during that era are seen as recording the drinking practices of Americans in the twenties and thirties, which, long forgotten by us but clear to Prohibition-era readers, contain much more political and moral consequence than twenty- first-century readers would initially ascribe to them. Drowne wants to remind us that when a character drinks in a narrative written during Prohibition, the act of drinking 10 carries with it a legal and moral transgressive force, even when unaccompanied by the author’s comments on the rightness or wrongness of such actions, simply because the sale, purchase, and transport of alcohol had been outlawed by the Eighteenth Amendment. However, I am not satisfied with ending the investigation into Prohibition-era literature with the claim that the literature merely records patterns of drinking and the lifestyles that arose during Prohibition, nor do I feel the investigation ends even with the important recognition that the act of drinking in these stories is transgressive. If we are to fully understand not only the mimetic efforts of Prohibition-era writers but also the creative cultural work of their texts that sought to wrestle with concepts of American identity, the nature of the drinker, and the kinds of stories that could be told about alcohol—to name only a few projects in the greater scheme of cultural work performed by these texts—then we must attempt to arrive at a much firmer understanding of the far- too-frequently overlooked narratives of alcohol proffered by the temperance movement, narratives in which lie the origins of Prohibition. For Prohibition would not have been visited upon the United States had it not been for the efforts of the temperance movement to create an essential master narrative of alcohol, a propagandistic narrative the movement hoped the entire nation would embrace, a narrative ideology that would provide clear guidance about ideal American behavior and identity. Against this backdrop of the temperance narrative, Prohibition-era writers perform their cultural work. For those of us in the twenty-first century, however, temperance and its narratives have virtually disappeared. Critic John Crowley points out the literature of the 11 temperance movement, “has long since been written off” (“Slaves to the Bottle” 115) and claims “anything and everything related to temperance was to become unmentionable in the wake of Prohibition’s failure during the 1930s” (“Slaves to the Bottle” 129). While some readers may call the veracity of Crowley’s claim to question, there is little doubt that for the greater reading public and for many critics, the literature of temperance rarely arises as a topic of study. In fact, in his recent book Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America 6 (2008), Jay Parini makes no mention of temperance literature or of Prohibition. Including in his appendix one hundred additional books that made significant contributions or changes to American culture, he completely neglects any temperance narrative, despite the fact that temperance, as perhaps the longest-running social reform movement in the United States, having its roots in the Eighteenth Century and still felt in the continued existence of the WCTU today—although arguably ending its most significant reign in 1933 with the end of Prohibition—certainly seems to meet Parini’s criteria for selection: “In choosing these [books]…I have focused on works that actually shifted something or solidified a change already in place….[These] are works that either defined a period or produced a notable shift or expansion of consciousness” (349). Although many Americans today might choose to “write off” the fact that temperance and Prohibition were a part of American history, one could hardly argue that the literature of the temperance movement did not “actually [shift] something.” As I argue, temperance narratives solidified an image of the ideal white masculine American 6 Whatever the merits or failures of his list, the thirteen books Parini chooses are Of Plymouth Plantation, The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Walden, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folk, The Promised Land, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, On the Road, and The Feminine Mystique. 12 identity in the imagination of late Victorian Americans and early Moderns, an image that ushered in thirteen years of federal interference in private citizen’s choices. Both Prohibition and the temperance movement have received a share of critical attention, but that attention lies largely in the areas of history or American studies. For example, Janet Giele, in Two Paths to Women's Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism, examines the role of the temperance movement in providing American women with a cause that drew them out of their enclaves of domesticity and into the public arena. Herbert Asbury’s The Great Illusion offers a critical overview of Prohibition and its temperance roots, and Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent situates the temperance movement in the context of the larger American Progressive movement. Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture does make an interesting observation about temperance narratives: The temperance cause in which clergymen and women worked side by side…was often promoted as a covert crusade to salvage not the alcoholic but the woman at his mercy. The drunkard, usually a male, destroys by his debauches himself and the saintly wife, mother, daughter, or sister who loves him and would draw him from the saloon to the fireside. His defiant drinking serves as a reminder of the limits of female “influence”; he is willing to kill himself in order to attack its nearest representative. (47) While the narrative element Douglas summarizes is important, her position is understandably myopic, given the topic of her book, and she too quickly dismisses the many other narrative goals of the Temperance movement, among them regulating masculine behavior and reinforcing a concrete idea of White, Anglo-Saxon American identity. These two goals that Douglas apparently disregards as “overt” deserve a closer 13 look, for it is these narrative objectives regarding alcohol, masculinity, and American identity that I wish to explore in temperance narratives and in Prohibition-era texts. 7 What I hope to do with my study is to explore the influence of what Crowley first called “Temperance Narratives” (Preface Drunkard’s Progress ix) on the literature written during Prohibition. Embedded within these narratives are a series of ideologies; sometimes the ideologies are quite obviously presented, such as the claim that alcohol is evil, while many of the ideologies are much more subtly expressed, especially ideologies concerning white American masculine identities. As these temperance narratives and their ideologies played a role in convincing Americans to endorse the Eighteenth Amendment, and in teaching Americans the temperance movement’s ideal vision of what American identity should be, I believe the influence the narratives exert on literature written during Prohibition is far greater than most critics have suspected. Temperance narratives become an important focal point for American writers, and I believe that the fact that the traditional dates of American Modernism (1910-1930) specified (and questioned) by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou in their book Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents overlap the dates of Prohibition (1920-1933) signifies a clash between Victorian America’s “last great effort…to regulate 7 When seeking any intersections between the temperance movement’s literature and Prohibition, one finds fewer resources, among them Crowley’s books and an anthology of essays on temperance titled The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature. Even in the MLA International Database, when one searches various combinations of the words and phrases “temperance and modernism,” “temperance narrative,” “temperance movement,” “temperance and narrative,” “prohibition and modernism,” “temperance and modernism” one finds from one to eight articles per topic; many of those articles appear in multiple searches. The most fruitful search, “temperance movement,” yields forty articles, many of which are on temperance in countries other than the U.S., some overlap the results of the other searches (including a handful of essays anthologized in The Serpent and the Cup), a few are related to temperance and morality, but none explore temperance narratives and the era of Prohibition. 14 human existence” (Johnston vi) and the inability of the Modern writer to “accept the claims of the world,” as “the usual morality seems counterfeit” (Howe 14). In other words, Prohibition’s failure to bring about the utopian America promised by the progressive goals of the temperance movement—and envisioned by such writers as Walt Whitman 8 —provides Modernists and other Prohibition-era writers with further evidence that the utopian vision offered by hegemonic Victorian morality and culture that Modernists critiqued was nothing but false advertising. Here in the twenty-first century, we know that there was a period in American history referred to as Prohibition; we know that it started with a Constitutional Amendment, spanned thirteen years, and was finally repealed by another Amendment. Many readers can guess that something must have caused Prohibition, although most readers seem to be more interested in—perhaps grateful for—the fact that it ended. Thus, I have a sense that we can detect the results of something leading to Prohibition and gain a glimpse of the aftereffects of the narrative forces that resulted in Prohibition, but a closer look at some of those narrative forces is overdue. Some critics and historians have explored temperance, but few have as of yet begun to explore the narratives that temperance used to propagate its ideologies, the effect of those narratives on American culture and literature, and the cultural world in which Prohibition-era texts were then written. Finally, the cultural work that Prohibition-era narratives perform as they interact with the hegemonic narratives of the tales that temperance advocates told about alcohol also needs to be explored. 8 In Franklin Evans, Whitman presents Franklin’s prophetic vision of the day when the last intemperate man in America signs the Temperance pledge. National rejoicing culminates in the cry, “‘Victory! victory! The Last Slave of Appetite is free, and the people are regenerated!’” (98). 15 Jane Tompkins defines and defends a study of cultural work in her book Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. In attempting to propose a different way of examining texts, one that values the cultural effects of novels rather than their aesthetic merit, she claims that her book “sees literary texts not as works of art embodying enduring themes in complex forms, but as attempts to redefine the social order. In this view, novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their particular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). Tompkins argues that the books she examines were not written “so that they could be enshrined in any literary hall of fame, but in order to win the belief and influence the behavior of the widest possible audience” (xi). While this position serves as her justification for examining books not generally recognized for their artistic merit, which aptly describes the temperance narratives, I would argue that even texts that are recognized for their aesthetic value, including those by Prohibition-era writers such as Fitzgerald, are not beyond “offer[ing] powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment,” even when the authors themselves may have had aesthetic rather than cultural considerations in mind. Reading Prohibition-era texts against the backdrop of the temperance movement’s narrative claims regarding alcohol and American identities, including gender, ethnic, and racial identities, will enable us to understand the ways 16 Prohibition-era writers reacted to, critiqued, and appropriated temperance narrative forms and conventions. I will return to LaGuardia’s performance at the end of my chapter to implement a closer reading of the elements of the temperance movement’s narrative conventions that LaGuardia’s performance critiques and unravels, a reading that will provide the reader a glimpse of the close readings I will perform in later chapters exploring Prohibition-era writers’ narrative engagement with the temperance narrative. First, however, in order to assist the reader in understanding my overall project, I need to provide a brief timeline of some events important to the temperance movement and to more clearly articulate some of my views on temperance ideology and the movement’s use of narrative. The earliest glimmers of the temperance movement focused not on the use of alcohol, but its misuse, targeting those who drank excessively. In a nation where Americans put away vast quantities of hard alcohol every year, 9 excessive drinking must have been excessive indeed. 9 Amounts of consumption vary; Herbert Asbury recalls the first annual report of the Executive Committee of the Connecticut State Temperance Society, May 19, 1830, which stated that one rather temperate town in Litchfield County, population 1,586, put away 36,400 gallons of gin and rum in ten years (or roughly 2.3 gallons per person annually), while in 1827, residents of Salisbury, Connecticut imbibed twenty-nine and one half gallons of rum per family (13). I recall Benjamin Franklin, who records in his Autobiography that his coworkers at the printing house put away six pints of beer a day (36). Assuming they did not drink on the weekends (a naïve assumption), those coworkers are still drinking almost 275 gallons of beer a year. To put these amounts in perspective, I refer the reader to Time magazine’s recent collation of information from a variety of sources, among them the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Agriculture, which indicates that American consumption of alcohol per capita in 2007 equaled seven bottles of liquor, twelve bottles of wine, and two hundred thirty cans of beer, or roughly 1.4 gallons of liquor, 2.4 gallons of wine, and 21.6 gallons of beer for a total of 25.4 gallons of alcohol. Citizens of some states, such as New Hampshire, consume much more than the national average, and citizens of other states, such as Utah, consume much less. The studies found that one third of Americans do not drink, and Americans rank fortieth overall in worldwide per capita consumption. Looking especially at consumption of liquor, we can 17 The first published claims in the United States that alcohol may pose a danger to the body and the soul came around 1785, when Benjamin Rush published his Pamphlet and Moral and Physical Thermometer of Intemperance, in which he acknowledges that beer and wine may have some fortifying effects on the body: water, milk mixed with water, and small beer could lead to “Serenity of Mind, Reputation, Long Life, & Happiness,” while cider and perry, wine, porter, and strong beer could lead to “Cheerfulness, Strength, and Nourishment, when taken only in small quantities, and at meals.” However, according to Rush’s thermometer, harder alcohols were harmful both to the body and morality. His list is quite extensive, but he sets up a series of columns identifying the vices, diseases, and punishments of a variety of drinks, ranging from punch, which fosters the vices of idleness and gambling, the disease Rush identifies only as sickness, and the punishment of debt; to extensive drams of rum, brandy, and gin, consumed morning, noon, night, and all points in between, which results in the vices of perjury, burglary, and murder, the diseases melancholy, palsy, apoplexy, madness, and despair, and the punishment [here reading the thermometer can become difficult] of state prison for life, and the gallows (reproduced in Barr xiv). While not the first time that someone attempted a connection between drinking and immoral behavior—Hogarth’s etching Gin Alley (1750) is one earlier visual exploration of the dangers of drink—Rush’s thermometer is perhaps the first recorded American endeavor to delineate a hierarchy of the health and moral effects of alcohol, laying the foundation for later American efforts to outlaw alcohol altogether. see that alcohol consumption in the United States is currently much less than it was during the nation’s earlier years (“Annual Alcohol Consumption”). 18 In 1826, Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet, made what was most likely the first appeal for legal intervention to prevent drinking, but it was not until the mid-1830s that abstinence became the main concern of anti-alcohol activists, as Justin Edwards and other pastors began to focus on the damaging effects of alcohol on the soul (Asbury 37-38). Around this time as well, evangelical circuit riders and traveling preachers seeking some means to set their converts apart from the general populace settled on abstinence as an outward sign of conversion, a sign that these wandering evangelicals could point to as an example of the efficacy of their ministry and the strength of the converts’ faith, thus creating an enmity between many Christian churches and alcohol that exists to this day (Barr 358). One important event in the temperance movement’s war on alcohol came on August 4, 1836, when the American Temperance Union (ATU) voted to adopt fiction as an effective weapon in the war against alcohol (Reynolds and Rosenthal 3). Up to this point, most temperance groups relied on their personal observations and generalized prejudices against inebriates. The majority of temperance groups were religiously evangelical and conservative, and the fact that the ATU had to vote to use fiction indicates both a suspicion at the time of using what the group must have viewed as subterfuge to achieve the movement’s agenda and the movement’s beliefs that the war on alcohol was so vital to the health of the nation that new tactics should be embraced. 10 This choice is important, for it signifies the movement’s willingness to win the war by any means necessary, even the narrative equivalent of lying. From this point on, the 10 Donald A. Koch refers to the lack of fiction in the early days of the movement. He claims that short fiction blossomed after its use was approved, but that there was still a “lingering disapproval of novels that had its origin in the early puritan days” (li). That disapproval would soon disappear. 19 narratives that undergirded the movement’s position on alcohol did not have to come only from ostensibly true observations that could vary from person to person or from vague generalizations; now the movement could focus on the construction of a more formulaic temperance narrative, an often more extreme, horrific, and judgmental narrative, as long as the ideological ends of the movement were served. Thus, women, children, and teetotaling men could be drafted to perform skits and recite fictitious narratives of abuse, such as those collected in The Temperance Speaker, and temperance narrative novels could become bestsellers. 11 What the ATU had done with the decision to embrace fiction is to begin the process to ensure propagation of the movement’s ideologies regarding alcohol. By allowing anyone to write a temperance narrative, the ATU guaranteed both that the temperance narrative would adopt a relatively consistent, standard form and that the mass production of that temperance narrative form could now ensue. Then in 1840, the Washingtonians, a group of reformed drinkers whose focus on recovered male drinkers who supported other male drinkers through recovery became the predecessor to twentieth-century twelve-step programs, gathered in Baltimore, beginning a more secularized temperance movement. By 1841 the Washingtonians had reached New York City, but by the late 1840s their efforts became overshadowed by other temperance groups, largely due to claims against the most prominent Washingtonian, John Gough, who after years as a popular circuit speaker and the success of his best- 11 Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans (1842) is often cited as the first temperance novel. Whitman certainly thinks so, as he points out in his conclusion to the novel: “As works of fiction have often been made the vehicle of morality, I have adopted the novel experiment of making one of the sort a messenger of the cause of Temperance” (111). 20 selling autobiography, was found drunk in a brothel in 1845, victim, he claimed, of a massive conspiracy of his enemies, but viewed by most Americans as another backslidden drunk. At this point, the war against alcohol began to intensify and spread throughout the United States. 1851 brought the passing of the first state law prohibiting alcohol—in Maine—which became the model for a number of states to follow. Most of these “Maine laws” were either ignored or repealed by the end of the Civil War. In 1865 came the National Temperance Society, which established a publishing house in Saratoga Springs, New York. In forty years, the publishing house circulated an estimated 1,500,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 pages of temperance literature, at least twenty pages for every American 12 (Asbury 64). In 1869, the National Prohibition Party was formed as a political platform for candidates in favor of prohibition to seek public office. In 1879, Frances Willard became the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1874 after a series of women’s crusades in New York and Ohio 13 — 12 Using the lower estimate of total pages and dividing by the total U.S. population recorded in the 1900 U.S. Census and archived at the Fisher Library of the University of Virginia Website—74,607,225 (“1900 State Level Census Data”), one can estimate roughly twenty pages for every person in the United States. When one considers that the population of the U.S. in the 1870 census was listed as 38,115,641, or 38,558,371 with the inclusion of the Territories (United States Census Bureau), and factors that number into the larger estimate of two billion pages, then the amount of pages printed per person in the U.S. becomes larger—roughly fifty-two pages per person. While it is difficult to arrive at a completely accurate number—obviously, two billion pages did not appear fully formed in 1865 with the founding of the publishing house—that number must fall somewhere between these two extremes. In addition, while it is foolish to assume that every citizen read the publications of the National Temperance Society, to assume that Americans as a whole were unaware of these temperance narratives in the face of their abundance is equally naïve, especially considering that the pages would have most likely been read by more than one person. Even should we assume that some people read more than their twenty to fifty-two pages, and then destroyed those pages, we cannot rule out the inevitable word-of-mouth proliferation of the ideas contained within those pages. Finally, we should remember this number of pages per person comes from only one temperance publishing house. 13 The WCTU identifies Fredonia, New York, as the site of the first encounter between a women’s group, led by Mrs. Esther McNeil, and a saloon; that group was the first to adopt the name Women’s Christian 21 which had branches across the United States. The WCTU succeeded in 1902 in their attempts to demand what they called “scientific instruction laws” that ensured that public schools would teach the dangers of alcohol to their captive audience (Asbury 87). Furthermore, Herbert Asbury recalls a poster that recreated drawings by Dr. Thomas Sewell, depicting the grim effects of alcohol on the body of the drinker. Asbury goes so far as to claim that any American able to remember the beginning of the 1900s would recall this poster, indicating the pervasiveness of its images (42). In addition, by the middle twenties one New York newspaper estimated that it had published 17,000 articles on temperance and Prohibition in eight years, many of them front page items (Asbury 317). Numerous other books and pamphlets ensured that virtually no one in the United States could possibly remain uninformed of the temperance ideologies that drove Prohibition. I would argue that in this vast narrative media blitz lies the temperance movement’s desire to write the ideal white American identity. Many historians of temperance, such as John Crowley, Janet Zollinger Giele, and Catherine Murdock, have noted the movement’s moralizing efforts and its alignment with nativist agendas. Giele indicates that the temperance movement worked with immigrants to teach them proper modes of American behavior and morality to help them assimilate, especially teaching Catholic Irish, Italians, and Germans not to drink (94-96). Where I break with critics such as these is in my interest in American identity. In virtually every instance, Temperance Union on December 22, 1873. On December 24 th , Mrs. Eliza Thomson led a group of women in Hillsboro, Ohio from church to a saloon. The WCTU recognizes this event as the beginning of the Women’s Temperance Crusade, strategically targeting local saloons with pray-ins in order to eliminate them. Both events culminated in the national WCTU (“Crusades”). 22 temperance narratives figured drunkards as native-born, white, usually Anglo-Saxon males, which indicates that as much as temperance groups may have worked with immigrants to eliminate drinking, the focus of the narratives was on white male Americans. Imbedded within targeting white males is an ideology that regulates racial and ethnic identity by identifying the act of drinking not only as an intemperate act, but also as a foreign, non-white act. Where critics fall short is in usually overlooking the ideology inherent in temperance narratives that insists that white native-born Americans who choose to drink, refusing to shape their behavior to the Temperance movement’s ideals, can lose their Americanness, becoming non-native, non-white, foreign, “other.” 14 In addition, wrapped up within this ideology of whiteness that equates intemperance with foreigners is an equally powerful ideology that makes similar claims about intemperance and Victorian male behavior. In temperance narrative ideology, men are almost essentially intemperate, male behavior must be redirected, and males must be reeducated in order to ensure the future of men, families, and the country. To accomplish that goal, the narratives must go far beyond the elimination of alcohol to re-form men, to interpellate them—that is, recruit them as temperance activist subjects, to cultivate in them a new paradigm for masculine behavior—one that realigns Victorian masculinity more closely with Victorian femininity, and to reject the individualistic tendencies of Victorian masculine culture, a topic I will discuss in further detail in my next chapter. 14 I must note that in their introduction to Franklin Evans, editors Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler observe, “Franklin Evans follows the same racial trajectory as the protagonists of many other temperance tales, fictional and nonfictional. The drunkard, at his lowest point, is often described as a man who has figuratively and often literally lost his whiteness, whose skin has taken on an ‘unnatural redness’ or still darker tones” (lvi). Their single paragraph noting this phenomenon, while important, is insufficient for examining the full implications of the inebriate’s abdication of his whiteness, a situation I hope to begin to rectify in my next chapter. 23 If, as Crowley says, Prohibition has yet to be fully explored because of its status as a period of national shame, then perhaps what Crowley is trying to articulate in narrative terms is that Prohibition does not fit the narrative of the nation that we like to tell ourselves. In other words, Prohibition strikes many Americans as an era of social control that usurped the individual freedoms we Americans like to believe we have. For Crowley, our hesitation to examine Prohibition keeps most of us from looking closely at not only the history but especially the narratives that brought us to Prohibition, and in these moments of cultural narrative amnesia we have forgotten that people living during Prohibition were immersed in the temperance narratives that had led to Prohibition and had lived so for all of their lives. Although to twenty-first century readers these temperance narratives seem sentimental and formulaic, for writers living during Prohibition these narratives exerted a very tangible influence, regulating alcohol, masculinity, and American identity. By examining narratives proffered by the Temperance movement as part of their effort to achieve an ideal America, I hope to establish for some Prohibition-era narratives a deeper appreciation of their writer’s cultural work, demonstrating the ways in which these Prohibition-era narratives can be seen “as attempts to redefine the social order. . . articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (Tompkins xi). What the temperance movement offered was a structure of nationalism that holds to a general refusal to romanticize the nation’s past and instead focus on the nation’s future. 15 In other words, rather than writing a revisionist account of the origins of the 15 With the possible exception of the temperance movement’s occasional appropriation of various Puritan ideologies, such as John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” which the temperance movement hoped the United 24 country, or hitching the nation’s wagon to some outmoded system of nationhood that had been devastated by the Civil War, what the temperance movement offered to the nation was a vision of the nation’s future. In doing so, the temperance movement created a narrative that usually downplayed American exceptionalism and focused on the broken, fallen nature of the drinker and his return to wholeness and community. By creating narratives that promoted the idea of a drinker caught in the throes of alcoholism who either recovers or dies, the temperance movement began to promote an idea that transgressed the boundaries of public and private. For the temperance movement, a temperate, productive citizen equaled a temperate, productive nation. Thus, rather than allowing an idea of the nation that was an ambivalent, unarticulated idea founded on the origins of the nation, the temperance movement sought to create through narrative its vision of the nation and its future to concretize the idea of the nation, attempting to write and speak through tales of the individual drinker the direction and identity of the nation yet to come, a millennial city on a hill. In other words, as the temperance movement sought to reshape not only the behavior and identity of individual Americans, the movement also sought to shape the behavior and identity of America itself. That is not to say that the temperance narratives themselves consist of overt nation building. On the contrary, the idea of the nation is not often the direct preoccupation of the temperance narratives. 16 However, as the most popular States would become for the rest of the world, setting a powerful temperate example that nations that rejected alcohol would prosper. 16 One narrative that does explicitly invoke the idea of the nation is Luther Benson’s 15 Years in Hell. Providing the transcript from one of his speeches given at Faneuil Hall, Benson observes, “It was in this hall that was first inaugurated the grand march of revolution and liberty that has gilded the page of the history of our time with the most glorious achievements of the patriot that the world has ever had to 25 proselytizing tool of the temperance movement, temperance narratives do contain glimpses of the nation that the temperance movement was working tirelessly to create in the public sphere outside of the narrative realm. In their prospective shaping of the ideal America(n), temperance narratives seek to create a national narrative from the ground up, one that coincides with the problems and promise of the drinker. Generally, most American national narratives that come to mind arise out of an assumption that greatness is inherent in America always/already. Puritans saw opportunity and hope in a new land that offered them the chance to demonstrate they were spiritually superior to the rest of the world’s citizens. The gentleman scholar or entrepreneur as typified by Benjamin Franklin or the great architects of business of the Gilded Age are usually constructed as hard-working American men possessed of great discipline. Westward expansion and manifest destiny suggest that Americans inherently have the right to go forth and conquer. Temperance recovery narratives, however, break with these visions of American exceptionalism in that while they do focus on the success of an individual, the possibility of that success is not destined, as testified to by the many failures and suicides in the temperance narratives that warn of death. In the recovery narratives, success is not destined merely because the narrator is American. In fact, the only way to ensure success is first to recognize brokenness, then through hard work, discipline, faith, and mutualism admire…. It was here that the beacon of liberty first blazed, and the rainbow of freedom rose on the cloud of war; and as a result,…liberty has erected her altars here in the very garden of the globe…. I would talk to you to-night of liberty, that liberty that frees us, body, soul, and spirit, from the slavery of the intoxicating bowl” (78-79). Benson clearly believed that just as the American Revolution introduced a new form of liberty to the world, so could America serve as an example of an even greater form of liberty by eliminating alcohol through the temperance movement. 26 can new Americans be created and the new America mediated. The America(n) of the temperance narrative is a malleable, threatened thing that is not foreordained; it must be created and maintained. Its origins start not with the virgin territory of a new land, but with the damaged potential of a cursed drinker whose reformation could provide salvation to the country. While other narratives use hard work and morality as tools to highlight American exceptionalism, they do not usually imply that greatness can be lost or that there can be a threat to American identity that must be regulated. In addition, the rewards of the temperance narrative go beyond the self and benefit the family, the community, the nation, and ultimately the world. The temperance narrative does not offer seclusion like the America of the Puritans, or riches like the America of Westward Expansion and the entrepreneurs; rather, it offers a selfless act of self-improvement and conformity that offers a model to the community, undermining individualism. The narratives privilege communal prosperity as the end of individual success, not only in the form of material wealth, but also in the spiritual renewal that arises through redemption from drinking. The temperance narrative’s insistence on the individual’s submission to the community differs from most American national narratives. The individual is, of course, the source of strife and contention in the community, but he is also the bearer of the promise to extend his reformation to the community. In the temperance national narrative, the drinker and the country must realize their brokenness and their dependence upon the community to restore wholeness. The narratives articulate the America the temperance movement wants to create. In doing so, the temperance narrative conflation of American identity and alcohol focuses on the ends 27 as much if not more so than the beginnings, and is a highly teleological structure in which an American could read a temperance narrative and, through the process of reading, experience the teleology of the bottle and be redeemed with the drinker, interpellated and re-educated to go forth and shape a new nation in the image of the temperance narrative. With the onset of Prohibition and the legislative culmination of the temperance movement’s goals, the private person who had been shaped by the temperance narrative into the kind of American who would vote for Prohibition, hoping for a brighter future, had helped move the new national narrative into the public sphere. In many ways, the temperance movement’s elision of the private and public through the temperance narrative did result in a new America, an illusory millennial America that could temperately shine forth hope in a world ravaged by the First World War. However, with the passing of Prohibition, the temperance movement’s propagandistic efforts to reshape the country became less strident as they became ostensibly less necessary. Fewer people need to be convinced that an act is wrong if it has been declared illegal, or so the temperance movement may have perceived. However, in depriving the temperance movement of its moral power by transforming that power to the legislative power held by the State, thus transferring the means of punishment for transgression from the body, the soul, and God to the State, the temperance movement very likely sabotaged its goals, debilitating the moral momentum it had accumulated. I believe that the reduction of temperance narratives shortly before the passing of Prohibition 17 combined with the 17 e.g. John W. Crowley indicates that the last important Washingtonian-related temperance narrative, Joseph H. Francis’s My Last Drink: The Greatest Human Story Ever Written, was published in 1915 (Drunkard’s Progress 202). While certainly temperance activists were hard at work through Prohibition, 28 subsequent ineffective enforcement provided by the State and the enervated moral position of the temperance movement allowed Prohibition-era writers an opportunity to take notice of the narrative propaganda that had been foisted on the country, and to begin to explore some of the temperance movement’s origins and ideologies. For it is in the Moderns’ America, in a world where the temperance movement’s narrative ideologies had succeeded in changing a public policy that in turn shaped the ways that private citizens could behave or be perceived, that Prohibition-era writers begin to more intentionally focus on reflecting upon, incorporating, critiquing, challenging, and often rejecting the nation- and identity-shaping attempts of the temperance movement. In effect, the insistence upon a temperate national identity that culminated in Prohibition, in which social policy directly influenced social life, the two becoming much more deeply intertwined, highlighted the instability of the temperance movement’s construction of America, especially as Prohibition progressed and the utopian expectations of the temperance movement were not realized. 18 This conceptual instability of the nation, this insecurity in identity that expanded as Prohibition evolved, encouraged the Prohibition-era writers to push against temperance ideologies, to create their own opportunities for identity and nation building, or, at the very least, identity and nation questioning. The unfulfilled promise of Prohibition allowed the Prohibition-era writers to perform a necessary cultural work, that of resisting the hegemony of the new the reduction in major temperance narratives indicates the movement’s confidence that the war against alcohol was as good as won and that the narrative had become sufficiently internalized in citizens. 18 Walt Whitman portrays the utopian society of an alcohol-free America, when, in Franklin Evans, he describes a vision of that future time (only two score years away from 1842) when the last intemperate man finally signs the pledge, signaling a universal end to American intemperance (94-98). From what my research has uncovered, no such grand utopia occurred with the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment. 29 temperate American identity, one based on concretized ideas surrounding race and gender and a highly teleological narrative system of drinking that, once challenged, tumbled. These writers perform this cultural work through their incorporation, manipulation, or rejection of the temperance narrative form and its accompanying ideologies and assumptions about American identity. I hope to explore how the temperance movement used narrative to shape a more determined, unwavering idea of the ideal American, constructed as male and white, and how the inheritors of the temperance movement’s political agenda work against that narrative and ontological certainty, seeking to open up new possibilities for alcohol narratives—often by dismantling temperance narrative teleology and conventions, new possibilities for American identity—often by exposing the equation of alcohol with non-white identities and rejecting both racial and gender conformity, and new possibilities for the country itself—often by abandoning the implicit hope and certainty of most temperance narrative forms. In other words, I will explore how Prohibition-era writers engage the temperance narrative form and conventions to reclaim both individual liberty and equality for the myriad identities that the temperance narratives tried to write out. When one reads temperance narratives, one cannot escape the sense that the narratives are formulaic, 19 which one can see as an attempt to concretize the identity of the drinker and to eliminate any possible alternative identities for him; in other words, the narratives are a form of identity regulation. Repetitive narrative forms seek to create in the national psyche an attempt to write the drinker, and, by extension, anyone associated 19 Donald Koch identifies the formulaic nature of temperance narratives when he claims that the plot of T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room was “familiar now to the point of tedium, [and] followed the first- tumbler-to-the-tomb formula” (lxxi). 30 with alcohol, out of the national narrative. In these formulaic narratives, the drinker relates his 20 tale of woe, starting with the form’s convention of the first drink, that first step on the road to sin and damnation that ensnares an otherwise good or even godly person. 21 Frequently, that first drink visits the drinker when he is rather young, often in the company of other men or when participating in some masculine activity, such as logging. From there the tale of woe expands, regaling the reader with a series of events that mark a repetitive pattern of illusory rise and ultimate descent, another convention. Usually, the pattern of rising and falling begins with the drinker at a morally, economically, politically, and culturally secure place, either in childhood, or as the father of a household and a fine, productive worker, or as a young man just setting out to make his way in America. After a series of misadventures in which the drinker usually loses his job, his family, perhaps even his faith, the drinker reaches his nadir, often after thoughts of suicide or even an attempt. 22 The drinker then has a moment of introspection, and is usually led out of his pit by a friend, often a former drinker, whose mission has become to save those unfortunates who are down in the gutter where he once lay, indicating the importance for men to change their behavior and invest in the lives of others, a rejection of individualism that institutes mutualism as the new masculine 20 Usually the narrators are male, a realization of the temperance movement’s wishes to “alter masculine behavior” (McGerr 83), an important point in my next chapter. 21 Because first drinks set the narrator on his intemperate path, they are important and will be a feature of my next chapter. 22 Both Luther Benson in Fifteen Years in Hell and George Dutcher in Disinthralled recount their suicide attempts. Benson tries to cut his own throat (60), while Dutcher “meditated suicide in different ways, and took a fierce delight in thinking that [his] sufferings were about to end” (157). 31 paradigm. After this conversion, the drinker is led out of darkness into light, often reunited with family, and restored to his place of community involvement. The temperance narrative’s general adherence to form 23 reinforces the teleological narrative form the movement wished to emphasize. In maintaining what is essentially a formulaic narrative that reinforces ideologies of the threat of alcohol to masculine and American identity and reshapes masculine social scripts to combat that threat, a fairly rigidly controlled form ensures that all readers are presented with the key points of the temperance movement whenever they encounter a temperance narrative. In addition, as I have mentioned, adherence to form encourages mass production of the temperance narrative, taking the form from what could have been essentially a cottage industry in the hands of reformed drinkers writing their autobiographies and placing it into the hands of all temperance activists. 24 The temperance narratives are not only formulaic as a means to control identity and ideology, to convince drinkers of the inevitableness of their situation, and to consistently reinforce the temperance movement agenda, but their formula is also based on what one could argue is, on a surface level, common sense. By common sense I mean that those who have consumed alcohol or who have witnessed alcohol consumption will 23 Certainly, not every temperance narrative is identical to every other temperance narrative. Some are more preoccupied with fatherhood and the threat to children than others are, for example. However, the effect of the large number of narratives, regardless of minor differences, is to create an aggregate form, a master narrative, that imbedded the larger identity concerns and ideologies of the temperance movement in the national psyche. 24 However, some of the reformed drunkards maintain that their work is more authentic than that produced by merely concerned citizens. George Dutcher in his narrative admits that while he was moved to donate to the cause after hearing a temperance lecturer speak, the speaker was not as effective as he could have been: “He had never been a slave to drink, and his remarks did not reach me as they would if he had related his own experience” (212). Those narratives ostensibly written by reformed drunkards, versus those narratives presented by outsiders interested in the cause, generally contribute to a more mutualistic American identity, placing more responsibilities on white, masculine identity, as I will argue in my next chapter. 32 be able to notice similarities between their own experiences or the experiences of those they have witnessed and the temperance narratives. In other words, there is a certain biological imperative to temperance narratives. Drinkers cannot escape their own corporeality, and anyone who drinks alcohol to excess can experience similar effects. Again, recognizing that there are exceptions to even biological imperatives, drinkers can feel a sense of elation, a heightened sense of well-being, followed by stupor, spins, and hangovers. These patterns of rising and falling, of elation and despair are repeated throughout the temperance narrative genre and reinforce it. However, we must ask ourselves if our responses to alcohol are not as biologically imperative as they seem. Andrew Barr in his book Drink: A Social History of America records the details of an experiment at the University of Wisconsin performed in the 1970s. At the university, psychologists chose a number of people, many of them diagnosed as alcoholics. In the experiment, subjects received one of two substances, either vodka and tonic or a placebo of plain tonic water. Some subjects were given vodka and told they were receiving alcohol, some were given the placebo and told they were given alcohol; some were given vodka and told they received the placebo, and the last group was given the tonic water and were told they were drinking tonic water. Barr presents the results: “One of the men who had been expecting to receive alcohol but had been given tonic water began acting in an intoxicated manner, whereas several of the men who had been told that they would be drinking tonic water but were actually drinking alcohol continued to suffer from withdrawal symptoms, even after consuming the equivalent of double vodkas. This and other tests indicate that someone’s reaction to 33 alcohol, far from being biochemically determined, depends on how he expects it to affect him” (24). 25 If this study has any bearing on my work at all, it is to highlight the fact that the temperance movement’s choice to make narrative a prime weapon in its war against alcohol may have been cannier than even the movement’s members thought. For if narratives are at heart about creating and fulfilling (or denying) expectations, then temperance narratives are a powerful psychological tool for ensuring that their readers would create their own punishments, cementing the hegemony of the temperance movement ideology. Thus, the unified front of the temperance narrative, its meticulous reliance upon formulaic conventions, reinforces the temperance movement ideologies on virtually every conceivable level. When one claims that temperance narratives are formulaic, one must also acknowledge that that formula is desperately teleological. The teleological nature of temperance narratives becomes, then, both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The strength of such a nature lies in its propagandistic power. To have so many writers, so many speakers, so many testifiers all witnessing essentially the same chain of events reinforces the movement’s ideology. If the temperance movement could convince the country that alcohol was such a powerfully evil entity that even the tiniest first sip would lead the imbiber down a road of inebriation and degradation every single time, then clearly something must be done about alcohol. At first, the temperance movement was satisfied with the mere suggestion that alcohol was evil and, therefore, Christian 25 Laurel and Hardy seem to have been aware of this fact long before the University of Wisconsin study. In their 1930 film Blotto, the two go out for a night on the town with a bottle of what they think is liquor that Laurel has appropriated from his wife. The two get rather rambunctious, laughing uproariously, but the punch line comes when the wife finds them and reveals that what they had thought was alcohol was really a mixture of tea, mustard powder, and various other ingredients. 34 Americans should have nothing to do with it. Moral suasion was a powerful force in the temperance movement, with the mere suggestion of moral impropriety serving as deterrent. However, as the nature of the temperance movement changed, and the movement sought legislation that would eliminate alcohol from the nation’s shelves, then the strength of the movement lay in its suggestion that because the ruination of the drinker was inevitable, it behooved the state to intervene, protecting its citizens from themselves and ensuring the moral health of the nation. The inevitable nature of a teleological narrative form certainly contributed to arguments in both the moral suasion and the prohibition legislation camps. But this strength, like so much in temperance, becomes perhaps its greatest weakness, for in its establishment of a formulaic narrative teleology, the temperance narrative form, using such tropes as the first drink and descent, the narrator presents the reader with an argument that claims that every time a drinker takes a sip, he is in danger of starting this chain reaction. In order to better understand this narrative form and the narrative expectations it creates, it may be helpful to turn to some narrative theorists to examine the form and function of temperance narratives. Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot articulates a number of useful statements that I wish to apply to an understanding of temperance narrative plots, for only when we understand the workings of temperance narrative plots, the forces that drive them, and the themes they seek to articulate, can we begin to understand the resulting countercultural, counternarrative plots that prohibition-era writers created. A useful place to start with Brooks is his statement that in all plots, the end lies in the beginning (93). This feature of 35 plot is painfully evident in the temperance narratives, for the entire plot hangs on the fact that the drinker, either the narrator or someone the narrator narrates, has consumed alcohol and will continue to do so until the end of his narrative. That end may be either in death or reform or in madness or in incarceration, but the seeds of the termination of the narrative are planted with that first sip. Relying so heavily on a teleological feature that contains the death of the drinker, either literally or figuratively, in the pop of the first cork contributes to the Temperance movement’s need to create the impression that alcohol leads to an inevitable end. This inevitable end is perhaps a much more literal application of Brooks’s claim, primarily due to the nature of Temperance narratives as a form of didactic propaganda, which generally demands that plots are formulaic in order to create meaning. This attempt to create meaning brings me to another of Brooks’s claims, that readers are themselves moved forward through the plot by desires inculcated by the plot itself, that readers are “seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning” (xiii). The meaning of temperance narratives, if the narrator has done his or her job effectively, should be apparent to the reader from the beginning. 26 One necessary function of temperance narratives is not narrative surprise, plot twists, or unresolved conclusions. The reader should never begin a temperance narrative wondering whether or not alcohol will be 26 While the temperance movement sought to create an inviolable direct connection between form and meaning, the inherent slippage between form and meaning will be exploited by some Prohibition-era writers. Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring, for example, appropriates much of the temperance narrative form, but instead of a completely redeemed and finalized ending, Thurman offers a narrative that ends in death, ambivalence, and the necessity for the main character to move on, not having fully resolved his identity or his situation. 36 vilified or vindicated. Perhaps the most important part of a temperance narrative for a narrator bent on either creativity or didacticism is the middle, which Brooks claims brings the reader “through the problem of desire gone wrong and brings it to its cure” (9). For many temperance narratives, the narrative surprise lies in the progression of the drinker’s life from the beginning of intemperance to its end, through the redirection of the drinker’s and the readers’ desires. In addition to Brooks’s work on plots, Mieke Bal’s book Narratology offers some tools to help us understand the ways that temperance narrative form works. Among the book’s insights, I find Bal’s observations on fabula and suzjet to be especially beneficial. She explains that part of a narrative’s power can come from the reader’s familiarity with the fabula, that is, with the overall plot, the overall series of chronologically related events, which the author can then manipulate in his or her own suzjet, that is, the way those events are presented to the reader. As an example, she presents the story of Tom Thumb, arguing that most readers are familiar with the story and know which characters are sympathetic and which are not. However, each version of Tom Thumb is creatively different, so that a reader can read two or more versions of the tale, impressed with each version’s creativity in expressing what is arguably the same chain of events in the story (5-6). In other words, while the tale of Tom Thumb seems to be a familiar tale for all European readers, the way in which that tale is presented in a text—perhaps achronologically, or with differing character descriptions or minor plot details— identified as suzjet by the Russian formalists, provides the element of difference for each version that makes each text a unique contribution to the narrative world. Bal later 37 identifies a difference between a primary fabula and an imbedded fabula, which she identifies a kind of “mirror text,” a text within a text that encapsulates the primary fabula in microcosm, so that the tale contains within itself a summary or mirroring tale. She argues that where such a mirror text falls in the primary fabula can have various functions for the reader, from creating suspense to conveying significance (58). I see each temperance narrative as a mirror text within the greater text of temperance ideology. That is, in examining the various forms of temperance narrative, their repetitive similarity, the inevitability of the drinker’s fate, the same patterns of apparent ascent and ultimate descent, I would argue that the temperance movement sought to create a master narrative of drinking, an uberfabula, if you will, that in seeking to promote the movement’s ideologies attempted to concretize the ways that writing about alcohol could be performed. This master narrative, then, came to dominate popular thought, and inhabited a highly contentious place in the public’s imagination when the public turned that imagination to alcohol. In attempting to ensure a united national front against alcohol, the temperance movement had to create a master narrative for alcohol and as a result was forced to propagate narratives that underscored and supported this master narrative. Doing so created a highly propagandistic literary form that carried no surprises in its fabula, rather, the surprises, the “joys”—even if they tended toward schadenfreude, lay in the details of the drinker’s downfall and ultimate recovery. Thus, the temperance movement created a primary fabula to which every subsequent temperance narrative becomes a mirror text. In creating this uberfabula, this master narrative, the temperance movement by default 38 ensured that the form would have a predicted outcome, that each narrative would, in effect, carry in its beginning the seeds of its ending. Here Bal can again prove helpful as we strive to understand the implications of such a narrative coup: One more or less traditional form of anticipation is the summary at the beginning. The rest of the story gives the explanation of the outcome presented at the beginning. This type of anticipation can suggest a sense of fatalism, or predestination: nothing can be done, we can only watch the progression toward the final result, in the hope that next time we may recognize the writing on the wall. This type robs the narrative of suspense, at least a certain kind of suspense. The suspense generated by the question ‘How is it going to end?’ disappears; after all, we already know how it is going to end. However, another kind of suspense, or rather a tension which keeps the reader engaged, may take its place, prompting questions like ‘How could it have happened like this?’ with such variants as ‘How could the hero(ine) have been so stupid?’ or ‘How could society allow such a thing to happen’ or ‘How did the hero(ine) find out about this?’ and so on, according to the direction in which the conventions of the genre steer the reader. But so-called ‘first person’ texts are most suitable for references to the future. A narrative which is related by a narrator who claims to be presenting his own past can easily contain allusions to the future, which, in relation to the story-time, is ‘the present’ or may even already be the past. (95) If we look at the temperance movement’s attempt to create a temperance narrative uberfabula as a means to ensure formulaic conformity when creating narratives about alcohol, then we can not escape the implication that once this project is underway, every reader who approaches a temperance narrative will, in effect, know the end, because the end is dictated by the larger ideologies of the temperance movement. Thus, the purpose of reading a temperance narrative does not become an exercise in teleological suspense, the question, “What will happen to characters that drink?” is no longer a valid question; the temperance movement made sure that such a question did not need to be asked. Rather, as Bal says, what comes into play is “a tension which keeps the reader engaged . . . prompting questions like ‘How could it have happened like this?,’ with such variants as 39 ‘How could the hero(ine) have been so stupid?’ or ‘How could society allow such a thing to happen’ or ‘How did the hero(ine) find out about this?’ and so on, according to the direction in which the conventions of the genre steer the reader” (Bal 95). This tension is shifted from teleology to epistemology, from speculation about outcomes and origins to a didactic discussion of what specific behaviors will result in the doom of the drinker and what specific expectations the narrative places on the reader that will result in change for the reader, the characters in the narrative, and for any inebriates the reader encounters in his or her own life. Temperance narratives become not a literary genre written for suspense, but a didactic simulation tool, in which authors can posit a variety of origins and behaviors, see how those behaviors play out, ask readers “How could society allow such a thing to happen?” and ultimately to construct a world in which the focus is not on the (already predestined) fate of the drinker, but rather on the series of events that contribute to the construction of the knowledge of the identity of the drinker, and the possibilities for the reader to contribute to the reformation of the drinker, while simultaneously interpellating the reader as temperance activist. Writing from the position of narrative completion allows the narrator an atemporal opportunity for reflection in which he can teach and reinforce temperance narrative ideology, offering thoughts of regret or wisdom that did not occur at the time of the fabula incident but provide readers with the correct interpretation and response in the suzjet. If a series of narrative simulations, if you will, either autobiographical or fictional, can help the nation understand the multitude of processes that can result in the identity of the drinker, then perhaps society, in the shape of the reader, can be transformed and taught to intervene at 40 the most critical points in that narrative continuum to erase the undesired, prohibited identity of the drinker, to “other” the drinker, to write out the possibility of anyone ever becoming a drinker, and condemning the act of drinking to become a behavior of the past, existing only in the past tense of the temperance narrative. This interconnected nature of theme and plot in temperance narratives—the core of the temperance narrative form, while contributing to the effectiveness of temperance narratives in reaching and convincing a large audience, is also their downfall. When the temperance movement insists that temperance narratives faithfully render the plot of drinkers in lived experience, and when the temperance movement guarantees that the lives of drinkers will play out just as they do in temperance narratives, then the movement leaves its greatest didactic weapon open for effectively disarming criticism. If this elaborately constructed narrative form fails in any of its claims, then the thematic and ideological claims of the entire construct can come crashing down. Prohibition-era narratives, in their attempt to re-write the possibilities both for alcohol and American identity, for the individual and individualism, often disrupt the form. What readers find in Prohibition-era narratives that involve alcohol is a rewriting of temperance narrative assumptions and ideologies. Rather than consistently ending in death or redemption, some Prohibition-era narratives involving alcohol can leave certain characters apparently untouched. Alcohol does not play a role in such characters’ demise, nor is alcohol used to mark that character as an outsider, as non-American. Much of the drinking in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for instance, falls into this category. If the temperance movement’s ideology of social control insists that one drink 41 will remove the drinker from the privileges of American identity, from the potential for capitalistic success, from the continuum of heteronormative familial engagements and community involvement and redemption, then Fitzgerald problematizes temperance claims by enabling many of his partygoers to exist, within the framework of his narrative, apparently unscathed. Yet Fitzgerald, along with other writers, does adopt certain narrative conventions from temperance narratives, such as the death of one “drinker”— Gatsby—and the repentance of another—Nick, and the thematics and ideologies of temperance are manipulated to produce new critiques of the tenuous certainty of the American dream. In his tale of the failure of the American dream, Fitzgerald’s engagement with temperance narrative forms demonstrates an awareness of the power the temperance movement had possessed in foisting their form of the American dream on the nation and a subsequent appropriation and redirection of the form’s narrative energies to new literary goals. Many novelists recognize the temperance movement’s attempt to link identity to alcohol and use alcohol in their texts as a key to prohibited identities. Rather than accepting the temperance movement ideologies that dictate that drinking leads to a tragic loss of white heteronormative American identity, some writers embrace or even celebrate that loss, using the loss as a way to rewrite new possibilities for American identity. Still others find embedded within the temperance movement’s linking of racial identity and alcohol an opportunity to critique social control and race rather than social control and alcohol. 42 New York plays a central role as either the primary setting for the majority of the narratives I will examine or a presence that looms over the plot, a space perhaps occasionally ventured into by the protagonists. Aside from the fact that New York was the home of most major publishing houses during the transition from Victorianism to Modernism, and thus the center of deciding which stories would be published, controlling the information about the nation, I would like to offer Ann Douglas’s view on the importance of New York City: The era that saw America become the world’s most powerful nation also saw New York gain recognition as the world’s most powerful city. The census of 1920 declared America for the first time in its history an urban nation and New York was the largest city in that urban nation. . . . New York was the first, and to date the last, American city to become, in the phrase popularized by the German cultural historian Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West . . . a “World City . . .” (Terrible Honesty 4) New York’s role as a “World City” and the resulting influx of immigrants, its population of African Americans and homosexuals, and the fact that New York City could potentially represent the United States to the rest of the world combine to make New York a hotbed of contested American identity. As the citizens and visitors move through the city, seeking whatever chunk of the American Dream they could grab, temperance ideology, which doggedly refused to disappear throughout the thirteen years of national Prohibition but eventually began to lose sway as Americans came to realize that national Prohibition itself was an under-enforced, farcical means of social control, struggled to control who could have access to that Dream. Those Prohibition-era writers, some who had encountered the city and stayed and some who had left, seeking to challenge Victorian concepts of morality and invoke what Douglas calls a “terrible 43 honesty,” could find no more appropriate battlefield. For on the streets of New York City, the fluidity of everyday interaction with immigrants, African Americans, and homosexuals countered the concretized national narrative of both alcohol and identity that temperance ideology sought to embed in the minds of Americans, and the “Modern project” of challenging the status quo, of opening possibilities and resisting control, of “making it new” could engage in the discourse concerning alcohol and identity to radically reshape America in the twentieth century. What I hope to do with this dissertation is to examine how temperance movement ideology influenced Prohibition-era fiction. As the temperance movement’s influence had gradually shaped the culture of the United States for at least one hundred years by the time Prohibition was passed, and as the temperance movement adopted fiction and the novel as a tool for propagating its ideology, both that ideology and temperance narrative forms influenced the shaping of American thought and American fiction. In an America in which the social control efforts of the temperance movement resulted in one of the most restrictive behavioral laws this country has ever passed, Prohibition-era writers find themselves unable to escape the ever-looming specter of temperance narratives, which had influenced a major portion of the population. Thus, Prohibition-era writers sometimes find themselves, consciously or not, engaged in narrative discourse with temperance ideology, with a variety of effects ranging from such engagement as countercultural critiquing of temperance ideology, much like LaGuardia’s public beer- drinking performance, to manipulation of temperance narrative form to explore and 44 critique American identity, to celebrating the very behaviors and identities that temperance narratives sought to write out of American existence. This brings me back to LaGuardia’s performance with which I introduced this chapter. For me, his act of public civil disobedience has served as a microcosm of the entire Prohibition-era project of rewriting American identity, of challenging the temperance form, and of refusing social control by engaging with temperance narrative forms and assumptions. Closely reading the account of LaGuardia’s plotted performance will demonstrate how I will approach the texts I have chosen for my dissertation, providing the readers with some essential information that will facilitate their engagement with future chapters. LaGuardia’s civil disobedience presents us with a very public act of challenging temperance ideology that informs my readings of the acts of narrative formulaic disruption, or at least re-examination and critique of the form, that the writers I engage with find themselves performing. We must not forget the national ubiquity of the temperance narrative form at the time of Prohibition, and while many Americans may hesitate to grant the authority to Temperance narratives I am granting, I believe that we have overlooked the authority the temperance movement claimed for itself and its narrative forms 27 and the subsequent desire of Prohibition-era writers to explore how that authority had been ceded to the movement, whether or not that authority had been abused, and how well the temperance narrative stood up to scrutiny. 27 I recall the tremendous influence right-wing Evangelicals have both claimed for themselves and exerted (whether the rest of the country wanted it or not) for the past thirty years of our national politics. 45 In attempting to better understand LaGuardia’s machinations, I defer to Foucault. In discussing the transition of punishment from public spectacle to internalized self- regulating paranoia, Foucault’s outline of the consequences of such a move seem like a checklist of goals for the temperance movement: “It leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime” (9). The temperance movement had an uphill battle to face when attacking alcohol’s evils, for it is difficult to argue that it is not possible to drink in moderation without experiencing the damning effects the temperance movement sought to attach to the act of drinking. Thus, their reliance on the internalizing power of narrative becomes eminently useful in their attempts to regulate behavior and exert social control. While Americans could certainly witness public drunkenness and the potentially violent behavior of the bibber, removing the punishment from the “domain of . . . everyday perception” and abstracting the horrors of drinking in such a way that they become internalized and aggravated—essentially insisting that Americans should ignore whatever proof they might encounter in their own lives about the ways alcohol “works” and about the consequences or lack thereof of drinking, instead insisting that the true nature of alcohol reveals itself only in the internalized spiritual and narrative domains rather than the external world, imbuing alcohol with their own ideologies—the temperance movement creates a much more convincing case. Thus, in the figurations of the temperance movement, the potential for violence, damnation, and the forfeiture of 46 whiteness that accompany drinking in the temperance narratives become more real than the everyday experiences of Americans. “Virtual” reality supplants actual reality in the temperance narrative form. LaGuardia, in his dogged determination to highlight the farcical notions that Prohibition could be enforced and that the foundation for Prohibition lay in any semblance of truth, challenges the temperance narratives by dismantling conventional elements of the temperance narrative form. Insisting that his drinking and its results must be a public spectacle, LaGuardia reintroduces the effects of drinking into the “domain of . . . everyday perception” and transforms the act of drinking from an act done in the isolation of nineteenth-century taverns or twentieth-century speakeasies and homes into an act performed in front of witnesses in the public sphere. LaGuardia simultaneously invokes and rejects the self-regulating panoptic forces that the temperance movement fought to create. In LaGuardia’s performance, we see a number of conventions of the temperance narrative form exposed and undone. LaGuardia’s drink of choice, aside from being the easiest drink to produce at home, had been imbued with all kinds of satanic power by the temperance movement. In the ideologies of the temperance movement, beer was configured to be a dangerous beverage, for brewers had deceived the American public since the founding of the nation with the notion that beer was a healthy drink, fortifying workers and providing relief from daily cares. Here LaGuardia publicly challenges temperance claims by not only drinking the stuff himself, but sharing it with others in a complete rejection of temperance narrative ideologies and values, which identified those 47 who share drinks as emissaries of evil and which also attempted to restructure the practice of treating others to drinks into the predecessor of today’s twelve-step programs by encouraging former drinkers to share not drinks but their testimonies about their harrowing escapes from Demon Rum’s clutches. No wonder temperance activists informed of LaGuardia’s stunt were so incensed; LaGuardia was publicly unraveling the knots on alcohol the temperance movement had for years striven to tie. Beer was not the only important ingredient in LaGuardia’s press conferences, for both his body and his soul (and those of others) become the public battleground on which the stranglehold temperance ideology had on Americans could begin to become loosened. Temperance narratives had long targeted immigrant European populations as drinkers and therefore un-American. In his performances, LaGuardia forces the public to confront this nativist ideology by enacting the very role of which his people had been accused. By entering into the beginnings of the narrative of the tempting Italian drinker wildly celebrating his ethnic difference, then rejecting the temperance narrative endings by refusing to become the caricature of Italian identity to which Italians were frequently reduced, 28 LaGuardia effectively blocks and erases temperance ideological claims. In addition, at the July 17 th rally in New York City, LaGuardia invited Irish American Major 28 For example, In John Barleycorn, Jack London offers both pugnacious Irish and Italians who are fervently ecstatic in their celebrations and physically threatening in their potential for violence. Coming from one of only two “American” families in the area where he lived as a child, London is forced to seek companionship with “non-American” families. While visiting an Irish family, London witnesses a tremendous fight break out because certain members of the Irish family had been drinking whisky. Hastily leaving the scene, some of the Irish children encourage London to accompany them to an Italian farm, where a dance is being held. At the dance, an older Italian boy offers London some wine, and London reveals a portion of xenophobic wisdom his mother had imbued in him. Informed by his mother that Italians are violent people, London fears for his life and accepts the drink. Filled with terror, London continues to accept the wine pressed into his hands, and by evening’s end, he has consumed enough wine to impress the Italian family (25-30). 48 Michael Kelly to join his performance. Kelly was a highly respected veteran of World War I, and the two of them together represent the twin stereotypical villains of some temperance narratives, Irish and Italians. The presence of these two men, who both had clearly achieved a piece of the American dream, and the “temperate” behavior they exhibited even after drinking LaGuardia’s brew, subverts temperance claims that these two ethnicities could not be fully accepted members of American society, nor could they drink without becoming pugnacious or transgressive. Both LaGuardia and Kelly, as members of ethnic groups who had been identified by temperance activists as some of the perpetrators of the evils of alcohol, have achieved the kind of public acclaim often denied their ethnicities by the Anglo-Americans who ostracized their people. LaGuardia as a member of the House of Representatives and Kelly as honored veteran have both achieved a social influence that Anglo-Americans respected. Using their cultural capital to erase the temperance propaganda both about alcohol and about their ethnicities, LaGuardia and Kelly demonstrate that not only can Italians and Irish become successful Americans, they can even drink beer and not be instantly transformed, Jekyll-and-Hyde- like, into slavering lunatics. LaGuardia’s act also seeks to counter the temperance claim that virtually instant damnation would result from the first sip of beer. Of course, temperance activists might have claimed that the full impact of God’s wrath had not yet been played out upon LaGuardia’s body or soul, 29 yet such hedging would have revealed the intricately 29 However, in a turn of events that might have gratified temperance activists who witnessed this scene, Kelly would become victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound—albeit an accidental one—four years later almost to the day, while cleaning his gun on July 22, 1930 (“Maj. Kelly Killed by His Own Pistol”). 49 tentative nature of the temperance narrative. LaGuardia’s public drinking unveils the fact that the threat to abstract notions such as family, morality, the nation, identity, and the soul had ultimately replaced the threat to the body and physical health upon which early temperance activists such Benjamin Rush had focused. LaGuardia’s explicit experiment was to risk arrest and arraignment by Prohibition officers, hoping to reveal how ridiculous enforcement laws were. But his ultimate success lies in his knocking down several key conventions of the temperance narrative, joining masses of people who had been undermining Prohibition every time they walked into a speakeasy, and bringing into perhaps a more public discourse the unraveling of the temperance narrative ideologies that Prohibition-era writers had already begun and with which they would continue to experiment. Thus LaGuardia brings into the public sphere an act of resistance that on the surface seems merely an act of civil disobedience but that in its very public performance exposes, intentionally or not, the underlying ideologies of the movement against which he was working. That exposure, when viewed against the framework of ideologies it opposes, weakens those ideologies by drawing attention to them through obliquely referencing them. As I examine the Prohibition-era texts, I will explore the ways in which they expose temperance ideology and the ways they respond to that ideology, offering readings of certain texts that I hope will invite closer readings of other Prohibition-era texts. I propose that Twenty-First Century readers examining Prohibition-era texts will find, in most cases, Prohibition-era writers are working against Kelly’s death by gunshot evokes the suicide of the drinker in a narrative etching entitled The Drunkard’s Progress, which I will discuss in my next chapter. 50 the conservative temperance project that struggled to foster an impression in the national psyche of the ideal and proper American identity based on temperance; not solely the temperance that comes with a rejection of alcohol, but the kind of temperate behavior established by the Puritans and their Anglo-American descendants, a temperance that clearly demarcated acceptable hard-working, moderate American behavior from the frequently over-exuberant, indulgently sensual behaviors of foreign immigrants and African Americans, a temperance that privileges mutualistic conformity to the community over individualism. In most cases, I would argue, Prohibition-era writers resist the temperance movement’s privileging the community over the individual. Thus, for some Prohibition-era writers, a valorization of intemperate behavior becomes a thematic focal point, and at times foreign immigrants or other non-Anglo identities, such as African-American, become the focal American identity, rejecting conformity and redefining who can be successful Americans. Some writers go so far as to adopt temperance narrative forms, redirecting their energies not against alcohol, but against other forces, such as racism or the suspect increase in commercialism, material consumption, and capitalism. Some writers refute temperance ideologies simply, like LaGuardia, by revealing that the ultimate end of drinking is not death or damnation, but by terminating their own drinking narratives before the moralistic judgment that accompanies temperance narratives can engage, thus avoiding condemning the drinker. Other writers find themselves incorporating, perhaps naively, perhaps honestly, perhaps intentionally ambiguously, the sanctioned outcome for drinkers, resulting in characters who drink and suffer, either through death or a decent into criminality. Such a narrative 51 move can undermine the otherwise anti-hegemonic work of the author, or complicate and obfuscate the narrative surety that some readers seek, or even demonstrate the author’s honest acknowledgement that however new and Modern he or she hoped to be in his or her writing, however he or she may have hoped to challenge certain ideological assumptions of the temperance movement, he or she cannot escape the one inevitable biological truth that alcohol is essentially a poison, and consuming it to excess can take a deep toll on one’s life. 52 Chapter 2. “But Go With Me, For You Can Suffer No Harm”: Altering the Male Reader through the Temperance Narrative In the Twenty-First Century, most readers equate Temperance with the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment, which most people believe, as Catherine Murdock puts it, “came about as a compulsory cure for inebriety” (61). While such an assumption is not completely mistaken, it is far too facile to assume that prohibition and temperance existed merely to cure drunks. Such a possibility has certainly not gone unnoticed by critics and historians. Catherine Murdock argues that the temperance movement sought much more than erasing alcohol; she notes the movement believed in an intricate connection between alcohol and men: “Considering the various elements connecting men to alcohol—class, ethnicity, leisure, labor, even public and private space—it appears as if all of nineteenth- century culture promoted alcohol consumption as essentially masculine” (15). Janet Zollinger Giele goes even further, observing, “Men’s drinking fueled formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and other organizations within the nineteenth- century woman movement, groups that sought to control not only male alcohol consumption but also male sexuality, warfare and politics” (42). In effect, Giele argues the temperance movement existed to control male behavior. Yet I believe that while such a goal may certainly be true, many temperance narratives written by men go far beyond the attempt to control men; these narratives hope to accomplish much more than a hegemonic usurpation of masculine power. Essentially, many male temperance 53 narratives 30 become complicit with an attempt to achieve the desire of temperance activists and other progressives to not simply control but to “alter masculine behavior” (McGerr 83). What I am interested in exploring is exactly how a number of male- focused temperance narratives alter masculine behavior, creating a new paradigm for white American males, one that attempts to redefine white American male identity. In creating a new paradigm for masculine behavior, the movement also concretizes white American identity in an attempt to bring American behavior, especially masculine American behavior, into a more temperate expression. While Ann Douglas has noted that many female-led temperance efforts focused victimization due to alcohol on women (47), many later 31 temperance narratives, especially those influenced by the Washingtonians, re-imagine the victims as men who need the active intervention of other men to reform. Thus, rather than either allowing other men to be excommunicated by judgmental branches of the temperance movement that abandoned drinkers to death or degradation, 32 or abdicating the reformation of drunken men to the women and children so often wronged in sentimental tales that underlay the WCTU ideology that women were “already there” (Giele 71) when it came to moral superiority, many of the narratives inspired by the Washingtonians sought to encourage men to reclaim their own. For me, the form of many later temperance narratives is itself a sort of narrative virtual reality, the 30 As opposed to those written for a primarily female audience and featured in such magazines as the WCTU’s Union Signal. 31 Although doing so is inherently problematic, as is any attempt to set temporal boundaries on literary movements, I identify “later” temperance narratives as those narratives that arose primarily after the Civil War. 32 Such sympathies are demonstrated in the Drunkard’s Progress lithograph and in T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-room. 54 reading of which the movement hoped would directly alter masculine and, by extension, American behavior. What the temperance narrative offers, then, is a strange mix of the sentimental religiosity of the Victorian evangelical movements, those discussed by Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture, and the more masculine concerns of novelists such as Hawthorne and Melville, who focused on, as Douglas argues, men (not women or children—although they are certainly present in temperance narratives), engaged in economic endeavors in forests, cities, and at sea, forcing readers “into direct confrontation with the more brutal facts of America’s explosive development” (6); those brutal facts being, for the temperance movement, the problems of intemperance. Thus, the hybrid faith evoked by the temperance narrative both feminizes men and masculinizes a sentimental Christianity by offering models of spiritual action for men who had strayed from the moral concerns of the feminine domestic sphere, teaching men to care about family and God, but valorizing men as the primary weapon in the mission to redeem other men, providing men with a great spiritual work. Temperance narratives become an effective recruitment tool into this developing faith that blurred the established gender identities that American society had defined, presenting to the American intellectual landscape a reified idea of American masculine identity. 33 Examining representative temperance narratives that both contribute to embedding the master temperance narrative in the national psyche and seek to alter men 33 Even Jack London, who lies outside the faith traditions invoked by most temperance narratives, recognizes the need for men to change their behavior and abdicate some control to women. In his inebriate autobiography John Barleycorn, he opens his book by informing readers that he has just voted for female suffrage and did so while drunk. He recognizes that men are doomed, and ensuring women can vote for prohibition legislation will allow the morally superior women to save men from themselves (14-15). 55 allows us to discover how the temperance narrative form functions in contributing to the movement’s attempt to create an ideal American identity, one that was clearly different from the identities of immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans. The attempt to write out the drunkard from the national landscape is, in effect, an attempt to homogenize American identity and to write out the “other.” While eliminating alcohol was, on the surface, the primary goal of the temperance movement, altering masculine behavior and values was the hoped-for end result that could perpetuate the promise of a homogenized America. Through an attempt to transform masculine behavior, the ideology of white, Anglo, native-born supremacy could be promulgated, and the status quo of white privilege could be maintained. In order to ensure the survival of white, Anglo identities in the face of increasing immigration, the behavior of white, native-born American males must be redirected into a more productive outlet, as the current trends of masculine behavior fueled by alcohol seemed destined to destroy men. The later male temperance narratives, by encouraging altered behavior in their readers by often directly addressing the reader, interpellating him (or rarely her) as a temperance activist, create in the national psyche a new imagined nation of homogenized identity that attempts to concretize a sanctioned white male American identity while highlighting differences between native and immigrant or native and non-white behaviors. Exploring the ideological forces embedded within the temperance narratives, forces that simultaneously concretize and disintegrate differing aspects of identity, enables us to better understand the social and political climate regarding alcohol in which Prohibition-era writers found themselves. 56 The collective narrative might of temperance narratives created what I called in my first chapter an uberfabula or master narrative of alcohol that can be broken down into a series of essential plot conventions that, in their teleological structure, reinforce the ideas of the dangers of alcohol and create in the mind of the reader the impression that consuming alcohol inevitably leads to the drinker’s demise. Among these plot conventions that permeate temperance narratives, we usually find an account of the narrator’s first drink—either the first drink in the narrative itself 34 or the very first drink the narrator consumed in his life. The bulk of the narrative consists of the narrator’s extensive account of the degradation to which alcohol brought him, usually provided in excruciating detail and often including ruminations on the deceitfulness of alcohol and/or on the power of alcohol to dominate the drinker, often ascribing a Satanic subjectivity to King Alcohol, a subjectivity that adds an element of pathos to the already suffering inebriate whose struggle with alcohol obtains, in the more evangelically-minded narratives, an element of spiritual warfare that goes far beyond the mere moral judgment perceived by many secular outsiders. Finally, in most temperance narratives, the narrator recounts the means to his salvation, his road to recovery, often involving signing a pledge in which the drinker promises never to drink again. Such a pledge was a common practice of the temperance movement, and signing indicates the drinker’s recognition that he lives in and is accountable to a community. While most temperance narratives include the narrator’s redemption, there are some narratives—such as the etching The Drunkard’s Progress—that offer no hope for redemption, and included within most temperance narratives is at least one other drunkard whose road to ruin leads to the grave rather than 34 In which case, the narrative could be said to begin in media ampullae—in the middle of the bottle. 57 to home. The reformed drunkard’s path to redemption is littered with the bodies of those drunkards who were not redeemed, and they serve as omnipresent warning signs to both potential drunkards and to readers who do not become fully invested in the temperance project. But before male readers can be transformed into mutualistic, sympathetic activists complicit with the effort to alter men, they must be convinced that their current status is less than desirable. The goal of convincing readers of the threat of alcohol and the fallen nature of the drunkard has been addressed competently by a number of critics and historians, among them John Crowley, David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler. Aside from the immediately obvious threat that a nation teeming with drunken men as represented in the temperance narratives would not long prosper, these critics and others have focused on the many accounts of broken families, lost fortunes, violence against women and children, and suicide contained in temperance narratives. However, in order to make my case for how the temperance narratives function as an immersive tool for altering masculine behavior, I must briefly establish at least a cursory examination of the perceived need to alter masculine behavior. To do so, I would like to offer the observation that in all cases, the need to alter men appears to have been accelerated by what could be called Darwinian motives. The motives that I see in the need to modify male behavior arise from two different Darwinian perspectives. The first is simply the need for the species to propagate itself, a possibility threatened by drunken men thwarting commands to be fruitful and multiply. 58 For the temperance movement, saloons were evil places. The refuge of many an inebriate, saloons were viewed not only as spaces where alcohol could be consumed and men could escape, but also as a typical workspace for prostitutes. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman indicate in their book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America that anti-vice commissions of the early twentieth century in the years before Prohibition struggled to shut down saloons because of their role in promoting the “‘…Devil’s Siamese Twins’ of liquor and lust. Saloons competing for business would provide lewd entertainment to attract male clients, and back rooms where prostitutes could take their customers” (210). Consequently, not only were men who frequented saloons threatening the home by squandering on alcohol the money the family needed to survive, coming home drunk with the implied threat of violence that comes with Victorian imaginings of inebriation, 35 but the men were also bringing into the home the time they had spent with the moral taint of prostitution, and perhaps a touch of venereal disease as well, a fact acknowledged by Catherine Murdock in Domesticating Drink (17). Thus, for the temperance movement, the saloon presented a space that threatened the survival of the family as not only a moral bastion against the immorality of the world, but also the very physical survival of the family itself. If fathers are consorting with prostitutes rather than fulfilling their divinely sanctioned duties to multiply through the sanctity of the marriage bed, then the potential for no heirs to the white American throne exists. In addition, the danger some venereal diseases pose to fertility further suggests that these white families could die out. 35 As I pointed out in chapter one, Ann Douglas recalls the almost universal trope of the violence against wife, mother, daughter, sister that permeates many of the narratives presented by the WCTU to female readers (The Feminization of American Culture 47). 59 While the sexual threat to the survival of the family offered by the juxtaposition of alcohol and prostitution reduces the likelihood of producing progeny, drunkards were often depicted as providing an even more efficient barrier to procreation, suicide. The archetypical example of the temperance narrative that ends in suicide is visually presented in a lithograph from 1846 entitled “The Drunkard’s Progress.” This lithograph, which exists in at least two forms—Nathanial Currier created one; E. B. and E.C. Kellogg created the other—indicates the kind of judgmental attack on drunkards that many reformers embraced. The two prints are incredibly similar; they both present the progression of the drinker as a series of identical steps that take the shape of an arch, under which each lithograph depicts a different scene: Currier’s lithograph shows a family forsaken by the drunkard, while the Kelloggs’ print portrays the means of production of alcohol. The two prints are identical in their presentation of the nine steps of the drinker, starting with “Step 1: A glass with a Friend,” ascending to “Step 2: A glass to keep the cold out,” progressing to “Step 3: A glass too much,” and “Step 4: Drunk and Riotous.” The drinker achieves the summit, carousing with his friends at “Step 5: The summit attained. Jolly companions A [sic] confirmed drunkard.” The drinker begins his descent with “Step 6: Poverty and Disease,” continues to “Step 7: Forsaken by Friends” and “Step 8: Desperation and Crime,” and culminates in “Step 9: Death by Suicide,” in which the drunkard shoots himself in the head. Obviously, The Drunkard’s Progress exists as a philippic against alcohol in which the fate of the drinker is suicide. Many of the narratives contain the threat of suicide; I have already mentioned both Dutcher’s and Benson’s thoughts on suicide, 60 while London’s narrative agonizes over suicide as the ultimate end for the drunkard. While most of these accounts are fairly sympathetic toward the drunkard, they do indicate the very real possibility of his death, and hold that threat out both as a warning to prospective drinkers and as an acknowledgement of the disruption of the family that occurs with the death of a drinker. The threat to producing progeny does not only lie in the lack of conjugal procreative acts, or in the very real possibility of the death of the drunkard, but also in the threat of extinction that drunken fathers offer their own children. In many pre- Prohibition accounts, drunken men abuse their children who, more often than not, wind up dead. George Dutcher’s temperance narrative offers us a drunken father whose behavior when drunk brings about the death of his child. Early in the narrative, Dutcher regales his readers with a horror story. In many earlier, pre-Civil War temperance narratives (such as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, in which a saloon keeper unintentionally kills the daughter of one of his customers), child murder becomes an important convention of the form, becoming one of the worst crimes that alcohol could induce a drunkard to commit. Dutcher’s narrative perpetuates this convention, but does so only through secondhand account. Dutcher does not commit the crime himself; rather, he recalls the tale of a man in his neighborhood while he was growing up who sank deeper and deeper into drink. One fateful day, the father returns home drunk to find that his son had not adequately performed a chore the father had assigned him. Flying into a drunken rage, the father beats the child severely. Horrified by his actions and racked with guilt, the father flees the scene, hiding out in the countryside. He haunts the woods near his 61 house, anxious to hear the condition of his son, only to hear a few days later that his son has died. Upon hearing the news, the father runs away, becoming a fugitive from the law, exacerbating the already degraded moral ruination to which alcohol has brought him (42-47). The father’s act is outside of the continuum of expected Victorian paternal behavior, and rather than face his punishment, he flees, deprived of his paternal masculinity. Thus, males become a very real threat to the continued existence of the family, either through the financial and sexual enervation they bring to the family, through the possibility of self-inflicted or accidental death—made more likely by their drunkenness, or through the danger of abuse and possible murder of their offspring. But intemperate men do not pose these threats only to their own families, for men continuing in the behaviors of drinking threaten the existence of other men, as fathers pass on their capacity for inebriation to their sons or grandsons, neighbors pass on their thirst to neighbors, and boyhood friends introduce each other to drink in childhood. Men become the vector for the disease of drunkenness, and the vector must be changed if the white Victorian American family and America itself is to survive. In many temperance narratives, men are presented as prone to inebriation almost by nature. Gathering men together almost ensures that drunkenness will be transmitted to the group; in fact, without the insulating effects of the Titaness—the title Thomas Beer gives moralistic Victorian women in his book The Mauve Decade—and her domestic fortress, men, even young boys, inevitably turn to alcohol. Luther Benson describes his first drink without explicit admonitions that such an act is fateful; however, he is quick to provide such claims throughout his narrative, both before and after this scene. As he tells his readers in his third 62 chapter, long after we are aware that drinking has led to his current incarceration in an insane asylum, at the age of six, he and a boyhood friend found a jug of whisky from which the men had been drinking to strengthen themselves during the wheat harvest. The boys, in this time of male labor, drink themselves almost senseless (15). Benson’s first drink, as we’ll see repeated in some other accounts, notably London’s, takes place outside of the home, away from the realm of the Titaness and firmly in male territory. At this time of implicitly male outdoor activity—harvesting, logrolling, threshing—all of which contain the threat of implied male violence, the young boy is removed from the aegis of the Titaness. There, performing male activities in the company of males, boys learn to drink and become infected with the thirst. George Dutcher’s experience is similar to Benson’s in that the beginnings of Dutcher’s intemperance comes when he, around the age of ten or eleven, uses whisky while performing field work for a local farmer. The farmer insists that no one can meet his expectations for labor without being fueled by alcohol, a view not atypical of the day, so he provides whisky three times a day for his workers. Although Dutcher admits he had previously drunk cider and had sampled leftover spirits from adults’ glasses, he identifies this practice as the origin of his habit (26). Dutcher joins Benson in indicating that men teach other men to drink, and locates the opportunity to drink, like Benson, in men’s work. Continuing the trend of identifying the source of drinking as other men, Jack London records his first drink in John Barleycorn. At the age of five, he took the opportunity to sample the beer his father, working in the field, had sent him to fetch. As a child, he trusted that adult judgments were good and, knowing his father enjoyed beer, he wanted to see what adults liked. (22). London writes his book as a plea for 63 prohibition, and departs from the temperance party line that a single drink contains the teleological doom of the drinker. He claims that his drinking was the result of years and years of cultivation, that alcohol tasted to him far worse than any medicine, and that he had no predisposition to drink (16). However, London’s association of his first drink with his father further points to the likelihood that fathers, consciously or not, transfer their desire for alcohol to their sons. As in Benson’s narrative and in Dutcher’s, London’s culturally learned behavior occurs in a male realm, the fields of harvest time, a male domain in which drinking traditions can be passed on. London’s, Dutcher’s and Benson’s revelations that first drinks often occur as a result of outdoor work, frequently performed with fathers or other male authority figures, signify for many in the temperance movement the dire necessity to transform masculine behavior. Yet the need to change male behavior due to the Darwinian threat to families offered by drunken fathers who fail to support their progeny, who may kill their children, or who are perhaps doomed to pass on their malady to their male children is not the only ideological focus of the temperance narrative, for there still remains the second Darwinian threat, that of the encroaching species, in this case, the “other”: immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans. For many native-born Anglo-Americans, fear that the influx of immigrants could choke out white, Anglo-Saxon identities, especially through the dangers of alcohol, haunted their thoughts. In order to ensure the survival of white Anglo identities, white men needed to be clearly marked as different from immigrants and from other non-whites. If white men became subsumed in the tide 64 of immigrants, then native-born Anglo-American families could very well cease to exist, the disappearance of the father in another form. We must understand the perceived threat of invading species presented by the immigrant and “others” to white identities. In 1867, F. J. Ottarson reacted to census information regarding immigration in his article “New York and Its People,” in which he writes: From 1847 to 1860 inclusive the number of aliens landed in this city was 2,671,819; in 1854 alone the number was nearly 320,000. During the first part of the late war the tide slackened very materially, but increased again from 1864. The whole number received by the Commissioners of Emigration in twenty years ending last December, was 3,583,184, equivalent to the population of more than twelve of the smaller states of the Union in 1860. The immigration last year was 233,410. But I will not confuse the reader with figures—all remember the overwhelming tide, and we were thankful for the national and individual prosperity that enabled us to receive millions of the persecuted and the destitute without perceptible diminution of our resources or danger to our Government. (135) While Ottarson seems to pat himself and his country on the back with the observation that the U.S. took in and assisted so many “persecuted” and “destitute,” his metaphor of the “overwhelming tide” and his relief that the resources and Government of those to whom resources and Government rightly belong betray a certain perception of entitlement and a fear that the tide could wash away not only jobs, shelter, and food, but culture as well. Ottarson exacerbates the nativistic views of his native-born countrymen by highlighting the failings of some of the waves of immigrants who have approached within the tide. The Irish, he claims were the “most numerous and the poorest,” and, being unable or unwilling to pursue a life on the frontier, congregated in New York City, 65 where they “crowd[ed] into whatever place of shelter they could find, seeking the commonest and poorest paid work when they sought any, setting up little dirty liquor shops, a great portion of them falling naturally into an unhealthy and degraded way of life” (135). Irish are not alone in being the object of Ottarson’s ire, Germans as well clutter up Ottarson’s formerly homogenous city. He admits that many Germans came with more money and more drive to go west than the Irish did; however, there are enough Germans who “preferred the city and lager-beer peddling to the country” (135). Both groups, the reader will note, are especially singled out for the alcohol that they consume, offering new, more outré styles of drinking into which the native-born man could descend. When both Germans and Irish enter areas of New York “in force,” Ottarson observes, “the native New Yorker has fled before them” (135). Here Ottarson reveals his great Darwinian terror: overcome by the overwhelming tide of invading species, the native species flees or faces the danger of temptation from “little dirty liquor shops” and “lager-beer peddling.” Ottarson’s most chilling statistic for his fellow nativists might be when he combines proof that foreigners are outbreeding native-born Americans—he examines the recorded rates of childbirth, from where he does not clearly indicate, in which he finds a total of 3,151 births, made up of 2,756 foreigners and 570 native-born 36 —with the fact 36 Mathematically inclined readers will notice that Ottarson’s numbers do not add up. Combining the given number of births to foreign parents with the number he provides for native parents results in 3,326 births. He does admit before this curious math that his information does come from a “partial record of births,” but that confession does not explain his discrepancy. We must wonder exactly where those extra 175 births came from. Given his nativist sentiments, I cannot imagine that he is allowing some children to be counted under both categories. The title of his essay, “New York and Its People” indicates that these numbers are probably restricted to New York City; however, that number seems fairly low, only “3,151” births in 1865. The fact that his claims seem at least slightly spurious, and, one might say, “spun” for political effect does 66 that the children of both foreigners and native-born Americans “come to maturity” at roughly the same rate, which results in his assumption that natives make up thirty-three percent of the whole population, while foreigners and their children make up sixty-seven percent of the population (136). In Ottarson’s prognosis, the fear that native-born white American identity may soon be erased, subsumed in the tide of foreigners, manifests quite clearly. While not explicitly connected with the temperance movement, Ottarson’s project expresses the same concerns as nativist temperance advocates. Admittedly, the temperance movement’s nativist anxiety is not expressly stated in temperance narratives; that is, no temperance narrative I have examined specifically claims that the rising tide of immigration will erase whiteness from the shores of the nation. However, that sentiment suffuses many temperance narratives, and expressed itself in the movement’s volunteer activities. Janet Zollinger Giele, in her book Two Paths to Women’s Equality, posits that the WCTU made efforts to welcome Irish Catholics, Italians, and Germans to American shores, educating them in a variety of American customs and practices, especially in abstaining from alcohol, while privileging the overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon identity of its membership (94-96). The WCTU, perhaps resigning itself to the inevitability of the encroaching immigrant presence, sought to stave off the erasure of white identity by inculcating in the immigrants standards of white native-born behavior that would at the very least delay, and could possible eventually prevent, the complete not negate the fact that his observations were representative of the kinds of nativist fear encouraged at the time. 67 disintegration of white identity by seeding in the foreign identities the same values honored by white native-born Anglo Americans. Thus, not only is whiteness threatened by the possible genetic extinction of the race held out by the implication of drunken violence against self and children, but it is also threatened by the impending doom of erasure, overwhelmed by encroaching immigrant identities. To counter this peril, the temperance movement and many other progressive movements recognized the need to adapt white masculine behavior to the demands of a new, more diverse and threatening America in order to ensure the survival of the race. By linking American behavior to white Anglo native-born behavior, the temperance movement began to construct a new idea of American identity in a more concrete form than had been previously enforced. To reinforce the threat of non-whites to American whiteness, the temperance narratives offered an extensive attempt to connect alcohol with non-white identities and to hold out the threat that white identity was less fortified and more endangered than most white Americans thought. For some time, those concerned about the effects of alcohol were concerned that drinking it could wear away social barriers. In some narratives, the threat to whiteness lies in the mere possibility of racial groups mingling together through the lubricating effects of alcohol. For example, George Dutcher recounts an incident during which he and a number of other laborers are preparing to leave for a logging camp the next day. The group consisted of “Irish, Dutch, native born Americans and the dark- skinned sons of Africa.” Aware that they would all be leaving the next morning to the camp twelve miles away, the men begin to strike up relationships. They find a violin, on 68 which an American “[ground] out some lively strains.” To the music of this violin, the “sable sons of Africa” demonstrate their dancing prowess, and everyone consumes whisky. Early in the morning, the “bacchanalian orgies” end, each member of the party takes one last swig, pledging brotherhood, and they all fall deeply asleep on the floor of the barroom (53-54). In Dutcher’s tale, whisky is a great uniter, bringing immigrants, Americans, and Africans together in an intertwined mass of humanity on a barroom floor. Yet two features stand out here that most likely would have stood out as warning signs to Dutcher’s contemporary readers. By this point in his narrative, Dutcher has vociferously attacked the consumption of all alcohol, so while on the surface the scene seems to be of a joyous revelry to naïve twenty-first century readers, his contemporaries know that the revelry is in reality a revelation of the deceptive nature of alcohol that encourages only the illusion of joy and brotherhood in this diverse group. In addition, Dutcher’s scene of interracial brotherhood, which appears so eminently desirable to our twenty-first century mindset, would have been much more suspect to his contemporary, generally nativist and racist, readers. In fact, Dutcher’s juxtaposition of alcohol with interracial mixing should indicate to readers, who already know that no good can come of alcohol, that this brotherhood of races is not to be trusted. At a time when both male and racial purity were preoccupations, this scene of homosocial, perhaps even homoerotic, mixing eased with the aid of alcohol should serve as a dire warning of the evil outcomes of both drinking and race mixing. The threat of mingling races because of alcohol went beyond warnings against cross-racial homosocial association. Walt Whitman provides one of the more grievous 69 examples of white America’s fears of race mixing. About two-thirds of the way through Franklin Evans, Franklin finds himself attracted to Margaret, a Creole slave owned by an acquaintance he meets on business in Virginia. Aware that he should have nothing to do with Margaret, because they are not of the same race and have differing situations of freedom, Franklin is still attracted to her and, in hindsight, lays the blame squarely on alcohol: There seems to be a kind of strange infatuation, permanently settled over the faculties of those who indulge much in strong drink…. The mind becomes…obfuscated, and loses the power of judging quickly and with correctness. It seems, too, that the unhappy victim of intemperance cannot tell when he commits even the most egregious violations of right; so muddied are his perceptions, and so darkened are all his powers of penetration. And the worst of it is, that even in his sober moments, the same dark influence hangs around him to a great degree, and leads him into a thousand follies and miseries. (82 original emphasis) If one’s perceptions and powers of penetration have become “darkened,” then one can more easily succumb to the dark charms offered by Creole women. Drunk, Franklin marries Margaret, finding himself, in a slightly more sober moment, shackled to a wife not of his own race. Ultimately, Margaret will commit suicide after a treacherous series of events in which she becomes jealous of Franklin’s interest in a white woman and exposes that woman to a virulent fever (83-104). Whitman’s narrative highlights the dangers alcohol can pose to white racial purity, but also ensures that that purity will emerge, if not unscathed, then at least potentially redeemed by being a powerful lesson on the path to reform, at the expense of the victimized Margaret. The temperance movement’s attempt to connect alcohol and race goes beyond association or even intermarriage, for implying that alcohol contains the potential to unite 70 non-white classes and races with white Americans does not suffice to strengthen the temperance narrative argument of the threat of alcohol to the drinker’s identity. In order to convince white Anglo Americans of the identity dangers of alcohol, those dangers must be able to be visited upon whites, and the threat to whiteness must be made manifest in the body and behaviors of the drunkard himself. Castiglia and Hendler have pointed out the connection between race and the body of the drunkard, as I mentioned in my previous chapter. In their discussion, they generalize the temperance narrative convention in which “the drunkard, at his lowest point, is often described as a man who has figuratively and often literally lost his whiteness, whose skin has taken on an ‘unnatural redness’ or still darker tones” (lvi). They point to Franklin Evans’s nadir, as he experiences his downfall in terms of color: “My face, I felt, was all dirty and brown and my eyes bleared and swollen. What use had I for life?” (62 qtd. in lvi). For Castiglia and Hendler, drunkards who triumph over their adversary “are almost always whitened, not only by the clear water associated with sobriety, but also by the restoration of their ‘natural’ color” (lvi). In Castiglia and Hendler’s understanding of the temperance narrative’s logic of race, skin color is a clear indication that the drunkard has slipped from his state of white grace into the fallen state of color. As temperance narratives progressed beyond Whitman’s Franklin Evans, their preoccupation becomes not simply expurgating drunkards from the American landscape, as many judgmental narratives sought, nor even simply reclaiming a few lost white souls. For many of the later temperance narratives, reform, re-education, and reshaping patterns of behavior in drunkards and non-drunkards alike become paramount, so that in some 71 narratives whiteness is threatened not only by a change in skin color, but more importantly by a change in behavior, so that drunkards find themselves playing out the performative scripts culturally constructed for other races. Alcohol’s threat to American identity goes far beyond changing skin tone; alcohol threatens not only the appearance of Americans, but also the behaviors of Americans, behaviors that the temperance movement and other nativist movements sought to closely regulate. To examine the threat that alcohol holds for identity, we should first turn to Luther Benson’s Fifteen Years in Hell. Benson seems less preoccupied with race than some of the temperance narrators are; however, he lays a strong foundation for the disintegration of identity in the drunkard. Benson includes a number of metaphors throughout his narrative through which he can bemoan the fluid state of his identity as a drunkard, no longer sure of his white American masculinity, not even of his humanity: he descends into animal life, becoming, in the Biblical image, like a dog returning to its vomit (43). He compares himself to insects, a moth attracted to the source of its undoing (43) and a scorpion that stings itself to death to escape an encroaching circle of fire lit by tropical street children (45). He even at one point leaves the animal kingdom, imagining himself a water-sodden log (31). His penultimate doom is to see a vision of himself as a demon, tormenting other drunkards (38). Yet even demons are not the lowest link in Benson’s Chain of Being. That site belongs to the drunkard, about whose life “[t]he devils of the lower world could see nothing to envy in it. It was worse than their own torture” (36-37). While Benson does not imply these stages of identity disintegration are chronologically progressive, the cumulative effect of these various metaphors reinforce 72 Benson’s claims not only of descent, but of the unmoored nature of the drunkard, who becomes unmoored not only in space, wandering through picaresque misadventures, but also in existence, losing his humanity to become a drunkard. While Benson articulates concerns that identity and alcohol do not mix, his concerns remain largely racially unmarked. Here, I should point out the most obvious, yet still important, element in the construction of white identity and the “othering” of the drinker: the connection between temperance and slavery. Images of slavery abound in temperance narratives, and the logic of such a connection is inescapable. What better image to portray the loss of freedom, of self-reliance, of independence than that of the slave? For white readers in ante- and post-bellum America, the form of slavery that dominated the national imagination was the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. Thus, any mention of slavery in temperance narratives inevitably signifies race and highlights a connection between abolition and temperance. In addition, the temporal coincidence of the two movements insures elements of textual cross-pollination. Luther Benson’s narrative, for example, is littered with the language of slavery. Because of alcohol, he is the devil’s slave (9); he is the most hopeless and wretched slave on earth (17), and he writes about emancipation from alcohol (80). Washingtonian narratives often use images of slavery; one of the most famous Washingtonians, John B. Gough, peppers his narrative with claims of slavery to the bottle, for instance, “Such a slave was I to the bottle, that I resorted to it continually, and in vain was every effort, which I occasionally made, to conquer the debasing habit” (140). Just as chattel slaves often 73 sought to escape the confines of the plantation, only to be caught and punished, so does Gough voice his despair over the difficulty of escaping his particular form of slavery. John W. Crowley has written a fine essay on slave narratives and temperance narratives. In “Slaves to the Bottle: Gough’s Autobiography and Douglass’s Narrative,” Crowley meticulously points out the appearance of slavery metaphors in Gough’s text and discusses some of the ways alcohol appears in Douglass’s narrative, both of which were published in 1845. Making the case for a closer examination of Gough, Crowley argues that while we still read Douglass today, Gough’s book is long forgotten, even though it far outsold Douglass’s book. Crowley’s primary concern, however, is with what he calls the focal question of his essay: “What, if anything do these texts reveal about the interrelationship of temperance and abolition?” (116). While I leave it to my reader to read the essay and determine Crowley’s ultimate answer to this question, I will point out that Crowley claims that the two movements often worked hand-in-hand with each other, and temperance activists and abolitionists often attended the same meetings. One element of the intersection of temperance and abolition was the mutual exchange of terminology; however, many abolitionists resented the temperance movement’s usage of slavery imagery, claiming that doing so diluted the horror of chattel slavery. Yet many reformed drunkards insisted that their form of slavery truly was worse, for while chattel slaves were only enslaved in body, drunkards were enslaved in both mind and soul, a privileging of the mind over the body that corresponded with white stereotypes of both themselves and slaves. This kind of racism was typically inherent in much of the temperance movement, as most temperance organizations, with the exception of some 74 groups such as the Washingtonians, excluded African Americans from their ranks. The argument about which form of slavery was worse played out in a number of venues, but ultimately the racism of many temperance advocates won out, and the voices of those temperance advocates who also spoke out against using chattel slavery language were apparently muted. What Crowley does not articulate in his essay, and what I think needs to be made explicit, is that white men who drink shackle themselves not just to the bottle, but to a non-white identity; not only might their skin color change as Castiglia and Hendler point out, but their behavior becomes a behavior prohibited for white Americans. Drunkards occupy the space in the national imagination reserved for identities other than white. However, while most temperance narratives are brimming with such words as “slave,” “master,” “fetters,” and a host of other slavery-associated words, temperance narratives must go beyond mere metaphor, as powerful as metaphor may have been for their readers, to firmly imbed in the national psyche the dangers to white identity inherent in alcohol, and the need to eliminate alcohol in order to ensure the survival of white masculinity. In many narratives, alcohol works as a dark elixir that transforms the inebriate into a performer of a racial identity other than his own. One temperance narrative in particular, George Dutcher’s Disinthralled, provides a wealth of scenes that demonstrate how alcohol rewrites the socially constructed scripts for racial identity, so that white drinkers begin performing as “othered” races. I have already referenced Dutcher’s account of a father who killed his son in a drunken rage. The story’s tragedy does not end with the death of the son, however, for at that point, 75 already having departed from the script of paternal responsibility and love the Victorians would have written for the man, the father accepts a role usually constructed for someone whose skin color differs from his: He remained in his hiding-place until night, when he silently stole away on foot, over fields, through swamps and forests, with his face towards Canada. The north star was his only guide through the long hours of night as he pushed on, fleeing from the hand of Justice, goaded with the terrible thought, his bosom heaving with emotion, knowing that he was the murderer of his own child, and that rum had maddened him to commit the monstrous crime. (44) Already off his sanctioned social script, the shattered father, driven by the new social script rum has created for him, plays out the role of the fugitive slave, hiding during the day, stealing away through swamps and forests, headed toward Canada by following the north star. No longer simply a slave to the bottle, he becomes a runaway, fleeing into the space envisioned as freedom from slavery. Dutcher’s narrative takes the father beyond filicide, the crime which in earlier temperance narratives was its own punishment, and aggravates that punishment, for not only has the drunkard lost his son, he has also abdicated his whiteness, straying so far from the normative social scripts he should be performing that he finds himself in a script written for another race. In this fugitive tale, the father is eventually caught just before crossing the border into Canada, and he is returned, like a runaway slave, to his hometown to face his sentence. While this account is calculated to terrify white potential drinkers, it does seem slightly removed from Dutcher’s experience, in that this anecdote is simply an account of what happened to another drinker. Striking closer to home, Dutcher recounts the scene his own family performs due to his father’s drinking. Living in a cabin in the Catskills, Dutcher and his family are surrounded by a graciously providential nature that provides 76 for the needs of the family that the father, deep in his cups more often than not, is unable to meet. However, while nature may be able to meet the family’s physical needs through its fecundity, and may even, to some extent, nurture the family’s souls in a way the father cannot, Dutcher’s family is finally forced out of their cabin, for rent money does not grow on trees. As his family leaves the cabin that had provided for them so providentially, Dutcher sighs, “Not more sorrowful is the emigrant, leaving his native land around which all his fond affections cluster to seek a home in the new world…than were we….” (20). In this lament, not only does Dutcher’s alcoholic father’s native-born identity become threatened, as, I would argue, is often the case in temperance narratives, but the firmly rooted native-born American identity of the entire family becomes displaced as they are transformed into something more sorrowful than emigrants. Forced to wander, uprooted both in space and in identity, the entire family become strangers in their native land, experiencing the dreadful fate of those who exchange the temperate nature of their white native-born American identity and that of their families for that of the “othered” drunkard. Dutcher’s father’s identity sins are meted out upon the entire family. For Dutcher, the tragedy continues, as it inexorably does in temperance narratives, and Dutcher himself grows into a drunkard. In one scene that continues the machinery of erasing the white American identity of the drunkard, Dutcher agrees to participate in a drinking contest: Finally, we [Dutcher and his companions] concluded to see which could drink the most liquor without giving in, and all that afternoon and evening we continued pouring down the fire-water, as an Oneida Indian who was one of the party was pleased to call it. Well might he call it fire-water—the curse of his nation and his 77 tribe. It had caused many a council-fire to become extinguished, and his once powerful people were now a mere handful. The noble chieftains who inspired the pen of Cooper are, alas! no more; deprived of their lands; degraded by fire-water; their spirits broken, they, silent and sad, follow the trail of the setting sun.” (136- 37) At the conclusion of the contest, the only two participants who remain are Dutcher and the Oneida Indian. In the text, readers are presented with an etching of Dutcher and the Indian having a council with each other while leaning on the bar, agreeing to share the victory in the contest, and Dutcher and the Indian become two personifications of the same drunken identity, each staring at his mirror image along the bar’s countertop. In this construction, Dutcher becomes the Indian, his unmarked whiteness blends with the Indian identity, and the lament Dutcher offers for the Indians and their decimation under the influence of fire-water becomes his own, though at the time he is unaware of his fate. Dutcher’s whiteness has become so diluted by alcohol that it is no longer White. The Indian, however, does not benefit from mirroring Dutcher’s identity; he does not slide effortlessly into whiteness, for there can be no uplift through drinking. The two can only slide inevitably downward, joining each other in following the trail of the setting sun. Once more, Dutcher creates a scene in which his white drinker has adopted the social scripts written by Anglo-Americans for members of another race. Dutcher continues to unite the social scripts of drinkers and others, especially immigrants. In Dutcher’s narrative, conversations are usually presented in summary, that is, Dutcher usually points out that a discussion occurred; for example, in the scene with drinking and men of all races, Dutcher simply informs us the men “pledged long life, happiness and fortune to each other” (54), rather than recounting verbatim the maudlin 78 scene. When another person is allowed to speak in Dutcher’s tale, then he or she is quoted in the conventional way, with conventional spelling, with few attempts to reproduce each individual’s dialect. However, when drunkards and immigrants speak, their “otherness” is frequently evident simply in the ways their conversation is textually represented. Dutcher provides the discourse of Dennis O’Rafferty, a man of obvious Irish origin who, after a drink with Dutcher (reinforcing the image of the drinking immigrant), takes Dutcher to a dock to point out a steamer bound for Cleveland: “Now me man, there is the boat that will just take yez where yez want to go, and it’s a safe voige I’m wishing ye’ll have, and long life to yez. You’ll be after gething yer ticket at the winder, when the capt’in comes aboard (116). O’Rafferty’s clichéd language marks him as “other,” an identity reinforced by the form of the words themselves, not as a member of the mainstream native-born American population whose discourse is unmarked. Likewise, native-born drunkards’ discourse is sometimes reproduced phonetically, interjected with reproduced hiccups and verbal stumblings. The form of the drunkard’s discourse also marks his difference: The first hotel we came to my friend reined in his horses, and we entered the house. Here we met a man about half-seas over, who addressed us on sight with— “Whill-hill-hillostran—hic—gers. Where—hic—the d-d-devil did yer—hic— come from? Le’ss—hic—take some –hic—pen to drink—hic—I’m on—hic—fun and—hic—lousy with money,” at the same time pulling a handful of silver from his pocket, several pieces of which dropped on the floor. (128) Again, skaz identifies the speaker as “other.” Marking both Irishman’s and drunkard’s discourse as different, as “other,” may be merely intended as an amusing typographical 79 diversion. The effect, however, of uniting these two identities through the similarity of the marked difference in their speech serves to elide the difference, once more reinforcing the abdication of American identity through drinking. In order to salvage the future of white America, the temperance movement had to re-imagine gender roles. For many critics, especially Giele, the temperance movement, combined with women’s suffrage, offered Victorian women the opportunity to exit the domestic sphere, to imagine new roles for themselves in the public sphere, and to assert their perceived moral power on a political playing field. In other words, for many women, working in the temperance movement moved them on the gender continuum imagined by Victorian Americans away from the extreme cult-of-domesticity position that had been foisted on women and towards more masculine roles, not only in the political spheres but even in the behavioral spheres as indicated by the roles played out by female activists such as Carry Nation, who, in her bellicose hatchet attacks on saloons, enters into a violent role more usually associated with males. Such a realization that the temperance movement masculinized femininity is not terribly new, but what has gone far overlooked is how the temperance master narrative feminizes masculinity, moving ideal forms of masculine behavior closer toward the center of the Victorian imagined gender continuum, in order to ensure the survival of whiteness and the establishment of Anglo, native-born behaviors as the standard of American behavior and identity. The narratives themselves serve as immersive didactic experiences in which masculine readers are encouraged to emulate behaviors more traditionally associated with Victorian femininity. Barbara Welter identifies four key 80 feminine qualities celebrated by the cult of domesticity: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (21). I would argue that we can see these four qualities transformed into masculine qualities in many of the later temperance narratives, which offer readers models of piety through male narrators who offer and invite immersive displays of piety in their requests for prayer and appeals to God, models of purity in the terrible warnings against alcohol and in the benefits of conforming to ideals of temperate white behavior, models of submissiveness in identifying male independence as a vice that must become virtue by transforming into sympathetic interdependence, and models of domesticity in the implied dangers of existing solely in a male sphere and recognizing male responsibility in the home and in the community. To underscore how the temperance narratives worked to engage in fostering a mutualistic, interventionist scheme that alters American males, I turn to Robyn R. Warhol’s work on “engaging narrators,” which focuses primarily on the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Eliot. Warhol explores a theory of narrators who try “to close the gaps between the narratee, the addressee, and the receiver,” in order to “inspire belief in the situations their novels describe—and admittedly hoping to move actual readers to sympathize with real-life slaves, workers, or ordinary middle-class people…these novelists used engaging narrators to encourage actual readers to identify with the ‘you’ in the texts” (811). 37 Certainly, Warhol is trying to understand the ways that sentimental novelists might add an element of verisimilitude 37 Warhol understands that the “you” may resemble the reader “only slightly or not at all,” (males reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin may feel alienated by Stowe’s ostensibly feminine “you,” for example), but she argues that this “you” is much closer to the possibilities of the author’s imagined reader than the concretely identified addressee in such works as Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, as discussed by Prince and Genette, who Balzac indicates “sits in a well-padded armchair, holding the book with white hands” (811). 81 to their novels, which, while fictional, dealt with real-life problems and situations, experimenting with making the reader in some sense a character. In some cases, e.g. in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the authors might have hoped that their readers, who were clearly addressed as the “you” that appeared in the text, might not only be sympathetic to the plight of slaves, but also take some form of action. However, the novels generally avoid a direct plea to the reader to intervene in the lives of the characters, ostensibly because the characters are not “real” or are, at best, only representative of “real” people, and Warhol’s authors can only hope that the sympathy the narratives evoke will inspire readers to extend that sympathy to actual slaves, workers, or middle-class people. In the temperance narratives, that plea is directly made, and the homodiegetic narrators go beyond merely engaging their readers’ sympathy in the plight of the characters in the text to encouraging active intervention, sometimes even in the narrator’s life. Luther Benson, for example, requests intercessory prayer from the reader throughout his narrative. Beyond merely evoking the sympathy Warhol identifies, most temperance narrators expressly encourage intervention in the lives of real-life drunkards the reader may encounter. We might go so far as to identify these narrators as “exhorting narrators,” who actively confront the readers’ beliefs and behaviors and insist on activism and change. These exhorting narrators’ requests might range from asking for prayer from the readers, to insisting on the transformative power of a handshake and asking readers to offer such a handshake to drunkards, to adjuring readers to offer whatever a drunkard needed to ensure his recovery. 82 Such an interactive narrative feature has been explored by Gregory S. Jackson in his PMLA essay on the homiletic novel, “‘What Would Jesus Do?’: Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel.” In his article, Jackson employs “homiletic” to “describe the … literary strategies by which authors like Sheldon 38 engaged religious readers in narrative enactments aimed at merging fictive settings with readers’ everyday lives” (642). Through a technique of raising questions of the reader, directly inquiring of the reader concerning his or her thoughts on the narrative at hand and how he or she might act in such a situation, these homiletic texts “invok[e] a kind of virtual reality . . . den[ying] readers a passive role, presenting instead real-life scenarios that demanded narrative participation, insisted on moral volition, and asked readers to apply discursive enactments to their own lives through imaginative exercises for structuring everyday reality” (643). Tracing the evolution of homiletic texts and their impact on American culture, Jackson observes: Influenced by seventeenth-century Protestant sermon traditions, the homiletic novel aimed to facilitate private devotion, strengthen moral autonomy, and foster social engagement through particular acts of reading. It was to a nation of like- minded Christians what the sermon had been to smaller regional communities. As a powerful form of mass media, the homiletic novel also performed a kind of communal collective bargaining, allowing individuals to articulate the limits of moral and social concession, addressing through dialogue, public praise, and proscription what was acceptable, negotiable, or tolerable, and thus framing the broadest features of national and communal Christian values. (642) Although Jackson does not allude to temperance novels, I believe his insights on the homiletic novel help us understand the kind of narrative engagement temperance narratives asked of their readers. The “virtual reality” created by homiletic and temperance novels merges the act of reading with action. Engaged in working through 38 Charles Sheldon, author of In His Steps (1896), source of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” 83 the narrative, the reader is actively encouraged by the temperance narrator to become a character in the temperance master narrative, to internalize the temperance narrative. In light of Jackson’s views, the act of reading a temperance novel is itself a moral act, through which the reader is brought from intemperance—if not alcoholic intemperance, then the too intemperate rejection of hope for the drunkard—to temperance and, like the narrator, re-enters his community energized to reshape that community into the utopian vision of the temperance movement, a vision that saw the elimination of alcohol, intemperance, and the identities it identified as “other”—the drunkard, the non- American—as essential to usher in a redefined, more mutualistic America. Jackson’s homiletic texts, and, I believe, temperance narratives, “built networks of reform, translating individuals into communities of action that read religious fictions as experiential templates for their own lives” (644). 39 Having experienced intemperance through the temperance narrative experiential template, the reader ideally takes his newly learned lessons, his newly altered masculinity, and acts to reform himself, his home, his community, and his nation. Examples of exhorting narrators, of the desire to “translate individuals into communities of action,” abound, especially in the later temperance narratives, but presenting a sample will illustrate exactly how the temperance narratives explicitly sought to engage the reader in both internal and external projects of moral and behavioral reform. Exploring direct address to the reader, combined with didactic asides and the 39 I must point out that not all temperance narratives aligned themselves with evangelical Christianity. I have already discussed the Washingtonians’ secular approach; Jack London’s John Barleycorn is also clearly not an evangelical Christian text, while Franklin Evans borders on the theistic. However, Jackson’s concept of homiletic texts as “experiential templates” conveys what I see the temperance narratives doing. 84 occasional appearance of sentimental pleas from the narrator will reveal how the temperance narrative form works to alter men. A fine place to start in examining the uses of sympathetic interdependence in temperance narratives is in what many critics recognize as the earliest temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate, written by Walt Whitman and published in 1842. The novel presents a troubling recognition that the most dangerous source of temptation to the potential drunkard is other men already initiated into the world of the drunkard, contrasted with the recognition that the sympathetic intervention of reformed drunkards will provide the most direct path to reform. Somewhere within this continuum of male danger and male hope lies Whitman’s attempt at recognizing the importance of citizens who remain untouched by Demon Rum in the reformation of the drunkard. Franklin’s initiation into the demimonde of the drunkard comes through his friend Colby, once Franklin has found a place to stay in New York City. The pair sit in Franklin’s boardinghouse room, discussing Franklin’s employment, when Colby prompts: “‘But come,’ said he, ‘this is dull fun here. Let us go out and cruise a little and see what there is going on.’ … ‘In a little while, Colby asked me if I did not wish to hear some fine music and drink a glass of wine’” (27). Colby brings Franklin to a music hall where Franklin quickly learns the joys of drinking in the presence of other men. Once Franklin is thoroughly immersed in his drunkenness, he addresses the reader, proffering a hope in the power of narrative: “I think that by laying before [my fellows] a candid relation of the dangers which have involved me, and the temptations which have seduced me aside, the narrative may act as a beacon light, guiding their feet 85 from the same fearful hazards” (43). Other temperance narrators adopt Whitman’s metaphor as well, notably George Dutcher, who hopes that his narrative will be a lighthouse for the drunkard (103). But, as much as Whitman may hope that his narrative will bring his readers to the resolution of their struggle with drunkenness, he does recognize that simply reading a novel provides only the first step to reform. After acknowledging that his readers may find his actions as a drunkard inscrutable and repugnant, Franklin exhorts those readers, hoping that their repugnance could change to sympathy: It is not well to condemn men for their frailties. Let us rather own our common bond of weakness, and endeavor to fortify each other in good conduct and in true righteousness, which is charity for the errors of our kind. The drunkard, low as he is, is a man. The fine capacities, the noble marks which belong to our race, those glorious qualities which the Great Builder stamped upon his masterpiece of works, are with him still. They are not destroyed, but hidden in darkness, as precious gems cast down in the mire. And the object of the truly wise and good will be, to raise him up again; to reform and brighten those capacities, and to set in operation a train of causes, which will afford him a chance of attaining once more a respectable station in society. (57) Claiming that action driven by sympathy is an essential element in the reform of the drunkard, Franklin immediately reminds readers of the dangers of being unsympathetic: I have seen so many cases of hopeless and confirmed intemperance, made thus by the injudicious severity of the neighbors and relatives of the unhappy victim. Little aware of the strength of the chains which bind him, and the horrors which surround a man in those moments when he is without that stimulus which custom has rendered necessary to him, they cast every slight upon the drunkard, and are unguarded in their expressions of anger and contempt. A little moderation perhaps, a little friendliness and sympathy, bestowed at the proper moment, would work a complete revolution in his character. But it is not bestowed, and the wretched one goes from bad to worse, until there is no hope left. (57) Through his narratorial mouthpiece, Whitman recognizes the power of the Washingtonian experience meetings, which encouraged both sympathy and the need for 86 mutual interdependence, and argues that only by welcoming the “other,” the drunkard, into the community through simple acts such as friendliness and sympathy, can both the community and the drunkard be altered and redeemed. As the first temperance novel, Franklin Evans embraces Washingtonian ideologies, ideologies that indicate that the best cure for inebriates was sympathetic support from both former inebriates 40 and from the community at large. However, Whitman’s plea for sympathy and action, at least in the form of pity and understanding, is rarely fully directed at the reader. When Franklin does address his readers, he does so to encourage their sympathy rather than to directly instigate any action on their part. Complicating Whitman’s seemingly sympathetic tale, Franklin’s valorization of sympathy is rejected by Franklin himself. At the end of the novel, Franklin seems to embrace what almost feels like a moment of narrative revenge rather than an opportunity to live out the doctrine of sympathy that he has advocated. Having signed a full temperance pledge in which he swears to never touch alcohol again, Franklin comes upon a wretched sight: a drunkard capering for the entertainment of a group of laughing boys. To his shock, Franklin realizes that the drunkard is Colby, his friend who had initiated him into drinking: Wretched creature! Had I even wished for some punishment upon his head, in requital of the harm he had done me, a sight of the kind I saw there, would have dissolved all my anger. His apparel looked as though it had been picked up in some mud hole; it was torn in strips and all over soiled. His face was bloated, and his eyes red and swollen. I thought of the morning when I awoke upon the dock, after my long fit of intemperance: the person before me, was even more an object of pity than myself on that occasion. His beard had not seen the razor for weeks, and he was quite without shoes. 40 Later, the key character in Franklin’s reform will be a former inebriate whose child is saved from drowning by Franklin. 87 The spectators laughed, and the heedless children clapped their hands in glee—little thinking of the desecration such a spectacle brought upon the common nature all shared. I felt sick at heart, and hurried away from the place. (109) In this scene, Franklin rejects any intimation that he felt a need for revenge upon Colby, and he expresses pity for the poor man. However, Franklin’s frequent narrative exhortations to his imagined readers that they should express sympathy seem to fall short when Franklin confronts a scene that desperately needs sympathetic intervention. In perhaps what is an unconscious admission that Whitman’s narratorial mask as drunkard is merely an illusion, Franklin “hurried away from the place,” refusing to intervene in what could have been the novel’s most triumphant moment: Franklin initiating into temperance the man who had initiated him into intemperance. Thus, while the novel goes through the motions of articulating a Washingtonian ideology of sympathy, it falls short of completely fulfilling that ideology. Whitman’s attempt at creating a new novelic form succeeds on a narrative level, but the moral force of the novel, its “moral propriety,” as he describes it (111), seems shallow and unfulfilled. While Whitman’s attempt at recreating a Washingtonian experience meeting’s sympathy ultimately deconstructs itself, Nicholas Warner points out that while some temperance literature was sympathetic, the bulk of the literature produced by the movement during the second half of the Nineteenth Century offered a negative view of the drunkard: “…[I]ndividual drunkards were often portrayed as morally reprehensible and personally disgusting….[T]he hostile unforgiving view of the alcoholic became increasingly dominant in both American literature and society” (141). As we can see, Warner’s observations concerning the change in temperance literature seem to be fairly 88 cogent, for in little more than ten years after Franklin Evans, attempts at inculcating in the reader any hope for redeeming the drunkard had begun to shift from Whitman’s early plea for sympathy (that proved ultimately more wished-for than real) into the kind of judgmental narrative represented by T. S. Arthur’s objective journalistic view in Ten Nights in a Bar-room, in which the narrator models merely sitting and observing while inebriates and their families spiral downward into degradation. Of course, other, more sympathetic tales than Arthur’s most certainly were written, but in the twelve years between the two novels, the Washingtonians had crumbled as a major force in the movement, and the majority of temperance groups by Arthur’s time were those that became more interested in legislative proscription rather than moral redemption. The movement’s emphasis has turned from the inefficient method of intervening in the lives of individual inebriates to the much more efficient method of prohibition, which promises to eliminate the drunkard by cutting off access to that which makes him drunk. Maine laws—state and local laws that prohibited alcohol—sprang up around the nation, and the problem of the drunkard had the potential to become merely a waiting game, as the nation waited for prohibition laws to take effect. However, many of the Maine laws were repealed rather swiftly, so the movement struggled with the lackadaisical attitudes of the general public and started a more concerted effort to demonize the image of the drunkard. Warner indicates: “After the Civil War, this image crystallized in the skid row stereotype. And, given the fears of the sanctity of the middle-class home, the demands of industrial efficiency, and the premium on good citizenship in a rapidly changing society, the individual drunkard’s aberrant 89 behavior and apparent lack of regard for neorepublican virtues was intolerable, at least in temperance eyes” (140-41). Thus, Warner and other critics indicate that the drunkard became an almost universal image of scorn, an alienated “other” who needed to be rejected rather than reclaimed. The Washingtonians’ descendents and other subgroups within the larger temperance movement, however, were not satisfied with the resultant disregard of masculine identities that allowing the drunkard to die out presented. For these groups, the callous disregard for the welfare of the drunkard pointed to an infection in the national psyche, an infection that ran counter to the supposed value of the American individual proffered by American cultural myths. The only cure for that infection would be recognizing that even the outcast, the down and out, had the potential to offer some good to the community, to the nation. Thus, unwilling to resign themselves to any suggestion that certain white Americans were less worthy than any other, the redemptive temperance subgroups sought to secure the reclamation of not only the drunkard, but those Americans who were willing to let the drunkard drink himself to oblivion. The redemptive temperance narratives offer an interesting counterpoint to the less sympathetic trends in the larger movement, for these later temperance narratives go beyond offering pitiful portraits of drunkards to readers who seem to partake of a touch of schadenfreude as they read, to engaging their readers in the mutualistic work of redemption in ways that such tales as Franklin Evans and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room do not. These sympathetic texts encourage an interventionist model of action that is significant in an era when much of the mainstream temperance movement seems to have 90 abandoned any hope of redemption. Where Whitman’s ostensibly sympathetic model falls short and where Arthur’s journalistic objectiveness provides little hope, these narratives encourage mutualistic action, sympathetic intervention, and the redemption of the reader himself from the clutches of a selfish hopelessness that is too readily willing to abandon a fellow American to an enemy who could be defeated by a interdependently united front. One such sympathetic narrative is George Dutcher’s Disinthralled, which abounds with warnings against alcohol that are a staple of many temperance narratives. Dutcher’s heartfelt warnings appear throughout his narrative, but one of the most succinct appears at the very end of his narrative, when he takes the opportunity to remind readers one last time of the threat posed by alcohol: “If you have taken the first glass, let it be the last. Take not another. If you have never taken the first glass, do not do it” (275-76 emphasis Dutcher’s). While ending his narrative with such a sentiment seems to privilege the goal of preventing the creation of new drunkards over any other goal, we must recognize that the rest of Dutcher’s narrative, and those of the later temperance narrators, seek not only to warn potential drunkards away from alcohol, but to ensure that those already lost to alcohol can be redeemed. In the imaginations of the later temperance narrators, the only way to redeem those fully entrenched in their alcoholism is to recruit those who have not succumbed to demon rum, to interpellate readers as sympathetic subjects. Consequently, much of Dutcher’s narrative goes far beyond simple warnings to avoid alcohol to present temperate readers with straightforward guidelines concerning the role each reader may play in the redemption of the drunkard. 91 That redemption, Dutcher reveals, is his purpose in writing his narrative. Roughly one-fifth of the way into his narrative, Dutcher steps out of his personal narrative to offer a diatribe on the evils of rum. After begging his readers’ indulgence for his tangent, Dutcher writes, “the great object in writing this book is, if possible, to lead some poor drunkard back to the paths of temperance, happiness, and virtue, and to God; and restore him reconstructed and redeemed to the arms of his own dear family, as the prodigal son returned to his father’s house” (47). Dutcher provides no indication that he imagines a drunkard will read his narrative and be redeemed through the act of reading. However, through clues provided in the rest of his narrative, we can discover that the hopes he has for redeeming drunkards often lay squarely upon the shoulders of his readers, whom, he often claims, are perhaps both more directly involved and more potentially effective in the redeeming work than they may be aware. Dutcher unambiguously declares throughout his narrative the role that his readers must play in the good work. Recounting yet another intemperate moment, Dutcher declares: Did those who do not drink know but a thousandth part of the intense misery suffered by one who has indulged his appetite too freely they would use words of kindness instead of censure. Many a poor fellow trying to recover from a spree, has been driven again to drink by the cold looks and words of those who ought to have taken him kindly by the hand, and sympathised (sic) with him in his great, almost unbearable sufferings” (138). Dutcher seems to be arguing that all citizens are directly responsible for the fate of the drunkard, either condemning him or sympathizing. The wishes of those within the temperance movement who would readily abandon the drunkard to his fate are directly identified as a reason for the inebriate’s continued slavery to the bottle. Implicated in 92 Dutcher’s observation are those who, in their sense of moral superiority, dismiss drunkards, refusing to recognize their responsibility as Christians to care for the unfortunate. Later, Dutcher repeats his doctrine of kindness: There are a great many, perhaps, who are connected with the drinking man, who never drank themselves, and know not his dreadful longing for drink, and cannot sympathize with him, and who, by their looks and manner toward him show a coldness which drives him to drink again. This ought to be avoided. Show kindness to the poor drunkard, for God knows he needs it if any one. Harshness and unkindness never reformed a drunkard; such treatment will only make him sink lower. Recollect this, my friends, and abide by it. Remember also that a drinking man is doubly sensitive at times, and small trifles have great influence. (166) Dutcher’s invitation to the reader to imagine him or herself as those “connected with the drinking man” demonstrates his hope to interpellate the reader, calling for a kinder interaction with the drunkard that seeks to redeem him, not reject him. Putting God on the side of the drunkard disarms those evangelical temperance activists who placed the sin of intemperance beyond the purview of their own Christian responsibility to help the oppressed, hoping the drunkard would die out. At the very least, Dutcher wants readers to recognize that while the temptations of alcohol are strong, often it is the judgmental temperate person who drives drunkards to drink when he or she should offer a sympathetic hand in kind assistance. By extrapolation, then, judgmental temperance activists who are unkind are as dangerous as alcohol itself. In Dutcher’s narrative scheme, redeeming the unkind reader will contribute to the great work of redeeming the drunkard. Blending his doctrine of kindness with the moral power of women, Dutcher later provides his readers with a model of kindness that demonstrates how easy yet powerful 93 kindness can be. Insisting that what he asks of his readers is far less demanding than they imagine, Dutcher offers this observation: “Oh, what a vast power there is in kindness! Sometimes a word of sympathy may be the saving of a soul. Kind words are cheap; be not so sparing of them; they do more good than you can imagine; none know their value more than the poor drunkard. A single word of kindness will do more good than all the logic and metaphysics that were ever uttered by mankind” (210). Dutcher privileges kind words and sympathy over any of the attempts at moral suasion and evangelism that many temperance groups offered. Simply judging drunkards will result in more drunkards. Yet the redeeming work Dutcher proposes is “cheap,” and “does more good than [we] can imagine.” Surely, Dutcher’s view must be too simplistic, for his story and the narratives of other reformed drunkards have clearly indicated that the road to recovery is not such an easy one. However, as an encouragement, Dutcher follows up his claim with an anecdote that demonstrates the truth of his claim and provides a simple model that any of his readers can follow. He describes the experience of a drunkard who had for thirty years been ostracized by his New England town. One evening, a passing lady greeted him with “Good evening, Mr. H—.” Shocked that he had been greeted so respectfully, he realized he was not beyond reformation and joined the Sons of Temperance (210-211). In Dutcher’s account of this incident, nothing further was required of the lady after her kind greeting; the greeting itself was sufficient to plant the seeds of reform in Mr. H—. The kindness that comes naturally to the lady is the sort of kindness Dutcher hopes his male readers will cultivate. Surely every one of Dutcher’s readers can spare such 94 “cheap” kind words as these, secure in the knowledge that their exchange may be as redemptive as this one was. However, while kind words are often the impetus to reform, Dutcher’s doctrine of kindness does, on occasion, demand more from citizens than a mere respectful greeting. At the brink of his own reform, Dutcher describes an encounter with a man who models perhaps Dutcher’s ideal kindness. Having been wandering from job to job for quite some time, Dutcher is slowly making his way home to his parents’ house. Penniless, hungry, and tired, he stops at a tavern where he hopes he can beg some food. Observing the boisterous crowd at the bar, Dutcher sits down at a bench at the side of the main room. One of the men comes over to him to inquire where Dutcher is traveling. Relating his tale of woe, Dutcher touches something within the man, who swears that Dutcher “shall not suffer as long as [he has] a cent,” brushing a tear from his eye. Dutcher recollects: He had a noble heart, and was ready to open it to me although a stranger to him. Many times since my reformation have I thought of that man, and if I knew he was in want I would divide my last crust with him. He gave me a good meal of victuals at the hotel, and when he went away he told the landlord to keep me over night and not to take a cent from me. He also gave me five dollars, and said— “Now I do not want you ever to pay this back; but when you are over your present difficulties and meet a man situated as you now are yourself, why, give him a helping hand, and by so doing I will be amply repaid.” (232) Dutcher’s account should interest us for a number of reasons. Shortly after this incident, Dutcher makes his way home, promises his mother he will not drink again, and indicates that he has been successful in that promise. Thus, there seems to be some connection between this Good Samaritan act of kindness given Dutcher by a man in a tavern. The fact that he was in a tavern may give readers pause; however, we must consider a few points. That men could be in taverns and choose not to drink was clearly indicated by 95 Arthur in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, whose temperate narrator merely sits in the tavern and observes. Dutcher does not directly reveal that his sympathizer had been drinking, but that the man may have been is suggested by Dutcher’s promise that if he knew the man was in want, as many drinkers were destined to be, he would share his last crust of bread with him. If this man were a drinker, then Dutcher seems to indicate here, as he does throughout his narrative, that even drunkards are capable of the acts of kindness that he demands from his temperate readers. If a drunkard could exert such a positive influence in the effort to redeem another drunkard, then surely Dutcher’s temperate readers could follow the model presented by the man in the tavern and take steps beyond mere kind words. In addition, Dutcher offers readers a model in this stranger of his ideal reader, one who hears a tale of woe and is not only sympathetic but kind and generous as well. In caring for Dutcher, the stranger recruits Dutcher himself, entrusting him with the responsibility of contributing to the redemptive care of some future drunkard. If kind words are what may begin a drunkard on the path to recovery, then actions such as those of this man, offering money, care, and a request to transfer that kindness that indicates a hope for recovery, are perhaps required for the ensured redemption of the drunkard. While Dutcher values kind words, this incident seems to indicate that once his male readers become adept at kind words, they will be expected to provide a temperate, newly reified masculine response to this act of kindness possibly performed by an intemperate man, a response that will carry with it the moral power found in temperance. Of Welter’s four feminine qualities celebrated by the cult of domesticity, submissiveness—through 96 rejecting selfish independence and engaging in acts of kindness—appears to be Dutcher’s priority, in addition to the purity that is the focus of every temperance narrative. Luther Benson also articulates a need for kindness, but goes beyond Dutcher in his direct interpellation of the reader. Writing five years after Dutcher, Benson states in his narrative that one purpose of his narrative is to provide safe passage through the experience of inebriation, in order that his readers might be equipped to help other drinkers in their lives out of the depths of their dependency. In his preface, Benson invites, “But go with me, for you can suffer no harm, and a knowledge of what you will see may lead you to warn others who are in danger of doing as I have done” (7). The key purpose of Benson’s narrative is to engender both sympathy and action, for inebriates will not be redeemed as long as they are rejected, spat upon, and ignored by the temperate. Thus, Benson indicates that reading his narrative will, while admittedly not harming the reader (and Benson repeatedly indicates that he would not wish his experiences upon anyone), provide the reader with the necessary sympathy that will allow his readers to interpret the lives of other inebriates and to not only warn them, as he indicates here, but also to directly intervene in their lives, to enter into the narratives of those other inebriates, as it were, to enable them to begin the long journey back to recovery. In Benson’s imagination, reading his temperance narrative, and presumably the narratives of others, creates the necessary narrative sympathy to engage the reader in action. In order to ensure that his readers will leave his narrative equipped with the proper tools to perform this good work, Benson indicates a variety of means by which his imagined readers could intervene in his own life, to enter into his narrative. By becoming 97 characters in his narrative, his readers will be prepared to do the same for other inebriates. Thus, through a combination of direct address, nostalgic regret, and narrative modeling, Benson creates a narrative that ensures his readers will abandon their old ways of aloof individualism and disembark upon a life of mutualistic and sympathetic engagement with the character of the inebriate. That sympathetic community is important for Benson and others becomes readily apparent throughout his text. For example, Benson explicitly articulates the importance even a kind look has played in his redemption. Arguing that “…the agony of feeling that on the whole face of the earth there is not a face that will look upon you in kindness, nor a heart that will throb with compassion at sight of your misery…” understandably magnifies the drunkard’s misery and contributes to his already heightened desire for suicide, Benson recognizes that the kind intervention of others plays an immeasurable role in redemption. For while his own prayers and tears have not wrought his complete recovery, the “support and active help” of others, their kindness, even “if only a word or look,” has demonstrated “the love, sympathy, and pity which elevates the human into the divine” (46). What Benson desperately hopes his readers will understand is that an American value on individualism will inevitably ensure the destruction of the drunkard. In seeking redemption for himself, for other drunkards, and for the country, Benson wants to encourage a mutualism that has been largely overlooked in the rush to establish American exceptionalism: “The pride of philosophy has taught us to treat man as an individual. He is no such thing. He holds, necessarily, indispensably, a relation to his species. He is like 98 those twin births that have two heads and four hands, but if you attempt to detach them from each other, they are inevitably subjected to a miserable and lingering destruction” (63). Contrary to the claims of any in the judgmental camp of the temperance movement who might presume that as a country the United States could simply allow the drunkard to die out, Benson clearly indicates the importance of recognizing the mutuality of the temperate and the intemperate man. Not only does the intemperate man benefit from the kind, sympathetic intervention of the temperate man, his conjoined twin who shares heads and hands with him, but the obverse is also true: if the temperate man allows the intemperate man to suffer, then he is guaranteeing his own “miserable and lingering destruction,” as the temperate man’s capacity for goodness, for sympathy, for Christian mercy stagnates and festers. Of course, one must wonder what Benson proposes to ensure that mutualism. His solution is to invoke the supernatural, for what Benson requests, perhaps more than any other temperance narrator does, is for the reader to intercede for him in prayer. Throughout his narrative, Benson establishes the problematics of prayer; prayer is necessary, but falls short when performed individualistically, that is, only by the inebriate himself. Thus, prayer becomes a mutualistic practice, not simply an act one advises a drunkard to do, then walks away smug in one’s temperance. As he points out concerning his own prayer life, “Could prayers and tears lift one out of misfortune and wretchedness I would long ago have stood above all the tribulations of my life” (46). In other words, there must be something more to the redemption of a drunkard than his own penitence. Later, he addresses those critics who ask him why he does not simply pray for 99 deliverance. Indicating that he has ‘been told to do that ten thousand times by good- meaning men and women, who do not know how to pray as [he does], and never will until (which God forbid) they have suffered as [he has],” Benson argues that such prayers are not answered because they violate God’s natural laws. One might as well pray for the removal of the need to eat (66). Besides, such assumptions about prayer once again indicate that the speakers of such sentiments are missing out on Benson’s most intimate point: one cannot pray successfully for oneself if one is not being supported in prayer and in other matters mutualistically by other people. In other words, Benson seems to believe, as many evangelicals do, that praying for another creates a relationship between intercessor and intercessee that, while finding its origins in prayer, will progress beyond prayer to action. Thus, not only is the inebriate changed, but the intercessor will become a more sympathetic, mutualistic person as well. In order to ensure that his readers understand the power of prayer to encourage mutualistic behavior, and that his readers will understand that they are not only invited but also required to enter into prayer relationships with him and with others, Benson offers a number of passages that directly plead for the intercession of his readers. In one such passage, Benson directly places an onus of responsibility on the shoulders of his readers: “I ask every one who reads this chapter, to pray to God for me with all your heart and soul. Oh! men and women, 41 pray for wretched, miserable, sorrowing, suffering, lonely me” (18). Benson’s pathetic exhortation is the first of at least three direct pleas for 41 The fact that Benson addresses women in this passage indicates that not all women were in the sympathetic mutualistic camp and needed encouragement to take part in the redemption of the drunkard. Thus, not only are men directed to become more mutualistic, perhaps more feminine, but some women, who have strayed from the compassionate path, are redirected as well. 100 prayer that inculcate in the reader a recognition of Benson’s understanding of the vast importance of petition for others. His second plea offers a much more specific prayer request, one that not only goes beyond merely fixing Benson in the readers’ hearts as they pray, but also provides a model of the specific prayer Benson would like readers to pray. Benson groans, “Oh, God! Grant me this one boon! Give me this one request!...In the future let all other hopes, and joys, and aspirations die, if needs be, all but this—this one—that I may never in any way touch liquor again. May every man and woman who sees this allow their hearts to go out in an earnest prayer that I may succeed in this one thing” (33). Praying for miserable Benson will have some effect, but Benson demands that his readers pray specifically for his protection from alcohol. Doing as Benson requests strengthens the spiritual discipline Benson perceives as necessary for intervening in the lives of drunkards, with the added benefit that we readers will come to no harm in our prayer life, for we recognize that while Benson may not be fully recovered, and may never be fully recovered, he is still a narrative character, not a friend, who exists primarily in our imagination. Recognizing that his narrative virtual reality will shelter us from the possibility of his failure, we can begin to be prepared for the kind of prayer that will make us more vulnerable, more mutualistic, by praying for actual drunkards in our own lives. Finally, lest readers reach the end of Benson’s narrative and forget the specific requests that he has placed upon them, Benson closes his tale with one final petition: “I earnestly desire the prayers of all Christian men and women. Every time you pray ask God to keep and save me with a salvation which shall be everlasting” (91). These two 101 final sentences provide readers with the ultimate understanding that the act of reading has transformed into an act of responsibility. Benson increases the number of those praying for him beyond his family and small circle of friends, a mere two or three gathered together, into a vast host of intercessors, buttressing his attempts to resist alcohol. In our attempt as readers of Benson’s narrative to begin to understand the life of the inebriate, we are interpellated, willingly or not, as part of the team of redeemers who share responsibility for Benson’s redemption. In other words, as Jackson notes about the works of Sheldon and others in the social gospel movement, Benson refuses to allow his readers to be merely passive; he demands activity. Benson, like Sheldon, present[s]…real-life scenarios that [demand] narrative participation, [insist] on moral volition,” narratives that exhort readers “to apply discursive enactments to their own lives through imaginative exercises for structuring everyday reality” (Jackson 643). By applying Benson’s discursive supplications for prayer, readers will understand the impact they can have on their everyday reality, not just in the lives of inebriates, but in their own lives, restructuring themselves into mutualistic intercessors and sympathetic interveners who will both pray for and kindly redirect the drunkard. In Benson’s imagining, and in that of other later temperance narrators and the progressive movement at large, readers, not just inebriates, are in need of redemption. Benson’s male readers have been effectively schooled in achieving yet another of Welter’s feminine qualities—piety—through their newly acquired powers of prayer. Like Benson’s and Dutcher’s, Dave Ranney’s narrative tells the story of a man who recovered from a life of intemperance, living to tell the tale and to encourage others 102 to do the same. Unlike Benson’s and Dutcher’s narrators, Ranney’s does not become a peripatetic temperance speaker; rather, Ranney becomes firmly entrenched in the Bowery in New York City, working there to help the downtrodden and the homeless, who usually happen to be inebriates. As a consequence, Ranney’s narrative differs in significant ways. For example, while Dutcher and Benson spend a large portion of their narratives describing in detail the middle passage of their lives, that time when they were most enthralled to Demon Rum, Ranney glosses over that period, leaving a twelve-year gap between two chapters. Ranney’s elision removes the sense of schadenfreude that so many other temperance narratives seem to encourage in the reader by detailing every iota of drunken subjectivity that the narrators dare recall. Instead, Ranney seems to be focused on the beginnings and endings of his encounters with alcohol, magnifying the teleology of the bottle by highlighting the beginning and the end while passing immediately over the middle. Ranney’s narrative is that much more triumphant then, for rather than interminably discussing the evils of alcohol, which he certainly does not neglect, Ranney focuses on his recovery and the surprisingly optimistic results of his having been an inebriate. Like Benson and Dutcher, Ranney indicates that he will struggle against the temptations of the bottle for the rest of his life; nevertheless, Ranney refuses to get bogged down in his sorrows, using hope rather than fear to inspire his readers. Of the temperance narratives I have examined, Ranney’s is the most optimistic, establishing how completely changed Ranney is and demonstrating that change by the state of Ranney’s current life. Benson’s closing narrative perspective, writing from the 103 Indiana Asylum for the Insane, and Dutcher’s, still unmoored from domestic life, although not by drink but by his compulsion to spread the gospel of temperance, indicates that these two men have fought difficult battles that may never be won, or, at the very least, that both men have been so changed by alcohol that even in their recovery they seem compelled to wander as they did when fully enslaved. Ranney, of all our representative temperance narrators, is the only one who seems to be completely welcomed into his society, having abandoned his wanderings to become a lodging house mission worker. In his recovered capacity, Ranney alone of these narrators is allowed to reconcile with his wife and son, and when his wife eventually dies after a battle with an unidentified illness, he becomes for his son the moral center that was usually reserved for mothers. Eventually, Ranney remarries and adds a daughter to his brood. So completely recovered is Ranney, and performing such good work at the time of his narrative present, that the final chapters of his narrative are given over to the recovery stories of others, ostensibly to demonstrate how much good work a reformed drunkard is capable of performing and to model the redemptive work for his readers. Of course, like Dutcher and Benson, Ranney is deeply concerned for the welfare of his readers and is invested in their redemption. By the time Ranney is writing, 1912, the temperance movement had largely shifted its focus from redemption to prohibition. In light of this shift, it is understandable that Ranney should change his narrative somewhat, and rather than focus on all the evils that befell him, he should concentrate on the good he has done since becoming temperate. 104 Like many of the other temperance narrators, Ranney provides a purpose for his narrative, hoping it will be a help and check some who are on the wrong road (4 of 55). Inebriation is not explicitly evoked, as Ranney will later narrate all the varied social ills he seeks to counteract in his role as “Lodging House Missionary to the Bowery under the New York Mission and Tract Society” (29 of 55), but throughout his narrative he makes clear that in most cases of crime, oppression, poverty, and white slavery, alcohol is intimately connected. That he envisions a role for his readers similar to the roles envisioned by other temperance narrators becomes clear at a variety of points in his narrative, such as a moment early in the narrative when he is contemplating committing a theft. While not drinking at this moment, Ranney explicitly connects his various sins including drinking to a spiritual struggle with the Devil, and indicates that when he surrenders to the Devil, he sins. Facing the temptation to steal, Ranney’s present narrative self enters into the past moment, crying, “Oh! if only I could have had someone to tell me plainly what to do at this time, it might have been the turning-point in my life!” (9 of 55). This call for help is reminiscent of the interactive discourse Jackson sees in In His Steps and other social gospel texts. While Ranney does not directly address the reader at this point, the astute reader joins Ranney in his lament and enters imaginatively into that narrative moment, envisioning what he or she might have done at that point, and what he or she might do in the future, given the chance to be that someone who tells some boy at the cusp of a fatal decision plainly what to do. 105 For Ranney, there is a vast spectrum of moral models readers may follow in his narrative. At its simplest, Ranney proclaims the simple power of a handshake, a moment of physical contact that bridges the gap between temperance and intemperance. As a part of his recovery, Ranney describes the effect a handshake had on him. A young man that Ranney thought he might rob for money to buy alcohol instead offers Ranney a fifty-cent piece and an invitation to meet at the Broome Street Tabernacle the next day. Ranney takes the money, they shake hands, and Ranney departs, planning on never seeing the young man again. The next morning, Ranney imagines that he had an easy mark in the young man, so he does go to the Tabernacle. There, the young man greets him with a handshake that Ranney describes as so powerful, “one would have thought he had known me all my life,” following that observation with the confession: “There’s a lot in a handshake” (18-19 of 55). The handshake and the young man’s obvious pleasure at seeing him shake up Ranney, and the opportunity for the young man to intervene much more effectively in Ranney’s life has opened. The young man offers Ranney a new suit and money for a bath, both of which he accepts, and upon returning to the young man sartorially transformed, he begins a discussion that culminates in his spiritual transformation; he has literally put on new spiritual clothes. 42 From that handshake, the trust the stranger offers Ranney, and the new suit, Ranney tells us that “kindness had won” (19 of 55); in other words, like Dutcher and Benson, Ranney urges the importance of kindness and sympathy upon the reader. 42 Reminiscent of Isaiah 61:10, “I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness…” (NIV). 106 However, this moment also offers perhaps the most personally intrusive model of mutualism in these later temperance narratives, for the stranger does go beyond a mere handshake to offer time, clothing, and money to Ranney in a scene that acknowledges the hard truths of redeeming the drunkard: that while handshakes, kindness, and even prayer are necessary to the redemptive work, one must go beyond such surface measures to complete and ensure the redemptive work. This model of mutualism demands more than any of the previous narratives have, but it also offers more rewards, as demonstrated by Ranney’s indication of his own success at reclaiming his family and obtaining a well- respected, well-paid job. Yet kindness is exhorted throughout Ranney’s narrative as the foundation for more active intervention; two final examples will demonstrate Ranney’s use of kindness. In running the Bowery Mission, Ranney transforms the Mission into what is effectively a homeless shelter. Describing the process that led to turning the Mission into a shelter, Ranney acknowledges that he was bending the rules of the Mission that had been entrusted to him, but he offers the homeless drunkards a space on the floor and a fire to keep them warm, ascribing the motive for offering this kindness not to himself, but to God through him. Recognizing that he was “winning them through kindness,” he describes his subsequent run-ins with the Board of Health, whose representatives, once they heard Ranney’s explanations, would allow him to continue his work, observing, “If people who want to do good would only get a place to house the poor unfortunates, there would be less crime and misery” (34 of 55). Again, Ranney indicates the power of 107 kindness, and extends an open-ended narrative invitation for what his readers could do to reform drunkards: house the unfortunate. Ranney’s recognition that he was redeemed through kindness is made even more explicit when he later offers another piece of advice to his reader for dealing with down- and-out men in the Bowery: “You can’t push or drive them; they will resent it and give you back as good. But if, on the other hand, you use a little tact spiced with a little kindness, you will win out with the Bowery boy every time” (39 of 55). As his narrative approaches at times the form of the how-to manual, Ranney offers himself as the model of what can happen to the recipient of kindness: “It was a kind word and a kind act that were the means of saving me, and I never tire of giving the same” (39 of 55). Once again, Ranney’s narrative demands a bit more than the narratives of other reformed drunkards, for while the kind word is important—the door opener, as it were, the kind act is necessary to finish the work—to seal the deal. Should we have missed Ranney’s frequent exhortations to do something to help the inebriate men of the Bowery (or those inebriates that we encounter in our lives wherever they may be), he closes the penultimate section in his narrative with his most explicit indication that he hopes to pass the responsibility of intervention on to the reader. Writing about a boy named Tom who had left his home in upstate New York to seek his fortune in the big city, Ranney describes his teleological downfall; turning to alcohol, the boy winds up on the Bowery, “where they all go in the end” (48 of 55). Ranney intervenes in the boy’s life, eventually reconnects him with his parents, and sends the boy home, comparing his story to that of the Prodigal Son’s. Ranney closes the tale with this 108 final thought: “There are other boys on the Bowery from just as good families as Tom’s—college men some of them—who are without hope and without God’s friendship or man’s. What can you and I do for them?” (49 of 55). This most homiletic of questions creates a mutualistic bond between Ranney and his readers, for he recognizes that the work of redeeming the drunkard is a team effort, not simply up to you or I, but you and I. When we consider the work that Ranney has already done, we are invited to realize how we can continue that work, offering kindness, handshakes, and shelter to those who need it so they may get off the streets, conquer King Alcohol, and return to productive lives that will enable others to live free. Ranney’s attention to kindness, his insistence on providing care and housing for downtrodden inebriates, and his inclusion of his readers in his mutualistic work best demonstrates how Ranney’s narrative reshapes Welter’s feminine value of domesticity as a new masculine value. The sympathetic temperance narratives invite their readers into a new formation of masculine identity that calls men out of their isolation in saloons and business places and hopes to not only reinvest their interest in the home but to engage them in a much more fulfilling mutualistic relationship with their fellow Americans, at least those white fellow Americans. For many of the early temperance narratives, the identity of the drunkard was concretely determined. In The Drunkard’s Progress, for example, the drunkard’s experience with drink leads inevitably to his self-inflicted death. The teleology of these early temperance narratives ensured the direct progression from first drink to doom. However, as the sympathetic temperance narrative form evolved, the narrators realized the wealth of untapped potential represented by drunkards. These later, 109 more sympathetic narratives took the concretized identity of the doomed drinker and drew that identity back to a threshold of possibility that held out the promise for change, for redemption, if only the reader of the narratives could be interpellated, exhorted to insert himself into the drunkard’s formerly predetermined narrative and derail the eschatology of that earlier narrative form to rescue the drinker from his previously doomed, determined outcome into the potential of a redeemed, living outcome. In other words, while some temperance propaganda demonstrated only one possible outcome for the drunkard, many of the later temperance narratives inspired by the work of the Washingtonians and other mutually supportive groups, re-imagined the drunkard from a solid, marmoreal figure into a liminal figure whose narrative potential existed, but rested on the intervention of another, especially the interpellated reader, who had embraced a narratively-induced understanding of the potential of the drunkard. Of course, while for the temperance movement this new construction of the drunkard’s identity represented a shift in sympathy and intervention, the new identity was still teleologically determined, an identity prey to an either/or determinacy that restricted the possibilities for a multivalent identity in the presence of alcohol. One drank and either died or recovered; there was no middle ground or any identity outside of those boundaries. Regardless of the individual motives of the temperance narrative writers, the cumulative effect of the vast narrative energies focused on the identity of the drunkard and the great moral peril offered to whiteness by alcohol imbedded in the national psyche an intellectual, emotional, spiritual, moral, and legal sentiment conducive to passing national Prohibition, ratified on January 16, 1919. Having realized the first stage of its goals, the elimination 110 of alcohol, the temperance movement, I believe, fell prey to the overoptimistic belief that the other, more subtle goals of the temperance narratives, had been achieved as well— masculinity had been changed, whiteness had sufficiently been buttressed against the encroaching invaders and against the possibility of challenges from within the borders of the United States itself. However, by reducing its moralistic efforts and settling for legislation, the movement hamstrung itself and opened itself to criticism and examination that in the rush to Prohibition had been silenced by the mass of temperance narratives and other temperance propaganda. While the temperance movement thought it had succeeded in eliminating the drunkard, their deterministic construction of identity rankled a Modern hope in a more elastic, polymorphic potential, and the Moderns and other writers during the Prohibition era developed their own need to wrestle with its predecessors’ ideologies and its conventions, pursuing what Ann Douglas terms a “terrible honesty.” 111 Chapter 3. “Simultaneously Enchanted and Repelled”: The Great Gatsby and the Temperance Narrative With the passing of the Volstead Act, Congress ensured that the Eighteenth Amendment would be enforced; thus, on January 16, 1920, making, selling, and transporting alcohol in the United States became a crime. They would remain so until the Twenty-First Amendment repealing the Eighteenth was approved, and in 1933 sales of alcohol were once more legal. During those intervening years, Prohibition-era writers found themselves in a world where the ideologies of the temperance movement seemed to have won. Through a combination of an effective shaping of American thought concerning alcohol and American identity, and a savvy political machine led by the likes of the Anti-Saloon League’s Wayne Wheeler and by representatives of other pro- Prohibition temperance organizations, the temperance movement had succeeded in convincing enough legislators to vote for the Eighteenth Amendment. In this more regulated America, the many branches of the temperance movement must have felt triumphant, for the time of national temperance that they had envisioned and which had been imagined by such writers as Benson and Whitman was on the cusp of being realized. With the banishment of alcohol would come, they thought, the banishment of all the undesirable, prohibited elements that were tangled up in alcohol: the less-than-American foreign behaviors that the movement believed would now dwindle without alcohol to fuel them, the homosocial threat offered by male spaces— such as saloons and workplaces—where men could initiate other men into intemperance, the violent threat to women and families presented by drunken men. As we know from our position as 21 st -century readers, this millennial kingdom has yet to be established. 112 The unfilled promise of a new, more concretized America was one of the many reasons Prohibition became such an abysmal failure. In addition, the hope that the temperance movement had placed in the temperance narrative, which held that once alcohol was eliminated, not only would men be more mutualistic, but also the United States would become a greater country—the city on a hill it was intended to be—led to an expectation that very quickly became disillusioned. In this era of disillusionment, Prohibition-era writers find themselves driven to examine more closely, and with a more cynically free hand, the claims of the temperance movement. Having sold the country on the promise of a new America, the temperance movement found itself the unpopular object of intense national scrutiny, a scrutiny expressed by Prohibition-era writers that would sometimes find itself at odds with the claims of the movement, and at other times would concede a tragic, if complicated, amount of acceptance to some of the temperance movement’s claims, incorporating elements of temperance narratives into Prohibition-era texts to explore the post-Victorian world. In her book Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas describes the intensity of Modern Americans who sought to investigate the claims of the Victorians as a “terrible honesty,” a key element in my attempts to understand exactly what impact temperance narratives had on Prohibition-era literature. In effect, by pursuing a “terrible honesty,” Prohibition- era writers were refusing to accept as gospel truth anything handed down to them from the previous generations. Unwilling to merely sustain the status quo, these authors and the people of the era insisted upon the importance of their own experience, viewing conventional wisdom as a filter that would keep them separate from the real world that 113 surrounded them. Daniel Joseph Singal articulates the concept this way: “… [A] Modernist mind will typically display a critical temperament uninhibited by considerations of formal matters: gentility gives way to the necessity of making contact with “reality,” no matter how ugly or distasteful that reality might be” (8). Finding themselves in a world in which the previous generation had sought to eradicate the drinker through the initial process of “othering” him, Modernists are faced with a choice. Either submit to federal law, assuming that wiser previous generations had struck upon a truth that must be heeded, or, no matter how dangerous such a path might be, find out for themselves the inherent truth or deception of the temperance narrative, to test pieces of temperance ideology, offering their own bodies up as the wager in this gamble with the previous generation, even if doing so proved to be “ugly or distasteful,” especially in the minds of those Americans who still clung to Victorian values. In the following chapters, we shall see how Prohibition-era writers engage the variety of claims of the temperance narratives, questioning conclusions and premises, playing with temperance narrative conventions to critique entirely different American values, discarding some temperance claims and ambivalently embracing others, and valuing a variety of identities, even those rejected by the American Victorians who led the temperance movement. Such an examination of the ways that Moderns took what the world gave them and reshaped that inheritance to their own visions of the world should be fruitful, and one way to begin such an examination is by exploring how the Moderns engaged in a dialogue with the narratives and ideologies of the temperance movement. Some critics have explored the connection between alcohol and Modernism; perhaps two of the best 114 texts are John W. Crowley’s The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, and Tom Dardis’s The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, but such investigations are relatively rare, are usually more often cultural than textual studies, and still have yet to explore the ways that the temperance narrative created a hegemonic American identity and a master narrative of drinking that the Moderns found themselves hoping to reject, or at the very least, closely examine without the kind of unquestioning sympathy and desire for action the narratives sought to evoke in the readers of temperance narratives. Thus, to begin looking at the ways the temperance narrative and temperance ideologies influenced Prohibition-era texts, and the ways that those texts incorporate, reject, reshape, appropriate, queer, signify, and/or manipulate the energies of the temperance narrative and its encapsulated ideologies, I offer a close reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a text that holds a space in popular imagination as the seminal text of the 1920s. In my study, I hope to demonstrate the ways that Fitzgerald incorporated temperance narrative tropes to construct his tale of the end of the American dream, and how, in many ways, such incorporation complicates the claims of the movement, rejecting some claims, accepting others, approaching the temperance narrative with the ambivalence that permeates the novel. Claiming that the temperance narrative had a direct influence on the novel is rather difficult, and probably impossible. Richard Lehan finds himself in a similar position, when, in a chapter of his book on Gatsby entitled The Limits of Wonder, he begins exploring the narrative patterns of romantic works that permeate Gatsby. Rather than performing an exhaustive catalog of 115 the specific works he feels influenced Gatsby, he rests his defense on the claim that “Fitzgerald was breathing romantic air when he wrote” (62). As I have indicated, I believe the temperance narrative was such a pervasive and familiar form, in some ways similar to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaigns of the 1980s in their pop- culture dominance, that Fitzgerald, consciously or not, was “breathing temperance air” and could not escape the narrative potential offered by the ideologies of the temperance movement. What I hope to demonstrate over the next three chapters, starting with Gatsby, is my sense that all of the Prohibition-era writers were breathing this same temperance air, or, perhaps more accurately, the Prohibition air that sprung from the temperance air. The Great Gatsby, I will argue, incorporates conventions of the temperance narrative form, appropriating the conventions when Fitzgerald sees fit, manipulating them at times, ignoring them at others. The overarching form of the novel is reminiscent of the temperance narrative, and a variety of scenes echo some of the internal logic of the temperance narrative. Fitzgerald’s use of such elements contributes to his overall themes of disillusionment, lack of vision, and a world struggling to find a moral center. I hesitate to create the assumption that I feel The Great Gatsby is a temperance narrative concerning alcohol; I would be hard pressed to argue that at this point in his life Fitzgerald was propagating such an ideology. However, I see a number of narrative parallels, some of the drive and structure of the temperance narrative, even some themes and tropes that are appropriated by Fitzgerald to tell his tale of obsessions. If the novel borrows from temperance narratives at all, it does so not to attack alcohol, but to analyze 116 obsessions, not with alcohol, but with money, with romance, with conservative nostalgia, with excess, with America. Appropriating temperance conventions also allows the novel to critique the temperance movement and the Victorian values and morality that led to the creation of the movement. What lies behind my sense that temperance narratives play an important role in The Great Gatsby will make itself clearer over the course of this chapter, but Matthew J. Bruccoli offers us a helpful observation. Noting that in a letter to his daughter Scottie, Fitzgerald revealed that on occasion he wished he had gone into musical comedy, but, as he writes, “I guess I am too much of a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than entertain them.” Bruccoli extends Fitzgerald’s desire to his critique of Fitzgerald’s work: “There is a good deal of preaching in Fitzgerald. But it’s palatable. He’s not up in a pulpit pointing a finger at his parishioners. His preaching is done by indirection. It’s done through irony; it’s done through juxtaposition” (29). The temperance narrative form offers a great deal of finger pointing and preaching, the kind that Fitzgerald avoids; however, the temperance narrative was a dominant moral form, perhaps the dominant moral form, in the United States before the era of Prohibition, and it certainly offers a great deal of narrative potential for a man hoping to write a novel about the failures and excesses of the American Dream. The temperance narrative attempted to reify a new form of the American Dream, one that offered a unified front of American identity, one that tried to offer a hope for financial success, revival, and mutualism that would reshape the country. As the moral narrative form that most clearly influenced Prohibition, which, Fitzgerald 117 indicates in Gatsby, has gone horribly awry, the potential for moralizing and simultaneously lamenting a lack of moralizing proves to be immense. That Nick should choose to tell his tale incorporating elements of the temperance narrative tells readers a great deal about Nick, about his decision to retreat not only to the West but to a narrative form that offered the old kind of moral center, the absence of which had bothered him so. As Nick warns us of his unwillingness to be the confessor for the young men who often want to share their revelations with him, he informs us that the terms of their confessions are “usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions” (2). Reading Nick’s intimate revelations, we are prepared for the very plagiaristic tendencies that Nick decries in others; he will “plagiarize” elements of his morality tale from the temperance narrative form and will include “obvious suppressions.” Nick’s/Fitzgerald’s latching onto the temperance narrative form demonstrates his appreciation for the old values, and the presence of alcohol, the constant reminder that Prohibition has failed, is his recognition that once more, like Gatsby, America has gotten the attempt to make itself a better country wrong, for all the wrong reasons. But Nick’s temperance narrative is fragmented, misdirected, wavering between a harsh morality and a lack thereof, variously targeting different characters for different reasons. To paraphrase line 431 of The Waste Land, Nick shores up the fragments of the temperance narrative, the pieces of a failed moral form, against the ruins of the East. Bruccoli provides us with a few other observations that continue to clarify Fitzgerald’s ambivalent use of the temperance narrative in Gatsby. Offering his own approach to Fitzgerald, Bruccoli posits, “Fitzgerald became the archetypical Twenties 118 writer or at least the quintessential representation of the American writer in the 1920s because all of his life he retained the ability to see two ways at once. This is an important idea.....Fitzgerald’s capacity to be simultaneously committed to two ideas was called by the critic Malcolm Cowley, in his review of Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald’s ‘double- vision’” (27). Bruccoli continues, “There is a constant judging process going on in Fitzgerald’s work. He has been called the moralist of the jazz age. He was not an uncritical recorder of parties. In everything Fitzgerald wrote—at the height of his involvement in the orgy that he writes about so brilliantly—he is stepping aside and judging and weighing and commenting and moralizing” (27). Incorporating elements of the temperance narrative into The Great Gatsby allows Fitzgerald to judge, weigh, comment, and moralize on not just on temperance and Prohibition, but also on the excess of the 1920s version of the American Dream. Some readers may wonder why Fitzgerald, a representative of high Modernism, would pay any attention to such a lowbrow, popular narrative form. To them I respond that Gatsby is peppered with pop culture allusions to dime novels, popular books, and music—for example, the name Dan Cody and the Western hero tradition that both this character in Gatsby and the two icons of the West who are evoked by his name, Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill Cody, embody, and that assuming he would not be including allusions to or even conventions from temperance narratives, which stemmed from one of the most important social movements of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, especially in a nation dominated by national Prohibition, is to ignore a major cultural force of his day. In fact, Gatsby contains clues to the influence of temperance narratives that most 119 21 st -century readers have overlooked. These clues are much more subtle than some of the other allusions in the novel, because of, to some extent, the sentiment behind Crowley’s observation that “anything and everything related to temperance was to become unmentionable in the wake of Prohibition’s failure during the 1930s” (“Slaves to the Bottle” 129), thus leaving 21 st - and even late 20 th -century readers unequipped to recognize the temperance conventions that Fitzgerald incorporates, while recognizing other allusions to more lasting cultural influences. In Gatsby, temperance conventions inhere in a number of characters, but especially Nick and Gatsby. Nick, I would argue, provides us with a narrative that is highly reminiscent of the majority of temperance narratives written by the survivors of drink. Gatsby, on the other hand, presents the kind of narrative that Crowley calls “disinterested” (“Slaves to the Bottle” 116), that is, a narrative similar to those early temperance narratives written not by survivors but by someone outside of the culture of drinking—a clergyman, a doctor, or some bourgeois representative such as Walt Whitman—whose primary goal in telling the tale is to demonstrate the self-destructive nature of drinking. These two conventional temperance characters, the survivor and the failure, allow Fitzgerald to pursue the terrible honesty of each of their obsessions and to incorporate a hegemonic moral form into a novel that explores moral hegemony and its absence. As narrator, Nick is the first of the two characters we should explore. At the very beginning of the novel he informs his readers that he is writing from the position of narrative completion; he tells us that in his recent past, last Autumn, he came back from 120 the East (2). Like Benson, Ranney, and others, Nick Carraway indicates he is a survivor. Admittedly, such a narrative position is certainly not exclusive to the temperance narrative, however similar it may be. Nick’s next statement begins to lead us further in that direction: “I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (2). Nick reveals he has experienced some kind of conversion. From his implication we can deduce that he experienced something that was somehow too civilian, undisciplined, something that did not have a rigid moral sense. This experience, which we will discover as we read his narrative, offered him visions of humanity that he no longer has any desire to see, his ironic “privileged glimpses” echoing the more straightforward lament of the temperance authors who describe in detail their decline and recovery. Thus, we begin Nick’s tale in a way that recalls temperance narratives. Nick has survived some riotous excursion that has affected him deeply, and he has come to tell us about it. What separates Nick’s tale from those of most temperance narrators is the absence of direct address to his readers indicating the rightness or wrongness of any actions or ideas; what we lack is the didactic drive to dictate what we readers should feel and think and do. Even though Nick’s first person narrative offers much more interiority than many of its contemporaries did, for example Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, we do not find the late Victorian impulse to explicitly teach some lesson. What we may have might more appropriately be called a temperate tale, in the sense of moderation. Nick has experienced something extreme, even something gorgeous, we will soon find out, but this 121 experience leaves him a conservative. He bemoans the lack of uniforms and moral attention, and this is exactly the rhetorical position of many of the temperance narrators. In other words, while our narrator does not explicitly condemn alcohol, or tell his readers that he has a great call to action for them, he does indicate his recent moral change, and this is my first sense that temperance narratives will exert some influence over this novel, for it is difficult for me to conceive of what appears to be a confessional moral narrative written during Prohibition that does not feel the weight of temperance bearing down upon it. The similarity of Nick’s personal story arc to the survivor temperance uberfabula or master narrative, in its account of experience, conversion/redemption, and return, is highlighted by a number of scenes in which structural conventions of the temperance master narrative appear. One such scene occurs in the apartment that Tom Buchanan rents for his trysts with Myrtle Wilson. Having brought Nick with him into the city, Tom proceeds to host an impromptu party, with neighbors and relatives of Myrtle dropping by. As Nick examines the room, noticing the photograph of the “stout old lady” 43 and the copies of magazines and books that lay on a table, Tom brings out “a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door” (29). While not the first drink in the novel—that honor goes to some unidentified cocktails that Tom serves to Nick, Daisy, and Jordan on their first meeting (10)—this whiskey becomes important for Nick’s survivor temperance narrative, for he informs us that “I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so 43 This old lady hints at the presence of the Victorian matriarch who could potentially disapprove of this scene. However, Fitzgerald writes she “beamed down into the room,” (29) which hardly seems an expression of disapproval. Moral certitude is problematized. 122 everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it…” (29). This scene provides us with Nick’s only recorded experience in the novel with drunkenness. While admittedly not the first of the usual series of drunken experiences that occur in temperance narratives, this drink becomes pivotal for Nick, for it provides moments of drunken interiority that will influence Nick’s ultimate criticism of the characters involved in this scene, especially Tom and Myrtle, and replicates some important conventions of the temperance narrative form. One convention that appears here is the trope of descent. As Nick continues to drink, he and others physically descend to the street, to apartments below Tom’s, and ultimately even to below the street. Nick’s first descent comes almost immediately after the whiskey comes out. Myrtle, sitting on Tom’s lap, telephones some people, presumably to invite them to the party. Nick, realizing there are no cigarettes, goes down to the drugstore on the corner to buy some. When he returns from this first descent and subsequent ascent, Tom and Myrtle have disappeared, so he tries to read the book Simon Called Peter lying on the table. He notes “either it was terrible stuff, or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me” (28). Here, Fitzgerald adapts the dangers of alcohol presented by the temperance narrative to suit his themes. Problems with seeing and interpreting abound throughout the novel. For Nick, whiskey “distorts,” and his drunkenness provides a “dim, hazy cast” over the events of that afternoon and evening. At various times in the novel, especially concerning Gatsby, alcohol will contribute to the difficulties of interpretation, either for Nick or for others, but in this scene alcohol, perception, and morality are explicitly connected. Thus, while 123 Nick’s first and subsequent descents may not be the tragic cycle of descent that plagues the temperance narrative drunkard, this moment of inebriation provides one of Fitzgerald’s key manipulations of the temperance narrative dangers of drink. As Richard Lehan points out, Simon Called Peter was a popular book published in 1921 about an English clergyman who, disillusioned by the absurdity of war, experiences a crisis of faith and begins sexual experimentation (32). Nick’s concern for regimented morality has difficulty with the faith crisis and sexuality the book describes, for him it is “terrible stuff,” and his confusion is complicated by his inebriation, one of his moments of Victorian moral failure. The combination of perception-altering alcohol and a novel that presents a sexualized faith crisis highlights Nick’s grasping for moral certainty and places him in precisely the kind of moral situation the regimented morality he desires in his narrative present should reject. Temperance narrative teleology ensures for Nick an afternoon of regret, and Fitzgerald visits upon Nick the consequences that regimented morality demands. The rest of the afternoon and evening spiral downward, as the nature of Tom’s and Myrtle’s relationship is revealed to Nick. A second bottle of whiskey is called for, and Nick experiences a bifurcation of consciousness: “…[H]igh over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (35). Nick’s consumption of alcohol has split him into perhaps his most unregimented moment. The debauchery works on Nick’s conscience and consciousness 124 in a way similar to that described by the temperance narrative; he is no longer himself. He has been divided in two, and ambivalence rather than moral certainty dominates, as it will throughout the novel. Nick’s account recalls Benson’s purple prose when describing his fluid identity, becoming a dog, an insect, a log, a demon. Under the influence of alcohol, consciousness does not behave the way temperate people prefer, and Nick will begin to turn away from alcohol and be driven back toward a more conservative reality partly as a result of this event. Nick continues to descend, and that descent is played out by the others involved in drinking as well. The other partygoers “disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away” (37). The drinking patterns here seem to be following temperance narrative conventions, both of the “lost-ness” of the drinker, his wanderings, and the descents into violence described by such texts as Ten Nights in a Bar-room. The evening erupts in Tom’s violent assault on Myrtle for saying Daisy’s name, during which he breaks her nose. Blood flows and the women, Myrtle’s sister Catherine and a neighbor, Mrs. McKee, both console Myrtle and scold Tom, and Myrtle tries to protect the tapestry scenes of Versailles that cover the too-large furniture with a copy of Town Tattle, presumably to prevent any blood from staining the tapestry. We cannot escape the feeling of decadence in this scene, as a modern gossip rag covers the images of Versailles, we realize that there has not been much progress in the moral uplift of the world, despite the efforts of such movements as temperance. This scene also begins to parody the temperance fears of the threat to women offered by alcohol. For many 125 temperance activists, as Ann Douglas points out, the most seriously affected victims of drunkenness were wives and children, who often were the targets of terrible blows thrown in drunken rage by the father of the household (The Feminization of American Culture 47). Here, rather than posing a threat to his wife and children, Tom’s domestic violence is directed at his mistress, another step in Fitzgerald’s simultaneously being enchanted and repelled by various elements of temperance narrative ideology. In the era of Prohibition, dominated by those men who have made their fortunes and carelessly rule an America that has lost sight of both its city-on-a-hill potential and its moralistic, even religious, origins, the moral system offered by temperance that supported monogamous married relationships is undermined by a freer morality that temperance has not prevented, but the moral weight of the biological imperative of alcohol still holds sway; drinking too much does result in consequences, and for Tom, whose natural propensity seems to be for violence, the alcohol encourages him to play out the script of violence against women proffered by the temperance movement. Mr. McKee leaves the room, and Nick follows him into the elevator, where Nick begins the final descent of this chapter. Having witnessed the devolution of the evening’s activities, Nick escorts Mr. McKee to his lower apartment, and the scenes become fragmented, as the narrative thread of consciousness becomes diluted by the accumulated effects of the evening’s alcohol asserting themselves: …I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. “Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook’n Bridge….” 126 Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train. (38) In these fragments, Nick takes Mr. McKee back to his room, Mr. McKee shows off some more of his photographs, and Nick makes his final descent to the “cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station.” Having provided us with this drunken spree that by the time of the novel’s narrative completion will be only Nick’s second drunk, and presumably his last (at least at the time of recounting his tale), Nick descends from the apparent revelry with friends that the temperance movement offered as a warning of the deceitful nature of alcohol to the cold depths of a train station. Nick, like the drunkard in many temperance narratives, finds himself unmoored in space and is left to wander. He eventually winds up in the metaphorical ditch that is the train station, and the chapter ends with this image of waiting for a train, staring at but not reading the morning newspaper, and Nick’s drunken descent is complete. 44 This scene of descent is important for understanding the ways that Fitzgerald is both enchanted and repelled by the temperance narrative. As I have briefly demonstrated, elements of the temperance narrative that retain some of their ideological weight appear in The Great Gatsby, for example the assertion that drinking has 44 He will drink at other times in the novel, but will never approach this level of dissolution, although he admits that he comes close at his first party at Gatsby’s house. There he is on his way to getting “roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment” at not knowing much about the host of the party, turning to the cocktail table, “the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone” (42), when he is rescued by recognizing Jordan. Fitzgerald simultaneously satirizes and incorporates temperance ideology in this later scene as well. Gatsby as provider of alcohol is the great tempting saloonkeeper of the temperance narrative, and Nick begins to succumb to alcohol in Gatsby’s space. He is rescued by the presence of a woman, although Jordan is hardly the moral bastion the Victorian matriarchs claimed to be. In addition, the only proper male space for single males, as Nick observes, is the cocktail table, a recognition once again that the ideal temperate world promised by the temperance movement in Prohibition has not come to fruition. 127 teleological consequences. Even the Moderns could not deny that excessive drinking led to intoxication. However, the ways those consequences play out, and precisely who is drawn into and affected by temperance ideologies, are often manipulated by Fitzgerald and other writers who ply their craft in the shadow of Prohibition. By de-emphasizing the consequences of drinking and other temperance narrative conventions, Prohibition-era writers derail the teleological determinism of the temperance narrative, creating a narrative space in which drinking can have more realistic, multivalent outcomes rather than the fatal one emphasized by the temperance narrative. 45 One key convention of the temperance narrative that Fitzgerald alludes to yet de- emphasizes is the importance of the first drink. Nick’s confessional narrative denies us that first drink, but hints at it with his aforementioned confession, “I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon” (29). Writing in an era in which his readers would be aware of the temperance movement and their claims about the dangers of alcohol, Fitzgerald provides us with a drinking narrative that acknowledges the tradition of the temperance narrative, but denies us its moral arguments. In the temperance master narrative, that first drink becomes the mark of a cursed man, and great rhetorical importance is placed upon convincing readers that they should avoid their own first drink experience at all cost. In many temperance narratives, that first drink leads directly to the first drunken experience; in the minds of the temperance movement activists, the first drink often equals the first drunk. Here Nick 45 A newspaper article reviewing one of Luther Benson’s speeches makes that outcome clear, recording the fact that Benson convinced the audience that “in the use of [alcoholic] beverages, even in a temperate degree, there was but one result—drunkenness and eternal death” (77). 128 tells us that he has had a first drink, but he refuses to describe it, denying us the edifying lessons usually offered by those first drink accounts. 46 But to feel a need to condemn the first drink is to admit that drinking is undesirable and is in desperate need of condemnation. Fitzgerald and other Moderns do not make such claims, for the most part. 47 Primarily, I assume, because they do not themselves hold such rigid views, but also because, as Peter Brooks points out, the Modern era was “an era of suspicion toward plot, engendered perhaps by an overelaboration of and overdependence on plots in the nineteenth century” (7). The temperance narrative is so formulaic and teleological in its plot structure that every effort must be made to reinforce the dangers of drink, from the first drink to the last, even to the extent of directly telling readers what to think and believe for fear they may need reinforcement, leaving no room for any creativity or deviation on the part of the author. Suspicious of such narrative control, most Moderns resist the Victorian urge to direct a reader’s response that reflects a belief in narrative and moral certitude. Certainly Hemingway and other writers refused such authority for their audience, as Michael S. Reynolds points out in his book on The Sun Also Rises: “[T]he old novel told you how to react to detail; the modern novel typically does not” (24). As a result, Modern writers 46 Fitzgerald, however, does present us Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss, which retains some of the teleology of doom expressed by the first drink: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete” (111). Gatsby’s first kiss with Daisy casts Gatsby down from his cognitive divinity to his enfleshed theophany as son of God. 47 Some authors come closer than others to apparently condemning alcohol. As we shall see in the next chapter, Wallace Thurman at times appears to approach a temperance condemnation of alcohol in Infants of the Spring, but that novel’s ambivalence makes condemnation difficult to pin down. 129 refuse, for the most part, to inform their readers as to the proper way to react to drinking; rather, they present the drinker in his or her circumstances, and let readers interpret drinking in whatever way they see fit, a form of narrative moral ambiguity that reflects the moral ambiguity they see around them and encourages Douglas’s terrible honesty in the readers themselves by avoiding the moral strictures conservative Victorian Americans desired. While Nick as a character often echoes the survivor temperance master narrative, even though he resists the urge to direct readers, Gatsby can be, like Nick, plotted along another master narrative that temperance offers. Whereas Nick is the redeemed, converted drinker, Gatsby’s own plot parallels that of the doomed drinker presented by “disinterested” temperance narratives of the kind that Crowley identifies, such as Ten Nights in a Bar-room. In fact, in his own rise and descent, Gatsby could be identified with the drunkard in The Drunkard’s Progress lithographs. Like the Drunkard, Gatsby’s rise is deceptively impressive. Of course, I have no wish to argue that Gatsby is a drunkard, or that Fitzgerald mechanically inserted the name Gatsby into each step of The Drunkard’s Progress. However, I do find a number of similarities, primarily because The Drunkard’s Progress encapsulates the disinterested narratives so well, and I believe they bear a closer look, for I feel that the cultural weight of the temperance narrative was so pervasive, so much more familiar to Prohibition-era writers than we have previously admitted, that we must continue to reassess the influence of the temperance movement on the Moderns. 130 Some of the similarities of Gatsby’s plot and that of The Drunkard’s Progress might bear an attempt at correlation, arguing that each step in the lithograph corresponds to a specific scene in the novel, but I would prefer not to drag my reader through a procrustean attempt at connecting the two. Rather, while I may point out some correspondences between specific scenes in the novel and specific steps in the lithograph, I am more interested in the similarities of Gatsby’s rise and fall to the master narratives that the temperance movement created for alcohol and the drunkard. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy, his insistence on rewriting his history and creating the kind of Jay Gatsby that the Daisy Fay that he imagined would love, is similar to the obsession of the drunkard with alcohol, especially in the unwillingness of many of the drunkards in their early stages of drinking to accept the fact that they are drunkards, rewriting their own history, as it were, in order to make it more in tune with the identity they wanted to believe for themselves. This unwillingness to acknowledge their doomed state, reflected in the Drunkard’s Progress lithograph in the initial steps that seem simultaneously trivial and convivial, and in such narratives as Benson’s Fifteen Years in Hell, in which he describes his “few fleeting—oh how fleeting—hours of false delight” (10) before he realized how doomed he was, prefigures Gatsby’s inability to recognize his “dead dream” (134). Thus, Jay Gatsby becomes so thoroughly obsessed with his lost romantic ideal of Daisy that he comes to believe the past he has created for himself, like the drunkard believing that he is not in danger, to the point that Gatsby firmly believes that Daisy will leave Tom for him once she sees what kind of man he has become (132-33). 131 Gatsby’s arc parallels that literal arc of the lithograph in other ways. One might be able to justify close correspondences, such as James Gatz’s internship with Dan Cody being a narrative nod to “Step 1: A glass with a friend” in the lithograph, or even how James Gatz’s final transformation into Jay Gatsby, and his association with the underworld of New York represented by Meyer Wolfsheim parallels the apex of The Drunkard’s Progress, “Step 5: The summit attained. Jolly companions. A confirmed drunkard.”, but a few of the steps on the lithograph present problems. How might Gatsby’s rise be a reflection of “Step 2: A glass to keep the cold out,” or “Step 4: Drunk and riotous”? Certainly “Step 6: Poverty and disease” defies a facile attempt to match the novel and the lithograph, and “Step 8: Desperation and crime” would perhaps apply more to James Gatz’s transformation into Jay Gatsby on the ascent side of the lithograph. However, in the overarching moral energies of ascent and descent presented by the lithograph, in Gatsby’s amoral ascent through the world of crime to arrive at his apex where he can give Daisy what he imagines she wants, and in the unraveling of Gatsby’s dream once his secret is revealed by Tom to Daisy, and even in his death by gunshot, I feel that exploring the parallels between the disinterested temperance narratives, typified by The Drunkard’s Progress and Ten Nights in a Bar-room, and the story of Jay Gatsby can supplement more traditional readings of the novel. One detail that connects Gatsby to temperance narratives is the source of his income. While Gatsby appears to have connections with the illegal bond market and with gambling, he is also a bootlegger. Tom suspects as much, pointing out that a lot of nouvelle riche are bootleggers, but Nick denies it (107). Before that accusation, Nick 132 records rumors that hint at bootlegging: “Contemporary legends such as the ‘underground pipe-line to Canada’ attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore” (97). While Prohibition was in effect in some parts of Canada, which did not enforce National Prohibition but allowed provincial autonomy through the local option, it was nowhere near as strict as that in the United States, 48 so an underground pipeline to Canada where alcohol could still be rather easily obtained would be a bootlegger’s dream, as would a house boat that could ply the waters off Long Island, a key route navigated by bootleggers smuggling alcohol obtained in Canada. But Tom’s investigations confirm that Gatsby is a bootlegger, for he reveals that Gatsby and Wolfsheim “bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter” (133). Herbert Asbury in The Great Illusion points out that it was common practice for drugstores to sell illegal alcohol through a system that involved bogus prescription forms from doctors who could justify the patients’ need for the stuff (218-19). Gatsby’s role as bootlegger directly connects him to the impressions of alcohol that the cultural work of the temperance narrative performed. As the bootlegger, the provider of alcohol, Gatsby represents a primary object of derision of the temperance narratives. 49 While temperance narratives were either sympathetic to the plight of the 48 In addition, more than half of the Canadian provinces had repealed Prohibition by 1925, the year the novel was published (Hallowell). 49 Benson describes the rumseller as “a man selling for gain what he knows to be worthless and pernicious; good for none, dangerous for all, and deadly to many. He has looked in the face the sure consequences of his course, and if he can but make gain of it, is prepared to corrupt the souls, embitter the lives, and blast the prosperity of an indefinite number of his fellow-creatures. By the selling of his poisons he sees that 133 drunkard or impatient to remove the drunkard from America, all branches of the temperance movement held nothing but contempt for saloonkeepers, bar owners, and others who provided alcohol to the drunkard. Reforming or eliminating the drunkard may have been the primary focus of the temperance movement, but eliminating saloons is certainly a subtext of many of the narratives, especially those such as Ten Nights in a Bar-room, and was, in fact, carried out by the “hatchetation” campaigns of Carry Nation and her followers. As the provider of alcohol, Gatsby’s fate is virtually sealed by the moral momentum the temperance movement established, and he must be removed from the narrative. In addition, Gatsby’s own interactions with alcohol identify him even more deeply as a target of temperance ire. Like some of the saloonkeepers presented in temperance narratives, Gatsby rarely drinks, acting as the saloonkeeper who knows the dangers of the stuff he peddles and the threat it offers to his own ability to manipulate his dream. At the first wild party thrown by Gatsby that Nick attends, Nick observes, “I wondered if the fact that he wasn’t drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased” (50). Witnessing the hilarity of his guests, Gatsby’s sober state aides him in the delicate attempt to reinforce his cover story; inebriated, Gatsby would hardly be able to maintain this front, contributing to Nick’s sense that “he was picking his words with care” (48). Gatsby has learned his reluctance to drink from Dan Cody. As personal assistant to Cody, Gatsby serves in a variety of roles, among them jailer, “for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about” (100). Cody is the with terrible certainty, along with the havoc of health, lives, homes, and souls of men, he can succeed in setting afloat a certain vast amount of property, and that as it is thrown to the winds, some small share of it will float within his grasp” (64). 134 quintessential drunkard, who is unrepentant in his debauchery, but who possesses the material wealth necessary to ensure that his excesses do no lasting harm, at least to his own pocketbook. Even Nick recognizes this aspect of Cody, describing a portrait of him as “a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face—the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone” (100). In his ambition, Gatsby learns from Cody’s negative example that alcohol can offer the kind of danger the temperance narrative warned about. What he does not learn from Cody is how to reign in his romantic obsession with Daisy, and he falls prey to intemperate excesses of his own, repeating the financial excesses he had learned from Cody. Gatsby does drink, however, for some celebratory Chartreuse is consumed at his reunion with Daisy (91). But, ever cautious about his ability to carry out his romantic scheming, Gatsby has only one glass. This kind of moderation again puts Gatsby in the sights of temperance morality, for throughout many temperance narratives, the claims that people could drink moderately were furiously denounced. 50 Gatsby’s only drink in the novel marks him simultaneously as a more moderate and a more delusional drinker than Nick, one who refuses to see the danger of his position. Nick’s and Gatsby’s parallels with various temperance narratives extend to the amount of interiority that we are allowed to glimpse. Nick, of course, as the narrator, 50 I have already indicated Luther Benson’s view on the subject, which he expounds throughout his entire narrative. Dave Ranney offers another perspective on the special dangers of even a single drink: “It is not the second or the one hundred and second drink that makes a man a drunkard, but the first” (11). 135 allows us into his thoughts, even though whether he is as possessed of the cardinal virtue of honesty as he claims (59) is open to debate. We see Gatsby through Nick’s eyes, and though vision in the novel can be quite unreliable, still Nick is all we have. As readers approaching Gatsby through Nick’s filters, we share Nick’s awe of Gatsby, and some readers may even find Gatsby sympathetic, in the sense that once we understand his obsession with Daisy, his actions and downfall make a kind of narrative sense. However, as in the “disinterested” temperance narratives, we are offered no interior views of Gatsby, and cannot assume the kind of internalized sympathy generated by the more inviting internalization of first person narrative. Gatsby is located outside of Nick’s consciousness, as is every other character, and we become removed from Gatsby’s fate, identifying more closely with Nick. Gatsby’s exclusion contributes to our suspicion of him, and the suspicion that many characters have for him. This suspicion plays itself out in their speculation about exactly who he is. Here, Fitzgerald intricately connects alcohol and identity through Gatsby’s role as bootlegger. Bootleggers have an almost romantic association with alcohol that started in the 1920s and persists to this day. As I have pointed out, alcohol can provide an obstacle for interpretation in the novel: Nick had trouble following Simon called Peter due in part to his inebriated state. It can, however, contribute to a romanticized perception as well, which in its own way presents a perspective that may not be accurate. We find Nick at Gatsby’s party in chapter three talking with Jordan Baker and meeting Gatsby for the first time, although Nick does not yet know his table companion is Gatsby. In this scene, Nick writes “I had taken two finger-bowls of 136 champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound” (47). Alcohol can hinder interpretation by distorting perceptions, and it can heighten a possibly mistaken sense of profundity that also makes interpretation difficult. As the almost physical personification of alcohol, Gatsby finds himself the subject of often romantic speculation and even fear, as he is alternately identified as a killer, a German spy, an American veteran (44), a frightening nephew or cousin of Kaiser Wilhem (32). Jordan doubts that he is an Oxford man (49), and the guests are thrilled with trying to determine just who he is. 51 Thus, the refusal of a man so closely associated with alcohol to be nailed down, to slavishly fulfill the scripts people want to create for him, becomes one of Fitzgerald’s many commentaries on the temperance movement, which insisted on the master narrative that dictated the only two possible outcomes for drunkards, death or conversion, and the narrative script that dictated a temperate white behavior. In other words, as people try to nail down Gatsby, his identity as provider of alcohol resists their determinism. Thus, as in the temperance narratives, alcohol in The Great Gatsby complicates identity, and Fitzgerald exposes the movement’s attempts to solidify identity through highlighting alcohol’s identity-shifting nature. Like Benson, Gatsby shifts through different unmoored identities. Even in death, Gatsby parallels the violent elements of the master narrative offered by The Drunkard’s Progress and other disinterested temperance narratives. 52 51 Fitzgerald himself admits his own difficulty with Gatsby’s identity. In a letter to John Peale Bishop, he writes “…[Y]ou are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind” (“To John Peale Bishop” 358). 52 Such disinterested temperance narratives usually conclude in tremendous violence. Ten Nights in a Bar- room, for example, on its seventh night, features a drunken brawl that results in a character being stabbed 137 Like the drunkard in the lithograph, Gatsby dies by a gunshot wound. Unlike the drunkard, Gatsby’s wound is not self-inflicted; rather, he is shot by George Wilson, who then turns the gun upon himself. In this parallel tale of obsession, Gatsby has descended, his world has crumbled around him, and he is literally adrift on the air mattress floating in his pool, recalling the drunkard cast adrift as wanderer through life. George and Gatsby are united in their death and in their deprived, fallen state. Both men have lost the women they love, and both are the victims of shattered dreams. George’s role as representative of the ashen dreams of the middle class becomes even more tragic than Gatsby’s role as deluded romantic, and George is as compelled to kill himself by narrative drives similar to those of the temperance narrative, which sought to regulate middle and lower class American identity and behaviors—George provides the symbolic death of middle class behaviors, as Gatsby is to be eliminated, to become the sacrificial victim of a morality that Fitzgerald could both admire and suspect, beginning to see it as having built a cumbersome momentum. This morality, propelled by its own inertia, would continue to exert various forms of social control, even though the central moral beliefs of the usually evangelical Christians who formed the temperance movement had seemed to lose their place in a modern world. Here is the crux of Fitzgerald’s use of the temperance narrative in the novel. As I have pointed out, the temperance narrative was the temperance movement’s chief tool in to death and the subsequent death of his mother from a broken heart (167-170), the shooting death of the stabber (184), the brutal beating of a Judge (190), the beating of the saloonkeeper—who loses an eye (191- 194), and the wounding of the saloonkeeper’s son and his friend (197). The eighth night spotlights the saloonkeeper and his son almost coming to blows over their mutual disrespect (219-220), followed in the ninth night by the inevitable murder of the saloonkeeper by his son, who in his grief attempts suicide but misses with his gun (236). Along the way, the saloon is wrecked, other men are injured in the fray, and the saloonkeeper’s wife is sent to an insane asylum (208). 138 propagating their beliefs in a vision for America that included social control, standardized American behavior, a sanctioned, pure American identity, and a sense that once all Americans fell in line with this temperance regimen, the resulting ideal America would become a city on a hill. With the advent of Prohibition, the temperance movement seemed immeasurably closer to realizing their goals, and this new America must have seemed imminent. However, for those Americans who were more skeptical about this American vision, and who were able to be a little more honest in their observations, the new millennial America was clearly not here and did not seem to be imminent. In fact, if anything, the world seemed emptier, more God-less than ever before. As a result, many of the Modern Prohibition-era writers include these observations in their texts, criticizing the extinct moral energies that drove such narratives. Prohibition-era narratives incorporate elements of the temperance narrative to highlight the broken promises of the temperance vision, an American dream gone wrong. In The Great Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder, Richard Lehan discusses Fitzgerald’s observations that, in essence, the millennial promise had remained unfulfilled: The Great Gatsby was one of the very first novels to depict the vacuousness of the new commercial culture. Except for Gatsby’s godlike sense of the potentiality of self, God has withdrawn from this world and is replaced by the commercial billboard with the blind eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, and embodied (all symbolic forms in the novel have human equivalents) by the equally blind eyes of the owl- eyed man who appears at Gatsby’s party and reappears at his funeral, bridging the connection between the two, just as the end product of Gatsby’s parties are embodied in the orange pulps and lemon rinds and by that other symbol of a romantic waste and emotional exhaustion—the valley of ashes. This is a blind world because there is no source of moral vision. This is a wasteland world of exhausted hopes because the only vision to be had—Gatsby’s—is an ersatz one. (32) 139 Lehan has articulated rather clearly Fitzgerald’s sense, shared by so many Moderns, that the world, perhaps especially America, lacked a moral center. Fitzgerald highlights this lack and the departure of God with his reference to Simon Called Peter, which Nick reads in Tom’s and Myrtle’s trysting apartment. The book is important to the theme of an empty, God-less world; we have a bit of intertextuality reinforcing the idea of a faithless world. Of course, when reading this book, Nick is admittedly drunk, which connects the reading of a book about a loss of faith to an act that a faith movement had tried to eradicate, and the temperance movement and their claims are directly implicated. In essence, by connecting Simon Called Peter with the temperance narrative, Fitzgerald provides his readers with a social critique. The morality and faith that drove the temperance movement to seek the eradication of the drunkard and the reshaping of American social controls is juxtaposed with a book about the loss of faith that arises from a war that erupted after the temperance movement was at its height. Although Prohibition was passed in 1919, and came into effect in 1920, the demoralizing, shattering effects of World War I had already begun to undermine the facile faith of the temperance movement. Therefore, The Great Gatsby and other Modern works often perform a new bit of cultural work that strives to counter that performed by the temperance narratives, and Gatsby becomes in many ways a critique of the form. Fitzgerald’s choice to use this highly moral form in a novel that lacks a moral center, in which God is replaced by a billboard, becomes highly ironic, as he critiques the temperance movement and other conservative evangelical beliefs. In Gatsby, a moral force reminiscent of that found in 140 the temperance narrative remains, but it is a blind moral force that seeks to punish certain characters and leaves others unscathed, even though the others may be perceived as more guilty in the moral schemes of the temperance narrative. Thus, crushed under the weight of temperance narrative morality, the bootlegger dies, even though he is often portrayed as the most religious character in the novel. Gatsby is a self-incarnated “Son of God,” (98) whose vision is “religious” in its intensity, is constantly “hosting” parties (Lehan 40), seeks the grail that is Daisy (Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 149), and is the only character who has infused himself with the sense of wonder and possibility religions offer (Lehan 40-41). And under the moral inertia of the temperance narrative, the “drunkard” Nick reforms, although his conversion seems less a joyful return to innocence than a despairing retreat to the familiar, to a lost past. Those characters who seem most guilty, Tom and Daisy, become the focus of Nick’s moral ire and are part of Fitzgerald’s reshaped vision of America, a vision that recognized that the wealthy were often outside of the concerns of the temperance narrative, perhaps both being seen and seeing themselves as above the middle class concerns of the morality of social control. For the wealthy, money can buy a ticket out of the American middle-class moral continuum. The carelessness of the rich and the attendant loss of a sadly gone egalitarian democratization replaces the reform of the drunkard as a prime concern. Tom and Daisy’s existence outside of the general moral scheme of the temperance narrative reflects Fitzgerald’s understanding of the fact that the rich possess the means to insulate themselves from the moral concerns of the middle class, undermining any sense of liberty and equality offered by the idea of America. For Nick, the sympathetic engagement of 141 mutualism the temperance narratives sought to inspire has not taken root. In fact, during Prohibition, there was a growing sense that those citizens with means would be free to defy Prohibition with impunity, expressing an individualism stronger than that previously dreaded by American progressives. In 1928, Herbert Hoover called for the creation of a commission under George Wickersham, former attorney general, to investigate the effectiveness of Prohibition enforcement. When the commission filed its report in 1931, it revealed a deep resentment about the 18 th Amendment. “William S. Kenyon, one of the members of the Wickersham Commission that investigated the enforcement of Prohibition, expressed his concern that the disregard for the prohibitory laws, so flagrantly demonstrated by those who ought to have been the leaders of society, offered a very bad example to the rest of the population” (Barr 248). Those “leaders of society” who had the financial wherewithal to do so had stocked up on their alcohol stores to prepare for the coming of Prohibition, and many citizens of various classes followed suit in defying Prohibition, frequenting speakeasies, paying outrageous prices for bathtub gin and other synthetic alcohols. Kenyon observed, “…[I]t has been frankly stated before our commission that many of these people of great wealth and prominence will not obey the prohibition laws, do not intend to, and boast of the fact that they will not because they do not believe in them…” (“Statement”). As early as 1925, Fitzgerald recognized the problems the wealthy posed for any kind of equal enforcement of Prohibition and the creation of a more mutualistic America, surely aware of the class resentment that the less wealthy might develop. 142 Fitzgerald himself indicated that class resentment was a major concern of the novel. Andrew Turnbull writes, “He told a friend that ‘the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it’” (150). 53 While Fitzgerald’s assessment of the idea of his novel seems a little disingenuously reductionistic, Nick focuses on this class resentment, or at least his disillusionment with the seeming superiority of the rich, at the end of the novel. Running into Tom, Nick indicates that he does not think highly of him, refusing to shake Tom’s hand. Nick confronts Tom about Tom’s sending Wilson after Gatsby, and Tom admits that he did feed Wilson the belief that Gatsby was responsible for Myrtle’s death, partly because Tom felt threatened by Wilson, but Tom defiantly adds that Gatsby “had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s” (178). Tom expresses the teleology of Nick’s revised temperance narrative morality: whether or not Gatsby did anything right or wrong, he had been hurtling toward this end; he had it coming to him, an opinion voiced earlier by an anonymous guest at Gatsby’s parties who replied to Nick’s phone invitation to the funeral that Gatsby “got what he deserved” (169). But Tom continues to feel some need to express his motivation in eliminating Gatsby, explaining his own suffering in returning to the flat to find the box of dog biscuits that the elevator boy had purchased for Myrtle’s dogs. Nick tells us that “I couldn’t forgive [Tom] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused” (179). Nick recognizes that Tom has 53 Turnbull unfortunately gives no indication of who that friend might be and what his source was. 143 created his own morality, a morality that is exclusive to Tom and outside of Nick’s own, so that Nick cannot forgive or like Tom. Tom’s moral system is careless and confused, and while we may associate “careless” with the sense of sloppiness that confused encourages us to pursue, we should consider “careless” to indicate a morality that is without care, not care-free, but lacking in care for others. Tom’s morality has become the pinnacle of the empty morality of the book in that Tom’s moral center is himself, and his universe has contracted so much through the morally entropic energies of the modern world that he has lost any sense of wonder at all, not even feeling a moral, let alone a spiritual, connection to others. The mutualism hoped for by the temperance movement has not manifested in the social controls of Prohibition, and Nick is left pining for a more regimented morality, the unfulfilled promise of Prohibition. Yet Nick does not reserve his moral disgust for Tom alone, for he implicates Daisy as well. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” (179). 54 Tom and Daisy have become the incarnation of the mechanistic, God-less moral inertia that permeates the novel and directly counters the millennial promise of temperance. Like the cars that hurtle recklessly throughout the novel, Tom and Daisy smash things up, and can retreat behind the walls of their own morality that are built by their money and the lack of care for others that comes with their individualism. For Tom and Daisy, there are almost no moral consequences, certainly not of the teleological type 54 Nick’s more mutualistic moral system is more careful. Unlike Tom and Daisy, he “wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep [his] refuse away” (177). 144 that the temperance movement insisted upon, for the center of their morality lies within themselves, not in other people, nor in God, and thus they get to decide their own consequences, ignoring the devastation that they leave swirling in their wake. For in the America of The Great Gatsby, there are consequences, but they are empty, motiveless, moving with the inertia of a moral system that once had a center but is now performing its destructive duty without any kind of universal controlling force keeping that morality in check, like some vast amusement park ride flung free of its rails. But Nick’s morality lacks the kind of center promised by the temperance movement as well. His morality, however, is not the redemptive kind of morality offered by later temperance narratives, for he is unconcerned with reforming anyone by the end of the novel and certainly does not request readers to join him in a return to the Midwest. His morality is much more the disinterested, judgmental variety that retreats back home, where it can superciliously bemoan the apparent lack of morality in the East, pining for, as we read at the beginning of the novel, a kind of regimented, controlling morality. Nick’s morality offers an inactive, reclusive judgment, one that merely observes, standing at attention forever, never interacting with the world around it. Unlike the morality of the East that spins out of control and lacks a moral center, apparently taking victims on some purposeless whim, Nick’s morality is completely for show, an army that stands around and does nothing but cast judgment upon the world from its place of refuge, even though that refuge no longer exists. Nick retreats into the judgmental model of the temperance narrative, clinging to a moral narrative form that provides him the illusion of moral certainty. 145 Not only does Fitzgerald incorporate the moral energies of the temperance narrative to highlight the loss of a moral center and the disappearance of God, he also satirizes other temperance morality concerns, among which is, of course, the Titaness. In this novel about empty morality, one quite visible lack in the era immediately following the 19 th century is the Victorian matriarch. Without a Titaness, the second greatest source of moral guidance outside of God, there can be no moral center, for, as the temperance embodiment of all things faithful and moral, the mother has no place in Gatsby. Fitzgerald gives fathers to the two characters with whom readers are most concerned, Nick and Gatsby, 55 Nick introduces the novel with his father, who advises him that he should remember his privileged origins; he has had a number of advantages that other people haven’t had (1). This advice leads Nick to be “inclined to reserve all judgments” (1), and he claims to have become far more open, less given to criticism than the Titaness might want him to be. However, by the end of the novel, we have seen Nick offer a whole series of judgments, and Nick’s sense of his impeccable honesty is called to question. Gatsby, as well, is given a father, although Gatsby was apparently ashamed of his father, finding no space for him in the revised identity that he had created for himself. Gatsby’s father, however, is filled with the kind of obsessive love for his child that is usually reserved for the Titaness, although this obsessive love may be more invested in Gatsby’s material success. Nick meets Mr. Gatz before the funeral, wandering around Gatsby’s house: “His pride in his son and in his son’s possessions was continually 55 As we have seen in temperance narratives, fathers are not always the best sources for moral upbringing. It should not be any wonder to readers of Nick’s temperance tale that both he and Gatsby would fall prey to their various forms of intemperance. 146 increasing and now he had something to show me” (172). Mr. Gatz shows Nick a picture of Gatsby’s house that Gatsby had sent him. A love for the son’s things supplants even the love for the son, as Mr. Gatz tells Nick that he understands that Gatsby had to run away, for “he had a big future in front of him,” and once that future was materially realized, Gatsby bought his father’s forgiveness: “…ever since he made a success he was very generous with me” (172). Parenting in The Great Gatsby becomes a parody of the Victorian Matriarch’s vision. Like an intemperate father’s thirst for alcohol, Gatsby’s father’s obsession with material things has been passed on to his son. Yet there is a potential matriarch in the novel, a fact that many readers often overlook: Daisy is a mother. However, she is distantly removed from her child, and offers her no real moral guidance at all, treating her child as a mere plaything, a distraction. The baby is first introduced by Daisy in chapter one, in a non sequitur that comes after expressing a desire to return to Daisy’s childhood home: Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.” “I’d like to.” “She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?” “Never.” “Well, you ought to see her. She’s—” (9-10) In this brief dialogue, Daisy reveals how far she falls short of a Victorian matriarch ideal, through two small details. First, she says the baby is three years old. Using the narrative timeline that Richard Lehan establishes in The Limits of Wonder, we find that Nick first visits Daisy and Tom on the 7 th of June, 1922. We later learn that Daisy’s daughter, Pammy, was born in 1920, which would make her two at the time of this discussion. This difference in age could be an error on Fitzgerald’s part, which is Bruccoli’s opinion 147 (91). However, we can read the error as Fitzgerald’s wink to his readers that Daisy is so unconcerned about her child, so careless, that she cannot even remember how old the child is. Also, in trying to describe the baby to Nick, Daisy is cut off from any attempt to describe her, saying only that “She’s—,” expressing Daisy’s inability to articulate any sentiment at all about the child. The only other scene between Daisy and her daughter in the novel also erases any kind of maternal sentiment in Daisy, who treats Pammy more like a doll than a child: …[A] freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room. “Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms. “Come to your own mother that loves you.” The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother’s dress. “The bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say—How-de-do.” Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child in surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before. “I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child, turning eagerly to Daisy. “That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Her face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You absolute little dream” (117). Daisy relinquishes care of the child to the nurse, who has seen to the dressing of Pammy, but Daisy still claims the love of the Titaness for herself, smothering Pammy with a sentimentality that rings hollow, formulaic, and cute. Pammy becomes a conversation piece, a material possession whose prime meaning for existence is to be shown off. Daisy admits her true feelings for Pammy, calling her an “absolute little dream.” For Daisy, Pammy is the dream of motherhood that Daisy feels she should fulfill, but Daisy is ultimately incapable of the kind of nurturing love the moral center that is the Titaness can offer. For Gatsby, Pammy is far from a dream, representing a harsh reality that 148 contradicts the dream he has created for Daisy and himself; Pammy provides proof that Daisy has loved another man. Of course, to completely demolish the idea of Daisy as Titaness, we see her drink, and we know that she is behind the wheel when the car hits Myrtle. Fitzgerald effectively erases the Titaness from his world and with her absence ensures the erasure of the moral center of the previous generation. With no moral center, the characters must pursue a terrible honesty, for that is all they have left. While Fitzgerald appears to incorporate certain conventions of the temperance narrative in various scenes in The Great Gatsby, he ignores others. While the temperance narrative was obsessed with “othering” the drinker, to the extent of claiming, as I have demonstrated, that a drunker abdicated his whiteness, Fitzgerald does little to “other” the drinkers in his novel. Neither Nick for Fitzgerald himself seem to have any interest in claiming that people who drink are somehow un-American or morally depraved. If anyone is “othered,” it is the extremely wealthy, the individualistic, “careless” ones at the end of the novel (179). Fitzgerald does, however, offer us a scene in which alcohol and race become interconnected as they so often do in the temperance narratives. In this scene, as in so many others, Fitzgerald picks and chooses which conventions of the temperance narrative he wishes to incorporate and manipulates them to suit his narrative objectives. Appropriating the narrative and rhetorical power of the temperance narrative, Fitzgerald refuses, however, to kowtow to the overarching ideologies of temperance and to restrict himself to the extremely rigid narrative expectations of the teleological temperance narrative. 149 The scene appears early in the novel. At the first dinner meeting of Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan, Nick admits to his sense that as a Midwesterner, he is slightly out of place in the more refined setting of an Eastern dinner: “‘You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’ I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way. “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?” “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” (12-13) In this conversation, the transition from Nick’s confession that he feels uncivilized to Tom’s tirade about civilization’s downfall obscures the minor but important detail about the wine. Fitzgerald introduces most of the alcoholic drinks in The Great Gatsby simply by providing a generic name for them: “a bottle of whiskey” (29), the unidentifiable “cocktails” (10), and the like. The much more specific description of the drink in this scene bears a much closer look, for when juxtaposed against the conversation that follows, it reveals Fitzgerald’s understanding of the cultural efforts of the temperance movement and similar nativist movements to associate alcohol with prohibited, non- American identities. It is important to note that the word “claret” may have a significance that is easily overlooked. Most Americans do not use the term “claret,” referring to the wine by the French region from which it originates, Bourdeaux. “Claret” is more commonly used by the British in reference to the same wine; thus, Fitzgerald’s use of the word here hints at 150 an obsession with Anglo-Saxon identity, clearly a preoccupation for Tom, at least. In addition, wine was generally consumed more often by members of the upper classes than by members of any other class during temperance and Prohibition, 56 so the drink in this case signifies the upper class Anglo identity of Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and Nick. While the drink has these significances, the quality of the drink is what is perhaps most important in this scene. While it is impressive, the wine has become “corky,” a phrase used by wine connoisseurs to indicate that the wine has been improperly stored, and as a result the cork has mildewed a bit, affecting the taste of the wine. Today, a customer discovering that he or she had ordered a corky wine at a restaurant should send it back, but in the era of Prohibition, drinkers were not often so choosy. This corky claret opens up a space for Tom’s discourse about eugenics and miscegenation. The wine represents a striving for an Anglo-Saxon purity 57 that has degenerated; the impressiveness of the wine has mixed with the inferior quality of the cork, and the resulting wine leads to Tom’s review of Goddard’s book, and the revelation of his “bottled up” white fear. In this description of corky wine, Fitzgerald has embedded a recognition that alcohol, race, and class had long been intertwined Fitzgerald includes a number of other subtle jabs at the temperance movement and their apparent victory in Prohibition. One key unraveling of temperance movement 56 “The only people who continued to drink imported wines with their meals throughout Prohibition were those who were so fabulously rich as to have been able to afford not only to have bought enough wine beforehand to keep them going for thirteen years, and a cellar large enough to hold it, but also armed guards to protect their stocks from raids by bootleggers” (Barr 107). 57 Of course, claret/Bourdeaux is not made from a single varietal; usually Bourdeaux is composed of a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc (Robinson 132). Thus, the deceptively purely named claret/ Bourdeaux is itself a blend, calling the illusion of Anglo-Saxon purity created in this scene even further to question. 151 wishes comes in Nick’s account of the first party he attends at Gatsby’s mansion. A chief concern of the temperance movement was to eliminate both a desire for alcohol and alcohol itself from American culture, hoping to relegate alcohol to memory, a moment trapped in the past offered by the redemptive temperance narrative. In other words, in the ideal temperate America, alcohol would only exist as a vague memory, a past-tense curse that the country would be better off without, some vile liquid that the country has left behind in a past that is far better forgotten than nostalgically recalled. Fitzgerald offers a narrative denial of this temperance desire. Nick describes the frequency of Gatsby’s parties, the piles of spent citrus fruit left every Monday, the caterers that come “at least once a fortnight,” the Rolls-Royce that becomes an omnibus, shuttling guests from the city all day and long into the night (39-40). Nick ends this past-tense reminiscence by describing the bar: “In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another” (40). This bar exists as an object from the past, and Nick’s looking backward from his point of narrative completion keeps it in the past. Its brass rail is reminiscent of the rails that were a traditional feature of 19 th - Century saloons, an anachronistic artifact, and the cordials are forgotten, seemingly fulfilling temperance movement wishes. Then Nick shifts into the present tense, and the Prohibition victory of the temperance movement is completely undone, for alcohol and drinking become an ever- present preoccupation: 152 The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun. (40-41) Not only has the party begun, but in Fitzgerald’s shift from the past tense of memory provided by Nick’s narrative present to the present tense of eternal immediacy, a feature of time incongruous with the remembered past of the temperance narrative form, he has ensured that the party will always already begin. The hopes of the temperance movement for making alcohol—like the forgotten cordials—a relic of the past and keeping an intemperate exuberance that defies white Anglo normative behavior from erupting in America are quashed. The rail and the cordials are held out before readers as an acknowledgement of the temperance movement’s desires to eradicate drinking, then Fitzgerald yanks away any hope that they could be forever gone. Yet in this scene Fitzgerald does more than simply ensure that at least one narrative account of alcohol and drinking is not relegated to the past. At this party, Fitzgerald intimates that in this new post-temperance world the temperance movement’s 153 specious victory in Prohibition has gone so horribly wrong that the universe itself has become infused with alcohol, thwarting the social control and return to morality so desperately desired by temperance. The “earth lurches away from the sun,” moving on its drunken course through the universe. Perception is mixed in the synesthesia of the “yellow cocktail music” as sound and sight become united by alcohol. The air itself is infused with cocktails, for the dancer can seize a cocktail out of the air. The garden is permeated with floating rounds of cocktails. Laughter in this permanently intoxicated world becomes easier and easier, is spilled with the prodigality of the drunkard, and is tipped out at a cheerful world by the tipsy partygoers. Liquid imagery abounds in this scene, implying a world that has become fluid, less rigid. Consider “floating,” “spilled,” “tipped out,” “swell,” “dissolve and form” (like waves), and “sea-change.” Not only is alcohol not an artifact of the happily-forgotten past, it has permeated this party and America itself in a way that temperance morality had been unable to do. The permeation of alcohol into the physical world has spilled out of this scene and reappears in other parts of the novel as well. In chapter one, Jordan Baker ascribes a certain level of subjectivity to the first cocktails in the novel: “‘No thanks,’ said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in training’” (10). Here, although Jordan’s “No thanks” is probably addressed to whomever is offering the cocktails, it appears that Jordan addresses the cocktails themselves, which arrive on the scene, apparently under their own power, from the pantry. Unlike in the temperance narratives, such as Luther Benson’s, that granted subjectivity to alcohol as an evil spirit, a demon, Fitzgerald presents us with cocktails that appear on the scene, almost as 154 background characters, void of any kind of moral judgment upon them at all. Later, at Gatsby’s second party, Nick is sitting “at a particularly tipsy table” (106). Here Fitzgerald utilizes metonymy, as the partygoers at the table are presumably the ones who are tipsy, yet the implication is that the table itself is tipsy. In the alcohol-infused world, even furniture can become tipsy. Even Gatsby’s house was built by a brewer (88), and as Nick and Gatsby bring Daisy over to show off the house, the confusing synesthesia of alcohol once more arises, as they notice the “sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate” (90). “Sparkling,” “frothy,” and “pale gold” recall the other product of the brewer’s art, and the house and its grounds join the rest of the world of Gatsby in the inextricable infusion of alcohol. No wonder, in this thoroughly inebriated Modern world, that vision is blurred and morality has lost its focus. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald presents characters that variously critique, reject, and pine for the America promised by the temperance movement. Incorporating elements of temperance narratives that enable him to demonstrate the lack of a moral center in Prohibition-era America, Fitzgerald turns the temperance narrative and the attendant ideologies back on themselves, capturing in The Great Gatsby the sense of loss that confronts him in the Modern world he occupies, and the simultaneous enchantment and repulsion he feels for that loss and for the morality that has been lost. Unlike the temperance narrators, Fitzgerald offers no instructions, no way to ensure morality in America, presenting instead a world in which his characters must pursue their own 155 terrible honesty to seize a morality that seems right to them, whether it is their own or that of the preceding generation, perhaps the generation that is truly lost. 156 Chapter 4. “Deliberately Ignoring the Highballs”: Signifyin(g) Race, Alcohol, and the Temperance Narrative in the Harlem Renaissance African Americans living during the eras of temperance and Prohibition found themselves involved in a complicated relationship with alcohol. As I indicated in my second chapter, African Americans were part of the group of non-whites targeted as “other” by the temperance movement who could be used as a threat to the white audience of temperance narratives, held over the heads of potential readers as entities into whom potential drinkers could transform, abdicating their hierarchical position as white Americans. John Crowley has discussed the connections between slave narratives and temperance narratives, especially the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and An Autobiography by John B. Gough. While Crowley sees the abolition and temperance movements as the two pivotal social movements of nineteenth century America, he does overlook some of the implications of the language of slavery used by temperance narratives, as I indicated earlier. In addition, Crowley only briefly touches on the intersection of slavery and alcohol, and does not discuss the intersection of the temperance movement and African Americans, nor the implications of temperance ideology for African Americans, topics which would reward more scholarship. To that end, I begin some of that work by examining alcohol as a means to perpetuate slavery as recorded in Douglass’s narrative, and to briefly explore some of the stereotypes surrounding African Americans and alcohol held, most frequently, by whites in the South, stereotypes that likely moved with the great African American migration to the North in 1910. This overview of alcohol, slavery, and stereotypes, combined with a brief glance at African Americans in temperance, will provide the foundation for my 157 analysis of the ways in which African American writers used the opportunity opened by Prohibition to explore both the African American position as “other” and the forbidden identity of the mixed race American through scrutinizing white Americans’ practice of equating these forbidden identities with alcohol as forbidden substance. What these writers do is what Roger D. Abrahams and, later, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. identify as “Signifyin(g)” with alcohol and race. Abrahams identified signifying as “the language of trickery, that set of words or gestures which arrives at ‘direction through indirection’ and which is used often to humiliate an adversary…” (70). In Abrahams’s entry for “signify” in his glossary, he defines the term as “To imply, goad, beg, boast, by indirect verbal or gestural means. A language of implication.” (267). In addition to Wallace Thurman’s use of temperance ideologies and conventions to critique the Harlem Renaissance, what I am interested in discovering is the way Thurman and other Harlem Renaissance writers used alcohol and temperance narrative form and/or ideology to “humiliate” white power systems by indirectly exposing connections between alcohol and race that the Anglo- dominated temperance movement had hesitated to make explicit. By exploring the language of implication surrounding alcohol in Harlem Renaissance texts written during Prohibition, I hope to reveal that a people already oppressed by law saw no need to submit to another oppressive law; therefore questions of identity and race could be fruitfully explored, resulting in the exposure of the risible nature of both Prohibition and racial stereotypes. In other words, I wish to explore how Harlem Renaissance writers perform an exercise in “tropological revision,” what Gates describes as “the manner in which a specific trope is repeated, with differences, between two or more texts” (Gates 158 xxv). The trope of the Harlem Renaissance writers that most interests me for this project is alcohol. That trope, like so many in African American literature, has its origins in slavery. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass describes the holiday between Christmas and New Year’s day that slaveholders allowed their slaves. Working during those days was frowned upon, as “[a] slave who would work during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them. He was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master” (55). Many slaves, according to Douglass, spent the time visiting family, improving their living situations by making brooms, mats, baskets, or pursuing physical diversions such as hunting, wrestling, playing ball games, and dancing (55). However, one activity was practiced by a number of slaves and was “by far the most agreeable to the feelings of [the] masters”: drinking whisky (55). In fact, “[it] was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means, during the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas” (55). Southern slave masters, who very likely had wives involved in or at least familiar with the temperance movement, if they were not active in the movement themselves, held wildly different opinions concerning the use of alcohol depending on the color of the imbiber’s skin. Very likely, such behavior served multiple purposes. For those in the temperance movement who wanted to point out the depths to which alcohol could bring a person, they merely had to visit a plantation during this holiday to witness the debauchery that surely ensued, reinforcing both the dangers of alcohol and the weakness of Africans who would allow themselves to arrive at such a 159 state. Douglass articulates what effect such a practice had on the slaves, arguing that slaveholders knew that allowing a few days of “freedom” would serve as a safety valve, staving off any potential thoughts of rebellion. In addition, Douglass clearly understood the role alcohol played in keeping slaves firmly ensconced in their enslaved position: [The holidays] are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. This will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation…. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field,—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery. (56) As Douglass was aware, slaveholders relied upon the dangers of alcohol as a means to reinforce slavery just as temperance movement narrators used slavery as a means to reinforce the dangers of alcohol. What emerges is a conflation of African American identity and alcohol that will plague African Americans to the present day, but will become an object of the closest scrutiny only after slavery and alcohol had both ostensibly been abolished. For both the temperance movement and for slaveholders, alcohol could become a tool of oppression, a tool for maintaining the status quo of white dominance and African American opression. As Crowley points out, Douglass himself became involved with the temperance movement, taking a pledge of abstinence on October 22, 1845 at the home of Father Theobald Mathew. Mathew, the founder of the Irish temperance movement, had invited 160 Douglass to speak in Dublin while Douglass was presenting a series of lectures throughout the British Isles. While on tour, Douglass spoke on a number of occasions about his former thralldom to the bottle (“Slaves to the Bottle” 126-27). Douglass’s willingness to speak on temperance while on this tour of the British Isles gives one pause, for it seems that his audiences across the pond were more receptive of a temperance message from the mouth of an African American than his American contemporaries. While certainly not reticent to discuss his drinking with American audiences, Douglass surely knew that American temperance ideologies betrayed much more antipathy toward African American identities than British temperance ideologies did. As white American members of the temperance movement sought to eliminate alcohol as the devil’s drink that encouraged sin, erased whiteness, and undermined the status quo, Douglass’s motivation in joining the temperance movement, and the motivation of other African Americans in the movement, was surely fueled by their recognition that alcohol was yet another tool in the white supremacist toolbox for shackling African Americans to a culturally constructed identity of inferiority. Douglass’s inclination to begin to speak about temperance while outside the U.S. hints at the difficulty of a former slave voicing such a sentiment within the country. However, this sentiment was in fact articulated by some African Americans who held positions of prominence in the African American temperance movement. The role of African Americans in the temperance movement has been relegated to a footnote in most studies of temperance; however, some studies that focus on the white temperance movement are quick to point out that a comparable African American movement worked 161 at the same time as the white movement, although often in a much more subordinate role. In most books on Prohibition or the temperance movement, African American involvement is given a mere nod. For example, Herbert Asbury’s Great Illusion notes that the Sons of Temperance had divisions for African Americans, and that the Friends of Temperance organized African American groups they called the “sons of the soil” (55). Janet Zolinger Giele records that the WCTU had segregated groups for African American women: “African-American women had their own local and state units, at first designated by such names as Sojourner or Harper, later by number, as in Texas No. 2” (94). Admittedly, the focus of these books may lie elsewhere, but such glossing over African American involvement in the temperance movement is not unusual. Occasionally, books on the history of temperance and Prohibition devote a little more than a single sentence or two to the subject of race and alcohol. Catherine Murdock’s Domesticating Drink, a book that explores the complex relationships between women and alcohol in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, relationships that are usually oversimplified into the platitude that women opposed alcohol, begins to orient us toward the racist ideologies implicit in the temperance movement, perhaps taking some strides toward explaining why African American involvement in the temperance movement was so understated. Murdock identifies the connection between alcohol and eugenics that fueled much of the racism and nativism that coincided with the temperance movement; temperance activists often viewed drinking as a form of race suicide, in that drinking was believed to weaken the offspring; thus, drunken men and women would eventually weaken the (white) race (45). While not explicitly targeting a particular race 162 or immigrant group, this view resonates with the images of abdicated American identity that appear in the temperance narratives; in other words, those who drink are no longer white and necessarily become “othered.” However, some temperance groups went even further than mere eugenics in their alliance with racism. Murdock notes “Although the WCTU and the ASL sought to differentiate themselves from the Ku Klux Klan, many causes—nativism, patriotism, Protestantism, Prohibition—overlapped. In the Midwest, women with years of activism in the WCTU joined and led the women of the Ku Klux Klan” (128). In the Midwest, at least, alcohol and racism were fine bedfellows, continuing the connections established during slavery between alcohol and race dominance. In the South, the connection between alcohol and race was even more pronounced, for, as Murdock points out, “prohibition in the South was predicated on the control of blacks and poor whites, and drys there capitalized on fears of drunken black men” (32). These fears were surely fueled in part by the exuberant, excessive behavior that arose during the holiday revelry recorded by Douglass, as the end of slavery (1865) and the beginning of Prohibition (1920) were a mere fifty-five years apart. Even Francis Willard, leader of the WCTU from 1879 to 1898, expressed this opinion. In a letter published in the temperance periodical The Voice on October 23, 1890, she wrote, “Better whiskey and more of it is the rallying cry of great dark-faced mobs in the Southern localities where Local Option was snowed under by the coloured vote.” She continued, claiming, “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is the center of its power.” In her assessment, these drunken mobs were undoubtedly a threat to 163 “the safety of women, of childhood, of the home . . . in a thousand localities.” 58 When the leader of such an influential organization as the WCTU voices this terrifying vision, no wonder few white temperance groups seemed willing to fraternize with African Americans, even if they agreed on the threat alcohol posed to both races. Of course, African Americans during the time of temperance and Prohibition did not let such comments go unanswered. Ann Douglas identifies Frances E. W. Harper as a leader of African American women in the temperance movement, and claims African American women in temperance “had to spend as much time fighting the anti-Negro rhetoric and tactics of Willard’s WCTU (not altogether closed to black women but strictly segregated) as they did crusading against demon rum. Willard thought the Negro male’s sexual depravity stemmed from his addiction to the ‘grog shop,’ but Harper took such descriptions to be evidence, not of black male alcoholism and sexual savagery, but of white feminine racism, part of the national habit of scapegoating the black man for the nation’s problems, one more attempt to prove him unfit for the vote” (261-62). That African American women believed temperance was an important crusade is unquestionable; Mary McLeod Bethune went so far as to identify Prohibition as “The Second Emancipation of the Negro” (Murdock 119); however, African Americans were surely aware of the opinions of white Americans concerning African Americans and alcohol, and, as we shall see, some African American writers working during Prohibition used the opportunity opened by Prohibition, the apparent victory of the temperance 58 Willard’s letter was quoted by Ida B. Wells in her letter to the British journal Fraternity, May 1894, in which she discussed her dismay at the positions of both Dwight L. Moody and Willard regarding the state of lynching in the South. Both Wells’s letter and Willard’s response are archived online by the Illinois Historical Digitization Projects of the Northern Illinois University Libraries, in a document entitled “The WCTU and the Lynching Controversy” by Jennifer Erbach. 164 movement, to critique these opinions, to poke a subtle sort of serious fun at white Americans for their views, and to complicate the implications of conflating identity and alcohol. One book that performs this work while simultaneously positioning itself both as a celebration of African American drinking practices and as a temperance narrative of sorts is Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring. Of all the books I examined for this project, few other texts apparently align themselves more thematically with the form of the temperance narrative than this novel; however, it does so with a different set of underlying ideologies and with its tongue, at various points, firmly in cheek. Thurman’s novel records the patterns of daily life for bohemians in Harlem during Prohibition, and wrestles with the importance of art as an integral ingredient in racial uplift. While there are some few exceptions, alcohol in Thurman’s novel becomes a barrier for African American artistic production, rather than the inspirational potion that some artists believed it to be, and only through eschewing alcohol can the African American artist potentially produce an art that will bring acclaim to his people. Thurman turns alcohol to his own ends, incorporating temperance narrative conventions to present his ambivalent view of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition, alcohol and race mixing, as we shall see, becomes a preoccupation both of this novel and a number of other Harlem Renaissance novels. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s concept of “Signifyin(g)” has been a key theoretical tool in my understanding of Thurman’s approach to temperance narratives and Infants of the Spring. Signfyin(g), which, Gates claims, is a key element of African American 165 literature and culture, focuses on repetition and improvisation. As Gates observes, “Repetition, with a signal difference, is fundamental to the nature of Signifyin(g)” (51). In addition, in describing how Signifyin(g) works, Gates discusses jazz, blues, and improvisation: “Improvisation, of course, so fundamental to the very idea of jazz, is ‘nothing more’ than repetition and revision. In this sort of revision, again where meaning is fixed, it is the realignment of the signifier that is the signal trait of expressive genius. The more mundane the fixed text . . . the more dramatic is the Signifyin(g) revision” (63- 64). For my project then, I see Thurman taking the fixed form of the temperance narrative and realigning the signifier. Recognizing how utterly mundane, even laughably ridiculous, temperance narratives and claims would have been in the views of many Prohibition-era writers, Thurman’s genius is in taking the teleological, moralistic form of the temperance narrative and turning it back upon itself, simultaneously ostensibly agreeing with its claims about alcohol yet celebrating alcohol in ways that the temperance movement would have found abhorrent, while realigning the signifiers of alcohol away from the creation of an ideal American identity to a discussion of racial mixing, integration, and the possibility for a Harlem Renaissance. As we shall see at the end of my chapter, Thurman is not the only author to revise the tropes established by the temperance narrative. The apparent ambivalence of Infants of the Spring, which both celebrates and vilifies alcohol, both hopes for and denies the liberating power of African American art, is an artifact of Thurman’s own views about Harlem and Modern life. Langston Hughes portrayed him as “a strange kind of fellow, who liked to drink gin, but didn’t like to drink 166 gin; who liked being a Negro, but felt it a great handicap; who adored bohemianism, but thought it wrong to be bohemian” (185). In addition, Hughes points to Thurman’s ambivalence about literature. Well read in Western literature, Thurman was still able to thoroughly enjoy a book and then “[find] a million things wrong with it” (182). This man of contrasts even had a list of dislikes that Theosophilus Lewis, to whom Thurman was an assistant while Lewis was editor of Looking Glass, could articulate: “all Negro uplift societies, Greta Garbo, Negro novelists including himself, Negro society, New York State divorce laws, morals, religion, politics, censors, policemen, sympathetic white folks who go in for helping Negroes, and every damned spot in the United States except Manhattan” (Anderson 209). With this understanding of Thurman, one scene in the novel may help to explain Thurman’s complicated moral views surrounding his ambivalent approach to the temperance narrative form and his critique of African American culture. In the salon scene, in which Raymond hosts a group of budding Harlem artists working under the auspices of Dr. Parkes, who hopes that this will be the birth of an even bolder Harlem Renaissance, Raymond responds to the various opinions that arise by declaring that “To me, a wholesale flight back to Africa or a wholesale allegiance to Communism or a wholesale adherence to an antiquated and for the most part ridiculous propagandistic program are equally futile and unintelligent” (Thurman 240). The word “wholesale” summarizes Thurman’s skeptical views of anyone who holds the naïve belief that a singular vision, a determined course, can provide a consistent, reliable solution. Thus, his use of the teleological form of the temperance narrative, coupled with its antithesis, a 167 celebration of alcohol that, for the most part, lacks the dire consequences predicted by temperance narratives, plus the contrasting hopes of racial harmony that art can offer and the continuance of racial divides that crop up throughout the novel, among a host of other ambivalent concerns, serve as Thurman’s rallying cry for a kind of temperate, rational behavior that had been abandoned by both the temperance movement and those who sought racial reconciliation. In Thurman’s novel, no one course will guarantee a desired result, and those who moor their hopes on a deterministic stereotype limit the possibilities of the human spirit. Thurman opens Infants of the Spring with an epigraph from Hamlet. If Infants of the Spring is a temperance narrative of sorts, one about the construction of the ideal African American artist rather than the construction of the ideal American, then the epigraph indicates how we should read the novel: The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent. (5) In Infants, the canker that galls the infants of the spring, the flowers of Harlem, is alcohol. This “liquid dew” blasts Harlem’s aesthetes while they are still young, before they can solidify their position as part of DuBois’s “talented tenth.” However, Thurman’s epigraph from Maxim Gorky indicates that although the youth of Harlem may be doomed by demon rum, they are those who “are not quite achieved, who are not very wise, a little mad, ‘possessed.’” This state of possession is what makes these unfinished characters in this novel more “plausible” and “interesting” (7). Thus, while most temperance novels would attack the drunkard, structuring him as an enemy of mankind, 168 Thurman’s novel will be much more sympathetic to the drinker as a more interesting character, while struggling with the inescapable worry that these interesting characters will wind up creating works that are second-rate or, more tragically, erased and never read. By the second page of the novel, Thurman’s characters begin drinking, ensuring their enshrinement as interesting characters. However, the drinking begins immediately following a discussion focusing on aesthetics and Negro art. Raymond, the central character in the novel, and, in this roman à clef, Thurman’s mouthpiece, brings Stephen, a white foreigner, and Samuel, a white American with visions of great service to the African race, to visit the apartments in Harlem that will soon come to be called Niggeratti Manor. Stephen complements the décor, and Raymond indicates that Samuel does not appreciate it, for the place seems to embrace the African identity of its denizens a little too strongly for Samuel’s taste, which finds some of the decorations offensive: Namely, the red and black draperies, red and black bed cover, the crimson wicker chairs, the riotous hook rugs, and Paul’s erotic drawings. You see, Steve, Sam thinks it’s all rather flamboyant and vulgar. He can’t forget that he’s a Nordic and that I’m a Negro, and according to all the sociology books, my taste is naturally crass and vulgar. I must not go in for loud colors. It’s a confession of my inferior race heritage. Am I right, Sam? (11-12) As Thurman introduces the struggle of many in Harlem over whether or not to embrace their African heritage or to adopt more European tastes, the aesthetic discussion focuses on Paul’s paintings, which Samuel labels obscene and Steve feels are astonishing and feature a skilled use of color. Raymond terminates the discussion with an exasperated plea that Steve enlighten Sam about the merits of Paul’s work and an offer of highballs (12). As the discussion begins to approach a compelling level, a place where the men can 169 argue over the essentializing of taste and aesthetics, Raymond silences the conversation with alcohol, and the three men retreat to different corners of the room. Some of the attendant dangers of alcohol and African Americans are made fun of when Raymond brings the drinks to Steve and Sam. Stephen indicates that when he knew Samuel at the University of Toronto, Sam “wouldn’t even take a drop of ale” (13), but Raymond has apparently educated Sam in the ways of the drinker, even though the drink he offers Samuel is still a little weak (13). Thus, the African American writer has introduced the white American to alcohol, aligned nicely with the temperance narratives that almost always identified foreigners, immigrants, and “others” as the providers of alcohol, seducing white Americans. 59 It is important to note that Stephen himself is a foreigner, albeit a Nordic one: “I was born in Canada. My father was Norwegian, my mother was a Dane. I was educated at the University of Toronto where I met Sam and identified myself as much as possible with things American. My folks moved back to Copenhagen. I spent the summer with them…” (23). In the temperance narrative racial schema, Stephen’s identity may be close to ideal as he is Nordic. Although Stephen is not quite an Anglo-Saxon, he is trying to be ideally American. In the hierarchy of Harlem, Stephen’s status as Canadian Dane allows him access to a world that Samuel, as privileged white American tinged by America’s racist past, cannot fully enter. Thus, in this novel that complicates both the temperance narrative form and ideologies, and the African American construction of the 59 Arriving in Springfield, New York after wandering into and out of New York City, George Dutcher informs his readers, “At nine o’clock in the evening, I entered a saloon kept by some colored men, where they played billiards and cards (222). Waking up three days later surrounded by worried men and women, he recalls little of the rest of the evening. He chooses this moment to discuss the horrors of his experience with delirium tremens, conflating race, alcohol, and some of alcohol’s worst horrors. 170 ideal artist and the Harlem Renaissance, Stephen is a strange figure, not quite serving as the ideal American of the temperance narrative, yet underscoring the trouble between white and black in America, since even a foreigner can get drawn into the feelings and ideologies of our racist system. Stephen’s status as foreigner is part of what attracts Raymond to him. The two meet at a dinner hosted by Samuel, each recognizing in the other something of the exotic, the outsider, that provides a bond that no one else in the novel shares. While the temperance narrative sought to bring Americans back into line, to create a sense of the ideal patterns of behavior for Americans, Thurman’s temperance narrative instead focuses on the outsider, inverting the former focus of the form. The connection between these two “othered” identities allows Thurman to criticize the various ideologies of identity and temperance that had been used to keep Americans separate from each other, more clearly delineating race lines and ensuring racial division. In the outsider, the “other,” Thurman can voice his concerns with the ideal worlds that both blacks and whites had attempted to construct around him, worlds which seemed failed to him, much like the millennial promises of the temperance movement seemed failed to the white Moderns such as Fitzgerald. If one were to trace every appearance of alcohol in the novel, every time someone is intoxicated or drunk, then one would be very busy indeed. To avoid creating a tedious cataloging of these events, I will focus on the number of times that drinking and alcohol accrue greater significance, and on the ways the novel mimics and perhaps mocks the temperance narrative, Signifyin(g), in other words, in order to critique Modern Harlem. 171 As Ray and Steve get to know each other in this first scene, each sizing up the other, Steve tries to read Ray’s apparently mixed racial heritage (16), Ray states he is ready for another drink and asks Steve if he would like another: “I can’t say that I’m crazy about the taste of your gin, but I suppose the effect is desirable.” “Quite. You must get used to Harlem gin. It’s a valuable and ubiquitous commodity. I couldn’t do without it.” (18) Here, gin will become an important metaphor for Stephen’s relationship with Harlem. Harlem gin is itself an interesting concept, almost oxymoronic in the constructions of the temperance narrative, for gin is an essentially European drink, having originated in Holland, whence it moved to England, where gin distilling arguably reached its apex. The ease of creating an ersatz form of gin is the primary reason that gin became the drink of choice for Harlemites; it required far fewer raw materials, and plenty of additives were available to mimic the flavors of higher-quality gins. Stephen, as the European foreigner, takes issue with the taste of the gin, an interesting phrase in the light of the characters’ earlier discussion concerning aesthetics, essentialism, and taste. Thus, the taste of Harlem gin is perhaps slightly jarring for Stephen, and probably for the other whites who cross into Harlem for a chance at lawbreaking and identity shifting, but the effect, that of inebriation, of easing the imbiber into a transgressive non-ideal American identity, is what entices whites of all kind, foreign or American, to the speakeasies and apartments of Harlem. Raymond’s reply solidifies the fact that the gin is indeed from Harlem, and Raymond imbues the gin with a significance that will resonate throughout the novel. For many Harlem Renaissance writers, alcohol becomes associated with African American identity, as we shall see in the rest of this chapter. However, 172 understanding that this association exists allows us to realize that what Raymond is talking about is not necessarily just Harlem gin, but the distilled essence of Harlem itself, African American identity. Thus, Raymond’s reply becomes a sort of manifesto of African American identity. Whites, whether foreign or not, must get used to African Americans. They are a “valuable and ubiquitous commodity,” having a greater impact on American society than white Americans may want to admit. Ray’s admission that he couldn’t do without Harlem gin, is his recognition that African American identity is essential to his being, but his admission is also a reminder to all who read the novel that no one, white or black, can do without African Americans. The conversation progresses to the introduction of Raymond’s landlady, Euphoria Blake, whom Thurman presents as an interesting amalgam of the Victorian Titaness, the African American patroness of the arts, and a mockery of both. Here, Thurman writes: It just happens that my present landlady is a visionary as well as a businesswoman. She has dreams. One of them is that some day she will be a best selling author. That accounts for this house. She knew the difficulties experienced by Harlem artists and intellectuals in finding congenial living quarters, and reasoned that by turning this house over to Negroes engaged in creative work, she would make money, achieve prestige as a patron, and at the same time profit artistically from the resultant contacts. (19) Stephen’s ensuing question reveals a key problem the novel will address: “Is the house entirely filled with these …er…creative spirits?” While Euphoria may hope to have a house that will become a focal point for the Harlem Renaissance, and while those artists who live in her house may aspire to achieve her dream, Stephen’s oxymoronic self- conscious pun on “spirits” unveils the clash between artistic creativity and alcohol, for a great preoccupation of the novel will be, as I stated earlier, the difficulty of creating while 173 inebriated, the almost perpetual condition of everyone who lives in Euphoria’s house. Euphoria will later attend a party in Niggeratti Manor at which she attempts to aspire to some form of the artistic life. Unlike the Titaness that she partly resembles in her moralism concerning uplift, she asks for a drink (50), and accepts one when Pelham returns with gin and ginger ale (53). Having witnessed her tenants at work, Euphoria is aware of the amount of drinking that occurs, and she, like many artists and laypeople of the time, associates inspiration with the drinking that these artists do. However, when she is served her drinks, she “emptied her glass more quickly than the others, then announced her intention of leaving… ‘I gotta go. It’s late, and I have to make time in the morning. Not being an artist…yet…I must work’” (53). Euphoria falls prey to the belief that alcohol can provide inspiration and hopes for a small taste of it; yet she also knows that imbibing too much would impair the work she must do. It will not be until later in the novel that she and others start to lay the morality of the Titaness upon the denizens of Niggeratti Manor, especially Raymond, who seems to hold the most promise for fulfilling everyone’s dreams for artistic achievement. Paul and Pelham, two contrasting characters, round out the residents of Nigeratti Manor, each representing a different promise of artistic achievement. Paul appears to be a genius, able to produce paintings and writings that inspire awe, while Pelham writes doggerel, and acts as manservant to the rest of the aspiring artists. Paul begins to tell Stephen about his paintings, but does so only by self-identifying himself through the work of others, such as Wilde, Baudelaire, Blake, Gauguin, Picasso, indicating that he is a composite of these other giants. Refusing to speak any more of his paintings, he 174 declares it is time to go to a speakeasy to celebrate Stephen’s first experience of Harlem, but then demands that Samuel and Pelham stay behind. These two “anti-artists,” Samuel who is only interested in racial uplift but not art, and Pelham, who exists to serve others and whose poetry is mediocre at best, are not invited to join the artists on their binge. Samuel, the virtual teetotaler and Pelham, who will be most effective as bartender (or saloon keeper) for the artists, serve as foils to the too facile morality of the temperance narrative form that Thurman incorporates. While temperance narratives were terribly naïve and teleological in their insistence that alcohol would surely doom the drinker from the first sip and that the drinker would proceed to follow a predetermined set of scripts, Thurman is not so conveniently morally insistent, complicating the ready morality and ideology of both temperance and the Harlem Renaissance by creating two characters that shift back and forth between not drinking—yet also not being interested in art, or capable of only creating mediocre art at best, for not every artist in Harlem qualifies as the Talented Tenth—and drinking, occasionally even providing the drinks for others. Yet Pelham, who often takes the role of saloonkeeper in this temperance narrative, remains free of the excoriation the narrator of temperance narratives usually reserves for the saloonkeeper. Samuel, who cannot produce art whether he is sober or not, will provide the moral opprobrium usually voiced by temperance activists, yet his lack of artistic production, his own participation in drinking, and his desire to be the great white hope for his African American friends, leaves him in an unstable moral position from which he is far less free—in the moral schema of the temperance narrative that dictates only the 175 temperate, the productive, should sit in judgment—to cast aspersions on those people whom he envisions himself serving. The idea of Infants of the Spring as a sort of temperance narrative that, generally unlike Gatsby, does critique alcohol use finds its grounds in a number of scenes that contrast drinking with artistic production. Throughout the novel, Thurman portrays alcohol as a barrier to inspiration, rather than inspiration itself. As the ostensible focus of the novel, Raymond bears much of the weight of this temperance narrative, being told by others to stop drinking, recognizing in himself some connection between alcohol and an inability to write, and occasionally serving as a thematic focus of a critique of alcohol, without, as a character, being aware of that critique. I have already begun to make a case for this view, but a number of scenes reinforce my position. One such scene is Raymond’s discussion with Euphoria as he walks her home after her drink and before her day of work. Euphoria voices her concern that some of her tenants, namely Eustace and Pelham, might be unable to pay their rent. Euphoria admits that Pelham provides a number of services around the house, so she does not mind if he is behind, and Raymond is quick to alleviate her fears about Eustace by pointing out that he has plenty of belongings to pawn. Euphoria then says, “I guess you’re right, but I wonder if the house is going to be productive artistically. None of you seem to be doing much work. All I run into are gin parties” (56). Serving her role as Titaness, Euphoria begins to articulate a concern that alcohol might have some detrimental effect on her vision for a Harlem art studio. Certainly not as vociferous in her opposition to alcohol as were some white Titanesses, such as Frances Willard or Carry Nation, yet she, as the head of this 176 household, still feels the need to voice her moral concern. Raymond’s reply, “That’s part of our creativeness,” has the ring of avoiding her concerns, and sounds a bit too much like the position that Prohibition-era writers often took in their approaches to alcohol. 60 If one accepts the fact that drinking could be performing some form of cultural work that attempts to reshape or resist the cultural norms of temperance and Prohibition, then the drinking in Niggeratti Manor could be creative, a liquid text that is not quite what Euphoria had in mind. However, there seems to be no such attempt to make their drinking a conscious cultural work; rather, their drinking seems to be, on the surface at least, drinking for drinking’s sake, at most a celebration of scofflawism. Raymond’s quick answer to her concern intimates that he may also share her concern, but does not want to admit it, and so quickly dismisses her concerns with a jest. On his way back to Niggeratti Manor, Raymond thinks about Euphoria’s concern over a lack of production, and recalls a conversation he had with Stephen earlier in the evening: “Just when are you going to begin work on your novel, Ray?” “I don’t know, Steve,” Raymond had answered. “I can’t get started. Something holds me back.” “Laziness?” “Partially.” “Lack of material?” “You know it isn’t that. Haven’t I often outlined the thing for you? I know what I want to write…but…” He had shrugged his shoulders. “Something holds me back.” 60 In The Thirsty Muse, Tom Dardis discusses the connection between creativity and alcohol upon which many American writers have insisted: Over the years, many of our best artists have accepted such a connection. In fact, several have claimed they had little choice but to drink, and heavily at that, if they were to perform at their creative peak. In this view, creativity flowers at its fullest when the constrictions inhibiting everyday life are swept aside by alcohol. Thus drinking is believed to open the windows of the soul; true vision is achieved only when the mind has been liberated by liquor… (3-4). 177 Stephen had shifted his gaze and lit a cigarette. “Are you afraid,” he had asked, “of exposing your own peculiar complex?” (58) The discussion continues with some ultimately fruitless exploration of what might be holding Ray back, perhaps some racial inferiority complex, a fear that Ray and others like him might be unable to produce the kind of work to which they aspire, a position Ray denies. However, coming on the heels of his discussion with Euphoria, and preceding Ray’s arrival home where he finds everyone drunk, one cannot escape the possibility that Euphoria may be on to something. Pointing to alcohol as the one thing that keeps artistic production down is a bit too easy, a “wholesale” solution that Thurman would probably deny, but alcohol certainly plays a major role in providing that barrier to productivity that Raymond feels holding him back and which may play a larger part in the “complex” Stephen intimates Raymond avoids. Later, alcohol will again be a sign for a lack of production in Ray. Bull, the virile black stereotype who visits Niggeratti Manor, provides readers with his views of race mixing, in which he reveals that he despises white men who prey on black women, but who himself wants to have any white woman he can get in order to hurt white men. In the silence that follows this revelation, due in part to the uncomfortable recognition that Stephen is a white man and was with the group listening to this diatribe, Paul asks Bull to identify the packet of cardboard he has with him. Bull answers, “Just some drawin’s of mine I brung along to show you.” Raymond, surprised by this turn of events, “became choked on the gin he was drinking. The others were equally aghast” (70). Ostensibly, Raymond’s reaction is an expression of his surprise that the brutish Bull would have any 178 artistic talent at all. The drawings indicate some skill, although a skill tinged by Bull’s particular outlook on the world: his sketches of women are “huge amazons with pugilistic biceps, prominent muscular bulges, and broad shoulders” (70). Even though Bull’s work might be called more graphic design than art, might be more suited to comic books than to art galleries, there is no denying that he is producing something, flawed though it may be. Bull, of course, is a drinker, so Thurman avoids the too facile condemnation of alcohol that would arise from the kind of view of alcohol similar to the temperance narratives’ that argued alcohol affected all people in the same way. However, there is a reaction in Raymond, a reaction that is consistent with Ray’s struggle with alcohol and inspiration. In the presence of “artistic” production, Ray’s drinking produces a reaction in his body. He experiences an almost reflexive rejection of alcohol, choking on gin, at the revelation of Bull’s work. While the others are “equally aghast,” no one chokes on their drinks, even though they had all been drinking as Raymond had. As Ray is the character most aligned with Thurman in this roman à clef, one must wonder if this depiction of Ray’s struggle with alcohol is emblematic of Thurman’s own struggle, for he appears in Ann Douglas’s catalog of alcoholic writers (23 Terrible Honesty). Raymond’s dilemma with alcohol blocking his production is underscored on the next page, the beginning of chapter seven: “For a week or so after Bull’s explosion, things were fairly quiet in Niggeratti Manor. And Raymond had taken advantage of the lull in gin drinking to do some work on the first chapter of his proposed novel” (71). If we have been lax in our observations concerning alcohol in this novel, then this passage makes the connection between alcohol and a lack of artistic production perfectly clear. 179 Without the influence of gin, either on others or on himself, Raymond can finally begin work on his novel. For the most part, this will be the pattern throughout the rest of the novel. When he is drinking, Ray will not be able to write. Only when he is not drinking will he be able to pursue his artistic goals, 61 While certainly not as vocal in its attack on alcohol as temperance narratives usually are—that is, the novel is not written from the vantage point of a reformed drinker who tells us his tale of survival and repentance—the novel still recognizes the dangers alcohol can pose to a person striving to perform any kind of work. Unlike many of his Prohibition-era contemporaries, Thurman retains alcohol’s biological imperative, refusing to write a novel that takes a wholesale celebratory approach to alcohol. Ray’s creative abilities can flower in the absence of alcohol, even if all he is working on is a book review, which he finally finishes in chapter nine. His review, which happens to be three days late, derides a book he despises by one of the class of African American writers he feels are only writing not because they had anything of merit to say but because they felt they needed to represent the best of their race to white readers. Approaching the end of his review, he is interrupted by Janet and Aline: “Got anything to drink?” “Is that the reason you disturbed me? No, I have nothing to drink and no money. Isn’t there any downstairs?” “No. Pretty tough, eh?” “Probably a blessing.” (92) 61 I am amused by the woodcutting by Michael McCurdy that illustrates the cover of the Northeastern University Press edition of Infants of the Spring. The image features a white man, most likely Stephen, sitting in a wicker armchair in the background, while an African American man, presumably Raymond, sits at a desk in the foreground, writing some kind of manuscript with a bottle of rye whiskey and a full glass on the desk next to the manuscript. As is true of many illustrations that grace the covers of novels, this scene never happens in the novel. First of all, as I have indicated, Ray cannot drink and write. Second—a picayune detail, I know—no rye whiskey appears in the novel. A bottle of gin would be a more accurate choice, but still inconsistent with the novel’s preoccupation with alcohol and artistic production. 180 Even the desire for a drink can interrupt Ray’s progress, but as the desire is not his, he is able to finish the review, due in no small part to the blessing of an absence of alcohol and a temperate, sober mind. At the end of the chapter, the rest of the denizens of Niggeratti Manor, in a fit of thirst and desperation, hold a ceremony in which they pray for gin. The prayer is a great mockery of the prayers of the temperance movement, which sought the eradication of alcohol, and begs, in no uncertain terms, that they be delivered of their thirst through the sending of gin (102). Ray, having experienced some progress in pursuing the muse, resents being drawn into the prayer. As the next chapter begins, the prayer has yet to be answered, and Ray is recruited to go to the corner speakeasy and ask for some gin on credit. “But this Raymond refused to do. He, himself, was not over-anxious for a drink, and consequently felt no interest in whether the others had any or not” (103). Echoing the moments in temperance narratives when the drunkard believes he has finally been delivered from the curse of alcohol, Raymond seems to be moving into a new step in his relationship with drink. Rather than eagerly agreeing to the offer of a drink, Raymond, aware of the productivity he has experienced without alcohol, is happy to see it go, for now. But Raymond is soon back to drinking, and in a scene that recalls the almost inevitable misappropriation of funds that occurs in most temperance tales—in which money meant for some noble end such as feeding the drinker’s family is instead squandered on a terrific spree—Raymond winds up spending money given to him for another purpose. The Niggeratti Manorites throw a Donation party, asking their guests to 181 bring donations of food that will sustain the Manorites until they can afford more. This variation on a rent party would not have been uncommon in Harlem during Prohibition. While most of the guests bring gifts of food or drink, Barbara, a young Jewish woman passing as royalty and known as Countess Nitsky, approaches Raymond at the party with her retinue, introduces Raymond to the crowd, then slips something into Raymond’s hand. “’For Negro art,’ she whispered, then, slipping quickly away, corralled her friends and ushered them toward the punch bowl. Raymond opened his palm and gasped at the sight of a twenty-dollar bill” (177). Barbara has bequeathed unto Raymond a generous donation, casting herself as patroness. Yet her patronage of the arts is quickly forgotten: “It was one-thirty. The twenty dollar bill had been given to Eustace, who had sent for another dozen bottles of gin” (182). The donation in support of the arts is, like the arts themselves, steered astray by gin. Once more, Raymond sacrifices art for alcohol. Of course, the behavior of those in Niggeratti Manor attracts the attention of judgmental busybodies who feel it incumbent upon themselves to criticize. An editorial in a Harlem news weekly, the New York Call, adopts the moral tone of the temperance movement and of those in Harlem who feel the race must be presented in only the most positive light: There was…a house in Harlem which had for its residents a number of young Negro writers and artists. Instead of pursuing their work, they were spending their time drinking and carousing with a low class of whites from downtown. Racial integrity they had none. They were satisfied to woo decadence, satisfied to dedicate their life to a routine of drunkenness and degeneracy with cheap white people, rather than mingle with the respectable elements of their own race. (197) The editorial uses a technique of the temperance movement to further its agenda, using the public forum to create a sense of proper behavior. In addition to condemning the 182 drinking going on in the Manor, the article focuses on the dangers of carousing with low- class whites, making one more connection between drinking and race mixing. Another scene that contains traces of the temperance narrative comes in chapter twenty-one: For three days and nights, [Raymond] had secluded himself in his room, and devoted all his time to the continuance of his novel. For three years it had remained a project. Now he was making rapid progress. The ease with which he could work once he set himself to it amazed him, and at the same time he was suspicious of this unexpected facility. Nevertheless, his novel was progressing, and he intended to let nothing check him. In line with this resolution, he insisted that Paul and Eustace hold their nightly gin parties without his presence, and they were also abjured to steer all company clear of his studio. (226) Again, Raymond has recognized the connection between alcohol and a muddling of inspiration. While an overt connection between social interruptions and a lack of progress is made, alcohol is still part of that something that keeps his progress in check. However, there is no wholesale adoption of temperance. Raymond will continue to drink in other scenes, as will other characters, but this scene is the last one to acknowledge alcohol’s power to keep creativity at bay. We are given no promise that Raymond will continue to recognize alcohol’s power, nor that he will produce any more once we reach the end of his narrative. The hope offered by most survivor temperance narratives is never fully voiced. In fact, in Infants of the Spring Thurman presents us with a drinker who is on at least one occasion so unrepentant that he recognizes the damaging effects of alcohol and uses those effects as a weapon to sabotage a movement in which he no longer believes. In the salon scene, Dr. Parkes has asked Raymond to host a group of the most promising 183 artists and thinkers of Harlem. Upon receiving Dr. Parkes’s letter, Raymond realizes an opportunity for deflating those who have adopted a wholesale hope in the intellectual promise of the Harlem Renaissance, and “mischievously” (229) begins to make phone invitations. As we have seen, Raymond is well aware of the intellectually enervating effects of alcohol, yet he is quick to ensure that alcohol will be present at this event. Once all the guests arrive at Niggeratti Manor, we read that “[t]here was an hour of small talk and drinking of mild cocktails in order to induce ease and allow the various guests to become acquainted and voluble” (233). Raymond seduces his guests with the not unusual sentiment that alcohol could lubricate social situations and perhaps even inspire the imbiber to greater creative heights. Whether or not alcohol is capable of providing such effects, Raymond is well aware that drinking can quickly devolve into something far less noble. Spurred on by Raymond’s mischievous machinations, the salon does exactly that. The artists argue about the role of art, the hopes of racial reconciliation, and disagreements abound. Soon, things turn ugly: Pandemonium reigned. The master of ceremonies could not cope with the situation. Cedric called Sweetie an illiterate southern hussy. She called him all types of profane West Indian monkey chasers. DeWitt and David were shocked and showed it. The literary doctor, the Communist and Fenderson moved uneasily around the room. Annette and Paul giggled. The two child prodigies from Boston looked on wide-eyed, utterly bewildered and dismayed. Raymond leaned back in his chair, puffing on a cigarette, detached and amused. Austin, the portrait painter, audibly repeated over and over to himself: “Just like niggers…just like niggers.” Carl Denny interposed himself between Cedric and Sweetie May. Dr. Parkes clucked for civilized behavior, which came only when Cedric stalked angrily out of the room. (243) 184 Raymond’s work in manipulating the palaver into an entertaining display of everything the salon should be working against has worked, but his plan is far from completed. Again, under the guise of hospitable host, Raymond serves “a soothing cocktail” (243). Once more, Thurman articulates a sentiment about the nature of alcohol that Raymond ironically exploits. Throughout the novel, Thurman has presented stereotypes of alcohol that he inconsistently undermines, sometimes providing the exact opposite of the stereotypes, sometimes ignoring them. Such work highlights Raymond’s views on the “wholesale” adoption of anything, including stereotypes. Any claim that alcohol will consistently provide certain effects, or will guarantee preordained outcomes reflects a naïve essentializing of alcohol, and Thurman’s presentation of these beliefs serves double duty as a social commentary on the temperance movement and Prohibition and about the essentializing of race. If some mere liquid such as alcohol can contain all of these stereotypes, yet both fulfill and deny them depending upon the situation, then how can something as complex as a human, no matter his race, be expected to be easily stereotyped? Rather than soothe his guests, Raymond hopes the alcohol will inspire even more entertainment. It does, of course, and the party collapses in chaos: Paul rushed to Carl’s rescue. He quoted Wilde in rebuttal: Nature imitates art, then went on to blaspheme Sargent. Carl, having found some words to express a new idea fermenting in his brain, forgot the argument at hand, went off on a tangent and began telling the dazed Dr. Parkes about the Negroid quality in his drawings. DeWitt yawned and consulted his watch. Raymond mused that he probably resented having missed the prayer meeting which he attended every Thursday night. In another corner of the room the Communist and Fenderson had locked horns over the ultimate solution of the Negro problem. In loud voices each contended for his own particular solution. Karl Marx and Lenin were pitted against Du Bois and his disciples. The writing doctor, bored to death, slipped 185 quietly from the room without announcing his departure or even saying good night. Being more intelligent than most of the others, he had wisely kept silent. Tony and Sweetie May had taken adjoining chairs, and were soon engaged in comparing their versions of original verses to the St. James Infirmary, which Tony contended was soon to become as epical as the St. Louis Blues. Annette and Howard began gossiping about various outside personalities. The child prodigies looked from one to another, silent, perplexed, uncomfortable, not knowing what to do or say. Dr. Parkes visibly recoiled from Carl’s incoherent expository barrage, and wilted in his chair, willing but unable to effect a courteous exit. Raymond sauntered around the room, dispensing cocktails, chuckling to himself. (244-245) This final chaotic scene underscores the variety of approaches to the Negro Renaissance and the plethora of effects of the alcohol that everyone has been drinking. One can, as Paul does, turn to white artists for inspiration, venerating Wilde and attacking Sargent, becoming fawning and belligerent. Like Carl, one can highlight “Negroid qualities,” having become intellectually unhinged and incoherent. DeWitt is bored and regrets missing prayer meetings, seeking God as solution to the Negro problem and as moral arbiter. Like Fenderson and the Communist, one can become bellicose followers of Marx or DuBois, hoping for reconciliation through economic or intellectual means while feeling the pugnacious effects of alcohol. One can simply withdraw oneself from the fray as the writing doctor does, ignoring the Negro problem and succumbing to an effect of alcohol that inspires taciturnity and solitude. The blues and jazz can be seen as the way out of race problems, as Tony and Sweetie May become lost in their fascination with music as many drinkers do. Annette and Howard, as many race activists and drinkers do, get lost in gossip about personalities. The prodigies are confused, not sure what to do in this new Negro Renaissance, confused by the cacophony and by drink. Dr. Parke wilts, 186 ineffective in his work, drained by the alcohol. Raymond continues serving drinks, sauntering and chuckling to himself. In the salon scene alone, we have seen alcohol imbibed to ease social situations, to inspire creativity, and to soothe. In Raymond’s hands, we have seen alcohol used as a weapon. In this final catalogue of responses to the Negro problem and to alcohol, Thurman completely undermines any hope in a single-handed, wholesale approach to anything, presenting a complex variety of responses and outcomes revealing no easy solutions to social problems nor any teleology of alcohol that allows the drinker to default to predetermined behavioral scripts. Such a recognition of the complexity of both race solutions and alcohol reveals Thurman’s more sophisticated views of both, but an endless fascination with complexity and an erosion of a belief in wholesale solutions or outcomes suffers its own downfall, the chaos into which the party descends, ultimately providing no solutions to race problems while simultaneously revealing that, while alcohol can have a number of effects, not simply the one claimed by the temperance movement, it still does not readily bow to any one person’s hopes or fears, providing no ready solutions nor excuses; certainly there is no “soothing” here. While Thurman critiques credulous attitudes concerning both drinking and race, he adapts other elements of the temperance narrative to his own end, providing readers with the kind of foil character that many temperance narratives present, the drinker who does not survive and repent. Paul, who in many ways is similar to Raymond in his artistic potential, never recognizes alcohol’s impediment to his creativity, and will pay for that oversight. 187 At the end of the novel, as the residents of Niggeratti Manor have gone their separate ways, Raymond receives a phone call in the middle of the night informing him of Paul’s suicide. Paul had performed one last dramatic act, hoping to cement his place in the annals of literary greatness through the force of his final work. Granted, Paul’s suicide is not explicitly brought on in a fit of alcoholic despair, but then Thurman is not committed to the temperance narrative form in so wholesale a manner. However, Paul does commit suicide after attending a party where there had been liquor and cocaine (282), and the circumstantial connection is exactly the kind of connection that temperance activists would point to as the indicator of the dangers of alcohol and that rising danger, cocaine. Thurman plays with the narrative expectations of the temperance narrative, offering a suicide seemingly connected to alcohol, but given no overt sermonizing about the dangers of drink. Instead, in the continual conflation of alcohol and art that Thurman has been exploring, what is of prime concern in this scene is not necessarily the death of a drinker, but the death of an artist, whose life given up in the name of art becomes utterly meaningless as his death in the bathtub erases his text, Wu Sing: The Geisha Man, due to the inundation of the bathroom with the spilled water from the bathtub, the source of all that Prohibition-era bathtub gin. For Thurman, who has connected a critique of the Harlem Renaissance with a critique of temperance, suspicious of and yet hopeful for both, the ending becomes the bleak ending of a failed temperance narrative, and the Harlem Renaissance ends in the suicide of one of the few artists who possessed the potential to leave behind a legacy of true art. That, coupled with Lucille’s announcement of her pregnancy by Bull and her subsequent abortion, leans toward a dark 188 vision of an African American future that ends in race suicide, unable to reproduce, and unable to leave a lasting legacy of art in its wake. Paul’s sketch of a black skyscraper reminiscent of Niggeratti Manor that will soon crumble, leaving “dominating white lights in full possession of the sky” (284) underscores Thurman’s worry about the futility of African American art to struggle against a world dominated by white artists. Combining that bleak vision with the frequently optimistic form of the temperance narrative forces readers to consider the naïve hopes wholesale believers in the ready solutions offered by the temperance narrative and the Harlem Renaissance have foisted upon the world. Arguably a despairing ending, it must be tempered against the often optimistic tone adopted by many characters in the novel and by social critics concerning both an ability to drink moderately and to produce an African American art that can stand on its own against white aesthetics. While Thurman may use the temperance narrative form as a foundation for his critique of the Harlem Renaissance, the intersection of alcohol and race does not end with the appropriation of a form saturated with racial ideology, but continues in the use of alcohol as sign. For Thurman, and for other Harlem Renaissance writers, Prohibition offers an opportunity to critique the position of the African American as outsider, as unwanted, in American society. As I explained in my second chapter, a crucial element in temperance movement ideology is the construction of the ideal American identity as white, Anglo, and temperate, and to dismiss alcohol as belonging to all things non- American, whether that be immigrants, American Indians, or African Americans. Thus, Thurman and other African American writers use the apparent victory of the temperance 189 movement in Prohibition to critique that ideology. As alcohol becomes a prohibited substance under Prohibition, and as alcohol had been connected to non-white identities by the temperance movement, then, by extension, African Americans and other non- Anglos become Prohibited as well. For narratives that explore the implications of race, the possibilities of African American identity, alcohol will become an important symbol signifying the rejection of entire peoples through the rejection of alcohol. Thurman and other writers will make an unequivocal connection between alcohol and African American identity in a collective game of the dozens with white America is the target. In the calm after the temperance storm that culminated in Prohibition, African American voices can finally be heard as they explore the implications of temperance ideologies and begin to both adopt and resist their role in relationship to alcohol. Stephen offers readers some insight into this view of African American identity and Harlem. In his letter to Raymond in which he says goodbye yet hopes their friendship will not end, he writes, “I’ve drunk my fill of Harlem” (190). Casting Harlem as something that can be drunk, as a liquid that in this era of Prohibition can only be alcohol, Stephen clearly connects Harlem, African American identity, and alcohol. The letter serves as Stephen’s declaration of temperance repentance, his recognition that he has abandoned a white identity, albeit a Nordic European one, for his forays into Harlem and his opportunities to use alcohol as an entrance into the forbidden identities offered by both alcohol and Harlem. The conflation of the two and the fact that this observation comes from a foreigner underscores the inability for white Americans to have made this connection, even though it is a connection that they themselves, in the ranks of the 190 temperance movement, created. Harlem and alcohol are intricately intertwined as two symbols of prohibited identities in the minds of white Americans. Some of Thurman’s fears for Harlem and alcohol are contained in Lucille. Having already discussed Thurman’s bleak hope for the Harlem renaissance in his depiction of Paul’s death, and its continuation of temperance narrative elements, I would like to turn to Lucille and her depiction as a fear of race suicide, not through a weakening of the race as feared by the temperance movement and other eugenically-minded groups, but in a refusal to carry on procreation. In chapter twenty-two, Lucille approaches Raymond to tell him that she is pregnant with Bull’s child. She implores Ray to help her find a doctor to abort the baby. Ray takes the opportunity to criticize Lucille’s experiment with virile men, and Lucille quickly silences him with a retort that he should not be melodramatic and that he should use his “much vaunted reason” to help her. She continues, “Let’s eschew dessert and hasten to a speakeasy. I have already composed a toast in honor of my abortion. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it” (253). Rather than a baptism at its birth, the abortion receives a toast in a speakeasy. If Paul’s death signifies Thurman’s fears about the potential death of art in the Harlem Renaissance, then the death of Lucille and Bull’s child becomes the physical death of Harlem, the ultimate end of virility, and perhaps of the race. Alcohol, which we have begun to see has been intricately connected to African American identity, seals Thurman’s race suicide fears and fantasies, ushering into the world a formerly occupied womb. No other liquid is a more fitting recognition of the social position of African Americans. 191 Yet Thurman is still not so quick to jump on an anti-alcohol bandwagon, for alcohol seems to offer some hope for race reconciliation; that hope, however, is still tinged with ambivalence. At the Donation party, Samuel tells Raymond that Stephen has become terribly drunk, fought with Aline and Janet, and has run away. Raymond, who had been roaming the house witnessing the various incarnations of the party, returns to the main body of the party to try to find Stephen: The party had reached new heights. The lights in the basement had been dimmed, and the reveling dancers cast grotesque shadows on the heavily tapestried walls. Color lines had been completely eradicated. Whites and blacks clung passionately together as if trying to effect a permanent merger. Liquor, jazz music, and close physical contact had achieved what decades of propaganda had advocated with little success. Here, Raymond thought, as he continued his search for Stephen, is social equality. Tomorrow all of them will have an emotional hangover. They will fear for their sanity, for at last they have had a chance to do openly what they only dared to do clandestinely before. This, he kept repeating to himself, is the Negro renaissance, and this is about all the whole damn thing is going to amount to. (186-87) From his position near the end of the Harlem Renaissance and Prohibition, 62 Thurman gives voice to his ambivalent hopes and fears. The “grotesque shadows” betray the fact that this scene is not necessarily the scene desired by the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, in fact, it is an almost hellish one. At the Donation party, “color lines [have] been completely eradicated.” Here, there is no black or white; rather, the two races are “trying to effect a permanent merger.” In such a merger, there can be no black or white, there can be only a languorous gray, in which black and white are no longer distinct, no longer different, but in this merger, something vital seems to have been lost. The social equality that liquor, jazz, and close physical contact have provided may exist, 62 The novel was published in 1932. Prohibition ended in 1933, and David Levering Lewis identifies Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine, published in 1934, as the “last novel of the Renaissance” (304). 192 as might an emotional and physical equality that will turn into a hangover the next day, as the partygoers realize their wish fulfillment was not, in fact, the intellectual equality sought so desperately by many of the African American attendees of the party. Alcohol and sex are the great equalizers, not the new black aesthetic offered by such literary outlets as Fire. No wonder Raymond, who had such high hopes for Negro art, is ultimately disgusted by the empty promise of the Negro renaissance, whose best efforts can be so easily surpassed by pouring some gin, playing some records, and pushing a few eager bodies at each other. Yet Thurman, like so many other Harlem Renaissance authors, is not so quick to join a pseudo-temperance movement condemning alcohol because its transgressive properties undermine what he and other artists of the era were trying to do more gradually and respectfully by presenting African American art in all its glory as equal to white art. Other than the acknowledgment in Infants of the Spring that alcohol might be a distraction from the goals of the Harlem Renaissance, there is no real condemnation of it. Instead, an underlying current of Signifyin(g) alcohol runs through a great deal of Harlem Renaissance literature, as if, as I have already mentioned, Harlemites recognized in alcohol a kindred spirit, both alcohol and African American identity being viewed as prohibited, forbidden, “other,” by mainstream white culture as revealed in temperance narratives and public policy, whether official or not. We find many of these Harlem Renaissance writers conflating African American identity and alcohol, often through overt connection between the two, sometimes through a much more subtle, more playful 193 chastising of mainstream white culture in which authors play small alcohol jokes, using alcohol as a symbol for African American identity and/or race mixing. Thurman provides a number of scenes from which we can begin to explore this trend. One scene that demonstrates a connection between white and black identity, class, and alcohol comes toward the end of the novel. At the beginning of chapter twenty-three, Aline approaches Raymond to tell him that she is preparing to pass for white. Understanding immediately that her decision is ostensibly a romantic one, he asks Aline what man inspired her decision, and she tells him that “he’s a swell fellow…Big jeweler downtown with oodles of money. He’s gonna get me an apartment n’ everything “ (259). To celebrate her decision, Ray offers Aline a drink, cognac. To this point in the novel, cognac has made no appearance. The drink of choice for the residents of Niggeratti Manor has been Harlem gin, with an occasional unnamed cocktail thrown in. Harlem gin has seemed like a badge of honor for these drinkers, an alcohol they can call their own, can identify with. At the Donation party, where a number of whites brought alcohol, the inventory the next morning included “half a case of champagne, several quarts of burgundy, sauterne, port, chartreuse and dago red” (188). This list of alcohols reads like an invitation list to an exclusive European party. A number of the drinks donated at the party contain connotations of class, such as champagne and port, while other drinks speak of an American vision of European tastes: sauterne, burgundy, chartreuse. One drink even is explicitly connected with an immigrant identity—dago red. Yet of these drinks, only champagne carries some element of the class cachet that cognac can offer. Cognac 194 has long been associated with money and elite identities, 63 and Raymond’s choice of cognac to celebrate Aline’s passing into a wealthier class of white society is an overt acknowledgment through symbolic alcohol choice that Raymond recognizes Aline’s transgression. There is no need to ask how Raymond might have acquired such an elite drink, or whether his cognac is the kind of cognac that a jeweler with oodles of money might drink or a cheap ersatz cognac. It is sufficient that Raymond possesses some to offer to Aline, easing her transition into white society with an arguably white drink. The toast he offers her opens an opportunity to recognize the connection between alcohol and race mixing: “Here’s to your new life, old dear. May it prove profitable, and may all your children escape the tarbrush” (260). Tracing a connection here, alcohol leads to the toast, which leads to a recognition of profit-seeking, procreation, then race mixing. Undoubtedly, alcohol will continue to play a role in easing Aline’s transition into white beds, as it had in her relationship with Stephen. While we are never explicitly told that alcohol played a role in Aline’s dallying with the jeweler, it does contribute to her liaison with Stephen. When Aline first meets Stephen it is in Niggeratti Manor while everyone is lounging around and drinking. The drinking continues, Aline and Janet join Stephen on the daybed, and Samuel later pulls Stephen aside to warn him about race mixing (43-52). Aline and Stephen become more intimately involved, often through the influence of alcohol, as Raymond acknowledges to Lucille, who asks him if he has finished the first chapter of his book: “Yes, thank God. 63 Such an acknowledgment still surfaces today, as reflected by the number of African American hip-hop artists who turn to cognac as their alcohol of choice to signify their arrival in the upper, predominantly white, class. See Busta Rhymes’s “Pass the Courvoisier,” and songs by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, the Ying Yang Twins, and others. 195 Some time this morning after the liquor was gone and I’d kicked Aline and Steve out of my bed” (74). Thurman provides no overt recognition that the alcohol contributed to Aline’s and Stephen’s presence in the bed, but he does not have to. In this era of Prohibition, riding the end of the wave of temperance, a loosening of inhibitions and subsequent sexual philandering necessarily follows drinking. Thurman fulfills the narrative expectations of his readers by acknowledging alcohol stereotypes. While Thurman does not connect the dots for his readers with Stephen and Aline, he gleefully does so with Stephen and Janet, underscoring stereotypical white fears of alcohol and race mixing. 64 Raymond reveals to Stephen that Janet believes she is in love with Stephen, who scoffs at the idea, declaring that Janet knows he is attached to Aline. Raymond inquires if Stephen has ever encouraged Janet, to which Stephen replies: “Oh, hell, I’ve kissed her, I guess, when I was drunk…” (100). Alcohol is directly responsible for the potential of race mixing between Janet and Stephen, and Janet’s darker skin marks her more than the lighter Aline as the kind of African American woman who possessed the exotic sexuality that white women feared could be fueled by alcohol. In the midst of all the possibilities for race mixing that surround Stephen, and the stereotypes that the connections between alcohol and race mixing evoke, Thurman provides a different use for alcohol, still connected to racial identity and race mixing. Alcohol becomes, for both Bull and Stephen, a symbolic representation of their respective positions on white men mixing with black women. Bull fires the first shot. Disgusted by Aline’s and Stephen’s behavior and fueled by alcohol, Bull attacks both of 64 Whitman demonstrates these fears in Franklin Evans, when the drunken Franklin marries the Creole woman Margaret. See my second chapter for details. 196 them, decrying Aline as a hussy: “With a white man, eh? Yer own race ain’t good enough? You want a white man? You goddam bitch, I’ll kill you” (64). Bull is eventually thrown out, after Raymond tries to stop him and is sent reeling, while Stephen passes out and snores in a chair. The next morning, Bull sheepishly returns to apologize for his behavior the night before, admitting his drunkenness (67). Everyone finishes breakfast, then Eustace retrieves a hidden bottle of gin and begins mixing highballs as everyone lounges around, talking. “Bull alone took little interest in the conversation. He seemed determined to become drunk again, gulping down glass after glass of straight gin, deliberately ignoring the highballs Eustace prepared” (68). Although Bull has apologized for his behavior from the night before, he has not abandoned his position on white men and black women: “I ain’t used to seein’ no white man with no colored woman. The bastards lynch every nigger that has a white woman and I kinda thinks darkies ought to do the same” (68). Bull continues his diatribe on race mixing, revealing that a crowd had lynched an uncle of his, suspecting that he had raped a white woman. The young Bull vows revenge, and declares to his listeners in Niggeratti Manor his plan for that revenge: “[By] havin’ every white woman I can get, an’ by hurtin’ any white man I kin. I hates the bastards. I gets drunk so’s I can beat ‘em up an’ I likes to make their women suffer. But if I ever catch one of the sons of bitches messin’ ‘round with one of my women, hell’s doors won’t open quick enuff to catch him” (69). Thurman provides his readers with a stereotypical violent black man who acknowledges that alcohol makes him even more violent, tossing Bull in the face of those white readers who fear black violence. In addition, Bull drinks straight gin as he mulls over his position on race relations, refusing 197 to drink the mixed drinks Eustace passes out. As he espouses his views on racial purity, which he had enacted the night before, his rejection of the possibility of white and black race mixing in any other form of relationship other than revenge is played out in the unmixed state of his drink choice. For Bull, drink is connected to race, and his discussion on race relations can only be lubricated by an untainted, pure, gin, not the mixed highballs everyone else seems satisfied with. Stephen himself will later adopt Bull’s drinking strategies as he begins to change his position on race mixing. Stephen has all along joined the others in quaffing cocktails, but on the night of the Donation party, there is a distinct change in his drinking habits: Also on the table were a half dozen bottles of gin, and Raymond noted that it was to one of these that Stephen was clinging tenaciously. “Have some punch?” “No,” Stephen answered Raymond shortly and continued to gulp down glass after glass of straight gin. (174) Small details such as a character’s choice of drink are often dismissed as mimetic devices; people in real life like to experiment with different drinks, so writers pursuing verisimilitude should have their characters do the same thing. However, as we have already seen with Bull, sometimes a drink choice can signify a particular viewpoint, especially when drinks have become so closely affiliated with otherness and race. Thus, Stephen’s choice to gulp down straight gin should be a sign to readers who understand the language of drinks that trouble is brewing in his relationships with African American women. 198 Such is surely the case. Raymond loses track of Stephen at the party, and barring the occasional distraction from other partygoers, spends the bulk of the party looking for Stephen. Samuel finally tracks down Raymond and relates the bad news: “Listen, Ray, for God’s sake,” Samuel interrupted. “Find Steve and get him out of here. He’s terribly drunk and in an awful mess.” “What the hell are you talking about?” “He, Aline and Janet just had a scrap.” “Where is he?” “I don’t know, Ray. No one can find him. He was standing in the door there…to Eustace’s place. All at once there was a great confusion. I pushed through the crowd just in time to hear Steve shout: ‘You goddamn sluts.’ And before I could grab him, he had hit Janet in the face, took a punch at Aline and rushed away.” (185) Later, in Stephen’s goodbye letter to Raymond, Stephen reveals the newfound attitude about race relations that he had begun declaring by drinking straight gin: I’ve wanted to break away for almost two weeks, but I didn’t have the courage. It took Aline and Janet to finish me up for good…I have lived recently in a suddenly precipitated fear that I had become unclean because of my association. So complex and far-reaching has this fear become that I rushed in a panic to a doctor recently to be examined. I feared, unreasonably, and with no definite evidence, that Aline and Janet were unclean and that I had become contaminated, diseased. I never thought positively about venereal diseases before, but even the doctor’s reassuring Wassermann failed to allay my suspicions. (191) Just as Bull had chosen to drink straight gin in order to underscore his position on race mixing, so has Stephen eschewed cocktails as a sign of the mixing that he has come to loathe and even fear. In Infants of the Spring, Stephen will never drink another cocktail. A number of other Harlem Renaissance authors explore connections between alcohol and African American identities, creating what may be called the trope of the cocktail. 65 This trope is not universal in its meaning; that is, for Thurman, the cocktail 65 Following the mode established by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey when he discusses such topics as “The Trope of the Talking Book.” 199 may be different from what it is for Nella Larsen or Richard Bruce Nugent, but for many writers of the Harlem Renaissance, alcohol becomes an important ingredient in their narratives. As I have already discussed, some of the trouble the temperance movement had with alcohol was its ability to liberate the morality of the drinker, to weaken inhibitions, while for other people that liberation was a key element in desiring alcohol. Alcohol’s liberating effects were not yet completely acceptable for most of America in the 1920s, and exploring these effects through literature was quite similar to exploring the sexuality of black women. As Deborah E. McDowell writes in her introduction to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, “Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen could only hint at the idea of black women as sexual subjects behind the safe and protective covers of traditional narrative subjects and conventions” (xiii). Just as these Harlem Renaissance novelists had to disguise their ideas behind traditional narratives, so do many writers use alcohol to veil the exploration of prohibited identities. Alcohol creates a space in the text in which we can explore issues of race and sexuality, expose the cultural associations of African Americans with both alcohol and sex, and uncover the possibility for miscegenation. Just as a deep thread of nativism had fueled much of the temperance movement and its attempts to regulate and normalize white Anglo-Saxon American behavior, so too was this xenophobia directed toward African Americans. The apparent victory the temperance movement won in Prohibition was helped in large part by views of African Americans as violently eroticized “others”; for example, Andrew Barr writes, “The fear that black men, stimulated by alcohol, would attack women had played a major part in 200 the introduction of prohibition in the South” (253). As we can see, Southerners identified a direct relationship between alcohol and miscegenation; hoping to destroy the latter, they ratify the prohibition of the former. African Americans and alcohol have long been conflated in the United States. In addition to Douglass’s concerns expressed in his narrative, Andrew Barr recalls the popular concept of “‘triangular trade,’ in which molasses was exported from the Caribbean to New England, rum from there to Africa, and then slaves back to the West Indies” (35), dismissing it as popular myth. He identifies it as myth, however, not so much as something that did not exist; rather, he repudiates it on the grounds that “New England merchants played only a minor role in the slave trade” (35). Myth or not, this conception was largely accepted in the United States. Still, the associations of blacks with alcohol can be traced back even further. Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s Passing dates the association to biblical times, telling Irene that Clare’s conservative white aunts “weren’t quite sure that the good God hadn’t intended the sons and daughters of Ham to sweat because he had poked fun at old man Noah once when he had taken a drop too much. I remember the aunts telling me that that old drunkard had cursed Ham and his sons for all time” (159). Clare’s account records the apocryphal view held by some that Noah’s curse was blackness. In this folktale, all blacks bear the Mark of Ham as an indirect result of drinking and are doomed to slavery forever. Continuing the conflation of African Americans and alcohol, we have already seen in Infants of the Spring the cocktail as a metaphor for race mixing. However, the cocktail metaphor for race mixing is not a one-way metaphor; race mixing can be read as 201 drink mixing. Richard Bruce Nugent writes in “Orini,” an excerpt from his incomplete work Gentleman Jigger, the tale of Stuartt, a mixed-race gay man. Stuartt says to a group of friends in Harlem, “We should all be glad that I’m such a mongrel, because I’m certain that only a weird collection of bloods like mine could produce such a beautiful and polyglot cocktail. I think I’ll call it ‘Quadroon’” (191). Nugent’s character sees himself as a racially mixed cocktail, conflating the meanings of mixing. Unlike most cocktail names that hint at sexual acts through innuendo, Stuartt’s cocktail’s name openly acknowledges mixed race sexual activity while simultaneously appropriating an offensive white name for its beautiful mix, signifying Stuartt’s understanding of the power relationships inherent in the American racial hierarchy. In addition, the sum of Stuartt’s parts is greater than the whole; a mixed identity is a more beautiful one than its genetic ancestors, contrary to eugenic views of racial purity such as those of Stephen and Bull. The sexual implications of race mixing are often present in Harlem Renaissance texts. White America’s eroticized conflation of sex, alcohol, and miscegenation in Harlem continues in Passing, in which alcohol again stands as a metaphor for mixing, and is used by various characters as punishment for miscegenation or as a wedge to open up the text to prohibited identities. Our first encounter with alcohol is indirectly through Clare Kendry’s drunken father Bob. Bob’s father was a white man, and this white man’s conservative sisters clearly did not approve of his mixing. Rejecting their mixed nephew, the aunts express their disapproval of miscegenation, resulting in Bob’s drunkenness. At Bob’s death in a drunken brawl, Clare’s white aunts take her in and raise her, treating her as a black servant within the home. Passing is, of course, the novel in which the curse of 202 Ham is identified with alcohol, so for Bob Kendry, who but for his father’s choice of choosing a black woman would be free of the “curse,” alcohol becomes the disciplinary tool used to punish him for his father’s indiscretion. For the majority of the novel, alcohol is virtually nonexistent, as the temperance movement hoped it would be in an era of Prohibition. Irene Redfield is an upper class black woman concerned with uplift and keeping up appearances. Irene is in a prominent position, and as such must present a predominantly teetotaling front to the community. Irene, and the majority of the upper-class blacks in this novel, provides a far better example than their upper-class white counterparts, who often brazenly violated Prohibition. 66 Irene and her fellow uplift blacks follow the law quite closely, and alcohol is rarely present in her story. When alcohol’s physical presence is felt, however, it acts as a metaphor for miscegenation and a commentary on one-drop race laws. It also provides the opportunity for upper class Irene to adopt a horrible prohibited identity. Toward the end of the novel, Irene is struggling with her homoerotic feelings for Clare and projects those feelings onto her husband Brian, fearing that he and Clare are having an affair. The three of them attend a party, and when offered a drink, Irene replies, “If I must take something, make it a glass of ginger-ale and three drops of Scotch. The Scotch first, please. Then the ice, then the ginger ale” (237). If we read Irene’s highball as an ironically eugenic cocktail, then that undesirable, foul-tasting Scotch is literally covered up by ice and ginger ale. Thus, in a twist that parodies the white supremacist theories of eugenics, black blood is covered by the more palatable mixing elements of white blood, and we have a 66 See my last chapter for William S. Kenyon’s observations on the upper class and Prohibition. 203 drink/woman that can pass. But that reading is less effective than viewing the drink as a commentary on one-drop laws. Earlier in the novel, Clare introduces Irene to Clare’s white husband, John Bellew, who does not know that Clare is passing. To Irene’s horror, John’s nickname for Clare is “Nig,” which comes from the fact that he believes she is getting darker as she gets older; if she is not careful, he jokes, one day she will wake up “and find she’s turned into a nigger” (171). Clare jovially dismisses his comment, then asks him: “My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two per cent coloured?” (171). John replies confidently that he knows she is not black; he would never allow “niggers” in his family. We readers, of course, know that she is black, and far more black than only one or two percent. Clare’s question recalls the questions about identifying race that the nation had been asking for years. F. James Davis notes that: The nation’s answer to the question “Who is black?” has long been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with slaves and later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South it became known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a single drop of “black blood” makes a person a black. It is also known as the “one black ancestor rule,” some courts have called it the “traceable amount rule,” and anthropologists call it the “hypo-descent rule,” meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group. (5) By ordering a drink that can hardly be considered alcoholic, Irene creates a sardonic commentary on one-drop laws. If one would not consider three drops of Scotch a cocktail, as we surely would not, why would one consider one or even two drops of black blood the controlling factor in determining race? The presence of this drink also creates the possibility for Irene to transgress into prohibited identities. With the presence of alcohol, (which we are never sure she drinks) 204 Irene confronts her mixed feelings for Clare and Brian. Taking advantage of the chaos created when Clare’s husband erupts into the party, accusing Clare of being a “damned dirty nigger” (238), Irene transgresses into the possibilities of becoming a murderer. Whether or not Irene pushes Clare out the window is, of course, never concretely established. The fact remains that once the normally teetotaling Irene orders a drink, the eventuality that she will adopt an identity prohibited to an upper-class black woman concerned with uplift increases exponentially. Larsen incorporates the aforementioned white fears of violence, alcohol, and African American identity. Irene, who had been so concerned with uplift, defaults to white stereotypes to deal with her problem. Ostensibly choosing between the identity of lesbian or murderer, Irene chooses the prohibited identity that will end the debate. In the cultural space opened by Prohibition, many Harlem Renaissance writers take the opportunity to turn alcohol into a trope through which they are Signifyin(g) to whites an African American recognition of the position to which both African American identity and alcohol had been relegated. In adopting elements of the temperance narrative in Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman works some mighty Signifyin(g), critiquing a wholesale allegiance to any ideology, whether it be about race relations or alcohol. Richard Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen create tropes of alcohol that clearly conflate African American identity and alcohol and the status of both as prohibited by white society, but, for Nugent at least, an African American identity is more beautiful. Larsen’s recognition of the complexities of alcohol, morality, and race lies at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, the struggle for identity, and the struggle for self. While 205 narratives in the Harlem Renaissance recognized and incorporated elements of temperance ideology for their own purposes, we shall see in my next chapter a novel that sidestepped the ideology and form of the temperance narrative to reveal the indeterminacy of alcohol. 206 Chapter 5. “When a Fellow is Drunk, He Will Dream Queer Things” 67 : Queering the Temperance Narrative in The Young and the Evil In 1896, the New York state legislature passed the Raines Law, which was, on the surface, another attempt at legislatively encouraging temperance. Under the Raines Law, saloons in the state would be required to close on Sundays, one of the busiest days for saloons because most laborers would have that day off. George Chauncey, in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890- 1940, indicates that while the law was intended as a means of reducing drinking, it also targeted working class men, attempting to control the kind of working class male sociability that the middle class feared and which was often excoriated by the temperance movement. This attempt to target the working class was made clear by a provision in the law that allowed saloons attached to hotels to remain open on Sundays; legislators apparently felt that such hotel-based saloons catered to a more respectable class of male drinker and thus could be allowed to remain open (160). Rather than reducing the likelihood that working-class males would be congregating together by eliminating the spaces in which they met, the law encouraged the opposite effect. Because the law defined a hotel as any space that had at least ten rooms for rent, numerous saloons immediately rented nearby rooms or divided up the space within the saloon itself, creating tiny cells that could be declared “rooms,” where men could retire to find some private time—either by themselves, with women with whom they were engaged in romantic relationships but had no privacy in which to pursue a sexual relationship, or, as readily supplied by the saloons, with prostitutes. 67 Another intriguing phrase taken from The Temperance Speaker (Stearns 155). 207 Shocked at the failure of their attempt to regulate behavior, some legislators and other moral reformers created various reform committees, of which two of the most prominent were the Committee of Fifteen and the Committee of Fourteen. The Committee of Fifteen investigated the propensity for saloons to be spaces for immoral assignations and realized that saloons had become festering dens of vice that spread throughout the city. In order to undo what the Raines Law had done, various businessmen later formed the Committee of Fourteen for the Suppression of Raines Law Hotels in New York City, which campaigned against the rising tide of “prostitution and unrestrained socializing between men and women” from the time of its forming in 1912 to 1932, when it was disbanded (Chauncey 161). However, because of the Committee’s obsession with regulating female sexuality, they actually encouraged homosexual relationships: Although the Committee’s campaign led to the closing of the best-known Bowery resorts where “fairies” were on display, such as the Jumbo, its efforts had less effect on the use of the Raines Law hotels for sexual trysts by male couples than by heterosexual couples, precisely because of their focus on female prostitution. The Committee’s main strategy was to close as many of the hotels as possible…and to prevent those it could not close from being used for assignations by prohibiting them from admitting women. By 1909, it had reduced the number of such hotels by half and had forced almost three-quarters of the remaining 690 hotels to agree to admit men only. This forced a wholesale movement of prostitution out of such hotels and back into tenements and furnished-room houses, but it had little effect on male couples seeking accommodation. (161) Like Prohibition, the Raines Law did seem to reduce one kind of behavior that it sought to regulate while simultaneously unintentionally encouraging another kind of behavior that it would have deemed “worse.” For, while the law did initially obtain the desired results of closing some saloons on Sundays, the ten-room hotel loophole allowed saloons 208 to defy the law. Then, in the attempt to recalibrate the law, the Committees appear to have reduced the prostitution that sprang up in the spaces the law created, but overlooked the male homosexual behavior that may have been an unmentioned but understood target of the law in the first place. Prohibition had much the same effect; Andrew Barr notes, “Alcohol consumption did decrease during Prohibition by about one third, but not because of any general desire to respect the law that banned it. Consumption fell because the illicit nature of the trade in alcohol caused the price to increase markedly (16). Later in his book, Barr records some of Prohibition’s unintended results: “it increased the popularity of alcohol among women and young people; it caused beer drinkers to convert to spirits; it made drinking synonymous with drunkenness; it engendered disrespect of the law” (379). Regarding Barr’s last point, the federal government’s lack of funding for enforcing the law and the truly insufficient enforcement that resulted encouraged a distrust of the government that fostered the kind of attitude that Tom Dardis observed when he wrote that “many independent minds believed it was their moral duty to violate the law on every possible occasion” (11). Other interesting coincidences between primarily middle-class views about homosexuality and alcohol exist; for example, the evolution of middle-class society’s beliefs about the manifestation of alcoholism and homosexuality is fairly similar. As Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio point out in their book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Americans’ views of same-sex sexual relationships have changed since the first colonists considered “individual acts of sodomy (anal sex between 209 men) or buggery (sex with animals)” sinful acts that must be punished but “for which a man could repent” (122). Early American colonists had no concept of homosexuality as an identity or as a condition, only as isolated incidents that needed public regulation. Like homosexuality, alcohol posed a different threat to the early colonists than Americans believed it posed later. Public inebriation was not terribly uncommon, but once a drinker crossed some line, either in his inability to work, in posing a physical threat to others, or, in the case of the laws of many New England towns, spending too much time in the taverns (Asbury 20), then the drinker was punished for these sins and offered the chance for public repentance. Herbert Asbury records, “In Massachusetts a man who had been convicted several times of drunkenness was compelled to wear, dangling from his neck, a large ‘D’ painted in red upon a white cloth; or a large placard pinned to the back of his coat and emblazoned, ‘A DRUNKARD’” (20 original emphasis). The punishment for homosexual acts (and drinking) continued to evolve. Throughout the nineteenth century, sodomy continued to be targeted by state laws, but the definition of sodomy was expanded to include any nonprocreative sexual act, such as masturbation or oral sex. The various religious awakenings in the nineteenth century continued to exert some control over the ways that physical same-sex acts were described. For instance, Freedman and D’Emilio provide an excerpt from an 1810 Maryland sodomy court case that claimed, “the defendant had been ‘moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil’” (122). One cannot read that phrase without recalling the similar plea so often stated by Benson, Ranney, and others that their drinking was the 210 result of losing a spiritual battle with the Devil, becoming seduced by his wiles and winding up a slave to the bottle. Consider especially Ranney’s “[B]ut you see how the Devil popped in and once more made me do what I know was wrong—drink that first cursed glass of beer” (11 of 55). In this figuration of homosexuality and inebriation, both are seen as a sin, not as a choice or identity, which occurs because of some sort of spiritual weakness in the guilty party. As legal and moral concerns began to replace the more religious concerns, attitudes about both homosexuality and alcohol changed. Legal phrases began identifying sodomy and other homosexually-identified acts as “‘crimes against nature’…implying that acts of sodomy offended a natural order rather than the will of God” (Freedman and D’Emilio 122). Similarly, moral suasion was used to redirect the concerns about excessive drinking from the threat alcohol posed to the drinker’s eternal soul to the threat alcohol posed to women and children. In both cases, the spiritual realm is removed from the equation, and the offenses are not committed against God but against, in homosexuality’s case, perceived biological directives or, in inebriation’s case, against the Victorian family. Both reinforce the cultural primacy of heteronormativity. Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, “physicians employed a medical language, referring to sodomy not as a sin or a spiritual failing, but rather as a disease and a manifestation of a bodily or mental condition” (Freedman and D’Emilio 122). At roughly the same time, science entered the temperance debate. Having realized the damaging effects of moderate to abusive use of alcohol on the body, scientists and 211 doctors were able to identify the body of the drinker as the problem. As Catherine Murdock indicates: [B]y the early twentieth century scientists of unchallengeable reputation were proving alcohol’s deleterious effect on moderate and abusive drinkers, the healthy and the sick. In 1917 the American Medical Association thrilled prohibitionists when it passed a resolution opposing ‘the use of alcohol as a beverage’ and ‘discouraging’ its use ‘as a therapeutic agent.’ Drys now capitalized on scientific as well as moral and economic arguments for temperance. (82) With this scientific turn, the disease model of alcoholism entered the scene, eventually leading to various attempts to treat alcoholism not as a sin, or as a moral failing, but as an essentially genetic condition that the drinker carried within himself (Crowley White Logic 4-5). When one investigates temperance and Prohibition, one begins to realize that much more lay behind the temperance movement than a mere animosity toward alcohol, regardless of whether that animosity was fueled by a belief that drinking was a sin or a sense that drinking was a disease. Clearly, intense social control of prohibited American identities was ultimately the cause behind banning alcohol from America. Just as the temperance narratives intimated the threat that white drinkers would abdicate their Americanness or even their whiteness, so to do many temperance narratives indicate that drunkards are somehow “queer.” While most temperance narratives make no obvious attempt to connect alcohol to homosexuality, they do express concerns about alcohol and male homosociality. Consider the threats men offer to other men when they drink together, discussed in my second chapter. In addition, the fear that these ideally heterosexual men could be ruined by their drinking, that, driven to the depths of desperation, in which they sell every scrap of clothing they owned, such thirsty men 212 could turn to the forbidden acts of male prostitution, or even merely to the solace of another man’s arms, can lurk within the narrative, at least to our twenty-first century minds. Reading some narratives, I recognized the possibility for an intersection between homosexuality and drinking that lay under the surface of the texts. Certainly, Whitman’s Franklin Evans presents readers with such an intersection as Franklin, being introduced to alcohol by his friend, Colby, drinks then accepts Colby’s invitation: “Let us go out and cruise a little, and see what there is going on” (27), practically begging Twenty-First Century readers to create a queer reading. Franklin frequently finds himself in the role of drunkard flâneur, wandering the streets of New York and gazing upon seemingly normal people, while he is exiled from their straight, Victorian lives. Conversely, we could examine Dave Ranney’s narrative, in which he erases twelve years of his drinking experiences in the transition from his third chapter, “Into the Depths,” to his fourth chapter, “Saved by Grace.” He ends chapter three with his account of how he spent almost three years in prison. “I was arrested for a trick that, if I had got my just dues, would have put me in prison for ten years, but I got off with three years, and came out after doing two years and nine months” (16 of 55). Ranney never identifies this trick and often glosses over the crimes he has committed, assuring us that they were awful, so we can never truly know what he did. His use of the word “trick” does give one pause, considering Ranney’s status as wandering vagrant desperate for enough money for a drink. He begins his next chapter with a mysterious transition: Twelve years later, after a life spent on the road and in prison, I found myself on the Bowery, in the fall of 1892, without a friend, “down and out.” After spending my last dollar in ---‘s saloon, I was sitting down in the back room of that place, wondering if I dared ask --- for a drink, when in he walked. He looked at me, and 213 said, “Now, Danny, I think you had better get a move on! Get out and hustle. You are broke, and you know I am not running this place for fun.” (17 of 55) To Twenty-First Century readers seeking homosexuality in Victorian or early Modern texts, it can be tempting to look at such scenes as evidence of homosexual practices. However, problems arise when we speculate that “trick” and “hustle” have the same kind of sexual connotations that they can have today, especially considering the fact that the OED indicates that “trick” did not acquire a sexual meaning until about 1926, and “hustle” did not acquire a sexual meaning until about 1930, while Ranney’s narrative was published in 1910. Other less sexual but still criminal definitions of the words did exist at the time, 68 complicating such a reading of this text. Still, Dave’s presence in the back room of this saloon, the kind of place identified by vice opponents and others as precisely the dreaded place for unregulated male socialization, and the fact that the saloon is in the Bowery, a space that Chauncey claims had been made a center of gay life by gay men by the 1890s (2), invites the potential of reading Ranney’s work as a joint drunk and homosexual confessional narrative, in which drinking takes center stage but homosexuality is alluded to in the indeterminate background. 69 Certainly, Ranney’s emphasis on male touch represented by the power of a handshake gives one pause. 68 “Hustle,” in the sense of “to rob,” has been around since at least 1751, and “hustle,” in the sense of “to sell goods in an aggressive manner,” since at least 1887. “Trick,” in the sense of “a robbery or theft,” has been in usage since at least 1865 (OED). 69 From his perspective as former drunkard, Ranney observes: “A lodging-house is a queer affair. Men of all nations sleep there—some drunk, some dreaming aloud others snoring. The cots are about two feet apart—just room for you to pass between them. It takes a lot of grit and plenty of God’s grace to live a Christian life in a lodging-house” (22). Ranney’s comment that a lodging-house is “a queer affair” contains a startling open secret fear about these spaces for virtually unrestrained male sociability. While Ranney is not explicit in his description of lodging-houses as a place for same-sex assignations, the implication is certainly there, both in a sense of “queer” as homosexual, but also in the sense that “queer” means some indeterminate quality that is somehow different from the status quo. Men should not be crowded together in beds like this; it is unseemly, unsuited for heteronormativity. 214 What I hope to argue in this chapter is a continuation of the thread of argument in other chapters, that as temperance ideologies sought to control an ideal American identity, the apparent victory of the temperance movement in Prohibition spurred a variety of responses. Whereas for the Moderns, such as Fitzgerald, their response included an ambivalent or even hostile reaction due to a quest for a terrible honesty, a reaction that spawned Fitzgerald’s problematic parody of the temperance narrative in Gatsby, and whereas for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance writing about alcohol became a way of signifyin’ mainstream white culture’s associations of racial identity and alcohol—as exemplified by Thurman’s rejection of wholesale ideologies, and the repeated trope of the cocktail, for the queer culture of New York City during Prohibition, represented in Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and the Evil, writing about drinking performs the cultural work of not only embracing the “othered” identities and behaviors of the type that temperance sought to eradicate, but also of celebrating those identities, contributing simultaneously to a more coherent and a more indeterminate sense of what a homosexual identity could be, rejecting the teleology of alcohol offered by the temperance narrative, and rewriting the possibilities for the outcomes of drinking, freeing alcohol from the temperance movement’s attempt to rigidly control its signification by focusing on the indeterminacy of alcohol as sign. While other Prohibition-era texts can be read as incorporating elements of the temperance narrative for formal and cultural inspiration, and, to some extent, continuing to rely on alcohol as a relatively stable signifier, The Young and The Evil makes alcohol a floating signifier that can at times seem to have meaning and at other times seem to mean nothing at all, 215 offering a playfulness with alcohol that pokes fun at temperance ideology’s insistence on the determinacy of both alcohol and identity. A celebration of and pride in “othered” identities is evident in much gay culture of the twenties and thirties. Unlike some of the accounts of the Washingtonians, especially the stories of the founders who were firmly unrepentant drinkers who mocked the idea of temperance until they went to hear a temperance speaker, the gays of the 1920s did not seem to harbor any secret longing to be converted to heterosexual desires. In fact, as the tools of medical science were brought to bear on the “problem” of homosexuals, [n]umerous doctors reported their astonishment at discovering in their clinical interviews with “inverts” that their subjects rejected the efforts of science, religion, popular opinion, and the law to condemn them as moral degenerates. One doctor lamented that the working-class “fags” he interviewed in New York’s city jail in the early 1920s actually claimed they were “proud to be degenerates, [and] do not want nor care to be cured.” (Chauncey 6, original emphasis) Attempting to provide medical cures or counseling to drunkards had, in the past, proven to be at least partly successful, so it is understandable that doctors might assume that homosexuality, as another form of moral or social degeneracy—or so doctors at the time thought—could also be cured through some form of therapy. However much alcoholics might have denied a desire for a cure at first, inevitably, at least according to the temperance narrative and its ideologies, the drunkard would want relief from his curse if he did not die first. No wonder that doctors were surprised that these homosexual degenerates did not eventually break down under the relentless interference of the medical establishment and confess their longing for being brought back into the status quo fold. 216 George Chauncey dismisses a number of similar myths about gay life around the turn of the nineteenth century, including what he calls “the myth of internalization,” which claimed that “gay men uncritically internalized the dominant culture’s view of them as sick, perverted, and immoral, and that their self-hatred led them to accept the policing of their lives rather than resist it” (4). While some gay men in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds might very well have “internalized the dominant culture’s view,” Chauncey contends that many if not most of them did nothing of the sort. In fact, one purpose for his project is to glean the ways that gay protest went beyond any kind of organized political resistance: …to include strategies of everyday resistance that men devised in order to claim space for themselves in the midst of a hostile society. Given the effective prohibition of gay sociability and the swift and certain consequences that most men could expect if their homosexuality were revealed, both the willingness of some men to carry themselves openly and the ability of other gay men to create and hide an extensive gay social world need to be considered forms of resistance to overwhelming social pressure. The full panoply of tactics gay men devised for communicating, claiming space, and affirming themselves—the kind of resistant social practices that the political theorist James Scott has called the tactics of the weak—proved to be remarkably successful in the generations before a more formal gay political movement developed. Such tactics did not directly challenge anti-gay policing in the way that the movement would, but in the face of that policing they allowed many gay men not just to survive but to flourish—to build happy, self-confident, and loving lives. (5) As we shall see, some of the tactics employed by the gay community represented in The Young and the Evil included a resistance to and a reworking of the morality of alcohol as created by the temperance movement, at times by celebrating and at times by making indeterminate—and thus defusing—the very claims the temperance movement had made. 217 If we hope to understand the ways in which The Young and the Evil resisted and reworked temperance narratives and ideologies, we should turn to Eric Haralson’s exploration of the Victorian and Modern use of the word “queer”: Originally, the conceptual terminology of “queerness” (or “queer”) drew its analytical and political force from the very quality that made it so appealing, as well, to Victorian and modernist authors and readers: a fluency or an indeterminacy of signification that was felt to be at once powerful and elusive. In Saint Foucault, for instance, David Halperin suggests that both the intellectual value and the subversive potential of queer depended on its being defined as indefinite, its referentiality mobile and contingent rather than fixed: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence….describing a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.” One impetus of this challenging anti-definition (challenging in every sense) was clearly the desire to push against the damaging epistemological operations whereby the modern sex/gender system conflated identities with essences and fastened down referentiality in order to categorize, weed out, and punish those who were “at odds.” (1 original emphasis) For the Victorian temperance narrative authors, such as the authors represented in The Temperance Speaker, from which this chapter takes its title, and Ranney, who exists on the cusp of the new Modernism, associating drunkenness with queerness—like associating drunkenness with immigrants, African Americans, or other prohibited identities—indicates Victorians’ disgust with drunkenness, for being identified as “queer” signals a recognition that the identified behavior defies the norms that the temperance movement fought so energetically to establish and maintain. Thus, when a man transitions into the wandering, unmoored life of a drunkard, he passes into the status of queer, having unhitched his narrative wagon from the straight narrative that had been established by Victorian expectations of familial sexual and moral values and embarks on a path that is, in its narrative form, one that consists of a series of dips and curves, a 218 rather queer narrative indeed. It is this narrative view of alcohol that Ford and Tyler both embrace and complicate, making alcohol as sign “indefinite, its referentiality mobile and contingent rather than fixed,” contrary to the way the temperance movement had striven to ensure alcohol as sign would be. Thus, in The Young and The Evil, the temperance narrative form is not only dismissed, the very evils the temperance narrative seeks to erase are often embraced. Many elements of the temperance narrative are overturned, thwarting the narrative expectations of those few readers still possessed of some vestige of Victorian morality. For example, there is no reflection on the dangers of the first drink. The novel contains a first drink, but it is not a character’s first drink; rather, it is the drinking that begins the novel. There are no real consequences for drinking, no real descent. If drinkers are “othered,” it is because they want to be. Drinking can become a signal for others that a queer identity is being embraced, much like the red ties worn by fairies that signaled their status (Chauncey 52). The Victorian matriarch, the Titaness, does appear at least once in the form of Karel’s mother, but her presence is so inconsequential and so clearly one element that contributes to Karel’s Modern rejection of the Titaness and his embracing of a queer identity, that her inclusion becomes a joke at her expense: “When he got there whom should he catch sight of but a couple of old friends and one whom Karel’s mother had always told him not to associate with because he was a ‘sissy* (sic) asked him out to a private tea-party and Karel said yes thank you hardly knowing what he did” (5). Like Jack London’s mother, whose fear of Italian immigrants contributed to London’s drinking habits, which he relays in John Barleycorn (25-30), Karel’s mother, in 219 identifying this “one” as a sissy, has marked for Karel a fellow sissy, whom Karel would choose to associate with, even if he hardly knows what he is doing. To some extent, one of the most essential strategies of queering the temperance narrative and its ideologies in The Young and The Evil is for the novel to present a narrative obsessed with morality. The difficulty in choosing words like “amoral” or “immoral” in discussing The Young and The Evil is that for both the writers and the characters, the novel is not immoral, for the immorality implied by the term is a set of behaviors identified by others, namely the temperance movement and other similar moral movements, as immoral. 70 To identify this novel as immoral is to embrace the moral values of temperance. While a useful term in describing the self-contained morality expressed by the gays of the 1920s, at least in its separation from the moral system established by the status-quo-maintaining Victorians, “amoral” seems to imply that there is no morality at all in the novel, which may be inaccurate, for it is a morality that is, as I indicated, self-contained, the morality of a group of outsiders who construct their own values in their rejection of the norm’s view of them. The novel is simultaneously immoral (in its celebration of an identity identified by morally conservative groups such as the temperance movement as immoral), amoral (in its lack of concern regarding those conservative values), and something other, perhaps “ur-moral,” on the cusp of creating a new morality, defined by the possessors of that morality on their own terms in the language of that group. Still, the novel is identified by critics as both “amoral” and 70 In many ways, I see this novel’s reaction to morality as similar to Susan Sontag’s discussion of Camp aesthetics: “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards” (286). 220 “immoral,” and where appropriate, those terms will be used. For example, Joseph Boone, in his book Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism, discusses the problem of amorality, saying that The Young and the Evil seems amoral because both it and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood “refuse the logic of a core identity within which prevailing moral values can or should be located” (218). In other words, unlike the temperance narrative, that vast, teleological mechanism for perpetuating prevailing moral values, which focuses on the interiority of a drunkard in firmly established narrative patterns, The Young and the Evil refuses this temperance logic, sliding between and over interiorities, blurring boundaries even through its use of punctuation, refusing to provide a single character to whom any kind of moral consequences can adhere. If the hegemonic morality of the temperance narrative that encouraged a sort of constant surveillance of others could be pictured as some invisible force or ray, such as a laser, then the nature of the narrative of The Young and The Evil is a reflective one, resisting and deflecting the moral forces brought to bear against it. The novel begins with an allusion to Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf, the Round Table, a “fairy prince” and a “mythological creature,” signaling to the reader that The Young and the Evil will be a fairy story. Unlike the fairy stories that readers are familiar with, however, this one features a fairy prince, not a princess, and in the first sentence gender identities are as mixed and blurred as the words are, with no punctuation other than periods to separate the units of meaning. In the gay argot that infuses the novel, the wolf is a man on the prowl for sexual relations with another man, and the red of the riding hood recalls the aforementioned red ties. These elements of fairy tale take on an 221 entirely new signification in the logic of the queer fairy tale. Boone highlights this scene’s referencing of Little Red Riding Hood: “If the relation of text to reader, as the opening sentence implies, is analogous to that of leering wolf to Little Red Riding Hood, one cannot help but recall that the wolf is making an elaborate attempt at seduction that hinges on his disguise in grandmotherly drag; into what then, is the reader being seduced, and by whose dissimulating enchantments?” (256). The seductive nature of this text highlights one similarity to temperance narratives The Young and the Evil possesses that the novels I discussed in previous chapters did not, that of shaping the reader him- or herself into the ideal readerly identity. The unconventional punctuation and grammar force the reader to read queerly. Thus as I claim that temperance narratives interpellate the reader by offering Jackson’s virtual experiences through my take on Warhol’s engaging narrator, so too does The Young and The Evil shape the reader’s experience by creating textual indeterminacy, forcing the reader to read surfaces, bridge gaps, struggle to interpret, simultaneously parodying the desires of straight people to “read” gays and demonstrating the futility of such a desire. Just as many characters in the novel try to determine the sexual status of other characters, e.g. Gabriel, who denies a gay identity and experiences “being meant”—that is, being read by others—when he is identified by four “gangsters” as a “faggot” (25), so too does the reader struggle to fit the text into preconceived notions of how texts should work, only to be thwarted by the indeterminacy of the text, an indeterminacy of interpretation that calls to question the ready teleology of narrative, alcohol, and sexual identity. 222 The indeterminacy of alcohol as sign begins in the second paragraph, where Henri-Ford and Tyler provide the first textual representation of alcohol, and it is yet again hidden in the in-crowd language established by the queer community of the 1920’s. Here, alcohol is “tea,” 71 and Karel, invited by the fairy prince and the “mythological creatures known as Lesbians,” approaches the table where “he saw the most delightful little tea-pot and a lot of smiling happy faces” (4). Already on the first page, temperance narrative ideology is rejected. Ignoring the construction of the drinker as a downtrodden loner who is desperate for his next drink, Ford and Tyler present readers with a crowd of men and women drinking together, smiling and happy. Rather than exiling the drinker to the edges of mainstream society, alcohol at the start of this novel is a communal recognition of a queer identity, a celebration of status as outsider, a drink that draws like- minded inverts together. Ford and Tyler flirt with readers’ expectations that alcohol and loosened sexual inhibitions, the “‘Devil’s Siamese Twins’ of liquor and lust” (D’Emilio and Freedman 210), would go hand in hand. Karel’s invitation to the table, however, is an invitation to the reader as well. We readers are invited to sit at this table and to drink with the Lesbians and other mythological fairy creatures, to gaze upon their smiling happy faces. Here, The Young and The Evil’s opening scene offers an invitation to a literary titillation, a titillation that tourists had sought in New York for quite some time. As George Chauncey points out, “[t]ourists visited the Bowery, the Village, and Harlem in part to view gay men’s haunts. In the early 1920s, at the height of popular fascination with gay culture, literally thousands of them attended the city’s drag balls to gawk at the drag queens on display 71 Boone identifies this gay argot in his discussion of the scene (256). 223 there” (4). The Young and The Evil offers the spectacle to a wider audience, inviting those who cannot visit the Village to partake of its pleasures. However, the wolf in the opening implies a threat to the reader, the threat of being the sexual object choice of the text, for while The Young and The Evil is inviting in its opening, reading the novel could relegate the reader to the status of “trade”: “ideally a sailor, a soldier, or some other embodiment of the aggressive masculine ideal, who was neither homosexually interested nor effeminately gendered himself but who would accept the sexual advances of a queer” (Chauncey 16). Regardless of the gender preference of the reader, there is for those straight readers the chance to be caught up into the vortex of queerness that pervades the novel. “Threat to the reader” may be too strong a phrase, for the threat is more a flirtation, an invitation to transgress the normal behavior of the reader, who expects meaning to be regulated by normative punctuation. What this book has to offer in response to the temperance master narrative is not necessarily the threat of indifference to temperance claims, for one can find indifference in any number of Prohibition-era texts. Rather, the threat posed by The Young and The Evil is not that drinks would come to mean nothing at all, for that position was anticipated by the temperance narrative in their frequent insistence that assuming that drinks meant nothing at all, that they offered no danger of dissipation, was mere self- delusion. The threat to temperance ideologies posed by this novel, and the cultural work the novel performs that has contributed to our culture’s views of alcohol today, is that alcohol can become unstable, sliding through a variety of significations, “its referentiality 224 mobile and contingent rather than fixed,” and will lose the concrete teleological nature that the temperance movement insisted upon. With all the drinking in chapter one, however, we are denied any real titillation, for as Karel moves through the fairy world of chapter one, meeting satyrs and naiads, he eventually disappears into the safety of a private home to drink coffee, not “tea.” For now, the spectacle of the fairy ends, shut off to the reader behind the closed door of a private home, a “haven” (5). The chapter begins the first of many teases the novel offers to the reader, for throughout the novel, we encounter a number of scenes involving alcohol that carry great erotic transgressive promise, which instead deliver little at all. One such scene is the first meeting of Julian and Karel in chapter two. As Julian meets Karel disembarking from the ship from New Orleans, he immediately recognizes Karel by the sartorial signals Karel sends: he is wearing green, a color that like the red tie, signifies one’s status as fairy (Chauncey 52), 72 and his eyelashes are made up with mascara, something Julian “expected” (6). As the two retreat to a hotel and check into a room, we experience their first apparently desire-laden gaze: “[Julian] saw Karel with attachment and wonder and Karel looked at him exploringly” (6). The promise of a sexual liaison is heavy in the air, and Julian’s request to order some gin indicates to readers familiar with the fear that drove the temperance movement to connect forbidden sexualities with alcohol 73 that the very act that the temperance movement and such 72 This association of green with homosexuality continued in some form through at least the late 1970s. I remember being told by other children in playground banter that if you wore green on Thursday, it meant you were gay. 73 Not only the possibility of homosexuality, but also the possibility of miscegenation as represented by Franklin Evan’s marriage to Margaret, the Creole slave (82-83), prostitution, and other forms of sexuality outside the Victorian normative of the marriage bed. 225 regulatory attempts as the Raines Law hoped to banish is, in fact, imminent, for two men alone in a private hotel with gin can only mean one thing to readers in an era when sex and alcohol had been so dangerously paired. The bell-boy brings the gin, and drinking ensues: “This is good gin Julian said pouring the two tumblers again half full, pouring again two half full, pouring half full again two, being used to corn whisky” (7). Not only do the two men drink, but they drink a lot, quickly. As they drink, the word order of the drinking is manipulated, and various syntactic possibilities are explored. As syntax is queered, readers’ expectations for other forms of transgression rise. In addition, the sentence contains the promise of something new, for Julian is used to corn whisky, a more rural, less sophisticated drink choice. Contained within this promise of something new is a sense that for Julian, at least, what he has dabbled in before has never been as heady as this new urbane stuff. As Julian proceeds on his quest for his sexual identity throughout the novel, he will shift from the naïve tyro to the sophisticated urbanite, moving from corn whisky to gin, becoming more convinced of and confident in his choice to identify as queer. As the two begin to undress to prepare for bed, Karel takes off his coat and says to Julian, “Do you realize…that I am what you might call tight?” (8). Here sexual argot and drink argot intersect, and that intersection hints again at the promise of a sexual encounter as Karel flirts with Julian. Karel’s declaration that he is tight contains a number of possibilities: either he is “tight,” meaning drunk, or he is “tight,” meaning that in the chance of various forms of genital pleasure, his orifices offer the possibility of even more 226 pleasure, 74 or, most likely, he is both, encapsulating within a single word the melding of both drinking and queer identities. As the expectation levels rise for Julian and the readers, Julian begins to face some hesitation in his choice to continue this sexual encounter. The two men share a single pair of pajamas, Karel wearing the pants and Julian the coat, promising again some sort of union of the two halves of the pajamas as the two men proceed with the encounter. As Julian looks at Karel, “he thought Karel unimportantly dirty; before, he hadn’t thought about hygiene and morals, both being easy to neglect” (8). The implication here is that suddenly Karel’s hygiene may offer some excuse for second thoughts. Having been prepared to neglect morality for a tryst with Karel, Julian had not realized the full implications of encountering someone so intimately and all the attendant features, including the reality of dirty bodies, that come with intimate physical contact. Whether or not Julian had been active in pursuing men for sexual relationships before this scene, the anxiety about his choice that pervades much of the novel begins here. Lying in bed, Julian inhales cigarette smoke, which accelerates his heart “even more,” implying that his heart was already accelerated, clearly, we assume, because of the alcohol and the mixed anticipation of and anxiety about sex with Karel. Perhaps a little bemused that Julian is simply lying in bed smoking, Karel takes matters into his own hands, indicating that he can’t sleep: He said oh. I can’t sleep now. 74 That “tight” is an indicator of sexual pleasure traces at least to 1880-1914, when “Tight cunts and easy boots” was offered as a male toast (Partridge 1233). That it is part of gay argot is revealed in football jokes about “tight ends,” and that it is connected to erotic possibilities elsewhere in the novel is revealed when Julian talks about the letters Karel sent to him that brought him to New York, letters in which Karel “made words … that meant o sweet tight boy” (6). 227 Why not there’s nothing else to do Julian said Isn’t there? It’s so late isn’t it? Well, our heart is beating very fast. Much Gin Julian murmured and turned on his left side also. Are you really sleepy? Karel said. Yes I am trying to decide what I shall dream about. Or whom. Yes. You can feel my left side thumping even extending the thump to my right side. I should much rather not be excited at all or excited much more. He placed the cigarette’s lighted ash in the carpet, took a deep breath and embraced the pillow. Good night he said. Karel was silent. Then before it is light I must do something cruel he said. (9) In this exchange, Julian’s reticence to pursue the encounter to its sexual end terminates the arrangement and Karel gets up to leave. Julian’s initial frightened yet slightly hopeful denial that there is nothing else to do is answered by Karel’s coy “Isn’t there?” Julian’s excuse about the hour is met by Karel’s admission that he has noticed Julian’s desire, but Karel’s advances are thwarted by Julian’s blaming the gin. In this scene, the gin initially offered the promise of readerly voyeurism, but now Henri-Ford and Tyler turn that voyeurism upon itself, using the gin itself to erase its initial promise. Gin both entices with the possibility for a space for sexual transgression and substitutes itself, at least in Julian’s mind, for sexual desire. Yet Julian is not quite finished playing the tease himself, indicating that he would rather not be excited or, in a phrase filled with promise, excited much more, but rather than embracing Karel, he embraces the pillow and ends his part of the coquetry, and Karel leaves, the beginning of his something cruel. Readers, having been teased with transgressive possibility, leave with Karel. The next morning, after a night of wandering and reminiscing, Karel receives a phone call from Julian asking Karel to help Julian find a place to live. Karel’s disgust 228 with the previous night’s events are apparent as he cattily asks Julian if Julian had succeeded in “forestalling realization” (12), presumably the realization that Julian did, in fact, want to pursue sex. As Julian continues to beg Karel’s help, Karel persists in his digs at Julian, calling him “impenetrable” (12). In due course, the two reconnect and eventually find an apartment for Julian. After settling on the rent, the two have breakfast at a wagon, celebrating the new apartment with phallic foods, hot dogs and bananas (14). They realize the potential for hosting parties in this new place and make plans for holding one. Karel warns that Julian “better have curtains put up first for policemen and such might burst in with suspicions” (17), suspicions fueled by the intermingled presence of alcohol and fairies. The two discuss who they might want to invite, then the narrative proceeds into a long digression of memory and dream, and we realize that Julian has had some sort of relationship with one of the intended party guests, Theodosia, whom Julian, in his indeterminate state over his sexual object choices, indicates that he did not want to kiss, but did, only to attract her with his beauty. However, she is attracted to something else in Julian, something that she identifies in him, something he does not quite yet embrace, and alcohol contributes to her insights. She herself is an indeterminate character, not quite sure of her own identity, and she wanders, in a state of almost perpetual inebriation, as it were, drinking in nature: Theodosia drinking the morning, drinking the noon, Theo in moonlight, in darkness, walking, walking and saying he is queer. I wonder. Theo bearing wonder. Theodosia finding queer, saying I love you. In strange smoke-thick yellowed air of speakeasies, over wine, over liqueurs, over smoke, over dreamings, Theodosia chanting words like broken musics: I love you. In the yellow afternoon of blinding heat Theodosia in orchid, white limbs and amber hair, white limbs and scarlet shoes, white limbs as nude as morning, Theo in orchid. Theo finding queer: walking slowly in sunlight and saying slowly: I 229 almost believe, except there is a difference and if you are? then there IS a difference. Theodosia walking in sunlight of morning bearing her pale not virgin body over spent dreamings, bearing her pale not virgin body and slim limbs, walking and walking in sunlight and saying queer, I love you. (19 original emphasis) Theodosia’s drinking the morning and noon, combined with her walking, leads her to debate whether or not Julian is queer, and the debate continues in speakeasies over wine and liqueurs. Once more, alcohol and identity seem connected by Victorian associations of drinking and sexuality. Theodosia ultimately identifies Julian as queer, and marks herself as the quintessential “fag hag,” who, despite the difference in Julian if he is queer, still loves him. The combination of drinking, alcohol, wandering, and location serve as elements in an almost alchemical process that demonstrates the indeterminate nature of identity and relationships and the attempts of the characters and the readers to negotiate identity and relationship. As the characters explore the possibilities of indeterminacy, readers wonder, like Theodosia, how to read the characters and the text. This process will occur throughout the novel, especially in Julian’s quest to determine what he will settle upon as sexual object choice. In fact, the wandering in the novel is reminiscent of the wandering that occurs in most temperance narratives, in which the drinker, lost in his haze of drink, becomes unmoored from the standards and mores of his day, lost to the regulating powers of the Victorian matriarch and her court of heteronormativity. Whereas in the temperance narratives, the wandering drunkard is seen as a lost soul, drifting through existence, unable to fulfill his familial roles and responsibilities, in The Young and The Evil, the wandering indeterminacy is celebrated, just as alcohol is celebrated, or, at least, is seen 230 not as a threat to the status quo but as adjunct to the condition of those who seek to reject the status quo. In fact, Julian’s lack of a constant living space, his frequent transition from apartment to apartment, becomes a series of epiphanies in which he is able to explore various sexual identities, and in which alcohol as sign becomes more indeterminate. For example, in the first scene in the novel connected with a rented living space, Julian retires to a hotel with Karel, as I have already discussed. Thrown into a temporary location for the chance at experimenting with a tryst, Julian is hesitant to commit, impenetrable. As he later convinces Karel to help him find another apartment, Julian finds he has a home in which he can throw parties, to which many people will come, but again, Julian makes no clear sexual object choice, avoiding sexual relationships with his guests and roommates (14, 31-41). Later, Julian invites Theodosia to move in with him, and he experiments with bisexual desires. His time with Theodosia prepares him for full acceptance of a fairy identity, which we later find when he invites Karel and Louis to move in with him (63-87). 75 In a later scene, Julian fears he has something in his eye and asks Karel to take him to the doctor. They decide to get some breakfast instead, and wind up in a speakeasy drinking punchino and applejack. There, they meet a group of men and a “round blonde girl” who invite them to the table. Here, for more characters than just Julian, drinking and sexuality collide, as one of the men in this space set aside for drinking says about the 75 Much of the novel resists dividing identities into strict hetero/homo binaries as most of the characters explore polymorphous sexualities in their relationships, sleeping with members of each sex, embracing or rejecting sexual labels, refusing, like Ford and Tyler do with alcohol, to fix on a single, determined meaning. That Julian appears to be seeking a concrete location on a hetero/homo continuum makes him almost like Fitzgerald’s Nick in his conservatism relative to the rest of the novel. 231 girl as she leaves to dance with one of the other men, “I would like to rape that girl there before everybody’s eyes” (31). In the exploratory moral world of The Young and The Evil, the threat of male violence to women because of alcohol is not merely hinted at as a result of drinking, it is openly discussed and loudly proclaimed; in addition, it becomes a potential performance as the man wishes to do it under the gaze of everyone in the speakeasy. The Young and The Evil explores the ways that sexual deviancy enters the public sphere, moving beyond mere intimate object choice to public performance. Both alcohol and sexuality, objects and behaviors groups such as temperance sought to regulate, are resisting social controls in this novel. Rather than internalize the regulation, in this scene the regulation is not only rejected, but its opposite is valorized, and the moral signs temperance had attached to alcohol are ignored or even inverted in this scene. Good and bad seem to have switched positions. The party eventually heads to the girl’s place, where “not having a thing to do [they] decided to play strip poker” (31). While Julian is mostly dressed, the girl loses her clothes, and he realizes he is not too far behind her. When he finally becomes nude, the girl says, “I’m drunk” and lays her head in his lap (31). Yet again, alcohol becomes the catalyst for sexual perversion as defined by sodomy laws, as the drunken woman lays her head in Julian’s naked lap. What ensues is left to the imagination, but Julian is once more left to ponder the state of his sexual identity. The other guests leave, and Julian and Karel and the girl sleep in the girl’s bed, “Julian having forgotten about breakfast and all about his eye” (31), presumably due to his conflicting emotions with the two possible objects of desire in the bed with him. 232 The next night in Julian’s apartment, he prepares for a party, and Karel comes over to make him up. Julian dresses in “a black shirt and light powder-green tie,” his sartorial choices serving as costume for performing queer, writing his identity with his wardrobe. Karel offers to make him up, bringing his “box of beauty,” and Julian “submit[s] to his artistry, only drawing the line at his eyebrows being plucked” (32). Julian’s boundaries here again suggest his anxiety at fully adopting a queer identity. As Chauncey points out, plucked eyebrows were yet another sign to the viewer’s gaze that the owner of those eyebrows identified as a fairy: In 1922 a seventeen-year-old Italian boy told of being arrested with a friend in Prospect Park when a detective “took off our hats and saw that our eyebrows were tweezed [and] said, ‘You are fairies.’” That the detective’s surmise about the meaning of tweezed eyebrows was widely shared was confirmed not only by the boys’ efforts to hide their telltale eyebrows with hats but also by an eighteen-year- old’s assertion, a few years later, that it was “common knowledge” among the boys in his Italian Harlem neighborhood that “men with full faces, long delicate fingers, tweezed eyebrows and well shaped lips are inverts.” (54) Julian has still not committed to the queer identity with which he so facilely flirts, hesitating to broadcast to the world his choice, even though he has voiced desire for other men. However, continuing its tendency to invite the reader into the gay demimonde, the novel follows the brief description of Julian’s transformation into transitional queer with an intricate account of Karel’s transformation of himself, offering a sort of how-to guide for pansy makeup, offering readers another chance to explore their own quest for sexual identity: Karel never did badly by his own face. He put an infinitesimal spot of lip salve in each nostril and almost invisible lines of black running vertically in the center of each eyelid. His eyelashes, as Frederick Spitzberger always predicted, were long enough now to catch in the boughs (should he go for a walk in Washington Square). His mouth, though not long, was made smaller sometimes by raising the 233 lower lip and pushing in the upper lip with it. Of course his eyebrows often looked the same as the week before. They could be penciled into almost any expression: Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, etc. (32) Recognizing the next essential ingredient in this attempt to explore his sexual identity, Julian declares “…[Y]ou stay here while I go for the gin” (32); not surprisingly we find that alcohol once more becomes an ingredient in embracing and enhancing queer identities. Julian’s response indicates that, for him, gin is the final touch on the makeup ritual, ensuring his transformation while dethroning alcohol from its position as demonic tempter and relegating it to mere fashion accessory. What ensues is a terrific scene of debauchery. Unlike The Great Gatsby, which contains an elaborate eternally present party scene but features little actual drinking, the party scenes in The Young and The Evil joyously present drinking and the subsequent queer behaviors that accompany it. Returning with the gin, Julian begins pouring as the guests arrive. Because Karel is “desperately afraid of a raid,” they tack red curtains up over the windows, evoking red neckties (34). The Mexican Santiago arrives, as do a number of women, and the mixing of races and genders feared by the temperance movement begins. Frederick, a rather vocal critic of Midwestern poetry values, begins smoking marijuana, which Karel protests against. More guests arrive, many already drunk or bringing their own alcohol, such as Osbert, “already well filled with wine which he drank habitually in large quantities (36), and Gene who “immediately offered K-Y 76 a drink of rye which he carried in his hip-pocket. She said she wasn’t drinking” (36). K- Y’s choice not to drink is apparently a ruse, as she is later seen being dragged by Gene up 76 K-Y is the nickname for an unnamed woman from Kentucky, ostensibly the source for the nickname. However, K-Y lubricant had been on the market for almost thirty years at the time of the novel’s publication, and the hyphen between K and Y in her nickname intimate an in-joke. 234 balcony steps, “but she was too heavy and the steps too narrow and since she wouldn’t walk up and said Christ you’re hurting me he had to be content with talking to her on the couch” (37). Later still, however, after the gin has run out and Frederick and “Gene’s friend” have run out to get some more, everyone but Gabriel and K-Y drink the gin that Frederick brings back. Theodosia arrives, and “Yes she wanted a drink. She had been trying she said to make a decision all day and she would get drunk and make it” (36). As we try to decipher what that decision might be, we find Theodosia spending most of her evening either with Julian or maneuvering to be with him. Julian teaches Karel some dance steps, while Theodosia dances with Gene’s friend, and when the dance is done, Gene’s friend asks Karel to dance and “Julian and Theodosia went behind the partition for another drink. Theodosia liked to get drunk all at once so she took a double one” (37). Theodosia’s decision must be a difficult one indeed, as she forsakes any temperance morality hopes for the propriety of women and proceeds to get quickly drunk. By the end of the evening we realize what Theodosia’s decision would be: “Theodosia said to Julian she had planned to spend the night with him but since Karel… Yes Julian said since Karel… Gene offered to take her home and Theodosia said all right call a taxi” (40). As we learn, Theodosia had been planning to seduce Julian, but Karel provides a barrier, the type of which is never explicit, though it is clearly textual and presumably sexual. Earlier we had found out that Karel “drank more than he had ever drunk in one evening” 235 (39), and upon passing out, was taken to Julian’s bed by Frederick to sleep it off. 77 Part of Theodosia’s and Julian’s interchange is the plain truth that Julian’s bed is already occupied. However, the part that remains unspoken is Theodosia’s suspicion, mentioned earlier, that Julian is queer, and we know, possesses some romantic feelings for Karel, so Julian’s love for Karel is the open secret that comes between Theodosia’s and Julian’s tryst. The scene is fraught with sexual tension, but whose and what kind is difficult to pinpoint. Julian seems to want to sleep with Theodosia; however, he also seems to need someone to tell him what he is, to voice the love that dare not speak its name. Gene’s interruption suspends that moment of revelation, and Julian and Theodosia, their physical union thwarted at this point, will shortly thereafter live together, and Julian will use Theodosia as sanctuary on his quest to discover his own queer identity. Before he can settle on his identity, however, Julian needs to explore queer identity a little further, and once again alcohol helps him do so. Having never consummated his love with Karel, Julian mourns when Karel departs to live with Louis. Sitting alone in his apartment, Julian sips some coffee, then goes out to a speakeasy to buy a white bunny, proceeds to consume four drinks, then leaves the bar. In what appears to be his drunken interiority, 78 narrative form melts, and in his stream-of- consciousness rambling, he has an explosion of queer fantasies. He conflates mascara and masculinity in an inversion of the typical use of mascara as a signifier of an 77 Thus, while Theodosia turns to alcohol to make her seduction of Julian possible, Karel’s use of alcohol acts as barrier to that desire. Alcohol fulfills more than one role here, becoming more and more contingent and indeterminate. 78 Boone denies interiority in the novel (261), but scenes such as this one beg the question: if this is not interiority, then to whom is Julian speaking? 236 effeminate identity, “I bemoan them most under sheets at night when their eyes rimmed with masculinity see nothing…,” (44) as if struggling to come to grips with what masculinity and femininity are and where both are situated on the continuum of gender and sexuality that he is struggling to negotiate. He perseverates on erections, picturing “trousers [that] must be adjusted over the exclamation point” (44), then disdains the puritanical practices of old maids, the current status of the Victorian Matriarch, who, in their ambivalent reaction to erections, “prefer not to grasp although they say how do you do adonsiprick or do they grasp it with their five-fingered wrinkled cunts” (45). These old maids seem to echo Julian’s own anxieties about penises. Moving away from this, to him, disturbing image, Julian proceeds to imagine the various men who would not undress in a subway for a quick erotic encounter, “fearing imprisonment and shame” (45), and numbers among them a variety of movie stars, Ramon Novarro, Richard Barthelmess, and John Barrymore, 79 and his own acquaintances, including Harry Number, Louis, Karel, and himself. That these latter men apparently do partake in genital male relationships with other men points out the power of mainstream straight culture to deny these men their selves. The fantasy progresses to males in drag orgasming in just such anonymous encounters: Their necks grow unknowingly…something explodes near their testicles and in the vicinity of their hearts (and sometimes they are nauseated). They doubtless clean spots off or out; they are soldiers without medals since they have legs with hairs on them and their heels sound. They wash themselves assuredly. 79 Ramon Novarro was a Mexican actor, who played many swashbuckling roles in Hollywood films, and who was, according to William J. Mann in Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, “known to be gay throughout the industry (96). Richard Barthelmess was primarily a silent film actor, and of him Mann has virtually nothing to say. John Barrymore is probably the most famous of the three, being part of the Barrymore acting dynasty. Mann identifies him in a list of male actors who represented the change in “the image of the male hero on the screen” in the 1920s, that hero becoming far more androgynous than the “masculine cowboys and stolid hawk-nosed heroes of the Teens” (90). 237 I have often imagined the curve of them next to me in bed colored like coffee or like cream or like peaches and cream powder but without peaches and cream powder in their perspiring dear pores. They have I understand eyelashes with noses to match. I have often caught them going into toilets and coming out too. (45) Liberated by alcohol to pursue his queer fantasy, Julian can imagine these erotic encounters, and places himself in the middle of them, in bed with a variety of races, crossing all sorts of boundaries the temperance narrative morality had striven to establish and concretize. The toilets are, of course, the location for quick sexual encounters, and it is from toilets that one can come out. Anxious about his own identity, Julian resists the impulse to come out once and for all. However, after wandering throughout the city, he returns home to drop on his bed, where he “heard for the thousandth and more time the irregular beat of his heart through his right ear on the pillow” (46). As in Julian’s first encounter with Karel, drinking and sexual fantasy become inseparable, and readers cannot identify whether the heartbeat is due to his drunkenness or his desire. At this point, Julian apparently enters a dream that is not interfered with by his heartbeat, whether it be desire-driven or alcohol-fueled. In his dream, seemingly a recurring one, he envisions himself as a woman or girl, as near as I can tell, and this time she is the most beautiful woman she has ever been, more beautiful even than when he had such dreams at ten years old in the awakening of his sexuality. Toward her comes a sailor, a key queer icon for trade, object of desire of many a fairy. The two apparently engage in a sexual encounter: “She wasn’t afraid of him at all, she was by the sea. They were warm to each other, he was pure. She was beautiful, it was sad to see the sailor-boy have to piss afterwards and walk away” (46). The fantasy of Julian as woman in this 238 other iteration of a polymorphous sexuality is ruined by the brevity and impersonality of the situation, with the sailor pissing and walking away. So far in the novel, it is only in dreams and in alcohol-induced fantasies that Julian can more freely wrestle with who he may actually be. However, while alcohol can for Julian be a catalyst for exploring an identity about which he seems to be anxious, there are some vestiges of the temperance narrative morality concerning alcohol that still remain for other characters. Throughout much of the novel, alcohol serves as a moral lubricant, allowing characters to slide into forbidden identities effortlessly, or nearly so. Attaching this attribute to alcohol, making alcohol a fixed sign of queer identity or an elixir that releases inhibitions seems to support a queer agenda. However, in order to maintain the integrity of indeterminacy, the narrative cannot simply swap good for bad, valorizing the evil. If indeterminacy is a lynchpin of this narrative, then alcohol must serve a variety of purposes, must become a floating signifier that, to paraphrase Boone’s position on core identities in the novel, “refuses the logic of a core [signifier] within which prevailing moral values can or should be located” (218 emphasis added). In other words, alcohol cannot only serve as lubrication, cannot only be embraced for encouraging “othered” identities; it must be possessed of a mobile and contingent referentiality. Thus, for one character at least, alcohol leads not to a greater understanding of his queer identity or to a more easily enacted sexual encounter, but instead it leads to his failure in attempting to seduce someone to whom he is not attracted. Alcohol becomes impediment rather than lubricant. 239 Gabriel, wandering as many of the characters do, leaves a speakeasy where he has spent the night, carrying a pint of whisky offered to him by an Italian stranger. 80 He heads toward Theodosia’s house, where he is paid to type up her manuscripts. Whenever he arrives at her apartment, she is always in the bathroom, telling him that she will be out in just a minute, but leaving the door open a crack (47). Theodosia is apparently attracted to indeterminacy—whether Julian’s anxious indeterminacy or Gabriel’s denied indeterminacy. However, Gabriel has never thought of Theodosia with any kind of real desire. “If he had considered her as an object of pleasure, it was only as a minor pleasure that could be postponed indefinitely” (47). His lack of any real desire for her, combined with alcohol, presumably the lubricant for illicit pleasure, will be his undoing in what is arguably the only scene in the novel in which drinking has any negative consequences whatsoever. On his way to Theodosia’s apartment, Gabriel stops in Union Square, and, watching the people circle around him, feels as if he is the center of a merry-go-round. “Feeling the bottle of liquor, which his hand had warmed, he took it out of his pocket and extracted the cork. Raising the bottle to his lips he tilted his head back, closing his eyes to the sun. The whisky flowed down his throat, leaving the bottle in excited regular agitations. His insides felt as if they were just being given life, as if they had had no 80 The bottle seems offered as the second half of some exchange, and while there is no explicit mention made, it may be that Gabriel has serviced the man, even though he had not been drinking, for Gabriel’s smile gives the impression of derision, and we read, “If it was his will to treat the lives of people objectively, hence without involving his own feelings, hence selfishly, it was his fate to be treated so by others” (47). In other words, we realize Gabriel has just been treated as an object. Gabriel is a character who at one point in the novel is trying to raise money for an abortion, presumably of his own child. He denies homosexuality (26), yet seems to have a physical relationship with Louis. Gabriel even apparently flirts with Julian, calling him beautiful (58). Like many characters in the novel, Gabriel’s sexual identity is polymorphous, resisting determinacy. 240 blood before and were ready now to function” (48). Compared to the men Julian fantasized about who wouldn’t undress in public, Gabriel’s very public drinking is rather exhibitionist. Performing an almost erotic act, fellating the bottle as it were, the alcohol coming into his throat in “excited regular agitations” similar to ejaculation, Gabriel is revived, not enervated as the temperance movement would have him think, his insides given life, impregnated. He does not bemoan his thirst nor desperately pursue his next drink, fulfilling temperance scripts; rather, he is now ready to function, tumescent with blood. By the time he arrives at Theodosia’s house, Gabriel is thoroughly soused. Walking into her apartment, “he shed his overcoat and fumbled with his left hand at the knot in his tie. He took long breaths and walked heavily towards the bathroom door” (49). The drunken Gabriel loosens his tie, what has been a sartorial gay signifier, and shambles toward the bathroom door, where a new kind of encounter awaits him: It was opened two inches and one eye of Theodosia looked at him. She didn’t say, as usual, just a minute. Gabriel stopped with his lips apart and looked at the slit showing her one eye. He was silent and seemed to be impelled towards the thin horizontal shaft that had an eye at the top. He was running after it (through a tunnel) and the thing was on the end of a train leaving him running as hard as he could….His eyes focused and it was Theodosia’s breathing close face that he saw. He felt her arms around his neck and his arms around her waist. He smiled sweetly as he could and picked up her body which was taller than his own and walked with her to the bed. She wore a white nightgown. On the journey to the bed she said Gabriel Gabriel and put a cheek against his shoulder. He deposited her on the bed. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing rapidly. Gabriel kept his eyes on her while he jerked off his coat for if he took his eyes away he had a difficult time locating her again. (49) The bathroom becomes an enormous vagina, beckoning Gabriel into its “slit,” its “thin shaft,” with a clitoral eye, “through a tunnel,” and he is impelled towards it, directed by 241 the train of his erection. Yet there is some difficulty with this encounter, for Theodosia has been seen by Gabriel as only a minor pleasure, the postponement of which appears to have come to an end. True to form so far, alcohol seems to be encouraging a sexual encounter. Gabriel must concentrate upon the task at hand, for he has a difficult time locating her, due both to the alcohol’s inebriating influence but also as a location on his sexual desire continuum. While preparing to attempt this sexual conquest, Gabriel needs to prime himself, “jerking off” his coat. Theodosia, we find, has wanted this encounter to happen for two weeks. “She had felt when with him that her spirituality was challenged. His thoughts seemed forever separated from the flesh. But in her heart Theodosia desired to make him hers just once” (50). Theodosia recognizes some difference in Gabriel, that his thoughts and his flesh are disconnected somehow in her continuum of desire. Yet that difference is of no consequence to her as “[h]er nightgown was being raised and she breathed faster and faster. She felt Gabriel’s hands on her ankles and her legs slowly bending at the knees. Oh, oh she gasped, her eyes still closed. Then she opened her eyes some and saw Gabriel on the bed kneeling in front of her with his hands holding her legs apart, his mouth descending (50). In the act of engaging in sex with a woman he saw as only a minor pleasure, he appears to be still postponing his own pleasure at least a little, turning to cunnilingus for foreplay. That he does not engage in direct genital intercourse with Theodosia underscores Gabriel’s refusal to fulfill heteronormative scripts for procreation—he is already notorious for funding an abortion. 242 Gabriel’s attempt to surrender to Theodosia’s minor pleasures fails. Theodosia faints at the thought of the pleasure to come, but Gabriel is transported to the middle of the merry-go-round again, where he “saw a nude woman walk up behind him. She kicked his head off. He saw his head whirl brilliantly from his shoulders. His head was a bottle whirling in the sun. He could see the blood gushing from his heedless trunk. It gushed like vomit” (50). Immediately after this vision, Gabriel realizes he has actually vomited all over Theodosia, who jumps up and flees to the bathroom, sobbing. In his vision, Gabriel becomes a bottle opened by a nude woman. Alcohol, rather than facilitating this sexual act, has ended it. Gabriel becomes the temperance movement’s feared essence of perversion himself. As a bottle of alcohol that echoes the bottle of whisky he drank and threw whirling through the air before he came to Theodosia’s apartment, Gabriel, who has attempted an encounter had had previously looked upon as only a minor pleasure, reacts adversely, spilling his contents all over Theodosia. Whereas in other scenes in the novel inhibitions are erased by alcohol, here they seem reinforced. Rather than enhancing the pleasures that are often strongly but secretly desired in the novel, here alcohol prevents a pleasure that is seen as only minor. Gabriel may be in denial of a queer identity, not wanting to be seen as a faggot (25), and impregnating women only to abort their babies, but here, in the presence of alcohol, Gabriel is confronted by an inability to perform. Usually, the novel celebrates the kind of perversion that imbibing alcohol can bring. For example, later in the novel, a thought occurs to Julian: “A taste for bad wine may be cultivated like sexual perversions and any number of other dubious refinements” 243 (80). In this thought lies a very explicit connection between alcohol and perversion; a taste for either is a learned behavior, and both lie outside the temperance morality continuum; no good, temperate American should learn such things. That Julian, who struggles with his sexual identity throughout the novel, realizes the connection between alcohol and perversion is important to the celebratory and inviting elements of the novel, and demonstrates the celebration of the very ideologies the temperance movement sought to reject and control. However, in this scene with Gabriel and Theodosia, a taste for perversion fueled by alcohol butts up against a contradiction of Gabriel’s sexual desires. Although seemingly motivated by alcohol to pursue a sexual perversion that violates the integrity of his desires, Theodosia’s pleasures being only minor, Gabriel cannot perform. His desires trump perversion, and what would be to Gabriel a perverse act, cunnilingus with only mildly pleasing Theodosia, produces his violent, visceral reaction. In the moral schema of the novel, in which perversity as defined by the status quo is embraced and celebrated, one act that is truly perverse is to settle for minor pleasures, however young and evil they might be. That is why one of the key events for the novel lies in Julian’s admission to himself that he is queer. Living with Theodosia for a while offers Julian a life “much as [he] expected it would be….She paid the rent and her passion was not so lyrical, and he was grateful for both.” (57). However, as Julian pursues an unfulfilled sexual pleasure with her, he is constantly reminded of the deeper desires within him. Even though Julian has a sexual outlet, even though Theodosia offers him heterosexual pleasure, or at least bisexual pleasure, his queer identity struggles for acceptance, for psychic honesty: “He 244 didn’t have to but his mind had to. His mind had to because he wanted to. He was looking at her roaming around her body. I am you are he was. Forgive and forget are both bad words because they have grown together and thus become impossible. Beckoning is the same as becoming” (57). Faced with the tempting presence of Theodosia, Julian’s corporeality does not “have to,” that is, he does not need to look elsewhere for a sexual object. Yet “[h]is mind had to because he wanted to.” In other words, his queer identity is asserting its desires even though there is a sexual outlet for the erotic energies that the era supposed coursed through men. As Chauncey articulates, this era was one in which “men regarded themselves as highly lustful creatures whose health would be impaired if their explosive sexual needs did not find release” (83). Julian’s body may be satisfied, but his mind, his self, is not. He looks at her, but roams around her body, in an unsettled orbit around the heterosexuality she offers, unmoored like the drunkard and the cruising queer. As we struggle to decipher the “I am you are he was,” it may be helpful to see it as Julian’s internal struggle, an internal monologue between the various pieces of his psyche that are trying to assert which one will have full control over his identity. It also could be a summary of the kinds of discussions he has had with Theodosia, who had earlier marked him as queer and targeted him for her heteronormative ministrations. In that sense, he is affirming her claim that he is now experiencing a heterosexual pleasure with Theodosia, who in turns reaffirms the relationship with the “you are.” “He was” becomes the explanation they offer to those who look in upon their relationship with doubt, knowing Julian’s taste for men. But establishing a straight identity in the face of a clamoring queer one is not as simple as 245 uttering “I am.” Both Theodosia’s forgiving him for his desire for men and his attempt to forget that desire have grown together, precluding any chance for success, and the beckoning desires for men ultimately indicate that Julian will eventually become established in a much more queer identity. That beckoning is represented by Julian’s thoughts when he is with Theodosia, expressed textually as the word “love” becomes queered in Julian’s ruminations upon it: Oh I think that love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love lovelovelovelove love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love lovelove love love love love love lovelove love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love lovelovelovelovelovelovelove lovelove love love love lovelove love love love love love love love love love love love love lovelove love love love love love lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvrvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee lolololololololololololololololololololololololololololo veveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveveve lovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlovlov eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee lovelovelovelovelovelovelove lovelovelovelovelovelovelove lxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvx lxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvxexlxoxvx is grand and must be complete with Louis I wonder. 81 (57-58) 81 I have done my best to accurately reproduce the text, but there are some difficulties. For example, the 17 th letter in the sequence of “vvv’s” above is an “r,” and the spacing may at times be arbitrary, although I have copied my text faithfully. I have noticed a number of what may be typos in my edition of The Young and The Evil. Some examples of possible typos include: “Dancing drew the blood faster through their bodies. Drink drusic (sic) drowned them” (94), and “He didn’t stare at it, his eyes were walking along the 246 As Julian progresses through love, passing through the kind of lovesick infatuation that repeats the word interminably, he eventually breaks the word down into its component parts, separating it, reconnecting it in new ways, inserting stray letters that interrupt the word, to end on Louis with whom love may be complete, having left Theodosia far behind. Louis is, of course, Gabriel’s partner in crime and more openly queer. At one point, Louis, Karel, and Julian spend the night together in Julian’s apartment, forming a love triangle of differing desires. At this point, Theodosia asks if they can go out, and they proceed to Frankie’s, where they order white wine, finishing four glasses (60). They proceed to the Tavern, where they observe Santiago performing his whip dance, and Julian’s gaze is erotically charged: “Julian liked the dance—the way the whip cracked and his heels clicked and one hand caressed his oiled curly black hair” (61). When Santiago’s dance finishes, the customers crowd a dance floor, and Santiago joins K-Y and Windward at a table. We learn that enough time has passed “after K-Y’s abortion for her to drink so she was drunk” (61), and this revelation may clue us into why K-Y was claiming not to drink at the earlier party. If she were pregnant, then she probably would have chosen to abstain. However, now that she has eliminated that obstacle to her inebriation, her drunken gaze settles on Theodosia (61). Finished dancing, Julian and Theodosia join the table, and couples are paired up, Julian and Santiago, and Theodosia and K-Y. Russians from a nearby table offer them chartreuse to drink. After more dancing, they are joined by block they had »ust (sic) traversed” (84). Of course, given the queering nature of the narrative, in which punctuation, spacing, and other conventions of writing are often ignored or transformed, it is difficult to determine whether or not instances such as these are editorial mistakes or intentional authorial manipulations of the text. 247 Windward and Mrs. Dodge, and Windward offers them Harlem rye (62). Julian seems to be attracting both Mrs. Dodge and Santiago. K-Y, meanwhile, “was talking close to Theodosia’s ear and Theodosia was fascinated” (62). Alcohol seems to be working its magic on these couples, and Julian offers the observation that he will be “wild drunk mixing drinks” (62). In that phrase “wild drunk” lies a promise of what is to come, and alcohol once more becomes associated with gloriously reduced inhibitions. Windward, trying to get some attention, throws his empty bottle at the piano player, and the customers all clear out, screaming. In the confusion, Julian sees K-Y and Theodosia get in a taxi together. That old catalyst, alcohol, has encouraged a new prohibited identity in Theodosia, and perhaps in K-Y, as the two go off to presumably pursue a sexual encounter that does not include the possible consequence of pregnancy. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dodge and Santiago ask Julian where they will finish the evening, and he invites them to his apartment where he has some gin. The three take off their clothes and climb in to bed, with Julian in the middle, and the time for his decision has arrived. Placed in the middle, as the third sex, Julian must realize where he will ultimately align his sexual object choices, for unlike many of the characters in the novel, Julian seems to desire the integrity that comes from settling on a monomorphous, not a polymorphous, sexuality. Santiago complicates matters when he tells Julian that Julian is the only sissy that he ever loved. He repeats that assertion about Julian to Mrs. Dodge, and puts his arm around Julian. Still repelled by the term “sissy,” as we have seen Julian draw the line at adopting a fully sissified identity earlier in the novel, Julian seems to make his choice as he moves closer to Mrs. Dodge (63). Offended by Julian’s apparent choice, Santiago hits 248 Julian, “but not hard” and gets up, gets a drink and throws it into Julian’s face. Santiago dresses, announces that he is leaving, and abandons Julian to his apparent choice. However, the chapter ends with Mrs. Dodge asking Julian three times, “But you are aren’t you?” (63). These three questions hang in the air unanswered. Reminiscent of the three times in the Gospel accounts that Peter was asked if he knew Jesus at the time of Jesus’s trial, 82 Mrs. Dodge’s questions provide Julian the opportunity to test his courage, to make a choice, to confess and adhere to the identity as “sissy” that he has been attempting to suppress up until this point. Having become “wild drunk” by mixing all of those drinks, Julian enters the space of identity that alcohol can open for those who wish to transgress the status quo. Alcohol, rather than clouding his mind and his judgment as it does so often in the temperance narratives, is the impetus that demands introspection and honesty, an invitation rather than a curse. At the beginning of the next chapter, Theodosia returns to gather her things, and Julian feels “joy at what he decided to have happen” (64). Julian has decided something, and whatever that decision may be, it no longer includes Theodosia. After she leaves, he realizes that he must hurry to join Karel and Louis, impelled by the force of his decision to align himself with them, to embrace his queer identity. Thoughts race through his mind as he scurries to Karel and Louis’s apartment on 14 th Street; one thought in particular indicates how firmly he has embraced his true identity: “He walked along Fifth Avenue and though if he should really meet, actually MEET President Hoover on his way he would say, oh well what would he say except: I am what I am and I would for the price of a suit and overcoat and would you throw in a hat, please, Mr. Hoover?” (64 82 Found in Matthew 26: 69-75, Mark 14: 66-72, Luke 22: 54-62, John 18: 15-27. 249 original emphasis). As Gregory S. Jackson pointed out about the homiletic novels I mentioned in chapter two, the novels invited readers to enter a dialogue with the text in order to wrestle with the great issues of social justice of their day. In a similar manner, throughout much of The Young and The Evil, readers are required to fill in pieces of conversation, implications, and innuendo that have been left out, encouraging readers to think queerly. Just as the homiletic novels sought to encourage an ideal Christian response to the needs of the world, and the temperance narratives sought to interpellate and concretize an ideal American identity in their readers, so in many ways does The Young and the Evil seek to create an ideal queer identity, through such methods as inviting readers to think queerly, to queer the typography of the text itself (as in Julian’s ruminations on “love”), or to learn practical steps to fostering a queer identity, such as how to put on queer makeup and how alcohol can encourage queerness. Here, in this scene where Julian finally embraces his queer identity, we realize as we fill in the rest of his conversation with the President, that Julian has become an ideal American queer. As Julian meets the President in his fantasy, he admits that the only thing he could say would be “I am what I am.” This phrase alludes to the Tetragrammaton, the name God gave in Exodus 3:14 when Moses asked God what God’s name was. 83 The phrase has been translated in a variety of ways, including “I am who I am” and “I will be what I will be.” Theological debate aside, Julian’s use of this phrase offers a direct assault on evangelical groups such as the temperance movement that sought to regulate identity. In doing so, Julian declares himself to be a sort of self-contained entity beyond the concerns 83 Of course, another famous source of this phrase is the cartoon character Popeye. As cartoon “trade,” the quintessential sailor, Popeye, who first appeared in 1929, offers interesting possibilities for Camp interpretations. 250 of such petty groups, an entity who has accepted his identity as queer, an identity he has always had and always will have. As the new apotheosis of queerness, Julian enters into a sexual commodity exchange with President Hoover, who is cast as Julian’s trade. Free of recriminations, free to finally accept his queer identity as queer God incarnate, Julian goes forth to preach the gospel of queer to America through its representative, Hoover. For the mere price of a suit, coat, and hat, Julian cruises the President in his fantasy, hoping to reveal to him and indirectly to the country an observation that Julian makes later in the novel, “America is so Greek but doesn’t know it” (83). Relying on classical stereotypes of Greek homosexual behavior, Julian casts himself as a queer prophet, revealing the truth about the country’s sexual identity. While alcohol can initiate characters into queer identities and reduce or reinforce inhibitions, it can, of course, signify other things as well. Julian becomes a key character in another moment of intense cultural work forming an ideological shift concerning alcohol in the novel, once more making alcohol’s referentiality mobile and contingent. In one particular scene, Julian and Gabriel go to an Italian restaurant and buy two bottles of wine. The two men stroll down the street, stopping in empty doorways to drink the wine so they would not have to share it with anyone who might turn up their apartment. However, Gabriel drinks only a single sip from one of the bottles, and Julian finishes the rest. Filled with two bottles of wine, Julian “felt like beauty” (80). Unlike the consequence the temperance movement would cast for those who drink to excess, such as an unquenchable thirst for more, a turn to violence, intense sickness, or visions of demons coming to torment the drinker, the consequence here is to transform Julian into 251 beauty personified. Not only does Julian feel like beauty, but he apparently looked like it as well. Although he can not be sure of any kind of outward physical transformation, he does find that in his beautified state, Gabriel touches his ear and wants to kiss him flatly on the mouth, but Julian refuses, identifying Gabriel as his “intellectual lover” and keeping Gabriel at bay for the moment (81). Thus, alcohol can not only lubricate (or prevent) relationships, signify identity, reduce inhibitions, but it can also imbue men with an aesthetic presence that encourages putatively straight men to want to kiss them on the mouth. 84 That the novel is striving to perform a cultural work that runs counter to that performed by the temperance narratives is made even clearer in a later scene in the novel. There, Julian, Frederick, and the rest attend a drag ball that is represented by the queerest language in the novel. Snippets of conversation are blended together in juxtapositions that force perverse readings. Alcohol is, of course, a major element in this ball. Julian wanders from table to table and imbibes gin, rye, and more gin. Towards the end of the scene, as the text begins to return to a more conventional form, Julian accepts advances from a stranger at a table and finally pursues an anonymous sexual encounter in a hallway beside the stage: “Julian knew that people had to forget appearances, that horses would hardly, that mountains and clouds wouldn’t and neither would some men but this one would. He found he could be mad and wasn’t afraid of the vengeance of God nor its earthly equivalent and there was no hesitation from beginning to end. He came out fanning himself. A chaplet to go around my neck he thought” (103). Free to engage in 84 The possibility for creating a gay aesthetic of alcohol is not fully realized here. However, another gay writer who does write what amounts to a manifest of alcohol and aesthetics is Richard Bruce Nugent, especially in the Pulcreado worship of his character Gale in his short story Geisha Man. 252 an encounter with this man who would forget appearances, Julian finds he can be “mad,” he can be queer, and can be unafraid of the vengeance of God touted by conservative morality movements, having established his primacy in creating his own morality. This encounter, unlike some of the encounters earlier, such as Julian’s first meeting with Karel, proceeds without hesitation, and Julian has fully entered into the world of the cruising queer and can wear this encounter around his neck as a Catholic artifact, incarnating this intersection of sexuality and spirituality as a rosary. The novel offers an America in which men can have sex with other men anonymously, can drink, can even unite polymorphously perverse sexuality with spirituality and God’s wrath never strikes anyone down. Returning from the drag ball, Julian and Karel prepare for bed, and Julian takes off his makeup, having fully adopted the costume of his new queer identity. As they pontificate about various aesthetic and social points, Karel argues that “morality is rotten…it’s a stage of rot. It’s the skin beginning to fall off” (108). In this novel that works to create a new morality unconcerned with previous moral systems, a morality that might be unidentifiable as morality given the conservative nature of the country, Karel understandably identifies morality as a disease that can be sloughed off to reveal something underneath. That something becomes the queer identity that has been submerged beneath the rotten skin of morality forced upon it by others, and various medicines can encourage that sloughing; alcohol is perhaps the most prescribed concoction for accelerating the change, while makeup, acting as an exfoliant for that rotten skin and accompanied by plucked eyebrows, can also ensure a positive prognosis. 253 The final scene in the novel that involves alcohol offers a Camp reading of drink, playfully acknowledging the dangers of a queer identity fueled by drink. As the title of chapter fourteen, “Cruise,” implies, the focus of the chapter will be on cruising, on seeking sexual partners while wandering. Frederick and Karel go to a speakeasy and order Old-Fashioned cocktails. As we progress through the narrative, we realize that they are looking for some kind of sexual diversion. Looking around the bar they “[see] nothing that interest[s] them in their present mood” (112). Knowing that one good way to modify a mood, to facilitate various sexual experiences, is to imbibe, they order another drink. After that drink, Frederick declares that it is time to “go up on the Drive” (112). Karel, in agreement with Frederick, declares that he is ready to do so, especially considering that he is “dying for it” (112). Fueled into a lustful frenzy, the two men ride a bus to 106 th street and walk to Riverside Drive. A crowd of civilians and sailors follows them, ideal targets for a promising cruise. However, alcohol can affect judgment, and the two men appear perhaps a bit too flamboyant, for they are attacked by some of the crowd in a parking lot, then saved by some policemen, who bring them and some of the sailors to a jail. Frederick worries; he is on a suspended sentence for a previous conviction, but Karel is more nonchalant, familiar with the process, removing his makeup to destroy evidence. When the two are eventually brought before the magistrate, they get a bit of a surprise. The magistrate winks at them. Karel puts on a performance for the magistrate, thinking that the magistrate “had his eye furtively upon him” (118). Under the desiring gaze of the closeted magistrate, Karel camps it up a little, thinking that perhaps they have 254 an ally behind the bench. The magistrate dismisses the charges, and as Karel and Frederick pass by the bench, the magistrate leans over and says “sweetly,” “but be more careful next time” (119). The two men leave the courthouse, Frederick voicing his disbelief at their good luck, Karel indicating that he could tell the magistrate was on their side: “There’s at least one judge in the world with a civilized with a sense of civilization” (sic 119), his apparently drunken skaz rewording itself; that is, unless we have another typo. The two retire to a drugstore, where Karel has a chocolate ice-cream soda, and Frederick has a coca-cola with vanilla ice cream. The allied magistrate who flirts with Karel is a civilized man, as all potentially queer men are, while the drinks become a pharmaceutical framing device. The Old Fashioneds prepare the two men for their upcoming sexual activities, while the ice-cream sodas offer a Campy way to come down from the experience. Breathing a sigh of relief, the two men celebrate their freedom, not by risking further incarceration with the dreadful joy that comes from drinking, but by indulging in a much more mundane, almost childish, return to innocence. That this scene includes a judge highlights the judgment that mainstream society had cast upon both alcohol and queer identities. While seemingly an example of internalizing the dominant culture’s view of gay men, Karel and Frederick’s choice to drink ice cream sodas is, rather, a form of textual resistance, a Campy nod to temperance ideologies, a knowing wink to those readers who understand how silly and sentimental both an ice cream soda and the people who would insist on drinking only sodas instead of alcohol can be. 85 85 Consider Sontag’s “[T]he relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental” (280). Faced with outdated forms of judgment, the two men celebrate with childish drinks 255 That Camp would rule the final drink choice in the novel seems appropriate. For queer writers living during Prohibition, in which so many of the temperance movement’s ideologies had seemed to emerge triumphant, reshaping possibilities for alcohol becomes a necessary goal. To set the status quo askew, to overturn the hegemonic cultural structures that insisted upon heteronormativity and relegated queer identities to the back alleys of the Bowery and the Village, Ford and Tyler demonstrated that both a celebration of alcohol’s transgressive abilities and a dismantling of its concretized referentiality would be necessary to combat the fear-mongering of such judgmental groups as the temperance movement. Rather than accepting the claim that queer identities were inferior, wrong, or sinful, Ford and Tyler realized that the most powerful way to confront these ideas, to reshape them, was to embrace the very claims identified as wrong and to celebrate them, to flaunt them, to embrace them, and to destabilize them. 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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Creator Pinkham, Kevin John Frank (author)

Core Title Through the bottom of a glass darkly: narrative, alcohol, and identity in temperance and Prohibition-era texts

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 01/22/2010

Defense Date 01/14/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Alcohol,identity,modernism,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,Prohibition,Temperance

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kaplan, Carla (committee chair), Halttunen, Karen (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email kevin.pinkham@nyack.edu,pinkham@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2809

Unique identifier UC1187822

Identifier etd-Pinkham-3445 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-290936 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2809 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Pinkham-3445.pdf

Dmrecord 290936

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Pinkham, Kevin John Frank

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu