Temperance, Abolition, and Genre Collision in Whitman's Franklin Evans

• Published in: Studies in American fiction 2017-09, Vol.44 (2), p.185-209
• Main Author: Lawrimore, David
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abolition of slavery; Alcohol; American literature; Antebellum period; Evans, Franklin; Fiction; Garrison, William Lloyd (1805-1879); Genre; Ideology; Narratives; Plot (Narrative); Politics; Slavery; Social activism; Truth; Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)
• ISSN: 0091-8083; 2158-5806; 2158-415X
• DOI: 10.1353/saf.2017.0008

"38 Not unlike the Washingtonians, Garrison argues for the limitless nature of slavery, which ends with the complete demoralization of the slaveholders' lives. Because of their belief in the progressive nature of intemperance and slavery, moreover, both Washingtonians and Garrisonians adhere to a doctrine of the immediate and complete elimination of their respective social ill. "59 The false pledge ultimately demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the inebriate's attempt to limit her drinking, making clear that the only cure is total abstinence. [...]reform only comes after signing the Washingtonian Temperance Pledge, which Charles T. Woodman describes as a "glorious event … and one from which I date the commencement of my present happiness. Whatever sympathy Evans has for Margaret is undercut, for he is convinced that Margaret "had done her best to entrap [him] into" their marriage (83). [...]Evans paints her reaction to his budding affair with Mrs. Conway as unnecessarily heated and violent: "Poor Margaret! it was a wild and fearful storm that raged within her bosom, when she came fully to know the truth of her desertion." Reform for these societies were top-down endeavors in which upper-class men and women worked to convert common drunkards into respectable citizens. [...]the growing support of the Prohibition movement of the late 1840s, which culminated in the passage of the short-lived Maine Law in 1851, is one of the major reasons for the decline in the Washingtonians' popularity, which balked at the movement's strategy of legal coercion and nativist politics.