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Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser in the temperance tradition

Kimmel, David P., Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1991

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

CRANE, SINCLAIR, AND DREISER IN THE TEMPERANCE TRADITION

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

David P. Kimmel, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1991

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Steven Fink f .

Julian Markels ^ s Adviser Thomas Woodson Department of English VITA

June 17,1963 ...... Bom - Fremont, Ohio

1985 B.A., O tterbein College, Westerville, Ohio

1987 ...... MA., Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: English

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

VITA...... ii

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE TEMPERANCE TRADITION IN LITERATURE...... 19

II. CRANE...... 89

III. SINCLAIR...... 163

IV. DREISER...... 228

CONCLUSION...... 271

WORKS CITED ...... 284 INTRODUCTION

The end of the nineteenth century was a period of upheaval and introspection on the part of American society. Following the Civil War, the northern states had experienced a massive growth in population and industrialization. Giant corporations appeared, pooling the resources of the entire country in the hands of a small group of directors and industrialists. This Gilded Age of industrial expansion saw great new markets for the products of industrial manufacturing, caused by steadily rising per capita incomes and growing urban markets. By the time of the Chicago Exposition in 1893, the changeover from a primarily rural, agriculture-based economy to a primarily urban, industrial-based economy had for the most part become a given of American life. Americans at the turn of the century viewed their country in terms of the American Dream: a land of limitless opportunity, in which as long as a man was willing to work hard, he could make it big. By 1893, however, another view of American society was also in full force, a view which countered the mainstream optimism of the period with an acknowledgement of the dark side of industrial development. The Gilded Age’s rapid economic growth provided Americans of the period with immense productivity and a seemingly inexhaustible opportunity for expansion; along with this growth, however, came shocking symptoms of a breakdown of the old social order: existing social structures were

1 inadequate to deal with working women and children or with the masses of immigrants pouring into large cities such as New York and Chicago. Inner-city slums teemed with masses of poor immigrant laborers, whose lives seemed the antithesis of the middle-class lifestyles of the growing class of “normal” Americans. As the middle class became aware of the social stresses exacerbated by industrial development and the resulting growth of cities like Chicago and New York, concerned citizens began organizing efforts to rectify some of the most glaring social problems. By 1893, every major city in America had felt the effect of civic organizations aimed at curbing housing abuses, illiteracy, unfair labor practices, and unsanitary living conditions. Leading the effort to clean up America were the newspapers of the “yellow press.” In New York, enterprising young publishers, such as Hearst and Pulitzer, made millions by printing sensational exposes of inner-city conditions. A host of young writers devoted their careers to exposing fraud and injustice in the manner of reformer-authors, such as Jacob Riis, whose best-selling How the Other Half Lives did much to raise the consciousness of middle-class America concerning the plight of the urban poor. Among these young writers were three who would become known for their contributions to the literary school of American naturalism: Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser. In Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother, Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, all three authors write with the social world of the city in mind and with the intention—at least partially—of affecting that world by exposing the truth about it. It is important for any reader of these city fictions to remember that the novels stand as responses to and reflections of the reform mentality of tum-of-the-century America. The reformers and reform-minded journalists and authors of the 1890s and early 1900s covered a wide range of social problems plaguing American cities, but the discussion concerning all of these various problems had one issue in common: alcohol. As a social issue, alcohol— and in particular the temperance movement—touched on nearly every other major social issue of the day. And many prominent suffragists and urban housing reformers were also prominent advocates of the temperance cause. It should come as no surprise, then, that alcohol figures prominently in the city writings of Crane, Dreiser, and Sinclair. All three writers recognized the importance of alcohol in the social, political, and economic world of their day, and that importance is reflected in their fiction. Alcohol and saloons appear throughout all four city novels, contributing much to the background “feel” of the novels and often serving as the settings of or driving forces behind the major action of the stories. It is as difficult to imagine these stories without their alcoholic content as it is to imagine turn-of-the-century America without the temperance movement. Mary Johnson, for example, would be an entirely different character without her “brown bottle,” and George Kelcey’s story would be altered dramatically if he hadn’t been tempted by saloon-life. Likewise, the saloons he frequents are as much a part of Jurgis Rudkos’sl Packingtown experience as his work on the actual killing-floors of Smith’s. And the

1 “Rudkos” is the original spelling for the Lithuanian heroThe of Jungle as it appeared in Appeal to Reason. In the more familiar Doubleday, Page edition, the spelling was altered to “Rudkus.” glitter and flash of Hannah and H ogg’s ^ is practically inseparable from the personality and image of George Hurstwood. This study will investigate the role alcohol plays in the city fiction of Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser, attempting along the way to show how the use of alcohol in these stories— beyond merely adding verisimilitude to the novels—links the three authors to their historical moments. I will pay particular attention to the uses the authors make of temperance forms and of patterns of thinking inherent in the temperance movement. I am not interested, here, in merely tracing the existence of the temperance influence in the work of Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser; such source tracing has already been a successful part of the criticism of these three authors. Some of this type of source criticism has focused on establishing connections between the lives of the authors and the lives of their characters. In the case of Crane, critics have focused on Crane’s Methodist background, explaining how the themes, forms, and underlying morality of Crane’s fiction are directly descended from Crane’s heritage, as in Thomas Gullason’s “The Prophetic City in Stephen Crane’s 1893 Maggie” (136); Bernard Weinstein’s “George's Mother and the Bowery of Experience” (47); Carol Hurd Green’s “Stephen Crane and the Fallen Women” (226); and Clarence Oliver Johnson’s unpublished dissertation, ‘“A Methodist Clergyman--of the Old ambling-Nag, Saddle-Bag, Exhorting Kind’: Stephen Crane and His Methodist Heritage” (92). For critics of Upton Sinclair, the most interesting connections between background and

2 “Hannah Hogg’s” appears as “Fitzgerald and Moy’s” in the original Doubleday, Page edition ofSister Carrie. This and many of the other proper names in the novel were changed by Dreiser at the request of Doubleday (Kazin xvi). I will use the names as they appear in the PennsylvaniaSister Carrie. story revolve around Sinclair’s middle-class background as an obstacle to the author’s complete understanding of his subjects—as is discussed by Leon Harris in Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (75)—and around Sinclair’s heavy-drinking father as a source for the anti-liquour stance the author upheld throughout his life—an idea examined by Jonathan A. Yoder in Upton Sinclair (18-19). And Dreiser critics such as Philip L. Gerber, in Theodore Dreiser, and Donald Pizer, in The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study, have described the manner in which Dreiser turned his early life experiences—mainly his sister Emma’s elopement with a Chicago saloon manager and his own struggles as a poor, unemployed young man stalking the streets of New York—into the plot and main characters ofSister Carrie (Gerber 64-70; Pizer 32). Another type of source criticism involves tracking-down the literary sources for the characters and plots of these naturalist stories. By far, the greatest amount of literary source hunting has involved Crane’s two Bowery stories. Between 1955 and 1961, three seminal studies of Crane’s literary indebtedness were published: Marcus Cunliffe’s “Stephen Crane and the American Background of Maggie,” Thomas A. Gullason’s “The Sources of Stephen Crane’s Maggie,” and Lars Ahnebrink’s The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction: A Study of the Works of Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, With Special Reference to Some European Influences, 1891-1903. CunlifFe finds Crane’s Maggie influenced by the 19th-century slum literature of B.O. Flower, Edwin Chapin, John R. McDowall, Charles Loring Brace, and Thomas DeWitt Talmage (35, 37-40); Gullason links Maggie to the work of Jacob Riis (500-501); and Ahnebrink established a literary connection between Crane’s 6 Bowery tales and Zola’s L’Assommoir (249-276). Recently, Alice Hall Petry and David Frank Hillsman have updated the source search for Crane’s Bowery novels, Petry revealing in “Gin Lane in the Bowery: Crane's Maggie and William Hogarth” some interesting similarities between Maggie and Hogarth’s famous “Gin Lane” picture (418), and Hillsman, in his unpublished dissertation “Crane's 'Maggie' and Huysmans' 'Marthe': Two Naturalist Prostitute Novels,” reiterating Ahnebrink’s argument for a Crane-Zola connection, as well as nodding toward Crane’s debt to the urban “sub-literature” of the late 1800s (177-186,188-189). Partly as a reaction to the work of the early source critics and partly as a natural extension of their work, criticism in the latter half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s shifted from exploring the indebtedness of Crane to his literary predecessors to describing how Crane undercuts the traditional literary forms he employs in his stories, through irony and parody. Eric Solomon led the way with hisStephen Crane: From Parody to Realism, in which he claimed that Crane parodies—and thereby deflates— the popular literary forms of the success, slum, and temperance novels (10, 16, 23-24, 50-67). Solomon’s basic premise—that Crane simultaneously utilizes and subverts popular literary forms—formed the basis for a number of similar studies, including Malcom Bradbury’s “Romance and Reality in Maggie”; James B. Colvert’s introductions toMaggie an d George’s Mother in the Bowery Tales volume of the Virginia Edition and a later discussion in his own book, Stephen Crane", Milne Holton’sCylinder of Vision: The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane; David M. Fine’s “Abraham Cahan, Stephen Crane and the Romantic Tenement Tale of the Nineties”; and Laura Hapke’s “The Alternate Fallen Woman in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” in which she maintains that Crane breaks with the conventions of the prostitute novel in the character of Nell, while adhering closely to those same conventions in his portrayal of Maggie, herself (41-43). While they have not been nearly as prolific in their discussions of literary sources as their Crane colleagues, critics of Sinclair and Dreiser have made similar claims to those made concerning Crane’s Bowery tales. As is the case in all aspects of Sinclair criticism, the volume of critical attention directed toward The Jungle is small, but two studies in the 1980s have outlined something of the extremes of thought as to Sinclair’s use of popular literary forms. In “Muckraking the Muckrakers: Upton Sinclair and His Peers,” Judson A. Grenier separates Sinclair from other muckraking reform journalists, claiming that Sinclair was more sincere in his attempts to use literature to influence change in society (71), while Suk Bong Suh, in “Literature, Society, and Culture: Upton Sinclair and The Jungle” discusses Sinclair’s debt to the popular “literature of poverty” (88). The treatment by literary critics of Dreiser’s use of literary conventions inSister Carrie follows along the lines of the Solomon-led group of Crane criticism, with several studies making similar claims throughout the 1970s. In the first such study, Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels, Richard Lehan claims that Dreiser turns the conventions of the Horatio Alger story morally upside down inSister Carrie and th at Dreiser’s original portrayal of Carrie, before Dreiser and George edited the text for publication, showed her as much less innocent than in her final embodiment (60, 76). Five years later, James Lundquist, in Theodore Dreiser, wrote that Dreiser’s “ambiguity” overshadows his conventional 8 plot in Sister Carrie, turning that plot into something new and different (30), a theory later echoed by Cathy N. and Arnold E. Davidson in “Carrie's Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser's Heroine,” in which they claim that Dreiser parodies conventional forms of the fallen woman, “refracting and distorting” them (395). In the 1980s, feminist critics, such as Patrice K. Gray in her unpublished dissertation, “The Lure of Romance and the Temptation of Feminine Sensibility: Literary Heroines in Selected Popular and 'Serious' American Novels, 1895-1915,” and Rachel Helena Bowlby, in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and haveZola, taken up Dreiser’s use of the traditional fallen woman tale in their examination of Dreiser’s treatment of women inSister Carrie, concluding that Dreiser simultaneously upholds and reverses the traditional forms (Gray 162; Bowlby 52,61). Such source tracing is, indeed, valuable. But even Solomon’s view of Crane as a parodist, deflating the conventional forms he satirizes, leaves unanswered important questions about what, exactly, the presence of alcohol and temperance forms contributes to the relationship between these three naturalists and the world in which they wrote. How, for instance, does Crane’s use of the drunken woman character or Sinclair’s use of the dangerously drunken worker relate to these authors’ attitudes toward the subjects of their stories? How does Dreiser’s equation of the glitter and flash of the up-scale saloon with the social position of George Hurstwood relate to Dreiser’s leanings on issues of great interest to the temperance movement? My goal in this study is to answer some of these questions. In order to understand the importance of the temperance forms found in the city fiction of Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser, it is necessary to 9 look at the history and significance of the forms, themselves. The story of the temperance tradition reflects the mixed attitudes of middle-class reformers toward the objects of their reforms. At its heart, the temperance movement was always a conservative movement aimed at upholding the status quo. As Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin have explained, in Drinking in America: A History, antiliquor reformers worked “not against drinking patterns or consumption ratesper se but against drinking as a symbol of rampant pluralism, individualism, and potential social disorder” (95). For middle-class temperance reformers, alcohol threatened to cause economic immobility and social isolation for immigrant workers and to serve as tinder for a possible uprising by the immigrants against their common economic and social lot. Alcohol was also seen as a key cause of the disintegration of the nuclear family in working class neighborhoods and as a very real economic threat to middle- class women. At the same time, however, the temperance movement aligned itself with other, more progressive movements, such as the urban housing reform movement and the women’s suffrage movement. The temperance movement was the arena for the first successful political movement on the part of American women, primarily in the form of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Under the leadership of Frances Willard, the WCTU became an enormously vibrant and radical force for social and economic change in the United States. While traditional temperance reformers viewed the drinker as ultimately responsible for his or her drinking problem—which led to related problems such as poverty and a decline in health—the WCTU under Willard began to question the 10 traditional “drink-causes-poverty” equation, suggesting that alcoholism might be an effect of poverty, rather than the cause. For a time, the WCTU—which in the 1880s and early 1890s was the dominant force in the temperance movement—operated on two distinct premises. The leadership, most notably Willard, worked under the assumption that the cause of alcoholism was poor living conditions and that the way to eliminate alcoholism was to improve those conditions. Much of the rank-and-file membership in the small towns of the Midwest, on the other hand, adhered to the old temperance view that drunkards were weak-willed individuals and that the only way to eliminate drinking was to remove temptation by outlawing the sale and possession of alcohol. Eventually, the conservatives won out, and with the formation of the Anti- Saloon League in 1893, prohibition became the chief goal of the temperance movement. The confusion within the temperance movement reflects a greater confusion on the part of the entire reform movement in the United States. On the one hand, reformers were people sensitive to the plight of the poor and addicted, and the reformers honestly hoped to alleviate some of the suffering of those people. At the same time, however, the reform impulse involved an inevitable separtion between the reformer and the reformed. A study of the temperance forms and patterns of thinking that appear in the city fiction of Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser illustrates how these three naturalist writers, like any reform-minded individuals at the turn of the century—indeed, like the entire reform movement—were ambivalent in their feelings and thoughts toward the subjects of reform or, in terms of their novels, toward their lower-class characters. I am certainly not the first to suggest that these three authors have a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the subjects of their novels. Indeed, this ambivalence has contributed to much of the vibrancy of the criticism concerning their city fiction. Crane critics, for example, have struggled to decide whether Crane’s main interest in his Bowery tales was to show that “environment is a tremendous thing in the world” (Fitelson 184 and Conder 43) or that his Bowery characters were morally bankrupt (Pizer 111, Ziff 109, and Ford 295). George Monteiro, in “Stephen Crane and the Antinomies of Christian Charity,” makes Crane’s indecision concerning his characters quite clear, explaining that Crane takes an ambivalent stance toward the Bowery, but that Crane is generally for his characters (94). Similarly, Sinclair critics are quick to point out thatThe Jungle reveals Sinclair to be a radical tainted by “elitist or genteel perspectives.”3 (Bloodworth 61; also Harris 75; Folsom 259; Homung 30; and Kerkhoff 192). Dreiser critics, for their part, view that author as tom between accepting and rejecting the Victorian society in which he wrote, with some seeing Dreiser openly rebelling from his society’s moral rules (Bunge 48 and Westbrook 392) and others claiming that Dreiser begins by accepting such rules but “ends up deconstructing them” (Mukherjee 45; also Lynn 142, Mookerjee 39). What is unique about this study is its attention to the role alcohol and temperance forms play in the creation of this ambivalence. The literary forms and thought patterns of any other reform movement would also work to reveal the ambivalence of the authors toward their subjects, but approaching these issues through a study of the temperance tradition

3 William A. Bloodworth, Jr.,Upton Sinclair (Boston: Twayne, 1977) 61 (see also Harris 75; Folsom 259; Homung 30; and Kerkhoff 192). 12 provides me with the opportunity to touch on all the many major social issues that concerned tum-of-the-century reformers: immigration, poverty, labor violence, the dissolution of the family, and changing roles for women. Besides, alcohol plays such a major part in the works that it is odd that no critic has seriously examined its role in the fiction of these three authors. Each of the naturalists uses alcohol in a different manner in his city fiction. Of the three, Crane and Sinclair operate in the most similar manner. Crane openly parodies temperance fiction forms, but he also uses those same temperance forms in a “straight” manner for effect. Crane seems consciously aware of temperance forms as meaning-bearing fictional devices, but he is very middle-of-the-road concerning his attitudes toward the social issues he deals with. Crane is possibly the most openly or consciously conservative of the three authors. Sinclair uses temperance forms for dramatic effect, but he is seemingly unaware of the conservative connotations and implications those forms lend to his story. While Sinclair is the most openly radical and progressive of the three writers, his use of temperance fiction forms shows him to be at the same time the most conservative at heart. The main difference between the two authors is that Crane is aware of the meanings of the forms he chooses, but seems confused as to what he wants to say—whether he wants to be a radical or just satirize everyone—while Sinclair is more certain of his viewpoint, but is unaware of the counter-messages his applications of the forms of temperance ficiton send to the reader. Dreiser almost doesn’t seem to fit into the same set with the other two naturalists in the study. After all, there is practically no drunkenness in Sister Carrie : There are no drunken louts, no drunkard’s wives, no horrible drunken women in Dreiser’s story. And while Hurstwood’s climactic theft scene, of course, relies upon George’s earlier drinking as an explanation for his actions, this is the only time he is shown becoming actually drunk. Even when Dreiser is describing a man who has all the markings of a skid-row bum, a potential alcoholic, even when Hurstwood is hanging out with the lowlife of the Bowery, not once is alcohol mentioned, except in terms of George’s search for a job. Dreiser approaches the temperance tradition more obliquely than do Crane and Sinclair. He keeps it in the background, as a part of the overall environment affecting the lives of his characters. It is on the level of overall form and structure and of thought patterns that Dreiser connects with the temperance tradition. And this connection shows that Dreiser, for all of his attempts to unsettle the conventional notions of success and family, retains a number of conservative views on these matters; he, like the others, is ambivalent toward his subjects. So, although all three authors use the temperance tradition in different ways, all three do use the tradition and all three authors’ novels reveal ambivalent attitudes toward their subjects—attitudes imparted to their works through the temperance forms they employ and attitudes which are similar to those shared by the entire reform mentality at this time. Thus, understanding the temperance forms employed in these novels helps the reader better understand the connections between these three authors and the world in which they wrote. The major literary critic closest to my work in terms of subject matter would have to be David S. Reynolds, whose Beneath the American 14 Renaissance examines the “sub-literary” world of antebellum reform literature, including temperance fiction. My critical approach differs from Reynolds’s in terms of the ends to which we put our analyses of reform literature. In the terms of the current debate over the constitution of the canon of American literature studies, Reynolds occupies a fairly conservative position. Reynolds’s orientation is indicated by his choice of labels describing two impulses within reform literature: conventional reform literature and subversive reform literature. The polarization implied between conventional and subversive links Reynolds to the mid- twentieth-century canonization of such writers as Melville, Dickinson, and Thoreau, who were praised for their subversion of mainstream literary and moral conventions; as Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, “The canon we’ve inherited was formed, in part at least, through a revaluation of our now classic writers as subversives” (104). The reform literature which makes the greatest impact on the canonical writers Reynolds deals with is naturally that from the subversive reform impulse, since that impulse most closely relates to those canonical writers’ supposedly subversive tendencies. What Reynolds does after connecting his canonical writers to the subversive reform tradition is to show how the canonical writers—Poe, for instance, in his Washingtonian-influenced “The Black Cat”—transform the elements of the non-canonical reform writers into something different, something better and more “artistic” than is to be found in their source materials. My interest, however, lies in a different direction. Rather than concerning myself with the question of whether or not the writing of my three canonical writers is better or worse than that of their temperance predecessors, I choose to concentrate on the question of how the forms of the 15 temperance writers affect the works of the canonical writers who employ them. While I freely admit that Crane’s writing is stylistically more interesting than T. S. Arthur’s and that Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is, indeed, a much different novel than anything written by the latter author, I am interested in the ways in which Crane does not depart from his source materials, the ways in which Crane aligns himself with the exact conventions he seeks to undermine. The temperance authors wrote their fiction for a specific purpose and with a specific audience in mind, and the forms of temperance fiction reflect that purpose and that audience. Moreover, the forms of temperance fiction reflect something much deeper than merely the overt desire of temperance writers to persuade their readers of the need for temperance reform. The temperance movement, like many of the other reform movements begun in the middle of the nineteenth century and continued through the turn of the century, was basically a conservative movement, concerned mainly with protecting the social and economic position of the middle class in the face of vast changes in American culture and demographics. The forms of temperance fiction serve as representations of these conservative concerns, and looking at the ways Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser use temperance forms in their novels also means looking at how these three authors utilize (or are used by) the conservative ideology that lies behind those temperance forms. At the bottom of such a project is an approach to literature that is interested primarily in what Jane Tompkins calls “the way . . . narratives work out problems inherent in the culture at the moment of composition” (quoted in Kolodny 304). This approach, in turn, stems from a concern with what new historicists, such as Louis A. Montrose, call “the historicity of 16 texts and the textuality of history” A The work of these new historicist theorists serves more as an illuminating correspondance to the critical approach of this project than as a conscious theoretical groundwork for it. More influential in shaping the theoretical basis of my project were some of the recent works in which critics have attempted to relate realist and naturalist fiction to its historical context. Walter Benn Michaels’sThe Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century ties “the logic of naturalism” to the goals of the money economy (178), thereby connecting a literary form to the socio-political motivations of the culture in which it is written. A similar idea is voiced by Amy Kaplan who, in The Social Construction of American Realism, claims that authors—even “realist” authors—cannot avoid involvement in their historical moment: “Realists do more than passively record the world outside; they actively create and criticize the meanings, representations, and ideologies of their own changing culture” (7). The forms of the literature, themselves, become connected with the political and social concerns of the authors and their times. June Howard takes this idea even further in Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, claiming,

My contention will not be that naturalism has an ideology or reflects an ideology, but that the form itself is an immanent ideology. It is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense—and making narrative—out of the comforts and discomforts of the historical moment, (ix)

4 Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989) 20. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 11-12, and Hayden White, “New Historicism: A Comment,” 297-299, from the same collection. 17 Such a view of the relationship between literary forms and ideology seemed consistent with my earlier studies of the ways the forms of myths have been used for political and ideological purposes; this earlier work focused primarily on the biblical typology tradition and the relation between myth and politics in the book of Genesis. This study will consist of this introduction, four main body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The first main chapter, “The Temperance Tradition,” serves as a historical introduction, a description of the temperance literary tradition, and an explanation of the main thesis behind my project, that the forms of the temperance tradition are based upon and reflect an inherently conservative ideology. The second chapter applies my thesis to Stephen Crane’s two city novels,Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother, showing how Crane consciously attempts to ironically undercut middle-class morality, but—through his use of temperance forms in his treatment of alcohol in the novels—simultaneously supports the same moral code he criticizes. In the third chapter, I describe how Upton Sinclair—a self-styled radical—sends a mixed message to the reader of The Jungle; employing temperance forms laden with conservative ideology in his novel, Sinclair undercuts his own radical critique of the status quo. The last main chapter is somewhat different from the previous two, since Dreiser makes almost no use of temperance forms inSister Carrie. However, alcohol is still important in the novel, and there is a connection between Dreiser’s text and the temperance tradition; in this case, the connection occurs on the level ofideas rather than forms. Finally, in the conclusion I tackle the question of whether the temperance forms actually add conservative ideology to the work of the novelists or merely highlight 18 ideas that are already a part of the authors’ mindsets. I also investigate the implications of the study for the field of American naturalism and American literature studies. Because my basic thesis is that Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser are conservative even in their attempts to be radical, I have chosen texts which might be considered the most radical or unconventional. All three of these authors encountered censorship in some form; the texts chosen are based on editions or manuscripts which were completed before the censors touched them. In the case of Crane, I have used the original 1893 edition of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, since the Virginia volume, Bowery Tales, is based on the 1896 edition. I have used the Virginia version of George’s Mother, which is based on the 1896 Edward Arnold edition. For Sinclair, I have used a 1988 edition of The Jungle, based on the original version of the novel, which appeared serially in Appeal to Reason. This version contains several passages excised from the more well-known Doubleday, Page text; however, the editing of the edition is somewhat suspect, with numerous typographical errors that cast doubt on the authority of the text. In the case of Dreiser, I have relied on the Pennsylvania edition ofSister Carrie, which contains text altered before the novel was published by Doubleday, Page. For each of these novels, footnotes will be used to mark significant deviations between the texts. CHAPTER I

THE TEMPERANCE FICTION TRADITION

Crane, Dreiser, and Sinclair wrote during a period in which reformist thought dominated the political and literary world of the United States. This turn-of-the-century reform impulse had its roots in the reform movements of the antebellum period, and many of the assumptions, attitudes, and rhetorical strategies of the mid-century reformers were very much a part of the work of later reformers, such as Jacob Riis. This was particularly true of the temperance movement, which had arisen from the ashes of the Civil War as the predominant social issue of the post-war period. By the end of the century, the temperance tradition—modified but relatively unchanged since the 1850s—was a part of the consciousness of most literate Americans in the industrial North. And the temperance movement, touching as it did nearly every other major reform movement, served as a focal point for the concerns and fears of middle class Americans who viewed with trepidation the masses of immigrants and working-class poor crowding into the major cities and who viewed with equal apprehension the changes occurring in the structure of the traditional family. And a mainstay of the temperance movement was the temperance tale. Found in sizes ranging from short anecdotes to pamphlets, to full novels, temperance fiction remained remarkably consistent in form and content throughout the entire period of the

19 20 temperance movement. For all of that time, both the form and content of temperance fiction served the cause well, providing the movement with a literary representation of the overt thesis of temperance advocates, as well as the underlying ideology of that thesis. Following the Civil War, the northern states experienced a massive growth in population and industrialization. While in 1870 the United States was still primarily an agricultural nation, by 1900 the balance had shifted irrevocably in the other direction, with industrial production exceeding agricultural production by $8.3 billion (Cashman, America 13). Such industrial expansion led the United States to grow from a second-rate industrial power in 1860 to a position in which by 1890 the production of manufactured goods in this country almost equaled the combined total production of Britain, France, and Germany (Cashman, America 12). A major reason for the success of the American industrial expansion during the post-war period was the expansion of the nation’s railroad net. Between 1865 and 1900, track mileage increased from 35,000 miles to 193,000 miles (Smith 90; Cashman, America 26). The railroads literally connected the nation. Together with the telegraph lines strung along their routes, the railroads provided a communications/transportation network spanning the continent, uniting the West Coast with the East Coast, and connecting the producers of raw materials with the producers of manufactured goods and the manufacturers with the retail outlets who would pass the products on to the final consumers. One result of the industrialization of the country was the appearance of giant corporations, pooling the resources of the entire country in the hands of a small group of directors and industrialists. The giant industrial corporations emerged in part due to striking advances in production techniques occurring after the Civil War. Mechanization and mass- production techniques, combined with falling rail rates during the post-war years, made possible for the first time large-scale production operations, with higher productivity and lower production costs. By the time of Maggie ’s publication in 1893, the large factory was the chief unit of production for almost all industrial manufacturing in the United States (Ginger 46-47). Even more efficient than single large factories were giant corporations, made from a combination of several large plants. As the century drew to a close, the giant corporations clearly had become the most efficient and most successful type of economic unit in this country, and they were growing at an incredible pace, shouldering out the competition and consolidating their hold on the American economy. As Cashman explains, “Between 1893 and 1904 the number of giant combinations increased from 12 to 318 with an increase in aggregate capital from less than $1 billion to almost $7 billion. These 318 companies controlled about two fifths of the capital invested in manufacturing” (America 85). The result of the growth of the giant corporations was that, by 1890, the gap between the richest segment of the population and the poorest was growing daily, with the wealthiest 12 percent of American families owning 86 percent of all the wealth (Painter xx). By the time of the publication of Maggie, there existed in the United States the beginnings of a distinct, if somewhat elastic, class system, with a small number of very rich families controlling the vast majority of the wealth, a large body of middle class families working and saving so as to become rich, and an equally large body of poor, working- class families struggling to survive. The major U.S. cities underwent exponential growth during the post­ war period. Cities grew from respectably sized commercial and residential centers into gargantuan industrial and financial metropolises. Between 1865 and 1901, the United States underwent what Cashman describes as a transformation “from a country of small and isolated communities scattered across 3 million square miles of continental territory into a compact economic and industrial unit” {America 12). During this period, the population of the United States grew from 35,701,000 in 1865 to 77,584,000 in 1901 (Cashman, America 13). This swelling population provided a ready source of labor for the new industries springing up during this period. And the chief place of residence for these millions of laborers was the cities. Chicago and New York, for example, grew to commanding positions as economic foci for the entire United States (Trachtenberg 116; Smith 365). For most Americans, in fact, New York representedthe city, a center of industry, trade, finance, arts, publishing, and journalism. For many rural Americans, particularly young men and women, the bustle of the expanding metropolises proved to be an inescapable lure. Faced with the prospects of a life on the farm—hard work and little in the way of financial or material reward—many young people looked to the city as a place of glamor, excitement, and unlimited opportunity. Many other transplanted country people were failed farmers, forced to look for work in the industries of the city by bank foreclosures, falling wheat prices, and rising rail rates. The experience of Sam Lewiston, the Kansas wheat farmer in Frank Norris’s “A Deal in Wheat,” is representative of the experience of thousands of small farmers, crushed by economic forces they only vaguely understood; more than one Midwestern farmer was forced, 23 like Lewiston, to admit to his wife, “We’ll go to Chicago. We’re cleaned out!” (Norris, “Deal” 1445). Another source for the influx of workers into the cities was the mass of blacks facing intensified repression in the post- Reconstruction South. As United States troops pulled out of southern capitals in the last years of the 1870s, southern whites began a systematic disenfranchisement of southern blacks that would remain in force for over 80 years. Many blacks responded by leaving the South (Smith 641-642). This movement from the South to the North was encouraged by Northern industries, who welcomed the newly arrived blacks as a cheap source of labor to be used in breaking the growing union movement. Following the Civil War, the number of immigrants coming to America from Europe rose dramatically, from 91,000 in 1862 to 1,285,000 in 1907 (Smith 332-333; Cashman, America 87). These post-war immigrants came in two great waves; the first wave, peaking in the early 1880s, was primarily northern European in makeup—with immigrants from Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia—but also consisting of a trickle of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, while the second wave, peaking just after the turn of the century, marked a definite shift from northern European countries to those of the south and east (Smith 332; Cashman, America 87). Many of these im m igrants were destined for work in one of America’s growing industries, which became dependent on immigrant labor (Cashman, America 95). And, because industries were based around the major cities, most of the immigrants ended up in metropolitan areas. New York—the entry point for the majority of immigrants—served as the first American home for wave after wave of first-generation Americans. The assimilation of these immigrants into American culture came in stages, and the attitudes of native-born Americans altered with the passage of time. The case of the Irish is perhaps the most blatant and yet representative of this process. During an antebellum wave of immigration, the Irish were viewed by native-born Americans as poor, lazy drunkards of subnormal intelligence and ambition. It is no accident or evidence of any idiosyncratic prejudice that Henry David Thoreau, in the “Economy” chapter of Walden, represents the Irish with the poor family of James Collins and the mildly thieving “neighbor Seeley, an Irishman,” who “in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said” (Thoreau 29). Even while he attacks the exploitation of Irish laborers by the railroads, Thoreau also voices the attitudes of the majority of native- born Americans toward the newly arrived Irish immigrants. When the first post-war wave of immigrants arrived in the 1880s, the Irish were deeply entrenched in the political machinery of American cities, particularly in Boston and New York. No longer lazy and shiftless, the Irish had become, in the eyes of the native-born Americans, corrupt and power-hungry, a threat to the rest of the citizens of the United States. And, with the birth of new generations of Irish-Americans bom in the United States, the Irish began to assimilate into American culture. When immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began arriving in the second wave of post-war immigration, the Irish, themselves established as 25 true Americans, were among the most vocal critics of these supposedly poor, lazy drunkards of subnormal intelligence and ambition. Along with the Gilded Age’s rapid economic growth came serious problems. One such problem was the ebb and flow of the economy in a market-based system. The post-war economy experienced wild fluctuations, swinging between years of booming growth and crushing depression. The depression 1893, for example, is considered by many as the worst depression to hit the United States to that date (Ginger 164-166; Wiebe 91). The country’s economy came to a virtual standstill, and at least 20 percent of the workforce was unemployed during the winter of 1893-1894 (Cashman, America 242; Ginger 164, 167-168; Painter 116). The situation became so desperate for the unemployed that during the spring and early summer of 1894, an industrial army of 1200 jobless men—dubbed “Coxey’s Army” after Jacob Coxey, the founder of the original group of 500 that had left Massilon, Ohio, in March of 1894—descended upon Washington to demand work. While authorities quickly dispersed the marchers, the spectre of an army of the dispossessed tramping across the country struck fear into the hearts of middle-class America. A more long-term problem than the depressions was the horrible conditions in the rapidly growing cities. Inner-city slums teemed with masses of poor immigrant laborers, whose lives seemed the antithesis of the middle-class lifestyles of the vast majority of “normal” Americans. The majority of these laborers were crammed into seedy tenement apartments; in New York, from two-thirds to three-fourths of the population—1,000,000 to 1,200,000 people—lived in 32,000 to 37,000 tenements (Cashman, America 121; Smith 366). These tenements were cramped, dark affairs, and such 26 overcrowding naturally led to problems, including disease, fire, and crime (Cashman, America 123-124). Infant mortality in the tenements was extremely high, as was homelessness and child abuse (Smith 367). Children in the tenements lived lives a far cry from the conventional, middle-class notions of the lives of children, filled with innocence and nurturing at the hands of caring parents. The new industrial workplace, too, was a source of concern for the middle class. There were two main causes of the labor problems that plagued the new industrial economy of the post-war United States: unfair labor practices on the part management and the rise of the national labor unions. The condition of laborers in the post-war period was atrocious:

In every industry the story was monotonously the same: paupers’ wages; the constant fear of dismissal; wretched and unsanitary working conditions; ten-, twelve-, and even fourteen-hour days (sixteen for bakers); six- and sometimes seven-day weeks; erratic pay; little or no compensation for injuries or fatalities; a constant increase in the number of women and children employed under such conditions; and, worst of all, the widespread conviction that workingmen and women (not to mention children) had been losing ground ever since the end of the Civil War. (Smith 223) In the quest for efficiency, manufacturers redesigned their factories around the needs of the machines and machine tools necessary for the operation of their businesses, rather than around the needs of their workers (Trachtenberg 56). The result was 30,000 workers killed and nearly half a million injured every year at the turn of the century (Painter 206). Many of the shops and factories were firetraps, and in such dangerous and unhealthy conditions, men, women, and children labored for 10 to 12 hours at a stretch, often having little to show for their labors at the end of the week (Trachtenberg 90). Employers regularly cheated 27 workers out of their wages, and used unemployment as a weapon to keep wages down, recognizing that a person facing making a living with no job is much more likely to be satisfied with working for less than a person who feels secure in his or her employment (Smith 216). Working long hours for little pay in unsafe working conditions, workers looked for some relief from their plight. In the post-war world, many workers hoped to find such relief in the burgeoning national labor unions. National unions began in this country following the Civil War, but their development was stifled by stiff opposition from the employers, disunity among the workforce caused by rapid employee turnover and diverse ethnic backgrounds among workers (Smith 223-224), and a glut of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the job market (Cashman, America 144). By far, the most important factor working against the unions was their inability to rally support from the general public due to the fear instilled in the middle class by the violence—often bordering on open warfare between workers and the authorities—of the five major strikes occuring after the Civil War: the Molly Maguires strike of the early 1870s, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket riot of 1886, the Homestead strike of 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894 (Cashman, America 145-170). The result of these labor battles was that the labor movement, foreigners, and anarchy became intertwined in the minds of middle-class Americans (Trachtenberg 90). For many, if not most, Americans, though, the extremes of the labor movement and the fears of anarchy and chaos that it provoked were, except in times of crisis, vague threats, removed from the round of everyday existence. This was especially true of the large and growing middle class. 28 Labor problems were someone else’s problems, except in a very general way or when those problems interfered with one’s ability to travel via train or to purchase certain goods. A much more personal, immediate problem in the eyes of the general American public was the perceived breakdown of the American family; this breakdown was a problem much discussed and agonized over in discussions across the country (Smith 914). It would be quite simple to blame changes in the family as a social unit on the economic pressures exerting themselves during the period. In the traditional, primarily middle-class view of the home — a view to which many still ascribe today — the husband works, the wife manages the household, overseeing the servants, and the children grow up in hazy, childhood bliss. In post-war America, however, such a household was only possible for the middle and upper classes. Economic necessity—low wages and high unemployment—forced many women and children into the workforce to support the family (Smith 218-220). The necessity of women and children working in homes as domestics and in factories as underpaid laborers naturally affected the quality of family life available to such working-class families. Yet, if working-class families were the only group to experience a change in the structure of the family, this would not explain the general concern over the fate of the family voiced from all strata of American life. The post-war American family also received pressure from a re- evaluation of women’s roles in the family. Women, in the traditional view of the family, were seen as devoted wives and mothers. As such, women were expected to be pure and untainted by sexual desire; men, on the other hand, were granted a license for sexual outlet through prostitutes, of which 29 there were 20,000 in New York in 1860. Professionals involved in the prostitution issue, such as Elizabeth Blackwell, began in the late 1800s to question the double standard that they saw as detracting from the strength of the family (Smith 686). The prostitution issue was seized upon by women’s rights activists because it symbolized the second-class status granted women by the male-dominated society of turn-of-the-century America. In nearly all aspects of life outside the role of mother and wife, women were inferior to men and lacked the rights of property and suffrage granted to all men at the time. The only cure for such a dilemma, in the eyes of many women’s advocates, was increased opportunity and equality for women, within the home and within society in general. While many traditionalists viewed the women’s movement as yet another blow against the family as a stable institution, the women’s movement was not a revolt against the family so much as an attempt to rectify wrongs within the traditional view of the family, thereby strengthening the family even more. Still, the very existence of the women’s rights movement at this time is another indication of the fears for the future of the family expressed by many Americans at the turn of the century. These various pressures working on turn-of-the-century American culture concerned the middle class, who saw the established social order— and their places within it—threatened by the changes occurring around them. These concerns led middle-class reformers such as Jacob Riis to attempt to instigate change. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives stands as the premiere example of tum-of-the-century reform journalism. By exposing the honible conditions of poverty and hardship among the residents of New York’s tenement district, Riis tries to shock his middle-class reader into 30 action. However, while Riis’s overt concern is for the well-being of the inhabitants of New York’s tenement districts, his underlying concern is for the possibility of a lower-class uprising, a fear he plays upon in his appeal for housing reform:

Crowding all the lower wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and the quality of the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be? (17) Riis’s description of the threat posed by the poor in New York reflects the fears of most of his readership, who also looked with apprehension at the growing numbers of foreign-born or first-generation Americans living in New York every year. This fear of the immigrant working classes is evident throughout Riis’ work, especially through his attributions of certain behavioral characteristics to each major ethnic grouping in the city. The Irish are described as power-hungry and money-grubbing (19). The Germans, on the other hand, are described as “respectable” (122), and Riis distinguishes between the family-oriented drinking of the industrious Germans with the saloon-oriented drinking of the politically active Irish (25). For Riis, the Italians are the lowest European-based group, “content to live in a pig-sty and [submit] to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur” (43). The Italians, like the Chinese, are bom gamblers and dangerous 31 when angered (44). Riis’ portrayal of the Jews in New York reflects all of the anti-semitic stereotypes that have long been associated with this culture, but he is particularly harsh in his denunciation of their miserliness, which leads families to starvation in the hope of saving a few dollars. All of Riis’ descriptions of immigrant groups share the same rhetoric of violence and fear, which makes Riis’s nativist stance very similar to that which lies behind such temperance works as George Allen or Franklin Evans. It was more than concern for the well-being of the “Other Half’ that lay behind the work of reformers such as Riis; there was also an element of fear. The cities of turn-of-the-century America were a jumble of fragmented communities: pockets of newly arrived immigrants, clinging to others of the same background, and collections of country folk, struggling to adapt to their new lives in the city. The cities of turn-of-the-century America were also the scene of a concentrated contrast between wealth and poverty. In New York City, only blocks separated the poorest sections of the tenement district from the wealth of Fifth Avenue. For many in the middle class trying to carve out their own portion of the “good life,” the contrasts between rich and poor in the cities presented a potentially explosive situation. As Cashman puts it, “When Riis referred to the ‘sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters’ heaving ‘uneasily in the tenements,’ the middle class took it as a portent of incipient class war”{America 123). Such fears were not as paranoid as they may sound today, as the post-war period had already witnessed highly explosive confrontations between the haves and the have-nots. The turn-of-the-century reform movement of which Riis is a representative actually has its roots in the wide-ranging and active reform movements of pre-Civil War America. The antebellum reform tradition began during the early part of the 19th century, when Americans began to undergo a national self-examination. By the 1810s and 1820s, the country had been established as a viable example of self-government, yet many Americans were concerned about the necessity of perfecting the American experiment. If the United States were to be a model country which based its government on the will of its population, then it made sense to early reformers that they should be concerned with the quality of that population. In a way, this reform impulse has its roots in the very foundation of the American democratic government and in the notion of personal reform, exemplified by the “Project for Moral Perfection” Benjamin Franklin describes in his Autobiography. The history of the American reform fiction is the story of a gradual movement from what David Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance, calls “conventional” reform to what he calls “subversive” reform. Early, conventional reformers tended to emphasize the ingredients and rewards of virtue, stressing traditional bliss and avoiding excessive sensationalism, while subversive reformers emphasized the results of vice and poverty (Reynolds 57-59). The impact of these two branches of the reform movement can be clearly seen in the reform literature of the period. In Henry Ware’s The Recollections of Jotham Anderson (1824)1, the

1 Henry Ware (1794-1843). Unitarian clergyman and editorChristian of Disciple (1817- 1829). Brother of William Ware (1797-1852), Unitarian clergyman and author of popular historical works, such asLetters of Lucius M. Piso from Palmyra (1837);Probus: or, Rome in the Third Century (1838);Julian: or, Scenes in Judea (1841); and Lectures on the Works and Genius of Washington Allston (1852). (Hopkins 1141) 33 conventional reform novelist’s light-handed approach is clearly evident. Ware makes his anti-Calvinist, pro-Unitarian point through the career of country minister Jotham Anderson. At all times Anderson’s story has a calm, rational feel to it, with nothing sensational or exceedingly graphic. Similarly, another early reform novel, Catharine Sedgwick’s The Poor Rich Man, and the Rich Poor Man (1836)2, emphasizes the virtues of the Aiken family as they overcome the limitations of their poverty. Yet, while Sedgwick concentrates on the superiority of the Aikens as “Rich Poor,” she also utilizes some fairly graphic descriptions of other poor families not as well-adapted as the Aikens. The 1840s saw the introduction of a new type of reform novel in the city-mysteries genre (Reynolds 82). In an attempt to draw attention to the need for urban reform, city-mysteries novels took their readers on a literary tour of urban areas, showing their readers sections of cities those readers would never normally visit. Ned Buntline’s The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848)3 is a good example of the city-mysteries genre. Buntline’s novel contains some conventional virtuous-poor characters, in the form of Angelina and her mother, but these two seem almost afterthoughts in a novel that focuses almost entirely on providing its readers with racy descriptions of life in New York’s Tenderloin. Even the scenes describing Angelina and her mother emphasize the hardships and hopelessness of their existence; rather than being rewarded for their virtue in the face of poverty, as is the case with Sedgwick's Aiken family, Angelina and her

2 Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867). Author of domestic novels, such Newas A England Tale (1822); Redwood (1824); Hope Leslie (1827); The Linwoods: or Sixty Years Since (1835). (Hopkins 931) 3 Edward Zane Carroll Judson (1823-1886). Author of dime novels under the pseudonym of Ned Buntline. (Hopkins 513) 34 mother find that her virtue only drags them into deeper hardship and poverty. Buntline’s harsh treatment of Angelina—and nearly every other decent character in the novel—serves his cause by arousing the righteous indignation of his supposedly cultured readers; sifter all, if this angel-on- Earth seamstress can be crushed by the system that creates the slums she inhabits, surely something must be done about the system. This subversive emphasis on the results of poverty can be found in reform literature through the post-war period, and many of the techniques of the city-mysteries genre were incorporated into the reformist journalism of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Riis’s. Riis, like the subversive reform novelists before him, emphasizes the results of poverty in an attempt to shock his readers into action. Many of the scenes he chooses to document are remarkably similar to those Buntline described over 40 years earlier. In one chapter, Riis even utilizes the city-mysteries technique of the tour, when he leads his reader through a dilapidated tenement. As was the case with the subversive Buntline, Riis found the dark side of the urban crisis a much more effective selling point for reform than the triumphs of those poor individuals who manage to make a decent life for themselves. There is a connection between Buntline and Riis in terms of motivation, also. Just as Riis and the other tum-of-the-century reform journalists exposed the seamy underside of their society in the hope of saving it from the problems they wrote about, so, too, the antebellum subversive reform writers attempted to preserve the status quo by shocking their readers into action. Reynolds’s terms “conventional” and “subversive” are helpful descriptors regarding the techniques of reform writers, but “subversive” is really a misnomer for a reform approach that is fundamentally conservative in 35 nature. Though the subversive writers may rely on sensation and titillation, their main goal is identical to that of the conventional writers: fix the surface problems of society so that the basic status quo m ay be maintained. This distinction regarding Reynolds’s terms is especially important when one examines an important sub-category of reform fiction, temperance fiction. The importance of temperance fiction lies in the importance of temperance issues in tum-of-the-century America. Whether a drinker or an abstainer, every American living at this time was affected by alcohol in some way; alcohol as a social issue was connected with nearly every other major social issue, from immigration to city crime to women’s suffrage, as Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin explain, in Drinking in America: “The dramatic social changes inherent in rapid industrialization and urbanization placed traditional dry worries over alcohol and such civil maladies as poverty, vice, crime, disease, and violence in a new and more visible context” (102). Alcohol was everywhere; in 1909, there was one saloon for every 300 people in the United States, more saloons than there were churches (Cashman,Prohibition 4). The temperance was taken up by the reform press, which, as Lender and Martin explain, “came out firmly for prohibition, citing it as an indispensable link in the execution of other reforms” (125). One of the primary targets for the reform press was the corruption of city government, and the press viewed the liquor trade as deeply involved in such corruption. As Cashman explains, in Prohibition: The Lie of the Land, sm all, respectable saloonkeepers were driven out of business in favor of brewery- 36 controlled operations, which were readily turned into fronts for all types of illegal activities:

Once he became the brewers’ front the small saloonkeeper was obliged to flout the liquor laws and take part in vice and criminal activities to stay open. The Sunday-closing regulations were widely ignored, and in New York in 1908 more than 5000 of the 5820 saloons in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx stayed open on Sundays despite the law. Some bar owners cooperated with prostitutes, gamblers, and petty criminals such as pickpockets in order to increase their sales by ‘improving’ their facilities. (5) Combined with their omnipresence in large cities and industrial areas — there were more drinking establishments in Chicago in the early 1900s than there were in all the South (Cashman, Prohibition 7) — the illegal activities undertaken in many, if not most, saloons made them the perfect target for reform-minded urban progressives. “By the turn of the century,” Lender and Martin write, “this [anti-drinking] feeling, particularly in its prohibitionist form, had become thoroughly intertwined with contemporary Progressive reform thought. Urban Progressives viewed temperance as a means to alleviate poverty and to clean up the political corruption spread through insidious saloons” (125). For progressives and temperance workers alike, the abolition of the saloon was a goal that promised a reduction in the horrible suffering of the urban poor. By the early 1900s, alcohol was in many ways the issue of the day, as Lender and Martin point out: “Most Americans, as a number of recent and detailed state-level histories have shown, genuinely considered prohibition the issue of the day; if they were not thoroughly committed temperance workers themselves, they were at least willing to give the sober republic a fair try” (128). The story of the alcohol issue in post-war America actually begins much earlier, back in the formative years of the Republic. In the early 1800s, drinking was viewed mainly as a m atter of individual choice, with the effects of a debauch falling solely on the head of the drunkard (Lender and Martin 53). As the century wore on, it became obvious to concerned reformers that alcohol abuse was a damaging and dangerous vice, affecting not just the drunkard, but his family and his community. In 1808, the first temperance society was formed, carefully speaking out against excessive drinking, rather than against drinking in general (Lender and Martin 64). In the 1810s and 1820s, the anti-liquor movement gained strength as Protestant orders such as the Presbyterians and Methodists began to campaign against intemperance, resulting in the formation in 1826 of the American Temperance Society (Lender and Martin 67-68). The temperance movement gained momentum during the reform- minded decades immediately preceding the Civil War. In the early 1840s, the Washingtonian Movement, founded by drinkers who “signed the pledge,” renouncing their wet ways, swept the country (Lender and Martin 75-76). Although the Washingtonian Movement was defunct by 1847, similar temperance societies — basically support groups aimed at aiding drinkers from reneging on their pledges of abstinence — were popular throughout the country in the late 1840s (Lender and Martin 76-79). For many Americans of this period, the alcohol issue was as important a social issue as abolition. Alcohol abuse was seen as a problem of individual willpower, and more and more temperance advocates became convinced that even such relatively innocent beverages as cider or beer were just as dangerous as the demon rum. For these temperance workers, the 38 elimination of all temptation, in the form of prohibition, seemed the only sensible solution, as J. C. Furnas explains, in The Life and Times of The Late Demon Rum : “While Temperance hardened into intemperate Teetotalism it also flirted with the notion of enlisting law in the good cause. The ‘moral suasion’ that led persons to renounce Rum might profit from so-called ‘legal suasion’ as eliminator of temptations” (161-162). The result, in the early 1850s, were the so-called Maine Laws, state-by-state prohibition in many northern states and territories: Maine, Vermont, Minnesota Territory, Rhode Island, Michigan, Connecticut, Ohio, Indiana, New Hampshire, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, and New York, with Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey narrowly defeating such laws (Lender and Martin 84). But, as the slavery issue began occupying more and more of the nation’s attention and as the country drifted closer and closer to war, the prohibition movement lost its momentum and the Maine Laws were repealed, one after the other (Lender and Martin 85). After the Civil War, alcohol again became an important social issue. American cities and towns were crowded with saloons and other wet establishments, some unlicensed and many of dubious integrity. The prevalence of alcohol and of the saloon during the post-war period led to the creation of several national organizations, devoted to temperance and, eventually, prohibition, on a nationwide scale. First came the Prohibition Party, which in 1869 tried unsuccessfully to become a third political party (Cashman Prohibition 7). Then, in 1874, housewives and mothers concerned about the effects of alcohol abuse on their husbands and sons— and the related economic effects of such abuse on themselves and their families—founded in Cleveland, Ohio, the Women’s Christian Temperance 39 Union [WCTU] (Lender and Martin 92). Originally devoted solely to the furtherance of the temperance cause, the WCTU, under the direction of Frances Willard, became involved in many social issues of the day, including women’s suffrage and city reform (Lender and Martin 110). As was the case in the late 1840s, the temperance movement became over the course of years of discussion and debate the prohibition movement, and organized itself into an efficient legislative lobbying machine with the creation of the Anti-Saloon League in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893. The Anti- Saloon League combined church backing with plenty of money — collecting $35 million in contributions between 1893 and 1926 — to create the organization that would, more than any other, be able to claim responsibility for the passage of national prohibition in the early 1920s (Cashman Prohibition 7). The transferral of power within the temperance movement from the WCTU to the prohibitionist Anti-Saloon League seems at first glance merely a matter of politics within the movement. But this change in leadership is important, as it reveals the basic ambivalence that lies at the heart of the temperance movement. While temperance advocates were for the most part earnest reformers who sought to help those they saw as in need of assistance, those same middle-class temperance advocates also sought to preserve their own social position by isolating and controlling those elements of society which they found threatening. The main thesis of the temperance movement, in any of its several embodiments, revolves around the responsibility of the drunkard for his (or her) own condition, around the idea that alcohol abuse causes the ruin of its abusers. Temperance advocates saw the drunkard as a specific type of individual 40 whose weak moral character made him susceptible to alcoholism (Gusfield 32). When placed in any position of temptation, the potential alcoholic naturally took to drink, and the results of his transgressions included poverty, physical debilitation, and a relaxation of normal moral principles. This relaxation of morals, in turn, leads characters to violence and vice, most notably in the form of gambling. The job of the temperance advocates was, therefore, to protect the drunkard from his own weakness, and thereby preserve the drunkard and his family from a fall into poverty and depravity. For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this view of alcohol and the mission of temperance advocates held sway. It was not until after 1886 that Francis Willard guided the WCTU toward a more socially aware view of the relationship between alcohol and the lives of its abusers. Under Willard, the WCTU reversed its attitude, maintaining that drinking is an effect, not the cause, of poverty and related social problems (Painter 63-64). After 1886, the WCTU broadened its scope of interests, working on many diverse projects, some only remotely connected with temperance (Painter 233-234). However, Willard’s socialist approach was disliked by many in the rank and file of the organization, who not only saw the expanded activities of the WCTU as a diversion of energy away from the one true goal, the elimination of the alcohol threat, but also looked suspiciously upon activities they saw as questioning or threatening traditional social structures. The traditional temperance advocates eventually won the day, as the Anti-Saloon League rejected Willard’s viewpoint and restated the older view that alcohol should be eliminated because it is the cause of the problems of a drinker. Therefore, aside from a small period at the end of the 1880s, the temperance 41 movement remained faithful to its original view of the drinker as responsible for his own fate. Fundamental to the above temperance theory was the conception of the object of reform as an Other, as an individual separated by psychological makeup from the reformers. This separation was important, because it allowed temperance workers to “reform” American society without changing existing social structures in any significant way. The temperance movement was predominantly a middle-class movement (Gusfield 81), and temperance advocates at the end of the nineteenth century viewed temperance as an indicator of middle-class propriety in an individual: “As a statement of what is wrong with society, the doctrine of Temperance makes the creation of moral behavior—that is, the behavior of the Protestant Christian middle-class respectability—a major goal of social reform” (Gusfield 74). The temperance movement, after all, grew out of an antebellum reform movement that was itself a response by established, native-born Americans of the upper and middle classes to what they viewed as the rampant pluralism that threatened to overwhelm their culture and oust them from their positions of power within American society (Lender and Martin 65-66; Gusfield 39-42). Although the Washingtonians of the late 1840s brought a decidedly “common touch” to the temperance movement (Gusfield 49; Lender and Martin 75), the movement always primarily consisted of middle-class reformers who crusaded “not against drinking patterns or consumption rates per se but against drinking as a symbol of rampant pluralism, individualism, and potential social disorder” (Lender and Martin 95). Every bit as much as Riis or other urban reformers, temperance advocates saw reform as a way of staving off a potential uprising among the growing numbers of the urban poor: working-class whites, blacks moving into Northern cities from the South, and huge numbers of immigrants. The mainly white, middle-class temperance movement found all three groups threatening, and much of its rhetoric mirrors that of anti-Labor, nativist, and racist agitators in 19th-century America. Tum-of-the-century temperance attitudes toward the drinking of workers had its roots in Jacksonian-era fears on the part of the middle and upper classes as to the wisdom of a true democracy, in which the working-class “rabble” who formed the majority of the electorate would dictate the course of the nation. The nativist taint of late-nineteenth-century temperance propaganda reflected a much earlier connection with anti-immigrant movements of mid-century, such as the Know-Nothings (Gusfield 57, 71, 73; Lender and M artin 65, 93, 95, 98, 102, 127). And the temperance movement also reflected the racism of the majority of nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, who viewed blacks as dangerously different from the “true” humanity of whites; even Frances Willard, whose Christian socialist WCTU came as close to a radical organization as any temperance organization, revealed racist sentiments in her attacks on saloons, linking drinking to the white paranoia of black men raping white women: “‘The grogshop [is] the Negro’s center of power. Better whiskey and more of it,’ she wrote, ‘is the rallying cry of great, dark-faced mobs,’ whose drunken exploits menaced ‘the safety of women, of childhood, [and] the home .. . in a thousand localities’” (quoted in D’Emilio and Freedman 218). From the earliest days of the temperance movement, a large percentage of temperance advocates were women. In the antebellum temperance movement, with its male-dominated leadership, women served mainly as rank-and-file workers in the crusade against drink. After the Civil War, however, women took over more and more of the leadership of the movement, until temperance came to be viewed as a “Woman’s Crusade.” While they raised questions about the validity of women’s roles within the established social order—in part through the subjects of their works and in part through their very existence—the women’s branches of the temperance movement, most notably the WCTU, originated as, and for the most part remained, conservative reactions to the threats made against family institutions by industrialization, the changing workforce, and alcohol abuse. The WCTU was the first successful nationwide reform organization administered by women, no small accomplishment when the standard thinking was that women belonged in the home or, at most, in the church. Led by Frances Willard, the WCTU advanced into action on many fronts, as Joseph R. Gusfield explains, in Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement: “In her statements and activities [Willard] spanned all the major movements of conservative, progressive, and radical Christianity. Woman’s suffrage, dress reform, cremation, vegetarianism, Christian Socialism, the Populist Party, and the Labor movement are among the movements in which she was an active and often a leading member” (76). Many other WCTU members were suffragists and social workers, and the organization soon became identified with changing perceptions of womanhood (Lender and Martin 110). The success of the 44 WCTU disproved many long-held notions concerning the ability of women to operate in traditionally male-dominated roles of managers and administrators and it naturally led to questions as to the validity of traditional roles in American society. After all, if women could operate a national temperance organization with thousands members, what kind of proof was there that women could not also manage businesses or even the government? In this light, the saloon took on new symbolic importance; not only did the saloon provide temptation for weak-willed men, it also “represented the innermost sanctuary of the male public sphere from which women were excluded” (D’Emilio and Freedman 152). The WCTU also raised questions concerning the relationship between men and women, particularly in terms of marriage. Alcohol became a focus for the concerns of middle-class women for their own security, because the results of alcohol abuse provided a tangible proof of the tenuous position women held in Victorian society. Women feared alcoholism, because a drunken husband was likely to lose his ability to provide for the family, and the options for women attempting to support themselves and their family were practically nil:

Bars appeared to invite family catastrophe: They introduced children to drunkenness and vice and drove husbands to alcoholism; they also caused squandering of wages, wife beating, and child abuse; and, with the patron’s inhibitions lowered through drink, the saloon led many men into the arms of prostitutes (and, not incidentally, contributed to the alarming spread of syphilis). If any of these disasters occurred, a displaced homemaker had no social welfare system to cushion the blow. (Lender and Martin 107) When, later in the century, the quest for suffrage rights became a part of the temperance agenda, feminist-leaning temperance advocates began 45 questioning not only the existence of saloons, but the existence of the very family structures the saloons threatened. Influenced by feminist thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, members of the WCTU began examining the validity of the money- for-sex relationship that lay at the heart of their conception of Victorian matrimony (D’Emilio and Freedman 153). Once this relationship was brought into open cognizance, these temperance advocates began to wonder whether the family structures they sought to protect from demon rum were worth protecting. Simultaneously, however, the rank and file of the temperance movement, middle-class women from small communities across the nation, clung to the old mission of protecting the family from the threats of alcohol. For these women, the traditional family—and the traditional roles of women within that family—was the mainstay of American society, and their fight against drunkenness was a fight against the forces seeking to destroy that society. Although the WCTU provided women with opportunities for fashioning new definitions of what it meant to be women, for the most part, temperance workers saw themselves as defenders of the qualities of women prescribed by their society. Even Frances Willard, whose perhaps did more to prove the limitations of conventional definitions of womanhood, still maintained that at its deepest level the temperance movement was—as Lender and Martin describe it:

. . . convinced that liquor was an especial threat to the status and morality of women. “When a man would rob a woman of her virtue,” Willard asked at one point, “or a woman is about to sell herself in the most degraded bargain that the mind can contemplate, what does he give her, and what does she take? STRONG DRINK!” (109) 46 The conservative heart of the temperance movement came to the front when the WCTU—created and run by women—was replaced by the Anti-Saloon League—a more traditional organization in which women were relegated to relatively low levels of responsibility. This change back to conventional ways should really come as no surprise, since the temperance movement— for all of the questions it raised concerning American social structures— was essentially a conservative movement of middle-class men and women hoping to protect their own social positions. This conservatism is reflected in one of the chief tools of the temperance movement, the temperance tale. Temperance fiction officially got its start in 1836, when, during the second annual convention of the American Temperance Union at Saratoga Springs, New York, members voted to include the temperance tale as one of their weapons in the war against alcohol (Arthur lii-liv, Whitman 16). But the real origins of the temperance tale must be traced back much earlier to Benjamin Rush’s A n Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Human Mind and Body (1784)4. As J. C. Furnas explains, in The Life and Times of The Late Demon Rum, the temperance story owes its rhetorical style, its tone, and many of its most characteristic elements—including the “Over-the-Hill-to- the-Poorhouse” plot structure, the use of children for sympathetic effect, the character of the drunkard’s wife, and the use of detailed descriptions of delirium tremens for shock value—to Rush’s work (111-113). Rush was not the only influence on the early temperance fiction writers; from the 1790s into the early 1820s, Mason Locke Weems5, a

4 Benjamin Rush (1745-1813). Physician, Revolutionary patriot. (Hopkins 898) 5 Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825). Episcopal clergyman, subscription book agent, author ofThe Life and Memorable Actions o f George Washington (c. 1800). (Hopkins 1164) 47 travelling reformer better known as “Parson” Weems, developed a sensational approach to such reform issues as gambling, dueling, and drinking. Weems’ temperance essays included introductory tales filled with graphic examples of the type of violent, perverse behavior unleashed by strong drink. “In one characteristic story,” writes Reynolds, “a man suffering from delirium tremens chops up his loving wife and three children with an ax under the illusion that they are vipers” (60). However, Weems was the exception to the rule of rational, theological early temperance essays of the early part of the 19th century (Reynolds 65); it wouldn’t be until the mid-1830s that temperance tales would pick up the sensationalist tone of Weems’ work, and it would take the example of the Washingtonians of the 1840s to fully unleash the imaginations of temperance writers. Once temperance fiction became an officially recognized form of anti­ liquor propaganda, the temperance tale became a remarkably successful medium, particularly in terms of sales. James D. Hart, in The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste, reports that many novelists of the 1830s cashed in on what was a very lucrative market: “Over 12 per cent of the novels published in America during the 1830s dealt with temperance, and though they were mostly brief tracts disguised as fiction and distributed free, they had a great circulation” (108). For successful temperance writers such as Lucius Manlius Sargent6 and Timothy Shay Arthur7, the rewards of writing temperance fiction could be great. Arthur, whose Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854) stands as the pre-eminent example

6 Lucius Manlius Sargent (1786-1867). Author of such worksHubert as and Ellen (1812), The Temperance Tales (1848), andDealing with the Dead (1856). (Hopkins 911) 7 Timothy Shay Arthur (1809-1885). Temperance author. (Hopkins 30) 48 of temperance fiction, single-handedly “produced over 5 per cent of all the volumes of fiction published in the 1840s” and, by 1860, had published over one million copies of his books (Hart 109). With figures such as the above, it is easy to see why, even though temperance fiction tended to be read primarily by those already committed to the cause (Hart 110), temperance advocates generally considered the temperance tale a success (Gusfield 50). Aside from the work of extremists like Weems, early temperance novels were relatively sedate (Reynolds 66). A good example of what Reynolds labels “conventional” temperance reform novels is Lucius Manlius Sargent’s My Mother’s Gold Ring (1833). In this small pamphlet, Sargent provides the reader with the account of a young woman whose husband stumbles onto the dangers of strong drink. Sargent’s narrative focuses on the tearful suffering of the narrator as drink turns her normally honest, hard-working farmer into a lazy, drunken lout. As the farmer is led off to prison for not paying his debts, he is rescued by a kindly neighbor—a former drinker, himself—-who urges the narrator’s husband to sign the temperance pledge. The drunken husband does pledge, using as collateral his wife’s most prized possession, a gold ring given her by her dying mother. Needless to say, the husband reforms, returns the ring to the narrator, signs the official temperance pledgebook, and everyone lives happily ever after. Sargent’s story is notable for its sentimentality, its happy ending, and for its relative lack of the type of graphic details that came to be expected from later works. Another early temperance pamphlet, George B. Cheever’s The True History of Deacon Giles’ Distillery (1835), provides an interesting example of a temperance tract appropriating the trial transcript form that swelled “into a broad river by the 1830s and to a virtual flood by the 1840s” (Reynolds 175). Cheever’s pamphlet consists of five main sections. The pamphlet opens with a description of the background Cheever’s story, explaining how Cheever came to be sued for libel by a local distiller, who claimed that the story, “Inquire at Amos Giles’ Distillery,” which had appeared in the local paper, referred specifically to him. The second section provides the text of the story, which, cast in the form of a dream, describes how a distiller enlisted the help of the devil in transforming his distillery into a brewery. The third section is a transcription of Cheever’s libel case, which he lost, and the fourth section, “Deacon Jones’ Brewery,” is another story, almost a carbon copy of the original tale. Cheever’s stories, themselves, are relatively mild; though “Inquire at Amos Giles’ Distillery” contains references to the debilitating effects of alcohol and though the story does tell of one of Giles’ workers who, overcome with guilt over his ruinous trade, drowns himself in a vat of hot liquor, the stories contain little elaboration of the evil results of intemperance. Much different is the fifth section of the pamphlet, the independently paginated “The Arrest, Trial and Conviction of King Alcohol.” Here Cheever provides the “transcription” of a mock trial held by a group of Washingtonians who sought to condemn alcohol as a murderer and ruiner of young men and women. The “testimony” found in this transcript provides a good example of the type of graphic testimonials offered by Washingtonian ex-drunkards during the late 1830s and early 1840s, with plenty of short narratives relating how strong drink turned normally gentle individuals into raving, murdering, and suicidal drunkards. 50 The Washingtonian influence pervades another work published at the same time, Mary L. Fox’s George Allen: The Only Son (1835). In this full-length novel, Fox describes in detail the fall of a young man into a life of drunkenness and vice. Fox’s story is much more developed than the earlier tales, providing her readers with a close-up look at the life of a dissolute young man. Fox takes her readers along with the main character to a private college, where he changes from a promising young scholar to a rule-breaking drunken reprobate who is thrown out of school after less than one year of study. From there, Fox follows the young man to New Orleans, where he again comes into contact with the wrong people—in the form of a young plantation owner—and slides into a life of vice, forgery, and finally murder. While Fox’s novel is sentimental—the final deathbed scene in which the young man calls to his attendant parents is certainly that—her story clearly reflects what Reynolds calls the “subversive” approach, in which temperance fiction “began to take on a note of doom, as more and more writers stressed alcoholism’s ravages rather than its remedies” (66). Fox concentrates on the dark side of the alcohol question and, in a notable departure from Sargent’s example, she has her main character prove not reformable. Seven years after the publication of George Allen, a young Walter Whitman was convinced by friends in the Washingtonian movement to write Franklin Evans (1842), a full-length temperance story following the overall structure of Fox’s work. Whitman’s story, like Fox’s, shows a young man succumbing to the temptations of alcohol and sinking into a cycle of degeneration and reform that takes him, like George Allen, from failure in the North to failure in the South and back again to the North, though in this case Whitman’s hero is saved from Allen’s fate by a kindly benefactor and reforms for good. While I am not attempting to prove a direct influence from Pox’s work to Whitman’s, the similarities of the stories—the emphasis on the decadence caused by alcohol, particularly— show that the Washingtonian-inspired subversive approach to temperance fiction had clearly taken hold in the imaginations of authors of the movement. That this movement toward the dark side of the alcohol issue would continue throughout the 1840s and on into the 1850s is made clear by the evidence of Maria Lamas’s The Glass (1849) and Timothy Shay Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854). Lamas’ short tale is crammed with example after example of the destructive effects of drinking on the lives of ordinarily wealthy, respectable people. Through a combination of her husband’s and her own drinking, the narrator slips from comfortable wealth to abject poverty, ending up for a time in the county alms house. The narrator is saved in the end by a kindly benefactor, but there is only enough left of her to tell her tale; the best portions of her person have been ravaged by drink. The story is graphic in an almost gratuitous way, with descriptions of the decadence, violence, and poverty caused by drink that are much more intense that those in Fox’s or Whitman’s stories and far beyond those found in Sargent’s tale. A rthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room outdoes even The Glass for the sheer number and detail of its descriptions of the violence and immorality to be expected from alcohol abuse. With the exception of Joe Morgan, the stereotypical hard-luck drunkard whose dying child convinces him to pledge total abstinence and who turns his life completely around, Arthur 52 spares no one who comes in contact with alcohol in the story, mercilessly grinding every character into the dirt. From the formerly good miller- turned-bartender, Simon Slade, to his wife, Ann, to their son, Frank, to the young gentleman, Willie Hammond, all of the characters in the book who come into the saloon are destroyed in some way by its evil. The descriptions of violence and poverty caused by the saloon are the main focus of the story and constitute the majority of the narrative, save the long description of the death of Joe Morgan’s child and his resultant reformation. Ten Nights in a Bar-Room stands as the premiere example of what Reynolds calls the “dark temperance” tradition (68) and it stands equally in most people’s minds as the representative temperance tale. Arthur’s story was exceedingly popular during its day, but even more popular was the stage version of the novel, adapted in 1858 by William W. Pratt (Arthur lxxx). Pratt’s dramatic version of the novel, transformed over the years into a melodramatic musical, was performed throughout the country during the rest of the 19th century and into the early 20th century (Arthur lxxx-lxxii). The success of the stage version of Ten Nights in a Bar- Room provides an indication of the shift away from temperance fiction in favor of temperance drama that occurred in post-bellum America (Arthur lxxx). A good example of post-war temperance drama is Nellie H. Bradley’s Marry No Man if He Drinks (1868). In Bradley’s one-act play, the three main characters debate the merits of total abstinence, with two of the young women deciding to sign a pledge that they will “m arry no man if he drinks.” Compared to the late temperance fiction of Arthur or Lamas, Marry No Man if He Drinks is quite tame, with none of the type of violence and depravity associated with dark-temperance works. Yet, Bradley’s play does rely on the traditions of the temperance tale, particularly through the use of the “drunken wife” as a stock character. When the third friend, Susan, who refused to sign the pledge and married a man who drank, comes to the pledge-signers in distress, with tales of her drunken husband’s cruelty and neglect, Bradley consciously calls upon her audience’s familiarity with the sufferings of the traditional drunkard’s wife character, a standard element in temperance fiction from Sargent on through Arthur. As Marry No Man if He Drinks demonstrates, the temperance tale, itself, may have fallen out of favor after the Civil War, but many of its elements and rhetorical strategies survived in the temperance drama of the post-war era. While I have in the preceding historical survey of the temperance fiction tradition again utilized Reynolds’s terms conventional, subversive, and dark to describe the changes which occured in temperance fiction during the 19th century, let me repeat my earlier qualification that these terms serve as helpful descriptors of the surface differences between the stories, rather than as labels for distinct classes of temperance fiction. While the temperance works discussed in this chapter span a period of over 30 years and represent divergent approaches to temperance fiction, from the relatively subdued My Mother's Gold Ring through the openly sensational Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, there is a remarkable degree of similarity among the fictional elements they employ. The “belabored thesis” Donald A. Koch notes inTen Nights in a Bar-Room is the same in all temperance stories (lxxxii): drinkers m ust be saved from them selves or they will pose a threat to their own persons and to society at large, and this thesis is brought forth in the stories through the elements of the stories. A 54 look at the fictional forms temperance stories hold in common reveals that those forms are closely linked to the overall conservative ideology which lies behind My Mother's Gold Ring as well as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. One element common to these stories is their overall tone, what Koch describes as an “all-pervading atmosphere of sanctimonious piety” (Arthur lxxxii). Generally, the stories include opening and closing remarks by the author, with the introduction explaining the edifying purpose behind the tale and the conclusion baldly laying out the lesson to be learned from the preceding story. The conclusions, in particular, are noteworthy for stridency of their prose. Lamas’ remarks at the conclusion ofThe Glass, in which the author preaches about the hazards of women encouraging their men to drink, exemplify this type of authorial comment:

How many fashionable women of the present day lend their influence to the destruction of mankind, by encouraging wine- drinking. . . . Let man do as he will, woman should not only refrain to encourage but should openly discourage the use of wine, or any other drink that intoxicates. For though the expense—the mere dollars-and-cents portion of the consequence, falls mainly on the man, nine-tenths of the sorrow, the anguish and the shame falls upon woman. . . . Yet we find many, ah! very many thoughtless, heedless, well- meaning women, who encourage by their presence if not by their example, the drinking of wine. (31-32) The confidence of the narrator in her explanations of what womenshould do and the over-excited prose of “Yet we find many, ah! very m any thoughtless, heedless, well-meaning women” are distinctive marks of the authorial comment in a temperance tale, and may be found in the introduction or conclusion of nearly any temperance story. In many stories, the sanctimonious preaching of the narrators is nothing compared to the pontificating on the part of the characters.Ten 55 Nights in a Bar-Room is filled with characters who love nothing better than to comment at length on the evils of liquor and, particularly, on the dangers of the saloon. The narrator, of course, is intently interested in engaging anyone in the Sickle and Sheaf in an extended conversation on the topic of alcohol. In one such exchange, during his second visit to Cedarville, the narrator happens upon a stable hand, and the conversation naturally turns toward the benefits of the Maine Law ticket:

It isn’t the drinking men who are so much opposed to the Maine Law, as your politicians. They throw dust in the people’s eyes about it, and make a great many who know nothing at all of the evils of drinking in themselves, believe some bugbear story about trampling on the rights of I don’t know who, nor they either. As for rum-seller’s rights, I never could see any right they had to get rich by ruining poor devils such as I am. I think, though, that we have some right to be protected against them. (196-197) This is quite a speech from a hostler with an injured head and a hangover. And this articulate stable hand is not alone, by any means. Nearly every character the narrator encounters in the town of Cedarville—with the exception of the young men ruining themselves in the bar and the old men, like Slade, the barkeeper, who are profiting from their ruin—takes every opportunity to denounce demon rum and extol the benefits of temperance and, more precisely, prohibitive legislation. While Arthur’s story is an extreme example, in terms of the sheer amount of lecturing that takes place in its pages, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room is certainly not the only temperance story to have characters who speak as the mouthpieces of their authors’ cause. A certain degree of preaching is to be expected in almost any temperance story, if not by a character, then definitely by the narrator. 56 The preaching of narrators and characters in temperance stories reveals a great deal about the rhetorical orientation of temperance fiction. These temperance stories are attempts at persuasion, but the self- righteousness of the preaching that takes place in them indicates that the primary audience for this persuasion is not the drunkards, themselves; rather, these stories are aimed at an audience of middle-class temperance advocates who share the goals and basic philosophy of the authors, themselves. Instead of persuading drinkers to take the pledge, the purpose of temperance writers seems to be to remind the converted—or, at most, to fully convince the undecided—of the need for the temperance cause. There is a distinct separation in temperance fiction between the author and her readers on the one hand and the subjects of her stories on the other. This separation is amply illustrated by a quote from George Allen, in which Fox denounces the opera dancer Allen watches in New Orleans:

No one who has ever witnessed so disgusting an exhibition as the highly applauded feats of a female opera dancer, need be told of their indelicacy. The very profession in itself, assures every mind possessing the least moral principle, that no female of modesty, nay, no woman, (shame! that woman’s name should be so degraded,) who was not utterly depraved, would place herself in such a situation. (Fox 65) Fox makes it absolutely clear that a giant chasm rests between her own self-righteous position in life (supposedly shared by her reader) and the position of the subjects in her story. This separation between the narrator (along with the reader) and the subjects of temperance stories is a distinct feature of the tales and the natural result of the reformist impulse inherent in them. The very idea of reforming someone necessitates a separation between the self of the reformer and the other of the reformed, and the 57 moral tone of the temperance tales is geared toward keeping the subjects of the stories on a different moral plane from the narrator and the reader. Because the temperance writers were writing to persuade members of their own social group of the righteousness of their cause, much of the preaching that takes place in these stories reflects attitudes the authors held in common with their readers, particularly regarding their relationship to persons outside their own social and geographical group. Although the temperance movement did involve participants in the antebellum South, its connection to the abolition movement marked it as a predominantly Northern movement (Lender and Martin 80-81), an orientation which continued after the Civil War, primarily because the vast majority of the urban saloons so threatening to the temperance movement were found in the North. This Northern bias in the temperance movement is reflected in many temperance tales, with the authors privileging Northern country life as the seat of wholesome, Christian virtues. These authors draw a distinction between this and all other lifestyles. As historians have noted, the temperance movement was fueled, in part, by fears that drinking was somehow “un-American” and represented a threat from hard-drinking foreigners, seeking to overthrow the predominantly Puritan, New English culture (Gusfield 51; Lender and Martin 98). Such fears and prejudices are evident in several of the temperance works surveyed. In these stories, the city—in particular New York City—and the South are viewed as places of evil and temptation when compared to the rural North. In Franklin Evans, Whitman makes an obvious point concerning the dangers of a young man from the country, represented by Evans, 58 attempting to make his fortune in the big city. Before Evans even arrives in New York, Whitman has a character warn him at length of the dangers lurking for him in the city:

You are taking a dangerous step, young man. The place in which you are about to fix your abode, is very wicked, and as deceitful as it is wicked. There will be a thousand vicious temptations besetting you on every side, which the simple method of your country life has led you to know nothing of.. . . [Intemperance] will assail you on every side, and . . . if you yield to it, will send you back from the city, a bloated and weak creature, to die among your country friends, and be laid in a drunkard’s grave; or which will too soon end your days in some miserable street in the city itself. It is indeed a dangerous step! (58) The warning, of course, proves entirely true, as the young Evans stumbles into a life of drinking and gambling. Whitman’s comparison of good country life with the dangers of the city echoes similar sentiments in Fox’s earlier novel. There, the author makes the superiority of life in rural New England over life in the “profligate city” of New Orleans a major point of her novel. In one instance, for example, Fox places a heavily romanticized scene of New England farmland just after a climactic scene of murder and mayhem set in New Orleans. In Fox’s description of farm life, even the animals seem to display the superiority of their Connecticut heritage:

It was a beautiful morning in September; the bright rays of the sun were reflected in the clear depths of Connecticut river, and the trees were leaded with fruit. Heaps of bright red apples were lying on the grass, ready to be transported to the storehouse or cider mill, and every living thing seemed to be in motion. The cows were going from the milking yard to the pasture; horses were standing in the farm yard, in company with the patient, gentle looking oxen, waiting to be employed in carrying home the fhiit; and the merry, rosy children were busy, with all the tireless activity of happy childhood, in calling the fowls to receive their breakfast, feeding the pigs, bringing in the milk-pails, and any thing else their little busy hands could find to do; while from all animate and inanimate nature 59 arose that indescribable but harmonious sound which none but those who have enjoyed an autumnal morning in the country can realize. (93-94) Fox continues her portrait of farm life in New England by showing the farmer and his family, hard at work early in the morning, finish their chores and return home to a prayerfully eaten “plentiful repast, which consisted of hot meat and potatoes, the necessary ingredients in a New England country breakfast, bread of Indian meal, fresh butter, eggs, honey, and new milk” (95-96). From the beginning to the end of her novel, Fox takes every opportunity to illustrate and moralize concerning the natural superiority of the New England country lifestyle, which represented the best of American Anglo-Saxon Protestant agrarian values. That Fox chooses New Orleans as her representative “profligate city” is not accident, as the city’s Louisiana locale permits the author to add critical commentary on Southern life to her attacks on the wickedness of big cities. When Fox sends Allen to New Orleans in an attempt to rebuild his shattered life, she lets the reader know that the protagonist has no real chance, having walked into a city and culture built upon depravity and evil. In New Orleans, Allen meets a slave-owning planter, who lures him into more vice. The planter is portrayed as a drunken playboy, and his immorality is clearly tied to the immorality of the slave economy that supports his lifestyle. In a scene that could have come from any abolitionist story, Fox describes the violence inherent in the slave system as an overseer beats a twelve-year-old boy to death for having a headache:

The mother of the boy, who had stood looking on in agony, when she saw the blood streaming from her child’s back, could bear it no longer, but falling on her knees before the cruel man, with clasped hands, begged him to spare her son. 60 “0! massa, do forgive him, he will work; pray no kill my boy, me got nobody else to love me.” The only answer was a blow from the whip, and a fresh application of the lash to his victim. Before night the boy was raving in a brain fever, and in two days he died. (Fox 70-71) For Fox, the violence and immorality of slavery mark Southern culture as the evil opposite of the wholesome Northern culture, and the evil of slavery is combined in the wicked city of New Orleans with the evils of intemperance and vice. In his later story, Whitman, too, makes a statement about the superiority of Northern country life over Southern plantation life by sending Evans to Virginia after the main character’s ruinous bouts of drunkenness in New York. Once in Virginia, the young man hooks up with a heavy-drinking plantation owner. The two engage in a constant round of wine-drinking, and, during an exceedingly heavy drinking binge, Evans displays shockingly how depraved he has become by marrying one of the planter’s slaves, a Creole. It is only once Evans returns north that he is able to return to a life of sobriety and industry. Temperance writers also display distrust of those outside their immediate social grouping through their nativist portrayals of foreigners and immigrants. In George Allen, Fox blasts the French opera dancer as much for her nationality as for her scandalous dancing. In his novel, Whitman describes a poor Irish doorman, who ends up a dazed, impoverished drunk; there is no reason for him to be Irish, other than to capitalize on existing prejudices toward the Irish as drunks. Whitman also shows his nativist colors in his description of the dance hall where Evans becomes drunk for the second time; Whitman stresses the depravity of the place by explaining that “The keeper of the house was not an American” (72). And, when the narrator of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room 61 returns to Cedarville to visit Simon Slade’s tavern five years after his first visit, he describes how the place has become run-down over the years. Part of his proof of the degeneration of the tavern is the fact that Slade now employs an “Irish bar-keeper” (110) and “two greasy-looking Irish girls” (125) as waitresses. Such anti-foreigner or anti-immigrant prejudices merely reinforce the importance of the nativist, rural North-oriented thesis in temperance works, which, in turn, merely reflect the attitudes and patterns of thinking of the members of the temperance movement who wrote and read such stories. Another characteristic of temperance fiction is its reliance upon sensational descriptions in its portrayal of the effects of alcohol. Early temperance writers such as Sargent tended to be relatively conservative in their descriptions. As we move through the middle part of the 19th century and especially after the emergence of the Washingtonian movement, temperance writers became more and more graphic and sensationalist, most notably Arthur, who thrills his audience with scene after scene of lurid violence and vice. This difference is more a m atter of degree, however, than an absolute division between approaches to temperance descriptions. Even in the relatively calm early temperance works, the authors feel obliged to slip in gratuitously violent details. Sargent, for example, whose My Mother’s Gold Ring stands as a prime example of the conventional approach to temperance fiction, includes a description of child abuse in his narrative: “His father had taken him on his knee, and was playing with him, but had given him a blow in the face, only because he had said, when he kissed him, “dear papa, you smell like Old Isaac, the drunken fiddler” (7). The use of the young, innocent child as the victim of almost gratuitous violence such as this is typical for a temperance work, and both Whitman and Lamas heighten the horror of their examples of child abuse by having them committed by the children’s mothers, operating under the influence of alcohol. The mock trial transcript found at the end of Cheever’s pamphlet is filled with acts of violence committed by drunkards upon themselves and others while under the effects of alcohol, displaying the Washingtonian preference for the violently sensational in their “confessions.” Cheever, in his own “Inquire at Deacon Jones’ Distillery,” has one of Jones’ employees commit suicide rather than face the evil his occupation is creating: “...certain it is that one of its members had drowned himself in the vat of hot liquor, in the bottom of which a skeleton was tome time after found, with heavy weights tied to the ancle bones” (Cheever 9). Simply having characters die in these stories seems not enough; characters who die because of alcohol must die grisly, violent deaths. As usual, Arthur outdoes all other temperance authors in the degree and number of the descriptions of violence which appear in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Beginning with Simon Slade accidently knocking cold Joe Morgan’s young daughter with an errant toss of a beer glass, the inhabitants of Cedarville engage in one act of violence after another. The climax of the violence in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room comes when Slade and his drunken son, Frank, go after each other in the barroom. Frank strikes the first blow, with a half-clenched fist to the chest of his father to ward him off, then warns his father to stay away. Slade, thoroughly enraged, comes forward and whacks his son in the face. 63 Instantly, the young man, infuriated by drink and evil passions threw the bottle at his father’s head. The dangerous missile fell, crashing upon one of his temples, shivering it into a hundred pieces. A heavy, jarring fall too surely marked the fearful consequences of the blow. When we gathered around the fallen man, and made an effort to lift him from the floor, a thrill of horror went through every heart. A mortal paleness was already on his marred face, and the death-gurgle in his throat! In three minutes from the time the blow was struck, his spirit had gone upward to give an account of the deed done in the body. (A rthur 233-234) Throughout each of these acts of violence, the narrator provides the reader with detailed descriptions of the action, observed from a safe distance. Because the narrator is more observer than actor, his perspective is closely allied to that of the implied reader, who is both appalled and fascinated by the violent acts committed due to alcohol. This fascination with what would normally be merely appalling is one of the main characteristics of the temperance tale. Reynolds claims that temperance writers included sensational details in their works in order to satisfy the perverse curiosity of their middle-class readers, who wished to see something of life outside their own narrow round of experience (66), and to a certain extent this seems to be the case. But the temperance fiction authors use graphic descriptions for much more than mere sensation. The shocking quality of the descriptions in temperance stories serves to heighten the horrors of drunkenness. This effect of graphic descriptions helps explain the prevalence of delirium tremens narratives in temperance fiction. Ever since Benjamin Rush introduced delirium tremens as the greatest threat to body and mind caused by alcohol abuse, the D.T. narrative was a prime element of temperance propaganda (Furnas 118), and temperance fiction writers liberally sprinkled within their stories plenty of examples of drunkards in 64 the grip ofmania a potu. Although, as Furnas points out, the prevalence of the D.T. narrative, usually anonymous and often overdone, eventually led to it assuming joke status (120), well before it had burned out its energy, the description of a drunkard in the throws of delirium tremens lent a powerful and threatening quality to any temperance story. Some of the most graphic descriptions of the delirium tremens occur in The Glass. The first of these takes place after Helen More has collapsed in the street in the grip of “mania a potu—the brain fever of drunkenness” (22). The narrator’s nightmarish visions are mingled with the sounds of her son’s cries for help from the locked clothes room, “Under this I labored, and all night long and all next day toads crawled around and serpents slimed over me, and every now and then there would come a scream, as a of a child in mortal agony, over my brain; and oh! what torments—what agonies of torment were mine” (Lamas 22). The hallucination is a major factor in nearly all accounts of delirium tremens, with strange creatures a common element of such dreams. Much later in the story, Lamas describes in precise, gruesome detail a derelict drunk More sees in the insane asylum:

There lay the wretched drunkard occasionally passive and silent, with the white foam escaping from his lips, his eyes glassed and staring, the pupils extended to their utmost dilatation, the blood seeming ready to start from his skin, his fingers quivering nervously—then, with fearful howls and shrieking curses, struggling in the strong arms of his captors. (Lamas 27) Lamas seems almost obsessed with the physical sufferings of the poor drunkard in this scene. While we do not know exactly what visions torment the man, Lamas makes it plain through his shrieking and struggling that his mental anguish is severe. Scenes such as these reminded the middle-class readers of temperance tales of the urgency of the temperance cause and of the dangers alcohol posed when allowed to fall into the hands of other less responsible than they. The more graphic the description, the more strident the warning. The “subversive” temperance stories—with their shrill reminders of the dangers of alcohol—offer a more conservative message than the “conventional” stories, which tend to play-down the effects of alcohol abuse to a minimum. The reason behind such a change in emphasis is a corresponding change in the attitudes of temperance advocates as to the reformability of drinkers. In early temperance works, such as Sargent’s My Mother’s Gold Ring, the pledge was viewed as the cure for intemperance. The pledge enabled the alcoholic to substitute the willpower of a group of non-drinkers for his own patently weak willpower; the group supported the former drinker in time of need, helping him resist temptation, which at this time only referred to temperance, not complete abstinence. As the temperance movement entered the 1840s, some doubts as to the reformability of drunkards began to seep into temperance thinking (Reynolds 66), and temperance advocates began calling for a complete pledge of abstinence from all types of intoxicating liquors. This change in point of view is reflected in the increase in reliance upon sensational description between the early “conventional” temperance tales and the “subversive” temperance tales of the late 1840s, George Allen, Franklin Evans, and The Glass; as temperance thinkers began to lose faith in the efficacy of the pledge, temperance writers began to rely on the shock value of sensational description as a warning to their readers of the need for total abstinence. 66 By the time Arthur wrote Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, the temperance movement had moved beyond even the total abstinence pledge and had begun calling for prohibitionist legislation. Arthur’s repeated calls in his novel for support of the Maine Laws is in perfect keeping with his extremely graphic portrayals of the horrible effects of drinking, because the sensational descriptions serve as illustrations of the very reasons the temperance movement supported prohibition; alcohol is so dangerous and drunkards are so vulnerable to its effects that the only way to protect them and the rest of society is to remove the temptation of alcohol completely. At the very least, the sensational descriptions found in temperance fiction serve to emphasize the points the authors wish to make in their stories, points generally made through a combination of plot and characters. Plot in this case is singular, because nearly every temperance story is built around the same basic storyline, what Koch describes as “the step-by-step decline of the inebriate” (lxxxii) and Furnas calls the “Over-the- Hill-to-the-Poorhouse” frame (113). As we have already noted, this basic frame was first introduced by Benjamin Rush in 1784, and in its most pristine state works something like this: A character, generally considered a good citizen, begins with social drinking, graduates to full- scale drunkard status, neglects his responsibilities, becomes entangled in debt or some other legal or criminal difficulty, and ends up in either the local jail, the poorhouse, or the graveyard. This frame is used in My Mother’s Gold Ring, for example, when the husband, once a productive and sober farmer, becomes a drunkard, loses all his ambition, and heads for jail, all because of a chance drink. Whitman liked the standard Over-the-Hill frame so much that he used it 67 four tim es in Franklin Evans. The first use occurs when the narrator describes the decline of the “hale and hearty farmer” from the narrator’s hometown on Long Island who became intemperate and lost his farm, becoming a joyless innkeeper/ bartender (Whitman 41). Shortly after the narrator describes his own introduction to New York nightlife, he again employs the Over-the-Hill frame in the story of the poor Irish porter at Evans’ bank, who “had the unfortunate habit of tippling, which sadly interfered with his efficiency at work” (78); the porter is fired and, reduced to drinking on an empty stomach, ends up in prison for stealing bread. In a third use of the frame, Franklin Evans, himself, is reduced by his drinking to poverty, walking aimlessly around New York, begging for food, and finally resorting to criminal activity. And finally, at the end of the story Evans runs into his old drinking companion, Colby, once a dashing young man but now reduced to dancing in the street for drinking money. Drinking literally leads the narrator of The Glass to the poorhouse: “I relapsed to my old habits—lost my situation and myself—sank deeper and deeper in degradation, and at length was taken in a fit of delirium tremens, a common pauper, to the Blackley Alms House” (Lamas 25). And Arthur would be nowhere without the Over-the-Hill storyline, as the fall of Simon Slade from a successful miller to a saloon-keeper to a drunken lout is responsible for the falls of many other characters in the story. The changes which occur within the moral makeup of characters as they move Over the Hill are emphasized by parallel changes in their physical appearance. Almost all temperance authors describe in detail the physical changes heavy drinking brings upon the drunkard. The alterations are typically from positive cultural stereotypes of good health—a muscular, well-fed body; strong, manly features; a fair, youthful complexion; and so on—to their opposites, as the only possible movement for a drunkard is toward the grave. Sargent, Fox, Whitman, and Lamas all utilize this convention of temperance literature, but the author who makes the most use of the parallel between the moral and physical descent of the drunkard is Arthur, who in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room makes his description of the deterioration of a drunkard the organizing principle behind his entire novel. By having his narrator return to the tavern at regular intervals, Arthur is able to provide for his audience a vivid description of the decline of a drunkard. In an interesting—if somewhat obvious—use of parallel structure, Arthur has the descriptions of Simon Slade mirror those of his tavern; as the tavern deteriorates, so does Slade’s physical well-being. When the narrator first meets Slade, the latter still retains the ruddy health and good nature that marked his life as a miller: “...the good-natured face of Simon Slade, the landlord, beaming as it did with a hearty welcome, was really a pleasant sight to see, and the grasp of his hand was like that of a true friend” (7). Likewise, Slade’s tavern meets the approval of the road-weary traveller:

I felt, as I entered the new and neatly furnished sitting- room adjoining the bar, that I had indeed found a comfortable resting-place after my wearisome journey. “All nice as a new pin,” said I, approvingly, as I glanced around the room, up to the ceiling—white as the driven snow—and over the handsomely carpeted floor. (Arthur 7-8) Slade and his tavern have yet to feel the effects of prolonged exposure to heavy drinking; the “white as the driven snow” of the ceiling is certainly intended as a parallel to Slade’s inherent goodness and innocence at this early stage in his saloonkeeping venture. 69 When the narrator returns to Cedarville, his first glimpse of Slade reveals the dramatic changes drinking has wrought upon the features of the poor man:

His face had grown decidedly bad in expression, as well and gross and sensual. The odour of his breath, as he took a chair close to where I w as sitting, w as that of one who d ran k habitually and freely; and the red, swimming eyes evidenced, too surely, a rapid progress toward the sad condition of a confirmed inebriate. There was, too, a certain thickness of speech, that gave another corroborating sign of evil progress. (Arthur 113) These changes in Slade’s physical appearance are closely paralleled by the appearance of his tavern. The narrator makes plain the distinct contrast between the tavern now and then:

Then the room was as sweet and clean as it could be; the sheets and pillow-cases as white as snow, and the furniture shining with polish. Now all was dusty and dingy, the air foul, and the bed linen scarcely whiter than tow. No curtain made softer the light as it came through the window; nor would the shutters entirely keep out the glare, for several of the slats were broken. A feeling of disgust came over me, at the close smell and foul appearance of every thing. (Arthur 109) The details chosen to parallel Slade’s personal decline are obvious ones given the middle-class, predominantly female audience; for 19th century women, whose only available occupation was often as housekeeper, the state of one’s home directly reflected the state of one’s person, even to the extreme that moral defects can be made apparent through lapses in housekeeping. In the case of Slade’s saloon, then, the waning authority of his good wife on Slade’s morals is visually represented through the deterioration of his tavern. The last time the narrator departs the stage at Slade’s tavern, he is greeted by the horrible sight of “Two or three old empty whisky barrels 70 lumbered up the dirty porch, on which a coarse, bloated, vulgar-looking man sat leaning against the wall—his chair tipped back on its hind legs— squinting at me from one eye, as I left the stage and came forward toward the house” (Arthur 203). This Simon Slade is an individual far-removed from the “pleasant sight” that greeted the narrator on his first visit. Clearly, the positive, moral influence of Slade’s wife is gone, leaving both man and tavern in utter ruin. Arthur very deliberately describes the state of the barroom, perhaps the most obviously symbolic portion of Slade’s tavern:

The brass rod around the bar, which, at my last visit, was brightly polished, was now a greenish-black, and there came from it an unpleasant odour of verdigris. The walls were fairly coated with dust, smoke, and flyspecks, and the windows let in the light but feebly, through the dirt-obscured glass. The floor was filthy. Behind the bar, on the shelves designed for a display of liquors, was a confused mingling of empty or half­ filled decanters, cigar-boxes, lemons and lemon-peel, old newspapers, glasses, a broken pitcher, a hat, a soiled vest, and a pair of blacking brushes, with other incongruous things, not now remembered. The air of the room was loaded with offensive vapours. (Arthur 207) As the narrator soon discovers, the external decay of the tavern exactly matches the moral decay of its inhabitants, and it is with little real surprise that the narrator watches Slade and his son engage in a fight to the death. In the end, the only option available for the townspeople hoping to stem the rot that has beset their town is to close down Slade’s bar for good, thereby eliminating the source and the symbol for their town’s difficulties. Of course, many variations of the Over-the-Hill theme exist—in fact, the variations most likely outnumber the faithful renditions—but the standard frame was so well-known to contemporary readers that temperance fiction writers seemingly felt safe in modifying the basic 71 storyline, confident that their readers would know what should have happened under normal circumstances. The most common alteration to what should happen is the introduction of a happy ending, in which a doomed drunkard is redeemed through the intervention of a loving wife, a sweet child, or a kindly benefactor. Always this redemption involves the signing of a temperance pledge. In My Mother's Gold Ring, the drunken husband is saved on the way to the local jail by his kindly farmer neighbor who convinces him to sign the pledge. InFranklin Evans, the narrator is saved from sure doom by a wealthy benefactor and signs a pledge of total abstinence. But, by far the most well-known example of a character saved from the clutches of demon rum is that of Joe Morgan, the run-down drunk of the first chapters ofTen Nights in a Bar-Room. Joe is persuaded by his dying child to vow never to enter Simon Slade’s barroom again; he of course keeps his vow and becomes a fine, upstanding citizen in the community. Another variation on the Over-the-Hill frame is what one might call the Corruption of Innocent Youth plot. In this frame, the character must be an innocent youth, generally a young man from a good family in the country. The first step on this young man’s road to ruin is to become introduced to a culture different from the wholesome country lifestyle he is accustomed to and, in the process, become introduced to alcohol. Once in this new environment, the young man inevitably falls in with “the wrong crowd,” which usually includes one seemingly helpful friend, more experienced in the ways of the world, who is actually out to ruin the hero. The young man’s drinking inevitably leads to some kind of immoral activity, usually gambling, and to trouble with some authority figure, which leaves the young man in the position of having disgraced his 72 parents. From here, the basic Over-the-Hill pattern returns with its predictable results. The Corruption of Innocent Youth frame is the primary storyline for four of the stories we have dealt with. In George Allen, George leaves his New England community for college, where, after becoming friends with some shady upperclassmen, his education in alcohol and gambling soon overshadows his other education; he is expelled and sets off on the inevitable downward trek. Whitman has Franklin Evans move from rural Long Island to New York city, where he hopes to find fame and fortune but finds a drinking companion, Colby, instead; Evans disgraces himself when he goes out drinking rather than deliver an important letter for his employer and is fired. And in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, the rural youths of Cedarville are suddenly exposed to the immoral environment of the saloon when Simon Slade takes up the bartending trade; several of the youths, Willy Hammond in particular, are lured into a trap set for them by a professional gambler named Green, who ruins Willy and, in the process, Judge Hammond, too. An interesting modification of the Corruption of Youth frame occurs in The Glass, where the narrator’s husband is corrupted twice. In the first instance, the narrator, Helen More, persuades her future husband and two other normally teetotalling suitors to become drunk. After she marries, More finds her husband has become a dedicated drunkard and a gambler. At one point, however, the narrator swoons away when she accidently runs into her inebriated husband on the street. Assuming that Helen is dead, More's husband is grief-stricken and pledges never to touch another drop. The husband’s evil friend, however, talks him into one glass of brandy to 73 calm his nerves, to which the husband agrees. More, who has all the while been slowly recovering from her death-like state of shock, watches in horror as her husband and his friend polish off several bottles of fine brandy and commence playing cards in front of her casket! The husband’s pledge of sobriety is only remembered when the narrator finally gains enough strength to call out that she is alive. These variations on the basic Over-the-Hill plot are merely surface alterations of a fictional form which crystallizes the temperance philosophy, providing temperance authors with a neat justification for the entire temperance enterprise. As Gusfield explains,

In Temperance tales the drinker is not only an immoral and sinful man in his alcoholic vice. He is also about to be ruined. With drink comes economic deprivation. The drinker loses his industrious devotion to work. He loses his reputation for reliability. Finally he is without any employment at all. Retribution is possible. Reform sobriety, and the pledge to abstain are rewarded by the return of economic virtues and the reappearance of economic reward. (50) The essence of the Over-the-Hill plot, then, is the concept that the drunkard is responsible for his own poverty and hardship, which may naturally be extended to mean that all instances of poverty and hardship are to a certain extent brought on by the sufferers themselves. This idea is central to the temperance mission, because it simultaneously provides a rationale for alcohol reform and bolsters the social position of middle-class temperance advocates, who can feel their comfortable existence somehow reflects their own good nature and quality. The basic Over-the-Hill temperance plot, then, is built around the idea that the suffering caused by drunkenness is a matter of personal quality and worth, and temperance authors attempt to “prove” the validity of this idea through the characters they include within the basic temperance plot. This proof is possible, because temperance characters fall into strict types, each with its own connection to the ideology which lies behind the temperance movement. There are four main character types in temperance fiction: Drunkards, what Koch calls “the martyred innocents” (lxxxii), evil influences, and benefactors. The latter two types of characters tend to be one-dimensional abstractions of the forces contesting for control over the drunkard. The benefactor characters, in particular, seem less important as actual characters than for what they represent—good, solid, middle-class values that the drunkard left when he became an imbiber and to which he must return if he is ever to be saved from the Over-the-Hill fate. This connection between middle-class values and the benefactor is even more important when one realizes that the benefactor character is theonly method temperance authors use to change the course of the Over-the-Hill plot from its pre-ordained tragic ending. Evil influence characters, too, tend to be completely flat, undeveloped characters whose real contribution to the stories lies in their personification of the types of temptations that lure potential drunkards to strong drink. These characters also personify the other bad habits which invariably accompany drinking in the temperance model, particularly card-playing, allowing the temperance writers to sermonize about activities of which they disapprove in addition to providing the catalyst for test of the drunkard’s willpower which is the heart of the temperance story. Often the evil influence characters are the (so-called) friends of innocent young men. Whitman’s Franklin Evans stumbles into a life of drinking and vice when his friends persuade him to join them in their carousing at night in the 75 city. George Allen falls prey to a sinister upperclassman friend at college, who lures him into the drinking and gambling life: "his principles, based as there were on nothing firmer than vague ideas of virtue and morality, melted away before the fascinating and ingenious sophistry of one whose mind had long been tainted with infidelity” (Fox 27-28). In The Glass, the narrator’s husband is trapped into drinking by the narrator, herself, who in an exercise in control persuades three non-drinking suitors—one of whom is her future husband—to drink until they become inebriated. Later, the husband is influenced in his drinking habits by his toady friend, Breem, the character who convinces the husband to have a drink only moments after the husband vowed before his wife’s casket never to touch another drop. Breem, who Lamas describes as a kind of professional bad influence, is echoed in Arthur’s character of the professional gambler, Green, who systematically ruins the majority of the young men in the town with his alcohol-fortified card games. The main thing all of these evil-influence characters have in common is their raw, malicious evil. They are so unreflective of the evil deeds they commit that they seem less characters than representations of evil environmental forces acting on the drunkards, yet, because they are personified, the genre can reinforce its emphasis on individual willpower and character. Another type of evil influence character is the saloonkeeper. The chief difference between the portrayals of the evil friend tempters and those of the saloonkeepers lies in the premeditation that surrounds the former’s actions. The saloonkeepers are generally shown to be good men who work at a bad trade. Sargent portrays the saloonkeeper in My Mother’s Gold R ing as a prominent member of the local church who lures the innocent 76 husband into the life of a drunkard by having him accept a glass of brandy in lieu of change for his dry goods. The saloonkeeper is not an evil man, but his trade blinds him to the damage alcohol does to his customers. Cheever’s Deacon Giles is a harsher version of the saloonkeeper fromMy Mother’s Gold Ring; Giles is a hypocrite who sells Bibles out of a room in his distillery. Arthur, too, utilizes this stock saloonkeeper character in the form of Simon Slade. The narrator makes a point of describing Slade as an inherently good man; it is Slade’s occupation that makes him dangerous:

I am not disposed to blame Simon Slade for the wrong-doing of Morgan; but here is a simple fact in the case—if he had kept on at the useful calling of a miller, he would have saved this man’s family from want, suffering, and a lower deep of misery than that into which they have already fallen. (Arthur 31) For all of these authors, the saloonkeeper’s goodness in all other aspects of his life serves as a handy point of comparison with the evil caused by his occupation. This circumstance permits temperance writers to lay the blame for the saloonkeepers’ actions on the saloon, itself, lending support to the temperance tradition’s abhorrence of the saloon. Part of the hatred temperance advocates harbored for the saloon stemmed from the way saloons undermined the traditional work ethic. Ablaze with gilt and finery, the saloon offered its patrons the illusion of something for next-to- nothing, the chance to assume the role of a wealthy member of the leisure class who had nothing to do but stand around and philosophize with his friends, all for just the cost of a drink. Simon Slade illustrates this view of the saloon as representing the opposite of the work ethic through an explanation of his change in profession:

I’ve followed milling these twenty years, and made some little money. But I got tired of hard work, and determined to lead an 77 easier life. So I sold my mill, and built this house with the money. I always thought I’d like tavern-keeping. It’s an easy life; and, if rightly seen after, one in which a man is sure to make money. (Arthur 13) By removing responsibility for the drunkard’s fall from the head of the saloonkeeper and placing it on his place of employment, temperance writers emphasize the role of the entire culture of drinking—which the temperance movement located in the saloon—in the fall of the drunkard. The only way to remove the drunkard from temptation is to dismantle the culture of drinking by destroying the saloons. A much more important character type in terms of this study is the innocent victim character. Just as with the previous two types of characters, innocent victim characters are more important for what they represent than for who they are. While the benefactor and evil-influence characters serve as representations of the types of environmental and social forces which lure drunkards to their dooms, the innocent victim characters serve as representations of the effects temperance advocates saw drunkenness having on the traditional family. Innocent victim characters have very well-defined traditional familial roles, which the temperance writers know their readers will understand and identify with propriety and stability. Then, when these characters are shown to suffer at the hands of their drunken relatives, the reader is led not only to a recognition of the bestial quality of alcohol abuse, but to an even more important recognition of the validity of the traditional family roles the victim characters represent. When Arthur has Willy Hammond’s sweet, elderly mother timidly approach Slade’s saloon every night in the hope of finding some clue as to her boy’s whereabouts, she is accompanied by all mothers—the reader’s, included—and the pangs of sympathy the reader feels reach out not just to 78 this old woman, but to beleaguered motherhood, itself. Likewise, the Judge Hammond of the final pages ofTen Nights in a Bar-Room—lonely, broken, dying of remorse—is simultaneously Willy’s father and the very notion of fatherhood. By having their drunkards cause pain to these representatives of parenthood, Arthur and the other temperance authors force their readers to acknowledge the existence and validity of the views of parenthood the represent. Another important member of the drunkard’s family is the drunkard’s child. The sweetness and innocence traditionally ascribed to children provide temperance authors with the ultimate victim of drunken violence, and it is a rare drunkard’s child who does not suffer some form of abuse at the hands of her drunken parent. My Mother’s Gold Ring, Franklin Evans, The Glass, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room: in each story, a drunken parent abuses a child in some shocking manner. Perhaps the greatest example of the drunkard’s child, though, is Joe Morgan’s daughter from Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Every night, little Mary drags Joe home from Slade’s saloon in a heart-warming display of childhood devotion and innocence. Accidently struck on the head by an empty glass hurled by Simon Slade, Mary accomplishes a marvelous death-bed reformation of her retrobate father. The drunkard’s child exists to be abused by the drunken father, thereby heightening the horror of the drunkard’s loss of self-control. The result of this abuse is a strengthening of traditional familial roles, since the reader’s reaction to the drunkard’s actions rely upon accepted notions of the roles of children and of their parents. The reaction of the reader at listening to Helen More tell of accidently killing her young son in The Glass is half shock at violence 79 committed against an innocent child and half indignation at wrongs committed against the concept of parenthood; drink is shown as evil because it makes Helen More neglect her son, but is much more evil because it destroys her as a mother. First and foremost among the drunkard’s victims is the drunkard’s wife. The drunkard’s wife character goes back to the very origins of the temperance tale in Benjamin Rush’s Inquiry (Furnas 113), and her type spans the entire length of the temperance tradition. Although temperance writers shifted the emphasis of their treatment of these characters from the attempts by the wives to save their husbands from drunkenness to the effects of their victimization by their drunken husbands (Reynolds 358), the essential attributes of these characters remained constant. Patient and virtuous, drunkard’s wives endure the poverty, disgrace, and physical degeneration their husbands’ drinking brings to their families with stoic good faith. The result of their faithfulness is either the eventual redemption of their husband—as is the case with the narrator ofMy Mother’s Gold Ring and Fanny Morgan from Ten Nights in a Bar-Room— or a terrible death of neglect, abuse, and heartbreak. The latter fate is by far the more common, as represented by Franklin Evans’ young wife, Helen More in The Glass, Simon Slade’s wife in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and Susie from Mary No Man if He Drinks. Temperance authors concentrate a great deal of attention on the mental and physical deterioration which marks the suffering of drunkard’s wives. In Franklin Evans, Whitman describes his young wife’s patient suffering due to his drinking problem, suffering that finally ends in her death of a broken heart: 80

I remember well, with what agony she has often leaned over my prostrate form, and the hot tears that fell upon my bloated face. I remember the gathering degradation that fixed itself round our name. I remember how my wretched Mary’s face grew paler and paler every day—the silent uncomplaining method of her long, long time of dying—for my conduct killed her at last. (99) Whitman, however, is relatively gentle in his handling of the drunkard’s wife character, compared with how Arthur’s treatment of Fanny Morgan in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room:

What an apparition met my eyes! A woman stood in the door, with a face in which maternal anxiety and terror blended fearfully. Her countenance was like ashes—her eyes straining wildly—her lips apart, while the panting breath almost hissed through them. (53-54) Such descriptions of the results of becoming a drunkard’s wife were so widespread and so consistently drawn that sometimes the mere mention of the type is enough to draw a reaction from a character or reader. InThe Glass, Lamas has one of Helen More's former suitors warn her concerning her husband’s potential for drunkenness: “Look to your husband, lady— look to him. To be a drunkard’s wife—tied to a living corpse—oh, this is a fate at which you should shudder—but as sure as there is a God and a retribution, such is your destiny” (9). The suitor does not need to elaborate; both the narrator and the reader are presumably well enough aware of the type of the drunkard’s wife that the mere mention of the character is enough to send shivers down the spine. And, for two of the three young women in Marry No Man if He Drinks, simply the possibility of becoming a drunkard’s wife is enough to spur them onto persuading their fiances to sign the total abstinence pledge. 81 In all treatments of the drunkard’s wife character, the combination of descriptions of great suffering—often quite graphic—and examples of the heroic perseverance of these characters in the face of such hardship is omnipresent, and for good reason. The readers of temperance fiction were primarily the middle-class women members of the temperance movement, and the drunkard’s wife character serves as a personification of themselves and their fears. Through the drunkard’s wife character, women readers could vicariously live out an exciting fantasy of the worst possible outcome of their married lives; by projecting themselves into the place of the character, these readers could reassure themselves that they, too, would have the willpower and perseverance to survive such an ordeal. Even more importantly, the drunkard’s wife character reinforces traditional definitions of womanhood, strengthening the commitment of the women readers to their socially prescribed role in society. The descriptions of the terrible hardships of the drunkard’s wives indicate the importance of the traditional models of womanhood those hardships place in jeopardy. Arthur, for example, qualifies his description of Fanny Morgan’s rumpled state:

She could not now be called beautiful; yet in her marred features—marred by suffering and grief—were many lineaments of beauty; and much that told of a pure, true woman’s heart beating in her bosom. (55) Even in her despair of suffering and grief, Fanny displays the characteristics any middle-class woman was taught to expect and revere in herself. The drunkard’s wife character, then, is more than merely the source of sensational descriptions of suffering; she represents an attempt 82 by temperance writers to bolster the types of feminine roles their movement was, at heart, most interested in protecting. The drunkards in temperance fiction—whether practicing drunkards, reformed drunkards, or innocent youths doomed to become drunkards—share the common character defect of a weakness of willpower that makes them susceptible to drunkenness. Fox explains in detail the personality defect that dooms George Allen to a life of drunkenness, his lack of self-discipline. Even as a young boy, George “was too daring, too much disposed to gratify the desire of the present moment, without looking forward to the consequences; and not sufficiently attentive to his parents’ advice, and sometimes their commands” (Fox 7). Later, after George is grown, Fox’s verdict is very similar:

The most dangerous frailty in George Allen's disposition was a want of firmness. His character, chameleon-like, to the hue of that which it came in contact with; always, however, like all who have not felt the purifying influence of religion, more readily assuming the dark tint of unlawful indulgence than the bright coloring of virtue. (Fox 59) George’s “want of firmness” leaves him openly “susceptible of being easily influenced by the artful and designing” upperclassmen, who lure him into a decadent and destructive course of study (Fox 22). Whitman, too attributes the actions of the drunkard to a lack of willpower, warning potential drunkards of the difference between themselves and temperate individuals:

It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to the weak—the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of those around them. Such must fly the convivial [glass] in the first instance, if they do not wish to sell themselves, for their term of life, to misery. (Whitman 106) 83 And in the case of Franklin Evans, the young man’s disposition toward drinking led to his susceptibility to drunkenness, and his drunkenness aggravates other weaknesses in his personality:

Those habits were of the most insidious, sly, and fatal detriment to me. They relaxed my energy of character, what little I had, and left me like a ship upon the ocean, without her mainmast. ... I can trace the outset of all these frailties, as well as all the calamities that have befallen me in my life, to that fatal night when Colby drew me into the drinking place; where, amid music and gayety, the first step in my downward road was taken. (153) Drinking, then, is both caused by and the cause of a weakness in willpower and moral strength. Arthur also blames the drinking problems of his characters on a lack of willpower. At one point, after Joe Morgan has pledged to his dying child that he would never enter a saloon again, Simon Slade’s wife advises Joe’s friends at the bar to protect Joe from his own weakness:

His purposes are good now; he means to keep his promise to his dying child—means to reform his life. Let the good impulses that led to this act of relief, further prompt you to watch over him, and, if you see him about going astray, to lead him kindly back into the right path. Never—oh! never encourage him to drink; but rather take the glass from his hand, if his own appetite lead him aside, and by all the persuasive influence you possess, induce him to go out from the place of temptation. (Arthur 103) Arthur utilizes the weakness theme throughout his story, especially in the case of the young men, such as Willy Hammond or Frank Slade, who fall under the evil influence of alcohol over the course of the story. But Arthur includes this theory in the discussions of the townspeople who speak to the narrator, as in the following mini-sermon:

If you would save the young, the weak, and the innocent—on you God has laid the solemn duty of their protection—you must 8 4 cover them from the tempter. Evil is strong, wily, fierce, and active in the pursuit of its ends. The young, the weak, and the innocent can no more resist its assaults, than the lamb can resist the wolf. They are helpless, if you abandon them to the powers of evil. (Arthur 238) The lack of willpower explanation for drinking fits snugly into the overall thesis of the temperance movement concerning the causes of alcohol abuse. It also is an indispensable part of the theory of drunkenness which lies behind the whole temperance movement. If drinking causes poverty, as mainstream temperance thinking maintained, then those of the poor who are drinkers are also responsible for their own poverty. And, if drunkards drink because of some innate lack of willpower, then a fundamental difference exists between them and the middle-class temperance advocates, who were neither poor nor drinkers. The implication, here, is that the social distinctions between these two groups are based on some kind of innate differences in personality. This reliance on the identification of the lower classes with drinking as support for existing class structures is part of the reason for the temperance hatred of middle-class drinkers; those individuals tended to skew temperance theories by providing the “bad example” of a well-to-do individual who lacks the willpower to resist drink. There is another type of drunkard to be found in some temperance literature, a type of drunkard who deserves separate mention because of the especially harsh treatment she receives whenever she appears in a story: the drunken woman. For all of the personality deficiency attributed to male drunkards, they receive relatively gentle treatment when compared with their female counterparts. In Victorian American society, women were viewed as something higher and holier than men, and their traditional roles as mothers and wives were sentimentalized and carefully guarded by 85 all of society. As Lender and Martin reveal, in Drinking in America, this artificial, elevated view of women meant that a woman alcoholic was doubly damned by society:

Many Americans were unprepared to see women with drinking problems as ‘real women’: The ideal woman was virtuous and pure; alcoholics were degraded. Women defended the home; alcoholics imperiled it. . . . Alcoholism was considered to be so far from an acceptable standard of behavior for Victorian women that society could explain such conduct only in terms of extreme deviance. . . . The public . . . invariably saw inebriated women as worse than drunken men. The stigma imposed by this double standard led to the now familiar ‘hidden alcoholism’ among women. Alcoholic women kept their condition to themselves for fear of social disgrace, only to deteriorate physically as a result. (118) This “hidden alcoholism” is exhibited by the narrator of The Glass. P a rt of the calculated horror of the story stems from her admission that she is unable to control her own secret drinking problem:

With all this there was an intense dread always over me lest my husband should discover my habit and thus despise me. . . . At length I grew so bad that I could not do without drinking before breakfast, and in order to hide my practice as I thought, or rather to disguise the smell on my breath, I was obliged to chew aromatics. After I had got so far, as though not content with a private display, I imprudently drank so much wine, at a party, to which Frederick and myself were invited, that the company saw my weakness fully developed, and I was carried home in a state of complete intoxication. (Lamas 21) The unstated fact of this passage is that More, had she been a man, would have only committed an indiscretion by becoming publicly intoxicated; because she is a woman, however, she has committed a terrible humiliation upon herself. Obviously, a man reeling drunk in the streets is treated with disdain in Lamas’ story—as is the case with the townspeople’s view of Helen’s husband—but a woman drinker, even one as relatively 8 6 secretive as the narrator, is a social outcast, capable of all manner of other evils. Such evils are manifest in the actions of the drunken women in temperance stories. Because women are traditionally viewed as guardians of the household, the wretchedness of women drunkards naturally focuses on their inability to function as good housekeepers and loving mothers. Whitman does his part to portray the evil of women drunkards by reserving his most graphic descriptions for a scene in which Evans visits the home of a dying woman drinker:

Never before had I been in so miserable a place. The furniture of the apartment, what there was of it, would have been scouted from a negro hovel. The bed on which the woman herself lay in one comer, was a filthy thing of feathers and soiled rags. . . . She was very wretched—no doubt she had been as guilty as she was wretched; and thoughts of remorse might be the cause of that restlessness which I saw depicted in her countenance. (Whitman 91-92) The woman’s drinking problem is undoubtedly the cause of the extreme poverty of the family, which has reduced one child to a sickly wreck and the other to begging for beer money for his mother. However, for all the hardship her drinking causes her family, the effects of this woman’s drinking are relatively benign, when compared with another woman Whitman tells of, who practically murdered two infants due to her drunken neglect. Lamas provides the reader of The Glass with an example of a dangerous drunken woman in the character of Helen More, who—in a fit of drunken rage—locks her young son in a third-floor clothes room and then forgets him for three days; when she finally emerges from her delirium tremens and races to the clothes room to let him out, she finds him dead in a pool of blood, having gnawed his arm to keep from starving to death. The 87 incredibility of this scene—it is certainly difficult to imagine a young boy gnawing at his arm to appease a hunger of a few days—is definitely overshadowed by the fact that a mother could possibly neglect her child so shamefully. Certainly, Lamas implies, a drunken woman is a beast of unbelievable degradation. The sensational nature of such scenes seems intended to heighten the reader’s horror at the bestiality of the drunken woman. Just as much as drunkard’s wife characters, drunken women characters are representations of 19th-century views on the position of women in society. The drunken woman is a terrible creature, because she threatens the established conception of a woman as a virtuous wife-mother, entirely devoted to the well-being of her husband and children. The drunkard’s wife serves as an example of the threat posed to women by a drunken husband. Since women at this time were considered a part of their husband’s household and had no claim to his property or possessions, a husband who ruined himself through drinking also ruined his wife. It was this fear of the economic and social consequences for women of drunken men that spurred on the temperance movement and eventually gave rise to the WCTU. Temperance tales reflect this fear through their emphasis on the morality and virtue of temperate females and the immorality and degradation of intemperate women. The drunken women characters also support traditional views of womanhood by graphically illustrating the results of any step outside the bounds of acceptable womanly behavior. This, then, is the temperance tale. Bom out of the early temperance lecturer’s use of the temperance anecdote and officially sanctioned and appreciated as a propaganda vehicle for the temperance movement, the temperance tale grew into a recognizable art form, with its own set of significant characteristics. Temperance fiction wedded a single major thesis—alcohol is the cause of many problems for drinkers who do not have the willpower to resist temptations—with a single major plot line—the Over-the-Hill-to-the-Poorhouse frame—in a literary form that combines self-righteous moralizing with graphic description of the results of intemperance. With this form, temperance authors sought to combat the forces of pluralism and chaos they and their temperance associates saw as threatening middle-class values and—more importantly—middle-class social and economic security. CHAPTER II

CRANE

Stephen Crane’s writing is known for its ironic attitude toward the accepted middle-class views of his day concerning life in the city. Many critics—such as David M. Fine and Malcom Bradbury—have shown how Crane uses parody to undercut middle-class morality and social understanding. One particularly tempting target for Crane is the hypocrisy of middle-class reformers and clergy working in the inner-city. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane consistently exposes the holier- than-thou attitude of the middle class toward the poor by juxtaposing his lower-class main characters against representatives of the middle class, as when Maggie seeks help after being rejected by Pete:

Suddenly she came upon a stout gentleman in a silk hat and a chaste black coat, whose decorous row of buttons reached from his chin to his knees. The girl had heard of the Grace of God and she decided to approach this man. His beaming, chubby face was a picture of benevolence and kind-heartedness. His eyes shone good-will. But as the girl timidly accosted him, he made a convulsive movement and saved his respectability by a vigorous side-step. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he to know that there was a soul before him that needed saving?1

1 Johnston Smith [Stephen Crane],Maggie: A Girl of the Streets ([New York, 1893]) 141-42. All parenthetical references toMaggie are to this text. Significant differences between this text and the Virginia edition ofMaggie, based on the 1896 version of the novel, will be noted where appropriate.

89 90 The details of the description—“stout gentleman,” “silk hat,” “chaste black coat”—define the stranger as a relatively well-to-do man of the cloth, just the type of individual one would expect to be concerned about the welfare of an unfortunate such as Maggie. This description places the stranger in a different social scale from Maggie and sets up Crane’s ironic point about the hypocrisy of this “son of God.” Crane further stacks the deck against the gentleman by describing his face as a “picture of benevolence and kind- heartedness,” which serves as an ironic contrast to his selfish actions. This type of ironic undercutting of middle-class morality is prevalent throughout Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which has led critics to assign Crane the role of a social critic working to dismantle the misconceptions of the middle class (Fine 96, 105; Bradbury 120). Crane takes an especially critical approach toward middle-class notions concerning alcohol, particularly as represented by the work of temperance reformers and their supporters. It is tempting to trace Crane’s attitude toward temperance reform back to his youth, growing up with a Methodist clergyman father and a mother who—after the father’s death— became a spokesperson for the New Jersey chapter of the WCTU (Stallman 2-5; Weinstein 46; Monteiro 92; Hussm an 95-96; Gullason “Prophetic” 136, “Sources” 497, 498; Crane, Bowery Tales 108). And, indeed, as R. W. Stallman reports, Crane voiced his displeasure with the temperance cause as early as his brief enrollment at Syracuse University: “When the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Miss Frances Willard, came to the campus, he refused to meet her because he ‘considered Miss Willard a fool’” (30). Crane’s opinion of Willard is interesting, considering the fact that under her direction the WCTU headed 91 toward a more sociologically aware view of temperance reform and away from the type of narrow-minded view of reform he parodies inMaggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother. In the latter story, Crane attacks religious temperance advocates by showing the inadequacy of the mother’s belief system in the face of life in the city. George’s mother is an old-school temperance advocate, who feels her religious convictions and eternal vigilance offer more than enough protection for her family against the onslaught of the forces of strong drink. But, as Crane makes quite clear over the course of the story, the mother’s ideas about temperance do little to protect her son and herself from the very alcohol she is so concerned about. The little woman who so courageously battles the dirt in her home and equally courageously battles the evils outside her home is shown by Crane as dwarfed by the brewery down the street, “a stupendous affair, a machine of mighty strength” (Crane, Bowery Tales 120). So focused is the mother upon her temperance-inspired notions of the world that she cannot even recognize when her son comes home late at night drunk and wakes up with a hangover. Although George stumbled home most likely stinking of beer, the mother does not even consider alcohol as an explanation for his actions, instead inventing in her mind wild speculations:

She surmised in a vague way that he was a sufferer from a great internal disease. It was something no doubt that devoured the kidneys or quietly fed upon the lungs. Later, she imagined a woman, wicked and fair, who had fascinated him and was turning his life into a bitter thing. Her mind created many wondrous influences that were swooping like green dragons at him. They were changing him to a morose man, who suffered silently. (Crane, Bowery Tales 133) 92 The mother’s sole solution for her son’s behavior is to beg him to come to the church meeting with her. When George finally accompanies his mother to church, Crane reveals the mother’s religion to be void of anything but self-satisfaction and threats of damnation: “At last the young clergyman spoke at some length. Kelcey was amazed, because, from the young man’s appearance, he would not have suspected him of being so glib; but the speech had no effect on Kelcey, excepting to prove to him again that he was damned” (Crane, Bowery Tales 158). Others may be “saved” at such church meetings, but Crane makes it very clear that those like Kelcey, rooted in real-world problems, derive little benefit from such activities. Throughout George's Mother, Crane continually attacks the religious reform impulse, especially as it pertains to temperance reform; for Crane, apparently, any movement that views reform as a matter of changing the behavior of someone else who does not live up to the reformers’ own standards of moral and ethical behavior is ripe for abuse. Crane directly mocks the temperance reform movement in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets when Jimmy and a friend happen upon a mission soup kitchen of the type which mixes charity with moral persuasion. Many such missions were established by temperance organizations in the hope of competing with the free lunches handed out every day in saloons. Jimmy’s experience with the mission kitchen shows Crane juxtaposing the honorable intentions of the reformers against the reality of the reformed:

He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at a mission church where a man composed his sermons of “you’s.” Once a philosopher asked this man why he did not say “we” instead of “you.” The man replied, “What?” While they got warm at the stove, he told his hearers just where he calculated they stood with the Lord. Many of the 98 sinners were impatient over the pictured depths of their degradation. They were waiting for soup-tickets. A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see the portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and his hearers. “You are damned,” said the preacher. And the reader of sounds might have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people: “Where’s our soup?” (Crane,Maggie 31-32). The speaker, like the clergyman in George’s Mother, is shown as totally glib and out of touch with the lives of those whom he intends to save. This is exactly the type of middle-class notion of reform that Crane continually attacks in his fiction. Crane’s rough handling of these reform approaches has led critics such as Eric Solomon to classify Crane as a parodist (Solomon 4). For Solomon, Crane’s writing is a process of restructuring old, middle-class forms into original forms: “In his major fiction . . . Stephen Crane worked in familiar genres and transmuted them into the products of his special sensibility, forming in his best works at once incisive criticisms of traditional styles and entirely fresh fictional creations” (10). Solomon’s thesis is echoed by several critics, who claim that Creme’s ironic style overshadows the older popular literary forms he uses as the basis for his city stories (Bradbury 118; Crane, Bowery Tales lii; Colvert 72-73; Holton 56). I agree wholeheartedly with these critics that Crane’s city fiction shows the author to be an ironic social critic, parodying middle-class ideas and narrative forms in his city fiction. But the relationship between Crane’s stories and the historical moment in which they were written is much more complicated than these critics would like to believe. For one thing, the critics in Solomon’s camp have a difficult time proving that Crane is parodying his predecessors and not just borrowing from them. For example, early in his discussion ofGeorge's Mother, 94 Solomon describes that story as “an anti-success story,” supposedly a new form created by Crane’s parody of the traditional rags-to-riches tale (16). Later on, however, Solomon must admit thatGeorge's Mother is not just a parody of a rags-to-riches story; it is simultaneously a parody of a rags-to- riches story and a parody of a temperance story. While I can see how the word parody fits Crane’s use of the success-story plot frame, the word just does not seem to apply to what is actually an extremely faithful copy of a basic temperance plot frame: the Corruption of Innocent Youth modification of the basic Over-the-Hill-to-the-Poorhouse frame, utilized in mid-nineteenth-century temperance stories such as George A llen, Franklin Evans, The Glass, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Aside from running the risk of oversimplifying a complex relation between Crane and his literary predecessors, critics who insist on viewing Crane as a pure parodist also risk oversimplifying Crane’s attitude toward the subjects of his novels. A parodist traditionally takes a detached attitude toward her subject, deftly dismantling the pretensions of her subject without resorting to any obvious, overt denunciations or editorializations. In attempting to prove Crane a parodist, critics have attempted to prove that he fits the traditional mold, as Solomon does when he writes that Crane, unlike the authors of the city novels he is parodying, does not editorialize on the social problems dealt with in his stories (Solomon 27). Holton, following closely upon the path forged by Solomon, makes a similar statement, claiming, “Indeed, it would seem that it is Crane’s use of parody and burlesque that enables him to place himself at a great distance from his subjects, to refuse to moralize about them, and at the same time to render their blindnesses and their delusions with a sharp irony” (56). While Crane 96 may operate in a manner more subtle than that of the city novelists, the impulse to editorialize is nonetheless present, as in Maggie’s meeting with the clergyman on the street: “He did not risk [his reputation] to save a soul. For how was he to know that there was a soul before him that needed saving?” (Crane, Maggie 142). It is difficult to imagine any motive behind such a statement beyond the obvious criticism of the clergyman’s religion of respectability. The critics who view Crane as a parodist also tend to over-simplify the relationship between Crane’s novels and the social issues dealt with by the slum-fiction writers he is parodying. In the view of such critics, Crane’s irony is primarily aimed at the conventional morality expressed in the popular fiction forms he parodies, as Colvert explains in his book, Stephen Crane: “The plot he contrived from these unexceptional materials, transmuted by the distancing effect of his irony and the pictorial brilliance of his descriptions, owed much of its satirical power to his skeptical feelings toward Methodist piety and the sentimental heroics of popular literature of the day” (72-73). W ith all of th eir emphasis on Crane’s attitude toward the morality expressed in reform literature, the parody critics deny that Crane also dealt with any of the host of other social problems the reform writers touch on. For example, Solomon writes that “the very absence of any sense of class warfare or economic motivation on Crane’s part may be emphasized by a certain vagueness of setting” (27-28), a sentiment Holton echoes in his analysis ofGeorge’s Mother: “Nowhere does he consider— even to the extent he does in Maggie —slum conditions, economic duress, or the exploitation of the poor” (57). Both of these comments bring to mind the very real economic and class concerns inherent in Maggie’s experience at 96 the collar and cuff factory, her parents’ poverty, and the attitudes of the wealthy Christians she and her like bump into over the course of the story. Clearly, there are limitations to claiming that Crane “overcomes” the traditions he uses in his stories and creates something different and better. Instead of dismantling a middle-class art form and replacing it with something new, Crane has appropriated a middle-class art form, following its requirements very precisely; the fact that Crane is also following something of the form of the Horatio Algeresque success story merely strengthens my position that Crane’s relationship with his historical moment is a complex one. Solomon and the other critics in the parody camp are correct; Crane does seem to subvert middle-class ideas and art forms in his city fiction. But at the same time, Crane cannot subdue or eliminate the stereotypes and misconceptions of his middle-class readership. In fact, Crane depends upon these stereotypes and misconceptions. This is especially true regarding Crane’s use of middle- class perceptions of the role of alcohol in the economic and social life of turn-of-the-century Americans. Throughout his city fiction, Crane utilizes conventional temperance forms and characters which reveal a very conservative view of the issues which lie beneath the temperance cause: namely the middle-class concern over poverty, the growing immigrant population, and the threat of imminent class warfare. Just as the temperance movement reflected deeper middle-class fears and concerns, so Crane’s approach to alcohol within his stories reflects similar fears and concerns. Although Crane from one perspective seems to be a radical challenger of conventional ideas, he at the same time upholds and supports the same ideas. 97 One of the basic tenets of the temperance movement was the idea the alcohol abuse was the cause of poverty for the abuser. From the time of Benjamin Rush, the decline of the drunkard from prosperity to destitution was a given of the temperance movement. The promise to eliminate poverty was one of the chief enticements for many to join the ranks of the temperance advocates. While in the late 1880s Frances Willard modified the WCTU’s stance on the matter, recognizing that alcohol abuse is only one of many results of poverty rather than the cause of poverty, Willard’s views were in the minority even in her own organization. Much more mainstream was the approach of the Anti-Saloon League, which singled out legal prohibition as its one goal, citing a host of evils caused by the saloon and an equal number of blessings to result from the elimination of the saloon. This view of the relationship between poverty and alcohol was codified by temperance writers throughout the 19th century, and it played a particularly prominent role in the temperance stories written during the middle of the century. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the Over-the- Hill plot frame was the basic plot for temperance stories, and its inherent view of the role of alcohol in creating poverty was one of the main points of the temperance writers. While Crane’s explicit motives and techniques are not to be confused with those of a temperance writer, a hard look at Crane’s city fiction reveals that Crane’s writing reflects both the forms of temperance stories and the attitudes toward the relationship between poverty and alcohol inherent in those forms. In “Stephen Crane and the Antinomies of Christian Charity,” George Monteiro says of Crane’s famous letter to Catherine Harris—in which he claims that “the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice” and 96 expresses a desire to "load all the babes off to some pink world where cows can lick their noses and they will never see their families any more” (Crane, Portable 2)—that “it can be argued (and it should be) that while in this letter Crane’s attitude toward Bowery dereliction and his avowal of sympathy for children may seem to be at odds, Crane’s prevailing attitude toward the poor and the socially deviant was far closer to the feeling he here expresses toward city children” (Monteiro 94). I would argue exactly the opposite; there is no need to eliminate the contradiction in Crane’s statement, because Crane’s attitude toward the poor, like the attitude toward the poor expressed in temperance literature, is an ambivalent one. That is, Crane simultaneously wishes for the improvement of the lot of the lower classes and fears their strength and numbers. As I have already suggested, Crane utilizes the Corruption of Innocent Youth temperance plot inGeorge’s Mother. In the first chapter, Crane describes George in terms of a common, normal working man:

A brown young man went along the avenue. He held a tin lunch-pail under his arm in a manner that was evidently uncomfortable. He was puffing at a corn-cob pipe. His shoulders had a self-reliant poise, and the hang of his arms and the raised veins of his hands showed him to be a man who worked with his muscles. (Crane, Bowery Tales 115) Here is a young man every bit as innocent and hard-working as the farmer husband of My Mother’s Gold Ring; Crane, like Sargent, carefully sets up his character at the beginning of his story to heighten the contrast with the character after drink has taken its course. For the remainder of the story, Crane shows how George succumbs to the temptations of his friends, who—like those of Whitman’s Franklin Evans—urge him to join them in their carousing. The results, of course, are predictable. George gradually 99 loses his ambition, his honesty, his job, and his loving mother, all because of that first drink. The implied message behind Crane’s plot is exactly that of the temperance stories that are its forerunners: Alcohol alters the moral character of the young man, causing him to ruin himself through loose and unproductive living; if his parents (in this case, George’s mother) had been in a position to intervene in the son’s actions, he would still be a productive member of society (and the mother would still be alive). In addition to the overall plot of the story, Crane further strengthens the connection between alcohol and poverty through his portrayal of George’s drinking buddies, particularly Charlie Jones, George’s friend from Handyville. The first view we have of Charlie is as “a man in old clothes” (Crane, Bowery Tales 115), and when the two old friends order drinks in the local saloon, Crane connects Jones’ poverty with alcoholism by calling upon the traditional temperance distinction between the relative dangers of beer and whiskey as social beverages; George, the neophyte drinker, takes beer, while Charlie, an evidently more experienced drinker, takes whiskey, the stronger drink. In a more thorough description of Charlie, Crane calls upon some fairly standard descriptive details of the drunk in mid-decline. George calls up a comparison with the former, presumably less decadent, Charlie by telling him, “Yer changed, though!” (Crane, Bowery Tales 116). The friend replies “with some complacency,” that he has changed:

He regarded himself in the mirror that multiplied the bottles on the shelf back of the bar. He should have seen a grinning face and a rather pink nose. His derby was perched carelessly on the back part of his head. Two wisps of hair straggled down over his hollow temples. There was something very worldly and wise about him. Life did not seem to confuse him. Evidently he understood its complications. His hand thrust 100 into his trousers’ pocket where he jingled keys, and his hat perched back on his head expressed a young man of vast knowledge. His extensive acquaintance with bartenders aided him materially in this habitual expression of wisdom. (Crane, Bowery Tales 116) Jones is a combination of socialite man-about-town and failure, a combination Crane ties tightly to the man’s drinking:

Jones emptied the whiskey into his large mouth and then put the glass upon the bar. “Been in th’ city long?” he asked. “Um—well, three years is a good deal fer a slick man. Doin’ well? Oh, well, nobody’s doin’ well these days.” he looked down mournfully at his shabby clothes. (Crane, Bowery Tales 117) The details of Crane’s treatment of Jones call to mind similar passages in temperance stories, for example Arthur’s descriptions of the decline of Simon Slade from hale and hearty farmer to drunken lout in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Crane here seems to be calling upon his reader’s familiarity with the type of character Jones represents—the drinker on his way to ruin—and with the same conventional physical details of the drunkard character type: the “rather pink nose,” the straggling hair and “hollow temples,” and the “shabby clothes.” Crane’s use of these conventions is no accident, and any reader familiar with the temperance tradition Crane calls upon would also be familiar with the assumptions about the relationship between poverty and drinking inherent in that tradition. Crane also utilizes the Over-the-Hill tradition extensively in his treatment of Pete and of Maggie’s family in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Maggie’s mother will be examined in detail a little later in the chapter, but the examples of Maggie’s father, Jimmie, and Pete provide more than enough proof that Crane is using the Over-the-Hill tradition in his story. First of all, we see Maggie’s father, a common worker who has progressed relatively far on the slide to ruin. He drinks to excess, mistreats his 101 children, fights with his wife—verbally and physically—and steals from his own child, taking the can of beer Jimmie buys for “D’ ol’ woman” and swallowing it all in “a tremendous gulping movement.” Crane’s early descriptions of Jimmie show him to be no innocent, and the author’s discussion of Jimmie’s movement into adulthood in Chapter IV shows that the development of his character came about as the result of a combination of environment and conscious decisions about the nature of the world, with no explicit references to alcohol. But Jimmie winds up in a condition very similar to that of his father, bumping through life in alternating cycles of work and drink. In the later chapters of the story, Crane shows Jimmie as a drunken brawler and an irresponsible ladies’ man, the father of several illegitimate children. With neither Jimmie nor his father does Crane explicitly call upon the Over-the-Hill tradition; it is only through the details of their characterization that we see glimpses of the tradition, but these glimpses are sufficient to imply the full outline of the conventional plot. In the case of Pete, Crane offers much more than glimpses of the Over-the-Hill drunkard type. Through the course of Pete’s wooing and subsequent abandonment of Maggie, Crane draws a picture of the final stages of the drunkard’s descent into depravity. When Maggie first sees Pete, he is dressed like the flashy “tough” he is:

His hair was curled down over his forehead in an oiled bang. His pugged nose seemed to revolt from contact with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like hairs. His blue double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, was buttoned close to a red puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes looked like weapons. (Crane, Maggie 43-44) Pete’s job as *< bartender and his concern for respectable appearances mark Pete—at least in Maggie’s estimation—as a man occupying a social level 102 far above the men of her immediate acquaintance, and the places Pete takes Maggie on their first dates are notable for their relatively high quality. As Maggie’s moral situation deteriorates, so does the quality of the establishments she and Pete frequent. But the decline in quality of the bars Pete and Maggie patronize also reflects upon a similar decline in Pete’s character. In the “hilarious hall” with its “twenty-eight tables and twenty- eight women” where Pete leaves Maggie with the “mere boy,” Crane shows Pete grovelling at the feet of Nell, a “woman of brilliance and audacity,” who seems on only a slightly higher level than the prostitutes who sit one per table in the bar. And in the last scene with Pete, he is reduced to a slobbering drunk, hardly able to formulate a sentence, “I’m damn goo’ fler, an’ w’en anyone trea’s me ri’, I alius trea’s—le’s have nozzer drink” (Crane, Maggie 155). At the end of the scene, Pete falls to sleep “with his swollen face fallen forward on his chest,” falls groaning to the floor, and lies snoring with “wine from an overturned glass dripp[ing] softly down upon the blotches on the man’s neck” (Crane, Maggie 158), his pockets emptied by Nell. In other words, by the end of the story Pete is the perfect vision of the depraved drunkard, every bit as bad off as Fox’s George Allen at his lowest point. In both of these stories, then, Crane uses the “Over-the-Hill” plot frame and many of the character details that formed the core elements of temperance stories. While one could view these temperance elements as part of Crane’s overall attempt to parody and undermine the authority of conventions and stereotypes, the impact of the temperance elements as a body in both stories is just the opposite. Rather than subverting the middle- class thinking that lies behind the temperance stories, Crane actually 103 relies upon that thinking for the success of his own stories. In all of the above examples, Crane relies upon the traditional temperance relationship between poverty and alcohol. Each character who drinks becomes impoverished; some of the circumstances may be complicated—mainly by the fact that alcohol cannot be seen as theonly cause of the poverty of the characters in the stories—but the basic form of the situations is identical to that found in temperance stories. The root philosophy of those temperance stories is that drunkards are responsible for their own poverty, which marks a fundamental separation in the minds of mainstream, middle-class temperance advocates between their relatively comfortable existence and the abject poverty of the drunkard. By relying upon temperance forms in his stories, Crane also relies upon this same view of poverty being the fault of the poor.Maggie: A Girl of the Streets may have been written “to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless” and to make “room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people” (Crane, Portable 1), but Crane also very clearly distinguishes between the “all sorts of souls” in his stories and the “many excellent people” who read those stories. As June Howard puts it, inForm and History in American Literary Naturalism, “In Maggie Crane draws a line between the narrator and the reader and the characters” (111), and this separation between Crane and his readers on the one hand and the characters of his stories on the other hand is a key point in understanding Crane’s attitude toward both his subjects and his audience. 104 One of the ways this separation manifests itself in Crane’s stories is through his ironic attitude toward the aspirations and pretensions of his Bowery characters. Crane’s underlying message to his readers in each of these passages seems to be that the poor lack appropriate goals and aspirations for their station. The poor—and Maggie especially—harbor illusions about their station and their potential (Ford 295, 296; ZifF 109). The irony for Crane and his readers lies in the inappropriate nature of the pretensions of the poor; at all times Crane shows his poor characters as trying to mimic middle- and upper-class lifestyles and aspirations with little success. A good example of this ironic handling of the poor occurs when Crane describes Pete’s attempts to amuse Maggie. Maggie, of course, is overwhelmed by everything, being equally impressed by the dime museum, the Central Park Menagerie, and the Museum of Arts. Pete, for his part, shows himself to be an ignorant thug no matter where he is; while Crane’s readers would supposedly recognize the allusion to the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities (Crane,Portable 33 note #36), Pete’s response to this artistic treasure is, “Look at all dese little jugs! Hundred jugs in a row! Ten rows in a case an’ ‘bout a t’ousand cases! What d’ blazes use is dem?” (Crane, Maggie 69-70). Crane’s message to his readers, here, seems to be that the upper classes can try to educate the masses to the finer things in life by offering a free zoo and a free museum, but the masses really lack the ability to properly appreciate those finer things. The melodramas to which Pete takes Maggie are another example of Crane separating his genteel, sophisticated readership from his ignorant, naive characters. Donald Pizer has written at length about the failure of the moral codes that direct the actions of the Bowery population to 105 adequately reflect the reality of Bowery life (Pizer 111, 116; Holton 39, 54). These moral codes, Pizer says, are inappropriate because they neglect “to distinguish between moral appearance and reality” (116). The tendency of the Bowery public to confuse appearances and reality has led critics to emphasize the importance of the melodramas Pete and Maggie attend. The audience at these melodramas is shown to be hypocritical and self-serving: “Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue” (Crane, Maggie 71). Maggie, lacking any sophistication, takes the entire show at face value, feeling she had just witnessed a work of “transcendental realism”:

Maggie always departed with raised spirits from these melodramas. She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually overcame the wealthy and wicked. The theatre made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory. (Crane, Maggie 72-73) What has caught the attention of critics is the parallels between the audience’s expressed approval of conventional morality and the Bowery inhabitants’ inappropriately conventional morality, particularly in regard to “fallen” women such as Maggie, as Donald Vanouse explains:

In Maggie . . . the Bowery melodrama is not merely parodied; it is shown as a destructive force in the slum-battlefield which is Maggie’s environment. The plots and themes of melodrama are merely fatuous evasions of the sordid truths of the shirt factory and the tenement. But the melodrama’s moral clarity and its version of audience participation are more dangerous distortions. ... By the end of the novel other characters have rejected Maggie with equally preposterous gestures of moral arrogance, and popular melodrama is visible as a source or as 106 a re*enforcement of the attitudes which destroy her. CPopular Culture 427) The problem with the melodramas, though, is not that the morality expressed in them is incorrect or evil, but that it is inappropriate for the Bowery audience. The type of morality expressed in the melodramas is not meant for the rough world of the Bowery, and one gets the sense throughout this scene that Crane, for all of his talk about getting poor street girls into heaven, sees an unbridgeable gap between people like Maggie and people like himself and his readers. It is easy to imagine that Crane’s opinion as to Maggie’s ability to attain culture and refinement would be something like “Probably not.” This ironic separation between Crane and his middle-class audience on the one hand and Crane’s subjects on the other hand implicitly aligns the author with his more sophisticated, middle-class reader. As I have already noted, the decline in quality of the drinking halls Pete patronizes parallels the decline in Maggie’s moral situation and the decline in Pete’s physical and mental condition. But Crane’s descriptions of these establishments—particularly his descriptions of the entertainment offered in each establishment—reveal as much about Crane’s attitude toward his subjects as they do about the situations of Maggie and Pete. Ford describes the change in the establishments as, “a clear progression from total illusion to a clarity of vision which parallels Maggie’s own growing perception of just what her situation really is” (297); once Maggie makes it to the last saloon, she—along with her reader—has seen “beyond the illusion of opulence” (Ford 298). Generally, as the quality of an establishment declines, the quality of the entertainment offered declines also, and the interest of the clientele shifts away from the entertainment 107 and toward the alcohol. In the last hall to which Pete takes Maggie, the audience gulps down glasses of beer while the orchestra and the audience both ignore the woman singing and smiling upon the stage. And in the saloon in which Nell rolls the besotten Pete, no mention is made at all of any entertainment other than drinking. However much difference Crane draws between the orchestra of the “hilarious hall,” the “ballad singer, in a dress2 of flaming scarlet” of Maggie and Pete’s second hall (Crane, Maggie 104), and the “orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men on an elevated stage near the centre of a great green-hued hall” (Crane, Maggie 59), all th re e forms of entertainment are subjected to Crane’s ironic attitude toward their overall quality. The basis of Crane’s irony in each case is the attempt by the lower classes to mimic the style and culture of the upper classes. In Crane’s portrayal of the second hall, for example, the entire show, down to its conductor in “frowsy hair and in a dress suit”3 (Crane, Maggie 104) is described as a somewhat shopworn version of what was offered in the first music hall to which Pete takes Maggie. But Crane compares this second hall as much to the types of musical entertainment of his reader’s experience as he compares it to the first music hall in the story. Crane makes the direction of his comparison obvious by showing his reader “the person of a girl with a straw-colored wig who upon the stage was flinging her heels about in a somewhat awkward imitation of a well-known danseuse” (Crane, Bowery Tales 52). It is the imitation of the “well-known danseuse”—a type, at least, if not an individual, with which the reader

2 The 1896 edition reads “gown.” 3 The 1896 edition reads “soiled evening dress.” 108 would presumably be familiar—that carries the weight of Crane’s irony. And in his description of the first music hall—however much he intends this “acceptable” palace of entertainment to serve as a comparison to the later halls—Crane makes the separation between the lower and middle classes the focus of his attention. Nearly every detail of his description in this section is geared toward illustrating the attempt by the Bowery to mimic the style and fashion of mainstream Manhattan. Crane even comes right out and reveals his intentions in this section when he describes one of the dancers as falling “into some of those grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town, giving to the Bowery public the diversions of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates” (Crane, Maggie 60). The attempt of the Bowery inhabitants to appropriate up-town culture is humorous to Crane and his reader because the attempt is so futile. The poor will never be able to be like the rich, Crane seems to be saying, because the poor are fundamentally different from the rich, not even intelligent enough to recognize the inferiority of their own pale imitation of culture. To the poor, the musical drinking hall of the first scene is a music hall first, and a drinking hall second; I would suggest that to Crane and his middle- class reader, familiar with “real” culture, the relationship between drinking and music in this first hall is reversed, with the music serving as merely a mask to prettify what amounts to just a saloon. This explains why, as the characters become less interested in pretending to be doing something other than drinking, drinking becomes the focus of the establishments they patronize, with music fading into the background. 109 The “culture” and entertainment of the musical drinking hall is merely gilt overlaid upon the traditional, poverty-producing saloon, which is where Pete ends up in his final scene. This sense that saloons attempt to hide their real mission under a veneer of respectability and flash harkens back to early temperance stories, as in the case of Whitman’s Franklin Evans, in which the hero is seduced into a life of dissolution by visits to musical drinking halls, where the beauty of his surroundings prevents him from recognizing the threat that alcohol poses to his youthful ambitions. From the perspective of the temperance tradition, Crane’s detailed description of Pete’s saloon reveals more than an attempt to capture a scene:

The interior of the place was papered in olive and bronze tints of imitation leather. A shining bar of counterfeit massiveness extended down the side of the room. Behind it a great mahogany-imitation sideboard reached the ceiling. Upon its shelves rested pyramids of shimmering glasses that were never disturbed. Mirrors set in the face of the sideboard multiplied them. Lemons, oranges and paper napkins, arranged with mathematical precision, sat among the glasses. Many-hued decanters of liquor perched at regular intervals on the lower shelves. A nickel-plated cash register occupied a place in the exact centre of the general effect. The elementary senses of it all seemed to be opulence and geometrical accuracy. (Crane, Maggie 91-92) Throughout this description, Crane’s phrasing seems to whisper to his reader that, for all the appearance of opulence and geometrical accuracy— which leaves the implication that along with a beer or whiskey a saloon patron purchases with the price of a drink a sense of wealth and order not normally available in his real life—the saloon is still just a saloon. The power of the next paragraph in this section then becomes evident:

Across from the bar a smaller counter held a collection of plates upon which swarmed frayed fragments of crackers, 110 slices of boiled ham, dishevelled bits of cheese, and pickles swimming in vinegar. An odor of grasping, begrimmed4 hands and munching mouths pervaded all. (Crane, Maggie 92) Here is the illusion of the saloon exposed in all its ugliness; the free lunch counter, with its promise of something for nothing, was perhaps the most tangible symbol for the temperance workers of what they faced in their struggle to eradicate the saloon. Crane’s description of Pete’s saloon is eerily reminiscent of Arthur’s description of Simon Slade’s bar during the narrator’s second visit to Shadyville. Although it seems possible that Crane would have known Arthur’s work and might have consciously or subconsciously borrowed the earlier writer’s description, it seems more likely that Crane’s description resembles Arthur’s because the two share a common view of the role the saloon plays in the willingness of the poor to hide from their situation, in what Crane calls, in his famous letter to Catherine Harris, “a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking” (Crane, Portable 2). The connection between poverty and alcohol extends beyond the saloon and the musical drinking hall to the everyday lives of Crane’s characters. This connection is especially interesting in the way Crane handles its relationship to the various immigrant groups who appear in his two stories. Crane continually draws upon middle-class commonplaces concerning the drinking and living habits of immigrants, particularly in the case of the Germans and the Irish. It is no accident that Crane peoples his first, respectable musical drinking hall with “Quiet Germans” who listen to the music “with the expressions of happy cows” (Crane,Maggie 57). The Germans as an ethnic group were considered at that time to be

4 The 1896 edition reads “begrimed.” I l l hard-working, honest, thrifty people, whose interest in “beer gardens” reflected their family-oriented social structure. Jacob Riis’s description of a German immigrant, in How the Other Half Lives, is typical of this type of ethnic stereotyping:

The best part of his life is lived at home, and he makes himself a home independent of the surrounding, giving the lie to the saying, unhappily become a maxim of social truth, that pauperism and drunkenness naturally grow in the tenements. He makes the most of his tenement, and it should be added that whenever and as soon as he can save up money enough, he gets out and never crosses the threshold of one again. (25) Yet Crane always maintains the distance between his immigrant characters on the one hand and himself and his reader on the other, no matter the nationality of the immigrants. A good example of this is Crane’s description of Bleecker’s residence in George's Mother. Bleecker’s is a great example of the immigrant-laden boarding house, not what a middle-class reader would view as desirable apartments:

Bleecker lived in an old three-storied house on a side-street. A Jewish tailor lived and worked in the front parlor, and old Bleecker lived in the back parlor. A German, whose family took care of the house, occupied the basement. Another German, with a wife and eight children, rented the dining­ room. The two upper floors were inhabited by tailors, dressmakers, a peddler, and mysterious people who were seldom seen. The door of the little hall-bedroom, at the foot of the second flight, was always open, and in there could be seen two bended men who worked at mending opera-glasses. The German woman in the dining-room was not friends with the little dress-maker in the rear room of the third floor, and frequently they yelled the vilest names up and down between the balusters. Each part of the woodwork was scratched and rubbed by the contact of innumerable persons. In one wall there was a long slit with chipped edges, celebrating the time when a man had thrown a hatchet at his wife. In the lower hall there was an eternal woman, with a rag and a pail of suds, who knelt over the worn oil-cloth. Old Bleecker felt that he had quite respectable and high-class apartments. He was glad to invite his friends. (Crane, Bowery Tales 141-142) 112 Bleecker’s place is not a bad place, but the fact that tenants work at home and the hatchet mark in the wall prove that this house is not as calm and sophisticated as Bleecker pretends. The hatchet mark and the battle between the German woman and the little dress-maker also show that these immigrants, though predominantly hard-working Germans, are still a far-cry from middle-class. The fact that no one calls the police on Bleecker’s rowdy party also helps to separate the immigrants of this boarding house from Crane and his reader. And in his description of Bleecker’s party, Crane “satirizes the stereotyped tastes, crippled thought, and vulgar emotions of the guests” (Colvert 74), further distancing himself and his reader from his German immigrant subjects. Crane’s depiction of his German characters as hard-working, if still rough around the edges, illustrates his adherence to middle-class notions of the relationship between ethnicity and poverty. So too, does Crane’s depiction of Irish characters. David M. Fine explains that “Maggie Johnson belongs to an Irish-American family and lives in an Irish enclave in Manhattan,” but Fine continues on to claim that “the fact of her Trishness’ is in no way crucial to the story” (105). This is far from the case; Maggie’s “Irishness” is, indeed, crucial to Crane’s attitude toward her and her family, a fact that becomes readily apparent when one looks at Crane’s treatment of the main families in each of his two city novels. It is significant and revealing that both of Crane’s Bowery novels take place in the same tenement building. The building, itself, as described in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, is a warren of darkness and filth:

Eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn 113 raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In die street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure comers. A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels. (Crane, Maggie 12-13) While Crane never actually specifies the nationality of his characters, from their dialect-laden dialogue, the inhabitants of this tenement—at least as portrayed in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets—are predominantly Irish. The Johnson family is definitely Irish: Maggie and M ary in particular being traditionally Irish names. The Johnsons seemingly belong in their tenement, the appearance of their own flat contributing little to any improvements in the overall condition of the building:

Turning, Maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture of her home. A clock, in a splintered and battered oblong box of varnished wood, she suddenly regarded as an abomination. She noted that it ticked raspingly. The almost vanished flowers in the carpet-pattern, she conceived to be newly hideous. Some faint attempts which she had made with blue ribbon, to freshen the appearance of a dingy curtain, she now saw to be piteous. (Crane, Maggie 51- 52) The difference between the living conditions of the Johnsons inMaggie: A Girl of the Streets and those of the Kelceys in George’s Mother is striking. While the Johnsons live in abject poverty, the Kelceys, though certainly not well-off, live quite comfortably in their little flat. The difference between the families seems to be one of work ethic, rather than income, as both George and the two Johnson men work at similar occupations. Because the Johnsons throw away their money on 1 1 4 alcoholic binges rather than working diligently and thriftily like the Kelceys, the former family lives like pigs compared to the latter family. Once George adopts the work ethic of the Johnsons, the fortunes of his family begin to move in a downward direction; one implication of the mother’s death at the end of the story is that she dies of a broken heart, unable to face the prospect of becoming like the Johnsons. Crane links this difference in work ethic to the ethnic backgrounds of the two families. The Johnsons are definitely Irish immigrants—the parallels between the lives of the father and Jimmie indicate that the father, like Jimmie was a product of the Irish tenements of New York—but George and his mother do not seem to be Irish immigrants. AlthoughKelcey seems to be an Irish surname, George and his mother speak several times of coming to the city from the country, from Handyville, which means that this family is at least one generation removed from the Irish immigrants of the tenement district. This separation between the Kelceys and their Irish neighbors is further heightened by the differences in their speech patterns. While George’s mother undeniably speaks in a dialect other than that recognized as standard middle-class English, “If yell'll only get in the habit of doin’ it, it’ll be jest as easy as throwin’ it down anywheres” (Crane, Bowery Tales 134), her language is a great deal more standard than that spoken by Mary Johnson, who tells Jimmie on Maggie’s return home, “Oh, she’s jes’ dessame as she ever was, ain’ she? She’s her mudder’s putty darlin’ yit, ain’ she? Lookut her, Jimmie! Come here, fer Gawd’s sake, and lookut her” (Crane, Maggie 131). The Kelceys may be of Irish origins, but they definitely are not as ethnically Irish as the Johnsons. 115 The difference between the ethnicity of the Kelceys and the Johnsons helps Crane to show his reader the difference between the poverty of the two families, because Crane is drawing upon his reader’s familiarity with a long tradition which equates the Irish with poverty and drunkenness, a tradition dating back to the first Irish immigrants and including Thoreau’s own description of his Irish neighbor inWalden. Crane’s use of this tradition in his stories is not surprising, given his view of the relationship between poverty and alcohol. Just as Crane seemingly agrees with the temperance movement’s view that alcohol is the cause of poverty and that the poor are separate from the middle class due to their susceptibility to the lures of alcohol, Crane also seemingly agrees with the temperance movement’s traditional view that certain ethnic groups are more likely to be influenced by alcohol and, therefore, more likely to be poor. Just as inTen Nights in a Bar-Room, when Arthur uses the Irish workers in Simon Slade’s tavern to signal the decline of Slade’s fortunes, so Crane uses the very Irishness of his characters to signal to his reader thetype of character the reader is about to encounter. Crane’s attitude toward ethnicity, then, seems to be very much the same as the nativist impulses of the temperance movement. In fact, Crane’s nativist impulses are more like those of the temperance movement in its antebellum form than in its fin-de-siecle form. Crane’s choice of the Irish as his representative type for the doomed poor drunkard is stikingly old-fashioned. In a time when even Jacob Riis—who betrays no love of the Irish—is forced to admit that the Irish have moved from the oppressed of the tenements to positions of management and city office, Crane’s Irish are shown in terms of their oldest stereotypes, stereotypes familiar to the 116 temperance writers of the 1840s and 1850s. It seems odd that a writer who claimed to have studied the Bowery in such detail would have overlooked the role of the eastern and southern Europeans in the ethnic mixture of the lower east side of Manhattan in the early 1890s. The only non-Irish or non- German immigrant to appear in either Bowery novel is Maggie’s boss at the collar and cuff establishment:

She felt that she should love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment. He was a detestable creature, he wore white socks with low shoes. He sat all day delivering orations, in the depths of a cushioned chair. His pocketbook deprived them of the power of retort. “What een hell do you sink I pie fife dolla a week for? Play? No, py tamn!” (Crane, Maggie 66-67) Of indeterminate but probably central European—and possibly Jewish— origin, Maggie’s boss seems more like a stockforeigner than a particular ethnic type. The temperance movement showed a nativist strain from its inception, but at the end of the century, in particular, nativist tendencies were directed toward the perceived threat of the masses of immigrants crowding into cities such as New York. So, while the nativism of the temperance and other reform movements showed apprehension at the growing numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants coming to the United States, and while their rhetoric reflects this specific threat, Crane’s treatment of immigrants in his Bowery tales retains a more general nativist taint, based on a view of the immigrant situation that was already 20 or 30 years out of date by the publication of Maggie. Basically, the nativist strain of the temperance movement considered the growing numbers of immigrants entering the United States as a threat to the status quo, the lifestyle of the predominantly middle-class native-born 117 Americans. For antebellum temperance reformers, the supposedly uncontrollable drinking habits of the immigrants were responsible for the terrible poverty of the tenement districts in large cities such as New York. Not only that, the drinking of the immigrants provided a bad example for native-born Americans, particularly the husbands and sons of temperance advocates. So—in the minds of antebellum temperance advocates—the immigrants threatened to weaken the position of native-born Americans by flooding the cities with overwhelming numbers of poor, drunken wretches like themselves and by corrupting the lives of middle-class men and women who came in contact with them. After the Civil War, however, the fears of the middle-class temperance advocates took on a new edge. Now the temperance cause found itself concerned not only with nativist fears of an immigrant takeover of the United States, but with new fears of a labor uprising. The depressions of 1873,1883, and 1893 and the great nationwide strikes and demonstrations of the post-war period—the Molly Maguires in the early 1870s, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket riot of May 3, 1886, and the Homestead strike of 1892—combined to create in the minds of the upper and middle classes of the United States a feeling that their country was about to explode into open class warfare. Many of the reform movements of the early 1890s drew their energy from the fears of the middle class; if the middle class were to hold onto what it had, something had to be done about the armies of unemployed and poor Americans living in the inner cities. Jacob Riis openly played on his readers’ fears throughout How the Other H alf Lives: 118 Crowding all the lower wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and the quality of the mercy expected. The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be? (Riis 17) The temperance movement also used the fears of class warfare in its propaganda. Alcohol had always been connected with violence in temperance discussions—the fear of violence at the hands of a drunken husband being one of the major impulses driving women to band together into temperance societies—and temperance novels are filled with graphic examples of the violent acts men and women are capable of when under the influence of strong drink. Once the temperance movement convinced its readers that the lower classes—and particularly the immigrants—were more susceptible to violence when under the influence than native-born Americans, the temperance cause found itself a powerful reason for prohibition. Temperance advocates warned the middle class that providing the lower classes—already at the breaking point due to harsh working conditions, poverty, and horrible housing conditions—with strong drink was like pouring kerosine on a smoldering fire. One way to help avoid class conflict was to eliminate alcohol. Crane, as usual, takes a double-edged approach to the relationship between alcohol and class violence. On the one hand, Crane takes the side of his working-class subjects, attacking the moral hypocrisy of the middle 119 and upper classes in their attitudes toward the poor. All of the representatives from the middle or upper classes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets reveal the limitations of their classes’ understanding of the poor. I have already pointed out the inability of the well-to-do men Maggie encounters after her rejection at the hands of Pete to recognize Maggie for a soul in need of help, rather than as merely a member of her own class. Clearly, Crane wants his reader to recognize the necessity of acknowledging the essential humanity in every person, even “an occasional street girl” (Crane, Portable 1). Also, I have noted how Crane’s ironic handling of the mission soup kitchen shows him harshly criticizing the insensitivity and glibness of urban missionaries whose sole aim is to point out to the poor their moral defects. Maggie’s foreigner boss at the collar and cuff factory serves as a perfect example of a callous, profit-oriented capitalist, intent on squeezing the life out of his young women employees. And, finally, Freddie, the young man with Nell when Pete meets up with her, represents the rich young man “slumming” in the Bowery, a snob who tells Maggie, “She thinks my name is Freddie, you know, but of course it ain’t. I always tell these people some name like that, because if they got onto your right name they might use it sometime” (Crane,Maggie 125-126). Freddie, with his decadent irresponsible handling of his wealth, illustrates the gap in responsibility between the Bowery poor and the middle and upper classes. Yet, as I pointed out earlier, a closer study of Crane’s representation of the self-absorbed clergyman and the urban missionary reveals that Crane is not simply an advocate for the poor; at the same time he criticizes the upper classes, he also utilizes their frames of reference, offering a 120 subtle criticism of the very poor subjects he originally appears to support. For example, while Crane paints a very unappealing portrait of Maggie’s boss, he also makes it clear that Maggie’s boss is a foreigner and a member of a social class different from that of Crane’s readers, as evidenced by his lack of fashion sense: “He was a detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes” (Crane,Maggie 66). And while Crane is separating the boss man into a separate, immigrant-turned-capitalist social class, he also plays on his reader’s association of the working classes with violence; the fact that Maggie, the meekest member of Rum Alley society the reader encounters in the novel, would “love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment” (Crane, Maggie 66) indicates something of the depths of beastiality to which factory labor supposedly drives human beings. And Freddie is far from being merely a “bad” rich young man, a representative of the self-centeredness of the rich. Freddie’s character has its roots far back into the reform fiction tradition; there are several representatives of this character type in The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, and in Mary L. Fox’s George Allen. Freddie as well as his predecessors serves a duel role. On the one hand, he serves as a criticism of careless wealth, but on the other hand he serves as a warning to the middle and upper classes of the dangers involved in allowing their sons too much liberty; if boys like Freddie were permitted by their parents to run wild in the streets of the Bowery, their actions would weaken the position of the middle class, which needed to separate itself from the working classes in order to hold on to its material advantages and avoid a class war. Throughout these two stories, the fear of violence at the hands of the lower classes is a constant underlying theme. 121 For one thing, Crane shows his Bowery characters as surrounded by and immersed in violence for the length of their lives. The first glimpse the reader has of Jimmie in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is of the young boy standing upon a heap of gravel, “throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him” (Crane, Maggie 3). Though only a fight between groups of small boys, Crane makes it clear that the battle is intense and dangerous:

His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features looked like those of a tiny, insane demon. ... A stone had smashed in Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. (Crane, Maggie 4-5) For Jimmie, violence is a way of life; his father, when he catches the young boy fighting, reacts with violence of his own. As Jimmie grows up, Crane describes him as a violent, immoral thug:

He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number of miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had become known to the police. Once he had been arrested for assaulting a Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into waitings about marriage and support and infants. (Crane, Maggie 39) Again and again in his Bowery stories Crane links lower-class characters such as Jimmie to violent acts, as when George helps a comer-gang member beat up a man: “They beat the short man. They forced him against a high board-fence where for a few seconds their blows sounded upon his head in swift thuds” (Crane, Bowery Tales 164). Crane seems to be 122 indicating that something must be inherently violent about the people inhabiting the Bowery. This implication is especially apparent in Crane’s description of the fight between Jimmie and his mother; here even the most sacred ties between mother and son are not enough to prevent horrible violence of the most sensational kind:

“Damn yer ol’ hide,” yelled Jimmie, madly. Maggie shrieked and ran into the other room. To her there came the sound of a storm of crashes and curses. There was a great final thump and Jimmie’s voice cried: “Dere, damn yeh, stay still.” Maggie opened the door now, and went warily out. “Oh, Jim m ie!” He was leaning against the wall and swearing. Blood stood upon bruises on his knotty fore-arms where they had scraped against the floor or the walls in the scuffle. The mother lay screeching on the floor, the tears running down her furrowed face. Maggie, standing in the middle of the room, gazed about her. The usual upheaval of the tables and chairs had taken place. Crockery was strewn broadcast in fragments. The stove had been disturbed on its legs, and now leaned idiotically to one side. A pail had been upset and water spread in all directions. (Crane, Maggie 79-81) While this type of violence would be shocking in any family situation, one sentence, “The usual upheaval of tables and chairs had taken place,” communicates a sense of recurrent violence within this family, something even more shocking than a single, violent outburst. I will discuss the dynamics of family life in the Johnson household in more detail later in the chapter; for now, it suffices to point out how Crane’s portrayal of the Johnsons separates them from the experience of their middle-class reader who would no doubt be shocked at the actions of this violent family. As was noted at length in the previous chapter, the temperance fiction tradition of the mid-1800s placed great emphasis on the connection 123 between alcohol and violence, often working sensational descriptions of the violent acts committed by drunkards into their temperance narratives. This concern with the alcohol’s relationship to violence was still a part of temperance propaganda in Crane’s day, and Crane’s Bowery stories reflect the view that alcohol brings out the beast in those who drink. The most obvious example of this connection between alcohol and violence is Bleecker’s drinking party in George's Mother. The three chapters of this section of the story are filled with violence, both implied and explicit. Of course, the wild goings-on of Bleecker’s party, including scenes of George and his friends fighting under the stimulus of drink shows violence connected with drinking outright, and Crane’s description of the aftermath of Bleecker’s party could be taken directly out of Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room:

The grim truthfulness of the day showed disaster and death. After the tumults of the previous night th interior of this room resembled a decaying battle-field. The air hung heavy and stifling with the odors of tobacco, men’s breaths, and beer half filling forgotten glasses. There was ruck of broken tumblers, pipes, bottles, spilled tobacco, cigar stumps. The chairs and tables were pitched this way and that way, as after some terrible struggle. In the midst of it all lay old Bleecker stretched upon a couch in deepest sleep, as abandoned in attitude, as motionless, as ghastly as if it were a corpse that had been flung there. (Crane, Bowery Tales 150) But open fighting is only part of the violence Crane describes in Bleecker’s party. At one point, for example, George and Jones begin to dance and end up sprawling “over a pair of outstretched legs.” Kelcey hits his head, quite hard, evidently:

Old Bleecker, O’Connor, and Jones, who now limped and drew breath through his teeth, were about to lead him with much care and tenderness to the table for another drink, but he laughingly pushed them away and went unassisted. Bleecker 124 told him: “Great Gawd, your head struck hard enough t’ break a trunk.” (Crane, Bowery Tales 147) The casual manner with which George handles the violence accidently directed his way shows the reader that alcohol has fundamentally changed George’s personality for the worse. Something in drink, evidently, makes violence and injury both acceptable and expected for George; in fact, Crane shows how George’s entire motivation for attending Bleecker’s party is centered around violence: “As he walked home he thought that he was a very grim figure. He was about to taste the delicious revenge of a partial self-destruction. The universe would regret its position when it saw him drunk” (Crane, Bowery Tales 141). George’s experience is only one representative example of the connection between alcohol and violence in Crane’s work, a connection quite similar to that found in temperance literature. Crane goes beyond merely suggesting that the old temperance view of alcohol as a source of violence is valid; in his two city novels Crane shows his reader how alcohol-inspired violence is a major factor in the over-all violence of the working classes, echoing the temperance argument that alcohol and the lower classes make a dangerous mix. The Johnson family, for example, as prone to violence as they are, are nearly always drunk when engaged in acts of violence (although it’s possible to argue that the m other is always drunk). Jimmie and his friend are drunk long before they enter Pete’s saloon in search of revenge for Pete’s treatment of Maggie. Crane’s choice of the saloon for the scene of Jimmie and Pete’s fight is no accident, either, if Crane subscribes to the middle-class view of the saloon as a focal point for the evil and violence normally attributed to the city. That this is probably the case becomes more evident when one remembers that 125 the gang in George’s Mother focuses all of its illegal and violent activities around the neighborhood saloon; the saloon in Crane’s city fiction serves as a magnet for the violence of the lower classes. When Pete retells his experience with the rowdy drunk for the benefit of Jimmie and Maggie, he exemplifies the role of the saloonkeeper in the relationship between violence and alcohol in the lives of Bowery inhabitants. His narrative first of all glows with a glorification of violence and its necessity in the face of an unruly drunkard, the logic of which Jimmie wholeheartedly agrees:

“Hully gee! Dey makes me tired,” he said. “Mos’ e’ry day some farmer comes in an’ tries t’ ran d’ shop. See? But dey gits t’rowed right out! I jolt dem right out in d’ street before dey knows where dey is! See?” “Sure,” said Jimmie. “Dere was a mug come in d’ place d’ odder day wid an idear he wus goin’t’ own d’ place! Hully gee, he wus goin’ t’ own d’ place! I see he had a still on an’ I didn’ wanna giv ‘im no stuff, so I says: ‘Git d’ hell outa here an’ don’ make no trouble,’ I says like dat! See? ‘Git d’ hell outa here an’ don’ make no trouble’; like dat. “Git d’ hell outa here,’ I says. See?” Jimmie nodded understandingly. Over his features played an eager desire to state the amount of his valor in a similar crisis, but the narrator proceeded. “Well, d’ blokie he says: ‘T’ hell wid it! I ain’ lookin’ for no scrap,’ he says—see? ‘But,’ he says, ‘I’m ‘spectable cit’zen an’ I wanna drink an’ purtydamnsoon, too.’ See? ‘D’ hell,’ I says. Like dat! ‘D’ hell,’ I says. See? ‘Don’ make no trouble,’ I says. Like dat. ‘Don’ make no trouble.’ See? Den d’ mug he squared off an’ said he was fine as silk wid his dukes—see? An’ he wanned a drink damnquick. Dat’s what he said. See?” “Sure,” repeated Jimmie. Pete continued. “Say, I jes’ jumped d’ bar an’ way I plunked dat blokie was outa sight. See? Dat’s right! In d’ jaw! See? Hully gee, he t’rowed a spittoon t’ru d’ front windee. Say, I t’aut I’d drop dead. But d’ boss, he comes in after an’ he says, ‘Pete, yehs done jes’ right! Yeh’ve gota keep order an’ it’s all right.’ See? ‘It’s all right,” he says. Dat’s what he said.” (Crane, Maggie 44-46) 126 Aside from illustrating the violence surrounding his trade, Pete’s story also provides a glimpse of the complex nature of the bartender’s trade, from a temperance perspective. The primary responsibility of the bartender is to sell alcohol, which means to a temperance advocate that the bartender’s job is to sell to his customers a substance which will bring out the violent tendencies of their nature, which in the the Bowery are considerable and close to the surface. But the bartender is also responsible for the reputation, legality, and material well-being of the saloon; Pete, therefore, must know when a customer has reached the point where he might become violent and remove that customer from the premises before the customer causes any trouble. When a customer crosses the threshold of acceptable behavior, the bartender must change roles yet again and violently attack the customer, throwing him out of the saloon. So, from the temperance viewpoint, the bartender is the supplier of a substance which causes violent actions, the regulator of the behavior of the consumers of that substance, and a violent attacker of consumers who succumb to the violent tendencies unleashed by alcohol. It is no wonder the saloon was viewed by temperance advocates as a tinderbox for a potential class conflict, a realization Crane makes clear in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets through the nearby policeman running through the crowd to break up the fight between Jimmie, his friend, and Pete; the policeman’s job is as much to prevent small fights from flaring into full-scale rioting as it was to protect the Bowery inhabitants from one another. The threat of open rebellion on the part of the lower classes rims beneath the surface throughout both stories, emerging openly whenever Crane confronts the character of the Bowery tough. These characters pose 127 in Crane’s mind as the potential catalysts for an uprising, a class war such as he considers in “Above All Things,” a posthumously published piece written while Crane toured Mexico in 1895:

The people of the slums of our own cities fill a m an with awe. That vast army with its countless faces immovably cynical, that vast army that silently confronts eternal defeat, it makes one afraid. One listens for the first thunder of the rebellion, the moment when this silence shall be broken by a roar of war. meanwhile one fears this class, their numbers, their wickedness, their might—even their laughter. There is a vast national respect for them. They have it in their power to become terrible. And their silence suggests everything. (Crane, Portable 183) The fear of the lower classes that Crane displays in this passage, the same fear that drove the middle-class reformers such as Jacob Riis to warn their readers of the dire consequences of neglecting urban reforms, is evident throughout his descriptions of Bowery toughs. The toughs represent the ultimate threat to the status quo, openly rebelling against the employers they refuse to work for:

One lad in particular used to recount how he whipped his employer, the proprietor of a large grain and feed establishment. He described his victim’s features and form and clothes with minute exactness. He bragged of his wealth and social position. It had been a proud moment of the lad’s life. He was like a savage who had killed a great chief. (Crane, Bowery Tales 163) Crane’s Bowery toughs walk along the edge of rebellion, barely containing their violent impulses for fear of the police:

Jimmie’s occupation for a long time was to stand on streetcomers and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of pretty women. He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets. ... He maintained a belligerent attitude tward all well-dressed men. To him fine raiment was allied to weakness, and all good coats covered faint hearts. He and his order were king, to a certain extent, over the men of 128 untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps, to be either killed or laughed at. (Crane, Maggie 33) And the toughs dream of “the first thunder of the rebellion” which will signal their time of vengeance:

The vast machinery of the popular law indicated to them that there were people in the world who wished to remain quiet. They awaited the moment when they could prove to them that a riotous upheaval, a cloud-burst of destruction would be a delicious thing. They thought of their fingers buried in the lives of these people. They longed dimly for a time when they could run through decorous streets with crash and roar of war, an army of revenge for pleasures long possessed by others, a wild sweeping compensation for their years without crystal and gilt, women and wine. This thought slumbered in them, as the image of Rome might have lain small in the hearts of the barbarians. (Crane, Bowery Tales 163) In short, Crane’s portrayal of the Bowery toughs reveals all the paranoia and fear of the lower classes one would expect from middle class urban and temperance reformers, a fear much more in tune with the sensibilities of Crane’s middle-class readers than with his Bowery subjects. Just as his treatment of the role of alcohol in the poverty and violence his characters face reveals Crane’s ambivalence toward the subjects of his novel, so too does his treatment of alcohol and its role in the perceived degeneration of traditional family structures. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother, Crane attempts to show how life in the Bowery, the conditions under which children grow up, influences their chances of avoiding evil in their later lives. Crane particularly singles out the family for its impact on the lives of its children. In Maggie’s family, in particular, Crane creates a group that amounts to a parody of middle-class conventions concerning family life, an anti-family. One could view this portrayal of an anti-family as Crane’s way of dismissing the middle-class concern over the break-up of the family; these characters, Crane seems to 129 be saying in this view, have so many other problems facing them, including a pronounced problem with alcohol abuse, that middle-class notions about changing family roles are irrelevant. In fact, in this view of the stories, Crane totally deflates the power of middle-class conceptions of the family by having Mary Johnson, the booze-guzzling monster, herself very much responsible for Maggie’s death, ape the actions of a righteously grieving mother, and “No one who responded to the blow against convention and sentimentality which weighted his structure to fall in climax upon the awesome hypocrisy of the dreadful mother would miss his point” (Cady

112 ). Yet, just as Crane could not satirize conventional attitudes towards poverty, ethnicity, and the lower classes in relation to alcohol without simultaneously—and perhaps more powerfully—validating those same attitudes, Crane cannot satirize conventional views of family roles without also relying upon and supporting those views. However much Crane may have wished to be seen as a cosmopolitan deflater of traditional morality, he could not escape that morality. This was particularly the case with Crane’s attitude toward the options of women faced with a crumbling family structure, as Lawrence E. Hussman explains in Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest: “Although Crane rejected the romantic settings and situations in the fiction of his time, he had no quarrel with the formulae that placed beautiful young women on pedestals, rued the effects of demon rum, or, finally and fatally for the novella, punished women who dared to use their bodies to survive the maelstrom of the city” (92-93). Throughout both Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George’s Mother, Crane 130 consistently shows affinities to the middle-class temperance viewpoint in regard to alcohol’s role in the dissolution of traditional family roles. In both of his Bowery tales, Crane describes for his reader families which today would be categorized as disfunctional, and in both stories, Crane’s portrayal of each family’s problems follows traditional tem perance patterns, with alcohol lying at the root of the breakdown of traditional roles and relationships within the families. As I have noted earlier, George’s Mother closely follows the temperance fiction frame of the Corruption of Innocent Youth, a frame that has as its driving thesis the idea that doting or inattentive parents are in part responsible for the drinking of their sons, drinking which in turn destroys the parents. The relationship between George and his mother is so psychologically rich that critics have been unable to resist Freudian readings of the story, pointing to similarities between George and his mother in the story and Crane and his own mother in real life. Yet, while this relationship is much more complex and developed than anything found in a traditional temperance novel, the differences between Crane’s handling of the son-mother relationship and that found in temperance literature are more a matter of style than content. Crane’s story has more psychological depth than those of traditional temperance novelists, because he takes an internal, subjective view of his characters’ thoughts and actions. But the essence of the family relationships is the same. George’s family falls apart because he takes that first drink with Jones, which dooms him—as it doomed so many temperance heroes before him—to the slow slide to disaster. Just as in temperance stories, the actual relationship between George and his mother is important only in that it sets George up for his fall; George, the willful 131 child, is too spoiled by his doting parent to resist the lure of alcohol. The fact that these two are the sole survivors of a broken family only makes them more vulnerable to the curse of alcohol, adding more evidence to support the temperance notion that the traditional family is at once threatened by and the strongest preventative measure against the dangers of alcohol abuse. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane makes an even more obvious connection between the breakdown of traditional family roles and alcohol abuse. Throughout this first Bowery novel, Crane portrays the Johnson family as the antithesis of a traditional family, a perfect example of the destructive effects of alcohol on family values. In the first chapters of the book, Crane systematically describes the Johnsons in situations that reveal their opposition to traditional values and roles within the family. According to the traditional view of the family, the love between husband and wife is second only to the love and devotion parents display toward their children. The hard-drinking Johnsons love neither each other nor their children. Mary and the father engage in two violent altercations in the one evening they appear together in the story, and from the reaction of the neighbors it seems as if this is standard fare for this household. More shocking even than the verbal and physical abuse these two heap upon each other is the abuse they direct toward their children. Far from the stereotype of nurturing parents, ready to lay down their lives for their children, the Johnsons barely tolerate their children, speaking to them only in anger. The very first glimpse Crane provides of the father is typical of his rapport with his children: 132 “Here, you Jim, git up, now, while I belt yer life out, yeh damned disorderly brat.” He began to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground. The boy Billie felt a heavy boot strike his head. He made a furious effort and disentangled himself from Jimmie. He tottered away, damning. Jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father, began to curse him. His parent kicked him. “Come home, now,” he cried, “an* stop yer jawin’, er 111 lam the everlasting head off yehs.” (Crane, Maggie 10) The Johnsons’ child-rearing philosophy seems to be, “Forget the rod, just give me a tire iron,” an approach that even Mr. Johnson seems to feel is inadequate: “Stop that, Jim, d’yeh hear? Leave yer sister alone on the street. It’s like I can never beat any sense into yer damned wooden head” (Crane, Maggie 14). The Johnsons cannot even claim that their violence is in their children’s best interests, since both parents are remarkably self-absorbed. David Fitelson points out that the parents react to violence solely in terms of their own well-being: “In each instance the reader is informed by means of irony that fighting is undesirable because it is inappropriate in some way to the demands of the speaker’s survival” (187). At one point, for example, the father raises an objection to the mother’s abuse of Jimmie, but he immediately makes it clear that he only minds the noise and commotion: “Let the damned kid alone for a minute, will yeh, Mary? Yer alius poundin’ ‘im. When I come nights I can’t git no rest ‘cause yer alius poundin’ a kid. Let up, d’yeh hear? Don’t be alius poundin’ a kid” (Crane, Maggie 16). The mother, like most mothers, is concerned that her son has been fighting in the street, but as she explains to the father, her real concern is with the monetary loss Jimmie’s tom clothes entails:

“Why d’ blazes don’ chere try t’ keep Jim from fightin’? I’ll break yer jaw,” she suddenly bellowed. 133 The man mumbled in drunken indifference. “Ah, wha’ d’ hell. WVs odds? Wha’ makes kick?” “Because he tears ‘is clothes, yeh damn fool,” cried the woman in supreme wrath. (Crane, Maggie 26) Even Mary’s fiscal concern is not genuine; unlike the traditional mother, who would sacrifice her own food so that her children could eat well, Mary seems concerned only with saving enough money to be able to afford more booze. These two parents are so self-absorbed that the father at one point even steals from Jimmie:

The father wrenched the pail from the urchin. He grasped it in both hands and lifted it to his mouth, he glued his lips to the under edge and tilted his head. His throat swelled until it seemed to grow near his chin. There was a tremendous gulping movement and the beer was gone. The man caught his breath and laughed. He hit his son on the head with the empty pail. As it rolled clanging into the street, Jimmie began to scream and kicked repeatedly at his father’s shins. (Crane, Maggie 24-25) Crane’s greatest irony in his portrayal of the two parents is that, their vision blurred by drink, the parents do not even recognize their own inadequacies as parents. Mary’s histrionics regarding Maggie’s fall from grace are the best-known example:

“She’s d’ devil’s own chil’, Jimmie,” she whispered. “Ah, who would t’ink such a bad girl could grow up in our fambly, Jimmie, me son. Many d’ hour I’ve spent in talk wid dat girl an’ tol’ her if she ever went on d’ streets I’d see her damned. An’ after all her bringin’ up an’ what I tol’ her and talked wid her, she goes t’d’ bad, like a duck t’ water.” (Crane, Maggie 87) Mary is obviously not describing the same household Crane has been describing, a contradiction which lends irony to the scene. Here are two parents, the total opposite of what tradition expects from parents, their personalities horribly skewed by heavy drinking. 134 The parental inadequacies brought on by drink that plague the Johnsons of course have a heavy impact on the children. While the traditional view of childhood is one of innocence and unconditional trust in one’s parents, the Johnson children group up terrified of their parents. During the parents’ interminable quarrels, the children try as best they can to stay out of the way: “The babe crawled under the table and, turning, peered out cautiously. The ragged girl retreated and the urchin in the comer drew his legs carefully beneath him” (Crane, Maggie 17). The abusive nature of the parents causes a twisted view of right and wrong behavior, wrong behavior consisting of anything that will bring down the mother upon them; as Maggie reminds Jimmie, “Youse alius fightin’, Jimmie, an’ yeh knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an’ it’s like we’ll all get a poundin’” (Crane, Maggie 14). Maggie’s concern for Jimmie is somewhat limited by her concern for her own well­ being, but her later attempts to tend to Jimmie’s cuts and her care for little Tommie show that she has been forced to grow up too quickly, to take on the parental duties abandoned by her inebriate parents. Jimmie, for his part, eventually assumes the role of the father, even to the point of continuing the father’s drunken, physical abuse of the mother. With children assuming the roles of adults, the entire traditional structure of the family has been shattered, with terrible results. Here, then, is a family that has been destroyed by alcohol. The drinking of the parents has caused them to become inadequate in terms of their parental duties, actually altering the individual roles within the family structure, just as the drinking of parents in such temperance stories as My Mother’s Gold Ring, The Glass, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room 135 turned once-competent, caring mothers and fathers into horrible wretches. This relationship between alcohol and parenting was a mainstay of the temperance movement. Temperance advocates viewed alcohol as a terrible threat to traditional family roles by weakening the moral and physical constitution of the family members. Temperance advocates also felt that once alcohol had weakened those roles, it totally destroyed them by providing alternate family structures in the form of the street gang and the saloon, both of which are centered around alcohol. Just as he adhered to conventional views of the role of alcohol in the weakening of traditional family structures, so too does Crane follow the standard temperance line on the role of alcohol in creating surrogate family structures. For young boys such as Jimmie, whose home was only a home inasmuch as it was where he slept and ate, the street provided a sense of identity which manifested itself in the form of gangs of young boys, such as those depicted at the beginning of the story. While Crane takes an ironic attitude toward the pretensions of valor on the part of Jimmie and his fellow warriors, describing their street fight in mock heroic terms, a good part of his satiric attitude may be the result of fear caused by the knowledge that their battles are only harmless because of the small scale of the combatants. Crane seems to sense that when these young boys reach the age of Pete, their activities will be filled with menace to the rest of society. Just as the groups of young dandies in temperance novels such as George Allen and Franklin Evans fill the vacuum created by the hero leaving his traditional family, so the street gangs in Crane’s stories serve as surrogate families for their members, replacing the already faulty biological families of the youths. And, just as the groups of young men in Fox’s and Whitman’s 136 temperance novels center their activities around alcohol, so Crane’s street gangs regulate their activities around alcohol. Crane makes the connection between these surrogate families and alcohol explicit in George’s Mother, where George’s gang occupies the comer across from the local saloon, commits its crimes against the patrons of the saloon, and conducts its m ost important bonding ritual gathered around a stolen can of beer (Murphy 92). Alcohol gives the gang members a common purpose and a direction in which to vent their dissatisfaction with society. It is difficult, given Crane’s description of the gang, to imagine the gang holding together without the common bond of alcohol, illegally obtained and physically fought-over. While the street gang serves as a surrogate family for boys and young men whose families have fallen apart under the strain of drink, for grown men this service is performed by none other than the saloon, which provides both family and home for the price of a drink. The home-away- from-home quality of the saloon was one of the reasons the temperance movement fixed on it as a prime symbol of the evils of alcohol. To temperance advocates, the free lunch, comfortable atmosphere, and friendly comradery of the saloon were powerful lures which drew wayward men away from their homes and families and into an exclusively male environment, shut-off to respectable women. This concern over the home- replacing nature of the saloon carried over into temperance fiction, where writers were quick to point out the failings of a father who was more interested in his drinking companions than in his own family. The classic example, of course, is Arthur, with his portrayal of the unfortunate men of Shadyville, drinking away their lives in Slade’s tavern while their wives, 137 parents, and children wait at home and at the saloon door for their return; Arthur’s description of little Mary Morgan, coming pitifully to Slade’s tavern every night to bring home her wayward father, is perhaps the most recognizable image of the entire temperance novel form. For Crane’s male characters in the Bowery novels, the saloon offers an escape from the “real world” problems on the outside, which generally involve women. Pete, for example, knows that he is safe from Maggie’s entreaties as long as he keeps her away from the door of his saloon. Jimmie, too, dodges his responsibilities in regard to women by hiding in saloons, a technique which he illustrates when confronted by Hattie, the “forlorn woman” looking for him in the street:

“Say, fer Gawd’s sake, Hattie, don’ foller me from one end of d’ city t’d’ odder. Let up, will yehs! Give me a minute’s res’, can’t yehs? Yehs makes me tired, alius taggin’ me. See? ain’ yehs got no sense? Do yehs want people t’ get onto me? Go chase yerself, fer Gawd’s sake.” The woman stepped closer and laid her fingers on his arm. “But look-a-here—” Jimmie snarled. “Oh, go t’ hell.” He darted into the front door of a convenient saloon and a moment later came out into the shadows that surrounded the side door. On the brilliantly lighted avenue he perceived the forlorn woman dodging about like a scout. Jimmie laughed with an air of relief and went away. (Crane, Maggie 129-30) One gets the sense that this is not the first time Jimmie has used this particular maneuver. After his first terrific fight with Mary, Jimmie’s father retreats to the local saloon for solace and liquid courage. Not only does the father use the saloon for an alternate home, but he uses the problems of his real home as excuses for his heavy drinking: “During the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies and declaring to all comers, confidentially: ‘My hone reg’lar livin’ hell! 138 Damndes’ place! Reg’lar hell! Why do I come an’ drin’ whisk’ here thish way? ‘Cause home reg’lar livin’ hell!’” (Crane, Maggie 25). In his saloon home, the father is confident and boisterous; in his real home, he is reduced to mumbling with drunken indifference as his wife berates him. While the male characters ofMaggie: A Girl of the Streets use the saloon as a surrogate home in order to avoid the female-related problems that confront them on the outside, this is a relatively minor facet of the novel. In George’s Mother, on the other hand, the tension created between George’s natural family life with his mother and his artificial family life with his male drinking companions is a major theme of Crane’s work (Murphy 91). If one were to take a New Critical look atGeorge’s Mother, one would notice the balanced opposition Crane sets up in the story between George and his temperance-oriented mother at home in their little flat and George and his drinking-oriented friends out in their saloon. Over the course of the story, Crane showsGeorge vacillating between his two homes. As is usual with Crane, the author takes an ironic stance toward both types of home, slyly poking fun at George’s hard-drinking friends, his teetotaling mother, and George, himself. And, as is usual with Crane, for all of the irony directed toward the conventional-minded mother, it is her conventional, temperance-inspired vision of home and family that seems to carry the most weight with Crane in the end. In the first two chapters of the novel, Crane sets up the opposition between the two families, tying the two together through the constant theme of alcohol. The first mention of the mother occurs when George’s fHend Jones, who has just hustled Kelcey into a saloon for a few drinks, asks of the latter, “How is th’ ol’ lady, anyhow? .... Th’ last time I remember she 139 was as spry as a little ol’ cricket, an’ was helpeltin’ aroun’ the country lecturin’ befor W.C.T.U.’s an’ one thing an’ another” (Crane,Bowery Tales 118). In the second chapter, Crane draws the connection between the mother and alcohol even tighter when he has a “man with a red, mottled face”—his face indicating that he is a drinker—hurl a bottle at the mother and her loud hymn singing; the giant brewery in the distance offers more obviously symbolism pitting the little old lady against the giant powers of alcohol. Once George comes home, the mother dotes and nags at the same time, fussing and worrying over George throughout his meal. The consummate over-protective mother, she warns George against becoming friends with Jones:

“I know he ain’t th’ kind ‘a man I’d like t’ have you go around with, he ain’t a good man. I’m sure he ain’t. He drinks.” Her son began to laugh. “Th’ dickens he does?” He seemed amazed, but not shocked at this information. She nodded her head with the air of one who discloses a dreadful thing. “I’m sure of it! Once I saw ‘im cornin’ outa Simpson’s Hotel, up in Handyville, an’ he could hardly walk. He drinks! I’m sure he drinks!” “Holy smoke!” said Kelcey. In this and other scenes in the story, Crane shows how the mother, concerned as she is about the evils of intemperance, is very naive concerning the realities of drinking; for her, alcohol is a relatively abstract concept, as hazy and ill-defined (and romanticized) as the terrible illnesses and “wicked and fair” woman she invented to account for his surly attitude toward her. The fact that George could come home from a night of drinking, presumably stinking of alcohol and cigar smoke, and his mother would have as little inkling of his drinking as she does reveals some ironic intent on Crane’s part. In a way, it is as though Crane, as far as this 140 aspect of the story is concerned, takes George’s view of his mother that she is not “modem” and is out of touch with real life in the big city. This could be a thinly veiled criticism of temperance workers in general—possibly his mother or Frances Willard—who Crane would feel lacked the experience with the real world to adequately comprehend the alcohol issue. Crane, himself, on the other hand, had plenty of real-world experience with alcohol, a fact he makes plain through his descriptions of George’s initiation into the world of drink. Bernard Weinstein claims that Crane’s descriptions of drunkenness and its effects are more realistic and less traditional than Maggie: “In George’s Mother, the process of degradation is traced more carefully, and as a result the novel is shrewder than M aggie : more observant about human nature and less inclined to embrace sociological and metaphysical platitudes. Its shaping force is first-hand observation and experience” (46). A look at Crane’s technique in describing the world of alcohol indicates that Crane is writing from experience. Carefully, detail by detail, Crane draws an incredibly accurate portrait of the novice drinker from that drinker’s perspective, as when George wakes with a hangover following his first drinking binge:

He ate the greater part of his breakfast in silence, moodily stirring his coffee and glaring a t a remote comer of the room with eyes that felt as if they had been baked. When he moved his eyelids there was a sensation that they were cracking. In his mouth there was a singular taste. It seemed to him that he had been sucking the end of a wooden spoon. Moreover, his temper was rampant within him. It sought something to devour. (Crane, Bowery Tales 131) By taking his subject’s perspective, Crane seems connected with his subject in a way that traditional temperance writers—who, even when writing in the first person, came across as somewhat detached from their 141 characters—cannot match. The reader gets the sense that Crane writes of what he knows, accurately capturing the experience and recreating it for the reader. Any reader who has been in George’s condition will recognize the sensations Kelcey experiences at Bleecker’s party; just reading this passage makes one feel somewhat lightheaded. The overall effect of Crane’s subjective description is that it causes George’s drinking experience to have much more reality attached to it than his mother’s temperate religion can offer. To a certain extent, the reader, like George, looks forward to George’s excursions to the local saloon; that surrogate family setting, after all, seems more vital and real than the austere confines of George’s little apartment. This is not to say, however, that Crane has written an openly anti­ temperance, anti-family novel. In fact, the opposite is nearly the case. While Crane suggests that there are limitations to the temperance viewpoint and while he proves that he understands the intricacies of the drinking world, Crane fairly obviously comes out in support of the standard, traditional, temperate family home that George’s mother provides for her son. Just as traditional temperance writers such as Mary L. Fox support the traditional family unit as the foundation of proper society and civilization, so too does Crane, in his own roundabout way. Crane's attitude toward the traditional home and the saloon as surrogate home becomes evident when one looks at his portrayal of the group of drinking buddies that George joins up with at the request of his friend, Jones. The men at the bar provide George with a family that, unlike his mother, who is constantly badgering him to hang up his coat and to attend prayer meetings with her, openly seeks to support one another in 142 brotherly comradery. While George immediately falls for this group of good-natured gentlemen, it is clear throughout that Crane is taking an ironic stance toward the men. What is more, Crane’s unspoken criticism of the drinking “family” in the saloon corresponds with traditional temperance criticisms of the saloon. One of the major criticisms of saloon on the part of the temperance movement is that the saloon is based on illusion. I have already pointed out how Crane indicated an awareness of this perspective in his descriptions of the various drinking establishments appearing in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. There, the emphasis was on the illusion of wealth and culture that the saloons attempted to create. The saloons also created an illusion of comradery and belonging among patrons. Crane illustrates this illusion and offers a criticism of it in his descriptions of the two major drinking encounters in which George partakes. The drinking men are constantly telling each other what great guys they are; in fact, building each other up with compliments seems to be one of the prime activities of the drinkers. Jones, in particular, is singled out by Crane as a jovial, loud drunk whose main purpose in the group seems to be to help them arrive at a state of intense comradery and isolation from the world:

He congratulated his companions upon being in his society. They were excited by his frenzy. They began to fraternize in jovial fashion. It was understood that they were true and tender spirits. They had come away from a grinding world filled with men who were harsh. When one of them chose to divulge some place where the world had pierced him, there was a chorus of violent sympathy. They rejoiced at their temporary isolation and safety. (Crane, Bowery Tales 128) The emphasis on each group member’s isolation from the rest of the world helps the group to feel as if his drinking friends were the only people in the 143 world who understand him. As usual, Crane ironically undercuts such pretensions through his descriptions of and hints toward the actual situation of each of the characters. Such is the case when Crane writes of George that “Presently he began to believe that he was a most remarkably fine fellow, who had at last found his place in a crowd of most remarkably fine fellows” (Crane, Bowery Tales 127). Crane is obviously being ironic, here, especially considering the group of has-beens George is drinking with. And the goodwill and friendship among the friends is shown to be completely phony when George goes to ask his friends for some assistance toward the end of the story:

When Kelcey went to borrow money from old Bleecker, Jones and the others, he discovered that he was below them in social position. Old Bleecker said gloomily that he did not see how he could loan money at that time. When Jones asked him to have a drink, his tone was careless. O’Connor recited at length some bewildering financial troubles of his own. In them all he saw that something had been reversed. They remained silent upon many occasions, when they might have grunted in sympathy for him. (Crane, Bowery 172) The fair-weather-friend aspect of the drinking buddies shows that Crane assumes that his reader has all along recognized the boozers for what they are, and that it is only George who has been fooled. One problem with such phony goodwill and comradery, from the temperance perspective, is that it hides the true business of the saloon: to sell drinks. Crane, in his subtle manner, exposes this hypocrisy over the course of the drinking scenes in the saloon. For one thing, Crane makes sure his reader recognizes the importance of alcohol as a social lubricant for this group. The friends’ all-purpose solution to any snag in their discussions is to “Have a drink.” Without the common bond of drink, it is doubtful that the group would ever have anything to keep it together. 144 Certainly, as Crane ably illustrates, the intellectual discussions of the men would only appeal to a group of drunken men. And the men drink a great deal over the course of their discussions. Just in George’s short talk with Jones upon meeting him on the street, the two swill down three drinks in rapid succession. All of this drinking is fine in the eyes of the bartender, who watches over the proceedings, providing the friends with the means for their discussions and himself and the saloon owner with a living. For temperance advocates, the bartender held one of the most despicable, cynical jobs imaginable. From the temperance perspective, the job of the bartender was one of luring innocent men to their doom, encouraging them to drink poison, while he and the saloonkeeper raked in the dough. The bartender in George’s Mother is not as clearly and explicitly evil as Simon Slade eventually becomes in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, but Crane always leaves enough clues for his reader to remind the reader of the bartender’s hypocrisy. Generally, the bartender is a friendly, agreeable gentleman who appears to like the group of drinking friends a great deal. But, as Crane subtly reminds us, that is the bartender’s job. The bartender provides the group with a place to bond, and he keeps the drinks coming as fast as the men can drink them: “The bartender came often. ‘Gee, you fellahs er tanks,’ he said, in a jocular manner, as he gathered empty glasses and polished the table with his little towel” (Crane, Bowery Tales 129). The bartender’s mild comment is more of a compliment and note of encouragement than a warning to watch how much they drink. Later, though, at closing time, the bartender reveals that he walks a thin line between being host to this wonderful fraternity and watching out for the 145 legality of his business: “The bartender came to the door. ‘Gee, you fellahs er making a row. It’s time fer me t’ shut up th’ front th’ place, an’ you mugs better sit on yerselves. It’s one o’clock’” (Crane,Bowery Tales 130). Crane reminds his reader in this scene that the bartender, for all his professions of admiration for a friendship with the group of drinkers, is at bottom a businessman, and that his interest in his “friends” who patronize his bar is driven by the enormous volume of spirits the group downs in his saloon. One final clue as to Crane’s attitude toward the ersatz family of the saloon is the manner in which he describes George and the mother at home. I have already mentioned that Crane sets the mother up as the opposite of the gregarious, fun-loving, supportive barroom community. The mother is constantly nagging George, pestering him about this and that until he is quite ready to run out of the house and down to the local bar to meet his friends. But Crane always treats the mother with a very gentle brand of irony, and one always has the sense that, though he might poke fun at her, Crane always has a soft spot in his heart for the mother and for the type of family home life she represents. Take, for example, George’s behavior toward his mother. Although he is often fed up with her nagging, we never see George as content and happy as he is when he decides to buckle down and be a good, conventional, hard-working son, “content to read the papers and talk with his mother” (Crane, Bowery 154). And, of course, the ending of the story validates the proper home, since it is only George’s movement away from the traditional home values of the mother that causes him to lose, first, his job and, then, his mother. It seems, then, that, while Crane has some qualifications to make with the temperance- 146 inspired view of the home, he definitely appears to prefer it over the phony home of the saloon. Crane’s preference for the conventional mother over the hard- drinking saloon provides a nice tie-in w ith an even larger issue related to the family: the economic, social, and political options available to a women when the traditional family structures fall apart due to alcohol. The unsure position of women in Victorian American society when forced outside the traditional role of wife and mother was one of the chief motivating factors behind the formation of the women’s temperance movement of the 1870s, a movement which eventually led to the formation of the WCTU and, later, the Anti-Saloon League. This concern was a part of temperance discussions much earlier than this, even, going clear back to the very beginnings of the temperance movement. Early temperance fiction writers, especially women writers, addressed the problems facing women with drunken husbands through the character of the drunkard’s wife and also, as a sort of opposite role model, through the character of the drunken woman. In both cases, temperance writers created characters which were in essence conservative responses to a threatening situation. The drunkard’s wife, as I discussed in the Temperance Tradition chapter, is a character who maintains her virtue and goodness—characteristics traditionally ascribed to women—in the face of the horrors of a drunken husband; the drunkard’s wife, therefore, served as both example and warning to young women readers, the message being that even the most wholesome and virtuous woman needs to be on her guard against the hazards of letting her husband drink. The opposite of the drunkard’s wife is the woman drunkard, also previously discussed at length; this character 147 serves as a warning of the horrible scenes awaiting women who drink and as an affirmation of traditional views of womanhood. George’s mother fits into this discussion as a variation of the drunkard’s wife character. The mother is shown throughout the story as a representative of the proper homemaking role of the middle-class view of womanhood. The very first time Crane describes the mother, it is in terms of housekeeping:

A little old woman was the owner of the voice. In a fourth- story room of the red and black tenement she was trudging on a journey. In her arms she bore pots and pans, and sometimes a broom and dust-pan. She wielded them like weapons. Their weight seemed to have bended her back and crooked her arms until she walked with difficulty. Often she plunged her hands into water at a sink. She splashed about, the dwindled muscles working to and fro under the loose skin of her arms. She came from the sink, steaming and bedraggled as if she had crossed a flooded river. (Crane, Bowery Tales 119) The mother’s hatred of intemperance and her fears of George becoming a drunkard are in a large part explainable as reactions to her fear of the consequences of losing her son as a provider. The mother, after all, is reliant solely upon George for her food and lodging, much the same situation as a young woman, newly married to a man she suspects drinks. The results of George’s drinking—especially the loss of his job—directly affect the future well-being of the mother, just as they would if she were George’s wife. And, when the mother dies at the end of the story, Crane draws the scene exactly as a temperance writer would show the repentant husband, rushing to the bedside of his dying wife (or daughter, as in the case of T. S. Arthur’s Mary Morgan). As Carol Hurd Green explains, “Guilty George suffers the drunk’s punishment: staring at the wallpaper 148 above his mother’s death bed, he sees the brown roses ‘like hideous crabs crawling upon his brain.’” (237), and, just as in Franklin Evans, watching his loved-one die in an agony of heartbreak over his drunkenness is more than adequate punishment for the drunkard (Green 237; Murphy 92). Crane’s treatment of the fate of the drunkard’s mother/wife in George’s Mother is a minor but still important facet of the story. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane directly and openly confronts the options available to women who are forced from traditional family roles when alcohol abuse breaks down the traditional family. As is usual with Crane, his handling of this issue runs in two directions at the same time. While, on the one hand, he attempts through his portrayal of Maggie’s fall into prostitution and eventual death to make “room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people” (Crane, Portable 1), on the other hand, his use of traditional temperance characters and situations helps to make the division between street girls and excellent people even more well- defined. In other words, Crane, as usual, sets out to criticize middle-class conventions but ends up clinging to and strengthening them. One way Crane shows his support for traditional views of womanhood is through his use of the great negative example of the temperance tradition, the drunken woman. Two drunken women appear in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets: the old woman who lives on the next floor and Mary Johnson. Each of these women represents the antithesis of the middle-class conceptions of womanhood. The old woman in the Johnson’s tenement building is a representative of the options available to women once they pass the age where they can work; with no family members left to 149 support them, these women were often reduced to beggary. Crane, however, takes a rather cynical view of this type of charity case. The old woman in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is a mixture of compassion and scam. While she poses as a virtuous old crippled matron, Crane makes it very clear that she is a hypocrite and a swindler:

The old woman was a gnarled and leathery personage who could don, at will, an expression of great virtue. She possessed a small music box capable of one tune, and a collection of “God bless yehs” pitched in assorted keys of fervency. Each day she took a position upon the stones of fifth Avenue, where she crooked her legs under her and crouched immovable and hideous, like an idol. She received daily a small sum in pennies. It was contributed, for the most part, by persons who did not make their homes in that vicinity. (Crane, Maggie 22- 23) Crane’s description of her daily activities is reminiscent of Jacob Riis’ descriptions of similar cases in How the Other H alf Lives. Riis, like Crane, takes a jaded view of the actual needs of such beggars. Crane never shows the old woman drunk, but she sends Jimmie out for a pail of beer, a common errand for young children at the time, sent by lazy, busy, or embarrassed adults in search of a drink. In a way, the woman’s clandestine drinking symbolizes her character, overall; by sending Jimmie to fetch her beer, she may drink in secret, secure in the knowledge that her fa$ade of respectability is protected. Such closet drinking was widespread among women alcoholics, especially those in the middle class, whose respectability was a vital social and economic commodity. From a temperance viewpoint, of course, this type of drinking was in a way more damaging to women than outright drunkenness, and temperance writers like Maria Lamas were quick to thoroughly condemn the practice in the harshest of terms. After all, if some women could 150 successfully hide their drinking, that fact cast doubt on the virtue of all women. Fox is careful to have her narrator describe her drinking in terms of a horrible, secret shame, and she is equally careful to have her narrator end up an impoverished wretch in the county poorhouse due to her drinking. Crane, in his portrayal of the old woman, reflects this attitude, particularly when he has the old woman tell Maggie, “Well, come in an’ stay wid me t’-night. I ain’ got no moral standin’” (Crane, Maggie 134). Even the old woman recognizes that she has no real virtue in the eyes of the community she tries to make a living off of. By far, the representative drunken woman appearing in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is Mary Johnson, Maggie’s mother. In every particular, Mary Johnson follows the mold of the beastly drunken woman, the worst character type appearing in any temperance novel. If Crane deviates from mold at all in creating Mary, it is merely in terms of degree; Mary is the drunkest, meanest, most horrible drunken woman imaginable. That Mary drinks is evident in every scene in which she appears; she is always described as either already drunk or in the process of drinking from yellow- brown bottles. Crane indicates his disapproval of Mary’s drinking by linking it to the type of hypocrisy he sees as rampant in the tenements: “Her drunken rages symbolize the animal fury of a slum home, and her quickness to judge, condemn, and cast out Maggie symbolizes the self- righteousness of Bowery morality” (Pizer 114; also Green 236). Mary, like many women alcoholics, refuses to admit her alcohol addiction:

“You’ve been drinkin’, Mary,” he said. “You’d better let up on the bot’, ol’ woman, or you’ll git done.” “You’re a liar. I ain’t had a drop,” she roared in reply. They had a lurid altercation, in which they damned each other’s souls with frequence. (Crane, Maggie 18) 151 Such denial is common with Mary, who hides her own shortcomings behind a drunken veil of wailings about injustices inflicted upon her:

The mother sat blinking at them. She delivered reproaches, swallowed potatoes and drank from a yellow-brown bottle. After a time her mood changed and she wept as she carried little Tommie into another room and laid him to sleep, with his fists doubled, in an old quilt of faded red and green grandeur. Then she came and moaned by the stove. She rocked to and fro upon a chair, shedding tears and crooning miserably to the two children about their “poor mother” and “yer fader, damn ‘is soul.” (Crane, Maggie 20) In all such cases of Mary’s hypocritical self-pity, Crane carefully links Mary’s behavior to the bottle. In fact, Crane’s ironic subversion of the type of moralizing carried out in the tenements relies to a great degree on the image of Mary as a drunken woman that Crane so carefully sets up. For example, the scene in which Jimmie and his mother discuss Maggie’s ruination depends upon Mary’s bottle for effect as much as it depends upon what the characters say to each other. The moralizing of the mother and Jimmie is intended to be ironic, since the mother should be the last person on earth to consider herself an expert on morality and virtue. The irony of the mother’s speech depends upon the fact that the mother is drinking at the same time as she is laying waste to her daughter’s future and character, “His mother took a drink from a squdgy5 bottle that sat on the table. She continued her lament” (Crane, Maggie 110). Then, when the mother says, “Wid a home like dis an’ a mudder like me, she went t’ d’ bad” (Crane, Maggie 111), the reader is hit over the head with the irony of the situation. If Mary had been anyone but herself, her statements about Maggie, though severe, would probably have been taken by Crane’s middle-

® The 1896 edition omits “squdgy.” 152 class readers as truthful wisdom. It is only because Crane painstakingly depicts Mary as the ultimate drunken woman that her words have a double edge to them. It is interesting just how thorough Crane is in depicting Mary as a drunken woman. As I have earlier noted, the drunken woman is a stock character in temperance fiction, and her appearance is always heavy with shock value. The narrator ofThe Glass, for example, is clearly intended to shock the reader with her behavior while under the influence, and the dying woman drunkard in Franklin Evans is described in terms designed to elicit shock and pity from Whitman’s reader. But Crane’s depiction of Mary Johnson overshadows the efforts of even the most sensationalist temperance writers. Violent, ugly, and monstrous, Mary is a complete beast. Crane’s descriptions of her emphasize her huge size and horrible ugliness:

The urchin stole forward. He began to shiver in dread of awakening his parents. His mother’s great chest was heaving painfully. Jimmie paused and looked down at her. Her face was inflamed and swollen from drinking. Her yellow brows shaded eye-lids that had grown blue. Her tangled hair tossed in waves over her forehead. Her mouth was set in the same lines of vindictive hatred that it had, perhaps, borne during the fight. Her bare, red arms were thrown out above her head in an attitude of exhaustion, something, mayhap, like that of a sated villain. (Crane, Maggie 27-28) The word choices in Crane’s description—“inflamed and swollen,” “tangled hair,” “lines of vindictive hatred,” “sated villain”—are reminiscent of Whitman’s descriptions in Franklin Evans. Perhaps the greatest example of Mary’s lack of basic human values and characteristics occurs in Chapter IX. Mary's experience at the saloon, in the street with the young boys, and in the tenement hall mark her as a pure drunken woman, without any 153 womanly grace and without even any human dignity. Everyone in the horrible tenement sees her as below even their level. What best shows that Crane was attuned to the mindset behind the drunken woman character in the temperance tradition is the way he—in the same manner as the temperance writers—uses the drunken woman character as an anti-woman character. Mary Johnson—in appearance and behavior goes against everything Victorian middle-class Americans considered womanly or lady-like. She is, as I have already noted, a terrible parent, lacking in all of the sympathy and nurturing instincts considered natural to all parents. Her appearance, as mentioned above, is hardly recognizable as female, much less feminine. And in her actions, she not only steps beyond the stereotype of proper feminine behavior, she actively seeks to destroy any representation of traditional feminine gentility she sees around her. In the scene in which Maggie leaves on her first date with Pete, Mary assaults all of the symbols of housekeeping available in the flat:

Her mother drank whiskey all Friday morning. With lurid face and tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all Friday afternoon. When Maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay asleep amidst the wreck of chairs and a table. Fragments of various household utensils were scattered about the floor. She had vented some phase of drunken fury upon the lambrequin. It lay in a bedraggled heap in the corner. . . . When Pete arrived Maggie, in a worn black dress, was waiting for him in the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage. The curtain at the window had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack, dangling to and fro in the draft through the cracks at the sash. The knots of blue ribbons appeared like violated flowers. The fire in the stove had gone out. The displaced lids and open doors showed heaps of sullen grey ashes. The remnants of a meal, ghastly, lay in a corner. Maggie’s mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed and gave her daughter a bad name. (Crane, Maggie 54-55) 154 The second paragraph of this section reads almost like a list of traditional symbols of feminine delicacy and taste. Like the drunken women in temperance fiction, Mary stands as a warning to all middle-class women of the horrors awaiting even surreptitious female drinkers; women drinkers, even if moderate, are an affront to traditional femininity in the temperance viewpoint. Therefore, the ultimate purpose of drunken woman characters, including Mary Johnson, is to bolster traditional views of what constitutes acceptable behavior for women. Recognizing the anti-feminine element of Crane’s drunken woman character, Mary Johnson, is an important step in understanding how Crane’s portrayal of the main character of the story, Maggie Johnson, represents the very type of middle-class notions of womanhood and femininity that the drunken woman character is the antithesis of. In this view of women, moral virtue and feminine values of good appearance and good housekeeping are the necessary elements of a happy life. Any woman who steps outside of accepted modes of behavior is not only subject to social ostracism, but is also, and worse, open to the immoral advances of men. As Hussman explains, Crane seems interested in more than merely realistically portraying the effect of the Bowery environment on Maggie’s character: “. . . when Crane turns his attention to Maggie, his realistic treatment of the material short-circuits. Instead of establishing his heroine’s typicality as molded by her environment—a necessary quality in ‘case study’ ficton—he stresses romantic qualities which set her apart not only from the street crowds but from her family as well” (93). Actually, however, Crane’s portrayal of Maggie is more complex than merely a representation of middle-class ideas about women. Maggie’s story 155 simultaneously serves as a validation of middle-class values concerning women and a warning concerning their misapplication. In his description of Maggie’s passage into adolescence, Crane writes of Maggie, “The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl” (Crane, Maggie 41). Crane continues by noting, “None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins” (Crane, Maggie 41). This passage reveals a great deal about Crane’s attitudes toward middle-class views of women. Up to this point in the narrative, Crane’s reader has witnessed an incredible degree of beastiality on the part of the Johnson family, representatives of the entire Bowery community. But Crane shows Maggie to be entirely separate from her surroundings. Even the “philosophers” of the tenement cannot understand her dissimilarity to the rest of the Bowery population. It is almost as though Crane had dropped a traditional, middle-class girl into the Bowery, so little does she seem to belong there. And this is no accident; by separating Maggie from the Bowery, Crane places her—at least in terms of her character—closer to the position occupied by Crane’s female readership, thereby making her more recognizable and identifiable for all of his middle-class readers. Throughout the rest of the novel, Crane actively identifies Maggie with the traditional characteristics of young womanhood. Maggie is a flower, a “pretty girl,” both images associated with traditional womanhood. In fact, Maggie’s beauty is remarked upon constantly throughout the story. The “young men of the vicinity” recognize it, claiming—in a deliberately unpoetic and unromantic way, calculated to further separate Maggie from her surroundings—that “Dat Johnson goil is a puty good looker” (Crane, 156 Bowery Tales 24); Pete notices it, telling Maggie, parenthetically, “Say, Mag, I’m stuck on yer shape. It’s outa sight” (Crane, Maggie 47); and the men in the seedy saloons to which Pete takes Maggie notice it, which prompts Pete into making another inspired remark, “Mag, yer a bloomin’ good-looker” (Crane,Maggie 41). The effect of Maggie’s beauty is to separate her from her surroundings, or, as Hussman explains it, “all around are violence and despair. Yet Maggie grows to a womanhood of tenderness as well as beauty, one of the least likely candidates in the bowery to end up as a prostitute” (94). Both Crane’s portrayal of Maggie and Hussman’s interpretation rely, of course, on an understanding of the importance of beauty to conventional conceptions of womanhood. Maggie is also virtuous, another absolutely vital quality in any proper young woman, and something evidently rare in the women of the Bowery. While David M. Fine claims that “. . . Crane’s story differs from other versions in his having resisted casting Maggie in the role of the long- suffering heroine struggling to maintain her purity against the wiles of a ruthless seducer” (101), this is exactly the type of virtuous activity Crane continually shows Maggie engaged in. For instance, she innocently rejects Pete’s expectation of a kiss after their first date:

“Say, Mag,” said Pete, “give us a kiss for takin’ yeh t’ d’ show, will yer?” Maggie laughed, as if startled, and drew away from him . “Naw, Pete,” she said, “dat wasn’t in it.” “Ah what d’ hell?” urged Pete. The girl retreated nervously. “Ah, what d’ hell?” repeated he. Maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs. She turned and smiled at him, then disappeared. (Crane, Maggie 64) 157 Crane carefully constructs this scene to show Maggie to be completely innocent of the true intentions of Pete. There is nothing in the girl’s manner to show that she led Pete on in any way; in fact, Crane proves just the opposite, as he shows Maggie shocked at even the suggestion of such intentions on the part of Pete (Hussman 95). Maggie just as innocently recoils from the attentions paid her by the patrons of the “hall of irregular shape.” Though she is sitting in a saloon in which the only other women are most likely prostitutes, Maggie responds to the gazes of the men just as would any virtuous woman, with fear: “Those glances of the men, shot at Maggie from under half-closed lids, made her tremble. She thought them all to be worse men than Pete” (Crane, Maggie 108). And, although Crane has ironic intentions in stating that “Maggie considered she was not what they thought her,” when she draws back her skirts in passing the painted women, there seems to be, along with the ironic foreshadowing of Maggie’s own fate as a prostitute, a sense that Crane expects any properly virtuous woman would display the same reaction. In addition to her virtue and beauty, Maggie displays an impulse toward the feminine domain of fashion and interior design. In order to impress Pete, for instance, Maggie buys material for a lambrequin, which she fashions of flowered cretonne. As she begins thinking of winning-over Pete, Maggie’s thoughts automatically drift to fashion: “She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women” (Crane,Maggie 64). Although Maggie’s efforts in the direction of fashionableness meet with the scorn and physical 158 obstruction of her mother, these efforts undoubtedly prove Maggie to be, at heart, a true woman, sharing the same interests as those of her middle- class readers. Crane symbolically sums-up Maggie’s distance from her surroundings by making her a teetotaler. In an environment in which every other individual not only drinks but—especially in the case of her family—drinks to excess, Maggie remains sober and wholesome. The excesses of Mary Johnson, whose rowdiness and disgusting appearance are always described in connection with her drinking, serve as a direct counterpoint to Maggie’s temperate behavior. In only one sentence does Crane mention Maggie as a drinker, “In a hall of irregular shape sat Pete and Maggie drinking beer” (Crane, Maggie 116; also H ussm an 95), and even there Crane makes no indication that Maggie is anything but sober. Her quiet, unassuming manner in the bar contrasts sharply with the drunken riot of the men in the bar, and further sets her apart as someone who does not belong in this environment. Even when Maggie is reduced to selling herself to survive, she stands out as relatively sober and wholesome, compared with the drunken, sordid customers of her business and with her fellow fallen women, Nell and her companions (Hapke 42). For readers undoubtedly familiar with the likes of Marry No Man if He Drinks, the connection between sobriety and virtue would be unimpeachable, almost going without saying. For these readers, Maggie’s temperance would have been as much a signal of her lady-like qualities as her beauty, virtue, and fashion-sense. Yet, for all of her similarity to traditional conceptions of womanhood, for all her distance from the environment in which she has grown up, 159 Maggie is not a perfect, middle-class woman. Just as Crane distances her from her surroundings, so he distances her from her readers. Maggie’s problem is that she is a flower in a mud puddle. As Green explains, Crane consciously separated Maggie from his middle-class readership, “By making Maggie so clearly working class, he ensured that her fall into prostitution and her suicide would not unduly disturb the reader” (235). Throughout the novel, Crane takes little ironic jabs at Maggie, intimating that her ideas of feminine qualities and her attempts at mimicking those qualities are woefully out of place in her environment. Maggie’s inattention and naivete as to her position blind her to Pete’s true character. While Crane and his reader see Pete for what he is, a loudly-dressed thug, the details of his wardrobe—“His blue double-breasted coat, edged with black braid, was buttoned close to a red puff time, and his patent-leather shoes looked like weapons—pronounce for Crane’s reader the character’s personality in no uncertain terms. The same is not true for Maggie, who, possessing impulses toward the feminine knowledge of fashion but lacking any real fashion sense, views him as “the ideal man.” Maggie cannot tell the difference between a true gentleman and a flashily dressed thug such as Pete. And Maggie’s deficiencies in spotting Pete’s lack of culture are symbolic of her later inability to foresee the consequences of her relationship with Pete. As late as their visit to the “hall of irregular shape,” Maggie still connects Pete with romanticized visions of a life with Pete every bit as secure and comfortable as that expected by any traditional bride, but in her case, Crane points out the irony of her wishes: “She imagined a future, rose-tinted because of its distance from all that she had experienced before” (Crane, Maggie 107). The implication, of course, is th a t if Maggie 160 had been more aware of her position and of the true intentions of Pete, she would not be reduced to such wishful thinking. Maggie’s horrible condition after her fall—her snivelling dependence upon and abandonment by Pete, as well as her existence as “A girl of the painted cohorts of the city”—serves as a warning to Crane’s characters not to forget the place of virtue and other womanly qualities. If Maggie had not wavered from her earlier virtuous stand, she never would have ended up on the streets and, eventually, in the river. In the final analysis, then, Crane’s portrayal of Maggie is absolutely conventional, reflecting the conventional feelings that, while the virtuous woman is beset on all sides by temptation and evil-minded men, she is in the end solely responsible for her own conduct. If she falls, the conventional wisdom went, she is largely to blame. So Maggie, though she may share responsibility with her environment, is ultimately responsible for her own death (Green 236; Hapke 42; Hussman 97). That Crane should view Maggie as to blame for her treatment at the hands of Pete and her family should really not come as too much of a surprise for the reader. After all, this tendency toward blaming the victim is one of the major characteristics of the temperance movement and other reform movements of the 19th century. As I have already mentioned, the temperance reformers displayed an ambivalent attitude toward the subjects of their reforms. While on the one hand, these reformers were honestly concerned with the welfare of alcoholics and their families, temperance advocates were also conservative-minded members of the growing American middle class, concerned with what they viewed as a threat to their way of life. In the thoughts of these temperance workers, drunken 161 hordes of immigrant laborers threatened to burst out of their tenement enclaves and wreak destruction over the middle and upper classes, while drunken husbands and sons threatened to destroy the fabric of the family, the social and economic mainstay for middle-class women. These concerns—and the overall ambivalence of the temperance movement— were embedded in the forms of the temperance literature written during the mid-19th century. The drunken foreigner, the dangerous worker, the surrogate family of the saloon and the street gang, and the drunken woman all carry with them the ideology of the temperance movement, conservative and nativist at heart. When Crane borrows the forms of the temperance tale to use as the basis for his own city fiction, he also inevitably borrows the ideology that has been inseparably attached to those forms. For example, Mary Johnson is simultaneously the drunken mother in Maggie and the drunken mothers of The Glass and Franklin Evans, and the impact of her character relies a great deal on the same ideology that lay behind her earlier prototypes, concerning the role and character of “respectable” womanhood. Just as temperance writers condemned drunken women for the threat they posed to the economic and social position of middle-class women, so does Crane condemn Mary Johnson for her refusal to follow the dictates of respectability. Furthermore, the mindset that lies behind the drunken woman character forms the basic groundwork behind Crane’s condemnation of Maggie for her own “fall.” If Mary Johnson serves as a warning concerning the dangers of the destruction of traditional feminine values and family roles, Maggie Johnson serves as a warning concerning the dangers of the misapplication of traditional feminine values in the 162

Bowery experience. Maggie “falls” not so much because of the effects of her environment as her unwillingness to accept her station. Thus Crane takes a double-edged attitude toward his heroine, precisely as the temperance advocates took a two-sided attitude toward the subjects of their reforms, at once pitying and condemning those subjects. As the critical tradition initiated by Eric Solomon has rightly explained, Crane is, indeed, a parodist, working with popular literary forms in an attempt to undermine the authority of conventional moral attitudes. But Crane is also an uneven, unfocused parodist. While he uses these popular forms to critique middle-class values and attitudes, at the same time he also employs those forms in very conventional, conservative, middle-class ways. By looking at Crane’s use of the forms of the temperance tradition, in particular, it is possible to see how Crane— however much he would like to be viewed as a radical subversive—is actually rather conventional. This inconsistency may be attributed to Crane’s age and inexperience, to the fact that “This is the writing of an inexperienced author who is guessing at his subject, which he only knows about from hearsay, or from his reading” (Cunliffe 37). Or it may be attributed to Crane’s Methodist heritage, the temperance values of which he never could escape (Gullason “Prophetic” 36, “Sources” 497; Weinstein 47; Green 226; Johnson 92). Whatever the source for this inconsistency, the important point to be made, here, is that it is Crane’s use of temperance forms in his Bowery novels that makes the inconsistency so apparent, that marks Crane the self-style bohemian as Crane the conventional moralist. CHAPTER III

SINCLAIR

At one point inThe Jungle, Upton Sinclair rails against the hypocrisy of middle-class evangelists preaching against drunkenness and vice without understanding the motivations of the men and women who partook of such activities. In a voice every bit as ironic as Crane’s in his treatment of a storefront preacher inMaggie, Sinclair describes one of the reformers: “his smooth, black coat and his neatly-starched collar, his body warm, and his belly full, and money in his pocket,”1 comparing this well- groomed, respectable member of society to the figure cut by Jurgis, who sneaks into the revival only for the benefit of the warmth and shelter provided by the meeting hall. As is usual for Sinclair, the author provides for his reader the moral of his scene: “These men were out of touch with the life they discussed,” Sinclair writes, “they were unfitted to solve its problems. . . . They were preaching about drunkenness—and what made workingmen drink but repulsive homes, exposure and hunger, over-work and uncertain employment—the fact, in a word, that his life was a hell,

1 Upton Sinclair, The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, ed. Gene DeGruson (Memphis; Atlanta: St. Lukes P, 1988) 199. All parenthetical references are to this text. Significant variations between this text and the 1906 Doubleday, Page version will be noted where appropriate. These variations are according to the Appendix at the end of the DeGruson edition, pages 337-349.

163 164 and that a man who has to live in hell had better be drunk than sober” (Sinclair 199).2 Here, then, Sinclair voices the progressive temperance philosophy of the Willard-led WCTU, a philosophy that viewed alcohol abuse as a symptom, rather than the cause of poverty. And it makes sense that Sinclair, writing a radical expos£ of Packingtown life, would support an interpretation of drunkenness that viewed drinkers as victims of larger social forces than merely the call of the bottle. Both Willard and Sinclair, after all, would have agreed with each other, could they have met, that the packers and the rest of the economic policy makers were as responsible for Jurgis’ drinking as for his family’s disintegration in the face of economic catastrophe. Yet it would be a mistake to take Sinclair consistently at his word with respect to his attitude toward alcohol. Just as the temperance tradition wavered between Willard’s conception of alcoholism as a result of poverty and the more traditional idea that poverty is a result of drunkenness, so does Sinclair split his portrayal of alcohol-related incidents in The Jungle between those like the above example that support a progressive view of alcohol and other incidents and passages that support a more conservative, traditional view. Sinclair's rhetoric in the above quote shows the author drawing a distinction between the experience and point of view of the evangelist and that of the poor men and women he is addressing. In my previous chapter, 1 explained how Crane employs a similar rhetorical strategy in his

2 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the sentence “They were preaching about drunkenness—and what made workingmen drink but repulsive homes, exposure and hunger, over-work and uncertain employment—the fact, in a word, that his life was a hell, and that a man who has to live in hell had better be drunk than sober.” 165 treatment of a temperance reformer speaking at a soup kitchen. However, although Crane tries to separate the middle-class reformer from the lower classes, the he also separates himself from the lower classes, aligning himself with his predominantly middle-class readers. Sinclair claimed to be writing The Jungle for the common working man and woman, the type of person who readAppeal to Reason, the Socialist newspaper for which he originally wrote the novel. As William A. Bloodworth explains, inU pton Sinclair, th e Appeal to Reason provided Sinclair with a connection to the subjects of his novel:

With an established circulation in the hundreds of thousands, the Appeal was the nation’s foremost Socialist voice. It was also evidence of the agrarian and western nature of the Socialist movement. By 1904, Sinclair was a conscientious reader of the Appeal, and that year he also became one of its regular contributors. The pages of theAppeal provided Sinclair with his first real sense of the masses of workers and farmers who were the foundation of American Socialism. His own involvement with the movement had been restricted to a few members of the intellectual elite, and most of his own Socialist expressions up to 1904 had been based on something other th an contact w ith working-class life. N ot only did the Appeal help provide the missing contact but it also identified Sinclair’s fixture audience. (Bloodworth 45; see also Suh 106)) And Bloodworth is not alone in feeling that Sinclair connected with his audience and his subjects; Michael Brewster Folsom, in “Upton Sinclair's Escape from The Jungle: The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America's First Proletarian Novel,” claims that “Sinclair appeared to share the point of view and sensibility of his working-class characters” (240). However, a closer look a t T heJungle indicates that Sinclair carefully separates himself and his readership from the workers he writes about. 166

Often this separation is indicated by Sinclair's use of the second person in a manner that characterizes the reader and the author as persons outside the experience of the working class: “If you had the misfortune to be bom into that class, you lived and died in it, and no galley- slave was ever chained to his oar more tightly than you were chained to your place in the machine” (Sinclair 91).3 And in some cases, the author relies upon his reader’s separation from the life of the workers in order to make some important point:

' -■% The cultured reader’s own home is provided with a bathroom—perhaps with half a dozen; and he does not have to stand in the m idst of blood and filth from seven o’clock in the morning until six, or perhaps nine, at night; and he has time to use his bathtub, and cannot understand why everyone is not as clean as he. Also, when he goes traveling he does not sleep in places where his clothing and baggage get filled with vermin; if such a deplorable accident were to happen he would probably bum them all. (Sinclair 65).4 Although Sinclair treats his “cultured reader’s” fastidiousness ironically, showing it to be inappropriate in the world of Packingtown, the point of reference in the above quote is definitely that of the “cultured reader” and not the oppressed worker. Like Crane, Sinclair approaches his subject from the point of view of his middle-class readership; although he is trying to change his readers’ thinking about the working class and the conditions in Packingtown, Sinclair relies upon middle-class perspectives on the lives of the poor in order to get across his points. In fact, much of Sinclair’s own attitude toward the workers he writes about seems to be close to that of his middle-class readership. In fact, while the Appeal’s working-class readership was ostensibly Sinclair’s audience, the audience implied by the

3 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits this sentence. 4 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits this entire passage. 167 novel’s rhetoric and structure seems to be made up of middle-class Socialists like himself. For all of his Socialist sympathies, Sinclair viewed both himself and his reader as something other than (and above) the common workers who were the subjects of his novel. That Sinclair’s socialist stance is influenced by non-radical attitudes has been noted by several of his critics. As Alfred Hornung puts it, in “Literary Conventions and the Political Unconscious in Upton Sinclair’s Work,” “. . . a deconstructive reading of the chosen literary convention will reveal the presence of a continuous and dominant political unconscious that seems to run counter to Sinclair’s stated intention to institute ‘a proletarian literature in America . . . .’” (24). The literary convention Hornung refers to is American naturalism, which Hornung claims introduces an emphasis on the individual which conflicts with Sinclair’s radical purpose, since the Socialist cause is founded on the importance of the individual as a member of the group. William A. Bloodworth, Jr., while lacking Hornung’s post-structuralist terminology, makes much the same point: “He was devoted to exposing the oppressive conditions of proletarian life under capitalism, and he apparently wrote with a working- class audience in mind. Yet he tended to view his lower-class subjects from elitist or genteel perspectives” (61). For Michael Brewster Folsom, Sinclair’s ambivalent attitude toward his subjects was the inevitable result of the author’s training and upbringing:

As Sinclair worked out his plot during months of crisis in his personal, political, and imaginative life, the great gulf widened between Sinclair, the expensively educated professional writer, and the humble working stiffs who peopled his brilliant early chapters. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant petit-bourgeois intellectual triumphed over realism, Socialism, the alien working class, and serious literature. (248) 168

Folsom is referring, here, to the notorious last chapters Theof Jungle— in which Sinclair abandons his original naturalist/realist story-telling techniques in favor of including long, windy lectures on Socialism delivered by a few new characters—and he seems to have little quarrel with Sinclair’s treatment of his working-class subjects in the remainder of the novel. But Sinclair betrays his conservative, middle-class tendencies in more than just the last three chapters of his book. That this is so can be demonstrated by examining Sinclair’s use of the forms of the temperance tradition throughout his novel. Aside from the packing plants, saloons are the most frequent setting in The Jungle. The novel begins with Jurgis’ and Ona’s ueselija, set in a Packingtown saloon. Although this is primarily a happy scene, the veselija provides Sinclair with an opportunity to connect drinking—and particularly saloons—with the problems faced by the working-class characters of the story. Sinclair links alcohol to everything from the bank panic that threatens Marija’s savings—caused by “the attempt of a policeman to arrest a drunken man in a saloon next door” (Sinclair 99)—to wife abuse and other acts of violent crime. And, throughout the novel, Sinclair relies upon traditional temperance formulations of the role of alcohol in urban life. While Sinclair’s use of these temperance conventions in the last few chapters of the novel can be explained by his self-acknowledged “comparative unfamiliarity with the rest of Chicago—except Packingtown, that is” (Harris 80), the novelist appropriates conventional plot devices and characters of the temperance tradition throughout the novel, using them as dramatic evidence to further his socialist thesis, only to find that he cannot escape the embedded 169 conservative meanings that go along with those temperance forms. Sinclair’s use of these forms reveals his basic ambivalence toward the socialist message of his novel and toward the subjects of that novel, and a close look at this phenomenon will reveal that Sinclair’s conservatism is exposed in his treatment of alcohol in two main contexts: its relationship to the breakdown of traditional family structures and its relationship to middle-class fears of ethnic or racial groups and the working class as potential sources of civil unrest. As I have already mentioned the temperance tradition emerged in the antebellum period and re-emerged after the Civil War as a result of two perceived threats to the middle-class position in society. One of these threats, of course, was the threat posed by the lower classes of American society: the poor, the newly arrived immigrants, the Irish, and the blacks. The other threat stemmed from a breakdown of traditional family structures. This breakdown was a result of the urbanization of American society and was hastened along by the drinking problems of the husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons of the threatened families, or so the temperance theory went. In temperance novels such as Franklin Evans and George Allen, temperance authors describe a three-way relationship between weakened traditional family structures, urban life, and alcohol, with all contributing to the moral and physical decline of their main characters. In The Jungle, Sinclair takes this same relationship and makes the role of alcohol and urbanization even more obviously responsible for the breakdown of family structures than had Whitman and Fox before him. For all of his radical condemnation of middle-class morality and despite the fact that he had once organized an experimental commune, Sinclair in The 170

Jungle shows himself to be as concerned about the perceived threat to traditional family structures posed by urbanization and alcohol as was the most ardent temperance advocate. The Jungle places Sinclair in the difficult position of being the author of a proletarian novel who blames the problems of an industrializing nation on the fact of its industrialization. The workers of Chicago, Sinclair implies, would be much better off if they were not in Chicago, or any other city, for that matter. Sinclair oddly sounds more like one of the transcendental agrarians of the 1840s upon whom Hawthorne based his satiric Blithedale Romance than like a serious believer in Socialism as the answer to the ills of an industrialized, capitalist society. ThroughoutThe Jungle, Sinclair makes use of the conventional view of the city being bad and the country good. Like the authors ofFranklin Evans and George Allen, and like the authors of antebellum urban reform novels such as The Poor Rich Man, The Rich Poor Man, Sinclair creates a very simplified and romanticized view of the differences between the country and the city, a view which refuses to recognize the problems which faced the immigrants in the Old Country and the problems which beset farmers at this time in the United States, yet also a view that was quite popular with middle-class reformers such as President Theodore Roosevelt (Homung 29), and, by implication, with Sinclair’s middle-class audience. In the opening scene of theveselija, Sinclair shows his Lithuanian characters reminiscing with misty-eyed nostalgia as they listen to Tomoszius Kuszlejka scratching out the times of their homeland. The music, Sinclair says, allows the immigrants to temporarily abandon their poverty and hardship for the brighter world of the Old Country: “Chicago 171 and its saloons and its slums fade away—there are green meadows and sunlit rivers, might forests and snow-clad hills. They behold home- landscapes and childhood scenes returning; old loves and friendships begin to waken, old joys and griefs to laugh and weep” (Sinclair 5). Indeed, Sinclair claims the Lithuanians hold onto their wedding festival entirely because of its connections with their lives in a better time and place: “The veselija has come down to them from a far-off time, a time when money was made for man and not man for money—when the fruits of the earth belonged to the person who tilled it, and when plenty and to spare was the reward of honest toil” (Sinclair 10).5 Just when such a golden age existed in Lithuania is not made clear, nor is the reason why the immigrants would have left such a land of milk and honey for the trials and tribulations of life in the New World. Sinclair similarly glosses over the problems of life in the country, allowing Jurgis to tramp merrily throughout the countryside, living off the land at the expense of greedy farmers who refuse to share the wealth of the land with the likes of Jurgis, while making no mention of the economic and physical hardships which daily drove farmers into the cities for a second chance at life. Sinclair’s motivation for valorizing the country is uncertain and unknowable, but it would seem that his comparisons are meant to further the effect of his descriptions of the stockyard district of Chicago as a place of misery and evil. The effect of these comparisons, however, is certain; they reinforce long-standing notions of the city as evil and the country as good, notions which proved valuable to advocates of the temperance tradition attempting to link alcohol and urbanization to the possibility of the

® In the Doubleday, Page version of the novel, this sentence ends with “a far-off time.” 172 destruction of traditional family structures. I have already outlined the manner in which Sinclair links alcohol to the seedy side of life in Chicago; this connection is important in understanding the role of alcohol in the disintegration of the traditional family that Sinclair describes in The Jungle. For Sinclair, as for the temperance writers who preceded him, alcohol abuse inevitably leads the drinker into other vices so plentiful in the city, which in turn brings the entire family in contact with dangerous influences that work to weaken traditional family roles. Of all the temperance character types I have discussed so far, easily the most common of all is the drunken husband/father. Inevitably violent and irresponsible, the drunken husbands and fathers of temperance stories are among the most effective of the temperance forms because they strike closest to the real fears of the middle-class women who made up the bulk of temperance advocates. The drunken husband/father was a tangible and terrifying symbol of the dangers to the family exposed to alcohol, and the drunken husband/father proved to be an enduring literary type. Temperance writers, of course, relied on the character, but so, too, did “serious” writers such as Poe and Twain. And, as I showed in the previous chapter, Stephen Crane relied on the form in his creation of Maggie’s father. Sinclair embraces the form without question, utilizing it again and again for effect in his attempts to shock his reader with the hardships brought on the workers by their urban environment. Early in the novel, as Sinclair moves through the crowd at Jurgis’ and Ona’s veselija, giving glimpses of the stories behind many of the guests, the author’s attention falls upon Jadviga Marciukus and her big boyfriend, Mikolas; among the 173 many ills that beset this unfortunate couple is the drunken father of Mikolas, whose inability to support his own family prevents the boyfriend from marrying Jadviga. The generosity of one of the neighbors who contribute their scarce money to pay for a midwife to help Ona give birth to her second child is enhanced when Sinclair adds that she “had a husband who was a skilled cattle-butcher, but a drinking man” (Sinclair 159) and, therefore, a poor provider. When Jurgis spends time in jail after beating Connor, prominent among his cellmates, each of whom is representative of the lowest of life in Chicago, is a “drunken wife-beater” (Sinclair 137). And Sinclair emphasizes Jurgis’ descent into depravity after Ona’s death by having his hero drink heavily with little thought of his family’s welfare when he steals Katrina’s money and leaves the family for the comfort of the saloon. Later, when as a worker in the tunnels under Chicago Jurgis spent all his money on saloon-pleasures, Sinclair describes the life of the saloon- goer as the opposite of the family life Jurgis has rejected: “Our friend had now no home to go to, no children to laugh and play with, no wife to greet him, to plead with him and save him from himself; he had no affection now in his life, only the pitiful mockery of it in thecamaraderie of vice” (Sinclair 196).6 This opposition of the family and the false family of the saloon is a staple of the temperance tradition, as exemplified by Ten Nights in a Bar- Room, in which men are seen to mingle in degenerate company rather than tend to their families’ needs and in which Simon and Frank Slade’s father-son relationship is twisted by exposure to the bad atmosphere of the

6 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the phrase “no children to laugh and play with, no wife to greet him, to plead with him and save him from himself.” 174 saloon into a “pitiful mockery” of what such relationships should be. The message behind Sinclair’s examples of the effects of drinking on the family is identical to that of the temperance writer, that drinking causes men to fall away from the family and accept the poor substitute of the saloon, a substitution which harms both the drinker and the family he no longer supports. In the world view of temperance writers, children were major victims of alcohol abuse, whether these children were subjected to abuse at the hands of their drunken fathers, as is the case with the young boy in My Mother’s Gold Ring, or whether they succumb to temptation and embark themselves on the road to alcoholic ruin, as do the main characters in Franklin Evans, George Allen, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. For Sinclair, the main threat to the children of Packingtown is the Americanization of their value systems, the rejection of their parents’ ways for the ways of the big city. At first glance, this would seem to be an anti- nativist stance, since it validates the cultures the immigrants brought with them from Europe, something the nativistic temperance movement would never agree with. But in fact, what Sinclair actually describes is not the replacement of European values by American values, but the replacement of family values—recognizable to any traditional-minded American—for the values of the city. And the values of the city are intimately tied to the connection between alcohol and vice to which Sinclair returns again and again. In The Jungle, childhood disappears when families are forced through economic necessity to put their children to work, an act which 175 exposes the children to the vices of the city, chief among which is alcohol. At one point early in the story, Sinclair rails against child labor laws:

One would like to know what the lawmakers expected them to do; there were families that had no possible means of support except that [of] the children, and the law provided them no other way of getting a living. If they begged or stole they would be put in jail—it would be very interesting to know what the rich people meant. (Sinclair 57)7 But Sinclair spends the rest of the book actually arguing implicitly in favor of such labor restrictions by showing how putting children to work destroyed their childhood, forcing them into premature adulthood. For example, Villimui and Nikalojus, eleven and ten, respectively, are sent into the city to sell newspapers, and quickly fall prey to the ways of the city:

They were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick up cigar stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling with pennies and dice and cigarette-cards; they were learning the location of all the houses of prostitution on the “Levee,” and the names of the “madames” who kept them, and the days when they gave their gorgeous banquets, which the police-captains and the big politicians all attended. If a visiting “country customer” were to ask them they could show him which was “Hinkydink’s” famous saloon, and could even point out to him by name the different gamblers and thugs and “hold-up men” who made the place their headquarters. Among other things the boys were getting out of the habit of coming home at night. What was the use, they would ask, of wasting time and energy and possible car-fare riding out to the stock-yards every night, when the weather was pleasant, and they could crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep exactly as well? (Sinclair 117-118) Alcohol commands a central position in this description, reflecting the importance of alcohol to the world of vice and corruption found in the city. Alcohol also plays an important role in the demise of Stanislovas, the oldest boy in the household, who was hired by the men of an oil factory to get their

7 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the second sentence of this passage. 176 beer at lunch—a very typical employment for young boys in the city. Stanislovas’ death is worthy of the most sensational passages of a Maria Lamas or a Timothy Shay Arthur: “He used to carry cans on a long pole. And he’d drink a little out of each can, and one day he drank too much, and fell asleep in a corner, and got locked up in the place all night. When they found him the rats had killed him and eaten him nearly all up” (Sinclair

260). And alcohol plays a part in the decline of other immigrant youths, who replace the traditions of their parents for the me-first attitudes of the city toughs, represented by the insolent youths who crash the veselija a t the beginning of the story: “Still others, worse yet, would crowd about the bar, and at the expense of the host drink themselves sodden, paying not the least attention to anyone, and leaving it to be thought that either they had danced with the bride already, or meant to later on” (Sinclair 12). For all of these young men and boys, the alcohol-related attitudes of the city have replaced their original family-oriented attitudes, leaving them with no moral guidance at all. Therefore, alcohol is shown by Sinclair to play a major role in the destruction of childhood, which in turn contributes to the weakening of traditional family structures. Along with drunken husbands and wayward children, a third illustration of the threat alcohol posed to the family employed by temperance writers was the fallen woman. In some ways, the fallen woman was the most powerful literary device available for temperance authors, since the majority of their readers were middle-class women, those who stood to lose the most with the disintegration of the traditional family. Predictably, Sinclair draws a traditional portrait of the relationship 177 between women and the decline of the family, first tying alcohol to prostitution and sexual depravity in general and then providing examples of how “good” and “bad” women react to the alcohol-related world of the city. A large proportion of Jurgis’ solo wanderings in and away from the city are spent in situations involving both alcohol and prostitution. When Jurgis works with the harvester gangs during his time tramping around the countryside, he spends his earnings on drinking and sex, drawn into the grip of a vast complex of saloons and prostitutes which has been organized to take the money from workers such as Jurgis. Later, Jurgis hooks up with the political graft of Chicago through “hanging round in dives and gambling-houses and brothels” (Sinclair 226). As I have already noted, when the packers bring in strikebreakers to destroy the unions, they also bring in “trainloads of supplies” for the strikebreakers, “including wagon-loads of beer and whiskey” and “all the available prostitutes of the city and vicinity .. . as cooks and waitresses” (Sinclair 239).8 The actions of the packers during the strike undeniably show the connection Sinclair wishes to make between alcohol and prostitution, as does Jurgis’ conversation with Marija, after he stumbles upon her in a brothel: “If the girls didn’t booze they couldn’t stand it any time at all. The madam would rather they took dope, of course, for that keeps them quiet—when they have had enough, they don’t care what is done to them.” (Sinclair 263). And, when Sinclair wants to create an image of absolute depravity, he calls upon a mixture of madness, drunkenness, and prostitution:

8 The entire passage in question reads thus in the Doubleday, Page version: “And meantime trainloads of supplies were coming in for their accommodation, including beer and whiskey, so that they might not be tempted to go outside.” 178 These desperate ones were the dregs of the city’s cesspools, wretches who hid at night in the rain-soaked cellars of old ramshackle tenements, in “stale-beer dives” and opium-joints, with abandoned women in the last stages of the harlot’s progress—women who had been kept by Chinamen and turned away at last to die. Every day the police net would drag hundreds of them off the streets, and in the Detention Hospital you might see them, herded together in a miniature inferno, with hideous, beastly faces, bloated and leprous with disease, laughing, shouting, screaming, in all stages of drunkenness, barking like dogs, gibbering like apes, raving and tearing themselves in the last stages of delirium. (Sinclair 201)9 Sinclair’s wording in this type of description shows the author’s removal from his subject matter. The “stale-bear dives,” the “opium-joints,” and the woman-keeping “Chinamen” are staples of urban reform exposes, such as How the Other Half Lives, while the recurrent references to “stages” echoes the phraseology of mid-century reformers, including temperance fiction writers. These temperance writers would also find familiar Sinclair’s descriptive adjectives for the “last stages of delirium”; the “barking,” “gibbering,” and “raving” Sinclair employs is quite similar to Lamas’s description in The Glass of a drunkard in the last stages of the delirium trem ens at the county Alms House Lunatic Asylum:

Stretched on a rude pallet, and guarded by two under-keepers, who restrained him when necessary, lay a bloated wretch, whom I could not recognize. . . . There lay the wretched drunkard occasionally passive and silent, with the white foam escaping from his lips, his eyes glassed and staring, the pupils extended to their utmost dilatation, the blood seeming ready to start from his skin, his fingers quivering nervously—then, with fearful howls and shrieking curses, struggling in the stong arms of his captors. (27)

Clearly, then, Sinclair is drawing upon the temperance tradition in his use of alcohol-related terminology in order to create a sense of depravity.

9 The Doubleday, Page text reads, “tearing themselves in delirium.” 179

While much of Sinclair’s exposure of the connections between alcohol and prostitution was based on reliable evidence—if one is to believe the accounts of the reform journalists who witnessed these connections firsthand—his treatment of the connections within the novel seems equally based on earlier reform writings, particularly temperance stories. For temperance writers, there were only two possible responses a woman could make to the threat and temptation posed by alcohol: either the character maintains her womanly decorum and moral bearings and becomes a drunkard’s wife (or daughter or mother) figure, or she gives in to the pressures of alcohol and becomes a drunken woman character. In either case, the fate of the individual is a matter of character. Even in the face of awful suffering and hardship, a truly good woman— such as Fannie Morgan fromTen Nights in a Bar-Room—will stick to her principles and suffer for her family’s sake, never giving in to temptation, while those of lesser moral and personal strength—such as Helen More from The Glass—find themselves in trouble when faced with difficult situations. The difference between Helen More and Fannie Morgan, or between More and any of the other drunkard’s wives who are ground up in these stories—such as Mary Evans or Ann Slade—is simply willpower and goodness of heart, which makes the drunkard’s wife and drunken woman characters into a neat representation of the polarization of choices facing Victorian women in a number of ideas. The drunkard’s wife character represents traditional female roles and choices, while the drunken woman represents their opposite; that there are only two possible choices available reflects the narrow opportunities for action allowed women in nineteenth- century American society. Alcohol, though it is indeed the catalyst behind 180 such choices in temperance fiction, is not the substance of the choices; the substance of such choices is the adherance to the rules governing the behavior of women. InThe Jungle, Sinclair utilizes these two character types in the form of Ona and Marija. Drinking is a part of the forces that work against these two women, but the presence of alcohol in the novel is only part of the connection between Sinclair’s two main women characters and the two main types of female characters in temperance fiction. Like the temperance drunkard’s wife and drunken woman characters, Ona and Marija present the reader with opposite reactions to the same situations, and their cases taken together serve as a validation of traditional conceptions of women, just as with the temperance characters. In The Jungle, the most obvious descendent of the drunkard’s wife character is Ona, Jurgis’s young wife, a model of womanhood who maintains her separation from other, less worthy female characters and who becomes the standard against which those other characters are judged. Ona, like the drunkard’s wives of temperance fiction, is a representation of everything a woman is supposed to be, according to nineteenth-century definitions of gender roles. Sinclair, for example, refers to Ona as “one of god’s gentlest creatures,” and “Little Ona,” both of which mark her as insignificant and helpless as far as worldly matters are concerned. Another conventional characteristic of womanhood is that women are supposed to be not only virgins when married but virtually ignorant and definitely uninterested in anything to do with sex; Sinclair reinforces the impression of Ona as an innocent child/woman when he describes the wedding speech of Jokubas Szadwilas “in which he showers congratulations and prophesies of happiness upon the bride and groom, 181 proceeding to particulars which greatly delight the young men, but which cause Ona to blush more furiously than ever” (Sinclair 6). The significance of Ona’s blushing in the above quote is highlighted by the separation between the men and women, with the men interested in sex and the women fearful and embarrassed by any reference to it. The innocence of the traditional woman is only matched by her dependence upon her husband. For 19th century American women, few practical options existed as far as independent action was concerned, and one way this dependence was made permanent and unquestionable was by making it an admirable quality in a woman. In temperance fiction, this characteristic of the traditional woman was included in the drunkard’s wife character, a relatively passive figure whose only active course when faced with a drunken husband is to attempt to persuade him to mend his ways. Some—such as Fannie Morgan or the narrator ofMy Mother’s Gold Ring—succeed in persuading their husbands to give up the bottle, but the others—such as Ann Slade or Mary Evans—are destroyed by their husbands’ drinking. None of the wives of drunkards in these stories ever strikes off on her own to raise her children independently of her husband, since such an action would be not only financially irresponsible but improper. In fact, it is the inability of women to act in any way to save themselves that instills a sense of horror into the drunkard’s wife character; and it is this same limitation of the conventional role for women which lead, ironically, to the formation of the WCTU, the first national organization in which women did, indeed, have an active role in determining their own futures. For all the potential the WCTU held for women to direct their lives, however, the heart of the temperance 182 movement at all times remained loyal to the concept that women should be dependent upon their husbands. In The Jungle, this dependence of a woman on her man is a major part of Ona’s characterization. Sinclair constantly emphasizes Ona’s childlike dependence on Jurgis for protection and support. At one point, after Jurgis has uttered his normal solution to any problem facing him or his family, “I will work harder,” Ona practically swoons in girlish admiration for her husband: “Ona drew a deep breath; it was so wonderful to have a husband, just like a grown girl—and a husband who could solve all problems, and who was so big and strong!” (Sinclair 14). Jurgis, for his part, maintains the dependence of Ona by first carrying her home like a child from the veselija and then preventing her (along with the children) from working after they are married. Jurgis’s attitude toward Ona is protective and possessive, simultaneously:

She was so sensitive—she was not fitted for such a life as this, the truth be told; and a hundred times a day, when he thought of her, Jurgis would clench his hands and again fling himself at the task before him. She was too good for him, he told himself, and he was afraid, because she was his. So long he had hungered to possess her, but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the right; that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness and no virtue of his. (Sinclair 62)10 In short, Sinclair describes in Ona and Jurgis the perfect traditional couple, th e wife an innocent, helpless, good-hearted, beautiful child who is completely dependent upon the husband, a huge, strong, hard-working, loving man.

10 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the phrase “the truth be told.” 183

That the relationship of this perfect couple should end in tragedy is solely due to the fact that economic necessity forces the Rudkos family to abandon the traditional roles assigned to husband and wife, the husband working to support the family and the wife staying home to raise a family. All of the problems that lead to Ona’s death are the result of her going to work, and—significantly—all of these problems are tied by Sinclair to alcohol, in one way or another. Ona’s health is jeopardized by work for which, Sinclair makes recurrent mention, the young woman is physically ill-suited; the travelling, the exposure, the all-day standing, all combine to wear away Ona’s delicate health. Once Ona returns to work after giving birth to Antanas—thereby becoming a working mother, as well as a working wife—she begins to experience what Sinclair calls “womb-trouble”:

The great majority of the women who worked in Packingtown suffered in the same way, and from the same cause, so it was not deemed a thing to see the doctor about; instead Ona would try patent medicines, one after another, as her friends told her about them. As these all contained alcohol, or some other stimulant, she found that they all did her good, while she took them; and so she was always chasing the phantom of good health, and losing it because she was too poor to continue. (Sinclair 95) While the alcohol she ingests is incidental to the medicine, the fact that she is forced to consume it by the condition to which working has reduced her is quite significant. This is especially true, since Ona is not herself tempted by alcohol as an escape from the problems working force upon her. Instead, Ona’s demise is linked to alcohol through the conspiracy of her “forelady” and Connor, the drunken Irish boss of the sausage room, who coerces Ona into an affair with him, threatening her with the demise of her family if she fails to comply with his ugly requests. Although Ona is, herself, innocent of any wrong-doing—she only goes with Connor to protect 184 her family—the fact that she has left her role of wife and mother makes her vulnerable to the vice connected to alcohol, personified by Connor. As in the case of the temperance stories, alcohol, here, serves as a representation of the threats posed to women who step outside of their tradition roles as wives and mothers within the home. Ona, herself innocent of any real wrongdoing other than leaving her home for the workplace, is destroyed by her connection with Connor and dies a death that Jurgis, in his hypocrisy, sees as fully justified:

It was a thing that could not be faced; a new shuddering seized him every time he tried to think of it. No, there was no bearing the load of it, there was no living under it. There would be none for her—he knew that he might pardon her, might plead with her on his knees, but she would never look him in the face again, she would never be his wife again. The shame of it would kill her—there could be no other deliverance, and it was best that she should die. (Sinclair 138) So, in his portrayal of Ona and Jurgis’ marriage, Sinclair illustrates the same message that any temperance advocate would have identified with. When the city makes it impossible for Jurgis and Ona to follow conventional notions of family life, their fate is as doomed as is that of Simon Slade’s family, when his new life as a saloonkeeper slowly erodes the traditional structures within the Slade family; Ona’s death is as inevitable as Ann Slade’s trip to the county sanitarium. In a way, Ona’s death provides Sinclair with an opportunity to critique traditional gender roles. After all, if the very best the conventional conception of womanhood can offer is not good enough to survive in the modern city, then maybe there is something wrong with that conception, maybe Ona is killed as much by the inadequacies of the system as by the outside forces—represented by the alcoholic Connor—preying on her. This, 185 however, is not the only message behind Ona’s story. Like the temperance authors—whose stories also kill off virtuous characters—Sinclair deflects criticism away from the institution of nineteenth-century womanhood by providing an example of its opposite. In temperance fiction, the opposite of the drunkard’s wife character is the drunken woman; in The Jungle, the opposite of Ona is Marija. Without Marija, Ona’s death would be a blow against traditional female roles; with Marija, the views of womanhood that lie behind the character of are validated. Marija is probably the most unlike Ona of any female character in The Jungle, and, as Ona is the standard against which all women in the novel are to be judged, Marija is the example of what women should avoid at all costs. Comparing Marija to Ona, one can see just how carefully Sinclair manipulates his reader’s conventional views of womanhood in creating this anti-woman. In fact, though she is never portrayed with anything of the sensationalism of Crane’s Mary Johnson, Marija shares with Maggie’s mother many of the characteristics of the drunken woman figure of temperance fiction. While I am not claiming that Sinclair set out in creating the character of Marija with the drunken woman temperance character in mind—a claim I am most certainly ready to make concerning Crane’s characterization of Mary Johnson—the author ofThe Jungle does seem to employ the tradition of the drunken woman character, consciously or unconsciously, in creating a character who represents the opposite of everything Ona stands for. Marija, unlike Ona, definitely deserves—is almost destined for—the fate that awaits her in the brothel in which Jurgis finds her. 186

Ona is a quiet, demure, innocent child of a woman; Marija, on the other hand, is a loud, boisterous, aggressive woman. While Ona is a perfect example of traditional womanhood, Marija is almost masculine in her attributes. Sinclair emphasizes Marija’s masculinity throughout the novel, but particularly in his early descriptions of Ona’s cousin. In one such description, Marija seems to rival Jurgis in her commanding physical stature:

Marija is short, but powerful in build. She works in Smith’s canning factory, and all day long she handles cans of beef that weigh fourteen pounds. She has a broad Slavic face, with prominent red cheeks. When she opens her mouth it is tragical, but you cannot help thinking of a horse. She wears a blue-flannel shirt-waist, which is now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving-fork in her hand with which she pounds on the table to mark the time. (Sinclair 6) The details of Sinclair’s description—the “broad Slavic face,” the rolled up shirt sleeves, and the “brawny arms”—reveal how the author has employed typically masculine details in order to emphasize the lack of femininity in Marija. Sinclair also shows Marija’s lack of traditional feminine charms through her behavior, which is aggressive enough for a barroom brawler, much less the cousin of the bride:

The occasion rested heavily upon Marija’s broad shoulders—it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling everyone out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. . . . Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and, springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall. Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, “Eik! Eik Uzderck-durys!” in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music. (Sinclair 1) 187

Sinclair continues to emphasize Marija’s unfeminine qualities when he has her find a job in the smoked beef canning plant—her boss impressed by “the combination of a face full of boundless good-nature and the muscles of a dray horse” (Sinclair 36)—and later when she finds a second job as a replacement for a man. It is easy to see, then, how Marija can be viewed as the opposite of the child-woman Ona; Marija’s character is a deliberate departure from the conventions of womanhood, and Sinclair does his best to separate her from those conventions. In a way, Marija can be seen as a positive character, a type of “new woman” who is capable of surviving in the face of forces which destroy the likes of Ona. Marija’s “descent” into prostitution, in such a view, merely indicates her strength, her ability to adapt to any situation in which she finds herself. From this perspective, Marija’s aggressive behavior and masculine characteristics are virtues in an economic system which rewards action and hard work. Compared to Ona, Marija is the perfect woman for her situation. Yet this view of M arija is only valid to a point, and there is a definite sense in the novel that Sinclair does not view Marija in so positive a light. In fact, Sinclair is quite careful to contrast Marija’s practical, survival-oriented behavior with the selfless, family-oriented behavior of Ona. Perhaps the easiest way to uncover Sinclair’s attitude toward Marija is to examine her relation to the figure of the drunken wom an. From the opening of the novel, Sinclair carefully distinguishes between Ona’s and Marija’s attitudes toward alcohol. In the midst of the bedlam of the veselija, Ona’s feminine purity keeps her safe from the temptations of the free-flowing booze surrounding her: 188

Little Ona is nearly ready to faint—and half in a stupor herself, because of the heavy scent in the room. She has not taken drop herself, but everyone else there is literally burning alcohol, as the lamps are burning oil; some of the men who are sound asleep in their chairs or on the floor, are reeking of it so that you cannot go near them. (Sinclair 15) Marija, on the other hand, has freely imbibed throughout the evening, an activity which has made her even more difficult to deal with than normally (if at all possible). The fact that Marija drinks marks her as an anti­ woman of sorts, but what turns her into a full-fledged drunken woman character is the fact that she is a violent drunk: “And Marija is just fighting drunk, when there comes to her ears the facts about the villains who have not paid that night. Marija goes on the warpath straight off, without even the preliminary of a good cursing, and when she is pulled off it is with the coat collars of two villains in her hands” (Sinclair 15). Later in the story when Marija is out of work and looking for a job, she even looks for work in the saloons, something no respectable woman such as Ona would ever dream of trying. Marija’s connection with alcohol could be viewed as just another example of her uniqueness and separation from the sterility of traditional females such as Ona if it were not for the scene in which Jurgis finds Marija among a group of very drunken prostitutes in a brothel. Throughout this scene, Sinclair carefully separates the drunken, strung- out Marija from any of the characteristics of “proper” women that she may have exhibited before. Even Jurgis is shocked by her lack of propriety and traditional female modesty:

Marija had nothing on but a kimona and a pair of stockings; yet she proceeded to dress before Jurgis, and without even taking the trouble to close the door. He had by this time divined 189 what sort of a place he was in; and he had seen a great deal of the world since he had left home, and was not easy to shock— and yet it gave him a painful start that Marija should do this. They had always been decent people at home, and it seemed to him that the memory of old times ought to have ruled her. (Sinclair 259) Jurgis’s distinction between “decent people” and Marija is a significant indication of Sinclair’s attitude toward the ham-canner-turned-prostitute, especially since he has up until this point separated Marija’s personality traits from those of Ona. Most importantly, the same personality traits that make Marija a good worker also lead her to drink and into prostitution. Marija, like the drunken woman of temperance fiction, “falls” because she lacks something found in Ona that allows the latter character to stick to her principles in the face of overwhelming odds. That Sinclair views the differences between Marija and Ona in favor of Ona is revealed by Jurgis’s comparison between Marija’s and Ona’s fate. While Ona dies of what is basically a broken heart of what she is forced to do with Connor in order to save her family, Marija later calmly tells Jurgis that the family should have cashed in on Ona from the first: “When people are starving . . . and they have anything with a price, they out to sell it, I say. I guess you realize it now when it’s too late. Ona could have taken care of us all in the beginning” (Sinclair 261). Jurgis, though he has drifted throughout the low life of Chicago society and though he has robbed, cheated, and murdered for money, himself, cannot bring himself to agree with Marija’s cynical attitude toward Ona: “‘I—yes, I guess so,’ Jurgis answered, hesitatingly. He did not add that he had paid three hundred dollars, and a foreman’s job, for the satisfaction of knocking down the boss a second time” (Sinclair 261). As he reflects on Marija’s comments, Jurgis realizes the depths to which she has plunged. His thoughts take him back 190 to his family before their tragedy and, inevitably, to Ona. As Sinclair describes it, these thoughts of Ona and the family’s problems are “the old voices of his soul” and lead to the reformulation of a conscience in Jurgis, a conscience which will soon be tapped into by the Socialist speakers he is about to encounter at a rally soon after he takes his leave of Marija. Marija, then, as the antithesis of Ona’s purity and traditional femininity, serves as the final straw that breaks Jurgis free of his cynical, self-indulgent m indset. The lesson behind the stories of Marija and Ona and the other “fallen” women ofThe Jungle is a lesson that would have seemed familiar to Sinclair’s traditionally minded middle-class readership. These women “fall” because they cannot stay home in their traditional roles as wife and mother or because they are not suited for those traditional roles. Ona was a perfect traditional woman, who was tom from her suited role by economic necessity. Her death following her ruin at the hands of Connor is as blameless as the deaths of the suffering wives of the drunkards in temperance stories such as Franklin Evans or Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Ona never strays from the standards of traditional womanhood, and, in fact, becomes the standard by which other characters are judged. Marija is absolutely the opposite of Ona; her descent into prostitution is attributable to the economic conditions of life in Packingtown, to be sure, but there is also a sense that her final situation is a result of her own personality, of her lack of traditional feminine qualities. Since Marija does not belong within the formulas of womanhood prescribed by tum-of-the- century American society, she has no more hope of a happy ending to her story than Mary Johnson has to hers. It should be no surprise, then, that 191

Sinclair utilizes temperance forms in his novel, since the messages behind his characters of Marija and Ona are identical to those behind the temperance characters of the drunken woman and the suffering wife. As Bloodworth discusses, even though Sinclair paints things grimly for Jurgis when he returns from the countryside, the author actually strengthens the traditional view of the family:

Jurgis returns to Chicago the following autumn. He finds a job digging tunnels beneath the city but discovers that the wages and security of a job are no protection against loneliness. The single life is not good and he has no place to go in the evenings except to saloons. .. . Here Sinclair seems to indicate that family life has meaning even under capitalism; at the very least it is a stay against the bottle and the whorehouse. (Bloodworth 53-54) Although Sinclair may have set out to show how the society in which his women characters live is so corrupt and evil that even the best of them cannot survive in it, his use of these temperance character types—that is, his creation of the characters of Marija and Ona so closely resembling the earlier temperance characters—actually sends his reader the same message as did temperance stories, that traditional family roles must be preserved at the risk of death and depravity. Sinclair’s use of the drunkard’s wife and drunken woman in his characterization of Ona and Marija—combined with his other allusions to the threat alcohol poses to the family—places him squarely within the temperance tradition. And this connection with the temperance tradition brings with it the white, middle-class mindset that lies behind the temperance fiction forms he utilizes. When Sinclair alludes to the drunken father, he also alludes to the temperance movement’s goal of protecting the family as a viable social structure. Even though Sinclair blames the 192 economic and social environment of the city for the problems which plague the family, his use of the drunkard’s wife and drunken women characters orients his perspective toward that of the middle class, for whom the problems which confront Ona and Marija are definitely someoneelse* s. This middle-class perspective can be found also in Sinclair’s treatment of ethnicity and race in The Jungle, particularly as these issues are related to alcohol. Even more than in the case of family issues, Sinclair falls into temperance tradition modes of thought regarding ethnicity and race as he utilizes temperance conventions to portray the drinking of his immigrant and black characters. Connected early on with mid-nineteenth-century anti-immigrant groups, such as the Know-Nothings, the temperance movement was deeply influenced by nativist thinking. For mid-century temperance advocates, the drinking of Irish immigrants presented just one more threat to the social structures their movement sought to protect. This early linkeage between alcohol and nativist prejudice continued right through the turn of the century, serving not only the temperance movement but also other reform movements as a handy weapon in the fight for immigration control—the Progressive era, after all, is marked not only by such reforms as women’s suffrage and prohibition, but also by some of the toughest immigration restrictions every instituted in the United States. Not unexpectedly, the temperance fiction tradition reflects the nativist orientation of the temperance movement. In such stories asFranklin Evans, George Allen, and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, temperance authors portray immigrants—particularly the Irish—as scandalous drunkards 193 who represent the opposite of middle-class, predominantly northern, WASP respectability. As far as immigrants from central- and eastern-European countries are concerned, Sinclair tends to break with the nativist slant of the temperance tradition, avoiding the type of negative ethnic stereotypes associated with temperance thinking. The Lithuanians, of course, are well-represented by the Jurgis Rudkos, Ona Lukoszis, Marija Biarczynskas, Teta Elzbieta, and the other members of their extended family, who work diligently in the face of overwhelming odds, but who are finally ground down by the awful hardships that confront them. The Slovaks and Poles, too, are treated positively, and the Germans are singled out for special praise, represented in the narrative by the family who had owned the first share in the house later purchased by Jurgis’s family: “The German family had been a good sort. To be sure, there had been a great many of them, which was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half paid for the house” (Sinclair 56). While the portrayal of Germans as thrifty and hard-working was a stereotype in reform literature as far back as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Sinclair’s sympathetic treatment of the eastern European immigrants in The Jungle was unusual for the time. By 1905, when The Jungle was published by Doubleday, Page & Company, the third great wave of immigrants was pouring into the United States from southern and eastern Europe. In response to the growing numbers of new immigrants, nativist sentiments in the United States were on the rise, and many members of the middle class—including the participants in middle-class 194 reform movements such as the temperance movement—subscribed to racist portrayals of eastern and southern Europeans as lazy, ignorant, hard-drinking, and beast-like. Sinclair, on the other hand, portrays the Lithuanians and other eastern Europeans who appear in his story as hard­ working, temperate laborers, who try their best to succeed against the odds. Yet Sinclair’s descriptions of his ethnic characters are far from untainted by middle-class, nativist thinking. For one thing, the “good foreigners” in The Jungle are only superficially ethnic. As Antanas Musteikis explains, in “The Lithuanian Heroes of The Jungle,” Sinclair uses Lithuanian names and phrases in his descriptions of his main characters, but, aside from the opening scene of the veselija, puts very little into his characters that is essentially Lithuanian (Musteikis 30). Bloodworth claims that“The Jungle imposes traditional American images on its foreign characters” (61), a criticism that Musteikis upholds. In fact, according to Musteikis, much of the longish story of how the immigrants came to be in Packingtown is seemingly based a combination of popular American western stories and on Sinclair’s mistaken equation of Lithuania with Imperial Tsarist Russia, of which it was at that time a part. Sinclair, for example, claims that Jurgis walks a fortnight to meet Ona, when it would only take a fortnight to walk across the entire length of Lithuania; and, for another example, Sinclair keeps referring to the Lithuanians as Slavs, when ethnic Lithuanians are more Germanic than Slavic and would be rather insulted by the confusion (Musteikis 30). Sinclair’s Lithuanians are much more American than Lithuanian, especially in terms of their response to their new environment: 195 Since the author revealed some genuine Lithuanian cultural features, we expect their continuation at least to some degree in the new American environment. We agree that corrupted industrial and political patterns had to affect our “New Americans” (the Lithuanian emigrants), more or less disintegrating their previous cultural ways. But we could not contend that the Rudkus family instantly became a kind of tabula rasa in which only the experiences of the new environment remained. (Musteikis 33) So, in some ways, the “good foreigners” inThe Jungle are good precisely because they are not very foreign. And even then, to say that the immigrant Lithuanians in Sinclair’s novel are always positively portrayed would be totally inaccurate. Jurgis and his family serve Sinclair in a very important role in The Jungle. As inexperienced newcomers to Packingtown, the Lithuanians provide Sinclair with fresh eyes through which to show his readers the horrors of life in and around the slaughterhouses: “Now, of course, Sinclair was setting out to question the laws and ways of the meat packers’ works, and he used Jurgis’ initial innocence and gradual disillusionment as foil and technique of discovery” (Folsom 243). But the naivete and innocence of the immigrant Rudkos family seems to make a point beyond its merely practical value for the story line. The Lithuanians seem almost too naive for belief, and there develops over the course of the story a distancing between the author and his reader on the one hand and the immigrants on the other which is subtly reminiscent of the distancing that takes place in Maggie between Crane and the reader and Maggie and her associates. Many times throughout the first chapters of the novel Sinclair exploits the lack of experience of the immigrants in a manner that makes 196 them look positively simple-minded, as when they are shown a sleazy operation involving a brickyard:

Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys. First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and not yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with the nearby soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun; and then, when winter came, somebody cut the ice on it, and sold it to the people of Packingtown. This, too, seemed to the newcomers an economical arrangement; for they did not read the newspapers, and their heads were not full of troublesome thoughts about germs. (Sinclair 24) Sinclair applies the same patronizing tone to his description of the newcomers’ tour of the packinghouses. At one point, the group watches cattle driven up chutes to the tops of the buildings: “In these chutes the stream of animals was continuous; it ws [sic] quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious—a very river of death. Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all” (Sinclair 27). Jurgis, in particular, is described as “unsophisticated,” “guileless,” and “ignorant,” but Sinclair applies the same overall description to the entire family, as they are continually misled and swindled by their more clever American-born peers. Sinclair’s conscious motives for emphasizing the naivete of his immigrant family are no doubt noble ones, but the subtle message his handling of this quality in his characters brings to the reader is merely a watered-down version of the same nativist, WASP-oriented view of immigrant laborers as was current at the time. 197

But the nativist strains of Sinclair’s handling of his eastern European immigrants are relatively benign and hardly noticeable. With the above reservations noted, Sinclair does seem to attempt to make his Lithuanians into likeable characters. The same cannot be said for Sinclair’s portrayals of other immigrants and ethnic Americans in The Jungle. Folsom explains that Sinclair at times takes a very conservative view of those different from himself and his middle-class readership:

At his worst, Sinclair could shift from condescension to contempt—even to vulgar racist and national chauvinist contumely of the working class. True, the passage I have in mind characterizes strike-breakers, “scabs,” who are helping the packers to defy the honest union workers. But these are the same kinds of people, socially and ethnically, who are out on strike, and the net effect of this characterization is not so much to enlighten the working-class reader about the depravity of scabbing as it is to reinforce the polite reader’s stock attitudes toward “inferior” peoples, and to appeal gratuitously to the white reader’s racism. (Folsom 259) For these other minority groups, Sinclair reserves all the prejudices of a typical middle-class American at the turn of the century, and these prejudices come to the fore in the novel particularly when Sinclair deals with alcohol. First, there is the case of Madame Haupt, Hebamme, the midwife Jurgis hires to help Ona survive the birth of her second child. The description of this large woman combines the tradition of the drunken woman character with stereotypical visions of foreigners as slovenly drunkards:

Madame Haupt was frying pork and onions, and had her door half open to let out the smoke. When he tried to knock upon it it swung open the rest of the way, and he had a glimpse of her, with a black bottle turned up to her lips. Then he knocked louder, and she started and put it away. She was a Dutch woman, enormously fat—when she walked she rolled like a small boat on the ocean, and the dishes in the cupboard jostled each other. She wore a filthy blue wrapper, and her teeth were black. (Sinclair 160). Here Sinclair ties together several different ideas. First, Madame Haupt is fat and rather unkempt. Secondly, she is Dutch. And thirdly, she is seen drinking. These three characteristics are shown to be inseparably linked to the remainder of Sinclair’s portrayal of her as a bossy, self-interested old woman who is only grudgingly persuaded to go with Jurgis to check on Ona. Later in this scene, after Madame Haupt has failed to save Ona or the baby, she labors down the ladder and requests a drink of Panei Aniele, and it is important that the drink request comes just before Madame Haupt coldly informs Jurgis of Ona’s and the baby’s conditions: “‘She vill die, of course,’ said the other, angrily. ‘Der baby is dead now’” (Sinclair 165). That Madame Haupt drinks is an important part of her characterization, as her link with the drunken woman character explains for Sinclair the existence of many of her other characteristics, but the dominant—and possibly controlling—characteristic of this character is her ethnicity. Throughout her scene, the reader can never escape Madame Haupt’s Dutch identity, because every time she opens her mouth she re-emphasizes it through her dialect. And her dialect is made even more pronounced by the fact that Jurgis, who has been in the country only about a year, speaks in standard edited American English:

“It is not goot to tink of anybody suffering,” she said, in a melancholy voice. “I might as veil go mil you for notting as vot you offer me, but I vill try to help you. How far is it?” “Three or four blocks from here.” “Tree or four! U nd so I shall get soaked! Gott in Himmell, it ought to be vorth more! Vun dollar und a quarter, und a day like dis! But you understand now—you vill pay me de rest of twenty-five dollars soon?” “As soon as I can.” 199 “Some time dis mont’?” “Yes, within a month,” said poor Jurgis. “Anything! Hurry up!” (Sinclair 161) The effect of all this dialect is to link Madame Haupt’s unusual characteristics—her unkempt appearance, her gruff manner, her preoccupation with receiving her outrageously high service fee, and most of all her drinking—to her Dutch identity. Why Sinclair chose to make Madame Haupt Dutch is uncertain, as the author tends to have little bias toward other Germanic people in the novel. It may be that her thick Germanic dialect provided a readily accessible technique for symbolizing ethnicity, which is how Crane uses a very similar dialect to portray the “greasy foreigner” boss of Maggie’s sweatshop collars and cuffs factory. So, in a way, Sinclair—though writing ten years later than even Crane—also, like Crane, relies upon much older stereotypes of foreigners than were necessarily current at the time, stereotypes that hearken back to the first waves of immigrants in the mid-19th century and which are an integral part of the temeprance tradition. And it is possible to see this phenomenon as directing Sinclair’s treatment of other minorities inThe Jungle. Sinclair certainly relies upon stereotyped, traditional visions of Jews in The Jungle, creating two minor figures whose Jewish identity is necessary only for the “color” it lends to their portrayals. For instance, at one point in Jurgis’s underworld career, the bartender who is hiding Jurgis and his friend Jack Duane introduces them to “one of the ‘runners’ of the sporting-house where they had been hidden while the police were seeking the assailants of the stranded ‘country customer’” (Sinclair 225).11 The “runner” seeks to make a deal with Jurgis and his friend to crack the

H The Doubleday, Page version omits the phrase “while the police were seeking the assailants of the stranded ‘country customer.’” 200 head of a “processional ‘card-sharp’”; in exchange for this favor, the “runner” would let the pair in on a gambling scheme involving the police- captain of the district and a big syndicate of horse-owners. This very minor character, “the runner,” could have existed in the story without any additional description, at all, but Sinclair chooses to make him a Jew—a “little Jew” and “a little ‘sheeny’ named Goldberger”—presumably only as a negative attribute, using for its effect Sinclair’s readers’ knowledge of the racist stereotypes of the crooked Jew, just as F. Scott Fitzgerald would do much later with Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Sinclair uses the Jewish label for another minor figure in the story with similar effect when he describes the behind-the-scenes politicking of Tom Cassidy. Sinclair begins the story fairly tamely, saying only that, “There had come to Cassidy a proposition to nominate a certain rich brewer who lived upon a swell boulevard that skirted the district, and who coveted the big badge and the ‘honorable’ of an alderman” (Sinclair 227). So far, the most important characteristic of this figure is his title of “brewer,” and the fact that he is a rich brewer attempting to buy his way into the corrupt world of Chicago politics could be a point made by Sinclair about the ties to political corruption displayed by the brewing industry, a common claim of the temperance movement. But Sinclair dismisses the brewer in the next sentence: “The brewer was a Jew, but he had no brains, and was harmless, and would put up a rare campaign-fund” (Sinclair 228). The fact that the brewer is Jewish is as significant a determinant of his character as is the fact that he is a brewer, and from this point on in the story the candidate is referred to interchangeably as “the rich brewer” or “the 201

‘Sheeny.’” Thus, both his ties to alcohol and his identity as a Jew are used by Sinclair as negative traits. By far the most prominent ethnic group inThe Jungle—w ith the obvious exception of the Lithuanians—is the Irish. For every attempt Sinclair makes to be honest and sensitive in his treatment of the Lithuanians and most other eastern Europeans in the novel, his Irish characters display the worst type of drunken, corrupt, and power-hungry late-19th century stereotypes of the Irish. Without any of the humanizing psychological detail that softens the stereotyping of the Irish inMaggie , the Irish in The Jungle are portrayed as completely flat, evil cogs in the great capitalist Packingtown machinery. Though Anderson’s and Swift’s and Morton’s are all owned by native-born Anglo-Saxons, one gets the sense from Sinclair’s novel that all of the graft, all of the corruption, all of the illegal activities that take place in the packinghouses are the work of the Irish middlemen working for the packers. Nearly every truly evil character in the novel is Irish, and I have not been able to identify a single instance of a noble or humane act carried out by an Irishman in the novel. The Irish characters in the novel range from the Irish union representative who attempts to bully Jurgis into joining the butcher- helpers’ union in Packingtown to the “big Irishman” who hires Jurgis for clandestine work in illegal subway tunnels under the streets of Chicago to Tom Cassidy— “political lord of the district” and “a little dried-up Irishman, whose hands shook” (Sinclair 229)—to nearly every policeman Jurgis encounters in Chicago. The police of Packingtown Sinclair shows to be worse than even the Tsarist police Jurgis knew in Lithuania: 202 Also there were policemen to see that he did not steal, and kept out of people’s way; only in Russia the policemen were friendly, and would call one Brother, while they pushed him along—whereas the policemen here in America were Cossacks. Out in the stockyards they were all Irishmen, and rated a Slav of any sort as lower th an a yellow dog. (Sinclair 80)i2 All of these Irishmen have in common the stereotypical Irish greed and corrupt spirit. Another stereotypically Irish characteristic Sinclair’s Irish display is drunkenness. And Irish drunkenness in The Jungle is shown to be connected with Irish corruption and greed. When Jurgis goes to court following his fight with Ona’s boss, his judge is a crooked politician-turned justice whom Sinclair describes as “a stout, florid-faced Irishman, with a nose broken out in purple blotches” (Sinclair 139), the archetypal drunken Irishman who has manipulated his way into a position of power. Sinclair also calls upon the stereotyped connection between drunkenness and corruption in the Irish in his description of the Irish family that had once owned the home Jurgis and his family buy at the beginning of the story. As Grandmother Majauszkis tells the Lithuanians—and this comes right after she has finished telling how the Germans who owned the house first were decent, hard-working family people who were ground down by ill fortune—the Irish were of the worst sort imaginable:

Then there had come the Irish, and there had been lots of them, too; the husband drank and beat the children—the neighbors could hear them shrieking any night. They were behind with their rent all the time, but the company was good to them; there was some politics back ofthat.... He had gone all to ruin with the drink, however, and lost his power; one of his sons, who was a good man, had kept him and the family up

22 This entire passage is omitted from the Doubleday, Page version of the novel. 203 for a year or two, but then they too had been turned out, and had disappeared. (Sinclair 56)13 Here Sinclair combines the two main vices attributed to the Irish, drinking and corruption, and makes a quick allusion to the temperance Over-the- Hill plot, as the corruptly successful Irishman is ruined by his addiction to drink. Once again, drinking and corruption are connected with the Irish in a manner quite familiar to the temperance tradition; it would probably be difficult, after all, to differentiate this Irish family of Sinclair’s from the Johnsons of Crane’sMaggie. By far, the worst Irish character in the entire book, though, is Ona’s boss, Connor. From the very first time he is introduced, Connor displays all the bad qualities of an evil Irishman: “she went to the sausage-rooms and saw the boss, a coarse-looking, red-faced Irishman whom she had frequently seen with her ‘forelady’” (Sinclair 119). Later, when Jurgis confronts Connor and attacks him, the Irishman is described as “a big, red­ faced Irishman, coarse-featured, and smelling of liquor” (Sinclair 135). Connor, of course, seduces Ona, blackmailing her into having sex with him and then staying with him at his downtown brothel, even kicking the pregnant woman to show his contempt for her. What gives Connor the authority to conduct himself in such a shameless manner is his political connections, which later contribute to Jurgis’s demise. Connor is a scoundrel, and more importantly an Irish scoundrel, who, of course, drinks. Even Sinclair’s treatment of the Irish, though, pales in comparison with his portrayal of blacks in The Jungle. As Folsom puts it, “Sinclair was

13 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits “they too had been turned out, and had disappeared. 204 most offensive in his characterization of black laborers. . . . Sinclair reaffirmed every notion and fear in the repertoire of racism, and especially the vision of brute sexual threat to white womanhood” (260). E arly inThe Jungle, Sinclair writes, “Once upon a time a great-hearted woman set forth the sufferings of the black chattel-slave, and aroused a continent to arms. She had many things in her favor which cannot be counted on by him who would paint the life of the modern slave” (Sinclair 65).14 The author goes on to explain how the job of dramatizing the slavery of the workers is much more difficult than was that of Harriet Beecher Stowe: “This slave is never hunted by bloodhounds; he is not beaten to pieces by picturesque villains, nor does he die in ecstasies of religious faith” (65). Sinclair even hints that the life of the wage slave is at least as bad if not in some ways worse than that of the Southern plantation slave of the antebellum period. Sinclair is obviously drawing upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an archetype for his own story, itself hopefully destined to stir the nation’s conscience the way Stowe’s novel had moved that of an earlier generation. Yet Sinclair’s connection with Stowe is ironic. Stowe has been criticized over the years for oversentimentalizing the sufferings of the blacks in her novel; although she seems sincere in her feelings for their plight, there is a great deal of doubt as to whether she really understands their condition. Sinclair, too, in his attempt to write a modern Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reveals his own lack of understanding for their situation. What is more, while Stowe’s story errs on the side of too much romanticizing the lives of the slaves, Sinclair’s

The entire paragraph in which Sinclair makes the comparison betweenThe Jungle and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is omitted from the Doubleday, Page version of the novel. 205 attitude toward the blacks in The Jungle is much more sinister, at times rivaling that of the most ardently racist proponent of black slavery. Blacks, in Sinclair’s view, are a type of subhuman worker race, represented on the one hand by the “great burly negro, bare-armed and bare-chested” who stands among the ranks of normal workers during the Lithuanians introductory tour of the packinghouses and on the other hand by the “‘green’ negroes from the cotton-districts of the far South” (Sinclair 243) brought in by rail to help the packers win their battle with the union. Sinclair paints all of the strikebreakers as the scum of the earth: “They had been attracted more by the prospect of disorder than by the big wages; most of them had brought a bottle or two with them, and they .... made the night hideous with singing and carousing, and only went to sleep when the time came for them to get up to work” (Sinclair 237). But he reserves his worst descriptions for the black strikebreakers. In just two pages within Chapter 28, Sinclair attempts to shock his middle-class reader with the decadence of the strikebreakers, a decadence he attributes solely to the color of their skin: “The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel- slaves, or held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free—free to gratify every passion—free to wreck themselves” (Sinclair 244). Sinclair’s reasoning hearkens back to the inferior-race line of argument which had long been used to support slavery, the Jim Crow laws of the South, and the urban segregation of the North. Bloodworth says of the above passage, “This kind of statement, clearly racist in its implications, seems to embody Sinclair’s belief that without the restraints of an orderly and just society freedom is dangerous” (54). The 206 freedom Bloodworth refers to is the freedom of a people viewed as “savages,” whose years of external control have supposedly made them incapable of self-control, and the dangers of this freedom are compounded for Sinclair by his view that the black strikebreakers seem not far removed from their African—and, to his middle-class readership, primitive and frightening— tribal roots, an implication Sinclair makes concrete through his description of a back-lot revival meeting among the strikebreakers:

. . . and then around the corner one might see a bon-fire blazing, and an old, grey-headed negress, lean and witchlike, her hair flying wild, and her eyes blazing, now yelling and now chanting of the fires of perdition and the blood of the “Lamb,” until men and women lay down upon the ground, moaning and screaming in convulsions of terror and remorse. (Sinclair 245)15 The emphasis on the wildness, the unthinking passion of the blacks in the above quote is echoed in Sinclair's description of the results of giving these “untamed” blacks the freedom they have up to this point lacked: “any night, in the big open space in front of Smith’s, one might see brawny negroes stripped to the waist, and pounding each other for money, under the eyes of policemen, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about” (Sinclair 244).16 Sinclair’s imagery clearly plays upon the prejudices and collective fears of his white audience, who used precisely such imagery in their own justifications for keeping blacks subjugated and “in their place.” It is really no surprise that in the midst of his descriptions of the terrible effects of black freedom Sinclair should introduce alcohol as one of the main elements in the debauchery. As I have several times noted, one of

*5 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel reads, . . blazing, yelling and chanting of the fires. . .” The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the phrase, “under the eyes of policemen.” the motivating concerns of the temperance movement was the fear that widespread drunkenness among the lower classes would contribute to a class uprising which would wipe out the middle and upper classes. Combined with white fears of black lawlessness in general, the prospect of masses of drunken blacks roaming the streets was enough to paralyze whites with fear. Added to this fear of an alcohol-related black uprising was the worry that the supposed degeneration of moral principles that accompanied drunkenness—a cornerstone of temperance ideology, as I have already shown—would lead to miscegenation. Whitman played on this fear in Franklin Evans when he used his hero’s marriage to a black former slave as proof of the depths to which his drinking had taken him. And the WCTU’s own Frances Willard took the idea even further, linking alcohol to fears of black men raping white women: “The grogshop [is] the Negro’s center of power. Better whiskey and more ofit... is the ralying cry of great, dark-faced mobs [who menace] the safety of women, of childhood, [and] the home ... in a thousand localities” (D’Emilio and Freedman 218). Sinclair adheres to such temperance thinking by closely linking alcohol and sexual depravity. In The Jungle, however, Sinclair makes explicit the type of connections the temperance tradition merely alludes to, as in his descriptions of the wild goings-on in the stockyards during the strike: “So whiskey and women were brought in by the car-load and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards. Every night there were stabbings and shootings, rape and murder stalking abroad” (Sinclair 244).17 And prominently displayed among the effects of this combination of women and

*7 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the phrase, “rape and murder stalking abroad.” 208 alcohol in the hands of the black strikebreakers is the intermingling of races that results from such a combination: “Fighting, gambling, drinking and carousing, cursing and screaming, laughing and singing, playing banjoes and dancing, black and white mingled together in the sordid democracy of vice” (Sinclair 245).18 Sinclair’s main goal in these passages would seem to be to illustrate the decadence of the strikebreakers unleashed by the combination of strong drink and lack of control, but his attention keeps returning to the spectacle of the resultant inter-racial relationships:

They lodged men and women on the same floor, and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before were witnessed in America, and never in the world since the days of Baal and Moloch. Along the platforms where the railroad-cars were loaded one could not pass for the bodies of men and women, black and white, sleeping together, and as the women were the dregs from the brothels of Chicago, and the men were for the most part ignorant country negroes, the nameless diseases of vice were soon rife. . . . (Sinclair 244)19 Although in this passage Sinclair primarily focuses on the medical results of this “saturnalia of debauchery” and although the author makes an explicit separation between the white middle-class females of his readers’ acquaintance and the white prostitutes brought in to entertain the strikebreakers, Sinclair in another passage reveals that w hat truly bothers him about the strikebreakers is the threat to pure white womanhood posed by the drunken blacks: “. . . men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck negroes with daggers in their boots,

The Doubleday, Page version of the novel omits the phrase, “black and white mingled together in the sordid democracy of vice.” The passage, “and never in the world since the days of Baal and Moloch. Along the platforms where the railroad-cars were loaded one could not pass for the bodies of men and women, black and white, sleeping together,” is omitted from the Doubleday, Page text. 209 while rows of wooly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories” (Sinclair 244). Throughout his treatment of the strikebreakers, Sinclair reveals a middle-class fear of blacks that is expressed in part through temperance tradition connections between alcohol and fears of a black uprising. This uneasiness on the part of middle-class temperance advocates is also felt toward immigrant groups, and here, too, Sinclair expresses his own misgivings in similar terms. The same is true regarding Sinclair’s response to the changes in family structures caused by urbanization and industrialization. Sinclair—who would probably describe himself as an enlightened, modem, free-thinker with regards to family relations— consistently takes a conservative approach to family structures, often relying on temperance forms to express that approach. Thus, temperance fiction forms offer a helpful lens through which to view Sinclair’s approach to a variety of social issues. Yet, these are relatively marginal issues within The Jungle. After all, Sinclair was not hired by Fred D. Warren to write a novel about the family, immigrants, or blacks, primarily, but about the evils of wage slavery. With this issue, Sinclair could be expected to fulfill his billing as a writer of the proletariat, having written a novel in which the main character becomes a Socialist and in which the final sentence—at least in the Doubleday, Page edition—is “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” However, a look at Sinclair’s use of temperance forms again reveals that those forms betray a conservatism that rims counter to his radical message even regarding the issue that is the heart of The Jungle. Sinclair’s treatment of alcohol inThe Jungle follows the basic temperance doctrine that alcohol is a cause of the poverty and suffering experienced by 210 drinkers, that this poverty and suffering is a matter of character, and that the drinking of the working class threatens to unleash the pent-up passions of the workers into open class warfare. If one were able to question Sinclair about his views on the relationship between poverty and alcohol, I believe he would immediately claim that the Packingtown workers were forced into drinking by the hardship of their lives and the saloon-oriented working-class social structure. I base this hypothesis on Sinclair’s statements to that effect in the already-cited passage concerning the temperance revival Jurgis attends in his street experience in Chicago and in another, longer section of the book in which he describes how the combination of the free lunch, the monotony of the workers’ lives, and the escape offered by alcohol results in a situation where “a whole family would drift into drinking, precisely as the current of a river drifts down stream” (Sinclair 70).20 But this would be Sinclair’s consciously formulated, politically correct answer, which is not to say that this would be the extent of Sinclair’s thoughts on this issue. My interpretation of Sinclair’s conscious answer is based on his expository passages in The Jungle. A very different answer may be formulated by looking closely at how Sinclair falls into conservative temperance thought patterns through his reliance upon the Over-the-Hill plot structure in Jurgis’ sections of the story. At the beginning of the novel, Jurgis’ story is that of a frustrated American dream, as Bloodworth explains:

Jurgis scrupulously follows the American dream and the ethic of work. .. . After he gets a job by being selected from a crowd of men on the basis of his commanding physical presence, he

20 The Doubleday, Page version omits “precisely.” 211 buys a home and marries Ona; he also goes to night school to learn English and soon becomes an American citizen. But all of these attempts at success fail. For Jurgis the American dream and the ethic of work become a nightmare of effort without reward. (Bloodworth 50-51) In a way, by frustrating the classic rags-to-riches plot structure, Sinclair creates for Jurgis a parody of the original form. Once he takes his first drink, however, the plot of the story changes its structure, and Jurgis’ sections of the story follow very closely the Over-the-Hill plot structure used in most temperance stories. And what is more, Sinclair does not parody this form; rather, he follows it faithfully in form and in spirit. Jurgis, like many of the characters of temperance fiction caught up in the web of Demon Rum, begins the story a devoted, hard-working family man. Then, just as the other, he is lured into taking that first fatal drink, an event Sinclair describes with all the hyperbole of an Arthur or a Lamas:

Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another spectre following him. he had never spoken of it, nor would he allow anyone else to speak of it—he had never acknowledged its existence to himself. Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had—and once or twice, alas, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink. (Sinclair 123) From there, Jurgis follows the predicable downward course of the drunkard. First of all, Jurgis’ drinking contributes to the economic woes of the family, which in turn makes it easier for Jurgis to seek escape in the bottle. Then, as his drinking progresses, he begins to lose interest in all else but the next drink, forsaking his previously close family ties:

There came a time when nearly all the conscious life of Jurgis consisted of a struggle with the craving for drink. He would have ugly moods, when he hated Ona and the whole family because it so stood in his way. He was a fool to have married; he had tied himself down, and made himself a slave. It was all because he was a married man that he was compelled to stay in the yards; if it had not been for that he might have gone off like Jonas, and to hell with the packers. (Sinclair 124). 212

When Jurgis reaches this point, it is a relatively small step for him to forsake his family after Ona’s death for the freedom of life in the countryside. After he leaves the stabilizing influence of his family, Jurgis plunges into his drunkenness, adopting a cynical attitude toward the world and engaging in worse and worse instances of vice and depravity. Jurgis works for a harvest season on a farm gang, then spends his money in a saloon in town:

On a Saturday night he drifted into a town with his fellows; and because it was raining, and there was no other place provided for him, he went to a saloon. And there were some who treated him and whom he had to treat, and there was laughter and singing and good cheer; and then out of the rear part of the saloon a girl’s face, red-cheeked and merry, smiled at Jurgis, and his heart thumped suddenly in his throat. He nodded to her, and she came and sat by him, and they had more drink, and then he went upstairs into a room with her, and the wild beast rose up within him and screamed, as it has screamed in the jungle from the dawn of time. And then, because of his memories and his shame, he was glad when others joined them, men and women; and they had more drink, and spent the night in wild rioting and debauchery. (Sinclair 191) Returning to Chicago for the winter, Jurgis becomes addicted to drink, an addiction that threatens even his own sense of self-preservation: “He must have a drink now and then, a drink for its own sake, and apart from the food that came with it. The craving for it was strong enough to master every other consideration—he would have it, though it were his last nickel, and he had to starve the balance of the day in consequence” (Sinclair 250). Jurgis is finally reduced, just before his salvation at the hands of the Socialists, to sleeping in stale beer dives and lying to an old woman in order to beg of her the price of a meal. A poor, wretched pile of skin and bones, 213 his health laid waste by drink and hardship, Jurgis before his Socialist transformation is practically indistinguishable from earlier victims of the “Over-the-Hill” plot: Franklin Evans, George Allen, Simon Slade. Even the last few chapters of the novel fit the temperance plot, as Jurgis’ conversion to a teetotalling Socialism is nearly identical to the conversions of earlier drinkers, such as Joe Morgan ofTen Nights in a Bar-Room. And Jurgis’ struggle with alcohol, like the struggles of those earlier temperance characters, is a matter of character. In the early chapters of The Jungle, Sinclair makes a great deal of Jurgis’s naivete concerning the ways of Packingtown and in particular the hiring practices of the packers. Young and strong, Jurgis is a believer in the traditional view that those who really want to work can find work. Of those who could not find work, all he could say was “. . . but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do not tell me, there always work for a man!” (Sinclair 17). Sinclair, of course, takes a wiser, more ironic view of the workers, seeing Jurgis’s pronouncements as the result of the immigrant’s lack of experience in the world of Chicago. But it is interesting that, in making his point about Jurgis’s incorrect notions about the way of the world, that Sinclair should include this comment about alcohol. Sinclair uses another, similar comment about alcohol and character when Jurgis dismisses the descriptions of the packers given him by Tamoszius: “Tamoszius was simply another of the grumblers. He was a man who spent all his time fiddling; and he would go to parties at night and not get home till sunrise, and so, of course, he did not feel like work” (Sinclair 49). Sinclair, of course, sides with Tamoszius and views Jurgis’s 214 statements about the latter’s character as simply more evidence of the immigrant’s naivete. This ironic handling of Jurgis’s understanding of the relationship between character and alcohol in the working world is an argument against the traditional temperance notion of drinking as being a result of a weakness of character. But, as usual, this argument represents only part of Sinclair’s thinking on this issue, as the author provides many instances in the novel where he makes an entirely opposite point, where he actually supports the claim that character has a great deal to do with alcohol abuse. After Jurgis loses his first job on the killing floors, he goes to a saloon, where he speaks with the other unemployed packinghouse workers. There he hears the histories of these jobless men, the “vast majority” of whom “were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless packing- machine” (Sinclair 111). But others of this group “were out from their own fault. . . who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink” (Sinclair 111). The phrase “out from their own fault” lends a sense of blame to the stories of the drinkers, which is a different signal than Sinclair had been sending concerning drink and poverty in the previously mentioned sections of the story. In another brief aside in the same section of the novel, Sinclair again offers a glimmer of an idea contrary to that which he would consciously expound: “An unmarried man could save, if he did not drink” (Sinclair 112). Again, the phrase in question is a minor part of a much larger point, but it gives an indication of another level of Sinclair’s thinking concerning alcohol, a more traditional level beneath his conscious, Socialist-based theorizing. 215

Ironically, Sinclair also hints at a traditional view of character and alcohol when he describes how Jurgis is coerced by circumstance into taking up drinking. The free lunch of the saloon is described by Sinclair as the sole reason for Jurgis’s drinking, becoming almost a refrain in Sinclair’s description of Jurgis’s downslide:

At the saloon Jurgis could not only get more food and better food than he could buy in any restaurant for the same money, but a drink in the bargain to warm him up. Also he could find a comfortable seat by a fire, and could chat with a companion until he was as warm as toast. At the saloon, too, he felt at home—it was the place where he was supposed to be, where everything was understood, without questions or apologies. Part of the saloon-keeper’s business was to offer a home and refreshment to beggars in exchange for the proceeds of their foragings; and was there anyone else in the whole city who would do this . . . ? (Sinclair 200)21 From Jurgis’s first drink on, Sinclair maintains a consistent view of the laborer as a thrifty man, driven to drink by the necessity of the free lunch and the warm fireside. Sinclair shows Jurgis forced into the saloon for want of a better lunch spot, and Sinclair shows Jurgis running into the saloon with the few cents he could beg on the street, running to safety in the warmth of the saloon. But Sinclair’s apologizing for the saloon and for Jurgis’s constant trips there seems too forced to be entirely genuine. It is as though Sinclair feels the need to justify Jurgis’s trips to the saloon, because the author, himself, feels that drinking in a saloon is somehow a sign of—or a cause of—moral weakness. In all of his descriptions of Jurgis’s relationship with alcohol, Sinclair implies that his Lithuanian hero is somehow different from other workers driven to drink. Of the worker’s early introduction to drinking,

21 The Doubleday, Page version omits “—it was the place where he was supposed to be, where everything was understood, without questions or apologies.” 216

Sinclair writes, “He never would take but the one drink at noon-time; and so he got the reputation of being a surly fellow, and was not quite welcome at the saloons, and had to drift about from one to another” (Sinclair 70), which indicates that Jurgis is unlike the other saloon patrons, who gather there and drink more from desire than from absolute necessity. This separation between Jurgis and other, weaker-willed workers is present throughout the entire novel. Jurgis is not only stronger and healthier than any other worker in Chicago, he is also the possessor of a vastly superior work ethic, which includes a strict abstinence from alcohol, except when practically unavoidable, as with the free lunch. Even back home in Lithuania, Jurgis is described as heroically different from the other workers on the railroad: “He did not drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona. . . . When they paid him off he dodged the company gamblers and dramshops, and so they tried to kill him, but he escaped, and tramped it home, working at odd jobs, and sleeping always with one eye open” (Sinclair 18-19). And, when Jurgis loses his job and has to look for new work, Sinclair makes a great effort to show Jurgis’s superiority over the other unemployed men around him:

This was a critical time in Jurgis’s life, and if he had been a weaker man he would have gone the way the rest did. Those out-of-work wretches would stand about the packing-houses every morning till the police drove them away, and then they would scatter among the saloons. Very few of them had the nerve to face the rebuffs that they would encounter by trying to get into the buildings to interview the bosses; if they did not get a chance in the morning, there would be nothing to do but hang about the saloons the rest of the day and night. (Sinclair 110 ) The separation of Jurgis from “those out-of-work wretches” is absolute, here. The only thing that keeps Jurgis from going “the way the rest did” is 217 his superior character; the others are too “weak” to resist temptation the way Jurgis is able. And Jurgis carries his superiority of willpower into his life as a criminal. Even after he clears out a dance hall in a drunken quarrel over a girl, Jurgis is described as basically temperate at heart:

He soon found that if he kept his wits about him, he would come upon new opportunities; and being naturally an active man, he not only kept sober himself, but helped to steady his friend, who was a good deal fonder of both wine and women than he. (Sinclair 224-225) Sinclair’s wish to separate Jurgis from even the other criminals he is in contact with supports the connection between alcohol and character. Jurgis is superior to those with whom he is in contact, in part because of an innate superiority of character. This superiority—here expressed in temperance terms—helps explain Jurgis’s conversion at the end of the novel and his reaction to Marija’s depravity. Jurgis, though he may have run across hard times, is really more than a drunken criminal at heart; all he needs is the opportunity to be protected from his own weaknesses. This is exactly the argument used by temperance advocates to justify the need for prohibitory legislation. It is important that Sinclair bases his claim for the uniqueness of Jurgis in a large part on the worker’s relationship with alcohol, because the idea that drinkers are somehow deficient in character is a cornerstone of conservative temperance thought. As I have explained previously at greater length, the conservative temperance tradition held that drinking is a matter of willpower: those strong in spirit—primarily temperance advocates, one supposes—are able to withstand temptation, while those weak in spirit succumb to it. This is the theory of drink that lies behind the entire temperance and prohibitionist movement. Temperance advocates argued that the weak need the moral 218 support of their families and peers and the incentive of a formal pledge of temperance in order to resist the lure of alcohol, while prohibition advocates argued that the weak could never withstand the temptation of liquor, leaving no alternative but the elimination of the source of temptation. By showing how Jurgis displays superior character in resisting the temptations of alcohol, except when driven into the saloons by absolute necessity, Sinclair places himself firmly within the conservative temperance tradition. While Sinclair does, indeed, show in his Socialist novel that the drinking of his characters is in part caused by their economic distress, he at the same time supports an opposite view, the one held by the temperance tradition: that—since in this tradition alcohol abuse is a matter of willpower and, therefore, an activity over which one has control and since in this tradition poverty is merely one of the effects of alcohol abuse—the anyone who is poor and also a drunkard is responsible for her own situation. And the logical extension of this view of the relationship between alcohol and poverty is that the poor, in general, are to an extent responsible for their own situation. The irony of Sinclair, the author of a supposedly Socialist novel, supporting in that very novel a theory that blames the poor for their own situation is heightened by Sinclair’s equally middle-class—and equally temperance-related—attitude toward the workers who form the central core of characters inThe Jungle. Just as Sinclair’s use of temperance conventions concerning blacks reveals a fear on his part concerning the threat of a racial uprising, so his use of temperance forms reveals a similar fear of a violent class uprising. As I explained earlier, in the temperance 219 tradition chapter and in the Crane chapter, the temperance movement was primarily a white, middle-class movement, and—while the movement was dedicated to the betterment of life for the poor workers it saw as most affected by alcohol abuse—the movement also expressed concern over the possible threat to the status quo posed by those very workers. Temperance fiction, therefore, contains a hefty dose of middle-class bias towards the working class as somewhat dangerous in its drinking. As I explained in the previous chapter, Stephen Crane, through his use of temperance forms in Maggie and George’s Mother, displays similar anti-labor sentiments in his novels to those found in temperance fiction. When Upton Sinclair deals with these groups in the context of alcohol, he, too, finds himself revealing in his portrayal of workers a middle-class distrust and fear of those not like him self. The Jungle is meant to be a Socialist novel. However, even though the novel is dedicated “To the Workingmen of America” (Sinclair v), in it Sinclair shows himself to be simultaneously on the side of workers and apprehensive about their intentions. An important part of the Socialist dogma Jurgis encounters after his conversion in the final portion of the novel is the movement’s opposition to drunkenness. When Jurgis applies for a job at Hinds’s hotel, unaware that Hinds is a state organizer of the Socialist party, the worker begins extolling his virtues of honesty, strength, and willingness, only to be cut short by the owner’s more important question, “Do you drink?” (Sinclair 285). Jurgis’s negative answer—a lie, by the way—is all that is required for the job, and the positive influence of his Socialist boss leads Jurgis to give up drinking. Jurgis does not always succeed in not drinking, but Sinclair turns even this weakness into another 220 benefit of Socialism: “It was so evidently a wicked thing to spend one’s pennies for drink, when the working-class was wandering in darkness, and waiting to be delivered, and when the price of a glass of beer would buy ten copies of a Socialist paper, or fifty copies of a leaflet!” (Sinclair 290). And, in Schliemann’s long speech toward the end of the story, the Socialist includes drinking in his catalog of the ills resulting from the wastefulness of competition. For the Socialists Theof Jungle, alcohol abuse is primarily a matter of lost productivity and distraction from the goals of the movement. But for Sinclair, alcohol abuse is also a matter of violence, and the author spends a great deal of the novel connecting strong drink with what he seems to see as the workers’ potential for violence. On the one hand, Sinclair makes a point in the novel to show how labor unions attempt to stifle labor-related violence. During the major Packingtown strike described in the novel, the unions worked hard to ward off spontaneous acts of violence on the part of their members:

. . . the union leaders had hired horses and buggies, which they could not well afford, and were driving about to make certain that their orders of “no violence” were being obeyed. They had even paid to have the neighborhoods placarded with posters in five languages, w arning the m en “to m olest no person or property, and abide strictly by the laws of this country. Your organization will not assist you if you get into unlawful trouble.” (Sinclair 235).22 And the union organizers succeed in preventing outbreaks of spontaneous violence, even when opposed by the press, which for its own reasons of increased subscriptions and packer-based advertising dollars sorely desired a labor war. In some cases, the press and the police turned minor squabbles between workers into full-scale pitched battles between strikers

22 This entire passage is omitted in the Doubleday, Page version. 221 and police. And in other cases, union workers waded into these battles, saving the lives of many individuals on both sides by quieting the violence. There are two elements of Sinclair’s treatment of the work of these labor organizers that are of significant interest: the emphasis that is placed on violence in regard to the workers and the link between that violence and alcohol. One of the key jobs of the union organizers, as Sinclair portrays them, is to maintain discipline within the ranks of the strikers, and one of their main concerns is to keep idle men away from the corners and saloons, potential breeding-grounds for violence:

They pleaded with the men to work at home, to go fishing on the lake-front, to do anything but loaf on the corners. As only a minority of the strikers belonged to the unions, the officers could not always have their way; but with the help of the three thousand members of the girls’ union, they put an absolute end to “can-rushing,” and they all but spoiled the business of the saloons. (Sinclair 242) The union officials are wise to concentrate their efforts on reducing the business of the saloons, because much of the violence in the strike is in some way involved with alcohol, as “when the police began clubbing union men who were trying to stop a fight between two drunken gamblers, and the people of Packingtown swarmed out of their houses, and there was a pitched battle, lasting an hour, between three thousand frenzied man [sic] and women and a hundred policemen” (Sinclair 243). As I pointed out in the temperance tradition chapter and the Crane chapter, the temperance movement grew in part out of the fears of the middle class concerning the growing working-class population in the city. To temperance advocates, the unruly masses posed a threat to the status quo, and alcohol was seen as a potential fuel for a class uprising. Temperance fiction, therefore, tends to be filled with examples of the 222 violence to be expected when the lower classes get their hands on alcohol. Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, for example, contains several scenes of drunken violence and mayhem calculated to shock the middle-class reader into righteous concern over law and order. Crane works within the alcohol- equals-violence formula in both of his city novels, providing his readers with plenty of evidence to support the claim that the working class is a seething cauldron of discontent, and that drinking threatens to bring about a violent uprising. In his attempts to demonstrate the hard work and dedication of the union organizers attempting to avoid strike-related violence, Sinclair inadvertently betrays his own fears of the drunken violence of the working class. One passage, in particular, shows that Sinclair falls into line with traditional temperance thinking on this issue, describing the workers as prone to drink-related violence:

The public was never reminded that Packingtown was always a center of violence; that the people were ignorant, and that the work they were forced to do accustomed them to scenes of cruelty and to the shedding of blood. In “Whiskey Point,” where there were a hundred saloons and one glue factory, there was always fighting, and always more of it in hot weather. (Sinclair 242).23 The combination of these two sentences, one in which Sinclair equates ignorance with violence and another in which he equates drinking with violence, shows Sinclair’s attitudes toward his subjects. These attitudes are apparent from the very first chapter of the novel, where Sinclair writes of the drunken fights that threaten to break out wherever the workers get

23 The Doubleday, Page version reads: “Packingtown was always a center of violence. In ‘Whiskey Point,’ where there were a hundred saloons and one glue factory, there was always fighting, and always more of it in hot weather.” 223 together to drink. There he describes how the drunken guests of the veselija “stagger about in each other’s arms, whispering maudlin words” and “start quarrels upon the slightest pretext and come to blows and have to be pulled apart” (Sinclair 14). After he describes how the policeman must be ready to stop any fight immediately, “for these two-o’clock-in-the-morning fights, if they once get out of hand, are like a forest fire, and may mean the whole reserves at the station” (Sinclair 14), Sinclair goes on to offer an explanation for the violence, basing his theory on a supposed predilection for violence on the part of the workers: “There is but scant account kept of cracked heads in back of the yards, for men who have to crack the heads of animals all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice on their friends, and even on their families, between times” (Sinclair 14). This connection between the violence of the workers on the job and their violence off the job is significant in the way Sinclair keeps bringing alcohol into the discussion. Such is the case when Sinclair describes the incident that created the opening Jurgis filled in his first job: “One of the cattle butchers had been drunk the night before, and been in a fight; meeting his enemy on the floor, he had hurled his knife at him, and, missing him, slashed open the abdomen of an inoffensive Polack, who had been shoveling guts with the same implement that Jurgis was now using” (Sinclair 51). The inclusion of drink in the story is superfluous to Sinclair’s main point, concerning the violence of the line of work Jurgis has found himself in, but the inclusion of this detail in Sinclair’s story is not superfluous when one sees that it helps to build the connection between violence and alcohol that lies behind Sinclair’s thinking concerning the workers. 224

Going back to Sinclair’s earlier statement in Chapter One that “these two-o’clock-in-the-morning fights, if they once get out of hand, are like a forest fire, and may mean the whole reserves at the station,” one sees the real concern that lies behind the connection between the workers and violence and alcohol: the threat of a class uprising that might spring from a drunken brawl. Sinclair, like many other middle-class intellectuals and like most members of the upper classes, is concerned about drink-related violence primarily because he is concerned about a labor uprising. Sinclair may end the Doubleday, Page & Co. edition of The Jungle with the cry that “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” (Sinclair 318), but the “standard of revolution” that the Socialist party waved before the “outraged workingmen of Chicago” led the way via the voting booth, not through armed uprising. And Sinclair reveals his concerns about the workers through his descriptions of them. Not only are the workers violent by nature and spurred on to violent acts by alcohol, but they harbor an intense hatred for the ruling management classes. Early in the story, the author provides a description of the scope of the antipathy on the part of the workers:

He was quite dismayed when he first began to find it out—that most of the menhated their work. It seemed strange—it was even terrible, when you came to find out the universality of the sentiment; but it was certanly [sic] the fact—they hated their work. They hated the bosses, and they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighborhood—even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it; it was rotten, rotten as hell—everything was rotten. When Jurgis would ask them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and content themselves with saying — “Never mind, you stay here and see for yourself.” (Sinclair 47) Later, when Jurgis tramps the streets of Chicago, begging for his life, the former laborer builds in his mind a terrible hatred for the upper classes: 225

... he hated the rich, he would wander out along the great boulevards and driveways, where they had built their palaces, where they lived in their haughty magnificence, flaunting their greatness to the world. He saw them glide past him in their automobiles and their sleighs; he saw their children, parading on exhibition with their nurses; he saw their wives, in bejeweled and disdainful splendor, emerging from jewelry- shops and florists; he saw their coroneted equipages, with lackeys robed in bearskins, their faces charged to the point of bursting with insolence and contempt. Shivering, starving, agonized, he wandered about among sights such as these, one helpless arm tied fast, and the other outstretched for a pittance of money or a bit of bread, and a rage that was almost madness heaping itself up within him, a longing to hurl himself upon it, to smash it and crush it, to fling a bomb into the midst of it all, and blow it into eternity. (Sinclair 203)24 Surely, here is the quintessence of the middle-class’ view of the raving poor man, hovering on the edge of a violent uprising. With thousands of such souls marching the streets of Chicago and thousands more harboring equally violent thoughts in the slaughterhouses of Packingtown, it is no wonder that the upper classes feared for their own safety and looked suspiciously at alcohol as a dangerous element in the hands of so volatile a people. After examining Sinclair’s treatment of alcohol in relation to family structures, ethnicity, poverty, and class in The Jungle, it becomes obvious that Sinclair is far from the radical writer his popular image projects. True, Sinclair does make an overall radical point in the novel; as Jonathan A. Yoder explains, in Upton Sinclair, “In Sinclair’s book, his version of reality, Jurgis cannot succeed financially without exchanging his high morality and willingness to work for a cynical acceptance of the need to lie, cheat, steal, and exploit others” (Yoder 33). And Sinclair’s indictment of

24 This entire passage is omitted in the Doubleday, Page version. 226 the packers for corruption and fraud in their dealings with the workers and the public was and is still quite effective. Yet, in his treatment of poverty, ethnicity, and family structures, Sinclair reveals that he is radical and conservative, simultaneously. In making his radical criticisms of established social and economic structures, Sinclair utilizes many of the forms traditionally associated with those structures: character types, plot structures, sensational incidents. This use of existing forms is especially apparent in regard to temperance fiction forms; whenever Sinclair writes about alcohol in his novel, he utilizes the existing forms of temperance fiction. And, while he uses these forms for their dramatic effect—as when he calls upon the drunken woman character in his portrayal of Marija as a drunken prostitute at the end of the novel—Sinclair often seems unaware of the counter-messages he is sending to his reader by doing so. The temperance forms he employs often inform Sinclair’s reader of the author’s underlying thoughts concerning the issues he is dealing with, thoughts which are many times at variance with his stated positions. It is not so much that Sinclair is openly or even consciously conservative inThe Jungle as it is that he has a certain level of subconscious conservatism that comes to the surface through his use of temperance forms. In Crane one finds a writer who attempts to parody or to undercut every tradition or philosophical position around him, but who finds that in doing so cannot escape being implicated by the very philosophies he attempts to undercut. In Sinclair, there is a writer who attempts to frontally assault a very specific set of social constructions, but who—unwittingly, perhaps—reinforces those same constructions and assumptions by utilizing fictional forms which rely 227 on those very same constructions and assumptions. In both cases, a close look at how the authors utilize temperance forms helps a reader see how the writers have failed to separate themselves from that which they supposedly oppose. CHAPTER IV

DREISER

Like Stephen Crane and Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser has a reputation as a rebel against the norms of society. Dreiser—“the always alienated and radical Dreiser,” as Alfred Kazin refers to the author in his introduction to the Penguin American Library edition of the Pennsylvania Sister Carrie (ix)—has established for himself, in the eyes of many critics, an unimpeachable position as a (orthe ) great radical naturalist writer. Carrie’s unrepentant “fall” shocked turn-of-the-century readers, which is partial explanation for the novel’s poor performance at the booksellers. And the story behind the publication of Sister Carrie has been ingrained in the minds of critics ever since the novel’s rediscovery in the decade after its first appearance; in fact, Dreiser’s censorship at the hands of his friend, Arthur Henry; his wife, Jug; and his publisher, Frank Doubleday was used as partial justification for the “restored” Pennsylvania edition of the novel (Kazin xiii-xv). And a quick look at the critical work on Sister Carrie reveals that most critics view Dreiser’s novel as rejecting the traditional morality prevalent in his time. This view of the novel, however, is inevitably based on only half of the story, the narrative that relates Carrie’s rise to stardom. When one looks at the other half of the story, that which focuses on Hurstwood’s declining fortunes, it becomes obvious thatSister

228 229

Carrie offers two competing messages, one radical (or at least liberal) and one conservative. The way in which the Carrie story offers a critique of conventional morality has been the subject of most critical studies of the novel. As Max Westbrook explains, in “Dreiser's Defense of Carrie Meeber,” Dreiser in Sister Carrie departs from the experience of his conventionally minded audience by showing Carrie defying the rules of Victorian morality, “for she has broken a sacred rule, feels no guilt, and is well on the way to success rather than the poverty she deserves” (392). Nancy Bunge goes even further than Westbrook, claiming in “Women as Social Critics inSister Carrie, Winesburg, Ohio, and Main Street” that Carrie not only rejects conventional morality but actually creates a set of counter values that supplant those of her society: “Sister Carrie not only acknowledges unconventional standards, she instinctively follows them. Environment influences but does not limit her, for she eventually adopts values larger than those defined by her society” (48). Other critics—such as Lawrence E. Hussman, in Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest, and Rabindra Nath Mookerjee, in Theodore Dreiser: His Thought and Social Criticism —voice similar opinions concerning Dreiser’s morality inSister Carrie, claiming that Carrie’s “new” morality—which really amounts to little more than situational ethics—is more “true to life” than that normally illustrated in popular fiction (Hussman 99, 100; MookerjeeTheodore Dreiser 39). Many critics have, of course, recognized a sentimentalist bent to Dreiser’s writing, which is conspicuously clear in much ofSister Carrie. 230

One such critic, Michael J. Hoffman, discusses in “From Realism to Naturalism: Sister Carrie and the Sentimentality of Nihilism” the “blind strivings of the heart” passage that concludes the Doubleday edition of the novel:

Dreiser is guilty, however, as he is many times during the book, of a specious sentimentality in the midst of his Nihilism. . . . The language here is ersatz sublime; it is the kind of specious transcendence found in cheap fiction. Every line contains a resounding cliche that one can read only with pain. But it is obvious that Dreiser’s resources have been taxed past their limit by the vision of life he has presented in his narrative. (152) Hoffman’s strategy in dealing with what he admits is Dreiser’s “specious sentimentality” is to claim that the author is not to be blamed for his lapse, since he has worn himself out in presenting his reader with transcendent reality in other portions of the book. Hoffman, however, is alone in making excuses for Dreiser. Most critics who deal with Dreiser’s sentimentality tend to view it in terms of the literary traditions of the city romance, the “fallen woman” novel, and the working girl novel. When seen in this context, these critics claim, Dreiser’s sentimentality can be seen as nothing less than a parody of the literary forms in which this sentimentality was traditionally packaged. The result of this parody is that the sentimentality Dreiser places in his novel actually makes a point exactly opposite from that which is normally associated with such sentimentality. James Lundquist, for example, writes in Theodore Dreiser that Dreiser’s “ambiguity” overshadows his conventional plot inSister Carrie, turning that plot into something new and different (30). For Sheila H. Jurnak, in “Popular Art Forms in Sister 231

Carrie,” the transformation that occurs when Dreiser employs the sentimental forms of popular art is a transformation of popular art into true art:

Dreiser’s references to popular art forms inSister Carrie function both directly and ironically. . . . In relation to the fiction of Dreiser’s time, they provide an ironic contrast between the ‘popular’ heroine and Dreiser’s heroine. In terms of the relationship between art and life, they serve as Dreiser’s ironic commentary on the gap between popular conception of cause and effect and its actuality. (313) Anne T. Trensky, in “Sister Carrie: First Female Hero in American Fiction,” claims that Dreiser changes Carrie from a traditional heroine character into a more powerful, more fully realized “female hero” character (29). And Cathy N. Davidson and Arnold E. Davidson, in “Carrie’s Sisters: The Popular Prototypes for Dreiser's Heroine,” claim that Dreiser parodies conventional forms of the fallen woman:

Sister Carrie mirrors the conventional fiction of its time, for Theodore Dreiser employed well established plot devices to examine the same manners and mores prescribed by his now forgotten contemporaries. But the moral image reflected in various widely read turn-of-the-century novels is, in Dreiser’s work, refracted and distorted, inverted and reversed. At times, Sister Carrie even seems to parody the formulae implicit in late nineteenth-century popular literature. (Davidson and Davidson 395) The basic message of all of these critics is that Dreiser transformed or parodied the traditional literary conventions of his time, with the result that Dreiser’s novel incorporates forms that, while similar in appearance to those of the popular literature of his day, are quite different in effect. The main effect of Dreiser’s parody of traditional forms concerns morality, since it is around traditional morality that most of the forms he 232

parodies are built. Therefore, many of Dreiser’s critics have focused on the interplay between Dreiser’s parody of traditional form s and his criticism of traditional morality. In Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels, for instance, Richard Lehan states Sister Carrie is a reversal of the Horatio Alger story:

Dreiser was working within the Horatio Alger tradition of the novel; b u t instead of taking a virtuous young man who succeeds by diligently pursuing a principled life, he took an ambitious young woman and allowed her to fare remarkably well by pursuing a life of dubious virtue. Dreiser took the conventions of a Horatio Alger story and turned it morally upside down. (76) The result of placing a character like Carrie into a plot structure from popular literature, according to these critics, is a juxtaposition of reality and artifice: “The world of dreams is surrounded by the world of grim reality and the reader is forced to alternate between them. Thus, though Dreiser takes off from popular literature and popular values, he ends up deconstructing them” (Mukherjee 45). For such clitics, Dreiser’s rejection of traditional literary standards is inseparable from his rejection of traditional moral standards, an opinion expressed by Kenneth S. Lynn in “Sister Carrie ”: “So alien to D reiser were thegoing moral standards of the America of his day that not only did he blithely violate the ironclad literary convention that the wages of sin are death, he did not even believe that Carrie had sinned” (142). And more recently, feminist critics such as Patrice K. Gray in her unpublished dissertation, “The Lure of Romance and the Temptation of Feminine Sensibility: Literary Heroines in Selected Popular and ’Serious' American Novels, 1895-1915,” and Rachel Helena Bowlby, in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola, 233

have reached similar conclusions, finding that Dreiser’s use of the traditional fallen woman tale reveals that the author simultaneously upholds and reverses the traditional forms and the moral structures that go along with those forms (Gray 162; Bowlby 52, 61). One thing these critical examinations of the treatment of traditional morality in Sister Carrie have in common is that they all focus on Carrie’s story. This is for good reason, since this portion of the novel does offer a critique of conventional morality and marital relations quite similar to that espoused by nineteenth-century feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Susan B. Anthony. Dreiser attempts to weaken, if not destroy, the power of the traditional vision of male/female relationships by illustrating that the basis of such relationships is the exchange of money for sex: women offer men youth, beauty, homemaking services, and sex, while men offer women money and the image of success and power that accompany success. For example, when Drouet meets Carrie on the street after she has lost her job, Drouet focuses his attention on her sexual attractiveness, while Carrie’s attention is drawn to “two soft, green, handsome ten-dollar bills”;1 both symbolically and practically, this scene exposes the basic exchange that lies behind Carrie’s relationship with men in the novel (Hussman 97; see also Michaels 57). Carrie’s story is only half the novel, however; alongside her narrative Dreiser lays the story of Hurstwood, which shows Dreiser to be quite conservative, at heart. The two stories withinSister Carrie provide the

1 Dreiser, Theodore,Sister Carrie (N.p.: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981) 62. All references given in further parenthetical citations will be to this text. Significant variations between this text and the original Doubleday, Page edition will be noted when appropriate. 234

novel with a dual structure, with one narrative strand showing Carrie’s rise and one showing Hurstwood’s simultaneous fall, the two crossing somewhere in the Wheelers’s New York flat. These two narrative strands also provide the novel with competing messages: Carrie’s story offers a critique of conventional morality, family structures, and the middle-class work ethic, while Hurstwood’s, to the contrary, offers a validation of those same ideas and social structures. The conservatism of the Hurstwood story becomes evident when one looks at the way alcohol and temperance ideology is intricately tied to the manager’s fate. Dreiser’s treatment of alcohol inSister Carrie differs from the uses to which Crane and Sinclair put alcohol in their novels. Crane consciously employs the conventions of the temperance tradition as part of an attempt to subvert through satire the mentality that lies behind that tradition. Sinclair, in his urgent desire to reveal the corrupt underworld of Packingtown and the rest of Chicago, uses the forms of the temperance tradition for dramatic effect, relying on the sensation of these conventions for their shock value. As I have shown in the previous two chapters, however, a close look at how these two authors utilize the temperance tradition in their novels reveals neither author can escape the ideological positions embedded in the forms of temperance fiction; the temperance tradition was an essentially conservative tradition, and the forms of temperance fiction bring to (or reveal within) the fiction of Crane and Sinclair their own conservative, traditional values. Crane, try as he might to subvert traditional morality, is himself undermined in his attempt by the very forms he chooses to utilize in the construction of his parodies. 235

Sinclair, as earnestly radical as he is in his attempt to move his reader with the tragic tale of the Packingtown workers, naively employs stereotypes and conventions of the temperance tradition which send a message counter to that which he intends. The literary forms of the temperance tradition that Crane and Sinclair employ in their own novels reveal the basic ambivalence of the temperance movement toward the subjects of its reforms. When Crane and Sinclair utilize the forms of temperance fiction, the forms manifest an ambivalence that calls into question the attitudes of the authors toward their subjects. Dreiser in Sister Carrie avoids some of the problems encountered by Crane and Sinclair by keeping alcohol in the background of his novel, by not directly utilizing the traditional forms of temperance fiction. Dreiser goes out of his way to avoid depicting drunkenness in any form, and, indeed, employs almost none of the elements of temperance fiction prevalent in the novels of Crane and Sinclair, elements almost inseparable from the issue of alcohol when treated in literature. There are no drunken louts, no drunkard’s wives, no horrible drunken women in Dreiser’s story. And while Hurstwood’s climactic theft scene relies upon George’s earlier drinking as an explanation for his actions, this is the only time any character is shown becoming actually drunk. After Hurstwood’s theft, after he begins his long descent into poverty and hopelessness, he does not drink. Even when Dreiser describes a man who has all the other markings of a skid-row bum—and who by all traditional temperance formulas should easily slide into drunkenness and depravity—even when Hurstwood is hanging out with the low-life of the Bowery, not once is alcohol mentioned, 236

except in terms of George’s line of work. In fact, most of the drinking in the book is drinking by the upper and middle classes as they dine—particularly by men as they enjoy their own good company—and this type of drinking is hardly in the category of that described by Crane in his Bowery tales. Yet, even though Dreiser avoids explicitly using temperance fiction forms in his novel, a full consideration ofSister Carrie must acknowledge the importance of alcohol, as it plays a central role in the Hurstwood sections of the novel. To be more precise, it is the saloon that is central to Hurstwood’s story, since his entire experience—his entire characterization, in fact—is the result of his identity as the manager or ex­ manager of Hannah and Hogg’s. While Dreiser doesn’t deal explicitly with drinking and therefore does not make use of temperance forms, per se, the Hurstwood sections ofSister Carrie do adopt the same views of the role of the saloon as expressed in the temperance fiction tradition. By removing drinking from his treatment of the saloon in the novel, Dreiser emphasizes the way the temperance movement used drinking as merely a symbol for its deeper concerns about a perceived threat to American culture by the opposing values of the saloon culture, values based on an image of success and wealth sold alongside alcohol at the bar. Dreiser, like the temperance writers before him, is particularly concerned with the threat that the countervalues of the saloon pose to two mainstays of middle-class American culture, traditional family structures and the work ethic. Dreiser also reveals, through his use of the Over-the-Hill plot form, that he agrees with another tenet of the temperance movement, the idea that the 237

poor are to blame for their own condition, which is due to a deficiency in character. One of the chief concerns of the temperance movement was the manner in which the saloon threatened to undermine the traditional family. For one thing, the saloon provided men with a second home, separate from the rest of their families. This situation caused problems on both sides of the saloon doors, in the temperance view; the men lacked the positive influence of their real homes, and their families lacked the presence of the father within the home. Most temperance thought focused on another, more sensational threat to the family, the violence and neglect brought upon a family by a drunken husband and father reeling home from the saloon. Sister Carrie reflects concerns about the effect of the saloon on the traditional family through Dreiser’s treatment of Hurstwood’s family in the manager’s sections of the novel. Temperance writers tend to focus on the most tangible, physical, obvious effects the saloon has on the family through lurid descriptions of the suffering of the drunkard’s family. The drunkard’s parents, children, and wife are generally portrayed as the innocent victims of the drinker’s alcohol'inspired brutishness. The drunkard’s wife character was such a standard of temperance fare that later writers in the tradition needed only to allude to the type to draw sympathetic shudders from their readers. Dreiser, however, takes a different approach to this issue, avoiding any use of the traditional formulations of the drunkard’s family; Julia, George, and Jessica, wrapped up in middle-class respectability, seem highly out of place alongside such victims of drink as Mary and Fannie Morgan, from Ten 238

Nights in a Bar-Room. In fact, since Hurstwood hardly drinks in the novel, Dreiser removes drinking from the issue, altogether. What Dreiser does is to focus on the first effect of the saloon on the family—the manner in which the saloon serves as a surrogate family, replacing the traditional family in the minds of its patrons, to the vast detriment of patrons and families, alike. In Sister Carrie, this effect of the saloon is exemplified by the way Hurstwood’s preoccupation with the world of his saloon is responsible for the sterility of his home life. Although Dreiser takes an approach to this issue that on the surface seems fundamentally different from that of the temperance writers before him, the underlying message behind his treatment of Hurstwood’s family is the same as found in temperance stories. In nearly every section of the novel in which he treats Hurstwood’s family, Dreiser makes a point of distinguishing the manager’s family from the traditional family. As Dreiser makes clear, the difference between the families is not a matter of money or comfort, since the Hurstwoods are “well established in a neat house on the North Side, near Lincoln Park” (Dreiser 44). Instead, the difference is a matter of what Dreiser calls “home spirit,” something he describes as the true essence of the traditional family:

A lovely home atmosphere is one of the flowers of the world than which there is nothing more tender, nothing more delicate, nothing more calculated to make strong and just the natures cradled and nourished within it. To those who have never experienced the beneficent influence of its delightful seclusion, no words can make clear the power whereby it uplifts. To those who have never found in it the tolerance and love which are chief among its constituents, the song and the literature of the home are dulled. They will not understand wherefore the tear springs glistening to the eyelids at some 239

strange breath in lovely music. The mystic chords which bind and thrill the heart of the nation they will never know. (81)2 The last sentence of the above quote—with its implication that this view of the traditional family is a vital part of what it means to be truly American— reveals Dreiser’s connection with the mindset that led temperance writers to equate the threat alcohol posed to the family with that which they saw alcohol posing to their entire middle-class position within society. Just what “lovely home atmosphere” means is unclear, but Dreiser is adamant that “Hurstwood’s residence could scarcely be said to be infused with this home spirit” (Dreiser 81). Ironically, Dreiser gives what may be the best explanation of what he sees as the perfect family in his description of Hurstwood’s homecoming the evening of his fateful argument with Julia, his wife:

When he entered, the house to his mind had a most pleasing and comfortable appearance. In the hall he found an evening paper, laid there by the maid and forgotten by Mrs. Hurstwood. In the dining room was the table, clean-laid with linen and napery and shiny with glasses and pink-flowered china. Through an open door he saw into the kitchen where the fire was crackling in the stove and the evening meal already well under way. Out in the small back yard was George Jr., frolicking with a young dog he recently purchased, and in the parlor Jessica playing at the piano, the sounds of a merry waltz filling every nook and comer of the comfortable house. Everyone, like himself, seemed to have regained his good spirits, to be in sympathy with youth and beauty, to be inclined to joy and merrymaking. (217-218)

2 The Doubleday, Page version of the novel reads: “A lovely home atmosphere is one of the flowers of the world than which there is nothing more tender, nothing more delicate, nothing more calculated to make strong and just the natures cradled and nourished within it. Those who have never experienced such a beneficent influence will not understand wherefore the tear springs glistening to the eyelids at some strange breath in lovely music. The mystic chords which bind and thrill the heart of the nation they will never know.” 240

The effectiveness of this passage relies upon the scene’s incongruity with Dreiser’s descriptions of the family as it normally functions; this is Hurstwood’s family as it should be and as it never is, according to Dreiser’s other description of home life with the Hurstwoods. Normally, the Hurstwood household “could hardly come under the category of home life. There was not enough spirit in it—not enough soulfulness. It ran along by force of habit, by force of conventional opinion. With the lapse of time it must necessarily become dryer and dryer—must eventually be tinder, easily lighted and destroyed” (Dreiser 87). The members of Hurstwood’s family are not “victims” in the classic temperance tradition sense of the word. In fact, in a way they can be seen to emerge from the story victorious, especially Julia, who ends up with her husband’s money and a rich son-in-law, too. But there is always a sense that—while Dreiser may not choose to grind down Hurstwood’s wife and children as he grinds down Hurstwood—the author disapproves of George Jr., Jessica, or Julia. The children—particularly Jessica—are self- indulgent and self-absorbed, interested only in finding the means to support their own projects and desires. Julia, for her part, is far removed from the helpless drunkard’s wife of such temperance stories as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room or My Mother's Gold Ring. Shrewd and resourceful, Julia represents the exact opposite of the drunkard’s wife, and, since the drunkard’s wife character is in part a representation of the vulnerability the middle-class women readers of temperance fiction felt with regard to their own home lives, Hurstwood’s wife represents a possible answer to the fears of such readers. Yet Dreiser, like the temperance authors, does not 241

find stronger women an especially appealing alternative to the vulnerability of most women, and Dreiser weakens the power of her victory by making her a petty social climber:

Mrs. Hurstwood was the type of the woman who has ever endeavored to shine and has been more or less chagrined at the evidences of superior capability in this direction elsewhere. Her knowledge of life extended to that little conventional round of society, of which she was not, but longed to be, a member. She was not without realization already that this thing was impossible, so far as she was concerned. For her daughter she hoped better things. Through Jessica she might rise a little. (Dreiser 82-83) Dreiser makes it clear, though, that the problems with Hurstwood’s family members are less matters of personal deficiency than merely aspects of the overall failure of the family to match accepted norms of conduct. So, while Dreiser avoids the use of the temperance tradition of viewing the drunkard’s family as victims of his depravity and lack of self-control, he follows the basic outline of temperance attitudes toward the family, seeing the family members as negatively affected by the father’s connection with the saloon. The problems with Hurstwood’s family life are not the result of drinking and the abuses that traditionally accompany alcohol abuse, but they are intimately connected with Hurstwood’s job as a saloon manager. Just as the saloon provides its patrons with an alternative home set aside from the traditional family home, so Hurstwood’s position at Hannah and Hogg’s provides him with a second home. To be more precise, Hannah and Hogg’s serves Hurstwood as more of a first home than a second: “The life of the resort which he managed was his life. There he spent most of his time” 242

(Dreiser 85). Rather than centering his life around his family, as a traditional husband and father would do, Hurstwood centers his life around the surrogate home of the saloon, practically ignoring his real home in the process: “It was a world apart from Hurstwood’s own. It was something he cared very little about” (Dreiser 87).3 For Hurstwood, his family is merely an extension of his job, a part of the overall persona he must adopt in order to be a successful manager of a saloon. Hurstwood sees his family as an investment. He pays the bills and the family provides him with the illusion of a stable home environment, important for the overall image of respectability necessary for his position. And, although Hurstwood becomes slightly annoyed at the prospect of paying money to support three people who have little loyalty or even respect for him, “Out of the house . . . his mind was engrossed with other subjects and he did not give it much thought” (Dreiser 143). Because Hurstwood focuses his affections on those at the saloon, he necessarily neglects his life at home, which results in a stagnant home atmosphere and a wife and two children who lack any real sense of family values. The implication, of course, is that if Hurstwood would have maintained more than just the appearances of a good family life, he would have found his family much more like the one he returns home to on his last day in the house. Hurstwood’s neglect of his family life is more than just the result of a man becoming engrossed in his work; Hurstwood’s situation at home is intimately tied to the fact that he is the manager of a saloon. If the saloon was viewed by temperance advocates as an insidious surrogate home for its

3 This passage is omitted in the Doubleday, Page version of the novel. 243

patrons—who traded the wholesome life of a family man along with their cash for the drinks they consumed at the bar—it was also seen as a house of illusion. One of the great appeals of the saloon was that it provided the trappings of a high-class establishment—the gilt, the order, the ease of manner, the well-appointed help—and a “free” meal, all for the price of a drink. Each drink purchased for the patron—for a short time, anyway— the chance to become a member of the leisure class, the chance to exchange his every-day worries about work and money for the care-free life of a successful gentleman. In the eyes of middle-class temperance advocates, the saloon, with its emphasis on getting something for nothing, directly assaulted one of the foundations of American culture, the Puritan work ethic. When Sam Slade gives up the honorable trade of miller for the dishonorable trade of saloonkeeper, it is because he sees the saloon as a way to avoid hard work; the terrible price Slade and his customers pay for their rejection of the work ethic says something of the degree to which temperance writers such as Arthur felt threatened by what they saw as a weakening of one of the pillars of their society. These same concerns about the saloon as a threat to the work ethic pervade Sister Carrie. In his novel, Dreiser views this threat in terms of a replacement of the work ethic with a quest for theimage of success. Rather than viewing success as a reward for good, honest labor, Dreiser saw people looking at success—or, rather, the image of success—as an end in itself. Throughout the entire novel, Dreiser provides evidence that this desire for the image of success has infected all of society. The emphasis on theater and the stage in the novel is in some ways merely a reflection of the 244

importance of image in the novel (Garfield 224). The image of success is often more important than actual monetary or professional success, though money is often necessary for the maintenance of this image. Drouet, for one, is a character absolutely addicted to the image of success. Everything about the drummer is calculated along the lines of how it contributes to his own image in the world of success, even down to his choice of eating establishments:

He was not a ‘monied’ man. He only craved the best as his mind conceived it, and such doings seemed to him a part of the best. Rector’s, with its polished marble walls and floor, its profusion of lights, its show of china and silverware, and above all its reputation as a resort for actors and professional men, seemed to him the proper place for a successful man to go. Corkin cites the above passage as an example of the way simple necessities such as eating are treated as part of larger social structures in the world of Dreiser’s novel, claiming, “Once again we see a world where even the simplest acts are commodified. Dining is a means of fulfilling a social role, not of performing a vital function” (611). Drouet is certainly not the only character inSister Carrie to view the illusion of success as of prime importance. When Carrie accompanies the Vances to dinner at Sherry’s, for example, Dreiser makes it quite explicit that the atmosphere of the restaurant is more important than even the food: “She was keenly aware of all the little things that were done—the little genuflections and attentions in the waiters and head waiter which Americans pay for. The air with which the latter pulled out each chair and the wave of the hand with which he motioned her to be seated were worth several dollars in themselves” (331-332). The pursuit of the image of 245

success is so much a part of the American psyche at this time that even Ames—whose comments to Carrie on the extravagant cost of dining at Sherry’s are Dreiser’s most explicit statement against the wastefulness of conspicuous consumption—fails to recognize that it is not overpriced food that he is objecting to, but the purchase of success. This addiction and slavish attention to the image of success is even more obviously displayed for Carrie during her first visit to Broadway with Mrs. Vance, when Carrie—who at this point actually lives a fairly normal middle-class existence with Hurstwood in their little flat—recognizes the absence of success in her own life. As Bowlby explains it, “The combination of looking at a display of the things that money can buy and feeling excluded and inferior is repeated much later, when Carrie takes her first walk down Broadway in the company of her New York neighbor, Mrs Vance” (58). Once she does achieve success, she finds that others are willing to pay her way in order to have some of her own image rub off on them, as is the case with the hotel managers who offer Carrie a room, basically free of charge, in exchange for the right to tell other patrons of their successful boarder. Thus Carrie begins the novel as a woman entirely lacking any of the image of success who, over the course of the story, gradually acquires more and more of this image of success, until by the end of the novel she is able to trade on that image for even more of the image of success that she craves. In the final chapters of the novel, Carrie’s image of success is self- perpetuating—the more image she acquires, the more is given to her. In the above passages of the novel, Dreiser seems to be more interested in describing the phenomenon of Americans being infatuated 246

with the image of success than in offering any critique of such impulses. Far from condemning Carrie’s quest for success, for example, Dreiser rewards her with more and more of what she craves. In fact, Dreiser seems somewhat interested, himself, in the possibilities of a society in which the image of success is more important than anything else. Yet, again, such a view of the novel is only possible if one concentrates on Carrie’s path to the top. Hurstwood’s half of the novel takes an entirely different view of this infatuation with the image of success, a much darker view, and one which—like that of the temperance fiction writers—focuses on the saloon as the seat of the corrupting influence of this quest for success. Hurstwood is a character built entirely upon the leisure/image ethic of the saloon, an ethic entirely at odds with the traditional work ethic followed by middle-class temperance advocates. When Dreiser sends Hurstwood on his long decline into poverty and despair, he supports the traditional work ethic by showing how someone who bases his existence on the saloon culture’s leisure/image ethic cannot survive in a world that really needs traditional values. While there is no drunkenness in the classic temperance sense in Sister Carrie, alcohol is always present in the background of the novel in the form of the saloon, which—as in the temperance tradition—serves as a tangible symbol of the power of the image of success. Drouet’s choice of Hannah and Hogg’s Adams Street saloon was calculated as a chance to buy into what Drouet saw as the “high life.” And Drouet’s feelings in the matter are hardly idiosyncratic. In fact, for a saloon like Hannah and Hogg’s the sale of image is completely inseparable from the sale of alcohol, 247

a situation the proprietors do everything to maintain. Everything about the saloon is calculated to impress upon its clientele a sense of wealth and success. In appearance, the saloon outdoes even Rector’s for pomp and grandeur:

The floors were of brightly-colored tiles, the walls a composition of rich, dark-polished wood, which reflected the light, and colored stucco-work, which gave the place a very sumptuous appearance. The long bar was a blaze of lights, polished woodwork, colored and cut glassware and many fancy bottles. It was a truly swell saloon, with rich screens, fancy wines, and a line of bar goods unsurpassed in the country. (Dreiser 42-43) The clientele of Hannah and Hogg's, too, is calculated in term s of the image of success it lends to its patrons; Drouet and his friends come to Hannah and Hogg's “because they craved, without perhaps consciously analyzing it the company, the glow, the atmosphere, which they found” (Dreiser 47). Cook County politicians, actors, businessmen—all the many versions of the images of success meet in Hannah and Hogg’s, the successful to display their image success, the potentially successful to capture some of that image for themselves, and the formerly successful to recapture some of their long-lost gilt. Dreiser creates in Hurstwood a character whose entire being is built around the image of success and its importance to Hannah and Hogg's. Bowlby claims that Hurstwood’s primary interest in life is money, “Hurstwood measures his standing first of all in dollar income, of which the material evidence (including an attractive woman) is a necessary manifestation but secondary to this in importance, since what he spends has to have come from his own pocket. Lacking adequate means, he can 248

only droop” (60). But money is only important to Hurstwood as a necessary part of the overall image of success around which his life is built. Deborah M. Garfield, in “Taking a Part: Actor and Audience in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie ,” corroborates my interpretation of Hurstwood, stressing the link between Hurstwood’s character and image:

Hurstwood, also a dexterous manipulator of appearance early in the novel, “looked the part” of a worldly saloon-keeper, and Dreiser, continually linking him to the theater, twice describes him and the collection of well-dressed men a t Fitzgerald and Moy’s as “scenes.” An urban Proteus, he models his career at the saloon on “creating a good impression” and his union with his wife, who regularly patronizes the theater, on a “semblance of leadership and control.” His stature in the Chicago hierarchy is partially created by his business apparel—tailored suits, solitaire ring, gold watch—which pegs him as a well-to-do “type.” Like Drouet, he bases his identity, or part, on the rank of those who surround him, on the stylishly garbed “actors and professional men” who are his supporting players at the “spectacle” of light in the saloon. (226) Over and over in the early chapters of the novel, Dreiser emphasizes the link between Hurstwood and the image of success, particularly in terms of the effect Hurstwood’s image has on those around him. Hurstwood, after all, makes his first impression on Carrie primarily through his appearance. Dreiser’s description in this scene underscores the connection between the things that constitute Hurstwood’s image and the effect those things have on Carrie:

His clothes were particularly new and rich in appearance. The coat lapels stood out with th at medium stiffness which excellent cloth possesses. The vest was of a rich Scotch plaid, set with a double row of round mother-of-pearl buttons. His cravat was a shiny combination of silken threads, not loud, not inconspicuous. What he wore did not strike the eye so forcibly as that which Drouet had on, but Carrie could see the elegance 249

of the material. Hurstwood’s shoes were of soft black calf, polished only to a dull shine, while Drouet wore patent leathers, but Carrie could not help feeling that there was a distinction in favor of the soft leather, where all else was so rich. She noticed these things almost unconsciously. They were things which would naturally flow from the situation. (94) Hurstwood, then, is a character of image, a creation of the image of success. As such, he represents—as several critics have pointed out—the average middle-class man in turn-of-the-century American society, whose life was built around just such an image of success (Lundquist 31; Lynn 142; Moers 88). Corkin writes of Hurstwood that the manager’s characterization stems almost entirely from his work: “The most important element in this description of Hurstwood is his position and the status of the establishment in which he works. His character is dismissed with the relatively inarticulate description ‘nice man’” (613). Hurstwood’s position at Hannah and Hogg’s gives to him an image of success; in turn, Hurstwood lends to Hannah and Hogg’s—and, thereby, to its clientele—this same im age:

His grace, tact, ornate appearance gave the place an air which was most essential, while at the same time his long experience made him a most excellent judge of its stock necessities. Bartenders and assistants might come and go, singly or in groups, but so long as he was present, the host of old-time customers would barely notice the change. He gave the place the air which they were used to. (Dreiser 124) Philip Fisher, in “Acting, Reading, Fortune’s Wheel: Sister Carrie and the Life History of Objects,” explains that Hurstwood is in effect a salesman with nothing tangible to sell: 250

As manager he, in effect, sells his tone, presence, and air to the nightclub. Standing around, the “dressy manager” rents out his personal approval. Objects have disappeared from the selling process, but the fictionality of social role is increasing. The customers do notbuy Hurstwood, they purchase the right, by talking to him and being acknowledged by him as worth talking to, to believe that they are his equals. What Hurstwood sells, therefore, is not his personality, as Drouet does, but his air of knowing and making available the entire circle of which the customer would like to imagine himself a member. (266) Alcohol enters into this transaction through social drinking. Hurstwood’s job, in a sense, is to serve as a drinking companion, though only in appearances, as Dreiser’s description of the drinks Drouet and Hurstwood pour themselves at their first meeting in the novel illustrates: “The barkeeper was setting out the glasses and bottle before them, and they now poured out the draught as they talked, Drouet filling his to within a third of full as was considered proper and Hurstwood taking the barest suggestion of whiskey and modifying it with seltzer” (Dreiser 45). The emphasis on the rules of the act makes it almost ritualistic; what is important is the act of drinking, not the consumption of alcohol. Hurstwood’s job is to be a drinking companion, not to drink, and his one mistake at work occurs when he is drawn from his professional role by the glitter of the celebrities in the saloon and begins imbibing along with them as an equal. The result of this transgression, of course, is the blurred thinking which contributes to Hurstwood’s decision to steal the money from the open safe. Hurstwood, then, is a personification of the leisure/image ethic of the saloon. He manufactures nothing. He sells nothing. He provides no real service for anyone. His entire job is to appear not to work, to appear not to need to work, and to lend to his place of employment the air of leisure and 251

success that its patrons desire. Because Hurstwood is a representation of the leisure/image ethic of the saloon culture, what happens to him can be seen as a reflection of Dreiser’s attitude toward this ethic and by extension, to the entire saloon culture. In this way, Hurstwood’s story becomes a strike against the saloon culture, for Dreiser clearly shows the limitations of the leisure/image ethic, both inside and outside the saloon. Dreiser could very easily have Hurstwood continue his comfortable existence as the ambassador of the image of success, even moving on to a greater position in the new world of New York city. But this, of course, is not the case, as Hurstwood slides from complacency and fulfillment to impoverishment and death. Ironically, the cause of Hurstwood’s fall is the very image of success upon which he bases his entire career and existence. Hurstwood’s reliance upon the saloon culture anti-work ethic in his job makes him vulnerable, and his refusal to reject that ethic for a more traditional work ethic dooms him to a lonely end in a Bowery flophouse. The image of Hannah and Hogg’s as a respectable place to see and to be seen is vital to the success of the saloon, and the owners are very careful as to whom they entrust their business: “They wanted no scandals. A man, to hold his position, must have a dignified manner, a clean record, a respectable home anchorage” (Dreiser 85). Hurstwood’s position is very delicate, being based entirely on the maintenance of a thin line of respectability and success. This emphasis on appearance, of course, affects Hurstwood: “If there was one quality which might be predicated more than another of Hurstwood at this time it was circumspectness, which the state of his home life and the tenure of his position depended upon. . . . He was 252

respected” (Dreiser 111).4 His concern for his reputation—the image of propriety demanded of him by his employers—colors Hurstwood’s thinking regarding moral matters, much as is the case with saloonkeepers in temperance fiction. Simon Slade, Deacon Giles, the unnamed saloonkeeper from My Mother’s Gold Ring—these temperance characters allow their personalities to be overwhelmed by the culture of the saloon, until they can no longer make moral and ethical decisions based on any other perspective than that from behind the bar. In Hurstwood’s case, the manager becomes so fixated on avoiding trouble, on maintaining his image in the eyes of his employers and their patrons, that he loses touch with any morals he might have ever had. Hurstwood cold-heartedly sets about luring Carrie away from Drouet and into an adulterous relationship, with no thought for any implications of his actions other than the possibility of discovery and the scandal which would result. While Carrie is hardly an innocent by the time Hurstwood meets her, there is nothing in the manager’s approach to her seduction that even resembles the “poor girl” sympathy which flavors Drouet’s actions toward Carrie. Take, for example, Hurstwood’s thoughts when he and Carrie walk among the prosperous West Side neighborhoods of Washington Street:

It was a street where many of the more prosperous residents of the West Side lived, and Hurstwood could not help feeling nervous over the publicity of it. He was known to a great many merchants on all sides of the city, and although he consoled himself with the thought that at this time of the day most merchants would be in their offices, and with the additional thought that in most cases he was not known to their wives

4 This passage is omitted in the Doubleday, Page version of the novel. 253

and children, still he could not help wishing that his presence was not so conspicuous. (Dreiser 126)5 Here is Hurstwood about to cheat on his wife, lying to Carrie about his eligibility for a liaison that will spell the end of both their relationships with Drouet, and all he can think about is who might be looking. Ironically, Hurstwood’s obsession with avoiding scandal not only blinds him to the immorality of his actions, but it also makes him open to the very scandal he hopes to avoid, a fact which his wife capitalizes on in her quest for revenge. Hurstwood’s allegiance to the saloon ethic is so complete that even when locked out of his own house by his family, he can only think of his job:

He also thought of his managerial position. “If she raises a row now, I’ll lose this thing. They won’t have me around if my name gets in the papers. My friends, too!” He bit his lip as he thought of the talk any action on her part would create. How would the papers talk about it? Every man he knew would be wondering. He would have to explain and deny and make a general mark of himself. Then Hogg would come and confer with him and there would be the devil to pay. (Dreiser 233) During his moral dilemma, Dreiser makes it clear that it is not the rightness or wrongness of taking the money that concerns Hurstwood, but the chances of getting caught: “The true ethics of the situation never once occurred to him. It is most certain that they never would have, under any circumstances” (270). In Hurstwood, then, Dreiser creates a character who—just like Deacon Giles, who sells Bibles out of the back room of his distillery, or the saloonkeeper in My Mother’s Gold Ring, who knowingly leads the narrator’s husband to drink and near-ruin, or Simon Slade, who

5 The Doubleday, Page version this passage reads, “It was a street where many of the more prosperous residents of the West Side lived, and Hurstwood could not help feeling nervous over the publicity of it.” 254

has his son tend bar in his saloon even though the boy is obviously adversely affected by the occupation—allows his own natural moral sense to be swallowed up by the culture of the saloon. For Hurstwood, it is the image of success that the saloon is built upon which controls his actions. By showing how the nature of Hurstwood’s job shapes the manager’s personality and sets him up for a terrible fall, Dreiser offers his reader a temperance-movement-inspired criticism of the saloon culture’s portrayal of the saloon as a place where men could go to assume a new identity as members of the wealthy leisure class. This criticism becomes even more pronounced when Dreiser removes Hurstwood from the context of Hannah and Hogg’s. If Dreiser shows Hurstwood’s obsession with the image of success as it occurs in the saloon to be problematic, the author shows this obsession to be completely irrelevant—even dangerous—in the “real” world of New York city. Dreiser manages to make this point by placing Hurstwood, the representative of the saloon culture’s leisure/image ethic, into a world which validates the traditional Protestant work ethic. The real cause of Hurstwood’s fall, Dreiser implies, is that the manager cannot see—or refuses to see—that the image of success he worships, which he has based his entire self upon, is just an image, with no substance outside the Chicago saloon in which it was created. Even in the face of enormous hardship in the final chapters of the novel, Hurstwood maintains his faith in his own self-worth. In some ways, Hurstwood’s pride gives his character a quality that the reader cannot help but admire. When Hurstwood declines to begrudge Carrie her success at the end of Chapter XLVI, his “bent, bedraggled but unbroken pride” 255

(Dreiser 449) shines forth, giving the reader some indication of the worth of the man. And Hurstwood’s stoic endurance of the hardships of the streetcar strike is made possible entirely through his pride: “The one thought that strengthened him was the insult offered by Carrie. He was not down so low as to take all that, he thought. He could do something—this even—for awhile. It would get better. He would save a little” (Dreiser 426). However, Hurstwood’s pride—for all that it does to make the reader sympathetic toward him—is based on a self-image created by the saloon in which he worked, and this pride proves itself to be a negative quality that surfaces at the most inopportune moments to cloud his thinking with an overblown sense of self-worth. For example, even though Hurstwood is desperate for work of any sort and finally brings himself to beg for a job at a hotel, his self-importance shows through: “‘My friend,’ he said, recognizing even in his plight the man’s inferiority, ‘is there anything about this hotel that I could get to do?’” (Dreiser 460). Hurstwood refuses to re-orient himself to his new situation in New York, a fact that Dreiser emphasizes by continually using the phrase “ex-manager” when referring to Hurstwood. From his earliest moments in New York, Hurstwood constantly compares his life there with his former life in Chicago. As Corkin puts it, “Hurstwood’s inability to forget his life in Chicago leaves him with a sense of self that persists. Unable to put Hurstwood behind him, his Mr. Wheeler lacks definition and is most notable for what he is not, which is George Hurstwood” (616). In Hurstwood’s eyes, his life as Mr. Wheeler lacks all of the image of success that gave his former life a sense of worth, and Hurstwood keeps close watch in the papers of the actions of his 256

former associates, always conscious of the differences between the world they inhabit and that in which he now resides: “Men whom he had known, men whom he had tipped glasses with—rich men, and he was forgotten. Who was Mr. Wheeler? What was the Warren Street resort? Bah!”

i (Dreiser 340). Even though Hurstwood is comfortably situated in New York, what is missing from his existence there is the image of success that was so much a part of his life in Chicago. Without his daily shots of success, Hurstwood sees as little value in life as the temperance drunkard sees without his daily shots of liquor. As the relevance of his self-image of success is called more and more into question by the facts of his situation, Hurstwood becomes more and more attached to it, until he actually begins to leave reality altogether in favor of a fantasy world of his manager days. The first instance of this occurs when Hurstwood awakens after his night with the streetcar strikebreakers:

In the morning he was aroused out of a pleasant dream by several men stirring about in a cold, cheerless room. He had been back in Chicago in fancy, in his own comfortable home. Jessica had been arranging to go somewhere and he had been talking with her about it. She was so clear in his mind, that he was startled now by the contrast of this room. He raised his head, and the cold bitter reality jarred him into wakefulness. (Dreiser 419-420) In a second, more threatening, instance, Hurstwood lapses into a revery that seems to him indistinguishable from reality:

The first of these lapses that he sharply noticed concerned a hilarious party he had once attended at a driving club, of which he had been a member. He sat, gazing downward, mentating, and gradually he though he heard the old voices and the clink of glasses. . . . 257

All at once he looked up. The room was so still it seemed ghostlike. He heard the clock ticking audibly and half­ suspected that he had been dozing. The paper was so straight in his hands, however, and the item he had been reading so directly before him that he rid himself of the doze idea. Still it seemed peculiar. When it occurred a second time, however, it did not seem quite so strange. (Dreiser 431-432) After a while, these incidents occur more and more frequently, with Hurstwood eventually becoming less and less able to distinguish between his actual situation and his former. In his “fifteen-cent lodging house in the Bowery,” Hurstwood sits in “a bare lounging room” and reminisces. “Here his preference was to close his eyes and dream of other days, a habit which grew upon him. It was not sleep at first, but a mental harking back to scenes and incidents in his Chicago life. As the present became darker, the past grew brighter, and all that concerned it stood in relief” (Dreiser 459). Hurstwood prefers even the memory of his former days to his present reality, lacking as it does anything of the image of success he has built his life around. Hurstwood’s preference for the memories of Hannah and Hogg’s over the realities of his life in New York is important, because it illustrates nicely the temperance concern for the way saloons are seen as palaces of illusion, places where drinkers can escape the realities of their lives. The real danger of such escape, in the temperance view, is not just that the drinker comes to prefer his inebriated state over his sober one, or even that he comes to prefer his saloon-culture self-image to his real-life identity, but that this latter preference destroys his ability to function within society. The drunkard’s preference for the self-image he gains by drinking in a saloon is especially dangerous, according to this line of thinking, because it 258

prevents him from finding and holding a job. For the drunkard, the means with which to purchase alcohol become scarcer and scarcer as he moves farther and farther away from the Protestant work ethic, which increases his preference for the saloon; the result is a spiral descent that only ends with death—as in the case of Simon Slade—or a last-minute salvation via the pledge—as in the case of Joe Morgan. Hurstwood’s case follows a similar pattern, providing Dreiser’s reader with a message about the inappropriateness of the ethics of the saloon culture in relation to the outside world, which operates under the traditional work ethic—at least in the Hurstwood portions of the novel. What is most significant about Dreiser’s treatment of this issue is that Hurstwood’s case practically excludes alcohol from consideration. Hurstwood, unlike the temperance drunkard, is not prevented from working due to intoxication or the latent effects of such; what keeps Hurstwood from succeeding in the working world of New York is the saloon-culture non-work ethic that made him who he is. In his narration of Hurstwood’s fall, Dreiser strips away the surface concern, alcohol, to get to the real concern of the temperance movement, the emphasis on the image of success found in the saloon culture. It is important, for example, that Hurstwood is dissatisfied with the partnership he arranges in a New York saloon. One would think, after all, that Hurstwood would be content working in any saloon, if alcohol were the prime element of his attraction to saloonkeeping. This is not the case, since it is the image of success Hurstwood can gain from working in a saloon that interests him, and the New York saloon cannot offer the level of image of success that Hurstwood 259

was accustomed to in Chicago. It takes the owner’s description of the quality of his clientele to convince George of the New York saloon’s potential: “‘We deal with a very good class of people,’ he told Hurstwood, ‘merchants, salesmen and professionals. It’s a well-dressed class. No bums. We don’t allow ‘em in the place’” (Dreiser 308). However, once Hurstwood becomes settled into his new position, he discovers that his saloon lacks contact with “celebrities—-those well-dressed, elite individuals who lend grace to the average bars and bring news from far off and exclusive circles. . . . The patronage was good enough, but the class he was used to roamed in different fields. Such interesting company would never come here” (Dreiser 309).6 As the above passage reveals, it is the image of the saloon that interests him; the sale of alcohol is only a means of obtaining the image of success that he craves. Hurstwood’s problem is not that the Warren Street saloon does not possess any of this image of success, but that the image provided by the saloon is much more diluted than that to which he was accustomed in Chicago. Once Hurstwood’s Warren Street resort collapses, the discrepancy between Hurstwood’s desire for the image of success and his actual situation infects every aspect of his job hunt and prevents him from thinking clearly about his prospects. At one point, the former manager worries about finding a job, considering the worst possible outcome for him the chance that “he would have to hire out as a clerk” (Dreiser 346). Hurstwood becomes so entangled in his memories of the social distinctions of various jobs that he begins to draw distinctions between his various

6 The portion of this quote following the ellipses is omitted in the Doubleday, Page version. 260

possible courses of action that are completely illogical. For instance, after one round of job-hunting, Hurstwood finds himself a seat in the Broadway Central hotel:

Taking a chair here was a painful thing to him. To think he should come to this. He had heard loungers about hotels called chair-warmers. He had called them that himself in his day. It had always seemed a cheap, miserable thing to do. But here he was, despite the possibility of meeting someone who knew him, shielding himself from the cold, and the weariness of the streets, in a hotel lobby. (Dreiser 353) As Hurstwood himself points out, the occupation of chair-warmer is hardly a respectable vocation; practically one step above pauperism, the chair- warmer trades exclusively on his image, having nothing else of worth. Yet still, even at this low level on the social scale, Hurstwood continues to draw distinctions between himself and work which he considers below him: “All this time his mind would come back to saloons as a last resort, and for these he had no money. It occurred to him that the positions of bartenders were sometimes open, but he put this out of his mind. Bartender—he! the ex-manager” (Dreiser 353).7 Even though the job of bartender is probably the job he is best qualified for and most likely to get a position with out of all his prospects, Hurstwood cannot let go of his memories of his successful life in Chicago enough to allow himself to take such a job. Bartenders will always be underlings to him, since he is and always will remain in his mind the “ex-manager.” In Hurstwood’s story, then, Dreiser provides his reader with an illustration of the temperance view that saloons are dangerous because they

7 The Doubleday, Page version omits the sentence “All this time his mind would come back to saloons as a last resort, and for these he had no money.” 261

erode the work ethic, replacing it in the minds of drinkers with a thirst for the image of success. That Dreiser’s story practically ignores alcohol merely serves to concentrate the illustration on what is really important for the temperance advocates. Hurstwood’s story is a case of competing value systems, with the traditional value system of the Protestant work ethic shown to be superior to that of the saloon culture. Once we see that it is this image of success and not drinking that is important to the temperance movement and to Dreiser’s narration of Hurstwood’s story, a significant aspect of the Hurstwood story comes into focus. The story not only follows the line of thinking which lies behind temperance writers’ treatment of saloons in their works, the overall form of Hurstwood’s story also follows almost exactly the form of the basic temperance Over-the-Hill plot, with the image of success Hurstwood craves substituting for alcohol as the substance of abuse. Dreiser, himself, makes the connection between alcohol and the illusion of success—in terms of Hurstwood’s job, as I have already pointed out, but also in literal terms, as agents of addiction. When Hurstwood faces the prospects of beginning his life anew in New York, Dreiser writes at length of the effect the image of success has on those who come into contact with it; the author refers to this image in terms of opium, but uses the same phraseology as one would expect in a temperance discourse:

So long, also, will the atmosphere of this realm work its desperate results in the soul of man. It is like a chemical reagent. One day of it, like one drop of the other, will so affect and discolor the views, the aims, the desires of the mind, that it will thereafter rem ain forever dyed. A day of it to the untried mind is like opium to the untried body. A craving is set up which, if gratified, shall eternally result in dreams and death. 262

Aye, dreams unfilled—gnawing, luring, idle phantoms which beckon and lead, beckon and lead, until death and dissolution dissolve their power and restore us blind to nature’s heart. (305) This is the type of strident prose that critics have long noticed in Dreiser, prose that matches in content and tone the types of authorial comments found in temperance stories; in terms of tone, alone, the last passage calls to mind Lamas’ remarks at the end of The Glass: “Yet we find many, ah! very many thoughtless, heedless, well-meaning women, who encourage by their presence if not by their example, the drinking of wine” (32). Dreiser’s connection of the image of success with addiction in the above passage is no accident or mere passing reference. Hurstwood’s entire story follows up the logic of this connection, as he—replacing alcohol with the image of success as the substance he yearns for—takes the path laid out by temperance writers for the drunkards of which they write. The basic Over-the-Hill plot follows the descent of a drunkard, originally a good citizen, who begins with social drinking, graduates to full- scale inebriation, neglects his responsibilities, becomes entangled in debt or some other legal or criminal difficulty, and ends up in either the local jail, the poorhouse, or the graveyard. Hurstwood follows this path, allowing his addiction to the image of success he finds in Hannah and Hogg’s to gain the upper hand over his actions, and from his moral crisis onward, directly descending into poverty, isolation, and death. As Corkin points out, “He becomes featureless as he slips into economic despair, as those whom he solicits on the street pass him without seeing him. His inability to define a new self results in invisibility, poverty, and finally suicide” (617). Just as 263

with the drunkard of temperance fiction, Hurstwood’s inability to shake his addiction leads him into economic destitution and eventual death. One of the basic elements of the temperance movement’s narrative of the fate of a drunkard is the parallel between the character’s growing addiction and a decline in his physical appearance and health. Fox’s description of George Allen on his return home after a career as a drunken criminal is typical: “The stranger appeared to be a young man, but very different from her idolized boy; his face was extremely emaciated, as though he had suffered much from disease or want; his complexion was dark, and George’s was very fair. O it could not be that he had altered so much in so short a time” (Fox 110). The alterations are typically from positive cultural stereotypes of good health—a muscular, well-fed body; strong, manly features; a fair, youthful complexion; and so on—to their opposites, as the only possible movement for a drunkard is toward the grave. Whitman takes this approach to describing the drunkard even further with his description of Franklin Evans’ former friend, Colby, whom he spots in the street at the end of the story:

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. (Whitman 180-181) 261

And, in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, Arthur prolongs his description of the deterioration of a drunkard, making it the focus of his entire book; by having his narrator return to the tavern at regular intervals, Arthur is able to provide for his audience a vivid description of the decline of a drunkard. In all of these cases, temperance authors use the physical degeneration of their characters to mirror the moral or mental deterioration those characters are suffering from. This inverse relationship between addiction and physical decline is true also of Hurstwood’s experience. As his addiction to his self-image of success takes more and more control over his life, Hurstwood begins to lose the willpower to care for his personal appearance. This change in Hurstwood’s appearance results, of course, in his unfortunate encounter with Mrs. Vance, in which Hurstwood answers the door dressed in his old clothes and is embarrassed to the bone by her reaction to him. It also results in aiding Carrie in making up her mind to move away from her dying relationship with the ex-manager: “The sight of him always around, in his untidy clothes and gloomy appearance, drove Carrie to seek relief in other places” (Dreiser 399). Then, just before Carrie leaves Hurstwood and finds success of her own, Dreiser emphasizes the distance between Carrie’s new situation and Hurstwood’s old memories of success through his description of Hurstwood’s appearance: “Little eating had thinned him somewhat. He had no appetite. His clothes, too, were poor man’s clothes. Talk about getting something had become even too threadbare and ridiculous for him. So he folded his hands and waited—for what he could not anticipate” (407). Hurstwood’s decline in appearance eventually 265

becomes a decline in health, which is used by Dreiser as a gauge by which to estimate the ex-manager’s decline, as Fisher relates: “Hurstwood’s decline is measured by the shrinking of his space from a Chicago mansion to a modest apartment to a smaller flat to a room to a cubicle.... An equation is made between the decline of his health, his eyesight, and the amount of light in his world, and the shrinking of his money” (274). Every bit as much as in the case of George Allen or Franklin Evans or Simon Slade, the decline of Hurstwood’s physical appearance and health are used by the author to illustrate his parallel decline into addiction. The idea that the addict of drink is morally affected by his addiction is a mainstay of the temperance tradition, and Hurstwood’s moral crisis in Chapter XXIX shows Dreiser adhering to the same principle. There George, just as any other drinker, finds that alcohol has clouded his reasoning; he begins to view taking the money as an escape route from all of his problems. But Hurstwood would never have arrived at this moral dilemma if he had not already been addicted to his own image of success. As I have already discussed, Hurstwood’s moral crisis is the result of his pre-occupation with the image of success that comes to him through his saloon; all of the manager’s attention is concentrated on preserving and nurturing his own position at Hannah and Hogg’s, and this pre-occupation prevents Hurstwood from thinking through the implications of his actions. Just as alcohol sends the drunkard over the border of normal behavior in the temperance tradition, so Hurstwood’s need to maintain his image of success sends him past the boundaries of his normal morality/ethics. 2 6 6

Along with a weakened sense of morals, comes a self-destructive streak in the actions of the drunkard, particularly in regard to money. Squandered riches are prominent in nearly every temperance story I have examined. The Husband in My Mother’s Gold Ring, George Allen, Helen More's unnamed husband, Franklin Evans, Simon Slade, Willie Hammond—each of these temperance characters loses his money due to his own drunken folly. Hurstwood, too, throws away much of his remaining cash on a fling, trying—exactly like the drunkard on a spree—to chase away his problems with a little of the hair of the dog that bit him. In Hurstwood’s case, though, the dog is the image of success: “Now desperation seized him and for a day or two, going out thus, he lived like a gentleman, or what he conceived to be a gentleman, which took money” (Dreiser 375). As Fisher points out, “The ability to waste money on cigars proves that he is ‘independent’ and not a destitute drifter” (269). Nothing, however, is more self-destructive—in the eyes of temperance writers—than gambling. Gambling both reduces a drunkard’s material goods and contributes to the moral decline that plagues all drinkers in temperance stories. Gambling claims the capital of Helen More's husband and involves Simon Slade in the shady dealings he has with the professional gambler, Green. Gambling is even more commonly used in the Corruption of Innocent Youth variation of the basic temperance story; George Allen, Franklin Evans, and Willie Hammond all succumb to the temptation of gambling, and all suffer for their folly. Hurstwood, in the midst of his period of excess, falls into the trap that had laid waste to so many temperance fiction heroes before him. It is 267

interesting, given the importance of theform of Hurstwood succumbing to gambling as the result of his addiction, that both of the ex-manager’s gambling fiascoes occur in the back rooms of saloons. Dreiser’s use of the temperance Over-the-Hill plot in the Hurstwood story reinforces the importance of the saloon and alcohol, and it also links this story with the basic message lying behind the Over-the-Hill plot. The basic temperance story is matter of willpower, with the drunkard displaying a fatal weakness of character in this area. The drunkard is too weak-willed to resist the temptation of alcohol, and the poverty and hardship which result from his drinking are shown as caused by this lack of willpower. The logical (at least in this line of thinking) extension of this situation is that, if the poverty of drunkards is the responsibility of the drunkard, then the poverty of anyone is due to some kind of defect in that person’s makeup. This lack of willpower is perhaps the most consistent element in Hurstwood’s personality. From Hurstwood’s moral crisis, in which “the clock of thought ticks out its wish and its denial” (Dreiser 269), to his final “What’s the use” (Dreiser 499), Dreiser centers Hurstwood’s story on the manager’s inability to control his actions, to resist the addicting effects of the image of success. If the idea that Hurstwood’s fall is caused by a lack of willpower— which emphasizes the role of the individual in his own fate—seems inconsistent with the idea that it is the saloon-culture which lies behind Hurstwood’s addiction and fall—which emphasizes the role of the environment in the fate of an individual—it is because Dreiser has based the underlying logic of Hurstwood’s story on that of the temperance story, 268

and the logic of the temperance story—indeed, the entire temperance movement—is inconsistent. The temperance movement, after all, sought to control what it saw as threatening social changes by controlling the actions of individuals. Linking poverty to drinking and drinking to willpower, the temperance movement separated itself from the subjects of its reforms—viewing the poor as fundamentally different from middle- class reformers—which made it easier to concentrate its efforts on destroying the saloon culture that threatened to undermine the traditional social structures that were real concern of the temperance movement. In Sister Carrie, then, alcohol is removed from, yet still connected to the temperance tradition through the overall form of the narrative and through the underlying concerns of this narrative as compared to those of temperance literature. Both the form of the temperance story and the ideology that lies behind that form are conservative at their basic level, so the effect of Dreiser linking his novel to this literary tradition is to heighten (or to introduce) a conservative message in Hurstwood’s story. Thus,Sister Carrie is a novel with two competing strands of thought, two different responses to the social issues Dreiser confronts in his novel. On the one hand, as the majority of Dreiser criticism has explained, the Carrie portion of the novel offers a fairly radical critique of traditional morality, gender roles, and the American dream. On the other hand, the Hurstwood portion of the novel offers an opposing viewpoint, one that supports the traditional values the Carrie story questions. Such oppositions, however, are difficult to see as totally valid for readers in a post-structuralist time such as ours; the boundary between the 239

Carrie and Hurstwood stories is far from definite, as the meaning of each story informs and intrudes upon the meaning of the other. The social criticism of the Carrie story constantly calls into question the values supported by the Hurstwood story, while that same social criticism is weakened by the existence, in the same story, of its opposite message. For example, while the social criticism of the Carrie story is well-established, Dreiser’s emphasis on the role of the image of success in the Hurstwood story casts a shadow of doubt upon the totality of Carrie’s victory over the forces of traditional morality and gender roles. True, Carrie escapes censure and victimization at the hands of the system, but her reward for bucking the system amounts to merely more of the image of success that her career is founded upon. The emptiness of Hurstwood’s image of success as it manifests itself in Hannah and Hogg’s saloon resounds against Carrie’s vague sense of dissatisfaction at the end of the novel. It is significant that the half of the story that is most radical avoids completely any mention of alcohol and saloons, while the other half of the novel is almost entirely fixated on these same items. It is as though Dreiser must avoid temperance forms to avoid the conservative ideology that comes with them. After all, even the half of the novel that deals with saloons practically ignores alcohol and drinking, focusing instead on the role of the saloon as a social force and on the overall form of the temperance tale. At the very least, Dreiser’s treatment of temperance issues without direct mention of drinking places his relationship with the temperance ideology on a different, more subtle level than is found in the work of Crane and Sinclair. With Crane and Sinclair, the temperance forms the authors use 270

tend to subvert the subversion of traditional values the authors intend, because of the conservative ideology that comes with the forms. Dreiser avoids the trap of using temperance forms without considering the meanings attached to them; what Dreiser does is to cut through the forms used to portray drinking in literature by ignoring drinking and dealing directly with the ideas behind those forms. While Dreiser’s approach gives his reader a novel with two contrary messages, it is a novel in which the author seems more in control of his treatment of alcohol than is the case with Crane or Sinclair. Whether it is possible to discuss alcohol in any way without falling into temperance modes of thought at some level is a question I will take up in the conclusion to this study. CONCLUSION

Following the Civil War, the reform impulses that had swept the nation in the antebellum years returned to the consciousness of middle- class Americans, who were again concerned by the changes they saw around them, changes they felt threatened their position within American society. This re-emergence of reform impulses was accompanied by an equal re-emergence of the literary traditions of the antebellum reform movements. By the turn of the century, the reform tradition was all the more prominent in the literary world due to the prevalence of reform journalism, represented by the work of Riis, as the major new testing ground for young writers. Not only were many of the best young writers of the day also reform journalists, but the self-promotional aspects of the reform impulse carried over into the literary publishing arena. The yellow journalism of the period fostered the notion that writers are “made” through a combination of experience, talent, and marketing, as Christopher P. Wilson explains, in The Labor of Words:

In perhaps the broadest sense, a young writer’s “experience” was now not regarded as a constituent part of his literary apprenticeship so much as a resource to be tapped at the appropriate market moment. This was itself a reflection that authorship might take a rather ‘other-directed’ outlook— perhaps so removed from the ‘inner-directed’ calling that one’s experience was not a guide at all; in this sense, in short, writers could be ‘made’ and not bom. (89) The result was that a young writer in tum-of-the-century America found himself at the mercy of the marketplace and the publishing establishment, 271 272 itself very much in tune with popular ideas and philosophies. To survive in such an environment, young writers—no matter how radical they may have professed to be—were forced to acknowledge the expectations of their predominantly middle-class publishers and readership. All three of the naturalist authors dealt with in this study—Crane, Dreiser, and Sinclair—experienced the effects of this new professionalism in literary authorship, and all three authors were well-acquainted with the reformist ideas permeating the air of the American scene at the turn of the century. Crane, the son of a Methodist clergyman and a prominent member of the New Jersey WCTU, researched the Bowery scene of Maggie while reporting Syracuse police court news for the New YorkTribune (Stallman 2-5, 8). Crane later proved to be one of New York’s star reporters, capably applying his own style to the subject matter of reformist journalists such as Jacob Riis. Crane’s background and professional training as a reporter provided him with an inside knowledge of the conventions of the reform movements and of the expectations of the readership of the 1890s. Dreiser began his writing career as a reporter with the Chicago Globe, later moving on the St. LouisGlobe-Democrat and, eventually, the New York World (Lingeman 94,102, 151; Swanberg 37, 39, 65). In St. Louis and Chicago, Dreiser work both as a straight-news reporter and as a writer of “Sunday supplement features, full of color and lurid details” (Lingeman 98). After quitting the World, where he was restricted to straight reporting

i “on space”—the lowest-paying method of reporting—Dreiser began a career as a magazine contributor and editor (Lingeman 151; Swanberg 39). For a while, Dreiser edited Ev’ry Month, a magazine of features and romantic 273 fiction directed at young women, who bought the magazine primarily for the free sheet music included with each issue (Lingeman 168-169; Swanberg 70-71). Following Ev’ry Month, Dreiser worked as a free-lance contributor to such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Ainslee’s, Demorest’s, Truth, and Metropolitan (Lingeman 193; Swanberg 79). As Amy Kaplan points out, inThe Social Construction of American Realism, Dreiser’s work with newspapers and magazines made him acutely aware of the needs and wants of the popular audience (122-123). While Sinclair never actually worked as a newspaper reporter, his commission to writeThe Jungle for the Socialist newspaperAppeal to Reason placed him in a situation where he consciously crafted his novel with his audience and its potential sales foremost in mind (Wilson 131). Between the novel’s publication in Appeal to Reason and its re-publication in hardcover form, Sinclair and his editors—although the editor of the republished original Appeal to Reason version of the story makes the case that Sinclair’s wishes were not adhered to in the process—carefully tailored his socialist novel to meet the expectations of a more mainstream readership (Wilson 139). After the hardcover publication of The Jungle, Sinclair was deeply engaged in the promotional efforts of his publisher (Wilson 138). So it seems that Sinclair, like Dreiser and Crane, was well- aware of the expectations and biases of the publishing world and the mass audience who would read his work. We have, then, three writers who consciously wrote for a literary market which rewarded writers who were aware of and catered to the public’s ideals and conventions. This literary marketplace was connected 274 with the reform literature tradition. One of the major branches of the reform literature tradition was the temperance literature tradition, the popularity and wide-spread availability of which made temperance thought and temperance literary forms major forces in the literary world in which these naturalists wrote. Ironically, all three authors saw their work as subversively critical of the same ideals and conventions valued in the literary marketplace of turn-of-the-century America, but when one looks at Crane’s, Sinclair’s, and Dreiser’s treatment of alcohol and temperance issues, their use of temperance forms and ideas betrays a conservatism that runs counter to their radical intentions. To a certain extent, this conservatism already exists within the philosophical framework of the authors in question, a combination of the influence of their own pasts and the literary marketplace in which they wrote. However much Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser wanted to criticize their own culture, their own identity within it conspired against them. But the temperance forms also seem to be responsible for the conservatism which counters the radical mission of these novels. While there is a sense that Crane chooses to use the drunken woman character as the basis for Mary Johnson because that character best reflects his own conservative notions about woman- and motherhood, there is an equally strong sense that these conservative notions are not revealed by so much as embedded within the drunken woman character. From this perspective, any author using the drunken woman character automatically brings a level of conservatism to her writing, whether she means to or not. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the forms and theses of temperance 275 literature serve as literary representations of the ideas of the middle-class temperance movement. In effect, then, any portrayal of alcohol or drinking in a work of literature which makes use of temperance forms or ideas automatically introduces into the work in question a measure of the conservative ideology that lies behind those forms. The significance of the above idea becomes apparent when one takes into account the widespread use of temperance forms in American literature well before and well after the turn of the century. As Reynolds has pointed out, many of the major writers involved in the American Renaissance—writing as they did during the antebellum heyday of temperance literature—were aware of and utilized the traditions of temperance fiction. Melville, for example, uses temperance images and issues in nearly all of his novels (Reynolds 137,139,140-41,145-46), and Whitman, of course wrote a temperance novel. Poe, for his part, had connections with the Washingtonian movement and with such “dark temperance” authors as Timothy Shay Arthur (Reynolds 69), and such Poe classics as “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” show the influence of subversive or “dark” temperance tales, especially in their emphasis on the effects of alcohol upon the reason and moral sense of the characters (Reynolds 70-71); the similarities between the violent, drunken behavior of the main character in “The Black Cat” and the type of behavior exhibited by characters in Ten Nights in a Bar-Room certainly lend weight to Reynolds’s assertions. Although Reynolds attempts to separate Poe from the temperance tradition, claiming that “Poe converts a popular reform formula into an intriguing study of disintegration of the Conventional 276 sensibility through the agency of Subversive forces unleashed by alcohol” (70), there is nothing in Poe’s story to suggest that the author has actually subverted any of the conservative ideology th at lies behind the temperance forms he employs. Even after the demise of the temperance novel as a popular art form, temperance issues and the fictional techniques of the temperance tale appear in mainstream fiction of the post-war period. InThe Rise of Silas Lap ha m, for example, Howells illustrates his main character’s provinciality by having Lapham become embarrassingly drunk at a dinner party. The more the teetotalling Lapham drinks, the less control he has over his faculties. The next day, as Lapham talks over his behavior of the night before with young Corey, he berates himself for his lack of self- control: “I was the only one that wasn’t a gentleman there!.... I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I mortified your father before his friends! .... I showed that I wasn’t fit to go with you. I’m not fit for any decent place” (Howells 185). Lapham’s behavior shows an awareness on Howells’ part of the temperance fiction tradition connecting intemperance with one’s social position, and his emphasis on “self-control” places him squarely within the temperance notion of willpower being a key to drunkenness. In another classic Realist work published in 1885, Mark Twain also deals with temperance issues and fictional devices. In a notable passage early in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain deflates the temperance tradition of the reformed drunkard when, after Pap serves a 277 week in jail following a rousing drunk, the town’s new judge attempts to reform the old man, taking him into his home and feeding him dinner:

And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he’d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was agoing to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn’t be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him .. . . Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. (23) Twain has followed the temperance tradition of the pledge leading to a new life for the drunkard absolutely faithfully to this point, but in the next sentence he totally destroys the convention:

Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room, and in the night sometime he got powerful thirsty and dumb out onto the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and club back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. (23) The new judge, of course, is shocked at the result of his attempted philanthropy, which Huck handles in his typically understated manner: “The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the ole man with a shot-gun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way” (23). Throughout his treatment of Pap, Twain reveals a thorough knowledge of the conventions and ideology of temperance tales, and by bringing the temperance-minded judge face-to-face with the reality of Pap’s character, Twain questions the high-minded intentions of the temperance writers who came before him. 278

Yet Twain’s treatment of Pap’s pledge does not separate the author from the temperance tradition. While Huck’s deadpan delivery is a far cry from the strident, over-written prose of the temperance writers, the underlying message of Pap’s episode would be entirely familiar and acceptable to any temperance writer from Maria Lamas on. Pap, after all, is irredeemable because he is a bad individual, and therefore inherently different from the judge. This notion of the inherent difference between drunkards and non-drinkers—which renders the pledge an inadequate solution to the problem of alcohol abuse—is a staple of temperance ideology; in fact, it lies behind the entire prohibitionary impulse that led to the Maine Laws, the Anti-Saloon League, and the Eighteenth Amendment. Not only that, elsewhere in the novel Twain utilizes temperance traditions with no qualifications, at all, particularly in references to Pap. The first time Huck lays eyes on his father at the beginning of the novel, for example, Twain’s description of the old drunk could be taken—except for Huck’s dialect— from any temperance tale:

He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his faces showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on ‘tother knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor; an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid. (20-21) The connection between Pap’s physical appearance, his alcoholism, and his moral character is quite similar to that found in such temperance 279 novels as Franklin Evans. Twain also utilizes a staple of the temperance tale by having Pap almost kill Huck during a bad case of the delirium tremens. Twain, then, can hardly be considered to have escaped the temperance tradition in his treatment of alcohol; he, like Poe, naturally falls into the use of temperance forms, which bring to his novel the conservative ideology that lies behind them. I have focused on Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser in this study, because their naturalistic stories share a common setting, the turn-of-the-century American city. But these three authors are not alone among the American naturalists in the use of temperance traditions in their novels. In Harold Frederic’s The Damnation ofTheron Ware (1896), wine-drinking plays an important part in the allure the Catholics, Dr. Ledsmar and Father Forbes, hold for the Methodist Ware; while this is an interesting play upon the temperance view of the Catholics as wine-drinking threats to teetotaling Protestantism, these scenes between Ware and the Catholics are more important in the way alcohol is linked to “dangerous thoughts” and to the weakening of Ware’s ethical and moral principles. And alcohol also appears in Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), serving as part of the overall beastiality of the dentist’s character, as when Trina returns to her husband after a walk with Miss Baker and finds her husband asleep in a drunken stupor:

The dentist sprawled his gigantic limbs over the worn velvet of the operating chair; his coat and vest and shoes were off, and his huge feet, in their thick gray socks, dangled over the edge of the footrest; his pipe, fallen from his half-open mouth, had spilled the ashes into his lap; while on the floor, at his side, stood the half-empty pitcher of steam beer. His head had rolled limply upon one shoulder, his face was read with sleep, and 280

from his open mouth came a terrific sound of snoring. (145- 146) The emphasis on “steam beer,” a very cheap, low-class variety of lager, is repeated throughout the novel, signifying for Norris something of McTeague’s vulgarity. In Sinclair Lewis’s Prohibition-eraB abbitt (1922) in a way centers around alcohol, as Babbitt’s social life—both legitimate and illegitimate— receives much of its impetus from the illegal consumption of alcoholic beverages. In one important passage, Lewis describes “the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of righteousness and prohibition.” His description of the former saloon in which Babbitt purchases the alcohol for his party calls upon a number of temperance traditions:

He entered a place curiously like the saloons of ante- prohibition days, with a long greasy bar with sawdust in front and streaky mirror behind, a pine table at which a dirty old man dreamed over a glass of something which resembled whisky, and with two men at the bar, drinking something which resembled beer, and giving that impression of forming a large crowd which two men always give in a saloon. (89) The “long greasy bar,” the “streaky mirror,” the “dirty old man” contribute to a sense of gilded seediness that the temperance tradition generally connected with alcohol and saloons. And Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1940) is entirely dependent upon temperance forms for its setting and characterization. The one element that brings such a diverse array of characters as The General, Willie Oban, Hugo Kalmar, Jimmy Tomorrow, and Harry Hope together is alcohol, and the setting of the play in “a cheap ginmill of the five-cent whiskey, last-resort variety situated on the downtown West Side of New York” (O’Neill vii) provides O’Neill with a host 281 of temperance-related connotations for the development of those characters. The fact that O’Neill sets the play in 1912, during the heart of the Progressive crusade against social evils such as drinking, is quite significant. The above sampling of the uses of temperance forms in the portrayal of alcohol and drinking-related issues is admittedly sketchy and preliminary, but the fact that all of the authors sampled rely upon temperance forms in their writing about alcohol raises an interesting question. Is it possible after the introduction of temperance fiction in the 1830s for any American author to treat alcohol in a work of fiction without resorting to the use of temperance characters, themes, and plots—and thereby introducing into that work of fiction the political ideology that goes along with those temperance forms? The evidence of the three authors focused upon in this study would indicate that the answer is no. N either Crane nor Sinclair make any effort to avoid the use of temperance forms— with Crane attempting to parody those forms and Sinclair using them at face value—and neither author avoids the conservatism these forms lend to their novels. Dreiser’s case, too, would indicate no. While the Carrie storyline in Sister Carrie does come across as a critical attack on conventional morality and gender roles, it does so in almost complete isolation from any mention of alcohol, at all: In the Hurstwood half of the novel, which centers around Hurstwood’s job as manager of a saloon, Dreiser comes as close as anyone in writing about alcohol without utilizing temperance forms, but he does this only by removing drinking from the 282 discussion. Even then, on the level of ideas and overall form of his narrative, Dreiser’s discussion of the saloon follows the temperance lead. Whether or not it is possible to write about alcohol without having one’s work influenced by the ideology that accompanies the forms of the temperance literary tradition is a question that is not within the scope of this study to settle definitively. What is certain is that the examination of the ways Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser deal with alcohol and alcohol-related issues in their city novels enriches the study of these three novelists. After observing the ways in which temperance ideology infiltrates into the fiction of these authors through the temperance forms each employs—or, in the case of Dreiser, avoids employing—it is difficult to view either of the three as the type of literary radical they have been considered by the majority of critics. This is not to say that Crane, Sinclair, and Dreiser are conservatives, since they do make some important criticisms of traditional values and social structures; I have concentrated on the conservative message of the temperance forms simply because that strain of the writing of these three authors seemed neglected in the majority of criticism. What I am suggesting is that examining these authors through the lens of temperance fiction allows for a more balanced, honest appraisal of their relationship to their historical moment than has been the case, generally. The other major point that is certain from this study is that the reform literature of the middle of the nineteenth century presents scholars of American literature with a gold mine of literature practically untouched by critics. While, from a New Critical perspective, this reform literature stretches the boundaries of the term literature, lacking the stylistic polish of 283 the canonical writers, it is important simply for the fact that it was read by large numbers of people during the mid-1800s, including the writers of the American Renaissance. What is more, the reform literature tradition continued right up through the turn of the century, influencing the work of such reform journalists as Jacob Riis and, not insignificantly, naturalist novelists such as Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser. The temperance fiction tradition offers an especially rich area for further investigations into the manner in which this type of literature impacted the work of other, more canonical writers. I have noted a few possible connections with other authors in this conclusion, but there are many questions that need answers. How, for instance, did Prohibition affect the use of temperance fiction forms in “mainstream” literature; my brief nods to Lewis and O’Neil in this conclusion indicate little change, but a closer look at their work might reveal otherwise, and they are certainly not the only writers of their period to mention alcohol in their works—Fitzgerald and Hemingway spring to mind. And what about later, more contemporary writers? What does the temperance tradition have to do with the portrayal of drinking in a work like Gravity’s Rainbow? These are all questions that need answers, but they are questions that can only be asked if we allow ourselves to broaden the scope of what we consider proper subjects for literary criticism. WORKS CITED

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