In the United States, in 1830, per capita alcohol consumption peaked at record levels and then began to decline as the temperance movement worked to curtail American drinking. Although the goal of a sober nation was laudable, the movement’s fundamental bias toward a white, middle-class audience exacerbated growing tensions with the lower class and called attention to the issues of slavery and racial inequality, ultimately generating social conflicts on par with those it was working to alleviate.
This dissertation examines a group of genre paintings created in America, 1830-1860, that depict alcohol, alcohol consumption or intoxication in order to identify how the controversies surrounding drinking and temperance directly, but also indirectly, influenced their formal and thematic construction. Combining the methodologies of social history, formal analysis and material culture, this study explores how painters struggled, with varying degrees of success, to incorporate a temperance message in their work while visually managing the issues temperance brought to the fore—class conflicts, racial tensions, even debates over freedom and liberty. In particular, this dissertation focuses on images of rural and frontier laborers in which the presence of alcohol is significant, yet difficult to detect without an understanding of antebellum temperance propaganda and the visual vocabulary it established.
One common feature of temperance’s visual language was conflation of alcohol with the drinking vessel that contained it in such a way that a bottle or jug literally became alcohol. The temperance propaganda circulating contemporaneously with these canvases would have activated the meaning of the jugs and bottles in the paintings and moved the role of these objects beyond merely a compositional function. A jug’s opacity meant it could hold anything, while explicitly revealing nothing—leaving the final word on meaning up to the viewer. This dissertation suggests, that by presenting alcohol in the form of the jug, these canvases helped to bolster the hope of middle class reformers that this substance, and by association the citizens who used it, could effectively be contained and controlled.