Abstract/Details

A tug from the jug: Drinking and temperance in American genre painting, 1830–1860

Kilbane, Nora C.   The Ohio State University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,  2006. 3238194.

Abstract (summary)

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.

Indexing (details)


Subject
Art history
Classification
0377: Art history
Identifier / keyword
Communication and the arts; Drinking; Genre painting; Painting; Temperance
Title
A tug from the jug: Drinking and temperance in American genre painting, 1830–1860
Author
Kilbane, Nora C.
Number of pages
271
Degree date
2006
School code
0168
Source
DAI-A 67/10, Dissertation Abstracts International
Place of publication
Ann Arbor
Country of publication
United States
ISBN
978-0-542-93034-8
Advisor
Groseclose, Barbara
University/institution
The Ohio State University
University location
United States -- Ohio
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
3238194
ProQuest document ID
305303978
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/docview/305303978