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

In addition to reminding us of Walt Whitman's longstanding prominence, the rediscovery and re-publication of his lost novel Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852) demonstrates early Whitman's debt to generic conventions.¹ While the novel is perhaps most easily characterized as a Dickensian rags-to-riches tale, it also features elements from other popular genres: aspects of sentimentalism, adventure fiction, reform literature, sensationalism, and others make an appearance.² In a way, Jack Engle is a compendium of the fiction genres that Whitman utilized during his early career, for by this work's publication, he had published another novel and over twenty other pieces of short fiction.³ It is a helpful reminder, in other words, that before Whitman was the deeply original poet that remains in our popular imagination, he was a dedicated student of potboiler fiction.

It is with this view of Whitman as an author who incorporated, merged, intersected, and reworked a variety of generic conventions that this essay considers his other novel Franklin Evans, Or, The Inebriate (1842). Just as Jack Engle is superficially a formulaic rags-to-riches tale, Franklin Evans is superficially a formulaic temperance narrative. It follows the titular character's slow drunken descent into poverty and vice until, upon signing a temperance pledge, he is redeemed. Moreover, like Jack Engle, Franklin Evans integrates elements from other genres. These include a range of subplots like "The Death of Windfoot," a Native American legend; "The Reformed," a sentimental redemption narrative; and—most notably—"The Margaret Episode," a pro-slavery romance.

This essay considers the possibilities and problems that emerge in Franklin Evans when genres with competing ideological aims intersect. Specifically, I investigate the interaction between "The Margaret Episode" and the novel's framing temperance nar-Studies in American Fiction 44.2 (2017): 185–209 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press rative. I demonstrate that while elements of the pro-slavery romance contained in "The Margaret Episode" initially appear subordinate to the novel's temperance ideology, a means to recast and enrich the genre's overarching goals, the temperance tale is ultimately unable to contain the romance's racist ideology. The intrusion of "The Margaret Episode" therefore destabilizes the temperance genre to a point that undermines the temperance movement's core beliefs.

Reading Franklin Evans as a collision of genres differs from existing interpretations of the novel. Most scholarship roughly falls into two intersecting camps. The first reads the novel as one of Whitman's initial attempts to speak in what Peter Coviello has called a "language of attachment."⁴ They argue that the novel is part of Whitman's larger effort to form, through voluntary participation and sentimental exchange, a nonstate public sphere that is, admittedly, white and male.⁵ The second camp considers how the novel reveals the violence that the creation of Whitman's white sphere does to people of color. Focusing largely on "The Margaret Episode," they argue that this form of attachment not only differentiates races but also racializes black bodies, making them into figures of intemperance to be codified and extirpated.⁶ Both camps have much to say about Whitman's development, but they are less attendant to the historical generic context in which he was writing. They mostly view the novel as part of Whitman's corpus, as an assessment of the potentials and limitations of his nascent "language of attachment."⁷

Though less attentive to what Franklin Evans says about Whitman's career, this essay considers what the collision of genres can tell us about the relationship between literature and social change. In particular, I explore the dialectical relationship between the ideology of the Washingtonian Temperance Society (the Washingtonians) and the form of the Washingtonian temperance narrative that frames Franklin Evans.⁸ The Washingtonians were an especially popular and effective branch of the temperance movement, which was perhaps "the most durable social movement of the nineteenth century."⁹ The temperance movement's reach is attributed, in large part, to the effectiveness of the temperance narrative: an immense number of these tales were published and sold during this...