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American Quarterly 56.2 (2004) 489-497



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Through the Highball Glass

Arizona State University
Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Postwar America. By Lori Rotskoff. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 336 pages. $45 (cloth). $18.95 (paper).

In reading Lori Rotskoff's Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Postwar America, I found myself haunted by a scene from a film whose release coincided with the book's publication, Todd Haynes's homage to 1950s melodrama, Far from Heaven (2002). In it, the sparkling facade of a suburban cocktail party is shattered when the host, who drinks to dull the pain of his losing battle against homosexual desire, begins verbally abusing his long-suffering wife. The heroine—whose plans for the party have throughout the film signified her desperate efforts to shore up their crumbling marriage and idyllic image as "Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech"—moves swiftly to smooth over the incident, chiding, "Darling, don't you think you've already had enough?" even as she bustles to refresh her guests' cocktails. The scene crystallizes the key historical contradictions anatomized in Rotskoff's fascinating study of alcohol and marriage in postwar America: the simultaneous glamorization of social drinking and pathologization of "problem" drinking, the construction of alcoholism as symptom of a deeper crisis in masculinity, and the demand that the alcoholic's wife both preserve [End Page 489] the facade of normalcy and subordinate her own needs to her husband's therapeutic process.

While alcohol plays only a supporting role in the film's dramatization of the rift between suburban ideals and painful realities, Love on the Rocks brings such moments into sharp focus, using the intertwined discourses of drink, alcoholism, and recovery as lenses through which to examine the larger ideological contradictions of postwar America. Rotskoff mines an impressive archive of historical evidence—from the professional discourses of psychologists, physicians, and social workers, to popular fiction and film, to the internal records of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Al-Anon. Building upon the now-familiar association of consumer culture and therapeutic discourse, Rotskoff argues that alcoholism emerged as "the primary, even paradigmatic illness of overindulgence by the 1950s" (234). Moreover, she makes a compelling case that examining such discourses of individual pathology and dysfunction can help us better understand the ideals and norms of the dominant culture, since the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like alcoholism reveal implicit norms about "healthy" masculinity, marriage, and family life. As models of "problem drinking" shifted from a moralizing discourse of "sin" targeted at working-class and immigrant others to a therapeutic discourse of "sickness" focused on white, native-born, middle-class family men, Rotskoff suggests, discourses of alcoholism and recovery redefined the white middle-class family no longer as an unquestioned norm but rather as an institution in crisis, wracked with contradictions that threatened to destroy it from within. A lucid, insightful, and richly documented cultural history, Love on the Rocks makes a valuable contribution to the growing scholarly and popular interest in "the darker underside of domestic life during the mid-twentieth century" (8).1

As the cocktail party scene from Far from Heaven suggests, postwar attitudes toward alcohol were deeply divided between an increasingly pathologized disease model of "problem drinking" and a normalization and glamorization of "social drinking" as a "tension reliever," "social lubricant," and hallmark of modernity (62). Post-repeal consumer culture celebrated heterosocial drinking—from the after-work highball to the suburban cocktail party—as a natural release from workaday pressures and as a pleasant ritual of companionate marriage and domesticity. At the same time, the figure of the solitary problem drinker provided the very standard against which "moderate" and "social" [End Page 490] drinking could be measured. Moreover, the emergent "disease model" of alcoholism, in striking contrast with the temperance-era indictments of "demon rum," located the problem not in the substance consumed but in the psyche of the problem drinker. Echoing Warren Susman's distinction between the culture of "character" and the culture of "personality," Rotskoff demonstrates that problem drinking was increasingly...

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