Temperance Friction

Published in 1854, the same year as Timothy Shay Arthur's temperance classic Ten Nights in a Barroom, and What I Saw There, Sophia Little's novel The Reveille; or, Our Music at Dawn undermines common critical interpretations of temperance fiction. Generally understood as a genre that normalizes white, middle-class gentility and helps to institutionalize gendered separate spheres, temperance fiction's cultural work was significantly more inclusive and malleable, as Little's novel demonstrates. In it, we find a heroine who struggles as much against the restrictions of gender and class as she does against drink, engaging a broad spectrum of progressive social and political issues even as she fights to keep her husband sober and her children and herself safe and secure in their home. Rewriting the possibilities for women's democratic engagement in the antebellum public sphere, Little's novel demands that we critically revisit both the movement and its fiction.