Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South ed. by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger (review)

In the last two decades, the history of alcohol has enjoyed robust scrutiny from scholars of the American South. Historians have explored how drinking patterns changed over time as well as how temperance and reform movements reflected wide-ranging concerns about racial and gender mores, the perils of modernity, and economic uncertainty. Despite the maturation of the historiography, popular perceptions of drinking in southern history remain mired in a simplistic dichotomy of hard drinkers and teetotalers. As the essays in this collection illustrate, common narratives promulgated in literature, film, and trade publications depict a southern drinking culture that reinforces the region’s problematic social hierarchy. In challenging these narratives, editors Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger hope to redirect public understanding of southern drinking with critical analyses of the mythologies surrounding alcohol in the region.

Picken and Dischinger have assembled an introduction and seventeen essays organized into three thematic sections: “Alcoholism, Temperance, and the South,” “Revising Narrative through Intoxication,” and “Alcohol’s Production, Commodification, and Circulation in the South.” Chronologically, most of the essays fall within the twentieth or early twenty-first century. The chapters also share a methodological emphasis on textual analysis, as the authors are specialists in literature and film. This distinction offers an opportunity for fruitful cross-pollination with the historiography, which to date has offered comparatively little insight into the discourse surrounding southern drinking culture. Such interdisciplinary approaches should be embraced for the field to advance and reach a broader audience.

The depth and variety within the collection are impressive. As one might expect, Picken and Dischinger include essays analyzing the alcohol-soaked mythologies of William Faulkner’s Mississippi, Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, and John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans. Other essays examine tropes found in the works of Flannery O’Connor, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Richard Wright. The examination of southern drinking in film ranges from depictions in Touch of Evil (1958) to Big Bad Love (2001), as well as an insightful analysis of so-called moonshine cinema. Alison Arant’s lead article on Gertrude “Ma” Rainey is representative of the seminal contribution of the collection. Rainey’s blues lyrics, which prominently featured references to liquor consumption, provide an illuminating text on drinking culture’s complexity and significance. In seeking the emotional catharsis and freedom afforded by her lifestyle, Rainey eschewed middle-class respectability while challenging the race, class, and gender hierarchy at the height of the Jim Crow and Prohibition eras. As Arant’s work demonstrates, gauzy mythologies about alcohol consumption cover up significant histories of many Souths.

Given the region’s manifestly obvious inequalities, exposing the power dynamics embedded within discourse may strike some readers as less urgent than other subjects. Yet, as the authors of these essays demonstrate so effectively, common narratives about drinking stifle those who have contributed so much to the region’s cultural and material wealth while framing stories in ways that perpetuate inequality. The essays in this collection offer a start to a more expansive and inclusive understanding of southern drinking culture. In their introduction, Picken and Dischinger write that they hope their book “will also find a home in both public libraries and public houses” (p. 14). They have succeeded in assembling a collection that will stimulate popular audiences and specialists in southern studies alike.