Friends of Bill F. : alcohol, recovery, and social progress in southern fiction

In “Friends of Bill F.: Alcohol, Recovery, and Social Progress in Southern Fiction,” I argue that many southern writers use the trope of drunkenness to investigate the South’s often hesitant stance toward social change. The overwhelming presence of hard drinking in southern fiction is so ubiquitous that it becomes nearly invisible, and what distinguishes twentieth century southern literary representations of alcohol from their antecedents is how overconsumption reflects a dis-ease in both the individual drinker and the region as a whole. Emerging from the concept of diseased drinking is the idea of recovery, and by foregrounding recovery language alongside depictions of addiction, these texts privilege drinking-recovery as the metaphor through which to signify how southerners confronted progress. My intervention into the discourse of the South and modernity traces the literary contours of alcoholism alongside the emerging Sobriety Movement that became popularized with the rise of Alcoholics Anonymous, to suggest that recovery from alcoholism perhaps anticipates individual and social progress. I argue that progress remained conceptually problematic for writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Cormac McCarthy who saw the South’s tepid relationship to social change as hypocritical

Panel IV

Open Spaces, Open Secrets: Sanctuary\u27s Mysterious Something / Lisa Hinrichsen, University of Arkansas Unvanquished Uncertainty / Sarah Mahurin Mutter, Yale University Drunk and Disorderly: Alcohol and Prohibition in Sanctuary / Conor Picken, Louisiana State Universit

Drunk and Disorderly: Alcoholism in William Faulkner\u27s Sanctuary

The dramatic events in William Faulkner\u27s Sanctuary a region under the siege of corruption, as pervasive violence precludes any hope of orderly reconciliation between entrenched power and those subject to it. The world of novel has been described as a wasteland (Blotner 269) whose moral, social, and political decay rots everything from church to brothel. Situating this wasteland in a specific context, Francois Pitavy remarks, prohibition so saturates the narrative that it comes to inform it -- to control its very writing. From subject matter, prohibition becomes a governing concept ordering the narrative -- at once what is told and what must remain untold (47). Lost in the novel\u27s sensational violence is the fact that Sanctuary, as Pitavy claims, is very much about Prohibition. The circumstances informing the central plot rely on outward signifiers of Prohibition, placing the novel as one set in and responding to the milieu propagated by the Eighteenth Amendment (also known as the Volstead Act)

Southern Comforts: Drinking & the U.S. South

Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South. Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what drinking has meant over time. Complexities of race, class, and gender remain hidden amid familiar images, catchy slogans, and convenient stories. As the first collection of scholarship that investigates the relationship between drinking and the South, Southern Comforts challenges popular assumptions about alcohol in the South by examining evocative topics drawn from literature, music, film, city life, and cocktail culture. Taken together, the essays collected here illustrate that exaggerated representations of drinking oversimplify the region\u27s relationship to alcohol, in effect absorbing it into narratives of southern exceptionalism that persist to this day. From Edgar Allan Poe to Richard Wright, Bessie Smith to Johnny Cash, Bourbon Street tourism to post-Katrina disaster capitalism and more, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South uncovers the reciprocal relationship between mythologies of drinking and mythologies of regionhttps://scholarworks.bellarmine.edu/fac_book_gallery/1051/thumbnail.jp

Panel. Moonshine and Magnolias: A History of Spirits in Faulkner\u27s Mississippi

Booze and Borderlands: Historicizing Race and Class in the Liminal Spaces of Light in August and Sanctuary / Carrie Helms Tippen, Texas Christian UniversityThe production, distribution, and consumption of illicit alcohol creates borderlands where the binary categories of race and class are destabilized. Rather than a history of alcohol alone, this presentation is a history of spaces: the forces that generated the demand for spaces, the persons and groups that met in such spaces, and the consequences of those meetings. I use this historic narrative to reinterpret the liminal spaces liquor creates in Faulkner’s works. In Light in August, the diner/brothel is a public space for conducting private acts. As a “white-only” space, the diner/brothel demands that Joe Christmas be assigned a discernable racial identity. Conversely, the Old Frenchman’s Place in Sanctuary is a private space turned public, merging Ruby Lamar’s home life with Lee Goodwin’s business. Ruby’s dining table and the porch, particularly, are borderlands where class status seems to lose some of its potency.The Noble Experiment? Faulkner\u27s Two Prohibitions / Conor Picken, Bellarmine UniversityFaulkner’s Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun use the historical bookends of Prohibition and the Sobriety Movement to interrogate the South’s troubling reaction to social change. Both novels feature Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens, and the manner in which they consume across these texts ties them to the historical climate of Prohibition and the emerging culture of sobriety/recovery in its wake. Sanctuary features Temple and Gowan descending into of alcoholism, while Requiem for a Nun shows them struggling with recovery from it. Temple and Gowan’s troubled experiences with alcoholism pressure notions that historicized representations of drinking reflect the progressive intents of what I call Faulkner’s two Prohibitions We Thought It Was Whiskey : Prohibition in the Jim Crow South and Faulkner\u27s Image of the Intemperate Negro / Meredith Kelling, University of Missouri, St. LouisProhibition in the South ought to be viewed as a movement not to inspire temperate behavior in all of its citizens—for the alcoholic behavior of established whites was famously overlooked—but to color-code the consumption of alcohol, to further an image of the African American slave descendant as a body in need of policing. In Faulkner’s oeuvre, that body belongs to Nancy Mannigoe. This paper will examine how varied perceptions of Nancy, in both 1931’s “That Evening Sun” and 1951’s Requiem for a Nun, problematize the stereotypical image of the intemperate Negro both by allowing for black subjectivity and by revealing the sanctioned paternalistic impulse to criminalize black behavior more generally. This paper provides a historical context for Nancy’s victimization, madness, and crime, that is, of Prohibition in the Jim Crow South, which sought to maintain slavery’s socioeconomic status quo by perpetuating an image of inherent black criminality

Salt-Sensitive Hypertension, Renal Injury, and Renal Vasodysfunction Associated With Dahl Salt-Sensitive Rats Are Abolished in Consomic SS.BN1 Rats

Background Abnormal renal hemodynamic responses to salt-loading are thought to contribute to salt-sensitive (SS) hypertension. However, this is based largely on studies in anesthetized animals, and little data are available in conscious SS and salt-resistant rats. Methods and Results We assessed arterial blood pressure, renal function, and renal blood flow during administration of a 0.4% NaCl and a high-salt (4.0% NaCl) diet in conscious, chronically instrumented 10- to 14-week-old Dahl SS and consomic SS rats in which chromosome 1 from the salt-resistant Brown-Norway strain was introgressed into the genome of the SS strain (SS.BN1). Three weeks of high salt intake significantly increased blood pressure (20%) and exacerbated renal injury in SS rats. In contrast, the increase in blood pressure (5%) was similarly attenuated in Brown-Norway and SS.BN1 rats, and both strains were completely protected against renal injury. In SS.BN1 rats, 1 week of high salt intake was associated with a significant decrease in renal vascular resistance (-8%) and increase in renal blood flow (15%). In contrast, renal vascular resistance failed to decrease, and renal blood flow remained unchanged in SS rats during high salt intake. Finally, urinary sodium excretion and glomerular filtration rate were similar between SS and SS.BN1 rats during 0.4% NaCl and high salt intake. Conclusions Our data support the concept that renal vasodysfunction contributes to blood pressure salt sensitivity in Dahl SS rats, and that genes on rat chromosome 1 play a major role in modulating renal hemodynamic responses to salt loading and salt-induced hypertension