“Blood will tell”: Suttree’s Drinking Class

Abstract

ABSTRACT How can we account for the ubiquity of destructive drinking in Suttree? This article argues that alcoholism—both medical disease and metaphor for materialist excess—can be used to interpret Suttree’s actions as a critique of his father’s bourgeois values. Alcoholic consumption ironically mirrors a brand of material consumption that Suttree disdains. The article interacts with other scholarship that explains how the educated son from an affluent family chooses the life that he does, but it does so by reading Suttree’s familial discord through the shifting etymological significance of “alcoholism” as a physiological disease that also reflects social value. I argue that by understanding Suttree’s choices as the pathology of this disease, his marginal existence reads less like rebellion and more like addiction. But Suttree’s alcoholic life along the trash-riddled Tennessee River is also a reminder of the other kind of consumer excess that those of his father’s ilk represented in the halcyon economic days after World War II. The article uses a historicist approach to contextualize Suttree’s life as both the backlash to upper-class socioeconomic standing and as the life of an addict whose despair only abates if we read his “fly them” moment as a sober one.