Intemperate Reform: Cripped Associations in Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans

Abstract

Benjamin Rush's foundational work in temperance reform influenced early nineteenth-century reformers to associate democracy with the sober, able body. In the early 1840s, the explosive growth of Washingtonian Total Abstinence Societies, a working-class movement based out of Baltimore, began to shift temperance culture away from its earlier bourgeois formulations. Written for the Washingtonians, Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate (1842) attempts to refigure the relationship between the body and the body politic. Building upon work from disability studies and crip theory, this paper considers how Whitman's approach to the genre of the temperance novel and the underlying ideas of the movement were shaped by his relationship with his brother Eddy, a person with physical and mental disabilities. Through scenes set in a crowded and chaotic New York City, Whitman questions what role people with non-normative bodies and minds can have in a democracy. Through depictions of vulnerable, dependent, and abnormal bodies, Franklin Evans imagines a form of association that not only acknowledges but depends upon the embodiment of citizens to locate and address political, economic, and social systems in need of reform.