| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elaine Frantz Parsons. Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States. (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 241. $42.95.
In this book, Elaine Frantz Parsons notes a difference between her approach and that typical of temperance historians, and she purposefully sets aside one of their primary concerns. The medical versus moral debate on the status of inebriety as a "disease" has been covered so often and so well, she gracefully concedes, as to render her own thoughts superfluous. "This book supplements, rather than challenges, the literature on the social history of alcohol and temperance" (p. 14).	1
In Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery (1999), I claimed that "temperance narratives" (my term) constituted a lost genre of American literature, one with unexplored links to contemporaneous slave narratives. Parsons boldly expands such modest claims, positing that "drunkard narratives" (her term) were inexhaustible and ubiquitous throughout the nineteenth century. Drunkard narratives, moreover, underpinned two crucial cultural debates: over the limits of individual autonomy within an environment seen to be ever more determined, and over gender roles within the family and in the public sphere. Thus Parsons is not primarily concerned with how drunkard narratives may have helped to solve American drinking problems, but instead with how they affected the discursive formulation of more abstract problems.	. . .

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