| Perhaps no other nineteenth-century pastime elicited reactions as strong as those generated by gambling. Americans were deeply ambivalent about gaming: while the dominant culture was trying to establish a narrative of personal success through hard work and moral rectitude, it was undeniable that chance and "the breaks" increasingly played a major role in the making of fortunes. The subject of gaming was a persistent and culturally significant topic of discourse throughout the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, it was addressed often by writers, moralists, fabulists, and artists, each of whom had his or her own approach to the issue. What is surprising is that such a hotly disputed cultural undercurrent has received little, if any, attention from modern art historians. This dissertation will examine gambling in American art as a site of cultural contention, in which there was a confluence of contemporary discourses about morality, economics, and national identity. As a contested phenomenon, gambling intersected predictably with certain contemporary discussions---about the value of hard work and skill in a meritocracy, for example---but also with some less obviously related issues, such as ethnicity and economic uncertainty. My project will be organized at those areas of intersection, where artists used gambling as a trope to intervene in or moralize about some aspect of identity or contemporary culture.;The dissertation is organized into four chapters. The first places gambling in a larger context of American reform and moralizing movements. The second chapter centers on William Sidney Mount and his works that reference gambling in opposition to a proper work ethic. Chapter three deals with a variety of works produced at mid-century, and examines the ways in which gamblers were depicted as inveterate cheats; it also examines how images of that cheating did cultural work in a growing, but increasingly unstable, national economy. The last chapter describes gambling at the turn of the century, focusing on how the activity---considered socially inappropriate for a variety of reasons---was associated with various ethnic or religious groups to insinuate that they were similarly unwelcome in American society. |
