do so, he wants to make up for his neglect. Mary Evans: Franklin's first wife. Evans and Mary are in love, but she dies because of his neglect toward her. The Marchion Family: After saving their daughter from drowning, the Marchion family helps Evans when he is thrown in jail and helps him both times he tries to abstain from alcohol. Bourne: The friend whom Evans stays with when he leaves the city and reintroduces him to drink. Margaret: She is a slave but is given her freedom when Evans decides he wanted to marry her. Their marriage is not pleasant because Evans does not really love her; he only thought he did in his drunken state. Evans' love for another woman leads her to commit murder and then suicide. Mrs. Conway: After marrying Margaret, Evans meets Mrs. Conway and takes an instant liking to her. He spends more time with her than with his wife and would do anything for her. Knowing that Evans never would say no to her, she asks for the brother of Margaret to be her servant. Evans complies with her and causes so much anger in Margaret that she plots to kill Mrs. Conway in her quest for revenge. When her plan backfires and her brother becomes ill and dies, Margaret decides to strangle her. Not being able to live with the guilt, she kills herself. Criticism Two critics of Franklin Evans are Michael Warner and William Lulloff. In his paper "Whitman Drunk", Warner addresses problems he has with Walt Whitman and Franklin Evans. Lulloff does the same in a shorter piece of criticism in The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia. "Whitman Drunk": Readers today often find Franklin Evans unsatisfactory because it originally was published in newspapers, Michael Warner states. When Whitman is talking about alcohol in Franklin Evans, he often seems to be thinking about something else. Most of the time, the idea of pleasure seems to be stuck in his brain. For example, he writes "Oh, fatal pleasure," not "Oh, fatal alcohol." Whitman seems to make a correlation between will and desire in his novel. Warner states that the temperance movement was one of a non-state society and Franklin Evans helped to mediate constitutive self-understanding. Commissioning fiction as propaganda had been a part of the public strategy of the temperance movement since 1836, and Whitman went along with this idea. Because of this, both