Prohibition

Prohibition is invoked as a remembered backdrop to Cornelia’s familiarity with drunkenness. It makes Jacqueline’s excessive drinking recognizable to her, while leaving another aspect of the encounter unexplained and unsettling.

A Period of Familiarity

Cornelia recalls having seen plenty of drunkenness during the Prohibition years. The reference establishes her past exposure to it without specifying when or where those experiences occurred.

Relevance to the Scene

When Jacqueline is drinking too much, Cornelia considers this no novelty. What troubles her instead is the mismatch between Jacqueline’s apparent attention to Cornelia and the sense that she is speaking to someone else. Prohibition thus supplies a point of comparison: the drinking is familiar, but Jacqueline’s behavior in the room is not.