Sentimental Men – Masculinity & the Politics of Affect in American Culture - Hardcover

Chapman, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520216210 ISBN 13: 9780520216211

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

The essays in this volume analyze a wide variety of cultural forms to demonstrate the centrality of masculine sentiment in American literary and cultural history from the early republic to the progressive era. Challenging the association of sentimentality exclusively with femininity in studies of American culture, the contributors analyze sentimentalism not just as a literary game but as a structure of feeling manifested in many areas: temperance testimonials, begging letters, historiography, philanthropic performance, photography, portraiture, and poetry. Essays from a variety of disciplines deconstruct the alignment of reason, commerce, and the public sphere with men, and feelingfs, domesticity, and the private sphere with women.

About this title

About the Author

Mary Chapman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Glenn Hendler is Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

From the Back Cover

"[Sentimental Men] advances our understanding of American culture with contributions of original and often superior research that come together as an interdisciplinary conversation about sentimentalism and masculinity."—Charles Berryman, author of Decade of Novels

"[Sentimental Men] makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing theoretical, historical, and critical project of reassessing sentimental discourse. Like the best of the recent work in this field, this anthology of essays does not merely celebrate what had formerly been execrated by professional readers, but it undertakes to understand the reasons behind celebration and execration alike. More centrally, it endeavors to reveal the 'cultural work' that sentimentalism does, and continues to do, in the overlapping spheres of art and culture."—Katherine Snyder, University of California, Berkeley

From the Inside Flap

"[Sentimental Men] advances our understanding of American culture with contributions of original and often superior research that come together as an interdisciplinary conversation about sentimentalism and masculinity."—Charles Berryman, author of Decade of Novels

"[Sentimental Men] makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing theoretical, historical, and critical project of reassessing sentimental discourse. Like the best of the recent work in this field, this anthology of essays does not merely celebrate what had formerly been execrated by professional readers, but it undertakes to understand the reasons behind celebration and execration alike. More centrally, it endeavors to reveal the 'cultural work' that sentimentalism does, and continues to do, in the overlapping spheres of art and culture."—Katherine Snyder, University of California, Berkeley

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture

By Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, editors

University of California Press

Copyright 1999 Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, editors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520216210
Chapter One
Fireside Chastity:
The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s
Vincent J. Bertolini

I dreamed pleasant dreams that night;
for I dreamed that my Reverie was real.
IK MARVEL (DONALD GRANT MITCHELL)

Bachelors and fireplaces go together in the antebellum period. The scene of the solitary lounging bachelor dreaming before the glowing embers, lost in that mood of feelingful reminiscence and imaginative projection that the nineteenth century called "revery," is common in the narrative literature of the period. Not merely a literary motif or familiar setting, the bachelor's fireside revery is a widely diffused cultural topos, emerging not only in such canonical high-literary texts as Melville's Pierre and Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, but also in the pages of Godey's Lady's Book andin especially crystallized formin Donald Grant Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor, a hugely popular book published in 1850. Indeed, bachelorhood was an obsessive preoccupation of antebellum American culture, and the bachelor, a highly problematized social identity, was the frequent topic of stories, plays, magazine pieces, poetry, and songs, as a rapid check of publication records from the period immediately reveals.

What then was the antebellum bachelor doing by his fire? He was sitting and thinking: sitting before the lonely bachelor hearth, a crude approximation of the warm center of official domesticity, the sentimentalized heart of the nineteenth-century home; and thinking, thinking in the bachelor's dreamy, longing way, primarily of what it would be like not to be a bachelor. This combination of physical passivity and feelingful imaginative activity, enacted in the resonantly symbolic

site of normative familyhood, marks the bachelor's fireside revery as a moment of discursive pressure, intrasubjective conflict, and emergent identity.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the bachelor in America hadas the proliferation of popular references to bachelorhood attestsfully entered the national consciousness; he had become a well-known, primarily urban social type specified by a determinate set of features. At the same time, bachelor identity was wholly defined in relation to the terms of normative white masculinity, the discursive contours of which by now are quite well-knownheterosexual, generally desensualized, (eventually) married, and (ultimately) procreative. That is, though the bachelor was a fact of the American social scene, he represented one of the worst threats to nineteenth-century bourgeois social and sexual ideology: the appearance of a codified male subject position that could respectably host non-normative sexual subjectivity and alternative erotic practice. Such an identity did in fact come fully into place by the end of the century.1 But in the discursive environment of antebellum America, the bachelor was still a fluid category. To the northeastern writers of reform theorythose educators, divines, and medical men who produced advice books for young men and women, educational reform treatises, and scientific tracts on everything from diet to "sexual hygiene"the bachelor could be easily associated with the anarchic sexual possibilities of solo masculinity. He embodied the potential for deviance from the reformers' strict domesticating and desensualizing regimes. In his solitary and unmonitorable status as an autonomous unmarried adult male, the bachelor represented the transgressive triple threat of masturbation, whoremongering, and that nameless horrorhomosexual sex.

But threat to what? The history of American sexuality shows that sexual reform discourse, from the 1830s onward, reflected and attempted to manage bourgeois anxieties about the social fragmentation of American society resulting from rapid urbanization, industrialization, and the expanding Western frontier.2 Reform theory emerged in full flower in the context of the breakup of the small, local socioeconomic units (the agricultural, mercantile town) and intimate social institutions (primarily the family) which regulated and normalized everyday life. The ascetic regimens of the reformers were intended to institute a kind of nostalgic rural discipline within the flesh of actual subjects, so that, for example, the rootless young men who inhabited the bustling city or the lone prairie would bring the forms of pre-industrial social life with them as a system of beliefs and values that determined their sexual practice. By transforming young white males into self-interpellating subjects of sexual ideology, the reformers aimed to keep them out of prostitutes', their own, and each other's hands, and oriented towards infrequent, productive, and what was thought of as socially stabilizing sexuality. Reform theory attempted to execute this monumental task of social construction by appealing to foundational ethico-religious as well as physiological principles: not only the truth of scriptural precept and the unequivocal social good of normative procreativity, but also the scientific fact that any erotic activity (auto-,

hetero-, or homo-) was physically and psychically destructive to the health of men, women, children, and unborn generations, hence to society and the nation at large.3

The weight of the world, it seemed, rested on the bachelor's shoulders. And the conflicts and stresses registered in certain bachelor texts derive from the peculiar situation of bachelor identity in the antebellum phase of its emergence. The bachelor occupies an ambiguous position within the mid-Victorian system of sex, gender, and body ideologies. Not yet the subject of etiquette books such as The Complete Bachelor (1896),4 no longer an addressee of the young men's guides of the thirties and forties (in which the word "bachelor" can barely be mentioned),5 nowhere to be found in the treatises on domestic life and marital sexuality, the bachelor's sociosexual identity is undefined and unregulated. Located in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshold between domestication and transgression, the bachelor is a liminal concept in antebellum culture and a transitional state within proper masculine development.6

Within the antebellum sex / gender system, bachelorhood is a liminal concept since it is negatively defined by its total lack of explicit sexual content, all practices, single or reciprocal, being proscribed (hence the double meaning, which persists as a Latin trace in modern romance languages, of celibate as "unmarried male" and "sexually abstinent"). With no socially validated practices to call his own, the bachelor exists as a purely conceptual entity in relation to sexualized nonbachelorhood, and not as a practical (that is, activity-oriented) sexual identity. The bachelor is precisely he who must fend off his association with the socially abject sexualitiesthe self-abuser, whoremonger, or sodomiteas well as he who struggles to define himself in imaginative relation to what he is not yeta lover, husband, and father. Bachelorhood is a transitional state because the bachelor has left properly constituted boyhood, in which the young man's sexuality is monitored, chastened, and directed towards proper objects by the mother, but not yet entered properly constituted manhood, in which the wife extends the maternal regime within the bounds of a limited, procreative conjugal sexuality.7 From both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, the antebellum bachelor finds himself in erotic limbo.8

It is no wonder then that the bachelor in antebellum culture is so often domesticated. Some cultural artifacts merely rail against the bachelor or leave him on the cusp of husbandhood.9 Other texts convert him outright in moralistic parables intended to illustrate the loneliness and pain of the unmarried condition and the pleasures and virtues of transcending it. Such texts can be thought of as constituting a specific literary modebachelor sentimentalism strategically related to a female-authored sentimentalism that functioned in complex ways within nineteenth-century ideology. Sentimentalism in the nineteenth century was not merely a literary genre but a widespread mode of cultural signification or, as Shirley Samuels calls it, "a set of cultural practices designed to evoke a certain form of emotional response, usually empathy, in the reader or viewer." In her

introduction to The Culture of Sentiment, Samuels writes that sentimentalism, by embodying a "double logic of power and powerlessness," offered an "affective alternative" to politics, one which "gave political actions their emotional significance" and "intimately linked individual bodies to the national body."10 Samuels has in mind primarily female-authored sentimentalism in a wide variety of cultural products, and the thrust of the essays in her volume is towards a dialectical reading of sentimentalism that sets sentimentalism's reiteration of the hegemonic against the oppositional political values resulting from its ability to cross boundaries of race, class, and gender. This double cultural work of sentimentalism also finds expression in Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor and, more consciously and critically, in Melville's parodic bachelor sentimentalism from the 1850s.

"Bachelor's Disease"

Let every young man who reads these pages resolve, in his own mind and heart, to do all in his power to effect on society, a most important and most thorough work of reform. Shall he not, at least, take the first stepthat which must, forever, be the first stepshall he not reform himself?
WILLIAM A. ALCOTT, THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE

Samuels's analysis illuminates the literature of domesticated bachelorhood, for much bachelor sentimentalism works toward normalizing reformist ends. Bachelor sentimentalism employs not only the representational and plot conventions of sentimental fiction, but also its affective strategies. It is precisely through the representation of bachelor subjectivityand the male reader's empathetic identification with those representationsthat bachelor discourse does its regulatory work. By producing a subject who finds in himself the painful affects represented as belonging to bachelorhood (and who then desires to remake himself in the national image of ideal masculinity), bachelor sentimentalism mimics the operations of antebellum sex and gender ideology. Conversely, antebellum ideology works sentimentally: it tries to train subjects to desire and to "freely obey" the Law by cultivating in them the pleasurable feeling of a properly ordered subjectivity, rather than through potentially provocative and antidemocratic interdiction.11 Within the domestic sphere, as G. M. Goshgarian argues, pleasure and law were conjoined through the ideological "open secret" of maternally supervised filial masturbation, a dynamic of prohibition / permission that had incestuous qualities.12 But in their postfilial state, away from the surveillance of mothers and not yet under the watchful eyes of wives, men had to be trained out of bachelorhood through reading effects: through the pain-avoidance and pleasure-maximization that bachelor sentimentalism signaled. In the most normalizing narratives of bachelor domestication, the bachelor is represented as lonely and depressed, at loose ends but at the same time tightly bound, incapable of releasing the natural upwelling feeling that orients proper men towards the opposite sex and marriage.

The descriptions of the bachelor's situation and affectand the metaphors used to characterize bothreveal bachelorhood to be a cultural pathology that parallels the most worrisome male medical problem in the nineteenth century: spermatorrhea. The affective strategies of bachelor sentimentalism operate according to the diagnostic logic of the disease; as the spermatorrheic is cured of his condition by nineteenth-century medicine, so the bachelor is cured of his by sentimental reading.

The etiology and pathology of spermatorrhea, or involuntary loss of semen (through wet dreams or premature ejaculation, or during urination or defecation), show the disease to be the medicalized expression of two of the period's primary sociosexual anxieties: excessive male sexuality and decreased procreativity. The disease was thought to be caused by masturbation or early sexual overindulgence, and the ultimate effect of untreated spermatorrhea was impotence.13 In the interim, the subject suffered psychic as well as physical symptoms, including nervousness, shyness, a "'disrelish for society,'" wandering attention, bad memory, moroseness, sadness, and the "substituting [of] 'shadowy dreams' and 'erratic phantasms' for intellectual labor." The physical symptoms of the disease were various, and reinforced the separation in post-1830 sexual ideology between vigorous and pleasurable sexuality and the reproductive function.14 Behavioral incontinence, in particular early masturbation, was correlated with physical incontinence ("seminal leakage"); at the same time, the affected body was also constipated, less fluid and loose than in its healthy state. The erotic sensations that catalyzed the disease gave way to discomfort and pain or dullness and deadness.15 The pathology of spermatorrhea, in other words, combined a desensualizing fear of excessive and perverse male sexuality with a re-sensualizing desire to harness a more naturalized conception of male eros for normative sociophysiological ends. The historical evidence suggests that sexual reform theory had the desired effect, and that generations of men were affected by the terror tactics of medicine allied with ideology.16 The only fully effective cure for "bachelor's disease," men learned, was coitus within the bounds of matrimony.17 Impotence would come to an end; full erections and moderate sexual pleasure would follow.

Just as marriage cured the bachelor's traumatized body, it also promised the only pleasurable relief from the traumatic interstitial situation of bachelor identity. "The Old Bachelor," a two-part story in Godey's of 1850, shows the logic of spermatorrhea at work in the sentimental domestication of antebellum bachelors.18 The "hero" of the story"for Dr. Hinton is our hero" (232)is troped by the alternating metaphors of hardness / boundness and fluidity / looseness conventionally used to describe subjects who resist feeling (such as bachelors and spinsters): he is a "colossal" and "terrific iceberg . . . inwardly consumed by a fierce volcano, which boils, and spits, and rages, and tries frantically to let off steam, while it is held in durance vile by the strong, consolidated ice of ages" (231). This image of emotional constipation, with its sense of a repressed ejaculatory sexuality, is repeated, after the doctor meets his "innamorata" (233), in the

description of his feelings for her: he is "no ordinary lover" but loves "with the concentrated and accumulated love which had been lying dormant in his system for full thirty years" (269). A clear case of developmental delay, the doctor is undergoing a crisis he should have suffered ("strange animal" (231) that he is) as a young man: the danger of this suggested affective / seminal backup is that our hero's passions will find an outlet in transgressive behavior. He needs to be melted, but also prevented from overflowing, by conjugal love.

The onset of the unnerved, insomniac bachelor's crisis is cast in the domesticating formula of True Womanhood's relation to True Manhood: "she [was] that good angel, come at last, for whom, through boyhood, manhood, and oldbachelorhood, he now, upon his lonely bed, acknowledged he had in secret sighed" (231). This bachelor realizes he has existed only as the pathetic shadow of what he could be. The negativity of his bachelor identity registers temporally: "He looked back into the past, and found it all a blank compared to this moment. He looked forward into the future, and the coming days and years actually menaced him" (232). This bachelor, on the verge of transformation along normative sociosexual lines, experiences his liminal identity qua bachelor as empty of prior content and at the same timeif it continues unchangedas threatening. That his is an ordeal of identity also registerson the sleep-deprived morning after he meets Clarain his alienation from his physical self: he "consult[s] his mirror with eager and unusual anxiety," and as never before finds himself "hopelessly ugly"; he is "disgusted with himself" (231). Thoughts of his unmarried state make him desire the obliteration of his incomplete self:

"It is not good for man to live alone. . . . I despise myself! I wish I was dead and decently interred this very minute!"

Thus he sat and mused, all solitary and alone, and was on the verge of suicide. Had a gentle wife but ran her fingers through his hair, or a prattling boy but climbed upon his knee, there would have been none of this. No murmurs against fateno wish for oblivion. (233)

This desire to commit suicide, without the will to execute it, is another symptom of spermatorrhea.19 In this sexual ideology, the spermatorrheic's desire to commit suicide encodes a warning against the transgressive practices that bring on the often fatal disease. In the terms of bachelor discourse, however, the desire for suicide seems to be the affective expression of the bachelor's inability to live out his impossible identity; suicide also tropes bachelorhood as the self-inflicted destruction of a proper masculine identity, immanent in all men, that can be realized if they will only act appropriately.

It is the absence of action, however, that shakily preserves bachelorhood; that absence is nowhere more present than at the bachelor's hearth, in the moment of fireside chastity. As our suffering hero sits by the fire, his imagination calls up the physical attractions of Clara in minute detail and in language resonant with the claims she makes upon his desire. She is "coy," "spicy," "piquant," "imperious,"

and "witching." These mental images and the movements of feeling they stimulate totally define the practical erotic life of this obedient bachelor; they are both alive and (as nonpractice) dead: "he embalmed them in his good, pure heart, and there they lay as all he had ever known of beauty and of love" (233).

In the gap between desire and praxis that opens in the moment of the fireside revery, pain is introjected as the bachelor measures his situation (in the blithe, gloating voice of the married male narrator) against the practical delights of normative hearth life:

Life became now a burden to our bachelor friend. Time did not even kindly strike a trot, but groped along heavily, slowly, and oppressively. Oh, the long, long hours of that dreary, hopeless winter! Who can measure them?who can tell how painfully they passed away? I cannot, I am sure; for I love old Winter, with its heavy frosts and bridal snows, its long evenings and cosy nights, and roaring, cheering fires. I have heard old bachelors talk about the horrors of these; and my imagination will sometimes sketch them as they yawn, and smoke, and twirl their fingers, and poke the fire, and consult their creeping watches, and wish in vain for something on earth to do . (233, emphasis added.)

The sentimental effect of a passage like this is embodied both in its narrative form and in the dynamic of readerly identification and counter-identification it constructs. In his breezy, even offhanded way, the married narrator both engages bachelor subjectivity and disengages himself from it: he is "sure" he cannot feel the bachelor's pain, because he inhabits an identity which so totally excludes its Other that the phenomenology of the Other's identity is unimaginable; at the same time, he presents the matter in a rhetorical form ("who can tell . . . ?") which invites a bachelor reader's affective identification ("my imagination will sometimes sketch them"). Careful, however, not to let the reader wallow in self-pity, and quick to present the alternative to bachelorhood in a vivid way that would motivate action, the narrator shows that the conjugal hearth and home is where the bachelor really wants to be:

I do not like to dwell upon [bachelors'] miseries. Not I. I had rather marshal up the married man, who returns from his office, after the busy day, to meet the baby's eager greeting and his wife's glad kiss at the doorwho finds his paper ready aired, his slippers and his gown all waiting, the fire briskly burning, and a welcome everywherewho in sorrow finds a comforter, and in joy finds others happy through him. (233)

The conjugal hearth is the scene not of lonely reminiscence but of bustling activity characterized in affective terms (eagerness, gladness, comfort, joyfulness, happiness), domestic activity which, unlike the oppressive non-activity associated with bachelorhood, pleasurably complements male endeavors in the economic sphere. In contrast to the spermatorrheic's "disrelish for society," this scene of normative domesticity displays the achievement of happiness through society and points towards its socially stabilizing benefits. As the well-known reform writer and doc-

tor William Alcott says in The Physiology of Marriage, matrimony is "the golden chain that binds society together. Remove it, and you set the world ajar, if you do not drive it back to its original chaos."20

What makes "The Old Bachelor" a domesticating tale is, of course, the bachelor's achievement of happiness through marriage. At the end of the tale, Dr. Hinton himself adopts the domesticating role of the narrator, illustrating for the "four-and-twenty sheepish bachelors" who attend his wedding how they too can "be of good cheer." At this point the narrator pipes up with a final wish that "all the old bachelors under the sun" may also come to the Doctor's "wise conclusion" (273).

Sweet Sin and Stirring Weakness

I wonder, thought I, as I dropped asleep, if the married man with his sentiment made actual, is, after all, as happy as we poor fellows in our dreams?
IK MARVEL (DONALD GRANT MITCHELL)

What happens if the bachelor refuses to obey, chafes against domesticity? What are the psychic, affective, and practical ramifications of resistance for bachelorhood as a sociosexual identity? The answer lies in the dynamic of co-constitution between the transgressive (that is, active, embodied, and erotic) and the normalizing (that is, passive, abstract, and chaste) aspects of bachelor identity; it lies also in the paradoxical way sentimentalism works on embodied subjects. It is at the moment of the bachelor's fireside revery that we find the active and passive, transgressive and normalizing, sides of bachelor identity contending against one another. At the moment of sentimental revery, domestic ideologies of sex and gender, which bear on the bachelor not only cognitively but as variously valued structures of feeling, contend with the antidomestic thoughts, desires, and identifications available to bachelors as the (only) potential stuff of practical identity. If bachelors, in the process of sentimental domestication, are trained to inhabit other subjectivities imaginatively and to desire to adopt them, these affective operations always take place in the hidden context of prohibited practices and abject identities. Hence, if the bleak moods and obvious suffering of the obedient bachelor spring from his vain wish "for something on earth to do," the unspoken content of his wish draws as much from prohibited as from permitted conduct. Indeed, the pull of the transgressire-practical can seem almost as strong as the desire (whatever its cause) to remain single: the bachelor can erotically practice outside of matrimony (even if he is stigmatized) and still in some sense remain a "bachelor."

It is at the moment of the bachelor's fireside revery, the moment of discursive convergence and conflict within the bachelor's imagining / feeling subjectivity, that sentimentalism does its double cultural work. During the revery, the moment of feelingful imagination that both constitutes bachelor identity and opens bache-

lor subjectivity to the operation of dominant ideology, the boundaries between the head and the heart, the mind and the body, sentiment and sexuality, begin to blur. At such moments, distinctions between affective objects can muddle: warm regard for the goodness of women, intended to produce an ethicized longing that moves men toward the prospect of lifelong instruction within the conjugal relation, can spill over into more eroticized forms of desire. With this enlarged affect, the cognitive content of the revery can diversify in such a way that the bachelor begins to imagine specific kinds of erotic resolutions that remain "nonthematizable" with respect to the overt purposes of sentimental subjectivization.21 Within the representational practices of texts that host such reveries, objects and values can cross in a way that challenges dominant concepts of proper male desire, praxis, and identity. That is, at the moment in the revery of the access of sentiment, the bachelor experiences his own sexual subjectivity as excessiveas "extravagant" (to use Thoreau's term)with respect to the conceptual boundaries of normative masculinity. And as this sociocultural phenomenon achieves concrete (counter-)discursive form, bachelor sentimentalism begins to function as a literary medium through which a fraught social category opens itself up to reveal the faint outlines of alternative sexual subjectivity, the seed of some alternative sexual identity.

Nowhere in the antebellum period is this process more evident than in Reveries of a Bachelor .22 Mitchell's book was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, and its enormous popularity certainly had to do with its overt thematizing of normative domesticity and explicit affirmations of dominant values. Here was an exemplary bachelor, or so it must have seemed to many, if not all, readers. F. W. Shelton, in his essay "On Old Bachelors," is "disposed to show no quarter to the sentimental bachelor," one of the four types of bachelor he discusses.23 By this type he means bachelors in the Mitchell tradition: "By my ancient friendship for Isaac Marvel, I declare that no apology can be found for any of the set. Do not believe a single word which they say." The problem with the sentimental bachelor lies in the seeming incongruity between inside and outside, in the fact that he talks a good game but does not follow through, and in what this discrepancy suggests about what he is holding back and why. The reveries of the sentimental bachelor "are no unhealthy, night-mare visions, crude, vague, undigested phantasies. They are delicate, airy, sweet pictures, which can be gazed at with pleasure by one who is wide awake." They seem to be "just the ones to be over head and ears in love the whole time." Sentimental bachelors say the proper sentimental things in just the right accents and with the right affect, "discours [ing] in such amiable, set phrase, all about the tender affections, with tears in their eyes, and their cheeks flushing with emotion" (225). But neither the evoked feelings nor the sweet speeches are ever translated into action, and the reason for this "remains a mystery" (226).

The elusiveness of the sentimental bachelor, this sense that all his fine emotional expression masks hidden motivations, emerges in the fireside fantasies of

domestic life of Mitchell's fictional alter ego, "Ik Marvel." Indeed, the moods represented in Ik's first revery are volatile, ranging from enthusiasm to anger, proceeding (as Mitchell's chapter titles suggest) through "doubt," "cheer," and "desolation." The structure of the first revery correlates these last three moods with stages in the life of the fire (smoke, flame, and ashes), and with stages of the domestic fantasy (opposition to marriage and family, happy husband- and fatherhood, and the husband / father's bereavement). The volatility of affect hints at the psychic costs of toeing the normative line, and the resolutions that he fantasizes finely balance reiteration and resistance.

Marvel begins the first revery before his smoky, cold hearth with the negative aspects of "unchanging, relentless, marriage" (21)pesky children, nosy relatives, and wives who are too rich or too poor, too henpecking or too literary. At the moment of the fire's hopeful blaze, he delivers a paean to the normative family, to the beauties of prattling lively children and a soul-communion with his sister / angel wife, whose loving and correcting influence increases joy and makes "love master self" (35). At the end of the revery, as the fire turns to ash, Marvel imagines death taking off his loved ones one by one. Significantly, sentiment increases and is enriched by the fantasy deaths of this fantasy family. As soon as the bachelor comes into being as he who (only) dreams of wife and family, he imagines being restored, through no agency of his own, to his bachelor state. In obsessive and lovingly rendered detail, the bachelor describes the progress of his wife's disease, her paling, weakening, fading descent into the well-made coffin that sits on the staunch table: "'It is a nice coffin, a very nice coffin. Pass your hand over it; how smooth!'" (47). In passages like these, the sentimental inhabitation of the role of loving husband and father brings the bachelor into being through mutual constitution with dominant masculinity; at the same time, sentimentalism provides the bachelor with a language and a structure of feeling that allow him to respectably fend off the grubby realities of actual family life with which the book begins.

In the second revery, Marvel's thoughts turn away from domestic matters towards courtship, the rituals preceding marriage, and the fantasies they provoke. In these passages Mitchell renders women as objects of the bachelor's erotic interest, and the revery registers the bachelor's frustrations at having to inhabit a liminal, transitional identity defined by what he is not and characterized by inactivity. The fantasies of this section reveal how the gateways of feeling, once open, can swing wide, flooding the bachelor subject with very undomestic thoughts and with the painful internal conflict that results from acknowledging a structure of desires which cannot be satisfied through socially validated forms of practical life. At this point, the bachelor dreams not in front of his country fireplace but before his city grate, warmed into revery not by solid oak and hickory but by flickering sea-coal and long-burning anthracite. This movement between the country and the city reflects the bachelor's peculiar position between the reformers' nostalgic rural vision of normative sociosexuality and the evolving reality of the Jacksonian city as a democratizing place of transgressire practices and emergent identities.

And here by his city grate the bachelor's revery of the allurements of a courted "coquette" threatens to spill over into what looks like masturbatory fantasy. By inviting an interpretive link between masturbation and revery, in a context in which neither is stigmatized, Mitchell makes a bold cultural gesture. As we saw, "shadowy dreams" and "erratic phantasms" were one of the hallmarks of male sexual disease; F. W. Shelton also emphasizedin his remark about "unhealthy, night-mare visions, crude, vague, undigested phantasies"the ethico-biological dimension of certain dreams that bachelors may be subject to (though sentimental bachelors, he says, are not). When John Todd, the famous "male purity" reformer whom I will discuss in more detail below, inveighed against the "rovings of the imagination" and the "habit of reverie" in The Student's Manual (1835), he directly connected these states of mind to the horrific results of "permitting the thoughts to wander when aloneevils which want a name, to convey any conception of their enormity." (These evils so want a name, in fact, that Todd gives the subsequent two-page disquisition on the destructiveness of Onanis scelus [heinous onanism] in chaste Latin.)24 In the context of such discursively driven paranoia, the "coquette" passage, which ends the "Sea-coal" chapter, reads as the bachelor's fairly brazen assertion of a solo sexual fantasy, if not (or not obviously) an actual act of masturbation:

And so, with my eye clinging to the flickering blaze I see in my reverie a bright one dancing before me with sparkling, coquettish smile, teasing me with the prettiest graces in the word; and I grow maddened between hope and fear, and still watch with my whole soul in my eyes; and see her features by-and-by relax to pity, as a gleam of sensibility comes stealing over her spirit; and then to a kindly, feeling regard: presently she approaches,a coy and doubtful approach,and throws back the ringlets that lie over her cheek, and lays her handa little bit of white handtimidly upon my strong fingers, and turns her head daintily to one side, and looks up in my eyes as they rest on the playing blaze; and my fingers close fast and passionately over that little hand, like a swift night-cloud shrouding the pale tips of Dian; and my eyes draw nearer and nearer to those blue, laughing, pitying, teasing eyes, and my arm clasps round that shadowy form,and my lips feel a warm breathgrowing warmer and warmer

Just here the maid comes in, and throws upon the fire a panful of Anthracite, and my sparkling sea-coal reverie is ended. (76)

It is the rhythm of the passage as well as its contentits repeated short phrases and the accelerating pace that builds towards a climaxthat mark this as a scene of possible masturbatio, decidedly interruptus . The style of the passagewith its images of energy and passion, its description of warm, sensate, proximate bodies, and its trope of Dian eclipsedsuggests that sentimental expression functions here as an erotic vehicle: by casting his eroticized imaginings in the respectable contexts of a "whole soul['s]" appreciation, and of "pity," "sensibility," and "kindly, feeling regard," the bachelor is allowed to verge imaginatively toward proscribed practices.

The arrested fantasy / activity that ends the chapter spurs Marvel to social polemic and to a kind of oxymoronic language that tries to unite pleasure and law, activity and thought, within bachelor identity. The companion passage to Marvel's masturbatory fantasy complicates the relations of content and value structured by antebellum sexual ideology, and may be read as a plea for the right to a respectable solo sexual praxis:

I know not justly, if it be a weakness or a sin to create these phantoms that we love, and to group them into a paradisesoul-created. But if it is a sin, it is a sweet and enchanting sin; and if it is a weakness, it is a strong and stirring weakness. If this heart is sick of the falsities that meet it at every hand, and is eager to spend that power which nature has ribbed it with on some object worthy of its fulness and depth, shall it not feel a rich relief, nay more, an exercise in keeping with its end, if it flow out, strong as a tempest, wild as a rushing river, upon those ideal creations which imagination invents, and which are tempered by our best sense of beauty, purity, and grace? (7778)

As sexual ideology always does, the passage relies upon a concept of nature as the ontological ground for its ethics of male sexuality. But here wildness, fluidity, and power are proposed as ethically good; the disease-ridden body of the masturbator is nowhere to be found. Instead, Mitchell joins affective terms denoting male pleasure with traditional moral concepts, shifting (almost fully reversing) their meanings. Sexualized revery and the act it can lead to may be "weakness" and "sin" (concepts drawn from the medico-moral and religious reformism of the day), but if giving in to one's heart's desireallowing it to "spend that power which nature has ribbed it with"is weakness, it is, oxymoronically, a "strong and stirring weakness." Such desires, as these terms suggest, powerfully animate not just the heart but the sexualized male body. Indeed, the image of the expending, ribbed, full, deep, flowing, and relieving heart does not need to be teased into a trope for the erect and ejaculating penis. Rather, the fact that heart and penis are related in more than a merely tropic sense is what is at issue in the passage. Marvel is pleading to be allowed to bring his unmarried and excited penis into contact with his feeling and properly ordered heart, to unify sentiment and sexuality in a socially validated practical identity informed by his culture's "best sense of beauty, purity, and grace." That is, this bachelor desiresthrough reconstructed social valuesto free from the "falsities that meet it at every hand" not just his heart but his desiring male body.

Lightning in the Closet

In thunder as in sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God .
HERMAN MELVILLE, "THE LIGHTNING-ROD MAN"

The rhetorical structure of Marvel's polemic reveals the suffering that the narrator endures as a result of living with the tension between bodily desire and social

actuality. He "know[s] not justly" how to judge his erotic life, cannotsave oxymoronicallythink himself out of his culture's ethical terms; he leaves his rhetorical question"if this heart is sick . . . shall it not feel a rich relief . . . ?"unanswered. Marvel never tests his alternate bachelor identity beyond the bounds of the fireside revery, in social circumstances fraught with real risk and transformative possibility. While Mitchell's sentimental bachelor evades the social world to inhabit the world of his sexual fantasies, Melville represents bachelors and husbands who engage bachelor discourse in the context of specific social relationships. In Pierre, "I and My Chimney," and "The Lightning-Rod Man," Melville deploys the topos of fireside chastity in plots that diagnose the ideological production of domesticated bachelorhood and imagine tentative forms of practical resistance to heteroerotic and procreative norms.25

In Pierre, the bachelor revery is variously linked with a fictitious domestic order established through Pierre's design, with an act of self-writing in Pierre's thinly disguised fictional autobiography, and with a type of utopian reformism shot through with the desensualizing practices of antebellum sexual ideology. In the midst of the clashing racial identities, sexual license, and drunken pandemonium Pierre encounters in the Jacksonian city, he takes refuge in a flesh-mortifying male reform community and an unconsummated, fake heterosexual marriage which realizes, in its structure and desensualizing effect, the equation of sisters and wives in domestic ideology. Pierre is in one sense neither a married nor a single man but a sad, neutered combination of both. But Pierre is, of course, still a bachelor, and Melville introduces the topos of fireside chastity to show the discursive filiations between male domesticity and midcentury bachelor identity. The bachelor hearth by which Ik Marvel affirms his single manhood by symbolically killing his wife and children becomes the pathetic stove-warmed bricks and flagging that Delly puts under Pierre's feet while he writes. The warm city grate by which Marvel fantasizes his coquettes becomes the crook of stovepipe that enters Pierre's cold writer's garret, only "to elbow right out of it, as some coquettish maidens enter the heart."26 At the moment of revery, when Mitchell's bachelor at least imaginatively projects himself into a scene of sexual exchange, Pierre thinks of his fictional alter-ego Vivia, whose problems his creator cannot resolve, making Pierre's literary effort look like the liminal bachelor's activity of ideological self-interpellation.

Indeed, the novel's rhetoric of an ahistorical and decorporealized propagation of identitythe self as "self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodite" (259)reads as an idealizing fantasy of transcending the ideology that produces a conflicted structure of feeling within the bachelor's traumatized body. Melville links bachelorhood and idealism through the ragtag community of Transcendentalist reformers (" 'The great men are all bachelors, you know'" [281]), in order to exhibit how both philosophical and medico-moral idealism have the same effects on the embodied subjectivities of unmarried men. As Pierre shows, even utopian alternatives to dominant forms of socioeconomic life do not easily escape the

desensualizing logic of normative masculinity.27 Pierre is unable, finally, either to inhabit an eroticized domesticity or to enjoy a pleasurable solo sexuality. He sits, we are told, on his "indigent bachelor's pallet . . . entirely idle, apparently; there was nothing in his hands" (270). Neither he nor any of the flesh-chastening bachelor reformers he lives among can translate same-sex desire into action.28 Pierre stands as a testament to the painful impasse of midcentury bachelor identity and the effects of nineteenth-century sexual ideology on male erotic subjectivity.

Melville's story "I and My Chimney" avoids this ahistorical fantasy of a place of freedom beyond discourse. Instead, the story engages bachelor discourse from within the institution of marriage and carves out a tiny space of freedom within marriage's normalizing constraints. We find the story's narrator, a husband and father, striking the attitude of sentimental bachelorhood, sitting by the fire smoking his pipe in melancholy meditation on the beauties and transience of human life. He is often in a mood of nostalgic contemplation and, like bachelors, enjoys the compensatory pleasures of the table. But this male subject, narrating in a bluffly comic tone a skittish and elusive tale, is enmeshed in a life-or-death cultural struggle for domestic power. The motive for the narration is the conflict between the narrator and his wife over whether the massive phallic chimney in their house, which extends from the basement through the roof, should be torn out. Through plot and trope, Melville writes the conflicts about evolving forms of American political thought and social life onto the relations between husband and wife. The narrator identifies with Old-World monarchical government, and, nearer to home, with an old-fashioned and stable federalism; he values aristocratic social relations of dominance and subservience, playing the ministering subject to the king, his chimney. His wife, a restless projector, builder, and transformer, incarnates the energy and diversity of Jacksonian America: she embraces dietary reform, Swedenborgianism, spirit rapping, and ladies' magazines, living in a future-directed state of constant flux. Their battle over the chimney symbolizes the contest over the patriarchal foundations of American social life. With the growth of the ideology of "separate spheres," which reconfigured gender roles and entrusted women with the supervision of their sons' and husbands' sexuality, and within the tradition of postrevolutionary democratic antipatriarchalism, paternal power in the domestic sphere had been significantly diminished and redistributed. The narrator's ongoing battle to save his lordly chimney from his wife's destructive schemes tropes an attitude of embattled conservatism, a desire to preserve patriarchal institutions and forms of social organization.

But within the narrator's patriarchalismas within the bachelor identity itselfthe dominant is shown to hide its opposite: the possibility of antidomestic male sexuality. Unlike Ik Marvel, whose potent sexuality craves an outlet simultaneously physical, emotional, and societal, the narrator of Melville's story, though a father, is almost wholly de-eroticized. His wife, on the other hand, is hilariously, punningly, eroticized, suggesting not only the sexual energies being released within the new forms of nineteenth-century life but also the normsperhaps

constrictive for the narratorof heterosexual activity within the procreative family.29 The narrator wants simply to be left alone with his chimney, in a relation of political submission which, in an absurdly extended trope of behindness and rearness, seems also a relation of sexual submission. He goes about "with [his] hands behind [his] back," belongs to "the rear guard," and "bring[s] up the rear of [his] chimney," his "superior," whom he "ministers" to by "bowing over" (160). This hint of homoerotic identification is paralleled near the end of the story by the rumors of a secret "closet" built into the chimney by the narrator's bachelor relative, who remained a mysterious and eccentric stranger to the townsfolk among whom he lived until his death. This closet, as the architect (a "Mr. Scribe") in league with the projecting wife speculates, may hide the relative's never-discovered fortune or may have served some "other purpose, [which] may be left to those better acquainted with the history of the house to guess" (180).30 The narrator thinks the rumored closet may be a "secret ash-hole" linked to the "queer hole" in which he and his wife already put ashes (183). Subsequently, the narrator slips, referring to "this secret oven; I mean secret closet of yours, wife" (184), a moment linked lexically and thematically to another "mysterious closet" maintained by the narrator himself, one in which he keeps "mysterious cordials, of a choice, mysterious flavor," but won't keep his wife's eggs, "on account of hatching" (168).

Ovens and eggs on the one hand, queer secret holes on the other: the closet becomes a site of cultural conflict between the domestic regime and excessive male subjectivity. It also functions as a psychic space within which nineteenth-century males can assert the one prerogative of bachelorhoodthat of preserving the privacy of desirein a culture in which marital sexuality was increasingly a matter of public discussion and regulation. It is in this context that the narrator defends the inviolable privacy of his bachelor kinsman's closet, at the same time expressing his related desire that his own closet and its mysterious, sensual, antidomestic contents remain inviolate:

even if there were a secret closet, secret it should remain, and secret it shall. Yes, wife, here, for once, I must say my say. Infinite sad mischief has resulted from the profane bursting open of secret recesses. Though standing in the heart of this house, though hitherto we have all nestled about it, unsuspicious of aught hidden within, this chimney may or may not have a secret closet. But if it have, it is my kinsman's. To break into that wall would be to break into his breast. (188)

In "I and My Chimney," Melville leaves his married narrator hunkered down in the heart of the normative family, guarding the last corner of an already purely negative bachelor freedom within which the dim hope of an alternative erotic subjectivity can still flicker.31

If in "I and My Chimney" Melville imagines the trials of excessive masculinity within the confines of the bourgeois home, in "The Lightning-Rod Man" he represents the impulse towards an alternative eroticized homo-domesticity and an

exuberant rejection of reform discipline. In this story the closet expands to the walls of the house and, instead of shutting out the normative social world, opens up to receive it, invites it to shelter there, to accept and be accepted by its Other. The tale begins with a reformulation of sentimental bachelorhoodwith an image of the bachelor standing on his hearthstone and meditating not on melancholy bachelor topics, but on the thrilling power of grand and glorious nature as represented by the raging storm outside his house. The lightning-rod man arrives, selling his long copper and wood device affixed to two glass balls and terminating in three devilish tines at the top. The narrator invites the salesman to join him on his hearth, but the terrified salesman refuses. Again he is offered a chair placed "invitingly on the broad hearth," and again he refuses, ordering the narrator to "'quit the hearth . . . the most dangerous part of a house' "(152). The fear-inducing words of the salesman make the narrator "involuntarily" step off the hearth, but at the stranger's "unpleasant air of successful admonition" he "involuntarily" steps back on again, revealing a proud instinct to resist such smugly paranoid counsel. The "strange mixture of alarm and intimidation" and the salesman's "conjur[ing]" and "command[ing]" anger the narrator, who is "not accustomed to be commanded in [his] own house" (153).

The hearth (most parts of the house, it seems) conducts electricity, the dangerous power of nature, which the salesman's coldly mechanical phallic product can carry safely away from the house and harmlessly into the earth. Not only will the salesman not share the narrator's hearth with him, he won't touch the narrator, because "'a man is a good conductor.' " " 'Are not lonely Kentuckians, ploughing, smit in the unfinished furrow?' " the salesman says. " 'Of all things, I avoid tall men'" (157). But the narrator is not frightened by nature's power and indeed lives in a house that attracts it: his floors are made of " 'heart-of-oak' " (an image that connotes both sentiment and hardness / strength / durability), and oak, as the stranger tells him, " 'draws lightning more than other timber' " (154). In fact, one manifestation of natural power, " 'instead of alarming [the narrator], has strangely inspired confidence.' " He learns that lightning can strike backwards, " 'when the earth, being overcharged with the fluid, flashes its surplus upward.' " He is cheered: " 'The returning-stroke; that is, from earth to sky. Better and better. But come here on the hearth,' " he says to the stranger, " 'and dry yourself' " (156).

This interchange, and the story as a whole, can be read as a coded dialogue between reform theory (represented by the lightning-rod man) and the possibilities of excessive masculinity (represented by the bachelor), about the containment or free expression of male sexuality. The reformer wants to attach a kind of ideological prosthetic to this domestic sphere, a phallus which conducts the forces of sexuality away from men and their penises; he does this by an appeal to powerful voices of authority within nineteenth-century culture, those of science and religion, as they reach American subjects through discursive products: " 'I will publish your infidel notions,' " the salesman rants at the narrator, who instead

" 'reads'" in the blue sky and the " 'scroll' " of the storm the essential benevolence of nature (158). The narrator celebrates the potential of warm homoerotic domesticity and the pleasures of an ejaculatory and excessive manhoodof coming on the hearth and flashing your surplus at the sky.

The salesman, whom the narrator jokingly calls "Jupiter Tonans," has been identified as the Reverend John Todd, the real object of the story's satire, an identification that supports my reading of the story as a critique of reform ideology and a fantasy of a newly sexualized male domesticity.32 Todd was the pastor of the Congregational Church of Pittsfield throughout Melville's tenure at Arrowhead (1850 to 1863), where he wrote "The Lightning-Rod Man"; a copy of Todd's The Student's Manual was to be found at Melville's boyhood home from 1839 on. (Also, Todd's church assembly room was struck by lightning during a prayer meeting in 1835.) However, it is not Todd the peddler of Calvinist fear or bad moral philosophy that Melville satirizes in the story but Todd the peddler of repressive sexual ideology, and with him all other commodifiers and popularizers of disciplinary systems that constrain and neuter male sexuality. The end of the story can be read as a victory for a resistant solo masculinity and as an exhortation to male defiance of the domesticators' regimes. When the lightning-king thrusts the lightning-rod at the narrator's heart, the seat of all the trouble in the first place, the narrator smashes the rod and flings his nemesis out of his house. The narrator ultimately remains alone, and "the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land . . .  driv[ing] a brave trade with the fears of man" (158). Nevertheless, the transgressive tone of the story and its representation of a proud and fearless bachelor opening his home to embodied activity both single and reciprocalnot just longing reverymake it perhaps the limit-text of Melville's social imaginary: "The Lightning-Rod Man" comes closer than any of his other fictions to imagining lee shore versions of both Ishmael and Queequeg's homosocial domesticity and the homoerotic fellowship of "A Squeeze of the Hand."

Recent work on American bachelorhood paints late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century bachelors as inhabiting more socially integrated and more conceptually diversified identities than their predecessors. As Peter Laipson points out, by the last third of the nineteenth century bachelors had recourse to a quite viable form of alternative homo-domesticity: the bachelor's club. These were available both as dclass (but quite civilized and comfortable) communal living arrangements and as fancier, more "formal organizations of men united around some common interest or identity (from politics to a shared alma mater) which supplied most domestic amenities, including, in some cases, lodging for those who desired it." Against the charge that club denizens were "reckless and rootless sybarites" isolated from the kinds of proper domestic experience that would make them selfless, fully productive men, members deployed an "explicit rhetoric of domesticity and

kinship, arguing that clubs not only replicated the structure of the family but ennobled the relationships between members." This kind of counterargument "was not only polemical but performative, reflecting the desire of club members to create the very relationships they claimed already existed."33 Thus, by the end of the century the meanings of single-male identity had shifted with respect to the defining categories of father-, husband-, and familyhood: both single and married men could participate in a richly articulated communal domesticity different from the limited scenarios available in the antebellum period.

Similarly, the sexual content of late-nineteenth-century bachelor identity expanded and diversified. Katherine Snyder argues that though the representations of bachelorhood remain fairly consistent from the middle of the century on, "nevertheless the stereotyped traits, motifs, and plots associated with bachelors do shift in their meanings, particularly because bachelorhood maintains a dialectical relationship to normative (bourgeois / professional / married / paternal / patriarchal) masculinities which themselves were undergoing changes over this period, changes which contributed and responded to shifts in the ideologies, institutions, and practices of marriage, domesticity, and sexuality, among others." The sexual doubleness in Mitchell's and Melville's representations of sentimental bachelorsparticularly in the ways they portray bodiliness, affect, revery, domestic space, and intersubjective relationscan thus be seen to prefigure the enlarged possibilities for the bachelor's erotic practice that later cultural changes were to make possible. Indeed, as Snyder points out, the fact that bachelorhood existed as a social category before the emergence of the heterosexual / homosexual binarism means not only that bachelor identity was marked by the new binary regime, but also that "bachelor discourseboth in representations and in lives . . . contributed to the bi-formation of heterosexuality and homosexuality; bachelor figures contributed to the formation of categories of sexual identity that were both repressive / disciplinary and also emotionally and politically enabling."34 As "the bachelor" acquired structured associations in the social imaginary of the nation, actual embodied bachelors could then order extravagant affect, identification, and activity within evolving practical identities that could be lived more publicly and communally. Though this process produced a determinate type of sexual identity, the homosexual man, who could then be subject to both personal and social forms of discrimination and violence, it also provided, in the variety of fluidly signifying social traits that characterized bachelorhood, the rudimentary materials for a distinctively gay culture.35

Bachelor discourse did similarly liberating cultural work in its constitutive impact on the formation of heterosexual masculinity. For while the norms of proper masculinity remained largely heteroerotic, matrimonial, and procreative (as to an extent they still do), respectable forms of eroticized, unmarried, and antisentimental (hence not subject to the feeling of Law) heteromasculinity became available in the period. In a 1905 article on "Men Who Marry and Men Who Do Not," Lyndon Orr describes a kind of man who

is at once the delight and the despair of women. He is their delight because they secretly respect him for not giving in to them and because he has the charm of the unattainable; and he is their despair, because they feel so utterly baffled and helpless when they encounter his perfectly invincible admiration, his urbane and deferential indifference. Moreover, the man who will not marry is really more attractive than the man who can be made to walk into a trap with his eyes wide open. He is one who has a sense of relativity. He looks at life in a scientific way, and while he wants to enjoy all of its pleasures and opportunities, he is very much averse to tying himself by the leg in letting any single pleasure master him. He likes women so much that he cannot concentrate his whole interest upon just one of them. He is a connoisseur, finding a special charm in each individual type, but no overmastering, compelling charm in one more than in another. Holding himself in the innermost sanctuary of his heart, a little bit aloof, he is able to enjoy to the full the esoteric attractions of womankindthe sympathetic intelligence, the grace, the wit, and all those softer feminine attributes which are so delightful to a man of mind and taste.36

Not even (or perhaps especially not) the polemical midcentury defense of bachelorhood in Single Blessedness pictures a bachelor who radiates this kind of fascinating and powerful detachment. While Orr does not explicitly mention sex, his frank talk about a cool bachelor taking advantage of "all of [life's] pleasures and opportunities" deftly keeps all erotic implications in play. Though a rationalizing motivation may lurk behind this male writer's description, and though the kind of self-serving behavior here described does not exactly look like male liberation from the sex / gender system, a passage like this nevertheless could not have been imagined fifty years earlier. This bachelor utterly and blithely disregards the affective connections through which domestic ideology was often propagated and which often led to husband- and fatherhood: he is a "man who does not feel, in that compelling way, who does not care, in the sense that he is bound by his concern" (emphasis added). His "fundamental unconcern," which makes him (unlike a Marvel or a Pierre) "at ease and free from all self-consciousness," and the sense that he has an actual, practical erotic life represent a new phenomenon of heteromasculinity. This turn-of-the-century bachelor seems unbound by either the constraints on excessive sexual subjectivity or the injunction to procreative norms that so shaped and defined midcentury bachelorhood. And this seems to be the case in part because of the ease with which the new bachelor can revel in either solitude or masculine company, a freedom that makes the boundaries of his "straight" identity slip suggestively.37

Surely not every bachelor at the turn of the century, queer or otherwise, experienced the relativistic pleasures of the "scientific" life, the life lived in thrall to no dominating enjoyment or idea. Still, Orr's model bachelor represents a breaking free from the cultural and conceptual binds that produced the antebellum topos of fireside chastity, and from its associated moods and manners. Mitchell's and Melville's bachelor types, represented within the paradigmatic scene of the fireside revery, anticipate the reconstruction of bachelor identity and the re-eroticization of

American manhood generally. Mitchell's alter ego semireflectively registers the stresses inherent in the metaphysics of antebellum bachelorhood, while Melville's critical bachelors parodically foreground, allusively reveal, or exuberantly reject features of the conflictual bachelor subjectivity. In these different ways, both authors' literary creations begin the cultural spade work that was to bring the bachelor away from his lonely fireside and passive meditations into a world where he could live a newly sensualized practical identity.

Continues...

Excerpted from Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture by Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, editors Copyright 1999 by Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, editors. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520216210
• ISBN 13: 9780520216211
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300