Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Afterword: The Bachelor’s Prospects

“Flora she was once. She was florid.

A bachelor of feen masquerie

Evasive and metamorphorid”

--Wallace Stevens, “Oak Leaves Are Hands”

A couple of years ago, I accompanied my husband to a postcard convention. He was searching for turn-of-the century images of his favorite cities, and I was looking for bachelors. Although there seemed to be a category for everything from Alcohol to Zoos, bachelors were left out. Scattered within the “quirky humor” and “dog” sections, however, I discovered a dozen or so bachelor postcards from the early twentieth century. These postcards either make the bachelor the butt of a joke or the object of pity. “Too good to marry,” reads one, of an isolated, bookish fellow; “I’m a bachelor but I couldn’t help it,” says another, of a forlorn puppy.

I’m a bachelor but I couldn’t help it. Ca. 1914

“Be good and you will be lonesome.” Ca. 1905

Given the notes scrawled on the backs of the cards, people apparently bought them to rib friends and relatives about their marital status, or to make self-deprecating jokes about themselves.

As these postcards suggest, bachelors inspired laughter as well as tears, becoming icons for unrealized romance and dejected dreaming. Throughout the nineteenth century, the understanding of bachelorhood changed, reflecting shifting attitudes toward gender, profession, sexuality and family (Bertolini 728). Antebellum bachelor literature anticipated and provided a leaping-off point for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century treatment of the bachelor, particularly in its emphasis on fantasy, aesthetics, and individualism. When we examine the bachelor identity at the end of the nineteenth century, we see several strains and variations, such as the female bachelor, the homosexual, the bohemian, the playboy, and the aesthete. Bachelors of that period became even more associated with dreaming, fluidity, and beauty, as bohemianism and aestheticism emerged as significant cultural forces.[1] As Frank Chaffee observes in Bachelor Buttons (1892), an urbane guide to the single life, “The society which many bachelors in New York most affect is very delightful. It is mostly found in that pleasant land that lies just between Vanity Fair and Bohemia, a country whose inhabitants number all sorts and conditions of men—and women—and the passport across whose border is only to be kindly, and witty and wise” (13). By describing “bachelor-land” as a unique territory, Chaffee contends that bachelors belong to a counter-culture based on bohemian values such as experimentation, wit, and artistic expressiveness, one that is open to women as well as men.

As Chaffee suggests, a significant bachelor sub-culture developed in late-nineteenth century America, reflecting the large number of bachelors in American cities and the emergence of institutions and cultural forms that were directed at them, such as magazines, products, and advertisements (Chudacoff 6). In fin-de-siecle America, bachelorhood flourished, as young men flocked to pool-halls and cabarets to take pleasure in the single life. Hence bachelorhood contributed to the “blossoming American consumer culture of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in the direction of youth and the individual, rather than toward the family” (Chudacoff 19). The sentimental bachelor of the antebellum period pre-figured both the fin-de-siecle consumer and the bohemian artist. As Chudacoff argues, the bachelor represented an approach to manhood that borrowed from the playfulness of boy culture, rejected the civilizing impulses of domesticity, and insisted upon independence and spontaneity (248). Alongside these freewheeling social practices, we can see the emergence of a literary identity that likewise challenged bourgeois values but focused more on intellectual and cultural self-fulfillment and creation.

In Manhood and the American Renaissance, David Leverenz echoes Alfred Habbegger in arguing that male writers of the antebellum era “developed premodernist styles to explore and exalt their sense of being deviant from male norms,” whereas “[l]ater writers such as William Dean Howells and Henry James might accept with relative equanimity the ‘sissy’ role given to male writers in an industrializing society” (17-18). However, I suggest that what Leverenz and Habbegger label the “sissy” role pre-dates James and Howells, as male sentimentalists such as Irving and Mitchell adopted a posture of repose and fantasy to articulate artistic identities. These bachelor poses contributed to James’s and Howells’s sense of themselves as artists. For instance, James recalled his “very young pleasure” in “the prose, as mild and easy as an Indian summer in the woods,” of Melville, Curtis, and Donald Grant Mitchell. James connected these authors to ‘the charming Putnam’ of ‘the early fifties,’” linking Melville with his fellow magazine authors Mitchell and Curtis.[2] James associates the male sentimentalists with relaxation and pleasure, the literary equivalent of a lake house vacation. Likewise, William Dean Howells, fondly reminiscing about his own boyhood reading, remembered that along with Irving, Shakespeare, Goldsmith, and Cervantes he admired “the gentle and kindly Ik Marvel, whose Reveries of a Bachelor and whose Dream Life the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture” (64). Bachelor fiction thus provided a link between sentimentalism, romanticism, and realism.

Initially a figure to be pitied, laughed at, or scorned, by the end of the nineteenth century the bachelor had become, as Eve Sedgwick argues, “the very type of the great creative artist,” whose refined self-consciousness was achieved through celibacy (Between Men 162). The bachelor continued to be popular into the twentieth century, serving as a central figure in fin de siecle and modernist works. As Elaine Showalter claims, the English literary marketplace at the turn of the century shifted away from the three-decker novel and plots that culminated in marriage, expanding to include works specifically aimed at “the celibate, the bachelor, the 'odd woman,' the dandy, and the aesthete” (16). Similarly, late-nineteenth-century American fictions explored the lives of village spinsters (Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman), the New Woman (Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman), isolated individuals confronting a cruel world (Crane), and men of pleasure (Dreiser). Attitudes toward reading also shifted, since bachelor fictions were typically read in private rather than in a family setting, offering not complete lives but fleeting moments. As Snyder suggests, the fanciful bachelor fictions of the antebellum era anticipated modernist or pre-modernist characters such as Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Nick Caraway in The Great Gatsby, J. Alfred Prufrock, Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, Conrad’s Marlow, and James’s Lambert Strether.[3]

Although there are many permutations of the bachelor, one is especially germane to the discussion of authorial identity: the Jamesian artist. James’s short fictions from the 1880s and 1890s show how the bachelor’s emphasis on fantasy helped to shape the persona of the self-conscious modern artist. Whereas Irving both celebrates fantasy for cultivating new insights and warns against the delusions that it can produce, Donald Grant Mitchell asserts that imagination is superior to reality, and that the bachelor is best positioned to serve as a channel for sentimental dreaming. In contrast, Melville cautions against the foolishness, isolation, and hubris that the bachelor perspective cultivates. With James, however, the bachelor’s subjectivity serves as the foundation of his narrative strategy. James transmutes Irving’s genteel bachelor rover and Mitchell’s sentimental dreamer into the accomplished artist.

The Lesson of the Bachelor

In his short fiction from the 1880s, Henry James explores what makes an artist, what constitutes art, and how it is received by its audience. As Alfred Habegger points out, James crafts tales full of mystery and ambiguity, challenging the reader with the disjunction between appearance and reality. In “The Lesson of the Master,” which asks whether an author can be married (and whether the committed bachelor has been duped by a master fictionist to remain single), James examines many of the issues previously raised by Irving, Mitchell, and Melville. Like Irving, James meditates upon the connections between authorship and bachelorhood. Like Mitchell, James investigates the relationship between the narrator, author, and audience by showing readers pursuing intimate relationships with “masters” and analyzing their actions as if they were texts. Like Melville, James confronts the “sacrifice of relation” between ideal and reality, raising epistemological questions about how we find truth. Through his own bachelor, James shapes the identity of this figure not as a retired amateur, incidental dreamer, or deluded decadent, but as a modern artist. James transmutes the bachelor’s reveries into narratives of psychological depth, probing the alienation of the artist and the relationship between the imagination and art, but the master’s lessons are ambiguous.

James defined his habits as a thinker and artist in terms of his bachelorhood. Recalling his arrival in England in 1876, he later wrote in his journal, “London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life…. I had complete liberty, and the prospect of profitable work… I took possession of London” (qtd. by Snyder 104). James sets up “bachelor” and “artist” as parallel terms, since both intensely observe human activity and enjoy their freedom of movement, imagination, and experience. Through unfettered observation, bachelor artists can imaginatively “possess” the city, thus providing alternatives to the acquisitive businessmen of the Gilded Age. James self-consciously defended his bachelorhood, claiming that “an amiable bachelor here and there doesn’t strike me as at all amiss, and I think he too may forward the cause of civilization” (Edel 233). James overturns the notion that bachelors are deviants and identifies praiseworthy bachelors as those who engage with society and promote cultural development. Yet, as Edel contends, psychosexual fears likely motivated James, as this closeted homosexual “had channeled himself in the cultivation of his art—an art, however, carefully disengaged from disturbing passions” (234).

By placing James’s works in the context of the American literature of bachelorhood, we can better understand the connections between American romanticism, sentimentalism, and realism. As critics such as Eve Sedgwick and Kelly Cannon have observed, James often made a bachelor his protagonist in his middle and late-fiction. James likely derived this figure from the literary bachelors of the 1850s, such as Hawthorne’s Coverdale. Embracing Coverdale’s position as a poet and observer, James contends:

Coverdale is a picture of the contemplative, observant, analytic nature, nursing its fancies, and yet, thanks to an element of strong good sense, not bringing them up to be spoiled children; having little at stake in life, at any given moment, and yet indulging, in imagination, in a good many adventures; a portrait of a man, in a word, whose passions are slender, whose imagination is active, and whose happiness lies, not in doing, but in perceiving--half a poet, half a critic, and all a spectator. (Hawthorne 105)

James identified Coverdale with Hawthorne, suggesting a connection between the bachelor spectator and the author. For James, the bachelor artist bridges contradictions, so that he is both sensible and fanciful, detached but engaged in acts of the imagination, creative and critical, an observer and a poet. The artist finds power in the imagination and his ability to observe the world.

James re-shapes bachelor sentimentalism to develop a realism focused more on perception than plot. In the preface to the New York edition of The Lesson of the Master and Other Tales, James explains that artist stories such as “The Death of the Lion,” “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Lesson of the Master” “deal all with the literary life, gathering their motive, in each case, from some noted adventure, some felt embarrassment, some extreme predicament, of the artist enamoured of perfection, ridden by his idea or paying for sincerity” (viii). James associates the artist with the single-minded quest for the ideal, yet he also exposes the hazards facing this figure, including the popular audience’s ignorance of and disdain for art. Like Melville, James was troubled by the failure of the artist to achieve popular success, but he also contended that focusing on cultivating public favor weakens art: “from the moment a straight dependence on the broad-backed public is a part of the issue, the explicative quantity to be sought is precisely the mood of that monster” (xiv). James argues that the pressure to achieve commercial success demands a narrative strategy that explicates rather than explores or questions. Hence he promotes the militance of a “fine spirit” against “the rule of the cheap and easy” (x), claiming that “the tradition of a high aesthetic temper” offers alternatives to the narrow vulgarity of reality. The bachelor represents this fine spirit and refined aestheticism, since he is identified with idealism, individualism, and the deliberate pursuit of beauty. In his bachelor tales, James treats the distance between the artist’s desire for perfection and the inadequacies of the real world ironically, but the irony functions not so much to dismantle the idealism of the artist as to expose the shortcomings of reality. James prefers “the possible other case, the case rich and edifying where the actuality is pretentious and vain” (ix). In his bachelor tales, then, James emphasizes the power of the imagination to rework the materials of reality into new insights, yet he also worries that the bachelor artist may be either deluding himself or exploiting others.

In “The Lesson of the Master,” James explicitly explores the relationship between bachelorhood and artistic creation. While visiting a country house, Paul Overt, a “young aspirant” and bachelor who has written the critically acclaimed novel Ginistrella (5), meets Marian Fancourt, a sensitive reader and appreciator of literature, and Henry St. George, a once-great author whose recent works reflect failed potential. St. George bears the trappings of success—a country house, a fine carriage, children in elite schools—but he has been forced to compromise his artistic values to support his family’s lifestyle. Rather than incarnating a detached elegance, St. George seems more like an ordinary businessman, married to a woman who “might have been the wife of a gentleman who ‘kept’ books rather than wrote them” (9). James cleverly plays off “keeping” books against writing them, as St. George’s wife demands financial rather than creative success. Appalled by Mrs. St. George’s proud declaration that she has destroyed one of the artist’s manuscripts, Paul cries, “St. George and the Dragon is what the anecdote suggests!” (27). This manuscript seems to symbolize St. George’s ambitions and identity as a writer, since he admits

“Oh yes - it was about myself.” Paul gave an irrepressible groan for the disappearance of such a production, and the elder man went on: “Oh but you should write it--you should do me.” And he pulled up--from the restless motion that had come upon him; his fine smile a generous glare. “There's a subject, my boy: no end of stuff in it!” (74)

Smudging the lines between authorship and self-creation, St. George indicates that Overt’s role is to write—and live—the promise suggested by the lost manuscript. St. George equates writing and doing, so that literature assumes the force of reality. Like the St. George of legend, who was chopped up into pieces and buried three times, then three times reconstituted by God (Thurston), the author can be re-made through the imagination. Reworking the language of surrogacy that Irving used in imagining his role within the literary inheritance, St. George invites Overt to serve at once as a father and as a son, to become his disciple and to create his potential anew in fiction. Yet James hints that like his “generous glare,” St. George’s motives are ambiguous—potentially openhearted, potentially threatening.

St. George represents the fear that the responsibilities of marriage would force an author to approach fiction-making as a mere trade, where success is measured by pages produced and copies sold rather than by brilliance and beauty. St. George works in a windowless room “walled in to my trade,” standing at his desk like a clerk at a counting house (63). Echoing the common suspicion that women restrict men’s freedom and weaken their creative powers, St. George jokes that he works in a gilded cage controlled by his wife: “Ah we're practical--we're practical!… Isn't it a good big cage for going round and round? My wife invented it and she locks me up here every morning” (62). James exposes a central irony as he makes a case for art that rises above practical concerns: in adopting commercial rather than aesthetic values, St. George has cut himself off from the “real” world and operates in a hermetically sealed environment. His art is derived from fancy (the reveries of a husband?) rather than observation. In his study, “[t]he outer world, the world of accident and ugliness, was so successfully excluded, and within the rich protecting square, beneath the patronising sky, the dream-figures, the summoned company, could hold their particular revel” (64). James inverts Melville’s image of Pierre’s entrapment in bachelorhood by presenting St. George imprisoned by marriage.

If the house of fiction has, as James proposes in the preface to Portrait of a Lady, a million windows out of which readers may peer, the space of St. George’s authorship has no prospects. Hence he cannot create fictions capable of supporting multiple perspectives. Instead, this self-described “successful charlatan” produces artificial works that he calls “cartonpierre,” "Lincrusta-Walton," and “brummagem” (68).[4] Rather than building a house of fiction, St. George decorates his stultifying room with the ornaments of middle-class life. Speaking the language of interior decoration, St. George compares his work to the papier mache used for architectural decorations, the fake plaster wall covering developed by Frederick Walton as a cheap popular alternative to wood or metal, and cheap, showy imitations. By citing mass-market products that pretend to be something grander, James criticizes writing that makes a claim to be art but is really second-rate.

If the bourgeois home is a fake, love might be the real thing. “The Lesson of the Master” centers on the clash between life and representation, love and art, a conflict represented by both Overt’s and St George’s desire for Marian Fancourt. Looking at Marian, Paul questions his devotion to art over ordinary life, feeling “responsive admiration of the life she embodied, the young purity and richness of which appeared to imply that real success was to resemble that, to live, to bloom, to present the perfection of a fine type, not to have hammered out headachy fancies with a bent back at an ink-stained table” (19). Whereas Marian embodies organic perfection and blossoming, the artist must labor over his inventions, as James echoes Melville in suggesting that true artistic production requires strenuous work. James mixes gendered terms in describing the artist as one who has “headachy fancies” yet also “hammers out” his work at an ink-stained table. For Overt, the choice seems quite literally between a life immersed in actuality, embodied by Miss Fancourt, and a life devoted to art, which requires solitude and quiet contemplation. James poses Overt the idealist against Fancourt the life-force; St. George the slain (or slayer?) represents a failed compromise between the two. Yet when Paul suggests that being an artist is “so poor” in comparison to “being a person of action - as living your works” (22), Marian replies, “"But what's art but an intense life - if it be real?” (22), echoing Mitchell’s view that the imagination can capture a deeper reality.

In a climatic moment, St. George warns Overt against marrying, claiming that his art will suffer if he worships “false gods… the idols of the market; money and luxury and ‘the world;’ placing one's children and dressing one's wife; everything that drives one to the short and easy way” (36). According to St. George, the artist must reject the pursuit of material goods and success and serve as an acolyte to art, diligently laboring in isolation. As St. George explains, he has sacrificed his own powers by “marrying for money”—not because he wed his wife for her wealth, but because he jilted the aesthetic muse for the “mercenary muse whom I led to the altar of literature. Don't, my boy, put your nose into that yoke. The awful jade will lead you a life!” (67). The commercial muse, James suggests, is a shrew, who limits an artist’s freedom and reduces his talents by entrapping him in a limited view of life. Whereas married men must make compromises, James suggests that the artist sets himself apart from economic demands and social convention to create great art.

As Katherine Snyder argues, “The Lesson of the Master” exposes the competitiveness at the base of the master-apprentice relationship. Paul faces a choice between living a comfortable bourgeois life with wife and family, or an extraordinary life as an artist. If Paul chooses his passion for art over the desire for an ordinary life, St. George promises “my highest appreciation, my devotion” (79), reversing the power relationship and putting himself in the position of reader and disciple. James reworks the idea of sympathy by positioning the artist as a sort of surrogate who lives a life that ordinary people can only approach through reading. Regarding St. George as an ideal reader, Overt proclaims his willingness to commit himself to art in romantic language. As St. George’s challenge “locked his guest a minute as in closed throbbing arms,” Overt replies, “I could do it for one, if you were the one” (66). By admitting his own failures as an artist and urging Overt to avoid making his mistakes, St. George seems to be taking on a fatherly role, living out his dream of artistic perfection through the younger writer. Paul is excited by St. George’s appeal, ostensibly because it cultivates a greater intimacy between the two, but also because it leaves an opening for his own triumph. Although the bachelor artist may seem to withdraw from competition, this detachment often reveals a deeper desire for mastery. Heeding his master’s advice, Overt leaves England and diligently labors in solitude over a new manuscript. In the meantime, St. George’s wife dies and he becomes engaged to Marian. James presents an interpretive puzzle that reflects Overt’s fears: what if St. George duped Overt into devoting himself to art so that he could then court Marian? In marrying Marian, is St. George committing himself to bourgeois husbandhood rather than to art, or is he seeking a new source of energy and inspiration? If Paul is “overt,” open about his desires, St. George seems covert, so that the reader, like Paul, cannot penetrate his mask or know his true motivations.

In the end, James presents a network of selfish sacrifices: Paul has sacrificed Marian to pursue his art, and the Master seems to have sacrificed his art to pursue Marian, since he tells Paul that he has given up writing. In removing Marian as a distraction for Overt, the Master says to Paul that he hopes “I shall be the making of you” (93), as if by dedicating himself to bachelorhood Paul undergoes a second birth into the life of an artist. By carrying off the damsel and making Overt the hero of art, the Master reverses the terms of romance and of artistry, as the father becomes the lover and the youth the creator. James leaves the narrative open-ended: If the Master produces a great work despite having married Marian, then Overt knows that he has been duped. Yet if St. George were to produce a great work, Overt would be the first to appreciate it, “which is perhaps a proof that the Master was essentially right and that Nature had dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion” (96). The story turns on the perception of reality, as the reader is left to decide whether bachelorhood is essential to artistic creativity. Hence James brings to the forefront an issue that underlies many antebellum bachelor narratives, examining the links between solitude, perception, and artistic accomplishment.

Even if “Lessons of the Master” seems to suggest that one must be single to be a great artist, the tale opens up the possibility of contradictory interpretations: for instance, perhaps true happiness and understanding can only be found through romantic love, or perhaps the beloved can serve as a muse rather than an inhibitor of creativity. Such ambivalence toward bachelorhood runs throughout James’s bachelor tales of the 1880s and 1890s, perhaps reflecting his own guilt and sense of isolation. For instance, in “The Aspern Papers,” the bachelor scholar who narrates the tale will do almost anything to get his hands on the private papers of the great poet Jeffrey Aspern. When he discovers that an elderly woman owns a cache of Aspern’s personal documents, he pretends to court her unmarried niece so that he can get access to the secret knowledge contained in them. However, he cruelly rejects the niece when he finds that he must marry her to see the documents. The niece turns out to be more crafty than the bachelor narrator suspected, suggesting that bachelors err in assuming that they have the deepest understanding of truth. James thus indicts the bachelor for his selfishness, deceptiveness, and fear of sexuality. Although the bachelor has the leisure and autonomy to devote himself to scholarship and art, James suggests that in the course of a romantic relationship couples can develop a private knowledge. In “The Figure in the Carpet,” for instance, the bachelor narrator cannot discern the hidden meaning in the works of a great author, but his colleague works out the secret and shares it with his wife. The bachelor seems to lack a complete, intersubjective understanding of truth.

James’s variations on the bachelor sketch demonstrate the complete emergence of the bachelor as an important paradigm for the American artist. During the antebellum period, the associations between the artist and the bachelor were implied but not fully articulated, since bachelor sketches of the period imagined authorship more as a leisured pursuit than a professional identity. Sketches, novels, poems, and songs depicted the bachelor as a figure whose lack of economic responsibilities, detached perspective, solitude, avuncular authority, and love of fantasy stimulated literary creativity. Three scenes recur in antebellum bachelor literature and illustrate both why the bachelor was adopted as a narrative persona as well as why this figure was derided. In one scene, the bachelor—perhaps Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon—sits by his window or strolls along the street, spectating on the human drama and providing commentary. In another, a fanciful bachelor like Ik Marvel reclines by his fireside, caught up in a waking dream in which he imagines what could be. In the final scene, we see a bachelor pessimist such as Pierre sulking in a cold chamber, miserable and alone. In each scene, the bachelor is an outsider, but his detached perspective implies different costs and possibilities. As a spectator, the bachelor could observe and report on contemporary culture, but his observations might reflect his own psychological quirks rather than provide accurate insights. As a dreamer, the bachelor could promote the ideal and rhapsodize over beauty, but he risked falling victim to the “Descartian vortices” or the deceptions of the dream. As a solitary sufferer, the bachelor might merit sympathy, but he also illustrated the isolation and misery of not having a family (or, in Pierre’s case, of having fractured relations with family).

As the first chapter suggests, understanding the bachelor requires recognizing the ways that this figure both challenged binaries and occupied a conflicted, changing position in antebellum culture. Whether a deluded narcissist or exemplar of single blessedness, the bachelor represented an alternative to the normative male identity of worker, father, and husband. Whereas the second chapter shows the cultural and personal reasons why the bachelor pose enabled Washington Irving to imagine himself as an author, the chapter on Ik Marvel focuses on reader response to explain why works such as Reveries of a Bachelor were so popular and influential. Yet even as authors such as Irving adopted the bachelor mask to work out their own sense of disenfranchisement and insight, and even as readers embraced dreaming bachelors such as Ik Marvel for articulating their own fantasies, some contended that the bachelor was an inadequate model for the artist. In Melville’s works post-Reveries of a Bachelor, he ridicules the Marvelous dreaming bachelor for evading social responsibility, getting caught up in false dreams, missing out on concrete, complex human experiences, and producing genteel, empty art. Underlying these representations of bachelorhood is a larger discussion of the function of the male artist in antebellum society: is he supposed to serve as a spectator? To articulate beautiful dreams? To describe how things really are? To be a man of leisure or a professional?

By the end of the century, the bachelor persona breaks out of a sub-genre of sentimental literature and become important to imagining the alienated or psychologically complex artist. Except for Pierre, none of the bachelor figures I have studied describe themselves as authors; rather, they pose as spectators, dreamers, or idle scribblers. Pierre’s anguished case illustrates the almost Titanic difficulty of declaring oneself an author in antebellum America, given the competing demands of the market, family responsibilities, and the perception that romantic authors articulated idiosyncratic, possibly crazy, visions. Most of the literary bachelors that I focus on appear either in sentimental sketches or in more extended satires such as Pierre and The Blithedale Romance. By the end of the century, the bachelor was frequently thought of as an individual devoted to pleasure, art, and self-culture, and the identity was extended to women as well as men. Even though James was himself a bachelor, late nineteenth-century bachelor narratives focused less on the travails of writers in achieving authorship and more on the narrative possibilities opened up by the often-unreliable bachelor narrator. In a sense, the bachelor persona at the end of the century represents a fusion of prior models. The detached, ironic, sentimental perspective of Geoffrey Crayon is brought together with the idealism and aesthetic temperament of Ik Marvel, yet Melville’s suspicion about the bachelor’s veracity also infuses this figure. Even as the bachelor’s independence and imaginativeness fuel art, modernist and pre-modernist narratives also probe the bachelor’s motivations and misapprehensions, so that the psychology of the bachelor becomes an important part of the narrative. What if the storyteller is deluded, or even trying to dupe the audience? What can be gleaned by seeing from a detached perspective, through the eyes of a Nick Carraway or a Jake Barnes? What are the underlying sexual motivations of these characters? Such questions are approached with greater self-consciousness by the end of the century.

[3] The bachelor also became an important to the emerging medium of film, as audiences peered into bachelor apartments or laughed at the ironic fates of bachelors who become lovers or fathers. The Internet Movie Database lists over 50 films with “bachelor” in the title, including A Crusty Old Bachelor (1899), A Fascinating Bachelor (1911), A Bachelor Husband (1920), The Bachelor Daddy (1922), The Bachelor's Baby, or How It All Happened (1913), The Bachelor's Club (1921), and A Bachelor's Love Story (1914). Female bachelors also attracted notice, as evinced by the films Hot Afternoon in a Bachelor Girl's Flat (1898), The Bachelor Girl (1929), Biography of a Bachelor Girl (1935), and Bachelor Mother (1933).

[4] “Brummagem” also calls to mind slavery, given that the word is derived from the British city Birmingham, where cheap trinkets were produced to be used in trading goods for slaves.