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Chapter 1: That Especial Genus of Unmarried Life: Bachelorhood and Artistic Identity in Antebellum America
Old bachelors have been styled unproductive consumers; scissors with but one blade; bows without fiddles; irregular substantives, always in the singular number and singular case; unruly scholars who, when told to conjugate, always decline. (“Mirror of Apothegm”)
“Fascinating, evasive, and inscrutable,” bachelors are fitting subjects, consumers, and producers of literature—so argued Kate Sanborn in her 1878 lectures on “Spinster Authors of England” and “Bachelor Authors in Types” (61). By providing an extensive list of bachelor authors, Sanborn points to the relationship between being an artist and being single, likely a pressing concern for a female intellectual who herself remained unmarried. Sanborn’s lectures won acclaim for “abounding in happy allusions and brilliant classifications of that especial genus of unmarried life,”[1] yet her attempt to classify bachelors falls apart because of the idiosyncratic, fluid nature of the bachelor’s identity. Whereas she views Spinsters as comprising a single group, Sanborn sorts literary bachelors into multiple sub-groups based upon their eccentricities: “The Hermit” (Thoreau, whom she also calls “The Bachelor of Thought and Nature”), “Those governed by an Early Love” (Irving), “the Old-Maidish bachelor” (Gray), “the Egoist” (Whitman), “Clams, cold, encased in a hard shell” (Hume), “Corpulent Bachelor Authors” (Gibbon), and the “Pessimist” (Josiah Royce) (75, 69, 78, 92). For Sanborn, the “Ideal Bachelor” is Whittier, who is “simple-hearted, kindly, shy; a ‘friend’ in the truest sense, not only to the slave and the suffering, but to children, to the homely country life, and the simple wayside flowers of New England, to humanity” (103). Many popular narratives about single men likewise depicted them either as a closed, cold Clam or as the Ideal Bachelor, or sometimes they described the gradual transformation of Clam to Pearl through acts of self-sacrifice.
In confronting Sanborn’s discussion of bachelor authors, I encounter some of the same difficulties in accounting for the significance of bachelorhood as an artistic identity, and defining a class of individuals who evade definition. Sanborn suggests one reason why artists are so often characterized as bachelors in antebellum America: their creators were themselves unmarried. Yet authors also made a strategic choice in presenting artists as bachelors, since they could shape figures who were less bound by economic and social responsibilities and therefore could devote themselves to intellectual and artistic pursuits. My plan is to push beyond Sanborn’s pithy descriptions by analyzing specific works that illustrate the mental modes, literary conventions, economic conditions, and conflicted social attitudes that construct the bachelor pose. In order to explain the significance of the evasive bachelor for American culture, this chapter excavates long-forgotten magazine sketches, story collections, sentimental poems, and songs. By exploring the different ways that the bachelor was imagined in popular culture, I hope to set the context for the rest of my treatment of the bachelor and introduce important problems and themes that were elaborated by Irving, Mitchell, and Melville.
Who exactly was the bachelor, and what did he represent? Was bachelorhood a necessary prerequisite for being an artist, or was the bachelor some kind of delusional narcissist who produced shallow, derivative work? As a solitary observer, did the bachelor possess greater insight, or did marriage encourage a more balanced perspective? Could the bachelor broaden his sympathies because he was not bound to one family, or was his bachelorhood an indication of his utter lack of human feeling? The debate over bachelorhood illustrates the conflicted understanding of the creative individual’s role in American society. While moralists insisted that men must marry to fulfill their social duties, proponents of bachelorhood contended that marriage distracted men from philosophy and poetry.
In exploring the conflicted understanding of bachelorhood, particularly as it relates to authorship, I will focus on the different roles of the bachelor: man of leisure, detached observer, dreamer, and sufferer. By emphasizing these aspects of the bachelor’s persona, male sentimentalists sketched out a creative identity that enabled them to deal with some of the anxieties of authorship. Rather than being constrained by the responsibilities of orthodox domesticity, the bachelor could create his own version of domesticity that valued leisure and beauty. From a detached perspective, the bachelor claimed to see with greater accuracy and thus could serve as an unbiased advisor. Rather than getting caught up in everyday affairs, the bachelor frequently engaged in reverie, promoting an idealized vision of the world. Bachelor sketches presented him as a sentimental exemplar, both because of his own suffering and his insight into the suffering of others. Yet critics of the bachelor author used the same qualities to attack this figure. By exiling himself from orthodox domesticity, the bachelor resigned himself to living in filth, disorder, and loneliness, some said. If he assumed a detached perspective, then his view would be fuzzy and narcissistic rather than accurate. As a dreamer, the bachelor ignored the wisdom offered by experience. If he suffered, it was because he willfully rejected what would make his life happy and purposeful. In popular bachelor sketches, then, a larger debate unfolds about masculine identity and the role of the artist in American society.
An “Anomaly in the Human Family”: The Bachelor in Antebellum America
“A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union. He is an incomplete animal.” --Benjamin Franklin, qtd. by Chudacoff, 25
As I noted in the introductory chapter, the bachelor was a common figure in antebellum American sketches, novels, and poems. In part, the frequent representation of bachelors in antebellum American literature reflects their significant presence in the American population, particularly in cities and on the expanding frontier. In cities such as Boston and San Francisco, between 40 and 50% of men aged 25-35 were bachelors during the antebellum era, as were a third of men from all age groups (Chudacoff 29). According to social historians such as Howard Chudacoff and E. Anthony Rotundo, young, unmarried men threatened conventional society by preferring individual pleasure to social and familial responsibility. As new economic opportunities opened up in urban areas, young men left farms and small towns to participate in the industrial economy. In response to this growing population, urban districts such as New York’s Bowery developed to play host to the bachelor, offering cheap housing and abundant entertainment in bars, sporting clubs, theaters, and brothels. Social reformers worried that young men might lose themselves to the temptations of the city and warned unmarried youths against the allure of alcoholism, the undisciplined imagination, premarital sex, and the thoughtless pursuit of material goods. For instance, the Male Purity Movement, led by ministers and medical reformers such as Sylvester Graham and William Alcott, urged men to remain chaste until marriage (Abbott 204).[2]
For many men, bachelorhood was a temporary stage between leaving their parents’ home and establishing their own. Therefore commentators made a distinction between young bachelors, who might disrupt society through their pursuit of illicit pleasures but were likely to grow out of their bachelorhood and marry, and “old bachelors,” unmarried middle-class men over 30 “who, having passed the zenith of existence, give no evidence of matrimonial intentions, thus plainly evincing their preference for the suspension of the rule which governs the choice of the majority of the great human family in this respect” (“Colloquial Chapter” 538). Typically the literary bachelor was a member of this older group, settled in his status as bachelor. Although historians like Chudacoff and Chauncey perform valuable work in studying the demography and sociology of American bachelorhood, I focus my spotlight on bachelorhood as a cultural identity, as expressed in literary texts rather than as experienced by young men.
As nineteenth-century critics of bachelor literature such as Kate Sanborn and F. W. Shelton pointed out, there were many variations on the bachelor identity—
voyeur, aesthete, disappointed lover, surrogate father, curmudgeon, lonely sufferer, and so on—but each of these identities typically shares an emphasis on individualism and the imagination. The rhetoric of bachelor literature thrives on contrast: illustrations are divided into two panes, one showing the bachelor’s life and the other the husband’s (see Figure One); songs compare the bachelor’s carefree existence with the husband’s domestic drudgery; and stories such as Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” are diptychs, posing bachelors against spinsters or married men. Marriage is the implied norm and bachelorhood the deviation, although the sketches and images vary in tone: some set the relaxed bachelor against the overworked husband, while others pair a laughing father with a lonely bachelor. For example, Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” an astute satire of the stereotypes of bachelorhood and spinsterhood, contrasts the carefree lives of bachelors with the burdens of married tradesmen “with ledger-lines ruled along their brows, thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies” (PT 316). If husbands were constrained by the demands of family life, spinsters were often pictured as rigid and repressed, like the meticulous Miss Ophelia in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the harsh Miss Fortune in The Wide, Wide World, and the silent mill-maids in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.”[3] In contrast to the spinster and the husband, the literary bachelor typically enjoyed a more carefree lifestyle of fantasy, relaxation, and self-cultivation, yet moralists warned that the bachelor’s pleasures were empty and fleeting. In general, sketches more sympathetic to the bachelor are narrated from the first-person, while third-person sketches typically focus upon the bachelor’s selfishness and isolation.
Rather than being a strictly conservative or radical figure, the bachelor illustrates the ambiguity of cultural categories. Even as critics attempted to pigeonhole the bachelor, they acknowledged that his defining characteristic was his evasiveness and tendency for metamorphosis, his very resistance to categorization. Contrasting the bachelor to the Benedict (a newly-married man, like the once-committed bachelor who marries Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing), Leon H. Vincent observed in “A Successful Bachelor” (1898),
There is something final in the condition of a Benedict. You know where to find him, or at least you know where he should be found. But of a bachelor you know nothing. Bachelorhood is a normal condition up to a certain period in a man’s life, and after that it is abnormal. He who elects to remain unmarried elects to become queer. (806)
Like other commentators, Vincent views the bachelor as someone who makes a conscious choice to ignore social norms, yet at any time the bachelor can transform himself to a Benedict. In the grammar of identity, the bachelor’s behavior is subjunctive, contingent and hypothetical, but his very unknowability and “queerness” attract the interest of readers.
Even if the bachelor was mysterious and mercurial, bachelorhood was a recognized identity often associated with gentility and literary tastes. Soon after passing a tax on unmarried men, Virginia categorized the bachelor among “Professionals and Merchants” in its listing of occupations for its 1860 census (“Occupation Listing”). Others in this category included “Attorney,” “Professor,” “Gentleman,” “Widower,” “Editor,” and “Minister,” genteel professions that typically involve working with language and ideas. The description of bachelorhood as a vocation reflects how middle-class masculinity was defined in relation to occupation and the gendered division of labor (Snyder 21). Magazine and pamphlet series such as “Human Nature in Chunks” (1855) and Portraits of the People, or Illustrations and Sketches of American Character by Popular Artists and Authors (1841) presented the bachelor as one of the main “types” representing the diversity of American character. According to “Human Nature in Chunks,” bachelorhood was an inescapable primary identity:
wherever he trod, a melancholy whisper greeted his ear bachelor, bachelor…. Whenever requested to give to charity, he was accosted as the liberal old bachelor. Whenever mentioned in connection with science, he was characterized as the thoughtful old bachelor. Whenever he set up an original idea, above the world’s opinion, he was called the whimsical old bachelor. His faith, his prayers, his deeds, his works, his love, his life, were all clothed in single blessedness. (327)
An odd human type, the bachelor is defined by his detachment from society and by his singularity. Rather than simply reflecting marital status, bachelorhood assumes an inherent identity associated with eccentricity, generosity, scholarship, originality, and solitude.
Although positive representations touted bachelors for their philosophic disposition, heightened capacity for feeling, and independence, the rhetoric against bachelorhood represented them as selfish fools who failed to contribute to society and were deluded by narcissistic fantasies. In a broader sense, many criticisms of bachelorhood were veiled attacks on fiction, which was likewise seen as leading men away from their proper duties. For instance, in The Student’s Manual, Rev. John Todd warns young bachelors against the dangerous enticements of such imaginative writers as Byron, Scott, Bulwer, and Cooper: “allow me to life up a loud voice against those rovings of the imagination, by which the mind is at once polluted, and the heart and feelings debased and polluted. It is almost inseparable from the habit of reverie” (146-47). Immediately following this warning, Todd quotes from a treatise on masturbation in Latin (presumably because he was too embarrassed to use English), linking unregulated reading and reverie with non-conjugal sexuality.
Whereas fiction was thought to break down discipline and immerse readers in their own fantasies, moral commentators contended that marriage brought discipline to men’s lives and cured them of a selfish, subjective mindset. Arguing that men and women had a social and moral duty to marry, moralists embraced a binary view of gender, whereby marriage expanded men’s sympathies and gave women an outlet for affection. As E. Anthony Rotundo points out, “Marital oneness was more than a merger of two kindred spirits—it was a union of opposites” (131). Advocates of marriage praised the selflessness of husband and wife, who “dedicate themselves upon the altar of sacrifice they give themselves to each other; and each in seeking to minister to the happiness of the other, ceases to think of self” (“Colloquial Chapter” 538). The bachelor, by contrast, was thought to be overly subjective, irresponsible, and either immune to feminine influence or himself effeminate. Although marriage might seem to impinge upon the husband’s freedom, proponents argued that men needed to embrace constraints in order to be “useful.” For instance, the narrator of “Matrimony and Medicine: A Tale of a Doctor’s Wooing” (1854) is aimless until he marries. As he concludes, “a wife and family is a balance-wheel, restraining the impetuosity of youth, preventing excess, and enabling the force of manhood to be directed to some useful result” (589). Against the self-indulgent, purposeless freedom of bachelorhood, the narrator poses the beneficial restraint of marriage, which promotes productivity by harnessing men’s fantasies.
Whereas moral commentators praised marriage for promoting balanced, disciplined, and purposeful manhood, they often regarded celibacy as unnatural, even sinful, associating it with the lack of productivity and the willful refusal to embrace domesticity (“Getting Married” 203). For example, “A Colloquial Chapter on Celibacy” (1848) argues that bachelors are selfish, irresponsible, deluded, and cold-hearted. Perhaps the most effective rhetorical strategy in opposing bachelorhood was to imagine the bachelor as a pathetic alien who could be redeemed only by marriage:
He is an exile alike, from the solacing sweets of the gentle beings whose radiant smile would dissipate his sorrows, and enhance his purest pleasures, as well as from the alluring delights of a hallowed home…. He sits to a book alone; there is no one by his side, to enjoy with him the favorite passage, the apt remark, the just criticism; no eyes in which to read his own feelings; his own tastes are unappreciated and unreflected; he has no resource but himself, no one to look up to but himself; all his enjoyments, all his happiness, must emanate from himself. He flings down the volume in despair; buries his face in his hands, and sings aloud, O! me miserum. The panacea of all a poor forlorn bachelors infelicities is to be found in a help-meet--a wife. (“Colloquial” 540)
This passage presents the common literary scene of the bachelor reading, yet transforms it from a scene of enlightenment and pleasure to one of melancholy. Whereas proponents of bachelorhood focus upon his ability to control his own private space and to find beauty in his fantasies, this commentator makes the book the centerpiece of the bachelor’s solitude and emphasizes that he lacks a sympathetic, appreciative audience. According to this view, a man’s aesthetic and sentimental satisfactions come not from solitary reading, but from having a wife to appreciate and reflect his genius.
The notion that the bachelor was selfish and contributed nothing to society culminated in efforts to tax unmarried men. Bachelor taxes have a significant history in America; as an article on marriage reported in 1868:
In 1695 the local authorities of Eastham, in Massachusetts, voted that every unmarried man in the township should kill six blackbirds or three crows yearly while he remained single, and that, as a penalty for not obeying the order, he should not get married until he had destroyed the requisite number in arrear. In 1756 the Assembly of Maryland laid a tax of five shillings a year upon all bachelors above thirty-five years of age who were possessed of one hundred pounds. (“Marriage Days” 363)
Bachelor taxes were also levied in seventeenth century Connecticut, eighteenth century Pennsylvania, and nineteenth-century Virginia to punish what a Hartford, Connecticut ordinance called “the selfish luxury of solitary living” (Chudacoff 26). By penalizing men for not fulfilling their social duty to marry and reproduce, the tax treated them as a special, almost genteel, class that was leisured rather than productive. Bachelors were likewise seen as “living from under family government,” as a 1762 Massachusetts court record held (Chudacoff 26). Neither under the control of their fathers nor themselves fathers, antebellum bachelors seemed to challenge the patriarchal family and therefore were brought under the regulation of the state. Yet this freedom from family responsibility also enabled the bachelor to engage in literary pursuits.
Flaneurs of the Bookshelves: The Bachelor as Author
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
Now that we have a sense of the bachelor and his station in antebellum America, we can focus on the tight connection between bachelorhood, authorship, and the book. In the Western imagination, books and bachelors often go together. Indeed, the association is contained in the history of the word “bachelor,” which initially meant a young squire in service to an older knight, then a student at a university working toward a “baccalaureate,” a sense that continues today. Through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, scholars were often celibate monks. Even as secular scholarship developed, it was still assumed that a true scholar should devote himself only to his intellectual work, since wives would lead men away from study (Zack 65). In the English educational system, teachers and scholars were typically unmarried clerics into modern times. As an alternative to marriage, scholarship offered a sense of purpose and freedom from the demands of family life. As “Ichabod” (1826), a bachelor correspondent for Freedom’s Journal remarks, echoing Washington Irving’s epigraph to The Sketch Book, “I have no disobedient son—no unloving wife—no 'two cents for yeast' to distract me, and though loneliness dwells by my side in my cosy library, yet disquiet never protrudes itself from its pages.” Paradoxically, Ichabod suggests that marriage brings about the loss of patriarchal authority and the denial of love, so he instead embraces the comfort and solitude of the library. Books serve as the bachelor’s companions, granting him the autonomy and security of a retired, scholarly life.
The close association between celibacy, scholarship, and idealism has deep roots in Western thought. In Symposium, Plato distinguishes two kinds of love: the celestial love represented by the Venus Urania, who sprang from the foam produced by the severed genitals of Uranus after they were cast into the sea, and the earthly love represented by the Venus Pandemos, the “common” Venus who was the daughter of Zeus and Dione (25-27). Whereas the Venus Urania is the product of “the male only,” the Venus Pandemos, born of the fusion of masculine and feminine, is the goddess of sex and procreation. According to Plato, crude men favor physical over spiritual love, while scholars pursue a selfless, noble love represented by the Venus Urania. Invoking Plato’s distinction between the two types of love, Michael Riffaterre contends that
scholars and lovers are diametrical opposites, as far apart as Venus Urania and carnal Aphrodite. Here is an archetypal representation of mankind: imagination links lovers and scholars as two kinds of men who can be defined by their opposition. The scholar stricken in his scholarness, despoiled of his wisdom, the ruined scholar is the scholar in love…. It is not by chance that Balzac regards chastity as one of the fundamental traits of the man of science. (217)
Riffaterre explains why the author is so often imagined as a bachelor: the assumption that love would distract the scholar from the idealistic pursuit of knowledge. Yet the lover and scholar both embrace an enthusiasm, the lover for passion and the scholar for knowledge.
In defining a bachelor identity, some antebellum American writers invoked the Platonic tradition, preferring the purity and abstraction of the Venus Urania to the earthiness of the Venus Pandemos. Whereas marriage required immersion in the mundane details of the real, the bachelor claimed that he maintained fidelity to the ideal, the wellspring of art. Embracing Plato as founder of the bachelor sect, D. J. Sprague argues in an 1856 essay that unmarried men are idealists who “look beyond the external; yet no one better than they appreciate the beauty of female character, form, and loveliness” (179). To defend Platonists against the charge of misogyny, Sprague contends that bachelors actually elevate the status of women by appreciating and expressing their beauty. Yet the desire for control and fear of female power seem to motivate the Platonists, as Sprague asserts that “Each of our sect is lord of his own body, soul, and domains” (178). In contrast, husbands must face the disruptions of family life:
How pleasant, when the toils of day are over, to retire to one’s own room to enjoy the companionship of those immortal minds which inlay his walls, each with its silent title beckoning him to search its pages for knowledge…. With the opening door, no long list of wants, ever prefaced by ‘my dear’… no half-dozen little progenies to mount his knees and rack his weary frame; but he finds in his own domicil a quiet and repose from all the cares of this noisy, bustling world. (178)
Sprague paints the library as the bachelor’s temple, a place of repose where he can commune with great thinkers through his own reading and meditation. This vision of the library as the preserve of the bachelor’s creativity and meditation recurs in bachelor fiction, offering an alternative domesticity based upon male relaxation and dreaming.
The association of the bachelor with idealism and repose manifests itself in the literature of bachelorhood.[4] As the example of Sterne’s Yorick suggests, the sensitive bachelor emerges from the literature of Sensibility. According to Janet Todd, eighteenth-century sentimental fiction represents two types of manhood: the “sensitive, benevolent man whose feelings are too exquisite for the acquisitiveness, vulgarity and selfishness of his world,” and the villainous seducer (Todd 4). Although some literary bachelors resemble the rake in their rapacious appetites and self-indulgence, most are like the Man of Feeling, approaching the world through their imaginations and cultivating their emotions.
Perhaps even more than the literature of Sensibility, the British essay tradition shaped antebellum American authors’ use of the bachelor persona by popularizing a pose of detached authority. To guide the rising middle-classes in proper behavior, Addison and Steele devised a clever narrative strategy for their Spectator papers: pose as members of the Spectator Club, a group of eccentric, good-natured bachelors. As Mr. Spectator argues, his “speculative” position as a silent observer enables him to better comprehend social practices: “I am very well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as standers-by discover plots, which are apt to escape those who are in the game” (4-5). As a spectator rather than a participant, the bachelor narrator cleaves to the ideal, honors tradition, and advises those who depart from them. Such a pose of disinterest and idealism became crucial to the essay tradition, with its personal, meditative tone. As William Hedges notes, “After the Spectator, the British essayist had often pretended to be, if not an elderly gentleman, at least the close associate of one or more aging bachelors well versed in old fashions and customs” (17). Mindful of the authority and insights granted by such a pose, antebellum American writers such as Irving, Cooper, and Tuckerman emulated Addison and Steele’s Spectator. James Fenimore Cooper even adopted the convention of the bachelor’s club in his Notions of the Americans Picked Up by A Travelling Bachelor (1828), in which the narrator, a member of an international club of peregrinating bachelors, recounts his excursions through America with the “philosophical” American bachelor John Cadwallader. Responsible only to himself, the bachelor narrator is more open to experience and more free to explore the world.
Drawing from both classical and eighteenth-century literature, antebellum American advocates of bachelorhood wrote sketches arguing that it was essential for a life devoted to art and philosophy. In an angry poem called “To a Bachelor of Arts, on His Marriage” (1838), Wilbur Huntington accuses a recently married man of surrendering his ties to his fellow bachelors and “tear[ing] those laurels from thy head,” as if marriage and art are irreconcilable. Similarly, the cover to the sheet music for Jargo’s “The Poetry of Matrimony, Written When the Author Was a Student and a Bachelor” (1863) sets two images against each other, contrasting the leisure, independence, and fancy of the bachelor with the exhaustion and responsibilities of the husband (see Figure One).
In the image titled “POETRY,” a beautiful woman—perhaps a muse or genii—seems to rise out of the smoke produced by the dreaming bachelor’s cigar and beckon to him, while “MATRIMONY” shows a husband holding a baby as his wife stops sweeping to make a commanding gesture. As the verses make clear, the gay, dreaming bachelor who once occupied “Paradise” has “yielded his neck to the halter” of matrimony, and now advises his bachelor friend “You’d better not marry at all” (Jargo). Whereas the bachelor can indulge his ethereal fantasies of love and produce poetry, the married man must subordinate his own desires to the quotidian demands of marriage.
While poetry might promise greater pleasure than matrimony, making a living through writing presented a real challenge to aspiring poets. In antebellum America, male authors confronted a crisis of identity, since American manhood was oriented toward practicality and profit rather than reflection and poetry.[5] According to conventional definitions, to be a man in the nineteenth century was to labor and advance economically rather than to lounge over a book or closet oneself in a study writing (Pugh 18, 24). Authorship worked against this definition in three senses, given that it guaranteed no stable income, was considered at odds with marriage, and was thought to be opposed to the vigor and productivity of male enterprise (Derrick 14). According to Washington Irving, the author had no real place in American culture, since the leisure required for authorship seemed irreconcilable with the nation’s emphasis on industry: “Unqualified for business in a nation where everyone is busy; devoted to literature where literary leisure is confounded with idleness, the man of letters is almost an insulated being, with few to understand, less to value, and scarcely any to encourage his pursuits” (qtd. by Douglas 235). Irving differentiates between “idleness” and “literary leisure” to suggest that while idle men waste time, the man of letters needs unstructured time in order to write. In deciding to become authors, American men grappled with the fear that they might be regarded as effeminate and unproductive (Gruesz 48), yet this sense of inadequacy could be lessened somewhat if they had no dependents.
According to Michael Newbury, antebellum American authors defined their literary labors in relation to work, both to promote their accomplishments as craftsmen and signify their alienation from industrialism (4). However, an authorial identity also emerged from the evasion of work, as bachelor authors adopted dreaming, leisured poses. Although Wordsworth told Emerson that America had no culture because it lacked a leisured class (Leverenz 57), the literature of bachelorhood contradicted this notion by portraying a subculture based upon male leisure and fantasizing. American critics claimed that the author needed to enjoy solitude, exercise creative freedom, and focus on his art, which the free-wheeling bachelor was uniquely positioned to do. Promoting the development of American literary culture, the prominent critic Evert Duyckinck (1840) asserted that the author should be a bachelor so that he could achieve a single-minded focus on his art:
A single life is the first best qualification of an author. His attention must not be distracted by variety of pursuits. The world must be content to have him to do one thing well, and honor his retirement, grant him liberally books, leisure, means of subsistence: but let the author be true to himself, and not sacrifice his talent to even honest gains. (“Authorship” 23)
Essential to Duyckinck’s sense of the author were his retirement and his detachment, since he was “at once actor and spectator in the world” (20). As a spectator, the author could view day-to-day events from a distance and cultivate his genius, yet he could also act in the world by producing literature. Likewise, the Democratic Review (1843) painted the author as isolated and unique:
An author is a kind of anomaly in the human family, an exception to the general rule of the species, living apart from his race, inhabiting an ideal world, with feelings and impulses peculiarly his own, and governed by laws which are alien to all mankind beside…. In fine, he is essentially an anti-social being, having usually a strong spice of asceticism and saturnine exclusiveness that at once induces our commingled pity and admiration. (“Loose Leaves” 290)
Echoing the common description of the bachelor as an idealist, alien, and individualist, this commentator suggests that bourgeois family life is not compatible with authorship.
By adopting the bachelor mask, writers such as Irving and Mitchell avoided the taint of professional authorship and instead posed as whimsical gentlemen retired from society.[6] In “The Author’s Account of Himself,” Irving’s bachelor narrator Geoffrey Crayon claims that he writes “to get up a few [sketches] for the entertainment of my friends” (Selected Writings 5), as if he were just extending leisurely conversation through publication. Crayon presents himself as a traveling bachelor, not a professional author. Similarly, Mitchell’s Ik Marvel begins his Reveries by describing the book as an assemblage of “bachelor” impressions rather than a deliberately-crafted work of art: “This book is neither more, nor less than it pretends to be; it is a collection of those floating Reveries which have, from time to time, drifted across my brain. I never yet met with a bachelor who had not his share of just such floating visions; and the only difference between us lies in the fact, that I have tossed them from me in the shape of a Book” (v). As he describes reveries “floating” and “drifting” across bachelors’ brains, Mitchell suggests that the dominant mental mode of bachelors is accidental and variable. He merely transcribes bachelor visions, casually “tossing” them into a book.
By adopting the bachelor mask, antebellum authors worked through their own anxieties of authorship. In fact, many antebellum American authors were bachelors, including Washington Irving, Henry Tuckerman, Walt Whitman, Cornelius Matthews, John Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau.[7] Other authors produced important work while they were bachelors; for instance, Mitchell published Reveries of a Bachelor while still single, and Charles Brockden Brown more or less ended his literary career when he married and became a “respectable burgher” (Dauber 39). Of course, one does not need to be bachelor in order to write about them. Although both Melville and Hawthorne began their literary careers while bachelors, they wrote their most complex bachelor fictions, Pierre and The Blithedale Romance, after they had married.[8] (Yet it is worth noting that both novels satirize the bachelor artist.)
Donald Grant Mitchell’s emerging sense of himself as an author reveals the conflicted relationships between manhood, marriage, professionalism, and authorship. While a student at Yale, Mitchell began writing for the Literary Magazine, a decision that his guardian, an all-business conservative named General Williams, criticized. Echoing the continuing suspicion that literature was a sick passion that could destroy self-discipline, General Williams worried that his charge would waste his time on trifles, and perhaps even fall into the unfortunate profession of authorship. To defend his writing, Mitchell appealed to the very values Williams embodied:
I am not insensible, I assure you, to the necessity [of] Practical Knowledge & (if [I] may so speak) to its steady-- vigorous--full application: I am not in love with Literature-- not rapt into a morbid enthusiasm for mere books & writing, but pursue its more essential branches, as a means and not as an end-- as a means of disciplining my mind for vigorous thought-- as a means of acquiring knowledge-- as a means of ability to render that knowledge effective in its highest capabilities; and when a Profession is before me, it is to that alone I mean to concentrate my energies-- if health favor-- with untiring application, & if then, despite my efforts, I shame my friends, from lack of natural endowments-- be it so--for God “hath made us, & not we ourselves.” (July 13, 1840)
Mitchell’s moralizing defense of writing reveals how he was negotiating his way around his culture’s suspicion of “mere pleasure” and idealism, as well as its identification of literature with seduction and the loss of self-control. Using a vocabulary that emphasizes action (“untiring application”), manliness (“vigorous”), discipline, and acquisition, Mitchell insists that writing would develop skills essential to triumphing in a profession, which he equates with success in life.
Yet even in this self-conscious defense of writing, Mitchell worried he might fail and embarrass his friends, an anxiety that only increased as he began considering authorship as a career. Soon after he achieved initial success with his “Capitol Sketches,” Mitchell wrote to his friend and cousin Mary Goddard, “So far as support goes, there is to my mind no doubt now, that my pen would do it—but it is a dog’s life;— & as you love me, never speak of me as a literary man. It shall be an amusement to me always: a business never” (January 28, 1847). Just as Mitchell insisted that he wrote only for pleasure, so he imagined himself as a retired bachelor who interacted with the world through his books and imagination. After declaring his “full determination of living a bachelor,” Mitchell asked Goddard to “look out for me a little farm where I may gather together my books & chattels—hang up my chamois skin & knapsack together—keep my gun & fishing tackle in order, my pipe ready for occasional service, & so live out my span doing good in such humble way as falls to my allotment” (July 1, 1848). To deal with his insecurity over his lack of professional prospects and fear of never marrying, Mitchell attempted to adopt the identity of an easygoing gentleman philosopher, reclining in a self-constructed world of leisure and contented solitude.
When he finally met the woman that he was to marry, Mitchell’s attitudes toward authorship shifted, as he described it less as an idle, romantic pursuit, and more as hard, manly work—business rather than amusement. While he was trying to finish Fudge Doings (1855), which followed on the success of his best-selling Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life, Mitchell wrote to his fiancée Mary Pringle:
I want to warn you of our cold, selfish, men’s hearts, which in the dark & ambitions of life fling down at sadly frequent intervals the fondness of a hearty nature: & follow the iron leading of a work-day brain. This you will forgive & forget: I will back to better instincts, one who will ever love, & guard, & honor you. Well, is it not odd, that here, at my desk, the scene of hard, & much heart-less work, I should be dashing off ten trite sheets--love letters… (ca. 1853)
Conscious of the association between professional work and public manliness, this beloved literary sentimentalist characterizes his writing for pay as “heart-less,” suggesting that it is motivated by professional ambition and economic necessity rather than feeling. Yet writing crosses the boundaries between the public and the private spheres, as Mitchell claims to write both to make money and to woo his future wife. (Indeed, Mitchell used his published writing as an instrument of romance when he gave Mary Pringle a fine edition of Reveries soon after meeting her.) To reinforce his own masculinity, Mitchell asserts that his labor is driven by “work-day” motives and ambition, but promises that with Mary he will embrace his “better instincts” and fulfill his gentler duties as a husband. As these letters suggest, Mitchell seemed to internalize his culture’s insistence that two events signified the achievement of manhood: finding a vocation and getting married (Rotundo 115).
The bachelor persona appealed to those who did not want to be circumscribed by the expectations of bourgeois manhood. This persona was not only a literary construct, but also a literary mask that antebellum American men (and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, women) self-consciously adopted, inspired by their reading. In an 1841 letter to his soon-to-be married female cousin, Stanton Dorsey imagines himself as an “old bachelor”:
thy humble friend, my own self, is here, in the Southwest corner of the store, all alone--but how delightful it is to be sometimes alone--it is then, we can write to our friend, and in so doing, enjoy a small portion of that good feeling, which is so much better expressed in words than on paper. It is then, too, that we can look backward, and dwell with pleasure upon the delights of our past lives--and picture happiness to come--for who, that could avoid it--would willingly dream of evil? How many happy times have I enjoyed in silent communion with my own thoughts-- But do not suspect me of misanthropy--for in all my pleasant imaginings, fancy admits much of society. The luxury of being alone is like a strain of sweet music-- monotonous, when too long, or too frequently enjoyed. Our reason should teach us to regulate our pleasures, and not suffer them to cloy by over indulgence--But it is getting late, and I must cut short my lecture upon what many would call ‘old Bachelor notions,’-- It may yet be my privilege, however, to become a member of that useful and respectable class of citizens--unfettered and free----[9]
Dorsey rhapsodizes upon the advantages of solitude, which enables him to connect with friends, remember the past, daydream about the future, and savor the feeling produced by such reveries. Yet Dorsey, probably aware of moralists’ criticisms of reverie, acknowledges that one must “regulate” the pleasures of solitude. A lover of literature (in the letter’s preceding paragraph in he makes reference to Sir Walter Scott), Dorsey recognizes his own musings as “old Bachelor notions” and signals, perhaps facetiously, his hope to join that fraternity. By emphasizing the words “useful” and “respectable,” he suggests just how contested the question of the bachelor’s social worth was—he could be taken either ironically or sincerely, as defending the usefulness of the bachelor or joking about his irrelevance. To this point, we have explored the contested role of the bachelor in antebellum America and seen this figure’s connection to an emerging literary identity. In the sections that follow, I explore how the ambivalence toward bachelorhood manifested itself in antebellum literature, focusing on the controversies over the bachelor’s attitude toward domesticity, as well as his detached perspective, sentimentality, and creativity.
Bachelor Domesticity
“To Bachelor’s Hall we good fellows invite, to partake of the Chase that makes up our delight” (Charles Dibdin, 1790)
To describe where (and how) the bachelor lived, authors invoked “bachelor’s hall,” a term which originated in Charles Dibdin’s song about the wine, plentiful food, and good cheer that men enjoy together at the hearth after spending a day hunting. Although it came to mean a “place presided over by an unmarried man,” typically in solitude (OED), “bachelor’s hall” retained its initial association with leisure and pleasure. In a sense, bachelor’s hall inverted conventional domesticity, since it was solitary rather than familial, but it also promoted comfort and repose. As Katherine Snyder points out, bachelors were “often thought to be the antithesis of domesticity yet they were also sometimes seen as its epitome” (19). Even though bachelor sketches value satisfying individual desire over nurturing the family, they also promote the vision of home as a retreat from the competition and striving of the public sphere, a space where beauty and fancy can be cultivated.
By rejecting marriage and domesticity, bachelors seemed to prefer independence to intimacy, ideas to experience. Sketches critical of the bachelor ridiculed this choice by suggesting that without a wife’s presence, men would live like children, if not animals. For instance, Mrs. Carr’s The Intellectual Regale, or Ladies’ Tea Tray (1815), likely a parody of Irving and company’s Salmagundi, satirizes a band of misogynists who have exiled themselves to the country and proudly proclaimed “that the single state is the happiest” (168). These vain bachelors live in a filthy building that once was a blacksmith’s shop, refusing to clean their home for fear of seeming feminine (although the men, presumably unfamiliar with orthodox cleaning implements, do hoe their dirt-covered dinner table once a year). At their bachelors’ hall they spend their time “talking, reading, writing, eating, drinking, smoking, and sleeping”—eschewing “real work,” the bane of bachelors (234). They must by abide by absurd regulations designed to protect them from female powers, such as a prohibition against going outside on a moonlit night. Ultimately some of the bachelors revolt against these strictures and advertise for wives in newspapers, while a lottery is held to marry off the rest of them. In this spoof, Mrs. Carr mocks the notion that men can survive in a world without women and shows bachelors resisting the transition from a patriarchal society governed by men to one oriented toward male enterprise and female control of the home. Without wives to regulate them, Mrs. Carr suggests, men avoid productive labor and assume that their foolish fantasies reflect reality.
The bachelor’s relationship with domesticity became a political issue in the 1856 presidential election, which pitted Republican John Charles Fremont, a married man, against Democrat James Buchanan, a bachelor. According to the campaign song “The Bachelor Candidate,” America would suffer by putting a bachelor in the White House, without “a petticoat in it to lend a charm.” The lyrics picture the White House in decline as a result of the bachelor’s presidency, its walls festooned with cobwebs, its floors covered with cigar stubs, and “All things in confusion from attic to ground.” If a bachelor were president, the song implies, then the White House would no longer represent domestic harmony and order, as the individual home that stands for the nation. Whereas Buchanan is depicted as a “unit and cypher at that,” Fremont “doubled his value by taking a mate,” so that the husband represents unity, the bachelor extreme individualism and ambiguity.
Although some authors pictured bachelor’s hall as a sty, others presented it as a Paradise where men could devote themselves to dreaming, beauty, and self-cultivation. Important in the iconography of bachelor domesticity were the well-tended hearth, the armchair, and the table stacked with books, all of which were associated with good taste and fantasy.[10] The title character of “The Bachelor—A Tale” (1849) enjoys such extravagant luxury that his marital status is evident:
Mr. Lefevre, then, sat in his cushioned chair, wrapped in a dressing-gown embroidered with gold and silver figures, in a style rather too gorgeous for correct taste, with a pair of worked slippers on his feet, and a cigar in his mouth. A decanter of wine stood at a convenient distance on his right hand; several letters, newspapers, olive dishes, &c., littered the table…. That he was a bachelor the reader has inferred, from the easy and comfortable manner in which he was situated. (492)
Like many other tales, this one ends with the bachelor moderating his tastes and controlling his impulses through marriage, but the essential point is that the sketch describes the bachelor’s luxurious lifestyle with such luminosity and precision as to fixate upon the aesthetic satisfactions of the single life. The antebellum bachelor thus served as a predecessor to the aesthete of the late nineteenth century.[11] Whereas the private life of the husband was subsumed by family, the bachelor could make an art out of home life, living in exquisite comfort. As Katherine Snyder argues, the bachelor’s quarters signified an approach to domesticity focused more on pleasure and beauty than morality and affection (34).
Just as bachelor’s hall offered a space where the single man could both enjoy and make evident his aesthetic tastes, so it provided a retreat where he could engage in fantasy and speculation. In the poem “A Day Dream, By a Bachelor” (1842), the speaker describes a “self-taught phantasy” that he conjures up whenever he is struck by sadness. The bachelor acknowledges that fantasizing can bring “distempered dreams” as well as inspiring visions, but for him it supplies greater comfort than any human companion, serving as “a most gentle guide, and helpmate ever kind.” Appropriating the language of domesticity, the bachelor replaces the wife with his own mental productions. Whereas the typical domestic fantasy features the family by the fireside, the bachelor’s daydream focuses upon “a cheerful hearth, whose blaze by fits/ Shoots up in flashes o’er his form, there sits/ A thoughtful man, of high but furrowed brow.” In a narcissistic fantasy anticipating Ik Marvel, the bachelor imagines himself dreaming at his fireside, the flickering blaze reflecting the movements of his imagination. If the family hearth is the scene of love and affection, the bachelor’s is the space of contemplation and aesthetic appreciation: “The book-strewn table and the cushioned chair/ Tell comfort and the minds best riches there; / While every slight adornment, sweetly placed,/ Betrays the guardian hand of love and taste.” According to this idealized picture of the bachelor’s home, in solitude he can commune with the minds of the past and produce his own beauty, acting as a “guardian” of mental and aesthetic pleasures. This poem, which serves almost as a meta-fantasy on fantasy, suggests that the bachelor’s hearth provides both the stimulus to dreaming and is itself the object, since there seems to be no greater pleasure for the bachelor than to dream in his private quarters.
Not only did bachelor’s hall provide a space for repose and contemplation, but also authorship. Whereas most men in the nineteenth century worked outside the home (Leverenz 72), the author was typically an exception, since the creative labor of writing usually took place in the privacy of the study or parlor. For instance, Melville suggests that authorship depends upon domestic repose when he describes Hawthorne writing while reclining in a “quiet arm-chair in the noisy town” (“Hawthorne,” Piazza 245). Free from the distractions of the market and family, the bachelor could make both his quarters and his fictions a retreat hospitable to dreaming. The link between bachelor domesticity and authorship will be discussed more fully in the chapter on Washington Irving, whose works reflect both his desire for domestic comforts and his fear that the responsibilities of marriage would dry up his creative powers.
Even as the bachelor withdrew into the privacy of his quarters, he peered back at society, insisting that his insights and creativity depended on his detached perspective.
By suggesting that the bachelor’s position as a spectator fed his writing, bachelor sketches somewhat paradoxically emphasized both his objectivity and subjectivity. On the one hand, they implied that because the bachelor was not bound to family interests, he could see impartially. On the other, bachelor sketches contended that he derived his insights not so much from direct observation as from fantasies and interpretations; what the bachelor saw prompted his speculations about what could be. However, critics of the bachelor maintained that his observations and reveries reflected his own warped psychology and false assumptions rather than a deep understanding of truth.
The bachelor’s position as a spectator is suggested by the title to Donald Grant Mitchell’s The Lorgnette; or Studies of the Town by An Opera Goer (1849). In this series of satiric sketches, a bachelor narrator named Timon gazes through his lorgnette (opera glasses) at his neighbors, scrutinizing them as if he were watching the splendid artifice of an opera. Whereas the “coxcomb writers, in opera gloves, and in velvet trimmings” (2) produce shallow, imitative work, Timon looks “about the world, as carelessly and freely as I chose” (1), celebrating his own idiosyncrasy, independence, and honesty. He writes “to amuse some little portion of that world, which has so long and gratuitously amused me” (1). Timon’s readers were not only amused, but also perplexed by this figure who stared so intently at them without revealing his own identity. Timon epitomizes the detached bachelor, who proclaims his own authority to observe, mock, and occasionally sympathize with his fellow citizens. Such a pose of disinterest stimulated the interest of many readers, who wanted to know the secrets of this mysterious figure. In his next book, Reveries of a Bachelor, Mitchell casts the detached bachelor as a sentimentalist rather than a cynic, offering a compelling meditation on the connections between detachment, dreaming, and feeling.
By presenting himself as a spectator, the bachelor narrator assumes a position similar to that of his readers and implies that the proper role of the author is to observe and interpret. In The American Lounger (1839), Joseph Holt Ingraham suggests that the bachelor’s fondness for spectating enables him to spin good stories even as he shows how fantasy can lead to error. The narrator opens this collection of sketches and tales by declaring his own bachelorhood: “I am a bachelor, dear reader! This I deem necessary to premise, lest, peradventure, regarding me as one of that class whose fate is sealed… you should deem me traitor to my sworn alliance” (15). By asserting that he is single, the narrator reassures his readers that his loyalties lie with them rather than a wife. Just as the reader necessarily experiences a situation vicariously, so the bachelor lives his life watching and interpreting. The narrator describes himself as a “lounger” who values idleness and who often stares out dormant windows, which “are sacred to us single gentlemen, particularly to poets and certain fundless members of the literati” (16). “Dormant” suggests the narrator’s inactivity, his potential to change, and his preference for an attic perch, which offers a superior view of the world below.
For Ingraham, authors belong to a subspecies of genus bachelor, particularly fond of the low rents and lofty vistas offered by the garret apartment. The barebones nature of the bachelor’s existence means that he is free to pay greater attention to what happens around him and can be more available to the reader:
Look with me forth from the window, complaisant reader! Take my chair there in the nook, and I will stand (for there is room only for one) on this step beside you. You need not first cast your eyes about my apartment. It contains only a single cot-bed–the birthright of bachelors–two chairs, one of which you now honor me by occupying in the window, a small, drawerless, pine table, covered with loose manuscripts, poems, a well thumbed novel, ‘Clinton Bradshaw,’ a Dictionary of Quotations, and a Bible…. Turn your back, sir, upon these uninteresting domestic items, and let us together survey the living drama beneath. (36)
The books and manuscripts reveal the bachelor’s desire to be a man of letters; F.W. Thomas’s popular 1835 novel about Clinton Bradshaw, a young lawyer on the rise, might encourage his own literary ambitions, while the classic texts of wit and religion aid his writing and reflection. As he invites the reader to step into his nook and gaze out at the “living drama below,” Ingraham crafts an alternative to domestic fiction’s focus on “uninteresting domestic items.” Rather than detailing everyday life, bachelor fiction is defined by the romantic, speculative gaze of the single observer. By inviting the reader into his home, the bachelor pretends intimacy, but the garret functions more as a theater box than a parlor. For the narrator, looking out the window at the scenes below serves as a metaphor for the act of literary representation. As he peers out the window, he imagines himself as a sort of literary tour guide who stands by the reader pointing out stories and separating the significant parts from the “confused spectacle” of the whole.
After earning a small sum from a bit of hack writing, the narrator climbs the three steps to his window seat overlooking the street “to speculate on things external” (25). As he moves from his desk to the window, the narrator embodies the symbiotic relationship between watching and writing, leaving open the bachelor’s susceptibility to misguided idealism. Initially the narrator wonders whether he should venture forth into the scene below, asking like a would-be Don Quixote in search of his steed, “Where was my Rosinante?” (26). Soon he learns the hazards of imposing a romantic narrative on observed scenes. The narrator witnesses a romance unfold between a beautiful woman who lives in the fine house across the street and a gentleman who spots her while riding past her home and who, like the narrator, believes her to be the ideal woman. From his perch, he even sees the gentleman, a count, get down on his knees and propose to her. Yet the narrator discovers the errors of idealism when he finds that the woman is not the daughter of a wealthy gentleman, but a housekeeper. This episode teaches the narrator that his interpretations may be false and verifies his prejudice that marriage is a trap.
Bachelors, however, can save themselves from delusion and narcissism by first looking with sympathetic eyes and then acting on their sympathies. In the final first-person chapter of The American Lounger, the bachelor narrator describes his own revival from a long sickness as spring begins. The narrator’s illness is symbolized by a huge bulkhead of snow on the street below his window that lasts into the spring: “It seemed to me that it would never dissolve. I at length became so interested in its disappearance, that I sat for hours together with my eyes intensely fixed upon it, and forgetful of every thing else. It lay like an incubus on my thoughts” (133). The snow pile becomes his new obsession, signifying the bachelor’s sexual repression, his passivity, and his inability to spring forth from invalidism. Still believing himself too weak to leave his post by the windowsill, the narrator orders his servant, a manly surrogate, to clear the mass of snow away. However, each time the man is about to plunge his shovel into the bank, something happens to make the narrator call halt from his perch by the window: a small boy defends himself against a bully by making a snowball from the pile, or a rube is duped into believing that the snow is a pile of sugar. Here the narrator resembles Bronte’s Lockwood, Hawthorne’s Coverdale, and James’s Ralph Touchett, whose invalidism, Katherine Snyder argues, enables them to cross boundaries of identity and gender, and signifies their “constant negotiations between sympathy and detachment, between proximity and distance, and also between specular vicariousness and spectacular self-display” (66). Like the reader, the narrator both identifies with those on the street and feels superior to them. When the narrator sees that a young woman has been injured after her carriage crashes into the snow bank, he recovers his strength and rushes away from his window-side post to aid her. At the end of the tale, the scene of bachelor detachment has been transformed into a domestic tableau, as the narrator is no longer perched by the window looking out but staring in at his wife, father-in-law, son, and daughter. Sympathizing with others and acting on that sympathy have restored the former bachelor, so now his gaze has shifted from things external to domestic scenes. After he marries, the narrator’s personal sketches end, as if his speculations are no longer interesting, or he is no longer willing to invite the reader into his home. In this view, bachelor narratives are so prominent because of the dramatic tension between the bachelor’s dreams and the fulfillment of those dreams, and because of the willingness of the bachelor to make his most private longings public.
In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne criticizes the detached bachelor by showing the moral and psychological damage his spectating does. When Coverdale introduces himself, he emphasizes three linked aspects of his identity: he is a bachelor and poet who enjoys the enigmatic spectacle of the Veiled Lady (5, 7). In a classic scene of bachelor voyeurism, Coverdale watches the activities visible in the windows close to his own, declaring himself “a devoted epicure of my emotions” (135). Coverdale associates feeling with taste, ignoring the human pain underlying his aestheticism. On the first day of his voyeurism, Coverdale stares at two scenes that seem to epitomize the choices open to him: bachelorhood, represented by an upper-floor apartment where a young gentleman styles his hair in preparation for an evening out; and marriage, suggested by a bottom-floor apartment where a father kisses his children. Yet on the second day Coverdale sees a third option: the warped utopian drama enacted by Zenobia, Priscilla, and Prof. Westervelt, who challenge the orthodox family. Though titillated by the scene, Coverdale complains that it draws upon his “already wearied sympathies,” so he sets himself apart and hopes for some dramatic climax that he can analyze and then move past (145). Instead, Coverdale is spotted at the window by Westervelt, receives a scornful glance from Zenobia, and is chastised when she drops the curtain “like the drop-curtain of a theatre, in the interval between the acts” (147). Coverdale’s use of theatrical language emphasizes his role as a spectator who is unwilling to commit to any action and who views those around him as actors on a stage rather than fellow humans (147).
Although Coverdale attempts to recover from the “rebuke” by claiming that he looks with “generous sympathies” (148), Hawthorne reveals the underside of the bachelor’s detachment, characterizing it as voyeuristic, selfish, and ultimately delusional. As Gillian Brown argues, Coverdale “relates a bachelor’s romance, reveries of limited engagements” (114). Coverdale’s sympathy is just a pretense for his desire to both invade and hold himself back from his peers at Blithedale. Zenobia recognizes the distance and desire suggested by Coverdale’s gaze when she says, “You are a poet—at least, as poets go, now-a-days—and must be allowed to make an opera-glass of your imagination, when you look at women” (156). By comparing Coverdale’s poetic imagination to opera glasses, Hawthorne suggests that he cannot grasp the reality of human suffering and that he distances himself from genuine experience, like Mitchell’s Timon. Haunted by the events at Blithedale, Coverdale ultimately lives the monastic life of a retired bachelor, giving up writing poetry and instead interpreting Apocrypha like his namesake, the Biblical scholar and translator Miles Coverdale. Even if the bachelor’s detachment stimulates his imagination, it can also reflect his “[b]igotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity” (157), as Zenobia claims in criticizing Coverdale’s selfishness and hollow visions.
“A Devoted Epicure of My Emotions”: The Bachelor and Sentimentality 
How the bachelor responded to his spectating determined whether he was perceived as a cold clam or ideal bachelor. In one view, the bachelor repressed his emotions so well that he was utterly without sympathy; in another, his sensibilities were so keen and his imagination so lively that he could guide others in their own sentimental responses to suffering. Whereas Caroline Kirkland describes “Less fanciful people, frugal housewives and hard-hearted old bachelors” (Forest), James Fenimore Cooper calls maidens and bachelors “the more sentimental part of the community” (Lionel). By associating “less fanciful people” with the “hard-hearted,” Kirkland suggests that fancy cultivates feeling. Even Kirkland acknowledged that beneath his cold exterior, the bachelor was susceptible to shedding sympathetic tears. Although domestic novels such as The Wide, Wide World were supposedly intended for girls, Kirkland claimed that the sentimental power of the book extended even to bachelors: “we are much mistaken if the Wide, Wide World, and Queechy, have not been found under the pillows of sober bachelors,—pillows not unsprinkled with the sympathetic tears of those who, in broad day, manfully exult in ‘freedom’ from the effeminate fetters of wife and children” (“Novels” 113). According to Kirkland, the bachelor identity is defined by a public face of manly independence from family life, and a private yearning for home.
Some commentators depicted the bachelor as cold-hearted and selfish to show the dangers of rejecting family and immersing oneself in solitary abstraction. Among the descriptions of the old bachelor that appear in The Oxford English Dictionary are “crusty,” “dozened,” “cynic misogynic heretic,” “precise and obstinate.”[13] Commentators also accused the old bachelor of “priggism and pedantry” and claimed that “There is no more sentiment in the soul of an old bachelor, than there is music in a corn-stalk fiddle.”[14] Such descriptions present the old bachelor as a dry, impotent, unfeeling pedant, the antithesis of the sympathetic artist. Although the bachelor scholar, like the bachelor artist, prefers ideas to experience, he represses sentimental responses that might connect him to others and thus expose his own vulnerability. “Starry” Vere, the abstracted captain of the Bellipotent in Melville’s Billy Budd, exemplifies the bachelor scholar in his rigid insistence on obeying rules.
Even the most curmudgeonly bachelors could be redeemed by recognizing their isolation and sympathizing with others. In bachelor conversion narratives, the single man hides his feeling behind a mask of cynicism, abstraction, and coldness, but breaks out of this façade after being won over by a woman or a child. Often stories set the bachelor’s conversion from a curmudgeon into a man of feeling at Christmas, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843).[15] Since Christmas is traditionally a family holiday, such stories reinforced the importance of family bonds by illustrating that even the most determined loners could have their hearts melted by moments of grace, or at least by desire for the good cheer of family celebrations. In “A Bachelor’s Christmas” (1851), the narrator is a stereotypical bachelor scholar who devotes himself so much to study that “my books became my dearest, my only associates” and he “became egoistic and lazy” (399). As he listens in his bachelor quarters to the merriment of a Christmas gathering held by his landlady, he grows angry, envious, and distracted, so much so that he can’t read and instead imagines himself an isolato like Robinson Crusoe. Following his solitary Christmas, he takes a bride and buys a home. By setting this sketch at Christmas, the author shows that in his quest for independence and his immersion in study, the scholarly bachelor is cut off from domestic comforts. As he asserts, “Freedom of will and action are, at least, among a bachelor’s joys; but experience has taught me that, after a certain time, such absence from restraint resolves itself into that species of liberty which Macaulay touchingly designates ‘the desolate freedom of the wild ass’” (399). Like other cautionary bachelor tales, this one contends that men need some limitation on their freedom and warns against the isolation of a scholarly life.
While stories such as “The Bachelor’s Christmas” urge men to marry by showing that books cannot substitute for human company, other sketches validate bachelorhood by promoting “single blessedness” and making the bachelor the object of sympathy. Celibacy could be a “higher calling” than marriage if the “blessed single” dedicated himself or herself to serving God and humanity (Chambers-Schiller 18). Even though society might view the bachelor as cold and heartless, he may feel more deeply because he has suffered, and because he does not focus his sympathies solely on his own wife and family. The Rev. William Aikman suggested that the bachelor was misunderstood:
Yonder isolated man, whom the world wonders at for having never found a wife! who shall tell you all the secret history of the by-gone time! of hopes and loves that once were buoyant and fond, but which death, or more bitter disappointment dashed to the ground…. The expectation of wife, or home, has only been given up as one of the dreams of youth, but only with groans and tears; now he walks among men somewhat alone, with some eccentricities, but with a warm heart and kindly eye…. If he has no home, there is many a home made glad by his presence; if there is no one heart to which he may cling in appropriating love, there are many hearts that go out toward him, and many voices which invoke benedictions on his head. (45)
Rather than refusing to feel, the bachelor has dropped many tears; although homeless, he is welcome at many homes. His “secret history” of unrealized love leads him to exchange affection with a wider community. Such stories of bachelor’s sadness and isolation moved readers; for instance, a reader of Thomas Tattler’s “Why I am a Bachelor” pressed a flower between the pages of the story, likely as a way of registering his or her own identification with the bachelor’s suffering.[16]
Some stories, such as “Why My Uncle Was a Bachelor” (1854), present the bachelor as a secular saint. Puzzled that his benevolent uncle never married, the young narrator says, “He was of such a kindly temper, so chivalrous toward women, so keenly alive to domestic enjoyments, and withal such an earnest promoter of marriage in all his relations and dependents, that it seemed to me perfectly inexplicable” (664). The narrator reveres his uncle, in part because the benevolent gentleman helped overcome his family’s objections to his own upcoming marriage. Yet the narrator discovers that the very qualities he associates with married men—kindliness, chivalry, love of family—were cultivated in his uncle because he was not able to marry his beloved. As a youth, his uncle had fallen in love with a passionate and beautiful actress, but his mother forbade the marriage and consigned her son to a life of loneliness and longing. As a result of his sorrow, the uncle’s sympathies expanded, so that he became the generous advisor common to sentimental stories by Irving, Sterne, and others. The bachelor uncle thus acts as a channel for sympathy, nurturing his extended family with his guidance and love. Appealing to sentimental tradition, the sketch ends by describing how the uncle was buried with a lock of his beloved’s hair and a tear-stained letter, icons that indicate the eternal nature of their love and give visible proof of his sorrow.
In works such as John Treat Irving’s Harry Harson: Or, the Benevolent Bachelor (1853), a novel by Washington Irving’s nephew, the bachelor’s paternal love toward a child makes him a sentimental exemplar and suggests that even unmarried men can participate in patriarchy. The benevolent bachelor Harry Harson takes in a poor orphan girl who has fallen asleep at his doorstep, then works with his fellow bachelor Holmes to uncover the complex story of her kidnapping by her nefarious, money-grubbing uncle. Rather than standing opposed to domesticity, the bachelor verifies it by reconstituting the home through his own noble sacrifices, showing that paternity can be based on sentiment rather than biological connection.
The benevolent bachelor assumes a redeeming presence in domestic fictions such as Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter and Susan Warner’s Queechy. After The Lamplighter’s young Gerty is abandoned by her cruel guardian, the good-hearted lamplighter Trueman Flint steps in to save her, acting as her “friend and protector” (15). Cummins appeals to the reader’s sympathies by detailing how the “old bachelor” awkwardly but lovingly prepares a meal for Gerty, then watches her eat “with a tenderness which proved that unerring instinct of childhood had not been wanting in Gerty, when she felt… that he was a friend to everybody, even to the most forlorn little girl in the world” (14). As a bachelor, Flint is able to make the quick choice to take in the poor child, since his home is under his complete control. Likewise, Queechy features a wealthy bachelor scholar who becomes a sort of fairy godfather for the heroine, Fleda. Dr. Gregory, who is responsible for “collecting rare books for a fine public library, the charge of which was now entrusted to him,” seems to be Warner’s ideal of the American intellectual; he is at once practical and philosophical, gruff and refined, bookish and prosperous (179). Not only does Gregory almost adopt Fleda as a daughter, but also he makes available his books to her and recognizes her genius. With a bachelor father like Gregory, Fleda can more freely cultivate herself, since he lacks direct control but acts as a sentimental and intellectual role model.
Defenders of the bachelor insisted that his singleness made him a more effective advocate for the needy. For instance, Thoreau, whom Emerson dubbed “the bachelor of thought and nature” because of his asceticism (454), argued that the unmarried work for the good of future generations. Analyzing a passage from Agassiz and Gould’s natural history work, in which they report that working bees are barren females who labor only for the good of the new generation, Thoreau observed, “This phenomenon is paralleled in man by maiden aunts and bachelor uncles, who perform a similar function” (qtd. by Taylor 12). Using this passage as the key to his study of Thoreau and American politics, Bob Pepperman Taylor contends,
Thoreau’s chosen vocation, as critic of American society and politics, is that of a ‘bachelor uncle.’ His concern is less for his contemporaries than for the values and institutions that will nurture and mold future generations... It is the legacy of American citizenship that Thoreau ultimately aims to influence. In attempting to establish this influence, it is perhaps inevitable that he appears odd, eccentric, like a ’bachelor uncle,’ especially to his own generation. (12)
Antebellum American literature features many bachelor uncles who speak as wise, disinterested advisors and illustrate the dynamic between sentiment and detachment.
To reflect their detached authority, the authors of nineteenth-century advice columns and guidebooks frequently posed as bachelor uncles or maiden aunts, depending on the gender that they were addressing.[17] Harper’s Monthly featured “The Lounger’s Letter Box” (1859), in which a wry bachelor jokes about the eccentricities of single men and counsels Benedicks about their duties. Exemplifying the association between leisure and bachelorhood, the Lounger presents himself as a whimsical, unattached observer who sees situations with a mix of irony and sympathy.[18] Likewise, miscellanies such as Donald Grant Mitchell’s The Lorgnette and Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The American Lounger are narrated from the perspective of a bachelor with the leisure to watch and comment upon social happenings. Freedom’s Journal, the first African-American newspaper published in the US, featured a column by “The Observer” (1827), a bachelor who upholds middle-class American values such as female modesty, obedience to parents, and participation in debating societies. The Observer is beloved for his good sense and openness. As one of his correspondents writes, “A man of your benevolence will always listen to any plan, for the improvement of his fellows in morals and education.” Rather than incarnating a fixed ideology, the bachelor could hold himself apart, take in a variety of perspectives, and render an unbiased opinion. By posing as detached spectators, antebellum authors could claim insight without responsibility, and could be representative without surrendering their uniqueness.
Married to the Public or Out at Elbows?
Just as the benevolent bachelor was free to act selflessly on behalf of future generations, so the bachelor author could create an uplifting literary legacy by working in solitude. Bacon’s essay “Of Marriage and the Single Life” served as a touchstone for antebellum bachelor literature, particularly his assertion that
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly, the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. (21)
Citing Bacon, “A Colloquial Chapter on Celibacy” (1848) lays out common broad themes in pro-bachelor literature: first, that single people excel as artists and scientists; second, that bachelors’ sympathies are wider because they are not restricted to a single family. Married men are constrained by obligation, but bachelors can be excessive, both in their imaginations and in their generosity to others. Similarly, in her lecture on bachelor authors, Kate Sanborn approvingly quotes Bacon’s claim that unmarried artists and scholar can focus on their work and “marry” and “endow” the public (105). Bacon’s metaphor suggests that by devoting themselves to their art, authors make the public both their brides and their heirs. Authorship, that is, offers an alternative means of patriarchy, a theme elaborated by Irving.
Through his reveries, the bachelor author could inspire a grateful audience and promote idealism. In an extended tribute to the sentimental essayist Charles Lamb (1841), Henry Tuckerman highlighted the author’s bachelorhood as a way of explaining his “singular and constant devotion to the ideal”:
He knew not the happiness of conjugal affection; but his attachment to a departed object was to him a spring of as deep joy, as the unimaginative find in an actual passion. No little prattlers came about him at eventide; but dream-children, as lovely as cherubs, solaced his lonely hours. The taste, the love, the very being of Charles Lamb, was ideal. (Rambles 351-2)
Lamb’s writing was energized by absence rather than presence, which Tuckerman identifies as being crucial to sentimental writing—to feel deeply what is not actually there, to reach out for something more emotionally charged and latent with greater possibilities than real life. Whereas the solitude of bachelorhood invigorates the imagination, the husband turns to tangible comforts. Lamb was a touchstone for Tuckerman, himself a life-long bachelor who used the bachelor dreamer as the central figure for his Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man (1832).
Even as some authors adopted the bachelor mask to promote idealism and cope with the anxieties of authorship, others opposed the bachelor persona for representing a weak, imitative approach to authorship and failing to meet the norms of manhood. Whereas bachelor literature focuses on the musings of an isolated individual, Longfellow envisions a “masculine civic poetry” in which the author would act as a sort of father bringing together the nation as a family (Gruesz 49). According to Longfellow, professionalism, not the pose of genteel leisure, would nurture the growth of a national literature. Likewise, Melville self-consciously and deliberately pursued elevated artistic ambitions (Railton 168) and, as I shall show in Chapter 4, rejected the bachelor model. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville contends that America can produce writers as powerful and original as Shakespeare, but that it must move away from the smoothly genteel, derivative style of Irving (to whom he does not refer by name): “But that graceful writer…that very popular and amiable writer, however good, and self-reliant in many things, perhaps owes his chief reputation to the self-acknowledged imitation of a foreign model, and to the studied avoidance of all topics but smooth ones. But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation” (247). In criticizing Irving, Melville asserts a counter-aesthetics oriented toward originality and bold truth-telling rather than popularity, smoothness, and fidelity to European models. Offering an alternative model for the American author, Melville quotes from Hawthorne’s description of the Truth Seeker in “The Intelligence Office” (Mosses): “A man now entered, in neglected attire, with the aspect of a thinker, but somewhat too rough-hewn and brawny for a scholar. His face was full of sturdy vigor, with some finer and keener attribute beneath; though harsh at first, it was tempered with the glow of a large, warm heart, which had force enough to heat his powerful intellect through and through” (250). While Melville characterizes the Irvingesque bachelor narrator as imitative and smooth, he imagines the Truth Seeker as a new model of man, one who combines the ruggedness and strength of an American frontiersman with the sensitivity and intelligence of a scholar.
Critics of the bachelor contended that his leisure and dreaming brought about deception and aimlessness. James Hall’s “A Bachelors’ Elysium” (1833) satirizes the celibate’s idealism by describing it as a dream gone wrong. At a Christmas party for bachelors and spinsters, the revelers make various excuses for not marrying. Miss Scruple, for instance, claims that “persons of sentiments” should only marry if they meet their ideal match (211). That evening, the bachelor narrator has a nightmare about the Bachelor’s Elysium, actually a hell where single men and women once too choosy to marry face ironic fates by being matched with a partner and forced to dance forever. Queen Elizabeth jigs with a cobbler, priests polka with royal maids of honor, and a dandy waltzes with a beggar girl. Hall uses this madcap inferno to build to his moral, which is uttered by the narrator’s dream-guide:
You have yet to learn that marriage is man's chief good, and they who neglect it are sent here to be punished. In the other world we had the substantial and virtuous enjoyments of life before us, but we disregarded them, and pursued phantoms of our own creation. One sought wealth, and another honour; but the greater number luxuriated in idle visions of fancy. We were never happy but in imagining scenes of delight too perfect for mortals to enjoy. (221)
By condemning celibates for indulging in fantasy rather than engaging reality, Hall suggests a link between the false ideals of bachelors and the wild imaginings of artists. Indeed, Hall’s criticisms of bachelors and idealism seem to spring from his own suspicion toward “idle” fiction-making, given that he typically wrote historical sketches, village romances, or personal essays. When he created the mock fantasy “Bachelor’s Elysium,” Hall insisted that his art was grounded in masculine experience: “I would not have my fair readers to suppose, that I have dreamed away my life in a ‘Bachelor's Elysium’ or a ‘Paradise of Coquettes,' or that all my days have been devoted to ‘Love in a village.’ I have done the state some service, in the days that tried men's soles, and have had my own blistered with many a weary march” (81). Conscious that he might be regarded as an idle dreamer like the bachelor, Hall asserts his own manhood by declaring that both his body and his soul were tested in war, the ultimate masculine experience.
Similarly, James Kirke Paulding’s light satire “Dyspepy” (1829) suggests the bachelor risks irrelevance and self-destruction unless he subscribes to one of the traditional models for manhood: productive labor or marriage. After the narrator, a bachelor named Ambler, retires early from his prosperous business, he overindulges in food and develops dyspepy. Leisured bachelorhood leads to decadence, restlessness, and illness, Paulding suggests. Ambler visits a health resort, where he meets a fellow glutton named Abstract and becomes even more ill from all of the relaxation. Eventually Ambler recovers from dyspepsia—not through further rest, but by acquiring and improving a country estate. As the owner of a fertile farm, the bachelor proclaims his patriarchal power, rhapsodizing over his view of a “little stream, of which, as being the proprietor of its parent spring, I consider myself the father, with the majestic Hudson” (245). By finding a home, assuming paternal authority, and producing something tangible, Ambler overcomes his illness and connects himself to both nature and history.
Ambler represents a genteel model of manhood, whereby a man derives his worth from governing an estate. In contrast, Ambler’s friend Abstract recovers from his dyspepsia by pursuing another means to productive manhood—marriage. When Ambler runs into Abstract on the street, he asks what has made the former invalid so “hale and hearty”:
"O I'm married," he replied, "and have enough to do besides attending to my nerves; but you -- you are metamorphosed too; what has come over you? are you too, married?"
"NO: I'm a bachelor still," said I, "so you see there are two opposite ways, to the same thing.”(246)
The “thing” is not only moral and physical health but also a responsible state of being, one focused on building the future rather than indexing and fulfilling immediate desires. Hence Paulding offers two paths to male satisfaction: marriage, or the benevolent patriarchy of a hardworking landowner. In this comic allegory of American manhood, Paulding charges the bachelor with being overly abstracted, wayward, and unproductive.
In “Out at the Elbows” (1857), a satire of the American literary scene post-Reveries of a Bachelor, many of bachelor literature’s themes are referenced and mocked. Parodying the conventional way that the male writer was imagined, the sketch makes the narrator a bachelor, aspiring author, and flâneur who hopes to become renowned for “my power of observation” (42). He writes hack criticism for The Literary Mohawk and daydreams about producing his own masterpieces: The Great-Hearted Newsboy, a parody of sentimental literature’s elevation of the lowly, and The Philosophy of Dress in America, perhaps a parody of Carlyle’s philosophy of clothes in Sartor Resartus. Like many of his fellow writers, the narrator loves ambling along the streets, where he attempts to gather material by studying “men and manners.” More often, however, he goes window-shopping, as fantasies of consumerism overwhelm (and seem to be at the root of) his own creative aspirations (42). One day this would-be philosopher of dress spots a man whose demeanor is dignified, but who is wearing an out-of-fashion suit and old boots. With an intensity that today’s critics would likely label homoerotic, the narrator looks for this mysterious stranger, Mark Wilmot, on his daily walks. If he misses his sighting, nothing else satisfies him—not seeing his own works in a bookshop’s window, not even “a pair of black eyes which now and then beamed upon me, from under such a love of a bonnet” (43). The narrator’s obsession with Wilmot undermines the assumption that the bachelor can be trusted as an independent observer.
In gazing after Wilmot, the narrator seems to be searching for his own identity. After encountering Wilmot at, appropriately enough, a bachelor’s club, the narrator discovers his secret: he’s married to a lover of luxury who refuses to restrain her spending even when it bankrupts the family. When he was a bachelor, Wilmot behaved like a decadent in a Poe tale, living in a “bachelor’s snuggery,” throwing parties, and gambling; as a Benedick, however, he must subordinate himself to his wife’s whims, becoming “out at elbows,” or in a bad condition. Wilmot, then, illustrates the hazards marriage poses for manhood. After hearing his woeful tale, the narrator has a nightmare in which he is married to a spendthrift who brings down a storm of bills upon him. Upon awakening, he is comforted—sort of—with the thought, “what young lady in her senses would think of marrying a poor author, out at elbows?” (43). But his reasoning seems circular, since bachelor authors and Benedicks are both poor and bedraggled.
The narrator associates Wilmot with Edgar Allan Poe, a man likewise “out at elbows.” One evening the narrator glimpses Poe standing under an awning in a rain shower. Although the narrator considers sharing his umbrella, he walks away—in part because Poe had once accused him of plagiarizing a submission to the magazine he edited, questioning his credentials as an author. Now the narrator confesses that “I see his sallow face, and his dark haunting eyes, whenever I pass the spot” (42).[19] The keen eyes of the author have been turned on the narrator, who has failed to create original works or to act with sympathy. Husband and author—both are miserable and “out at elbows”; likewise, both the sentimental tale (The Great-Hearted Newsboy?) and the story of romantic authorship (The Philosophy of Dress) are out at elbows, for the term refers not only to someone who is poor and ragged, but also to a creative work that is hackneyed and stale. Through its puns and double entendres, this comic tale—published at the end of the antebellum period of bachelor literature—seems to accuse American literary culture and stereotypes of the bachelor of being bankrupt.
Still, the bachelor seemed to hold special appeal and use for antebellum American literature, since he represented the power of fantasy and the limited authority that artists could exercise in their cultural milieu. With the bachelor, we are offered an alternative model of manhood to the view of men as aggressive, practical, productive workers. The bachelor mask also permitted artists to test the boundaries defining American culture, to construct personae that brought together sentimentality and idealism and that affirmed pleasure, beauty, and repose. Yet critics contended bachelorhood was an insufficient model for the artist, too remote and abstract. In the next three chapters, I probe this stereotype in greater detail, showing how Washington Irving based his authority as an artist on bachelorhood, Donald Grant Mitchell shaped a relationship with his readers that was both intimate and detached, and Herman Melville criticized the bachelor’s genteel ignorance and misguided fantasies.
[1] Saturday Evening Gazette, quoted in “Miss Kate A. Sanborn’s Lectures on Literature.” Sanborn was a noted scholar who helped to develop the Library of Congress classification system, taught English at Smith, and published an anthology of women humorists, The Wit of Women (1855).
[2] Although the texts that I focus on present the bachelor as celibate (if subject to masturbatory dreams), it is worth noting that “bachelor” was used to describe “playboys” in pornographic literature such as The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851, which listed whorehouses and prostitutes (Cohen).
[3] See Kathryn Kent’s “‘Single White Female’: The Sexual Politics of Spinsterhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks.” Kent argues that the spinster Miss Asphyxia, who works so much that she is compared to a machine, represents “the dangers of industrialization, in particular the effects of the capitalist reorganization of production on the body and on subjectivity” (46). According to Kent, the spinster representssignifies the “blurring of the economic and the domestic,” as material productivity replaces maternal reproduction. Conversely, the literary bachelor represents the infusion of domestic values into the economic, as feeling and leisure are valued for prompting literary creativity, the production of ideas rather than objects or children.
[4] Inventorying the characteristics of literary bachelors such as Charles Lamb’s Elia and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, Phillip Lopate emphasizes their irony, idiosyncrasy, “heightened, touchy moral sensibility,” detachment, colloquial style, immersion in the “trivial,” and status as “flaneur[s] of the bookshelves” (251, 252, 256, 259, 263).
[5] See Derrick, especially Chapter 1 (1-31), and Leverenz, 3-5. As David Leverenz explains, “American manhood seemed blithely inhospitable to any kind of literary spirit” (13).
[6] According to Leverenz, male writers self-consciously “sought alternative states of manly creativity,” opposing the perceived feminization of literature and the norms of masculinity by challenging, shocking, and attempting to refashion readers (14). Although I agree with Leverenz’s basic argument about the anxieties surrounding authorship, his emphasis on deviant, evasive male literature overlooks bachelor sentimentalism. Whereas Derrick and Leverenz insist that many male authors were hostile toward domesticity, femininity, and the market, by adopting the bachelor mask male sentimentalists were able to appropriate some aspects of domesticity even as they insisted upon their own independence, acting as bachelor uncles who supplied guidance.
[7] Remaining single seems to have been even more prevalent among female authors. Of the 30 women authors listed in the appendix of biographical data in The Feminization of American Culture, 12 never married, while only one of the 30 ministers included (Joseph Buckminster) remained a bachelor (332-345). The number of bachelor authors is likely higher, given that ministers were expected to marry and could typically depend upon a steadier source of income.
[8] Analyzing the shifts in themes and narrative strategies after an author marries would make for a fascinating—if difficult—study. For instance, one might note that after Hawthorne became engaged to Sophia Peabody, his fiction shifted away from the Irvingesque Twice Told Tales toward longer narratives focused on the relationships between men and women. Similarly, one might link Melville’s decision to write the ambitious romance Mardi with his engagement to Lizzie Shaw. This dissertation, however, does not explore such speculations.
[10] In The Blithedale Romance, for instance, Coverdale fondly describes the curtains, books, and writing desk in his “bachelor-parlor,” revealing his materialism and his attempt to distinguish himself through what he owns rather than what he does (37).
[11] For more on male aestheticism in post-bellum America, see Blanchard’s Oscar Wilde’s America, particularly chapter 1.
[13] Livingstone Zambesi ix. 195, 1865; Brockett, N.C. Words, 1828; New Monthly Magazine XV (1825), Routledge’s Ev. Boy’s Ann 65/2, 1872.
[15] The association of bachelors with Christmas extended into the post-Civil War period. For instance, among the bachelor Christmas tales published in Harper’s Weekly or Harper’s New Monthly Magazine are: “A Bachelor’s Christmas.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 2 (Feb 1851) 399-401; Margaret Cameron, “The Bachelor and the Baby.” Harpers 114:681 (Feb 1907) 381-391; “Hit or Miss,” Harper’s Weekly 27.1410 (December 29, 1883); “Gurney and Co,” Harper’s Weekly 15.732 (January 7, 1871); “The March Past, by a Bachelor Cousin,” Harper’s Weekly 16.784 (January 6, 1872); and “An Old Bachelor’s Complaint,” Harper’s Weekly (January 5, 1878).
[17] In The Blithedale Romance, for instance, Zenobia promises to lecture Priscilla on social behavior to “fill the place of a maiden-aunt” (72).
[18] Perhaps the popularity of “lounger” as the title for a series of light essays (and for the author of those essays) is derived from the Sensibility tradition. From 1785-1787, Henry Mackenzie, author of “The Man of Feeling,” served as the editor of The Lounger.
[19] In describing the narrator’s strolls about the city in pursuit of a fascinating, mysterious man, the author echoes Poe’s “Man of the Crowd.” The author may be making another, more obscure reference to Poe in naming the object of the narrator’s obsession Wilmot. One of the most sensational divorce trials of the 1850s was between Rufus Wilmot Griswold and Charlotte Myers, who was twelve years his senior. Griswold served as Poe’s literary executor, whom he slandered and whose works he mangled. Five months after his marriage to Myers in 1845, Griswold left her, having never consummated the relationship. The misery of the author and the married man seem ironically interrelated here. If Mark Wilmot indeed is an ironic reconstitution of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, then perhaps he illustrates the hazards of marriage—or perhaps his misery is just.
Posted by lspiro on November 20, 2007
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