When you look closely at American literature, there’s the bachelor, peering back with lenses framing his eyes and a pen clenched in his hand. Consider, for instance, James’s Lambert Strether, T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, Fitzgerald’s Nick Caraway, and Cornell Woolrich’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s L. B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Rear Window). Until recently, however, bachelors have been mostly invisible in criticism of American literature and culture. Although single men have been a part of the stories that critics tell about American culture—from R.W.B. Lewis’s American Adam to David Leverenz’s Men in the Making—such works don’t deal explicitly with bachelorhood as a significant phenomenon in the development of American literary culture.
To understand the importance of the bachelor to American culture, we should examine the emergence of this figure in literature from the antebellum period, a time when the idea of the American author was also being formulated. As Vincent Bertolini argues, “bachelorhood was an obsessive preoccupation of antebellum American culture” (706), reflecting conflicts over masculinity and artistic identity. Washington Irving, hailed as the first American author to achieve popular and critical success, narrated his whimsical, sentimental sketches from the perspective of bachelors such as Geoffrey Crayon and Diedrich Knickerbocker. Emulating Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Tuckerman, and Joseph Holt Ingraham deployed bachelor narrators, as did countless other poems, sketches, and songs published anonymously in antebellum magazines. Perhaps the most beloved antebellum bachelor text was Donald Grant Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), which ranked as one of the most popular books of the pre-Civil War era and inspired enthusiastic readers to write fan letters thanking Mitchell for articulating their own dreams so well. As the table below indicates, the term “bachelor” appeared frequently in antebellum American literature, far more often than comparable terms such as “spinster” or “old maid.” The bibliography for this chapter lists over 100 works about the bachelor, further illustrating the prominence of this character in antebellum American literature. Some works, such as The Bachelor’s Journal (1828), even took the bachelor as their main subject. (However, after six months of “single blessedness,” the Bachelor's Journal merged with the Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette, perhaps indicating the marginal status of this figure.[1]) A character with wide appeal, the bachelor was featured in magazines aimed at women (Godey’s Lady’s Book) and men (US Democratic Review), as well as Southern (Southern Literary Messenger) and Northern (Knickerbocker) audiences.
1
Table 1: Occurrences of “bachelor,” “spinster,” and “old maid” in databases of antebellum American literature[2]
Defining the Bachelor of Arts
Why was the bachelor so popular in antebellum literature? Why do we so often see him watching, dreaming, reading, and writing? What was the bachelor thinking about, and what should we think about him? Although to twenty-first-century readers the term “bachelor” likely suggests a swinging playboy,[3] antebellum literature typically presents the bachelor as an odd fellow who detaches himself from society. Rejecting the economic responsibility to participate in the marketplace and the social responsibility to raise a family, the bachelor is an idealist who favors abstract ideas to everyday reality and attempts to be a self-contained individual. From the margins, the bachelor tests the boundaries between work and leisure, masculinity and femininity, the real and the ideal, and between thought and feeling. As Vincent Bertolini argues, “Located in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshold between domestication and transgression, the bachelor is a liminal concept in antebellum culture and a transitional state within proper masculine development” (709). While some sketches attempt to “domesticate” the bachelor by describing his loneliness or the chaos in which he lives, others celebrate his independence, keen aesthetic sensibilities, and revelatory fantasies. Hence, the bachelor occupies neither the masculine sphere of work nor the feminine sphere of domesticity. Rather, he stakes out a space between, a zone of contemplation and fantasy. Even as the bachelor evades the social roles assigned to either gender, he adopts characteristics associated with both men and women, thus illustrating the fluidity of gender categories. Just as women were linked to feeling and domesticity, so the bachelor focuses on his emotions and claims the home as his private dream studio. Yet just as mobility and self-making were thought of as masculine qualities, so the bachelor presents himself as an individualist and self-creator.
Examining the shape-shifting bachelor opens up a number of interpretive vistas into antebellum American culture, including its attitudes toward gender, domesticity, vocation, and sexuality. Although I will consider these factors, I focus on exploring the relationship between bachelorhood and the development of an American literary identity. I initially grew curious about the bachelor when I noted that antebellum literature commonly depicts male authors and scholars as being single. Indeed, I found that the unmarried dreamer, thinker, and writer—what I dub the “bachelor of arts”— was a common character type in antebellum American literature, derived from the bachelor spectators of Addison and Steele. Existing outside of the economy of purpose, the bachelor of arts (henceforth called “bachelor” for brevity’s sake) puffs languorously on a pipe or cigar, reclines with a book, and daydreams in a tastefully furnished parlor. Without obligations, the bachelor became a powerful figure for a leisured, creative lifestyle, enjoying the freedom to “engage alone in a quest for self-realization” (Chudacoff 10).
By imagining the man of letters as a bachelor, antebellum American authors coped with some of the challenges of articulating an artistic identity, such as how to make a living, how to find the leisure necessary for writing, how to assume the authority to write, how to appeal to a growing popular audience, and how to justify fiction-making in a culture still somewhat hostile to it. In working out these anxieties, antebellum authors emphasized four traits commonly associated with the bachelor: independence, a detached perspective, fondness for reverie, and a sentimental outlook informed by his own suffering. Since he had no dependents, the bachelor need not worry about making a living and could spend his ample leisure time on literary pursuits. The spectating bachelor, such as Washington Irving’s Launcelot Langstaff, claimed to have greater insight into society and authority to comment upon it because he viewed it from a distance. Just as the bachelor assumed a detached perspective on mainstream culture, so did the author, rejecting the bourgeois values of industry and enterprise in favor of contemplation and the imagination. By describing the reveries of bachelors such as Donald Grant Mitchell’s beloved Ik Marvel, authors began to overcome the bias against fiction and promoted dreaming as a means of accessing truth and achieving sentimental connection. The bachelor’s own suffering made him more sympathetic towards others and therefore deserving of sympathy.
Through the bachelor, then, American authors began to articulate an artistic identity, yet this identity was defensive and nostalgic rather than forceful and fully formulated. Instead of presenting the man of letters as a bold truth-teller, committed professional, or self-conscious creator, bachelor sketches describe him more as a retired gentleman sharing idle speculations with a receptive audience. However, as the anxious letters of bachelor authors such as Washington Irving and Donald Grant Mitchell reveal, the notion that the bachelor could escape the demands of the marketplace was a fantasy—yet they used this fantasy to their advantage in masking their own economic motives for authorship. As I show in Chapter 3, even as readers embraced the bachelor’s sentimental musings, they also wondered whether they were being manipulated, worrying that the seemingly warm-hearted bachelor was really cold and self-obsessed. Readers’ worries reflected larger controversies over the bachelor, who was attacked both for not fulfilling the responsibilities of manhood and for being a failed model for the artist. Although I examine the general arguments against bachelorhood in Chapter 1, I am most interested in the backlash against the bachelor as a figure for the artist. Writers such as Melville criticized the bachelor for his false gentility, withdrawal from experience and human relationships, and assumption that his fantasies led to truth. By examining the bachelor of arts, then, we can see how this figure was used to articulate and negotiate the conflicts about masculinity, artistic identity, and idealism that shaped antebellum American culture.
Although the bachelor of arts appears in novels, poems, and songs, this figure is presented most vividly in the bachelor sketch, a significant, if little-studied, sub-genre of sentimental literature in which a sensitive bachelor observes society from a detached perspective and relates his dreams and observations. The lack of critical attention to bachelor literature reflects the more general failure to appreciate the antebellum American sketch, which is a “short piece of prose… usually of a descriptive kind… commonly found in newspapers and magazines” and closely related to the tale and short story (Cuddon 884). As Kristie Hamilton shows, the sketch was one of the nineteenth century’s most popular and culturally significant literary forms. Widely disseminated in magazines, read by diverse audiences, and written by almost every American author, “[t]he seemingly marginal literary sketch became integral, in fact, to the processes by which mass consumption of, and tastes in, literature were shaped” (Hamilton 14). The sketch’s brevity and casual, personal tone contributed to its popularity, since it could be read quickly and invited emotional intimacy. Rather than offering a sustained narrative of cause and effect, sketches present an observed scene or a fleeting reverie, providing “a mental impression merely jotted down” (Snyder 54). Contending that the sketch is meant to be consumed rapidly and then tossed aside, Ann Douglas labels it a weak genre, “self-indulgent in mood and shrewdly commercial in purpose” (238). Yet Douglas overlooks the ways in which the sketch can reflect the movements of the imagination and the complexity of thought. Just as a reverie enables the dreamer to “snatch fleeting pleasure” (Hamilton 47), so the sketch invites the reader to fill in the gaps in the narrator’s descriptions and engage in their own productive dreaming.
According to Hamilton, nineteenth-century American sketches typically are narrated either from the perspective of a “detached, roving bachelor” of the Irving school, or the “close-range, home-identified, participatory perspective” associated with the gentle rural sketches of Mary Russell Mitford (54). Whereas the bachelor approaches society from the disinterested perspective of a traveler or dreamer, the participatory sketch writer reports on his or her own village, often articulating a greater will to change social conditions. In general, Hamilton associates the detached perspective with genteel male authorship and the participatory position with female authorship and reformist literature. Noting that the bachelor attempts to “merge the cultural authority and privilege of the gentleman with a bourgeois private sensibility,” Hamilton traces this pose to the traditional model of the author as an elite, detached sage such as Samuel Johnson or Addison (54). However, the absence of an aristocratic social hierarchy on which to base this model meant that the American bachelor narrator was a weaker, more passive figure. According to Kenneth Dauber, the central challenge facing the American author is an ethical one, that of establishing writerly authority in relation to the audience. Indeed, the bachelor of art’s authority came not from his social class or erudition, but from his lively imagination and ability to express feeling. Rather than both projecting and being constrained by elite authority, the American bachelor is more free to engage in personal meditations and shape a persona based on feeling, fancy, and contemplation.
Critical Contexts
By focusing on the bachelor of arts between 1800 and 1860, I hope to participate in recent attempts to enrich our understanding of gender and American literary culture, fill in a gap in the current critical discourse about the bachelor, and trace the development of a significant literary identity. As I analyze the relationship between bachelorhood, authorship, masculine identity, and the development of American literary culture, I will draw primarily from critics working in gender studies and the history of reading and authorship. To describe the antebellum literary scene in which our discussion of the bachelor is embedded, critics have contended that it was divided between female sentimentalists and male romantics (Chapman and Hendler 4-5). Hence F.O. Matthiessen ignores works by women in his American Renaissance (1941), while Fred Pattee and Herbert Ross Brown disparage the “unmistakably feminine treble” of sentimentalism (Brown qtd. by Chapman and Hendler, 4). In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler looks more seriously at the interactions between “male” romanticism and “female” sentimentalism, yet he does so to describe what canonical male authors were writing against, the “flagrantly bad best-seller” authored by women (93). Similarly, Ann Douglas defines sentimentalism as the manipulative, self-absorbed, and inauthentic public expression of private feeling (254-55), whereas she characterizes romanticism as the rigorous exploration of ideas through the active imagination. According to the critical narrative put forward by Fiedler, Douglas, Leverenz, and others, accomplished male antebellum writers reacted against the perceived “feminization” of American culture, which was promulgated by women, ministers, and male sentimentalists such as Mitchell and George Curtis (Douglas).
Whereas American literary criticism has focused on binaries based upon gender—masculine vs. feminine, high-cultural vs. popular, public vs. private, work vs. leisure, reason vs. fantasy, sentimentalism vs. romance—the bachelor incorporates both poles into a shifting persona and exposes the blurred boundaries between the seemingly separate spheres. In questioning the binaries that have been used to describe antebellum American culture, I am echoing critics such as Lora Romero, who dissects the politics of domesticity; Glenn Hendler, who examines sentimentality as a public phenomenon; and Cathy Davidson, who called for “No more separate spheres” in a special issue of American Literature (September 1998). Similarly, essay collections such as Chapman and Hendler’s Sentimental Men (2000) and Elbert’s Separate Spheres No More (2000) examine masculine as well as feminine sentimentalism, highlighting convergences between masculinity and private feeling, femininity and public activism. As Karen Kilcup argues, it is important to appreciate “the conversations between, and even the meshing of, ‘traditions’… while continuing to value the particularity of each” (3).
By examining antebellum bachelor literature, I hope to contribute to a richer understanding of an important but neglected “culture of letters” in nineteenth-century America and trace the associations between bachelorhood and the development of a self-consciously literary identity. As Richard Brodhead suggests, understanding the complex relations between writing and social conditions requires looking at the processes of literary production and reception within specific social and historical contexts (8). Whereas the cultures of letters that Brodhead describes are typically defined by ethnicity, geography, race, or class, I will focus on marital status, which itself is a part of a complex network of social, economic, familial, and psychological forces. By looking back at the antebellum bachelor of arts, we can trace forward the development of a detached, fluid artistic persona, see the interactions between what is typically figured as male romanticism and female sentimentalism, and understand one strategy that was used to deal with the suspicion toward the imagination and the awkward position of the author in antebellum America.
In other words, I hope to show that arguments about gender, authorship, and the formation of American culture are missing something important when they fail to take into account the dreaming, spectating bachelor. Although few critics addressed the bachelor explicitly until the 1980s, this figure has lurked behind many arguments about gender and authorship. In Love and Death in the American Novel, for instance, Leslie Fiedler contends that the failure to marry signifies the American writer’s fear of maturity, paternal authority, and sexuality, “[f]or marriage stands traditionally not only for reconciliation with the divided self, a truce between head and heart, but also for a compromise with society, an acceptance of responsibility and drudgery and dullness” (338). Where Fiedler sees the desire to escape domesticity, I see ambivalent fascination, given that so many bachelor fictions fantasize about the home. In describing marriage as a balance between head and heart, Fiedler re-inscribes the binaries of antebellum anti-bachelor literature, failing to note how intellect and emotion could be brought together within a single individual. However, he is insightful in pointing out that many fictional bachelors rejected the “drudgery and dullness” of everyday life, which contributed to their identification with idealism.
Like Fiedler, David Leverenz contends that “classic” American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman wrestled with anxieties about masculinity and authorship. Leverenz points to two central challenges that antebellum male authors faced: the difficulty of reconciling authorship with bourgeois competition, and the demands of a largely female reading audience (16). By crafting deviant, evasive texts, Leverenz argues, “classic” American writers articulated their frustration at their lack of a role in society and sought to refashion their readers. In arguing that male writers adopted either strenuous masculinity (Dana and Parkman) or deviousness (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson) to deal with their sense of impotence, Leverenz overlooks another significant rhetorical strategy: bachelor sentimentalism. In works of bachelor sentimentalism, feeling is produced not through the direct experience of suffering, but through the fantasies and observations of an autonomous, detached male spectator. Even though Leverenz never mentions the word “bachelor,” they peek out from the corners of his argument:
For men, as male writers portray them, dominance has to be earned through rivalry. As the Ahabs, Hollingsworths, and Westervelts battle it out, the Ishmaels and Coverdales stand off to the side, wavering between self-absorption and mesmerized fascination. They empower themselves as narrators in large part by transforming feelings of unmanly deviance into strategies of deviousness. (172)
Significantly, the Ishmaels and Coverdales are bachelors, part of a fragmented fraternity that prefers spectating and fantasizing to active competition. Yet Ishmael and Coverdale also reflect their authors’ distaste for the bachelor stereotype, given that Coverdale is revealed to be an impotent narcissist, while the rover Ishmael warns against the allure of the “Descartian vortices” that threaten those tempted by reverie. Rather than attempting to prove his manhood by describing extreme physical adventures or by running readers through rhetorical obstacle courses, the bachelor of arts assumes a relaxed, meditative pose, inviting his readers to share in his reveries. Whereas strenuous men engage in the culture of competition and deviant writers challenge it, the bachelor watches life from his perch at a garret window. Fantasy and observation thus offer a third way of dealing with contemporary culture, so that presenting oneself as a bachelor means adopting a pose of passivity and mutability rather than vigor or active deviance.
Fantasy, however, was controversial in antebellum America, where hostility toward fiction and fiction-makers lingered. As Michael Davitt Bell argues, orthodox antebellum American opinion, influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy, held that the imagination could subvert essential American values such as “reason and fact” and “sober duty” (11). In becoming authors, Irving, Melville, Mitchell, and others struggled with a culture that viewed the imagination as a potential threat to the social order: “to choose the role of romancer in a society that equated romance with insanity and subversion and seldom granted its authors an enduring financial reward was to embrace what sociologists call a ‘deviant career’” (Bell 30). However, by posing as carefree bachelors, authors could both acknowledge and soften their deviance, since they had no families to harm and their penchant for dreaming could be presented in the whimsical tones of Addison and Steele’s spectators rather than as Gothic terror. According to Bell, Irving used figures like Geoffrey Crayon (not coincidentally a bachelor) as his “projection of himself, of that unconscious aggression that (in Irving’s displaced aesthetic vocabulary) engaged in imaginative literature as a means of escaping ‘solid’ responsibility” (73). As Bell suggests, Irving and his inheritors created bachelor personae to signify their own rejection of bourgeois masculinity, yet this rejection was tempered by the bachelor’s idealism and expressions of feeling. Not only did the bachelor dream about a life of adventure, but also about the warmth of family, suggesting an underlying ambivalence in bachelor fiction.
Even as authors narrated fictions from the perspective of leisured bachelors, authorship itself was becoming a profession driven by publication contracts, marketing, and the demands of a growing audience. Yet, as Michael Newbury suggests, antebellum American authors did not want to imagine themselves as professionals churning out commodities, since doing so would diminish their sense of themselves as artists and make them reliant on an anonymous public. According to Newbury, “In order to solve a crisis of self-understanding, antebellum authors created paradigms of relation between their own work, industrial labor, slavery, white-collar work, and craft production” (5). Although Newbury offers persuasive readings of the ways that authors such as Hawthorne and Melville depict authorship as a craft rather than industrial labor, he overlooks another means of figuring independence from the market: idleness, a trait commonly associated with the bachelor.
Indeed, Sandra Tomc contends that antebellum American authors ranging from Hawthorne to Stowe characterized their writing as an idle, aimless pursuit, thus seeming to retreat from marketplace competition and acquisition. Tomc shows that idleness was essential to the professionalization of authorship, as the supposedly leisured activity of writing made possible the financial success that facilitated further leisure. Despite their pose of genteel alienation from the marketplace, antebellum authors labored many hours over their writing in order to make money. Tomc argues that writers such as Willis, Hawthorne, and Mitchell adopted the pose of an idler in order to legitimate—but disguise— their pursuit of literary success:
The fraught thematizations of what it means to ‘work’ as an American author are amply represented, from the stutterings of Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale, the ‘idle’ poet who can never quite tell his story, and the agonies of Herman Melville’s Pierre, who sets out to write a great ‘work’ he can never finish, to the paralysis of Donald Grant Mitchell’s ‘bachelor’ in Reveries, who never quite manages to leave his fireside chair—authorial types who, like Willis, capture a dynamic of motion without progress and work without accomplishment. (799)
Tomc suggests that antebellum authors defined writing not as a productive enterprise, but as the frustrated attempt to relate a dream or observation. Although incisive, Tomc’s reading of the integral relationship between work and leisure misses the essential fact that Pierre, Coverdale, and Mitchell’s Ik Marvel are all bachelors, and that the speaker’s bachelorhood makes possible his idleness. Not only did the bachelor avoid family responsibilities, but also the demands of the market. Yet married or single, American authors still sought to make money through publication. Paradoxically, male sentimentalists such as Irving and Mitchell succeeded in the literary marketplace by pretending to not be participating in it, presenting their works as casual speculations.
Perspectives on the Bachelor
Even though the bachelor raises fascinating questions about gender, the imagination, and authorship in antebellum America, few critics offered any sustained analysis of this figure until the mid-1990s. With the growing interest in male sentimentalism and homosexuality, however, this figure has been receiving increasing attention. Three main approaches to bachelor literature have emerged, focusing either on culture, sexuality, or authorship. In their brief treatments of the bachelor, Douglas (1977) and Weisbuch (1986) associate this figure with cultural decline, whether because he signifies an ethic of consumption or because his self-indulgence and impotence represent a culture that can develop no further. Sedgwick (1986) and Bertolini (1996) emphasize the bachelor’s sexuality, describing him either as a figure of homosexual panic or as a predecessor to the homosexual. Exploring the intersections between bachelorhood and authorship, Snyder (1999), Romero (1997), Warner (2000), and Traister (2002) analyze how the bachelor represents the relationship between masculinity and high cultural artistic identity, and reflects the immaturity of American authorship in the early national period. While I also focus on artistic identity, I will emphasize how the bachelor was deployed in the larger cultural debate about fantasy and leisure.
Whereas Leverenz and Fielder more or less ignore masculine sentimentalism in arguing that high-cultural authors such as Melville and Hawthorne revolted against female readers, Ann Douglas devotes a chapter to sentimentalists such as Donald Grant Mitchell and George Curtis. Douglas contrasts the shallow, consumerist culture promoted by domestic writers and their allies, liberal ministers and male sentimentalists, with historically-minded and intellectually challenging works by Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. For Douglas, writers such as Mitchell and Curtis exemplify the shift from history and social engagement to a “feminized” literary culture characterized by sentiment, consumption, and artificiality. Despite their smooth surfaces, Douglas argues, these works reveal a deep frustration with existing modes of manhood and with feminine values and culture. Hence Ik Marvel fantasizes about the deaths of dream wives, and George Curtis’s narrator invents fantasy wives despite his professed devotion to his wife Prue. Although Douglas articulates an incisive criticism of bachelor fiction, she overlooks the ways that these texts open up the opportunity to explore alternative identities through reveries and detached observation. The repose of the bachelor makes possible the vivid imaginings of the artist.
Like Douglas, Robert Weisbuch contends that the bachelor embodies cultural decline, but he casts this phenomenon in terms of a depleted culture rather than consumerism, contrasting British with American literature. As Weisbuch argues about the bachelor in the nineteenth-century novel,
He is a grotesque with an oversized intellect, a shrunken body, and a shriveled heart. He refuses the human community; he will not risk relatedness, preferring to experiment upon others or to observe them from a voyeuristic distance. Crippled by self-consciousness, if he loves he often runs away to maintain an equilibrium that is passion’s defeat. Impotent and vengeful, highly intellectual yet unwise, he sells his soul for a sullen invulnerability that is itself fraudulent, for his great need is to impress others…. The Bachelor personifies cultural lateness, the anxiety of overcivilization in which form replaces feeling, hesitation refuses spontaneity, custom murders vitality, nature sickens, and love dies. (122-23)
Citing as examples Elliot’s scholar Causabon and Emily Bronte’s narrator Lockwood, Weisbuch claims the bachelor signifies “cultural lateness,” the decline of a culture that has become over-intellectualized and over-civilized. In an American context, however, Weisbuch suggests that the bachelor might reflect “cultural earliness,” the immaturity and derivativeness of a culture that has yet to establish itself. Although Weisbuch advances his view of the bachelor as impotent, abstracted, and antisocial, he focuses only on one strain of bachelor literature, novels critical toward this figure. Hence he misses the ways that bachelors were also used to promote feeling, as well as how they signified what many antebellum readers desired—leisure, detachment, and the opportunity to imagine oneself outside conventional definitions of identity.
In her groundbreaking analysis of mid-to-late nineteenth-century British literature, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick associates the emergence of the bachelor type with homosexual panic, the paranoia caused by the repression of homosexual desire. Whereas the earlier “paranoid Gothic” presented the homosexual as a threat to social and familial order, Victorian fictions domesticated him by presenting him as a bachelor whose sexuality was “anesthetized” (247). As Sedgwick contends,
the bachelor is at least partly feminized by his attention to and interest in domestic concerns. (At the same time, though, his intimacy with clubland and bohemia gives him a special passport to the world of men, as well.) Then, too, the disruptive and self-ignorant potential for violence in the Gothic hero is replaced in the bachelor hero by physical timidity and, often, by a high valuation on introspection and by (at least partial) self-knowledge. Finally, the bachelor is housebroken by the severing of his connections with a discourse of genital sexuality. (189-90)
According to Sedgwick, the bachelor’s androgyny, passivity, “atomized male individualism” (159), and celibacy make him a diminished figure, a mock hero. Rather than affirming a homosexual identity, Sedgwick’s bachelor is a “bitchy hypochrondriac” who reflects the culture’s fears of homosexuality by refusing all sexual connection. Sedgwick convincingly associates bachelorhood with homosexuality, especially given that “bachelor” became a code word for homosexual by the late-nineteenth-century (Snyder 33). Preferring not to replicate the work already being done on bachelorhood and homosexuality, I will focus on aesthetic rather than sexual identity, sexuality only insofar as offers a perspective on creativity and art. Without denying the cogency of Sedgwick’s argument, I’d like to sketch another way to read this character type, focusing on the links between it and the development of an artistic identity. The bachelor’s ability to pass between masculine and feminine worlds might suggest that artistic practice is not constrained by normative categories of gender, whereas his introspection, self-consciousness, and timidity might be associated with the mental modes that facilitate artistic creation. While the bachelor’s celibacy and extreme individualism may indicate passivity and repression, they could also reflect an active choice to focus on art rather than family. In other words, the bachelor represented more than just male homosexual panic; he also pointed towards an artistic vision and lifestyle that valued private pleasure and speculation. Sedgwick bases her observations on the comic Victorian novels of Thackeray and Trollope, overlooking sentimental or romantic representations of bachelorhood in antebellum American texts. As Katherine Snyder points out, although the figure of homosexual panic is present in some bachelor fictions, “this type is not typical” (4).
Vincent Bertolini starts with some of Sedgwick’s assumptions but makes a twist to her argument, contending that the bachelor was an intermediary figure in the progress toward the fuller acceptance of a homosexual identity.[4] According to Bertolini, the bachelor “represented one of the worst threats to nineteenth-century bourgeois social and sexual ideology: the appearance of a codified male subject position that could respectably host non-normative sexual subjectivity and alternative erotic practice” (708). Even as the bachelor embodied (masturbatory) pleasure outside of marriage, he was also used to show the dangers of single life. Bertolini examines the bachelor within the context of reform theory, which responded to the threat that young men might fall victim to the temptations of the city by dictating that for both moral and health reasons sex should only occur within marriage. To reform young men, bachelor sentimentalism offered “moralistic fables intended to illustrate the loneliness and pain of the unmarried condition and the pleasures and virtues of transcending it” (710). By vicariously experiencing the pain of the fictional bachelors, Bertolini argues, young men would be driven to avoid such suffering and marry.
Although Bertolini rightly points out the ways that some bachelor fictions promote marriage, his argument depends on two arguable assumptions: first, that antebellum bachelorhood was routinely represented as a “cultural pathology” (711), and second, that the primary audience for bachelor sentimentalism comprised bachelors themselves who needed to be redeemed. Even though some bachelor narratives present him as a curmudgeon, fool, or sorrowful loner, others cast him as a secular saint or celebrate his exquisite taste and fondness for reverie. Moreover, as we will see in Chapter 3, “Reading with a Tender Rapture,” both genders read works of bachelor sentimentalism, and many embraced its view of fantasy as a means to aesthetic satisfaction and sympathy. As Bertolini himself contends, bachelor narratives by authors such as Mitchell and Melville reveal a doubleness, both sketching out an alternative to bourgeois manhood and acknowledging the social constraints limiting the open assertion of such an identity.
Bertolini builds to the argument that by the end of the nineteenth century, bachelor narratives contributed to the formation of “a distinctively gay culture” (729). Underneath the surface, many antebellum bachelor sketches suggest “the possibility of antidomestic male sexuality” (724), a possibility that was articulated more forcefully in turn-of-the-century bachelor texts. As George Chauncey shows, a bachelor sub-culture emerged in late-nineteenth-century New York City “[e]mbodying a rejection of domesticity and of bourgeois acquisitivism alike” (79). In documenting a lively subculture associated with the rise of a homosexual identity, Chauncey focuses more on urban blue-collar life in the late nineteenth century than the parlor-lives of literary bachelors who dominate antebellum American magazines, gift-books, and novels. Although both literary bachelors and blue-collar bachelors rejected domesticity and money-making, they emphasized different aspects of bachelorhood, the literary bachelor pursuing culture in solitude, the blue collar bachelor searching for fun and pleasure in groups. Though Bertolini and Chauncey advance compelling arguments, they still are telling only part of the story. If authors struggled with attitudes toward sexuality, they also confronted the challenge of presenting themselves as artists in a culture initially hostile to works of the imagination.
While Bertolini and Sedgwick focus on the sexual dimensions of bachelorhood, Bryce Traister, Michael Warner, Katherine Snyder, and Lora Romero examine the bachelor in relation to literary creativity, anticipating and providing the foundations for my study. Warner and Traister trace the connections between Washington Irving’s use of the bachelor figure and his own assertion of a literary identity. According to Warner, Irving’s use of the bachelor reflects the troubled transition between a patriarchal model of society and one based upon “modern heterosexuality” (776). Irving’s bachelors employ the “asexual means of literary culture” to serve as surrogate fathers and shape future generations (Warner 774). Whereas Warner describes antebellum bachelors as literary patriarchs, Traister contends that they reflect America’s awkward transition from youth to adulthood. Although the bachelor sometimes symbolized failed masculinity and the threat of sexual and economic unproductivity, his freedom from obligation granted him license to pursue individual desires. The bachelor’s celibacy thus “produces the imaginative spark of literature” (127), since he can retain his energies for storytelling and find inspiration in observing and describing the lives of others. Warner and Traister point to a fundamental problem in bachelor sketches, the clash between individual desire and social function. I hope to show that sentimental bachelor narratives attempt to address this conflict by promoting fantasy as a means of both individual fulfillment and emotional connection.
Whereas Traister and Warner focus on problems of nationality and authority in the works of Washington Irving, an American author prominent during the first part of the nineteenth century, Katherine Snyder’s Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel examines the bachelor narrator in “high-cultural,” pre-modernist and modernist novels by authors such as Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, James, Conrad, and Fitzgerald. Describing the bachelor as a boundary-crossing figure, Snyder argues,
The contested status of bachelors as figures of luxurious self-indulgence and/or of disciplined self-abnegation made them well-suited to articulate the melodramatic vicissitudes of male, high-cultural authorship. Like the male authors who deployed them, bachelor narrators are themselves given to recasting abjected manhood as manhood triumphant, and to disavowing melancholically the sentimentality that stands both as their own defining trait and as that of the significant others with whom they identify. (7)
By bridging the divide between romantic alienation and sentimental connection, the bachelor narrator at once embodied a refined, “high-authorial” consciousness and attracted popular audiences (3). Snyder persuasively challenges the binary view of literary identity as either engagement or detachment by arguing that bachelor narrators derive power from their “between-ness,” their ability to negotiate between distance and intimacy, “normativity and perversity” (14), and the marketplace and domesticity. Although drawing on Snyder’s groundwork, I hope to contribute new insights by examining the significance of fantasy to the development of literary identity, analyzing the conflicted views of bachelorhood in popular literature, and assessing the appeal of the bachelor for antebellum readers as well as authors.
While Snyder focuses on the ways that the bachelor crosses the boundaries between seemingly separate spheres, Lora Romero argues that the divide between masculine and feminine culture was an artifice constructed both to limit female influence and to support a “high authorial consciousness” (vii). In her chapter on Hawthorne and the homosocial romance, Romero contends that his ability to see from a romantic, idealistic perspective depended upon his “estrangement” from the domestic (97). Romero grounds her argument in an account of Hawthorne’s adult visit to a college friend’s home, where he enjoyed a “paradise of bachelors” free from social obligation (94). To defend his own authorship from perceived threats by female authors, Hawthorne differentiated between female domesticity, which was concerned with the everyday, and male romanticism, which transcended quotidian domestic concerns and granted observers a detached vantage point from which they could transform familiar objects into aesthetic truths. For instance, when Dimmesdale, Hester, and Peal are re-united on the scaffold on the evening of Governor Winthrop’s death, the ethereal light of a meteor gives a “moral interpretation” to the familiar houses, gardens, and streets around them (92), as Hawthorne converts what could be a scene of family intimacy into a deliberately conceived set of symbols. As Romero argues, “Hawthorne’s repudiation of realist language takes a variety of forms in his work, but at some level they all express Hawthorne’s attempt to create professional currency for himself by defining literary value against a feminine realm, which he associates with Hester Prynne’s quotidian afterlife, the domestic scenes from which he stages his early exclusion and later detachment” (103). The key insight—one that applies to bachelor fictions as well as Hawthorne’s romances—is that femininity is depicted as being too immersed in dull reality, whereas the single male dreamer can rise above concerns of hearth and home and create things of beauty. However, Romero overlooks the ways in which bourgeois masculinity and labor are likewise seen as deadening, as well as how bachelor sentimentalism views the domestic as the space for dreaming but the wife as a threat to it.
In the four chapters that follow, I build upon Snyder’s analysis of the bachelor narrator and Romero’s examination of the homosocial romance to show how antebellum authors employed the bachelor to shape an artistic identity and promote the imagination. By emphasizing the significance of leisure and dreaming, I hope to contribute not only to the understanding of the bachelor, but also the bachelor’s relation to sentimentalism and authorship. If we adopt Shirley Samuel’s definition of sentimentalism as “a set of cultural practices designed to evoke a certain form of emotional response, usually empathy, in the reader or viewer” (qtd. by Hendler, “Structure” 146), then laughter, fancy, and pensiveness are among possible emotional responses. However, recent discussions of American sentimentalism have focused more on the political economy of tears than on aesthetic qualities of dreaming. When critics do discuss fantasy’s role in sentimentalism, they often do so to disparage it. For instance, Ann Douglas derides sentimentalism by arguing that it served as “a complicated mass dream-life” (9), associating fantasy with commercialism and narcissistic withdrawal from social responsibility. To overcome such dismissals of sentimentalism, Jane Tompkins insists that it is based on real feelings and experiences rather than fantasy, that this “structure of meanings . . . fixed these works, for nineteenth-century readers, not in the realm of fairy tale or escapist fantasy, but in the very bedrock of reality” (qtd. by Hendler, “Structure” 149). Although Tompkins fundamentally disagrees with Douglas’ reading of sentimental fiction, she accepts her characterization of fantasy as escapist and inauthentic.
Yet bachelor fictions dramatize fantasy’s importance to sentimentalism by suggesting that dreaming helps to cultivate connections between people and inspires creativity. Indeed, the imagination provides the foundations for sentimental literature. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith suggests that the imagination enables the sympathizers to comprehend another’s suffering: “It is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are [the] sensations [of our brother on the rack]… By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure the same person with him” (qtd. by Chapman and Hendler 3). Through fantasy, the observer (or the reader) can project himself or herself into the other’s position and be moved to act with sympathy. Moreover, fantasy sparks artistic creation, as Freud suggests in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908): “The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality” (4). Rather than inscribing the constraints of the real, bachelor fictions invent a self-reflexive world in which solitary dreamers play with different creative possibilities, sometimes inviting readers to join in. If sentimental fictions cultivate sympathy, bachelor fictions often aim for simpatico, the pleasant feeling of being of like mind.
Peering Ahead
After opening our eyes to the bachelor in American literature, we begin to see the figure everywhere: in Poe’s tales of flâneurs and decadents, Thoreau’s description of his experiment in living deliberately at Walden, Nathaniel Parker Willis’s leisurely narratives of European travel, the surrogate brothers and uncles of domestic novels, Whitman’s celebrations of male sexuality, Hawthorne’s tales of isolated artists and failed utopian communities, and Emily Dickinson’s rejection of marriage. As tempting as it is to track the bachelor throughout American literature, I explore the intersections between bachelorhood and artistic identity by first examining central issues articulated in antebellum magazine fictions, popular poetry, and sketch collections, then performing detailed case studies of three authors who exemplify different approaches to the bachelor of arts: Washington Irving, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Herman Melville. Focusing on these three writers reveals the relationships between what might now be labeled canonical (Melville), semi-canonical (Irving), and popular (Mitchell), as well as the chain of influence from Irving to Mitchell to Melville. One might say that Irving is the initiator of the bachelor tradition in American literature, a tradition that Donald Grant Mitchell promoted and Herman Melville rejected. That’s a simple way to sum up the story, but in the following chapters I delve into the subtleties of that argument.
Examining Irving, Mitchell, and Melville in the context of magazine fiction, songs, and poems yields insights into the complex milieu of American literary culture: the anxieties of authorship, the aspirations of readers, and the aesthetic, moral, and psychological concerns underlying attitudes toward the bachelor figure. Each chapter takes a different perspective on the bachelor, looking at his relationship with controversies over manhood and artistic identity (Chapter 1), authorship (Chapter 2), reading (Chapter 3), and the idea of art (Chapter 4). Of course, this is by no means a complete account of antebellum literary culture, since it focuses on literature by and about unmarried, middle-class white men—a tradition, some might argue, that has already received ample attention. I hope, however, to open up a new perspective on gender, authorship, and artistic creation by analyzing the particular (and sometimes peculiar) identity of the bachelor of arts. As Lee Chambers-Schiller argues about the spinster, “In true dialectical fashion, the underside of the Cult of Domesticity was a Cult of Single Blessedness” (18). Similarly, the bachelor represents an alternative to normative bourgeois manhood and a challenge to the view that there were strictly separated “masculine” and “feminine” literary cultures.
Chapter 1, “That Especial Genus of Unmarried Life: Bachelorhood and Artistic Identity in Antebellum America,” highlights significant issues in the popular but little-studied literature of bachelorhood and sets the context for close readings of bachelor texts by Irving, Mitchell, and Melville. After exploring why the bachelor was commonly associated with the author, I show how controversies over the role of the creative individual in American culture were articulated through stories about bachelors. These sketches question whether the bachelor represents chaos or beauty, deviance or insight, delusion or artistic brilliance, narcissism or sympathy, and a threat to domesticity or the exemplification of it. In a larger sense, they ask whether the author should be immersed in everyday experience or peering at it from a detached, dreamy perspective.
In Chapter 2, “Washington Irving and the Bachelor’s Domestic: How a Bachelor of Arts Came to Be Hailed as the Father of American Literature,” I argue that Washington Irving used the bachelor mask in order to claim the limited authority to write. Previous critics of bachelor literature have neglected to trace the connections between Irving and his successors, thus failing to provide an historical account of the bachelor artist’s development. Irving helped to initiate and popularize the American tradition of bachelor literature by crafting Geoffrey Crayon, a sensitive, observant bachelor narrator. For Irving, the bachelor mask reflected both his feelings of guilt toward his artistic inclinations and resentment of a culture that failed to make a space for the artist (Bell 71). Hailed as “the Father of American Literature,” Irving worked through an anxious relationship with patriarchy by imagining the bearers of culture not as fathers siring sons but as keen-eyed bachelors observing their surroundings and spinning fanciful narratives. Just as Irving promoted “bachelor patriarchy,” so he advocated “bachelor domesticity,” appropriating the home from the “termagant wife” and claiming it as the space where men could daydream, enjoy fellowship, and write.
Presenting himself as Irving’s heir, Mitchell dedicated his Dream Life (1851) to his mentor, called him a “friend” and “teacher,” and affirmed that he did not know of any writer to whom “I am more indebted, than to you” (8). However, if Washington Irving was reserved and conflicted in articulating an identity based upon the imagination, Donald Grant Mitchell boldly asserted the superiority of the dream life and the bachelor’s immersion in it. Whereas the Irving chapter emphasizes authorship, the third chapter, “Reading with a Tender Rapture: Reveries of a Bachelor and the Rhetoric of Detached Intimacy,” focuses on readers by analyzing fan letters written to Donald Grant Mitchell in response to his best-selling Reveries of a Bachelor. Many fans pursued what I call “detached intimacy,” in which readers engage in a profound identification with the text even as they remain conscious that they are constructing a fantasy. Rather then seducing readers into delusion, reverie prompted readers to imagine different ways of constructing their own identities.
The final chapter, “Melville’s Symposium on the Bachelor,” shifts to the philosophy of art, as I show that Melville attacked naïve idealism through his satires of the bachelor figure. Although Irving helped him to find a publisher for Typee, the author of such seeming bachelor fictions as Moby-Dick once remarked that Irving’s greatest virtue was in knowing the limits of his talents (Leary 202), and Melville regarded the bachelor as a similarly limited figure. In his novels and short stories of the 1850s, Melville presents the bachelor as being so caught up in his own fantasies and abstractions that he cannot see the truth. Playing up the ironies of bachelorhood, in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Melville casts him as a foolish scholar ignorant of suffering, while in Pierre he depicts the sentimental bachelor as a madman. For Melville, the bachelor persona served as an inadequate model for the artist because he embodied the failure to integrate experience and the imagination, detached himself too much from social relations, and was associated with the genteel, self-limiting, and effete poses of the Irving school.
Whereas most critics tend to view the artistic identity either in the context of work (e.g. Michael Newbury’s Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America) or home (e.g. Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism), I look more systematically at how the bachelor mask enabled authors and readers to slip outside the constraints of both the public and private spheres and establish a flexible identity in which work is play, home provides a window to the outside world, and selfhood is a shifting performance. In Jamesian terms, the bachelor is often the figure in the carpet in antebellum narratives, the hidden presence whose own dreaming and observing parallel that of the reader. Even as literary bachelors look backward to the genteel authorship of eighteenth-century sages, they gaze forward to the modernist view of the author as an alienated individual who possesses a unique vision of the world.
[1] Freedom’s Journal, October 3, 1828. African American Newspapers: The Nineteenth Century. Malvern, PA: Accessible Archives.[2] These searches were conducted on June 2, 2001 and verified on March 17, 2002. The Early American Fiction Project is found at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf; Harper’s Weekly is available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/harpweek/uva; and Making of America is online at http://moa.umdl.umich.edu.[3] ABC’s “The Bachelor,” in which a handsome, well-educated eligible bachelor chooses his prospective wife from a group of 25 women, was one of the network’s most successful, if controversial, series of 2002.[4] Sedgwick suggests such a connection herself in contending that the bachelor occupied “a pivotal class position between the respectable bourgeoisie and bohemia” (Epistemology 193).
Posted by lspiro on November 20, 2007
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