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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic.” Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986: 148-186.

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---.The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857-1891. University Press of Kentucky, 1972.

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Taylor, Bob Pepperman. America’s Bachelor Uncle: Thoreau and the American Polity. University Press of Kansas, 1996.

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---.“A Successful Bachelor.” Atlantic Monthly 81 (1898): 805-812.

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I was lucky enough to have superb English teachers in high school and college who inspired me with their passion for literature.  I’m especially grateful to Candida Williamson, Kit Wallingford, Dennis Huston, and Marsha Recknagel.  At Virginia, Steve Railton has provided good counsel and support throughout my graduate career, enriching my knowledge of American literature and serving as a great role model.  Likewise, Jessica Feldman has been a terrific advisor, helping me to see ideas buried in my work and inspiring me with her intellectual enthusiasms and sense of humor.  In working on a project for David Vander Meulen’s textual editing class, I came across a collection of fan letters to Donald Grant Mitchell that got me excited about my dissertation; I thank him for his kindness and support.  Thanks also Marion Rust and Joseph Kett for serving as readers of my dissertation and for providing helpful feedback about  how it can be improved.  I’m also grateful to staff members at Alderman Library’s Special Collections and Yale’s Beinecke Library for their assistance in locating appropriate bachelor texts.

My colleagues at Rice have cheered me on in my Ph.D. work.  I am especially grateful to Geneva Henry, who urged me to complete my dissertation and allowed me to set up a flexible work schedule; Greg Hillis, my fellow Virginia expatriate ABD (now PhD); my Perl buddy Chuck Bearden; Chuck Henry; Sara Lowman; Denise Arial; Megan Wilde; Mia McKeehan; and Ashley Fell.  Thanks also to Seamus Ross and Helen Tibbo for their support.

When I started working at Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, I had no idea how much fun it would be, or how my work there would open up new interests and alter the direction of my career.  Many thanks to David Seaman, Carolyn Fay, Chris Ruotolo, Steve Ramsay, Matthew Gibson, Johnnie Wilcox, Karen Wikander, Craig Simmons, Carol Osborne, Tom Palombi, Jennifer McCarthy, Catherine Tousignant, Bryson Clevinger, and the rest of the Etext gang.

This dissertation would be much weaker were it not for the incisive comments of my dissertation group: Michelle Allen, Amanda French, June Griffith, Elizabeth Outka, and Virginia Zimmerman.  Not only did they help me focus my ideas and straighten out tangled sentences, but they have been true friends, always willing to give support and good advice, share a spinach-and-garlic pizza, stories, and a few beers, and go on backyard sledding expeditions.  I have also been sustained by the friendship of Janice Miller, John Picker, Lauren Murray, Cate Nielan, Jessica Feinberg, and Karen Murray.

I grew up in a house full of books and my parents are both teachers, so I never had to justify studying humanities.  Thanks to my parents Bob and Linda Spiro, my brother John, and my in-laws Sue and Ray Johnson for their encouragement, and to my grandmother Ruby Spiro for funding my first year of graduate school.  My dad put in many hours editing the manuscript; I am grateful to him for saving me from using awkward phrases like “oriented around,” helping me to focus the dissertation, and drawing smiley faces next to my jokes and puns.  Buster the Wonderdog was a loyal writing companion, taking me out for regular walks and snoozing by my side.

One of the best known pro-marriage clichés is “Behind every successful man is a good woman.”  Well, behind me from the start was my husband Richard Johnson, who was understanding when I secluded myself to read bachelor tales, picked up the slack with household chores, and helped me revise and proofread the manuscript.  He makes me laugh, helps me put things in perspective, and enriches my life, demonstrating that love is the foundation.  I’m glad he’s not a bachelor.

A bachelor of feen masquerie

Evasive and metamorphorid”

--Wallace Stevens, “Oak Leaves Are Hands”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lesson of the Bachelor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although readers of Melville’s early works associated him with bachelorhood, his own attitudes toward the bachelor were more complicated. Whereas Mitchell casts the bachelor as a dreamer full of feeling, Melville exposes the emptiness and narcissism of bachelor dreams in fictions of the 1850s such as Pierre and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Melville hinted at his disdain by naming two fictional ships after the bachelor figure. One, the Bachelor (from Moby-Dick), represents the errors of materialism, while the other, the Bachelor’s Delight (from “Benito Cereno”), reveals the falsities of idealism. As the Pequod cruises towards its tragic confrontation with Moby-Dick, it encounters the Bachelor, a ship bound for its home port of Nantucket. The Bachelor is bursting with sperm, which spills out of barrels, sailors’ chests, coffee pots, and any other available vessel. On the Bachelor’s decks mates dance with Polynesian women who have eloped with them. While the Bachelor’s captain watches the spectacle in amusement, Ahab scowls in “gloom”: “as the two ships crossed each other’s wakes—one all jubilation for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene” (451-52). Whereas Ahab is determinedly pursuing his quest of Moby-Dick “against all natural lovings and longings” for his wife and child (493), the captain of the Bachelor professes not to “believe in him at all” (452). Two world-views run in opposite directions: the monomania of the husband who abjures family in pursuit of his quest, and the frivolity of the bachelor Bachelor captain who rejects mystery and floats on proven success. Here, the Bachelor presents the figure of sensualism and materialism. In “Benito Cereno,” however, Melville criticizes idealism by dubbing the ship captained by the naively charitable, blindly racist Delano the Bachelor’s Delight. Whereas the Bachelor treats life as a party, the Bachelor’s Delight embodies a superficial benevolence and the ignorant assumption that the real world matches Captain Delano’s idealized sense of order.

These two ships of fools represent the poles of a common epistemological problem: one navigates the world through frivolous indulgence while the other sails on abstract sympathy, neither fully committed to creativity and truth. By presenting two models of the bachelor, the active sensualist and the brooding idealist, Melville criticizes the failure to wed conflicting aspects of humanity, body and mind, real and ideal. As John Wenke observes, Melville “tends to celebrate the human need to forge a balance between experiential and intellectual extremes, to accommodate disparate possibilities for selfhood, to maintain flexibility and freedom within limits prescribed by natural existence” (“Ontological” 587). One of the chief ways that Melville explores this dichotomy is through the bachelor. Just as the dandy can “teach us of sudden metamorphoses” (Feldman 270), one might expect Melville to treat the bachelor as a figure of openness, flux, and experimentation, given the bachelor’s tendency toward reverie and lack of solid commitments. Instead, Melville associates the literary bachelor with a selfish, foolish absolutism, a tragic failure to reconcile imagination and experience

Most of Melville’s protagonists are single men, including Typee’s Tommo, Redburn, White Jacket, Ishmael, Mardi’s Tajii, Pierre, and Billy Budd’s Captain Vere. However, he reserves the term “bachelor” not for rovers such as Ishmael and Tommo, but for selfish authority figures like Redburn’s Captain Riga or superficial scholars like the narrator of “Bartleby.”[1] While Melville’s early work betrays his ambivalence toward the bachelor, from Pierre forward he undercuts the bachelor figure to repudiate the idealism promoted in works such as Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor. Conscious of the stereotype of the detached, leisured “old bachelor,” Melville uses “bachelor” to signify a mental attitude based upon privilege, artificiality, and deliberate ignorance of the broader social world. While young rovers such as Ishmael and Tommo pursue social (and sometimes sexual) relationships, Melville’s bachelor often isolates himself from society, lacks the broader sympathy that enables him to look beyond his own limited perceptions, and produces shallow, derivative texts.

Critics have noted Melville’s frequent use of the bachelor, but have not yet offered a full analysis of its significance. For instance, Laurie Robinson-Lorant contends that “Redburn is one of Melville’s ‘bachelors,’ a man whose limited exposure to real life and privileged position in society blind him to the moral complexities of life,” emphasizing the bachelor’s elitism and obtuseness (207). Likewise, Robert K. Martin argues that Melville uses bachelors “to suggest the removal of the individual from the world of social relationships, from Ahab’s ‘inter-indebtedness.’ As bachelors, they inhabit a sterile world in which work leads to no creativity” (Hero 105). Merton Sealts observes that “From at least the time of Mardi, undertaken not long after his own marriage, Melville had repeatedly used bachelors—bachelors and sophomores—as his favorite examples of pleasure-loving immaturity and naivete, as yet untouched by misfortune” (159). Associating the bachelor with middle age rather than youth, Michael Davitt Bell argues that “Melville’s typical persona in the short fiction of the 1850s is an unambitious middle-aged bachelor” (214) and connects this persona to moral blindness, the lack of self-awareness, and the failure of revolutionary ideology. As astute as Martin, Robinson-Lora, Sealts, and Bell are in claiming that Melville uses the bachelor to reveal the problems of blindness, withdrawal, and privilege, they make these observations only in passing, declining to explore how or why Melville develops his criticisms of bachelorhood. This chapter seeks to understand Melville’s complex attitudes toward the bachelor figure by considering his work of the 1850s (post-Reveries of a Bachelor) in relation to the antebellum literature of bachelorhood as well as to his views on art and the artist. Through his frequent references to Plato’s Symposium and to Greek myth, Melville suggests the importance of eros in shaping art and repudiates a dualism that values the ideal over the real.

By rejecting the bachelor, Melville repudiated the strategy that some masculine sentimentalists used to deal with the American bias against fiction. As we have seen, antebellum American authors faced “a hostile climate, a climate in which the fictionality of fiction was accentuated and condemned” (Bell 14). By posing as a genteel bachelor observer who lacked artistic ambition, Irving rendered his writing harmless. Mitchell more actively justified fantasy by focusing it on the home and infusing it with sentiment, crafting a bachelor speaker who was intimate yet detached. However, Melville evinced greater ambivalence toward both dreaming and the bachelor dreamer. In plunging into Mardi, he declared to his publisher his intention to “out with the Romance, & let me say that instincts are prophetic, & better than acquired wisdom” (Correspondence 106). Even as Melville proclaimed the superiority of imagination and instinct, he acknowledged that fantasy can lead to error, writing that “Things visible are but the conceits of the eye: things imaginative, conceits of fancy. If duped by one, we are equally duped by the other” (qtd. by Charvat 216). In his fiction of the 1850s, Melville wrestled with the problem of how we know what we think we know, making the bachelor embody the errors of philosophical idealism.

In Mardi (1849), Melville imagines what would happen if a bachelor ran the kingdom, centering government on his own fantasies and pleasures rather than the common good. Through his satire of Abrazza, the “care-free bachelor” and king (588), Melville exposes the hypocrisy and emptiness of the bachelor sensibility, ostensibly sympathetic but fundamentally driven by the selfish desire for power and pleasure at the expense of others. Abrazza demands that his subjects endanger themselves by diving for pearls to decorate his “royal robe,” promising to bestow his pity on those who are injured even as he belittles their pain: “He vows he’ll have no cares; and often says, in pleasant reveries,--‘Sure, my lord Abrazza, if any one should be care-free, ‘tis thou; who strike down none, but pity all the fallen!’ Yet none he lifteth up!” (589). Perhaps using this “king-philosopher” (589) to satirize Plato’s philosopher-kings in the Republic (Sealts 288), Melville shows that Abrazza’s “hollow” kingdom is a built around fantasy and supreme ego (590), thus illustrating the dangers of absolute idealism (and absolute power). Frequently in reverie, the bachelor king removes himself from real problems, disdaining those who do not feed his fantasy. Not only is Abrazza cruel, but he also lacks the ability to comprehend inspiration, genius, and art. When he discusses the author Lombardo with Babbalanja, Abrazza betrays a simplistic view of the writing act, contending that it involves no real labor, that authors must be motivated by wine or money, and that literary works must be “unified” (597). As Charvat contends, “Against the Abrazzas of the world the writer must put up defenses” (229). Abrazza embodies the errors of sensual idealism, whereby the dreamer claims to be reaching for the ideal but really seeks to serve his own selfish needs.

Melville commonly links the bachelor and idealism, especially in works published after Reveries of a Bachelor (1850). In Moby-Dick, Melville acknowledges both the allure and the danger of the bachelor’s penchant for fantasizing. In “The Mast Head,” Ishmael describes “romantic,” “melancholy” young philosophers gazing down at the sea from their celestial perches:

those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home… lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadences of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature… But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. (152)

Here Melville seems to satirize two of Donald Grant Mitchell’s works— Lorgnette, in which the keen-eyed bachelor scrutinizes the crowd through his opera glasses, and Reveries of a Bachelor, in which the sentimental bachelor rhapsodizes over the pleasures of fantasy. As John Wenke argues, this passage illustrates “the incompatibility of philosophical idealism and workaday actuality” (“Ontological” 586), as dreamers and philosophers get pulled into the mystical and are then drowned by reality. Even as Melville acknowledges the seductiveness of reverie, he differentiates the self-aware Ishmael from the dreaming bachelors.

In Moby-Dick’s “Squeeze of the Hand” scene, Melville articulates the conflict between the tender merging of bachelor brotherhood and the more “objective,” rational life of the husband. In a moment of homoerotic sexual communion, the sailors together squeeze lumps of sperm from the whale carcass, sometimes grabbing each others’ hands and enjoying “abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling” (385). Yet Ishmael concedes that such fantastic bliss can only be temporary:

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hand in a jar of spermaceti. (385)

As he suggests that the immersive sexuality of this scene must be displaced by the concreteness of marriage, where everything has its place, Melville sounds a note of resignation. Although Ishmael finds the homoeroticism and idealism of the scene enticing, Melville suggests that the productive sexuality of marriage—based upon stable things rather than fleeting feelings and abstract ideas—ultimately wins out. According to Merton Sealts, here Ishmael registers his “repudiation of the Platonic scale of values” by shifting “from the realm of intellect to the realm of tangible entities” (310). Yet the passage is more ambivalent than Sealts suggests, since Melville wistfully describes the allure of idealism and sexual communion even as he acknowledges its impermanence and the impossibility of fulfillment.

In examining Melville’s relationship to sentimental culture and idealism, I focus on selected bachelor works from his middle- and late-periods. Critics such as Ann Douglas, Richard Brodhead, and Samuel Otter have noted that Melville shifted his strategies, style, and purposes when he wrote Pierre (1852), attacking the sentimental culture that he associated with his own failures in the literary marketplace. I treat Pierre as a troubled parody of the sentimental novel, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” as a sly revision of an Irvingesque tale of a traveler, and “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilacs” as a poetic revamping of Irving’s classic tale that asserts the importance of contingency and accident in artistic creation and appreciation. Despite differences in style, genre, and tone, these works all make use of the bachelor to repudiate idealism, to satirize sentimentalism, and to criticize the model of the artist as detached dreamer.

Marrying the Ambiguities: Pierre and the Bachelor Artist

Prometheus was a bachelor.--Kafka

When Melville heard that his friend Charles Fenno Hoffman, an author and editor, had been committed to an insane asylum, he suggested that his status as a bachelor and an artist had contributed to his insanity: “he was just the man to go mad—imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried,--without a port or haven in the universe to make…”(Correspondence 128). Inventorying the qualities typically associated with the bachelor artist, Melville contends that a man is more susceptible to madness if he rejects the bourgeois values of work, family, and home, which anchor him to reality. Yet Melville also acknowledges that “he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains” (128), asserting that the imagination can plunge a person into a “riot” of maddening dreams as well as stimulate philosophical insights. Even though Melville embraced the power of the imagination, writing in Moby-Dick that “man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”(383), he also believed that the imagination “clearly undermined conventional conceptions of reality, including the distinction between imagination and judgment” (Bell 146). Pierre was cited by reviewers as evidence of Melville’s own poor aesthetic judgment, even insanity; one critic asserted that “his fancy is diseased, his morality vitiated, his style nonsensical and ungrammatical, and his characters as far removed from our sympathies as they are from nature” (The American Whig Review, November 1852, qtd. in Melville Log 464). I suggest that, rather than exposing Melville’s “diseased fancy,” Pierre reflects how Melville employed the bachelor stereotype as a way to explore what makes the fancy diseased.

Pierre charts the ironic slide of the bachelor from light-hearted swain to tortured prophet and finally to mad nihilist, exposing the sexual tensions, philosophical errors, and elitist assumptions that contribute to this descent. In writing Pierre, Melville claimed to be crafting a book that was, as he told his publisher Bentley, “very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work” (Correspondence 226). Moreover, as Melville advised Sophia Hawthorne, in Pierre, “a rural bowl of milk” (Correspondence 219), he aimed to please a female audience. Yet Pierre, which sold only 1856 copies over 35 years (Charvat 249), is more a bowl of curdled milk, with its clotted language and sour plots of incest, murder, suicide, and artistic failure. In attempting to produce a work that would appeal to the popular audience, Melville ended up intensifying what William Charvat calls his “conflict with his readers” (204), troubled by the conditions of popular success and by the demands of sentimental culture. As Melville famously declared to Hawthorne, “Dollars damn me... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches” (Correspondence 191).

Frustrated by the seeming impossibility of meeting his artistic ambitions, Melville lashed out at American literary culture as well as at the reading public. In a chapter titled “Young America in Literature,” Melville lampoons critics for valuing “Perfect Taste” and respectability over originality and vision, publishers for regarding books merely as products to be marketed, female readers for treating Pierre as a pawn in parlor society, and men’s literary societies for celebrating fame rather than genius. As Ann Douglas argues, “Melville presents a savage study of the conspirational interaction between genteel religion, feminine morality, and polite literature against the interests of genuine masculinity” (294). Yet Pierre’s grand ambitions are treated as savagely as the superficiality of readers, as Melville reveals “the everlasting elusiveness of truth; the universal insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts” (Pierre 339). Citing such statements, many critics contend that Pierre marks a turning point in Melville’s career because he seemed to surrender the hope of coherence. Analyzing Melville’s attempt to write a sentimental romance that would attract a popular audience, Richard Brodhead argues that Pierre represents Melville’s “ambivalence, his desire both to make use of this genre and to assert his independence from it” (Hawthorne 164). According to Michael Rogin, in writing Pierre Melville moved away from writing romances animated by closely observed detail to authoring surreal, formalist fictions built around binaries. Focusing on Pierre’s distorted, incoherent style, Samuel Otter argues that Melville rejected the possibility of breaking outside of subjectivity. Building upon these arguments about the ambivalence and incoherence of Pierre, I suggest that Melville’s turn toward explicitly bachelor narratives exposes his frustrations towards artists, the making of art, and, indeed, the work of art itself, frustrations that are funneled through the figure of a male dreamer.

Subtitled The Ambiguities, Pierre focuses on problems of epistemology, the difficulty of knowing what is true and understanding how we know (Sealts 321). Pierre breaks his engagement to Lucy so that he can pretend to be the spouse of his supposed half-sister Isabel, creating a world of artifice and lies. If, as Katherine Snyder argues, literary bachelors are “threshold figures” who expose the tensions in discourses of masculinity, domesticity, and artistic production (7), then Pierre represents these tensions to an exaggerated degree. Wobbling at the ever-shifting center of the novel, Pierre is pulled by an overwhelming array of opposed forces: dark lady vs. fair angel, mother vs. father, consumption vs. production, patriarchal inheritance vs. democratic self-making, genteel vs. professional authorship, and the “perfect ideal” vs. “the miserable written attempt at embodying it” (273). Initially a caricature of the pastoral swain, Pierre becomes a multifaceted oxymoron—an innocent sinner, a near-blind visionary, a loving murderer, a bachelor husband. Failed artifice illustrates the incoherence of language and character—for example, the deceptive letters of Glen, the seductive music of Isabel, the hollow philosophy of Plinlimmon, the terrifying painting of Beatrice Cenci and the false painting of Pierre’s father, and Pierre’s failed masterwork. As a painful meditation on the deceptions of art, Pierre is itself slippery and duplicitous, allowing the reader no comfortable resolution.

As Hershel Parker and many others have noted, Pierre seems disrupted, even bifurcated, by the section on “Young America in Literature,” which appears just after the protagonist has fled his patriarchal estate and arrived in the city to create a new life. According to Parker, in its original form Pierre lacked these sections and was more symmetrical in its construction, so his Kraken edition omits them altogether (xi). Yet these chapters provide an important point of transition where the novel shifts from focusing on the perversions of love to a disturbed analysis of the delusions of artistic ambition. Gillian Brown rightly suggests that at this point the novel switches from a parody of the family novel to an exploration of literary individualism, but she misjudges the significance of this transition (135). Rather than, as Brown argues, endorsing the autonomous masculine author freed from domesticity, Melville treats this figure with ambivalence, as he reveals the impossibility of avoiding domesticity and the foolishness of the bachelor’s self-centered perspective. As Tara Penry argues, Melville presents two dominant models of manhood in Pierre: romantic manhood, which implies rebellion against patriarchy and the resulting attempt to create oneself anew, and sentimental manhood, which is built on the formation of relationships and the clasping of hands. By comparing bachelors to Titans, Melville suggests that bachelorhood constitutes a lonely rejection of sentimental manhood, no matter how much the bachelor tries to compensate for this lack of connection through dreaming. Yet romantic manhood—the solitary struggling of Pierre—leads to defeat and misery. Through his portrait of the artist, Melville illustrates the failings of American literary culture, which is divided between the shallow gentility of Pierre the juvenile author and the Platonic hubris of the Apostle Pierre.

Like Reveries of a Bachelor, which had been published only two years earlier, Pierre presents a bachelor as its protagonist and examines dreaming, detachment, and the analogy between writing and character. Rather than using a whimsical, garrulous first person narrator such as Ik Marvel or Ishmael, Melville employs an ambiguous third-person narrator, who announces the impossibility of understanding “the confusions and confoundings in the soul of Pierre” (171) and declares him a victim of “Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue!”(302). Whereas many readers regarded Ik Marvel as a sentimental exemplar for his flowery effusions over imagined loves, Melville’s nightmares of the bachelor picture the decline of a man who rejects marriage, is tormented by seemingly irreconcilable conflicts, invents a “blasphemous rhapsody” (356), and ends up declaring himself to be neuter. Exposing the ironic underside of the sentimental bachelor, Melville shows that his idealism is narcissistic and deluded, his detachment leads to isolation and self-righteousness, his spectating reflects back his own sinfulness, and his art is impotent.

The Broken Engagement Plot

Typically the marriage plot resolves conflict and integrates the characters into a harmonious family. However, as befits a novel so troubled by ambiguity, Pierre refuses the happy ending, focusing instead on fractured ambitions and failed union (Otter 239). Reversing the narrative trajectory of a comedy or romance, the novel begins happily, with Pierre and Lucy swearing their “boundless admiration and love” (4). Of course, as James Creech argues, Melville ultimately attacks the normative family, depicting the mother as a Gorgon, the father as a liar, the “sister” as a manipulator, the cousin as a competitor, and the girlfriend as a threat despite her seeming innocence (84). Yet it is Pierre’s ironic decision to pose as a husband while remaining a bachelor that obstructs the happy ending and brings about the disintegration of his family. Melville insists

that not always doth life’s beginning gloom conclude in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life’s fifth act… yet the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate. (141)

By rejecting the conventional ending of a wedding, Melville instead builds a “profounder” novel around bachelorhood, which is a state of incompletion, a union yet to be made. As he inverts the marriage plot, Melville takes the bachelor narrative to an exaggerated and ironic end, emphasizing the bachelor’s isolation despite the sentimental presence of surrogate sister-wives, his blindness despite his visionary impulses, and the impotence of his art in spite of his paternal ambitions. In Pierre, love is distorted by incest, illegitimate birth, fear of sexuality, jealousy, and celibacy. None of these relationships result in legitimate offspring, and each, in its way, exposes the falsity behind the “smoothness and genteelness of the sentiments and fancies expressed” in Pierre’s works as a juvenile author (245), thus undercutting the conventions of sentimental fiction.

What disrupts the marriage plot is Pierre’s discovery of his apparent half-sister Isabel. Ironically, Pierre had fantasized that the brother/sister relationship would serve as a prototype for the tender balance of marriage:

So perfect to Pierre had long seemed the illuminated scroll of his life thus far, that only one hiatus was discovered by him in that sweetly-writ manuscript. A sister had been omitted from the text…. He who is sisterless, is as a bachelor before his time. For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already lies in the sister. (7)

Melville mocks Pierre’s naiveté on two levels: first, his notion that the relationship between siblings parallels that of spouses, and second, his assumption that life unfolds like a novel (although in this case of course he is correct, given that Pierre is a fictional character caught in the convoluted plot of a novel). As we have seen, conventional views identified marriage with a harmonizing of masculine and feminine, but the fake marriage between Pierre and Isabel upsets this balance. The sibling bond is more ambiguous than marriage; brother and sister are made from the same but different stuff. Although Pierre thinks of his life proceeding as a “sweetly writ” romantic narrative, Melville exposes the weak foundations of such sentimental stories, as Isabel introduces both “Tartarean misery and Paradisiac beauty” into his life (43).

If the life of the Glendinning scion Pierre has been on the surface a well-structured narrative, the orphan Isabel’s life is an incoherent manuscript. As she appeals to Pierre for sympathy, Isabel cries, “Oh, my dear brother—Pierre! Pierre!—could’st thou take out my heart, and look at it in thy hand, then thou would’st find it all over written, this way and that, and crossed again, and yet again, with continual lines of longings, that found no end but in suddenly calling thee” (158). To describe the incoherence of Isabel’s character and the deceptions of sentimental communication, Melville compares her heart to a constantly revised manuscript. By associating his characters with texts, Melville reveals the essential problem that Pierre probes: the difficulty of literary expression constrained by artificial genres, the limitations of the imagination and intellect to discern truth, and the ambiguity of moral action.

(Per)versions of the Author

Just as the first half of the novel catalogs the ironies of love, so the second half satirizes different approaches to artistic creation. Pierre depicts five models of authorship, all of which are associated with the bachelor: the male sentimentalist, the naïve idealist, the greedy producer and consumer of commodities, the nihilist, and the deluded prophet. Initially Pierre appears as a sentimental bachelor:

For even at that early time in his authorial life, Pierre, however vain of his fame, was not at all proud of his paper. Not only did he make allumettes of his sonnets when published, but was very careless about his discarded manuscripts; they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and were forever flitting out of the windows, and under the door-sills, into the faces of people passing the manorial mansion. In this reckless, indifferent way of his, Pierre himself was a sort of publisher. (263)

Like Irving’s Pindar Cockloft, Pierre “publishes” by letting his papers scatter about the house, and like Ik Marvel he turns the proceeds and products of his authorship into cigars, as the production of literature becomes like reverie, pleasing yet quick to vanish in smoke. A sentimentalist, the leisured author prefers to operate in the ethereal realm of ideas instead of the physical world of concrete objects. Rather than autographing young ladies’ albums, he “kiss[es] lipographs upon them,” since “actual feeling is better than transmitted sight” (251). Such statements echo Donald Grant Mitchell’s pronouncement that the dream is superior to reality. Embracing abstraction, the juvenile author refuses to commit himself to a single image; his autographs lack uniformity (253), and he declines to have a Daguerreotype taken, since “instead of… immortalizing a genius, a portrait now only dayalized a dunce” (254). According to Gillian Brown, Pierre’s avoidance of fame illuminates Melville’s hostility toward domesticity and the market (141-43). At another level, Melville satirizes the hazy idealism of male sentimentalists by mocking Pierre’s reluctance to allow his “genius” be captured in a physical form, whether an autograph or a photograph. Since Pierre’s own identity shifts with his emotions, no fixed icon can capture his essence.

To expose the failings of naïve idealism, Melville focuses on Pierre’s neighbors at the Apostles, a former church and lawyers’ office building that has become a haven for intellectuals and artists. Echoing his warnings against reverie in Moby-Dick, Melville characterizes the writers and philosophers who live at the Apostles as fools: “But these poor, penniless devils still strive to make ample amends for their physical forlornness, by resolutely reveling in the region of blissful ideals.… Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can not but give in to the Descartian vortices” (267). As David Leonard explains, Melville uses the vortex to represent a hell of meaningless, inexorable circular motion that pulls all in, so that transcendental faith in the imagination spins into pessimistic mechanism. Even the most inspiring ideas cannot satisfy a gnawing hunger, as Melville insists that the bachelor Apostles must operate within the constraints of the physical world.

Whereas the idealistic Apostles attempt to deny physical reality, the professional author focuses on the production and consumption of material goods, treating ideas as tokens that can be bought and sold. When he moves to the city and realizes that he must support the tangible needs of his household, Pierre decides to subject himself to the “metamorphosing mill” (246) of publication and commits himself to “literary enterprise” (285). Yet despite—indeed, because of—his labor over his writing, Pierre does not fit the mold of the professional author, since his aspirations go beyond just churning out pages for profit. While Pierre struggles over the dilemma that dogged Melville, the clash between “the burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless” (Correspondence 283), the bachelor Charlie Millthorpe stands for a false compromise. Like a mill (hence his name), the “sophomorean” Millthorpe rapidly manufactures faux-philosophical works: “peculiar secret, theologoico-politico-social schemes of the masonic order of the seedy-coated Apostles; and pursuing some crude, transcendental Philosophy, for both a contributory means of support, as well as for his complete intellectual aliment” (276, 280). A genial scrivener, Millthorpe produces texts more to satisfy his appetites than to disseminate truth.

Whereas the hack writer Millthorpe focuses on production (of writing) and consumption (of the goods brought in through his literary efforts), the nihilist gives out nothing. Plinlimmon, the false prophet whose pamphlet haunts Pierre, embodies the emptiness of a philosophy that passively negates rather than confronts or resolves conflicts. Plinlimmon projects an attitude of “non-Benevolence”—not actively evil, but devoid of goodness (290). Just as some bachelors are defined by their renunciation of marriage and family, their deliberate embrace of nothing, so Plinlimmon negates affection, effort, or imagination: “He seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort. He never was known to work with his hands; never to write with his hands (he would not even write a letter); he never was known to open a book. There were no books in his chambers” (290). In describing Plinlimmon’s separation from family or work, two defining spheres of nineteenth-century America, the narrator links his isolation with his unwillingness to read or write. If Plinlimmon is neither a reader nor a writer, he is all the more inscrutable, since Melville often presents character in relation to text.

Not only does Plinlimmon negate personal feeling, but he also seems to project nothing in others. The scene in which Pierre stares at Plinlimmon through a window reprises a common moment in bachelor literature, where the single man surveys life from his perch in the garret. But in Melville’s version of the scene, Plinlimmon, another bachelor spectator, stares back, so that Pierre is both looking and looked at. Rather than escaping from his own subjectivity through his window-sill reveries, Pierre receives a shocking vision of his own isolation. Pierre fears that the philosopher of nothing acts both as a microscope, scrutinizing his lies and sins, and a mirror, reflecting his emptiness. At this moment, Melville hints that Plinlimmon’s nihilism and Pierre’s idealism are intimately related. Through his utter failure to relate or react to what he observes, the fraudulent philosopher challenges the very foundations of sentimental literature: “For that face did not respond to anything…. If to affirm, be to expand one’s isolated self; and if to deny, be to contract one’s isolated self; then to respond is a suspension of all isolation” (293). Plinlimmon embodies complete detachment without any possibility of intimacy or sympathetic response.

In contrast to Plinlimmon’s complete passivity, Pierre aims to produce “some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth” (283). In reaching for divine truth, Pierre begins to think of himself as a prophet, declaring, “Isabel, I will write such things—I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!” (273). So great is his ambition that he believes he must abandon family relations, commanding Isabel to “Call me brother no more!” (273). Sadly, the narrator reveals Pierre to be a deluded prophet, characterizing him as an immature author attempting a mature work (282). Pierre resembles a prophet only in his asceticism, as he denies himself food and warmth while he labors in an unheated room that contains “an indigent bachelor’s pallet,” a crude desk made out of a board on two barrels, and little else (270). Through his excruciating description of the physical deprivations and emotional anguish associated with authorship, Melville undermines Pierre’s idealism and repudiates the assumption implicit in bachelor literature that writing consists of leisurely dreaming.

According to the knowing narrator, Pierre’s failures result from his rigid subjectivity, exaggerated ambitions, and deliberate isolation. By undermining Pierre’s perception of himself as a prophet, Melville dispels Platonic idealism, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, was frequently associated with the bachelor. “[S]illy” Charlie Millthorpe echoes this association by claiming Plato as the predecessor to the modern artist (338): “The great men are all bachelors, you know. Their family is the universe: I should say the planet Saturn was their elder son; and Plato their uncle” (281). By constructing this absurd genealogy, Melville parodies both the view of artistic tradition as smooth patriarchal succession and the assumption that the bachelor serves the greater good because he is not bound to a single family.[2] As the Titan Kronos in Greek myth, Saturn castrated and overthrew his father Ouranos to become king of the gods. To preserve his power, he consumed his own children, but his wife and sister Rhea (aka Ops) tricked him into swallowing a stone rather than his son Zeus, who ultimately revolted against his father and exiled him to Tartarus. Bachelor creators are likewise overthrown by artists of the next generation, so their godlike aspirations to negate family and assume power are thwarted.

Although Pierre aspires to become like a god through his authorship, he becomes instead a monstrous failure, a chastened Titan. As he labors over his book, Pierre “began to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate” (339). The conditions of authorship and the “everlasting elusiveness of Truth” cripple and mock him (339). Indeed, in his “unnatural struggle” to produce a great work (340), Pierre becomes like the earth-born giant Enceladus, a monstrous product of incest whose rebellion against the gods fails: “still, though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk… still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him” (345). Enceladus’s chastened defiance reflects Pierre’s own failures, as he is “mutilated,” “distorted,” “impotent,” and “shamefully recumbent” (345-6). By making Enceladus an icon of Pierre, Melville warns against men attempting to make themselves gods, since such celestial asp