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

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520216210 ISBN 13: 9780520216211

Verlag: University of California Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, editors

University of California Press

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within the antebellum sex / gender system, bachelorhood is a liminal concept since it is negatively defined by its total lack of explicit sexual content, all practices, single or reciprocal, being proscribed (hence the double meaning, which persists as a Latin trace in modern romance languages, of celibate as "unmarried male" and "sexually abstinent"). With no socially validated practices to call his own, the bachelor exists as a purely conceptual entity in relation to sexualized nonbachelorhood, and not as a practical (that is, activity-oriented) sexual identity. The bachelor is precisely he who must fend off his association with the socially abject sexualitiesthe self-abuser, whoremonger, or sodomiteas well as he who struggles to define himself in imaginative relation to what he is not yeta lover, husband, and father. Bachelorhood is a transitional state because the bachelor has...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520216210
• ISBN 13: 9780520216211
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Herausgeber: Chapman Mary, Hendler Glenn
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar