The wandering bachelor: Irving, masculinity, and authorship

American Literature

Volumn 74, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 111-137

  Traister, Bryce ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54049098657     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-74-1-111     Document Type: Review

References (38)

1. See Richard Henry Dana Sr.'s review of The Sketch Book in North American Review, September 1819, 348
2. In so doing, I hope to expand the scope of a growing academic conversation about the nineteenth-century American bachelor, which has so far focused on the bachelor between 1850 and 1900; see, for example, Vincent Bertolini's argument that the late antebellum bachelor was "[l]ocated in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshold between domestication and transgression ... [T]he bachelor [was] a liminal concept in antebellum culture and a transitional state within proper masculine development" ("Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s," American Literature 68 [December 1996]: 709)
3. For other discussions of late-antebellum bachelors, see Samuel Otter, Melville's Anatomies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 212-27
4. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994)
5. and Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Sub-Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999)
6. For a discussion of the nation's language of development in the context of imperialist and pedagogical writing in the antebellum period, see Lora Romero, "Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism," American Literature 63 (September 1991): 385-404
7. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 115
8. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 31
9. "Bachelors," New-England Galaxy, 19 March 1824
10. "The Bachelor," Parlour Companion, 9 May 1818
11. "To Be Disposed Of by a Lottery," Intellectual Regale or Ladies' Tea Tray, 24 June 1815, 506
12. "A Geographical Description of Bachelor Island," New-England and Masonic Magazine, 24 July 1818
13. "Old Bachelors," Ladies Literary Cabinet, 5 January 1822
14. "Bachelor's Thermometer," Ladies Literary Cabinet, 11 August 1821
15. and "Who Would Be an Old Bachelor?" Saturday Magazine, 29 June 1822
16. "Character of a Bachelor," Saturday Evening Post, 31 January 1824
17. "Bachelor's Tax," Albany Microscope, 13 March 1824
18. "The Old Bachelor: A Soliloquy," New-York Mirror and Ladies' Literary Gazette, 4 June 1825
19. Francis Hopkinson, "The Bachelor," Juvenile Port-Folio, 21 August 1813
20. For a modern edition of Hopkinson's "Old Bachelor" series, see The Comical Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Humor of Francis Hopkinson, ed. Paul M. Zall (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1976)
21. See Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World, 51
22. "Down with the Bachelors - Huzza!" New-England Galaxy, 14 January 1825
23. "The Bachelor's Huzza," Saturday Evening Post, 6 September 1823
24. "On Professed Young Bachelors," Weekly Visitor, 29 December 1810
25. "Old Bachelors," New England Galaxy, 12 March 1824
26. "The Bachelor's Elysium," The Port-Folio, December 1822
27. On the reverie's association with masturbation in the antebellum period, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 12
28. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. I am unconvinced that the result of homographesis is necessarily and always a visible gay body. The lesson Irving teaches us is that the result may also be an unconvincing heterosexual body
29. "The Bachelor," United States Literary Gazette, 15 May 1825
30. Nelson, National Manhood, 97
31. "The Bachelor's Dinner," National Recorder, 30 June 1821, 405-7
32. On the genre of adventure narrative and Irving's interest in it, see Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1990)
33. "The Batchelor [sic]," Juvenile Port-Folio, 10 July 1813
34. "The Bachelor," Parterre, 14 September 1816
35. Ishmael (Moby-Dick)
36. Thoreau (Walden)
37. Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), 1:107
38. In a recent analysis of the writing and career of Nathaniel Parker Willis, Sandra Tomc argues that Willis and other antebellum authors carefully cultivated a rhetoric of leisured industry that became "a mark of the new entrepreneurial-style professionalism demanded by the expanding commercial book industry" ("An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure," American Quarterly 49 [December 1997]: 781)