Bachelor Reformers: Self-Reliance, Marriage, and Utopia in the Antebellum Era

Sociological and literary studies of bachelorhood have demonstrated that bachelors, as portrayed in nineteenth-century newspaper editorials, behavioral manuals, and popular fiction, were a lightning rod for cultural anxiety about male sexuality. However, because most of these studies focus on portrayals of bachelorhood in popular fiction or focus only superficially on the antebellum era, a sustained, comprehensive study of bachelorhood in the works of the American Renaissance is still needed. Drawing on the work of Howard Chadacoff, Vincent Bertolini, Katherine Snyder, and others, I provide that comprehensive study here.;In this dissertation, I argue that the writers of the American Renaissance reveal an unacknowledged context for antebellum bachelorhood. Rather than understanding bachelorhood in the context of moral reform and male purity, these writers link bachelorhood with utopian ideology. For this reason, I argue that the proper context for understanding bachelorhood is the American communitarian movement of the 1840s. This movement attempted to make labor more egalitarian, create a communal home, and provide an alternative to the failures of capitalism, but in the popular mind, it was linked with free love. By connecting bachelorhood with these utopian communities, the writers of the American Renaissance attempted to explore questions of marriage, sexuality, and reform.;Chapter one introduces the issue of reform as articulated by Emerson and Thoreau and examines how their assumptions about marriage and the home shape their conception of the single male reformer. In chapter two, I focus on Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and examine the implications of narrating the history of Brook Farm from the perspective of a disillusioned bachelor. While Hawthorne's novel is often read as a conservative attack on reform, its radical critique of marriage and sympathy for free love suggest otherwise. In chapter three, I turn to Melville's Pierre, which extends Hawthorne's critique of marriage and represents bachelorhood as the crux of conflicts over gender, sexuality, writing, and reform. Finally, in chapter four I argue that Whitman's conception of bachelorhood diverges from this pattern, but his "Letters from a Travelling Bachelor" shapes his configuration of marriage, free love, and male sexuality in "Enfans d'Adam" and "Calamus.".