Masculinity and the Highly Wrought Style in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Sarah Elizabeth Boyd A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts & Sciences. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by Eliza Richards Michelle Robinson Philip Gura Tim Marr Jane Thrailkill ©2017 Sarah Elizabeth Boyd ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Sarah Boyd: Masculinity and the Highly Wrought Style in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Under the direction of Eliza Richards) This dissertation calls attention to how male authors’ use of the highly wrought style, a literary aesthetic traditionally associated with women’s fiction, to explore heterodox masculine desire and imagination in 19th century America. It explores the gendered concerns of men’s highly fiction in nineteenth-century American literature, examining the dense constellation of themes and tropes governing men’s florid fiction, which cleaves to insistent revelations of the fantastic in the ordinary (as well as the ordinary in the fantastic) and coalesce around corollary, sometimes conflicting interests in feminine forms and heterodox masculine desires. The texts in this study circulate around two key mythologies from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—Pygmalion and Hermaphroditus—about transformation and transgression and that concern gender, desire, and the masculine imagination. The four chapters in this study examine the work of four very different authors—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Henry James—to map out a broader picture of the masculine politics of the florid style that bisect genres and movements in nineteenth-century American literature. The authors and their stories, importantly, represent just four small points in a larger constellation of male writers and texts who use the style to address their own hopes and anxieties about transforming understandings of masculine gender and sexuality as an aesthetic expression of heterodox desires over the course of the nineteenth-century. iii DEDICATION To my father, whose memory still drives that “urge and urge and urge,” my mother, whose presence always reminds me the importance of “a squeeze of the hand,” and to all my public school teachers, especially the great ones. And for my grandfather, who only ever read one book—Cheaper by the Dozen—but liked it. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a highly wrought process, messy, and tending towards excess and sometimes absurdity, much like the florid writing it examines. Many thanks to all my committee members for weathering my fevered progress: your focused criticism and warm encouragement has sustained me through this attenuated process and helped shape it into something better. Especial thanks to Eliza Richards, who continued to read so many “drafty” drafts, and for her warm advice and friendship; Michelle Robinson, for her invaluable mentorship, many “check ins,” and critically vital and deeply entertaining discussions; Tim Marr, who puts the “ship” in scholarship, launching many a young mind into critical explorations of ideas and texts, and for his iridescent optimism; Philip Gura, for his unfailing reassurance and ever timely critical advice; and Jane Thrailkill, who has offered me some of the most detailed and thoughtful critical comments on my writing as its own, equally important, art form: thank you. I must also thank the Department of English and Comparative Studies, the Graduate School, Correctional Education, and the Summer Bridge Program at Carolina for the financial support in the form of teaching fellowships, graduate research assistantships, research assistantships, and other funding opportunities that helped subsidize the pursuit of my doctoral degree. I owe an additional debt of gratitude to the faculty in the Department of English at the University of Kansas who supported my early academic inquiry: Dorice Williams, Iris Smith Fischer, Doreen Fowler, and especially Philip Barnard, a wonderful mentor and friend who has provided me with so much excellent advice, connections, opportunities, and all around good v times, without which I would not be here today. I also wish to thank all the administrative support staff, facilities services personnel at Carolina and Kansas keeping our world spinning. I would be remiss if I did not also thank the many hundreds of incredibly talented students at KU and UNC-Chapel Hill who I’ve been fortunate enough to teach over the years and who have helped me become a better educator. I extend a special thanks to UNC’s Summer Bridge Program and Correctional Education for providing me with some of the most rewarding teaching moments of my academic career. I also wish to thank the Charles Brockden Brown Society for kindling my love of early American literature and fostering my early scholarship. Last but not least, I am incredibly grateful to my friends and family, who have sustained me through the trials and triumphs of graduate school: you know who you are. Special thanks to Tyler Harris, for always making sure I ate dinner, and Alex Lolly Reyes, for holding my hand until the bitter end. Special thanks to my parents, who instilled in me a life long love of reading with their own voracious—near omniligent—reading habits. And finally, many thanks to Kurt Blythe, the best reader, editor, cheerleader, and ex-husband anyone could ask for. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 2: Fitz-James O’Brien…………………………………………………………38 CHAPTER 3: Thomas Bailey Aldrich……………………………………………………..77 CHAPTER 4: Henry James, Jr…………………………………………………………….118 CHAPTER 5: Thomas Wentworth Higginson…………………………………………….147 CHAPTER 6: Coda – Before and After…………………………………………………...188 REFERENCES…………………………………………………….……………………....199 vii Chapter 1: Introduction to the Queer Masculine Poetics of Men’s Highly Wrought Fiction Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansion, a young woman appears on the piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there, --of pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and has gold hair, and dark eyes, and a blue illusion dress looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is chaussée like a belle in the time of Louis Quartorze. All this splendor goes into that hammock, and sways there like a pond-lily in the golden afternoon. The window of my bedroom looks down on that piazza,--and so do I.1 ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich “Marjorie Daw” (1873) She swept out from between the rainbow-curtains of the cloud-trees into the broad sea of light that lay beyond. Her motions were those of some graceful naiad, cleaving, by a mere effort of her will, the clear, unruffled waters that fill the chambers of the sea. She floated forth with the serene grace of a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day. The perfect roundness of her limbs formed suave and enchanting curves. It was like listening to the most spiritual symphony of Beethoven the divine, to watch the harmonious flow of lines. This, indeed, was a pleasure cheaply purchased at any price. What cared I, if I had waded to the portal of this wonder through another’s blood? I would have given my own to enjoy one such moment of intoxication and delight.2 ~Fitz-James O’Brien, “The Diamond Lens” (1858) I This dissertation explores the production and reception of men’s “highly wrought” fiction and its contested place in the American literary tradition over the second half of the nineteenth century, charting the gender and sexual politics surrounding the aesthetic pleasures of masculine 1 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. “Marjorie Daw.” The Atlantic Monthly. (April 1873): 407-418. 2 O’Brien, Fitz-James. “The Diamond Lens.” The Atlantic Monthly. (January 1858): 354-367. 1 creativity and desire in the florid literary style often associated with nineteenth-century women’s fiction.3 The two examples above typify the thematic and rhetorical function of the style in nineteenth-century men’s fiction, revealing the tensions between gender and fantasy in its representation of feminine beauty and masculine desire. Written from the perspective of young bourgeois bachelors living out the heady days of their bachelorhood in and around New York City, the two passages reconstruct formerly mundane landscapes—like O’Brien’s drop of water—into exotic and erotic landscapes inhabited by women of exceptional beauty and charm, women who represent impossible feminine ideals, hyperbolized still further by their unreal existence. Fitz-James O’Brien’s microscopic nymph—if believed—is not only invisible to the naked eye, she can only be rendered visible by the aid of a diamond-lensed microscope powerful enough to glimpse into an atom. If not believed, the tiny sylph shares the fate of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s hammock-swinging heroine, who is eventually exposed as a fiction, a figment of the dreamy bachelor-narrator’s highly wrought imagination. Taken together, the vignettes elaborate a dense constellation of themes governing men’s highly wrought fiction, which cleaves to insistent revelations of the fantastic in the ordinary (as well as the ordinary in the fantastic) and coalesce around corollary, sometimes conflicting interests in feminized forms and heterodox 3 A number of critics and scholars have linked the “feminine” style to women’s fiction. Henry James, perhaps, established the association most famously in his 1865 critique of Harriet Prescott [Spofford]’s “Azarian School.” And in the twentieth Century, Fred Lewis Pattee located the style in the “gorgeous period of American literature,” which occurred between 1849 and 1860: “It was characterized chiefly by an orgy of feminine sentimentalism and emotionalism, a half-savage rioting of color and superlatives and fantastic fantasies, an outburst of wild desires to reform all abuses and to bring the world swiftly to a golden age of love and beauty and feminine dreams” (161).