UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Seduction
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Seduction, Sporting Culture and Sensational Literature: White Manhood and Male Fraternity in the Antebellum United States A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Katherine Anne Merit Thompson Committee in charge: Professor John D. Blanco, Co-Chair Professor Shelley Streeby, Co-Chair Professor Dennis Childs Professor Sara Johnson Professor Rachel Klein 2018 Copyright Katherine Anne Merit Thompson, 2018 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Katherine Anne Merit Thompson is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Co- Chair ________________________________________________________________________ Co- Chair University of California San Diego 2018 iii DEDICATION To my Mom and Dad, and Dave. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS SIGNATURE PAGE ...................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................ iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................. v LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................... viii VITAE ............................................................................................................................ xii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ..................................................................... xiii Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 Sensationalism, Gender, and Race: Methods for Understanding Sporting Culture ...... 10 Sensational Literature and Sporting Culture .............................................................. 10 Sporting Masculinity and Gender: Towards Broadening Our Considerations .......... 15 Sporting Masculinity and Race: Towards Critical Critique ....................................... 21 Dissertation Overview and Chapter Summaries ............................................................ 26 Chapter One – Sporting Male Magazines: Urban Ennui, Class Fantasy, and Sporting Masculinity .................................................................................................................... 30 1.1. Introduction: Sporting Men and Modernization ..................................................... 30 1.1.1. Sporting Men & Magazines ............................................................................. 40 1.2. Sporting Ennui: Meaninglessness, Boredom and Apathy ...................................... 47 1.3. Sporting Men, Prostitution and Masculine Class Fantasy ...................................... 53 1.3.1. Background: Prostitution in the Antebellum Metropolis ................................. 55 1.3.2. The Luxury Brothel and Sporting Class Fantasy ............................................. 56 1.3.3. Glaring Differences: Sex Worker’s Wealth and the Fantasy Disrupted .......... 64 1.3.4. “It is a third rate house, and third rate people go there”: Disreputable Prostitutes and the Fear of Being Declassed .............................................................. 68 1.4. Racial Mixing, Minstrelsy and the Limits of Desire .............................................. 73 1.4.1. Minstrelsy and Black Entertainment: Eroticism and Escape ........................... 79 1.5. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 95 Chapter Two – “The Beast in the Shape of Man”: Libertinism, Sporting Culture, and Seduction in U.S. Popular Culture ................................................................................. 97 2.1. Introduction: The Phenomenon of Seduction in the Antebellum U.S. ................... 97 2.1.1. Historical Meanings of Seduction .................................................................. 103 2.1.2. The Seduction Plot in U.S. Literature ............................................................ 104 2.2. “All these were of that class called sporting gentlemen”: Seduction, The Libertine and Sporting Men ........................................................................................................ 109 2.2.1. Sporting Life and the Command of Urban Space .......................................... 109 2.2.2. The Sensational Seduction Plot: Men’s Social Seduction and The Lure of Sporting Culture ....................................................................................................... 114 2.3. Between Men: The Seduced Woman, Prostitution Reform and ‘Saving’ Women to Save Men. .................................................................................................................... 130 v 2.3.1. The Victim of Seduction: The Seduced Woman and Seduction as Social Crime .................................................................................................................................. 131 2.3.2. Prostitution Reform: “Saving Women” to Save Men and the Middle Classes .................................................................................................................................. 138 2.3.3. What Women Should Be Saved: Class and Prostitution Reform ................... 141 2.3.4. Prostitution Reform: Saving Women to Save Men ........................................ 144 2.4. Coda: Seduction Law ............................................................................................ 149 2.5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 150 Chapter Three – The Question of Male Unity: George Lippard’s Brotherhood of the Union, The Killers, and Washington and His Men ...................................................... 152 3.1. Introduction: George Lippard, The Killers, and Washington and His Men ......... 152 3.2. Lippard’s Politics .................................................................................................. 161 3.3. The Killers: Slavery, Corruption and Broken Masculinity ................................... 165 3.4. Washington and His Men: Ideal Masculinity and the Memory of the Revolution179 3.5. The Brotherhood of the Union: Crafting Ideal Men and an Ideal Nation ............ 189 3.6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 201 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 203 Works Cited ................................................................................................................. 213 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: “Grand Pic-Nic At Hoboken”………………………………...43 Figure 1.2: “Lives of Nymphs”…………………………………………...45 Figure 1.3: “Wants to Know”……………………………………………..47 Figure 1.4: “Dinnertime”………………………………………………….51 Figure 1.5: “The Frail Fair”…………………………………………..…...60 Figure 1.6: “A grand ball”………………………………………………...63 Figure 1.7: “Put a ‘noder eel in dat bunch”……………………………….89 Figure 1.8: “Grand Trial Dance”………………………………………….93 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many thanks to give to the individuals and institutions that helped make this dissertation possible. I want to start by thanking professors and mentors who helped me along my path at critical points early on in my educational career. At Palomar College, Martin Japtok and Carlton Smith offered support and encouragement that bolstered my confidence and excitement about literature. At UC Santa Cruz, Christine Hong was instrumental in guiding me on my path to graduate school. She spent hours of her personal time and energy on helping me to edit and hone my research proposal, offering an unshakable and assured belief in my abilities. My research and writing was supported in part by generous grants and fellowships. Thanks to a dissertation writing fellowship from the UCSD Literature Department I was able to take a break from teaching and focus on my research, which was crucial to finishing this project. I want to also thank the UC Humanities Research Institute, which awarded me a Dissertation Support Grant that greatly aided my research. I would not have been able to write Chapter Two or so fully explore the world of sporting men if it were not for the American Antiquarian Society, which loaned me their microfilm copies of the magazines. Thank you to Marie E. Lamoureux for coordinating these loans on a few occasions. I also want to thank the Interlibrary Loan staff at UCSD for acquiring the many difficult-to-find texts for my research. A Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia allowed me conduct extensive research into the work of George Lippard, his Brotherhood of the Union, reform societies and much more. Thank you to James Green of the Library Company for talking with me viii about Lippard and for pointing me to all the relevant source material. A special thank you to Cornelia King for her exhaustive knowledge