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  • "A Man's Sense of Domesticity":Donald Grant Mitchell's Suburban Vision
  • Maura D'Amore (bio)

Throughout Rural Studies, with Hints for Country Places, a collection of essays compiled in 1867 as a meditative guide for men who sought to relocate beyond America's urban centers, Donald Grant Mitchell personifies the domestic landscape as a woman whose trust and affection must be won by way of artistic vision and persistence. "A country home," he asserts,

will not yield its largest enjoyments to any who adopt it in virtue of a mere whim; there must be love; and with love, patience; and with patience, trust. The mistress who wears the golden daffodils in her hair, and the sweet violets at her girdle, and heaps her lap every autumn time with fruit, must be conciliated, and humored, and rewarded, and flattered, and caressed. She resents capricious and fitful attentions—like a woman; receiving them smilingly, and sulking when they are done.1

In turn, as he later suggests, a house should "court" its visitors, appearing to be mysterious and witty as it reveals its charms by degree. The approaching drive, the placement of the house on the lot, and the positions of trees and shrubs, according [End Page 135] to Mitchell, contribute to a sense of excitement and allure for resident and visitor alike. Referring to the "partial concealment of the beauties that confront the eye" in the design of home and landscape as "art management," he asks readers to look for desire, suspension, and ultimate gratification in the experience of domestic life, arguing that such qualities "quicken the zest with which the natural beauties, as successively unfolded, are enjoyed," effectively "wed[ding] the home to the view; . . . drap[ing] the bride, and teach[ing] us the piquant value of a 'coy, reluctant, amorous delay'" (RS, 178, 179).

In an effort to delineate possibilities for what he calls "a man's sense of domesticity" (RS, 273), Mitchell aestheticizes the domestic sphere and classifies home design and even the act of living as a form of art. Criticizing housewives for a brand of utilitarianism that leaves no room for "true home relish" in its unceasing commitment to organization, cleanliness, temperance, and morality, he designates "livab[ility]" as the ultimate goal of men's domestic efforts, associating it with attitudes and decorative elements "that suggest easy comfort, ample room, odd loitering nooks, indefinite play of fire-light and lamp-light, wide and unpretentious hospitality" (RS, 272, 273, 272). Mitchell formulated and refined these ideas over the course of his literary career within the context of larger trends in community formation, both geographically and in print, eventually locating in suburbanization a solution to the frustrations with feminine domesticity that he had voiced early on. In Rural Studies and in previous writings about the experience of country life within city reach that lead up to the 1867 volume, Mitchell urges American men to cultivate a masculine domesticity of self-nurture as an antidote to the malaise of urban life and the strictures of feminine self-sacrifice.2 Replacing fears of subjugation and stasis with the pleasures of an elaborate symbolic courtship, his suburban vision enlists the domestic in an ongoing defense of the bounds of male personhood and the fulfillment of individual dreams and aspirations.3 [End Page 136]

Dreams of a Different Sort of Domestic Life: Immobilizing Visions in Reveries of a Bachelor

The few critics who discuss Donald Grant Mitchell in the context of nineteenth-century print culture have focused on the popular success of Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart, which sold 14,000 copies in its first year and was reprinted almost 100 times between its appearance in book form in 1850 and Mitchell's death in 1907.4 Organized as a four-part, first-person contemplation of bachelorhood, marriage, family, and home narrated by Paul, a single man in his mid-twenties, it is also a meditation on life and death. Relaxing in a comfortable chair in his Connecticut cottage with a dog at his side, Paul stares into the fire and dreams about past, present, and future. Readers are invited to follow his flights of fancy...

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