Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature, and: Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Both David Greven in Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature and Cindy Weinstein in Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature rethink conventional narratives of affective bonds. Greven’s book examines antebellum literature and some of its most canonical texts and protagonists to argue that inviolate manhood is a persistent trope often underexamined by literary scholars. Weinstein rereads the sentimental novel and revises its articulation of familial affiliation. Taken together, the authors show us how mid-nineteenth-century literature resists the habitual, be it with respect to the conjugal family, homosocial fraternity, or heterosexual relations.

The texts and characters that Greven reads are characterized by their refusal to cede to the demands of homosociality and heterosexuality. “The crucial works of American Romanticism explored in this study...offer a roughly cohesive version of American manhood, a manhood desperately resolved to remain inviolate, defensively posed against the threat of multifarious desires from both Woman and the homosocial sphere” (2). Caught amidst two dominant antebellum narratives, self-made manhood and hygienic reform, Greven sees the inviolate male’s “determined resistance to assimilation into regimes of the normal” (59). At its finest, Men Beyond Desire interrogates the inclination to “render abject the isolate” (54). Greven particularly is concerned that contemporary criticism too readily celebrates homosociality as transgressive, and his study demonstrates that “it was itself a socially engineered, deeply endemic, pervasive aspect of culture” (55).

With chapters on Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Stowe, we meet protagonists who resist the pull of compulsory heterosexuality and fraternity. Arthur Dimmesdale quite literally would rather die than yield to Hester Prynne’s or Roger Chillingworth’s competing intimacies. While Greven’s revelation may bring new life to Hawthorne’s scaffold, some of his readings are more successful than others. His chapter on Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of the more substantial chapters in its close attention to the primary text and its reading of extra-literary contexts. Other chapters–and those on Arthur Dimmesdale and Roderick Usher come to mind–seem more willful in their readings of singular textual moments as representative of the demand for and defiance of Jacksonian manhood. Indeed, I found Men Beyond Desire capacious in its range of reference and yet often maddeningly narrow in its cultural scope. Jackson, with “his raw masculine appeal” becomes a cardboard cutout made to stand too rigidly and repeatedly “against the threat of gender instability, serial deviance, and racial Otherness” (7). For me, the repetition of the anti-masturbation campaigns across several chapters lost its nuance. I wanted to hear more about self-making and inviolateness, and more discussion, for instance, of the role of capitalist competition in the inviolate male’s refusal of desire. Finally, the absence of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (Greven’s study does extend to the turn of the twentieth century but only briefly mentions James’s story) seems puzzling. I would have liked Greven to unmask John Marcher’s “beast,” testing the chronological limits and cultural tentacles of the antebellum imperatives central to his book.

Like David Greven’s work, Cindy Weinstein’s Family, Kinship, and Sympathy asks its readers to see intimacy “unhinge[ed]” (20), in Weinstein’s case, from the biological family. Her book is a lucid and lively rejoinder to debates in literary studies about sentimentalism. While “sentimental novels are often denounced on the grounds that their generic prescription requires an unthinking and conservative allegiance to marriage and the restoration of family order” (30), Weinstein argues that the “cultural work of sentimental fictions is nothing less than an interrogation and reconfiguration of what constitutes a family” (9). Sentimental novels are dedicated to the “reconstitution of affectionate bonds through other means...