Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy, and Charles Brockden Brown's Editorship of The Monthly Magazine and American Review (review)

Sharon Stone's return as Catherine Tramell, pulp novelist and icy femme fatale, in the film Basic Instinct 2 appears, quite frankly, to offer little to moviegoers anywhere, much less to those interested in gender relations in early American print culture or the periodical editing of Charles Brockden Brown. The movie's central character, Tramell, engages in a psychosexual tussle with shrink Dr. Michael Glass, who, in turn, becomes obsessed with her guilt, or perhaps innocence, as a sensual serial killer. According to many critics of the film, the movie is just plain trash and suffers from a sensational, raunchy plot, unrealistic characters and motivations, and clichéd dialogue.

In a variety of ways though, the reviews of Stone's film recall Brown's career as a novelist, gothic and otherwise, and the perception, as Jane Tompkins and others have pointed out, that his novels were too fractured and formulaic and have never really measured up to mainstream American literature. By extension, his subsequent career as an editor of, and "hack writer" for, various periodical publications has also always been seen as suspect and evidence of further artistic failure. In this unique context, it seems useful to ask what happens when such a film brushes up against work like Brown's in general, and a monograph such as Scott Slawinski's Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy, and Charles Brockden Brown's Editorship of The Monthly Magazine and American Review in particular. Is it possible for modern media to augment analysis of the ways Brown's editing of The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799–1800), like his fiction, represented early republican anxiety over changing social mores for men and women? Likewise, what can a study of eighteenth-century periodical literature tell us today?

Like Michael Cody's recent study Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary Magazine, Slawinski's Validating Bachelorhood examines Brown's role as a periodical editor and the cultural relevance of his publication. Slawinski specifically looks at the manner in which Brown represented gender concerns in order to sustain a readership and argues that Brown's magazine betrays his efforts to "establish a space where single men could find validation of their unmarried status and where married men who shared the nation's attitudes toward the bachelor would find their beliefs challenged and their notions of married life subverted" (14). Brown, he maintains, used his New York periodical as "a vehicle for establishing a male readership, for challenging the negative stereotypes of the single man and the positive stereotype of the married man, and for validating bachelorhood as a viable alternative form of early republican masculinity" (99). However, despite its efforts to map gender and print relationships and its success in identifying how Brown interrogates the patriarchal status quo, many will find the inability of Validating Bachelorhood to accurately account for Brown's Wollstonecraftian ideas about women its major shortcoming.

Using R.W. Connell's argument about hegemonic masculinities and Mark E. Kann's assertions about bachelorhood in the early republic, Slawinski opens his study by situating Brown's personal and professional life amid work on classical and liberal republicanism, recent research on hegemony and masculinity and the social status of single, unmarried men, and previous Brown scholarship. He relies on a historical-psychobiographical reading of Brown's life and work, and casts Brown as emotionally unstable —as regularly registering "complaints in one form or another about the course of his life" (2), being nearly suicidal because of personal and professional pressures, and evincing the habits of an "undisciplined writer" (3). "Neurotic to the end," he says, Brown has anxieties that "are rooted in the historical moment, in the immense changes in the political, economic, and social fabric wrought by the American Revolution and the turbulence of the 1790s" (4). Through his editing, though, Brown interrogated patriarchal authority structures and shed light on how single...