Boys at Home: Discipline, Masculinity, and "The Boy-Problem" in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Introduction: Literary Critics and “The Boy”

Introduction literAry critics And “the Boy” The Boy is a dreadful animal, under whatever aspect we regard him. —“Against Boys,” 1863 The good conduct of our boys has at all times cheered and comforted us, and spread around our home the invaluable blessings of peace, content, and love. —Boys at Home, 1854 The boy problem is confessedly one of the most perplexing with which . . . society has to deal. —The Advocate of Peace, 1845 In many ways, the figure of “the boy” has been at the center of our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and culture in the United States. Boy characters like Tom Sawyer and the “good bad-boys” that followed in his wake have been seen as crucial metaphors for numerous kinds of male-centered literary , political, social, economic, and moral value systems. As the visionary young American Adam, the boy is a sign of American exceptionalism, Thoreauvian individualism, and Emersonian self-reliance. He often serves as an occasion for reveries about the country’s “innocent” past because, like the early nation, he is adventurous and rough around the edges, with a heart that is always in the right place. In the form of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and other upwardly mobile boy heroes, he represents the future of the capitalist patriarchy. He can even be seen, as Huck Finn is, as a figure for the writer who resists an emasculating culture; in this formulation, Twain’s protagonist embodies an American consciousness articulated in an authentic dialect that expresses universal—which is to say American and male—truths. The boy is thus inscribed as all that is traditionally not feminine. Even more so than the adult male, he has come to be a kind of critical shorthand for the physical and ideological spaces outside of the home, spaces often defined xii introduction in opposition to formations of sentimentalism. We can understand sentiment, domesticity, women, and girls in literature and history, the argument goes, by conjuring Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, or their many quintessentially American antecedents and descendants, like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo or any number of Ernest Hemingway protagonists, characters who seem to personify the masculinist critique of home values and the suffocating bonds of domesticity . Given that children were perhaps the great obsession of nineteenthcentury domestic theorists, it is surprising that boys have not been studied as the carefully produced offspring of domestic ideology, rather than the antithesis of it. Many recent critical discussions of the domestic, such as Amy Kaplan’s “Manifest Domesticity,” are largely interested in the political and national implications of domestic theory. My interest, however, is closer to home. I employ the term “domestic ideology” to refer to writings about the family environment and relationships within it (such as parent-child, mother-daughter, brother-sister), and I include under this heading writings addressed to adults and children about boys, their nature, and how they should be treated by family members. In addition, I examine writings about children and school that are closely related to domestic discourse and often express similar beliefs about boys and management.1 A fundamental conflation—confusing “the boy” and “boys”—has plagued literary and historical studies. “The boy” has been so useful as a way into broader social and historical concerns that we have ignored what writings about boyhood have to say about boys and their relationship to the culture in which they lived. Educators and authors from Horace Mann and Jacob Abbott to Louisa May Alcott and Lydia Sigourney certainly talked about “the boy,” yet they were not interested in making abstract claims about, say, “the boy as figure for the nation,” but in furthering a literary and pedagogical dialogue about the meanings and functions of boys in public and private spaces. Sigourney, for example, wrote a history of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius that she believed would serve as a “domestic education” for her boy readers (iii). She meant that not only could the book be used in home instruction, but that it would be an education in home values. Boys would learn of Aurelius’s achievements in public life and, far more importantly, of the domestic virtues of familial affection and social obligation that made his narrative exemplary. These authors were especially anxious about the difficulties that boys posed for the culture at large; those who were not well managed when young presented numerous problems when older, becoming neglectful fathers, abusive husbands, dishonest merchants, or even slave-owners. To avoid such outcomes, domestic theorists wrote...