The Horrors of the Half-Known Life

Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in 19th. Century America

G.J. Barker-Benfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781138155091
• eBook ISBN: 9781135959852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Now a classic in the field, The Horrors of the Half-KnownLife is an important foundational text in the construction of masculinity, female identity, and the history of midwivery.

Part I The Sexes in Tocqueville’s America

1 The American Man

DOI: 10.4324/9780203009802-1

Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were so moved by the story of a French couple’s flight to the American West that they made a pilgrimage to Frenchman’s Island in Lake Oneida, where the couple had found refuge. Tocqueville embodied the experience in Democracy in America, and Beaumont shaped his sociological novel Marie according to the original account of the flight. There is a sharp contrast between the “tranquil joys” and the “charms of conjugal union” of the French couple whom Beaumont and Tocqueville envisioned in “a new Eden,” and the picture they each presented of the relations that existed between a typical American and his wife, whether in the wild West or in the settled East. The imaginations of Tocqueville and Beaumont were captured, not by the Frenchman’s braving the wilderness, nor by his fleeing society, but by the relationship, under daunting circumstances, between the man and the woman.¹

Tocqueville’s observations of the typical American male’s behavior in the face of the wilderness provide a suggestive frame for an account of his observations of the typical sexual relations between an American man and his wife. “Everywhere extreme civilization and nature abandoned to herself find themselves together, and as it were, face to face.” Tocqueville was sensitive to his natural surroundings. In spite of his soul’s penetration “by a sort of religious terror” he “couldn’t keep from admiring the supreme horror of the place,” the wilderness. On one occasion he and his companion were softened into a rare state of consciousness, beyond the will to express it. Open to see nature’s momentary equilibrium, Tocqueville became aware of the corresponding dimension of his own body.

The canoe slid without effort or noise. There reigned about us, a universal quietness and serenity. We ourselves soon felt as if it were softened by such a spectacle. Our words began to come more and more rarely. Soon we expressed our thoughts only in a whisper; finally we fell silent; and lifting our paddles in unison, the two of us sank into a tranquil reverie full of inexpressible charm…. Who will ever faithfully paint these rare moments in life, when physical well-being prepares you for moral tranquility, and when, before your eyes, as it were, a perfect equilibrium is established in the universe; when the soul, half asleep, balances between the present and the future, between the real and the possible, when, surrounded by beautiful nature, breathing calm and balmy air, at peace with himself in a universal peace, man lends his ear to the even beating in his arteries whose every throb marks the passage of time which, for him, seems to flow drop by drop in eternity.

He presented these feelings as “the sweetest and most natural emotions of the heart.”²

Apparently the American man did not experience such feelings; he took the confrontation with nature in his stride. “A daily witness of these marvels, the American sees nothing astonishing in them. This unbelievable destruction, this still more surprising growth, seem to him the usual procedure of the events of the world.” Thoreau made a similar generalization: “For one that comes [to the woods] with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle.”³

The American’s treatment of the Indian, Tocqueville observed, was as ruthless as his approach to nature. He followed his account of the Indians (whom he found pathetic after reading François-René de Chateaubriand and James Fenimore Cooper) with a bitter analysis of the American hypocrisy which rationalized the Indians’ destruction. He described the white American response to a drunken Indian lying in their way in terms which we shall see later at the heart of Tocqueville’s view of American male psychology—“insensibility,” “cold and implacable”—not only in connection with the fate of the Indian but in the attitude toward nature generally and toward the American woman. “In the heart of this society, so policed, so prudish, so sententiously unreal and virtuous, one encounters a complete insensibility, a sort of cold and implacable egoism when it’s a question of the American indigenies…. This world belongs to us, add they… The true proprietors of this continent are those who know how to take advantage of its riches.”⁴

Those proprietors “understood” the land insofar as it could be turned into money. If “it’s a question of gaining a dollar” the American could understand crossing almost impenetrable forests, passing deep rivers, braving pestilential swamps, sleeping exposed to the damp of the woods. “But that one should do such things through curiosity, that’s something that doesn’t reach his intelligence… that one has a high regard for great trees and a beautiful solitude, that’s entirely incomprehensible to him.” To get Americans to show them the way across the wilderness, Tocqueville and Beaumont had to pretend that they too were interested in a fiscal relation to it. The American, in contrast to the Indian and Frenchman, was “tenacious,” “cold,” and “pitiless” in his struggle against the soil and savage life. “He struggles ceaselessly against it, despoils it daily of some of its attributes.”⁵

In Tocqueville’s account, the demands of this struggle affected the attitude of the American male toward his wife and family. Intent “on the one goal of making his fortune, the emigrant has finally created for himself an altogether individual existence. Family sentiments have come to fuse themselves in a vast egoism, and it is doubtful if in his wife and children he sees anything else than a detached portion of himself.” This is Tocqueville’s portrait of the pioneer American wife “in her prime”:

time has weighed heavily on her; in her prematurely pale face and shrunken limbs, it is easy to see that existence has been a heavy burden for her. It is in fact, this frail creature who has already found herself exposed to unbelievable miseries. To devote herself to austere duties, submit herself to privations which were unknown to her, embrace an existence for which she was not made, such was the occupation of the finest years of her life, such have been for her the delights of marriage. Want, suffering and loneliness have affected her constitution, but not bowed her courage. ’Mid the profound sadness painted on her delicate features, you may easily remark a religious resignation and profound peace, and I know not what natural and tranquil firmness confronting all the miseries of life without fearing or scorning them. Around this woman crowd half naked children, shining with health, careless of the woman, veritable sons of the wilderness. From time to time their mother throws on them a look of melancholy and joy. To see their strength and her weakness one would say that she had exhausted herself, giving them life, and that she does not regret what they have cost her.

D.H.Lawrence described the homesteader wife as a “poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the wilderness, nine times out of ten,” and Hamlin Garland asserted in 1892 that such a life of self-denial (repression some would say) cost her her sanity:” ‘Oh, the fate of the women!’ ‘Yes, it’s a matter of statistics…that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums.’ “Eighty years earlier Benjamin Rush suggested that the solitude of a country life in America predisposed women to madness.⁶

According to Tocqueville, devotion, submission, courageous resignation, and self-denial were also characteristic of American wives back East. Their husbands shared the psychology of the American male out West. “The man you left in New York you find again in almost impenetrable solitudes…same clothes, same attitude, same language, same habits, same pleasures…the spirit of equality has spread a singularly even coloring over the inner habits of life. Now, note this well, it is precisely these same men who each year go to people the wilderness.” The acquisitiveness, the constant motion, and the excited pursuit of chance characterized the American democrat, at home and on the frontier, and as we shall see, it was the anxieties generated by American democratic conditions that shaped a common view of women. According to Tocqueville, this “unknown man is the representative of a race to which belongs the future of the new world.” It was a “nation of conquerors who submit themselves to the savage life without ever allowing themselves to be seduced by it.” American men “shut themselves in the American solitudes with an axe and some newspapers.” The typical American man left the social “bosom” that nurtured his early years, his “natal earth”; avoiding “staking” his life “on the throw of the dice or the destinies of a woman,” he converted his desire “into the labours of the wilderness.” He pursued an obsessive but confined ambition under circumstances that stirred Tocqueville to reverential awe. “Is a man capable of such sacrifices, a cold and insensible being? Ought not one, on the contrary, to recognize in him one of those mental passions, so burning, so tenacious, so implacable?”⁷

Tocqueville sensed that he had been led to “see the still empty cradle of a great nation.” The terms accompanying the birth were violent and destructive, as one would expect, since they were in the hands of that cold, implacable pioneer. “It’s the idea of destruction, this conception of near and inevitable change, which gives in our opinion, so original a character, and so touching a beauty to the solitudes of America.” Democracy marched inexorably into the forest. The representative American, hard, closed off from the feelings regarded by Tocqueville as “natural to the heart,” compelled himself pitilessly to the destruction of the Indian and the exploitation of nature, his wife, and perhaps himself.⁸

The Arena

DOI: 10.4324/9780203009802-2

Pioneer couples have not captured American myth. The lone hunter of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumppo, realized the promise of total mobility because he was free of women. Lawrence represented Natty’s life style as the “wish fulfilment” of a man otherwise shackled by the obligations of marriage and work. Arthur Moore, too, links the fantasy to the mundanity of settlement: the creation of “playful savages” “appears to owe quite as much to the dark irrational content of the metropolitan unconscious as to the physical frontier.” Indeed the frontiersman was largely a creation of the eastern imagination.¹

Cooper’s lone hunter could not be integrated into ordered society. According to Lawrence, “Natty had no business marrying. His mission was elsewhere…. A philosophic old soul, he does not give much for the temptations of sex. Probably he dies virgin.” He asserted that “childless, womenless men…are the new great thing …the inception of new humanity…. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Lawrence, child of a dominant mother and weak father, rootless, dipping for energy into woman and nature, shared this mythology.²

American history is in several ways the interplay between male activity construed as free with the heterosexual obligations of settlement. The bachelor in the nineteenth century was a more genteel version of the hunter, and one that perhaps could sit more comfortably on the civilized knee of the reading public. Cooper’s Notions of the Americans retained the form of his Leatherstocking novels, a dialogue between unattached males and married society. The “Notions” were “Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor,” who wrote letters describing them to members of an all-male club. The sole qualification for membership was bachelorhood. It was this sexual definition that made the narrator an outsider, traveling beyond heterosexual society, just as Natty did. To marry was to “fall,” to destroy the freedom of autonomy: marriage was a “malady,” showing “symptoms.” That is, it represented a threat to a man’s body. It shackled and humiliated; according to the bachelors, sexual union was a painful and permanent form of subordination and women were perennial dangers.³

One way of keeping woman at arm’s length was to make her an abstraction, and go through the motions of manifesting “a proper spirit of homage to the loveliness of the sex,” and in that way avoid any real contact, any consideration of a woman as an individual person. Homage to the sex was one fantasy the bachelors could play with; another had the respective elevations reversed: “There is a good deal of Caesar in my composition, as respects the sex; unless I could be first with the Houris I believe I should be willing to abandon Paradise itself, in order to seek pre-eminence in some humbler sphere.” They explained the form of their sexual lives by “ambitious temperament,” which “has been our bane, and has condemned us to the heartless and unsocial life we lead.” They said they had banished settled heterosexuality to the imagination: “alas! what is the testimony of one who can point to no fireside, no house-hold of his own but the dreaming reverie of a heated brain.”⁴

The bachelors were both attracted and repelled by the idea of marriage. The narrator in the introduction to the second volume of Notions of the Americans explained that he had just escaped having to give up his bachelor chair in the club, from “a cause so fatal as marriage.” He claimed a triumph in not being married: most “other [than English] husbands consider matrimony, more or less, a convenience; but these downright moralists talk of its obligations and duties. Obligations! There is our [American bachelor’s] triumph.” Leslie Fiedler has pointed out that “the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run…to avoid …the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility.”⁵

The ambivalent attitudes of Cooper’s bachelors toward women and marriage, their susceptibility to reverie, travels, and encounters with a variety of women only to part from them, were all characteristic of the theme of bachelorhood in nineteenth-century litera ture. Characteristic too was the group identity of bachelors in a club, drawn together as “brothers,” perhaps by the construing of sexual relations as a war. Sexual conflict was intensified in America by the hypostasis of sex and race in place of class identification or at least by the much greater emphasis on physiological identity.

Reveries of a Bachelor by Ik Marvel, pseudonym of Donald Mitchell, was one of the best-selling novels of 1850. By 1859 it had gone through thirty-nine printings. The autobiographical bachelor, claiming to be the “only safe and secure observer of all phases of married life,” sat poker in hand before a fire, enjoying t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction to the First Edition
• Part I The Sexes in Tocqueville’s America
• 1 The American Man
• 2 The Arena
• 3 Work and Sex
• 4 Democratic Fathers and Democratic Sons
• 5 Freedom of Intercourse
• 6 Strong Men over Orderly Women
• Part II From Midwives to Gynecologists
• 7 The Absence of Midwives from America
• 8 Democratic Doctors
• 9 The Rise of Gynecology
• 10 Architect of the Vagina
• 11 Sexual Surgery
• Part III The Lightning-Rod Man
• 12 The Reverend John Todd
• 13 Primers for Anxiety
• 14 Todd’s Masturbation Phobia
• 15 The Spermatic Economy and Proto-Sublimation
• 16 Men Earn—Women Spend
• 17 Woman’s Refinement
• 18 Sex and Anarchy
• 19 From Mother to Mother Earth
• Part IV Augustus Kinsley Gardner
• 20 Dr. Gardner’s Education
• 21 Gardner’s Career
• 22 The Physical Decline of American Women
• 23 Punishing Women
• 24 The Great Organ of Communication
• Notes to Chapters
• Index