Quivering Adam: Male hysteria and the construction of masculinity in early American literature
Description
As its title implies, this study offers an elaboration of the Adamic myth in American literature that was popularized by R. W. B. Lewis in his influential book, The American Adam (1955) by examining that myth through the lens of hysteria as a means to understand better the construction of American manhood. Covering roughly the same period that Lewis does, this inquiry focuses on the anxiety that some of these heroes felt when they were forced to confront the psychological realities of self-definition in the new republic. By looking at the anxiety that necessarily accompanied the American Adam's feeling of possibility and promise, a richer and more complex understanding of the era's construction of a national subject emerges A number of writers used the emergent language and dramatic imagery of nineteenth-century hysteria, with all its contradictory meanings and pejorative connotations of femininity, to address their fears about what it meant to be a national subject in the new republic, a subject that was unsurprisingly gendered male. Examining these texts in light of the contradictions involved in contemporary understandings of hysteria reveals important incongruities within the texts themselves about who or what constitutes a national subject. Although primarily considered a feminine illness for most of its history, the specific language that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century around hysteria provided a rich vocabulary of symptoms and cures for the authors examined here, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to describe the anxiety inherent in nascent American masculinity. In fact, I contend that it is precisely because of hysteria's connection to femininity that writers found its language such a useful tool for expressing the undefined and uncertain masculinity of the early republic