100
PARTISAN REVIEW
mined the power of the fathers . It was not simply that leading family
patriarchs were in decline. Fathers up and down the unstable social scale ,
tempted by the "mammon" of acquisition, were no longer the repositories
of virtue . These problematic fathers appear in different forms throughout
antebellum culture . In the best-selling temperance novel,
T en Nights in a
Bar-room,
for example, "the predominating sensuality" of every single
father has endangered his family. The fathers are marked by their "gross
sensual expressions ... particularly around the mouth "; these mouths fasten
on the glass and the bottle . Either the father himself or his son has deserted
the family for the alternative, all male family of the ihn. The greed-ridden
fathers appear strong ; in fact they are weak. They lose control of their sons
to " the monster intemperance" and the book climaxes with a "parricide ."
With father 's virtue held hostage in the marketplace, mother became
the repository of morality . The mothers in
T en Nights
all embody virtue .
They are powerless, to be sure , against the "eating cancer" of drink, but
their weakness , so closely tied to their purity, is only one side of the
problem. Maternal dependence, as the image of the bottle suggests, is no
more acceptable than amoral, marketplace freedom. Maternal bonds
threatened not merely the son's independence , but as Christopher Lasch has
recently shown, his sexual identity as well. The nineteenth-century con–
jugal family was losing central social and productive relations . The urban
father usually worked in a mysterious world away from home; even ifhe did
not, the forces impinging on his working world were removed and imper–
sonal. Natural affection rather than social function, wrote Tocqueville,
characterized the ties between parent and child. But natural affection in a
withdrawn family intensified claustrophobic, libidinal ties . Sentimental
novels like
Ten Nights
spiritualized incestuous temptations, and consum–
mated them (once for father and daughter in
Ten N ights,
once for mother
and son) in the child's death . When Melville's
Pierre
exposed the incestuous
roots of familial loves and
liebestodten,
he tore the veil off mysteries, the
American Whig Review
charged, that should forever be "shrouded in deco–
rous darkness, " and struck "with an impious hand, at the very foundations
of society ." Melville was accused of exposure, not calumny. The self-made
man had
to
free himself not only from weakened fathers but from loving
mothers as well .
The Jacksonian individual escaped his problematic parents by becom–
ing both father and mother of himself. As father, he slayed maternal images
ofluxury, materialism, dependence, and sensuality . The "monster intem–
perance," like Masonic conspiracies and Popish plots, appeared at the
fringes of antebellum politics; four monsters progressively defined its
center. These were the bloodthirsty Indian "children of nature" ; "the old
