Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Trouble in paradise: bachelors and bourgeois domesticity
- Chapter 2 Susceptibility and the single man: the constitution of the bachelor invalid
- Chapter 3 An artist and a bachelor: Henry James, mastery, and the life of art
- Chapter 4 A way of looking on: bachelor narration in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Chapter 5 The necessary melancholy of bachelors: melancholy, manhood, and modernist narrative
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Susceptibility and the single man: the constitution of the bachelor invalid
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Trouble in paradise: bachelors and bourgeois domesticity
- Chapter 2 Susceptibility and the single man: the constitution of the bachelor invalid
- Chapter 3 An artist and a bachelor: Henry James, mastery, and the life of art
- Chapter 4 A way of looking on: bachelor narration in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Chapter 5 The necessary melancholy of bachelors: melancholy, manhood, and modernist narrative
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The author of an 1871 essay, published in the popular British periodical Once a Week and entitled “Bachelor Invalids and Male Nurses,” summarizes his three-fold purpose in writing:
This point I shall endeavour to prove — in the first place, to mitigate the real anxiety which women naturally feel when they know that their bachelor friends or relations are ill, and left to the tender mercies of hirelings and the rougher sex; in the next place, to divert the freely bestowed compassion of susceptible and impulsive natures from useless channels; and lastly, in the hope that some reminiscences of bachelor sick-rooms may be found entertaining, and not altogether uninstructive.
The set of aims he describes — to mitigate anxiety, to divert compassion from useless channels, and to entertain — might well describe the charge of the nineteenth-century sick-nurse. The male writer of this essay claims that he does not believe that men make better nurses than women: “Far be it from me to underrate the merits of female nurses, or to depreciate the fortitude, patience, and devotion with which thousands upon thousands of them are continually sacrificing time, rest, and health in tending sufferers. My aim is to show that men can, at a humble distance, follow their example” (p. 318).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850–1925 , pp. 64 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999