 | hero's behavior remains fairly conventionally gender bound. But once the 'gentle boy' is removed from the street and street occupations and is placed in a private, at least minimally genteel domestic setting, he and his boy friends begin to differentiate themselves along (for boys of Alger's day, or of our own) highly unconventional gender-role lines." Running their household as if in accord with Catharine Beecher's principles of "scientific" domesticity, Alger's boys also begin to assume the customary roles, with the more "dominant" type often playing the maternal one. "'The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes,''' pp. 97, 99.
|
| 54. "Roaming Poet Buys a Home."
|
| 55. Ibid.
|
| 56. W. D. Howells, "Editor's Easy Chair,"
Harpers Monthly 136
(December 1917), 148-49.
|
| 57. Kevin Starr,
Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 242.
|
| 58. Ibid., p. 248.
|
| 59. Isobel Strong Field to Stoddard, [? March] 1882 (HM 37963, The Huntington Library).
|
| 60. Theodore Roosevelt, whose gender ideal of "the strenous life" was antithetical to Stoddard's aestheticism, was speaking for popular American opinion when he remarked to George Cabot Lodge: "How remarkably Oscar Wilde has vindicated Nordhouse's judgement [Max Nordau, in
Degeneration
(1895)]. I took some pleasure in explaining to John Hay the other day, who is a champion of the Yellow Book, that the writers and illustrators of that pleasing periodical were on the high road to precisely the same kind of fate that overtook Oscar Wilde, [Wilde, in fact, was never published in
The Yellow Book.]
Unhealthiness, hysteria, morbid criminality, and absence of wholesome regard for what is pure and decent and truthful and brave, bring about mere rottenness in the end." Letter of 10 April 1895; quoted in John W. Crowley, "'Dear Bay': Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to George Cabot Lodge,"
New York History
53 (April 1972), 183. Stoddard considered Roosevelt to be a madman, better suited to an asylum than the White House. Reacting to the new strenuosity of San Francisco at the turn of the century, Stoddard wrote to a friend that he was "homesick for the life which is not Teddyfied, as all life on this coast today isCursed be the name of Roseveldt
[sic]!"
Stoddard to Jenny Johns Peet, 29 May 1907; quoted in Stroven. "A Life," p. 310.
|
| 61. Stoddard to Will Stuart, 23 September 1882 (location unknown).
|
| 62. Sedgwick,
Between Men,
pp. 216-17.
|
| 1. Stoddard to Harry Van Dyke, 8 September 1903; letter copied in Stoddard's Notebook (The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley).
|
|
