The weight of the world, it seemed, rested on the bachelor's shoulders. And the4 conflicts and stresses registered in certain bachelor texts rerive from the peculari situiion of bachelor identiy in the antebellum phase of its emergence. The bachelor occupies an ambigious position within the mid-Victorian system of sex, gender and body ideologies. Not yet the subject of etiquette books such as the complete bachelor (1896, no longer an adresse of younge men's guides of the thirties and forties (in which the owrd "bachelor" can barely be mnetioned, nowhere to be found in the treatises on domestic life and martial sexuality, the bachelor's sociosexual identity is undefined and unrelgulated. Located in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshokld between domestication and transgression, the bachelor is a liminal concept in atebellum culture, and a strantional s tate within proper masculine devolpment...

Fireside Chasity, The Erotics of Sentimental Bahelorhood in the 1850s, Vincent J Bertolini, from Sentimental Men 29.