1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures: Nature; Addresses, and Lectures; Essays: First and Second Series; Representative Men; English Traits; The Conduct of Life (New York: Library of America, 1983), 64Google Scholar. I am grateful to Leslie Bow and David Glimp for their help on earlier drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to Bob Levine for sharp suggestions and for his invitation to present an earlier version in the Americanist Lecture Series at the University of Maryland, College Park.

2. Gattens, Moira, “Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Conbay, Katie, Medina, Nadia, and Stanbury, Sarah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 81Google Scholar.

3. Ibid., 86.

4. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1990), 18Google Scholar.

5. Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 6Google Scholar.

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8. Emerson, , “The Individual,” in Early Lectures, 2: 176Google Scholar.

9. Trall, R. N., Home Treatment for Sexual Diseases. A Practical Treatise on the Nature and Causes of Excessive and Unnatural Sexual Indulgence, the Diseases and Injuries Resulting Therefrom, with Their Symptoms and Hydropathic Management (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1853), 57Google Scholar.

10. Calhoun, George R., Report of the Consulting Surgeon on Sprematorrhea, or Seminal Weakness, Impotence, the Vice of Onanism, Masturbation, or Self-Abuse, and Other Diseases of the Sexual Organs (1858)Google Scholar, in The Secret Vice Exposed! Some Arguments Against Masturbation, ed. Rosenberg, Charles and Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll (New York: Arno, 1974), 5Google Scholar. Peter Gay's discussion of the circumstances surrounding the publication of Calhoun's pamphlet points to the philanthropic patronage of antimasturbation discourse. In 1858, a group of public health crusaders paid for the printing and free distribution of 5,000 copies of Calhoun's report and three years later funded a new edition. See Gay, , Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience — Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 296–98Google Scholar.

11. Calhoun, , Report, 6Google Scholar.

12. Emerson, , “The Individual,” in Early Lectures, 2: 176Google Scholar.

13. Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 148, 170Google Scholar. See also Thomas, John L., “Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,” American Quarterly 17 (Winter 1965): 656–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kaul, A. N., The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Yale University Press, 1963), 8–32Google Scholar. On the individualist character of antislavery reform, see Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 33, 41Google Scholar. On the individualist character of hygienic reform, see Nissenbaum, Stephen, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980), 19, 131–36Google Scholar; Whorton, James C., Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 7Google Scholar; and Burbick, Joan, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 302–305Google Scholar.

14. See Sánchez-Eppler, , “Temperance in the Bed of a Child: Incest and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 47 (03 1995): 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Walters, , “The Boundaries of Abolitionism,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 21Google Scholar.

15. The Library of Health, and Teacher on the Human Constitution, 6 vols. (Boston: George W. Light, 1837–1842), 4: 344Google Scholar. This monthly periodical, first entitled Moral Reformer, was edited by William A. Alcott, president of the American Physiological Society. The fact that Alcott could push homeopathy even as he acted as the head of a professional medical society reveals the porousness of medical discourse, making it permeable to ideas and rhetoric found in transcendental, abolitionist, moral, and political discourse.

16. Ibid., 4: 342, 343.

17. Ibid., 4: 345.

18. For instance, whereas Tissot believed that masturbation should be avoided because one ounce of seminal fluid contained as much vital energy as forty ounces of blood, American hygienic reformers did not inveigh against orgasm and the loss of semen per se as enervating and draining but instead suggested that the combination of mental and physical stimulation produced by autoeroticism weakened the body's nervous system, rendering the self susceptible to a “habit” likened to tyranny and bondage. The U.S. proliferation of antimasturbation literature is well documented. D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B. (Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America [New York: Harper and Row, 1988]Google Scholar) note the emergence of “an abundant anti-masturbation literature” (71) in the 1830s, and Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility, describes “the sudden emergence of an unprecedented public apprehensiveness about human sexuality” (26). See also Herbert, T. Walter, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 190–94Google Scholar.

19. Calhoun, , Report, 22Google Scholar; Trall, , Home Treatment, x, 48Google Scholar; and White, Ellen G., An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental, and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time (1864; rept. Payson, Ariz.: Leaves-of-Autumn, 1984), 25Google Scholar.

20. This assortment of euphemisms for masturbation, both in terms of its practice and its cure, is scattered throughout antimasturbation literature. Examples are from Graham, Sylvester, A Lecture to Young Men (Providence: Weeden and Cory, 1834), 44, 51Google Scholar; Fowler, Orson S., Sexual Science; Including Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Interrelations; Love Its Loves, Power, Etc., Selection, or Mutual Adaption; Married Life Made Happy; Reproduction, and Progenal Endowment, or Paternity, Maternity, Bearing, Nursing, and Rearing Children; Puberty, Girlhood, Etc.; Sexual Ailments Restored, Female Beauty Perpetuated. etc., etc., as Taught by Phrenology (Philadelphia: National, 1870), 379, 380Google Scholar; Sweetser, William, Mental Hygiene: Or, an Examination of the Intellect and Passions. Designed to Show How They Affect and Are Affected by the Bodily Functions, and Their Influence on Health and Longevity (New York: George Putnam, 1850), 386Google Scholar; Gregory, Samuel, Facts and Important Information for Young Women on the Subject of Masturbation: With Its Causes, Prevention, and Cure (1857)Google Scholar, in Rosenberg, and Smith-Rosenberg, , The Secret Vice Exposed! 14, 62Google Scholar; Alcott, William A., ed., The Library of Health and Treatment of the Human Constitution, 6 vols. (Boston: George W. Light, 1837–1842) 2: 298Google Scholar, 4: 343, 5: 316, 5: 317, 6: 106; and Trall, , Home Treatment, 57Google Scholar. The rhetorical role of slavery in lending a distinctive, urgent idiom to bourgeois reform efforts was not limited to antimasturbation discourse. Drunkards became “slaves to drink” in what David Roediger describes as a broad tendency to configure white working-class identity within and against popular understandings of race slavery (The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class [New York: Verso, 1991], 86Google Scholar). Prostitutes became “white slaves,” as Pivar, David notes (Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900 [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973], 7)Google Scholar. As a metaphor, slavery exerted a wide appeal among the diverse interests of social reform. Crusaders for temperance often doubled as antislavery activists and fired off overlapping denunciations of alcoholism and chatteldom that similarly stigmatized individuals for enslavement to different forms of bodily control. Frederick Douglass, for one, likened the “slave system” to the “drinking system,” in effect privatizing racial bondage as a question of individual responsibility (My Bondage and My Freedom [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985], 95Google Scholar). Such associations of corporeality and unfreedom, as Robert Levine has shown, were part of reformist confluence between temperance and antislavery that treated “slaves of appetite” (Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], 99–143Google Scholar). In addition to temperance, dietary reform and calls for vegetarianism “fit the same mold as antislavery” (Walters, Ronald, “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25 [05 1973]: 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar). One of the best sources for understanding the political stakes of such metaphoric slippages is Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Abolition and Feminism,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 28–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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22. Ibid., 151.

23. Library of Health (1840), 4: 345–46Google Scholar.

24. “Masturbation and Its Effect on Health,” Graham Journal of Health and Longevity 2 (1838): 19Google Scholar.

25. Cornell, William M., The Beacon: Or, a Warning to Young and Old. In Which Is Shown, in the Medical Practice of the Author, How Body and Mind Are Destroyed by Evil Habits; Resulting in Epilepsy, Consumption, Idiocy and Insanity (Philadelphia: F. Humphrey, 1865), 59–60Google Scholar. Joan Burbick offers a comprehensive study of the intersections between the language of the body and the rhetoric of American nationalism (Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]Google Scholar). She examines how physiological understandings of brain, heart, nerves, and eye contain anxieties about the roles bodies play in the emerging republic. Her study does not address the role that the representations of genitals played in the production of republican discourse.

26. Davis, David Brion, “Reflections on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony” in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Bender, Thomas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 173Google Scholar.

27. Alcott, William, “Physiological Vice,” in Library of Health (1837), 1: 160Google Scholar.

28. Emerson, , “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lectures, 262Google Scholar.

29. Ibid.

30. Emerson, , Journals, 5: 484Google Scholar.

31. Quoted in Library of Health (1842), 6: 291Google Scholar.

32. Emerson, , “Self-Reliance,” 266Google Scholar. This perspective is also evident in “Spiritual Laws,” where Emerson argues that the specific issues urged by various programs of liberal reform, including antislavery activism, are, in fact, insignificant before universal considerations: “When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, of the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she [Nature] says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir’” (307). Nature disdains specific acts of cultural criticism or political participation because her concern is wrapped up in the single citizen who has become overexcited and agitated.

33. Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 165, 171Google Scholar. In addition to Barker-Benfield, historians have noted the relationship between masturbation phobia and the democratic erosion of traditional structures of authority. See Barker-Benfield, , Horrors, 162–71Google Scholar; D'Emilio, and Freedman, , Intimate Matters, 71–84Google Scholar; Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Jacksonian America” in Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, Ed. Demos, John and Boocock, Spence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 213–20Google Scholar; and Walters, Ronald, Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 41Google Scholar.

34. Cornell, , The Beacon, 45Google Scholar.

35. Kateb, George, Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 176Google Scholar. See also his The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. 77–83Google Scholar.

36. Library of Health (1942), 6: 24, 106Google Scholar. It should be noted that Alcott here is discussing women's “enslavement” to “useless, degrading, unhealthy, unchristian customs,” implying specific bodily habits such as the tight lacing of corsets in addition to unspecified sexual practices.

37. Emerson, , “The Fugitive Slave Law,” in Emerson's Antislavery Writings, ed. Gougeon, Len and Myerson, Joel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 83Google Scholar. Emerson reiterates this sentiment two years later in an antislavery address on “bloody” Kansas: “I set the private man first. He only who is able to stand alone is qualified to be a citizen” (113). Of course, as Richard F. Teichgraeber III has pointed out, it is no great revelation that scholars have long deemed Emerson an “anti-institutionalist” for his reluctance to join organized abolition (Sublime Thoughts / Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 110Google Scholar). But Teichgraeber's recuperative view of Emerson is itself dependent on an asocial view of literary history: he treats Emerson as a “formidable and free-standing figure” (151), echoing Emerson's own search for a figure “able to stand alone.”

38. Emerson, , “Self-Reliance,” 263Google Scholar.

39. Emerson, , “Fugitive Slave Law,” 83Google Scholar. Gougeon, Len's Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990)Google Scholar argues for Emerson's gradual acceptance of an abolitionist platform.

40. Library of Health (1840), 4: 132Google Scholar. For less metaphoric estimates of Graham's popularity and impact, see Nissenbaum, , Sex, Diet, and Debility, 14–17Google Scholar.

41. Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 59, 27Google Scholar.

42. Ibid., 8. 19.

43. Ibid., 14. Walters notes the popularity of Graham's ideas among abolitionists (“Boundaries of Abolitionism,” 11), and Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez discusses abolitionists who stayed in Graham boardinghouses (Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], 32Google Scholar).

44. Tyler, William, Letter to Edward Tyler, quoted in Thomas H. Le Duc, “Grahamites and Garrisonites,” New York History 20 (04 1939): 190Google Scholar.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid. Henry David Thoreau and Horace Greeley also adhered to dietary “laws” of the Graham System. A Graham table could also be found at Brook Farm.

47. Beriah Green, Letter to Theodore Dwight Weld, July 11, 1841, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844, ed. Barnes, Gilbert H. and Dumond, Dwight L., 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1834), 2: 868Google Scholar. My attention to the importance of Weld and his colleagues in personalizing slavery is motivated by Walters, (“Erotic South,” 187–90)Google Scholar.

48. Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 7–8Google Scholar.

49. Ibid., 16.

50. Crosby, Josiah, “Seminal Weakness-Castration.” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 29 (08 1843): 10–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Ibid., 11. As educational reformer Horace Mann put it in 1850, “Health is earned — as literally so any commodity in the market” (A Few Thoughts for a Young Man: A Lecture Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association on Its 29th Anniversary (1850; rept. Boston: Reed and Fields, 1877), 21Google Scholar. As with Crosby's medical narrative, Mann's lecture connects male sexuality to commerce in what historians have called a “spermatic economy”; see Barker-Benfield, , Horrors, 12, 181Google Scholar; D'Emilio, and Freedman, , Intimate Matters, 68Google Scholar; and Nissenbaum, , Sex, Diet, and Debility, 123Google Scholar.

52. Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 29 (09 6, 1843): 97Google Scholar.

53. Baker, Edward L., “A Few Cases Illustrative of the Ill Effects of Onanism,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal 2 (06 1846): 337Google Scholar.

54. Ibid.

55. Anonymous, “Effects of Masturbation,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 12 (03 11, 1835): 140Google Scholar.

56. Retundo, E. Anthony, “Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 24Google Scholar.

57. Butler, Charles, The American Gentleman (Philadelphia: Hogan and Thompson, 1836), 29, 167Google Scholar.

58. Emerson, , “Self-Reliance,” 281Google Scholar. Overlaps between metaphysical and physiological counsel were familiar to readers of health manuals and journals. Emersonian maxims often appeared in such publications: the Library of Health, for instance, approvingly cited passages from Emerson's “Man The Reformer” that speak of “simple tastes” and a diet of “parched corn” (Library of Health [1841]: 5: 228Google Scholar). Publishers of phrenological and hygienic pamphlets also brought out cheap editions of Emerson's works, and audiences at lyceums and other public venues could one week listen to a series of lectures on hygiene and male chastity and the next sample more intellectual, but still discursively related, fare about civic virtue and self-reliance.

59. Trall, , Home Treatment, xivGoogle Scholar; and Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 9Google Scholar.

60. Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 9Google Scholar; and Emerson, , Essays and Lectures, “American Scholar,” 56Google Scholar.

61. Bullough, Vern L. and Bullough, Bonnie mention laws enacted in Wyoming and Indiana as indicators of the force of antimasturbatory arguments in Sexual Attitudes: Myths and Realities (New York: Prometheus, 1995), 73Google Scholar.

62. White, , Appeal to Mothers, 16Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., 11.

64. Ibid., 19.

65. Todd, John, The Student's Manual: Designed, by Specific Instructions, to Aid in Forming and Strengthening the Intellectual and Moral Character and Habits of the Student, 5th ed. (Northhampton, Mass.: J. H. Butler, 1836), 93Google Scholar. Barker-Benfield, reports that by 1854 Todd's handbook had gone through twenty-four editions (Horrors, 136)Google Scholar.

66. Todd, , Student's Manual, 147Google Scholar.

67. Ibid., 111–12.

68. Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 20Google Scholar.

69. Assertions that masturbation's degenerative effects were inherited suggest the citizen's impossible longing for disconnection from all history, even family history In addition to Pancoast, Cornell details the congenital effects of masturbation to describe how, “out of four hundred twenty cases of congenital idiocy, the Massachusetts Commission found in three hundred fifty-six of them that one or the other, or both, of the immediate progenitors of the unfortunate sufferers had, in some way, widely departed from the normal condition of health, and violated the laws of nature.” Contamination of future generations, he fears, might not be unintentional: “Parents have been found, who encourage in their children — how horrid! … that vicious habit which is the general theme of this book” (The Beacon, 56, 57). The citizen's severe social independence — once guaranteed by his property, whiteness, and maleness — no longer seemed a surety in an era that historicized his previously unmarked corporeality.

70. Emerson, , “Self-Reliance,” 261Google Scholar.

71. Ibid., 282.

72. Anonymous, “Masturbation” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 27 (08 10, 1842): 104Google Scholar.

73. Nissenbaum, , Sex, Diet, and Debility, 164Google Scholar. Nissenbaum also reports that in 1838 Gove opened a Graham Boarding School at Lynn, Massachusetts. Acclaimed by a contemporary journal as “that indefatigable champion of the cause of female instruction in Hygiene and Physiology,” Gove was credited with organization of “Health Societies” in New York City, Boston, and Oberlin much in the same way that Graham boardinghouses sprang up in cities of the Northeast (Library of Health [1840], 4: 40Google Scholar). After obtaining a divorce from an abusive husband, Gove later married the reformer Thomas Nichols, and together they continued their reform labors throughout the late 19th century, espousing and then rejecting free love, and discussing and then glossing over women's pleasure and orgasm.

74. Gove, Mary S., Lectures to Women on Anatomy and Physiology, with an Appendix on Water-Cure (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), 174Google Scholar.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 1. Also, see Venon A. Rosario on the ways in which anti-onanist discourse is involved “in countering the pathological effects of ‘civilization’” (“Phantastical Pollutions: The Public Threat of Private Vice in France,” in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artisitic Discourses of Autoeroticism, ed. Bennet, Paula and Rosario, Vernon A. II [New York: Routledge, 1995], 111)Google Scholar.

77. Gove, , Lectures to Women, 26Google Scholar.

78. Gove, Mary S., Agnes Morris; or, the Heroine of Domestic Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849), 36Google Scholar. For Emerson's use of similar language, see his “Divinity School Address” on “our soul-destroying slavery to habit” (Essays and Lectures, 89)Google Scholar.

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80. Jean Fagan Yellin discusses the circulation of gender and race in such abolitionist emblems and images (Women and Sisters: The Antislavey Feminists in American Culture [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989]Google Scholar).

81. Quoted in Smiley, David L., Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969), 56Google Scholar.

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87. Emerson, , “The Individual,” in Early Lectures 2: 176Google Scholar.

88. Graham, , Letter to the Hon. Daniel Webster, on the Compromises of the Constitution (Northhampton, Mass.: Hopkins, Bridgeman, 1850), 18Google Scholar.

89. Ibid., 3.

90. Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 14Google Scholar.

91. Graham, , Letter, 13Google Scholar.

92. Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 40, 19Google Scholar. This nervous connection between the genitals and the brain may have prompted Joseph Howe to develop the following medical simile: “The testicle, like the brain, has three coverings, a serous, fibrous, and vascular coat,” Howe, , Excessive Venery, Masturbation, and Continence: The Etiology, Pathology, and Treatment of the Disease Resulting from Venereal Excesses, Masturbation and Continence (New York: Bermingham, 1883) 37Google Scholar.

93. Graham, , Lecture to Young Men, 16Google Scholar.

94. Graham, , Letter, 8Google Scholar.

95. Ibid., 8.

96. Ibid., 3.

97. Ibid., 8.