Set against the backdrop of the Jacksonian era’s obsession with social purification and its underlying opposition to ‘non-normative gendered and sexual identities,’ Men Beyond Desire presents a refreshing and comprehensive study of the representation of gender and gendered relationships by authors such as Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe, among others.  Feeding from and contesting traditional, unproblematic understandings of the cult of American manhood, David Greven searches for the ‘queerly inflected threat’ embodied in the emergence, development, and literary representation of the figure of what he variously calls the ‘unavailable,’ ‘undesiring,’ and, more consistently, the ‘inviolate’ male.  For Greven, the ‘inviolate male’ was the product of the ‘discordant agenda[s]’ of the contemporary discourses and movements behind the ideologies of selfhood, manhood, effeminacy, propriety, and acceptable behaviour (namely, the ideology of self-made manhood, sexual and health reform, temperance and conduct literature).  Ultimately, the inviolate male’s elusiveness, his condition as ‘a hermetically sealed vessel of chastity and purity,’ is seen as a response to the conflicting coexistence – in its compulsory form – of homosociality and heterosexuality in nineteenth-century American life.

Greven persuasively separates the inviolate male, actuated by a ‘self-conscious deferment of desire,’ from the bachelor, who represents ‘bounteous desire with no clearly directed, socially responsible aim,’ and sees the former as more deeply problematic for ‘the idea of normative heterosexuality as destiny.’  Throughout the book, Greven questions the critical and cinematic tendency to idealise homosocial or fraternal bonds as a way of reinforcing heterosexuality and erasing ‘queer potentiality,’ thereby extending the Jacksonian opposition to effeminacy, which he believes it was both complied with and critiqued by the authors in the study. 

Most of Greven’s work is concerned with white inviolate manhood as realized through characters such as Ichabod Crane, Natty Bumppo, Fanshawe, Dimmesdale, Coverdale, Billy Budd and the narrator of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.  Yet Greven also transposes the ‘inviolate’ state to black manhood, through his reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Tom-Eva, Tom-St Clare relationships, and to womanhood, in his overview of Augusta Evans’s Macaria and its unavailable female protagonists. The coda to the book examines briefly how the figure of the inviolate man permeated the literature of the end of the nineteenth century and how the image has also been perpetuated by twenty-first century literary and cinematic representations of manhood.