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antipodes of fantasy between which he alternated for much of his life. 26 When he was not dreaming of a return to the South Seas, he was imagining himself in monastic habita fantasy captured in the portrait of Stoddard painted by Joseph Strong during the 1870s. 27 As Jackson Lears has shown, "the aesthetic legacy of medieval Catholicism charmed increasing numbers of nineteenth-century American Protestants." As it developed beside a "more general interest in premodern art and ritual," this movement toward the church "merged, at its periphery, with fin-de-siècle aestheticism." 28
The draw of Catholicism was certainly aesthetic for Stoddard, who even as a boy found the mass, the music, and the colorful ecclesiastical trappings all the more attractive by contrast to the starkly evangelical

 

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religion of his family. "The beauty of its ritual, the mysticism of its creed, the consolation of its confessional, all appealed to him intensely." 29 But the church, which he formally joined in 1867, also afforded Stoddard another way, alternative to "barbarism," of allying himself with antimodern resistance to the business ethos of the Gilded Age. And insofar as Catholicism was more "feminized" even than high-church Protestantism, Stoddard's aestheticism (his artistic vocation) became congruous with the asceticism (the religious life) of those under stricter orders than he could ever have abided himself.
Meditating over the ruins of the Acropolis on his first trip to Greece, Stoddard wrote: "It is not unlikely that in the flight of the gods mankind lost his reverence for the purely beautiful; they took with them that finer facultythe sentiment is called feminine to-day, it may be considered infantile tomorrowfor the want of which the world is now suffering sorely." 30 This linkage of religion, beauty, and the "feminine" and/or "infantile" was commonplace in Stoddard's time. The gendering of aestheticism, which accompanied the refashioning of Victorian gender codes during the later nineteenth century, effected the redefinition, as Lears remarks, of "the 'feminine' ideal of dependence'':
In the fin-de-siècle imagination, many of the "childlike" qualities associated with premodern character, and with the unconscious, were also linked with femininity: fantasy, spontaneity, aesthetic creativity. The premodern unconscious generated androgynous alternatives to bourgeois masculinity. Those options especially appealed to the men and women who were most restive under bourgeois definitions of gender identity, and who suffered most acutely from the fragmenting of selfhood. 31
For a man like Stoddard, who had never fit the Wild-West mold of masculinity, the androgynous elements of Catholicism could be embraced without the ambivalence felt by men like Henry Adams, whose "vestigial commitments to male ego-ideals, to individual autonomy and conscious control" made him fear the power of the Virgin he simultaneously worshiped from a safe distance. 32 What was "feminine" about the church tallied with Stoddard's need for a model of "masculinity" that was nurturing rather than aggressive, domestic rather than entrepreneurial, genteel rather than strenuous; one, in short, that affirmed his ideal of spiritual beauty in brotherly love. It was in the name of Mother Church, for instance, that Father Damien became a missionary martyr among the lepers at Molokai. In Stoddard's eyes, Father Damien was a saint. But even the ordinary Catholic priests whom he befriended

 

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seemed to represent a sure and universal refuge for pilgrims, like Stoddard, constantly in need of spiritual care and manly affection. No wonder, as he wrote from Europe in 1874, he was tempted to "bury myself out of this world in the seclusion of one of these monasteries. I never pass one here but I keel a little over to that side." 33
For those capable of vowing celibacy, Catholicism provided one solution to the problem of gender identity. But the side of Stoddard that