The Queer Hermit

Abstract

Abstract The final chapter examines how the story of an alleged eighteenth-century infanticide by Elizabeth Wilson and her public execution became transformed into a narrative, and a religious tract, about the executed woman’s brother. William “Amos” Wilson became “a recluse from the jars of a contending world” after failing to save his sister from a public execution in 1786. He left behind a life narrative, entitled The Sweets of Solitude (1821), that demonstrates changing notions regarding masculinity in the public sphere. The text of the hermit’s narrative quotes from eighteenth-century translations of Seneca, representing the modern, public world as corrupt and degraded. Because these quotes are not acknowledged in the text, I argue that the narrative resembles a commonplace book with unattributed aphorisms that suggest the depersonalization of republican masculinity.