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David Greven’s The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud and the Politics of Gender follows on from his work in Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (2005) to revise our understanding of how gender functions in nineteenth-century literature in much more complicated ways than proposed by the now superannuated notion of separate spheres. Greven aims, specifically, to bring the analytic frameworks developing in queer theory to bear on this body of literature, building on work by critics such as Robert K. Martin, Christopher Castiglia, Scott Derrick, and others. In The Fragility of Manhood, Greven has two projects that he wants to develop by focusing on minor and major fictions by Hawthorne. The psychoanalytic part of this project contributes to the ongoing recuperation of the concept of narcissism from the versions of Freudianism that associated it with femininity and homosexuality as inferior and pathological subject positions. To do so, Greven recalls that Freud also saw primary narcissism as a “universal sexual disposition” (p. 33) that persists regardless of later developments in identity. Tracing the figure of Narcissus in multiple Hawthorne texts, Greven explores the attractions and dangers of narcissism. Greven admits early on that Hawthorne never mentions Narcissus by name nor includes his story in either of the retellings of Greek myths that he wrote for children, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and the sequel Tanglewood Tales (1853), but he makes a compelling case for the prevalence of this type of beautiful young man, often of dubious moral character, who is the object of desire to himself, men, and women in Hawthorne’s fiction. A reader disposed to consider silences and gaps as meaningful would not be troubled by this literal absence; Greven finds numerous instances in stories, such as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832) and “The Gentle Boy”(1839) as well as the major novels, including the unfinished, posthumously p