amativeness

His imagination invested her with the taste for the fine arts which ho required from a wife, and he married her in her first season, only to discover that the amativeness in her temperament was so little and languid that she made all his attempts at fondness ridiculous, and robbed the caresses for which he had longed of all their anticipated ecstasy.

There is also change: he de-couples amativeness and adhesiveness and prioritizes the latter, suggesting shifting conceptions of sexual object-choice into the more (supposedly) stable, binaristic terms of "homo-" and "hetero-." So, too, does the passage suggest the givenness of American space as a knowable, albeit abstract, entity, with a discernible and singular character with its unique "worldly interests."

Spurzheim's opponents points out, 'Amativeness, Combativeness,

Whitman also distinguished between "adhesiveness," or comradeship, and "amativeness," or heterosexual love.

In Democratic Vistas (1871/1982), Whitman differentiates between a spiritual bonding between men, "adhesiveness," and a more carnal attraction between men and women, "amativeness." (4) In Whitman's view, "adhesiveness," which he sees as exclusively male, is far deeper and more transcendental than marital love.