Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America

Abstract

Christopher J. Lukasik's Discerning Characters explores literary answers to the problem of how to communicate distinction in a democratizing America. In four initial chapters, he shows how some authors of postrevolutionary seduction fiction promoted the physiognomy of Johann Lavater (the reading of character from unalterable facial features) to address the troubling problem of dissimulation and social mobility fueled by Lord Chesterfield's best-selling advice on projecting gentility through bodily performance. In two final chapters, he considers the continued engagement with physiognomy in several antebellum novels by James Fennimore Cooper and in Herman Melville's Pierre (1852). He concludes by noting how these cultural explorations were a precursor to the pseudo-scientific thinking about race in nineteenth-century America. Lukasik is generally judicious in his claims for the scope of his work and contribution. He is persuasive about the fascination with physiognomy, and yet acknowledges that it was not the only answer to the problem of distinction in the new nation. His argument that writers and readers were engaged in simultaneous practices of seeing and reading is important in its own right, but Lukasik might have contributed more with greater acknowledgment of the intermediate cultural context for his study. For example, although he gives a usefully corrective “federalist” reading of seduction novels by Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, and Tabitha Tenney to demonstrate their embrace of physiognomy to limit Chesterfieldian social climbing, he does not sufficiently acknowledge the political, social, and cultural reality that this was a rearguard action. It is curious that he describes Charles Brockden Brown's and Melville's rejection of the idea that faces could reveal true and inherited distinction—in Ormond (1799) and Pierre, respectively—without acknowledging that, like them, most Americans recognized that social mobility was the way of the new republic. There was no point in bemoaning it since, as Brown and Melville pointed out, nothing could be done about it. It makes sense that defensive novelists would cozy up to conservative social goals to legitimate their works, and readers might have been charmed by this nostalgic older social vision of inherited quality. But that does not mean readers shared the illusion that such a world could exist (or ever did exist) in America.