Facing the Nation

In 1788, as the proposed federal Constitution made its way through the (barely) United States, Philip Freneau, widely known as the “Poet of the Revolution” published a fat collection of his essays, stories, and verse. Among the miscellany on offer was a brief tale entitled “The Picture Gallery.” The story recounts the narrator’s “visit to a certain picture gallery in a country town” and the phantasmagoric dream that followed. In the waking version, the narrator encounters “a vast number of half-finished faces, hung up on the wall on either side of me,” several of which he “recollected to have seen before in different parts and places of these States.” Before the narrator can take in the painted crowd, a gallery attendant importunes him and begins, “immediately,” to offer “a short history of these worthies, one by one.” Each potted biography ends with the same punch line: “this one also had a very great share in accomplishing the American Revolution.” But which one is “this one”: had the person won the nation, or was the likeness itself doing that work? Freneau’s referent is deliberately ambiguous; the answer, for better and for worse, is both.¹

As “The Picture Gallery” reveals, the connection between persons and pictures, reality and representation, was vexed—perhaps newly so—in the topsy-turvy world of the early American republic. The monograph and the collection of essays under review interrogate that complex relationship as it played out in literary and visual culture from the 1770s through the 1820s. Exploring a wide variety of texts and objects and employing a diverse array of methods to read them, Christopher Lukasik and the contributors to Shaping the Body Politic offer new insights into the cultural project of nationalism and the national project of culture.

After the Battles of Concord and Lexington, the painter Charles Willson Peale recalled what a London correspondent had told him years earlier: “that when my brush should fail . . . I must take to the Musket.”² If the Revolution was, in part, a crisis over modes of representation, how did brushes and muskets, pens and swords, together remake the world? And what if anything about the culture forged at the easel, the printing press, and the point of a bayonet was “American”?

Christopher Lukasik is a professor of English literature, and his provocative book centers primarily on printed texts, particularly novels. Discerning Characters does a great deal of close reading of works ranging from the canonical (Hannah Foster’s Coquette and Herman Melville’s Pierre) to the obscure (Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond and James Fennimore Cooper’s early work, Precaution). Lukasik means not only to offer fresh readings but also to question the practice of reading itself. Discerning Characters “seeks to join a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship dedicated to revising and broadening our concepts of Anglo-American literacy during the colonial and early national periods” (p. 10).

Lukasik’s quarry is a specialized kind of literacy: reading faces. How does a person’s face convey—or conceal—her character? Does the surface bespeak the essence, or belie it? Any middle-schooler will tell you that this mode of reading retains a desperate urgency. But the intense “social volatility” of the post-Revolutionary world, Lukasik argues, made assessing what we might call face value especially crucial and newly vexed: a national as well as an interpersonal challenge (p. 13). After all, the young United States was a nation of heads and tales: a republic constituted less by history, language, or blood than by the stories and images of men and women fashioning institutions rooted in the virtue of disinterested individuals. Colonial Americans had preferred portraits to all other modes of visual representation. In the post-Revolutionary world, personal...