Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America by Christopher J. Lukasik (review)

Discerning Characters demonstrates how transatlantic discourses that focused on reading the human face (including civility and physiognomy), as well as cultural forms of representing the face (including portraiture), shaped the representation of social distinction within post-revolutionary American literature. Honing in on the period 1780–1850, the book details how the theatricality and creative self-making of the American Revolutionary period yielded to “a more permanent, essential, and involuntary sense of character from a person’s face that no amount of individual performance could obscure” (10). Christopher J. Lukasik locates this shift as popular adaptations of Chesterfieldian civility, which “stressed the strategic management of facial expression, including dissimulation, as an integral component in the signification of genteel distinction,” gave way to the widely distributed ideas of Johann Lavater (11). Lukasik then follows this intellectual history with careful close readings of literary and visual texts—attending, in particular, to moments of literary ekphrasis, where the protocols of visual representation set the terms of verbal representation (and where, more broadly, the culture shifted its representational strategies from portrait to proxy). This book is clearly the product of substantial archival research, and its chapters move nimbly and knowledgably through an impressive range of sources, from fictional to philosophical, textual to material, ephemeral to enduring. Weaving these different strains of evidence together, Discerning Characters provides a rich and subtle history of the ways that eighteenth-century American people and texts read distinction in the faces of their fellows.

Central to any story of distinction is the analytic of class, and central to any story of physiognomy is the analytic of race. But Discerning Characters suggestively shows how class and race mapped onto one another in the post-revolutionary period in ways that are entirely counterintuitive to latter-day scholars. In several places, Lukasik observes how the face was used to register distinction within races as much as it was used to discriminate among them. Or, in much more quantitative terms, we learn that of the 787 references to physiognomy published in American imprints, newspapers, and periodicals between 1775 and 1825, only 59 (7.5 per cent) discuss people of specifically non-European descent (38). Lukasik reads this focus less as evidence of a concern about race and racial science and more as evidence of the ongoing construction in this period of the relationship between whiteness and class aspiration. The book shows that the period’s extended dilations on physical appearance did not hang on the kinds of racialized differences that would dominate public discourse in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century. The book’s alternative genealogy for the public discourse of immutable appearance opens up fascinating implications for thinking about the relationship between post-revolutionary American literature and whiteness studies. At the same time as this implication is clearly posed, however, it remains poised. Discerning Characters is notable for its tendency to distill such fascinating implications while shying away from overly broad claims. Rarely does a work of scholarship support a large number of counterintuitive turns while still maintaining an impressively light touch.

Accordingly, the close readings are the best feature of this work. The later chapters hone in on a number of literary texts—The Contrast, The Power of Sympathy, The Inquisitor, Female Quixotism, Ormond, Precaution, and Pierre—often juxtaposing several in or across chapters. These readings treat the texts with equal seriousness, convincingly showing how many early American novels can sustain careful critical attention in a highly formalist mode. Discerning Characters is one of the few books in the field in the last twenty years to definitively expand the close reading of early American literary texts beyond a canonical few. At the same time that Discerning Characters recovers some comparatively minor works, it also revisits familiar texts in original ways—for instance, by providing a bracing reading of famously boring works, such as James Fennimore Cooper’s...