Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America

Chapter 5. The Invisible Aristocrat

C h a p t e r 5 The Invisible Aristocrat Books are, in a great measure, the instruments of controlling the opinions of a nation like ours. They are an engine, alike powerful to save or destroy. —James Fenimore Cooper, Precaution (1820) The first object of a writer, should be the support of just and honorable sentiments. When an author of fiction has sufficiently respected this imperative obligation, it would seem that he has some right to felicitate himself that his pictures, whether of the passions, or of sensible objects, are so like the originals as to be recognized by those who are most familiar with the subjects. —James Fenimore Cooper, Letters and Journals (1830) It is a trait of American genius to give pictures with astonishing clearness and reality, and Cooper exhibits this trait in its greatest perfection. —United States and Democratic Review (1849) The previous four chapters traced the face’s relationship to the social perception of character in early American culture with particular attention paid to how transatlantic discourses for reading the face (such as civility and physiognomy ) and cultural forms for representing the face (such as portraiture) shaped the literary representation of distinction in the fifty years following the revolution. The presence of Chesterfieldian civility and the logic of physiognomic distinction in postrevolutionary literature, I suggested, were part of a more general struggle over how distinction would operate within the social 156 The Changing Face of the Novel space of the new republic and, more broadly, how culture, specifically literature , might participate in that struggle. The postrevolutionary seduction novel imagined the face as a location from which the absence of distinction would be made visible through physiognomy and, it did so, I argued, in an effort to minimize the legitimacy of the cultural capital of Chesterfieldian civility in the signification of genteel distinction. The transposition in the determination of character that physiognomy promised was central to how the postrevolutionary novel of seduction imagined social space. Moreover, the reading practices and ways of looking promoted by these novels positioned culture—especially dispositions to culture—as a means to restrict rather than facilitate social mobility. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the conditions for understanding the social perception of character had changed from their original postrevolutionary context. The face remained an important location for the social perception of character during these years, but physiognomy as a scientific discourse for understanding its meaning was being challenged by more quantitative, if equally arbitrary, discourses such as such as crainology, phrenology, and eventually scientific racism. In addition, the rise of Jacksonian democracy signaled the transformation of the United States from an elite republic to a democratic republic inclusive of all white men.1 By the 1820s “state legislatures across the United States moved toward enfranchising all free white men regardless of property holdings” (Nelson 127). “White claims to racial preeminence became more urgent, rigid, and consistent in the 1820s and 30s,” John Wood Sweet notes, “just as new democratic ideals were becoming established and new class divisions were becoming entrenched” (11). The decade of the 1820s thus “stands as a crucial decade in marking all sorts of distinctions,” Mary Kelley observes, “including the distinction signaled by the rise of the ‘middling classes’” (27). Refinement, once the exclusive domain of the established gentry, had been democratized into a form of vernacular gentility which “became an integral part of the aspirations of ordinary men and women in the first decades of the nineteenth century” (Appleby 43). By the middle of the century, this vernacular form of gentility had become “the possession of the American middle class” (Bushman xiii). Yet, as Richard Bushman observes, “the spread of gentility reminds us that the ancien regime still had a grip on the social imagination of Americans” (408). The perception that America was politically democratic, but socially aristocratic would persist into the 1820s and beyond. “From the conflicts between Federalists and their opponents in the 1790s over the alleged monarchical tendencies of the new government, to The Invisible Aristocrat 157 the Jacksonian Democrats’ attacks on ‘aristocracy’ in the 1830s, and Abraham Lincoln’s condemnation of ‘crowned kings, money-kings, and land-kings,’ a quarter-century later still,” Christopher Clark notes, “reference was to the model of a hierarchical social order which most Americans claimed to have set aside” (560). The democratization...