Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America

Notes

N o t e s introduction 1. Franklin 27. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated F. For an alternative reading of this famous scene, see Erkkila 722. 2. Franklin’s tale of necessity not only emphasizes the ease he will attain later in life (his distance from practical necessity in terms of capital), but demonstrates his luxury to be able to have a second distance from that moment (the first is material, the second cultural). This “objective distance from necessity and from those trapped within it combines with a conscious distance which doubles freedom by exhibiting it” (Bourdieu Distinction 55). 3. Michael Warner contends that “access to the public came in the whiteness and maleness that were then denied as forms of positivity, since the white male qua public person was only abstract rather than white and male” (“Mass” 383). For Warner, the “rhetorical strategy of personal abstraction is both the utopian moment of the public sphere and a major source of domination” (“Mass” 382) since the “bourgeois public sphere has been structured from the outset by a logic of abstraction that provides a privilege for unmarked identities: the male, the white, the middle class, the normal” (“Mass” 383). 4. Warner argues that Franklin valued the personal only insofar as it could be socially reproducible, and it is for this reason that he “envisions writing as the scene of pure socialization ” (Letters 87). For alternative accounts of the personal in Franklin’s Memoirs, see Baker 71–95 and Kennedy. 5. For the centrality of politeness to Franklin’s Autobiography, see Harris, Shurr, and Chaves. 6. On the different forms of capital, see Bourdieu “Forms of Capital” 243–48. Bourdieu criticizes traditional mobility studies for ignoring how social space is transformed by the conversion of one form of capital (economic) into another (cultural or educational) and for disregarding how these conversions may impact the distribution of capital itself (Distinction 141). He contends that the exchange rate between economic, social, and cultural capital is exactly what is at stake in the struggle over the dominant principle of domination as different fractions of the dominant class struggle to determine the dominant form of capital and its exchange rate. See Bourdieu Distinction 124–25. 7. Burroughs 224. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and abbreviated B. 236 Notes to Pages 7–10 8. Henry Fielding remarked some seventy years earlier, “that an open disposition, which is the surest indication of an honest and upright heart, chiefly renders us liable to be imposed on by craft and deceit” (178); see also Fliegelman 37 and Tytler Physiognomy 147. 9. For more on the relationship between Burroughs’s Memoirs and Franklin’s Memoirs, see Downes, Williams 120, and Mihm 35. 10. On the theatricality of the commercial self, see Agnew. 11. On how Franklin’s Autobiography transformed the status of mobility, see Wood Americanization 240. 12. Stephen Mihm understands Burroughs similarly as someone who represents “the promise and peril of an emergent market economy” (23). 13. My sense of the term “social space” is shaped by, but not identical to, the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Social space, as Bourdieu defines it, is the invisible reality that “organizes agents’ practices and representations” (“First Lecture” 635). For Bourdieu, individuals occupy a position in a multidimensional social space; they are not defined by social class membership, but by the amounts and kinds of capital they possess. These are “economic capital (in its different kinds), cultural capital and social capital, as well as symbolic capital—commonly called prestige, reputation, renown, and so forth—which is the form in which different types of capital are perceived and recognized as legitimate” (Bourdieu “The Social Space” 724). Individuals do not move about social space in a random way, because they are subject to the forces that structure the space and because they resist these forces according to their specific properties—dispositions (habitus in embodied form) and goods/qualifications (in its objectified form) (Bourdieu Distinction 110). Bourdieu’s theory of social space departs from traditional Marxist theories of class in its attention to how relationships and other forms of capital (such as cultural or social) structure social space as much as material substances and economic capital do. He maintains that the identity of class with capital distribution renders the social space more durable and stable than it actually is (“The Social Space” 726). My understanding of social space differs from Bourdieu in...