Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America

Chapter 3. The Face of Seduction

C h a p t e r 3 The Face of Seduction the answer. by a young lady. Teach me, my Friend, to understand A gen’rous, from designing, Man; For I have heard wise people say, “Most men are formed to betray.” Now these, I think, we must conclude, Are not the vulgar, rough, nor rude, From such, the modest Virgin flies, And Rakes and Foplings all despise. Deceivers must, I think, inherit External grace, truth, judgment, merit— Now tell me, sally, if you can, A virtuous, from a cunning, Man. Physiognomy is oft deceiving; An art, in which I’m unbelieving: You must some safer rule point out; And, till you do, I still will doubt. the reply There’s truth, I own, in what you say; Where Delicacy rules, A Lady, blushing turns away From Knaves, and Fops, and Fools. 74 Distinction and the Face Sometimes a Fool doth look sedate, A Coxcomb looks demure: A knowing look and shallow pate Do sometimes meet, ’tis sure. But gen’rally, I think, you’ll find The face and heart agree: The eye’s window of the mind, Thro’ which the soul we see. —Sarah Anderson Hasting, Poems on Different Subjects, 1808 In the preceding chapter, I suggested that the discourse surrounding Chesterfieldianism during the postrevolutionary era was part of a more general struggle over how distinction would be imagined to operate within the social space of early America and more broadly how culture, specifically literature , might participate in that struggle. Chesterfield’s Letters downwardly distributed a model of civility less dependent on economic or social capital, thus less subject to the institutions and networks traditionally responsible for reproducing such capital (such as those associated with family, church, and state). As texts such as The Contrast and The Power of Sympathy demonstrate, criticism of the Letters—whether in periodical, dramatic, or fictional form— often represented the struggle between the cultural capital of social aspirants and the social capital of established gentry in terms of seduction. Seduction, of course, was a staple of postrevolutionary sentimental fiction . Most sentimental fiction in America and “more than half of the novels of the early national period” were stories of seduction (Tennenhouse Importance 45). Seduction spun many of these sentimental plots, Cathy Davidson argues, because it “set forth and summed up crucial aspects of the society” (106). The political import of the seduction novel has been the subject of a number of studies that consider how these narratives mediate notions of democratic citizenship and national belonging through the discourse of sentimentalism and its related vocabulary of sensibility, sympathy, and fellow feeling.1 Leonard Tennenhouse, however, contends that the nation for whom the sentimental novel of seduction produces feeling should be understood not merely as a political entity, but as part of a diasporic English culture. One reason seduction fiction was so popular in the new republic, he claims, was because it “offered both British and American readerships experiments The Face of Seduction 75 in imagining who could in fact marry whom” (Tennenhouse 45). “At stake in these experiments,” Tennenhouse explains “was the basis of civil society— the rules for exchanging women—that constituted kinship relations between men” (45). While the postrevolutionary seduction novel certainly reflects how British rules governing kinship relationships were transformed in the American context, it also addresses a more fundamental problem related to the fragmentation of families that accompanied the British diaspora in America: how do you discern the character of an unknown or dissembling man in the absence of established forms of distinction? And, more broadly, would reading novels—a practice considered analogous to reading men during the period—illuminate or obscure knowledge of a person’s moral character and social origin in the actual world? These questions, as the following pages will demonstrate, were particularly important to the seduction novel as it emerged in postrevolutionary America. Their significance to the genre should prompt us to consider not only how these novels explore the possibilities or limitations of the new democracy, but how they imagine the social space of that democracy. Postrevolutionary seduction fiction frequently associated the dissembling male seducer with the cultural capital of Chesterfieldian civility, and his individual polite performances were imagined as unaffected by either the vigilance of parental surveillance or the reputation assigned by familial, moral, and social networks.2 Although not every postrevolutionary seduction...