Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America

Introduction

1 Introduction “The Grandest Thing in the World” My first assertion is one that I think you will grant—that everyone in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed. —Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”1 When I was a young man, we talked much of character. . . . It is typical of our time that insistence on character today in the country has almost ceased. Freud and others have stressed the unconscious factors of our personality so that today we do not advise youth about their development of character; we watch and count their actions with almost helpless disassociation from thought of advice. —W.E.B. Du Bois, “My Character,” in The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois2 Bodies of Reform studies what was perhaps the most coveted object of nineteenth-century American culture, that curiously formable yet often equally formidable stuff called character. So much more than simply the bundle of traits that distinguish and define an individual’s identity, character was to many nineteenth-century Americans, as Orison Swett Marden somewhat gleefully put it, “the grandest thing in the world.”3 The impact of the concept of character on the culture of the nineteenth century is hard to miss, its influence difficult to overstate. A pervasive and defining keyword across a range of nineteenth-century political, literary, 2 Introduction philosophical, scientific, and pedagogical discourses, character was a concept that mediated understandings of the most fundamental relationships between individuals and their bodies, bodies and civil society, and civil society and the state. Conceived at the intersection of literature and politics , the concept of character connected the literary work of novelists to the ideological work of cultural nationalists in the nineteenth century and played a pivotal role in the articulation of national, racial, and gender identities in the United States. Character was a central category as well in the broader liberal tradition out of which the United States emerged and has long been a key term for imagining the reach of the public over the private sphere as well as the reach of the nation over and into the citizen. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine another concept that has done so much hard and politically charged work throughout the history of the United States. From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to postwar sociologists, character has had a very long and checkered career articulating national identity in the United States.4 It is thus surprising that, at a time in which postnational critiques of the intersections of race, gender, and class in the ideological construction of “American character” have so invigorated U.S. literary and cultural studies, few have asked why “character” itself emerged as such a privileged mediator of national identity and public culture in the United States.5 Bodies of Reform closes this gap in U.S. literary and historical studies by charting the development of character as a central object of literary representation and social reform in the fictional genres, reform movements , and political cultures of the United States from approximately 1850 to 1920. The book’s first aim is to make visible a unique archive in which the cultural practices of reading and representing character can be seen to operate in relation to the character-building strategies of social reformers by reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in relation to a diverse range of historical documents also concerned with the formation and representation of character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines , police gazettes, libel and naturalization law, benevolent society publications , psychology textbooks, Scout handbooks, and success manuals. In these readings, I delineate the ideological formulation of what I call the “rhetoric of character” by elucidating the various yet interconnected meanings of character across this diverse range of political, popular, scientific , and literary discourses. More importantly, I examine the practices Introduction 3 of individual and collective embodiment...