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  • Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America
  • Bridget M. Marshall
Lukasik, Christopher J. Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 320 pp. $45.00

The recent announcements of facial recognition programs created by Facebook and Google (and the ensuing anxiety and outcry regarding how these technologies will be used and abused) highlight the importance we place on the face as a site of personal identity. Mediating our public and private lives, our faces provide us with a unique way to identify ourselves to each other, whether through official channels like photo IDs and passports, or in more personal arenas. Christopher Lukasik's book, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America, thus intervenes in a subject of near constant interest, revealing an intriguing history of American culture's obsession with reading faces. As displayed in their focus on physiognomy, phrenology, and portraiture, American novels and American culture more generally have long been fascinated by figuring out faces and what they tell us about each other. Lukasik provides wide-ranging and compelling support for his argument that "the legibility of the face was crucial in mediating the social space of postrevolutionary America. The face served both as the pliable medium of polite performance and the durable marker of moral character" (53).

The book has two parts: "Distinction and the Face," which features four chapters, and "The Changing Face of the Novel," which features two chapters more closely focused on the work of individual novelists (one on Cooper, the other on Melville). [End Page 376] The first chapter, "Discerning Characters," focuses on physiognomy (particularly the work of Johann Lavater) and its reception in early America. This is a welcome exploration of a fascinating topic; while there is fairly extensive work on physiognomy and phrenology in England and Europe, until now study of their use in early America has been more limited. The chapter is wide-ranging in its selection of source material, from imprints, newspapers, and periodicals, including ample illustrations. The many examples from both high and low culture make a convincing case for the widespread nature of physiognomical information, whether through Lavater-inspired handbooks and lectures, or more informal conventional wisdom about what various facial features reveal about a person.

In chapter 2, "Reading and Breeding," Lukasik explores the concept of "civility" with a particular focus on Chesterfield's Letters and the dire responses of critics to their dissemination among the masses. Lukasik tracks the alarmed (and often quite funny) responses to Chesterfieldianism that appeared in popular and critical writing and in numerous plays and novels. Lukasik highlights the fact that "the intense attention paid to the tone and cadence of the voice, the display of the countenance, the style of one's hair, the type of clothes one wore, the proper gestures, the appropriate conduct, and the grace of one's deportment—was a corporeal theater from which the drama of distinction was performed and observed in early America" (56). While the description of this "corporeal theater" (perhaps minus the "appropriate conduct" and "grace") might also apply to observations of the social environment in any reality television program in modern America, Lukasik indeed shows the ways that the performance of gentility was increasingly distrusted. Throughout the texts he studies, he shows how characters (and presumably many readers) evince a desire to find some reliable, legible evidence of personal integrity that could not be affected by the dissembling of performance. A thoughtful reading of Royall Tyler's The Contrast (including an enlightening discussion of the frontispiece image of the text) shows the ways that gentility was equated with dissimulation and reveals anxiety about the possibilities of rapid mobility in early American society.

Chapter 3 continues the exploration of post-Chesterfieldian anxieties about the performative nature of identity and morality but takes as its focus the widely popular genre of seduction novels. Opening with a description of the debate over novels (and highlighting many of the hilarious responses to "novel-mania"), the chapter turns to specific examples of novels that themselves suggest (often in jest) the dangers of novel-reading. He employs a considerable list of novels in this...

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