Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art by Philipp Schweighauser (review)

Misinterpretation and outright deception often fuel narratives, from gothic novels to contemporary sitcoms. In early American literature, Charles Brockden Brown's plot in Wieland (1798) hinges on ventriloquism, an act of deception that tests the characters' abilities to interpret the world around them. Philipp Schweighauser's book Beautiful Deceptions: European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art examines the rise of autonomous art in the period of the early Republic, a time when authors and artists employed deception both within and through their art, as Schweighauser argues.

Schweighauser's introduction distinguishes between definitions of art and arts, which referenced practical pursuits in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the modern definition of art as autonomous from morality and religion. Writers and painters had the ability to deceive their audiences and this autonomous act paved the way for a modern understanding of art, appearing in the period before Romanticism flourished. Using Niklas Luhmann's "systems-theoretic perspective" as his theoretical framework, Schweighauser argues that "the gradual emergence of modern notions of autonomous art … is an integral part of a broader process of functional differentiation that resulted in the division of Western societies into social systems that each perform one unique function for the social whole" (5). The key authors Schweighauser considers in the book are Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, and Royall Tyler. The trompe l'oeil paintings of Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale and the wax sculptures of Patience Wright are the focus of a chapter on visual artifice.

Schweighauser begins his literary analysis in his first chapter, "Aesthetics, Politics, and the Early American Novel," with Hugh Henry Bracken-ridge's picaresque novel Modern Chivalry (1792) as a text that wavers between a premodern emphasis on the moral and religious usefulness of literature and a modern conception of novels as a form of autonomous art. In other words, Schweighauser sees Brackenridge as "an advocate for the right of novels to be … verbal works of art" (21). He provides a historiography of recent developments in early American studies. While acknowledging the contributions of canon expansion by the New Historicists, Schweighauser argues that it is now time to return to a study of aesthetic considerations in early American literature.

Chapter 2, "Political Deceptions and Sensory Delusions," begins with some historical context: the deception of the Boston Tea Party as an event with disguise at its core. Schweighauser notes that deception in early American literature could be a political tool, but it also provoked anxieties. Using texts by Benjamin Franklin and Lord Chesterfield, Schweighauser describes the thin line between the self-made man and what later became known as the confidence man, arguing that Franklin and Chesterfield used dissimulation as a strategy for social advancement. Widely read by the middle class, Chesterfield's letters, for instance, threatened social stability and thus worried elites. Sweighauser analyzes European aesthetics regarding the untrustworthiness of sense perception as a larger transatlantic context for American literature. Reading Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten alongside Charles Brockden Brown demonstrates that Brown's novels Wieland and Arthur Mervyn (1799) share the concerns expressed in aesthetic treatises that sense perception is faulty. Schweighauser finds passages in Wieland in which the "distinction between the two meanings of art—deception, creative endeavor—is blurred" (100); he continues that "[s]uch passages add a decisively self-reflexive dimension to Brown's novel in that they explore deception and delusion as not merely aberrations of the creative imagination but also as sources of artistic production" (101). Schweighauser concludes that Brown's novels move American literature in the direction of modernity and autonomy.

In chapter 3, "The Right to Deception," Schweighauser examines the paradox of fiction pretending to be fact; in the early Republic, novels had to assert their veracity so as not to be labeled as immoral in an era when the antifiction movement situated literature in the...