Jefferson's Body: A Corporeal Biography by Maurizio Valsania (review)

Thomas Jefferson's body is a wonderful subject for a book. As Jefferson was a central figure in a new republic devoted to forging a distinctly American, if not modern, identity, his abiding interest in male and female bodies, fashionable bodies, laboring bodies, racialized bodies, and private, or self-possessed, bodies proves to be a most relevant avenue for exploring foundational questions about civic culture in the United States. Maurizio Valsania's " corporealbiography" engages a series of subjects that collectively constitute the body politic, so to speak (p. 4). These include such matters as the role of civility in a democratizing, "postmartial" or "postaristocratic," age, rules of self-presentation and their correspondence to an emerging gestalt of equality and natural rights, shifting notions of manhood, and the post-Independence redefinition of self-government (pp. 4, 3).

Indeed, that sovereign self offers an apposite context for studying America's great transition from patriarchy to fraternity. Jefferson was determined to create a persona that embodied this event, a citizen capable of synthesizing natural refinement, rational utility, and individual autonomy into an ethic of "bourgeois modernity" (p. 59). Valsania consequently assigns Jefferson's pantaloons a central role in his study, which he tells us were an anti-aristocratic habiliment consciously deployed to perform a homespun plainness that drew sharp distinctions to Old World dissipation. This, in turn, informed a masculine ethic suited to a society that promoted such men as absolute rulers of their own fate. Unfortunately, such observations are not developed into a more wideranging treatment of their various implications in the transatlantic political philosophy that informed Jefferson's materialism, for instance, or the problematic role of fashionable emulation in a society skeptical of ostentation and deference, the fraught dynamics between productive labor, which was often identified with the making of cloth, or the breakdown of the household economy that Jefferson identified as the source of republican virtue.

A similar sense of missed opportunity characterizes Valsania's discussion of Jefferson's relationship to enslaved bodies. We are reminded of Jefferson's fear of slavery's influence on the republic: that the brutality intrinsic to the planter's dominion over his chattel threatened to undermine any attempt to acquire the self-command required of self-governing citizens. In that respect, a black person's degenerate physiology, in which Jefferson was deeply invested, would tragically corrupt the inherent superiority of white masters, bringing all down to the same debased condition. Once it became clear that slavery was not about to be abolished, the solution found its form in a new regime of discipline that drew inspiration from Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (whose precepts Valsania somehow discerns in the design of Monticello) and was meant to separate out violence from power. This is another interesting argument that Valsania should have pursued by asking how such rationalization was supposed to be integrated into the southern plantation complex or by exploring how the philosophical and ideological conflict between self-possession and property in human beings played out in southern bodies. Instead, Valsania becomes caught up in a false dichotomy between Jefferson's enlightened thought and his rabid racism.

This account of Jefferson's body is, as such, consistently undertheorized, which causes considerable frustration on the part of the reader, not least because of the subject's rich possibilities. A glance at the study's citations reveals the root of the problem, for the endnotes are filled with texts on Jefferson rather than the ample literature on fashion, masculinity, property, discipline, and the American slave regime that is required reading for making sense of Jefferson's place in the nation's body and soul. We are left, instead, with a pastiche of discrete manifestations of the corporeal, presented in no particular order, sharing an obvious common denominator that never adds up to a singular cultural event or a coherent self.