Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (review)

In Bodies of Reform, James B. Salazar traces the rhetoric of character building in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. culture. He places discussions of “character” formulated by five major writers—Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, and Jane Addams—within a larger context of American character-building rhetoric found, for example, in child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, police gazettes, Scout handbooks, and success manuals. His analysis ultimately includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, P. T. Barnum, Richard Henry Pratt, Sojourner Truth, and seemingly everyone of the period who reflected on character building. The result is a comprehensive and original study of the various ways the rhetoric of character appeared in American culture.

Salazar’s most compelling argument is that “character” in the United States has been drawn not as an interior quality—as one might expect—but as a quality of the body. So, for example, chapter 1, centering on The Confidence-Man, asserts that Melville’s text uncovers character partly by identifying and thereby naturalizing race; chapter 2, on A Connecticut Yankee, reveals how character appears embodied by association with particular habits; chapter 3, on Gilman, explores the significance of body building to character; chapter 4, on Hopkins, emphasizes the place of physical beauty; the final chapter, on Addams, the importance of organized exercise.

This, however, is only one aspect of Salazar’study: another significant thread explores how the rhetoric of character can both liberate American subjects from and constrain them within normative cultural categories. Salazar argues, for example, that Melville’s exploration of character may show the “fungibility of racial identification,” but it also reasserts race as a natural quality; Twain’s rhetoric of character may express the ways particular habits can uplift individuals from social constraints, but it ultimately reaffirms class boundaries. Similarly, Hopkins may break limiting ties between race and character, but she reasserts class and character connections; and Gilman may challenge the gendered nature of character, but she reaffirms racial difference. While Salazar does not explicitly state this, it seems that of all his major writers, it is Jane Addams who develops a concept of character that is most open to gender, ethnic, class, and racial differences.

Salazar’s argument gets clearer and stronger as the book continues, but in early chapters, in particular, dense prose needlessly obscures many of his fine points. Attempts to sum up ideas seem particularly abstruse. One typical summary sentence, for example: “The interpretive inference that a racially unmarked, uniquely self-reliant and consolidated agent lies behind the polymorphous masks of the confidence man, like the unmasking of the misanthrope’s self-reliant character, this chapter demonstrates, requires the endorsement of an imperial allegory of racial difference and the interpretive consolidation of racialized characters.”

At the risk of oversimplifying Salazar’s thinking, such prose could surely be sharper, because there are ideas here that would be of interest to undergraduates and nonacademics concerned with American culture. The implications of Salazar’s argument are significant: if character in American discourse is “embodied,” what do we do with the old, the fat, the conventionally unattractive, the ill, the disabled? Is our rhetorical history such that the “character” of these individuals will always be challenged? How can we, even in the twenty-first century, probe the continuing embodiment of “character,” which is surely in the culture all around us? These do not appear to be questions that particularly interest Salazar, but as I see it, they form the broader significance of his work—if his prose could reach beyond the most specialized academics.