Over the past fifteen years, there has been an increasing amount of scholarship in the humanities devoted to discussing the cultural and social implications of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century physiognomy in Europe.¹ Dror Wahrman, for example, has read the rise of the physiognomic mode across so many late eighteenth-century English cultural forms as signaling the arrival of a new modern regime of selfhood featuring more innate and fixed categories of identity. Physiognomy’s role in the formation of more modern notions of race has been the subject of a number of studies. Work by Judith Weschler, Kay Flavell, and Richard...

Civility appears as an integral, yet complicated, feature of the political and social transformations of the pre- and postrevolutionary periods in America.¹ As a social practice, civility was a prominent feature in the signification of gentility, and its importance grew during the eighteenth century as the traditional sources of gentility—wealth and birth—became increasingly “surrounded and squeezed by other means of distinction, by cultivated, man-made criteria having to do with manners, taste, and character” (Wood Radicalism 32).² With its models for personal behavior in public (such as politeness) and its institutions for their practice and reproduction (such as face-to-face...

In the preceding chapter, I suggested that the discourse surrounding Chesterfieldianism during the postrevolutionary era was part of a more general struggle over how distinction would be imagined to operate within the social space of early America and more broadly how culture, specifically literature, might participate in that struggle. Chesterfield’s Letters downwardly distributed a model of civility less dependent on economic or social capital, thus less subject to the institutions and networks traditionally responsible for reproducing such capital (such as those associated with family, church, and state). As texts such as The Contrast and The Power of Sympathy demonstrate, criticism...

The previous chapter discussed how a number of postrevolutionary seduction novels imagined social spaces in which the visibility of distinction was relocated from the genteel yet voluntary performances of the polite individual to the permanent, involuntary, and unalterable features of his face, and they did so in ways resonant with the cultural practices of physiognomic distinction detailed in Chapter 1. The transposition in the social perception of character that discourses such as physiognomy promised was imagined within these novels as a deterrent to the performances of Chesterfieldian seducers and, by extension, to their promotion of cultural capital in the signification...

The previous four chapters traced the face’s relationship to the social perception of character in early American culture with particular attention paid to how transatlantic discourses for reading the face (such as civility and physiognomy) and cultural forms for representing the face (such as portraiture) shaped the literary representation of distinction in the fifty years following the revolution. The presence of Chesterfieldian civility and the logic of physiognomic distinction in postrevolutionary literature, I suggested, were part of a more general struggle over how distinction would operate within the social space of the new republic and, more broadly, how culture, specifically...

The previous chapter explored how the physiognomic distinction of the face in the social perception of character was appropriated and transformed in the early fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s seduction fiction reproduced the transposition in the social perception of character to the physiognomic features of the face, but where those features had served primarily to unmask the dissimulating seducer in postrevolutionary seduction fiction, they now served to distinguish the invisible aristocrat. As a result, the purpose of discerning character from the face had changed from detecting the visibility of its absence to addressing the invisibility of its presence. I...