| Early Americans were sophisticated readers of character---a term that encompassed personal particularity, public participation, and reputation. Physiognomists claimed to read permanent character in the face; political writers emphasized the importance of virtuous character in a republic; and memoirists and novelists regularly depicted scenes of discerning character. By examining physiognomic, journalistic, and didactic texts alongside novels, tales, and memoirs, this study shows how the language of character connected the hermeneutics of the face, the creation of public personae, and the definition of political personhood in early America.;The cultural work of "character" was paradoxical. While the commonplace of visible character exemplified Enlightenment ideals of transparency, the figuration of the face as a text implied the need for interpretation. And while the "natural" person was at the heart of both physiognomic and political theory, theatrical performance and political participation relied upon artificial personae. Writers attentive to these contradictions unsettled the very notions---man, the individual, the citizen---that others invoked the language of character to support. Early American and Atlantic writers including Charles Brockden Brown, Stephen Burroughs, Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa, and Edgar Allan Poe transformed physiognomic and political theory alike by differentiating character and the person from the human individual.;By highlighting the discursive centrality of character to early American and Atlantic culture, this dissertation intervenes in a number of critical debates. It mediates between opposing views of the public sphere by showing how print and performance culture relied on a shared vocabulary of character, virtue, and legibility. It demonstrates how discourses of character provided an idiom for the non-individual persons and personae that emerged from print culture, performance, economic circulation, and slavery. Finally, it reveals how the readerly logic of physiognomy persists in present-day critical theory and practice. |
