“Evolving American Interiorities”

Panel Organizer: Sarah Mesle

Northwestern University

s-mesle@northwestern.edu

Panel Chair: Julia Stern (j-stern3@northwestern.edu)

Katy L. Chiles

Northwestern University

k-chiles@northwestern.edu

“Dyeing the Body: Natural History, Environmentalism, and

Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Thoughts on the Works of Providence’”

This paper broaches the subject of “Evolving American Interiorities” counterintuitively: it claims that in late eighteenth-century America, “race” was commonly thought of as an exterior rather than an interior phenomena. As documented by historians such as Winthrop Jordan and Bruce Dain, prevalent “environmentalist” beliefs—that the physical surface of the human body was shaped by external factors such as climate, diet, and society—predated and contradicted later notions of a biologized “truth of race” that resided within the body. Emphasizing the racialization of skin color in the late eighteenth century, this essay attends to contemporaneous debates about the exact characteristics of various races and the ability of environmental factors to change one’s physical complexion and/or “race.” More importantly, however, it outlines how literatures of the time period marshaled certain aspects of this natural historical thinking to explore how professedly malleable physical attributes came to signify within this emerging system of racialization. To do so, it argues that Phillis Wheatley’s “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” draws upon beliefs about exposure to the sun from both ancient mythology and eighteenth-century natural history to articulate the complex position of a black poet, not as an exception to the rule, but as a likely inevitability, which ultimately allows Wheatley to engage in scientific and aesthetic arguments over the implications of blackness.

Peter Jaros

Northwestern University

p-jaros@northwestern.edu

“Multiplying Faces” in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond

For early national Americans, as for their European contemporaries, interiority revealed itself in the face. The self-described science of physiognomy, in its late eighteenth-century heyday, claimed that reading the countenance could yield not only individual character but also the very essence of humanity. The central place of “man” in early American political rhetoric, tied to the tradition of “natural language”—self-evidence, sympathetic sensibility, and rhetorical transparency—meant that questions of character, and thus of physiognomy, were both philosophically and politically charged in the early Republic. Thus, the descriptions of character, the face, and physiognomic encounters that permeate literary texts from this period are particularly charged in American works; yet these works have only rarely been examined in physiognomic terms.

This paper attends to the physiognomic scenes that punctuate the tortuous plot of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond. It argues that Brown contrasts two different approaches to physiognomy—an “orthodox” attitude in line with Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy and the natural language of sincerity, and a more disruptive view that, by highlighting social and intersubjective bonds, fragments the physiognomic individual into baroque multiplicity. I argue that the physiognomic debate staged in Ormond does not merely provide a footnote to a long-superannuated science, but rather reveals the paradoxes that haunted notions central to early American culture: sincerity, the individual, and the relation between vision and force.

Sarah Mesle

Northwestern University

s-mesle@northwestern.edu

“Trifles to Relate:” Caroline Lee Hentz, the Relations of Slavery,

and the Problems of Sentimental Literature

The antebellum American literary marketplace was dominated by texts characterized as “sentimental”—that is, preoccupied with women’s emotional, domestic experience. This genre makes a series of claims about interiority as an ontological reality, as a subject of representation, and as an influence in antebellum America’s political world. Because of the popularity of texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, criticism often formulates its understanding of sentimental interiority via its participation in progressive movements such as abolition. However, this essay will argue that the sentimental genre offers more profound insights into antebellum interiority when juxtaposed with pro-slavery literature. In a culture trying to reconcile democracy with slavery, the status of race gains tantamount importance. Because the racial belonging of individuals was legally associated with their mother’s racial status, the moral and domestic lives of women gained crucial importance. In promising special access to women’s interior lives, sentimental literature told the stories of the culture’s desire to secure the unstable category of race.

This essay will explore this argument via two novels written by Caroline Lee Hentz, the author of The Planter’s Northern Bride, a famed pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In juxtaposing this novel with Hentz’s next, Ernest Linwood, I will claim that in the later novel Hentz offers a provocative account of how the ideological problems of slave relations transferred to the daily experience of all citizens in a democratic, slave-holding culture. In Hentz’ account, women’s interiorities emerge as the nexus at which emotional equality and social hierarchy are negotiated.

Sarah Blackwood

Northwestern University

s-blackwood@northwestern.edu

“Picturing the Interior: Frederick Douglass, Henry James,

and the Nineteenth-Century Portrait”

This paper contends that one of the places "Evolving American Interiorities" are most readily seen is in the nineteenth-century portrait. The portrait is often overlooked as a "merely" reflective or reactive art form that simply responds to and records social realities. But writerly and artistic interest in the portrait throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in fact helped produce the concept of psychologized interiority. Linked by their concern with discovering and bringing to the surface the defining inner nature of the subject, both the realist portrait and psychological theory depend on the construction and representation of interiority. This paper will make its larger argument about the visualization of interiority in American portraiture through close readings of two very different mid-nineteenth century works: Frederick Douglass's 1863 speech "Pictures and Progress" and comments on author portraiture, and Henry James's 1868 "The Story of a Masterpiece." Both works are concerned with the racialized and gendered aspects of visual portraiture and exhibit, simultaneously, faith in and deep skepticism of the developing ideals of psychologized interiority that portraits are understood to represent.