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Visual Technology and Literary Culture in the Early United States

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Visual Technology and Literary Culture in the Early United States A NATION IN SIGHT: VISUAL TECHNOLOGY AND LITERARY CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Megan Walsh August, 2010 Examining Committee Members: Miles Orvell, Advisory Chair, English David Waldstreicher, History Katherine Henry, English Michael Kaufmann, English Max Cavitch, External Reader, English, University of Pennsylvania i © by Megan Walsh 2010 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT “A Nation in Sight” asks how authors living in the immediate wake of national founding articulated, critiqued, and expanded the aspects of representative government by engaging with the contemporaneous discourses about visual representation. On the one hand, new visual technologies and emerging theories of sight allowed early Americans to collectively imagine an ideal version of the nation. On the other hand, the scientific and material realities of vision were problematic, giving rise to notions that any attempt at representation was deeply fraught from the outset. Even though optical devices allowed viewers to perceive the world in illuminating ways, they were always comprised of a host of elements that relied on distorting elements like lenses, mirrors, and other objects to trick the eye. In “A Nation in Sight” I argue that crucial innovations in autobiography, lyric poetry, and the novel that came to define American literature after the Revolution reflected attempts to reconcile the promises inscribed in republican political ideology with the frequently distorting and illusory qualities of real optical science with which writers were surrounded. I read a range of scientific texts about vision—including advertisements for optical mechanical devices in newspapers and magazines, medical treatises on the eye, and essays by Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, James Madison, Charles Willson Peale, David Rittenhouse, Thomas Reid, Benjamin Rush, and others—in order to offer new readings of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral , and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale . “A Nation in Sight” iii provides an account of American literature in which authors employed the language of visual technology to uncover the civic and political inclusions and exclusions that inhered in the theories and practices of a newly formed representative government. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Like all dissertations, this one is the result of time spent in libraries and archives, collaborative efforts, and conversations with advisors, friends, and colleagues. The members of my advisory committee at Temple University—Miles Orvell, David Waldstreicher, Katherine Henry, and Michael Kaufmann—were behind this project from its inception and have continually offered their unwavering support. I am also grateful to my two readers at the University of Pennsylvania. For his encouragement, kindness, and extraordinarily helpful questions, I thank Max Cavitch in the Department of English. At the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, I thank Dan Richter, for his absolutely unparalleled enthusiasm, generosity, and wisdom—Dan is the best booster one could ever hope to have. A number of institutions provided support, space, and time necessary to my research. At Temple University, I thank the College of Liberal Arts, the Graduate School, and the Department of English for awards that gave me time to write. For generous fellowship support outside of Temple, I thank the Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the Winterthur Museum, Library, and Country Estate, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. At these institutions, especially at the McNeil Center, I was introduced to an exceptional community of librarians, teachers, readers, and friends. Their help has been invaluable. For everything, I thank my parents, Dan and Renate Walsh. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: ARGUS IN AMERICA ..........................................................1 2. THE POLITICS OF VISION: CHARLES WILLSON PEALE IN PRINT .........30 3. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S SPECTACLES .........................................................75 4. PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S AND VENTURE SMITH’S TRANSATLANTIC VISIONS ............................................................................121 5. HOW TO SEE A BILOQUIST: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN SKETCHES THE EARLY REPUBLIC ..............................................................168 6. CONCLUSION: VISION IN THE ANTEBELLUM AGE ................................206 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................210 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Federal Tambour Desk with Perspective Glass ........................................................16 2. La Destruction de la Statue Royale a Nouvelle York ................................................19 3. The Accident in Lombard Street . ..............................................................................44 4. Title page of The Life of Charles Willson Peale .......................................................66 5. Benjamin Franklin ....................................................................................................76 6. David Martin portraits of Benjamin Franklin ...........................................................93 7. Deborah Franklin ...................................................................................................119 8. Frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley ................................................................124 9. Woodcut images on Massachusetts execution broadsides ......................................135 10. Tombstone of Venture Smith ..................................................................................156 11. Camera obscura.......................................................................................................184 12. Charles Brockden Brown architectural drawing .....................................................194 vii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: ARGUS IN AMERICA At the close of the Revolutionary War, new visual technologies began to appear in the parlors, studies, and exhibition halls of early America. Brought by unprecedented growth in consumer spending and interest in foreign goods, these machines, devices, and amusements reached America from England, France, and Germany. American cabinetmakers, carpenters, and metal smiths fixed European-made lenses into American settings while shop proprietors and itinerant salesmen offered such goods for sale. One device assembled and crafted in Salem, MA, provides a representative but also especially rich example. Sometime in the early 1790s cabinetmaker Edmund Johnson started building Hepplewhite mahogany writing desks with folding tambour doors and other elements designed in the Federal style. Within their bodies, the desks housed a set of expensive lenses and mirrors used for magnified viewing. Easily one of the more popular optical amusements sold in the eighteenth century was the zograscope. An example of the devices contained within the Johnson writing desks, a zograscope produced a three-dimensional version of an engraved image. These images usually depicted urban vistas, capturing the ordered regularity of city gardens, 1 newly built squares, and other spaces emptied of the disordered crowds that actually gathered there. Yet despite the ordered content of these images and the controlled setting in which they were viewed, the effects of the zograscope resulted from a series of distorting mirrors and magnifying lenses. Prints had to be engraved and colored especially for such machines and were easily distinguished from other illustrations. They featured perspective lines drawn out of proportion, wide foreground fields, and, most tellingly, backwards type. Such images were widely available throughout the eighteenth century, regularly appearing in major periodicals like the London-based Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1750s. Buyers could purchase such publications, cut out the engraved prints, and insert them under their special magnifying lenses. Visual representations were miniaturized, packaged, and commercialized within—and crucially not apart from—the period’s print culture. 1 If a visit to the imposing neoclassical architecture and urban plans of Europe was out of reach, then readers and viewers with enough money could make such tourism a virtual reality. Devices like the zograscope presented an often chaotic world in impressively ordered and clarified terms, manipulating a viewer’s sense of sight in order to represent a more perfect version of real life. The consumer demand that drove the production of objects like the Johnson desks was part of a much larger cultural fascination with the workings of the eye and with optical technologies, a fascination that led to notions that sight was a perfect sense, one 1 For recent discussions of zogroscope devices more generally, see Wendy Bellion,
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