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

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.

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

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,

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, “Pleasing Deceptions,” Common-Place 3 (Oct. 2002); Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); Erin C. Blake, “Zograscopes, Virtual Reality, and the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The New Media, 1740-1915 , ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 1-29; Dennis Carr, “Optical Machines, Prints, and Gentility in Early America” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware-Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, 1999); J.A. Chaldecott, “The Zograscope or Optical Diagonal Machine,” Annals of Science 9 (Dec. 1953), 315-22; and R. F. Johnson, “A Machine for Viewing Prints,” Country Life 125 (Feb. 1959), 252.

that could allow individuals to perceive and interpret the world in the most accurate way

possible. Evidence of Americans’ interest in vision is manifest in the many print artifacts

of period—purchasers and users of optical devices were also writers and readers. The

popular print culture of the eighteenth-century articulated recurring themes about the

connections between sight, representation, and political and social belonging, which

conditioned major literary figures to treat visual technology with specific concerns and

values. In the moment and in the immediate wake of national founding, scientific

developments about sight as well as new literary forms emerged alongside one another

and, often enough, existed in collaboration with each other.

The role of visual perception and representation has been widely recognized as a

central part of early national literary culture. Studies that emphasize the oral nature of

early America, for example, have focused on the visual performance cues of political

speechifying, evangelical preaching, and Native American diplomatic practices,

elocutionary moments in which gesture, clothing, and facial expression mattered almost

as much as tone and content. Similarly, studies of print culture have discussed the

practices of publication that enabled the eyes of Americans to move more easily across

the pages of texts. Readers, writers, and publishers required good eyesight to make sense

of the types, inks, and blank spaces that comprised print culture. Along similar lines,

studies of sentimental fiction have attended to the visual cues of sincerity, urging that the

didactic function of such fiction was to instruct readers to identify the insincere tears and

smiles of the rakes and coquettes that plagued the moral republic. 2

2 Influential studies of sentiment include Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia UP, 1997). Leading studies of oral culture see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the 3

While scholarship has taken note of this literary interest in visual representation,

less attention has been given to historicizing the sense of sight within political and

cultural contexts. As a result, we have not fully appreciated all of the different processes

and modes of vision early Americans embraced. For example, individuals had to have

healthy eyes both to perceive the subtle facial expressions that indicated genuine feeling,

good character, and honest communication and to produce the delicate and controlled

tears that visible emotion required. One advertisement for a “Remedy for Weakness of

Sight and all Complaints of the Eyes,” for example, claimed that the poultice in question

would restore “a good Countenance” as well as lift the “Specks, Films, Mists, and

Suffusions” that plagued the optical organs. 3 Eyes were essential for seeing as well as for

being seen. Texts like the eye remedy advertisement ought to inform our readings of the

more literary works that likewise circulated at the same moment.

Discussions of sight like the remedy challenge us to treat vision less

metaphorically than materially, and to take more seriously the science of sight as a

central context for the production of literature. Considering the historical contexts

surrounding vision brings a new dimension to how we understand the ways early

Americans understood their world, and in particular, how they wrote about the dramatic

political and civic changes taking place at that moment. Writers living in the early

republic were certainly not the only group to engage with modes of vision in the

Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993) and Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). The leading study of print culture in the early republic is Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990).

3 This broadside, produced sometime around 1770 and distributed in Philadelphia by a healer named John Sparhawk, advertised a cure made from “Essential Euphragiae,” presumably the Euphrasia , a genus of plant whose species had long been used by herbalists to cure various disorders of the eye. The original is owned by the American Antiquarian Society.

production of literature. Sight is a well-rehearsed trope in both British and American

literary traditions, one that was treated with renewed vigor during the rise of literary

theory in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, vision—and the material objects, images,

and technologies that attend it—is a particularly rich terrain for studying writers living in

a moment dominated by debates about representation. Political thinkers relied on

metaphors made available by the theories, media, and technologies of sight in order to

describe the structures of a representative government taking shape at the same time. On

the one hand, new visual technologies like the perspective devices set into the Johnson

desks and emerging discourses about 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 new and 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. If the media, technologies, and objects from which political thinkers derived metaphors of representation always entailed elements of distortion, then those political ideals, structures, and theories suddenly seemed less settled and less perfectly representative.

Accounts of early national America have tended to follow the premise that citizens participated in a republican public sphere model of civic and political association. In this view, (white, male, property-owning) early national Americans interacted with each other through rational, polite, dispassionate, and self-negating discourse. While public sphere theory persists, a number of studies have begun to erode

some of the central elements of this organizational model. Recent emphases on

regionalism, transnationalism, and even friendship call into question many of

characterizations of republican civic and political organization by destabilizing the extent

to which early Americans thought of themselves first and foremost as United States

citizens. The fragmented, irrational, oblique, unreliable, material, sensory, and

passionate realities of lived experience intrude on the theoretical stability of the public

sphere. 4 Visual technologies, with their accompanying distorting, confusing, and obfuscating qualities do not sit neatly alongside a model that posits rational discourse as its primary qualifier. “A Nation in Sight” suggests that the constant fluctuations and perspectives afforded by visual technology might provide a better, more realistic model for understanding early national civic and political organization.

Conclusions about the connections between the visual and the literary have often been framed around the final production (the image) rather than the process through which it was produced. While the zograscope desk is an exceptional case, many other technologies shaped and directed Americans’ visual practices; it is necessary to understand technology in broader terms than simply defining it as the tools and products of scientific inquiry. As a number of historians of the book and material texts studies

4 Coined by Jürgen Habermas, the term public sphere gained currency with Michael Warner’s assertion that early national Americans imagined the nation through networks of print, and that the tremendous rise in the publication of newspapers, periodicals, and broadsides gave them a forum in which to rationally debate the existence of the nation and the qualifications for citizenship. To participate in this public sphere, citizens (white, propertied men) theoretically divested themselves of their private interests, often writing anonymously or with pseudonyms to preserve their lack of self-interestedness. A number of recent studies have questioned the reality of an early national public sphere. In the field of Material Texts Studies, for example, Trish Loughran has unsettled the position that print culture was ever as universal as Warner posits. In her description of the dissemination of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense , for example, Loughran argues that famous printed works were hardly as widely read or as popularly influential as we have often believed. See Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007).

scholars have suggested, the relationship between visual technologies, politics, and

literary production is dialectical rather than causal. Responsible studies of technology

must reject, as Michael Warner has argued, the “fundamental premise…that technology

has an ontological status prior to culture.” Such teleological claims, Warner suggests,

lead to “a kind of retrodetermination whereby the political history of a technology is

converted into the unfolding nature of that technology” and in which “historians have

learned to consider the realm of politics and culture only as the secondary field of

technology’s presumed effects.” 5 The privileging of technology can be avoided by

recognizing its definitional dependence on the discourse in which it exists. Culture and

politics shape and create technologies as much as technologies inform culture and

politics. 6

In aiming to resist a deterministic approach, this study understands technology

from a conventional viewpoint, but also reaches to the broadest meanings of the term.

Besides discussing objects like the zograscopes, I address the other media that influenced

ways of seeing, and that ultimately became technologies of vision because they were

culturally and politically used as such. These include material objects such as portraits,

drawings, books, medallions, engravings, furniture, as well as theories such as ekphrasis,

Lavaterian physiognomy, and aesthetic philosophy. A broad definition of visual

technology allows for a more precisely early national understanding to, as Lisa Gitelman

5 Warner, 5-9.

6 Technological determinism has been especially prevalent in studies of the photography. Some critics have suggested that photographic technology produced a dramatic cultural shift and that thinkers and writers living before the photograph understood visual perception as relatively static. As Jonathan Crary argues, “Photographs may have some apparent similarities with older types of images, such as perspectival painting or drawings made with the aid of a camera obscura; but the vast systemic rupture of which photography is a part renders such similarities insignificant.” See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 15.

has put it, “the ways that people experience meaning, how they perceive the world and

communicate with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify culture.” 7

“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. More

specifically, in the chapters that follow, I examine the convergence of literary culture,

political design, and optical science in order to consider and conclude the following: 1)

how textual attention to existing visual technologies generated increased fascination with

those technologies and allowed for the development of new theories about their social

and political functions and ramifications, 2) how ongoing changes in individual identity

and relationship to a wider community network took shape in printed discussions about

the role of the viewer, 3) how a growing interest in visual technology helped writers stage

discussions about representation, both individual and national, 4) how concepts of truth

and falsehood, of the authentic and the imitative, took shape in America’s literary

imagination around examples of visual representation, and finally, 5) how turning to

discussions of visual technologies and media allowed writers to question and even

broaden definitions of existing social and political structures.

This chapter offers a necessary context for the readings of poetry and prose

surrounding the artist and scientist Charles Willson Peale, and three longer works

including The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1793), Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on

Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale (1798) that follow. These three primary

7 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 1.

works provide an especially good archive through which to discover various models of early national perception and representation. All three are structured around the voices of single speaking subjects, yet each represents a distinctly different genre and perspective.

The autobiographical “I,” the poetic “I,” and the fictional narrative “I” are unique literary modes designed to perform and interpret individual points of view. Furthermore, the different biographical details of each author—a major figure in eighteenth-century scientific and political thought, an enslaved African-born woman, and an originator of the early American novel form and part-time lawyer—present a range of civic and political backgrounds and concerns. Innovations in autobiography, poetry, and the novel that came to define American literature after the Revolution and just before the introduction of photographic technology reflected attempts to reconcile the promises of perfectly rational and clear national order inscribed in republican political ideology with the frequently distorting and illusory qualities of real optical science with which writers were surrounded.

Zograscopes and Other New Old Media

To say that eighteenth-century Americans were interested in the science of optics would be an understatement. From debates about the correct way to observe the astronomical events that influenced everything from nautical precession to farmers’ almanacs to the emergence of illustrated scientific catalogues in which artists relied on grids to achieve exactitude in their drawings to the zograscopes, telescopes, microscopes, and camera obscura machines and devices with which wealthy and learned gentlemen

filled their offices and parlors, the desire to understand—and to perfect—visual

perception was a pervasive goal. Seventeenth-century works on visual science like

Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections (1665), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), and Isaac Newton’s Optiks (1672-1704) were reprinted widely in the eighteenth. This interest in seeing what had previously been relegated to scientific discourse spilled over into the literary techniques of eighteenth-century writers as they embraced a descriptive praxis first found in the writings of the seventeenth-century members of the Royal

Society. As Cynthia Wall explains, “things and the surfaces of the natural world seemed to become more visible, more immediately felt and perceived, in the seventeenth century…and as things come to seem to define the world for the eighteenth century, so eighteenth century texts adapt to accommodate things in description.” 8 What was the purview of scientists became that of literary writers.

If it was the art of description that the New Science offered English writers, then

American writers clung all the more forcefully not to description, but to sight itself.

English authors treated the familiar as a world to be magnified, dissected, and laid bare to the human eye, as catalogues of objects filled the lines of works like Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) and the pages of Addison’s The Spectator (1711-1714). By contrast,

American writers recorded technologies of visual perception, devoting more of their attention to microscopes than to the microscopic. In their search for the perfect political philosophy, Americans studiously read the works of Empiricist, Realist, and Common

Sense, who, despite their various disagreements, all generally granted that sight out of all the senses was the most valuable for knowing the world. John Locke, for example, noted

8 Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth-Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 95.

that sight was the “most instructive of the senses” and, later, Thomas Reid explained that

“Of the faculties called the five senses , sight is without doubt the noblest.” 9

If Locke kept his thoughts on the senses and perception relatively distinct from his political theorizing by publishing his ideas in separate volumes, then James Madison found it more useful to blend them. Staging the creation of the Constitution in the terms of visual perception, Madison, writing as Publius in Federalist 37 , compares the act of nation-making with the production of other forms of knowledge. Madison asks readers to recognize that the organs of perception are fallible, and that, if anything, readers ought to empathize with Constitutional drafters because of a shared recognition of “the imperfection of the eye.” Good governments are hard to make, claimed Madison, because, “obscurity arises as well from the object itself [“the institutions of man,” or, government], as from the organ by which it is contemplated.” 10 Drafting the Constitution is difficult enough because constitutions are inherently clumsy documents riddled with errors; add a human inability to perceive those errors, and an imperfect result is the only outcome that should be expected. In an ideal world, according to Madison, human beings would be better at perception—especially visual perception—and thus would write better constitutions.

By the middle of the eighteenth-century, the theories of sight that filled treatises on the senses throughout the century had purchase in part because examples of optical

9 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind , ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1970), 88.

10 James Madison, “Federalist 37” in The Federalist , ed. Jack N. Rakove (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 94.

technologies appeared in ever more popular media. 11 Following the vogue for new technologies, Thomas Jefferson, a frequent transatlantic traveler, carried his interests in optical technology to America, buying several camera obscura machines. These prephotographic devices that relied on a lens and a dark box or room to reproduce an image became increasingly popular and affordable as the end of the eighteenth century neared.

Jefferson wrote to astronomer David Rittenhouse, asking to borrow his friend’s camera obscura so that his daughter could “take a few lessons in drawing from nature.” 12 Often used as drawing aids, camera obscura instruments helped prospective artists produce more exact copies of whatever they chose to view by allowing them to trace the resulting images onto canvas or paper. They featured moveable lenses that projected an inverted image onto a pair of mirrors, which, in turn, displayed a reversed image of the viewed object onto a glass viewing plate.

Those who were not able to purchase such devices for private use could go see them exhibited in public. Americans frequently gathered together to observe each other using mechanical devices designed for observation. Scientists and peddlers of scientific equipment counted on this phenomenon, advertising the exhibition of optical machines.

One such itinerant entrepreneur, John Bonnin, travelled the colonies with various optical technologies. In an advertisement he placed in the Pennsylvania Gazette , readers were invited to head to John Biddle’s tavern “at the sign of the Indian King” in groups of “not more than twelve persons at one time,” where they could pay to view what the

11 Wall notes that this vogue for all things scientific even led to the creation of miniature microscopes that could be worn on tied to the wrist. The Prose of Things , 72.

12 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to David Rittenhouse, 6 Sept. 1793,” MS, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Digital Edition.

advertisement called “the famous Philosophical Optical Machine .” 13 An earlier version

of the zograscope device like the kind fixed within the Salem desk, the Bonnin machine

produced stereoscopically enhanced versions of a variety of locations from across the

Atlantic, including various locations in London, Rome, Naples, and Venice. Bonnin’s

advertisement described the viewing experience as a kind of virtual tourism, making it

“the fastest, cheapest, and most delightful way of travelling that was ever invented.”

Like picture-perfect postcards, images seen through the philosophical optical machine

allowed viewers to imagine themselves in artificially idealized versions of urban vistas,

city gardens, and famous European plazas.

Another mid-eighteenth-century advertisement similarly represented observation

as a public activity, but presented the act of visual observation as an especially scientific

activity. With a typographical emphasis on the instrument, the broadside advertised the

arrival of a “ Solar or Camera Obscura MICROSCOPE” to be exhibited “For the

Entertainment of the CURIOUS and Others.” 14 De-emphasized by small print, part of the

advertisement stresses that although the visual observation of “The Animalculae in

several Sorts of Fluids, with many other living and dead Objects” is an astounding

scientific accomplishment, the “Animalculae” themselves are “too tedious to mention.”

Presumably it is the microorganisms’ smallness and vast number that makes naming them

an inappropriate task for an advertisement. Yet the use of the word “tedious” hints that

what one really goes to see when visiting the “large commodious Room, at the House of

Mr. Vidal , in Second-Street” is the microscope and not what it magnifies. “This

13 “Advertisement, 11 May 1749,” Pennsylvania Gazette , 11 May 1749, p. 3.

14 Just Arrived from London… (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1744).

Curiosity,” the writer explains, “was never shewn by any Person that ever travelled,” underscoring that the purpose of visiting Vidal’s house is to view not specimens, but an optical instrument. The experience of seeing the microscope in use was hardly meant to be a private one; it could be exhibited to companies of “Six or more” and could even be brought to various “ Gentlemens Houses, giving half an Hour’s Notice .” The exhibition of the microscope served a function beyond the satisfaction of curiosity—it also provided viewers with the chance of seeing each other engaged in the observation of a machine for observing. To view the microscope was to visually confirm that one belonged to a specific community of viewers. Identity could be fashioned through the shared act of looking rather than through the act of looking at another’s clothes or countenance.

As Lorainne Daston and Peter Gallison have explained, individuals in the eighteenth century developed a fetishistic attachment to the practice of observation, generating “seasoned naturalists” or “devotees of the cult of the genius of observation.”

Before the birth of the concept of “objectivity,” a scientific ideal in which “ordinary endowments and a few years of training could make anyone an expert,” experts clung to the notion of a carefully honed practice of visual observation to maintain their elevated status. 15 Cultivated looking offered its most seasoned practitioners an elite cultural status—individual subjectivity was affirmed by expertise. It is no wonder, then, that eighteenth-century Americans might be expected by the promoter of the camera obscura microscope to seek out a chance to see the device rather than what it magnified. A technologic portal to the world of selfhood, the microscope offered viewers the opportunity to fashion personal identity through the act of seeing.

15 Loraine Daston and Peter Gallison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 46.

Given the focus of these mid-century advertisement writers’ interest in stressing

the act of viewership structured in the terms of public community, it is worth turning

back to the desk made in Salem nearly fifty years later. While the advertisement for John

Bonnin’s Philosophical Optical Machine and the solar microscope exhibited in

Philadelphia served as public amusements that helped develop individual identity through

public observation, by the end of the century more Americans were experimenting with

new technologies in the more private space of the home. What was once a group activity

in which half a dozen or so individuals gathered around a single instrument, the Johnson

zograscope desks suggested a more polite, more limited observational experience. The

Johnson desks are exceptional because, unlike the devices that appeared in American

advertisements before, these were hidden within the piece of furniture. When closed, the

desks appear unexceptional within the world of high cost status object furnishings. They are virtually identical to the many other desks manufactured in Massachusetts during the

1790s for wealthy buyers. Only two brass handles affixed to the sides designed to ease movement hint that the desks are anything other than a typical example of this style of furniture. When opened fully, however, the desks reveal their secondary purpose.

Replacing most of the central pigeonholes used for storing correspondence and other documents, the central bodies of the desks feature a viewing lens. The special prints used for the devices were placed within the bodies of the lower cabinets from a rear door concealed from the front of the desks and from viewers. Unfinished and rough, the back of the desks might have been placed against a wall when not in use. When in use, they were most likely brought away from the wall so that a servant could inconspicuously change and adjust the images from behind (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. Edmund Johnson, Federal Tambour Desk with Perspective Glass. Salem, Massachusetts. Ca. 1795. Winterthur Museum and Country Estate.

Contained within characteristically localized examples of American cabinet-

making, the optical devices within revealed not only the distorting qualities of three-

dimensionality, but also a genealogy of European science and the arts that made the desks

possible. For even though the desks were crafted in New England with all the details

particular to 1790s Salem, everything about the devices they contained were imported.

From the French or English made lenses to the French and German made engraved prints

that those lenses magnified, the Johnson desks wrapped American production around

foreign trade goods. The transatlantic interplay manifest in the desks is especially

evident in some of the prints that may have been used by owners like Benjamin Pickman

and their families, many of which capitalized on the cultural currency of the events of the

American Revolution. One French-made print, La Destruction de la Statue Royale a

Nouvelle York , depicted an American mob toppling a statue of George III (see fig. 2).

The problem with the rendering, however, is that the real statue was an equestrian one

and that the buildings look more like they belong in Paris than New York. 16 Made by

European engravers who did not know or did not care about details of American cities, prints like La Destruction gave American viewers a sense of how Europeans imagined their world. For an American using one of the Salem desks, seeing such a print would have been a disorienting virtual experience to say the least. A remarkable combination of functions, the Johnson desks blurred the lines between viewer and author and challenged earlier scientific and philosophical notions that vision was open, freeing, or rational.

16 For a longer discussion of such European-made prints of American places, see E. McSherry Fowble, To Please Every Taste: Eighteenth-Century Prints from the Winterthur Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1991).

Argus Awake

Early national Americans wrote a good deal about Argus. Much like the instruments and events of optical science, the famed watchman of classical myth appeared endlessly throughout late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American literature and the culture of essays, advertisements, letters, sermons, and other writing printed alongside. Argus was alternately the name of several ships that regularly crossed the Atlantic, the pseudonym shielding the identities of vitriolic letter writers, the classical referent in more than a few analogies found in discourses on colonial vigilance, the name of a Boston-based newspaper that ran from 1791 to 1793 and another in New York that ran from 1795 to 1796, and the subject of a wide range of poetry. Such popularity of a mythic figure fits within the Americans’ obsession with antiquity. Like other figures and themes lifted from the classical world and fixed in an American context, Argus was metamorphosed countless times to meet the needs of his creators. As the list above suggests, he was a character whose characteristics could be made to fit many purposes.

One poem first printed in a Providence, RI, newspaper in 1785 drew on the familiar hundred-eyed figure of antiquity to make a humorous comparison. Printed over twenty-two times between its original publication date and the close of the century, the short verse appeared in newspapers throughout the thirteen states. Its anonymous author compared Argus with the lady of the title:

EPIGRAM, on a LADY who squinted .

If ancient Poets Argus prize,

Who boasted of a Hundred Eyes;

Figure 2. Andre Basset and J. Chereau after Francois Xavier Habermann, La Destruction de la Statue Royale a Nouvelle York . Paris. Ca. 1776 -1800. Winterthur Museum and Country Estate.

Sure greater Praise to her is due,

Who looks a Hundred ways with two. 17

Argus’ perfect vision is juxtaposed with the lady, a woman whose ailments would seem to include both (or either) optical impairment as well as a predilection for nosiness and quick judgement. The poem’s humor turns on the word squint, reflecting the metaphoric reach of vision to represent social performance. Consider the definition offered in the sixth edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1785) for “SQUINT. adj.”:

Looking obliquely; looking not directly; looking suspiciously.

Where an equal poise of hope and fear

Does arbitrate the event, my nature is

That I incline to hope rather than fear,

And gladly banish squint suspicion. Milton

If a problem with the optical organs went by the same name as a character trait, then the anonymous poem trades in that capital. Sight is no longer a scientific function; in comparing the woman to Argus, sight takes on a particular civic function. The anonymous author satirizes excessive vigilance as suspicion. Too much watching leads to the undesired trait of suspicion characterized by an imperfect optical organ.

Poems like “EPIGRAM, on a LADY who squinted. ” are fairly representative of contemporary depictions of Argus, but these versions of Argus notably diverge from

17 Anonymous, “EPIGRAM, on a LADY who squinted,” The Providence Gazette and Country Journal , Jul. 30, 1785, p. 4.

classical narratives. Described nowhere more fully than in Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses ,

Argus’s sight, as it turns out, was hardly perfect. Set by Juno to stand guard over her suspected rival Io (in the shape of a cow) to Jove’s affections, Argus plays the role of diligent cowherd. Directed by the always amorous Jove to slay Juno’s faithful watchman

Argus and to free Io, Mercury dons the guise of a goatherd with an enchanting reed pipe.

Charmed by the sound of the pipe and “many a tale” spun by Mercury, Argus listens drowsily. Finally, in the middle of one of his stories, “All Argus’s eyelids closed and every eye/Vanquished in sleep.” Mercury kills the ill-fated watchman:

…quick then with his sword

Struck off the nodding head and from the rock

Threw it all bloody, spattering the cliff with gore (I.712-717) 18

Verbal triumphs over visual as Mercury’s poetry helps him commit murder. Argus might be the most famous representative of good sight of the classical literature that so delighted and enthralled early American readers, but he was also representative of the inherent fallibility of sight. Falling asleep on the job, as Ovid points out, is the trait of a fairly ineffectual watchman.

With more adherences to Ovid’s tale between the forces of constant sight and the charms of recited verse, Philip Freneau engaged the Argus myth in order to comment on the rise and subsequent decline of print in the years following the Revolution. Freneau’s poem “The Country Printer” demonstrates the emphasis that writers, readers, and publishers placed on visual perception and its civic and political functions. Published

18 Ovid, Metamorphoses , trans. A.D. Melville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22.

between December 1791 and January 1792, the poem humorously addresses the question of print’s loss of influence over American politics and the public sphere. 19 Freneau’s poem is both representative of the attitude many Americans had to print as a force that could affect political action through public discourse and highlights the ways in which printed texts like newspapers interacted with a visually constituted public sphere.

Treating what he sees as a long-lost avenue for democratic discourse, the poem’s speaker describes a fictional printer’s town, his interest in the news, his printing office, and his political role, often spoofing the printer along the way. Freneau’s poem is a lampoon of as well as a lament for his office’s prior importance. In spite of this seemingly central focus on the process of print, the printer, and all things printed, Freneau’s poem determines print’s connection to the world in terms that are expressly visual and conceived of as optical phenomena.

As the “The Country Printer” opens, the poem’s speaker invites the reader to

“Look where you will” at the fictional printer and his environs, a town that has become neglected by the century’s end. As readers, we are introduced to this fictionalized world of print through the experiences of seeing, as the speaker paints a visual scene that has the ability to “please the eye.” Freneau’s printer becomes a metaphor that emphasizes the visual nature of print. The aptly named Type putters about his old print shop in the decaying town, ever watchful for a piece of information that might be turned from an actual public spectacle (that is, a piece of news observed by others) to a printed version

(one that is visible only through the mediated form of the printed word):

19 Philip Freneau, “The Country Printer,” reprinted in American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries , ed. David S. Shields (New York: Library of America, 2007), 747-752.

Not Argus with his fifty pair of eyes

Look’d sharper for his prey than honest Type

Explores each package, of alluring size,

Prepar’d to seize them with a nimble gripe

Did not the post-boy watch his goods, and swear

That village Type shall only have his share.

Type functions like an optical conduit, a modern substitute for the mythological Argus who, “with his fifty pair of eyes,” is no match for Type, since not even Argus “Look’d sharper for his prey than honest TYPE.” In describing Type’s choice of selections,

Freneau returns to the visual:

All that was good, minutely brought to light,

All that was ill,--conceal’d from vulgar sight!

Things in print are illuminated and visible. The result of Type’s optical enactments is not simply a newspaper or broadside, but an effect of vision which takes the form of a new set of images produced in the town’s inhabitants’ visual spectrum. The townspeople’s reactions to Type’s printed texts are distinctly optical in nature as his printed news accounts have the ability to “set the town a-gape, and make it stare.” Both Type and townspeople become the agents of sight as Argus, a single body comprised of many eyes, is replaced by many bodies, each with only one pair. Mythological Argus is an outdated

model of constant vigilance displaced by the more civic body which composes itself and

mediates the world through the printed word.

In enacting the Argus myth within the terms of eighteenth-century newspaper culture, Freneau stages an alternative outcome to Argus’s grisly fate. “The Country

Printer” suggests that verse, taking the form of news, printed anecdotes, advertisements, and other miscellaneous pieces rather than the melodious epic narratives sung by

Mercury, provides an anecdote to the problem of image versus word. Rather than replacing sight with poetry, registering sight as inferior to the poetic arts, Freneau recasts the visual and the verbal as linked. The textual does not replace; it rather reforms the classical dichotomy rehearsed by Ovid by suggesting that the visual is an essential, even dialectical, component of the textual. Type needs a reading audience who will stare with mouths agape to inspire his own journalistic watchfulness.

Visual Nation

If instruments like Edmund Johnson’s zograscope desks exist, but are forgotten in museum collections as antiquated contraptions, there are plenty of devices that have materially disappeared altogether. Their past existence is evidenced only by the presence of descriptions of them in newspapers, periodicals, account books, wills, poems, letters, personal narratives, novels and other textual productions. The unique properties of such technologies and the social and political functions they helped to create, describe, and challenge, persist in the shadows and beneath the surfaces of early national literary culture. If the Johnson desks articulate the intertwined identities of author and viewer, word and image, and art and science, how many other technologies remain to be recognized as fundamental aspects of early national American culture? In what ways can

such devices and other new old media inform our readings of the literatures of civic

participation and of political belonging?

On July 8, 1776, Colonel John Nixon mounted a stage in Philadelphia’s State

House yard to read the Declaration of Independence to the crowd that had gathered

there. 20 While the location was ideal for a public political oration, the platform on which

Nixon stood had originally been constructed for another use. In the spring of 1769 the

American Philosophical Society, an organization founded in Philadelphia by the city’s scientifically-minded upper class, put in motion plans to build an observatory.

Completed that year and outfitted with a telescope imported from London, the observatory was comprised of stone foundations topped by a covered platform. By the time Nixon stood atop the observatory platform, the instruments had long since been removed; at the outset of the Revolution, the Society had enacted their prudent plan to secret the original telescope elsewhere.

While not all of the members of Nixon’s audience would have known the history of the stage, many would have been familiar with the events and corresponding dispute that generated its construction. Astronomers on both sides of the Atlantic looked forward to observing the transit of Venus and made preparations for viewing the astronomical event long in advance. Hoping to record the path of the planet as it passed in front of the sun, several Philadelphians, including Reverend John Ewing, a Presbyterian clergyman, and Reverend William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, and David

Rittenhouse, Smith’s protégé, strove to provide mathematical calculations that would

20 John Adams recorded this event in a letter, writing “The Declaration was yesterday published and proclaimed from that awfull Stage, in the State house Yard.” “John Adams to Samuel Chase, July 9, 1776,” Adams Papers, Vol. 4 , ed. Robert J. Taylor, Gregg L. Lint, and Celeste Walker, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 372.

indicate when to observe the planet’s passing. Ewing was the first to propose the idea that the transit could be seen from Philadelphia and that its arc should be recorded, an occurrence that allowed scientists to determine the distance between the earth and the sun. Rittenhouse’s calculations, however, were considered more accurate. In a bid to stake his claim, Ewing took the opportunity as secretary of the American Philosophical

Society to record his entire mathematical paper into the minutes. Faced with this scientific and personal competition, the Society directed that both Rittenhouse’s and

Ewing’s projections should be published and discussed at length by specially appointed committees. The outcome was in favor of Rittenhouse, whose work in recording the planet’s transit was lauded by the scientific community in both the colonies and in

Britain, cementing his position as one of the leading astronomers in the colonial period.

To have heard of David Rittenhouse was to know that he had successfully undertaken the observation of the transit of Venus. 21 Of course the platform was chosen because it provided a convenient stage, and not only because of its associations with Rittenhouse.

Nevertheless, that the document that proclaimed the self-evidence of certain political truths should be read atop the foundations of one of the eighteenth-century’s greatest achievements in optical science hints at the connections between the technology of visual perception and government. Like a spectral presence, the absent telescope lurked beneath a central political event, one that was distinctly textual in its development, drawing attention to a relation that over the next few decades would become remarkably complex.

21 For a more detailed discussion of Rittenhouse’s involvement with the astronomical observations carried out at the American Philosophical Society and the controversy surrounding it, see Brooke Hindle, David Rittenhouse , (New York: Arno Press, 1980), especially pages 41-59, and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., “Astronomical Observatories of the American Philosophical Society,” 1769-1843, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , 108 (Feb. 1964), 7-17.

Visual technologies remain embedded, but often unrecognized, within the pages

of America’s growing body of poetry, autobiographies, and novels. The remainder of this project takes up the search for these lost visual theories, discourses, and technologies.

My second chapter, “A Nation in Sight: Charles Willson Peale and the Politics of

Vision,” examines the relationship of the American Constitution to the development of a national visual culture in Philadelphia. The textual and visual performances that Peale and others who helped create the apparatus of a visually legible and unified nation maintained that visual perception ought to be highly organized and, if possible, mediated.

At the same time, the poems and descriptions written in response to Peale’s museum that appeared in newspapers and periodicals charged that Peale attempted to visually and imaginatively conceal the disorder, disunity, and regionalism that marked the early republic. Authors used the forms of poetry and fiction to argue for alternate models of visual perception to counter those proposed by Peale. This chapter concludes by examining The Life of Charles Willson Peale (1826), Peale’s lengthy autobiography.

When staged by Peale in retrospect, the American Enlightenment seemed more confusing

and irresponsible than rational or clarifying. This chapter, unlike previous studies, treats

Peale as a literary production, as a character rather than a historical figure, and in so

doing reveals specific concerns about the creation of arts and sciences in America.

The next two chapters address the questions raised by Peale’s critics in order to

show how authors adapted visual language to carve out alternative definitions of public

belonging. Both chapters are framed around portraits and the existence of those portraits

within other technologies such as book printing and engraving. Some of these images are

well known (those of Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley) and one is not (that of

Venture Smith). I place these visual objects in dialogue with writers’ operations of

literary portraiture in order to demonstrate how aware these writers were of visual media

and, crucially, how they engaged with those media to unsettle their readers’ expectations

about political rights and literary forms. In Chapter three, “Benjamin Franklin’s

Spectacles,” I argue that the definitions of private and public life set out in his

Autobiography (1793) resist contemporary versions of political life. In formulating

privacy in terms of visual metaphors and optical technologies, Franklin recasts

figurations of civic life organized into spatial locations such as the coffee house, street,

or home. As a result, the Autobiography ultimately conceals certain elements of private life such as information about his wife Deborah Reed by crafting selective moments

wherein the narrative would seem to operate as exposé. Franklin casts his political and

civic successes as a result of his ability to control how he sees and, more importantly,

how others see him, his family, and other aspects of his personal life.

Chapter Four, “Phillis Wheatley’s and Venture Smith’s Transatlantic Visions,”

approaches the question of political organization more directly by looking at the ways

two black writers used conventional literary forms to challenge conceptions of personal

liberty. Like many persons writing from within the institution of slavery or at its margins

after their own manumission, Wheatley and Smith directly engage the practice of

kidnapping, enslaving, and transporting African-born people to North America. They do

so, I argue, by writing about the visual media, both pro- and anti-slavery, that like them,

crossed the Atlantic in order to be offered for sale to white audiences. Phillis Wheatley’s

work, for example, shows evidence of a number of notable revisions to her poetry for its

collection in a book that also featured her image. Her published writing attempts to direct

her readers’ viewing practices as well as claiming for herself an identity as viewing subject, and, by extension, a position as social and political equal. Venture Smith’s

Narrative (1798) similarly engages with visual media, rewriting the cues outlined in mass-produced Wedgewood anti-slavery medallions in order to articulate a version of black identity that refuses the visual and literary expectations of whites.

The final chapter, “How to See a Biloquist: Charles Brockden Brown Sketches the Early Republic,” gathers several implicit threads that run through the previous chapters by tracing the ways in which visual media and technology might serve as a unique literary aesthetic. Brown’s novel Wieland; or, the Transformation, an American

Tale (1798) and short novella A Lesson on Concealment; or, Memoirs of Mary Selwyn

(1800) propose a novel formal approach by engaging the popular technology of the camera obscura. Both works rethink the formulas and expectations of popular seduction fiction as well as the gothic novel, and in so doing, develop an aesthetic that undercuts efforts to separate the arts and sciences. In making a claim for the central role of the technologic to the literary, Brown also asserts a claim for the new United States in which transparency, clarity, and visibility, are no longer the best models for personal and political representation. Less visible, less educated, and less rational characters, Brown finally contends, often make for better citizens than their enlightened counterparts.

CHAPTER 2

THE POLITICS OF VISION: CHARLES WILLSON PEALE IN PRINT

On January 24, 1784, the Philadelphia-based artist, museum curator, and inventor

Charles Willson Peale completed work on one of his largest public undertakings.

Comprised of paintings done on oiled canvas and suspended over a large wooden frame,

Peale’s “Triumphal Arch” was a temporary construction meant to mark the recently established peace between Britain and the new United States and the hope of political order that such an event seemed to promise. Fully assembled, the 46-foot edifice straddled Philadelphia’s Market Street just in front of the newly constructed “President’s

House,” allowing spectators to pass between its illuminated columns. Unfortunately for

Peale, however, his construction, made “very combustible by the varnish and oil,” the

“700 rockets,” and over 1,100 candles that it featured, caught fire, injuring observers and attendants, causing mass public chaos, and burning Peale so severely that he was forced to remain in bed for over three weeks. As he recalled years later, Peale only escaped the inferno by jumping from his perch at the top of the construction: “In his descent he fell across the edge of a board of the building, which broke two or three of his ribs, and from thence to the ground with several blazing rockets carried with him that went off in

different directions, his cloaths being on fire.” 22 Creating a public spectacle of peace,

order, and national unity, as Peale found out, was easier said than done.

The remainder of Peale’s career would seem to have been a concerted effort to

rectify his Triumphal Arch disaster by bringing visual embodiments of order to

Philadelphia’s inhabitants. Like a federal phoenix, Peale rose to become the founder and

curator of the nation’s foremost museum of portraiture and natural history. Meant to

have a didactic effect on visitors, the Philadelphia Museum was designed to present

viewers with what Peale termed “rational amusement.” No early modern wonder cabinet,

Peale’s Museum featured intricately organized sets of objects and artworks. The

Museum held taxidermied animal specimens, carefully arranged according to Linnaean

models of classification; parallel rows of portraits; curiosities like the skeleton of a

mastodon that he unearthed in 1803; and a variety of inventions and mechanical devices.

While it eventually came to occupy a large portion of the Pennsylvania State

House (now Independence Hall) in 1802, the first incarnation of the Museum was just a

small portrait gallery that Peale built in 1782 onto the rear of his home. As an

advertisement in the Pennsylvania Packet described the space, Peale’s “New Exhibition

Room” was worth a visit because of the character of its contents. The rather humble gallery was “ornamented with portraits of a great number of worthy personages” noteworthy more for their uniformity than their evidence of stylistic or artistic mastery. 23

22 Charles Willson Peale, The Life of Charles Willson Peale . Manuscript copy held at the American Philosophical Society. Reprinted in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 5: The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale , ed. Lillian B. Miller, et al. (New Haven: Published for The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale UP, 2000), 92.

23 Charles Willson Peale, “Announcement for the New Exhibition Room,” Pennsylvania Packet , November 14, 1782. Reprinted in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 1, ed. Lillian B. Miller, et al. (New Haven: Published for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale UP, 1983), 373.

Displayed in relatively small gilt, oval frames, Peale’s portraits depicted leading political and military figures. Presented as rationalized and regularized visual representations of larger-than life individuals, Peale’s portraits helped create an ordered and classified visual vocabulary during a highly tumultuous cultural moment. As Christopher Lukasik has argued, “Postrevolutionary culture…was…characterized by the desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character,” a yearning “which arose in part, as a response to social and political anxieties generated by the fluid culture of performance” that dominated the era. Early Americans’ interest in

“public portrait galleries, waxwork figures, prints, sculpture, profile portraits, silhouettes, and printed biographical portrait galleries” existed because they worked to “represent the abstract ideals of civic virtue and communicate exemplary character” in intelligible, visually stable ways. 24

While the organized rows of portraits and the faces they depicted provided a sense of stability within the space of Peale’s first portrait gallery, the pre-Constitutional world beyond its walls was deeply fragmented. Even as Peale was busy organizing the portraits of his famous subjects into tidy rows where political friends and enemies hung comfortably side by side, the real Philadelphia of the mid 1780s, the realm most of his sitters actually inhabited, was a politically fractious place. Just blocks down the street from Peale’s studio, those in favor of a strong federal union were busy wrangling their opponents into support of the Constitution, a document that like Peale’s gallery, helped manufacture a fiction of the new nation as an organized, unified, and harmonious whole.

24 Christopher Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” Early American Literature 39 (2004), 414.

Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and others worked hard to project an image of consensus and unanimity, despite the real disagreements and factions that actually existed. Like the Constitution, the paintings and engravings Peale produced at the start of his career exist as significant cultural and political signifiers because of the disunity and sectionalism they helped imaginatively conceal.

Most scholars have tended to regard Peale as a stalwart of Enlightenment values, a figure who consistently championed scientific rationalism, ordered nature, and a theoretically attainable social equality, even as the rapidly changing cultural practices of the nineteenth century inevitably encroached on his ideals. 25 Even scholars who interrogate this (overly optimistic) narrative by addressing the racial, gendered, and classed hierarchies that Peale helped to codify, tend to view the rise of Peale’s Museum as an uninterrupted corollary to the birth of self-evident nationhood. 26 Others understand

Peale’s artworks as contributing to the emergence of a culture obsessed with authenticity, personal transparency, and interiority, looking to his paintings as indicative of multi- valenced approaches to selfhood. 27 Peale’s biographical presence serves as the locus for

25 This is the most widely accepted interpretation of Peale’s career, a view reiterated by a range of scholars across a variety of disciplines. It results, at least in part, from efforts made to preserve his legacy, almost all of which have followed Peale’s nineteenth-century descendants Rembrandt Peale and Charles Coleman Sellers in arguing for a greater recognition of Peale’s place in a pantheon of Founding-era polymaths. See especially Sidney Hart and David C. Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal: Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, 1790-1820,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale: A 250 th Anniversary Celebration , ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: Published for the Smithsonian Institution by the University of Pittsburg Press, 1991), 219-235.

26 See especially David Steinberg, Laura Rigal, and David R. Brigham. Brigham asserts that despite Peale’s “remarkably broad” admissions policy, the actual practices of viewing and learning that occurred inside the Museum helped Peale preserve “hierarchical relationships” between social groups. David Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 6.

27 This is the line of thinking that has most interested literary scholars, and in large part has been focused on Peale’s Museum as it existed in the nineteenth century. Susan Stewart, for example, has argued that 33

a number of narratives that explain just how the transition from colonial America to early

antebellum United States took shape. As a historical actor, he embodies the conflicting

early American impulses of private interior selfhood and moral public instruction,

scientific rationality and its Gothic alternatives, inclusive democratic potential and the

realities of a republican political order.

We would do well to consider Peale not only in terms of his historical identity,

but also how he existed as a literary character constructed within his lifetime. As with

debates about the ratification of the Constitution, writers took to Philadelphia’s print

venues to point out what they thought were Peale’s many faults, noting, in particular, that his models for viewership in the new nation erased the disordered and chaotic world in which they were produced. The literary critiques of Peale’s images and gallery that appeared in Philadelphia’s print culture not only attempted to call into question his artistic skill, but also worked to uncover the visual and political gymnastics required to present an image of the nation as unified. Literary forums provided authors with the unique opportunity to suggest alternative forms of visual expression. These imaginary scenarios of visual observation countered the concealing and harmonizing impulses in

Peale’s visual representations, and with them notions of perfect political unanimity.

This chapter begins by tracing the politics of vision Peale attempted to establish in the first incarnation of his portrait gallery and in the printed engravings he produced for

Peale’s portraits and collecting habits reflect his anxieties about death and the cognitive boundaries between memory and forgetting. In a similar vein, Alan Trachtenberg has suggested that as a museum curator Peale saw himself as “the mediator of the world’s truth, one who not only creates a copy of things, ‘a world in miniature,’ but reveals the true order hidden within things, an invisible order he brings to view” (Reading American Photographs 9). More recently, Wendy Bellion has explained how Peale’s early public exhibitions in the 1790s helped formulate personal subjectivity and train citizens for participation in the public sphere. See Wendy Bellion, “Illusion and Allusion: Charles Willson Pale’s ‘Staircase Group’ at the Columbianum Exhibition.”

public sale. Peale depicted allegories of responsible citizenship in Philadelphia as he

visually fit the city within gridded frameworks that encouraged perspective viewing,

aesthetic exercises that attempted to train virtue by training vision. I then turn to two

early literary critiques of Peale, the anonymous poem “Written whilst a Lady’s Picture

was drawing” and a short prose piece “The Picture Gallery,” two texts that transform

Peale into a literary character in order to satirize his models of national vision as well as

his painterly prowess. The literary critiques of Peale’s early portrait gallery turned

Peale’s invocations of rationalist empiricism and visual didacticism against him,

undermining claims of federal unity by textually adapting the very same aesthetics of

visual perception that he hoped would imaginatively secure it. Finally, the chapter ends

by considering Peale’s staging of himself as a literary character, and suggests that in

writing an autobiography, Peale reconsidered many of his early artistic and political

imperatives.

The Most Perfect Order

Peale expected a great deal from those who visited his collections. Not only were visitors asked to pay an admission fee, they were charged with the task of observing the paintings and objects with disinterested, rational contemplation. Even from its outset as a small assemblage of portraits, Peale’s collection was made public with the hope that it might educate visitors, giving them the intellectual and interpretive tools that would help them become better citizens. It was up to the viewer, Peale often suggested, to consider the contents of his collection—indeed the nation he proclaimed that it represented—

through the lens of Enlightenment rationalism, discerning civic values and uncovering

political ideals in the faces of his portraits and the perfect bodies of his animal skeletons.

It was possible, Peale hoped, to instill values of social and political harmony in viewers if

the synecdochal world they saw in a museum could be presented that way.

Like his contemporaries, Peale was fascinated with the promises of physiognomy

and other scientific trends that suggested that inner character was branded externally as

facial features and other visually discernable bodily components. But Peale took things a

step further than most. As Brandon Brame Fortune has explained, Peale worked to create

“moral, civic portrait[s], depicting republican sitters in an appropriately severe and ‘self- effacing’ manner.” 28 Peale purposely distorted individual features, creating visual

likenesses through “the subtle alteration of the features” in order to produce visual

representations of individuals that Peale felt were more in line with their internal

characteristics. 29 Similarly, David C. Ward has argued that Peale “smoothed out the

features and bodies of his sitters” in order to further distance them from the class of early

Americans whose features and bodies were hardly ever described as perfect. The scars of

difficult living, slavery, and disease marked many early Americans, features nowhere

more apparent than in the advertisements for runaway slaves and indentured servants.

“In his gallery,” Ward notes, “Peale created the pictorial fiction that the mark of election

could be read on an individual’s face and that character led ineluctably to good works.” 30

28 Brandon Brame Fortune, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait Gallery: Persuasion and the Plain Style,” Word and Image 6 (1990), 318.

29 Ibid, 320-321.

30 David C. Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 84.

If real life did not match what Peale felt were his sitters’ true characters, he could simply

paint those perceived discrepancies away.

Outside of spaces like his portrait gallery, Peale had far less control over visual representations of the nation and was unable to attempt the kind of curatorial organization that would ensure rational contemplation. Early in his career Peale printed images that would circulate beyond his exhibition rooms, but worked to limit various interpretations

that his anticipated audiences might develop. The first of these was an engraved portrait

of William Pitt, the British parliamentary hero of the Stamp Act crisis. Peale’s 1768

engraving of Pitt was composed to limit viewers’ responses to the image and to the

highly charged political iconography it contained. Based on a portrait of Pitt that Peale

had completed earlier that same year, the engraving depicts Pitt in the trappings of a

Roman orator. Pulling together a nearly endless set of classical iconographic fixtures,

Peale offers the viewer plenty to visually read in the image: besides Pitt’s face

(occupying only an extremely small portion of the total visual field) crowding the portrait

are images of Whitehall Palace, a huge Roman column, a statue of Liberty holding a

Phrygian cap, a wreath of laurels, an eternal flame, a sculpture of a Native American

accompanied by a dog, a small bust of Sir Algernon Sydney and another of Sir John

Hampden, and, finally, in Pitt’s hand, a scroll copy of the Magna Charta .

The Pitt broadside was an unusual image in that it attempted to present the

political iconography of the portrait in a highly mediated form. To aid the viewer’s

understanding of the image, Peale printed the image on a broadside with text directly

beside it. Presenting an image with a textual accompaniment was nothing new. Artists in

the eighteenth-century frequently published works this way, and artistic exhibitions,

including those by Peale, employed textual guides to help viewers understand what they

were seeing. Yet unlike the printed guides Peale provided for visitors to his Museum years later, the broadside did not encourage the reader to view the image from multiple perspectives. While a museum viewer had to look down at the guide in his or her hand and then up to the corresponding image on the wall, the broadside’s print position directly beside—almost encroaching upon—the image suggests the image ought to be read primarily with the interpretation beside it. Peale’s placement of the text hints that he wanted to point viewers towards particular interpretations and away from others.31

Peale’s Pitt engraving anticipates the kind of practices of viewership that emerged

some twenty years later in his endeavor to help celebrate the ratification of the

Constitution. While Peale intended his Museum and the paintings it contained to offer

visitors a chance to experience what he called “rational contemplation,” to reason through

notions of ideal civic participation and nationhood through the act of viewing, the shows

of national cohesion and federal unity that Peale produced outside the Museum were

supposed to operate in a far less participatory way. Once the ratification of the

Constitution seemed imminent, supporters of federal union in the new nation’s cities

organized “Federal Processions” for the spring and summer of 1788 to mark the political

change. 32 In Philadelphia, thousands of participants and observers came out for the

31 For a longer discussion about Peale’s use of word and image combinations in his early work and especially in the Pitt portrait, see Sidney Hart, “A Graphic Case of Transatlantic Republicanism” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale: A 250 th Anniversary Celebration , ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: Published for the Smithsonian Institution by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 73-81.

32 By the 1790s, the term “federalism” had taken on larger political meanings that did not always correspond to its original use; it initially referred to the sort of strong federal union suggested by the Constitution. Countered by Jeffersonian-Republicanism, Federalism as a political party emerged in the 1790s. While scholars have generally depicted Peale as a Jeffersonian-Republican because of his interests in natural history and scientific discovery, as well as his friendship with Thomas Jefferson, much less has been said about his political beliefs in the 1780s. 38

Grand Federal Procession, a parade stretching nearly one and a half miles and winding

through the city’s largest streets. 33 Unquestionably the largest of such nationwide

celebrations, the Grand Federal Procession in Philadelphia was an extravagant spectacle

of Constitutional ideals made conspicuously visible. The floats built especially for the

occasion, including one featuring “a saddler’s shop dressed with saddlery, and a variety

of ready made work” and another complete with a domed construction supported by

thirteen columns and decorated with thirteen stars, were elaborate tableau vivants that helped parade organizers explicitly link commercial culture with political iconography.

A member of the planning committee along with Francis Hopkinson and Benjamin Rush,

Peale participated in 1780s federalist projects in a distinctly material way. As a leading

Philadelphia artist, Peale helped plan the event and design floats, even staying up late the night before the Procession painting “the Temple” of federal union.

The Procession was designed to provide its spectators with a visual vocabulary concordant with a clearly unified federal government. As Laura Rigal has pointed out, the floats and banners that constituted the parade as well as the print culture that it generated, relied on metaphors of production and a notion of “republican self-assembly.”

In order to prove its existence through its materiality, the new nation was symbolically brought into being as workers constructed and “raised a roof” of federal unification. 34

Organizers hoped to provide spectators with a fantasy view of the world in which union

33 For Peale’s account of his participation in the planning of the Procession, see “Diary Number 7,” especially June-July, 1788. For the most part, Peale’s involvement was limited to practical arrangements such as acquiring materials and painting floats. Charles Willson Peale, “Diary 7, May 30-November 3, 1788,” reprinted in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 1, ed. Lillian B. Miller et al. (New Haven: Published for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale UP, 1983), 491-543.

34 Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 25.

triumphed, the ratification of the Constitution was accepted by all Americans, and, in turn, the dissent and anarchy that marked the American public sphere during the colonial period and under the Articles of Confederation were replaced with a more controlled social and political order. In the words of historian David Waldstreicher, “order was the order of the day.” 35

Written accounts of Philadelphia’s Grand Federal Procession strengthened its position as a spectacle that could cultivate a sense of civic order and a greater emphasis on national unity. Chroniclers of the event, many of whom conveniently doubled as organizers, were especially quick to point out that not only was the Procession meant to control the kind of social disorder that regularly plagued early American streets, but that it was also intended to limit the aesthetic responses—the interpretive disorder—of its observers. As one writer described the event in his official account of the celebration in the July edition of The American Museum; or, Repository of Ancient and Modern

Fugitive Pieces & c. Prose and Poetical , “the most perfect order and regularity were effectually observed.” 36 Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was more forceful, drawing on the language of aesthetic philosophy to exclaim that “the pleasure [the Grand

Federal Procession] excited in every mind” was due to “the sublimity of the sight.” 37

Evocative of the sublime, visual representations of federal unity, according to Rush, were beyond the realm of expressible description and qualification. They provoked spectators

35 David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, by the U of North Carolina P, 1997), 107.

36 [Francis Hopkinson], “Account of the Grand Federal Procession in Philadelphia, July 4, 1788,” The American Museum; or, Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces &c 4.1 (July 1788), 57.

37 [Benjamin Rush], “Observations on the Federal Procession on the Fourth of July 1788,” The American Museum; or, Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces &c 4.1 (July 1788), 78.

not to understand the nation in terms of dispassionate reason and thoughtful contemplation, but rather to understand them in terms of awestruck wonder. Unlike in

Peale’s gallery where rational contemplation was supposed to be the mode of appreciation, the outdoor event was supposed to affect observers through more physical and emotional means.

National Perspectives

By the late 1780s Peale seems to have begun rethinking his earlier participation in visual print culture. Unlike the Pitt broadside, the printed engravings Peale began printing as the Constitutional Convention approached appeared without text, inviting the kind of rational contemplation on the part of viewers that he inscribed in his Museum.

With the dawning of the new Constitutional era, citizens were mandated to approach spectacles of national unity with discernment and reason, learning to see visual representations of the newly formed federal government from multiple perspectives, and, in the process, to understand their own position in the new nation through that experience. Just as visitors to Peale’s portrait gallery were charged with the task of recognizing strong moral character in Peale’s carefully crafted portraits, viewers of

Peale’s Constitutional-era engravings were instructed to discern a perfectly ordered and unified nation through certain visual cues.

One of the ways Peale encoded national order was through the organized geographies represented in urban views. In the spring of 1788, for example, Peale spent several weeks working on a panoramic image of the Maryland State House in Annapolis.

Peale’s images of the capital building in Annapolis encouraged an immediate sense of

visual observation and multiple viewing perspectives, as well as gesturing towards the

less federal, more local realities of the post-Constitutional nation. Intended as a set of

engravings, Peale’s Annapolis State House engravings featured images of the building as

seen from the ground in front and (a no longer extant) circular image of the view from the

large dome. For art historian Wendy Bellion, Peale’s panoramic images of the State

House in Annapolis illustrate “the shifting subject positions of the republican citizen” by

representing a viewer’s relationship to the State House as a vacillating perspectival

experience. 38 Peale’s attempt to create both a panorama of the Annapolis State House from the perspective of the street (looking up and towards the dome) and from the point of view of the dome itself (looking outward in a circle towards the city of Annapolis) evidences, for Bellion, Peale’s engagement with “the ocular and political possibilities inherent within a model of republican subjectivity that, paradoxically, envisioned the citizen as both participant and observer of the state apparatus.” 39 Peale’s attempt to

panoramically capture the Annapolis State House was meant to encourage spectators to

engage in the kind of dialectical viewing that would help a viewer to experientially

understand the alternative positions implied by republican citizenship.

The Annapolis drawings were not the only images Peale created in the late 1780s

that challenged practices of single-point perspective viewing. As Peale produced more

urban scene engravings, he began to encourage viewers to reason through the experience

of observation, asking them to understand how the nation could exist and be imagined in

38 Wendy Bellion, “‘Extend the Sphere’: Charles Willson Peale’s Panorama of Annapolis” Art Bulletin 86 (2004), 546.

39 Ibid., 544.

perfect order and national unity. Peale completed one such image, “The Accident in

Lombard Street,” in 1787, offering it for sale as an independent artwork (see fig. 3). An engraving based on his drawing, Peale offered the print for sale on its own. In the center of the engraving, a young woman appears distraught and with hands upraised.

Surrounded by “laughing Sweeps,” representatives of Philadelphia’s free black population, the woman looks down at “The pye from Bake-house she had bought,” which has fallen on the ground. It is “for want of thought,” Peale’s accompanying verses explain, that she has dropped the pie in the middle of the street. On the left and right sides of the image, however, we are presented with visual representations of what might have happened had the woman been more vigilant with both her “pye” and the version of female virtue it (rather coarsely) suggests. To the left, another woman appears again walking down the sidewalk; she holds an intact pie, but is followed by a man. As a counterpoint, the right side of the engraving depicts yet another woman, carrying a child instead of a pie. From these peripheral figures, a viewer might learn that women should be cautious both with their pies and their sexual virtue.

Peale’s presence looms large in this image. Recognizable to any viewer familiar with Philadelphia is Peale’s own home and the extension in the yard containing his portrait gallery on the left side of the image. Peale’s portrait gallery and the beginning of his collection of natural history dominate the local street scene and suggest that one need not be inside the gallery to benefit from its instructive message. Peale’s image of the street in front of his house echoes his first advertisement for the Museum:

Mr. Peale, ever desirous to please and entertain the Public, will make part

of his House a Repository for Natural curiosities—The Public he hopes

Figure 3. Charles Willson Peale, The Accident in Lombard Street . Engraving. 1787. Library of Congress.

will thereby be gratified in the sight of many of the Wonderful Works of

Nature which are now closeted and but seldom seen. The several Articles

will be classed and arranged according to their several species; and for the

greater ease to the Curious, on each piece will be inscribed the place from

whence it came, and the name of the Donor, unless forbid, with such other

information as may be necessary. 40

While the interior of the museum features “Natural curiosities,” the street in front of

Peale’s museum depicts yet another set. Presented as objects of study, the women that

populate “The Accident in Lombard Street” are, like their counterparts within the portrait

gallery, “classed and arranged…for the greater ease to the Curious.” An allegory of

urban and social order, the placement of the errant woman and black chimney sweeps in

the center of the image only draws attention to their marginal status in the national order.

They do not fit into the perfectly ordered world of Peale’s national landscape. Peale’s

engraving suggests that the instructive and classificatory qualities that the gallery creates

can be easily transferred to the world outside, teaching viewers a thing or two about the

proper place and conduct of women and African Americans along the way.

It is not just the foreground of the image that deserves attention. One can make

out a portion of Philadelphia’s New Market on Second Street in the far distance where

Lombard Street ends and the perspective lines of the image converge. Not only does the

presence of the market in the background suggest the economy of sexual virtue that the

women in the foreground illustrate, it also works to provide a more orderly and organized

40 Peale’s first advertisement for his gallery was published in the Pennsylvania Packet almost 40 times between July 7 and November 12, 1786 and in the Independent Gazeteer from July 22 to November 20, 1786. See “Advertisement for the Museum, Pennsylvania Packet July 7, 1786,” in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 1, ed. Lillian B. Miller et al. (New Haven: Published for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale UP, 1983), 448.

version of the city. Depicted again in William Birch’s widely published The City of

Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania, North America, as it appeared in the Year

1800 , a book that touted the organizational and nation-making powers of Philadelphia’s

grid plan, New Market was a substantial construction serving the city’s southern

quarter. 41 Built in 1745 to coalesce and regulate urban commercial exchange, New

Market ran two blocks in the middle of Second Street, and featured an open structure, covered with a gabled, arched roof, and supported by two parallel rows of brick pillars.

Even though it was constructed while Pennsylvania was still very much a colony, New

Market fit nicely within early national notions that architecture did essential political work. As Dell Upton has argued, the “powerful desire to create a city that was regular— visually and spatially uniform” reflected the hope that “the all-encompassing political community of the nation” would emerge if only its visible incarnation in the form of a city existed to prefigure its arrival. 42 Thus, “Libraries, scientific and technical societies,

and fraternal orders often established their presence on the street by erecting structures

larger and more sumptuous than they could use or afford” in order to establish their own

credibility as contributing to the project of nation building through visual urban

representation. 43 Architectural projects that implied and even demanded urban order

illustrated the extent to which planners thought an ideal nation would emerge if a city

visually represented such civic and political perfection already existed. By the time Peale

and Birch depicted it, New Market had become a central feature of the urban landscape,

41 W. Birch and Son, The city of Philadelphia, in the state of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the year 1800 (Philadelphia: William Russell Birch, 1800).

42 Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), 2-3.

43 Ibid., 8.

and their depictions of the structure that heightened its orderly construction and location visually secured the Southwark neighborhood it served as a location of substantial regulated commercial importance.

At the same time, Peale’s engraving of Lombard Street perhaps more closely resembles the perspective views that were popularized in the 1740s and 1750s in Britain than it does the regularized and self-evident representation of the city’s urban space that

Birch depicts. Some of the most popular images of urban public spaces in the eighteenth century were produced as images for view with the aid of devices that enhanced three- dimensional perspective. First appearing in the London newspaper, the St. James

Evening Post , in 1747, zograscope views were engraved drawings sold either alone or printed in magazines. These images required that the viewer employ a zograscope, or diagonal mirror, an optical device comprised of a large, magnifying lens and a diagonally placed mirror mounted on a wooden table stand. Looking through the zograscope’s lens provided the viewer with a heightened sense of spatial depth by magnifying the image and enhancing stereoscopic effects. Such a picture would appear three-dimensional with the aid of such a device. Unlike ordinary single-point perspective views, prints designed for use with a zograscope were created with a specific set of characteristics to ensure three-dimensional qualities. Most noticeably, the center-point of the image was always moved from the center-foreground to a position in the diagonal and perspectival rear.

The effect of this technique is that the foreground of the image is eclipsed by the stereoscopically enhanced background. Distant objects seem to be visually emphasized while nearer ones recede in visual significance.

The rise in popularity of the zograscope paralleled the rise in polite culture, giving observers the ability to view the urban world from a visually mediated distance. As Erin

C. Blake explains, “zograscope views told a story of public space as available, accessible, dynamic, and vibrant, but controllable, clean, and polite…streets, squares, parks, and church interiors were spaces for unhindered physical movement and expansive vision, not static, deep, particular experience. It was a new modern geography, made visible by the zograscope in its presentation of generalized open space as something three- dimensionally real.” 44 Shifting the process of viewing from a two-dimensional experience to a three-dimensional one engendered the emergence of a kind of viewing from a distance, a rational, composed, and controlled kind of viewing, marked by an exceptionally organized and cohesive kind of sight.

Studying at Benjamin West’s famous school in London in the 1760s, Peale would have had ample opportunity to appreciate the zograscope views that filled London print culture the previous decade. It would be only natural that one of his very first engravings would echo the zograscopic style. While Birch’s image shows New Market as easily distinguishable from its surroundings, appearing evident to the viewer immediately,

Peale’s depiction of the market recedes into the background, requiring that the viewer observe the image with precision and magnification. Because it contains several hallmarks of the zograscopic style, it is very likely that those buyers of the print who already owned one of the popular machines might have placed Peale’s engraving under their lenses.

44 Eric C. Blake, “Zograscopes, Virtual Reality, and the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The New Media, 1740-1915 , ed., Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 5.

In “The Accident in Lombard Street,” New Market visually emerges if the image is viewed stereoscopically, an observational practice that would minimize the local and disordered encounter between the young woman and sweeps in the foreground. If viewed through the imaginative lens of three-dimensionality that the image’s perspectival organization invites, then the world of order that the market represents (both architecturally and as a sanctioned location for the exchange of commodities) emerges from the rear of the image to loom over the disordered exchange—a broken pie, laughing sweeps, barking dogs—that had at first caught our attention. What is more, the socially and politically marginalized people at the center of the image become visually marginalized. Proper gender and race hierarchies are maintained when the viewer sees the image from the proper perspective. Unlike Peale’s image of the Philadelphia State

House, the engraving of Lombard Street invites viewers to see the city in both an idealized representation and as imperfect, but correctable. Peale’s early image of

Philadelphia calls for a particularly distanced kind of engagement with the urban landscape, and further suggests that social order is best imagined and maintained through practices of exceptional vision. The urban space Peale depicts in his engraving of

Lombard Street is, in other words, a world in which order is achieved through the creation of a new visual dimension. National virtue is taught when the nation’s vision is properly trained.

Literary Visions

“The Accident in Lombard Street,” like Peale’s other early engravings, proved to be a commercial failure. By the mid-1780s, he had abandoned his engravings and turned completely to large projects like the Grand Federal Procession and his growing portrait gallery. It was this newly directed attention that finally brought with it a flurry of criticism, both aesthetic and political. While Peale worked hard to produce a visual version of the nation as ordered and unified through a variety of engraved images and through an organized portrait studio, the literary responses to Peale’s gallery reflected a far less clear version of nationhood. Contemporary writers acknowledged Peale’s commitment to rational contemplation and careful order, but used the aesthetic possibilities of the literary to imagine an alternative. Repudiating accounts of nationhood that attempted to produce the fantasy of unity and national stability by attempting to enforce particular viewing practices, literary criticisms of Peale’s goals and the purported purpose of his gallery evinced especially disparate modes of seeing. A counterpoint to the typical rendering of an early national America in which cultural actors were deeply engaged in making the world knowable, ordered, and rational, at least two of the literary print culture responses to Peale’s gallery on the eve of Constitutional ratification suggest a nation and historical moment shaped by sensory instability and irrationality. Modes of visual perception counter to Peale’s suggest that the better way to see, to visualize the nation, was through an unfocused and multi-directional lens. Literary critiques like the ones I discuss here helped give the lie to the notion that visual representations of

nationhood such as Peale’s and the stability and order such representations implied were necessary or even possible. 45

One such criticism was a short ballad poem published, like several of Peale’s engraved views of Philadelphia, in Matthew Cary’s The Columbian Magazine . Printed in

June of 1787, “ Written whilst a Lady’s Picture was drawing ” is a dramatic monologue written by an anonymous author signed “S.” 46 The short poem describes “Friend Peale” composing a portrait of a young woman:

Written whilst a Lady’s Picture was drawing.

Friend Peale, the piece begins to strike:

The nose and brow I swear are like!

The lip so red, the hair so brown,

The face unsullied with a frown!

But softly, Peale, pray have a care—

The eyes—I fear thou’lt miss it there—

The eyes, I doubt are part thy skill—

It does—no, faith, it never will—

Thy pencil drop,—the fault I see

45 Historians of science have been especially invested in calling into question the fiction of an American Enlightenment that believed only in rational empiricism and disinterested contemplation. For many, the distinction between European and American models of thought lie in American rejections of pure rationalism. As James Delbourgo has persuasively argued about the emergence of scientific knowledge, for example, “the so called Age of Reason and Age of Enthusiasm did not always clash” (280). What made the American Enlightenment American, according to Delbourgo, was the tendency towards “rejecting, rather than pressing, claims to rational mastery” (283). James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006).

46 It is worth noting that literary critiques of Peale in the 1780s do not rely on ekphrasis. Early national literary writing on Peale is much more concerned with practices of viewership than with word/image aesthetics.

Is in the art , and not in thee .47

As the five rhyming couplets proceed, we learn that Peale, while able to portray some of the lady’s features, is ultimately unable to produce her entire likeness. While the poem’s second line—“The nose and brow I swear are like!”—is an exclamation of the artist’s skill, the speaker begins to hint in the next two lines that Peale artistic gifts lack full development. Stepping away from the issue of likeness, the speaker explains: “The lips so red, the hair so brown,/The face unsullied with a frown!” The speaker’s suggestion here isn’t necessarily a comment on the sitter’s physical attributes; it rather suggests that the Peale’s representation of the sitter is extraordinarily beautiful, too perfect. A reference to Peale’s own painterly aesthetic, the speaker’s description of the painting shows how Peale exceeds real likeness. Thus, the young woman’s features as depicted on canvas are executed to hyper-perfection in order to bring out her true inner beauty and happiness. The redness of the woman’s lips and the brownness of her hair must be modified by a qualifier that expresses exceptionality: “lip so red” and “hair so brown.”

What we also learn from this poem is the correct way to interpret—to see—one of

Peale’s paintings. The reader, playing the part of the viewer, is encouraged to notice the crucial differences between the sitter as we perceive her in real life and the visual representation we see beside her. This gap, or visual distancing, is what enables the speaker to admonish Peale for his lack of artistic skill as the poem progresses. While he has completed the rest of her features, Peale stands poised before the poem’s speaker

47 S., “ Written whilst a Lady’s Picture was drawing ,” The Columbian Magazine (June 1787), 506.

ready to paint a representation of the woman’s eyes. But noting that “The eyes, I doubt

are part thy skill—”, the speaker commands Peale to stop his work: “Thy pencil drop.”

The speaker worries that Peale will destroy the entire painting by creating a poor likeness

of the lady’s eyes—“I fear thou’lt miss it there—.” It is necessary, the speaker assures

us, for the act of creation to take place under the watchful vigilance of an outside

observer, a discerning visitor to the studio of creation who can stop the process at exactly

the right moment. It is before the eyes are painted, before the visual representation is

given the semblance of sight—itself a dig at poor seeing (How can a painting see

anything?)—that everything must come to a halt. For it is not the artist’s inability to

paint a representation of the lady’s eyes that causes concern; the problem, rather, lies “in

the art , and not in thee .” The enjambed structure of the last couplet—a notable departure from the previous four—suggests that the act of seeing (“the fault I see”) holds a special perceptual and interpretive power. While we know almost from the immediate outset of the poem that there are three people in the room—the speaker/observer, Peale, and the lady, all of whom ought to be able to see—it is only the observer who is able to really understand what he sees. And it is only through his emphasized act of seeing that he is able to discover that crucial “fault.”

The poem’s culminating line also indicates the lack of agency Peale (or any artist) has in the creation of a work. As the title suggests, the verses were composed “ whilst a

Lady’s Picture was drawing .” No one, in fact, seems to actually be engaged in the act of drawing if we follow the logic of the title. The speaker suggests that the better kind of vision is not that of the artist, but rather that of the watchful and disinterested spectator, the visitor who peers over the artist’s shoulder only to step in and disrupt the act of visual

representation in the making. Only the external and mediating witness can discern the

problems of representation that the artist—Peale— crucially, fails to see.

If “ Written whilst a Lady’s Picture was drawing ” challenged the notion that artists like Peale were especially good at visual discernment, then another print culture account of Peale, Philip Freneau’s “The Picture Gallery,” more explicitly tied practices of visual perception to the creation of a national identity. Freneau’s short prose piece first appeared in print in The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau Containing His

Essays, and Additional Poems (1788), providing readers with a virtual visit to an alternate reality version of Peale’s Museum. 48 Opening with a recollection of an anonymous narrator’s visit to a “certain picture gallery in a country town” that he and a friend had visited “sixth months since,” Freneau’s story revolves around the men’s anxiety over unstable visual signifiers of class and civic virtue. Both visitors are troubled by the presence in the gallery of portraits of markedly unrecognizable men, individuals whose inclusion within a pantheon of national greats signified by their representation in portraiture prompts the narrator and his companion to criticize the gallery’s commitment to national virtue. After his visit, the narrator goes to bed and dreams restlessly about his daytime trip. In his nightmarish version of the event, the gallery is transformed into a space where social boundaries have collapsed as morally-bankrupt members of the nation’s emerging middle classes press the proprietor to include their portraits despite their lack of civic ethics.

48 Philip Freneau, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau Containing His Essays, and Additional Poems (Philadelphia: Printed by Francis Bailey, 1788), 49-53.

By all accounts, Freneau was especially anxious that the values of civic virtue and republican disinterestedness would fall by the wayside in the wake of an increasingly commercial society. As Christopher Lukasik has argued, “The Picture Gallery” reflects

Freneau’s concern that personal corruption might eclipse the civic and political progress made in forming the new nation. “The Picture Gallery” presents a world in which,

Lukasik explains, “portraits end up identifying civic virtue with the faces of particular persons rather than communicating it through them.” 49 “The Picture Gallery” illustrates

Freneau’s worry that a growing culture of liberal, individualistic, and corrupt interest will threaten the images’ power to convey civic virtue and patriotic feeling, the notion that a portrait’s meaning is located in the identity of the specific sitter it depicts rather than the civic values such a person might represent.

The anxieties “The Picture Gallery” suggests extend far beyond portraits and to the unsettling and very un-republican problem of war profiteering. A major financial and social concern for Americans living in the period of economic insecurity and indebtedness in the wake of the Revolution, war profiteering takes central role in “The

Picture Gallery,” a fact which makes for a rather depressing tale. Freneau mourns both the loss of a financially upright citizenry and a stable republic that could be represented in a visual form. Just as in the anonymous poem that appeared a year earlier, Freneau’s

“The Picture Gallery” suggests that Peale, and by extension, any artist attempting to depict the new nation in visual terms, is ultimately faced with an impossible task. What the artist in the new republic needs, according to both Freneau and the author of the poem, is a third-party observer who will step in to correct the artist’s faults before they

49 Lukasik, 414.

are engraved on the national visual canvas. What is significant about Freneau’s piece, then, is not what the narrator thinks about portraiture, but how Freneau goes about satirizing the notion that any kind of visual representation could or should communicate national unification.

Freneau is especially careful to articulate the fallacy of national consensus, staging his version of Peale’s gallery not in Philadelphia, but in the rural South. Such a location would have been highly implausible at the time Freneau was writing, since

Peale’s gallery in Philadelphia was the first of its kind. The images on the wall that the narrator so quickly recognizes are not portraits of the men we might expect; they are not the typical Revolutionary heroes usually present in the period’s mythmaking art and literature. Besides his references to “his excellency the commander in chief,” an unnamed George Washington, the narrator lists Southern heroes “ Reed , and Moultrie , and

Marion ; and there is Lincoln , and Montgomery , and Greene ” in his daytime visit to the gallery (49). 50 Francis Marion, known as “The Swamp Fox,” rose to fame because of his knowledge and exploitation of the region’s wetland geography, and in 1780 Nathanael

Greene was appointed commander of the Southern branch of American troops. The only man on the list who did not either come from the Carolinas or direct a campaign there is

Montgomery, an Irish-born general in Washington’s Army who was killed early on in the war, an event officially entered into historical memory as a heroic martyrdom once depicted in an1808 painting by John Trumbull. Conspicuously absent are the

Revolution’s leading heroes from the North, many of whom were far more famous than

50 In his 1784 inventory of portraits Peale includes Washington, Green, Lincoln, and Moultrie, but not Montgomery or Marion. See Peale, “Portrait List, October 13, 1784.” Reprinted in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 1, ed. Lillian B. Miller et al. (New Haven: Published for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale UP, 1983), 634-635.

the ones Freneau’s narrator lists: Lafayette or Gates, for example. Only in a fictitious

Southern setting would these individuals be so lauded and so recognizable.

Perhaps depicting a gallery filled with the images of leaders from the South is homage to Freneau’s readership? It would seem that Freneau intended his story to be read by Southerners. 51 The subscription list for the first edition of Freneau’s book counts over 200 names under the category “ Charleston , South Carolina,” while there are only 28 names listed for subscribers from “ Pennsylvania , New-Jersey and Delaware States .”

Despite having lived in Charleston during the time he was writing most of the works found in Miscellaneous Works , the book was printed and bound in Philadelphia. Because the book was produced in an expensive version bound by celebrated Philadelphia binder

Robert Aitken and in a slimmer, cheaper, and more common version, it is likely that

Freneau hoped the book could be sold in conjunction with the Constitutional Convention being held the same year. Visiting political leaders, familiar with his earlier patriotic

Poems (1786) might have been expected to purchase the new work. 52 Despite these efforts, Miscellaneous Works was never as popular as Freneau’s earlier poetry, and was not printed again. 53

The print publication history of Miscellaneous Works coupled with the suggestion that Peale’s gallery ought to be thought of in regional terms illuminates the particularities

51 Freneau’s brother lived in Charleston and Freneau spent considerable time there between 1786 and 1790. For a longer discussion of Freneau’s time in Charleston, see Lewis Leary, “Philip Freneau in Charleston,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 42 (1941), 89-98.

52 Philip Freneau, Poems (Philadelphia: Printed by Francis Bailey, 1786).

53 Very few of the expensive versions of Miscellaneous Works (1788) seem to have been printed, suggesting that Freneau, his printer Francis Bailey, and various booksellers regarded the work as a collection of cheap satire rather than the more high-brow form of poetry. I am indebted to Jim Green at the Library Company of Philadelphia for information about the printing of Miscellaneous Works .

and sectional tendencies of the print culture in which it circulated. As Trish Loughran

has argued, the Constitutional nation came into being not because of an identifiable

public debate held through the “figment” of print and the “coherent, connected, self-

intelligible, and autonomous public sphere” that some scholars have claimed that it was, but because of highly localized understandings of consensus and consolidation that were made possible by the “gaps in communication from site to site and state to state that finally proved crucial to ratification’s success.” 54 Print culture and the notion of an

interconnected and unified nation for which it has often been seen to represent was a

“federalist fantasy,” an imagined “virtual nation” 55 in which “federalists’ attempts to

construct such a monolithic public succeeded only because one did not yet exist to resist

such a representation.” 56 Sectionalism and regionalism and not ordered national

interconnectedness and cohesion, in other words, are what ultimately led to unification as

practice. It is exactly this localism that Freneau stresses in his critique of Peale’s gallery.

Even if Peale described and others treated viewership in Philadelphia as a national act,

the business of visual representation was a distinctly regional and disjointed effort. In

stressing the nation’s fragmented particularities and deeply local impulses, and not the

totalizing universalism the Constitution ratification implied, Freneau suggests just how

ineffectual and unrealistic Peale’s gallery actually was.

Besides learning that visual representation was a local, rather than national,

practice, what we also learn from “The Picture Gallery” is that Freneau’s narrator thinks

54 Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 111-112.

55 Ibid., 162.

56 Ibid., 112.

Peale is not, to put it simply, very good at painting, or, for that matter, at visual perception. While Peale claimed to have been particularly selective about whose likenesses he would paint, Freneau’s narrator contends that it is exactly on the issue of being able to identify morally and ethically corrupt individuals that Peale is particularly unsuccessful. Unlike his artistic skill, which he often described as wanting, Peale prided himself on his ability to identify potential sitters, explaining in one early diary entry that despite “a collection of about 80 Portraits there is none to disgrace the gallery as yet,” adding that he hoped to “continue to be equally fortunate in my choise of men.” 57

It is his “choise of men” for which Freneau’s narrator takes Peale to task. While the gallery contains portraits of a number of well-known leaders of the Revolution, men whom the narrator and his friend easily recognize, it also holds a sizable collection depicting men whom the narrator refers to as “yonder fat headed animals that are also putting in their claim for immortality” (49). It is the gallery artist and proprietor—the satirized Peale—who is the real target of this insult. The narrator’s complaint is not only that such apparently unworthy individuals have been depicted in portraiture, but that their images are interspersed with the other, more appropriate subjects as though no disambiguation needed to be made between them. Even the guide who offers to explain the gallery’s contents to the two visitors voices a sameness between the men in the images, by repeatedly tell the visitors that that each of the men depicted “ also had a very great share in accomplishing the American Revolution ” (49).

57 Charles Willson Peale, “To John Isaac Hawkins, March 28, April 8, 1807,” reprinted The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 2, Part 2 , ed. Lillian Miller et al. (New Haven: Published for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale UP, 1988), 1008-1011.

After going to bed and entering his dreamed version of the gallery, the narrator repeats the phrase again to himself as if to stress its validity. And the claim is, in the terms Freneau introduces, technically true. While the real “worthies” helped fight the battles and draft the documents that made the Revolution a reality, the “fat headed animals” that so disgust the narrator are men who became rich from war profiteering.

Their “share,” as the narrator understands it, is their ill-gotten profits. Clamoring to convince the artist to paint their likenesses are an extremely wealthy “shoemaker” (50) and “taylor” (51), men who, as the “throng” (53) of other petitioners point out, were especially culpable in defrauding the government. Makers of essentials like shoemakers and tailors were the special targets of those who criticized the corrupt agreements begun towards the close of the war whereby private companies were officially contracted to outfit the Continental Army with clothing and other supplies. The shoemaker’s and tailor’s transgressions are not the microeconomics of individual vice, but rather signal the corruption of the nation as a whole. For despite their unethical and criminal behavior, war profiteers did contribute a tremendous financial “share” to the Revolutionary cause.

The plan devised and enacted with single-minded determination by Congressman Robert

Morris and private businessmen in 1781 to equip, feed, and clothe the Continental Army through private contracts, was a major contribution to the American victory. While the system was hugely successful in that it provided the Army with much needed supplies and put a stop to the endless disorganization earlier provisions systems entailed, it also served to make Morris and his associates tremendously wealthy. 58 It would seem that the artist’s inability to distinguish between different men arises because the difference

58 Wayne E. Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984), 213-215.

between corrupt criminal and virtuous citizen eroded as nationhood was established.

Freneau’s satiric jab is not only at Peale, whose ability to correctly classify the nation’s citizenry is decidedly faulty, but, more generally, towards the greedy capitalists whose rise paralleled that of the nation.

By contrast, Freneau’s poem “Lines, Intended for Mr. Peale’s Exhibition,

Philadelphia, May 10, 1784,” praises Peale’s skill as a portraitist. The poem praises

Peale’s representation of George Washington:

What apt resemblance strikes the eye!

Those features to the soul convey

A WASHINGTON, in fame as high,

Whose prudent, persevering mind

Patience with manly courage join’d,

And when disgrace and death were near,

Look’d through the black distressing shade,

Struck hostile Britons with unwonted fear,

And blasted their best hopes, and pride in ruin laid! 59

It is notable, however, that the speaker quickly sidesteps aesthetic praise, moving on instead to the generalized platitudes about Washington. The “apt resemblance,” in other words, is not as much a function of artistic merit as it is a product of the very fact of

59 Freneau, “Lines, Intended for Mr. Peale’s Exhibition, Philadelphia, May 10, 1784,” The Poems of Philip Freneau, Written Chiefly during the Late War (Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1786), 355.

Washington being the subject of the painting. As a cipher for bravery and virtue, an image of Washington would “strike the eye” no matter what its aesthetic qualities.

But Freneau’s satire isn’t all despair and cynicism. “The Picture Gallery” does provide readers with a model for how to visually imagine the nation, how to visually embody national ideals, and how to perceive those ideals through acts of viewing. The narrator’s dream might be a fantastical world in which a cacophony of voices calls out their desire to be included in the visual national imaginary that the gallery offers, but it nevertheless provides the more lucid, more honest version of reality that the story offers.

Even though neither the artist nor the guide, nor, we are left to assume, most visitors to the fictional gallery, are able to discern an individual’s civic virtue through visual representation, it is exactly a clarity of visual representation that Freneau gives the narrator in his dream. While the corrupt tailor, shoemaker, and the countless others they represent, might visually bleed together with the upright heroes of the republic in a gallery like Peale’s, the narrator imagines the greedy and corrupt men in his dream with instantly recognizable markers of their corruption. Armed with “a large pair of shears he carried under his left arm” (51) and “a large needle in his sleeve” (52), the tailor, for example, is easy for the narrator and the gathered crowd to associate with Robert Morris and his associates. Even so, the dreamed version of the artist is still unable to identify him as culpable in the corrupt contract system. It is not until a member of the crowd steps forward and explains “that this man had, on a certain occasion, been entrusted with a large quantity of the public cloth, intended for the use of the army in time of the late war, and that, by appropriating about one third of it to his own use, he had acquired a handsome estate” (52) that the artist realizes the tailor’s unethical character. Freneau’s

satire, in short, asks readers to visually discern more carefully—to see outward signs of national character—than even an artist like Peale does. The implication is that those who proclaim themselves good at visual perception and who are charged with the task of visually representing the nation are, to put it plainly, inept. A nation of multiple identities, localities, and beliefs required a variety of different modes of viewing, and not just those argued for by Peale in his artworks and gallery.

While the textual and visual performances that Peale and others who helped create the apparatus of a visually legible and unified nation argued that visual perception ought to be highly organized and, if possible, mediated by works like the engraving of

Philadelphia, at least two authors engaged with the literary print culture at the same historical moment in order to unravel this idea. Given the appearance of the poem in one of the leading periodicals of the period and the enormous popularity of Freneau’s works in general, it is likely that Peale’s critics had many readers. These authors produced texts that encouraged viewers to question Peale’s ability to visually assess and represent the nation. Peale’s detractors, then, provided not only a critique of his abilities as an artist; they also illustrated the difficulty of producing a visual representation of national unity, and an easily managed and uniform practice of viewership.

Philadelphia Fire: Peale in the Antebellum Age

Efforts like Freneau’s and others’ ultimately failed to slow Peale’s increasingly successful career. Given his eventual fame, it is worth returning to the Triumphal Arch disaster, the scene of his first major public humiliation. Despite being a relatively dramatic event in the Revolutionary-era history of Philadelphia, the burning of the

Triumphal Arch received comparatively little textual attention at the time. Most

newspapers failed to mention it, while the few writers who did wondered if it was a bad

omen for the new nation. The most complete account of Peale’s fiery arch disaster was

recorded, in fact, by Peale in his autobiography over forty years after it happened.

Sometime in the fall of 1825, Peale began looking over the extensive collection of letter

books, diaries, and other textual odds and ends he had produced and received in the

previous 80 or so years of his life. Writing to Thomas Jefferson that winter, Peale

announced that his decision to produce a written account of his life was the result of

requests from an inquiring public. They were hoping, Peale explained, for an “account of

the first painters who have painted in America” and for a detailed report of the “sundry

transactions of the revolutionary War.” 60

Peale’s autobiographical recording of his Triumphal Arch disaster may be a most

incredible transaction at the end of the Revolutionary War, but it fits remarkably well

within a narrative that reads surprisingly less like a march towards national stability and

more like a chaotic miscellany. Hardly the Whiggish version of American progress one

might expect from a figure like Peale, the autobiography is the most literary and

imaginative of all his textual productions. A surprising conclusion to a life marked by

order and rational knowledge, Peale’s autobiography presented the celebrations marking

the end of the Revolution in a decidedly horrific and fantastical way. Peale’s lifetime

commitment to Enlightenment values apparent in his museum exhibits and regularized

portraits seems to have all but disappeared in his autobiographical manuscript. Words

60 Charles Willson Peale, “Letter to Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 9, 1825,” reprinted in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 5: The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale , ed. Lillian B. Miller, et al. (New Haven: Published for The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale University Press, 2000), xviii-xix.

offered Peale something that paintings and museum cases could not, enabling Peale to

generate an autobiography that draws more from the dark pages of an emergent American

gothic fiction than any Enlightenment Book of Nature. Considering the autobiography,

the literary text that persists at the margin of Peale’s life as an artist, museum curator, and

scientist, invites us to reconsider Peale’s career. The autobiography also asks us to think

more about the specific role Philadelphia played in antebellum literary production as

writers attempted to imagine the nation’s future and reimagine its past. Given the literary

attention paid to Peale’s early endeavors, we ought not to dismiss Peale’s own textual

characterizations of himself.

Peale’s autobiography is no more stable a text than his museum was as a national

institution. Never published in his lifetime, Peale’s 992-page manuscript has been fairly ignored by all but the most ardent Peale scholars (see fig. 4). The first edition to ever appear in print did so as a courtesy of a massive editorial project launched by curators at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. This undertaking has so far entailed the collection and editing of all of Peale’s diaries, correspondence, and other writing, and will extend to the writing of his children. Published in 2005, the Smithsonian edition of

Peale’s autobiography is a stand-alone volume, a gesture to Peale’s own desire to see his autobiography published as a single, coherent work. At the same time, the Smithsonian autobiography is very much unlike the manuscript from which it was produced. The

Smithsonian edition provides a meta-historical apparatus by reorganizing the text into discrete sections arranged by date. Peale’s manuscript, on the other hand, reads as one long unbroken narrative.

Figure 4. Detail from the title page of The Life of Charles Willson Peale . MS. Ca. 1826. American Philosophical Society.

Peale’s autobiography is without question the longest and the most literary text

Peale ever produced. And even though it wasn’t published for another 175 years, Peale seems to have wanted his autobiography to come out as a book. Playing fast and loose with generic convention, Peale’s autobiography invites readers to engage with it as a piece of literature, yet throughout the text remains somewhat opaque on exactly what kind of literature that is. From the minutia of Peale’s early financial woes to the romantic excesses of his several courtships to the details of Peale’s service in the Continental

Army, the autobiography has it all. It trades in the conventions of the autobiography genre, while at the same time deploying hallmarks from other genres, encouraging

readers to decide for themselves what exactly it is. For example, Peale’s nominal references to himself evidence his rather flip approach to genre. We usually know him as plain third-person “Peale” or the slightly more fanciful “Mr. Peale,” but he also makes occasional appearances as the more epic “our hero” or the slightly picaresque-sounding

“our adventurer.”

What is more, Peale is likewise indeterminate about what exactly to call his work.

In his letters and in the text, the autobiography is alternately “a sketch of his life,” “his memoirs,” “his novel,” or “a history,” and on the title page it is simply “The Life of

Charles Willson Peale.” Peale’s ambiguous and multiple terminologies suggest the practical realities of a time when generic definition was still in its nascent stages. While the term autobiography wasn’t in general usage at the time Peale was writing, autobiography was nevertheless in the air. American interest in a much more famous

Philadelphian’s autobiography gained momentum just on the eve of when Peale began writing his. The first English edition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography to be based on Franklin’s original manuscript first appeared in print in 1818. It is very likely that

Peale was at least familiar with Franklin’s autobiography. Peale had certainly known the doctor, having painted his portrait on several occasions. Yet unlike Franklin’s text,

Peale’s autobiography is as much concerned with describing Philadelphia as it is with celebrating its author.

Peale’s autobiography invites us to reconsider a nineteenth-century cultural commitment to historical memory, to writing the past for readers in the future. The years immediately preceding Peale’s foray into autobiographical composition were marked by a sudden interest in memorializing Revolutionary era events. Throughout the nation,

monuments were erected, buildings preserved, and elderly veterans of the Revolution

were feted and paraded as the last of America’s first greatest generation. In Philadelphia,

the city’s citizens unexpectedly rushed to save the State House from a metamorphosis

into office space, renaming it Independence Hall in the process. By the time the aging

Marquis De Lafayette revisited America in 1826, Independence Hall was well on its way

to becoming the preserved shrine to the Founding era that is today. The ten years

immediately preceding Peale’s death was a moment, as historian Gary Nash explains, in

which “the process of constructing a web of memory never ceased” and in which the

business of “remembering Philadelphia would become…a thriving enterprise.” 61 Peale

seems to have begun working on his own contributions to this decade of Revolutionary

memory-making by painting a large-scale portrait. Only a few years before Peale began

writing his autobiography, he produced what is now his most recognizable visual work.

An antecedent of his textual creation, Peale’s The Artist in His Museum (1822) is a life-

size trompe l’eoil self-portrait depicting him with his museum. Holding a raised curtain,

Peale stands in front of the central gallery of the museum, signaling his ability to

catalogue and preside over the new nation’s bewilderingly vast natural history and huge

number of portrait-worthy leaders.

Given the painting’s popularity, Peale might have supposed a similar popularity

would emerge if he produced a written representation of his life. The very existence of

Peale’s autobiography signals his likely awareness of an increasingly profitable American

book market. As an intrepid entrepreneur, it is likely that Peale thought of books as he

regarded almost everything else he produced—that is, as creative endeavors whose

61 Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 8.

success could be measured in coin. If Peale wanted his text to be a novel, the form he

chose for his manuscript certainly gestured in that direction. Peale transcribed his

original manuscript into a series of sixty-eight bound booklets that approximated the

conventions of duodecimo-size printed works, the print form in which almost all novels

were published and sold in antebellum America. No mere manuscript, Peale’s

autobiography seems to have been a very real draft for a project that never quite reached

the printing house.

The inclusion of the Triumphal Arch disaster in Peale’s autobiography makes a

bit more sense, then, if we consider the narrative as being as much invested in nineteenth-

century literary conventions as it is in monumental history. Reaching 46 feet at its

highest point, Peale’s Triumphal Arch was intended to be exhibited in the center of

Philadelphia’s Market Street where spectators could pass through its three illuminated

paper and canvas archways. Philadelphians eagerly anticipated the entertainment. One

writer glowingly exclaimed in anticipation that Peale’s arch “will be the most

magnificent that has ever been made in America.” That same writer also praised “the

ingenious Captain Peale” for his plan to set off “a constant succession of fine fire-

works.” 62 It was a serious disappointment then, when the edifice caught fire. What

ensued was a chaotic melee. As one witness described it, the fire and smoke coming

from the burning arch resulted in “much confusion in the street…many persons were hurt

by being thrown down and trampled on” in their attempts to escape the scene. 63 Other

witnesses reported robberies and sporadic looting.

62 Independent Gazetteer , 3 January 1784, p. 3.

63 Jacob Hiltzheimer, “Excerpts from the Diary of Jacobs Hiltzheimer, of Philadelphia, 1768-1798,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 16 (July 1892), 167.

While no doubt a horrific event, Peale plays up the confusion and danger in his

autobiographical account by relying on conventions of the gothic and picaresque. Peale

gives a particularly rich description of his escape from the fire. He recounts standing

on the upper-most part of the edifice, and seeing the painting on fire, he

immediately endeavored to make his escape from the flames, by letting

himself down on the back part of the frame which was covered with

topsails to keep the wind from blowing out the lamps. He had descended

only a few feet when a bundle of rockets took fire and was burning all

around him, and some he believed had got under his loose coat, his only

chance as the thought then struck him, was to let himself fall to the

ground, which was more than 20 feet. In his descent he fell across the

edge of a board of the building, which broke two or three of his ribs, and

from thence to the ground with several blazing rockets carried with him

that went off in different directions, his cloaths being on fire. 64

Besides breaking some of his ribs, Peale also recounts being very badly burned and being

forced to spend three full weeks in bed. The medical treatments Peale describes seem to

be almost as horrific as the fire: a surgeon bleeds him, noisome and ineffectual poultices

and various ointments are applied, and Peale is given water laced with lead. By contrast,

Peale’s “french servant,” who “had his face and hands much burn’t” does not receive the

same medical care that Peale does. Forced to treat his burns on his own, the French

servant “went to a Pump and washed his burns in cold water, which so effectually took

64 Charles Willson Peale, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, Volume 5: The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale , ed. Lillian B. Miller, et al. (New Haven: Published for The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale University Press, 2000), 92.

out the fire that he had no more trouble with his sores.” Both the author and the subject

of his own tale of gothic horror, Peale figures modern medicine in terrifying terms as he

explains how this incident “prooves the efficacy of cold water .” 65

Peale’s criticisms of the modern era do not end with his newfound knowledge about the medicinal value of cold water. The streets of Philadelphia, so often described as a paragon of regularity and urban order, are remarkably disordered and difficult to navigate once the fire begins. Even in making his way a few blocks to his own street,

Peale is met with “great difficulty” and only “got along by intreating the crowds to let him pass,” reaching “3 rd street being almost spent with excessive fatigue.” The smoke- filled streets of Philadelphia in his autobiography are very much unlike the ordered urban spaces Peale described in the eighteenth century.

But Peale’s autobiographical description of the Triumphal Arch disaster at the

Revolution’s close doesn’t come without a warning. Six pages earlier, Peale interrupts the chronology of the narrative in order to preface his description of the event. Lest a reader should think that Peale’s first and disastrous attempt at illuminated transparent paper and canvas was his only one, he gives a description of the much more successful— and much less dangerous—illuminated transparent images that he produced and exhibited three years after the Triumphal Arch disaster. The first artworks Peale ever displayed in his gallery-turned-Museum, were a set of six distinct two-dimensional scenes with moving cut-out figures and backlit with candles. These scenes, the artwork that really launched Peale’s Museum, relied heavily on images of light and darkness and featured depictions of extreme sunlight and bright flames. Perhaps the most striking of the six,

65 Ibid., 93.

given Peale’s description of the Arch disaster that immediately follows in the narrative, is

the fourth scene, a representation of Milton’s Pandemonium from Pa radise Lost . It featured a set of moving cut-outs with “flames…naturally represented,” “repeated flashes of lightening,” “Imps of various fanciful forms flying through the fire,” and

“satan…passing through the fire.” The exhibition of the scene, Peale explains, was also accompanied by music and verse. A broadside printed to advertise the exhibition even includes twenty-three lines from Milton. Initially Peale had hired a local orator to select and read “amusing selections to entertain the Company; from Milton, shcool of scandal, shaekespeare, and also some other pieces of humor,” but the arrangement didn’t work out. Peale explains: “the reader, fond of causing laughter in the audience, choose [chose] some pieces which admitted of double entendre, which did not accord with the sentiments of Peale.”66

It makes some sense, then, that Peale chose to insert his own poetic formulation of

Milton’s hell in the autobiographical version of his description. This section in Peale’s autobiography is almost identical to the broadside advertisement except for the poetry.

The blank verse of Paradise Lost is replaced by Revolutionary-era ballad meter as Peale renders Milton’s “Pandemonium” as the similar, but not quite exact “Padamoniam.”

Heavily reliant on repetition, Peale’s ballad is as follows:

Rise Padamoniam Rise

Amidst sulpherous fume

Whose rolling smoke assend the skies

Will burn and not consume

66 Ibid., 88.

Rise Pandamonim arise

Amidst sulfurous fume

Whose rolling smoke assends the Skies

Will burn and not consume

Ever burning n’er consuming

With hotest fire ever fuming 67

In his rewriting of the poetic accompaniment to the vision of Pandemonium, Peale overtly emphasizes the fiery nature of Satan’s stomping grounds. In so doing, this chronologically misplaced account of his transparent pictures foreshadows the Triumphal

Arch fire that in reality came before, but in the literary space of the autobiography comes after.

Peale’s decision to forgo Milton in rewriting his description of the transparent pictures is in keeping with the narrative persona he cultivates in the autobiography.

Somewhere between Romantic genius and autonomous liberal individual, Peale explains that building the six scenes of which the Milton representation was a part were a tremendous mental and physical burden. He explains: “[they were] great and wonderful labours of the mind, which had taken such possession of his soul, as to prevent him from taking the necessary refreshments for his body, by sleep, and even in the little sleep he took, his mind found out new methods to perform the effects which had occupied his waking thoughts.” 68 Like the mad eccentrics peopling the imagined dream worlds of

67 Ibid., 87.

68 Ibid., 86.

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Philadelphia’s other writers of gothic

fiction, Peale as the hero of his own narrative is a man obsessed. And that obsession,

Peale explains at the end of his description of the Triumphal Arch leads to an intriguing

lesson that Peale imparts as “a warning to his children.” Only partially compensated for

the expenses he incurred from the Arch disaster, Peale advises his children and readers

that it is far better “to trust to the generosity of an Individual than to the Public.” 69 No longer the American Athens, Peale’s autobiographical Philadelphia is a place where one should cultivate mistrust and watch out for fires.

69 Ibid., 94.

CHAPTER 3

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S SPECTACLES

Perhaps the most enduring image of America’s most famous Founder is one that was produced only ephemerally within his own lifetime. Upon Benjamin Franklin’s arrival in France as an ambassador for the recently separated colonies, the June 16, 1777

Journal de Paris advertised the publication of a print based on a drawing by Charles

Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Augustin de Saint Aubin (see fig. 5). The portrait, which depicted Franklin as a caricature of New World simplicity complete with spectacles, homespun garb, stringy hair, and a fur cap, was immensely popular throughout Europe. It was repeated regularly in a vast array of informal media: on inexpensive prints, ceramics, watches, and pendants, to name a few.70 Franklin delighted in his portraits, frequently going out of his way to sit for artists and often sending likenesses of himself to far away friends and relatives as tokens of affection.

In many ways, Franklin’s appearance in the world was a repudiation of his own apt advice in the Autobiography : “I therefore put my self as much as I could out of sight.” Soliciting subscriptions for the building of a library, Franklin finds, is a task made easier when he “stated it as a Scheme of a Number of Friends, who had requested me to

70 Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 228.

Figure 5. Augustin de Saint Aubin after Charles Nicholas Cochin, the Younger. Benjamin Franklin . Engraved print. France. 1777. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

go about and propose it to such as they thought Lovers of Reading.” 71 Franklin’s

recommendation to his readers and would-be emulators is, remarkably, the exact opposite

of his physical presence in the cultural and political line of sight that helped him promote

an already astounding career into one of dramatic proportions. Yet Franklin’s claim that

one should put oneself “out of sight” is a bit misleading. In revealing to his readers—or,

more precisely, to his own politically errant son William whom he addresses at the

beginning of Part One (“Dear Son”)—that being figuratively

invisible is the real way to wealth, or at least the path to the founding of libraries, he

places himself squarely in our collective imaginative sights. We, in other words, are

invited to see Franklin even when his potential donors do not. Even as he cloaks himself

in the invisibility that fabricated “Lovers of Reading” afford, he pulls back the curtain for

his readers, stepping into our imaginative line of vision as he reveals the trick.

That Franklin’s Autobiography is revelatory should not come as shocking news.

As an autobiography it is what it purports to be. But Franklin never called his work by

that anachronistic name, referring to it instead as a “ Recollection ” (1). It was not until

years later that Autobiography became the byword for his famous posthumous publication. 72 Driving a wedge between the names of the narrative, between the selective history that recollections suggest and the crafted personal exposé inscribed in the autobiography genre—provides a standpoint from which to look at the text itself. For the distance between remembering and revealing is often bridged by self-concealment. The

71 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , 2nd ed., ed. Edmund S. Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 143. This work is cited parenthetically hereafter.

72 Several studies have taken on the complicated publication history of Franklin’s Autobiography . For a recent discussion, see James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press for the Library Company of Philadelphia and the British Library, 2006).

narrative’s peculiar literary gift as both recollection and revelation—as Memoirs (in

French), as it was called when it was first published, and Autobiography (in English)—is that it allows Franklin to conceal as much as he reveals, to be “out of sight” as much as he is in our sight as a self-exposing character.

Considering Franklin as fundamentally concerned with visibility and invisibility invites us to reconsider notions of privacy and publicity that have become pervasive in studies of eighteenth-century writers. Frequently treated as emblematic of the century in which he lived, Franklin’s life, and especially the versions of it he recorded in his

Autobiography , has come to stand for an eighteenth-century selfhood whose presence in the public (and political) world is contingent on maintaining a private life under wraps.

For some, Franklin’s ability to conceal a private self is conveyed through what has been described as his “protean” qualities in the Autobiography ; in this view, Franklin’s careerist shape-shifting prevents anyone from seeing his true self. For others, Franklin’s linguistic gymnastics in the Autobiography represent the height of performativity; even his prose is constituent of a performed selfhood. For still others, Franklin’s career as a printer allows him to conform to a republican paradox of selfhood, or what Michael

Warner has dubbed “the principle of negativity,” a cultural phenomenon in which

Franklin and others achieved levels of civic and political representativeness—an entrance into the public sphere—through the protection or submergence of a private, interior self beneath an abstracted, public self. 73 The public sphere in this view might be shorthanded, to borrow Charles Taylor’s description, as a “metatopical,” imaginary location that “knits

73 Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990). For a recent summary of the history of Franklin studies and in particular those approaches that understand Franklin as performative, see Nancy Glazener’s “Benjamin Franklin and the Limits of Secular Civil Society” American Literature 80 (2008), 203-231, especially pages 205-210.

a plurality of spaces into one larger space of nonassembly,” whereas its alternative, the

private sphere, is a real-life location made up of tangible people and things. 74

Yet as some scholars have recently begun to illustrate, privacy is hardly a simple

concept. As Michael McKeon has persuasively argued in his monumental study of early

modern British literary culture, privacy and publicity are not as mutually exclusive as

they would sometimes seem, often either overlapping or forming concentric rings of

increasingly out-of reach-realms. In McKeon’s view, “Secret History” narratives—

stories that promote themselves as particularly revelatory—operate by “disclosing

traditional or elite secrets [to] make public a history of secrets,” but in so doing, they

“need to sustain their own secrecy by obscuring the identity either of their authors or

those figures they aim to expose.” 75 Publicity, then, entails the act of exposing a private,

or “secret,” piece of knowledge, while simultaneously reinforcing privacy as an essential

component of that exposure. Revealing a hidden truth is, to put it differently, an empty

act, unless accompanied by an assurance that there really is a secret, private realm from

which it issues. 76

The concepts of privacy and publicity, as McKeon and others have discussed

them, are often thought of in spatial language; disclosing private information, in these

accounts, is akin to revealing an imaginary location, a space that conceals a hidden

74 Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (winter 2002), 113-114.

75 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 472.

76 For a recent discussions of the overlaps between privacy and publicity in American literature see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Dillon’s study is especially invested in nineteenth-century conceptions of gender.

interiority. 77 Such metaphors are inadequate, however, because they do not account for what, in Franklin’s day, would have been the leading discourse about perception. Being public (and, alternatively, being private) entailed an understanding of the world as a visual field in which seeing and being seen were paramount. I seek here to discuss publicity and privacy within the visual metaphors that populated eighteenth-century

vocabularies by bridging the gap between Franklin’s image as it circulated within

eighteenth-century visual culture as a visual depiction that would seem by all accounts to

embody publicity and the accounts of seeing and being seen in private that occur with

surprising frequency in Franklin’s writing. I wish, in other words, to reconcile the

materiality of vision and visual culture as Franklin and his contemporaries knew it—as

the very real, very material depictions of Franklin that flourished in his lifetime—with

Franklin’s own imaginative figurations of visual self-representation and operations of

literary portraiture.

In this chapter I suggest that it is precisely the diffuse and complicated

interrelation between private and public worlds, the constant overlapping and subsequent

ambiguities that are instilled in Franklin’s descriptions of a visible self in a visibly

constituted world. Paradoxically, the ideal way for Franklin to put himself “out of sight,”

to maintain a visually private selfhood, is to be in sight. In a culture that valued visual

sensory perception above all other modes, seeming to be publicly visible—to offer up a

private, secret self in visual terms—always entailed an act of the subsumption of other

visual information. Moments of invisibility in Franklin’s texts, then, are dependent

77 A very recent example of scholarship in this vein that is of particular interest because it is explicitly about Franklin is Edward Cahill’s “Benjamin Franklin’s Interiors,” Early American Studies 6 (Spring 2008), 27-58. Cahill reads the interior space of Franklin’s home as a metaphor for his psychological interiority.

constructions of public visibility. The more Franklin purports to visually expose his private life, the further he removes it from the eye of the public observer. Moments of

Franklin’s visible exposure in the Autobiography —often as the underdressed, unrefined, rustic character like that depicted in the Cochin portrait—conceal a good deal more than they reveal.

Visible Franklin

Toward the end of his lengthy stay in France, Franklin briefly corresponded with his friend George Whatley on the state of growing old, noting, among other things, the pains of gout and frustrations with increasingly less reliable vision. Writing from Passy on May 23, 1785, Franklin explained the benefits of one of his most famous inventions:

I had the Glasses cut, and half of each kind associated in the same Circle,

thus By this means, as I wear my Spectacles constantly, I have only to

move my Eyes up or down as I want to see distincly far or near, the proper

glasses being always ready.

In his description of bifocals (or, as Franklin usually called them, his “double spectacles”), to his “Dear old Friend,” Franklin expounds on the merits of his new glasses to help him in difficult social situations, allowing him to adeptly engage in the social conversations directed at him:

This I find more particularly convenient since my being in France, the

Glasses that serve me best at Table to see what I eat, not being the best to

see the Faces of those on the other Side of the Table who speak to me; and

when one’s Ears are not well accustomed to the Sounds of a Language, a

Sight of the Movements in the Features of him that speaks helps to

explain, so that I understand French better by the help of my Spectacles. 78

Maneuvering through the challenges of a foreign language is an act made easier for

Franklin once he can see those mannerisms and facial cues that accompany speech. 79 But

Franklin’s reliance on such visual cues not only points to the obvious benefits that sight would afford someone attempting to converse in an unfamiliar tongue; it also underscores the importance of gestures and facial expressions that accompany public speech acts in eighteenth-century elocutionary culture. In addressing the visual elements accompanying the delivery of a speech act, Franklin connects the visual qualities of oratory to another of the eighteenth-century’s modes of public participation. 80

Yet in the Autobiography , incidents in which Franklin is seen by others work to set him up not in conversation with others, but opposed to others; in his telling of events, he appears as the visual focal point against a backdrop of inferiors. As in the book’s narrative structure, other characters recede into the background as Franklin steps forward to become the center-point of the visual image. Franklin’s genius in these events is that

78 Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to George Whatley, 23 May 1785.” MS. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Digital Edition . The American Philosophical Society and Yale University.

79 There is significant reason to doubt that Franklin actually invented bifocals; it is more likely that he was one of the first wearers and promoters of bifocals. See John R. Levene, “Benjamin Franklin F.R.S., Sir Joshua Reynolds, F.R.S., P.R.A., Benjamin West, P.R.A. and the Invention of Bifocals,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 27 (1972): 141-163.

80 As Jay Fleigelman has argued, rhetoric underwent an important shift in this period when Americans, in their newly acquired interest in the persuasive aspect of orally delivered argument, began to adopt a carefully choreographed version of rhetorical delivery. “Natural language,” as Fliegelman calls it, became the norm for oral performances; adherents to this system strove to achieve a practiced theatrics that would look as though the speaker were experiencing genuine passion and feeling about his subject. Classical rhetoric was amended so that “tonal and gestural delivery,” or pronunciato , “was given a new position of centrality” (30). A number of studies of late eighteenth-century culture have implicitly noted the importance of the visual to public modes of expression, citing the increased emphasis Americans began to place of gesture, blushing, crying, and other (supposedly) uncontrolled and visually apparent modes of communicating interior feeling. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence .

he is able to craft an incident of public spectacle as one of personal encounter. Upon first

arriving in Philadelphia, Franklin famously strolls through the city in the clothes of a

poor apprentice (really in the garb of a runaway, as he tells us elsewhere) and carrying

three large rolls under his arms. 81 Franklin explains how this was the first time he ever

registered on the field of Deborah’s visual perception: “I went up Market Street as far as

fourth Street, passing by the Door of Mr. Read, my future Wife’s Father, when she

standing at the Door saw me, and though I made as I certainly did a most awkward

ridiculous Appearance” (76). But this is more than just another version of the familiar

“how I met your mother” tale. Franklin wants us to imagine the event as a pair of

potentially star-crossed lovers, who eventually work things out once they have overcome

a staring contest in the public street. What Franklin does not mention in his description

of being seen by Deborah is that behind him lies the Market Street’s expansive public

market. Situated in the middle of the wide street, a series of covered market sheds

extended from Front Street to Fourth Street, creating a busy background against which

Deborah would have seen Franklin. Yet the visual field of a dirty and crowded market

filled with many young men more or less just like himself falls away as Franklin

describes Deborah seeing him alone—even as unique—to ensure that we see him that

way as well.

Despite his apparent popularity in real life, the autobiographical Franklin explains

that he prefers one-on-one interactions, incidents in which he is not seen by a large

audience. Working for the disordered, yet autocratic, Samuel Keimer, Franklin finds

81 For an extensive discussion of Franklin as a young runaway apprentice and the implications of that identity, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

himself wishing he were master of his own print shop, hoping that he might eventually save enough to set up for himself, all the while secretly wishing Keimer’s financial demise. But before this could happen, an incident occurred which “snapt our

Connexion.” While working upstairs in Keimer’s print shop, Franklin hears “a great

Noise happening near the Courthouse” and to discern the cause “put my Head out of the

Window to see what was the Matter.” But, to Franklin’s chagrin, “Keimer being in the

Street look’d up and saw me, call’d out to me in a loud Voice and angry Tone to mind my

Business, adding some reproachful Words.” What irritates Franklin is not only that

Keimer tells Franklin to get back to work, but that Keimer does so before a public audience. Explaining what it is that really irks him about the incident, Franklin recalls that Keimer’s insults “nettled me the more for their Publicity, all the Neighbours who were looking out on the same Occasion being Witnesses how I was treated” (110-111).

Franklin’s standing out against what he describes as a crowd, his sudden “Publicity,” would seem to operate to Franklin’s detriment here. In reality, however, this is the incident that causes Franklin to leave Keimer’s employment and set his own plans for a career as a printer into real motion. Franklin locates agency for this decision not with himself nor with Keimer, but with the abstract concept of visual publicity. Even though he claims to abhor public visibility, it is the witnessing of neighbors, a gaze both abstract and identifiable, both imaginary and real, that pushes Franklin into business.

Neighbors’ gazes are remarkably almost always focused on Franklin, ever ready to serve as a location for Franklin’s own displacement of individual agency. Franklin might tell a story of himself as industrious and parsimonious, but it is only when he is seen that way by others do those character traits count for anything. In effect, the myth

of the self-made man so often ascribed to Franklin should more rightly be thought of as a myth of the public’s gaze, for Franklin’s successes as recounted in the Autobiography aren’t the result of hard work, but of hard work seen in public. In a particularly remarkable passage in the Autobiography , Franklin describes his industriousness, recalling that having stayed late one night to reset broken type, he is witnessed by Dr.

Baird on his way home from a social event. Putting words into the doctor’s mouth,

Franklin explains that the doctor found his work ethic “superior to any thing I ever saw of the kind,” since “I see him still at work when I go home from Club; and he is at Work again before his Neighbours are out of bed” (119). Franklin uses the incident as evidence of his industriousness, taking the example of a fortuitous happenstance and turning it into an exemplum of his character by quietly erasing the substantial distance between working late one night by chance and working late every night on purpose. In authoring Dr. Baird’s comments of praise for him, Franklin turns a particular event into a universal claim.

But Franklin also elides the distinctions between simply being observed and being spied on, turning the peeping of a respected neighbor into a self-satisfied discussion of his own industry. Franklin must cast Dr. Baird not as a prying Philadelphian, but as an upstanding gentleman who is able to recommend the young printer. It is the doctor’s peering in through the window late at night that grants him the warrant to recommend the younger man. In Franklin’s telling of the incident, Dr. Baird is a necessary foil for

Franklin’s own desire to be seen. What is more, Franklin’s desire for such visible public exposure is made doubly apparent by Franklin’s own retelling of the incident. As author of the account, Franklin again presents himself to public view by re-presenting the event

for his readers’ scrutiny. Franklin asks his readers to envision Dr. Baird’s peeping even

as he asks us to witness the event, both his working late and Dr. Baird’s witnessing of his

industriousness, for ourselves. Franklin’s credibility is determined not just by the

doctor’s actions, but by the reader’s necessary witnessing of a long-past event that the

narrative conjures in our imaginations. Representing himself as a victim of visual prying

is, for Franklin, neither an embarrassment nor a trivial event. It is, rather, his primary

narrative tool.

His account of recomposing types late at night in the Autobiography is not the

only moment in which Franklin made sure the public’s gaze could scrutinize his writing.

Even in reality, Franklin desired an audience for his writing, setting himself up to be the

victim of public peeping when writing at his desk. Even though many writers used

pseudonyms (and Franklin was particularly prodigious in his use of them), the material

necessities of writing were far more revelatory than concealing. 82 Whether or not

Franklin intentionally left the shutters open on that fateful evening on purpose remains a

mystery (he couldn’t have been relying on light from street lamps since he didn’t invent

those until years after the incident), but it would seem he often left his work desk open

for public viewing.

One of Franklin’s desks, a secrétaire, was an ornately carved piece of

Chippendale furniture, and it featured, like many desks owned by affluent members of the colonial elite, hinged doors that had to be open when the desk was in use. It was one of two kinds of desks used in the eighteenth century, a type where “the writing surface, drawers, and other storage spaces were all hidden inside the desk, often secured by a

82 For Franklin’s use of pseudonyms in particular, see Gordon S. Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004).

lock.” 83 Secrétaires like Franklin’s often featured secret compartments and false-

bottomed drawers, allowing their owners to reveal as much or as little of their “interior”

writing habits as they deemed fit. “They were,” as Carol Sargentson notes, “meaningful

because they reflected concerns about the safety of personal possessions and a level of

private control over those possessions.”84 Yet while Franklin’s desk could be closed and

locked like most secrétaires , the intricate carvings on its interior drawers and

“pigeonholes” were only visible when the doors and writing surface were open. In

contrast, most other secrétaire-style desks from the period featured elaborate decoration

on the exterior and featured relatively plain interiors, suggesting that Franklin’s own desk

was meant to be left open, rather than closed. Franklin’s desk was designed for the writer

and his writing to be seen. 85 Just as incidents within the Autobiography are Franklin’s to reveal if he so chooses, the ornate woodwork and hidden compartments of the desk might be concealed at any minute. Just as in Franklin’s retelling of his account with Dr. Baird is a case of exposure that Franklin as author of his own narrative has the power to disclose, so too could the desk act as a medium for Franklin’s regulation of his visual exposure.

83 The other kind is a bureau , a type of flat, leather-topped table with visible drawers, a piece of office furniture much like typical twenty-first century desks. The distinction between bureaus and secretaries is evidenced in their etymologies, where the former originally referred to counting-house tables and the latter to the development of a culture of secrecy and secret correspondence. See Dena Goodman, “The Secrétaire and the Integration of the Eighteenth-Century Self,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past , ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 187.

84 Carolyn Sargentson, “Looking at Furniture Inside Out: Strategies of Secrecy and Security in Eighteenth- Century French Furniture,” in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past , ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007), 206.

85 But being seen at one’s desk could also expose a writer’s faults. Towards the end of the Autobiography , Franklin is forced to wait for General Loudon to finish his correspondence. Franklin notes that Loudon’s incapacities as a general lie in his indecisiveness, a trait made obvious to those who see him at his writing desk. See Autobiography , 248-259. 87

INVISIBLE FRANKLIN

Franklin was often seen dining at the homes of his famous friends in France and

Britain, but he was hardly ever at his home on Market Street in Philadelphia. Despite sending vast stores of luxury goods like chinaware, linens, and carpets to his family,

Franklin only spent the last few years of his life at home. And when he was at home, he was hardly the hard-working youth of his Autobiography or the disinterested, disembodied republican that was the idealized model of citizenship. As Edward Cahill has noted, Franklin’s home acted as a kind of absent presence for Franklin’s troublesome selfhood, a space to which he could send furnishings while staying safely abroad and away from those who might criticize the house as a representation of Franklin’s self- interestedness. In Cahill’s words, Franklin’s writing on the topic of his house “reveals the depth of uncertainty that occurs when the claims of republican virtue in a commercial culture are literally brought home” and a self-conscious owner “whose anxious subjectivity could not be entirely ‘put out of sight.’” 86

Cahill’s argument about Franklin’s relationship to his house represents one part of the much larger issue of being seen as successful in a culture increasingly devoted to republican ideology and, subsequently, whose inhabitants were interested in being seen as immaterial and disinterested. The eighteenth-century witnessed a number of radical changes in the ways Americans related to their material possessions, made nowhere more visible than in the British Empire’s second largest city. In Philadelphia, consumer

86 Cahill, “Benjamin Franklin’s Interiors,” 30-31.

demand grew tremendously in the second half of the century, leading to what has

commonly been referred to as a “consumer revolution.” As a number of historians have

recently shown, the expansiveness of market economies of the eighteenth century created

a world in which many new products became available, resulting in the development of

new consumer desires and the expansion of old ones. Manufactured material goods came to visually signal social status to such an important extent that it became almost essential for consumers to purchase as many luxury goods as they could afford. The display of these goods and the dexterity with which people employed them became visible markers of social and political affiliation. Indeed, the business of consumption and display was so central to people’s lives that, as historian T.H. Breen has argued, the period’s most noteworthy political bonds were cemented not over abstract ideological principles, but through a singular and unifying “narrative of consumer display.” 87 For Breen, the

American political Revolution was inextricably connected to the consumer revolution

taking place at roughly the same time.

However, consumption, if left unchecked, could quickly turn into luxury, a vice at

the heart of many Revolutionary-era social critiques. Franklin’s youthful version of

himself in the Autobiography learns lessons about being observed rather quickly,

gleaning that refinement and gentility are ideas to be visually concealed, rather than

exposed. On his first return to Boston after finding work in Philadelphia, Franklin visits

his brother (and former apprentice master) at his shop. Describing the event in explicitly

visual terms, Franklin explains that his brother James “receiv’d me not very frankly,

87 T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15.

look’d me all over, and turn’d to his Work again.” Franklin determines that the slight— his brother’s wordless turning away—is a result of his personal appearance. According to Franklin, the younger version of himself “was better dress’d than ever while in

[James’s] Service, having a genteel new Suit from Head to foot, [and] a Watch,” not to mention being considerably wealthier; in this description Franklin embodies the character of the genteel young man, a figure who even verges on arrogant foppery as he describes his suit and watch. The very things that within the eighteenth-century culture of visual social signification could potentially build bonds of fraternity are what prevent those bonds from forming.

Unlike in his letter to Whatley where Franklin works to master polite conversation in order to be socially visible, in the world of the print shop seeing and being seen as polite work to Franklin’s social disadvantage. Once his brother “look’d me all over,”

Franklin becomes an unwelcome presence within the Boston printing house and the

Franklin family. Franklin’s punning on the family surname—“received me not very frankly”—only reinforces the fraternal distance that his appearance generates. Yet as if to counteract the slight he feels at the hands of his brother, Franklin quickly turns the objects of his genteelly-outfitted person to court visual recognition from the other men at the shop. Noting that “Paper being the Money of Boston,” the youthful Franklin

“produc’d a handful of Silver and spread it before them.” Continuing what he describes as “a kind of Raree-Show” in which he is the central attraction, Franklin then gives the men the “Opportunity of letting them see my Watch,” allowing the men to ogle the material signifiers of his newly transformed genteel identity (81-82). This moment is a turning point for the autobiographical Franklin as he recognizes that material goods have

the effect of alienating him from the society he seeks—he, like the objects he displays in his brother’s shop, becomes an alien thing, where fancy clothes and a watch turn their owner into a curious spectacle. In short, the lesson Franklin learns at the print shop is that he ought to appear as distanced as possible from the material effects that signify his social and financial advancement.

And distance himself he did. Shortly before completing this first section of the

Autobiography in 1771, Franklin commissioned a notable portrait of himself copied from a 1766 portrait by British painter David Martin that became the basis for many copies, being reproduced even well after Franklin’s death. Presumably because he liked the original, Franklin had Martin paint the first known copy of the image the following year, intending it to be hung in his Philadelphia home (see fig. 6). Both versions depict

Franklin as a refined gentleman of science. He is pictured in a contemplative pose with his thumb on his chin and dressed in white wig and expensive blue jacket with gilt trim, sitting at a desk covered by red velvet and piles of papers, while looking over him is a bronze bust of Isaac Newton. Franklin’s copy of the portrait was an almost exact imitation; the crucial difference between the original and Franklin’s copy was the conspicuously visible back of his chair. It is topped by rococo ornamentation in the original and appears plain red in the copy. Visual representation, then, might be possible without the “kind of Raree-show” expensive objects would produce. 88

Franklin presents the notion that, paradoxically, pretensions to refinement remove people from access to political change early in his career with a 1732 pseudonymous

88 See Sellers, 328-340. Although Sellers thinks the chair embellishment on the original was added sometime after the painting was completed, no paint analysis has been done on the original to conclude that the chair ornamentation was a later addition.

letter to The Pennsylvania Gazette . In it, Franklin attempts to turn the tables on the visual spectacle of refinement, working hard to manipulate consumer culture so that one need not be refined to gain visual recognition. In order to satisfy the increasingly prevalent notions of an individual leading life through simplicity and a lack of adornment, Franklin consciously reinterprets rudeness as the essential qualifier for visual recognition. Or put slightly differently, he turns the simple furnishings and dress that were seen as signs of rudeness, what had historically been signifiers of social and political invisibility, into social and political visibility. Indeed, in order to frame the private realm of the self visually articulated as the unrefined and impolite, as the site from which political agency issues, Franklin is forced to rewrite the very codes of the eighteenth-century social space.

When writing in the character of Anthony Afterwit, a self-styled sensible husband and “honest Tradesman” who claims to have been fooled by his wife’s father into thinking her wealthier than she is, Franklin explains the actions he takes once he realizes that his wife’s passion for refinement in home decoration is draining his finances. 89

Because of her “Strong Inclination to be a Gentlewoman ,” Afterwit is almost reduced to

penury until, after “receiving a very severe Dun,” Afterwit resolves to take action against

his wife. While she is away on a two-week visit “to see a Relation,” Afterwit removes all

of his wife’s expensive possessions and replaces them with more affordable alternatives.

89 [Benjamin Franklin], “Anthony Afterwit,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, July 10, 1732, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Digital Edition . The American Philosophical Society and Yale University.

David Martin, Benjamin Franklin (Original). 1766. Oil on canvas. White House.

David Martin. Benjamin Franklin (First Copy of Original). 1767. Oil on canvas. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Figure 6. David Martin portraits of Benjamin Franklin.

Afterwit “dispos’d of the Tea-Table, and put a Spinning Wheel in its Place,” while “The

stately Clock I have transform’d into an Hour-Glass.” But these replacements, he

jokingly suggests, are more aesthetically pleasing and more tasteful than the original

objects. The Spinning Wheel “looks very pretty” and the Hour-Glass is cast as an

important “Ornament…to the Room.” But this is not just jocular irony on Afterwit’s

part. As the author of the story and newly empowered director of the home, Afterwit has

reconfigured aesthetic taste as a pointed rejection of all things refined, those things which

ordinarily make one socially and politically visible.

In imposing a new authority on the decorative possibilities of his domestic space

and redrawing the boundaries of eighteenth-century aesthetic taste, Afterwit explicitly

employs a discourse of government in order to describe his results. As the new master of the house he now “has the Freedom to give…an Account” in the newspaper. Afterwit intends to impose a system of heavily regulated rule, even including a system where he effectively taxes his wife for her pretensions to refinement, intending to punish her with the removal of “the Great Glass, with several other Trinkets.” Even while divesting the house of the objects of refinement, Afterwit invests it with a new political authority, albeit, his own, unquestioned rule. Mrs. Afterwit loses more than just access to the world of refinement to which she so aspires; in the same stroke she also loses her control over home rule, becoming the victim of her husband’s revolution. The very act of replacing household goods becomes a matter of political change as, upon her return to the house after visiting a relative, Afterwit expects that she will suffer physical maladies—“the

Headach, the Stomach-ach, Fainting-Fits”—as a result of the “surprising Revolutions” he

has affected in the home, suggesting that a change in home décor might, much like a military coup, cause bodily harm on those whose rule is overthrown.

Perhaps taking what he had learned from his own early Anthony Afterwit fable,

Franklin applied the same “surprising Revolutions” to representations of his ancestral home as he describes it in the Autobiography . Franklin’s accounts of his early life in the

Autobiography stress the unrefined nature of his character, featuring a number of barely believable anecdotes meant to affirm his rejection of the culture of consumption and luxury that surrounded him. The first part of the Autobiography , in fact, is a near catalogue of unrefined material objects that intrude into the text to offset suspicions that

Franklin might well have been enjoying his fine suits of clothes and pocket watches. In tracing his own filial lineage, for example, Franklin emphasizes the unrefined nature of his forbears, explicitly drawing attention to the rude and simple furniture he imagines that they owned. Attempting to create a familial lineage that might explain his “bookish inclination,” Franklin describes the family legend where his ancestors “thro’ the Reign of

Queen Mary” could be found reading an English Bible in the evenings. In order to protect themselves from the legal fallout that would occur should they have been caught with it, Franklin’s relatives were obliged to “conceal and secure it…with Tapes under and within the Frame of a Joint Stool.” Thus, Franklin’s “Great Great Grandfather” was able to read the book aloud to his family when “he turn’d up the Joint Stool upon his Knees, turning over the Leaves then under the Tapes” (50).

In Franklin’s account, it is not merely reading that is figured as a brave and political act, for the family bible, the instrument of political and religious resistance, is situated as an inextricable part of the family’s furniture. The ties that bind the book to the

stool are wound “within the Frame.” It is at this moment of familial folklore, “This

Anecdote I had from my Uncle Benjamin,” that Franklin reinforces the notion that

humble furnishings like a simple stool are the basis for filial affiliation and political

action figured through visible representation. Yet both of these are subsets of visual

representation. Franklin’s family must appear to reject English Protestantism by visually

concealing the material evidence of their beliefs. The moment of dangerous exposure, as

Franklin figures his familial history, will come as a result of visual revelation—his

ancestors fear being seen with the Bible. In not being caught, Franklin seems to say, his

family learned how to manipulate their public appearances years ago.

Exposing Privacy

Franklin had good reason to distance himself from visible signifiers of his

success. Eighteenth-century America and Europe were often scenes of chaotic violence.

To declare their disgust at the passing of unpopular legislation and economic crises, mobs

rose up in protest, marched through the streets of major cities, and often, along the way,

paused to register their discontent by attacking the homes of those they felt embodied

whatever ideas or legislative acts they opposed. Such attacks usually began with the

burning of an effigy. Then the mob would turn their attention to the victim’s home as

another suitable substitute for the body of the perceived wrongdoer.

An account from the Newport Mercury of a riot in Boston that accompanied the passing of the Stamp Act, illustrates the substitutive qualities of such attacks.

Assembling with the intent of attacking one house in particular, a mob “not finding the

Gentleman there…shattered some of the windows and went off.” The same mob returned

later that day to continue the attack: “But not satisfied with the Mischief they had done,

they soon returned to the Charge with redoubled Fury, broke the Windows and Doors all

to Pieces, damaged the Partitions of the House, and ruined such Furniture as was left in

it.” Afterwards, the mob moved on to yet another house, “where they committed

Outrages equally terrible, in tearing the House to pieces, and demolishing his Furniture.

The Cellars of both Houses were ravaged, and the Provisions, Wines, &c. destroyed and

lost.” 90 The allusions to the house attacks as sexual violations—“Outrages,” “ravaged,”

“ruined” (eighteenth-century code for a compromised sexual virtue)—are underscored by

an account of the same incident in the Boston Gazette , which decries “the unbridled

Licentiousness of this Mob.” 91 As in a rape, house attacks were meant not only to harm, but to expose the victim as vulnerable. And this is exactly what happened. In the attack on Thomas Hutchinson’s home the same day, the “Lieutenant Governor, it was said, saved nothing but the Cloathing he had on,” forced to flee from the site of the intrusive attack on his home. 92 Despite retaining his clothing, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson nevertheless appears as a victim of exposure, suggesting that stripping his house of its interior ornamentation is the next best thing to doing so to the Lieutenant Governor himself. What is more, a personal attack, something that happens invisibly and in private, has become the very substance of public visual spectacle.

Besides evoking vulnerability and exposure as tropes of sexual violation, the house attacks were also meant to make a statement against the visually secretive nature of

90 “Newport, September 2.” The Newport Mercury 2 Sept. 1765, p. 3.

91 “Boston, September 2.” The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal 2 Sept. 1765, p. 2.

92 “Newport, September 2.” The Newport Mercury 2 Sept. 1765, p. 3.

upper class life in colonial society. As Robert Blair St. George has noted, mobs “laid the body of the house open to view and thus discovered a performative means of resisting the bourgeois enclosure of the body as political and social metaphor.” 93 Georgian houses like the ones attacked in the Boston Stamp Act riots concealed more than they revealed, hiding intricate architectural interiors beneath deceptively simplistic and symmetrically organized exteriors. False doors and windows concealed interior spaces that could be known only by a home’s architect, owners, intimate guests, and of course, the small army of laborers who helped construct it. Discovering a cellar was to uncover the most secret heart of the home and to visually dismantle the social hierarchy that its architecture implied.

The rhetoric of visual exposure could be turned by colonial elites on the multitudes, by owners on attackers. Many crimes such as stealing and cozening were dependent on the secretive identity of the perpetrator; catching such an offender depended on the revelation of his or her true identity. Once found out, the identities of confidence schemers were often advertised in newspapers to hamper their efforts at repeating their deceptions. Some newspapers even advertised that thieves and confidence men should come forward into public view before they were found out. For example,

Franklin called for the return of “a Silver Spoon, marked T C, Philip Syng Maker” in the

December 24, 1745, issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette : “The Person supposed to have taken it, is desired to return the same, before exposed.” 94 When considered in light of the

93 Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 284.

94 A silver spoon made by Philip Syng would not have been inexpensive. Syng was the premier silversmith of his day; it was he who was crafted the silver inkwell in which the pens for the signing of the Declaration of Independence were dipped. [Benjamin Franklin], “Advertisement,” The Pennsylvania Gazette , 24 Dec. 98

house attacks that marked the century, the stolen spoon stands for more than the loss of

an individual object. In stealing it, the thief has taken the object from a private world

identified through a visual signification of ownership—“marked T C”—and exposed it to

a public (and unknown) world of potential black-market exchange. The only appropriate

end for the thief, then, is the personal exposure that Franklin’s advertisement threatens.

The only equivalent act for exposing someone’s personal possessions—visual stand-ins

for the owners—is to subject the perpetrator to the same kind of public exposure.

Yet nearly two years after advertising for the return of the spoon, Franklin appears

to have begun rethinking notions of exposure. On the eve of his retirement from printing,

before he “had secur’d Leisure during the rest of my Life, for Philosophical Studies and

Amusements,” Franklin campaigned hard for the building of military defenses to

surround Philadelphia (196). His widely distributed pamphlet on the subject, Plain

Truth; or, Serious Consideration on the present state of the city of Philadelphia, and

province of Pennsylvania discusses the needs for the building of defensive structures as

expressed by a nameless “Tradesman of Philadelphia.” 95 The pamphlet’s main point is to

stress that without defenses, Philadelphia artisans will be threatened with the destructions

of their property.

The Latin preface to the pamphlet, a lengthy passage taken from the Roman

historian Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, complicates the issue of ownership, articulating it in

explicitly material and visual terms. Appearing just over two weeks after the original

pamphlet was printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette , Franklin printed a translation of the

1745, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin . Digital Edition. The American Philosophical Society and Yale University.

95 [Benjamin Franklin], Plain Truth: or, Serious Consideration on the present state of the city of Philadelphia, and province of Pennsylvania ( Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1747).

original’s Latin epigraph accompanied by an explanatory letter by Franklin’s

pseudonymous “X.” 96 Under the guise of his X identity, Franklin presents the translation as “Entertainment of your Readers unskilled in the Latin Tongue.” 97 The Sallust translation employs descriptions of luxury goods to serve as demarcations of boundaries of liberty and sovereignty. The first lines of the translation read:

Should the City be taken, all will be lost to the Conquered. Therefore if

you desire to preserve your Buildings, Houses and Country Seats, your

Statues, Paintings, and all your other Possessions, which you so highly

esteem; if you wish to continue in the Enjoyment of them, or to have

Leisure for any future Pleasures; I beseech you by the immortal Gods,

rouse at last, awake from your Lethargy, and save the Common-Wealth. 98

The existence of the state, or “Common-Wealth,” is equated with “Buildings, Houses and Country Seats, your Statues, Paintings, and all your other Possessions,” since both require that the reader “save” them. The matter of protection causally links material belongings to the state itself, where one ought to save the state so that he might also

“preserve” material objects, a sentiment underscored by the unclear referent of the word

“all” in the first sentence. If the city is conquered, then the things that will be lost (and that therefore need protection) seem to be both the imagined idea of the state as well as

96 The translation of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae for the second edition of Plain Truth is Franklin’s own according the Leo Lemay. See [Benjamin Franklin], Plain Truth: or, Serious Consideration on the present state of the city of Philadelphia, and province of Pennsylvania [Sixteen lines in Latin from Sallust] (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, November 19, 1747). The Papers of Benjamin Franklin . Digital Edition. The American Philosophical Society and Yale University; and, Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume Two: Printer and Publisher, 1730-1747 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 20.

97 [Benjamin Franklin], Plain Truth , 1.

98 Ibid., 2.

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the real material objects that the state contains. In linking the necessity of protecting the

state with the preserving of objects, the Sallust translation figures political involvement

as a matter of personal ownership. To be a citizen concerned about the state is likewise

to be an owner of material goods. Franklin’s use of Sallust prefigures William

Blackstone’s description of burglary and of the relationship between personal dwellings

and individual sovereignty: “the law of England has so particular and tender a regard to

the immunity of a man’s house, that it stiles it his castle, and will never suffer it to be

violated with impunity.” 99 The definition of burglary, as Blackstone goes on to elaborate,

is complicated; included in his definition is both “a forcible invasion” of a home, but also

the act of stepping “over the threshold” and using “a pistol to demand one’s money.” 100

Franklin differentiates between things owned, between property and objects. In

fact, his translation of Sallust figures almost any kind of object ownership as a reasonable

prerequisite for access to being part of the state. As the epigraph continues we learn that

what constitutes the set of material objects that need protection is remarkably universal.

For, the passage continues, “your Liberties, Lives and Fortunes, with every Thing that is

interesting and dear to you, are in the most imminent Danger.” 101 It is the more universal

“Thing”-nes of possessions, or their fact of being owned, that makes them valuable, and not their particular attributes as luxury goods. By inscribing ownership as something available to almost anyone since nearly everyone owns some-“Thing”—except, significantly, enslaved people—the translation seems to suggest that likewise any object is available as a temptation to potential invaders. Franklin’s translation further recalls

99 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England , 4 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1765-69), 223.

100 Ibid., 223, 227.

101 [Franklin], Plain Truth , 2.

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another of Blackstone’s notations, his definition of “ things , as contradistinguished from

persons .” According to Blackstone, “things” can be divided into “things personal”

(“goods, money, or all other movables”) and “things real” (things that are “permanent,

fixed, and immoveable…as lands and tenements”). 102 Simply being an owner, but not

necessarily a homeowner, is enough to make one a victim of invasive attack. Being part

of a state, therefore, is the result of seeing oneself as an owner, a social identification that

allows one to think of oneself as exposed and vulnerable. Exposure, for Franklin, is both

a matter of protecting one’s material possessions and also something that is desirable.

The potential vulnerability of a set of private goods is what allows the state to exist at all.

As the body of the pamphlet continues, we learn that it is not just the potential

outside attackers that expose “the middling People, the Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and

Farmers of this Province and City” to danger. Significantly, such artisans are also beset

by Philadelphia’s urban elite, for “the Rich may shift for themselves. The Means of

speedy Flight are ready in their Hands; and with some previous Care to lodge Money and

Effects in distant and secure Places.” 103 Vulnerability is two-fold. Philadelphia’s

“middling” classes are exposed to danger by outsiders, but also by wealthy insiders, who, because of their riches, can easily refuse to help financially support the necessary defensive fortifications for the city. Indeed, as the rise in Georgian architecture in the eighteenth-century illustrates, the wealthy already thought themselves protected by the spatial secretiveness of their newly constructed homes. Yet as the attacks on such houses

102 Blackstone, 16.

103 [Franklin], Plain Truth , 14.

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also show, such refined fortifications were largely symbolic and ineffectual against any

kind of real attack.

Franklin’s discussions of vulnerability and exposure in his Plain Truth pamphlet and in his translation of Sallust formulates the rhetoric of the house attack as something that an owner and not a dangerous mob can have control over, figuring the intrusion of a public into one’s private space as an act of personal revelation. In spite of the pamphlet’s apparent linguistic attack on Philadelphia’s wealthy homeowners, it simultaneously recognizes wealth as a catalyst of attack. To a certain extent, Franklin’s speaker in Plain

Truth wishes to have it both ways—his working cohort is beset by the wealthy who will abandon the unprotected city in a time of crisis, but they are also afflicted by their own monetary success. The thing that will “induce an Enemy to attack us” is not simply their own defenseless position on the Delaware River, but also “Our Wealth, of late Years much encreas’d,” which also “is one strong Temptation” to outside invaders. 104

Franklin’s speaker necessarily casts the city’s middling classes as successful in their own right so that they might be convinced to donate to the fund for defense; if described as too poor, too defenseless, too much like a rioting mob, Franklin’s logic would seem to go, then the intended audience would not feel compelled to give money. In a sense, then, the artisans and tradesmen of Philadelphia are in control of their own exposure, able to determine the likelihood of attack on their city as a function of the wealth they have been visibly accruing. What we learn from the discussion of wealth as a lure to attackers in the body of Plain Truth is that defenselessness can to some degree be controlled by those who are beset and that imagining oneself as vulnerable and exposed is desirable.

104 [Franklin], Plain Truth , 5.

103

Imagining oneself as materially exposed would seem for Franklin to be an ideal model for thinking about a community. In linking the state to personal ownership,

Franklin is asking us to understand public exposure in large-scale terms. While homeowners and cities might imagine themselves to be under assault, Franklin also seems to suggest that all individuals living in the world desire and even seek an end to their privacy. While Franklin might employ the trope of exposure to affect real political action as in the building of Philadelphia’s defenses, his discussions of vulnerability in his other writing tends to visual models of witnessing and being seen. The Autobiography , as the incident with Dr. Baird illustrates, is about a desire not for an intrusion of one’s home, real or imagined, but rather, a yearning for exposure construed in explicitly visual terms.

Without the exposure of their private lives, characters in the Autobiography become caricatures of more public versions of themselves. Just as figures of potential exposure and attack allow readers of Plain Truth to imagine themselves as members of the state, visual revelation is what gives individuals in the Autobiography a sense of self.

Constructing yet another foil to counter his own insistence that visual publicity actually enforces greater personal privacy, Franklin introduces readers to “a Maiden Lady of 70” who lodged in the garret of the London house where he rented rooms. The woman is “a

Roman Catholic” who had once held “the Intent of becoming a Nun,” but who, instead of fulfilling that goal, merely lived “the Life of a Nun as near as might be done” in cosmopolitan London. As Franklin explains, the woman styles herself a virtual hermit.

Instead of removing herself to a remote region to live out a life of solitude, she sequesters herself in the British Empire’s most populous, most public location. In order to retain a

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strict control over her own privacy, the woman must extend the boundaries separating her from the outside world far beyond what the walls of her garret can physically maintain.

Her life is a set of nearly unbelievable Spartan restrictions; she never leaves the one-room attic space and lives “her self on Watergruel only, and using no Fire but to boil it” (103).

She especially eschews financial interests, donating much of the income from her own

Estate, “reserving only Twelve Pounds to live on,” so that she can, presumably, avoid the necessarily public nature of capitalist exchange. The woman is a caricature of solitude, absurdly mimicking, in Franklin’s account of her, the lifestyle of a real hermit who casts away worldly possessions and shuns social exposure. Unlike a real hermit, the woman reserves some of her money instead of giving it all up and she subsists not on a natural bounty of locusts and honey, but rather on the very modern and manufactured wheat in her porridge.

What the woman initially seems to desire is a concept of privacy made famous over a hundred years later by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis who articulated the definition of privacy as “the right to be let alone.” 105 Long before this concept became codified as part of American jurisprudence, discussions of the right be left alone implicated the inconsistencies in Enlightenment-era social theory. In describing the woman in the garret, Franklin comments on the eighteenth century’s literature of hermitage, in which, as Eric Slauter explains, self-imposed solitude is figured as a critique of theories of the Lockean social contract that undergirded American political discourse. According to Slauter, textual descriptions of hermits served as criticisms aimed at the fiction at the heart of the imagined social contract; that is, the social contract

105 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Journal 4 (1890), 193.

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was “ultimately less of a real choice than it might at first appear” 106 and hermitage offered “radically alternative narratives about society and about individualism,” suggesting that, for example, “society was morally corrupting rather than morally enabling” and that a secluded existence maintained in a state of nature might be the best model for preserving the rights of a communal, public society. 107 In describing the lady in her garret, Franklin attempts to refute such articulations of solitude as desirable. For without exposure, according to Franklin, one becomes not a paragon of virtue to be emulated, but a parody of a truer asceticism (the important difference between actually being a nun and simply living like one) and an endorsement of the exposure of the private self as the basis for workable, sustainable, (public) social organization.

At the root of Franklin’s parody is that the woman actually desires visibility despite all her apparent protestations against it. Despite never coming into contact with the social, public sphere, the woman is remarkably well-versed in the rules that govern public interaction. Even though she lacks experience within the public world, she “was cheerful and polite, and convers’d pleasantly” with Franklin (and presumably with the

“Priest [who] visited her, to confess her every Day”), suggesting that—at least in

Franklin’s description of her—her refusal to participate in the public world is merely a denial of her unselfconscious desire to do so (103). No matter how much she should secretly desire exposure, she cannot bring herself to perform it, left only mimicking a more public version of domestic life rather than engaging in it. For Franklin’s description of her room suggests that he thinks her more attuned to the customs of public

106 Eric Slauter, “Being Alone in the Age of the Social Contract,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (January 2005), 9.

107 Ibid., 29.

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spaces than she would care to admit. He notes,

The Room was clean, but had no other Furniture than a Matras, a Table

with a Crucifix and Book, a Stool, which she gave me to sit on, and a

Picture over the Chimney of St. Veronica, displaying her Handkerchief

with the miraculous Figure of Christ’s bleeding Face on it, which she

explain’d to me with great Seriousness (103).

While Franklin’s description might at first glance seem to depict an extreme version of

devotional solitude—she “had no other Furniture”—it shows the old woman’s

remarkable interest in conventions of eighteenth-century feminine sociability. She has a

book for reading—that most genteel of pastimes—and offers Franklin a stool on which to

sit. Franklin’s description of her, interestingly, inverts his own Protestant family’s use of

the stool in Queen Mary’s Catholic England and plays into prevalent stereotypes of

subversive Catholic subcultures. Despite its illegality, Catholicism was nevertheless

prevalent in eighteenth-century England and was especially popular among two groups in

particular: aristocratic women and the poor. The woman in the garret’s emulation of aristocratic Catholic women illustrates what Franklin lampoons as a slippery division between social groups. 108

Franklin’s visit to the woman’s room is also a parody of the carefully-prescribed

tea-table parties taking place not just in England but throughout the Anglo-Atlantic

world. Replacing the standard tea equipage are the artifacts of the woman’s religious

devotion. As though it were a mimicking of the chinaware needed for taking tea, the

woman’s crucifix lies ready on a table should it be needed for the ritual of Catholic

108 For a discussion of Catholicism in England at this time see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).

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prayer. What is more, the visit is not simply between Franklin and the woman; they are attended by the glaringly noticeable other pair of faces in the room, those of St. Veronica and Christ. Franklin’s description of this distorted version of the tea-time ritual recalls a

1780 letter to one of Philadelphia’s most fashionable ladies from her lover, Louis

Guillaume Otto. In an attempt to impress her with his (covert) observational skills, Otto writes “this evening I passed before Your house and seeing Company in the parlour I peep’d through the Window and saw a considerable Tea Company, of which by their situation I could only distinguish four persons.” 109 Otto recalls the exact locations of the tea-party participants and furnishings in the room, even supplying his epistolary addressee with a diagram of her parlor. What makes the experience public—that is, outside the implicitly private world of social entertaining—is its exposure by Otto who curiously figures himself as the courting beau by simultaneously characterizing himself as a peeping-tom. In the context of Otto’s letter to Nancy Shippen, Franklin’s visit to the old woman in the garret takes on resonances of a social encounter that has the potential to be witnessed. In his version, however, Franklin plays both the part of the tea-party participant as well as the peeping-tom Otto, bringing the woman very close to the brink of visually revealing her private world by visiting her in the company of her usual, though imaginary, companions. In describing the incident to readers of the

Autobiography years later, Franklin is able to posthumously provide the lady with that which he thinks she desires most—to be exposed into a publicly accessible visual field.

109 A partial reproduction of this letter is included in Rodris Roth’s “Tea-Drinking in Eighteenth-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage,” in Material Life in America, 1600-1860 , ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988), 448. The original “Letter from [Louis Guilllaume] Otto [to Nancy Shippen]” is held by the Library of Congress.

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Imposing Privacy

For most of this chapter I have been writing as if privacy most nearly means

secrecy, concealment, or aloneness. Yet as legal scholars Neil M. Richards and Daniel J.

Solove have pointed out, privacy is definitionally tricky. Having given rise to two

conceptual models—a British one based on protecting personal dignity (one is not

supposed to “kiss and tell”) and an American model based on personal liberty conceived

of spatially (an inviolate home)—privacy is often thought to be rooted in understandings of human interaction that are “highly individualistic” rather than rooted in interpersonal relations. 110 By contrast, the concept of confidentiality gives the lie to these modes of

defining privacy. Because it “focuses on relationships…it involves trusting others to

refrain from revealing personal information to unauthorized individuals. Rather than

protecting the information we hide away in secrecy, confidentiality protects the

information we share with others based upon our expectations of trust and reliance.” 111

In defining confidentiality, Richards and Solove theorize privacy’s potential as the deeply

felt social act of exposing a secret piece of knowledge to one or more other individuals.

Personal privacy reformulated as the necessarily revelatory world of

confidentiality is, in fact, of the sort that Franklin works hardest to develop in the

Autobiography . Because it allows for acts of exposure that are selective and chaotically

dispersed, it is especially invisible to readers. Franklin is interested in developing

confidentiality and understanding privacy as something that both entails a necessary

110 Neil M. Richards and Daniel J. Solove, “Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality,” The Georgetown Law Journal 96 (October 2007), 127.

111 Ibid., 125.

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exposure or revelation and that builds bonds of social affiliation. The Autobiography is most about privacy, in other words, when revealing something to someone. What is more, confidentiality exists for Franklin, as with his other manipulations of privacy and publicity, explicitly in terms of the visual world. Visual revelation invites personal intimacy while seeming to make personal information public.

Franklin’s descriptions of himself, especially those that emphasize his physical features, work to make his reader feel included, to imagine a confidential relationship where none exists. The reader of Franklin’s prose is compelled to make up the difference in the text’s meaning, to, in other words, create a relationship that Franklin’s text subtly invites, but does not make explicit. Writing to his British friend Emma

Thompson from Paris in 1777, Franklin flirtatiously paints an intimate (textual) portrait of himself for her:

I know you wish you could see me, but as you can’t, I will describe my

self to you. Figure me in your mind as jolly as formerly, and as strong and

hearty, only a few Years older, very plainly dress’d, wearing my thin grey

strait Hair, that peeps out under my only Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap, which

comes down my Forehead almost to my Spectacles. Think how this must

appear among the Powder’d Heads of Paris. 112

Here is the familiar Franklin. This description should evoke a pictorial remembrance.

His posturing in this epistle is the linguistic equivalent of the Cochin image that came to dominate European visual culture later that same year. Yet there is one especially crucial difference between his verbal self-representation—his literary self-portraiture—and his

112 Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Emma Thompson, 8 Feb. 1777.” MS. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Digital Edition . The American Philosophical Society and Yale University.

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actual portrait. While the Cochin portrait was painted by someone else and existed as a

public commodity, Franklin’s description rewrites the visual version of himself created

by Cochin as his own self-production. He adds to the intimacy with which the letter’s

recipient, Thompson, might know him, stressing that this description, despite its

existence in popular imaginative iconography, is personal.

For Franklin positions vanity as personal revelation. Franklin’s reference to the

“Powder’d Heads of Paris” takes part in a cultural mockery of wigs as synecdoches of

political and social rank. Wigs were, as Marcia Pointon has discussed, “invested with

the concepts of masculine and institutional power” and “to appear without one was to

expose oneself as eccentric, exceptional or deviant.” 113 It is exactly this exposure, this

self-representation tinged with a hint of the obscene in which Franklin is invested; it is

the most secret and confidential kind of privacy. Franklin directs Thompson to “see” him

on the most intimate visual plane of all, making her a confidant by asking her to “Figure

me in your mind.” That Franklin’s appearance is only between himself and Thompson is

further evidenced by his presumption that his addressee “wish[es] you could see me,” and

his response in the same sentence, that he will “describe myself to you.” The syntactic

(and geographic) distance between the personal pronouns “I” and “you” is overcome as

Franklin figures his own intimately revealed appearance as the crucial link between them.

Franklin’s intimate letter to Thompson can tell us something about the

Autobiography as well. Towards the end of the first part of the text, when Franklin

claims to have been working hard setting up his print shop and securing a good business

reputation, he explains:

113 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993), 117.

111

In order to secure my Credit and Character as a Tradesman, I took care not

only to be in Reality Industrious and frugal, but to avoid all Appearances

of the Contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no Places of idle Diversion;

I never went out a-fishing or shooting; a Book, indeed, sometimes

debauch’d me from my Work; but that was seldom, snug, and gave no

Scandal: and to show that I was not above my Business, I sometimes

brought home the Paper I purchas’d at the Stores, thro’ the Streets on a

Wheelbarrow (125-26).

In effect, the reader of this passage serves a similar reader function as his friend

Thompson does. By recalling an incident of visual exposure—a purposeful restaging of being seen late at night by Dr. Baird—Franklin confides in us. Franklin encourages us to see two Franklins: first, there is the one who walks through the streets with a wheelbarrow, and, second, there is the Franklin who tells us that he walked through the streets with a wheelbarrow. The first part of the passage—his claim that he was “in

Reality Industrious and frugal”—is over-shadowed by the explication of the next clause in the sentence that follows, suggesting that “all Appearances of the Contrary” need to be

explained away. Here, Franklin can have his cake and eat it too when it comes to what he

wishes his readers to understand. They might, as D. H. Lawrence famously did, take

Franklin at his postured self, believing that the Franklinian reality was industrious, frugal,

and deeply capitalistic. 114 Or a reader might interpret the first sentence by dint of the second. Like a person elaborating his own unbelievable lie, Franklin over-explains how it is that he was seen to be industrious and frugal. This is the moment when Franklin

114 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1991).

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confides in us; for we know what his observers on the streets of Philadelphia do not—the wheelbarrow is a carefully planned ruse and an even more carefully articulated performance.

In both his letter to Thompson and his description of the wheelbarrow in the

Autobiography , Franklin asks his readers to see him selectively and as others, presumably, should not. He advises us, as he does in a letter to his sister Jane Mecom, to choose wisely when it comes to visual perception:

I send you a Pair of every Size of Glasses from 1 to 13…If the first Pair

suits neither Eye, put them up again before you open a second… I advise

your trying each of your Eyes separately, because few Peoples Eyes are

Fellows, and almost every body in reading or working uses one Eye

principally, the other being dimmer or perhaps fitter for distant Objects;

and thence it happens that the Spectacles whose Glasses are Fellows suit

sometimes that Eye which before was not used tho’ they do not suit the

other. When you have suited your self, keep the higher Numbers for

future Use as your Eyes may grow older... 115

Visual perception, as Franklin recognizes it, is always multiple and is in constant temporal flux. Mecom should choose lenses that correspond to the different optical abilities of each of her eyes and understand that her eyesight will become increasingly worse over time. In his assessment that individuals use “one Eye principally,” Franklin suggests that Mecom’s new spectacles ought to serve that eye rather than the one “being dimmer or perhaps fitter for distant Objects.” She should, Franklin explains, distinguish

115 Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Jane Mecom, 17 July 1771,” MS, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin , Digital Edition, The American Philosophical Society and Yale University.

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between “that Eye” that can see well and “the other,” selecting the eyeglasses that provide the best optical support for closer objects and binocular vision. Franklin articulates a difference, therefore, between the kind of practical vision he advises his sister to procure with the help of a prosthesis and the kind of eyesight that emphasizes distance viewing over the stereoscopic effects of binocularity.

Franklin’s models of seeing recall Norman Bryson’s helpful differentiation of visual perceptions as the “Gaze” and the “Glance.” According to Bryson, the “Glance” is a “flickering, ungovernable mobility” that “strikes at the very roots of rationalism, for what it can never apprehend is the geometric order which is rationalism’s true ensign.”

All the Glance “knows is dispersal—the disjointed rhythm of the retinal field.” In

Bryson’s view, rational and organized pictorial compositions encourage and gratify a viewer’s “Gaze”—the Glance unsettles the power of the Gaze. 116 Franklin invites us to see his world in the form of the Glance by looking beyond the most obvious and instead towards objects, events, and people that are peripheral. Unlike in his first encounter with

Deborah at the beginning of the Autobiography , Franklin teaches his readers to see him within the visual background and troubled by the unsettling presences that exist there.

Visual confidentiality is, in Franklin’s understanding, a matter of alternative seeing; see what you aren’t directed to see, he advises, and enjoy a confidential revelation.

It is this theory of an extra-perspectival kind of viewing that Franklin employs to keep certain relationships as private as possible, to confide in readers the most private affairs of his life through careful exposure and placement in the distant portions of the visual field. In revealing intimate details about his personal, domestic life, Franklin is

116 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 121-122.

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able to protect an even more private world, while creating a relationship of confidentiality

with the reader. We trust that he is sharing the most private, most personal information

he has to offer, in other words, because he’s sharing some private information. Or put in

visual terms, we think all of Franklin’s private life is visible because we are only trained

to see what is in the visual grid. Franklin, in other words, puts the most private parts of

his life like his close relationships with other people outside the expected visual arena, so

that if we wish to see them, we must use that part of our visual perception that is “perhaps

fitter for distant Objects.”

Understanding vision in this way helps explain one of the more notable absences

from Franklin’s life story—that of Deborah. Using the logic of visibility that Franklin’s

writing suggests, Deborah Read, arguably the representative of the most intimate,

personal part of Franklin’s life, emerges as a textually and graphically invisible presence

as the result of the logic of confidentiality. Franklin’s building of a confidential

relationship with his readers through visual exposure leads to an increasingly privatized

and invisible Deborah. As a number of scholars have pointed out, Deborah’s

appearances in the Autobiography are limited in number. She tends to enter the narrative at moments where she operates as crucial deflections of Franklin’s own “errata,” especially those moments where he comes into his own as a member of the financially successful colonial class. Recalling the beginnings of an amassing of luxury goods in his home, Franklin writes,

But mark how Luxury will enter Families, and makes a Progress, in Spite

of Principle. Being call’d one Morning to Breakfast, I found it in a China

Bowl with a Spoon of Silver. They had been bought for me without my

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Knowledge by my Wife, and had cost her the enormous Sum of three and

twenty Shillings, for which she had no other Excuse or Apology to makes,

but that she thought her Husband deserv’d a Silver Spoon and China Bowl

as well as any of his Neighbors. This was the first Appearance of Plate

and China in our House, which afterwards in a Course of Years as our

Wealth encreas’d augmented gradually to several Hundred Pounds in

Value (145).

In his description “Luxury,” as embodied by “a China Bowl with a Spoon of Silver,” has become an active agent in its presence in Franklin’s home. Like a guest who overstays his initial welcome, “Luxury” bullies Deborah Franklin into an extravagant purchase and then sets up shop in their home, progressing seemingly without any more human intervention than Deborah’s initial purchase from its “first Appearance” to a vast amount of goods worth “several Hundred Pounds.” Deborah has been so completely removed from the act of material consumption that she is eventually overshadowed by the very objects she purchased.

As several scholars of eighteenth-century British literature have recently shown, the owned “objects in eighteenth-century literature” often breach the limits of their commodity value and “threaten to overtake human agency and reverse the power dynamic of human, the creator, and object, the created,” even becoming imbued with what Jonathan Lamb calls “the soul of the thing.” 117 Thus, in Franklin’s telling of the

event, it is the china and silverware that has breached the limits of their objecthood,

117 Barbara M. Benedict, “Encounters with the Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Early Eighteenth-Century Thing-Poem,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (winter 2007), 194. Jonathan Lamb, “The Crying of Lost Things” ELH 71 (winter 2004), 954.

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calling into question Deborah’s personhood. By relying on the emergent vocabulary also

found in the century’s growing genres of it-narratives and thing-poems, Franklin seems to

make visible his own growing wealth—as represented by the description of particular

domestic, personal objects—while at the same time figuring Deborah as increasingly

invisible next to them. Agency has been transferred from person to thing.

Similarly, our focus also moves from person (from Deborah) to thing (to china

and spoon). Franklin repeats the notion that his wife’s very identity might be

overshadowed, even overtaken, by the goods she owns in an letter to her. In a note

describing the recent purchases he has made for the Franklin home in Philadelphia,

Franklin describes the objects, noting what draws him to a particular piece of delftware:

I also forgot, among the China, to mention a large fine Jugg for Beer, to

stand in the Cooler. I fell in Love with it at first Sight; for I thought it

look’d like a fat jolly Dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white

Calico Gown on, good natur’d and lovely, and put me in mind of—

Somebody. 118

Mrs. Franklin loses her name as her husband elides the distinctions that exist between the object, Deborah, and an abstract “Somebody.” The ambiguity of the word “Somebody” suggests that in Franklin’s written accounts, Deborah’s individual identity has a tendency to slip away.

What is more, Franklin’s specific descriptions of the “neat blue and white Calico

Gown” recalls the only extant image of Deborah Franklin, a portrait painted by the

English painter Benjamin Wilson at Franklin’s request in 1758, the same year of

118 Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Deborah Franklin, 19 Feb. 1758.” MS. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Digital Edition . The American Philosophical Society and Yale University.

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Franklin’s letter (see fig. 7). Deborah is pictured pale-skinned, against a dark background

in a white, ruffle-edged, low-cut bodice, and draped in blue silk folds. Her likeness is

almost completely reduced to swathes of blue and white. In contrast, Franklin’s own

portrait, also commissioned from Benjamin Wilson just one year later, and painted to

hang beside Deborah’s in their Philadelphia home, is flush with yellow and sepia tones.

Wilson was an established and decorated painter; his “contemporaries,” as art historian

Wayne Craven explains, “at times compared his work with that of Sir Joshua

Reynolds.” 119 Like all professional painters of the period, Wilson was undoubtedly

aware of Reynolds’s Discourses on Art , the eighteenth-century’s leading handbook on the

techniques of painting. In it, Reynolds explicitly directs portrait painters to avoid “blue,

the grey, or the green colours” for clothing and other items near the face and to instead

ensure that “the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm mellow colour, yellow,

red, or a yellowish white.” 120 It is all too coincidental that Wilson violated Reynolds’

recommendations to paint a portrait of Deborah that, in coloring at least, more resembles

Franklin’s expensive dinnerware than his wife. 121 Painted only a year after Franklin’s

remarkable comparison in his letter, Deborah’s portrait is very nearly a human

embodiment of the fashionable blue and white porcelain beer container that Franklin had

purchased for her.

119 Wayne Craven, “The American and British Portraits of Benjamin Franklin,” Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective , ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 253.

120 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art , ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 158.

121 For a another discussion of blue and white color shades in eighteenth-century American portraiture and such images’ connections to contemporaneously fashionable porcelain, see Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), especially pages 63-65.

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Figure 7. Benjamin Wilson. Deborah Franklin . 1758-1759. Oil on canvas. American Philosophical Society.

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Both Deborah’s portrait and the beer jug that operates as her surrogate underscore her relative absence and invisibility in the Autobiography . Deborah’s metamorphosis

into a household object is what keeps her well hidden from a public gaze that cannot

conceive of looking askance. We should be careful, however, not to read her

transformation into a drinking vessel as an attempt on Franklin’s part to diminish the importance or power of his wife. As a text in which the leading narrative device is to introduce characters only so that Franklin might differentiate himself from them and in which the resultant dichotomy is always the same—Franklin good, other character bad—

Deborah’s absence preserves for her an independence outside of Franklin’s life story and prevents her from collapsing into yet another personification of Franklinian vice.

Franklin’s Autobiography and the eighteenth-century development of selfhood

that it articulates necessarily complicate the boundaries of public and private as we have

come to think of them. Privacy, in Franklin’s formulation, is never one-dimensional.

When conceived of as confidentiality, privacy instead exists on a continuum that enables

Franklin to expose his private life while at the same time allowing him to push aspects of

that private world further and further from the world of publicity. Those things that

belong in Franklin’s private world and that, like Deborah, have their own lives apart from

Franklin’s narrative remain hidden because of the complex networks of seeing that

Franklin creates for his readers. Franklin’s interactions with the period’s visual

vocabulary should teach us to read his Autobiography differently and to think about

concepts of eighteenth-century privacy and publicity in visual and not in spatial terms.

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CHAPTER 4

PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S AND VENTURE SMITH’S TRANSATLANTIC VISIONS

On September 9, 1773, Londoners got their first look at an African American woman author from the colonies. Nineteen years old when she arrived in England to promote her first and only book, Phillis Wheatley had been born in West Africa, kidnapped as a child, transported to Boston, and sold to the merchant John Wheatley.

Her prowess as a poet was a result of her ability to master the language and formal poetic structures introduced to her by her mistress Susanna, a feat she accomplished with astonishing speed and acumen. The author of the first book of poetry written by an enslaved person anywhere in the British colonies, Wheatley was somewhat of a celebrity even before her book appeared. Wheatley’s publisher, Archibald Bell, advertised the sale of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) in the Morning Post , the

Daily Advertiser , and the London Chronicle . By all accounts many English readers were keenly aware of the implications for liberty, education, and race that a phenomenon like

Wheatley embodied and they were eager to read her work.

Wheatley made good use of her short trip to England, visiting a number of people,

“things and Places,” in spite of being “no more than 6 weeks there.” Paying a number of obligatory visits, Wheatley gave famous abolitionists and reform conscious political and social leaders the opportunity to see colonial America’s intriguing poetic export in

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person. As she explained in a letter to David Wooster, Wheatley called on “Lord

Dartmouth…Alderman Kirkman.—Then to Lord Lincoln…the Famous Dr. Solander…to

Lady Cavendish, and Lady Carteret Webb,--Mrs. Palmer a Poetess, an accomplished

Lady.—Dr. Thos. Gibbons, Rhetoric Professor, To Israel Mauduit Esqr. Benjamin

Franklin Esqr. F. R. S.” But Londoners weren’t the only ones who got to see a new and

curious spectacle from across the Atlantic. Wheatley cut her list to Wooster abruptly

short, proceeding to explain that she also accompanied antislavery advocate “Grenville

Sharp Esqr. who attended me to the Tower and Show’d the Lions, Panthers, Tigers, &c.

The Horse Armoury, Sma[ll] Armoury, the Crowns, Scepters, Diadems, the font for

christen[in]g the Royal Family… Saw Westminster Abbey, British Museum[,] Coxe’s

Museum, Saddler’s wells, Greenwich hospital, Park and Chapel, the royal Observatory at

Greenwich, &c. &c. too many things and Places to trouble you with in a Letter.” 122 Of course she did trouble Wooster with them. Quick to shift the focus of her letter,

Wheatley wrote at length about her opportunities for visual observation as she textually eschewed the meet and greet events expected of a famous author and antislavery symbol.

Her own excessive descriptions of sightseeing suggest that Wheatley preferred to observe the curiosities of the urban metropole like those contained in the menagerie at the Tower of London and the British Museum than to play the role of a curiosity for others’ interested gazes.

Wheatley is thus perhaps perfectly portrayed in what is the only likeness of her ever produced in her lifetime. Often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an African-American artist owned by another Boston family, the profile portrait of Wheatley at a table with pen

122 Quoted in Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings , ed. Vincent Caretta (New York: Penguin, 2001), 146- 147.

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and paper appeared as the frontispiece in the first edition of her book. Wheatley’s

“elegant engraved likeness,” as her publisher styled the image, is encircled by a ring of identifying text: “Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston” (see fig. 8). This textual wreathing works to curtail Wheatley’s agency by articulating her position of servitude and bondage, but the image seems to undercut such efforts by divesting the act of seeing from the act of writing for Wheatley’s eyes look not down at her work, but up and away. The pictorial Wheatley directs her gaze away from the white viewer, visually taking in the world even as her poetry and authorial identity is offered up for inspection under the eyes of white readers.

To think about Wheatley’s participating in the visual world in which she lived is to rethink the influences surrounding her poetry and the discursive community into which she wrote. Critics have almost always written about early black writers like Wheatley in the context of others’ looking. A lengthy tradition of literary scholarship has more often than not understood the visual world that early free and enslaved African-American writers inhabited as one in which white audiences were the only agents of sight. On the one hand, Wheatley’s visual appearance in the world as signified by her portrait has been read as emblematic of the way her image was manipulated by whites to authenticate her identity and illustrate her novelty. On the other hand, Wheatley’s portrait has been treated as a symbol of resistance because of its astounding position as the first of its

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Figure 8. Frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley . Poems on Variou s Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Archibald Bell, 1773).

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kind. 123 Even accounts that read Wheatley’s act of viewing as it is depicted in the portrait suggest that the poet’s gaze does not acknowledge, as Barbara Lacey has put it, “the world around her” because she is “inwardly directed.” 124 While thinking of Wheatley as inwardly focused accords with her authorial identity, such readings suggest that Wheatley visually ignored the world in which she lived and in which she published.

Other recent scholarship, however, has taken a different approach to connections between black writers and practices of vision, exploring the ways black writers adapted and reworked popular images and engaged with optical technologies in order to effect resistance. Sarah Blackwood, for example, has explained how Frederick Douglass and

Harriet Jacobs manipulated “the representational capacity of a variety of prephotographic visual technologies, including portraiture, woodcuts, stereotypes, and the camera obscura” in order “to disrupt the teleological revelation of truth expected of the slave narrative.” 125 And Michael Chaney has directed literary critics to investigate not only

123 Recent literary scholarship on Wheatley see Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 180-195; Katy Chiles, “Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley’s Early America,” PMLA 123 (2008), 1398-1417; Betsy Erkkila, Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 224-251; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Civitas Books, 2003); William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and her Writings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984); Frank Shuffelton “On Her Own Footing: Phillis Wheatley in Freedom,” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), 175-189; Kirstin Wilcox, “The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley,” American Literature 71.1 (1999), 1- 29. For discussions of Wheatley that especially address Wheatley’s portrait see Astrid Franke, “Phillis Wheatley, Melancholy Muse,” The New England Quarterly 77.2 (2004), 224-251; Barbara Lacy, “Visual Images of Blacks in Early American Imprints,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53.1 (1996), 167-173; and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: Addison Gallery of Art in association with the University of Washington Press, 2006), 27-43.

124 Lacy, 172.

125 See Sarah Blackwood, “Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology,” American Literature 81.1 (2009), 95-96.

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Jacobs’s use of the camera obscura, but also the ways some black writers repurpose “the

illusory effect of mastery endemic to the totalizing view of the panorama in order to

forcefully juxtapose the subjection of the black body.” 126 For both Blackwood and

Chaney, the new visual technologies and media introduced in the nineteenth century—

with their ability to both reveal and conceal, expose and mystify, clarify and encode—

brought with them an increased interest in the ability of visual rhetoric to challenge

prevailing notions of black identity.

Black writers living before the nineteenth century also lived in a moment of

overwhelming visual change. New forms of image production coincided with the

cultural and political debates over the circumstances, inconsistencies, and lasting results

of the trade in enslaved people to produce a historical moment in which visual

representations of black people suddenly existed within or in conjunction with a variety

of recently popularized visual media. This chapter connects two very specific material

media—the Wheatley profile portrait and the popular Wedgwood antislavery

medallion—with two eighteenth-century black-authored texts, Wheatley’s Poems on

Various Subjects and Venture Smith’s Narrative (1798), in order to suggest some of the ways eighteenth-century black authors used words to reject the visual depictions that white readers would associate with them and their work. Black writers made representations of seeing and being seen central to the structure of their literary productions in order to address, refute, and manipulate the expectations of white readerships. Wheatley and Smith recognized the power in the acts of looking new visual media suggested, working with the language of visual observation within a literary

126 See Michael Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 12.

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aesthetic in order to build discursive communities, establish the boundaries of personal

identity, and isolate the connections between states of unfreedom and practices of

viewership. Put slightly differently, this chapter suggests that we should follow

Wheatley’s turning away from the abolitionists and political leaders to which she was

introduced on her London tour and instead pay attention to her textual investment with

visual observation, taking seriously her interest in the “things and places” that she

recorded in her letter.

If white readers were already literate in practices of viewing that made African-

born people invisible and objectified, then Wheatley used poetry to identify and reshape

the relationships between modes of viewership, visual representation, and slavery. The first half of this chapter argues that Wheatley’s poetry clarifies the buried links between viewership and enslavement, and, in doing so, takes part in a larger transatlantic discourse about the rights and actions of enslaved people. I then suggest that Venture

Smith’s Narrative refutes the expectations of antislavery imagery by using the form of the personal narrative to illustrate how he is able to manipulate his image for white viewers. Considering early black writers like Wheatley and Smith as viewers within the cultural context of British and American images about slavery helps us to better understand the methods of resistance available at the end of the eighteenth-century, and how the circulation of texts throughout the Atlantic world shaped how that resistance

might be expressed.

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SEEING PHILLIS WHEATLEY

Perhaps the most famous image of one of African-American literary history’s most famous female authors was produced not for an American audience at all, but for an

English one. Wheatley’s English patron, the Countess of Huntingdon, agreed to finance part of the publication costs of the small bound volume on the condition that Wheatley’s portrait be included in the book. Her logic was that such a visual accompaniment “would contribute greatly to the Sale of the book.” 127 Huntingdon’s publication request suggests that if, to follow Kirstin Wilcox, “Wheatley’s white patrons in large measure determined how she was read,” then they did so in part by determining how she was seen. 128

Likewise, Wheatley’s English publisher Archibald Bell emphasized the inclusion of the portrait, explaining in his newspaper advertisements that in addition to purchasing a book of poetry “display[ing] perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced,” buyers would also be getting “an elegant engraved likeness of the Author,” a cultural two-for-one that allowed buyers to textually and visually inspect the author. 129

While elegant engraved likenesses of authors were nothing new in the British book market, Wheatley’s image was novel because it combined the practice of depicting authors in their works and the practices of depicting images of the black female slave.

The Wheatley portrait set a precedent for picturing female authors with pen and paper

127 Robinson, 31.

128 Wilcox, 2.

129 Archibald Bell, “Advertisement for Wheatley’s Poems,” London Chronicle of Universal Evening Post , September 9, 1773.

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and disrupted the tradition of depicting enslaved black women as highly sexualized, a

tradition that attempted to romanticize away the realities of the transatlantic slave trade.

As Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has explained, at the time Wheatley’s portrait was painted,

there was “no direct precedent for [such an] image.” Wheatley’s portrait was a

representation that traded, Shaw explains, in a “revolutionary rhetoric of agency” that

depicted her “fully and conservatively dressed” and with “her body cropped so that the

viewer is only given access to the parts of her that are active in the creative process.” 130

Even white women were hardly ever depicted in such a desexualized way or with the trappings of authorship. Wheatley’s portrait, in other words, is entirely unlike other eighteenth-century images of black women such as Thomas Stothard’s frequently reprinted The Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies (1801) or

William Blake’s famous engraving of John Gabriel Stedman’s drawing, Flagellation of a

Female Samboe Slave (1793), which depict black women as the objects of slaveholders’ violent sexual fantasies. Yet despite the important overturning the Wheatley portrait accomplished, no visual depiction so readily invited readers to think of a writer as a curiosity to be observed or to join an author’s visual appearance in the world with her textual productions.

Perhaps the first image Wheatley’s local Massachusetts readers associated with the young poet was a woodcut printed at the top of the broadside of her first published poem, an image, however, not of the poet herself. Wheatley’s elegy for the celebrated itinerant minister and anti-slavery advocate George Whitefield visually presented her to

Boston’s reading public for the first time. Published initially as a broadside with the

130 Shaw, 32.

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unwieldy title, “Elegiac poem, on the death of that celebrated divine, and eminent servant of Jesus Christ, the reverend and learned George Whitefield,” Wheatley’s mourning poem for Whitefield was reprinted in broadside form many more times. As her popularity as a writer grew—presumably along with the knowledge that she was somewhat of a novelty—broadside versions of the poem began to emphasize her authorial role. One printing simply titled the poem “Phillis’s POEM on the Death of Mr.

Whitefield.” It was the popularity that the Whitefield elegy garnered, in fact, that encouraged Wheatley’s friends and supporters to encourage her to attempt to publish a book of poetry. Her Poems evidences Wheatley’s (and her publisher’s) interest in linking

Wheatley to the Whitefield elegy, reprinting it with an amended title that, like the other poems collected in the volume, gestured more explicitly to the form of the classical ode:

“On the Death of the Rev. Mr. GEORGE WHITEFIELD. 1770.”

The broadside versions of Wheatley’s elegy for Whitefield often featured a woodblock imprint of the minister; one presented his likeness at the pulpit, while another depicted him in death. Far more frequently reproduced than the image of Whitefield preaching to his followers, the imprint of Whitefield in death is noteworthy for its remarkable specificity. The depiction of Whitefield’s dead body appears almost as in life: laid out on a palate beside his coffin, Whitefield’s corpse remains bewigged, robed, and portly. Whitefield looks too large for his coffin; even death’s apparatus appears unable to contain the famously vociferous preacher. Woodblock cuts like the ones of

Whitefield were often stock images, repeated by printers on a variety of documents. So prominent in fact were they that such woodblocks were available for purchase from long lists. Printers could simply purchase those images for which they thought they would

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find the most use. Yet the image of Whitefield seems to have been made especially for his death. Like Wheatley’s elegy and the outpouring of verse occasioned by Whitefield’s death, the image of Whitefield testified to his popularity and the vast interest in his passing. A celebrity like Whitefield demanded a portrait and not a woodcut recycled from elegiac broadsides past. With the exception of the portrait frontispiece included in her book, Wheatley’s image was never reprinted with the Whitefield elegies during her own lifetime.

The vast publication of the Whitefield elegy only served to heighten the reading public’s knowledge of Wheatley’s position of bondage, or, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s phrase, “social death.” Sandwiched between the poem’s title and the body of the poem, the elegy broadside includes a short sentence to identify the poem’s author for the reader:

“By PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of

Boston :--And has been but 9 Years in this Country from Africa.” The extensive publication of the broadside only reinforced the public’s knowledge that Wheatley was enslaved, was socially dead. The more the broadside print appeared, the more readers were made aware that Wheatley occupied a very different legal, social, and political position than her poetic subject.

Wheatley’s frontispiece portrait appeared in a decidedly different medium and context than other images of black people with which colonial readers and viewers would have been familiar. Perhaps the most common images of black people in colonial

America appeared on advertisements for runaways or for slave auctions. Such documents often included images of depersonalized enslaved people in the act of running

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away or depicted blacks in chains awaiting sale. 131 Despite coming to fame as a poet

through the broadside medium, Wheatley’s image never appeared in the more ephemeral,

more easily circulating world of broadside printing. Wheatley’s image appeared in her

lifetime only in copies of Poems and then again in a crude woodcut version printed in the

1782 edition of Bickerstaff’s Almanac .132

One broadside in particular provides an especially useful context for understanding the local literary print culture into which Wheatley was writing. A poem with a didactic purpose, “A few Lines On Occasion of the untimely End of Mark and

Phillis , Who were Executed at Cambridge, September 18 th for Poysoning their Master,

Capt. John Codman of Charlestown .,” offered fourteen ballad quatrains explaining how good servants ought to behave. Printed by Boston printer Thomas Fleet in 1755, the ballad appears in two columns separated by a border often used for mourning poems.

The poem’s opening couplet invites readers to gaze upon a scene of punishment, lamenting that a viewer would have to see such a deplorable spectacle at all: “WHAT sad and awful Scenes are these/presented to your View.” Very likely published in advance, the broadside ballad may, like other such publications, have been sold and circulated during the very execution it describes. The “sad and awful Scenes” are not necessarily imagined, but instead could easily have been Mark and Phillis’ actual deaths.

The ballad exhorts the reader to imagine the acts that Mark and Phillis committed that led them to this point as a series of narrative snapshots, exhorting the reader to think of their lives and crime in visual terms. Staged as a “Sight” that “is shocking to

131 See especially David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 3-26.

132 Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanac, For the Year of our Redemption , (Boston: 1782), American Antiquarian Society.

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behold,/and dismal to our Eyes;” readers are asked to feel sympathy for John Codman, whose “Life they took away.” If in possession of the right emotional sentiment—“if our

Hearts are not o’er hard,” that is—a reader should be filled “with Surprise” at the imaginative visual rendering of the murder. While the earlier parts of the poem suggest that the reader is engaged in imagining the spectacle of the murder, the ballad’s twelfth stanza seems to suggest that the reader might also be viewing the execution of Mark and

Phillis. The ballad hints that the reader ought to view two scenes at once, one overlaid on the other: Mark and Phillis’s crimes and their execution. In order to further emphasize the danger of the crime committed—Codman’s death by “poys’ning”—the poem’s speaker emphasizes readers’ role as viewers:

May every Soul who views the Sight,

Be careful how they View;

Lest while they do remain in Sin

Eternal Death pursue.

The stanza warns those who might be feeling sympathy with the condemned: if “they

View” incorrectly—or misinterpret—the deaths of Mark and Phillis as unjust or tragic, then such viewers likewise await the same fate (“Eternal Death pursue”). The stanza also serves as a warning to those who might have seen the crimes committed or who have committed such crimes themselves. They ought to rethink their roles in past events that are imaginatively “shocking to behold.”

The attention to visual observation throughout the poem also seems to invite the reader to contemplate the woodcut printed in the upper right of the broadside. In the image a lone body hangs suspended from a gallows. Surrounding the place of execution

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is a crowd of witnesses and a horse and cart. Given the promise of the ballad’s title—

“the untimely End of Mark and Phillis ”—one would expect to see not one, but two bodies suspended from the gallows. As it turns out, however, the image is more accurate than it would first seem. Mark was hanged; Phillis was burned at the stake.

While many printers reused woodcuts for inexpensive broadside prints such as this one, other broadsides printed in Boston suggest that a visual representation of Phillis was omitted intentionally. For example, another Boston printer produced “A few Lines

Upon the awful Execution of John Ormesby & M atth. Cushing , October 17 th 1734, One for Murder, the other for Burglary” twenty years earlier with a nearly identical woodcut; the only difference between the images was an extra body hanging from the gallows. Yet by 1754, at least one Boston printer—perhaps even Fleet—had altered the woodcut image for use with another execution broadside. “ A Warning to Young & Old: In the

Execution of William Wieer , at Boston , the 21 st of November , 1754, for the Murder of

William Chisan , on the 6 th of April last.” also includes the image, but without the second body (see fig. 9). An easy alteration, a printer needed only to chip away the raised portion on the woodblock that collected ink in order to erase the second body. It is certainly a more accurate visual representation of William Wieer’s execution, since only one man was hanged, not two. Fleet relied on the altered woodcut, including the single body image in the broadside for the execution of Mark and Phillis. That Fleet chose to reuse a woodcut that Boston printers had already employed for the depiction of the execution of a single individual suggests that, at least according to Fleet, Phillis’s death

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Detail of woodblock print from “A few Lines On Occasion of the untimely End of Mark and Phillis .” Boston: Printed by Thomas Fleet, 1755. New York Historical Society.

Detail of woodblock print from “A few Lines Upon the awful Execution of John Ormseby & Matth. Cushing .” Boston: Printed by Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green, 1734. Reprinted in Winslow, 87.

Detail of woodblock print from “ A Warning to Young & Old: In the Execution of William Wieer .” Broadside. Boston: Printer unknown, 1754. American Antiquarian Society.

Figure 9. Woodcut images on Massachusetts execution broadsides.

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required less visual representation. 133 Not only was Wheatley writing into a local literary

print culture in which enslaved women frequently appeared as criminals, but she was also

taking part in a particular kind of print culture—broadsides—that had a tendency to

visually erase enslaved women. Perhaps this context provides a reason for Wheatley’s

later decision to write poetry about visual representation and perception.

The publication conditions Wheatley faced only reinforced the extent to which the

identity of enslaved blacks depended on visual observation. Forced to undergo an

examination of her poetic skill at the hands of eighteen of Boston’s leading male citizens,

Wheatley had to prove herself as the authentic author of her work. Some scholars have

famously imagined this in the form of an in-person trial in which Wheatley literally stood

before the eyes of white readers. Whether a trial or a series of meetings or parlor

performances, Wheatley’s print persona required in-person certification that could then

be presented in print. 134 The attestation of her authorship signed by eighteen merchants, ministers, and political leaders was included in every copy of Wheatley’s Poems and in nearly every advertisement publicizing the sale of the book. The presence of both the attestation and the portrait in Poems underscored notions that Wheatley was an object for white observers. More likely to identify with Wheatley’s examiners than with Wheatley, many readers would have had the distinctly virtual experience of second-hand observation that reading the attestation could afford.

133 The Library Company of Philadelphia holds a version of the Whitefield broadside on which the image and first line of the title have been neatly torn away. While it is impossible to say when or why the image was removed, it is a curious defacement given the visual omission of Phillis from the execution broadside.

134 Kirstin Wilcox provides an overview of the way scholars have come to understand how the attestation was created. See Wilcox, 9-10.

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From Broadside to Book

Wheatley’s popular poems that had already appeared in print formed the

framework of her book, and secured for her a reputation as a poetic virtuoso and friend to

the Revolutionary cause. In preparing her works for the bound volume that was

published in London, Wheatley made a number of revisions, often editing out the

specifics of Boston life as well as toning down much of her patriotic rhetoric. At the

same time, however, Wheatley added a number of references to slavery, frequently

framing the language of colonial political rights in a broader set of terms about liberty

and freedom by heightening poetic attention to the material realities of enslavement. Her

larger, transatlantic audience found a book of poems that connected the horrors of the

slave trade with the Revolutionary cause.

Take, for example, the revisions Wheatley made to one of her most widely read

poems, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal

Secretary of State for North America, &c.” Written on the eve of the American

Revolution that would begin just a few short years later, the poem addresses the newly appointed governor of the American colonies. Wheatley opens the poem by praising

Dartmouth on his recent promotion, then asks him to preserve a measure of rights for colonial subjects, then presents herself as an expert on liberty because of her enslaved condition, and finally, closes the poem by foretelling Dartmouth’s eventual death. In writing to Dartmouth, Wheatley employed the language of rights to blur the distinctions between colonial liberty and personal freedom. Published first as a single-sheet

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broadside, the book version of the poem features a revision made to a crucial turn in the poem’s central metaphor. Consider lines 15-19 of the final, book version:

From Poems (1773):

No more, America , in mournful strain 15

Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,

No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,

Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand

Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.

Then consider two earlier versions of the poem:

Lines 15-18, manuscript variant: Lines 13-16, 1772 variant: No more of grievance unredress’d No more, of Grievance unredress’d complain; complain, Or injur’d Rights, or groan beneath the Or injur’d Rights, or groan beneath the chain, Chain, Which Wanton Tyranny with lawless hand, Which wanton Tyranny, with lawless Made to enslave, O Liberty! thy Land. Hand, Made to enslave, O Liberty! thy Land.—

The phrase “iron chain” in line 17 of the book version is closely tied to “Tyranny,” yet is absent from both of the earlier variants. Unlike in the manuscript and broadside versions, whose mid-line comma breaks force pauses, the line in the book version builds to a

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crescendo. The entirety of the corresponding line in the book version is constructed to

emphasize the powerful image of a chain, and specifically an iron one.

This is no empty metaphor. It has a referent in the iron manacles, whips, and the

other horrific objects with which Wheatley was all too familiar from childhood and

which were frequently exhibited by contemporary abolitionists. In an age in which

notions of sympathy were especially in vogue in the wake of works like Adam Smith’s

Theory of Moral Sentiments , the stuff of slavery was used by antislavery advocates to

remind audiences that all bodies—black or white—could feel the cold touch of iron and

possibly even the grasp of enslavement. Monarchical abuse of power and mistreatment

of the colonies sound remarkably close to that other kind of limited liberty with which

Wheatley’s readers would have been aware. Chains might metaphorically suggest the

loss of theoretical political liberty, but chains of iron drive the reality of slavery

uncomfortably home.

If Wheatley emphasized the material conditions experienced by the enslaved, she

also underscored the experience of spectatorship, reminding her larger, transatlantic

audiences of their role as viewers as well as readers. Such changes suggest that she

found the rhetoric of vision as potent a conveyor of her arguments for liberty as she did

the language of colonial unrest. One of Wheatley’s most overlooked poems, “To a Lady on the Death of her Husband,” appeared towards the beginning of Poems . Found only a few pages after “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield,” the poem that had made her an international celebrity, “To a Lady” appears within a cluster of poems about death and mourning. Long ignored because of their imitative and popular form,

Wheatley’s poetry on death has only recently received attention as an uncovered site of

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her resistance. As Max Cavitch has argued about her elegies, “Wheatley…create[d] a conscious community of memory in which, though a socially dead person herself, she could nevertheless relate to the living with a measure of authority.” 135

Wheatley’s revisions of “To a Lady” for publication in her book suggest the ways

Wheatley capitalized on the elegy as a form that could perform social and political work in a variety of contexts. If elegiac verse gave Wheatley a measure of control over her limited position, then part of what Wheatley managed when she wrote herself into a community of mourning was how her readers visually imagined the act of grieving. The updated version not only directed readers how to grieve, but also how to view the dead and to visually imagine the act of mourning. Initially published as a 1771 broadside in

Boston as “To Mrs. Leonard, on the Death of her Husband,” Wheatley revised the poem as “To a Lady” for publication in her book. 136

To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband (From Poems , 1773)

GRIM monarch! see, depriv’d of vital breath,

A young physician in the dust of death:

Dost thou go on incessant to destroy,

Our griefs to double, and lay waste our joy?

Enough thou never yet wast known to say, 5

Though millions die, the vassals of thy sway:

Nor youth, nor science, not the ties of love,

135 Cavitch, 187.

136 Both versions are printed in Complete Poems , 18-19, 117-118.

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Nor ought on earth thy flinty heart can move.

The friend, the spouse from his dire dart to save,

In vain we ask the sovereign of the grave. 10

Fair mourner, there see thy lov'd Leonard laid,

And o’er him spread the deep impervious shade;

Clos’d are his eyes, and heavy fetters keep

His senses bound in never-waking sleep,

Till time shall cease, till many a starry world 15

Shall fall from heav’n, in dire confusion hurl’d,

Till nature in her final wreck shall lie,

And her last groan shall rend the azure sky:

Not, not till then his active soul shall claim

His body, a divine immortal frame. 20

But see the softly-stealing tears apace

Pursue each other down the mourner's face;

But cease thy tears, bid ev’ry sigh depart,

And cast the load of anguish from thine heart:

From the cold shell of his great soul arise, 25

And look beyond, thou native of the skies;

There fix thy view, where fleeter than the wind

Thy Leonard mounts, and leaves the earth behind.

Thyself prepare to pass the vale of night

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To join for ever on the hills of light: 30

To thine embrace this joyful spirit moves

To thee, the partner of his earthly loves;

He welcomes thee to pleasures more refin’d,

And better suited to th’ immortal mind.

For the most part “To a Lady” is almost identical to its earlier incarnation. Both poems console the woman of the title, the wife of “A young physician” who has recently been

“depriv’d of vital breath.” The first part opens with a brief apostrophe to the “GRIM monarch,” asking Death to look upon the man he has taken. The poem’s speaker then moves to call on the grieving widow. While the first half of the poem meditates on death on earth, the second part describes the deceased soul’s accession to heaven. The poem ends by directing the widow how to grieve. As in many of her other elegies, Wheatley advises against excessive grief and instead suggests that mourners prepare for their own inevitable deaths.

The most noticeable and most telling revisions in “To a Lady” are in the two couplets that begin at line 11:

From “To Mrs. Leonard” (1771): From “To a Lady” (1773): Fair mourner, there see thy own Fair mourner, there see thy lov’d Leonard LEONARD laid, spread, And o’er him spread the deep impervious Lies undistinguish’d from the vulgar dead; shade; Clos’d are his eyes, eternal slumbers keep, Clos’d are his eyes, and heavy fetters keep His senses bound in never-waking sleep, His senses bound in never-waking sleep,

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In both the broadside and the book versions, Wheatley’s speaker addresses the widowed

Mrs. Leonard (“Fair mourner”), asking her to look at her husband’s corpse, to “see thy

own Leonard spread”/”see thy lov’d Leonard laid.” In revising line 12, Wheatley moves

from a pathetic lament about the widow’s husband’s loss of identity in death to a line that

invokes the language of vision. “Lies undistinguish’d from the vulgar dead;” becomes

“And o’er him spread the deep impervious shade;” in the second version. The directive

to “spread the deep impervious shade” suggests both the placement of a funereal shroud

(as in “to spread”) but also the slow degradation of the body after death (spreads over).

Bodies are darkened by shades; death moves the deceased out of view.

Immediately following this couplet, Wheatley’s speaker shifts back to the mourner, explaining that it is Leonard who is no longer able to see. While in the 1771 version, Wheatley draws on a familiar comparison by likening death to sleep, in the revision death is linked both to blindness and to slavery.

Clos’d are his eyes, and heavy fetters keep

His senses bound in never-waking sleep.

Here a lack of vision, or blindness caused by death, evokes the reality of slavery.

Leonard’s sight, “His senses,” are “bound” by death and held there in “heavy fetters.”

The enjambed structure of the lines further emphasizes the link between “fetters” and the act of being “bound.”

In her poetic formulation of blindness and death in “To a Lady,” Wheatley’s addition of the word “fetters” suggests a comparison to the very real horrors of slavery. The closed

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eyes of the corpse recall the author’s social death, the blindness to her subjectivity under

a system in which people—not just senses—were too often in fetters.

An Aesthetics of Conspiracy

While “To a Lady” attempted to manage the viewing practices of Wheatley’s

readers by describing the act of seeing a corpse at a funeral, she did not neglect to write

poetry from the perspective of a viewer. Towards the end of Poems , Wheatley meditates

on the experience of aesthetic viewing, including two poems that describe seeing

paintings. Wheatley’s ekphrasis poems provide an especially useful form for

undermining the modes of viewership to which her own portrait was subjected, allowing

her to write an aesthetics of resistance that depends on the mediating qualities of two arts.

In describing the act of viewing another art—painting—Wheatley is at her most forceful;

the extra remove from reality gives her license to articulate a rhetoric of resistance with

less restraint.

The first of the painting poems in her book, “NIOBE in Distress for her children

slain by APOLLO, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI. and from a view of the

Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson ,” is a lengthy allegorical poem that evokes both popular characterizations of Britain as a misguided parent and the language of New England antislavery discourse. Punished for her hubris, all fourteen of Niobe’s children are slain by the arrows of Apollo. Niobe is the loving, but ultimately bad mother whose misplaced pride eventually causes the deaths of her children. The poem describes the speaker’s reaction to one of several paintings of the famous myth done by Richard Willson in 1761.

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It is likely that the image Wheatley saw was actually a 1761 engraved print of Willson’s

work made by William Woollett, which circulated in both London and Boston. If her

allusions to the neoclassical hinge on the observation of a painting, Wheatley’s language

evokes that of the often successful petitions for freedom placed by enslaved

Massachusetts blacks against their white masters. Eric Slauter has argued that

Wheatley’s use of “petitions” (line 66) for prayers and choice to cast Niobe as a “rebel”

(line 104) should lead us to read “Wheatley’s ‘Niobe’ as a response to the contemporary

petitions by Massachusetts slaves, as a consciously crafted attempt to imitate the

language of both neoclassicism and natural rights and to question that status of these

languages as the exclusive province of white colonists and white poets.” 137 Yet Slauter

reads “Niobe” as one of Wheatley’s poems about death, grouping it with the elegies

rather than with the painting poem that follows it. Ultimately a response not only to a

myth, but, crucially, to a painting, Wheatley’s “Niobe” requires viewership as a

mechanism that can warrant the language of resistance.

If “Niobe” employs the experience of seeing Richard Willson’s painting to speak

to issues of neoclassical aesthetics and legal debates of over natural rights, her poetic

reflections on artwork by a black painter takes the discussion of negotiating for rights in a

more violent direction. Wheatley’s “To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his

Works” is a notable departure in content from the other poems in her book because it is

the only one in her book to speak directly about the community of black people living in

Boston. The poem begins by addressing the painter and continues by reflecting on the

speaker’s response to his work:

137 Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 202.

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To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works (From Poems ,

1773)

TO show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,

And thought in living characters to paint,

When first thy pencil did those beauties give,

And breathing figures learn from thee to live,

How did those prospects give my soul delight, 5

A new creation rushing on my sight?

Still, wond’rous youth! each noble path pursue,

On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:

Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire

To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire! 10

And may the charms of each seraphic theme

Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!

High to the blissful wonders of the skies

Elate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes.

Thrice happy, when exalted to survey 15

That splendid city, crown’d with endless day,

Whose twice six gates on radiant hinges ring:

Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring.

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Calm and serene thy moments glide along,

And may the muse inspire each future song! 20

Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless’d,

May peace with balmy winds your soul invest!

But when these shades of time are chas’d away,

And darkness ends in everlasting day,

On what seraphic pinions shall we move, 25

And view the landscapes in the realms above?

There shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow,

And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow:

No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs,

Or rising radiance of Aurora’s eyes, 30

For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,

And purer language on th’ ethereal plain.

Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night

Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

As the poem continues, the speaker advises the artist on his subject matter, suggesting that he “fix thine ardent view” on less earthly, more “seraphic theme[s],” as Wheatley calls them, if “immortal fame” is what he seeks. While “immortal fame” might be on earth, the poem suggests that fame might also be found in death, that is, in heaven. The way for the painter to get to heaven—“to the blissful wonders of the skies”—is by fixing his gaze upward, the speaker explains. The young artist must “raise thy wishful eyes” if

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he is ever to behold “That splendid city, crown’d with endless day.” Looking is a twofold process; it is both real (the subject of paintings) and imagined (an afterlife).

By the second half of the poem, Wheatley’s speaker explains how seeing the painter’s works inspires her to imagine a divine paradise at the end of time. It is the act of seeing his art that brings her to her millennial vision, a golden age when, as she says in line 24, “darkness ends in everlasting day.” But Wheatley’s paradise in this section is decidedly different than the kind of heaven she imagines in the first half of the poem. In line 31, the arts are transformed:

For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,

And purer language on th’ ethereal plain.

Art takes on a different valence once her “muse with heav’nly transport glow[s],” as she explains (line 28). It is exalted, better, purer, truer.

If the visual arts allowed Wheatley to write about an imagined golden age, it was perhaps because painting played such a central role in her life. While Wheatley’s other poems address white readers, her “To S. M.” explicitly breaks from this precedent, identifying the painter as “a young African” in the title. And this, of course, is the most obvious difference between this poem and all of the others that appeared in her book.

While it was Wheatley’s white publisher and patron who arranged for the production of the portrait, it was the young African-American artist Scipio Moorhead who was charged with task of painting it. In addressing a painter through poetry, Wheatley’s “To S.M.” participated in larger contemporary discussions about the role of poetry and painting, to aesthetic forms commonly referred to as the sister arts. Perhaps the most influential of these debates was that staged by German critic and thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in

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his 1766 treatise Laocoön . Painting, Lessing explains, is an art form insufficient to capture and represent all of the dimensions of reality in the way that literature is capable of doing. As Lessing puts it, “Painting and poetry should be like two just and friendly neighbors, neither of whom indeed is allowed to take unseemly liberties in the heart of the other’s domain.”138 (110). Painters and poets ought to build high walls, if we follow

Lessing, to keep each other out.

Wheatley, however, chose not to follow directives like Lessing’s, instead opting to illustrate how poetry and painting do in fact belong together. While it is impossible to determine if Wheatley wrote in direct response to Lessing, her poem “To S.M.” took the very “unseemly liberties” forbidden by his philosophy of the arts, and in the process, made a compelling case about her own liberty. Wheatley’s poem to Moorhead suggests how race and slavery might reformulate the distinctions between the arts of poetry and painting. The poem suggests that the arts, like the two enslaved artists, have more in common than one might initially suppose. In the middle of the first verse paragraph, for example, Wheatley stresses that Moorhead’s artistic and poetic productions and her own enhance one another and emanate from the same source:

Still, wond’rous youth! Each noble path pursue,

On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:

Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire

To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire! 10

Even though Wheatley’s use of the word “thy” with each art—“thy pencil,” “thy verse”—positions Moorhead as both poet and painter, her own famous status lurks

138 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lacoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry , trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910), 110.

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beneath the surface. In the context of the publication of her book, he is the painter and she is the poet. In the line that immediately follows, Wheatley extends that complicity between poetry and painting into the language of conspiracy, a word choice that implies that revising accepted aesthetic arguments is a relatively subversive act. More than

“friendly neighbors,” as Lessing would have it, Wheatley and Moorhead are figured as co-conspirators in the act of theorizing a new aesthetics.

In “To S. M.” painting and poetry operate together, working in tandem rather than through one-way vectors of inspiration. It is significant that it is in her only poem to another enslaved person—to another African American artist—that Wheatley refutes ideas like Lessing’s which call for division between the arts. Wheatley’s poetry on visual observation shows how the shared experience of enslavement was a political condition that could shape and transcend established aesthetic distinctions. If the Dartmouth poem underscores the reality of slavery by emphasizing the material conditions of slavery, then

“To S. M.” offers a personal account of enslaved experience, one that uses the material art object of Wheatley’s portrait to engage with contemporary discussions of the proper relationship between word and image. In paying attention to the underexplored visual dimensions of Wheatley’s work we can begin to see not only how the aesthetics of poetry provided Wheatley with a vehicle to question race and slavery, but we can also more fully understand how slavery shaped the aesthetic practices of eighteenth-century poetry.

Wheatley’s choice of conspiratorial language recalls a broader discourse of resistance, suggesting that conspiracy might refer to action as much as aesthetics.

Wheatley’s use of rhyme and the enjambed structure in the last two lines as well as the placement of the colon after “view” distances the couplet from the preceding one, asking

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us to take it on its own. This couplet’s ambiguous construction calls attention to the

rhyme. And it isn’t a perfect rhyme. The word “fire” might be read with one syllable or

two. 139 If pronounced with two syllables the word fire extends the final foot of the

couplet’s first line with a rhyming unstressed syllable. When coupled with the line that

follows, and which has perfect metrical feet thanks to the two syllables in “conspire,” the

rhyme reads as just a little off: fi-re (with two) against -spire (with one). Such a metrical

ambiguity can be no accident in Wheatley’s perfectly correct poetry. The couplet’s hint

at uneven meter draws attention to a rhyme (“fire/ conspire!”) that we might, but should

not, overlook. Nowhere else in Wheatley’s published poetry does this same rhyme exist.

This might be surprising given how easy it seems to the ear. Wheatley, however, most often chose to rhyme fire with far less intimate, less conspiratorial choices. Of the eight times it appears at the end of a line in Poems on Various Subjects the word fire is only rhymed with conspire once—in her only poem to another African American. In “To S.

M.” painting and poetry operate together, working in tandem rather than through one-way vectors of inspiration.

Fire/conspire is a perplexing rhyme choice, then, but one that becomes less so when placed in the context of eighteenth-century slave uprisings and other social and political unrest. Living in the home of one of Boston’s most prominent merchants,

Wheatley would have had access to the network of newspapers that reported on the uprising and conspiracy plots that filled eighteenth-century colonial print culture. It would only make sense that Wheatley’s understanding of rights and liberty would come

not just from the immediate Whig language with which she was surrounded in Boston,

139 The OED offers the following for “fire, n.”: “In poetry sometimes as two syllables.”

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but would also have been informed by the vast number of slave uprisings reported by

anxious magistrates and plantation owners from throughout the Atlantic world. In 1760

in Jamaica, for example, local militias put down a violent uprising known as Tacky’s

Rebellion. Easily the most frequently discussed of uprisings before the Haitian

Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century, Tacky’s Rebellion provided plenty of

fodder for slaveholders obsessed with the threat of a conspiracy. For example, Edward

Long, an eighteenth-century Jamaican planter, made much of the conspiratorial nature of uprisings. He explained, “the extent and secrecy of its plan, the multitude of the conspirators, and the difficulty of opposing its eruptions in such a variety of different places at once,” made the uprising in Jamaica “more formidable than any hitherto known in the West Indies.” 140 Many writers imagined that the revolts led by enslaved persons were extensively planned and carefully orchestrated. They worried that enslaved blacks operated within an intricate and invisible network of communication that existed beyond white slaveholders’ knowledge.

Many periodicals printed in both the colonies and the metropole contained accounts of suspected conspiracies, and authors frequently mentioned arson as a sign of planned insurrection. While arson accompanied almost all periods of colonial unrest, after the relative success of Tacky’s Rebellion, colonial leaders were especially keen to interpret suspicious fires as signs of secret slave conspiracies. One account printed in the

London newspaper the St. James’ Chronicle described a fire that devastated Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts, explained “That this Fire, so furious in is Progress and destructive

140 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica , vol. 2 (London: 1774), 462.

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in its Consequences, began by Accident is greatly to be doubted.” 141 Newspaper reports of suspected conspiracies often printed imagined dialogues between suspected conspirators in an effort to ventriloquize the voices of suspected conspirators. For example, an account supposed to have been overheard between two enslaved men was especially clear in its linking of conspiracy with fire: “It will be put in Execution between this and Wednesday night; when once begun, we must go through with it. We are to set Fire to the Houses, and stand by the Doors and Windows.” 142 Accounts of fires took place closer to home as well. Houses were burned in Boston, New York, and

Philadelphia throughout the 1760s and early 1770s during the Stamp Act crisis, the

Boston Massacre, and during the Revolution. It is safe to say that Wheatley lived and wrote in an especially incendiary time.

If fire was linked with conspiracy in popular print culture, then we might also rethink Wheatley’s word choice in line eight. Wheatley’s speaker directs the young painter’s gaze: “On deathless glories fix thine ardent view.” According to Johnson’s

Dictionary “ardent” might mean “fierce,” “vehement,” “passionate,” or “affectionate.”

Yet the first definition listed is a literal meaning as derived from its Latin antecedent

“ardere” (“to burn”): “Hot; burning, fiery.” 143 A further signal that Wheatley’s possible subtext is slave revolt, the choice of ardent extends her poetic linking of aesthetic viewership and violent resistance. The formal hiccup at the site of the fire/conspire rhyme in this otherwise perfectly metrical poem is suddenly very noticeable when placed against a backdrop of eighteenth-century writing about black resistance. Much like the nature of

141 St. James Chronicle , November 9, 1776 (London).

142 New York Journal , March 2, 1775.

143 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language , vol. 1 (London: 1755-1756), 155.

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a potential slave conspiracy, something that could never definitively be known,

Wheatley’s fire/conspire rhyme hinges on ambiguity—metrical ambiguity. Calling into question the rules that govern poetic pronunciation, Wheatley’s poem on African-

American art should remind us that all rules and all systems of power might also be unsettled.

The final couplet of the poem brings together the acts of seeing, conspiracy, and coded language:

Cease, gentle muse! The solemn gloom of night

Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

Wheatley’s speaker explains that night closes off her daydream as well as her opportunity to conspire with Moorhead and to observe his artwork. Paradise is cut out of view once the speaker can no longer see Moorhead’s art. Wheatley’s poem on art encodes resistance not only as the act of an African-American writing, but also as the act of

African-American seeing. The muse is less gentle than we might at first have assumed.

Venture Smith an African

The majority of this chapter has been anchored by a very recognizable material image. If Wheatley’s portrait has become almost a visual cliché because of its publication in her book, I turn now to an unfamiliar corollary, an artifact that relies on well-worn, rather than innovative, visual representation. If Wheatley’s image moved across the Atlantic, travelling from Boston to Wheatley’s publisher’s London printing house, and then back to Boston in book form, then the only known image linked with

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Venture Smith was a definitively immobile thing. Created just after his death in 1805,

Venture Smith’s tombstone is a familiar but distinctive example of early New England

graveyard carving. The East Haddam, Connecticut, tombstone includes a short self-

authored epitaph for “Venture Smith an African” and is topped by the image of a winged face made by the white carver John Isham. Unlike the portrait of Wheatley, Smith’s tombstone was a self-production. While he didn’t carve the winged face, he commissioned the gravestone and paid for the plot on which it rests today. Often described as portraits of the soul because of their expressionless features, Isham’s faces are practically identical. The only image we can definitively assign to Venture Smith, as it turns out, is one that doesn’t depict his physical appearance at all (see fig. 10).

It is this very lack of information we get from the Smith gravestone image that makes surprising his interest in textually manipulating his image. If Wheatley pressed at the conventions of established poetic forms to direct others how to see and to signal her participation in larger, non-poetic, discourses, then Smith used the form of autobiography to identify and press at the limits of identity allowed to a free black tradesman in eighteenth-century New England. Published a quarter of a century after Wheatley’s

Poems , A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (1798) rethinks the role of white viewership at the end of the century and from the perspective of a formerly enslaved writer. Smith’s Narrative details his childhood in Africa, his kidnapping and transportation to Connecticut, his purchase of his freedom, and his life as a free African

American living in the wake of the American Revolution. By the time of his death,

Smith owned a considerable parcel of land, explaining that at the time of his writing, “I

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Figure 10. Tombstone of Venture Smith. John Isham, carver. Sandstone, 1805. Cemetery of the First Congregational Church of East Haddam, Connecticut.

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am now possessed of more than one hundred acres of land, and three habitable dwelling

houses.” 144 Successful by any standard, Smith occupied a distinctly different social position than Wheatley did.

Throughout the Narrative Smith makes much of his own abilities as a keen

observer. For Smith recognizes what many of his masters and the other white people he

comes into contact with do not. To lend money and become a successful capitalist one

must discern and assess the financial intentions of others. Because he is both outside and

inside the system of capital that makes him purchased and purchaser, Smith learns to read

the signs of a gentleman as the marks of a confidence man. Towards the end of the

Narrative , Smith relates an incident of being cheated by the white legal system:

On our return, the Indian took on board two hogsheads of molasses, one of

which belonged to Capt. Elisha Hart, of Saybrook, to be delivered on his

wharf. When we arrived there, and while I was gone, at the request of the

Indian, to inform Captain Hart of his arrival, and receive the freight for

him, one hogshead of the molasses had been lost overboard by the people

in attempting to land it on the wharf. Although I was absent at the time,

and had no concern whatever in the business, as was known to a number

of respectable witnesses, I was nevertheless prosecuted by this

conscientious gentleman, (the Indian not being able to pay for it) (30).

Smith concludes that although such a case would have been regarded “as a crime equal to

highway robbery” in his homeland, in America, “Captain Hart was a white gentleman ,

144 Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, CT: 1798), 31. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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and I a poor African ” (30). As David Kazanjian has shown, individuals like Hart must

“ritually reinvoke his exclusion of Smith, turning that exclusion into a kind of perpetual performance” in order to maintain his superior status in relation to Smith. 145

In telling the account in his narrative, itself a kind of ritualized invocation, Smith

questions the race-based claims of Hart. Smith reads the external markers of race

(whiteness) and of economic and social status (gentlemanliness) as indicative of a lack of

internal moral character. But Smith illustrates the ineffectuality of another kind of visual

observation within a system of capitalism that privileges whites. Giving himself a group

of alibis to attest to his absence when the molasses was lost, Smith underscores the fact of

his absence from the event and his truth-telling character as an effect of others’

witnessing: “as was known to a number of respectable witnesses.” Despite witnesses,

Smith is still obliged to unfairly pay. At the meeting point between two sets of

contradictory observers (“Capt. Elisha Hart” and “a number of respectable witnesses”),

Smith’s real character is overshadowed by the external performances of white seeing

around him. Smith recognized the ways that white observers located varying identities in

him.

It is a multiplicity of identities that Smith’s white editor articulates in his preface

to the Narrative . Smith’s editor, Elisha Niles, a Connecticut schoolteacher and

antislavery advocate, helped Smith produce “a relation of simple facts, in which nothing

is added in substance to what he related himself” (iii). Unlike Wheatley, however, Smith

appears to have dictated his prose, working collaboratively with Niles to generate a

145 David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 65.

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written account of his life. 146 Inviting the reader to examine Smith’s life in the pages that

follow, Niles explains, “The reader may here see a Franklin and a Washington, in a state

of nature, or rather in a state of slavery” (iv). The first half of the sentence exhorts

readers to imagine a literary portrait of Smith that fits neatly into the kind of popular

heroic portraiture developed in the wake of national founding. In textual form, Smith’s

life comes to embody the identities of both Founders; he becomes “a Franklin and a

Washington,” two identities inhabiting one formerly enslaved writer that readers are

invited to “here see.” What is more, Niles positions Smith within—and, significantly, not

beyond—the system of slavery, which, as he rightly corrects himself in the second half of

the sentence, is distinct from a state of nature.

If Niles expected readers to imagine Smith as a vessel for the identities of

Franklin and Washington, then readers very likely would have associated Smith with

another familiar “portrait.” Wheatley’s was hardly the only, or the most famous image of

an enslaved African-American, to move amongst white readerships. Perhaps the most

reprinted antislavery image for the eighteenth-century was commissioned by the Society

for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) in 1787 and produced by Josiah

Wedgwood’s factories. Depicting a kneeling black man in chains, the image is encircled

by a line of text presumably voiced by the man in chains: “Am I Not a Man and a

146 The term collaborative is one used by Phillip Gould to designate “early black thought and writing that is simultaneously inside and outside Anglo-American culture” (150). Gould responds to a tradition of scholarship that has viewed the “authenticity” of narratives such as Smith’s skeptically. See Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 122-151. In this vein see John Sekora’s much-cited essay, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authentity and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative” Callalloo 10 (1987), 482-515. Several critics have since begun to refute this line of thinking. See, for example, Rafia Zafar, We Wear the Mask: African Americans write American Literature, 1760-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). In specific reference to Smith, see Robert E. Desrochers, Jr. “‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic” The Journal of American History 84.1 (1997), 40-66.

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Brother?” Made with a special new kind of jasper clay that Wedgwood had only very

recently perfected for large-scale use in ceramics, the cameo was reproduced widely by

Wedgwood and frequently copied by his competitors. Fashionable abolitionists had the

cameo set into bracelets, hairpins, snuffboxes, and a vast assortment of other personal

luxury objects. 147 In a perhaps unconscious, but nevertheless telling choice of words,

Smith’s editor explains in the preface that “had his education been suited to his

genius…he might have been an ornament and an honor to human nature” (iii). Black

autobiography becomes abolitionist object.

Smith expectedly critiques the system of slavery, but also the kinds of depictions

of blacks introduced by SEAST. Despite its connection to the abolitionist cause, the

image reinforced notions of black inferiority. As Marcus Wood explains, the Wedgwood

cameo performs a kind of “erasure,” in which black people are “cultural absentee[s]” and

appear “as blank page[s] for white guilt to inscribe,” emerging “as a necessary pre-

condition for abolitionist polemic against the slave trade.” 148 Abolitionist rhetoric relied

on images like the Wedgwood design, in other words, because of—and not despite—their

ability to condense many black people into a single supplicant individual and many black

voices into a single, pleading utterance. Or as Michael Chaney has explained about

similar mass-produced images of escaped slaves on the run, such images were

“presumably marketed to denounce slavery’s dehumanization,” but actually “replicated

and amplified the process by which the slave was reduced to an object of

147 For a recent discussion of the distribution of the Wedgwood medallion, see Mary Guyatt, “The Wedgwood Slave Medallion: Values in Eighteenth-century Design” Journal of Design History 13.2 (2000), 93-105.

148 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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commodification.” 149 The Wedgwood image was reproduced in so many media so many times in both Britain and America that it would have been very unlikely that Smith would not have come across it. Smith refuses the sympathetic identification anticipated by the

SEAST medallion’s question and the constraining definitions of black identity it inscribed, using the narrative to argue for his ability to manipulate his image for his own commercial ends. Writing, and specifically the form of the narrative, offers a version of black subjectivity that images could not convey because it allowed Smith to illustrate how African Americans could be at once visible and invisible.

Throughout the Narrative Smith recognizes the resonance a black man in chains visually conveys, working to unsettle that meaning in any way possible. An owner of land and a successful lender and businessman even while enslaved, Smith manipulates his own appearance towards others to suit his own needs. When sold to “one William

Hooker” who wants to take Smith “to the German Flats with him,” a remove that would certainly compromise Smith’s financial position in Connecticut and keep him from his family, Smith explains to Hooker that he will not go with him. In reply, Hooker claims that because he “will go by no other measures, I will tie you down in my sleigh.” What

Smith realizes that Hooker does not is that a bound slave is more difficult to sell than an unfettered one, a fact Smith proceeds to explain to Hooker: “I replied to him, that if he carried me in that manner, no person would purchase me, for it would be thought that he had a murderer for sale. After this he tried no more, and said he would not have me as a gift” (21). Taking charge of his own image in a world in which both antislavery and

149 Chaney, 6.

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proslavery advocates attempted to visually condense the appearance of African-

Americans is what enables Smith to have a measure of liberty.

In his physical descriptions of himself and his family the Narrative upsets the containment images like the oval Wedgwood medallion inscribe. Early on in the

Narrative , Smith is quick to draw our attention to his appearance, supplying a physical description of his ancestors in the first paragraph. “I descended from a very large, tall, and stout race of beings, much larger than the generality of people in other parts of the globe, being commonly considerable above six feet in height, and every way well proportioned” (5). Smith echoes this initial description with a more specific one of his father. Recounting the attack on his family by another group of Africans that led to his kidnapping and enslavement, Smith explains how his father resisted the attackers’ attempts to extract information about “the place where his money lay” through violence.

“I saw him while he was thus tortured to death,” Smith explains (11). Immediately following Smith’s recollection of his father’s violent death, Smith explains that his father

“was a man of remarkable stature. I should judge as much as six feet and six or seven inches high, two feet across his shoulders, and every way well proportioned. He was a man of remarkable strength and resolution, affable, kind and gentle, ruling with equity and moderation” (11). The characterization that Smith offers in the short eulogy for his father pivots on his deceased father’s physical strength. Before explaining his internal characteristics—his resolution, affability, and kindness—Smith offers his father as a literally larger-than-life exemplum of his people.

Smith moves through his life-story breaking the bonds that hold him. The

Narrative carefully catalogues the incidents in which he snaps whips, breaks chains, and

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evades the arms of several men at once. When, for example, several other slaves are

ordered “to take his [master’s] hair rope and bind me with it,” they do so “in vain, tho’

there were three assistants in number” (16). Later in the Narrative , Smith describes how he broke his mistress’s “horse-whip,” explaining that “while she was glutting her fury with it, I reached out my great black hand, raised it up and received the blows of the whip on it which were designed for my head. Then I immediately committed the whip to the devouring fire” (19). Smith reorients the terms of the Wedgwood medallion, reaching out to break the object that signifies slavery instead of bending beneath it. His hand reaches beyond the frame of slavery’s dehumanizing punishment, rising up to catch the whip in the mid-air before destroying it.

If Smith uses physical description to distance himself from the Wedgwood image, he also turns to short phrases of irony to unsettle the sentimental expectations of its motto, refusing to play the role of the supplicant interlocutor. In almost every case where

Smith’s physical power frees him from whips and shackles, Smith concludes his description of the incident with sarcastic or punning comments. Not to be reduced to the antislavery advocates’ popular motto, Smith plays with the language of abolitionism. For example, he coolly refers to his handcuffs as “gold rings,” recalling that he gave thanks to his mistress for them (20). Smith’s verbal description undercuts the power of the

Wedgwood medallion, giving a new voice to the figure of a man in chains. Elsewhere

Smith mocks religious rhetoric in a move perhaps meant to comment on the often religiously effusive, but practically ineffectual, actions of many white antislavery activists. In recalling that his first master’s son “would order me to do this and that business different from what my master directed me,” orders that directly interfered with

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tasks he had already been asked to do, Smith remarks, “This was to serve two masters”

(15). A reference to Matthew 6:24 that one should not serve both God and wealth,

Smith’s iteration of the verse refutes the presence of both religious protection and wealth

in his own life. The bitter sarcasm that Smith offers the reader as though they were

mottos refute the terms of sympathetic identification required of the Wedgwood

medallion.

Refusing the terms of sympathetic identification also entails employing the

language of commerce to the most intimate human relationships. If the Wedgwood

medallion’s phrase pleads for recognition in familial terms, Smith’s Narrative substitutes the language of affiliation with that of capitalist exchange. Undoubtedly one of the more disturbing moments in early African-American literature for modern readers comes in the third chapter of the Narrative . After “purchasing his freedom” Smith sets about calculating his financial gains and losses, noting in particular, that the “forty pounds” he paid for his wife’s freedom was an especially advantageous financial transaction. At the time of the sale “she was then pregnant,” which saved Smith from “having another child to buy” (27). Smith further calculates the death of two of his children in the same coldly capitalistic terms. As a result of his son’s death on a whaling voyage, Smith “lost equal to seventy-five pounds” in his dead son’s unpaid wages (26). And Smith was compelled to pay, he explains, “forty pounds” for the “physicians’ bills” after his daughter Hannah’s death from an extended illness (28). Smith’s description of his relationships with his family in starkly economic terms performs a mastery of capitalism, the very system that keeps his family in slavery for so long. As Philip Gould explains, it is by “Recognizing the uncertain distinction between humanity and property” that Smith masters the

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symbolic economy of slave trading. “At crucial moments,” Smith “takes control of his

body”—and his family’s bodies—“as a symbolic commodity and deploys its cultural

function.” 150 It is, in other words, by rewriting himself and his family as socially and

politically invisible, as enslaved and therefore unrecognizable as persons, as anything

other than commodities, at particular instances in the text that Smith is able to find

economic visibility. He empties the Wedgwood medallion of its visual power to inscribe

blacks as subjected by casting the invisibility and visibility of blacks—himself, his

family—as entirely subject to his control.

Easily the most widely circulated, Smith’s Narrative was not the only biography produced at the end of his life. Inscribed just below the expressionless and non- identifying face at the top of his tombstone, the anonymous author of an epitaph (possibly even Smith himself) reminds readers of his multiple identities in life:

Sacred to the Memory

Of Venture Smith an

African tho the son of a

King he was kidnapped

& sold as a slave but by

his industry he acquired

Money to purchase his

Freedom who Died Sep t 19 th

1805 in y e 77 th Year of his

Age

150 Gould, 150.

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It is here in death that the Smith’s African identity tends to disappear despite the reference to his birthplace. By contrast, Smith opens his Narrative by declaring his birth place and tribal affiliation: “I was born at Dukandarra, in Guinea, about the year 1729.

My father’s name was Saungm Furro, Prince of the Tribe of Dukandarra” (5). Buried in a white cemetery, Smith’s body lies beneath a monument that erases the particularities of his ethnic identity and conforms to conventional descriptors for black Americans. In death he is “African tho son of a/King,” a statement that exalts his royal lineage while at the same time flattening Dukandarra into the continent of Africa. Even while at the center of the epitaph, African-ness fades in comparison to the “Money” mentioned towards the end of the poem and to the capitalist identity that it implies, an American selfhood explicitly evidenced by the epitaph’s very existence. Nevertheless, the uniform anonymity of Isham’s winged face, like the enduring image on the Wedgwood medallion, raises troubling questions about how an author’s ability to shape his or her image persists once death has robbed them of the ability to use language. It is crucial to look to an author’s literary engagement with the visual in order to better understand the meaning of accompanying images.

It should come as a stark reminder then, to consider the most material and durable image of Phillis Wheatley. Erected in 2003, artist Meredith Bergmann’s statue of

Wheatley in downtown Boston reminds passersby of her role in eighteenth-century

Boston culture. Seated at a block of squared-off granite with pen in hand, the three- dimensional Wheatley appears without her paper and book. Instead of the paper that implies Wheatley’s authorship only a few lines from her “On Imagination” are etched

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into the side of the granite marker. In attempting to mime the frontispiece portrait,

Wheatley’s modern statue does less to tell tourists about her poetry than it does to cement her position as an object of others’ visual contemplation. Wheatley’s poetry, like Smith’s

Narrative , shows how engaging visual theories, language, and media might challenge the social and legal inequalities of slavery. While she could never have anticipated the

Boston statue, Wheatley was aware that her image was used by others and was very often beyond her control. The Boston monument is a testament to the enduring need to remember that Wheatley and Smith were theorists of the visual as much as they were literary authors.

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CHAPTER 5

HOW TO SEE A BILOQUIST: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN SKETCHES THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Often described as America’s first gothic novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s

Wieland: or, the Transformation, an American Tale (1798), is filled with characters who

stumble through dark rooms and passageways while following unseen voices. They

reach their hands out in the dark, searching for doorknobs, stairways, and window ledges;

they call out to invisible friends and foes; and they almost always look for lanterns and

candles. The home of the novel’s narrator, the effusive, slightly coquettish, and possibly

mendacious Clara who also may in fact suffer from bouts of madness, is a particularly

rich example of Brownian architecture. Clara’s house is “a wooden edifice, consisting of

two stories,” each with two rooms “separated by an entry, or middle passage, with which

they communicated by opposite doors.” 151 Despite its relatively simple design, Clara’s

house is remarkably difficult for characters to navigate as they seek to confront or avoid

invisible evils. Clara’s house encourages readers to imagine the “mazy paths” suggested

in Brown’s epigraph to the novel, rather than the neat and angular architecture

characteristic of rural Pennsylvania building. 152

151 Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland: or, The Transformation, An American Tale , ed. Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin, 1991), 64. Wieland is cited parenthetically hereafter.

152 The full epigraph reads: “From Virtue’s blissful paths away The double-tongued are sure to stray; Good is a forth-right journey still, And mazy paths but lead to ill.” 168

It is an intriguing coincidence, then, that a novel in which characters are always in confusing and darkened buildings was first composed in a notebook that Brown had previously filled with detailed drawings of neoclassical buildings. The first known manuscript copy of Brown’s first major novel is a text that winds between the lines and curves of Brown’s intricately charted architectural plans and grids, between plans for stately columns and arched windows. The text of the novel fills in the blank spaces, overpowering the perfectly ordered drawings with a story about mystery, disorder, and danger. The material production of Brown’s novel mirrors its place in American literary history. Gothic literature like Brown’s emerged out of the Enlightenment by reshaping ideas about order and clarity like those embodied in the notebook’s drawings. 153

Throughout the novel, readers are invited to imagine the architectures, contours, and spaces of the physical nightmare world Brown creates. The novel’s ventriloquist villain Carwin is behind much of this, as he hides in Clara’s closet, her garden grotto, and elsewhere throughout the Wieland family property. The intricacies of eastern

Pennsylvania architecture become all the more crucial to the novel when Carwin exercises his ventriloquist abilities. When, for example, Clara is reclining in the secluded glen of her garden in order to better “reflect upon my situation,” Carwin fills the space behind her with his voice almost as soon as she takes her seat: “a low voice was heard from behind the lattice, on the side where I sat. Between the rocks and the lattice was a chasm not wide enough to admit a human body; yet, in this chasm he that spoke appeared to be stationed” (72). Carwin “appeared to be stationed” in the crevice of the grotto

153 The notebook is held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Librarians there and at the Library Company of Philadelphia suggest the notebook belonged to Brown’s father. However, other drawings similar to the ones in the notebook that are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas- Austin are attributed to Brown.

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between rock wall and latticework, but as a savvy reader would already have figured out

by this point in the novel, is not in fact there. What Clara experiences with Carwin is not

just a distrust of her sense of hearing (“This voice was immediately recognized”), but

also her sense of sight. Ventriloquism, Brown’s novel suggests, is problematic because one’s sense of sight as well as one’s hearing is confused. 154

Brown’s focus on sensory perception is one of his many interests in the composition of the human body. His attention to the medical informs his characters’ madness and their other psychological problems. In turning to disorders of the mind,

Brown linked narrative technique to medical science to argue against prevailing definitions of citizenship. As Justine Murison has explained in her analysis of Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly , for example, “Brown questions the implied analogy between mind and nation that conflates personal immorality with national degeneration, suggesting that the very notion of moral citizenship flirts with mental disease.” 155 For Murison, Brown’s use of somnambulism, or sleepwalking, as narrative device in Edgar Huntly allows

Brown to rethink early theories of the psychological, which disrupt predominant models of national community participation. In her attention to Brown’s interest in the psychological, Murison’s claims echo those of Bryan Waterman, who has argued in writing on Arthur Mervyn that Brown should be located within a “contemporary culture

154 Many critics have long read the instances of ventroliquism in Wieland in a rather totalizing way, implicitly arguing that the auditory and sonant qualities of the ventriloquist action completely outstrip the visual ones. Key texts in this especially long line of criticism include: Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Nancy Ruttenberg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Eric A. Wolfe, “Ventriloquizing Nation: Voice, Identity, and Radical Democracy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland” American Literature 78.3 (2006): 431-457.

155 Justine S. Murison, “The Tyranny of Sleep: Somnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly ,” Early American Literature 44.2: 243-270, 245.

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of information.” 156 Brown’s close proximity and relationships to professional medicine,

claims Waterman, “allow us to recognize Brown’s fever writings as fundamentally

concerned not only with questions of the disease’s origins, symptoms, treatments, and

prevention, but also with the very structures of communication—the flow of information

and its relationship to human behavior.” 157 Professional authorship, in other words, was

invested in reporting medical, moral, and social information that would benefit individual

readers and the nation at large.

But if Brown was invested in the medical debates of the early republic, he was

just as concerned with the physical science that tested, aided, and evidenced the bodily.

Optical technologies fascinated Brown throughout his career, as he reflected on the

scientific advances being made in America and abroad. While he may have roomed with

physician Elihu Hubbard Smith in New York during the city’s yellow fever epidemic, he

was the child of a land speculator and surveyor, an individual whose familiarity with

tools and technologies would very probably have extended to the perspective glasses and

camera obscura devices commonly used for drawing property maps. In this chapter, I

position Brown within an alternative scientific context, but one no less real, less material,

or less immediate than medical or psychological ones. Far from theorizing the sense of

sight in conjunction with sound to create the deceptions of ventriloquism, Brown’s

Wieland insists on visual technology as aesthetic practice. Reflective of debates about

light and darkness, Deism and evangelicalism, reason and wonder, Wieland turns on these dualities by narrating the drama of illusion manufactured by popular optical

156 Bryan Waterman, “Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository and the Early Republic’s Knowledge Industries,” American Literary History 15.2 (Summer 2003): 213-247, 220.

157 Ibid., 218.

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machinery. 158 The novel’s political and moral imperatives result from a narrative

structure that not only draws from, but also, crucially, simulates the mechanical working

of popular camera obscura devices. Camera obscura devices helped architects, surveyors,

and artists sketch more proportional images of the world, but such devices also turned

what viewers saw upside down, altered size, and transformed the real into the immaterial.

The camera obscura coalesced the alternate impulses of light and dark, known and

unknown, while it also served as a literary tool for the scientifically and nationally

minded author.

This chapter argues for the camera obscura as a scientific instrument that could

operate as a literary structure. I show how it took shape during Brown’s period of intense

creative productivity at the turn of the century, considering first his widely overlooked

short fictional sketch, A Lesson on Concealment; or, Memoirs of Mary Selwyn (1800) and

then turning to Wieland . The first of his forays into the genre of more sentimental fiction

tales like his later and far less successful novels Jane Talbot (1801) and Clara Howard

(1801), A Lesson on Concealment traces the events that lead to the eponymous

character’s social ruin. I consider how the tale’s crucial moment of crisis mimics the

darkened chamber of the camera obscura. I then turn to a discussion of Wieland , to show

how Brown’s engagement with popular science invites readers to question the novel’s

seeming moral and political imperatives, and to think more broadly about the overlapping

nature of science and the arts. Brown tests assumptions about individual perception, and

158 These binaries often take shape in critics’ portrayals of Brown’s works as Federalist, paranoid meditations on a postrevolutionary capitalist America in which unknown conspiracies constantly threaten national stability. For this line of criticism, see especially Beverly Voloshin, “Edgar Huntly and the Coherence of the Self,” Early American Literature 23.3. (1988): 262-280; Jay Fliegelman, “Introduction” to Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (New York: Penguin, 1991): vii-xlii; and Stephen Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

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ultimately about social and political belonging, by structuring the novel’s first-person narrative around the image of a camera obscura.

Lessons on Concealment

Towards the end of A Lesson on Concealment , Mary Selwyn narrates the events leading up to her seduction by Haywood, a gentleman temporarily lodging in her father’s home. Growing ever paler and weaker, Mary’s hopeful lover Haywood is “consumed by unsatisfied desires” (195). Claiming naiveté about the sexual relationship that lies in her path, the excessively congenial Mary attempts to console Haywood, hoping to restore his

“bloom and his health” which had “rapidly decayed” (192). Finally, in an apparent gesture of reserve and moral rectitude, Haywood decides to leave her father’s home in order to preserve Mary’s sanity and virtue:

Haywood, seizing the opportunity of my absence, resolved to end my

conflicts and his own, by withdrawing from the house and the country. He

wrote a letter containing the reasons of his conduct and his last adieus.

This he designed to leave upon my toilet; and, for that end, came softly to

my chamber, which he reasonably imagined to be vacant (196).

Only Mary’s chamber is not empty. Exhausted from endless fretting about Haywood’s health and a possible challenge to her modesty, Selwyn falls asleep in her room. It is there that events go badly. After her seduction, Mary rapidly discovers that “Haywood was already married, and had a wife alive” (197). Noting that her “brother and husband were likewise expected to return” soon and that she was now pregnant, Mary flees to

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Ridgefield, Connecticut, a rural town where she is unknown. Switching from her married name (Colmer) to her maiden name (Selwyn) and consciously withholding information about her past, Mary finds happiness in solitude, and even eventually marries again. Her carefully crafted second life comes undone when Henry Kirvan, a friend of Haywood, comes to stay with her and her new husband, Mr. Molesworth. He recognizes her resemblance to her brother, Haywood’s enemy, and reveals her true identity.

First printed in the March 1800 edition of The Monthly Magazine, and American

Review , A Lesson on Concealment is unlike the gothic novels that Brown published a

year earlier. Its short length and primary focus on a seduction plot distinguishes it from

much of his other work. As one critic has argued, the novella’s jumbled plot and framing

devices “represent a formal alternative to the unreliable simplifications of schematic

thought” and “was an instrument for discovering ideas, for exploring and testing them

out.” 159 Another critic has read these formal complexities as evidence that the work

might be said to “deconstruct” itself. 160 In many ways, Brown’s first periodical endeavor

is a bridge between Brown’s earlier gothic fiction and his later works. The magazine

focused less on lengthy prose works and instead featured a wide array of shorter works

on various subjects. It was in the Monthly Magazine that Brown first published a

fragment of Edgar Huntly and Memoirs of Stephen Calvert , in addition to A Lesson on

Concealment . Despite attempting to enlist members of the Friendly Club with whom he

was affiliated, much of the contents of the New York based Monthly Magazine was

159 W.B. Berthhoff, “‘A Lesson on Concealment’: Brockden Brown’s Method in Fiction,” Philological Quarterly 37.1 (Jan. 1958): 45-57, 55, 46.

160 Fritz Fleischmann, “Concealed Lessons: Foster’s Coquette and Brockden Brown’s ‘Lesson on Concealment’ in Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture , edited by Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), 334.

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composed by Brown. A compendium of meditations on the arts and sciences, the

Monthly Magazine contains some particularly useful clues for reading A Lesson on

Concealment . Brown reprinted as well as authored several pieces that address the topic of light and visual science, glossing the definitions of popular terms and offering meditations on prevalent scientific theories.

The fleeting nature of light plays an especially central role in the plot of A Lesson on Concealment , since it is only by studying her face in profile, and against the light of a flickering candle that Henry Kirvan is able to discern the true identity of Mary Selwyn.

Henry first comes to stay with the Molesworths to learn to become a physician, and only discovers his connection to Mary (Selwyn) Molesworth by coincidence. After living several months with the generous Haywood, Henry is forced to make his own way after

Haywood kills Mary’s vengeful brother in a duel and is then forced to leave the state.

Shortly after his arrival at the Molesworths’, Henry contracts a fever. Incapacitated by his illness, Henry is nursed by Mary. In his delirium, his eye falls “upon the lamp on the table whose oil was nearly exhausted, and that burnt feebly” (181). The “gleams darted from the ill supplied flame of my lamp, reminded me of what had passed in Haywood’s house on the interview” with Mary’s brother. Killed in a duel with Haywood in an attempt to revenge his sister’s fallen virtue and disappearance, Selwyn becomes a fixture, a recurring image that plays repeatedly on the screen of Henry’s mind.

So entranced is Henry in imagining Selwyn’s image that the dead brother almost becomes real, or rather, as real as the pigments and lines of an image: “All before me was colour and form” (182). It is this fixation on the memory of Selwyn’s face that causes Henry to mistake reality, and to misidentify Selwyns. When Mary pours oil into

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the weakening lamp, Henry is struck by the shadow her face and figure casts in bending over it:

Engrossed as I was by the image of Selwyn, and scarcely conscious of the

transition I had made from the ideal to the genuine object, this face being,

like that, illuminated by the same reddish and dazzling beam, I was

affected as if Selwyn’s apparition was before me. The same cast of

features was so strongly visible in both, that I doubted whether the figure

tending the lamp, was not that of the dead in some new guise. I had not

time to take a second view; for, her office being finished, she glided as

softly and swiftly out of the room as she had entered it (182).

Like an ethereal apparition, the real figure of Mary is overwhelmed by the imagined one of her dead brother. The play of light causes what amounts to an optical illusion—Henry thinks he sees Selwyn when in fact he sees his sister. This switch is especially indicative of optical illusion since the real is what disappears in place of the imagined, or, put more accurately, the dead. The living Mary becomes a spectral presence once she enters the illuminated theater that Henry’s sickroom lamp creates.

That a flickering oil lamp is what enables Henry to understand Mary’s true identity recalls a reflection Brown printed on the nature of solar light from elsewhere in

The Monthly Magazine . In “On the Inequalities of Solar Light,” the author, B. (very likely Brown himself), draws on German-born astronomer William Herschel’s work to ponder the sources of earth’s temperature variations and the causes of shadows. B. explains that while some facts of solar light might be known, for example, that “Heat depends not only on our nearness to the burning body, on the free passage and the direct

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incidence of the rays, but likewise on the quantity of rays,” other qualities of the sun are less discernable. 161 Despite its apparent stability, B. suggests, “we are not certain that this immense taper may not go out to-morrow.” 162 Famous for his telescopes, Herschel corrected earlier astronomical observations and discovered a number of celestial bodies.

While new astronomical theories could provide greater evidence of the ways light operated on earth, such theories also proposed that the light cast by the sun was as potentially fleeting as that of a simple candle. Light, B. explains, might help us know the world, but because of its complex and possibly even transitory nature, it also presents many mysteries. Telescopes like Herschel’s, like the sputtering oil lamp in Henry’s bedroom, treat the eye to new discoveries, but such new findings might prove false and misleading.

Henry spends the following few weeks of his convalescent stay with Mary and her husband in trying to accurately discern her secret identity. In so doing, he plumbs the depths of his own understanding by undertaking a variety of amateur visual experiments that he suspects will lead him to the truth. For even though he “dared not make direct or indirect inquires” by asking Mary or her husband about her secret identity, Henry follows an agenda under which he “noticed and compared appearances” in order to test his hypothesis (183). Henry embarks on a program of scientific observation that takes place not merely through visual observation and record keeping, but one that requires a special and specialized retooling of his eye. His fever, besides making him bedridden and placing him within the position as household ethnographer, also changes the physical

161 B., “On the Inequalities of Solar Light,” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review 1.2 (May 1799): 82.

162 Ibid., 83.

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characteristics of his optical organs, turning his eyes into hypersensitive magnifiers of individual character. Once his sickness begins, Henry’s vision sharpens to converge on the figure of Mary as his “eye followed her movements involuntarily” (183). Cast as an optical disease, Henry’s fascination with Mary clouds his literal view of her as much as it does his moral one. The leading symptom of his feverish state is optical degeneration, a condition that, paradoxically, turns out to be the necessary tool for uncovering Mary’s hidden moral degeneration. Unlike Mary’s husband, Henry is the man whose sight is impaired, a temporary physical deformation that remarkably makes his eyes particularly keen tools for seeing invisible internal traits.

Like a supernatural ability, Henry’s special sight is particularly active at night. It is when Mary steps before a lamp or fire, that his newfound skill is especially keen. One of the first experiments that he undertakes intentionally and when he has put his plan of observation into practice takes place one evening when Mary is reading to her patient. It is when they are alone together and Mary is “seated near the fire” with “no light but glimmering coals on the hearth,” that Henry is able to make his best observations (183).

On one such occasion, Henry accepts Mary’s invitation to read to him despite the fact that he “did not expect to derive pleasure from the attention to the volume.” It is not the contents of the book that encourage Henry to sit with his sad host, but rather his interest in performing another experiment: “the attitude which she assumed when reading, and the occupation which her eye found in the page, allowed me to gaze upon her features, and indulge the reveries of my fancy, without exciting observation” (184). Reading, in other words, proves the ideal pastime to set the scene of scientific experimentation.

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Henry can watch his subject without her being aware of his doing so, and so can test his hypothesis with unnerving attention.

It is in this moment of silent contemplation that events take a turn for the decidedly gothic. “Overfraught with images pertaining to Haywood” (Henry’s friend,

Mary’s former lover, and Selwyn’s murderer), Henry unexpectedly “uttered an exclamation of horror.” Speaking without thinking, Henry explains to his terrified companion Mary, “‘I thought it was real; but my vision was confused. It could not be.’”

Expanding on this first statement, Henry continues, “‘I mistook a spectre for a man. I thought—I thought it looked over your shoulder—at the book.’” And then: “It was shadowy, imperfect: I cannot tell what; but methought—methought it was—your brother! ’” In this moment it is a disruption in Henry’s feverish and unnatural vision that undoes his evening of quiet scientific observation. For instead of perceiving Mary as an incarnation of her brother, Henry observes both siblings side by side. While his first inclination that Mary and Selwyn are related occurs when he visually understands her as a ghostly apparition passing through his sickroom and his imagined vision of Selwyn, in this moment the two fleeting and spectral images are distinguished from one another.

Henry’s claim that “my vision was confused,” is for the first time untrue. It is at the moment of seeing the imagined ghost of Selwyn that his vision is at its best and that he is able to identify Mary. It is only after his cry of terror and explanation that the apparition he’s seen resembles her brother, that Mary Molesworth is finally revealed as Mary

Selwyn.

If Brown’s description of apparitions in A Lesson on Concealment is complicated, another piece that appeared in the Monthly Magazine only a few months later was more

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straightforward. In “Differences between Shadow and Shade,” the writer (again, very likely Brown) carefully distinguishes between the two words “of Saxon origin, and from the same root.” A shadow, he explains, “is the figure of a body, produced by the rays of any luminary being partly intercepted by that body,” while “shade is that part of the space into which no rays are directly admitted.” The piece, with a single paragraph on “the second sense of the word shade (as equivalent to spectre or ghost),” notes that the usage is “perfectly proper” given the previous definitions. “A spectre,” presumably one like

Selwyn, “is conceived to possess an independent substance, however great the tenuity of that substance may be, something sufficiently opaque to be seen, and, consequently, such as to intercept the rays, and produce a shadow.” 163 Shades, in other words, have shadows as much as any other bodies.

Given the definitions provided elsewhere in the Monthly Magazine , Henry’s optical experiments take on another tone. Seen within the light of the evening fire, the ghost of Selwyn is more substantive than fleeting. But Selwyn cannot, crucially, be seen without the special optical skills of an observer like Henry. Shades might, in fact, be real bodies, but they require particular visual precision to discern them. What confuses

Henry—“my vision was confused”—is not that he sees the ghost of Selwyn, but that

Selwyn is the ghost and Mary the living person. His fever slightly abated, Henry still sees with more clarity than other characters, but is also increasingly better at interpreting what he sees.

Henry’s special sight contrasts significantly with that of Mary’s widowed husband. After Mary’s death from a fever (caused by learning the devastating news

163 Charles Brockden Brown, “Differences between Shade and Shadow” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review 3.4 (Oct. 1800): f244.

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about her brother’s death at the hands of her former lover), Molesworth writes to Henry, imploring him to unfold the “concealment, this duplicity” that was kept between them

(174). In requesting this information, Molesworth conforms to the standard identifying impulse of sentimental fiction—he reads faces and body language. Suspicious of a romantic affair between Mary and Henry, Molesworth notes that he “saw trouble in your countenance; your eyes betrayed some little reluctance to meet mine.” Likewise,

Molesworth recalls that he began to scrutinize Henry once he sees his wife’s tears. He discovers her “weeping. I never saw before traces of such deep sorrow…From me there was something which she laboured to conceal” (174). Molesworth moves quickly from noticing his wife’s sadness to his suspicion of a secret between her and Henry: “With me she strove to keep dry eyes, and to seem happy; but with you she thought herself at liberty to weep” (174). Molesworth correctly reads that his wife has a secret, but he, unlike Henry, is unable to penetrate what it is. Because he lacks the specialized vision that Henry’s past friendship with Hayworth and his fever impart, Molesworth remains in ignorance of his wife’s true identity.

Even the portrait of Mary that Molesworth has sketched does not reveal her inner character. As Henry remarks when he sees Mary for the first time, “When I took up my abode with you, your wife was absent. I knew her only by the picture which you had drawn, and by that evidence of her sagacity which your excellences afforded” (181). As the story unfolds, we learn that Henry is implicitly critical of Molesworth’s drawing abilities, or perhaps just of drawing as an art. Even as his fever begins, Henry does not notice any resemblance between the image of Mary and that of Selwyn, which he stored in his memory. In short, he can only identify Mary’s true nature in person and in profile,

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and, significantly, without the necessarily mediated qualities the portrait medium entails.

It is not the recorded image of the individual, but rather, how that individual is seen—and

by whom—that allows for inner virtue to appear. The portrait sketch or miniature

keepsake, both prized tokens of the avid sentimentalist, are rendered valueless objects

when compared to the power of specialized scientific visual observation.

Dark Chambers

Given the attention to Henry’s eyes, his specialized and even almost mechanized

optical organs, we should turn again to the central scene in A Lesson on Concealment .

The dénouement of any sentimental fiction, Mary’s story is structured around the seduction scene.164 It is no surprise that female victims like Mary find themselves alone

and at the mercy of their pursuers, but Brown contrives such scenes as elaborate

descriptions of light and dark framed within the terms of optical science. In A Lesson on

Concealment Mary is seduced by Haywood in her darkened bedroom, a room that seems

to have special powers once the curtains are closed. Alone together on many earlier

occasions, the pair of lovers is used to being unsupervised. And yet it is only once the

curtains are pulled shut that seduction ensues. Despite the daytime hour, Mary’s room

“was darkened by curtains, that the heat, as well as light, might be excluded.” Once

Haywood enters, a surprising transformation takes hold of both of them. Haywood is not

164 In what might be the first sustained study of early American seduction fiction, Cathy Davidson notes that in publishing such fiction printers typographically emphasized the word “seduction” in advertisements and on title pages, “a graphic illustration (literally and figuratively) of the role of the printer in the creation of the American novel and in the ‘seduction’ of the American reading public.” While “seduction” is not spelled out this way for A Lesson on Concealment , it follows conventions of the genre. See Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 91.

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the seducer and Mary is not the victim. Instead, as Mary describes it, the element of the

dark room “lulled my reason, and that of my betrayer, into an oblivion long enough to put

our mutual destruction beyond the reach of prevention or recal” (196). Like the

flickering illumination of the oil lamp in Henry’s sickroom or the dim glow of the fire

when Mary reads to him, the relative absence of light is what causes revelation. Mary

and Haywood’s sexual relationship is consummated not simply because they are alone,

but more precisely because they are alone in the dark.

An artificial darkness, Mary’s apartment is reminiscent of the conditions

necessary for producing a camera obscura. At its most basic, a room-sized camera

obscura can be created simply by creating a small aperture of light in an otherwise totally

darkened room (see fig. 11). The result is an image of the outside landscape projected in

an inverted form onto the opposite wall. A more precise device can be created by

affixing a simple converging lens like the kind regularly produced for eyeglasses over the

aperture. The resulting image projection is sharper and clearer with the use of the lens.

Yet no matter how it is made—with a lens or without—a camera obscura room always

creates a distorted image. A view of the world literally turned upside down, camera

obscura projections flip the image they project. English chemist William Nicholson’s

work An Introduction to Natural Philosophy notes the peculiar attraction of viewers to such a camera obscura, or what he calls, “one of the most pleasing and delightful experiments in optics.” That it “never fails to strike the beholder with surprise and admiration” is tempered by “Its only defect,” which “is the inverted position of the picture.” Yet Nicholson, whose work on scientific observation was read widely in

Europe and America, does not recommend that the defect in visual perception “be

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Figure 11. Image of the camera obscura in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers , ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Projet (Winter 2008 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

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remedied” by any of “several methods,” because “as they all tend to make the image less lively, they are seldom used.” 165 As Nicholson notes, little was done to correct the inverted projections as viewers simply accepted that images of the world produced by light were better seen in distorted forms.

While initially a device used primarily by and for scientists of optics, by the end of the eighteenth century, the surprising and lively nature of the camera obscura room made it just, if not more, fit for the casual elite viewer. As I discussed in Chapter 1, interest in such devices peaked at the turn of the nineteenth century as American cabinetmakers and optical salespeople began to produce devices that could be fit into shutters. Declaration signer George Wythe, for example, appears to have manually drilled a hole into the window shutter of his study at his Virginia home to create the optical effect. 166 And account books from throughout the early United States record an especially high spike in sales of small, table-top camera obscura boxes with openings through which viewers could look, maintaining a particularly strong presence in

Philadelphia in the years Brown was at his most prolific. Many of these portable devices allowed a viewer to trace the visible image onto paper or canvas. Because of their exactitude and practicality, such machines were used by land surveyors to create official records as well as by fashionable young people, especially female children of the wealthy

(like Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, for example), to learn to draw. Some even suggested that the deceptive qualities of optical machines could train viewers to become more

165 William Nicholson, An Introduction to Natural Philosophy , 3rd edition (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1788). This is the first American edition; the first edition was published in London in 1781.

166 This information is courtesy of Jim Hollins at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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precise and intense observers of the world around them. 167 Camera obscura devices, or

chambre noire as they were often called, circulated broadly in the social world Brown

occupied, suggesting that in writing about dark chambers, Brown very likely could have

had the popular technology in mind. Often given as gifts to young women of privilege,

camera obscura boxes helped women attain the social graces that secured their places in

high society.

The allusion to this fashionable technology in A Lesson on Concealment

establishes an unusually ironic punch. It is in the moment in the plot that most resembles

the interior of a camera obscura that Mary is undone. It is in her darkened room that

Mary is able to indulge in her “wonted reveries” (196) and in which the social rules that

have thus far kept Haywood and Mary on strictly platonic terms are broken. Rather than

offer an opportunity for refined amusement, the darkness of the room turns those rules

topsy-turvy, causing the lovers to forget reason and for a moment enter an alternate moral

reality. Allusions to the scientific toy encapsulate moral degeneration in Brown’s story,

and not the rise into polite womanhood its proponents suggested.

While Mary is seduced by Haywood and bears a stillborn infant, the narrator and

central female voice of Wieland resists the advances of Francis Carwin. Mysteriously

brought to Mettingen, the home of Clara Wieland, her brother Theodore, his wife

Catherine, and their children, Carwin intrudes into the elite Enlightenment space that the

Wielands have carved out for themselves on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Before Carwin

arrives, their only visitor is Clara’s love interest and Catherine’s brother, the witty and

167 See for example, William Hooper, Rational Recreations, in which the principles of numbers and natural philosophy are clearly and copiously elucidated, by a series of easy, entertaining, interesting experiments. (London: Printed for L. Davis, Holborn, 1774). For how devices like the camera obscura were viewed and circulated see Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Education and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

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wealthy Pleyel, a “champion of intellectual liberty” who “rejected all guidance but that of

his reason” (28). After Carwin arrives, events unravel quickly and horrifically. Initially

joining the Wielands in their leisure time, Carwin becomes part of their intellectual,

social, and familial circle. The harmony comes undone once characters start to hear

mysterious voices, some of which are merely the mischievous Carwin engaging his

voice-throwing abilities. Pleyel becomes convinced that Clara has been seduced by

Carwin, Clara worries about her brother’s mental state, and finally, in a moment of

madness, Theodore murders his wife and children because he believes he has been

instructed by God to do so. Based on accounts of several real murders, Brown’s novel

questions the extent to which the early United States is a rational and stable place. 168 For

Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, Wieland adopts techniques from the Schauerroman

genre, sensational German horror fiction, in order to critique modes of intellectual

exchange promoted by British progressives like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft,

and Thomas Paine, as elitist and exclusive. 169 Wieland recombines British and German

gothic writing as well as the very real historical events of America to question prevailing

ideas about political and social organization as represented by the unwittingly

exclusionary practices of progressive thinkers. An underexplored element of Brown’s

criticism of Enlightenment theories and practices, visual technology operates in Brown’s

fictions to further test the contradictions inherent in 1790s intellectual culture.

168 In December 1781, James Yates murdered his wife, four children, and livestock in upstate New York, and in December 1782 in Wethersfield, Connecticut, William Beadle committed suicide after killing his wife and their four children. Both events were reported widely and remarked upon by members of Brown’s social network.

169 Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, “Introduction” to Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation, with Related Texts (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009), ix-xlvi.

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Trouble starts to brew at Mettingen when Carwin arrives, to be sure, but it really

gets going once he starts hiding in Clara’s bedroom closet. Keeping the door to the small

room off her bedchamber “always locked, but when I myself was within,” there is little

opportunity for Carwin to enter. He nevertheless terrorizes her either by maintaining a

position within the closet or by leaning through the closet’s tiny window. Hearing a

whisper that “evidently proceeded from one who was posted at my bed-side” (65), Clara

soon discovers that the voices were those of “persons actually immured in this closet”

(67). The conversation she hears is understandably terrifying. Two men seem to be

plotting to commit her murder: “One resolved to shoot, and the other menaced

suffocation” (66). As it turns out, they are only the voices manufactured by Carwin.

Clara flees to the nearby home of her brother where she collapses just before reaching the

front steps; Carwin throws his voice again, alerting the Wielands of Clara’s presence.

This incident is only the beginning of Carwin’s midnight mischief in Clara’s

closet. After awhile, Clara finds herself again restless at night. Clara proceeds (rather

inexplicably given recent events) to her closet to retrieve her late father’s “manuscript,

containing memoirs of his life,” thinking that reading it will bring her comfort (95).

Upon reaching the door, Clara freezes, suddenly recalling “what had lately passed in this

closet” and noting that she is “alone, and defenceless” (96). Nevertheless Clara moves to

open the door, but finds it held shut from within. Finally, Carwin emerges from the

closet, explaining to Clara that he had been hiding there with the intention of raping her.

But, he claims, he is stopped by an “eternal foe,” “a sentiment that does you honor; a sentiment, that would sanctify my deed” (103). Clara is safe, claims Carwin, but he persists in remaining in her room for some time, only leaving after a long interval of

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silence between the two. Found out by Clara that he has been hiding in her closet, and indeed all over the grounds of Mettingen, Carwin manufactures this story to test her appraisal of his character.

What Clara initially fears most in opening the door to her closet is not Carwin, but rather a shapeless and nameless force. She explains, “My fears had pictured to themselves no precise objects. It would be difficult to depict, in words, the ingredients and hues of that phantom which haunted me” (97). Clara’s terror exists but cannot take a recognizable shape. Neither “words” nor “hues” are adequate to describe it. Similarly, the force that protects her is more intangible than which threatens her. As Carwin describes it, Clara is safe because of his “eternal foe,” which is an unknown “chimera”

(103). Carwin further suggests that this foe is actually a second side of his personality.

He is both of the murderous characters he creates on his first visit to Clara’s closet. On the one hand, he exhibits all the signs of “a convict under sentence of death, who had escaped from Newgate prison in Dublin” as well as the more benevolent figure who steps in to prevent harm to Clara (147). Carwin’s double personality as well as the indescribable forms that Clara’s fears take suggest that Clara’s closet, like Henry’s fever and Mary’s apartment, has a particular visual power, one that tends to create distinctively doubled iterations, though iterations that are, despite their double-ness, difficult to see.

Interior architectures hold special power in the seduction plot, and the complicated design of Clara’s home is no exception. In some ways Clara’s house conforms to a common design in Pennsylvania vernacular architecture called the “Quaker plan” or “four over four” house, but it is also comprised of several unusual elements. 170

170 For a discussion of this building style, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pages 475-481.

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Unlike almost all rural houses built in the eighteenth century in the Delaware Valley,

Clara’s house is “a wooden edifice” (64). And then there is the closet, a rather uncharacteristic addition. So unique is this architectural feature, that Brown devotes a full paragraph to describing it:

The opposite wing is of smaller dimensions, the rooms not being above

eight feet square. The lower of these was used as a depository of

household implements, the upper was a closet in which I deposited my

books and papers. They had but one inlet, which was from the room

adjoining. There was no window in the lower one, and in the upper, a

small aperture which communicated light and air, but would scarcely

admit the body (65).

Clara’s closet is a more fully-formed version of the darkened bedroom in A Lesson on

Concealment . Whereas Mary’s room is an accidental camera obscura, Clara’s closet seems almost entirely designed for that purpose. The tiny window, “a small aperture,” corresponds with the opening needed for a camera. As Carwin explains, the aperture is so small, that he is unable to enter through it despite having “found a ladder, and mounted to your closet window.” The diminutive architectural feature is, he continues, “scarcely large enough to admit the head, but it answered my purpose too well” (231). The size of the room and its wooden composition recall the small buildings constructed, often temporarily, only to house and display the optical device. Finally, Clara’s practice of storing papers and books, likewise suggests materials kept for artists and amateurs on which to practice their craft. It is no wonder then that Carwin refers to chimera and double personas. With Clara’s closet imitating the characteristics of a camera obscura,

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the only images of the world that should issue forth from it should be inverted, fuzzy, and

distorted.

Unlike the pleasant surprise of a projected image that real camera obscuras were

supposed to produce, what projects from Clara’s closet in the form of Carwin is all terror.

And instead of desiring to see more, she looks away to visually scan the room for an

“avenue by which I might escape” (103). Once Carwin finally leaves her room after the

second incident, Clara stands pensively as she “listened while he descended the stairs,

and, unbolting the outer door, went forth.” So terrorized by the incident, she refuses to

use her sense of sight and does “not follow him with [her] eyes, as the moon-light would

have enabled.” Instead, she sinks into a chair in order to contemplate “those bewildering ideas which incidents like these could not fail to produce” (105). The attempted seduction by Carwin does not produce in Clara a crisis of virtue or a desire to seek the company of friends and family. She conceals the incident, keeping it to herself in order

to decide what to make of it. Like a scientific experiment, Carwin’s constant hiding in

Clara’s closet provides her with an opportunity to test her assumptions about human

nature, moral virtue, and her own understanding of the world she inhabits. She meditates

privately and internally rather than publicly with her family.

Clara’s closet provides a counterpoint to the novel’s other major built figure, the

Wielands’ domed outbuilding. As with Clara’s closet, the events of Wieland similarly swirl around the edifice, which is located on a rocky outcropping “three hundred yards” from Theodore and Catherine’s house (12). Initially it belonged to Clara and Theodore’s father, who used “what to a common eye would have seemed a summer-house” as “the

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temple of his Deity” (12-13). Built by the elder Wieland, the structure is devoted to his personal interpretation of the teachings of French Huguenot group the Camissards:

The edifice was slight and airy. It was not more than a circular area,

twelve feet in diameter, whose flooring was the rock, cleared of moss and

shrubs, and exactly leveled, edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and

covered by an undulating dome. My father furnished the dimensions and

outlines, but allowed the artist whom he employed to complete the

structure on his own plan. It was without seat, table, or ornament of any

kind (12-13).

After their father’s death, the Wieland children eventually repurpose the building in a more fashionable style. Decked out with the trappings of eighteenth-century polite rationalism, the temple contains “a bust of Cicero” copied “from an antique dug up…in the environs of Modena,” which is placed on “a suitable pedestal” made of material from

“a neighboring quarry,” as well as “a harpsichord, sheltered by a temporary roof from the weather.” It is no wonder that Clara recalls how “Every joyous and tender scene most dear to my memory, is connected with this edifice” (26). The edifice forms only one of the two poles around which the novel moves, and its dangerous double, Clara’s closet, exists to question the refined and rational values figured by the temple.

Brown seems to have had special interest in the relationship between neoclassical architecture and the hidden and winding designs of gothic buildings. An assortment of loose undated drawings distinct from the Wieland manuscript attest to Brown’s interest in the debates that linked architectural design to perfect political structure, and even in some cases, to utopian community. Complete with mathematical calculations in the margins

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and labeled dimensions, these images bear the hallmarks of real designs if not for their lack of units and utter impossibility. Almost like a plan for the Wieland’s temple, several of Brown’s drawings suggest his interest in the perfectly proportional designs favored by

Benjamin Henry Latrobe and other leading architects, who were commissioned to construct neoclassical buildings to house banks and political bodies in Philadelphia,

Washington, and elsewhere. By contrast, several of Brown’s other images recall the elements of a medieval church more than of neoclassical design. Still others blend these elements, combining seemingly antithetical architectures to create highly imaginative structures. Large domed rooms are surrounded by much smaller rooms, and in some cases, are even connected to what appear to be towers (see fig. 12). While it is impossible to know when Brown completed these drawings, they are evidence of his fascination with the multiple possibilities of imagined architectures. And the combinations of neoclassical and gothic, of domed and angular, of large and small, suggest that Brown saw the mechanisms of these elements as more analogous and commensurate than distinct. To follow the logic imparted by Brown’s drawings, Clara’s closet is the necessary counterpart to the Wieland family temple.

If Clara’s closet evokes the structure of a camera obscura machine, then Carwin is its necessary operator. Even though his roots are American, Carwin comes into the lives of the Wielands after having travelled throughout Europe. He represents the itinerant and amateur scientist peddling European-made optical illusions to curious spectators. Carwin operates the scientific device of the camera obscura as represented by Clara’s bedroom closet through the use of his mechanized skills. During his confession and summation of

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Figure 12. Untitled and undated Charles Brockden Brown architectural drawing. Charles Brockden Brown Papers. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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events to Clara at the end of the novel, Carwin explains that while he doubts the ethics of deceiving Pleyel earlier in the book, he is “hurried onward involuntarily and by a mechanical impulse” (239). Even the skills he employs to effect the deception are reminiscent of the technologic. His voice “is the instrument which I employed” rather than learned human skills. Clara’s camera obscura-like closet is the perfect forum for his talents, since it too replaces natural human senses with mechanistic alternatives. Sound and sight alike fall under Carwin’s technological accomplishments.

Like the mechanical operator of a camera obscura device, Carwin creates illusions. From Clara’s viewpoint, Carwin’s presence and constant deceptions are what cause the Wieland family to fall into chaos. Ultimately blaming him even for her brother’s madness despite Carwin’s involvement in the voices Wieland hears, Clara notes at the end of her narrative that she should have understood Carwin’s dangerous presence much earlier. Tragedy could have been avoided, Clara contends, “if I had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight” (278). For Clara, “This scene of havock was produced by an illusion of the senses” (266). In terming the results of Carwin’s actions

“illusions,” Clara adopts the language of popular visual amusement, casting the visual technology that enthralled polite society in terms of dangerous chaos and disorder, while also bemoaning her lack of vision (her “foresight”). 171 In spite of Clara’s claims that

Carwin is a “double-tongued deceiver” (278), she presents his character in terms of visual

technology. Even though he saves her life, she nevertheless claims to be “indifferent” to

him in spite of the fact that she attempt to mentally decide whether Carwin is “Ruffian or

171 Brown’s novel responds to a contemporary paranoia about foreign forces that many Americans worried would disrupt or unsettle the stability of the newly founded nation. Spurred by the creation of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Americans vocalized their fears over secret conspiracies by foreign born visitors and immigrants as well as groups like the Illuminati.

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devil, black as hell or bright as angels.” She finally concludes, “thenceforth, he was

nothing to me” (264-265), suggesting that like an optical illusion, both “black” and

“bright,” there is ultimately nothing there at all.

Even the specific “havock” Carwin causes is framed by Clara in the language of

optical technology. Theodore Wieland’s madness, far from being a categorically clear-

cut medical condition, is instead a result of illusions that then proliferate into Wieland as

himself an illusion. Upon learning that her brother is the murderer of the Wieland family,

Clara asks her uncle, the caretaker with whom she has been staying after the murders, if

Wieland has already been put to death. Clara further questions her uncle about the causes of Wieland’s madness, asking “Were not these sights, and these sounds, really seen and heard?” In an attempt to bring her to reason, Clara’s uncle answers her as an interlocutor:

“‘Can you doubt,’ said he, ‘that these were illusions?’” (202). Clara’s uncle’s questions double back on reality, leaving the real source of Wieland’s madness as empty and elusive as the illusions by which it was supposedly caused.

Carwin is significantly more skilled at the visual arts than the genteel characters of Wieland whose years of refined education should make them exemplary. While

Carwin creates illusions—auditory and visual—from inside the closet, Clara attempts to engage with visual perception and representation through the form of the portrait. But like the unfortunate Molesworth, she is completely unable to capture the true identities of her subject. Instead of visiting her brother, Clara “could not resist the inclination of forming a sketch upon paper of this memorable visage.” Once completed, Clara is not satisfied with the image. In part a metaphor for the sexual desire she feels towards

Carwin, but that she is decidedly unable to recognize, Clara is left unsatisfied with the

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image. She “placed it at all distances, and in all lights” with her “eyes riveted upon it,” but yet is unable to appreciate the image or to understand the identity and character of the person it portrays (61).

A distorted version of the practices of tracing the images produced from a camera obscura device, Clara’s drawings refigure polite feminine activity as the grotesque.

Rather than produce a genteel society, Clara’s drawing of Carwin only becomes more imprinted, the fact of which Brown reminds his readers frequently at the beginnings of chapters. Many, like chapters eight and ten, open with Clara musing on Carwin’s appearance, his visual presence burned increasingly more indelibly into her mind.

Throughout the remainder of her narrative, Clara returns again and again to her inability to give proper meaning to Carwin’s face as her mind becomes a palimpsest for the image she cannot correctly perceive. The more she observes him, the more his visible presence produces “a complex impression on my mind” (106). First formed as a pen or pencil sketch on paper, the image of Carwin transmutes from ephemeral to permanent the longer

Carwin stays at Mettingen and, crucially, the more he hides in Clara’s closet. Clara’s literal and figurative returns to the image of Carwin suggest that visual technology like the camera obscura not only structures Clara’s horrific encounters, but, in fact, the novel itself.

Dark Revolutions

Clara’s near constant returns to the visual presence of Carwin further signal the double nature of the camera obscura. The novel’s climax predictably comes in the form

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of an illusion or double vision witnessed by Clara that she then traces for her readers in

words. But if events are set in motion because of the camera obscura-like qualities of

Carwin and Clara’s closet, then they unravel once the illusion is pierced. The last third of

the novel, where Clara unfolds both Carwin’s true nature as well as that of her mad and

murderous brother, begins when Clara enters the house only to find the body of her sister- in-law Catherine lying on her bed. It is at this point that the instructive qualities of

Clara’s closet dark room become fully realized.

Rambling around her property in the middle of the night, Clara finally returns to her home for an eleven o’clock meeting with Carwin. As she approaches the house, she notes that there is a “light from the window of my own chamber,” which prompts her to regard Carwin in even worse terms than before (165). He has entered her house, she reasons, and made himself comfortable enough to put on a light and wait in her bedroom.

Outraged by this idea, Clara proceeds to the house, enters, and begins to ascend the stairs, only to find that the same mysterious voice calls out the “piercing exclamation of hold!

hold! ” again (168). Pivoting around to identify the source, Clara is positioned to observe

the inner workings of the illusionistic device:

I had not closed the door of the apartment I had just left. The stair-case, at

the foot of which I stood, was eight or ten feet from the door, and attached

to the wall through which the door led. My view, therefore, was sidelong,

and took in no part of the room.

Through this aperture was an head thrust and drawn back with so

much swiftness, that the immediate conviction was, that thus much of a

form, ordinarily invisible, had been unshrowded (168).

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Clara catches a crucial glimpse of the operator who controls the illusions she has seen.

Unsurprisingly, she does not know what to make of what she has seen, asking, like the

perplexed empiricist she strives to be, “What conclusion could I form?” (168). Catching

out the method of Carwin’s visual deception and the nature of optical illusion is not

ultimately useful knowledge for Clara. She still must work hard to “dispel any illusive

mists” that no doubt linger in her house (171). Despite having seen behind the slick

exterior of optical illusion, she cannot and will not understand its cause.

Clara only begins to comprehend the hidden mechanics of Carwin’s design,

indeed everything about Mettingen and its residents, once the curtain is pulled aside for

her. It is only when Carwin explains his role in recent events that Clara is even remotely

able to understand them. Carwin’s lengthy oral explanation, as it turns out, is what is

required to convince Clara. Despite the visual evidence before her, only words are

suitable to express the secret workings of the world she inhabits. And it is a quest for a

piece of text—not an image—that structures the final scenes of the novel. Set off by her

desire to regain possession of and to destroy her diary on the eve of her trip to Europe,

Clara returns to her home on the Wieland estate. Despite narrating the story, Clara’s

identity as a writer slips out of the novel. While the drawing of Carwin disappears as the

narrative continues, being transformed into the permanent impress in Clara’s mind,

Clara’s textual productions take more material shape. From the outset of the book, Clara claims to be writing for “a stranger to the depth of my distress,” instructing that reader to

“Make what use of the tale you shall think proper” (5). For most of Wieland she hardly remarks on the act of writing at all. It is not, in fact, until near the novel’s ending that readers are reminded that Clara is, perhaps more than anything, a writer. If Clara seeks

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an accurate image of Carwin for the majority of the novel, that desire turns textual by the end. Words replace images, language substitutes for sight.

Clara’s reference to the manuscript that drives her to return to her home even after finding the body of her sister-in-law there and the warnings of her uncle, holds the key to events. Suddenly remembering the text’s existence, Clara recalls how it was “an imperfect sight of” the “journal of transactions in short-hand” that causes Pleyel to mistrust her from the outset (218). If only, Clara seems to think, the journal can be recovered and its contents read in full, then all events and Clara’s innocence will be made apparent. Cast in explicitly visual language, disaster happens not because Pleyel reads her private diary, but because he only reads a portion of it. Even texts are susceptible to misunderstanding and misinterpretation if they are not seen correctly.

Like a mystery finally unlocked, Clara’s second ill-advised trip to her bedroom alone at night replays the incidents of her discovery of Catherine’s body. With the additional information imparted to her by Carwin, she is only now able to understand the events she witnesses, and, in turn, the true condition of her brother’s mental state. Again, the structure of the camera obscura is present since “the door being closed, a dim ray streamed through the key-hole,” an accidental structure which creates “a kind of twilight” perfect for concentrating lines of sight on some objects while at the same time leaving

“all minuter objects in obscurity” (221). It is here that the events of the preceding novel are narrated again, this time by Carwin. Claiming that he has “uttered the truth” Carwin concludes his story having listed “the extent of my offenses” (246). It is at that moment that Wieland appears. A repetition of the scene in which Clara discovers Catherine’s body and her brother in a murderous frenzy, this second iteration moves in a different

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direction. Unable to convince her brother to spare her, Clara pleads with Carwin to

intervene and rescue her. Finally, enacting the voice of Wieland’s god, Carwin

commands him to “Shake off thy phrenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be

lunatic no longer.” (262). Just as he does earlier in the novel, Carwin dictates modes of understanding and illusion in Clara’s bedroom. In voicing control over Wieland, Carwin remakes the scene of Catherine’s murder into one not of tragedy but of safety.

As the operator of the mechanistic world of illusions inhabited by Clara and her family, Carwin knows more about the world, and about how to visually perceive it than they do. As it turns out, Carwin and not members of the Wieland family, is better educated in the principles of vision that would inform genteel taste. Not only does he function in the novel like the operator of a camera obscura, using the mechanics of small apertures and dark rooms in Clara’s house to create deceptive visions, he is also skilled in other refined visual modes. The reason, he tells Clara towards the end of the novel, that he spends so much time lurking around the grounds of Mettingen is in part because its artful landscapes please his aesthetic tastes. 172 “In all my rambles,” Carwin declares, “I

never found a spot in which so many picturesque beauties and rural delights were

assembled as at Mettingen” (231). Both the reader and Clara are in fact introduced to

Carwin as he admires the estate when she first notices him “passing close to the edge of

the bank that was in front” of her house. Carwin stands out to her more because of where

172 Ed White has argued that the geography of Wieland coalesces around the German Crescent where Mettingen is situated, “the mediating region between the wild, disruptive, and factional violence to the west and the urban vacuum to the east…is the test ground for cultural and political developments” (47). While this geography might account for the political unrest in Pennsylvania, it does not fully account for the figuration of the Wieland estate as a representative for elite county seats. See Ed White “Carwin the Peasant Rebel” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic . Edited by Philip Barnard, Stephen Shapiro, and Mark Kamrath. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 41-59.

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he is walking and than because of his “ungainly and disproportioned” figure or his dirty and shabby clothing. Despite his “rustic and aukward” gait, his pace is “careless and lingering” as he strolls near her estate as though to admire the landscape and architectural detail. As Clara explains, “The lawn was only traversed by men whose views were directed to the pleasures of the walk, or the grandeur of the scenery” (58). This passage identifies Clara’s fundamental problem with Carwin—he is neither of the peasant class nor of the genteel. This contradiction in turn signals a kind of crisis of classification for

Clara who is consistently unable to place Carwin within a finite social rank. It is further problematic for her because Carwin’s refusal to be categorized proves that certain markers of gentility are learned rather than innate. And those markers are, Brown informs us by introducing Carwin as a careful spectator, especially forceful in terms of the visual.

As it turns out, the only characters that are truly able to see and understand the events at Mettingen, are those who are socially and politically invisible. Just as Carwin is at his most powerful when he manipulates realities from his secret locations, so too do the other inhabitants of the Wieland estate become important elements to the novel when they are out of sight. This is especially true for those character that are least recognized by Clara. She draws Carwin’s portrait to ponder over, but is unable to provide a description of her servant Judith. Given Judith’s near constant presence at Clara’s house, it would make sense that Clara would at some point acknowledge more than her existence. In denying Judith any agency whatsoever, Clara only falls deeper into the illusions that terrorize her. Without Judith, Carwin points out, he would not have been able to play tricks on Clara from her closet. In describing how he created the illusion of

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murders plotting in her closet, he explains that there was a third voice, Judith’s, who mimicked the “struggles and prayers of the victim” (230). As Carwin notes, Clara’s fearful nature causes her to flee rather than listening more closely. Just as Clara completely misjudges Carwin, so too does she misrecognize the character of Judith, a young woman who, as Carwin explains, “was taught that the best use of her charms consists in the sale of them” (230). In Carwin’s telling of events, Judith is at least partially responsible for the tragic events that unfold.

Working class young women like Judith populate more of the Mettingen estate than Clara seems to realize, and are certainly more important players than she is willing to admit. Clara’s own life is saved by the actions of a servant girl who resides at her brother’s house, yet she is unwilling or unable to describe the girl’s actions in relation to her own well-being. Wieland is identified as the murderer by “a servant-maid who spied the murder of the children from a closet where she was concealed.” He then

“acknowledged his guilt, and rendered himself up to justice” (184). The unnamed servant then promptly disappears from Clara’s narrative; her appearance in Clara’s telling of events is made possible only because of her distinctly important disappearance at the moment of the murder. Even though she remains hidden in a closet during the horrific infanticides, Wieland, Brown suggests, could not have seen her anyway. Like Clara,

Wieland is unable to acknowledge the existence of those figures that remain outside their privileged lives, those figures whose social and political marginality is defined almost exclusively in visual terms.

Even the architecture of Mettingen, an element of the plot important enough to warrant several sustained descriptions from Clara as well as the observing gaze of

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Carwin, exists to camouflage the existence of disenfranchised members of the early republic in Clara’s telling of events. At the outset we learn that Mettingen was constructed with “the service of African slaves, which were then in general use” (11).

Like the occupants of the huts that Clara visits several times throughout the novel, the people who built and continue to run the estate are nameless and unacknowledged.

Native Americans are likewise erased. As a number of critics have pointed out, Carwin’s vocal talents were learned, he claims, from Native Americans, a point Brown picks up again in Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803-1805), the unfinished prequel to

Wieland . The first years of her brother’s marriage, “those six years of uninterrupted happiness” were made possible, Clara explains, by the “Revolutions and battles, however calamitous to those who occupied the scene.” “The Indians,” she recalls, “were repulsed on the one side, and Canada was conquered on the other,” events which “contributed in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity, and furnishing causes of patriotic exultation” (29). As Anthony Galluzzo has suggested, the distance of these happenings is a fundamental part of the aesthetic to which the Wieland family adheres.

“In keeping with the vicarious terrors of the Burkean sublime—enjoyable only insofar as they are vicarious—” the realities of war and suffering “are suddenly made immediate by way of Carwin’s impostures.” 173 Nevertheless, the marginal figures in the Wieland world such as rural laborers, enslaved blacks, and Native Americans, gain a place in the novel and in the imaginative world of its author Clara through their ability to control distorted modes of vision that structure the narrative.

173 Anthony Galluzzo, “Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Aethetics of Terror: Revolution, Reaction, and the Radical Enlightenment in Early American Letters” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (Winter 2009): 255-271, 256. For another recent discussion of Brown’s use of aesthetic theory, see Edward Cahill’s expansive “An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy: Charles Brockden Brown’s Aesthetic State” Early American Literature 36 (2001), 31-40.

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In exerting their presence through the act of looking, either the practiced genteel observation done by Carwin or the witnessing by hidden servants, Brown’s novel argues for narrative space in which socially and politically marginalized figures exert influence over elite storytellers by maintaining a more accurate sense of visual discernment.

Brown draws attention to the presence of the ordinary out of sight individuals like laborers and servants by positioning them as witnesses and observers essential to the plot.

The structure of Brown’s novel referenced around moments of visual confusion and optical illusion is a compelling case for the fundamental interdependence of scientific invention, popular entertainment, and the literary aesthetic. It is also an indictment against narratives like those told by Clara that ignore the hidden mechanics of rational knowledge and national order. By referencing the polite amusement of the camera obscura, Brown challenges readers to question the rules of civic participation.

Sometimes those who see and understand the world with the most rational clarity, and who, by extension, are theoretically more fit as actors in the public sphere, are those who are not amused—or in the case of Clara, befuddled and terrorized—by the workings of visual science. If the Edmund Johnson zograscope desk with which I began this dissertation was operated by an unseen servant who worked from behind the device, then we might read Carwin, Judith, and the nameless other members of the Wieland society as essential, if invisible, human components of the early American novel and the political culture to which it refers. Ever a revolving dialectic between real and fanciful, the theories, discourses, and mechanics of vision shed light on the political inconsistencies left in the wake of national founding.

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CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: VISION IN THE ANTEBELLUM AGE

The previous chapters have addressed the relationship that a variety of early

American writers had to theories and practices of vision during and immediately following the nation’s founding. More specifically, I have argued that Benjamin

Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, and Charles Brockden Brown employed the language, theories, and structures of visual technology in order to address the changing dynamics of civic, political, and economic life in early national America. I have considered a range of works by scientific, artistic, medical, and political writers in order to inform my readings of literary works that privilege the position of a single “I” voice and engage with technologies of vision. In turning to the visual, these texts suggest that even if the new

Constitutional government was theoretically representative, representation was a deeply problematic concept.

The dissertation began by considering how Peale, the period’s leading political artist, attempted to put the notion of American unity into visual terms by staging public events, constructing a museum, and creating a variety of portraits, engravings, and other images. For Peale, visual experiences could shore up anxieties about the new government and uphold federal interests by directing viewers to quite literally see the nation in particular ways. The literary responses to Peale’s work, as well as his own life’s retrospective, questioned the extent to which Peale was ever able to accurately

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represent national unification, to control his viewers’ perceptions of his works and the

founding project, or even if the new group of states was truly united.

Franklin, Wheatley, and Brown, by contrast, attested to the complications and

imperfections of the new United States by creating literary works that challenged the

assumptions, policies, and mythologies of the reigning political and civic order. Each

employed the language of vision to assert new modes of affiliation, belonging, and

participation and ultimately to suggest that individual perception could be varied,

fragmented, and indefinite. In the Autobiography , Franklin engages with the sense of sight to posit a version of privacy that hinges on personal exposure. In engaging the autobiographical form, Franklin develops a model of selfhood that challenges eighteenth-

century notions of how personal life might be kept private. Wheatley and Venture Smith employ the language and practices of sight in order to make claims not only for civil society, but for political rights. They rely on first-person speaking voices to direct their readers to question visual representations of slavery, and by extension, to see their social and political status in a different light. Finally, Brown works with metaphors of visual technology in order to show how the new form of the novel provides an ideal medium for exploring the multi-faceted nature of representative government. He builds the events at

Mettingen around the camera obscura-like structure of Clara’s closet in order to suggest that socially and politically invisible figures like Carwin, Judith, and other servants were as central to the newly formed nation as they are to Clara’s first-person narrative.

In the nineteenth century, authors continued to write about visual technologies in order to point out inconsistencies and problems with the national order. Even though the introduction of photographic technology, for example, affected the ways Americans

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wrote about the sense of sight, writers continued to be fascinated by existing visual technologies. Above all, they were fascinated by the ways that sight could help build communities of individuals, extend a sense of inclusiveness to those outside the law, and challenge earlier models of spiritual and personal experience. We might recall Harriet

Jacobs hiding in her grandmother’s attic, claiming freedom by watching her children through her “loophole of retreat”; Whitman’s twenty-ninth bather, imagining her participation in a masculine world as she peers through the “blinds of a window”; and

Emerson’s charge that when one walks into the woods with the right attitude, he too might become “a transparent eye-ball,” being nothing, but seeing all. Antebellum writers shifted the conversation about representation in new directions in order to respond to new historical developments, often conceiving of a national community against a backdrop of extreme violence, racism, and war. In the nineteenth century the political resonances latent in technologies of vision unfolded alongside the emerging discourses of American nationalism, exceptionalism, expansionism.

It is by thinking about seeing, about the engagements early national authors had with sight, that we might understand the political and cultural implications of their works in new ways, and to better recognize the multiple levels on which writers critiqued the framework of the early United States. If representation was the primary concern of visual theorists, scientists, and artists, then the qualities of the visual technologies they discussed and used provide a unique and historically relevant way to consider the larger issue of representative government. Despite changing social, cultural, and economic contexts, nineteenth-century men and women of letters continued to employ the language

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of visual technology to get at the heart of civic and political inclusions and exclusions that inhered in the theories and practices of a newly formed representative government.

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