Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States 9780812291162

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Against Self-Reliance

Early American Studies Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Against Self-Reliance T h e A r t s o f De p e n d e n c e i n t h e E a r ly U n i t e d S t a t es

William Huntting Howell

u n i v e r si t y of pe n n s y lva n i a pr e s s ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Howell, William Huntting.  Against self-reliance : the arts of dependence in the early United States / William Huntting Howell. — 1st ed.    p. cm. — (Early American studies)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8122-4703-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. American literature—­ 1783-1850—­History and criticism. 2. United States—­Civilization—­1783-1865. 3. National characteristics, American—­History—­18th century. 4. National characteristics, American—­History—­19th century. 5. Women—­Education—­ United States—­History—­18th century. 6. Women—­Education—­ United States—­History—­ 19th century. 7. Dependency. 8. Repetition (Aesthetics) 9. Originality. 10. Imitation. I. Title. II. Series: Early American studies. PS193.H64 2015 810.9'353—dc23 2014032442

Contents

Introduction: Imitation Is Suicide

1

Part I. Copy-Writing Chapter 1. Imitatio Franklin, or the American Example Chapter 2. Phillis Wheatley’s Dependent Harmonies

19 46

Part II. Emulation and Ethics Chapter 3. Reproducing David Rittenhouse Chapter 4. The Republican Girl and the Spirit of Emulation

85 116

Part III. Critiques and Affirmations Chapter 5. The Horrors of the Republican Machine 159 Chapter 6. The Copyist Moby-Dick 192 Notes 217 Bibliography 267 Index 295 Acknowledgments 303

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Introduction

Imitation Is Suicide

In the summer of 2007, a piece of graffiti appeared on the wall of a bathroom in the Earwax Café, near the intersection of Milwaukee and Damen Avenues on Chicago’s northwest side. With the broad strokes of a blue paint marker, an artist identifying him-­or herself as “Stel/Sim” had written “Imitation is Suicide.” Though not the most common graffiti—­I didn’t see any other iterations around the neighborhood that day, and I haven’t seen any since—­it nevertheless distills one of the organizing principles of contemporary U.S. culture: imitation is an existential threat. A 2008 essay in Psychology Today—­one of the great barometers of American conventional wisdom—­frames the problem rather starkly: “A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what’s ‘just not me.’ Midlifers deepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-­images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were ‘true’ to themselves.”1 As Psychology Today imagines it, the injunction to “be yourself ” properly structures the entirety of the American life cycle: from adolescence to senescence, living well means finding and amplifying the still, small voice of individualism; to model oneself on another (“what’s ‘just not me’ ”) is to be inauthentic or false to one’s “true” essence and to set oneself up for a lifetime of “regret.” We might be skeptical about Psychology Today’s blithe generalizations about generational difference, its reduction of existence to “friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements,” and its deployment of a universalizing “us,” but the principle of anti-­imitation and anti-­dependence that it describes nevertheless saturates contemporary

2 Introduction

culture. Indeed, resistance to imitation operates over and above other deeply felt cultural fissures: “Never Follow” is both a song by the anti-­capitalist punk band Naked Raygun and an advertising slogan for Audi of America. Of course, there is more in Stel/Sim’s graffiti than an evocation of American pop psychology. For one thing, in the context of guerilla public expression, the image presents an aesthetic manifesto: to be legitimate (and psychologically legitimating), the work of art must be original to its maker. That is, the art-­object must be unique, exceptional in the sense that it breaks from what has come before, and recognizable as something new. Borrowing and repurposing is fine, so long as the source is somehow transformed by the appropriating artist: hip-­hop DJs lift from old songs to make new beats, and therefore they are making art; Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings rely on familiar iconography, but they count as art because their obvious derivativeness operates as original commentary on the bright vacancy of consumer and popular culture. Multiples and editions—­as with someone like Jeff Koons—­are fine, but copies of someone else’s objects are imagined to be flat, pale, weak—­bereft of the spark of life, dead on arrival.2 This is as true for the graffiti writer as it is for the piece he or she makes: dependence on the work of another compromises the creative self. The work of art that borrows the style or idiom of another is the material sign of an immature voice, a lack of imagination, a misunderstanding of cultural conventions, or bad faith. (In the language of the graffiti world, such imitation is known as “biting”—­as if the copyist were a kind of parasite.) To knowingly imitate in spite of such proscriptions is to voluntarily cede membership in the community—­to commit social suicide. She who would make a name for herself cannot do so in borrowed finery. Art and artistic subjectivity are not the only things at stake here, though. To the café-­going public, Stel/Sim’s message simply suggests that any copying activity is suspect and that all subjectivity must be an organic and sui generis expression of the psychological interior. What marks an individual identity are those aspects of the person that are not the product of duplication and that cannot themselves be duplicated. Beneath such claims is the commonplace that “personality,” like the Cartesian “soul,” functions as a principle of mystery or exception: the self may have sources (to borrow a phrase from philosopher Charles Taylor), but it is properly neither reducible to them nor reproducible from them. This ineffability serves as shorthand for the comforting fiction that who and what we are cannot be exhaustively defined by our histories, our education, or a tangle of electrochemical impulses—­what the mid twentieth-­century cultural critic Dwight Macdonald called “mere

Introduction 3

congeries of conditioned reflexes.”3 No matter how well cultural or biological determinism may explain the nature of cognition, or memory, or desire, there is always irreproducible magic somewhere. To assert a self (as an “artist” or as anything else) through imitation is to impugn this principle of exceptionality. Put another way: to set the copy where the original should be is to undo the connection between individuality and differentiation that underwrites the popular idea of modern personality. Although Freudian psychology characterizes the process of identification as an essential tool in the delineation of the subject—­ whereby the subject assimilates an aspect of the Other and is transformed by the model that the Other provides—­persistent, nondevelopmental imitation is pathological.4 Such terms can be found in anthropological discourse, too: the ethnographer Clifford Geertz defines the self as a “bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes.”5 Copying blurs distinctions of mine and thine—­both physically and metaphysically—­and must be disavowed in order for the contrasts that define that “center of awareness” to hold. Imitation is suicide, in other words, because it denies the premises of what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard calls the “differential vicissitudes” and “aleatory charm” of individuality—­it threatens to reduce us to clones.6 In highlighting the relationship between artistic expression and assertions of autonomy, the point I wish to make here is relatively straightforward: a signed, public display of the statement “Imitation is Suicide” neatly distills the modern ideology of American liberal individualism in both its popular and more specialized forms.7 For all of its universalizing intent, however, the text of Stel/Sim’s graffiti (and the ideas about self and aesthetic expression that it encapsulates) has a very particular history. The phrase comes directly from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Self-­Reliance,” first delivered in 1836 and subsequently published in 1841: “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”8 Hence the punchline of the piece: Stel/Sim’s clarion call for originality is about as dependent and unoriginal as can be. As an unattributed (but not especially obscure) quotation, its arguments about the artist and the self are categorically undermined by their expression.

4 Introduction

Origin Stories Ironies aside, I begin with Stel/Sim and Emerson in order to make an initial claim about the ways in which the imitative, the iterative, and the derivative have been systematically devalued in contemporary culture and to locate the roots of that devaluation (at least in part) in historically specific arguments. Although it may seem to have been with us forever, the American obsession with individuation and originality is not natural or inherent but contingent; it is the product of specific nineteenth-­century ideological circumstances. Attending briefly to that cultural moment in which imitation becomes conflated with suicide can help set the stage for understanding the more protean moment that comes before—­the colonial and early republican periods at the heart of this book—­in which different sorts of copying were essential to the artistic, psychological, and political projects associated with national independence. Early in his 1838 address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, for example, Emerson—­lately resigned from his pastorate in Lexington, Massachusetts, and continuing to turn away from organized Christianity—­warns his audience about the perils of preaching according to convention.9 “[Certain divine laws] refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. . . . The moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and thought,—­in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars.”10 This is not, in and of itself, a particularly groundbreaking sentiment. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (“Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”) makes essentially the same case: the manmade rules of grammar and logic chop up and parcel out a divinity that is rightly unitary; the true Word of God cannot be stated according to the strictures of the page and must be written, immaterially, on the heart.11 “These [divine] laws execute themselves[,]” Emerson continues, “They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance” until they are abjected into the temporal, spatial, and circumstantial realm of human expression.12 If the frame is old, though, Emerson uses it for new and particular ends. Where Paul makes a case for his own apostolic authority—­the special investment of Christ with divinity lends his evangelists the “commendation” to conduct a “ministration of the spirit,” in order to redeem humanity from the written condemnations of the Old Testament—­Emerson makes a case for a considerably more diffuse (or democratic) experience of revelation.13 In the

Introduction 5

Divinity School Address, infinitude knows no privilege; it invests all selves uniquely but also equally, spontaneously; it neither brooks nor expects any sort of external or collective explanation. A sense of the unique relation in which one stands to God “corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another,—­by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason.”14 What starts as an argument about evangelical modesty and divine ineffability, in other words, becomes an argument about the necessary sovereignty of the individual. In the introduction to Nature (1836), Emerson had put the same point even more bluntly. He famously opens that essay with an echo of the Kantian imperative Sapere aude: when contemplating the mysteries of the world, have the courage to think for yourself.15 “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”16 The axiomatic desirability of this “original relation to the universe” serves as both the heart of Continental Enlightenment philosophy and the organizing principle of Transcendentalist epistemology.17 The wager of Emersonian thought is that the highest laws of the cosmos are present and identifiable in all things, from the most ethereal to the most concrete—­that every thinking person may thus begin to recognize “the currents of the Universal Being [that] circulate through [her]” and may sense that she is “part or particle of God”—­even if she can’t put that sensation into words.18 Like his prose, Emerson’s cosmology is essentially fractal: because the same laws that animate the universe animate the particular being, the individual needs nothing more than a properly tuned sensibility to begin to see how she fits into the systems of creation and to approach the cosmos’s profoundest truths. Looking inward, one finds the unspeakable proofs of divinity that the consultation of other people’s material expressions (written biographies, histories, criticism) destroys. In “Self-­Reliance,” Emerson frames the necessity of an “original relation to the universe” even more forcefully. Elaborating his sense of the singularity and immateriality of the self—­in Nature, he divides the universe into the soul and the “NOT ME,” which includes “both nature and art, all other men and my own body”—­Emerson argues that “the relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.”19 These “helps” are things like “culture” or “society” or “convention”—­whatever locates authority or wisdom beyond an individual’s own power of apprehension

6 Introduction

has the capacity to disrupt (or disprove) the relays of Transcendence. “Society everywhere,” he argues, “is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-­stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-­reliance is its aversion.”20 Against this joint-­stock conspiracy, Emerson posits the necessary uniqueness of Manhood—­a spiritual and intellectual independence that finds looks beyond accepted names and customs to the real majesty they cannot translate. In Nature’s famous claim that he has “enjoyed a perfect exhilaration” and been made “glad to the brink of fear” even when “crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,” Emerson casts himself as what he calls “Man thinking.”21 He sees in those things that custom holds mundane and homely the deep organizing structures of Creation.22 To adopt the perceptions or philosophical procedures of others—­to acknowledge conformity as a virtue—­would be to both deny the divinity of those things that the culture abjures and to refuse your own participation in the universal. Emerson’s peroration to the Divinity School Address thus presents the six young graduates before him a very clear program: Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, “I also am a man.” Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was something natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man’s.23 In this closing moment, we can see vividly how an argument most immediately about spirituality—­the form following of imitationist piety gets in the way of personal revelation and fails to grasp how God suffuses everything—­ might also come to frame a broader way of imagining subjectivity; what is in one way a specific brief against the increasingly hidebound character of Unitarian thought and practice may raise much larger questions about the historical morphology of the self.

Introduction 7

By casting culture as a problem and dooming the imitator and the dependent to hopeless mediocrity, Emerson suggests a particularly liberal way of imagining the social order: entrepreneurship is superior to collective action, innovation trumps the preservation of tradition, and inner light rightly exceeds external authority. The ideology of self-­reliance, then, can be understood as a necessary corollary to both U.S. democracy and capitalist enterprise: it supports the notion that a government should operate as a function of its individual citizens’ collated wills—­an expression of “We the People”—­ and it serves as the philosophical grounds for the cultural celebration of the yeoman farmer, the “pioneer,” and the Horatio Alger–style entrepreneur.24 Even the counternarratives and dissenting voices of the nineteenth century took the emergence of the organizing trope of self-­reliance as a boon. In 1848, for example, the suffragist Seneca Falls Convention issued a “Declaration of Sentiments” on the model of the Declaration of Independence. Its final grievance—­the one that sums up all the rest—­is as follows: “[Man] has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-­respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.”25 In an oration on “Self-­Made Men” that he delivered regularly between 1859 and 1893, Frederick Douglass framed the cultural deployment of this self-­reliant ideal as clearly as anyone: Self-­made men are the men who, under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position and have learned from themselves the best uses to which life can be put in this world, and in the exercises of these uses to build up worthy character. . . . In fact they are the men who are not brought up but who are obliged to come up, not only without the voluntary assistance of friendly co-­operation of society, but often in open and derisive defiance of all the efforts of society and the tendency of circumstances to repress, retard, and keep them down.26 It is a story with undeniable pull, particularly for those who, like Douglass and the suffragists, had been systematically marginalized by dint of race, gender, ethnicity, language, religion, or economic status. It acknowledges the essential dignity of the abused and casts cultural power as conditional and subject to reversal—­it builds into itself the possibility that those who have been denied everything may yet rise up and take it for themselves.

8 Introduction

But there are also other stories to tell. Alexis de Tocqueville, for one, was not so sure of the cult of self-­reliance. He worried about atomism and isolation: “Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”27 William Heighton, a cordwainer and labor activist from Philadelphia, argued in 1827 that a “system of individual interest and competition . . . strips man of all the noblest faculties of his mind, and the most exalted virtues of his heart, and leaves him an easy prey to hypocrisy, dishonesty, fraudulence, and injustice. It is the fell destroyer of all moral excellence.”28 And Frederick Douglass himself, while acknowledging the power of the idea of the “Self-­Made Man,” also critiqued it: Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-­made men. That term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist. Our best and most valued acquisitions have been obtained either from our contemporaries or from those who have preceded us in the field of thought and discovery. We have all either begged, borrowed, or stolen. We have reaped where others have sown, and that which others have strown, we have gathered. . . . The brotherhood and inter-­dependence of mankind are guarded and defended at all points. I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as the lowest. It, like the loftiest waves of the sea, derives its power from the grandeur and vastness of the ocean of which it forms a part. We differ as the waves, but are one as the sea.29 This book begins to navigate Douglass’s “sea”: it frames different sorts of interdependent begging, borrowing, and stealing as essential to the American experience in the era of Independence.

Against Self-­Reliance The purpose of Against Self-­Reliance is to explore an epoch in late eighteenth-­ and early nineteenth-­century America in which imitation was pointedly not suicide—­when various “arts of dependence,” as I will call them, were considered central to imagining, expressing, and integrating self and polity, to

Introduction 9

building a life and a country instead of tearing it down. Broadly speaking, these arts include any spiritual, artistic, or personal practices that find modeling, reproduction, or re-­presentation at their core. Imitation, emulation, derivation, repetition, iteration, and sympathetic identification are the most important for my analysis, but any actions that value the following of examples over unalloyed origination, that promote humility over pride or ambition and deference over a strictly policed individualism, or that insist that the well-­ wrought copy can be as valuable as (and potentially even more valuable than) an original would serve just as well.30 Dependence, then, as I will use it here and throughout, is not helplessness, or hopeless second-­orderness, but rather a way of acknowledging contingency and connection—­of hanging together. The elements of a mobile are not to be disparaged because they are part of a larger work; their necessity and dignity is not compromised by the fact that they do not stand on their own or by their connection to a complex whole. In its broadest strokes, Against Self-­Reliance revalues and rethinks what it meant to imitate, to emulate, to be repetitive, derivative, or pointedly generic at the time of the founding of the United States and beyond; it takes a series of cultural forms and moments that have typically been understood as obsessed with independence and looks at the ideological, artistic, and subject-­making processes that such sui generis fantasies occlude.31 Although mine is a fundamentally literary project, the conceptual framework for my inquiry has roots in political history, philosophy, and material culture studies. In some ways, Against Self-­Reliance extends the historiography of republican subjectivity. This last may be tautological: as Gordon Wood has pointed out, republicanism as a political philosophy “ideally . . . obliterated the individual”; it placed the abstract ideal of the common good above personal interests, desires, or needs and imagined individuality not as an oppositional or isolated state but as a function of community.32 Under such a system, he who becomes more like all of the other republicans in working for harmonious improvement of the whole becomes properly himself; the subject grounded in the essentially republican ideals of imitation, iteration, and personal effacement works together with other like-­minded subjects to create a new nation-­state. A nascent quasi-­Emersonian liberalism operates alongside this republican ideology, of course—­as numerous historians have argued, the philosophies of personal ambition (in which working for the private good should increase the public good) and self-­effacement (in which working for the public good should increase the private good) run closely together in the Early Republic. Part of the wager of this book, though, is that

10 Introduction

focusing on liberalism’s now-­disdained opposites—­imitation, dependence—­ can help us see how the negotiations of these two modes of being American gave rise to what we now know as the United States.33 More recent accounts of republican subjectivity—­like historian Sarah Knott’s “sensible selfhood—­ socially constituted, socially turned”—­offer particular points of departure for my interest in individuality without individualism.34 The arts of dependence, I will argue, can help us to think more about what such a selfless self might look like and how it might operate in the world. Beyond intervening in the historiography of republican personhood, Against Self-­Reliance serves as a complement to recent work in transatlantic cultural history on the American imitation and appropriation of British and Continental objects and forms. As Leonard Tennenhouse puts it, “What we mean by American is most likely a reproduction of cultural practices that originated somewhere else.”35 This is undoubtedly right and is borne out abundantly by the historical archive: from the shape of houses and gardens to the preparation of meals to the cut and finish of clothing, from geographical naming to the conventions of storytelling, from mercantile practice to religious philosophy, there’s very little that might count as strictly original about the behavior of the early American middling and elite classes.36 Even after the American Revolution brought an end to the legal relationship between England and its former colonies, and even in the face of real political tensions with other European powers (particularly France), Americans looked abroad for direction. Some scholars have found in this state of affairs the cause for profound cultural anxiety. Kariann Yokota, for example, argues that even as such borrowings helped to reinforce the “legitimacy” of those on the postcolonial periphery, “the extent of [that] borrowing fueled insecurities about the derivative nature of what was ostensibly an independent society”; they would have to “unbecome” British in order to take their rightful place in the world.37 Others, like Elisa Tamarkin, have found in what she calls “imperial nostalgia” more a cause for celebration: the emulation of the British in the nineteenth century helped Americans figure out how to cathect to otherwise noncharismatic state apparatuses or political ideals, make better sense of the trauma of revolution, and generate support for abolitionism. Against Self-­Reliance operates on a smaller scale. To the extent that they are extricable from one another, I am interested less in the broad strokes of American cultural dependence—­the ways in which the artists, writers, and artisans of the United States borrow from Europeans—­and more interested in the intimate mechanics of individual artistic, linguistic, and behavioral

Introduction 11

dependence. Scholars have taken up this question before but have tended toward a developmental model that tracks precisely a traditional academic trajectory, where people imitate until they don’t have to anymore; copying is a stage on the road to mastery and invention, to be abandoned as a strategy once such sufficiency has been achieved.38 As Eric Slauter puts it, the Age of Revolutions marks the waning of a culture of deference and the blossoming of intertwined notions of originary genius and capitalist self-­sufficiency, in which the limited emulation of better examples is rejected in favor of the untutored, the “natural.”39 Under such conditions, dependency becomes a source of anxiety, not celebration. One of the claims of this book is that these sorts of stadial accounts insufficiently express the facts on the ground—­that the arts of dependence persist and remain essential beyond what Immanuel Kant calls the “tutelage” of the man, the woman, the poet, the artist.40 Indeed, these practices of personal dependence represent active (and actively theorized) attempts to forge coherent social patterns and to locate the individual in a lucid cultural narrative—­they were, in other words, critical to the project of American independence. To make these claims, the archive of Against Self-­Reliance is intentionally diverse. Indeed, formal and generic diversity is part of my argument—­one of the things that the book wants to do is position the arts of dependence as a way to see commonalities between the putatively distinct discourses of literature, psychology, science, material culture, and politics. That said, there is a curatorial rationale for the objects constellated here: although it is possible, I think, to mount a similar argument with different texts, I have tried to use works that illuminate as vividly as possible those aspects or versions of the arts of dependence that seem to me most critical for understanding the first years of the United States. In some cases, that means taking up familiar texts—­ Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Herman Melville’s Moby-­Dick—­in what I hope are new ways; in other instances, it means taking relatively less-­studied material (Phillis Wheatley’s occasional verse; schoolbooks and samplers; Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond) and exploring the dynamics of dependence that they encode. The first part of the book, “Copy-­Writing,” concerns the arts of rhetorical and literary dependence—­theories of imitative textual production and their relation to different kinds of selfhood. The texts of the first section, Franklin’s Autobiography and Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, offer complementary strategies for claiming cultural and personal authority through deference; I argue that they each work to imagine the power of imitative or iterative (as

12 Introduction

opposed to strictly creative) writing. Such a pairing may appear unusual at first glance. Begun in 1771 but published in full only after Franklin’s death, the Autobiography is perhaps the most canonical eighteenth-­century literary articulation of an independent “American” subjectivity (the “self-­made man”). It is also, however, a complex brief for the ethics of dependency. Franklin’s Autobiography provides an account of his own imitative development to both set himself up as a representative man and provide those who come after him with a blueprint for achieving the same: he follows (and theorizes following) so that you may follow too. The fact that there is so much in the way of recipe in Franklin’s account of himself makes explicit the reformist/ model-­for-­imitation instrumentality that remains implicit in so many other eighteenth-­century autobiographies. In everything from dramatizing his process of learning to write by reproducing pieces from the Spectator to his dissemination of an Art of Virtue to his fond defense of the single-­subject poetry contest, Franklin aligns derivative writing and copyist action with moral probity and self-­possession. This alignment of dependence with virtue informs his ideas about unifying the interested, squabbling populations of the United States: casting the self as a textual effect to be compiled—­to be copied down from others, to be copied into others—­Franklin expressly imagines a national feeling in terms of perpetual reprintings and new editions. Although pointedly excluded from such national feelings by virtue of her enslavement, her gender, and her poverty, Wheatley too writes of the worldly (and otherworldly) power of copying. Her embrace of a derivative aesthetics has long been a problem for critics looking to place her at the head of an African American literary tradition: her appropriation of “white” poetic forms (like heroic couplets); her mobilization of classical allusions, structures, and conceits; and her crafting of poems sympathetic to aspects of the slavery system (especially its paternalist pretext of bringing Christianity to the enslaved) can make her seem a mouthpiece for interests that cannot be her own. If she produces art that both fails to capture her peculiar situation as a slave or as a person and refuses to give voice to some kind of transcendent black experience, what does she actually have to offer? Chapter 2 offers the beginnings of one answer: not all art seeks origination, individuation, or timelessness; there are other registers of signification and other metrics for success, including instrumentality, historicity, and the assertion of common cause. This becomes especially true with respect to political art—­as art must necessarily be when it is addressed to questions of race, piety, and performance (textual and otherwise) and produced at the crisis point of the global slave trade in

Introduction 13

the second half of the eighteenth century. For Wheatley, I argue, poetic imitation becomes a complex act of self-­assertion through self-­effacement—­an expression of a higher Methodism and a counter to an emergent racialized aesthetics itself bound up with liberal individualism. Wheatley, in other words, extends (or anticipates) the story that Franklin begins to tell about the cultural power of rhetorical conventionality and works to imagine terms for a viable American subjectivity beyond the confines of an atomistic self. The second part of the book, “Emulation and Ethics,” considers in greater detail the behavioral arts of dependence: the theory and practice of the mimetic imprinting of character. Operating under the materialist assumption that the mind is a blank slate subject to inscription through sensory input, most eighteenth-­century psychologists in the West imagined “personality” to be in many ways the product of iterated actions, gestures, and expressions. Identifying proper exemplars and imitating their characteristics was, therefore, the surest route to ethical subjectivity. My work to understand the links between repeated physical performance and ethereal (if deeply held) morality begins in Chapter 3, which shifts from humanistic and religious considerations of personality to the realms of natural philosophy. More particularly, I analyze Benjamin Rush’s post-­Revolutionary efforts to establish the natural philosopher David Rittenhouse as a shining model for American imitation. Rush describes a Rittenhouse whose passion for experimental replicability—­ immanent in everything from standards of natural-­philosophical observation to clear handwriting to circulating specie—­serves as a critical engine for imagining “disinterested” “republican” people. Analyzing Rittenhouse’s clockwork solar systems and specie-­minting devices in the context of essays on education and on the nature of mind by Rush, I argue that the principles of repeatability inherent in scientific method and the principles of behavioral repetition inherent in materialist ideas of the self come together in the 1780s under the sign of the national subject. In casting orreries, coin stampers, and schoolchildren as what he calls “republican machines,” Rush imagines personal disinterest and political consensus as problems in precision manufacturing; only the endless reproduction of similarity can moderate the spiraling animosities of the postwar moment. The rhetoric of scientifically modulated republican disinterest, in other words, produces the expedient illusion of national consensus amid the intractable political divisions of the early United States. Chapter 4, “The Republican Girl and the Spirit of Emulation,” considers the material culture of post-­Revolutionary female education as a gendered

14 Introduction

expression of Rush’s and Rittenhouse’s fantasies of ideological common ground. My archive consists of compiled readers, writing books, and embroidered samplers—­ubiquitous objects well documented in other fields but comparatively understudied by literary historians. The reasons for this neglect are instructive: such objects immerse the subjective into the rote, the machinic, the objectified. Because they place passivity and sensation (feeling and appreciating the “beautiful”; reproducing it again and again) over activity and “reason,” we have tended to think of these “ornamental” arts as the tools of oppression, the impositions of a patriarchal ideology that insists that an “educated” woman know only that which is unnecessary to the functioning of the polity. Readers, samplers, and handwriting exercises divert the originary, potentially radical intellectual and affective energies of the young into derivative, palliative, and emotionally vacuous frippery.41 Narrower categories of accomplishment like oratorical performance and expressive writing have fared much better in our histories: the discursive and disputatious girl can subvert dominant ideologies of feminine silence, modesty, and invisibility; to borrow the title of one of the best and most recent works on female education in the years after the Revolution, “Learning to stand and speak” affords women not only a place in public life but a new, rich privacy as well.42 But what of the rest of the stuff that young women had to make and do? Reading a number of schoolgirl embroideries and a textbook that might have been assembled by the important sentimental novelist and schoolmistress, Susanna Rowson, I argue that the thoroughly derivative, endlessly recycling material products of early U.S. female pedagogy actually have quite a bit to teach us, too. More particularly, these objects allow us to see how contemporary understandings of sympathetic identification—­the ability to imaginatively replicate another’s feelings in one’s own body—­emerge from aesthetic considerations. They also help to trace the shifting contours of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in practical terms. I argue that “ornamental” texts created by and for young women can offer critical insight into the twinned processes of individuation and de-­individuation at the heart of “republican” theories of the subject. That is, I contend that “women’s work” and theories behind it afford not only an important purchase on pre-­Emersonian genealogies of the self but also more inclusive perspectives on the political history of the Early Republic. Part III, “Critiques and Affirmations,” begins with resistance to intersubjective harmonics through imitation in the work of novelist Charles Brockden Brown and ends with the reinscription of the arts of dependence in the work

Introduction 15

of Herman Melville. Brown underlines the potential for Gothic horror—­the murderous impersonator, the mass grave—­inherent in the culture of dependence and repetition. He is particularly interested in the way that personal externalities may be duplicated or forged in order to work some kind of violence. The falsifiability of identity is a relatively common literary concern at the turn of the nineteenth century. A number of early American tales make use of the trope of uncanny doubling or impersonation as a way of dramatizing the danger posed by emergent Chesterfieldian (or Franklinian or Rushian) ideas of the malleability or performativity of personality.43 From sentimental novels such as Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (where the villains look noble but act like cads) to Stephen Burroughs’s roguish Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (where the protagonist inhabits various subject positions—­teacher, preacher, farmer—­as a way of deflecting attention from his other kinds of counterfeiting), uncanny doubling or impersonation threaten to upset both intimate relations and the cultural order. Brown, though, seems especially worried: he makes dissimulation and Gothic imitation the master tropes of his fictional career. It is at the heart of the problem of his four biggest novels: Carwin in Wieland destroys lives with his mimic voices; forgery is an engine of evil for Arthur Mervyn’s Welbeck; and in Edgar Huntly, the main character finds his conscious life to be a thin and failing veneer for what lies beneath. That said, it is Ormond; or the Secret Witness (1799) that takes on dissimulation in writing and in repertoire most pointedly over the course of its narrative; I have included an extended treatment of it here because it is so vehement and detailed in its case against republican subjectivity without positing any kind of stable alternative. More particularly, I argue that Ormond refutes popular claims about American polity building as a function of the ethical copy: it aligns imitation with forgery, drudgery, mimicry, and dissimulation, casting all such derivative behaviors as a serious threat to the social contract. Where Rush finds the possibility for republican virtue in the essential mechanicity and reproducibility of the subject, Ormond finds heartlessness and murder; where Franklin imagines morality to inhere in repeated behavior, Ormond casts routinization as a kind of living death; where Wheatley celebrates the mastery of literary genre as authorizing and humanizing, Ormond presents such conventional virtuosity as a weapon of terrible power; where Rowson sees the concurrences of sympathetic identification as the grounds for building a moral polity, Ormond sees the possibilities for exploitation, fraud, and rape. Brown’s work paves the way, in other words, for the Emersonian narrative of exceptional individualism outlined above.

16 Introduction

Even so, Against Self-­Reliance concludes by underscoring the perseverance of the arts of dependence into the middle of the nineteenth century. Using the reprint culture of antebellum periodicals as a heuristic lens, I argue that the textual compilation and copying that structure Melville’s Moby-­Dick; or the Whale (1851) offer us a new framework for understanding what we have come to call the “American Renaissance.” Against persistent claims that Moby-­Dick represents a triumph of a self-­reliant (and peculiarly American) genius—­what Michael Warner calls the “Cold War readings” of Melville, in which “the American individual is pitted against a demon of ideology that is identified with everything except the American individual”—­I argue that the novel’s programs for democracy and for humanistic inquiry rely on various sorts of productive dependency, including sympathetic identification and artistic appropriation.44 In place of Ahab’s prophetic liberalism and bourgeois individualism, I argue, Ishmael’s different species of borrowing frame anti-­ capitalist and anti-­imperial models for making texts, subjects, and nations. In weaving a book from bits of other books and in building a personality from persistent identifications, Ishmael places a copyist ethics at the heart of a more perfect union. He insists, in other words, that an internationally viable United States cannot spring from singularity: imitation and the other arts of dependence may be suicide for the atomistic self, as Emerson and Stel/Sim would have us believe, but they may also be the very life of the culture.

Part I

Copy-­Writing

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Chapter 1

Imitatio Franklin, or the American Example

Prince Richard in the lamb’s skin: with a tongue in the cheek for aristocracy, humbly, arrogantly (that you may wish to imitate me) touching everything. —­William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

I begin with an epigraph from the early twentieth century because I mean to make an initial point about reception: since the first partial publication of the text that would come to be known as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (in France, in French, in 1791), it has served as a touchstone for numberless studies of the “American Character.”1 For more than 200 years, and for better and for worse, the Autobiography’s expressions of individualist, rationalist, practical, secular, and capitalist virtues—­especially when taken alongside the maxims that Franklin compiled into the preface to Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1757 (subsequently altered and canonized as “The Way to Wealth”)—­have been made to stand for something called an “American.”2 Claims for Franklin’s originary “American-­ness” cite the Autobiography’s perfect encapsulation of the tectonic epistemological and cultural shifts away from a deferential tradition toward a progressive modernity—­the same shifts that marked the eventual creation of the United States. Franklin’s breaking his indenture to his older brother is understood as representative of a broader movement out of an Old World guild system toward self-­determined (or “rational,” in Max Weber’s terms) labor; his flight from “provincial” Boston to “cosmopolitan” Philadelphia stands in for a cultural turn from the religious strictures of Puritanism to the boundlessness of the “free” and secular market. More than this, Franklin’s willingness to engage in typically proscribed

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behaviors (like frolicking with a “naughty” girl whom he has no intention of marrying, disobeying his father and older brother, or abandoning his Massachusetts relations) is thought to reveal an up-­to-­date sense of the impermanence of sin. His cultivation of the appearance of industry—­and his famous insistence that such appearances are at least as important as the virtue of industry itself—­mark the triumph of “representation” over “immanence” (to use literary historian Larzer Ziff ’s helpful formulations) and usher in a new age of market-­oriented self-­promotion; his social mobility—­from dutiful boy to prodigal son, printer’s devil to royal guest, escaped apprentice to esteemed philosopher—­charts the rise of a capitalist and intellectual meritocracy against the decay of hereditary power.3 When Franklin biographer J. A. Leo Lemay calls the Autobiography a “consummate and full statement of the American Dream,” he has hundreds of years of scholarship and popular opinion to back him up.4 It is worth noting that all of these “American Dream” and “tradition-­to-­ modernity” transformation stories are grounded in the assumption of a fully realized, utterly original, and independent Franklinian psyche.5 For such stories to make a persuasive case for Franklin’s inauguration of a modern American subject, his marching orders must come from within, not from without; Franklin must be self-­authored, self-­authorizing, and self-­contained—­a fully autonomous creature. But in making this brief, these stories neglect Franklin’s obsession with imitation and emulation—­his instrumental interest in the literary influences that shaped him and his conscientious authorship of new “norms and conventions” for shaping himself and other people.6 Franklin’s descriptions of his self-­making project are never insular or atomistic. Indeed, they form a model of bold imitation, heroic meekness, and boundless iteration that emerges from the material circumstances (normalized and conventionalized) in which his story takes place. More specifically, the Autobiography folds age-­old cultural protocols for developmental copying in with a contemporary sense of the operations of print culture; it recasts personality—­and not just autobiographically represented personality—­as a material, imitative, and iterable textual effect. In foregrounding the power of a continuing, reflective, and well-­remarked literary and behavioral dependence—­both explaining how adherence to a particular model will make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise and explicitly providing such a model for others to follow—­Franklin finds the grounds of subjectivity and independence in the managed arts of dependency and sets the mold for imagining individuality without individualism. There are myriad examples of the dynamic arts of dependence in the



Imitatio Franklin 21

Autobiography, but three in particular are crucial for understanding their historical development and influence in early American culture: Franklin’s initial discussions of his Table of Virtues in Part Two (written in 1784), his narratives about self-­instruction in the art of the essay (Part One, 1771), and his accounts of the development of a portable version of the Table of Virtues (also in Part Two). By treating each of these examples as meditations on the structures and functions of imitation, emulation, and iteration, it is possible to consider the convergence of textual aesthetics and corporeal behavior that structure Franklin’s project.7

Imitate Jesus and Socrates The second part of the Autobiography is not long, but it is more or less universally acknowledged as the philosophical heart of the text. Veering away from the genealogical and anecdotal history of Part One, Part Two is designed explicitly as a template for the youth of America to follow, a sort of breviary for making little Franklins. Its own centerpiece is one of the most famous lists in American literary history. As part of his “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” Franklin enumerates “Thirteen Names of Virtues . . . that at that time occur’d to me as necessary or desirable, and annex’d to each a short Precept, which fully express’d the Extent I gave to its Meaning.”8 This Table of Virtues—­arguably the foundational textual event of a tradition of American liberal identity—­appears as follows:





1. Temperance. Eat not to Dulness. Drink not to Elevation. 2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling Conversation. 3. Order. Let all your Things have their Places. Let each Part of your Business have its Time. 4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve. 5. Frugality. Make no Expence but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing. 6. Industry. Lose no Time. Be always employ’d in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.

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7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. Justice. Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty. 9. Moderation. Avoid Extreams. Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no Uncleanness in Body, Cloaths or Habitation. 11. Tranquility. Be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable. 12. Chastity. Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace or Reputation. 13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.9

Critical discussions of the famous table typically treat the whole thing as a bit of Franklin’s famous cheek—­D. H. Lawrence called it a “barbed wire fence” in which Franklin “trotted inside like a grey nag in a paddock”—­and take the last virtue as the biggest joke of them all.10 In such readings, “Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates” is nothing more than Franklin winking at his readers, acknowledging that the strictness of such a list is too difficult or silly actually to achieve. After all, how could one both be humble and imitate the Son of God and the Sage of Athens? Jesus and Socrates may have been paragons of humility, but the notion of a “paragon of humility” is surely self-­contradictory or, as Myra Jehlen puts it, “magnificently paradoxical.”11 I disagree. Franklin is almost certainly having a laugh, but, as the poet William Carlos Williams has written of Franklin, “Nowhere does the full assertion come through save as a joke, jokingly, that masks the rest.”12 Readings of that thirteenth virtue that see it only ironically emerge from a misreading of Franklin’s terms: for Jehlen, “imitation” means the same thing as “dissimulation” or “obvious counterfeit”—­in the same way that “imitation cocoa” makes poor-­tasting hot chocolate or “imitation leather” smells like industrial solvents. In these views, Franklin is necessarily a deceiver, one with a rich and complicated inner life that must be concealed from the outside world at all costs; a “real” Franklin (as a “real” American) throbs and connives beneath an opaque shell of sanitized, morally upstanding public appearance.13 To imitate Jesus or Socrates is to put on a public mask of perfect innocuousness—­the better to gain private advantage, to put one over on the dupes in the public square. But such a characterization of Franklin’s “imitations” unnecessarily limits the relationship



Imitatio Franklin 23

between “enacting” and “being”; these interpretations assume a Franklin with an identity separate from his performances—­an assumption that the Autobiography itself works very hard to deconstruct and discredit.14 As James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass put it, “Franklin knew that there was no such thing as ‘mere’ copying. Copying was how one learned. For writer and printer alike, imitation was the key to making a ‘new & more perfect Edition.’ ”15 For Franklin, in other words, imitation does not conceal vice so much as it instills virtue; simulations are not masks for personality but its essential components.16 Franklin’s directive to imitate Jesus and Socrates is not a mockery of impossible standards but rather a fusion of somewhat uneasily aligned early eighteenth-­century ideas of self-­making: the imitatio Christi (made popular in the spiritual biography and autobiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and the still-­evolving humanist conception of classical imitation. If we take Socrates as a figure for rationalism and formal scientific method (as many in the eighteenth century did), we can also locate in Franklin’s advice a synthetic third term: a quasi-­Deistic conception of logical and empirical subjectivity that fuses the tenets of neo-­Platonism and secularized Puritanism and that builds on the interpenetration of textuality and personality to frame a method for reforming humanity.17 Setting that final possibility aside, I want first to consider the constitutive elements of Franklin’s “Humility”: imitating Jesus and imitating Socrates. As a model of subjectivity, the imitatio Christi has a long history. Its central doctrine—­be as Christ-­like as you can—­is conceptually straightforward but historically complicated. What it means to be Christ-­like evolves over time as ecclesiastical structures morph and splinter and as interpretations of Scripture change. In the Christianity of the late Middle Ages, for example, imitatio was more or less limited to those rare individuals designated as saints; to be like Christ meant to perform miracles—­healing the sick with touch, speaking with angels, and so forth. Church elders placed greater emphasis on Christ’s divinity than on his humanity; only those who could suspend the observed laws of nature (that is, miracle workers) were recognized as true imitators of Christ. These miraculous few typically were seen—­as Christ himself was—­ more as objects of adoration than as objects of emulation. Such figures offered glimpses of divinity and confirmed the promise of God’s interventionist favor, but they were so special and so removed from the world of the everyday that they could not be models for living a pious but average life. The saints may have imitated Christ, but the churchgoing public could only admire and revere Him and His disciples on earth.18

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For the adherents of the Protestant Reformation, though, the notion of the imitatio changed. Protestant theologians rejected the worship of miracles and saints as idolatry and sought to shift the burden of imitating Christ (along with the burden of interpreting Scripture) to the everyday believer. They de-­ emphasized the divinity and singularity of Jesus, preferring instead to count him as the fulfillment (or telos) of a long series of Scriptural antetypes beginning with Moses. This sequence was imagined to continue after Christ’s death and resurrection. The resulting institution of an elaborate system of typology, in which believers were encouraged to map their own experiences (spiritual and otherwise) onto the experience of biblical figures, was one of the most important products of the Reformation. Instead of celebrating the miraculous deeds of others, reformed Protestants were encouraged to find the parallels between themselves and their spiritual antecedents; to recognize the trials and triumphs of Job or Jonah or Jesus in one’s own internal landscape could help a believer understand his or her place in God’s universal order. In this Reformation context, to imitate Christ is to recall how He (or one of his antetypes) thought or acted in a scriptural situation that parallels one’s own life and to work to replicate those thoughts and actions. Of course, zealous Protestantism also insisted that the extent to which a nondivine being could imitate Jesus was necessarily limited; something like a human “self ” (with its interests, yearnings, and physical failings) prevented the possibility of a perfect imitation.19 That is, for the Puritans, the “self ” was an intrinsically secular notion, hostile to perfect identification with Christ: authentic Protestant saints would live in Christ alone, without regard for anything as base as socioeconomic status, political sensibility, physical ability, or any of the other factors that otherwise might determine one’s standing in the (fallen, irretrievable) material world.20 Edward Taylor’s manuscript poem “The Soule Bemoning Sorrow rowling upon a resolution to Seek Advice of Gods People” (1701?), for example, runs through several metaphors for the horribly individuated corpus: it is a record of a “Traile of Sins” that “courts” and corrupts the soul (a “product of Breath Divine”), a “lump of slime,” a “cote” (in the sense of dovecote), a “dirty clod of clay,” a “Muddy tent,” a “Cawle-­wrought case,” a “Musty Cask.” The sinner wants nothing more to than to “[moult]” and “shed [his] woe” and therein to find himself enrolled among “Mercies Golden Stacks”—­to have his particularizing crimes forgiven and replaced with an unmarked, perfectly generic salvation.21 The fact that one could not succeed exactly in simultaneously crafting a “self ” and imitating Christ, though, does not diminish the ideological



Imitatio Franklin 25

importance of the imitatio. Even in the strictest Protestant ethos, living typologically and cultivating partial identifications with the incontrovertibly elect (like Christ) was a beneficial process. Although salvation was a preordained, unmerited, and permanent gift from God, it was bestowed only upon certain members of the church: each believer carried the responsibility for discerning how his or her lot had been cast.22 So that although performing Christ-­like works was no route to salvation, it was still critical to understand how one’s actions could be interpreted in a Christic framework. Imitating Christ was not as much about asking what He would do in a certain circumstance as it was a matter of asking what He had done and how closely His actions had paralleled one’s own. The closer the parallel, the more likely it was that one was one of the elect and, thus, assured of being spared the torments of hell and of sitting at the right hand of God after the Rapture. Put another way, retrospective identification was encouraged; prospective identification was a form of heresy. Of course, such doctrines were subject to critique, and they changed over time. The emergent philosophies of seventeenth-­century Arminianism held that man could consent to Grace and that good works were a sign of such consent. This meant that one’s behaviors mattered to one’s salvation status and that acting like Christ could indicate the initiation or continuation of an acceptance of Grace into one’s life. Arminian inroads into the New England orthodoxy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made a work like Thomas à Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi—­previously banned as Catholic heresy—­frequently translated and reprinted, even in Massachusetts.23 Cotton Mather, whose Calvinism was no less orthodox than that of his father (Increase Mather) or his grandfather (Richard Mather), outlined in his sermons and his diaries a program for imitating Christ: although persons were innately depraved, they could be born again—­and saved—­if they gave themselves over to a “vital” experience of their Savior.24 This “New Piety,” in which a dynamic view of the imitatio prevailed over strict predestination, comported well with the increasing mercantilism of New England and the burgeoning rationalism of the New Science: it provided a method for conceptualizing saintliness and grounds for negotiating its acquisition. By the turn of the nineteenth century, such sentiments had become entirely conventional: one popular sampler verse from the early nineteenth century reads Be Christ my pattern, and my guide! His image may I bear! Or may I tread his sacred steps; And his bright glory share!25

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Of course, there is a subtle but important difference between the tradition of the imitatio Christi and Franklin’s invocation of it in the Autobiography—­ one that suggests Franklin’s distance from doctrinaire Protestantism and reveals his generally instrumentalist attitude toward religious faith. In what amounts to a radical shift from his dissenting forebears (who Franklin claims rigged a “Joint Stool” to hide their Bible from the authorities during the regime of the Catholic Queen Mary), Franklin urges his readers (and himself) to “imitate Jesus,” not to imitate Christ.26 That is, Franklin extols the virtues of Jesus as a man and a moral philosopher, not as the Son of God or the savior of mankind. Although Franklin was never a particularly hidebound Protestant—­in refuting the arguments of the Deists early in life, he found that he was one himself—­one of his French Catholic eulogists noted that he was “accustomed to invoke [Jesus] with the most respectful awe” and that he strove mightily to comport with Christian teachings.27 That said, such comportment was for earthly reasons—­money, health, power, fame—­rather than spiritual ones. Franklin admits, “Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such; but I entertain’d an Opinion, that tho’ certain Actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them; yet probably those Actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own Natures, all the Circumstances of things considered.”28 In other words, as we shall see, Franklin casts the imitation of Jesus as a matter of good business and, thus, good moral sense, rather than as humanity’s only means for reconciliation with the ordainments of the divine. As with his exhortation to imitate Jesus, there is more to Franklin’s inclusion of Socrates in the Table of Virtues than the philosopher’s proverbial humility. The humanist tradition, which developed in dialogue (sometimes affable, sometimes explosive) with the Christian tradition described above, took Socrates as one of its central figures. This tradition, which emphasized the imitation of classical models in rhetoric and the arts as the best route to a useful, pious, and remunerative life, developed out of the classical philology of the Middle Ages. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at monasteries and libraries scattered throughout Western Europe, scholarly interest in the writings of the Romans and the Greeks began to wax.29 With the advent of movable type and more efficient printing presses in Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, ancient works and the critical apparatuses that enabled their study circulated much more widely: no longer limited to manuscript circulation, the formal procedures of Greek and Latin philology



Imitatio Franklin 27

became more universally taught and economically desirable. Distilled over several hundred years—­in poems and didactic essays by Petrarch, Erasmus, Roger Ascham, Thomas Elyot, and many others—­these procedures became the central philosophies of what we now call classical humanism. The pedagogy of the humanists emphasized the study of nonsectarian, pre-­Christian writings—­histories, orations, poems about heroes and philosophers, songs and plays about the gods—­in their original languages. The best way to exhibit a properly nuanced grasp of the language was to write in imitation of the ancients, whether in the vernacular or in the ancient language itself. The closer that a student could come to reproducing the style and structure of Livy or Tacitus, the more successful that student was considered to be.30 Books like Erasmus’s own De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512) or George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) provided students with detailed descriptions of rhetorical figures from antiquity and encouraging instructions on how best they may be incorporated into one’s own literary efforts.31 Imitation was not limited to the page: students also were encouraged to speak in the mode of Cicero—­including gestures, stance, and pacing.32 Although Socrates’ notoriously plain speech did not necessarily comport well with the more florid or decorative rhetorical operations of Renaissance humanism, his strategies of argument were much admired. The progression from indisputable first principles to their occasionally surprising or controversial conclusions became standard form for didactic essays and poems, as did the Socratic technique of guiding an active reader or interlocutor to arrive at desired argumentative conclusions as if they were his own. From Erasmus’s Colloquies—­which taught Latin grammar and proper behavior by modeling moralistic and humorous conversations—­to Noah Webster’s “Federal Catechizm”—­which taught political lessons by asking pupils questions about the proper operations of government in a constitutional republic—­the Socratic approach was at the center of humanist education.33 Franklin himself seems to have discovered his own zeal for Socratic argument in his youthful reading of James Greenwood’s Practical English Grammar and Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates: “I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt Contradiction and positive Argumentation, and put on the humble Enquirer and Doubter.”34 Franklin writes with evident relish of using his new rhetorical technique in his “Disputations” with his employer (and rival), Samuel Keimer: “I us’d to work him so with my Socratic Method, and had trapann’d him so often by Questions apparently so distant from any Point we had in hand, and yet by degrees led to the Point, and brought him

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into Difficulties and Contradictions that at last he grew ridiculously cautious, and would hardly answer me the most common Question, without asking first, What do you intend to infer from that?”35 This movement from simple first principles to complicated conclusions by way of the interlocutor’s own apparently independent work was not merely important to arguing high-­ theoretical or academic points. Humanism was also a moral philosophy, and Socrates was a central figure in the regimes of behavioral ethics promoted by Ascham and Erasmus. Socrates was revered for his simplicity, his generosity, and his scrupulous devotion to finding truth by rigorous logic—­all functional subsets of his humility. The virtues of such characteristics were both clear and transferable to the humanists: imitating Socrates would teach students to suppress their own passions in the interest of discerning truth, would inculcate the value of speaking with due clarity and force, and would instruct them on submitting to the dictates of power.

Imitatio Franklin For Franklin, inviting persons to imitate Jesus and Socrates may be less a way of undercutting through humor the grandiosity of a morally perfect self than a technique of fusing humanistic and Christian traditions for creating the same. To copy popular models is not to simulate virtues that one holds secretly in contempt but to embrace the most approved methodology for acquiring and maintaining those virtues. This is not just the lesson of the various imitatio traditions but the lesson of the Autobiography. In the same way that Franklin’s moments of aggressively performative industry (his carrying of two full forms of type up the printing house stairs, his trundling of a wheelbarrow full of paper through the streets of Philadelphia, his profligate use of candles) and his moments of actually being industrious produce similar outcomes—­that is, the work gets done—­simulating morality actually produces moral behavior.36 Moral behavior repeated—­even if undertaken without expressly “moralizing” intent—­becomes moral character.37 Franklin’s wheelbarrow pushing and night typesetting create an image of industry that happens to comport entirely with his actual work ethic: “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.”38 Such “Appearances” are portrayed not as dissemblance, in other words, but as functionally transparent—­if actively cultivated and instrumentalized—­representations of Franklin’s character.



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That said, the point of the Table of Virtues is not just for the young Franklin to encourage himself to imitate Jesus and Socrates but for readers to imitate Franklin’s imitations. Although one of Poor Richard’s own aphorisms holds that “we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct,” Franklin is never shy about acknowledging the power of a good model.39 Recalling the sorts of reading he was particularly fond of as a young man, for example, Franklin offers up a canonical list of expressly didactic or instrumentalist works: in addition to “Plutarch’s Lives . . . in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great Advantage,” he mentions “a Book of Defoe’s, called an Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather’s, call’d Essays to do Good which perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the principal future Events of my Life.”40 Pace Poor Richard’s claim, the Table of Virtues, like each of those antecedent (and “Influential”) texts, is expressly designed to reform behavior, to make the world a better place by offering better examples. Explaining the benefits of the table, Franklin informs his “Posterity” that “to this little Artifice, with the Blessing of God, their Ancestor ow’d the constant Felicity of his Life”; it was “the joint Influence of the whole Mass of the Virtues, even in the imperfect State he was able to acquire them” that created “all that Evenness of Temper, and that Chearfulness in Conversation which makes his company still sought for, and agreable even to his younger Acquaintance.” He hopes, therefore, “that some of [his] Descendants may follow the Example and reap the Benefit.”41 Of course, these “Descendants” are not just his flesh and blood offspring: although the initial addressee of the Autobiography is his own son, William, the implied audience broadens as the text goes on; Franklin famously envisions training a “Junto” in his self-­building program. He explains, “My Ideas at that time were, that [a] Sect should be begun and spread at first among young and single Men only; that each Person to be initiated should not only declare his Assent to such Creed, but should have exercis’d himself with the Thirteen Weeks Examination and Practice of the Virtues as in the before-­mention’d Model.”42 The Junto is imagined to then expand geometrically: original Junto members will split off and form new Juntos on the same principles, and those new Juntos will fragment and their members form still more new Juntos, and on into perpetuity.43 Franklin’s system of virtue is designed to become an infectious agent, radiating a sort of viral reform out into the American populace.44 Put another way, the Autobiography is not imagined as an inert representation of a life already lived but as a fractal blueprint for future lives,

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for future populations; it serves as the key text for a new regime—­an imitatio Franklin.45 The letters from friends that Franklin wanted published in the Autobiography as a way of justifying the writing of his life make such claims explicit: they position Franklin’s text as a necessary cog in the unfolding political experiments of the post-­Revolutionary period and treat the universal imitation or widespread re-­creation of Franklin as a lynchpin for consolidating a virtuous republic.46 In his letter, for example, the Quaker Abel James compares Franklin’s work to the “Friend’s Journal” (likely the Journal of George Fox, which appeared in England in 1709 and was reprinted throughout the eighteenth century), noting that such books “insensibly [lead] the Youth into the Resolution of endeavouring to become as good and as eminent as the Journalist. Should thine for Instance when published, and I think it could not fail of it, lead the Youth to equal the Industry and Temperance of thy early Youth, what a Blessing . . . would such a Work be.” The reformation of “American Youth” in particular along these lines, according to James, is of “such vast Importance, that I know nothing that can equal it.”47 In the other letter (dated 1783), Benjamin Vaughn casts Franklin’s life as “a table of the internal circumstances of [his] country” and positions Franklin as the “author” of the “immense revolution of the present period.”48 As such, Vaughn imagines that the representation of Franklin’s life will not only provoke American children and adults (“both . . . sons and fathers”) to emulate his wise examples but will begin to ameliorate the political tensions between England and the United States.49 When Englishmen understand that Franklin and the Americans made in his image rebelled for reasons of “modesty” and “disinterestedness,” Vaughn writes, they will be inclined to “[think] well” of the former rebels; when “modest” and “disinterested” (i.e., Franklinian) Americans see such goodwill, they will “go nearer to thinking well of England.”50 The heart and soul of this new imitatio Franklin lie in the (material and immaterial) consumption, production, and, ultimately, incarnation of literary texts.51 From the very beginning of the narrative, Franklin insists that the best way to reform oneself according to the universal virtues he describes in his Table of Virtues (or to replicate oneself according to the Franklinian pattern) is to imitate books. That is to say not only that would-­be reformers should adhere to behaviors or patterns of thought outlined in specific moral texts but also that those wishing to emulate Franklin should work to embody the epistemological and material characteristics of printed matter. As Michael



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Warner puts it, Franklin’s “famous ambition of perfection is formed on the model of print,” because this model allows for “the submersion of the personal in a general reproduction.” In Warner’s reading, the printer and statesman “may be said to have embodied the written subject, to have lived within the structures of career and personality in a way that was profoundly shaped by the printed discourse of the public sphere, articulating a career for the subject of that discourse.”52 And yet the flesh remains. Betsy Erkkila’s work on the Table of Virtues represents an important corrective to such abstracted readings of Franklin’s life, placing the body—­his body—­firmly at the center of his philosophies. Franklin’s focus on the pleasures and transgressions of the body enables him to imagine a space outside of religious and political hierarchies—­a space where something as radical as the American Revolution may happen. “For all of Franklin’s efforts to subject the body to regimes of discipline and control,” Erkkila contends, “his Autobiography is grounded in a reconceptualization of the self as fleshly, worldly, fluid, and ungodly.” This suggests “both a new conceptualization of the body as a source of agency and responsibility in the eighteenth century, and the constitutive role that the unruly body would come to play in defining enlightenment notions of the natural, the human, the rational, and the universal.”53 Here, Franklin makes a revolutionary (and Revolutionary) statement: by establishing the “personal” or the corporeal as a site of reform and insisting that the impetus for that reform comes from within, not from without, he finds that there is nothing out of the control of the persistent self. Franklin’s bodily transformation points up the fact that large sociopolitical forces (churches, crowns, parliaments) that act in opposition to personal enlightenment are not so powerful after all: abstractions like Liberty, Progress, and Rationality can find expression in the human body, even when they are otherwise forbidden. Crucially, though, even as it becomes invested with ideological significance, the body itself never goes away. As the most important object in Franklin’s reform philosophy, there is never a complete sublimation of the flesh into the text. reform programs call such critical In the end, Franklin’s subjective-­ oppositions—­between books and persons, between words and the actions they are meant to inspire or describe—­into question. Franklin cannot conceive of behavioral emulation outside of the forms and conventions of literary composition, consumption, and analysis; accordingly, he poses the problem of making and remaking the embodied self as a problem of derivative writing, revision, and publication.54 Nor can he imagine writing without the body

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and the physical discipline that indicates and structures this morality. Rather, he posits a collapse of behavior and textual aesthetics, erasing distinctions between the primarily rhetorical imitatio of the humanists and the primarily conduct-­based regime of the late-­Protestant imitatio Christi.

Franklin and the Spectator Such a synthesis of corporal and rhetorical reform is evident in a critical childhood incident that the Autobiography mentions obliquely but whose full explanation is deferred. When Franklin was a child, his Uncle Benjamin wrote at least three poems especially for him—­one of which Franklin seeks to reproduce in the text of the Autobiography, as his note indicates: “(Here insert it.)”55 None of these poems appeared in the original editions of the text, but Guillaume Le Veillard’s manuscript translation of 1791 (produced from one of Franklin’s own copies) includes two of them. The first (dated 7 July 1710) is a warning against the “Dangerous Trade” of “Martial affaires”; the second (dated 15 July 1710) is an acrostic that explains the duties of an “Obedient son.”56 The third poem—­and the one that might be “inserted” most sensibly into the narrative, although it seems not to have made it to Le Veillard—­is “To My Name 1713.” Written in response to a poem that the then seven-­year-­ old Franklin had composed, it ends with a rousing exhortation: Goe on, My Name, and be progressive still, Till thou Excell Great Cocker with thy Quill; Soe Imitate and’s Excellence Reherse Till thou Excell His ciphers, Writing, Verse. And show us here that your young Western clime Out Does all Down unto our present Time; With choicer Measures put his poesie Down, And I will vote for thee the Lawrell Crown.57 If a preadolescent Franklin was perhaps too young to absorb fully the significance of his uncle’s poetic advice when it was given, it is clear that the elderly Franklin composing the Autobiography was not. Indeed, Franklin casts such “Bookish Inclinations” as the key trope of his childhood: his desire to “Imitate [authors] and [their] Excellence Reherse” in the interest of promoting the “young Western clime” structures his initial understandings



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of his own personality.58 To appease a consuming “Thirst for Knowledge,” for example, the young Franklin claims to have read Bunyan, Plutarch, and Cotton Mather; he bought and sold and borrowed books of all kinds; he recalls that he learned this uncle’s shorthand in order to read the sermons that his namesake had collected.59 Although his father seems to originally have figured him for a tallow chandler, and Franklin had it in his own mind to go to sea, the young man’s love of books provided a third option: at the age of twelve, Franklin signed an indenture to work in the Boston print shop of his older brother, James.60 Soon afterward, Franklin began to take a more serious interest in poetry—­first in reading and appreciation and subsequently in composition. He wrote some broadsheet ballads (including a song on the gruesome death of Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard the Pirate), but his father soon put a stop to such frippery.61 Wishing to avoid the life of “Beggar[y]” that his father insisted would attend the large-­scale or professional production of verse, Franklin embarked on the project of teaching himself to write good prose.62 Briefly recalling those first efforts to write persuasive paragraphs—­in an epistolary debate on the propriety of educating women—­Franklin finds his reasoning sound but admits that his style was comparatively primitive. Happily, Franklin writes, his father corrected him: “Without entring into the Discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the Manner of my Writing, observ’d that tho’ I had the Advantage of my Antagonist in correct Spelling and pointing (which I ow’d to the Printing House) I fell far short in elegance of Expression, in Method and in Perspicuity, of which he convinc’d me by several Instances.”63 Without the proper rhetorical pose, the canniest arguments are destined to be unconvincing; Franklin, who insists repeatedly on the instrumentality of writing, cannot abide prose or verse that does no work.64 Accordingly, Franklin sees the “Justice of his [father’s] Remarks, and thence grew more attentive to the Manner in Writing, and determin’d to endeavour at Improvement.”65 Franklin’s method for reforming his writing is particularly famous, and it draws out the important doubleness of emulation—­at once imitating and desiring to exceed an original.66 It is worth quoting the description at length: About this time I met with an odd Volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the Writing excellent, and wish’d if possible to imitate it. With that View, I took some of the

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Papers, and making short Hints of the Sentiment in each Sentence, laid them by a few Days, and then without looking at the Book, try’d to compleat the Papers again, by expressing each hinted Sentiment at length and as fully as it had been express’d before, in any suitable Words, that should come to hand. Then I compar’d my Spectator with the Original, discover’d some of my Faults and corrected them. But I found I wanted a Stock of Words or a Readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquir’d before that time, if I had gone on making Verses, since the continual Occasion for Words of the same Import but of different Length, to suit the Measure, or of different Sound for the Rhyme, would have laid me under a constant Necessity of searching for Variety, and also have tended to fix that Variety in my Mind, and make me Master of it. Therefore I took some of the Tales and turn’d them into Verse: And after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the Prose, turn’d them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my Collections of Hints into Confusion, and after some Weeks, endeavour’d to reduce them into the best Order, before I began to form the full Sentences, and compleat the Paper. This was to teach me Method in the Arrangement of Thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discover’d many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the Pleasure of Fancying that in certain Particulars of small Import, I had been lucky enough to improve the Method or the Language and this encourag’d me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English Writer, of which I was extreamly ambitious.67 In many respects, this is Franklin at his most humanist: although the object of imitation is Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator instead of Virgil’s Eclogues and the language of imitation is English, the methodology that Franklin describes for learning how to write better closely tracks an Erasmian model. First, the student identifies an ideal: in this case, the scrupulous neutrality (or aristocratic distance) of the “Spectator”—­a narrative persona who eschews “personal” bias or rhetorical flourish in favor of plain talk.68 The student then takes great pains to duplicate his model, and success is judged based on the accuracy of the reproduction. His copies are compared with the originals and his faults are corrected, yielding successively better re-­creations.69 Upon achieving the mark of distinction that comes from producing a copy



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that is indistinguishable from the master, the student continues to emulate but shifts emphases. Instead of second-­order imitations (representations of previous representations of ideas), the student takes on first-­order imitations: he attempts to represent the master’s ideas directly.70 Franklin rigorously adheres to such a trajectory. At first, he is content with accurate reproductions of sentences and their sentiments, but he soon wants more; he converts prose to poetry and poetry to prose, and he jumbles his “hints” so that he can practice crafting arguments longer than verses or paragraphs. In the latest stages of his self-­education, he insists that his copies have become more perfect expressions of sentiment than the models he has followed: Franklin counts himself “lucky enough to improve” on the original. His repeated imitations have instilled in him the virtue of superior prose style, and he is ready to prosecute ideas of his own.71 This sort of shrewd copying could then be put to use in the market: Franklin advertised his short-­lived General Magazine and Historical Chronicle (begun in 1741) as “imitative of those published in London”; fifty years after the action described in the Autobiography, editions of Franklin’s Works were advertised as “Chiefly in the Manner of the Spectator.”72 Here, it is important to recall the material aspects of this procedure: Franklin’s imitations are not strictly a series of abstract or linguistic gestures but a collapse of physical and mental labors. In other words, Franklin’s reworking of rhetorical processes (which are also intellectual processes—­ways of thinking) is informed by his work in the print shop. As much as his reimagination of Addison and Steele suggests the process of budding classicists, it reflects just as vividly the processes of setting type and pressing pages. In Franklin’s method of composing, for example, concepts become blocks of letters to be jumbled up and moved around, then reset into more powerful arguments; by “modeling the act of thinking after the manipulation of objects,” according to Warner, Franklin underscores the relationship of physical behavior and aesthetic/intellectual production.73 Still, Warner concludes his analysis by returning to Franklin as an unmixed man-­of-­letters, a numinous, bodiless function of language. That is, the acts of writing and thinking are removed from the flesh-­and-­blood person doing the thinking and writing: the manufacture of essays or ideas is analogous to material work but is itself necessarily immaterial. For Warner, this passage signals the beginning of Franklin’s essential “negativity”; following the lead of the Spectator, he becomes a “general authority” on rhetoric and on thinking by abandoning his corporeal particularity entirely: “His internalized, private understanding of rationality implies a set of properly social

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and public norms.” Consequently, the “self ” becomes a disposable device for acquiring and calibrating such norms; the “personal” is “a necessary postulation, nothing more.”74 But such an analysis obscures Franklin’s necessarily physical relationship with his aesthetic productions and reproductions: his worries about the “sound” of his prose and his concerns about amassing a stock of words that literally will “come to hand” suggest the persistence of the aural and the tactile in Franklin’s composition process. This is not to posit a Franklin whose “body wags [his] mind,” as Erkkila suggests, but to acknowledge the ways in which Franklin imagines the body and the mind to be complementary.75 Franklin’s insistence on the importance of the ear and the hand indicates that there can be no written “archive” without the embodied “repertoire” and vice versa. As Franklin notes, searching out “Sounds for the Rhyme” serves both vocabulary-­building and argument-­making functions: the intellectual faculties are honed to “Master[y]” only as they seek to please the ear.76 Franklin’s treatment of the writing hand as a vehicle for the mind, as the ground from which verbal arguments spring—­words are only available for use when they are “at hand”—­is not a dead metaphor either. When he discusses his partner Keimer’s method of making poems, for example, Franklin emphasizes that which is lost when the hand is removed from discursive production: “Keimer made Verses too, but very indifferently. He could not be said to write them, for his Manner was to compose them in the Types directly out of his Head; so there being no Copy, but one Pair of Cases, and the Elegy likely to require all the Letter, no one could help him.”77 Here, Franklin works to collapse two distinct definitions of composition: the mechanical art of typesetting and the rhetorical art of persuasion become mutually constitutive. But he also insists that this produces poems that are both “indifferen[t]” and not “writing,” in the sense that such a manner of composition lacks a manuscript and that it bypasses the scripting hand. In doing so, Keimer’s method also forecloses an essential part of Franklin’s notion of the writing process: the (often physical) interaction with—­or dependence upon—­the labor of other people. “No one could help” Keimer set the piece because there is no copy to work from—­he is on his own when manufacturing his elegy, and the memorial suffers accordingly.



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The Little Book Probably the most striking instance of Franklin conflating body and derivative text comes in a grimly funny little manuscript poem that he periodically used as a calling card. One version runs like this: The Body Of Benjamin Franklin, Printer (Like the cover of an old book, Its contents torn out, And stripped of its lettering and gilding,) Lies here, food for the worms; Yet the work itself shall not be lost, For it shall, as he believes, Appear, once more, In a new And most beautiful Edition Corrected and revised By The Author.78 Episcopal clergyman James Jones Wilmer puts another version of the fanciful epitaph at the very end of the Franklin section of his American Nepos (1805), a collection of biographies of the “most remarkable and the most eminent” contributors to the development of America; the Abbé de Fauchet reproduced it in his “Eulogy on Franklin,” treating it as an example of “the ingeniousness with which he could make use of the terms of his original profession [i.e., a printer], as a medium for conveying his thoughts.”79 Ingenious as it may have been, of course, the epitaph relies on a familiar trope: Christopher Looby points out that Franklin’s conceit of life as a book as timeless object to be emended upon further editions may have come directly from John Woodbridge’s elegy for John Cotton, reproduced in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, where the Puritan divine is transformed into a “living breathing Bible.”80 L. H. Butterfield proposes several other sources, including John Donne and Francis Quarles, acknowledging that the figure of the new edition for the redeemed soul “was so well suited to the learned verbal play cultivated by the seventeenth-­century ‘metaphysicals’ that the basic

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simile . . . was more or less a commonplace a hundred years before Franklin wrote his Epitaph.”81 For my purposes, the imitative epitaph figures perfectly the conflation of life and dependent text, body and copied book—­the master tropes of the Autobiography: “I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first. So would I if I might, besides correcting the Faults, change some sinister Accidents and Events of it for others more favourable, but tho’ this were deny’d, I should still accept the Offer. However, since such a Repetition is not to be expected, the next Thing most like living one’s Life over again, seems to be a Recollection of that Life; and to make that Recollection as durable as possible, the putting it down in Writing.”82 When Franklin dwells on these “Faults”—­which he terms “Errata,” further conflating the discourses of printing and behavior—­it is not merely to show a private mastery of problems but also to preemptively amend the mistakes of others; he wishes to make himself into a new template and to forward the cycle of dependent acts.83 Franklin consistently presents himself and his text as “Example[s]”; because a temporal or physical “Repetition” is impossible, the “Thing most like living one’s Life over again” is to “Recollect” on paper and to invite the public to live their lives according to that textual idealization. As the life-­as-­a-­text metaphor indicates, Franklin’s ethic does not allow for passive reading. Just as Franklin has learned to write by emulating the Spectator, Franklin’s readers are to learn to be Franklinian by reading the Autobiography and committing its textual precepts to heart; they are to take Franklin’s words as the germs of their own future actions. Such is the explicit purpose of the second part of the Autobiography, in which Franklin discusses his plans for the Table of Virtues described above. Franklin seems to have intended that the table appear in a book to be called “The Art of Virtue, because it would have shown the Means and Manner of obtaining Virtue, which would have distinguish’d it from the mere Exhortation to be good, that does not instruct and indicate the Means.”84 Determined to improve upon the “Apostle’s Man of Verbal charity,” who instructs the poor to be less poor without offering any substantive help, Franklin makes “Means and Manner” his chief business. For the benefit of “People in all Religions,” Franklin explains precisely how the Table of Virtues may be iterated, materialized, and put into operation: “I made a little Book in which I allotted a Page for each of the Virtues. I rul’d each Page with red Ink, so as to have seven Columns, one for each Day of the Week, marking each Column with a Letter for the Day. I cross’d these Columns with thirteen red Lines, marking the



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Beginning of each Line with the first Letter of one of the Virtues, on which Line and in its proper Column I might mark by a little black Spot every Fault I found upon Examination to have been committed respecting that Virtue upon that Day.”85 This experiment allows Franklin to survey his transgressions and to monitor his improvement: he gets to see “on my Pages the Progress I had made in Virtue, by clearing successively my Lines of their Spots, till in the End by a Number of Courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean Book after a thirteen Weeks daily Examination.”86 Behavioral transgressions are converted into marks on paper that may be perused and emended; as in Warner’s formulation, the body quite literally comes under erasure as Franklin strives for blankness in his book.87 There is a problem, however: although the program works, Franklin finds that “scraping out the Marks on the Paper of old Faults to make room for new Ones in a new Course” means that his little book soon becomes “full of Holes.”88 He solves the problem with typical ingenuity: “I transferr’d my Tables and Precepts to the Ivory Leaves of a Memorandum Book, on which the Lines were drawn with red Ink that made a durable Stain, and on those Lines I mark’d my Faults with a black Lead Pencil, which Marks I could easily wipe out with a wet Sponge.”89 The paper book (like the fleshy body) is discarded as weak, unable to withstand erasures, so Franklin switches to a new kind of record. He remakes his little book as a little person, effectively vivifying his text. Made of bone and inscribed with “red Ink”—­a “durable stain” that recalls Lady Macbeth’s “damn’d spot!” as well as Franklin’s interest in the persistence of family traits and the “durability” of the printed life—­the memorandum book straddles the line between rhetorical device and physical corpus.90 Although it is carefully bathed with a sponge, the little book is not subject to the deep indignities of the flesh—­the vagaries of sin are surface marks to be erased at one’s pleasure.91 In such a system, blankness is ideal: an empty page is the most virtuous page of all; the absence of sin is the essence of virtue. For Warner, a virtuous personal “negativity” is achieved by making notations on a page; Franklin’s imitators, on the other hand, are encouraged to mark only so that they may efface. Although many of Franklin’s other efforts work hard to eliminate such emptiness, this grid’s blankness is not congruent with “unimprovement.”92 With the bone-­book, the empty grid stands for the life in which the forces of “inclination”—­that is, of peculiar desire, “personal” longings—­have been routed. It yields, in other words, what literary critic Mitchell Breitwieser deems the essence of Franklinian virtue: an “aloof and capacious blankness of a

Figure 1. Benjamin Franklin, “Form of the Pages.” From the holograph copy of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Courtesy Huntington Library.



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character that does not succumb to being defined by the diverse situations that it engages and masters.”93 Such blankness makes what D. H. Lawrence called a “pattern American”—­an individual that is by no means individuated and who can be thus be copied by innumerable others.94 Writing in and rubbing away, Franklin’s imitators will stop merely aping Jesus and Socrates and start to become versions of them. At the same time, Franklin emphasizes the ceaseless nature of this project: to arrive at moral perfection is neither possible nor particularly desirable; what matters is the process of perpetual reform. As Franklin puts it, “Such extream nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of Foppery in Morals, which if it were known would make me ridiculous; that a perfect Character might be attended with the Inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself, to keep his Friends in Countenance.”95 In other words, full erasure is not his desire: he wants his new little body-­text always to be marked, his “Character” always to be flawed slightly, so that it can always stand a little fixing. Reform, like housekeeping, must be a process iterated into perpetuity. He also wants his perfect discursive method to maintain a bit of fleshly frailty—­just as the flesh is bolstered by the abstraction of textuality—­so that it avoids the charge of foppish idealism. The bone-­book theoretically remains with Franklin in perpetuity, “always carried” as a symbol of his textual-­physical reformation and of his transcendence of that reform, as well as a signal to those who would reform themselves in his image.96 Although there is not much evidence that Franklin’s little book existed beyond his description of it in the Autobiography, its “existence” and circulation in print are precisely what make it important to his narrative and to his ethics.97 As a flesh-­and-­bone-­and-­word example, the memo-­book also serves as the keystone for Franklin’s political philosophy; it is this little body-­text—­properly written, ultimately unwritten, but never completely effaced—­that will form the citizens of the republic. In such a light, it is not surprising that Franklin likens his project of self-­ reformation to the emulous training of the writing hand. His metaphor for the process of becoming a properly moral person is the copybook: “On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was by the Endeavour a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been, if I had not attempted it; As those who aim at perfect Writing by imitating the engraved Copies, tho’ they never reach the wish’d for Excellence of those Copies, their Hand is mended by the Endeavour, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.”98 Imitating Jesus and Socrates and

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using the Table of Virtues and the Spectator as material aids, the Franklinian subject exists in an eternal state of becoming, of copying out to mend his or her life. It is no coincidence, then, that Franklin used his own handwriting as the model in the penmanship-­training plates in his and David Hall’s 1748 edition of George Fisher’s The American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion.99 This book, printed in dozens of editions over the course of the eighteenth century, became a standard in schools from Maine to Georgia; generations of American schoolchildren learned to write Franklin’s particular (or nonparticular) ABCs. Similarly, many of Franklin’s Poor Richard aphorisms became copy in copybooks. Thus, Franklin did not just set the aesthetic forms for learning writers; he set the moral content of their examples.100

Franklin Redivivus Franklin died of pleurisy in 1790, but as his presence in copybooks might indicate, his afterlife was considerable. In a 1773 letter to his friend and translator Barbeu DuBourg “On the Generally Prevailing Observations of Life and Death,” published posthumously in his Works, Franklin considers the prospects of animal resurrection. After speculating about the preservation of toads buried in sand, he shifts into a discussion of insect revivification; it is worth quoting at some length. I have seen an instance of common flies preserved in a manner somewhat similar. They had been drowned in Madeira wine, apparently about the time when it was bottled in Virginia, to be sent to London. At the opening of one of the bottles, at the house of a friend where I was, three drowned flies fell into the first glass which was filled. Having heard it remarked that drowned flies were capable of being revived by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment upon these. They were therefore exposed to the sun upon a sieve, which had been employed to strain them out of the wine. In less than three hours two of them began by degrees to recover life. They commenced by some convulsive motions of the thighs, and at length they raised themselves upon their legs, wiped their eyes with their fore feet, beat and brushed their wings with their hind feet, and soon after began to fly, finding them selves in Old England, without knowing how they came thither. The third continued lifeless until sun-­set, when, losing all hopes of him, he was thrown away.101



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Converting hearsay into experimental practice, Franklin performs two-­thirds of a miracle. His sense that consciousness or identity might endure a period of suspended animation—­that American flies, having drowned in Virginia, must have been confused about waking up in England—­suggests the very real possibility of life-­after-­death. Not the same life lived over again with faults corrected, as in the fanciful epitaph discussed above, but a kind of secular resurrection. Most of all, then, the parable of the flies suggests another way that a body might imitate Jesus—­in this case, rolling away the stone on Easter morning. Indeed, the flies give Franklin an idea: “I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life, at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine, with a few friends, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country.”102 What is impossible for science, however, is not impossible for literature. Memorials for Franklin rarely fail to seek the dissemination and regeneration of his spirit in other, future persons; galvanic experimentation may be too primitive to bring Franklin back to nineteenth-­century America, but an iterative Franklinism might be the next best thing. Douglas Anderson uses the trope of the “unfinished life” to talk about the incompleteness of the Autobiography, but the figure is equally applicable to the man himself. In his “Eulogium for Dr. Franklin,” delivered before Congress in 1791, William Smith argues that “it is for the interest of Mankind that so divine a passion should be cultivated, rewarded, and held up for imitation. The neglect of it would have an unfriendly influence on Virtue and Public Spirit.” Smith goes on to quote his own Oration in Memory of General Montgomery (1775): “it was the ‘manner of the Egyptians, the fathers of Arts and Sciences, not only to celebrate the names and actions of their departed worthies, but to embalm their bodies, that they might long be kept in public view, as examples of virtue, and, although dead, yet speaking.’ ”103 There will be more to say about this twinning of memorial and didactic functions in the eighteenth-­century eulogy and elegy in Chapters 2 and 3, but for now it is enough to suggest that Franklin’s brand of systematic imitation subtends a kind of eternal vitality for its objects and for the subjects it creates.104 Some eighty years after his death, the Boston firm of Golding & Co. advertised the home version of their printing press with dual taglines: “Every Man His Own Printer” and “Every Boy A Ben Franklin.” In this spirit of resurrection and perpetual return, I want to follow the

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Autobiography (and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas) and conclude with another form of inconclusion. Over the course of this chapter, we have seen how Franklin takes the dependent arts of the Christian and humanist traditions of self-­making and frames them in the context of print culture to cultivate a successful independence; the endless production, emendation, and reproduction of copy-­text becomes the master trope for understanding personality. Franklin’s embrace in a nonresolving process of emulation—­a desire to both replicate given models and to surpass them—­at once shapes his life and offers a rationale for the ways in which his written life may shape other people. Such perpetual motion, in which nothing is settled except for the dynamism or the unsettledness of the project, is itself critical to understanding Franklin’s conception of personhood and the continuing cultural significance of the Autobiography. Although Samuel Johnson designates “self ” as “a substantive” when conjoined to pronoun adjectives (“my,” “thy”), Franklin, who capitalizes all nouns, very infrequently capitalizes “self ” in the Autobiography.105 That is, Franklin tends not to treat “self ” as a thing but as an unending and never-­ perfected procedure—­an adjective that describes the process of becoming.106 “Self ” is at once the object of reform and the continually changing sum of reforming actions; it might even exceed the boundaries of life itself.107 Casting “American” as a set of nonresolving oppositions and providing outlines for not resolving them (in the Table of Virtues especially), Franklin imagines a nationalized but nontotalized, subjectivity—­a citizenship of contestation and perpetual change but also endless iteration. In much the same way that Article V of the U.S. Constitution sets procedures for the amendment and revision of the uniform and supreme law of the land, Franklin’s American exists in a constant state of striving for exemplarity. To imitate Jesus and Socrates or to approximate a body-­in-­writing is not the work of an hour, or a day, or a lifetime, Franklin argues, but rather the continual, never-­ ending task of an enlightened, “rising people.”108

Figure 2. Golding & Co. advertisement for a home printing press. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

Chapter 2

Phillis Wheatley’s Dependent Harmonies

On the eve of an unappealing business trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1764, John Adams paused to write a letter to his future wife, Abigail Smith. Anticipating the company of “bauling Lawyers, drunken Squires, and impertinent and stingy Clients,” Adams imagines himself transforming such disagreeable interactions into a flirtatious moral outrage. He reserves the height of his distaste for a “Gentleman” acquaintance who does impersonations of “Dutchmen and Negroes”: “I have heard that Imitators, tho they imitate well, Master Pieces in elegant and valuable Arts, are a servile Cattle. And that Mimicks are the lowest Species of Imitators . . . Pardon me, my dear, you know that Candour is my Characteristick—­as it is undoubtedly of all the Ladies who are entertained with that Gents Conversation.”1 As playful as it is, Adams’s assertion of a shared distaste of “Mimickry” as entertainment finds in the mutual exercise of aesthetic judgment a serious relationship-­building power: he and Abigail can agree that imitators in general—­even the best of them—­are “servile Cattle” and that their efforts (whether artistic, personal, or commercial) are bound to fail. Worse still are those whose imitations take on a racialized or foreign cast. In putting the voices of the disavowed in the mouth of the “Gentleman,” such performances threaten to upend or make a mockery of the social order; they bring the lowly into the drawing room and plunge the privileged into the “Depth of the Profound.”2 Indeed, for Adams, the impersonator of “Dutchmen and Negroes” is just as unequivocally degraded as the people that he imitates. In contrast to the “servile Cattle,” who blackens his own reputation as he rejects his proper station and personality to assume the words of another, Adams claims “Candour”—­manly frankness and honesty, with a Latin root in candere, “to be white and shining”—­as his own defining “Characteristick.”



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I begin with Adams’s sense that mimicry and candor are as naturally opposed as black and white, servility and freedom, or inhuman and human, to further foreground some of the cultural stakes of conscious imitation in pre-­ Revolutionary America. If Franklin’s embrace of exemplarity and the edition-­ like iteration of personality points up one of the hidden arts of dependence at the heart of an “Americanized” subject, Adams reminds us of equal and opposite cultural forces: the denigration of servility and the association of imitation with immaturity. In the eighteenth century, essentially aesthetic determinations about the value of imitation and originality were bound up with questions of natural and political rights.3 Under the terms of the traditional developmental model of imitation, copying was only properly the province of the child-­like, the not-­quite-­fully-­formed; once the culture’s normative techniques, ideologies, and feelings have been installed, the copying is supposed to stop. If it does not stop, there is something wrong with the copier: he or she is neither intellectually nor emotionally fit for the full privileges of citizenship. Such arguments were made with particular zeal with respect to black people, whose purported gifts for mimicry were often mobilized as evidence against the possibility that they might ever be equal to those of European descent.4 Indeed, claims about black imitativeness and what Marcus Wood has identified as a fiction of “childlike simplicity” go hand in hand as part of the broader dehumanization project that underwrites New World racial slavery.5 If the Revolution was an assertion of cultural and personal “maturity” and “authority” on the part of white colonials, the supposed immaturity and dependency of black people provided philosophical cover for all sorts of structural racism, including the denial of the franchise to black men, restrictions on black interstate immigration, and the three-­fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution.6 Adams’s casual association of mimicry or imitation with servility, inauthenticity, and degradation, in other words, epitomizes some of what we have come to understand as the organizing assumptions about art, politics, race, and subjectivity in the dominant culture of the Revolutionary moment: origination is aesthetically superior to repetition, independence is morally superior to dependence, and therefore white folks (who found in every contingency new ways to press claims about their originality and independence) necessarily exert authority over black folks. In the spirit of disrupting Adams’s easy equivalencies and the racist codes that they instantiate, I want to consider the transformational power of the dependent arts of poetic conventionality and repetition in the poetry

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of Phillis Wheatley—­a black writer who has been both praised as a pioneer and derided as an imitator for more than 200 years.7 This divided response to a single body of work makes a certain amount of sense: Wheatley was the first enslaved woman in Revolutionary-­era Boston to enter the world of belles lettres, but her poetry is decidedly neoclassical in form and content. Her personal story is more or less unique among eighteenth-­century writers—­and yet with respect to eighteenth-­century poetic convention, Wheatley’s body of work is unexpectedly expected. Instead of using her undeniable expressive abilities to write about the African experience in the New World, or her own marginalized colonial or gendered subjectivity, or the plight of her fellow enslaved persons, she writes on typically nonsubversive subjects in the voice of approved Anglo tradition. Her oeuvre is packed with elegies for ministers in exquisite couplets, adaptations of Ovidian myth in sedate pentameter, and odes to imagination and memory packed with similes straight out of an Erasmian copia. In form and content, she “writes white”—­inscribing what looks like submission instead of rebellion.8 As such, doubts about Wheatley’s sincerity or authenticity have marked her entrée into the American literary canon. She stands as an origin point for black writing in America, but her evident dedication to the conventions of not-­especially-­aleatory eighteenth-­century poetry and her manifest gratitude for being converted to a white supremacist version of Christianity have made her a complicated figure in African American literary studies. In his groundbreaking 1966 recuperation of Wheatley’s collected writings, for example, Julian Mason characterizes her as “not really a poet, in the classical Greek sense of maker, seer, creator.” Instead, according to Mason, she was a “craftsman”—­“primarily an occasional poet, one interested in the clever crafting of verse”—­rather than any sort of genius.9 Even more recent studies that move away from a politics of racial authenticity still feel compelled to use “imitation” as a term of obloquy—­as if it inevitably connoted racialized inferiority.10 June Jordan, for example, finds a provisionally miraculous Wheatley in fleeting fragments of her verse, celebrating those moments in which she “veer[s] incisive and unmistakable, completely away from the verse of good girl Phillis ever compassionate upon the death of someone else’s beloved, pious Phillis modestly enraptured by the glorious trials of virtue on the road to Christ, arcane Phillis intent upon an ‘Ode to Neptune,’ or patriotic Phillis penning an encomium to General George Washington.”11 Henry Louis Gates voices concerns about this search for “real blackness” in Wheatley’s poetry but also concludes his most recent



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study of its reception with an approving reproduction of an anagram that he’s been sent—­in which it is revealed that Wheatley has secretly been a subversive originary genius all along, if you simply take the time to rearrange all of the letters in her poems.12 In a different light, however, Wheatley’s imitation, repetition, regularity, and strict formal conventionality—­the poetic characteristics that have made her so problematic for critics and canon builders—­are not so much problems as they are opportunities to reconsider the poet in her own historical context. Indeed, a derivative, recursive, and extravagantly precisian method is not only characteristic of Wheatley’s aesthetic milieu but central to Wheatley’s particular poetic project. Embracing modes of writing that suppress anything like modern “personality” (recognizably subjective emotion, individuated responses to particular situations) in favor of an unimpeachable adherence to the accepted forms of Augustan verse and to the supernal patterns of astrotheology, Wheatley conjures the transcendent possibility inherent in the cultivation of similitude. More specifically, her exquisite meditations on matters of poetic dependence yoke together science, religion, and prosody in ways that offer a wholesale revision of what we have come to think of as critical elements of Enlightenment ideology—­especially those that concern individual autonomy. “Personhood” in late eighteenth-­century America designated a particular set of sociocultural coordinates—­white, propertied, male—­defined by its difference from (or frank opposition to) other sets of sociocultural coordinates: women, slaves, Indians, immigrants, children, the poor. It also encoded a certain philosophy of self-­determination: of their own volition, “persons” could declare (and enact) political independence, could enter into contracts, could buy and sell property, and so forth.13 In arguing against self-­determination, in positing imitation and moral submission as higher goods than liberal agency, Wheatley’s poetry doesn’t seek to redraw this coordinate map to include black people but rather to discard it altogether—­to restore (or preserve) the critical dependency of Christian subjectivity. Put another way, Wheatley is not as interested in expanding the idea of the autonomous “person” to include slaves, women, and other marginalized figures—­such that they might have legal standing to execute their own ambitions, hold property, count fully in the census, and so forth—­as she is in valorizing a “personhood” that does away with such potentially problematic atomism in favor of other empowerments. If, as Lincoln Shlensky has recently argued, the “life of a slave entails an unrelenting isolation of the self,” Wheatley’s arch-­conventional (and therefore dependent and relational) poetry is a

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historical record of resistance to that “unrelenting isolation.”14 Her imitation, iteration, and conventionality may not only suggest ways to transgress the boundaries of a particular racialized subjectivity—­“negro mimic,” enslaved woman, the socially dead—­or to forward some kind of pre-­Romantic aesthetics, but also to work against the idea of the isolated, bounded, self-­actualizing “modern” subject altogether.

The Question of Black Monotony Wheatley’s early biography is incomplete but oft-­rehearsed—­in her time and our own.15 A child of seven or eight in the summer of 1761, she arrived in Boston as part of a cargo of slaves from West Africa. She was sold to the merchant John Wheatley, given the name Phillis (likely after the ship that carried her), and placed under the domestic authority of John Wheatley’s wife, Susanna. Mrs. Wheatley and her teenage daughter Mary taught Phillis to read, write, and sew, and the poet Mather Byles may have instructed her in the art of versification.16 No matter who was doing the teaching, the young Wheatley showed a remarkable aptitude for languages: her first published poem, “On Messrs Hussey and Coffin” (who nearly drowned in a gale) appeared in the Newport Mercury in December 1767; her elegy for the Rev. George Whitefield appeared in print in 1771, sometime around her seventeenth birthday. With the publication of the Whitefield elegy, Wheatley became known as a bona fide woman of letters: she published poems (mostly occasional, mostly elegiac, and almost always neoclassical) in newspapers throughout New England and struck up correspondences with socially and culturally influential people, including Samson Occom, Samuel Hopkins, and George Washington. In 1773, Wheatley traveled to London to participate in the publication of her first book; her fame was such that her departure for London was remarked in newspapers. The Connecticut Journal’s notice of shipping activity in Boston for 3 May 1773, for example, advised its readers that “we hear that Capt. Calef, in the Ship London, sails for London next Wednesday, in whom go Passengers Mr. Nathaniel Wheatly [John Wheatley’s son], Merchant, and Phillis Wheatley, the ingenious Negro Poet.”17 Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, appeared under the London imprint of Archibald Bell in the fall of 1773. It included nearly forty of her compositions—­many previously printed in New England newspapers—­as well as an engraved frontispiece portrait and a welter



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of materials designed both to confirm Wheatley’s authorship and to modulate criticism of the text. Her master, John Wheatley, for example, attests to the fact that the poems contained in the volume “were written originally for the Amusement of the Author, as they were the Products of her leisure Moments.” John Wheatley’s statement corresponds to a long tradition of assigning women limited agency with respect to publication and asserting strict conformity with accepted conventions of gendered household labor. “She had no Intention ever to have published them,” John Wheatley writes, “nor would they now have made their Appearance, but at the Importunity of many of her best, and most generous Friends; to whom she considers herself, as under the greatest Obligations.”18 (Compare, for example, the authorizing prefatory material to Ann Bradstreet’s 1650 The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, or her own “The Author to Her Book.”)19 John Wheatley’s statement is followed immediately by an account of Wheatley’s ability signed by eighteen of Boston’s leading citizens—­all white, all male—­including the governor and lieutenant governor of the colony of Massachusetts (Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver), as well as John Hancock, Charles Chauncy, and James Bowdoin.20 All of this prefatory work to confirm Wheatley as the origin of the three dozen Poems on Various Subjects both performs and proleptically defuses critical disbelief: the authorizers appreciate skepticism about a slave’s opportunity or ability to write, and so they have come to explain it away in this particular case. But Wheatley as an origin is different from Wheatley as original, and the question of imitativeness—­its moral and intellectual valences, its racialized particularity, its cultural status—­structured the popular and professional reception of Poems on Various Subjects in ways that still resonate today. Contemporary London and Edinburgh reviews of the volume, for example, find Wheatley singular and her poetry dull; the details of her experience and abilities may disrupt received wisdom about the limited capacities of black people, but the poems themselves—­derivative, repetitive, firmly conventional—­tend only to confirm white doubts about capacities of the black mind.21 The Critical Review of September 1773, for example, begins its review with the standard thinking of the day: “The Negroes of Africa are generally treated as a dull, ignorant, and ignoble race of men, fit only to be slaves, and incapable of any considerable attainments in the liberal arts and sciences. A poet or a poetess amongst them, of any tolerable genius, would be a prodigy in literature. Phillis Wheatley, the author of these poems, is this literary

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phaenomenon.”22 As a prodigy (in the older sense of “monstrous, out of the ordinary course of things”), Wheatley is the exception that proves the rule; the “[general] treatment” of black folks as inherently and permanently inferior to whites is, it seems, completely justified. The Critical Review goes on to qualify even this modest approval of Wheatley: if there are fragments of her work that “would be no discredit to an English poet,” and the poems “have too much merit to be thrown aside, as trifling and worthless effusions,” they nevertheless “aren’t remarkably beautiful.”23 Even those politically sympathetic to the plight of American slaves were reluctant to find much merit in the verse qua verse: John Langhorne, writing in the December 1773 [London] Monthly Review, laments that the people of Boston haven’t purchased Wheatley’s freedom but also describes her work as “merely imitative,” representative of the “sloth and languor” and “deadness of invention” among Africans.24 As nearly everyone who writes about Wheatley has noted, though, the most notorious and influential critique of Wheatley’s career belongs to Thomas Jefferson; it too turns on the idea of problematic imitation, albeit in slightly less explicit terms. In the middle of the extended Query on “Laws” in his 1784 Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson remarks that “religion has produced a Phillis Whatley [sic], but it has not produced a poet.” According to Jefferson, Wheatley’s works are “below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem.”25 In this multistage allusion, Jefferson carefully distances Wheatley from what he calls “imagination”: Alexander Pope’s Dunciad ruthlessly mocks the subpoetic efforts of Thomas Shadwell and other Grub Street hacks; Wheatley is to Shadwell and his ilk as the famously diminutive and enfeebled Pope is to Hercules. Her poetry is, thus, considerably worse than the very worst of published English verse. Jefferson does not specify his objections—­judging her poems “below the dignity of criticism” takes care of the need for that—­but the broad contours are clear enough: Wheatley’s verse is imitative, recursive, mechanical. Just before his remarks on Wheatley, Jefferson argues that black people are “more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time”—­while also claiming such rhythmic accuracy as a limit to creativity. Black people, Jefferson argues, have “been found capable of imagining a small catch . . . [but whether] they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved”; where “melody or complicated harmony” could be, there is only endlessly repeating, monotonous rhythm.26 Wheatley’s poetry—­with its remembered and reiterated meters, rhetorical figures, characters, and neoclassical conventions—­fits



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right in. For Jefferson, it only proves that black folks can reproduce what they encounter, not that they can reason or create.27 The same could be said for Wheatley’s origin in “religion”: to Jefferson, Wheatley is the pure product of unreflective devotion, proof of black adherence to and simple repetition of the spiritual protocols laid down by their betters. Both her neoclassicism and her Christianity, in other words, represent mimesis (in its degraded form) rather than poesis. Wheatley, like other black people, is hopelessly tied to contingency and circumstance, to representing the bleak ambit of the already real: “Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination”; “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”28 Jefferson’s Wheatley is merely a copyist, a disciple, a recording device—­never a proper maker-­of-­worlds. Although its placement in a Query devoted to a discussion of “the administration of justice and a description of the laws” of the state of Virginia as of 1783 may seem curious at first, Jefferson’s ungenerous reading of Wheatley’s career fits in neatly with his larger argument about the sociocultural incompatibility of blacks and whites and the necessity of legal means to keep them apart.29 Jefferson organizes this argument around the proposition that whiteness (physically and culturally) subtends healthy complexity and variability and that blackness encodes pathological simplicity and invariability. Accordingly, Jefferson begins his rationale for the deportation of freed black slaves from Virginia (and for “the importation of white settlers”) with a discussion of emotional sensitivity and the hermeneutic glories of mutable whiteness.30 Paraphrasing Buffon, Jefferson asks, “Is [the skin] not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in [whites], preferable to the eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?”31 Physical beauty, in other words, is not merely a matter of a consonance between interior and exterior states of being (with the open face and the open heart as necessary correlates) but a matter of changeability; as Jay Fliegelman puts it, “Blacks, in their blackness, violate an aesthetics of variety.”32 It’s not just aesthetics, though. The many colors of whiteness—­flushing, blushing, blanching—­are beautiful not in and of themselves but because they afford exquisite proof of the sophistication and depth of human feeling; moment-­to-­moment variations of skin tone provide an observer a sort of access to changing interior states, evidence for drawing conclusions about the real-­time operations of character, intellect, morality.33

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The blush, in other words, renders concrete the potentially ineffable pursuits of psychology; the coloring of the face, as Jefferson would have it, provides a meaningful (because empirical) index for what might otherwise be uneasily captured emotional states. As they give rise to capillary activity, slippery abstractions like “shame” or “desire” or “guilt” become points on a visible spectrum, recordable and classifiable as empirical data points. And as involuntary responses to common stimuli, the movements of blood in the face allow observers to draw distinctions between persons without fear of some kind of Chesterfieldian simulation: if X blushes at the ribald joke and Y does not, it becomes possible to extrapolate all sorts of things about their particular characters.34 In Jefferson’s version of blackness, however, there is only “veil” and “eternal monotony”—­a dark, endlessly repeating, and forever blank slate where a transparent index of individuation and higher humanity would properly be.35 This essential inscrutability leads Jefferson to sweeping conclusions about the uncomplicated and unvarying interior states of black people: “They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”36 Jefferson’s claims about the opacity of the black body and the simplicity of the black mind thus reinforce one another: in the absence of physiological evidence of black psychological depth, Jefferson concludes that black people are not fully human. A version of this fantasy about black invariability returns as Jefferson moves from “moral” considerations to “political” ones.37 By Query’s end, the problem of personal monotony has morphed into the looming threat of a more general uniformity presented by racial amalgamation. Holding carefully regulated speciation in very high esteem, Jefferson wonders, “Will not a lover of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the departments of man as distinct as nature has formed them?”38 As the father of seven mixed-­race children with Sally Hemings, Jefferson could no doubt attest to the fact that the line between the black and white “departments of man” in Virginia was becoming blurrier—­and therefore more in need of policing—­with every generation.39 When interbreeding renders the population phenotypically monotonous, what is the “eye of philosophy” to do? How



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can the scientist draw conclusions about the origins and capacities of species if the categories of speciation are ambiguous, fluid, or corrupted? As in people, so in poetry. Reading Jefferson’s 1786 letter to the Marquis de Chastellux on the subject of prosody, we can see how Wheatley’s relentless consistency—­both in her poetic line and the sentiments her verses conjure—­ feeds back into Jefferson’s conclusions about the deficiencies of the “Negro” race and his worries about racial amalgamation. Taking up a favorite subject with a favorite correspondent, Jefferson’s letter applies the eye and ear of the naturalist to the different species of English meter. In the interest of moving away from the subjective niceties of literary criticism (which might laud ineffable characteristics like “grace” or “force”) and into the “real circumstance which gives harmony to English poetry and laws to those who make it,” the letter works to codify and evaluate poetic lines as if they were representative anatomical “specimens.”40 That is, Jefferson looks to make a sort of a racial science of the arts of poetry appreciation and performance. Jefferson’s hypothesis is straightforward: instead of relying on patterns of syllable length to find its rhythmic structure (as in Greek and Latin poetry), English verse relies on patterns of accent, the regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed sounds. This sonic palette is limited by convention and by biology: “In the infinite gradations of sounds from the lowest to the highest in the musical scale, those only give pleasure to the ear which are at the intervals we call whole tones and semitones. The reason is that it has pleased God to make us so.”41 The remainder of the essay illuminates this providential state of sonic affairs: Jefferson’s argument takes the form of a guided tour through exemplary lines and stanzas—­a sort of metrical zoo, where the structure and function of various feet are illuminated and where rules for pronunciation (in matters like elision and synecphonesis) are described. Jefferson is careful to point out “deformities” (an iambic foot in an anapestic verse, for example) that mar otherwise distinguished constructions, but for the most part he is content with producing a normative catalogue.42 If his project is more or less strictly descriptive, though, and if he seems less interested in the moral effects of particular meters than other prosodists of the Anglophone eighteenth century, Jefferson nevertheless does eventually posit a philosophical hierarchy of English poesy.43 Like others before him, Jefferson reserves his highest praise for the species of English blank verse: “The poet, unfettered by rhyme, is at liberty to prune his diction of those tautologies, those feeble nothings necessary to introtrude the rhyming word. With no other trammel than that of measure he is able to condense his thoughts

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and images and to leave nothing but what is truly poetical.”44 Such talk of fetters and trammels—­the horrible bondage of rhyme—­aligns certain kinds of poetry with slavery: recursive instead of forward looking, relational instead of independent, structurally beholden to certain sounds (instead of sentiments or ideas or moral arguments), and critically unfree, rhymed verse in English could never “constitute . . . the most precious part of our poetry.”45 Jefferson’s characterization of rhyme as fetter is, of course, wholly conventional, but his insistence that such formal choices place a poet beyond the pale of “our” best work raises the political stakes; end stops become a route to (and proof of) marginalized alterity.46 He gives the opening of Milton’s Paradise Lost as an example of the “dignity” and “majesty” of the blank verse line, then continues, “What proves the excellence of blank verse is that the taste lasts longer than that for rhyme. The fondness for the jingle leaves us with that for the rattles and baubles of childhood, and if we continue to read rhymed verse at a later period of life it is such only where the poet has had force enough to bring great beauties of thought and diction into this form.”47 Rhyming verse, then, is in the main like Jefferson’s imagined black folks: infantile, dull in imagination, valuing sound over sense, “tasteless, and anomalous”; it is what “we” are not.48 In certain lights, of course, Wheatley’s verse is guilty of all of the sins that Jefferson describes: it is endlessly iterative—­both in the sense of reproducing older forms and in the sense of producing variations on themes—­and is largely devoted to the “jingling” pentameter of heroic couplets. It is also emotionally even (or opaque) and almost unfailingly regular. In other words, those characteristics that Jefferson sees as poetic liabilities, Wheatley sees as virtues. If we shift away from responses to Wheatley’s poetry (and her person) and into some discussion of how the poems themselves theorize success or failure—­we can start to build a case for the power of trite images, potentially “over-­regular” lines, and other aspects of a pointedly derivative, dependent aesthetics. More particularly, we can begin to see that Wheatley’s poetic methodology (including her neoclassicism) and her spiritual Methodism are uncompromisingly aligned. Her poetry elaborates the relationship between Methodism and formal (that is, rule-­bound, iterable-­by-­design) eloquence and mounts a grand argument that the arts of poetic imitation (following the form of Pope, Dryden, Homer, etc.) and a Franklinian imitatio Christi are not merely analogous but functions of the same radical humility.



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Christian Humility and the Poetic Tradition In the late 1730s, George Whitefield—­who would later become the leading Methodist in America, whom Wheatley revered, and who served as chaplain to Wheatley’s patron, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon—­began giving a “Sermon on Self-­Denial” to various English audiences. Taking as his text a fragment of Luke 9:23, “And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,” Whitefield outlines the principles of Christian selflessness. He is quite clear that he is not merely speaking of charity or beneficence but about an erasure of individuation—­an ideal dependence or submergence of the personal or individual in the godhead. “Now as the Faculties of the Soul are distinguished by the Understanding, Will, and Affections; so in all these must each of us deny himself. We must not lean to our own Understanding, being, wise in our own Eyes, and prudent in our own Sight; but we must submit our short-­sighted Reason to the Light of Divine Revelation.”49 It may go without saying that such recommendations of radical humility and dependence upon supernal guidance proliferate in seventeenth-­ and eighteenth-­century Protestant rhetoric, but Whitefield and the Methodists interpreted it rather more strictly than others. The Irish Presbyterian John Abernethy, for instance, devoted a sermon to Matthew 16:24 (which echoes Luke 9:23 more or less verbatim) in which self-­denial only extends to the restraint of “appetites, desires, and passions within due bounds, so as to preserve the supremacy of conscience; their just share to the higher affections in forming our tempers, and their proper influence in the direction of our conduct.”50 Indeed, Methodists were notorious for taking denial of self too seriously: one anti-­Wesleyan and anti-­Catholic pamphlet, George Lavington’s The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar’d, maps the Methodist abnegation of personality onto Catholic practices of mortification, claiming that each pursues a “Love of Contempt, Abuse, and Injury.”51 This sort of behavioral humility has strong analogs in poetic performance; a dynamic of deference, imaginative substitution, and favor seeking structures the Christian devotional canon. As William Scheick has argued, Wheatley “participates in an extensive tradition of religious poets, like George Herbert and Edward Taylor, who fantasized about the correspondence between their spiritual reconstruction and the aesthetic grace of their poetry.”52 Consider, for example, Herbert’s “Submission” (1633), which frames the poet’s experience of writing like this:

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But that thou art my wisdome, Lord, And both mine eyes are thine, My mind would be extremely stirr’d For missing my designe.53 The trope is, of course, exceedingly common. The Boston clergyman-­poet (and Wheatley’s poetic mentor) Mather Byles ends his “Hymn to Christ for our Regeneration and Resurrection” with more or less the same sentiment. To Thee my Reason I submit, My Love, my Mem’ry, LORD, My Eyes to read, my Hands to write, My Lips to preach thy Word.54 In both poems, appeals for spiritual regeneration are also arguments that verse form itself should come directly from the divine: if the poet fails to put on a radical humility and cede his vision (and his “hands”) for the poem to the Lord’s, he will “[miss] his designe.” That is, he will both throw away his ordained opportunity for grace and make a botch of the verse. Wheatley may not be a devotional poet, exactly—­there is comparatively little in her work about her own struggle with faith or about her personal experiences of salvation—­but the contours of religious devotion, spiritual dependence, and Christian humiliation are nevertheless critical to her poetic project. This is especially true insofar as the trope of self-­effacement offers a useful way to reconcile the classical, pagan world that Wheatley’s poems often invoke and the Christian ethics that she uses those poems to promote. Put another way, giving oneself over to neoclassical conventionality—­explicitly mobilizing tropes and forms vetted by temporally and geographically remote others, adhering strictly to predetermined rules, effacing one’s own situational, observational, and linguistic peculiarity—­and Christian abnegation are versions of each other.55 This double valence of self-­sacrifice speaks in turn to other modes of subjectivity beyond a bounded, unitary self. Wheatley’s “To Maecenas,” for example—­the first poem in Poems on Various Subjects—­effectively turns a traditional appeal to a patron into something that erases distinctions between the poet and the audiences for poetry, between writers and readers, between authority and supplicant.



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Maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade, Read o’er what poets sung, and shepherds play’d. What felt those poets but you feel the same? Does not your soul possess the sacred flame? Their noble strains your equal genius shares In softer language, and diviner airs.56 Wheatley’s invocation of the favor of Maecenas, the patron of Horace and Virgil, follows a powerful and conventional neoclassical logic: with the protection of a patron, the economically, sexually, and racially marginalized poet can devote her attention to her verse rather than her mortal plight.57 Wheatley’s speaker would like her “lays” defended and thinks Maecenas peculiarly suited for the job.58 That said, this opening moment outlines a more general relationship between the producer and the consumer of poetry: as Wheatley imagines it, Maecenas “read[ing] o’er what poets sung” can “feel the same” as those poets whose work he supports. Poetry itself becomes a method of transferring experience, of occupying the lives and minds of others. There is room for individual variation—­Maecenas’s genius is “equal” but expresses itself in different “airs”—­but the reading of poetry is ultimately a technique for bracketing that difference in favor of an empathy in which the bounded self is deemphasized. Having speculated about what Maecenas might feel in the presence of a poem, the speaker begins to describe what happens to her as she reads: While Homer paints lo! circumfus’d in air, Celestial Gods in mortal forms appear; Swift as they move hear each recess rebound, Heav’n quakes, earth trembles, and the shores resound. Great Sire of verse, before my mortal eyes, The lightnings blaze across the vaulted skies, And, as the thunder shakes the heav’nly plains, A deep-­felt horror thrills through all my veins.59 What is true for Maecenas—­he feels what Homer feels—­seems to hold for the speaker as well. Immersed or “circumfus’d” in the atmosphere of Homer’s language, she hears the gods as they move, feels the rumbling thrill of thunder in her own body, sees the blazing lightning for herself. The act of reading, then,

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is not just figured as surrender or submission but as a kind of substitution: the best poetry is so absorptive that the situation of the reader and the situation of the writer become the same. The speaker’s subsequent plea follows this logic exactly: Great Maro’s [i.e., Virgil’s] strain in heav’nly numbers flows, The Nine inspire, and all the bosom glows. O could I rival thine and Virgil’s page, Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage; Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn, And the same ardors in my soul should burn: Then should my song in bolder notes arise, And all my numbers pleasingly surprize; But here I sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind That fain would mount, and ride upon the wind.60 As before, the self-­abnegation and embrace of imitation in this stanza are both complicated and utterly conventional. The speaker combines traditional poetic modesty (the claiming of an earthbound, “grov’ling mind”) with traditional poetic ambition (“O could I rival thine and Virgil’s page”) and positions the emergence of a bold and formally “surpris[ing]” voice as a product of the replication of another poet’s feelings. If the Muses would look on her as they look on Virgil and Maecenas, the “same beauties” would adorn her mind and the “same ardors” affect her soul; if she could feel like them—­not just feel in the same way that they do, but feel the same things that they feel—­then she would be more authentically herself. The poem concludes with the speaker finding on her own terms the poetic agency that she seeks to claim from Maecenas: instead of waiting around for him to bestow laurels upon her, she promises to “snatch” one from his “honour’d head, / While you indulgent smile upon the deed.” But what looks like a declaration of independence quickly resolves into something like infinite dependency: instead of ending with the stolen laurel, the speaker goes back to praising Maecenas (“the muse thy praise shall sing” for as long as the Thames shall flow) and seeking his favor (“Hear me propitious, and defend my lays”)—­just as so many others have done before.61 The whole of “To Maecenas” thus dramatizes the ways in which Wheatley’s adoption of the forms of Augustan neoclassicism participates in a dynamic of self-­assertion (that is, the claiming of a special place in a given pantheon) through self-­denial. By



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substituting whatever might be her “natural” mode of expression for the strictures of Pope and Dryden, she collapses Christian sacrifice and pre-­Romantic eighteenth-­century aesthetics. “To Maecenas” casts submission to the formal requirements of poetic tradition as joyous, liberating, and a source of perfect security, underlining some of the mechanisms by which the aesthetic pleasure of language—­especially highly conventionalized language—­might have a transformative or evangelical effect.

Methodism and Eloquence In this connection between formality and self-­abnegation, we can begin to see the alignment of Wheatley’s poetic methodology and her spiritual Methodism. As its name indicates, Methodism posits a critical link between form and content, between finely observed devotional procedures and spiritual progress; it rejected Calvinist doctrines of predestination in favor of the possibilities of repentance, regeneration, and, to borrow the title of one of John Wesley’s sermons, “Christian Perfection.”62 At Oxford, as Henry Abelove puts it, Wesley and George Whitefield’s originary religious club “kept a strict regimen. They fasted, took communion frequently, observed the Sabbath, met together for prayer and study, and visited the prisoners in the local jail, whom they fed and taught and comforted. So regular, so methodical, was their piety that the wits of the university jokingly called them ‘Methodists.’ ”63 As relatively doctrinaire Anglicans, it was the more the style of their devotion rather than any overriding theological innovation that gave the Methodists their moniker. Although sympathetic to the more enthusiastic evangelical movements of the eighteenth century—­of the sort that ranted, roared, and witnessed—­the Methodists found zeal without structure and control unseemly.64 Although careful to avoid Arminian or Socinian heresy and to distinguish mere earthly adherence to God’s laws from true godliness, Wesleyan Methodists nevertheless found keen observation of accepted rules indispensable to the project of spiritual perfection.65 Methodism’s critics most often expressed concerns about excessive formality with respect to Methodist preaching; anti-­Methodists often counted their preciseness of speech and address against them. Franklin, who numbered Whitefield among his friends, presents the mildest version of the argument in his Autobiography, recalling his experiences as an auditor in Philadelphia in 1739–40. Noting that a life of itinerant preaching affords

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extraordinary rehearsal opportunities, Franklin remarks that Whitefield’s delivery of sermons has been “so improv’d by frequent Repetitions, that every Accent, every Emphasis, every Modulation of Voice, was so perfectly well turn’d and well plac’d, that without being interested in the Subject, one could not help being pleas’d with the Discourse, a Pleasure of much the same kind with that receiv’d from an excellent Piece of Musick.”66 The substance may lack, but “frequent Repetitions” can ensure that the form is indeed heavenly. Franklin finds himself so bewitched by the polished sound of Whitefield’s preaching that he gives considerable amounts of money to Whitefield’s cause of building an orphanage in Georgia—­even though he can’t bring himself to believe in it.67 Alexander Garden, of Charlestown, South Carolina, puts the critique of Methodist eloquence rather more crossly in an anti-­Whitefield pamphlet from 1740. He argues that the “Enthusiastick Notions” of the Methodists always travel in the most beautiful (and therefore worrisome) sonic forms: there is “No Proposition in Euclid more demonstrable to me than that, not the Matter but the Manner, not the Doctrines he delivered, but the Agreeableness of the Delivery, had all the Effect upon you.  .  .  . Take away this Cause, no more Multitude after the Preacher! His Discourses will then appear what they really are, viz. a Medley of Truth and Falshood, Sense and Nonsense, served up with Pride and Virulence, and other like sawcy Ingredients.” The Methodist preacher’s words, Garden claims, “would equally have produced the same Effects, whether he had acted his Part in the Pulpit or on the Stage.”68 Garden’s case both echoes Franklin’s and taps into deeper concerns: accusations of rhetorical excess and impossible theatricality were common enough in cultural arguments of all types in the American eighteenth century; linking Methodist preaching with the lies put forth in the course of acting fits neatly into widely held worries about the integrity of public performance.69 What is striking, however, is Garden’s insistence that sonority is the whole of Methodism’s appeal: without the “Agreeableness of the Delivery . . . no more Multitude.” The beauty of the presentation deflects analysis of the doctrine: those enchanted by Whitefield’s voice, Garden argues, won’t recognize the impossible contradictions of his theology. Garden’s invocation of “sawcy”-­ness as a characteristic of Whitefield’s discourses registers a complex variation on the theme: where proper preaching provides a sort of main-­ course nourishment for the spirit, Whitefield’s efforts present (aural) flavor without lasting substance—­a kind of spiritual garnish. (Then as now, “sawce”



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can mean “condiment” or “insubstantial vegetable accompaniment” as well as impertinence.) This devotion to evanescent fleshly/sensory pleasures is, in turn, the height of sauciness in the face of the eternal; the surface may be beautiful (or “Musick[al],” as Franklin would have it), but there is no core of Christian edification. A sense of disconnection between surface and depth, of course, is Jefferson’s problem with Wheatley, too; she may have approximated the “tune and time” of genuine poems but failed utterly to capture the complex feeling that is supposed to animate them. As terms of derogation, “imitator” and “mimic” track precisely these claims: to reproduce conventional forms without apparently authentic substance is to counterfeit—­and therefore to threaten to disrupt the evidentiary procedures of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic judgment more broadly. (If you can’t trust the form to reflect the substance, how will you know when the substance is there?) Wesley, for his part, seems well attuned to criticisms that Methodism is more about rules and forms and beautifully wrought phrases than about heart-­love of Christ. Picking up the old works versus faith controversy from deep in the Reformation in his fight with the Scottish Sandemanians (who held faith as an act of will, salvation as something to be agreed to), he acknowledges that the “faith of adherence,” in which the forms of piety are strictly observed—­prayers are dutifully intoned, tithes are grudgingly given, mercy is a technicality—­is only a “second branch” of faith.70 And yet expression continues to matter. Whitefield was accustomed to cautioning his listeners about “dry Formalis[m]”—­about those operations of worship undertaken mechanically, without the real feeling only possible through Christic intervention and the regeneration of the heart—­but he also longed for a universal conjoinment of Letter and Spirit. “Oh that our Words and Actions might plainly declare that we belong to Christ!”71 In such a light, the stakes of eloquence become much higher. During his 1741 sermon on “Christian Perfection,” Wesley himself describes at length the fallibilities of man, carefully distinguishing between sins (drunkenness, uncleanness, “returning railing for railing”) and “infirmities.” The former must be repented, but the latter, as they are not of a “moral nature,” must be seen as ineluctable conditions of humanity. “Such are weakness or slowness of understanding, dullness or confusedness of apprehension, incoherency of thought, irregular quickness or heaviness of imagination . . . [or] the want of a ready or of a retentive memory.”72 As it happens, these infirmities manifest themselves in rhetorical performance: “Such in another kind are those which are commonly in

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some measure consequent upon these: namely slowness of speech, impropriety of language, ungracefulness of pronunciation—­to which one might add a thousand nameless defects either in conversation or behaviour.” Even though such problems cannot be solved on earth—­“none can hope to be perfectly freed [from these infirmities] till the spirit returns to God that gave it”—­it follows that excellent speaking (no matter how flawed in comparison to the ideal) approximates godliness.73 Those with the most grace in pronunciation and the greatest propriety in putting together sentences offer real, if pale (or darkling), purchase on what salvation looks like.74 In his 1744 “Scriptural Christianity,” Wesley echoes this same sentiment: working through the millennial notion of the “fullness of time” (from Romans 11), he speculates that among the saved, “no unkind word can ever be heard . . . no ‘strife of tongues,’ no contention of any kind, no railing, or evil speaking—­but everyone ‘opens his mouth with wisdom, and in his tongue there is the law of kindness.’ Equally incapable are they of fraud or guile: their ‘love is without dissimulation’; their words are always the just expression of their thoughts, opening a window into their breast, that whosoever desires may look into their hearts and see that only love and God are there.”75 Again, although perfect communication is reserved for a time beyond humanity—­ and “Truth, not eloquence, is to be sought for in Holy Scripture”—­faint glimmers of that redeemed future may nevertheless be present in perfectly just expressions, in speech that does all it can to present transparently the operations of divinity in the world or in the speaker’s heart.76 Sticking closely to poetic forms, then—­paying careful attention to tune and time and rhyme—­may be less a sign of imaginative failure than a sign of principled Methodist piety. When Whitefield died in 1770, Wheatley wrote an elegy for him that carefully rehearses the link between the formal requirements of sonority and the content of spiritual beatitude: We hear no more the music of thy tongue, Thy wonted auditories cease to throng. Thy sermons in unequall’d accents flow’d, And every bosom with devotion glowed.77 In an earlier published version of the poem, “emulation” replaces “devotion” as the thing that Whitefield’s verbal music engenders in all he meets; in both cases, Whitefield’s well-­wrought speech makes him a perfect evangelist and exemplary Christian.78 The rest of the poem marks this dynamic at every



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turn, repeatedly conflating Whitefield’s masterful oratory and his holiness. Thus, she writes, Thou didst in strains of eloquence refin’d Inflame the heart, and captivate the mind.79 And Thy pray’rs, great saint, and thine incessant cries Have pierc’d the bosom of thy native skies.80 In both couplets, Whitefield’s speech manifests special efficacy: it’s so beautiful, finely turned, and consistent that it reforms minds on earth and captures the interest of the almighty. Wheatley soon after connects Whitefield’s eloquence with his proselytical selflessness: He long’d to see America excel; He charg’d its youth that ev’ry grace divine Should with full lustre in their conduct shine; That Saviour, which his soul did first receive, The greatest gift that ev’n a God can give, He freely offer’d to the num’rous throng, That on his lips with list’ning pleasure hung.81 The participation of Christ’s salvation and the crowd’s “list’ning pleasure” go hand in hand: the grace of the linguistic transaction between orator and “num’rous throng” instantiates the “grace divine” of deliverance from sin. Moreover, as Whitefield “freely offer[s]” to the crowd a “gift” at first bestowed upon himself, he loses what Emerson might call his “mean specificity”—­what has made him special may, if properly received, make everyone else present special in the same way. Wheatley concludes the poem with a final lament for Whitefield’s lost eloquence: But, though arrested by the hand of death, Whitefield no more exerts his lab’ring breath, Yet let us view him in th’ eternal skies, Let ev’ry heart to this bright vision rise;

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While the tomb safe retains its sacred trust, Till life divine re-­animates his dust.82 Wheatley’s lingering on the physicality of Whitefield’s achievements—­ his “lips” earlier in the poem, the “lab’ring breath” of public speaking here—­and her looking forward to the resurrection of that physical body anticipate Olaudah Equiano’s famous remark about observing Whitefield “sweating as much as I ever did while in slavery on Montserrat beach” while preaching in Philadelphia.83 Admiring the way in which Whitefield manages to bring the corporal exigencies of linguistic utterance in line with the demands of spiritual “vision”—­his ability, that is, to match content with form in the service of giving himself away—­Wheatley celebrates his place among the saints everlasting.

Astronomy Domine The innocuous, totally conventional figure of “th’ eternal skies” that concludes the Whitfield elegy introduces another aspect of Wheatley’s formalist ethics. Since the publication of Wheatley’s Poems, critical interest in Wheatley’s relationship to the stars has been strong: just before he gets to the part about the poet being “merely imitative” in his 1774 Monthly Review essay, for example, John Langhorne claims that “the poems written by this young negro bear no endemial marks of solar fire or spirit.”84 Although Langhorne refers to a failed expectation of extravagant passion or exoticism (in keeping with then-­current ideas about race as a function of climate) in Wheatley’s poems—­suggesting that in her neoclassical or Christian precisianism, she has traduced the single potentially interesting aspect of her African birthright—­it also points us toward a critical set of rhetorical figures. In point of fact, “marks of solar fire or spirit” (albeit of a different kind than the reviewer wants to see) are everywhere in Wheatley’s verse.85 Some contemporary scholars ascribe this to Wheatley’s syncretic impulse, finding African or Africentric resonances in her sun worship.86 For my purposes, however, there is something more to it than that: building on a long tradition of Christian (and pre-­Christian) thought, the tropes of astronomy become useful shorthand in her exploration of the relationship between endlessly iterable verse form and providential cosmology—­another way of relating her work as a poet to the operations of the divine. Wheatley’s “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” for example, begins with a statement of purpose and an invocation:



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Arise, my soul, on wings enraptur’d, rise To praise the monarch of the earth and skies, Whose goodness and beneficence appear As round its centre moves the rolling year, Or when the morning glows with rosy charms, Or the sun slumbers in the ocean’s arms; Of light divine be a rich portion lent To guide my soul, and favour my intent. Celestial muse, my arduous flight sustain, And raise my mind to a seraphic strain!87 We will return to this notion of the “seraphic strain” in a moment—­for now, though, it will do to emphasize that “goodness and beneficence appear” in ordered, predictable movements; the power of the divine “monarch of the earth and skies” inheres in His ability to keep those things harmoniously and repeatedly circling.88 One of Wheatley’s repeated euphemisms for God is “Ruler of the sky [or skies].”89 In “To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband,” Wheatley imagines the apocalypse as that moment where the celestial-­regulation operations of God come to an end: “Till time shall cease, till many a starry world / Shall fall from heav’n, in dire confusion hurl’d.”90 There is a similar vision in “To a Lady on the Death of Three Relations.”91 For a poet like John Milton, it is enough to praise or invoke the light itself (as “Hail holy Light!” at the beginning of Paradise Lost, Book III) in order to begin a song; for Wheatley, though, the patterning of light is the thing—­and the God of ordering, of metronomic ebb and flow, becomes the muse.92 The regular motion of the sun—­its diurnal rolling through sunrise and sunset—­is as representative of God’s favor as the light that it emits. As “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” continues, so does the trope: Ador’d for ever be the God unseen, Which round the sun revolves this vast machine, Though to his eye its mass a point appears: Ador’d the God that whirls surrounding spheres, Which first ordain’d that mighty Sol should reign The peerless monarch of th’ ethereal train: Of miles twice forty millions is his height, And yet his radiance dazzles mortal sight So far beneath—­from him th’ extended earth

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Vigour derives, and ev’ry flow’ry birth. Vast through her orb she moves with easy grace Around her Phoebus in unbounded space; True to her course th’ impetuous storm derides, Triumphant o’er the winds, and surging tides.93 Again, God’s power is manifest most clearly in formal regularity, the smoothness with which earth continues in its regular orbit no matter how powerful (or erratic) the “winds” and “storms” and “tides” may be. (“Tides” here seems to operate more in the metaphorical or poetic sense—­standing for the movement of the ocean more generally, not the predictable ebb and flow of tidal waters.) There may be irregularity on the ground, but the motions of the heavens are all “easy grace.” Wheatley’s notion of the vast revolving mechanical universe—­with an unseen God “ordaining” and “harmoniously” “whirling” all before Him—­is certainly a familiar figure: metaphoric claims about God as a divine clockmaker or about the clockwork nature of creation were at least as old as the Romans and work just as well with Pythagorean and Newtonian cosmology as they do with Christian doctrine.94 Indeed, there was a whole genre of texts published in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, including William Derham’s Astro-­Theology (first published in 1715; in its thirteenth edition by 1769) and Bernard Nieuwentyt’s Religious Philosopher (1718), which combined cutting-­edge astronomy with theology. In these works, the careful observation of the motions of the heavens informs cosmological proofs of the existence of the deity. Derham in particular celebrates the “great Regularity of the Motions of every Globe”: “that every planet should have as many, and various motions, and those as regular, and well contrived and ordered, as the world and its inhabitants have occasion for, what could all this be but the work of a wise and kind, as well as omnipotent CREATOR, and Orderer of the world’s affairs?”95 There are, in other words, no bright lines between natural philosophical inquiry and spiritual longing. Derham cites Plato, Aristotle, and “Tully’s Stoick” as evidence for his argument about the necessary divinity of the prime mover but also includes (in a section on sunspots as a testament to God’s providence) the more contemporary empirical observation-­based efforts of distinguished natural philosophers like Galileo, Cassini, Boyle, Hooke, Halley, Flamsteed, and Picard.96 Wheatley’s affinity for this syncretic approach to the universe appears not just in the overall argument of “On Providence” but in its seemingly



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throwaway details. The “twice forty millions” figure, for instance, that the speaker gives for the distance between the sun and the earth recorded in the poem reflects then-­current scientific thinking. Although this distance is nearly unimaginably large, it is not at all metaphorical: it can be measured, calculated, empirically observed; unlike a “vast immensity” or a Miltonic “huge,” it is a reproducible result. If we compare Wheatley’s number with another treatment of solar distance, from the earlier and less astronomically inclined Increase Mather, the difference is striking. For Mather, “The Old Astronomers have maintained that it is above Eighty Millions of Miles, from the Earth to the Starry Heaven. Late Astronomers, suppose it to be many times more, than that amounts unto. . . . We know from the Scripture, that the Empyrean Heaven is Vastly above the highest Stars, but how much higher no man can say. And it is Presumption in those men, who go about to Determine it.”97 To Mather, writing in 1711, the limits of science are manifest. Numerical speculation tells us nothing of the “Empyrean Heaven” that we need to know; the “wonderful” will not be reduced nor the infinite “Determine[d]” by mathematicians, astronomers, or “some Divines.” For Wheatley, on the other hand, science and religion are inextricable: producing and drilling down into astronomical data reveals nothing more or less than the regulating operations of divinity. Wheatley was well aware of texts like Derham’s. She had received a copy of another astrotheological work, Thomas Amory’s Daily Devotion Assisted and Recommended, as a gift from the Reverend Charles Chauncy in 1772. (Indeed, she thought enough of it to pass it along to her young friend Thomas Walcutt, just starting college in 1774.98) Amory’s argument about the power of God manifest in the mere fact of sunrise speaks especially well to Wheatley’s formal interests: The constant, regular, and beneficial succession of day and night demonstrates to every considering mind, the unbounded power, wisdom, and goodness of God, continually exerting themselves, and should lead us to observe and acknowledge them. The great change from night to day, is produced by the motion of the earth round its center. The earth, which is thus constantly rolled round, is a heavy lifeless mass, incapable of moving itself, and its bulk twenty-­four thousand miles or more in circumference. Almighty then must we confess that hand, which hath for so many thousand years performed this motion in an uniform manner. . . . How ought we therefore, when we open our

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eyes to the returning light, to adore the God, whose power through immense spaces darts to our eyes the morning rays; and moves the great bodies of the universe, so as in a regular succession may give us the enjoyment of them!99 In Wheatley’s poetry, we find the same thing: the “uniform” and “regular” succession of night and day provides humanity with some sort of hope for their collective future. After a brief discussion of how sleep prefigures death (“When tasks diurnal tire the human frame, / The spirits faint, and dim the vital flame”), the speaker of “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” finds in the endlessly recurring, utterly rule-­bound promise of sunrise a version of resurrection or redemption. Again, gay Phoebus, as the day before, Wakes ev’ry eye, but what shall wake no more; Again the face of nature is renew’d, Which still appears harmonious, fair, and good. May grateful strains salute the smiling morn, Before its beams the eastern hills adorn!100 Endless regularity and repetition is the natural province of the divine; the sun, “again . . . as the day before” rises and “renews” the face of nature, expressing the essential harmony and goodness of Creation.101 Humanity is not accorded the same privilege of endless repetition because mortality breaks the cycle—­ some eyes wake, some eyes “wake no more”—­but people can approximate the repeating majesty of the universe by participating in the ritual predawn song. “Grateful strains,” devotionally performed, express a faint resonance with creation’s own rhythms; matins offer hope that Providence extends all the way down to us. Wheatley’s verse epistle “To the Rev. Dr. Thomas Amory on Reading His Sermons on Daily Devotion, in which that Duty is Recommended and Assisted” also works to connect astrotheological discourse to the reform of personal comportment, recommending an ethics that reflects the regularity and eternal recurrence of the ordered universe. The poem begins with a statement about the functions of Amory’s book: To cultivate in ev’ry noble mind Habitual grace, and sentiments refin’d,



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Thus while you strive to mend the human heart, Thus while the heav’nly precepts you impart, O may each bosom catch the sacred fire, And youthful minds to Virtue’s throne aspire!102 Wheatley’s sense of grace as a “sacred fire” potentially “habitual” in individuals—­rather than divinely ordained or revealed—­fits well with her notion that “heav’nly precepts” are implantable in all readers of Amory’s text. Universal salvation may come from the diurnal repetition (both within and across persons) of Amory’s lessons, which practice finds its model in the movements of the sun. Indeed, Amory’s book expressly imagines itself as something of an astronomically inflected Book of Common Prayer—­ scripting devotional performance so that it can be consistently performed. The second edition adds “prayers, for the assistance of those who, properly impressed with the instances of the providence and goodness of God, which every morning and evening supply, are desirous to cherish and communicate their impression by daily family devotion.”103 Put another way: for both Wheatley and Amory, regularity and virtue go hand in hand and find their perfect representatives in the stars. It is perhaps for this reason that Wheatley insists that astronomy is better suited to describing “God’s eternal ways” than other disciplines—­poetry included: Artists may paint the sun’s effulgent rays, But Amory’s pen the brighter God displays: While his great works in Amory’s pages shine, And while he proves his essence all divine, The Atheist sure no more can boast aloud Of chance, or nature, and exclude the God; As if the clay without the potter’s aid Should rise in various forms, and shapes self-­made, Or worlds above with orb o’er orb profound Self-­mov’d could run the everlasting round. It cannot be—­unerring Wisdom guides With eye propitious, and o’er all presides.104 For Wheatley, straightforward descriptions of the movements of the stars provide more persuasive arguments for the existence and omnipresence of God than more traditionally “poetic” or “artistic” images. Praiseful representations

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of the “sun’s effulgent rays” are certainly appealing, but they don’t capture the majesty of the deity (or confirm the grace of the speaker) in the same way that astrotheology can, with its emphasis on the regular motions of the “everlasting round.” Simply because they are not astronomers, “Artists” risk prioritizing their own perceptions and injecting too much of the carnal self into their depictions. In self-­consciously artful art, the self-­made shape and the “self-­mov’d” object of atheism become all too possible. As such, Wheatley argues that if poetry is to have any effect at all, then it must conform to and somehow confer this universal order; that is, it must be mimetic, born of radical humility, and work especially hard to represent the ceaseless perfect rhythms of the heavens. One of the poems used to promote the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (appearing in The London Magazine; or Gentlemen’s Monthly Intelligencer in September 1773) was Wheatley’s version of an aubade, “An Hymn to Morning.” It opens with a classical invocation: Attend my lays, ye ever honour’d nine, Assist my labours, and my strains refine; In smoothest numbers pour the notes along, For bright Aurora now demands my song.105 Appropriately enough, Wheatley’s quatrain about how describing dawn requires refined “strains” and “smoothest numbers” is nearly perfect iambic pentameter. (Perhaps in a nod to human frailty, there is a slight hiccup in the second line: “and” does not receive a full stress). If Pope mocks those poets who are “correctly cold, and regularly low, / That shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep,” he also finds that True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. ’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense: Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows.106 Wheatley’s “Hymn” suggests that “correctness” and “cold” may be antithetical; only the most regular poetry can capture the warmth and beautiful periodicity of the sun. If she resists Pope’s claim that a poet’s own practiced “art”



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might be of help in according “sound” and “sense”—­they are naturally consonant anyway; divine correspondence needs no human intervention—­she is nevertheless committed to approximating the motions of the spheres as well as human language can. In “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” Wheatley links other sorts of poetic mimesis with the natural patterns that confirm providential theology. All-­wise Almighty providence we trace In trees, and plants, and all the flow’ry race; As clear as in the nobler frame of Man; All lovely copies of the Maker’s plan.107 Here, the botanical world offers the same evidence of Design that everyone may find in the heavens and in themselves—­as “lovely copies of the Maker’s plan.” Wheatley’s “we” (the poet and her celestial muse? all humanity?) both follows out and depicts (with the double meaning of “trace” certainly active here) the wonders of the natural world as a form of worship. Poetic imitation reinforces the lessons of more worldly observation. The rhyme, figural repetition, and cultural allusion that Jefferson cannot abide operate as formal restatements of the recursiveness of the ordered universe; the well-­tended, metrically correct line offers another “lovely [copy] of the Maker’s plan.” If, then, her poems sound like other people’s poems, that might count more as triumph than as shame. Indeed, Pope’s sense that the “ancient rules” of poetry deserve “a just esteem”—­that “To copy nature is to copy them”—­offers a compelling warrant for Wheatley’s poetic project: Those Rules of old discovered, not devised, Are Nature still, but Nature methodized; Nature, like liberty, is but restrained By the same laws which first herself ordained.108 For Wheatley, God’s rules and plans are to be discovered and followed in poems just as they are in life; conventional fidelity—­metrical, adjectival, figural, ­subjectival—­is the watchword, not origination or innovation. In “On Imagination,” for instance, after dozens of lines extolling the miracles of fancy—­how in the mind “The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise” even in the depths of a New England winter, how imagination allows the poet to “surpass the wind, / And leave the rolling universe behind”—­Wheatley’s

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speaker finds herself confronted by the absolute inevitability of the divinely ordained real. Winter austere forbids me to aspire, And northern tempests damp the rising fire; They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea, Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.109 Imagination’s power is intoxicating, but its disavowal of the natural order of things and its removal of the poet from the rhythms of the “rolling universe” means that it must be necessarily temporary.110 The fancy that starts out so promising comes to represent anthropocentric hubris—­where Creation is redesigned to fit the whims of humanity instead of the dictates of God—­and it therefore cannot and should not last. What initially registers as melancholy here (the poet is “reluctant” to “leave the pleasing views / Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse”) becomes the triumph of abasement before divinity.111 As the poet ceases her own “unequal” song, equality is returned to the “lay” of the universe.

The Elegy and the Celestial Song This figure of the “celestial lay” or the “seraphic strain” features especially prominently in Wheatley’s poems of mourning, which recommend again and again that the bereaved turn from their own grief to consider the joyful noises of the departed. More particularly, the poet insists that mourners should take solace in the fact that their dead have moved to a realm of lyric perfection—­ not merely a place where the troubles of this fallen world have gone away but where the rude exigencies of actual linguistic composition no longer trouble poetic expression. “On the Death of J. C. an Infant,” for example, asks that Parents, no more indulge the falling tear: Let Faith to heav’n’s refulgent domes repair, There see your infant, like a seraph glow: What charms celestial in his numbers flow Melodious, while the soul-­enchanting strain Dwells on his tongue, and fills th’ ethereal plain?112



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In “To His Honour the Lieutenant-­Governor, on the Death of his Lady, March 24, 1773,” the speaker finds the newly dead Hail’d with acclaim among the heav’nly choirs, Her soul new-­kindling with seraphic fires, To notes divine she tunes the vocal strings, While heav’n’s high concave with the music rings.113 The celestially informed “strain” and “music” act as a kind of pre-­lapsarian, carnality-­free expression; they are dramatizations of the lyric wonders that can emerge from the cession of human agency. They imagine, in other words, the art that can happen when mere self disappears into communion with the sacred: translated into ethereal form and assuming the glow of the seraph, the dead may more fully inhabit the forms and conventions that the divine has set for singing its praises. Without the earthly bonds of contingent, individuated personhood, the child and the lady may finally relay the unadulterated beauty of the universal. Indeed, insofar as it is only this newly realized tongue (or newly tuned “vocal strings”) that can approximate that “flow / melodious” and “soul enchanting strain” of the regulated heavens, death should be greeted with celebration. It would be possible to multiply examples and variants of the trope of the celestial song—­there is hardly a Wheatley elegy without it—­but I want here to link its strict and necessary formality to the strict and necessary formality of the elegy as a genre and to suggest a relationship between the perfection of “strain” and the way in which the memorial poem is also about forgetting. A hundred years earlier, in the preface to his “Elegie Upon . . . Thomas Shepard” (1677), Urian Oakes had cast the humane conventionality of elegy as a real problem: I wonder what the learned World still ailes, To tune and pace their sorrows and complaints In Rhythm and Verse! He that his crosses wailes Indeed, would vent his griefs without restraints. To tye our grief to numbers, measures, feet, Is not to let it loose, but fetter it.114 Here, Oakes is expressly resisting the “feminine” model of elegy—­where formal coherence is at odds with sincerity—­the same phenomenon that Franklin had

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satirized with the elegy-­recipe in “Silence Dogood No. 7” and that Mark Twain would mock in the Emmeline Grangerford episode in Huck Finn.115 “No matter what’s the trifling Poets Use,” Oakes concludes, “Th’ Imperious Law of custome we deride”: formal constraints will not interfere with his expression of loss.116 Along the way, though, he also finds that the “[Poet] wisely doth perform his mourning part / in Verse, lest grief should time and measure miss.”117 As one of the well-­defined rituals of mourning, elegy gives grief a familiar rhythm and a finite duration; fitting the enormity of death into the manageable parameters of poetic convention is one way of neutralizing its power. Whether it can fully express the full spectrum of bereavement or not, the poem can help mourners put a period to the feeling—­to keep mourning from becoming melancholy.118 Kirstin Wilcox points out that the original proposal for Poems on Various Subjects includes a listing of the poems that “reads less like a table of contents than a log of recent significant events in Boston, particularly in the city’s mercantile and Methodist circles.”119 Most of these events are deaths, though, which means that the logging of terrestrial events typically gives way to supernatural considerations. In much the same way that eighteenth-­century New England grave markers offer simultaneously a record of earthly specifics and broader spiritual norms, in Wheatley’s memorials the particular disappears into the universal, the unique into the conventional.120 This is perfectly in keeping with the broader genre of elegy, which as Max Cavitch has argued, is “strongly characterized by competing tendencies toward individuation and deindividuation.”121 Although one function of the elegy is to memorialize a particular dead person (Wheatley will often give initials, or specify a relation in a title), another is to place that death into a larger narrative—­one that is applicable more universally. In Wheatley’s world, every Christian death follows a standard pattern: if, in life, situational specificity gives rise to unique expressions of piety (or other forms of subjectivity), in death all such peculiarity vanishes. We might here think of Wheatley’s “To a Lady and Her Children, on the Death of her Son and Their Brother”: in the 1772 proposal for Wheatley’s volume, the poem was listed as “To Mrs Boylston and Children on the Death of her Son and their Brother.”122 The difference between “A Lady” and “Mrs Boylston,” of course, is the difference between generalization and specificity; Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral opts for the former. The change of title changes the way we read the poem itself: mournful allusions to the charitable acts of Nicholas Boylston, a wealthy Boston merchant who died in 1771, become instead commendations of the general principle of charity. “The poor, who once his gen’rous bounty fed, / Droop, and bewail their



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benefactor dead.”123 In ceasing to be Boylston and assuming the mantle of benefactor, the mourned moves from individual saint in the community of Beacon Hill into the Community of Saints; the poem may be occasioned by “one death” in which “various comfort dies!” but it, like nearly all of Wheatley’s elegies, could be about any (properly Christian) one at all.124 Even in Wheatley’s most specific elegies, there are critical gestures toward universality or iterability; the unique example is important but only insofar as it may be turned to generic purposes. Consider her elegy “On the Death of Dr. Samuel Marshall. 1771,” a poem for which the onomastic precision and explicit dating offer an early hint about its elegiac procedure. A relation of Susanna Wheatley, Marshall was a London-­trained and Boston-­based physician and “man-­midwife” who died in September 1771. Particulars about his life and death structure the verse: the speaker provides details about Marshall’s family (his wife Lucy, pregnant at the time of Marshall’s death and “Wild in her woe”; his young son, who “Clings round his mother’s neck, and weeps his sorrows there”), about his professional skill (particularly his obstetric abilities), and about his relative civic importance (“And Boston for her dear physician mourns”). Wheatley’s Marshall elegy, in other words, is about remembering Marshall—­until it is not. The poem ends with a return to genericity: The common parent, whom we all deplore, From yonder world unseen must come no more, Yet ’midst our woes immortal hopes attend The spouse, the sire, the universal friend.125 The move from the peculiar Marshall as the object of mourning to the “common parent” shifts the mode from memorialization to evangelism: reminding its audience that everyone born of woman necessarily comes to mourn (“deplore,” in its eighteenth-­century sense) someone, the poem redistributes the energy of grief into thoughts of Christian salvation. Marshall’s mortality, in other words, is most effectively an occasion to meditate on the various figurative roles of the redeeming Christ (Bridegroom, Lord, indiscriminate Savior), upon whom we must rest our hopes of immortality.126 Even Wheatley’s most occasional poems—­her most detailed responses to particular events—­reveal themselves as iterative, systematized, and turned to emphasize their participation in a larger pattern rather than their singularity.127 In unmarking the dead even as she re-­marks them, in casting the fading of the peculiar voice into the perfectly regulated chorus of the angels as a consolation rather than a

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loss, Wheatley casts spiritual redemption and generic conformity as branches of the same Christian telos.

Race and Exemplarity And yet Wheatley is marked. Wheatley’s embrace of the idea of a verse-­form and a humanity redeemed from earthly distinction raises implicitly the question of race as it pertains to the poetic/natural-­philosophical/devotional complex described in this chapter. The question becomes explicit in “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” circulated in manuscript as early as 1767 and appearing as the third poem in Wheatley’s 1773 volume. In it, the poet addresses herself directly to her most pointed Others: white men of property, formal education, and political expectations—­the putatively unmarked subjects of Revolutionary America. The poem begins with a discussion of Wheatley’s background and her current situation: While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, The muses promise to assist my pen; ’Twas not long since I left my native shore The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom: Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.128 Individuation is in many ways the watchword in this opening: the poet provides a brief overview of her particular African roots and her “intrinsic” feelings, her special relationship with the Muses, and her sense of Providence’s hand in her own peculiar life. There is, in other words, a coherent “I” or “me” here, in possession of a personal history (“my native shore”) and the intellectual and material tools (“my pen”) to set it down. She is an owning person, not an owned thing; the marks that distinguish her she has either claimed for herself or been given by the hand of God.129 As the text unfolds, Wheatley’s speaker shifts from narration of her own particularity to an exhortation for collective reform: Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights Above, to traverse the ethereal space, And mark the systems of revolving worlds.



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Still more, ye sons of science ye receive The blissful news by messengers from heav’n, How Jesus’ blood for your redemption flows.130 In many ways, the stanza rehearses in miniature just what we see in so many Wheatley poems. To “scan the heights” is not merely to look longingly into the sky; it is to treat the universe as a poem to be analyzed, with the motions of the planets or stars arranged according to regular metrical feet. And insofar as this sense of “scan” comes from the Latin scandere (“to climb”), to analyze in such a way is to approximate heavenly ascension. Of course, Wheatley’s own claimed displacement from such celestial scanning/scansion constitutes much of the dramatic tension here. It is pointedly not the poet herself who can look at this moment through nature to God but rather Harvard’s students. Although she may exhort, the freedom to actually “traverse the ethereal space” is reserved for those without the situational characteristics of the marked (that is, black, female, and enslaved) body. Even so, in what amounts to one of her signature tropes, Wheatley manages to turn her experience of cultural marginalization into poetic and moral authority.131 See him with hands out-­stretcht upon the cross; Immense compassion in his bosom glows; He hears revilers, nor resents their scorn: What matchless mercy in the Son of God! When the whole human race by sin had fall’n, He deign’d to die that they might rise again, And share with him in the sublimest skies, Life without death, and glory without end. Improve your privileges while they stay, Ye pupils, and each hour redeem, that bears Or good or bad report of you to heav’n. Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul, By you be shunn’d, nor once remit your guard; Suppress the deadly serpent in its egg. Ye blooming plants of human race devine, An Ethiop tells you ’tis your greatest foe; Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain, And in immense perdition sinks the soul.132

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By foregrounding her own status as an “Ethiop,” Wheatley lays claim to the power of the commonest of commonplaces: if even those accounted lowliest are aware of the dangers of sin, what excuse could the college-­educated have for letting their guard down?133 But her emphasis on the provisionality (and potential evanescence) of such “privileges”—­her “while they stay” implies that such advantages are always fleeting—­also lays the groundwork for a more biting ideological critique. The Harvard students may be on top of the social heap, but that might have nothing to do with natural law or divine Providence; if they don’t get right with God, begin to observe, celebrate, and repeat for (and in) themselves the formal majesty of the universe (“share with him in sublimest skies”), they will soon enough find themselves ground up by its mechanism. Most important, perhaps, it is at this moment that Wheatley puts herself up as a figure for emulation—­that she moves from sedulous, celebratory copyist of heavenly rhythms into the role of exemplar. Like Franklin, whose espousal of the dependent virtues of imitating Jesus and Socrates resolves into his presentation of himself (and his text) as a pattern to be followed, Wheatley leverages her claim to humble particularity into Christian universalism. Inviting the students to witness the crucifixion in the present tense just as she does (“See him with hands out-­stretcht”; “He hears revilers without scorn”) Wheatley embodies a particular vantage that is nevertheless critically reproducible. It is not enough for Wheatley to report on the magic of harmonic identification—­as she has done in other poems we have seen in this chapter. Wheatley insists that each member of her audience needs to experience for himself precisely and immediately what she is seeing. To imitate her here is to be present at the redemption of humanity; the manifold differences between Wheatley and her implied readers are turned to an invitation to participate, to unify—­“to share with him in the sublimest skies.” Once the students listen to this call—­only when they do so—­will they recognize the value of constancy (and the plotted divinity of the “blooming plant” and the stars above), embrace Christic sacrifice and virtue, and avoid the “endless pain” of perdition. It is this potential poetic transmission of virtue—­and possibly something like personality—­that most pointedly links Wheatley and Franklin. As tightly crafted (and endlessly correct) as they are, and as focused on the beautiful as they may be, Wheatley’s poems are never merely aesthetic objects. In the same way that the Autobiography is at once a descriptive memoir and a prescriptive blueprint for manufacturing Americans, Wheatley’s poems are both



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representations of Order and calls for its celebration and eternal continuation. To appropriate Emerson’s terms for the greatest of poems, they are meter-­ making arguments for the spiritual and ethical possibilities of dependence. The pattern-­following that the poet celebrates is almost never the province of the poet alone: someone else or something radically Other—­the souls of the dead, the celestial muse, the students of Harvard—­is nearly always along with her, following the same pattern (perhaps even following her pattern). Inviting all those who read to join her in imbricating natural philosophy, aesthetics, and spirituality under the sign of harmonious repetition, Wheatley articulates a model of self, of self-­expression and cultural progress predicated on ceaseless and ubiquitous imitative acts; her formalism finds assertion in humility and humanity in anything but liberal agency. For Wheatley, where ego is, God cannot be.134 In the formal and ideological framework that the devotional poet inhabits, mastery and submission are facets of the same pious impulse. Dependence is not weakness but strength; formality is not artifice but worship; individuation is merely a representation of one’s distance from God. To assume the mantle of salvation is to humble oneself before divinity and to elevate oneself above the mass of (fallen) men; the visible, evangelizing saint is at once the passive object of heavenly favor and the active proselyte, ushering in a new millennium of belief.

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Part II

Emulation and Ethics

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Chapter 3

Reproducing David Rittenhouse

At the tail end of the “Productions Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral” Query of his Notes on the State of Virginia, not long before he dismisses Phillis Wheatley’s verse out of hand, Thomas Jefferson turns his attention to the Abbé Raynal’s charge against the “race of whites” in the New World. Without pausing to translate, he quotes Raynal’s elaboration in Histoire philosophique des deux Indes (1770) of the Comte du Buffon’s hypothesis that the animals (including the native people) of the Americas are inferior to those of Europe: “ ‘on doit etre etonné (he says) que l’Amerique n’ait pas encore produit un bon poëte, un habile mathematicien, un homme de genie dans un seul art, ou une seule science.’ ”1 (“One must be astonished that America has not yet produced a good poet, an able mathematician, or a man of genius in a single art or science.”) Jefferson, naturally, disagrees. After commonplace invocations of Washington (“whose memory will be adored while liberty shall have votaries”) and Franklin (“no one of the present age has made more important discoveries, nor has enriched philosophy with more, or more ingenious solutions of the phaenomena of nature”), he offers up the natural philosopher and instrument maker David Rittenhouse as an example of American ability. “We have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living: that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-­taught. As an artist he has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. He has not indeed made a world; but he has by imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived from the creation to this day.”2 The remark fits easily into Jefferson’s well-­documented admiration of Rittenhouse and into the popular conception of the natural philosopher, who had gained wide notice in the late eighteenth century as a philomath (a calculator of almanac data), an astronomer, and one of the young nation’s leading mechanical geniuses. This last capacity seems foremost in Jefferson’s mind

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here: Rittenhouse’s skill in making orreries—­clockwork versions of the solar system, named after Richard Boyle, fourth Earl of Orrery, an early patron of such devices—­indicates to Jefferson an analogical relationship with the great Creator of the actual Universe.3 (In 1779, Jefferson proposed that the College of William and Mary acquire a Rittenhouse machine of its own—­although he insisted that it be called a “Ryttenhouse,” to honor its American builder instead of an English earl.4) In stark contrast to his sense of Wheatley’s poetic imitations—­which he claims index various kinds of black incapacity, as we saw in Chapter 2—­Jefferson finds that Rittenhouse’s physical imitations of nature render him nearly divine. Within such lavish praise lies one of the great paradoxes of republican personhood: for Jefferson, Rittenhouse’s singular worth is predicated on the erasure of his singularity; although he exhibits a certain “self-­taught” (or liberal) mastery or imagination, it is only “by imitation” that he actually approaches divinity. Rittenhouse’s skill in the arts of dependence, in other words, make him who he is: his machine is great not because of its creativity but because of its accuracy in reproducing astronomical phenomena; his genius lies in the effacement of observational particularity more than in his imagination. Indeed, the astronomer’s individuated success seems to emerge from the suppression of anything like “individuality,” willfulness, or originary production. At his best, Jefferson finds, Rittenhouse is passive, impersonal, a vehicle for the material expression of the higher laws and equations that give form to the universe; that transcendence of humanity that Wheatley hopes to generate with her dependent harmonies, Jefferson finally sees in Rittenhouse’s imitations of planetary motion. In his own conceptualizations of what he initially called his “Planetarian-­ machine” project, Rittenhouse placed a similar emphasis on virtuous self-­ effacement: his 1767 proposal to manufacture the device defines the cleverness of humanity solely in terms of its ability to reflect the cleverness of Creation; no object made by the hand of man can represent nature perfectly, but the most accurate will be the least subjective.5 An Orrery . . . adapted to an Armillary Sphere is the only machine that can exhibit a just idea of the true System of the World. . . . But in my opinion . . . [it] is likewise very unnatural: for what has a Sphere, consisting of a great number of metaline Circles, to do with the true System of the World? Is there one real, or so much as apparent Circle, in it? (the bodies of the Sun and Planets excepted.) Are they not all



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Figure 3. Rittenhouse orrery. Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Art Galleries.

merely imaginary lines, contrived for the purpose of calculation? I did not intend to let one of them have a place in my Orrery . . . I did not design a Machine, which should give the ignorant in astronomy a just view of the Solar System, but would rather astonish the skillful and curious examiner, by a most accurate correspondence between the situations and motions of our little representatives of the heavenly bodies, and the situations of those bodies, themselves.6 In other words, the best model of the solar system is the one that makes the least concession to the representational limitations or incapacities of

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mankind. Rittenhouse’s project thus casts the proper duty of the natural philosopher as the discovery and translation of the general laws of nature and nature’s God as completely and accurately as possible.7 As Thomas Paine puts it in The Age of Reason, “Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them”; the goal of natural philosophy is to limn a more perfect account of the rules that govern the universe, to make the arcane structures of existence apprehensible to the “wondering crouds.” Rittenhouse “copies creation in his forming mind” with as little allowance for his human frailty as he can; he does not to hope to create the world anew.8 Rittenhouse’s sense of his astronomical machine as consisting of “little representatives” points us toward the central claim of this chapter: the fantasies of replication and mechanized reproduction that structure the New Science were not limited to natural philosophy—­they also lay at the heart of popular post-­Revolutionary theorizations of the American Republic and those disinterested, republican citizens that would, ideally, constitute its inhabitants.9 Amid the regional, factional, and economic turbulence of the post-­Revolutionary and Constitutional eras, the discourse of republican virtue—­dispassion, far-­sightedness, sympathy, self-­abnegation, and the patriotic replicability of “American-­ness”—­became increasingly important to the survival of the infant nation. With new political parties engaging in pitched battles over foreign and domestic policy, including deeply polarized debates about Hamilton’s funding and assumption program and the Jay Treaty, the notion of a bedrock “republican” subject served to articulate a much-­needed common ground.10 Just as with George Washington, whose significance as an imagined repository for a universalizing “American” virtue (especially in death) eventually eclipsed his significance as a military or political strategist, the idea of Rittenhouse (even above and beyond his accomplishments), just like the idea of Franklin generated in the Autobiography, circulates in the late eighteenth-­century United States as a model of fixed, endlessly iterative, and super-­factional principles.11 As with the Deist metaphor of the clockwork universe, the trope of virtuous imitation yokes scientific probity and replicability with republican “disinterest” in order to promote the myth of American ideological coherence.12 As Samuel Johnson defines it, the “disinterested” citizen to be cultivated in republican theory will be both “Superiour to regard of private advantage; not influenced by private profit” and “Without any concern in an affair; without fear or hope.”13 Historians and literary critics have long been taken with the ways in which this fantasy of disinterest was deployed in the



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early national period. Scholarly work on the postwar sentimental novel, for example, has shown that sympathetic identification and disinterestedness are crucially linked: one becomes a citizen—­an “American,” a “self ”—­as one learns to bracket his or her own mean individuality and to replicate and feel another’s woe, to figuratively inhabit other psyches. Multiple and fluid identifications of the kind encouraged by the reading of fiction may distribute dangerously local or personal sentiment into “national” feeling.14 Such formulations have been complicated by studies of oratory and performance in the Early Republic, in which the situated bodies of speakers form loci around which public opinion may coalesce.15 Unlike the pointedly de-­individualized text, the multiply signifying orator enjoys the benefits of both universality and individuality; by embodying his own potentially abstract arguments, he is able to articulate both general principles and their specific relevance for his listeners.16 According to such analyses, witnessing elocution, gesture, and the physical display of emotion may be more useful in forging a People from the messy, conflicted publics of the Revolutionary-­era than the consumption of circulating texts. Jefferson’s elevation of Rittenhouse to the status of a representative man—­ one who stands like Washington or Franklin (if not like Wheatley) for the possibilities of American subjectivity—­suggests a synthetic route to disinterest: if there is a homology between the philosophies of replicability that structure eighteenth-­century science and the subject-­making practices of republican ideology, then particularized “sincerity” and the “authority of impersonality” need not conflict.17 As an astronomer, surveyor, model builder, and director of the U.S. Mint, Rittenhouse is at once a practical mechanic and a theoretical philosopher; his promoters imagine that he bodies forth the ethics and politics of careful imitation and its imagined corollaries, accurate representation and perfect reproducibility. In mastering a personal “objectivity,” of the kind that obviates the peculiarity of personal perception or that yields an experimental self whose results may be reproduced, Rittenhouse approximates an individuality premised on a lack of individuating difference; in positing the universal emulation of a given exemplar as the basis for government according to putatively disinterested or natural law, he acts the part of the ideal republican topos. Tracing the intersections of the literary and abstract realms of natural philosophy and the pragmatic domains of political exigency, it is possible to see in Rittenhouse the coalescence of the cultural and subjective preconditions of a particularly important kind of political actor—­to see, in other words,

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the ways in which republican theory was imagined to realize certain kinds of polities by realizing certain kinds of people.

National Biography Although David Rittenhouse had been an important figure when he was alive, it was not until his death, in the summer of 1796, that he became what one poet called a “man of millions”—­at once a descriptive example of the American people and a prescriptive example for the American people to follow.18 Born in 1732 near Norriton, Pennsylvania, Rittenhouse taught himself math and natural sciences while growing up on his father’s modest farm. Finding that he had a significant mechanical aptitude, he began his career as an instrument maker as a very young man: still a teenager, he built clocks out of wood and brass using tools that had been given to him by his maternal uncle. By the time he was twenty-­four, Rittenhouse was making telescopes, levels, and compasses for his own astronomical use and for the surveying trade. By 1771, when Rittenhouse moved from the country to Philadelphia, he had become Pennsylvania’s premier fabricator of complicated machines. With the advent of war in 1775, Rittenhouse shifted some of his attentions to political matters: he served as a consulting engineer for Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety—­the organizational and strategic center of the pro-­independence faction—­working to strengthen Philadelphia’s military defenses. When Franklin left the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1776 to serve in the Continental Congress, Rittenhouse assumed his seat. He also took on the demanding and politically complex post of treasurer for the Commonwealth, emitting currency and levying taxes to support the war effort. When not working on matters of state, he continued to do experimental and observational science: he wrote papers on magnetism, optics, and the nature of light. He also became administratively active in the affairs of the American Philosophical Society (founded by Franklin and John Bartram in 1743 and the most important scientific organization in the infant United States), acting as a referee for the Society’s Transactions. After the death of Benjamin Franklin in 1790, Rittenhouse was elected to the presidency of the Society.19 He served until his death. Of course, not all skilled, smart, and politically active figures are afforded the status of representative men. Jefferson’s praise aside, one of the main engines of the transformation of Rittenhouse from mechanical genius and



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political operative into nationalist icon was Rittenhouse’s old friend and ally, Benjamin Rush. When the board of the American Philosophical Society asked Rush to deliver a eulogy on Rittenhouse to honor the memory of its recently deceased president, Rush happily obliged.20 His remarks, presented later that fall to an audience of dignitaries (including George Washington and most of the Fourth Congress of the United States) gathered at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, are significantly more than personal reflections on the life of a particular natural philosopher. Rush took the occasion of speaking before such an august body to present Rittenhouse’s accomplishments as a polemic about the state of the new nation. In his Eulogium, Rush urges his auditors to “be just, and loose the bands of the African slave,” to “render war odious in our country,” and to reject any lingering “monarchical spirit” that might prevent the United States from encouraging “clergymen, physicians, philosophers and mechanics [to] take an active part in civil affairs.”21 Most pointedly, however, Rush takes a Franklinian turn and argues that the creation and perpetual maintenance of an American disposition is essential to properly honor the memory of his departed colleague. “Be free,” he exhorts, “by assuming a national character and name, and be greatly happy, by erecting a barrier against the corruptions in morals, government, and religion, which now pervade all the nations of Europe.” As a model of such a “national character,” Rush argues, there could be none better than Rittenhouse himself: “Come, and learn by his example, to be good, as well as great.—­His virtues furnish the most shining models for your imitation, for they were never obscured in any situation or stage of his life, by a single cloud of weakness or vice.” Echoing William Smith’s eulogy for Benjamin Franklin, and anticipating those mass commemorations that attended the death of Washington in 1799, Rush invites his audience to “let the day of [Rittenhouse’s] death be recorded in the annals of our society, and let its annual return be marked by some public act, which shall characterise his services and our grief, and thereby animate us and our successors, to imitate his illustrious example!”22 “Sketches of the Character of Rittenhouse,” printed in the 4 July 1796 New York Argus (and in a dozen other places in the summer of 1796), ends with a similar peroration: “The Sons of science and patriotism! you have sustained, it is to be feared, an irreparable loss! The present loss is indeed great. For who can supply the place of Rittenhouse! —­Let us, however, hope that we, as well as our children, will emulate his virtue, and rival his talents; and that the offspring of an example dear to science, humanity, and freedom, will be neither few in number nor feeble in power!”23 The connection of Rittenhouse

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to Franklin’s exemplarity was sometimes explicit: according to the satirist and conservative reactionary William Cobbett, Philadelphia’s radical republicans had a party on 6 February 1797, in order to celebrate the “Anniversary of Alliance between the American and French Republics.” The twelfth toast given at the event, he disapprovingly notes, was to “the memory of Franklin and Rittenhouse—­may their example instruct the philosopher and the statesman, that true glory consists in doing good to mankind.”24 Rittenhouse may be irreplaceable, but he must not be inimitable.25

Imitation and the Republican Machine Before turning to Rush’s enumerations of the accomplishments and characteristics that made Rittenhouse particularly worthy of emulation, it will be helpful to pause and further consider the intimate mechanics of the dependent arts of learning by example and imitation at the end of the eighteenth century. We have already seen the practical operations of these mechanics in Franklin; Rittenhouse and Rush allow us to dig a bit deeper into the theories of mind that make them supportable. In one way, learning-­through-­imitation is simply one manifestation of the empirical revolution of the eighteenth century. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno have argued, a fascination with repetition and reproducibility in or of persons is an inevitable function of Baconian “scientific method.” Because empiricism dictates that whatever cannot be repeated cannot have been real, repetition comes to have an authorizing “power  .  .  . over reality.”26 For the subject operative in the world of natural law, these sorts of epistemological procedures have far-­reaching consequences: under these conditions, men come to be defined as the sum of their repetitions; multiplied acts or performances become an immutable character. Through replication and iteration, what once seemed notional is proved to be (or becomes) essence. Such theoretical elaborations relied on then-­emergent ideas about the physical nature of the mind and personality. Unlike the neoplatonic Emerson, who would later include “the body” in the philosophical category of things that were “not me,” much eighteenth-­century philosophy tended to treat cognition, emotion, and identity as material effects. Under the broad rubrics of sensationist epistemology, faculty psychology, and “sensibility,” thinkers from John Locke to David Hume to Joseph Priestley cast the inner landscape as a function of the operations of nervous stimuli; physiological perception,



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logical thinking, and sentimental reflection could not be separated. 27 As an Edinburgh-­trained medical doctor and as a philosopher, Rush was an unshakeable materialist, convinced that the intellect and the body were one and the same. He argued in several different essays that all of the mind’s “operations are the effects of bodily impressions. . . . The understanding contains no knowledge of any kind, but what was conveyed to it through the avenues of the senses.”28 Rush’s notion that there can be nothing present in the mind that is not the result of some sort of physical process was not uncommon among physicians and philosophers, particularly those associated with the Scottish Enlightenment: Rush based his opinions on the researches and arguments of Herman Boerhaave and William Cullen (his teachers at Edinburgh), as well as Priestley, Hume, and David Hartley, who in turn worked from a Newtonian (and Lockean) conception of intellect and morality as tabulae rasa that could not exist without the inscription of experience.29 In a 1778 essay, Priestley frames the problem this way: “whatever matter be, thinking is the result of a modification of it  .  .  . this faculty [of thought] does not belong to an invisible substance, different from the body.”30 Although the minutiae of converting material experience into “character” and “mind” through repetition remained obscure—­as fierce contemporary debates about “liberty” and “necessity” in human life would indicate—­Rush, like other psychological materialists, believed that the brain organized corporal stimuli in stable, mechanical ways and that, in consequence, behavior, personality, and ideas were shaped (and could be reshaped) by a long series of physical inputs.31 The mind, in other words, is not the evanescent, supra-­physical nonobject of Cartesian philosophy but rather an exquisite mechanical contrivance for converting stimulus into response—­an unimaginably complicated piece of the body but a piece of the body nonetheless.32 Rush’s sense that all mental states—­healthy or pathological—­are the product of physical states organizes his late Observations on the Diseases of the Mind (1812). Mammoth in conception—­Rush initially projected seven the work details psychological problems (mania, depression, volumes—­ “manalgia”), their environmental causes (too-­vigorous horse riding, noisome air, spicy food), their physiological symptoms (thready pulse, rosy cheeks, rapid breathing), and their physical treatments. For Rush, bloodletting was an effective remedy for just about everything, although sweating, emesis, enemas, and the drinking of not-­too-­cold water had their places, too. He was also keenly interested in the beneficial effects of confinement and sensory deprivation as treatments for mental disease: he invented a “Tranquillizer”—­a

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combination of a padded chair and a chamber pot in which hooded patients could be immobilized for days. With all material (visual, tactile, aural) stimuli removed and the head in a fixed “perpendicular position,” Rush posited, maniacs would soon recover their mental equilibrium.33 But physical discipline was not just for the sick or insane. According to Rush, “The people commonly called Quakers and the Methodists, make use of the greatest number of physical remedies in their religious and moral discipline, of any sects of christians———and hence we find them every where distinguished for their morals.”34 For Rush, corporal and spiritual calisthenics are one and the same—­well designed and regularly performed, the dietary and exercise regimens of the Quakers and the Methodists have a more salutary effect on church members than any doctrinal or doxological innovations. Or rather, because there is no morality without physicality, a strict attention to physical discipline becomes itself a doctrine or a prayer—­lessons, as we have seen, not lost on Franklin (with his moralizing hand) or Wheatley (with her moralizing ear). Rush’s pedagogical writings proceed under similar assumptions that the mind of the child and the body of the child are, at bottom, the same thing. The responsibility for shaping this mechanical body-­mind must therefore be distributed across a number of different activity regimes. In defining the scope of his Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty—­a lecture for which the American Philosophical Society issued a thousand tickets in February 1786—­Rush calls for something like a national youth-­training program: “Hitherto the cultivation of the moral faculty has been the business of parents, schoolmasters and divines. But if the principles, we have laid down, be just, the improvement and extension of this principle should be equally the business of the legislator—­the natural philosopher—­and the physician; and a physical regimen should as necessarily accompany a moral precept, as directions with respect to air—­exercise—­and diet, generally accompany prescriptions for the consumption, and the gout.”35 There is, in other words, no net benefit to the world in cultivating an American ethics that is not also an American politics. Although the scope of the “moral faculty” in question is quite broad, it is also rather straightforward: “I mean a power in the human mind of distinguishing and chusing good and evil; or, in other words, virtue and vice.”36 The “moral faculty” has nothing to do with intellection or memory or judgment—­ “It is quick in its operations, and like the sensitive plant, acts without reflection, while conscience follows with deliberate steps, and measures all her actions,



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by the unerring square of right and wrong”—­but it is nevertheless the bedrock upon which a critically materialized virtue is built.37 “I consider virtue and vice to consist in action, and not in opinion,” Rush argues. The “state of the moral faculty is visible in actions, which affect the well-­being of society. The state of the conscience is invisible, and therefore removed beyond our investigation.”38 This notion that virtuous citizenship and the “well-­being of society” are products of physical stimuli and are expressed in repeated physical manifestations undergirds Rush’s plan for creating American citizen-­feeling. More particularly, it suggests Rush’s interest in the material pedagogy of modeling behavior. According to Rush’s program, the mark of a well-­regulated subject is both present in and informed by the fold of an arm, the pace of the gait, the disposition of the eyebrows, the dressing of the hair, the motion of the hands, and so forth; those hoping to reform themselves must copy those positively identified as their betters in all these things.39 To physically simulate morality or feeling is to exercise the mental resources of moral decision making even in the absence of moral volition. Over time, these imitations become habits, the “mechanical effect[s]” of which constitute character. Indeed, Rush contends, “There are many instances, where virtues have been assumed by accident, or necessity, which have become real from habit, and afterwards derived their nourishment from the heart.” As evidence, Rush quotes earnestly Hamlet’s sour speech to his mother in which he implores her to forego his uncle Claudius’s bed for just one night: “Assume a virtue; if you have it not, / That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, / Of habits evil, is angel, yet in this.”40 For Rush, if not for the Prince of Denmark, the simulation of morality is not a hypocritical gesture; it may be, rather, an indispensable help in the acquisition of virtue itself.41 In pretending to care, one might eventually find that one actually does. Rush’s theories of moral discipline through the copying of examples applied equally to the already corrupt and the completely unformed: he was an active proponent of new systems of criminal punishment and childhood education that stressed the transmissibility of character, for worse or for better. Rush was at the center of the movement against Philadelphia’s “wheelbarrow law,” which set male convicts to work in public labor gangs with their crimes indicated on their clothes. Rush cast these gangs as a threat to the social order, negative examples that otherwise honest citizens might nevertheless identify or sympathize with—­as vectors for what historian Michael Meranze calls “mimetic corruption.” Better for the culture, Rush thought, to keep the bad examples hidden from public view; in solitary confinement, prisoners could reflect on their own mistakes without inviting repetitions in other bodies.42

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On the other hand, with an eye to transforming America’s children into an endless parade of virtuous republican citizens, Rush devoted a series of essays in the 1780s to promoting the creation of state institutions centered on the rigorous imitation of selected eminent but reproducible models. Only when such a uniformly constituted population exists, Rush argues, will the real American “revolution” cease to be conflated with the war of the same name.43 Such a need is especially acute in states with multilingual and multiethnic communities supporting divergent cultural traditions. In one essay, Rush offers the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a rationale: “Our citizens are composed of the natives of so many different kingdoms in Europe. Our schools of learning, by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”44 Ignoring the question of black, Indian, and gendered subjects (all of whom would fall outside the narrow ideological boundaries of eighteenth-­century U.S. “citizenship”), Rush famously declares that the end result of his project will be the wholesale recasting of white men as “republican machines.”45 As Rush claims in his 1786 “Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools in Pennsylvania,” this engineering “must be done if we expect [such men] to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state. That republic is sophisticated with monarchy or aristocracy that does not revolve upon the wills of the people, and these must be fitted to each other by means of education before they can be made to produce regularity and unison in government.”46 In Rittenhouse, Rush found his exemplar, his perfect republican machine.

Rittenhouse as Prototype For Rush, as for Jefferson, the astronomer’s ability to suppress the subjective in favor of the imitative and the replicable makes him the ideal subject.47 Although Rittenhouse had been visibly active in local, colonial, and national affairs for decades—­serving as engineer on Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety, setting rations for Continental army troops, working to develop a rifled cannon and a telescopic gunsight, delivering lectures to the Continental Congress, acting as treasurer of Pennsylvania, presiding over the American Philosophical Society—­Rush insists on locating his public service (and serviceability) in other, more easily generalized activities.48 In Rush’s



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program, everything Rittenhouse does persuasively aligns republican and scientific theory: from observing stars, building celestial models and minting coins, to writing a copybook hand and maintaining a flawless physiognomic transparency, Rittenhouse’s genius lay in materializing the natural truths of republicanism. Rush devotes the first half of his Eulogium to detailing Rittenhouse’s practical and theoretical natural-­philosophical achievements, more or less as they appear in the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions. He is always careful to underline their political context and to emphasize the intimate connections between Rittenhouse’s scientific behavior and the practices of American power. After a long list of Rittenhouse’s accomplishments in observation (he recorded a brilliant “account of the effects of a stroke of lightning upon a house furnished with two metallic conductors on the 17th of August, 1789,” for example), mathematics (“Short, and elegant theorems for finding the sum of the several powers of the lines, either to a radius of unity, or any other”), and experiment (“A new method of placing a meridian mark for a transit instrument within a few feet of the observatory, so as to have all the advantages of one placed at a great distance”), Rush declares the scientist an organ of the state.49 “Talents so splendid, and knowledge so practical in mathematicks, are like mines of precious metals. They become public property by universal consent. The State of Pennsylvania was not insensible of the wealth she possessed in the mind of Mr. Rittenhouse. She claimed him as her own, and employed him in business of a most important nature.”50 Rittenhouse’s talents never simply prove his own worth—­they index the viability of the commonwealth. In Rittenhouse’s astronomy, Rush finds the same polity-­supporting function, albeit on a larger scale; the “study of astronomy has the most friendly influence on morals and religion” tout court.51 Speaking of Rittenhouse’s observations of the transits of Venus and Mercury in 1769, for example, Rush notes that they were not merely “received with great satisfaction by the astronomers of Europe,” but they “contributed much to raise the character of our then infant country for astronomical knowledge.”52 Rittenhouse himself had argued in an address to the American Philosophical Society some years earlier that political considerations had no place in astronomy—­that the “direct tendency of [the discipline] is to dilate the heart with universal benevolence, and to enlarge its views. It flatters no princely vice, nor national depravity.”53 Still, in Rush’s eye, there is no escaping the nationalist importance of such efforts. (For what it’s worth, Rittenhouse’s anti-­nationalist argument appears in

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a 1775 oration on the history of astronomy dedicated “to the Delegates of the Thirteen United Colonies, Assembled in Congress at Philadelphia; to whom the future liberties, and consequently the virtue, improvement in science and happiness, of America, are intrusted.”54) The apparent contradiction was easy enough for the philosophers of the Early Republic to solve: they present the cause of America (which Thomas Paine famously casts in Common Sense as the “cause of all mankind”) as universal and therefore excepted from the rule; cosmological observation and republican political representation idealize the same dispassionate neutrality, the same distaste for “princely vice,” and so whatever nationalism it promotes is virtuous.55 In Rush’s characterization, Rittenhouse’s surveying work served the same republican cause. Rittenhouse was deeply involved, for instance, in “adjusting a territorial dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia, and to his talents, moderation and firmness, were ascribed . . . the satisfactory termination, of that once alarming controversy in the year 1785.”56 (Rush does not mention it, but Rittenhouse had also been part of the delegation appointed by Congress in July 1787 to settle a border dispute between New York and Massachusetts.57) Insofar as all controversy and dispute about matters of fact is “alarming” to republican governance—­suggesting the presence of various (possibly factional) arguments within what ought to be plain truths, like measurements of distance and degrees of variation from rhumb lines—­Rittenhouse worked to preserve not just the geographic consistency of the United States but its very philosophical grounds. Under Rittenhouse’s steady gaze, the shifting boundaries between states became fixed, replicable, empirical; in specifying an independently verifiable coordinate set for its constituent parts, Rittenhouse returns a necessary regularity to the republic. The space at which Pennsylvania begins and Virginia ends is no longer a matter of controversy, ambiguity, or subjective opinion; it becomes a fixed point that could be occupied by any real or theoretical observer.58 Like Jefferson, Rush imagines Rittenhouse’s orreries as the capstone of his republican accomplishments—­scientific, political, and characterological wonders, models of representation that suggested both astronomical and sociocultural phenomena. The minutes of the American Philosophical Society (where plans for the first orrery were discussed) approvingly reprint Rittenhouse’s own hypothetical description of the object. “The orbit of each planet is . . . to be properly inclined to those of the others . . . as not to differ sensibly from the tables of astronomy in some thousands of years. . . . It must be understood that all these motions are to correspond exactly with the celestial



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motions, and not to differ some Degrees from the truth, as is common in orreries.”59 Rittenhouse’s theoretical orrery would be neither an experimental nor an observational instrument, but it would retain a critical predictive power: its motions would mirror precisely the objects and the movements that it sought to describe.60 Where previous Continental builders had been content with circular paths for the planets, with keeping them all on the same orbital plane and with showing them at a uniform speed throughout their orbits—­ resulting in the “Degrees” of error anathema to the Society’s mission—­the American mechanic sought to make a device capable of depicting the planets in their actual paths: elliptical, tilted, and with variable velocities.61 In creating such a device, Rittenhouse would avoid misrepresenting divine law for the purposes of subjective convenience; he would manufacture a system in which no allowance for the artist’s fallible hand would be necessary. The machine that Rittenhouse actually built, of course, could do no such thing. To keep the proportions of the solar system accurate, an earth as big as birdshot would need to lie 180 feet from a beach ball–sized sun; in order to house his device in a cabinet, Rittenhouse was forced to compromise on scale. And although he was able to retain planar eccentricity, elliptical orbits proved too difficult to create; Rittenhouse, like his Continental forebears, made his planets travel in circles. Presenting variable orbital speeds for all the planets was also beyond his considerable skill: Rittenhouse was only able to solve the engineering problem for Mercury. Concessions to practicality, then—­to those physical and mental limitations of the engineer, to the intransigent properties of brass and wood—­mark each function of the finished orrery.62 Perhaps in keeping with all this compromise, Rush’s praise for the completed object is less extravagant than Jefferson’s; it repeats Rittenhouse’s and the American Philosophical Society’s anticipatory effusions in a minor key. In Rush’s Eulogium, Rittenhouse’s orrery merely “represented the revolutions of the heavenly bodies in a manner more extensive and complete, than had been done by any former astronomers.” Rush makes no pretense about perfect predictive accuracy—­or quasi-­divine replication of the motions of the heavens—­ but he does call approving attention to another aspect of Rittenhouse’s powers of reproduction. The College of New Jersey had purchased the first orrery in 1771, and so “[a] second was made by him, after the same model, for the use of the college of Philadelphia. It now forms part of the philosophical apparatus of the University of Pennsylvania, where it has for many years commanded the admiration of the ingenious and the learned, from every part of the world.”63 Rush’s pleasure in the duplication is clear: the remaking of the

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Princeton orrery for the University of Pennsylvania is another version of the representational precision of the object itself—­another proof of Rittenhouse’s natural-­philosophical “spirit of accuracy” and another way in which Rittenhouse bodies forth the perfect regularity and the personal transparency that ideally characterize republican subjects.64 Building the same thing twice—­ following a model of the model of the universe—­confirms Rittenhouse’s skill as well as his initial (critically copyist) invention. Ultimately, then, Rittenhouse’s construction and reconstruction of the orreries do not merely place an American first among the world’s instrument makers; they suggest the self-­abnegating foundations, the paradoxically “superlative modesty,” of what Rush called the “splendor [of] the American character.”65 Such valorizations are reflected in the consistency with which orreries served as a political metaphor for the newly United States. The clockwork solar system’s “little representatives” elegantly model certain theories of representative republican government.66 The exceptionalist idea of the American state as a version of the solar system—­a nation adhering to higher laws and principles, exempt from the foibles of men and compromises of history—­ was a popular conceit in magazines and newspapers of various ideological stripes.67 A 1794 report on the end of the Whiskey Rebellion in Robert Treat Paine Jr.’s semi-­satirical Federal Orrery extends the metaphor to its breaking point: the anti-­tax uprising in western Pennsylvania becomes a “meteor” that “impinge[s] on the orbit” of the “federal system”; the armed resistance that disrupts the stable celestial model wears the “fiery tail” of the rogue or too-­eccentric object. Observers of the phenomenon are “political astronomers” using their “telescopes” to determine the time at which the meteoric uprising will burn itself out in the “national luminary” or the “sun of government” and the skies will be clear and orderly once more.68 As Rush and Rittenhouse understood it, the relationship between the republican government of the United States and the measured procession of the planets was more than metaphorical: the two phenomena were reciprocally enabling, part and parcel of a single natural-­philosophical precept. In a poem on the “Liberty Tree” that preceded the publication of Common Sense by several months, Thomas Paine characterizes that symbol of America as a “celestial exotic” and “a fair budding branch from the gardens above, / Where millions and millions agree”—­that is, as a reflection and a product of the order of the stars in the heavens.69 In his Eulogium, Rush declares that “man was made for a republic, and a republic was made for man. . . . Our philosopher adopted this truth from the evidence of his feelings, in common with the rest of mankind,



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but it was strongly reinforced in his mind by numerous analogies of nature.” He continues with a set of rhetorical questions: “How was it possible for [Rittenhouse] to contemplate light and air as the common and equal portions of every man, and not acknowledge that heaven intended liberty to be distributed in the same manner among the whole human race! Or how could he behold the beauty and harmony of the universe, as the result of universal and mutual dependance [sic], and not admit that heaven intended rulers to be dependant upon those, for whose benefit alone, all government should exist. To suppose the contrary, would be to deny unity and system in the plans of the great creator of all things.”70 In the logic of Rush’s and Rittenhouse’s shared natural philosophy, astronomy and republicanism are versions of a single religious and scientific “unity and system”; equally perceptible to all parties, the motions of the stars and planets arise from the very same “universal and mutual dependance” that members of Congress ought to enjoy with their constituents. Those celestial motions (and their representations) that in Wheatley’s poetry confirm the righteous, regular power of God confirm for Rush and Rittenhouse the wisdom of representative government. In other words, the orrery is not only an exercise in calculus and gear-­carving but also a replicable materialization of the scientific proof that the colonies were right to rebel, that the United States must remain united, and that philosophers must stand against tyranny as they would against any other false logic.71 In Rush’s mind, whether they are real or theoretical, the marvelous properties of the orrery—­accuracy, mechanic elegance, duplicability, republican transparency—­are amply (and necessarily) reflected in its maker.72 Rush devotes the remainder of his Eulogium to sketching Rittenhouse in the more “familiar character of a man.”73 He begins with an account of Rittenhouse’s family history, arguing that his manifest political and scientific abilities are ineluctable products of his ancestry—­that Rittenhouse was, as William Cobbett would later sneer, “Born a mental republican!”74 According to Rush’s narrative, Rittenhouse’s whole family was distinguished “for probity, industry, and simple manners. It is from sources thus pure and retired, that those talents and virtues have been chiefly derived, which have in all ages enlightened the world.”75 Renewing his argument that the material and political inequalities of monarchical and oligarchical governments are contingent, vicious inversions of the “divine order of things,” Rush positions Rittenhouse as an agent of God’s “impartial goodness.” Rittenhouse’s disinterestedness and the radical equalization of the “condition of mankind” participate in the same republican fantasy: as Rush later explains, persons and nations possessed of disinterested

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“republican constitutions” manifest the belief “that general happiness was the original design, and ultimate end of the divine government, and that a time would come, when every part of our globe, would echo back the heavenly proclamation of universal peace on earth, and good will to man.”76 In such a political system, singularity becomes a character flaw akin to atheism; the properly faithful republican, like the properly observant astronomer, will work to delete traces of his own uniqueness in order to “echo back” more precisely the edicts of divine law. Indeed, even when Rittenhouse invents, he does not invent. Rush tells the story of a young Rittenhouse reading Newton and developing a theory of “Fluxions” (what we would call calculus)—­“of which sublime invention he believed himself for a while to be the author.” It was only, Rush insists, “some years afterwards, [that Rittenhouse found out] that a contest had been carried on between Sir Isaac Newton and Leibnitz for the honor of that great and useful discovery.”77 As Rush continually makes clear, this unoriginal brilliance is present in most everything that Rittenhouse ever did: the great astronomer’s character is distinctively nondistinctive, transcendently normal; he succeeds as an unadulterated example of exemplarity itself. This framing-­as-­typical of Rittenhouse extends beyond discussions of his intellectual orientation into treatments of his physical carriage: late in the Eulogium, Rush claims that “there was no affectation of singularity, in any thing [Rittenhouse] said, or did. Even his hand writing, in which this weakness so frequently discovers itself, was simple and intelligible at first sight, to all who saw it.”78 Rush is certainly right: reflecting the precision and transparency of the astronomical observer, Rittenhouse’s writing does not take the form of the inimitable character of a “personal” script but rather an exceedingly regular copybook round hand, sedulously imitative and designed to be imitated. Rittenhouse’s waste-­books (in which he worked out rough calculations) and his field notes (in which he recorded raw data from his experiments and researches) contain rows of clear numbers and steady diagrams.79 Even his signature is formally indistinguishable from the rest of his text. Of course, for Rush there was more than mercantile or scientific precision to the clarity of Rittenhouse’s penmanship. In his other writings, Rush unambiguously treats chirography as an index for the soul; well-­ruled handwriting indicates a natural resistance to self-­absorption and a peculiarly American political consciousness. Disdaining the Continental practice of maintaining different scripts for different social contexts (secretary hand for court affairs, round hand for business, running hand for personal correspondence), Rush



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Figure 4. Two leaves from William Milns’s Round Hand Copies. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

recommended a single, clear, round script for all literary and financial transactions.80 In a 1787 address to the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia, Rush argued that “the Italian and inverted hands, which are read with difficulty, are by no means accommodated to the active state of business in America or to the simplicity of the citizens of a republic.”81 In this formulation, legibility and morality are natural cognates: a republican hand, like a republican personality, must be readable, imitable, and frictionless in its circulation.82 Perhaps anticipating Rush’s argument in his multiple portraits of Rittenhouse (1772, 1791, and 1796), Charles Willson Peale highlights the astronomer’s ­ hand. On each occasion, Peale depicts Rittenhouse in three-quarter profile from the left, gesturing (with a stylus or with his finger) at the clean parabola

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Figure 5. David Rittenhouse, receipt for payment to Tristram Dalton/scrap paper, 14 January 1793. Courtesy American Philosophical Society.

of an eccentric orbital path; the manifestation of perfect penciled curves indicates for the painter the scientist’s proper skill in observation, computation, and principled consistency.83 (That Peale paints Rittenhouse in the same position each time—seated with arms folded on a table, slightly smiling, in three-quarter ­ ­ profile from the left—­suggests a parallel between the portrait painter and the surveyor/astronomer: a sitter’s character, like a stable border or the motion of a celestial object, may only be properly registered by iterated observations from a fixed point of reference.) In emphasizing republican transparency, Rush’s own thoughts on Rittenhouse’s face echo Peale’s. “The countenance of Mr. Rittenhouse,” Rush

Figure 6. Charles Willson Peale, portrait of David Rittenhouse (1791). Courtesy American Philosophical Society.

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observes, “was too remarkable to be unnoticed upon this occasion. It displayed such a mixture of contemplation, benignity, and innocence, that it was easy to distinguish his person in the largest company, by a previous knowledge of his character.”84 Rittenhouse’s appearance may be remarkable but only insofar as there is nothing materially remarkable about it: instead, Rittenhouse is a living portrait of his own cardinal virtues—­contemplation, benignity, and innocence—­so much so that a stranger could pluck him from a crowd by a “previous knowledge” of those abstract principles alone.85 Rittenhouse’s face acts as a loss-­free conduit for representing or “echoing” laws that necessarily exceed his individuality. Even Rittenhouse’s critics remarked on his fundamental transparency: John Adams, recalling his impressions of the astronomer in an 1814 letter to Jefferson, paints him as a cat’s-­paw for radicals: “In Politicks, Writtenhouse was a good, simple ignorant well meaning Franklinian Democrat, totally ignorant of the World, as an Anachorite, an honest Dupe of the French Revolution; a mere Instrument of Jonathan Dickinson Sargent, Dr. Hutchinson, Genet and Mifflin.”86 In both the positive and negative examples, Rittenhouse becomes what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison might call a “characteristic” illustration of an ideal—­his particularities retain the specimen’s power to, as Alexander Nemerov puts it, display “the ‘underlying type,’ a broader class of which the individual object was just one example.”87 Rush was not the only person to consider the wonderful normativity of Rittenhouse’s mien. In 1776, Oliver Wolcott wrote a letter to his wife in which he describes attending a meeting of the Continental Congress at which Rittenhouse was present: “I saw Mr Rittenhouse and Viewed him with great Curiosity, but I saw no other Mark of Genius Stamped upon him than what is discoverable in an ordinary man. He appeared extremely modest and rather what We call Shamefaced—­but he has erected a Monument [the orrery] which will be admired while learning lasts, or Man is capable of adoring the Creator.”88 “Stamped” (or, as I will argue below, minted) just like everyone else, Rittenhouse betrays no invention or artificiality; although his skills as an artisan are unmatched, there is nothing interesting about him, no “Mark of Genius” except his beautiful ordinariness.

Federal Money As a marvelous imitation of the motions of the heavens, Rittenhouse’s orrery fully articulates the naturalization of republican ideology; as the transparent



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articulator of universal logics and the representer of universal laws, Rittenhouse himself becomes the prophet of a republican way of being in the world. But Rittenhouse and his orreries were limited quantities with limited availability: the question of how to distribute these virtues among the squabbling, disparately situated People presented significant problems to those “political astronomers” who had taken on the project of Americanizing the American public. As we saw in Chapter 1, Franklin worked to address the problem with his Table of Virtues, offering readers a technological aid for helping their imitations of him. Rush’s textual calls for the masses to imitate Rittenhouse—­to commit themselves to the republican virtue of personal replicability, to cast off subjective opacity for the clear light of regular, repeatable maxims—­were reinforced by the mass manufacture and circulation of objects encoding these essentially performative virtues: coins. Reading Rittenhouse’s work as director of the U.S. Mint in the light of Rush’s theories, it becomes possible to trace further the late eighteenth-­century production and reproduction of a national morality. In 1786, Congress had passed laws establishing a federal currency, theoretically replacing circulating English pounds and shillings, Continental pistoles and Johannes, and, most important, locally issued paper scrip, with federal gold, silver, and copper coins.89 Although federalization was considerably less than total—­Bailey’s Rittenhouse Almanac for 1807, for example, still includes “A Table of the Value and Weight of Coins, as they pass in the respective States of the Union, with their Sterling and Federal Value”—­it was a critical beau ideal in the ratification era.90 In 1791, President Washington asked Rittenhouse to help realize a desired uniformity in circulating specie—­to follow the example of Isaac Newton and put his talents as practical philosopher to use in the design and administration of the U.S. Mint. Rittenhouse agreed. He had served as treasurer of Pennsylvania from 1777 to 1789 and had joined Jefferson, Robert Morris, and Alexander Hamilton as a vocal advocate for American currency reform.91 Their argument was relatively straightforward: a vast array of circulating specie is hostile to republican governance, they claimed, because it prevents regulation, complicates individual transactions, discourages commerce among the states, and makes the collection of duties exceedingly difficult.92 To further reduce the confusion of the monetary system, Congress proposed the introduction of a decimal dollar as a standard. It was an old idea—­Jefferson had pointed out to the Finance Committee of the Continental Congress as early as 1775 that one of the “circumstances . . . of principal importance” in fixing a republican unit of money is “that its parts

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and multiples be in an easy proportion to each other, so as to facilitate the Money Arithmetic”—­but one with increasing high stakes as the states came to grips with the idea of federal power.93 By 1795, such arguments had moved from the halls of Congress all the way to the schoolroom. As one popular textbook puts it, “The policy of tyrants [is] to keep their accounts in as intricate, and perplexing a method as possible; that the smaller number of their subjects may be able to estimate their enormous impositions and exactions. But Republican money ought to be simple and adapted to the meanest capacity.”94 In doing away with the “intricate” fractions involved in figuring with English pence and shillings, a base-­ten monetary system would theoretically allow for citizens of the “meanest capacity” to check the math (the “impositions and exactions”) and therefore the power of elected officials. That is, decimal money would make a government’s previously opaque or mystified equations and transactions reproducible by individuals armed only with the ability to count.95 Such transparency would in turn discourage corruption and build populism into the micro-­structures of American finance. Decimal theory was only part of the battle; the production of a uniform currency also presented significant logistical and mechanical-­engineering challenges. As Congress was careful to point out, the idea of a stable currency requires that all coins of the same denomination be materially the same, at least in weight and metallurgical composition; only with consistent replication could a dime or a dollar represent a fixed value. In the 1792 statutes, for example, a coin with eleven pennyweights of copper was worth one cent, the hundredth part of a dollar.96 Because a pennyweight is one-­twentieth of a troy ounce, very slight deviations from the rule had the potential to cause very large problems: cents assayed to contain ten pennyweights of copper (one half of a troy ounce instead of eleven-­twentieths) could potentially ruin the credibility of all circulating coins, cause a speculative run on precious metals, or engender rampant inflation. Even in small change like the penny, an extra twentieth of an ounce could disrupt, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “the steady value of all contracts, and in a certain sense, all other property.”97 A perfectly consistent currency denotes stability in the issuing government as well as in the market economy it enables and regulates: if a penny-­coin is always a penny-­coin, and so forth, transactional distrust is mitigated—­both at the level of individuals and at the level of institutions. In 1792, several decades after completing his first orrery, Rittenhouse took charge of the massive engineering operation of assaying metals and stamping out coins—­a project whose sole political and ideological purpose was to generate copies with strict precision.



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Although the manufacturing challenges were considerable, one of the first problems that Rittenhouse faced as master of the U.S. Mint was aesthetic. Insofar as the moralistic utility of the designs on coins, particularly small change, had become a popular cultural commonplace, Rittenhouse found himself involved in a spirited debate about iconography. Writing from Passy in 1779, Benjamin Franklin notes that coins ought not merely work as money but should “serve other purposes” as well: “Instead of repeating continually upon every halfpenny the dull story that everybody knows, (and what it would have been no loss to mankind if nobody had ever known,) that George the Third is King of Great Britain, France and Ireland &c &c, to put on one side, some important proverb of Solomon, some pious moral, prudential or economical precept, the frequent inculcation of which, by seeing it every time one receives a piece of money, might make an impression upon the mind, especially of young persons, and tend to regulate the conduct.”98 Franklin’s “other purposes” are clear. Coins are not merely to be passive symbols of republican political theory about the accountability of rulers or tokens of its efficacy: as iconographic objects, they suggest ways in which persons may be shaped by the mechanical repetitions of the mint. Endlessly circulating and totally ubiquitous, money has the effect of continually repeating whatever narrative or moral sentiment is stamped into it, effectively working to disseminate a normative national character.99 Cash, in other words, was to serve as a technology for minting people: by impressing particular virtues on the mind every time it is received, specie may reform personality and conduct. Instead of depicting the story of King George III and, therefore, training recipients to revere royalty, American coins ought to be stamped with expressions of Solomonic (or, more likely, Franklinian) virtue, allowing for the production of antiroyalist republicans. Because of the imagined rhetorical or disciplinary power of the minted coin, official debates about numismatic iconography were quite contentious. In 1792, as Rittenhouse was assuming responsibility for the mass production of American coins, Congress weighed two divergent versions of “An Act establishing a Mint and regulating the Coins of the United States.” One, printed by the conservative Federalist John Fenno, calls for each coin to bear the “impression or representation of the head of the President of the United States for the Time being, with an inscription which shall express the initial or first letter of his Christian or first name, and his surname at length, the succession of the Presidency numerically, and the year of the coinage.”100 The other proposed act, which argues that such depictions of succession are monarchical,

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specified “an impression emblematic of liberty, with an inscription of the word Liberty” for the obverse of the coin. 101 After much debate in a joint committee, the latter version won out, and Rittenhouse’s mint began production. The finished designs, approved in 1793, pointedly link the virtues of replication (and the replication of virtue) with decimal math and the mass production of specie. The obverse features an image of a flowing-­haired female Liberty based on Augustin Dupré’s 1783 Libertas Americana medal and engraved by Joseph Wright.102 Its reverse shows “united states of america” in a circular pattern, surrounding the denomination (“one cent”) inside a laurel wreath. (There was a brief run of cents in which the device encircling the denomination was a set of thirteen linked rings; these so-­called chain cents suggested slavery to some and were discontinued.) Underneath this device, the fraction “1/100” appears, aligning the putatively republican advent of base-­ ten money with the victorious union of the states. After a brief run of coins in which Liberty appeared unadorned, Rittenhouse’s die cutters added a liberty cap and a liberty pole to the background. In addition to presenting a classical antecedent for American liberty—­these objects were icons of the Roman Republic, the visible signs of newly freed slaves—­the cap and pole articulate a commitment to a particular kind of revolutionary thought. Popular symbols in the run-­up to the American Revolution and during the war itself (Paul Revere famously engraved a bowl with a liberty cap and the names of those Massachusetts legislators who had voted to protest the Stamp Act), the cap and pole were signs of resistance to tyranny of all kinds.103 By the 1790s, such caps and poles had come to reflect solidarity with the more radical wings of the republican movement and were displayed by French revolutionaries and American partisans of the French Republic.104 These icons did not just reflect ideology; they served an admonitory, instrumental function as well. The liberty pole, for example, at once recast the vindicta—­the staff whose touch manumitted a Roman slave—­and offered a portable version of the “liberty tree”; it represented not only the promise of a deep-­rooted and flowering popular sovereignty but also the discipline of the rod and the hangman.105 During the Revolution, liberty poles were often deployed as weapons, just as the liberty tree periodically served as a figurative gallows for enemies of the American Republic.106 The liberty cap is just as fraught with meaning. As one anonymous contemporary magazine essayist explains, the cap is “common in its texture, and of a whitish colour . . . It is made of wool, to signify that liberty is the birthright of the shepherd as well as of the senator . . . and undied. This demonstrates that it should be natural



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Figure 7. U.S. large cent obverse/reverse, 1793. Courtesy Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.

without deceiving gloss, unspotted by faction, and unstained by tyranny.”107 Emphasizing humility, simplicity, and a broad sense of human brotherhood, the cap argues for a strict adherence to the laws of disinterestedness: its wool must be “undied”; no “deceiving gloss,” no “spot” of faction, or “stain” of tyranny will be countenanced by an American Liberty. On the other hand, the birthrights for which the cap stands include both universal freedom (for the “shepherd” and the “senator”) as well as a naturalized, and therefore unimpeachable, division of labor and property. Although each man may pursue his career as he sees fit, the senator and the shepherd have necessarily different roles and responsibilities; for one to occupy another’s station is to place particular interest over the good of the whole, to disrupt the social order. Such iconography and the controversy that surrounded it indicate the tensions between commonality and singularity at the heart of Rush’s praise of Rittenhouse and that animate discourses of republican subjectivity more broadly. The liberty cap on the cent presents uniqueness as both the law of nature and the enemy of natural law; good republicans participate in a universalizing cause, yet they cannot be “shepherd” and “senator” simultaneously. Like the images they behold, possessors of the cents are required to share in the multiple significations of E pluribus unum—­at once separated from the many and making it up.108 In authorizing the mass production and dissemination of such a design, Rittenhouse did not just put republican copies—­and the republican ideology of the desirability of the copy—­into pockets up and down the Eastern Seaboard; he worked to impress the paradoxes of republicanism into people.

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The Ghost and the Machine Rush’s theories of education and Rittenhouse’s pennies illustrate succinctly the potential political expediency of the arts of dependence. At its heart, republican theory attempts to produce citizens who are also nonsubjects, creatures whose essential humanity lies not in liberal agency or in a Romantic principle of uniqueness but rather in a regular, mechanical, repeatable adherence to particular examples or inviolable natural laws. Drilled on common texts and object-­lessons and taught to emulate universal models, people will be “fitted” to each other and to the machinery of the republic—­and, in turn, raise future generations in that same image. This broader social machine, then, becomes one of perpetual repetitive motion—­a self-­renewing, self-­regulating, and self-­evident manufactory for unselfish selves. Such a procession of disinterested, radically similar adults and children would obviate, in turn, the problems of differential consent, dissent, and faction plaguing the newly United States. In the face of jealousy, discord, and partisan violence, these notions of a regular, repeatable American-­ness offer a fantasy of perfect sympathy, celestial harmony, and national unity. With Rittenhouse and his handcrafted and mass-­produced objects as a template, Rush and Jefferson may imagine a nation where Joseph Priestley’s 1778 proposition about individual psychology may come true for a nation—­ where “different systems of matter, organized exactly alike, must make different beings, who would feel and think exactly alike in the same circumstances. Their minds, therefore, would be exactly similar, but numerically different.”109 In this imagining, Rush, Rittenhouse, and Jefferson’s ideas of dependence conjure the only state in which the vox populi may actually replicate the vox dei.110 At the same time, it is not hard to trace the emergence of the ineffable, exceptional, sovereign self—­the autonomous private subject of Romantic individualism and liberal philosophy—­as a counterweight to all of this “Americanising and mechanizing” (to repurpose D. H. Lawrence’s derisory sense of Franklin, to which we will return in Chapter 5). Indeed, another triangulation of Rush, Rittenhouse, and Jefferson in the early nineteenth century shows how a republican subjectivity and a more Romantic subjectivity might exist as two sides of the same coin: co-­present, mutually constitutive, revolving together like planets in the orrery. In 1805, Rush appealed to then President Jefferson to appoint him to Rittenhouse’s old job as director of the U.S. Mint.111 Having named Robert Patterson, a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania, to the post several days earlier, Jefferson declined Rush’s application. He took the time, however, to provide a courteous rationale for his decision.



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Jefferson argued that the director of the U.S. Mint must (like Rittenhouse) approach Newton in his mathematical abilities; as such, Patterson was a better fit for the office. Such determinations, the president continued, “are the most painful part of my duty, under which nothing could support me but the consideration that I am but a machine erected by the constitution for the performance of certain acts according to the laws of action laid down for me, one of which is that I must anatomize the living man as the Surgeon does his dead subject, view him also as a machine and employ him for what he is fit for, unblinded by the mist of friendship.”112 Rush graciously acquiesced and, in his reply to Jefferson, writes, “No man could have been nominated as [immediate former director Elias Boudinot’s] successor that would be more agreeable to me than Mr. Patter[son], and had I known before that he was a candidate for the appointment I should not have requested it.” He continues, though: “I have only to beg that my application to you may remain a secret in your own bosom.”113 As president, Jefferson posits himself as a machine of the Constitution, one that acts only according to predetermined “laws.” His subjects are also machines, fitted to certain jobs and mechanically unsuitable for others. Repeating back to Rush his own figuration of the clockwork republic, in which every man acts as a particular gear in the apparatus of the state, Jefferson elegantly turns potential conflict into the picture of harmony. And yet Jefferson’s reply also marks a powerful antithesis to the mechanist regime: the “mists of friendship” that must be avoided or disavowed for the decision-­ making machine to function properly. This mist, which threatens to blind the mechanism, is another way of thinking about personal interest, party affiliation, and affect as they exceed republican virtue—­about the situational and characterological singularity that makes one man president and another a supplicant to a president. To avoid or disavow such a mist is to admit that it exists, even if its existence is proscribed; the machines still feel, even if the erasure of those kinds of particular feeling is the purpose of the machine. In asking Jefferson to conceal the “secret” of his application, Rush also operates on the assumption that personal transparency is neither inevitable (or natural) nor always desirable. To avoid accusations of seeking private advantage, Rush must take advantage of privacy. His reputation for commitment to the public good—­that is, for machine-­like or “natural” disinterest—­relies on Jefferson’s discretion, on the opacity of the president’s “own bosom.” The trope of mist as a natural complication of Enlightenment regimes of knowledge and being has a long eighteenth-­century history. In John

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Trusler’s definition from 1776, mist “prevents our seeing things at a distance”; it “obstruct[s] prospects.”114 As a metaphor, mist suggests confusion or ignorance or whatever lies beyond orderly classification. In Alexander Pope’s Dunciad Variorum (1729), Dulness bears the epithet of the “cloud-­compelling queen”; her powers include the ability to direct rhetorical “fogs” to distort reality and the ability to impose “mists” of stupidity upon her subjects.115 In Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland: or the Transformation (1798), the mist stands as a Gothic figure of darkness, chaos, and madness: nothing is so hostile to insight, tranquility, or rationality as the enveloping cloud.116 In other cases, mist is used in the way that Jefferson uses it, to delineate the conflict of personality and impersonality, particularly in the realms of political theory. Responding to attacks on Jefferson during the 1796 presidential campaign, Tench Coxe accuses John Adams of “throwing clouds over our prospects under elective governments, when discoursing upon the opinions of republican theorists.”117 The cloud here is the partial, partisan explanation—­ the miscasting of what ought to be impersonal matters for personal gain. Men such as Rittenhouse were cast as de-­mistifiers, those who see far enough to mediate individual conflict and who might call attention to the higher principles that such conflict obscures. John Swanwick begins his elegy for Rittenhouse by calling attention to these peculiar capacities: Fame, seize thy clarion—­sound along the shore, America’s great artist is no more—­ He whose sagacious enterprize could scan, Of starry worlds, the motion and the plan; In human mechanism the whole could trace, And tear the veil from mystic nature’s face.118 Even so, there are limits to Rittenhouse’s capabilities, to claims of universality in politics, and to the procedural demands of natural philosophy and republican government. Early in his Eulogium, Rush speculates on the happiness that Rittenhouse and his assistants must have felt when he awoke to clear skies on 3 June 1769, the date of the transit of Venus: “The night before the long expected day, was probably passed in a degree of solicitude which precluded sleep. How great must have been their joy when they beheld the morning sun, ‘and the whole horizon without a cloud.’ ”119 Nature is at once a mechanical motion and a divine plan, but it is also mystic, inscrutable; the physical and metaphysical clarity that it potentially offers is always endangered by its equal



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and opposite potential for obscurity.120 No matter how good Rittenhouse is at tracing or imitating the design of the universe, he is still at the mercy of earthly exhalations: he may understand the motions of the heavens, but he cannot compel the motions of the clouds.121 The same is true for representative government. James Madison’s Federalist No. 37 (11 January 1788), for example, registers a familiar melancholy: “When we pass from the works of nature, in which all the delineations are perfectly accurate, and appear to be otherwise only from the imperfection of the eye which surveys them, to the institutions of man, in which the obscurity arises as well from the object itself as from the organ by which it is contemplated; we must perceive the necessity of moderating still farther our expectations and hopes from the efforts of human sagacity.”122 Just as the polity that Madison recommends must compensate for the inevitability of human error, Jefferson cannot discard the notion of friendship simply because it exists outside the universalizing mechanical protocols of republican subjectivity; he must acknowledge it and calculate accordingly. These extra-­mechanical, irreproducible mists are in him, he says, whether he wants them or not, and their influence will always emerge. Rush counts it as perfectly reasonable (if not self-­evident) that a private communication of personal interest ought to be kept private and personal—­that the maintenance of a “natural” republican transparency often requires an appeal to an equally “natural” secrecy. Put another way, Rush and Jefferson’s exchange insists that their own theories of political subjectivity cannot be endlessly iterated and cannot describe fully the varieties of republican experience: the functional Republic ultimately requires both universality and faction, transparency and opacity, perfect replication and that which may not be replicated, interchangeable republican machines and unique selves. As Shakespeare’s Lear—­standing heartbroken over his beloved Cordelia—­reminds his audience, only together may mists and mirrors constitute the sign of life.123

Chapter 4

The Republican Girl and the Spirit of Emulation

In the summer of 1787, just a few blocks away from the Grand Federal Convention and its intensifying arguments about the tenor and purpose of a U.S. Constitution, Benjamin Rush delivered a commencement address to the newly organized Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia. The speech, entitled “Thoughts on Female Education Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America,” presents both an incipient nationalism and an elegant summary of what we have come to understand as the essence of post-­Revolutionary female pedagogy; it serves as a gendered mirror image of the eulogy for David Rittenhouse that Rush would deliver nearly a decade later, in which he presented the astronomer as a model for American imitation. Because the United States must distinguish itself from its colonial past, Rush argues, the “education of young ladies, in this country, should be conducted upon principles very different from what it is in Great Britain, and in some respects different from what it was when we were part of a monarchical empire.”1 The different circumstances that suggest these different principles are clear enough in Rush’s formulation. First, the vast and underdeveloped “state of property” in the United States will require men to be working at many “different occupations” at the same time, and so American households will need more help from women in managing affairs than their European counterparts: “some knowledge of figures and bookkeeping” and “a fair and legible [i.e., mercantile] hand” must be taught to girls.2 Second, because of the “equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share that he may have in the government of our country,” girls must be instructed in “geography” (a combination of political opinion and physical description) and “chronology” (i.e., chronological history), particularly that



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of the United States.3 “In some instances,” Rush continues, “the first principles of astronomy, natural philosophy and chemistry” may also be taught, the better to combat Old World “superstition” and to aid in the manufacture of household remedies.4 Ultimately, though, Rush’s plan claims even higher stakes. Undertaken in the right way, this new and “peculiarly” American sort of feminine learning will lead to a wholly new population—­both male and female, children and adults. “A philosopher once said, ‘let me make all the ballads of a country and I care not who makes its laws.’ He might with more propriety have said, let the ladies of a country be educated properly, and they will not only make and administer its laws, but form its manners and character.”5 In other words, Rush argues that the literary and philosophical training that girls receive in their youth will not merely shape relatively mundane things like domestic accountancy or pharmacology—­it will determine the moral fate of the nation-­ state. Like other eighteenth-­century advocates for female education, Rush draws his lines of influence very clearly: girls must be trained as principled republicans because the marriages they will contract and the households they will administer will provide the United States with models and metaphors for domestic tranquility. In modern histories of the post-­Revolutionary period, these arguments are not unfamiliar; generations of feminist historians and literary critics have mobilized versions of the “Republican Mother” and the “Republican Wife” as counterpoints to narratives of the founding that treat women as a matter of secondary importance.6 Placing the mother, the wife, the daughter, and the hearth at the ideological center of the Early Republic has helped to rewrite the story of the United States: American independence is not merely a result of scrimmages in the putatively masculine realms of political philosophy, novel writing, public oratory, military strategy, or mercantile policy but also the product of evolving ideas about domesticity, literacy, household economy, and gendered morality. More than this, by pointedly reimagining national feeling, literary production, and legal debate as problems of the parlor as well as the study, the town hall, or the Congress, the ideas of the Republican Mother and the Republican Wife have moved us to understand “private and public Virtue” as inextricable.7 They present lenses through which we may glimpse the reciprocal manufactures of an “Americanized” person, an inclusive national literature, and a coherent U.S. polity. Although these master tropes of Republican Wife and Republican Mother have been modified, qualified, challenged, and repurposed over the years,

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their essential heuristic utility has remained intact.8 And yet they may obscure or distort some of the cultural and political functions of gendered learning and politesse that they seek to explain: such theorizations of post-­ Revolutionary femininity have relied too heavily on the idea of liberal subjectivity. To recuperate a past in which women are accorded their rightful importance in the discursive and political life of the republic, in other words, we have imagined intellectual and moral autonomy as the organizing principles of female education; for the properly trained Republican Mother or Wife, claims to individuation and “virtue” are ultimately identical. In these models, exemplarity springs from distinction, independence, and a unique instantiation of the abstract principles of liberalism and republican theory.9 Such theses have afforded women the autonomy, authority, and rational personhood that feminist history rightly seeks to ratify, but as we have already seen in Franklin, Wheatley, and Rittenhouse, emphasizing the development of liberal subjects only tells part of the story of the early United States. The problem with an emphasis on psychological individuation becomes clear as Rush continues in his oration. As we have seen in Rush’s work on Rittenhouse in the previous chapter, republicanism valued “disinterest” above all things; it posits the production of proper individuality in the evacuation of individual difference—­the pupil who becomes more like all of the other republicans becomes her best self.10 To manufacture its virtuous girls, Rush insists, the Young Ladies’ Academy will foster “emulation  .  .  . without jealousy,—­ ambition without envy,—­and competition without strife.”11 In a later speech to the same body, James A. Neal repeats the argument: “in The Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia . . . the spirit of emulation reigns throughout; and this stimulus alone, effects the [school’s] important purposes.”12 Nearly a decade afterward, the school’s principal, John Poor, notes that it is not enough for a girl to be transformed; she must offer herself as a model for future transformations: the school’s students must be “conspicuous characters”—­that is, they must “excite the rising fair to emulate (with equal excellence) [their] very noble examples.”13 This “spirit of emulation” that Rush, Neal, and Poor each identify as the driving force of the academy’s “important purposes” is an exceedingly common phrase in late eighteenth-­century Anglophone texts about moral, literary, and political education; it is the central component of the pedagogical apparatus designed to create female citizens of the newly United States. Although “emulation” and “competition” were sometimes synonymous—­ one late eighteenth-­century engraving features the “Genius of Emulation”



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holding a laurel wreath—­they are not identical.14 Emulation encodes rivalry (and therefore individuation) but also, as we have seen, imitation: it is at once the generation of distinction and the erasure of distinction. In the context of education, to emulate—­“to imitate with hope of equality, or superior excellence,” as one of the definitions in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language puts it—­is to become oneself by becoming more like a commonly held model—­perhaps even more like the model than the model already is.15 To emulate is to mold the private in the image of the public—­to construct a psychological interior by persistent and evaluative identification with exterior examples. The “spirit of emulation” thus underwrites the imagined continuities of self and state at the heart of an emergent “American” feeling: to find one’s voice in another’s is to forge (through repetition and competition to repeat) a “national” culture from a mass of putatively disparate or “jealous” individuals. More than this, the “spirit of emulation” posits a counterforce to the dangers of unbridled (“masculine” and potentially libertine) possessive individualism: it articulates distributed modes of reading, writing, and being that resist assimilation into easy liberalism. As we will see, the emulative “poetics” of femininity in the post-­Revolutionary era—­the structural principles through which the discursive stuff of literary and material culture was transformed into mutually supportive narratives about female subjectivity and American nationalism—­suggest genealogies of the political subject (and the self) that the idea of the bounded “individual” obscures.16 The spirit of emulation cultivated in and by schoolgirls may be at cross-­purposes with a strict bourgeois liberalism, but this cements—­rather than subverts—­the importance of female pedagogy to our understanding of the early United States. The evidence I use to make this case—­fiction and nonfiction writing by Susanna Rowson as well as embroidered samplers and needlework pictures worked by girls enrolled in ladies’ academies—­has much in common with Rittenhouse’s coins, Wheatley’s elegies, or Franklin’s Table of Virtues: these objects illustrate how the counter-­romantic behaviors of manufacturing, appreciating, or promoting replications and imitations may lie at the heart of collective morality or even nationhood itself. In dramatizing the operations of emulation and its affective, behavioral, and aesthetic cognates—­specifically sympathy and pattern following—­the dependent arts of the schoolbook, the sentimental novel, and the sampler offer critical purchase not only on feminine education but on broader questions of gendered subjectivity and political organization.

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The Spirit of Compilation In 1797, Susanna Rowson—­playwright, actress, and author of the best-­selling Charlotte Temple; a Tale of Truth (1791)—­withdrew from the national spotlight to open a school for girls near Boston’s Beacon Hill. Designed to finish young middle-­and upper-­class women, the curriculum of Mrs. Rowson’s Academy—­unlike the rather more progressive Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia—­was quite traditional: lessons in reading, drawing, penmanship, and embroidery occupied the bulk of the day.17 The school was an unqualified success. Although Rowson began the term in 1797 with a single pupil, by 1800 she had moved her academy to a mansion in Medford, Massachusetts; acquired a pianoforte; and taken on a full-­time faculty of six—­ including a “French nobleman” as a dancing master.18 In the midst of all this expansionary activity, Rowson, using the moniker “AN AMERICAN LADY,” may have compiled “Essays, Descriptions, Tales . . . Epistles, elegant and entertaining . . . Dialogues and Dramatic pieces . . . Poetry” and “A short system of Virtue and Happiness”—­all “carefully extracted from the best modern authors, and designed principally for the use of Female Schools, but calculated for general instruction and amusement”—­into an inexpensive textbook, The New Pleasing Instructor: Or Young Ladies’ Guide to Virtue and Happiness.19 Trading on the popularity of George Fisher’s The Instructor: or Young Man’s Best Companion and Anne Fisher’s The Pleasing Instructor, two English schoolbooks that had been standards since the middle of the eighteenth century and that had run through scores of editions, The New Pleasing Instructor was marketed as specifically useful to “Female Academies, Schools, &c.”20 The book was to be sold for a “dollar single, or 87 and a half cents by the dozen.”21 The contents of the New Pleasing Instructor are critical to understanding the dynamic of emulative femininity that this chapter seeks to describe. For the moment, though, I want to linger on the text’s form and on the imagined conditions of its production—­to recast the essential derivativeness and disputed authorship that scholars have taken as textual problems as opportunities to think through some overlooked aspects of gender ideology at the turn of the U.S. nineteenth century. That is, instead of asking, “Who created this text?”—­a question that scholars have been unable answer definitively for the past century and a half—­we might instead ask, “Why compile anonymously?”22 What does it mean to preside over a work as “A Lady” or “An American Lady”?23 What does it mean to be a reader of such a book? What



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can such compilers and readers tell us about the arts of dependence with respect to prevailing notions of feminine morality in the Early Republic? On one hand, the New Pleasing Instructor understands girls as potentially liberal subjects—­of the kind that a proper name typically designates. Its assembled essays suggest repeatedly that “Happiness” springs from competitive approaches to “Virtue”: the young woman who freely chooses and assiduously performs moral acts will set herself apart as an example to the coarse, unmanaged masses and fulfill the promise of the newly United States. She will, in other words, make a name for herself. The form of the Instructor, however, tells a different story about the possibilities of bourgeois interiority and the propriety of distinction. Borrowing most of a title from popular English texts and replicating the form of numberless other popular schoolbooks by reproducing stories, poems, and theatrical vignettes from dozens of sources, the Instructor extols the virtues of imitation and compilation as much as the pleasures of uniqueness or origination. Pointedly lacking a singular author, the text assumes the authority of the commonplace: it rejects individualized insight in favor of conventional wisdom and urges its readers to a similar feat—­to play down their own singularity in favor of conformity, modesty, and disinterestedness. The figure of the anonymous compiler posits and thus allows us to consider the twinned processes of individuation and de-­individuation at the heart of “republican” theories of the subject: in the project of creating a properly nationalized citizen, the “self ”—­as the compiled volume—­is at once singular and plural, original and derivative. Consider, for example, the Instructor’s preface—­a version of which plays an important role in the work’s advertising: “Among the various selections of Lessons in Reading and Speaking, which have fallen into the hands of the Compiler of the following sheets, she does not recollect any one adapted to the use of schools for Young Ladies. Feeling too sensibly the many inconveniences resulting from [such] partial attention . . . she has been induced to contribute something towards the promotion of so desirable an end, by making the selection, for which she now solicits the patronage of their instructors and of the public in general.”24 The author’s adoption of third-­person address while speaking of herself neatly captures the tensions I mean to explore: although this is a book about the consolidation and maintenance of the modern female subject, there is no “I” on display here—­there is only “the compiler.” The organizing wisdom here belongs to no one in particular but to a general category of persons. Forswearing identifiability, “A Lady” or, as the advertisement puts it, an “American Lady” assumes the authority of disinterest.25

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By its nature, the performance of disinterest requires a bit of an epistemological tightrope walk: to assert oneself as self-­effacing is not an easy task. As such, it makes perfect sense that the text would begin by disclaiming any sort of personal or intellectual agency in the compiler’s evaluation of the state of the pedagogical field—­textbooks just “fall” into her hands, certainly unbidden, until the “feeling” they create overmasters any kind of intellectual reluctance she might have about addressing their various “inconveniences.” Once induced to labor, the compiler limits herself to generating another set of “selections”—­to borrowing portions from those borrowing books and reconstituting them in a sequence that will serve the geographically specific subset of the fairer sex that she has designated as her audience. She is exceedingly careful to subordinate her role as compiler to the role of an originating author: the preface ends with a slightly modified and uncited quotation from Edward Young’s Universal Passion: Love of Fame. If the work is found beneficial to young women, “the Compiler will reflect on the hours, which she has spent in collecting and arranging the materials that compose it, with great satisfaction and ‘Glory in the work she did not write.’ ”26 Quoting a text that describes (even if ironically) the pleasures of quotation, the compiler sets any “glory” that she may find at a double remove from her own person: the sentiments contained in the text are not original to her; they may only produce “satisfaction” in her because another has previously articulated the principle by which they may do so. In what amounts to a mise en abyme of authority, she has not merely put together a book of extracts, she has located the authority for such a process in an extract about extraction—­anywhere but in some kind of writing “self.” That said, this kind of sorting is most assuredly work. No matter how much the compiler insists that she is a passive receiver and quoter of schoolbooks, she is nevertheless an active composer. And so it may not be surprising that the preface spends some time reflecting on the process of compiling: it takes the time to describe the compiler’s methodology and her reasons for adopting it. “To render the book more deserving of [students’] attention, she has generally preferred whole pieces to extracts; and has taken much pains to collect a pleasing variety of matter.” This articulation of editorial method matters quite a bit: overwhelmed no more by feeling, willing to “prefer” a particular handling of texts, the compiler unequivocally becomes an agent—­ one who “takes pains” in the fulfillment of her duty. Soon, she is someone with explicitly reformatory goals: “Her aim throughout, has been to blend instruction with rational amusement. Convinced that books, which convey



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only the latter, are already too much multiplied, she has admitted but few pieces which do not tend to inform the mind, to improve the heart, to correct the manners, or to regulate the conduct.”27 Recognizing girls as actors on various public and private stages—­with minds, hearts, manners, and conduct in need of alteration—­the compiler sets out to create a new kind of feminine agent—­one whose free will (or free thought) is indistinguishable from the collective will (or collective thought) represented by (and in) the text. The figure of the anonymous compiler maintains such virtues marvelously. Finding the principles she would communicate in the words of another, she reproduces the best of her peers—­and acknowledges the act of reproduction. Instantiating brilliantly what Sarah Knott calls the “socially turned self,” whose interiority is a function of her exteriority, the compiler’s personal and cultural specificity emerges from her particular sensitivity to and mobilization of other’s thoughts and feelings.28 She has observed her governesses and masters (her sources), collated what’s best in them, and come up with an expression of wisdom that is both unique to her (and salable as such, as the advertisement insists) and generally prevalent. As such, proper sympathy and heteroglossic compilation—­of the kind that Mikhail Bakhtin associates with the novel, of the kind that the Lady performs in the Instructor—­mirror each other implicitly.29 Anonymity keeps objectivity and subjectivity in perfect tension: “A Lady” is as universal as it is unique; the figure of the “American Lady” at once abstracts the principles of the “nation” and concretely instantiates them.

The Regimes of Sympathy As in form, so in content: seeking to “blend instruction with rational amusement,” the Instructor’s collated pieces are themselves designed to “inform the mind, to improve the heart, to correct the manners, or to regulate the conduct” of those young ladies who peruse them.30 Following other eighteenth-­ century schoolbooks for middle-­and upper-­ class American girls, the Instructor contains brief chapters on abstract principles for use in the consolidation and maintenance of a discrete self: narrative trifles on the “The Beauty of Virtue” and “Good Nature” appear alongside short essays on “Content,” “Chastity,” “Modesty,” and “Cleanliness.” Before arriving at this canon of potentially individuating “Politeness and Accomplishments,” however, the Instructor presents essays on “Reading,” “Writing and Spelling,” “Cyphering,”

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and “Grammar” that imagine a principled intersubjectivity as the key to an ethical life. Drawn from Charles Allen’s Polite Lady: Or, a Course of Female Education (London, 1760), these extracts argue that practical advice for correspondents, domestic accountants, and hearthside orators is of primary importance to developing girls: proper verbal and numerical communication is the foundation of all of the other universally admired aspects of femininity.31 Such a homology between ethics, politics, and grammar hinges on contemporary notions of sympathy. In her Spelling Dictionary (1807), Rowson follows Samuel Johnson in defining “Sympathy” as “mutual sensibility, fellow feeling, compassion”; to “sympathize” is “to feel with or for another.”32 In this respect, sympathetic identification presents another art of dependence, another version of the “spirit of emulation”: to sympathize perfectly is to copy precisely emotional states, to feel exactly as another feels, to find oneself thinking another’s thoughts. Where romantic notions of subjectivity place a premium on opacity and ineffability—­in which what is hidden or nonreproducible counts as the “essence” or “spirit” of a given person—­sympathetic notions of personality emphasize transparency, imaginative projection, identification. Against the depredations of “interested” selves, the protocols of sympathy require a devotion to “disinterest,” to thinking oneself as another—­they submerge the desires and inclinations of the individuated for the sake of generating a morally informed self; they cultivate private sensibilities that resonate, ideally, with the private sensibilities of others. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), for example, takes sympathy as one of its key terms. To Smith, a proper sympathy theoretically subtends a full-­spectrum imaginative replication of the circumstances of those one observes and the subsequent comparison of one’s own (imagined) responses and the other’s (observed) behaviors. Tracing out the steps by which one may come to understand another’s pain, for example, Smith finds that “by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.”33 Although the qualifications (“in some measure”) are important, this notion of sympathy as a temporary imaginative transference of personality—­in which masterful and thorough psychological imitation might collapse the potentially infinite distance between psychologically distinct persons—­becomes the basis of Smith’s entire Theory. Of course, the self does not disappear entirely: this cognitive projection ultimately serves to allow the drawing of distinctions between one’s own



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mind and someone else’s. As Smith puts it, “We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality. We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behavior.”34 Such migrations of personality do not merely promote benevolence, then, as narrow understandings of Johnson’s and Rowson’s definition of sympathy might suggest. Indeed, as they afford the only possible grounds for moral judgment—­Is this man I observe doing what the culture would say is the right thing in his situation? Is this woman responding properly to this environmental stimulus?—­they form the sole basis for reasoned social interaction. The dynamic is precisely emulatory: to project oneself into another’s situation is to imitate; to make fine discriminations about the acceptability of another’s responses—­especially as one works to establish the propriety of one’s own—­is to use imitation in the hope of “superior excellence.” To read Rowson’s novels—­or indeed, any of the great mass of eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century novels we now designate as “sentimental”—­is to become intimately familiar with the powers of these sorts of mutual sensibility: many of these texts explicitly and repeatedly dramatize the marvels of emotional emulation and the consequences of its perversion; they reveal how sympathy works not merely as a personal or interior phenomenon but as an engine for generating interpersonal—­even national—­narratives.35 Because of its astonishing potency, sympathy has to be carefully nourished and controlled by an extensive cultural apparatus: in the speech to the Young Ladies’ Academy cited above, for example, Rush outlines a conventional argument against novel reading. He reminds his auditors that the “abortive sympathy which is excited by the recital of imaginary distress blunts the heart to that which is real; and, hence, we sometimes see instances of young ladies, who weep away a whole forenoon over the criminal sorrows of a fictitious Charlotte or Werter, turning with disdain at two o’clock from the sight of a beggar, who solicits in feeble accents or signs a small portion only of the crumbs which fall from their fathers’ tables.”36 Perhaps because of the ubiquity of anxieties like these, literary critics interested in the cultural work of sympathy have by and large focused their attentions on novels and novel reading.37 But novels are only the beginning: schoolbooks like the Instructor offer a different take on how worthy kinds of sympathy and emulation (bodily and linguistic, moral and intellectual) are

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produced—­especially in the teaching of reading, writing, and spelling—­and illustrate the consequences of such production. In this light, the teaching of grammar, penmanship, and orthography assumes a sociopolitical significance beyond the potentially narrow individual-­psychological pursuits of conventional literary history.

Reading the New Pleasing Instructor In the extract from Allen on “Reading” that begins the Instructor, for instance, the narrating “Polite Lady” skirts popular debates on the morality of different kinds of literature. Instead of proscribing philosophy as useless to girls or asserting that sentimental novels (like Rowson’s) are corrupting horrors, she focuses on intersubjective relations: the techniques of oration and conversation. For the Polite Lady, as for most of the other educational writers of the day, “reading” does not mean sitting quietly with a book—­it means to read aloud to one or more people. 38 Lindley Murray’s popular English Reader (1799), for example, divides the art of reading into eight headings, “proper loudness of voice; distinctness; slowness; propriety of pronunciation; emphasis; tones; pauses; and mode of reading verse.” Murray subsequently explains why he places such emphasis on the mechanics of speech: for young men, “reading must be done clearly and with expression, in such a way as to show that the student has minutely perceived the ideas, and entered into the feelings of the author.”39 In other words, reading comprehension and sympathetic identification are versions of the same phenomenon. The degree of an argument’s reproducibility (of the kind lionized in the discourses of eighteenth-­ century natural philosophy, as we’ve seen in Rush’s claims about Rittenhouse) is a critical measure of its success; the extent to which a reader is able to reproduce (or paraphrase, or inhabit) an argument becomes a critical measure of his intelligence and his ability to hold a conversation with the world.40 Although good reading and the logics of reproduction are still closely aligned in the case of feminine reading, the stakes are slightly altered. Where boys are expected to “minutely perceive” abstract ideas and enter “into the feelings of ” a distant author, girls are expected to perceive minutely and to enter into the feelings of their immediate auditors. In the Instructor, a young lady “read[s] with propriety,” only when she develops a sympathetic manner of speaking—­that is, when she anticipates (through identification) the smallest wishes of her audience and strives to mold her performance to them.



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The “Reading” section opens with a catalogue of unpleasant women and their oratorical and moral mistakes. “Aunt Filmer,” for example, speaks “with such a canting tone as grates the ears of the whole company.” There are also “[C] ousin Pultency . . . [who] reads with such hurry and rapidity, and such neglect of the proper stops and pauses, that the most attentive hearer cannot understand one sentence she pronounces” and “Mrs. Nugent, [who] reads with such a loud and shrill voice as stuns the ears of the whole audience. It might do very well in a public assembly, but is altogether unfit for a tea-­table: whereas Mrs. Littleton’s accent is so faint and feeble that you must apply your ear almost to her mouth, before you can understand the subject.”41 The Instructor’s maps of misreading always include unpleasant configurations of mouths and ears; although the reader in these examples may understand her own discourse (and perhaps enter into the “feelings” of the author), what seems to matter most is the way that she is intellectually and corporeally received. The lesson is clear: a failure to speak eloquently is a failure to adequately reproduce the feelings of others (in this case, one’s audience) in one’s own bosom. In not perceiving how she is being perceived, the girl who evinces a lack of sympathy both indicates and fosters impropriety; in the Polite Lady’s pedagogy, the woman who has not considered others in her reading aloud must be congenitally thoughtless or callous. She who resists vocal conventionality—­who refuses to mold herself to the standards set by others—­is morally reprehensible and unfit for society. In contrast, the Instructor’s good reader imaginatively inhabits the consciousness of the auditor and accommodates her voice to the auditor’s physical and mental capacities. Pronunciation and pacing index bodily and emotional comportment; the good reader perceives the needs of those around her, feels with them, and suits her behavior to fit. Her mouth and lungs form “the same easy voice as she uses in conversation. She observes the stops and pauses with great exactness. She reads so slow as to be easily understood by any person, who will give proper attention, and is not absolutely dull; and yet so fast, as not to disgust those of the quickest apprehension. Her voice she carefully adapts to the number and extent of her audience. When she reads to a large company her voice is high without being shrill; when to a small one, it is low, but withal distinct.”42 Because the judicious pronunciation of language is a function of sympathetic identification—­of the ability to comprehend and reproduce the polyvalent “senses” of another in one’s own consciousness—­such comportment at once demonstrates a lively mind, a well-­regulated body, and a sufficiently other-­directed heart.

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Of course, there is a dark verso to such formulations. As Charlotte Temple’s La Rue and countless masculine rakes illustrate, any equation of pleasing speech and ethical behavior is open to exploitation. Following the lead of Samuel Richardson’s Lovelace (and John Milton’s Satan), nearly every rogue in the galaxy of sentimental fiction speaks beautifully, the better to mask his or her ruinous plans—­to couch wicked singularity (or “interest”) in the stuff of propriety or generosity. At the level of the learning girl, though, there are slightly different concerns about disconnects between pleasant articulation and right-­feeling. In the Preface to her Spelling Dictionary, Rowson recalls, I have myself witnessed young people who have read with precision and even elegance; every stop was scrupulously observed, every mark, every pause, attended to, and the voice modulated to the sense of the subject; yet I have been convinced by subsequent questions, that they have attached no idea whatever to what they have read, but that any string of words with the same capitals, breaks and points, would have been read exactly in the same manner. To this mechanical kind of reading I was a perfect stranger, till repeated instances assured me it really did exist; it then appeared to me a very serious evil.43 Rowson offers two solutions to the problem of machine-­like repetition: a dictionary for children that includes the meanings of words that one speaks but does not understand and a clarification of the procedures of emulation. As the Instructor insists, a perfect vocal imitation of the reading mistress—­the most exact and affecting translation of print to sound—­is not the same as moral reading. Verbal imitation without emotional sympathy is mere mimicry. The only way to begin the process of becoming a proper reader—­to develop a sympathetic identification with one’s auditors, to understand the moral (and the morality) of the things one says—­is to nurture a sympathetic identification with one’s own teacher. The Instructor exhorts the young lady who would read well to “form yourself upon the example of your governess, who, indeed, is one of the best readers I ever heard. . . . She is a complete mistress of the art of reading; and you cannot fail to become so too, if you imitate her manner, and follow her directions.”44 As her sympathetic identifications become more and more exquisite—­that is, as she becomes less and less “herself ”—­the reader becomes a paragon of virtue and an object lesson for those whose syntactic sympathies are not yet as developed—­another emulable feminine citizen. Such policies about exemplarity seem to have been



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strictly enforced at Rowson’s own school. A student from the academy later recalled, “Our lessons were reading, writing, geography, drawing, painting, and embroidery. Our preceptress was very attentive to our dress and manners. If she noticed any of us sitting, or standing in a stooping posture, she would immediately pronounce the name of the forgetful one and assume herself the proper attitude.”45

The Ethics of Textual Form The second section of the Instructor, “Writing and Spelling,” explores the linkages between the motions of the writing hand and a writer’s moral probity. We have seen this imagined relationship between chirography and ethics before—­in Franklin’s alphabet engravings (Chapter 1) and in Rush’s Eulogium for Rittenhouse (Chapter 3)—­but it becomes particularly vivid in copybooks, the direct material products of the cultural precept. To take one vividly representative example, the writing book of Elizabeth Taylor (1785) includes a page on which the following lines are repeated (with minor variations) in careful round hand: Quit thyself nobly, with a prudent care, Elizabeth Of clumsey Writing, and of Blots beware. Taylor To which is appended: Elizabeth Taylor, her hand and pen. 178546 The repeated inscription of the name after the admonitory lines suggests more than simple page-­filling thrift: it is as if “Elizabeth Taylor, her hand and pen” are all elementary products of the same lesson. The lines themselves, which equate good writing with good morals and which efface any distinction between “Blots” of ink and “Blots” of imprudence, reify the underlying conflation of subjectivity and handwriting.47 This conflation holds even in cases where the copy-­text is nonnarrative or nondidactic (like the full pages of “Northampton” and “Kingsfieldshire” in David Clap’s copybook or the page of “Honorificabilitutinatibusque. Inhabitantibus” in Almond Tracy’s).48 Writing masters found moralizing processes operative in the material production of writing even when considered apart from nonmaterial (and therefore more

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traditionally recognizable) moralizing processes, like crafting rhetoric or expanding on a theme. As E. Jennifer Monaghan points out, in the eighteenth century, “Just as ‘good’ reading was considered to be accurate oral reading, so ‘good’ writing seemed to be entirely in terms of fine letter formation.”49 Indeed, unfinished thoughts are endemic to the exercise book. Almond Tracy’s copybook (ca. 1810?) features several pages of tellingly incomplete didactic sentences. “Beauty soon fa[des]”; “By caution and care you will learn to wri[te fair]; “Emulation se[ldom fails]”; “Reward sw[eetens labor].”50 Samuel Salisbury’s copybook includes a page of “Our minds must be cultivated as well as our pl[ants]”; Simon Ray Green’s 1801 writing book has twelve pages of “Observe the Copy and write better if you” and “Observe the Copy and write better if you can.”51 The sentiments may be imperfectly expressed, but because the process of writing them down legibly and repeatedly is just as important as the process of understanding what the words mean, they retain their character-­ building functionality. In other words, turning a clever (or moralist) phrase or constructing a well-­organized paragraph of one’s own was nice, but making sure that the characters making up such a phrase or paragraph were perfectly in accordance with given letterforms was thought to be even better. The Instructor explains that the well-­formed written “character” and the well-­formed moral “character” are mutually constitutive because they are mutually dependent upon sympathy and emulation. Casting off European fashion, which dictated that ladies ought to be taught an Italian or epistolary hand, the Polite Lady joins with other American teachers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to argue for the superior propriety (or “character”) of the round hand. In the opening moments of this section, she draws probity and penmanship together in the interest of manufacturing a “private” personhood that is simultaneously a social order: Writing, my dear, is one of the most useful arts that ever was invented. Were it not for this art, the knowledge of every person would be contracted within the narrow circle of his own experience and observation; but by means of this, we can enjoy the knowledge and discoveries of all those, who have lived before us; and, in some measure make them our own. By means of this art, you may converse with your friend, though removed to the most distant corner of the world, almost as well as if personally present. By means of this art, you can preserve on paper whatever you read, hear, or see, that is worth



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remembering; and which it would otherwise be impossible to treasure up in your memory.52 Quoting Allen, the compiler here presents writing as a convivial art, as another time-­tested way of generating sympathy; the translation of events and perceptions onto the page allows for those events and perceptions to enter into a sympathetic economy where states of feeling may be reproduced over great distances. When rendered in legible letters, “experience and observation” become relivable in other bodies; the well-­disposed hand allows for one’s correspondents to re-­create or emulate—­to sympathize with—­one’s joys and sorrows and intellectual operations. As a prosthetic for memory, writing even allows one to sympathize with one’s former self by returning to thoughts and feelings that may not have been fully “treasured up” in one’s mind.53 Good handwriting, then, is the sine qua non of public and historical sentiments: the musings that might otherwise remain local to one’s hearth or head, when written out, may matter anywhere in the world and vice versa. As the mental workings of others become “our own,” one moves from the isolation of the “narrow circle of experience and observation” into the world of the literary, the social, and the political. One of Rowson’s students remarked in a letter to her parents that although she had “contracted a love for solitude, I never feel alone when I have my pen or my book.”54 Illegibility and misspelling, on the other hand, render null the possibility of sympathetic identification and therefore foreclose sociability and political action. If one’s correspondents cannot parse one’s script or puzzle out one’s orthography, they cannot participate in one’s “knowledge and discoveries,” and one is left alone in the cramped space of the private.55 The Instructor’s essay on grammar proceeds in much the same way as its essays on reading and handwriting, treating lexical correctness as less of a kind of binding social contract and putting forth the local teacher as its arbiter. A similar lesson appears in Rowson’s fiction, in which the grammatically “vulgar” and the syntactically “ignorant” are almost always the “interested,” the selfish, the unsympathetic, the evil.56 The farmer’s wife at the end of Charlotte Temple, for example, breaks a number of grammatical rules as she evicts her tenant—­a very pregnant Charlotte—­into a terrible snowstorm: “I’m come to see if as how you can pay your rent, because as how we hear Captain Montable [Montraville] is gone away, and it’s fifty to one if he b’ant killed afore he comes back again; an then, Miss, or Ma’am, or whatever you may be, as I was saying to my husband, where are we to look for our money.”57 The wife’s

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inquiry about Charlotte’s financial status takes the form of a jumbled string of “as hows” and improper tenses (“I’m come”)—­what the narrator calls a “curious harangue.” Like the unsympathetic content of her speech, the form of the wife’s language is rude, low, and incorrect; her awful grammar and her cold-­heartedness are inextricable and reciprocal functions. Charlotte may be destabilized or corrupted as a person and as a signifier—­as indexed by the wife’s confusion about whether Charlotte is “Miss, or Ma’am, or whatever you may be”—­but the farmer’s wife is considerably worse. The result of all of this improper speech is the suspension of discourse altogether: bad language drives out the good, and the chapter ends as “Charlotte bow[s] her head in silence . . . the anguish of her heart . . . too great to permit her to articulate a single word.”58 Echoing the lessons of novels like Charlotte Temple, the Instructor offers two sociogrammatical case studies, “Caroline M.” and “Sophia S.” “The former, possessed of excellent sense, but without any knowledge of grammar, expresses herself in so awkward and incorrect a manner, that with all her understanding, she is often disgusting: while the latter hath not half her abilities, or general knowledge, by being mistress of the rules of grammar, expresses herself, both in writing and in conversation, in so easy, correct, and graceful a manner, as charms all who hear her converse, or enjoy her correspondence.”59 Imagining an interpersonal “charm” to be the most important product of proper grammar and “disgust” as the product of careless usage, the Instructor divorces linguistic structure from intellectual substance in the interest of sociability. Like good pronunciation, good grammar becomes aligned with good morals precisely because well-­pointed recitation alone affords the possibility of mutual pleasure, intelligibility, and sympathetic identification among a disparate group of ladies. Poor Caroline M. can find no one to share in her “excellent sense” because she is in violation of the conventions of sentence making, which are, in the Polite Lady’s scheme, also the rules for interpersonal contact. Sophia S., on the other hand, is a worthy “model,” a local preceptress to be imitated. The student should “not think you have attained sufficient knowledge in that branch of your education, till you can speak and write as correctly and with as much propriety as she does.”60 As in the case of penmanship (with the benevolent and ever-­present writing master) and reading (with the mistress as exemplary form), skill in grammar may only come from the emulation of live local persons. The various technical competencies described above carry the day, even over individual “understanding,” because they indicate the possibility of “[enjoyable]



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correspondence”; even when separated from coherent moral or intellectual content, good grammar builds sympathetic relationships. And these relationships—­produced, defined, and mediated by the pedagogical effacement of singularity—­ultimately build societies or “nations.” In “Sketches of Female Biography,” appended to her collection of commencement addresses, A Present for Young Ladies (1811), Rowson contends that for the project of maintaining a republic, Biography is equally authentic, equally instructive, and in general, more interesting than history; it is calculated at once to inform the mind, improve the taste, and amend the heart, and presenting to our view excellence actually attained, excites in the bosom, a noble emulation to equal those who have gone before us; to young females, the memorials of exemplary women are peculiarly interesting. The importance of women in every civilized society is generally acknowledged, and their ascendence [sic] in forming the character of the other sex cannot be disputed; it is not alone to the nursery, or during the periods of childhood and youth, but in riper years, in the cabinet, in the camp, in almost every station in some way or other their influence is found to be unbounded.61 Here, Rowson makes a strong case for the signal political importance of a nonprescriptive and decentralized pedagogy, in which multiple individuals are objects of imitation and in which persons are themselves the products of multiple imitations. Under these conditions, cultural and political authority is not seated in the distant institutions of a high-­Federalist patriarchy or in a fantasy of autonomous self-­making but in the replication of each well-­ ruled grammarian, each virtuous mind, and each sympathetic heart. Rowson argues that the necessarily intersubjective “noble emulation” of real-­live women—­not individualist striving for the Enlightened abstractions of “liberty,” “justice,” or “self-­sufficiency”—­can lead to “excellence actually attained” and may become an alternative means for constituting the United States.

Embroidering a Self In February 1803, Mrs. Judith Foster Saunders and Miss Clementina Beach purchased advertising space in consecutive numbers of the Boston

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Independent Chronicle to announce the formation of an “ACADEMY for Ladies at Dorchester.” Although the notice emphasizes the school’s “pleasant situation,” it makes no other claims to novelty or difference; it outlines a curriculum and a set of charges more or less in lockstep with the nationally emergent institution of the female seminary. Room and board were thirty dollars per term; reading, writing, English grammar, arithmetic and plain sewing, six dollars; embroidery, six dollars. For similar fees, Beach and Saunders would also offer instruction in tambour (embroidery done in a round frame), in “All kinds of work done out of frame,” in French, in “Geography and use of the Globes,” in painting, and in “Hair-­Work on Ivory.”62 Aided, perhaps, by Beach’s reputation as an artist—­she had been a student of Gilbert Stuart’s—­the school was immediately successful: by 1804, Mrs. Saunders and Miss Beach’s Academy had thirty-­six pupils in residence and a full-­time dancing master.63 What ought we to make of Beach and Saunders’s utterly commonplace interests in embroidery, painting, drawing, or hair-­work? All too often, these arts have come to stand for something like vice: because training in handicrafts—­especially the finer ones, the fancy sewing, watercolors, and so forth—­relies on elaborate systems of rote imitation, in which the derivative was valued over the originary and in which following the model was often the highest form of achievement, feminist histories sometimes cast them as politically irrelevant or ideologically counterproductive. Indeed, what were often categorized as “ornamental accomplishments” in the period have been, to some extent, vilified as “social accomplishments”—­markers of an aspirational “refinement,” of a rigidly hierarchical, misogynist, and antidemocratic conservatism. Thus, fine arts instruction (and the objects that it creates) become the outward, material signs of an aggressively policed class distinction, markers of a vestigial (European-­style) leisure and pleasure in an age when most Americans—­even those of a more or less middling sort—­were doomed to unremitting toil.64 On the contrary, in early nineteenth-­century female education, the appreciation and reproduction of aesthetic objects is never only a means to superficial refinement but also “useful” to the girl and to the polity that imagines itself in her image. As Rush puts it near the end of his address to the Young Ladies’ Academy, attention to these matters is essential to American independence: “It is high time to awake from this servility [to European models]—­to study our own character—­to examine the age of our country—­and to adopt manners in everything that shall be accommodated to our state of society



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and to the forms of our government. In particular it is incumbent upon us to make ornamental accomplishments, yield to principles and knowledge, in the education of our women.”65 Susanna Rowson’s school—­where needlecrafts formed an essential part of the curriculum—­seems to have followed Saunders and Beach’s in taking Rush’s injunction to heart.66 One newspaper’s “Communication” about the annual exhibition at Mrs. Rowson’s Academy for 1810 calls attention to the school’s particular specialties: “The prize medals were distributed, with a prudent conformity to real merit. The prizes for embroidery, for figure and flower painting, were conferred on those, whose talents in these particular branches, were truly conspicuous. In all the performances, we could trace the ingenious pen of Mrs. Rowson; they breathed that sweet mixture of mirth and sentiment, which both delight the ear and instruct the mind.”67 Rowson-­ school works, usually silk pictures presenting secular or literary subjects copied from popular prints (“The Landing of Columbus”; “Boston Harbor”; “Shakespeare’s Tempest”), place an entirely typical emphasis on accurate reproduction.68 The “Communication” repeats this emphasis, neatly rendering the interpersonal dynamics of emulation at the heart of republicanism. The distributed medals at once signal the presence of “truly conspicuous” and “particular” talents—­ thus concretizing distinction or differentiation among the girls and proclaiming their elevated status in the community—­ and acknowledge a shared “[breath].” In “all the performances,” their teacher, Rowson, is visible, co-­present. Like reading aloud and writing letters, then, plying the needle develops moral probity and a sufficiently porous “private” character. As such, samplers and other forms of imitative needlework are not merely “social accomplishments” but socializing ones: the theory and practice of schoolgirl embroidery aligns imitative aesthetics with sociability and intersubjectivity. Again, such an equation relies on a calculus of emulation and imitation: a well-­formed stitch indicates a well-­wrought mind and a proper femininity because it shows how well a girl can conform to a given model—­ how well her sense of “self ” comports with everybody else’s selves. Unlike the oratorical and chirographical performances discussed above, however, these objects suggest critical negotiations of pattern and imitator, of commonality and individuality. To begin to make this case, it helps to consider the most common—­ and least class-­marked—­genre of needlework: the embroidered sampler. Worked in farmhouses, townhouses, and schoolhouses all over the newly United States, samplers were an essential part of female education (polite

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and otherwise).69 In 1730, Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum defined “samplar” as “a Pattern or Model; also a Piece of Canvas, on which Girls learn to mark, or work Letters and Figures, with a Needle”; by 1770, a new edition of the same work defined “samplar” as a “Pattern or Model; also a Piece of work by young Girls for Improvement.”70 This doubled sense of “improvement”—­ where samplers act at the level of ethics as well as manual dexterity—­was well understood. Featuring alphabets, numbers, didactic poems, Bible verses, and instructive scenes (such as the return of the Prodigal Son, or Adam and Eve with the Serpent) as well as decorative patterns, samplers were repositories of practical knowledge about language, aesthetics, and morality.71 Whatever moralizing, socializing function samplers have is precisely emulative: although their bright colors, manic ornamentations, and fanciful animals and flowers sometimes suggest anything but a strict attention to the rules of mimesis or careful copying, youthful whimsy and the singular imagination of the embroidering girl were not part of the equation.72 Historians of needlework have shown that most of the design elements of a sampler typically were drawn by a preceptor (or, in some cases, by a local artist) on a slate at the front of the room, directly onto the ground fabric or onto a piece of paper, which was then affixed to the back of the sampler-­to-­be. Girls were admired for their ability to translate these models in thread and were rewarded according to the accuracy of their reproductions. Although samplers are singular, nonreproducible objects, as Susan Burrows Swan observes, novel composition was never the point: “originality [was] not praise[d]: [the] ability to work stitches was.”73 In stressing pattern recognition and reproduction, samplers were thought to teach humility (with respect to teachers, parents, and God), discipline, and sympathy.74 Consider, for example, Caroline Vaughn’s 1818 sampler, worked at Mary Walden’s School, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Likely framed and almost certainly displayed at an examination as an example of Vaughn’s propriety and refinement, the piece signals a young woman’s engagement with certain culturally determined (that is, raced, classed, gendered, religiously specific) notions of beauty and accomplishment. As such, its rigidly generic and imitative (although not precisely mimetic) visual vocabularies develop a potentially politicized intersubjectivity as much as a potentially politicized distinction. To reproduce perfectly a given visual trope was to materialize an identification with one’s teacher—­to sew a basket or a cherub just like the teacher’s was not just to accept the culture’s aesthetic conventions as one’s own, or to exhibit bodily self-­discipline, but to prove in another way one’s capability of entering



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Figure 8. Marking sampler, worked by Caroline Vaughn. Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art.

into the thoughts and feelings of another. In other words, the barns and birds that decorate Vaughn’s text do not just provide evidence that she knew how to sew a proper stitch; they argue for that psychological continuity between instructor and pupil universally lauded as the key to developing feminine virtue. Every basket, every floral border is the visible sign of virtuous emulation: the student’s best accomplishments are the ones in which her hand and her teacher’s are revealed to be the same, in which the relays between exemplar and example, sympathizer and sympathized are, as at Rowson’s pageant, “truly conspicuous.” Like the vast majority of samplers produced in North America after 1700, Vaughn’s piece includes several alphabets. The emphasis on letterform over

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semiotic content suggested by the truncation of the first and third alphabets from the top rehearses Allen’s/Rowson’s arguments that prettiness and legibility may trump whatever message one may wish to communicate in writing. Or rather, in a culture where visual presentation and virtue are inseparable, an assiduous and explicit conformity with conventional aesthetic forms is one of the messages to be communicated; in proving that she can follow the individual letter models set out by the preceptor—­even at the expense of comprehensiveness—­the girl proves her agreeability.75 Of course, all of this sympathizing with the teacher is performed in the service of sympathizing with others—­her parents, her friends, the virtuous public. To sew poorly, just as to write illegibly, to read gratingly, or to speak ungrammatically is to fail to imaginatively inhabit the minds of one’s viewers, interlocutors, or readers. Vaughn’s truncated alphabets may again be illustrative: because in most cases, her audience would grant the alphabet integrity as a unit—­as the second alphabet from the top, which has been fitted perfectly into the space afforded by the borders, seems to insist—­these partial versions may only conform to convention when completed by a viewer. It is the alphabet, after all, and every literate spectator knows what comes next—­that the half-­formed P of line 1 is a half-­formed P and not another rehearsal of the opening strains of K, even though the forms are identical. The incompleteness acts as an invitation to dialogue, to collaboration.76 Like the moral “self,” these alphabets must be shared in order to be made whole. The poem at the center of Vaughn’s piece reinforces this same dialectic of feminine individuation and de-­individuation, imitation and origination. Worked in the same script font as her uppermost alphabet, the poem is a version of one of the most common sampler verses of the early nineteenth century: Jesus permit thy gracious Name to stand As the first effort of an infant’s hand And while her fingers oer this canvas move Engage her tender heart to seek thy love With thy dear children let her share a part And write thy name thyself upon her heart The poem aligns the act of fancy sewing with the act of worship; the sampler itself becomes a prayer. As the girl moves her “fingers oer this canvas,” writing out her message to Jesus as well as working her flower baskets, her houses-­and-­barns, Christ is to do some embroidering of his own—­sewing



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his seal upon her heart. If this last line suggests the particularity that we have come to expect from the romantic individual—­a monadic subject’s plea for a unique relationship with her Redeemer—­such thoughts are complicated by the poem’s utter conventionality.77 As the adoption of the third person address indicates (what in other versions of the poem are “my fingers” and “my heart” belong to “her” in Vaughn’s), this personal plea is curiously impersonal—­ individuality is less at a premium than membership in a gender, a class of persons. Of course, this is perfectly in keeping with the poem’s emphasis on Christian fellowship and identification. Whatever may be written/sewn on Vaughn’s particular heart (by dint of her own writing and sewing), it would be best if “she share a part” of the love written on the rest of His “dear children.” Christic virtue here is critically divisible, participatory, iterable; the verse seeks only to make its copyist into one of the many—­to allow her to share attributes with those of the visible church, just as she shares a part of her teacher, her friends, her viewers, and her poetic tradition.

Samplers and Print The logic of iterability and reproducibility becomes particularly marked in embroidery that takes its cues from printing. Consider the case of Elizabeth Rowland, a young woman who in 1803 was enrolled at the Quaker-­run Westtown School in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Rowland’s marking sampler, in many ways, is the very picture of typicality: on a plain white ground, there are alphabets of different kinds, a patch of numbers, and a hanging tulip-­ and-­vine border; it is marked with her name and with the time and place of working. This form of marking sampler is common to Quaker schools, regardless of their geographical situation.78 As the use of Roman characters instead of a typical sampler or marking alphabet indicates, following the form is the heart of the assignment. Indeed, these letters are the idiom of mechanical reproduction: instead of looking like hand-­sewing or manuscript, Rowland’s running-­stitch alphabets bear an uncanny resemblance to movable type. Her sampler suggests the same link between austerity, legibility, and mechanical reproduction made explicit in the proverbial phrase “As plain as print.”79 Rowland seems to treat the traditional cross-­stitch/marking alphabet as a subtle form of ornament; other than its appearance as a whole alphabet, it is used only at the beginning of proper nouns, as with the E and the R in “Elizabeth Rowland” and the W and the T in “West Town.”

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Figure 9. Marking sampler, worked by Elizabeth Rowland. Courtesy Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, Pa.

Rowland’s practice of presenting the same letterform in different heights and widths is common among Quaker schools and is another version of this machine-like ­ principle. The bottom two alphabets in Rowland’s text differ as the upper and lower sections of a printer’s case; they are the equivalent of 32-point ­ and 16-point ­ type.80 Rowland’s relatively unusual depiction of punctuation marks suggests that minutiae will not be ignored in the copying of texts. The angle bracket, semicolon, colon, comma, exclamation point, and



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Figure 10. Poetic extract sampler, worked by Elizabeth Rowland. Courtesy Chester County Historical Society, West Chester, Pa.

question mark in the middle of her larger alphabet indicate that whatever her sampler speaks, it will speak in print. Rowland’s alignment of the actions of the hand and the actions of the press in turn suggests that embroidery may be a third term in the dialectic of print and manuscript, copy and original. Insofar as samplers owe their cultural power to their reproducibility and ubiquity as well as their uniqueness, this equation makes perfect sense—they are a ­ 81 quintessentially republican technology. The point is made explicit in a second Rowland work from 1803, a poetic extract from Edward Young’s popular poem The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality. The poem, a long meditation on

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faith and doubt, was a much-­excerpted staple of genteel educations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; it was mentioned regularly in Westtown’s lists of works appropriate for children.82 Within a conventional Quaker vine-­and-­leaf border, Rowland reproduces her portion of the text almost exactly as it appears on the page—­not just verbatim but as if her sampler were set in type.83 ’Tis not the curious, but the pious path, That leads to my point: Lorenzo know, Without or star, or angel, for their guide, Who worship God, shall find him, Humble love, And not proud reason, keeps the door of heaven, Love finds admission, where proud science fails.84 Rowland’s task is not merely to copy out Young’s words or to make his sentiments her own (as her nonscript subscription might indicate) but to simulate precisely a particular printed version of the lines. Although an important quality of printing is its elimination of both the trace and bias of the subjective, singular hand, Rowland’s work insists that such an establishment of mechanical anonymity or assimilation might also be a way of producing republican subjectivity.85 Young’s excerpt remains uncredited—­neither the title of the poem nor the name of its author appear—­ but the place and date of its reproduction (“West-­Town Boarding School”; “MCXXXIII”) and its reproducer (“Elizabeth Rowland”) appear prominently.86 The piece at once specifies its origins and obscures them, asserts its worker’s individuality and forecloses it. The embroidered verse extract thus performs the same contradictory motions as Wheatley’s hyper-­conventional poetry: if replication, unconditional piety, and humility trump rational inquiry in the eyes of God, the only way to an individualized relationship with the Almighty is to give up one’s self completely. The next (possibly concurrent) step in the process of stitching together a coherent self for girls at Westtown School was the darning sampler. A record of techniques for mending torn or damaged textiles, darning samplers first appeared in England in the middle of the eighteenth century; the earliest American examples followed soon after.87 Like embroidered marking, which could be used to assert ownership of textiles, darning served an important economic function: at a time when a napkin could be an heirloom and a fancy tablecloth could take years to weave and embroider, a girl’s ability to



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Figure 11. Darning sampler. Courtesy Winterthur Museum. Museum purchase.

spot-repair ­ fabric could save her household large amounts of money and labor.88 In other words, darning went well beyond basting holes in socks: because of the broad range of textiles in use in American households (especially post-­Revolution), the darning sampler was a full-­scale experiment in imitation. The explicit purpose of the darning sampler was to prove that girls could reproduce from scratch a given fabric using only their needle and the proper thread: holes would be cut in otherwise complete pieces of linen and filled in with new needlepoint weaving constructed just like the old or just like a swatch of another. Many of them had twelve or fifteen squares—­one

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typically reserved for re-­creating the ground (an all-­white patch, supposed to be unrecognizable as new work), and the rest for various patterns (typically multicolored, the better to show the weaving). Girls were evaluated on more than aesthetic accuracy—­in addition to copying its appearance, matching the elasticity and density of the target fabric determined the success of the undertaking. At Westtown, girls were not allowed to take on other sewing projects until they were able to darn “[a] piece twelve by eight inches . . . so perfectly that the mending can scarcely be distinguished from the original material.”89 That is, they were not able to progress with their educations until they had proven a set of complicated mimetic skills: until they could copy their teacher in copying fabric, they were remedial students. The most advanced needlework projects at Westtown came after all doubts about a student’s ability to copy texts and copy textiles had been set aside. As a Westtown internal directive put it, “[The darning] examination passed, the student undertakes the complex embroidery of spectacle cases, globes representing the earth, and samplers with beautifully stitched designs bordering alphabets and moral sentiments, usually in poetry.”90 These globe samplers move into other (related) circles of mimetic philosophy—­in reproducing the whole earth or the whole night sky (in celestial globes), they participate in representational economies similar to Rittenhouse’s. Dated 1815 but probably worked for more than a year, Ruth Wright’s globe, for example, pieces together twelve sections of white or light blue satin (like the peel of an orange wedge) on a ball of stuffed canvas. The globe features continents, islands, and large inland bodies of water (the Caspian Sea, for example) embroidered in silk to a rather high degree of detail. Navigational lines are also sewn in (every ten degrees of latitude and every fifteen degrees of longitude; every other longitude line masks a seam in the globe’s surface), as are the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Country names (although not their borders) are inked in, as are (on occasion) interesting bits of information. Westtown globes typically use the same openwork font for writing out the names of things (like “Atlantic Ocean”), suggesting a single lithographic source, very carefully followed. There is room for difference, too: on Wright’s globe, there’s a sewn-­in note next to Owyhee (Hawaii) that says “Where CCook was killed.” Some of the globes are signed and dated; others (like Wright’s) are not. Map samplers like these are partly about instilling national feeling: depicting the United States and its contexts marks (as it creates) emotional and intellectual investments in the integrity of borders and the coherence of the



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Figure 12. Globe sampler. Courtesy Winterthur Museum. Museum purchase.

cultures that they mark.91 But they are also about generating other sorts of sentiment: like Rittenhouse with his orrery, these pieces illustrate the popularization of a scientific method that is, in some ways, the same thing as perfecting a particular kind of mimesis. And, like Rittenhouse, they show how such perfecting is imagined to be a moral act—not ­ just a science project.92 As Rachel Cope wrote to her parents from Westtown in October 1816, “I expect to have a good deal of trouble in making them, yet I hope they will recompense me for all my trouble, for they will certainly be a curiosity to you and of considerable use in instructing my brothers and sisters, and to strengthen my own memory respecting the supposed shape of our earth, and the manner in which it moves (or is moved) on its axis, or the line drawn through it, round which it revolves every twenty-four hours.”93 The making of a globe, then, ­ is an act of imitation that builds families, that makes natural-philosophical ­

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knowledge transmissible across gender and age lines, and that gives a sense of one’s political and geographical place in the world. Replicating the earth in miniature, embroiderers become masters of their own universe.

Pictures from Shakespeare To think further about the socializing aspects of embroidered aesthetics, I want to turn to two rather more pointedly artistic needlework pieces: Caroline Blaney’s 1812 silkwork picture of a moment in The Tempest and Mehitable Neal’s 1807 scene from Cymbeline are more or less as fancy as schoolgirl embroidery got in nineteenth-­century New England.94 Both of these young women came from comfortable Boston-­area families—­they were finished in the latest fashions by the most reputable schools. (Blaney was likely a student of Susanna Rowson; she worked her piece around the age of fifteen. Neal was a student of Beach and Saunders; she was twenty-­one when her piece was completed.) As such, whatever else they represent, each of these pieces is certainly an “ornamental accomplishment”—­an unabashed signifier of class aspiration, of bourgeois “distinction.” In both cases, the thousands of stitches represent large quantities of idle time without idle hands—­a virtuous prosperity. Their materials and intricate working monumentalize expense: silk floss, gold thread, and the training to use them in these ways were not at all cheap. Their subject matter indicates the same bourgeois sensibility: each piece asserts familiarity with the exclusive reaches of belles lettres, as well as an understanding of the fashions and conventions of Continental painting and engraving. Both pieces have even been framed in gilt for hanging at school exhibitions and, in time, the family’s parlor. (We have account books for the framer of Neal’s work, John Doggett; he seems to have charged $17.50 to mount three separate pieces.95) As with the alphabetic needlework, however, there is much more to all of this than the marking and policing of personal and sociocultural boundaries. And again, process is the key: as Jane C. Nylander has shown, both of these images are copied from the Shakespeare Galleries assembled and published by John and Josiah Boydell of London.96 These engravings, which the Boydells commissioned from a variety of artists, were among the most popular print images of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: they were reproduced in enormous quantities, in many forms and editions. They were also repurposed for enormously variable uses—­including dozens (if not



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Figure 13. Embroidered scene from The Tempest, worked by Caroline Blaney. Reproduced in Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1: 81.

hundreds) of needlework pictures.97 As versions proliferated, their conventionality became part of their appeal—the ­ copied images at once proposed and confirmed material links between the pillars of English artistry (Shakespeare, David Garrick, the various painters and engravers) and the United States. More than such cultural continuities, these pictures describe continuities between teacher and student, between artist and viewer: to follow the

Figure 14. Embroidered scene from Cymbeline, worked by Mehitable Neal. Reproduced in Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1: 98.



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Figure 15. Engraving of a scene from The Tempest, from Boydell et al., A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakspeare. Courtesy Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

print source as accurately as possible was to prove that you could see as others see and to invite others to see as you do—­that is, to cultivate and instantiate sympathetic identification.98 Some needlework pictures go so far as to use only black thread on a white-­linen ground, improvising crosshatching, weighted lines, and so forth, the better to approximate the look of printed engraving.99 The inscriptions on both pieces monumentalize the pedagogical dynamics of dependency. In Neal’s picture, the legend reads “Wrought by Mehitable Neal at Mrs Saunders and Miss Beach’s Academy.” It is not only Neal’s individual hand and mind on display but her web of social relations, her cultural imbrications. In Blaney’s piece, “Act I Scene II” and “Caroline Blaney” flank the title (“Shakespeare’s Tempest”), which is written in the same gilt. And so although the work may be said, in some ways, to authorize her—­it places her name on the frame, after all—­it summons her finally as a supplement, a kind

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Figure 16. Engraving of a scene from Cymbeline, from Boydell et al., A Collection of Prints, from Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakspeare. Courtesy Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.

of co-­artist. Just as Neal’s piece insists on the presence of Saunders and Beach in the final product, Blaney’s piece renders Shakespeare’s role in the creation of the piece explicit. By reproducing lines from the play, it records the presence of the Boydell form, too—­many versions of the Boydell prints were accompanied by the brief passages they were intended to illustrate. That said, it may be worth pointing out that the Boydells’ engraving of this scene uses different lines as a caption—­and that whoever made the choice to switch them up picked some of the most famous lines in the play: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t? / Is, I know how to curse.” As such, the piece at once inserts Blaney into an artistic tradition and insulates her from an originary status in that tradition, proposes its worker’s individuality, and forecloses it. In places where perfect reproduction is impossible—­due to the perceived (and rigidly enforced) limitations of the medium or the worker—­the task of



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reproducing is turned over to the professionals. For Blaney’s Tempest piece, a “limner” (perhaps, as Davida Deutsch has argued, the Boston portrait artist John Johnston) has painted in the faces and extremities of Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda; the whole of Ariel; and the scene’s central pale blue backdrop.100 Blaney was responsible for working clothing, foliage, and other elements of the staging—­the ground on which the characters stand, the trees that frame the scene. In the upper right quadrant of the piece, it is possible to see where the limner has mixed his paints to match the colors of Blaney’s thread; the two have worked together to integrate the whole. Although it has more silk and less painting, Neal’s piece observes the same conventions: she works the building, the bodies, and the furniture, but hands and faces, as well as the glimpse of background sky, are the province of a professional painter. What the pieces register, then, is a layering of collaborations, of visually mediated and aesthetically constituted sociabilities. The painting may follow a particular staging of the play; the engraving follows the painting; Blaney and Neal follow their teacher’s drawing and their print source; the limner and the framer (possibly the same artisan) follow the same—­a potentially endless chain of identifications and evaluations, of seeing and being seen.

Variant Subjects To conclude, let us consider briefly a pair of slightly earlier samplers from the same small town in seacoast New Hampshire. Although these objects share the commitment to the morality of competitive imitation described above, they also offer important counterpoints to the citizenship-­through-­ emulation model that I have been describing. Specifically, these two samplers suggest a material third term between the machinery of republican reproduction and the romance of the bourgeois subject; they claim difference and differentiation without an immediate resort to uniqueness. In 1804 and 1805, Sally Blunt and Mary Ann Hooker were students at Reverend Timothy Alden’s Female Academy in Portsmouth. The samplers that they worked under Alden’s tutelage are recognizable immediately as samplers of the same school and instructor and perhaps off of the same design. In many ways, they imitate each other: wave motifs fill in empty space around the alphabets; similar devices separate the numbers one through twelve; names and ages are each included and written in the same curlicue font. Each includes similar geometric internal borders and a colorful strawberry external border; each

Figure 17. Marking sampler, worked by Mary Ann Hooker. Reproduced in LaBranche and Conant, In Female Worth and Elegance: Sampler and Needlework Students and Teachers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1741–1840, 70.

Figure 18. Marking sampler, worked by Sally Blunt. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

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has the same didactic poem fragment and scallop-­shell badge enclosing the name of the worker. Both pieces reproduce the same trapezoidal basket with five tiers of fruit; they share the same dimensions and the same green linsey-­ woolsey ground. Despite this congruity, though, the samplers are still quite different. Hooker’s is plainer, featuring bits of text (“Beauty is a fading flower” and “Virtue is a blooming flower”) in lieu of Blunt’s elaborate arboreal decorations.101 Hooker includes a date (1805), while Blunt does not. Blunt places an “NH” in her scallop medallion, recording the place where the sampler was worked; Hooker offers no explicit statement of geographic location. Blunt’s sampler has less green space and a different sequence of alphabets. Hooker’s version of the strawberry border has shorter stems and adds swags at the top; Blunt’s has more berries and includes vines with birds at the bottom. An extra trapezoidal basket, featuring a handle and multicolored flowers, is part of Blunt’s work. Just as these samplers are clearly samplers and are quite keen to demonstrate the morality that comes from miming predetermined examples, they are also unmistakably individualized. That is, these textiles exhibit a peculiarity and excess that cannot be assimilated into a strictly republican or iterative literary or aesthetic project; they participate in a cultural and symbolic economy of repetition and emulation but in such a way that they call into question the perfectibility of that economy. The verse that each girl includes on her piece is an examplar that raises questions about exemplarity itself: How blest the maid whose circling years improve Her God the object of her warmest love Whose active years successive as they glide The Book the Needle and the Pen divide. On one hand, this is a perfectly conventional sentiment to express in thread; there are literally hundreds of versions of this poem extolling the pietistic and regulatory virtues of good reading, chaste writing, and careful needlework.102 In precisely the way that republican theory imagines, the reforming-­machine perpetuates itself—­proper girls embroider themselves a reminder that embroidery will make them proper girls. Even so, although each girl copies out a common model and each expresses the community of sentiment Rowson and Rush claim as central to the republican political project in the United States, the poem that they copy is different from other poems that share some of its phrases. In their anthology of sampler verse, Bolton and Coe record at least



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fifty-­one different poems in praise of education and embroidery; notably, the poem that Hooker and Blunt reproduce is not among them.103 More than this, the poems are worked differently: Blunt uses cross-­stitch marking letters to capitalize words in the middle of the lines (as with “Maid” and “God”), and Hooker uses running-­stitch cursive capitals. Such lyric and material divergences suggest a peculiar dialectic of flexibility and convention that the genre of the sampler—­like the schoolbook, like the schoolgirl—­seems to encode; there are always variants (poetic and mechanical) in the pedagogical effort to disavow the idea of the variant. Consider the common sampler practice of inscribing the place and date and the name of worker in among the other design elements: like the signature on the flyleaf of a ubiquitous textbook, sewing out “Mary Ann Hooker” or “Sally Blunt” is a nearly universal act of particularization; it is a mark of distinction that everyone has. In this light, samplers become at once declarations of independence—­I made this, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1805—­and declarations of conventionality—­I can work or be just like all the other girls in my school, my town, in the United States. This critical dialectic of individuation and sameness has been elided in our zeal to recover autonomy, authority, and cultural capital for the female citizens of the Republic: because samplers, readers, and handwriting manuals rely on elaborate systems of rote imitation, in which the derivative is valued over the original and in which following the model is the highest form of achievement, feminist historians have typically cast them as irrelevant or counterproductive. These objects purport to instill obedience, silence, pathological self-­effacement; as products of the dark energies of a culture of misogyny, they threaten to reimagine potentially heroic (and critically “free”) “liberty’s daughters” as nonagents, as figures of submission. But this view of the evidence obscures as much as it enlightens: these material elements of women’s history, rendered invisible by a strict focus on the cultivation of “individuals,” not only exhibit an excess and a difference that we might designate as “personality” but are the very objects that make the strongest case for women’s nationalizing importance, their political subjectivity. The structures of emulation present in these dependent arts not only may be the basic terms of post-­Revolutionary political subjectivity but also may be the primary, if forgotten, grounds of republicanism itself. In Alexander Hamilton’s portrait of the congressional representative in Federalist No. 35 (5 January 1788), for example, he invites its readers to ask themselves, “Is it not natural that a man who is a candidate for the favor of the people, and who is dependent on the

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suffrages of his fellow citizens for the continuance of his public honors, should take care to inform himself of their dispositions and inclinations, and should be willing to allow them their proper degree of influence upon his conduct? This dependence, and the necessity of being bound himself, and his posterity, by the laws to which he gives his assent, are the true, and they are the strong chords of sympathy between the representative and the constituent.”104 In the end, Hamilton’s requirements for the representative’s ability to emulate and sympathize—­his capacity to bind himself to “dependence” and his willingness to pay attention to and reproduce the “dispositions and inclinations” of his correspondents, even as that “influence” is kept to its “proper degree” and tempered by his own superior judgment—­are the same as Rowson’s expectations for her charges and the sampler’s rules for its workers.105 In this light, it becomes possible to read The Federalist as a form of conduct manual and an argument against uncomplicated valorizations of liberal subjectivity and to acknowledge schoolgirl embroidery, The New Pleasant Instructor, Charlotte Temple, and A Present for Young Ladies as forceful works of political theory, created by and for ineluctably political (even if not precisely liberal) agents. Encompassing endless sameness and endless difference, the sampler and the compiled schoolbook—­as well as the unself-­like selves they seek to manufacture—­posit perfect reproduction and perfect individuation as potentially commensurable goals. Only when we look to these objects and these nonsubjects—­that is, when we look beyond the familiar figures of Republican Mothers (or Founding Fathers)—­can we begin to properly trace those fantasies of uniqueness and conjunction that underlay both the project of national union and its intractable discontents.

Part III

Critiques and Affirmations

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Chapter 5

The Horrors of the Republican Machine

The first two parts of this book have analyzed various arts of dependence lauded for their beneficial effects: Franklin’s designs for the perpetual incarnation of Jesus and Socrates, Wheatley’s empowerment through the submissive propagation of form, the “Americanizing” poetics of scientific reproduction in Rittenhouse and Rush, and the sympathetic politics of the needle and the grammar book each imagine virtuous copying as the ethical bedrock of the polity. As pretty as it was to imagine a universalizing republican orthodoxy born of sympathy, mutual dependence, and material discipline, though, there were always dissenters and critics—­social energies that resisted harmonic containment, persons who would not be fitted to the machines. The Constitution was not ratified without a fight, after all; the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania proved the limits of both federal power and Federalist ideology; the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts brought forth very real ideological differences between otherwise consonant Americans, as did the continued existence (and expansion) of racial slavery.1 Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that the Federalist’s own fantasy of sympathetic national conformity—­of dispassionate persons and disinterested polities acting naturally in concert for the settled good of the United States—­barely survives the first couple of weeks of its serial publication. James Madison’s Federalist #10, for example, presents the entire project of representative government as a technology for diffusing personal interest. Because the “latent causes of faction are . . . sown into the nature of man,” government can only work to “[control] its effects”; a strong central government with a tripartite legislative, executive, and judicial structure should modulate the mischiefs of regional, economic, and psychological difference inevitable in an extensive republic.2 If the real thing is forever out of reach, the federal system will at least provide a reasonable simulacrum of consensus, harmony, and universal orthodoxy. The question of whether such

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a structure represented the most exigent response to an intractable problem or simply a self-­serving mystification of the concentration of power organizes the political debate of the American 1780s and 1790s. The field of aesthetics was just as divided: not every “view” was one of Thomas Birch’s, and not every museum was Charles Willson Peale’s; for all the orthogonal vectors and Linnean grids organizing space and arguing for a beautiful and coherent natural order, there remained dodgy maps, portraits with ungainly perspective, and galleries filled with lurid wax tableaux of famous crimes, fanciful taxidermies, and other inassimilable prodigies.3 One of the best places to read resistance to the ideologies of harmonic orthodoxy is in the Gothic novel. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), for instance, presents incest and suicide—­not virtuous cultural unity—­as products of unchecked fellow feeling. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) dramatizes the limits of empiricism and the fecklessness of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; it finds in the singular and inexplicable passions of its villain mortal threats to the social order. Despite its French setting and its assertion that it leaves “politics entirely out of sight,” Sarah S. B. K. Wood’s Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (1800) aligns rationalism and social leveling with horrific violence.4 Another extended expression of dissent from the orthodoxy project is Charles Brockden Brown’s novel of plague-­year Philadelphia, Ormond; or the Secret Witness (1799). Structured by forgery, mimicry, contagion, and endless repetition—­the poisoned doubles of imitation, emulation, and the other arts of dependence—­Ormond gives us a Gothic verso of the republican coin. It registers profound anxieties about the kinds of subject-­making philosophies and practices embraced by the other figures in this study. What if the ultimate yield of Franklin’s repetitive and systematized moral perfection is vicious automata? What if pious performances like Wheatley’s emphasize form at the expense of belief, undoing the work of the Reformation and threatening to undermine “real” piety? What if the bureaucracy and mechanicity of the self encoded by Rush’s emulatory regimes is a recipe for disaster—­producing technically correct but ruthless or inhuman individuals?5 What if designs like Rowson’s for “nationalizing” persons—­in which imitation exploits the material culture of the mind to ensure a fundamental and incorruptible likeness along cultural lines—­are antithetical to both personhood and culture?6 In what amounts to a novel-­length critique of the emulative disciplinary regimes outlined by his early national contemporaries, Brown presents the dark world of Ormond as the pure and repellant product of the arts of



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dependence. Ormond develops a fictional environment in which republican theories of social and subjective harmonizing have become the laws of the universe; they are the given conditions under which the narrative unfolds into disaster. This is a world in which persons mechanically imitate until their humanity is completely effaced, in which adherence to form leads to blasphemy, in which the “machines of government” that Rush extols inexorably destroy, and in which the balm of human sympathy dissolves into mimicry, mockery, and exploitation. In essence, Brown’s text works Socratically (or, more accurately, like Franklin in a Socratic mode): it begins with what may be taken as innocent first principles (the “moral faculty”—­to use Rush’s phrase—­is a product of physical interactions; government must be like a clockwork; sympathy and imitation are necessarily correlated) and extrapolates them out to unmistakably terrible conclusions. In this way, Brown’s text dramatizes the ways in which the theories of Rush, Franklin, Wheatley, and Rowson are Gothic in and of themselves—­the ways that they produce the very evil that they intend to reform away. Although it is a text about exceptional monsters, Ormond also reveals that monstrosity might be an emergent cultural norm.7

Varieties of Custom Against the backdrop of plague-­ravaged late eighteenth-­century Philadelphia, Ormond unfolds the story of the Dudleys—­a middle-­class family beset by a series of confidence men and an apparently endless parade of unhappy coincidences; it details the struggle to survive in a pitiless world of recurrent disease, drudgery, and despondency. The story opens, however, on a bright note of individuality developed through healthy emulation: Stephen Dudley was a native of New York. He was educated to the profession of a painter. His father’s trade was that of an apothecary. But, his son manifesting an attachment to the pencil, he was resolved that it should be gratified. For this end Stephen was sent at an early age to Europe, and not only enjoyed the instructions of Fuseli and Bartolozzi, but spent a considerable period in Italy in studying the Augustan and Medicean monuments. It was intended that he should practise his art in his native city; but the young man, though reconciled to this scheme by deference to paternal authority, and by a sense of its propriety, was willing as long as possible to postpone it.8

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Presumably refining his skill by copying the greats, Dudley’s early life follows a pattern in which the reproduction of examples and the assertion of self-­ direction are one and the same; it presents another instance of productive emulation, similar to Franklin’s use of the Spectator: under master artists like Henry Fuseli and Francesco Bartolozzi, court engraver for George III, Dudley studies others’ paintings in the service of honing his own artistic talents and, thereby, his own subjectivity.9 The narrative insists that Dudley’s contentment, his improvement as an artist, and his personal sovereignty are each functions of the same fact: every day he spends imitating the lines and palettes of his masters follows the pattern of the day before, and this constancy makes his own line and palette better. His “progress [in art] was proportionably rapid, and he passed his time without much regard to futurity, being too well satisfied with the present to anticipate a change.”10 “A change, however, was unavoidable.”11 Upon the death of his father’s wife, Dudley is forced to return home from Europe. Then, when his father dies, Dudley is obliged to take over the family apothecary shop. Although his artistic “habits had disqualified him for mechanical employments,” he has no choice but to “stoop to the imaginary indignity which attended them” and start mixing drugs instead of paints. He must, in other words, “deny himself the indulgence of his inclinations and regulate his future exertions by a view to nothing but gain.”12 Rehearsing Franklin’s language of inclination and regulation in a minor key, Sophia (Westwyn) Courtland, Ormond’s narrator, presents Dudley’s systematic management of desire not as a triumph of rationality over feeling in the interest of making a best-­self but as a kind of senseless capitalist tragedy. What’s worse: his shop is a “good stand,” enjoying a “certain quantity of permanent custom.”13 The money (the “gain”) is necessary, but the fact of its endless business makes the work of the pharmacy “insupportably disgusting” to the young painter. Edward Cahill has recently cast Dudley as an “object lesson in the dangers of devoting oneself exclusively to the pleasures of art”; he suffers because his training has unfitted him for the rigors of petty accumulation.14 But the problem seems to lie less with Dudley than with the shop itself, which operates as a principle of distasteful systematization. Forced from a routine based in passion for a routine based in grim necessity, Dudley loses the endlessly repeating but nonetheless progressive process of artistic emulation—­by which the hand and eye are mended—­and enters the dark, emotionally disabling problem of perpetual commercial exchange. The danger of the unsuitable model inherent in Franklin’s promise of developmental imitation thus becomes materially apparent: by imitating his



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father instead of his beloved artists, Dudley loses his sovereignty; he cedes his identity as a painter and abandons the life he had previously worked so hard to create. With every philter or poultice he mixes, he comes closer to living someone else’s life anew and he begins to lose his mind.15 Sophia casts this type of bad repetition in epidemiological terms; the discourses of contagion—­in which the symptoms (not the virtues) of one person repeat in another and another—­figure imitation as stagnation and pestilence. A short time after Dudley returns and reluctantly begins to reproduce his father’s existence, his wife catches “the infection that preyed upon his mind, and augmented his anxieties by partaking in them.”16 The horrors of Dudley’s unwanted repetitions are repeated in his spouse—­like the fever that will come to haunt the novel, imitation becomes a viral agent.17

Violating Copy-­Write The narrative soon shifts from the potential terrors of imitated behavior into the wicked possibilities of copied writing. Into the stultified atmosphere of the pharmacy drifts the apparently unthreatening Mr. Craig, seeking an apprenticeship. Outwardly English, well spoken, with a command of Latin and a beautiful written hand, Craig appears more or less too good to be true. Dudley, crushingly “engaged behind his counter as usual” and desperate to “remi[t] his attention to his own concerns,” hires the young man on a provisional basis after a set of cursory interviews.18 In the beginning, the arrangement works well: Craig seems particularly suited to the unchanging routine of the apothecary, building a reputation for “stability,” “integrity,” “sobriety invariable,” and “application incessant”; after three years, Dudley makes him a partner in the business and returns full-­time to painting and to other assorted “social and literary gratifications.”19 In time, however, this new idyllic order is revealed to be a terrible simulacrum. Five years after Craig’s arrival, a mysterious letter reveals him to be a fraud—­a skilled forger from New Hampshire who has been using his skill to carefully bleed the business of its capital.20 Before he can be confronted about his misappropriations, Craig disappears. Essentially bankrupted, Dudley is forced to put up his paints and canvasses, leave New York for Philadelphia, and restart the “drudgery” of a new kind of shop-­work under an assumed name. In the logic of the novel, the cruelest element of this move is not the reduction of Dudley and his family to “frugal fare and an humble dwelling” or

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even to “beggary and contempt”; rather, it is Dudley’s return to the bad kind of repetition and imitation: “His spirit would not brook dependence,” but in a bleak parody of his former life as an artist, his new job as a “writer in a public office” sets him to copying documents all day long.21 To be fair, Dudley does not hate the task of fancy writing itself: he “pride[s] himself ” on “the facilities and elegancies of his penmanship,” and his use of a stylus bears a pleasing “resemblance to his ancient modes of life.”22 Even so, the fact that he must perform the same tasks over and over again is immeasurably galling. As Sophia Courtland insists, the work of a scrivener is never done and never variable. “Perpetually encumbered” by the “impertinent circuities” and “endless tautologies” of writing law—­of copying the briefs and arguments of others, duplicating exactly contracts and writs—­Dudley again becomes trapped in a world in which “nothing occur[s] to relieve or diversify the scene. It was one tedious round of scrawling and jargon; a tissue made up of the shreds and remnants of barbarous antiquity, polluted with the rust of ages, and patched . . . into new deformity.”23 Where Franklin might have thrived—­with endless recurrence offering an opportunity to perfect a schedule or streamline a self-­making procedure, or to take up old texts and make them new again—­Dudley does not fare well. In his work writing copy, just as in the pharmacy, Dudley loses sight of who (and how) he previously has trained himself to be—­“when his life became uniform [again], and day followed day in monotonous succession, and the novelty of his employment had disappeared, his cheerfulness began likewise to fade, and was succeeded by unconquerable melancholy.”24 What works for Franklin threatens to undo Dudley. Indeed, the direct consequence of Dudley’s return to this horrible uniformity, where each day follows precisely the pattern of the day before, is monumental loss. Monotony is “incompatible with a temper like his, to whom the privation of comforts that attended his former condition was equivalent to the loss of life. These privations were still more painful to his wife, and her death added one more calamity to those under which he already groaned. He had always loved her with the tenderest affection, and he justly regarded this evil as surpassing all his former woes.”25 That his entrance into a closed, endlessly recursive order is figured expressly as a kind of living-­death and that Mrs. Dudley’s death comes in a subordinate clause—­as an example of “one more calamity” in a long chain of essentially indistinguishable misfortunes—­ suggest that the real terror lies not in the content of the events but in their relentlessly repeating form. When Dudley (temporarily) loses his vision to



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cataracts and is “shut out from the light of heaven, and debarred of every human comfort,” the narrative etiology is quite clear: the loss of happiness, identity, spouse, and vision are all predicated on the Gothic realities of repetitive motion.26 It is worth noting too that in linking the movements of the hand to “jaded spirits” and “unconquerable melancholy,” the story of Dudley’s ruinous stint as a scrivener also hints at a dark recasting of Rush’s contention about the materiality of moral character. In previous chapters, we have seen the positive effects of chirographic replication and behavioral emulation: to the young women of Rowson’s Academy, for example, the exquisite manual reproduction of a copy-­text is an exercise in sympathetic identification; in Rush, the corporeal imitation of the forms of virtue leads, eventually, to the assumption of virtuousness itself. Ormond turns this paradigm on its head: the mechanical imitation of convention—­particularly the mechanical imitation of the conventions of handwriting and demeanor—­produces the height of viciousness. In terms of the writing hand, this evil is easiest to see in Craig—­the forger and dissembler responsible for Dudley’s ruination whose “machinations” seem to indicate the educational principles of Rush’s “republican machine” carried to its logically Gothic extreme.27 To take this notion of “machination” literally, as the text does, is to consider Craig as the character of Ormond will at the novel’s end—­that is, as an “instrument,” an “engine” of destruction, or as a pantograph that kills.28 When Sophia remarks on Craig’s “master[y] of the pen,” she means that he writes clearly—­in that same round hand that Rush recommends for business and young ladies—­that his lines are fine (but not too fine), that his letterforms and spacing and all the rest conform to the acknowledged standards of the discipline. Such standards were both increasingly fixed and increasingly widespread in the late eighteenth-­century: as printing technology improved, engraved copybooks became cheaper and more readily accessible. Paradoxically, such efforts to standardize handwriting were shot through with claims that the written hand offers an unclouded reflection of the writing subject. Like oratory, handwriting in the eighteenth century was imagined to bear the traces of the individual body; as a product of the singular hand, it could stand, like the gesture or intonation of the orator, as a mark of authenticity.29 To put it in terms of a dialectic that Jay Fliegelman rightly places at the center of post-­Revolutionary American culture, handwriting was often made to stand with speech on the side of “sincerity” and “affective experience” against print and the “authority of impersonality.”30 As Tamara Thornton writes, “Where

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print was defined by dissociation with the hand, script took its definition from its relation to the hand. Where print was impersonal, script emanated from the person in as intimate a manner as possible. Where print was opaque, even duplicitous, script was transparent and sincere.”31 The problems with this equation of script and personhood in an era of increasing standardization are clear: if handwriting is a “mechanical art,” to be “taught mechanically,” and the goal is a nation of hands that all look the same (like Rittenhouse’s or Franklin’s), then locating something like human singularity or individual “authenticity” within these disciplinary regimes will be self-­defeating.32 Enoch Noyes’s Analytical Guide to the Art of Penmanship (1821), for example, offers some of the genre’s briefer instructions on the proper way to hold a writing instrument: Take the pen between the side of the thumb and middle finger, with the latter about half an inch from the point. The thumb should be drawn up so far as to bring the end of it nearly opposite to the first joint of the fore finger. Let the pen be held loosely, resting it about two thirds the way from the second to the upper joint. The hand should rest upon the ends of the two smallest fingers, and the wrist turned so as to point the upper end of the pen directly over the right shoulder. The above method of holding a pen is a good general rule; but may be varied to conform, in some measure, to the shape and proportion of different hands.33 Despite his concluding nod to physiological variation, Noyes seems more interested in calibrating the body-­machine than in translating something like subjective authenticity. When business round hand is the standard of the republic precisely because of its impersonality, it becomes increasingly difficult to translate a written character into any kind moral or psychological analog.34 A forger like Craig serves as a ghastly test case for the problem of mechanical standardization in handwriting.35 Preternaturally skilled at the gestural operations of the art—­so much so that he can replicate the mechanics of others and produce perfect “chirographical imitation[s]”—­Craig dramatizes the crisis of individuality that physical emulation can provoke.36 As Hillel Schwartz explains the practice, “Forgery is but the extreme of copying: the extreme of fair copying, when what is forged is indiscernible from the original.”37 Trading on the equation of handwriting and authenticity to work his forgeries, then, Craig undermines its logical premises: if one person may



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write—­indeed, is supposed to write—­exactly like another, how can handwriting serve as a marker for unique sentiment or character? To further his dark designs, Craig writes in many different hands: he uses his ability to generate “distinct and characteristical” scripts to prove the existence of persons who do not exist; he manufactures letters of credit to mask the fact that he has no capital; he fabricates romantic relationships with diligently imitated strokes of the pen.38 He reveals, in other words, the ways in which this putatively intimate, transparent, and sincere medium may be subject to calculation, opacity, and insincerity.39 That said, Craig’s counterfeit writing talents have their limits, mitigating the danger that they pose to republican philosophy. Although he is remarkably successful at forging financial instruments and letters from nonexistent persons, his efforts to counterfeit already extant personalities are met with skepticism. For instance, later in the text, some forged letters come to light suggesting an affair between Dudley’s daughter Constantia and Craig’s own fictitious brother. The chaste Constantia is nonplussed and argues that they are wholly unconvincing. Try as he might, she insists, Craig cannot reproduce what she imagines to be her immaterial essences: “His skill in imitation extended no further in the present case than my handwriting. My modes of thinking and expression were beyond the reach of his mimicry.”40 Constantia’s point is clear: Craig may counterfeit the motions of the muscles in her fingers, but he may not re-­create the motions of her intellect or the currents of her heart. At that critical moment, his forgeries cease to be creditable and, as such, lose their power—­Craig’s mechanical skill falls short of his ambitions, his true character is revealed, and his present schemes are ruined.

Forging Persons If Constantia’s rebuke of Craig seems to establish the numinousness of the mind or the soul—­that is, to carve out modes of existence not necessarily subject to the laws of mechanical reproduction—­the narrative has already troubled such counter-­materialist speculation. Craig’s mastery of the mechanics of character is not, after all, limited to the page; his extra-­textual manipulations reveal the broader notion of personality as itself a piece of complicated deceptive machinery. Craig’s skillful management of his own face, for example, reveals that physiognomy, another putative index of natural individuality—­and a science in which Constantia has, in other parts of

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the narrative, placed implicit faith—­may be open to mechanical reproduction and dissimulation.41 Sophia’s description of Craig’s appearance is remarkable in a number of ways: [He] was one of the most plausible of men. His character was a standing proof of the vanity of physiognomy. There were few men who could refuse their confidence to his open and ingenuous aspect. To this circumstance, perhaps, he owed his ruin. His temptations to deceive were stronger than what are incident to most other men. Deception was so easy a task, that the difficulty lay, not in infusing false opinions respecting him, but in preventing them from being spontaneously imbibed. He contracted habits of imposture imperceptibly. In proportion as he deviated from the practice of truth, he discerned the necessity of extending and systematizing his efforts, and of augmenting the original benignity and attractiveness of his looks by studied additions.42 This striking amalgam of innate and manufactured behaviors casts Craig as a man-­machine—­a mixture of nature and contrivance that trades on the former to generate confidence and mystify the latter. His magnificent “plausibility” depends upon the implausibility of his artifice: the “open and ingenuous aspect” that the science of physiognomy considered an unalloyed product of nature is revealed to be an intricate piece of deceptive machinery.43 In this mode of imitation, the terms of Craig’s existence are remarkably Rushian: his “habits” (one of Rush’s favored terms for the imitative-­mechanical formation of personality) are at first eminently natural, picked up and repeated “imperceptibly”—­that is, both incrementally and without evaluation.44 But Craig soon “systematize[s] [his] efforts”: with “augment[ations]” and “studied additions,” he ensures that no part of his mien remains out of his conscious control. Such an unwavering insistence on regularity and discipline in those bodily indices of spontaneity and authenticity shifts Craig from personhood into the realm of the automaton—­the material signs of life without its essential content.45 Charles Hutton’s Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary (1796) defines “automaton” as “a seemingly self-­moving machine; or one so constructed, by means of weights, levers, pullies, springs, &c, as to move for a considerable time, as if it were endued with animal life.”46 Craig’s facial gymnastics produce the forms of emotion without regard to any actual



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feeling; although his manipulated “weights, levers, pullies, [and] springs” are muscles, bones, and ligaments, he becomes, nonetheless, a simulacrum of humanity. Summarizing the Cartesian formula (outlined in Discourse on Method) for understanding the distinction between men and animals or machines, Catherine Liu points up the importance of impulsivity in defining the human in the eighteenth century: “To be an ‘honnète homme’ or ‘un homme d’esprit,’ one must be capable of being spontaneous, unpredictable, ‘inégal’ in the sense of irregular. . . . The absence of the capacity to reason in animals and machines [is indicated by] their inability to produce a spontaneous linguistic formulation.”47 Craig is utterly incapable of such spontaneity: in speech and in bodily comportment, anything like surprise or “natural” gesture has been driven out in favor of studied, deceptive fabrication. As Sophia explains of his efforts, “The further he proceeded, the more difficult it was to return. Experience and habit added daily to his speciousness, till at length the world perhaps might have been searched in vain for his competitor.”48 In short, then, Craig is not merely a pantograph for counterfeiting texts but an infernal device for counterfeiting the emotions of an ordinary—­that is, a nonpsychotic—­person. As such, he renders himself the terrible double—­ and the perfect example—­of Rush’s “republican machine”: he follows precisely Rush’s mechanical procedures for making a personality, but instead of becoming a tractable citizen, fitted to the operations of the clockwork state, he becomes a more dangerous rogue, a more skilled swindler, and, ultimately, a more merciless killer.49 Unlike Rush’s theoretical schoolchildren, Craig’s imitation of virtues that he does not have only furthers his mischief; as in his textual forgery, he uses the philosophical underpinnings of emulationary doctrine as cover for deception. Indeed, Rush’s theories are precisely what allow Craig to operate—­what make his act believable, his face trustworthy—­ and what make the public (here represented by the Dudley family) so vulnerable to his exploitations.50 The final turn of the screw is the perpetual nature of Craig’s project. In contrast to Rush’s essays, which imagine the endlessness of “republican machines” begetting “republican machines” as a necessary condition for a political Eden, Brown’s narrative casts Craig’s repeating habits as a kind of prison—­as a formula for isolation instead of community. Having phased out his capacity for spontaneous action, Craig loses his ability to stop the processes of self-­manufacture; he becomes caught up in a cycle of “ruin” that he cannot alter. His habits admit of no “return” or repeal: they “add daily to his

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speciousness” even after he has become perhaps the most specious man in the world. Repeating—­always repeating—­his self-­imposed instructions for effective villainy, Craig becomes the kind of “republican machine” whose operations bankrupt families, compromise friendships, and might just kill the republic.

Ormond, or What? Although it is difficult to imagine a more dangerous and destabilizing figure than Craig, the forger from New Hampshire is but a pale copy of the narrative’s eponymous monster, Ormond. If the former represents forgery’s threats to property and imitation’s threats to personal and political integrity, the latter—­an Illuminatus who will, over the course of the novel, carry on illicit relationships with women, commit several murders, and otherwise wreak havoc on Constantia’s life—­represents a world of emulation that threatens to dissolve the entire social contract. Where Craig offers hints toward understanding Rushian programs for personality-­building-­through-­imitation as the hideous repetition of dehumanizing mistakes, the character of Ormond works to prove the case beyond all doubt. When Sophia first introduces Ormond in the narrative, she characterizes his ontological and epistemological situation as fascinatingly extreme: “of all mankind, [he is] the being most difficult and most deserving to be studied.” Perhaps because of this extremity, she explains, “to comprehend the whole truth” about Ormond is impossible for a single observer; she will merely report on what she can grasp—­not his schemes, not his politics, but simply “the maxims by which he was accustomed to regulate his private deportment.”51 From the very beginning of his presence in the narrative, then, Ormond is not so much a person with a personality as he is a system of quotations or logical rules—­whatever his “private deportment,” it is only knowable or explicable in its aphoristic (or “maxim”-­al) regulation, its mechanical governance.52 This characteristic aligns him with Franklin’s Father Abraham, whose serial quotation of the moralistic adages of Poor Richard is the sum total of his subjectivity. The iteration and reiteration and endless circulation of proverbial phrases—­in which personal opinions and local stories are removed from their contexts and repeated as generalities—­yields, over time, the “Way to Wealth” or the “Path to Riches and Happiness.” Father Abraham thus offers further evidence for Horkheimer and Adorno’s observation that



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in the Enlightenment, “the individual is reduced to the nodal point of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected of him.”53 As a mechanical-­maximal man, Ormond also resembles the “celebrated Servin,” described in the Duke of Sully’s Memoirs and in at least one contemporary miscellany.54 This creature—­whom Sully characterizes as “both a wonder and a monster,” an “assemblage of the most excellent and pernicious qualities”—­was born, according to Benjamin Rush, who uses the case of Servin to illustrate the impact of physical causes on the moral faculty, with “an original defect in . . . the brain.”55 Where Servin’s “moral faculty” ought to be seated, Rush contends, there is only “chasm”—­“filled up by a more than common extension of every other power of his mind.” To prove his case, Rush then quotes Sully’s Memoir at length; I reproduce it here. Let the reader represent to himself a man of a genius so lively, and of an understanding so extensive, as rendered him scarce ignorant of any thing that could be known—­of so vast and ready a comprehension, that he immediately made himself master of whatever he attempted,—­and of so prodigious a memory, that he never forgot what he once learned. He possessed all parts of philosophy, and the mathematics, particularly fortification and drawing. Even in theology he was so well skilled, that he was an excellent preacher, whenever he had a mind to exert that talent, and an able disputant, for and against the reformed religion indifferently. He not only understood Greek—­ Hebrew—­and all the languages which we call learned, but also all the different jargons, or modern dialects. He accented and pronounced them so naturally, and so perfectly imitated the gestures and manners both of the several nations of Europe, and the particular provinces of France, that he might have been taken for a native of all, or of any of these countries: and this quality he applied to counterfeit all sorts of persons, wherein he succeeded wonderfully. He was moreover the best comedian, and the greatest droll that perhaps ever appeared. He had a genius for poetry, and had wrote many verses. He played upon almost all instruments—­was a perfect master of music—­and sung most agreeably and justly. He likewise could say mass, for he was of a disposition to do, as well as to know, all things. His body was perfectly well suited to his mind. He was light, nimble, and dexterous, and fit for all exercises. He could ride well, and in dancing, wrestling, and leaping, he was admired. There are not any recreative

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games that he did not know, and he was skilled in almost all mechanic arts. But now for the reverse of the medal. Here it appeared, that he was treacherous—­cruel—­cowardly—­deceitful—­a liar—­a cheat—­a drunkard and a glutton—­a sharper in play—­immersed in every species of vice—­a blasphemer—­an atheist.—­In a word—­in him might be found all the vices that are contrary to nature—­honor—­religion—­and society,—­the truth of which he himself evinced with his latest breath; for he died in the flower of his age, in a common brothel, perfectly corrupted by his debaucheries, and expired with the glass in his hand, cursing, and denying God.56 Whether or not we may consider Servin to be a “source” for Ormond, the resemblance is certainly striking. Each is a multilingual polymath, an elegant physical specimen, and a gifted “counterfeit[er] of all sorts of persons.” Each is a master of generic expression, pairing eloquence with a just and agreeable sense of time. Both men are evidently rootless (“a native of all, or any of these countries”), in possession of an eidetic memory, “skilled in the mechanic arts,” and of “a disposition to do, as well as to know.” Of course, the “reverse of the medal” is also the same: each man is a sociopath—­a treacherous, cowardly, dissipated scoundrel destined to die in corruption and iniquity. The depiction of human character as a stamped-­out object—­in which the raw material of the psyche is fitted by mechanical force to an already extant cultural order—­is, as we’ve seen in Chapter 3, a common one in republican discourse. Somewhat less common is the figure of the two-­sided medal—­in which a character may be said to have a reverse or in which the mechanical processes that shape one side leave a negative or deforming image on the other. In this way of conceptualizing subjectivity, every “impression” (the trace of mechanical presence) produces an attendant “chasm” (the trace of absence) on its opposite side. In introducing the anecdote, Rush argues that the two-­faced Servin is a pure example of neuroanatomical defect—­he lacks the mechanical capacity to sympathize—­but Sully’s metaphor of the medal suggests that the trouble may lie in the broader notion of the “mechanical” subject itself. Sophia, in her portrait of Ormond, renders explicit what Sully’s figure only suggests. The problem may not be that Servin is a damaged machine but that he (or anyone) is imagined to be a machine in the first place: Ormond, Servin’s double, represents the cultural perils of casting persons as particularly sophisticated automata.



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In light of this argument, the first and most important of Ormond’s “maxims” makes perfect sense. Sophia gives it as follows: No one could entertain loftier conceptions of human capacity than Ormond, but he carefully distinguished between men in the abstract, and men as they are. The former were beings to be impelled, by the breath of accident, in a right or a wrong road; but, whatever direction they should receive, it was the property of their nature to persist in it. Now, this impulse had been given. No single being could rectify the error. It was the business of the wise man to form a just estimate of things, but not to attempt, by individual efforts, so chimerical an enterprise as that of promoting the happiness of mankind. Their condition was out of the reach of a member of a corrupt society to control.57 Ormond here simply takes to its logical terminus a commonplace argument of republican educational philosophers. Where someone like Noah Webster finds that “impressions received in early life usually form the characters of individuals,” Ormond imagines such first “impulses” as irresistible determinants.58 This brand of fatalism is radically Newtonian and perfectly in keeping with some of the more radical elements of Enlightenment thought, particularly, as Cahill points out, William Godwin’s “principle of necessary causality.”59 “Impelled, by the breath of accident,” subjectivity becomes a physics problem; once force is imparted, “whatever direction they should receive, it was the property of their nature to persist in it.” Thus, Ormond imagines the psyche as he imagines the rest of the universe: that is, as “a series of events connected by an undesigning and inscrutable necessity.”60 The mind is governed by the laws of inertia just as a rolling billiard ball or a ticking clock would be, set into motion by something external to itself and only altering with a second external force. In the face of such psycho-­physical conditions, anything like an “individual effort” (especially one on behalf of the collective “happiness of mankind”) is “chimerical”—­not only ineffective but illusory, impossible; there can be no single impetus that will nudge into alignment the proliferating vectors of human thought and experience. Despite Sophia’s hints of an oppositional pair in Ormond’s primary maxim, no thoughts about “men as they are” are forthcoming. It soon becomes clear in the narrative that Ormond thinks of all men “in the abstract” and that such thinking informs his theories of society. Ormond’s musings on

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the “principles of the social machine” reveal the Gothic side of the “machines of government” that Rush had proposed in his “Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools.”61 In Sophia’s paraphrase of his approach to politics, for instance, Ormond finds that “man could not be otherwise than a cause of perpetual operation and efficacy. He was part of a machine, and as such had not power to withhold his agency. Contiguousness to other parts—­that is, to other men—­was all that was necessary to render him a powerful concurrent.”62 With its mass of men fitted into a mechanism of “perpetual operation and efficacy,” Ormond’s philosophy re-­creates what Rush considers the necessary conditions for republicanism.63 But what Rush envisions as the regularization of the masses through the gentle harmonics of emulation, Ormond recognizes as the potential mass “production of evil.”64 In Ormond’s version, what Rush might have considered to be organic or mutually reformatory relationships become the “contiguousness” that allows the gears of the baleful machine to turn; sympathy is recast as leverage or friction—­the force needed to perform potentially culturally destructive work. In each vision, individual motives are irrelevant to the workings of the whole; the ultimate output of the system necessarily exceeds any of its constitutive elements. When there is only “human capacity,” the possibilities for each individuated human are terribly bleak. Sophia pauses in her narration to pose a rhetorical question about the practical stakes of Ormond’s philosophical position: “What, then, was the conduct incumbent on him? Whether he went forward or stood still, whether his motives were malignant, or kind, or indifferent, the mass of evils was equally and necessarily augmented. It did not follow from these preliminaries that virtue and duty were terms without a meaning, but they require us to promote our own happiness, and not the happiness of others.”65 What we might call sociopathy, Ormond holds as the only version of sociability available in Rush’s mechanized polis: “Our power in the present state of things is subjected to certain limits. A man may reasonably hope to accomplish his end, when he proposes nothing but his own good. Any other point is inaccessible.”66 For Ormond, a man ought to maintain a “benevolent desire” toward his fellows but “relinquish the pursuit of general benefit” as impossible.67 In arguing that the culture is a clockwork and that its members (including himself) are strictly self-­interested machines, Ormond claims that his libertinism is immutable, unexceptionable, and irrelevant to the operations of the collective at the same time that he insists that his “individuality” cannot exist. Put another way, Ormond maintains that he acts with impunity because he has no choice in the matter and because his fate—­and the fate of



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the collective—­has been determined by the laws of the mechanical universe and that universe’s initial conditions.68 No matter how much Ormond appears to be an ultra-­individualist, he also insists that anything resembling free will eventually is revealed as an illusion.69 Such is the world according to Ormond, and such is Sophia’s account of his place in it. For all his insistence on the limits of his abilities—­on the circumscriptions of his influence and the unwavering determinants of his behavior—­Ormond remains a singularly ambitious man. Sophia explains that “Ormond aspired to nothing more ardently than to hold the reins of opinion,—­to exercise absolute power over the conduct of others, not by constraining their limbs or by exacting obedience to his authority, but in a way of which his subjects should be scarcely conscious. He desired that his guidance should control their steps, but that his agency, when most effectual, should be least suspected.”70 In desiring a transformational sway over unlimited others—­others who do not know that they are being controlled, who think that they control themselves—­Ormond seeks to arrogate to himself the same power that Rush and Franklin claim: to mass-­manufacture a version of proper character in such a way that it seems perfectly natural to those who manifest it. His method for achieving these goals—­for turning persons into “instruments” who believe themselves to be acting as “principals”—­is what the narrative calls “secret witness.”71 This “secret witness” consists of imitation in a Gothic key. In Sophia’s telling, Ormond discovered in his youth a marvelous ability to mimic the “voice and gestures of others.” His first deployments of the skill are innocent enough—­he performs “for the entertainment of convivial parties and private circles”—­but they soon take a dark turn. As Sophia has it, his mastery of duplication fosters in him an “aversion to duplicity” that shades into a suspicious temperament: because Ormond understands so well the processes of deception, he is “apt to impute deceit on occasions where others, of no inconsiderable sagacity, were abundantly disposed to confidence.” Thus primed to find pretense and imposture, he uses his own skills as a mimic to expose fraud; by his logic, since mankind is “in the perpetual use of stratagems and artifices, it was allowable . . . to wield the same arms.” But the gambit works too well: Ormond succeeds initially in thwarting evil but finds the power acquired through acts of imitation too appealing to give up simply because evil has been thwarted. He thus shifts his attentions from exposing fraud into gaining “access, as if by supernatural means, to the privacy” of innocent others. In mimicking the speech patterns and physical trappings of a best friend,

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a doting parent, or a trusted servant and engaging his targets in conversation, Ormond inhabits and exploits preexisting intimacies—­he uses his skill to obtain “something like omniscience.”72 Where Craig’s forgeries fail to capture, for instance, Constantia’s modes of thinking and expression, Ormond’s imitative “dexterity” yields a comprehensive knowledge of her mind.73 This knowledge becomes power very much in the way that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish. Ormond’s mimicry allows him to become a panoptic eye—­potentially everywhere at once, always hidden but perhaps always monitoring—­such that his dicta become internalized and naturalized in those he claims as “instruments.” As Sophia puts it near the narrative’s end, “His means of information I did not pretend, and thought it useless, to investigate. We cannot hide our actions and thoughts from one of powerful sagacity, whom the detection sufficiently interests to make him use all the methods of detection in his power. The study of concealment is, in all cases, fruitless or hurtful. All that duty enjoins is to design and to execute nothing which may not be approved by a divine and omniscient Observer.”74 With this kind of soft compulsion, Ormond translates the information he learns through his imitations into social, political, and monetary capital: his functional omniscience, when it is recognized by those he would control, leads very quickly to something like omnipotence. Because no door remains closed to him and because he is completely devoid of scruples, no person is entirely safe from his depredations. In other words, for Ormond, the ability to mimic—­to imitate with malicious motivation, to internalize another’s codes and conventions of expression—­equals virtually limitless power. Because mystification of the process is part of what makes Ormond’s mimicry so powerful, Sophia offers only one scene in which he actually performs his sleight-­of-­personality trick. Seeking to know more about the Dudley family, Ormond exchanges “his complexion and habiliments for those of a negro and a chimney-­sweep” seeking employment. When they hire him on, the Dudleys afford him access not only to an inventory of their material circumstances—­he “carried away with him a catalogue of everything visible”—­ but also their moral and ethical proclivities.75 Ormond learns enough about Constantia to reconsider his ideas about the folly of marriage; she doesn’t even know that he’s in the house. Critics of the novel have rightly paid a good deal of attention to this manifestation of Ormond’s singular imitative ability. For example, Julia Stern argues that Ormond’s racial and economic drag plays on anti-­theatrical discourse to lay bare the cruel—­and foundational—­fictions of republican thought: Ormond’s assumption of the formal trappings of the



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most abject role in republican society (poor, itinerant, black) in order to gain access to Constantia’s house represents an “idiosyncratic abuse of sympathy.”76 Picking up on Eric Lott’s terminology, Stern makes clear that Ormond’s mimicry is “theft” without “love”: he performs the part of the sweep without considering what it actually means to be poor or itinerant or black, without “remotely imagining the subjective experience that accompanies such embodiment.”77 In so doing, Stern concludes, Ormond figures the deepest hypocrisies of the Early Republic: although the polity “acts” as if it is built on a universalizing fellow feeling, it is only in the exclusion and abjection of blacks, Indians, the poor, women, and immigrants that something that like a republic may be constituted. Stern emphasizes the racial and economic elements in this episode, yet her analysis also suggests that the problem represented by Ormond reaches beyond the political exploitation of racial and economic difference and beyond critiques of theatricality. Ormond’s imitations ultimately argue that all the world’s a stage: they reveal the terrifying fact that an unstable relationship between truth and acting does not just obtain beneath the proscenium arch but everywhere and at all times. If Rush’s discourses of personal reform turn everyone into an actor, Ormond raises the possibility that any person may not be who he says he is, thus suggesting that the entire social order is an elaborate fiction. As Sophia insists, “Compared with this [Ormond’s mimicry], the performance of the actor is the sport of children.  .  .  . He blended in his own person the functions of poet and actor, and his dramas were not fictitious but real. The end that he proposed was not the amusement of a playhouse mob. His were scenes in which hope and fear exercised a genuine influence, and in which was maintained that resemblance to truth so audaciously and grossly violated on the stage.”78 Combining the “functions of poet and actor,” Ormond both dissimulates in accepted reality and makes a new reality (in the classical sense of poesis) of his own. In other words, Ormond’s mimicries ultimately “propos[e]” that the apparently opposed categories of the “real” and “fictitious” are, in fact, a collapsing binary; his information-­gathering imitations threaten not only Constantia but ultimately the grounds of intellection, rationality, and moral philosophy that underwrite the Enlightenment. One anonymous review of the novel tellingly extends the problem of Ormond to the problem of Ormond: in the narrative, “History is frequently appealed to, and its facts mingled with the illusions of fancy. The boundaries of each do not distinctly appear. Correct knowledge is hereby subverted.”79

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Materialism and Morality As a radical alternative to a nation founded on the hyper-­rationalist principles of republican mechanism, other contemporary critics have proposed the constitutive sentimental bonds (whether sexual or not) between the women in the novel (Sophia and Constantia; Martinette and Constantia; Helena and Constantia). For such readings, taking the love of two adult women—­ ostensibly mutual and nonhierarchical—­as a metaphor for national cohesion opens up egalitarian and democratic possibilities foreclosed by metaphors drawn from the depredations of masculine privilege. The friendship of Sophia and Constantia, in this analysis, counteracts the aggressive antisociality of Ormond and Craig. Although such interpretations fit well with Brown’s shifty but generally somewhat feminist politics, imagining Sophia, Constantia, Martinette, and Helena as women—­that is, as creatures distinct from the men in the narrative—­whether “in the abstract” or “as they are” is not at all straightforward.80 I should emphasize that I do not mean to cast aspersions here on Brown’s ability to create realistic female characters—­a question that scholars have taken up with curious vigor—­but rather to show how Brown takes pains to suggest that the women in the novel are by no means exempt from the unpleasant operations of republican imitation, mechanization, and systematization.81 In other words, the narrative’s women may not be wooden because of Brown’s deficiencies as a writer but rather because the discursive economies that made Ormond and Craig made them as well. The narrative as a whole begins with a prefatory letter from Sophia to the enigmatic I. E. Rosenberg (presumably female but never again discussed in the narrative), and it maintains an attenuated epistolary form throughout: Ormond is, more or less, a very long letter. As the functionally omniscient narrator of the text, Sophia becomes disturbingly Ormond-­like—­in her narration, she effectively acts as another “secret witness.” Her characterological insights are voluminous and her ability to channel the thoughts of her subjects is uncanny, but her methods of gathering data are pointedly mysterious. On the subject of Ormond, for example, Sophia remarks, “I shall omit to mention the means by which I became acquainted with his character, nor shall I enter, at this time, into every part of it . . . I do not conceive myself authorized to communicate a knowledge of his schemes, which I gained in some sort surreptitiously, or, at least, by means of which he was not apprized.”82 Although mimicry may not be one of her research tools, she is certainly adroit



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at mimicking the people who populate her story: to detail Ormond’s philosophies (the “maxims” discussed at length above), Sophia has to resort to the same kinds of surreptitious action that he favors. Her reluctance to “enter . . . into every part” does not merely perform a rhetorical deferral but offers a description of her intellectual and narrative procedure; she becomes characters in the same way that Ormond does—­by mirroring. Describing herself for the first time (nearly three-­quarters of the way through the narrative), for example, is an occasion for emphasizing the transmissibility of personality. “There is little of which I can boast; but that little I derived, instrumentally, from Constantia. Poor as my attainments are, it is to her that I am indebted for them all. Life itself was the gift of her father, but my virtue and felicity are her gifts.”83 This mutuality tracks through the whole story: Sophia’s grasp of Constantia (as a friend, as a character) springs from their perfect sympathy, each woman’s perfect imitation of the interior states of the other. On the occasion of their surprise reunion, Sophia writes, “The stream of our existence was to mix; we were to act and to think in common; casual witnesses and written testimony should become superfluous.”84 Their minds are so perfectly mirrored that only one needs to experience something for them both to feel its repercussions; when together, there is no need for communication of thoughts or feelings, because the other party will have already thought and felt the same. If Sophia’s ability to sympathize with and to reproduce the modes of thinking of her characters—­putatively good and putatively evil—­marks methodical identification as a neutral force, the experiences of Sophia’s mother cast the practice in a different light. The shared childhood that produces Sophia and Constantia’s mutual affection and reflection is a result of maternal abandonment. Sophia tells the story of her orphaning as a variant of the parable of the Prodigal Son: like Franklin in his youth, Sophia’s mother found herself at the mercy of her inclinations, embracing profligacy and “depravity” to the extent that her “offences were too well known” to even record. Her “freaks of intoxication,” her “defiance of public shame, the enormity of [her] pollutions, [and] the infatuation that made [her] glory in the pursuit of a loathsome and detestable trade” eventuated both in childbirth and the need to leave that child (Sophia) behind. The Dudleys take Sophia in, and the relationship between the two girls is established. But Sophia does not stop telling her mother’s story, even after it has served its narratively exigent purpose; the tale continues, partly as a way of framing the problem of republican subjectivity. In running away from the “theatre of her vices,” Sophia’s mother

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sets out to create a new version of herself in particularly Rushian terms. As a fallen recipient of a “fashionable education,” she “delighted to assume all parts, and personate the most opposite characters”; she dons the “mask of virtue” and lights out for “scenes . . . unvisited,” where she assumes the identity of a moral person.85 Although the process takes time, this wearing of the “mask of virtue” leads to being actually virtuous—­just as in Rush’s protocols, Sophia’s mother becomes the very same “sentimental heroine figured by the mask.”86 Thanks to the intervention of a “Methodist divine,” who presumably encourages a belief that systematized good works might eventuate in some assurance of moral character, Sophia’s mother imitates her way to being good: “Her heart seemed, on a sudden, to be remoulded, her vices and the abettors of them were abjured, she shut out the intrusions of society, and prepared to expiate, by the rigours of abstinence and the bitterness of tears, the offences of her past life.”87 So far, so good. In Rush and Franklin, this is where the story would end—­ simulated virtue is made real by methodized (and here, Methodized) applications, and the project of self-­improvement succeeds. Sophia’s mother, however, just keeps going. The imitative reform-­project quickly becomes pathological: “Her remorses gained strength in proportion as she cherished them. She brooded over the images of her guilt, till the possibility of forgiveness and remission disappeared. . . . Her awakened conscience refused her a momentary respite from its persecutions. Her thoughts became, by rapid degrees, tempestuous and gloomy, and it was at length evident that her condition was maniacal.”88 Sophia’s mother, in other words, becomes so virtuous—­by simulating virtue and imitating its forms—­that she goes mad in contemplating her former sins. If the promise of Franklin is ongoing identifications and, thus, an America defined by flexibility, change, and constant progressive renewal, the horror of Brown lies in this suggestion that such processes may in fact be ceaseless, pointless, even fatal automated loops. If Rush’s doctrines of materialist psychology indicate that reforming “Habit” can manufacture a reformed character, Ormond suggests that character (whether material or not) can be destroyed by the habits of reform. In Brown’s narrative, what begins as pleasantly methodical “remoulding” of personality ends in a cycle of suffering without even “momentary respite”; restorative routine rapidly shades into routinized horror. The problems associated with this modified Rushian psychological materialism, especially with respect to the women in the novel, are made particularly vivid in another of the novel’s characters, Martinette de Beauvais. Sister



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of Ormond and another mirror image of Constantia and Sophia, Martinette repeats in miniature many of the novel’s other plots: a gifted “deceiver” of “vigorous faculties, and masculine attainments” who successfully impersonates a man for the purposes of fighting on the American side in the Revolution, Martinette maps as easily onto the male characters of the novel as she does onto the female.89 (Her battlefield emotions carry over into her civilian life; she “felt as if imbued by a soul that was a stranger to the sexual distinction.”90) Despite her intriguing androgyny, though, Martinette is just like everybody else in the narrative: “the conversation and deportment of this woman . . . exhibited no tendencies to confidence, or traces of sympathy.”91 This peculiar lack of warmth, personality, or sympathetic feeling emerges, as Martinette herself explains, from an early inculcation in psychological materialism at the hands of a lecherous Italian tutor. A “man of profound dissimulation and masterly address,” this Father Bartoli justified his advances on the fifteen-­year-­old Martinette by explaining his belief in the “newest doctrines respecting matter and mind. He denied the impenetrability of the first, and the immateriality of the second. These he endeavoured to inculcate upon me, as well as to subvert my religious tenets, because he delighted, like all men, in transfusing his opinions, and because he regarded my piety as the only obstacle to his designs. He succeeded in dissolving the spell of ignorance, but not in producing that kind of acquiescence he wished.”92 With faith, morality, or spirituality explained away by the new science of physics-­based psychology, Bartoli imagines, Martinette will no longer take non-­physics-­based concepts like soul or sin or damnation or chastity seriously; once she fully accepts the transfusion of his opinions, she will be just as depraved as he is.93 That is, once she considers herself to be the mere product of material interactions, she will find that her desires mimic his own. In the end, he succeeds in all but the consummation; she resists his advances only because he is considerably less than handsome. Her ability to feel much of anything, though, is more or less gone; her days, like Dudley’s in the pharmacy, become an endless parade of sameness. “My servitude grew daily more painful. I grew tired of chasing a comet to its aphelion, and of untying the knot of an infinite series. A change in my condition became indispensible to my very existence. Languor and sadness, and unwillingness to eat or to move, were at last my perpetual attendants.”94

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Constantia, Concurrence, and the Perils of Constancy The novel’s chief heroine would seem to have all of the “firmness of . . . principles” that Martinette lacks. As Robert S. Levine puts it, Constantia “is accurately described by her name: she is constant. In a world of plague, misfortune, and inequity, she retains throughout the novel her moral poise and benevolent desires.”95 That said, she is far more than a straightforward foil for the baroque evils of Craig and Ormond or a neutral ground of virtue against which villainy lies in stark relief.96 Indeed, Constantia’s participation in the economies of replication that I have been discussing in this chapter marks her as rather more than a standard-­issue Gothic protagonist.97 Far from standing as a straightforward argument for feminine courage in the face of danger or feminine constancy in a swirl of adverse conditions, she represents the trouble with constancy itself. To put it another way, although one early review of the novel positions her as “a perfect contrast” to Ormond, they actually have quite a bit in common.98 Constantia may be a victim of circumstance, but it is the very same circumstance—­ materialist republicanism—­that has manufactured her oppressors; the heroine and the villains are mirror images of each other, compelled by the same dark forces of ceaseless, machine-­like repetition. We can see the beginnings of such cross-­gender mechanical identifications in a series of episodes that comes soon after Dudley loses his sight from all that fine transcription work. With his disability preventing him from earning money, Constantia and her father soon become more or less destitute and fall victim to an unfeeling landlord. Some of Constantia’s efforts to solve the problem of poverty are commonplace—­she tries to take in more needlework, she pawns her father’s beloved lute—­but her scheme to economize on food offers particular insight into her character. After hearing her father talk about the diet of St. Benedictine of Messina, Constantia comes to believe that “polenta . . . was no less grateful than nutritive. Indian meal was procurable at ninety cents per bushel . . . [and] this quantity, with no accompaniment but salt, would supply wholesome and plentiful food for four months to one person.”99 She accordingly buys three bushels of corn, one for each member of the household, and implements a hasty pudding menu for winter. Sophia understands that poverty entails difficult choices but also worries that treating the body as nothing more than an engine requiring fuel may mark a shift from frugality into ethical deficiency: “He indeed must be wretched . . . who in the choice of food, for example, is governed by no consideration but its cheapness, and its capacity to sustain nature.”100 (“Wretched” here does



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double-­duty: it means both poor and, by the anti-­mechanist logic of the narrative, wicked.) Constantia, on the other hand, finds eating only polenta for a quarter of a year to be “as practical and beneficial as her fondest expectations had predicted”; just as Ormond in his maxims, she displays no anxiety whatsoever about casting herself (and those around her) as straightforward material effects.101 Taste, pleasure, and other potentially idiosyncratic phenomena are easily—­even fondly—­dismissed by Constantia’s embrace of the iron laws of necessity. Not long after the polenta regimen begins and Constantia’s nonanxious mechanicity is revealed, the narrative begins to explore her search for kindred personalities—­her attempts to find happiness with another who duplicates her habits and her patterns of thinking. At one point, for example, a reasonably successful Scottish businessman falls in love with Constantia and asks for her hand in marriage. Sophia, reporting on the relationship, insists that the benefits of such a union are immediately apparent: the man is modest, industrious, “tranquil and uniform,” a veritable “model of chasteness and regularity,” and, most important, well-­to-­do: if the nuptials were to happen, the Dudley family would immediately be lifted out of its grinding poverty.102 But Constantia refuses; she rejects his suit on the grounds of an imperfectly congruent temperament. “Her modes of thinking,” Sophia explains, “were, in few respects, the same as her lover.”103 Obsessed with correspondence, with finding herself repeated in another, Constantia argues that “the company of one with whom we have no sympathy, nor sentiments in common, is, of all species of solitude, the most loathsome and dreary. The nuptial life is attended with peculiar aggravations, since the tie is infrangible, and the choice of a more suitable companion, if such a one should offer, is forever precluded.”104 Although Constantia concludes her rationale with a strong feminist argument—­“homely liberty was better than splendid servitude”—­taking her position as a case for something like companionate marriage is rather difficult.105 Brown had argued for the practice in Alcuin (1798), but Sophia treats Constantia’s rejection of Balfour as an example of impracticality, of mechanistic absurdity, of rule run riot. Thus, Dudley’s response, dutifully recorded by Sophia: “Her opinions, it is true, were erroneous; but he was willing that she should regulate her conduct by her own conceptions of right, and not by those of another. To refuse Balfour’s offers was an evil, but an evil inexpressibly exceeded by that of accepting them contrary to her own sense of propriety.”106 No matter which evil is the lesser, in the logic of the narrative, Constantia is punished for her decision: upon spurning Balfour, she becomes

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the subject of malicious gossip and loses the patronage of her needlework customers. Rendered even poorer than before, she is uniquely vulnerable to an entanglement with Ormond, the Illuminated rapist and murderer. The irony, of course, is that Ormond is her perfect double—­in Ormond, she manages to find someone who (at least in the beginning of their relationship) regulates his conduct by “conceptions of right” that are just like her own. Constantia first encounters Ormond as she searches for the disappeared Craig; although their initial meetings are brief, the alignment of their sympathies is revealed almost immediately. Their acquaintance blossoms with the intervention of Helena Cleves, Ormond’s mistress, who takes Constantia into her employ and, at his urging, conveys all sorts of information about Ormond’s life and opinions. Even though she strongly disapproves of his dishonorable interactions with Helena, Constantia is intrigued by Ormond’s resemblance to herself. Over the course of the narrative, the sympathetic “points of contact” between them increase continually; because Constantia has an “exquisite” sense of the “benefits to flow from the conformity and concurrence of intentions and wishes heightening the sensual passion,” she cultivates likeness with whatever she finds amenable.107 As Constantia concurs with Ormond, so he concurs with her. Whereas in his past Ormond had only met women with “no affinity with the sentiments which he cherished with most devotion . . . and the uniformity of his experience at length instilled into him a belief that the intellectual constitution of females was essentially defective,” in Constantia he finds a version of himself. With the advent of this maximal woman, he no longer “denied the reality of that passion which claimed a similitude or sympathy of minds as one of its ingredients.”108 Around her, the master dissimulator Ormond “pretended to nothing, and studied the concealments of ambiguity more in reality than in appearance. Constantia, however, discovered a sufficient resemblance between their theories of virtue and duty.  .  .  . Her discourse tended to rouse him from his lethargy, to furnish him with powerful excitements; and the time spent in her company seemed like a doubling of existence.”109 We can only assume that Sophia means this final simile quite literally: Ormond well understands the fundamental similarity between his mind and Constantia’s; he falls in love with her because she is, more or less, another Ormond. Attendant to all of this mirroring and doubling—­this repeating of the qualities of the one in the bosom of the other—­is the repetition of thoughts and emotions felt by a mechanically determinate psyche. “Constantia did not form her resolutions in haste; but, when once formed, they were exempt



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from fluctuation”; although she maintains the “mutability of muscle which belong[s] to woman,” she is just as “incurable and obdurate,” as Ormond is “implacable.”110 Sophia suggests that the roots of such implacability lie in republican education; Constantia shares with Ormond the schooling that Craig purports to have had. The education of Constantia had been regulated by the peculiar views of her father, who sought to make her, not alluring and voluptuous, but eloquent and wise. He therefore limited her studies to Latin and English. Instead of familiarizing her with the amorous effusions of Petrarch and Racine, he made her thoroughly conversant with Tacitus and Milton. Instead of making her a practical musician or pencilist, he conducted her to the school of Newton and Hartley, unveiled to her the mathematical properties of light and sound, taught her, as a metaphysician and anatomist, the structure and power of the senses, and discussed with her the principles and progress of human society.111 This is not Rush’s program for American girls, of course—­it is considerably more aristocratic (or old-­school humanist) than that—­but the inclusion of “Newton and Hartley” as guiding lights for Constantia’s education nevertheless implicates Rush in her development. Along with John Locke, Isaac Newton and David Hartley are the philosophical fathers of the materialist psychology that underwrites Rush’s programs for “republican machines.” Hartley in particular was a favorite of Rush—­his doctrines of association (developed from Locke) and vibration (developed from Newton) explain in detail the necessary physicality of the human mind.112 To Hartley (as to Hume and others), “Ideas are Copies and Offsprings of the Impressions made on the Eye and Ear”; things like “will” and “intellection” are more complicated outcomes of material interactions (the “vibrations” of the neurological ether) but are, nonetheless, the products of physics.113 If the body of the model (the gesture, the voice) can be imitated—­that is, its physical conditions more or less copied—­then the mind will follow. Such a materialist education fits quite well with Ormond’s needs in a spouse. “Every thing in his domestic system was fashioned on strict and inflexible principles. He wanted instruments and not partakers of his authority,—­one whose mind was equal and not superior to the cogent apprehension and punctual performance of his will; one whose character was squared, with mathematical exactness, to his situation.”114 He finds precisely

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such a “one” in Constantia: although she is sometimes a little less tractable than he might like, she is also perfectly suited to all of his tastes and doesn’t really need to be any different. As he demands of her, more or less rhetorically, “Who but yourself could be mistress of all the springs of my soul? I know the sternness of your probity. . . . Lay yourself out of view. . . . Is there no part of me in which you discover your own likeness? Am I deceived, or is it an incontrollable destiny that unites us?”115 In another narrative, such harmonic convergences might argue for the possibility of true love; in Ormond, this sort of attraction and congruency between Constantia and Ormond can lead to nothing but a terrible end. Even though she cannot imagine being married to anyone else, out of respect for her father’s wishes (and her own discomfort with Ormond’s handling of Helena’s eventual suicide), Constantia refuses Ormond’s advances. Unaccustomed to rejection, Ormond vows to persist in his efforts and to take what he wants—­to confirm the affinity between them—­by force. He explains his plans in the terms of mechanical inevitability: “Shall I warn thee of the danger that awaits thee? For what end? . . . Come it will. Though future, it knows not the empire of contingency. An inexorable and immutable decree enjoins it.”116 Although his mechanistic theories of society and personality suggest “inexorable” and “immutable” outcomes, Ormond nevertheless gets to work; avoiding the “empire of contingency” means putting into motion a Gothically elaborate scheme for revenge. His Rube Goldberg device for breaking Constantia’s will includes everything from writing her curt letters to causing Craig to murder her father; it does not stop until Constantia is more or less isolated in a world of his own design.117 Ormond’s grand machinations come to fruition at Constantia’s country seat in rural New Jersey. Alone in an upstairs room at midnight, Constantia spies a mysterious rider, hears some suspicious noises, tries and fails to light a lamp, and then attempts to flee to the safety of a nearby farmhouse. She gets as far as the hallway before the corpse of a fashionable man face-­down on the floor stops her in her tracks. He has clearly died violently, but he bears “no mark of blood or of wounds.”118 She wavers in her resolve for a moment before taking off down the stairs toward the front door of the house—­which is when Ormond appears out of the shadows and begins to explain the situation in which she finds herself and to alert her to some of its consequences. Fittingly, Ormond’s terms are the terms of the social machine. He begins by identifying the corpse as Craig in such a way that anything like Craig’s humanity is immediately effaced: the forger was simply an “instrument,” an



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“engine” killed in an automatic “recompense” for the crimes that Ormond himself facilitated. He goes on to explain Constantia’s father’s death (at Craig’s hand) as simply a “disinterested offering on the altar of your felicity and mine.”119 What Ormond considers to be selfless, disinterested, and ineluctable acts—­recalling the republican mantras of political and economic dispassion and the necessitarian philosophy of mechanic causality —­Constantia not surprisingly considers abominations. Ormond’s grotesquely utilitarian attempts to justify the murders—­especially the killing of Dudley, in which he reasons that the old man’s life had little remaining “value” and that his death was inevitably approaching—­are merely enhanced by his abhorrence of anything like discord: “My happiness and yours depended on your concurrence with my wishes. Your father’s life was an obstacle to your concurrence. For killing him, therefore, I may claim your gratitude.”120 Here, republican unanimity, in the form of a longed-­for “concurrence,” is offered as the greatest of goods: the duplication of one’s wishes in the mind of another is more important than the real lives that stand in that duplication’s way. The novel ends with a generically familiar confrontation: with Craig’s body on the floor between them, Ormond explains to Constantia that he intends to demonstrate their consonance by raping her and carrying her off with him. Renewing Father Bartoli’s arguments to Martinette, he casts resistance as the vestige of “imaginary honour.” Her rape will be thus merely a “trial” or an “experiment”; any “injury” she incurs will be “without a name or substance, without connection with the past or future, without contamination of thy purity or thraldom of [her] will.” That is, Ormond considers rape a sublimely material action—­one that has no effect on what Constantia might consider her immaterial (or fictional) virtue or desire. Indeed, her consciousness does not enter into his thinking at all: “Living or dead,” Ormond vows, “the prize that I have in view shall be mine.”121 Constantia, schooled in Hartley and following Rush, disagrees: she counts “purity” and “will” among the functions of her material body, and, determined to preserve her virtue, she struggles with Ormond. A penknife is produced, Ormond is stabbed, and, just like Craig and as if to literalize the metaphor of the republican machine, he dies a bloodless death—­like a clockwork running down. As Sophia explains, “The wound by which he fell was secret, and was scarcely betrayed by the effusion of a drop of blood.”122 This tidy end is not merely a typically Gothic mystification of violence, where the depiction of bodily harm becomes sublimated to the landscape (as in evocations of the ruined castle or the raging river) or deferred to a retrospective narrative gloss;

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it is a key argument against Ormond’s humanity. His “secret wound,” like the “springs” of his soul and his secret witnessing, suggests a fundamental removal from the realm of the flesh-­and-­blood person—­what has been merely a metaphorical suggestion of his automatic (un-­)nature is revealed, in the end, to be all too accurate.123

The Contagion of Example With Ormond’s death—­ from a stroke that Constantia characterizes as “scarcely the fruit of intention,” the product of a “momentary frenzy,” and “desperate and at random”—­the narrative leaves the empire of regular, predictable mechanism for that “empire of contingency” that Ormond himself refuses to imagine.124 Explaining the aftermath of the killing, Sophia marks the necessitarian mechanical framework that led to Ormond’s demise but also looks beyond it, to greener, less determinate pastures: “Not to deplore the necessity which had produced this act was impossible; but, since this necessity existed, it was surely not a deed to be thought upon with lasting horror, or to be allowed to generate remorse.”125 To accomplish such forgetting, to put all of this “necessity” behind them, Sophia and Constantia decide to leave the United States: in the throes of a mysteriously transmissible yellow fever, the nation presents a sphere of contagious influence not unlike Ormond’s; it too seems bent on producing a terrible uniformity among its subjects—­the catastrophic replication of the mass grave. In what amounts to the darkest possible version of republican theory, Sophia remarks that “many corpses were thrown into a single excavation, and all distinctions founded on merit and rank were obliterated.”126 The mass grave thus dramatizes the failures of social emulation and ghoulishly literalizes Sophia’s characterization of “the difference between Europe and America”: “in the former, all things tended to extremes, whereas, in the latter, all things tended to the same level. Genius, and virtue, and happiness, on these shores, were distinguished by a sort of mediocrity.”127 For the United States, “genius, and virtue, and happiness” are all interred in “mediocrity”—­that which distinguishes the American is his or her essential indistinguishability. It is a country at the mercy of what Martinette calls “the contagion of example”: the only way to escape being buried in its horrors is to run away as quickly as possible.128 A jealously guarded individuality is the only way out of such mechanized, serially dependent horror. Considering her courses of action in the midst of



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the plague, Constantia recalls that “on occasions when the malignity of contagious diseases has been most signal, some individuals have escaped. For their safety, they were doubtless indebted to some peculiarities in their constitution or habits. Their diet, their dress, their kind and degree of exercise, must somewhat have contributed to their exemption from the common destiny. These, perhaps, could be ascertained, and when known it was surely proper to conform to them.”129 Idiosyncrasy saves lives—­and that which is idiosyncratic and effective must be observed and celebrated and then, perhaps paradoxically, “conformed to.” The only way that the “common destiny” may be avoided is to make “peculiarities in . . . constitution or habits” into commonality itself. If there is a moral to the novel, then, it lies perhaps in a broad recommendation to destroy and forget the particular mechanical simulations of life recommended by Rush and the rest. But such destruction and forgetting is not so easily accomplished: Ormond and Craig may be defeated and their ideas revealed as poisonous, but their influence lingers. Sophia closes her moral case with a negative example: having amply demonstrated the ways in which repetition can drive a body mad, having exposed the ways in which the disciplines of materialist imitation may be exploited for fraudulent and violent ends, and having described in detail how a clockwork society may ruin utterly the people it seeks to harmonize, she ends her narrative. Constantia embraces chance and contingency to momentarily escape that fate to which Ormond had consigned her, but it is not at all clear that such an embrace is sustainable for a life going forward. As Sophia explains, with considerable melancholy, “Since her arrival in England, the life of my friend has experienced little variation.”130 Putting forward unchecked idiosyncrasy and individuality as possible solutions to the problem of a mechanically informed cultural harmony or to the “contagion of example” only to take the gesture back almost immediately, Ormond thus presents an extensive and thoroughgoing critique of the dependent arts without offering anything like a viable alternative. The narrative shows us how routine can become dangerous, how a reform-­minded psychological materialism can deny or devalue basic humanity, how projection into other minds can index megalomania just as readily as it indexes humility—­ but it refuses to outline other modes of social or interpersonal organization. Indeed, the narrative’s chief exponent of individualism—­the conventional alternative to the arts of dependence—­is also its biggest monster: Ormond’s sense of his own singularity is precisely what authorizes his refusal to care

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about the consequences of his actions. Conformity may be social poison, but liberty shades so easily into libertinism that it might be just as bad. Like Wieland, then, which ends with Brown’s narrator enumerating the flaws of empiricism and beseeching his readers to be more careful about believing the evidence of their senses, Ormond works more to unsettle than to instruct. Or perhaps, like so many Gothic works, it finds instruction in unsettlement. If one of the basic tenets of the American arts of dependence is that polity building is a function of ethical copying, Brown’s refusal to identify a positive example or specify a working system to be propagated is the only sort of critique that cannot be assimilated into or appropriated by the paradigm that it would destroy. A sort of global destabilization, then, frames a broader statement of the principle of exception that we have seen in Jefferson’s letter to Rush about the necessary opacity of the president’s decision making or in the variations-­on-­a-­model that Sally Blunt and Mary Ann Hooker sew into their samplers: it argues for the importance of noise in the system, for ethical resistance to totalization, for the beauty and utility of unassimilable difference. What’s different about Ormond, however, is that the terms of exceptionality are never explicitly set out. They are merely posed as a problem—­explicitly recommended for contemplation by everyone who encounters the text without any particular hints at a solution. “It is now finished; and I have only to add my wishes that the perusal of this tale may afford you as much instruction as the contemplation of the sufferings and vicissitudes of Constantia Dudley has afforded to me. Farewell.”131 A final paragraph that in one sense closes out the narrative’s epistolary frame thus serves in another sense as a gesture of radical inconclusion. Sophia’s “Farewell” suggests both finality and futurity—­a gesture of parting that also points toward the necessity of incorporating the text’s “instruction” into unspecifiable decisions to come. More important, Sophia’s use of the second person works to open the problems of the narrative out into the wider world: it is not just I. E. Rosenberg (the narrative’s express recipient) on the hook for moralizing the spectacle of Ormond; it is also every other potential reader of the story. This moment of direct address thus suggests that the philosophical problems with the arts of dependence that Ormond proposes have a currency that each reader must meditate for herself; figuring a workable middle ground between absolute individuality and mechanistic regularity is everybody’s ongoing problem—­your ongoing problem. Like Franklin’s reform project, which imagines itself as a perpetual-­ motion machine of imitative perfecting, Brown’s critique posits a ceaseless and universalized questioning of Franklinian (or Rushian, or Wheatleyan)



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wisdom. Ormond cannot in itself undo the cultural effects of materialist psychology, mechanical repetition, conventionalized expression, or disciplinary emulation, but in making sacraments of uncertainty and uniqueness, it conjures an atomized public (or an “empire of contingency”) that may one day take that responsibility themselves.

Chapter 6

The Copyist Moby-­Dick

In December of 1851, Harper’s Monthly Magazine began its section of “Literary Notices” with an anonymous, positive review of a book written by one of its own contributors. “A new work by Herman Melville, entitled Moby-­Dick; or The Whale, has just been issued by Harper and Brothers, which, in point of richness and variety of incident, originality of conception, and splendor of description, surpasses any of the former productions of this highly successful author.”1 At roughly the same time, The International Magazine of Literature, Art, and Science—­a rival of Harper’s in New York’s robust market for literary periodicals—­published an anonymous, negative review of Moby-­Dick, “Herman Melville’s Whale.” Or, more accurately, it republished an anonymous, negative review of Moby-­Dick, “Herman Melville’s Whale”—­prefacing it with a brief explanatory paragraph: “The new nautical story by the always successful author of Typee, has for its name-­giving subject a monster first introduced to the world of print by Mr. J. N. Reynolds, ten or fifteen years ago, in a paper for the Knickerbocker, entitled Mocha Dick. We received a copy when it was too late to review it ourselves for this number of the International, and therefore make use of a notice of it which we find in the London Spectator.”2 Pointing out one of Melville’s source-­texts and freely admitting its use of a foreign notice, The International Magazine’s critique at once challenges Harper’s claims to Moby-­Dick’s “originality of conception” and forswears its own “originality.”3 The reproduced Spectator review that follows this disavowal characterizes Moby-­Dick’s “singular medley” of metaphysical digressions and its unconventional narrative structure as repellant “rhapsody run mad”; Melville’s “go-­ahead” method results in “catastrophe that overrides all rule.”4 Anything that may be thought of as novelty in Melville’s novel is treated with the highest level of scorn; “Herman Melville’s Whale” directs its only praise toward Moby-­Dick’s “unmixed” and “appropriate” discussions of nautical fact.

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This brace of receptions makes a strong case that the theories of artistic independence that we have come to take for granted in the age of Emerson were far from universally accepted and were, in fact, the subject of intense cultural debate at the time that Moby-­Dick was written. Just as Evert Duyckinck (Melville’s editor) and the Young Americans were insisting that the fate of the United States depended upon the emergence of a strong and self-­sustaining indigenous artistic tradition—­and robust, aesthetically and intellectually independent authors to prosecute it—­a healthy majority of American literature was, as Meredith McGill reminds us, “defined by an exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination.”5 Despite Emersonian calls for “self-­reliance” and for the construction of a new American subjectivity around the notion of an “original relation to the universe,” there were scores of artists and writers who remained stubbornly imitative, relational, and contentedly dependent. And despite heated agitation by authors seeking muscular and enforceable international copyright and intellectual property laws—­which took the sanctity of “originality” and “original work” as a necessary condition of modern life—­a good many mid-­nineteenth-­century philosophers and critics simply did not hold “originary genius” at a premium. Melville, I argue, is one of them. In his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” for example, Melville creates a persona that espouses notions of “originality” and “genius” that are more informed by geographical specificity than by human creativity—­that work to disarticulate liberal personhood from artistry. Writing in a broadly nationalist vein, Melville’s “Virginian spending July in Vermont” insists that American writers “boldly contemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and fragrant as the morning; and foster all originality, though, at first, it be all crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots.”6 But “originality” here does not mean “newness.” Rather, it indicates “a sense of origins”—­a strong affinity to the intellectual and cultural conditions under which the artistic object is produced, regardless of whether there are other, quite similar objects already in the world. As for “genius,” it must not be confined to the individual—­it must be distributed among a number of writers. Melville’s “Virginian” notes, And here, let me throw out another conceit of mine touching this American Shiloh, or ‘Master Genius,’ as Hawthorne calls him. May it not be, that this commanding mind has not been, is not, and never will be, individually developed in any one man? And would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable to suppose, that this great fullness and

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overflowing may be, or may be destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius? Surely, to take the very greatest example on record, Shakespeare cannot be regarded as so immeasurably beyond Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that those great men can be said to share none of his power?7 Hawthorne may have the “largest heart” and “largest brain” in the history of American literature, but, as the Virginian insists, even his efforts are always partial, always inadequate to the project of focusing and translating fully the overwhelming spirit of the age.8 Because it exceeds the capacities of the single authorial conduit, the expression of the genius of the times requires tributaries, a large number of writers working to speak the same truths. As an endpoint, I want to place Moby-­Dick back into the context of such mid-­nineteenth-­century conversations about the sources and operations of “genius” and to argue that certain culturally persistent aspects of the arts of dependence lie at the very center of Melville’s epic. In form and in content, Moby-­Dick elaborates an economy of psychological and textual borrowing, sharing, and reproducing—­it finds in the writing (and whaling) self ’s reliance upon others both its master trope and its most potent critique of nineteenth-­ century American political ideology.

Source Work Although Melville represents Moby-­Dick to his London publisher Richard Bentley as having “great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner,” the text itself tells a different story.9 As generations of scholars have labored to illustrate, the bulk of Moby-­Dick consists of extracts and excerpts patchworked over a purloined narrative frame.10 There is an identifiable source for most every character, scene, and fact in the novel; the masterwork that proves what Charles van Doren calls Melville’s “immense originality” is, on balance, conspicuously and pointedly dependent upon other texts.11 That said, literary historians rarely consider the philosophies behind Moby-­Dick’s extensive use of sources to be worthy of extended consideration—­a century of scholarship has denigrated or mystified Moby-­Dick’s textual borrowings in order to defend the book’s and its author’s integrity, originality, and genius. Every study that concerns itself with sources in Moby-­Dick alters slightly

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second-­mate Stubb’s masthead soliloquy in “The Doubloon”: other books may have supplied the “bare words and facts,” but the author “[came] in to supply the thoughts.”12 These studies all take inspiration, it seems, from ideas like T. S. Eliot’s about the Elizabethan playwright Philip Massinger: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”13 The great Melville scholar Howard Vincent’s version of the refrain is typically eloquent: “Melville’s borrowings do not in any way make him liable to the charge of plagiarism; whatever he took he transformed; the practice and authority of Shakespeare, his great master, gave sanction to his method of transfer. Out of [Thomas] Beale’s and [Frederick] Bennett’s sows’ ears Herman Melville made silk purses.”14 This line of criticism is not wrong: Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) and Bennett’s A Whaling Voyage Round the Globe (1840) have their charms for readers with a passion for the details of nineteenth-­century life at sea, but they are chiefly interested in the neutral retailing of matters of fact. Moby-­Dick, on the other hand, is about récit as much as it is about histoire: in foregrounding matters of form (by staging chapters as plays, for example, or as ironized natural histories), the text asserts itself unashamedly as a work of art. Put another way, Moby-­Dick’s ability to combine history with imagination (or physics with metaphysics), human feeling with philosophical inquiry, cultural critique with psychological depth, and so on is beyond reproach; probably more than any other prose writer of the American nineteenth century, Melville inhabits the category of “Great Artist” as we have come to understand it; Moby-­Dick is neither plagiary nor pastiche.15 Even so, the text’s economies of copying and appropriation are at once critical aspects of its larger ethical arguments and useful shorthand for the print-­cultural scene of Melville’s moment. From the rampant (and usually unattributed) reproduction of stories and engravings in newspapers to the coterie circulation of copied manuscripts, borrowed, bowdlerized, excerpted, and otherwise derivative works made up a significant majority of the imaginative productions of the antebellum United States.16 What makes Moby-­Dick so special, in this case, is its critical distance. Unlike other reprinters, imitators, digest makers, and commonplace book keepers of the antebellum period, Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, meditates at length on the metaphysical motivations and consequences of writing an appropriative text. These meditations have serious ramifications: taking an even partially pro-­copying stance

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productively upsets conceptions of art, artistry, and personhood constructed exclusively around liberal atomism.17 In the vast majority of twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century Melville scholarship, Moby-­Dick has been used to illustrate (for better or for worse) the emergence of capitalist individualism as the dominant sociopolitical order in the United States: Melville’s sui generis artistic success confirms that the cultural development of nineteenth-­century America is contiguous with the broad application of Emersonian theories of macroeconomics, nationalism, and genius.18 On the contrary, it’s my sense that an ethics of motivated copying (cited and uncited) is the key to Moby-­ Dick’s critiques of authorship and citizenship: the different species of borrowing in the text argue powerfully against emergent liberal models of American subjectivity. Many of the textual moments that I marshal to discuss the copyist Moby-­ Dick are the commonplaces of the long and rich tradition of criticism which reinforces putatively romantic or Emersonian principles and will be familiar to Melville scholars. In revisiting those moments to offer an account of Melville’s epic that moves beyond a model of singularity and genius, beyond influence and its anxieties, and into the fluid worlds of emulation and dependence described by Franklin, Wheatley, Rush, and Rowson, we can reclaim a more complicated (or dialogical) interpretive framework for Moby-­Dick and for the American literary tradition that it is said to epitomize.

Extracts and the Copied Text The copyist ethic that emerges over the course of Moby-­Dick constitutes a complex negotiation of the limits of authorship, ownership, and personhood. To narrow the scope of the inquiry, I will explore these negotiations by singling out a particularly fruitful metonym for copying and its complications: the topos of the “splice.” A figure drawn from the byzantine world of nautical ropework, splicing refers to the practice of interweaving strands from two ropes together in order to form a single line. As Richard Henry Dana’s Seaman’s Friend (1841) defines it, “Splicing, is putting the ends of ropes together by opening the strands and placing them into one another, or by putting the strands of the ends of a rope between those of the bight.”19 Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of 1828 itself copies from an unspecified “Mar[itime] Dict[ionary]” to define the verb. “Splice: To separate the strands of the two ends of a rope, and unite them by a particular manner of interweaving them;

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or to unite the end of a rope to any part of another by a like interweaving of the strands.”20 For Moby-­Dick, splicing becomes a controlling metaphor at the level of composition and at the level of the book’s political and ethical program: throughout the narrative, interweaving appears as shorthand for relationships created through emulation, citation, and nonproprietary sharing among disparate texts and disparate persons. To tell its story of the epistemological and political perils of “monomania” and possessive individualism, Moby-­Dick becomes imitative, collaborative, and adamantly polyvocal—­it splices multiple narratives from multiple texts into a single thread.21 In the narrative of Moby-­Dick, the figure who most fervently espouses methods of writing, subject making, and polity building that are suspicious of originality and independence is Ishmael, the book’s narrator and fictive author. As a member of a brotherhood of what he calls “ostentatious smuggling verbalists,” Ishmael continually advertises the fact that his book is made from other books, that his story is the synthetic product of multiply layered “authorities” that resist hierarchical arrangement.22 Forever copying out the stories, opinions, and arguments of other people, Ishmael figures the appropriation, duplication, and reproduction of sources as a kind of interdependent and anti-­proprietary weaving; always exploiting etymologies, he insists on the textile nature of his text. This appropriative textile imaginary is present from the very first pages of the book; even before the first narrative chapter, “Loomings,” the fabrication of Moby-­Dick has begun. The American edition, for example, begins not with a famous narratorial imperative (“Call me Ishmael”) but rather with two chapters of excerpted material, “Etymology” and “Extracts.”23 The former—­ expressly borrowed from a “late consumptive usher”—­offers a lexicographical history of “whale” that illustrates the word in thirteen different languages (from Hebrew to Erromangoan) and that reproduces English derivations from Webster and from Charles Richardson’s New Dictionary of the English Language. These authorities conflict: Webster finds the root in the “Sw[edish]. and Dan[ish]. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” Richardson, on the other hand, states that “[whale] is more immediately from the Dut[ch]. and Ger[man]. Wallen; A[nglo]. S[axon]. Walw-­ian, to roll, to wallow.”24 Faced with a choice between derivations, Ishmael prefers not to choose. Recorded without comment or gloss—­each is plausible, neither is preferable, and both need to be copied down and presented to the reader—­these etymologies at once highlight the braided nature of the story to come and proleptically indicate the slipperiness

Figure 19. Sailor’s knots, including short splice (#3), long splice (#4), and eye-­splice (#5). Richard Henry Dana, The Seaman’s Friend, Plate V. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society

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and multiplicity of the truth about whales, a theme that recurs in the middle sections of the book. Moby-­Dick’s second section (at least in its American edition) enacts a similar dynamic of copying and interweaving: “Extracts” reproduces dozens of passages compiled by a “Sub-­Sub-­Librarian” and presents them more or less chronologically as “higgledy-­piggledy whale-­statements.” They take many forms: there are Bible quotes, bits of poems and plays (from Milton, Lamb, Spenser, and Shakespeare), fragments of law and natural history and travelogue, hints of political theory (from Hobbes’s Leviathan, naturally), and doggerel from children’s books (“Whales in the sea / God’s voice obey,” from the New England Primer). And although the statements operate in very different registers—­Alexander Pope’s joke about failing whalebone petticoat-­stays from The Rape of the Lock doesn’t exactly fit comfortably with the bit from Antonio Ulloa’s A Voyage to South America about the “insupportable smell” of the whale’s breath that precedes it—­the multiplicity is the point. One of the intriguing things about the whale, from Ishmael’s point of view, is just how polysemous it is—­how it means differently to different people and how readily its physical characteristics can be turned to different metaphysical (or narrative) ends. Faced with the manifest complexity of the creature and the systems of signification it inhabits, Ishmael has no choice but to depend upon the work of others and to reproduce their remarks in with his own.25 As Ishmael puts it in the later “Cetology” chapter, which develops an extended analogy between the morphology of whales and the physicality of books, “My object . . . is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.”26 As an “architect,” he imagines himself to be responsible for the broad conceptual outlines of the work, not for its complete realization. “Cetology” ends with an unequivocal statement and an ironic plea: Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—­nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!27

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In other words, a complete “cetology” depends upon the contributions of subsequent generations of texts—­Moby-­Dick is neither the first nor the last word on whales but a kind of blueprint that others may follow toward a fuller understanding. The metaphor of the cathedral—­a commonplace (in several senses) that shifts the conception of the project away from secular and individualist concepts of origination, rather like Wheatley’s arguments for regular meter—­combines with Ishmael’s self-­defined status as “architect” and “draught”-­sman to position this text outside the realm of bounded authorial property. On the contrary, although he retains the privilege of having worked on the design, Ishmael imagines himself to be just another cog in the vast mechanical and intellectual effort required to construct (if not complete) the natural and cultural history of the whale. “What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. ‘Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!’ But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest, and I will try.”28 Although his singularity peeks through—­as his individual sailing experience and his inalienably “visible hands” would attest—­Ishmael’s account is more certainly written by one who has “swam through libraries.” Taking full advantage of those heterogeneous repositories of knowledge, Ishmael is an absorber and an emitter, a weaver of threads—­a practitioner of the arts of dependence—­not an originator. And so, like its “Extracts” and “Etymology” sections, much of the rest of Moby-­Dick adopts the form of an elaborate and enormous commonplace book: for every assertion, thought, or feeling, there is some kind of a source, either explicit or implicit. This is particularly true in what Vincent calls the “cetological center” of the text—­that grand tour through the natural history of the whale and the cultural history of whaling that occupy the middle third of the narrative. Ishmael does not merely state his own thoughts on something like the phylogenetic classification of the whale; for example, he quotes from others: “In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, ‘I hereby separate the whales from the fish.’.  .  . Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.”29 Later, as a way of setting up a joke, Ishmael reworks a passage from the Scottish anatomist John Hunter (itself quoted in Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale) about the morphology of the whale’s fin.

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In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity . . . is . . . very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-­fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. “However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.”30 Moments like these proliferate: someone else’s delightful fact or striking turn of phrase becomes an armature upon which Ishmael can build one of his own (or note one that he has witnessed).31 Ishmael’s sometimes overt, sometimes obscured engagement with source-­work positions him as a spectacularly gifted version of the extract-­collecting “Sub-­Sub”; because the “systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera” is a task to which “no ordinary letter-­sorter in the Post-­office is equal to,” Ishmael spends the greater part of Moby-­Dick becoming an extraordinary one.32

Splicing Persons As the remainder of the narrative shows, though, it’s not just the truth about whales and whaling that requires copying—­it’s the truth about everything else. After poststructuralism, such arguments about the subsumption of a monological “Author” into appropriated, interwoven, and multiply imagined discourses are commonplaces of textual interpretation; all text, as Roland Barthes reminds us, is a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”33 For Ishmael, though, the weaving process—­which encodes strength or viability through borrowing, copying, and variegation, taking someone else’s idea or trope or thread and braiding it in with your own—­is not limited to the realm of writing. Activating the pun in “Loomings” and running through reveries on “The Line,” “The Log and Line,” and “The Mat-­Maker,” Ishmael explicitly uses splicing and weaving as overriding metaphors for the construction of properly democratic persons and societies. The trope of the splice in this sense first appears at the very beginning of Ishmael’s narrative proper. Afflicted with the “hypos,” he decides to make a

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voyage on a whaler; after a brief trip from Manhattan, he arrives at night in New Bedford and looks for a place to sleep. He settles on the Spouter Inn but is told that the only bed available is already partially occupied by Queequeg—­a South Seas harpooneer whom he initially imagines to be a “dangerous man.” Ishmael objects to sharing a bunk with someone he deems a savage, but Coffin, the innkeeper, persists: “ ‘Come, it’s getting dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes—­it’s a nice bed: Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.’ ”34 Coffin’s recollection of the bed as integral to the nuptial process—­with “spliced” acting here as nautical slang for “married”—­serves as prolepsis for Ishmael and Queequeg’s subsequent matrimonial relationship.35 The landlord takes the skeptical Ishmael up to the room and leaves him there to consider his situation. Ishmael’s actions in evaluating the room relate his narratorial process and his ethical project and set the stage for the kinds of splicing to come: Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe no doubt, in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-­place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed. But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, the same as in South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against

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the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.36 Having taken a comprehensive inventory of the things in the room that fit in with his understanding of the world—­the seaman’s flexible bag, the bone fish hooks, the harpoon, the figured fireboard—­Ishmael turns his attention to things that he cannot place. He foregrounds his own ignorance or insufficiency (“But what is this on the chest?”)—­another moment of characteristic modesty, of refusal to claim certainty where there is none—­but he also outlines a procedure for moving forward. Figuring that the woven thing before him is a garment, Ishmael takes the extraordinary step of putting it on and looking at himself in the mirror. It’s damp and heavy and clearly not for him, but his rejection of the object is considerably less important than the sympathetic impulse that drives him to don it in the first place. Ishmael’s spirit of generosity and curiosity find form in imitation: he tries here not just to imagine what it would be like to be a cannibal harpooneer but actually to inhabit his subject position. “I put it on, to try it” represents the temporary reproduction of an Other in the self, the occupation of the different as a route to understanding—­a material and metaphysical rehearsal of the Sub-­Sub Librarian’s sedulous copying out of contradictory and generically disparate statements about whales. When Queequeg finally shows up—­tattooed, carrying a shrunken head, preparing offerings for a tiny wooden god—­Ishmael can scarcely believe his eyes. He cries out “Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!” but a few seconds of pidgin-­y conversation are enough for his spirit of generosity and fellowship to kick in again and to convince him that Queequeg is a “clean, comely looking cannibal” after all and that he needn’t worry about sharing a bed with him.37 Queequeg may look irremediably Other, but Ishmael’s experiments in textile imitation with the “door mat” have proven that frightening appearance need not mean frightening demeanor: “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—­the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.”38 Once the landlord convinces Queequeg to put up his tomahawk-­pipe, Ishmael feels safe enough to go to sleep. “I turned in,” Ishmael says, “and never slept better in my life.”39 The next morning, Ishmael reveals that he and Queequeg indeed get along as beautifully as Coffin had predicted: underneath the visibly sutured fabric of “The Counterpane,” the two men have indeed copied Sal and Coffin and “spliced” together.

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Upon waking  .  .  . I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-­colored squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade . . . looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.40 As Queequeg’s markings and the counterpane map perfectly onto one other, so do they map onto Ishmael’s narrative methodology: the parti-­colored, accreting, and interminably iterative textile offers a space where homosocial and democratic bonds between men may be forged. In time, Queequeg and Ishmael even reproduce a South Seas wedding ceremony, bringing the figure of the splice full-­circle: “he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.”41 The friendship between the men, a result of borrowing material practices from distant islands and heterosexual marriage and the figurative language of the patchwork textile, is lasting and deep; they ship as a pair, sail as a pair, and, in the version of Moby-­Dick that Richard Bentley printed in London, they die as a pair.42 Soon after their marriage-­through-­borrowing, the spliced pair of Ishmael and Queequeg leave the Spouter Inn together and make their way to the wharf, seeking berths on a whaler. The one they finally land on, the Pequod, is owned by Quakers, and Ishmael finds himself required to debate the religion of his new friend with its captains, Peleg and Bildad, before they will allow the pair to ship. Standing up for his new friend/husband against charges of paganism, Ishmael insists that “Queequeg here is a born member of the First Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”43 Captain Bildad takes Ishmael’s joke at face value. He does not know which church this is, and so Ishmael is forced to continue: “I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First

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Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands.” “Splice, thou mean’st splice hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer. “Young man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-­mast hand; I never heard a better sermon.”44 Captain Peleg’s insistence on “splice” over “join” serves a couple of different important functions. First, it works as Ishmael’s reinduction into the lexicon of seafaring; he may have been at sea before, but he seems to have forgotten its verbal conventions. By correcting Ishmael’s word choice, the old captain provides him with a new template for use in future arguments: following the form and copying out the figure will mark him as a member of the linguistic fraternity of sailors. Beyond reminding Ishmael how whalemen talk, however, Peleg suggests that the splice is an excellent way for figuring the broader confraternity of man. As Peleg notes, recognizing and disseminating transcendent but nondenominational truths is a task of interweaving; Ishmael’s universalist church is a fabric to be spliced into—­a matter for weavers, not for joiners. The Quaker captain’s promotion of the figural splice works to acknowledge persistent and natural commonality (hands simply joined may be rent asunder; spliced hands, as in the marriage bond, may not) as well as the possibility for some kind of individual distinction within that commonality. Different religious practices are iterative variants of a single principle. In the splice, “queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief ” are taken up intact into universal truth; origination (here, Queequeg’s difference and Ishmael’s novel argument) is acknowledged but subsumed into the broader pattern of a origin-­less and variegated weave. In the splice, the line between pagan and Christian remains distinct but unimportant; each is necessary to the production of the “everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world.” As members of that braided Congregation, Peleg and Bildad allow Ishmael and Queequeg to ship.

Splicing and Metempsychosis Once Ishmael and Queequeg are on the boat, the story accelerates: Captain Ahab and his supporting cast appear and the transoceanic hunt for the White Whale begins in earnest. As compelling and thrillingly telic as this narrative

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is—­the search for Moby Dick is more or less the only thing beyond “Call me Ishmael” that appears in Brainerd Duffield’s adaptation of the story for a Decca LP in 1949, for example—­Ishmael finds considerable opportunity to use arcane plot points as occasions for musing on the metaphysics of life at sea and the possibilities for life on land. In a long series of chapters designed to explore the philosophical questions prompted by the sensual and material realities of whale hunting, he elaborates the ethical project he begins with “Loomings.” In “Stowing Down and Clearing Up,” for example, his swabbing of the Pequod’s decks prompts a reverie on the eternal cycle of dirtying and cleaning, death and rebirth. But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-­spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-­six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—­they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-­ works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-­killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—­There she blows!—­the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again. Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—­and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!45

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What begins as a lament about the endlessly recursive toils of whaling—­about a “man-­killing” cycle of spying, chasing, slaughtering, processing, and cleaning that recalls Mr. Dudley’s complaints about the bitter repetitions of the pharmacy in Ormond—­winds up as a salutary figure for the human condition: “Yet this is life.” To Ishmael, perpetual labor doesn’t breed solipsism but rather opportunities for connection across time and space—­for the transmigration of souls. The reincarnating splice specifically suggested here yokes together past and present in the text of the “simple boy” and serves as a method for both retaining and repeating history while becoming a viable “self ” in the present. Ishmael renews, in other words, Franklin’s and Rush’s emulatory processes of self-­making—­he imagines personhood as a set of nonproprietary skills in need of imitation and transmission; the spliced self learns rope splicing from another. That this spliced self learns rope splicing from another shows the democratic possibilities encoded in the weave: the sharing is perpetual, and the bounded “proper person” is a fiction. Metempsychosis reveals that there can be nobody who is self-­identical, nobody who belongs only to himself and is solely responsible for his own thoughts and actions. Rather, the splice makes im-­proper persons—­people who are always already someone else as well, who stand for commonality and multiplicity against the threats of unchecked individualism: ideal citizens of a republic in its Franklinian and Rushian conception. In his simplicity and his depth of soul, Ishmael’s imagined im-­proper Pythagoras bears a resemblance to (or is a metempsychotic copy of) the Pequod’s boy, Pip—­lately cast overboard, transformed by the isolation, and subsequently rescued. (Recalling one of his preferred textile tropes for the complexity of nature and proleptically indicating Pip’s role as Fool to Ahab’s Lear, Ishmael imagines the young black boy finding unassimilable clarity in profound distress: bobbing in the ocean, Pip “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom [of the universe], and spoke it, and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense.” 46) When Pip arrives on deck a few moments after Ishmael ends his Stowing Down and Clearing Up rhapsody, he finds himself in the middle of a heated (although silent and internal) debate between the ship’s officers over the significance of a doubloon (an Ecuadorean eight escudos piece from 1838–41) that Ahab has nailed to the mast. Each sees what he wishes to see. Ahab finds a symbol of himself in everything the coin depicts—­its eagle, volcanoes, and tower indicate indomitability and egotism. First-­mate Starbuck marks out a “dark valley between

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three mighty, heaven-­abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol”; he finds comfort in the thought of divinity surrounding man as he walks through this “vale of Death.” Second-­mate Stubb fixes on the coin’s zodiac as a jolly metaphor for the stages of life. Third-­mate Flask sees “sixteen dollars . . . and at two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars.”47 Although his shipmates have previously marked him out for a lack of sophistication, Pip complicates the situation further. As Stubb notes, Pip too has been watching all of these interpreters [of the doubloon’s meaning]—­myself included—­and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark! “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” “Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind, poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—­hist!” “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” “Why, he’s getting it by heart—­hist! again.” “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”48 By quoting “Murray’s Grammar” and in getting this text “by heart,” Pip too becomes an im-­proper person: there is no distinction between the book and the boy, no sense of “self-­possession.” In his speech, Pip’s spliced repetitions make clear the idea that while subjects may differ, the verb can stay the same; from the disparate voices of the sailors, Pip picks up a common thread. As such, Pip works to show the crew how they are all im-­proper too: although each reader has come up with a different exegesis of the doubloon, they are all aligned in the act of interpretation, which makes them versions of each other. Even within epistemological distinction of divergent “identities,” copying and (sometimes literally) incorporating difference provides the possibility for commonality.

Misuses of the Splice Present from his first appearance in the text, Ahab’s “monomania” serves as the antithesis of Ishmael’s ethics of the splice. Ahab’s terrible need to kill the whale that has taken his leg and, in so doing, punch through the inscrutability of the world to the “little lower layer” of unalloyed Truth he thinks he will find

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beneath is obsessively singular, originary, and “proper” to himself.49 Sounding like Emerson at his most strident, Ahab at one point yells at the ship’s carpenter working too slowly to build him a new false leg; the collaboration necessary to keep him upright rankles both his pride and his individualist sensibilities. “Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-­ indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be as free as air; and I’m down on the whole world’s books.”50 Ahab’s loathing and resentment of the “mortal inter-­indebtedness” that gives rise to the “whole world’s books” does not prevent him, however, from finding the socializing function of the interdependent splice to be quite useful for his monomaniacal project. 51 Because he has no choice but to enlist the help of his crew in pursuing his particular whale, Ahab nails the aforementioned doubloon to the mainmast at the outset of their journey, promising it as a reward to the sailor that first spies Moby Dick. By way of justifying such an unusual circumstance, he tells the brief story of his wound: “ ‘Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,’ he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-­stricken moose; ‘Aye, aye! It was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!’ ”52 Transformed into a “poor pegging lubber,” with his bodily integrity compromised and his identity as a captain—­if not his humanity (in his “animal sob”)—­up for grabs, Ahab seeks to be made whole through collective revenge. Splicing is his metaphor of choice: “Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: ‘Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.’ ”53 The men agree; they splice. And once they do, they become “one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale.”54 Late in the narrative, Ahab returns to the metaphor as a way of reminding the crew of their pledge: “ ‘Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ’Tis Ahab—­his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his

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purpose yet.’ ”55 Here, Ahab imagines himself to be a straining rope tugging a heavy burden, a fraying line in need of shoring up by the men who “stand round.” Just as Ishmael may not approach a comprehensive cetology without copying from authorities and farming out to followers, Ahab may not fight the whale alone. He must appropriate the labor of his colleagues to accomplish his goals; he must make a ship-­borne polity that “moves on a hundred legs” and reflects the centipede of his soul. To do this, to ease the strain on his purposeful “hawser,” Ahab splices into a new social order. As an indissoluble bond that allows for identity between disparate objects and that makes possible the intertwining of one’s own teleological threads into the narratives of others, the trope of interweaving is ideal for consolidating power among the “Anacharsis Clootz deputation” on the Pequod.56 As Ishmael has shown, though, a good splice is variegated—­an exhibition of multiple threads and multiple minds. Ahab’s splice—­his new “hawser”—­is tragically homogeneous. Because his mad quest is predicated on totalitarian control of the ship and her crew, Ahab works to turn everyone on the Pequod into putative copies of himself; the monomaniacal captain braids the wills of the crew into a monological filament. During the final chase of Moby Dick, “They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—­oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—­yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.”57 By refusing to hear or incorporate dissenting voices (particularly Starbuck’s) and by rigidly imposing his own terms on the collective, Ahab splices as an owner, a patriarch, and an originator instead of as just another one of “every mother’s” sons.58 This foreclosure of dissent invites ruin, and Ahab’s monomaniacal mishandling of the splice proves to be the undoing of the entire social entity that it creates. When the Pequod finally catches up with Moby Dick, it is destroyed; under Ahab’s command, it sinks with (nearly) all hands. Ahab himself, however, is killed not by his adversary but by an errant rope: “The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;—­ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was

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gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-­splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-­empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.”59 The “heavy eye-­splice” sliding under the sea signals the end of Ahab’s totalitarian command. Standing as a figure for monomaniacal weaving, the eye-­ splice is significantly different from other rope splices: instead of joining two ropes together to form a new and stronger rope, it weaves a single rope onto itself (see Figure 19).60 The disappearance of this looped line marks the end of Ahab’s fatal solipsism; its sinking is closely followed by the staving of the Pequod and the end of Ishmael’s narrative. As I noted above, in Richard Bentley’s London edition, this is the close of the book—­much to the chagrin of The Spectator and of other British reviewers. In the Harper and Brothers’ New York edition, the entangled Ahab and his ship sink into the depths, but Ishmael pops up, the sole survivor of the wreck. He writes an epilogue, locating his project in the textual precedent of Job 1:14–19: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Ishmael survives to “tell” the wreck of the Pequod by grabbing onto Queequeg’s coffin and bobbing among the sharks until he is scooped up by another ship, the wandering Rachel. This coffin, now a “life-­buoy,” participates in the same copyist economies of borrowing and quotation that Ishmael has used throughout his text: it is covered with marks transferred from the harpooneer’s tattooed body.61 Queequeg had spent many spare hours . . . in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.62 Removed from the realm of the “mouldering” “proper person” through transfer to the coffin, Queequeg’s dependent and obscurely universal text becomes

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a salvific article; Queequeg dies, but his copied marks live on to buoy up his loved companion and to enable that companion to narrate his (own) story. The “smuggling verbalist” lives to pursue the “art of attaining truth” by floating on a Queequeg reproduction; without the copy, there would be no text at all.

The Joint-­Stock World The contrasting ends of Ahab and Ishmael forcefully illustrate Ishmael’s point about the potency of the variegated splice: the originator goes mad and drowns, the copyist lives to explore (if not to penetrate) the “little lower layer” of cetological truth. To begin to limn more extensively the philosophical and political consequences of this principle, I want to return to a scene that takes place earlier in Moby-­Dick. As I’ve previously noted, in the narrative’s long middle, Ishmael turns from Ahab’s quest to provide a detailed portrait of the life and activities of a whaling man. In one of his digressions, he describes at length the process of flensing a whale—­that is, removing its blubber so that it may be rendered into oil. Flensing is a two-­man job: a harpooneer scrambles about on the floating carcass and uses a spade to cut strips of blubber free; a designated oarsman stands above him holding onto a safety line attached to the harpooneer’s belt. As Ishmael points out, the use of this safety line, called the “monkey-­rope,” is common to “all whalers.” But Ahab’s ship is different: “it was only in the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford to the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-­ rope holder.”63 Stubb’s simultaneously derivative and singular “improvement” becomes a potent symbol for Ishmael; his experiences flensing with Queequeg yield a long metaphysical discussion. It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-­rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature

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united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.64 In what amounts to another version of the splice, an umbilical rope yokes two disparate persons into a single organism made of conjoined bodies: whatever happens to Queequeg will also happen to Ishmael.65 The two maintain some kind of individuality—­Ishmael on deck, Queequeg on the whale—­but they cannot be sundered, for better or for worse. Indeed, Ishmael “distinctly [perceives] that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound.”66 The joint-­stockness that Emerson had cast as a problem to be solved in “Self-­Reliance”—­as a repressive “conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” that substitutes conformity for honest and spontaneous individual engagement with the self-­evident laws of the Divine—­Ishmael here presents as the inevitable way of the world.67 The “hempen bond” of this state of affairs may have its “dangerous liabilities,” but it will always be with us: I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-­rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.68 This infinitely interconnected “joint-­stock” world, where everyone is spliced by monkey-­ropes to everyone else, stands in contradistinction to the atomism and possessive individualism promoted by a society devoted to “originality” and “independence.” Ishmael appropriates the language of capitalism to insist that there can be no action or reaction that is the product of a single will; no matter how careful a man is to remain a self-­possessed individual, there is no way for him to separate himself from the collective.69 At the same time, however, Ishmael assiduously maintains the “management of one end” of an intricately woven personhood; no matter how much he insists that he

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and Queequeg are united, they are not identical. The end result, then, is an infinite system of “joint-­stock companies” where collectivism and individualism are always in negotiation, where questions of the many and the one are always under consideration. Within these companies, “originality” is, at best, of little use or, at worst, a serious detriment; to fetishize self-­reliance is to deny (or to sever) the monkey-­rope that binds, is to veer into an undesirable, if not impossible possessive individualism. An ethics of splicing, however, works to acknowledge the necessary commonality of thought and emotion even as it allows for differences in expression and action. As such, the monkey-­rope creates a model of citizenship that accounts for both capitalist interest and republican disinterest—­when it becomes clear that one is spliced to an infinite mass of men, working for oneself and working for one’s fellow man turn out to be exactly the same labor. Having reached this conclusion, in a chapter on “Fast-­Fish and Loose-­ Fish,” Ishmael turns to address the specific issue of possession in a society coming to be organized around possessive individualism. He does so by outlining the salvage laws of the ocean: “I. A Fast-­Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-­Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.” Thinking through the nominally Lockean conception of personal property, Ishmael then considers the moral consequences of owning anything: “Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-­Fish. . . . What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-­Fish? . . . What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-­Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas, but a Fast-­Fish?” The analogy between a jealous maintenance of “property” and slavery, cruelty, imperialism, and colonialism is a strong one: liberal and patriarchal notions of ownership encode a “natural” hierarchy of “owner” and “owned,” which in turn encodes abuse. Against this ugly notion of the Fast-­Fish, the Loose-­Fish—­that is, the incompletely possessed fish—­figures productive contention: “What was America in 1492 but a Loose-­ Fish? . . . What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-­Fish.” Although the potential for a naturalized hierarchy of ownership exists, it is as yet unrealized: the Loose-­ Fish represents possibility, not mere subjection. “What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-­Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-­Fish? . . . What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists

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are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-­Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-­Fish?” The chapter ends with a final unanswerable question: “And what are you, reader, but a Loose-­Fish and a Fast-­Fish, too?”70 Inviting the reader of Moby-­Dick to consider his or her own status as an object of property relations—­as the living part of an abstract system of ownership—­ Ishmael indicates the peculiar position that the antebellum American writer occupies within the emergent discourses of capitalist individualism. At once Loose and Fast, as open to appropriation as to appropriating, the subject that Ishmael describes is part of an unstable and perpetually reconfiguring matrix of originality and imitation, of possession and its limits, of singularity and “joint-­stock” existence. Staged in public and in private, in magazines and in books, on whale ships and in libraries, these dialogues provide the outlines for the literary traditions of the United States.

* * * In the end, what the International Magazine called Ishmael’s “go-­ahead” method—­ accretive, imitative, dependent, textile, natural-­ philosophical—­ represents an extension of the eighteenth-­century methodologies that I have been describing throughout this study. Ishmael’s theories of source-­work follow the model of Franklin’s formative reproductions of the Spectator; his conflation of writing and sympathetic identification valorizes Rush’s and Rowson’s approaches to education; his treatment of literary forms and genres as routes to devotion echoes Wheatley’s tightly controlled verse-­prayers. Ishmael shares some of the same suspicions as well: like Brown, he understands that imitation and repetition may be vehicles for totalitarianism. As such, Ishmael is also a bit of an Emersonian: from his assertion of a qualified agency in the drafting of a “system of cetology” to the fact of his blessed singularity at the end of the novel—­that he “alone escapes” to tell his collaborative tale—­he manages to inhabit both self-­reliant and anti-­self-­reliant positions at once. In so doing, it seems, Ishmael works to prove that both of the reviews that begin this chapter are right: “originality of conception” has much to recommend it, but, as Ahab proves, it also contains the potential for obsession—­ “rhapsody run mad” and “catastrophe.” Ishmael (and Moby-­Dick) offer, finally, a synthetic or commonplace vision for nineteenth-­century American culture that we would do well to recall. When we recognize the persistence of eighteenth-­century notions of the arts of dependence—­and when we understand how these discourses inform nineteenth-­century aesthetics and

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politics, literature, personality, and nationality—­we significantly revise our understanding of American cultural history well beyond the Founding. In this light, we can find an appeal to a lingering vision of republican subjectivity in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s insistence that universal sympathy will destroy slavery and that a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin can foster just such a harmonics of “feel[ing] right.”71 We can see another version in Walt Whitman’s anaphoric reveries and relentless identifications—­“I am the hounded slave”; “I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken”—­in Leaves of Grass; another in Emily Dickinson’s appropriation of hymn-­meter to build her lyrics; another in Frederick Douglass’s account of taking up his master’s copybook and learning to write for himself as the first step out of bondage.72 Finally, we see these dynamics in Emerson, too. In his 1868 essay “Quotation and Originality,” for example, the prophet of self-­reliance riffs on Ishmael’s textile metaphor: “All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation.”73 Such an assertion might seem to contradict his earlier claim that “imitation is suicide,” but Emerson simply treats it as proof of Transcendental verities. “Quotation confesses inferiority,” he argues, and yet it may still express genius or truth: insofar as all properly constituted hearts, by trusting themselves, will “vibrate to the same iron string” of the universal law, it makes perfect sense that one would periodically find one’s own thoughts in someone else’s expression.74 To the “thinker” who “feels that the thought most strictly his own is not his own, and [who thus] recognizes the perpetual suggestion of the Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he speaks them.”75 It is worth pointing out, finally, that “Self-­Reliance” itself opens with the words of another: the essay’s epigram, “Ne te quaesiveris extra”—­“seek not yourself outside yourself ”—­is a quotation from the seventh satire of Persius. This mark of dependence is its own argument: if there was an American “Renaissance”—­or, more broadly, an America to be reborn in the nineteenth century—­its legacy does not spring merely from singular people of singular “genius” but from emulated models, copied extracts, and sympathetic imitations continually renewed.

Notes

Introduction 1. Wright, “In Search of the Real You,” 72. 2. In advance of theorizing the fate of “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin draws the line between artistry and copying rather brightly: “In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Manmade artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain” (Illuminations, 218). There is the work and there are its derivatives, in other words, and never the twain shall meet. In creating an artwork, the artist is an artist; in “diffusing” it, he joins the pupil and the capitalist or the philistine as something else entirely; the tyro and the marketer or popularizer are equally ineligible for greatness. That a whole host of important artists—­from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol to Gerhard Richter, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine—­have devoted their careers to interrogating or troubling such strict binaries merely confirms the persistence of the idea. 3. Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, 9. 4. See Fuss, Identification Papers, esp. chap. 1. 5. Geertz, quoted in Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, xi. 6. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 101. 7. See Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 21. 8. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 259. 9. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 288. 10. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 76. 11. 2 Corinthians 3:6. 12. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 76. 13. 2 Corinthians 3:7–12. 14. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 78. 15. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Philosophical Writings 13:263–69. 16. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 7. 17. On Denis Diderot’s deployment of the trope of daring to think for oneself, for example, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 323. 18. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 10. Later in Nature, “The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world” (Essays & Poems, 29–30).

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19. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 8, 269. 20. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 261. As the preeminent Emerson scholar Lawrence Buell has pointed out, “Self-­Reliance is not reducible to a theology, a social theory, an epistemology, an aesthetic, an educational program”—­it’s all of those things at once, rolled into “personal life practice” (Emerson, 59, 63). 21. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 10. In his Journal, right around the time of the Divinity School Address, Emerson writes, “And because nothing chances, but all is locked & wheeled & chained in Law, in these motes & dust he can read the writing of the True Life & of a startling sublimity” (Selected Journals 1820–1842, 616). 22. This discovery of the transcendent in the everyday presumably is one of the reasons that Emerson admired Walt Whitman’s poetry. With the possible exception of William Wordsworth, no poet had devoted as much energy to celebrating the transporting power of the ordinary as Whitman does; his poetry is predicated on the democratic idea that dim, gristly, pimply things are and of right ought to be vectors for transcendence—­no matter how far from poetic convention they may fall. 23. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 88–89. 24. See Watts, The Republic Reborn, esp. chap. 1; Opal, Beyond the Farm; Howe, Making the American Self; Kateb, The Inner Ocean. 25. In Buhle and Buhle, eds., Concise History of Woman Suffrage, 95. 26. Blassingame, ed., Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 5:549. 27. Tocqueville, from Democracy in America, quoted in Shields, Reality Hunger, 178. 28. Heighton [“Unlettered Mechanic”], “An Address Delivered Before the Mechanics and Working Classes Generally,” in Foner, ed., William Heighton: Pioneer Labor Leader of Jacksonian Philadelphia, 81. See Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 75–79. 29. Blassingame, ed., Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, 5:549–50. 30. In The Backcountry and the City, Ed White argues that “the fundamental practical ensemble of colonial life [is] the series”—­that the propagation of customs and ideas over time and across geographical distance “was fundamental to a colonial modernity defined by the forbidding task of managing vast new spaces and resources in a context of institutional weakness” (30, 31). The importance of such seriality in no way diminishes with the advent of the United States—­indeed, seriality is at the heart of U.S. (and every other) nationalism. 31. Watts, Republic Reborn, xvii. 32. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1786, 61. 33. See Howe, Making the American Self; Watts, The Republic Reborn; Opal, Beyond the Farm. 34. Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 22; Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality. 35. Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English, 9. 36. See Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony”; Bushman, The Refinement of America; Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods; Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-­Cross; Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English; Tamarkin, Anglophilia. 37. Yokota, Unbecoming British, 9. 38. See, for example, Reynolds, Literary Works 1:305–29, esp. 314–17; Prown, John Singleton Copley, 1:18–19; Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France; and Auricchio, “The Laws



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of Bienseance.” Slauter casts the 1770s as a moment in the “middle of a cultural revolution against the status of classical imitation” (State as a Work of Art, 183). 39. See Slauter, State as a Work of Art, 190–92. 40. Kant’s famous formulation: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-­incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-­incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—­that is the motto of enlightenment” (“What Is Enlightenment?” in Philosophical Writings, 263). 41. There are some exceptions. Susan Stabile, for example, emphasizes the affective and mnemonic power of ornamental and aesthetic objects in Memory’s Daughters. 42. As Mary Kelley puts it, “Female academies and seminaries provided the sites at which women polished reasoning and rhetorical faculties. Students published newspapers and magazines, delivered addresses at commencements, and, most important, founded literary societies. At the weekly meetings of these societies, students practiced the art of persuasive self-­presentation. They contributed formally prepared commentaries on reading they had chosen collaboratively and shared the prose and poetry they were writing” (Learning to Stand and Speak, 16). 43. Lukasik, Discerning Characters, esp. chap. 1. 44. Warner, “What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?” 50.

Chapter 1 1. Jean-­Baptiste Nini’s medallion of 1777 featured Franklin in profile, wearing a fur cap, surrounded by the legend “B. Franklin. Americain”; it was widely reproduced. For the extremely complex composition and publication history of the book we now call the Autobiography, see Lemay and Zall, A Genetic Text, xvii–lxii, and Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 145–71. 2. See Labaree et al., “Introduction,” in Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 9–12. Cremin provides a useful bibliographical essay on the persistence of “Franklinian ideals” in the education of American schoolchildren (American Education, 2:564–65). For very different evaluations of Franklin’s works that nonetheless agree on his status as a prototypical “American,” see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, esp. 1:227–33; Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History, 50–82; Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 20–31; Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, esp. 47–78; Looby, Voicing America, esp. 99–144; Warner, The Letters of the Republic, esp. 73–96; Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, esp. 83–106; Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin; and Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin. A more recent popular treatment may be found in Hitt, Bunch of Amateurs, esp. 37. On the publication history of “The Way to Wealth,” see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 122–33. 3. Writing in the New Nation, xi, 83–106. As Mark Patterson puts it, Franklin “transforms his conception of identity and authority from the fixed standards of family ties to the arbitrary ties of social interaction and association” (Authority, Autonomy, and Representation, 6). See also Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, esp. 106–12.

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4. Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1:230. 5. Patterson, Authority, Autonomy, and Representation in American Literature, 10–11. See also Howe, Making the American Self, 32. Douglas Anderson begins his recent work on the Autobiography thusly: “The following pages are about a book, not a man” (The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1). 6. Jehlen, Readings at the Edge of Literature, 15. See Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 170. 7. See Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, chap. 1. 8. Franklin, Autobiography, 148–49. 9. Ibid., 149–50. 10. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 22. 11. Jehlen, Readings at the Edge of Literature, 9. The humility of Jesus is one of the most well-­ rehearsed themes of the New Testament. His acts of meekness in the face of torture, his insistence on the transformative power of modesty and submission, and his willingness to be crucified for the redemption of humankind (see Philippians 2:8) are evidence that he is what he says he is, the Son of God. We know that Christ is Christ, in other words, precisely because he is so humble. Luke’s report of Jesus’ advice to the Pharisees makes this clear: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). Although Socrates was long dead before the arrival of Jesus, his humility fits easily into a Christian narrative framework. In his colloquy on “The Sober Feast,” Desiderius Erasmus—­one of the great popularizers of classical humanism, especially in England—­recalls the meekness of Socrates, telling the story of an assault on the philosopher by a robber, whom Socrates subsequently refuses to prosecute. Socrates reasons that his impoverished and unlettered attacker is no more responsible for his actions than a wild animal would be, and since Socrates could not blame an animal for attacking him, the only recourse is to turn the other cheek. He presents, as Erasmus puts it, “an example of moderation and long-­suffering”; he maintains a philosophical disinterest from his private passions and does only what his reason (which strives to be the unqualified reason of the universe) allows (The Colloquies of Erasmus, 455–56). More famously: when sentenced to death for treason by an Athenian jury, Socrates accepts the condemnation and drinks his cup of hemlock, humbly acceding to the judgment of his peers. To do otherwise would be to question the justice of the law and threaten the social order. In each case, the great man proves his greatness by submitting to punishment, although he is blameless; each puts the welfare of the mass above personal considerations. 12. Williams, In the American Grain, 155. In the 1739 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin himself says much the same thing: “The Vain Youth that reads my Almanack for the sake of an idle Joke, will perhaps meet with a serious Reflection, that he may ever after be the better for” (quoted in Stallybrass and Green, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 108). 13. “To make the world safe for a fertile selfishness and duplicity,” Jehlen writes, “the good American agrees to be careful of the common good and reasonably honest. Imitating Jesus and Socrates is exactly the thing: real sincerity and humility would miss the point which is far less to be this way or that inside oneself than to enact a useful self in the world” (Readings at the Edge of Literature, 31). See also Orvell, The Real Thing. On the problem of a “secret” Franklinian self, see Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 232–34.



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14. As Michael Warner contends, “Rhetoric ceases to be duplicitous masking in Franklin’s rationality because the negative self-­relation of the instrumental rhetorician just is the structure of rationality. Rhetoric is rational because rationality is rhetorical” (The Letters of the Republic, 81). 15. Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 17. 16. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Consider “Silence Dogood No. 7” (25 June 1722), in which Franklin serves up a “Receipt to make a New-­England Funeral ELEGY.” The conventions of elegy making are roundly satirized, and the dull wits who rotely follow them come in for a bunch of ironic praise. “I should be very much straitned for Room, if I should attempt to discover even half the Excellencies of this Elegy which are obvious to me. Yet I cannot omit one Observation, which is, that the Author has (to his Honour) invented a new Species of Poetry, which wants a Name, and was never before known. His Muse scorns to be confin’d to the old Measures and Limits, or to observe the dull Rules of Criticks” (Labaree et al., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 1:25). Insofar as the elegy under discussion does nothing so much as confine itself to “old Measures and Limits,” imitation here begets the worst of poetry—­and the worst of poets—­not the best. For more on the importance of conventionality to elegiac verse, see Chapter 2. 17. In 1725, Giambattista Vico noted in his timeline of the history of “The New Science” that in the 3335th year of the world, “Socrates originate[d] rational moral philosophy” (The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 28). As the putative father of inductive reasoning and dispassionate inquiry, Socrates’ disdain for foreordained precepts (especially religious precepts) became the theoretical progenitor of scientific method as well as contemporary liberal democracy. See Priestley, Socrates and Jesus Compared. 18. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 9. 19. Middlekauff, The Mathers, 255. 20. As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it (quoting Edward Taylor’s Christographia [1701]), “The self (even when it denoted a de facto saint) clung too tenaciously to its own nature to yield a model of christic identity; and yet precisely because Christ’s life was the model—­an ‘Exact Coppy, written by the Deity of the Son of God, with the Pen of the Humanity, on the milk white Sheet of an Holy Life’—­His example could not serve of itself to order the processes of the self ” (Puritan Origins, 9). See Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, esp. chap. 1. 21. Taylor, Poetical Works, 78–79. 22. The language of cast “lots” was a popular metaphor for describing the Elect or Reprobate status of a soul (Middlekauff, The Mathers, 4). 23. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 214n49. The most popular English translation of De Imitatione Christi was George Stanhope’s The Christian’s Pattern; or, a Treatise on the Imitation of Jesus Christ (1698), which had gone through thirty editions by 1766. Another version of De Imatatione, translated in 1735 by John Wesley (and also called The Christian’s Pattern), became one of the foundational texts of Methodism; see Chapter 2. 24. Middlekauff, The Mathers, 408n26. 25. Hannah Carpenter, sampler worked in 1811, Chester County, Penn. See Schiffer MS. Coll., 644 Series One, Box One, Folder 9, Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Del. A much-­anthologized fragment from Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind takes the form of a dialogue between a skeptical child and a wise adult. Recalling the story of a twelve-­year-­old Jesus

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asking questions of his elders, the child worries that he cannot possibly pass muster: “ ‘Well might the Son of God, even at those years, be far wiser than the aged; but can a mortal child emulate such heavenly wisdom? Can such a pattern be proposed to my imitation?’—­Yes, my dear;—­remember that he has bequeathed to you his heavenly wisdom, as far as concerns your own good. He has left you such declarations of his will, and of the consequences of your actions, as you are, even now, fully able to understand, if you will but attend to them. If then you will imitate his zeal for knowledge, if you will delight in gaining information and improvement; you may even now become ‘wise unto salvation’ ” (1:75–76). The passage shows up in J. Ireland’s 1784 miscellany Beauties in Prose and Verse, 85, and in A Lady [Susanna Rowson?], New Pleasing Instructor, 41–42. 26. Franklin, Autobiography, 50. 27. Franklin, Autobiography, 114; Franklin, Private Life of Benjamin Franklin, 278. 28. Franklin, Autobiography, 114–15. 29. At first, the works of Livy, Virgil, Cicero, and others received considerable attention as philologists studied the language and meter of Latin. At the end of the fourteenth century, after Petrarch and Boccaccio became interested in Homer, Hesiod, and Euripides, Greek scholarship became more fashionable. For an overview of European classical philology, see Mann, “Origins of Humanism,” 14–17. 30. One of the great dramatizations and critiques of classical humanist pedagogy in American literature comes at the beginning of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Although a man mysteriously and spontaneously has combusted there, the heroes of Brown’s narrative compete at imitating Ciceronian orations in a “Tuscan”-­columned temple overlooking a very poetic landscape (Wieland, 27, 34). They quit the temple (eighteenth-­century gardeners would likely have called it a “folly”) when they start hearing disembodied voices from its depths. For more on Brown as a critic of popular (although not necessarily neoclassical) pedagogical philosophies of imitation, see Chapter 5. 31. On the importance of Puttenham, especially to the development of English vernacular culture, see Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric. 32. The question of speech training has been taken up with considerable zeal by literary historians with an interest in early America; see Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power; Looby, Voicing America; Fliegelman, Declaring Independence; Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak; Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers. 33. On the deployment of Erasmian bon mots, see Winterer, Culture of Classicism, 20. Webster’s “Federal Catechizm” first appeared in his Little Reader’s Assistant (1790) and later in his bestselling Grammatical Institute, more popularly known as the “Blue-­Back Speller” (Warfel, Noah Webster, 91–92). 34. Franklin, Autobiography, 64. See Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1:72–73. 35. Franklin, Autobiography, 88. 36. Among Franklin’s displays of temperance while working in London: “I drank only Water; the other Workmen, near 50 in Number, were great Guzzlers of Beer. On occasion I carried up & down Stairs a large Form of Types in each hand, when others carried but one in both Hands” (Autobiography, 99). Although he performs such feats of strength in order to teach his colleagues a moral and financial lesson and to prove his own worth as an “industrious thriving young Man” (Autobiography, 126), he does this by way of performing (in every sense of the word) the work assigned to him by the shop.



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37. Franklin’s performances are certainly consonant with Benjamin Rush’s sentiments: “If the habits of virtue, contracted by means of [an] apprenticeship to labor, are purely mechanical, their effects are, nevertheless, the same upon the happiness of society, as if they flowed from principle” (“An Oration  .  .  . Containing an Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” 21). 38. Franklin, Autobiography, 125. 39. Franklin, “Father Abraham’s Speech to a great number of people” [The Way to Wealth], 15. 40. Franklin, Autobiography, 58. 41. Ibid., 157. 42. Ibid., 162. 43. Ibid., 170. 44. For the dark side of this “contagion of example” realized in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, see Chapter 5. 45. As Breitwieser puts it, “Readings of the Autobiography are . . . to be sequels to it, or continuations of it” (Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 264). 46. On the textual history of these letters, see Lemay and Zall, eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, 182–90. 47. Quoted in Franklin, Autobiography, 134. 48. Quoted in ibid., 135, 139. 49. Quoted in ibid., 136. 50. Quoted in ibid., 136, 140. 51. Neither Jesus nor Socrates left any writings behind—­they are reported on by others. Plato and Xenophon wrote the life of Socrates; the gospels of Jesus were recorded and disseminated by his apostles. In a certain sense, this fact may be explained as a function of Jesus’ and Socrates’ shared proverbial humility: if one’s disciples spontaneously write out one’s life and thoughts, one can hardly be charged with self-­aggrandizement. In this light, Franklin’s obsession with producing his own textual legacy—­turning his life into text, acting as his own amanuensis—­becomes another of the rich ironies of the Autobiography. As Richard D. Miles puts it, pointing out the difference between Franklin and George Washington: the former “served as his own Parson Weems” (“American Image,” 118). 52. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 89, 76. 53. Erkkila, “Franklin and the Revolutionary Body,” 2. 54. See Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 17. 55. In discussing his Uncle Benjamin, Franklin notes that he was “an ingenious Man” and that he “left behind him two Quarto Volumes, M.S. of his own Poetry, consisting of little occasional Pieces address’d to his Friends and Relations” (Autobiography, 48). 56. Franklin, Autobiography, 48n, 49n. 57. Labaree et al., eds., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 1:5–6. For the circumstances of James Franklin’s composition, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1:58. 58. Franklin, Autobiography, 58. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 53, 57–58.

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61. Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, 1:62–66. 62. Franklin, Autobiography, 60. 63. Ibid., 61. 64. “I approv’d the amusing one’s self with Poetry now and then, so far as to improve one’s Language, but no farther” (Autobiography, 90). Woodrow Wilson writes that Franklin’s “plain, straightforward, manly prose seemed with him an instrument of business” (History of the American People, 3:87). 65. Franklin, Autobiography, 61. 66. Jay Fliegelman indicates that Franklin’s use of the Spectator may be the “most famou[s]” example of emulation in American literary history. It neatly captures, he rightly argues, “the larger challenge suggested by the conflict of old editorial and new authorial aesthetics, of editors and authors, of cultural preservation and innovation . . . to conserve the past with its power to legitimate and authorize while at the same time embracing a certain degree of necessary novelty, thereby obeying Bacon’s insistence that ancient texts no longer be blindly studied, but that nature and the world be studied directly” (Declaring Independence, 180). 67. Franklin, Autobiography, 61–62. 68. In “Silence Dogood No. 4,” Franklin’s first sustained authorial persona dreams that she is allowed access to the secrets of a closed college campus (Harvard) because she is deemed a “Spectator”—­one who will observe without drawing conclusions. Of course, she draws conclusions anyway (Papers, 1:14–18). 69. This is standard humanist practice; for the painterly analog, see Reynolds, Literary Works, 1:321–22. For much more on the specifics of Franklin’s use of the Spectator, see McCrae, “The Virtue of Repetition: Mr. Spectator Trains Benjamin Franklin.” Caroline Winterer’s description of eighteenth-­century grammar schools seems apposite too: students “practiced writing dialogues, scanning verse, making verse, writing themes, and turning themes into declamations. They translated, turning Latin into English and then English back into Latin” (Culture of Classicism, 11). Christopher Looby casts this branch of Franklin’s learning—­his teaching himself to write like the Spectator and the Bible—­as part of a larger oedipal drama. Franklin’s imitations represent a “submission to language”—­a suppression of his own voice in the neutral/selfless Logos of secular and religious scripture—­which, in turn, figures his submission to his father (Voicing America, 116). These submissions eventuate in a “mastery” of rhetoric: Franklin accepts his father’s criticisms, learns to copy Addison and Steele (or the Old Testament), and may then refute his earthly father’s criticisms or rewrite his (heavenly) Father’s law. Following exactly the arc of emulation’s apprentice-­into-­ master sequence, Franklin abases himself before authority in order to learn its structures and then assumes authority once his learning is complete. In this reading, Looby’s Franklin recapitulates perfectly the trajectory of American thought that Fliegelman describes in Prodigals and Pilgrims: a resistance to patriarchal authority permanently is bound up with the reinscription or reconstitution of a similar patriarchal authority under another name (“language,” “republicanism,” “the market”). 70. I should emphasize here that I am thinking of “ideas” in a quasi-­Platonic sense, just as the humanists would have. In this epistemological structure, truths and ideas exist in the world prior to or outside of human conceptualization; the thoughts that people have, therefore, are recognitions and representations of a preexisting natural order, not originary products of the imagination.



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71. Later in the Autobiography, Franklin and his friends in the Junto perform similar operations on the Eighteenth Psalm: they have a competition to see who can do the best job of rewriting it. Franklin’s friend Ralph wins the contest; the poem is written with “such Painting, such Force! such Fire!” as to have “improv’d the Original” (91). 72. For the General Magazine, see Green and Stallybrass, 44fig14. The full title of Franklin’s Works as published in London and Philadelphia was Works of the late Doctor Benjamin Franklin, consisting of his life, written by himself, together with essays humorous, moral, and literary, chiefly in the manner of the Spectator. For a mildly dissenting opinion as to Franklin’s success in approximating the voice of Addison, see Miller, Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2:347nH. 73. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 79. Warner explains, “Being a type compositor and press worker by day as well as a writer at night, [Franklin] has a keen sense of the duplicability of letters; here he sees that feature of letters as expressive of something in the nature of thought and discourse, marking a distinction between form and content” (79). Rush remarks of Franklin’s dependence upon the physical act of writing in making important decisions: “Dr. Franklin was so sensible of the strength and correctness the mind derived from a slower current of ideas in writing, than in barely thinking; that he never undertook any important enterprise, without first committing to paper all the arguments for and against it, and afterwards placing them before his eyes, while he deliberated and decided upon it” (“Lecture IV,” 108). See also Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 149–50. 74. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 79–81. 75. Erkkila, “Franklin and the Revolutionary Body,” 6. 76. Here we might recall the Autobiography’s notorious description of George Whitefield’s orations, which focuses on the acoustics of his speech to the exclusion of its content. For Franklin, the physics of audition are just as important as whatever ideas are being represented by the sound (179). 77. Franklin, Autobiography, 78. 78. There are, as L. H. Butterfield points out, at least three different “authoritative” holograph variants to go along with four different printed versions; I take my text from Franklin, Private Life, 192. As with everything Franklin, the textual history of the epitaph is exceedingly complex; see Butterfield, “B. Franklin’s Epitaph,” passim. 79. Wilmer, The American Nepos, 226; Franklin, Private Life, 192. Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America reproduces a version of the epitaph as well (372). 80. For Looby, Franklin’s extended use of the book-­as-­life metaphor places the Autobiography into “the literary tradition that the Magnalia inaugurated, what Sacvan Bercovitch has called ‘auto-­American-­biography’: a mode of writing that conflates individual experience and national destiny in a celebration of representative American selfhood” (Voicing America, 108–9). Looby and Bercovitch are right, of course, but the nation and the self are not the only things being conflated here: the collapsing of man and country is predicated on the collapsing of man and text. See also Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 17–20, and Butterfield, “B. Franklin’s Epitaph,” 25–26. 81. Butterfield, “B. Franklin’s Epitaph,” 26. 82. Franklin, Autobiography, 43–44. 83. Writing of the loss of his son to smallpox, for example, Franklin takes pains to note that his

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mourning has a purpose. “In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 years old, by the Small Pox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by Inoculation; This I mention for the Sake of Parents, who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; my Example showing that the Regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen” (Autobiography, 170). 84. Franklin, Autobiography, 157–58. 85. Ibid., 157, 151. 86. Ibid., 152. 87. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Westtown School in Chester County, Pennsylvania, adopted Franklin’s grammar of the self to teach English grammar, substituting his little bone-­ book with a “blunderbook.” Helen Hole writes that “the boys worked in small groups, and each group had with them a notebook known as a ‘blunderbook’; one of their number had charge of it, and if he detected any ungrammatical expressions used by any of his companions, he entered the error in the book and then handed it to the culprit, who became keeper of the book in his turn. In the evening each boy corrected his own blunders, giving the rule of grammar applicable in the case” (Westtown Through the Years, 54–55). 88. Franklin, Autobiography, 155. 89. Ibid. 90. For more on ivory memorandum books, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 13–16. 91. With a great deal of irony, Franklin finishes his discourse on Method by relating the anecdote of the speckled axe, insisting that a perfectly bright axe requires more effort in the grinding than the brightness is worth (Autobiography, 156). 92. One 1758 edition of “Father Abraham’s Speech to a great number of people” printed by Franklin’s brother-­in-­law, Benjamin Mecom, for example, includes beneath its table of contents a detailed exegesis of the proverb “It is good to make hay while the sun shines” in order to fulfill the directive that “no Part of Our little Book may be left blank and unimproved.” See Franklin, Father Abraham’s Speech, ii. 93. Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 235. 94. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 30. 95. Franklin, Autobiography, 156. 96. Ibid., 155. 97. Erkkila, “Franklin and the Revolutionary Body,” 12. John Adams, writing about Franklin’s personal habits, notes that “he was invited to dine abroad every day and never declined when We had invited Company to Dine with Us . . . Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his Pockett in which he minuted all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. [Arthur] Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual” (Adams and Adams, Works, 4:119). Franklin’s real little book is an outward-­ looking record of sociability, not an inward-­looking record of reform. I thank Chris Hunter for pointing this moment out to me. 98. Franklin, Autobiography, 156. 99. Nash, American Writing Masters, 11, 23. The rare books collection at the U.S. Library of



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Congress contains several volumes of British political writing that have been annotated extensively by Franklin, including Matthew Wheelock’s Reflections Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies (1770) and Allan Ramsay’s Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government (1769). Franklin’s comments are written in copybook-­perfect script and are as funny, instructive, and incisive as they are easy to read. In their “Introduction” to Franklin’s Autobiography, Labaree et al. report that Franklin’s handwriting loses “some of its firmness and control” near the end of his life but that it “remains perfectly legible” (Autobiography, 25). 100. As one mid-­nineteenth-­century recounting of Franklin’s life puts it, “We must not omit to mention one great benefit which Franklin did to the reading part of the population of his country. It was about a hundred years ago, in 1732, that he began to publish an almanac, under the name of Richard Saunders, which was enriched with all those excellent proverbs and sentences, many of which are yet seen on copy-­books, and in publications of various kinds” (Working Man’s Companion, 143). 101. Franklin, Works, 2:62. 102. Ibid., 62–63. 103. Smith, “Eulogium on Dr. Franklin,” 5. 104. See Cavitch, American Elegy. 105. See Johnson’s third definition of “Self ” in the 1799 edition of his Dictionary. For Franklin and capitalization, see Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence, 59. 106. Franklin’s practice, then, seems consonant with some strains of contemporary feminist theory, in which the “self ” is the unstable and ever-­changing product of endless identifying. Echoing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, among others, Diana Fuss argues that “identification is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable” (Identification Papers, 2). See also Fliegelman, “Introduction” to Wieland, xix, xxii. Or maybe what’s old is new again: Charles Taylor, writing about the self in antiquity, notes that “it is probable in every language there are resources for self-­reference and descriptions of reflexive thought, action, attitude (these resources would go beyond referring expressions and would include forms like the archaic Indo-­European middle voice). But this is not at all the same as making ‘self ’ into a noun, preceded by a definite article, speaking of ‘the’ self, or ‘a’ self. This reflects something important which is peculiar to our modern sense of agency” (Sources of the Self, 113). 107. It’s worth noting that a Franklin silhouette adorns the cover of each Franklin-­Covey day planner. These updated systems of time and life management are mass marketed to students and businesspeople alike under the imprimatur of Franklinian virtue. 108. The notion of the Americans as a “rising people” is Benjamin Vaughn’s; see Franklin, Autobiography, 135.

Chapter 2 1. Adams and Adams, The Book of Abigail and John, 45. 2. In counterfeiting sensory data—­creating dissonance between observers’ visual and aural

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perceptions of speakers—­mimics also threaten to disrupt the regime of empiricism. As Jay Fliegelman has noted, the most dramatic example of this phenomenon in early American literature is Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, in which the false evidence of ventriloquism begets broken engagements, religious fanaticism, and multiple murders. A variant of the dynamic, in Brockden Brown’s Ormond, or the Secret Witness, is discussed at length in Chapter 5. 3. Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, esp. chap. 4. 4. See ibid., 186–87, and Gates, Figures in Black, 66–72. 5. Wood, Blind Memory, 20. 6. See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. 7. For a comprehensive (and animated) summary of the long critical tradition surrounding Wheatley and her poems, see Shields, Poetics of Liberation, chaps. 2 and 3. See also Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, 183–86. 8. “When not accusing her of derivative, slavish imitation, hence denying her the possibility of embodying an authentic, sincere voice, many of her commentators allege that she ‘writes white’ ” (Shields, Poetics of Liberation, 9). The quotation is from J. Saunders Redding’s To Make a Poet Black. On Wheatley’s use of Pope, see, for example, the epilogue to Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-­Century Women Readers. 9. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 13–14. In his Harper’s review of Vincent Carretta’s recent Wheatley biography, Daryl Pinckney seems to agree with Mason: “Phillis Wheatley was special, but her poetry was not. It earned her a place among the white congregants of her church precisely because it behaved, conformed. . . . A poem by her can sound like the eighteenth-­century poem next to it by someone else” (“Unknowable Girl,” 78). For an elegant summary view of the modern reception of Wheatley, see Gates, Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 74–82. Among those critics and historians of black American literature holding Wheatley’s poetry (if not her personal achievements) in low esteem: James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle Jr., and Alice Walker. Gates’s catalogue of dismissal amplifies Russell Reising’s account of post–Black Arts criticism of Wheatley, in Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text, 217. The musician and mogul Jay-­Z offers a counterproposal, arguing for the imagination-­confirming power of adhering to form: “But even when a rapper is just rapping about how dope he is, there’s something a little bit deeper going on. It’s like a sonnet, believe it or not. Sonnets have a set structure, but also a limited subject matter: They are mostly about love. Taking on such a familiar subject and writing about it in a set structure forced sonnet writers to find every nook and cranny in the subject and challenged them to invent new language for saying old things. It’s the same with braggadocio in rap. When we take the most familiar subject in the history of rap—­why I’m dope—­and frame it within the sixteen-­bar structure of a rap verse, synced to the specific rhythm and feel of the track, more than anything it’s a test of creativity and wit. It’s like a metaphor for itself; if you can say how dope you are in a completely original, clever, powerful way, the rhyme itself becomes proof of the boast’s truth” (Decoded, 26). 10. On the discursive history of “servility” coupled with imitation and on the ways it becomes bound up with notions of racial inferiority, see Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, 83, 102. 11. Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die, 180–81. Jordan’s interest in the historical Wheatley—­her insistence that the circumstances of her life, if not always the poetry she produced, mark her as a



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founding figure in a black literary tradition—­is ironically undermined by Jordan’s own repeated rhetorical questions about the relevance of that history. Even as she dramatizes the banality of purely historical reading—­asking rhetorical questions about the weather on the day of Wheatley’s sale into slavery that suggest the inanity of historical detail in the context of the cultural horror of the traffic in human flesh—­she also revels in its explanatory power. Put another way: Jordan argues that without careful attention to Wheatley’s historical (read: raced, gendered, and enslaved) situation, the poems have comparatively little to offer black aesthetic traditions. 12. Gates, Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 88. Gates’s delight in the anagram seems to cut against the grain of his earlier arguments. In an earlier book, Gates takes issue with those critics who dismiss Wheatley along romantic lines: “Perhaps it is appropriately ironic that Phillis Wheatley—­who contained so painstakingly her poetic concerns within highly contrived and classically structured decasyllabic lines of closed heroic couplets, which seem in retrospect to have been about the direct imitation of neoclassical poetic models rather than the imitation of nature or even the fanciful invention of peculiarly American forms—­would be judged by critics whose poetics seemed to be grounded not in the praise of imitation and artifice but in the praise of a supposed unmediated relation between genius and nature” (Figures in Black, 64). 13. Riss, Race, Slavery and Liberalism in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature, 11–26. See also Sobel: “By [1840], the ideal white male was individuated, self-­concerned, and determined to succeed in a rapacious market economy. The subtext of this ideal was the expectation that women and all blacks would remain enmeshed in a communality and serve the needs of increasingly individuated white males. Women, white and black, and black males had to respond to this situation as best they could. Some tried to adopt the same goal of individuation that white males were adopting; others reacted against it and actively sought to strengthen communality” (Teach Me Dreams, 4–5). 14. Shlensky, “ ‘To Rivet and Record’: Conversion and Collective Memory in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” in Carey and Kitson, eds., Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act, 1807, 111. 15. The fullest modern account of Wheatley’s life may be found in Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. 16. See Shields, “Phillis Wheatley and Mather Byles”; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 49. 17. Connecticut Journal and New Haven Post-­Boy, 5 May 1773, 3. In the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-­Letter of 13 May 1773, Wheatley’s poem “Farewell to America” appears under a similar shipping notice; there, she appears as the “extraordinary Negro Poet, Servant to John Wheatley” (quoted in Poems, 153). 18. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 45. 19. Bradstreet, Works of Anne Bradstreet, 3–12, 221. 20. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 45. The origins of this attestation are themselves the subject of some debate. Gates, in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, presents a dramatic account of an empaneled jury, a single “primal scene” in which the principals share a room for “one of the oddest oral examinations on record” (5, 6). In “Our Phillis, Ourselves,” Joanna Brooks convincingly refutes Gates’s narrative, finding in Wheatley’s individual correspondence all the cultural capital she needed to publish. 21. See Isani, “The British Reception of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects.”

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22. Reproduced in Isani, “British Reception,” 145. 23. Reproduced in ibid., 146. 24. Langhorne, “Review of Phillis Wheatley,” 458; Isani, “British Reception,” 147; Carretta, ed., Complete Writings of Phillis Wheatley, xxii; Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 24–25. 25. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 140. As tempting as it is to take Jefferson’s misspelling of Wheatley’s surname as another indignity, William H. Robinson notes that Jefferson seems to have owned an edition of her Poems attributed to “Phillis Whatley” (Bio-­Bibliography, xv). 26. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 140. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 135. 30. Ibid., 138. 31. Ibid. On the link to Buffon, see Barker-­Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, 455n89. 32. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 193. 33. For more on this aspect of blushing, see O’Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth Century English Novel and the Blush, esp. chap. 1, and Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, as well as Barker-­Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, 73, 90–92; Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 19–20; and Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, 96–97. 34. On the problem of Chesterfieldian simulation, see Lukasik, Discerning Characters, esp. chap. 1. 35. One of the ironies here, of course, is that gradation in black skin tone—­at least at the level of the group rather than at the level of the individual—­was one of the obsessions of eighteenth-­ century natural philosophy. Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, for example, has an elaborate table of racial purity; “documentary” casta painters of the Caribbean went to enormous lengths to capture the precise look of different sorts of people classified as blacks and so forth. See Katzew, Casta Painting. 36. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 139. 37. Ibid., 138. 38. Ibid., 143. 39. See Gordon-­Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello. 40. Jefferson, Writings, 593, 601, 602, 603. Chastellux himself recalls Jefferson’s animation about poetry in his account of a 1782 visit to Monticello. “After Mrs. Jefferson had retired, we happened to speak of the poetry of Ossian. It was a spark of electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other; we recalled the passages of those sublime poems which had particularly struck us, and we recited them for the benefit of my traveling companions. . . . Soon the book was called for, to share in our ‘toasts’: it was brought forth and placed beside the bowl of punch. And, before we realized it, book and bowl had carried us far into the night” (Travels in North America, 2:392). 41. Jefferson, Writings, 596. 42. Ibid., 604. 43. Bradford’s Augustan Measures provides a useful overview of eighteenth-­century arguments about the hierarchy of meters and rhymes.



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44. Jefferson, Writings, 618. For a similar take, see, for example, Lemuel Abbott: “The greater Iambic is the Standard Foot of English heroic Verse, (as we shall find it to be of most other Kinds of English Verse) and that the other Feet when introduced have the Effect of taking off that perpetual Monotony which the constant Use of the greater Iambic would cause, but, when too thickly placed they destroy the musical Uniformity of the Verse: And we see that Blank Verse admits of a more frequent Use of them than Rhyme” (Poems on Various Subjects, 22). 45. Jefferson, Writings, 618. This resonates with Edward Young’s 1759 remark: “The first Ancients had no Merit in being Originals: They could not be Imitators. Modern Writers have a Choice to make; and therefore have a Merit in their power. They may soar in the Regions of Liberty, or move in the soft Fetters of easy Imitation” (Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 12). 46. For more on the relationship of slavery and prosody, including a discussion of poetic form as “fetter” in the American nineteenth century, see Cavitch, “Slavery and Its Metrics,” in Larson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-­Century American Poetry, esp. 98–99. 47. Jefferson, Writings, 619. Terry Eagleton inadvertently reproduces Jefferson’s critique when he writes of Wheatley’s (and Pope’s) preferred poetic form that “heroic couplets, however superbly accomplished, can never quite avoid an echo of the jingle. Each rhyming couplet seems like a self-­ enclosed unit of sense, which is clinched by the second rhyme-­word and left behind for the next unit” (How to Read a Poem, 78). Big ideas, it seems, cannot be captured in twenty-­syllable fragments of verse; to properly avoid the fate of the “jingle,” the poem must enjamb. Young, again: “For Rules, like Crutches, are a needful Aid to the Lame, tho’ an Impediment to the Strong. A Homer casts them away” (Conjectures, 17). Carretta argues that the “heavily end-­stopped couplets” of Wheatley’s “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” “reflect the author’s youth and inexperience” (Phillis Wheatley, 66). 48. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 139. The Oxford English Dictionary’s third sense of “jingle” marks the stakes well: “The affected repetition of the same sound or of a similar series of sounds, as in alliteration, rhyme, or assonance; any arrangement of words intended to have a pleasing or striking sound without regard to the sense; a catching array of words, whether in prose or verse. Chiefly contemptuous.” 49. Whitefield, Mr. Whitefield’s Sermon on Self-­Denial, 7. 50. Abernethy, Sermons on Various Subjects, 1:12. 51. Lavington, Enthusiasm of Methodists, 1:22. 52. Scheick, “Phillis Wheatley’s Appropriation of Isaiah,” 137. 53. Wilcox, ed., English Poems of George Herbert, 343. 54. In David S. Shields, ed., American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 447. 55. Mary Louise Kete argues that one of the distinguishing features of neoclassical verse in the eighteenth century is that it offers “escape from the particular contingencies of the self ”—­that the “pleasure offered by the neo-­classical aesthetic is the pleasure of rules fulfilled, universal standards achieved, and objective truths prevailing through skill and wit on the part of reader and writer” (“The Reception of Nineteenth-­Century American Poetry,” in Larson, ed., Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-­Century American Poetry, 22, 21). 56. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 49. 57. Paula Bennett argues that Wheatley “uses ‘To Maecenas’ to express her frustration with her

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race-­based subordination—­a subordination whose constitutive inferiority she refuses to internalize” (“Phillis Wheatley’s Vocation,” 64). 58. Horace’s Odes, Epodes, and Satires starts with a poem to Maecenas; Virgil’s Georgics was dedicated to him. See Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 106. 59. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 49. 60. Ibid., 50. 61. Ibid., 50–51. For the liberationist reading, see Watson, “A Classic Case,” 120. 62. Wesley, Christian Perfection, passim. 63. Abelove, The Evangelist of Desire, 1. 64. Wesley’s preface to his Select Hymns with Tunes Annexed, for example, makes one version of the case for structured worship: “I have been endeavouring for more than twenty years to procure such a book as this: but in vain. Masters of music were above following any direction but their own. And I was determined, whoever compiled this, should follow my direction: not mending our tunes, but setting them down, neither better nor worse than they were. At length I have prevailed. The following collection contains all the tunes which are in common use among us. They are pricked true, exactly as I desire all our congregations may sing them” (Select Hymns with Tunes Annexed, iii–iv). 65. Abelove, The Evangelist of Desire, 86–91. 66. Franklin, Autobiography, 180. 67. Ibid., 177. 68. Garden, Regeneration, and the Testimony of the Spirit, i. 69. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 79–94, and Barish, The Anti-­Theatrical Prejudice, passim. 70. In Outler and Heitzenrater, eds., John Wesley’s Sermons, 375. Compare Franklin’s mercantile vision of deliverance in Chapter 1. 71. Whitefield, Putting on the New Man, 22, 24. 72. In Outler and Heitzenrater, eds., John Wesley’s Sermons, 72–73. 73. Ibid., 73. 74. This emphasis on “proper” speech would also fit in with Wesley’s keen interest in establishing himself (and his theology) as genteel, even as his itinerant and evangelistic qualities calculatedly appealed to popular audiences. See Abelove, Evangelist of Desire, 7–23. 75. In Outler and Heitzenrater, eds., John Wesley’s Sermons, 105. 76. Wesley, The Christian’s Pattern,15. See also Matthew 21:16, in which Jesus remarks on how untutored children may produce “perfect praise” for the Lord. 77. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 55. 78. See ibid., 136. 79. Ibid., 56. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 57. 83. Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself, 132. 84. Quoted in Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 25.



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85. Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation, 48. 86. Wheatley’s helio-­theism is most pronounced in her poetic dialogue with John Prime Iron Rochfort in the Royal American Magazine in 1774–75—­especially in her “Reply to the Answer in our last by the Gentleman in the Navy,” where she describes Africa as “realms devoted to the God of day!” (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 163). See Jennings, “African Sun Imagery in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley” and Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation, 101. 87. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 67. 88. There are a great many examples of this trope of astronomical regularity as proof of God’s existence in Wheatley’s poems. In her “Address to the Atheist,” for instance: Atheist! behold the wide extended skies And wisdom infinite shall strike thine eyes Mark rising Sol when far he spreads his Ray And his Commission read—­To rule the Day At night behold that silver Regent bright And her command to the lead the train of Night Lo! How the Stars all vocal in his praise Witness his Essence in celestial lays! (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 121) 89. See “On the Death of J. C., an Infant” (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 93–95) and “To a Gentleman on his Voyage to Great-­Britain for the Recovery of his Health” (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 91–92). 90. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 59–60. 91. Ibid., 71. 92. Milton’s invocation in Book Three of Paradise Lost conflates God and light absolutely: Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-­born, Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam’d? since God is Light, And never but in upproached Light Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. (Complete Poems and Major Prose, 257) 93. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 67–68. 94. “To compare the world with a clock was only an extension of the ancient custom of calling the world a machine. The expression machine mundi, ‘the world machine,’ was used first by the Roman poet Lucretius (94–55 B.C.). Subsequently, the term occurred in the works of many ancient authors . . . and in that of most scholastic philosophers” (Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, 39). On the trope of the clockwork creation more generally, see ibid., chaps. 2 and 3. 95. Derham, Astro-­Theology, 13th ed., 99–100. 96. Ibid., 102–8.

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Notes to Pages 69–77

97. Mather, Meditations on the Glory of the Heavenly World, 216–17. 98. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 92n34; Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 88. 99. Amory, Daily Devotion, 6–7. 100. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 68–69. 101. Cavitch describes a similar dynamic in some of Annis Boudinot Stockton’s politicized pastoral elegies, in which the “seasonal revolutions of ‘each revolving year’ impose a kind of order and continuity upon . . . naturalized images of political upheaval (howling tempests, screaming winds, dreadful blasts)” (American Elegy, 66). 102. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 92. 103. Amory, Daily Devotion, iv. 104. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 93. 105. Ibid., 73. 106. Pope, Essay on Criticism, ll. 240–42, 362–67, in Major Works, 25, 29. 107. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 69. 108. Pope, Essay on Criticism, ll. 88–91, in Major Works, 21. 109. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 78–80. 110. For a very different reading of the poem, see Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 58–63. 111. Mason, ed. Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 80. 112. Ibid., 94. 113. Ibid., 106. 114. In Meserole, Seventeenth-­Century American Poetry, 208. 115. Cavitch, American Elegy, 56–57. Franklin’s Silence Dogood No. 7 appeared in the New England Courant 47 (25 June 1722); it is reprinted in Labaree et al., eds., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 1:23–26. 116. In Meserole, Seventeenth-­Century American Poetry, 208. 117. In ibid. 118. See Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Standard Works of Sigmund Freud, 14:243–58. 119. Wilcox, “The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley,” 14. 120. On the iconology of gravestones, see Ludwig, Graven Images. 121. Cavitch, American Elegy, 48. Edward Taylor’s “Upon wedlock and the death of children,” for example, combines an abstract or generic narrative of redemption (“Take them Lord, they’re thine!”) with the very specific—­that is, sensual and individuated—­horrors of illness: “But oh! the tortures, Vomit, screechings, groans, / And six weeks fever would pierce hearts like stones” (Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, 117–18). As Robert Dale Parker notes, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s memorial poem for her son, William Henry Schoolcraft, “To my ever beloved and lamented Son William Henry” (1827), “closely follows the form of Ann Taylor’s . . . ‘My Mother’ (1804), where the refrain is ‘My Mother’ rather than ‘My Willy’ ” (Changing Is Not Vanishing, 60). 122. See Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 87n30, 186; Carretta, ed., Complete Writings, 166. 123. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 87. 124. Ibid. A number of Wheatley’s other elegies lose their dedicatees in the transition from early circulation/proposal and book publication. James Sullivan was the initial addressee of “To a Gentleman and a Lady on the Death of the Lady’s Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name Avis,



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Aged One Year” (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 88). Curiously, “Avis” is allowed to stand—­ partly because it recurs in the text of the poem (not just in the title), perhaps because although it is a proper name, it also serves as an apt figure for the delicate, fleeting, birdlike soul of a child. 125. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 90. 126. This “common parent” claim could also indicate Wheatley’s investment in a theory of racial monogenesis—­the ideologically progressive view that all humanity shares a single set of ancestors. Such arguments were typical of antiracist polemic, although not widespread until the nineteenth century. See Wheeler, The Complexion of Race. 127. Waldstreicher’s insistence on Wheatley as a political poet—­one whose deep interest in the larger social, economic, and ethical problems of her moment actually drove cultural debate—­ certainly seems relevant here. This movement from specific examples to underlying principles in Wheatley—­the relentless asking and answering of what we now call “so-­what” questions—­makes hers as “political” a poetry as there is in eighteenth-­century America. See “The Wheatleyan Moment,” passim. 128. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 52. 129. This same assertion of particularity over and against generic expectations structures Wheatley’s most (in)famous poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” That poem begins “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land / Taught my benighted soul to understand, / That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: / Once I redemption neither sought nor knew” (in Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 53). At the same moment that she affirms the slavery-­apologist’s Christianizing-­the-­generic-­heathen narrative, she presents herself as having a singular history, a coherent self, and being capable of ownership. With all of those “mys,” the owned thing asserts herself as an owning person: the possession indicates the power to possess and, in so doing, disrupts the logic of slavery. 130. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 52. 131. Wheatley’s “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” mildly advocates for the American cause of “freedom” from fresh impositions by Britain’s Parliament. As a slave, she knows from slavery: “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancied happy seat / . . . / Such, such my case. And can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 83). Her marginalized position in the American colonies, in other words, affords her the authority to speak of America’s marginalized position with respect to the Crown. As Carretta notes, this recasting of marginalization as power is an old strategy, notably employed by the diminutive (and non-­Anglican) Alexander Pope (Phillis Wheatley, 57). For more on the origins of this poem and its effects, see Waldstreicher, “Wheatleyan Moment,” 522–27; for more on the metaphors of slavery and American Revolutionary rhetoric, see Slauter, State as a Work of Art, 179–86. 132. Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 52. 133. Carretta argues that “Ethiop” (instead of, say, the metrically identical “African”) positions the speaker inside a particular Biblical tradition—­marks her as one of those discussed (even if Othered) by Scripture (Phillis Wheatley, 57–58). 134. Wesley’s version of Thomas à Kempis puts the same principle dialogically: “Christian: Lord, how often shall I resign myself? And wherein shall I forsake myself? Christ. Always and every

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hour, as well in little things as in great; I except nothing, but require thou be naked and void of all things. Otherwise, how canst thou be mine, and I thine, unless both within and without thou art free from all self-­will” (Christian’s Pattern, 83).

Chapter 3 1. Raynal, quoted in Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787 London ed.), 107–8. 2. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 64. 3. This was not the first time that Jefferson had offered such a favorable comparison. In a 1778 letter to Rittenhouse, he had claimed that “the amazing mechanical representation of the solar system which you conceived & executed, has never been surpassed by any but the work of which it is a copy” (Jefferson, Writings, 763). In both compliments, Jefferson disputes the anglophilic labeling of Rittenhouse’s device as an “orrery”: “There are various ways of keeping truth out of sight. Mr. Rittenhouse’s model of the planetary system has the plagiary appellation of an Orrery; and the quadrant invented by Godfrey, an American also, and with the aid of which the European nations traverse the globe, is called Hadley’s quadrant” (quoted in Notes on the State of Virginia, 276n102). I will return to the trope of “keeping the truth out of sight” at the end of this chapter. For a detailed history of Rittenhouse’s orrery, see Hindle, David Rittenhouse, 27–59. 4. See Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 64n103, and Jefferson, Writings, 762. 5. Barton, Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse, 192. 6. Rittenhouse to Thomas Barton, 28 January 1767, quoted in Barton, Memoirs of the Life of David Rittenhouse, 194; see also Hindle, David Rittenhouse, 30. 7. In Book 7 of his nationalist epic Vision of Columbus (1787), Joel Barlow translates Rittenhouse’s goals into poetry: See the sage Rittenhouse, with ardent eye, Lift the long tube and pierce the starry sky; Clear in his view the circling systems roll, And broader splendors gild the central pole. He marks what laws the eccentric wanderers bind, Copies creation in his forming mind, And bids, beneath his hand, in semblance rise, With mimic orbs, the labours of the skies. There wondering crouds with raptured eye behold The spangled heavens their mystic maze unfold. (208) 8. Paine, Collected Writings, 692. As Steven Shapin puts it, “Few cultural-­historical topics are more pervasive than the equation between truth, solitude, passivity, and impersonality” (A Social History of Truth, 5). Shapin goes on to write persuasively about the relationship between the fantasy of a disinterested gentility, the practice of natural philosophy, and the sociology of truth in seventeenth-­century England. Freed, as Aristotle had insisted, from the obligations of remunerative labor, the better sorts of Englishmen could devote their attentions to discerning the best



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directions for theoretical and experimental philosophy, just as they could devote their political energies to the abstract causes of the nation rather than the myriad tangible problems of their immediate surroundings. Although the architects of the American republic largely had cast aside notions about the propriety of hereditary or oligarchical rule, they did not reinvent standards for public virtue. The characteristics that constituted virtue in the Old World—­financial independence, dispassion, temperance, wisdom—­were still valorized. For the purposes of a republic, however, they must be discoverable by the mass of people more broadly. I should hasten to add that the facticity of contemporary or historical “scientific objectivity” is beyond the scope of my inquiry. Recent work in the history of science has significantly complicated philosophical claims to scientific universality, neutrality, or objective truth by insisting on experimental and theoretical locality, opacity, and contingency, as well as on the various sociologically complex networks that develop around and through the pursuit of knowledge. In addition to Social History of Truth, see, for example, Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Golinski, Science as Public Culture; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump; Bourguet, Licoppe, and Sibum, Instruments, Travel, and Science. Even in its impossibility, the myth of scientific objectivity remains an essential critical commonplace in the eighteenth century—­just as it does today. 9. See Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” in Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation, 84. More particularly, Wood ascribes the federalist advocacy of “disinterestedness” to a fear of free market capitalism—­too many people pursuing their own interests and luxuries would destroy the possibility of a representative government. My analysis suggests that an economic justification is necessary but not sufficient for explaining the ideal of the “disinterested” subject. 10. In the interest of clarity, I should point out that my use of “republican” follows its most neutral (and general) use in late eighteenth-­century America: I mean to indicate the form of government in which elected representatives meet to deliberate laws that apply to the several states. This is the bedrock republicanism that different factions (like “Federalists” and “Democratic-­ Republicans”) elaborated in different ways, leading to the stark ideological fissures of the 1780s and 1790s. See Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic. The historiography on the sources, form, content, implementation, and efficacy of republican thought in the early United States is much too extensive to summarize or even to begin to list here. 11. For detailed treatments of the idealization of Washington, see Nelson, “Representative/ Democracy,” and Cavitch, American Elegy, 80–107. It is worth noting here that Jefferson’s claim about Rittenhouse approaching divinity by imitation was repurposed for the purpose of mourning George Washington. A brief article on “Tributary Honors, in Boston,” reprinted in newspapers from New Hampshire to Philadelphia in January of 1800, notes that Bostonians “devoted last Thursday to tokens of their exalted veneration of the talents, virtues and services of that matchless MAN, through whose instrumentality they have owed the enjoyment of their ‘alters and fire-­sides,’ and who, ‘though he hath not made a world, has by imitation, approached nearer its maker than any man who has lived from the creation to this day.’ ” See the Columbian Centinel, 11 January 1800. I thank Lynda Yankaskas for bringing this article to my attention. 12. On the rise and progress of the metaphor of the clockwork state, see Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, and Gilmore, “Republican Machines and Brackenridge’s Caves.”

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13. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1:3Zv. The problem of “interest” in the rhetoric of the founding has been taken up with zeal in the past thirty years. Among other examples, see Furtwangler, The Authority of Publius; Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” in Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation, 69–112; and Fliegelman, Declaring Independence. 14. See Barnes, States of Sympathy, and Burstein, Sentimental Democracy. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia Stern persuasively argues that the republican ideal of disinterested sympathy and its democratic practice were often at odds. In her analysis, individual sentiment and private grief—­ especially in those (non)persons outside of the umbrella of federal feeling, like blacks, foreigners, women, the poor—­create a counternarrative to the rhetoric of the founding. More than this, Stern argues, even the most selfless of “republican” subjects are possessed of a self—­or at least determined by a unique set of sociocultural coordinates that fix the parameters of subjectivity: “Always already implicated in structures of race, class, gender, and economic privilege, republican disinterest is never, finally, dis-­interested” (234). Stern’s critique of republican “disinterest” thus echoes Marx’s critique of ideology, which Pierre Bourdieu neatly summarizes “as the universalization of a particular interest: the ideologue is the one who posits as universal, as disinterested, that which is in accordance with their particular interest” (Practical Reason, 89). The fantasy of disinterest (just as the fantasy of an outside to ideology) nevertheless persists. 15. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence; Looby, Voicing America; Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power. 16. Sandra Gustafson, for example, in her discussion of injured Revolutionary War veterans as an essential engine of public opinion, argues that in “the emerging republican conception of the body politic, the heroic orator incarnates the eternal nation while the wounded victim of martial violence experiences the particularity of individual suffering occasioned by the wars that protect and enhance the state. When these two roles merge, the image of the national body condenses with peculiar force” (Eloquence Is Power, 195). 17. I borrow the dialectic of “sincerity” and “impersonality” from Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 129. 18. “To the Memory of the Late Dr. Rittenhouse,” 1. 19. The preceding paragraphs are adapted from my “David Rittenhouse,” in Spencer, ed., The Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, and, somewhat less directly, from Hindle, David Rittenhouse, passim. 20. Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:97, 100. 21. Rush, An Eulogium, intended to perpetuate the memory of David Rittenhouse, late President of the American Philosophical Society, 33–36. Not everyone agreed. Loyalist Jonathan Odell’s satirical “The Word of Congress” casts Rittenhouse’s taking up of politics as a Miltonic fall: There dwelt in Norriton’s sequester’d bow’rs, A mortal blest with mathematic pow’rs, To whom was David Rittenhouse unknown, Fair science saw, and mark’d him for her own. His eye creation to its bounds would trace,



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His mind, the regions of unbounded space: Whilst thus he soar’d above the starry spheres, The word of Congress sounded in his ears; He listen’d to the voice with strange delight, And swift descended from his dazling height, Then mixing eager with seditious tools, Vice-­President elect of rogues and fools; His hopes resign’d of philosophic fame, A paltry statesman Rittenhouse became. See D. S. Shields, ed., American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 605. 22. Rush, An Eulogium, 33, 25, 43. 23. “Sketches of the Character of Rittenhouse,” The Argus, or Greenleaf ’s New Daily Advertiser (4 July 1796): 2. 24. Cobbett, Porcupine’s Political Censor, for Jan. 1797, 30, 34. 25. Rittenhouse remained one of nationalist-­biography’s go-­to great Americans well into the nineteenth century. Rush’s “Eulogium” is reprinted in its entirety in James Jones Wilmer’s American Nepos (1806); Jared Sparks included James Renwick’s account of Rittenhouse in his enormously popular and unashamedly boosterish Library of American Biography (1834–38). 26. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 12. 27. See Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, esp. 5–10 and 69–104; Ogden, “Edgar Huntly and the Regulation of the Senses,” 419–28; Howe, Making the American Self, chap. 1. 28. Rush, Six Introductory Lectures, 90. See also Hume, “Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 31ff. 29. See Carlson, Introduction to Two Essays on the Mind, vii–viii. For more on Hartley and materialist psychology, see Chapter 5. 30. Priestley and Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity, 60. 31. The question of the existence of free will in humans was one of the organizing theological debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The basic positions are quite simple: persons who believed in “Liberty” held that human beings have some capacity to make their own decisions—­ that no matter how informed by God and the circumstances He brings about, people retain a fundamental freedom (what Milton calls a “freedom to fall”) to make unforeseeable choices. Persons who believed in “Necessity” claimed that all human decisions from the moment of creation have been and will continue to be predetermined by God—­that His omniscience and omnipotence make no allowance for the putatively “independent” decisions of human agents. In natural-­philosophical circles, this debate was recast into a different form, pitting those who believed in the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the material body against those who believed that the soul was a part or function of the body. If the soul was material, then it was of necessity shaped by material and physical stimuli; it the soul was immaterial, then it was liberated from base material determinism. 32. This is remarkably close to certain strands of modern cognitive theory. See Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.

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33. Letter to James Rush, 10 May 1810 (Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2:1048–49). See also Letter to John Redman Coxe, 5 September 1810 (Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2:1058–60). 34. Rush, “An Oration . . . Containing an Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” 36n1. 35. Ibid., 36. 36. Ibid., 1. 37. Ibid., 2. 38. Ibid., 3. 39. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 80–81. 40. “An Oration,” 30–31. Although many variants of these lines have appeared in the 400 years since Hamlet’s composition, Rush’s quotation tracks numerous eighteenth-­century editions of Shakespeare’s works, including the eight-­volume Plays of William Shakespeare, printed for J. and R. Tonson et al. in 1765. 41. I use the word “simulation” advisedly. As Jessica Riskin has shown, the late eighteenth-­ century obsession with artificial life (the defecating duck of Vaucanson and the birthing machine of Madame du Coudray, for example) centers on a principle of “simulation” rather than “analogy.” A simulated arm does not merely perform tasks analogous to an actual arm (reaching, grasping); it reproduces the internal structures of the arm (wooden bones, leather tendons, rubber veins) in order to do so. Riskin, “Eighteenth-­Century Wetware,” 100–104. 42. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 87–127. See also Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination. 43. Writing to fellow philosopher and education reformer Richard Price in 1786, Rush argues that “we have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted” (Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:388). 44. Rush, “A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools in Pennsylvania; to Which Are Added Thoughts on the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 10. 45. Ibid., 17. On Rush and the question of the impossibility of republicanizing blacks and Indians, see Takaki, Iron Cages, 11–35. For Rush’s thoughts on the limitations of feminine agency—­which hew closely to the now standard conceptions of “Republican Motherhood”—­see his “Thoughts upon Female Education,” discussed at some length in Chapter 4. 46. Rush, “A Plan,” in Rudolph, ed. Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 17–18. Modern critics like Ronald Takaki and Carl Kaestle have been tempted to read this as a program for mass dehumanization—­as a proto-­fascist “iron cage” for personality, as a method for generating legions of American automata. Others (notably Paul Gilmore and John Kasson) have taken the characterization of the white male student or citizen as a “republican machine” as emblematic of the philosophical imperatives of machinofacture in the early United States, at once a residue and a constituting fiction of newly mechanized cultures of commodity production. In the context of Rush’s broader philosophical approaches, though, his stated goal is neither totalitarian nor necessarily economic. Rather, as Colleen E. Terrell has argued, the “republican machine” “reveals the ways in which the line between mechanism and human



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nature remained every bit as indistinct as that between the proverbial machine and garden” (“ ‘Republican Machines,’ ” 130). 47. On 4 January 1797, Rush sent a copy of his Eulogium to Jefferson with a humble and admiring reference to the passage of Jefferson’s Notes cited above. See Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 784–85. 48. For Rittenhouse’s military experiments—­including his work with Charles Willson Peale on a telescopic sight—­see Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 13, and Hindle, David Rittenhouse, 125–30. 49. Rush, An Eulogium, 17–18. 50. Ibid., 19. 51. Ibid., 15. 52. Ibid., 13. 53. Quoted in ibid., 15. 54. Rittenhouse, An Oration delivered February 24, 1775, Before the American Philosophical Society, iv. 55. Paine, Complete Writings, 1:3. Such claims about the political efficacy of scientific models were not without precedent. In his “A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton” (1727), James Thomson makes the case for that astronomer as a necessary inspiration for future Britons. The speaker asks Newton to break off his heavenly activities and steer his gaze below: Oh look with pity down On humankind, a frail erroneous race! Exalt the spirit of a downward world! O’er thy dejected country chief preside, And be her Genius call’d! her studies raise, Correct her manners, and inspire her youth. (Seasons, a Hymn, 4:68, ll. 198–203) 56. Rush, An Eulogium, 20. 57. See John Philip Schuyler’s unpublished manuscript “Journal, 1787” (American Antiquarian Society Mss. Octavo Vols. S). 58. Taking seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century plats as his archive, Martin Brückner has argued that “descriptive geodetic writing . . . became a genre of self-­distinction and an expression of self-­love”—­that mapmaking was not merely a technology of abstracting the landscape but of writing (and rewriting) the subject. The kind of person created through these technologies—­what Brückner calls the “surveyed self ”—­bears a strong resemblance to the “republican” subject that I have attempted to draw above. Theoretically fitting cleanly into mathematical structures, adopting the endlessly repeatable role of observational center, producing records of “applied literacy and mechanical skill” rather than “personal interest,” the surveyor is at once individuated and denied individuality (Geographic Revolution, 48, 43). 59. American Philosophical Society, Early Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 11–13. 60. Hindle, David Rittenhouse, 31. 61. Kepler’s second law of planetary motion holds that planets sweep out equal orbital sectors in equal times; when they are farther away from the sun, they move more slowly.

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Notes to Pages 99–101

62. Hindle, David Rittenhouse, 31–33. 63. Rush, An Eulogium, 9–10. The orrery is still on display on the sixth floor of University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library. 64. I borrow the phrase “spirit of accuracy” from Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 57. The emergent protocols of replication in experimental method are discussed at length in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, particularly chaps. 2 and 6. 65. Rush, An Eulogium, 41, 5. 66. Rittenhouse, letter to Thomas Barton, quoted in Renwick, Lives of Sir William Phips, Israel Putnam, Lucretia Maria Davidson, and David Rittenhouse, 359. In his persuasive case for the influence of Newtonian discourses on the Declaration of Independence, Garry Wills notes that “the revolution of the colonies, like the revolving of heaven’s bodies, is a process open to scientific observation and description. [In the Declaration] Jefferson has come to describe it” (Inventing America, 94). 67. Among the astronomy-­themed newspapers of the post-­Revolutionary period were Benjamin Smead’s Federal Galaxy in Brattleboro, Vermont; John Dixon’s Observatory in Richmond, Virginia; and the Ballston Spa [New York] Republican Telescope. See Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers 2:1077–78, 1141; 1:548. 68. (Boston) Federal Orrery, 23 October 1794. Treating the orrery as a metaphor for a model state promotes a popular specular fantasy: the republic writ small is the republic that may be entirely surveyed and controlled from a single, central position. For more on the ideology of federal union and “elevated perspective,” see Rigal, American Manufactory, 45. 69. Paine, Complete Writings, 2:1091–92. 70. Rush, An Eulogium, 36–37. 71. For a pointed counterargument, see Wheatley’s “To the University of Cambridge, in New-­ England,” discussed in Chapter 2: “Students, to you ’tis given to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space, / And mark the systems of revolving worlds” (Mason, ed., Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 52). The poem points up the dark irony that the republic contains many for whom the ostensibly egalitarian principles of celestial motion are not and can never be operative, including slaves, women, the illiterate, and the poor. Jefferson’s thoughts on the black letter writer Ignatius Sancho reflect a similar dynamic: his mind is “wild and extravagant, [and] escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky” (Notes on the State of Virginia, 140). Blackness exists outside of order of the republican worldview, and so Sancho’s mind must be figured as a rogue celestial body. 72. Michel Foucault summarizes the Paracelsian nostrum that man is “constellated with stars” thusly: “His inner sky may remain autonomous and depend only upon itself, but on condition that by means of his wisdom, which is also knowledge, he comes to resemble the order of the world, takes it back into himself and thus creates in his inner firmament the sway of that other firmament in which he sees the glitter of the visible stars” (The Order of Things, 20). 73. Rush, An Eulogium, 25. 74. Cobbett, Porcupine’s Political Censor, for January 1797, 35. 75. Rush, An Eulogium, 7.



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76. Ibid., 35. 77. Ibid., 9. 78. Ibid., 41. 79. See, for example, Rittenhouse’s “Observations Made at Wilmington for Determining the Longitude, July 1–October 14, 1784” (American Philosophical Society, MS 526.62 R51). Because of the unusual form of the book (white pages interleaved with blue pages) and because of the periodically haphazard orientation of materials (i.e., some things are written sideways), Rob Cox, former manuscript curator at the American Philosophical Society, believes it to have been a field book and not a fair copy (personal communication, 15 May 2004). 80. McGill, “The Duplicity of the Pen,” in Masten et al., eds., Language Machines, 51; Nash, American Writing Masters. 81. Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 29. 82. For other discussions of the imagined linkages between handwriting and personality in the period, see Chapters 4 and 5 of this study, as well as Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (especially Part III); Thornton, Handwriting in America; Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America; Goldberg, Writing Matter; Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts in Early Modern England; and McGill, “The Duplicity of the Pen.” 83. Fortune and Warner, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-­ Century America, 42–44, 133–35. Fortune and Warner argue that the celestial trajectories depicted in these portraits are for different objects: the earliest may be Lexell’s comet; the latest may be a comet that Rittenhouse himself discovered. The gesture, however, remains more or less the same. 84. Rush, An Eulogium, 40. 85. This sentiment is based in eighteenth-­century theories of physiognomy, in which the structures of the human face were imagined as transparent indices for inward character. Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy was the standard reference work for the discipline. For much more on the politics and poetics of facial expression in the early republican moment, see Lukasik, Discerning Characters. 86. Cappon, ed., The Adams-­Jefferson Letters, 2:426. 87. Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, 33. See Daston and Galison, Objectivity, esp. chap. 2. 88. Wolcott, quoted in Fortune and Warner, Franklin and His Friends, 161. Wolcott’s letter may be found in Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, 3:360. 89. Harrod, The Dollar, 7; Hepburn, History of Coinage and Currency in the United States, 11. See also Garson, “Counting Money,” passim. 90. See Bailey’s Rittenhouse Almanac for 1807 [unnumbered]. The table acknowledges different values for foreign coins depending upon location: the same English guinea worth $4.66 in Federal currency, for example, was worth 1l 8s in New England and Virginia money; 1l 17s in New York and North Carolina money; 1l 15s in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland money; and 1l 1s 9d in South Carolina and Georgia. 91. As Rittenhouse wrote to Ralph Izard in 1791, “The abilities of the Secretary of State [i.e., Jefferson] and the great attention he has given to the subject of an Uniformity in the Currency,

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Notes to Pages 107–110

Weights and Measures of the United States, are . . . well known. . . . That such an Uniformity is very desirable is I believe universally admitted” (Rittenhouse to Ralph Izard, 21 December 1791). 92. Many members of Congress considered paper money to be an engine for putting private economic “interest” over the good of the public whole; not only had the debt floated by paper scrip during the Revolution translated into a sophisticated and atomistic postwar capitalism, but its severe fluctuation had destroyed the traditional lending practices of the landed gentry. See Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness,” 77–78, 105–8; Breen, Tobacco Culture, 93–106; and Riesman, “Money, Credit, and Federalist Political Economy,” in Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation, 128–61. For more on the advent of American coins, see Cohen, A Calculating People, 127–30, and McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, 1:403–4. 93. Quoted in Watson, A History of American Coinage, 14. Along with Robert Morris, Jefferson was one of the chief advocates for decimal reckoning. 94. Erastus Root, An Introduction to Arithmetic: For the Use of Common Schools, 28. See also Watson, A History of American Coinage, 8–16, and Cohen, A Calculating People, 127–30. 95. In 1790, the Treasury of Pennsylvania began to publish broadsides and pamphlets detailing Rittenhouse’s official activities as treasurer. These displays reproduced (and made reproducible) Rittenhouse’s accounting practices (and the inflows and outlays of money for Pennsylvania) for a broad public audience—­the broadsides in rough outline, the pamphlets in exquisite detail. Alongside the official “Examin[ation] and Settle[ment]” by John Nicholson, Rittenhouse’s sums might be checked and certified by any reader who cared to work them. See “State of the Accounts of Mr. David Rittenhouse, Esq,” 70. 96. Second Congress of the United States, An Act Establishing a Mint, 3. 97. Quoted in Watson, A History of American Coinage, 40. 98. Quoted in ibid., 25–26. 99. For extended discussions of Franklin and the morality of numismatic imagery, see Irvin, “Benjamin Franklin’s Enriching Virtues.” 100. Second Congress of the United States, An Act Establishing a Mint, 3. The Library of Congress copy of this pamphlet bears extensive longhand notations: much of the passage quoted above has been crossed out. It reads: “Upon one side of each of the said [gold] coins there shall be an impression or representation of the head of the President of the United States for the Time being, with an inscription which shall express the initial or first letter of his Christian or first name, and his surname at length, the succession of the Presidency numerically, and the year of the coinage.” The marginal note reads: “the figure is the representation of the head with this as a caption ‘General George Washington.’ ” 101. Second Congress of the United States, An Act Establishing a Mint, 3. 102. Korshak, “The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France,” 61–62. 103. Ibid., 55. For more on the bowl, see Hipkiss, “The Paul Revere Liberty Bowl,” 19–21. The bowl itself is now on permanent display in the new American Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, directly in front of a John Singleton Copley portrait of its maker. 104. Hindle, David Rittenhouse, 345. 105. On the vindicta, see Korshak, “Liberty Cap,” 53. 106. Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 633. See also Silverman, Cultural History of the American Revolution, 75, 80, 113.



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107. “The Origin and Properties of the Cap of Liberty,” 245–46. 108. E pluribus unum did not appear on U.S. coinage until 1795; see Evans, Illustrated History of the U.S. Mint, 82. On the history and contradictions of the former motto of the United States, see Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 120–36, and Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 173. 109. Priestley and Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, 78. 110. See Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, esp. chap. 5. 111. Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush 2:894. 112. Quoted in Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2:897n1. Jefferson’s reply, dated 13 June 1805, is in the Library of Congress Papers of Thomas Jefferson manuscript collections. 113. Rush et al., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2:896. 114. Trusler, The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language, and the Proper Choice of Them Determined, 48. 115. Pope, Dunciad Variorum, 7. 116. See Brockden Brown, Wieland. 117. Coxe, The Federalist,” 33. Tench Coxe believed in the virtue-­making power of machines; he was a famous advocate for machinofactures in the United States. See Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 150–69; Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 29–32; Gilmore, “Republican Machines and Brackenridge’s Cave,” 323; and Rigal, American Manufactory, 14–15. 118. Swanwick, Poems on Several Occasions, 172. 119. Rush, An Eulogium, 12. The quotation is from Rittenhouse’s report to the Society on his activities. Rittenhouse reportedly had a rough go of the transit observation, at one point losing consciousness. Rush notes the fact only to discount the fainting spell as a passing moment of philosophical elation. Hindle’s account of Rittenhouse during the transit emphasizes the terrifying imprecision of the whole process and suggests that illness and fear of error—­rather than joyful transport—­may have been the cause (David Rittenhouse, 56). Of course, displays of fallibility were important elements of building trustworthiness in the context of scientific reportage: leaving the failures in the account was part of making “modesty visible,” which was an essential part of “specifying the social relations that could constitute and protect experimental knowledge” (Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 65). 120. In the preface to Astro-­Theology, William Derham praises Christian Huygens’s new model of telescope but acknowledges its limitations: “Indeed the grand obstacle to all my views with Mr Huygens’s glass was the vapours near the Horizon, which not only obscured the object, but caused so great a trembling and dancing thereof, as made it no less difficult to be distinctly and accurately viewed than a thing held in the hand is, when danced and shaken backwards and forwards” (13th ed., 7–8). 121. This recalls Jefferson’s famous remark about the fossil record of the Virginia mountains: “There is a wonder somewhere.” Even in the face of up-­to-­date geological theory, Jefferson chooses mystery over its alternatives: “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong” (Notes on the State of Virginia, 33). 122. Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, 171. 123. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear (Folio Text), (5.3.236–­8), in Complete Works, 973.

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Notes to Pages 116–118

Chapter 4 1. Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 5. 2. For an extended discussion of girls and household bookkeeping, see Cohen, A Calculating People, 140–44. 3. It is worth noting that the various editions of Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography (the standard textbook on the subject from 1789 into the second quarter of the nineteenth century) contained extensive observations on political and social structures in addition to descriptions of landscapes and waterways. For much more on the breadth of the discipline of “geography” in the post-­Revolutionary period, see Short, Representing the Republic. 4. Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 79–80. 5. Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 36. The line about ballads was an eighteenth-­century commonplace; it originates with Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, an advocate for Scottish independence active at the end of the seventeenth century. See Stowe, Dred, 605n3. 6. The canonical examination of Republican Motherhood is Linda Kerber’s pathbreaking Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. For the figure of the Republican Wife, see Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic.” On female education in the early United States more generally, see Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States. 7. I borrow the phrase “public and private Virtue” from Magaw, A Prayer, 6. 8. Margaret A. Nash has argued that Rush’s programs were implemented only on the smallest of scales, that the affected pupils subverted them at every turn, and that historians have, therefore, “overstated the impact of republican motherhood” (“Rethinking Republican Motherhood,” 171). Still, altered versions of the Republican Mother and Republican Wife theses proliferate; see Norton, Liberty’s Daughters; Evans, Born for Liberty; Brown, Domestic Individualism; Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames. 9. Mary Beth Norton casts the post-­Revolutionary period as one in which women began to cultivate “A Reverence of Self ”—­setting bourgeois individuality as a counterforce to misogynist notions of “feminine weakness, delicacy, and incapacity” (Liberty’s Daughters, 228). An equation of motherhood and liberal selfhood is even more forcefully argued in later works like Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism. In “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-­Revolutionary America,” Rosemarie Zagarri’s mapping of the ways in which Lockean discourses of natural rights (which emphasize personal liberty) became “masculine” and Scottish commonsense discourses of natural rights (which emphasize social duties) became “feminine” in the Early Republic offers a helpful corrective: women could (and did) act as political subjects without adhering to exclusionary models of liberalism. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s cogent analysis of “sociality” and the “circular constitution of the subject”—­in which strict divisions between the public and the private are blurred and in which persons must be “publicly produced (even in his or her interiority) and ratified to attain the status of a contracting individual” (Gender of Freedom, 119)—­traces a synthesis of the Lockean and



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commonsense traditions but retains “individuality” as its ultimate end. See Gender of Freedom, esp. 116–96. For a counterpoint, see Fox-­Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions. 10. The most thorough and suggestive tracing of the different (and ever-­changing) iterations of “republican” theory in the post-­Revolutionary United States remains Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, esp. 46–124. See also Shalhope, “Republicanism and Early American Historiography.” 11. Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” 39. 12. Neal, An Essay on the Education and Genius of the Female Sex, 9. 13. Poor, [“Principal’s Address to the Graduates”], quoted in Neal, An Essay on the Education and Genius of the Female Sex, 27. 14. This version of the “Genius of Emulation” is reproduced in Kerber, Women of the Republic, 223; another appears in Nash, “Rethinking Republican Motherhood,” 182. In an issue of Eighteenth-­ Century Studies partially devoted to the history of the concept, several scholars of French cultural history consider emulation among the bourgeoisie in the years after the old régime. In each case, the definition of emulation is limited to a variation of Johnson’s first sense, “to rival”: it becomes shorthand for patriotically virtuous competition—­a principle of economics that encourages personal striving but that ultimately puts the good of the country ahead of the good of the individual. These scholars cite the numerous “societies of emulation” (sometimes called émulations) in which participants were to invent things that would benefit la Patrie—­typically labor-­saving agricultural devices—­and in which success was marked by public trusts of “glory” and “honor” instead of personal financial wealth. See Kaplan, “Virtuous Competition Among Citizens,” and Shovlin, “Emulation in Eighteenth-­Century French Economic Thought” in particular; for an American analog, see Opal, Beyond the Farm. In Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen uses emulation strictly as a synonym for capitalistic or “pecuniary” competition: it is the will to distinguish oneself as a privileged member of society by accumulating and conspicuously spending money. For cultures in which the necessities of the physical body are more or less universally available, emulation serves as a vehicle for cultivating the “invidious distinction” between haves and have-­nots. Such distinction, in turn, begets the interlocking evils of private property, slavery, the oppression of women, and the extravagant waste of natural and cultural resources. Although I am persuaded by Veblen’s critiques of consumption and the terrors of bourgeois life, I wish to decouple emulation from individualism; that is, I wish to recuperate that older sense in of the word which “distinction” is both a problem and a goal. 15. See Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 8th ed., s.v. “emulate.” 16. I take my definition of poetics from Paul Ricoeur’s distillation of Aristotle: it is that “discipline which deals with the laws of composition that are added to discourse as such in order to form of it a text that can stand as a narrative, a poem, or an essay” (From Text to Action, 3). 17. A 25 December 1802 classified advertisement in the Columbian Centinel lists itemized tuition rates for Rowson’s school, now relocated to Medford. “Board per quarter, 30 dolls—­Tuition in Reading, Arithmetic, English Grammar, Geography, use of the Globes, and useful Needlework, 6 dolls.—­Embroidery in its various branches, 6 dls—­Painting and drawing flowers, figures, or landscape, 6 dolls—­Use of Books, Pens and ink, 30 cts.—­Use of Piano-­Forte for practice, 3 dolls.” 18. Nason, A Memoir of Mrs. Susanna Rowson, 103.

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19. As my use of the conditional past suggests, the identity of “A Lady” and the “authorship” of this volume are matters of some dispute. Blanck’s Bibliography of American Literature lists the book as “possibly edited by Mrs. Rowson,” but R. W. G. Vail leaves it out of his bibliographical study of Rowson’s career. Evert A. and George A. Duyckinck’s Cyclopaedia of American Literature attributes the work to Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as does Samuel Alston Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of British and American Authors, Living and Deceased. The recent Oxford edition of Tenney’s Female Quixotism and Sharon Harris’s American Women Writers to 1800 attribute the work to Tenney as well. Charles Evans’s American Bibliography remains neutral: it lists the imprint but does not speculate on the identity of “A Lady.” See Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature, 7:308; Vail, Susanna Haswell Rowson, the Author of Charlotte Temple; Duyckinck and Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 1:504; Allibone, Critical Dictionary of British and American Authors, 2:1885 and 3:2371; and Evans, American Bibliography, 13:5. 20. On the popularity of the George Fisher and Anne Fisher texts, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, 128–33. 21. Columbian Centinel (Boston), 24 April 1799. 22. As Max Cavitch puts it, speaking about the delicate politics of assigning authorship to anonymous nineteenth-­century American poems: “Attributions are also affirmations of a poetics of individuated authorship that many of us are inclined to look at with some skepticism—­not only because we may want to distinguish between the producer of a text and the producers of the text’s meaning, but also because of what tracking down and naming an author may facilitate: for example, narcissistic forms of readerly identification that often go unexamined; underestimating or forgetting the racialization of authorship’s entitlements; misapprehension of individuation and self-­possession as invariably empowering; and, not least, the fabulation of poetic language as personal voice” (“Slavery and Its Metrics,” in Larson, ed., Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-­ Century American Poetry, 95). 23. Margaret J. M. Ezell begins to sketch some answers to this question in her “ ‘By a Lady’: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-­Century Print Culture,” in Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, 63–79. 24. New Pleasing Instructor, [iii]. 25. The Thomas and Andrews advertisement—­which quotes this preface in order to preemptively answer questions about the Instructor’s use value—­insists that the little essay is the product of the compiler herself—­that it is not a publisher’s or patron’s add-­on. 26. New Pleasing Instructor, iv. 27. Ibid., [iii]–iv. 28. Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 5. 29. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 259–67. 30. New Pleasing Instructor, iv. 31. Allen’s text is an extravagantly conventional series of forty epistles between a mother and a daughter that joins a narrative of filial separation with musings on the forms and functions of women’s schooling. An American edition, printed by Mathew Carey, appeared in 1798. 32. Rowson, A Spelling Dictionary, 109.



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33. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 12. 34. Ibid., 15. 35. Here I mean to follow Nina Baym in arguing that critics ought not equate “sentimentalism with the bourgeois liberal personality”; there is more to the cultivation of feeling than the edification of the monadic subject (“Women’s Novels and Women’s Minds,” 337n5). 36. Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 31. 37. For explorations of the role of sympathetic identification (both positive and negative and for better or for worse) in the early American novel, see Stern, The Plight of Feeling; Barnes, States of Sympathy; Davidson, Revolution and the Word; and Tompkins, Sensational Designs. 38. Jay Fliegelman persuasively argues that in eighteenth-­century America, “the universality of language lay less in the features of language than in the features of delivery and countenance. . . . The body of the speaker and its attitudes, not the body and attitudes of the text, become the site and text of meaning” (Declaring Independence, 43). 39. Murray, The English Reader, 8, 74. 40. On the importance of the reproducibility of results to eighteenth-­century scientific method, see Bourget et al., eds, Itineraries of Precision. For different applications of this principle to the problem of “personality,” see Lyon “The Science of Sciences,” and Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 41. New Pleasing Instructor, 9–10. 42. Ibid., 10. 43. Rowson, A Spelling Dictionary, i. 44. New Pleasing Instructor, 10. See Murray, English Reader, viii. That the model is one of “the best readers I ever heard” suggests one of the problems with all this emulation: what if the figure you copy is a bad one? In Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple, the wicked temptress Mademoiselle La Rue is the moral equivalent of a line of bad copy at the top of a virgin page: “Madame Du Pont [the headmistress of the school] was a woman every way calculated to take the care of young ladies, had that care entirely devolved on herself; but it was impossible to attend the education of a numerous school without proper assistants; and those assistants were not always the kind of people whose conversation and morals were exactly such as parents of delicacy and refinement would wish a daughter to copy. Among the teachers at Madame Du Pont’s was Mademoiselle La Rue” (23). 45. Quoted in Nason, A Memoir of Mrs. Susanna Rowson, 104. 46. MS Doc 1048, Winterthur Library, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, 25. 47. See Goldberg, Writing Matter, and Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152ff. For the ways in which Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography repeats and complicates this conflation, see Chapter 1; for Benjamin Rush and David Rittenhouse and handwriting, see Chapter 3; for Brockden Brown and the intimate mechanics of penmanship, see Chapter 5. 48. Northampton and Kingsfieldshire were among American writing masters’ favorite words. See Nash, American Writing Masters. Clap’s copybook is MS Doc 831, Winterthur Library, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera; Tracy’s is in the American Antiquarian Society’s Penmanship Collection: undated 1762–1856, Mss. Octavo Vols. P, Vol.

250

Notes to Pages 130–135

1. “Honorificabilitudinitatibus” (spelled properly and without the “–que” at the end) appears as a jokingly long Latinate word and the height of useless pedantry in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.1.41); see The Complete Works, 296. 49. “Literacy Instruction and Gender,” in Davidson, ed., Reading in America, 59. 50. AAS Penmanship Collection, 1762–1856, Ms. Octavo Vols. P, Vol. 1. 51. AAS Penmanship Collection, 1762–1856, Ms. Octavo Vols. P, Vol. 5; Vol. 8. 52. New Pleasing Instructor, 10–11. 53. Here I am indebted to Susan Stabile’s analysis of handwriting and the architectonics of feminine remembering. See Memory’s Daughters, 74–125. See also Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, esp. 209–11. 54. Bowne, A Girl’s Life Eighty Years Ago, 27. Ellen Brandt has claimed that this moment in Bowne’s correspondence represents her “contentment apart from society” (Susanna Haswell Rowson, 183). I would argue that it represents the difficulty of parsing the “social” from the “solitary”—­that even when alone with a book, the girl is participating in a set of conversations that must not end. 55. Horace Mann describes an analogous situation in his Lectures on Education (1845). He recommends against the common use of the “quarto-­sized map, or perhaps a globe no larger than a goose’s egg” in teaching children geography, because they “do not expand the mind of the child to the dimensions of the objects, but . . . [belittle] the objects to the nutshell capacity of the mind. Such a course of instruction may make precocious, green-­house children; but you will invariably find, that, when boys are prematurely turned into little men, they remain little men always” (39–40). The only way out is out: a proper geographical sense begins with recognizing the student’s immediate physical environment, then “a visit to a neighboring town, or county” (40). Only after a “just extension has been given to his ideas of county, or a state, [should] that county or state . . . be shown to him on a globe; and cost what labor or time it may, his mind must be expanded to a comprehension of relative magnitudes, so that his idea of the earth shall be as adequate to the size of the earth, as his idea of the house or the field was to the size of the house or the field” (40). Privacy manifests itself as a problem of scale; only those directed outward will cease to be “little.” 56. New Pleasing Instructor, 13. 57. Rowson, Charlotte Temple, 112. 58. Ibid., 114. 59. New Pleasing Instructor, 13. 60. Ibid. 61. Rowson, A Present for Young Ladies, 84–85. 62. (Boston) Independent Chronicle, 21 February 1803 and 28 February 1803. 63. Ring, Girlhood Embroidery 1:94; Boston Gazette, 24 October 1803. 64. Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 69. 65. Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 36. 66. See Nason, A Memoir, 109. See also Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1:88–93. 67. New England Palladium 36.44, 30 November 1810. For more on the exhibition culture of the Early Republic, see Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, and Kelly, “Reading and the Problem of Accomplishment,” in Hackel and Kelly, eds., Reading Women, 124–43.



Notes to Pages 135–140

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68. See Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1:88–93, and Nylander, “Some Print Sources,” 292–301. 69. Jennifer C. Van Horn claims that samplers are “unquestionably genteel,” but such generalizations fail to capture the varieties of needlework that fall under the rubric of “sampler” (“Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort,” 220). The scrap of homespun embroidered with native wool worked by the failing light of one’s own hearth may be just as much a sampler as the gilt-­framed silk-­on-­linen piece sewn in a tony boarding school. There are certainly important markers of gentility built into some of these objects, but class striving is far from the only force that motivates their production. 70. Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum, s.v. “samplar”; Bailey, A Universal Etymological Dictionary, s.v. “samplar.” 71. See Calabresi, “ ‘You Sew, Ile Read’: Letters and Literacies in Early Modern Samplers,” in Hackel and Kelly, eds., Reading Women, 79–104. 72. Andrew W. Tuer neatly distills the complaint: “The decorations on those [samplers] which do remain to us are always impossible—­impossible trees, impossible houses, impossible birds, beasts, and fishes, impossible men, women and children” (History of the Hornbook, 415). 73. Susan Burrows Swan Papers, Winterthur Museum Ms. Coll. 725 Box 1, folder 6. See also Swan, Plain and Fancy, 108. 74. Educational theorist John Cosens Ogden remarks that the ornamental “employments of the needle are most essential”: they open “a broad field to exercise the ingenuity and amuse the mind: While they are forming a landscape or imitating the various shapes and tinges of a flower, with their needle or pencil, [girls] are imperceptibly led to admire and adore the power of the Great Creator, who has clothed the lily of the field with greater beauties than Solomon was arrayed with in all his glory” (An Address, 20). Borrowing from Luke 12:27, Ogden reminds his readers that Solomon’s cloth-­of-­gold raiment, no matter how beautifully embroidered, does not compare favorably to the beauty of the lily. By trying—­and failing—­to generate perfectly realistic imitations of His works, they learn the Glory of God; they may have skill with the needle, but His powers are infinitely greater. 75. On the morality of legibility, see Thornton, Handwriting in America, 3–41, and Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, 59, 273–301. On virtue and visibility, see Bushman, The Refinement of America. 76. In its demand for repetition, the truncated sampler works rather like the version of the alphabet song that ends with “Next time won’t you sing with me.” 77. Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe record a number of versions of this poem in their survey of early American needlework. See their American Samplers, 319. 78. Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 2:285–311; 1:150. Generically related examples were worked under Quaker tutelage all over the United States, including on Nantucket and at other Friends’ academies in Dutchess County, New York. 79. Whiting, Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 348. 80. This phenomenon is even clearer on Mary Ann Clark’s marking sampler, which centers on three roman alphabets of descending size. The Winterthur Decorative Arts Photographic Collection data sheet notes that it looks as if these alphabets were “copied from a printer’s sample book” (DAPC Acc. No. 72.1120). See Swan, Plain and Fancy, 65.

252

Notes to Pages 141–145

81. In positing samplers as a technology of printing, I draw on Peter Stallybrass’s suggestion that historians of the book might do well to reconsider hard-­and-­fast differences between “manuscript” and “print” as modes of textual production. Samplers, as with writing books or printed forms (for bookkeeping, legal contracts, bills of lading), may be hybrid genres that reveal essential continuities between the writing, sewing, drawing, or painting hand and the printed word (Rosenbach Lectures, University of Pennsylvania, 6 February and 15 February 2006). Some eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century copybooks feature marking alphabets among the other fonts that they reproduce—­fonts in use by printers and scriveners. See, for example, Samuel Huntington’s American Penman, which includes cross-­stitch letters alongside Italic, German, Old English, and Egyptian alphabets. 82. See Hole, Westtown Through the Years, 73. 83. There are some exceptions to this style: “Lorenzo” appears in large lowercase letters instead of capitals, as in the printed versions of the poem that I have examined; Rowland’s embroidery does not reproduce printed italics and does not capitalize nouns. These latter two elements may be a function of her copy-­text; Young’s poem was extraordinarily popular and much reprinted and excerpted; although I have not yet found one, there could certainly have been versions without italics and without noun capitalization. 84. The verse fragment appears in “Night 9: The Consolation.” See Young, The Complaint; Or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 246. 85. For extended arguments about the perceived impersonality or personal “negativity” of print, see Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-­Century America. 86. On the possibilities and impossibilities of signatures, it may be helpful to recall Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” More explicitly than other signs, the signature operates as a perpetual evocation of present-­absence or absent-­presence: it indicates a moment in time and the presence of an individual (the moment of signing, the presence of the signer), but it also indicates timelessness and the absence of the individual (once the moment of signing has been witnessed, the signature is valid into perpetuity; the writing stands in for the signer, re-­present-­ing the necessarily physical act of subscription). That Rowland’s signature here is in Roman text underscores its reproducibility, its fundamental identity with other signatures, even as it denotes a singular individual at a particular time. See Derrida, Limited Inc., 19–21. 87. Ashton, Samplers, Selected and Described, 71. 88. Probate inventories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tend to list the collected textiles of a house, from bedsheets to napkins, below land and livestock but above things like chairs and tables and silverware. As steam-­powered looms and silk culture became more widespread in England in the nineteenth century, the value of fabric in America began to fall. Even so: although replacement prices for things like tablecloths and shirts were trending downward in 1805 Pennsylvania, textiles were by no means disposable goods. See Ulrich, The Age of Homespun. 89. Hole, Westtown Through the Years, 100. 90. Ibid., 100–101. 91. Bruckner, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” 313. See also Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods, 109–11. 92. For a catalogue of extant Westtown globes, see Tyner, “Stitching the World.”



Notes to Pages 145–159

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93. Quoted in Hole, Westtown Through the Years, 56. 94. There are other examples of the Cymbeline picture from the Rowson school. Ann Trask’s, for example, is at Old Sturbridge Village and is discussed by Nylander, “Some Print Sources of New England Schoolgirl Art,” 295. 95. Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1:93, 98. 96. See ibid., 1:81, and Nylander, “Some Print Sources.” 97. On the use of print sources as needlework patterns, see also Ivey, In the Neatest Manner, 75. 98. This holds even though the differences between the print and the needlework are so striking. In Blaney, for example, the reversal of the image may be explained by mechanical exigency: the source image may have been an intaglio print-­of-­a-­print, or it may have been inverted in the process of transferring it to fabric. Putting a robe on Caliban, however, is a slightly different story: because nudity—­especially male nudity—­would have been seen as inappropriate, teachers regularly clothed classically undraped figures. Teachers would also declutter designs, removing unprofitable things like monkeys or fairies. Students, then, are not copying the print but the teacher’s emended copy of the print—­the chain of sympathy is altered but unbroken. That said, there were things—­like color—­that neither the printed model nor the drawn/traced pattern would indicate—­these would be left to the cultivated sensibilities of the girl herself, likely in consultation with the instructor. 99. See, for example, Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 2:320–26. 100. Deutsch, “John Johnston, an Artist for the Needleworker,” 727. See Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1:80–81. 101. It’s worth pointing out that the flower was often considered a metaphor for youthful virtue and that botanical figures provided an extremely common way of talking about child development. The first part of Aunt Mary’s Tales (1827), for example, concludes with a poem that makes this all very easy to see: You, dearest girl, are but a budding flower; Your youthful mind is opening still to view; And, aided by instruction’s genial shower, Soon may the flowers of virtue bloom in you (66). 102. Bolton and Coe’s American Samplers does not record the variant that appears on Hooker’s and Blunt’s sampler, but it also appears on Hannah Bartlet’s sampler, worked in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1804 (Ring, Girlhood Embroidery, 1:120, fig. 136). 103. Bolton and Coe, American Samplers, 271–78. 104. Hamilton et al., The Federalist, 161. See Burstein, “Political Character of Sympathy,” 629, and Cornell, The Other Founders, 80. 105. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 43, and Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 254–58.

Chapter 5 1. See Slaughter, The Whisky Rebellion. 2. Hamilton et al., The Federalist, with Letters of “Brutus,” 41, 43.

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Notes to Pages 160–163

3. On Birch’s views, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, chap. 3; on Peale’s museum and Federalist fantasy, see Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, chap. 1, and Bellion, Citizen Spectator, chap. 1; on wax museums, see Kelly’s forthcoming National Galleries. 4. Wood, Julia, and the Illuminated Baron, ix. 5. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “Under the leveling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), the [free] themselves finally came to form that ‘herd’ which Hegel has declared to be the result of the Enlightenment” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13). 6. For a parallel argument about the conflict between “democratic personality” and nationalized subjectivity, in which the spectacles of nation building upset “private” or “innocent” economies of expression, see Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality, esp. chap. 6. 7. Such an approach follows Looby’s work on Brown’s Wieland (1798). He argues that the villainous Carwin’s ventriloquism, although productive of all sorts of horrifying consequences, is not “an aberration within the forms of auditory experience; rather, it is a version of the ordinary condition of such experience, the deterritorialization of vocal expressions. Its principle is the very principle of communication, the imaginary transposition that takes place in intersubjective understanding” (Voicing America, 168). That is, the questions of phenomenology raised in the everyday acts of conversing and understanding—­What does it matter who is speaking? for example, or, Is all audition (the hearing of another’s voice inside your own head) a threat to a coherent “identity”?—­ are the same as the ones raised by Wieland’s extraordinary feats of biloquism. See also Fliegelman, “Introduction,” and Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality, 180–82. 8. Brown, Ormond, 39. 9. For more on classical imitation and the modes of teaching painting in eighteenth-­century Continental salon culture, see Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, and Auricchio, “The Laws of Bienséance.” 10. Brown, Ormond, 39. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 40. 13. Ibid. 14. Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 180. 15. Speaking of Theodore Wieland similarly following in his father’s footsteps in Wieland, Caleb Crain notes that “to copy the father is not to honor him” (American Sympathy, 106); in these two cases, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. 16. Brown, Ormond, 41. 17. See Stern, Plight of Feeling, 166–67, and Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 175–76. 18. Brown, Ormond, 41, 42. 19. Ibid., 41–43. 20. Largely considered a rugged waste by its more densely populated neighbors to the south, eighteenth-­century New Hampshire was a notorious incubator for forgers, sharps, confidence men, rogues, blackguards, ne’er-­do-­wells, pirates, counterfeiters, smugglers, and other persons of ill-­ repute. See Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters, 32. Stephen Burroughs, perhaps the most famous confidence man in the Early Republic, was from Coventry (now Benton) in the western part of the state.



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21. Brown, Ormond, 49–50. It’s worth noting the gender politics here: “drudgery” typically carries an association with femininity. Jehan Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse (1530) has “Drudge, a woman servaunt, druge, meschine” (OED “drudge”); in the alternate ending to Godwin’s Caleb Williams, a woman appears in Williams’s cell to do the “drudgery” (440). These duties are, in other words, the opposite number to something like “masculine” independence. 22. Ibid., 50. 23. Ibid., 51. Such a disdain for the infelicities of the law is not surprising coming from Brown, who studied to become an attorney but abandoned his pursuits at the age of twenty-­one. For more on Brown’s legal career, see Ferguson, Law and Letters, 129–49. 24. Brown, Ormond, 50. 25. Ibid., 51. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 112. 28. Ibid., 265, 266. “Instrument” and “engine” of destruction are the terms in which Ormond explains himself in the novel’s denouement. Enlightening Constantia on the killing of Dudley, which he has directed Craig to perform, and on the reasons why he himself had to kill Craig, he explains, “I have set an engine [Craig] in act to obliterate an obstacle to your felicity, and lay your father at rest, under my guidance, this engine was productive only of good. Governed by itself or by another, it will only work you harm. I have, therefore, hastened to destroy it. Lo! it is now before you motionless and impotent” (Ormond, 266). For discussions of the pantograph, see Bedini, Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines. 29. See Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers. 30. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 220; Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 129. See also Looby, Voicing America, and Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power. 31. Thornton, Handwriting in America, 41 (my emphasis). 32. The mechanical metaphors come from John Jenkins’s 1791 The Art of Writing (quoted in McGill, “Duplicity of the Pen,” 45). In Declaring Independence, Fliegelman describes a difficult archival moment where the script of Philip Freneau and his brother Peter cannot be told apart (175). Michel Foucault counts the “gymnastics” of chirography—­“a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the finger”—­as one of the cardinal examples of the operations of discipline upon persons (Discipline and Punish, 152). 33. Noyes, Analytical Guide to the Art of Penmanship, 8. 34. See McGill, “Duplicity of the Pen.” Although McGill’s main focus falls somewhat later than Brown’s time, her observations about the procedures of teaching handwriting in the 1860s and 1870s are applicable to the late eighteenth century, too. Even after the Civil War, as “penmanship manuals take up the question of individuality in writing, it is most often treated as a ‘bias’ that prevents the acquisition of right writing, or as a ‘deviation’ that occurs when classroom instruction is through. In contrast, excellence in writing is marked by a momentary uncertainty about the ownership of one’s hand” (“Duplicity of the Pen,” 50–51). For more on the regularization of handwriting and personality, see Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 220–29. 35. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 219.

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Notes to Pages 166–170

36. Brown, Ormond, 116. 37. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 219. 38. Brown, Ormond, 42. 39. As Julia Stern observes of the unhappy apothecary, “Duped by the technology of writing—­ mistaking the supplement for an originary and authentic presence—­Dudley becomes the perfect gull for the forger’s misrepresentations” (Plight of Feeling, 200). 40. Brown, Ormond, 158. 41. Constantia “delighted to investigate the human countenance, and treasured up numberless conclusions as to the coincidence between mental and external qualities. . . . The features and shape sunk, as it were, into perfect harmony with sentiments and passions. Every atom of the frame was pregnant with significance” (Ormond, 97). 42. Brown, Ormond, 116. 43. On the operations and ideologies of physiognomy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Lukasik, Discerning Characters. Fliegelman notes that Lavater himself “skillfully begged the question” of whether belief in the doctrines of physiognomy “encouraged rather than exposed dissimulation.” He quotes Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: “ ‘The act of dissimulation itself, which is adduced as so insuperable an objection to the truth of physiognomy, is founded upon physiognomy. Why does the hypocrite assume the appearance of an honest man, but because that he is convinced, that all eyes are acquainted with the characteristic marks of honesty’ ” (Declaring Independence, 37). 44. “The utmost advantage should be taken,” Rush writes, “of a proper direction of those great principles in human conduct—­sensibility, habit, imitation, and association. . . . The influence [of] these physical causes will be powerful upon the intellects as well as upon the principles and morals of young people” (“A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools,” 15–16). 45. In The Plight of Feeling, Stern uses a similar trope to describe Ormond later in the text: “the sociopath mimics the forms of sympathy evacuated of all content” (205). 46. Hutton, Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary, 142. 47. Liu, Copying Machines, 12. See also Riskin, “Eighteenth-­Century Wetware,” 116. 48. Brown, Ormond, 116. 49. In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, one of Brown’s source texts for Ormond, we see a similar dynamic at work. A Mr. Collins, upon meeting Caleb Williams (not without acute displeasure) for the first time in many years: “You know my habits of thinking. I regard you as vicious; but I do not consider the vicious as proper objects of indignation and scorn. I consider you as a machine; you are not constituted, I am afraid, to be greatly useful to your fellow men: but you did not make yourself; you are just what circumstances compelled you to be. I am sorry for your ill properties; but I entertain no enmity against you, nothing but benevolence” (416). 50. Lukasik connects Craig’s (and Ormond’s) facial manipulations to a broader fear of Chesterfieldianism in the United States—­the worry that the teaching of manners will result in a mass of noble-­and polite-­seeming men who lack the breeding or moral stature to fulfill the duties of nobility or polite society. See Discerning Characters, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. 51. Brown, Ormond, 126–27. 52. See Franklin’s Father Abraham’s Speech. I thank Jay Grossman and Peter Jaros for pointing up the importance of the “maxim” in understanding Ormond’s character. Breitwieser rightly treats



Notes to Pages 171–175

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aphorism as a kind of Franklin-­virus: “in its insular independence from surrounding expository or literary context, in its adaptive transferability to a virtually unlimited variety of rhetorical contexts . . . it is the perfect formal vehicle for the Franklinian self ” (Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 259). 53. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28. 54. The Entertaining Medley, 119–22. 55. Sully, Memoirs, 3:216; Rush, “An Oration . . . Containing an Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” 5. 56. Rush, “An Oration . . . Containing an Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” 5–7. 57. Brown, Ormond, 127. 58. Webster, “On the Education of Youth in America,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 43 (my emphasis). 59. Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 186. See also Taylor’s discussion of this same inertial problem in Paul Henri Holbach’s Systême de la Nature in Sources of the Self, 325. 60. Brown, Ormond, 183. 61. Ibid., 127; “Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools,” 19. This division between “men in the abstract, and men as they are” never really goes away. It is also the organizing problem of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852). 62. Brown, Ormond, 127. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 127–28. 66. Ibid., 128. 67. Ibid. 68. It is worth noting here that universal determinism is the dark side of Paine and Jefferson, too. Their rhetoric of “self-­evidence,” typically deployed to mask partisan arguments (or to frame arguments as facts, as Edward Larkin puts it) about the freedom of the individual or the autonomy of the polity, can also be deployed for radically different ends. See Larkin, Introduction to Common Sense, esp. 23–28. 69. In some ways, the narrative’s explanation of the conditions that produce Ormond is consistent with the critiques of individualism that cut across Brown’s novels. As Cathy Davidson argues, “Characters in these novels flagrantly demarcate the self from the other, the individual from society, to put themselves against the enemy that stands in their way, which, collectivized, constitutes the actual community. In short, these characters lack any sense of social responsibility that might act as a check upon individual desire; they simply cannot balance the abstract claims of a community to which they belong (for they do not see themselves as belonging to one) against their individual and mostly materialistic tendencies” (Revolution and the Word, 334). This may be true, but Ormond approaches the problem of self and society from the opposite direction: he may be a libertine (or a Godwinian “rational anarchist” [Verhoeven, “This Blissful Period,”14]) without a meaningful connection to the community, but his lack of “social responsibility” springs from the mechanical nature of the society. In this, he reflects the necessitarian side of Godwin’s philosophy. See Wiley, The Sources and Influences of Charles Brockden Brown’s Novels, 116. Fliegelman remarks

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Notes to Pages 175–178

of Wieland’s Carwin that he seems a “victim of the ‘empire of mechanical and habitual impulses’ ” (“Introduction,” ix). 70. Brown, Ormond, 180. 71. Ibid., 117. 72. Ibid., 130. In “Thoughts upon Female Education,” Rush argues that if women were better educated, “our young men would then be restrained from vice by the terror of being banished from their company. The loud laugh, and the malignant smile, at the expence of innocence, or of personal infirmities—­the feats of successful mimickry—­and the low priced wit, which is borrowed from a misappropriation of scripture phrases, would no more be considered as recommendations to the society of the ladies” (in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 36). Rush casts all mimicry as exploitation—­humor at the “expence of innocence” or “personal infirmities.” As we shall see, Brown does not seem to disagree. Despite John Adams’s and Benjamin Rush’s disdain, there was, as Kenneth J. Silverman notes, a “general eighteenth-­century fondness for mimicry” (A Cultural History of the American Revolution, 94). The preface to The Mimic: A Poem (1761) remarks that “mimicry is not only the most entertaining, but the most difficult species of acting” (vi); it is an art that “the wisest and politest nations have held in the greatest esteem, and looked upon as a necessary accomplishment towards perfecting their greatest orators” (viii). Ormond’s mimicry, though gravely different in content, retains the same form as low comedy. 73. Brown, Ormond, 131. 74. Ibid., 250. 75. Ibid., 145–46. 76. As articulated by Rousseau, Diderot, Rush, and others, eighteenth-­century anti-­theatrical discourse centers on problems of “abortive sympathy” (Rush, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic, 31). When actors and audiences leave the theater and return to their actual lives, the argument runs, the mental effects of such mistaken identifications and misunderstandings linger on; participating in the fantasies of the stage world might render one incapable of negotiating the truths of the real world—­the putatively hard logics of the market, the home, and the public square. For more on anti-­theatricality in general, see Stern, Plight of Feeling, 216–17, and Barish, The Anti-­Theatrical Prejudice, passim. 77. Stern, Plight of Feeling, 212–13. 78. Brown, Ormond, 130–31. Just like the characters of Brown’s Wieland, Ormond inhabits a world in which baroque metaphor and fanciful utterance immediately become cold reality—­in which, as Mark Seltzer argues of Wieland, saying literally makes it so (“Saying Makes It So,” 83–91). 79. Universal Gazette, 4 July 1799. 80. The complexities of sex and gender are not uncommon themes in Brown’s work. As Bruce Burgett points out, Brown’s essay-­in-­dialogue Alcuin is dedicated to exploring and refuting received notions of sexual difference. Brown’s Mrs. Carter strongly resists “sexual dimorphism as the corporeal grounding of civil and political relations,” arguing that all gender hierarchies are specious because “ ‘men and women are partakers of the same nature’ ” (Sentimental Bodies, 125). 81. On Brown’s successes or failures in the depiction of female “character,” see Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 40–61; Stern, “State of ‘Women,’ ” 182; and Krause, “Brockden Brown’s Feminism.” 82. Brown, Ormond, 126.



Notes to Pages 179–182

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83. Ibid., 219. 84. Ibid., 242. 85. Ibid., 220–21. 86. Nelson, “A Just Reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” 167. 87. Brown, Ormond, 222. For more on method and Methodism, especially with respect to Phillis Wheatley, see Chapter 2. 88. Brown, Ormond, 222. 89. Ibid., 198, 191. 90. Ibid., 201–2. In her androgyny, Martinette is of a piece with other Brown heroines. See Burgett on Alcuin in Sentimental Bodies. 91. Brown, Ormond, 191. Martinette aggressively assumes commonness or representative status, even—­or especially—­when it seems most absurd. Consider, for example, the dialogue between Martinette and Constantia on the subject of the former’s parentage: “My mother was a Greek of Cyprus. My father was a Slavonian of Ragusa, and I was born in a garden at Aleppo.” When Constantia remarks on the “singular[ity]” of this “concurrence,” Martinette is nonplussed: “How singular? That a nautical vagrant like my father should sometimes anchor in the Bay of Naples; that a Cyprian merchant should carry his property and daughter beyond the reach of a Turkish sanjack, and seek an asylum so commodious as Napoli; that my father should have dealings with this merchant, see, love, and marry his daughter, and afterwards procure, from the French Government, a consular commission at Aleppo; that the union should, in due time, be productive of a son and daughter,—­ are events far from being singular. They happen daily” (193). 92. Ibid., 196–97. 93. That most advocates for the materiality of the mind and the soul were careful to profess a deep and abiding Christian faith seems to be beside Ormond’s point. Rush, for example, provides a third-­person defense in the preface to his oration on the influence of physical causes on the moral faculty: “He is so far from proposing physical influence, as a substitute for religious, moral, or rational instruction, that he offers it only as a reinforcement to the obligations of reason and religion; or rather, as a neglected part of christianity” (unnumbered “Preface”). Still, no matter how pious these materialists claimed to be, the doctrines that they espoused could be (and were) turned to atheistic purposes, and their critics were often successful in aligning them with godlessness in the popular imagination. John Stancliff ’s fanciful An Account of the Trial of Doctor Joseph Priestley (1784) imagines the materialist philosopher accused of denying the divinity of Christ and pleading his case in front of an American court. The judge convicts him and presents materialist doctrine as a kind of nation-­upsetting disease: he finds Priestley guilty of being “in league with Beelzebub. He, no doubt, hath sent you to breed an infection among the rising generation of these flourishing States” (23). 94. Brown, Ormond, 197. 95. Levine, “Conspiracy,” 130. 96. In Nelson’s “Just Reading of Ormond,” for example, Constantia is an example of “virtuous feminine helplessness” (170) whose studied passivity makes an otherwise sympathetic and charming Ormond into a sexual predator. In Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, she is a “chilling” virago (101), who lacks the “softer and more romantic qualities of womanhood” but who nonetheless uncomplicatedly represents the “female principle” that Ormond wishes to destroy (102). In each case,

260

Notes to Pages 182–186

Constantia is not so much a character as an explanation for Ormond’s less explainable actions. More recent criticism has moved toward thinking about Constantia on her own terms but tends to hew closely to the line that she is a paragon of embattled virtue or, as Stern puts it, “an almost allegorical representation of republican innocence under duress” (“The State of ‘Women,’ ” 184). 97. The name Constantia was a very common one in the sentimental discourse at the time, indicating the kinds of feminine sensibility and affection approved by the ancients. As the anonymously published Constantia: or a True Picture of Human Life (1751) puts it, “heroic love and unalterable constancy” are the only subjects suitable for novels (iv); several novels signaled their commitment to such subjects by giving the name to important characters (Harriet Lee’s Constantia de Valmont [1799], for example). Judith Sargent Murray wrote her Gleaner essays under the pseudonym of “Constantia”; she counts feminine constancy as one of the “noble passions” that argue for women’s equality (“On the Equality of the Sexes,” in Harris, ed., American Women Writers to 1800, 150). 98. “Criticism on Ormond; or the Secret Witness,” Universal Gazette (4 July 1799), 1. 99. Brown, Ormond, 81. 100. Ibid, 106. 101. Ibid., 81. 102. Ibid., 101. 103. Ibid., 102. 104. Ibid., 103. 105. Ibid., 104. 106. Ibid., 105. 107. Ibid., 155, 164. 108. Ibid., 132. 109. Ibid., 165. 110. Ibid., 155, 98, 173. 111. Ibid., 62. For more on Rush’s programs for the education of young women, see Chapter 3. 112. See Carlson, Introduction to Two Essays on the Mind, viii. Hartley was also a great favorite of Joseph Priestley, who wrote a laudatory book on Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind. On materialist psychology in Ormond, see Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 174–76; on materialist psychology more generally, see Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 69–104, and Barker-­ Benfield, Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility, 62–95. 113. Hartley, Observations on Man, 1:56. For Hume’s approach to the problem, see Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 63–68. 114. Brown, Ormond, 139–40. 115. Ibid., 172. 116. Ibid., 248. 117. In Wieland, Carwin describes the horrors that his ventriloquism engenders in precisely the same terms. Musing on the violent end of his sister, for example: “Surely my malignant stars had not made me the cause of her death; yet had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no controul, and which experience had shewn me was infinite in power?” (246). For further discussion of mechanism and necessitarian philosophy, see Fliegelman, “Introduction” to Wieland, xix–xx.



Notes to Pages 186–192

261

118. Brown, Ormond, 259. 119. Ibid., 264–66. 120. Ibid., 266. 121. Ibid., 269. 122. Ibid., 273. In what amounts to a critical narrative repetition, at a climactic moment in Brown’s Wieland, Clara fends off her depraved brother with a penknife. This detail, Ruttenburg argues, suggests that Clara and, by proxy, Brown have “not yet discovered a mode of guiltless authorship” (Democratic Personality, 257). Fliegelman reads the penknife as Brown’s suggestion of “connections among writing, violence, and symbolic revenge” (“Introduction,” xxv). It is also tempting to read these moments as twinned speculations on feminine empowerment through writing—­they are, after all, moments in which women successfully wield writing implements as weapons in defense of their autonomy. 123. The main character of E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1814 story “Automata” regards such devices—­ particularly the humanoid ones—­with a significant level of anxiety: “The fact of any human being’s doing anything in association with those lifeless figures which counterfeit the appearance and movements of humanity has always, to me, something fearful, unnatural, I may say terrible, about it. I suppose it would be possible, by means of certain mechanical arrangements inside them, to construct automata which would dance, and then to set them to dance with human beings, and twist and turn about in all sorts of figures; so that we should have a living man putting his arms about a lifeless partner of wood, and whirling round and round with her, or rather it. Could you look at such a sight, for an instant, without horror?” (Best Tales of E. T. A. Hoffman, 95). 124. Brown, Ormond, 273–74. 125. Ibid., 274. 126. Ibid., 240. 127. Ibid., 230. 128. Ibid., 206. It is worth noting here that the novel as a genre was often cast as a kind of infectious agent. In William Hill Brown’s Power of Sympathy, Mr. Holmes puts the problem in an entirely typical way: “We wisely exclude those persons from our conversation, whose characters are bad, whose manners are depraved, or whose morals are impure; but if they are excluded from an apprehension of contaminating our minds, how much more dangerous is the company of those books, where the strokes at virtue are redoubled, and the poison of vice, by repeatedly reading the same thing, indelibly distains the young mind?” (20–21). See Lukasik, Discerning Characters, 80. 129. Brown, Ormond, 80. 130. Ibid., 275–76. 131. Ibid., 276.

Chapter 6 1. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 4 (December 1851): 137. 2. “Herman Melville’s Whale,” The International Magazine of Literature, Art, and Science 4.5 (December 1851): 602. The review first appeared in The Spectator 1217 (25 October 1851): 1026.

262

Notes to Pages 192–194

3. Following advertisements for Melville’s other published books in the 1851 Harper and Brothers edition of Moby-­Dick: or The Whale, there is a doubly un-­originary prospectus for Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Like the International Magazine, Harper’s Monthly Magazine’s explicit mission is to furnish the American reading public with the best British reprints. “The Magazine will contain all the continuous Tales of Dickens, Bulwer, Croly, Lever, Warren, and other distinguished contributors to British periodicals: Critical notes of the Publications of the day: Speeches and Addresses of distinguished Men upon Topics of universal Interest: articles from Punch and other well known humorous publications, and some of the master-­pieces of classical English literature, illustrated in a style of unequaled elegance and beauty; notices of Events, in Science, Literature, and Art, in which the people at large have an interest, &c., &c.” Harper’s Magazine still operates under these principles today, reproducing articles from diverse sources in its “Readings” section. For more on Harper’s as an engine of reprinting in the nineteenth century, see Newbury, Figuring Authorship in America, 201–5. 4. “Herman Melville’s Whale,” 602, 604. 5. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834–1853, 4. For other views on this debate, see Newbury, Figuring Authorship in America; Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America; Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870. For more on the Young America movement, see Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville, and Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. 6. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 248. On the conceit of the Virginian (and “Mosses” as ironic pose), see Rothschild, “Reframing Melville’s ‘Manifesto.’ ” Hawthorne himself periodically embraces such a distributed, geographical (or neoclassical) conception of genius: in “The Old Manse,” he writes, “A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries” (Tales and Sketches, 1138). On conceptions of originality and conventions of authorship more generally, see, among many others, Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature; Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright; Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality; Mallon, Stolen Words; and Woodmansee and Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. In Faking Literature, K. K. Ruthven maps elegantly different species of dissent from such “originological,” romantic, and commodified conceptions of authorship. 7. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 252. 8. Ibid., 253. 9. Melville to Richard Bentley, 27 June 1850 (Correspondence, 163). 10. Howard Vincent’s magisterial source study, The Trying-­Out of Moby-­Dick, is nearly as long as Moby-­Dick itself. Vincent goes well beyond providing vague analogues and possible inspirations for Melville’s creative mind—­he exhaustively reproduces sentences and paragraphs from other books that appear, changed or unchanged, in the text of Melville’s novel. 11. Van Doren, Cambridge History of American Literature, 1:322–23. In 1899, William Livingston Alden wrote one of the earliest calls to canonize Moby-­Dick, arguing that “Melville was perhaps the most original genius that America has produced”; Augustine Birrell, reviewing the 1920 Oxford World Classics edition of Moby-­Dick, takes its originality as so obvious as to be beneath discussion:



Notes to Pages 195–197

263

“The two striking features of this book, after allowing for the fact that it is a work of genius and therefore sui generis, are, as it appears to me, its most amazing eloquence, and its mingling of an ever-­present romanticism of style with an almost savage reality of narrative” (quoted by Hayford, et al., in the “Historical Note” to the Northwestern-­Newberry edition of Moby-­Dick, 749–51). This profusion of genius has been used to explain Moby-­Dick’s low appeal among the reading publics of the United States and Britain in the years after its publication: Melville’s work was simply too original to be understood—­let alone consumed—­by contemporary audiences. On the politics and consequences of the canonization of Moby-­Dick—­particularly with respect to the question of a distinctly modernist “originality”—­see Lauter, “Melville Climbs the Canon.” 12. Moby-­Dick, 433. This paradigm holds true even in revisionist work on Melville and his sources. Writing about Typee, Elizabeth Renker argues that copying is necessary to Melville’s method but that he always “anxiously disavows” and “represses” his “disingenuous” borrowings (Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing, 5, 3). In her portrait, Melville’s works are structured by his fears that the terrible opacity of all written description—­especially second-­hand description—­necessarily obscures nontextualizable truth. As such, the anxiety about copying appears to be a “constitutive component” of Melville’s work, not the copying itself. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to Moby-­Dick are to the Northwestern-­Newberry edition. 13. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, 125. We might add Seneca’s Epistle 84; see Potolsky, Mimesis, 57. 14. Vincent, The Trying-­Out of Moby-­Dick, 135. 15. See Dyer, Pastiche, esp. chap. 1. 16. Newbury neatly summarizes the situation of copyright in the American nineteenth century: “Literary property simply was not, even in an age of rapidly expanding industrial capitalism and possessive individualism, hegemonically understood to be a natural, inalienable, or self-­ evident possession of the writer or anybody else” (Figuring Authorship, 187). 17. See Weinauer, “Plagiarism and the Proprietary Self,” 697. 18. These are the “Cold War readings” of Melville, in which, as Michael Warner puts it, “the American individual is pitted against a demon of ideology that is identified with everything except the American individual” (“What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?” 50). Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism and Wai-­Chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism, for example, each argue that Melville embraces a philosophy of literary production built around the singularity of his own genius. This, in turn, provides for a capitalist-­individualist mode of authorship: when the writer is solely responsible for the generation of the text, it is his to own or sell, as his conscience (or the market) dictates. For a counterreading, see Pease, “Moby-­Dick and the Cold War,” in Michaels and Pease, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered, 113–56. 19. Dana, The Seaman’s Friend, 44. W. Clark Russell defines splice as “a connexion formed by passing the ends of two ropes through their strands.” See Sailor’s Language: A Collection of Sea-­ Terms and Their Definitions, 134. On the baroque world of sailors’ ropework, see Ashley, The Ashley Book of Knots. 20. “Splice,” An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828 ed. 21. Melville, in a letter to Sarah Huyler Morewood (12? September 1851), reproduces the textile metaphor: “Concerning my own forthcoming book—­it is off my hands, but must cross the sea

264

Notes to Pages 197–204

before publication here. Dont you buy it—­dont you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a peice of fine feminine Spitalfields silk—­but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers” (Correspondence of Herman Melville, 206). 22. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 398. 23. In Richard Bentley’s London edition of The Whale, these two sections appear in an appendix at the end of volume 3; they are the last words of the book, not the first. For other substantive differences between the American and British editions, see Hayford, Parker, and Tanselle’s “Note on the Text,” in Moby-­Dick, 763–808. 24. Melville, Moby-­Dick, xv–xvii. 25. Ibid., xvii, xxiii–xxiv. 26. Ibid., 136. 27. Ibid., 145. 28. Ibid., 136. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 263–64. 31. For more on Hunter’s presence in Moby-­Dick, see Vincent, The Trying-­Out of Moby-­Dick, 218–19; Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, 132–33. 32. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 134, 136. 33. See Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 223. 34. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 19. 35. This is not an uncommon nineteenth-­century usage, especially for mariners and unreconstructed New Englanders. W. H. Smyth, for example, defines “splice” as “the joining of two ropes together. Familiarly, two persons joined in wedlock” (Sailor’s Word Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms, 643). One caricature of New England romance, “A Runaway Couple,” tells the story of “ ‘true lovyers’ of the most fervent Yankee stamp, arrived at a small inn near Boston, [who] wanted the landlord to send for a minister to ‘splice ’em,’ and to ‘be quick about it.’ ” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 11.63 (August 1855): 421. It was later reprinted in Flag of Our Union 12.49 (December 1857) and Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine 7.2 (February 1858). 36. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 19–20. 37. Ibid., 23, 24. 38. Ibid., 24. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 25. For more on the erotics of Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship, see Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form, and Crain, “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels.” 41. Ibid., 51. 42. The death of Ishmael is another of the substantive differences between the first American and British editions of Moby-­Dick: in Bentley’s London edition of The Whale, there is no epilogue, no Ishmael scooped up by a passing ship. The Spectator review reproduced in the International Magazine ends by pointing out that “it is a canon with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to have known: thus, he must not



Notes to Pages 204–213

265

describe the conversation of miners in a pit if they all perish” (“Herman Melville’s Whale,” 604). The implication, of course, is that Ishmael could not narrate the story of the Pequod after having perished in its sinking. The first American edition, published after the British edition, includes an epilogue that remedies this unconventionality: Ishmael survives to tell his tale. See Parker, Herman Melville, 2:20–22. 43. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 88. 44. Ibid.. 45. Ibid., 428–29. 46. Ibid., 414. 47. Ibid., 432–33. About Flask’s math, the less said the better. 48. Ibid., 434. 49. Ibid., 164. 50. Ibid., 471–72. 51. Ahab’s words curiously echo arguments made before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark copyright case of Wheaton v. Peters in 1833. J. R. Ingersoll, one of the lawyers representing the government, argues that “an individual who . . . mingles what cannot be exclusively enjoyed, with what can, does upon familiar principles, rather forfeit the power over his own peculiar work, than throw the chain around that which is of itself as free as air. The intermixture . . . must render the whole insusceptible of exclusive ownership. That which is public cannot in its nature be made private, but not e contra” (McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 61). 52. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 163. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 164. 55. Ibid., 561–62. 56. Ibid., 121. 57. Ibid., 557. 58. Ibid., 88. 59. Ibid., 572. 60. Dana describes the process of making “An Eye Splice . . . Unlay the end of a rope for a short distance, and lay the three strands upon the standing part, so as to form an eye. Put one end through the strand next to it. Put the next end over that strand and through the second; and put the remaining end through the third strand, on the other side of the rope. Taper them, as in the short splice, by dividing the strands and sticking them again” (Seaman’s Friend, 44–45). 61. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 573. 62. Ibid., 480–81. 63. Ibid., 320n (Melville’s note). 64. Ibid., 320. 65. Fiedler reads this passage as mapping directly onto heteronormative marriage practices, finding in Ishmael’s tone an ironic distance that indicates a depth of feeling for Queequeg that mirrors but surpasses companionate male-­female matrimony (Love and Death in the American Novel, 376–77). 66. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 320.

266

Notes to Pages 213–216

67. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 261. 68. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 320. 69. Although John Locke is typically considered to be the chief philosophical advocate for possessive individualism, recent scholarship has troubled this consideration. Matthew Kramer convincingly demonstrates that Locke’s thought is characterized by a “complete interpenetration of communitarianism and individualism. . . . His atomism was itself utterly collectivistic. We shall find that a blending of values [of atomism and collectivism] was out of reach, for one value engulfed the other entirely” (John Locke and the Origins of Private Property, 4). 70. Melville, Moby-­Dick, 396–98. 71. In the “Concluding Remarks” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe remarks that “there is one thing that every individual can do,—­they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race” (624). 72. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 39. 73. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 1028–29. 74. Ibid., 1034. It’s worth noting that Emerson is here quoting himself—­this is one of the hundreds of bits of prose that Emerson poached from his own journals. See Selected Journals 1841–1877, 591. On Emerson’s compositional practice, see Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance, chap. 3. 75. Emerson, Essays & Poems, 1041.

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Index

Numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbott, Lemuel 231 n. 44 Abelove, Henry 61 Abernethy, John 57 Adams, Abigail 46 Adams, John 46–47, 106, 114, 226 n. 97 Adorno, Theodor 92, 170–71 aesthetics 47, 80–81, 146, 154, 160, 195, 215–16; neoclassical 48–49, 53, 56, 58–59, 66 Alden, Timothy 151 Alien and Sedition Acts 159 Allen, Charles 124, 126, 131, 138 American Philosophical Society 90–91, 94, 96–98, 105 Amory, Thomas 69–71 Anderson, Douglas 43 anonymity 119–22, 142, 248 nn. 22–23 Arminianism 25, 61 arts 161–63; of dependence 8–16, 20–21, 47, 86, 112, 121, 159–60, 189–90, 194, 200, 215; fine 134; ornamental 14 Ascham, Roger 27–28 astronomy 85, 96–101, 117. See also astrotheology; orrery; Rittenhouse, David astrotheology 49, 66–74 automata 168, 261 n. 123 Bailey, Nathan 136 Bakhtin, Mikhail 123 Barlow, Joel 236 n. 7 Barthes, Roland 201 Bartolozzi, Francesco 162 Bartram, John 90 Beach, Clementina 133–34, 146, 149 Beale, Thomas 195, 201 Bell, Archibald 50 Baudrillard, Jean 3

behavioral modeling 28, 31–32, 95–96. See also psychology, materalist Benjamin, Walter 217 n. 2 Bennett, Frederick 195 Bentley, Richard 194, 204, 211 Birch, Thomas 160 Blaney, Caroline 146, 149–50, 253 n. 98 Blunt, Sally 151, 153, 154–55, 190 Boerhaave, Herman 93 Boudinot, Elias 113 Bowdoin, James 51 Boydell, John and Josiah 146, 149–50 Boyle, Robert 68 Boyle, Richard, Earl of Orrery 86 Boylston, Nicholas 76–77 Bradstreet, Ann 51 Breitweiser, Mitchell 39, 41 Brown, Charles Brockden 11, 14–15, 214; Alcuin 183, 258 n. 80; Arthur Mervyn 15; Edgar Huntly 15; Ormond; or the Secret Witness 15, 160–91, 207, 257 n. 69, 259 n. 91; Wieland 114, 160, 190, 222 n. 30, 227 n. 2, 254 n. 7, 254 n. 15, 258 n. 78, 260 n. 117, 261 n. 122 Brown, William Hill 160, 261 n. 128 Buell, Lawrence 218 n. 20 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 53, 85 Bunyan, John 33 Burroughs, Stephen 15 Butterfield, L. H. 37 Byles, Mather 50, 58 Cahill, Edward 162, 173 capitalism 7, 11, 16, 19–20, 162, 196, 213–15, 237 n. 9, 247 n. 14, 263 n. 18 Cassini, Jacques 68 Cavitch, Max 76 Chapone, Hester 221 n. 25

296 Index Chastellux, Marquis de 55, 230 n. 40 Chauncy, Charles 51, 69 Chesterfield, Lord 15, 54, 256 n. 50 Christianity. See Jesus; Methodism; Puritanism; Reformation, Protestant citation. See quotation Clap, David 129 Clark, Mary Ann 251 n. 80 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark clones 3 Cobbett, William 92, 101 compilation 16, 120–23, 199, 248 n. 25 Constitution, U.S. 113, 116, 159; Article V 44; three-fifths clause 47 contagion 163, 188–91 Continental Congress 96, 106, 107 convention 4–5; poetic 47–49, 58 Cope, Rachel 145 copybooks 41–42, 102, 129–30, 165, 216, 249 n. 48, 252 n. 81. See also handwriting copyright 193, 263 n. 16, 263 n. 18, 265 n. 51 counterfeiting. See forgery; mimicry Cotton, John 37 Coxe, Tench 114 Cullen, William 93 currency 106–10, 111, 119, 207–8, 244 n. 92; decimal basis for 107–8, 110. See also Mint, U.S. Dana, Richard Henry 196, 198, 265 n. 60 Daston, Lorraine 106 Davidson, Cathy 257 n. 69 de Tocqueville, Alexis 8 Derham, William 68, 245 n. 120 Derrida, Jacques 252 n. 86 Descartes, René 2, 169 Deutsch, Davida 151 Dickinson, Emily 216 Diderot, Denis 217 n. 17, 258 n. 76 disinterest 13, 30, 88–89, 101, 111–13, 118, 187, 214, 236 n. 8, 237 n. 9, 238 n. 14 Dixon, John 242 n. 67 Doggett, John 146 Donne, John 37 Douglass, Frederick 7–8, 216 DuBourg, Barbeu 42 Duchamp, Marcel 217 n. 2 Duffield, Brainerd 206 Dupré, Augustin 110 Duyckinck, Evert 193

education 78, 80, 95–96, 108, 112, 173–74, 185; women’s 13–14, 33, 51, 116–56, 180. See also Franklin, Benjamin; Rush, Benjamin elegy 36–37, 43, 48, 64–65, 74–78, 114, 119, 221 n. 16 Eliot, T. S. 195 Elyot, Thomas 27 embroidery. See sampler Emerson, Ralph Waldo 16, 65, 81, 92, 193, 196, 209, 215; Divinity School Address 4–6; Journals 218 n. 21; Nature 5–6, 217 n. 18; “Quotation and Originality” 216; “SelfReliance” 3, 5, 213–14, 216 empiricism 92–93. See also Enlightenment; New Science emulation 20–21, 23, 31, 64, 80–81, 92, 116–17, 120, 124–25, 128, 130–37, 154, 161–62, 170, 174, 197, 207, 247 n. 14; definitions of 118–19; doubleness of 33, 44 Enlightenment 5, 49, 93, 113, 171, 177. See also empiricism; New Science; psychology, materialist Equiano, Olaudah 66 Erasmus, Desiderius 27–28, 34, 48, 220 n. 11 Erkkila, Betsy 31, 36 exceptionalism 2–3, 15, 190; American 100 Fauchet, Abbé de 37 federalism 100, 108 Federalist Papers 115, 155–56, 159 Fenno, John 109 fiction. See novel Fisher, Anne 120 Fisher, George 42, 120 Flamsteed, John 68 Fletcher, Andrew 246 n. 5 Fliegelman, Jay 53, 165, 238 n. 17, 255 n. 32 forgery 15, 22, 63, 163, 165–70, 172, 186 Foucault, Michel 176, 242 n. 72, 255 n. 32, 255 n. 34 Fox, George 30 Franklin, Benjamin 11–13, 15, 19–44, 47, 61–63, 75–76, 80, 85, 88–94, 106, 109, 112, 118, 129, 159–62, 164, 166, 175, 179–80, 190, 196, 207, 215, 222 n. 36, 223 n. 51; corporeality of 31, 36, 37, 38, 41; on elegy 221 n. 16; imitation of the Spectator 33–35, 38, 42, 224 n. 66, 224 n. 69; interest in poetry 32–33, 36; and printing 20, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 44, 45; and Protestantism 26; theory of imitation 22–23, 28–29, 35;



Index 297

Autobiography 88; —, reception of 19–20; —, Table of Virtues in 21–22, 29–31, 38, 40, 42, 44, 107, 119; —, George Whitefield in 61–62; General Magazine and Historical Chronicle 35; Poor Richard’s Almanac 19, 29, 170, 220 n. 12; “The Way to Wealth” (see Poor Richard’s Almanac) Franklin, William 29 Freud, Sigmund 3 Fuseli, Henry 162 Fuss, Diana 227 n. 106 Galilei, Galileo 68 Galison, Peter 106 Garden, Alexander 62 Garrick, David 147 Gates, Henry Louis 48–49 Geertz, Clifford 3 genius 8, 11, 16, 48–49, 85–86, 106, 188, 193–96, 216 George III, King 109 Godwin, William 173, 254 n. 19, 256 n. 49, 257 n. 69 Gothic 15, 160–61, 165, 174–75, 182, 186–87. See also Brown, Charles Brockden grammar 27, 124, 131–33, 208, 226 n. 87 Grand Federal Convention 116 Green, James N. 23 Green, Simon Ray 130 Greenwood, James 27 habit 71, 95, 168–69, 180, 226 n. 97, 256 n. 44 Hall, David 42 Halley, Edmond 68 Hamilton, Alexander 88, 107–8, 155–56 Hancock, John 51 handwriting 14, 36, 91, 102, 103, 104, 129–31, 163–67, 249 n. 48, 255 n. 32; women’s 116. See also copybooks Harper’s Monthly Magazine 193, 262 n. 3 Hartley, David 93, 185, 187, 260 n. 112 Hastings, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon 57 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 193–94, 257 n. 61, 262 n. 6 Heighton, William 8 Herbert, George 57–58 Hobbes, Thomas 199 Hoffman, E. T. A. 261 n. 123 Homer 59 Hooke, Robert 68

Hooker, Mary Ann 151, 152, 154–55, 190 Hopkins, Samuel 50 Horkheimer, Max 92, 170–71 humanism 23, 26–28, 34–35, 44, 185, 222 nn. 29–30. See also Erasmus Hume, David 92–93, 185, 242 n. 64 humility 22–23, 26, 28, 56, 57–58, 72, 111, 136, 142, 189, 220 n. 11, 223 n. 51 Hunter, John 200–201 Huntington, Samuel 252 n. 81 Hutchinson, Thomas 51 Hutton, Charles 168 Huygens, Christian 245 n. 120 imagination 52–53, 56, 73–74 imitatio Christi. See Jesus, imitation of imitation 32; developmental model of 47; of persons (see mimicry); poetic 56, 59–60, 73; and race 46–47, 51–52; virtuous 88, 121.See also Jesus, imitation of individualism. See subjectivity, liberal instrumentality 12, 20, 26, 28–29, 33, 110, 175–76, 179, 185–87, 237 n. 11 James, Abel 30 Jay-Z 228 n. 9 Jefferson, Thomas 85–86, 89, 96, 98, 106, 107, 112–15, 245 n. 121, 257 n. 68; on Phillis Wheatley’s poetry 52–53, 63; on prosody 55–56; on race 53–55, 242 n. 71 Jehlen, Myra 22 Jenkins, John 255 n. 32 Jesus 138–39, 220 n. 11, 221 n. 25, 223 n. 51; imitation of 21–26, 221 n. 23 Johnson, Samuel 44, 88, 119, 124–25, 227 n. 105 Johnston, John 151 Jordan, June 48 Kant, Immanuel 5, 11 Keimer, Samuel 27, 36 Kelley, Mary 14, 219 n. 42 Kempis, Thomas à 235 n. 138; De Imitatione Christi 25 Knott, Sarah 10, 123 Koons, Jeff 2 Lamb, Charles 199 Langhorne, John 52, 66 Lavater, Johann Caspar 243 n. 85, 256 n. 43 Lavington, George 57

298 Index Lawrence, D. H. 22, 41, 112 Le Veillard, Guillaume 32 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 102 Lemay, J. A. Leo 20 Levine, Robert S. 182 Levine, Sherrie 217 n. 2 liberalism. See subjectivity, liberal liberty 101, 190; blank verse as sign for 55–56; liberty cap 110–11; liberty pole 110; liberty tree 100, 110; personification of 110; in theology 239 n. 41 Lichtenstein, Roy 2 Linnaeus, Carl 160, 200 Liu, Catherine 169 Locke, John 92–93, 185, 266 n. 69 Looby, Christopher 37, 224 n. 69, 225 n. 80, 254 n. 7 Lott, Eric 177 Macdonald, Dwight 2–3 machine, republican 13, 92, 96, 113, 115, 161, 165, 169–70, 174, 178, 185, 187, 237 n. 12, 240 n. 46. See also orrery Madison, James 115, 159 Maecenas. See Phillis Wheatley, “To Maecenas” Mann, Horace 250 n. 55 Marshall, Samuel 77 Mason, Julian 48 Massinger, Philip 195 materialism. See psychology, materialist Mather, Cotton 25, 29, 33, 37 Mather, Increase 25, 69 McGill, Meredith 193 Melville, Herman 11, 15, 16; “Hawthorne and His Mosses” 193–94; Moby-Dick; or The Whale 16, 192–216; —, first American and British editions compared 197, 199, 204, 211, 264 n. 23; —, reception of 192–93, 215, 262 n. 11, 264 n. 42 Meranze, Michael 95 metempsychosis 205–15 Methodism 13, 56, 57, 61–64, 94, 179–80, 221 n. 23. See also Wesley, John; Wheatley, Phillis; Whitefield, George Milns, William 103 Milton, John 56, 67, 69, 128, 185, 199, 233 n. 92, 238 n. 21 mimicry 46–47, 63, 128, 167, 175–81, 227 n. 2, 258 n. 72

Mint, U.S. 107–9, 112–13, 244 n. 100. See also currency Monaghan, E. Jennifer 130 money. See currency monomania 197, 208–11 monotony 50, 53–54, 164 Morris, Robert 107 Murray, Judith Sargent 260 n. 97 Murray, Lindley 126, 208 Neal, James A. 118 Neal, Mehitable 146, 149–51 Nemerov, Alexander 106 neoclassicism. See aesthetics, neoclassical New Jersey, College of. See Princeton University New England Primer 199 New Pleasing Instructor, The. See Rowson, Susanna New Science 25, 88 Newton, Sir Isaac 68, 93, 102, 107, 113, 173, 185, 241 n. 55 Nieuwentyt, Bernard 68 Nini, Jean-Baptiste 219 n. 1 novel: arguments against reading 125; sentimental 89, 119, 125, 128. See also Brown, Charles Brockden; Melville, Herman; Rowson, Susanna Noyes, Enoch 166 Nylander, Jane C. 146 Oakes, Urian 75–76 Occom, Samson 50 Odell, Jonathan 238 n. 21 Ogden, John Cosens 251 n. 74 Oliver, Andrew 51 opacity. See transparency originality 2–5, 9–10, 20, 47, 121, 136, 192–94, 197, 213–16 ornament. See arts, ornamental orrery 13, 86, 87, 98–101, 106–7, 145, 242 n. 67. See also Rittenhouse, David Paine, Robert Treat, Jr. 100 Paine, Thomas 88, 98, 100, 257 n. 68 Palsgrave, Jehan 254 n. 19 Patterson, Robert 112–13 Peale, Charles Willson 103–4, 105, 160 pedagogy. See education Pennsylvania, University of 99–100



Index 299

Petrarch 27, 185 philology, classical. See humanism physiognomy 168, 243 n. 85, 256 n. 43. See also Lavater, Caspar Picard, Jean-Félix 68 pileus. See liberty cap Plutarch 29, 33 poetic form 55, 64. See also aesthetics; elegy; prosody; Wheatley, Phillis Poor, John 118 Pope, Alexander 72–73; Dunciad 52, 114; The Rape of the Lock 199 Price, Richard 240 n. 43 Priestley, Joseph 92–93, 112, 259 n. 93, 260 n. 112 Prince, Richard 217 n. 2 Princeton University 99–100 printing 20, 26–27, 30–35, 38–39, 43–44, 45, 139–42, 149–51, 165–66, 195 prosody 79, 231 n. 44; and race 55–56, 231 n. 46 psychology 54; Freudian 3; materialist 13, 93– 95, 171–72, 178–81, 184–87, 191, 260 n. 112 Puritanism 19, 23–24. See also Mather, Cotton; Reformation, Protestant; Weber, Max Puttenham, George 27 Pythagoras 206–7 Quakerism 30, 94, 204–5. See also Westtown School Quarles, Francis 37 quotation 122, 170, 197, 200–201, 208, 211, 216. See also humanism race 53–55, 78–79, 85, 176–77. See also Jefferson, Thomas; mimicry; slavery; Wheatley, Phillis Ramsay, Allan 227 n. 99 Raynal, Abbé 85 reading 126–29 Reformation, Protestant 24 religion (Christianity) 4, 23–24, 44 repetition 38, 47, 62, 81; in astronomy 70–73; in poetry 47–49 Revere, Paul 110 Reynolds, J. N. 193 Richardson, Charles 197 Richardson, Samuel 128 Richter, Gerhard 217 n. 2 Rittenhouse, David 13, 85–92, 96–103, 104,

105, 112–16, 118, 119, 126, 129, 145, 159, 166; death of 90–92; orreries designed by 86, 87, 98–100; work at U.S. Mint 106–11 Rochfort, John Prime Iron 233 n. 86 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 258 n. 76 Rowland, Elizabeth 139, 140, 141 Rowson, Susanna 14, 15, 119–20, 125, 135, 146, 154, 160–61, 165, 196; Charlotte Temple; a Tale of Truth 120, 125, 128, 131–32, 156, 249 n. 44; The New Pleasing Instructor 120–23, 125–32, 137–38, 156, 222 n. 25; A Present for Young Ladies 133, 156; Spelling Dictionary 124, 128 Rush, Benjamin 13, 15, 91–104, 106–7, 111–13, 115, 126, 154, 159–61, 165, 168–69, 171–72, 174–75, 177, 180, 185, 187, 190, 196, 207, 223 n. 37, 259 n. 93; An Eulogium, Intended to Perpetuate the Memory of David Rittenhouse . . . 91, 97–102, 114, 116, 129; Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty 94; Observations on the Diseases of the Mind 93; “A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools in Pennsylvania” 96, 174; “Thoughts on Female Education . . .” 116–18, 125, 134, 258 n. 72, 258 n. 76 Salisbury, Samuel 130 sampler 25, 156, 190, 250 n. 69, 252 n. 81; darning 142, 143, 144; embroidered 11, 14, 119, 135–36, 137, 138–39, 140, 141, 142, 151, 152, 153, 154–55, 251 n. 80; globe 144, 145, 146 Sancho, Ignatius 242 n. 71 Saunders, Judith Foster 133–34, 146, 149 Scheick, William 57 Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston 234 n. 121 Schuyler, John Philip 241 n. 51 Schwartz, Hillel 166 Sedition Acts. See Alien and Sedition Acts self-reliance 8, 193. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo Seneca Falls Convention 7 sensibility 92, 125 Shadwell, Thomas 52 Shakespeare, William 39, 115, 194, 195, 199, 240 n. 40; Cymbeline 146, 148, 150; Hamlet 95; The Tempest 146, 147, 149 Shakespeare Galleries 146–47 Shapin, Steven 236 n. 8 Shlensky, Lincoln 49 simulacra 159, 163, 169

300 Index simulation 240 n. 41 Slauter, Eric 11 slavery 12, 47, 91, 110, 214, 216. See also Jefferson, Thomas; race; Wheatley, Phillis Smead, Benjamin 242 n. 67 Smith, Abigail. See Adams, Abigail Smith, Adam 124–25 Smith, William 43, 91 Socrates 21–22, 26–28, 161, 220 n. 11, 221 n. 17, 223 n. 51 Solomon, King 109 Spectator 12, 32–34, 162, 224 n. 66 Spenser, Edmund 199 splicing 196–97, 198, 199–214, 264 n. 35, 265 n. 60 Stamp Act 110 Stancliff, John 259 n. 93 Stanhope, George 221 n. 23 Stallybrass, Peter 23 Stern, Julia 176–77, 238 n. 14 Stockton, Annis Boudinot 234 n. 101 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 215 Stuart, Gilbert 134 subjectivity 23, 162, 172–73, 193; Christian 49, 58 (see also Jesus); liberal 3, 13, 49, 112, 118–19, 121, 151, 189, 193, 196, 266 n. 69; republican 9–10, 14, 15, 86, 89–90, 104, 109–15, 118, 142, 151, 161, 178–80, 182, 185, 207, 216; —, compared to liberal and Romantic subjectivity 112; Romantic 112, 124, 139; women’s 14, 117–18, 154–55. See also education; psychology Sullivan, James 234 n. 124 Sully, Duke of 171–72 Swan, Susan Burrows 136 Swanwick, John 114 sympathy 123, 125–26, 131, 161, 172, 174, 177, 179, 181, 183–84, 203, 216; definition of 124; sympathetic identification 14–16, 89, 124, 131–32, 149, 165, 249 n. 37; —, in reading 126–28; —, and writing 131–32 Tamarkin, Elisa 10 Taylor, Charles 2, 227 n. 106 Taylor, Edward 24, 57, 234 n. 121 Taylor, Elizabeth 129 Tennenhouse, Leonard 10 theatricality 62, 176–77, 258 n. 72 Thomson, James 241 n. 55 Thornton, Tamara 165–66

Tracy, Almond 129–30 Transcendentalism 5. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo transparency 28, 54, 64, 97, 100–102, 104, 107–8, 113, 115, 124, 165–67, 190, 243 n. 85, 263 n. 12 Trusler, John 113–14 Twain, Mark 76 Ulloa, Antonio 199 Unitarianism 6 van Doren, Charles 194 Vaughn, Benjamin 30 Vaughn, Caroline 136, 137, 138–39 Veblen, Thorstein 247 n. 14 Venus, transit of 97, 114, 245 n. 119 Vico, Giambattista 221 n. 17 Vincent, Howard 195 Virgil 59–60 Walcutt, Thomas 69 Walden, Mary 136 Warhol, Andy 2, 217 n. 2 Warner, Michael 16, 30–31, 35–36, 39 Washington, George 50, 85, 88, 89, 91, 107, 237 n. 11 Weber, Max 19 Webster, Noah 27, 173, 196–97, 198 Wesley, John 61, 63–64, 221 n. 23, 232 n. 64, 235 n. 134. See also Methodism Westtown School 139–46, 226 n. 87 Wheatley, John 50–51 Wheatley, Mary 50 Wheatley, Nathaniel 50 Wheatley, Phillis 11–13, 15, 85–86, 94, 101, 118, 142, 159–60, 196, 200, 215; as figure to be emulated 80–81; publication of her poetry 50–51; reception of her poetry 48–49, 51, 228 n. 7, 228 n. 9; “Address to the Atheist” 233 n. 88; “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of . . . George Whitefield” 50, 64–66; “An Hymn to Morning” 72; “On Being Brought from Africa to America” 235 n. 129; “On Imagination” 73–74; “On Messrs Hussey and Coffin” 50; “On the Death of J. C., an Infant” 74–75; “On the Death of Dr. Samuel Marshall. 1771” 77; “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” 66–70, 73; “To a Lady and Her Children, on the Death of



Index 301

Her Son and Their Brother” 76; “To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband” 67; “To a Lady on the Death of Three Relations” 67; “To His Honour the LieutenantGovernor . . .” 75; “To Maecenas” 58–61; “To the Rev. Dr. Thomas Amory . . .” 70–72; “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” 235 n. 131;“To the University of Cambridge, in New England” 78–80, 242 n. 71 Wheatley, Susanna 50, 77 Wheelock, Matthew 227 n. 99 Whiskey Rebellion 100, 159 Whitefield, George 57, 61–66, 225 n. 76. See also Methodism Whitman, Walt 216, 218 n. 22 Wilcox, Kirstin 76 Williams, William Carlos 19, 22

Wilmer, James Jones 37 Wilson, Woodrow 224 n. 64 Wolcott, Oliver 106 Wood, Gordon 9 Wood, Marcus 47 Wood, Sarah S. B. K. 160 Woodbridge, John 37 Wright, Joseph 110 Wright, Ruth 144 Xenophon 27 Yokota, Kariann 10 Young, Edward 122, 141–42, 231 n. 45 Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia 116–18, 120, 134 Ziff, Larzer 20

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Acknowledgments

It may go without saying that writing a book about the arts of dependence makes particularly vivid the ways in which the debts we owe become part of who we are. The following acknowledgments cannot begin to express the extent of my obligations or the depths of my gratitude, but like Ishmael, I am in earnest and I will try. For funding support, I am grateful to Northwestern University; the Josephine De Kármán Foundation; the Mellon Foundation; the McNeil Center for Early American Studies; the American Philosophical Society; Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library; and the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Thanks are also due to the various archives and librarians that provided material for the project over the years, including the American Philosophical Society (especially Roy Goodman), the Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur, University of New Hampshire Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries, Boston University Libraries, University of Pennsylvania Special Collections (especially John Pollack), the Library of Congress, the Chester County Historical Society, and the American Antiquarian Society. A shorter version of Chapter 3 was published  as “Spirits of Emulation: Readers, Samplers, and the Republican Girl, 1787–1810,” American Literature 81.3 (2009): 497–526. It is included by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. A modified Chapter 4, “Reproducing David Rittenhouse,” appeared in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 44.4 (October 2007): 757–90. I thank AL and WMQ for permission to reprint. I am profoundly grateful to Northwestern’s English Department for its support in the initial stages of the project. The astounding warmth, enthusiasm, and generosity of Betsy Erkkila, Julia Stern, and Jeff Masten made the first forays into the book’s composition actually kind of fun. And Jay Grossman taught me about the lake full of bass, without which this work would not exist. Among the other Northwestern folks who helped, through timely reading and conversation, to make the project into something better than it was:

304 Acknowledgments

Carrie Wasinger, Peter Jaros, Katy Chiles, Sarah Blackwood, Sarah Mesle, Christopher Hager, John Edward Martin, Glenn Sucich, Melvin Pena, Joanne Diaz, Mike Garabedian, Dana Bilsky, Hyun-­Jung Lee, Ashley Byock, Christopher Franklin Rebacz, Ryan J. Friedman, Janaka Bowman Lewis, Jenny Mann, Matthew Cordova Frankel, Emily Bryan, and Leah Guenther. Marcy J. Dinius was an especially important part of this improvement process, and I thank her for everything she did for me along the way. A two-­year Mellon fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS) at the University of Pennsylvania and a one-­year fellowship at the University of Delaware afforded me time and opportunity to rethink everything that I thought I knew about the American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dan Richter welcomed me into the MCEAS with characteristic generosity; I am grateful for his advocacy then and now. Special thanks are due to Christopher Hodson, Heather Kopelson, Christina Snyder, Robb Haberman, Katie Paugh, Brian Murphy, Ken Cohen, Yvie Fabella, Adam Jortner, Lynda Yankaskas, Jessica Lepler, Candice Harrison, Laura Keenan Spero, Patrick Spero, Wayne Bodle, Dallett Hemphill, Michael Zuckerman, Zara Anishanslin, and Amy Baxter-­Bellamy. Extra special thanks to the literary scholars who kept counsel with me among the historians: Christopher Iannini, Yvette Piggush, Joanne van der Woude, Matthew Garrett, Julie Kim, Jared Richman, Megan Walsh, and Chris Hunter. I am also grateful to Stephen A. Bernhardt and the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware and to the members of the Delaware Area Writing Group, including Ed Larkin, Martin Brückner, Wendy Bellion, Kendall Johnson, Alan Braddock, Lily Milroy, and Max Cavitch. And also to everyone else who made the rest of my time in Philadelphia so delightful: Mike East, Marissa Huber-­East, Rich Cervantes, Alice Cervantes, Dustin Albert, Leya Williams-­Albert, Matt Shoaf, Nenette Luarca-­Shoaf, Aidan J. Smith, and Penny Calloway. The English Department at Boston University, where this book was finished, is a great place to be. I owe particular thanks to Gene Jarrett, Susan Mizruchi, Jack Matthews, Mo Lee, Bill Carroll, Laura Korobkin, Joe Rezek, Anita Patterson, Tom Otten, Kevin van Anglen, Anna Henchman, Amy Appleford, James Winn, Jonathan Foltz, Carrie Preston, Sanjay Krishnan, and Larry Breiner, as well as Anne Austin, Alec Barnes, and Cady Steinberg. Jack Matthews has been my duly appointed mentor since I arrived at Boston University, but his support has long exceeded the parameters of the assignment; I could not have asked for a better guide. I also would like to thank the American and New England Studies Program for its support, especially

Acknowledgments 305

Nina Silber, Kim Sichel, Claire Dempsey, Keith Morgan, and Will Moore. So too the BUNFIGHT folks, including Andrew West, Cara Lewis, Pete Alrenga, Simone Gill, Ashley Mears, and Phil Haberkern. I would also like to thank the people at the University of Pennsylvania Press, particularly Bob Lockhart, and the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their timely, generous, and exceedingly helpful suggestions for revision. Also, for all of their kindness: Joshua Greenberg, Arielle Zibrak, Mary Kuhn, Reed Gochberg, Sari Altschuler, Paul Erickson, Eric Slauter, Mendy Gladden, Emily Dings, and Marie Satya McDonough. Coleman Hutchison always makes everything better, both on the page and off. Aimee Pflieger helped me into and out of a series of jams; I thank her for that and for much else besides. Thanks too to Cathy Kelly, a wonderful collaborator and co-­ conspirator in the weird stuff of early America. And also to Jamie Burke, for sharing all the stories. Lastly, a never-­ending thanks to Kasey Evans, Rob Keefe, Michael J. Merenda Jr., Owain Harris, Roger Lamarque, and Ari Conley for their sustaining friendship over the years. My mom and my dad and my sister—­and Carson Smith and K. and H. and M.—­have been with this whole thing from the very start and seen it through to the end. And so whatever else it is, this book is also for them.