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The Face of the Public

The Face of the Public christopher j. lukasik Boston University In two of the more influential accounts of America's transition from eighteenth-century colony to nineteenth-century nation, the body has been identified either as antithetical to the disinterestedness of civic republicanism or as instrumental to the development of a more democratic community based upon a common discourse of affective experience.1 Alternatively, I propose that the body's negative relationship to the public sphere, on the one hand, and its positive relationship to a culture of performance, on the other, were also mediated by a third entity: the legibility of permanent moral character upon the face. Postrevolutionary culture, I would like to suggest, was also characterized by the desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character--what Richard Sennett has described more generally elsewhere as the ``involuntary disclosure of character'' (24)--which arose, in part, as a response to social and political anxieties generated by the fluid culture of performance that critics such as Jay Fliegelman, David Shields, and Nancy Ruttenberg so ably document. I seek here to complement recent explanations of the body's relationship to the public in the postrevolutionary period by situating two texts-- Philip Freneau's ``The Picture Gallery'' (1788) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Early American Literature University of North Carolina Press

The Face of the Public

Lukasik, Christopher J.
Early American Literature , Volume 39 (3) – Jan 13, 2004
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by The University of North Carolina Press.
ISSN
1534-147X
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Abstract

christopher j. lukasik Boston University In two of the more influential accounts of America's transition from eighteenth-century colony to nineteenth-century nation, the body has been identified either as antithetical to the disinterestedness of civic republicanism or as instrumental to the development of a more democratic community based upon a common discourse of affective experience.1 Alternatively, I propose that the body's negative relationship to the public sphere, on the one hand, and its positive relationship to a culture of performance, on the other, were also mediated by a third entity: the legibility of permanent moral character upon the face. Postrevolutionary culture, I would like to suggest, was also characterized by the desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character--what Richard Sennett has described more generally elsewhere as the ``involuntary disclosure of character'' (24)--which arose, in part, as a response to social and political anxieties generated by the fluid culture of performance that critics such as Jay Fliegelman, David Shields, and Nancy Ruttenberg so ably document. I seek here to complement recent explanations of the body's relationship to the public in the postrevolutionary period by situating two texts-- Philip Freneau's ``The Picture Gallery'' (1788)

Journal

Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Jan 13, 2004

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