Republic of Taste - Catherine E. Kelly Early American Studies

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and executed as vehicles for republican knowledge and taste were vulnerable to the logic of the market and the illogic of consumer desire. Early national museums, for example, were explicitly didactic. They claimed to serve the republic by connecting the right kind of observation and the right kind of reading to the right kinds of objects. In fact, museums—the subject of Chapter 5—generated forms of looking and reading that defied republican protocols and gestured toward a political imaginary that was every bit as likely to undermine republican pieties as to reinforce them. Not even George Washington, the ur-founder, was insulated from the contradictory effects that aesthetic practices had on political culture, a political imaginary, and on politics proper. Chapter 6 traces the multiple contexts in which Anglo-Americans and others produced and viewed representations of Washington from the Revolutionary War into the nineteenth century. Washington himself leveraged both his likenesses and his person, creating a visual politics calculated to secure his political position and his place in history. His efforts were almost immediately dwarfed by the endless work of painters and engravers, sculptors and metalworkers, who saturated the market with depictions of his face. The relentless reproduction of Washingtoniana underscores the promise held out both by the republic of taste and the intersection of aesthetics, on the one hand, and by the market, on the other. Washington—as man, as myth, and as commodity—was both the product and the culmination of the American republic of taste. This book concludes with a brief epilogue that uses the Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphal return to the United States in 1824 as an opportunity to take stock of the American republic of taste.

      CHAPTER ONE

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      Learning Taste

      “Saturday morning we defined the word Sensibility.” So wrote Caroline Chester in the copybook that she kept while attending Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Academy in 1816.1 Chester was proud enough of her own definition to record it in her journal: “True sensibility is that acuteness of feeling which is natural to those persons who possess the finer perceptions of seeing, hearing and feeling. It may very easily be distinguished from the false as the former has the effect upon the heart while the latter affects only the nerves.” This sort of exercise was a typical part of an academy instructor’s repertoire: Students parsed words like “useful knowledge,” “discretion,” “taste,” and “sensibility” in order to nurture those qualities in themselves and reward them in others.

      “Sensibility” was an obvious choice for the pantheon of virtues that Pierce aimed to inculcate in her students. In the narrowest terms, the word described an organic, physiological sensitivity—Chester’s “finer perceptions.” But for Pierce and her students, it meant much more than that. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, sensibility had been a catchphrase and a catchall. By the time that Caroline Chester put pen to paper, legions of philosophers, popularizers, ministers, and novelists had touted sensibility as the ideal marriage of reason and feeling. They had also enshrined it as both a prerequisite for and a crucial component of the development of taste, a quality that promised to reinforce moral as well as aesthetic judgments. In fact, “taste” and “sensibility” were so closely linked in everyday usage that one conjured to mind the other. Judgments afforded by taste were suffused with feelings that flowed from sensibility.2

      If it is not surprising to find that sensibility was included among the key words of an early national academy student, neither is it surprising to learn that Chester associated it first with the “finer perceptions of seeing.”3 The same transatlantic discourse that defined and celebrated “sensibility” underlined the connections between physical perception, intellectual apprehension, and affective realization: Information about the world entered the individual through the eye, or the mind’s eye, causing a nervous reaction and igniting emotion. That emotion manifested itself first in the individual’s bodily appearance—in flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and pooling tears—and then in his or her behavior. One person’s capacity for sensibility was thus immediately visible to others who were similarly endowed. Comparable processes were at work in the exercise of taste. Although taste operated on all kinds of phenomena, ranging from landscapes to texts to music, it generally depended on visual perception. Taste shaped what people saw and how they chose to be seen. Just as the man of taste picked his discerning way through the world guided by his eyes, so, too, did he mark his identity in ways that would render him visible within the republic of taste. The logic of sensibility and taste locked men and women of feeling into a sensory feedback loop that was predicated upon and driven by assumptions about the significance of vision and visibility for subjectivity, taste, and cognition. To be sure, these closely linked constructs posited individual virtue in ways that aligned morality with class. Yet Pierce and her contemporaries recognized that these qualities could be maximized in almost everyone. Toward that end, early national academies placed considerable emphasis on the cultivation of sensibility and taste.

      These preoccupations were invested with new political and social urgency in the years following the American Revolution. Educated and influential citizens insisted that sensibility and taste could contribute to the harmony of both domestic relations and civil society. Imagining that manners and affect, taste and feeling could bind an increasingly diverse, increasingly contentious society together, Americans likewise imagined a republic in which the putatively personal became explicitly political. At the same time, the values and practices associated with sensibility and taste reinforced Americans’ fundamentally contradictory ideas about status and opportunity. Based on capacities that could be cultivated if not precisely taught, sensibility and taste held out the promise of improvement to an infinite number of citizens. And to the extent that these qualities were, at root, predicated on one’s ability to distinguish between good, better, and best, they reinforced any number of social distinctions. Simultaneously elevating individual and society, sensibility and taste, linked selfcultivation to public service.

      This broad consensus on the public importance of taste and sensibility accounted for their prominence among the characteristics that early national academies aimed to inculcate in youth. An equally broad consensus on how these qualities were constituted and how they operated led educators to situate visuality near the center of the academy experience. But academies were more than crucial sites for the enculturation of taste and sensibility in young women and men. They were also crucial sites for projecting the notion that taste and sensibility were central components of the republican project. The curricula and culture that defined these institutions, like the endless discussions of education that swirled in newspapers and magazines, served as a charged fantasy, an idealized picture of what the nation should look like. Grand pronouncements about education in general and academy education in particular allowed a very select group of young men and women to stand in for the nation as a whole. These discerning students, in turn, served a particular vision of the republic, one that was exclusive rather than inclusive, hierarchical rather than egalitarian.

      The Academy in the Republic

      The academic world that produced Caroline Chester’s copybook, with its studied definition of sensibility, was as much the product of an institutional matrix as an intellectual one. Colonial education had been a patchwork affair. Notwithstanding a handful of state-sponsored Latin grammar schools in New England, education was largely a private concern. Throughout the colonies, enterprising men and women opened up ad hoc venture schools, providing a paying clientele with training in any number of skills, practical and otherwise: Advertisements for various eighteenth-century venture schools enticed students with geography, French, fencing, drawing, and dancing along with reading, writing, and arithmetic.4

      By the middle of the eighteenth century, academies of various sorts had begun to appear. Ranging widely in curricula, organization, constituency, and financial support, early Anglo-American academies defy the tidy categories that historians usually aim to impose: Any provisional definition collapses before the sheer variety of schools that were deemed academies by their contemporaries. Indeed, that very flexibility was central to their success. Depending upon circumstance and market, academies might offer the rudimentary English of

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