A Good Judge of Character?

Abstract

A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912. By Cathy Boeckmann. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 2000. 238 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Judgments of character can be the most political judgments of all. And yet the most common judgments of character—the most personal, the most everyday—are most political precisely when their reliance on a politics of character is least visible. The arena in which character has been most visible as a political concept, however, is the arena of national character. In Anglo-American political theory, at least since Hobbes, the concept of character has been a key term for imagining the reach of the public over the private sphere, the reach of the nation over and into the citizen. But as postcolonial and postnational critics have been keen to suggest, perhaps the question of character, particularly the question of national character, is no longer relevant in an increasingly postnationalist frame. Indeed, as Emily Apter among others has observed, in "the postnational 'beyond,' the category of national character fails to figure prominently, if at all." 1 Perhaps the reign of character has passed, residually relegated to conservative polemics of personal accountability and liberal universalizations of cultural difference. Perhaps the phantom of national character has become less relevant as a subject of political analysis, even a red herring of sorts in the study of transnational and global circuits of power and subject formation. But I suspect that it has not. Character continues to be a powerful term in the most everyday strategies of reading, representing, [End Page 325] and performing personal identity, and remains so because of its naturalization, because of its increasing invisibility as a political category. Indeed, as Cathy Boeckmann's richly informed and theoretically astute book, A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912, reminds us, the concept of character is perhaps most relevant, most resourceful and galvanizing, in times of its own invisibility, in times in which it no longer appears to be in question at all. Appraising the American subject's approximation to and incorporation of national ideals has long taken shape as "a question of character." And yet the question of character, the reflexive question which asks what kind of semantic and performative resources have made the concept of character such a privileged mediator of national identity in the United States and beyond, is asked with surprising rarity. It is difficult to imagine another key concept which has done so much hard and politically vexed work throughout the history of the United States. From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character has had a very long and checkered rhetorical career giving shape to the individualistic terms of American national identity. It is thus surprising that, at a time when interrogations of many of the central discursive bearers of national, racial, gender and class identity have so reinvigorated American studies, such a productive—and often nefarious—concept has received such scant attention, even as the object of a simple genealogical stocktaking. After a generation of post-war sociological and literary accounts of the "American character" (Riesman's The Lonely Crowd perhaps the most influential among them), Warren Susman's influential essay in Culture as History on how the "modal concept" of character organized both techniques of self-mastery and modes of public presentation in nineteenth-century American culture was one of the first to critically assess the concept of character within a broad historical framework. 2 And while Alan Trachtenberg has more pointedly suggested in The Incorporation of America that character "has not received the critical attention that it deserves," 3 such critical attention continued to take shape only as the scattered, incidental, or methodological remarks on character by scholars pursuing other topics. More recently, however, such scattered remarks have given way to a developed body of scholarship on the...