The Face of Poverty: Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Abstract

Abstract: Since the late eighteenth century, observers of American poverty have often focused, in literal and metaphorical ways, on the faces of the economically dispossessed, finding in them a means to generate emotional responses that are more personalized than those offered by sociological data. For these writers, the "face of poverty" contains the potential to rectify the consignment of the poor to what Gavin Jones has called a "categorical blind spot" in U.S. culture, yet despite the long tradition of such efforts to reveal "the other America" this blindness seems to persist in contemporary literary analysis. This ongoing invisibility is in fact rooted in precisely the optical rhetoric that this tradition so often relies upon, a rhetoric whose origins and evasions I trace to the early nineteenth century, when modern discourses of poverty were being formulated. More specifically, I focus on the "parabolic mobility novel," a group of fictional narratives published from 1800-1815 that typically trace the fall into poverty and eventual providentially instigated return to wealth of bourgeois characters. Combining the theories of sympathy-as-self-identification expounded by Adam Smith with the interpretive logic of physiognomy-as-moral-interiority popularized by Johann Caspar Lavater, these novels produced a conservative model of the "politics of recognition" that, rather than involving an acknowledgment of the Other on their own terms, revolved around the projection of middle-class values onto the poor. Through their moments of anagnoristic recognition, the plots of these novels effectively established the now deeply ingrained tendency to replace the individuality of the poor with external beliefs and assumptions.