Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
individuals.
Figure 1. Samuel Powel, Silhouette of George Washington, Philadelphia, before 1790. The likeness is now part of the permanent exhibit at Powel House. The note attached to the profile tells the story of its creation and preservation. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks.
They trusted that these shared affinities, which provided so much personal pleasure, also advanced the public good and thus held out great promise in the American republic. Never mind that the newly formed United States lacked the Old World’s aesthetic infrastructure. In their eyes, the nation itself constituted a kind of gallery, a series of real and imagined spaces in which republican citizens could display and affirm their sensibility, their taste, and their virtue.
The intellectual underpinnings of the American republic of taste stretched back a century and spanned the Atlantic. European, and especially British, thinkers had been preoccupied with questions about taste, visuality, and aesthetics since the early decades of the eighteenth century. Whatever their differences, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair all linked aesthetic dilemmas to political ones by the middle of the eighteenth century. Moreover, they did so in terms that invited the engagement of a growing middle class. Around the same time, prominent and well-connected painters-turned-theorists like Sir Joshua Reynolds insisted upon art’s broadly didactic purpose, imbuing it with civic value. This wide-ranging body of thought, which encompassed philosophy, belles lettres, and the fine arts, contributed to a new understanding of the world. It simultaneously helped shift authority from the state to society and defined a terrain on which society could define and organize itself. Its high-minded aesthetic ideas were distilled and popularized through Britain’s flourishing periodical press, starting with the Spectator (1711–1712), whose essays, published daily, titled simply by number, and reproduced widely, would influence aesthetic theory and literary culture on both sides of the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century.4
Before the American Revolution, educated and affluent Anglo-Americans sought access to the tasteful world that emerged from the pages of these texts in order to strengthen their ties to the metropole, in order to become more Anglo and less American. During and after the American Revolution, however, they invested this transatlantic discourse with enormous and explicitly republican significance.5 Exploiting the similarities between aesthetic and political dilemmas, American thinkers explored questions about taste and beauty in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Thus, in 1776, John Adams imagined representative assembly as “in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large”; more than ten years later, Anti-Federalists repurposed Adams’s metaphor to attack the proposed Constitution, which failed to provide a legislative body that could serve as a “likeness” of the people. Indeed, Federalists and Anti-Federalists explicitly invoked debates over the relative importance of uniformity and variety as components of beauty in arguments over issues including representation and the separation of powers.6 In much the same way, debates over the nature of taste (Was it innate or learned? Was there a single standard or were there as many standards as there were individuals?) directly informed debates over political and social authority. Precisely because the imagination posited by eighteenth-century aesthetic theory demanded both creative freedom and critical restraint, it provided Americans with an intellectual framework for considering the limits of liberty. Thinking about art, architecture, literature, poetry, or the theater thus became vehicles for thinking about and thinking through political issues ranging from government structures, to legislative representation, to qualifications for citizenship, to the meaning of liberty itself.
If taste accommodated social aspiration and encouraged political debate, it also suggested the possibility of affinity grounded in a shared national identity. Putatively free from the Old World’s decadence, taste promised to be a vehicle for discovering and exercising a distinctly American genius. And putatively free from sectional prejudice and partisan strife, taste provided a platform that would encourage men and women to rise above their differences. Like “manners” and “sensibility,” the period’s other shibboleths, taste promised to bind the disparate citizens of a republic together while setting them apart from Europeans. Thinkers as different as Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Dennie, whose views extended across the early national political spectrum, clung to the hope that a republic could be forged at least partly out of taste. With so much at stake, it is small wonder that aesthetic preoccupations peppered the pages of the U.S. periodical press and turned up in speeches given to mark everything from college graduations to July 4th celebrations. Thus did a transatlantic republic of taste distill into an American republic of taste.
This is by now a familiar story; its narrative outlines have emerged over the past thirty years from the work of literary and cultural historians, including Jay Fliegelman, David S. Shields, Eric Slauter, and Edward Cahill.7 But despite all that we have recovered about the resonance of taste for American political discourse, for all that we now know about the centrality of aesthetics more generally to American intellectual life, we have scarcely paused to ask whether, much less how, the eighteenth century’s aesthetic turn figured in the lives of women and men who were not intellectuals in any canonical sense of the word. Did the early national vocabulary of taste, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution or outside the pages of the Port Folio? Did it extend past political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.
In the years following independence, ordinary women and men sought membership in the republic of taste because it afforded them cultural capital and personal pleasure in equal measure. They assured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual’s character, about his or her potential for republican citizenship. The man (or woman) of taste was disinterested, capable of seeing past particulars to grasp universal truths. At the same time, he was sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others. He was sensitive, indeed, to the world that surrounded him. Although his taste was to some degree innate, it was also the product of careful and sustained cultivation. He was thus knowledgeable, for in fostering his own taste he had become familiar with things that were appreciated by other people of taste. This familiarity with the texts, objects, and images that signaled taste was not only intellectual. It was also material. The tasteful life was graced by exquisitely bound books and mass-produced engraved prints, by decorated ceramics and schoolgirls’ needlework. It was expressed in the graceful curves and swoops of penmanship and in the serenely composed faces that looked out from oil portraits and ivory miniatures. Taste conjured soft fabrics and polished surfaces just as it conjured intellectual and imaginative aspiration.
The valorization of taste was thus well suited to the early republic’s Janusfaced culture of class, which simultaneously promised opportunity and reinforced distinction.8 In theory, taste operated freely, unconstrained by either hereditary status or financial net worth. By and large, Americans preferred thinkers who treated taste as a capacity that responded to careful cultivation over those who believed it to be an absolute. But however taste was theorized, it operated within a constellation of texts, images, objects, and persons that placed it well beyond the grasp of people whose occupations, wealth, or race excluded them from the ranks of an emerging middle class.9 Lack of money and standing did not necessarily signal a lack of taste. Indeed, the laboring men and women who created refinement’s props often insisted that the quality of the goods they produced reflected their taste as well as their skill. That said, one was far more likely to discover a capacity for taste in a young woman whose once-respectable family had been rendered destitute by hard times than in a young man bent on clawing his way out of hardscrabble poverty.
Broad as taste’s compass might have been, when Anglo-Americans attempted to define or to account for it, they turned time and again to metaphors and examples that hinged on sight and seeing. For Americans as for their British counterparts, taste and its cognate words—imagination, fancy, discretion, and, to a lesser extent, connoisseurship—were grounded in the eye.10 The countless Americans schooled in taste by the rhetorician Hugh Blair, for example, learned that taste