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

Pethers, Matthew

Abstract

From Jacob Riis to Michael Harrington, 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 social reformers, the “face of poverty” contains the potential to rectify what Harrington calls the U.S.’s pervasive “social blindness” in relation to the poor, yet despite the long tradition of such efforts to reveal “the other America” this blindness seems to persist in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. This persistent 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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 3, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Oct 17, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-04
• Deposit Date: Mar 10, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 30, 2023
• Journal: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
• Print ISSN: 2166-742X
• Electronic ISSN: 2166-7438
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 91-119
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2023.a909297
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/18235502
• Publisher URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/909297
• Additional Information: Copyright © 2023 C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. This article first appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2023, pp. 91-119. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.