and Munson, the politics of this highly eroticized visibility cut in multiple directions. Pleasure and power (if young men like Brace are to be believed) were countered by concerns about feminine reputation. Overexposure or improper exposure, especially before the wrong sort of spectator, could do permanent damage to a young woman’s social and moral standing, undermining her prospects for a good marriage and a secure place within the community. That was the lesson driven home to Caroline Chester in 1816, when she and several schoolmates trekked to Little Island on the Bantam River. Splashing from stone to stone to reach the island, the girls got wet and one fell into the river. “Some one” proposed that because the island was “so retired a place,” the girls could safely take off their shoes to wash their feet. The wettest also took off their “frocks” to dry across a bush. Alas, Little Island was not “so retired” as they hoped. After “spying two gentlemen” on a hill about “a quarter of a mile distant,” the young women threw on their clothes and beat a fast path home. Within twenty-four hours, exaggerated accounts of their indiscretion had reached Pierce. Chester and her friends managed to prove that they were “careless only & not improper” and that they had been “unjustly accused.” Still, for days afterward they were lectured about the uneasiness and unhappiness they had brought to the school. They were assured that some citizens continued to suspect them of the “most flagrant breach of propriety & delicacy.” They were exhorted “like Caesar’s wife [to] beware of being even suspected.” After hearing for the umpteenth time that she should never even “approach the boundary line of propriety,” Chester concluded that were she to “stay in Litchfield 100 years I would never, never walk to Little Island.”50
Figure 5. Page from the diary of George Younglove Cutler depicting Miss Munson, August 13, 1820. Litchfield Female Academy Collection, Litchfield Historical Society, Helga J. Ingraham Memorial Library, 7 South Street, P.O. Box 385, Litchfield, CT 06759.
More striking than the story’s predictable moral—that a “woman’s fame is easily tarnished”—or the way that it maps feminine propriety onto the town’s geography, is the way that Chester’s narrative illuminates the importance of seeing and being seen. Spectatorship pervaded the academy experience. The anonymous men on the hill who may have glimpsed the girls, or the spectators who may have hidden on the island itself, were no different from Mansfield, the would-be suitor who timed his walk to coincide with the students’. The citizens of Litchfield who decried the girls’ scandalous undressing on the island were the same people who applauded their fashionable attire at balls. Those citizens, in turn, were little different from teachers like Pierce, who trained an eagle’s eye on her charges’ posture.
There was more to this than the imperative to submit rigid discipline of society; politeness was not an end in itself. By training young women and young men to mind their grooming, their posture, and their manners, academies instilled a doubled sense of self. As the objects of observation and as increasingly adept observers, students learned simultaneously to inhabit their world and to imagine how they must appear to others as they inhabited it. The ultimate aim was what the literary critic Peter de Bolla, following Adam Smith, has termed a “spectatorial subjectivity,” which was “precisely not positioned in the eye of the beholder but, rather, in the exchanges that occur in the phantasmic projection of what it might feel like to be constituted as a subject by looking on the onlookers of ourselves.” Or, as Chester came to understand after the disastrous trip to Little Island, the key to looking, like the key to looking good, was to understand immediately and intuitively how one looked to others.51
Academic Art
The close connections between taste, beauty, and selfhood coupled with the porous boundary between the textual and the visual prompted many academies to provide students with access to books and images aimed at sharpening their visual literacy. The same institutions were likely to offer some form of handson instruction in the fine arts. Although textile arts ranging from ornamental embroidery to worsted work remained the exclusive preserve of young women, other pursuits, especially drawing, attracted both genders. Whatever the media, students’ artistic productions were meant to reinforce their book learning. The same themes dominated the images they created and the books they wrote. Like composition and chirography, drawing and embroidery were predicated on emulation. Both sets of practices, like the academy experience more generally, were calculated to ground students in a gendered republic of taste.
The haphazard nature of early national academy records makes it difficult to know for certain exactly which art books and images any particular school supplied or how many schools supplied them, but scattered references are suggestive.52 Some libraries contained books that focused on art history, theory, or practice. The library of the Bethlehem Female Seminary, for example, acquired Paston’s Sketch book, Smith on Drawing, and an edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting.53 Many more schools would have made do with books like Richard Turner’s Abridgement of the arts and sciences or William Duane’s Epitome of the arts and sciences, which were specially “adapted to the use of schools and academies.” These books provided rudimentary definitions of an art form like architecture (“the art of building or raising all kinds of edifices”); broke it down into subcategories (civil, military, and naval); and identified its key styles (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite). Written with recitation in mind, these texts unfold as a series of formulaic questions (“How many sorts of paintings are there?”) and answers (“Five: oil, fresco, water-color, glass, and enamel”).54
At best, such books were sparsely illustrated. In the first edition of his Epitome, for example, Duane included woodcuts illustrating mythological figures and natural phenomena like waterspouts, but he saw no point in picturing the difference between Doric and Corinthian columns. Authors like Duane and Turner were less interested in feeding students’ eyes than in training them. They seem to have assumed that their readers already had access to paintings, sculpture, and architecture or to the representation of those arts in prints. That is, they provided the tools to translate what readers observed elsewhere into a shared language and to turn that language back onto images and objects in the form of criticism.
In order to provide objects for their pupils’ criticism, educators called on a variety of sources. Printed images were an obvious choice. Judith Foster Saunders and Clementina Beach, who operated a female academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, amassed a print collection that included prints based on Angelica Kauffman’s paintings, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, and the Bible. Nazareth Hall early on acquired Johann Daniel Preissler’s eighteenth-century German drawing manual, Die durch Theorie erfundene Practic, which worked its way from studies of single body parts like eyes, noses, and feet through the whole human form and then culminated in classical figures, both nude and clothed. The Bethlehem Female Seminary began acquiring prints in the eighteenth century and continued at least through the 1820s. Catalogs for the Germantown Academy in Pennsylvania boasted that the school had built a print collection to “interest the students in the productions and nature of art.”55 Illustrated books offered educators another obvious source for visual materials. The plates in Charles Rollin’s Ancient History and Pope’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, introduced students to the visual conventions of classicism, regardless of their ability to read Latin. The Litchfield Academy purchased an edition of the Count de Buffon’s Natural History that included a “great number of cuts.” At a Massachusetts boarding school catering to younger girls, the scholars were allowed to look at two images in a large, lavishly illustrated Bible every Sunday as a reward for good behavior. Teachers and schoolmasters and mistresses also took advantage of resources outside the academy walls when they could. Madame Rivardi, who operated Philadelphia’s Seminary for Young Ladies, regularly dispatched groups of chaperoned girls to the city’s galleries and museums. Pierce made certain that an itinerant artist who performed demonstrations with a perspective glass and a set of English landscapes put in an appearance at her school.56
The
