are analogous to moral philosophy; sketches of eyes and columns form a pictorial corollary to the universalizing maxims that students transcribed into their commonplace books.
Young women’s pictures gesture toward a closely related intellectual milieu, the transatlantic world of polite letters. And, like the young men’s drawings, their painted and stitched pictures are predicated on emulation. But where young men’s art proclaims universal truths, young women’s art illustrates narrative. It figures contexts and characters, choices and dilemmas. Just as important, young women’s art concretizes and elaborates its origins in the material world in ways that young men’s art does not. Women’s pictures reproduce particular heroines drawn from particular engraved prints and particular illustrated volumes, insisting on the material underpinnings of the republic of letters. More than that, it trumpets their access to exclusive visual resources and expensive materials. If male students’ art testifies to the circulation of ideas, female students’ art testifies to the circulation of ideas-as-commodities. Depictions of Palemon and Lavinia or of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, with their tiny stitches and delicate washes of color, inscribed the American republic not as a republic of letters but as a republic of taste, where virtue resided in the propertied discernment of the connoisseur rather than the earnest, workaday morality of the artisan.
This was hardly a neutral substitution. Literary critic Michael Warner has famously argued that, in the years following the Revolution, growing numbers of Americans laid claim to print culture as a means of articulating their citizenship and defining their place in an emergent public sphere. But if these men and women aggressively pursued books and periodicals, they did not gain access to costly illustrated books; they enjoyed far less exposure to fine, imported engravings. Female students’ grandest productions underscored the fact that print cultures, like the citizens who participated in them, were not equal. Culled from exclusive books and prints, fashioned in silk and watercolor, and executed by graceful young ladies, “schoolgirl” art ensured that the highly restrictive republic of taste would work to counter the more protean republic of letters.71
Exhibiting Taste
An academy education, encompassing art and composition, penmanship and politeness, was ultimately calculated to culminate in the production of a virtuous citizenry. More immediately, though, it culminated in the production of academy examinations and exhibitions, where students displayed the fruits of their learning before a public audience. Colonial colleges had long sponsored public commencement ceremonies. But in the years following the Revolution, with the growing insistence on the connections between the quality of education and the health of the republic, examinations and exhibitions became more common, more public, and more elaborate. As rituals, examinations were intended both to demonstrate that students were fit to join a republican culture and to provide an idealized picture of that republican culture. The academy exhibition was the public sphere writ small.
The ceremonies typically took place in school halls, drawing townsmen and -women into the school proper and underscoring the public ends of private education. And they were routinely covered in the local press. Reportage ranged from cursory announcements to full-blown stories that ran for inches and included the names of especially impressive students, male and female alike. Either way, the press made the proceedings available even to those who were unable or unwilling to attend. It is difficult to know for certain exactly who turned out for exhibitions. William Bentley, Salem’s indefatigable minister, made a point of attending local academy examinations just as he did Harvard’s commencement. Joseph Dennie was a regular at the annual exhibitions at the Philadelphia Young Ladies’ Academy. Harriet Beecher Stowe recalled that the “literati of Litchfield” always turned out for exhibitions at Pierce’s academy. It is likely that audiences grew to include more than local literati, given that newspaper accounts regularly reported audiences numbering in the hundreds. By the 1800s, many schools were publishing broadsides that advertised the dates, times, and order of exercises for their exhibitions in order to encourage attendance.72
The precise format and content of these exhibitions varied from school to school. The trustees of the Atkinson Academy promised audiences that their exhibitions “shall not exceed four hours,” while students at the Bethlehem Female Seminary thanked the audience for their “kind indulgence” after five days of public examination and exhibition. Exhibitions might include musical interludes or full-blown plays, complete with stage, scenery, and wardrobes “in true theater style.” Some schools concluded their exhibitions with a public ball, where students could put their dancing lessons to good use. Regardless of the program’s duration, audiences could count on hearing oratory, recitation, salutations, and staged “conversations” encompassing a variety of topics. Patriotic odes and essays on the significance of education in a republican society were popular among male and female students. But audiences might also hear students perform a dialogue such as “On Civilization, between a Fop and a Farmer,” “On Taste,” a “Latin dissertation on Electricity,” or a “Lecture on Wigs.”73
Academy examinations and exhibitions were public performances that literally displayed students’ learning, sensibility, and suitability for civic life. Indeed, the emphasis on performance was so pronounced that some educators hastened to reassure parents and audience members that the public examinations would offer an accurate representation of student ability. Principals of the Clermont Seminary promised that their students appeared “in their true and natural state both of mind and body.” Genuine accomplishment rather than hollow performance was the order of the day. “No one of our pupils is made to learn particular pieces of prose or poetry to recite,” they insisted, “that he may shine a moment like a meteor in the darkness.”74
If these “true and natural” displays depended on the spoken word, they also depended on a careful attention to visual detail. Even elementary student oratory was yoked to stylized gestures that underscored the speakers’ meaning. A successful speech depended almost as much on choreography as recitation. As a consequence, efforts to reinforce the import of students’ words with the movements of their bodies could become quite elaborate. Consider the dialogue “Astronomy and the use of the globe,” performed at Nazareth Hall as part of the 1793 examination. The performance culminated when one of the boys explained how the stars, which were “calm, regular, & harmonious, invariably keeping the paths prescribed them,” were “ranged all around” the earth. As he spoke, his classmates turned themselves into a human orrery. Quietly forming a semicircle around the globe, the students stood in for the stars that “ranged round the earth.” The boys embodied the very qualities that the speaker explained governed the stars—regularity, harmony, and the determination to follow “the path prescribed them.” By their positions onstage, as much as by the work they had submitted for examination, the boys suggested that the laws regulating the movements of the heavens could also regulate republican society.75
The visual dimensions of academy exhibitions extended well beyond choreographed oratory. Samples of penmanship, arithmetic, composition, drawing, painting, and embroidery were set out for audiences to inspect. Even commonplace books, diaries, and personal letters were mandatory submissions.76 Students’ bodies, especially those of young women, also came in for a fair amount of scrutiny. Visitors took pains to note how young women’s virtue and accomplishment registered in their appearance as well as in their work. At Susanna Rowson’s academy, for example, an observer reported that the “ladies [were] attired with the greatest simplicity; no ornament whatever appearing among them.” At Bethlehem’s 1789 examination, the girls arranged themselves before the audience “in the form of a half-moon, and were mostly dressed in white.” And in 1814 John P. Brace noted that on examination day the Litchfield “girls were all arranged in their best apparel” around the schoolroom. Only after the visiting “ladies and gentlemen had looked as long as they pleased” at both the girls and the specimens of their work could he announce the students’ credit marks.77
Jacob Marling’s May Queen (Crowning of Flora) (1816), which captures a May Day celebration at North Carolina’s Raleigh Academy, plays on the fascination with
