Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
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was an intensely embodied process. For one thing, the richly aestheticized education promoted by early national academies depended on the senses, especially sight. It was manifested materially, physically. Thus it is not surprising that teachers paid careful attention to the students’ bodies. For another, educators, parents, and students were heirs to a long-standing western tradition that elevated a mastery of the body into a hallmark of gentility, imagining it as a central element of what one scholar has called “the civilizing process.” An individual’s mind and affections correlated with his or her physical form.
This inclination to view the body as the initial register of character was invested with new political and cultural significance after the Revolution, when Americans were keen to find evidence of themselves as a people who were truly republican and intensely worried that they would come up short.39 The same assumptions and anxieties that connected the life of the mind to the body politic also connected the life of the mind to the bodies of students themselves. Accordingly, many academies incorporated into their curricula what we might call a course in physical education, one that started at the washbasin and ended in the ballroom.
First, students learned to pay close attention to their bodies. Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy included instructions about hygiene in the school’s long list of rules, requiring “Cleanliness in Dress and Person” and directing students to take care that “the head be combed and the hands and Face washed before coming to School.” Young women were also encouraged to heed their appearance. Every week, students at the Litchfield Academy were directed to inventory their bodies as well as their souls. Just as they “prayed to God in whose hands your breath is” they were to review whether they had “been neat” in their “persons” or careless with their clothes, whether they had combed their hair with a “fine tooth comb” and cleaned their teeth every morning. This preoccupation with the well-groomed body as a manifestation of inner character worked its way into book learning. “Neatness is the natural garb of a well ordered mind and has a near alliance with purity of heart,” wrote one Litchfield student, pointing out that “Richardson whose taste was exquisite as his imagination glowing has painted his Clarissa as always dressed before she came down for breakfast.”40
Regular and diligent grooming was a precursor to physical grace. In repose and in motion, students were taught to conform to the kinetic conventions of refinement. The goal was a kind of erect ease through the torso and neck, leaving one’s arms, legs, and head free to trace Hogarth’s line of beauty. Failure to master those conventions was a matter of real concern. Elizabeth Way, who operated a school for girls in eighteenth-century Delaware, was especially vigilant in policing the bearing of her charges. Way reportedly hung necklaces of “Jamestown-weed burrs” round the necks of students who let their heads hang forward and strapped both steel rods and “morocco spiders” to the backs of young girls inclined to slouch. In 1802, fourteen-year-old Lucy Sheldon shamefully reported that when she and her peers at Litchfield assembled to hear “Miss Pierce tell our faults,” she had been singled out for “holding my arms stiff which made me appear awkward, and which I shall certainly endeavor to correct.”41
If steel rods and public scoldings discouraged bad posture, dancing fostered physical grace and infused it with politeness. Both a physical discipline and a mode of interaction, dancing represented the union of genteel body and genteel sociability. Accordingly, many schools made dancing lessons available to male and female students for an extra charge. As Mary Bacon put it in an 1820 composition, dancing was “professedly an essential part of a good education as correcting any awkwardness of gestures giving an easy and graceful motion to the body.” She was not alone. Speaking before Philadelphia’s Young Ladies’ Academy, Swanwick suggested that dancing promoted health and rendered “the figure and motions of the body easy and agreeable.” The principals of the Clermont Seminary went further. They promised parents that dancing lessons combined with a close supervision of their sons’ manners would impart “a taste and relish for decorum, and politeness,” which was “no small part of education.” Indeed, the Reverend James Cosens Ogden told the notables assembled for the dedication of the Portsmouth Academy in 1791 that dancing contributed decisively to a broader social good by dispelling “the rust of prejudice.” When diverse and even divided men and women see one another in their “best dress and most pleasant face,” he enthused, “spleen flies—harmony reigns.” Amid the rancorous political climate of the 1790s, some observers hoped that society could serve as a balm to the wounds of partisan politics.42
Certainly, dancing attracted its share of critics. The novelist and educator Hannah Webster Foster surely spoke for many when she listed dancing among “the most fascinating, and of course the most dangerous,” of accomplishments. The dangers were especially acute for women. A woman might well appear “polite and elegant” while executing the steps of a cotillion. But the thrill of self-display and the gratification of public recognition all too often lead to “unbounded wants,” to psychic ambitions and physical desires that could not be satisfied within the realm of propriety. Because the ballroom was the setting for collaborative, ensemble performances, a woman who aspired to command center stage was surely headed for trouble. The boundary between the polite and the erotic was disconcertingly porous. Even Bacon, who credited dancing with erasing “awkward gestures,” worried that “modern manners may however have carried the fondness for this accomplishment to an immoderate extreme.” She wondered whether “exceling in this particular does not inspire too great a fondness for dissipated pleasures and proportionably abate the ardur for more retired virtues.” After all, she reasoned, “a woman who can sparkle and engage the admiration of every beholder at a birth night or a ball is not always content with the grave office of managing a family.”43
Removing dancing from a school’s curriculum did not remove it from its culture. Many of the same schools that excluded dancing from their course lists included balls on their social calendars, suggesting that educators and parents expected students to have at least a passing familiarity with the basics. At singlesex and coeducational academies, balls were typically staged to mark holidays like July 4th and to celebrate the close of the school year. And at some schools, balls and dances were organized far more often than that. Certainly that was the case with Litchfield Female Academy. Although the school did not offer dancing lessons, student diaries and journals are punctuated with references to “pretty agreeable” balls, “very agreeable” balls, “school balls” composed of students only, and “public balls,” where scholars mingled with select townsmen and -women.44
The point of dancing was not simply to school the body in grace but also to put the graceful body in the service of polite society. If student balls were rehearsals, public balls were auditions. Students were judged on their dancing and on the number of partners they attracted. But observers also took note of their dress, mien, conversation, and charm. Scattered accounts from diaries, letters, and memoirs suggest that young women were ranked more on appearance; young men, on their social skills. In both cases, the stakes were high. Most obviously, balls served as very public vehicles for initiating courtship. They also served as a proving ground for polite society. As a middle-aged woman quipped after watching the “heels fly this way and that” at a Litchfield ball, “This is solemn business.” Or, in the words of her companion, a law student seeking the admiration of Litchfield’s loveliest belles and the respect of its best families, balls “could make toil of pleasure as the old man said when he buried his wife.”45
Like mastery of the body, mastery of the politesse that made balls such serious business was a formal part of academy educations. Especially around the turn of the nineteenth century, academies and seminaries took pains to assure parents and patrons that they could train citizens who were as well mannered as they were virtuous. Schools promised to police sloppy table manners, hush loud laughter, and calm boisterous behavior. But they also pledged to inculcate the sort of manners appropriate to a harmoniously hierarchical social order. Prominent among the “rules” that students at Litchfield Academy copied every year, for example, was a definition of politeness that directed “Every real Lady” to “treat her superior with due reverence” and her “companions with politeness.” According to the trustees of New Hampshire’s Atkinson Academy, precisely because politeness formed the “basis of honour & happiness to individuals, the foundation