Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

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 female display and performance that informed this exhibitionary culture. The young women who dominate the canvas have honored Mary Du Bose of Georgia, their “favourite girl,” by electing her May Queen. Surrounded by her loving peers, Du Bose sits in the center of the canvas, facing an audience that includes faculty, townspeople, children, and slaves. As the queen is wreathed with flowers, her fellow student, Ann W. Clark, recites an address that simultaneously celebrates the pleasures of spring, when “all nature is now attired in its loveliest robe,” and warns that those pleasures are bound to fade. The fate of the season and of the students is the same. The “blooming crown” of spring blossoms will soon decay, reminding Du Bose of “beauty’s transient glow, while its fragrant sweetness forcibly inculcates the superior charms of virtue.” Quoting lines from Cowper that were as suitable for a commonplace book or a sampler as they were for an address, Clark pronounces “the only amaranthine flower on earth, is Virtue—the only lasting treasure, Truth.”⁷⁸

      Perhaps. But Marling’s painting is more concerned with display and publicity than with “amaranthine flowers” or “lasting treasures.” The celebration of aestheticized, feminized publicity plays out on multiple levels. Marling himself was among the audience, perhaps invited because his wife was the academy’s art teacher. He sketched the scene as it unfolded in order to share the moment with a larger audience who frequented his “exhibition gallery.” A lengthy description of the event, including Du Bose’s and Clark’s names, a transcription of Clark’s speech, and a discussion of Marling’s planned painting, was reported in regional papers and approvingly reprinted in both the New-York Weekly Museum and the Port Folio. The fusion of taste and learning enabled a virtuous, distinctly feminine publicity.⁷⁹

      Marling painted a romantic May Day celebration rather than a sober annual examination; Du Bose was singled out for her popularity rather than her intellect. Nevertheless, the May Queen reproduces many of the conventions of the academy exhibition: the white-gowned young ladies; the staged accomplishment; the attentive, genteel spectators; and the multiple varieties of publicity. More than that, the painting helps us to recognize the pronounced resemblances between the female students who assembled to exhibit their learning and skill and the painted and embroidered female figures who populated their artwork. The same aesthetic—which might be summed up as the willful physical projection of a deeply internalized taste and sensibility—is at work in the painting, in abundant samples of schoolgirl art, and in young women’s studied self-presentation. And why not? For if one of the main aims of an academy education was, in Pierce’s terms, “to create or direct taste,” then these young women had surpassed the goal. More than acquiring taste, they had become it. And they had done so in a context where, as we have seen, taste had considerable moral and political purchase.

      But that process of becoming cut in multiple directions. On the one hand, it allowed women to stake a claim to the republic of taste and to play a crucial role in maintaining its boundaries. On the other hand, it raised questions about the legitimacy of women’s claims to full participation within the republic of the United States. The same commonplace books, pictures, and performances that registered virtuous taste also summoned to mind the threatening specter of luxury, commodities, and consumption that haunted the public discourse on