CHARACTER

The acclaimed literary scholar considers the shifting significance of the term "character."

Garber, a Harvard professor of English and visual and environmental studies, brings a wide range of sources to her erudite, illuminating study of the “complex, sometimes self-contradictory, and often elusive concept” of character, whose meaning has changed throughout history. Claiming the idea of character to be a cultural obsession involving politics, entertainment, education, psychology, neurology, art, and literature, Garber examines many questions it has generated: “How can it be perceived, measured, assessed, developed, trained, or ‘built’?” Is character “innate, learned, taught, or instilled? Are character traits fixed or changeable?” Is there such a quality as a national character? Is character synonymous with personality? Is a person’s character visible, able to be “read” by head bumps, as phrenologists believed, or analyzed by physiognomy? As the author explores such questions, she turns to sources as varied as Shakespeare (Garber is a noted Shakespeare scholar) and other playwrights, Greek philosophers, photographers and artists, education tracts, and contemporary political rhetoric. The idea that character can be trained, she asserts, was promoted by many 19th-century self-help books as well as the Scouting movement. Character building “was an invitation to personal initiative.” The popular 19th-century educational series McGuffey’s Readers, Grimm’s fairy tales, and even The Wonderful Wizard of Oz all contain moral teachings to help a child build character. Garber traces the 18th-century fad of physiognomy, which later emerged as phrenology, which asserted that qualities such as greed, wickedness, melancholy, and maliciousness could be assessed from physical traits. Rubrics of character traits have been popular for centuries: As far back as the fourth-century B.C.E., Theophrastus came up with a list of 30 character types, including The Flatterer, The Reckless Cynic, The Officious Man, The Vain Man, The Oligarch, and The Slanderer, most of which, Garber astutely notes, are recognizable today.

A capacious overview of an enduring human value.