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novel that involve legal matters of inheritance slowly flesh out the open-
ing scene between a man and a woman who are in the woman’s bedroom
not for sexual activity—it turns out that they are brother and sister, af-
ter all—but to sort out receipts that have been turned into the appara-
tus of her fashionable appearance. Such a rendition of the economy of
slavery literally embedded into the economy of the family stands behind
the explications of vision that this forum presents.

Race and Architectural Geometry:

Thomas Jefferson’s Octagons
Irene Cheng
California College of the Arts

On the topic of race, the study of nineteenth-

century American architecture remains troublingly myopic. In the fields
of American literary studies and history, the construction of racial dif-
ference has become an indispensable subject of analysis, but even some
recent surveys of nineteenth- century architecture ignore or downplay
the roles of racial ideology, slavery, and nonwhite ethnic groups in shap-
ing the built environment.1 This neglect persists despite a steady trickle
of important research by historians and literary scholars, beginning in
the 1980s with the work of Dell Upton and Michael Vlach.2
Early work on race and architecture focused on rereading spaces
such as plantations as diverse, hierarchical environments, and on recon-
structing the experience of nonwhite inhabitants of buildings, cities, and
landscapes. More recently, however, scholars like Martin Berger and Di-
anne Harris have considered how racial thinking inflects visual culture
in objects and ways that appear removed from concerns about race—
for example, in paintings that depict only white people, or in landscape
photographs that contain no humans at all.3 One contribution of white-
ness studies and postcolonial theory has been to reveal how objects
that appear race- or gender-neutral on their surface may be powerfully
coded to affi rm specifically Euro-American or male identities. Applied
to architecture, projects to deconstruct whiteness, or to “provincialize
Eu rope,” to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, pose the question of
how elements of buildings ostensibly far removed from race might be
supported by a substructure of racial thinking.4
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Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is now well recognized as a site deeply

shaped by slavery. Where tour guides once interpreted the house primar-
ily in terms of Jefferson’s ingenuity and brilliance, today, thanks to the
work of historians like Lucia Stanton, there is acknowledgment that the
site was also occupied by a large community of enslaved people.5 This
essay argues that issues of race pertain to Jefferson’s architecture not
just because of the presence of black slaves—that is, because of its so-
cial history—but also because race permeated its aesthetic dimensions,
its forms, style, and ornament. In short, the story of race in Jefferson’s
architecture includes those aspects traditionally considered to be the
province of art and architectural historians. My intention is not to reify
distinctions between social and formalist art history but simply to ar-
gue that race influences architecture in multiple registers. Here I will con-
sider one par ticu lar feature of Jefferson’s building designs that may
appear unrelated to race—his use of octagons.
Numerous scholars of Jefferson’s architecture have observed that
he was obsessed with eight- sided forms, employing them in projecting
bows and free- standing configurations in designs from houses to pris-
ons. Jefferson never explained his infatuation with octagons; historians
cite the influence of European precedents, Jefferson’s love of mathemat-
ics, and a desire for light and air. Virtually no one has seen a connection
between Jefferson’s octagons and racial ideology. And yet, if we delve
into the sources for his eight- sided figures, we fi nd ways in which race
operated as what Simon Gikandi has recently called the “sublimated
ghost” of modern aesthetics.6 It was not just that the presence of slaves
had to be visually and spatially repressed at places like Monticello but,
crucially, that the Enlightenment ideals of light and freedom embodied
in the architectural figure of the octagon were valorized in distinction
to ideas of darkness and unfreedom associated with racial slavery. My
contention is that Jefferson’s octagons were inspired in overdetermined
ways by the ideal of a modern, autonomous, sensory and political sub-
ject that could only be conjured in reference to its obverse—an unfree
and unaesthetic racial subject.

Renaissance Harmonies
One direct influence for Jefferson’s eight-sided forms was the Renais-
sance architect Andrea Palladio, whose Four Books of Architecture Jef-
ferson called the “Bible.” Jefferson’s earliest-known design incorporating
an octagon form, dating to the 1770s, was a sketch for an eight-sided cha-
pel, probably intended for Williamsburg. On the back of the sketch, Jef-
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Figure 1. Thomas Jefferson,

Plan of a chapel, ca. 1770–79.
Reproduced by permission of
ferson cited Palladio’s plates of the circular Temple of Vesta The Huntington Library, San
as his source. In characteristic fashion, Jefferson played Marino, California.
with precedent loosely, freely converting the pagan temple
into a church and turning the circle into an octagon.
As a provincial reworking of the classical circular temple form, Jef-
ferson’s design called to mind the larger constellation of meanings of the
circle in Renaissance architectural theory. The round form evoked the
Platonic harmony of the universe and linked the divine, the archetypal
human body, and the building in one figure. This reverberation was given
an iconic visual form by Leonardo da Vinci, after a verbal description
by the Roman architectural treatise-writer Vitruvius, who compared the
symmetry of buildings to the “well-made man.” In da Vinci’s rendering,
the body was inscribed within a circle centered on the navel—an
anatomic-mathematical figure whose proportions could also guide ar-
chitecture. Renaissance architects judged the beauty of both human and
architectural forms by comparing their geometric proportions to ideal
types.
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Circles, and by extension

octagonal forms, in architecture
were thus clearly imbued with
analogies to human bodies. By the
late eighteenth century, such an-
thropomorphic overtones re-
mained while the implicit racial
hierarchies attendant on them in-
tensified. As David Bindman has
argued recently, Enlightenment
aesthetic theory was suffused
with racial thinking, particularly
during the rise of physiognomy and
other movements that connected
the exterior attributes of human
bodies with interior character and
advanced judgments about the
Figure 2. Thomas Jefferson,
Sketch labeled “To draw 3 sides relative beauty of different racial
of an Octagon . . . ,” ca. 1771. groups. The German art historian Johan Winckelmann, for
Collection of the Massachusetts
Historical Society.
example, contrasted the sublimity of Greek sculptural fig-
ures with the deformations of non-European bodies, such
as the horizontal eyes of the Chinese and the swollen
mouths of Africans.7
Jefferson’s writing on racial difference in terms of aesthetics mir-
rored pervasive Euro-American prejudices about the relative beauty of
different human forms. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he observed
that white bodies had “a more elegant symmetry of form,” and that the
paler tone of white faces permitted “the expressions of every passion by
greater or less suffusions of colour,” whereas black faces were plagued
with an “eternal monotony . . . that immoveable veil of black which covers
all the emotions.”8 Jefferson’s preference for symmetry in architecture
may seem far from his praise for the symmetry of white bodies. Yet given
the long tradition of architectural theory connecting bodies to architec-
ture, it is difficult to see how these beliefs about beauty did not reinforce
one another.9 The perfect symmetry of one form could only be appre-
hended through contrast with the dissymmetry of less beautiful bodies.
A second explanation for Jefferson’s fondness for geometric forms
is his well-known love of mathematics. Among his drawings for Monti-
cello are two sketches related to the addition of octagonal bows to his
original rectilinear design for the house. Strikingly, Jefferson rendered
 Irene Cheng · Race and Architectural Geometry 125

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these octagons in the form of abstract geometric proofs—a series of logi-

cal steps undertaken with a compass and divider. For Jefferson, the draw-
ing of the octagon was an exercise in reason. Like many eighteenth-century
men, he saw Euclidean geometry as a way of training minds. John
Locke, for instance, advocated for mathematical learning as “a way to
settle in the mind a habit of reasoning closely.”10 Jefferson advised that
mathematics “gives exercise to our reason” and connected the study of
mathematics to the cultivation of a rational body of citizens.11 Advanced
training in the mathematical and physical sciences would “develop the
reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their
morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.”12
Here again, the notion of a universal reasoning subject ran into the
contradictions of racial ideology; Jefferson did not deem all Americans
equally fit to receive the edifying effects of mathematical instruction. In
Notes, Jefferson wrote disparagingly of African Americans’ capacity to
learn geometry: “I think one could scarcely be found capable of trac-
ing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.”13 Following Jef-
ferson’s logic linking geometry with both aesthetic order and political
reasoning, a people who lacked the capacity to undertake geometry
could, by extension, be excluded from the corpus of democratic—and
aesthetic— subjects.

Sensational Octagons
In Renaissance architectural theory, buildings evoked the harmony
of the universe and the human body. By the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury, such symbolic understandings of beauty were supplanted by atten-
tion to the functional and sensory effects of aesthetic forms— a
revolutionary shift that some historians have identified with the birth
of modern aesthetics. The new theory was heavily influenced by contem-
porary English sensationalist philosophy, which posited a mind shaped
through sensory perception of the exterior world. Sensationalism influ-
enced English architecture by generating greater attention to the effects
of geometric forms on the perceiving subject. This modern aesthetic ap-
proach constituted a third source for Jefferson’s interest in octagonal
architecture.
The view of architecture as a practice in the manipulation of per-
ception can be found in the book that was likely the direct source for a
number of Jefferson’s eight- sided figures, Robert Morris’s Select Archi-
tecture (1755).14 Morris described the eight- sided elements in his archi-
tecture primarily in perceptual terms—as objects meant to be viewed
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both from without and within. In his remarks on an octagonal pavilion,

he explained that such a building was intended to be seen at a distance
and would contribute to creating “a new Succession of pleasing Images”
in the landscape.15 Octagons were not just objects to be seen but objects
to enable seeing— optical devices, in a sense. Morris described one house
as best suited for a hill, “where an agreeable Prospect may be had.” Its
“many Windows” were designed to enable “more easy obtaining [of] a
Variety of Views.”16
The rise of a picturesque aesthetic in English painting and landscape
design was partly a response to enclosure. As land became increasingly
privatized and consolidated, estate owners lavished attention on plea-
sure gardens that projected a vision of rural ease and naturalism.17 Oc-
tagonal architecture was a product of this new aesthetic of territorial
possession. Eight- sided forms were associated with garden follies, with
devices that allowed owners to look out over privatized and domesticated
landscapes.18 The power to see was coupled with the power of ownership.
This view is clearly expressed in a dictum by Henry Wotton that was fre-
quently reprinted in the eighteenth century. Wotton refers to something
he calls a “royalty of Sight”: “For as there is a Lordship . . . of the Feet,
wherein a Man walketh with much Plea sure about the Limits of his own
Possessions, so there is a Lordship likewise of the Eye, which being a
Ranging, and Imperious (I had almost said) Usurping Sense, cannot in-
dure to be Circumscribed within a small Space, but must be satisfied both
with Extent, and variety.”19 Wotton’s words made clear the connection
between the picturesque aesthetic and the power of ownership over a
piece of land. The octagon was an architectural device enabling this vi-
sual sovereignty.
Jefferson prized the visual qualities of octagons and the sense of op-
tical mastery over his land that they afforded.20 He sited Monticello on
the top of a hill, allowing him to step outside his house and survey the
plantation below. He designed the octagonal projection of the main par-
lor so that it faced a large lawn, providing an immediate view of an ex-
pansive domesticated landscape. Whereas the typical bows in English
pattern books were three- sided, Jefferson’s in the fi rst Monticello were
five- sided, yielding spaces suffused with light and permitting even more
unfettered visual access to the exterior landscape.
In the translation of a sensationally oriented architectural theory
from England to the southern United States, the use of octagonal build-
ings to create a “lordship of the eye” gained a racial charge. Such scopic
mastery was, of course, reserved to the white owner and residents of
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Jefferson’s house, as well as the white proprietors of other domiciles

that he designed, which often included an octagonal projecting bow as
a central feature.21 The enslaved people who worked these estates were
not the viewing subjects for which geometric viewing platforms were
designed. Although sensationalist theory, with its suggestion of an emi-
nently moldable mind, opened the door to a radically environmentalist
idea that all humans are born innately equal and only differentiated by
subsequent experience, in actuality few whites accepted the absolute
equality of the races in aesthetic or other capacities.22 More often, think-
ers from David Hume to Jefferson asserted the inferiority of blacks not
only in reason but also in the aesthetic faculties of taste and imagina-
tion. Jefferson believed that in imagination, blacks were “dull, tasteless,
and anomalous,” claiming that he had never found in any black individ-
ual “an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” He further averred
that this aesthetic incapacity could not be attributed to situation, since
some African Americans had been “liberally educated.”23
The idea of an inequality of aesthetic capacity was reflected in the
vertical relationship of spaces at Jefferson’s buildings. At Monticello, for
instance, white subjects inhabited the main level, which featured an ar-
ray of octagonal bows yielding views of the landscape, attended by
black slaves who were expected to pass through the spaces but not to
linger in acts of contemplative looking. In contrast, the working quar-
ters of Monticello were sunk below the main house in a pair of side
wings.24 The role of enslaved workers was visually and architecturally
repressed in order to emphasize the visual sovereignty and rationality of
the master.
A similar vertical spatial hierarchy was visible at Poplar Forest, the
retreat that Jefferson built between 1806 and 1826 to escape the crowds
that were descending on Monticello. The retreat, a freestanding octagon
in concept, displayed the geometric purity of a mathematical theorem.
Its central dining room was a perfect twenty-foot cube, illuminated only
from above by a skylight.25 The structure was as close as Jefferson ever
got to realizing the conceit of a geometric garden pavilion-as-house. Here
again Jefferson used the octagon to create a space enabling visual sov-
ereignty over the landscape. The primary public space was an elongated
octagonal parlor with two windows and a door opening onto an elevated
covered porch, where he could walk out and gaze upon his property. At
Poplar Forest, Jefferson could indulge the dream of a rational, enlight-
ened self, able to see all, yet free of prying eyes and a judging public—a
panoptic fantasy of an eye looking out with no returning gaze.
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Figure 3. Thomas Jefferson, Plan

of Poplar Forest, undated, drawn Yet the myth of independence that Jefferson attached
by John Neilson. University of
Virginia, Special Collections to Poplar Forest was full of contradictions, which were
Department, Thomas Jefferson manifested in the section of the house in contrast to the
Papers.
geometric clarity of the plan. Although Jefferson imagined
the house as a space of solitude, at least one and maybe
more enslaved people accompanied him during his stays. In his fantasy
of spatial autonomy, he apparently neglected to include stairs connect-
ing the living spaces above and the work spaces below. After construc-
tion began, he asked his builder to add the stairs, acknowledging, if
grudgingly, the interdependence of freedom and enslaved labor.26
Poplar Forest has sometimes been celebrated as the clearest expres-
sion of Jefferson’s desire for a villa to accommodate the private citizen.
Its “pure” octagonal geometry has been interpreted as the fi nal embodi-
 Irene Cheng · Race and Architectural Geometry 129

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ment of his love of reason, self- determination, and privacy. Yet the dis-
parity between the purity of its plan and its hierarchical bifurcation also
allegorically expresses how aesthetic architectural features tradition-
ally read as race-neutral are inextricably entangled with issues of race
and slavery. It is not simply that the (literally submerged) labor of en-
slaved blacks was necessary to prop up the myth of the independent
and enlightened citizen. Just as the asymmetry of the black body shad-
owed the perfect symmetry of the Vitruvian figure inscribed in the cir-
cle, so too the black subject’s supposed incapacity for reason and aesthetic
imagination haunted the geometric clarity of Jefferson’s eight- sided ar-
chitectural forms. This inextricability of Enlightenment and slavery, the
liberal subject and the racial one, shadows Jefferson’s octagons and early
American architecture in ways historians have only begun to dissect.

Notes
1. See, for example, Barksdale Maynard’s Architecture in the United States, 1800–1850
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), or Mark Gelernter’s History of American Archi-
tecture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999). Neither contains an extended treat-
ment of racial slavery or race, and both assert the dominance of English and Eu ropean influences
on nineteenth- century American architecture over more “marginal” or “exotic” ones.
2. Key early works include Upton’s essay “White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-
Century Virginia,” Places 2.2 (1984): 59–72, and John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The
Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
See also Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race, ed. Crag E. Barton (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). For a good brief historiographic survey of work on
race and architecture in the nineteenth- century United States, see the introduction in William
A. Gleason, Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature (New York: New York
University Press, 2011).
3. See Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005); and Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar
Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif-
ference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
5. Lucia Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s
Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
6. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
7. David Bindman, From Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth
Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 81–89.
8. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New
York: The Library of America, 1984), 265.
9. Jefferson’s love for architecture occasionally took anthropomorphizing and gendered
forms. For example, he described one of his favorite buildings as a female lover: “Here I am,
Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison quarree, like a lover at his mistress.” Jefferson to
Madame de Tesse, March 20, 1787 (Writings, 891).
10. John Locke, “Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” in Some Thoughts Concerning
Education; and, of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth Weissbourd Grant and Nathan
Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 181.
11. Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., August 27, 1786, The Papers of Thomas Jef-
ferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), http://founders.archives.gov.
12. Jefferson, “Report to the Commissioners for the University of Virginia,” 1818 (Writings,
459–60).
13. Jefferson, Notes, 266.
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14. Clay Lancaster, “Jefferson’s Architectural Indebtedness to Robert Morris,” Journal of

the Society of Architectural Historians 10, no. 1 (1951).
15. Robert Morris, Select Architecture, 2nd ed. (London: Robert Sayer, 1757), 8.
16. Ibid., 2.
17. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
18. In the books most often cited as Jefferson’s sources for octagons—Morris, Wilhelm Got-
tlieb Becker, and James Gibbs— eight- sided figures are used overwhelmingly in the context of
garden pavilions or in connection to viewing a landscape.
19. Richard Neve, The City and Countrey Purchaser, and Builder’s Dictionary (London:
printed for J. Sprint, G. Conyers, and T. Ballard, 1703), 59. Neve is quoting from Henry Wotton’s
Elements of Architecture (1624).
20. See Dell Upton’s reading of the octagonal dome of Monticello in Architecture in the
United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 36–37.
21. On Jefferson’s house designs for others, see Hugh Howard, Thomas Jefferson, Archi-
tect: The Built Legacy of Our Third President (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), 86–114.
22. On the question of whether Lockean empiricism helped break down essentialist con-
cepts of race, see the discussion in Berger, Sight Unseen, 30–32. On Hume, see Gikandi, Slavery
and the Culture of Taste, 102–3.
23. Jefferson, Notes, 266.
24. As Dell Upton has observed, at Monticello, Jefferson submerged these areas so as to
misleadingly make a small village inhabited by black and white appear as the relatively modest
home of one enlightened occupant. Upton, Architecture, 30.
25. In the built house, the perfect geometry of the dining room is disrupted by the awk-
ward addition of a fi replace in one corner.
26. On the late addition of the stairs, see Travis C. McDonald Jr., “Constructing Optimism:
Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8 (2000): 195n33.

Visualizing Race Science in Benito Cereno

Christine Yao
Cornell University

Alexandro Aranda’s skeleton displayed as the er-

satz figurehead of the San Dominick and Babo’s severed head impaled
on a pole are perhaps the two most striking images from Herman Mel-
ville’s Benito Cereno. The deliberate public exhibition of the bodily re-
mains of both the Spanish slave owner and Senegalese rebel mastermind
is central to the turn and resolution of Melville’s novella; yet these scenes
are significant deviations on the part of Melville, who otherwise based
his story on an episode from Amasa Delano’s memoir Narrative of Voy-
ages and Travels, in which the American captain thwarts a revolt on-
board a Spanish slave ship.1 The narrative’s pre sentation through the
limited perspective of the American captain Amasa Delano makes Benito
Cereno, according to the prevailing reading by critics such as Carolyn
Karcher, “an exploration of the white racist mind and how it reacts in
the face of a slave insurrection.”2 Delano’s notorious misreading of the
racial dynamics of the San Dominick, a misreading of the slave revolt