Whatever else they are doing in fle

Whatever else they are doing in fleshing out their characters, the figures we credit for the rise of the novel are also registering their culture’s investment in the eloquence of the material surface—the fact of the page, the outside of the body—and their culture’s idealization of what was graphically self-evident. Eighteenth-century culture, we should remember, made person both a word for someone’s physical appearance and a word for someone. It made trait signify a minimum unit of the stuff of personality, one of the identifying marks that set persons apart, and it made trait cognate with words such as strokeorline—words for the graphic elements from which both pictorial and written representations are composed and through which they are identified. (38)