Olaus Magnus, Carta marina (detail), 1539. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the collections of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, there’s a round ceramic disk, about the size and shape of a cobblestone, with the barest image of a face on it. Two eyes in a mushroom-shaped head, a mouth opened in a howl or scream of some kind. Radiocarbon dating puts its age at about seven hundred years old, which would make it one of the earliest known images of the Jersey Devil.

The Lenape knew it as Mësingw, a spirit being vital to preserving the balance of the forest. Mësingw (“Living Solid Face,” “Masked Being,” or “Keeper of the Game”), according to Herbert C. Kraft, who devoted his life to researching and documenting Lenape culture, was of prime importance to the Lenape. Of all the manetuwàk (spirit beings whose job it was to care for and maintain the world that Kishelëmukòng had cre­ated), Mësingw had one of the most important jobs: looking after the animals of the forest and ensuring their health and safety. Mësingw could sometimes be seen riding through the forest on a large buck, cov­ered in long, black hair from head to toe like a bear. The right side of his large, round face was colored bright red, the left side colored black.

Alternately revered and feared, he ensured the prosperity and preva­lence of vital game for the people but could also, if displeased, ruin a hunter’s luck, or “break his speech,” causing him to stammer uncontrol­lably, or scare him to death. Mësingw, for the Lenape, kept the forest in balance, mediating between humanity and animal life. When white set­tlers came to the land where the Lenape lived, they saw images and masks of a strange creature who, they were told, lived in the forbidding wilds of the Pine Barrens, the edge of the settled world. As they heard tales of Mësingw and saw the masks and effigies of the god, they saw him not as a figure of order but of terror. Read More

Detail from lithograph by Matthias Rudolph Toma depicting Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “character heads,” 1839. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The “Theophrastan character” is not often mentioned today, perhaps because it is so little known as a genre. Yet for centuries this was what “character” meant in literature. A list of familiar social types compiled in the fourth century B.C. that chronicled human traits and foibles—from bore to boaster, cynic to coward—influenced the development of later fiction and drama, and remains sharply pertinent in psychology, journalism, cartoon art, and popular culture.

Theophrastan character sketches deliberately describe a recognizable model of behavior rather than a mocked or skewered individual. Dickens’s ever-hopeful Mr. Micawber, clinging to the thought that “something will turn up,” is a descendant of the Theophrastan character, as are Molière’s miser and hypochondriac. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have created character types on what could be called the Theophrastan model, like the obsessive-compulsive, the hysteric, the impulsive man, and the paranoid (whom Theophrastus, lacking the resources of the DSM, might have called “The Suspicious Man”). The “white working-class voter” is a Theophrastan type, as is the equally hypothetical “soccer mom,” not to mention generational “types” like the baby boomer and the millennial. By the twenty-first century, the “character sketch” (or “character portrait”) had become the frequent province of editorial journalism, both print and electronic, as well as of social media and stand-up comedy. “Any kid with a passionate interest in science was a wonk, a square, a dweeb, a doofus, or a geek,” wrote the scientist Stephen Jay Gould, a self-confessed geek. (Within a year or two, however, this “depreciative” term—“an overly diligent, unsociable student,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—would morph into the glamorous style called “geek chic.”)

Why has this ancient mode survived so long? “The Characters suggested an adaptable form and a set of basic techniques, according to which human types of any century or country could be depicted,” observes J. W. Smeed. “The book seemed to offer an invitation to later writers to borrow the method and use it to describe their own contemporaries.” He adds, “I cannot think of a smaller book with a greater influence.” Read More