Revolutionary Histories: Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism 1775-1815 (Romanticism in Perspective)

Revolutionary Histories Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775–1815

Edited by W. M. Verhoeven

Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories

This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. Titles include: Toby R. Benis

ROMANTICISM ON THE ROAD

The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth’s Homeless

Frederick Burwick

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Knowledge and Power

Richard Cronin (editor)

1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS

Péter Dávidházi

THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE

Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective

Charles Donelan

ROMANTICISM AND MALE FANTASY IN BYRON’S DON JUAN

A Marketable Vice

Tim Fulford

ROMANTICISM AND MASCULINITY

Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett,

Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt

Michael J. Hofstetter

THE ROMANTIC IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY

England and Germany, 1770–1850

David Jasper

THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM

Preserving the Sacred Truths

Malcolm Kelsall

JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM

Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Temple University/New York University; Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow

Mark S. Lussier

ROMANTIC DYNAMICS

The Poetics of Physicality

Ayumi Mizukoshi

KEATS, HUNT AND THE AESTHETICS OF PLEASURE

Ashton Nichols

THE REVOLUTIONARY ‘I’

Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation

Jeffrey C. Robinson

RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS

‘My Ended Poet’

Anya Taylor

BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND

Writers and Drink, 1780–1830

Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry (editors)

1800: THE NEW LYRICAL BALLADS

W. M. Verhoeven REVOLUTIONARY HISTORIES Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775–1815 Michael Wiley ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces Eric Wilson EMERSON’S SUBLIME SCIENCE John Wyatt WORDSWORTH’S POEMS OF TRAVEL, 1819–42 ‘Such Sweet Wayfaring’

Romanticism in Perspective Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71490–3 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Andrew McCann

CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s

Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere

Revolutionary Histories

Edited by

W. M. Verhoeven

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Transatlantic Cultural Nationalism, 1775–1815

© W. M. Verhoeven 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–79415–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Revolutionary histories : transatlantic cultural nationalism, 1775– 1815 / edited by W. M. Verhoeven. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–333–79415–X

1. American literature—Revolutionary period, 1775–1783– –History and criticism. 2. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Literature and the revolution. 3. English literature– –18th century—History and criticism. 4. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 5. American literature—1783– 1850—History and criticism. 6. Revolutionary literature, American—History and criticism. 7. Revolutionary literature, English—History and criticism. 8. Nationalism and literature– –United States—History. 9. Nationalism and literature—Great Britain—History. I. Verhoeven, W. M. PS193 .R48 2001 810.9’358—dc21 2001034808 10 11

9 10

8 09

7 08

6 07

5 06

4 05

3 04

2 03

1 02

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Figures

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction W.M. Verhoeven

1

1

Traveling Through Revolutions: Chastellux, Barlow, and Transatlantic Political Cultures, 1776±1812 Lloyd Kramer

2

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History Wessel Krul

3

Benjamin Franklin, Native Americans, and the Commerce of Civility Carla Mulford

4

A Language for the Nation: A Transatlantic Problematic Leonard Tennenhouse

5

International Embarrassment: A Transatlantic Morphology of Blushing, 1749±1812 Robert Lawson-Peebles

10 26

48 62

85

6

Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel Nancy Armstrong

7

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens: Nursery Tales on the Frontier Marilyn Gaull

122

``That Miserable Continent'': Cultural Pessimism and the Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw Klaas van Berkel

135

The Illusion of the Illuminati: The Counterconspiratorial Origins of Post-Revolutionary Conservatism Michael Lienesch

152

8

9

v

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

104

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Contents

vi Contents

166

11 Edmund Burke, Historism, and History Frank Ankersmit

188

Notes

212

Index

255

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

10 ``I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale ± !'': Historical Sensitivity and Generic Contiguity in the Narrative Theories of William Godwin W.M. Verhoeven

1 The Contrast, 1793, anonymous contemporary caricature.

From an original held by the Huntington Library, San Marino,

California xii

2 C.-F. Volney, after a portrait bust by David d'Angers; in

Wessel Krul's collection 29

3 Cornelis de Pauw, portrait medallion (c. 1790); # Kath.

Propsteigemeinde St. Viktor, Xanten 136

4 Stop the Wheels of Government, frontispiece,

The Political Censor, 1796 154

vii

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

List of Figures

F.R. Ankersmit is Professor of History at the University of Groningen. He has published widely, mainly on the philosophy of history. His publications include: Narrative Logic: a Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language (1983); Knowing and Telling History: the Anglo-Saxon Debate (1986); The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: the Dynamics of Historiography (1989); History and Tropology: the Rise and Fall of Metaphor (1994); A New Philosophy of History: Critical Views (1995); Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (1996). Nancy Armstrong is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media, and Women's Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (1987) and co-author, with Leonard Tennenhouse, of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (1992). She has co-edited two collections, also with Leonard Tennenhouse, The Ideology of Conduct: Literature and the History of Sexuality (1986) and The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (1989). Most recently she published Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism (1999). Klaas van Berkel studied history and philosophy at the University of Groningen and gained his doctorate in the history of science at Utrecht University with a dissertation entitled ``Isaac Beeckman (1588±1637) and the Mechanization of the World Picture.'' He was appointed as Professor of Modern History at the University of Groningen in 1988, and is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include books and articles on the history and historiography of science in the Netherlands; on the European image of America; the history of cultural criticism; and the theory of cultural science. Marilyn Gaull is Professor of English at New York University and Temple University. She is the author of English Romanticism: the Human Context (1988) and of many essays and articles on Romantic literature, cultural history, and the history of science. She is the founder and viii

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors ix

Lloyd Kramer is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research examines the cultural and intellectual history of cross-cultural exchanges, with particular emphasis on the era between 1775 and 1850. He is the author of Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830±1848 (1988), Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (1996), and Nationalism: Political Cultures in Europe and America, 1775±1865 (1998). Wessel Krul is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Groningen. He is co-editor of Feit & Fictie, a journal dedicated to the study of representation in history. Recent publications include Romantiek en Historische Cultuur (with Jo Tollebeek and Frank Ankersmit; 1996) and ``In the Mirror of Van Eyck: Johan Huizinga's Autumn of the Middle Ages'' (1997). Robert Lawson-Peebles held posts at Oxford, Princeton, and Aberdeen before moving to Exeter University, where he is now a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Sub-Dean of the Faculty of Academic Partnerships. He has written widely on transatlantic relations and environmental history. Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America (1988) was followed by two collections (co-edited with Mick Gidley): Views of American Landscapes (1989) and Modern American Landscapes (1995). He edited Approaches to the American Musical (1996) and has written essays on, among others, Walter Ralegh, George Washington, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry George, and William Carlos Williams. A forthcoming book, American Literature Before 1880 (2002), tries to show the ways in which American literature inflected and developed a number of European literary and cultural traditions, including those of the Greeks and the Vikings. Michael Lienesch is Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An expert in the field of American political thought, he has written widely on the role of religion in politics from the eighteenth century to today. In addition to articles and essays, his books include New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (1988);

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

editor of The Wordsworth Circle, director of the Wordsworth±Coleridge Association, and founder and American director of the Wordsworth summer conference in Grasmere.

x Notes on Contributors

Carla Mulford, Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is currently writing a book-length study, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. She has published numerous essays in the field, most recently on Franklin, on the problems of history writing, and on canon formation. Among other books, she has published two scholarly editions, Only for the Eyes of a Friend: the Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton and John Leacock's First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times. Other books of note include the collection of essays Teaching the Writings of Early America, and an anthology of primary readings, Early American Writings. Leonard Tennenhouse is Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is author of Power on Display (1986) and co-author, with Nancy Armstrong, of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (1992). He has co-edited two collections, also with Nancy Armstrong, The Ideology of Conduct: Literature and the History of Sexuality (1986) and The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (1989). W.M. Verhoeven is Professor of American Culture and Cultural Theory at the University of Groningen, and is director of the American Studies Program. He has published extensively on American literature and culture, and has edited Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon (1992) and James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts (1993); he has co-edited, with A. Robert Lee, Making America/Making American Literature (1996), and, with Amanda Gilroy, Correspondences: a Special Issue on Letters, Prose Studies (1996), the first modern edition of The Emigrants by Gilbert Imlay (1998), and Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (2000). He is currently writing a book entitled Contested Lands: Radicalism, Transatlantic Emigration, and the 1790s' American Travel Narrative.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Ratifying the Constitution (with Michael A. Gillespie; 1989); and Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (1993).

The essays in this volume are based, in part, on papers originally presented at a conference held in Groningen, the Netherlands ± an academic joint venture between the University of Groningen and its transatlantic partner, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I wish to thank the United States Information Service, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Rudolf Agricola Research Institute (Groningen), and the UNC Center for International Studies (Chapel Hill), who sponsored the ``Revolutions and Watersheds'' conference. Many individuals have helped make this book possible, and it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge some of them now. Marilyn Gaull has been the book's most enthusiastic and loyal supporter, and I am particularly grateful to her for her unflagging faith in the project. I would also like to thank Townsend Ludington at UNC, without whose warm good spirits and hospitality the ``Revolutions'' conference would not have taken place. Various colleagues and friends on both sides of the Atlantic have provided support and encouragement of one kind or another. Kevin Moore was an efficient organizer and congenial host; Kiene Brillenburg Wurth kindly offered diplomatic mediation at a critical point; Charmian Hearne and Eleanor Birne have been very supportive and patient editors. I am also greatly indebted to the contributors, who have stayed with the book on its journey to publication, always responding promptly and professionally to my queries and requests for revisions. Finally, I would like acknowledge my long-standing indebtedness to my sparring partner in all matters academic, Amanda Gilroy, whose sharp critical acumen and cool common sense have made this a much better book than it might have been. The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce the following illustrations: the cover art, Sans-Culottes, and The Contrast, 1793 courtesy the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Cornelis de Pauw courtesy the Stiftsarchiv/Stiftsbibliothek Xanten, Germany; Volney is courtesy Wessel Krul, from his private collection.

xi

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Acknowledgments

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Figure 1 The Contrast, 1793, anonymous contemporary caricature. From an original held by the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Introduction

``History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget these events.'' Burke In a decade pregnant with expressions of a deep, common awareness of its historical significance, T.R. Malthus displayed in the opening paragraphs of his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population a particular sensitivity to the essential ambiguity of the historical markers of the 1790s. Hiding his cool, incisive rationality behind the persuasive cadences of his symphonic prose, Malthus sets the scene for a simple yet powerful argument that was thoroughly to upset the uneasy ideological stalemate that had arisen in Britain in the post-Bastille years. With a dwindling number of progressive minds ± despite the late, unsettling developments in France ± still propagating the revolutionary age as the dawn of the perfectibility of man and society, and others, at the other end of the political divide, having adopted a mental attitude of reactionary insularity, Malthus introduced a grim analysis of stark economics (that ``dismal science,'' in Carlyle's phrase) that effectively silenced both camps and rendered their arguments useless: The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy; the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing; the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered, and even unlettered world; the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects, which dazzle and astonish the understanding; and particularly that tremendous phenomenon 1

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

W.M. Verhoeven

in the political horizon, the French revolution, which, like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind. It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement; or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery, and after every effort remain still at an immeasurable distance from the wished-for goal.1 If Malthus's mountain-top view over the future of Britain and mankind was ultimately less a Pisgah-experience than it was a dire warning against heady hopes of social progress, this passage nevertheless documents Malthus's keen historical awareness that his generation was not only witnessing what would prove to be historical revolutions, but that it was also crucially involved in writing the revolutionary histories by which the age was to be remembered ± formulating widely reverberating answers to ``the great question . . . now at issue.'' Writing from his particular vantage point of Britain in the 1790s, Malthus can be excused for referring to the French Revolution as the single most important force rocking the cradle of the new era in European history and culture: in fact, of course, the north-Atlantic world had never really quietened down entirely after the nationalist energy released by the American Revolution. The years between 1775 and 1815 constitute a crucial episode in the history of Europe and America. Between the start of the American Revolution, with the first armed clashes between British regulars and American militiamen at Concord and Lexington, and the closing act of the French Revolution, with the eclipse of Napoleon's dreams of glory on the battlefield of Waterloo, America and Europe witnessed permutations of radicalism and revolution that left virtually no aspect of public and private life untouched. While the American colonies managed to wrench themselves away from their colonial parent, and France went through the stormy rapids of its own Revolution, Great Britain was forced to redefine itself vis-aÁ-vis both these emerging nations. But, as Malthus (and, indeed, many of his contemporaries) commented at the time, the period of 1775 to 1815 was ``big with the most important changes'' ± ``Bliss it was that dawn to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

2 Revolutionary Histories

be alive'' ± offering more than the two Revolutions that determined the face of modern America and Europe: feeding into and emanating from these Revolutions were major watersheds in most areas of cultural and intellectual life, ranging from the rise of Romanticism to the rise of Republicanism, from the beginnings of modern feminism to the creation of constitutional democracy, and from the abolition of slavery to the rise of cultural nationalism. In this collection of interdisciplinary essays, historians and literary critics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze and assess many of the watersheds and faultlines that occurred in this formative era of Euro-American relations. Individually, the essays trace one or more of the transatlantic patterns of intellectual, cultural, or scientific cross-pollination between the Old and the New World, between pre- and post-Revolutionary modes and mores. Collectively, the essays argue that the many revolutions that produced the national ideologies, identities, and ideas of state of present-day America and Europe were not in the first place part of a national but of a transnational and, more particularly, transatlantic dialogue (between Europe and America), or even trialogue (between France and Britain and America).2 The present volume cuts across the conventional scholarly dichotomies that have in the past determined the study of the American and French Revolutions, and of British radicalism. In its interdisciplinary focus (historical and literary critical/ theoretical), Revolutionary Histories aims to map previously under represented cultural spaces, thereby revealing a dynamics of cultural formation where monodisciplinary approaches have traditionally yielded only static and essentialist notions of nationhood and identity in the Revolutionary period. One of the main strengths of the present volume, then, lies in its innovative qualities. Focusing on a historical period that is now widely seen as a crucial watershed in the making of modern Euro-American identity, it offers a wide array of boundary crossings: geographical crossings (Europe/America); disciplinary crossings (history/literature); historical crossings (colonial/postcolonial); identity crossings (both racial and gendered). With a valuable degree of methodological self-consciousness, these essays explore the implications of recent trends in cultural theory to move away from essentialist notions of nationhood, identity, history, and science in the Revolutionary period, and instead interrogate these categories from decentered, constructionist perspectives. Individual essays deal with, for example, the appropriative practices underlying the early American representation of the native peoples (Carla Mulford); the complex process of transatlantic cultural signification involving that

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Introduction 3

deceivingly harmless phenomenon of the blush (Robert Lawson-Peebles); the qualifying of European geographical pessimism as a warning against, rather than a contribution toward, the colonialist exploitation of North America (Klaas van Berkel); and the creation of an illusion of international conspiracy in Revolutionary America in order to influence the increasingly nationalistic politics of the time (Michael Lienesch). The collection as a whole thus positions itself in the vanguard of what is an emerging and potentially key field within the newly revised map of Romantic literary, historical, and cultural studies. The first signs of the emergence of an explicitly transatlantic slant to the study of the era of the great revolutions date back to the late 1980s, which saw the publication of Richard Twomey's Jacobins and Jeffersonians: Anglo-American Radicalism in the United States (New York, 1989). But it was not until the 1990s, partly in response to it being the bicentennnial of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s, that we saw a marked increase in the number of publications on transatlantic relations, most notably: Roger G. Kennedy, Orders from France: The Americans and the French in a Revolutionary World, 1780±1820 (Philadelphia, 1989; paperback 1990); Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution Through British Eyes (New York, 1990); and Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, Kansas, 1997). The launch, in 1997, of Symbiosis, a journal of Anglo-American literary relations, is further witness to the increasing interest among scholars to redress the institutionalized divide between literatures in English on either side of the Atlantic. Revolutionary Histories continues these and other explorations of transatlantic cultural relations, and at the same time significantly expands the scope of the debate to include, apart from discourses of radicalism and rebellion, discourses of science, morality, and race.

The first three essays focus on constructions of state and nationhood in the late eighteenth century, and the Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideologies that fed into these constructions. They are especially concerned with the attempts by both American and European writers to assess the true meaning of the American Revolution, and to establish what its relevance might be to the post-Revolutionary future of America and the Revolutionary future of Europe, notably of France. Thus, Lloyd Kramer presents a transatlantic, cross-cultural comparison of Joel Barlow's and the Marquis de Chastellux's readings of the American Revolution. Both authors, he argues, assumed that reason, education, and social reforms would produce better institutions and liberate people

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

4 Revolutionary Histories

from Old World or Old Regime cultural prejudices. Chastellux and Barlow thus expressed a political optimism that now seems naive, but the aspirations of their late-eighteenth-century transatlantic culture should not simply be ignored or dismissed in our own, more skeptical era. In his essay, Wessel Krul looks at how Volney was trying to salvage his idealist notion of Revolutionary ``America'' against the background of the derailing of the French Revolution in the 1790s. The effects of his radical pessimism are best revealed in the dysfunctional personality of Mary Shelley's ``Creature,'' on whom Volney's works had a profound influence. Carla Mulford's essay argues that the way in which Franklin, one of the architects of the United States, placed Native Americans into a colonized situation, was not unlike the situation into which some Europeans, in particular the French and the English, placed him ± making him both colonizer and colonized, dominating and dominated. Carla Mulford's essay examines Benjamin Franklin's Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America and his Captivity of William Henry, both of which were published in England and Europe and both of which treat typically European colonial concerns about colonization, whether in terms of manners (in Remarks, especially) or of commerce (in Captivity especially). While on the one hand, Franklin presents a positive construction of native people in an effort to note the ethnocentrism of white Europeans, on the other hand, he represents native peoples in such a way as to please polite Europeans who might wish, for reading pleasure, to ``dress in feathers'' (that is, Franklin repeats the colonial process he himself has called into question). Thus, the essay concludes by speaking to the issue of the appropriative practice underlying all history-writing and story-telling. Several essays examine the ways in which revolutionary ideology was translated into strategies of linguistic and literary representation, arguing that cultural change is effected and consolidated through a process of naming and imaging as much as through political debate. Thus, Leonard Tennenhouse compares the debates over the nature and shape of the nation as a linguistic body that took place on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Most scholars have assumed the arguments about the relation between a spoken and a literary language have little to do with the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Tennenhouse, however, argues that these debates influenced each nation in a way that would continue to raise questions of what kind of literary language should indeed represent that nation. Using the transatlantic reception and development of the seduction story, in particular Clarissa, as his point of reference,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Introduction 5

Tennenhouse argues that British culture placed greater emphasis on writing that distinguished refined feelings, delicacy, and literary taste from verbal behavior that went by the name of the public sphere, whereas the American seduction tales and abridged versions of Clarissa sought to collapse the difference between the personal and the political. This latter strategy produced what might seem like a naive and plotdriven brand of realism, but this realism actually constitutes a relatively coherent idea of a nation that understood itself in terms of a modern people's republic. Robert Lawson-Peebles's complementary essay examines the function of embarrassment in late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American letters by attempting to distinguish between the treatment of emotions in Britain and the United States at the time. He analyzes the national politics of blushing in Fanny Burney's Evelina and a number of contemporaneous texts, especially conduct books: in an age of rampant Francophobia, English women preserve the modesty lost by French and other ``unsex'd'' women. Lawson-Peebles goes on to explore the transatlantic popularity of conduct books. He argues that Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple lays even greater stress on morality than that required by the English conduct books because of the threat posed to moral behavior by the disorders of the Revolution and Early Republic. The authorial/readerly blush that concludes Rowson's novel exposes the flaws in ``American happiness,'' that is, the much-vaunted familial structure of the new nation. Nancy Armstrong's essay, ``Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel,'' picks up an argument begun in The Imaginary Puritan, where Armstrong and Tennenhouse speculated that English fiction originated in British North America ± in narrative accounts by English women taken captive by the Indians. The desire of the captive to remain English at any cost and by virtue of the art of writing down her small acts of personal heroism under dire conditions, provides the narrative form and ideological strategy we associate with Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa and, by way of Richardson, with later works of domestic fiction ± notably Austen's Northanger Abbey and BronteÈ's Jane Eyre. Assuming that the captivity narrative links the eighteenth-century English novel not only with colonial America but with nineteenth-century English fiction as well, Armstrong uses it as a yardstick for determining how the novel adapts to changing historical conditions. Accordingly, these are the questions that organize the body of her essay: What changes does domestic fiction undergo as it ceases to authorize an emergent class and has to accommodate the facts of their dominance instead? Or put another way, once an industrial middle class is clearly in charge of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

6 Revolutionary Histories

England's destiny, how can a captive woman embody the values of that class and still convince readers their collective fate hung upon the preservation of her virtue? What kind of community does such a narrative ask readers to imagine as their own? Marilyn Gaull's essay distinguishes nursery tales from folk and fairy tales in order to identify what role this essentially European tradition played in American life. She argues that there is an analogy between the American frontier and nursery tales where irreconcilables (domestic/ wild; Old World forms/New World experiences) meet. Crucially, the dangers that were fantastic or figurative in eighteenth-century Europe and England became real in colonial America. Nursery tales inculcated a ``pedagogy of fear,'' and thereby protected children from the alien wilderness as well as tying them to the domestic economy by which they all lived. As well as political revolutions, the period saw revolutions in scientific discovery and in the very languages of science. Alongside the moral value ascribed to nature in the work of the Romantic poets, there was a range of other ways of looking at the natural world. Linnaeus's system of classification popularized botanical discourses, and developments in medical science, such as new schools of anatomy, altered perceptions of the human body. In the wake of Captain Cook's three great voyages of discovery, conflicting ethnological discourses produced new categories of race and gender. In his essay, Klaas van Berkel argues that Cornelis de Pauw's work reflects pessimistically on such colonialist appropriations of other nations. Placing De Pauw's theory of geographic pessimism and degenerative evolution within the context of contemporary explorations of the Pacific (notably those by Cook), Van Berkel posits that De Pauw's attack on the Native Americans should be read as a warning against undue interference in the fate and affairs of other peoples, lest these, too, should slide into the same process of degeneration he believed to have been triggered by the discovery and exploration of the American continent. Besides, Van Berkel argues, when De Pauw presents the American natives in negative terms, he is not so much denouncing the natives for what they are as for what they have been turned into at the hands of the Catholic missionaries. His text thus offers a critique of cultural imperialism. Finally, a number of essays deal with the inevitable end of all revolutions. That is, they examine the fundamental paradox that revolutions, if they are to be successful, if the disorder they unleash is not to undermine their own objectives, at some point have to be consolidated, and that the changes they effect have to be institutionalized, and turned

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Introduction 7

into legally binding checks and constraints as well as prescriptive morality. Michael Lienesch's essay examines the idea of the Illuminati conspiracy and its role in the creation of postrevolutionary conservatism in the transatlantic world of the 1790s. Using popular sources, including John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy, Abbe Barruel's Memoirs of Jacobinism, and Jedidiah Morse's Sermon at the New North Church, it charts the connections that brought the idea of the Order of the Illuminati from Europe to America, describes the effects that fears of this foreign secret society had on the heated and highly partisan domestic debates taking place in the new American nation, and examines the ways that party politicians used the illusion of international conspiracy to influence the increasingly nationalistic politics of the time. In conclusion, it speculates as to why conservatives have continued to be haunted by specters of international conspiracy, not only in America but increasingly in Europe as well. My own essay examines William Godwin's contribution to contemporary historiographic theory. Arguing that he was at the forefront of the intellectual drive aimed at exposing the Enlightenment's inability to see historical knowledge, as well as the nature of language, as fundamentally problematic, I analyze Godwin's attempts to restore the irrational and the discontinuous to our understanding of history, and to make fabulation and figurative language relevant to an adequate representation of (historical) truth. However, while Godwin may have wanted to question and problematize textual genres as stable categories of meaning and knowledge, he ultimately cannot be associated with what Horkheimer and Adorno have described as late-Enlightenment ``dissolvent rationality.'' In the last essay, Frank Ankersmit offers a careful reading of Burke's writings from the perspective of the historicization of political theory, arguing, using Mannheim's terminology, that Burke's appeal to history was certainly not meant to contribute to a ``dynamization'' of politics. Instead, the Burkean notion of ``prescription'' ± i.e. adherence to tradition ± was meant to make history serve a static rather than a dynamic conception of state and society. Ankersmit argues that Burke's political theory should be seen as a variant of natural law philosophy rather than as an early exponent of historicized nineteenth-century political thought. While these revolutionary histories have not perhaps quite decided ``the future fate of mankind'' after all, there can be little doubt that the ``era of the great revolutions'' for some time to come will be recognized and studied as a period in which the cultural domains of Europe and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

8 Revolutionary Histories

America went through one of their more decisive formative phases. The essays in this collection aim to increase our awareness of the degree to which the emergence of cultural nationalism in the period 1775±1815 was essentially a transatlantic process ± a process that was itself set in motion by a circumatlantic cultural continuum, which was neither onedirectional, nor linear, nor steadily progressive, but rather, in Foucault's words, ``an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers.''3

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Introduction 9

Traveling Through Revolutions: Chastellux, Barlow, and Transatlantic Political Cultures, 1776±1812 Lloyd Kramer

The American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century stimulated the development of an optimistic, liberal, transatlantic political culture that united the advocates of both revolutions. Of course nobody knew in the early 1780s that the American Revolution would be followed before the end of that decade by a revolution in Europe, but the revolutionary events in America attracted the attention of European intellectuals and took on new philosophical significance after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic began to argue about the similarities and differences in these two modern revolutionary movements, thus launching a historical debate that continues down to our own day. Did the French Revolution express and extend the principles of America's Revolution or did it break decisively from American ideas about government and civil society?1 This complex, long-debated question remains a useful starting point for research on late eighteenth-century transatlantic dialogues, in part because it leads to important historical comparisons of texts and events that both promoted and denied human rights in Europe and America. My objective here, however, is to raise a somewhat different issue for cross-cultural comparisions by contrasting the political optimism of that revolutionary age with the widespread cynicism in the transatlantic political culture of our own era. The remarkable optimism of late-eighteenth-century writers can be found in much of the era's vast political literature, but I want to examine these political and cultural themes in the works of only two authors: a French soldier and philosophe, the Marquis de Chastellux 10

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

1

11

(1734±88), and an American poet and political philosopher, Joel Barlow (1754±1812). Both of these writers lived as foreigners in the revolutionary societies they described, both strongly supported the revolutionary movements they observed, and both interepreted these revolutions as the beginning of a new, more enlightened age in human history. We can still learn about specific events or conflicts by reading these authors, yet the most striking aspect of their narratives (from our own fin-de-sieÁcle cultural perspective) appears in their confident belief in political and social progress. In stark contrast to the pervasive, late twentieth-century skepticism about politics, political leaders and the future resolution of economic or social problems, Chastellux and Barlow expressed profound optimism about the future political and social development of the revolutionary societies they analyzed from their positions as cultural outsiders. This difference between the historical moments of ``then'' and ``now'' suggests that the transatlantic dialogue is also a ``transhistorical'' dialogue, but this historical dialogue will be more implicit than explicit in most of my discussion of eighteenth-century texts. Although the writings of Chastellux and Barlow were well-known and controversial during their lifetimes, both authors have become almost invisible in the histories of the American and French Revolutions. Chastellux was a high-ranking general in the expeditionary force that the French government sent to aid the American revolutionary cause in 1780. His military career had therefore given him a prominent position in the French army, but his interests ran more to philosophy and social commentary than to military strategy, and he had made a name for himself in Parisian salons. He was best known as the author of an Enlightenment-style treatise on human progress and tolerance, which Voltaire had warmly praised after its publication in Amsterdam (1772). The book was soon translated into English (1774) with a title that indicated the progressive, optimistic themes of the argument: An Essay on Public Happiness, Investigating the State of Human Nature, under each of its Particular Appearances, through the several Periods of History, to the Present Time.2 Chastellux's themes in this book and in other writings strongly endorsed the social utility of tolerance, liberty, agriculture, and reason, thereby attracting enough favorable attention to secure his election to the French Academy in 1775. He thus arrived in Rhode Island with a clearly delineated philosophical perspective that shaped his response to the many conversations he would have with Americans. Using the privileges of his high rank in the French army and his fluency in English, Chastellux took long trips and wrote extensive diaries about his travels in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and Virginia (1780±2). These

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

diaries were later published in Paris under the title Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782 by the Marquis de Chastellux (1786) ± a two-volume book that also included an essay on ``The Progress of the Arts and Sciences in America,'' which Chastellux had written shortly before his return to France in 1783.3 A publisher in London soon produced an English edition of the book (1787), but Chastellux did not live long enough to enjoy the acclaim or respond to the criticism that his work evoked because he died from a severe fever in the fall of 1788. Chastellux therefore missed the French Revolution, yet his commentary on America contributed to the expanding prerevolutionary French discourse on politics and society, and his descriptions of American political and social mores showed how an enlightened philosophe could find philosophical significance in the American Revolution. Although his diaries provided descriptions of people, events, and conversations rather than a systematic treatise, Chastellux might be described historically as an optimistic philosophical predecessor of Alexis de Tocqueville. By the time Chastellux died in 1788, Joel Barlow had arrived in France to represent an American company that was trying to sell Ohio land holdings to investors in Europe. The American company went bankrupt, and Barlow's business reputation barely escaped the shady dealings of his employers, but he soon found other political and commercial activities to pursue in the general upheaval of the French Revolution.4 Barlow was a graduate of Yale University, a former chaplain in the Continental Army, and a writer who had published a conventional epic poem on America's historic role in world affairs (The Vision of Columbus [1787]). His opinions about history and social order began to change, however, as he and his wife circulated in the new political cultures of France and England during the early 1790s. Moving between Paris and London, Barlow embraced the cause of Reason and social revolution, met often with radicals such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, and began to publish commentaries that linked the American Revolution to the new political order in France. His bestknown work, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government (1792), resembled Paine's books in refuting Edmund Burke's antirevolutionary arguments and in advocating the extension of France's new political ideas to all of Europe. Despite some concerns about the growing violence in France, Barlow remained a strong supporter of the Revolution even as it entered its most radical phase. He offered advice to the French Constitutional Convention after the overthrow of the king (September 1792), ran

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

12 Revolutionary Histories

13

unsuccessfully for a seat in the French National Assembly (December 1792), and later became the American diplomatic reprentative to Algeria (1795±7). Settling again in France at the end of the decade, he continued to write, to speculate in business enterprises, and to defend the French Revolution against American critics until his return to the United States in 1804. His travels resumed, though, when President James Madison persuaded him to go back to Paris (1811) for trade negotiations with the Napoleonic government. The negotiations failed, and Barlow ultimately became an American casualty of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign; he died from exposure after trying unsuccessfully to meet with the Emperor in Lithuania and Poland at the time of the French army's headlong retreat toward Europe in November and December of 1812. Barlow's travels and commercial activities prevented him from writing various histories that he intended to produce, yet he managed to publish some of the most extensive American commentaries on the French Revolution. Few Americans knew so much about France or had such extensive first-hand experience with the French Revolution (the National Convention made him a citizen of France in 1792). His sympathetic accounts of revolutionary events in Europe made Barlow a well-known, controversial figure in America, especially after a publisher in New York collected his most important writings on the Revolution in a book, The Political Writings of Joel Barlow (1796). Federalist critics condemned his political ideas and also ridiculed him as an atheist, but the Jeffersonians admired his publications and continued to seek his advice on European affairs after he returned to the United States. Although Barlow usually wrote about general principles rather than specific leaders or policies, he gave English-language readers a proFrench historical perspective to explain all of the era's political and military events. His writings about the French Revolution were more systematic, more polemical, and more radical than Chastellux's accounts of America, and yet the two men shared a late-Enlightenment political ideology that attributed the transatlantic revolutions to the growing influence of reason and liberty in modern human affairs. At the same time, both Chastellux and Barlow struggled with late-Enlightenment tensions that appeared whenever writers argued for both the shaping role of the environment in human affairs and the existence of universal, natural laws that stood outside of all social or political systems. This philosophical tension between ``environmentalism'' and ``natural laws'' was often hidden in the rush of events, however, and it rarely affected the optimistic interpretation of the era's revolutionary transitions. This optimism rested mainly on the revolutionary trinity of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

14 Revolutionary Histories

Reason, Liberty, and Progress, but we must look more specifically at the texts of Chastellux and Barlow to see how these ideas sustained optimistic interpretations of the emerging political cultures.

Chastellux portrayed Americans as rational people who were mostly free from European corruptions and social problems, and he praised American leaders for exercising reason in all of their important political and military actions. There were of course significant differences among America's various regional cultures, yet Chastellux reported that Americans everywhere promoted ``a democratic government and a government by representation, in which the people express their will through their delegates,'' and the ``delegates'' used Reason to guide their actions: Any philosopher acquainted with mankind . . . who has studied the springs of human action, must be convinced that, in the present revolution, the Americans have been guided by two principles. . . . He will distinguish in their legislation and in their opinions a positive and a negative principle. The positive principle I call everything that reason alone might dictate, in such an enlightened age as this, to peoples who are choosing the type of government best suited to them; I call the negative principle everything that they have done out of opposition to the laws and usages of a powerful enemy for whom they had conceived a well-founded aversion. (T, 2:533±4)5 The intense negative opposition to England sometimes caused the Americans to make mistakes (Chastellux questioned the anti-English tendency to hold frequent elections and provide few honors for elected officials), but the fundamental positive principle of the American Revolution expressed and protected the best characteristics of the revolutionary cause. This positive principle ± beginning with goals that ``reason alone might dictate'' ± stressed the freedom to choose one's own government and to resist the impositions of an outside imperial power. Describing a conversation with Samuel Adams, for example, Chastellux affirmed his strong support for the central political claim of the American patriots. ``I am firmly convinced,'' Chastellux explained, ``that the Parliament of England had no right to tax America without her consent, but I am even more convinced that when a whole people says `I want to be free,' it is difficult to prove to it that it is wrong'' (T, 1:161). Although America's delegated representatives had rightly expressed

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Chastellux's account of America: reason, liberty, and progress

15

such claims for political freedom in their official declarations, these formal rhetorical declarations seemed less important to Chastellux than the daily exercise of freedom in the army and civil population. America's most significant political achievements could be seen in both the free actions of common soldiers and the rational integrity of their leaders. Chastellux reported favorably on the complex procedures to supply the Continental Army with provisions from the countryside and on the democratic processes whereby citizen soldiers in the militia chose their own military commanders. ``Nothing is more common in America than to see an innkeeper a colonel,'' Chastellux reported; ``they are in general militia colonels, chosen by the militia themselves, who seldom fail to entrust the command to the most worthy and most esteemed citizens'' (T, 1:84).6 Such procedures were of course completely alien to the French military practice of choosing officers from elite noble families, but Chastellux went beyond these political observations to stress that such freely chosen leaders produced exceptionally impressive military results. The famous fortress at West Point, for example, stood in 1780 as a monument to American creativity and initiative amid adverse conditions that military commanders would rarely face in Europe. ``When we recollect that two years ago West Point was an almost inaccessible wilderness,'' Chastellux noted, ``which has since then been covered with fortresses and artillery, by a people, who six years before had scarcely ever seen cannon . . . when, indeed, so many wonders, of both the physical and moral order, are brought together, it may easily be imagined that I had sufficient food for thought, and that my mind was not idle on the road'' (T, 1:91). The most remarkable feature of this fortress, however, appeared in the people who built it. A French visitor would be amazed by the fortress, but ``he would be still more so on learning that these fortifications cost nothing to the state, having been built by soldiers, who received not the smallest gratification and who did not even receive their stated pay'' (T, 1:94). As Chastellux described them, therefore, America's revolutionary soldiers showed what free people could do when they were motivated to defend their own social interests and their own enlightened political cause. The American Revolution nevertheless reflected more (in Chastellux's view) than the will of well-motivated soldiers and the justice of an enlightened cause. It also expressed the vision of rational, enlightened leaders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams, all of whom represented the extraordinary talents and insights of America's republican leadership. After meeting Washington at the Continental Army's Headquarters in New Jersey, Chastellux reported

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

that the commander had a ``perfect harmony'' in his ``physical and moral qualities'' and a rare ability to be ``[b]rave without temerity, laborious without ambition, generous without prodigality, noble without pride, [and] virtuous without severity'' (T, 1:113). The common soldiers of this new republican Continental Army thus followed a new kind of enlightened republican leader: General in a republic, he has not the imposing pomp of a MareÂchal de France who gives the order; a hero in a republic, he excites another sort of respect, which seems to spring from the sole idea that the safety of each individual is attached to his person. (T, 1:114) Fortunately for the Americans, this republican general also understood complex, modern military tactics, as Chastellux learned from asking him about the military books he had read (T, 1:190). In short, the most important military figure in America combined the virtues of an ancient Roman with the knowledge of the most enlightened modern Europeans. The enlightened qualities of America's republican leadership also appeared in the exemplary case of Thomas Jefferson, whom Chastellux visited at Monticello in April 1782. If Washington was the ideal republican general, Jefferson was the ideal republican philosopher, whose conversations on science, classical literature, and politics apparently resembled the most stimulating discussions of an enlightened Parisian salon. Summarizing the wide range of Jefferson's knowledge and accomplishments, Chastellux emphasized a personal affinity of ``feelings and opinions'' which was ``so perfect that not only our tastes were similar, but our predilections also ± those predilections . . . which men of spirit and feeling take pride in calling . . . `enthusiasm''' (T, 2:392). On one occasion they recited the poetry of Ossian to each other. ``At other times, natural philosophy was the subject of our conversations, and at still others, politics or the arts, for no object has escaped Mr. Jefferson'' (ibid.). Whatever the topic, however, such conversations were possible in the remote hills of Virginia because Jefferson ``had placed his mind, like his house, on a lofty height, whence he might contemplate the whole universe'' (ibid.). Chastellux thus suggested that a shared respect for reason and liberty was leading American soldiers and philosophers alike toward the kind of enlightened society that a soldier-philosopher from France could only dream about at home. The practical use of reason and liberty in America's revolutionary cause elicited frequent praise from Chastellux as he wrote about

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

16 Revolutionary Histories

17

American achievements and social mores. The rapid growth of agriculture was transforming the wilderness into productive land (``a vast forest . . . has been peopled with three million inhabitants,'' thanks mainly to ``the immense and certain profit from agriculture'' [T, 1:80±1]), but the expanding economy was also the foundation for the new nation's impressive cultural institutions. Chastellux reported that American universities, libraries, and scholars compared favorably with the best universities in Europe (see T, 2:503±4), and he found people throughout America who agreed with his own views of knowledge and progress: ``Let us never cease repeating: that from every possible point of view, Ignorance is the source of evil, and knowledge that of good'' (T, 2:540).7 All of America's important political, economic, and cultural institutions therefore offered good reasons to anticipate a highly successful national future, yet Chastellux was also realistic enough to see some dangers that could threaten the happiness of future generations. He worried, for example, about the commitment to political equality in an expanding commercial system that would produce economic inequalities and new forms of social conflict. American political principles might well be compromised in the social competition for wealth, and the democratic experiment could collapse. ``[S]uppose that the increase of population reduces your artisans to the status they have in France and England,'' he wrote in his commentary on the progress of the arts and sciences in America; ``do you then believe that your principles are democratic enough so that the landholders and the opulent would still continue to regard them as their equals?'' (T, 2:536). The answer to that question could carry America into familiar Old World problems, especially if wealthy people lost respect for public office. Chastellux thus stressed the need to provide sufficient compensation and honors for government officials in order to attract talented people who would otherwise avoid the burdens of public life. Americans must recognize the political consequences of social inequalities, including the contradictions of an agrarian system that divided the population into categories of ``free'' and ``slave.'' Although Chastellux accepted many of the emerging racist assumptions about differences between white and black people, he criticized the ``tyranny'' and ``ill effects'' of slavery and reported with approval that Virginians ``seem grieved at having slaves, and are constantly talking of abolishing slavery and of seeking other means of exploiting their lands'' (T, 2:439). Chastellux's own proposal for eliminating slavery was to transport black males out of the country and ``encourage the marriage of white men with the Negresses,'' thereby producing a new mixed race in which ``the color would be totally

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

changed'' (T, 2:440, 441). Such ideas indicate that Chastellux's usual optimism may have vanished when he pondered the problem of slavery in America, though his speculations on interracial marriage did overlap with his recurring interest in American sexual behavior. Chastellux often commented on the familiar, informal relations between men and single women which he observed in taverns, inns, and homes throughout America. As he explained in one of his early comments about the women he encountered, ``[l]icentious manners . . . are so foreign in America that conversation with young women leads no further, and that freedom itself there bears a character of modesty unknown to our affected bashfulness and false reserve'' (T, 1:68). Despite this exceptional sexual order and propriety, Chastellux expressed concerns about the future virtue of American women and wrote strong warnings about the potential dangers of women's fashion, expensive jewelry, and corrupting luxuries. The purity of America's women was for Chastellux one of the nation's great resources; indeed, he assumed that the national future would depend on this resource as surely as it would depend on successful government institutions. He advised women to ``take pride for the preservation of their virtue'' and to be careful about men who would take that virtue from them. ``Men who love only pleasure corrupt the opposite sex, whom they make but an instrument of their own voluptuousness'' (T, 2:540).8 America's future would thus be assured in Chastellux's view if the public virtues of reason and liberty could remain connected to the private virtues of modesty, trust, and simplicity. Too much wealth or luxury might well undermine the achievements of this remarkable revolutionary society, where common soldiers, innkeepers, generals, and philosophers all acknowledged the social utility and truths of reason, freedom, and virtuous behavior. Chastellux's description of the American Revolution emerged in his detailed reports on common people, famous leaders, and daily life, but the details may have been more effective than any abstract, polemical tract in producing an image of the New World that ``enlightened'' Europeans could admire. It was also the kind of virtuous, democratic image that most Americans saw in themselves when they traveled (like Joel Barlow) from the United States to Europe.

Barlow's account of France: reason, liberty, and progress Barlow defined the meaning of France's Revolution much as Chastellux had described events in America by referring often to the rationality and popular will of the revolutionary cause. Where the Americans had cast

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

18 Revolutionary Histories

19

aside the claims of an Old World imperial power, the French had rejected the traditional claims of an Old Regime monarchical state in a revolution that Barlow called (1792) ``the work of argument and rational conviction, and not of the sword. . . . It was an operation designed for the benefit of the people; it originated in the people, and was conducted by the people. It has therefore a legitimate origin.''9 According to Barlow, both the rationality and popular sovereignty of the French Revolution stood in complete opposition to an Old Regime which had always rested on the foundation of irrationality, royal sovereignty, and social inequality. The political struggle of the 1790s was thus a moral struggle, and Barlow strongly believed that the moral virtues of the era could be found in the revolutionary political campaign for reason, freedom, and equality. Barlow's writings about the French Revolution therefore urged people outside France to promote the new political ideals in their own societies. Appealing to the people of northern Italy to join the revolutionary cause, for example, Barlow argued (1792) that all enlightened persons should honor and support the new republic in France. ``She has addressed herself to the great principles of reason which are common to all men; she has cleared away the mass of prejudice, of false doctrine, [and] of superstition in the science of morals. . . . She has laid down and clearly defined the rights and duties of man and of citizens; [and] explained the great doctrine of equality.''10 The great French upheaval had thus overthrown the ancient power of feudal Europe and initiated what Barlow described as the ``rational system of public felicity to which the nations of Europe are moving with rapid strides'' (A, 5). This historical movement toward a new rational system faced obstinate opposition, however, because European regimes had long indoctrinated their ``subjects'' in a feudal mentality that fostered social hierarchy, mind-numbing obedience and religious superstitions. Barlow's longest commentary on the Revolution, Advice to the Privileged Orders . . . of Europe, catalogued this dismal history of false consciousness and attempted to show how the church, the army, and the law courts of the ``feudal system'' had instilled irrational beliefs in the European population. The French Revolution was now challenging the whole feudal tradition, however, and showing Old World populations how they could follow the Americans in claiming their sovereignty and their rights ± if they would simply change what Barlow called their ``habit of thinking.'' Social hierarchies endured because people thought that such social arrangements were the inevitable conditions of human existence. When they learned to think that freedom and equality were the natural, rational conditions of human social life, then new systems

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

based on such principles could quickly displace the older hierarchies. This transition in thought had already occurred in America, thus proving the truth of the new social and political system for others. ``Their deep-rooted and inveterate habit of thinking,'' Barlow wrote about the Americans, ``is that all men are equal in their rights, that it is impossible to make them otherwise; and this being their undisturbed belief, they have no conception how any man in his senses can entertain any other. This point once settled, every thing is settled'' (A, 16). France's revolutionary role in Europe thus replicated the earlier American movement insofar as the French had redefined the European understanding of freedom and equality. Defenders of the Old Regime would continue to condemn this radical change in European thought, but Barlow confidently affirmed that the revolutionary advance of human reason and freedom would soon enable even the most oppressed people to achieve the enlightened goals of the age. ``Engrave it on the heart of a man, that all men are equal in rights, and that the government is their own, and then persuade him to sell his crucifix and buy a musquet ± and you have made him a good citizen'' (A, 18). The French rejection of Old Regime ideas and institutions thus opened Europe to the reason, liberty, and social equality that would produce new forms of human initiative and creativity. In contrast to Chastellux's account of specific American soldiers and innkeepers, Barlow narrated the story of France's Revolution as a general transformation of oppressed ``feudal'' people into rational, free individuals. ``It must be confessed,'' Barlow noted, ``that the opinions we have formed of the human heart stand a chance of being erroneous; as they have been formed under the disguise of impressions which do not belong to its nature. The picture of man could not have been fairly drawn while he sat with a veil upon his face'' (A, 99). This new recognition of the human being without a ``veil upon his face'' encouraged Barlow to believe that a radically new era of human history was now possible. The new human being, wrote Barlow, ``rises into light, astonished at what he is, ashamed of what he has been, and unable to conjecture at what he may arrive'' (ibid.). Although nobody could say for sure where human beings might be heading, the key point for Barlow was that virtually every positive aspiration now seemed achievable. There would be new tolerance, new freedom, new wealth, new learning, new equality, new justice, and new peace. Indeed, as Barlow reported in his Advice to the Privileged Orders, ``the probability becomes more apparent, the more it is considered, that society is capable of curing all the evils to which it has given birth'' (A, 58).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

20 Revolutionary Histories

21

This extraordinary optimism (which seems alien and naive to our skeptical age) rested on a distinctive Enlightenment conception of social environments and human nature. Change the environment or education of human beings, Barlow suggested, and their natural reason and freedom will soon emerge. ``When the mind is once set loose from the shackles of royalty,'' Barlow argued in one of his optimistic predictions, ``it finds itself in a new world. . . . Human nature assumes a new and more elevated shape, and displays moral features, which, from having been always disguised, were not known to exist'' (PW, 171). To put it simply, as Barlow did in his most enthusiastic moments, that old human conflict between ``nurture'' and ``nature'' was on the point of being resolved in a postrevolutionary reconciliation of rational institutions and rational people. Among the many benefits that could be expected to follow upon this revolutionary transition, Barlow emphasized the prospects for peace and international cooperation. In the new, postmonarchical age of human freedom, there would be fewer conflicts over national boundaries and no reason to go to war over disputed royal territories. Citizen soldiers would replace standing armies, the royal motives for foreign conquest would disappear, and a new international cooperation among free people would soon emerge (see PW, 164; 196; 232). ``If all the nations of Europe were as free as the French,'' Barlow explained, ``and every individual member of society were equally independent of every other individual, the question respecting the boundaries of any particular government would become in a great measure indifferent, both to the people of that government and to all their neighbors. No person would have any interest in extending or contracting the territorial limits of a state'' (PW, 232). A free Italy, for example, would have no reason to wage war against a free France, and free people everywhere would seek careers and honors in commerce and public service rather than in armies.11 Barlow saw of course that the French Revolution had actually led to a general European war by 1792, but he blamed the war entirely on royalist enemies who refused to accept the Revolution's ideas or institutions. ``The Principles of this revolution are those of universal peace,'' Barlow explained with his characteristic confidence in a better future; ``because it takes away every motive for national hostility, and teaches the people of all countries to regard each other as friends and fellowcitizens of the world. . . . Purge the earth of its tyrants, and it will no more be tormented with war'' (PW, 216; 219±20). We may wonder about Barlow's optimism in the midst of so much violence and bloodshed, but his belief in human rationality enabled him to believe also that all

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

rational people could eventually accept the same political truths. Although there were still too many kings in 1792, the wider ``environmental'' truth lay safely beyond the violence of the day: Remove the tyranny of kings, nobles, and established churches and a new, peaceful Europe would eventually emerge from the feudal rubble. Barlow therefore shared and extended Chastellux's optimistic expectations for progress in all spheres of human society, including government, commerce, education, and international relations. Yet even in his most optimistic moments Barlow could see obstacles to the progress he anticipated and affirmed. His long ``Letter to the National Convention of France'' (September 1792) discussed 13 significant flaws in the French Revolution's first Constitution and offered detailed advice on how the French could expand and protect the revolutionary project they had begun. He worried, for example, about the creation of a governmentfunded national church, the political influence of a standing army, the use or abuse of capital punishment in the justice system, the failure to free France's overseas colonies, and the high salaries for government officials (see PW, 172; 184; 187; 191; 194±6). Curiously enough, where Chastellux had advised Americans to have fewer elections and pay officials more money, Barlow advised the French to have more elections and give government officials less money (see PW, 182±3). The management of government money was for Barlow a major threat to the integrity of the Revolution because he saw the new government adopting deceptive, Old Regime strategies to raise money through indirect taxes and lotteries. Such deceptions violated the public's right to know how money was collected and spent, but the tax policies were only part of a flawed revenue system that also depended on the dangerous accumulation of a burdensome public debt (see A, 116).12 France's revolutionary leaders could thus undermine their own rational, progressive objectives if they continued to imitate Old Regime methods for funding the government, maintaining an army, or sanctioning an established religion. There was, however, an antidote for all of these public poisons in the new forms of rational education, which for Barlow (as for Chastellux) offered the surest protection against the traditional ills of social and political life. The new revolutionary society would survive and flourish through education that taught every citizen the truth about reason, human rights, and equality. In contrast to Old Regime obscurantism and superstitions, it was ``essential'' in Barlow's view ``that every thing should be reduced to the standard of reason'' (PW, 187). Even the most reasonable laws, however, could only have meaning or influence when people

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

22 Revolutionary Histories

23

learned about them, which meant that the right to knowledge would be one of the crucial human rights in the postrevolutionary era. ``Knowledge is a part of the stock of society,'' Barlow explained; ``and an indispensable part to be allotted in the portion of the claimant, is instruction relative to the new arrangement of natural right'' (A, 56). Such instruction enabled each person to understand the meaning of individual freedom and also ``to feel the cares and interests of an active citizen, to consider himself as a real member of the state, [and to] know that the government is his own'' (ibid.).13 The lessons of a rational education enhanced the wellbeing of societies as well as individuals because people who felt a stake in the political and legal system would rarely break the law. Education therefore became for Barlow the all-important shaping environment in which future generations would learn the ``habits of thought'' that sustained a successful republican state and society. Barlow's support for the ideals of the French Revolution never entirely disappeared, but Napoleon's dictatorship and wars eventually pushed him back to a Jeffersonian America that he clearly deemed superior to the political system in postrevolutionary France. Although the mature Barlow and the mature Napoleon were both in some sense ``representative figures'' of the French Revolution, they interpreted the Revolution's meaning and legacy in very different directions. There is thus a kind of metaphorical significance in Barlow's last journey as an American envoy who failed to connect with Napoleon on the snowy roads of the Russian front. Isolated in the cold, ruined towns of eastern Europe, Barlow vented his anger in a final poem that blamed Napoleon for waging brutal wars and also perhaps for the destruction of Barlow's earlier, optimistic dreams about the new human era of universal peace. He entitled his poem ``Advice to a Raven in Russia,'' thus playing with conscious or unconscious irony on his famous Advice to the Privileged Classes. Where Barlow had once advised Europeans on the happy future of reason and freedom, he now advised a hungry raven on the food he could find in the corpses that lay littered across Napoleonic Europe. The old hopes for universal peace had given way to the bitter reality of Napoleon's universal war: War after war his hungry soul requires,

State after State shall sink beneath his fires,

Yet other Spains in victim smoke shall rise

And other Moskows suffocate the skies,

Each land lie reeking with its peoples slain

And not a stream run bloodless to the main.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

24 Revolutionary Histories

The tyrannical Napoleon had thus destroyed countless human lives as well as the freedom and aspirations of the French Revolution, leaving Barlow with anger and disappointments that sound far more familiar to us than any of his earlier optimism. Barlow's final poem begins to carry us toward a postrevolutionary perspective that has become the chastened sensibility of our own transatlantic political culture. In the revolutionary decade of Barlow's most important political commentaries, however, his work constantly emphasized the progressive expansion of reason and freedom throughout the Western World, and it is the optimism of the 1790s that makes Barlow such an intriguing example of his generation's political and cultural movements. Much as Chastellux's narrative about America offered evidence to confirm the French philosophes' belief in the human ability to create a more rational, prosperous society, Barlow's narrative about France offered reassuring confirmation for Americans who believed that the New World commitment to freedom and equality would transform Europe. Each writer confirmed important themes in his own nation's culture by describing the revolution in another society, but each writer also assumed that he was witnessing a decisive contribution to the wider historical progress of human reason, human rights, and modern governments.

Conclusion: transatlantic revolutions and fin-de-sieÁcle pessimism Although we still live in societies whose political and social institutions evolved out of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century revolutions, many of that era's most prominent ideas have lost credibility. It is difficult, for example, to assert the existence of universal, natural rights in a contemporary intellectual milieu that interprets all political and cultural ideals as the ``cultural constructions'' of specific historical eras and social groups. Indeed, ``Reason'' itself is now often described as a powerful ideological component of Western culture rather than a reliable foundation for universal truth, and our post-Freudian age finds unconscious drives or anxieties rather than rationality at the root of most human behavior. We have also lost much of the Enlightenment

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Till men resume their souls, and dare to shed Earth's total vengeance on the monster's head, Hurl from his blood-built throne this king of woes, Dash him to dust, and let the world repose.14

25

optimism about the inevitable benefits of science and knowledge as we cope with the twentieth century's terrible history of world wars, genocidal murders, atomic bombs, and massive environmental pollution. Democratic nation-states have found new ways to wage war instead of assuring the peace that Barlow so optimistically anticipated. Kings and nobles have mostly disappeared, but where do we find the rational, enlightened leadership that Chastellux found in George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and why do wealth and privilege remain so influential in the politics of every democratic society? Modern world history has often challenged or destroyed confident beliefs in the reason, progress, and democratic governments that the revolutionary generation anticipated for posterity. We smile ironically at Chastellux's respect for the rationality of American political leaders and at Barlow's prediction that universal peace would follow the creation of democratic republics and citizen armies, in part because we can never go back to such confident speculations about the growth of reason, the future of democracy, or the end of warfare. We know too much about modern history to believe that better education will give us better human beings. After we have criticized all of the eigthteenth-century naivete and blindness, however, I think that we must try to recover at least some of that revolutionary generation's confidence in the democratic possibilities of public life and in the human ability to transform the social and political world. We must of course be on guard against naive assumptions about human reason, education, social reform, and inevitable progress, and we must recognize how such assumptions can lead to new forms of power, exclusion, and imperial arrogance. We nevertheless surrender too much to our own cyncism when we go beyond the critique of revolutionary-era naivite to abandon all aspirations or demands for democratic governments and democratic public cultures. Although we can criticize Chastellux and Barlow for their failure to see all of the dangers in the revolutionary societies they described, we foster another kind of blindness when we lose sight of the democratic aspirations for rational reform that these transatlantic movements so consistently expressed. Contemporary transatlantic dialogues should therefore include a continuing dialogue with the late Enlightenment because the political and cultural issues of that emerging democratic era remain part of our own, openended historical conflicts. Of course we face social and political problems that differ from the problems of the eighteenth century, but we can still learn from the blindness and the insights of that transatlantic past as we move toward an always-evolving transatlantic future.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Traveling Through Revolutions

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History Wessel Krul

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein contains a long monologue in which the Monster recounts its adventures.1 Frankenstein, the ambitious researcher who wanted to surpass nature, ignominiously took flight when his creation showed its first signs of life. He only dared to return home when he was sure that the Monster had left. A long time passed before the two, the creator and his creature, met again. Meanwhile the Monster acquired a remarkable knowledge of human civilization. It found shelter in a shed near a farmhouse, and it tried to observe and imitate its new neighbors as closely as possible. In this way, it quickly mastered the French language; and because its unsuspecting host family consisted of educated persons who had the habit of regularly reading aloud to each other, the Monster soon was introduced to several masterpieces of European literature. These writings offered an uncomforting view of the world in which it so abruptly found itself: Milton's Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. But the Monster had already learned about doubt and dejection from the very first book which it overheard being read by the fireplace in the evening hours. This was The Ruins by C.-F. Volney.2 Mary Shelley describes the mood induced by Volney's visionary essay of 1791 as a decisive change in the originally innocent and good-hearted character of the Monster. ``Through this work,'' she has it explain, ``I obtained a cursory knowledge of history and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight in the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics, of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians, of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans ± of their subsequent degenerating ± of the decline of that mighty empire, of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the 26

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

2

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 27

``Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of as noble and godlike. . . . For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.''3 Mary Shelley's novel, like the Gothic tales she took as her inspiration, is full of wild coincidences and implausible details. It resists all ``willing suspension of disbelief.''4 And yet it exerts a strange and lasting fascination. In the course of the story, the impression grows that Frankenstein (the scientist) and the Monster are two sides of the same individual.5 Although this is never made explicit, the reader is constantly reminded of the theme of the split personality, which, from Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir to Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, remains such an obsessive element in romantic literature. The habit of referring to the Monster itself, instead of to its creator, as ``Frankenstein,'' also points to this common identity.6 If we read the story in this way, the highly improbable education of the Monster gains much in credibility. The attempt to improve the mechanisms of nature by creating a superior living being, turned out to be a failure. The disillusionment of the scientist is reflected in the way the Monster, which started out with an unspoiled and very sensitive mind, indeed not unlike Goethe's Werther, gradually becomes aware that not everything is admirable in human society. The place accorded by Mary Shelley at this crucial moment in the novel to Volney's Ruins, nowadays certainly the least-known of the literary works the Monster overhears being read, points to the immense prestige this philosophical treatise enjoyed among a radical audience in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 It had been of great importance in the intellectual formation of Mary's husband. Percy Shelley's early philosophical poem Queen Mab (1813) is little more than a set of variations on Volney. The frequently anthologized sonnet Ozymandias (1817) makes use of the same type of imagery: all power will turn to dust. What Volney had to offer to Percy Shelley was primarily a fervent belief in a manmade future, in what Shelley called ``the necessity of atheism,'' in the inevitable downfall of all political and religious oppres-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

discovery of the American hemisphere and wept . . . over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.'' Volney's interpretation of history filled the Monster with contradictory sentiments:

sion, and in the human capacity, recently triumphant in the West, of being master of one's own destiny.8 This was the basic program of the radical Enlightenment. In the context of Mary Shelley's novel, however, these ideas lost much of their revolutionary impetus. For the Monster, the absence of an omnipotent Creator was not at all a stimulating thought. It did not feel emancipated, but lonely and desolate. The way in which it summarized Volney's vision of the course of history was even less promising. Of course the development from the ``slothful Asiatics'' to modern Europe showed an impressive dynamism, but the gains of progress were unequally distributed. When the New World was mentioned, the Monster immediately sympathized with the ``savages'' who had become the victims of civilization. In the critical commentary on Frankenstein, Volney's Ruins is usually, somewhat vaguely, referred to as ``an essay in the philosophy of history.''9 But what kind of history? After it had been introduced to it, Mary Shelley's Monster not only rebelled against the idea of a benevolent creator, but became deeply suspicious about mankind in general. A growing disillusionment with the results of the French Revolution, which can also be noticed in the later Percy Shelley, may account for some of Mary Shelley's skepticism.10 But it is possible that she was a more careful reader of Volney than some of her commentators. On closer acquaintance, Volney's enthusiasm for the Revolution is hedged with all kinds of reservations. The skepticism was there all along. Frankenstein adopts the form of the Gothic Novel to undermine the rationalist faith in scientific progress. In his ``reading'' of Volney's Ruins, ostensibly a rationalist pamphlet, the Monster meets history as a force largely independent of the individual will: its course is always unsure, and the achievements of centuries may be destroyed in a few short years.11 Curiously, the ``hapless fate'' of the native Americans is barely touched upon in the Ruins. It is, however, an important subject in Volney's later geographical studies of the United States.12 In writing the Monster's discourse, Mary Shelley may have been thinking of what she knew of Volney's oeuvre as a whole. If so, this explains even better why she decided to introduce his work at that important moment in her novel.

Geography and politics Among his many activities C.-F. Volney (1757±1820) included those of travel writer, geographer, political theorist, historian, orientalist, linguist, and specialist in agriculture.13 He visited both the Near East and the New World, and in this way had the opportunity of comparing

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

28 Revolutionary Histories

Figure 2 C.-F. Volney, after a portrait bust by David d'Angers, in Les ruõÈnes (Paris: Parmantier, 1826), frontispiece (collection of the author).

the most ancient human societies with the most recent settlements. In his writings, grandiose visions of historical change alternate with meticulously objective, even pedantically precise observations. However, he gradually came to the conclusion that his scientific findings did not corroborate his radical expectations. He fairly soon lost whatever political influence he had. In spite of his close ties with the reigning powers, he was never entrusted with more than honorary functions. And although some of his works remained in circulation throughout the nineteenth century, as a literary figure he was overshadowed by Chateaubriand, whose descriptions of the same geographical regions were much more colorful than his.14 Cultural history has had trouble in finding a distinct place for Volney and his generation. In general, the loose group of French writers and politicians to which he belonged is designated as the ``ideÂologues.'' Apart

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 29

from Volney, this group consisted of authors such as Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Garat, Daunou, Roederer, DegeÂrando, LaromiguieÁre, and Maine de Biran; often SieyeÁs is also included.15 All of them reached the height of their careers between 1790 and 1815. Napoleon, who was irritated by their moral scruples, used the name ``ideÂologues'' as a term of abuse. The group kept the name as a compliment, more or less in the same way as the defenders of Captain Dreyfus, almost a century later, began to call themselves ``intellectuals.''16 Intellectuals is certainly what the ``ideologues'' were. They had a firm confidence in reason as the sole instrument to understand the world. But experience had taught them to be prudent. The great social schemes and promises of progress that characterized much of Enlightened theory, no longer satisfied them. On the other hand, they had little use for the sentimentality, the appeal to subjectivity and aestheticism, that came into fashion at the time. They were too independent to support Napoleon in everything, but they did not join the Romantic opposition. As a result, they seemed to fall between two stools. Nonetheless, a writer such as Stendhal looked at them as his teachers and intellectual models.17 For a long time, Stendhal even maintained that nobody was able to understand his work, except Destutt de Tracy and Volney. And as far as connection with Romanticism is concerned, other indications exist apart from Frankenstein. As late as the 1840s, GeÂrard de Nerval, surely the most Romantic of all French Romantics, began a story with Volney as one of the main characters.18 Volney was born as Constantin-FrancËois Chasseboeuf, the son of a well-to-do lawyer in the province of Anjou. At 17, he started his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. He read law, later also medicine. But soon he discovered more exciting surroundings than the university. From 1777 onwards, he was a regular guest at the salons of Baron Holbach and Madame HelveÂtius. In these intellectually advanced, but also rather exclusive circles, he made friends with Benjamin Franklin, who in turn introduced him to Thomas Jefferson. Conversation with both Americans left the young philosopher with a strong desire to see the New World for himself. As he wrote later: ``To America, which was then in its birth throes, and to the Savages I felt ardently attracted.''19 But at the same time he became interested in the chronology and geography of Antiquity, and he took up the study of Herodotus which he was to continue throughout his life. In 1782 he decided to travel to Egypt and the Near East. He made extensive preparations, and trained himself to bear various kinds of hardships. In the introduction to his travel report he stressed the private and strictly scientific nature of his project. An unexpected legacy had left him with a sizeable sum of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

30 Revolutionary Histories

money. To undertake an expedition seemed the best way to spend it. Was that all there was to it? It has been suggested that the so-called legacy was in fact a subvention by the French government.20 At the time, France was still at war with Great Britain. To gain a military foothold in the Near East could be of great advantage. Shortly before, the French government had subsidized an expedition led by the Hungarian adventurer De Tott, who strongly recommended the conquest of Egypt. Even if Volney did not draw upon government funds for his travels, there can be no doubt that his activities were watched with interest in official circles.21 In his report he warned against ill-considered experiments in imperialism. But for an antiquarian, he paid a remarkable amount of attention to the actual political circumstances. His travel book offers detailed information on the economy, the climate, the food, and the existing diseases, and particularly on military matters, all of which could be profitable to a conqueror. Fifteen years later Bonaparte used Volney's work as his travel guide during his campaign in Egypt.22 Volney's Travels in Egypt and in Syria were published in two volumes in Paris in 1787.23 For this book, he first chose the pen-name under which he henceforth would be known. He never explained his change of name. According to some, it was a translation of Chasseboeuf (``cowherd'') in one of the languages of the Near East. But others have seen the two syllables as an act of homage to Voltaire, the sage of Ferney. After his return, Volney became actively involved in the movement for political reform in France. He published several radical pamphlets, and in 1789 he was chosen as a deputy in the meeting of the Third Estate, which was soon to proclaim itself the National Assembly. As a representative of the French people, Volney distinguished himself at least once by an impassioned discourse during the deliberations on the Rights of Man. But although his proposal to refrain from abstractions and to introduce the Declaration simply by a list of grievances against the Old Regime drew attention by its ``brutal honesty,'' it was not accepted.24 In 1791 Volney combined his impressions of the Near East with his expectations of the Revolution in his Ruins, a long meditation in prose on the course of history and the causes of human happiness.

The Old World and the New Among the French revolutionaries, Volney belonged to the moderate faction. After the coup d'eÂtat of October 1792 his position became more and more difficult to maintain. By order of the new government, he wrote a short introduction to the principles of the Revolution, intended

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 31

to be distributed among the people as a sort of catechism.25 But the pamphlet was never used as such. In 1793 he settled on the island of Corsica, where he experimented with the cultivation of tropical fruit. During his tours around the island, he was sometimes accompanied by the young army officer Napoleon Bonaparte. His notes on the habits and the often violent traditions of the native population were published in the official, state-sponsored journal, Le Moniteur. But after his return to Paris he was put under arrest. Volney spent 10 months in prison, and most probably was only saved from the guillotine by the downfall of Robespierre. As one of the early revolutionaries who had distanced himself from the Jacobins, he was an obvious suspect. In the end, he would have shared the fate of all the political victims of the Terror. Nonetheless, it seems that his arrest originally was not motivated by his political opinions, but by the financial manipulations he had allowed himself during his stay on Corsica. Shortly after his release, Volney was appointed professor of history at the recently instituted EÂcole Normale SupeÂrieure. At this school or college, the teachers would be trained who were to take care of the official, state-supervised education throughout the country.26 Volney's lectures, published as Lessons in History, breathe a spirit of skepticism and disappointment.27 He publicly regretted the political excesses of the preceding years, and as an approach to history he recommended an attitude of systematic doubt. The EÂcole Normale still formed part of the program initiated by the radical wing of the Revolution. It had just begun to function in a more or less haphazard way, when the more moderate Directory, which had come to power in 1795, decided to dissolve it. Again, Volney found himself without job or income. At this point, he began to reconsider his old plans to visit the United States. He did not intend such a journey as escapism or exile: he would have preferred an official commission. If his travels in Egypt and Syria had a political purpose, he carefully concealed it. Now he openly solicited for official support. But his attempts to be appointed as a representative of the French government came to nothing. In the end he had to be satisfied with the same position as before, that of an independent scholar. One of the members of the Directory, who had known Volney since the early days of the Revolution, quotes in his memoirs from a report in which he explained why he considered Volney unfit for diplomatic service. In his writings Volney usually presented himself as a balanced, sober, matter-of-fact, and strictly rational person. The comments by his former friend and potential patron show the existence of different traits in his character:

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

32 Revolutionary Histories

Being vain, excitable, fanciful and enthusiastic, he will easily be won over to something and as easily be bored by it. When he is praised, he will be inclined to concessions or confidences, both of which are harmful to the government; when he is contradicted or treated with disdain, his anger will be raised, and in his temper he will betray his secret out of offended arrogance. In short, his habit of feeling strongly in favor of or against people and things, and his tendency to see them in a different light from one moment to the next, will cause the government to be permanently misinformed and make it run the risk of taking the wrong decisions.28 Volney arrived in Philadelphia in October 1795, and he returned to France in June 1798. His time in America was not an unqualified success. Even though he was not sent as an ambassador, he kept hoping for an influential appointment. But he soon discovered that the country did not at all conform to his imaginings. His old friend Jefferson treated him with great respect, and received him for weeks as a guest at his country house, Monticello. In general, however, his social and intellectual contacts remained limited to the circles of French eÂmigreÂs, some of whom distrusted him as a former revolutionary. It was not long before he began to travel again. His explorations not only took him up and down the Atlantic coast, but he also penetrated into the interior over the Alleghanies, and he visited the French settlements near the western frontier.29 Along the way he constantly made notes on the things he saw and heard. It is possible that his geographical inquiries again were undertaken with undefined political intentions. But he had no chance to contribute anything to French-American political relations. In the end, he decided that there was little left for him to do, and he returned home to arrange and edit the material he had collected. Maybe he realized that the right moment had passed.30 In the first place, the United States were not the enlightened, rational republic he had hoped to find. Instead of using the opportunity to build a new and better society, most inhabitants clung tenaciously to the social and religious prejudices they had brought with them from Europe. His own ideas often met with resistance. In 1797 Joseph Priestley, who earlier had started a campaign against Tom Paine, continued his defense of the Christian religion with a pamphlet describing Volney as a dangerous atheist.31 Public opinion in the United States was changing. Revolutionary and postrevolutionary France was no longer considered a natural ally. Diplomatic relations between the two republics rapidly deteriorated. Volney made plans to turn the tide by strengthening the French

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 33

influence. But his own government had more urgent matters to take care of, and in a situation where both nations were at the brink of war, it was of little use to send delegations of artists and writers from Paris.32 Volney's contacts with native Americans resulted in one more disappointment. His earlier desire to see the ``savages'' in America suggests that he was at that time still possessed by an idea of an unspoilt and inspiring state of nature. Upon meeting them, he found the natives disgusting and pitiful. America thoroughly cured him of his belief in the Noble Savage.

Circumspection and aloofness Like many moderate revolutionaries of the first hour, Volney in 1799 supported Bonaparte's political coup. In return his former adjunct appointed him a member of the Senate, and for some time he was a dedicated servant of the First Consul. But he had little sympathy for Napoleon's imperial ambitions. In 1801 he objected to the plans to reinstate Catholicism as France's official religion. According to the anecdote, Napoleon defended his projects in arguing that, whether one liked it or not, 98 percent of the French people wanted the return of the Church. Volney is said to have answered that in that case he had better also reinstate the monarchy, for 98 percent of the French people also wanted the return of the Bourbons. Napoleon's reaction is described in gradations ranging from an icy look to a kick in Volney's behind.33 After the proclamation of the Empire in 1804 Volney retired from politics. That is to say that he let things go their way, and made no attempt at influencing official policy. He still was close enough to the government to receive its favors, but at the same time he tried to keep a careful distance. Almost to the end he remained a member of the imperial Senate, a completely honorary, but very well-paid, function. In spite of their differences of opinion, Napoleon usually treated his old acquaintance and teacher with respect. In 1808 Volney was raised to the nobility as Count Volney. Not much later he was nominated Commander in the Legion of Honor. But after the fall of Napoleon, Volney was acceptable enough to Louis XVIII to be reinstated in his title of nobility. As a Pair de France he made a smooth transition to the new First Chamber.34 Volney's Description of the Climate and the Soil of the United States appeared in 1803. The author clearly indicated that this was no more than a first part. A detailed view of America, or of whatever part of the world, had to start with the climate and the soil, before continuing to the character and density of the population, the economy, the different trades and branches of industry, to arrive finally at the manners and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

34 Revolutionary Histories

habits of the inhabitants, their history, laws, and language. He had applied the same model in his earlier travel book, and in his lectures on history he had extensively commented upon it. For personal reasons, he wrote, with regard to America he had so far only been able to consider the material foundations.35 The volume on social life was still to follow. But he did not keep his promise.36 In his letters he excused himself because of weak health.37 The political situation may also have contributed to his hesitation. Volney was not the only ``ideÂologue'' who was put on the sidelines by Napoleon. In 1803 the Second Class of the Institut de France, the most important forum of the group, was dissolved on order of the First Consul.38 It is possible that Volney at that moment saw too much risk in publishing a detailed analysis of a society in which the freedom of expression was so much better maintained. But perhaps the subject had lost its urgency. France and the United States had grown wide apart. The sale of Louisiana in 1803 meant the end of an era. Volney put his American notes aside, and turned with renewed enthusiasm to his classical and oriental studies. In the same year, 1803, he took lessons in Sanskrit with the interned British navy officer Alexander Hamilton, together with, among others, Friedrich Schlegel.39 The rest of his life was dedicated on the one hand to ancient history and oriental languages, and on the other to renewed experiments in agriculture. His favorite project was the development of a system to write all the various oriental languages in the same characters derived from the Latin alphabet. The last in a long series of essays on the subject appeared shortly after his death in 1820. In his testament he left a sum of money to the French Institute, stipulating that it should offer a gold medal each year to the scholar who had made the best contribution to the simplification of the oriental scripts. Evidently Volney wanted to be remembered by posterity not as a geographer or sociologist, but preferably as an orientalist and linguist. A growing disappointment with the results of the American and French revolutions and the increasing intellectual repression during the reign of Napoleon, may be sufficient explanation for Volney's loss of interest in contemporary problems. But his experiences cannot have taken him entirely by surprise. His reflections on history inspired him with a profound skepticism, that could easily turn into pessimism.40 Volney's enlightened rationalism necessarily included a belief in the perfectibility of man. But the same rationalism induced him again and again to throw doubt upon these expectations. His political and historical ideas contained a number of contradictions, which left him little space to finish his book on America. What is more: Volney's oeuvre

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 35

36 Revolutionary Histories

shows how the thought of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century was confronted with its own limits. In this way, it also illustrates the rise of Romanticism.

Edward Said has described Volney's Travels in Egypt and Syria as a ``an almost oppressively impersonal document.''41 Perhaps the personal element in this book lies precisely in this oppressiveness. Volney referred with disdain to his predecessors, who had decorated their travel reports with lyrical effusions and sentimental fantasies. He rejected every appeal to the imagination. Instead, he intended to give only precise observations and cool analysis. Sober facts abound in his work. But these are accompanied by a continuous polemic, not only against an easy exoticism, but against every form of emotional involvement. Volney was 26 years of age when he left for Egypt, but his Travels are written in the jaded style of someone who has already seen everything life has to offer. In his depictions of the landscape, the word ``boredom'' (ennui) returns again and again.42 Evidently he found pleasure in dissent. He subjected everything that had been praised by his predecessors to sharp criticism: the rivers, the gardens, the cities, the beauty of the women, the dancers.43 What Volney saw in front of him was not the picturesque Orient, but an image of neglect and decline. His first impressions of Cairo certainly were not engaging. ``The traveler,'' he wrote, looks with surprise at the burnt faces, armed with beards and moustaches; to the lengths of textile that are rolled in folds on the cleanshaven head; to the long cloak falling from the neck to the ankles, shrouding the body rather than dressing it; to the six foot long tobacco-pipes, and the long rosaries that are in everybody's hands; and the hideous camels carrying water in leather bags; and the saddled and bridled donkeys, lightly transporting their riders in their slippers; and the markets, poorly stocked with dates and small round loaves; and the dirty throngs of dogs roaming the streets; and the figures like walking ghosts who, clad in a garment out of one piece, show nothing human except two female eyes . . . ; the narrow and unpaved streets, the low houses, with bars in front of their rare windows, the lean, dark-skinned men on bare feet, who have nothing to wear except a blue shirt, girdled by a leather belt or a red handkerchief. The pervading mood of despondency resting on the people and the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Vanished glories

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 37

Volney's reputation, as far as it rests on his travels in Egypt, is highly ambiguous, even contradictory. Passages such as the one just quoted have tempted some historians to see Volney as one of the discoverers of the Third World.45 His opinion, voiced elsewhere in his travelogue and repeated in the early editions of his Ruins, that ancient Egyptian civilization was of black African origin, has earned him much credit with African and African-American scholars. On the other hand, the uses to which his writings were put during the French conquest of Egypt, have made it all too easy to dismiss him as a forerunner of modern imperialism. Matters are more complicated than both points of view suggest. Volney did not explain the poverty which he met everywhere by unchanging circumstances such as the climate or natural, inborn inclinations, but by political oppression and age-long exploitation. All the same, even he was inclined to see this situation as almost permanent. At the time of his travels, Egypt was involved in a civil war; the scarcity, fear, and instability he noticed had not been there forever.46 But Volney knew only one final cause. With almost monotonous regularity he returned to the same subject: it was the fatal influence of religion which had brought these regions to its present state of decline. He saw no easy way out. Occupation by a European power, he predicted, would bring even more trouble and misery, for the conquerors as well as for the indigenous population. On the other hand, he doubted whether these last would ever rouse themselves to change their fate by their own hands. In this way he presented imperialism, be it ever so reluctantly, as nevertheless acceptable and even inevitable.47 Tocqueville, who was well acquainted with Volney's writings, showed exactly the same scruples in his reports from the 1840s on French government policy in Algeria.48 And like Volney, in the end he had no better answer to offer. For Volney, redemption lay either in the distant past or in the distant future. His intense and often repeated dislike of Islam induced him to idealize the pre-Islamic societies of the ancient Orient. The Coptic minority was, he thought, a remnant of the Egyptians of Pharaonic times. And because he saw these, at least initially, as black Africans, it followed that Europe owed part of its civilization to Africa.49 Volney was a confirmed opponent of slavery, and all his life he was a member of abolitionist societies. The most frequently quoted fragment of his Egyptian travel report, however, did not mean to offer moral support

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

secrecy with which the houses are guarded, remind the viewer immediately of the rapacity of tyranny and the suspicion which is the result of slavery.44

to the colored people of his own time, but to show the decline of a once highly developed nation. ``It gives much food for thought when we see the present barbarism and ignorance of the Copts, in whose ancestors the deep genius of the Egyptians and the brilliant mind of the Greeks were united; and when we realize that this race of black people, nowadays our slaves and the object of our contempt, is the same as that to which we are indebted for our arts and sciences, and even for the use of language.''50 The original genius of the ancient civilizations was extinguished; decay had set in, speeded up by the introduction of the monotheistic religions, and in this way they had declined to the desolate situation in which they now lingered for centuries. The only way to escape such a fate, according to Volney, was to keep to the laws of nature and the precepts of reason. In his reflections on the leveling effects of time, or on the principles of human understanding, Volney was anything but impersonal. The remains of ancient power and glory always left him in a solemn and melancholy mood. Standing before the ruins near Alexandria, he wrote that the visiting stranger feels affected by ``an emotion which is all too easily accompanied by tears, and which awakens thoughts that by their sadness move the heart as well as elevate the soul.''51 The view from Mount Sannin in the Lebanon, on the other hand, made all anger and indignation vanish into thin air: From every side, an unlimited horizon stretches out; in clear weather, one's gaze ranges both over the desert which touches the Persian gulf, and over the sea which bathes the coasts of Europe; the soul thinks to embrace the world. Now the eye, floating over the mountain tops, carries the mind in a moment from Antiochia to Jerusalem; and then again, looking at its surroundings from a closer distance, it fathoms the distant depths of the beach . . . There is a secret delight in finding things so very small that earlier seemed so very big. With satisfaction one looks down upon the valley covered with storm clouds, and one smiles in hearing below oneself the thunder that rumbled above one's head for so long . . . ; one is flattered to be at the apex of so many things, and a feeling of pride makes one contemplate them with greater pleasure.52

Ruins and revolution Volney's philosophical essay, The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires of 1791, put these ideas to an actual use, and presented them

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

38 Revolutionary Histories

in an attractive literary form. The book was immediately popular. Translations appeared in almost every European language. The American edition by Joel Barlow was said to be based on a first version by no one less than Jefferson himself.53 Two elements contributed to its great success. On the one hand, it reflected the apprehension and bewilderment that so many felt as a result of the great political changes of the time. Volney agreed with Edmund Burke in considering the French Revolution ``the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.''54 But in contrast to Burke, he tried to take away the anxiety by representing the revolutionary upheaval as a necessary stage in the progress of freedom and prosperity. For many young radicals, his book offered a much-needed historical perspective. At the moment of its publication, The Ruins was one of the most eloquent defenses of the French Revolution available. The Ruins is not a novel, but of all Volney's writings it is closest to literary fiction.55 The work opens upon a scene that is directly related to some of the descriptions in his travel reports. While dusk is falling, the narrator wanders amongst the ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra. Palmyra! Volney had never seen it, but the ghost town, then four days' journey removed from the inhabited world, had long possessed a somewhat mysterious fame. Since the publication of the great illustrated volume by Robert Wood in 1753, it inhabited a special place in the European imagination. In appealing to the growing aesthetic interest in ruined buildings, Volney chose a name that was better known than the many ancient remains he had actually visited himself. The frontispiece of The Ruins was also derived from the plates in Wood.56 The monumental presence of the deserted shrines and the silence of the wide and desolate sands around him, awaken a mood of ``religious contemplation'' in the narrator. Of all the lively activity of this once important commercial center nothing was left: The noisy crowds of people who met under these arcades have been followed by the stillness of death. The silence of the graves has replaced the rumor of the market squares. The wealth of a town of tradesmen has changed into a horrible poverty. The palaces of the kings have become the abode of wild beasts; the flocks take their rest on the treshold of the temples, and hideous reptiles inhabit the sanctuaries of the gods! . . . Ah! How has so much glory come to nothing! . . . How has so much labor been annihilated! . . . This then is how the works of man perish! This is the way empires and nations disappear!57

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 39

Volney's reflections among the ruins have often been taken as a premonition of Romanticism. If that is what they are, then it must be a neoclassical Romanticism, comparable to the paintings of J.-L. David.58 The feelings expressed by the narrator unmistakably belong to the aesthetic category of the sublime. But the idea of the sublime, as in Burke or Winckelmann, arose from purely classicist conceptions. Meditations on grandeur and decline, on glory and decadence, had occupied enlightened authors from Montesquieu to Gibbon. For Volney, sentiments such as these, and even sentiments in general, had little value in themselves. They were no more than a stimulus to start the operations of analytical reason. What Volney had experienced on Mount Sannin was not an expansion of the self by feeling at one with surrounding nature, but a heightened awareness of his own intellectual superiority. The thinking ``I'' remained the center of the world. This also holds for The Ruins. Even in the lyrical ``Invocation'' right at the beginning of the book, the sense of awe in front of the workings of history is mixed with didactic and utilitarian considerations: I greet thee, isolated ruins, holy graves, silent walls! It is you I call upon; to you I address my prayers. Yes! Although your appearance repels the gaze of the common people with a secret fear, looking at you my heart is raptured by deep feelings and elevated thoughts. How many useful lessons, touching or striking observations do you not offer to the mind that knows how to consult you! When the whole enslaved world kept silent in front of the tyrants, it was you who already proclaimed the truths they abhor, and who, by mixing the remains of kings with those of the lowliest serfs, testified to the holy dogma of Equality. From the contemplation of the transcience of things, the thoughts of the narrator immediately are carried over to the question of causes. What has made these countries lose their former wealth? What catastrophe has brought about their downfall? With statistical precision Volney added that in antiquity the province of Syria, according to Strabo and Josephus, counted 10 million inhabitants, against 2 million in modern times.59 His interest was not purely historical. Knowing the answers, it might be possible to prevent such things from happening again. For modern civilization is not immune to this mysterious process. ``Who knows,'' the narrator muses by himself, ``whether our own countries will not one day be as desolate as these? Who knows whether not one day on the banks of the Thames or the Zuyder-Zee, where now,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

40 Revolutionary Histories

with the dazzling supply of pleasures, our hearts and eyes are unable to cope with the multitude of impressions; who knows whether not in these places a traveller such as I will sit down among the silent ruins, and weep for the dust of long-lost peoples and the memory of their greatness?''60 It was a sinister thought. In 1872 Gustave Dore illustrated the story of a New Zealander, who in the far-away future visits the broken remains of London, with an image that was directly derived from The Ruins.61 But whatever answers crossed the mind of the narrator, the solution kept escaping him. At this point the voice of a Spirit resounds in the desert. After some hesitation the narrator overcomes his fear and unbelief, and prepares himself to hear a long explication. The middle part of The Ruins is devoted to the discourse of the Spirit, who systematically unveils the secrets of history. Who is this Spirit? Volney does not tell the reader. Is it God? Certainly not the Christian God, as is clear from the remarks the Spirit itself makes on the subject. Apparently Volney was thinking of something much more abstract and allegorical.62 Again, it is striking how a Romantic theme like the Voice in the Wilderness is used with the purpose of demonstrating enlightened ideas. Once it has made itself known, the Spirit wins the attention of the narrator by referring to the guidance of Nature and Reason. What follows, is a summary of the principles of eighteenth-century radical thought. The Spirit explains that nature is unchanging; the causes of the downfall of civilizations therefore must be sought with man himself. Man is responsible for his own fate. The laws of nature teach us to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. To achieve this, man has to cooperate with his fellow beings. The state of nature is transcended by the Social Contract, and in this way a society of farmers and small proprietors comes into existence. But before long decay sets in. Some members of society impose upon the weakness and ignorance of others, and by recourse to violence force them to submit themselves. And thus begin inequality, slavery, and tyranny. So far the discourse of the Spirit must have had a familiar ring to most of Volney's contemporaries. But Volney thought he could point out somewhat more precisely than his predecessors where things had gone wrong: The greed and aggression of small groups of individuals have put an end to equality, and the prosperity of all has changed into the wealth of a few. From this exploitation many regions have never recovered. Why is it that humanity has never revolted, and that tyranny and repression have lasted for so many centuries? The cause is organized religion. Everywhere in the world priests have taught that true happiness cannot be found in this world, and that suffering is a sign of virtue.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 41

Religion is the source of public misery and the major obstacle to progress. But there is some hope: during the last three centuries Reason has spread its light, and maybe now the great moment has arrived. When one nation sets the example, others will certainly follow. ``The earth awaits a law-giving people.''63 From this point onward, the historical explanations of the Spirit are suddenly replaced by a vision of the future. The people that is to give the law has indeed arrived, and it calls on the other nations to shake off its chains and to unite in a universal brotherhood. After a short description of the principles of the French Revolution, the stage changes into a gigantic meeting of representatives of every people on earth. This spectacle takes up the last part of the book. If one wants to credit Volney with remarkable foresight, one might think of the assembly of the United Nations. But the scene rather is somewhere in the middle between the Day of Judgment and a tour of a Museum of Ethnology.64 The function of president of the assembly and general arbitrator is held by a Lawgiver, who evidently is a representative of revolutionary France. The subject of debate, however, is not politics but religion. One by one the various nations present themselves. They all praise their own beliefs, but the Lawgiver teaches everyone in turn to see that they have been sadly misguided, that all religions in essence are the same, and that they are without exception a product of the treacherous phantasies of a group of power-hungry priests. Volney tried to prove the common roots of all religions with the help of a great number of fanciful etymologies, of which the identification of Christ and Krishna, and of Jesus and Bacchus, are only the most conspicuous.65 Once the origin of all religions has been established and their general absurdity has been demonstrated, the various human races decide to live in harmony under the law of nature, and to take as true only that which is visible, tangible, and amenable to Reason.

The uses of history Apart from everything else, there are two obvious contradictions in this materialist and anticlerical version of the Social Contract. The narrator deplores the downfall of the ancient civilizations of the Orient, and he blames their decay on Islam and on misgovernment by the Turks. Apparently, he prefers not to remember that ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire were far from egalitarian societies. If they deserved his admiration, this had to be in spite of their priests and despotic rulers. But this also means that under a so-called tyranny a measure of prosperity

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

42 Revolutionary Histories

is possible, and therefore that religion cannot have been the principal reason for decline. If, moreover, all religions are essentially the same, it is astonishing how this single idea managed everywhere to overwhelm human reason. The assumption that all religion has its origin in the deceit of conspiring priests, leaves the enlightened mind extremely weak against every determined attack by the other side. After all, Volney himself choose the language and the imagery of the Bible to reinforce his argument.66 Only two ages in history really corresponded to his ideals: an almost completely hypothetical early civilization, and a modern society which for the most part still lay in the future. In Volney's Lessons in History, read at the short-lived EÂcole Normale in 1795, his problematic conception of history and progress is even more evident.67 Of course Volney now looked back upon the experience of the Terror. The Lessons, it has sometimes been said, offer the most convincing argument against the study of history.68 History, in Volney's opinion, is the result of a mindless urge to repeat things, such as is found in children, elderly people, and those who refrain from thinking. It is no more than ``a fanciful enumeration of past occurrences, of which only a shadow remains.'' It represents ``almost always scenes of madness, lechery, and crime.'' In inexperienced people it awakens dreams of power and glory, which often lead to a fatal outcome for themselves or for others. For this reason, history should not be taught to young children. Primary education must concentrate on more useful things, dietetics for instance: the bad temper shown by the polygraph Mably in his introduction to historical studies, had little to do with the past, and everything with the digestive problems of the author. Those who desire to improve the world, should look for answers outside history. What endless misery had but only recently resulted from the imitation of the Greeks and Romans!69 Is history therefore meaningless? Volney, like Edward Gibbon, thought it little more than ``the register of the crimes and follies of mankind.'' But Gibbon's irony, and Gibbon's very real sense of history, were completely foreign to him. Instead, he turned to science for an answer. As a remedy against the credulousness of historians he did not recommend a general skepticism, for there was no reason to assume that history had not actually taken place, but a critical doubt. Most people only repeat what they have received from hearsay. Real knowledge starts with the suspension of judgment. For this reason, the schools should not teach their pupils to speak, but to keep silent. Only then will room be made for tolerance. For the individual, however, the moral value of history will always remain limited. Whether history can positively

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 43

contribute to the common benefit depends, according to Volney, on the degree to which it can be turned into a social science. It should apply itself to the problem of constructing effective social or moral ``machines.'' The analysis of social systems is ``the higher mathematics of history.''70 For an example, Volney referred to his own travels in the Near East. ``In my opinion, the genre of the travelogue belongs to history, and not to literature,'' he had written in his report.71 Now he reversed the idea: ``history is a journey.''72 Travels in time required the same approach as travels on foreign continents. It is no coincidence that the theory that ``primitive'' peoples can inform us about the kind of life led by our own distant ancestors, was first developed in the circle of the ``ideÂologues.''73 Volney designed an extensive list of questions, to be used by travelers, military men, and diplomats in analyzing the societies they encountered.74 For the study of the past, he recommended the same well-tried sequence of systematic research: first geography, then demography and economy, and finally the social and political structure. He did not ascribe the variety of human relations primarily to the effects of the climate and natural surroundings. On the contrary; an important step forward in Volney, compared to enlightened authors such as Montesquieu or Turgot, is his awareness that the well-being of a society mainly depends on its political institutions. He liked to poke fun at the idea that the degree of humidity, the temperature, or the nature of the soil stimulated the inhabitants or left them passive.75 In antiquity, the Near East was situated at the intersection of various busy trade routes. Under the reign of the Turks, almost everything had come to a standstill. But had there been any change of climate in the intervening years? Nevertheless, the geographical situation sometimes offered opportunies that did not exist elsewhere. The variety of religions that Volney encountered in the Lebanon was directly connected with the type of landscape: the isolation of the high mountains allowed the various groups of inhabitants to defend their freedom in a way that was unthinkable in the Egyptian river delta.76 Geography therefore remained an indispensable part of all historical studies. The French conception of history as a social science, in close relation to geography, a conception which was to culminate in the journal Annales, had its origin in the writings of Volney. Not by coincidence, Marc Bloch repeatedly referred with approval to Volney's Lessons in his Apology for History.77 They showed the same skeptical, unreligious, and antiideological republicanism that Bloch himself appreciated so strongly. He paid no attention to the other side of Volney. The disillusion

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

44 Revolutionary Histories

caused by the outcome of the Revolution had driven the grandiloquent visions of The Ruins to the background, but not completely destroyed them. Volney stuck to the opinion that all religions intrinsically have the same origins. In the Lessons, he once again developed a rather naive linguistic theory to support this idea: The various languages also stem from a common origin.78 This implies, however, that history in its essence is not a record of continuous change. Everything in the end turns out to be the same. Throughout the centuries, under constantly varying names, an identical pattern is visible. Unremittingly people fall victim to the same delusions. But if everything just repeats itself, the course of history has little comfort to offer. The only way to achieve actual progress, is to free oneself from it as far as possible. This, then, is what Volney in his Lessons proposed as the real aim of the study of history: it should put an end to the usual confidence in the wisdom of the past.79 Knowledge of history can only serve mankind as a means to liberate itself from its recurrent cycle. Unhappy are the peoples who are mentioned in the history books: they fell victim to war, repression, and fanaticism. The true happiness of peoples and nations lies outside history.

Wildness and civilization Did America offer the answer? When Volney went there in 1795, he was in a melancholy mood: ``Saddened by the past, worried about the future, full of mistrust, I made my journey to a free people, to see if a sincere lover of our violated liberty could find a peaceful abode for his old days, which he could no longer hope for in Europe.''80 What he saw and heard did not solace him. He was no more susceptible to idyllic imaginings than he had been before. The American landscape with its endless forests was as depressing as the desert: ``the roads, or rather the footpaths as I found them, were continuously enclosed and overshadowed by the undergrowth or by high trees; and along the way the silence and monotony, the sometimes barren and sometimes swampy soil, the tree-trunks, fallen down from age or in the storms, that rotted away on the ground, the aggressive swarms of flies, mosquitoes, and gnats, did not make the charming impression that novelists in Europe, who never leave the city, dream of.''81 He felt the same about the American people. As if to take away every illusion once and for all, Volney stated right at the beginning of his Description that the Americans cannot be seen as a new nation. They are

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 45

a mixture of immigrants from Europe, and have not left behind the problems and the shortcomings of the Old World.82 Was this the reason why he limited himself this time strictly to geographical enquiries? On American society, he wrote in a letter to Jefferson, he had either far too much to say, or nothing at all.83 He decided upon the last. His incidental remarks and his appendices on the modern Americans suggest that they, in his opinion, until now had made insufficient use of the opportunity to build a rational society. To start with, they should change their diet. In his chapter on the influence of the climate on health and sickness, Volney repeatedly censured the strong tea, weak coffee, and excessive consumption of meat, that spoiled the teeth and the stomachs of the Americans.84 Was there any wisdom to be gained from native inhabitants? If they had ever lived in an unspoiled state of nature, Volney found little of it left. The most western point he reached, in August 1796, was the French settlement Vincennes on the Wabash, now in the state of Indiana.85 He was granted his old wish to meet the ``savages.'' The long chapter on the conditions of life of the native Americans in Volney's geographical survey has justly become famous. The text contains a transcription of his conversation (through an interpreter) with Chief Little Turtle. Volney's questions sometimes sound like a modern ethnological interview, but, on the other hand, it is sometimes reminiscent of the traditional philosophical dialogue between the Civilized and the Savage. He asked his informant to explain why the Indians ``melt away like snow before the sun,'' and tried to make him see that agriculture and landed property are the foundation of every prosperous society.86 Instead of the innocence and good cheer of the ``Noble Savage,'' he saw a numb indifference caused by misery and destitution. The life of the ``savage'' was dominated by death; if he was careless and took no precautions for the future, the reason was that he had nothing to expect from it. The New World was not new enough, and what was old in it found no favor with Volney either. An important result of his contact with the native Americans was a less idealized view of ancient literature: the heroes whose deeds are sung in Homer and the Greek tragedies, led a life not much different from that of the contemporary ``savages.''87 In this way, his encounter with the American Indians sent him back to his European background and the first subject of his studies. In Volney's vision history was turned into a gigantic hall of mirrors, in which the same image was repeated a thousand times. He bravely looked for a way out, but he never found it. In the introduction to his description of the United States he drew attention to the similarities between the American

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

46 Revolutionary Histories

and the French Revolutions. The conclusion must be, he wrote, ``that the great political movements which we call revolutions seem to have something automatic, something which not so much depends on prudent deliberation, as on a mechanical progress and succession of the passions.''88 This was his dilemma: is history nothing but chance and arbitrariness, and are education, reason, and sociability enough to ensure order and progress? Or is history itself a blind and inescapable power?

Conclusion Volney was not a Romantic in spite of himself because of his literary style, but because of his conception of history as an oppressive riddle, that can and must be solved. The generation that followed understood this very well. All religions were identical, according to Volney; they all stemmed from the imagination of a small group of people, who thought of themselves as the initiate. Only a small amendment was needed to turn this idea of the Enlightenment into the most mysterious Romanticism. Supposing it had been true what the ancient priests had said, and that they had indeed received the key to a great secret? The common source of all religions, then, was a universal revelation. This was how È rres and Creuzer thought about it in Heidelberg, and this also was the Go way in which GeÂrard de Nerval tried to incorporate Volney's ideas into his private mystical system.89 It is not difficult, on the other hand, to discern a dark undercurrent in the triumphant radicalism of The Ruins. The eighteenth century also had its fin de sieÁcle. The world lay open to Volney, but everywhere he was struck by boredom; he set high stakes on the future, but he was only moved by decay; he praised democracy, but he feared the opinion of the masses; he longed for revolution, but when it was there, he thought of it as a Last Judgment. He had no use for the cult of beauty and nature, in which so many found comfort at the time. His writings are suffused with bitter feelings about a humanity chained to its own fate, at the same time judge and defendant, creator and victim of itself. Mary Shelley was right when she placed Volney at the turning-point of her novel: history did not inspire much faith in humanity, while on the other hand, the revolutionary attempt to create a New Man had resulted in something ``automatic,'' a ``mechanical succession of the passions,'' in short, a Monster.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History 47

Benjamin Franklin,

Native Americans, and the

Commerce of Civility

Carla Mulford

The latter half of the eighteenth century was marked by shifting attitudes about the social formation, especially its stability and class differentiation, in Britain and France. The potential for establishing new forms of governance because of the clear possibility of independent economic viability of colonial holdings of both countries fostered clear anxiety among the genteel and aristocratic, because of an overwhelming desire to preserve the status quo ± and thus the status ± of elite group persons. For many from this group, the enriching of whole groups of people whose origin was not genteel or aristocratic meant a change in the social formation that was unacceptable. Especially if the upstarts had been born in the colonies, any attempt to ``pull rank'' with European upper classes was troublesome and unacceptable, regardless of how wealthy the colonial was. Didn't the colonials, after all, live among the Indians of America? And weren't those same Indians savages and brutes, far from the level of civilization that Europeans were participating in? The complexity of the social formation caused by colonial markets might be one reason why the discourses of savagism and civility lasted so long in European cultural circles, despite reliable information about the Indians of North America. What seems to have happened, among elites who wished to philosophize about such matters, was a differentiation of people that managed to place the colonials in a place somewhat beneath that of Native Americans. The complicated attitude seems to have been based on an assumption that dealing in the market was bad, because the market was driven by the interests and labor of the vulgar, whereas one ought to live one's life free of troubles about labor, so as to create an independency of spirit that would enable a more ``pure'' aesthetic to emerge. Colonials were participating in markets ± the source of their wealth ± and so were sullied by being subjected to the day-to-day 48

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

3

manipulation of trade, the worries about wealth and its accumulation that could only negatively and irreparably affect their attempts to gain culture while gaining economic viability and thus the potential for status. American Indians, on the other hand, were living in a more ancient way of life, a primitive way, that kept them apart from the contemporary marketplace of value, placing them in a special status of person as more pure because unsullied by thoughts of money, more pure, too, because living close to nature. American colonials were thus placed into a status apart from Europeans, and below them, because lacking in birthright and the gentility that long-established coffers could presumably create in terms of ``culture'' and ``civility.'' American Indians were placed into a status apart from Europeans but above colonials and thus aestheticized as more ``civil'' because closer to a more primitive form of living from which Europeans anciently, it was thought, had emerged. If ``better'' and more civil people were going to emerge from the colonies, these would not be the Europeans who had let go of their status as Europeans in order to gain wealth in the colonies. The rise in the standard of living of European Americans, a rise clarified by a greater longevity and better health, caused havoc in Europeans' conceptions about their own superiority over North Americans, whether of European or indigenous descent. Contemporary insight into these cultural complexities is afforded by a close examination of Benjamin Franklin's Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, written originally for circulation among a circle of Franklin's genteel and aristocratic friends in France, but then published in England shortly thereafter. Perhaps more than any other colonial, and certainly more than any other colonial whose roots were among working people, Benjamin Franklin was particularly well situated during the decades of the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s to notice the cultural anxieties of those among whom he was circulating and to remark upon what he'd noticed in writings aimed to counter misunderstandings about English American colonials and to uncover prejudices held by Europeans regarding the presumed ignorance of colonial people and the greater civility of American Indians compared to European colonials. Franklin's Remarks takes up the tropes of ``savagism'' and ``civility,'' only, as Montaigne did centuries before, to turn the irony back on those who assumed they came from a more ``civil,'' because artificially developed, culture. Yet the Remarks carries a stronger critique than Montaigne's Of Cannibals did, because, emerging as it did at a time when intellectuals presumed that the Enlightenment could provide

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 49

systematic matrices for a better and more stable culture, the Remarks speaks to a different attitude about state policy appropriate to disparate peoples, and it critiques any policy that does not align with an enlightened view of civility. Written at a moment of distinct transformation in the ideological construction of the ``natural,'' Franklin's Remarks evaluates city/country and savagism/civility dichotomies and reveals the tensions evident in any system that appropriates to itself superior cultural value simply because its system of operation is not based in nature but in the artifices of Europe. It also provides an oblique treatment of the presumed civilizing tendencies of enlightened commercial activity, as represented by free trade. The Remarks in effect critiques, from the vantage point of the colonial periphery, any state policy that does not align itself with enlightened civility, a civility best attained by colonials, and it thus serves as an able evaluation of most systems of state in Europe in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Of civility, barbarity, and commerce Europeans of the era of the first empire tended to construct linear-model stories of events and things to adjust their current understanding to written records of their past. Their primary cultural concerns were contingent less upon particular political orders, such as those associated with ancient cities like Rome, than with particular kinds of social formations, those that came to be described broadly as the civitas.1 The city, especially its metropolitan center, was the center of civility. Figured as the space (with ideologically if not materially walled borders) for the practice of virtue, the metropole was understood to be the space wherein communities would remain under a rule of law. Civil society came to be identified with a physical location (the metropolis) that would form the center of the customary and ethical life of the entire community. Leaving one's walls was to venture out among barbarians. In the eighteenth century, as in previous centuries, the term civility seems to have functioned with its presumed opposite, savagism, as a means by which Europeans would define their own cultural identities against nonEuropean counterparts. Elite-group Europeans participated in a cultural narrative of universalized values that pitted ``civilized'' people, with their written codes and language of abstract concepts, against ``natural'' people whose communications, it was said, were based entirely in a transparent language located in sense experiences. ``For most Europeans,'' as Anthony Pagden has remarked, ``understanding abstractions was a necessary condition of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

50 Revolutionary Histories

civilized life.''2 Cities were where civilized people lived, conducted business, and wrote; outside cities were barbarians, savages, people living close to nature and thus without the material signs of culture that could indicate civility. Such presumably natural people could be enslaved because they were, after all, not civil people, or they should be converted, whether with so-called benevolence or physical suasion. Civilized people were considered to have particular, felt attachments to their places of birth. Those who traveled away from the city to remote parts to live among savages were suspect. Europeans who left Europe to live in remote wilds of North America had to have been, in other words, less civilized than their counterparts who had remained home. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century, a competing attitude about what constituted civility emerged. Commercial activity had complicated the social formation by introducing wealth back into Europe that had been derived from colonial circumstances, circumstances that had ultimately enriched numerous people who could return to Europe wealthier than their counterparts who had remained at home.3 How to find a cultural place for these relatively newly rich persons whose birth had no aristocratic nor even genteel European link became a question for philosophers. A competing language regarding travel away from the city, a language positive in effect, emerged from many pens. For the Abbe Guillaume Thomas Raynal, for Denis Diderot, as for Chastellux and Mandrillon, travel could be a virtue, even though it took one away from one's civil culture, because through the vehicle of travel, Europeans could transform the dismal history of the conquest of peoples into a new future of peaceful commerce. These philosophers took up what Montesquieu called ``le doux commerce,'' the intermingling of peoples and peoples' things, and claimed, with him, that commerce was responsible for the development of virtue and civility, for ``making men gentle.''4 They argued, like William Darrell in The Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and a Happy Life, that the measure of worth should come less from ``tak[ing] the Measure of our Deserts by the Parts of our Forefathers'' than from a virtue attained by personal accomplishment. ``We may enter upon their Estates, and perchance upon their Titles, but not upon their Virtues,'' Darrell asserted.5 They concluded, like Baltasar Gratian in The Compleat Gentleman, that After all, the solid Basis and Foundation of the Superiority we are speaking of, which rendered us truly superior to other People, is real Merit; and this Merit consists in a perfect Knowledge of the World,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 51

52 Revolutionary Histories

People living apart from the city, then, especially people engaged in getting ``a perfect Knowledge of the World,'' its ``Sciences, Employments, and Business,'' could be redeemable in civil society, it seemed, according to this emergent discourse of commerce and civility. The colonial, in other words, might have a just place in Europeans' worlds. The question arises, then, regarding what this meant in terms of cultural attitudes about American Indian peoples. How were Native Americans cast in such a marketplace of ideas? What function might they serve in this still European-centered system of value? As one might expect, the philosophical outcome to such questions would be to continue casting non-Europeans in terms that defined European lifeways and customs as being at the center of the universe, making Europeans the ``lords of all the world'' even while purportedly describing presumably savage others. What emerged was a recognizable eighteenthcentury genre of ``savage'' characters, ``natural'' people or ``children of nature,'' wise in their simplicity and moral to the extent that they did not partake of luxuries. These savages are made to speak from positions of cultures that would not have been their own, indeed cultures that never existed except in the fabricated visions of those writers who created them in order to reflect upon the perceived failures of their own cultural world.7 ``Natural'' people, savage as they were described, were fictional vehicles for Europeans' self-scrutiny. Their presence in narratives served as arguments about problems with existing civic (European) culture. The emphases of the texts featuring Native peoples in the eighteenth century, even while the representation might have seemed to have been of Native Americans, centered literate Europeans who were, in effect, dressed in feathers and based in a culture of civility that would forever exclude, as exotically different, outsiders to that culture in temporal, geographical, political, and intellectual spaces peripheral to the metropolis. The textual effect of such representations was to create sympathy, indeed a secure sense of identification with Natives' ``pure'' values, even while alienating Native Americans from the Europeans' cultural systems.8

Europeans' anxieties, native civilities: Franklin's response In the eighteenth century, an era of shifting and destabilized marketplaces and of pervasive worry, in European centers, that Europe was

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

the Affairs of the Times, some certain Sciences, Employments, and Business, and the whole Conduct of human Life.6

being depeopled because European colonies, especially the Americas, seemed so attractive to workers, the ever-increasing numbers of writings about civility and what constituted civility ± whether it was primarily political or cultural or a mix of things ± suggests a general cultural anxiety about European identity and European value systems emergent within the social formation. With hindsight, we can see that some of the problems registered in writings about race during the century were problems that developed from the movements of laboring peoples out of their homelands to areas where they could sell their labor and personally profit from the comparative worth of their work in a colony compared to its diminished (because fixed) value at home. With hindsight, too, we can see how the problems within the European social formation could readily have led to revolutions both in North America and in France. Signs of the stresses and strains in Europe caused by greater labor mobility and increased awareness of the potential for happiness while living among other peoples elsewhere are registered in the very popularity of works, whether fictional or ``factual,'' of travel and of other cultures generally. Franklin's Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America plays upon the tropes of travel, of culture-collecting among exotic people, and of commerce, even as it seems to attempt to create a relatively accurate portrait, under the guise of a jeu d'esprit, of Native Americans, or at least of the Native peoples of Iroquoia whom the French and the English were coming to know better. Aware that French people were interested in Native Americans and that immigration projects were being fostered in France at the time he was writing, Franklin seems to have sought to prepare people for the cultural differences they would surely find divergent from the idealized portraits they could read in Voltaire, Diderot, or Lahontan. To be sure, and as his Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America evidences, Franklin likewise participated in the cultural exoticization of Native peoples. But the originating purpose of the narrative probably had a good deal to do with both propaganda and politics. Franklin originally called the narrative Remarques sur la politesse des sauvages de l'AmeÂrique septentrionale (Remarks on the Politeness of the Savages of North America), because he wrote it originally in French and hoped that his French friends would circulate the text, after having an enjoyable reading of it themselves. About the time that he was composing the Remarks, Franklin was also working on a formal tract, Information for Those Who Would Remove to America. Franklin was being pressed for writs of privilege and emigration for those who wished, for any number of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 53

reasons, to go to the British American colonies.9 He wrote to Charles Thomson, then President of Congress, ``I am pestered continually with numbers of letters from people in different parts of Europe, who would go to settle in America, but who manifest very extravagant expectations, such as I can by no means encourage, and who appear otherwise to be very important persons.''10 The Remarks, which Franklin published originally on his little press at Passy and gave to his friends there, was later sent by someone else (not Franklin) to England and published there, with the Information for Those Who Would Remove, in 1784. It seems that neither piece was intended for general print circulation, yet both were public pieces in that they were intended for circles of elite readers known to Franklin and thus would receive great publicity.11 The year 1783, when both the Remarks and the Information tract were composed, was a politically turbulent and crucial year with regard to the international imperial contest in North America and to the outcome of the legal separation of the British North American colonies from England. (The year 1783 was the year of the Treaty of Paris.) In effect, the Remarks can be said to stage Samuel Puffendorf's theory about the four stages of civilization, which explained the evolution of society in terms of the changing modes of production, from hunting and gathering to pastoralism to agriculturalism to commercialism.12 Franklin centered Native groups within the social changes Puffendorf theorized, even as the text of the Remarks, of course, articulated sets of received European value systems and customs, especially regarding attitudes about written history, about civility generally, and about a new kind of civility that could accrue with fair trade practices. In the context of offering a series of stories about Native peoples known personally to Franklin, the Remarks offers a representation of the shifting meaning of civility for Europeans, a shift pivoted on the point of commerce and brought to bear on the European cultural formation because of imperial trade wars in North America. Franklin wrote the Remarks within the year after and with full knowledge that the Abbe Raynal had requested (in 1782) that the AcadeÂmie de Lyon offer a prize for the best essay to address the question of what, for Europe, had been the advantages and what the disadvantages of the discovery of the Americas.13 Franklin's text, especially in its contrastive construction of the ways in which fair trade practices would improve relations between so-called savages and colonial settlers, in most ways reflects his own answer (similar to the finding by Montesquieu) to Raynal's question. The Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America treats the themes common in better-known, similar European writings of his day.14 In

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

54 Revolutionary Histories

these pseudo-ethnographic narratives and discourses, we can find discussions of language (the indigenous language versus the Europeans' languages) and the relative merits of indigenous or ``savage'' society versus those of European ``civil'' society. Topics that inform the discussion in such texts usually range among the following: family values, the relations between the sexes, methods of education (in particular, the merits of book-learning), methods of government (often including discussions of laws and arms), and religious practices. Few texts treat all of these items, but most do treat one or more issues related to European cultural values, often using the indigenous person to express the positive side (or a critique of the negative side) of elite-group European cultures of civility. Franklin's Remarks quite readily falls into this natural man or child of nature genre system, yet the text was, as I have indicated, of particular propaganda use at the time it was written, because of its attempt to display to uninformed Europeans a message about the supposed primitive people they might find in North America. The very opening of his piece ± ``Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs'' ± would have evoked for his learned readers Montaigne's Of Cannibals, even as it offered a differentiating meaning from Montaigne's. If for Montaigne the goal might have been to relate stories of civility with some degree of irony that the supposed colonizer was being uncivil, for Franklin the goal was more openly phrased yet perhaps even more subtle. The goal was a critique of the ethnocentrism of Europeans who could assume that theirs was a more civilized culture, despite the warlike nature of Europeans, their clear affection for disputatiousness, and their desire to acquire land only to privatize and thus squander its general usefulness for the community. The opening point, then, was that the ethnocentric attitudes of Europeans needed adjustment, just as Europeans also needed to understand that was possible among Native populations, too. Franklin's bagatelle relates a series of stories purporting to be about contact with the Iroquois (whom the English called Six Nations) peoples he had come to know during his years as a colonial negotiator in Pennsylvania and New England. Native peoples are said to have selfgovernment ``by the counsel or Advice of the Sages,'' and their governance occurs without force or prisons or ``Officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.'' Without the need for arms and laws, they ``hence,'' Franklin says, ``study Oratory.'' ``The Indian Women till the Ground, dress the Food, nurse and bring up the Children, and preserve and hand down to Posterity the Memory of Public Transactions.'' In

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 55

their abundance of leisure, they are said to spend time in conversation. They live without artifice, and they have no need for or interest in booklearning. All of these elements replicate the generic capacity of tales of natural people to bridge between utopian, idealized values of European civic cultures and the failures of Europeans to fulfill their goals of having civility. Conversation, book-learning, and religion are featured topics in Franklin's Remarks. With regard to book-learning, the Remarks relates a story about the colonists' offer to train young men from among the Iroquois in colonial schools. According to the story, when offered the opportunity to send young boys to study in the Virginia colony, the Native elders made a counter-offer to school white Anglo-American boys, ``instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them'' (R, 970). Using an emergent discourse of masculinity, the Remarks features the natural life of the utopic natural man as more manly than the artificial life fostered by books and schools and cities. In public counsel, it is said that the Native people rely on no writing, for women ``imprint'' the public counsels ``on their Memories'' (R, 970). There are no records of the counsels beyond the women's memories. In terms of handling governance, the Remarks avers that the Native peoples' politeness prevents them from interrupting or contradicting others. This sometimes creates problems for the colonial settlers and treaty negotiators and missionaries, however, for, Franklin says, ``they indeed avoid Disputes, but then it becomes difficult to know their Minds, or what Impression you make upon them. The Missionaries who have attempted to convert them to Christianity, all complain of this as one of the great Difficulties of their Mission'' (R, 971). Far from the murderous and negative depiction of cruel savages who, by the time Franklin wrote the Remarks, were the common characters in most captivity narratives coming from English speakers' pens, Franklin's Native people cause trouble for the Europeans because they are not the least disputatious even about abstract cultural meanings. Here is the ``subtle savage'' more typically, in English writings, presented as having a skulking way of war, transformed to a silent man who has peaceful rather than aggressive ends. The Remarks readily affiliates with French writings. It also works as an in-group representation of the French salon culture Franklin so enjoyed at the time. For the French in Franklin's day, and indeed for the people with whom Franklin was associating while he was at Passy, politeness and conversation were linked with morality and with social stability. As Dena Goodman has shown, Charles Pinot Duclos, Andre Morellet, and others were centrally interested in the ways in which arts of conversa-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

56 Revolutionary Histories

tion could control the critical spirit in society. For Morellet particularly, polite conversation provided the basis for training of the intellect, memory, and judgment, and it strengthened the attention of both speakers and listeners. For Morellet as for Duclos and numerous other French philosophers of Franklin's day who celebrated the (women's) salon culture in which they circulated, ``The free commerce of the two sexes,'' in Morellet's words, is ``one of the most powerful principles of civilization.''15 For Morellet, as for many of those engaged in the salon culture Franklin was enjoying, what distinguished France from the other European nations and from England, what characterized its standard of superior civilization, was the role that women held in superintending conversations and serving as both active listeners and evaluators of conversational outcomes. The particular oral stories Franklin would relate in the Remarks seem to have been well devised for this salon audience, the original audience for the text at Passy. The narrative notes that Native women ``till the Ground, dress the Food, nurse and bring up the Children, and preserve and hand down to Posterity the Memory of Public Transactions.'' It also asserts that Native ``public Counsels'' have ``great Order and Decency'' in their conduct, with three ranks of people, the old men seated first, then the ``Warriors,'' and finally ``the Women and Children in the hindmost.'' The Remarks makes abundantly clear the centrality of women to the cultural situation of councils: The Business of the Women is to take exact notice of what passes, imprint it in their Memories, for they have no Writing, and communicate it to their Children. They are the Records of the Council, and they preserve Tradition of the Stipulations in Treaties a hundred Years back, which when we compare with our Writings we always find exact. (R, 970) The Remarks would seem to have a reduplicative strategy at work in the text. It purports to tell of Iroquoian culture ± and is fairly accurate in this ethnographic detail ± even as it speaks of the importance of women to this culture in such a way as to appeal to the French audience for the text. Conversational politeness is linked here with keeping secure affairs of state. Franklin is representationally aligning Native culture with French cultural attitudes of his day. With regard to religious practice, decency, and politeness, Franklin tells another tale. When told the story of Eve and the apple by a missionary, an ``Indian orator'' is reported to have said that it is better to use

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 57

apples for cider, anyway. He goes on to offer his own story, repeated in Remarks. This story relates that ``a beautiful young Woman descend[ed] from the Clouds,'' bringing a promise of food. ``Where her right Hand had touch'd the Ground, they found Maize; where her left Hand had touch'd it, they found Kidney-beans; and where her backside had sat on [the hillside] they found Tobacco'' (R, 971±2). When the missionary rebukes the man for telling such a tale, the man points out that the rules of common decency suggest that if Indians are supposed to believe all of the missionary's stories, then the missionary should believe Native stories. From the missionary's vantage point, ``true'' religion ± Christianity ± necessarily should supplant anything else. From the Native's vantage point, conversational politeness, a mark of civility within the Native social system, might allow for lies like the missionary's to go unchecked. Rules of decency, rules of peace, required this, in civil culture. Surely Franklin's coterie in France, made up of free-thinking Catholics and atheists, enjoyed the story's targets for subtle humor, Christian missionaries and their circle's own self-conscious cultural attitudes about conversation.

Trading in culture Franklin used the Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America to comment on then-current debates about systems of trade. Political philosophy affiliated with theories of mercantilism supported the notion that trade within colonized areas should, by necessity, be used primarily to increase the wealth of the commonwealth of the home country or nation. Two general attitudes about mercantilism had emerged during the course of the eighteenth century. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, mercantilist philosophers argued that colonies existed primarily as suppliers of raw materials that would be taken to the home base and converted into usable products. By the middle of the eighteenth century, attitudes had shifted to accommodate the growing wealth of colonials, and mercantilist theorists began to argue that the greatest good colonists could offer the metropole and the home country was in purchasing already produced goods. The goal, with the second system, was to find the best means to tax colonials' use of goods received in trade from the home country and to establish tax norms for all goods acquired through importation. These mercantilist theories offered no space for individual profit-making of colonials or their European supporters, and instead the theories argued from the premise that all goods taxed were justifiably taxed to support Crown affairs.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

58 Revolutionary Histories

Earlier in his career, Franklin seems to have agreed with mercantilist philosophy, and he generally supported the role of taxation that was engineered by mercantilist tendencies. Later on in the century, after a series of bad experiences with British Crown officials and indeed after experiencing his own clear success as an individual colonial making his way in the world of goods, Franklin began to reflect upon other kinds of theoretical models, including those developed by his Edinburgh friend, David Hume. He came to some general conclusions more in line with laissez-faire theories of commerce than with the older theories of mercantilism. He concluded, generally speaking, that individual gain did not hurt (and indeed could assist) the spirit of nationalism, that markets for goods could be the best indicators of usefulness of those goods within any social formation, and that taxation to support a government that would not permit representation of all peoples at the legal bargaining table was inappropriate and indeed detrimental to fellow-feeling and to the commonwealth. In mid-century, he finally came to agree, in most respects, with French physiocratic philosophers who held that the greatest value to a commonwealth was its land, not necessarily its merchantable goods, and thus that laborers on the land had a crucial part to play in the commonwealth and its commercial system. Franklin used the Remarks to create an analysis, for the most part humorous, of the competing theories of trade and commerce. The last section of the essay concerns Europeans' trade culture, in an anecdote that includes his old associate, Conrad Weiser, and the then-dead but famous Iroquoian (that is, Onondaga) chief, Canassatego. The story, a purported interview with Canassatego, evaluates the niggardliness of any system that would not give to the laborer a competitive value for his goods. In this case, the goods are furs, and the laborer, an Iroquoian. Canassatego concludes that the traders at Albany go to church service on Sunday in order to barter out among themselves what would be the cheapest price for beaver pelts. Canassatego is said to have concluded that the ``good things'' the settlers say they learn at church are really just the means by which Indians shall be cheated. It is Hans Hanson ± a reference to Dutch, Swedish, or perhaps even German traders ± who comes in for abuse here, for Hanson it is who, given the implications of the narrative, hides behind a presumably superior Christianity in order to find ways to cheat the Native peoples of what they are owed. In a marketplace where Christianity is offered, beaver pelts bring little return for Native peoples. Franklin is obliquely referencing Europeans' competitive system of trade among Native peoples, even as he links the closed system of trade ± a system that gives

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 59

no bargaining opportunity to the laborer ± with established Christianity. The narrative's conclusion, based in a story about the hospitality of the Iroquois peoples, underscores Franklin's representation of the (Christian) niggardliness of traders' behaviors in the face of a superior people. Decency is expanded in meaning, then, from mere social behavior, and it is attached to the practical concerns of trade and commerce. By detaching rules of decency and hospitality from Europeans and by linking them with Native peoples and also with free commerce among people, Franklin's Remarks participates in some of the newest theorizing then taking place about mercantilism and commercial establishments, even as it evokes much of the contemporary writing on savage civility.

Civility in the era of revolutions Franklin employed the narrative strategies used by his European counterparts, strategies that employ Native people to reflect upon European social customs, but with one significant difference: his story, though it is about savages more civil than most Europeans, links equitable trade practices with civility, good commerce with good manners. Two issues are worth noting. First, Franklin was in effect supporting the new theories regarding the extent to which commerce could bring civility. He seems to be celebrating Conrad Weiser, who lived and worked among Iroquoian peoples, and thus celebrating those individuals who are willing to travel for potential gain of scientific and intellectual and material benefits. Second, in the narrative's very subtle critique of the State-selfish and limiting trade practices of Europeans, Franklin has set himself squarely in the camp of those interested in the laissez-faire commercial attitudes emergent in this era of revolutions, commercial attitudes holding that merchants and mercantile interests in North America should support the individual labors of local colonial (and indigenous) people. As indicated earlier, even Diderot could accept travel as virtuous if it were to enhance commerce between peoples.16 Franklin implied in Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America that fair trade practices, productive of commercial and cultural interconnections between Native peoples (stand-ins as British Americans, in this instance) and Europeans, were the surest and safest way to secure commitments for peace among disparate peoples. Franklin's Remarks, then, links its discussion of European civility with commerce, and it thus achieves its greatest potential for Franklin's French friends' enjoyment. That the narrative also ended up in English publications, originally without Franklin's knowledge, suggests the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

60 Revolutionary Histories

ironic (and political) effect his friends thought the piece would have with English readers supportive of the colonies. Commerce, once called by Diderot ``the new arm of the moral world,'' was, for Franklin, the best means by which European cultures of civility might successfully infiltrate Native customs in North America, and it was also the best means by which peaceful relations could exist, first, among European powers and, second, between those powers and their colonial holdings. Franklin's Remarks subtly shifted the normative European stance ± that civility is centered in the metropolis ± to one suggesting that civility must, through the vehicle of commerce in the woods among those seeming barbarians, begin to take place without interference from the imperial centers. Colonial British Americans had, in effect, just concluded a war against England to make the same point.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Franklin and the Commerce of Civility 61

A Language for the Nation: A Transatlantic Problematic Leonard Tennenhouse

Early in the 1750s, Scotsmen Adam Smith and John Stevenson were lecturing on rhetoric and belles lettres, soon to be followed in this endeavor by the likes of Hugh Blair and Robert Watson. Smith's and Blair's profound effect on English letters is commonplace. These lectures were also well attended by a number of intellectuals who eventually emigrated to America. When Blair's lectures were published in 1783, they were avidly consumed on both sides of the Atlantic. Having attended these lectures in Scotland, John Witherspoon taught Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at what would become Princeton University; and many other American colleges followed suit. Thus, it is altogether possible that the whole idea that English was a national language and the basis for a national culture began in Scotland.1 At any event, from the Declaration of Independence until well after the War of 1812, authors and intellectuals writing in the United States were caught up in a debate over what the relationship between language and national identity should be. This debate ranged widely over philological and linguistic matters and took up the question of what consequences should ensue from the political break with Britain. Was the Revolution only a political rupture, or did it require revolutionary arts of cultural and linguistic self-definition as well? Today, for example, we tend to assume that to be a nation, an emergent political order must produce its own language and literature as well.2 More in keeping with eighteenth-century thinking was the theory that revolution effected a return to national origins, an act fundamentally compatible with the concept of restoration of origins.3 Such a concept of revolution did not entail breaking all cultural and linguistic ties, only those considered corrupt and corrupting. David Simpson characterizes this well-known position: ``there were many, aside from the committed Anglophiles who 62

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

4

would sanction no deviation from the rules set down in London, who were open to the prospect of some particularly American modification of the language, but who were at the same time uncomfortable about making a completely new beginning.''4 From this position, we might infer yet a third position, which I will put forth in the essay to follow ± namely, that the language debates in the new United States continued a process of national redefinition that had been underway in Great Britain since at least the middle of the eighteenth century. Because each nation staked its cultural identity on establishing a stable relationship between spoken dialects and a print-vernacular standard, the language debates engaged not only lexicographers, philologists, and proto-linguists, but also writers, poets, novelists, belles lettrists as well. Any number of studies have been undertaken to reconstruct the various positions competing to resolve the question. It is my intention, by way of contrast, to focus on what was accomplished by the debate itself: how it forged a link between language and national identity that had never existed before on either side of the Atlantic. Moreover, since the debate was not only about language, but also about literature and what kind of experience members of a culture were to share, I will keep in mind the fact that these debates were launching national literatures as well.5 One argument to this effect took as its starting point the claim that American English was closer to the original Saxon, while another argued America's English derived from a seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury English and was thus less corrupted than the English written or spoken in England at the end of the eighteenth century. Still another argument for the uniqueness of American English stressed the fact that both colonial and British English were made of dialects which differed not only from region to region but from nation to nation as well. Representing this last position in 1795, James Carrol declared, ``The pronunciation of the southern states of English America is almost as different from that of the New-England states, even among the learned, as any two dialects of the language of any illiterate nation can be supposed to be: and yet both those parts of America abound with men of bright genius, large mental capacities and profound learning.''6 If American English divided North from South according to dialects, Carrol contended, then how much more extreme the situation back in Europe: ``In Great-Britain the pronunciation is much more various than in America; there being scarcely two Shires in which the English is pronounced according to the same dialect'' (iii). Carrol considers the very existence of regional dialects, each geographically bounded, as proof positive that American English differs significantly from that

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 63

spoken in England. This, for the very reason, paradoxically, that like Britain, America is rich in dialects. So differentiated in regional geography and cultural practices, an American language will necessarily reflect that difference. Another group of spokesmen on this issue grounded linguistic difference in the difference among bodies politic. Proceeding on the assumption that ``the Form of Government has an Influence upon Language, and Language in its Turn influences not only the Form of Government, but the Temper, the Sentiments and Manners of the People,'' a letter by John Adams written from Amsterdam in September 1780 proposed the creation of ``The American Academy, for refining, improving and ascertaining the English Language,'' comparable to those in France and Italy.7 In his Dissertations on the English Language (1789), Noah Webster justifies his attempts to codify and standardize American spelling and philology on much the same basis: ``As an independent nation, our nation requires us to have a system of our own, in language as in government.'' Even if we do speak the language that originated in Great Britain, Webster insists, British English ``should no longer be our standard, for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language, on the decline.''8 The position held by the proponents of an American English position is clearly a messy one, more so by far than what I will simplify in an attempt to delineate the major positons. For example, there were those like James Carrol, who wage a linguistic argument for the eventual regionalization of any English, and those who, like the Webster of 1789, believe that culture should become a means of reinforcing nationalism. For strictly rhetorical purposes, then, let me clean up the categorical distinctions between these positions, allowing us to differentiate them thus: 1

2

3

Though England and the newly created United States constitute independent social bodies, they are united by a single spoken and literary culture, which originated in England. England and the United States are different geographical regions, each in turn is composed of several distinct regions. Each such region gives rise to its own dialect which ought to be respected. Because Great Britain and the United States have become distinct political entities, each ought to have its national languages and cultures. There should be an American language and literature comparable to the language and literature of England.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

64 Revolutionary Histories

While these positions are by no means all ± Noah Webster himself offered several contradictory opinions on the question of an American language during the course of his career ± they do present a substantially more complex picture of the cultural climate in the decades immediately following the Revolution than we are likely to garner from the reigning accounts of American cultural history.9 Historically based scholarship has loaded the dice for the third position above at the expense of positions one and two. Even a brief investigation of the language debates will suggest that the position which holds that a separate political body should have its own distinctive language is in fact the result of a compomise between the first two positions. I want to consider this debate as an argument about the proper relationship between culture and politics, a struggle whose outcome was not at all assured from the start. For one thing, we know that an intense debate was occurring in Great Britain at about the same time, and that some of the more vocal participants in the American debate participated in the British struggle to decide the relationship between culture and politics. Although examples from American speech and spelling were occasionally cited, these British debates had little if anything to do with Anglo-American relations. Rather, by waging these debates, British intellectuals were trying to decide the concept and character of an English national culture: whether that culture was bound to the language traditions of the past as defined by an elite education, or whether English culture would be determined by what made sense to a rapidly increasing readership. So, too, in the United States, the language debates had less to do with the nation's relationship to Europe than with conflicting opinions in the new United States as to what indeed a nation was. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both nations were embroiled in internal struggles out of which would come distinctive definitions of national culture based on the English language. Having established the parallels between the debates preoccupying men of letters in the United States and England respectively, I will turn in the last section of the chapter to a specific literary genre and examine the strikingly different literary resolutions to the language question that developed on either side of the Atlantic during the period 1775±1830. I would like to challenge the idea that the two different models for a national language followed in any necessary way from the political separation of the United States from Great Britain. In doing so, however, I will not lean in the other direction and suggest that British and American English grew out of the efforts of Samuel Johnson and Noah

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 65

66 Revolutionary Histories

The Americanization of British letters For a good example of the self-conscious attempt to produce an American literary language in opposition to the traditions of the mother country, one can turn to the Connecticut Wits. The work of Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull, David Humphreys, and Lemuel Hopkins offers both individual and collaborative instances in which British literary forms and British literary language take up American themes, describe the American landscape, celebrate American heroes, and challenge the British dominance of letters in post-Revolutionary America. The Anarchiad by Hopkins, Barlow, Humphreys, and others quite selfconsciously borrows the English mock-heroic form of The Rolliad, only to translate what had been an English attack on Tory politics into an explicitly American assault on such domestic issues as the paper money crisis and the mob violence associated with Shays Rebellion. Another obvious American appropriation of English literary language is Barlow's The Vision of Columbus (1787). In his dedication of the poem to Louis XVI, Barlow calls The Vision ``an American production.'' Made with Miltonic language, this version of the poem remodels the language Milton gave the Angel Michael. Barlow puts an ailing and imprisoned Columbus in place of the fallen Adam and has the angel offer the discouraged voyager ``a Pisgah'' view of his journey to the New World as a version of the fortunate fall. Where in Books X and XI of Paradise Lost, Michael reveals to Adam the unfolding of human history that concludes with the Second Coming of Christ, the angel shows Columbus how his voyage will set in motion a historical process that culminated in the creation of the United States. Book VII of the poem ends by celebrating American science, learning, religion, and art. Columbus is comforted by the knowledge that Barlow's own contemporaries, the Connecticut poets, will eventually displace their British forebears. Because of John Trumbull's ``Skillful hand,'' Columbus is assured, ``Proud Albion's sons, victorious now no more, / In guilt retiring from the wasted shore / Strive their curst cruelties to hide in vain. . . . ''10 Dwight's Greenfield Hill offers a particularly compelling case for those who think the political break from England generated a poetic struggle for independence allowing a distinctive American literary language to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Webster respectively. At best, men such as Webster and Johnson were popularizers who crafted compromise formations, and what is most important about their efforts is that they were the result of a 50-year process in which most of the important writers of the two nations participated.

develop. Not only did he publish explanatory notes calling attention to his use of American terms, Dwight also characterized his poem as a kind of semiotic struggle with the tradition of English landscape and prospect poetry represented by Denham's Cooper's Hill, Pope's Windsor Forest, Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, and traditional country-house poetry. Dwight apparently struck upon Americanizing of English prototypes as a way of arguing against the uses to which such poetry had been put in England. Particularly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, Goldsmith's poem had gone through four editions in the first year of its publication (1770). The poem famously begins by recalling the village in an earlier time: ``Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain, / Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain, / Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid, / And parting summer's lingering blooms delayed. . . . ''11 Section II of Dwight's poem specifically echoes these lines in order to suggest that the village whose passing Goldsmith laments has actually rematerialized and is flourishing in America: ``Fair Verna! loveliest village of the west; / Of every joy, and every charm, possess'd / How pleas'd amid thy varied walks I rove, Sweet, cheerful walks of innocence and love. . . . ''12 Where Goldsmith regrets the relentless economic and social change that inevitably destroys such a way of life, Dwight celebrates the qualities of industry and competence that invigorate American culture and make his village thrive. This poetic logic assumes that what has faded into memory and metaphor in England comes true in the United States, so that Dwight's village provides the referent toward which Goldsmith's poem gestures. Dwight certainly suggests as much in his ``NOTES to PART II,'' when he claims that ``this part of the poem is designed to illustrate the effects of the state of property, which is the counter part to that, so beautifully exhibited by Dr. Goldsmith by in the Deserted Village'' (CW, 530). Although the notes identify the lines from Goldsmith that were reworked, by no means does Dwight acknowledge all that he appropriated from his English counterpart. Goldsmith, for example, mourns depopulation which he attributes to emigration ``To distant climes,'' to ``the wild Altama'' (CW, 344), by which he means the Altamaha, in Georgia, ``Where at each step the stranger fears to wake / The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake; / Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey; / And savage men more murderous than they'' (CW, 353±6). Where Goldsmith laments westward migrations, Dwight transforms the English poet's lines into a celebration of voyages still further westward and America's entry into the China trade. Like Goldsmith, he uses elegiac conventions to recount the disappearance of a way of life native

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 67

68 Revolutionary Histories

Through the war path the Indian creep no more; No midnight scout the slumbering village fire; Nor the scalp'd infant stain his gasping sire: But peace, and truth, illume the twilight mind, The gospel's sunshine, and the purpose kind. (TMP, II:724±8) On the basis of these literary borrowings, it is tempting to argue that the so-called Connecticut Wits were contesting traditions dear to English culture and, in this way, striving to complete a process begun with the war with England. I will, however, resist the temptation to read these poems as declarations on the part of American poets of independence from the literary culture of Great Britain. I prefer the less obvious position that by appropriating English literary forms, the Connecticut Wits were insisting on their status as authors of English poetry. Indeed, though American, they claimed to be more vigorous and more truly English in a poetic sense than those from whom they borrowed. What, after all, is Dwight's point in making his village the literal manifestation and referent for Goldsmith's, if not to invert the expected relationship of copy to original, making his village more English than Goldsmith's? Of Dwight's attempt in the ``Notes'' to Greenfield Hill to call attention to such Americanisms as ``Nutwood'' for Hickory or ``spring bird'' for a New England songbird, David Simpson has observed that the poet explains just as many terms that are not Americanisms. For this reason, Simpson rightly concludes these notes are not written for the benefit of a readership familiar with English verse; Dwight ``is explaining standard poetic diction to a potentially plain-speaking audience.''13 Despite their thematic assault on British politics and ingenious attempts to write American versions of English poetic forms, the Connecticut Wits had no intention of doing away with such forms. On the contrary, their manner of adapting that tradition to an American landscape was an effort to establish cultural continuity between two national literatures, where political events had ordained separate, even opposing, political destinies. That this use of English verse forms was understood as a way of preserving a British poetic tradition becomes all too evident if we turn to one of its sharpest critics, Hugh Henry Brackenridge. His long satiric novel Modern Chivalry launches a pro-dialect attack on such attempts to write British literature in America. Although his

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

to a region. In the American version, however, the decimation of an Amerindian population is the occasion for Dwight to employ the trope of the rising glory of the new nation:

wandering protagonist speaks the standard dialect, neither his servant, an Irishman, nor any of the people he encounters on his journey seem capable of doing so. This context, renders standard English as just another dialect. In the Introduction to his virst volume, Breckenridge writes, ``It has been a question for some time past, what would be the best means to fix the English language.''14 Rather than have an academy to settle the issue, Brackenridge would prefer that ``some great master of stile . . . arise, and without regarding sentiment, or subject, give an example of good language in his composition.'' The work of such an author might well ``fix the orthography, choice of words, idiom of phrase, and structure of sentence than all the Dictionaries and Institutes that have been ever made.'' This work would also provide ``a model or rule of good writing,'' a model which aims at being, in the words of Horace, ``simple, and about one thing only'' (MC, 3). Patterned on Don Quixote and imitations of Cervantes, on Butler's Hudibras, as well as on a number of other narratives both Classical and European, Modern Chivalry includes a marvelous range of linguistic, literary, legal, economic, and political positions. Brackenridge incorporates this range of European literatures, however, only to exaggerate certain features of the languages in which they were written. As if the reader could have thought otherwise, Brackenridge concludes his first volume with this postscript: ``The truth is, as I have said, I value this book for little but the stile. This I have formed on the model of Xenopohon, and Swift's Tale of a Tub, and Gulliver's Travels'' (MC, 77). Having had great fun at the expense of any search for a single written style, he kicks off his third volume by promising to offer such a model: ``Proceeding with my object; the giving an example of a perfect stile in writing, I come now to the third volume of the work. I well know, that it will not all at once, and by all persons, be thought to be the model of a perfect stile, for it is only the perfectly instructed, and delicately discerning that can discover its beauties'' (MC, 161).15 Does this mean that Modern Chivalry should not be taken seriously as a position on the national language? On the contrary, this cacaphony of voices and writing styles is designed as an assault on the position held by Dwight and Barlow.16 In poking fun at the idea of his rivals' plan for a single style of American English, Brackenridge implies that such a plan would significantly impoverish the language. Indeed, so hostile is that plan to American interests, he contends, that it must have been formulated by the English: ``The English language is undoubtedly written better in America than in England, especially since the time of that literary dunce, Samuel Johnson, who was totally destitute of taste for the vrai naturelle or simplicity of nature'' (MC, 78).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 69

From the history of the debate as dramatized by Dwight and Brackenridge, it is impossible to say which, if any, of the two positions actually won. Rather than choose either side, I am interested in what shared assumptions allowed such men to disagree in terms their readers would find meaningful. Both assumed an instrumental relationship between language and nation. Where the one insisted that a standard written English would stabilize, standardize, and give shape to the polity, the other stressed the diversity of English voices in America. Together they created a tautology. Where someone like Dwight certainly favored high literary poetic diction, he also felt compelled to include specifically American terms which he glossed in his notes to the poem. Moreover, for all the pleasure Brackenridge obviously took in collecting English variants, he still relied on a standard-style English to make this point, because he had his narrator speak according to the written standard. The intelligibility of Brackenridge's novel depends on the theory of language informing Greenfield Hill, just as the meaning of that poem depends on the position Brackenridge takes on language in Modern Chivalry. If it takes a field of variants to create the normative style, then a dialectic becomes meaningful as such only in relationship to an English standard. Out of this paradox, a national language was born. For demonstration, let us turn to Noah Webster. His writings on the history of English and theory of language usage and development link language directly to nation formation. In his Dissertations on the English Language he contends that the history of English pronunciation will show ``the principle differences between the practice in England and America and the differences in the several parts of America'' (D, 36±7). He believes the moment is right in America for establishing ``a national language and of giving uniformity and perspicuity'' (D, 36). He does acknowledge there are regional differences in English throughout the United States, and he wants to create a ``conformity'' that will lead to national coherence and uniformity. Taking specific aim at the English grammarians, Webster suggests how such a language will come into its own. For centuries English scholars sought without success to introduce the subjunctive into English. Attempts to impose grammatical usage invariably fail, he explains, because ``people in practice pay no regard to it'' (D, viii). Grammarians should have known that speakers of a language are the ones who determine how it is spoken. No attempt to impose a Latin rule can overrule the ``common practice, even among the unlearned, [which is] generally defensible on the principles . . . of analogy, and the structure of the language,'' and no attempt to impose a Latin rule or private opinion can overrule common practice (D, viii). If

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

70 Revolutionary Histories

``the people are right'' in England, Webster claims, then they are even more so in America, where ``The body of the people governed will still retain their respective peculiarities of speaking'' (D, 19).17 In addition to regional differences, immigration will produce variations in American English. Then, regrettably, there are always those people who insist on preserving British class distinctions: ``In many parts of America, people at present attempt to copy the English phrases and pronunciations,'' which has created differences between ``the language of the higher and the common ranks, and indeed between the same ranks in different states, as the rage for copying the English does not prevail equally in every part of North America'' (D, 23±4). Despite all these sources of difference, Webster insists, ``As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as in government'' (D, 20), and he wants that language to have ``uniformity and perspicuity'' (D, 36). While he believes that ``the general practice of the nation, constitute[s] propriety in speaking'' (D, 27), he maintains that speakers should determine how they speak the language, and American speakers observe very different local standards. Having exposed this conceptual loop only to discover it is in fact a loop, Webster arrives at the conclusion that ``the unanimous consent of a nation, a fixed principle interwoven with the very construction of a language, coeval and coextensive with it'' (D, 29) will establish the national standard. Despite all the spoken variations he documents, Webster insists that certain similarities bind these differences together: ``On examining the language, and comparing the practice of speaking among the yeomanry of this country, with the stile of Shakespear and Addison, I am constrained to declare that the people of America, in particular the English descendants, speak the most pure English now known in the world'' (D, 288). The ``yeomanry'' of America are the reason, he explains, that ``in the extent of twelve hundred miles in America, there are very few, I question whether a hundred words . . . which are not universally intelligible'' (D, 289). He agrees with Brackenridge that the English spoken by ordinary Americans is what makes an English language American, but he also concedes Dwight's point that speech provides the basis of a single style, one moreover that is purely English.18

The British revision of English letters The American debate about the language appropriate for a new nation may seem worlds away from any discussion of language in Great Britain. Arguments concerning the politics of language in England from

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 71

Johnson to Wordsworth, gave at most a nod of acknowledgment to the language debates in America. In keeping with the exceptionalist ideology of American historians, most discussions of those language debates treat them as unique to a group of colonies attempting to define themselves as a new nation. While both nations engaged in similar debates at approximately the same time, these discussions apparently occurred in relative isolation from each other, a coincidence that has yet to be reckoned with by more than a handful of scholars. If it seems all too obvious that a newly created nation such as the United States would undertake this cultural self-interrogation, why, we must ask, was England also undertaking the same project at the same time and raking over many of the same issues.19 In light of these similarities and their pervasively political tone, it seems to me only reasonable to conclude that both nations were embarking on a form of cultural nationalization that was as new to Europe as it was to North America. It is this conclusion I hope to reach with a brief discussion of the language debates that preoccupied late eighteenth-century England. Poets so different as Samuel Johnson, James Thompson, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith, understood the standard for written English as the language of an elite tradition of letters. Consider, for example, Goldsmith's amusing poem ``The Haunch of Venison,'' whose characters extend in social rank from the Duke of Cumberland to a lowly serving man for whom the Duke's letter must be read aloud. The group includes as well a Scotsman and a Jew, figures defining the outer limits of English society from the mid-eighteenth century on. All speak in terms that can be rendered in standard written English except for the Scot, whose brogue (```What the de'il mon, a pasty!''' [CW, 103]) Goldsmith represents as a comic degradation of the written standard. In contrast to the situation in America, the preponderance of English poetry indicates that English poetry's general belief in adherence to a written standard had hardly eliminated debate. On the contrary, although all gave notional assent to a written standard, virtually every English author from Johnson to Scott took a position on the question of a written standard for British English: How much Latin should it include? How fluid should the boundaries between written and spoken vernacular be? Were specialized terms from new areas of science and technology, from particular vocations, or from philosophy and religion acceptable according to the vernacular standard? And what about the commercial and cultural imports from colonial expansion? Should the language expand to accommodate them as well? In his reading of Roderick Random, John Barrell has provided a rather exhaustive set of lists of the regional

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

72 Revolutionary Histories

dialects, expressions specific to vocations, and speech forms particular to the ranks of Smollett's characters. On the basis of this information, Barrell observes, ``The language of Roderick Random is remarkable for a diversity which is, however (though to a lesser degree), a feature of Smollett's other novels and of Fielding's as well.''20 According to Barrell, this diversity of expression indicates something of the social diversity of Britain itself. Even as Smollett and Fielding were pushing written English in the direction of speech, allowing the various positions within English society to fan out like a deck of cards within writing, other writers were pushing the language in quite another direction. In his humorous poem ``On Archaism in Poetry,'' Johnson mocks the attempts by the usual suspects we now consider ``pre-romantic'' ± Collins, Gray, the Wartons ± to revive and even coin archaic diction. The result ± ``Uncouth words in disarray: / Tricked in antique ruff and bonnett, / Ode and elegy and sonnett'' ± is subject to ridicule.21 His comments on Collins's style sum up Johnson's position on the new poetic style: ``his diction was often harsh, unskillfully laboured, and injudiciously selected. He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival; and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry.''22 Nor was Johnson alone in this opinion. If we return to the most cacophonous novelists of the last half of the eighteenth century, we find that they, too, considered such linguistic displays of an elite education in violation of the prosaic standard. Despite a linguistic diversity that appears at times disrespectful of elite tradition, one finds that Smollett nevertheless endorsed a written standard. Smollett's first-person narrator speaks a brand of English that defies his Scottish origins, as he acknowledges in the opening sentence of the novel: ``I was born in the northern part of this united kingdom in the house of my grandfather, a gentleman of considerable influence, who had on many occasions signalized himself in behalf of his country.''23 So, too, Fielding was as likely to mock the linguistic manifestation of an excessive display of learning (e.g. Parson Adams), as he is to identify a character's humorous lack of familiarity with the prestige dialect as a failure to live up to the standard of civility identified with standard English prose (e.g. Mrs. Slipslop). Despite their evident differences, then, it is fair to say that Johnson, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Fielding sought to incorporate all differences of region, class, and profession within a standard prose vernacular. In relation to this standard, each and every such difference indicated a position within a hierarchy of which standard English, rather than Latin or Greek, stood at the top.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 73

It is precisely the development of this hierarchy in the late eighteenth century and the consequent overvaluation of a single written standard that Wordsworth challenges in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.24 I want to revisit briefly this familiar critique of the prosaic standards Wordsworth thought were diminishing the reach and resonance of English letters. As the ``Advertisement'' to the Lyrical Ballads declares, the poems ``were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to poetic pleasure.''25 Thus it is precisely the kind of spoken language that other authors oppose to polite writing that, for Wordsworth, offers a ``natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents'' (WW, 591). Writing based on speech is preferable to writing that conforms to a written standard, because speech comes substantially closer to expressing human emotion.26 I am less interested in the psychological, epistemological, or linguistic issues here than in the very literal meaning of Wordsworth's claim that writing should be based on ``incidents and situations from common life,'' that those incidents should be represented, moreover, in the ``language really used by men'' (WW, 596±7). To counter the prevailing theory that speech should model itself on English prose, Wordsworth proposed a theory of language that eventually wormed its way into the very core of nineteenthcentury liberal ideology: writing should model itself on speech that has its source in the feelings of the common individual. How else, if not by fashioning itself on common speech, could writing be indigenous to a nation? That this argument would come to dominate poetic rather than linguistic theory is the only point I want to make in alluding to this momentous, complex, and much-interpreted document. My purpose in so briefly alluding to the ``other'' side of the debate is to provide a sense of the positions that were resolved in the model that came to dominate England's understanding of its national language. In looking back before Wordsworth to Johnson's Dictionary, we see a third position already taking shape. In his Preface to the Dictionary, Johnson famously represented the task he undertook on behalf of England in terms that anticipate England's continuing imperial expansion: ``When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order'' (SJ, 309). In the Preface, as in the Dictionary itself, Johnson moves, without acknowledging the fact, from an argument about speech to an argument about writing. In what are perhaps the most quoted lines of this oft-quoted document, he explains, ``As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before written; and while they were unfixed

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

74 Revolutionary Histories

by any visible signs, must have been spoken before they were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great diversity, as we now observe those who cannot read to catch sounds imperfectly, and utter them negligently'' (SJ, 308). It is ``from this uncertain pronunciation'' that we are to understand the rise of ``the various dialects of the same country, which will always be observed to grow fewer and less different, as books are multiplied; and from this arbitrary representation of sounds by letters proceeds that diversity of spelling observable in the Saxon remains'' (SJ, 308). This account of the origins of variant spelling takes us almost imperceptibly from oral to written forms of a language, and from there it is a simple step to conclude that some way to establish acceptable and uniform practices is definitely in order, because the coherence of the English language depends on it. So, too, will variant language usage proceed from a welter of differences in rank, region, work, and education to a uniform standard. Johnson represents his lexicographic policy as a compromise between the populist and the dilettante: ``where caprice has long wantoned without control, and vanity sought praise by petty reformation, I have endeavoured to proceed with a scholar's reverence for antiquity, and a grammarian's regard for the genius of our tongue'' (SJ, 310). To avoid ``the corruptions of oral utterance'' (SJ, ibid.), on the one hand, and the excess of contemporary written styles on the other, he has, he says, ``studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the Restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction'' (SJ, 319). In sharp contrast to Webster, and in keeping with the English tradition, Johnson comes down decisively on the side of writing over speech as the means of determining the parameters of standard English. We know that both English and American lexicographers formulated a national standard for the English language during the last three decades of the eighteenth century, and they appear to have come up with different models. Johnson argued that writing should have priority over speech, because only writing can standardize speech and make a coherent nation out of disparate regions, classes, dialects, and professions. Webster, by way of contrast, believed that it takes the vernacular used in the spoken interaction among men to produce a distinctive national character. If in England all spoken dialects are judged idiosyncratic, Johnson's standard being based on writing produced before the Restoration, then American authors seem to display equally various styles of writing that might appear excessive in relation to the common speech of an indigenous ``American yeomanry.'' Can we not conclude that both

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 75

Johnson and Webster proposed to play off speech against writing as the means to create a national culture that is at once internally coherent and distinct from that of any other English-speaking nation? In briefly summarizing the language debates in Great Britain and the United States, I have not only stressed the specific literary conversations that produced these models, I have also stressed the differences between the models that resulted. But a closer look at the language debates in England will suggest that the two were perhaps not quite so different as my comparison of Johnson and Webster thus far suggests. True, Johnson declared that a standard based on writing was the only way to prevent the English language from becoming altogether foreign and chaotic. When he declared standardized written prose as the standard for spoken English, however, he also made speech the mark of distinction among the various classes, regions, and professions that spoke the language. He placed written English at the top of a linguistic hierarchy. The variation in one's speech according to region or social class became the means of constantly identifying one's precise position in that hierarchy. Though it can be considered an exact reversal of this strategy, Noah Webster's American English nevertheless accomplished much the same thing. It is true that Webster claimed the speech of an indigenous yeomanry should set the standard for written American English, but let us consider further who were these yeomen that Webster celebrates. In contrast with ``the illiterate peasantry'' of England, Webster's yeomen ``have considerable education.'' These men are property owners who write, keep accounts, read newspapers and the Bible, and fill their heads with ``the best English sermons and treatises upon religion, ethics, geography and history'' (D, 288±9). They have established ``public schools sufficient to instruct every man's children, and most of the children are actually benefited by these institutions'' (D, 289). In contrast with American citizens, people in England ``can hardly understand one another, so various are their dialects.'' Because of the relatively high level of literacy in the United States, however, ``in the extent of the twelve hundred miles in America,'' there are at most 100 words ``which are not universally intelligible.'' Behind the speech of the common American is a common standard of literacy that included writing as well as reading, and this is what lends speech a nationally cohesive structure. Indeed, in the United States we arguably accept Webster's belief in a linguistic democracy that tolerates a variety of inflections. Different though it may be from British English in this respect, it is simply naive to consider American English all that democratic on this basis alone. Common speech is never quite as good as speech that adheres to writing, and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

76 Revolutionary Histories

A Language for the Nation 77

class is ultimately inferred by one's ability to meet that standard. A national language so imagined induces assimilation.

Johnson's and Webster's respective models for a national language will, I believe, clarify the differences between the kind of fiction that appealed to readers in eighteenth-century Britain and that which was popular in America in the decades immediately following the Revolution. Johnson's argument for a standard written English helps to explain what happens to speech in eighteenth-century fiction. The version of spoken English which came closest to the written standard placed one at the top of a social hierarchy; all other dialects automatically placed the speaker in a complex set of relationships below. So powerful and pervasive was this concept of the nation as an intricate set of linguistic hierarchies that we find even writers so opposed to one another as Richardson and Fielding observing this very principle. As obviously as Fielding may endorse the written standard, Richardson models his fiction even more self-consciously on a kind of writing he portrayed as capable of regulating speech and, through speech, feeling. In Pamela the epistolary mode deftly reverses the assumption presupposed by Richardson's project of producing a writing manual as a standard for young ladies: namely, that by writing according to a certain style they would upgrade their speech and ultimately refuse their feelings. The novel itself creates the illusion that good writing comes from the heart, expresses emotion, and in so doing testifies to the quality of interiority from which it came. Indeed, so thoroughly is Pamela's writing represented as coming directly from within the girl herself that in what is arguably the most erotic scene in the novel, Mr. B threatens to seize her letters rather than her body: Artful slut! said he, What's this to my question? ± Are they [her letters] not about you? ± If, said I, I must pluck them out of my hiding-place behind the wainscot, won't you see me? ± Still more and more artful! said he ± Is this an answer to my question? ± I have searched every place above, and in your closet, for them, and cannot find them; so I will know where they are. Now, said he, it is my opinion they are about you; and I never undressed a girl in my life; but I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela; and I hope I shall not go far before I find them.27

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The American revision of British fiction

Being who he was, Richardson knew full well it was her writing that produced this interiority and gave it value, and nowhere did he make this fact more apparent than in Clarissa. Richardson's second heroine bonds feeling and thought to confessional prose in the manner of Pamela, but she also speaks in exactly the manner she writes and reports statements made by a wide range of other speakers. Indeed, in this novel writing is not only the material evidence of the vicissitudes of a highly developed interiority, it also provides the undisguised model for speech. There are reasons enough for Clarissa to think of her father's choice of a suitor as beneath her, but the one that would have eliminated any doubt for even the most patriarchally inclined, is that she has so little to say of his speaking ability. We must consequently assume that his speech neither compels her attention as a listener, nor meets her written standard (which amounts to the same thing). She simply reports all his petitions, declarations, boasts, and speeches in her own words in letters to her friend. Lest we should think for a moment that Clarissa has passed over Solmes too lightly, however, Richardson does provide one crucial piece of linguistic evidence to convince the reader that the man is every bit as presumptuous in courting Clarissa as she takes him to be. The note in which Solmes cautions Clarissa against Lovelace proves she was far better off in Lovelace's clutches than wedded to this man: I have something to communicate to you that concernes you much, if you be pleased to admit me to youre speech. Youre honour is concerned it [sic] itt, and the hounour of all youre family. Itt relates to the designes of one whom you are sed to valew more then he deserves; and to some of his reprobat actions; which I am reddie to give you convincing proofes to the truth of. I may appear to be interessed in itt: but neverthelesse, I am reddy to make oathe, that every tittle is true: and you will see what a man you are sed to favour. But I hope not so, for youre owne honour . . . ''28 Here, then, is Solmes's boorishness writ large, proof that he does not speak the same language she does.29 Since his linguistic insufficiency testifies to the quality of the man himself, moreover, their marriage had to strike the reader as an awful mismatch. Clarissa also encourages us to understand the relationship between Clarissa and Lovelace in terms of their respective modes of writing. Lovelace is nothing if not theatrical. He stages spectacles. Indeed, it is because of a spectacle in which Clarissa's brother was dishonored that

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

78 Revolutionary Histories

Lovelace is persona non grata in the Harlowe house. To make this point, Richardson goes so far as to represent those parts of the novel under Lovelace's control as a dramatic script. Letters 235 to 251 from Lovelace to Belford greet us in the form of characters' names with spoken statements following each. At those moments when Lovelace is being most theatrical, Richardson thus appears to hand over to him authority to decide what other characters shall say. In Letter 244, Lovelace explains how he stood behind Clarissa's chair in her meeting with the rascal Captain Tomlinson, ``That I might give him agreed-upon signals, should there be occasion for them: and so a wink of the left eye meant `Push that point, captain'; a forefinger held up and a biting of the lip, `Get off that as fast as possible'; a nod and a frown signaled `Swear to it, captain' '' (C, 832). Richardson thus converts the power that comes with Lovelace's wealth into the power to control other people by putting words into their mouths. Richardson also retracts this power whenever it collides with Clarissa's epistolary power; her writing challenges his theatrical authority by showing how insufferable it feels to those subjected to it. It would be too simplistic to say that the two concepts of language were locking horns in this novel. The problem with reading Clarissa as an allegory to the eighteenth-century struggle between the position Johnson defended in his attack on plain speech and Wordsworth's defense of the language of ordinary men is that both Clarissa and Lovelace speak the same brand of English. Their spoken dialect makes them compatible in the same way that Pamela's letters make her irresistible to Mr. B. But while the language Clarissa speaks is perfectly compatible with his, she writes in a manner that contradicts his belief that writing is a way of scripting speech. In Clarissa, Richardson reroutes the source of his heroine's writing so as to locate its origin in the individual heart. Lovelace proves it is not good enough for such prose to be fixed to speech, because the dramatic mode uses speech to falsify thought and feeling. Lovelace regards each individual as a producer of speech rather than as a performer of writing. Reading a letter written by the heroine implies that her writing simply gave verbal form to the wild swings of emotion Lovelace's theatricals forced her to undergo. She reverses the logic of a performance-based theory in which writing tells a character what to say and think. By thus creating the illusion that feelings necessarily precede their expression in writing, the epistolary mode performs a compromise between opposing the differing views of language that Johnson presents in his Lives of the Poets and Wordsworth proposes in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. In succumbing to Clarissa's epistolary blandishments, we actually accept writing as in every way superior to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 79

spoken language in representing the most delicate nuances of individual feeling. Publication records indicate that Richardson's fiction was almost as widely read in British America as it was in England. We might expect such a reception of British literature before the American Revolution, but the fact that for several decades following the War for Independence these novels only increased in popularity remains something of a mystery: what could a British novel say to a national readership in the midst of a debate over how best to make a language and literature of their own? If we bring the cultural logic of Webster's idea of a national language to bear on the American edition's starkly formal differences from the British original, the mystery begins to yield an answer. Let us take note of what is perhaps the first and most obvious of these differences. When Pamela was first published in London in 1740, the novel ran to about a quarter of a million words, and when Clarissa appeared it was well over a million words in length. The editions of Pamela that were popular in America during the 1790s were not only shorter, they were also reduced in size to the equivalent of a mere handful of letters.30 Pamela was only about 27,000 words in length, and Clarissa about 41,000, words or about the same length as Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple. These American versions were based on an edition that first appeared in London in 1756 and was reprinted in 1764. The publication data clearly indicates that from the late 1780s through the 1790s not only was there an intense explosion of this shorter Richardson into print, but also that the enormous popularity of this edition was a peculiarly American phenomenon.31 There is good reason for the brevity of these American editions. The short Clarissa undergoes few swings of her emotions and devotes remarkably little time to writing letters. The impersonal third person narration informs us that she ``wrote to Mr. Lovelace that as she had no other means of escaping her brother's tyranny, she would meet him the next Monday at the garden gate and put herself under his protection.''32 With this statement, all letter writing ceases, and the narrator simply reports events. Of these, there are precious few, and all are directly related to the rape of Clarissa. What had provided merely an occasion for the English Clarissa to carry on highly nuanced emotional performances in prose ± namely, the seduction plot ± thus becomes the stock and trade of the American edition. Indeed, it is entirely accurate to say that the abridged Richardson dispenses with all but the most necessary verbal performances in order to concentrate on the conduct of the female body.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

80 Revolutionary Histories

In marked contrast with the famously disordered writing of Letter 261 by means of which the English Clarissa registered the fact of the rape, the abridged Clarissa includes no personal record of this experience. The absence of all literary testimony to her damaged sensibility transforms the violation of a highly individuated consciousness into a devastating physical experience, which can be summed up in the following manner:33 What followed was the most vile and inhuman acts of violence. The distressed lady, roused from the dreadful lethargy into which she was sinking, pleaded for mercy, and cried, I will be yours ±, indeed, to obtain mercy, I will be yours! But no mercy could she find. Her strength, her intellects failed her. Fits upon fits followed, which procured her no compassion . . . 34 Gone are the lengthy passages in which Lovelace recapitulates events for his friend Belford. Gone are the painfully obtuse letters in which Anna Howe extracts the story from a distraught Clarissa and proceeds to garner responses from her circle. This one meager passage displaces all the psychological complexity and elevated language by which Richardson sought to enhance the value of Clarissa's sensibility. Thus it is important that the American edition bothers to quote her as saying, ``I will be yours,'' at the moment when the dirty deed is consummated. By way of contrast, in the unabridged edition, it is only later, in writing to Anna Howe, that Clarissa ``remember[s], I pleaded for mercy ± I remember that I said I would be his ± indeed I would be his ± to obtain his mercy ± But no mercy found I!'' (C, 1011). Her speech is not only reported in writing, but also buried in the middle of a paragraph almost 150 pages after Lovelace himself reports the event to Belford. Initially, the rape damages the source of writing, and we encounter only bits of paper arranged to represent delirium. With the slow decay of her body, however, her writing acquires unimpeachable authority to move the coldest heart and make pronouncements on the characters of those around her. The American text reverses the relation between writing and the body, because it grants to speech the power to authenticate rather than to undermine the written standard. This edition quotes very few utterances. Where these have stood out glaringly from Clarissa's prose in the British edition, they blend with the voice of the narrator in the American edition. Where the British Clarissa quotes only what cannot be said in her personal letters, the narrator of the American Clarissa

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 81

seamlessly folds those voices into its writing style and its way of thinking. The relations between speech and writing produce an entirely different narrative agency along with a new narrative genre. When Lovelace rapes Clarissa, the American text makes clear that rape robs her of the right to speak for herself. When she says, ``I will marry you,'' she is claiming this right from her father, only to be denied of that right by Lovelace. Cousin Morden can speak for her body, because he wants to restore its self-determination. In the British text, Clarissa's former nursemaid and loyal but powerless supporter, Mrs. Norton, reports Morden's confrontation with the Harlowe family, including his promise to cut off all ties to the Harlowes and declare Clarissa his sole heir. Through an act of writing, namely, the revision of his will, he proposes to reattach Clarissa to a family and thus redeem her value. This redemptive gesture is displaced not only by speech, but also by the fact of being reported in Mrs. Norton's letter (Letter 459). By way of contrast, we might say that the American Richardson quotes Colonel Morden directly, because his is the right kind of voice. He voices a kind of honor that defends the integrity of the body. His interventions on Clarissa's behalf increase in importance, if for no other reason because so much else has been redacted. Convinced of Clarissa's innocence, he pleads with the girl's family, the narrator tells us, to send a nurse to care for her. His interventions on her behalf promise to cancel out the fact of her rape as well as the excommunication from the Harlowe family. When brother James steps in to prevent her from receiving any succor, Morden confirms what the narrator has already implied, that ``in me shall the dear creature have the father, uncle, and brother she has lost'' (C, 111).

Conclusion By turning however briefly to literature, my point has been to suggest, first of all, how many major authors in both nations were addressing the question of a national language even when they seemed concerned with issues of a far more literary nature. I sought to demonstrate, moreover, the striking similarities between the two cultures, as each strove to formulate a national identity distinct and apart from other Englishspeaking people. In concluding this investigation, however, I have also suggested that quite different literary traditions developed out of these debates. Although Noah Webster's dictionary may seem today very much the same kind of enterprise as Samuel Johnson's, one would never equate the American edition of Clarissa with the one preferred

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

82 Revolutionary Histories

in England. Indeed, so reduced in literariness as well as size does the American edition seem in comparison with the original, that few scholars bother to discover that the abridgment was the more popular of the two in the United States, and even fewer bother to take it seriously as literature or teach it to their students.35 Yet, I would argue, this brief and plain-spoken narrative is not only indicative of a genre of seduction tales that flourished during the period following the American Revolution, it also dramatizes how sharply Webster's model of standard English prose in fact differed from the British model. On the assumption that the American fiction strove and failed to meet the English standard, literary criticism habitually regards Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple as an inferior version of the kind of sentimental novel exemplified by the English Richardson, and with good reason. Charlotte Temple is for the most part a third-person narrative about a young woman who lost her virtue to a British officer, followed him to America, and spent most of her brief life there in poverty and shame. This novel requires about as many pages as the American versions of Pamela and Clarissa. When published in England in 1791, Rowson's novel was largely ignored. But when published in the United States three years later, however, it became America's first bestseller. On the basis of just this much information, we might very well consider the abridged Richardson text an inferior version of Charlotte Temple, a perfect example of the kind of seduction narrative that was wildly popular during the 1790s. More clearly than any other product of American soil or sensibility, I believe, these narratives can clarify what the outcome of the language debates meant for literature written for Americans in English. That the English novel felt compelled to announce the fact of being written is as true of Fielding and Smollett as it is of Richardson. At the same time, one finds there, not only in Fielding and Smollett, but also to a lesser degree in Richardson, a cacophony of voices which establish elaborate distinctions interlacing class and education with the quality of sensibility one brought to those instruments. On the basis of their speech, Ladies Booby and Catherine de Bourgh appear as inferior in moral and emotional terms to the less wealthy and relatively low-born Pamela Andrews and Elizabeth Bennett as any dialect-speaking servant might appear in relation to speakers belonging to the land-owning classes. Whether cast in the epistolary mode or not, the British novels of the late eighteenth century use writing to translate the nation's class distinctions into speech. The closer one comes to the same written standard Clarissa uses to reduce the urban population teeming around

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

A Language for the Nation 83

her to an intelligible hierarchy, at once social and moral, the higher the person ranks both socially and morally. This is the heart of its literary appeal. The production of such categories is not only the reason why Clarissa must push the vernacular to new heights of emotional subtlety, but also why readers hang on her every word, letter after letter. In closing, let me emphasize that novels like Charlotte Temple provided readers with another way of imagining themselves as part of an English-speaking community. This method sought to naturalize writing in English so that it appeared to arise from the speaker and represented in a direct and unmediated fashion the vicissitudes of the body from which that speech arose. In speaking from the body and on its behalf, this style of English prose, no less contrived than its British counterpart, created a norm, not for speech, but for written prose. This prose identified any spoken dialect as regional or even idiosyncratic and thus incapable of representing the whole. On this basis, our plain-spoken writing relegated any narrator to the domain of spoken English. The inclusionary effect so often attributed to this simple style of writing should be rethought, I believe, in relation to its univocal character.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

84 Revolutionary Histories

International Embarrassment: A Transatlantic Morphology of Blushing, 1749±1812 Robert Lawson-Peebles

Shades of red: embarrassment in theory It is Chichester and Sunday. Two officers in the British Army, Montraville and Belcour, are taking a postprandial stroll. A group of girls issue from church: Such an assemblage of youth and innocence naturally attracted the young soldiers: they stopped; and, as the little cavalcade passed, almost involuntarily pulled off their hats. A tall, elegant girl looked at Montraville and blushed: he instantly recollected the features of Charlotte Temple, whom he had once seen and danced with at a ball in Portsmouth. At that time he thought on her only as a very lovely child, she being then only thirteen; but the improvement two years had made in her person, and the blush of recollection which suffused her cheeks as she passed, awakened in his bosom new and pleasing ideas.1 This episode, from the third paragraph of Susanna Rowson's bestknown novel, presents a choice of Lord's Day activities: feeding the body or the soul. It also presents a contrast between what might be called, paradoxically, styles of involition. Those styles illuminate the construction of gender in the final years of the eighteenth century. The ``natural'' attraction of the males receives its equally ``natural'' response in the female blush. The males adjust their dress in accord with the chivalric code. This is a cultural imposition, but one that is so imperious that their action too is supposed to be involuntary. The adverb, ``almost,'' is therefore a comment on the males. It is also a portent, 85

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

5

confirmed by the ``new and pleasing ideas'' awakened in the bosom of Montraville. The reader trained in such tales already suspects the outcome. The paradox is that the blush is here treated as instinctive, and therefore cannot be a style. Yet its manifestations and meanings have changed over time. Christopher Ricks, for instance, suggested that ``the hot flush of embarrassment rises with special frequency and centrality in the nineteenth century,'' while Mary Ann O'Farrell has explored its treatment by writers such as Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, and James.2 But the blush has caused intense, even voyeuristic interest in other centuries. It is an indicator of female virginity in Shakespeare's Henry V; while Havelock Ellis, the pioneer psychologist of sexuality, concluded three centuries later that it was caused by questions of context rather than sexual status. Recent medicine treats it as a general autonomic response: a ``sudden, brief erythema of the face and neck, resulting from vascular dilation due to emotion or heat.'' A Swedish surgical team has now developed a treatment.3 Eighteenth-century blushing has also received some attention. Felicity Nussbaum examines a group of mid-eighteenthcentury texts to suggest a connection between the blush, ``the embarrassed recognition of male domination in the domestic realm,'' and the veil, ``the sign of hidden sexuality of the harem and of the colonial empire abroad.'' As that notorious Arabic term suggests, Nussbaum is concerned with what has become known as the Second British Empire.4 The present essay has more to do with the moral and emotional complications that resulted from the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 and the expansion and consequent decline of the American empire between the years 1765 and 1783. It will examine attitudes to blushing on both sides of the Atlantic by analyzing the context of Fanny Burney's Evelina, published in 1778; and the text with which I began, Rowson's Charlotte Temple, first published in Britain in 1791 and in the United States in 1794. In Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1766), the philanthropic Mr. Fenton debates the nature of the blush. He attributes it to ``sensibility'' and concludes that it is ``from the fountain of virtue, alone, that this flush of shamefacedness can possibly flow.'' The blush, he thinks, is blind to context: ``goodness will blush in a closet, in a desert, in darkness.'' It can also be distinguished from ``the flushings of desire, or the reddenings of anger, or any such turbulent and irregular emotions.''5 Fenton's care over classification, and his certainty about the trigger of blushing, show that he has learned the lessons of associationism, the theory relating all mental activity to sensations and feeling, first fully

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

86 Revolutionary Histories

87

explored in David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749). Hartley discussed shame at length in order to place his empirical scheme at the service of the Bible. He referred to the third chapter of Genesis, and linked the shame of Adam and Eve with the feelings of his contemporaries who were sexually promiscuous. He looked abroad to prove his point, engaging in the debate about the qualities of savagism and civilization: There has never perhaps been any Nation in the World, where this intire Licentiousness has been allowed; the Mischiefs which evidently follow from all great Degrees of it, having always laid Mankind under some Restraints, and produced some imperfect Regulations at least, and some Approaches towards Marriage. However, the Misery and Desolation of the barbarous Nations of Africa and America, in whom the Violence of Passion, and the Degeneracy of Nature, have almost obliterated the faint Traces of the Patriarchal Religion; and the many Evils, public and private, which attend all unlawful Commerce between the Sexes in the more civilized Countries; are abundantly sufficient to evince what is affirmed.6 Hartley's Treatise shared a negative view of Native Americans with Buffon's Natural History, published in the same year. They disagreed only over the cause of the degeneration. While Hartley believed it was infidelity, Buffon thought it was the climate that caused the sad plight of the indigenes. The difference was significant in that it allowed Hartley to suggest that Britons were also degenerating. Developing his theme from Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education, he worried that ``carnal Desire'' in the young was being encouraged by ``Effeminacy . . . neglect of bodily Labour. . . . The Conversation which they hear, and the Books which they read, lewd heathen Poets, modern Plays, Romances, &c.''7 Hartley's views on reading at least were shared by the conduct books, those purveyors of morals increasingly aimed at young women. One of the most widely circulated was A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, by Dr. John Gregory, Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University. It was first published in 1774, appropriately the year after he died. In it Gregory debated associationism by theorizing about the maidenly blush: One of the chief beauties in a female character, is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration. . . . When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of beauty. That extreme sens-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

ibility which it indicates may be a weakness and incumbrance in our sex, as I have too often felt; but in yours it is peculiarly engaging. Pedants, who think themselves philosophers, ask why a woman should blush when she is conscious of no crime? It is a sufficient answer, that nature has made you blush when you are guilty of no fault, and has forced us to love you because you do so. ± Blushing is so far from being necessarily an attendant on guilt, that it is the usual companion of innocence.8 Gregory relies on a gendering of space which prioritizes the private sphere for women. He provides women with an appropriate emotion, modesty, for their public appearances. The indicator of modesty, the blush, is therefore given a positive value. It followed that blushing, like space, was gendered. Its appearance in males was an indicator of an excessive sensibility which received its ultimate fictional representation in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, also published in 1774. Gregory's ``natural'' theory of the maidenly blush may not have pleased Hartley, but it would have been a reassurance to English parents, for there existed a nearby threat to modesty. That threat emerged from the 1707 Union of Scottish and English Parliaments, but not of Laws. The Union caused an English dislike of the Scots unusual for its ferocity and longevity. The Scots Highlanders in particular were despised and feared. Different from both the English and the Lowlanders in language, religion, social organization, and warlike habits, they provided an example of alternative behavior much closer to home than the unrestrained Native Americans. Two examples, 90 years apart, sum up attitudes to the Highlanders. In 1707 the satirist Tom Brown greeted the Union of Parliaments by calling the Highlanders ``this barbarous Caledonian breed.'' In 1797 the Edinburgh historian John Pinkerton wrote that ``the highlanders from early times to the present century [were known as] the savages of Scotland.'' The implied similarity between Highlanders and Native Americans was made overt by Pinkerton in his 1814 An Enquiry into the History of Scotland, but it had long been understood. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, formed in the year of Union, had twin aims: to promote Christian knowledge not only in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, but also in the western borders of the American colonies. To those English like Samuel Johnson, who (despite his 1773 tour) were unwilling to be precise about its regions, Scotland provided an appropriate environment for what Hartley had called ``the Violence of Passion, and the Degeneracy of Nature.'' For instance, an anonymous correspondent to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

88 Revolutionary Histories

89

The Gentleman's Magazine in 1777 suggested that the American Revolution had resulted from an unholy alliance between Colonial rebels and ``perfidious'' Scots in high places in the British Government.9 Scotland became dangerously attractive after the so-called Hardwicke Act. The Marriage Act of 1753, sometimes named after the English Lord Chancellor, breached the canon law of precontracts by invalidating marriages styled as ``clandestine'' ± those created by private engagement and confirmed by sexual intercourse. With exceptions, from 1753 English marriages could be undertaken only after the publication of banns, and hence with parental consent.10 The Marriage Act opened the road to Scotland. Couples lacking parental consent fled to the border town of Gretna Green to be married by the blacksmith ± until that too was made illegal, in 1940. For almost two centuries, the Hardwicke Act added another reason for English moral censure of Scotland, and another reason for the fascination with the blush, for if Gregory was right it meant that an elopement to Gretna was not imminent.

Blushing in Britain If Hartley and the conduct books discussed the theory, the practical lessons were given by the increasing number of novels written by women, using women as protagonists. Gregory's hypothesis on blushing was demonstrated by one of the most widely read novels, Fanny Burney's Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, which was first published four years after A Father's Legacy. Early in the novel a performance of Congreve's Love for Love is the appropriate setting for a brief discussion about the blushes of its major narrator and eponymous heroine, who is disconcerted, as Gregory put it, by ``the gaze of admiration.'' The foppish MP, Lovel, reveals himself when he fails to understand their import: ``I have known so many different causes for a lady's colour, such as flushing, ± anger, ± mauvaise honte, ± and so forth, that I never dare decide to which it may be owing.''11 On the contrary, their meanings are precise. Evelina is an exemplar of Gregory's theory, for her blushes signify her innocence. Her embarrassment is recorded in her letters on a score of occasions, and has two causes. One is her inexperience of ``the world.'' The first blush occurs with the first dance, because of her fright ``at the thoughts of dancing before so many people, all strangers, and, which was worse, with a

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

stranger'' (29; italics in original). Evelina's innocence in this respect is saved by the plot: the stranger is the man she will eventually marry. The second cause of her embarrassment is, increasingly, society itself. She has made her entrance into a world that is raffish rather than criminal. There is only the occasional hint of the London underworld to be found in Moll Flanders, The Beggar's Opera, or Humphry Clinker. The moral landscape is therefore defined by the bounds of politeness rather than those of legality. At its heart, politeness has an egalitarian drive. If Jane Austen revealed, in David Daiches' words, ``the economic basis of social behaviour,'' Fanny Burney here depicts the social basis of economic behavior.12 Again, it is Evelina's future husband, the aristocrat Lord Orville, who raises her from the embarrassment created by the awareness of her lowly status. The repeated use of correlatives gives the prose here a stately yet carefully nuanced movement, and indicates a person who is achieving an ease with herself and her surroundings: The attention with which Lord Orville honours me is as uniform as it is flattering, and seems to result from a benevolence of heart that proves him as much a stranger to caprice as to pride; for, as his particular civilities arose from a generous resentment at seeing me neglected, so will they, I trust, continue as long as I shall, in any degree, deserve them. I am now not merely easy, but even gay in his presence: such is the effect of true politeness, that it banishes all restraint and embarrassment . . . the distinguishing good-breeding with which he treats me, prevents my repining at the visibly-felt superiority of the rest of the company. (296) The ``social freedom'' (296) produced by the politeness of Orville is rarely encountered elsewhere. The actions of the majority of her companions are beyond the bounds of politeness, resulting in the hot flush which is an indicator of innocence misunderstood or placed in jeopardy. A letter to Lord Orville, replete with superlatives, is thus quite different from the dignified measures of the one about him: I am so infinitely ashamed of the application made yesterday for your Lordship's carriage in my name, and so greatly shocked at hearing how much it was injured, that I cannot forbear writing a few lines, to clear myself from the imputation of an impertinence which I blush to be suspected of, and to acquaint you, that the request for your carriage was made against my consent. (249)

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

90 Revolutionary Histories

91

In outline, the moral landscape of the novel is cruciform. The axes meet at Berry Hill, Dorset, home of the Reverend Villars. It is the place Evelina leaves for her entrance into the world and the place to which she returns once she has obtained Villars' permission to marry Orville. It is presented as the moral center of a rather small universe. Villars is the surrogate father, playing therefore the role taken by a conduct book like Gregory's A Father's Legacy; indeed, put together, Villars' admonitory letters read like a conduct book. The horizontal axis of the cross is defined by London and Bristol. These are the sites of social interaction and tests of morality. The vertical axis might be called the line of civility. It runs from Aberdeen to Paris, places present in the text by implication, in the body of a representative character. Scotland is present in the figure of the melancholic poet, Macartney, called by the Branghtons ``the Scotch mope'' (215). The significance of Macartney to the first readers of Evelina is indicated by some comments Samuel Johnson made about him, which were recorded by Burney: ``I must not have you so fond of the Scotch, my little Burney, ± make your hero what you will, but a Scotch man . . . I like Macartney myself! ± Yes, poor fellow, I liked the man, ± but I love not the Nation.'' And then he proceeded, in a dry manner, to make at once sarcastic reflections on the Scotch, & flattering speeches to me, for the man's firing at the National insults of young Branghton, his stubborn resolution in not owning, even to his bosom Friend, his wretchedness of poverty, & his fighting at last for the honour of his Nation, when he resisted all other provocations. . . . 13 Forced by Burney and Hester Thrale to make an exception of Macartney, Johnson still maintains his dislike of the Scots. His use of ``Scotch,'' adjective and noun, as a moral signifier, is confirmed in Burney's novel by the expulsion of Macartney's unwed mother to Scotland; by the ``clandestine affair'' Macartney conducts in Paris; by the duel he fights with the English nobleman who is apparently his father; by his ``horrible plan of turning foot-pad'' (227±8, 230); and by his temperament, which is aggressive, even manic-depressive. France, overcivilized and corrupt, is at the opposite moral pole to savage Scotland. It is represented in Evelina by Madame Duval, who is introduced by means of a comic exchange with the deeply nautical Captain Mirvan (49±52). In a novel where the epistolary mode highlights the complexity of emotion, Duval is all surface. Others blush or color. Duval wears cosmetics. They provide a mask, which of course

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

92 Revolutionary Histories

She danced in a style so uncommon; her age, her showy dress, and an unusual quantity of rouge, drew upon her the eyes, and, I fear, the derision of the whole company. (222) The slapstick treatment of Madame Duval presupposes a readership steeped in Francophobia. Jeremy Black has shown that for much of the eighteenth century many English regarded the French as ``natural and necessary enemies.'' Linda Colley suggested that one element of Francophobia was the belief that, by intriguing at the royal court, aristocratic Frenchwomen exerted political power in an arena reserved for men, and thus quite different from the one depicted by the British conduct books. It will be clear by now that Evelina is a practitioner, in Gregory's words, of ``that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye.''15 In contrast, Madame Duval alludes to the absolutist route to power when she proposes that Evelina should claim her noble birthright and go to Paris, where her ``education and manners might receive their last polish'' in order that she might achieve ``grandeur'' by ``marrying into some family of the first rank,'' a suggestion greeted with ``surprise and terror'' (121). The astute contemporary reader knew that Evelina need not worry. Madame Duval had met her nemesis in Mirvan. He engineers her deconstruction in a ditch, described to Villars so mercilessly that it prompted an illustration in the fourth edition of the novel (135): Her head-dress had fallen off; her linen was torn; her negligee had not a pin left in it; her petticoats she was obliged to hold on; and her shoes were perpetually slipping off. She was covered with dirt, weeds, and filth, and her face was really horrible, for the pomatum and powder from her head, and the dust from the road, were quite pasted on her skin by her tears, which, with her rouge, made so frightful a mixture that she hardly looked human. (148; textual emphases) Captain Mirvan's penultimate reference to Madame Duval alludes to this incident in terms, redolent of hearts of oak, that are so coarsely sexual that either Evelina does not understand what she is reporting to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

denies the ageing process, but which also defeats Hartleian associationist deductions. The text draws attention to Duval's ``rouge,'' which had recently been introduced from France, by always placing the word in italics.14 Duval is an embarrassment to Evelina, to an extent that she is unusually merciless in describing her to Villars:

International Embarrassment

93

``Pray how does old Madame French do?''

``Madame Duval,'' said I, ``is, I believe, very well.''

``I hope she's in good case,'' said he, winking significantly, ``and won't

flinch at seeing service: she has laid by long enough to refit and be

made tight.'' (390±1; italics added)

Mirvan's concerned enquiry about Duval's condition (OED: ``case'') and the sexual/naval pun indicates that she is now suitable for an old salt, for shortly afterwards he reveals: ``she hit my fancy mightily; I never took so much to an old tabby before'' (393). Lord Orville is more discriminating. During the performance of Congreve's Love for Love he had shown that he could tell ``the difference of natural and of artificial colour'' (79±80). It is that sensitivity which, among other things, makes him a suitable partner for the blushing Evelina. Evelina was so popular that by the end of 1779 five editions had been published in Britain, one of them pirated. It is likely that an immediate reason for its success was Britain's deteriorating relationship with France. Evelina was first published in January 1778. Early in February 1778 France, which had been supplying American revolutionaries with arms, agreed commercial and military treaties with them. On June 14 hostilities began between France and Britain, and did not end until February 4, 1783, some 7 months before Britain, in the Peace of Paris, finally recognized the independence of the United States. It would therefore have been a pleasure, even for those Britons sympathetic to the American cause, to see an old sailor trouncing a proud Frenchwoman. A more long-lasting reason for the novel's popularity would have been its conservative investigation of courtship and female behavior at a time when marriage was a topic of debate. In 1780 Martin Madan (1726±90), the lawyer, Methodist minister, and editor of a popular Collection of Psalms and Hymns, published Thelyphthora: or, A Treatise on Female Ruin. He drew principally on the Pentateuch to support his argument. He used the account of the creation of Eve in Genesis 2:24 (``they shall be one flesh''), repeated and extended in Matthew 19:6 (``What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder'') to argue that marriage was established by sexual intercourse rather than by ``marriage ceremonies,'' which were ``proof of the depravity and corruption of human nature.'' In an unusual contribution to the debate over civilization, Madan looked admiringly at ``the savages of Otaheite,''

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Villars, or Burney has temporarily shrugged off the character in the pursuit of broad comedy:

where a man who made a woman pregnant was deemed to have become her husband. In contrast with the Tahitian custom, which involved ``obligation and responsibility,'' the Marriage Act ``may more properly be styled the anti-marriage act,'' because it led, he believed, to ``the ruin of the female sex.'' To an extent, the book repeated arguments against the Hardwicke Act when it was debated in the House of Commons. But Madan went further. He asserted that polygamy (although not polyandry) was permitted by Mosaic Law and, indeed, as a series of unions under the sight of God, was designed by Him to prevent adultery and ``the public prostitution of women.''16 The book quickly became notorious. By 1784 it had provoked, in addition to the reviews, some 16 responses in print. The French Revolution threw such debates into sharp relief. If, as Joan B. Landes suggests, the Revolution eradicated the public power held by aristocratic Frenchwomen and enforced a model of gendered space, confining women to domesticity, it repeated a confinement already being achieved, ironically, in England by the conduct books.17 The Revolution's most famous English critic, Edmund Burke, held a somewhat different view of the Revolution. He treated it, instead, as an attack on the sanctity of marriage, in the persons of the royal couple who symbolized the heart of the French state. The famous pages in Reflections on the Revolution in France that concern the removal of the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris depict the event as bad behavior, resulting in a riotous attack on female delicacy. They are organized around a contrast between Marie Antoinette as a ``delightful vision,'' so ethereal that she barely touches ground, and Revolutionary females, ``the abused shape of the vilest of women,'' who are ``lost to shame.'' ``[T]he age of chivalry,'' which had maintained the vision of pre-Revolutionary femininity, is for a moment, in Burke's sinuous prose, itself imagined in feminine (maybe even menstrual) terms as ``that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound.'' But the ``age of chivalry'' has been replaced by ``[t]hat of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators.'' In consequence, ``a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.''18 Burke's belief that France was sliding into bestiality seemed to be confirmed by the events of the next three years. Divorce was legalized on September 20, 1792 and the King guillotined on January 21, 1793, to be followed by the Queen on October 16. Burke had already used Hartley's Observations on Man in his 1756 book on the Sublime and the Beautiful. When the Observations on Man reappeared in a new edition in 1791, Hartley's strictures on ``the Misery and Desolation of the barbarous Nations'' provided a language that seemed apt for the situation of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

94 Revolutionary Histories

95

France.19 In the first of his Two Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), Burke suggested that the Jacobins had taken on ``a system of manners, the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned that ever has been known, and at the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious.'' He asserted that they had controverted ``Divine Wisdom'' by making marriage ``no better than a common, civil contract.'' They encouraged parricide, and even practiced cannibalism.20 Blushing in the 1790s had become a subject of political analysis. This is confirmed by two anti-Jacobin writers who examined female behavior in terms provided by Hartley and Burke. In his four poetic dialogues, The Pursuits of Literature (1794±8), T.J. Mathias claimed that government and literature were ``intimately connected,'' and tried to convince his readers that ``the understanding and affections'' were degraded by the ``pestilence'' from France. He praised the writing of Fanny Burney, except when she descended into ``broad farce.'' No doubt he had Captain Mirvan and Madame Duval in mind. Burney excepted, Mathias had particularly sharp words for ``[o]ur unsexed female writers'': they ``confuse, us and themselves in the labyrinth of politicks, or turn us wild with Gallick frenzy.''21 Women, he believed, were being encouraged to move into spheres for which they were unsuited. They were even reading about the sexuality of plants in Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden. As a result: Fled is the soft reserve and nicer sense,

Those primal guards of love and innocence. . . . 22

In 1798 the Cornish minister and writer Richard Polwhele published The Unsex'd Females: a Poem, addressed to the author of The Pursuits of Literature. Polwhele claimed that Mathias was ``a true poetical genius'' because his dialogues had ``fixed the principles'' of many ``whose politics and even religion have long been wavering.'' It was appropriate that Polwhele should use a phrase from The Pursuits of Literature for his title, for in structure, politics, and intention, his book closely followed Mathias's. He provided footnotes to back up the poetic assertions, and shared the fear of the influence of ``Gallic freaks'' on British women. He hoped that his poem would also act as an antidote. It closes with his ``unsex'd females'' regaining their femininity with ``conscious blushes.'' However, Polwhele went one stage further, indicated by his comment that women who became ``botanizing girls'' as a result of reading The Botanic Garden were ``in a fair way to become worthy disciples of Miss W.''23 The main target was now Mary Wollstonecraft. In January 1798, six months after Mathias had completed his fourth and final dialogue,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

William Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Godwin's best-known description of Wollstonecraft was as ``a female Werter,'' but throughout the book he presented her life in terms of unrestrained emotions.24 The book provoked a chorus of disapproval. Even those who had previously supported Wollstonecraft, like Amelia Alderson, turned against her.25 The Monthly Review suggested that it was so embarrassing that even men would be shamed: ``blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world.''26 Polwhele concentrated on female blushes. Since they were an indicator of restraint and modesty, Polwhele asserted that Wollstonecraft was an implacable enemy of them: See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks,

Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex;

O'er humbled man assert the sovereign claim,

And slight the timid blush of virgin fame.

A footnote elaborated the point: That Miss Wollstonecraft was a sworn enemy to blushes, I need not remark. But many of my readers, perhaps, will be astonished to hear, that at several of our boarding-schools for young ladies, a blush incurs a penalty.27 Polwhele's sentence construction here is another indication of the significance of the blush. The first sentence asserts what is apparently a universally-known truth. But like the truth ``universally acknowledged'' in that famous opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, it is not true.28 Polwhele was so outraged that the possibility of irony, which makes Austen's opening gambit so funny, completely escaped him. The second sentence is therefore constructed in all seriousness as a shocking revelation. There is no evidence that blushing was penalized in ladies' boarding-schools. On the contrary, we do know that Wollstonecraft blushed. Had Polwhele read her 1796 book, A Short Residence in Sweden, he would have seen that, far from being opposed to it, she admitted openly that she colored, and theorized briefly about it: if I blush at recollecting past enjoyment, it is the rosy hue of pleasure heightened by modesty; for the blush of modesty and shame are as distinct as the emotions by which they are produced.29

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

96 Revolutionary Histories

97

The theory is, of course, taken from Gregory. Wollstonecraft quoted the last sentences from A Father's Legacy, which contain his thoughts on blushing, in The Female Reader, the compendium which she published in 1789.30 Although Wollstonecraft attacked Gregory in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when his arguments implied the inferiority of women, she supported his advocacy of modesty, suggesting that it could be practiced to advantage by all, or, as she put it in one of the book's chapter headings, ``Comprehensively Considered, and Not as a Sexual Virtue.'' She related modesty to delicacy of feelings. Lord Orville in Evelina could, in Wollstonecraft's analysis, be instanced as a delicate man, although she did not mention him. She did, however, praise George Washington, who had ``always been characterized as a modest man.''31

American embarrassment The modesty of Washington is an important element in a complex gathering of images of him which in 1800 received its first mature statement in Mason Weems's Life. A modest Washington, contained within the label of the American Cincinnatus, appeared in 1778, at the same time as the image of him as ``the father of his country.'' The two images were interdependent; both were essential to the belief that Washington was at once a leader and a representative man. Weems therefore emphasized at some length Washington's religious devotion. In comparison, such leaders as Charles Lee, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr were fatally flawed by ``pursuing the phantom honour.''32 The images of Washington were part of the changes in familial ideology, analyzed by Jay Fliegelman, which placed him at the center of a national family which rejected hierarchy and patriarchy in favor of egalitarianism and affection.33 The new familial structure is displayed in one of the many ``Rising Glory'' poems of the time, David Humphreys' A Poem, on the Happiness of America (1786). It began by praising the United States, based on ``freedom'' and ``laws,'' and distinct from former empires, ``the work of guilt, / On conquest, blood, or usurpation built.'' Likewise, ``hallowed wedlock,'' which occupied the emotional heart of the new nation, was contrasted with the ``Eastern manner,'' which delivered up ``beauteous slaves'' to ``loath'd masters'': Here uncontroul'd, and foll'wing nature's voice, The happy lovers make th' unchanging choice,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

98 Revolutionary Histories

The result of national and marital felicity was inscribed on the landscape, again illustrated by contrast, this time with London: The eye no view of waining [sic] cities meets, Of mould'ring domes, of narrow, fetid streets; Of grey-hair'd wretches who ne'er own'd a shed, And beggars dying for want of bread.34 The negation in the first line here is another example of the tendency in Humphreys' poem to define American social reality in terms of a series of departures from the perceived customs of the Old World. The rhetoric of negation, as it has been called, was a common American technique which provided a recipe for inertia. The documents that defined American exceptionalism were the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Humphreys' poem implies that they were sufficient to protect the institution at the heart of Americanism. Abigail Adams's much-quoted letter to her husband, requesting laws to persuade American males ``to give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend,'' and threatening to ``foment a Rebelion'' if ``perticulier care and attention is not paid to the Laidies,'' met with no response.35 The result has been described by Linda Kerber. The United States for many years followed English precedents respecting marital relations.36 Humphreys therefore attributed marital felicity to the concept of separate spheres. American women were reluctant, he said, to ``wrest his bold prerogatives from man''; instead, they valorized their privacy.37 The transatlantic publication record of the British conduct books suggests that American women accepted Humphreys' recipe with even greater willingness than their British sisters. Gregory's A Father's Legacy was probably the most popular. It first appeared in three editions in 1775, a year after its publication in Britain. It was last published in New York in 1844, by which time some 33 editions had appeared, in 12 towns and cities from Albany, New York to Wilmington, Delaware. In the same period only 21 British editions had appeared. Other conduct books were published in America less frequently, but often enough to indicate steady support. Perhaps the most notable instance of their popularity

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

While mutual passions in their bosoms glow,

While soft confessions in their kisses flow,

While their right hands in plighted faith are given,

Their vows accordant, reach approving Heaven.

99

is Edward Moore's Fables for the Female Sex. It was first published in Britain in 1744, but did not appear in an American edition until 1787, 43 years later, and 4 years after the conclusion of the Revolution. Fables for the Female Sex has a transatlantic publication record similar to A Father's Legacy. Between 1787 and 1815, 12 American editions had appeared, compared with 7 British editions between 1787 and 1808, the last British publication date. Usually renamed Fables for the Ladies in America to avoid that three-letter word, the text contains 16 fables, of which the third, ``The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm,'' restricts virgins to the private sphere: The prudent nymph, whose cheeks disclose

The lily, and the blushing rose,

From publick view her charms will screen,

And rarely in the crowd be seen;

This simple truth will keep her wise,

``The fairest fruit attracts the flies.''38

This is an image of American manhood somewhat less pleasant than the one symbolized by modest George Washington. ``All restraint and embarrassment,'' in Evelina's words, had clearly not been banished with the British soldiers. Indeed, the blush was politicized in the United States as it had been in Britain. In both countries A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had found a favorable response, while Godwin's Memoirs produced the same virulence.39 William Cobbett published Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females in New York in 1800, developing Polwhele's language in his Preface to support Mathias, noting his very severe, though very just, animadversions on those literary ladies, in Great Britain, who had thrown aside that modesty, which is the best characteristic and the most brilliant ornament of their sex, and who, with unblushing front, had adopted the sentiments and the manners of the impious amazons of republican France.40 Cobbett also drew attention to the ``fearful example in Mary Wollstonecraft,'' singled out by Polwhele for her ``disgraceful life'' and ``melancholy end.''41 Timothy Dwight attacked both Godwin and Wollstonecraft in ``Morpheus,'' a fictional political serial. In the final episode, published in March 1802, ``Mary'' wishes that women would emerge into the public arena; but when her interlocutor asks, ``Who shall nurse our children, Madam,'' her only response is to blush silently.42

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

Dwight and Cobbett, although of different nationalities, were both anti-Jacobins. By 1800 the anti-Jacobins were no longer minority figures. The execution of Louis XVI, the Reign of Terror, and the XYZ Affair had prompted many Americans to dislike the French as well as the British. The result was to place Americanism under a particular moral pressure. The first bestselling American novel, Charlotte Temple, reveals the nature and extent of that pressure. Like the conduct books, the novel was more popular in the United States than in Britain. Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, as it was first known, was published in Britain in 1791, with little success. Mathew Carey imported it to Philadelphia in 1792. He published it in 1794, changing its title in 1797 to the one by which it has since been known. In 1812 Carey boasted that well over 50,000 copies had been sold, although even this is likely to be an underestimate, for there were many pirated editions. There were also abridgments, alterations, and serializations. It has been estimated that more than 200 editions were published by the first years of the twentieth century, by which time its popularity had declined.43 In terms of the depth of emotion that it evoked from its American audience, it should be compared with Death of a Salesman. Susannah Rowson confirmed its first title within the text: ``I am writing a tale of truth: I mean to write it to the heart'' (108). A number of critics have noted its fidelity to aspects of her biography, which included the experience of growing up both in England and America.44 But truth to feelings is more important than truth to biography. Cathy N. Davidson's review of inscriptions in early editions shows the extent to which readers identified with the tale. The following, written in an 1812 edition, is a charmingly garbled summary of the plot which nevertheless goes to its core and indicates its allure: She was fair and sweet as the Lilly Inosentas [sic] The young lamb folly misled her love betrayed her misery Cros'd the awful final ocean in the twentieth year of her age ± So ended the unfortunate Charlotte.45 Comparison with Evelina will show why the novel was so potent. Where Evelina employed a comedy which was sometimes too broad for its critics, Charlotte Temple is deadly serious, aimed at extracting tears rather than laughter. To adapt the title of chapter 33, it does not include ``People Void of Feeling'' (124), if there are any who would admit to it, in its implied readership. This is just one of the instructions in a novel in

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

100 Revolutionary Histories

101

which, as has often been noted, there are many. It creates a drama only to interrupt it with authorial intrusion, anticipating the shape of Rowson's career, which in 1797 involved abandoning the stage for the schoolroom. Its didacticism is of a piece with its seriousness, for it tries to provide rules for avoiding an evil that is physically present. A second comparison with Evelina will bring out the distinction. The casting of Burney's novel places the innocent in the company of people who are inconsiderate and foolish. Its epistolary form allows the reader to chart the inverse relation between the innocence of the protagonist and her critique of her companions. The casting of Charlotte Temple places the protagonist among a spectrum of characters that is broader both in terms of class and moral stature. There are, of course, a number of overlapping characters. La Rue is a younger and much darker version of Duval, reflecting, as Cobbett later put it, ``the sentiments and the manners of the impious Amazons of republican France.'' Montraville could be Willoughby with an added dash of thoughtlessness and impetuosity. But there is no character in Evelina like Belcour, who is evil personified. One has to move outside the conduct format to another genre, to Caleb Williams or Ormond, to find a character so malevolent. The third-person narrative of Charlotte Temple, in keeping with its didacticism, lacks the complexity of either Godwin's or Brown's novels, so that the reader is aware of Belcour's evil and Charlotte's helplessness before it. The reader may become educated by reading about Satan; in his presence the protagonist cannot. Belcour is easily able to overwhelm the ``Natural Sense of Propriety Inherent in the Female Bosom,'' as the title of chapter 7 has it (27). Charlotte's path runs steadily downwards, from the initial encounter as she exits from church (appropriately, for the first and last time in the novel), to elopement, seduction, abandonment, destitution, childbirth, and death. A third comparison highlights this trajectory. If the moral landscape of Evelina is cruciform, that of Charlotte Temple is bipolar. It is not the usual polarity, examined most extensively by Henry James, between a virtuous but superficial New World and a corrupt but sophisticated Old World. The equivalent of Villars' Berry Hill is the home of Charlotte's parents. This is the unnamed representative Great Good Place, where ``Plenty, and her handmaid, Prudence, presided at their board, Hospitality stood at their gate, Peace smiled on each face, Content reigned in each heart, and Love and Health strewed roses on their pillows'' (21±2). The Great Bad Place is everywhere else. Britain and the United States differ only in the extent of their moral turpitude. In a flashback, the narrative describes a Britain whose aristocracy is plagued by snobbery,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

International Embarrassment

102 Revolutionary Histories

Mr. Temple was the youngest son of a nobleman whose fortune was by no means adequate to the antiquity, grandeur, and I may add, pride of the family. He saw his elder brother made completely wretched by marrying a disagreeable woman, whose fortune helped to prop the sinking dignity of the house; and he beheld his sisters legally prostituted to old, decrepit men, whose titles gave them consequence in the eyes of the world, and whose affluence rendered them splendidly miserable. (6) The narrative then moves to the Fleet, site not only of the debtors' prison but also of the clandestine marriages which, conducted in great numbers by insolvent clergymen, were immediate causes of the Hardwicke Act.46 So far, the text has created a vision of Britain that is part of the ideology of the new republic. But the United States is hardly the ``new world'' shrugging off the sins of the old, as promised by Tom Paine in Common Sense.47 It is a worse kind of Hell, a savage periphery portrayed in precisely the terms celebrated by Paine: space and economics. The setting of most of the chapters is wartime New York. The officers and their wives come and go, according to military demands; two places mentioned are Rhode Island and St. Eustatia (the Leeward Island fought over by the British, Dutch, and French in 1781). The result is to strip from Charlotte the moral supports which would have been available for her in the Great Good Place, supports which are ironically extended to La Rue when she arrives at the Temple's door as a dying ``poor wretch'' (131). Left alone, Charlotte is at the mercy of the economic imperative. It turns up in the shape of one of Burke's ``oeconomists . . . an animal not of the highest order.''48 The farmer's wife has come for her rent. In response to Charlotte's request for charity, she breaks out, in Rowson's only attempt at vernacular: charity indeed: why, Mistress, charity begins at home, and I have seven children at home, honest, lawful children, and it is my duty to keep them; and do you think I will give away my property to a nasty, impudent hussey, to maintain her and her bastard; an I was saying to my husband the other day what will this world come to; honest women are nothing now-a-days, while the harlotings are set up for fine ladies, and look upon us no more nor the dirt they walk upon: but let me tell you, my fine spoken Ma'am, I must have my money; so

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

profligacy, and penury, rooted in primogeniture and arranged marriages:

International Embarrassment

103

Constructed as just two sentences, this flood of words, many of them redundant, reveals the inhumanity at the root of the social mobility created by the new economic order. Charity may now begin at home, but home for Charlotte is thousands of miles away, and quite unreachable. ``[D]oomed to linger out a wretched existence in a strange land'' (77), she wanders off, into the intense cold that is New York in winter ± a figure who, according to David Humphreys, was to be found in the Old World rather than the New. In these circumstances, the range of feelings indicated by the blush is extended beyond that discussed by Gregory or found in Evelina. It signifies innocence at the moment when Charlotte first appears, at the beginning of the novel ± and this chapter. Its next appearance, ``the gentle suffusion of vermilion'' (28), indicating Charlotte's embarrassment at receiving Montraville's first letter, then turns to the darker colors of shame when she meets the kind matron, Mrs. Beauchamp (66, 80), and becomes the ``crimson glow'' (105) of humiliation when she admits to Belcour that she is pregnant. The hot flushes of fever are ended by the pallor of death. There is just one blush left, ``the burning blush'' of Rowson herself as, in another authorial intervention, she indicates her ``indignation and shame'' (107) at writing a tale of seduction and death. Another death, Death of a Salesman, rubbed raw the emotions of American audiences because it exposed the flaws in the American Dream. At the death of Charlotte Temple, Rowson's blush was shared by the reader because it exposed the flaws in ``American happiness,'' the familial structure of the United States. The novel retained its potency for over a century. A memoir of 1903 showed that the myth that Charlotte was buried in New York's Trinity Churchyard had greater magnetism than the myth of the Republic, symbolized by the statuary of its leaders: In that churchyard are graves of heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, whose names are familiar to the youngest scholar, and whose memory is dear to the wisest and best. Their graves, tho marked by imposing monuments, win but a glance of curiosity, while the turf over Charlotte Temple is kept fresh by falling tears.49 Intense and abiding sensitivity, it seemed, was the true distillate of republicanism.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

seeing as how you can't pay it, why you must troop, and leave all your fine gimcracks and fal der ralls behind you. I don't ask for no more nor my right, and nobody shall dare for to go for to hinder me of it. (113)

Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel Nancy Armstrong

F.R. Leavis uses Austen to launch his account of the novel's rise to respectability as a literary form during the course of the nineteenth century. He identifies her as the first novelist to matter in this respect and proceeds to track the ``great tradition'' from Austen through to its culmination in Henry James.1 Assuming, thanks to Leavis, that with Austen's career the rise of the novel was complete, Ian Watt never even speculates about the fate of the novel after it had become the preferred reading material of a new commercially-oriented middle class.2 Despite their conflicting notions of what ``the novel'' is and how to tell its story, then, Leavis and Watt similarly refuse to deal with the question of what connects fiction before Jane Austen to that which comes after her. Together, they conspire to leave us wondering what a form of individualism defined by and authorizing the acquisition of property, according to Watt's understanding of the novel's mission, has to do with the ethically tortured relationship between subject and world to which Leavis attributes all proto-modernist formal innovations in fiction. Although my own study of the English novel describes domestic fiction as a continuous and indeed the dominant tradition from Defoe to Woolf,3 I never did say, at least not in so many words, how that tradition required and survived the jolting shift in form and function we experience when leaving the domain of Watt and entering that of Leavis. In the last chapter of The Imaginary Puritan, moreover, Leonard Tennenhouse and I found unmistakable traces of a distinctively New England genre, the captivity narrative, in eighteenth-century British fiction.4 We argued, in a nutshell, that sentimental fiction borrowed the following cluster of narrative ingredients from its New England cousin: (1) a lone heroine whose self-definition and cultural value are 104

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

6

105

under assault from members of a tribal culture, (2) an individual who manages to hang onto her value and identity by transcribing personal experiences under extreme circumstances, and (3) a written account that testifies to the captive's unwavering desire to return to an English home. Our point in thus opening up the possibility that the English novel began in British North America was not to fix yet another point of origin for the English novel, but to consider that genre as one which simultaneously connected and distinguished two anglophone cultures. The essay that follows attempts to push this same hypothesis further. Indeed, I will try to demonstrate that nothing so much as the English variant of the American captivity narrative provided the principle of continuity consolidating Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Charlotte BronteÈ as a single literary tradition. In so doing, I will suggest not only how English domestic fiction adapted the colonial paradigm for its own national purposes, but also what changes that narrative underwent as England became a modern imperial nation. I will not, in other words, be reading fiction in my usual manner ± as transforming the way in which readers imagined class relations ± because I want to consider fiction as the means by which English culture made itself uniquely capable of absorbing opposition and refiguring change as repetition. Let me begin to explain the unique durability of the captivity narrative by calling attention to a truth not universally known among scholars of English literature. During the period when Richardson's Clarissa was enthralling European readers, accounts of Europeans held captive in America flooded into England from the colonies. English readers consumed these captivity narratives almost as avidly as they did sentimental fiction, and they consequently knew exactly what kind of story would ensue once they recognized it as the testimony of a captive woman. In typical Puritan rhetoric, Mary Rowlandson's well-known account of her abduction and removal into Indian territory testifies to the steadfastness of her faith in God.5 At the same time, by simulating one half of the speech-act situation, namely, the activity of tale-telling, Rowlandson's testimony conjures up the other half, that is, a group of receptive listeners with whom the letter-writer imagines herself in conversation, as she describes the pain of separation from her original community. By virtue of writing for that community, paradoxically, the English captive necessarily displaces the original community of speakers and listeners from whom she had been forcibly separated.6 In their place, she posits a community of readers, and these two communities are entirely different. Indeed, a few statistics should suggest the magnitude of the difference between the new print-vernacular community

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

and one in which Rowlandson's account had circulated by word of mouth. In the year of its publication, 1682, Rowlandson's narrative went through three editions and several printings in British America. The same year a fourth edition was published in England, and by 1720 a fifth edition had appeared there as well. Once created, furthermore, the appetite for narratives of this particular kind never diminished with the rising popularity of fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.7 By the end of the eighteenth century, almost 30 editions of Rowlandson's account had been published, most in the last 30 years of the century. When he wrote his first novel Pamela, Richardson tapped into the power of this written testimony by turning a series of exemplary personal letters into a kind of captivity narrative. To adapt a form designed to deal with the perils of colonial experience for the situation in England proper, he simply translated the basis for the heroine's identity from nationality and religion into class and sexual conduct. The narrative that resulted has a wealthy landowner carry off a servant girl to his country house in Lincolnshire. Her sexual encounters with the English gentry inspire forms of resistance quite as extravagant as any performed by her Puritan counterpart, and their common preference for death before dishonor is often expressed in very much the same language. What is more, when apprehended in writing, such displays of resistance on the part of Richardson's heroines miraculously convert the libertine, who undergoes a transformation from villain to hero on the spot and agrees to marry on her terms. By so eroticizing captivity, Richardson discovered an international community of readers who obviously enjoyed this fantasy of marriage up into the lesser gentry. The sentimental novel was born. Richardson's second novel is similarly composed of the letters of an abducted woman who refuses courtship and marriage on any terms other than her own. In Clarissa, however, the heroine's testimony fails to soften the social boundaries of Richardson's epoch; the novel allows no sexual liaisons between people of different stations without lethal consequences to them both. The heroine in this case comes from a prosperous and respectable family, whom she can neither transform into a community of readers nor embrace in person during her lifetime. Her flight and subsequent rape by a member of the gentry sends her into steady economic decline and condemns her family to end their days in grief and humiliation. In his second novel, then, Richardson confronts and overturns the very conventions that would seem to explain the enormous popularity of his first. Yet Clarissa was, if anything, even more successful than Pamela. The apparent ideological conflict between

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

106 Revolutionary Histories

107

Richardson's first two novels vanishes, however, the moment we read them as English versions of the colonial paradigm. I will use Clarissa to explain how the captivity narrative did for English property owners what it did for New Englanders, namely, produce what Benedict Anderson calls ``an imagined community,'' the basis at once for a new concept of nationality and for a new ruling class.8 By reading Clarissa as a captivity narrative, however, I also want to raise what I regard as a far more perplexing question. The second half of this essay will consider why narrative fiction did not abandon the language and logic of captivity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the novel-reading public could imagine itself positioned at the center of a global empire. To understand the relationship between the novel before and after Jane Austen, we must figure out why the voice of the captive woman could in fact be heard in the land well after novels had begun to eroticize dominant rather than emergent cultural values: How could the English middle classes go on situating themselves imaginatively in a feminine position during the heyday of imperial expansion?

For want of a man Richardson does everything he can to assure us that Pamela had indeed transformed a libertine into the very embodiment of genteel paternalism before agreeing to marry him. Because she does eventually marry into the culture of her would-be seducer, however, this heroine could be accused of violating the model from which, I am arguing, her position acquired a good deal of its rhetorical appeal.9 For someone like Mary Rowlandson to resolve the dilemma of captivity by marrying into the very culture that had abducted her would be tantamount to going native, and Clarissa, Pamela's successor, would rather die than allow this to happen.10 In this respect, one could argue that Clarissa adheres more closely than does Pamela to the diasporic paradigm.11 From Charlotte Temple to Uncle Tom's Cabin to John Ford's The Searchers and Toni Morrison's Beloved, Anglo-American culture worked with and against the narrative assumption that a dead daughter is better than one who has mixed with another culture. The reason can be found in the contradiction that shapes all diasporic cultures. Should she fail to remain within her original household, that household would lose its original character. But should she fail, on the other hand, to reproduce her household outside the homeland, the culture of her origins would cease to exist.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

A similar double bind organizes Richardson's second novel. By demonstrating in extravagant terms that respectable women are no more safe in England than in British North America, this novel argues that England must become a sanctuary for them. In contrast with the colonial situation, however, the ruling-class male is fundamentally unfit to perform this task, for the obvious reason that he embodies a threat to female purity which closely resembles the threat posed by native Americans. In writing Clarissa, moreover, Richardson extends his earlier indictment of the English gentry to a traditional bourgeoisie, prosperous families whose income originally came from trade and investment rather than inheritance. This more sweeping condemnation of traditional male authority includes the heroine's own family, the Harlows. Everything is fine between Clarissa and her father until she reaches sexual maturity. Once she arrives at a marriageable age, her childhood home becomes a wilderness, and England offers her virtually no sanctuary from a savage brand of masculinity bent on destroying the very qualities that define her as an English heroine. Let us consider how Richardson's narrative performs this transformation of homeland into hostile territory. On the grounds that Clarissa's ``charm'' makes her an economic liability, father Harlow vows to confine her to her room until she agrees to his choice of a husband. As this man happens to be churlish as well as wealthy, she has no choice but to refuse. Thus cut off from her family, she takes to writing letters and addresses her father in the words of a defiant captive: ``Can you think I am such a slave, such a poor slave, as to be brought to change my mind by the violent usage I have met with?''12 Further attempts to marry her off for money answer this question in the affirmative, thus sweeping away the basic difference between being at home and being held captive in another culture. Clarissa turns for protection to someone a couple notches above her in social rank who is therefore another captor. Richardson will not provide this heroine with a way out of the double bind presented by a world devoid of gentlemen, but he certainly lets her try. He sets her to the task of writing letters designed to wheedle and shame good men into existence, and the more she writes, the more she consequently reveals the recalcitrance of the available cultural material. Clarissa agrees to put herself at the mercy of Lovelace, for example, after he has ``solemnly vow[ed] that his whole view at present is to free me from my imprisonment; and to restore me to my own free will'' (C, 349). By placing herself in his protection, however, she only places herself at a further remove from her rightful place within the Harlow family, and we consequently find her addressing Lovelace, much as she addressed her

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

108 Revolutionary Histories

109

father, in the terms of the captivity narrative: ``tell me, since I am a prisoner as I find, in the vilest of houses, and have not a friend to protect or save me, what thou intendest shall become of the remnant of a life not worth the keeping?'' (C, 900). A few more ``removes'' put her in the clutches of the notorious Mrs. Sinclair, who operates a household so antagonistic to sentimental norms that Clarissa cannot live there; being unable to leave, she dies. As if to acknowledge their daughter's kinship with colonial heroines, as a last measure the Harlows consider deporting Clarissa to Pennsylvania until she repents and the scandal she has perpetrated can fade from public memory (C, 1256). To make a stay in America the precondition for her returning home is to articulate fully the irony of her situation in England. Though in the bosom of her family, she is captive to a foreign people. In contrast with Mary Rowlandson, Clarissa consequently has no home to return to, as she herself acknowledges: ``fatherless may she well be called, and motherless too, who has been denied all paternal protection and motherly forgiveness'' (C, 1176). Because her father's house now violates the heroine's definition of ``home,'' each attempt on her part to return there only sharpens this difference, putting yet more distance between the captive and the culture of her origins. To maintain a relationship with them in writing, Rowlandson has to reimagine her original community as a readership. In returning home, the American heroine reconstitutes that home as one composed of modern individuals with a companionate couple at its center. Merely by writing, Pamela miraculously turns an aristocratic manor house into a modern household that at first falls short of order and morality but eventually meets the new domestic standard. In his second novel, however, Richardson refuses to patch over these differences, as he forces Clarissa to discover the contradiction contained within earlier accounts of captivity. In thwarting his heroine's every attempt to return home, Richardson suggests that her people are not the stuff from which a modern family unit can be crafted. By allowing Clarissa to return home only as the self-staged centerpiece of her own funeral, moreover, he identifies precisely which qualities the men of the old bourgeoisie are lacking. Richardson was certainly not the first or only English author to measure a man by his treatment of those less powerful than and dependent on him. In an early version of The Spectator, Richard Steele levels contempt at any man who uses his authority to abuse the very person whom he ought to protect: ``Can there be anything more base, or serve to sink a man so much below his own distinguishing Characteristick (I mean Reason) . . . as that of treating a helpless creature with Unkindness who

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

has . . . divest[ed] her Happiness in this World to his Care and Protection?''13 This cumbersome statement reveals several important aspects of the emergent masculine ideology. First of all, Steele makes reason contingent on kindness. He argues that men who possess reason will necessarily feel responsible for the happiness of their dependants, and he uses the woman to stand in for all those who depend on men of property and money. To deserve such care and protection, however, a woman must be practically abject. She must divest herself of any other form of care and protection, not only property, but also speech and writing. Should she speak out against the rough treatment she receives, the conclusion could be and was most often reached that she deserved such treatment by virtue of the fact that she displayed a lack of the very helplessness that would inspire a husband's sympathy and earn her community support. If we translate this little piece of sentimental logic back into Richardsonian terms, what can it tell us about the novel's appropriation of the captivity narrative? For one thing, we would be wrong to think that Clarissa's life hinges on whether she can free herself from Lovelace, as from her father before him. Even though the heroine willfully proceeds on that assumption, independence is never a narrative possibility. Richardson's novel stresses what Rowlandson's captivity could not ± namely, that the heroine's condition hinges, not on her release from captivity, but on the character of her captors, whether they are good or bad men. What I want to suggest is that neither Steele nor Richardson, and perhaps no sentimental argument, uses the female victim to demonstrate how women should behave. On the contrary, such a heroine serves primarily to constitute the modern man. She is his ``symptom,'' not in any derogatory sense, but rather as Lacan defines the term: she is that which gives the masculine subject its ontological consistency and fundamental structure as such.14 By virtue of Clarissa's helplessness in the face of the dangers she repeatedly confronts, one might argue that her story defines by way of its lack the need for a new brand of masculinity.15 Within less than a century, a household that was harmonious as well as prosperous indeed became as good as money in the bank, and businessmen and professionals who depended on credit began looking for substantial houses ± complete with lawns and gardens ± in the countryside outside the urban centers of England. In Family Fortunes, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall note a remarkable convergence between the portrayal of domestic life in popular magazines and fiction with the habitus of a new class of elites whose money came chiefly from investments. During the 1830s, after one of the most unstable periods in

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

110 Revolutionary Histories

111

England's economic history, according to Davidoff and Hall, ``good taste, the capacity not to be vulgar, was replacing salvation as the mark of special status.''16 The rather sudden appearance of households conspicuously shaped by this ideology is what, for them, identifies the moment when a relatively small group of people who could be called ``the middle class'' established their domestic practices as the measure of an individual's capacity for self-government. Given the uncertainty over money during the first three decades of the nineteenth century and the fact that credit arrangements remained essentially local, Davidoff and Hall conclude that ``[t]he behaviour of the entrepreneur, his family and household as well as their material setting, were tangible indications of financial as well as moral probity.''17 By midcentury, the acquisition and display of such character were the advertised enticements to settle in the fashionable suburbs springing up around commercial centers throughout Europe. What can only be called cultural capital had become virtually indistinguishable from capital at this point in modern history.18

Women in danger of depreciation It is relatively easy to understand why captivity narratives made sense in England so long as there was an enormous disparity between the violence required to run a household and the brand of masculinity called for by sentimental writing and presumably embodied in its authors. Readers could imagine the England they would run as a better place for women and on this basis perhaps consider themselves superior to those above them in the social order. Given this shift in the social landscape, how do we explain the fact that the language and logic of the captivity narrative did not disappear but continued to shape a whole range of novels throughout the Victorian period? Once the group to whom sentimental fiction addressed itself became the dominant social group rather than an emergent minority, how could the story of the captive work for the colonizer, and under what circumstances was imperial England willing to imagine itself as a persecuted woman? To see how domination stepped forth in the figure of abject dependency and gained rhetorical strength in the process, I propose to track this same contradiction and the bundle of narrative strategies that gave it credibility through the murky period between literary epochs that is usually finessed by turning to the Romantic poets. Ann Radcliffe's morally unblemished heroines and dirty old-world aristocrats offer an obvious analogue to the Englishwomen carried off by native Americans. And if not Radcliffe's gothic appropriation of Clarissa's story, then perhaps

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

Scott's account of Waverley's capture and succession of removes into the Scottish Highlands would allow us to follow the cultural logic of the captivity narrative as it was reproduced in the decades following the French Revolution and adapted for Darwin's century. For purposes of identifying the strategy by which the British novel maintained the paradox of the powerful victim as that of domination victimized, however, I find it most revealing to turn to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which paradoxically seems to renounce the imperiled heroines of eighteenth-century fiction. ``Dear Miss Morland,'' exclaims Henry Tilney, upon discovering that the heroine of this Austen novel has been using Radcliffe to explain his mother's absence and his father's bouts of rudeness, ``consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you ± Does our education prepare us for such atrocities?''19 ``Well, of course not,'' the modern reader is inclined to say, the countryside surrounding Bath was neither North America nor early modern England. Women were no more likely to be snatched out of carriages and kept at the mercy of libertines than they were in danger of being carried off by New World savages. When Austen deliberately set about to debunk the same tropes of captivity that Radcliffe exploited, she nevertheless entered into a collaboration with her gothic counterpart that would preserve the cultural logic I am tracking. It was this collaboration that created the link within Austen's fiction between the acquisitive ethos which Watt identifies with eighteenthcentury realism and the self-conflicted ethos characterizing Leavis's Great Tradition. Northanger Abbey was written and revised over the entire course of Austen's career.20 It was also written and revised during the period when Parliament was forced to abandon the gold standard and test public faith in paper. It depicts a new community of men and women with time and inclination to devour each new gothic thriller appearing in the circulating library.21 The problem with this reading material resides in its failure to prepare women for the very real perils of the social world in which they have to find a husband. True, this world is one that could never be negotiated without Catherine's peculiar brand of literacy; she hangs out with other novel readers. Under the influence of Mrs. Radcliffe, however, she jumps to the unfounded conclusion that General Tilney, her suitor's father and master of the eponymous Abbey,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

112 Revolutionary Histories

113

has locked up his wife and perhaps even murdered her. She infers all this from the disappearance of Mrs. Tilney's portrait and General Tilney's tendency to pace the parlor ``with the air and attitude of a Montoni.'' What, Catherine asks herself, ``could more plainly speak the gloomy workings of a mind . . . in its fearful review of past scenes of guilt [than such mood swings]?'' (NA, 190). To Catherine's novelistic reasoning, Austen's novel offers a reductively materialistic answer: the General is aggravated to have learned that Catherine will not in fact receive the inheritance that would make her an advantageous match for his son Henry, a disappointment he impetuously expresses by slighting her. Such motivation does not qualify the General to play the Lovelace or Montoni of this novel. He is incapable of committing not only the form of domestic abuse Catherine has mistakenly attributed to him, but also the form of sexual violation that would diminish a woman's value on the marriage market. Curiously enough, physical abuse of a virtuous woman is no longer the hallmark of the sentimental villain. Upon her discovery of the gaping difference between earlier eighteenth-century fiction and what passes in Austen for real life, the language of the captivity narrative loses its social application. Words that used to conjure up the terror and torture of imprisonment and rape now describe violations of good taste and manners. It is as if such violations have replaced rape as the one thing most likely to spoil a woman's value. While it is true that Austen aims desire at precisely the same kind of male who was simply not there to rescue the beleaguered heroines of Richardson's and Radcliffe's fiction, to do so she has to stigmatize another social group that had never figured largely in sentimental literature before. This shift in the source of female endangerment splits open the social contract, which mandated self-constraint in the name of protecting private property, as it set the kind of cultural exchange that ensures a stable and polite society in opposition to the economic behavior of the entrepreneur. In her revision of the captivity narrative, Austen reserves the role of the savage for those people who push their way into pump room or parlor in each of her novels. Such people exist at the very bottom of her social ladder, because they climb on without much money or any family name and yet behave as if they had such credentials. Spawned by a world where money was displacing all forms of hereditary value and effacing the visible signs of class difference, the Thorpes and Crawfords manage to pass for people who could be considered an advantageous match. Just by whisking Catherine off unescorted in his carriage or monopolizing her dances at a ball, John Thorpe can inspire much the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

same fear of defilement once reserved for the noblemen who preyed upon Pamela, Clarissa, Fanny Hill, Fanny Andrews Wilson, Isabella Vincenza, Emily St. Aubert, and many others. How can this be? Austen dismantles the analogy linking the women who were threatened by English libertines with their Puritan counterparts taken captive in British America. Having done so, however, she turns right around and sneaks that analogy back into her novel as the difference between those who have real capital and those whose capital is only a performance, or mere copy, of the original. This reversal of narrative positions transforms the very kind of sensibility in which sentimental fiction had formerly placed so much stock. In place of the expansive interiority of Richardson's epistolary heroines, Austen represents sensibility as something in excess of one's social identity, something, therefore, that had to be carefully watched and firmly regulated. Catherine Morland cannot claim noble origins. She has no expectations of an inheritance. What, then, distinguishes her from those who invade the parlors of respectable culture in order to insert themselves in mating rituals where they have nothing to give by way of exchange? Or, to rephrase the question in terms of the argument at hand, on what basis can Austen position her heroine as a captive in John Thorpe's carriage, when the girl has no more claim to occupy a better place in the social world than he does? To formulate an answer to this question, we must consider an economic change that eventually obscured the boundary between the established gentry and those appropriating the forms of respectability that might place one at a comparable social level. The event I have in mind brought about a new kind of value that revolutionized the basis for making social distinctions at the very levels where such distinctions mattered most ± namely, those levels inhabited by most of Austen's characters. Neil McKendrick has usefully described the advent of consumerism in just these terms.22 By a kind of chicken±egg tautology, as he tells the story, members of the middling ranks were seized by a curious desire to possess certain objects, ``once the prized possessions of the rich,''23 and new methods of manufacture made fashionable clothing, fine china, and any number of household items available to increasing numbers of such people: In imitation of the rich the middle ranks spent more frenziedly than ever before, and in imitation of them the rest of society joined in as best they might. . . . Spurred on by social emulation and class competition, men and women surrendered eagerly to the pursuit of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

114 Revolutionary Histories

Captivity in the English Novel

115

As Austen well knew, the value of a woman was altered by the new standard of consumerism as profoundly as were interior decoration and displays of sensibility that denoted femininity.25 Indeed, with the new aesthetic there also emerged a telling supplement to sensibility, which had been classified as both all femininity and all depth.26 Gone was any possibility of a finely tuned sensibility without an equally well choreographed surface. Thus we no longer find the woman of interiority held captive, as Clarissa was, in a world of false surfaces. In Austen's cultural moment, too much or too little of a good thing is instantly visible as such ± in either the lack of a fine appearance or the superabundance of self-display; the discerning eye did not migrate toward that which lacked visual appeal, but neither did it fasten on things that were new and showy. Appeal resided in the natural, the traditional, the inconspicuously up to date. If women were the bearers of sensibility, as in the case of Clarissa, then so must they provide the location where sensibility encountered the aesthetics of the surface.27 Whether she intended so or not, the way a woman dressed, as well as the objects with which she surrounded herself, henceforth made a statement not only about her position in the social order, but also about the quality of her interiority. Women of sensibility and station were in this quandary together; they were captive to the culture of the kind of market value instigated and exploited by the Thorpes. ``How a woman consumed, that is to say, how she identified with other commodities, would,'' according to Bermingham, ``determine how, in turn, she was consumed.''28 Although Austen put her extraordinarily powers as a novelist to work disguising this fact, her heroines nevertheless tend to be captive to the men of their own class, men who share their socially unstable predicament. Moreover, as they became the bearers of the outward signs of class, women were captive to their own class in a second and more profound sense than involuntary confinement to a carriage with the wrong man. So caught up in the exchange of signs and accessories of value, women became legible in terms of the quality of their consumerism, while single men were relatively illegible. The moment when surfaces began to supplement depth in determining a woman's value was also the moment when men began to display their prestige in their women and not on the surface of their own bodies or the expanse and character of their estates.29 Is it any wonder, then, that Austen regarded open displays of taste and emotional sensitivity on the part of a male

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

novelty, the hypnotic effects of fashion, and the enticements of persuasive commercial propaganda.24

character as a clear indication that he lacked precisely those qualities? To the true sensibility, she insists, fashion, appearances, even fine manners that announce themselves as such, always imply self-inflation and therefore required the eye of a reader educated to distinguish true gentility from its masquerade. Across a field of social barriers made permeable by capital, a new form of cultural capital established itself within the parameters of personal life and through the exercise of feminine discretion. Among the things Catherine Morland learns during her stay in Bath is the art of consumption ± what to buy and how to display it. Upon the heroine's ability to perform these decisive acts of self-commodification depends, to a greater degree than we might at first imagine, the quality of the man who desires her and of the life they will enjoy together. The novel did not so much reflect as produce this new way of reading social position. Austen in particular saw it as fiction's task to attach the new ± commercially available ± signs of class to a source within the individual. She made fiction, in the form of Radcliffe's novel, the test of the heroine's discrimination and the method for installing in each and every reader a faculty for recognizing the correct relationship between the subtlest of economic signs and the source that lends them value. From her peerless ability to fix such signs to qualities of individual interiority, let us move ahead to the moment when the new middle classes were entrenched, and respectable women were, by definition, safely tucked away in the kind of households that Davidoff and Hall describe for us so well. How was it possible for the language and logic of captivity to make sense, once the female captive began to embody the values of the dominant rather than an emergent class?

The fortunate failure of bourgeois masculinity That accounts of captivity did indeed speak to this later readership is not in question.30 The reception of Jane Eyre testifies to the fact that these narratives captivated the readership and, if anything, increased in political effectiveness with the consolidation of a new ruling class. Victorian authors evidently found it rather easy to place proper English women in situations where the wrong kind of men were in charge. Jane is surrounded by bad relatives, bad teachers, bad suitors, and, more generally, a bad class of people who systematically remove her from respectable company, confine her to various rooms, and depreciate her value as a woman. These people claim more respectability than Jane or Rochester put together. Yet the novel assigns to such people the role of captor that

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

116 Revolutionary Histories

117

eighteenth-century fiction reserved for the male representatives of a rival class or nation. The Victorian heroine's value is threatened, and threatened just as surely, by the very kind of people among whom she rightly belongs, the heads of households and modern institutions. The class in power is her class ± often her relatives ± and yet this is the very group who confines and abuses her.31 Given only what I have said so far, BronteÈ's novel might bring to mind Richardson's Clarissa, and it is not unreasonable to read Jane's narrative as a rewriting of that earlier account of home imprisonment at the moment when the norms of sentimental fiction ± especially benevolent paternalism ± became the official ideology of England. With the hegemony of sentimental discourse, the testimony of the captive woman does, at this point in history, constitute the other half of the communication situation. For the readership is Jane's community, and her story brands as deficient those who do not agree with her view of English society. Once she speaks with the voice of the dominant culture, however, the captive's account can no longer represent those whose very humanity was actually being extinguished by English imperialism. Captivity could hardly support the interests of that culture and still work on behalf of a subordinated and marginalized group, much as it might appear to do so. The story of Bertha Mason, Rochester's Creole wife, is there primarily, I believe, to make this point. We cannot read Jane Eyre in Victorian terms and think of Bertha as the captive. The novel never once treats repression and physical confinement as equivalent forms of captivity that could link Jane's mind to Bertha's body expressionistically. To the contrary, the madwoman is in the attic because, in terms of Victorian culture, there is no subject but only an object ± indeed, the body of a wild animal ± to confine. Language makes the telling difference between the subject and such an object in this narrative.32 Clarissa tried to claim such a source within her body as her very being, and no one took her seriously until it was too late; the source of her letters perished with her. True to tradition, this captive's language implies a source within the individuated body. The only people to survive Jane's narrative are those who resemble Jane and fit into her social circle.33 By the time Jane Eyre tells her story, however, the individual cannot exist as such and claim full human status unless or until she has the kind of literacy that presupposes such internal wellsprings of humanity. She is the progenetrix of a new kind of subject.34 In her, the responsibility for social reproduction has been naturalized. Significantly, we find her in a community from which all signs of difference have been banished: ``My Edward and I, then, are happy: and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

the more so, because those we love most are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both married: alternatively, once every year, they come to see us, and we go to see them. Diana's husband is a captain in the navy, a gallant officer, and a good man. Mary's is a clergyman, a college friend of her brother's, and from his attainments and principles, worthy of the connexion'' (JE, 398). The novel makes it all too clear that those who do not share this cultural capital are not really subjects. On the contrary, they are objects who can, like Bertha, be assessed in terms of profit and liability. With her death, one might say, cultural capital, as Jane has come to embody it, once again supplants crude economic capital as the basis for making social affiliations. Why the language and cultural logic of captivity remain so central to a class whose capital was perhaps first if not always cultural becomes apparent before we are many episodes into Jane's account. There is reason to think that Charlotte BronteÈ learned this lesson the hard way. The novel was produced in the wake of bitter disappointment. BronteÈ's first novel, The Professor, featured a much less aggressive woman and was summarily rejected for publication, while the efforts of her sisters ± Ann BronteÈ's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights ± were snapped up. Both capitalized on the tropes and narrative logic of captivity. Undaunted, Charlotte sat down and began the novel that would make her the most celebrated of the three, vowing, as she wrote, that her heroine would outdo theirs by accomplishing everything her sisters' did. Charlotte's heroine would do so, moreover, without money, status, family, looks, education, and a pleasant disposition, the signs of which could be read upon the body. She evidently felt her sisters had dished out these advantages too liberally to their protagonists. Thus we may assume Charlotte decided to outdo her sisters, or so she told Elizabeth Gaskell, by making something out of nothing at all ± a self out of little else but language. Tropes of captivity were essential to this project. Each time Jane is shut up in a room, kept at the bottom of a social hierarchy, silenced, humiliated, or otherwise crushed, we get yet more articulate evidence that something is already there to be confined, suppressed, silenced, or humiliated, something larger than its container, grander than any social role, more eloquent for all its honesty than those who presume to speak on its behalf, and noble beyond their ken. Hence the hydraulic effect of a narrative that pushes her down only to force her up and out ± first from Gateshead, then from Lowood, Thornfield, and finally Moore House. In surmounting the obstacles posed by bad mothers, bad teachers, bad suitors, and bad cousins, Jane arrives at a place ± if anything,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

118 Revolutionary Histories

119

as readers have noted, more confining ± where she finally feels at home. What propels her there is neither family, nor fortune, nor beauty, nor wit, nor even exactly Jane herself, but something that she has and others lack, call it a capacity for self-production. ``Ere I had finished this reply,'' she claims in recalling one of several such self-transcendent moments, ``my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt'' (JE, 31). Bertha is linguistically unfit to occupy the position of a self that expands not through the agency of the flesh but strictly through verbal expression. By emphasizing the inverse relation between the two wives of Rochester, the novel indicates an essential difference that prevents Jane from devolving into Bertha just as it disallows Bertha the possibility of developing into Jane. In placing the two on a continuum of female subjectivity, contemporary feminism cancels out the statement that ideology has choreographed them to make, especially in those scenes where Jane seems about to occupy Bertha's position.35 Even more dramatic than the sequence in which Bertha and then Jane try on Jane's wedding veil is the moment, on the verge of their marriage, where Rochester reveals his first wife to Jane, and Bertha displaces her rival in a fierce embrace. ``Mr. Rochester flung me behind him,'' Jane recounts, ``the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek: they struggled. She was a big woman, in stature almost equally her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest ± more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow; but he would not strike: he would only wrestle'' (JE, 258). He is, in other words, not abusive; Bertha is. To Rochester, BronteÈ delegates the obligation of explaining this inversion of the gender distribution we find in traditional captivity narratives: ```That is my wife,' said he. `Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know . . . and this is what I wished to have, this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell''' (JE, 258). This passage defines Bertha as the one who has usurped Jane's position, even though Jane was the one about to steal Bertha's husband. By putting Bertha in the position of the demonic savage, BronteÈ recasts the potentially adulterous Jane as the legitimate wife forcibly separated from her rightful home and husband. While Bertha represents the agent of a savage anticulture, in every situation Jane assumes the position of the ideal embodiment of Englishness detained within a hostile culture. Let me suggest what Victorian culture stood to gain from this elaborate reversal of what modern readers regard as the more obvious candidates for captive and captor. This reversal sets the stage for

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

Rochester's rehabilitation.36 He is the victimized male, sold in marriage to an abusive family who holds him captive and doubly so, since that captivity, in creolizing him, is what gives him the ``sullied name'' and ``filthy burden'' that makes him a threat to Jane's English virtue (JE, 271). The American captivity narrative took advantage of the inherently conservative fantasy that each man's home was his castle and put that fantasy to work on British America, where it allowed readers to imagine a new land transformed into an English nation piece by piece of an apparently limitless whole. Back in England, this model went to work on a historically well-inscribed political space and reclaimed spaces within that space, domestic spaces capable of providing sanctuaries for virtuous women. If, as eighteenth-century fiction suggests, culturally degenerate and abusive homes were common to the gentry as well as those below the social station attributed to the readership, then the amount of disreputable interior space to be made fit for feminine occupation was every bit as limitless as the wilderness occupied by American savages. The captivity narrative turned a tactic ± we might call it moral resistance ± into a strategy, or cultural hegemony. What happens to such resistance under these circumstances? Why should the nineteenth-century novel put a representative of the dominant culture in a state of emergency, as if the survival of middleclass values were not by then a sure thing? Why show the state in a state of crisis, whereby the defilement of respectable womanhood is an imminent possibility? It is clear, after all, that the natives and libertines of yore are no longer in charge. Where the eighteenth-century captive spoke from a position outside and at the mercy of another culture, and therefore exposed the exclusions and oppressions of that culture, the imperiled heroine of Victorian fiction appropriates a position she herself, as the spokeswomen for normative values, has subordinated and peripheralized. Jane has both relegated Bertha to the attic as culturally unfit to occupy a position in the family and assumed the position of the one wrongfully excluded form domestic comforts and companionship. Modern cultures characteristically situate one of their own ± someone articulate ± in the outsider's position. In this way, paradoxically, such cultures embrace and neutralize precisely what they have designated as dangerously opposed to their autonomy and continuity in time. By taking the religiously ungrateful Jane to its bosom, I am suggesting, the Victorian readership effectively incorporated within itself the capacity for opposition and critique. The critical tradition divides over the issue of whether the novel endorses imperialism or launches an assault on patriarchalism. Jane can be both an agent of imperialism, albeit a

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

120 Revolutionary Histories

121

brand of imperialism that operates close to home, while taking the dominant order to task for its sexism, precisely because she is the anointed critic of that order who is simply fulfilling her assigned task as a woman empowered to write her story. Her claim that ``this social order is bad, because it excludes me'' is perfectly compatible, I would suggest, with the claim that ``this social order is good insofar as it includes me.'' Where the first claim launches a critique, the second claim limits that critique to a demand that never threatens but, indeed, updates the status quo and endows it with a sense of adequacy.37 That we still tend to regard the Victorian middle class as something of a failure testifies, I believe, to the success of this strategy.38 To extend their authority, this class of people required ± indeed still require ± regular emergencies that can be said to put decent women at risk. Observing the logic of the captivity narrative, fiction inevitably represents such conditions as a failure of masculinity: the wrong kind of men are in charge. Indeed, it is fair to say that Victorian novels as a rule refuse to offer anything like an adequate middle-class man. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, the regularity with which the reigning masculinity fails to make a world safe for femininity suggests that feminine endangerment is not a disruption or error in the system but part and parcel of modern cultural logic and the guarantee of its success. Masculine authority was meant to fail, I am suggesting, and thereby to plunge the state into a new state of emergency. Sentimental novels in turn were born with and remain a constant of modern culture, because they provide a feminine body ± vulnerable to the forces of history and empowered to resist by words alone ± and place that body in a state of crisis. Those same novels ultimately stabilize the feminine body, the interiority it contains, and the household surrounding it, as they call forth new forms of bourgeois masculinity to resolve a problem created whenever an earlier brand of masculinity failed to ensure the sanctity of that domain.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Captivity in the English Novel

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens: Nursery Tales on the Frontier Marilyn Gaull

Eastern and obscure in origin, pagan, Hellenic, biblical, Islamic, traveling from ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, India, and Baghdad, to Italy, France, Germany, and Great Britain, like accidental tourists the nursery tales arrived in the eighteenth century on the American shore. What they were called determined how they were preserved, studied, and valued: myths, fables, ``popular antiquities,'' fairytales, and, after 1847, folktales. Somewhere along the way, they entered the nursery, chosen, unaccountably, by adults to recite to children before they went to sleep. Primarily oral, anonymous, collective, and bearing signatures of the culture, class, occupation, locality, and language that produced them, nursery tales are often studied as if they were folktales. They are, in fact, especially in America, a separate genre. To Herder, who initiated the study of folktales in 1778, and to his followers, they were repositories of language, national spirit, local customs or rituals, images of a society in its infancy.1 In the American setting, however, removed from the original languages, local traditions, and national character that they supposedly preserved, the tales lost their value as folktales and entered a new life cycle as nursery tales ± familiar oral narratives told primarily by adults to children.2 Translated, adapted, assimilating fairytales, fables, and myths, sometimes published and then restored to the oral communities, nursery tales were enriched by every setting and society in which they had been told. While they offer none of the insight into the language, customs, and rituals of colonial life that folktales provide, they document an emotional history of life on the edge, by the sea, in the woods, the boundary or liminal territories all children both literally and metaphorically inhabit and that the adults who raised them entered when they came to what they called the New World.3 122

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

7

Although they share many characteristics of folktales, and are often adapted to the nursery, fairy tales have a different genealogy and brought a curious contribution to American life. Written in France to amuse the court or teach aristocrats the virtues of civiliteÂ, along with folktales, they entered the nurseries and colonized Europe at the same time as Europeans were colonizing America: Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passe appeared in 1697, Galland's translation of ``The Arabian Nights,'' as Les Mille et Une Nuits in 10 volumes during 1704±17, and other familiar tales by courtesans such as Mme. D'Aulnoy or Mme. De Beaumont, author of the most familiar version of ``Beauty and the Beast.'' Their tales were collected in inexpensive chapbooks, distributed by peddlers all over Europe, appropriated in turn by new storytellers whose adaptations returned them to the folk tradition. The princes and princesses, the woodcutters, weavers, and ogres in ``Cinderella,'' ``Sleeping Beauty,'' ``Rapunzel,'' ``Rumpelstiltskin,'' ``Puss in Boots,'' ``Little Red Riding Hood,'' ``Beauty and the Beast,'' ``Bluebeard,'' and all their many variations, came to England, and later to the colonies, with merchants, tutors, and domestic servants. Some were collected as souvenirs by the British who had gone abroad for their educational tours or to learn languages.4 And some were dispersed by the French themselves when they found refuge from religious persecution in Germany, Scandinavia, Holland and England. The nature and function of fairytales, however, were shaped by the indigenous cultural forms they encountered in their travels, many of which had circulated in the oral communities for several hundred years before they were published. The fairytales were largely about mating, magic, female power, property, supernatural interventions, bestiality transformed or recovered, and subtle tests of quality or rank. However different from the heroic tales, they came from the same sources, were collected in the same ways, and addressed the same audience: Macpherson's fabricated Ossianic poems, published between 1760 and 1763, which he claimed to have collected in the Scottish highlands, and Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a highly contrived but more authentic collection of poems and metrical romances. They inspired Herder, philosopher, philologist, and historian, to collect native poetry, published as Volksleider, 1778±9, which, like the Ossianic poems and Reliques, he believed represented the pure spirit of Germany, preserved among the lower classes. In turn, Herder inspired a whole generation of writers and collectors who were looking for evidence of historical evolution in the narrative traditions of the isolated German villages.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 123

The interests of folklore, fairytales, and political life intersected with the interests of children after 1795, when philologists such as Brentano, von Arnim, and the Brothers Grimm used young people, their tutors, and nurses as informants. The Brothers Grimm published them as Kinder und HausmaÈrchen (Children's and Household Tales), from 1812 to 1815, as if told to children, translated by Edgar Taylor into English as German Popular Stories (1823), illustrated by Cruickshank, and published in America in 1826. By then, however, all the tales, especially those with folk origins or a prehistory such as ``Little Red Riding Hood,'' ``Beauty and the Beast,'' and ``Cinderella'' had circulated in various versions for at least a century and were familiar enough to have appeared on the London stage.5 With this complex itinerary, genealogy, and function, each time the tales migrated, from country to country, as well as among classes and generations, they began, as they were originally, as adult entertainment, told by professional storytellers, by merchants, pilgrims, soldiers, wanderers of all sorts at weddings and funerals, in coffee-houses, camps, marketplaces, along trade routes, in wars, and on religious quests. Erotic and heroic, full of magic and commerce, they were like currency, exchanged for food, shelter, drink, love, freedom, to educate or bond, to save the narrator's own or other lives.6 But the most significant exchange was one story for another, which explains the vast diffusion of European tales, their appearance even among northern Indian tribes and Eskimos, who, by the time their tales were collected in 1830, had been trading with the French for several hundred years (Thompson, 286, 297). There is a more difficult question, however, than how the illiterate and remote Indian tribes of North America acquired a Cinderella story: how and why did these ancient, alien, often brutal and adult tales end up in the nurseries not only of French and German and British children, but also American children? In the lives of children everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the New World, nursery tales were the real toads in the imaginary gardens. However diverse, the biblical and Hellenic tales, ``The Arabian Nights,'' the French fairytales, the British romances, the German cottage tales, and the nursery tales, as a separate genre, have enough in common for folklorists to have included them in their studies of origins and forms. As Thompson, among others, explained, some folklorists believed the tales arose spontaneously, independently, originally, in each culture at the same stage, each producing its own trickster cycle, for example, Jack tales in England, Coyote tales among the American Indians. This theory assumes that cultures develop like people, that they move through a

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

124 Revolutionary Histories

pattern of inevitable stages, that they offer evidence about whatever stage the culture is passing through when the tale appears. American tales, for example, relating encounters with the wilderness, could resemble ``The Arabian Nights'' or the cottage tales collected by the Brothers Grimm because the human brain is simply wired to generate similar narratives in similar situations. Examples range from ``stolen children/cannibal'' tales resembling ``Hansel and Gretel'' found among the northern Pacific Native Americans in the early nineteenth century, to Cinderella-like tales found in tenth-century China, among the Eskimos, and identified in 345 variants as early as 1893, a tale of courtship, identity, retribution that, according to one theory, each society generated on its own. Others believe in an ur-story, an archetype, such as Hermes, for example, or Persephone, Creation myths or Flood stories, from which all versions are descended. Or they may have been imported, adapted from tales told by missionaries, traders, exiles (Thompson, 298, 359). All these theories of origin are illustrated in the complexity of American lore, both native and colonial. Context explains why some tales migrated and not others, the shape they assumed, the meaning and values they carried to their new environment. On the edge of a real forest where isolated families lived among actual bears, wolves, and other predators, ``Little Red Riding Hood'' is a realistic and practical tale about careless mothers, vulnerable children, and hungry animals. In cultures where there are no wolves, or at times when sending children into the woods is uncommon or unnecessary, it may be, as Erich Fromm claimed, an adolescent confrontation with adult sexuality, or, as Bettleheim claimed, an expression of a female's prepubescent desire to sleep with her father.7 While it seemed better suited to the frontier than it was to the French court or the British nursery, ``LRR'' clearly had migrated, but, among its many homes (there are two anthologies of versions of ``LRR''), it is only on the frontier that the literal meaning applied. The landscapes and adventures that had been fantastic or symbolic in eighteenth-century Europe and England became real; and the danger, fear, and temptation they embodied, which had been merely part of a child's emotional growth or vocabulary in Germany or France, were essential for survival in colonial Pennsylvania or Virginia. Even the many fairytales concerning royalty had a place in colonial America, which, one recalls, was not the egalitarian paradise of popular history. Many were intent on reproducing the aristocracy they left behind, and without a history of their own in America, without any credentials or qualifying features, they made it up as they went along.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 125

In Europe royal families were instantly recognizable, leading public lives of ritual and tradition, surrounded by courtiers, even depicted on coins. Their identity and status were certified by observers from the moment of birth, their bloodlines, gene pools, protected by a vast network of ministers and matchmakers. Theirs were the true captivity narratives, imprisoned by their advisers and subjects who needed them to play their historically defined roles. The fairytales, on the other hand, composed to amuse as well as to instruct the courtiers themselves, were populated by more princes and princesses than there were kingdoms to rule, wandering around the countryside, usually alone and anonymous, lost in the woods or searching for a mate, or for themselves, bewitched, transformed, or transfixed in unnatural sleeps. The fairytales projected a society as equitable if not democratic as anything visualized in the colonies: anyone could be a prince or marry one, or simply meet one in the woods, or, by turning into a frog or tree, share the same enchantment. Such tales spoke directly to the wealthy families on plantations in the ante-bellum south or the merchant families in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, the possibility of being or mating with wandering and unrecognized royalty, of exchangeable princes and paupers. For them, the fairytales turned nursery tales, some still recited in French, provided the fantasies along with the civilite they were designed to cultivate. However familiar, in America, nursery tales became a new genre, neither original nor traditional. After passing through several cycles of oral transmission and publication, in different languages and different countries, nursery tales drew on the forms and functions of folklore, selectively adapted characteristics and themes from fairytales, and depicted in exotic and fanciful disguise what would be in the New World, reality-based narratives. To the poor and deprived everywhere, the tales were always ``rooted in the real world,'' as Darnton claims, especially for those French peasants whose lives really were ``nasty, brutish, and short'' ± which is what most fairytales are about, not the success of the prince, but the suffering and confusion of the poor (34). To the rich in America, without customs and tradition, nursery tales were conduct books, models of behavior and of expectation. Based on traditional cottage tales, court tales, tales of supernatural encounters, adventure and quest tales, told within or across generations or cultures, the nursery tales served to bond, or socialize, to initiate or solve problems, to deal with shared issues of survival: mating, power, property, identity, and the dangers of the unknown, whether the unknown is a place, a giant, a witch, a beast, or a human transformed into a bird or tree. They deal with abandoned, imprisoned, mutilated or

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

126 Revolutionary Histories

enchanted children, and battles one did not choose with forces one did not understand. As Dorson's rich and varied collection of early American writings demonstrates, the woods and the seas around the settlers really were inhabited by strange creatures, Indians, extravagant vegetation, grotesque insects, bewildering geological formations, spectral ships, pirates, sorcerers, hurricanes, sea-serpents, porcupines, whales, earthquakes, rattle snakes that could hypnotize, oysters as large as the cabin on a ship, and magic potions such as tobacco which could cure infections, prevent diseases, or drive people insane (1950: 67±101). Human beings in America acted in brutal and unpredictable ways: stories abound of madness and metamorphoses, men murdering and devouring their wives, mothers abandoning their children, but mostly the heart-wrenching captivity narratives, women forced to join the Indians who had butchered their husbands and children, to travel great distances on foot with strangers whose language and motives they did not understand, and even to mate or become murderers themselves. If the captives were Indians or white males or missionaries, the tales were even more brutal or pathetic.8 Captivity is one of the universal themes of nursery tales ± Sheherezade and all her tales, Rapunzel, Blue Beard, and Hansel and Gretel, to name a few. Captivity episodes are also common in folk narratives, Moses, for example, or Persephone, Ali Baba, and all the literature derived from them. For children, these captivity narratives are metaphors of life; they are the ``shades of the prison house'' that Wordsworth describes in ``The Intimations Ode,'' that descend on ``the growing Boy'' (ll. 67±8), who loses his freedom as he acquires his identity. Private and unique, like a repetitive magic spell in the tales themselves, the nursery tale literally captivates children, circumscribes and differentiates them, identifies and protects them from the hostile and alien world of adults, until they find themselves and their own place in the world. Similarly, then, and explaining the prevalence of the theme, the captivity narratives differentiate the narrators from the vast and alien world which threatens their identities (they often join their abductors) as well as their lives. Whether the captive is an African slave, Indian, Mary Rowlandson, John Smith, or even Hannah Dustan who brutally murdered her captors when she escaped, in order to survive in captivity and to escape, captives must master themselves as well as their captors. Like ``The Arabian Nights,'' these narratives emphasize survival, cunning, and the lurid mix of sexuality and religion. For those who read the captivity narratives, and for those who wrote them, the nursery tales were emotional if not structural prototypes, the antecedents, in which the same

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 127

experience is disguised, displaced, condensed, reconstructed, and universalized. The nursery tales, then, unsuitable for entertainment, for teaching history or moral principles, or for putting anyone to sleep, like a beast in the boudoir, like a toad in the garden, conveyed the forbidden, transgressive, and, for the sake of civilization, repressed human experiences including captivity, murder, dismemberment, parricide, matricide, cannibalism, incest, and abandonment. The dominant emotion is fear, ``the pedagogy of fear,'' as Tartar calls it (1992: 22±50). The very structure of ``The Arabian Nights'' (in which Sheherazade has to tell tales to a king with whom she sleeps every day, who is the father of her children, but who will behead her and her sister if she fails to amuse him) identifies the terror with the teller, and all her tales are suffused with this bizarre combination of danger and desire. For the adults who chose and told the tales in the eighteenth-century British nurseries ± tales that were in fact forbidden ± experiencing fear may have been an emotional experiment, an expression of the emotionalism of the age of sensibility and as much a part of the sentimental education as any other emotion. On the other hand, there was much to fear, even in England: revolutions, riots, apocalyptic religions, mad kings, deranged prophets, fears of invasion, of retribution, an earth history that started with an explosion and a universe that was expanding, without signs of a beginning or an end. The sublime in painting and music, the gothic in novels and on the stage, the cultivated taste for fear were simply expressions of the anxiety that afflicted the age. To Wordsworth, in The Prelude, fear was a discipline, a socializing force, an appetite, and an aesthetic necessity, a cognate of beauty on which the sublime was based. In colonial America, fear was necessary for survival, as Carl Sagan explained in The Demon-Haunted World. Teaching fear, awakening it in the home, bonded children to their families, taught them to avoid strangers, demons, beasts, their own instincts, dreams, unexplained gifts, and even other people's parents who are, in situations such as the American frontier, very dangerous indeed. Nursery tales tied the family to the hearth, where children were not only safe but economically useful as well, weaving, chopping wood, contributing to the cottage industries, the domestic economy by which they all lived. In America, the tales depicted two poles: the domestic setting where the tales were told and where everyone is safe, or the external world of adventure and the unknown, where children became part of the food chain. Fear, Sagan concludes, is an evolutionary mechanism: ``Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants.''9

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

128 Revolutionary Histories

It has always been ironic to me that given the perversity of these tales, most histories, including my own English Romanticism, claim that they were forbidden because the fantasies they projected were considered corrupting to the practical spirit in which the British were attempting to raise their children.10 Excluding the sentimentalism and the nationalistic spirit, however, they are perfectly suited to children, for children are by nature afflicted with innate images of violence, their lives, even the best of them, captivity narratives. As Charles Lamb pointed out in ``Witches and Other Night-Fears'' (Essays of Elia, 1821), even if children were deprived of violent images, they would generate their own: the Gorgons, Hydras, and Chimera ``are the transcripts . . . the archetypes . . . in us and eternal'' (79±81). And, for similar reasons, the tales are also suited to the subversive and repressed hostilities of the emigrants, the dispossessed and alienated populations who told and dispersed them. Among the unwilling religious migrants at the opening of the eighteenth century, the French Huguenots were perhaps more instrumental than any other group in diffusing, along with their skills as weavers, glassblowers, and domestic servants, the court tales that were then so common in France, tales that became canonical. In 1685, after nearly a century of relative peace under the Edict of Nantes, during which time they had access to French cultural life on every level, they were disenfranchised and exiled, taking with them the same popular tales that had been circulating in the oral communities and had formed the basis for the more familiar court tales. Many found refuge in Germany, especially in Kassel, where the Grimms lived; and their descendants and the children they raised became informants (Darnton, 11±12) ± while the Brothers Grimm valued these sources because, they believed, the tales they told embodied the spirit, language, customs, and rituals of old Germany; in fact, they came from France, originally from India, some believed, or Persia. Huguenots also settled in Holland, England, and Sweden before bringing these mixed nationalities, languages, and occupations, with a shared religious orientation, to settlements in Canada, Maine, the southern Appalachians, and New York (a German colony in New Paltz, a French one in New Rochelle, a Dutch on Staten Island, and the British in Virginia and Massachusetts, just to name a few).11 By the time the Huguenots had spread the tales in America, they had already been translated into other languages, and the localisms for which they had been valued in Germany were completely obscured. Whereas in Europe they had offered an unofficial history of the community that shared them, in America they offered a history of human nature itself.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 129

Among the settlers, adventurers or exiles, dispossessed, alienated, powerless, the political themes were especially evident, if not parodic, depicting the pomposity, vanity, arrogance, narrow-mindedness, sometimes hopeless stupidity of all kings, and their misguided quests for suitable mates. From the perspective of the colonies, which were made up largely of religious deviants and political malcontents, the tales were parodic imitations of the reality of French and British court life. George III was his own caricature: vain and stuttering, surrounded by reprobate sons and unwed daughters, toady courtiers and counselors who encouraged absurd taxes on tea and on windows, his inclination to ride around the countryside discussing crops and animals with the farmers, his periodic madness. Similarly, the Prince Regent makes a better tale than a king, as vain as his father, preoccupied with clothes and food, an invented heroic past, and surrounded by Dandies, mistresses, best remembered for his parties, parades, palaces, pavilions. Written to promote civilite in France, in British public life, nursery tales offered a perspective for judging royal behavior, even on the stage, in Christmas pantomimes, where otherwise references to the royal family would have been censored and forbidden. Equally parodic, the nursery tales had a religious dimension that even the Brothers Grimm recognized, one that emerged in the free-wheeling religious environment of the Enlightenment with its mythic revivals and apocalyptic yearnings, a religious dimension that appealed, however subliminally, to the exiled religious groups in America. In a controversial theory of origins, to the Grimms and others after them, the folktales were degraded nature myths that surreptitiously survived the emergence of the patriarchal religions, a counterfaith in which the witches and stepmothers were disguised versions of Lilith, Gaia, Hera, terrestrial fallen fertility goddesses, whose powers had been turned against the population that should have worshipped them. In the tales they are the witches, the wicked step-mothers, irrational, impulsive, implacable, who transformed men and women as well into revolting animals, or stones, or trees, or sent them on dangerous and pointless journeys, or immobilized them in unnatural sleep, or cooked and devoured their own or other's children, bewitched their daughters, abandoned, imprisoned, or stole their first-born (Tartar, ``From Nags to Witches'' [1987], 137±55; Thompson, 37±82; Warner ). In ``The Juniper Tree,'' for example, an evil step-mother lures everyone into a bestial and revolting drama, beheading the son, feeding him to the father, demonstrating both the destructive power of nature and the dangers of domesticity, the rage and vindictiveness of the ancient displaced

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

130 Revolutionary Histories

goddesses. ``Hansel and Gretel'' depicts trusting and vulnerable children whose greedy step-mother and inept father abandon them to starve in the woods, then captured by a witch, who initiates them into the brutality of her world, the world of nature, and they in turn murder her. In the abundance of the New World, where all forms of life flourished, the goddess ruled, creating, devouring, both awakening and punishing the unappeasable appetites of human beings in the wilderness. In relation to Catholicism, the religion for which the Huguenots and other Protestant faiths had been persecuted, witch-goddesses are the satanic alternative to the Virgin Mary, the Earth Mother vs. the Holy Mother. Stepmothers, widows, and unattached elderly women, the substitute mothers and wet-nurses who were stigmatized and isolated in Europe and England were literally demonized in America. The witch tales, as Dorson says, ``had seeded themselves deeply into the colonial soil'' (1973: 38), and the persecution of harmless or deranged old ladies, or anyone who was different, validated the fear and loathing the nursery tales generated. Again, what had been symbolic or metaphoric in England and Europe became literal in the witch trials of Salem. The nursery tales were gradually revised, edited, and accommodated to the various American ideologies. As Jane Yolen points out, in the original and most variants in Africa, China, even among Native Americans (who, according to Thompson, along with so many other tales, received this one when they were trading furs with the early French settlers), Cinderella is that inscrutable and amoral female fertility figure, deprived of her wealth when her father died, manipulating the prince into marriage, and taking retribution on her step-sisters by leaving them blinded, homeless, and without their toes. By the nineteenth century, Cinderella escapes poverty through love and her small feet, marries the prince, forgives her step-sisters, and takes them with her to live in the palace. This American version follows the pattern of the popular Horatio Alger stories such as Ragged Dick (1867) and Strive and Succeed (1872), among the first of the stories written in America specifically for children.12 The absence of a genuine American, as opposed to ethnic, folklore accounts for the absence of fairytales and the nursery tales which are based on them. Instead there is, as Dorson says, a ``grafting of Old World beliefs onto the New World environment,'' a ``generation of new folk fancies within old forms'' (1977: 8). There were, of course, folk heroes in America, some fictional and some historical: following the advice of Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, for example, appropriated German folktales, which were circulating all over Europe, and naturalized them

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 131

in ``Rip Van Winkle'' and ``The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.''13 There were, however, no sustained oral narratives about a hero comparable to Odysseus or Robin Hood or Aladdin. Paul Bunyan (fictional) and Davy Crockett (real), Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Johnny Appleseed, became heroes because Americans, again according to Dorson, pined for them, and ``hucksters,'' the great commercial interests in books and movies, supplied them (1977: 200) These heroes, now so familiar, were obscure characters in search of a story, wandering pioneers, cowboys, criminals, and storytellers, physically exceptional, capable of courage, endurance, an American male character, shaped, according to Frederick Jackson Turner, by the frontier, defined by ``coarseness and strength,'' ``acuteness and inquisitiveness,'' a ``practical and inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients,'' a ``masterful grasp of material things, lacking in artistic talent,'' ``restless nervous energy,'' ``individualism,'' ``buoyancy and exuberance.'' Having not experienced the frontier himself, Turner derived this character from popular culture, and his influence on the self-conception of the American males was incalculable. Among scholars perennially debating the effect of the frontier on character, Henry Nash Smith in The Virgin Land claimed that for Turner, ``the American forest has become the enchanted wood.'' Confronted with the idea of a frontier, which he did not know, Turner had interpreted it into the familiar metaphor of the European fairytale ± even while he claimed, as many erroneously did, that the achievement of the ``Western World'' was its ``building a society free from the dominance of ancient forms.''14 His American character was out of the same tradition as Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor, with guns and a horse (Thompson, 319±44), and an adversary in Nature and in the Indians that reflected his own dark side. These ``American'' heroes, the cowboys and robbers, known by their depiction in movies, comics, novels, whether historical or invented, are nearly all from the trickster tradition, Hermes, Odysseus, even the Indian Coyote, strong, mischievous, cunning, spirited, practical, sometimes rather dumb but lucky, and always alone. Unlike the contemporary British counterparts, who more closely resemble Pan and his effete, childlike descendants, they are tough, dirty, and quick on the draw. They defy authority, protect the weak, endanger their lives for small causes, kill giants and other political or oedipal symbols, and liberate, restore, or punish entire communities. Although they are enormously appealing to children (more appealing to scholars and critics given the number of books and essays about them) except for the film versions, they are usually too coarse, vulgar, and ill-natured for the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

132 Revolutionary Histories

nursery. In any case, by the time Americans got around to collecting their folklore in the 1880s, the traditional tales were supplanted by a new imaginative literature specifically for children, ``novels of a golden age'': Little Women, Huck Finn, Black Beauty, Tarzan of the Apes, The Wizard of Oz, and so on.15 Nonetheless, there are surviving tales, cycles of tales, such as the ``Jack'' tales, collected by Richard Chase in the southern Appalachians in 1935, that persuasively illustrate the naturalization, the Americanization of folktales, fairytales, and nursery tales that I have been describing. Rich in allusions, complex in form, they are, like the American culture, an aggregate of four or five Eastern and European traditions and narrative types, illustrating that regional folklore, as Glassie claims, however unified it appears on the surface, summarizes many ethnic influences, and temporal as well, the ``rich ambiguity,'' to which Wiesbuch refers, ``of plural cultural times'' to which these early Americans were heir (132). One tale, ``Old Fire Dragaman,'' is like an archaeological dig, exhibiting the distinct strata of British, German, Celtic, Huguenot, and Arabian antecedents and ending with a landmark reference (Bronner, 226). The tale (without the dialect, which is not well served by being printed): Three lazy sons, Will, Tom, and Jack, are sent into the wilderness by their father, equipped with a wagon, provisions, to build their own house and to plant a crop. They decide to divide their labors, one staying home to cook while the others work in the field. The first day, after dinner is prepared, when Will blows his horn to call his brothers, a giant appears who enters the house, eats the meal, lights his pipe with a coal from the fire, and leaves while Will hides under the bed. The second day, Tom has the same experience (recounted in great detail). The third day, when Jack cooks, he invites the giant to join them for dinner. The giant refuses, lights his pipe from the fire, and walks off into the woods. Jack follows him to a hole in the ground, which the three brothers explore the following day. One at a time, Tom and Will descend into the hole in a basket and report seeing houses beneath the ground before asking to be pulled up again. Jack goes down and discovers three beautiful women, each living in her own home, captives, since they were young girls, of the giant whose name is Dragaman. The most beautiful one, whom he chooses for his bride, gives Jack a magic salve, which protects him from the Dragaman's ``great balls of fire,'' a magic sword with which Jack cuts off his head, and a magic ring. After he helps his brothers raise the lovely girls in the basket, they cut the rope and leave him to die so they can have the girls to themselves. After about a week in the hole, when he is near to starving, Jack finally

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 133

remembers that he has this magic ring, wishes himself home, and instantly appears at his mother's hearth. He forgives his brothers, and they are all married to their appropriate brides and live in three little cabins in the wilderness, which are still visible today.16 Along with the ambiguities and multiplicities of reference one could find in this tale, the morality, ideology, political, economic, mythic (seasonal and agrarian), and religious implications, there is one principle, a nursery tale principle that prevails, a principle as applicable to children as it is to the adults who tell them: human beings live in mystery, move about, as Wordsworth described it in ``Ode: Intimations of Immortality,'' ``in worlds not realised,'' on the edges of things, at retreating boundaries, on temporal, spiritual, geographical, intellectual, and psychological frontiers. In nursery tales, just as on frontiers, irreconcilables meet: the universal and the particular, the mysterious and the rational, the domestic and the wild, the practical and the magic, love and murder, savage and civilized, brothers who will cook and who will kill, Old World forms in New World experiences, the toads in the gardens ± which is why, I believe, the nursery tales acquired a new life in America. The experience they represented ± both traditional and innovative, familiar and original, repeated ritualistically in private settings ± addressed the literal migrants, pioneers, settlers, adventurers and exiles, and their figurative counterparts, the children and the adults who nurtured them.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

134 Revolutionary Histories

``That Miserable Continent'': Cultural Pessimism and the Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw Klaas van Berkel

Introduction The story has been told several times before. In the late eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, the United States representative at the French court at Paris, hosted a dinner at which both American and French guests were present. Among the French guests was also the well-known philosophe Abbe Raynal, who in the course of the evening got on his favorite theory concerning the general degeneration of animals and even humans on the American continent. Irritated, Franklin felt the need to vindicate his fellow Americans and therefore asked all present to rise from their chairs, ``to see,'' as Thomas Jefferson later reported, ``on which side nature has degenerated.'' The result left no room for doubt. The Americans were ``of the finest stature and form, while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbe himself, was a mere shrimp.''1 The theory of American degeneration, one of the earliest version of systematic anti-American thought in Europe, was no invention of Raynal. Already in the 1750s the famous French naturalist Count de Buffon had defended the thesis that the animal world in the Americas had seriously degenerated compared to Europe. American animals were small, weak and inconspicious compared to their European counterparts, which he ascribed to the detrimental influence of a wet climate and swampy conditions. This theory, however, had become popular and widely discussed in the late 1760s and 1770s through the work of a lesser-known philosophe, Cornelis de Pauw. His two-volume Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains, first published in 1768±9 in Berlin, immediately triggered a widespread debate about the natural world and primitive society in America.2 Supporters of the idea of the ``noble 135

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

8

savage'' had to defend their idyllic images of the Americas against the arguments of a level-headed commentator like De Pauw. This debate, which lasted until the beginning of the nineteenth century, turned the unknown De Pauw into a celebrity in intellectual Europe. Frederick II, King of Prussia, tried to install him at his court at Potsdam, and when De Pauw wrote a second book, in which he dispelled the myth of the wise and enlightened Chinese, even Voltaire felt he had to cross swords with this upstart philosopher. Although the outbreak of the French Revolution put an end to the immediate impact of De Pauw's books, as late as 1811 Napoleon, the French emperor, deemed it appropriate to have an obelisk erected in his honor in the city of Xanten, in the western part of Germany, where the philosopher had lived for most of his life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, De Pauw and his theory of American degeneration fell into almost complete oblivion. ``History,'' as one of his first modern commentators remarked in 1936, ``offers many examples of individuals who have occupied the center stage during their life-time, only to be forgotten by posterity; but in modern times few writers have risen so high, and then sunk so completely out of sight, as did the abbe Corneille de Pauw.''3 During the last two or three decades, some intellectual historians showed some interest in De Pauw, and the Italian historian Antonello Gerbi even wrote an impressive, 600-page study on the controversy that erupted after De Pauw had published his Recherches philosophiques.4 Gerbi, however, did not intend to rehabilitate De Pauw, whom he accused of a ``slanderous

Figure 3 Portrait medaillon of Cornelis de Pauw (c. 1790). The ceramic medaillon is partly colored and has a diameter of 17.7 cm. It is now in the Regional Museum of Xanten (Germany). # Kath. Propsteigemeinde St. Viktor, Xanten.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

136 Revolutionary Histories

and murderous assault on the whole of American humanity.'' James W. Ceaser, the latest in the row of commentators, is no more complimentary: ``Today, I suppose, de Pauw may be said to enjoy an obscurity altogether warranted by the quality of his work and the level of his talents.''5 There is some reason to qualify this wholesale condemnation of De Pauw's ideas. A careful reading of his Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains reveals that although the picture De Pauw gives of American nature and American Indians (and even the Americans of European stock) is rather bleak, his book is not an open attack on the whole of American humanity, as Gerbi suggested. And contrary to Ceaser, I would like to contend that De Pauw is not one of those despicable anti-Americans who have given the world that perverted image of America deplored so much by conservative American political thinkers. The real targets of his biting criticism are not the native Americans, but the Europeans who conquered and exploited the American continent. If one takes into account not only the reception of the book ± the real subject of Gerbi's monograph ± but also its intellectual background and the motives De Pauw might have had for writing it, a different picture arises. If we ask ourselves what kind of debate De Pauw was trying to make a contribution to, we will discover that his Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains was much more than just a slanderous attack on the Americas. As with so many other Europeans writing about America, this book tells us much more about Europe than about America, because America is just a screen against which to project particular European worries. In fact, to unearth the motives of De Pauw is also to unearth a pessimistic or at least skeptical tradition in Enlightenment thinking. De Pauw reminds us that the Enlightenment at heart was much more ambivalent than we usually assume and was capable of self-criticism to a degree that always surprises us.6

A Dutch clergyman in small-town Germany Cornelis de Pauw lived in Germany and he wrote his books in French, but he was of Dutch descent. He was born in Amsterdam on August 18, 1739, the son of Antony Pauw and Quirina Johanna van Heijningen. Anthony Pauw was a member of the Catholic branch of a well-to-do family that had played an important part in local politics since the sixteenth century.7 Although Cornelis Pauw seems to have left Holland at an early age, his writings testify to his unbroken interest in the situation in his home country. His books contain numerous references to books written in Dutch, and he sometimes refers to a Dutch translation and not to its

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 137

French or German original.8 He also mentions quite a number of Dutch authors, like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the famous microscopist, Ysbrandts Ides, who had traveled through China, Johan Picardt, a protestant minister who wrote a book about the antiquities of the Dutch province of Drenthe, and Frederick Ruysch, the well-known Amsterdam anatomist and owner of a famous cabinet of natural history (R, 1:133; 1:173; 2:43; 2:66). De Pauw's Recherches philosophiques also contain references to ordinary life in Holland. From his own experience, De Pauw tells us that since Dutch farmers had discovered that red-and-white cattle were less vigorous than black cattle, the red-and-white variety had almost disappeared from the countryside (R, 1:353). So, even though the book was written in a small German provincial town and addressed a topic of international importance in the language of the international elite, its author did not belie his Dutch descent. And for that matter, Xanten was not far from the Dutch border. The local dialect even in the eighteenth century stood midway between Dutch and German. After the premature death of his father and mother, De Pauw was taken care of by an influential relative, Thomas Franz Cloots, a ``Geheimrat'' of Frederick II who lived at Gnadenthal in the German duchy of Cleves.9 De Pauw went to school with the Jesuits at LieÁge and Cologne, where he seems to have developed a strong hatred of the Jesuits. In 1761 Cloots, who by that time had become a baron, got him a position as a canon in the St. Viktor Stift in Xanten, the main church of a small town in the duchy of Cleves, nicely located on the west bank of the river Rhine. In 1765 De Pauw also took minor orders at LieÁge, but he never became a priest. During the rest of his life he took care of the administration and the library of the Stift and was therefore able to devote most of his time to the scholarly studies he loved so much.10 After settling in Xanten, De Pauw left the town and its vicinity on two occasions only, and both times he traveled to Berlin. Since the early seventeenth century the duchy of Cleves was ruled by the Elector of Brandenburg, who resided in Potsdam near Berlin. In the archives of the Stift it is recorded that in March 1767 De Pauw was in Potsdam ``in suis propriis negotiis,'' while in July it is said that he was absent as ``deputatus in aula berolinensi.'' Officially he had gone to court in connection with the restructuring of the finances of the Stift, but during this business trip De Pauw evidently also finished his studies and found the publisher for his Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains.11 The book was published in Berlin in two volumes, in 1768 and 1769. During his stay at Berlin, De Pauw was introduced to the Elector, Frederick II, and the Prussian king was so pleased with the wit of the canon from

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

138 Revolutionary Histories

Xanten that he tried to keep him at court in Berlin as his reader. De Pauw, however, found the atmosphere at court not very congenial, and by September 1768 he was back at Xanten, where he produced a report on his activities in Potsdam. In 1775, De Pauw made another trip to Berlin, once again on behalf of the Stift. Now he no longer was the unknown canon who had once made an interesting appearance at court, but had become a celebrity in the intellectual circles in Europe. His book on the Americans had elicited an immediate and critical response all over Europe, and the first to respond had been the librarian of Frederick II, Dom Pernetty. But his Dissertation was easily refuted by De Pauw, who incorporated the Dissertation and his own Defense as the third volume in a new edition of his book on the Americans. This new edition was reissued several times, but in the meantime De Pauw had also published a new and controversial book on the culture of the Chinese and the Egyptians (1773). No wonder Frederick II once again tried to keep De Pauw at his court. He offered him membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a position as canon in Breslau. However, De Pauw still disliked court life; he even said he would die if he had to stay in Berlin. Frederick II eventually let him go and De Pauw decided never to return to Berlin again. From then on, De Pauw concentrated on his scholarly studies, for which he by then had become famous ± not to say, notorious. His books were translated into several languages, including German and Dutch, while an abridged edition was published in England.12 While his book on America took Europe by storm, De Pauw continued to collect material for new books, including a book on the Greeks and another on the Germans. His Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs was published in 1787, but his book on the Germans never appeared, perhaps because the topic was too touchy, or because the French Revolution and the Coalition Wars simply made it inopportune for a Prussian subject to publish a book ± in French ± that without any doubt would have been critical of the doings of the Germans. During the last years of his life he was allowed to leave his religious duties to others because of ill-health and to devote himself completely to scholarly studies. In the last decades of the eighteenth century the religious atmosphere in Xanten was very tolerant and no one seems to have taken offense at his sometimes radical sympathies and antipathies. Initially he seems to have welcomed the French Revolution; at least the ideas of the revolutionaries regarding the relationship between state and church were sympathetic to him. On the recommendation of his nephew, the revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots (a son of his benefactor Thomas Cloots), on

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 139

August 26, 1792, De Pauw was even elected an honorary French citizen, together with Pestalozzi, Schiller, Washington, and several others.13 Whether he also welcomed the French occupation of the left bank of the Rhine, however, is not so sure. Cornelis de Pauw died in Xanten on July 7, 1799.14 He was buried in the shadow of St. Viktor's Church in Xanten, but he was not immediately forgotten. Rumor has it that Napoleon, on reading De Pauw's book on the Americans, decided to sell the huge territory of Louisiana to the United States in 1803. This might at least explain why in October 1811, when the emperor and his wife Marie-Louise visited Xanten, he ordered the local (French) government to erect an obelisk on De Pauw's grave, an order that was immediately executed. The obelisk has caught the attention of many a traveler to Xanten, survived the destruction of the city during the Second World War, and is still standing in front of St. Viktor's Church today.15

The originality of the Recherches philosophiques Why did De Pauw become so famous all of a sudden? His immediate celebrity is at least partially explained by the witty and sometimes sarcastic style in which his book is written. Although his style is not perfect, De Pauw is as witty as a philosopher in the eighteenth century had to be. He knows how to tell a story, stirs the emotions of his readers and above all, he is never boring. Perhaps also the predilection of this clergyman for stories about the sexual aberrations of the American Indians added to the attractiveness of his books. Content, however, is more important than style, as De Pauw himself knew quite well: ``Socalled eloquence or that play of declamation, so useless when one is right, is more than ridiculous when one is wrong'' (R, 1:ix). And there is no doubt that more than his style De Pauw's critical description of everything American is responsible for the success of his book. A wide range of subjects are treated in the course of the two (later three) volumes of the book: the climate of the Americas and its influence on its inhabitants, the different races in America, cannibalism, the Eskimos, the alleged Patagonian giants, slavery, the use of poisonous weapons by the Indians, the orangutan, the conduct of the Jesuits in Paraguay, etc. In the last resort, however, there are just a few theses to which De Pauw returns again and again: the inferiority of climate and nature in America, compared to Europe; the degeneration of its inhabitants and the pernicious influence of the American climate on European immigrants; and the brutal behavior of the Spanish conquerers and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

140 Revolutionary Histories

Jesuit missionaries, who killed native Americans by the millions. De Pauw feels no inclination whatsoever to glorify the ``noble savage'' or the civilizing work of the missionaries.16 To him, America and its original inhabitants, the Indians, have nothing attractive at all. The American Indians are ``a race of men that has all the defects of children, as a degenerate species of the human sort, lazy, impotent, powerless, without physical strength, without any elevation of the spirit'' (R, 1:viii). Europeans would do wise to to stay out of that miserable continent. No doubt more than anything else these theses were responsible for the excitement with which De Pauw's book was received. Of course, this does not mean that all was new and original in this book. On the contrary, as Gerbi already stressed, much of what De Pauw had to say on America could in part at least be found in works of others, the most important of them being Count de Buffon, the famous French natural historian, who for that matter is duly mentioned by De Pauw. Just a couple of years before De Pauw published his book, De Buffon had devoted a large chapter of his multivolume Histoire naturelle to the same subject, the degeneration of nature in America. According to Gerbi, De Pauw's book is nothing but an elaboration of De Buffon's thesis: ``It sometimes takes a writer of lower rank to deconsecrate and breath new life into a theme of far-reaching significance.''17 There is, however, some reason to dispute this general conclusion. Of course, De Buffon firmly believed in the inferiority of American nature and De Pauw had nothing to add in this respect. Why, so De Buffon had wondered, are there so few large quadrupeds in America, whereas the Old World (Europe, Asia, Africa) is inhabitated by the elephant, the rhinoceros, the giraffe, and the lion, to give only some examples. And why, so De Buffon had asked, are the American Indians beardless and weaker than the European immigrants? Since even European immigrants (and their domestic animals) tend to become weaker after a few years' stay in America, according to De Buffon this was all due to the effects of the climate and the physical conditions on the American continent. The humidity of this part of the world, combined with other factors, was unfavorable to large animals, while it provided the best conditions for insects and reptiles. De Buffon claimed that the lower animals in the New World had developed by spontaneous generation out of a rotting swamp, while the higher animals had emigrated from the Old World and had since degenerated to what they were at the time De Buffon was writing. De Buffon was a naturalist, and although he mentioned humans now and then in his Histoire naturelle, his chapter was entitled ``On the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 141

Degeneration of Animals'' and indeed was devoted only to plants and animals. De Pauw, on the other hand, concentrates more on the human race and here he disagrees with De Buffon. The French naturalist speculated that human beings had only recently arrived in America and that in this sense they were relatively new and young. Therefore they still might develop and become like the Europeans ± in this respect De Buffon still wavered between seeing American nature as degenerate and corrupted and as embryonic and still full of possibilities. De Pauw, however, is more radical: the American Indians, he tells us again and again, are as degenerate as their environment. They are lazy, weak, and cruel, they miss the appetite for the other sex that, according to De Pauw, constitutes the basis of society. He even devotes a separate chapter to refute all the silly stories told about the giants that were supposed to live in the most southern part of America ± Patagonia. In short, the Indians are brutal idiots, without culture and refinement, unable to overcome the negative impact of the American climate. Not only is De Pauw more radical and consistent than De Buffon in his description of the degeneration of American nature, including its native inhabitants, he is actually also concerned with a different problem and writing from a different perspective. His analysis of the state of nature in America is just part of a general theory of human society. De Buffon's interest in the American Indian follows naturally from his interest in the natural history of the Americas. He discusses the American Indians, insofar as he discusses them at all, as a natural historian. For De Pauw, on the other hand, a discussion of the natural conditions in America was only a first, though necessary, step in a discussion of the relative merits of the way of life of the so-called noble savages. He is not interested in natural history as such, but in the natural preconditions of human society. His approach is that of a moral philosopher. It is therefore really misleading to portray De Pauw as just a radical follower of De Buffon. He deserves to be seen as an independent and original thinker.

Europe versus America On the face of it, De Pauw's book is indeed an uncompromising attack on the American continent and its inhabitants. It cannot be denied that De Pauw's picture of the native Americans is highly loaded with negative connotations. Although it could be argued that the author is merely trying to describe human conduct that Europeans normally characterize as lazy, cruel, and devoid of emotions, considering his highly moralizing tone it is evident that De Pauw was in fact also condemning what he was

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

142 Revolutionary Histories

describing. At the same time, however, it is also undeniable that his real targets are not the native Americans ± gloomy though his picture of them may be ± but their European conquerers. Thus, the Spanish and Portuguese commanders and their soldiers are held responsible for murdering millions of innocent Indians, who at first were not thought to be human beings at all. De Pauw, however, is no more complimentary in his treatment of someone like Bartolome de las Casas, the Spanish missionary and historiographer who defended the Indians against their detractors. Not only did he stimulate or even create the misguided idea of the native American as a noble savage, but he also saved the Indians by introducing slaves from Africa. The institution of slavery plays a very important part in De Pauw's train of thought, and it is very possible that his book on America grew in fact out of a treatise on slavery he originally intended to write. For De Pauw, slavery is one of the worst crimes against humanity. He calculated that already more than 10 million slaves had been imported from Africa to America, where they ``have lived and expired in humilation, in pain, in servitude, in the center of a foreign country that they have cultivated with their own hands just to enrich their masters'' (R, 1:28). De Pauw accuses the Portuguese of having invented the slave trade and thereby commiting a horrible crime against humanity. Other nations, including the Dutch, soon followed: ``The most sacred rights of man were defended by none and betrayed by all'' (R, 1:89).18 The sharpest criticisms are reserved for the Jesuit missionaries in southern America.19 Not only did they help to disseminate a false picture of the native American, but they also forced upon them a religion these poor creatures clearly did not understand at all. The way the Jesuits exploited the native Americans in Paraguay is especially severely criticized by De Pauw; he devotes a separate chapter to the way the Indians were brutalized by the Jesuit missionaries. Evidently De Pauw, who himself was educated by the Jesuits, must have had a great dislike of their missionaries, whom he considered to be the greatest hypocrites in the world.20 De Pauw's dislike of the Jesuits went beyond what one might expect from an eighteenth-century philosophe (even clergyman-philosophe like himself). Indeed, growing criticism of the Jesuits in Bourbon countries in Europe had led to the gradual dissolution of the order, beginning in Portugal and France in 1764 and culminating in the Pope's final decision in 1773 (Frederick II, by the way, did not go along with the anti-Jesuit agitation and refused to expel them from his principalities). But De Pauw's censure of the behavior of the missionaries also touches upon religious issues. According to De Pauw, the Jesuits and other congregations had introduced an element of fanaticism into religion,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 143

which had brought more harm than good to the believers. Asceticism and the institution of celibacy were just two expressions of this kind of religious fanaticism. Of course, fanaticism and its consequences were much older than the Jesuit order, but De Pauw claimed that the Jesuits were mainly responsible for this deplorable element in contemporary Christian religion. In this context, De Pauw even went as far as to claim that the behavior of the Jesuits was even worse than the behavior of the American Indians themselves. De Pauw suggested that the cannibalism and human sacrifice in the temples of Mexican Indians were less horrible than the autos-da-fe in Spain (R, 1:201). Was De Pauw an antireligious man, then? It is true that in addition to the fanaticism of the missionaries, he also criticizes certain dogma's in his Recherches, such as, for instance, the immaculate conception of Mary. However, this was a relatively late dogma, while older and more established and crucial aspects of the Roman Catholic creed are never criticized by De Pauw. For instance, he never said a word about transubstantiation or the Holy Trinity. Also, the fact that he always performed his religious duties in the St. Viktor Church in Xanten, never giving the slightest pretext for accusations of irreligious behavior, suggests that De Pauw, although he was critical of several aspects of Roman Catholic belief and its institutions, never became an atheist or even a deist. Now in contrast to the sharp and unconditional criticism of the Jesuits and other Europeans in America, De Pauw's treatment of the native Americans is at least, let us say, ambivalent. On the one hand, he leaves no doubt as to his opinion about the moral value of their way of life. They live in miserable conditions, they are cruel, they lack all the feelings ± including the appetite for the other sex ± that constitute the basis of social life, they entertain the most bizarre sexual aberrations and they are stupid in the sense that they are unable to comprehend more abstract thoughts. ``When the Europeans first discovered America,'' De Pauw notes, ``there was not one American who could read or write; and even in our own days there still is not one American who can think'' (R, 2:107). Not one single American has made a reputation in the arts or the sciences, and the St. Mark University at Lima has not produced a native American who is able even to write a bad book (R, 2:120).21 De Pauw clearly has no sympathy for their way of life; he abhors it. On the other hand, however, he emphatically defends the native Americans against their European enemies: However blunt we may find the inhabitants of America, it is certain that one did not have the right to slaughter them while preaching to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

144 Revolutionary Histories

them the God of peace, nor to burn them alive for not believing in incomprehensible mysteries. On the contrary, their total weakness should have excited the greatest compassion in the souls of their conquerers, if these conquerers had a soul. The blood of the Indians, spilled by the Spaniards with such profusion, still cries for revenge. . . . (R, 2:162±3) And when Dom Pernetty accuses De Pauw of blackening the poor native Americans, the canon replies: The author of the Recherches philosophiques stresses again and again that it was unjust to refuse the Americans the title of human being, and that it was even more unjust to massacre them. He did not blacken the Americans as much as the terrible theologians from the fifteenth century did. He lamented the fate of the Indians, at every page he deplored their sorrows. There is not a word in his book that does not breath the love of humanity and he even tries to mitigate the unprecedented crimes of which the least barbarous peoples of America are accused. (R, 3:134)22 Nevertheless, for all his compassion, De Pauw of course extolls European civilization. In reply to Dom Pernetty, who accused him of this, De Pauw states that his intention indeed had been to show the infinite advantages of social life as it exists in Europe over savage life as it exists in America: The nations that have produced such great men as Newton, Locke, Leibniz, Descartes, Bayle, Montesquieu, 's Gravesande are indeed superior to the barbarians in America, who are not able to read and write and who cannot count with more than their fingers. (R, 3:132±3) Throughout his book De Pauw mentions several causes of this enormous difference between the Old World and the New, including the copiousness of nature in Europe and the industry with which the Europeans cultivate their land; but the main reason is that the Europeans live under the rule of law: The Americans, with their love of the wild life, hate the laws of society and the inconvenience of education, which, while tempering the most extreme passions, could elevate them from the level of the animal to that of a human being. People have to give up a portion of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 145

their liberty in order to ennoble their being, and cultivate their mind, and without this culture they are nothing. The tree that one prunes, that one cuts for grafting and that one trains, produces the most delicious fruits. The savage has never felt the hand of the gardener, he grows for himself only; what he produces is harmful, useless, if he produces something at all. This is how the savage lives. (R, 2:161) In a sense, therefore, the American Indians live outside history.23 Of course De Pauw was aware of the existence of some flourishing European colonies on the east coast of North America, and in the third volume of his book he concedes that in that part of the continent the clearing of the forests had ameliorated the climate a little bit, thereby giving civilization a chance to develop. But he was convinced that all the efforts of the colonists could not compensate for the negative influence of soil and climate, and in general he seems to have considered the colonies as not much more than temporary outposts of European colonial empires. The real objective of De Pauw becomes even clearer when he finally widens his view and contemplates the relative merits of the Asian civilizations too. It is evident that he dislikes Oriental despotism as much as he abhors American primitivism: It is depressing that this is the way in which two-thirds of the human race lives. For the number of people that live under fair laws is smaller than one is inclined to think. America and Africa are almost completely populated with savages; despotism has stifled and stiffles Asia and penetrates many places even in Europe, that seems to be threatened by that scourge at the same moment that philosophers raise their voices against despotism. (R, 2:162)24 Clearly, De Pauw is afraid that Europe is not only threatened by the primitivism of the American savages (insofar as they serve some Europeans with a model of society), but also by the despotism of Asian civilizations (insofar as they provide other Europeans with a model of enlightened despotism). It is no wonder that after finishing his book about the Americans he started to write a book in which he demolished the picture some European philosophers had of the enlightened Chinese rulers.25

De Pauw and the exploration of the South Pacific On the face of it, there might seem to linger some contradictions in De Pauw's opinions as explicated thus far. On the one hand, he dismisses

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

146 Revolutionary Histories

the primitivism of the American Indians and takes pride in European civilization and refinement. Progress, in which De Pauw evidently believed, is only possible in the kind of society that is exemplified in Europe, and not in primitive conditions like those in America or in autocratic regimes like those in Asia. But on the other hand, he also seems to deplore all efforts to bring European civilization to other continents, especially when this is done by missionaries of the Roman Catholic Church.26 Is it because he thinks it is useless to try and export European culture to America, where even the industry of the English colonists is only able partly to remedy the natural disadvantages of the American climate and soil? (R, 3:139). Or is it because he fears that further colonization of America will only lead to the depopulation of, especially, Germany? (R, 3:253). Considerations like these most certainly played a part, but a more serious reason for warning against further colonization is revealed in the so-called ``Discours preÂliminaire'' to his Recherches philosophiques. In this introduction, De Pauw admits that the discovery of America was something unprecedented in history, but at the same time is not something to be particularly proud of: ``It is without doubt a grand and terrifying spectacle to see one-half of the globe disgraced by nature in such a way that everything is either degenerated or monstruous'' (R, 1:i). And the European conquest of this new continent was also more of a disaster than a blessing: ``It is certain that the discovery of the New World, so famous and so unjust, is one of the greatest evils that has happened to humanity'' (R, 1:ii). He reminds his readers of the killing of millions of Indians during the conquest, but he also points to the spread of syphilis in Europe: After the prompt massacre of some millions of savages the atrocious conquerer feels how he is conquered himself by an epidemic disease that, while attacking both the principles of life and the sources of generation, soon becomes the most horrible scourge of the inhabitated world. Man, already depressed by the burden of his existence, finds himself falling into misfortune with the germs of death in the arms of pleasure and the bosom of joy. (R, 1:ii±iii) If something like this happened a second time, the human race might very well disappear from the face of the earth, leaving this planet to a species less afflicted by diseases. This is not just an example of timeless pessimism ± even though the reference to the depressing burden of human existence does seem to

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 147

make De Pauw one of those rare pessimistic philosophers that also belong to the Enlightenment. But something more is at stake. De Pauw, even though he was a clergyman in a small provincial town in Germany, was very well informed about what was going on in the world, and his warnings against yet another disaster that might follow from something like the discovery of America had a very precise meaning in the context of the late eighteenth-century expeditions to the South Pacific. According to the ancient geographers Pomponius Mela and Claudius Ptolemy, there had to be a great land mass in the southern hemisphere as a counterbalance to the large continents on the northern hemisphere. Although the Portuguese explorer Magellan had sailed around the world and right across the Pacific in 1519±20 without sighting this unknown southern continent, scholars still clung to this ancient idea. In 1570, the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius published a map of the world on which he depicted, just south of the route Magellan had followed, a huge continent which he optimistically called the ``Terra Australis Nondum Cognita'' ± the not yet discovered southern continent. In the early seventeenth century Dutch explorers discovered bits and pieces of this continent, which they called New Holland, Van Diemen Land, and so forth, but the actual shape of what is now Australia remained a mystery. Expeditions to the South Pacific petered out in the course of the seventeenth and came to a halt in the eighteenth century, so that as late as the second half of the eighteenth century the question whether or not this Terra Australis really existed was still unsolved. In the eighteenth century several prominent scholars still thought that it was probable that such a continent might be found in the South Pacific. Among them was the French scientist Pierre de Maupertuis, who in 1752 wrote a Lettre sur le progreÁs des sciences, in which he exhorted European princes to send expeditions to the Pacific in order to discover what he called the ``Terres Australes.''27 The letter inspired a scholar in France, Charles de Brosses, to collect all travel reports on the Pacific and publish them in his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes in 1756.28 More than anyone else, De Brosses succeeded in putting the discovery of the Great Southern Continent on the agenda of the European nations again.29 However, it was only after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 that Britain and France were able to devote their attention to the South Pacific. The French of course were looking for compensation for the loss of their North American colonies. They settled on the Falklands, which they intended to use as a base from which to explore the South Pacific (Dom Pernetty, De Pauw's critic, was one of the settlers and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

148 Revolutionary Histories

therefore claimed some first-hand experience in the Americas). The British, too, had reason to pay more attention to other continents. Although they had won the war, they were worried about the unruliness of their American colonies and therefore lent a favorable ear to those who urged the Crown to go and look for a second British empire in the Pacific. In 1764 the Hon. John Byron was sent on an expedition to the Pacific. The results of his expedition were rather meager, and shortly after his return in 1766 a second fleet was sent to the Pacific, under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis. At the same time, the Royal Society in London discussed the possibility to send an expedition to the Pacific in order to observe the transit of Venus that would occur on June 3, 1769. This in the end was to be the expedition that was led by the most famous of all Pacific explorers, Captain James Cook. The French in the meantime had been active as well. Their most famous explorer was Louis Antoine de Bougainville. In December 1766, only a few months before De Pauw traveled to Berlin to see his book on the Americans through the press, Bougainville set out to the southern Atlantic and from there to the Pacific, armed with a copy of De Brosses' Histoire des navigations aux terres australes. All of these expeditions were publicly announced in newspapers such as Le Gazette de la Haye or Le Gazette d'Amsterdam.30 Since these newspapers (and the learned journals that contained extracts from travel reports) were also read in the western parts of Germany, it is most likely that De Pauw, on finishing his studies on the Americas, suddenly realized how relevant his material was. In Berlin, he may even have heard that in 1765 one of the most prominent members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Sigismund Ehrenreich Count Redern, had presented a memoir about the possibility of discovering the Great Southern Continent.31 All this put his work on the Americans in a different light. He had been working on his American material for almost a decade, but the new wave of Pacific exploration gave it an urgency it did not have before.32 The prospect of finding another America clearly frightened him. So many miseries were waiting both for the still hypothetical Australians and the Europeans that it might be wise to stay out of the Pacific continent completely. De Pauw himself did not really believe in the existence of an extended continent in the South Pacific. Sailors had navigated that ocean as far as 60 degrees to the South without sighting land, while the argument that there had to be such a continent to keep the earth in balance simply did not hold. If the South Pacific proved to be a rather shallow sea the counterpoise effect would already be the same. And he gave little credit to those travel stories that pretended to give information about the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 149

unknown continent, because mostly these stories were told by uneducated people, who were apt to believe whatever fables they heard (R, 2:290; 3:321). The pieces of land that had already been discovered, mainly New Holland (now Australia), might be all there was to discover of those ``terres australes.'' Nevertheless, De Pauw hoped that those who were sending expeditions to the still undiscovered and perhaps non-existent continent, after reading his book might show the prudence ``to leave the Terres Australes in peace and to cultivate their own lands,'' a clear reference, by the way, to Voltaire's novel Candide (R, 1:iv).33 For those who might try to legitimate the expeditions with scientific arguments, De Pauw adds: ``Let us not kill off the Papoua's in order to read off from the thermometer of Reaumur the climate of New Guinea. After having dared so much, there is no other glory to be gained than by exercising the moderation that now fails us. Let us put limits to our urge to penetrate into everything, in order to know everything'' (R, 1:iv).34 And against those who might object by saying that it is a Christian duty to send missionaries to those unknown continents, De Pauw points to the disastrous results of the missionary zeal in America, where the missionaries were only able to convert the natives by tyrannizing them: ``Those poor savages, let them vegetate in peace, let us deplore them if their sorrows surpass ours, and if we cannot contribute to their happiness, let us not add to their misery'' (R, 1:iv). His message is quite clear: stay out of these continents, we cannot do anything to help these poor creatures, we can only increase their miseries ± and ours. His book is a warning against new projects and new disasters. The tragic story of the discovery of America and its subsequent exploitation provided the arguments against those people who wanted to repeat the same feat in the Pacific. Paradoxically, it is De Pauw's concern for humanity that motivated him in saying we should leave those countries and their inhabitants alone.35

Conclusion Seen in the context of the contemporary colonial exploration, it is evident that De Pauw's Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains, notwithstanding its gloomy picture of the native Americans, should not be seen as an assault on everything American. The book is first and foremost a defense of the core values of European culture as interpreted by De Pauw, a culture in which equitable laws provide the best conditions for material and moral progress. European culture for De Pauw is essentially a culture of moderation, and all the tendencies he deplores

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

150 Revolutionary Histories

or condemns ± primitivism, fanaticism, despotism ± are seen as possible threats to this culture of the middle ground.36 De Pauw's book belongs to a conservative tradition of cultural criticism and as such is completely different from De Buffon's treatises on natural history. De Pauw's critique of the aggressive and exploitative elements in European culture make him a precursor of the cultural criticism that developed in Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, as we know, the restraint and moderation De Pauw preached were completely disregarded by the Europeans. The discovery of Tahiti even proved to be a new stimulus to the old myth of the ``noble savage.'' In 1767 and 1768, as De Pauw was finishing and publishing his book on the Americans, Wallis and Bougainville landed on Tahiti and were so impressed by the friendliness and the free sexual morals of its inhabitants, that their itineraries greatly fueled the myth of the noble savage. Bougainville was so struck by what he experienced that in his diary he called the island ``Nouvelle CytheÁre,'' after the island off the coast of Greece where according to mythology the goddess Venus had risen from the sea. When he published the record of his travels in 1771, his chapters on the Tahitians especially drew the attention of his readers and inspired Diderot to write his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage. De Pauw most certainly would have shuddered at reading about this new noble savage craze, but perhaps he was also glad that Bougainville, and Cook after him, had finally disproved the existence of the mythical southern continent. There were to be no more Americas.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Idea of ``America'' in Cornelis de Pauw 151

The Illusion of the Illuminati: the Counterconspiratorial Origins of Post-Revolutionary Conservatism Michael Lienesch

At the end of the eighteenth century, thinking people throughout the transatlantic world seemed positively consumed with conspiracy. Everywhere they saw plots and counterplots: agents devising devious plans in shadowy places; brotherhoods that practiced bizarre and blasphemous rituals; spies who stashed their secrets in ingenious compartments in the bottoms of barrels. Moreover, in contrast to earlier conspiracies, those at the close of the century loomed larger and seemed somehow to be more menacing than ever before, at least in the minds of many conservatives. For the French Revolution had let loose a flood of events that were so earth-shaking and extraordinary as to defy any explanation short of an intricately interconnected conspiracy to overturn religion and overthrow good government throughout the world. By the late 1790s, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic had become certain that this unprecedented plan ± this mother of all conspiracies ± was well at work, and that at its center, controlling and manipulating events around the world, was the insidious secret society of international intellectuals known as the Order of the Illuminati. This chapter examines the idea of the Illuminati conspiracy. Although it focuses on America, its setting is the transatlantic world of the 1790s, a world in which ideas crossed easily back and forth between Europe and the new United States. Its approach is conceptual and political, assuming that concepts of conspiracy and counterconspiracy are the products of politics, and that they can best be studied in context, by evaluating political debates and examining political practices.1 The perspective that it takes is informed by the work of several scholars who have found a range of factors contributing to the creation of counterconspiratorial thinking, including ideology, political partisanship, social and economic dislocation, shifting moral and philosophical perspectives, 152

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

9

153

changing and contested cultural values, and prophetic religious predictions.2 It borrows most heavily from David Brion Davis, who argues that popular perceptions of subversion, along with plans to counter or eliminate subversive elements, can be seen as attempts to create or restore a sense of national identity by contrasting one's own country to alien ``others'' or a common enemy.3 Thus for Americans of the 1790s, struggling to define a sense of themselves in an international system in which national borders were often blurred and national identities were less clear and more loosely constructed than today, concerns about conspiracies and attempts to counter them can be considered as attempts to build boundaries and define differences between America and Europe. The essay considers conspiracy and counterconspiracy in these terms, by charting the connections that brought the idea of the Order of the Illuminati from Europe to America, by describing the effect that fears of this foreign secret society had on the heated and highly partisan domestic debates taking place in the new nation, and by examining the ways that party politicians used the illusion of international conspiracy to influence the increasingly nationalistic politics of the early nineteenth century. In concluding, it suggests that the specter of the Illuminati has continued to haunt American conservatives from that time to today, and it speculates that with the economic globalization of our own time, similar concerns about international conspiracy may well be predicted to arise among new-style conservatives in Europe as well.

Constructing conspiracy Adam Weishaupt could hardly have imagined the revolutionary implications of his newfound Order of the Illuminati when he announced its beginnings on ± appropriately enough ± May 1, 1776, in the Bavarian college town of Ingolstadt. With a grand total of five members, the poorly planned organization seemed, like many of the Enlightenment utopian ventures of the time, destined to fall somewhat short of its grandiose goals of eliminating superstition and tyranny and perfecting the human race. Forced into secrecy by the strict Catholic conservatives who controlled the Bavarian state, the bungling academic liberals of the society succeeded for a while, in spite of themselves, in attracting members through some combination of anticlerical resentment and fascination with the group's peculiar secret ceremonies. In 1780, their fortunes took a giant leap forward when the prominent North German diplomat Baron Adolf Knigge enrolled in the society and established a plan for effecting an alliance between the Illuminati and certain orders of Free-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

masonry. During the early 1780s, as Masonic lodges affiliated, the influence of the society spread, and by 1784 leaders were boasting of a membership of 2,000 to 3,000 in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, including such distinguished members as the philosopher Herder, the poet Goethe, and the educational reformer Pestalozzi. With success, however, came dissension in the ranks, along with the disapproval of local officials, and in 1785 the sect was suppressed by authorities in Bavaria, its leaders were purged from state positions and forced into exile, and the organization was effectively shattered. As for its founder, Weishaupt, ``he sank slowly into obscurity.''4 Yet despite its suppression, the Order of the Illuminati seemed to survive, at least in the fears and fevered imaginations of its enemies. Throughout the 1790s, as liberal rationalism spread rapidly across

Figure 4 Stop the Wheels of Government, frontispiece from The Political Censor, or Monthly Review of the Most interesting Political Occurrences relative to The United States of America, by Peter Porcupine, Philadelphia, 1796.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

154 Revolutionary Histories

155

Europe, conservatives looked in consternation at the proliferation of liberal periodicals and reading societies. As the French Revolution turned to terror, they began to conceive of a conscious campaign to spread revolution, and they started seeking out its perpetrators, searching for some centrally controlled secret society that was the source of revolutionary success. In spite of the suppression of the Order of the Illuminati, the organization seemed like a likely possibility. As early as 1793 pamphlets were being printed that purported to expose the Order, which was described as alive and more active than ever, secretly recruiting Freemasons, reformers, and writers to the revolutionary cause.5 By 1794, amid claims of secret missions to and from France, conservative writers were indicting the Illuminati for instigating the French Revolution, and authorities all over Europe were acting to stamp out its influence by suppressing secret societies and outlawing seditious views.6 Moreover, with the publication in 1797 of Proofs of a Conspiracy, a rambling but detailed expose by John Robison, a former Freemason and professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, the Order of the Illuminati appeared to have risen again from the ashes. While ``seemingly broken up,'' Robison assured his readers, ``it still subsists without being detected, and has spread into all the countries of Europe.''7 With Napoleon's armies beginning to advance across Europe, it remained only to tie the Illuminati to the ever-expanding French Revolution. From 1789 on, conservative writers had been tracing out the tangled webs that seemed to tie together Illuminism, French Freemasonry, and Jacobinism. From within certain illuminated Masonic lodges, secret societies were said to have been created whose members included the leaders of the powerful Jacobin political clubs and such leading lights of the Revolution as Condorcet, Danton, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and the Duke of Orleans.8 Compounding these claims was the account of the notorious Sicilian imposter ``Count'' Alessandro Cagliostro, who captivated conservatives with his tales of secret meetings with Illuminati chiefs and his allegations that the Order consisted of some 20,000 lodges throughout Europe and America.9 What seemed like positive proof, however, came in 1797, with the publication of Abbe Augustin de Barruel's Memoires pour servir a l'histoire du Jacobinisme, a detailed and heavily documented description that tied together almost all the popular tales and prevailing theories into a single synthesis.10 For Barruel, a former Jesuit priest and French eÂmigre living in London, the Jacobins were only the last in a long line of villains, and the Revolution was but the present phase of a much more deeply laid and larger plan, a campaign whose aim was the destruction of religion, monarchy, and society

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

itself.11 At the center of this campaign was a corrupt alliance of French Encyclopedists, German Freemasons, and Bavarian Illuminati, with the Illuminati playing the central role in what Barruel called a ``triple conspiracy against God, the King, and Society.''12 Events in France were only the beginning: Illuminati intrigues were already paving the way for the advancing armies of revolution, not only throughout Europe but in America as well. Concluded Barruel, ``God grant that the United States may not learn to their cost, that Republics are equally menaced with Monarchies; and that the immensity of the ocean is but a feeble barrier against the universal conspiracy of the Sect!''13 For their part, Americans seemed unusually vulnerable to threats of coming conspiracy. Predisposed by their Revolutionary past to see politics as a scene of constant conspiracy, subscribing to a republican worldview that considered free governments as fragile and impermanent, unprepared to play the role of a loyal opposition, they seemed defenseless in the face of factionalism, considering every disagreement to be a potential threat to the new United States.14 As Hamilton and Jefferson fell to fighting inside Washington's Cabinet, and their sympathizers organized Constitutional and Democratic political clubs, American politics in the 1790s became rapidly polarized and increasingly impassioned.15 Making the situation worse were the inept efforts of the new French minister Edmond Genet to secure the sympathies of the American public, raising fears of diplomatic intrigue and foreign meddling.16 With tax riots like the Whiskey Rebellion breaking out in the west, Federalists became increasingly fearful, suspecting some kind of Franco-American revolutionary plot, while Democratic-Republicans seemed confused and defensive.17 By early 1798, as an embarrassed public reacted with rage against France for its duplicity in the ``XYZ'' affair, Federalists were ready to conclude that a full-scale conspiracy had been at work.18 Thus when President Adams declared a day of fasting and prayer, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse took to his Boston pulpit to deliver his Sermon at the New North Church, in which he announced that for more than 20 years a deep and detailed plan had been in operation to root out religion and overthrow good government worldwide.19 Armed with Robison's book, which had appeared in America the week before, he proceeded to expose the perpetrators of the plan, members of the secret order of ``THE ILLUMINATED,'' advocates of suicide and sexual promiscuity, enemies of patriotism and private property, who had insidiously infiltrated the established institutions of Europe and who were fomenting revolution from inside them. More to the point, he went on, the conspiracy had already arrived in America, since there were

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

156 Revolutionary Histories

157

``too many evidences that this Order has had its branches established, in some form or other, and its emissaries secretly at work in this country, for several years past.''20 The charges of conspiracy seemed to strike a chord among the clergy, particularly in New England. Disturbed by declining orthodoxy, fearful of infidel ideas, and predisposed to interpret politics in prophetic terms, they took to their pulpits in the summer of 1798 to deliver dire predictions about the cosmic consequences of the coming struggle.21 Most important among them was Yale's President, Timothy Dwight, whose sermon The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, preached at New Haven on the Fourth of July, 1798, not only confirmed Morse's charges of conspiracy, but elevated them to the level of eschatology.22 Taking as his topic a passage in the Book of Revelation, Dwight placed the events of the times in the context of the millennial endtimes, arguing that the promised sixth vial of punishment was being poured out, and that impious philosophers and false prophets were flourishing in preparation for the end of the world. Referring to Robison and Barruel (whose book he had seen reviewed in an English literary magazine), he described the evils that the triple conspiracy of atheism, enlightenment, and revolution had already let loose upon the Old World, and he assured his audience that the secret society was actively at work in America, determined to see ``our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat [and] our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati.''23 In the minds of American evangelicals, Dwight's message was unmistakable: the Anti-Christ was abroad in the world, Armageddon and its terrible battles would soon be upon them, and the end of the world was almost at hand. More than an anti-Christian conspiracy, the Society of the Illuminati was the ultimate Anti-Christian conspiracy, long predicted and long awaited, announcing the ``awful advent of the King of Kings to be at the doors.''24

Countering conspiracy By the summer of 1798, the political passions that had been building throughout the decade had culminated in a constitutional crisis, and American politics became the scene of unprecedented partisanship. Frustrated by the refusal of President Adams to declare war against France, the Federalist-controlled Congress sought strategies to assure security at home, passing the series of measures that came to be called the Alien and Sedition Laws. Federalist editors, led by William Cobbett of Porcupine's Gazette, rushed to expose immigrant influences on

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

American politics, with French, Irish, and Germans (particularly after the failed Pennsylvania tax protest ± mostly of German-American farmers ± that came to be known as the Fries Rebellion) coming in for special scorn.25 Federalist preachers, many of them taking their cue from Morse, whose May sermon had been circulated to ``every clergyman in the commonwealth,'' attacked atheists like Tom Paine and denounced Masonic societies in their sermons of the summer.26 Federalist politicians cut to the chase, aiming their attacks directly at the DemocraticRepublican party. Thus on the same day that Timothy Dwight addressed his New Haven audience, his brother Theodore, a lawyer, politician, and publisher of the conservative Connecticut Courant, was warning a crowd in the state capital at Hartford that the same secret society that threatened Connecticut's congregational standing order was also attempting to overthrow its Federalist political establishment. Providing no proof but hinting heavily, he suggested that among the chief conspirators were none other than the leading lights of the Democratic-Republican party. ``I know not who belonged to that society, in this country;'' he concluded, ``but if I were about to make proselytes to illumenatism [sic] in the United States, I should in the first place apply to Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and their political associates.''27 With Federalists claiming conspiracy, Republicans found themselves on the defensive. Almost as soon as charges were made, the Republican press began to deny them, only to find that denials tended to bring credibility to the charges. Seeking a better strategy, some began to try to turn the tables by casting doubt on the credentials of those making the claims themselves. At first the debate seemed almost academic, centering on the credibility of Robison's claims, with Republican editors reprinting poor reviews of his book from the English press, and Federalists replying with more positive ones. When critics called Robison's character into question, suggesting that his conclusions were the product of anti-Masonic bias and perhaps even irrationality, Morse leaped to defend him, reminding readers that Robison was a professor at one of Europe's great universities, and soliciting and printing endorsements from Scottish correspondents. The debate became even more personal when Republicans began to cast doubt on Morse's motives, suggesting a Federalist scheme, and Morse seemed to make matters worse by replying that such respected citizens as the Dwights shared his sentiments.28 But the fur really began to fly when critics began to demand evidence, and Morse felt forced to back up his claims by providing his own proof. Taking the offensive in a November Thanksgiving sermon at Charlestown, the printed version of which came

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

158 Revolutionary Histories

159

complete with a 50-page appendix of documents, he described the existence of a network of ``Jacobin Clubs,'' created ``after the manner of the societies of the Illuminati in Europe,'' that existed ``in all parts of the United States, from Georgia to New-Hampshire,'' and that were agreed ``upon one plan, in concert'' to ``act against our government, in favour of France.''29 Throughout the winter and early spring of 1798 and 1799, Federalists pressed the charges of conspiracy. With French armies on the attack, and French-inspired revolutions taking place in one European nation after another, Americans began to see themselves as vulnerable to either conquest or civil war. Newspapers were filled with reports of French outrages; pamphlets describing the foreign intrigues of the Directory were rushed into print and thousands of copies were sold in days; even novels suggested subversion, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, in which a mysterious ventriloquist with ties to the Illuminati exerts his baleful influence on an innocent American family.30 Federalists fed the fears, charging that armies were assembling on the coast of France to attack the United States, that plans were afoot to create a revolutionary French republic in the American West, and that suspicious characters had been seen leaving Hamburg with dispatches from the Directory containing diabolical plans to incite a slave rebellion in the South concealed in tubs with false bottoms.31 With the public mood approaching hysteria, Federalist prosecutors began to bring Republican editors to trial on charges of sedition, and Federalist judges began to convict them.32 When President Adams declared another Day of National Fast for April, Morse used the occasion to recount his charges of an Illuminati conspiracy in terms that were more certain and more extensive than ever. ``I have now in my possession complete and indubitable proof,'' he assured his audience, that such societies do exist, and have for many years existed in the United States. I have, my brethren, an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, &c. of the officers and members of a Society of Illuminati (or as they are now more generally and properly styled Illuminatus), consisting of one hundred members, instituted in Virginia, by the Grand Orient of FRANCE. . . . The members are chiefly Emigrants from France and St. Domingo, with the addition of a few Americans, and some from almost all the nations of Europe.33 Having retreated about as far as they could go, Republicans finally began to strike back. Beaten badly in the fall elections of 1798, and again

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

in the spring of 1799, they had begun to see themselves as a permanent minority in the making. Yet Federalists continued to seek conspiracies, with Federalist prosecutors bringing cases under the sedition laws, and Federalist judges handing down severe sentences. With popular opinion starting to turn against the prosecutions, Republicans began to protest, in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and they began to organize.34 Responding to Morse's claims that the Society of the Illuminati had infiltrated certain Masonic lodges in New York and Virginia, leading Masons rose up in skepticism and resentment, denouncing his so-called documents and demanding either retraction or real proof. When Morse was unable to provide anything in the way of evidence, his critics charged fraud, contending not only that the Society of the Illuminati had not involved itself in American politics, but also that the Society had little if any influence in Europe, a fact that Morse had known all along. When Morse's supporters rallied with stories of other plots, including the widely circulated claim that the American vessel ``Ocean'' had been captured and all its crew brutally butchered by the French, Republicans responded with derision, exploding the stories and tracing them back to Federalist sources. Even the publication of Barruel's book did not turn the tide of opinion, as American audiences expressed little interest in its droning descriptions ± four volumes' worth ± of the endless intricacies of European politics.35 Amid growing public skepticism, Republican pamphleteers began to turn the tables, suggesting that the only real conspiracies had been Federalist ones. Thus in his View of the New England Illuminati, published in 1799, the Reverend James Cosens Ogden, an Episcopal clergyman from New Hampshire, contended that the true American Illuminati were none other than New England's Congregationalist clergy, led by the likes of Morse and Dwight, who had been secretly plotting all along to discredit other denominations and elevate their own to the status of state church. ``Fond of power, wanting wealth, proud of their influence and success,'' he described them, ``they have, in all parts of the states, rekindled animosities that ought never to have existed among Christians.''36 The Federalist collapse had begun. As European events fell into a lull, President Adams took the opportunity to press for peace, sending a delegation to France led by the Republican Joel Barlow with the mission of restoring good relations. Within the President's own party, conservatives reacted with rage, siding with Alexander Hamilton against Adams. With charges of conspiracy still reverberating though American politics, Federalist factions began to turn them against themselves, denouncing one another as conspirators.37 Believing that Hamilton was colluding

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

160 Revolutionary Histories

161

against him with members of his own cabinet, Adams dismissed Pickering and McHenry, his Secretaries of State and War. Hamilton responded in kind by attacking Adams in a 53-page pamphlet, and Republican politicians led by an ambitious Aaron Burr circulated copies of it during the close presidential campaign of 1800. Meanwhile, with popular sentiment continuing to turn against the excesses of the Sedition laws, the prominent Federalist John Marshall himself declared them divisive and useless.38 Republicans sat back and watched, content to see the Federalists self-destruct. On the eve of the election of 1800 they were declaring that the recent conspiracy craze had been nothing more than a Federalist farce. The Connecticut Republican Abraham Bishop took the message straight into the center of the Federalist stronghold, gleefully informing a New Haven audience that ``Robison and Barruel can deceive us no more: The 17 sophistical work-shops of Satan have never been found; not one illuminatus major or minor has been discovered in America, though their names have been published, and though their existence here is as clearly proved as was their existence in Europe.''39

The collapse of conspiracy With the election of 1800, all hopes for the creation of a counterconspiratorial conservatism collapsed. On the eve of the election, Federalist conservatives, particularly those among the New England clergy, were warning that the victory of Thomas Jefferson would have apocalyptical consequences, and at least a few went so far as to predict the end of the world.40 Yet the day following the election dawned on a revitalized Republican Party, and with prosperity at home and England and France preoccupied with continental conflict, Americans could chart their own political course.41 Unrepentant Federalists did not seem to recognize the uniqueness of the situation. Throughout the 1790s, they had defined America in transatlantic terms: French-Americans like Albert Gallatin were considered to be French first, then American; Irish immigrants like those in the Society of United Irishmen were described as anti-British revolutionaries; Masonic lodges in the United States were examined closely for their ties to arcane European orders.42 Even the spectacle of Masons marching in mass at the December 1799 funeral of Grand Master George Washington did not seem to allay Federalist suspicions of Masonic secret societies.43 As for the Illuminati, Federalists like Timothy Dwight seemed more certain than ever that the conspiracy was alive and well in America. Thus in his 1801 Discourse on Some Events

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

of the Last Century, Dwight once again revived Robison and Barruel, discrediting their critics by suggesting that they were conspirators themselves. The fact that not a single example of any society connected to the Order of the Illuminati had been uncovered in the United States showed only that the organization was even more devious than anyone had suspected. After all, he explained, ``a prime part of Illuminism is to deny the existence of Illuminism; a first feature of Jacobinism is to deny every dangerous doctrine and effort of Jacobins.''44 Thus the conspiracy continued, at least in Dwight's mind. Writing in early January, after the election but before the inauguration of Jefferson, he reminded his readers that the Bible promised ``troublous times'' before the end of the world. Addressing his fellow conservatives, he put their defeat in scriptural perspective, assuring them that ``we may be cast down, but we shall not be destroyed.'' He concluded by assuring them that the battle had only begun, and that it was up to them to ``meet face to face, the bands of disorder, of falsehood, and of sin.''45 Federalists never seemed to realize the danger of self-destruction. Predisposed to think in transatlantic terms, they considered America as an extension of the European experience. Thus their conservatism was deeply distrustful of democracy, which they saw as an invitation to innovation, and therefore to corruption, decline, and eventual revolution.46 With the ascendancy of the Republican party, they became not only critics of their country but, ironically enough, enemies of it. Thus Theodore Dwight informed New Haven's Society of the Cincinnati in an 1801 oration that the conspiracy of the Illuminati had succeeded. Jacobinism, in the form of Republicanism, had carried out its insidious plan to peacefully seize power in the United States. Only New England remained unconquered, for it was only in New England that ``the people partake strongly of a common character, and are more united and more Federal, than in any other division of equal extent in the United States.'' Yet even in Connecticut, the very capital of New England Federalism, the forces of Jacobinism were threatening. ``Having seized the reins of the general government,'' Dwight went on, ``they are now levelling their open, and their secret force, at your government, your institutions, your `steady ways.''' Only Connecticut's conservatives stood in their way. ``Here then,'' Dwight concluded, ``Federalism must take her stand; and if victorious here, she may still hope to regain the government which she has lost, and to save our distracted, and falling country.''47 In the end, counterconspiratorial conservatism became its own worst enemy. As Jefferson took a pragmatic and increasingly nonpartisan

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

162 Revolutionary Histories

163

path, Federalists stuck to their conservative principles, even at the cost of electoral defeat. With America asserting a new sense of nationalism, and expanding rapidly west, they retreated to New England, regrouping into a kind of provincial party, and eventually traveling the road toward secession that took them to the Hartford convention.48 Amid claims that they had created an ``Essex Junto,'' they found themselves increasingly in the ironic position of being considered an anti-American conspiracy. Their Republican enemies, still smarting from the charges of conspiracy that had been directed against them, seemed to delight in the irony of the situation. Writing in 1802, in his Proofs of a Conspiracy, Against Christianity, and the Government of the United States, Abraham Bishop delivered the final coup, using none other than Robison and Barruel themselves to describe the creation of a new conspiracy of New England conservatives ± apparently in alliance with Napoleon and the Pope ± to establish a union of church and state and to destroy American democracy. In rambling, sometimes ranting terms, Bishop placed the conspiracy in context, arguing that this secret alliance of conservatives had plotted to overturn the republican principles that had been established by the American Revolution. In short, Federalist conservatives had become revolutionaries against the Revolution, what Jefferson would later call in a letter to Lafayette ``the Marats, the Dantons, and Robespierres of Massachusetts.''49 To Bishop, they were America's most dangerous enemies: ``THE POLITICAL CLERGY ARE THE WORST ENEMIES OF THE CHURCH. THE FEDERAL LEADERS ARE THE WORST ENEMIES OF THE REVOLUTION, AND BOTH ARE ENEMIES TO THE COMMON PEOPLE.''50

The persistence of counterconspiratorial conservatism The collapse of counterconspiratorial conservatism in the United States was only one side of the transatlantic story. In the wake of the French Revolution, conservatives throughout Europe had warned of conspiracies and secret societies of all kinds. Alien acts had been passed, committees on secrecy created, unlawful societies outlawed. After 1800, however, with the rise of antirevolutionary republicanism and antiNapoleonic nationalism, concerns about conspiracy seemed to subside in many of the countries of Europe. In England, for example, Masons rushed to declare their loyalties, prominently advertising the presence of their Grand Master, the Prince of Wales. In Austria and Germany, lodges reacted to repressive measures by repudiating French Masonry and publicly disassociating themselves from anything remotely revolu-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

tionary.51 Even in France, the Royalist Fontanes felt called to confess that he himself had been a Mason, but had always found more ennui than conspiracy at the meetings.52 Inspired by the turn from rationalism to romanticism, conservative thinkers busied themselves with creating their various versions of cultural nationalism, consigning concerns about international conspiracy to the margins of their thinking. Writing in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke allowed the Society of the Illuminati only a footnote.53 Yet counterconspiratorial conservatism did not die. Especially in the United States, where repeated waves of immigration and periodic episodes of international intervention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made the boundaries between America and the rest of the world particularly problematic, fears of secret societies reappeared repeatedly: in the anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Mormon agitation of the 1820s and 1830s, in Populist anti-Semitism and Henry Ford's preoccupation with the ``International Jew,'' and in Joseph McCarthy's charges of communist conspiracy.54 Even today, the influence of the Illuminati seems as strong as ever, at least according to the American television evangelist and presidential candidate Pat Robertson, whose 1991 book The New World Order described a secret plan to create a one-world socialist state, centuries in the making, beginning with the Order of the Illuminati, being passed on through Illuminated Freemasonry, finding financing from Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and culminating in the creation of the American Federal Reserve system, the Trilateral Commission, and the New World Order of Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George Bush.55 Moreover, with the blurring of national boundaries that is taking place as a result of the economic globalization of our own time, counterconspiratorial thinking appears to be on the rise. In the United States, where uncovering conspiracy is a popular pastime, the theories are legion, involving everything from assassinations and ancient astronauts to international Mafias and multinational corporations who control the leaders of the world by placing microchips in their heads. And while most Europeans continue to see themselves as somehow immune from the American rantings, at least a few new-style conservatives have combined New Age, Green, and Neopopulist strains into a potent brand of popular conspiracy theory that seems to be attracting audiences.56 The advent of the internet has contributed to the revival: a recent search of the World Wide Web found over 8,000 entries for ``Illuminati,'' many of them exposeÂs describing the connections of the Society of the Illuminati to such modern conspirators as the Ford Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, the Church of Scientology, and the government of Sweden.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

164 Revolutionary Histories

165

At least a few contend that the Antichrist is the chief conspirator. Many seem certain that the conspiracy will be revealed soon, in apocalyptic events beginning sometime in the year 2000 or 2001, and continuing into the new millennium. The Society of the Illuminati may have died out two centuries ago, but its legacy lives on, and we can be almost certain that it will continue to inspire even more counterconspiratorial politics in the century to come.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Illusion of the Illuminati

``I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale ± !'': Historical Sensitivity and Generic Contiguity in the Narrative Theories of William Godwin W.M. Verhoeven ``Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history. Both wish to provide a verbal image of `reality.'''1 Hayden White's provocative statement, made almost 25 years ago in his essay ``The Fictions of Factual Representation,'' is today almost as controversial as then: depending on the respective sides they stand on in the truth± fancy, history±fiction divide, most literary critics (be it in many cases under the modern appellation of ``cultural critics'') will applaud White's observation as both scientifically accurate and liberating, while remarkably many historians are still likely to regard White's comments as dangerously relativistic if not downright reductionist. And yet, White reminds us in the same essay, what is now often perceived as the opposition of history to fiction is an invention of fairly recent date. Prior to the French Revolution, says White, ``historiography was conventionally regarded as a literary art. More specifically, it was regarded as a branch of rhetoric and its `fictive' nature generally recognized.''2 Although it was widely accepted that historical writings should deal with real, rather than imagined, events, theorists from Bayle to Voltaire and De Mably were convinced of ``the inevitability of a recourse to fictive techniques in the representation of real events in the historical discourse.'' While Enlightenment historians firmly stopped short of collapsing the distinction between ``truth'' and ``error,'' they universally recognized that an adequate representation of the truth involved the imagination no less than the reason. This, however, changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it became conventional, 166

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

10

``at least among historians, to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth, hence as a hindrance to the understanding of reality rather than as a way of apprehending it.'' From then on, historiography was regarded as the ``discourse of truth,'' and literature as the ``discourse of fiction.'' This essay will not provide arguments supporting either side in this long-standing scholarly and disciplinary schism; rather, it will follow White's argument back to the period in which he locates the sources of the history±fiction divide ± the period that saw the eruption of that major faultline in the evolution of modern cultural and intellectual life, the transition from the (putative) certainties of the Enlightenment to the ambiguities of ``Romanticism.'' More particularly, the aim of this essay is to increase modern critical awareness of the contribution of the writings on the subject of William Godwin to the late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century debate concerning the Enlightenment's ``deficiency'' in historical sensitivity and the concomitant ``shortcomings'' of its theories of language and the methodology of its discursive practices. Godwin, I will argue, was very much at the forefront of the contemporary intellectual drive aimed at exposing the Enlightenment's inability to see historical knowledge, as well as the nature of language, as fundamentally problematic; yet I will also argue that although Godwin tried to restore the irrational and the discontinuous to our understanding of history, as well as fabulation and the figurative language to any adequate representation of (historical) truth, he can ultimately not be associated with what Horkheimer and Adorno have described as the late-Enlightenment's ``dissolvent rationality'' ± the dissolution of the very values, concepts, and terminology (``rationality''; ``truth''; ``human nature'') that it was founded on.3 Godwin may have wanted to question Enlightenment categories of knowledge and understanding, as well as the various genres through which these were explored and in which they came to be institutionalized; but he was certainly not a subversive genre blender ± at least, not to the extent that he aspired toward the complete collapse of the difference between genres as epistemological categories of understanding and knowledge.4

I Before I look at Godwin's contributions to contemporary historiographic theory in detail, however, I want to briefly return to the watershed in the history of historiography that Hayden White associated with the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. White

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 167

locates the prime cause for the rise of historiography as a distinct scholarly discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the widespread distrust, shared by both the Right and the Left, of any kind of mythic thinking in the interpretation of the outbreak, achievements, and failures of the French Revolution.5 The overwhelming issue that was at stake in post-Revolutionary France (but similarly, as we shall see, in contemporaneous England and the United States) was no less than the production of a new, national, bourgeois ideology. Historiography played a key role in this tussle over the invention and definition of the new citizen because, White argues, ``by its very nature, [it is] the representational practice best suited to the production of the `law-abiding' citizen. This is not because it may deal in patriotism, nationalism, or explicit moralizing but because in its featuring of narrativity as a favored representational practice, it is especially well suited to the production of notions of continuity, wholeness, closure, and individuality that every `civilized' society wishes to see itself as incarnating, against the chaos of a merely `natural' way of life.''6 Hence, says White, ``It became imperative to rise above any impulse to interpret the historical record in the light of party prejudices, utopian expectations, or sentimental attachments to traditional institutions. In order to find one's way among the conflicting claims of the parties which took shape during and after the Revolution, it was necessary to locate some standpoint of social perception that was truly `objective,' truly `realistic.'''7 Consequently, the study of history had to be demystified, as well as defictionalized. Two things stand out in White's analysis of the evolution of historiography in post-Revolutionary France which will have a significant bearing on my reading of the historiographic theories of Godwin: first, that the discipline of historical writing is a key tool in the ideological formation and reformation of the modern nation-state; and, second, that in the course of the post-Revolutionary period a major diachronic schism arose in the history of historiography in Europe, a schism that would constitute a clear break between the eighteenth-century tradition of historical narrative as a branch of rhetoric and the nineteenthcentury notions of the discipline of historiography. At the same time, however, it is important to realize that White elsewhere in his writings introduces another, synchronic split in eighteenth-century historiography itself ± which equally has important implications for the way in which I want to position Godwin's historiography in the context of contemporary debates. Thus, in his essay ``The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment,'' White distinguishes what he regards as the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

168 Revolutionary Histories

``main line'' of rationalist or ironical historical thought in the eighteenth century ± represented by Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon ± from a ``variant convention,'' characterized by a greater or lesser degree of sympathy towards the irrational, in humanity as well as È ser, and in the historical record, and represented by Leibniz, Vico, Mo Herder.8 By not allowing manifestations of the irrational (the fabulous, the legendary, the mythical) in past ages and cultures ± deemed to be less devoted to reason than their own ± to become relevant and meaningful to the present, the mainstream Enlightenment historians had in the eyes of their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opponents shown themselves to be historically insensitive. The uncompromising attitude of the rationalists towards reason, historical truth, and historiography is pointedly reflected in Pierre Bayle's statement, ``I observe that truth being the soul of history, it is an essential thing for a historical composition to be free from lies; so that though it should have all other perfections, it will not be a history, but a mere fable or romance, if it want truth.''9 What appears from this observation is that the key problem with the rationalist position is not so much that they ignored the relevance of the ``irrational'' historical record, as that they did not ± indeed, could not ± see the will to truth and the will to historical knowledge as epistemologically debatable issues in the first place. As White points out, the rationalists tended to ``compartmentalize'' the human psyche, and hence the categories of human understanding and knowledge, to such an extent that they could only see truth and fable, reason and imagination in opposition to each other ± each having different uses and belonging to different practices of human intellectual endeavor.10 This compartmentalization in turn had obvious consequences for the rationalists' choice of the preferred generic mode of representing the truth, as well as for the preferred linguistic mode; trained as they were in the rules of classical rhetoric, they were convinced that only in historiography, not in poetry or any other kind of fabulation, could the truth of past events be adequately represented, and that likewise, discursive, analytical prose, not figurative language, was the proper linguistic instrument for conveying the meaning of historical accounts. It was in fact Giambattista Vico, White argues, who was the first and foremost of eighteenth-century theorists to tear down the fundamental but fallacious Enlightenment paradigm of opposition between truth and fable, reason and fabulation, science and poetry, and to replace it by a relationship of difference. Recasting the poetic, and the fictive in general, as a generic concept that ± like the real ± must in some way or other be expressive of the human consciousness (the mere fact that it is there, indicates it must have fulfilled some human need or desire), Vico man-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 169

ages to reconfigure ``the true and the fabulous as simply different ways of signifiying the relationship of the human consciousness to the world it confronts in different degrees of certitude and comprehension.''11 In Vico's way of thinking, that is, the literally true and the fictive have become two different strategies for representing (historical) knowledge. But what really caused White to identify Vico's insights as the basis of the ``variant convention'' in eighteenth-century historiographic theory is what he calls Vico's conception of the ``third order of knowledge,'' which exists ``between the literally true and the fabulous, on the basis of which the relationship between primitive consciousness and the world could be mediated and the adequacy of the one to the other be progressively realized.'' In this way, Vico provided ``a means of at once distinguishing between the irrational and the rational manifestations of consciousness and then linking them in time as stages of a single evolutionary process.''12 Vico's insights remained largely unrecognized throughout the eighteenth century, White observes, mainly because the leading rationalist theorists of the age, given their mission of extending reason to all areas of human knowledge and understanding and of establishing the hegemony of rationalist Enlightenment culture over all previous ages and cultures, could not ``afford the luxury of conceiving historical knowledge in general as a problem.''13 For the same reason, historians like Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon could only conceive historical cultural relations in terms of oppositions, rather than continuities and subtle gradations. Although skeptic thinkers like Hume ultimately came to question the supremacy of reason over unreason in history and thus to some extent rehabilitate irrationality as part of the meaning of history, Vico's third order of knowledge, as well as the insights of other historical thinkers who attempted to reconceptualize the relationship between reason and unreason (such as Herder), remained at the margins of the late eighteenth-century historiographical debate. In the following, I will argue that the historiographic theories of William Godwin, though marginalized ± by posterity as much as by contemporary commentators ± were very much part of the same ``variant convention.''

II Ever since he wrote his magnum opus, the author of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice has been associated so consistently and almost so exclusively with the heyday of British radicalism in the early 1790s and with

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

170 Revolutionary Histories

that one text, that it has become a major preoccupation of commentators on his work to provide explanations for his alleged conversions/ transgressions into a whole string of apparently more/less noteworthy or useful writerly activities and corresponding genres: from radical political philosophy (Political Justice) to writing a fictional tale of pursuit and adventure (Caleb Williams); from the discourse of the political tale (Caleb Williams) to the discourse of the sentimental and the domestic (St. Leon); from abstract philosophical totalization (Political Justice again) to constructive cultural criticism and educationalism (The Enquirer); and from all that into further deplorable hack writing and unreadable melodrama (Cloudesley and Deloraine). From his first reviewers to recent scholars like Pamela Clemit and Jon Klancher, almost every commentator appears to either applaud or criticize Godwin for having ``renounced'' some genre or other for the sake of another genre ± which seems to suggest, if anything, that Godwin's generic versatility frustrates easy categorization of his work. But does this problem of seeming generic instability lie with Godwin, or with his critics? A closer look at some of Godwin's autobiographical statements about the early stages of his career as a professional author, suggest that his critics are on the whole much more preoccupied with his alleged genre-hopping than Godwin himself was. Thus, in his well-known preface to the Standard Novels edition of Fleetwood, Godwin briefly describes his career during the years leading up to the publication of Caleb Williams. During his first 11 years in London ± from 1782 to 1793 ± Godwin was a poor hack writer living in chambers; basically kept alive ``by the liberality of [his] bookseller, Mr. George Robinson, of Paternoster Row,'' Godwin, like most hacks, produced the usual motley assortment of pamphlets, reviews, and editorial work, but he had always felt that his real ``vocation'' was to write ``narrative[s] of fictitious nature.''14 Indeed, prominent among his early writings were three compositions of this nature, the short novels Damon and Delia, Italian Letters, and Imogen (all published in 1784). Even though most of what he wrote at the time ± including his three novels ± ``fell dead-born from the press,''15 there is nothing in his accounts of this period to suggest that Godwin ever expected to be anything but a hack writer with a dream of making a better living in the increasingly lucrative romance/novel market. That is, until an even more lucrative venture offered itself. For if it had not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the shock-waves of radical enthusiasm this caused in Britain in the months and years immediately afterwards, it is highly unlikely that Godwin would ever have been launched on his meteoric

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 171

career as the priest of radical anarchy, and one of the most prominent political scientists of his day. Kept alive all along by his bookseller while he read up on the major eighteenth-century French historians and theorists, Godwin produced his ``child of the French revolution'' under the intense pressure of having to deliver his product while the market was hot ± just like any other hack of the day.16 In fact, Godwin's autobiographical fragment ``Analysis of [his] Own Character'' (begun in September 1798) presents a soberingly disarming picture of his early career: I had an early passion for literary distinction, but an extreme uncertainty as to the species of literature by which it was to be attained. Poetry may be said to have been my first, my boyish passion. Afterwards, abandoning poetry, I hesitated between history and moral philosophy, dreading that I had not enough of elaborate exactness for the former, or of original conception for the latter. My first attempt in 1782, a very wretched attempt, was history. To this I was immediately, and at the same time reluctantly, spurred by the want of money. In 1790 I wrote a tragedy on the story of St Dunstan, which has since been laid aside. In 1791 I planned and began my Political Justice. In 1793 I commenced my Caleb Williams, with no further design than that of a slight composition, to produce a small supply of money, but never to be acknowledged: it improved and acquired weight in the manufacture. To the choice of each of these kinds of composition I was more or less determined by mercantile considerations. If I had been [left to myself] perfectly at my ease in this respect, I cannot tell when I should have gravely attempted original composition, or in what species of literature. [italics added]17 Of course, I am not trying to suggest here that Godwin was a dilettante in the field of political philosophy, or that his support for the principle of political justice was merely a matter of commercial opportunism; but the point I am trying to make here is that Godwin's crossing over from one genre into another may not so much have been a matter of consciously subverting ``the Enlightenment category of literature and its imaginary social basis, the `republic of letters,''' as Klancher has argued, nor of producing what Clemit has called, with reference to different texts, Godwin's creation of a ``masterly precedent in the reformation of genre.''18 In other words, there seems to be a tendency amongst, especially modern, critics to project paradigms of genrecrossing, genre-reformation, and genre-subversion onto Godwin's

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

172 Revolutionary Histories

writings that are not matched by the actual circumstances under which he produced them, or by the actual motives with which he produced them. I would suggest that a better strategy to assess the significance of generic categories in Godwin's writings is to allow for a greater degree of historical contingency in our readings of those categories. Indeed, Godwin himself crucially underlined the paramount influence of the contingency of space and time on the generation of ``genius'' and, by extension, of the generic nature of its ``pursuits.'' Commenting on Edward Gibbon's Memoirs of My Life and Writings in an essay in The Enquirer entitled ``Of the Sources of Genius,'' Godwin observes: Circumstances decide the pursuits in which we shall engage. These pursuits again generate the talents that discover themselves in our progress. . . . If a man produce a work of uncommon talents, it is immediately supposed that he has been through life an extraordinary creature, that the stamp of divinity was upon him, that a circle of glory, invisible to profaner eyes, surrounded his head, and that every accent he breathed contained an indication of his elevated destiny. It is no such thing. When a man writes a book of methodological investigation, he does not write because he understands the subject, but he understands the subject because he has written. He was an uninstructed tyro, exposed to a thousand foolish and miserable mistakes, when he began his work, compared with the degree of proficiency to which he has attained, when he has finished it.19 This does not sound like a comment from an author who is likely to make his choice of genre take precedence over the content of his topic; rather, it sounds like we are dealing here with an author who has a very pragmatic, almost opportunistic attitude towards genre. In fact, there is no evidence in his work to suggest that Godwin ever saw genres other than as complementary to each other, or contiguous, rather than in juxtaposition, let alone in competition with each other. Which is not the same as saying that he was not acutely aware of generic difference (on the contrary), or of the fact that in the course of his writing career he surprised his audience on several occasions by what appeared to be sudden shifts in generic modes. Indeed, whenever he feared his latest genre shift might alienate his readers, Godwin felt inclined to address their concerns. One such instance, the Preface to The Enquirer, is especially revealing in this respect. Having announced

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 173

that The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature was ``upon a construction totally different'' from Political Justice, Godwin observes that although he has adopted a new ``method of approach'' in the present work, he still deems himself ``an ardent lover of the truth.''20 Rather than renouncing his earlier work, Godwin goes on to point out that there are actually ``two principal methods according to which truth may be investigated'': The first is by laying down one or two simple principles, which seem scarcely to be exposed to the hazard of refutation; and then developing them, applying them to a number of points, and following them into a variety of inferences. From this method of investigation, the first thing we are led to hope is, that there will result a system consentaneous to itself; and, secondly, that, if all the parts shall thus be brought into agreement with the new principles be themselves true, the whole will be found comformable to truth.21 This method of inquiry, which he applied in Political Justice, Godwin considers to be ``the highest style'' available to man in the pursuit of truth.22 However, he is quite willing to admit, the method is not without risks. Thus, one error introduced almost anywhere in the argument ``is attended with extensive injury.'' Additionally, says Godwin, ``if we are too exclusively anxious about consistency of system . . . we may forget the perpetual attention we owe to experience.'' It is for this reason that for the essays included in The Enquirer Godwin chose an alternative method of investigating the truth ± ``an incessant recurrence to experiment and actual observation.'' That is, rather than presenting them with a system of political science, Godwin on this occasion wants to assist his readers ``in perfecting the melioration of their temper''; he offers the essays to the reader, ``not as dicta, but as the materials of thinking.''23 Yet nowhere in his Preface does Godwin renounce the ``theoretical ambition'' and alleged ``philosophical totalization'' of Political Justice as such ± as Jon Klancher has asserted.24 On the contrary, Godwin proudly states that he has ``as ardent a passion for innovation as ever.''25 What he does regret, however, is that in the early stages of the French Revolution the ``friends of innovation'' were ``somewhat too imperious'' in trumpeting the ``principles of Gallic republicanism'' ± and he confesses that ``he did not escape the contagion.''26 This brings Godwin to formulate the true aim of the collection, which is not to replace either the contents or the mode of inquiry of the earlier work but to encourage his readers to uphold the principles of political justice, without, however, becoming

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

174 Revolutionary Histories

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 175

There are many things discussed in the following Essays, upon which perhaps, in the effervescence of his zeal, [the author] would have disdained to have written. But he is persuaded that the cause of political reform, and the cause of intellectual and literary refinement, are inseparably connected. He has also descended in his investigations into the humbler walks of private life. He ardently desires that those who shall be active in promoting the cause of reform, may be found amiable in their personal manners, and even attached to the cultivation of miscellaneous enquiries. He believes that this will afford the best security, for our preserving kindness and universal philanthropy, in the midst of the operations of our justice.27 So, ultimately, The Enquirer appears to have little to do with any assumed ongoing genre ``reform''; rather, what Godwin was concerned with ± against the background of a Revolution spinning out of control in France and increasing anti-Jacobin hysteria and political repression at home ± was trying to keep those British radicals in check whose passions might get overheated from further exposure to the inciting language of his earlier doctrine of political justice. For this purpose he adopts in the essays in The Enquirer a method of investigating the ``truth'' that he regards as more conducive to the current sociopolitical climate than the method he had used before, in 1791±2, when the buoyancy of the period made the time just right for the discourse of political science and ``system.'' It would appear, then, that the fact that Godwin has been associated so often with the ``instability'' of genre in the late eighteenth century stems, at least in part, from a persistent misrepresention of what he saw as his contribution towards the long-term goal of the perfectibility of man and of society. As the essays in The Enquirer make abundantly clear, Godwin was above all an author interested in establishing ± not undermining ± the Enlightenment category of ``truth'': the truth about contemporary society and political systems (``things as they are''), as well as the truth about the past, insofar as it had a bearing on the present and reflected significantly on what he saw as the evolutionary historical process towards a future system of liberty and political justice. Even as early as 1789, when, according to an entry in his diary, he was entertaining ``sanguine hopes of a revolution of which [the writings of Rousseau, HelveÂtius and others] had been the precursors,'' Godwin

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

so impatient and impetuous as to cause the nation to slip into civil unrest or sansculotte barbarism:

pointed out that he desired ``such political changes only as should flow purely from the clear light of the understanding, and the erect and generous feelings of the heart.''28 It cannot be emphasized enough that the man who was about to become in the eyes of both the right and the left the chief exponent of rational anarchism, was first and foremost a product of the Enlightenment; it was his unlimited faith in the salutary effects of the enlightened mind and his unqualified trust in human nature and man's ``moral'' instinct to always (or at least predominantly) do the right thing when confronted with a choice between public good and self-interest, that led him to reject political violence as ``unnatural,'' being opposed to the long-term social and political interests and progressive amelioration of mankind. Indeed, the only beneficial Revolutions, according to Godwin, are those decided ``by compromise or patient expostulation,''29 such as, most notably, the ``Glorious Revolution'' of 1688: it appears that revolutions, instead of being truly beneficial to mankind, answer no other purpose than that of marring the salutary and uninterrupted progress which might be expected to attend upon political truth and social improvement. They disturb the harmony of intellectual nature. They propose to give us something for which we are not prepared, and which we cannot effectively use. They suspend the wholesome advancement of science, and confound the process of nature and reason. (PJ, 274) Reason and the ``right passions'' will ultimately lead to liberty and truth, to political justice and equality. But although Godwin's agenda for political change was characterized by nonviolence and gradualism, the changes it proposed were by no means less than drastic. Rather than providing a practical guideline for implementing a new form of government, Godwin's ultimate objective was a total reshaping of man's way of thinking. He believed that if one wanted to liberate the institutions of a people, one would have to liberate their political opinions first. Consequently, Godwin put great emphasis on the education of the masses, on the ``illumination of the public understanding'' (PJ, 273). An enlightened people would have an enlightened system of government, and, he added, the only enlightened form of government would be to have no government. By definition it was contrary to sound reason and true political justice to surrender one's private judgment and the authority of the individual, or to obey another man simply because he was of higher status

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

176 Revolutionary Histories

``or because a concurrence of circumstances [had] procured him a share in the legislative or executive government of our country'' (PJ, 245). Going beyond liberalism and enlightened despotism, Godwin's utopian anarchism, therefore, ultimately dismisses Rousseau's contention that governments, granted that they are based on pure reason, can promote virtue; just as it dismisses HelveÂtius's proposition that true political justice is based on the greatest good for the greatest number. The only way to ensure absolute independence and self-determination of the individual is to abolish all forms of government, even those that have been democratically elected: ``Each man should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint'' (PJ, 758). Since real social and political changes are only effected in people's minds, Godwin gives a great deal of prominence in his Political Justice to a discussion of the working of the human mind: ``we can never arrive at precise conceptions relative to [the nature of political institutions] without entering into an analysis of the human mind, and endeavouring to ascertain the nature of the causes by which its operations are directed'' (PJ, 96±7). Godwin's concept of the working of the human mind, derived almost undiluted from ideas propounded before him by, notably, Locke and Hartley, led him to formulate the following, rather crude utopian axiom: Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error: Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated: Truth is omnipotent: The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement. (PJ, 140) Godwin's notion of ``revolution,'' then, consists of a total reshaping and re-educating of the human consciousness. And this is where he sees a potentially salutary effect of the Revolutionary spirit of the age. In Godwin's view a revolution should not, in the first place, be an occasion for destroying old political structures, for denouncing social evils, and for taking revenge for years of exploitation and oppression; rather, revolutions are primarily periods when drastic psychological and ideological changes can be introduced in a relatively short period of time. That is, a revolution is first and foremost a time when far-reaching ontological choices have to be made which will determine the future of a nation ± political, social, moral, philosophical choices. At such moments in history, Godwin felt, the people should possess the right

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 177

178 Revolutionary Histories

``In the history of every people . . . there are moments in which, uncertain of the side they shall choose, and balanced between political good and evil, they feel a desire to be instructed; in which the soil . . . is in some manner prepared, and may easily be penetrated by the dew of truth. At such a moment, the publication of a valuable book may give birth to the most auspicious reforms.'' (PJ, 278) At the time he first conceived the idea to branch out into political philosophy and interrupt his career as a romance writer, the Revolution in France had prepared the minds of British progressives for true political justice; it was Godwin's Political Justice that was to be the spark of inspiration, the seed of truth for which they were waiting. Through its cool, clear, abstract reasoning, the treatise was designed to revolutionize the political views of the nation, in accordance with Godwin's principle ± ``Let truth be incessantly studied, illustrated and propagated, and the effect is inevitable'' (PJ, 280).30 Being an educationalist before he was a revolutionary, and a utilitarian before both, Godwin was acutely aware of the centrality of language to any discourse of truth: ``Language is as necessary an instrument for conducting the operations of the mind, as the hands are for conducting the operations of the body.''31 Yet at the same time he was very much concerned about the unreliability of all available languagebased methods of exploring and representing ``truth.'' Locke may have optimistically defined the proper purpose of language to be the means to ``convey the knowledge of things,'' but Godwin did not share his confidence in language as the medium of truth. In his view, neither the author/speaker nor the reader/listener had sufficient control over the discourse they produced and consumed, respectively, for the meaning of it to be established with any kind of certainty. ``To ascertain the moral of a story, or the general tendency of a book,'' Godwin remarks in an essay in The Enquirer, ``is a science peculiarly abstruse. As many controversies might be raised upon some questions of this sort, as about the number six hundred and sixty six in the book of Revelations. . . . It seems the impression we derive from a book, depends much less upon its real contents, than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it.''32 If it is difficult enough to determine the ``tendency,'' or intended meaning, of fictional discourse, say, Homer's Iliad or Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Godwin argues

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

information so that they can come to the right conclusions. Quoting from HelveÂtius's De l'homme, Godwin says:

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 179

History is in reality a tissue of fables. There is no reason to believe that any one page in any one history extant, exhibits the unmixed truth. The story is disfigured by the vanity of the actors, the interested misrepresentations of spectators, and the fictions, probable or improbable, with which every historian is instigated to piece out his imperfect tale. Human affairs are so entangled, motives are so subtle and variously compounded, that the truth cannot be told. What reasonable man then can consign his reputation to the Proteuslike uncertainty of historical record, with any sanguiness of expectation?''33 Not only is the reality of past events and human behavior too complex to be adequately described in any historical account of it, the historian will never be able to cope with the problem of historical distance, and hence with his own subjectivity, either. ``It is a trite observation,'' Godwin remarks in his essay ``Of History and Romance,'' ``to say that the truth of a public transaction is never really known till many years after the event. The places, the dates, those things which immediately meet the eye of the spectator, are indeed as well known as they are ever likely to be. But the comments of the actors come out afterwards; to what are we the wiser? Whitlock and Clarendon, who lived upon the spot, differ as much in their view of the transactions, as Hume and the whig historians have since done.''34 Effectively, what he is saying here is that historical ``facts'' are forever beyond the grasp of the historian, and it is for this reason, Godwin snidely observes, that if, as has often be claimed, philosophers ``blunder in the dark . . . there is perhaps no darkness . . . so complete as that of the historian.'' In these circumstances, Godwin concludes, ``the man of taste and discrimination'' is bound to exclaim, ``Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance.'' What is so remarkable for someone who had such unshakable faith in the Enlightenment doctrine of ``truth,'' is that Godwin remains curiously unperturbed by the fundamental instability of language as a vehicle for meaning and by the indeterminacy of historical reality. For even though Godwin was well aware that in the powerplay of contemporary politics ``[w]e too often see the lives and liberties of men suspended upon hair-breadth constructions, upon distinctions of grammar, and subtle, philological discussions respecting the meaning

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

elsewhere in The Enquirer, it is entirely impossible to do so in the case of historical discourse:

of words,''35 his off-hand dismissal of the evidence of facts as ``uncertain . . . contradictory . . . and unsatisfying'' (``HR,'' 297), and of history as ``little better than romance under a graver name'' (``HR,'' 298) seems to betray an attitude towards the issues of a knowable past and the will to historical knowledge that is dangerously close to being naively relativist. However, the opposite turns out to be the case. Godwin's stance toward the problem of language again reflects his sobering pragmatism and boundless utilitarianism. Taking up Rousseau's point that ancient history may essentially be a tissue of fables, but at least such fables ``as have a moral perfectly adapted to the human heart,'' Godwin provocatively states: ``I ask not, as a principal point, whether [a fable] be true or false? My enquiry is, Can I derive instruction from it? Is it a genuine praxis upon the nature of man? Is it pregnant with the most generous motives and the most fascinating examples? If so, I had rather be profoundly versed in this fable, than in all the genuine histories that ever existed'' (``HR,'' 297). Ultimately, that is, it is not the meaning of a linguistic communication that is important: it is the effect on the consciousness and social behavior of the reader/listener. Likewise, it is not the nature of the representation of past events as such that is important: it is the use to which one's knowledge of the past is put, that is important. Thus, in a radical sweep, Godwin moves beyond the problem of language as a representational medium altogether: unlike Locke, Voltaire, and other rationalists, he is no longer interested in the modes of linguistic expression and historical representation but in modes of thought. In other words, Godwin may have undermined the use of language as a tool for epistemological exploration, but he retains, indeed strengthens, its use as a tool for ideological exploration and change. Godwin expands this bifurcation of the use of language into its use in the abstract and in practice to a similar, generic division of the study of history in his seminal essay ``Of History and Romance.'' ``The study of history,'' he observes, ``divides itself into two principal branches: the study of mankind in a mass, of the progress, the fluctuations, the interests and the vices of society; and the study of the individual'' (``HR,'' 291). The former kind of historiography would most typically produce what he refers to as the ``history of nations,'' or history ``in the abstract''; the latter, being the ``record of individuals,'' would result in what is nowadays called historical biography or ``microhistory.'' Godwin's historiographic split has not only received a good deal of critical attention lately, it has also led to a widespread misunderstanding of his theories on the study of history. For one thing, although

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

180 Revolutionary Histories

superficially Godwin appears to resolutely dismiss abstract or universal historiography, it is actually the practioners of this branch of historiography that he is critiquing rather than the method of historical exploration itself. ``To interest our passions, or employ our thoughts about personal events, be they of patriots, of authors, of heroes or kings,'' Godwin lashes out at the universalists, ``they regard as a symptom of effeminacy. Their mighty minds cannot descend to be busied about any thing less than the condition of nations, and the collation and comparison of successive ages. Whatever would disturb by exciting our feelings the torpid tranquillity of the soul, they have in unspeakable abhorrence'' (``HR,'' 291). Where universalists like Hume, Voltaire, and Robertson have gone wrong is that they have sublimated historical record into historical ``fact,'' and abstract historiography into historical ``truth.'' In what is certainly one of his most provocative and self-conscious passages in his key essay on the theory of historiography, Godwin subversively disqualifies the conventional generic tags and concepts: ``That history which comes nearest the truth, is the mere chronicle of facts, places and dates. But this is in reality no history. He that knows on what day the Bastille was taken, and on what spot Louis XVI perished, knows nothing. He possesses the mere skeleton of history. The muscles, the articulations, every thing in which the life emphatically resides, is absent'' (``HR,'' 297). In sharp contrast to universal history, ``individual history'' can be ``a most fruitful source of [social] activity and motive,'' offering an insight into ``the operation of human passions; . . . the empire of motives whether groveling or elevated; . . . the influence that one human being exercises over another, and the ascendency of the daring and the wise over the vulgar multitude'' (``HR,'' 293). It is for this reason in particular that Godwin champions individual history over universal history: unlike the latter, the former allows the historian to sidestep that chimeric category of empirical ``fact'' and to explore instead the underlying sociopsychological dynamics that produce these ``facts'' ± a fact being but the projection of meaning onto an ``event''; an event being caused by an ``agent''; an agent being activated by ``motives''; and motives being generated by thoughts or consciousness (sometimes referred to as ``passions''). Yet, the practitioners of individual historiography ultimately fare little better at the hands of Godwin than universal historians; for although they may excite in us a certain rapport with the emotions experienced by a historical personage, ``we simply enter into the feelings with which these authors recorded them'' (``HR'' 296). In the final analysis, therefore, Godwin dismisses both branches of historiography

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 181

because neither of them in the long run lives up to what he as a utilitarian reformer considers to be ``the genuine purpose of history,'' viz. ``to enable us to understand the machine of society, and to direct it to its best purposes'' (``HR,'' 293). Fortunately, says Godwin, coming to the real crux of his argument, there is ``one further mode of history writing, and this is the mode principally prevalent in modern times'': it is a mode of writing in which ``the narrator is sunk in the critic,'' producing a ``species of literature, which bears the express stamp of invention, and calls itself romance or novel'' (``HR,'' 298). Possessed of what Godwin calls this ``licentia historica,'' the writer of romance, unlike the historian, can scrutinize (conjecturally, if not empirically) the very nature of man's real social existence ± for Godwin a ``reality'' that, as a category of knowledge, far outstrips any concept of historical ``reality.'' It for this reason, Godwin concludes, that Romance . . . may be pronounced to be one of the species of history. The difference between romance and what ordinarily bears the denomination of history, is this. The historian is confined to individual incident and individual man, and must hang upon that his invention or conjecture as he can. The writer of romance collects his materials from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs; then generalises them; and finally selects, from their elements and the various combinations they afford, those instances which he is best qualified to pourtray, and which he judges most calculated to impress the heart and improve the faculties of his readers. In this point of view we should be apt to pronounce that romance was a nobler species of composition than history. (``HR,'' 299) Romance, in other words, can reach those aspects of man's past and contemporary social existence and experience that other historiographic methods of exploration (universalist or individual) cannot reach; that is, rather than merely registering the records of past (national) events, or the records of historical personages, the romance uses as the raw data from which it constructs its narrative account of the past ``the records of human affairs'' ± the latter being at the same time wider and narrower in range than either the full record of a nation's past events or that of an individual's past: while the ``record of human affairs'' will not match the full taxonomy of an era's objective historical ``facts,'' it will include records that, while not normally registered as historical facts, are yet ``historical'' (in that they existed in history ±

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

182 Revolutionary Histories

notably those records pertaining to the Enlightenment category of ``human nature'' as the collective of all lived, social relations); and while it will contain fewer ``factual'' details than are commonly found in the biography of a historical figure, it will eclipse the historical biography by registering those events that reflect the experience of mankind as a whole (and that are in that sense ``true,'' even though they are not necessarily ``factual''). Positioning the romance somewhere between universal history and individual history, between ``fact'' and ``fiction,'' Godwin comes close to claiming for it a status not dissimilar to Vico's third order of knowledge. Like Vico, Godwin is trying to establish a new way of exploring the progressive dynamic between the rational and irrational, between the historically represented and nonrepresented manifestations of man's consciousness ± his lived, social relations. That is, rather than in purely empirical or fictional representations of ``truth,'' Godwin is ultimately interested in ideology ± in the material production of ideas, beliefs, and values in social life. And like Althusser, Godwin's approach to ideology is less rationalist than positivist, and less epistemological than sociological: he is not so much interested in whether the representation of the past is true or false, as in whether or not it reflects man's lived relations to social reality, which are largely noncognitive, and therefore elusive and indeterminate in the first place. Ideology is hence a matter of experience for Godwin, rather than of insight. And because that is so, the way to influence the social behavior of the mass of mankind is not by putting one's faith in an empirical discourse, nor in a fictional or poetic discourse, but in the ``delineation of consistent, human character, in a display of the manner in which such a character acts under successive circumstances, in showing how character increases and assimilates new substances to its own'' (``HR,'' 301). Although in ``Of History and Romance'' Godwin may identify the ``writer of romance'' as the ``writer of real history,'' this by no means constitutes an unconditional dismissal of history as a stable category of knowledge, nor of historiography as a valid tool for historical exploration. In fact, Godwin is not so much arguing against historiography (universalist or individual) as in favor of a contiguous, generic method of historical investigation ± the fictional historical narrative or ``romance.'' Nowhere in his essay, for instance, does he reject the empirical mode of universalist historiography as the taxonomy of past events, albeit that in his assessment it has a specific and hence limited use, viz. to identify certain general trends or evolutionary continuities in the history of mankind: ``The fundamental article in this branch of histor-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 183

ical investigation, is the progress and varieties of civilisation'' (``HR,'' 291). Godwin's dissolving the certainty of historical events and ``facts'' into the multiple possibilities of alternative or contiguous narratives should therefore not be mistaken for a bid for the transformation of genre, let alone of one single genre of historical narrative into a single other one. And since Godwin never in the first place dismisses philosophical totalization in historiography as such, there can be no ``puzzling'' volte-face at the end of his essay, either, of the sort claimed by Jon Klancher, when he writes: ``Unexpectedly Godwin ceases to promote the project of literary genre-reform . . . and abruptly forestalls it, as though his own argument for narrative genre-transformation were itself to be read as a `fiction.'''36 Which is not to say that Godwin in the final analysis does not somewhat readjust the balance between the writer of romance and the historian; thus, on the one hand, he observes that ``[t]o write romance is a task too great for the powers of man, and under which he must be expected to totter. . . . To sketch a few bold outlines of character is no desperate undertaking; but to tell precisely how such a person would act in a given situation, requires a sagacity scarcely less than divine''; while, on the other hand, he points out that although the historian might ``not understand the character he exhibits,'' the ``information'' he extracts from ``the system of the universe . . . must be true'' (``HR,'' 301). But by making a last-minute ``deduction'' from his previous ``eulogium of the romance writer,'' Godwin is neither quite rehabilitating the historian, nor entirely abandoning the writer of romance after all. Rather, he wants to acknowledge that all accounts of the past as ``discourses of truth'' have their limitations since they are all contingent upon man's imperfect grasp of the myriad of physical and phenomenological details contained in historical time and space: ``Naturalists tell us that a single grain of sand more or less on the surface of the earth, would have altered its motion, and, in process of ages, have diversified its events. We have no reason to suppose in this respect, that what is true in matter, is false in morals.'' But even at this point Godwin is too much of a positivist and utilitarian to be tempted to take up the postion of the skeptic. Thus, he ends his essay by reminding us that even if ``the sciences and the arts of man are alike imperfect, and almost infantine,'' there is no real alternative; for he that ``will not examine the collections and the efforts of man, till absurdity and folly are extirpated from among them, must be contented to remain in ignorance, and wait for the state, where he expects that faith will give place to sight, and conjecture be swallowed up in knowledge'' (``HR,'' 301). No real alternative to ignorance and defeatism, that

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

184 Revolutionary Histories

is, other than retaining our will to knowledge, and our will to (historical) truth, employing all discourses of truth available to us. For if one thing is clear about Godwin's position it is that, despite the fact that in his eyes historical fact is fundamentally suspect, historiography of whatever kind unreliable, and the meaning of language by definition indeterminate, he had ± on his own evidence from an autobiographical fragment written in 1798 ± ``a most unequivocal, perhaps unmingled, passion for truth and right modes of sentiment.''37

III ``No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale ± !''38 At his most desperate moment in his narrative, when the truth about his life and character seem about to vanish forever into the quagmire of England's corrupt social and judicial systems, Caleb Williams paradoxically appeals to the telling of a tale as his last remaining hope of establishing the truth and seeing that justice is done. Caleb's outcry, so much will be clear from the above, can be regarded as Godwin's own defiant challenge to all those contemporaries who felt that the battle over ``truth'' could be won by either force or abstract reasoning alone ± whether they were disciples of Gallic republicanism willing to set fire to the land, or rationalist historians regarding the nation's future, as well as its past, as part of an eternal present in which Truth reigned absolute under the auspices of triumphant Reason. With Political Justice, the ``oracles of thought'' that according to William Hazlitt dealt by far the most resounding ``blow to the philosophical mind of the country,'' barely released into the public domain, Godwin, in one of the era's most extraordinary shifts of generic mode, exchanged political science for fictional narrative;39 but what was even more extraordinary was that neither the man's philosophy nor his political ambition had undergone any similar change in the shift: like Political Justice, Caleb Williams was explicitly written and designed to ``constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before.''40 For his long-time friend and secretary James Marshall may have rejected the romance in no uncertain terms as an utter failure and unworthy of the great mind that wrote it,41 but all the evidence suggests that Godwin from the moment he conceived the tale was in absolute control of his material, for no other reason than that he wanted to be in absolute control of the reader's responses to the story. Indeed, judging by his own account of the composition of the novel, Godwin planned, structured, and wrote Caleb Williams with almost mechanical control and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 185

186 Revolutionary Histories

analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing [his] metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses, which led the personages [he] had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.45 The end result was exactly that type of narrative discourse that had ``a powerful hold on the reader, which can scarcely be generated with equal success in any other way''46 ± the type of discourse, in fact, that he described three years later in ``Of History and Romance'' as the ``true history'' of the ``records of human affairs.'' Caleb's autobiographical narrative may be but a story, but, then, as he self-consciously points out on the opening page, it is a story that ``will at least appear to have that consistency, which is seldom attendant but upon truth.''47 Truth, rationality; human nature: they were never in Godwin's thinking and writing quite the absolutes that Horkheimer and Adorno associated so dismissively with what they saw as the Enlightenment's ``totalitarianism'' ± its deep-seated distrust of ``whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility.''48 Indeed, Godwin was a utilitarian, and one who believed that every discourse of truth had to be grounded in human nature, and that human nature formed the link between, and hence contained both past and present; but, unlike the mainstream Enlightenment thinkers, he did not regard the present as the culmination of the past; rather, for Godwin the present was merely an intermittent stage in the necessary evolution of the political happiness of mankind. Historical sensitivity was therefore for him a precondition for responsible citizenship in the present, and for the gradual attainment of political justice in the future. He was reminded of this many years after he had achieved notoriety with Political Justice when, in the course of 1812, he began to receive excited letters from Percy Shelley, who had just written An Address to the Irish People in the hope of triggering a revolution there; in one of his letters to Shelley, Godwin observed: The light in which I should wish every man, every young man in particular, to consider the study of history, is a means of becoming

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

surgical precision.42 More important than that, after a false start using a third-person narrative, he crucially decided to make ``the hero of [his] tale his own historian.''43 This, in combination with the hero's ``unconquerable spirit of curiosity'' and deep-rooted sense of guilt,44 enabled him to metamorphize the conventional romance of the day into an

The Narrative Theories of William Godwin 187

Then, in 1812, as in 1793, historical sensitivity toward man's past social experience was the key to Godwin's theories of historiography. And as to his preferred mode of historical discourse, he still had only one guiding principle: That discourse is the discourse of ``truth'' that in any given stage in the progressive evolution of human nature proves to be the most effective in influencing man's thinking and acting in society.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

acquainted with whatever of noble, useful, generous, and admirable human nature is capable of designing and performing. To see all this illustrated by examples carrying it directly into act, is perhaps superior to all the theories and speculations that can possibly be formed.49

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History Frank Ankersmit

``Tritt man vom Humeschen Bild des Staatslebens und der es tragenden geschichtlichen KraÈfte zu dem von Burke geschauten Bilde È ber, so ist es alsob genau dieselbe Landschaft, die eben im heru È chtern vor uns lag, in der warmen Sonne Morgengrauen kalt und nu zo leuchten beginnt.'' F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 273

Introduction: Burke versus Rousseau Historians nowadays tend to be democratic with regard to causality. They no longer believe in an ``aristocratic causalism'' claiming that only ``big'' causes can produce ``big'' consequences; contemporary historians are ready to recognize that small events can have big events as their legitimate offspring.1 A perfect illustration of this new, democratic regime governing cause and effect in history is Rousseau's psychology. Self-evidently, Rousseau's psychology is a mere trifle if compared to those majestic social forces that used to fascinate Marxist historians ± and not only then. Yet we all know that what went on in Rousseau's mind powerfully contributed to the downfall of a proud and thousandyear-old monarchy ± and are prepared to accept this as a fact. And there is more. For the regime governing causes and effects in human psychology is even more democratic. As we all know, psychoanalysts preferably discover the causes of human behavior in the most banal and insignificant events of human life. The most trivial of events in our childhood may deeply influence the rest of our whole life. Once again, Rousseau presents us with a striking illustration of this truth. Starobinski begins his brilliant La transparance et l'obstacle with the account of a most trivial event in Rousseau's youth. In his Confessions 188

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

11

Rousseau recounts that, when staying with the Lambercier family as a young boy, he was unjustly accused of having deliberately broken the teeth of Mme. Lambercier's comb.2 This completely trivial event proved to be utterly traumatic to the young and oversensitive child. He experienced the event as the opening up of an unbridgeable gap between the social world and himself. And Rousseau was well aware, says Starobinski, that the event and the way he experienced it formed the ultimate basis of most of his social and political thought. ``DeÁs ce moment je cessai de jouir d'un bonheur pur,'' Rousseau commented. He goes on to explain that from that moment onwards he was permanently aware of having been excluded from all meaningful and satisfactory human contact by an intrinsically alien, uncomprehending, and hostile social world. The young boy's crucial experience was, as Starobinski put it, ``l'opposition bouleversante de l'Ãetre innocent et du paraõÃtre coupable.''3 The experience instilled in him with a traumatic intensity the opposition between the world of his innermost self and of natural innocence on the one hand, and, on the other, a social reality supremely indifferent to authenticity and private conviction. Appearences may be completely at odds with how things really are ± and nobody seems to care. This is what Rousseau could never accept nor endure. This is why Rousseau hated history and why his political thought can well be seen as a permanent effort to undo, in one way or another, the workings of history. History is for him the history of how layer upon layer of appearences precipitated upon the pure crystal of human nature and succeeded in hiding that pure crystal below the sediments of spurious appearance. To use Starobinski's terminology, history is the ``obstacle'' which is primarily responsible for our exchanging the original ``transparency'' of human nature for the murky, obscure, and impure world of chaos, injustice, and struggle. History gives us the perversion and destruction of human nature. To be more exact, what Rousseau condemns in history is not so much the obstruction of natural goodness ± for like most of his contemporaries Rousseau held a fairly cynical view of human nature ± as history's concealment of what is the true foundation of the just political order. The real opposition in Rousseau's thought is that between unclarity and transparence; and the opposition between good and evil is a mere corollary of this more fundamental, essentially Cartesian opposition. Because Rousseau and Burke agreed in condemning the triumphant and self-congratulatory complacency of the Enlightenment,4 it is all the more striking that they assigned completely different roles to history in

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 189

their attack on the Enlightenment. Rousseau attacked the Enlightenment's blind spot for how history had tainted its certainties about the true and the good; Burke attacked the Enlightenment's blind spot for how history can reveal to us what are the truly significant facts about social life. In a sentence: in opposition to the Enlightenment's dissociation of history and human nature, Rousseau claimed that history conceals human nature, whereas for Burke human nature reveals itself only in history. As if attempting to refute Rousseau, Burke wrote in his ``Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs'' the famous and often-quoted words: ``for man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated and most predominates. Art is man's nature.''5 In the first place we should observe with how little reluctance Burke avails himself here of naturallaw terminology; he has no hesitation in speaking about ``human nature'' and is no less in agreement with the traditional natural-law theory by identifying human nature with Reason. Even more so, Burke graciously subscribes to the tired naturalist metaphor of the convenant founding society: ``now, though civil society might be at first a voluntary act (which, in many cases, it undoubtedly was,) its continuance is under a permanent standing convenant, coexisting with society.''6 Hence, the idiom of Burke's political philosophy does not differ from the one that was used by Rousseau (and by most natural-law theorists of the end of the eighteenth century). But precisely this shared background enables us to see where Rousseau and Burke fundamentally differ with regard to the relationship between nature and history. For where Rousseau sees an irreconcilable opposition between history and nature, it is for Burke only in history that human nature can articulate itself. ``Art is man's nature,'' that is, human nature requires the ``artificiality'' of human history to express itself. So in fact Burke is no less a naturallaw theorist than Rousseau7 ± but with the all-important qualification that he historicizes man's nature ± we are what we are, because History has made us into what we are.

Prejudice, wisdom, and folly If history is the most powerful generator of prejudice, we no longer need to be amazed by Burke's utterly un-Enlightened eulogy of prejudice: ``you see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

190 Revolutionary Histories

degree; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.''8 Burke defends prejudice not, as Gadamer would much later defend it, with the argument that only prejudice may provide us with a point of view that gives us a handle on the world we are living in.9 No prejudice, no point of view; and no point of view, no understanding of the world either. For according to Gadamer it is only thanks to the prejudices separating the historian from the people investigated by him that the historian becomes aware of being confronted by a historical problem in the true sense of that word; and it is only then that the whole machine of ``Verstehen'' (as analyzed by Gadamer) can be set in motion. Differences in prejudice(s) are, so to speak, the stuff that history is made of. Put differently, for Gadamer prejudice places the historian opposite to historical reality; even more, it is only thanks to this opposition that historical reality comes into being. This is where we may observe the transcendentalist residue in Gadamer's own argument ± however much Gadamer may have hoped to have defeated transcendentalism by means of a Heideggerian ontological analysis of what it is to be a human being10. In this way we could see Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudice as a historicization of that pure, ahistorical Kantian cognitive self. But by historicizing the transcendental self, we have not yet got rid of it ± as Gadamer himself so much liked to believe. On the contrary, by doing so we have protected transcendentalism against the accusation of being naievely ahistoricist; hence, we have now (unwittingly) given to transcendentalism precisely its strongest form, instead of removing it from the philosopher's agenda. Transcendentalism can only be avoided after we have recognized that the problems that hermeneutics, Gadamerian or not, attempts to solve are all themselves a spin-off from transcendentalism. No transcendentalism, no hermeneutics, to put it succinctly; and as soon as one takes the hermeneuticist's problems seriously, one has already accepted transcendentalism, whether one likes it or not. Since Gadamer's dealings with prejudice have been so unsuccessful (though we must praise Gadamer for avoiding the all too easy condemnation of prejudice and for properly recognizing its value and significance), it becomes all the more interesting to consider Burke's views on prejudice. Most importantly, Burke's rehabilitation of prejudice, unlike Gadamer's, is free from transcendentalist reminiscences. The explanation is that for Burke the human individual must always be thought of as being absorbed by sociohistorical reality, whereas transcendentalism always construes an opposition between the self and reality. An opposition

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 191

that, in spite of Gadamer's attempt to exchange epistemology for (Heideggerian) ontology, is still present in Gadamer's position in the historian's unceasing, but never successful, and Tantalus-like effort to get to the ever unattainable meaning of the text. However, for Burke, prejudice does not place us opposite to sociohistorical reality ± according to him it is only thanks to prejudice that we truly become part of it. Prejudice does not place us outside sociohistorical reality (transforming reality into an enigma challenging all our cognitive powers to the utmost), but inside it (which makes the world essentially unproblematic). Burke's Aristotelianism (to which we shall return later on in this essay) safeguarded him against all transcendentalist temptations. Though it must be admitted that he was probably little aware of why and where his own Aristotelian mental map differed so fundamentally from that of so many of his contemporaries (and of later theorists, such as Gadamer). Anyway, this is what, according to Burke, the French revolutionaries with all their striving for clarity, for ``transpararency,'' and for a political Cartesianism were never able to comprehend.11 They longed for that clarity, even thought that it was within their reach and that, insofar as this clarity was realizable, everything in sociopolitical reality could now be manipulated by them at will. By forgetting to what extent even they were absorbed by sociopolitical reality, they could believe that they had the possibility of placing themselves opposite to it ± in the way that the physicist is placed opposite to his experimental set-up. They now believed that they could experiment with sociopolitical reality just as freely as biologists with their mice; thus Burke accuses them of seeing the citizen ``as they do mice in an airpump, or in a recipient of mephitic gas.''12 But this kind of scientific objectivity and Rousseauistic transparency is a foolish and unrealistic ideal in politics; ± and where Rousseau, and, with him, the French revolutionaries discern the alpha and omega of all meaningful politics, Burke could only see a denial of all that belongs to the essence of politics. One might well define politics as that domain of human activity where eo ipso clarity and transparency are unattainable; we need politics for no other reason than in order to deal in a most responsible and careful way with this sort of intractable problem arising in a reality without clarity and transparency. It belongs, therefore, to the very nature of politics that an approach as recommended by Rousseau and as practiced by the French revolutionaries is utterly inappropriate to it. Rousseau and the French revolutionaries would undoubtedly retort that it is precisely prejudice that continuously blurs political reality, and

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

192 Revolutionary Histories

that it is therefore prejudice which stands in the way of the desired clarity and precision of the right political view. In harmony with the sapere aude of the Enlightenment they would conclude that a relentless war on prejudice is therefore the basis and presupposition of all rational politics; for as long as prejudice can successfully sow confusion in the heart of the citizen, a rational politics will be distracted from its proper course. But when reacting to this declaration of war on prejudice and on tradition by the French revolutionaries, Burke exclaims: ``in this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.''13 For it is man's nature, as acquired in history, to allow himself to be led by prejudice, and it is in prejudice that his nature announces itself. For example, why do we respect our princes and parliaments: ``Why? Because, when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected'' (Burke's italics).14 And, once again, ``natural'' does not refer here to an inclination towards traditionalism that is part of human psychology, but to the fact that we could never completely objectify such ``ideas'' and could never completely isolate them from other such ``ideas'' ± as is the case with the variables in a scientific law. Such a ``thinking away'' of the prince or of parliament, in order to find out what the world would look like without them ± i.e. the kind of thought experiment that is the presupposition of the possibility of the sciences ± is an almost impossible task in sociopolitical reality. For that sort of ``idea'' has its ramifications for all sociopolitical reality and cannot be isolated from others. And we have to deal with prejudice when ± as will almost always be the case ± these ramifications indeed reach further than rationalist, apriorist schemes seem to suggest. Burke's view of prejudice is, therefore, even more ontological than Gadamer's, in whose thought epistemological seductions still betray themselves when he emphasizes the cognitive, hermeneutic advantages of prejudice.15 It is here that one discovers what is, arguably, most profound in Burke's political philosophy. He recognizes that the transcendentalist, epistemological regime of the true versus the false, the Enlightenment's trusted compass, is helpless in the sphere of politics. In that sphere our only help can be found in the regime of wisdom versus folly. And the distinction between the two regimes is that the second does not presuppose the opposition between the world and the cognitive self characteristic of all (even of Gadamer's) transcendentalism. The world is not the exclusive and decisive criterion for distinguishing wisdom from folly ± as it undoubtedly is in the case of truth and falsity ± for the distinction between wisdom and folly is, no less, a distinction between subjects,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 193

i.e. between persons and between all that contributes to their personality. The regime of wisdom and folly is not a regime opposing chunks of reality to certain chunks of language ± as is the case with the regime of truth and falsity ± but opposes combinations of certain chunks of reality together with certain chunks of language to other combinations of other such chunks of reality together with other such chunks of language. Wisdom and folly relate to the kind of patterns we may discern in how people act; and human action always gives us this combination of language (or thought) and the world. Both regimes are fundamentally different: under certain circumstances it may be foolish to utter a certain truth, and wisdom is not incompatible with falsity. For example, who would speak the truth if a German Feldwebel were to ask us whether we have Jewish persons in hiding in our house? And we should note that Kant, whose respect for the regime of truth and falsity was greater than that of any other, would have required us to speak the truth even under such circumstances: think of Kant's fiat iustitia, pereat mundus and of his È r die Theorie richtig ist, categorical claim ``dass alles was in der Moral fu Èsse.''16 Èr die Praxis gelten mu auch fu An important implication follows from this. Obviously, we can only decide about wisdom and folly if we are in the position to compare several such combinations of reality and language (belief, thought, and action) to another such combination. So a plurality of combinations that we can label as either ``wise'' or ``foolish'' must be availabe; for, if not ± or what would come down to the same ± if no meaningful comparison between combinations were possible, nothing can properly be said about what is wise or foolish. Of course this is different in the case of true and false statements: we need no false statements in order to find out which statements are true. Such a comparison between true and false statements is not required to that end (though, in practice, the possibility of such a comparison may prove to be helpful). The explanation of this asymmetry of the two regimes is that the clear line demarcating reality from language has its counterpart in the distinction between truth and falsity.17 And that means that, in opposition to the notion of truth and falsity, the notions of wisdom and folly mutually presuppose each other. Obviously, we can without contradiction imagine a world in which no false statement has ever been made (or no true one, for that matter); whereas wisdom and folly can only be recognized thanks to the actual existence of instances of the other. A world of wise men only or of fools only is inconceivable by the very logic of these words (in contrast to persons who only speak the truth, or who only pronounce falsities).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

194 Revolutionary Histories

It follows that such clearcut and unambiguous delimitations as between truth and falsehood can never be expected for wisdom and folly, and that each of the latter two can only be discerned thanks to the presence of the other. Therefore it is a true sign of the greatest wisdom ± namely of insight into the nature of wisdom itself ± to recognize the inevitability of acquiescing in the existence of human folly (without which human wisdom would paradoxically be impossible). True wisdom will therefore never be lured into the Enlightenment's unwisdom of a total warfare upon folly ± or as Burke puts it himself in a very wise wisecrack: ``wisdom is not the most severe corrector of human folly.''18 Burke expresses here the profound Erasmian insight that wisdom and folly do not mutually exclude each other and that it is, in fact, the highest achievement of wisdom to acknowledge this necessity of folly19 ± not because wisdom would never be able to distinguish between itself and folly (we have not been discussing definitions of wisdom and folly here but these things themselves), nor because folly is just as much part of reality as houses or trees are, but because folly truly is part of wisdom, and because both folly and wisdom presuppose the existence of the other. Foucault discovered an illuminating paradox in the history of folly from the High Middle Ages down to Erasmus. Paradox arises since there appear to have been two intimately related but yet opposite movements in this history. In the first place, Foucault observes a movement of secularization or of domestication resulting in the transformation of folly from an alien and threatening power into that depressing, but not really very alarming, list of all too familiar human weaknesses, such as impiety, pride, avarice, licentiousness, gluttony, jealousy, etc. Insanity became ordinary vice and human weakness. But this movement of familiarization is counteracted by a second movement of estrangement: for, as Erasmus argues, if we were to look at our world, as Menippos liked to do, from the point of view of the moon, all human effort and all human struggle would seem to us as insignificant as the futile interaction between swarms of flies or mosquitoes. Surely, from that point of view all human endeavor is mere folly. And it is wisdom which effects such a disillusioned view of the human condition. Or, as Erasmus metaphorically expressed it himself, it is only under the escort of folly that we can get access to the stronghold of wisdom and happiness and, though less surprisingly, vice versa.20 It is, once again, the recurring message of the Moriae Encomium that wisdom and folly presuppose the presence of each other and that the greatest fools are therefore precisely those who think themselves to be the purest incarnations of wisdom. However, as such a wise man as Erasmus, himself impersonating folly in his book,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 195

enjoins again and again upon his readers, without folly there can be no wisdom that recognizes folly for what it is and vice versa.21 So when Erasmus brought late medieval speculation on wisdom and folly to its ultimate perfection, he did so by situating the regime of wisdom and folly within the gap that he had deliberately created between what is most familiar to us (our permanent follies, or weaknesses) and what is most remote from us (the Olympian or Menippean point of view from which we may look, with wisdom, at those weaknesses and at their unintended effects). To put it differently, both wisdom and folly only come into being in the logical space where they can be presented as representations of each other and where they can define each other by means of the mutual representational relationship obtaining between the two of them. For it is the privilege of the wise man to be able to recognize or to ``represent'' folly for what it is; and it is the sad characteristic of the fool to ``represent'' the actions of the wise man as mere foolishness. Wisdom is what folly is like after the Menippean movement of representational estrangement has taken place. Hence, wisdom and folly are aesthetic and not epistemological notions (such as the notions of truth and falsity that we discussed a moment ago); and as we can only have good pictorial representations thanks to the presence of bad ones, or good historical representations in the presence of bad historical representations, so it is with what is politically wise and foolish. Three conclusions follow from these Erasmian considerations. First, though knowledge may be an ingredient of, or inspire, wisdom, it it not essential to it. The domain of the true and of knowledge may, admittedly, have its overlap with aesthetics and with aesthetic representation, but they are governed by an essentially different logic. Second, if wisdom and folly presuppose the presence of each other, the attack on folly can, in the end, only result in an attack on wisdom as well. And, third, if wisdom and folly are to be situated in this logical space between human weakness and our view of weakness, folly is no less than wisdom an ineradicable part of human nature. We should therefore agree with Burke that the Enlightened attempt to eliminate folly from this world will be, in the end, an attack on human nature itself. The wise man will therefore be prepared to leave some freedom of movement to folly and be aware that it would be unwise, or even outright foolish, to strive for a world without folly. Or, as Pascal already put it: ``les hommes sont si neÂcessairement fous que ce serait eÃtre fou par un autre tour de folie de n'eÃtre pas fou.''22 It is foolish not to be foolish. And three years before the Reign of Terror Burke already correctly presaged to what kind of horrors the folly of the relentless Enlightened

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

196 Revolutionary Histories

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 197

The rights of men, real and imagined It will now also be clear what Burke found objectionable in the notion of human rights as defined by the French revolutionaries. He agreed with his opponents that these rights are inextricably connected with human nature. But human nature cannot be found in those shaky metaphysical principles on which the French revolutionaries liked to found their ``droits de l'homme et du citoyen,'' but only in how human nature articulated itself in the historical institutions human beings gave themselves in the course of time. Speaking about ``the rights of man'' in abstracto, apart from any real and historically existing sociopolitical order, is an attempt to anchor where there is no ground to anchor: ``the pretended rights of man, which have made this havoc, cannot be the rights of the people. For to be the people and to have these rights, are things incompatible. The one supposes the presence, the other the absence of a state of civil society.''23 The rights of man can only be real rights, expressed in positive law, and not metaphysical speculations. Even more so, not recognizing this may invite us to be content with these metaphysical speculations and to surrender real rights for metaphysical ones.24 History must therefore replace metaphysical speculation and this is why a substantial part of the Reflections presents us with an exposition of how since Magna Carta, since 1629 and, especially, since the Declaration of Rights of 1689, all that Burke refers to as ``our liberties as an entailed inheritance'' came into being.25 One should avoid theorizing about rights and political freedom since these things can only exist in their concreteness and inevitably something will be lost if they are divorced from their actual historical contexts. The political theorist speculating about abstract human rights will, in the end, often discover that he has weakened rather than strengthened the cause of political freedom. For people will be invited to introduce in the discourse on freedom hypotheses, debatable claims, unproven assumptions, and doubtful inferences that can only provide additional ammunition to the enemies of freedom. We should therefore only speak about freedom and rights in the most concrete possible way: ``the science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught apriori.''26

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

attack on folly would lead in actual political practice. Their attack on prejudice and folly was an attack on reality and human nature that had been inspired by the attempt to replace the regime of wisdom and folly by that of truth and falsity.

Moreover, abstract reasoning will not contribute in any way to the solution of a concrete political evil ± for ``what is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method or procuring and administering them.''27 And according to Burke, an even graver danger of abstract political discourse is that it tends to consider politics sub specie of the borderline case. For it is inevitably part and parcel of abstract political reasoning that the meaning and value of political principles can only be decided by considering their relationship if we apply them to the most extreme political circumstances. It is only then that we can discover what hierarchy really obtains amongst political principles. Actual political debate, politics as a going concern, is ordinarily a complex and undecipherable muddle and presents us with no reliable clue about what political principle overrides the application of others. It is only the state of emergency, as Carl Schmitt realized so well, which is the most reliable heuristic instrument in abstract political reasoning: ``what always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived.''28 And Schmitt's political philosophy is an excellent example of the abject conclusions this kind of reasoning may give rise to. But, against Schmitt, we should agree with Burke that it is precisely the main purpose of the well-functioning political constitution to successfully avoid such extreme cases at all times. It is exactly the reverse: we can only get to the heart of a political system by establishing the extent to which it succeeds in avoiding the emergence of extreme situations and the means it adopts to that end. The search for a principled politics is, ordinarily, inspired by an aversion to the complexities of politics as a going concern. It is inspired by precipitation, ignorance, lack of respect for reality, or even by sheer intellectual laziness. Or, as Burke criticized this latent extremism of the revolutionary discourse of the so-called rights of man: ``the pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.''29 Burke's rejection of the very idea of the ``droits de l'homme et du citoyen'' should therefore not be interpreted as a plea to surrender passively to the despotism of a tyrannical regime. Burke recognizes on several occasions the right to resist despotic government, though he emphasizes, in agreement with his distrust of abstract principles, that we should avoid theorizing about the question under what precise circumstances revolution against an existing regime would be

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

198 Revolutionary Histories

legitimate. And we know that Burke's qualification of his rejection of idle speculations about the legitimacy of revolutions was far from being an empty proviso from his unequivocal support of the cause of the American revolutionaries against the British government.30 Moreover, as heir and defender of the Glorious Revolution and in his resistance against the attempt by George III to adjust England's constitution into a more autocratic direction, Burke proved to be a determined and courageous protagonist of the rights of Parliament and of the citizen as these had been defined in the Declaration of Rights of 1689. But, once again, the point of his argument is that one should fight not for abstractions but for real rights: ``far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights of men.''31 We may discern here another ground for Burke's distrust of revolutions in general: insofar as revolutions draw their inspiration from speculations about abstract rights, they will result in lawlessness and despotism, whereas our real rights and our real freedom are best guaranteed by a prudent and careful adaptation of what exists. But, as Burke does not tire in pointing out, such adaptations are forever necessary, since a state that lacks the means to change itself as required by circumstances and that chooses to persist in an Egyptian immobility, will be condemned to political death ± and rightly so. Therefore: almost always (i.e. not always) we should prefer reformation to revolution ± and he expostulates with the French revolutionaries that there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that in 1789 the French monarchy was really beyond reform and that revolution was therefore the only viable alternative.32 Even when a political system has begun to show serious defects ± and Burke never denies that this was truly the case with France at the time ± even then, or better perhaps, precisely then, one should proceed from history and from what has grown historically and naturally. For it is history that may show us what has gone wrong and what historical antecedents may suggest an adequate medecine for our present political diseases. History should therefore never be hidden behind a Rawlsian ``veil of ignorance.'' For what cabinet-maker could repair a cabinet that he is not allowed to see? Destruction can be the only result.

Burke and historism Nevertheless, though Burke reminded the French revolutionaries again and again of the paramount political significance of history, he kept, in fact, amazingly close to the Enlightened conception of history. This may

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 199

become clear if we consider a most telling aside in the Reflections. Meditating on the disasters that have befallen humanity in the past,33 Burke writes: ``history consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, avarice, amibition, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same troublous storms that toss the private state and render life unsweet.''34 And, as he continues, these vices are the causes of those storms. ``Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, rights of men [sic!], are the pretexts'' (Burke's italics).35 Hence, aspects of human nature (such as pride, ambition, etc.) are the real driving forces in human history; it is they that make history into what it has been, whereas all that the history books so painstakingly instruct us about is mere ``pretext.'' We can now understand how Burke ± in contrast to Rousseau and natural-law philosophy in general ± succeeded in giving such ample room to history, without being forced into abandoning the idiom and discourse of natural-law philosophy. Indeed, it is the human being, and more specifically these less attractive human characteristics mentioned by Burke, that form history, and it is therefore history that will inform us about human nature. Ex ungue cognosceris leonem. As has been emphasized by Meinecke, Burke was more eagerly and more attentively read in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany than in his native England.36 This is strange. For the German historical consciousness, as it would gradually develop into historism,37 went far deeper and was far more pronounced than Burke's. Burke's conception of history, of what are the driving forces in history, does not yet transcend the Enlightenment view of history. There is even a striking similarity between Burke's thesis of historical forces being the mere pretexts which activate an unchangeable set of human passions (as described a moment ago) and David Hume's often-quoted statement to that effect.38 It is true that Burke was more sensitive to the life of political institutions than Hume, but he never saw them as formative of human nature. For Burke, as for Hume and the Enlightenment, history was like a play where the deÂcor was changed from time to time, but where the dramatis personae always remained the same.39 For Burke history was still primarily a matter of political expediency, rather than that strange world challenging our cognitive powers that would fascinate the historists. The historist revolution was not least an epistemological revolution; a revolution in our thinking about our cognitive access to the world. But Burke would never have understood the urgency of this revolution: for him history was the paradigmatically

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

200 Revolutionary Histories

unproblematic, the nec plus ultra of what is simply given to us. History was to him like the air we breathe, or the water that we drink, and he would have experienced the historist's far more troubled and complex relationship to the past as an unnatural alienation from history. Even more so, precisely because of this, history could be such a secure and reliable foundation of our political constructions. It may well be true that Burke's conception of history has, in fact, been a most fortunate juste milieu between the Enlightenment's indifference and the historist's devout prostration before history; it may well be that Burke's practical attitude towards history is most congenial to our own at the end of the twentieth century; it may well be that history should be our servant rather than an enigma forever escaping our grasp. Yet, it cannot be È ser and denied that the infatuation with Burke in the country of Mo Herder is like Newton expecting intellectual revelations from Galileo. The human passions that Burke still saw as the universal and unchanging agents in history were historicized by historism and their causal significance was subordinated to that of the nation, or the ``Zeitgeist.'' The hierarchy between what Burke still saw as cause and as mere pretext was completely reversed by historism, so that nothing in human reality could any longer escape the control of history. This truly went beyond Burkean traditionalism and could no longer be understood in terms of it. Burke's conception of history, for all its emphasis on the gradual development of the nation's constitution, was still static; his traditionalism,40 by excluding the very notion of something that might be fundamentally new, even further reinforces the predilection for the static that he had inherited from the Enlightenment and, especially, from Hume. But historism transcended traditionalism by historicizing traditions as well, and was capable of discerning (the possibility of) fundamental or even revolutionary change where Burke could only see continuity and tradition.41 If the fight between Burke and the French revolutionaries was a debate about the possibility and desirability of a revolutionary rupture with the past, historism transcended this whole debate by allowing room for revolutionary change without dramatic ruptures with the past. Historism had two ways to effect this utterly unBurkean reconciliation. In the first place historists often succeeded in seeing continuity where others used to see revolution. No nineteenth-century historian was more successful in doing this than Tocqueville, when, in his L'ancien reÂgime et la reÂvolution, he defended the amazing thesis that this revolution of 1789 which he disliked no less than Burke, was, in fact, nothing but the continuation of the Ancien ReÂgime albeit by different and far more effective means (i.e. administrative centralization). Neither

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 201

did the German historists see in the French Revolution a rupture with the past; for them it had its roots deep in French history. For example Ranke argued that the Revolution was the delayed reaction to the failure of Louis XIV's foreign policy of the end of the seventeenth century.42 This is also why historists felt no need to see in the Revolution a refutation of their historism, whereas for Burke no such reconciliation between revolution and continuity was at all thinkable. By historicizing revolution ± an intellectual device not yet available to Burke ± historists succeeded in reconciling revolution with their own antirevolutionary political instincts. And a generation later the left-Hegelians even attempted to legitimate revolution historically. In the second place, historists reconciled revolution and continuity by discovering the truly revolutionary potential of gradual historical evolution. Indeed, this is how historists required the historian to see the past: he should always be aware that beneath the appearance of continuity, immutability, beneath everything presenting itself as being the merely ``natural,'' revolutionary change is most likely to have hidden itself. In this way historism was not merely a new way of dealing with what had always been regarded as belonging to the realm of history; historism effected, instead, a historicizing of what had always been experienced as belonging to ``nature'' and as the appropriate object of investigation for the natural philosopher.43

Aristotelian and modernist natural law-philosophy If, then, the historist's victory over the tradition of natural-law philosophy was far more decisive than Burke's, if historism reduced natural-law philosophy to the status of an obsolete irrelevance from which only two centuries later theorists like Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick e tutti quanti would (vainly) attempt to rescue it, we are well advised to ask how to account for this. Why did Burke stick to the idiom of natural-law philosophy, in spite of his all too apparent distrust of its invitation to ``metaphysical'' speculation, whereas historism gave us access to a world that was both historically and politically without antecedents? If we wish to answer this question a closer investigation of natural-law philosophy will be necessary. Now, the more than 2,000-year-long history of natural-law philosophy belongs to the most complicated chapters in Western intellectual history and I could not possibly claim to do justice to it here.44 It is most helpful in the context of the present discussion to look at the two and a half centuries preceding the birth of historism and distinguish between an older, traditional and a modernist brand of natural-law philosophy.45

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

202 Revolutionary Histories

The older tradition can properly be called ``Aristotelian,'' even though Aristotle never developed a natural-law philosophy himself. This tradition is practical, empirically minded, shares Aristotle's disinclination to abstract and speculative reasoning, and has an unmistakable tendency towards conservatism. It is in agreement with the Aristotelian view of the human being as an intrinsically social being. More specifically, it is adverse to all political theory where the political subject is ontologically or epistemologically isolated from the world: here the given is social and political interaction and not the interacting agents themselves. St. Thomas Aquinas strongly contributed to this traditional, Aristotelian variant of natural law philosophy, which in this Thomistic codification dominated Western political thought down to the seventeenth century. Modernist natural-law philosophy can be seen as the attempt to introduce rationalist and Cartesian methodology in political thought. It is aprioristic, abstract, deductive, can be ruthlessly metaphysical, and claims for itself a quasi-mathematical certainty. We find its first formulation in Grotius's De iure belli et pacis (of 1625) and in Hobbes's Leviathan (of 1651), whose last part, entitled ``Of the Kingdome of Darknesse,'' is a merciless attack on Aristotelian political thought. Most natural-law systems that were developed in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries belonged to it. In contrast to the Aristotelian tradition it had, at least potentially, revolutionary implications, as the French monarchy would find out in due time. Indeed, at first sight it might seem that little or nothing was left of the Aristotelian or Thomist tradition of natural-law philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. But here we should avoid hasty generalizations. Not only did the Aristotelian tradition manage to survive the modernist onslaught in the more out-of-the-way European universities. For example, though theorists like Pufendorf and Thomasius were most successful in introducing the modernist tradition in Germany, the Aristotelian tradition never completely disappeared from German universities. Even such a supremely influential philosopher as Christian Wolff (1679±1754) remained quite close to Aristotelianism, especially in the German-language exposition of his political thought. Moreover, Aristotelianism possessed a striking capacity for survival by hiding itself in a guise that modernism did not always properly recognize as inimical to itself. In this way, the Aristotelian tradition may remind one of those rivers that sometimes go underground, only to come to the surface unexpectedly somewhere else.46 It is against this background that an explanation can be given of the differences between Burke's and the German historists' conception of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 203

history. Leo Strauss was the first to remind us of Burke's Aristotelianism.47 And, indeed, as soon as we recall Burke's insistence on ``experience'' being our only reliable guide in politics48 and his repeated condemnation of ``metaphysical'' speculation, the Aristotelian inspiration of his political thought should be obvious to anyone. In fact, Burke's reaction to the French Revolution could well be seen as nothing more or less than a belated counterattack of the Thomist, Aristotelian tradition of natural-law philosophy (which had been taught to Burke during his student years in Dublin) against the triumphant modernist tradition. But Burke is no less Aristotelian in his insistence that politics is essentially a matter of ``prudence.''

``Prudence'' and practical philosophy This notion of ``prudence'' enables us to shed some light on what presumably caused Burke (and much of later Anglo-Saxon historical thought) to follow a path different from that of German historism. But before proceeding further a short remark will be necessary about the notion of prudence within the Aristotelian tradition. In our dealings with the nonnatural world of culture (roughly what we mean by the social, historical, and political world) Aristotle distinguished between ``philosophical wisdom'' and ``practical wisdom.'' Sir David Ross, an editor of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, defines the distinction as follows: ``philosophical wisdom is the formal cause of happiness; practical wisdom is what ensures the taking of proper means to the proper ends desired by moral virtue.''49 The idea is that philosophical wisdom (defined by Aristotle as ``scientific knowledge, combined with intuitive reason'') teaches us what ends we should pursue in order to achieve our perfection and happiness, whereas practical wisdom, or ``prudence'' (phroneÅsis) informs us how to attain these ends. This relatively straightforward division is, however, complicated by Aristotle's commendable realism and modesty. His caution restrained Aristotle from being too specific about these ``ends''; in contrast to Plato he was well aware that if we wish to avoid illiberal meddlesomeness and unrealistic dreams, we had better not try to make universally valid claims about these ends; however, he always remained sufficiently close to Plato to believe that at least somewhere and somehow these universal ends are an indispensable part of the machine of practical philosophy. Aristotle's wise solution to the problem was to shift the burden of his argument from philosophical wisdom to practical wisdom ± though, of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

204 Revolutionary Histories

course, even for him the former is and will always remain logically prior to the latter. This shift announces itself in the distinction50 made by Aristotle between practical wisdom (instrumental for achieving noble ends) and mere ``cleverness'' or ``smartness'' (which may help us to realize ignoble ends) as well as in Aristotle's tendency to be more interested in this subaltern distinction than in a precise determination of what are the teachings of philosophical wisdom. Though, once again, the subaltern distinction is logically dependent on the one between philosophical and practical wisdom. Put differently, Aristotle was aware of the fact that the real problem in human action rarely originates from our ignorance of what are the relevant abstract and ``Platonist'' desiderata that it has to satisfy; the real problem always is how to apply these principles in practice. That is what really puts us in a quandary when confronted with moral problems. Indeed, universalist ``Platonist'' definitions of what is morally right or wrong are easy enough to give ± as Goethe once put it: ``ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange, ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.'' The most difficult problem in human action is the kind of problem that typically confronts the politician: namely the problem of how to apply a hierarchy of (Platonist) values to a political reality that takes an impish pleasure in playing havoc with this hierarchy and in presenting itself to the politician in a guise that is completely at odds with this hierarchy. In sum, Aristotle's wisdom was that inventing ``Platonic'' ideas about what is morally good is easy enough ± a child could do that. But all real problems of human action are application problems. Ethics, it must be said, is a superfluous and stultifying science as soon as we leave the sphere of individual human action behind us51 ± and we had better turn, therefore, to ``prudence,'' i.e. the issue of the practical applications of that science. Nevertheless, if Aristotle's humane tact prevented him from formulating apodictic claims about the teachings of philosophical wisdom, this remained the keystone in the architecture of his ethical and political thought. Without it, the whole architecture falls apart. Now, from the perspective of this account of Aristotelian ethics, one might say that Burke eliminated philosophic wisdom completely from it and was thus left with practical wisdom, or ``prudence,'' only.52 Two arguments can be adduced in favor of this contention. In the first place we must consider Burke's notion of ``prescription.'' Since the sixteenthcentury theorists have debated the question to what extent time can legitimate possession of rights or goods, and many of these theorists were indeed inclined to recognize prescription as legalizing possession. However, they rarely went as far as to accept prescription even in the

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 205

case of demonstrably unlawful initial acquisition. Yet Burke is prepared to make this ultimate step. As has been argued by Lucas, this means that in the relationship between the supreme dictates of philosophical wisdom and practical wisdom, the latter succeeded, in the Burkean doctrine of prescription, in completely vanquishing the former. Practical wisdom of the application of a certain philosophical moral truth (``do not appropriate another person's possessions'') has now toppled over into the denial of that moral truth itself ± and all that remained now was ``prudence,'' the practical wisdom of the responsible statesman.53 Secondly, and even more importantly, we should consider Burke's view of the English constitution. It is true that he venerated the English constitution as the highest achievement of political wisdom. But precisely because of this almost religious respect we cannot fail to be struck by the peculiar impassivity and calm of Burke's account of the English constitution in his Abridgement of English History and in his History of the Laws of England. For contrary to our expectations these essays on the history of the English constitution never suggest the existence of some aim, goal, or ``idea'' that has already been or still has to be realized in the course of time. First, such an aim or idea does not lie in the past. For example, when commenting on so important a document as Magna Carta, Burke writes: ``it is here to be observed, that the constitutions of Magna Charta are by no means a renewal of the Laws of St. Edward, or the ancient Saxon laws, as our historians and law-writers generally, though very groundlessly, assert.''54 But second, nor is such an aim or idea part of the future or a promise of history. Though the Glorious Revolution was for Burke the highest stage in the development of the English constitution, he never implies that 1688 should be seen as the fulfillment of a promise that had always been present in British constitutional history. For when comparing the Glorious Revolution with 1789, Burke writes that ``the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires.''55 This is, so to speak, Burkean prescription applied to the constitution. Just as infringements on the proper legal order, may, in due time, acquire legality, so constitutional history is a continuous adaptation to new problems and new developments that are always, essentially, unforeseeable and that gradually become absorbed as a legal part of the constitution. As the old conservative wisdom goes, one must change in order to preserve. But these changes are necessitated by circumstances unrelated

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

206 Revolutionary Histories

to the constitution itself (such as the appearance of an ambitious monarch in the person of James II); they are not guided by a continuous attempt to approximate as much as possible the ``idea'' or ``ideal'' of the English constitution. Of course, one may expect that the importance of the adaptations required by such unusual circumstances, will or even should be in proportion to the seriousness of the challenges posed by them. Thus 1688 was so crucial in the history of the English constitution because the autocratic tendencies of James II posed such a serious threat to it, and therefore elicited an important adaptation such as the Declaration of Rights. But despite its obvious importance, the whole episode is contingent rather than necessary; for Burke there is no such thing as an English national character, or some equivalent to that, that made it inevitable sooner or later. Thus, in Burke's view of precription and of the history of the constitution, we will look in vain for some sense of direction that organizes all these contingent adaptations into a logical and coherent whole and that is expressive of an ``idea'' or ``mentality'' of English political practice. Indeed, Burke does not hesitate to recommend to the French revolutionaries the remedy of 1688,56 because this proved so extremely wholesome to the English nation in its hour of distress. Hence, there is nothing peculiarly or exclusively English about the Glorious Revolution: the political wisdom gained by the English is, in principle, open to any (European57) nation and can assist other nations in their political squabbles, if only one has the good sense to recognize the treasure of this wisdom. Thus, for all his veneration of the English constitution and of 1688, any hint of ``Whiggism'' aÁ la Macaulay remains strangely absent from Burke's writings. There is no general principle, historical, metaphysical, epistemological, or other, guiding the development of the English constitution, however gradual, natural, and beneficial this development may have been. In sum, Burke's view of history could best be seen as an Aristotelianism from which the universalist dimension of philosophical wisdom (corresponding to that striking absence of universalist (Platonist) principles in Burke's political thought) has been completely eliminated. And all that remained was the practical wisdom, the ``prudence'' of the responsible statesman. And certainly much is to be said in favor of Burke's construction; it may well be that in politicis the dimension of philosophical wisdom should be recognized as the arcanum imperii whose existence we could not possibly deny but about which we should never speculate. For this arcanum imperii has the strange property of disappearing into thin air, as soon as we start to theorize about it.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 207

208 Revolutionary Histories

When looking at historism and its antecedents in eighteenth-century natural-law philosophy we will get a different picture. The Aristotelian tradition was in Germany a far more stubborn and successful adversary of the modernist tradition than in England or, for that matter, in France. Its success was, at least partly, due to the fact that, in contrast to what happened in England and in France, it managed to evade the conflict by timely concession or even by grafting itself onto the modernist tradition. It is illustrative that all through the eighteenth century, German political treatises tended to be entitled treatises on ``practical philosophy,'' and that Aristotelian terminology, definitions, and schematizations predominantly remained in use. But what most contributed to the survival of Aristotelianism has been its success in neutralizing the main disagreement between modernism and itself. This main disagreement, so much will be clear from my exposition, originated in the fact that Aristotelianism, by de-emphasizing philosophic wisdom in favor of practical wisdom (ultimately resulting in Burkean conceptions), avoided formulating general and universalist rules for the good state and the just society, whereas modernist naturallaw philosophy saw precisely that as its exclusive purpose. Now, what happened in eighteenth-century German natural-law philosophy was the emergence of a fusion58 of the Aristotelian and the modernist tradition. This synthesis is most striking in Christian Wolff's VernuÈnfftige Gedancken von des Menschen Thun und Lassen of 172059 ± and we should recall here that Wolff was the most influential German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant.60 We find in this treatise the typically Aristotelian division of practical philosophy in ethics, economics, and politics, whereas the mode of argument is strictly modernist in its deductivism. Wolff's debt to modernism also becomes clear from the pronounced eÂtatism and the absolutist tendencies that his practical philosophy shared with the Leviathans that were ordinarily called into being within the modernist tradition.61 It must be conceded, though, that Wolff's treatise was exceptional for its fusion of theoretical and practical philosophy and that his Latin writings are less risqueÂ.62 But since it would be dangerous to base general conclusions on the oeuvre of a single, albeit very influential, author, I shall now deal with the more fruitful question of what form this synthesis of Aristotelianism and modernism more generally took in eighteenth-century German political thought and what occasioned this synthesis. From that perspective we should concentrate upon the so-called ``Klugheitslehre''

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

German Aristotelianism and historism

(or doctrine of ``Weltweisheit'') and on cameralism (``Kameralistik''). In the seventeenth century, ``Klugheitslehre,'' the doctrine of prudence, was identical with Aristotelian practical wisdom, i.e. the discipline of the proper means to achieve certain ends. But even before the victory of modernism a modification of Aristotelianism took place in the sense that these means were ordinarily associated with a ``Pflichtenlehre,'' that is, with a doctrine of duties. This already tilted the balance between philosophic and practical wisdom more strongly in favor of the former than was ever the case in Aristotelianism generally: duties and the definition of their nature logically precede the problem of their fulfillment in actual practice. Next, cameralism expanded this doctrine of duties from its original domain of individual behavior to that of the state's duties towards its subjects ± needless to say, this was a most dramatic extension of the domain of duties. Above all, the state's duties were to guarantee public safety and public welfare. But this newly created ``Staatsklugheitslehre,'' or cameralism, as presented by Johann Theodor Jablonski, Johann Heinrich Justi, the great Frederick himself, and above all, by Gottfried Achenwall, was no less interested in more mundane affairs like the building of roads and canals, building regulations, employment, schools or universities and their curricula, free (!) public health service, legal aid, and, more generally, all that we now call welfare services, and so on.63 In fact, cameralism can be seen as the logical counterpart to raison d'eÂtat thinking, as this tradition was introduced by Hermann Conring64 in a strongly expurgated form in seventeenth-century German political thought. For whereas raison d'eÂtat thinking took the state's interest as its guide, cameralism found this guide in the duties of the state towards the citizen. But what both shared was a pronounced awareness of what were the specific properties, interests, strengths, weaknesses, realistic aims, duties, and obligations of the individual state (and of its ruler). The link between the two was established almost automatically as soon as one added the more or less self-evident premise that it will ordinarily be in the state's (and the prince's65) interest to fulfill its duties towards the citizen ± such as national safety and welfare. But apart from this material fusion of a doctrine of the state's duties and of raison d'eÂtat thinking, there was a no less important formal or methodological affinity between the two. For in both cases abstract and apriorist reasoning would be completely useless; only a knowledge of all the aspects of the history of the state, a knowledge as detailed and as accurate as possible, could be the prince's (and his servant's) reliable guide.66 Hence, by a very complex fusion of traditions, a situation gradually emerged within the intel-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 209

lectual jungle of eighteenth-century German natural-law philosophy in which the state's history presented the ruler with the relevant indications of how both interest and moral duty obliged him to act. As Ranke would put it in his inaugural address of 1836: ``demnach ist es die È heren Aufgabe der Historie, das Wesen des Staates aus der Reihe der fru Begebenheiten darzuthun und dasselbe zu VerstaÈndnis zu bringen; die der Politik aber nach erfolgtem VerstaÈndnis und gewonnener Erkenntnis es weiter zu entwickeln und zu vollenden.''67 In conclusion, it is history that will show the prince or statesman what are the proper ``general goals'' of their political enterprises. Or, to use the most appropriate terminology here, the historian has to discover the state's or the nation's Aristotelian entelechy and then it is the task of the prince and the statesman to realize this entelechy's telos. And indeed, with the help of the notion of the ``historical idea,''68 historists like Ranke and Humboldt succeeded in operationalizing this link between history and politics in a way that proved to be immensely valuable for the writing of history ± and that would also appeal to many nineteenthcentury German politicians. By means of the notion of the ``historical idea'' the Aristotelian natural-law variant succeeded in grafting itself upon nineteenth-century historical and political thought ± and in a way its grasp has never really slackened since then. Whereas for Burke history only teaches us along what route we came to where we presently are, without implying what the future will or must look like, German historism taught us that history does not merely inform us about political means, but also about the proper political goals. And it was that very long road of political Aristotelianism which finally led historism, via the notion of the state's duties, via the ``Staatsklugheitslehre,'' and via the absorption of raison d'eÂtat thinking, onto this so very unBurkean path.

Conclusion The transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is a watershed in the history of Western historical consciousness. As is so often the case with watersheds, on both sides we will find countless streamlets, brooks, and rivulets running in all possible directions before uniting themselves in the few big streams that we all know from our maps ± in this case the Christian understanding of the past as the history of salvation and, on our side of the watershed, history as formative of all cultural identity. And, similarly, as may be the case with watersheds, a coincidental and unimpressive range of mountains or perhaps just a mere modest little hill may determine the watershed's course.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

210 Revolutionary Histories

As I hope may have become clear from the foregoing, such a modest little hill has indeed played its tricks in the history of Western political thought. For it has been so insignificant a fact as an ambiguity in Aristotelian ethics (and its almost inaudible echoes in Western eighteenthcentury political thought) that has, to a large extent, determined how we relate to our past and how we conceive of the relationship between politics and history. This, then, is the lesson we may learn from the comparison of Burke with German historism proposed here. Whereas even Burke's most principled utterances ``occur in statements ad hominem and are meant to serve immediately a specific practical purpose,''69 and whereas for Burke history merely gave us the horizon for meaningful political action, German eighteenth-century natural-law theorists discovered in history the origin of what Aristotle saw as philosophic wisdom. For Burke ± as for most intellectuals in countries where the modernist tradition of natural-law philosophy gained the upper hand ± history is undeniably the scene where all our actions are enacted and on which their meaning is determined. However, to continue this metaphor, for German historism history is not so much the stage as the text of the play in which the politician has to display his talents. The many differences in the political histories of the Western democracies on the one hand and of the German-speaking countries on the other originate, to a considerable extent, in the ambivalences of Aristotelian practical philosophy. At the start of this essay we observed that in history small causes may sometimes have big consequences; the vagaries of political Aristotelianism and their impact on twentiethcentury political practice can be considered a striking illustration of this ``democratization'' of causality.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Edmund Burke, Historism, and History 211

Introduction 1 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Geoffrey Gilbert (1798; rpt. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 9. 2 Needless to say, there were other, less vociferous participants in the revolutionary cultural nationalism debate, not represented in this collection. The Irish Rebellion and the Jamaican Revolt in particular should be mentioned in this repect, as well as the complex political situation in the Dutch Republic, a nation that in the 1790s found itself in the less than enviable position of being wooed simultaneously by the fickle rivals France, America, and Britain. 3 Michel Foucault, ``Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,'' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 146.

Chapter 1: Traveling Through Revolutions 1 For examples of the modern historical analysis of the connections and differences between these revolutions, see R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959, 1964), Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), and the essays in Jaroslaw Pelenski, ed., The American and European Revolutions, 1776±1848: Sociopolitical and Ideological Aspects (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1980). I have discussed American responses to the French Revolution in Lloyd S. Kramer, ``The French Revolution and the Creation of American Political Culture,'' in Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution (Washington and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 26±54. 2 There is an excellent, concise account of Chastellux's life and intellectual interests in Howard C. Rice's introduction to the modern English edition of Chastellux's travel writings. See Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, 2 vols., ed. Howard C. Rice, Jr. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1963), 1:1±41. All citations from Chastellux's text are from this edition, and are given parenthetically in the text (T). 3 Chastellux published the book after various fragments of his diaries had appeared in European journals and unauthorized pamphlets. The French title was Voyages de M. le Marquis de Chastellux dans l'AmeÂrique Septentrionale Dans les anneÂes 1780, 1781 & 1782; a second French edition appeared in 1788 and 1791. The book was translated into English by George Grieve (1748± 1809), an English radical who had also traveled in America. Rice's modern edition of the Travels is a revised version of Grieve's translation. Chastellux 212

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes

4

5 6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

wrote his essay on ``The Progress of the Arts and Sciences in America'' as a long letter to the President of the College of William and Mary, the Reverend James Madison (a cousin of the Virginian with the same name who would later become President of the United States). Barlow has attracted more scholarly interest than Chastellux. For information about his life and works, see Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1943), 133±65, 271±341; James Woodress, A Yankee's Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (Philadephia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1958); and Arthur L. Ford, Joel Barlow (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971). See also Robert F. Durden, ``Joel Barlow in the French Revolution,'' William and Mary Quarterly 8 (1951): 327±54, and the brief discussion of Barlow in Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 239±43. This passage appears in Chastellux's essay on ``The Progress of the Arts and Sciences in America.'' Chastellux also discusses here an example of how the Americans collected food and livestock for the Continental Army. Americans honored Chastellux's knowledge of science and culture by electing him to membership in the American Philosophical Society (Jan. 1781). Despite his respect for American universities, Chastellux reported that the new country lagged behind Europe in the arts and music. See, for example, T, 2:537±9, 543±4. Chastellux had never married at the time of his travels in America, and his frequent speculation on the women he met raises questions about his own ``voluptuous'' thoughts. He eventually married (1787) a young Irish woman shortly before his death in France. Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government, with preface by David B. Davis (Ithaca: Great Seal Books, 1956; reprint of 1792 edition in London), 2. All further citations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text (A). Barlow, ``A Letter Addressed to the People of Piedmont, On the advantages of the French Revolution, and the necessity of adopting its principles in Italy,'' in Joel Barlow, The Political Writings of Joel Barlow (New York: Mott and Lyon, 1796), 205. All further citations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text (PW). For more of his critique of standing armies, see Barlow, Advice, 40±2. Barlow's critique of the new regime's financial policies appeared in a chapter on ``Revenue and Expenditure,'' which was added to a new edition of Advice that was published in 1793. Barlow's belief in the decisive role of republican education remained strong after his return to America, where he developed and promoted plans to establish a national research university in Washington, DC. Despite his extensive arguments for the cultural advantages of such an institution, Congress did not approve the proposal when Barlow's friends introduced bills for creation of the university in 1806. For more on the themes of this plan, see Woodress, Yankee's Odyssey, 241±3. Barlow's ``Advice to a Raven in Russia'' appears in an Appendix of Woodress, Yankee's Odyssey, 338±9. The quoted passage is the conclusion of the poem (339).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 213

214 Notes

1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (1818; rpt. London: Pickering, 1993), chs. 11±16. 2 C.-F. Volney, Les ruines, ou meÂditation sur les reÂvolutions des empires (Paris: Desenne, 1791). 3 Shelley, Frankenstein, 98±9. 4 Mario Praz, ``Introductory Essay,'' in Peter Fairclough, ed., Three Gothic Novels (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 25. The implausibilities of the plot are carefully listed in Leonard Wolf, ed., The Annotated Frankenstein (New York: Potter, 1977). 5 See, for instance, Paul Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 107, 118, 124. 6 The confusion is at least as old as Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848). Cf. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3±4, 86; and Stephen Bann, ed., Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 79, 184. In Frankenstein, the Monster is never given a name or invents one for itself. 7 The French text was reprinted five times before it was incorporated in an 8-volume edition of Volney's Oeuvres in 1820. An English translation appeared in Londen in 1795 as The Ruins; or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires. This was reprinted 11 times until 1878; a modernized version was published in 1921 as George Underwood, ed., The Ruins of Empire by Count Volney . . . A Revision of the Translation of 1795. See M.J.H. Liversidge, ``Rome Portrayed: `To Excite the Sensibility, and to Awaken the Admiration of Mankind,''' in Michael Liversidge and Catherine Edwards, eds., Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century (London: Merell Holberton, 1996), 38±53, esp. 41, 52. The German version by Georg Forster was reprinted 13 times until 1880, and there were translations into most other European languages. Mary Shelley is sometimes said to have known The Ruins in the American translation by Joel Barlow, published in Philadelphia in 1792: The Ruins; or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires. But the Monster ``reads'' the French original, and I see no reason why Mary Shelley did not do so too. 8 Percy Shelley's Alastor (1815) and The Revolt of Islam, written about the same time as Frankenstein, are also clearly indebted to Volney. Cf. Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (New York: Collier, 1962), 266±76; Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Quartet Books, 1976), 202; John Whale, ``Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art,'' in Stephen Copley and John Whale, eds., Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780±1832 (London: Routledge, 1992), 218±36; Marilyn Butler, ``Shelley and the Empire in the East,'' in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, eds., Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), 158±68; and, especially, Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 114±15, 122±3. 9 Cf.: ``An Essay in the Philosophy of History'' (Fairclough, ed., Three Gothic Novels, 504); ``a widely read compendium of meditations on history'' (M.K. Joseph, ed., Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969], 239); ``a popular essay in the philosophy of history'' (Maurice Hindle, ed.,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Chapter 2: Volney, Frankenstein, and the Lessons of History

10 11 12 13

14

15

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985], 259); ``a powerful polemic on the government of ancient and modern empires'' (Butler, ed., Frankenstein, 262). This last description is also quoted in Nora Crook, ed., and Betty Bennett, intro., Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, vol. 1 of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, eds. Betty Bennett and Nora Crook, 8 vols. (London: Pickering, 1996), 1:89. But see also Marilyn Butler, ``Shelley and the Empire in the East,'' and by the same author, ``Romantic Manichaeism: Shelley's `On the Devil, and Devils,' and Byron's Mythological Dramas,'' in J.B. Bullen, ed., The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13±37, esp. 17, for Volney's ``bleak vision of the history of human society.'' Gerald McNiece points to Volneyan influences in Percy Shelley's late and less than optimistic poem Hellas (Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969], 248±9). Volney's fundamental pessimism is stressed by Bernard Plongeron, ``Nature, meÂtaphysique et histoire chez les IdeÂologues,'' Dix-HuitieÁme SieÁcle 5 (1973): 375±412, esp. 398±400. C.-F. Volney, Tableau du climat et du sol des EÂtats-Unis d'AmeÂrique, 2 vols. (Paris: Courcier, 1803); translated as View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America (London: J. Johnson, 1804). Volney's collected works were preceded by an introduction from the publisher Adolphe Bossange, ``Notice sur la vie et les eÂcrits de C.-F. Volney''; cf. Volney, Oeuvres, 2nd edn. (1820; rpt. Paris: Didot, 1826), 1:i±xlix. Bossange seems to have used autobiographical material by Volney, but little is known of the relationship between the two men. Volney's papers were destroyed after his death. The most comprehensive modern biography is Jean Gaulmier, L'ideÂologue Volney (1757±1820): Contribution aÁ l'histoire de l'orientalisme en France (Beyrouth: Imprimerie Catholique, 1951). A shorter version was published as: Jean Gaulmier, Un grand teÂmoin de la ReÂvolution et de l'Empire: Volney (Paris: Hachette, 1959). I refer throughout to the first title. Gaulmier edited various modern editions of Volney's writings: Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (Paris±The Hague: Mouton, 1959); La loi naturelle ± LecËons d'histoire (Paris: Garnier, 1980). The Egyptian travel report has been reprinted in a recent collection of Volney's works: C.-F. Volney, Oeuvres, eds. Anne and Henri Deneys, 2 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1989), which also includes the first edition of Les ruines and the Tableau du climat et du sol des EÂtats-Unis. Bernard Valade, ``Volney,'' in Jean Tulard, ed., Dictionnaire NapoleÂon (Paris: Fayard, 1989) 1733±5, is a short but well-informed introduction. In 1853, Sainte-Beuve, himself of course a confirmed counter-revolutionary, tried to do away with Volney as a completely outdated curiosity (C.-A. de Sainte-Beuve, ``Volney,'' in C.-A. de Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, 15 vols. [Paris: Garnier, 1851±88], 7:389±433). For Volney's competition with Chateaubriand, see Jean Gaulmier, ``Volney et Chateaubriand,'' in Autour du romantisme. De Volney aÁ J.-P. Sartre. MeÂlanges offerts aÁ Monsieur le Professeur Jean Gaulmier (Paris: Ophrys, 1977), 89±93. For Volney's ideas in the context of the other ideÂologues, see Georges Gusdorf, La conscience reÂvolutionnaire. Les IdeÂologues (Paris: Payot, 1978); Sergio Moravia, Il tramonto dell'illuminismo. Filosofia e politica nella societaÁ Francese (1770±1810) (Bari: Laterza, 1986), and, by the same author, Il pensiero

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 215

16

17

18 19 20 21

22

23

24

degli IdeÂologues. Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780±1815) (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1974). A much older but very detailed study is FrancËois Picavet, Les IdeÂologues (Paris: Alcan, 1891). Various aspects of the group are discussed in FrancËois Azouvi, ed., L'institution de la raison. La reÂvolution culturelle des ideÂologues (Paris: EÂcole des Hautes EÂtudes en Sciences Sociales, 1992). In 1796 Destutt de Tracy introduced the word ``ideology'' in the sense of ``epistemology'' or ``science of ideas.'' Napoleon gave it the derogatory meaning of ``intellectual pretense'' or ``self-justification,'' which it has kept in the works of Karl Marx. Cf. Moravia, Il tramonto, 16, 599±601; Gusdorf, La conscience reÂvolutionnaire, 360±1. Volney's writings figure prominently on the reading lists by means of which Stendhal tried to educate his sister Pauline. Cf. Stendhal, Correspondance, eds. H. Martineau and V. Del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), vol. 1. For his own relations to the ``ideÂologues,'' see Victor Del Litto, La vie intellectuelle de Stendhal. GeneÁse et eÂvolution de ses ideÂes (1802±1821) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ``Ideology'' (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 251±87. GeÂrard de Nerval, Oeuvres, ed. A. BeÂguin, J. Richer, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 1:578±84. Volney, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie, ed. Gaulmier, 21. All translations are my own. Gaulmier, L'ideÂologue Volney, 56. Count Vergennes, secretary of foreign affairs, might have wanted a second opinion after the optimism of De Tott. See, in addition to titles mentioned earlier, Jean-Marie CarreÂ, Voyageurs et eÂcrivains francËais en Egypte, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut FrancËais d'ArcheÂologie Orientale, 1956), 1:96; Sergio Moravia, ``Philosophie et geÂographie aÁ la fin du XVIIIe sieÁcle,'' Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 57 (1967): 937±1011, esp. 983±4; Numa Broc, La geÂographie des philosophes. GeÂographes et voyageurs francËais au XVIIIe sieÁcle (Paris: Ophrys, 1975), 360. Until now, no archival material has emerged to prove that Volney was subsidized by the French government. Bonaparte is reported to have said that Volney was the only travel writer ``who did not lie.'' Volney's travels are seen as an integral part of French imperialism in Henry Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles de l'expeÂdition en Egypte. L'orientalisme colonisant en France (1698±1798) (Istanbul: Isis, 1978), 77±8. Cf. also Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798±1836 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 43±4. For the scientific impact of the Egyptian expedition, see Nicole and Jean Dhombres, Naissance d'un nouveau pouvoir: sciences et savants en France 1793±1824 (Paris: Payot, 1989), 93±149. The first printing of 1787 carried the title Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, which gave a better indication of the relative importance Volney accorded to both regions: the part on Syria is much more extensive. From the second edition onward, the names of the countries were reversed, in keeping with the chronology of Volney's travels. Cheryl B. Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French IdeÂologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 19±20; Edna Hindie Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants 1789±1791 (Paris: Universitas,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

216 Notes

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

1991), 942±3. For Volney's conception of human rights, see also Martin S. Staum, ``Individual Rights and Social Control: Political Science in the French Institute,'' Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 411±30, esp. 414. C.-F. Volney, La loi naturelle, ou cateÂchisme du citoyen francËais (Paris 1793); reprinted in Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:447±99. Moravia, Il tramonto, 380±4; Gusdorf, La conscience reÂvolutionnaire, 311; Broc, La geÂographie des philosophes, 446±67; Pierre Macherey, ``L'IdeÂologie devant l'ideÂologie: l'EÂcole Normale de l'An III,'' in Azouvi, ed., L'institution de la raison, 41±9; Dhombres, Naissance d'un nouveau pouvoir, 578±96. C.-F. Volney, LecËons d'histoire prononceÂes aÁ l'EÂcole Normale (Paris, 1795). L.-M. La ReÂvellieÁre-Lepeaux, MeÂmoires, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon, Nourrit 1895), 2:438; cited in Gaulmier, Volney, 351. Cf. also Moravia, Il pensiero, 624. For a reconstruction of his travel route in Northern America, see Gaulmier, Volney, 368, who also provides a map. For the context of Volney's experiences in the United States, cf. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 175±224. Gaulmier, Volney, 385±8; Moravia, Il pensiero, 628±9 (both, incidentally, speak of John Priestley). Volney defended himself in a public letter, stating that religion was a private matter; whether he was a believer or not, he did not trouble anyone with his opinions, like Priestley. See Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:7±18. Gaulmier, Volney, 382±3. Welch, Liberty and Utility, 210n. Other versions of the story: Sainte-Beuve, ``Volney,'' 428±9; Gaulmier, Volney, 434±6; Moravia, Il tramonto, 505. Volney did not end his life as a reactionary, but it is somewhat sentimental to assume that ``at heart'' he always remained true to his revolutionary beginnings (see Henri Deneys, ``La fideÂlite de Volney,'' Dix-HuitieÁme SieÁcle 29 [1997]: 431±47). In his introduction, he presented a precise outline of the book he had planned to write (see Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:21±32). The excuse that he ``lacked time and strength to complete it'' follows rather lamely (30). In the same introduction Volney asserted that long fragments of the second part had already been written. Whether this was true or not can no longer be decided. Gaulmier, Volney, 463. Gusdorf, La conscience reÂvolutionnaire, 307±9, 321; Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution, 41±3, 105. On the activities of the Institut, see the essays in Azouvi, L'institution de la raison. Gaulmier, Volney, 484±5; cf. also Raymond Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950), 75. Valade perhaps makes him too much a pessimist right from the start (Valade, ``Volney''). Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 81. For instance: Volney, Voyage, 29, 273; cf. Moravia, Il pensiero, 596±9. Gaulmier regards ``the fear of being duped'' as one of the dominant traits of his subject (Gaulmier, Volney, 95, 110). Volney especially turned himself against the idyllic orientalism of the Lettres d'Egypte by his countryman

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 217

44

45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

C.-E. Savary (1750±88). Cf. Gaulmier, Volney, 95±9; CarreÂ, Voyageurs et eÂcrivains, 1:79±118; Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles, 86±7; and for a more detailed È hn, Volney und Savary als Wegbereiter des romantischen discussion: Herbert Ku Orienterlebnisses in Frankreich (Leipzig: Gerhardt, 1938), who interprets the difference between the two travel writers in the light of the contrast between rococo and neoclassicism. Edna Hindie Lemay compares Volney with his contemporary J.-N. DeÂmeunier (see ``Le monde extra-EuropeÂen dans la formation de deux reÂvolutionnaires,'' in Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, ed., Histoires de l'anthropologie: XVIe-XIXe sieÁcles [Paris: Klincksieck, 1984], 117±31). Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 26. More than half a century later, Flaubert was to describe his first impressions of Cairo in the same terms: Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973± ), 1:563±5. Nicole Loraux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ``La formation de l'AtheÁnes bourgeoise: essai d'historiographie 1750±1870,'' in R.R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on Western Thought A D 1650±1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 169±222, esp. 188. CarreÂ, Voyageurs and eÂcrivains, 99±101; Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles, 69±71. See esp. Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 156±7. Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres. La reÂflexion francËaise sur la diversite humaine (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989), 219±34. Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 62±3; Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:191, 382. In the second edition of the Voyage, Volney added a note that his hypothesis had been confirmed in 1794 by German anatomical research on mummies. But the French expedition in 1797±9 made him doubt again. From the third edition onwards, the passage in The Ruins is replaced with a long footnote, stating that he had perhaps been wrong after all (see Volney, Les ruines (1791; rpt. Paris: Bossange, 1821), 360). In his modern defense of the idea, Martin Bernal was careful enough not to attribute it to Volney (see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987], 1:244). For Volney's popularity in Africa at the time of decolonization, see Jean Leclant, ``Un tableau du Proche-Orient aÁ la fin du XVIIIe sieÁcle,'' Bulletin de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Strasbourg 39 (1960±1): 243±60. Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 64. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 162±3. See above, note 7. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. A.J. Grieve (1790; rpt. London: Everyman, 1971), 8. Opinions vary on the literary qualities of The Ruins. Those who are primarily interested in Volney as a social theorist, tend to reject the work as an unsuccessful exercise in rhetoric (see, for instance, CarreÂ, Voyageurs et eÂcrivains, 1:103). More romantically inclined authors, on the other hand, have often found it too dry and formal (cf. Sainte-Beuve, ``Volney,'' 410; Andre Monglond, Le preÂromantisme francËais, 2 vols. [Grenoble: Arthaud, 1930], 1:163). For Gusdorf, however, it is nothing less than a ``great book'' (Gusdorf, La conscience reÂvolutionnaire, 335).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

218 Notes

56 Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra and Baalbec, 2 vols. (London, 1753±7). In his travel report, Volney admitted that his description of Palmyra was taken from Wood (cf. Wood, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 323±30). Cf. also Jean Gaulmier, ``Note sur l'itineÂraire de Volney en Egypte et en Syrie,'' in Autour du romantisme. MeÂlanges Jean Gaulmier, 55±60. On Wood and Volney in the context of architectural neoclassicism, see Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 109±10, 112± 13, and Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 32±5. The ruins theme in French writing is discussed in Ingrid G. Daemmrich, ``The Ruins Motif as an Artistic Device in French Literature,'' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (1971± 2), 449±57; 31 (1972±3), 31±41; for more details on Volney, see Roland Mortier, La poeÂtique des ruines en France. Ses origines, ses variations de la Renaissance aÁ Victor Hugo (GeneÁve: Droz, 1974), 91±9, 136±41. In Volney's wake, ``Palmyra'' became a standard literary symbol for vanished glory. The opening verses of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal (1857) again refer to the ``long-lost jewels of ancient Palmyra.'' 57 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:175±6. 58 See also Sainte-Beuve, ``Volney,'' 410. 59 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:176, 179. 60 Ibid., 178. The ``banks of the Zuyder-Zee'' refer to Amsterdam. In 1805, Volney made a visit to Holland, which he compared favorably to Egypt, that other populous river delta. 61 Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London: Grant & Co., 1872); cf. Werner Hofmann, Das irdische Paradies. Motive und Ideen des 19. È nchen: Prestel, 1991), 176. Jahrhunderts, 3rd edn. (1974; rpt. Mu à me,'' which can mean either ``ghost'' or ``spirit,'' 62 The French original has ``fanto and later, more respectfully, ``geÂnie'' (``genius,'' but also the ``jinnee'' from the Thousand and One Nights). It is certainly going too far to speak of it as ``the Spirit of Freedom,'' as in Mortier, La poeÂtique des ruines, 137. Rose Macaulay's suggestion that it must be the ghost of Palmyra's legendary Queen Zenobia is no more than a delightful fantasy (see Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins, ed. Constance Babington Smith [London: Thames & Hudson, 1977], 47). 63 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:246. 64 The first edition of The Ruins contained a passage in which Volney proposed the idea of installing a Museum with examples of all the various nations of the earth (cf. Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:272, 392). See also Gaulmier, Volney, 219. This exhibition, Volney suggested, would offer ``amusement to the masses, inspiration to artists, and knowledge to doctors, philosophers, and lawyers.'' The confusing diversity of history in this way was to be neutralized as an instructive spectacle. 65 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:358. 66 Mary Shelley praised (by way of the Monster) the ``Eastern style'' of The Ruins. But in its rhetoric, The Ruins shows no familiarity with Arabic or Persian literature; neither did Volney intend to offer ``a world rather than a European perspective,'' as Marilyn Butler has it (Frankenstein, ed. Butler, 99, 262). Meditations upon the ruins of once thriving cities, as an incitement to repentance, inevitably follow the model of the Biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah. In the same manner, St. Jerome reminded the Christian believers

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 219

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84

85

of his time that: ``The gods adored by nations are now alone in their niches with the owls and the night birds. The gilded Capitol languishes in dust and all the temples of Rome are covered with spiders' webs'' (cited in Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: the Origins of Archaeology [London: British Museum Publications, 1996], 100). Volney's call for moral and intellectual renewal, however antireligious, clearly stands in this Judeo-Christian tradition. See also Jean Gaulmier, ``Volney et ses LecËons d'histoire,'' History and Theory 2 (1962): 52±65; Henri Deneys, ``Le reÂcit de l'histoire selon Volney,'' Corpus 11±12 (1989): 43±71. Sainte-Beuve, ``Volney,'' 419±20. See also Bossange, ``Volney,'' xxix. Volney, LecËons d'histoire, ed. Gaulmier, 106, 112, 119, 116±17, 126, 138±44; cf. H.T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1937), 2, 11; Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 288±9; Mouza Raskolnikoff, ``Volney et les IdeÂologues: le refus de Rome,'' Revue Historique 167 (1982): 353±7. For Volney, ``history'' still primarily meant ``ancient history.'' Volney, LecËons d'histoire, ed. Gaulmier, 103, 112±14, 116.

Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 23.

Volney, LecËons d'histoire, ed. Gaulmier, 120.

For the idea in DegeÂrando's comments on the Baudin expedition in 1800, see

Gusdorf, La conscience reÂvolutionnaire, 498. Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 1:663±79; cf. Broc, La geÂographie des philosophes, 473, 486±9. For instance, Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 401±2; Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:326. See Moravia, Il pensiero, 610±12. Volney, Voyage, ed. Gaulmier, 164, 200. Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l'histoire, ou meÂtier d'historien, 7th edn. (1949; rpt. Paris: A. Colin, 1974), 76, 110. Volney, LecËons d'histoire, ed. Gaulmier, 134±6. Ibid., 84, 138, 142. Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:21. For Volney's American travels, see (in addition to the titles by Moravia, Gusdorf, and Broc referred to above): Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750±1900, trans. J. Moyle (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Univ. Press, 1973), 339±41; A. Deneys, ``GeÂographie, histoire et langue dans le Tableau du climat et du sol des EÂtats-Unis,'' Corpus 10±11 (1989): 73±90. Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:37.

Ibid., 23. See also Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, 339±41.

To Thomas Jefferson, 20 FloreÂal XI (cited in Moravia, Il pensiero, 631). I have

not been able to consult Gilbert Chinard, Volney et l'AmeÂrique (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1923). Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:246±7, 274±6. However, Volney vehemently rejected the theory popularized by Cornelis de Pauw that the American climate exercised a degrading effect on its inhabitants (see Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 114; cf. Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, 339; Moravia, Il pensiero, 645±51; MicheÁle Duchet, Antropologie et histoire au sieÁcle des LumieÁres [Paris: Flammarion, 1977], 156±60). Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:309. For his travel route in northern America, see Gaulmier, Volney, 368.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

220 Notes

86 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:357; cf. Broc, La geÂographie des philosophes, 456. It is doubtful, however, if there really was anything ``savage'' about Little Turtle; the interview apparently took place in Philadelphia, and Volney's interlocutor had in many respects adapted himself to the way of life of the European immigrants. 87 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:382±7; cf. Loraux and Vidal-Naquet, ``Formation de l'AtheÁnes bourgeoise,'' 190±1; Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, 482; Moravia, Il tramonto, 668±70. The hypothesis was first developed by J.-F. Lafitau in 1724. Diderot denied that the comparison between ancient Greeks and modern ``savages'' made any sense, but Volney and DegeÂrando took it up as a warning not to have too much respect for the past. In his youth, Stendhal found in the idea a liberation from Classicism (see Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism [New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1993], 155±6; V. Del Litto, La vie intellectuelle de Stendhal, 357±8). 88 Volney, Oeuvres, ed. Deneys, 2:24.

89 Nerval, Oeuvres, 1:324, 326. Cf. Schwab, La renaissance orientale, 204, 438±9.

Chapter 3: Benjamin Franklin, Native Americans, and the Commerce of Civility 1 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500±c. 1800 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1995), 17±18. 2 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), 133. 3 For background on these matters see Pagden, but see also Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged Moment in the History of England, Scotland, and France (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1994); Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998), esp. 28±127; and G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. 37±103. 4 Qtd. in Pagden, European Encounters, 170. 5 William Darrell, The Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and a Happy Life (London, 1723), 8. 6 Baltasar Gratian, The Compleat Gentleman, trans. T. Saldkeld (London, 1730), 15. 7 Pagden makes similar points, but differently, in European Encounters, 142±3. 8 I make this point elsewhere with regard to Franklin's Narrative of the Late Massacres in ``Caritas and Capital: Franklin's Narrative of the Late Massacres,'' in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del.: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1993), 347±58. 9 A. Owen Aldridge has argued that during one period when Franklin was in France, at least one in ten letters he received was a request for aid in emigration. Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1957), 171.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 221

10 Franklin to Thomson, March 9, 1784, in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10 vols., ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 9:177. Franklin continued in this letter, ``To save myself trouble, I have just printed some copies of the enclosed little piece, which I purpose to send hereafter in answer to such letters.'' The piece mentioned was his Information for Those Who Would Remove to America, which he had originally printed on his own press at Passy. 11 After learning that the pieces had been printed together in England, Franklin wrote to his friend Benjamin Vaughan requesting information about their printing. Vaughan returned, in a letter dated November 21, 1784, ``I know not who published your pieces on the Indians & on Imigrations, nor have I yet seen them. The latter piece the Abbe Morellet sent Lord Shelburne, from whom I had it; The Bishop of St. Asaph's family afterwards had my whole packet of your pieces for many weeks.'' The letter is quoted in Aldridge, Franklin and His French Contemporaries, 36. 12 In European Encounters in the New World, Anthony Pagden discusses the literary-cultural shifts that took place during this era as a result of commercialization (70ff.). 13 See Pagden, European Encounters in the New World, 169±70. 14 The English version of the text is available in Benjamin Franklin: Writings, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 969±74. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as R. 15 Qtd. in Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 130. 16 See Pagden, European Encounters, 170.

Chapter 4: A Language for the Nation 1 See Robert Crawford for the argument that what is considered English literature was a Scottish invention (Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 16±44). Although David Shields does not make a similar claim for the American case, his study of the culture of belles lettres in eighteenth-century British America suggests that a notion of what constituted English literature was clearly emerging in American literary salons, clubs, and coffee houses (David Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997]). 2 Although this position is most forcefully argued in postcolonial theory and criticism, its assumptions find their way into many discussions of American post-Revolutionary war culture. Postcolonial theory, however, was developed to account for the political, economic, and cultural conditions of twentiethcentury third world cultures emerging from the effects of capitalism, and it simply cannot be transposed directly onto eighteenth-century first and second world cultures. 3 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 47±50. For an extended discussion of the term ``revolution'' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical writing, see R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (London: Routledge, 1988), 65±86.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

222 Notes

4 David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776±1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 46±7. Throughout this essay, I am indebted to Simpson's groundbreaking study of the language debate in America. 5 Benedict Anderson suggests how one might understand the difference between seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century American culture in terms of a new kind of literature British Americans shared (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983]). 6 James Carrol, The American Criterion of the English Language (New London: Samuel Green, 1795; rpt. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1970), iii. 7 John Adams, ``To the President of Congress, No. 6,'' Sept. 1780, Papers of John Adams, ed. Robert J. Taylor et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 10:127±30. 8 Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789; rpt. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1967), 20. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as D. 9 Simpson discusses Webster's oscillation between contending language models (Politics of American English, 52±90); see also Vincent P. Bynack, ``Noah Webster and the Idea of a National Culture: The Pathologies of Epistemology,'' Journal of the History of Ideas 95 (1984): 99±114; Dennis E. Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 41±67, especially 53±6, and 132±9. Richard M. Rollins has discussed Webster's evolving ideas on language and authority in ``Words as Social Control: Noah Webster and the Creation of The American Dictionary,'' American Quarterly 28 (1976): 415±30. 10 Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus: A Poem in Nine Books (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787), 211. 11 Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:287, ll. 1±4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CW. 12 Timothy Dwight, The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight (1752±1817), with a Dissertation on the History, Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible, intro. William J. McTaggart and William K. Bottorff (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969), II: ll. 1±4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TMP. 13 Simpson, Politics of American English, 96. 14 Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry; or, The Adventures of Captain John Farrago, and Teague O'Regan, His Servant, ed. Claude M. Newlin (1792±1805; rpt. New York: Hafner, 1968), 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as MC. 15 Even as he calls for a simple American style, the narrator of Modern Chivalry brandishes examples from Greek, Latin, French, and English literature, along with American examples as well. Since he also describes the work as pure nonsense, playful satire, and adventure, one should not be surprised to find Brackenridge ultimately claiming for the book almost as many purposes as the various dialects, spoken and written, it includes. As Cathy Davidson observes, ``In effect, the narrative, like the hero, is a farrago, a hodgepodge, an adventure in discourse on a whole range of political opinions regarding the operations of democracy and the failures and the triumphs of the new Republic, and all bound up in one continuous, shape-shifting saga'' (Cathy

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 223

16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26

Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 178). Although neither makes the specific argument of this essay, Grantland Rice describes Brackenridge as criticizing an implicit trust in print, while Christopher Looby sees the novel thematizing the very linguistic diversity and attempting to establish ``a monolingual standard to aid in [America's] . . . self-constitution'' (see Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 125±43; and Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996], 202±65, quote on 204). Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language 1776±1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 21±60, discusses the debate in America about the relationship between representative government and representation in language. Looby shows the debate on spelling, pronunciation, and usage was quite selfconsciously a debate as well on political stability versus revolutionary change in the period 1774±89 (see Voicing America, 13±45). For accounts of the debates in England, in addition to those cited, I have drawn on Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983) and Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640±1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977). John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730±80: An Equal, Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 179±82, quote on 179. Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), ll. 6±8. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SJ. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. Arthur Waugh, 2 vols. (1779±81; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), 2:382±3. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce (1748; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 1. Olivia Smith is particularly useful in discussing the larger context in which Worworth participated with regard to the debate in England on the vernacular (Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791±1819 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984]). William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 591. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as WW. William Keach's admirably lucid and learned essay surveys the various arguments about poetic language in the second half of the eighteenth century (see William Keach, ``Poetry, after 1740,'' in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, The Eighteenth Century, eds. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 117±66). Keach reminds us that ``Wordsworth was not alone in his effort to derive from the primitivist and nativist strands characteristic of so much mid- and late-eighteenth-century critical theory a new aganda for poetic language. A series of essays that appeared in the 1796 Monthly Magazine, signed `The Enquirer' and written by William Enfield, cites Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and various French (rather than German) theorists in claiming that poetry has its origins in a `rude state of nature' when language was inherently `bold and figurative''' (139).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

224 Notes

27 Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740±2; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1958), 245. For a discussion of Richardson's creation of Pamela's interiority, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 108±34. 28 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (1747±8; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 250. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as C. 29 In this respect, Solmes's writing resembles that of the servants Will Summers (Letter 231.1) or Mrs. Hodges (Letter 305) and shares many of the same kind of grammar and diction. 30 For a discussion of the publication history of the editions of Richardson popular in America, see Leonard Tennenhouse, ``The Americanization of Clarissa,'' Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 177±96. 31 The American editions of Richardson's novels after 1786, according to William Merritt Sales, ``were written with an eye very closely fixed on'' the 1756 edition of The Paths of Virtue; or the History in Miniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison. See Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of his Literary Career with Historical Notes (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1934), 134. 32 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (Boston, 1795), 28. 33 In the unabridged text, Richardson printed Letter 261, Paper X, as a seemingly random assemblage of scraps of verse, several stanzas of which are set askew and in a haphazard fashion. By this typographical device, he manages to call attention to the effect of the rape on the writing subject, while saying not a word about her physical condition. 34 Richardson, Clarissa (Boston, 1795), 80±1. 35 Jay Fliegelman has commented on the editions of Clarissa published in the 1790s. He sees them as less successful attacks on parental tyranny than the unabridged Clarissa that was popular in America in the decades before the Revolution (see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750±1800 [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984], 86±9).

Chapter 5: International Embarrassment 1 Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, ed. Ann Douglas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 3±4. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically in the text. 2 Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2. Mary Ann O'Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997). 3 Shakespeare, Henry V, V.ii.232±3. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 3 vols, 3rd edn. (1900; rpt. Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1926), 1:72±8. Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 28th edn. (1900; rpt. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1994), 211. On the cure for blushing, which involves ``endoscopic thoracic sympathicotomy,'' see the website for the Carlanderska Medical Center at www.hand-sweat.com. A good survey of some meanings of

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 225

4 5 6 7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

blushing is: Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 65±80. Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in EighteenthCentury English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995), 19, 15. Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality (London: W. Johnston, 1766), 2:101±5. David Hartley, Observations on Man, 2 vols. (1749; rpt. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), 2:229. Ibid., 237±8. On the miasmatist debate, see Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth-Century Controversy (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1967); and Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ, Press, 1988), 31±43. John Gregory, A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774; rpt. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1808), 31±3. For an account of the conduct books, see Joyce Hemlow, ``Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books,'' PMLA 65 (1950): 732±61. Thomas Brown, ``The Highlander, A Satire,'' The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, Serious and Comical, in Prose and Verse, 4 vols., 7th edn. (1707; rpt. London: Edward Midwinter, 1730), 1:118. John Pinkerton, The History of Scotland from the Accession of the House of Stuart to that of Mary, 2 vols. (London: C. Dilly, 1797), 1:48, 339. Pinkerton, An Enquiry into the History of Scotland, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne & Co., 1814), 1:17; 2:19. [James Kirkwood,] Proposals Concerning The Propagating of Christian Knowledge, in the Highland and Islands of Scotland and Forraign Parts of the World (Edinburgh: n.p., n.d. [1707?]), 1±2. The Gentleman's Magazine 47 (1777): 312. See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707±1837 (1992; rpt. London: Pimlico, 1994), 14±15. See Christopher Lasch, ``The Suppression of Clandestine Marriage in England: The Marriage Act of 1753,'' in Women and the Common Life, ed. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 61±2. Fanny Burney, Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (1778; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 79 (italics in original). Future references to this text will be given parenthetically in the text. David Daiches, ``Jane Austen, Karl Marx, and the Aristocratic Dance,'' The American Scholar 17 (1948): 289±90. Fanny Burney, letter to Susanna Burney, Aug. 23±30, 1778, in Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, eds. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3:67±8 (italics in original). The OED shows that the first recorded use of the word in England, as a synonym for cosmetics, was in 1753. Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1987); Linda Colley, Britons, 250±1; Gregory, A Father's Legacy, 31. For an analysis of the salon and the salonnieÁre see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 23±31. Martin Madan, Thelyphthora; or, A Treatise on Female Ruin, 3 vols., 2nd edn. (1780; rpt. London: Dodsley, 1781), 1:18; 3:309, 320; 1:xvi; 2:50; 3:352 (italics added). See Landes, Women and the Public Sphere.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

226 Notes

18 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; rpt., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 161±71. 19 Hartley, Observations on Man, 2:229. 20 Edmund Burke, Two Letters on a Regicide Peace, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 9:242±6. 21 [T.J. Mathias,] The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, 7th edn. (1794±98; rpt. London: T. Becket, 1798), 5, 45, 412±13, 59±60, 238, 58. 22 Ibid., 148. 23 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females: A Poem, Addressed to the Author of ``The Pursuits of Literature'' (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), 7, 13n., 16, 32, 35, 18, 36. 24 William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ``The Rights of Woman,'' rpt. in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ``The Rights of Woman,'' ed. Richard Holmes (1798; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 242. 25 See Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 232±6; R.M. Janes, ``On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,'' Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 293±302; and Richard Holmes, Introduction to Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence and Godwin, Memoirs, 43±7. 26 The Monthly Review, May 1798, quoted in Holmes, Introduction to Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence and Godwin, Memoirs, 44. 27 Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females, 3, 15, 13. 28 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 51. 29 Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, rpt. in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ``The Rights of Woman,'' ed. Richard Holmes (1796; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 111. 30 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Female Reader, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1989), 4:75. 31 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (1792; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 207±12. 32 Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), 172±5. The first appearance of the image of Washington as ``Father of his country'' is identified by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750±1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 200. Probably the first appearance of ``Cincinnatus'' is noted in Robert Lawson-Peebles, ``On First Looking Into Cunliffe's Weems's Washington,'' Americana: Essays in Honour of Marcus Cunliffe, eds. Brian Holden Reid and John White (Hull: Hull Univ. Press, 1998), 37. 33 See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. 34 David Humphreys, A Poem, on the Happiness of America: Addressed to the Citizens of the United States ([London]: n.p., [1786]), 11±12, 20, 22, 26±7. 35 Abigail Adams, letter March 31, 1776 to John Adams, The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family 1762±1784, eds. L.H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Mary-Jo Kline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 121.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 227

36 Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980). 37 Humphreys, A Poem, 22. 38 Edward Moore, Fables for the Ladies (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1787), 16. 39 See Janes, ``On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.'' 40 William Cobbett, Preface to Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females (New York: William Cobbett, 1800), v. 41 Ibid., vi. 42 Timothy Dwight, ``Morpheus,'' in Mercury and New-England Palladium, 9 March 1792, qtd. in Kerber, Women of the Republic, 235; and in Robert Edson Lee, ``Timothy Dwight and the Boston Palladium,'' New England Quarterly 35 (1962): 235. 43 See R.W.G. Vail, ``Susanna Haswell Rowson, the Author of Charlotte Temple: A Bibliographical Study,'' Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, N.S. 42 (1932): 62±4, 91±125, and Cathy N. Davidson, Introduction to Charlotte Temple, by Susanna Rowson (1791; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), xxxi. 44 See, for instance, Davidson, Introduction to Charlotte Temple, xix. 45 Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 75. 46 See Lasch, ``The Suppression of Clandestine Marriage in England,'' 44, 52; and Miles Ogburn, ``This Most Lawless Space: The Geography of the Fleet and the Making of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753,'' New Formations 37 (1999): 11±32. 47 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1776; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 120. 48 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 170±1. 49 ``H.S.B.,'' letter Sept. 12, 1903 in the New York Evening Post, qtd. in Davidson, Introduction to Charlotte Temple, xiv.

Chapter 6: Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel Sections of this chapter appear in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32 (Summer 1998), a special issue in honor of Mark Spilka. 1 See F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; rpt. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1967). 2 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; rpt. Berkeley: California Univ. Press, 1964). 3 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). 4 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: California Univ. Press, 1992), 196±216. 5 Rowlandson's account of her captivity is generally regarded as the best example of its type. It combines a modern authorial consciousness with early

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

228 Notes

6

7

8 9

10

modern hagiography to produce distinctively English brands of experience and written testimony. Her abduction and captivity by a heathen people in a savage land put the author's faith on trial and, with that faith, her Englishness. Her testimony articulated unrelenting contempt for her captors to an unwavering yearning for a Christian life among English people. For a biographical account of Rowlandson, see Mitchell Breitweiser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: Wisconsin Univ. Press, 1990). Michelle Burnham calls attention to the fact that ``Rowlandson barely records her return to the Puritan community and does not mention at all her reunion with husband and children. Instead, she closes the narrative with a list of providences that retroactively expose God's plan to test severely but ultimately deliver the Puritan project in New England'' (Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682±1861 [Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1997], 11). Rowlandson leaves an English family, in other words, and her return to that family transforms it into the foundation for a new English nation. Supplementing this early publishing record, encapsulated versions of Rowlandson's story appeared in published sermons, in publisher's reports, and as advertisements included on the back pages of other books. By the end of the eighteenth century, almost 30 editions of the account had appeared, most in the last 30 years of the century, which suggests that the story was thoroughly familiar to the readership who devoured Richardson's novels (see Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, ``The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century,'' Early American Literature 23 (1988): 239±61; R.W.G. Vail, The Voice of the Old Frontier [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Univ. Press, 1949], 29±61). It is well worth recalling that Rowlandson's was only one of many accounts of Englishwomen taken captive by the natives of British America, a number of which approached hers in popularity. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). It should be noted that Pamela's father once owned property; as he explains, ``We are, 'tis true, very poor, and find it hard to live; though once, as you know, it was better with us'' (Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. [1740; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1958], 5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as P). More important to her status as someone worthy of marriage into the gentry, however, is the literacy Richardson displays by including several of the Andrews' letters to their daughter in captivity among his collection intended as examples of polite letter writing. Though definitely the recessive of the two, an equally familiar form of captivity narrative featured a hero or heroine who survived by ``going native'' and adapting to the captor's culture. Of these, Mary Jemison's account of her captivity is perhaps the best example. It is worth noting that Jemison tells her story in the manner of a native informant to an Englishman-observer who is responsible for the written version. As a captive who ``went native'' and married outside her nationality, she set herself and family forever apart from ``the rich and respectable people, principally from New England'' (see

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 229

11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20

James E. Seaver, A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison [Norman: Oklahoma Univ. Press, 1992], 54). It is to this apparently conservative logic of the narrative that Michael McKeon refers in saying that ``Clarissa Harlow . . . resists assimilation to the progressive model of her predecessor Pamela Andrews'' (Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600±1740 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987], 418). Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (1747±8; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 307. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as C. Qtd. in Margaret Hunt, ``Wife-Beating, Domesticity and Women's Independence in Early Eighteenth-Century London'' Gender and History 4 (1992): 10. Hunt's article makes it quite clear that the gentlemanly conduct endorsed by Steele and sentimental novelists was no reflection of life among the middling ranks during the eighteenth century, where abusive treatment of women who were less than submissive was commonplace. Ï izÏek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). See Slavoj Z On the absence of such a male in Clarissa Terry Eagleton offers these suggestive remarks: ``Male hegemony was to be sweetened but not undermined; women were to be exalted but not emancipated. The recourse to the feminine was always problematical ± for how could the public sphere of male discourse model itself upon values drawn from an essentially private realm? . . . The answer to this question is Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Grandison is not just a cashing in on the success of Clarissa: it is the logical culmination of Richardson's ideological project'' (Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa [Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 1982], 93). Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780±1850 (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1987), 191. Ibid., 208. As Davidoff and Hall explain, ``For a middle-class woman of the early nineteenth century, gentility was coming to be defined by a special form of femininity which ran directly counter to acting as a visibly independent economic agent. Despite the fact that women hold property, their marital status always pre-empted their economic personality. The ramifications of this fact for their social and economic position were profound. It can be argued that nineteenth-century middle-class women represent a classic case of Parkin's distinction between property as active capital and property as possession'' (ibid., 315). Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (1818; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 199. Herefter cited parenthetically in the text as NA. Cecil S. Emden has argued persuasively for 1794 as the date of the earliest draft of the novel (``The Composition of Northanger Abbey,'' Review of English Studies 19 [1968]: 279±87). A. Walton Litz demonstrates that by 1803 it was for all practical purposes finished. After 1803, Austen only ``touched up'' the novel. For this reason, he believes Northanger Abbey is the only major work that was completely a product of the early Austen (Jane Austen: a Study of Her Artistic Development [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965], 175±6). The novel was first published posthumously, in 1819.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

230 Notes

21 Within the scope of this essay, I will not develop the relationship between monetary convertibility, or the property of English Bank Notes to serve as interchangeable currency and thus the standard for other forms of economic exchange, and the capacity of certain writing to stand in for genuine emotion. My interest here is in the principle that Adela Pinch articulates especially well in her chapters on Radcliffe and Austen, namely the permanent elsewhereness of the source of emotion represented in fiction, which in turn prompts the question of whether reading that substitutes for the ``natural'' origin of such feeling is emotionally good or bad for readers (Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996], 111±63). 22 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: the Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982). See also C.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1992), 154±214. 23 McKendrick, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 11. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 According to Ann Bermingham, ``In aestheticising the natural and often commonplace scenery of Britain, the Picturesque awakened a large segment of the population to the realisation that aesthetic judgment was not the gift of the privileged few but could be learned by anyone and applied to just about anything'' (Ann Bermingham, ``The Picturesque and Ready-to-wear Femininity,'' in The Politics of the Picturesque, eds. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994], 87). 26 When she notes a sudden depreciation in the value of sensibility at about this same time, Janet Todd adds her voice to the chorus of historians who see this moment as one of apparently superficial but nonetheless profound cultural change. Sensibility, in Todd's words, became associated with ``debased and affected feelings, an indulgence in and display of emotion for its own sake beyond the stimulus and beyond propriety'' (Janet Todd, Sensibility: an Introduction [London: Methuen, 1986], 8). 27 My favorite analysis of this new relation of depth and visible surface is Mary Ann O'Farrell's explanation of how embarrassment operates to display good manners in the form of somatic control and yet, at the same time, to reveal those manners somatically. ``It makes sense,'' O'Farrell explains, ``that, in support of the mannerly effort to contain events of the body within a system of signification, Austen chooses to work with and on the blush, which event of the body, in its comings and goings, is most suggestive and provocative of signification. It is the wonder of Jane Austen that, in engendering an adaptation to the system she helps to put out of place, she has also invented a pervesity that simply is the display of good manners ± of having the grace to blush'' (Mary Ann O'Farrell, ``Austen's Blush,'' Novel 27 [1994]: 137). 28 Bermingham, ``The Picturesque and Ready-to-wear Femininity,'' 98. 29 As the new language of consumerism obscured the boundaries between the lower gentry and upwardly mobile people of taste and refinement, that same language made gender into what Kaja Silverman calls ``the great visual divide.'' As women became subject to the fickle winds of fashion, she explains, men's clothing became relatively stable and homogeneous, with the result that sexual difference provided ``the primary marker of power,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 231

30

31

32

33

privilege and authority, closing the specular gap between men of different classes, and placing men and women on opposite sides of the great visual divide'' (Kaja Silverman, ``Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,'' Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modeleski [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986], 147). When the works of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte BronteÈ initially appeared under the pseudonyms Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell, respectively, they inspired a great deal of speculation as to what manner of individuals had actually authored the novels. The fact she was the oldest and the sole sister to live long enough to respond to the reception of her work is but one of the reasons why Charlotte was embraced as the only mature novelist of the family. A famous review by Sydney Dobell understood Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre, and Shirley as four works of a single author. ``Currer Bell'' represented the mature novelist, whose first mature work of fiction was Jane Eyre. I would like to suggest that Charlotte's more faithful and sustained adherence to the subject-producing form of the captivity narrative, a form her sisters interpolated within their novels at many points, better explains Dobell's misreading of the BronteÈ's collective oeuvre, as well as the more pervasive and enduring popularity of Jane Eyre (see Emily BronteÈ, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. [1847; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972], 277±8). Cora Kaplan does a brilliant job of exposing the subtle web of references by which BronteÈ pursues ``what [Judith] Butler calls the `volatile logic of iterability,' which marks identification as `that which is constantly marshalled, consolidated, retrenched, contested, and, on occasion, compelled to give sway''' (Cora Kaplan, ```A Heterogeneous Thing': Female Childhood and the Rise of Racial Thinking in Victorian Britain,'' in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1996], 172). Thus Jane identifies with racially marked individuals in only this one respect: that her dark, frankly unattractive physical appearance and occasionally atavistic outbursts inspire her captors' abuse. If BronteÈ uses ethnological discourse to identify Jane's class position with that of the racially marked slave, she also differentiates her heroine with equal firmness from women who lack her verbal ability and thus the basis for accumulating cultural capital. BronteÈ does this by describing her heroine's subcultural counterparts in the xenophobic terms of the period, as racially incompatible. This holds true not only for her memorable representations of Bertha Mason, who lacks all capacity for literacy, but also for Jane's young charges in the rural school, among whom she confesses to feeling ``degraded . . . dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me'' (Charlotte BronteÈ, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn [1747; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987], 316. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as JE). As Cora Kaplan explains, ``[t]hese little peasant girls, though they may be `of flesh and blood as god as the scions of gentlest genealogy,' are nevertheless part of the Africanist discourse of the novel'' (```A Heterogeneous Thing,''' 193). A word must be said concerning why readers generally fail to feel confined by the limitations of the community to which Jane returns, thereby playing out the logic of the captivity narrative to the full. Carla Kaplan argues convin-

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

232 Notes

34

35

36

37

38

cingly that the novel remains unfulfilled despite the heroine's success in the respect that Jane's speech community falls far short, in terms of size and intimacy of the community that BronteÈ's novel imagines at moment of discursive eroticism (see Carla Kaplan, ``Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women's Narration,'' Novel 30 [1996]: 5±31). I would simply like to point out how clearly this disparity between the speech community realized by the heroine and the imagined community of readers produced by her narrative conforms to the Rowlandson model. In making this claim, I am appropriating Gayatri Spivak's argument to the effect that ``feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and `interpellation' of the subject not only as individual but as `individualist''' (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ``Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,'' Critical Inquiry 12 [1985]: 263). What Spivak identifies as the means of social reproduction, or ``childrearing and soul-making,'' however, I identify with education and one's possession of the prestige dialect, or writing. That is what makes one human in BronteÈ's novel. As Spivak has argued, ``Here the native `subject' is not almost an animal but rather the object of what might be termed the terrorism of the categorical imperative'' (``Three Women's Texts,'' 267). Bertha's ``difference'' cannot be a function of race, because she is white. On the contrary, the taint of creolization that necessitates her expulsion from the ``subject'' category and confinement as an ``object'' is cultural rather than natural. If Adela is a lower order of human because she speaks French, Bertha lacks all humanity because she shows no linguistic capacity. Deirdre David describes Jane as ``the symbolic governess of empire'' whom Charlotte BronteÈ positioned as the agent of ``the reformation of the colonizer [Rochester] rather than the colonized'' (Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire and Victorian Writing [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995], 78). I would only add that it is from the rhetorical position of the colonized and Bertha's potential victim by way of Rochester that Jane can affectively reform him. In offering a comprehensive synthesis of feminist responses to Jane Eyre, Carla Kaplan puts her finger on the source of such dualism within the novel: ``BronteÈ's strategy of casting the novel as an autobiography cuts two ways. By making Jane an autobiographer, a writer who speaks to a public, BronteÈ can figure Jane gaining the chance to talk effectively, to give an account of herself over which she has both formal and substantial control, and to establish an intimate and familiar dialogue with a `sympathetic' listener. One could, however, as easily argue the opposite. In presenting Jane's story as a fictional autobiography that reveals all to the reader but ± fully at least ± to no one else, BronteÈ demonstrates the limits of Jane's potential to give such an account and establish such a dialogue'' (Kaplan, ``Girl Talk,'' 23). Simon Gunn calls to our attention how regularly attempts to account for the historical role of the middle class in modern British society ``are linked by a single, pervasive theme: the `failure' of the middle class to realize it hegemonic ambitions'' (Simon Gunn, ``The `Failure' of the Victorian Middle Class: a Critique,'' in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-century Middle Class [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998], 18). He offers two reasons for the lack of a history of the middle-class comparable to accounts

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 233

chronicling the decline of a traditional aristocracy, the fate of the gentry, and the making of an English working class during the modern period: (1) the middle ranks were always absorbing various aspects of the classes they displaced, particularly the landed gentry, and (2) the middle classes never acquired a univocal and internally coherent class character. Not only did the middle class embrace as its own tradition a long tradition of dissent, it was also composed of groups who behaved more like factions contending chiefly against one another. Thus, in deliberating any given issue, its clear sense of historical mission, associated with progress and individual liberty, was invariably subject to dispute and compromised. ``This said,'' Gunn concludes, ``we are scarcely in a position, historiographically, to substitute an unequivocal thesis of bourgeois `success' for that of bourgeois `failure''' (38). My own argument suggests that the novel contributed greatly to this sense of the failure of the middle class. In that the novels on which I focus invariably set one faction of the middle class against another, they simultaneously promoted the idea that a failure of the middle class can only be remedied by a middle-class success.

Chapter 7: Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens 1 In this study, I have attempted to distinguish nursery tales from folk- and fairytales, and to identify the role this European tradition played in American life. Such speculation would have been impossible without the collections and theories of Stith Thompson, The Folktale (1946; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977); Ernest Baughman, Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America (The Hague: Mouton, 1996); and Richard Dorson, America Begins: Early American Writing (New York: Pantheon, 1950), American Folklore (1959; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1973), and Handbook of American Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1983). For interpretations of folklore, I am indebted to Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980) and Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook (New York: Garland Press, 1982). For interpretations of fairytales, I am indebted to Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987) and Off With Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), as well as to Jack Zipes' many contributions, especially Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1991), Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (New York: Routledge, 1992), Fairy Tale as Myth: Myth as Fairy Tale (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1994), and Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1997). These, and all subsequent citations, after the first reference, are cited in the text. 2 With the exception of ``A Visit from St. Nicholas,'' first published in a newspaper in 1823, there are no American nursery tales. So Orestes Brownson observed, ``We have a glorious nature, no doubt, but it is barren of legends, traditions, and human associations'' (as quoted in Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986], 131). To most critics, such as Yolen

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

234 Notes

3 4

5

6

7

8 9

10

(see below, note 12) and Zipes, an Americanized nursery tale means commercial, contrived, censored, inauthentic, mutilated by Walt Disney, simplified in comic books, misrepresented in films, and exploited in theme parks. Such value judgments are unfortunate and self-defeating. All adults instinctively either read or recite the same canon of nursery tales to their children, in various corrupted or personal versions, and thereby introduce real toads into the imagined and imaginary gardens of their children, often apologetically. To do so seems to be a test of good parenting. Therefore, understanding this universal literature, which we seem compelled to perpetuate, even in an American setting in the twenty-first century, is crucial. For this analogy between childhood and ``cultural childhood,'' or `cultural earliness,'' I am indebted to Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross, 122, 190, and passim. In ``Wordsworth and the Six Arts of Childhood,'' I traced the uses, functions, and migration of the nursery and folk tales during this period in Europe to establish their impact on the life and poetry of Wordsworth and his generation (in Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry, eds., 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads [New York and London: Palgrave, 2001], 74±94). For that essay, and this one as well, I am grateful to the work of Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1984). In my English Romanticism I provided a brief history of children's literature in England and suggested its impact on the stage, especially the pantomime (English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), chs. 3 and 4). For the circulation and response specifically to the Brothers Grimm, see Donald Haase, The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1993) and James McGlathery, The Brothers Grimm and Folktale (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988) and Grimm's Fairy Tales: a History of Criticism on a Popular Classic (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993). Robert Irwin traces with great subtlety the migration of ``The Arabian Nights,'' and identifies those characteristics that reveal the narrators and the occasions for the performance (The Arabian Nights: A Companion [New York: Penguin, 1994]). It is particularly useful in relation to the diffusion of the tales in colonial America. See Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976) and Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language: an Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (New York: Rinehart, 1951). To both, however misleading, we owe gratitude for treating nursery tales with great seriousness and generating scholarly activity around them. Among the many collections and discussions of captivity narratives, I prefer Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captive Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 109. Similarly useful on the subject of fear and on many other things related to the effect of fairytales, Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994). That the Enlightenment produced the gothic, the study of myth, fairytale, nursery tale, folktale, along with a belief in the intuitive and emotional

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 235

11

12

13 14

15 16

truths of these forms in Europe and in America is yet to be explored and may never be understood, although Geoffrey Summerfield made an excellent start in Fantasy and Reason: Children's Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), to which I am indebted even as I took exception in English Romanticism: The Human Context, ch. 3. For description and analysis of the curious mechanisms of diffusion, the localisms, diversification, and adaptation of folk culture in colonial America, Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968) and Simon J. Bronner, Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (Logan, Utah: Utah State Univ. Press, 1998). There has been, to my knowledge, no research on the role of the Huguenots in spreading both the French court tales and ``The Arabian Nights,'' though the new interest in geographical and demographic studies may inspire scholarship in this very rewarding area. Although many have speculated on the ubiquity of Cinderella and its iconographic role in feminist studies, Jane Yolen's is a classic: ``America's Cinderella,'' Cinderella: A Folklore Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (New York: Garland Press, 1982), 294±306. This migration is eloquently explained by Malcolm Bradbury in Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London: Penguin, 1996), 69±73. Frederick Jackson Turner, ``The Significance of the Frontier in American History,'' in A Documentary History of the United States, 2nd edn. (1893; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1965), 183±91; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950); and, for recent commentary, Alun Munslow, ``Writing History: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Deconstruction of American History,'' in Writing and America, ed. Gavin Cologne-Brooks et al. (New York and London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996), 176±94. All should be compared with such classic character studies as Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600±1860 (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973); R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955); and Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization (Balitimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965). Jerry Griswold, The Classic American Children's Story: Novels in the Golden Age (New York: Penguin, 1992) and Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998). The Jack Tales, Told by R. M. Ward and His Kindred in the Beech Mountain section of Western North Carolina and by other descendants of Council Harmon (1803± 1896) elsewhere in The Southern Mountains: With three tales from Wise County, Virginia . . . , ed. Richard Chase (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 106±13.

Chapter 8: ``That Miserable Continent'' For assistance in collecting material on De Pauw's life in Xanten, I would like to thank Elisabeth Uranic of the Stiftsarchiv/Stadtsbibliothek Xanten. The references she provided me with once again convinced me of the necessity of bringing

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

236 Notes

Notes 237

1 James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 28. 2 The full title reads: Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains, ou MeÂmoires interessants pour servir aÁ l'histoire de l'espeÁce humaine, par Mr. De P***, 2 vols. (Berlin: G.J. Decker, Imp. du Roi, 1768±9). The book was followed by a DeÂfense des Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains (Berlin, 1770), in which De Pauw refuted the arguments of the illuminist Dom Pernetty (or Pernety) in his Dissertation sur l'AmeÂrique et les AmeÂricains, read before the Academy of Berlin, Sept. 7, 1769. In later editions this Dissertation and De Pauw's DeÂfense were incorporated as a third volume. The edition I have used for this essay is the modern reprint of the 1774 edition (intro. M. Duchet, 2 vols. (Paris: Place, 1974)). All citations from De Pauw's Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text (R). No systematic research has been undertaken to establish the nature of the differences between the successive editions. I did not see the reprint of the 1770 edition (Upper Saddle, NJ, 1968), used by Ceaser. De Pauw later also wrote the entry on ``AmeÂrique'' in the Supplement aÁ l'EncyclopeÂdie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des meÂtiers, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: M.M. Rey, 1776±7), 1:343±54. 3 Henry Ward Church, ``Corneille de Pauw and the controversy over his Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains,'' Publications of the Modern Language Association 51 (1936): 178±206, esp. 178. 4 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750±1900, rev. and trans. Jeremy Moyle (1955; rpt. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), esp. 52±79. Gerbi is not really interested in biographical details, but he quotes without comment the unfavorable (and highly biased) portrait of De Pauw by Dieudonne Thiebault (659). For further information Gerbi refers his readers to Gisbert Beyerhaus, ``Abbe de Pauw und Friedrich der Grosse, eine Abrechnung mit Voltaire,'' Historische Zeitschrift 134 (1926): 465±93 and Church, ``Corneille de Pauw.'' Older biographies can be found in Johann Georg Meusel, Lexikon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller, 15 vols. (1810; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968), 10:300±7; C.G. Jocher, Allgemeines Gelehrtenlexicon. Fortsetzungen und Erganzungen von J.Chr. Adelung und H.W. Rotermund, 4 vols. (1816; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), 5:1752±3; A.J. van der Aa, Biographisch Woordenboek der Nederlanden, 21 vols. (Haarlem: Van Brederode, 1872), 15:140±1 (mainly based on Jocher). Van der Aa lists the philosophe as ``Cornelis Pauw,'' which of course was his Dutch name. 5 Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 63; Ceaser, Reconstructing America, 23. 6 This sort of analysis is also exemplified in a few passages in Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, De mythe van het westen: Amerika als laatste wereldrijk (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1992). 7 Antonius Pauw and Quirina van Heijningen were married on Nov. 9, 1725 in the Catholic Church in Amsterdam. They had 8 children, of whom Cornelis Franciscus was the last. In the literature his birthday is given as August 19,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

together, in one essay, the results of German, American, and French scholarship concerning De Pauw, traditions that usually are ignorant of each other.

8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

1739, but the archives show that he was born on August 18, and baptized on August 19. It is not known when his father died. A man called Antonius Pauw died on December 14, 1759, but he was buried at the cemetary for the poor and may just as well have been someone else. In Amsterdam there lived another Antonius Pauw (probably born in 1705), who was Dutch Reformed and was married to A. de la Fontaine. I kindly thank Hanneke Bartelds for clarifying the genealogy of Cornelis de Pauw in the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam. When De Pauw refers to The Natural History of California, he does so in the Dutch editon of 1761. De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques, 1:150, 155, 160, 162. Cloots descended from a wealthy Amsterdam merchant family and in 1748 had married De Pauw's elder sister Aleida Johanna. See C.E.G. ten Houte de Lange, ``De identificatie van een wapen (Cloots-De Pauw),'' De Nederlandsche Leeuw 112 (1995): 467±8. For more information on the Stift, see C. Rose, H.-J. Schalles, Das Stift von Xanten (Cologne: Regionalmuseum Xanten, 1986). De Pauw is introduced at 66±7 (with a portrait). See also, H. Jansen, Udo Grote, eds., Zwei Jahrtausende È nster: Dialogverlag, 1998), 374±5 Geschichte der Kirche am Niederrhein (Mu (with another portrait). At the end of the first volume, De Pauw inserted an extract from a letter written by a Berlin anatomist, Meckel, who confirmed De Pauw's theories on the cause of the black color of Africans. This letter is dated July 10, 1767. Johann Friedrich Meckel (1714±74) was professor of anatomy, botany, and obstetrics at Berlin, prominent member of the Berlin Academy, and court physician to Frederick II. C. de Pauw, Wijsgeerige bespiegelingen over Amerika, of gewigtige stukken tot opheldering der historie van het menschdom, 3 vols. (Deventer: Lucas Leemhorst, 1771±3). This edition ware favorably reviewed in the Dutch journal Boekzaal der Geleerde Waereld 113 (1771): 1:275±88; Boekzaal 114 (1772): 2:453±61; and Boekzaal 115 (1773): 2:55±9. This Dutch journal also mentions a Dutch refutation of De Pauw's book, entitled Brieven van den heer . . . aan den heer . . . betreffende de Wijsgeerige Bespiegelingen over Amerika (Utrecht: J. van Schoonhoven & Comp., 1772) (Boekzaal 114 (1772): 717). I was not able to locate a copy of this book in any of the larger Dutch libraries. See the catalogue of an exhibition in the StaÈdtisches Museum Haus Koekkoek in Cleves, Anacharsis Cloots: Der Redner des Menschengeschlechts (Cleves: Boss Verlag, 1988), 110±13. Both Elisabeth Uranic (Xanten) and Dr. E.M. Janssen Perio (Rotterdam) kindly drew my attention to this catalogue. Cf. also H. Engelskirchen, ``Der Xantener Striftsherr Kornelius de Pauw und seine Neffe Anacharsis Cloots,'' Heimatkalender (Landkreis Moers) 27 (1970): 33±6. His testament was published by H. Engelskirchen, ``Das Testament des È nigs Friedrich II., Franz Xantener Stiftsherrn und Vorlesers des Preussenko Kornelius de Pauw,'' in Annalen des historischen Vereins fuÈr den Niederrhein 123 (1933): 141±3. The text on the monument read: ``Ici repose Cornelie de Paw, ne aÁ Amsterdam le 19. Aout 1739, auteur des Recherches sur les Egyptiens, les Chinois, les Grecs, le Americains, mort aÁ Xanten le 5. Juillet 1799. Ce simple monument a eÂte eÂrige aux frais de la ville de Xanten, an MDCCCXI. VIII anneÂe du regne

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

238 Notes

16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

de NapoleÂon le Grand''; and: ``M.M. le Comte de Montalivet, Ministre de È er, Gruat, Sous-prefet de Cleves l'interieur, le Baron Ladoucette, Prefet de la Ro par interim, Eickmann, Maire de Xanten.'' The German traveler Aloys Henninger visited Xanten between 1851 and 1855 and included a È llers, Xanten ± description of the obelisk in his travel report: Wilhelm Mu gestern und heute (Xanten: Gesthuysen, 1975). For the correct date of birth, see note 7. For this tradition see the still indispensable book by Gilbert Chinard, L'AmeÂrique et le reÃve exotique dans la litteÂrature francËaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe sieÁcle (Paris: Hachette, 1934). Since De Pauw was not a Frenchman, he is not included in this volume. He is, however, treated in Chinard's ``Eighteenth Century Theories on America as Human Habitat,'' in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947): 27±57. Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, 63. For his criticism of Las Casas, see Recherches philosophiques, 1:18n. In this footnote De Pauw also gives detailed calculations of the number of slaves in the different parts of America, derived, as he says, ``from a Discours sur l'origine de la Traite des NeÁgres, which I wrote a number of years ago.'' Does that mean that his interest in America initially awoke in the context of his research for a treatise on the slave trade, which he abhorred? With regard to De Pauw's Dutch background this is interesting, because during the eighteenth century, criticism of the slave trade was practically non-existent in the Dutch Republic. See J.M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600±1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). The importance of De Pauw's critique of religion in his books has been stressed by Beyerhaus, ``Abbe de Pauw und Friedrich der Grosse.'' Modern historiography credits the Jesuits in America with providing the Indians with at least some sort of protection against the unhindered exploitation by white colonists. In his EncyclopeÂdie article on America (published in 1776), in which De Pauw largely repeats the ideas of his Recherches philosophiques, instead of the University of Lima, he ridicules the oldest academic institution in northern America, Harvard: ``It is not apparent, that the professors of the University of Cambridge, in New England, have formed any young American to the point where they are able to bring them out into the literary world. . . . Could we really expect any such achievement from a handful of merchants and adventurers guided by a rapacious avarice in all of their actions? Alas, we doubt it very much'' (De Pauw, ``AmeÂrique'', 351, qtd. in Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 99). By ``least barbarous peoples,'' De Pauw is referring to the Indians in Mexico and Peru, who were notorious for their human sacrifices. M. Duchet, Le partage des savoir. Discours historique, discours ethnologique (Paris: La DeÂcouverte, 1985), ch. 4, ``Cornelius Pauw ou `l'histoire en defaut,''' 82±104. De Pauw, however, makes it clear that he is not opposed to the reign of kings: ``The distance between the sky and the earth is smaller than the distance between a king and a tyrant'' (R, 2:162). De Pauw's Recherches philosophiques sur les AmeÂricains already contain numerous references to the Asian civilizations and especially to Chinese religion,

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 239

26 27

28 29

30

which some saw as the source of a number of religious practices in America. De Pauw even announces a memoir in which he will explain why the Chinese have such a poor record in painting (R, 3:349n.). In his Recherches philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois this is only one of the many topics treated. The book is organized as a refutation of the theory (already put forward by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century and repeated in the Paris Academy of Science in 1758) that civilization was brought to China by the Egyptians and that therefore Chinese civilization was more akin to the original Egyptian wisdom than European civilization. Voltaire was one of the eighteenth-century philosophes who entertained this idea and who also represented the Chinese mandarins as sages who administered their country as enlightened despots should do. Now De Pauw tried to prove that, first, the Egyptians could not possibly have colonized China and that, second, Chinese civilization was not superior to European civilization, but actually inferior, especially morally. Since the Jesuits were to a large degree responsible for the favorable picture of Chinese civilization, deconstructing this idealized picture offered De Pauw another opportunity for criticizing the Jesuit order. Gerbi draws attention to this apparent and, in his view, unresolved contradiction in De Pauw's denunciation of the Americans (Dispute of the New World, 56). Maupertuis, VeÂnus physique, suivi de la Lettre sur le progreÁs des sciences. PreÂceÂde d'un essai de Patrick Tort (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1980), esp. 148±52: ``Everybody knows that in the southern hemisphere there is an unexplored space, where one can locate a new continent larger than any of the other four. Now, in an age in which navigation has reached such a state of perfection, not one Prince has the curiosity of seeing whether this space is filled with land or with sea! . . . Several times people have circumnavigated the globe and every time the southern lands were left to one side. It is certain that they are completely isolated and that they constitute so to say a New World on its own, in which no one can forsee what there is to discover. The discovery of these lands could therefore offer great opportunities for commerce and marvelous wonders for physics.'' The letter was addressed to Frederick II of Prussia, whose Berlin Academy was presided over by Maupertuis from 1745. De Brosses' compilation is mentioned (and criticized) by De Pauw in his Recherches philosophiques, 2:105, 290. In Britian, Alexander Dalrymple was also promoting exploration in the southern Pacific. In 1769 he published An account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacific (printed in 1767, but issued only in 1769), to be followed by an even larger collection of travel reports in his Historical collection of the several voyages and discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (London, 1770±1). According to Dalrymple the unknown continent measured 5,323 miles from east to west and might have a total population of 50 million people. Jean-Etienne Martin-Allanic, Bougainville navigateur et les deÂcouvertes de son temps (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964); Derek Howse, ed., Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Margarette Lincoln, ed., Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

240 Notes

31 32

33

34

35

(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998). Of the explorers who were sent to the Pacific only John Byron had returned before De Pauw went to Berlin to publish his Recherches philosophiques. Byron had left England in 1764 and returned on May 9, 1766. His travel report is mentioned by De Pauw in his chapter on the Patagonian giants (Recherches philosophiques, 1:298). Byron claimed to have seen the giants, but Pauw of course does not believe him. The second British explorer, Samuel Wallis, left England in July 1766 and returned in May 1768. On June 17, 1767, he discovered Tahiti, which he called King George's Island. To the south his men saw mountain peaks that they believed belonged to the southern continent. By the time Wallis returned to England, the first French explorer, Louis de Bougainville, was already in the Pacific. He had left France on December 5, 1766, and after an extended stay in the south Atlantic (where he handed over the French settlement on the Falklands to the Spanish), landed on Tahiti on April 2, 1768. He reached France again in April 1769. James Cook, who once and for all dispelled all stories about a new continent in the South Pacific, left England on August 25, 1768 for his first voyage (1768±71). Howard T. Fry, Alexander Dalrymple (1737±1808) and the Expansion of British Trade (London: Cass, 1970), 102. In his DeÂfense against Dom Pernetty, De Pauw says that he had worked on his book for 9 years, while it only took his critic two or three hours to write the Dissertation to destroy it (De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques, 3:132). If this is true, De Pauw had started doing the research for his book in 1759, at the age of 20, even before he had settled in Xanten. Perhaps in that period he stayed in Denmark, which some of his remarks seem to suggest (see, for instance, ibid., 2:238n., where he refers to ``our memoirs sent from Denmark at the end of 1765''). De Pauw seems to be especially well-informed with regard to Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Greenland).The Scandinavian interest in De Pauw's work is illustrated by a Swedish translation of his book on the Americans in 1800. Voltaire's novel ends with the famous words: ``Cela est bien dit, reÂpondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.'' Since so many topics discussed by De Pauw had also been touched upon by Voltaire ± the slave trade, a trip to the Jesuits in America, the devastating consequences of veneral diseases, autos-da-feÂ, the hope of finding the best of all worlds in America, and so forth ± it might be worthwhile to study the possible relationship between Voltaire and De Pauw in more detail. The reference to Reaumur's thermometer seems to be very specific, but I was not able to find out to whom De Pauw specifically addressed this remark. As a matter of fact, the expeditions of Byron, Wallis, Bougainville, Cook, and others were not directed to New Guinea, but to the islands in the South Pacific. Although New Guinea was already sighted in the early sixteenth century and was claimed by the Spanish in 1545, it was not until 1793 that a European power (the British) tried to colonize the island (without success). Nevertheless, De Pauw must have known about the plan to observe the transit of Venus from a place somewhere in the South Pacific. In the end, Cook observed the event from Tahiti. James W. Ceaser, the only scholar who actually paid attention to the Introduction of De Pauw's book, rightly stresses his philosophy of restraint, but he

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 241

spoils his analysis by making De Pauw a precursor of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and late-twentieth-century criticism of European hegemonic thinking in general (Ceaser, Reconstructing America, 42). Although De Pauw indeed feels compassion for human beings in other cultures, for him European culture is superior. It therefore should avoid contamination with the unhealthy elements of inferior cultures. 36 See also De Pauw's warning against over-exploitation of farming land: ``There is here [in agriculture] as in all things a middle ground that one has to keep to ± il y a en cela comme en toutes choses un milieu qu'il faut garder'' (Recherches philosophiques, 3:352).

Chapter 9: The Illusion of the Illuminati 1 For background on the concept of conspiracy, see T.W. Adorno, Else FrenkelBrunswick, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950); Franz L. Neumann, ``Anxiety in Politics,'' Dissent 2 (1955): 133±43; Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963). Richard Hofstadter has argued that throughout their history Americans had been beset by continuing fears of conspiracy, and that certain American conservatives in particular ± Hofstadter called them pseudo-conservatives ± were predisposed to practice a ``paranoid style'' of politics, the central preconception of which was ``the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character'' (Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 14). See also the essays in Daniel Bell, The Radical Right: the New American Right, exp. edn. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963). 2 See, on ideology, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 94±143; on partisanship, Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967); on social and economic dislocation, Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, eds., Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); on shifting moral and philosophical perspectives, Gordon S. Wood, ``Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,'' William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1982): 401±41; on cultural values, James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991); and on prophetic prediction, Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1992). 3 David Brion Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), 362. 4 See Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1918), 142±73. The citation is on 185. 5 Ibid., 194±5. 6 Ibid. See also J.M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Scribner, 1972), 212.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

242 Notes

7 John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies . . . , 3rd edn. (Philadelphia, 1798), 13. 8 Stauffer, New England and the Illuminati, 196. 9 See ibid., 197n. 10 See Roberts, Mythology of Secret Societies, 194. 11 See ibid., 194. 12 Augustin de Barruel, Memoirs; Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. A Translation from the French of the Abbe Barruel (Hartford, 1799), xvii. 13 Ibid., 493. 14 See on predispositions to perceive conspiracy, Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 144±59; on fragility of free governments, John R. Howe, Jr., ``Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,'' American Quarterly 19 (1967): 147±65; on the problem of a loyal opposition, Lance Banning, ``Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789 to 1795,'' William and Mary Quarterly 31 (1974): 167±88; and on fears of international failure, Lloyd S. Kramer, ``The French Revolution and the Creation of American Political Culture,'' in The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, ed. Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel (Washington and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 26±54. 15 Marshall Smelser, ``The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,'' American Quarterly 10 (1958): 397. 16 Marshall Smelser, ``The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,'' The Review of Politics 13 (1951): 472±4. 17 See Marshall Smelser, ``The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy, Plutocracy, and Anglophilia, 1789±1798,'' The Review of Politics 13 (1959): 250±8. 18 See James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), 171. 19 On Morse, see Joseph W. Phillips, Jedidiah Morse and New England Congregationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983), 73±101. 20 Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Delivered at the New North Church in Boston, . . . May 9th, 1798 (Boston, 1798), 23. 21 See Stephen E. Berk, Calvinism versus Democracy: Timothy Dwight and the Origins of American Evangelical Orthodoxy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974), 127. 22 See James West Davidson, ``Searching for the Millennium: Problems for the 1790s and the 1970s,'' The New England Quarterly 45 (1982), 241±61. 23 Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, in the Present Crisis. Illustrated in a Discourse, Preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 (New Haven, 1798), 21. 24 Ibid., 30. 25 See J. Wendell Knox, Conspiracy in American Politics, 1787±1815 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1964), 127±9. 26 Stauffer, New England and the Illuminati, 276. 27 Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford . . . July 4th, 1798 (Hartford, 1798), 30n. 28 Stauffer, New England and the Illuminati, 241±3; 256±7; 258. 29 Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Preached at Charlestown, November 29, 1798, on the Anniversary Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. With an Appendix . . . exhibiting

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 243

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

proofs of the early existence, progress, and deleterious effects of French intrigue and influence in the United States (Boston, 1798), 67. Stephen C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730±1840 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996), 271. See also Stauffer, New England and the Illuminati, 126ff. Smelser, ``The Federalist Period,'' 409±13. For the full story, see James Morton Smith, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1956), 159±417. Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Exhibiting the Present Dangers, and Consequent Duties of the Citizens of the United States of America. Delivered at Charles town, April 25, 1799. The Day of the National Fast . . . (Charlestown, Mass., 1799), 15±16. See Smelser, ``The Federalist Period,'' 416.

Stauffer, New England and the Illuminati, 304±6; 313±20; 346±7; 311.

[John Cosens Ogden], A View of the New England Illuminati; Who Are Indefat igably Engaged in Destroying the Religion and Government of the United States; Under a Feigned Regard for their Safety ± And Under An Impious Abuse of True Religion (Philadelphia, 1799), 10. Knox, Conspiracy in American Politics, 152. Smelser, ``The Federalist Period,'' 415±17. Abraham Bishop, Connecticut Republicanism: An Oration on the Extent and Power of Political Delusion, delivered in New-Haven, on the evening preceding the public commencement, September, 1800 (n.p., 1800), 39. Michael Lienesch, ``The Role of Political Millennialism in Early American Nationalism,'' The Western Political Quarterly 36 (1983): 445±65. See Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), 273±90. Knox, Conspiracy in American Politics, 126. See Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), 110±11. Timothy Dwight, A Discourse on Some Events of the Last Century, Delivered in the Brick Church in New Haven, On Wednesday, January 7, 1801 (New Haven, 1801), 48. Ibid., 41; 43; 45. See Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), 173±215. Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Delivered at New-Haven on the 7th Day of July, A.D. 1801, Before the Society of the Cincinnati, . . . (Suffield, Conn., 1801), 6. James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Pary Politics in Massachusetts, 1789±1815 (New York: Knopf, 1970), 268±93. Jefferson cited in Knox, Conspiracy in American Politics, 297. Abraham Bishop, Proofs of a Conspiracy, Against Christianity, and the Government of the United States; Exhibited in Several Views of the Union of Church and State in New-England (Hartford, 1802), 166. See Roberts, Mythology of Secret Societies, 206; 208±9; 212. Jeremy D. Popkin, The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792±1800 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), 169.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

244 Notes

53 See Roberts, Mythology of Secret Societies, 206. 54 See Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy, 362. Davis concludes: ``There is an ironic significance in the fact that Robert Welch can trace the conflict with America's Great Enemy back to the Order of the Illuminati, and then create an Illuminati-like counter-society (the John Birch Society) to do battle with the forces of darkness.'' 55 See Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993), 237±43. 56 Paul Brown, ``Ex-Nutter Icke Rails at New World Order Mind Benders,'' The Guardian, May 19, 1995.

Chapter 10: ``I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale ± !'' 1 Hayden White, ``The Fictions of Factual Representation,'' in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), 122. 2 Ibid., 123. 3 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; rpt. New York: Continuum, 1999), 6. 4 I disagree in this respect with Jon Klancher, who, in ``Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory,'' reads Godwin's writings of the 1780 and 1790s as ``genre-shifting texts'' that were intended to undermine the Enlightenment republic of letters and thus to ``change history'' (in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-Forming Literature 1789±1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998], 22). 5 See ``The Fictions of Factual Representation,'' 123±4. 6 Hayden White, ``Droysen's Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science,'' in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 87. 7 ``The Fictions of Factual Representation,'' 124. 8 Hayden White, ``The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment,'' in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), 136. 9 Qtd. in White, ``The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment,'' 140. 10 Ibid., 142. 11 Ibid., 144. See Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh; intro. Anthony Grafton (1725, 3rd edn. 1744; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). 12 Ibid., 145. 13 Ibid., 147. 14 William Godwin, Preface to the Standard Novels Edition of Fleetwood (1832), rpt. in Pamela Clemit, ed., Fleetwood; Or, The New Man of Feeling, vol. 5 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (1805; rpt. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 5:7. 15 Ibid., 5:8.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 245

16 William Godwin, ``Thoughts Occasioned by the perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon,'' in Mark Philp, ed., ``Political Writings II,'' vol. 2 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 2:163. 17 William Godwin, ``Analysis of Own Character, Begun Sep. 26, 1798,'' rpt. in Mark Philp, ed., Autobiography, Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections, Godwin/Shelley Correspondence, Memoirs, vol. 1 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 1:55. 18 Klancher, ``Godwin and the Genre Reformers,'' 23; Clemit, The Godwinian Novel, 25. 19 William Godwin, ``Of the Sources of Genius,'' in The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1797), 26±7. 20 Godwin, The Enquirer, preface, v.

21 Ibid., v±vi.

22 Ibid., vi.

23 Ibid., x, viii.

24 Klancher, ``Godwin and the Genre Reformers,'' 28.

25 Godwin, The Enquirer, preface, x. See also Godwin's autobiographical fragment

entitled ``The Principal Revolutions of Opinion'' (March 10, 1800). Having briefly summarized the principal changes that had taken place in his thinking and writing since the late 1760s, Godwin concludes quite firmly: ``My speculative opinions have, I believe, undergone no radical and fundamental change, since [the publication of the second edition of Political Justice ± i.e. 1796]'' (Godwin, ``The Principal Revolutions of Opinion,'' rpt. in Mark Philp, ed., Autobiography, Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections, Godwin/Shelley Correspondence, Memoirs, vol. 1 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp [London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992], 1:54). 26 Ibid., ix.

27 Ibid., x.

28 Qtd. in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols.

(London: Henry S. King, 1876), 1:61. 29 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1793; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 272. Further references to the text are to this edition and will be given parenthetically within the text (PJ). 30 Klancher's claim that Godwin became an educationalist only after he had renounced the ``theoretical ambition'' and ``philosophical totalization'' of Political Justice and had turned to the small-scale pragmaticism of The Enquirer, is clearly misguided (``Godwin and the Genre Reformers,'' 28). 31 William Godwin, ``Letter of Advice to a Young American: On the Course of Studies it Might be Most Advantageous for Him to Pursue'' (1818), rpt. in Pamela Clemit, ed., ``Educational and Literary Writings,'' vol. 5 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 5:325. 32 William Godwin, ``Of Choice in Reading,'' in The Enquirer, 133; 135. 33 ``Of Posthumous Fame,'' in The Enquirer, 288±9.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

246 Notes

34 William Godwin, ``Of History and Romance,'' rpt. in Pamela Clemit, ed., ``Educational and Literary Writings,'' vol. 5 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 5:300. Further references to the text are to this edition and will be given parenthetically within the text (``HR''). 35 William Godwin, ``Considerations on Lord Grenville's and Mr. Pitt's Bills, concerning Treasonable and seditious practices, and unlawful assemblies. By a Lover of Order'' (1795), rpt. in Mark Philp, ed., ``Political Writings II,'' vol. 2 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), 2:142. Thus, elsewhere in the same essay, Godwin, commenting on the wording in Lord Grenville's bill of the words ``government'' and ``constitution,'' asks, ``where is the philologist that will give me a secure definition of these two words?'' (135). 36 Klancher, ``Godwin and the Genre Reformers,'' 34. 37 William Godwin, ``Analysis of Own Character, Begun Sep. 26, 1798,'' 1:60. 38 William Godwin, Caleb Williams [Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams], ed. Pamela Clemit, vol. 3 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (1794; rpt. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 3:266. 39 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits (London, 1825), 33. Godwin completed the manuscript of Political Justice early in January 1793, and had finished proofreading it on February 14. Ten days later he started writing Caleb Williams. 40 Godwin, Preface to the Standard Novels Edition of Fleetwood, 10. In his diary Godwin later recalled that Caleb Williams ``was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my `Political Justice' left me'' (qtd. in Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 1:78). 41 Having just read the manuscript of the novel, James Marshall wrote to Godwin with some alarm, expressing his deep concern about the latest turn in his friend's career. Warning Godwin that he should simply stick to what he was good at, viz. writing political philosophy, Marshall continued: ``for depend upon it, the world will suppose you to be exhausted; or rather what a few only think at present, will become a general opinion, that the Hercules you have fathered is not of your own begetting'' (qtd. in Kegan Paul, William Godwin, 1:90). 42 See Godwin, Preface to the Standard Novels Edition of Fleetwood, 8±12. 43 Ibid., 10. 44 Ibid., 9. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid., 9. 47 Godwin, Caleb Williams, 5. 48 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6. 49 William Godwin to Shelley, Dec. 10, 1812, rpt. in Mark Philp, ed., Autobiography, Autobiographical Fragments and Reflections, Godwin/Shelley Correspondence, Memoirs, ``Godwin/Shelley Correspondence,'' vol. 1 of The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, 8 vols., gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992), 1:80.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 247

248 Notes

1 For this issue, see G.A. Reisch, ``Chaos, History and Narrative,'' History and Theory 30 (1991): 1±21, and D.N. McCloskey, ``History, Differential Equations and the Problem of Narration,'' History and Theory 30 (1991): 21±37. The standard example is always the butterfly in China causing a hurricane in the US. 2 This is, by the way, the lady who so famously aroused Rousseau sexually when spanking him. 3 J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparance et l'obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 19. 4 ``Eigentlich kaÈmpften beide, Rousseau wie Burke, gegen denselben Feind, denn auch Rousseau gab dem AufklaÈrungsgeist einen gewaltigen Stoss durch seine Kritik des modernen Zivilisationszustandes.'' See Friedrich MeiÈ nchen: Oldenbourg, 1965), 270. necke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Mu 5 Edmund Burke, ``Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,'' in The Works of Edmund Burke, 12 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1865±7), 4:176. 6 Ibid., 4:165. 7 He might even be prepared to concede to Rousseau that history is the tragic spectacle of human injustice and iniquity. But, as Burke argued in his ``Vindication,'' one may ``confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak and wicked as they are.'' See Edmund Burke, ``A Vindication of Natural Society,'' in The Works of Edmund Burke, 1:65. 8 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Works of Edmund Burke, 3:346. 9 Cf.: ``darum sind die Vorurteile des einzelnen weit mehr als seine Urteile die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit des Seins.'' In the section following this claim, Gadamer expounds the role of ``Vorurteile als Bedingungen des Verstehens.'' See H.G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Wahrheit und Methode; GrundzuÈge È bingen: Mohr, 1960), 261. einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tu 10 For an exposition of the relevant weaknesses of Gadamer's argument, see Frank Ankersmit, De macht van representatie: Exploraties Deel II (Kampen: Kok, 1996), 226ff. 11 It may well be that Burke, who, as the author of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, was so much more fascinated by the obscurity of the sublime than by the clarity of the beautiful, unwittingly carried over his aesthetics to his politics here. 12 Cited in Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), 301. 13 Burke, Reflections, 296. 14 Ibid., 345, 346. 15 It certainly is a most surprising fact about Wahrheit und Methode that its careful and erudite author never pays any attention to Burke. È ber den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig 16 Immanuel Kant, ``U È r die Praxis,'' in Kleinere Schriften zur Geschichtsphilosein, taugt aber nicht fu sophie, Ethik und Politik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1973), 85. 17 Let us agree with the prevailing opinion according to which the correspondence theory of truth gives the correct definition of the meaning of the word ``true'' (i.e. a statement is true, if and only if it corresponds to a certain state of affairs in reality). It follows from this definition that truth and falsity can

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Chapter 11: Edmund Burke, Historism, and History

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36

only be established if the distinction between language and reality presents us with no difficulties. For if such difficulties would arise it would ex definitione have become impossible to use the correspondence theory of truth. So if one accepts the correspondence theory, one is automatically obliged also to accept this clear demarcation line between language and reality and vice versa ± hence, precisely that distinction which is put into question within the regime of wisdom versus folly. Burke, Reflections, 443. In the very first sentence of Erasmus's Moriae Encomium, he explicitly states that it is precisely the fools who hate folly most (see also note 17). See chapter 30 of the Moriae Encomium; with regard to the last part of this essay it is of interest to note the Aristotelian link between wisdom and happiness suggested here by Erasmus. As Foucault unusually succinctly puts it: ``car s'il y a raison, c'est justement dans l'acceptation de ce cercle continu de la sagesse et de de la folie, c'est dans la claire conscience de leur reÂciprocite et de leur impossible partage'' (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie aÁ l'aÃge classique [Paris: Gallimard, 1972], 44). Qtd. in Foucault, Folie, 47. Burke, ``Appeal,'' 188. Burke even goes on to argue that in proportion that rights may seem to us metaphysically true, they must be morally and politically false (Burke, Reflections, 313; see also Strauss, Natural Right, 307, 310). Burke, Reflections, 274. Ibid., 311. Or, as Tocqueville once succinctly put it: in politics ``nothing is more unproductive to the mind than an abstract idea''(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835±9; rpt. New York: Knopf, 1945], 243). Burke, Reflections, 311. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (1976; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 35. Burke, Reflections, 313. One may regret that nowhere in his writings does Burke discuss the legitimacy of the Dutch revolt against Philip II of Spain. On the other hand, one cannot fail to notice his amazingly dispassionate view of the Civil War and his not unsympathetic assessment of Cromwell, described by him as that ``great bad man of the old stamp'' (see Burke, Reflections, 294). Burke, Reflections, 308. Edmund Burke, ``Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,'' in The Works of Edmund Burke, 4:41. For an absurd exaggeration of these disasters to which Burke is typically prone, see Burke's ``Vindication.'' He there calculates the number of people murdered in the whole of history and, in his enthusiasm in this enterprise, loses sight of the fact that the calculated number even exceeds his estimate of the total number of people who have lived since the days of Adam. See Burke, ``Vindication,'' 24ff. Burke, Reflections, 418.

Ibid.

As early as 1793 Friedrich von Gentz, that very influential conservative

thinker of post-Napoleonic Germany, published a German translation

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 249

37

38

39

40

41 42

of the Reflections. For an exposition of Burke's reception in Germany, see Friedrich Meinecke, WeltbuÈrgertum und Nationalstaat (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1919),135ff. Characteristic is Novalis's wisecrack: ``es sind viele antirevoluÈr die Revolution geschrieben. Burke hat ein revolutionaÈres Ècher fu tionaÈre Bu Buch gegen die Revolution geschrieben'' (Novalis [pseud. of Friedrich von Hardenberg], BluÈthenstaub I [Heidelberg: Schneider, 1953], 340). In order to avoid the unfortunate confusion that the word ``historism'' so often gives rise to in Anglo-Saxon countries, I emphasize that I use that word here not in Popper's sense, but as referring to the view of history and of historical writing that is ordinarily associated with the names of Ranke or Humboldt. Cf.: ``it is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions. The same events follow the same causes'' (David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], 83). Of course, this is a reckless simplification of a far more complex phenomenon. Since Meinecke's book on the origins of historism the historist tendencies in many Enlightenment authors from Leibniz to Herder have often been pointed out. The nature of Burke's traditionalism manifests itself most clearly in his conception of the history of the English constitution; though there is continuous change, change has, for Burke, always the connotation of adaptation, and never that of ``organic'' growth, in the sense of a development, or of an unfolding of what was potentially already present. It is here that I would side with Regina Wecker and against Meinecke. Discussing Burke, Meinecke È chste Stufe des Traditionalismus aber war es [i.e. Burke's concepwrites: ``ho tion of history (F.A.)] vor allem dadurch, dass es ihm nicht um die treue È berkommener und bewaÈhrter Einrichtungen, Sitten, Pflege geschichtlich u È berhaupt, sondern um das innere seelische Leben handelte, Vorrechte usw. u das sie in einem einheitlichen Blutumlaufe durchflutet und sie dadurch zu ineinandergreifenden, miteinander verwachsenen Gieldern und Organen des È rpers macht'' (F. Meinecke, Die staatlichen-gesellschaftlichen Gesamtko È nchen: Oldenbourg, 1965], 277). But this hisEntstehung des Historismus [Mu torist organicism is, as Wecker demonstrates, explicitly rejected by Burke himself; she quotes Burke when writing that ``these analogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimes illustrate arguments, furnish no arguments of themselves'' [R. Wecker, Geschichte und GeschichtsverstaÈndnis bei Edmund Burke (Bern: Lang, 1981], 58). For an exposition of the logical features of the historist conception of historical change, and for its implications, see my ``Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis, History and Theory 34 (1995): 143±62; 168±74. Cf.: ``man darf wohl aussprechen, dass sie [i.e. the administrative disasters resulting from Louis XIV's `imperial overstretch,' as we would nowadays call it] fortwirkend die revolutionaÈre Bewegung hervorgebracht haben. Denn im Folge des misslungenen Vorhabens, dessen Idee alle Geister beherrscht hatte, aÈnderten sich die vorwaltenden Doctrinen und Tendenzen mit dem Willen

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

250 Notes

43 44

45

46

oder auch gegen den Willen der folgenden Regierungen'' ± needless to say, a perfect example of Ranke's postulate of ``das Primat der Aussenpolitik'' (L. von Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege 1791 und 1792, in Sammtliche Werke, 54 vols. [Leipzig: Duncker & Hamblot, 1867±90], 45:22, 23). See Frank Ankersmit, History and Tropology (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), 150ff. I should like to thank Jaap den Hollander for his invaluable advice for the remaining part of my argument. My exposition here is deeply indebted to his magisterial ``Conservatisme en historisme,'' Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 102 (1987): esp. 396ff. In fact, two other traditions should be taken into account as well in this period. In the first place we should think of the rediscovery of Stoicism in the sixteenth century. Neo-Stoicism, with its emphasis on the recta ratio and on logical argument, with its preference for deduction from first principles, and with its affinities with natural philosophy can well be seen as a transitional phase between Aristotelian (or Thomist) natural-law philosophy and its modernist competitor. In fact, Grotius is often said to have been the first to present a system of modernist natural-law philosophy. But Grotius's argument is neo-Stoicist rather than modernist (as in Hobbes, Locke, and so on). Secondly, there is the tradition of raison d'eÂtat thinking, which in a mitigated variant was especially influential in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Germany. This tradition easily mixed with Aristotelian practical philosophy ± I shall venture an explanation at the end of this chapter. Meinecke already observed the continuity between seventeenth-century raison d'eÂtat political theory and nineteenth-century historism (see Meinecke, WeltbuÈrgertum und Nationalstaat). It is to be regretted that he paid no attention to the variants of Aristotelianism in the period investigated by him: that would have provided him with additional arguments for his main thesis. Lastly, it should be observed to what extent textbooks on the history of political thought ordinarily present a caricature of the period between 1500 and 1800. For most often only the modernist tradition is expounded in such books, while the other three remain unmentioned. Not only does this obstruct a correct understanding of the political thought of this period, but it also renders incomprehensible the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Within accounts focusing only on the modernist tradition, the emergence of history-oriented nineteenth-century political thought is something of an inexplicable miracle. However, this transition loses much of its mystery if we recognize that it resulted from a shift in the relationship between the four traditions. Because the modernist tradition was, in the eyes of most theorists, thoroughly discredited by its involvement in the French Revolution, the other three reasserted themselves. And, indeed, most of nineteenth-century political thought can be understood as a series of alliances of the other three traditions against modernist naturallaw philosophy. Surely another example of such unexpected re-emergence of political Aristotelianism is provided by contemporary so-called communitarianism (one thinks of authors like MacIntyre, Taylor, Nussbaum, Etzioni, and so on). One wonders whether the communitarians, who so much like to present themselves as belonging to the politically progressive left, are sufficiently aware

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 251

47

48

49 50 51

52 53 54

55

of the inherent (Aristotelian, Thomist, Burkean) conservatism of their argument. More generally, the contemporary debate between the liberals or libertarians on the one hand and the communitarians on the other is, in fact, little more than a latter-day re-enactment of the conflict between the Aristotelian and the modernist variant of natural-law philosophy. And one cannot help thinking that a little more historical sophistication might render this debate more efficient and more to the point than it presently is. In any case, some historical knowledge might make it possible to avoid absurdities such as Rorty's: Rorty seems to believe that his well-known attack an epistemology is the most appropriate theoretical background to the embrace of a Rawlsian political Cartesianism. In fact, this attack it fatal to all political Cartesianism. But, arguably, the progressivism that contemporary intellectuals never dare to question makes them oblivious of historical subtleties such as the intrinsic conservatism of all political Aristotelianism. Nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum, to quote Horace. Cf.: ``what appeared to the generations after Burke as a turn to History, not to say as the discovery of History, was primarily a return to the traditional [i.e. Aristotelian (F.A.)] view of the essential limitations of theory as distinguished from practice or prudence.'' Strauss even believed that Burke's Aristotelianism contained ``the most important part of his work'' (Strauss, Natural Right and History [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965], 302, 303). Surely this is an echo of Aristotle. Thus Aristotle wrote: ``let us remember that we should not disregard the experience of ages; in the multitude of years between these things, if they were good, they would certainly not have been unknown; for almost everything has been found out, although sometimes they are not put together; in other cases men do not use the knowledge which they have'' (cf. Aristotle, Politica 2:5, 1264 a 1ff for this apt ``summary'' of Burke's political thought). Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and intro. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 154. Ibid., 1143b18±1144b5. Its recommendations could be compared to recommendations to football players like ``do your best,'' ``try to win,'' and so on ± that is, very sensible recommendations, indispensable even, in the sense that one cannot play football if one does not know that one should try to win. But all real problems arise with the question of how to win. For a criticism of ethics as the foundation of political thought, see Frank Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), introduction (``Against Ethics''). Strauss, Natural Right, 311. P. Lucas, ``On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; or, An Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers,'' The Historical Journal 11 (1968): 58ff. Edmund Burke, Abridgment of English History, in The Works of Edmund Burke, 7:462, 463. For a closely similar statement about the general development of the laws of England, see Edmund Burke, ``Fragment: an Essay Towards an History of the Laws of England,'' in The Works of Edmund Burke, 7:476±8. Burke, Reflections, 274, 275.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

252 Notes

56 When addressing the French revolutionaries, Burke writes: ``you might, if you pleased, have profited of our example [of the Glorious Revolution (F.A.)], and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity'' (Burke, Reflections, 276). 57 Non-European countries, such as India, are a different affair. 58 In this context Kossmann's study of Dutch seventeenth-century political thought is instructive. For Kossmann demonstrates here that such a fusion or synthesis was already achieved in the Netherlands in the course of the seventeenth century, and he refers to this synthesis by the notion of politica novantiqua. Willem van der Muelen and Ulrich Huber (professor in Franeker) are presented by Kossmann as the main protagonists of this politica novantiqua. Since especially Huber was eagerly read and commented upon in eighteenth-century Germany, it is far from unthinkable that Dutch seventeenthcentury political thought (whose originality was demonstrated recently in H.W. Blom, Morality and Causality [Ridderkerk: Offsetdrukkerij Ridderprint, 1995]) has been a major source of inspiration for eighteenth-century German political theorists. See E.H. Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende eeuwse Nederland (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche uitgevers maatschappij, 1960). 59 As Wolff himself commented: the book was written so that ``die theorie mit Èpfft worden'' (qtd. in D.M. Meyring, Politische der Praxi bestaÈndig verknu Weltweisheit: Studien zur deutschen politishe Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts È nster, 1965], 45). [Mu 60 Cf.: ``um 1770 beherrscht die Philosophie von Leibniz/Wolff beinahe souveraÈn È d-Deutschlands und das Wolffsche Naturdie katholischen UniversitaÈten Su È berwunden'' (see M. recht hat dasjenige von Pufendorf und Thomasius ganz u Thomas ``Christian Wolff'', in M. Stolleis, ed., Staatsdenker im 17. and 18. Jahrhundert [Frankfurt am Main: Nietzner, 1977], 265). 61 For an account of the political thought of a Dutch admirer of Wolff, see W.R.E. Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic: the Political Thought of Elie Luzac (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993). Velema here follows the thesis already defended by Kossmann in 1966 that Luzac should be considered an ``Enlightened conservative.'' For an elucidation of this striking oxymoron, see E.H. Kossmann, ``Verlicht conservatisme: Over Elie Luzac,'' in Politieke theorie en geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1987), 234±49. Kossmann's (and Velema's) results are of interest here: for they strongly suggest that, in practice, this synthesis of Aristotelianism and modernist natural law will take the form of an ``Enlightened conservatism.'' It might well be that Kossmann's oxymoron is also applicable to the mainstream of German eighteenth-century political thought. 62 Meyring, Weltweisheit, 47.

63 Ibid., 79; see also the entry ``Politik,'' in O. Brunner, W. Conze, and

R. Koselleck, eds., Geschichtlichen Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1972±97), esp. 4:831ff. 64 For an exposition of Conring's significance and his influence on the development of historical thought, see M. Stolleis, ``Machiavellismus und StaatsraÈson,'' in Hermann Conring (1606±1681): BeitraÈge zu Leben und Werk (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1983).

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Notes 253

È rst sich und sein 65 ``Klugheitslehre'' is now defined as ``Gedancken wie ein Fu È nne maÈchtig machen'' (see Meyring, Weltweisheit, 59). Land ko 66 The discipline that was developed in order to assist the state and its servants was ``statistics'' (literally, ``knowledge of the state'') and was characterized by Achenwall in the claim that ``statistics is stationary history and history is developing statistics.'' See A.T. van Deursen, Geschiedenis en toekomstverwachting (Kampen: Kok, 1971), 9, and A. Seifert, ``Staatenkunde: eine neue Disziplin und ihr wissenschaftstheoretischer Ort,'' in N. Rassem and J. Stagl, eds., È ningh, 1980). Statistik und Staatsbeschreibung in der Neuzeit (Paderborn: Scho 67 L. von Ranke, Abhandlungen und Versuche, in SaÈmmtliche Werke, 54 vols. (Leipzig, 1867±90), 24:288, 289. 68 For an exposition of this notion and of its role in the writing of history, see Frank Ankersmit, Denken over geschiedenis (Groningen: Wolters±Noordhoff, 1986), 177±80. 69 Strauss, Natural Right, 295.

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

254 Notes

Adams, President John, 156, 157,

160

Adams, Samuel, 14, 15

Adorno, Theodor W. see Horkheimer,

Max

Alger, Horatio, 131

Alderson, Amelia, 96

Althusser, Louis, 183

American English, 62±84 passim

Anderson, Benedict, 107, 223 n. 5

``Arabian Nights,'' 123±28 passim

Aristotelianism, 192, 202±11, 251±2 n.

46

Aristotle, 252 n. 48

Nicomachean Ethics, 204

see also Aristotelianism

Armstrong, Nancy

Imaginary Puritan, 104

Austen, Jane, 104, 105, 107

Northanger Abbey, 112±16

Pride and Prejudice, 96

Barlow, Joel, 10±25, 66, 69, 160, 213 n.

13

Advice to the Privileged Orders, 12,

19±20, 23

``Advice to a Raven in Russia,'' 23

``Letter to the National Convention,''

22

Political Writings, 13, 21±2

Vision of Columbus, 12, 66

Barrell, John, 72±3

Barruel, Abbe Augustin de, 155±63

Memoires, 155

Bayle, Pierre, 166, 169

Bermingham, Ann, 115, 231 n. 25

Bishop, Abraham

Proofs of a Conspiracy, 163

Blair, Hugh, 62

Lectures on Rhetoric, 62

Bloch, Marc

Apology for History, 44

Bougainville, Louis de, 149, 151, 241 n.

30

Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 68±71

Modern Chivalry, 68±9, 223 n. 15

BronteÈ, Ann

Agnes Grey, 118

BronteÈ, Charlotte, 105

Jane Eyre, 116±21, 232 nn. 30, 32, 33

Professor, 118

BronteÈ, Emily

Wuthering Heights, 118

Brooke, Henry

Fool of Quality, 86

Brosses, Charles de

Histoire des navigations, 148±9

Brown, Charles Brockden, 159

Ormond, 101

Wieland, 159

Buffon, Count de, 87, 135, 141, 142

Histoire naturelle, 141

Natural History, 87

Burke, Edmund, 12, 39, 94, 102, 164,

188±211

Abridgement of English History, 206

and historicism, 199±211

History of the Laws of England, 206

Reflections, 94

Two Letters on a Regicide, 95

Burney, Frances, 86, 89±93

Evelina, 86, 89±93, 97, 100, 101, 103

Burnham, Michelle, 229 n. 6

Burr, Aaron, 161

Byron, John, 149, 240±1 n. 30

cameralism (Kameralistik), 209

Cannassatego, 59

captivity narratives, 104±21

Carey, Mathew, 100

Carrol, James, 63, 64

Ceaser, James W., 137, 241±2 n. 35

Chase, Richard, 133

Chastellux, Marquis de, 10±25, 51

Essay on Public Happiness, 11

``Progress of the Arts and Sciences in

America,'' 12

Travels in North America, 12

Chateaubriand, 29

civiliteÂ, 123, 126, 130

civilization, Asian, 239±40 n. 25

civitas, 50

civility, 49±61 passim

Clemit, Pamela, 171, 172

Cobbett, William, 91±101 passim, 157

Porcupine's Gazette, 157

255

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Index

256 Index

Daiches, David, 90

Dalrymple, Alexander, 240 n. 29

Darnton, Robert, 126

Darrell, William

Gentleman Instructed . . . Happy Life,

51

Darwin, Erasmus

Botanic Garden, 95

Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall,

230 n. 18

Family Fortunes, 111±12

Davidson, Cathy, 100, 223±4 n. 15

Davis, David Brion, 153

degeneration, of species, 135±51

passim Destutt de Tracy, 30, 216 n. 16

Diderot, Denis, 51, 60, 61, 151

Dorson, Richard, 127, 131, 132

Durey, Michael

Transatlantic Radicals, 4

Dutch Republic, 212 n. 2

Dwight, Timothy, 66±70 passim, 99,

100, 157±62

Discourse on Some Events, 161±2

Greenfield Hill, 66, 68, 70

Eagleton, Terry, 230 n. 15

enlightened conservatism, 253 n. 61

see also Kossmann, E.H.

Erasmus, 195±6

fairytales, see nursery tales

Fliegelman, Jay, 225 n. 35

folktales, see nursery tales

Foucault, Michel, 9

Franklin, Benjamin, 30, 48±61, 135

Information for Those . . . to America, 53±4

Remarks Concerning the Savages, 49±50, 53±61 Remarques sur la politesse, 53

Frederick II, 136±39 passim, 143

Freemasonry, 153±65 passim

Fromm, Erich, 125

Gadamer, H.G., 191±93

Genet, Edmond, 156

Gerbi, Antonello, 136, 141

Gibbon, Edward, 43

Memoirs, 173

Glorious Revolution, 176, 199, 206±7

Godwin, William, 166±87

``Analysis of My Own Character,'' 172

Caleb Williams, 101, 171, 185

Enquiry Concern Political Justice,

170±87

Enquirer, 171±9, 246 n. 25

Fleetwood, 171

Memoirs, 96, 99

``Of History and Romance,'' 179±86

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 205

Goldsmith, Oliver, 67, 68, 72

Deserted Village, 67

Goodman, Dena, 56

Gothic novel, 28

Gratian, Baltasar

Compleat Gentleman, 51±2

Gregory, Dr. John, 87±89, 103

Father's Legacy, 87±8, 89, 91, 97±9

passim

Grimm, Brothers, 124, 125, 129, 130

Kinder und HausmaÈrchen, 124

Gunn, Simon, 233±4, n. 38

Hall, Catherine see Davidoff Hamilton, Alexander, 160±1 Hartley, David, 87±89 passim, 94±5 Observations on Man, 87, 94±5 Hartwicke Act see Marriage Act (1753)

Hazlitt, William, 185

HelveÂtius, 175, 177

De l'homme, 178

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 122

Volkslieder, 123

Hibbert, Christopher

Redcoats and Rebels, 4

historicism, 188±211

definition of, 249±50 n. 37

historiography and genre theory,

166±87

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

communitarianism, 251 n. 46

conduct books, 92

Congreve

Love for Love, 89, 93

Connecticut Wits, 66, 68

Conring, Hermann, 209

conspiracy, 152±65

see also counterconspiracy

Continental Army, 15, 16

Cook, James, 149, 151, 241 n. 30, n.

35 correspondence theory (of truth), 248

n. 17

counterconspiracy, 152±65

cultural pessimism, 135±51

Hofstadter, Richard, 242 n. 1

Hollander, Jaap den, 250±1 n. 44

Hopkins, Lemuel, 66

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W.

Adorno, 167, 186

Hume, David, 169±70 passim, 200

Humphreys, David, 66, 103

On the Happiness of America, 97±8

ideÂologues, 29±30, 35, 44

Illuminati (Bavarian), 152±65

Ingolstadt, 153

Iroquois (Six Nations), 53, 55, 57

Irving, Washington, 131

Jacobins, 155

Jefferson, Thomas, 15, 16, 25, 30, 33,

39, 135, 161±3 passim

Jemison, Mary, 229 n. 19

Jesuits, 143±4

Johnson, Samuel, 65±84 passim, 88, 91

Dictionary, 74

Kant, Immanuel, 194

Kaplan, Cora, 232 nn. 31±3, 233 n. 37

Keach, William, 224 n. 26

Kennedy, Roger G.

Orders from France, 4

Kerber, Linda, 98

Klancher, Jon, 171±2, 174, 184, 245 n.

4, 246 n. 30

Klugheitslehre, 208±10

Knigge, Baron Adolf, 153

Kossmann, E.H., 252±3 n. 58, 253 n. 61

Lacan, 110

Lamb, Charles, 129

Landes, Joan B., 94

Leavis, F.R., 104, 112

Locke, John, 178

Some Thoughts Concerning Education,

87

Lucas, P. 206

Mably, 43, 166

McKean, Michael, 230 n. 11

McKendrick, Neil, 114

Madan, Martin, 93±4

Thelyphthora, 93±4

Madison, James, 13

Malthus, T.R., 1±2

Essay of the Principle of Population,1

Marriage Act (1753), 89, 94, 101

Marshall, James, 185, 247 n. 41

257

Matthias, T.J., 95, 99

Pursuits of Literature, 95

Maupertuis, Pierre de, 148, 240 n. 27

Meinecke, Friedrich, 200, 250 n. 40

mercantilism, 58

Montaigne,

Of Cannibals, 49, 55

Montesquieu, 44, 51

Moore, Edward

Fables for the Female Sex, 99

Morse, Jedidiah, 156±60

Napoleon Bonaparte, 23, 24, 30±2, 34,

136, 155

national language, 62±84

Native American(s), 48±61 passim, 88,

135±51 passim

Native women, 55±7

Neo-Stoicism, 251 n. 45

Noble Savage, 34, 46, 141

nursery tales, 122±34

Nussbaum, Felicity, 86

O'Farrell, Mary Ann, 86, 231 n. 27

Ogden, James Cosens

New England Illuminati, 160

Pagden, Anthony, 50

Paine, Thomas, 33

Common Sense, 102

Pascal, Blaise, 196

Pauw, Antonius, 237±8 n. 7

Pauw, Cornelis de, 135±51, 220 n. 84

Recherches philosophiques, 135±51

Percy, Bishop,

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 123

Pernetty, Dom, 139, 145, 148

physiocrat(s), 59

Pickerton, John, 88

Enquiry into the History of Scotland, 88

Pinch, Adela, 231 n. 21

Plato, 204±5

Polwhele, Richard, 95, 96

Unsex'd Females, 95, 99

Porcupine, Peter, 154 fig. 4

see also Cobbett, William

postcolonial theory, 222 n. 2

Priestley, Joseph, 33

primitivism, 135±51 passim

Puffendorf, Samuel, 54

Radcliffe, Ann, 112±16 passim

raison d'eÂtat thinking, 209±10, 251 n. 45

Ranke, Leopold von, 202, 210

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Index

258 Index

Sagan, Carl, 128

Said, Edward, 36

savage, concept of the, 34, 46±61

passim, 221 n. 87

savagism, 49±61 passim

see also savage

Schmitt, Carl, 198

Shelley, Mary, 26±8, 47

Frankenstein, 26±8

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 186±7

Ozymandias, 27

Queen Mab, 27

Silverman, Kaja, 231±2 n. 29

Simpson, David, 62

slavery, 17±18, 37±8

slave trade, 239 n. 18

Smith, Adam, 62

Smith, Henry Nash

Virgin Land, 132

Smith, John, 127

social contract, the concept of the, 41,

42

Spivak, Gayatri, 233 nn. 34±5

Steele, Richard, 109±10

The Spectator, 109

Stevenson, John, 62

Starobinski, J., 188±9

sublime, idea of the, 40

south Pacific, 146±51

Strauss, Leo, 204

Symbiosis, 4 Tahiti, 151, 240±1 n. 30, 241 n. 34

Tartar, Maria, 128, 130

Tennenhouse, Leonard, 104

see also Armstrong, Nancy

Thompson, Stith, 124, 125, 130, 132

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12, 37

L'ancien reÂgime et la reÂvolution, 201

Todd, Janet, 231 n. 26

Trumbull, John, 66

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 132

Twomey, Richard

Jacobins and Jeffersonians, 4

Vaughan, Benjamin, 222 n. 11

Vico, Giambattista, 169±70, 183

Volney, C.-F., 26±47

Description . . . United States, 34±5, 45

Lessons in History, 32, 43, 45

Ruins, 26, 31, 37, 38±42, 45, 47, 218

n. 49, n. 55, 219 n. 66

Travels in Egypt and Syria, 31, 36±8

Voltaire, 136, 166

Candide, 150, 241 n. 33

Wallis, Samuel, 149, 241 n. 30

Warner, Marina, 130

Washington, George, 15, 25, 97, 99

Watson, Robert, 62

Watt, Ian, 104

Webster, Noah, 64±84 passim

Dissertations on the English Language,

64, 70±1, 76

Weems, Mason

Life of Washington, 97

Weiser, Conrad, 59, 60

Weishaupt, Adam, 153±4

Whiskey Rebellion, 156

White, Hayden, 166±70

Wolff, Christian, 208

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 95

Female Reader, 97

Short Residence, 96

Vindication, 97, 99

Wordsworth, William, 72, 74±5, 79

``Intimations of Immortality,'' 127,

134

Lyrical Ballads, 74

Prelude, 128

``XYZ'' affair, 156

Yolen, Jane, 131

10.1057/9780230597594 - Revolutionary Histories, Edited by Wil Verhoeven

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

Raynal, AbbeÂ, 51, 54, 135

Reign of Terror, 32, 100, 196

Richardson, Samuel, 77±84, 105±11

Clarissa, 78±84, 105±11, 117

Pamela, 77±8, 80, 83, 106

Ricks, Christopher, 86

rights of men, 197±9

Robertson, Pat,

New World Order, 164

Robespierre, 32

Robison, John, 155±63

Proofs of a Conspiracy, 155±6

romance, genre of, 179±86

Ross, Sir David, 204

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 180, 188±90,

192

Confessions, 188±9

Rowlandson, Mary, 105±10, 127,

228±9 n. 5, 229 n. 7

Rowson, Susannah, 80±4 passim, 85,

86, 100±3

Charlotte Temple, 80, 83, 84, 100±3,

107