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2012
Epidemic of the Mind: Insanity and Early
American Literature 1789-1804
Matthew L. Price
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
EPIDEMIC OF THE MIND: INSANITY AND EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE 17891804
By
MATTHEW PRICE
A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Summer Semester, 2012
Matthew Price defended this dissertation on April 19th, 2012.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Dennis Moore
Professor Directing Dissertation
Edward Gray
University Representative
Cristobal Silva
Committee Member
Maxine Montgomery
Committee Member
Candace Ward
Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the Dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
For Cheryl; thank you for changing my life and making this possible.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I once had this idea that if I ever won an Academy Award, I would walk up to the stage and say,
“I’d like to thank everybody I’ve ever known,” and then quietly walk off stage. I feel much the
same way about this dissertation; there are really too many people who helped me complete this
project to name in this space. However, there are some that I would like to specifically mention:
first and foremost Dennis Moore whose guidance and friendship has been absolutely crucial to
me over the last five years. Looking back I don’t think I made a decision about my scholarship
without talking to him first, and I am a better writer, reader, and thinker because of him.
Cristobal Silva has proved enormously influential to me over the past two years in terms of how
I approached this project, and ultimately helped to clarify my thinking about my professional
career. Also, I’d like to thank Nikki Raimondi and Kathleen Smith for their support and
guidance in completing this project and helping me to pursue my career path.
The completion of this dissertation could not have happened without the Dissertation Research
Grant that I received from the Graduate School in 2010. With the money awarded I was able to
spend valuable time in Philadelphia examining documents at the Philadelphia Library Company
and the College of Physicians Historical Library.
I would not have gotten into Florida State without the help of Mark Boren, who introduced me to
so many different ideas and the works of Charles Brockden Brown. The genesis of this
dissertation began in his graduate seminar on madness and American literature, and I am
enormously grateful for the help he provided me during my Master’s degree. Diane Price, whose
contributions to this project are hard to put into words, has been a great confidant, partner in
crime, and friend. Without her I wouldn’t have started reading, teaching, and writing about
literature. Lastly, Cheryl Blake Price has challenged me at key moments during the writing of
this project and kept me sane. She has been wonderful editor, idea bouncer-off-er, and a person
who has transformed me into the person I am today.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract...........................................................................................................................................vi
1.
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….1
2.
CHAPTER TWO: “THE FEVER OF THE MIND”: REVOLUTIANA AND THE
MELANCHOLIA OF CITIZENSHIP IN CRÉVECOEUR’S LETTERS FROM AN
AMERICAN FARMER..........................................................................................................31
3.
CHAPTER THREE: EPIDEMICAL DISTEMPERS: INSANITY, FEDERALIST
CITIZENSHIP, AND THE POWER OF SYMPATHY.........................................................60
4.
CHAPTER FOUR: “O INSUPPORTABLE REMEMBRANCE, HIDE THEE”:
WIELAND, HEREDITARY MADNESS, AND THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL
HISTORY.............................................................................................................................91
5.
CHAPTER FIVE: “BUT WHAT HORDE OF REBELS/RUSHES MADDENED TO
CARNAGE”: LEONORA SANSAY’S SECRET HISTORY; OR THE HORRORS OF ST.
DOMINGO AND THE INSANITY OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION........................130
6.
CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION.......................................................................................160
WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................170
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.......................................................................................................182
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines the ways in which the science of insanity informs the creation of
American citizen during the years of the early Republic. By utilizing the medical texts of
“America’s first psychiatrist” Benjamin Rush, as a way of interpreting early American literature
I discern that the uses of insanity factor into some of the key discourses about the creation and
function of citizenship in the decades just proceeding the American Revolution. Recent
scholarly trends in early American literature have started to understand how disease, especially
small-pox and yellow fever, uncover the strategies at work in transforming individuals into
national citizens. In the late-eighteenth century, insanity is conceived as a disease capable of
spreading throughout a geographic space. By examining the public’s reaction to this “epidemic
of the mind,” I reveal that the appearance of insanity in texts by Crèvecoeur, William Hill
Brown, Charles Brockden Brown, and Leonora Sansay gestures towards the precarious position
of former loyalists, women, and slaves during the late eighteenth century. In each chapter I
argue that the language of madness and the discourse on citizenship mirror each other, with both
offering a bleak assessment of post-Revolution America.
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CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to discern the separation between
reason and insanity in an effort to understand the whole of human progress. In his book
Anthropologie: A Practical View, Kant surmises that the insane subscribe to ideas that are
outside the established codes of society: “The only general characteristic of insanity is the loss of
a sense for ideas that are common to all (sensus communis), and its replacement with a sense for
ideas peculiar to ourselves (sensus privatus)” (117). Writing in the late eighteenth century, Kant
places insanity within the dialectic of public and private space, but this dyad is clearly
insufficient to explain the social and medical phenomenon of insanity. In essence, Kant locates
insanity in a sort of social purgatory caught between both the private and public sphere, so that
madness is always on both the outside and inside, viewing the social and medical forces that
diagnose and incarcerate it. As this dissertation shows, in the late eighteenth century the
responses and examinations of insanity deconstructed the static dyad between public and private,
rationality and irrationality. In some ways incarceration, the dominant method of dealing with
the insane in American during this time was an inept response to the social phenomenon of
insanity. The reason for this failure is evident from Kant’s dialectical problem and the
recognition that insanity has the ability to break down as well as illuminate the process of the
rational sphere and the motivations of its inhabitants. Moreover, insanity as a social
phenomenon forces those on the outside looking into the cell to evaluate our own commitment to
the criteria for citizenship within a wider community.1
This dissertation seeks to understand ways in which the science and function of insanity
informs the creation of citizenship in eighteenth-century American literature and culture. I
discern that the project of constructing a national citizen in America after the Revolutionary War
speaks to the ways in which insanity was being theorized by doctors and utilized by novelists
during the early Republic. When placed alongside the theorization of citizenship, insanity breaks
out of Kant’s purgatory and becomes central to understanding how a new nation created a
program of citizenship in order to make manifest a new national identity for itself, both
1
Throughout this dissertation I use the terms insanity and madness interchangeably. The reason for this
is that doctors in the eighteenth-century tended to substitute one for the other throughout their writings.
The OED defines insanity as “the condition of being insane; unsoundness of mind as a consequence of
brain-disease; madness, lunacy.” Similarly, it defines madness as “Insanity; mental illness.”
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domestically and on an international stage. Broadly, citizenship combines both the commitment
to a common understanding of one’s duty to the wider community and the private desires of the
individual that lead to conformity with public mores and social codes. In this way, it is the
power of citizenship that effaces the gap between the public and private and utilizes the private
sphere for the needs of the public. At the same time, the reactions to insanity shed light on the
values of the public, making it profitable to delve into the darker aspects of citizens’ private
desires.
The concept of insanity has never been far removed from discussions about citizenship.
In his seminal work on madness, Michel Foucault begins with a description of “Stultifera Navis”
or the Ship of Fools. The purpose of these boats during the Renaissance had been for a town to
remove those people they deemed insane and to keep them traveling on a ship (8). For Foucault,
these ships’ insane passengers were “highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their
reason” as they traveled port to port (7). The Ship of Fools demonstrates the threat that the
insane posed to Enlightenment valuation of reason and rationality. Moreover, these ships
explicate Kant’s dialectical problem; insanity lies in between sensus communis and sensus
privatus. Pushing the insane onto boats excises them from the public square, but even outside
the city walls, these unfortunates reached into the private sphere and, as Foucault admits,
“haunted the imagination” of the Renaissance public (9). In this way, madness was not a
separate category of social and psychical experience but rather one facet of a much larger
phenomenon that he defines as “unreason.” Under this much broader rubric, persons suffering
from madness were lumped in with other social undesirables such as criminals, prostitutes, and
sexual deviants and remained there until the mid-nineteenth century (65). As Foucault explains,
the purpose of incarcerating the insane was to protect and preserve the mores of bourgeois
society. For literary scholars, Foucault’s contribution to the study of insanity insists on an
understanding of the language that characterizes the experiences of the insane: “Language is the
first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in
which madness articulates its nature” (100). The object of Foucault’s inquiry is to demonstrate
that at a time in which rationality, empiricism, and public welfare were becoming the guiding
lights of a burgeoning liberal social order, insanity offered a counter-narrative. As such,
Foucault understands reason through the prism of unreason, the implication being that doctors,
politicians, and political subjects define rationality through the lens of insanity. Thus, if political
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and cultural space is defined through rationality, insanity becomes part of that defining
apparatus. In the eighteenth century, as monarchy gave way to nationalism, insanity played a
large role in the definition, experiences, and reactions to this new form of community.
In his book on nationalism, Tom Nairn suggests that “Nationalism is the pathology of
modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual, with much the
same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia,
rooted in dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism
for societies) and largely incurable” (359). In his influential study of nationalism, Benedict
Anderson uses Nairn’s explanation as a jumping-off point for his discussion of nationalism as an
imagined landscape (5). At the heart of both scholars’ work is the idea that nationalism is an
artificial and inherently irrational form of community expression. Anderson and Nairn envision
nationalism as an aberrant form of rationality in which one must unburden one’s sense of reason
to become fully participatory as a national subject. Recently, scholars in both history and
literature have delved into the complex web of interdisciplinary discourses that give rise to the
concept of nationhood. American nationalism is a particularly difficult process to decipher
because of its immigrant population and its borrowed civil and political forms. To explain how
America created and sustained its national identity, scholars have focused their attention on how
the language of nationalism infected and infused all types of writing, not just political. One
purpose of recent early American literary scholarship, as I understand it, is to explain the myriad
strategies that organize how a nation becomes, in Anderson’s terminology, imagined.
As part of the “Age of Revolutions,” the aftermath of the Revolutionary War called for a
program of citizenship that would bolster the fledgling nation. Keith Faulks argues that broadly
conceived, American citizenship “recognizes the contribution of particular individual makes to
that community, while at the same time granting him or her individual autonomy” (4). For
eighteenth-century America, the conception of citizenship walked the tightrope between an
egalitarian inclusiveness and a necessary exclusivity. While America’s founding documents
strive to realize universal egalitarianism, the institutions created to sustain the nation were built
around the idea that the nation had to exclude those people or ideas that threatened national
stability. Indeed, Faulks argues “citizenship has always been bound closely to the institution of
the nation-state and therefore in particular has acted as ‘a powerful instrument of social closure’”
(29). While the rhetoric of American nationalism stressed its universalism, American institutions
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were tasked with the job of ratifying colonial subjects as American citizens. This mission of
exclusion by political and cultural institutions means that American citizenship “does not imply
democracy” despite the rhetoric of influential citizens (Heater 54). In the starkest terms, the
purpose of citizenship in eighteenth-century America was to “maintain the republican form of
government, to prevent its degeneration” (54). The treatment and depictions of the insane
provide a window into how institutions exclude individuals from the realm and benefits of
citizenship. Moreover, the nation’s methodology for safeguarding its degeneration was by
withholding and, at times, revoking the basic rights of women, blacks, poor, and insane.
The practice of classifying and incarcerating the insane illuminates the way insanity
became a tool in defining America as a separate nationalistic space. Such influential scholarly
works such as Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s The
Gender of Freedom have elaborated and utilized Jurgen Habermas’ theorizing the growth of the
rational public sphere in Western political discourse. Habermas’ contention is that as monarchy
ceased to be the organizing agent of social life and political policy, royal subjects were replaced
by citizens who became free to establish a public sphere for social and political discourse that
relied on consensus rather than on monarchical decree. The public sphere, as Habermas
historicizes it, is built upon the premise of rational reasoned debate, which served as “an organ
for self-articulation of civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs” (74). This
rational enunciation of the public’s desires and hopes for progress constituted mechanisms,
which defined and still define the American nation. While Warner investigates how print media
defined the rational public sphere in America, Dillon looks at how gendered liberal subjects
became ratified in the public domain. For both these scholars, the American experience is the
negotiation of the subject and the cultural forms that stabilize a rational society. The
preoccupation with rationality in eighteenth-century America raises questions about the status of
irrationality and insanity during this time. More to the point, what is the fate and role of the
insane subject within a culture built upon the idea that a person must be rational to be ratified in
the public space? If the nationalistic public sphere is defined in terms of rational consensus, then
it seems pertinent to investigate how irrationality, insanity, and madness help to construct that
consensus.
In a sense, this dissertation is an examination of beginnings; I chose the Federalist Era as
a way of delving into the creation of the nationalistic American identity along with the career of
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the “Father of American psychiatry,” Benjamin Rush. Moreover, the texts I examine range from
the “first American novel” to a novel by “America’s first author.” The years 1789-1804 marked
an era of drastic changes, including new institutions and a realignment between subject and state.
This realignment reflected a time of great tumultuousness, where Americans were still reeling
from the trauma of the Revolution. Julia Stern argues that Americans suffered from a “collective
mourning over the violence of the Revolution and a preemption of liberty in the wake of postRevolutionary settlement” (2). The quest for national consensus occurred at a time in which
passion and reason fought for supremacy in the public sphere. The literary uses of madness tell
the story of a nation gripped by grief, anger, and despair while recognizing the need for a stable
national identity. A national project came into existence dedicated to creating a national identity
that was recognizable both domestically and internationally in various political and cultural
discourses. This period of time viewed e pluribus unum as not only a national motto but a
political and cultural objective as well. The post-Revolution years warranted a national identity
that could withstand domestic and foreign attacks, and for Federalists, this accomplishment
would be attained through a unified homogenous national citizenry. As Allison La Croix
demonstrates in her history of American Federalism, “With the rebellion against Britain behind
them, the members of the founding generation were able—indeed, required—to consolidate the
previous two decades’ many shreds and pieces of structural and political argument into a more or
less coherent conception of government” (132-33). To accomplish this merger, American
political and cultural discourse offered acceptable codes of conduct for a person to become
ratified as a citizen in the public sphere. Sheldon Wolin argues that republican political theory—
of which Federalism was a subset—sought to transform the status of private and public citizens
and to understand that the concept of unum includes the citizenry as “a unified people whose
oneness would for the immediate future be represented by the state” (61). Similarly, Catherine
Holland acknowledges that The Federalist creates “a principle of citizenry, a citizenry that is,
moreover, sovereign of itself and made so by governmentalist techniques of aggregate
universalism that sought to incorporate (rather than eliminate or neuter) the properties of local
bodies and local political cultures if only to meld them together” (79). Thus, for Holland unum
creates citizenship as an abstraction for a universalized body, a body where difference is
obscured or eradicated. Both Wolin and Holland examine the early American citizenry through
corporeal metaphors such as “body politic.” Holland concludes by stating that unum cannot
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contain the difference of pluris and that “there is a wildness in the world that exceeds even our
most strenuous, and well intentioned, efforts to contain, suppress, eliminate, or master” (86).
Thus, a tool of Federalist politics and culture was the controlling of citizen psychologies, and it is
precisely here that insanity, which defies that control, can illuminate the ways in which
citizenship was formed and the ways individuals reacted to this type of coercion. In eighteenth–
century America, insanity was part of that “wildness in the world” that defied and contested the
boundaries of citizenship.
Any discussion of American citizenship carries with it the subtext of American
exceptionalism. A central tenet of American exceptionalism is that the American nation and its
peoples are “destined to bring into being the final stages of history as progress, when liberty
would completely transcend power” (Noble 4). This line of thought harkens back to the New
England colony and to the idea that the Puritans were tasked with a mission to “create in the New
World a church and a society that would provide the model for all nations of Europe as they
struggled to reform themselves” (Madsen 1-2). The terms of exceptionalism was redefined as
America moved into the age of Enlightenment and the aftermath of the Revolution. During the
eighteenth century, Americans “surveyed the conditions over the rest of the globe, they came to
understand that they were almost the only people who did not live in ‘total subjection to their
rulers’” (Greene 163). Moreover, while the Puritans of the seventeenth century understood their
mission as providing a religious example to the world, eighteenth-century American citizens
desired to demonstrate their fealty to the principles of the Enlightenment and the rise of
democracy. In the words of Samuel Williams, revolutionary America would demonstrate to the
world “the streams of wealth, the beams of science, the stars of wisdom, the light of virtue, and
the sun of liberty” and “all form the sublime circle of human splendor and felicity” (qtd. in
Greene 164). Allowed to wander freely in the public sphere, the insane posed both a direct threat
to the idea of America as exceptional, and the opportunity for medical doctors to continually
affirm America’s preeminent place as an Enlightenment success.
I see this dissertation speaking to a variety of discussions in early American literary
scholarship. The biggest influence on this dissertation is the recent work on the role of disease in
early American culture, literature, and politics. I am heavily indebted to E. Fuller Torrey and
Judy Miller for The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present. The
authors apply a transatlantic focus to the issue of mental illness that gives a trajectory of
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reactions to madness across disciplines and over temporal and geographical borders. In their
introduction, Torrey and Miller use epidemiological methodologies to comment on the steady
increase of insanity over the course of two centuries. While Torrey and Miller use epidemiology
as a method for historical analysis, there has been a movement to incorporate this methodology
for literary use. Cristobal Silva argues that epidemiology is inherently narratological and that
looking at only numerical causalities of plagues and disease provides an incomplete picture of
the ways epidemics culturally signify. Silva applies this methodology to the narrative use of
epidemics in Puritan justification narratives, which “translates epidemic events into narrative
terms” (251). Similarly, Priscilla Wald argues in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and Outbreak
Narratives that epidemics “register the intrigue and possibility as well as the anxiety generated”
by social change (9). Both Silva and Wald look at actual epidemics, yellow fever, typhus,
bubonic plague, and other maladies that observers in the twenty-first century recognize as
diseases. Eighteenth-century doctors like Rush, Haslam, William Cullen, and Erasmus Darwin,
however, perceived and defined insanity in epidemical terms because of its origins in the body.
Moreover, they defined madness in epidemical terms because they thought it to be
communicable across corporeal and geographical spaces. I argue in this dissertation that insanity
represents a unique form of epidemic in the Federalist era, one which is, in part, imagined
because the nature of the “disease” engages the fears of Federalist-dominated America. The
wave of Revolutionary fervor helped to create national citizenship in America and spread, in the
words of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, like an “epidemic of the mind” across the colonies. The
implication of using epidemiology as platform for literary analysis is to show how epidemics are
not only part of social living but also part of the process of imaginative writing. As I
demonstrate, both novelists and doctors used the “epidemic” of insanity in order to imagine a
citizen subjectivity that is both rational and Federalist.
Along with this current scholarly trend, this dissertation also engages the recent work by
Justine Murison, who attempts to discern how “states of mind” created viable political, cultural,
and literary idioms. Murison is invested in uncovering ways in which the transformation in the
studies of the mind followed the transformations in governments during the antebellum years.
Murison’s argument follows in the footsteps of Elizabeth Barnes’ States of Sympathy: Seduction
and Democracy in the American Novel. Barnes argues that Adam Smith’s “fellow feeling”
creates democratic communities based on shared emotional responses; she writes that for
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eighteenth and nineteenth century authors “a democratic state is a sympathetic state . . . States of
feeling are exactly the issue in the American novel” (2). Barnes reads against the inherent
democracy of feeling in sentimental novels because the sentimental genre promoted a
representation that is familial rather than democratic: “By displacing a democratic model that
values diversity with a familial model that seeks to elide it, sentimental literature subordinates
democratic politics to a politics of affinity . . . that dissolves the boundaries between self and
other” (4). In her examination of an eighteenth-century text, Murison focuses on Charles
Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and his somnambulism, thereby broadening the debate from
“states of sympathy” to “states of mind.” This distinction elicits a more developed conversation
of the ways psychologies are formed in the early Republic. Moreover, Sarah Knott opens the
door to a conversation about insanity through her argument that the medically determined
“nervous body” becomes a “conduit for sensibility” to be “formulated, promulgated, and
circulated” in eighteenth-century America (73).
By chronicling the ways sciences about the mind and belletristic literature fused morality
and citizenship together, Murison utilizes Rush’s conception of “moral citizenship,” remarking
that in the early Republic “citizenship flirts with mental disease” (244-45). This dissertation is
focused more on the literature and events of the mid to late eighteenth century and draws from
the literature produced during this time. While Murison seeks to provide a continuum into the
nineteenth century before the advent of psychoanalysis and the career of Sigmund Freud, my
argument is that insanity is crucial to creating citizenship at the very moment in which these
concepts were being created. In novels of the Federalist era, insanity illuminates the larger
conflict between state and citizen during these beginning years of America as a nation. Also, I
focus on the concept of insanity before the moral reforms of the nineteenth-century in effort to
analyze the specific eighteenth-century nationalistic tenor of medical and imaginative writing.
The Public Body, Mind, and the Acephalic Order of Eighteenth-Century America
The advent of print capitalism in the eighteenth century caused a reevaluation in the
function and significance of the individual body within the public sphere. For Warner, print was
an indication of the political reality that an individual’s body is an abstraction within the
discourse of republicanism: “It is a ground rule of argument in a public discourse that defines its
norms as abstract and universal” (42). The purpose of this abstraction was to make citizenship as
egalitarian as possible, but even with the broad boundaries of abstraction, citizenship came to be
8
defined by its exclusivity. Accepting the abstraction of public discourse forced citizens into an
act of negation in which their identity is defined through the abstract terms of the public sphere
but only because of their “whiteness, maleness, and capital” (42). Crucially, the writer of
printed materials is erased and replaced with a negative body—a body wholly disconnected from
the body of the writer himself. Through print capitalism, the body of the writer is effaced while,
at the same time, citizen bodies are created through the expression and adherence to republican
ideology. As Bruce Burgett explains, Warner’s thesis is centered around the idea that “marketdriven print technologies of the late eighteenth century allowed citizens to imagine forms of
political authority that were rational and noncoercive to the degree that they were abstract and
disembodied” (13). Whereas Warner defines citizenship as a collection of “those persons whose
bodies vanish at the boundary between private and public life,” Burgett contends that the reliance
on sentimentalism in the creation of citizenship positioned “the body within republicanism as
both a tool of domination and a site of contradiction” (14). Instead of contextualizing the body
as a vanishing act of participation in the public sphere, Burgett attempts to put the corporeal
back into the metaphor of a republican body politic. Thus, when discussing George
Washington’s “Farewell Address,” Burgett notices that instead of Washington’s disappearing
into negation, the figure of the first President becomes corporate in a double sense. While the
actual physical presence of Washington disappears, in its place a new body is created that is as
flesh and blood as the real one. Indeed, the body created in the “Farewell Address” is still
beholden to the actions of the “real” Washington in the sense that the actions of the real
Washington will only contribute to the ability of the printed “Washington” to merge with the
body politic. In this act of incorporation, Washington enjoys another form of embodiment, one
in which “Washington” becomes metonymic for the nation itself. Thus, Burgett argues, the
“Farewell Address” “reveals the centrality of the corporate image of the nation as an indivisible
body politic to the nationalist fantasy of e pluribus unum, while it also points to the revolutionary
emergence within that body of a division between civil and state authority” (59). The
implication here is that citizenship began to be defined through its stated desire of abstract
universalism, but recent scholars have attempted to put the corporeal back into the idea of the
body politic. This argumentative shift allows the space to consider the public body through a
variety of corporeal functions, like that of the mind.
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Both Warner and Burgett are committed to understanding how the body, sentimentalism,
and print work to transform society into democracies. Moreover, in terms of democracy, both
are committed to understanding how liberalism furthers modernity. And while both are
persuasive, each has a tendency to see the body as a monolith whether it disappears or not. This
perception leads both writers tend to conflate the mind and the body under the heading of “the
body.” Missing from the discussion of the body is a discussion about the function of the mind
on its own terms. Part of this conflation happens as a result of the limits placed on participation
within the public sphere, where men are allowed to be participants based on their gender. The
discussion of gender naturally sexualizes the public body and leads to approaching the issue of
citizenship from the point of gender politics. Indeed, the discussion turns to the political
significances of virtue and sentimentalism, it is difficult to think of the body politic outside the
context of sexuality and gender. Moreover, during the eighteenth century, a tremendous shift in
medical knowledge occurred, away from the Cartesian model of the supremacy of the mind over
the body and refocusing on the body as the site of cultural, medical, and political contestation.
Indeed, as the Western conceptions of the body changed from a unified singular body into a
sexual dimorphic body that “provided a justification for gender inequality,” public debate
became centered on the status of the body (gendered and racial) within republican discourse (95).
This dissertation contextualizes the mind’s place in the creation of the Federalist citizen who is
the origin of liberal democracy in America. However, before the body can be gendered and
either allowed to participate in the public sphere or hidden from it, the mind endures a division.
The space for an American mind is evidenced when citizenship becomes nationalistic not
colonial. The move from a colonial subject of Britain to an American citizen is indeed a
revolution in terms of a citizen’s conception of rationality. And herein lies the danger: a sudden
psychological transformation brings with it madness, and thus, citizenship becomes a variation of
insanity.
In her examination of the function of gender within liberalism, Dillon draws attention to
the way the move from monarchy to democracy affected our understanding of the public body.
Severing the king from political and social power created a state that was, figuratively as well as
literally, “headless” (83). Indeed, starting with the Puritan colonies, Dillon argues that “Puritan
colonialism . . . effected a ‘headless’ political order and thus pointed toward the possibility of a
reformed political body that did not have a king standing at its head” (83). According to her
10
history of the rise of liberalism in America, Puritan colonialism and the American Revolution
were acts of decapitation that left American society without an organizing political and cultural
apparatus. Dillon suggests that both republicanism and liberalism served as a new head for the
headless body politic. After the Revolution, writers recognized the headless state of America; for
example, Benjamin Rush was constantly astonished that so many colonists still advocated
reconciliation with Britain. Indeed, Rush’s own flirtation with reconciliation was short-lived
compared to that of John Dickinson and the upper Northeast faction of the Continental Congress.
Not until 1776 did Rush finally break away from reconciliation when in the place of peace
emissaries, the King sent thousands of mercenaries to enforce the King’s position and quash the
rebellion.2 Years after the war had ended, Rush credulously remarked in a letter to John
Adamson the magical effect of the King’s decision on the minds of colonialists:
Few, very few, consented to our becoming an independent nation from the influence and
causes and motives that rendered our reunion with Great Britain as impracticable after
what had passed on both sides in 1774 and 1775 as the reunion of a body dissevered from
its head by the stroke of an axe (italics mine; qtd. in Brodsky 140)
Here, Rush plays into the metaphor of the acephalous political order of the colonies:
independence is figured as a decapitation of the king from the colonial body. The problem is that
without a head, the body has no consciousness or psychology. Without a head, rational public
action is impossible and chaos is the order of the day. The consequence of approaching the body
politic of early America from a position of headlessness is that doing so obscures any discussion
of the mind. Indeed, focusing solely on the definitions and relations of bodies obscures the
impact of the Revolution on the psychology of everyday citizens. Rush spent the years after the
war trying to assess the effects of the Revolution on the mind and body of the citizens of an
independent America.
In the initial years of the American government, the dependence on republican
principles—in the guise of Federalist social and political policies—attempted to create a “head”
for the American public. Indeed, with its insistence on social homogenization and reliance on
the elite for political power, Federalism expanded access to the seats of national power while
also retaining some of the worst impulses of monarchy. At the same time, liberalism represented
For more information on Rush and his frustrations with the public, see Alyn Brosky’s biography of
Rush, especially the chapter “Founding Father” (136-50).
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a multi-headed hydra of principles and impulses that pulled the body politic simultaneously into
different directions. For example, the theoretical presupposition of equality between citizens is
one facet of the liberal theory that sits alongside the continual denial of equality of women and
minorities. This dissertation looks at the moments before modern liberal democracy became the
reining theoretical principle of American political and cultural life. The moments during and
immediately after the Revolutionary War represents an epoch in which the headlessness of
colonial existence necessitated the creation of a new head (and mind) which became templates of
American citizenship. Indeed, Dillon’s idea of a headless body politic only further draws
attention to the lack of discussion about the role of the mind in the formation of citizenship.
Moreover, this dissertation will demonstrate that the foundations of liberalism and egalitarianism
left many citizens with the impression that they had more rights than they did, so that many fell
prey to madness once they realized the forces arrayed against them.
More than a year before his death, Thomas Jefferson reflected on the writing of the
Declaration of Independence in a letter to his friend Henry Lee. Modestly, Jefferson wrote that
the document was not designed to “find out new principles, or new arguments, never before
thought of” or to “merely to say things, which had never been said before” (343). Jefferson
argued that the purpose of the Declaration was to make clear the need for Revolution by
adhering to those universal principles of humanity. Yet, as Jefferson made clear, he understood
that the Declaration was in essence a document that created a national identity and that while the
rights demanded were not new, the body that desired them was. Jefferson continued to explain
that the Declaration was “[n]either aiming at originality of principle of sentiment, nor yet copied
from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American
mind” (343). For Jefferson, the Declaration was a document that reflected the consciousness of
the American citizen, even before the formal construction of the nation itself. So much has been
written about the corporeal analogy of a group of citizens being known as the body politic, but
here Jefferson gestures towards the idea of citizenship as a single mind.
The representation of citizenship as a unified mind was not unusual for Jefferson.
Indeed, in his first inaugural address after the tumultuous election of 1800 and the contentious
Federalist era, he implored Americans to “unite with one heart and one mind.” The metaphor of
a collective, uniform psychology is not unusual for a nation that uses e pluribus Unum as one of
its national mottos. Jefferson assumes that the creation of the American mind as a nearly
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perfunctory event; the nature of the conflict between America and Britain had necessitated that
American citizens join together to defeat the British and assume those unalienable rights that had
been denied them. However, as literary scholars and historians have demonstrated, the years
following the Revolutionary War did not lead to a unified national psychology, nor did they
bring into reality the lofty rhetoric of a unified body politic. The first two decades following
America’s independence from Britain were mired in political and cultural conflicts over class
and race. Moreover, as the ink was drying on the Treaty of Paris and the Constitution, politicians
and social commentators lamented that the new nation had turned into a cesspool of greed and
corruption. Reflecting on the newly created nation in 1777, Reverend William Gordon wrote
that a “horrid corruption hath spread so rapidly thro’ the American States; and that in the first
year of our existence we should have adopted so many of Old English vices” (340).3 Lester
Cohen argues that much of this feeling of national decline found its way into the historical
writings about the American Revolution to demonstrate how Revolutionary principles and
individual ethics formed a dialectic that presupposed institutions and individuals were mutually
constitutive (201). If we follow Jefferson’s metaphor of America as a mind, then Cohen tells us
is that American political institutions constituted the body, citizens are the mind, and a nation
must keep both working harmoniously. To ensure that this transformation would be successful,
Americans inflected the language of national unity into a variety of discourses: pamphlets on
female education, prison reform and medical literature, as well as petitions for public works
projects.
Literary scholarship is largely silent on these questions of American perceptions of
insanity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Perhaps one of the reasons for this lack
of scholarship is that the low population density in the colonies prevented the insane from being
a threat to the general welfare and thus writings about insanity were sparse. While London’s
Bethel Hospital claimed thousands of patients and inmates deemed insane, Pennsylvania State
Hospital, during Benjamin Rush’s tenure, only counted fewer than fifty. Still, colonialist leaders
in Pennsylvania headed by Benjamin Franklin petitioned for the erection of a state hospital in
1751 because the “lunatics at [who] are at large are a terror to their neighbors, who are daily
apprehensive of the violence they may commit” (qtd. in Gamwell and Tomes 20). This threat of
William Gordon to John Adams. June 5, 1777, “Letters of William Gordon 1770-1799,” Massachusetts
Historical Society, Proceedings, LXIII (1930): 340.
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violence spurred doctors to demonstrate America’s commitment to rationality through its
treatment to the medical and cultural issues posed by insanity. In fact, Rush envisioned his
humane treatment of the insane as a sign of how committed America was to the principles of
reason and compassion. By analyzing medical treatises, political pamphlets, and early American
novels in this dissertation, I am developing a clearer picture of the way insanity functioned in
pre- and post-Revolutionary eras, creating what would become the identity of an American
citizen during the initial years of the Republic.
While historians such as Mary Jimenez, Norman Dain, Nancy Tomes, Peter McCandless,
and Gerald Grob have cataloged the institutional and governmental response to insanity in the
nineteenth century, few literary scholars have yet addressed this subject. This silence is
especially deafening considering that canonized late-eighteenth-century American fiction relies
heavily on the sentimental and gothic genre which makes ample use of insanity, unrestrained
passion, and irrationality. I argue that the cultural and medical response to insanity infused the
major political and cultural discourses of pre- and post-Revolution America. In fact, insanity
became an integral discourse for America as it worked towards ultimately achieving
independence. Moreover, post Revolution doctors use insanity as a way to exorcise the irrational
and violent actions which had helped pave the way towards American independence. The
significance of this examination is the recreation of the public and private debates concerning the
creation of an American national identity not only through considering both rationality and
irrationality as separate categories but also through weaving the two together to form an early
American experience. When Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, he commented that
America “hath a blank sheet to write upon” (84). My argument looks at how insanity assisted
filling in Paine’s “blank sheet” of a new national narrative. Specifically, political and medical
discourses used insanity as a way to purge the national landscape of participants who could
impede social, political, and economic progress. However, at the same time novelists, spurred
by pronouncements like Charles Brockden Brown’s call for a national culture and literature, used
insanity to offer a counter-narrative, hoping to correct America’s inability to live up to its
enlightened self-image.
Benjamin Rush and the Science of Insanity
Central to the discussion of psychology, insanity, and citizenship are the life and work of
Benjamin Rush, writer of the America’s first book on insanity: Medical Inquiries and
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Observations on the Diseases of the Mind, published in 1812. Rush’s most famous and
influential book is a compendium of his experiences as a medical student in Edinburgh and a
physician at Pennsylvania State Hospital during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Born in 1745,
raised primarily in Philadelphia, and influenced by the Great Awakening, Rush participated in
some of the most important events of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America: he helped
Thomas Paine to write and publish Common Sense, signed the Declaration of Independence, was
a member of the Continental Congress, served as a medical officer for the Continental Army,
lectured at the College of Philadelphia to over three hundred students, authored the first book on
psychiatry and chemistry in America, and served on the staff of Pennsylvania Hospital, the first
medical facility dedicated to treating insanity. Committed to republican ideals, Rush strived “to
bring the ‘principles of morals and manners’ of American citizens into conformity with
republican institutions” (Haakonssen 198). A century before the professionalization of
physicians, Rush began his medical career at the age of eighteen as an apprentice to Dr. John
Redman, an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh. In 1766, at the prodding of Redman and
William Shippen (an Edinburgh graduate as well), Rush enrolled at Edinburgh to study under the
more famous physicians influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment. This medical revolution was
demolishing the antiquated humoristic understanding of insanity by focusing on “the extent and
nature of the interaction between the mind and body” (200). Under the tutelage of William
Cullen and Joseph Black, Rush witnessed a medical revolution first-hand; one dedicated to
revisiting and updating accepted medical theories. Rush had an almost religious reverence for
Cullen, whose writings on psychology posited, “it is no less certain that the conditions of the
mind do mutually affect the Body than conditions of the Body do affect the Mind” (qtd. in Berry
83-84). For Cullen, “all expressions of life originated from energy of the brain and passed
through the nervous system to the organs and muscles” (Haakonssen 201). The focus on the
brain brought a new incentive for medical doctors to analyze and revise the etiology of insanity.
When examining the issue of insanity, Cullen continued in the same vein: “although this disease
seems to be chiefly, and sometimes solely, an affection of the mind; yet the connection between
mind and body in this case is such that these affections of the mind must be considered as
depending upon a certain state of our corporeal parts” (122). For Rush, insanity was caused by
an inflammation of the arteries that resulted from “the impression of external objects or forces on
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the nerves” (204). Throughout his writings on madness, Rush consistently gauged the way the
“external” political events of post-Revolutionary America influence etiology of insanity.
In the context of Jefferson’s political metaphor, both Cullen and Rush suggested that the
mind and body work together through a sympathetic relationship. This belief naturally led
physicians like Rush to base their understanding of the mind and body on the eighteenth-century
theorization of sympathy: “Rush saw sympathy as due to a ‘connection of feeling in the nerves’
and performing a variety of functions ranging from the purely physiological to being the chief
agent in the formation of ideas” (Haakonssen 216). For instance in one of his medical lectures to
students at the College of Philadelphia, Rush emphasized that “[t]he brain has the most extensive
range of sympathies; it sympathizes with all the senses, the stomach, spleen, live, feet, muscles,
and passions,” but when a patient falls prey to disease, this sympathetic exchange is severed until
the patient recovers (241). It is in the context of the association of ideas that sympathy plays its
most important part; because for eighteenth-century doctors like Rush “sympathy was able to
‘decide upon the quality of actions;” (216). For Rush when a patient is unable to make the
sympathetic connections between the inner workings of the mind with the outside world,
madness inevitably follows.
Rush draws from the theories of sympathy that Scottish philosopher Adam Smith
advanced in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith examined how sympathy binds people
together through their mutual responses to pain, pleasure, benevolence, love, and hate. Through
the connective tissue of sympathy, Smith theorized, “fellow-feeling” connects people together
through our shared emotional responses: “Our joy for the deliverance of those heroes of tragedy
or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for their distress, and our fellow-feeling
with their misery is not more real than that with their happiness” (5). Continuing in the same
vein, Smith concluded that “[i]n every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the
emotions of the bystander always corresponds to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he
imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer” (5). Scholars of both early American and
British literature have argued that Smith’s examination of sympathy can be read as the
construction of national citizenship. Indeed, in the eighteenth century when sympathy and
sensibility became two of the defining traits of the newly created American citizen, “fellow
feeling” provided the blueprint for the construction of individual citizenship and the collective
body politic. During the eighteenth century, the novel became a central delivery system for the
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dissemination of proper codes of conduct and feeling for the republican citizen. In recent
decades, scholars have attempted to understand the ways sympathy and the sentimental genre
participated in the political program of creating a collection of people into a national citizenry.
In the early Republic, sympathy provided a way for political bodies to become transparent to
individual members and other international political bodies. Burgett argues that the political
effects of sentimentalism and sympathy defined the eighteenth-century reader’s body through the
act of reading sentimental texts: “the body of the reader mediated between the presumably
autonomous experience of corporeal sensation . . . and the clearly heteronomous demands of
social codification” (16). Through the double process of private subjectivity and public
representation, the act of reading was a process of embodiment. In this way the reading of early
American text that featured the insane allowed them to break free from the asylum. Indeed, the
use of insanity in early American literature brought the insane out of the asylums and into the
public and private sphere simultaneously. Moreover, the continued public fascination with the
insane demonstrated an almost unbreakable bond between publicly ratified citizens and the
insane, who existed on the margins. Indeed, the figures of the insane offered a metaphorical
counter-argument to the political and cultural forces that dominated Federalist America.
A central aim of this dissertation is to see how far Rush’s Diseases of the Mind can be
used towards literary analysis. I was drawn to Rush’s work because it represents an interesting
blend of social commentary with detailed medical descriptions about the processes of the body.
Perhaps influenced by his years of writing treatises on education, femininity, and temperance,
Rush used social criticism and observations throughout his etiology and remedies for madness.
For the most part, literary scholars have not delved deep into the implications and the
applicability of Rush’s conception of insanity to early American literature. This dissertation
demonstrates that while attempting to understand the medical side of madness, Rush was
working through the trauma of the American Revolution and constructing American citizenship
during the initial years of the Republic. However, I should acknowledge that while my
examination yields interesting connections, this dissertation does demonstrate the limits of using
Rush’s medical texts towards the purposes of literary analysis. In Chapters 1 and 3, I cite
writings by Sigmund Freud to more fully flesh out some of Rush’s ideas. The purpose of using
Freud in these chapters is not to transform my argument into a psychoanalytic one; however, I
find that Rush essentially does not follow through on some of his ideas. For example, Rush’s
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conception of Anarchia and Revolutiana are paradigms of the American mind after the war, but
he devotes only a few words to either concept, basically treating both as afterthoughts. With the
help of Freud’s more fleshed-out discussions of melancholia and mourning, Chapter 1 delves
into the implications of Rush’s paradigm to help explain instances of madness in specific
passages in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer.
A Brief Social History of Insanity in America to 1789
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, American colonials
understood madness in terms of religion and superstition. At best, records are spotty when
attempting to reconstruct the responses to insanity during the colonial era, but existing writings
make clear that the Puritans understood insanity in religious terms. If a community descended
into madness, it was because the individual or congregation had allowed the devil to enter the
community. Cotton Mather discusses in his Magnalia Christi Americana an incident of William
Thompson, a preacher who went insane. Mather constructs Thompson’s insanity as an epic
occurrence of “Christian Warfare” between Thompson and Satan. For Mather, the more one
rebuffs Satan’s advance, the more likely that he will suffer madness due to the Devil’s assault.
Mather describes Thompson’s madness as an attack by Satan against a vigilant foe: “Satan, who
had been after an extraordinary manner irritated by the Evangelical Labours of this Holy Man,
obtained Liberty to sift him; and hence, after this Worthy Man had served the Lord Jesus Christ .
. . he fell into that Balneum Diaboli, a black melancholy” (119). Thompson eventually
recovered, and Mather pinpoints two reasons: one, Thompson’s continued resistance to Satan
throughout the ordeal and two, the strong commitment of the Puritan community to God. Mather
writes of the community: “the Pastors and the Faithful, of the Churches in the Neighborhood,
kept Resisting of the Devil, in his cruel Assaults upon Mr. Thompson” (119). Mather’s words
reveal the ways in which madness blurs the boundaries between the public and private sphere;
Thompson’s madness is not only a private matter but also a public concern. For a community
built on religious devotion, Thompson’s madness was a threat to the bonds of the community
itself. As Mather defines it, incidents of madness implicate the entire community, either one is
afflicted or responsible for the cure. The implication here is that when insanity occurs in a
Puritan community it blurs the divisions between the center of Puritan life and the margins.
Thompson’s madness allows him to inhabit the space between the public and private sphere, but
also he becomes the conduit through which the Puritan community strengthens its identity.
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Thompson did not suffer the kinds of social ostracism that others would in later years, but
Mather does set the stakes of madness as an integral part of individual community identity, and
provides an origin for thinking about madness in terms of citizenship in America.
In his medical text Angels of Bethesda (1724), Mather again tackles the issue of madness
when he situates insanity as a deplorable condition yet one that can actually enlightens the
community: “Tis the spectator that is to be led into Thoughts and Points of Wisdome, from the
View of Madness, which he sees his Neighbour Unman’d withal” (129). Mather essentially
pleads with the rational spectators to effectively demonstrate their rationality: “O Sober
Spectator of the Mad, Think [and so prove thyself to be Sober-Minded]” (130). While Mather
creates a binary between the mad and the rational spectators, he undercuts it by suggesting that
everyone is mad and that a purpose of life is to know oneself to such an extent that a person can
sidestep those events that can induce madness: “What is the Whole World but an Entire Madhouse? What is Mankind, but People upon whom God from Heaven looking down, see that they
don’t understand, but, Madness is in their Heart” (130). Not only does Mather acknowledge the
vexed position of madness between the public and private spheres but he again makes madness
part of individual and communal identity. In essence, all community members are mad, but they
are able to keep a grip on sanity through private and public demonstrations of their devotion to
God. For Puritans, citizenship was defined by a deep faith in God exhibited privately and
publicly; Mather’s examinations suggest that madness allowed that identity to take shape and
have moral force. Moreover, Puritans understood citizenship as a journey of the mad towards
their sanity. In terms of the public sphere, this movement creates an enormous communal
responsibility to care for the mad because the insane are both reflections of the community
members and opportunities for the “spectators” to reaffirm their bonds with one another.
Mather’s writings on madness offer a rare glimpse at the ways American colonials
understood this medical and cultural phenomenon. However, the idea that madness was the
result of superstition or failure to conform to religious orthodoxy began to be replaced by the
mid-eighteenth century. Influenced by the philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment,
society began to characterize madness, not in terms of religion and superstition, but by passion
and irrationality. By the 1750s, madness was caused by “a failure to live within certain moral
limits [that] ultimately were rooted in the divine law and were increasingly discussed in the
context of natural law, a law accessible to human reason” (Jimenez 23). Thus, as the codes of
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citizenship began to change from religious to secular, so the etiology of madness changed;
moreover, the ways in which the insane were treated began to change as well. During the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the mad were usually placed in the care of family
members or of someone in the community who would and could care for them. Sometimes,
local colonial governments gave the caretakers money as payment for providing a community
service. As Mather explains, the mad represented a community problem, and it was up to the
community to demonstrate charity and compassion to someone who was less fortunate.
However, with the rise of the Enlightenment and the creation of the rational public sphere,
colonial communities began to see madness more as a threat than as an opportunity to reconfirm
communal beliefs. The understanding was that madness was the result of “moral turpitude and
irregular habits [that] could be known through reason” (24). Ministers still played an important
role in describing and defining madness for the public, but the message was more secular; in the
mid-eighteenth century, insanity was defined by “[b]ehavior, not belief . . . around which the
newer theory of madness was fashioned” (24). Situating madness as an individual disease made
it possible to marginalize and incarcerate it, but a community dedicated to rationality and reason
could not excise insanity from the public imagination. Thus, the bond between the insane and
the rational public sphere intensified as rationality, reason, and passion became central to the
public sphere’s self-articulation.
The move towards an understanding of madness as the failure of the individual to
maintain certain moral codes of behavior inaugurated new methods of treatment for the insane.
While the religious ethics that had helped inform the concept of madness in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries did not disappear completely, the belief that the individual was being
persecuted by an outside agent lost credence. This change meant that madness, in terms of an
individual’s behavior, did not necessarily implicate the wider community. In this way, excising
the mad from the public sphere in the form of incarceration became an obvious tool in dealing
with the insane. With the public sphere populated with only rational and disinterested
individuals, America could claim an identity that is enlightened and exceptional. Along with the
secularization of madness came the dissolution of a family’s or an individual’s personal
responsibility to care for the insane. Norman Dain succinctly describes the treatment of the
insane before the mid-eighteenth century: “Until then [1750s] the colony compared favorably
with England in providing equity for the insane but had not shown particular concern for their
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safety, comfort, and treatment” (6). The insane moved from the homes of their families or
charitable community members to almshouses or other small facilities that existed to alleviate
their suffering. In the almshouses, the insane disappeared because they were lumped together
with the poor, sick, and at times criminal. By the mid-eighteenth century, the public almshouse
in huge commercial centers like Boston and Pennsylvania could no longer adequately house the
rising numbers of insane, sick, or poor. As a result, more of the insane began wandering the
streets, where, if they did not cause harm they were not a dire social problem. However, the
insane did cause a symbolic problem for the rational public sphere. With their inability to
conform to rational public consensus, the insane were seen as a threat because they could not
participate in the creation of America as an Enlightenment success. The recognition that the mad
could not participate in forming rational public consensus, along with the change in medical
perception that madness could be cured, fueled the movement to build state hospitals in America
during the mid and late eighteenth century. Curiously, the petition for America’s first state
hospital would use the fear of the insane as a way of advocating a reform for the treatment of
them.
The physical threat posed by the insane was the primary motivation for the creation of
America’s first state hospital, Pennsylvania State Hospital. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote the
petition for the creation of the hospital, opened with a terrifying picture of the insane freely
roaming the streets:
That with the numbers of people, the number of lunaticks, or persons distempered in
mind, and deprived of their rational faculties, hath greatly increased in this province. That
some of them going at large, are a terrour to their neighbors, who are daily apprehensive
of the violences they may commit; and others are continually wasting their substance, to
the great injury of themselves and families, ill disposed persons wickedly taking
advantage of their unhappy condition, and drawing them into unreasonable bargains (4).4
To make the public necessity for the hospital appear urgent, Franklin remarks that the numbers
of the insane are on the rise as is the “terrour to their neighbors” (4). However, when
Pennsylvania State Hospital opened its “Insane Department” in February 11, 1752, two patients
diagnosed as insane were admitted (Morton 113). In the early decades of the eighteenth century,
4
Benjamin Franklin Some Account of the Pennsylvania Hospital. In his History of Pennsylvania Hospital
1751-1895, Thomas Morton confirms that Franklin is the author of the petition (8).
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low population density in the colonies prevented the insane from being a real threat to the
general welfare; for Franklin, the need for a hospital was more symbolic than literal. The
significance of an increase in the number of insane people roaming the streets, and the necessity
for building a state hospital meant that America was growing commercially. Thus, the insane
were invested with a symbolic significance that overshadowed their actual presence in lateeighteenth century America. In an era defined by Enlightenment commitments to rationality,
benevolence, and virtue in the public sphere, insanity posed a symbolic threat to the dominant
post-Revolution American identity.
The building of Pennsylvania State Hospital signaled the mutual exchange between both
public and private spheres in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the building of public institutions
dedicated to alleviating social problems was central to the formation of a national identity built
on benevolence and rationality. Habermas argues: “The public sphere as a functional element in
the political realm was given the normative status of an organ for self-articulation of civil society
with a state authority” (74). The nation articulates its identity in the production of discourse
designed to establish certain political, literary, and more broadly cultural parameters. The
creation of Pennsylvania State Hospital is part of public consensus creating the parameters of the
rational public sphere. With its focus on curing those that could not participate in the
productivity of the public sphere, asylums were determined to correct those that stood in the way
of national progress. The liberal theory of Locke and Hobbes demanded that the public and
private spheres be separated for the machine of society—commerce, politics, culture—to
function properly. Indeed, the cornerstone of liberal theory hinges on the subject’s ability to
form and make private and rational autonomous decisions outside the control of state authority.
However, as eighteenth-century American Federalists knew only too well, the state maintains a
reserve of power for those it considers a disruption to its governing order. Federalism’s drive to
create a homogenous national citizenry connected to Rush’s ideas about the treatment and
incarceration of the insane. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 2, Federalism operated much like a
benevolent prison where, if the citizen could reconcile the loss of autonomy, he could enjoy the
full protection of the federal government and culture. For those who were diagnosed as insane,
“Rush believed that the absence of reason annulled man’s social compact; it disenfranchised him,
suspended his liberty, his ability to make bargains, to keep promises and to give testimony”
(Haakonssen 211). The medical doctor took absolute control over the patient, dictated treatment,
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and evaluated whether the patient was cured. Rush described the power of doctors as the ability
to “establish a government over deranged person” (quoted in Haakonseen: 210). In this capacity,
the insane were part of the margins of eighteenth-century life but also served as a reminder of the
fate of those citizens who relinquished their autonomy for the protection of a strong federal
government. In addition, in much the same way that the educational and penal institutions
helped to strengthen the power of Federalism’s cultural hegemony, so too did the asylum.
Although the insane were literally removed from the public sphere, they were not wholly
separated from it. Indeed, this certificate of insanity was handed down by Judge McKean in
1797: “I do herby authorize & empower any Constable, or other discreet Citizen to take him the
said John Leonard Deneufville and convey him to the Pennsylvania Hospital where he is to be
delivered to the Steward and treated with humanity and as a other Lunatics are” (Morton 148).
McKean’s judgment is noteworthy in his use of the idea of discretion; to be discreet is to operate
in silence or under a veil of propriety. The judgment endows the state to act publicly as an
enforcer of McKean’s judgment, but if the state fails, the public is persuaded to act privately as
an ally of the state in its public objective. The tension here between state’s effacement of the
public and private spheres highlights the disruption that the insane caused as both a social and
cultural problem. John Leonard Deneufville’s deliverance by the state is made possible because
of a collapse between the public and private spheres. While Deneufville’s case causes the
boundaries between public and private space to blur, it also redraws those boundaries as well.
Once placed into the hands of the hospital, Deneufville was classified as a lunatic and thus was
outside the rational public sphere. McKean’s judgment and Deneufville’s treatment demonstrate
how madness disrupts the divisions between public and private while at the same time
privileging one type of citizen over another.
The rationale behind Franklin’s Account is to publicize and celebrate how the mechanism
of the colonial government responded to a public safety issue. Franklin recounts how individuals
committed to Christian benevolence and a desire to improve society worked together to alleviate
the suffering of many. Most of the Account consists of reprinted documents that pertain to the
administrative issues the committee faced when trying to find funding, supplies, and personnel
for the hospital. Tucked in all of the documents that helped to establish the hospital, Franklin
includes charts that document how many patients entered the hospital, their ailments, and the
number of cures. For instance, from February 2, 1752, to April 26, 1754, the hospital admitted
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18 patients for lunacy; two were cured, three were discharged, six were placed into the care of
family or friends and one died (65).5 Franklin created these documents to show the public that
the hospital was using their donations to the hospital effectively. In every report, Franklin
demonstrates that the hospital is constantly and consistently working towards the alleviation of
suffering. The report becomes representative of Franklin himself in some respects, always
working, producing, and innovating. But within these published reports, the division between
the public and private sphere crumbles, leaving the insane members of the public in their private
confinement. Part of this effacement was because the hospital subsisted on private donations,
and the efficiency of the hospital became subject to public scrutiny. However, these reports
were part of a larger public fascination with the insane that at times, paradoxically, threatened
the security of the hospital itself.
Franklin highlights that the insane were so scattered throughout the provinces that a state
hospital would be able to concentrate them in one place. However, while this decision allowed
the state to limit the physical threat posed by the insane, it did not limit their hold on the public
imagination. As soon as the insane were officially placed in the basement of Pennsylvania State
Hospital, the public began to find ways to view the spectacle. This interest became such a
problem for the hospital that it had to devise ways to keep the public out. During the spring of
1760, a proposal provided the hospital with two guards to stand outside and dissuade onlookers
from disrupting the insane patients. The petition read:
That a suitable Pallisade Fence, either of Iron or Wood, the Iron being preferr’d should be
erected in Order to prevent the Disturbance which is given to the Lunatics confin’d in the
Cells by the great Numbers of people who frequently resort and converse with them. It
was also agreed to hire Two Constables, or other proper Persons to attend at such Times
as are necessary to prevent this Inconvenience until ye Fence is erected. (Morton 130)
Those who contributed money or had money to contribute to the hospital were allowed to go on
a tour throughout the hospital, and most went because of the chance to see the insane. The
hospital used the spectacle of its insane patients as a fund raising tool; in 1762 the hospital staff
inscribed on the door to the insane wing, “persons who come out of curiosity to visit the house
should pay a sum of money, a Groat at least, for admittance” (131). This ordinance that allowed
5
Another report dated Feburary 1757 to April 1758 documented that the hospital admitted twenty four
patients in total; three were cured, one discharged, three escaped, six placed into the care of family or
friends, and one died (Franklin 98).
24
visitors into the hospital was created as part fund raising tool and part deterrent; the idea was that
if people had to pay to see the insane, they would lose interest, but more continued to come
despite the hospital’s best efforts.6 During Benjamin Rush’s tenure, Rev. Manasseh Cutler went
on a tour and later recorded his observations in a letter. Cutler provides one of the more vivid
descriptions of the hospital’s insane patients in the eighteenth century:
On the back part is a long entry, from which a door opens into each of them; in each door
is a hole, large enough to give them food, etc., which is closed with a little door secured
with strong bolts. On the opposite side is a window, and large iron grates within to
prevent their breaking the glass. They can be darkened at pleasure. Here were both men
and women, between twenty and thirty in number. Some of them have beds; most of
them clean straw. Some of them were extremely fierce and raving, nearly or quite naked;
some singing and dancing; some in despair; some were dumb and would not open their
mouths; others incessantly talking. It was curious indeed to see in what different strains
their distraction raged. This would have been a melancholy scene indeed, had it not been
that there was every possible relief afforded them in the power of man. Everything about
them, notwithstanding the labor and trouble it must have required, was neat and clean.”7
Cutler’s depiction suggests a possible explanation for why the public was both terrified by and
fascinated with the insane. Much like Franklin’s account, Cutler sees the insane as an
opportunity for solidifying American national identity as benevolently dedicated to the
alleviation of suffering. The attention to details, the clean straw and cells, plus the ability to let
light in are markers that demonstrate an acute cultural difference between America and Britain in
terms of the treatment for the insane. As important as this cultural differentiation is, most of
Cutler’s description is preoccupied with the insane as spectacle. The image the excerpt provides
focuses on the bedlam of insanity; here in Cutler’s detailed description, one begins to understand
that, while the insane provided any opportunity for America to live up its image as a benevolent
society, the insane always retained their spectacle status. While public officials worked hard to
provide the necessary relief for those who were unfortunate, a concerted effort by the public kept
the insane in their role as public spectacle.
6
7
Nancy Tomes argues that public visitations and tours for most state hospitals ended in the 1830s (35).
Reprinted in David Freeman Hawke’s Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (306).
25
During his tenure at Pennsylvania State Hospital, Benjamin Rush advocated many
reforms that were part of the beginning trend in “moral therapy” that would firmly take root in
the mid-nineteenth century in America and Europe. Essentially, this new approach to the
treatment of the insane focused on humane and moral teaching to place patients on a sure path to
a cure.8 A devout Christian, Benjamin Rush, was an early adherent to the “moral treatment”
which prompted him to begin a multi-year campaign to improve the conditions of the insane at
the hospital. Despite his reformist agenda, Rush was committed to preventing the insane from
interfering with the agenda of the public rational sphere. At one point, Rush advocated the total
seclusion of the insane from the outside world, proposing “[t]hat no visitor be permitted to
converse with or even to see the mad people (the Managers and officers of the hospital
excepted), without an order from the attending physicians” (150). Yet, despite these attempts to
excise the insane from the public square, institutional reforms could not remove them from the
public imagination. Novelists, who were writing what would become the beginnings of a new
national literature, deployed the figure of the insane across genres to register a profound sense of
anxiety and despair at the failure of post-Revolutionary America to live up to its Enlightenment
origins.
Over the course of the chapters that follow, I construct the image of the newly created
American citizen through a series of texts. I utilize overt and oblique references to madness as a
way to understand the ways the American citizen is being constructed and to examine the
contexts in which madness arises. The narrative trajectory of this dissertation is to first construct
the colonial American subject as viable candidate for citizenship (Chapter 1); to demonstrate the
forces at work that conscript the subject under a specific political program (Chapter 2); to discuss
the ways this new citizen understands his or her relationship to private national history (Chapter
3); and finally to describe the way the new American citizen exports those traits that interfere
with the ideal of American citizenship onto other colonial subjects (Chapter 4). In each chapter,
focusing on madness helps to locate the cultural forces that identify people as part of a national
citizenry.
Chapter 1 begins this dissertation with an examination of Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. By focusing on Farmer James’ narrative
Nancy Tomes and Lynn Gamwell point out that the “moral treatment” found its first practitioners in
New York Quakers, who in conjunction reformist William Tuke founded The York Retreat, which
opened in 1796 (37).
8
26
throughout Letters, I argue that James’ descent into melancholia is analogous to Rush’s
conception of Revolutiana—a type of madness that Rush reserves for loyalists. Rush theorized
that the Revolutionary War had induced two types of madness for the participants, arguing that
loyalists who had suddenly lost position and status fell into a deep melancholia he defined as
Revolutiana. At the same time, colonialists who enjoy new freedoms brought on by the success
of the Revolution found that they could not stop themselves from rebelling, and thus were
diagnosed with Anarchia. Rush did not construct these two forms of insanity in any great detail;
realizing that melancholia is at the heart of the James’ madness, I draw on the theories of
mourning and melancholia advanced by Sigmund Freud. By focusing on Farmer James’ decent
into Revolutiana, I surmise that Crèvecoeur was constructing American citizenship through a
negative example. Crèvecoeur argues through James that the death and destruction caused by
the Revolution does not outweigh its benefits. By the end of Letters, Farmer James flees an
epidemic of Revolutiana that is sweeping across Pennsylvania. In his final letter, Farmer James
denies his path towards an American citizen in favor of taking his chances on the frontier. Thus,
Crèvecoeur offer a bleak assessment of the choices a colonial subject must make because of the
Revolution: either one accepts Anarchia or resigns himself to melancholic Revolutiana.
The next chapter attempts to understand the forces of coercion that were reserved for
those who attempt to fit within American citizenship after the ratification of the U.S.
Constitution. If Chapter 1 considers the fate of those who reject American citizenship, Chapter 2
examines those who choose to be part of Federalist America but are ultimately rejected by it. In
this chapter, I focus on William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, considered to be “the first
American novel.” Although this distinction is highly contested, I find it a useful next step after
Crèvecoeur because of the novel’s explication of Federalist ethos. If Crèvecoeur is concerned
with citizenship in broad categories—either loyalist or American—Brown attempts to understand
the ramifications of the first iteration of national citizenship in Federalism. Brown’s sentimental
novel offers the familiar lessons on the importance of female chastity, rationality, and education.
I trace Brown’s uses of insanity as a metaphor for the inability of one to subscribe to the
Federalist conceptions of citizenship. I demonstrate that insanity was a familiar trope in the
sentimental genre, and Brown uses it to warn his readers about the dangers of the resisting
Federalism. Federalism as a political and cultural program worked to affect a homogenous
citizen who would willingly give up some of his or her liberty for the protection of a strong
27
federal government. However, Brown uses madness to represent the way such an ideological
program works against citizens and demonstrates that, far from offering freedom, the new
American government transforms citizens into prisoners. Insanity in The Power of Sympathy
metaphorically highlights the stakes of not conforming to the ideal of citizenship as defined by
the dominant Federalists of the late 1780s.
In Chapter 3, I examine the use of hysteria in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or,
The Transformation in an effort to discern the way citizens of the early Republic understood
their relationship to their colonial past. This chapter utilizes the eighteenth-century medical
theory of hereditary madness to suggest that Brown conceives of history as a recursive loop and
that the American citizen cannot realize a progressive historical trajectory. As with Anarchia
and Revolutiana, Rush never really fleshes out the implications of hereditary madness, choosing
instead to assert that it can be a cause of madness. In this context, I again rely on Freud to
examine the full implications of a hereditary predisposition to madness. Using the recent
theories on the nature of trauma, along with Freud’s writings on the etiology of hysteria, helps
shed light on the way Brown interprets the historical position of the American citizen. Freud
theorizes that the force of hysteria is found in the inability of the patient to fully experience the
traumatic moment that caused his madness. Thus, the hysteric consistently lives in the past and
is unable to experience history as progress. I take this idea and argue that Brown’s text holds the
gendered diagnosis of hysteria up as a model of historical predicament for the American citizen.
Brown’s text argues that after years of death and destruction caused by the Revolution, the new
American citizens are so traumatized that they are destined to continually relive their bloody
origins.
The conclusion of my dissertation ends with the rise of Southern Republicanism and the
demise of Federalist control. Chapter 4 concludes with a discussion of insanity and the Haitian
Revolution. Using Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel Secret History; or, The Horrors of St.
Domingo, I detail ways Americans used the tropes of their own creole identity to define the
Haitian Revolution. Recently, Sean Goudie has argued that America did not become a
postcolonial society at the moment of independence from Britain but that in fact America entered
a new phase of its colonial history, by engaging in paracolonial negotiations with both Britain
and the West Indies: “the emergent Republic, beneficiary of an ongoing client relationship both
pre and post Revolution with Europe’s West Indian colonies, can best be described as operating
28
paracolonially. The prefix ‘para’ meaning ‘alongside,’ ‘near or beside,’ ‘resembling,’ or
‘subsidiary to’ aptly describes the United States relationship to European colonialism in the
Western Hemisphere during the early decades of its existence” (11-12). Far from promoting
freedom for the enslaved populations of the West Indies, America sought to benefit from
Britain’s colonialism economically and culturally. While detailing America’s paracolonial
relationship with the West Indies, Goudie also discusses the United States’ “creole complex”
(13-15). Desperate for commercial and cultural strength, the Federalists, led by Alexander
Hamilton, essentially ceded authority to the British to dictate the terms of trade between the West
Indies and the United States.
By tethering American commercial independence to British colonialism, the Federalists
threatened the burgeoning national narrative of America as exceptional. As Benedict Anderson
European colonialists in America were designated as creoles which marginalized them from
metropolitan Europeans (59-61). After the Revolution, American politicians and writers worked
to shirk their creole identity in favor of American exceptionalism. The discourse of insanity is at
the heart of America redefining creole around the criteria of race. My argument in this chapter
demonstrates that the Haitian Revolution provided a unique opportunity for America to claim the
mantle of national exceptionalism by racializing their creoleness through the discourse of
insanity. Essentially, the American press and government took the tropes of their creole
identity— which the British discussed in terms of insanity—and mapped it onto the Haitian
rebels, specifically Jean-Jacques Dessalines. This act of redefining creole in terms of race
allowed Americans to cast off their own creole identity and to begin the process of defining
America as exceptional, independent, and white. This chapter demonstrates that there was a
realization by American writers that madness played a role in the formation of national
citizenship. I find the reactions in America to the Haitian Revolution compelling as motivation
to continually revise the codes of citizenship and, in the case of Haiti, to export those parts of
American citizenship that were undesirable. This motivation served the larger interest of
protecting the identity of the American citizen as white by furthering the hard racial distinctions
characterizing race relations that would fester in the nineteenth century.
The arguments I am presenting in these chapters offer a window into both the
institutional formation of American citizenship and the way insanity was theorized within a
culture that valued rationality and reason. By looking at insanity in the eighteenth century, one
29
comes to understand how precarious the definition of rationality is in a community beset with
continual challenges of identity. I trust that these chapters help to contextualize the literature and
discussions of insanity that appear in the nineteenth century, as literary characters like Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale and Melville’s Ahab become arresting embodiments of the American
self, representations that harken back to America’s founding. The convergence of insanity and
national citizenship in late-eighteenth-century America elucidates the ways citizens of imagined
communities understand their relationships to the social and political forces that govern their
lives as well as demonstrating how fluid the idea of rationality becomes at a time when America
was trying to define itself against a world that was in the grips of the “Age of Revolutions.”
30
CHAPTER TWO:
“THE FEVER OF THE MIND”: REVOLUTIANA AND THE
MELANCHOLIA OF CITIZENSHIP IN CRÈVECOEUR’S LETTERS
FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER
The father of American psychiatry Benjamin Rush, in an unpublished essay written in
1776 titled “On Different Species of Mania,” taxonomizes the different variations of mania that
he witnessed as a doctor during the early 1780s. His list seems quite silly to modern readers but
provides a window into how Rush views the relationship between madness and aspects of public
life. For example, “Negro-Mania” is a mental defect found in the South where white slave
owners fall under the delusion that “their interest in happiness” can be productive from land
“cultivated by Negro slaves” (212).9 Another species of madness, “Horse Mania,” describes a
patient who is too preoccupied with racing or riding horses to the exclusion of all other interests.
Even a cursory glance at Rush’s list leads one to the belief that any interest, no matter how small
or trivial, could, with enough attention and focus, become a catalyst for madness. Other forms of
mania are within this list and, in essence, describe the relationship between citizens and
government. For example, Rush discerns a “Liberty Mania” in which “this disease shews itself
in visionary ideas of liberty and governments . . . as to lead men to neglect their families for the
sake of caring for the state” (213). “Monarchical Mania” stands in contrast to “Liberty Mania”
as a form of madness found in “All those people who believe that a ‘king can do no wrong’ and
who hold it to be a criminal to depose tyrants” (214). Finally, there is “Republican Mania” that
is suffered by “[e]very man who attempts to introduce a republican form of government, where
the people are not prepared for it by virtue and knowledge” (214). Each of these instances—
from “Horse Mania” to “Republican Mania”—is the creation of a specific type of citizenship that
achieves equilibrium between personal desires and social responsibility. Rush’s list attempts to
define and grapple with the concept of citizenship from the examination of mental diseases, and
Rush sketches through the study of madness the ideal American citizen by creating a pathology
of non-citizenship. This pathology means that Rush marginalizes those traits—reliance on
See “On the Different Species of Mania” in Dagobert Rune’s edited collection The Selected Writings of
Benjamin Rush (212).
9
31
slavery, preoccupation with horses, liberty, and monarchy—in an effort to create a type of
citizenship that is focused solely on one’s duty to the newly created American government.
The key ingredient to all of Rush’s forms of mania in this unpublished piece is excess,
and the cure is always found in equilibrium. Rush presents a sketch of the American citizen as
one whose interests never consume familial and social responsibilities as well as having a
predisposed anxiety of too much monarchy, liberty, or republicanism. This image is not
surprising in an era where rationality, disinterestedness, and virtue were the crucial
characteristics of an Enlightenment citizen. Interestingly, Rush comes to this ideal image of a
citizen through the discourse of madness. The implication here is that those who suffer from
these examples corrupt the body politic. For Rush, the healthy American citizen like the larger
body politic is one that successfully tempers their desires while conforming to those social,
political, and familial roles that ensure stability for both the patient and the nation. Indeed, the
crux of Rush’s essay is to blur the distinction between person and nation: each becomes a
referendum on the other; the health of one implies the health of the other.
Rush continually refers to the mind in political metaphors and analogies throughout his
medical writings; earlier in his career as lecturer at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, he
gave a lecture on the mind that compared it to the system of British monarchy. Rush’s lecture
titled “The Human Mind may be compared to the British Government,” which he delivered
either years prior to or directly after the Revolution, explained that: “The Will is the King; the
Understanding, the House of Lords; the Passions the House of Commons; the Moral Faculty, the
Court of Westminster; and the Conscience, the High Court of Chancery.”10 Rush constructs the
mind by aligning mental process with political institution, and through this metaphor Rush
discusses the importance of equilibrium between the different faculties of the mind. Rush writes,
“As the Government can be well conducted only when these five powers harmonize with each
other, so the Mind can alone equably and right when the Harmony of its Power is perfect”
(Waserman 640). It is hard to find a more perfect distillation of Rush’s philosophy of the mind
and government, and the passage shows how blurred the distinction between person and
government becomes in Rush’s writings. Essentially, the individual and government cannot be
For fuller excerpt see Manfred J. Waserman’s “Benjamin Rush on Government and the Harmony and
Derangement of the Mind.” The details of this lecture come from notes by Rush’s student Marcus H.
Kuhl. Kuhl did not receive his degree until 1792, which means that Rush’s lecture probably predates the
Federalist era of the 1790s.
10
32
thought of as mutually exclusive or collaborative, they are one in the same. In effect, an
individual’s mind is an internal representative of government whose parts must work
harmoniously for the good of the body. However, the Revolutionary War years were anything
but stable and rational, and elsewhere in his writings Rush treats the war as a psychological
trauma upon the collective American mind, in which harmony becomes all but impossible.
In his most famous publication, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon Diseases of
the Mind, Rush refers to the trauma inflicted by the American war for independence:
“Revolutions in governments which are often accompanied with injustice, cruelty, and the loss of
property and friends . . . frequently multiply instances of insanity” (68). After relating that the
French Revolution was responsible for an increase in the number of insane patients in France,
Rush asserts that insanity “was induced, I shall say . . . by the events of the American
Revolution” (69). Rush posits that mental health is achieved through an equilibrium between the
mind and body, and the consequences of the Revolutionary War not only ripped the head off the
body politic but deracinated people from property, family, and social status. For Rush, the
sudden transition from loyalist to American, rich to poor, and colony to republic is so traumatic
that both the individual minds of citizens and the collective mind of the colonists are susceptible
to madness. Rush constantly mentions that people whom he treats are plagued by the events of
the Revolution; in 1775 his patient Peyton Randolph falls into apoplexy induced “by the pressure
of the uncertainty of those great events upon his mind” (271-72). Rush funnels the effects of the
Revolution through the discourse of psychology and conceives of American citizenship as a
structural move from one type of consciousness to another. The apoplectic man that Rush
describes becomes an embodiment of the ways in which colonial citizens transform through
madness from colonials into Americans.
It is helpful to remember that during the Enlightenment the idealized citizen is marked by
the capacity to be rational and disinterested (objective). As I have stated in the introduction,
America’s first insane asylum takes shape as a way of removing those people who cannot mirror
those characteristics of the enlightened citizen from the public sphere. The exhibition of insanity
in the public sphere destroys the image of America as an Enlightenment success; Rush’s work on
insanity demonstrates that while the public face of America can be seen in someone like
Benjamin Franklin, we must entertain the idea that perhaps Peyton Randolph embodies the
psychology of the American citizen. When an idealized image of America is at work, Rush sees
33
in his patients the psychological effects of a people destroyed by war and fretful of surviving in a
new nation where their status as people has changed so dramatically. Scholars have attempted in
recent decades to explain the possible psychological makeup of late-eighteenth-century America
by looking at the discourses of mourning and trauma. The scholars argue that it becomes
necessary in theorizing citizenship to discuss rationality, dispassion, and disinterestedness
alongside the ideas of trauma, mourning, and even madness. Peter Coviello raises an interesting
question: “Does the ideal of national cohesion have any more prominent form of expression in
America than the language of affect, of impassioned feeling, proper to scenes of tragic severance
and loss?” (439). In stepping back and examining the beginnings of American literature, it is
difficult not to answer Coviello’s question in the affirmative.
The immense popularity of the sentimental and gothic genres in America during the
eighteenth century attests to this very idea; novels such as The Coquette, Charlotte Temple, and
The Power of Sympathy affirm the American ideal of Enlightenment rationality, but only through
the affective power of trauma, death, and bereavement. Readers come to understand the power
of reason, but only through scenes of horror, murder, and at times madness much like the gothic
genre. Coviello argues that the sentimental and gothic genres “envision [an ]. . . late-eighteenthcentury world in which the terrors of revolution, the pain of revolutionary rupture, and anxieties
over national cohesion all contribute to the making of a civic atmosphere in which affect figures
less as a specter to be banished than as an elemental social fact” (442). In this same vein, Julia
Stern argues “those eighteenth-century novels best remembered for impassioned excess
elaborate, in fictive form, a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the
preemption of liberty in the wake of the post-Revolutionary settlement” (2). This chapter steps
back from considering post-Revolutionary American citizenship and tries to analyze an originary
moment when citizenship is created during the Revolution through the psychological toll of loss,
mourning, and trauma. Instead of examining post-Revolution sentimental or gothic genres, I turn
to Crèvecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer as a piece of writing that explicates on the
origins of citizenship through Rush’s concepts of Revolutiana and Anarchia. I argue in this
chapter that through the examination of loss, Rush and Crèvecoeur each arrive at a structure for
citizenship premised on the diagnosis of melancholic madness.
This chapter examines Rush’s and Crèvecoeur’s construction of citizenship from the
vantage point of loyalism. The chief argument of this chapter is that focusing on the loyalism of
34
Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James leads to examining how citizenship is created after the Revolution.
The recent work of Maya Jasanoff emphasizes that discussions of loyalism and its place in postRevolutionary America are often difficult because the “history of the American Revolution was
written by the victors, who were chiefly interested in exploring the revolution’s many
innovations and achievements” which meant that “Loyalist refugees simply fell outside the
bounds of American national narratives” (9). Jasanoff attempts to focus on the loyalist diaspora
that occurred during and after the Revolutionary War. After the war, loyalists were beset with a
myriad of anxieties, Jasanoff succinctly writes: “What kind of treatment could they expect in the
new United States? Would they be jailed? Would they be attacked? Would they retain their
property, or hold on to their jobs?” (6). The psychological turmoil undergone by loyalists
provides a different vantage point from which to examine the construction of American
citizenship that occurred directly after the Revolution. Moreover, approaching citizenship from
the perspective of a loyalist expands our knowledge of the otherwise unseen psychological
damage wrought by American independence.
Rush devotes an entire chapter in one of his lesser-known works Medical Inquiries and
Observations to examining just such effects of the Revolution on the psychical and mental health
of citizens. Published in 1789 during the Constitutional debates, this text looks at the effects of
the Revolution on both loyalists and revolutionary colonials and concludes that both are prone to
madness. In the chapter “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the
American Revolution upon the Human Body,” Rush examines how the war infected the minds of
colonial citizens. In some preliminary remarks, Rush sets up the radical transformation that
Americans endured: “The war was carried on by the Americans against a nation, to whom they
had long been tied by the numerous obligations of consanguinity, laws, religion, commerce,
language, interest, and mutual sense of national glory” (216). Throughout much of his
commentary, Rush suggests that the American Revolution was, literally, a civil war. This
distinction underscores the idea that the war had cleaved American life in two, but Rush
examines this division through psychology instead of looking at distinct communities. Because
the Revolution was such a cataclysmic event, Rush posits that “[t]he American mind was,
therefore, frequently occupied at the same time, by the difficult and complicated duties of
political and military life” (216). Rush represents the daily mental life of the participants and
spectators of the war as being pushed and pulled between competing demands and desires. The
35
implication here is that the consequences of war—the loss of relatives, property, and overall
social position—combined with a fractured psyche, terminating into madness. Thus, Rush
argues that this state is inevitable during revolutionary times: “Revolutions in governments
which are often accompanied with injustice, cruelty, and the loss of property and friends; and
where this is not the case, with an inroad upon ancient and deep-seated principles and habits,
frequently multiple instances of insanity” (DOM 70). Throughout the chapter, Rush conflates
soldiers, politicians, and civilians as connected, thus emphasizing that no one group of colonial
life was exempt from the psychological effects of the war. For example, Rush claims that the
victory at Trenton was enough of a psychological boost that soldiers became inoculated against
becoming sick during the hard winter months of 1776. At the same time, the wreckage and
instability that war caused brought with it an increase in the number of apoplexies in men.
Moreover, the vigor of military victories caused hysterical women to recover, due to the
“successful issue of the contest” between the colonials and Britain (223). There is a tension in
Rush’s writings on the Revolution; the Revolution creates madness at one point and at other
times cures it. Despite this tension we see that Rush thinks of madness as a visible cultural
marker illuminating the inner turmoil created by the Revolution. Towards the end of the chapter,
Rush conceives of a paradigm of citizenship that respects the divisions, which the war
engendered, by creating two forms of madness that distinguish Americans from loyalists. Rush
writes that for those who still held onto their British loyalism: “the terror and distress of the
revolution brought on a true melancholia” of which the “causes . . . may be reduced to four
heads. 1. Loss of former power or influence in government. 2. The destruction of the hierarchy of
the English church in America. 3. The change in habits of diet, company and manners, produced
by the annihilation of the just debts by means of depreciated paper money” (226). This form of
hypochondrasis is a melancholic madness that Rush calls Revolutiana. Typically, those who
suffered from it either died or became alcoholics while others died due to “exile and
confinement” (226).
For Rush, the diagnosis of Revolutiana creates a blueprint for a structure of citizenship by
giving loyalists a specific type of madness. The effect of the Revolution upon the minds of
loyalists was one of constant anxiety about their place within the new political and culture
circumstances of an independent America. Rush seemingly denies loyalists any grand notions of
national pride in the causation of their madness; the war apparently destroys the materialist basis
36
of loyalist citizenship and gives rise to madness. However, Rush does not simply diagnose
loyalists but also devises a “species of insanity” called Anarchia reserved for Americans who
fought for independence. Rush describes the context that gives rise to this particular form of
insanity: “the minds of the citizens of the United States were wholly unprepared for their new
situation. The excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war,
produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason, nor
restrained by government” (227). Writing in 1789, Rush might have had people like Daniel Shay
in mind, when identifying this specific form of madness that can afflict American citizens. For
Rush, Shay and his followers, in his rebellion against creditors’ confiscation of property, were
unable to rationally understand that the new government demanded the abrogation of certain
rights in exchange for national stability. Therefore, these Americans who refused to accede to
the power of the newly created government could not restrain their passion for liberty, which
induces madness.
Rush represents in Revolutiana and Anarchia a psychological mechanism of
identification—so central to the concept of citizenship—affected by the trauma caused by
revolution. It is easy to take it for granted that citizenship implies the process of the subjects’
identifying with the national landscape in a way that it becomes integral to their identity. In
Revolutiana and Anarchia, Rush demonstrates that the Revolution created a national citizenship
while destroying the previous allegiances of colonial subjects. Indeed, the implication is that at
some level, all people feel loss engendered by revolution, but it is only those who cannot
reconcile their new status who become insane. In this way, Rush complicates the formation of
citizenship by demonstrating that people subjected to cultural and political revolutions can
experience a profound sense of loss in the transition from one type of citizenship to another. The
concepts of Revolutiana and Anarachia acknowledge how psychologically messy the process of
citizenship can be when deriving from a revolution. Rush complicates the idea of citizenship
itself and posits that loss is at the heart of the identity of a national citizen. Stephen Frosh,
examining citizenship from the vantage point of psychoanalysis, argues that we should examine
citizenship as “more than a simple totting up of rights and duties” and that scholars need to
“embrace this space of feeling and fantasy, this realm of the subjective, of what might properly
be termed the investments which human subjects accrue towards their social world” (62). Rush
seems to anticipate this very notion of citizenship as a psychological investment in the social
37
world, while also acknowledging that revolutions destroy the previous investments of a people
and at the same time force them to invest in a new national identity.
Frosh opens the door to the use of psychoanalysis in a discussion of citizenship, which I
think is key to fully understanding the implications of Rush’s diagnosis of Revolutiana and
Anarchia. Rush theorizes the twin concepts of insanity are closer to the melancholia Sigmund
Freud outlined more than a century later in his influential essay “Mourning and Melancholia.”
Juxtaposing Rush and Freud can lead to a fuller appreciation of how the process of citizenship is
so fraught that insanity almost becomes a natural consequence. Etiologically, Rush and Freud
contend that melancholia derives from the loss of an object, person, or ideal that has been closely
aligned with a patient’s sense of identity. The ego in psychoanalysis identifies with an object or
person in such a way that it “assumes the characteristics of the object” (Group Psychology 65).
The transition from British subjects to American citizens demanded that colonials create and
appropriate the characteristics of the new nation. David Noble shows that eighteenth-century
colonials on the verge of becoming national citizens employed an “artful group mentality”
founded upon reason. Central to this new national consciousness was that citizens believed in
the exceptional nature of their national identity. Indeed, American citizens recognized that they
now existed in “isolated and autonomous states of nature” born out of “their national landscapes,
those virginal lands whose naturalness and purity were protected by national boundaries” (Noble
xxvi). This belief leads Americans to identify with our idealized nation in such a way that forces
us to live up to that image despite its origin in fantasy and wish fulfillment. Frosh argues that
nationalism hinges on an “excessive factor which reverberates subjectively for people, into
which their fears and desires are channeled, generating, and sustaining,” which leads to a
“desperate clinging onto some notion of identity [that is] enormously powerful as an organizing
principle for people’s lives” (63). Rush makes manifest in the diagnosing of Revolutiana and
Anarchia the extent to which this identification is central to a person’s understanding of
individual social and political place. It is helpful here to take this perception one step further—
with Freud’s help; citizenship is the process by which the ego becomes attached to the fantasized
image of itself as citizen of an imaged community. In this context, the Revolutionary War and
its aftermath destroyed an entire group’s ego identification, revealing that a person’s
consciousness loses the very object which helps define it. Thus the severance of a person’s
citizenship becomes a crisis of the ego and a crisis in the ability of a person to consciously
38
recognize his or her own identity. Freud’s theorization of melancholia becomes the most
effective way of making sense of the psychological turmoil Rush discusses in Revolutiana and
Anarchia.
Freud, Mourning, and Melancholia
Freud’s paper “Mourning and Melancholia” seeks to understand the differences between
the two as well as the way the ego navigates the complex psychological trauma associated with
loss. Freud locates the genesis of both mourning and melancholia in a “reaction to the loss of a
loved one or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s
country, liberty, an ideal and so on” (243). He structures mourning as a period of time in which
the patient withdraws from the world following the loss of a love-object. This process demands
that the emotional energy (cathexis) be withdrawn from the object of mourning and redirected
towards a surrogate or new love-object. The sufferer understands that the specific lost love
object cannot come back because of the reality principle and must submit to the will of
rationality to move on. Whereas the object of mourning is fixated on an external object that is
lost, the melancholic is different in that a sense of ambiguity attaches to the love-object. Freud
elaborates that melancholia begins much like mourning, but then he spells out the key difference:
“one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot
see clearly what it is that has been lost . . . even if the patient is aware of the loss which has
given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what
he has lost in him” (245). Melancholia continues to persist because the sufferer does not
precisely understand the nature or the meaning of the loss experience. The process of
melancholia turns the emotions associated with mourning onto the sufferer’s own ego and causes
“profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to
love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds
utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings” (244). These self-reproaches happen because
melancholia essentially divides the ego into two parts. One part forms a close identification with
the lost object and enjoys a narcissistic identification with it. Thus this part of the ego turns the
lost object into the ego-ideal and then judges the other part of the ego, which manifests the
patient’s dejection. Freud argues that instead of withdrawing the libido from the lost object and
redirecting it to a new source, the sufferer’s ego internalizes the loss by erasing any distance
between the object of loss and the melancholic. Freud clarifies that in melancholia, the libido is
39
“not employed in any specified way” and is used only to “establish an identification of the ego
with the abandoned object” (249). This process ensures that the libidinal energy is redirected
towards the ego, making the ego the subject of loss itself.
Freud’s concept of the ego-ideal connects to the theory of national citizenship in a myriad
of ways. Obviously, national citizenship hinges on the advent of nationalism within a
community; Benedict Anderson explains nationalism is essentially an imagined community.
Anderson writes that one reason to think of nations as imagined is “because the members of even
the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). The easiest example is
the image of America as an exceptional nation. American exceptionalism invokes a close
identification with the citizen who internalizes this exceptionalism as central to self-identity.
Crèvecoeur is not giving us a reality when he simply asks, “What is an American?” and then lists
a variety of traits each more superlative than the next, but he posits an idealized version of what
an American should strive to be. Thus, the image of a humble farmer—who works the land,
takes care of his family, helps his neighbors succeed, and is a devout Christian—is a site of
idealization with which the citizen’s ego identifies. The implication here is that citizenship is
essentially the process of ego-idealization and that once the citizen internalizes the ideal citizen
image it becomes central to the ego.
Briefly sketching out Freud’s argument enables us to understand the concept of
citizenship factors in a discussion of melancholia. Rush argues through Revolutiana and
Anarchia that the status of a person’s citizenship is central to his mental stability. Rush
demonstrates how individuals make citizenship integral in how they understand themselves
without actually acknowledging the implications of his diagnosis; however, if that understanding
is removed the logic of their existence is called into question. Essentially, a loyalist lost in the
Revolution was his self-worth and identity. Freud helps us understand the extent to which so
much of citizenship is unconscious and integral to the formation of the ego. Freud’s concept of
melancholia supplements Rush’s reliance on materiality as the basis of Revolutiana; and
Anarchia and opens up the more difficult terrain of subjectivity as well as the sometimes tenuous
relationship between citizenship and rationality. Examining Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an
American Farmer, provides a glimpse into the complex transition of one form of citizenship to
another, causing psychological damage to those involved regardless of political or national
40
affiliation. In the following pages, I sketch the extent to which James connects his own ego to
the experience of living in America as a loyalist. This connection reveals that James spends an
enormous amount of time detailing the extent to which he has made the American landscape
central to his identity and in effect has created it as an ego-ideal. Throughout the course of
Letters, James comes to realize that the ideal America he clings to is lost, and he suffers from a
profound sense of Revolutiana.
Crèvecoeur, Citizenship, and the “Fever of the Mind”
In scholarly discussions it is almost impossible to dissociate the biography of Crèvecoeur
from the sequence of events that befall the narrator of Letters. Crèvecoeur, born in Caen, France
in 1735 to a noble Norman family, spent a majority of his life in transition. Indeed, the year after
his birth, Crèvecoeur was taken on a tour of Britain; at the age of twenty he enlisted in the
French regiment and gained a reputation as a competent soldier, cartographer, and engineer.11 In
1765, Crèvecoeur migrated to New York and changed his name to J. Hector St. John. He
married Mehetable Tippet in 1769 and eventually settled in Orange County, New York, where he
would experience a life “the happiest he was ever to experience” (11). His time farming in Pine
Hill formed the basis of the experiences related by Farmer James, the narrator of Letters.
Crèvecoeur’s life for the next seven years was idyllic as his family, farm, and prospects
continued to grow, and this sense of optimism finds its way into letters like “What is an
American?” and the lengthy descriptions of Nantucket in selections IV-VIII. However in 1776,
the events of Revolution descended rapidly on Crèvecoeur, his farm, and family. Albert Stone
calls Letters both a celebration of America and an elegy because Crèvecoeur “whose peaceful
but generally pro-Tory sentiments were known” left America in the face of “mounting
antagonism and suspicions of his patriot neighbors” (11). Eventually, Crèvecoeur left America
(not without some difficulty from both British and American authorities), and made his way to
Ireland and then to London where he published Letters in 1782. Crèvecoeur eventually returned
to New York to reconnect with his family and work as a diplomat, but Letters chronicles that
11
Although there are biographies of Crèvecoeur, most have been prone to errors. For my purposes here I
use the biographical information related by Albert E. Stone in his introduction to the Penguin Classics
edition that combines Letters of an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America.
41
brief seven-year moment when Crèvecoeur entertained the perspective that America was a place
where Europeans could start anew.12
It has been commonplace in scholarly discussions of Letters to think of the narrator
Father James is a version of Crèvecoeur himself. Although this strain of analysis can be over
determined, there are general overlaps in the events of Crèvecoeur and Farmer James’ life. The
main convergence between Crèvecoeur and his narrators deals with the difficulties of citizenship
in the Revolutionary era. By the end of Letters, James decides to flee his farm because the
Revolution has transformed the landscape and people into antagonists. Of course these
observations end Letters, the much-anthologized beginning letters contain some of the most
reverent language about America. Reconciling these two voices has proved challenging when it
comes to identifying the possible political allegiance of James and the text of Letters. Scholars
have pursued this difficulty in Crèvecoeur’s writings, often coming to a variety of different
conclusions. Over the years, scholars have determined that Crèvecoeur and his narrator are: New
Yorkers (Philbrick 24), Loyalists (Traister 470), cosmopolitans (Larkin 53), Lockean liberals
(Carlson 258), Whigs (Saar 195), and dialectical purveyors of citizenship who espouse “two
opposing consciousnesses” with “two opposing views” (Rucker 193). Regardless of these
difficulties, one common denominator in the scholarship on Crèvecoeur is that current scholars
should be careful in applying the term American to his writings and the political affiliation of his
character Farmer James.
Even if one sidesteps the biographical difficulties of Crèvecoeur’s own life, it is clear that
Farmer James can be identified a loyalist because of his refusal to support the Revolutionary war.
In this light, it is difficult simply to label Crèvecoeur an American in the nationalist sense of the
term. Dennis Moore writes that Crèvecoeur “understood his own status to be a citizen of the
North American colonies of Great Britain” (xlvii-xlix). Moreover, when contemplating a Patriot
victory in the Revolution, Crèvecoeur was “convinced . . . that being an American would mean
having to renounce his ties with Britain—to choose between being British or American” (xlix).
Like his fictional narrator Farmer James, faced with this choice, Crèvecoeur decided to leave
However, it instructive to keep in mind Dennis Moore’s argument that Cr èvecoeur’s model for Letters was not
John Dickenson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, but Voltaire’s English essays Letters Concerning the
English Nation (1733). Aligning his text with satrisit Voltaire raises significant questions about the earnestness of
Farmer James and the political affiliation of Letters (157-58, 162). For my purposes here, Moore’s argument could
shed light on the use of insanity in Crèvecoeur’s text, especially by the climactic Letter XII, where I argue that
Crèvecoeur seems to suggest both American and Loyalists suffer from some form of madness.
12
42
America and slowly made his way back to France. Despite these biographical facts, Farmer
James’ loyalism is defined less by a sense of British citizenship than by a commitment to the
order of pre-national America, or as he calls it “British America” (70). This was not an
uncommon position for a loyalist to take, as Jasanoff points out: “For others, loyalism stemmed
from a personal commitment to the existing order of things, a sense that is better to stick with the
devil you knew. Also widespread was a pragmatic opinion that the colonies were economically
and strategically better off as part of the British Empire” (9). The implication of Jasanoff’s
argument is that while James does not demonstrate any overt affinity for the British monarchy,
his desire for the “existing order of things,” classifies as a loyalist during the Revolution.
When Crèvecoeur has Farmer James ask “What is an American?” he adheres to a form of
citizenship that owes it allegiance more to pre-national America than to British monarchy. James
writes that America “is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and
of a herd of people who have nothing” (46). When Farmer James designates something as
American, he is not affirming the national structure of citizenship but a colonial one. The
tension James undergoes throughout Letters is related to those aspects of Revolutionary America
that transform the European colonial landscape and colonial mind into an independent America.
Crèvecoeur situates his narrative within a revolutionary culture that makes them exceedingly
uneasy, and in this space his text creates two distinct types of citizenship. On the one hand,
Farmer James represents a loyalism to both Britain and pre-Revolution America; indeed, it seems
that more than any sense of European sentiment, Farmer James’ loyalism is directly tied to the
pre-Revolution, pre-nationalized American landscape. As Letters progresses and the
Revolutionary War advances through the countryside, Farmer James continually withdraws from
society, finally choosing instead to flee from his home, neighbors, and country. In “Distresses of
a Frontier Man,” James closes his series of letters by imploring the “Father of nature” to make
sure that “our ancient virtues and our industry may not be totally lost” because of the Revolution
(227). What I believe James means by “ancient virtues” are those characteristics of pre-national
colonial life, in which one understood his or her subjection to the British crown but felt a sense
of renewal and freedom in the American colonies. For James, the America that he identifies with
is the one of fecundity, balance, and egalitarianism; Crèvecoeur argues in Letters that the
Revolutionary War and the invention of national citizenship destroy the things that James takes
as his ego-ideal. The process of reading Letters is to marvel at the way in which Crèvecoeur
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demonstrates the psychological damage that can happen when a people go from colonialists to
national citizenry.
In this context, I read Letters as a continuous unfolding narrative, where the reader
follows Farmer James on his descent into Revolutiana. Thus, I read Letters sequentially to best
monitor the ways Crèvecoeur demonstrates the effects of the Revolutionary War on James’
psyche. Given the pairing of Crèvecoeur’s text alongside psychoanalytic theory that relies of
patients constructing a narrative of their trauma, reading Letters sequentially helps call attention
to the narrative arc that Crèvecoeur utilized in an examination of the effects of the Revolution.
Indeed, along with the bloody physical toll of the Revolutionary War, Crèvecoeur demonstrates
through Farmer James the trauma of creating a new citizen consciousness. In terms of the
overall argument of this dissertation, the fate of Farmer James metaphorizes the process that
created a space for American national identity. Thus, Crèvecoeur establishes a type of American
citizen through Farmer James’ negative example and gestures towards a profound
disillusionment with the inability of America to live up to its Enlightenment promise.
Even if one approaches Farmer James as simply a loyalist, the first half of Letters
eschews any overt political discussions. The first eight epistles of Letters chronicle Farmer
James as he describes the landscape, people, and customs of America to a correspondent in far
off London. James begins as a simple farmer whom Crèvecoeur styles as a salt-of-the-earth man
of humility without any of the corrupting refinement of Europe. In the opening of “Letter I,”
James informs the reader that he is not a skilled writer, and that the reader should not expect to
much of James’ because of his “very limited power of mind” (39).13 Further on in the text, James
doubles down on his humility by writing, “It is true I can describe our American modes of
farming, our manners, and peculiar customs with some degree of propriety because I have ever
attentively studied them; but my knowledge extends no farther” (39). The extent of James’
knowledge is much more difficult to define because he is well-versed in the landscape, his
neighbors, the animals on his farm, but also philosophy, religion, and ancient history. Even
though there is a lack of political discussions in the beginning, Crèvecoeur uses James’
descriptions of the landscape to offer cogent critiques of the war raging at this time between the
colonials and the British monarchy.
All quotations from both Letters and Sketches come from Albert Stone’s edited collection, unless
otherwise noted.
13
44
In terms of politics or European theories of philosophy, James rejects them all for the
simplicity of his farm: “I ceased to ramble in imagination through the wide world; my excursions
since have not exceeded the bounds of my farm, and all my principal pleasures are now centered
within its scanty limits” (53). The simplicity of James’ life in those early selections allows the
reader to contemplate America as a bountiful utopia, full of people who work together in
harmony with nature. To James’ most pertinent question concerning American identity, he
answers that he is first European, but by living on the fecund soil of America, has become “like
plants” because “the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and
exposition in which they grow” (71). Indeed, for James those Europeans who came to America
were purified by the soil and transformed into a different kind of European—one without the
debt owed to the corruption and moral morass of the European cosmopolitanism. James admits
as much, writing that for Americans working the soil, “the earth purifies them” which in turns
helps them to create civil institutions like government and religious houses with a “great degree
of sagacity” (71). This idea of the American as a purified citizen of the American landscape
underpins James’ observations in the first eight letters; whether commenting on the
industriousness of the people of Nantucket or the heroic nature of the whalers of Martha’s
Vineyard, all have been purified by the earth and have become a pre-national American citizens.
Crèvecoeur demonstrates that James makes the American landscape his ego-ideal; Freud writes
that this process demands that a person must “set up an ideal in himself by which he measures
his actual ego” (93). James details in much of the initial letters the criteria by which the
American ideal is central to his psychological makeup. The problem that James eventually
confronts is his eventually coming into contact with a natural landscape that is far more chaotic
and destructive than he is willing to admit (at least at first).
Farmer James’ rejection of political commentary in the opening selections is a reminder
of his pre-national loyalism. Still, Crèvecoeur subtly alludes to political events and ideas
through James’ naturalist descriptions of the landscape and his interactions with other colonials.
Thus, while James does refer obliquely to obliquely in Letters, this actuality does not exempt the
text from its political loyalism. Making a distinction in James’ political allegiances is important
in understanding the narrative arc of Letters. Most scholars approach Letters as a romantic
beginning followed by a sudden shift in Letter IX to one of despondency and dejection. Indeed,
the argument for Crèvecoeur’s canonicity is that letters like “What is an American?” in no small
45
measure serve as an origin for the romanticized, exceptionalist strain of American nationalism. 14
The problem with approaching Letters in this highly teleological way is that it runs roughshod
over the enormous complexities of citizenship that Crèvecoeur appears invested in. For
example, in Letter II, Farmer James remarks on a conflict between a bird and a swarm of bees.
James interprets this conflict in a way that presages the coming Revolution:
He [the bird] was followed by the same bold phalanx, at a considerable distance, which
unfortunately, becoming too sure of victory, quitted their military array and disbanded
themselves. By this inconsiderate step, they lost all that aggregate force which had made
the bird fly off. Perceiving their disorder, he immediately returned and snapped as many
as he wanted; nay, he had even the impudence to alight on the very twig from which the
bees had driven him. I killed him and immediately opened his craw, from which I took
171 bees; I laid them all on a blanket in the sun, and to my great surprise, 54 returned to
life . . . and joyfully went back to the hive, where they probably informed their
companions. (56)
Farmer James makes these observations when his romantic attachment to the industriousness of
Americans and the fertility of the landscape is providing much of the content of the early letters.
However, as becomes evident as early as Letter II, this romanticism stands in contrast to the
reality of conflict that permeates throughout late-eighteenth-century America. Through the scene
with the king-birds, Crèvecoeur allows a window into the mind of a Farmer James and the
difficulties of citizenship. This scene works as a metonymy for the Revolution between
colonialists and loyalists based on the interpretation of the identities of the birds and the bees. D.
H. Lawrence interprets this scene as a conflict between the monarchical kingbird and the “little
democrat” bees (36). At the end of the conflict between the king-birds and bees, James says that
the bees go back to the hive and relate to their compatriots of the “adventure and escape as I
believe had never happened to American bees” (36). At the same time, the birds are “kingbirds,” which James finds to be both a nuisance and useful collaborators in maintaining his
fields. It would seem that James makes his metaphor rather precise—birds represent monarchy,
the bees are rebellious colonials. However, the passage becomes confusing if one approaches
About Crèvecoeur’s loyalism and the strain of American exceptionalism of Letters, Edward Larkin
writes, “However, the most compelling difficulty with the exceptionalist argument stems from the fact
that Crèvecoeur wrote Letters as a loyalist and not as a patriot, a fact commonly ignored by criticism”
(57).
14
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James as a loyalist. James’ impulse to kill the kingbirds is a representation of the British crown,
because his “indulgence had been carried too far” and the birds had “increased too much” in
number (56). If the kingbirds metaphorically represent loyalism in the colonies and if James is a
sympathetic loyalist, it becomes difficult to see how this metaphor works. The difficulty only
increases in terms of the relationship between James and the bees. One way to read the metaphor
of the bees is that they represent colonial rebellion; James constructs the bees militaristically as a
phalanx of troops who first attack the kingbird. James all but admonishes the bees for arrogantly
assuming that they are victorious over the bird. However, at the same time he defends the rebel
bees by killing the metaphorical representation of loyal monarchism.
There is danger in reading James’ description of the conflict between the kingbirds and
the bees ideologically. Indeed, interpreting the kingbirds and the bees as a rigid fight between
monarchy and colonial rebellion becomes further vexed when we consider James’ final act of
saving the swallowed bees from the bird’s mouth. Under the metaphorical system that James
creates, this act would mean that he saves, in the words of Lawrence, those little Yanks from the
craw of monarchy. I would suggest that the possible way to read beyond this impasse would be
to focus on the numbers that James gives the reader. At first, there are too many kingbirds and
James’ indifference allows the kingbirds to multiply until they no longer help him on his farm.
Crèvecoeur does not necessarily metaphorize the Revolution here but rather offers a commentary
about excess. He makes it possible to interpret excess here both materially and psychologically.
James tries to construct an even balance between the kingbirds and the bees, with one kingbird
dead and the number of bees decreased by a third. Moreover, James does not wish to eradicate
the colonial bees: “It is my bees, however, which afford me the most pleasing and extensive
theme; let me look at them when I will, their government, their industry, their quarrels, their
passions, always present me with something new” (58). Crèvecoeur accomplishes in his
metaphor less a distillation of the Revolution than a cogent commentary on the need for balance.
By removing some birds and some bees, Crèvecoeur attempts to ensure that both can live
together if one does not overcrowd the other. Crèvecoeur does not exempt loyalists from this
balance; he seems to suggest that loyalism is also a danger when left unchecked. Thus, in these
opening letters James, while a loyalist in the general sense, searches for a type of citizenship that
maintains its European roots without destroying the balance between man, the landscape, and his
neighbors. Equilibrium seems always on James’ mind in these opening letters; in fact he uses
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the word equal twenty-seven times throughout these beginning letters. As much as James
searches for material equality—for instance, between man and the earth he tills—he also reaches
for a psychological equilibrium. Recalling Rush’s diagnosis of the different types of mania, a
citizen must strike an equilibrium between needs and desires, duties and wants. If at any time
one overcomes the other, the person is liable to fall into mania or hypochondrasis.
Crucial to understanding James is the extent to which his identity is reflected in his
descriptions. For instance, in a passage characteristic of the tenor of the opening letters, James
writes, “We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense territory, communicating with
each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild
government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power, because they are equitable”
(67). The passage is notable for the ways in which the landscape both facilitates James’ identity
and is also reflective of it. The inhabitants of America are cultivators who use the land, but the
fertility of the land allows them to realize this identity. Moreover, communication between
inhabitants flows smoothly as a result of the rivers and roads, both of which facilitate and reflect
the identities of the people around them. One understatement in Crèvecoeur criticism is that
obviously James feels a powerful connection with the land. However, James’ explanation is
more than just a connection; he describes the process in which national identity is analogous to
ego-ideal formation.
James’ striking realization in the final third of Letters is that with the Revolution
looming, no hope exists that he will be able to maintain that equilibrium. Even in the very nature
that he celebrates, birds fight bees militaristically; he cannot, however, stop the coming
Revolution or the realization that the American landscape is not always benevolent. Thus, the
psychological tension for James rests between a loyalism to an idealized American landscape
and being a citizen who is destroyed by the Revolution. Rather than discounting how
psychologically traumatic the Revolution is for James, it is important to note his coming to
recognize that the land and the people are transformed into violent antagonists. For these
reasons, James falls under Rush’s melancholic heading of Revolutiana, and Crèvecoeur makes
manifest the dividing lines of citizenship between loyalism and American nationalism. James
comes to realize that his idealized America is lost in the reality of the Revolutionary America (if
it even existed at all), and the narrative begins to demonstrate a significant change in the tone as
James moves closer to the final letter, “Distresses of a Frontier Man.”
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Scholars have long suggested that the moment in which Letters loses its optimistically
exceptionalist way is in Letter IX, “Description of Charlestown; Thoughts on Slavery; on
Physical Evil; A Melancholy Scene,” when James comes into contact with a slave in a cage
whose eyes were picked out by birds and his “body covered with a multitude of wounds” (178).
Crèvecoeur taps into a trope of colonial writing that twentieth-century scholarship historicized as
“the Black Legend,” a mode of discourse that the English used to indict imperial Spain’s
treatment of indigenous people (Moore xxxiv-vi). James begins this letter, like the other letters
before it, by remarking on the splendor of Charleston society: “Carolina produces commodities
more valuable perhaps than gold because they are gained by greater industry” (166). The use of
the phrase greater industry is ironic because Southern industry functions through slavery.
Crèvecoeur will demonstrate that the foundations of Southern aristocratic splendor are built upon
and rely on chattel slavery. The richness of Charleston social life is offset by the brutal
description of the slave dying in a cage while birds feed on his flesh. The tension between
material splendor and moral squalor oppresses James’ thoughts and sends him into a melancholic
reverie. Before he describes the mutilated slave, James confesses that “[t]he following scene
will, I hope, account for these melancholy reflections and apologize for the gloomy thoughts
with which I have filled this letter: my mind is, and always has been, oppressed since I became a
witness to it” (177). Thus, the mind that reflects on the beauty and resourcefulness of the
American landscape becomes oppressed by the reality of slavery, and this vision sends James
into a state of melancholia.
The Charleston letter is important in any discussion of what exactly happens to James and
his motivations for rejecting the American Revolution at the end of Letters. Doreen Saar argues
too that Letter IV demonstrates Crèvecoeur’s attempt to align with the radical language of Whig
rhetoric so central to the American Revolution. Saar contends that we must think of
Crèvecoeur’s discussion of slavery in two ways: one, he enlightens his readers to the horrors of
chattel slavery, and two, he uses slavery as a metaphor for the colonial relationship with
Britain.15 Furthermore, the late-eighteenth-century reader would notice that the metaphor of
slavery “meant the loss of power of an independent people” (195). Due to the events in Letter
IX, the remainder of Letters becomes a discourse on the moral decay of the colonies. The
Bernard Bailyn argues in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution that “[t]he identification
between the cause of the colonies and the cause of the Negroes bound in chattel-slavery—an
identification built into the very language of politics—became inescapable” (235).
15
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difficulty with this reading, and thus with any political reading of Crèvecoeur’s text, is that if a
reader assumes that James’ enlightened humanitarian concerned with colonial subjugation; then
how is it possible to understand his interactions with the dying slave? Faced with a dying man in
a cage, James writes, “Had I ball in my gun, I certainly should have dispatched him, but finding
myself unable to perform so kind of office” (178). The point is not that James does not have the
means to end the suffering of the slave; he simply chooses not to do so. He does give the slave
some water, and when he hears that the slave has been hanging there for two days, James
becomes “[o]ppressed with the reflections which this shocking spectacle afforded me, I mustered
strength enough to walk away” (178-79). That while paralyzed and unable to relieve the slave of
his suffering, James does manage to find the strength to escape his own “oppressed reflections.”
Later at home James finds out that the slave is being punished for killing a overseer, he remarks
that “the laws of self-preservation” rendered the punishment of the slave “necessary” (179).
Such a cold display of indifference to the slave highlights the ways in the Revolution threatens
James’ identity.
For all of James’ lamentations about the institution of slavery, he never really commits to
an ideological perspective in Letter IX. Crèvecoeur could be satirizing the Whigs and
abolitionists here in that both are able to feel for the plight of slaves but are impotent to do
anything substantive about it.16 He also could be making the point that the institution of slavery
is so ingrained into Southern consciousness that nobody reflects on the human toll that such an
institution can take on individuals. Despite these interpretations, I think Letter IX can be best
understood as a crisis of citizenship. Quite literally, James cannot “pull the trigger” and commit
to an ideological or political position. The incident with the slave forces James to confront his
fantasy of America as an ideal landscape, but he is never reconciled to a particular viewpoint
about the incident with the slave. James feels for the slave and gives him water but does not
attempt to free him; even though he thinks the institution is a blight, he also views the slave’s
punishment as justified. Essentially, James conforms to multiple positions on slavery without
settling on a particular outlook. James laments that the institution of slavery is a crime of
civilization (going all the back to Rome), but outside these humanitarian sentiments he has little
else to say. Indeed, at the moment in which James could engage the debates that justify slavery,
Again its worth keeping in mind that this might well be the case given that Crèvecoeur’s literary model
for Letters could be Voltaire’s Letters concerning the English Nation (Moore 159).
16
50
he abruptly ends the letter, stating “I shall not trouble you at present” (179). If he were to take
up a position, then he would have to commit to a political identity, which is something that
James consistently avoids.
The significance of Letter IX in assessing James’ loyalism is tied to this inability to
commit to an ideological position with regards to the caged slave. Elayne Rapping argues that
the depiction of nature in Letters is one of a “state of war” (710), and this position seems to be
true, but the catalyst for war is a conflict between sides. Thus, the reason Letter IX becomes
such a turning point is that this moment presents James with a choice and he refuses. In viewing
Letter IX as a piece of James’ larger disaffection with Revolutionary America, it is possible to
see that the egalitarianism that James celebrates in the opening letters is destroyed through the
necessity of choosing sides. The mere fact that James must choose sides demonstrates the extent
to which his idealized British America has been lost. To continue being American, James must
decide to accede to the Patriots’ demands and thus pit himself against his neighbors and
countrymen. The centrality of Letter IX to James’ feeling of Revolutiana is due to the constant
realization that Revolutionary America is a divisive environment that constantly pushes James
into identifying with the Patriot cause.
In Letter X “On Snakes; and Hummingbirds,” James outlines why he refuses to take
sides. The contest between the kingbirds and the bees and the events in Charleston demonstrate
that opposite factions have arranged themselves in such a way that James cannot live
independently on his farm. Again, what seemingly frustrates James the most is that the
Revolution is categorized as an event deriving from nature, which means that James has been
fighting the same natural forces that he reveres in the first eight letters. Letter X begins in the
same idyllic way as the initial letters, and for a moment the seemingly horrific events of Letter
IX are displaced. James sets about the task of remarking on the species of snakes and
hummingbirds for the benefit of his correspondent, Mr. F.B.; but whereas the early letters depict
James as a happy naturalist, Letter X demonstrates that James has slowly begun to realize that
the America that serves as his ego-ideal has been destroyed. James’ new disposition is
evidenced by the very first sentence: “Why would you prescribe this task; you know that what
we take up ourselves seems always lighter than what is imposed on us by others” (180). There is
fatigue and frustration in James’ language because he wonders about the purpose of his naturalist
project. With the Revolution underway, much of what James has described in the previous
51
letters will be lost, and so the picture that he has worked so hard to paint is washing off the
canvas. In this state of frustration, James uses the discussion of the snakes as a metaphorical
denunciation of the choices of citizenship now before the colonials.
Crèvecoeur’s decision to use a discussion of a snake to bring about James’ complete
denunciation of citizenship is particularly interesting because of the snake’s importance as a
symbol of revolution. Benjamin Franklin first used the snake in a letter to the editor of
Pennsylvania Gazette in 1751. At this particular time, the British used America as a penal
colony. In response, Franklin surmises that Americans should take up the policy of sending
rattlesnakes to Britain as a form of protest and retaliation. For Franklin, the rattlesnakes were
convicts from the “Beginning of the World” and the policy of the colonialists was to kill them on
sight. However, the snakes could be rehabilitated if they were allowed to “change their Climate,”
so the policy should be to transport them to England to change their ways (345). The symbol of
the snake would be immortalized in 1754 during the French and Indian Wars when Franklin
created an image of a snake cut into eight pieces with the famous words “Join, or Die” at the
bottom. By the time of the revolution, the symbol of the snake was widely used; it adorned Paul
Revere’s Massachusetts Spy, where the sectioned snake confronts a British dragon. In 1775,
Franklin saw a military procession where the drummer boys had painted snakes with the words
“Don’t Tread on Me” on their drums. This event led Franklin to write an editorial for the
Pennsylvania Journal in which he argues for the snake to be the emblem of the colonies.
Writing under the pseudonym “American Guesser,” Franklin assumes a character much like the
Farmer James in the earlier selections, a humble man who “has nothing to do with public affairs”
and hears from a person acquainted with science that the serpent can represent “an emblem of
wisdom, and in a certain attitude of endless duration.” Franklin continues his case for the
rattlesnake by utilizing the language of exceptionalism: “I recollected that her eye excelled in
brightness, that of any other animal.” As the piece continues, Franklin compares the
temperament of the rattlesnake to the colonials: “She [the rattlesnake] never begins an attack,
nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true
courage . . . . Conscious of this, she never wounds ‘till she has generously given notice, event to
her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her” (745).
Given the popularity of Franklin’s editorial and the use of the rattlesnake on colonial
flags, Crèvecoeur would probably have been aware of the snake as icon while writing Letters.
52
Instead of examining the characteristics of the American snake in keeping with the style of the
earlier letters, Letter X reflects James’ further descent into melancholia. Moving directly from
the slave in a cage, James describes the snakes in his usual fashion by giving the reader the
names and their general characteristics. There are two types of snakes: a black one and a
copperhead, which is “remarkable for nothing but its industry, agility, beauty, and the art of
enticing birds by the power of its eyes” (180). James remarks that, when it comes to the black
snake, “I admire it much and never kill it, though its formidable length and appearance often get
the better of the philosophy of some people, particularly Europeans” (180). By remarking that
philosophically the snake can “get the better” of Europeans, James appears to follow Franklin in
using exceptionalist rhetoric to describe the snake. However, James abruptly pivots when
describing the effects of a copperhead bite on a man:
The poor wretch instantly swelled in a most dreadful manner; a multitude of spots of
different hues alternately appeared and vanished on different parts of the body; his eyes
were filled with madness and rage; he cast them on all present with the most vindictive
looks; he thrust out his tongue as the snakes do; he hissed through his teeth with
inconceivable strength and became an object of terror to all bystanders. To the lividness
of a corpse he united the desperate force of a maniac; they hardly were able to fasten him
so as to guard themselves from his attacks, when in the space two hours death relieved
the poor wretch. (181)
Adroitly, Crèvecoeur utilizes Franklin’s framing device of snake-as-America and turns it on its
head. If one assumes that Crèvecoeur is engaging Franklin here, then reading the snake’s attack
on the man as an analogy to the spread of revolutionary sympathy makes sense. James remarks
that once bitten the victim becomes snakelike, and starts vindictively hissing and threatening the
rest of the community. The use of the word vindictively supports this reading by implying that
once “bit” with revolutionary fervor the man seeks revenge on those like James who are loyalist.
However, Crèvecoeur suggests that because those bitten become insane and rage manically
against the community, a community of revolutionary sympathizers will not survive and
eventually will turn on each other. Crèvecoeur’s passage connects to Rush’s concept of
Anarchia in the sense that those suffering from revolutionary fervor cannot rationally determine
who are their enemies nor when the fighting is over. The key of Anarchia is that those
revolutionary supporters suffering from it would not or could not stop fighting even after the
53
Revolutionary War was over. Through this passage, James further descending into melancholia;
again nature does not offer the refuge for the hardworking man of the landscape.
In another instance James witnesses an epic battle between two snakes while sitting
underneath an alcove. As symbols of the Revolution, the two snakes lock together and “appeared
in an instant firmly twisted together; and whilst their united tails beat the ground, they mutually
tried with open jaws to lacerate each other” (183). In an extended metaphor of the effects of
Revolutionary participation, Crèvecoeur envisions two snakes bent on their mutual destruction.
Much like in the beginning of “Letter X,” where Crèvecoeur likens revolutionary feeling to
madness, the two snakes represent two revolutionaries who have lost the rational capacity to
identify enemy from compatriots. James remarks that the two snakes “fought with their jaw,
biting each other with the utmost rage” (185). Again, the reader is drawn to the language of fury
and madness to metaphorize the revolutionary feeling. Interestingly, this line is directly
followed with Franklinian sentiment; the two snakes demonstrate “mutual courage and fury” and
one snake “seemed desirous of retreating toward the ditch” (183). This example of revolutionary
sympathy is short-lived as the two snakes fight along the bank of the ditch. James writes of the
climatic finale:
Strange was this to behold; two great snakes strongly adhering together by means of the
writhings which lashed them to each other, and stretched at their full length, they pulled
but pulled in vain; and in the moments of greatest exertions, that part of their bodies
which was entwined seemed extremely small . . . and now and then convulsed with strong
undulations, rapidly following each other . . . but the black snake seemed to retain its
wonted superiority . . . the victor no sooner perceived its enemy incapable of farther
resistance than, abandoning it to the current, it returned on shore and disappeared. (18586)
Crèvecoeur surmises the consequences of being infected with revolutionary fervor; the key
reoccurrence in James’ description of the event is that the two snakes are closely joined together.
Each one is tightly wrapped around the other, while they attempt to bite each other. The crucial
lesson that Crèvecoeur imparts here is that participants in a revolution will eventually destroy
each other. Ultimately, James confronts the choice of living as a loyalist outcast or being
destroyed by the rage of revolution. Obviously, this situation is not much of a choice for James
as it helps to set up the final letter, “Distresses of a Frontier Man.” From the opening letters,
54
James slowly comes to understand that the America that he has made central to his identity has
been lost to the revolutionary feeling of the colonies. The narrative trajectory of Letters takes us
from “men are like plants” to the idea that both loyalists and patriots are snakes joined in their
determination for mutual destruction. The American landscape from the king-birds to the snakes
forces James to choose sides. Moreover, the landscape also demonstrates that it is not a
helpmate to a humble farmer, who like James, is looking for a productive life. James realizes
that he has lost his identity because of the Revolution or, in keeping with Freud, his ego has lost
its external referent by which it defines itself. As Freud made clear, melancholia occurs
subsequently when the ego turns on the person, judges him or her, and finds them wanting.
James’ final letter exhibits the symptoms of melancholic Revolutiana as he decides to flee
revolution-torn America.
In the opening lines of the last letter “Distresses of a Frontier Man,” one immediately
notices that the narrative voice is melancholy.17 James begins the letter by discussing the ideal
conditions for his psychological state: “The climate best adapted to my present situation and
humour would be the polar regions, where six months’ day and six months’ night divide the dull
year; nay, a simple aurora borealis would suffice me and greatly refresh my eyes, fatigued now
by so many disagreeable objects” (200). In these lines, James admits that the American
landscape no longer provides the object of his identification. His melancholia becomes more
recognizable as the letter continues: “I can never leave behind me the remembrances of the
dreadful scenes to which I have been witness; therefore, never can I be happy! Happy—why
would I mention that sweet, that enchanting word” (200). James explains that America is a
“half-dissolved” society that no longer allows him to realize his ambition for a quiet productive
life with his family.
James remarks that the revolution has caused men to no longer support each other and
that neighbors can no longer bond together to overcome obstacles. Oddly, James mentions that
not until the revolution began had he begun to understand how perfect society was: “I lived on,
17
For the sake of brevity I have decided to forgo a discussion of Letter IX, because I have already covered many of
themes in earlier letters. However, for the sake of my arguementative structure, I should mention that James’
discussion with John Bartram continues to register his exhaustion and disappointment in the progress of
Revolutionary America. One of thing that is worth mentioning is that James begins to pointedly blame other
Americans for failing to understand the greateness of the landscape. James exclaims, “Oh, America . . . thou
knowest not as yet the whole extent of thy happiness” (193). The implication here is that once the Revolution is
complete and the landscape forever changed, the inhabitants will begin to miss and long for pre-Revolution
America.
55
labored and prospered, without having ever studied on what the security and the foundation of
my prosperity were established; I perceived them just as they left me” (201). In the grip of a
profound sense of melancholia, James uses the language of Revolutiana to describe some of what
he has lost: “Never was a situation so singularly terrible as mine, in every possible respect, as a
member of an extensive society, as a citizen of an inferior division of the same society, as a
husband, as a father, as a man who exquisitely feels for the miseries of others as well as for his
own” (201). Crucial to James’ symptoms of Revolutiana are the feelings of alienation induced
by the confines of revolutionary citizenship.
James acknowledges that the revolution pits different forms of citizenship against each
other; to survive this battle a person must cast off previous allegiances and adapt to a new
political and cultural identity. Citizenship hinges on the psychological process of egoidealization, by which the subject defines itself against an external object. Essentially, the
revolution asks James to transform his ego, to withdraw from the ego-ideal of America, a
naturalistic paradise of loyal subjects working in concert, and to become a revolutionary
American where allegiance to the aims of war is the marker of American national citizenship.
Realizing that he is completely alienated from the demands of American citizenship, James
writes: “I am seized with a fever of the mind, I am transported beyond that degree of calmness
which is necessary to delineate our thoughts, I feel as if my reason wanted to leave me, as if it
would burst its poor weak tenement” (201). By utilizing the language of madness—“fever of the
mind”—Crèvecoeur consigns James to the fate of melancholia. More than this change,
Crèvecoeur makes melancholia the only option remaining to James. Throughout the preceding
selections James barely registers a complaint against Britain, but in the final letter he
relinquishes his attachment to British loyalism. Recounting the horrors of war for both rebels
and loyalists, James writes, “Must I then, in order to be called a faithful subject, coolly, and
philosophically say, it is necessary for the good of Britain, that my children's brains should be
dashed against the walls of the house in which they were reared; that my wife should be stabbed
and scalped before my face; that I should be either murdered or captivated . . .” (207). Not only
does James feel alienated from those who support the revolution, he cannot relocate a connection
to loyalism. James makes the point explicitly: “If I attach myself to the Mother Country, which
is 3000 miles from me, I become what is called an enemy to my own region; if I follow the rest
of my countrymen, I become opposed to our ancient masters: both extremes appear equally
56
dangerous to a person of so little weight and consequence as I am, whose energy and example
are of no avail” (204). James has no plausible alternative to his previous ego ideal; therefore, he
cannot form any new attachments on which to base his identity. In the end, James is virtually
identity-less and completely isolated from any form of citizenship that is available to him.
The reader can recognize this sense of alienation in the idea that James’ farm is no longer
a tool for enlightenment but a brutal device for killing his children, and his neighbors are either
suspected loyalists or revolutionaries. James’ melancholy is so acute that at times he sounds
almost schizophrenic, switching back and forth between praising and denouncing Britain; for
example, he wonders: “Must I then bid farewell to Britain, to that renowned country? Must I
renounce a name so ancient and so venerable? Alas, she herself, that once indulgent parent,
forces me to take up arms against her. She herself, first inspired the most unhappy citizens of our
remote districts, with the thoughts of shedding the blood of those whom they used to call by the
name of friends and brethren” (209). A recurring theme throughout James’ last letter is the idea
that an outside force pushes and pulls him, and this force is present with the constant repetition
of must a word that James uses almost fifty times throughout the course of his last letter. Typical
of the melancholic is a depletion of self-worth, and the evidence of this trait in James’, which
serves as a constant reminder that he is no longer in charge of his fate. At this moment in time,
no amount of hard work or chronicling of the natural world affects James’ situation.
At the end of Letters, James renounces both British loyalism and American nationalism
and considers living with the Indians. Fully appreciate James’ decision involves recognizing that
he effectively rejects any form of citizenship. As James’ letter comes to a close, he is deciding
whether to head west and live in a community of people who do not recognize the efficacy of
Western political alignments. Moreover, as the title of the last letter suggests, James is a
“frontier man,” someone without any fixed political attachments. Crèvecoeur takes Rush one
step further in the psychology of citizenship; once James loses the basis for his ego-ideal, he is
unable to form a new ideal for which the ego can define itself. In this way, Crèvecoeur makes a
poignant counter-point to the psychology of citizenship that Rush theorizes. For Rush,
citizenship is a rigid system of identification; one is either a loyalist or an American; one
supports the Revolution or one does not. Rush disallows the messiness of revolutionary
transformation and the possibility that revolutionary change can obliterate identities rather than
just transform them.
57
Crèvecoeur makes his Farmer James a reminder that human psychology does not always
stay within the parameters of social institutions. James cannot reach catharsis because he does
not understand that he has lost his identity. As a further rejection of national identity, James
sounds hopeful that the Indians are a community that is “governed by no laws” (211). James
ends his letter stating that he is “determined industriously to work among them such a system of
happiness as may be adequate to my future situation” (226). This position sounds hopeful and
gives evidence that James is making steps to form a new ego-ideal. Yet, James’ rhetoric almost
matches his optimistic description of America in Letter III. James still believes that the land will
provide for him and wants to think that his neighbors will work in concert to achieve a happy
community. Crèvecoeur leaves the reader wondering what if anything James has learned from
his ordeal; however, with the language of melancholia the reader can see that perhaps James
refuses to acknowledge the devastating loss of his ego-ideal. At the end, the reader simply does
not know if James is successful in finding happiness. Yet with history as a guide, one can be
confident that James would have found as much difficulty living with the Indians as on his farm.
Both Crèvecoeur and Rush understand that consequences of the Revolution are a loss of
property and status while also acknowledging the psychological costs as well. Rush fails to
grapple with the psychological consequences of revolution by resting his theory of Revolutiana
and Anarchia on a materialist foundation. Crèvecoeur posits that those who do not take part in
the new form of citizenship that the Revolution required lose the defining factor of their
identities and are alienated from the rest of the world. Freud writes that in melancholia the world
is not impoverished, but the ego itself, and for Farmer James the loss of his loyalist status
operates in much the same way. Throughout this chapter James’ loyalism has been defined as a
desire “existing order of things” before the Revolution. For the first eight letters, James is a
loyalist under this definition, but Crevecoeur seems a little more interested in using James as a
cautionary tale for both loyalists and patriots. For loyalists, the American Revolution stripped
them of their status as well as left them unable to psychologically cope with the new political and
cultural order. For Crèvecoeur’s James, the effects of melancholia force him to retreat from all
forms of political affiliation, and at the end of Letters he is alienated from the America that he
had celebrated so eloquently in the beginning letters. Recalling the image of the two snakes
intertwined, Crèvecoeur is just as bleak for the prospects of the American citizen after the war.
Indeed, James’ melancholia is closely linked to the loss of his position, and Crèvecoeur seems to
58
anticipate that the new American government will take just as much from its citizens as it did
from loyalists like James. As the first foray into the ways in which madness and citizenship
connect, Crèvecoeur’s text demonstrates that the space needed for American citizenship occurred
through the psychological displacement of loyalists. The chapters that follow will show that as
America continues to define itself, the need for clear definitions of citizenship become
paramount in the success of the inaugural era of the American nation-state. In the next chapter, I
will show Federalism’s attempts to impress all citizens into one homogenous group for the
benefit of national stability. Concurrent with this political move is the rise of the sentimental
novel, which relies on the language of madness in an attempt to offer critiques about the ability
of people to exist within the confines of American citizenship.
59
CHAPTER THREE:
EPIDEMICAL DISTEMPERS: INSANITY, FEDERALIST CITIZENSHIP,
AND THE POWER OF SYMPATHY
Through the trials of Farmer James, Crèvecoeur constructs a space for the creation of
national American citizenry. Within this space, multiple institutional and discursive strategies
gave form and substance to the idea of American citizenship in the eighteenth century. One of
the most important developments was the utilization of print capitalism to disseminate the codes
of citizenship to a general public across geographical boundaries. Along with the rise of
newspapers and broadsides, the novel enjoyed a premier place in the formation of the public
sphere. In fact, the novel in America “developed in tandem with democratization and economic
expansion” and reflected the triumphs and anxieties of the early Republic (Gilmore 620). Yet,
the medical establishment approached the act of novel reading with trepidation, fearing that too
much reading would blunt the progress of the public sphere. The primary readers of novels
during the eighteenth century were women, and doctors and scientists interested in the inner
workings of human psychology began to study the effects of novel reading on women.18 Four
years into his tenure at Pennsylvania Hospital, Benjamin Rush delivered an address to the
visitors of the Young Lady’s Academy in which he suggests that novel reading can induce
delusions. Rush argues that novels imbibe an “abortive sympathy which is excited by the recital
of imaginary distress [and] blunts the heart to that which is real” (12). As a result of indulging a
“passion” for reading novels, Rush argues, it is common to “see instances of young ladies, who
weep away a whole forenoon over the criminal sorrows of a fictitious Charlotte or Werther,
turning with disdain . . . from the sight of a beggar” (12). As a demonstration of how novels
were central to conversations in the public sphere, Rush included two of the most famous
characters from early American reading.19 However, while novels provided capital to a growing
18
A note on terminology is in order. In the eighteenth-century references to novels usually meant
“romance” which were stories that indulged in fantasy, scenes of chivalry, and frivolity. Sentimental
novels are a distinct genre dedicated to a didactic message of right behavior and prescribed gender roles.
See Davidson’s chapter “Privileging the Feme Covert: the Sociology of Sentimental Fcition,” for a further
discussion of women as the audience for the novel in America (187-201).
19
In this quote Rush references Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Susanna Rowson’s
Charlotte Temple. For a discussion of their popularity in early America see Davidson (141-43).
60
enterprise, doctors, in both America and Europe, were concerned about the psychological effects
novel reading could have on an individual, especially a woman.
For Rush, the act of reading dissociates the female reader from reality and places her in a
fictional world from which she might not be able to return. This causality between reading
novels and inducing madness was a familiar discussion throughout the eighteenth century. Later
in 1798, British physician Erasmus Darwin, whose Zoonomia contributed much to the study of
insanity in America, concurs with Rush’s assessment: “because of the high-wrought scenes of
elegant distress displayed in, novels blunt “the “feelings of . . . readers towards real objects of
misery” (50).20 For both Darwin and Rush, novel reading engages a person’s capacity for
sympathy which is integral in creating a cohesive national citizenry; however, novels induce a
sympathetic delusion involving characters and events that do not exist and, thus, remove the
reader from the public sphere.
Adhering to the idea that sympathy was central to the creation of citizenship, and both
Rush and Darwin demonstrate that the sympathy at work in novels is, at best, a delusional
sympathy. In Rush’s broad taxonomy of insanity, he defines intellectual derangement (a species
of insanity) as the “departure of the mind in its perceptions, judgments and reasonings, from its
natural and habitual order” (11). The political significance of intellectual derangement is that it
defies the “habitual order” necessary for a stable national identity, and as I demonstrate below,
leaders of America’s leading political faction in the late 1780s, the Federalists, attempted to
create an ordered homogenous form of citizenship. As the reigning political force in the early
American life, Federalists attempted to create an entire culture “conducive to their aims and
governance” (Smith 19). In the public sphere, Federalists had the power to define the parameters
of rationality and reason. This governance translated into Federalists having to “recurringly
persuade their potential constituents both that they form a ‘people,’ and that by rights they are a
people who should be led by . . . elites (20).21 The threat posed by reading novels is that it
20
Linking novel reading with delusion was not an uncommon rhetorical stance; for instance, Thomas
Jefferson likens novels to poison and suggests, “when this poison infects the mind . . .The result is a
bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of like” (10).
21
For the purposes of this chapter, I am using the term Federalist and Federalism, to connote the
dominant political faction in American government led by Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson which
believed a strictly heirarchical form of citizenship. While the Federalists did have many factions, I am
specifically referencing the those Federalists who feared democracy and exhalted the elite. For more, see
Smith’s “Constructing American Identity: Strategies of the Federalists” especially his examination of
Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian Federalists (22-24).
61
placed the reader outside the confines of Federalism’s reach; for women specifically, novels led
them to indulge their individual desires which ran counter to the patriarchal demands of
Federalist elites.22
In William Hill Brown’s novel The Power of Sympathy, advertised as the first American
novel in 1789, the issues of; insanity, passion, and sentimentality are intertwined. The character
Worthy discusses the state of female education in the new Republic with Mrs. Holmes.
Listening to Worthy’s argument that American women need to be cautious because reading
novels perverts a woman’s mind through excessive flattery, Mrs. Holmes asks incredulously:
“You declare we are handsome—and your conduct demonstrates you to be more solicitous for
the possession of beautiful, than mental charms” (29). In essence, Mrs. Holmes calls Worthy’s
bluff by suggesting that men actually want women to be swayed by excessive flattery and not
doing so would cause a woman to lose her ability to marry. Then, Worthy laments that “flattery
is become a kind of epidemical distemper,” thus, signaling that women are susceptible to the
disease of flattery (29). Worthy’s phrase derives from the language of disease; distemper in
eighteenth-century lexicon could refer to fevers or to more specific diseases like smallpox.23
However, the word “distemper” is also synonymous for insanity in the eighteenth century; while
scholarship on the novel relies on the conflict between passion and reason, it also registers the
conflict between reason and insanity. Here, Worthy suggests that the mind’s inability to regulate
passion could lead to eventual madness.
In Disease of the Mind, Rush remarks “Where madness has only been induced by intense and
protracted application to books, it has generally been in persons of weak intellects who were unable to
comprehend the subjects of their studies” (63). Similarly, Rush argues that intense study “whether of the
sciences or of the mechanical arts, and whether real or imagined . . . produced madness” (37). It appears
that when Rush makes these remarks, he is specifically discussing the negative affects of professional or
scholastic studies. However, there are traces in Rush’s belief that novels create a tension between fiction
and reality and that if a woman spent copious amounts of time reading, she would be susceptible to bouts
of madness.
23
For example, Benjamin Franklin’s Some Account of the Success of Inoculation for the Small-Pox in
England and America: Together with Plain Instructions by which Any Person May be Enabled to Perform
the Operation and Conduct the Patient through the Distemper (1759). The OED gives one definition of
distemper as “deranged or disorder condition of the body or mind” but also suggests that the word could
mean: “Derangement, disturbance, or disorder (esp. in a state or body politic).” This essay demonstrates
the interconnectivity of both definitions and discusses how Brown’s sentimental novel uses insanity to
diagnose the consequences of the inability to signify within Federalist citizenship.
22
62
Taking Rush’s theories of the novel and Worthy’s denunciation of flattery together
demonstrates that an eighteenth-century women’s life was not necessarily a negotiation of social
spheres but a contest between insanity (induced by unregulated passions) and rationality. Given
the supposed emotionally volatile state of women, Rush constructs the sane female mind at the
brink of insanity. Rush writes, “the distressing impressions made upon the minds of women
frequently vent themselves in tears, or in hysterical commotions of the nervous system” (61).
This line of thought was not exclusive to Rush, John Haslam, one of Rush’s contemporaries
writes of a woman’s life: “the long endurance of grief; ardent and ungratified desires . . . in short,
the frequent and uncurbed indulgence of any passion or emotion, and any sudden or violent
affection of the mind” culminates in madness (210). For doctors, the life of a woman was a
constant battle to maintain sanity against her biological predisposition. The political effects of
these ideas marginalized women and kept them from positions of power. Yet, there is a
confluence between the discussion of the emotional volatility of women and the precarious state
of the American nation in the late eighteenth century.
On close inspection, Rush’s process of discussing fluctuations of modern nations is
similar to his understanding of women’s mental health. Rush writes: “Revolutions in
governments which are often accompanied with injustice, cruelty, and the loss of property . . .
frequently multiply instances of insanity” (70). Rush mentions that an abrupt fluctuation, like
the sudden loss of money in speculation or the loss of a loved one, can lead to insanity because it
suddenly transforms the status of the person without the benefit of regulated reflection. Thus, the
fluctuations of the female mind correlate with the instability of the nation. We can deduce from
Rush’s references that madness derives from a sudden loss of epistemological certainty on the
part of a patient or even a nation. In this context, the sentimental novel during the early
Republic, with its reliance on insanity as a trope, registers not only the uncertainty of identity in
a new nation but also the conceptualization of identities as insane because of the consequences of
commercial progress and citizenship. Women reoccur as the figure of insanity because, as
scholarship has shown, women in the new Republic were trapped by the demands of public and
private spheres which relegated them to a space of competing epistemologies. On the one hand,
the public sphere demanded that women conform to a strict moral code of behavior that
emphasized chastity and virtue; while on the other hand, their private desires, exhibited in the
sentimental novel’s use of the seduction plot, conflicted with their public identities. As such,
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women in sentimental novels exhibit atavism regarding the problems of citizenship in the early
Republic, and Brown’s novel explicates how insanity highlights the power of Federalism, while
simultaneously gesturing toward its eventual demise.
In the proceeding pages, I argue that the public understanding of insanity in late
eighteenth-century America is a central and yet overlooked cultural context of Brown’s The
Power of Sympathy. In 1752, Pennsylvania’s colonial government approved a plan to build
America’s first hospital dedicated to the treatment and containment of insanity, which was
believed to be a major social concern within the colony. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote the
petition for the creation of the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1752, opens with a picture that seems
analogous to Worthy’s “epidemical distemper,”
That with the numbers of people, the number of lunaticks, or persons distempered in
mind, and deprived of their rational faculties, hath greatly increased in this province. That
some of them going at large, are a terrour to their neighbors, who are daily apprehensive
of the violences they may commit; and others are continually wasting their substance, to
the great injury of themselves and families, ill disposed persons wickedly taking
advantage of their unhappy condition, and drawing them into unreasonable bargains. (4).
Creating a sense of urgency for a hospital, Franklin remarks that the number of the insane rising
as is the “terrour” they inflict upon other colonial subjects (4). Despite Franklin’s terrifying
picture of the insane roaming the streets and terrorizing citizens, it would be remiss not to point
out that when Pennsylvania State Hospital opened its doors, only two patients—diagnosed as
insane or “lunaticks”—were admitted (Morton 113). In the early decades of the eighteenth
century, low population density in the colonies prevented the insane from being a real threat to
the general welfare. Traditionally, a category for the insane did not exist; law enforcement and
colonial governments saw them as indistinct from the poor, and most were placed into the care of
almshouses. However, during the mid-eighteenth century, the insane became a distinct social
category that necessitated governmental classification and response. From the discrepancy
between rhetoric and reality, the need for a hospital (at least for Franklin) was more symbolic
than literal. Symbolically, the idea of insanity spreading throughout a major city in America
indicates the country’s transformation from a backwards frontier to a vibrant commercial nation.
Rush writes in his influential Medical Inquires and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the
Mind: “In commercial countries, where large fortunes are suddenly acquired and lost, madness is
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a common disease . . . In the United States, madness has increased since the year 1790” (66).
Rush ascribes the increase of insanity to the consequences of commercial progress where the
“magnitude of the objects of ambition and avarice, and to the greater joy or distress, which is
produced by gratification or disappointment in the pursuit of each of them” (Ibid.). Thus,
insanity is a cultural signifier of commercial progress in the early Republic. At the same time,
the proliferation of novels and novel reading was just as much a marker as well, and one of the
most important genres at this time was the sentimental novel. With its publication date the same
as the ratification of the Constitution, Brown’s sentimental novel The Power of Sympathy is an
apt place to begin an examination of the function of insanity in early American culture. The idea
that Brown’s novel is the first American novel is highly contested but we can consider that The
Power of Sympathy, was one of the first advertised American novels of the Federalist era.
Brown’s text bleakly predicts, through the trope of insanity, the problematic relationship between
citizens and political institutions and registers a profound anxiety about the agency of the newly
ratified American citizen.
If Rush nationalizes insanity as a symptom of commercial progress, as argued above, he
genders it as well. He writes, “Women in consequence of the greater predisposition imparted to
their bodies by menstruation, pregnancy, and parturition, and to their minds, by living so much
alone in their families, are more predisposed to madness than men” (59). For men, positions in a
commercial public sphere make them susceptible to insanity; for women, insanity is their natural
0state. For women, emotions fluctuate like the commercial market fluctuates for men, but while
men become insane through external forces, Rush suggests that insanity is natural within the
female mind. In essence, women are inherently emotional creatures who are naturally
predisposed to madness, and the problem with reading novels is it engages a woman’s emotions
rather than her intellect (Mulford xxi). Indeed, for doctors who believed that a woman’s sanity
was achieved through intellectual refinement and marital duty, the novel was a threat to a
woman’s sanity. Rush argues that frequent causes of madness are those that “act upon the
heart,” and the novel’s reliance on passion, fantasy, and romance engages the sympathies and
provokes the emotions of its readers (38). Moreover, a familiar theme in novels, lost love, for
Rush can lead to a “derangement of passion” (312). However, as the sentimental novel in
America attempted to correct the excesses of other novels through its didacticism, the
sentimental genre in America sidestepped women’s predisposition of excessive emotionality by
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making rational arguments for proper education, reading habits, and the institution of marriage.24
Novels like The Power of Sympathy were designed to make women think about the consequences
of their actions by strategically eliciting their sympathies.
The primary goal of this strategy would be to affirm the primacy of the institution of
marriage. For women, marriage was central to their identity: a woman spent her childhood
preparing for marriage and the rest of her life living up to social expectations as a wife and
mother. For women, marriage was demanded by the public sphere and formed the basis of an
individual woman’s rational decision making. So, it should come as no surprise that Rush
writes: “Single persons are more predisposed to madness than married people. Of seventy-two
insane patients in the Pennsylvania Hospital . . . forty-two had never been married, and five were
widows and widowers, at the time they became deranged” (61). Thus, physicians argued that
women needed to be guided towards literature that would argue forcefully for the institution of
marriage and the proper codes of behavior, while also ensuring that the emotions of women
would not overtake their capacity for reason. The sentimental novel competed for a woman’s
attention by offering didactic messages about the social necessity of virtue, chastity, and
marriage. Thus, the sentimental novel and the medical response to insanity sought to alleviate
much of the same social problems for women in the early Republic. And for physicians like
Rush, a woman suffering from insanity through a combination of unregulated passions,
unrequited love, and unsuccessful marriages or engagements was a constant reality within the
asylum.
Working alongside Rush at Pennsylvania Hospital, Samuel Coates kept a journal from
1785-1825 in which he recorded patient case histories and his “reflections upon madness and his
deductions drawn from his observations” (Morton 139). In one patient history, Coates tells the
story of a female patient “Polly” who had a violent tendency to attack the hospital staff.25
Coates begins his case history by noting the cause of Polly’s insanity: “Polly—I believe it is
forty years since this beautiful Girl was brought to the Pennsylvania Hospital. Her insanity was
24
Marion Rust complicates the relationship between female reader and sentimental novel in her book
Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women. She suggests that while the sentimental
novel was a power medium for disseminating patriarchal values, we should not overlook the
sophistication of the eighteenth-century female reader (48-49).
25
Coates uses “Polly” as an alias for another patient. All citations from Coates’ journal are from Thomas
Morton’s History of the Pennsylvania State Hospital 1751-1895.
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attributed to disappointment in Love” (140). Even with her violent tendencies, Coates recounts
Polly’s ability to entice and seduce. Coates writes: “The apparently mild and attractive Charms
of this beautiful woman were apt to lure young & Old in long & familiar Conversations with her.
She was often treacherous, tho’ She seemed so Agreeable” (141). In Coates’ journal, Polly uses
her feminine charms to seduce her attendants into a sense of false security, so she can escape. In
one instance, Polly suddenly stabs Dr. Thomas Parke for no apparent reason other than “She was
then rather High,” indicating that she was under the control of madness (141). Coates’ detailed
fascination with the account of Polly demonstrates a more visible connection between insanity
and the American sentimental novel. We can infer that Polly’s disappointment in love means
that she did not marry, and instead of directing her passion towards another suitor, her unrequited
passion drove her to insanity. Polly’s case history recalls some of the famous heroines of the
eighteenth century American sentimental novel—unsuccessful in love, controlled by her
passions, prone to coquettishness, and relegated to the margins of society.
Traditionally, critics of the sentimental novel have glossed over the issue of insanity in
the early Republic, treating it as just a trope of the melodramatic and artistically deficient
literature of the late eighteenth century. This glossing is odd considering the recent trends in
scholarship that strive to contextualize early American literature within discussions of science
and medicine in the early Republic. However, Karen Weyler argues that insanity in American
sentimental novels was a form of self-induced punishment resulting from sexual transgression
(303). Weyler’s argument illuminates the ways in which gendered forms of guilt force women
into stages of madness, and madness becomes a tool of the conservative narrative arch to exact
punishment upon women who have transgressed sexual mores (303). Weyler reads little known
sentimental texts such as Samuel Ref’s Infidelity, or The Victims of Sentiment (1797) and Sally
Wood’s Dorval; or The Speculator (1801) and concludes that madness in the sentimental novel
demonstrates that “those readers who transgress will be punished in a marked way” (303-4).
Weyler excavates a new contextual terrain of inquiry; my argument about madness in
sentimental literature approaches insanity as a symptom of social forces, rather than the
consequence of transgression. While Weyler is correct that madness serves as a disciplined form
of punishment for social transgression, one must be mindful of the ways in which the novel
replicates the cultural and medical responses to the insane. I think a more thorough
understanding of the ways in which insanity alludes to the political forces of the dominant
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Federalist faction of Hamilton, Adams, and even Washington will help to better contextualize
insanity’s transgressive nature. My argument below involves three observations: one, insanity in
the sentimental novel represents social fears about the epidemic of madness spreading
throughout the public sphere; next, the sentimental novel replicates the process of containment
that rationalized the creation of the first insane asylum in America; and three, the conflict
between reason and madness highlights the larger conflict between the coming liberal subject
and Federalist citizenship. Looking first at women who suffer bouts of madness and are
contained by their death in the sentimental novel demonstrates how women came to represent the
non-Federalist citizen of the 1790s. As much as Federalism created a system of government, it
also attempted to create an American psychology built on the suppression of differences. This
chapter will end with a discussion of Harrington’s eventually feminized madness and suicide to
illustrate how Brown defines madness as intrinsic to an egalitarian liberalism. The benefit in
examining madness in The Power of Sympathy is that one can gain a greater understanding of
how gendered social spheres collapse rendering both women and men susceptible to the
psychological alienation of non-citizen in the new Republic.
Epidemical Sentimental Literature and the Crisis of Containment
Insanity has not been discussed in much depth considering that it was a reoccurring trope
in both the sentimental novel and the ephemeral sentimental literature of Early Republic
newspapers and magazines. Indeed, like medical tracts that represent insanity as part of female
experience, sentimental novels and ephemeral literature form the basis of the gendered narrative
of insanity in the late eighteenth century. Typical of this trend is a story from a 1797 issue of The
New York Magazine titled “Story of Amelia, an Unfortunate Young Lady” which tells the
familiar tale of a coquettish young girl whose mind “was less attentive to cultivate and direct its
powers” because of her attachment to “the splendor of the ballroom” (210). Because of the
laxity of her commitment to a proper education, Amelia is seduced by man who is “skilled in
dissimulation” and flattery (Ibid.). Following the sentimental narrative structure, Amelia’s
inability to safeguard her chastity causes her to become pregnant and is soon abandoned by her
seducer. The consequences of this melancholic situation induce an insensibility that drives
Amelia into a “swell . . . of madness,” and she ultimately dies of “deadly consumption” (Ibid.).
In keeping with the didactic intent of sentimental fiction, Amelia recounts her seduction to her
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friend Lucinda with the hope the she will share Amelia’s experiences with others, so they can
avoid her fate.
The fate of Amelia seems not to be an isolated case; early American readers consistently
read about women going insane because of the consequences of seduction. In 1796, New York
Magazine published a poem titled “Lady Wandering;” the protagonist was a “beautiful and
amiable” young girl who suffered from “the perfidy of a Lover and cruelty of friends” and
eventually is “reduced to the most deplorable state of insanity” (440). Additionally, those who
read the Philadelphia Minerva would have been immersed in the story of Phebe Smith, whose
seduction and abandonment later transforms her into an “emaciated figure of lunacy” (1). In
1790, a year after The Power of Sympathy was published, the Massachusetts Magazine ran “The
History of Mira” in which the titular character suffers the perfidy of her seducer Melmoth, and in
“her delirium she raved” against her plight (464). This narrative of insanity as a consequence of
seduction even found its way into music lyrics such as Harriet Abrams’ “Crazy Jane.” In one
stanza, Abrams summarizes the plight of Jane who was seduced by an unnamed lover:
Dost thou weep to see my anguish?
Mark me—and avoid my woe!
When men flatter, sigh and languish,
Think them false—I found them so.
For I lov’d—oh! so sincerely,
None could ever love again!
But the youth I lov’d so dearly.
Stole the wits of Crazy Jane. (5).
The plight of Jane, Mira, Phebe, and the “Lady” suggest that we can attach sanity to the long list
of qualities stolen from a woman as a result of seduction. In each instance, we see that the cause
of insanity is the sudden transformation of circumstances, in this case from the prospect of love
and subsequent marriage, to the absence of the prospects of marriage or social ratification. In
this context, these seduced women fall prey to insanity because of their inability to signify within
the confines of eighteenth-century gender boundaries. Still more ominously, the instances of
insanity gesture towards a crisis of containment; as Federalist politics sought a unified
homogenous citizenry, the inability of women to signify with their gender roles meant that they
fell outside the bounds of Federalist control. The didacticism of the sentimental novel in
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America sought to eradicate the epidemic of feminine transgression through the use of insanity
as a consequence of seduction. If certain women could not be “cured” of their transgressive
ways, then the sentimental novel would marginalize them through insanity.
It is not surprising that these cultural narratives of female insanity made their way into
popular novels as well. In Susanna Rowson’s highly canonical Charlotte Temple, the
eponymous heroine’s insanity is cured only when she reassumes her proper gender role. For
Charlotte, the punishment for her seduction is that she becomes penniless, homeless, and
pregnant. While in this state, Charlotte begs for charity from Madame La Rue a crucial
participant in Charlotte’s seduction by Montraville. When the cold-hearted La Rue, who has
married and is established as Mrs. Crayton, declines to help, Charlotte faints and regains
consciousness only long enough to give birth to her daughter. After the birth of Charlotte’s
daughter, Rowson writes, “[a]fter this event she lay for some hours in a kind of stupor; and if at
any time she spoke, it was with a quickness and incoherence that plainly evinced the total
deprivation of her reason” (109). In this state, Charlotte’s attendants, who take care of her
despite Mrs. Crayton’s stated desires, refer to her as a “distressed lunatic” (110). Symptomatic
of her insanity is that she only thinks of her father and Montraville to the extent that “she was not
conscious of being a mother” (110). In fact, Charlotte’s insanity is so severe that she
hallucinates about seeing her mother standing by her bedside (111). Charlotte’s insanity is only
alleviated through her reinstatement into the only acceptable avenue left to her—motherhood.
Charlotte’s attendants witness Charlotte’s reclamation of her sanity because “when her child was
brought to her,” she “pressed it in her arms, wept over it” (114). Once she acknowledges her
position as a mother, Charlotte completes her rehabilitation through her assent to the dictates of
the conservative narrative arch of the sentimental novel. Charlotte accepts that she must die, and
her death serves the educational function of teaching young women the dangers of seduction.
Taken together these literary pieces suggest a real concern about the epidemic of both
insanity and the inability of women to conform to gender expectations. Essentially, these pieces
of literature register a crisis of containment of both the insane and morally lax women.
Moreover, connected to this discussion was the much broader argument over the proper use of
passions in the eighteenth century. Julia Stern argues that sentimental literature, with its reliance
on overwrought passions through the use of melodrama, exemplifies the “age of passion” that
characterizes the Federalist era. Similarly, Stern argues that sentimental literature is “best
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remembered for impassioned excess” by grappling with the “collective mourning over the
violence of the Revolution and the preemption of liberty in the wake of the post-Revolutionary
settlement” (2). Stern positions her argument within the discourse of the political function of
passion in the eighteenth century. The subject of passions usually involved a discussion of their
epidemical nature because Revolutionary rhetoric demanded a passionate response on the part of
the audience to take up arms against Britain. Thus, Nicole Eustace argues that during the
American Revolution pamphlets and broadsides sought to excite public passions through
reasoned critiques of British colonialism, she writes “Emotion—passion, feeling, sentiment, as it
was variously called—contributed as much as reason to the structure of eighteenth century
British American power and politics” (3). However, passions had to be controlled lest they
overrun the goals of ambitions of the elite faction of eighteenth-century American life. Political
leaders of the Revolution made a concerted effort to link reason and passion during the
Revolution through Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Paine, writing in the language of reason,
highlights the need for passion: “Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the
offences of Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt call out, ‘Come, come, we shall be
friends again, for all this.’ But examine the passions and feelings of mankind, . . . and then tell
me, whether you can hereafter love, honour [sp], and faithfully serve the power that hath carried
fire and sword into your land” (91). Paine performs the eighteenth-century rhetorical strategy of
using reason to provoke passions to achieve a concrete political goal. Thus, for Paine, passions
and reason are allowed to coexist as long as passion remained politically and militarily useful
and did not disrupt the cultural and political aspirations of the elite who dominated the public
sphere.
The construction of national identity hinged on the marginalization of certain groups.
Stern argues that early American sentimental literature functions as a “crypt” for the nation’s
“non-citizens—women, the poor, Native Americans, African Americans, and aliens” (2). The
insane are part of this list of marginalized non-citizens as well, and as demonstrated above, the
sentimental genre uses the trope of insanity to elucidate social anxieties about marginalized
groups. The Federalist era was plagued by passions that threatened to undermine the stability of
the new American government. This anxiety can be read in Henry Rose’s 1794 medical text
Inaugural Dissertation of the Effects of Passions Upon the Body (dedicated to Thomas Jefferson)
which demonstrates the national threat of passions to the body politic. Rose writes, “So intimate
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is the existing connection, that every sensation of mind, in a manner effects the body, the one,
therefore, will be affected by the disease of the other” (9). Rose’s description applies just as well
to the body politic; if the mind was corrupted, the body followed suit. This merging of the mind
and body led doctors to conceive of insanity as a disease which infects the body’s ability to
function. This melding of the mind and body was characteristic of the science on insanity during
this time. John Locke’s theories on the mind resituated the process of insanity; the descent into
insanity occurs when the patient loses the ability to make meaning out of sensory experience;
insanity becomes the outward manifestation of cognitive failure.26 Thus, insanity became an
influential trope in sentimental literature at points in the narrative when the afflicted failed to
make meaning out of their social positions. For instance, in the case of Charlotte Temple, her
insanity illuminates her non-signification because seduction throws her into an epistemological
uncertainty that is not reconciled until she recognizes herself as mother. As such, insanity draws
our attention to the unstable position of women in the eighteenth century; the novel itself,
through the reliance on conservative narratives, demonstrates society’s desire to contain those
who would disrupt the productivity of the rational public sphere.
The organizing principle of the eighteenth-century political life was that rational citizens
would come together in the public sphere to make decisions based on dispassionate reason.
Discussing the broader implication of the role of the public sphere, Jurgen Habermas argues:
“The public sphere as a functional element in the political realm was given the normative status
of an organ for self-articulation of civil society” (74). Through print, debating societies, and
novels, political subjects met in the public sphere to form an organic identity defined by the
production of discourses designed to establish certain political, literary, and more broadly
cultural parameters that gave shape and form to national identity. Habermas explains that the
public sphere is not isolated from a separate private sphere, but both work concomitantly to give
rise to rational public subjectivity. Indeed, Habermas perceives the narrative arch of liberalism
as the move from the pre-political private sphere into the realm of publicity. Crucial to the
functionality of the public sphere was its reliance of rational public debate; rational debate led to
rational public consensus; thus through consensus, national identity can be established. This
development is possible because political subjects adhere to the Enlightenment principles of
Locke’s theory that cognition is based of education and sensory experience insanity became in the
eighteenth century the “fault of cognition rather than will or passion.” See Roy Porter’s Madness: A Brief
History (59).
26
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reason and rationality. Indeed, with the understanding that all men in the public sphere would be
rational actors, Habermas can argue that the public sphere “preserved a kind of social intercourse
that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status all together” (36). Thus, the
public sphere can function because all participants are committed to rationality and reason.
However, the process of constructing a rational public sphere hinged on the ability of civil
society to exclude non-rational voices. Habermas argues in The Philosophical Discourse on
Modernity that the twin act of incarcerating the insane against their will and the creation of
benevolent institutions dedicated to their cure “serve to delimit heterogeneous elements out of
that gradually stabilized monologue that the subject, raised in the end to the status of universal
human reason, holds with itself through making everything around it into an object” (243).
Rationality objectifies insanity for the purposes of constructing subjectivity within the cultural
parameters of reason. Part of the institutional response for ensuring the rationality of the public
sphere was the creation of the insane asylum. Indeed, institutions of correction such as the
asylums and prisons allow Habermas to conceive of the “fiction” of the public sphere as
inherently benevolent and rational (Dillon 15-18). At a time when reason, calculation, and
disinterestedness were the public face of the American self, insanity, left ungoverned by the
rational public sphere, threatened to undermine America’s self-articulated national identity.
In this context, the sentimental novel becomes a literal translation of the imbalanced
interiority of the early Republic. This observation connects to the larger conversation of how
citizens were formed specifically into American citizens after the military and political battles
produced the Constitution at the end of the 1780s. The years after the ratification of the
Constitution were marred by internal dissensions that threatened to dissolve the union. Shays’
Rebellion in 1787 proved that the passions against taxation did not end with British colonialism,
and part of the impetus behind the creation of a national Constitution was to protect property
owners from the violence of the angry indebted poor.27 At the same time, the passions of
licentiousness that accompany sexual laxity threatened the desire that America be a nation of
virtue. In 1791, a citizen writing a letter to the editors of the Massachusetts Magazine laments
“Every town and village, affords some instance of a ruined female, who has fallen from the
heights of purity to lowest grade of humanity” (663). An article written in 1797 titled “Novel
For more information on the Shays’ Rebellion and the role of the Constitution in protecting the landed
class, see the first chapter of Woody Holton’s Unruly American and Origins of the Constitution (21-22,
25-29).
27
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Reading, A Cause of Female Depravity” takes the rhetorical position that chastity is a much
needed relic of the past: “what is of far greater importance, that chastity--pure spotless
CHASTITY--will once more be the darling attribute of women” (173). Believing that virtue is
defined by the sustaining of a strong centralized citizenry, Federalists denounced the “inherent
depravity of passionate, self-interested human nature” (Smelser 391). From the ratification of
the Constitution to the end of the eighteenth century, a genuine feeling among Federalists feared
that the nation was coming apart at the seams, and the only corrective measure was a strong
federal government and an effective Constitution.
Thus, cultural institutions during the Federalist era were committed to homogenizing the
internalities of the citizenry at large. In terms of education, Rush suggests that public schools
could “render the mass of people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for
uniform and peaceable government” (14). Following this logic to its inevitable conclusion, Rush
writes “I consider it as possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done, if
we expect them to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the
state” (27). Here, Rush distills the essence of Federalist citizenship; citizens are uniform cogs in
a much larger machine, made possible by the coercive effects of public education dedicated to
instructing students on the benefits of civic virtue.28 By advocating virtue and chastity, the
sentimental novel was a coercive tool in educating women about the duties of citizenship and
their responsibility to the nation.
Much scholarship has been devoted to the study of how the sentimental novel in America
helped to disseminate Republican values to the newly ratified American citizenry. Central to
Republican discourse was the creating of a national mythos that in no small way hinged on the
chastity of women. In a letter to Rush, John Adams remarks that our “national morality never
was and never can be preserved without the utmost purity and chastity in women; without
national morality a republican government cannot be maintained” (81). In its intentional
didacticism, sentimental fiction instructs readers on the values of virtue, rationality, and
ultimately marriage. The preface to William Brown’s The Power of Sympathy demonstrates the
instructional intent of sentimental fiction: “Of the Letters before us, it is necessary to remark,
Collen Terrell argues in “’Republican Machines’: Franklin, Rush, and the Manufacture of Civic Virtue
in the Early Republic” that Rush’s mechanistic language is less problematic than it sounds. While
admitting that Rush is committed to homogenizing citizens under his moral philosophy, Terrell points out
that the language of mechanics highlights Enlightenment belief of man’s possible perfectibility (102).
28
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that this errour on each side has been avoided—the dangers Consequences of SEDUCTION are
exposed, and the Advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION set forth and recommended” (7).
Stated clearly and equivocally, Brown’s text promotes a set of social mores that “would support
the social and political structures of the infant nation” (21). While Republicanism is the umbrella
term for a system of government based on the participation of its citizen, Federalist politics
sought to mitigate this participation through the cultural work of homogenizing the internalities
of American subjects.
Sympathy, Insanity, and Non-Signification
Those who argue that Brown’s novel participates in the larger discussions of
Republicanism fail to note that the most developed metaphor in the novels is that American
society is a prison. Towards the end of the novel when Harrington and Harriot have learned of
their incestuous relationship and Harrington, in the grips of melancholy, contemplates death,
Worthy writes a letter in the hopes of snapping his friend out of his reverie. Worthy relates the
story of a man who spent most of his life in a prison cell, only to be released “at an advanced
age” and when finally “liberated . . . he sighed to be again immured within” the prisons walls
(94). After writing that the old man wished to be incarcerated instead of free, Worthy comments:
“SUCH is our passion for life; we love it because we know it; and our attachment
becomes the more riveted, the longer we are acquainted with it—Our prison grows
familiar—we contemplate its horrours—but however, gloomy the walls that surround us,
there is not one but sets a full value on his dreary existence—there is not one but finds his
partiality for his dungeon increase, in proportion to the time he hath occupied it—for
among the race of human beings confined to this narrow spot—how few are they who are
hardy enough to break their prison? (94).
Worthy’s likening of society to a prison is the most fully developed metaphor in Brown’s text,
and it is meant to instruct Harrington and, by extension, readers on the duties of a Republican
man. Worthy clearly suggests that proper citizens should accept the fate of institutionalized
subjects and learn to become attached to the very society that imprisons them. As Michel
Foucault explains in his theorization of penal methodology, prisons were charged with
“distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them . . . training their bodies, coding
continuous behavior, maintaining them in prefect visibility . . . constituting on them a body of
knowledge that is accumulated and centralized” (231). Worthy’s metaphor is evocative of the
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fate of the Federal citizen in the late eighteenth-century when people were either ratified or
marginalized based on their gender, race, or class. Thomas Dumm draws our attention to the
political meaning of the prison in the early Republic; he argues that institutions of correction
(including the insane asylum) were for Rush a means of creating a “moral community.”29
Indeed, towards the end of Diseases of Mind, Rush at first laments the physical harm that
incarceration might cause for the insane but then reconciles this punishment by stating: “When
continued long enough, they [institutionalization] never fail of producing a change in the moral
temper of mind” (363). Concurringly, Justine Murison argues that the goal of tempering the
minds of citizens is “to make citizenship—and national identity more broadly—a state of mind”
(244). Certainly, the national motto of E Pluribus Unum is a psychological model for bridging
the gap between disparate citizens from different political affiliations and geographies. Brown’s
novel demonstrates, through the use of insanity, the process of creating a national consciousness
and the attendant fall out for those citizens relegated to the margins.
The phrase E Pluribus Unum contains many of the tensions found within the Federalist
idea of citizenship. Sheldon Wolin suggests that for Federalists “the choice of pluribus works to
conceal significant differences in order to enable unum to act in a unified manner” (122). Here,
Wolin points us to John Jay’s “Federalist No. 2” in which Jay observes that “Providence has
been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people” (61). While Jay assumes
that citizens are united in a common providential purpose, the actual work of uniting disparate
people across geographical landscapes necessitated a variety of rhetorical strategies. One of
these was to simply contextualize the idea of a united citizenry within the discourse of
rationality. Indeed, the public sphere’s rationality would be defined by the adherence to the
concept of unum. For example, in “Federalist No. 31,” Alexander Hamilton argues that
assenting to a national government is the natural state of the mind and that to reject a federal
government stems “from some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the
influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice” (164). At the very least, Hamilton
implies that those arguing against a new Constitution are irrational; at worst, he implies that
these critics suffer from insanity. By suggesting that critics of the Constitution suffer from a
“disorder in the organs of perception,” Hamilton attempts to represent Federalism as the natural
29
Dumm argues in Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States that prison and
asylums as well as the insane and prisoners highlighted the moral state of the nation. As such,
incarceration in a prison or asylum helped to isolate the causes of criminal behavior or madness (90-93).
76
state of mind of America. Even James Madison, whose Federalism leans more towards the
Jeffersonians, uses the trope of madness to allay fears that a strong federal government would
crush state authority if they attempted to resist federal mandates. Wolin argues that unum
“signifies a political exodus from a condition of political polytheism to one of political
monotheism” (124). The goal of The Federalist is to make a strong centralized government into
the only rational path for American power and representation. Believing that the new
government would always be dictated by reasoned consensus, Madison uses the language of
mental disease to assuage the fears that a strong central government will tyrannize the states. In
the context of whether or not citizens needed to be worried that the new government would make
war against its citizens, Madison asks “what degree of madness,” would prompt the new federal
government to undertake such an endeavor (265). Madison uses the madness in the same way
Hamilton does, by suggesting that it would be madness for a government to rise up against its
citizens and that people who believe such a thing suffer from madness as well. In each instance,
the trope of insanity is a powerful rhetorical device that helps to make transparent political
identities and to conceive a power relationship between government, citizen, and marginalized
noncitizen.
Rhetoric alone could not achieve the type of power relation between the government and
its citizens that the Federalists desired. The Federalists needed institutions dedicated to carrying
out the Federalist vision; the prison and asylum served as institutional tools of coercion and
control. Worthy’s prison metaphor expresses the Foucauldian narrative of how subjects become
institutionalized and how prisons, and by extension society, seek to develop citizens into
functioning cogs in the mechanics of institutionalized power relations. Worthy ends his letter to
Harrington:
LET us watch over all we do with an eye of scrutiny—the world will not examine the
causes that give birth to our actions—they do not weigh the motives of them—they do
not consider those things which influence our conduct—but as that conduct is more or
less advantageous to society, they deem it madness or wisdom, or folly or prudence—
Remember this. (95)
Worthy’s advice to Harrington is that society is concerned with codifying citizen action through
a dyadic system of reason and insanity. Through this codification, Worthy explicates the
functioning methodology of the social contract. By candidly morphing the duty of a citizen to
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that of a prisoner, Worthy philosophically links with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s discussion of the
social contract to which national citizens consent when entering the public sphere. Indeed,
Worthy’s prison is just a re-imagining of Rousseau’s famous phrase: “Man is born free; and
everywhere he is in chains” (49). The lesson that Worthy implores Harrington to remember is
that to live in a society, one must give up one’s freedom—in this context the freedom to desire
Harriot— so that he can enjoy the benefits and protection of the social compact. By utilizing the
language of madness and prisons, Brown’s novel attempts to show how citizens become
homogenized into Federal citizens. Interestingly, Jay’s “Federalist No. 2” assumes that
Americans already are one, but Brown’s text shows how citizenship was a process, not a natural
organic occurrence. Brown draws our attention to how institutionalized subjects—prisoners and
the insane—represent the new federalized American citizen. Published in the inaugural year of
the American government, Brown’s text explicates, through his most worthy character, the
relationship between citizen and the newly minted national government. Recent scholarship on
the importance of the sentimental novel in the Early Republic argues that the genre was one
conduit by which Republican ideology was disseminated to a growing reading public. Scholars,
noting the importance of The Power of Sympathy to the overall historiography of early American
letters, tend to dismiss Brown’s novel for more proto-feminist texts such as Hannah Foster’s The
Coquette or the transatlantic connections of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. However,
Worthy’s metaphor forces us to reconcile Brown’s bleak novel within the more celebratory
discourses of national unification that pervaded the early Republican period. Before Worthy’s
letter in which he describes the life of a citizen to that of a prisoner, Brown relays the story of
two women, Ophelia and Fidelia who both go insane because of their misfortune in love. Brown
uses these two instances of insanity to demonstrate the dangers of Federalist political thought and
to show the readers the consequences of the social contract. Brown uses insanity to highlight the
duties of Federal citizenship, and the novel itself becomes a cultural agent of containment that
runs throughout Rush’s notions of a “moral community.”
The central aim of Brown’s didactic text is to teach women readers the importance of
safeguarding their virtue in a world filled with seducers. For women, the need to defend their
virtue was a national objective; Rush writes that first signs of national “declension, will appear
among women” (22). In The Power of Sympathy, Brown demonstrates that a possible
consequence of failing to protect one’s chastity is insanity. Before the seduction plot is revealed,
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Brown tells the story of two women: Ophelia and Fidelia. Both women lose their virtue and
marriage prospects by falling prey to seduction, and the price of their inability to signify within
the system of marriage is insanity. As noted above, the preface to The Power of Sympathy
announces its intention to teach young female readers the importance of virtue and the disastrous
consequences of seduction. Brown’s epistolary novel provides a window into the personal
correspondence between women and men who are negotiating their proper societal roles.
Ophelia’s story is related to “Myra” by Harriot and ultimately serves as an illustration of the
damage caused by seduction. The purpose of this story is to drive home the idea that women are
complicit in their seduction; if women do not take the proper steps to insure their chastity, then it
is they who are responsible for their seductions. The story of Ophelia centers on her incestuous
seduction by her brother-in-law Martin as he “prevailed upon the heart of the unsuspicious
Ophelia, and triumphed over her innocence and virtue” (38). Ophelia then gives birth to
Martin’s child, which forces her family to rage “with unquenchable fury,” and “poor Ophelia
received other punishment from the hand of a vindictive father than bare recrimination” (38).
Utterly alone, Ophelia attempts to “obtain a divorcement of Martin from her sister” which
ultimately fails (39). Cut off from her family, denied any connection to the father of her child,
and left without any marriage prospects, Ophelia falls into a melancholy, and her “conduct
bordered on insanity” (40). Ophelia commits suicide by drinking poison and in her last moments
looks up at her mother and exclaims “LET MY CRIME BE FORGOTTEN WITH MY NAME—
O FATAL! FATAL POISON!” (40). Brown suggests that Ophelia and her crime are one in the
same because Ophelia’s identity only becomes understandable through her incestuous
relationship with Martin. However, Ophelia’s story does not die with her since Harriot and Myra
reproduce it, in effect, to illustrate that the consequence of seduction is madness.
Brown uses Ophelia’s story to warn female readers about the need to safeguard their
chastity, and he delineates the consequences as the loss of familial place, marriage prospects, and
life. Yet, Brown also suggests that insanity is a potential consequence of seduction. Failure in
romantic relationships was a common catalyst for insanity in the eighteenth century. However,
Ophelia’s possible insanity is not derived from love but more from the temporary loss of social
identity. In Ophelia’s story, a better sociological portrait exists in insanity’s signification in
eighteenth-century American culture. Because of her incestuous relationship with Martin,
Ophelia essentially loses her status as daughter and potential wife. Indeed, as Harriot tells Myra
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for Ophelia, “There was no one whom she durst implore by the tender name of father” (38).
Without father or a husband to legitimate her newborn child, Ophelia ceases to signify within the
context of the publicly proscribed gender roles of the eighteenth century. As the burden of
seduction rests with Ophelia, the rest of the community expels her while at the same time
ascribing to her a new marginal identity. Her family does not confer this new identity, as Brown
writes, “he who had seduced her from her duty and her virtue, was the first to brand her with the
disgraceful epithets, of undutiful and unchaste” (38). Faced with a marginal identity, Ophelia
tries to renegotiate the terms by attempting to “obtain a divorcement of Martin from her sister”
(39).30 Ultimately, this last gambit at social stability fails, and Ophelia is left without social
recourse, and her new social identity as outcast becomes further solidified.
While Ophelia’s new social status provides a fertile basis for her descent into insanity,
this event is not the ultimate reason for her mental illness; the catalyst for Ophelia’s implied
descent lies in her father’s desire that she publicly accuse Martin of seduction. Under
eighteenth-century laws of coverture, women were defined as property to be exchanged, and thus
their voices become “hidden” within the dominant discourse of eighteenth-century patriarchy
(Davidson 194-95). Ophelia’s plight is worse. Her value as property is left completely
destroyed; coupled with her non-representation before the law, Ophelia is caught between
complying with her father’s demands and her inability to be publicly recognized. Moreover,
Ophelia desires to recede from the realm of the public sphere, as Brown writes, “she hoped to
live retired from the world” instead of publicly confronting Martin (39). Thus, Ophelia is torn
between social binaries: a desire to live privately and to remonstrate publicly, her duty to herself
and her responsibility to conform to her father’s demands. Instead of publicly testifying about
her transgressions, Ophelia retreats to repair the damage that she has caused in her family; this
retreat suggests that Ophelia’s last attempt at redemption is found in the home and that the
private sphere is the origin of her identity. Ophelia uses the private sphere to atone for her incest
admitting, “she had been exposed, and acknowledged the effects of her temerity had impressed
her mind with sincere contrition” (39). Bearing to her family the extent of her guilt, Ophelia
Harriot remarks, “Whether from the promises of Martin, or the flattery of her own fancy . . . but it is
said she [Ophelia] expected to become his wife” (39). This line and Ophelia’s insanity obviously recalls
Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Once driven mad due to Hamlet’s dissimulation and her
father’s death, Shakespeare’s Ophelia sings “Young men will do’t if they come to’t./ By Cock, they are to
blame./Quoth she ‘Before you tumbled me,/You promised me to wed.” (4.5 1731).
30
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begs, “to be restored to the favour and protection of a parent” and hopes “to demonstrate the
sincerity of her repentance, and to establish peace and harmony of the family” (39). Despite her
entreaties, the familial sphere denies Ophelia admittance; thus, she has no chance of signifying
within the cultural economy of eighteenth-century patriarchy. At this point, Ophelia is severed
from both the public and private sphere and “became melancholy” and “[h]er conduct bordered
on insanity” (40).31 Ophelia commits suicide on the day she is to testify in a public forum about
her transgressions and Martin’s seduction. I suggest that Ophelia’s borderline insanity stems
from her inability to participate within the public or private sphere; no longer of value as
property to be exchanged and unable to be recognized in rational public sphere, Ophelia’s
insanity becomes the signifying image of her inability to signify.
Caught between the desire to be private but forced into the public to recoup her father’s
loss of property, Ophelia’s suicide is a forgone conclusion; Brown writes that “she was bent of
the manner of her death” which suggests that Ophelia was debating how to kill herself, not if she
should. Ophelia’s desire for suicide helps to further strengthen the link between femininity and
insanity. Rush writes that suicide is more prevalent among men than women, and that if a
woman commits suicide, it is because they are “exposed to sudden paroxysms of vexation and
despair” (61). For Rush, despair is symptomatic of a “disgust of life” that “drives the distracted
subject” to suicide (Ibid.). The concept of despair is integral to Ophelia’s insanity and suicide,
but her despair highlights her inability to participate in both the private and rational public
sphere.
Ophelia’s despair also seems to be well founded and not symptomatic of some larger
derangement. After finishing the story of Ophelia, Harriot writes Myra another letter in which
she recounts the “explanatory meeting” between Ophelia’s father Shepherd and Martin (42).
Shepherd charges Martin with murder of Ophelia, and Martin is forced to defend himself in a
public setting. Martin argues that the true cause of Ophelia’s death lies in Shepherd’s lack of
forgiveness; Martin suggests to Shepherd,
Had you been willing to receive her, as she return to you, happy would be you both; but
your pride was the cause of additional calamities . . .FROM these circumstances . . .you
cannot accuse me of the immediate cause of Ophelia’s death; the facts are as I have stated
Sarah Swedberg argues in “The Popular Culture of Depression in the Early Republic” that Ophelia’s
story connects to the larger question of depression in eighteenth century America (46).
31
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them—and thus was a straying, but penitent child, driven to despair and suicide by a
severe use of parental power, and a vain attempt to resent an injury. (42)
In this passage, Martin’s remarks borrow from the rational language of law based on calculated
reason.32 Martin’s speech to Shepherd is almost hyper-rational, with no mention of the
emotional weight of Ophelia’s death, as a cold recounting of the facts of her case. With the facts
open in a public forum, we begin to see that Ophelia disappears and is re-imagined at the same
time. Her story becomes a negotiation between men in a forum who did not recognize her, and
the moral of story becomes another cautionary tale about the need for female education. With
this focus in mind, Ophelia becomes erased, rewritten, and confined in the cultural narrative of
the proper goal of female education. Perhaps, Ophelia’s insanity was symptomatic of her
inability to control her own narrative, and as Martin’s summation of events illustrates, her
identity was never her own but rather subjected to the needs of the public sphere.
While Ophelia’s story is related to Myra by Harriot as part of their intimate
correspondence, Fidelia’s narrative is told in two letters by Worthy to his fiancée Myra. Like
Ophelia, Fidelia’s fate results from her inability to protect her virtue. However, the fact that
Worthy tells Fidelia’s story signals that both insanity and rationality are placed alongside each
other for comparison. The function of Worthy in the novel is to demonstrate the proper path of
rational man who reasonably indulges his feelings but not at the expense of his reason. Both
Worthy and Myra serve the atavistic function of representing the proper role of the sexes in the
Early Republic; Worthy is concerned with interpreting the world through calculated reason, and
Myra is determined to learn the proper education so that she can fulfill her domestic duties.
Furthermore, by retelling Fidelia’s story and by empathizing with her plight, Worthy performs
the act of fellow feeling that is crucial to the larger societal importance of the eighteenth-century
sentimental novel and the impetus by the treatment of the insane.
As in Ophelia’s narrative, the story of Fidelia rests on the assumption that women are
responsible for their seduction. The difference in Fidelia’s story is that while she is labeled
insane and thus marginalized, I argue that her insanity spreads throughout the text. Worthy meets
Fidelia while on a routine stroll through the countryside, he writes to Myra “WHILE we were
pursuing our walk, our ears were struck with a plaintive, musical voice, singing a melancholy
Davidson argues that the Martin’s legalistic testimony alludes to Perez Morton occupation as a
politician and state’s attorney (176).
32
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tune” (48). From this song, Eliza Holmes, Worthy’s companion, immediately identifies the
singer as “Fidelia . . .the poor distracted girl was carried off by ruffians a few days before her
intended marriage, and her lover, in despair threw himself into the river” (48). The act of singing
carried with it familiar cultural connotations for an eighteenth-century female reader. Benjamin
Rush writes women should sing in the house because it will “soothe the cares of domestic life”
and that the “distress and vexation of a husband—the noise of the nursery, and, even the sorrows
that will sometimes intrude . . . may all be relieved by a song, where sound and sentiment unite
to act upon the mind” (10). In essence, singing vocalizes domestic bliss; a woman who sings
announces her satisfaction with her status. Additionally, singing spreads throughout the
household, obliterating the dissonance of the domestic sphere by making those who hear it
content. Fidelia’s singing also recalls the happiness of her engagement to Henry; Fidelia’s father
tells Worthy that “When the young people danced together, Fidelia was always partner with
Henry” (50). Fidelia’s father continues that “the town beheld them with pleasure—and wished
them success and happiness—and from their knowledge of both characters, were led to hope
they would one day become good members of society” (50). Much like the ephemeral pieces
examined above the centrality of marriage is the key to understanding the mental health of
women in the eighteenth-century, and Fidelia’s father demonstrates that her sanity was directly
tied to her potential engagement to Henry.
Fidelia’s song serves as an announcement of her insanity, disrupting the “universal
harmony” of nature (48). Fidelia herself recounts the violence of seduction: “But ah! the cruel
spoiler came,/And nipt its opening bloom./Curse on the cruel spoiler’s hand/That stole thy bloom
and fled” (48). Through the image of a flower being plucked, Fidelia’s song recounts that her
chastity was, in fact, taken by force, yet despite this attack she continues to suffer. Fidelia
constructs a nosegay and tells Worthy and Eliza that she put them in river where the flowers
“will swim” to her lost fiancée. Despite her loss, Fidelia continues to play the role of a dutiful
partner; she remarks to Eliza that her fiancée “delighted to walk with me over all these fields—
but now, I am obliged to walk alone” (49). By retracing the steps of her destroyed relationship,
Fidelia reconnects with the public sphere through the spectacle of her insanity. The use of the
word “obliged” is tied to the language of contracts and law; in essence, Fidelia recreates her
domestic position under the system of coverture.33 It is worth keeping in mind that Fidelia’s
33
The OED defines oblige “To bind (a person) by oath, promise, contract.”
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name derives from the Latin fidelis, meaning faithful. Although she never marries Henry,
Fidelia stays faithful to him and to the contractual obligations of coverture through her insanity.
Much like Samuel Coates’ relationship with his patients, Worthy interacts with Fidelia on
their first meeting from a sympathetic distance. Brown uses Fidelia as demonstration of how
sympathy works in the public sphere; Worthy and Eliza both lament Fidelia’s insanity and try to
empathize with her situation but always from a distance. Likewise, the acceptable reactions from
Myra, upon reading this scene in a letter, connects to Worthy, Eliza, and Fidelia through the
social mechanism of “fellow feeling.” However, Worthy’s sympathetic attachment to Fidelia
transforms him into Fidelia’s double. In his second letter to Myra, which gives a more detailed
account of how Fidelia became insane, Worthy writes, “My melancholy meditations led my
yesterday to the same place where I had seen the distracted Fidelia” (50). Worthy notes in his
first letter about Fidelia that he heard her “singing a melancholy tune;” both characters wander
throughout the countryside locked into their melancholy, but in Worthy’s case, his reenactment
of Fidelia’s walk is due to an excessive sympathetic identification with the spectacle of Fidelia’s
insanity.34 An apparent instance of sympathetic identification quickly becomes an event of
sympathetic replication. As Worthy explains: “Before I could come up to the place, she was
gone—she went hastily over the field—I followed her—after a few minutes walk, I overtook her,
and we both went on together” (50). In terms of textual aesthetics, Worthy’s replication
becomes clear through the continual interruptions of dashes. Worthy’s thoughts become hurried,
broken, and only when he catches up to her, does he begin to regain textual stability.
The impetus behind Worthy’s stabilization is the transition of Fidelia from a site of
connection to a source of knowledge. Indeed, the force behind Worthy’s need to follow Fidelia
is he must know the source of her insanity. In this context, Brown seems to suggest that feeling
and sympathy and the Enlightenment quest for knowledge merge to replicate the source of
sympathy. Julia Stern complicates Smith’s model of fellow feeling in her examination of “the
inversion of fellow feeling” (24). She argues, “the ordeal of suffering before another ideally
creates a dialectic of sympathy in which the object of compassion and the viewing subject
exchange interiorities” (24). I would suggest that sympathy is not exchanged in this instance but
rather that Worthy becomes so closely identified with Fidelia that he loses his identity as a
34
The same sympathetic identification happens with Harriot as well; she writes to Myra after recounting
Ophelia’s story “this unhappy affair has worked me into a fit of melancholy” (40).
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rational public subject. Worthy’s replication highlights the eighteenth- century fear of the spread
of insanity. As Franklin remarks, public order and productivity are threatened by the insane, but
Brown seems to suggest that this threat does not stem from the insane but rather with the
sympathetic feeling they elicit. Recalling the image of public spectators desperate to catch a
glimpse of the insane through the windows of Pennsylvania State Hospital, Fidelia’s story
suggests that the increase of insanity is due to the rational public sphere’s insistence on
sympathetic feeling. Fidelia’s father laments the plight of his daughter by remarking that in her
“disordered state” she “knows me not as a father . . . she is no longer unto me as a daughter . . .
—She is deprived of her reason and knows not the weight of her misery; and I am doubly
burdened with her affliction” (52). Like Worthy, Fidelia’s father becomes melancholic because
he understands the totality of Fidelia’s illness and through daily sympathetic reflection relives
Fidelia’s loss of reason. Brown seems to suggest that the contagion of insanity lies in the
sympathetic response it demands. The implication of Fidelia’s non-incarceration is that she will
continue to spread her insanity through her ritualized walks throughout the countryside.
Masculinity, Race, and the Insanity of Liberalism
The prospect of insanity spreading throughout the rational public sphere adds another
context to the ultimate fate of the novel’s main characters: Harrington and Harriot. In terms of
characterization, Harrington is more developed than Harriot; in fact, of the sixty-five letters that
comprise the novel, twenty-nine are written by Harrington while only six come from Harriot.
Harrington’s passionate voice dominates the majority of the text, but despite this dominance, he
is relegated to the margins because of his passionate volatility. In essence, Harrington’s
instability feminizes him, and we are to assume that Worthy is a masculine figure for women to
aspire to. Of all the male characters in the text, Harrington is the one who is swayed by the
feelings of love, is prone to fits of melancholy, cries, and allows his emotions to dictate his
actions. As noted above, Rush’s idealized feminine mind, one that is naturally prone to insanity,
seems to correspond to Brown’s construction of Harrington. Indeed at the end of the novel,
Worthy’s eulogy for Harrington characterizes him as “the dupe of nature, and the sacrifice of
Seduction” (102). Worthy further feminizes Harrington by naturalizing his mental state and the
consequence of the seduction plot. This insight seems to render Harrington little different from
Amelia, Charlotte Temple, and even Harriot in terms of the effects of seduction. I have read
insanity as a trope of non-signification within the larger matrix of proper gender roles in the
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eighteenth century. In Harrington, he demonstrates the same process, but Harrington’s madness
and eventual suicide stems from his inability to signify within the proper role of Federalist
citizenship because of the threat he poses to the social unity in the early Republic.
Harrington’s threat to the Federalist social fabric is his inability to conform to hierarchal
distinctions between classes and races. Indeed, part of what drives Harrington to madness is his
inability to compartmentalize the sympathy he feels for slaves and the poor. In this vein, it is
quite telling that any mention or discussion of slavery in Brown’s text comes from Harrington, a
character who is prone to and eventually succumbs to madness. The issue of slavery during the
Constitutional Convention and the 1790s represented a direct threat to the social cohesion of the
fledgling government. In trying to come to terms with the Federalist response to slavery during
the 1790s, the issue tends to be glossed over or at best unexamined. In Stanley Elkin and Eric
McKitrick’s highly influential historical examination The Age of Federalism, slavery is barely
mentioned as singular issue and is instead grouped together with other issues dealing with federal
governmental power. However, Paul Finkelman explains that this silence is represented in the
historical record and reflects the uneasiness with which leading Federalists engaged in the issue.
Finkelman writes: “Wilson, [Alexander] Hamilton, [John] Jay, King and other supporters of the
Constitution overlooked, talked around, or ignored the pro-slavery implications of the
Constitution.”35 The main goal for Federalists during the debate over the Constitution was to get
it ratified and taking principled stands on slavery threatened to dissolve the already tenuous
partnership between the North and South.36 For Federalists, the issue of slavery represented
disunity, and once sides were taken the states would divide between anti-slavery forces in the
North and pro-slavery advocates in the South. In keeping with the idea that insanity highlights
the internal processes of a national American mind, then, the issue slavery became part of the
See Paul Flinkelman’s chapter “The Problem of Slavery in The Age of Federalism” in Doron Ben-Atar
and Barbara B. Oberg’s edited collection of essays Federalist Reconsidered. Flinkelman explains that
after the ratification of the Constitution, Northern Federalists were far more likely to be anti-slavery, but
this did not gain much traction as part of the larger identity of the Federalism until the 1820s (137-38).
36
Rogers M. Smith argues that disruption caused by the Haitian Revolution in 1791 kept Federalists from
pushing the issue of slavery too strenuously. Although Federalist passed “mild antislavery acts” like the
Northwest Ordinance, the ban on the exportation of slaves, Smith maintains that the political
consequences weakened Federalist power and prevented a concerted effort by Federalists to engage in the
issue of slavery during the 1790s (24). See Smith’s chapter “Constructing American National Identity:
Strategies of the Federalists” in Atar and Oberg’s Federalist Reconsidered (19-40).
35
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infectious agent that helped the epidemic of insanity spread throughout Federalist dominated
America.
Harrington’s first mention of slavery comes in the context of railing against the effects of
class inequality in a letter he writes to Worthy. While at a ball, one of Harrington’s
acquaintances whom he refers to as Miss P— is derisively referred to as a “mechanick’s[sic]
daughter” (33). At this Miss P— leaves insulted, and “Disorder and confusion immediately took
place, and the amusement was put to an end” (34). Continuing, Harrington lectures Worthy that:
“INEQUALITY among mankind is a foe to our happiness—it even affects our little parties of
pleasure—Such is the fate of human race, one order of men lords it over another; but upon what
grounds its right is founded I could never yet be satisfied” (34). While contemplating the effects
of inequality, Harrington examines and compares “the different manners and dispositions of the
inhabitants of the several republicks;” first among these are “those southern states” who are
“accustomed to a habit of domineering over their slaves” (34). Harrington juxtaposes this
picture of the South with the North where “the nature of constitution seems to operate on the
minds of the people—slavery is abolished—all men are declared free and equal” (34). It is
interesting that Brown chooses not to capitalize “constitution” which suggests an ambiguity as to
whether or not Harrington is referring to the federal document or the natural disposition of
people in the Northern states. Even though Harrington seems to place faith in the equalizing
power of the Constitution, this position puts him at odds with the reality of the situation in the
early Republic. Indeed, Harrington registers this tension telling Worthy that because of
inequality, “I like a democratical better than any kind of government” (34).
Harrington writes another letter to Worthy in which he relates “a circumstance I met with
in my travels through Southcarolina” (61). Harrington meets a female slave fetching water from
a nearby spring and sees that a handkerchief covers a scar on her throat. The slave remarks that
the scar “is the mark of the whip,” and she received it while protecting her child, who broke a
glass jar and was to be beaten (Ibid.). She further tells Harrington that she took the blame for
breaking the glass, was summarily “tied up,” and whipped. The slave tells Harrington “during
the smart of the whip, I rejoiced—because I shielded with my body the lash from my child, and I
rendered thanks to the best of beings that I was allowed to suffer for him” (62). To this act of
selflessness, Harrington exclaims “Heroically spoken” and then proceeds to commend the slave
for her ability to “SYMPATHIZE with thy children” and that if she places her faith in the power
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of sympathy “all thy labours will become easy—all thy burdens light, and the yoke of slavery
will never gall thy neck” (62). Harrington ends this letter to Worthy by pronouncing, “HAIL
Sensibility . . . thou art a pleasant companion—a grateful friend—and a neighbor to those who
are destitute to shelter” (Ibid.).
Both Davidson and Stern read this scene between the slave girl and Harrington as
symptomatic of Harrington’s narcissistic preoccupation his own ability to feel sympathy. Stern
is most critical while arguing that Harrington’s “ocular domination of the woman” is a
“voyeuristic variant of sadism” and “actually enables the sympathy” that Harrington believes he
feels (24). Moreover, Stern goes on to argue that this scene enables: “Harrington to indulge in an
explosion of self congratulates, launched with his patronizing affirmation of the woman’s heroic
sacrifice” (25). In concluding her critique, Stern contends that Harrington’s interaction with the
slave girl gives “license to declaim against the horrors of slavery rather than actively fight for its
abolition” (25). Stern makes a compelling case that this scene should be scoffed at for its
pretence of egalitarianism, and Harrington is just a typical Federalist because he sympathizes
with the plight of slaves but does not want to disrupt the prevailing social order predicated on
racial inequality. Stern’s argument is extremely persuasive, but the centrality of this reading
hinges on Harrington as a privileged member of upper-class society. However, in taking into
account that Harrington is burdened by the susceptibility of madness, one can argue that
Harrington’s sympathetic identification with the slave girl is symptomatic of his mental
instability.
Thus, we can read this scene as suggesting that anti-slavery sentiments are analogous to
madness. While Harrington’s response seems particularly clumsy, his language gestures to the
sentimental rhetoric that will dominate the abolitionist movement and novel of the nineteenth
century. However, for a society based on an equilibrium achieved through gender and racial
marginalization, Harrington’s response to the slave girl is supposed to repel the reader and force
him or her to question the internal logic of anti-slavery sentiments because we are supposed to
marginalize our sympathetic feelings for slaves and anti-slavery proponents. Harrington’s view
on slavery is supposed to be marginal, and his sympathetic connection to female slave is
constructed as a product of unregulated passion that culminates in madness. We should also
keep in mind that the one character who understands and remarks on the plight of slaves kills
himself because of his inability to regulate his passions. While there is no denying that
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Harrington’s foray into slavery is hardly effective, he is the only one to attempt any sympathetic
connection whatsoever. The reader never hears from Worthy, Myra, or Mrs. Holmes about
issues of class or race inequality. Indeed, Worthy never responds to Harrington’s letters when he
discusses these scenes. If Worthy is the image of the rational Federalist citizen, then his silence
effectively further marginalizes Harrington and places him outside the boundaries of Federalist
citizenship.
Once Harrington and Harriot begin to realize that their courtship has been incestuous and
that their marriage cannot be realized, both characters “become prey to warring passions” (87).
Harriot tells Harrington in her last letter: “At the hour of our first interview I felt the passion
kindle in my breast: Insensible to my own weakness, I indulged its increasing violence and
delighted in the flame that fired my reason and my senses” (86). She goes on to specify that
these passions have caused “the disorder of nerves, the intoxication of my brain” (86). As
Harriot clearly suggests, once fixed in a romantic relationship with prospect of marriage and
social acceptance, she cannot regulate her passions and eventually becomes insane and dies.
Before succumbing to melancholy brought on by Harriot’s death, Harrington rails against “this
tyrant custom” that forces Harriot’s death and his “disordered mind” (92-3). William Buchan
writes in his highly influential eighteenth-century medical text Domestic Medicine that the
mental illness of melancholy “is a state of alienation” (426). Seeking to avoid the infectious
nature of insanity, both Harrington and Harriot are exiled by Worthy and Myra at the end of the
novel. In Harrington’s case, he writes Worthy fourteen times and receives only two replies (in
which Worthy compares society to a prison), while Harriot and Myra’s correspondence stops
altogether. Thus, Harriot’s and Harrington’s madness registers the complete severance from the
public sphere, and madness becomes the symbol of their severance. The novel achieves
containment through the deaths of both Harriot and Harrington. While Harriot’s death further
highlights the consequences of women who fall prey to their passions, Harrington’s death
signifies the further establishment of Federalist cultural and political social unity. In essence,
Brown’s novel constructs the American mind as Federalist. Characteristic of this Federalist
psychology is the ability to suppress objections and to regulate unproductive passions for
marginalized groups. Thus, Harrington’s suicide becomes his metaphorical act of
“democratical” subjectivity. While Ophelia ingests poison and Harriot passively wastes away,
Harrington shoots himself in the head. Harrington destroys the part of the body that is most
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susceptible to both his passions and the entreaties of Worthy to learn to live in society’s prison.
By committing suicide with a bullet through his brain, Harrington finally places himself outside
of the coercions of Federalist discourse dedicated to creating a unified American national mind.
The novel’s ending suggests that even though Harrington’s act is profound, it is not
lasting. For the insane, reason always gets the last word—the final space to construct the
narrative of insanity. Foucault remarks “the man of madness communicates with society only
by the intermediary of and equally abstract reason which is order” (x). Worthy becomes the last
voice of the novel and, as such, constructs Harrington’s and Harriot’s narratives. Worthy’s
remark that at the funeral of Harrington, many spectators “crowded to see the body . . . they were
impressed with various emotions, for their sympathizing sorrow could not be concealed” (102).
Thus, Brown’s novel ends by focusing on the public display of fellow feeling, which gives the
impression that through sympathetic identification, virtue can be restored. Ultimately, Brown’s
novel demonstrates that insanity and rationality can never be severed if sympathy and fellow
feeling are the organizing principles of public life. As Worthy’s encounter with Fidelia suggests,
rational citizens are always susceptible to the lure of insanity because sympathetic feeling does
not recognize the distinction between rationality and insanity. Thus, we turn our attention to the
one object of insanity left ungoverned, Fidelia. Her story ends with the continuation of her walks
throughout the countryside, suggesting the inefficiency of the Federalist political project. Left
ungoverned by the public sphere, we are led to understand that Fidelia’s contacts will become
susceptible to her madness. The inability of the Federalist controlled government to regulate the
passions of everyday citizens would lead to more extreme displays of power and ultimately the
demise of Federalism itself. By utilizing the plight of the insane, Brown’s novel comments on
the Federalist political warfare of the late 1790s and at the same time indirectly hints at
Federalism’s demise.
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CHAPTER FOUR:
“O INSUPPORTABLE REMEMBRANCE, HIDE THEE”: WIELAND,
HEREDITARY MADNESS, AND THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL
HISTORY
On December 15, 1798 then Vice-President Thomas Jefferson received a copy of a novel
titled Wieland or; the Transformations along with a note from fledgling American author
Charles Brockden Brown. In the note, Brown writes that he believes his new novel “is capable
of affording you pleasure and of entitling the writer to some portion of your good opinion.” This
seemingly simple gesture has spurred Brown scholars to discern what exactly Brown meant by
giving a copy of his novel to Jefferson. In her famous reading of Wieland, Jane Tompkins
argues that Brown clearly envisions his novel as a political tract, and that by giving it to
Jefferson, he signals his engagement with Jefferson’s politics. Tompkins’ persuasive argument
has led scholars to view Brown’s novel as an assault on Jeffersonian republicanism.37 There is
much to this reading; for instance Jefferson famously asserts in Notes on the State of Virginia
that “[t]hose who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen
people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”38
Consequently, Brown’s novel ends with the murderous Frank Carwin escaping to Pennsylvania
and becoming a farmer, which suggests that at the very least Jefferson’s romanticization of the
countryside could lead to disastrous consequences. The line argumentation that posits Wieland as
a refutation of Jeffersonianism has steered the scholarly conversation about Wieland for decades.
However, within Brown’s note he seems to give us another motive for sending his new novel to
Jefferson. In addition to the political undertones in his note, Brown also alludes to Jefferson’s
interests in abstract questions of politics and history. In comparing his novel with Jefferson’s
reading tastes Brown writes:
I am conscious, however, that this form of composition may be regarded by you with
indifference or contempt, that social and intellectual theories, that the history of facts in
the processes of nature and the operations of government may appear to you the only
For Tompkins’ full argument see her chapter “What Happens in Wieland” in her book Sensational
Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (40-62).
38
See “Query XIX: The Present State of Manufactures, Commerce, Interior and Exterior Trade” in Notes
on the State of Virginia (135).
37
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laudable pursuits; that fictitious narratives in their own nature or in the manner in which
they have been hitherto conducted may be thought not to deserve notice, and that,
consequently, whatever may be the merit of my book as a fiction, yet it is to be
condemned because it is a fiction.39
It is impossible to know for sure, but Brown seems to create a space for his novel within
Jefferson’s desire for “social and intellectual theories” one of these being history as “facts in the
processes of nature.” Besides the immediate political arguments about Republicanism one finds
in Wieland, it also seems plausible that Brown engages Jefferson philosophically on the more
abstract questions of the structure of history. Brown makes a preemptive play on Jefferson’s
sympathies as an avid reader of history and philosophy; Brown’s rhetorical move here is to
convince Jefferson to blur his own distinctions—in the guise of tastes—between fiction, history,
and philosophy. This chapter argues that Brown’s novel Wieland can be read as a philosophical
examination of the very nature of history itself. Both Brown and Jefferson were part of a period
of time in which Americans grappled with the trauma of the American Revolution and a
complete seismic shift in citizen consciousness. For Brown these revolutions would question
man’s ability to be a rational creature capable of making ethical decisions. For Jefferson, ever
mercurial in temperament, the violence of the revolutions in America and France would lead to a
cool detachment in the use of violence. However, both were invested in how America should
recognize and respond to its own national history. Moreover, both men were invested in how to
chart the narrative of America’s national history. This chapter is much more concerned with
Brown’s response to the theoretic of national history than Jefferson’s. However, Jefferson offers
a model of how Americans attempted to understand America’s independence historically.
Brown examines how national history blunts man’s ability to make rational decisions, and
seemingly predicts that the violence of the Revolution traps America in a historical suspension.
To develop this line of inquiry, Brown uses the concept of hereditary madness to argue that
liberal progressive history is recursive; and national historical consciousness is a seemingly
endless reimagining of past historical events.40
The entirety of Brown’s letter can be found in David Lee Clark’s Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer
Voice of America (163).
40
This chapter’s argument is indebted to Elizabeth Hind’s chapter “Wieland: Accounting for the Past”
from her book Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue. Hind’s
argument revolves around the idea that the fate of the Weilands is directly tied to their inheritance from
39
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An adherent to the philosophy of William Godwin and in the mold of Caleb Williams,
Brown’s novel uses gothic conventions to offer a philosophical critique on the failure of men to
realize the principles of the Enlightenment. Brown’ novel is told in a long letter from Clara
Wieland to an unidentified recipient. In this letter, Clara seeks to tell the story of how her
brother Theodore comes to kill his entire family and himself. Clara begins her story by narrating
the events that precipitated her father’s madness and death. This narrative backdrop serves to
usher in the story of Frank Carwin, who comes to the Wieland’s country estate Mettingen and
proceeds to torment Clara and Theodore pushing both into madness. Carwin’s talent is that he is
a “biloquist”; that is, someone who can mimic the voices of almost anyone with uncanny
precision. By using his talents, Carwin is able destroy the Wielands’ faith in reason and
rationality and eventually causes Theodore to think that he hears the voice of God commanding
him to destroy his entire family, including Clara. At the end of the novel, Theodore commits
suicide and Clara escapes to France to live out the rest of her days. At its core, Brown’s novel
wrestles with those Enlightenment questions concerning man’s ability to think rationally and
make ethical decisions within a community.
Searching for reasons as to why Clara narrates the story the way she does and why
Theodore Wieland eventually kills his family, some scholars have suggested that they possibly
suffers from hereditary madness.41 Within the medical literature in the eighteenth century the
belief that madness could be passed on to other generations was widely held by a variety of
physicians, including Benjamin Rush. In his Diseases of the Mind, Rush lists the number of
patients that were treated at Pennsylvania Hospital and concludes that for some, “[a]
predisposition to the disease was hereditary” (47). At other times, Rush insisted that doctors
study the hereditary nature of madness: “[t]here are several peculiarities which attend this
disease, where the predisposition to it is hereditary, which deserves our notice” (51). The
their father. Thus, the catalyst for the downfall of Clara and Theodore is their participation in a system of
property exchange and inheritance that creates an “isolated social class” (100). Thus, Clara and Theodore
suffer because of their privileged status as inheritors of an estate. This chapter seeks to understand a
different type of inheritance in the novel, that of hereditary madness.
41
The issue of hereditary madness is one of those details in Brown scholarship that continually reoccurs
but without much commentary. For examples see Stephen Shapiro’s The Culture and Commerce of the
Early American Novel (231), John Limon’s The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary
History of American Writing (37), David Seed’s chapter “Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” in
Making America/Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper (117). To demonstrate how pervasive
this idea is, Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro include a footnote highlighting the possibility of
Theodore suffering from hereditary madness in their new Hackett edition of Wieland.
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possibility of hereditary madness was certainly a common idea among Rush’s medical circle.
Edward Cutbush writes in his dissertation on insanity in 1794, that those who are hereditarily
predisposed to madness become symptomatic between the ages of thirty and fifty (11). Joseph
Mason Cox divides the causes of insanity between connate and acquired; connate causes include
“hereditary affections; those often descend from sire to son, and are transmitted to successive
generations” (22).42 Now, symptomatic madness could not be passed down; someone who falls
prey to religious mania does not pass on that exact condition of madness to his or her progeny.
What transpires in this generational exchange is that parents who fall prey to madness pass on a
weakened mental constitution that makes their children far more susceptible or predisposed to
madness. The science in the late eighteenth century on the question of hereditary madness was
far from settled. Still, medical professionals continued to label heredity as a potential cause of
madness. In this context, the belief that madness could be hereditary informs its epidemical
nature. While societal events and social conditions could give rise to madness, the injection of
heredity morphs insanity into a historical disease.
In a way hereditary madness can serve as an historical model for America in the late
eighteenth century. The legacy of the Revolution exists in two ways: physically and
psychologically. As Brown’s novels demonstrate the physical violence of the pre and postRevolution years persisted throughout the early national period as conflicts over race, class, and
political representation continued. In terms of psychology, the Revolution was a traumatic event
that caused enormous damage to the national mind. This trauma weakened the mental
constitution of the American mind to such an extent that America becomes trapped in historical
stasis. Arthur Neal writes that “[t]he trauma of the American Revolution helped to shape the
identity of Americans as separate from the British” (22). In essence, Neal argues that those who
participated in and lived through the Revolution created a government and wrote a Constitution
as a way of dealing with the trauma of war. The idea of a traumatized national mind helps us to
discern the psychological structure in the creation of a national history. The question becomes
how does trauma replicate throughout successive generations and become part of its historical
trajectory? Brown seeks to provide an answer to these questions by using hereditary madness in
his novel. Moreover, the lack of specifics of how madness hereditarily transfers allows Brown to
42
Cox was a British physician whose work Practical Observations on Insanity was published in America
in 1812. Cox trained in Edinburgh and was familiar and influential on Rush’s conceptions of insanity.
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use the concept as a way of defining the psychological makeup of historical understanding, if not
history itself. This chapter uses the concept of hereditary madness as a launching pad with
which to investigate how Brown’s novel ushers in a temporal paradigm of historical progress that
is built on the psychological effects of trauma. The concept of “hereditary madness” connotes a
temporal structure that is not progressive, but static, and Brown’s novel becomes a bleak
assessment of how American national history is essentially stuck in the past, unable to break free
and realize a present.
The previous chapter examined how the sentimental novel uses madness to construct a
specific type of Federalist citizenship in the early Republic. This chapter will attempt to engage
with a more fundamental problem for early Americans, the difficulty of creating a specific
American history. As Benedict Anderson explains, one of the key factors that gave rise to the
advent of nationalism was a re-conceptualization of time that hinged on the “simultaneity of past
and future in an instantaneous present.” Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s concept of
“Messianic-time” Anderson surmises that temporality within a nation functions as “homogenous,
empty time” that provides the present a linkage to the past, and also to the future instantaneously
(24). Within this new secularized time, nations are imagined as whole in terms of temporal and
geographic spatialization. Central to this conception of time was the advent of the novel, which
allows reader access to witness, “acts performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by
actors who were largely unaware of one another” (26). During the eighteenth century, the novel
was caught in debate over its proper use; for Brown this debate split in two binaries—history and
romance. The years after the Revolution and the ratification of the US Constitution necessitated
that Americans understand their relationship, not only to a global history, but to a distinctly
American one as well and the novel proved critical in this project. The sense of timeless
continuation is one of the cornerstones of American exceptionalism, and Brown’s novel steps
into the debate over how Americans should understand and conceive their national history.
The Federalist era was marked by an effort that tried to reconcile the violence and death
necessitated by the American Revolution with a desire for national security and stability.
However, the legacy of the Revolution’s violence left an indelible impression on the fledgling
national consciousness. As Richard Maxwell Brown argues in his examination of violence in
America “[t]he Revolution . . . contributed to the demonic side of our national history, for its
origin was violence, and the concept of popular sovereignty lent itself frequently to tyranny”
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(41). The entirety of Charles Brockden Brown’s novelistic work involves grappling with the
violence of the American Revolution as a kind of hereditary defect that “owes much to the dead
weight of unsolved problems from the past” (41). In genealogical terms, the fathers of the
Revolution passed on their defects to future generations and progressive history is marked by a
continual effort to deal with the past. Brown’s novel Wieland translates this genealogical
relationship into a meta-psychological struggle for individuals to realize their capacity for
rationality in spite of their own history. By witnessing the violence of the Revolution, Brown
seemingly uses these experiences to understand how citizens exist within their own national
history.
For Americans the problem of identifying a national history came from its colonial
origins, which left writers wondering about how to chart America’s independence within the
context of global history. Essentially, American writers in the eighteenth century had to invent a
historical past that could explain its independent present. Catharine Holland argues that
“however much founding moments are oriented toward the construction of new futures, they also
involve the (re) construction of the past.”43 This reconstruction, as Holland puts it, can been seen
in the preoccupation American political leaders had with classical Greek and Roman
republicanism as an attempt to create a historical timeline for the new American government.
Holland draws our attention to Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to construct an American past in his
Notes on State of Virginia. Jefferson argues that America “did not need a past of any kind” and
from the establishment of America onward a new history would be created. But Holland
discerns in Jefferson’s Notes a concerted effort to establish an American past through nature and
Native Americans. In his natural history of Virginia, Holland suggests that Jefferson “produces
nature anew by representing it as a necessary precursor to national history . . . that makes an
American nation appear to be its logical, chronological, and inevitable outcome” (20). In Query
XI titled “Aborigines” Jefferson figures Native American as the origin of America, because their
“[i]ndependence from the European past could be secured most effectively by imagining an
America whose landscape, natural resources, and peoples were self-founding, self-sustaining,
and eternal” (Holland 29). By establishing an origin through Native Americans Jefferson is able
See Holland’s chapter “Notes on the State of America: Jeffersonian Democracy and the Production of a
National Past” in her book The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American
Political Imagination (2).
43
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to cast off America’s creole status and break culturally and historically from Britain. This
historical move allows Jefferson to sever any ties between Americans and slaves, who as
Holland points out are “creoles themselves.” Jefferson’s Notes can be read as at an attempt to
create an American national history by using race as a strategy to illustrate national timelessness.
Jefferson’s view of history is progressive, while Brown’s is static or even recursive. Brown uses
the concept of hereditary madness to construct a far more pessimistic model of American history.
By working to dissemble America’s identity as a nation of creoles, Jefferson subscribes to a
concept of history as a measure of progress. Brown comes to a completely different conclusion
in Wieland, and creates a scenario in which the main characters suffer from hereditary madness.
Through this species of madness Brown suggests that American history is caught in a recursive
loop, where subjects can only experience the past.
The events of Brown’s own life carried an enormous influence—both explicit and
implicit—over his novels. Born a Philadelphia Quaker in 1771, Brown lived through the horrors
of the American Revolution and the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. The
treatment of Quakers, and especially his father during the Revolutionary years led to a profound
ambivalence in Brown about the power of government and a pessimism about man’s ability to
make rational decisions when faced with the prospect of power. Between the years 1798-1801
Brown writes four novels that inaugurated a distinct American Gothic tradition that would not
rely on the British tropes of “[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and
chimeras” but on American experiences such as “Indian hostility and the perils of western
wilderness . . .” (4). For Brown, madness is central to a unique American experience. Indeed, as
Charles Pridgeon suggests, for Brown, madness should be one of the inspirations for the “moral
painter” in America (87). Brown’s interest in the science of the mind and madness derives from
his experiences in the Friendly Club in New York, which was a society of friends dedicated to
the understanding of science, art, literature in the late eighteenth century. As Bryan Waterman
explains the club was “[made] up of doctors, lawyers, scientists, merchants, playwrights, poets,
editors, novelists” and together they “inaugurated American legal and medical publishing” (2).
One of the leaders of the club, Elihu Hubbard Smith, a medical student who studied under
Benjamin Rush, probably provided Brown with source material about abnormal psychology and
madness specifically. David Lee Clark makes the observation that by 1797 Brown had read the
section on madness in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (76). Brown would have read Darwin’s
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theory of mania mutabilis a type of madness where “the patients are liable to mistake ideas of
sensation for those of irritation, that is imagination for realities . . .” (305). In Brown’s fiction he
uses the concepts of madness derived from Darwin and Rush to argue against the Enlightenment
held belief that man is capable of making rational decisions. However, it would be too limiting
to think that throwing light on the irrationality of man is all Brown seeks to do. As Wieland
demonstrates, Brown manages to engage in the discussion of man’s capacity to rational while
also using madness as way of understanding citizens’ connection to their own national history.
What is central to Brown’s relationship to the study of madness is that he makes insanity a key
characteristic of the new American citizen.
The constant references to madness in Brown’s novels has led to a ubiquity within
scholarship that uses words like “madness” and “insanity” as more adjectives than eighteenth
century conceptual keys that unlock possible cultural or theoretical meaning. This lack of
scholarly interest could be symptomatic of the division in Brown criticism that, as Waterman
explains, consists of two parts: “one that reads Brown’s work symptomatically, looking for
evidence of early America’s political unconscious or Brown’s own political partisanship (at
times confusing the two); and another camp . . . reads him as a diagnostician of his culture more
than a participant in its ideological or partisan conflicts” (236-37). Possibly because madness
lends itself so easily to diagnostic or symptomatic readings, scholars have glossed over the
potential significance of how madness further highlights and defines Brown’s engagement with
eighteenth century American political and social issues. Justine Murison attempts to bridge the
gap between these two scholarly camps by demonstrating through Brown’s use of
somnambulism in Edgar Huntly his investment in scientific discourses concerning madness and
how that relates to the construction of American citizenship. For Murison, somnambulism
becomes a structure of citizenship that “depended upon an under theorized psychological
analogy between mind and nation” (245). Thus, the moral imperatives of citizenship create a
psychological crisis where “citizenship flirts with mental disease” with the political implication
being that “citizens . . . betray themselves into tyranny because they do not have conscious of
conscientious control over their own tyrannical impulses” (244, 265). Murison uses Brown’s
scientific knowledge of madness to diagnose the state of citizen psychology in the late 1790s.
Moving beyond the mere adjectival uses of madness to describe Brown’s work and characters,
Murison points us in a direction that reorients our focus to the specifics of madness in the late
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eighteenth century and how Brown would have understood them, and what Brown’s reliance on
madness suggests about the state of affairs in America during the 1790s. Despite the
persuasiveness of Murison’s case she is still caught between the binary system—diagnostic and
symptomatic—of Brown criticism. This argumentative trap is not exclusive to just Brown
criticism but symptomatic of Early American scholarship as a whole, where understanding
historical events becomes the product of Early American literary study.44 This chapter seeks to
place Brown’s novel Wieland into a more philosophically abstract terrain of the concept of
history. By using Rush’s theories of hereditary madness as launching pad instead of a
foundation, I will suggest that psychoanalytic theory provides the necessary discursive
framework with which we can best approximate Brown’s theory of history that he puts forth in
Wieland. By utilizing psychoanalytic theory, Brown’s text moves beyond the symptomatic and
diagnostic impasse. The significance of this methodological move is not necessarily to confirm
Brown’s participation in eighteenth century political, medical, and cultural discourses, but to
arrive at a paradigm of historical understanding. By beginning this discussion contextually we
can then move to another line of inquiry that relies less on confirming eighteenth century beliefs
and theories, and more on how Brown’s text provides a model of history.
Recent work in Brown studies has sought to think outside the Brown-as political novelist
box and consider him from multiple disciplinary perspectives. As Brown is writing and
struggling to find an audience for his fiction, readers of the early Republic readily consumed
works of history. For late eighteenth century historians, the standard methodology of historical
writing was providential. Mark Kamrath writes that pre-Revolution histories of the North
American colonies suggest that, “American settlement and progress were guided by the hand of
God” (13). However, the trauma of the Revolutionary War created a new type of American
historian who was far more pessimistic about the ability of Americans to live up to the precepts
44
Recently Ed White and Michael Drexler have suggested that perhaps in an attempt to severe the deep
connection between the study of early American literature and history, that literary scholars look towards
literary theory as a methodological tool rather than just historiography. They argue that for early
American literary scholars “[t]his unspoken apprenticeship in the guild of History has been compounded
by our odd form of canonicity—specifically a weak, late, and partial canonization resulting in our
counter-canonical impulse that diminishes our theorization of textuality” (469). In effort to strengthen the
historicist tendency of Early American literary scholarship, White and Drexler essentially advocate for a
return to theory so that literary scholars can become “more central to the theorization of history” (481).
This chapter seeks to use psychoanalysis as a way of theorizing the historical model found in Brown’s
Wieland; and hopefully offers an effective reading of madness in the novel.
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of the Enlightenment. Lester H. Cohen argues that histories written after the Revolution
“demonstrate a greater concern for America’s present and future than for its past” (200). Cohen
points us to Mercy Warren Otis’ History of the American Revolution (1805) as an example of the
despair that pervaded American historical writing. Otis seemingly writes her history during the
politically and culturally turbulent time of the 1780s and 1790s. The Federalist era brought with
it rampant political corruption, that was complimented with class warfare. For some there was a
palpable feeling that independence from Britain had not brought with it a virtuous American
nation or citizenry. Thus historical writing like Otis’ history of American Revolution is
preoccupied with “people’s unwillingness to practice political self-discipline” (202). Brown’s
Wieland seemingly steps into this transition from providential to pessimistic historical narratives.
While seemingly participating over the state of the nation, the historical model offered in
Wieland refutes the notion of the idea that providence is behind America’s historical trajectory.
The idea behind providence is that God pushes the nation towards its enlightenment goals. In
essence providential history is progressive in structure. Brown’s historical model, which relies
on the inability of people to move beyond the trauma of the past, nullifies the providential model
of the historical understanding. Moreover, Kamrath argues that Brown uses his novels “as an
initial platform for reflecting more fully on the meaning and function of history—and historical
truth—itself” (xvi). Indeed, set against the filiopietistic and providential models of eighteenthcentury historiography, Brown’s novels and later historical writings utilize New Historicist
strategies that highlight the tenuous relationship between objectivity and historical narratives.
For Kamrath, Brown’s engagement in the process of writing against the traditions of the time
makes him “a significant writer of history in the early Republic” (xvi). One of the consequences
of this reading is that it becomes clearer how Brown “challenges enduring misconceptions . . .
about late Enlightenment historical consciousness and modern objectivity” and demands readers
to “reconsider stereotypes about the Enlightenment as wholly ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ and related
myths about American destiny and progress” (xvi). What makes Kamrath’s methodology
important for scholars is that he is able to blend past Brown traditions into a new prism for
looking at Brown’s work.45 By approaching Wieland as an act of historical writing, we can
45
As the editors of the highly influential collection of recent Brown scholarship Revising Charles
Brockden Brown put it, the narrative of Brown moving from novelist to magazine editor is a “persistent
and tendentious” and compartmentalized approach to Brown’s work (255). The stereotypical consensus
is that Brown’s novels and later journalistic writings and editorship are separate distinct categories with
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begin to see past the binary of the diagnostic/symptomatic model of Brown criticism, and delve
into theoretical questions that push us to think of Brown’s work in new ways with new
methodologies. This chapter works within Kamrath’s thesis of Brown as historian, and looks at
ways in which Brown in his novel Wieland or; The Transformations theorizes the function of
historical time through the use of hereditary madness. To help explain the process of how history
and madness work together it is profitable to consider the recent work in trauma studies as well
as the writings by Freud on the nature and process of hysteria. Psychoanalytic theory helps to
conjoin the psychology of madness with the temporality of historical progress. As we shall see,
Freud discerns that the traumatized and hysteric are caught in a recursive historical loop that
imprisons them. In his novel Wieland, the narrator Clara suffers from a hereditary madness,
which induces a hysteria that entraps her within her family’s history. Clara’s failure to reconcile
her familial past leads to a stasis that Brown uses as an analogy for the type of national historical
progress he envisions as model for America’s own national history. Before delving into the
temporality of trauma and hysteria, it is profitable to examine Brown’s writings about history in
his essay “Walstein’s School of History” where he attempts to understand the function of history
and historical narratives. When examining “Walstein School of History,” Kamrath agrees with
Steven Watts’ assessment that this essay is one of the few attempts by Brown in analyzing his
“intent and focus as a novelist” (75). Moreover, Kamrath suggests that we can also read the
“Walstein” essay as evidence of Brown’s “theory of history” (78).
Brown and the Structure of History
Brown published Wieland at a time in which historical writings were beginning to find a
receptive audience. This seems to be symptomatic of the larger question during the 1790s of the
unresolved emotional trauma of the American Revolution, and how citizens reconcile the
violence of their independence with their exceptional self-identity. In an essay published a year
after Wieland titled the “Walstein’s School of History” Brown delves into a theoretical
understanding of how to chart the course of historical time and the contours of historiography.
little or no overlap. However, as recent critical attention has shown Brown’s “later years produce
writings that are notable for their continuity with, rather that their departure from or abandonment of the
complex cultural politics and literary achievements of the novelistic years” (255). Indeed, recent
scholarship attempts to bridge the gap between Brown’s early novelistic phase and editor/journalist phase
for a number of reason, one being that Brown does not stop writing fiction if we consider that he
sometimes had to fill pages of The Literary Magazine with brief sketches, and that he appears to have
edited and written novels at the same time.
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Brown builds the essay around two competing ideas of history and romance; on the one hand
Professor Walstein constructs history around the progression of moral and political values, and
his student Engel argues that novels must use romance more effectively in getting a non-elite
audience to engage with their history. Before Brown discusses the divisions between Walstein
and Engel’s theory of history and romance, he provides a preliminary structure of historical time
based around the progression of certain moral values. Brown explains that both a political and
personal morality bind individuals across time: “The elementary truths of morals and politics
may merit the preference: our theory may adapt itself to, and derive confirmation from whatever
is human. Newton, and Xavier, Zengis, and William Tell, may bear close and manifest relation
to the system we adopt, and their fates be linked, indissolubly, in a common chain.” The initial
rhetorical move that Brown utilizes is to join these disparate historical persons together under
some kind of identifiable rubric of history. Brown’s construction of history suggests a model
that is progressive and rational. The theory behind “Walstein’s School” is that history itself is
directed by rationality and is inherently progressive. This seems to suggest that through the
reading about historical personages, society can attain an enlightened progress. After this initial
foray into the concept of history that lies outside the narrow parameters of just temporality,
Brown gives the reader Walstein’s theory of what the novel should do, which is to combine
history and romance into a system that advances the well being of mankind. Drawing from his
histories of Cicero and the Marquis of Pombal, Walstein admits that the details of their lives are
not important, it is their “exhibition of virtue and talents, forcing its way to sovereign power, and
employing that power for the national good” (188). For Kamrath, Brown’s essay demonstrates
that “history, like fiction, is constructed and, therefore, subjective, if not completely, then to a
great extent” (78). To bolster this reading, Kamrath points to Walstein’s statement that “actions
and motives cannot truly be described” which suggests that the “moral painter” has a certain
degree of license in representing historical events. Succinctly, Brown divides history from
romance by suggesting that the latter seeks to record “what has actually happened” while the
former provides a picture “of the probable” based the understanding of human motivations
(196).
Kamrath provides a highly beneficial explication on how Brown views history as a
malleable narrative capable of being molded to promote, in the words of the fictional Engel, “a
model of right conduct” (229). Missing from this conversation is how Brown views history in
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temporal terms; that is how does he understand history as a movement of time? Part of the
answer lies in Engels use of the word “model” in characterizing the function of historical
personages within historical narratives. When looking for examples of virtuous personages
worthy enough to emulate, Brown casts his eyes to a distant past in the hopes that present readers
will adopt the conduct of historical figures. The search for historical truth or fact is not at issue;
it’s the embodiment of what someone like Cicero represents. True, much of what is of value in
Cicero is determined by Walstein, but what gives credence to this methodology is Cicero’s
placement in time; he is distant and capable of abstraction, which makes his narrative pliable for
contemporary purposes. Brown seems to suggest that historical events and people capable of
abstraction have an exemplar power over the present. Because Cicero acts as a “model” the goal
in reading his history would be to replicate the virtuous depiction of Cicero through historical
progress.
Brown draws our attention to the weight we give to history, and how historical events and
peoples shape our present psychology. Invested in the eighteenth-century concepts of
sentimentality and affect, Brown’s model of history is an affective model. Indeed, by reading
about the virtuous exploits of Cicero, contemporary readers will be affected, and seek to replicate
his virtue. Brown’s conception of history is close to what Teresa Brennan calls the “transmission
of affect.” Brennan’s concept, by her own admission, is not distinct from the theories of affect
from eighteenth century philosophers like Adam Smith. Brennan defines the “transmission of
affect” as “the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these
affects entail, can enter into another” (3). The effect of this transmission is that it inaugurates a
“psycho-epidemic” that effaces the corporeal and psychological boundaries of individuals.
Brennan’s work on affect examines the immediate spatial “infection” of affect between
individuals and groups, but it also helps to discern the historical paradigm that Brown creates in
Wieland. Brown seems to suggest that future generations are affected by their history, and that
historical persons can hereditarily transfer affect to other generations. Thus, for early Americans
the trauma of the violent Revolution is hereditarily passed down to successive generations, which
continues the violence of America’s founding. Brennan’s model is close to how Brown
conceives of historical progress, but missing is how the transmission of affect becomes, in
essence, an historical model.
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One of the purposes of Walstein discussing Cicero’s history is to provide a hereditary
link from the present to the past, in effort to create an Enlightenment history of virtuous and
moral progress. Yet, it should be noted that the history that Brown provides in his essay is not a
national history but a classical one. However, the model is one in which historical virtue
exemplified by Cicero is hereditarily passed down to the present generation through writing of
history. What Brown theorizes in Wieland is how an affective transmission between generations
becomes the model of American national history. Brown’s novel suggests that traumatic and
violent events induce an insanity that is then hereditarily passed down through generations. As
Jane Tompkins argues in her study of Brown’s novel, the familial events of the Wieland
represent a miniature history of America from the Puritan era to the Federalist. Tompkins argues
that Brown’s novel “presents a series of transformations of a paradigmatic event in which
characters enact the same catastrophe over and over again” (44,61). Tompkins’ argument is both
right and misses the point; by reading Wieland in such a political way, we miss the significance
of Brown grappling with the truly philosophically abstract concept of human psychology, like for
instance how people exist and become subject to history. Through voice of Clara Wieland
Brown explores how the affect of trauma transmits historically entrapping individuals in a
historical stasis that does not nor cannot progress. To analogize how Clara functions within
Brown’s novel it is beneficial to consider Freud’s theories of trauma and hysteria. Clara
Wieland, the narrator of the novel, suffers from consistent bouts of hysterical “phrenzy” induced
by the death of her father. Clara is caught in a triple psychological bind, in that she is both
victim of her father’s hereditary madness, in addition to being traumatized by her father’s death
and her brother’s murders.
Psychoanalysis and the Trauma of History
In the context of theories of affect that help to collectively bind Americans after the
Revolution, scholars have attempted to understand how trauma figures in the process of
imagining America. Peter Coviello poses the question: “Is it possible anymore to imagine the
shape and substance of American nationality, and of the bonds that comprise it, in the absence of
visions of trauma, woundedness, suffering, and bereavement?” (439). Working off of Mark
Seltzer’s idea of America as a “wound culture” and Lauren Berlant’s argument that trauma is
central to the affective formulation of sentimentality and citizenship in America, Coveillo argues
that the “late eighteenth century world in which the terrors of the revolution, the pain of
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revolutionary rupture, and anxieties over national cohesion all contribute to the making of a civic
atmosphere.”46 The vision of America that Coviello, Seltzer, and Berlant offer is a nation whose
citizens are bounded together through the affective transmission of trauma. The issue of trauma
is central to the theorization of sentimentality in the eighteenth century. In his landmark study of
sentimentality Adam Smith begins is work with the image of a person being tortured on the rack
(3). Smith writes that as spectators to this torture “we place ourselves in his situation, we
conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become
in some measure the same person with him” (3). The feelings of pain, disgust, and horror that
the audience shares with the tortured man on the rack is what Smith terms “fellow feeling” and
what Brennan’s calls the “transmission of affect.” Crucial to the description of the tortured man
on the rack this description is the affective bonds of trauma, and how at the instance of
emotionally connecting with the man on the rack, the audience is traumatized as well. Smith
suggests that the audience comes to possess the interiority of suffering man, which then
augments their own internal processes. In her influential work on trauma narratives, Cathy
Caruth argues that “[t]o be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (3-12).
For the traumatized the act of possession causes the mind to live in temporal space that effaces
the linearity of progressive history. Caruth builds her discussion of trauma narratives around the
temporal structure of trauma itself. Trauma operates by obliterating the linearity of time; the
traumatize experiences an whose psychological effects are latent which manifest repeatedly. The
structure of trauma “consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the
event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated
possession of the one who experiences it” (4). The period of latency, so crucial to the power of
trauma, injects how the traumatic experience becomes, in a sense, an historical model. Caruth
argues that trauma is “not a pathology, that is, of falsehood or displacement . . . it is a symptom
of history” (5). In essence, the traumatized war veteran who suffers night terrors twenty years
after the war is a victim of historical non-assimilation. The traumatized becomes suspended in
an existence outside of historical progressive linearity. Although the traumatized lives in a
present, the experience is at the mercy of the historical trauma that can return if given the proper
See Seltzer’s Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (21-22) and Berlant’s essay
“Poor Eliza” (AL 70.3 1998 635-68).
46
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stimulus. This is the product of the inability of the traumatized to experience the traumatic event
fully at the original moment.
The progression of time and the symptomatic experiences of trauma allow the subject to
experience the psychical effects of the traumatic event. Moreover, the power of trauma is that it
prevents the subject from realizing a moment where the past is fixed temporally; for the
traumatized the present is only a gateway to the past traumatic event. Working in the field of
trauma studies, Caruth relies on the writings of Freud to understand how history functions within
the process of trauma. Within Freud’s theories on the mind “traumatic neurosis” occurs when
“an experience which within an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off
in the normal way, and this must result in permanent disturbances of the manner in which the
energy operates.”47 In his treatment of trauma Freud finds that in “every one of our patients,
analysis shows us that they have carried back to some particular period of their past by the
symptoms of their illness or their consequences” (339). Again the historical model of Freud’s
psychoanalysis demonstrates that the traumatized becomes beholden to unresolved traumatic past
experience that encroaches upon the present. The somatic symptoms of trauma become a way
for the mind to experience and work through the moment of the traumatic event. Under the
influence of traumatic neurosis, temporality is experienced as regressive, and historical events
never give way to a sense of progressive present and future. However, the traumatized patient
experiences a period of latency where symptoms of trauma can manifest years after the initial
event (what Freud calls an “incubation period”).48 The traumatized patient envisioned by Freud
and Caruth is one whose mind cannot relinquish the past, and whose actions in the present
become manifestations of the mind’s necessity to work through trauma. For Freud, there are
many different somatic symptoms of trauma, but his most famous and controversial diagnosis of
hysteria best approximates the mental state of Clara Wieland as she narrates the events of her
father’s death, her brother’s murders, and suicide.
In his inaugural paper on hysteria titled “Preliminary Communication” Freud and his
colleague Joseph Breuer continually link hysteria to both trauma and history. For both
“hysterical symptoms” derive from “psychical trauma” (6). In defining “traumatic hysteria” they
See Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, specifically Lecture XVIII “Fixation to
Trauma—The Unconscious” (339-340).
48
For a summary of how latency and the “incubation period” work within traumatic experience see Moses
and Monotheism (84).
47
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write: “It is of course obvious that in cases of ‘traumatic’ hysteria what provokes the symptoms
is the accident. The casual connection is equally evident in hysterical attacks when it is possible
to gather from the patients utterances that in each attack he is hallucinating the same event which
provoked the first one” (“Preliminary Communication” 4). For Freud the pathology of hysteria is
symptomatic of the inability to absorb traumatic events, and the hysteric is reduced to reliving
the initial traumatic moment. Freud details the process of trauma and hysteria thusly: “We must
presume rather that the psychical trauma—or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts
like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still
at work” (6). The hysteric is caught in a double bind, the initial trauma forces itself into
conscious life through hysterical attacks and symptoms, but what precludes the possibility of
resolution is that the traumatic event is shrouded in details and associations that the patient
cannot or will not decipher. What plagues hysterics is that they are subjected to traumatic
memories that they cannot fully remember, and thus the catalyst for the trauma is buried. Thus
for Freud, “[h]ysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (7). With regards to some forms of
hysteria the underlying traumatic event lacked the possibility of the person to respond to it.
Thus, hysterics relive the event somatically because they could not respond to the event
emotionally in real time. In this context hysterical attacks occur “just as memories do in normal
people” (16). Freud and Breuer describe that the pathway to alleviating the hysteric of his or her
symptoms is found in “bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was
provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect” (6). Once the process of detailing the
traumatic event happens the patient can emotionally react to the traumatic event specifically; that
is to say, they can respond to the trauma of the traumatic event. Freud and Breuer construct a
therapeutic regime for hysterics that is designed to make the patient understand and emotionally
respond to, the details of the past. Hysteria becomes a symptom of history, to the point that what
Freud and Breuer offer is a paradigmatic lens for understanding the structure of history.
In light of Freud’s construction of hysteria as a product of history it seems natural that he
would end his career writing meta-psychological studies of nations and peoples. Freud’s more
famous works like Civilization and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and
Monotheism are essentially works of meta-psychological histories of nations and nation building.
For Freud the basis of civilization begins with man’s denial of his instinctual desires, and the fate
of society was dictated by that decision. Examining the temporal dimensions of Freudian
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theories of the mind, demonstrates how psychoanalysis elaborates on man’s psychical experience
as an historical paradigm. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud draws on the discourse of
history to explain his structure of the human mind:
Historians tell us that the oldest Rome was the Roma Quadrata, a fenced settlement on
the Palatine. Then followed the phase of the Septimontium, a federation of the
settlements on the different hills; after that came the city bounded by the Servian wall;
and later still, after all the transformations during the periods of the republic and early
Caesars, the city which the Emperor Aurelian surrounded by his walls . . . Now let us, by
flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity
with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has
once come into existence will have passed away. (17-8)
Freud ultimately abandons this analogy because the structure of a city is too far removed from
the life of a living organism. However, the implication here is that the history of civilization is
builds from the bottom up, while at the same time remnants of each historical moment can be
found on the surface. As the analogy is meant to suggest, the human mind functions in the same
way, and conscious life is built on a series of psychical “cities” whose fragments exist on the
surface, and where larger pieces can be accessed. Within this structure that uses the historical
discourse to analogize psychological processes, Freud moves into the historical decisions that
have cursed man since the creation of civilized society. Freud theorizes that the origins of
civilization begin with man’s rejection of his instinctual desires so that he can realize some
security in the acquisition of the necessities of life. Thus, man is caught in a struggle between
adherences to the reality principle while denying the satisfaction gained through the pleasure
principle. Freud sketches this conflict in his introductory lecture on psychoanalysis: “The human
ego is, as you know, slowly educated by the pressure of external necessity to appreciate reality
and obey the reality principle; in this course of this process it is obliged to renounce . . .
pleasure” (462). The legacy of primitive man is an education that insists on the denial of the
drive to live in the pleasure principle. Thus, the repression of the pleasure principle becomes a
hereditary fixture of man’s mental life in a community. Again, Freud offers a schematic of an
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individual’s mental life while offering a historical paradigm that can be used to understand
historical events and narratives.49
I have sketched the temporal dimensions of trauma and hysteria to suggest that this how
“hereditary madness” operates within Brown’s Wieland. The goal has been to discern a
psychological pathway that allows for the transmission of the affect of trauma to be hereditarily
transferred to other generations. Caruth and Freud provide a model for how psychological
experience becomes a generational exchange that has the ability to stop the progress of historical
time. Those that suffer from hysteria do so because of their inability to abreact to traumatic
experience, and thus suffer from history. Brown uses the novel’s narrator Clara Wieland to
demonstrate that traumatic historical events prevent people from realizing progress. Clara and
her brother Theodore Wieland become caught under a historical rip tide that pulls them away
from realizing a progressive present or future. The event of their father’s death becomes a
traumatic event that causes Clara to suffer from hysteria. Frank Carwin’s biloquistic ruse ends
the period of latency that Clara enjoys after the traumatic death of their father. However, the
symptoms of their hysteria manifest in different ways that speak more to their psychological
desires that their father’s death brings to the fore.
Clara and Pregnant History
The narrative structure of Wieland is a long letter written by Clara to an unidentified
friend in which she provides a detailed description of “the events that have lately happened to my
family” (5). While employing the intimacy of the epistolary genre, Kamrath argues that Brown
“places Clara in the role of historian” of her family, friends, and Frank Carwin (33). Although
Clara acts as the historian of the novel, she is far from a rational source of information. If we are
to accept Clara’s role as that of a historian, we have to also grant that the history being written
comes from someone who is also traumatized by the very events she describes. Moreover,
throughout the course of the narrative Clara constantly calls into question her own rationality.
Controversially, some historians have latched onto the historical implications of Freud’s theories to
create the sub-discipline Psychohistory, which uses the genre of psychobiography. Fawn Brodie’s
bestselling Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) is one of the more famous examples of
psychobiography in recent memory. I want to sidestep the issue of Psychohistory as a discipline, or the
efficacy of psychobiography as a methodological tool. My interest in Freud’s historical paradigm has
more to do with how psychoanalysis understands history as a passage of time, and how psychical trauma
blunts the temporality of historical progress.
49
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Brown hints that reasons for Theodore’s “transformation” into a murderer and Clara’s
predicament, is that they suffer from hereditary madness. Thus, the historian at work in Wieland
is one who suffers from of weakened mental constitution that is susceptible to insanity as well as
one who is has just been recently traumatized by the murders committed by her brother.
However, Clara’s trauma is multilayered: the death of her father and mother, constant threat of
her life due to Carwin’s ruse, Theodore’s murders, and the loss of Pleyel’s affections are all
traumatic events that Clara experiences throughout the course of the novel. For Clara, these
traumatic events are explained by the mysterious death of her father. Thus, her father’s death
becomes the central catalyst of her family’s eventual downfall; the torments of Carwin only
hasten the moment where Clara must confront the trauma of her past. Before Carwin arrives at
Mettingen, Clara sets up defenses that impede the moment in which the repressed memories of
her father’s death come to the surface. One of the key defenses that Clara employs is that she
structures her narrative around solely explaining the circumstances that give rise to Theodore’s
murders. By focusing solely on her brother’s actions, Clara attempts to avoid any discussion of
how her father’s death affects her. Because Clara relies on language to communicate the tragic
events caused by her brother, she leaves linguistic clues that can help explain how she (as well as
Theodore) fall prey to madness. So, while Clara narrates the events of her family, she also
chronicles her own descent into hysteria. It is profitable to consider Clara’s narrative as an act of
an historian, but we should also consider how the narrative is an exercise in working-through the
traumatic events Clara has witnessed. The job of the reader, like that of an analyst, is to pay
attention to language of the traumatized, and how they form their experiences through linguistic
constructions. Under these terms reoccurring images, words, and phrases become keys to
understanding how the traumatized struggles with their trauma. As Freud argues, repetition “is a
transference of the forgotten past” and the analyst’s duty is to understand the memories shield
behind the repetition.50 Clara’s struggle for temporal progress becomes a struggle with the
trauma of her father’s death.
Clara begins the novel with a brief history of the Wieland family suggesting that all of the
events in novel from the death of the Wieland patriarch to the murder of Theodore’s family are
connected. Clara, who narrates the novel, writes in the beginning that her story “will exemplify
the force of early impressions, and show the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or
50
See Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (151).
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imperfect discipline” (5). To Clara, the past and present flow into each other essentially blurring
the distinction between the two. In terms of the novel itself, the reader never experiences a
present moment, all events are past events, and Clara’s narration is a retrospection of her
family’s ordeal. For Clara the past is fixed and people are left without recourse to redress past
events; she writes, “the past is exempt from mutation” (6). Moreover, Clara defines the
temporality of the novel in such a way that precludes a progressive future by contending that
“[f]uturity has no power over my thoughts” (5). Clara sets the temporal structure of the novel by
indicating that the past dominates the present and future to the possibility that temporal
progression does not happen at all.
Clara constructs a picture of her father as an alienated person whose devotion to religion
culminates in his death by internal combustion. The description of the father’s descent into
madness is carefully charted by Clara; for instance she writes about her father’s need for
seclusion so that he can read religious texts; Clara writes that “[t]he further he read, the more
inducement he found to continue . . . [t]he craving which had haunted him was now supplied
with an object. His mind was at no loss for a theme of meditation” (9). Slowly, the alienation
and religious devotion begins to transform from intense “meditation” into a catalyst for paranoia.
Clara writes of her father, “He imagined himself beset by the snares of a spiritual foe, and that
his security lay in ceaseless watchfulness and prayer” (10). Under the influence of his passion
for devotion Clara’s father settles on a mission “to disseminate the truths of the gospel among the
unbelieving nations” (10). At first Native Americans become the object of what Clara describes
as her father’s “species of benevolence.” But just as quickly as this course is decided upon Clara
abruptly ends this part of her father’s history. Indeed, this period ends her father’s paranoid
devotions and the “devout impressions of his youth” are seemingly destroyed (12). After this
Clara’s father meets his wife, they settle in America, and embark on a life that is financially
fruitful. However, Clara’s father does not give up on his religious devotions, and soon embarks
on his mission with greater energy. Finding that the world around him is indifferent to his
religious message, Clara darkly intones, “he encountered the most imminent perils, and
underwent incredible fatigues, hunger, sickness, and solitude” (12). The sources of this
treatment were “the artifices of his depraved countrymen” whose actions depleted both the
father’s mental and physical strength.
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Rejected by his community, Clara’s father builds his own temple where he prays in
seclusion from the world and his family. Even in his alienation, the elder Wieland’s mind
tortures him with “vague and indefinite” thoughts that “poison every moment of his being” (14).
In this state of agitation and alienation Clara’s father goes to his temple and dies as result of
internal combustion. The details about his death are lacking because Clara is our historian, she
did not witness the events and nobody was with her father when he died. The details that Clara
does provide for the reader are rather vague; she records that her mother saw a piercing bright
light emanate from the temple. Clara’s uncle is the one who runs down to the temple to find the
elder Wieland, and he too is confronted with a “cloud impregnated with light” that shocks his
body and mind with “fear and wonder” (17). Once the mysterious event has occurred, Clara
begins to offer more concrete details; her father’s clothes are missing and his body burned.
However, Clara’s father is not dead when he is found, but instead falls in a state of insensibility
and as Clara writes of her fathers mental state: “the disease thus wonderfully generated, betrayed
more terrible symptoms” which induced a “[f]ever and delirium” that “terminated in lethargic
slumber, which, in the course of two hours, gave place to death” (18). The last image that Clara
provides of her father is one of a rotting corpse so putrid that it drives everybody from the house.
Clara renders her father’s death in epidemical terms in that the disease of his mind infects his
whole body destroying it from within. Additionally, Clara understands that her father’s
susceptibility to and eventual descent into madness can spread generationally. Clara writes that
when her father dies she “was at this time a child of six years of age” and that the mysterious
death of her father left “impressions . . . [that] can never be effaced” (18). Indeed, the descent of
her father into madness and the effects of his death become weaved into the mental constitution
of both Theodore and Clara. Etiologically, Clara uses her father’s death to explain the
psychological reasons for why her brother would be susceptible to religious mania and commits
murder. However, we must recognize that her father’s death helps to explain Clara’s
susceptibility to Carwin’s entreaties and her consistent state of phrenzy in later half of the novel.
In concluding the chapter that details the death of her father Clara writes: “as I advanced in age,
and became more fully acquainted with these facts, they oftener became the subject of my
thoughts. Their resemblance to recent events revived them with new force in my memory, and
made me more anxious to explain them” (Ibid.). Succinctly, Clara describes her latency period;
as time passes the trauma of the past will eventually become the focus of her story. Clara uses
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the incident of her brother’s murders to unlock the mysteries of her father’s death and the
psychological damage that it has caused. As much as her letter is about relating the actions of
her brother, Clara’s narrative represents a concerted effort to understand the extent to which she
has repressed the trauma of her own familial history. Clara exists in a period of latency until
Frank Carwin arrives at Mettingen and commences to torment its inhabitants. More than just
challenging Clara’s sense of rationality, Carwin ends the period of latency and thus thrusts Clara
into contact with the trauma of her father’s death and reduces her to a state of continual phrenzy.
Almost immediately after the death of her father Clara writes that her mother dies from a
disease. The origin of this disease was the trauma of her father’s death; again, Brown draws our
attention to how affect transmits by rendering it in epidemical terms. In contrast to her father
Clara gives her mother’s death only a sentence. After the loss of their mother, Clara and
Theodore go to live with an aunt and she writes that her aunt’s kindness “made us in a short time
cease to regret that we had lost a mother” (20). Clara draws attention to the primacy of her
father’s death by all but ignoring the death of her mother. Clara writes that the years after the
deaths of her parents “were tranquil and happy” and that “[o]ur lives were molested by few of
those cares that are incident to childhood” (Ibid.). Soon Henry and Catherine Pleyel come to be
constant companions of the Wieland family. Despite the ability of Clara and her brother to move
on with their lives and form friendships their social circle is purposely limited. Clara writes of
the foursome that “[w]e gradually withdrew ourselves from the society of others, and found
every moment irksome that was not devoted to each other” (21). Essentially, the Wielands shun
the outside world to focus on their pursuits of pleasure, by avoiding the traumatic memories of
their past. Clara’s seclusion allows for the period of latency, which is integral to the traumatized,
to continue. Brown characterizes the existence of the Wielands and Pleyels as utopian where
they literally spend their days dancing, singing, and taking walks through the countryside. 51
Clara writes that while living at Mettingen “[t]he sound of war had been heard, but it was at such
a distance as to enhance our enjoyment . . . Revolutions and battles, however calamitous to those
who occupied the scene, contributed in some sort to our happiness” (26). The temple that once
Anthony Galluzzo argues in his article “Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Aesthetics of
Terror: Revolution, Reaction, and the Radical Enlightenment in Early American Letters” that the feeling
of utopianism that permeates throughout Mettingen is quite “bankrupt” (258). For Galluzzo, Carwin’s
biloquism represents an “insurgent aesthetic model” that collapses the distinctions between the aesthetic
and political.
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was the place where their father alienated himself from the world is now a temple of pleasure
and rationality that protects them from the events of the world. Unlike his father, Theodore
becomes a student of Cicero, and spends his time in the pursuit of knowledge through rational
debates with Henry, while Clara pursues the enjoyment she finds with both Pleyels. Thus, Clara
and Theodore spend their initial adult years summarily ignoring their father’s demise. By
throwing off the shackles of religious devotion, by pursuing a life of pleasure, the Wielands are
able to avoid abreacting to their father’s death. Psychologically, these decisions are fortifications
against the past; by pursuing the opposite course of their father both Clara and Theodore seek to
avoid his madness and fate. Thus, the temple becomes a physical representation of their defense
mechanisms against experiencing the trauma of their father’s death.
Once Theodore takes possession of his father’s estate and lives the life of superintendant
the estate. The leisure of the Wielands’ lives is understood by Clara in temporal terms “[t]he
future, like the present, was serene. Time was supposed to have only new delights in store” (21).
Here, Clara severs the model of Messianic time; only the present and future are experience
together, the past has been removed from the equation. Again, this temporal structure is a
defense mechanism, and Clara places enormous faith that the future is supposed to align with the
present but not with the past. However, despite these defenses the past creeps in; Clara suggests
that much like her father her brother’s “deportment was grave, considerate, and thoughtful” and
tended towards a “thrilling melancholy” (22). Taken together Clara admits that “there is an
obvious resemblance between him [Theodore] and my father” in terms of temperament, but
Clara places her faith in Theodore’s enlightenment and concludes that although “[t]heir
characters were similar . . . the mind of the son was enriched by science, and embellished with
literature” (23). Much like the decision to appropriate the temple for new purposes, Clara only
considers the material differences between her brother and father. What she cannot escape, and
must confess, is that her brother is constitutional the same as her father. From these details the
underlining psychological tension between the need to repress the past and realize a present and
future, and the inability of working through the trauma of their father’s death becomes
transparent. Clara attempts to conceive a temporal structure that does not include her own
history. For Clara, the repression of the trauma of her father’s death becomes linked to her
conception of historical time, and we see the strategies she employs to avoid the psychological
impact of historical events. Thus, the period of latency works within Clara’s conception of
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history, essentially becoming integral to it, but like the material defenses she creates, the fact
remains that her father’s madness and death are constitutionally part of her. Indeed, Brown
structures the novel in such a way that Clara father’s mental and physical experiences become
integral to Clara and Theodore’s mental life. The larger implication seems to be that creating
material differences with the past does not erase the trauma of historical moments. By creating
the novel through the eyes of Clara, Brown offers a structure of historical time in which material
differences between generations cannot efface the psychological link between them. At this
early stage in the novel, Brown offers of version of history that is decidedly different than the
one he constructs in “Walstein’s School.” Walstein emphasizes the transference of historical
materials, like narratives as well as contends that psychological dispositions can be transmitted
from generation to generation. But Walstein’s history is progressively structured; Brown
essentially renders progressive history inert in Wieland. Unlike her brother, determining the
psychological state of Clara is difficult; despite the preponderance of reactions that she records
throughout the novel, Clara hardly ever reflects on her emotional responses to the past. The
reader is given few details that can help to explain Clara’s reaction to the trauma of her father’s
death. To further grasp the historical model that Brown tries to construct, one must further
examine the contours of Clara’s latency period, and how Carwin is able to bring this period to
end through his biloquism.
In contrast to her brother, Clara’s inability to express sexual desire is the noticeable effect
of her father’s death. In a convergence with Freudian psychoanalysis, the death of Clara’s father
occurs while she is supposed to be in a state of sexual latency. This stage of childhood
development occurs between the ages of six to eight and Freud argues that this time is
characterized by a “halt and retrogression in sexual development” in which the children “fall
victim to infantile amnesia—the forgetting . . . which veils our earliest youth from us and makes
us strangers to it.”52 At the moment in which her father dies Clara experiences a period of
regressed sexual desire as well as the process of repressing the traumatic moments of her
childhood. In this context the death of her father becomes subject to the process of repression
that is integral to the life of a six year-old child. The period of latency is where the mind begins
to erect those mental defenses that will continually frustrate the sexual life of a person. The
See Freud’s “The Development of the Libido and the Sexual Organizations” in his Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis (22.404-405).
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creation of this repressive mechanism for Clara coincides with the traumatic moment of her
father’s death. Within this process of repressing both childhood memories and her reaction to
her father’s death, Clara’s sexuality becomes underdeveloped. Indeed, while her brother falls in
love with and marries Catherine Pleyel, Clara expresses no desire to form a love relationship
with anybody. Moreover, when discussing the births of her nieces and nephews Clara again does
not express a desire to form a family. At a time in which her brother works to create his own
family, Clara decides to live a single life in a house alone. She writes that she “can scarcely
account from refusing to take up my abode with him, unless it were from the disposition to be an
economist of pleasure” (22). The economy of pleasure that Clara creates is one built upon the
denial of pleasure; she writes “[s]elf-denial, seasonably exercised, is one means of enhancing our
gratification” (22). The libidinal energy that Clara expends is directed to paradoxically denying
herself pleasure in the furtherance of it, and by fulfilling the domestic desire “of administering a
fund, and regulating an household, of my own” (Ibid.). Couched in sexualized language Clara
uses her domesticity as a way to avoid dealing with scenarios in which sexual desire is required.
Although Theodore expresses no trepidation in forming a family and possibly continuing the
hereditary madness bequeathed by his father, Clara, in the beginning, avoids the issue altogether.
Indeed, Clara does not move into the post-latency period of sexual development where she can
form romantic attachments until the introduction of Frank Carwin. Thus, before Carwin comes
to Mettingen, Clara sexuality is virtually non-existent and this allows for her father’s death to be
repressed. Clara’s non-sexuality is uniquely tied to the mechanism that continues to prevent her
from abreacting to her father’s death. Because sexuality is intimately connected to procreation
and family Clara’s failure to indulge in sexual desire becomes another defense mechanism
against the past. Throughout her ordeal Clara slowly comes to realize is that she feels an
enormous amount of anxiety about continuing the Wieland family, because she might pass on the
her hereditary madness. As we will see, Clara’s sexual awakening brings with it her own
madness because she has to navigate between family and progress and her unresolved trauma
over her father. However, once Carwin initiates his biloquistic deceptions, Clara’s sexuality is
awakened through the sexual nature of his attacks. These assaults force Clara to confront her
past and essentially transform her into her father. However this transformation is ironic because
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it highlights the inability of Clara to move beyond the confines of her father’s legacy and her
family history.53
Throughout the novel, Carwin’s biloquism frustrates the romantic relationships of the
Wielands and Pleyels. The group experiences the first of these acts when Theodore hears what he
thinks is his wife’s voice commanding “Stop, go no further. There is danger in your path” (32)
while walking to the temple at night. Unable to reconcile where the voice is coming from,
Theodore remarks that he “could do nothing but obey” the voice’s command. The assault on the
efficacy of his senses sends Theodore back to the house to interrogate his wife as to whether or
not it was her voice that he heard. When she answers that it was not, and Clara and Henry
confirm that this is true, Theodore is sent into a brooding melancholy that Clara describes as part
of “his diseased condition of his frame, which might show itself hereafter in more dangerous
symptoms” (33). The disease that Clara mentions is the hereditary madness that infects
Theodore. Constitutionally predisposed to madness, Carwin’s assault impedes Theodore’s
ability to rationally interpret his senses. Before hearing Carwin’s biloquistic voice, Theodore
says that he cannot visit the temple at night without “being reminded of the fate of my father”
(32). While accessing the memories of his father’s death, which Theodore thinks of as “flowing
from a direct and supernatural decree”, Carwin’s voice makes Theodore collide with his past.
Indeed, back at the house and in a state of melancholic reverie, Theodore mimics his father’s
madness. Clara describes that the reason Theodore has fallen into this state derives from “[t]hose
ideas which, in others, are casual and obscure, which are entertained in moments of abstraction
and solitude, and easily escape when the scene has changed, have obtained an immovable hold
upon his mind” (Ibid.). Theodore fixates on unexplainable events and continually suffers
frustration because he cannot rationally resolve their mystery. For someone who devotes
himself to rational discourse, Carwin’s biolquism assaults the psychological defenses that
Theodore has created to keep his father’s legacy at bay. Thus, Theodore will fall prey to his
father’s madness through his attempts to work through and understand his father’s death. The
problem for Theodore is that he cannot explain the death of his father rationally, for him there
In this instance I am using the word “transformation” to denote the irony at work within the Wieland
family. Both Clara and Theodore transform into versions of their father, but I would suggest that we
should not read the word “transformation” progressively. One can argue that Clara and Theodore never
transform, but only realize their trauma.
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still remains a supernatural element to it. Carwin’s biloquism attacks Theodore’s reason to the
point that he abandons it, and becomes subject to what he thinks are supernatural decrees.
Clara’s reaction to the first act of Carwin’s biloquism leads her to contemplate her
father’s death. Not only that, but Clara finds pleasure in the connection between Carwin’s
biloquism and her father’s death. Clara writes about Theodore’s encounter with Carwin: “I
could not fail to perceive a shadowy resemblance between it and my father’s death. On the latter
event, I frequently reflected; my reflections never conducted me to certainty, but the doubts that
existed were not of a tormenting kind . . . It begat in me a thrilling, and not unpleasant
solemnity” (33). While Theodore reacts to Carwin by mimicking his father’s melancholy, Clara
experiences pleasure. The use of the double negative is an interesting linguistic turn; Clara does
not want to consciously admit that she derives pleasure from Carwin’s acts and its resemblance
to her father’s death, but she undoubtedly does. The feeling of pleasure is understood as sexual
in nature because immediately after making the statement Clara admits to feelings of sexual
desire for Henry Pleyel. That Clara develops an attraction for Henry is not shocking, considering
that he is the only male character she interacts with and the closeness of the two families.
However, it is curious that Clara admits to this affection only after the arrival of Carwin. Again
one should take note that Clara narrates the events of the novel from a historical perspective. So,
we are forced to look at the timeline of events in the text to discern how Clara sees them
connected. Clara connects to the first feelings of desire for Henry to the excitement felt from
Carwin’s biloquism. Each of these events has their foundations in the death of Clara’s father,
and Carwin’s next biloquistic act contrives the death of someone who Henry has fallen in love
with. The death of her potential rival for Henry’s affection frees Clara to pursue him, but death
becomes integral to Clara’s sexuality.
After receiving word that the woman he loves is no longer married, Henry begins to think
about moving to overseas to Leipzig to be with her. On an afternoon sitting alone, Henry hears a
voice whisper to him that: “Lo . . . I have news to tell you. The Baroness de Strolberg is dead”
(39). Startled by this information Henry demands to know how the voice knows this
information. Of course, the voice Henry hears belongs to Carwin who says in return that they
voice Henry hears comes “[f]rom a source that cannot fail. Be satisfied. She is dead” (41).
Henry narrates his encounter with Carwin to Clara, who sympathizes with Henry’s feelings of
loss, but also desires for Henry to stay at Mettingen. Under these circumstances Clara appears
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torn between sympathy and desire but quixotically remarks that she is not convinced that the
voice “was busy to evil rather that to good” (42). The good that Clara senses is the prospect of a
sexual relationship with Henry. By insinuating himself between Clara and Henry’s relationship,
Carwin’s machinations provide an avenue in which Clara can experience sexual desire.
Moreover, Carwin’s actions manage to remove the only rival Clara has to Henry’s affections. It
is within this context that Clara makes her first explicit statement of desire for Pleyel that is
rather muted. Clara writes on the consequences of Theresa Strolberg’s death: “Propitious to us,
the friends of Pleyel, to whom has thereby been secured the enjoyment of his society, and not
unpropitious to himself; for though the object of his love be snatched away, is there not another
who is able and willing to console him for her loss?” (Ibid.). Clara again resorts to the use of a
double negative to express her feelings of desire, but yet Carwin’s biloquism manages to remove
the obstacles that have prevented her from admitting to her affection for Henry Pleyel. Although
indirect and passive in its construction, this sentence by Clara is the first time she registers an
emotional and possibly sexual feeling towards Pleyel. Thus, Carwin supplies Clara with the
freedom to indulge in her desires and pursue a relationship with Henry, but this desire is only
possible because of death. The only death that matters to Clara is that of her father, and so by
experiencing sexual desire through death, Clara comes closer to realizing her father’s hereditary
madness. The material defense that Clara creates between her and her father is one of solitary
domesticity. However, Carwin destroys this defense by arousing in Clara the feelings of sexual
desire. With the period of latency at an end, Clara is now able to feel sexual desire but now she
is left defenseless against the trauma of her father’s death. Left without her defenses Clara is
vulnerable to madness due to her hereditary predisposition.
While Carwin’s biloquism manages to clear a path for Clara to express desire for Pleyel,
it is not until Clara sees him that her sexuality collides with her past and induces the symptoms
of hysteria. The foundations of Clara’s sexual awakening are mired in the memories of her
father’s death, but it is Carwin’s physical appearance that bridges the gap between the two.
Clara gives a description of Carwin that is frightening in its inability to be pictured; she describes
him as: “His cheeks were pallid and lank, his eyes sunken, his forehead overshadowed by coarse
straggling hairs, his teeth large and irregular, though sound and brilliantly white, and his chin
discoloured by a tetter. His skin was of course grain, and sallow hue. Every feature was wide of
beauty, and the outline of his face reminded you of an inverted cone” (48). Carwin’s allure is
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directly related to his grotesqueness; indeed so much so that Clara ranks seeing Carwin for mere
seconds as “among the most extraordinary events of my life” (Ibid.). Obviously, another
extraordinary event is the mysterious death of her father, and Clara links these two events
together. Recalling the details of the death of Clara’s father with his burned arms and face, his
rotting flesh, and diseased frame, the physiognomy of Carwin brings Clara into contact with her
history. Indeed, after seeing him for only moments Clara falls into a deep reverie where she
does nothing but think of Carwin’s features for hours on end. It is at this moment where Clara
realizes her transformation and becomes her father. Separated from the world, fixated to the
exclusion of everything else, Clara’s obsession becomes a manifestation of her hereditary
madness. Central to this transformation is the sexual awakening that Carwin provokes; Clara
writes of her fascination that “Perhaps you will suspect that such were the first inroads of a
passion incident to every female heart, and which frequently gains a footing by means even more
slight, and more improbable than these. I shall not controvert the reasonableness of the
suspicion, but leave you at liberty to draw; from my narrative, what conclusion you please” (489). Despite Clara’s fixation she does not desire Carwin sexually, his presence only allows her to
overcome obstacles that stand between her and Henry. Carwin’s physical presence allows Clara
to reconnect with her father’s death and through this process Clara becomes a sexual being with
desire. However, becoming a sexual being comes with a price for Clara, because she is not able
to successfully negotiate her newfound sexual identity, which eventually pushes her farther into
insanity.
Clara accomplishes her transformation before her brother, and we see the hereditary
effects of her father’s madness. After she meets Carwin, Clara’s begins to describe herself as in
a constant state of “phrenzy.” Indeed, for the remainder of her story Clara refers to her
“phrenzy” thirteen separate times. Clara is locked in a constant state of psychological “phrenzy”
that is link to her awakened sexuality rooted in the death of her father. Along with the constant
references to her psychological state Clara beings to use the language of pregnancy and birth
which occurs more than ten times throughout the rest of her narrative. Again we should
remember that while Clara becomes obsessed with Carwin, she desires to be with Henry, Carwin
just makes their union possible by freeing Clara to exhibit sexual desire. In this way, the
language of pregnancy and birth exist alongside the references of psychological “phrenzy” as
keys to Clara’s sexual needs, but also to her suspension within historical time. The word
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“pregnancy” both connotes a possible progression in the form of progeny while also gesturing
towards a suspension of time. Moreover, Clara’s transformation exemplifies the historical model
that Brown puts forth that all historical persons eventual return to an original moment of trauma.
In the very next scene, Carwin attempts his most sexually aggressive biloquistic act; he creates a
scenario in which Clara believes two men are in her bedroom closet debating whether or not to
kill her. Brown draws our attention to Clara’s sexuality and death, and her hysteria becomes
symptomatic of how her sexual desire will continually be frustrated. Clara’s madness stems
from a desire of a sexual union with Henry Pleyel but realizes that her sexuality is intimately
connected with death. Thus, the repetition of the language of pregnancy that Clara uses
throughout the latter half of the novel gestures to a desire for progressive continuation in guise of
another branch on the Wieland family tree. However, Clara cannot realize this progress due to
her father’s hereditary legacy.
In one of the more famous scenes in the novel, Brown seemingly brings the elements of
Clara’s sexuality, her desire for progress, and the hold of her father’s death into one event. After
spending the entire day contemplating Carwin’s grotesque visage, Clara begins to think of her
brother’s family. She writes that while thinking of Carwin “[m]y soul fondly dwelt upon the
images of my brother and his children, yet they only increased the mournfulness of my
contemplations. The smiles of charming babes were as bland as formerly. The same dignity sat
on the brow of their father, and yet I thought of them with anguish. Something whispered that
the happiness we at present enjoyed was set on mutable foundations” (49). The injection of
Theodore’s children signals both a bodily desire and an issue of historical progress. Thinking of
the future of the Wieland family, Clara can only be pessimistic because of the fate of her brother
and herself. Clara’s use of the word “dignity” to describe the similarities between both the
children and Theodore links them together historically with their the elder Wieland. If Theodore
shares his father’s fate in terms of religious obsessions and madness, then the idea that the same
“dignity” is evidence on the faces of his children indicates that they are another manifestation of
the Wieland’s hereditary curse. Clara admits her feelings of happiness are built “mutable
foundations” that seemingly shift beneath her feet. As I have been arguing, Clara’s journey
throughout the novel culminates in fulfilling her father’s destiny; in this context, Clara’s choice
of the word “mutable” highlights her belief that her father’s death and madness was a relic of the
past, but they are not. Indeed, the mutability of her circumstance is the recognition that her
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present happiness was an issue of latency, and that her she had successfully escaped the trauma
of her father’s death.
The change, or transformation that Clara recognizes is actually a symptom of her
realization that she is unable to move beyond her family’s history into a present. It is in this
moment that Clara realizes all life is essentially futile; she writes, “[d]eath must happen to all . . .
I either forbore to reflect upon the destiny that is reserved for all men, or the reflection was
mixed up with images that disrobed it of terror; but now with uncertainty of life occurred to me
without any of its usual and alleviating accompaniments. I said to myself, we must die” (49).
This sense of fatalism and futility is Clara’s way of understanding that life, as a progressive
continuum is an illusion that what seems like progress is only a temporal suspension before
death. What is crucial to understanding Clara’s state is that it is connected with Theodore’s
children. Children represent a possible dissociation with the past, and much like citizen or
political leaders who come after their forebears a new generation promises progress. For Clara
life is nothing but a suspended historical position where the subject cannot move beyond the
confines of their history. Of course, Clara cannot refrain from referencing her father as she
contemplates the futility of life she writes that “I heard the clock, which hung in the room, give
the signal for twelve. I was the same instrument which formerly hung in my father’s chamber,
and which, on account of its being his workmanship, was regarded, by every one of our family,
with veneration. I had fallen to me . . . and was placed in this asylum” (50). The clock becomes
a material link between Clara and her father’s madness in this sense that the same clock that
hung in his office while he slowly went insane, resides in Clara’s where she experiences her first
symptoms of hysteria. Figuratively, the clock becomes a reminder of the passage of time that for
Clara is regressive rather than progressive, that is as time moves forward her life only moves
closer to fulfilling her father’s hereditary fate. In this context, by reminding herself that the
clock comes to her through her father’s “workmanship” and familial “veneration” Clara admits
that her present circumstances are by her father’s design and her family is attached to his legacy.
Moreover, much like one cannot stop time, in this scene Clara resigns herself to the notion that
he destiny lies in her past, not her future. It is at this point that she first demonstrates her
“phrenzy” and loses control of her mind. What seemingly frustrates Clara’s sanity is her
understanding that she cannot abreact to her father’s death that the trauma of that death can never
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be worked through, it can only be replayed. While in this state Carwin contrives three sexual
assaults that propel Clara further into hysterical madness.
Carwin’s first sexual assault occurs directly after Clara’s realizes that all life is futile and
that death is comforting in its inevitability. Clara comes to this realization through her sexual
awakening that has its foundations in the death of her father. Thus, while sexual desire has the
potential to produce new subjectivities, Clara’s only confirms that she is being dictated by the
madness and death of her father. While seemingly taking this into account, Carwin contrives a
dialogue between two men. Sitting on her bed “scantily robed” Clara hears two men debate
whether to suffocate or shoot her. As we later learn in the novel, Carwin is standing in her closet
orchestrating this dialogue, whose effects further pushes Clara deeper into madness. Hearing
these two voices Clara becomes dissociated her from her mind and body. At first Clara thinks
the two voices that she hears derive from faulty cognition; she writes, “my imagination had
transformed some casual noise into the voice of a human creature” (51). However, as the voices
seemingly move close to her bed Clara’s imagination is vindicated and she hears the two men
debating on the proper method of killing her. At this realization that the voices are real, Clara
writes “Flight instantly suggested itself” and “My terrors urged me forward” (Ibid.). In terms of
mind and body Clara is not in control of either, but she does flee her room only to fall into a fit.
Symptomatic of Clara’s madness is that ideas suggest themselves and fear pushes Clara
“forwards with almost a mechanical impulse” (Ibid.). Brown uses the language of mechanics to
suggest that Clara (and later Theodore) is not in control of her actions and fate. What is in
control is the regressive historical force that keeps bringing her back to a moment of trauma.
Again, by calling Clara’s autonomy into question, Brown makes the argument that historical
forces control and deny subjects the ability to create their own present. Thus, Clara is
continually swept backwards by the regressive inertia of her family history, while at the same
time dealing with the desire to break free from the past. This conflict manifests the symptoms of
hysteria in Clara; she is unable to control her body, her mind frantically jumps from question to
question without ever providing any answers, and eventually she falls into a fit. The ultimate
effect is that in body and mind Clara’s hysteria consumes both. Interestingly, she linguistically
merges her sexual desires and her hereditary fate by utilizing the language of pregnancy and
birth to describe events.
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Emblematic of Clara’s conflict between the past and present is her continual use of the
language of the pregnancy and birth. Carwin’s assault in her bedroom only serves to push Clara
closer to Henry, and because of Clara’s psychological state, and the mysterious events
surrounding Mettingen, Henry decides to stay with the Wielands. With the news Clara writes
that “[t]he sentiment which lived with chief energy in my heart, was connected with the image of
Pleyel” (66). Its at this point that Clara’s language begins to reflect a desire to be with Henry, to
create a family with him, and to be saved from her father’s legacy. When Clara sees Carwin
after his sexual attack she writes, “whatever he said was pregnant with meaning” (Ibid.).
Throughout the latter half of the novel Clara continually uses the language of pregnancy; for
instance sounds are “pregnant with a mixture of wonder and pity” (92), facial features are
“pregnant with sorrow” (83), Clara’s views are “pregnant with danger” (137), settings are
“pregnant with motives to astonishment” (119), and moments are “pregnant with fate” (172).
Similarly Clara makes references to testimonies giving “birth to doubts” (63) and her abhorrence
that gives “birth to ferociousness and phrenzy” (174). Now naturally the use of “pregnant” and
“birth” tracks with the common usages of these words in the eighteenth century. However, as
Freud suggests repetition provides fertile ground for the analysts to understand the madness of
the patient. We can read this repetition in two ways: first, one Clara longs for a sexual union
with Henry Pleyel, and two that Clara is anxious of the fruits of that relationship. However, in
each instance the pregnancy is linked with danger, sorrow, fate, doubts, and ferociousness. We
can gleam that the causation of Clara’s madness is found in the needs of a sexual relationship,
while also believing that her life serves to bring her father’s legacy full circle. If indeed, Clara
was pregnant, the child would be part of the Wieland’s hereditary madness and Clara would be
the one that bequeaths the defect. Crucial to understanding the importance in Clara’s repetition
is that the language comes from her father’s description of his internal combustion. She writes
that before her father combusts he beheld a “cloud impregnated with light” (17). The light that
Clara’s father refers to is thought to be the supernatural agent that causes his destruction. What
is born out of the light is the destiny of Clara and Theodore; that is the cloud brings with it the
mystery of their father’s death and their ultimate fate.
If Brown theorizes a paradigm for understanding national history, then Clara’s use of the
language of pregnancy can be understood as part of this project. Pregnancy is a word that
connotes a future event that in all likelihood will happen. For instances, when Clara writes that
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something is “pregnant with danger” she is not referring to danger in the present but in the future
tense. At the moment in which Clara makes this statement she constructs a temporal structure
that is suspended—danger will happen but it has yet to come to fruition. Pregnancy is a term
that gestures to a future moment in which something is born; in this sense it’s a temporally
progressive term. At the same time, the term also connotes a suspended moment, a holding
period in which the event is about to happen. In this context, the repetition of the language of
pregnancy highlights the historical suspension that Clara and Theodore find themselves in
because of the death of their father. Thus, Clara’s madness and Theodore’s religious mania have
their origin in their historical stasis. For Clara her hysterical phrenzy becomes manifest during
moments when her desire for progress—in the form of her sexual desire for Pleyel—is impeded
by the memories of her father’s death. Therefore, Clara is never allowed to move into a realized
present moment that is separated from her father’s death, and she is destined to be continually
frustrated by her desire and her historical reality. Carwin operates as the agent that brings
Clara’s history to forefront of her consciousness, forcing her to both deal with it and realize her
inability to adequately deal with it. Again and again Carwin is able to awaken feelings of sexual
desire are “pregnant” with the promise of progress while at the same time demonstrating that a
progressive future is an illusion. The reality for Clara and for that matter Theodore is that
persons born out of violent traumatic historical events are affected hereditarily which determines
that they only relive versions of that original moment of trauma.
Clara and the End of National History
Before focusing solely on the night when Theodore kills his entire family, Carwin
attempts to drive a permanent wedge between Clara and Henry. One afternoon, while waiting
for Henry to meet her, Clara begins to become frantic as the hours tick by and Henry does not
show up. Symptomatic of her hysterical tendencies is that she begins to fantasize that Henry is
either sick or dead. Unable to stifle the disappointment of Henry’s Clara goes home gives “rein
to reflection” upon which she ruminates on a variety of different reasons for Pleyel’s absence.
Eventually, Clara settles on the idea that Henry drowned while crossing the river, because she
“was likewise, actuated by an hereditary dread of water” (69). The connection between Henry’s
possible death by drowning and Clara’s hereditary phobia is enough to convince her that this
must be the reason for his disappearance. This connection is so strong that it overpowers Clara
completely and she states “I can ascertain the date when my mind became the victim of this
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imbecility; perhaps it was coeval with the inroads of a fatal passion” (Ibid.). In a state of
imbecility Clara obviously connects Henry’s death by drowning to her father, writing that “[t]he
state of my mind naturally introduced a train of reflections upon the dangers which inevitably
beset an human being. By no violent transition was I led to ponder on the turbulent life and end
of my father. I cherished with utmost veneration, the memory of this man, and every relique
connected with his fate” (70). Clara clearly lays out the path of her mental life; circumstances
and events become parts of a train that ultimately terminates at the memories of her father’s
death. Again, at a moment in which Clara is in a state of hysteria, Carwin emerges to provoke
her further. This time, Carwin attempts to reenter Clara’s bedroom at night by recreating the
dialogue between two men who are contemplating how to kill her. However, this time instead of
flight, Clara goes to closet door in attempt to finally uncover their identities, except that when
she goes to the door to open it, Carwin pulls on the other end. Faced with the possibility of
confronting her persecutor, Clara is sent over the edge and her “actions were dictated by
phrenzy” (73).
Throughout the novel Brown contrives a series of Clara’s hysterical attacks that flow
from events that are connected to her father’s death. Moreover, as the novel progresses, Clara’s
options become limited and she is left with only her madness. While all of the events of the
novel have precipitated bouts of hysteria from Clara, she eventually falls completely into this
state after the loss of Henry’s affections due to Carwin’s deceits. The reason that Henry does not
show up to meet Clara is because Carwin contrives a scenario in which Henry overhears Clara
and Carwin engaging in a sexual act. Devastated by what he hears, Henry decides to leave
Mettingen for good, but before he goes he meets with Clara one last time to confront her. When
confronted Clara protests her innocence, but Henry does not listen to her. The realization that
Henry is lost to her, and with him her outlet to a live could offer a way out of her family’s
legacy, Clara falls into a phrenzy from which she does not recover until the very end of the
novel. Indeed, once Clara loses Henry the events of the novel tumble out culminating with
Theodore’s killing of his family. While Clara uses her narrative to explain why Theodore kills
his family, she ends up explaining how she undergoes her own “transformation” and realizes her
own hereditary madness. With Henry gone, Clara becomes hysterical while attempting to out
Carwin as the culprit of these mysterious events and dealing with the actions of her brother.
Before the news of the murder of Catharine Wieland and the children reaches Clara, she has
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already become enveloped in her father’s madness. Thus, as Theodore’s “transformation” is
central to the novel’s ending, what we see is that the narrative provides Clara with a space to
describe her own transformation into madness.
The events that give rise to Theodore’s actions has been well documented, but in essence
one night while sitting in his living room he hears what he thinks is the voice of God
commanding him to kill his children and his wife. Unable to rationally explain the voice’s
commands, Theodore falls prey to a religious mania that Clara says has always been part of his
mental constitution. Of course, Carwin uses his biloquism to make Theodore believe he hears
God, and sits back and watches as Theodore kills his entire family. After his arrest Theodore is
given the opportunity to explain his actions, and he praises God for giving him the opportunity to
fulfill his destiny. For example Theodore says of the murders “I thank thee, my father, for thy
bounty; that thou didst not ask a less sacrifice than this; that thou placedst me in a condition to
testify my submission to thy will” (127). In the context of religious devotion it seems
appropriate that Theodore makes God into his father, and thank him for the chance to prove is
devotion. However, knowing that Theodore and Clara are both dealing with unresolved trauma
of their father’s death, we could see this statement as Theodore actually thanking his father for
bequeathing a “condition” that allows Theodore to sacrifice his family. Theodore’s
transformation is the same as Clara’s, he is not as much turning into something new as becoming
a version of his father. Whereas Clara is given to bouts of reverie that led her to phrenzy,
Theodore is cursed with a belief in the supernatural that clashes with his commitment to rational
empiricism. Unable to reconcile the origin and purpose of the voices, Wieland places all his
faith in his senses and determines that the voice must be real and proceeds to kill his children
first and then his wife.
Clara’s reaction to the death of Catharine and the children is to admit that “[t]he phrenzy
which is charged upon my brother, must belong to myself” (144). Because of the murder of her
family and the eventual suicide of Theodore, Clara decides to leave America for France. Left
without a family Clara, who eventually reconciles with Henry, is left to live with the knowledge
of her brother’s crime and her family’s legacy. However, her move to France brings Brown’s
historical model into completion. As we have seen, Clara and Theodore become victims of past
as the affect of the trauma of their father’s death and madness hereditarily descends to them
causing them to fall prey to madness. Brown’s makes the argument that historical actors born
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out of violence, are unable to move beyond the confines of that trauma. For an American sitting
at the end of the 1790s where the Revolution not only did not provide stability and unity, but
gave way to class, racial, and imperial warfare, Brown’s novel provides a historical model that
explains why Americans are not able to realize the promise of an enlightened national
consciousness. However, Wieland does not end on American soil but in France where the events
of the American Revolution gave rise to the French Revolution. Curiously, while in France
Clara comes into contact with a Maxwell who was “deceitful and sensual” and “possessed great
force of mind and specious accomplishments” (181). Maxwell, who feels slighted by a Major
Stuart, begins to seduce the Major’s wife, and it successful. As Clara explains, Mrs. Stuart falls
for Maxwell’s deceit and due to the guilt of impropriety is reduced to a “state of suspense”
(Ibid.). However, once she becomes aware that she has been the victim of Maxwell’s revenge
plot she decides to move to America to avoid the disapprobation of the community. Thus, Clara
travels all the way to France only to find another version of herself and Carwin. Clara’s final
message to the reader is to be vigilant and safeguard their virtue and remember the principles of
rationality so that they can escape Clara’s fate.
While Brown does raise the issue of man placing his fate in the hands of his ability to be
rational, in Wieland he makes history the catalyst for man’s downfall. The ending to the novel
underscores the futility of Clara’s life, wherever she goes she cannot escape her heritage. One
wonders that when Brown continually has Clara use the language of pregnancy to describe her
historical condition, he has in mind William Godwin’s pronouncement that “The whole history
of the human species, taken in one point of view, appears a vast abortion” (457). As a professed
student of Godwin, Brown would have known of this line and aware that Godwin’s view of
human history is one of continual disappointment in man’s ability to achieve the tenets of the
Enlightenment. For Godwin, history is terminated before it can even begin. For Brown people
are caught in a historical loop where the resolved issues of the past continue to plague the
present. While Brown’s historical model seems to suggest that people are at the mercy of
historical trauma, he does leave open the door to the possibility that nations and peoples can
progress if they adequately confront the past fearlessly. This might explain that while Wieland is
inherently pessimistic, “Walstein’s School of History” written only a year later seemingly
promotes progressive historical narratives. Whereas those early American historians focused on
the failure of the present to live up to the Revolution, Brown’s novel flips this dynamic on its
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head. For Brown, the violence and chaos of the Revolution are so traumatic that Americans must
come to terms with it before that can progress. It seems clear that Wieland complements the
contemporary historical writings of the late eighteenth century, while adding the caveat that what
is at issue is not man’s capacity to be rational, but rather man’s capacity to confront those
national moments of horror, violence, and destruction that birthed America.
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CHAPTER FIVE:
“BUT WHAT HORDE OF REBELS/RUSHES MADDENED TO
CARNAGE”: LEONORA SANSAY’S SECRET HISTORY; OR THE
HORRORS OF ST. DOMINGO AND THE INSANITY OF THE HAITIAN
REVOLUTION54
Thus far, I have avoided any in-depth discussion of the subject of race as it pertains to the
science of madness in America during the late eighteenth-century. In Chapter 1, Farmer James’
interaction with the caged slave acts as a catalyst for his descent into melancholia, and in Chapter
2, we saw how Harrington’s professed sympathy for the plight of the slave he encounters is
symptomatic of his madness. The combination of race and madness in the eighteenth-century is
a complicated and somewhat difficult subject to engage. The first problem is that slaves are, for
the most part, largely missing from the medical literature and other administrative documents
relating to the treatment of madness. This lack of material makes it difficult, though not
impossible, to paint a picture of how race and madness intersected in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, reformists dedicated to
eradicating the worst practices of the asylum and the larger abolitionist movement rectified the
lack of racial issues in the literature on madness. However, this contribution happens much later
than the period I am discussing; this chapter will try to provide a window into the representations
of race within the discussion of madness in eighteenth-century America.
The history of the slaves’ journeys to the American colonies and the centrality of the
slavery system to America’s economy and politics in the nascent years of the early Republic
have been well-documented. Like most intellectual movements in the West, the science on
insanity converges with the institution of slavery. Indeed, eye-witness accounts of the effects of
the Middle Passage relay how madness spread among the slaves onboard. In recounting the
experiences of two passages during the late eighteenth-century, Alexander Falconbridge writes:
It frequently happens that the negroes, on being purchased by the Europeans, become
raving mad; and many of them die in that state; particularly the women. When I was one
day ashore at Bonny, I saw a middle aged stout women, [sic] who had been brought down
54
Line quoted from a poem in the November 15, 1791 issue of Moniter general de la partie francaise de
Saint Domingue reprinted from Jeremy Popkin’s Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the
Haitian Revolution (8).
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from a fair the preceding day, chained to the post of a black trader’s door, in a state of
furious insanity. On board a ship in Bonny River, I saw a young negroe [sic] woman
chained to the deck, who had lost her senses, soon after she was purchased and taken on
board. In a former voyage, on board a ship to which I belonged, we were obliged to
confine a female negroe [sic], of about twenty-three years of age, on her becoming a
lunatic. She was afterwards sold during one of her lucid intervals.55
Falconbridge, writing from the position of a staunch abolitionist, seemingly establishes madness
as a natural cause of slavery. The conditions that were characteristic of Middle Passage voyages
tested the limits of human suffering and, as Falconbridge states, mental health. One doctor
theorized that insane slaves suffered from a “fixed melancholy” which was symptomatic of a
“loss of will to live that resulted” because of the constant exhibition of human misery found
aboard slave ships (Mannix 119). In an 1859 report, a young physician described the process of
fixed melancholy: “it was known that if the Negro was not amused and kept in motion, he would
mope, squat down with his chin on his knees and arms clasped about his legs and in a very short
time die” (120). The idea is that faced with unending human misery, a slave would choose to
suffocate him or herself rather than keep living. Recognizing that property was at stake, ship
captains had to make sure that slaves were not sitting in one place for too long (120). Even for
those slaves who made it through the Middle Passage sane, a life awaited them that would
further test their abilities to mentally cope with their situations. As Mary de Young argues,
“[t]here was much about slavery that could induce madness. The deculturation, loss of identity,
breakup of families, brutal treatment and poor living conditions that were the sine qua non of the
very institution of slavery undoubtedly affected the mental health of some slaves” (62). Young
is quick to remark that we will not know the full extent to which slaves suffered from madness
due to the conditions of slavery because adequate records were not kept, or slaves were not
treated by hospitals. This gap in archival documents makes it extremely difficult to judge how
the institution of slavery and the rise of the science of mental disease connected. However, some
evidence exists that lets us draw some conclusions about ways in which the civil and political
institutions responded to the issue of slavery in general and to mentally ill slaves in particular.
55
Anna Maria Falconbridge and Alexander Falconbridge Narrative of Two Voyages to the River of Sierra
Leone and An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa. Ed. Christopher Fyfe. Liverpool:
Liverpool Press, 2000 (215).
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Peter McCandless’ work on the history of madness in South Carolina from the colonial to
Progressive era begins with the tribulations of a slave named Kate, whose neighbors thought her
“dangerously mad” (15). Indeed, Kate had murdered her own child and in June 1745 was
arrested, and the local authorities deemed her “out of her Senses” (15). The court decided to take
pity on Kate and forgo any trial or punishment. However, as McCandless points out, this
decision left the court with a bigger problem of how to proceed if they did not want to punish or
confine Kate like a common criminal. Because Kate’s owner Robert Fullwood was financially
unable to provide for adequate care, the local bureaucracy of Craven County, South Carolina,
petitioned the colonial assembly to provide funds for Kate’s case. At this suggestion, the
assembly balked but decided to pass a law that stipulated “each parish in the colony [was]
responsible for the maintenance of lunatic slaves whose owners were unable to care for them”
(15). McCandless argues that Kate’s story is an apt place to begin a discussion of early
American responses to insane slaves because it brings to mind three main issues: one, that the
slave population was larger in South Carolina than its white counterpart; two, that plantation
owners could not adequately provide care for their slaves; and three, that the colony of South
Carolina had no formal institutions dedicated to the treatment of the insane, slave or otherwise.
McCandless’ larger point is to demonstrate that in any discussion of the Southern institutions,
one eventually finds a reminder that slavery was absolutely central to southern life.
Despite some institutional and legal reforms resulting from Kate’s case, McCandless
quickly explains that the “eighteenth-century sources are virtually silent regarding the care and
treatment of insane blacks, most of whom were slaves” (30). It almost seems that we expect too
much from the available records; at a time when blacks were second-class people and property,
why would we expect there to be any material related to the legal or medical institutions? Over
the course of the last two chapters, I have been working closely with Rush’s Medical
Observations and Inquiries on the Diseases of the Mind, but when it comes to the issue of race,
his text is virtually silent. I should note at the outset that Rush was a passionate abolitionist and
believed slavery to be a moral evil. At the same time, Rush worked in a profession that did not
recognize the need to tackle the issue of race within the context of mental health. If we want to
learn anything about how race was categorized within Rush’s conception of madness, we have to
do so by inference. Throughout Rush’s seminal text, he outlines the causes of madness and those
activities that make one predisposed to madness. For instance, intense study, a sudden loss or
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gain of money, public and private humiliation, or winning a considerable prize in a lottery are all
possible contributing factors to someone’s descent into madness. Rush seems to believe that
those external conditions which could give rise to madness are those that stem from a life of
leisure. As Rush argues, “The absence of real and present care, which give the mind leisure to
look back upon past, and to anticipate future and imaginary evils, and the inverted operation of
all affections of the heart” can induce madness (61-62). Essentially, Rush rigs the science of
insanity in favor of the upper class, and at this time, white society and avoids any discussion of
the existence of madness among the slave and the poor classes. In assessing the effects of
climate on a person’s mental health, Rush contends that madness “is a rare disease in the West
Indies. While the great and constant heat increases the irritability of the muscles, it gradually
lessens the sensibility of the nerves and mind” (63). Again, Rush contextualizes madness as an
inherently white phenomenon. He writes that there are “Certain states of society, and certain
opinions, pursuits, amusements, and forms of government” that can make one predisposed to
madness (63). Furthermore, Rush bluntly states that madness is a rare disease among savage
populations. Thus, for Rush, madness is the consequence of a civilized society with
sophisticated problems like excessive religious devotion, greed, and ambition. Throughout
Rush’s outline of the causes of madness is the subtext of slavery as well as how that institution
works upon the minds of slaves, freemen, and slaveholders alike. His silence on the issue of
slavery is deafening considering that Rush takes great pains to look at different cultures and
different aspects of everyday life that can cause madness, but his constructing madness as a
symptom of white privilege leaves those slaves suffering from mental illness without any
recourse. Moreover, Rush’s text was used as a textbook for students, and by leaving the issue of
slavery out of etiology of madness, he insures that future students will continue to ignore the
issue of insanity within slave and freemen communities.
As one moves through Rush’s text, the exclusion of slaves becomes starker and his logic
seems eerily familiar to some of white supremacist theories that were circulating during the late
eighteenth century. For example, Rush writes that “The rich are more predisposed to madness
than the poor, from their exposing a larger surface of sensibility to all its remote and exciting
causes” (60). While recognizing that Rush was a committed proponent of abolition, one cannot
help noticing that this statement, which declares that the rich are more prone to madness because
of their exposure to sensibility, relies on racial prejudice. By comparison, some of Thomas
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Jefferson’s most racist statements in Notes on the State of Virginia share a similarity with Rush’s
formulation of madness. Jefferson writes that slaves “are more ardent after their female: but love
seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and
sensation” (119). Jefferson continues in this vein for almost an entire chapter, even concluding
that for blacks “in general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than
reflection” (119). The picture that Jefferson paints of slaves and freemen is that they are savages
who follow the dictates of their sensations without any intellectual ability to be rational. As a
result of that inability, slaves cannot suffer from afflictions like insanity, which Rush defines as
an intellectual disease. It would be monumentally unfair to Rush to make him bear the weight of
Jefferson’s ideas, but I think that by looking at these references, a possible reason as to why
slaves and freemen were left out of literature on insanity in the eighteenth century becomes
easier to understand. Rush’s definining insanity as an intellectual disease, induced by reflection,
class status, and leisure, essentially precludes blacks from the madness. Because the rich live a
comfortable life, they have more time to indulge in the cult of sensibility. We can also draw
from Rush’s statement that slaves are exempted from madness because of their lack of access to
capital and luxuries. Rush continues to make this point explicit in the very next sentence: “Even
where mental sensibility is the same in both those classes of people, the disease is prevented in
the latter, by the constant pressure of bodily suffering, from labour, cold, and hunger” (60).
Here, Rush seems to exempt any person who works at hard labor from the disease of madness;
indeed, he goes on to note that whenever a poor person becomes mad, “it is generally the effect
of corporeal causes” (60). As McCandless demonstrates, there were cases of slaves and freemen
who fell prey to madness, and those cases had an impact on the treatment of insanity in America,
but through Rush we see that those cases were anomalies and did not fit in the etiologies of
madness.
Yet throughout Rush’s seminal work, he outlines causations of madness that would
readily apply to the life of a slave. As de Young argues above, much in a slave’s life could
induce madness, especially by the terms that Rush’s text specifies. For instance, Rush argues
that terror, grief, and distress are all capable of sending a person into the grip of insanity. A
slave would have been consumed with these emotions on a daily basis from witnessing the
beating of friends and family members to the constant torture resulting from working on a
plantation. Rush also maintains that a sudden change in status, from rich to poor for instance,
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can induce madness. A slave’s life would have been fraught with sudden changes through the
loss of family members or the breaking up of family on the auction block. Of course, a slave’s
daily existence was one of constant distress without recourse to social institutions to redress
grievances or punishment by his master. Time and again, Rush fails to investigate the possibility
that slaves or freemen suffer from either a predisposition for insanity or live in conditions that
could lead to madness.
Despite Rush’s theorization of madness as a disease of the white upper class, he does
register, albeit fleetingly, that slavery could take an enormous psychological toll on slaves.
Throughout Rush’s text, the word slavery appears once, but he uses it to register an abolitionist
sentiment: “The Africans become insane, we are told, in some instances, soon after they enter
upon the toils of perpetual slavery in the West Indies” (39). Again, it is difficult to know how to
evaluate the lack of discussion about the issue of race and madness in Rush’s text, given his
history of abolitionist sentiment. Both McCandless and Rush draw our attention to the ways in
which race was effectively a hidden issue within the science of madness. Despite Rush’s
omissions, the case of Kate demonstrates that race had an impact on, at least, the public response
to the phenomenon of madness. This duality between the silence of medical literature and the
experiences of everyday slaves and freemen poses the most difficulty when tracing the subject of
race through the medical and institutional responses to insanity. Eventually, scholars run up
against a lack of resources from which to make any adequate claims about how the medical
establishment treated slaves. In fact, the issue of slavery was in evidence if we look at some of
the administrative records of Pennsylvania State Hospital, where Rush worked from 1783 to
1813. Slaves were admitted to the hospital in limited numbers and always at the expense of the
slave’s owner. For instance, in 1753, Dr. Moore brought in his slave Isabel Charlton to be
treated for lunacy. We have a record of this patient not because she was a slave, but because her
case was part of the hospital committee’s deliberation about what do with patients who were
delinquent on payment (127). Apparently, Dr. Moore promised payment and then decided he
could not or would not pay; thus, the committee decided to contact the “Overseers of the Poor of
this City” and placed Charlton in their care. At other times, it appears that insane slaves were
transferred from one master to another. In another case, “Negro Adam” was placed under the
care of Thomas Bond, a famous doctor at the hospital during Rush’s tenure. A patient named
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“Negro George,” belonging to Mr. Carrington, was left in the care of Dr. William Shippen at the
expense of ten shillings per week (127).
These records demonstrate that slavery was a presence in the Pennsylvania State
Hospital. In fact when the hospital opened its new wing exclusively dedicated to the insane, the
first insane patient to die was a slave named “Tom.” When city planners began buying up the
land for the hospital, part of the building rested in the section of town where slaves were
auctioned (Morton 75). What this suggests is the reality that while medical literature could
ignore slavery, there was no escaping the constant reminder that the institution played a central
role in America. Yet still, the experience of slaves usually followed two tracks within the
asylum. First, and most typical, slaves could not count on their masters to provide adequate care;
thus, many insane slaves were never admitted. At the same time, slaves were effectively sold to
hospital doctors, were “employed” as hospital staff, or accompanied their masters who were
suffering from madness. Thus, the asylum became a microcosm of the slave society existing
outside the hospital walls. Perhaps, if the hospital’s key goal was the restoration of white upper
class men and women, slavery had to be a part of the asylum environment as a visual reminder to
the distraught white patients of the rationality they were striving to attain. At any rate, the
literature about blacks and madness in the eighteenth century is fraught with the medical
establishment’s omissions concerning the initiation, progress, and effects of madness as well as
whom it can affect. Thus, the history of African Americans in relation to the study of insanity
becomes similar to much of the other discourses regarding civil institutions predicated on white
supremacy.
The silence about race in the medical literature belies the important conversations about
race that were happening in the late eighteenth-century. Bruce Dain succinctly writes that “[a]ll
sides in slavery and race debates were addressing the basic issue of whether slaves and ex-slaves
were capable of citizenship in the republic” (vii). The forces marshaled in this debate ranged
from literature, religion, and even science. Although the scientific racism on the nineteenthcentury was yet to develop, in the late eighteenth-century we can begin to see the contours of that
debate taking shape. Even talking about “race” in late eighteenth-century was complicated as
racial categories—like white and black—had yet to be codified. Contributing to the formation
of these hard racial distinctions was the threat of slave revolt and uprising, which was a constant
preoccupation for slave-owners especially in the South. As the Federalist Era ended and
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Republicanism began to rise to prominence, the events of the Haitian Revolution fused
America’s discussion about race, citizenship, and madness.
The Haitian Revolution was a cataclysmic event with profound consequences for the
trajectory of American identity. The Haitian Revolution was a successful slave revolt that
abolished the slave system and white planter class. As Dain argues, “The specter of the Haitian
Revolution fundamentally changed and heightened American public discourse regarding race.
Blacks had acted on the world stage in the most dramatic way possible. To many European
Americans this was terrifying; to African Americans, inspiring” (83). Because of Haiti’s
lucrative sugar and coffee trade and optimal location in the West Indies, the revolution there sent
shock waves around the globe. Initially, in America, the response by the dominate Federalist
Party was supportive; here, some commentators explained, was evidence of the principles of the
American Revolution bringing change and equality to other nations. This sentiment began to
lose its luster once the Haitian uprising turned from revolution to a civil war where whites were
persecuted and murdered. The second phase of the Haitian Revolution was defined in America
by the Jeffersonians whose winning of the presidency in 1796 brought an end to the Federalist
Era. This second phase of the revolution was characterized in terms of horrible violence led by
the madman Jean Jacques Dessalines, who replaced Toussaint Louverture as leader of the new
government. In America, a new national government, filled with Southern Republicans
dedicated to the slavery system, transformed the meaning of the Haitian Revolution from an
Enlightenment success along the lines of America’s war for independence to a slave revolt that
could spread to and destroy America. In this transformation, the use of madness becomes crucial
as the American press and novelists respond to the “horrors of St. Domingo.” Through the
language of madness, America further defined its own identity by separating its revolution from
the slave uprising in Haiti. This rhetorical reframing allowed Americans to assume an identity as
an international force on par with Europe instead of as an unsophisticated frontier.
A discussion of madness and the Haitian Revolution is a fitting conclusion to the
narrative I have been laying out. Not only does it coincide with the ending of the Federalist Era
but it allows a window into America’s creation and use of its identity on the global stage. In the
press and novels, the language of sentimentalism, history, citizenship, and madness all converge
as Americans push away from the Haitian Revolution and construct themselves as an exceptional
international force. As Noble explains, race was a central component to the theorization of
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American exceptionalism, was the linking of “Anglo-Saxons to national citizenship” (7). The
goal of forging a national citizenry meant the suppression of differences along class, race, and
gender lines (Noble 97). This chapter looks at how Americans, desirous for a homogenized
national identity, used the Haitian Revolution as a way to separate themselves from other creole
communities. The term creole linked European born Americans to other colonialized groups
such as those in the West Indies (Anderson 47). Having already overthrown their colonial
oppressors, and witnessed a spread of revolutionary fervor across the globe, Americans sought to
create a space between their revolution and the revolution of other colonialized groups like the
slave uprising in Haiti. Many rhetorical strategies were integral to achieving this division, but I
will focus on how American writers used madness as an effective tool in marginalizing the
Haitian Revolution and building those hard racial distinctions, which become operational in the
later nineteenth century. For this chapter, I will demonstrate how insanity in Leonora Sansay’s
Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo contributes to these nascent impermeable race
boundaries as well as to America’s exportation of its own creole identity while graphing it onto
the participants and leaders of the Haitian Revolution.
Revolutionary Madness: The Black George Washington versus the Madman
In 1791, led by Toussaint Louverture, Haitian slaves began a revolution whose effects
would be felt immediately throughout Europe and America. Because of Haiti’s importance as a
commercial center for coffee and sugar, a revolution that threatened to disrupt the flow of
commerce in the West Indies was a blow to European hegemony. Michael Drexler succinctly
posits that the Haitian Revolution occurred due to three distinct factors: “1) Opposition to
centralized, imperial mercantilism on the American revolutionary model; 2) the circulation of
universalist and equalitarian rhetoric from France; and 3) a slave uprising that violently but
categorically redefined freedom in the Americas” (19). Indeed, if we momentarily leave to the
side the issue of slavery, the catalysts for the Haitian Revolution are virtually the same as for the
revolutions in France and the United States. However, race is the lens through which the Haitian
Revolution was viewed in America during the late eighteenth century. As I mentioned in
Chapter 2, race during the Federalist Era was a vexed and contested concept that worked to
demonstrate ways in which the façade of a homogenous Federalist citizenship was crumbling
under the weight of the divisions between Northern and Southern citizens over racial matters.
The American reactions to the Haitian Revolution exemplified the political divisions within the
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country as the Federalists lost power and Southern Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, began
to direct the national agenda. As if ordained by fate, the Haitian Revolution would be broken
into two parts: the phase of Louverture coinciding with the last stages of Federalism and JeanJacques Dessalines’ brutal era of violence against white plantation owners coinciding with the
rise of Southern Jeffersonians.
In the context of American citizenship, the Haitian Revolution reflected two enduring
transformations in terms of national character and power. Sean Goudie identifies evidence of a
“creole complex” in the reactions to the Haitian Revolution by the American political class: “the
creole complex militates against the notion that the U.S. Revolution marked an absolute break in
the creole condition and character of U.S. Americans” (14). Indeed, desirous of creating a new
national identity, Americans understood that their status as colonial subjects to Britain had
creolized them, making them politically similar to colonial subjects of the West Indies. Such a
connection to the West Indies would mitigate notions of exceptionalism that were crucial to
America’s self-conception as redeemer of European decline. On this point, Goudie writes,
“ongoing mercantile participation in the West Indian plantation economies, on which the U.S.
political economy remains reliant for its economic and social prosperity, undermines the wouldbe model of Republic’s claims to hemispheric exceptionalism and contradicts the notion that the
nation has, in the New World’s embrace, redeemed the degenerated political, economic, cultural
institutions of Europe” (14). Much more fundamental than the continued connection between
American and Haitian creoles, the Haitian Revolution threatened to rip away America’s founding
principles: “the [Haitian] revolution demonstrated in graphic terms the ways in which creolizing
republican values like liberty and freedom were not, as had been argued, the sole purview of
white creole U.S. Americans alone” (15). If freedom was on the march in Haiti, the implication
for Americans was that their founding principles and credos were not exceptional but part of the
larger creolization of revolutionary political resistance in the eighteenth-century. Thus, the
Haitian Revolution threatened to undermine the foundations of American nationalism by
attacking the idea that American citizenship was unique. The American reactions to the events
of the Haitian Revolution demonstrate how national citizens wrestled and protected the
exceptionality of their national identity. The language of rationality and madness are but
rhetorical tropes that Americans employed to elucidate ways they should react to the shifting
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events in the West Indies. Moreover, the Haitian Revolution provided an opportunity for
Americans to continue to define themselves and their own revolution.
The language of madness is crucial to understanding the American perception of the
revolutionary events in Haiti. We should acknowledge at the outset that “understanding” the
Haitian Revolution was an ongoing process that in America lasted well into the nineteenth
century. But in accounts at the time of the revolution and afterwards, the language of madness
was central to explaining the events in Haiti. In 1805, in his early history of Haiti, Marcus
Rainsford attempts to explain why the Haitian slaves had risen up in arms by asking whites to
place themselves in the rebellious slaves’ position:
What would these men have said, if the people of color had endeavored to deprive the
whites of their political advantages. With what energy would they not exclaimed at such
oppression! Inflamed into madness at finding your rights have been pointed out to you,
their irritated pride may perhaps lead to make every effort to render our decrees
ineffectual (374).
Rainsford imagines a scene in which white men realize their basic human rights after being
placed under the yoke of servitude by black oppressors. Rainsford understands this moment as a
catalyst for madness, which will lead all involved to unspeakable acts of vengeance. Similarly,
in his jaundiced view of Haiti after the civil war, James Franklin observes that the seats of
government resembles a madhouse: “The communes’ house has more the appearance of a
receptacle for lunatics; and really if one were to only visit it during the sittings of the chamber, it
would not be surprising if an impression were made that the lunatics of the republic had
congregated in it, instead of reasonable men to deliberate upon the affairs of their country” (276).
In addition to these descriptions, the language of madness became a frequent descriptor of the
actions of individual leaders of the revolution. Henri Christophe is described as being
“maddened with rage” at the resistance of the French to the advances of his rebel army; another
writer describes his countenance as “indicating . . . a partial degree of insanity” (99). Similarly,
Paul Loverture, brother of Toussaint, “fell into a madness of revenge” when his wife was killed
(Beard 259). Stewart Hanna remarks that Haitians were “driven to madness by the conduct of
their persecutors” (30). At times, even Haitians described their conduct as madness; in his
collection of official documents, Henri Christophe discusses the civil wars of the Dessalines era
as a “species of madness” that under his leadership had been “visibly extinguished” (207).
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Within the context of the Enlightenment, statements using the language of madness to
describe a slave rebellion are less unique when we consider the primacy of the concepts of
reason and rationality in the late eighteenth-century. Indeed, the preoccupation with reason and
rationality was predicated on whiteness as the dominate element of political and social position
during the Age of Revolution. In his examination of the effects of the Haitian Revolution on
Western reason, Michel Trouillot explains why Americans and Europeans used the language of
madness to describe the slave uprising:
The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being
unthinkable even as it happened. Official debates and publications of the times,
including the long list of pamphlets on Saint-Domingue published in France from 1790 to
1804 revel the incapacity of most contemporaries to understand the ongoing revolution
on its own terms. They could read the news only with their ready-made categories, and
these categories were incompatible with the idea of a slave revolution (73).
Trouillot contends that the Haitian Revolution was essentially a “non-event;” this description
does not mean that the revolution in Haiti did not happen but that, through the eyes of white
society, it was inconceivable that slaves had the capacity to engineer a full-scale uprising.
Within this context, the use of madness begins to make sense as Western spectators internalized
the events in Haiti as representing a lack of adherence to the categories of reason and rationality.
Essentially, the response and early histories of the revolution categorize the revolution not as
non-event, but as a mad one. This contextualization allowed for a critical distance, making
possible the denial of the creole nature of Americans themselves and pushing the Haitian
Revolution outside the parameters of normalized Western thought. Again, the strategy that I
believe is at play is that American reactions to Haiti were predicated on a desire to overcome the
“creole complex” and to exist in a space of exceptionality. As Trouillot’s work makes clear, this
position is hardly a linear strategy, as Americans and Europeans had to theorize an event through
its impossibility. I contend that to break through the inconceivable nature of a slave rising, the
responses to the Haitian uprising unfolded in two stages: first, the cooptation of the Toussaint
regime as evidence of Enlightenment success, and second, the transformation redefinition of the
Dessalines era as a monstrous abomination. Not to make light of these stages, but for American
observers, the difference was between either black George Washington Loverture or the madman
Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
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During the eighteenth century, the American reaction to the reign of Toussaint
Louverture was mixed but with many supporters. In both the Northern and Southern press,
superlatives praising Toussaint’s command and abilities were ubiquitous. After the initial slave
uprising in 1791, Toussaint moved quickly to take command and establish order in the rebellion
forces, and he made a couple of decisions that would have an important impact on his depiction
in the American press. His most important decision was to leave the white planter class intact,
and instead of declaring all the slaves free, he petitioned the French government to pass
legislation to outlaw slavery eventually in the colony. Bruce Dain sums up Toussaint’s actions
nicely: “during the conflict, for all that he often acted as an independent agent the grand blancs
and the French, Toussaint maintained a nominal allegiance to France and attempted at least on
paper to conciliate the great planters and to keep up sugar and coffee production, eventually by
imposing a forced labor code that the laborers a third of their profits” (85). Dain’s statement
reflects the ambiguous place that Toussaint occupied in the American imagination, for he was at
once rational and reasonable while at the same time leading an irrational revolution. Despite the
brutality that accompanied the revolution in Haiti, Toussaint’s decision to basically align with
France in combating the influences of Spain and Britain struck American Federalists as properly
executed. Indeed, the fact that Toussaint helped his white master escape the carnage of the
uprising only further enhanced his reputation with Americans (Hickey 363). Thus, Southern
Republicans in America came to view Toussaint as a rational man worthy of being compared to
George Washington. One Southern editor wrote in 1799 that Toussaint “must be a man of no
inconsiderable talent, since he has both conceived and executed so great a project as that of
rescuing his unhappy country from the miseries of with which it was afflicted by the tyranny of
France” (Hunt 85). Thomas Pickering called Toussaint “a prudent and judicious man possessing
the general confidence of the people of all colors” (qtd. in Hickey 365). Alfred Hunt draws
attention to the fact that as reports of violence came to Americans, many felt the needed to
expunge Toussaint’s reputation from charges of barbarity; he reprints this excerpt from a
Southern editor:
Toussaint, before the arrival of the French army could not by the most rancorous of his
enemies, be accused with having split the blood of the innocent; he could not be
reproached with requisitions and robberies, such as have marked the progress of General
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Leclerc. We have been told that he was a monster, and that he has committed the most
wanton cruelties, but where are the proofs[sic] of this? (86).
What is remarkable about this defense of Toussaint is that it was that Americans would have
been reading it alongside descriptions of the “horrors of St. Domingo” such as:
With one hand the black daemons of slaughter were seen holding up the writhing infant,
and hacking off its limbs with the sword in the other. Those that escaped the sword were
preserved to witness more horrid sensations, being dragged by the negroes, (who
evacuated the town during the fire, and after the demolishing of the forts) to their strong
places in the mountains, to serve as hostages or to glut their fury.56
The reasons for the inability of the American press to blame Toussaint for the brutality caused
during the revolution are complex. At its heart, this lack of blame involves the status of France
in the American mind during the late eighteenth century. As the French Revolution descended
into gruesome violence at the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, Americans, especially
Southerners, reconsidered their views of the French Revolution and of France in general. When
France captured Toussaint and catered to the desire of white plantation owners by revoking the
agreement to end slavery in St. Domingo, American Federalists were in decline, and Southern
Republicans began to dictate foreign policy. Toussaint’s reputation in America would stay intact
through these turbulent years, as either the bringer of freedom or the victim of France. The
defense of Toussaint is also at least partially explained by Goudie’s creole complex. In the
beginning, Toussaint’s ability to keep mercantile lines open and to avoid completely destroying
the racial hierarchy in Haiti resembled the Americans’ own revolution. Federalists tended to
praise Toussaint for his ability to lead his people out of servitude and to reclaim basic human
rights. The American Revolution had operated in much the same way, from the perspective of
most Americans; they did not set about to destroy the existing social order but to reclaim rights
afforded them as citizens of Britain. As evidenced by Jefferson’s list of indictments against the
king in the Declaration of Independence, Americans wanted the king to abide by British law and
admit to their basic civil rights of colonials. The concept of the creole complex shows that these
resemblances brought home to Americans the fact of their own creole identity. As Hunt
demonstrates, American literature kept the connection between Toussaint and the principles of
Reprinted in Michael Drexler’s introduction to the Broadview edition of Leonora Sansay’s Secret
History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (23). The excerpt originally appeared in The Republican, or
Anti-Democrat 4 March 1802: 2.
56
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the American Revolution alive through much of the nineteenth century. For example, in 1855 a
southern writer for De Bow’s Review expressed his admiration for the accomplishments of
Toussaint by comparing the ex-slave to whites:
Toussaint Louverture . . . set the negroes to work, and even recalled some planters and
the overseer even, under whom he had been a slave, to manage the estates and to compel
the negroes to work. In every respect he was more humane, reasonable, and discreet than
the white fanatics sent there from France, and only fell because he was less tricky and
faithless than his French friends, and was inferior in deceit to the generals of the great
Napoleon. (Hunt 90).
It is not difficult to see the logic of the praise here, as Toussaint’s much heralded reputation
derives from his ability to drive slaves into work and from his acceptance of the white oligarchy
in the West Indies. Whether or not Toussaint actually believed this position is beside the point;
what the excerpt above shows is that, fifty years after Toussaint’s death, Americans were still
trying to understand how the Haitian Revolution was impacting their own ideas of national
citizenship. For the American press, Toussaint was a rational, exacting leader of a ragtag bunch
of inferior slaves who had to be disciplined into a fighting military force. Ironically, avowed
anti-abolitionist Edmund Ruffin seemingly conscripts Toussaint into white supremacist thinking
in his 1855 book The Political Economy of Slavery: “The black general Toussaint, (the only
truly great man yet known of the negro race), who after suppressing the civil war, assumed and
exercised despotic and severe authority, compelled the former slaves to return to the plantations,
and to labor, under military coercion, and severe punishment for disobedience” (90). The
conflicting images of Toussaint as a black George Washington leading his people to freedom, or
a slave driver whipping blacks into military force, exhibit the American writers’ negotiating their
identity during and after the Age of Revolution. However, Toussaint was only one half of the
story of the Haitian Revolution; Toussaint was captured in 1802 by French troops on orders from
Napoleon and died later that year in prison. With Toussaint gone, Jacques-Jeans Dessalines took
over, passed a Constitution outlawing slavery, destroyed the white planter class, and made
himself emperor of the republic of Haiti. If the image of Toussaint in the American imagination
was that of a rational man working towards freedom, Dessalines was portrayed as the exact
opposite. In the American press, at a time of Southern Republican ascendency, Dessalines was
styled as a bloodthirsty madman. The images of both Toussaint and Dessalines would last well
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into the mid-nineteenth century. The language of madness was used against Dessalines to
marginalize his ferocious abolitionism. By using the trope of madness, American writers
attempted to mitigate the creole complex, shifting to regain their sense of exceptionalism. The
Haitian Revolution was transformed from the Federalist-defined conflict of human beings rising
to take their rights to a slave rebellion that would destroy white men and women by the score.
Southerners, anxious that their own slaves would not rebel against them, took great pains to see
that Dessalines and Haiti were marginalized as examples of black overreaching.
Unlike descriptions and discussions of the character of Toussaint which ran in
newspapers and literary journals during the conflict, it is hard to find similar pieces on
Dessalines. This omission is surprising considering that Dessalines finally transformed San
Domingo into the Republic of Haiti and passed the constitution in 1805. Historical records show
that, like Toussaint, Dessalines was born in 1758 to slave parents and lived in slavery until the
uprising in 1791. In contrast to Toussaint, Dessalines came away from his life as a slave with a
deep-seated hatred of the grand blancs—the white aristocracy who utilized slave labor for their
plantations. And while Toussaint was amenable to the racial and economic structure of the old
regime, Dessalines, upon assuming command after Toussaint’s arrest, waged a savage campaign
to eliminate whites from St. Domingo. Thus, Dessalines confirmed all of the most horrific
fantasies of Southern Republicans, and the reactions towards the Dessalines’ era reflected the
shift in America, away from Federalism to a staunchly anti-abolitionist Republicanism.
However, as the discussion of madness that began this chapter demonstrates, slaves were thought
to be too mentally unsophisticated to fall prey to madness. To rectify this impasse, Southerners
describe Dessalines as a deliberate savage or someone who methodically committed irrational
atrocities. The Southern press would use the tropes of madness to describe Dessalines and his
actions as a way of shifting America towards a view of its revolution separate from the one in
Haiti. By examining this shift, we see how depictions of madness that Rush took great pains to
investigate became rhetorical tools in the advent of an American nationalism that would be
predicated on hard racial distinctions.
In one account that circulated throughout the South, the reigning tropes define Dessalines
to a Southern audience as:
about 42 years of age; the ensembles of his physiognomy offers something fierce and
savage. His features are coarse and his figure disagreeable without being ugly . . . Crafty
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and hypocritical as generally are all negroes, he is besides, brutish, passionate and violent
to the highest degree. He inspires a kind of terror in every one who approaches him, and
he is with reason feared because he does not hesitate to do himself immediate justice for
the least contradiction he experiences, either with his daggers, swords, pistols, or prison.
(1).
Time and again, Dessalines would be described as both highly violent and volatile, capable of
capricious atrocities without provocation. In this description, some of the language of madness
evidences the central understanding of madness in the eighteenth-century. Obviously, an
eighteenth-century reader would notice the use of the word passionate as a way of precluding
Dessalines from the faculties of reason. This newspaper account emphasizes that Dessalines’
passion governs him without recourse to reason and rationality. Within the context of madness,
this description makes Dessalines, much like Theodore Wieland, constitutionally predisposed to
madness. The other trope in the description is Dessalines’ being so arbitrary that at any moment
he can change his mind; because he is in a constant battle with his passions, the lives of others
are always at risk. Again for eighteenth-century readers, the impression here is that Dessalines is
incapable of reason and does not possess the rational foundations, which makes communal
interactions possible. Both of these descriptors—passionate and capricious—give us the
impression that Dessalines is a madman. Indeed as Dain remarks, “Dessalines was portrayed as
a bestial Negro madman bloodthirsty and out of control” (90). The conclusion that Dessalines
was a madman had profound implications for American Southerners’ economic and political life.
Given the epidemical understanding about the nature of madness, Southern aristocrats feared that
the “madness” of slave rebellion would spread to America.
Throughout the historical record, writers continually responded to the horrific
capriciousness lying at the heart of Dessalines’ actions. For instance, Dessalines ordered that the
bodies of dead Frenchmen not be buried because he wanted the French to always see the
repercussions of wrath; because of this ordinance, Dessalines killed a mother who was caught
burying her son (Brown 25). To American Southerners, Dessalines was a savage incapable of
feeling or reflection about how his decisions affected others. Reacting to one particular atrocity,
Dessalines is described as “this ferocious brute born in the wilds of the Congo [who slowly and
methodically” butchers his enemies (Stoddard 281). Such incongruous descriptions of
Dessalines, as both a savage brute and a methodical butcher, are easier to rectify when one
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considers the writings on madness in the eighteenth-century. As Rush explains, madness is an
intellectual ailment, a disease that perverts one’s rational faculties. By remarking that
Dessalines’ atrocities are deliberative and methodical, Southern writers turn revolutionary
abolitionism into a form of mental disease. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Harrington’s sympathy
for the slave woman in The Power of Sympathy is symptomatic of his insanity: in lateeighteenth-century American politics, the continuation of slavery was crucial to the creation of a
unified nation. Moreover, by tapping into the trope of madness, Southern writers constructed
abolition in much the way Franklin had constructed madness in his petition for the creation of
Pennsylvania Hospital. Thus, madness left unchecked in the West Indies will through its
epidemical character spread throughout the South, destroying its economy and culture.
In terms of national citizenship, the transformation of abolitionism into a type of
epidemical madness frames the Haitian Revolution as an event that placed race at the forefront of
national identity in America. As Dain suggest prior to the nineteenth-century, Americans
understood race as comprising many different categories of racial identity (82). The threat of
slave revolt that emanated from the Haitian Revolution helped harden racial divisions,
combining the many forms of race into either white or black. Parallel to this development is the
continuing effects of the creole complex and the fashioning of America as an exceptional nation.
By transforming Dessalines into a bloodthirsty madman, the American press created a space in
which the Haitian Revolution existed separate from the American. Aside from newspaper
accounts, Leonora Sansay’s sentimental novel Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo
chronicles this shift during the Dessalines phase of the Haitian Revolution. Sansay’s novel uses
the atrocities of the Haitian Revolution to cement the difference between the American
Revolution and the one in Haiti, through the tropes of madness. However, Sansay constructs
Haiti as a landscape incapable of fomenting rationality within the people who are exposed to it.
Indeed, in Sansay’s novel, the reason Clara, St. Louis, and even General Rochambeau fall prey to
madness is precisely because the revolutionary landscape of Haiti creates an atmosphere
incapable of sustaining reason.
Leonora Sansay and the Secret History of Madness
Many of the details of Sansay’s life remain a mystery, but we glean from the records an
astounding look at a woman in the eighteenth-century who defied social mores. As Michael
Drexler points out, much of what we know of Sansay comes from the papers of her mentor,
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confidante, and possible lover Aaron Burr (27). She was the step-daughter of Philadelphia
innkeeper William Hassal, who was friends with Thomas Bond, a physician who worked at the
Pennsylvania Hospital treating insane patients along with Rush (Scarf 273-74). Hassal died
“perhaps from the Yellow Fever epidemic” in 1793; at this moment, her history gets murky
(Drexler “Introduction” 27). Hassal’s tavern could have been the likeliest place where Burr
could have met Sansay, but there is no documentation of their relationship prior to 1796. In
1800, Sansay agreed to marry Louis Sansay, a “refugee of Saint Domingo who had sold his
plantation to Toussaint Loverture” and whose last name she acquired (28) Drexler maintains that
Sansay and Burr continued the affair despite her marriage (28). For a woman living within the
gender codes of the eighteenth century, Sansay would most likely have been labeled a coquette
(27). Evidence for this interpretation is based on existent letters written from Louis to Burr
begging him to return Leonora back to him. In one letter, Louis writes, “I tremble that it is her
intention to abandon me and I myself have decided to abandon everything, and even sacrifice my
life, rather than to leave her in the possession of another” (29). Sansay returned to Louis
eventually, perhaps at the prodding of Burr, and traveled to St. Domingo to reclaim lands lost
during the initial years of the revolution. Sansay arrived in Haiti on the auspicious day of
Toussaint’s capture by the French. Thus, Sansay’s first Haitian experiences were on the eve of
the bloody civil war of the Dessalines era, when it would soon be rebel policy to kill any white
plantation owner remaining in Haiti. By using these events as a backdrop, Sansay constructs in
Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo a sentimental novel in the mold of The Coquette
and The Power of Sympathy. Essentially, Sansay mirrors the internal dynamic of the sentimental
novel with its reliance on passions and irrationality with the events of the Haitian Revolution.
The effect is to communicate to an American audience the chilling prospects of the black
uprising in Haiti in a language they had grown intimately familiar with through their own novel
reading.
Scholarship on Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo is extremely
sparse considering the recent critical attention focused on the West Indies and transatlanticism in
early American literary studies. In terms of the sentimental novel, Sansay’s text is really no
different than The Coquette, which has enjoyed much scholarly attention. Sansay’s text is a
literary achievement in blending the conventions of autobiography, travelogue, and sentimental
fiction. Sansay draws many of the incidents and characters of the novel straight from her own
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life (for instance, the main character Mary is married to a man named St. Louis). The novel
details the fraught lines of communication between men and women and the consequences of
coquettishness to a woman’s standing in society. Borrowing from the sentimental novel’s use of
epistolarity as a framing device, the novel is told in series of letters from the main character
Mary to Aaron Burr. Mary relates the coquettish exploits of her sister Clara, the French
military’s incompetency, and the excessively violent events of the nascent Dessalines regime.
Still, it is the environment of Sansay’s novel that complements the sentimental novel’s
conventions as well as each was an exercise in passion, excess, and social barriers. In this
context, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon avers that the function of Sansay’s text is “to primarily detail
the excesses of a colonial regime that is willfully out of touch with the life and death and
brutalities of the colonial slave system that engendered the revolt occurring outside the doors of
its gilded fantasy world of luxury and dissipation” (78). Moreover, Dillon sees the relationship
between men and women serving as an analogy to the racial conflict of the revolution in Haiti:
“Metaphorically, then, love is colonel warfare” in Sansay’s text; to further her point, Dillon
connects the possession and dispossession of women in the novel with the treatment of the slaves
prior to and during the revolution (80). Thus, Dillon sees Sansay’s project as an attempt to write
a “creole novel” reflecting the anxieties of the epidemical nature of the Haitian revolution. As
Dillion argues, the creole women could not be successfully reproduced within the discourse of
the Haitian Revolution because their sexuality was rife with “degeneracy and danger” (87). The
implication is that within literature about West Indies’ colonialism, the successful woman is one
who does not conform to the sexual mores of the hypersexual nature of creole subjectivity. The
argument is akin to Goudie’s theorization of the creole complex; fear of creolization serves as a
useful tool in dividing the black from white, Haitian from American.
Sansay constructs her narrative using the available genre tools of popular eighteenthcentury literature. Matt Clavin helpfully situates Sansay’s text within the body of gothic
literature that was in circulation. Indeed, Sansay’s text outlines her sister Clara’s flirtatious
exploits and coquettish behavior against the backdrop of the horrific and terrifying revolution.
The novel is told through a series of letters, mainly written from Mary about Clara’s love triangle
between her husband and General Rochambeau. Throughout the text, the familiar scenes of
sentimental novels are present: balls, flirtations, and advice about a true woman of virtue.
Sansay constructs Haiti as a hyper-sentimentalized nation whose brimming passions released by
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the Haitian Revolution infect those who come into contact with them. By treating the effects of
the Haitian Revolution as an epidemical disease of madness which impedes a person’s ability to
be rational, Sansay signals to her audience a necessity to safeguard against the encroachments of
revolutionary passions that could disrupt America’s growing influence on the international stage.
Mary begins her first letter describing the emotions of the planter class who are returning
to Haiti to reclaim their lands that Toussaint’s forces had taken: “were now returning full of joy
at the idea of again possessing the estates from which they had been driven by their revolted
slaves” (61). In these lines, Mary constructs slave ownership in Haiti as uninterrupted by the
revolution; the slaves who revolted still belong to the planters and are in essence still their
slaves. Despite the joy felt at being able to return to Haiti, Mary mentions throughout the first
three letters that a distinct air of melancholy hangs over the voyage: “I was delighted with
profound tranquility of the ocean . . . But a truce to melancholy reflections, for here I am in St.
Domingo, with a new world opening to my view” (61). There are many ways to read Mary’s
feelings of melancholy in the context of madness; for starters, as a participant in the planter class,
Mary’s feelings can be a derivative of Rush’s Revolutiana. Indeed, Sansay hints at a much
broader and deeper meaning for Rush’s term, in that anyone who was in a dominant position
before a revolution becomes susceptible to madness. Moreover, the text invites teasing out the
implications of a return voyage to Haiti given that; as I have discussed, melancholy was a disease
suffered by slaves during the Middle Passage. It is possible here to consider Mary’s journey to
Haiti as a Middle Passage of American plantation owners who are so beholden to Haiti
mercantile profitability that they are in effect enslaved by the West Indies trade.
Gordon Brown remarks that America’s reliance on Haitian commerce in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries is difficult to overstate: “almost one-third of total American
exports” during the eighteenth-century were sold in the West Indies (19). Moreover, Haitian
sugar exports were central to the growing rum distillation industry that took shape after the
setbacks resulting from the British Molasses Act of 1783. Brown explains that trade to the West
Indies “provided employment for a great number of American seamen, port workers, and
shipbuilders, while the flow of goods through American ports provided the new U.S. government
with significant customs revenues . . . its earnings helped to pay for the imports from Europe,
and to ease substantially the balance of trade deficit America perpetually ran with the old
continent” (20). John Adams summed up the implications of America’s relationship with the
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West Indies in 1783: “The commerce of the West Indies is a part of the American system of
commerce. They can neither do without us, nor we without them. The Creator has placed us
upon the globe in such a situation that we have occasion for each other. We have the means of
assisting each other, and politicians and artful contrivances cannot separate us” (20). This
context reinforces the idea of Mary’s journey as a Middle Passage of those white planters who
cannot live without the commerce system they created in the West Indies on the foundations of
slave labor. Hence, Mary’s melancholy finds a connection to the “fixed melancholy” suffered by
actual slaves aboard the Middle Passage. Sansay’s text seemingly works this connection to
highlight a couple of strategies to break down the creole connection between Haitian
revolutionaries and American patriots. Dillon remarks that Sansay’s novel demonstrates the
excesses of the colonial regime’s thirst for power but adds that the novel locates this idea in the
characteristics of creole identities (78). Thus, as Mary gets closer to the shores of St. Domingo,
those epidemical revolutionary characteristics, seemingly shared by Americans and Haitians,
become pronounced. Possibly, Sansay argues against something like Goudie’s paracolonialism,
where America finds its identity through the continued commercial and cultural contact with the
West Indies (11-12). Sansay suggests that such an arrangement only further ties the identities of
America and Haiti together, which cuts against the possibility of a distinct American
nationalism.
The epidemical nature of the Haitian Revolution is at work when Sansay introduces
Mary’s sister Clara. Once Mary lands in Haiti, she reports, “Clara has had the yellow fever”
(63). During the revolution, yellow fever was the most potent weapon against the colonials, save
the guerilla tactics of the rebels. In the years that spanned the revolution, as many as 12,700 out
of 20,200 British troops died from the disease, while the French “suffered severe losses”
comparable to rate of the British (Geggus 40,48). By succumbing to yellow fever, Clara situates
herself as part of the colonial force, which metaphorically makes her vulnerable to the
epidemical disease of revolutionary Haiti. One of the symptoms of yellow fever was madness; in
1792 Hector McLean described some of the possible symptoms of the disease as “Tremor of the
body when moved, with a tendency to faint on flight exertion, justly alarm the observer; the
fierce delirium, which proposes heroic action, and raves of battle, is less to be dreaded than the
low, muttering, grim, melancholy, which is lost in meditating wrath, without an attempt to
move” (99). In essence, McLean was militarizing the effects of the yellow fever, demonstrating
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its usefulness as a weapon against incoming colonial interests. I do not mean to suggest that
Haitian revolutionaries consciously used the disease as a weapon, but yellow fever did as much
damage to the colonial forces as the armed revolution. By categorizing yellow fever as a tool of
rebellion, McLean attempts to marginalize the Haitian Revolution by making madness
symptomatic of revolution. Those who fall prey to yellow fever do not just become sick, they are
in the clutches of a “fierce delirium” that “raves of battle,” and in their wrath they settle into a
melancholy. Clara’s yellow fever signifies both her colonial position and the infection of
revolutionary madness that is evidenced by coquetry. Dillon wonders if the novel’s reliance on
the settings and issues of the sentimental novel “bespeak sustained delusion (or colonial
nostalgia)” on the part of Sansay or at least the novel’s characters (78). It is telling that Dillon
chooses to use the language of madness here because it does appear delusional that in the midst
of a racial revolution, Mary and Clara are preoccupied with balls, gowns, and the latest gossip of
the planter class. However, I believe that through madness Sansay uses the figure of the coquette
to creolize Clara in an effort to demarcate a line between the values of the Haitian and American
revolutions. Thus, Clara’s coquettish behavior is symptomatic of her madness induced by the
effects of a yellow fever that is a symbol of revolutionary fervor. This connection, in effect,
raises the stakes of the American sentimental novel; as I discussed in Chapter 2, The Power of
Sympathy and The Coquette attempted to correct and police the conduct of American women.
Sansay uses sentimentalism as a weapon of continual colonial and racial marginalization of the
Haitian Revolution. The effect of Clara’s madness, through colonial contact, allows Sansay to
excise the creole identity from the American psyche, thus freeing it to assume a nationalist
identity.
Throughout the narrative, Sansay uses Mary as the reasoned lens with which the audience
views the events of the Haitian Revolution and the romantic conflict between her sister, General
Rochambeau, and St. Louis. Mary remarks on the suffering of others, details the rhythms of her
social circle, and at times admonishes her sister for coquettish behavior. As the principal
narrator, Mary never really participates in the action but is always one step removed, chronicling
the movements and motivations of others. We identify with Mary, as the reader’s guide through
this sentimental novel, because she exhibits and professes those restraints that are central to a
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successful eighteenth-century woman.57 However, as most scholars acknowledge, by engaging
in a liaison with Burr, Mary is as guilty as Clara of not conforming to gender expectations of the
eighteenth century. Mary understands how society works against the desires of woman and,
unlike Clara, is shrewder in playing along her socially prescribed gender role. This position
vexes Mary’s ideology, within a genre that is dedicated to social and political didacticism.
Despite this ambiguity in Mary’s position within the text, her ability to understand the
logic behind society’s gender proscriptions leads her to hold her sister to those very standards.
Thus, in a strange reversal Mary becomes much more like a typical narrator in a conservative
novel than a progressive voice. For instance, when Mary charges Clara with “coquetry in her
disposition” or the general’s “unblushing rapacity” she demonstrates her adherence to
eighteenth-century codes of rationality and disinterestedness (77-78). Towards the end of the
novel, Clara drifts into the kind of didacticism characteristic of sentimental novels. When
discussing the lesson of her sister’s ordeal, Mary writes, “when a woman, like Clara, can
fascinate, intoxicate, transport, and whilst unhappy, is surrounded by seductive objects, she will
become entangled, and be borne away by the rapidity of her own sensations, happy if she can
stop short on the brink of destruction” (153). Implicit in Mary’s statement is that Haiti surrounds
Clara with objects of desire and passion. Much like in The Coquette, Sansay describes the
powers of femininity that—left unchecked by rational restraint and adherence to social mores—
will lead one to ruin. Mary does not advocate for Clara to break social constraints but laments
that her sister was not luckier in her choice of a husband: “If Clara’s husband had been in every
respect worthy of her she would have been the happiest of human beings” (153).
Once settled on the island, Mary finds a social circle comprised of women who had
stayed through the initial rebellion. The exposure of these women to the horrors and madness of
the uprising transforms them. Characteristic of the sentimental novel is the belief that
passions—desire, jealousy, or anger-- should never overwhelm a woman’s capacity for reason.
However, with the proximity of these women to the passions of the rebellious slaves, Mary
relates that far from separating whites from blacks, the rebellion has infected the sensibilities of
white upper-class women. In one scene, Mary listens to the latest island gossip of the story of a
Both Dillon and Goudie have remarked on the progressiveness of Sansay’s main character, who at the
end of the novel seemingly fights against eighteenth-century gender mores. In this chapter, I have
decided to forgo this conclusion in effort to foreground the ambiguity that lies at the heart of Sansay’s
text.
57
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creole woman who kills a slave girl named Coomba because she thinks a man displays a certain
“tendresse” towards the girl: “One lady who had a beautiful negro girl continually about her
person, thought that she saw a symptom of tendresse in the eyes of her husband, and all the
furies of jealousy seized her soul” (70). Consumed with jealousy, the creole lady initiates a
preemptive strike against a possible affair between her husband and Coomba. In the next
paragraph, Mary relates that the woman “ordered one of her slaves to cut off the head of the
unfortunate victim [Coomba] . . . At dinner her husband said he felt no disposition to eat, to
which his wife, with the air of a demon, replied perhaps I can give you something that will excite
your appetite; it has at least before. She rose and drew from a closet the head of Coomba. The
husband, shocked beyond expression, left the house and sailed immediately for France, in order
to never again behold such a monster” (70). Mary writes in the very next line, “similar
anecdotes have been related by my Creole friends” (70).
There is much to unpack in the scene of Coomba’s death which speaks to the larger issue
of using the sentimental genre to affect a separation of America from Haiti. The constant
identification of the lady as a Creole situates her as a cautionary example of the effects of
rebellion on their sensibilities. Sansay hints that the revolution transforms white society into
mirror images of the rebellious Haitians. As I have discussed above, horrific accounts of
brutality appeared in American newspapers, and in one such account the writer warned of
Haitian rebels’ killing infants. In this scene, the distance between the savagery of the Haitians
and the white lady’s collapse realizes the fears of American spectators who worried about the
spread of revolution from Haiti. Sansay creolizes the violence of the lady by describing her as a
“demon” that is controlled by the “furies of jealousy.” The implication in this scene is that the
Haitian revolution, in a sense, has already won because it has bridged the gap between the white
planter class and the rebellious slaves; in Sansay’s telling, both are almost indistinguishable. For
an American audience, the story of the creole lady serves as confirmation of their worst fears and
aligns with the Republican sentiments that the Haitian slave revolt does not share the same
principles as the American Revolution. Mary registers this very sentiment, writing of the creole
lady and her gossip circle: “In the ordinary intercourse of life they are delightful; but if I wanted
a friend on any extraordinary occasion I would not venture to rely on their stability” (71).
Tellingly, Mary uses the word stability to connote the bonds of friendship, but at the same time
she alludes to their mental stability as well. Moreover, Mary cautions the reader by utilizing the
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language of disease: “virtue is blasted in the bud by the contagious influence of example” (96).
Thus, Sansay acknowledges the madness of the Haitian revolution can and will infect American
citizens if they are not cautious and vigilant like Mary. In this scene, Mary establishes her
American identity by using madness to creolize her female social circle, which demonstrates to
the reader how American citizenship should be understood against the effects of the Haitian
Revolution.
The rest of Mary’s narrative is consumed with the trials and tribulation of her sister’s
love triangle between her husband and General Rochambeau. Much of the stories’ narrative arc
would have been familiar to any reader of sentimental fiction in the eighteenth-century. Clara’s
character is reminiscent of Eliza Wharton; she is naturally flirtatious and stuck in a society which
has prescribed specific codes for feminine behavior, but unlike Wharton, Clara is trapped in a
marriage to St. Louis, whose jealousy proves oppressive. Once on land and recovered from her
yellow fever, Clara begins to indulge her passions for fashion, society balls, and men. Mary
writes, “there is a vein of coquetry in her composition which, if indulged, will eventually destroy
her peace” (77). In other sentimental novels of the time, the passionate exploits of a rake would
push a young girl into the grips of passion, but in Clara’s case the Haitian Revolution, even Haiti
itself, operates as a seducer. Indeed, Mary admits as much, writing that the Haitian rebels had
“vanquished the French troops, and their strength has increased from a knowledge of the
weakness of their opposers[sic], and the climate itself combats for them” (73).
On the surface, Mary suggests that the oppressive heat of Haiti works to the advantage of
the rebels, but more than this literal reality there is an acknowledgement that the island
transforms and weakens colonial agents. At first, it is difficult to see how Clara fits into this
position. Once she is well enough to attend social events, Mary discusses Clara’s power of
conquering men. When Mary relates how St. Louis was jealous of the attentions of a French
major, she writes, “When Clara heard the story, she laughed, and, I saw, was delighted with a
conquest she now considered assured” (75). The slight ambiguity in this sentence leads to the
impression that Mary could be referring either to the Major or to St. Louis or to both. Just a few
lines later, Mary writes that General Rochambeau is so taken with Clara that he has been
“vanquished” by her (76). By using militaristic language to describe Clara’s interactions with
men, Mary, and by extension Sansay, connects coquetry to the Haitian Revolution. Just after
detailing Clara’s victory over the sentiments of the General, Mary dives into a long discussion on
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the plight of slaves on the island. She contends that slaves have “acquired a knowledge of their
own strength” through breaking the “yoke imposed on them by a few thousand men” (77). Such
a juxtaposing of statements leads us to contemplate the connections between the rebellions of
slaves and proto-feminists during the eighteenth-century. In Clara’s case, the argument does have
merit, but this reading tends to downplay the environment of the Haitian Revolution. Sansay
situates Clara’s proto-feminism alongside the events of the revolution; this position significantly
augments any feminist message in the novel. For an eighteenth-century audience, Clara’s
independence stems from a revolution that would completely destabilize and destroy the new
nation if citizens were not vigilant. Therefore, Clara’s coquetry follows the onset of disease by
suggesting that Clara’s action results in symptoms of revolutionary infection. Thus, fear of the
Haitian rebellion’s spreading impacts how we read Clara, and through this prism, it is difficult to
see her as feminist messenger but more as a victim of the madness caused by the revolt in Haiti.
Clara posits that symptoms of madness brought on by the Haitian revolution will
manifest differently in each person: “All have been in the same terrible fate, but with different
circumstances; all have suffered, but the sufferings of each individual derive their hue from the
disposition of his mind” (113). While Clara’s coquetry becomes her symptom, her husband St.
Louis descends into a demonic rage because of his wife’s flirtations with General Rochambeau.
From Mary’s vantage point, St. Louis is the cause of Clara’s distress, and she forgives her
sister’s coquetry even as she condemns it. St. Louis’ rage demonstrates how the epidemical
madness of the Haitian infects the white American property-owning class. Naturally jealous of
the attentions men pay his wife, once in Haiti, St. Louis cannot control his passions because of
his predisposition to madness or, as Mary calls it, his “old disease” (125). Mary relays that St.
Louis “raved and swore” and dragged Clara by the hair, only to fall into “fits of tenderness” that
are “as bad in the other extreme” (86-87). In one instance of St. Louis’ jealousy, Mary remarks,
“He was trembling with rage, transported with fury, and had more the air of demon than a man”
(84). Being a witness to St. Louis’ fits of both extreme rage and tenderness, Mary laments that
her sister is powerless in the marriage to affect her independence: “How terrible is the fate of a
woman thus dependent on a man who has lost all sense of justice, reason, or humanity” (115).
Sansay’s locating St. Louis’ behavior as a loss of reason shows that, much like Clara, her
husband has fallen prey to madness. Again, against the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution,
those flaws of American sensibility become exacerbated, and each individual is pushed over the
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brink into a form of madness. For St. Louis, his condition speaks of the fears that the epidemic
of the Haitian Revolution will not acknowledge class or gender boundaries. Sansay signals that
for St. Louis and the white owning planter class, money, power, or supposed racial supremacy
will not inoculate them against the disease emanating from Haiti.
Eventually Mary, Clara, and St. Louis flee Haiti because of Dessalines’ brutality.
Arriving in Cape Francois, Clara and St. Louis continue to be under the influence of their
passions. Like General Rochambeau, Clara attracts the attentions of Don Alonzo, which sends
St. Louis into jealous fits of rage. One night, Clara writes to Mary that St. Louis “dragged me
from my bed, said it was his intention to destroy me, and swore that he would render me horrible
by rubbing aqua-fortis in my face” (138). Clara writes to her sister Mary that the threat of
disfigurement and perhaps blindness was enough that it “roused me to madness” (138). Clara
eventually escapes from Don Alonzo and St. Louis, reunites with Mary in Jamaica, and proceeds
from there to Philadelphia. The picture that Mary paints of Clara is that, with time and distance
from St. Louis, her sister will find a better fate for herself. Indeed, at the close of the novel,
Mary decides that instead of castigating her sister for past actions, she will instead hold “that
truant girl to my heart” and forgive her for her coquetry. Mary then writes, “I cannot help loving
her, though I approve not of all she does; but I will blame her fate rather than herself” (152).
Scholars tend to read Mary’s last letter of the novel as a progressive rant against the inherent
conservatism of eighteenth-century patriarchal society. However, while Clara’s fate
encompasses her marriage to St. Louis, it also includes her time in Haiti, where she became
infected with a revolutionary madness which accentuated her coquetry. Indeed, Clara’s time in
Cape Francois, where she suffered another bout of insanity, further demonstrates the anxiety of
revolutionary sentiments spreading.
It is this fear of the epidemical nature of revolutionary madness that the novel gestures
toward in its closing lines. Mary writes to Burr: “Clara and myself will leave this for
Philadelphia, in the course of the ensuing week. There I hope we shall meet you; and if I can
only infuse into your bosom those sentiments for my sister which I glow so warmly in my own,
she will find you a friend and a protector and we may still be happy” (154). Mary signals that
Clara has infected her and wishes to spread these sentiments to Burr. On the surface, the reader
is to assume that Mary means those positive aspects of her sister that were denied her during her
time with St. Louis. However, a larger ambiguity exists here that registers an anxiety over the
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disease that both Clara and Mary bring to the shores of Philadelphia. The revolutionary madness
emanating out from Haiti flies against the reasoned logic of the public sphere that women are
submissive and blacks should be enslaved. The passionate intensity that pushes Clara over the
edge into madness is symptomatic of this radical transformation; at the same time St. Louis
demonstrates what happens within the rationality of the public sphere, dominated by men and
predicated on the oppression of enslaved blacks and women. The progressive nature of these
sentiments and Mary’s seeming acceptance of them at the end does not abrogate the anxiety that
the text as a whole registers about these revolutionary ideas. By using the language of madness
obliquely and strategically, Sansay offers the reader a complex, inconclusive portrait of how one
should understand the revolution in Haiti. If Sansay’s text says anything definitively at all, it is
that one cannot stop the spreading of the madness of egalitarianism; she cautions the reader to be
vigilant as to its effects on the national landscape and on American citizenship.
The intersections of race and the science of madness became more fleshed out as the midnineteenth century asylum and medical reform movements began to take shape. From the
vantage point of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discussions of race were
ignored and, at the same time, crucial to understanding the medical and public perception of
madness. The Haitian Revolution demonstrates that in an era in which America was in the
process of defining their revolution and national identity, madness became a useful tool for both
newspapers and novelists in dissociating the American Revolution from the uprising in Haiti.
Writers used madness as both a weapon and a defensive barrier that protected the wall of
American nationalism from encroachments of foreign influence. This process continued well into
the nineteenth-century as the hard racism of the South and the abolitionism of the North
developed in tandem. A serialized tale found published in Freedom’s Journal in 1828,
“Theresa—A Haytian Tale,” opens up with a description of the revolution by using madness.
The narrator of the tale writes, “During the long and bloody contest, St. Domingo, between the
white man, who flourished the child of sensuality, rioting on the miseries of his slaves had the
sons of Africa, who, provoked to madness and armed themselves against French barbarity”
(639). Even in a newspaper dedicated to Haitian immigration and the rights of African
Americans, the author uses madness to describe the irrationality of slaves’ asserting their rights.
This example is evidence that as America approached its own civil war over race, there were still
writers interested in how the Haitian Revolution impacted American citizenship. Central to that
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conversation was the constant battle between the public sphere’s demands for reason and
rationality, the threat of madness.
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CHAPTER SIX:
CONCLUSION
As the eighteenth-century gave way to the nineteenth, Franklin’s representation of the
insane as a growing threat to American life continued to be reaffirmed. Indeed, in the years
following Rush’s death in 1813, states began to invest more in medical infrastructure to alleviate
the social problems caused by the sick and insane. In addition to this development and as the
professionalization of medical doctors progressed, more American doctors expanded on the
earlier work by Rush. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Jacksonian era, states
and the medical establishment made little progress regarding the social issue of insanity. At the
risk of glossing over the twenty-years between the ending of Haitian Revolution and the
Jacksonian era, I want to focus on the developments of the 1830s because during this time the
issue of insanity progressed following Rush’s work as well as the creation of Pennsylvania State
Hospital.
The Jacksonian era saw a concerted effort by legislatures to increase the number of state
hospitals dedicated to the treatment of the insane, and the medical establishment took the initial
work of Rush and expanded it into a type of social commentary that became a cogent critique of
Jacksonian America. This progression from Rush to the Jacksonian era suggests that the insane
continued in their role as site of political and cultural expressions of citizenship. Moreover,
while this suggestion was not a new development, the extent to which the medical establishment
used the insane to critique America took the mild criticisms that Rush peppered throughout his
work to a new level. Indeed, while Rush was both a social critic and a medical doctor, his work
usually kept the two separate. However, Jacksonian era doctors completely blurred the two to
the existent that medical text on insanity began to resemble cultural and political polemics.
The catalyst for the expansion of the state hospital was the revolution in medicine known,
only obliquely during Rush’s era, as the moral treatment. Arising out of the work Philippe Pinel
in the late eighteenth century, the moral treatment would seek to eradicate the worst practices of
the asylums in Europe. Quite simply, but no less revolutionary, Pinel argued that patients should
be treated with kindness and provided with humane treatment that would lead to their recovery.
American physician Theodoric Beck, in his Inaugural Dissertation on Insanity (1811), gave a
very precise description of the contents of moral treatment (which he calls “moral
management”):
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Moral Management . . . consists in removing patients from their residence to some proper
asylum . . . A system of humane vigilance is adopted. Coercion by blows, stripes, and
chains although sanctioned by the authority of Celsus and Cullen, is now justly laid aside.
The rules most proper to be observed are the following: Convince the lunatics that the
power of the physician and keeper is absolute; have humane attendants, who shall act as
servants to them; never threaten but execute; offer no indignities to them, as they have a
high sense of honour; punish disobedience peremptorily, in the presence of other
maniacs; if unruly, forbid them company of others . . .introduce entertaining books and
conversation, exhilarating music, employment of body in agricultural pursuits . . . and
admit friends under proper restrictions. (27-8).
The moral treatment was a revolution in medical practice that transformed the way asylums
functioned in Europe and slowly began to influence American physicians like Rush. Indeed, the
creation of Pennsylvania State Hospital arose out the space that Pinel created through the moral
treatment. If we examine Beck’s language a little more closely, we see that the immediate effect
of the moral treatment was to replace chains with a tight hierarchical power structure where the
patient was to understand that “the power of the physician and keeper is absolute” (28). David
Rothman remarks that “although asylum physicians insisted that insanity was at its roots a
disease of the brain that called for medical intervention, they also believed that mental illness
often had a psychological or moral etiology, and that a carefully controlled environment was as
essential to the cure as the administration of medical treatment” (4). Indeed, the terms of
treatment set by the physician and enforced by the keeper micro-managed the day-to-day lives of
the insane. For instance, once the moral treatment became part of the philosophy of
Pennsylvania State hospital, the doctors and attendants kept patients on a rigid daily routine:
Affluent patients typically rose at 6 a.m. and had breakfast; after physicians made rounds,
patients went outside for a walk or amused themselves with books and games . . . . Lunch
was followed by a similar period of light activity, including carriage rides . . . and
attendants entertained patients with exercise classes and sporting events. At night,
patients attended lectures . . . concerts and balls.” (Gamwell and Tomes 39).
The key to the success of the moral treatment was that the patients received the stability and
socialization necessary for them to be reintroduced into society once cured. Indeed, because of
this new therapeutic reform movement, doctors began to assert that insanity was entirely curable,
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given the right conditions and staff dedicated to moral therapy. Thus, the movement of doctors,
including Pinel and Rush, subscribing to the “cult of curability” overtook the medical
establishment in Europe and America (Deutsch 130). The expansion of state hospitals in
America could not have happened in the nineteenth century without the belief that these facilities
would cure those who suffered from insanity. American physicians paid close attention to
doctors in Europe touting the percentage of cured insane patients who were discharged from their
hospitals. American physicians watched these developments and cobbled together a treatment
regime that recognized the curability of madness through moral therapy. However, the growing
professionalization of the medical profession gave a premier place in American society to
doctors, so much so that the medical literature of the Jacksonian era were political documents
transforming the insane into symbols of the decline of American values. This transformation
signified that asylums would become “at once laboratories for purifying the national culture and
theaters where this process could be observed” (Reiss3).
Examining the insane as a referendum of the political and cultural moment did little to
transform their identity in the public sphere and intensified insanity’s connections to citizenship.
Patients were constantly monitored in terms of their cultural habits because moral therapy
necessitated the strictest regime of cultural stimulus. For doctors, the American culture was to
blame for the suffering of the insane. It is not hyperbole to say that doctors controlled all aspects
of patients’ lives from their immediate physical needs to their cultural prefaces. Doctors and
medical attendants understood, “the management of patient’s cultural lives—promoting a
healthful variety of correct cultural practices and suppressing activities deemed dangerous—was
a central tool in maintaining an orderly democracy and producing sociable subjects fit to sustain
it” (4). Thus, American doctors understood that therapy was in essence the creation of viable
citizens for public life. This perception was a consequence of medical treatment during the late
eighteenth-century when doctors more readily embraced the political and cultural implications of
their therapeutic methods. This adoption of political and cultural implications lead to the
development of a type of medical writing that, while concerned with the science of the mind and
body, paid close attention to the ways in which the political culture of Jacksonian America drove
certain individuals insane.
In many ways, antebellum America exhibited great strides in American power and
prestige around the world. At this time, an American citizen saw himself, “endowed with
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material and moral riches no people had ever enjoyed—the best government on earth, sustained
by a virtuous and intelligent citizenry; and inexhaustible store of land and resources; and a
population keen to develop them” (Feller 9). Moreover, Jacksonian democracy emphasized the
collective power of the common man in determining the fate of the nation through the emphasis
on—albeit white and male—universal suffrage. In terms of economic development, expansion
was the operative word of the day, and banks, land developers, and manufacturers enjoyed an era
of laissez-faire governmental policy. From the point of view of some commentators, America
was fulfilling its promise to become the envy of the world, and its citizens were moving towards
more prosperity than any previous generation had known. Moreover, nineteenth-century
Americans increasingly were more connected through the building of the canals and roads. In
1817, Senator John Calhoun remarked (480): “On the subject of national power, what can be
more important than a perfect unity in every part, in feelings and sentiments? And what can tend
more powerfully to produce it, than overcoming the effects of distance?” The public response to
these reforms and advances were enthusiastic; newspaper editor Benjamin Russell famously
called the Monroe presidency the “Era of Good Feelings”(3); while in a 1825 speech
commemorating Bunker Hill, Daniel Webster urged the audience to “Let our age be the age of
improvement” (qtd. in Reynolds 51). The sense of national momentum led to a widespread
belief that America was finally realizing its exceptional destiny to serve as an example of the
progress of civilization; however, this progress was not without causalities and its critics.
Serendipitously, the recent expansion in state-sponsored asylums provided the space for both in
the early nineteenth-century.
For Jacksonian era doctors, madness was directly tied to progress of civilization. Edward
Jarvis argued that insanity was the “direct price we pay for civilization. The cause of the one
increase with the developments and results of the other . . . In this opinion all agree” (17). The
rapid expansion of America’s borders, along with economic successes and panic, imbibed
citizens with a sense of instability that could lead to madness. Thus, the doctor in an ideological
bind with their more progressive ideas about the treatment of insanity sat alongside a strong
conservative reaction to the cultural times. As Benjamin Reiss observes, psychiatric doctors
were “were both utopian dreamers and forerunners of today’s cultural scolds” (3). Indeed,
psychiatric texts offered up cultural analysis in addition to discussion about the inner workings of
the mind and body. Thus, nineteenth-century doctors expanded the cultural work that Rush used
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sparingly in his famous text on insanity. While Rush cautioned against the ills of modernity—
avarice and intemperance—nineteenth-century psychiatrists attacked the very essence of
American progress and “condemned the very facets of nineteenth-century life which at least in
retrospect seem most American: high levels of social mobility and political participation,
intellectual and religious freedom and enthusiasm (Rothman 125). In an historical twist,
nineteenth-century doctors came to resemble the religious doctors like Cotton Mather, who used
their platform in medicine as a corrective of communal sins. Indeed, a glance through the
rhetoric of medical text during this time bears a slight resemblance to the religiously inspired
jeremiad tradition that runs through American cultural and literary texts.
The jeremiad was a distinct Puritan discourse that was born out of the frustrating
experience of holding onto religious convictions in a rapidly changing world. For Puritans the
“jeremiad, was a lament over the ways of the world. It decried the sins of ‘the people’—a
community, a nation, a civilization, mankind in general—and warned of God’s wrath to follow”
(Bercovitch 7). Puritan religious leaders used the jeremiad as a disciplinary tool in an effort to
keep the community committed to the Puritan mission. In a way, the jeremiad was a discourse
meant to reemphasize the status of Puritan citizenship and provided an opportunity to reaffirm
the duties of the Puritan faith. Sacvan Bercovitch explains that the goal of the Puritan jeremiad
“was to direct an imperiled people of God toward the fulfillment of their destiny, to guide them
individually toward salvation, and collectively toward the American city of God” (9). Because
the American mission stemmed from the theological idea of America’s unique mission in the
world, the jeremiad tradition continued long after the end of the New England colonies. The
reason for the jeremiad’s longevity is that it was dedicated to creating and sustaining community
consensus about America and its origin. Bercovitch argues that “the power of consensus is
nowhere more evident than in the symbolic meaning that the jeremiads infused into the term
America” (176). The continual calls of Federalists and Anti-Federalists to stay true to the
Revolution were but another variation of the jeremiad as they were concerned with community
declension and its impact on the exceptional myth of America. When the reforms of the
Jacksonian era that sought to breakdown certain social barriers was coupled with the instability
of market capitalism, Anti-Jacksonians used the jeremiad idiom in a multiplicity of different
genres to suggest that America was losing its way. The asylum physicians used their positions
and audiences to level pointed criticisms about the decline of America during the Jacksonian era.
164
The jeremiad genre is clearly at work in the pronouncements by William Rockwell that
“perhaps there is no country in which” insanity “prevails to so great an extent as in these United
States” (qtd. in Rothman 113). Asylum physicians were trained to view insanity as a function of
civilization, and with the rapid progress of America both domestic and internationally, there
existed the belief that America placed too many burdens on the common citizen. David
Rothman provides a succinct overview of the pressures facing the Jacksonian citizen:
The style of life in the new republic seemed willfully designed to produce mental illness.
Everywhere they looked, they found chaos and disorder, a lack of fixity and stability.
The community’s inherited traditions and procedures were dissolving, leaving incredible
stresses and strains. The anatomical implications were clear: the brain received
innumerable abuses, was weakened, an inevitably succumbed to disease. (115).
There was very real feeling amongst asylum physicians that the recent progress of the nation
placed an undue burden on citizens, which infused their medical jeremiads with moral clarity and
force. Edward Jarvis utilized the jeremiad idiom to particular effect, when criticizing the
democratic fervor characteristic of Jacksonian America: “In this country where no son is
necessarily confined to the work or employment of his father, but all the fields of labor, of profit,
or of honor are open to whomsoever will put on the harness” inevitably allows for the “ambition
of some . . . to aim at that which they cannot reach, to strive for more than they can grasp” (1417). In this excerpt, Jarvis attacks the twin pillars of Jacksonian American—the impulse towards
great social mobility as well as the capitalistic impulse to acquire as much as one can. This
foundation places the citizen in a position where there are no limits to their drive for position,
money, and power. Through Anti-Jacksonian sentiments, Jarvis makes democratic mobility and
capitalism the main catalysts of insanity. Thus, because of the inability to realize a stable
existence where society checks the desires of its citizens, Jarvis argues that for the insane “their
mental powers are strained to their utmost tension; they labor in agitation . . . their minds stagger
under the disproportionate burden” (17). Repeatedly, doctors referenced the rise of greater
democratic freedom as the main catalyst for madness and their beliefs about the government’s
relationship to its citizens bears a striking resemblance to the Federalists of the late eighteenthcentury. Their conservative impulse, to preserve the existing social order and the elite’s position
within it, meant that the insane represented the consequence of specific Jacksonian ideas about
the greater involvement of citizens in the affairs of the nation.
165
Even by the 1850s, doctors still maintained that democracy plagued everyday citizens.
Physician William Sweetser argued:
Our own peculiar circumstances as a people are especially favorable to the growth of
ambition. Hardly as yet emerged from our infancy, with a widely extended territory, and
an almost unparalleled national increase, with so much to be accomplished, so much in
anticipation, every one finds some part to act; everyone sees bright visions in the future,
and every one therefore becomes inflated with a proud sense of his individual
importance. The field of advancement, moreover, is alike free to all, our democratical
institutions inviting each citizen, however subordinate may be his station, to join in the
pursuit of whatever distinctions our form of society can bestow. Hence as might be
expected, the demon of unrest, the luckless offspring of ambition, haunts us all, agitating
our breasts with discontent, and racking us with the constant and wearing anxiety of what
we call bettering our station.” (248).
Sweetser essentially attacks America’s exceptionalism as the driving force behind mental illness.
Moreover, the very concept of citizenship is challenged here as well; Sweetser argues that
America has grown too fast, and because of these developments, the average citizen is left at the
mercy of an unstable nation. By witnessing America grow, citizens learn that they too can
realize social mobility and wealth, and their mental energy is exerted in trying to attain these
Jacksonian promises. Thus, for Sweetser, the promises themselves cause individuals to become
insane, and thus the American citizen must recognize the importance of national growth while at
the same time realize that most citizens are alienated from the benefits of national progress.
Indeed, even the mere fact that citizens can vote caused enormous consternation for asylum
doctors; Isaac Ray argued, “Almost every man has a voice in the affairs of the town, in the
affairs of the country, in the affairs of the state, in the affairs of the nation, and they require much
of his time and attention” (254). For Ray, this opportunity was too much for a citizen to bear,
and thus the nation placed a heavy burden on the individual mind to keep track of local, state,
and national matters. Thus, the very tropes we associate with American exceptionalism—liberty,
freedom, and democracy—consign citizens to the fate of insanity. Taken together these medical
jeremiads destroy the idealized image of America while also denying citizens any agency to
enjoy any of the opportunity provided by national growth.
166
While the reform movements of the Jacksonian Era did much to alleviate the physical
suffering of the insane, it also consigned them into the role of national scapegoat. The patients
of Pennsylvania State Hospital, Massachusetts General, or Eastern State Hospital represented the
failure of modern America to keep in place those social boundaries that provided stability. In the
public sphere, the insane were further marginalized as symbol of Jacksonian democracy in
excess. The implication of this marginalization meant that insane were “imagined as sources of
psychic and cultural renewal” and that “asylums in practice left a legacy of stigmatization of the
insane and deepening cultural fissures in the national fabric” (Reiss 3). As America moved
closer and close to the 1860s, these cultural fissures between the conservatives and Jacksonians
would continue to the rip the country apart. Despite the eventual decline of the exclusively
Jacksonian politician, the sentiments behind direct democracy, especially in the area of race
relations, meant that there were two irreconcilable factions within American culture. The asylum
was dedicated to curing America of its excess by using the insane as powerful symbol of the
consequence of progress. Thus, the asylum “was not just a space for restoring the rationality of
the insane; it was also an institution devoted to the purification and rationalization of culture”
(8). Yet, while the asylum reform movement sought to rehabilitate citizens who were responding
to the progress of the antebellum age, novelists and essayists used the insane as a way to critique
not the progress itself but how that progress continually fell short of expectations. The literature
during the asylum reform movements, at times, gestured towards the conservative critiques
leveled by medical doctors. However, it is difficult to argue that the goals of novelists, essayists,
and doctors were one in the same. American writers, at times, eschewed the cultural and
political conservatism of the medical establishment but approached the insane in much the same
ways.
The debates over moral therapy and the treatment of the insane did find its way into the
literature of the time period. One of the most succinct, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The System of Dr.
Tarr and Professor Fether” (1845) offers a humorous but also deft commentary on the
relationship between the public sphere and the insane during the era of moral therapy. While
traveling in France (home of the moral therapy), Poe’s unnamed protagonist decides to visit
Maison de Santé to meet the superintendent Monsieur Maillard. Maillard tells his visitor about
the moral therapy, which he derisively calls “the system of soothing” (643). Within this system,
the insane are to be “humored” and the duty of the attendants was that they “contradicted no
167
fancies which entered the brains of the mad” (644). For instance, if an inmate thought that he
was a chicken, under the system of soothing, it was the asylum staff’s job to treat the patient as if
they were indeed a chicken. The narrator tours the facilities and is eventually invited to dinner
where the guest included “people of rank—certainly of high breeding” (645). Over the course of
the meal, the narrator suspects that the people whom he is dining with are insane themselves.
The dinner conversation revolves around each person telling a different story about a mad patient
who suffered from delusions; one person tells a story of a patient who thought he was a bottle of
champagne while another regals the group with the story of a man who “fancied himself a teapot” (647). By the middle of dinner, the narrator begins to understand that the guests are in fact
telling stories of their own madness; he also wonders who exactly is yelling and screaming in the
cells. At this point, Maillard tells the story of a lunatic who took over the asylum by swapping
the places of the attendants with those of the insane. Maillard relates that a particular patient
“had taken it into his head that he had invented a better system of government than any ever
heard of before—of lunatic government” (653). One night the patient, with the help of the rest
of the inmates, overthrows the attendants and throws them into the cells. Maillard’s story is
abruptly ended when the attendants finally escape from the cells and burst into the dining room
(showing signs that they had been tarred and feathered). At this moment, the narrator realizes
that Maillard is the rebellious lunatic and that he has been dining with the lunatics of the asylum
the entire time.
Poe’s short story is meant to be comical, but it does so by raising very real concerns
about the relationship between the mad and sane that we have seen throughout this dissertation.
Poe defines the lunatics’ method of treatment as a type of government; this phrase registers the
fluidity with which the insane are described at particular national moments. The ability of the
Maillard to switch places seamlessly with the attendants demonstrates the reoccurrence of
Mather’s belief that in essence we are all insane, and the separation of the sane from the insane
results from the changing will of the majority. That is, as the definitions of citizenship adjust to
new national realities so too will the traits of insanity. Whereas the Puritan community defined
madness through the efforts of a minister resisting the devil, nineteenth-century doctors defined
it along the lines of the rise in capitalism and the rise of democracy. Poe also demonstrates that
as the times change so too does the medical response to insanity; Maillard references the work of
Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether who are supposedly to have thought that the attendants and the
168
lunatics swapping places made for good therapy. In a way, they were correct; the lunatics were
“cured” of their madness but only by swapping their position with others in the public sphere.
Insanity then becomes defined in terms of whoever is incarcerated rather than who is insane.
Thus, Poe argues against the curability of madness, not from the position of medicine, but
culturally, because the American citizen is always on the brink of madness, and the duties of
citizenship will tells us who needs to separated and kept out of the public sphere.
Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers would continually link American experience
and citizenship to insanity because—as I have shown—the language and figure of the insane
were inseparable from the discussions of politics and culture. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
insanity is central to the experiences of Chillingworth (236), Hester Prynne (171), and
Dimmesdale (275) as a way of arguing—much like Charles Brockden Brown in Wieland—that
madness is the language by which we understand our history, and the effects of society on the
psychology of citizens in the center and on the margins. Herman Melville further explored the
slippery difference between madness and reason; in Moby Dick, Ahab is “madness maddened . . .
That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself” (162). The novel’s narrator Ishmael
argues “Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled,
it may have but become transfigured into still a subtler form” (171). The implication of Ahab’s
madness is that he is actually quite sane in his madness, his madness is defined by those who are
outside of his desires and ambition. Still others like Harriet Beecher Stowe would link slavery
with the figure of madness to demonstrate the effects of a brutal system on human beings; in the
novel Cassay “broke into raving insanity” at the thought of her brutal overseer Legree (389).
Again and again, the figure of the insane reappeared to continue the exploration of American
citizenship and experience, as best understood, and its relationship to those deemed insane at the
time. The work of eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers continually reaffirms that the
epidemic of madness is a historical epidemic, one that cannot be severed from the unique
experience of the American citizen.
169
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Matthew Price was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He received his B.A. degree in English
from the East Carolina University in Spring 2003. That following fall he enrolled at the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he was awarded a M.A. in English and wrote
his Master’s thesis on Michel Foucault and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In fall
2006 he began his Ph.D. at Florida State University focusing on early American literature with a
particular emphasis on the ideas of citizenship, disease, and madness.
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