SOURCE: Bray, Matthew. “Helen Maria Williams and Edmund Burke: Radical Critique and Complicity.” Eighteenth-Century Life 16, no. 2 (May 1992): 1-20.

[In the following essay, Bray explores the contradictions in Letters Written in France, contending that although most critics concentrate on its similarity to the sentimental novel, the work is more heavily influenced by its author's association with English dissenters and was written as a response to Edmund Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution.]

As several critics point out, Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790¹—Helen Maria Williams' eyewitness, epistolary account of revolutionary France during the euphoric months following the Fête de la Fédération—is a work containing pronounced contradictions. Although it celebrates the Revolution's transformative effects, Letters Written in France tends to advocate a “noble equality” of sentiment² which preserves intact the class hierarchy and the subordinate status of women that existed before the Revolution. Two explanations have been offered for the disparity between Williams' rhetoric—her joyous declarations of almost apocalyptic change in France—and her simultaneous reification of the status quo. The first explanation is straightforwardly ad feminam. Since Williams was an overly emotional woman of rather shallow intellect, this argument goes, contradictions in her work can be attributed to her political naiveté. M. Ray Adams declares, for example, that “seeing life about her and seeing it whole was precluded by her disposition”—that is, her tendency toward “emotional contagion” rather than “intellectual conviction.”³ This argument depends, though, on several self-conscious declarations by Williams of her lack of political intent, statements that were virtually clichés required of women writers in order to avoid charges of impropriety.⁴ The second, and more tenable, explanation suggests that Williams' ideological blind spots stem from her extensive employment of the conventions of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel in rendering the Revolution desirable for her English audience. Because the sentimental novel emphasizes the primacy of feeling over reason, these two explanations are often presented in tandem.⁵

While still acknowledging the powerful hold that the sentimental novel had over Williams' political imagination, I would suggest a different explanation for the ideological tensions at work in Letters Written in France, one that avoids the immemorial image of Williams as a caricature of overwrought sensibility. Most generally, Letters from France should be understood as the response of a strong supporter of English dissenters to the recent developments in France and to the dismaying English events of 1789 and 1790, including the failure of Parliament to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. More specifically, Williams embarks upon a sustained critique of the ideas of Edmund Burke, who not only engineered the defeat of this repeal measure, but also emerged as the archenemy of both the French Revolution and English dissent in 1790.⁶ In particular, Williams attempts to discredit Burke's antirevolutionary stance by critiquing the political ramifications of the opposition between sublimity and beauty that he sets up in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In revaluing Burke's aesthetic theory, however, Williams inadvertently produces a text that closely resembles Burke's own concerted effort in Reflections to rethink his political-aesthetic system, not only in its aesthetic determinations but also in its representation of the glorified, but nevertheless passive, role of women within this ideal society. After tracing Williams' complex response to Burke, I will conclude by situating Letters Written in France within the gendered discourse of English radicalism of the early 1790s.

I

Above all else, Letters Written in France is a tract strongly influenced by English dissent, a fact that has been obscured by the disproportionate attention that critics have paid to Williams' declarations of apoliticalness and to the work's novelistic, epistolary framework. Williams, like William Godwin, was a protégé of the Unitarian minister Dr. Andrew Kippis, a leading dissenter and prominent member of the Revolution Society. Throughout the late 1780s and early 1790s, she was in close contact with several other important dissenters, including Thomas Christie, with whom she collaborated on volume 3 of Letters from France. Williams herself emerged as an influential force among European radicals during the 1790s. Her Paris residence became an important destination and meeting place for English expatriate radicals and Girondins after she returned to France in 1791. In late 1795 and early 1796, her vindication of the Girondins against “those English friends of freedom who dared to besmirch their memory” in the first volume of Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France (1795) inspired The Analytical Review to reaffirm its commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution.⁷

Letters Written in France sounds all of the major demands of English rational dissent, calling for the abolition of the slave trade, for parliamentary reform, and for freedom of conscience in religious matters.⁸ It does so, moreover, in a manner that explicitly links the French revolutionary project with the dissenting reform program. Thus Williams not only informs her readers that Mirabeau has “proposed the abolition of the slave-trade to the National Assembly,” she also implores the English Parliament not “to doze over this affair as they have hitherto done” and allow the French to have “the glory of setting us an example, which it will then be our humble employment to follow” (p. 48). Further on, she points out that the National Assembly pays its members a living wage, insuring that its seats are ouverte aux talents, and has instituted minimal property requirements for its members and for French voters and electors. She does this not merely to praise the French system, but also to suggest that a similar system would improve the English Parliament, where “a candidate for a seat … often spends many thousand pounds, and … makes a whole county drunk for a week, merely to enjoy the privilege of serving his country without pay” (p. 58). By celebrating the positive results of the Revolution, Williams affirms the necessarily transformative effects that proposed dissenting reforms will have if instituted in England. Thus, in the words of Anthony Lincoln, “the French Revolution and its ideology came as a confirmation rather than an inspiration” to the dissenting circles in which Williams moved (p. 2).

For Edmund Burke, however, the French Revolution illustrated, in violent tableaux, precisely the opposite case: dissenting reforms create chaos and anarchy when put into practice. And Burke vehemently makes this point well before the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France on 1 November 1790: both his “Speech on the Army Estimates” (9 February 1790) and his speech opposing the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (2 March 1790) use revolutionary France as a damning example of the wrongheadedness of dissenting reforms. In the latter speech, for instance, Burke asserts that “the rising race of dissenters” are “imbibing” the same principles that led the French to “destroy the establishment” of the French church. Given their antiestablishment mood, Burke speculates that allowing the dissenting clergy to hold office by removing the religious tests will empower them to enact the same “plunder of the [church's] wealth and revenues” that had occurred in France (“Debate on Mr. Fox's Motion,” pp. 433-37).

As a supporter of dissenting aims, Williams could not and did not ignore Burke's increasingly influential attempts to sway public and parliamentary opinion against the French Revolution and dissenting reforms in 1790. Letters Written in France is, ultimately, an intensely forensic work: Burke places the Revolution on trial in 1790 and Williams steps forward to defend it. Ascertaining whether Williams was responding specifically to Reflections is, however, a difficult task because Williams does not mention Reflections explicitly and because most of the points that Burke makes in that work were either common currency in the British press (such as his outrage over the “raid” on Marie Antoinette's bedchamber on 6 October 1789) or were made in his earlier, well-publicized speeches.⁹ Moreover, Letters Written in France appeared within four weeks of the publication of Reflections, a period of time which did not prevent Mary Wollstonecraft from offering a considered reply to Burke in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, but which may nonetheless suggest that Williams did not have time to respond in depth to points Burke makes in his work.¹⁰

If, however, we cannot pinpoint with certainty which of Burke's antirevolutionary speeches and works of 1790 Williams was addressing, we can identify the strategies that she employed in critiquing him. Her first strategy is strictly defensive. Upon returning to England in September 1790, she hears over and over again in the streets of London a Burkean perception of contemporary France, where there are “nothing but crimes, assassinations, torture, and death. I am told that every day witnesses a conspiracy; that every town is the scene of a massacre; that every street is blackened with a gallows, and every highway deluged with blood” (p. 217). Williams refutes, point by point, the individual assertions Burke and others make about France, which, collectively, allow such a sordid picture to be painted.

Burke, for instance, complains of the French leaders' tendency to become lost in metaphysical formulations of the abstract rights of man; as a result of their singlemindedness, they have “Without opening up one new avenue to the understanding … succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart.”¹¹ Williams refutes this characterization: “The leaders of the French Revolution are men well acquainted with the human heart. They have not trusted merely to the force of reason, but have studied to interest in their cause the most powerful passions of human nature” (pp. 61-62). If Burke characterizes the members of the National Assembly as “comedians of a fair before a riotous audience … of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame” (Reflections, p. 119), Williams acknowledges that the “meetings are tumultuous,” but defends this tumult by declaring “of how little consequence is this impetuosity … if the decrees which are passed are beneficial” (pp. 44-45). She narrates the controversial events of 6 October 1789 without any of Burke's hyperbole. Instead, she reminds her readers of the crowd's reasonableness and of the free acquiescence of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to their people's will. When LaFayette implored the poissardes to spare the king's Gardes de Corps they did so without reluctance; when Louis accepted the national cockade upon his arrival in Paris, he “was received with the loudest acclamations” (p. 86).¹² Among the other justifications of the Revolution that may be responses to Burke in Letters Written in France are Williams' defense of the Revolution's early violence (pp. 81-83); of the revolutionary crowds' sober conduct (p. 30); and of the validity of the effort to frame a new French constitution (p. 68).¹³

In these defenses of the Revolution one cannot, as I suggested earlier, assert with confidence that Williams was responding solely to Burke since many of the anti-French perceptions that she attempts to refute were current in the British press well before Burke went public with his anti-Revolution, antidissent program. Still, Williams does defend the Revolution against two specific attacks that were, from all accounts, unique to Burke.¹⁴ First, in what seems to be an implicit response to Burke's condemnation of the Revolution's ecclesiastical policy, Williams lauds the recent changes in religious practice. The Revolution has promoted religious tolerance, not atheism, as Burke suggests.¹⁵ In the small town of Negre-Pelisse, for example, Catholics and Protestants received the National Oath, after which they sang Te Deum together. Of this incident Williams remarks:

Surely religious worship was never performed more truly in the spirit of the Divine Author of Christianity, whose great precept is that of universal love! Surely the incense of praise was never more likely to ascend to Heaven, than when the Catholics and Protestants of Negre-Pelisse offered it together!

(pp. 63-64)

This state-sponsored union of an oppressed religious minority and a formerly dominant majority could not help but give English readers a tantalizing preview of the religious tolerance and coexistence that the abolishment of the Test and Corporation Acts would usher in. Her use of concrete examples to illustrate the salutary effects of the French Revolution on actual religious practice is, moreover, unusual among respondents to Burke, most of whom emphasized rather abstractly the benefits of toleration and freedom of conscience.¹⁶ In a similar vein, Williams also opposes Burke's pathetic characterization of the ecclesiastical French émigrés as lost souls, forced to wander the face of Europe bereft of their offices and dignity.¹⁷ She points out that there are some émigrés, such as the son of the bishop of Sens, who enthusiastically support the Revolution (pp. 222-23).

These two responses, coupled with the sheer number of Burke's arguments that Williams appears to address (even if they were not unique to Burke), seem significant. The hypothesis that Letters Written in France is a response to Burke—one as thoroughgoing as Paine's or Wollstonecraft's—finds more definitive confirmation, however, in Williams' exhaustive theoretical response to Burke, in which she critiques the sociopolitical ramifications of the opposition he sets up in Philosophical Enquiry between sublimity and beauty.

II

About halfway through Letters Written in France, Williams casually signals her awareness of Burke's aesthetic theory when, after contrasting the “narrow, dark, and dirty” streets of Paris to the “broad, airy, light, and elegant” streets of London, she declares that “London has, therefore, most of the beautiful, and Paris of the sublime, according to Mr. Burke's definition of these qualities” (p. 73).¹⁸ Williams, however, begins dealing with Burke's definition of the sublime and the beautiful implicitly from the very first letter of her work. Following a conventional, Burkean definition, Williams aims in her first two letters to convey that the Fête de la Fédération celebrated on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was “the most sublime spectacle, which, perhaps, was ever represented on the theatre of this earth” (p. 2). First, she describes how the Overture to Te Deum, performed in the cathedral of Notre Dame,

by exciting ideas of trouble and inquietude, prepared the mind for a recitative which affected the audience in a very powerful manner, by recalling the images of that consternation and horror which prevailed in Paris on the 13th of July, 1789, the day before that on which the Bastille was taken.

(p. 3)

Here Williams employs a strictly Burkean vocabulary to portray the event's sublimity. Burke emphasizes that those passions which force us to fear for our well-being, which invoke pain or danger, or both, form the basis of our response to the sublime.¹⁹ That the Overture caused the audience to feel again the dread that they originally experienced when the king's troops descended on Paris and advanced toward the newly formed National Assembly was thus a measure of its sublimity. The chilling middle section of the Overture climaxed when “the sound of a loud and heavy bell mixed itself with this awful concert.” The bell was an imitation of the alarm bells that were sounded throughout Paris on 13 July, which, “it is said, produced a confusion of sounds inexpressibly horrible.” The pealing of a loud bell conforms to Burke's criteria for sublimity in sound—loudness and suddenness (Philosophical Enquiry, p. 82)—and, indeed, the audience was, according to Williams, “frozen with terror” until the bell ceased (p. 4). Storming the Bastille and forming the Federation were actions that produced a sublime effect, difficult feats that, in Burke's words, “required immense force and labour to effect.” In Letter II, Williams provides her readers with many more stock elements from Burke's catalog of the sublime: the vastness of the procession on the Champs de Mars; the discharge of cannons; and the sudden transition from darkness to light as the sun emerges from behind clouds when the queen raises the dauphin in her arms to the cheers of the approving crowd (p. 13).²⁰

This extended report of the procession on the Champs de Mars forms a master narrative for Williams, a langue through which she interprets nearly all of the events of the Revolution. The movement presented at the end of this report—from darkness to light, from terror to pleasure, from, in short, the sublime to the beautiful—reverberates throughout the rest of Letters Written in France. The celebrations that took place on the site of the liberated Bastille are interesting to her precisely because they reenact this narrative: the Gothic ruins “of that execrable fortress were suddenly transformed, as if with a wand of necromancy, into a scene of beauty and of pleasure” (p. 21). Williams characterizes the tumultuous proceedings of the National Assembly as “the confusion of mingled elements … [from which] the new constitution arises, like the beauty and order of nature” (pp. 44-45). Just as the Revolution transformed the site of the Bastille from a sublime, horrible scene into a site of beauty, so too will beauty emerge from the turbulent constitutional debates. As we have seen, Williams praises the religious effects of the Revolution, and these too are emplotted in terms of her master narrative. Under the ancien régime, religion was dark and repressive. Of the Carmelite convent in Rouen, Williams writes: “religion, which was meant to be a source of happiness in this world, as well as in the next, wears an aspect of the most gloomy horror” (p. 117). For her, the banishment of La Vallière, Louis XIV's mistress, to the Carmelite convent in Paris is a central symbol of the terror, fear, and arbitrary application of law in which prerevolutionary France was mired (much the same way that the raid on Marie Antoinette's bedchamber becomes a key symbol for revolutionary anarchy in Reflections); her banishment completely extinguished “a mind that seems to have been formed for virtue” (p. 76). After the Revolution, however, formerly separated people, such as the Catholics and Protestants of Negre-Pelisse, are united as the social and religious relationships based on sublime fear and terror dissolve.

Williams continues to narrate the progression of France from tyranny to liberty as an aesthetic movement from sublimity to beauty throughout Letters Written in France; for her, revolutionary France has become a land “dressed in additional beauty beneath the genial smile of Liberty” (p. 217). In presenting the Revolution as beautiful, however, she carefully attends to the secondary status beauty receives in Burke's theory, arguing in the end against power relationships based on the politics of the sublime. Burke asserts in Philosophical Enquiry that the drive for self-preservation, the concomitant of the masculine sublime, with its attendant passions of pain and danger, is more powerful than the desire for social interaction (whether in “general society” or in “the society of the sexes”), the concomitant of feminine beauty, with its attendant passions of life, health, and pleasure (pp. 38-41). In Burke's aesthetic schema, beauty is scrupulously separated from the “manly” sublime qualities of virtue, “fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like,” for any attempt to associate beauty with virtue “has a strong tendency to confound our ideas of things.” This is so because “we submit to what we admire [as sublime], but we love what submits to us [as beautiful],” and thus:

Those which engage our hearts, which impress us with a sense of loveliness, are the softer virtues; easiness of temper, compassion, tenderness and liberality. … Those persons who creep into the hearts of most people … are never persons of shining qualities, nor strong virtues.

(p. 111)

Because men love what submits to them, to what will not threaten to overpower them, women try to embody “weakness and imperfection”: “they learn to lisp, to totter in their walks, to counterfeit weakness, even sickness” (pp. 110-11).

Williams, like Mary Wollstonecraft, argues that one can love and respect simultaneously, that, in fact, these two feelings are not mutually exclusive, but rather necessarily connected.²¹ For her, the Revolution is beautiful because it is based on mutual respect and love rather than fear and submission. In her discussion of Henry the Fourth, she critiques (playing on, in part, Burke's discussion of Alexander the Great as a figure with whose distresses, after the ruin of Macedon, one sympathizes greatly [Philosophical Enquiry, p. 45]), the type of conjunction between ruling, sublimity, fear, and submission that Burke posits:

Nothing has afforded me more delight, since I came to France, than the honours which are paid to my favorite hero, Henry the Fourth, whom I prefer to all the Alexanders and Fredericks that ever existed. They may be terribly sublime, if you will, and have great claims on my admiration; but as for my love, all that portion of it which I bestow on heroes, is already in Henry's possession.

(p. 93)

The connection between love and virtue that Williams attempts to establish is implicit in the passage about Henry the Fourth, but it finds an earlier, more striking expression in the case of an aristocrat's eldest son who presents himself before the National Assembly while they are deliberating on a bill to eliminate primogeniture. The aristocrat's son implores the Assembly to pass the law immediately so that his dying father will know that “all his children were secure of a provision”—that his younger sons would come into an equal inheritance. This man's unselfish plea causes Williams to exclaim:

If you are not affected by this circumstance, you have read it with very different feelings from those with which I have written it: but if, on the contrary, you have fallen in love with this young Frenchman, do not imagine that your passion is singular, for I am violently in love with him myself.

(p. 60)

Critics have noted the influence of Sterne and Rousseau on Letters Written in France;²² at this point, one might also mention Richardson, for Williams' letters to her unnamed and generalized female English correspondent bear a striking resemblance to Harriet Byron's impassioned accounts of Sir Charles Grandison's virtuous actions to Lucy Selby, not only in the two examples mentioned above but also in her admiration of Mirabeau as a National Assembly member who has a “very powerful claim on my partiality” because of his abolitionist sentiments (pp. 47-48).²³

Williams continues to value love and pleasure over fear and submission throughout the rest of her work: “Liberty appears in France adorned with the freshness of youth, and is loved with the ardour of passion” (p. 71). As this statement suggests, the primary human relationship for Williams, the one that forms the paradigm for her political discussions, is heterosexual love. While Burke presents the relationship between parent and child (usually between father and son) as primary, and heterosexual love as secondary, Williams valorizes heterosexual love as the true basis of society, with the sublime of the father-son relationship as secondary. This is, in a sense the point of Williams' extended account of the du Fossé family that concludes Letters Written in France, a factual account that Williams asserts has “an air of romance” and that reads like an abridged sentimental novel. In this account, the sublime Baron du Fossé, who “preferred the exercise of domestic tyranny to the blessings of social happiness, and chose rather to be dreaded than beloved” (p. 123), persecutes his son, Augustin Thomas, for marrying and remaining married to Monique Coquerel, the daughter of an untitled farmer, against his wishes. To escape persecution, the couple flees to England. With the advent of the Revolution and the baron's death, which occur almost simultaneously, they are able to return to France and live legally, openly, and happily under the new government. The son's decision not to heed his father's demands and to remain devoted to his wife, whom he married for love, shows his allegiance to the new values that, for Williams, the Revolution inaugurates.

As several critics have noted, the man or woman of sensibility became, even while extolled, the exception more than the rule in the societies depicted by English sentimental novelists in the years approaching the French Revolution. The belief that people are “naturally capable of acting benevolently if given the chance” came under great strain as both novelists and philosophers began to doubt seriously whether the appropriate social conditions could ever exist to nurture widespread benevolence.²⁴ R. F. Brissenden points out that the French Revolution seemed to provide a great, sudden cure for the malaise of sensibility; at one stroke, a society was formed in which benevolence, love, and pity could flourish unimpeded.²⁵ This belief electrified no English writer as much as it did Williams (who was herself a sentimental novelist), for whom the Revolution was a kind of apocalypse of love, pleasure, and sympathy experienced by all who viewed it. It is, Williams strongly implies, only those people, such as Edmund Burke, who have not witnessed the Revolution firsthand who do not understand its transformative effects.²⁶

III

It would appear that Williams has succeeded in championing the Revolution as a harbinger of universal love, a position established through her reversal of Burke's opposition between sublimity and beauty. But this is not the whole story because both Burke, in setting up the opposition sublimity/beauty, and Williams, by reversing this opposition, create a situation where their devalued term, whether beauty or sublimity, maintains a covert supplementary power, a power that threatens to undermine the authoritative function of the privileged term within their systems. Furthermore, Williams' attempt to come to terms with sublimity's stubborn presence within her revised, “beautiful” theory of politics mirrors exactly Burke's own attempt in Reflections to deal with beauty's supplementarity within the sublime political system he established in Philosophical Enquiry.

As Frances Ferguson formulates it, Burke creates a binary opposition in Philosophical Enquiry in which his privileged term, sublimity, cannot contain the supplementarity of beauty, his devalued term. According to Ferguson, Burke values sublimity because it

represents a kind of opting out of the pressures and dangers of the social, because the sublime elevates one's individual relations with that mountain (or whatever natural object one perceives as sublime) above one's relationships to other human beings.²⁷

Burke, however, does inject the sublime into social relationships, where it both theoretically sanctions and serves as a mark for any existing social hierarchies. If he clearly associates pain with self-preservation and sublimity on the one hand, and pleasure with society and beauty on the other, he also tends to make “general society” the domain of sublimity and “the society of the sexes” the province of beauty when he discusses “society.” In “general society,” therefore, it is natural (“strongly inhere[s] in our constitution[s]”) for one to feel “timidity” in the face of “Sovereign power.” Indeed, Burke declares that he knows “nothing of the sublime which is not some modification of power.”²⁸ By making this assertion, by declaring that “we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us,” and by characterizing the father-son relationship as sublime (p. 113; on the father-son relationship, see p. 111), Burke begins to employ the sublime not to opt out of the social, as Ferguson would have it, but to affirm a particular, patriarchal vision of society. The use of the sublime to mark and, by implication, to sanction established social hierarchies (man/woman, father/son, king/subject) allows one, furthermore, to perceive the power relationships within these hierarchies as themselves “natural.”

This qualification of Ferguson's thesis, while significant, does not, however, alter the fundamental point that she makes regarding the role of beauty in Philosophical Enquiry: “With its commitment to companionable resemblance between humans,” beauty clouds the clear-cut, hierarchical power relations that sublimity authorizes. That is, the ability of beauty to mask or distort the operations of power in the social relationships that sublimity otherwise so sharply defines threatens, as Ferguson points out, to disrupt the notion that these relationships can be defined in the clear-cut, “natural” way that Burke desires. In fact, despite sublimity's ostensible primacy, beauty becomes in a significant way more powerful in Philosophical Enquiry because it works insidiously, behind the scenes, causing one to be “flattered” unawares into doing something rather than sublimely coerced through fear “into compliance.” Thus, the collapse of Burke's opposition, sublimity/beauty, suggest that all power relationships may be, simultaneously, humanly constructed, unstable, and deceptive rather than sublimely self-evident (“The Sublime of Edmund Burke,” pp. 80-82).

If Burke cannot adequately contain the potentially disruptive effects of beauty in Philosophical Enquiry, neither can he keep under wraps the atypical effects of its attendant, romantic love. Indeed, it is in his conception of “the society of the sexes” that Burke intimates a powerful relationship built on something besides hierarchy, fear, dominance, and submission. Although Burke posits as the norm the type of love that involves a man's attraction to a woman for her beauty (read: her inferiority), he also includes, as an exception to this rule, the male lover whose feelings for his beloved approach “madness,” who feels that he and his lover are as one. The pleasure received from such a relationship is so intense that to lose his beloved causes him to experience what Burke otherwise deems impossible, “a positive pain”: “if you listen to the complaints of a forsaken lover, you observe, that he insists largely on the pleasures which he enjoyed, or hoped to enjoy, and on the perfection of the object of his desires; it is the loss which is always uppermost in his mind.” In all other situations, whether in the domain of “general society” or of “the society of the sexes,” a man does not dwell on the past pleasures he has lost, but rather on his present pain: “When men describe in what manner they are affected by pain and danger; they do not dwell on the pleasure of health and the comfort of security, and then lament the loss of these satisfactions: the whole turns upon the actual pains and horrors which they endure” (p. 40). In this way, the instinct for self-preservation (the basis of the sublime) always prevails over pleasure (the basis of the beautiful) because it is stronger. Burke tends to write off pleasure as significantly less affecting than pain, and so when he runs up against the case of the forsaken lover, he tries to dismiss him as abnormal, a deviant exception to the operations of pain and pleasure. Still, Burke cannot deny that the forsaken lover does dwell on these pleasures more than he attends to his present “pains and horrors.” In this case, pleasure is stronger than pain, and the beautiful overcomes the sublime.

Just as the disruptive effects of beauty threaten to disrupt the clearly defined, sublime, hierarchical relationships that Burke posits in Philosophical Enquiry, so too does sublimity imperil the beautiful social relationships that Williams describes in Letters Written in France. The sublime produces for her both a desire for revenge and a dangerous eroticism, effects that she attempts to contain when, almost irrepressibly, they crop up in her text. Williams laments, for instance, the “ferocious revenge” that characterized the early days of the Revolution, a ferocity symbolized by the lanterne, the lamppost from which “the first victims of the popular fury were sacrificed.” Contemplating those who were hanged at the lanterne, she claims that she can only think about the “dreadful expiation” that they suffered, not their “imprudence” or “guilt” (p. 80). Further on, however, Williams temporarily relinquishes this moralistic perspective and admits her own strong desire for revenge: she wishes that the Baron du Fossé “lived a little longer,” a wish occasioned by “that desire of retribution, which, in the cases of injustice and oppression, it is so natural to feel” (p. 193; emphasis mine). If Williams is here tempted, sublimely (and according to her own pronouncements, gratuitously), to punish the baron for oppressing his son and daughter-in-law, she earlier acknowledges the powerful erotic pull that the sublime possesses. At the Benedictine convent at Rouen, Williams accidentally encounters a young man and a young nun sitting in a room together, separated by the iron bars that divide the room. Williams remarks that the young man was placed in a dangerous situation,

… for where can a young woman appear so interesting, as when seen within that gloomy barrier, which death alone can remove? What is there, in all the ostentation of female dress, so likely to affect a man of sensibility, as that dismal habit which seems so much at variance with youth and beauty, and is worn as the melancholy symbol of an eternal renunciation of the world and all its pleasures?

(p. 114)

Thus Williams suggests that it is when women are the most oppressed by sublime power relationships that they become the most appealing.

When applied to the story of Augustin du Fossé and Monique Coquerel, this suggestion becomes especially disturbing; Williams assures us that Augustin and Monique are incomparably happy when the barriers separating them have been removed, but she only shows us concretely Augustin's intense desire for Monique when she was made unavailable through the machinations of his father. Applied to the Revolution as a whole, Williams' observation about the nun's dangerous desirability translates into a far more ominous view of revolutionary France than that which Williams incessantly promotes. There is a troubling sense in Letters Written in France that the act of revolution itself—the actual process of opposing the ancien régime through necessary, yet also sublime, violence—is much more satisfying than the calm, beautiful order that emerges from this violence. This sense is perhaps best illustrated by the great national need for theatrical repetition of the Revolution's early days, a need satisfied by spectacles such as the Fête de la Fédération and the countless plays about the Revolution performed throughout France (Williams herself plays Liberty in one of these pieces).

In deconstructive terms, Williams reverses but does not displace the binary opposition Burke sets up, resulting in a powerful methodological complicity with him. That is, she does not put the newly valorized category of beauty under erasure, a procedure which would permit the emergence of a “new concept” that would not allow itself to be defined in terms of sublimity or beauty.²⁹ Consequently, her new system replicates the original dynamic of his opposition, in which one term—either sublimity or beauty—is almost absolutely privileged over the devalued term. The devalued term, because it is defined in terms of absolute difference or “exteriority,” tends (inevitably) to possess or to stand for that which Burke and Williams wish most to deny as a possibility: that power relations cannot always be comfortably defined (Burke) or that sublime desire cannot be adequately regulated for long under beautiful political arrangements (Williams). Sublimity and beauty “ought to lack nothing at all in” themselves, but because they are not self-sufficient they have to be supplemented.³⁰ On some level, Burke and Williams both recognize the “dangerous supplementarity” that, respectively, beauty and sublimity bring to their political-aesthetic systems and attempt to contain the disruptive potential of the devalued term in their opposition. Both authors try to accomplish this by domesticating this term—by making it part and parcel of their valorized term, turning it into a “complement” rather than an exteriorized and potentially dangerous supplement.

IV

It is ironic that even as Williams was attempting to reverse the relationship that Philosophical Enquiry established between sublimity and beauty, Burke was at the same time reconsidering the importance of beauty in light of what Ronald Paulson terms the “false sublime” of the French Revolution.³¹ In Philosophical Enquiry, he tentatively explores how the passage of time alters sublime familial relationships. A son, according to Burke, feels fear and terror toward his father, but a grandson feels awe and reverence, or the secondary degrees of the sublime, toward his grandfather because his “authority is removed a degree from us … the weakness of age mellows it into something of a feminine partiality” (p. 111). Burke expands upon this argument in Reflections, extending it to political relationships as well as familial, and implicitly refutes his earlier opinion “that it is hard … to think of reconciling them [the sublime and the beautiful] in the same subject” (Philosophical Enquiry, p. 113). Quite simply, the longer established power relationships are in place, the more people love the society they live in and thus perceive their government as beautiful rather than sublime. As Steven Blakemore puts it:

Burke's ancestor-worship is posited in terms of the beautiful; he does not dread the presence of the past or its father figures because he envisions them generating the beautiful prejudices and traditions they pass on. Because the play of time keeps their sublime presence from impinging directly on posterity, Burke sees and thinks of them through the categories of the beautiful. Time transforms the sublime into the beautiful.³²

Blakemore's formulation, while useful, requires the qualification that “time transforms the sublime into the beautiful” in the eyes of the people being ruled, for this transformation does not in any way change the actual sublime power structure that fear and terror created in the first place. Instead, beauty is here a beneficial by-product of sublimity, one that cements the social structure already in place. By recuperating beauty as a complement to sublimity, Burke domesticates its disruptive potential by making it an integral part of political perception.

If Burke establishes a new opposition here, it is now between a positive sublime and beautiful government and a negative sublime and beautiful government, of which revolutionary France is an example of the latter and England of the former. Indeed, one of Burke's strongest attacks against the revolutionaries comes when he argues that the National Assembly's rhetoric of liberty and equality—and thus of beauty—is belied by the sublime fear and terror that maintain their new order. “It is notorious,” Burke writes, “that all their measures are decided … under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post and the torch to their houses. … Amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscations, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society” (Reflections, pp. 118-19). Thus the French have substituted a willful effort to add beauty to the raw sublimity of their government for the “natural” process whereby sublimity is carefully monitored, submitted to the checks and balances of “civil society,” and then engrafted into the hearts of people as beautiful.³³

Given her extensive recuperation of love and beauty, it seems surprising, if not contradictory, that Williams approvingly reintroduces sublimity at the end of Letters Written in France. Williams does this, moreover, in a way that exactly parallels Burke's reinsertion of beauty back into Reflections. As with beauty in Burke, sublimity in Williams enters the political scene with the passage of time. Liberty, when first instituted, is thus described solely in terms of beauty; she is a young woman “adorned with the freshness of youth” who is “loved with the ardour of passion.” Over time, however, female Liberty is looked upon more with awe and admiration, the secondary degrees of Burke's sublime: “she is seen in her matron state, and, like other ladies at that period, is beheld with sober veneration” (p. 71). By comparing France's revolutionary politics to a ship of discovery at the end of her work, Williams presents sublimity serving the ends of beauty:

[this ship is] built upon principles that defy the opposition of the tempestuous elements … instead of yielding to their fury [it] makes them subservient to its purpose, and sailing sublimely over the untracked ocean, unites those together whom nature seemed forever to have separated, and throws a line of connection across the divided world.

(p. 222)

She contrasts this ship of discovery to older ships, which were used only to perpetuate the fear and terror of Burke's sublime; these ships conveyed “the warriors of one country to despoil and ravage another neighboring state: [they] only served to produce an intercourse of hostility, a communication of injury, an exchange of rapine and devastation” (pp. 221-22). With the image of the ship of discovery, sublimity emerges after previously separated elements are united over time, as the ship sails onward. The sublime effect here is not of fear and terror, but of awe and reverence at observing beauty (the unity produced from the merger of seemingly natural but false oppositions) created over and over again.

Having analyzed the relationships between governments, family ties, and aesthetics that Williams and Burke establish, it would now be useful to see these contrasting relationships schematically:

	Burke
	A. (New Government)	B. (Mature Government)
Familial Analogy	Father-Son	Grandfather-Grandson
Aesthetic Quality	Sublimity	Sublimity tempered by Beauty
Aesthetic Response	Fear and Terror	Awe and Admiration
	Williams
	A. (New Government)	B. (Mature Government)
Familial Analogy	Young Husband and Wife	Older Husband and Wife
Aesthetic Quality	Beauty	Beauty tempered by Sublimity
Aesthetic Response	Passionate Love, Pleasure	Mature Love: Sober Veneration

It is striking that, for Burke and Williams, the aesthetic quality that a mature government embodies and the reaction that citizens have to this government almost converge. The difference between “sober veneration” and “awe and admiration” is negligible, especially in comparison to the stark contrast between “fear and terror” and “passionate love and pleasure,” which they posit as the responses to a newly formed government. In practical terms, the aesthetic qualities of a mature government are not far apart either. The distinction between “sublimity tempered by beauty” and “beauty tempered by sublimity” is primarily a semantic one, involving a disagreement over origins—whether sublimity or beauty came first in the government of civil society—and a different emplotment of history. In Hayden White's terms, Williams emplots history as comic (with freedom, liberty, and human happiness increasing over time), while Burke emplots history as ironic. For Burke, the ideal political system—the English—is characterized by “a condition of unchangeable constancy,” which “moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.”³⁴

Since women are primary vessels for the “dangerous supplementarity” of Burke's beauty and Williams' sublimity, it is not surprising that both authors reconceive the role of women in similar ways as they make beauty a complement of sublimity and sublimity a complement of beauty. They both attempt to erase women's unpredictable supplementarity by granting them a newly glorified role within their revised visions of the functioning of sublimity and beauty within the political realm, a role in which they passively regulate male desire toward productive ends.

Burke, even as he accords women no positive power whatsoever in Philosophical Enquiry, nonetheless creates a situation where women possess an unrecognized supplementary power through their embodiment of beauty. In some sense, Reflections is an attempt to deal with women's supplementarity by taking them from the unregulated margins of society and placing them in the social and political forefront, via chivalry, as the exalted, if passive, regulators of proper male desire. Burke's account of the treatment of Marie Antoinette on 6 October 1789 illustrates this point most effectively in Reflections, for with this discussion he suggests that the male chivalric impulse, which is provoked and sustained by the desire to protect virtuous women in distress, provides the underlying basis for an ideal society. This impulse gives sublime power relationships the appearance of beauty, an appearance that produces “a noble equality” of sentiment “without confounding ranks.” The fact that “ten thousands swords” did not leap “from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her [Marie Antoinette] with insult” is the key indication that “the age of chivalry is gone,” replaced by the revolutionary sublime (pp. 126-27).

Women appear to possess more agency in Williams than in Burke: they support their husbands and sons during the storming of the Bastille, they renounce aristocratic titles and fortunes, and they participate in national festivals and local plays. But once the Bastille is taken and the acts of personal sacrifice are performed, there remains very little for women to do in revolutionary France besides watching events unfold. Indeed, if women's increased spectatorial exposure to the workings of national politics—an exposure that the male revolutionaries cultivated not only by admitting women into the National Assembly but also by staging carefully orchestrated public spectacles, such as the Fête de la Fédération—seemed liberating (as it did for Williams), it also served to define the limits of their participation in revolutionary society. As Joan Landes points out, women could become actors in these situations only by retelling or reenacting the events and debates that they witnessed: “Women in the audience became spectators, readers, and listeners—rather than agents, of the Revolution.”³⁵ Significantly, Williams herself becomes an actor by retelling the quasi-official version of the French Revolution.

If women are given at least a modicum of agency and self-determination in Letters Written in France, they nonetheless possess the most power in Williams' account, as in Burke's, through their passive ability to incite proper male desire. Williams asserts that women wield the most power behind the scenes: “we often act in human affairs like those secret springs in mechanism[s], by which, though invisible, great movements are regulated” (p. 38). Beyond the clear reference to the Revolution as a “great movement,” it is difficult to relate the tenor to the vehicle in this simile. Superficially, it would seem that “secret springs” refers to the insufficiently acknowledged, yet important, actions that women have taken in support of the Revolution: providing food and moral support for the men who stormed the Bastille, relinquishing aristocratic titles, sacrificing fortunes.

These actions, while perhaps not sufficiently appreciated, are, however, not entirely “secret” and “invisible,” since women offered their money and jewels publicly at the shrine of Liberty (p. 37). Instead, it seems more likely that these secret springs regulate the gears of male desire, impelling them to act in concert with the “great movement” of the Revolution. At one point, Williams offhandedly remarks that “the leaders of the revolution engaged beauty as one of their auxiliaries; justly concluding that, to the gallantry and sensibility of Frenchmen, no argument would be found more efficacious than that of a pretty face” (pp. 62-63). The serious suggestion behind this apparently frivolous statement—that male sexual desire could be channeled for revolutionary purposes—finds ample corroboration in the remainder of Letters Written in France. We have seen already, for example, that Augustin Thomas du Fossé was drawn out of a sublime power relationship by his desire for Monique Coquerel. More telling than this, though, is Williams' depiction of female Liberty, the symbol of the Revolution, in terms of heterosexual male desire: in France, she is “adorned with the freshness of youth, and is loved with the ardour of passion” (p. 71). Thus, in the transition from ancient régime to revolutionary France, proper male desire has been reinstated in Williams' account and short-circuited in Burke's. Williams' inscription of woman as passive, desired object in these passages suggests, moreover, that the patriarchal opposition—“active, desiring man/passive, desired woman”—was not, and perhaps could not be, completely overturned when Williams reversed Burke's political-aesthetic hierarchy because it is the axis upon which both writers' oppositions turn.

V

How do we situate Williams' response to Burke in the context of English radical politics during the early 1790s? To what extent is her complicity with Burke typical or idiosyncratic? To date, scholars have focused almost exclusively on the “collusion” between radical writers and Burke in terms of their shared, “bourgeois” promotion of laissez-faire economics. The extent to which Thomas Paine shared Burke's ignorance of persistent economic hierarchies in his advocacy of a libertarian meritocracy over a hereditary aristocracy has been well-documented. E. P. Thompson made the case first and most powerfully:

In terms of political democracy he wished to level all inherited distinctions and privileges, but he gave no countenance to economic levelling. In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other. The Rights of Man and the Wealth of Nations should supplement and nourish each other.³⁶

Paine's attitude was widely shared by English radicals. Thomas Christie, cofounder of the Analytical Review and Williams' collaborator for volume 3 of Letters from France, writes in his response to Burke that the government should “respect public opinion.” By public opinion he means not “the opinion of unformed multitudes, who may be said to have no opinion, because they have no principles,” but rather “the opinion of the reflecting and enlightened part of the community.” The difference here between Christie's “unformed” and Burke's “swinish” multitudes is, as Brian Rigby suggests, that of rhetorical emphasis.³⁷

Paine's middle-class boosterism has roots traceable immediately back to the dissenting campaign for reform in the 1780s, which, according to Anthony Lincoln, strove to exclude the lower classes from its project even as it condemned the luxurious excesses of the aristocracy. Thus, a dissenting minister in 1782 offered the following defense for his denomination's abstruse Ordination ceremony: “it tends to prevent unlearned, conceited, pragmatical persons and mechanics of the lowest station, from intruding into societies under the character of Gospel ministers.”³⁸

Williams, however, does not so much propose a meritocracy as she does what may be called a “sensocracy”: a society predicated upon an equality of feeling among all people. The Revolution has “awaken[ed] that general sympathy which is caught from heart to heart with irresistible energy, fill[ing] every eye with tears, and throb[bing] in every bosom” (p. 62). Her elevation of beauty, which emphasizes the connections between people rather than locking them into a sublime hierarchy, is designed to theoretically justify this society, even as it refutes Burke. And though this conception of an ideal society may be largely influenced by her immersion in the discourse of French and English sensibility, it is nonetheless significant that Williams does not, as her male colleagues ended up doing, frame the Revolution first and foremost as the victory of suppressed merit over arbitrary aristocratic privilege. Williams most likely did not vigorously promote a meritocracy because on some level she realized, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, that such a system—where “the best man wins”—necessarily excludes her as a woman. In her sensocracy, all can participate as equals: rich and poor, male and female.

Yet by manufacturing a universal realm designed to transcend differences between people, Williams inadvertently—and perhaps inevitably—reinscribes these differences back into her narrative. When, for example, she recounts the bread shortage that precipitated the Revolution, she characteristically highlights the fear that united both the “famished multitude” in the streets of Paris and the inconvenienced gentleman who sends his servant out for bread and finds that, after five hours, the servant returns with only one loaf (p. 27). Here, as elsewhere, Williams is concerned with the universal emotional effect of specific events—the feeling that draws people together—but fails to comment on the master-servant relationship that she rather innocently relates; nor does she differentiate between the starving anguish of the poor and the temporary inconvenience of the rich.

Despite her appropriation of the realm of emotion as a ground upon which both sexes can have equal footing, Williams also ends up affirming separate male and female spheres, an affirmation that mirrors Burke's depiction of women's roles in Reflections to an uncanny extent. Thus it is important that she, and other women, can partake of the emotions generated by debates in the National Assembly, but not critical that women be able to run for its seats or even vote for its members. If it is easy to fault Williams for her reinscription of traditional gender roles in Letters Written in France, it is worth noting that she and Wollstonecraft at least attempt to theorize a place for women in the radical project. Thomas Paine, on the other hand, accepts women's complete erasure as “citizens” by lauding the “universal right of citizenship” which the French National Assembly proclaims, even as its constitution classifies women as neither enfranchised “active” nor disenfranchised “passive” citizens.³⁹ The failure of Paine to consider women within his revolutionary program seems intentional when connected to his explicit critique of Burke's lament that the “age of chivalry” has passed and to his probable knowledge of the growing feminist consciousness within important French intellectual circles in 1790 and 1791, a consciousness that culminated in Condorcet's essay, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship.”⁴⁰

Like Williams, Wollstonecraft was confronted with women's exclusion from the emerging radical, meritocratic realm, but she chose a different strategy to deal with this exclusion (perhaps the only other strategy available). By arguing that women, possessing the same reasoning powers as men, should “stand erect, supported by their own industry” rather than “hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility,” Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman provides most late twentieth-century readers with a far more desirable program than does Letters Written in France.⁴¹ But to make this assertion should not automatically entail, at the same time, simply dismissing Williams as naive and emotional and praising Wollstonecraft as rational and intellectual.

First of all, we should remember that Wollstonecraft's concerted effort to oppose separate male and female intellectual spheres came at the price of eliding the issue of economic class. If, in 1790, Wollstonecraft emphasizes that “Inequality of rank must ever impede the growth of virtue” (A Vindication of the Rights of Men, p. 46), two years later she does not discuss class differences between women as hindering the advancement of reason and virtue for middle-class and aristocratic women. In her account, poor women are by definition virtuous (and therefore happy) because, unlike aristocratic and middle-class women, they have to occupy themselves with useful tasks: it is “the most respectable women [who are] the most oppressed” because they are denied rational pursuits. By proposing that “women of a superiour cast” enter the male meritocratic realm through their reasoning power while not considering poor women as candidates for this same realm, Wollstonecraft herself buys into the class elitism at the heart of English radicalism in the early 1790s.⁴² Second, though Williams was undeniably a proponent of sensibility, her head certainly was not “surcharged with dew,” at least not any more than was Shaftesbury's or Rousseau's. Williams' critique of Burke provides her readers with a thoroughly intellectual framework to support her vision of revolutionary France and her hope for contemporary England. To write Williams off as a benighted enthusiast not only replicates Wollstonecraft's own early assessment of Williams as well-meaning but superficial,⁴³ it uncritically accepts her theory of the negative effect of sensibility on “female manners” by overlooking the theoretical substance that is at the core of Letters Written in France.

Notes

1. The full title is Letters Written in France, in the Summer of 1790, to a Friend in England. Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution and the Memoirs of Mons. and Madame du F——— (London: T. Cadell, 1790). Letters Written in France became vol. 1 of Letters from France in later edns., after the publication of “Volume II” in 1792. Two more vols. followed, succeeded by a new 4-vol. series, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, published in 1795-96. Both 4-vol. series are available in a 2-vol. facsimile reprint, Letters from France, ed. Janet Todd (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975). All refs. to Letters Written in France will be cited in the text by page number, using the 1st, 1790 edn.

2. This phrase is taken from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, in vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. L. G. Mitchell & William B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1989), p. 127.

3. “Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution,” in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1939), pp. 91-93. Recently, Janet Todd has reiterated Adams' criticism. According to Todd, because Williams perceived “political events in sentimental and personal terms … her judgements remained spontaneous and emotional,” and thus she failed to sustain any sort of economic analysis of the revolution (“Helen Maria Williams,” in British Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, ed. Janet Todd [N.Y.: Continuum, 1989], pp. 720-21). Marilyn Butler declares that Williams' “attitudes are the naive ones of literary sentimentalism at its most simple and popular” (Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy [N.Y.: Cambridge Univ., 1984], p. 80). Finally, even Chris Jones' effort to recuperate for Williams some intellectual status as a writer of “radical sensibility” ultimately concurs with the dominant impression of Williams: “Her very naivety makes her an outstanding example of the reactions to sensibility to the swift changes of events, and a guide to the analogous reactions of more major figures, especially Wordsworth” (“Helen Maria Williams and Radical Sensibility,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 12 [1989]: 5).

4. Williams' two explicit disclaimers punctuate her text after she makes politically charged, controversial statements. She asks, rhetorically, “Did you expect I should ever dip my pen in politics?” after praising at some length the few members of the French nobility who willingly gave up their aristocratic titles and privileges (pp. 107-08). Earlier she declares that “my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart; for I have not been so absurd as to consult my head upon matters of which it is so incapable of judging” after reporting that her fictional correspondent has accused her of “describing with too much enthusiasm the public rejoicings in France” (p. 66). Mary Poovey reminds us that women were allowed to “write of their own feelings,” but were discouraged by notions of feminine propriety from writing explicitly political texts (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1984], pp. 33-47). In her conservative response to Williams, Laeticia-Matilda Hawkins presents the argument that women could not, and thus should not, write about politics (Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits. Addressed to Miss H. M. Williams, With particular reference to her Letters from France [London: Hookham & Carpenter, 1793]).

5. Chris Jones briefly points out that it is Williams' and Burke's shared sentimentalism that causes them to elevate “the authority of natural feelings” over artificial social and economic hierarchies (p. 4). Janet Todd asserts that Williams “rapturously converted the French ceremonies and revolutionary festivities into enactments of the tableaux of the sentimental fiction she also wrote.” Thus, any sustained economic or gender analysis is forgotten as “French revolutionary policy” becomes “crystallized into poignant family relationships and scenes of domestic tenderness” (Sensibility: An Introduction [London: Methuen, 1986], p. 130). Julie Ellison remarks on how Letters Written in France replicates Sterne's A Sentimental Journey in its presentation of philanthropy as a capricious mood (“Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment, and the Sublime in Williams and Wollstonecraft,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 [1990]: 203-04).

6. For a history of Burke's growing opposition to English dissent, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ., 1979), pp. 89-98. Burke's “Speech on the Army Estimates” appears in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols. (London: Rivington, 1826-27), 5:16-23; his speech of 2 Mar. 1790 condemning Fox's proposal to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts is reported in “Debate on Mr. Fox's Motion for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts,” in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, comp. William Cobbett, 36 vols. (London, 1806-20), 28:432-43.

7. For an account of Williams' influence on the Analytical Review in 1795 and 1796, see Brian Rigby, “Radical Spectators of the Revolution: The Case of the Analytical Review,” in The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley & Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1989), pp. 63-83. The most comprehensive account of Williams' life remains Lionel Woodward, Une Anglaise Amie de la Révolution Française (Paris: H. Champion, 1930). Additional sources of information regarding Williams' life include Marilyn Butler, p. 80; David V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790-1793 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri, 1986), pp. 221-31 passim; Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763-1800 (N.Y.: Octagon, 1971), p. 51; Janet Todd's entry on Williams in British Women Writers; and the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 21, ed. Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1959-60), pp. 403-04.

   On Andrew Kippis' participation in the Revolution Society, see Albert Goodwin, p. 86; and Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 127. While Lincoln declares with authority that Williams was a dissenter, Woodward demonstrates conclusively that this perception is based on the false assumption that her father was David Williams, a Unitarian minister. Her father was, in fact, Charles Williams, an army officer; her mother was a first-generation Huguenot immigrant (see Une Anglaise Amie, pp. 5-13). That Williams was embraced by dissenting circles and adopted wholeheartedly their reform goals, however, no one denies. Finally, Janet Todd identifies Thomas Christie as a cowriter of vol. 3 of Letters from France in her intro. to Letters from France, 1:5.

8. Other dissenting goals included “the reform of the code of criminal law, the abolition of press gangs, and the revision of the game laws” (Goodwin, p. 86). For a similar definition of dissenting demands, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 84.

9. William Palmer points out the newspaper origins of many of Burke's opinions in “Edmund Burke and the French Revolution: Notes on the Genesis of the Reflections,” Colby Library Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1984): 181-90.

10. The publication of Letters Written in France was declared in The General Evening Post (23-25 Nov. 1790; #8917). F. P. Lock reports that “Wollstonecraft's work appeared as early as 29 November 1790,” four weeks after Reflections (Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France [London: Allen & Unwin, 1985], p. 155).

11. Reflections, p. 118. Burke also makes this point during the debate over Fox's motion to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts (“Debate on Mr. Fox's Motion,” pp. 434-35).

12. See Reflections, pp. 121-22 for Burke's account of the poissardes acting out an orgy of violence on 6 Oct. 1789.

13. Burke condemns the Revolution's violence throughout Reflections. For Burke's attack on the French constitution, see pp. 85-104, 234-35.

14. See Palmer, p. 187 and Lock, pp. 49, 84-87 for evidence that Burke was the sole early English critic who attacked the Revolution's ecclesiastical policy and who lamented the fate of the émigrés.

15. “Speech on the Army Estimates,” p. 9; see also, Reflections, pp. 140-74 passim.

16. Paine, for instance, appeals to the individual relationship “between God and man” and the “universal right of conscience” when contrasting the newly instituted French disestablishment of the Catholic church to the English establishment, but nowhere does he mention the positive effects of French reforms within and between actual religious communities. Indeed, he emphasizes in the end the fact that freedom of conscience will increase “the prosperity of nations” (Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], pp. 84-88). Joseph Priestley makes a more direct and thorough case for the disestablishment of the English church in Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 3rd edn. (N.Y.: Hugh Gaine, 1791), pp. 58-63.

17. “Speech on the Army Estimates,” p. 9; and Reflections, pp. 191-212 passim.

18. Julie Ellison argues that Williams' sublime is “not a specific aesthetic or emotional structure, but rather the simultaneous experience of sublime associations, sentimental (including erotic) sensations, and ethical fervor” (p. 199). While I agree with Ellison that such moments do occur in Letters Written in France (even if Williams herself would not necessarily characterize most of them as “sublime”), I am arguing that there is a specific aesthetic-political structure in Letters Written in France, a structure that can be isolated by taking the reference to Burke and Williams' other explicit references to sublimity and beauty at face value, rather than, as Ellison tends to do, write them off as mere rhetorical flourishes (see, e.g., p. 203: “These are the stock binarisms of popular aesthetics”).

19. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 38.

20. See Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 71-80 for Burke's discussion of the sublimity of vastness, difficulty, and the transition from darkness to light.

21. Wollstonecraft takes issue with this passage on women's beauty, criticizing Burke for making “respect and love antagonistic principles.” She suggests that experience “might prove that there is a beauty in virtue,” but cautions that “Inequality of rank must ever impede the growth of virtue, by vitiating the mind that submits or dominates” (A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd & Marilyn Butler (N.Y.: New York Univ., 1989), p. 46.

22. We have seen Ellison's reference to A Sentimental Journey in conjunction with Williams; Todd suggests that Williams' extensive use of tableaux owes much to Rousseau (Sensibility, p. 130).

23. Sir Charles also stirs his sister, Charlotte, to virtuous action: “he awakened in me a capacity to enjoy the true pleasure that arises from a benevolent action” (The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 2 vols. [London, 1754], 1:200). In some respects, Letters Written in France is a kind of Sir Charles Grandison translated onto society at large in the way that it unites masculine virtue, compulsive unanimity, and a universalized language of the family. For a succinct interpretation of the novel on these terms, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 87-90.

24. R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 26. On this subject, see also Mullan, pp. 118-44 and Todd, Sensibility, p. 99. For a contrary view, see Chester Chapin, “Shaftesbury and the Man of Feeling,” Modern Philology 81 (1983): 47-50.

25. Pp. 53-54. Chris Jones reiterates this point when discussing Williams' “radical sensibility” (p. 4).

26. Williams' faith is, nonetheless, as strong as Richardson's that the secondhand experience of reading her letters can communicate this understanding as powerfully as actual observation. The tension that exists between Williams' strongly implied position that one must view the Revolution in order to understand it and her faith that the medium of letters can also convey this understanding is palpable. She recognizes that she will be able to “describe the images which press upon my mind” only “imperfectly,” but hopes that her reader's “imagination” will add “coloring and spirit” (p. 2). On Richardson and the power of letters, see Todd, Sensibility, p. 87.

27. “The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or the Bathos of Experience,” Glyph 8 (1981): 62-78. My analysis of both Burke and Williams owes a great deal to Ferguson's work. Though Ferguson does not make explicit reference to Derrida (she does, however, invoke de Man) to describe what she is doing, her reading of beauty in Burke as that which is supposed to supplement sublimity but which actually threatens to substitute for it mirrors Derrida's discussion of the supplementarity of evil to good, of culture to nature, and of masturbation to intercourse in Rousseau. See esp. “From/Of Blindness to the Supplement,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1976), pp. 144-64.

28. See Philosophical Enquiry, p. 38 for the distinction between “self-preservation” and “society” and pp. 64, 67 on sublimity, sovereignty, and power.

29. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Translator's Preface” to Of Grammatology, pp. lxxvi-lxxviii for an account of this process.

30. This phrase is from Of Grammatology, p. 145; the terms for my analysis of the dynamics of Burke's and Williams' binary oppositions comes mostly from chap. 2, “… That Dangerous Supplement …,” pp. 141-64.

31. Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale Univ., 1983), p. 66.

32. Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover, N.H. & London: Univ. Press of New England, 1988), p. 49.

33. See Reflections, p. 59 for a discussion of the need to monitor power relations carefully, and pp. 109-11 for Burke's account of “civil society.”

34. Reflections, pp. 83-85. For Hayden White on historical emplotment, see Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 1973), pp. 1-43 passim.

35. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1988), p. 166.

36. The Making of the English Working Class (N.Y.: Vintage, 1966), p. 96. While Thompson points out that Paine approved of Burke's championing of commerce and industrial enterprise, David Aers more comprehensively examines Paine's complicity with Burke in “Coleridge and the Egg that Burke Laid: Ideological Collusion and Opposition in the 1790s,” Literature and History 9, no. 2 (1983): 152-63.

37. Letters on the Revolution of France (London, 1791), pp. 43-44. Rigby compares Burke and Christie on these terms in “Radical Spectators of the Revolution,” pp. 72-73.

38. Ordination Questions of Rev. M. Pope to Rev. H. Worthington (London, 1782), p. 41, quoted in Lincoln, p. 14.

39. Though the second category of disenfranchised, “passive” citizens seems to include laboring women by implication: “Domestics, or Servants who receive Wages, and are supposed to be under the controul of their masters.” For the contemporary translation of the French constitution, see Christie, p. 366 (overleaf).

40. Paine ridicules Burke's invocation of chivalry in Rights of Man, pp. 50-51. Gary Kates provides an illuminating account of the feminist movement that emerged during the early years of the French Revolution. See “‘The Powers of Husband and Wife Must Be Equal and Separate’: The Cerce Social and the Rights of Women,” in Women and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite & Darline G. Levy (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1990), pp. 163-80.

41. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 219.

42. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 216-20. In her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft does mention the “preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilization a curse” (p. 215), but here it establishes that the poor are the least “corrupt” and unhappy of all classes since they are able to act virtuously, Wollstonecraft's ideal state of being, through their hard work. For discussions of Wollstonecraft's elision of class differences in her second Vindication, see chap. 2, “Man's Discourse, Woman's Heart: Mary Wollstonecraft's Two Vindications,” in Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, pp. 48-81, as well as “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism,” in Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 31-56.

43. Wollstonecraft writes of Williams: “Her manners are affected, yet the simple goodness of her hearts [sic] continually breaks through the varnish, so that one would be more inclined, at least I should, to love than admire her” (To Everina Wollstonecraft, 24 Dec. 1792, in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle [Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1979], p. 226).

Many thanks to Vincent Carretta, Neil Fraistat, Susan Lanser, and Nancy Leaderman for helpful comments, and to Maurice Leaderman for expert proofreading.