SOURCE: Blakemore, Steven. “Comedy, Tragedy, and Romance in Williams' Letters from France.” In Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution, pp. 163-79. Madison, Wis.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, Blakemore discusses Williams' characterization of the French Revolution as a comedy that turned into a tragedy during the Reign of Terror.]

I

In many ways Helen Maria Williams is the antithesis of Mary Wollstonecraft, even though they both have a Girondist view of the Revolution. Wollstonecraft emphasizes reason and judgement, while Williams stresses emotion and the heart. Williams' “political creed is entirely an affair of the heart,” which she opposes to her “head” (Letters, 1:1.66). She notes that political arguments are often confusing, but once “a proposition is addressed” to her heart, then she has “quickness of perception” and can “decide, in one moment, points upon which philosophers and legislators have differed in all ages” (1:1.195-96). By emphasizing “quickness of perception,” she emphasizes her sensibility (see Samuel Johnson, 1755 Dictionary, def. no. 2), especially the “feminine” sensibility that Wollstonecraft excoriates in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In 1777 Hannah More reproduced a common sexual stereotype, noting that “women have generally quicker perceptions.”¹ In Rouen (September 1791), Williams observed that “to feel the general good” one only needs “to possess the sensibility of a woman.”² Williams was, in effect, arguing that her feminine, emotional response to the Revolution was superior to “masculine” ratiocination. Whereas Wollstonecraft, in both of her Vindications, opposed sexual distinctions and stressed genderless virtues common to both sexes, Williams defined herself within the conventional categories of feminine response. In doing this, she continued a mode of self-definition for which she had been celebrated in the 1780s. Gary Kelly notes that “Williams' tactics were to write in an acceptably feminine mode, the familiar letter; to write as a woman of feeling; and to employ many topics and devices of the literature of Sensibility—a literature, that is, of self-authentication and a literature already feminised to some extent.”³ In addition, by dramatizing her heartfelt emotional response to the Revolution, Williams establishes a suggestive link between the Revolution and Romanticism, a nexus of interest to current criticism. Since “love is computed in the arithmetic of the heart” (Letters, 1:1.163), Williams loves the Revolution because it is a “system of politics … by which those I love are made happy” (1:1.196). Since it is “far more amiable to give way to the impulse of the heart” (1:2.97), she argues that the Revolution is an apocalyptic emotional event and that her feminine response is hence truer than a “cold,” intellectual analysis. By insisting on a feminine reading of the Revolution, Williams implicitly challenged the conventional meaning of gendered discourse and ensured that her feminine response would become an issue to those who envisioned the Revolution as a political event outside the perimeters of “proper” feminine discourse.

Williams also differs from both Wollstonecraft and Paine in openly depicting the Revolution as a sublime, theatrical spectacle, stressing the theatricality that both Wollstonecraft and Paine denounce, albeit reproduce, in their respective works. In The French Revolution, Wollstonecraft had criticized the theatrical posturing of revolutionary “actors” and denigrated the Parisian theaters as a corrupting influence. Williams, in contrast, enjoys the Parisian theaters and their “comic actors,” but considers the English theater superior for its production of tragedy (Letters, 1:1.90; cf. 1:2.77). Indeed, she initially sees the Revolution as a comedy—the happy spectacle that ends the Old Regime's tragedy—a formulation she later inverts when the Revolution becomes a terrorist tragedy. At the beginning, however, Paris is a delightful spectacle; there are at least twenty theaters, exhibiting “charming acting,” and the Parisians' love of the theater illustrates their superior joie de vivre (1:2.77, 79-80).

Her descriptions of revolutionary events are replete with theatrical metaphors. The Festival of Federation (14 July 1790) was “the most sublime spectacle, which, perhaps was ever presented on the theatre of this earth” (Letters, 1:1.2). The majestic Fête was a “spectacle” electrifying French “spectators” (5; cf. 16), and she herself was “a spectator of the Federation” (108). She uses the word spectacle in the sense of a public display or entertainment (OED, def. no. 1), as well as the French usage of spectacle as theater. Williams continually returns to the Festival as a dramatic representation of the true Revolution: an exhilarating theatrical event presented to an applauding audience of four hundred thousand people, re-presented in her Letters for the English people. The Revolution is a sublime spectacle, a divine comedy displaying the reconciliation of the French people and the incipient regeneration of humanity. Later, when the Revolution appears threatening to European spectators, it is still an ongoing “extraordinary drama” (1:4.121).

Although her description of the programmatic orchestration of the Festival unwittingly exposes her ingenuous emotional response, she astutely notes that the Revolution's “leaders” connect the French people to the Revolution by engaging them emotionally:

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, by the appointment of solemnities perfectly calculated to awaken that general sympathy which is caught from heart to heart with irresistible energy, fills every eye with tears, and throbs in every bosom.

(Letters, 1:1.61-62)

She suggests again the superiority of her emotional response and endorses as “natural” the studied calculation that could appear, to hostile observers, as manipulative and artificial. In describing the Festival of Federation, Williams (and practically everyone else who experienced it) emphasizes the emotional participation of the audience and “the effect it produced on the minds of the spectators” (Letters, 1:1.5)—an event in which the spectators were part of the spectacle. Wondering how she can possibly provide “an adequate idea of the behavior of the spectators” (5), she subsequently describes the people weeping and embracing each other, noting that her “heart caught with enthusiasm the general sympathy” and her eyes “filled with tears” (14). Thematically, this is both the “natural” language and response that the French leaders “calculated to awaken”—the “general sympathy … caught from heart to heart,” throbbing “in every bosom,” filling “every eye with tears” (1:1.62)—the same emotion and response she hopes the reader also catches. Moreover, Williams, like Wollstonecraft, in The Rights of Men, makes Burke's Enquiry an issue in her work and reinscribes, mutatis mutandis, one of Burke's insights in the Enquiry: descriptions of the effect of (revolutionary) beauty on the observer are more powerful than descriptions of beauty per se. In the Reflections, Burke had allusively dismissed the Festival of Federation: “Their confederations, their spectacles, their civic feasts, and their enthusiasm, I take no notice of; they are nothing but mere tricks” (306). Williams, in contrast, emphasizes the spectacle and enthusiasm Burke rejects.

From the beginning, of course, a series of new festivals (from the planting of liberty trees to the grand, orchestrated fêtes) celebrated the Revolution as a communal spectacle. These festivals “were intended to be spectacles in which the people would be both spectators and actors”; Bernard Poyet, one of the planners in charge of the Festival of Federation, wrote that “Public festivals inspired by lofty considerations of common interests have this special characteristic, that the sentiment of each person becomes that of all by a sort of electrification which people can scarcely resist.”⁴ In crystallizing the revolutionary leaders' intent and in describing the people's reaction—each citizen catching “the general sympathy” from “heart to heart,” seeing a reflection of each other in happy, tear-filled eyes—Williams underscores the emotional and visual identity of the spectators with each other and with the Revolution that is one and indivisible. She wonderfully captures both the spirit and intent of the revolutionary festivals; indeed, her description mirrors Rousseau's proposal for popular, communal fêtes in the Lettre à d' Alembert sur les spectacles, a proposal probably enacted by the Revolution's “leaders”: after assembling the people at a focal site, “you will have a festival. … let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves [that is, display the spectators as spectacle]; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.”⁵ Although Williams does not see the potential for coerced conformity in her unified celebration, she subsequently contrasts the natural Festival of Federation with the artificial Festival of the Supreme Being (8 June 1794).

Since the latter is Robespierre's festival, she emphasizes the programmatic conformity of the spectators' scripted roles, in which language represents beforehand what the people are supposed to enact: “mothers are to embrace their daughters … fathers are to clasp their sons … the old are to bless the young, and … the young are to kneel to the old” (Letters, 2:2.86). Williams' contrast is thus between spontaneous freedom and artificial coercion:

Ah, what was then become of those civic festivals which hailed the first glories of the revolution! What was become of that sublime federation of an assembled nation which had nobly shaken off its ignominious fetters, and exulted in its new-born freedom! What was become of those moments when no emotions were pre-ordained, no feelings measured out, no acclamations decreed; but when every bosom beat high with admiration, when every heart throbbed with enthusiastic transport, when every eye melted into tears, and the vault of heaven resounded the bursts of unpremeditated applause!

(2:2.87)

Williams had faithfully read Rousseau who, in the Lettre à d' Alembert sur les spectacles, laments rhetorically: “Ah! Where are the games and festivals of my youth? Where is the concord of the citizens? Where is the public fraternity? Where is the pure joy and the real gaiety? Where are the peace, the liberty, the equity, the innocence?”⁶ As Jacobin tragedians coercively rewrite the Revolution's primal script, Williams contrasts the Revolution's fall with the first festival and the original representation, which she remembers in nostalgic, romantic terms. Recollecting the spontaneous overflow of natural feelings in her wistful, ubi sunt lament, the first Fête is, for her, a prelapsarian spot of time.

The distinction between natural and artificial festivals complements the distinction between the Revolution as good theater—a comedy played out naturally—and the Revolution as bad theater—a terrorist tragedy in which natural roles are betrayed. The Terror forced Williams to re-emplot the comedic revolution as a French tragedy. In this Jacobin tragedy, however, the good “actors” still react naturally to the unnatural parts they are forced to play. The victims of the Terror display their natural feelings: all the sincere tears shed over friends or family members imprisoned or guillotined, tears resulting from unnatural, forced separations. Similarly, Williams' Girondins face the guillotine bravely. Conscious of their invulnerable innocence, they die in the best Roman tradition of Plutarch and other classic scripts. The change of genre reinscribes the Revolution's betrayal through a series of multiplying tragedies: a Jacobin tragedy that causes the national “French” tragedy, a domestic tragedy for persecuted French families, and a personal Girondist tragedy for Williams and her beloved friends. In the end, her feminine Girondists—progressively emotional, profusely lachrymose, and valiantly vulnerable—are like the Trojans in Burke's Enquiry: an endearing race, “whose fate [Homer] has designed to excite our compassion” by giving them “infinitely more of the amiable social virtues than he has distributed among his Greeks” (Enquiry, 158).

The Jacobin terrorists script everyone, including Williams, into the French tragedy. In a letter dated four days after the King's execution (25 January 1793), Williams is a “spectator of the [revolutionary] representation,” a great drama she experiences directly, in contrast to English spectators who view the Revolution “from a distance”: “I am placed near enough the scene to discern every gesture of the actors, and every passion excited in the minds of the audience” (Letters, 1:3.2). During the Terror, however, she is forced to become a reluctant actor, “a sad spectacle to the crowd” that watches her ascend “the steps of the Luxembourg” and enter prison (2:1.13). There is an allusive contrast between her earlier role as a privileged spectator, happily watching the exciting revolutionary comedy unfold, and the unhappy prisoner who is forced to experience both France's national tragedy and her own.

Her principal dramatic villain is Robespierre, a frustrated metaphoric actor who, as a young man, fancied himself a genius destined “to act a splendid part on the theatre of the world” (Letters, 2:1.229). But this is a false part, and he fails miserably: a mediocre lawyer and orator, he must leave Paris and return to his provincial home in Arras (230). A frustrated failure, he finally succeeds when he ruins the Revolution's happy representation, becoming the Terror's primary author and actor. For Williams, Robespierre is the director of the Revolution's tragedy—manipulating people behind the scenes, sending others to death, pretending to befriend while he betrays—and he tragically fulfills his evil role: “While Robespierre behind the scenes was issuing daily mandates for murder, we see him on the stage the herald of mercy and of peace” (2:3.142). She contrasts the illusion of his public role with the reality of his private in(script)ion. Robespierre, the envious despiser of literary authors, also suppresses drama for political reasons and plans “to abolish the theatrical entertainments all together” (2:1.231). He is, for her, the ironic Puritan dramatist of France's national tragedy.

Since Williams sees the Revolution as a dramatic event, whoever controls the “representation” directs the Revolution to its conclusion. In a letter dated 10 February 1793, she recounts the failed censorship of a play reportedly written before 10 August, the journée on which the fictional monarchy finally ended and the royal family was forced to flee to the National Assembly. Since the play contained a caricature of “patriots” as lovers of anarchy resembling Robespierre and Marat, the Paris Commune prohibited its performance, but people protested by surrounding the theater and insisting that the play be performed. The Commune responded by sending the Parisian National Guard “to prevent the representation of the piece”: suddenly the control of the drama becomes an allegorical struggle over control of the Revolution's direction and meaning—a conflict between the Girondist Convention (which previously declared that the Commune “had no right to control the representation”) and the Jacobin Commune, which, failing to prevent the play, takes its revenge by “ordering all public places to be shut for a week” (Letters, 1:4.15-18). Linking artistic freedom to political freedom, Williams equates the Jacobins' attempted control of French representation with their flawed terrorist tragedy.

Another principal villain who contributes to the Jacobin (mis)-representation is Collot d' Herbois, a member of the Committee of Public Safety and former terrorist responsible for the repression (including the infamous mitraillades) in Lyon (November-December 1793). Lyon, of course, was one of the federalist cities that revolted against the Jacobin purge of the Girondins in June 1793. In his prerevolutionary years (1769-89), Collot had been both an actor and playwright, the producer of mediocre comedies and romantic dramas that lauded royalty, aristocracy, and the institutions of the Old Regime. In 1787 he became director of a theater in Lyon and assumed the stage name of d' Herbois. Like many others, he became a revolutionary in July 1789.

Williams focuses on his acting career in Lyon and his motive for subsequently “exterminating” Lyon's citizens: the people of Lyon had previously repudiated Collot's acting ability—Collot was a “comedian who had been driven from the stage for his professional incapacity.” For Williams, the terrible irony is that the frustrated, failed comedian produces the horrible “tragedy” of Lyon (Letters, 2:2.157-58). Collot “was led to this vengeance on the people of Lyon for having hissed him when he acted on their stage. Thousands of victims have atoned for the insult offered to a wretched comedian” (166). Referring to Collot's role in Lyon's tragedy, she maintains that he modeled his role on Genghis Khan, avenging, like him, “private injuries” (160). Collot became a “tragic ruffian” acting “his part at Lyon”; later, she refers to him as “the tragedian of Lyon” (167; 2:3.54). The thematic link between Robespierre and Collot is that they are both failed artists who seek to punish others for their previous “artistic” failures.

After the fall of Robespierre, author of his own tragedy, Williams relates how one of Collot's agents, a comedian named Fusil, who had participated in the Lyon massacres and who subsequently became an actor in the Theater of the Republic, was forced by the audience to read the condemnatory verses of “Le Révil du peuple,” the popular anti-Jacobin song sung after Robespierre's death. The audience, in effect, forces Fusil to play a self-condemnatory part and then refuses to let him proceed with an “after-piece” (Letters, 2:4.26-29).

In Williams' own dramatic presentation, the true revolutionaries act out their parts faithfully while the false (counter)revolutionaries betray both their roles and the Revolution. Williams writes Dantean comedy, while the Jacobins engage in “low” comedy, paradoxically resulting in the Jacobin tragedy that ruins her original representation. Her revolutionary comedy—the happy spectacle of the Festival of Federation—becomes a tragic travesty. As a poet and self-conscious writer, she sees the betrayed Revolution as bad and evil art—a monstrous mixture of genres, resulting in the botched revolutionary drama and the terrorist tragedy produced by tragic comedians and failed artists.⁷ In the Reflections, Burke had viewed the Revolution similarly: “Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror” (92-93). Like Wollstonecraft, the closer Williams is to the Terror, the closer she is to Burke's representation.

In her revolutionary tragedy, the true artists, the genuine actors, are persecuted. The Paris Commune conducts an ideological purge, an “epuration” of actors “who had been in the habitude of personating princes, and nobles, and queens, and countesses”—corrupting roles that supposedly militate against “habits of equality.” Significantly, the tragedians who act out royal roles are “sent to prison,” while the comedians who represent lower-class characters are considered ideologically correct, “since they had acted their parts on the stage of the world without any disguise” (Letters, 2:2.179). The revolutionary comedians perform their roles without “disguise” (that is, they act out their true lower-class origins); they play and reveal their “real” and natural selves while the tragedians are supposedly tainted by masks and disguises. Williams alludes to the Jacobin obsession with virtuous “transparency” and the antithetical hatred of costumes, veils, and masks—the mystifying “wardrobe” of both the Old Regime and revolutionary impostors, which must be ripped off, revealed, and exposed.⁸ In an inversion of this ideological formulation, Williams suggests that their obsession with transparency leads them ironically to mistake appearance for reality. The accoutrements of fictional representation are identified with real counterrevolution; the Jacobins mistake illusion for reality and imprison actors supposedly contaminated by their fictional roles. Theatrical costumes become reflexive signs, since theatrical disguises supposedly reveal both counterrevolutionary sympathies and hence counterrevolutionary actors as they really “are.”

At times the real tragedies the Jacobins produce degenerate into farce.⁹ Referring to the notorious revolutionary ceremony (10 November 1793) when the “church of Notre Dame was changed into a temple of Reason,” Williams sarcastically notes that the “Goddess of Reason was a fine blooming damsel of the opera-house, and acted her part in this comedy … to the entire satisfaction of her new votaries” (Letters, 2:2.181). The irony resides in the inappropriate mixture of genres and roles: the common actress (conventionally considered low and “loose”—in England she was reported to be a prostitute) playing a virginal “damsel” in a farcical travesty of reason. The travesty continues when the Goddess of Reason introduces another actress representing the Goddess of Liberty (182). For Williams, true reason and liberty have been usurped (like the appropriated church) and misrepresented in grotesque parodies. There is an additional reflexive irony, since Williams had also played the part of Liberty in a play performed earlier at the chateau of the Du Fossés (Letters, 1:1.203-5)—the “charming little piece” that ended with the dancing of Le Carillon National, a “spectacle” that seemed “an enchanting vision” (1:203, 205, 207) corresponding to her vision of the Festival of Federation, the happy comedy of 14 July. In the reader's mind, the three scenes intersect to signify both the degeneration of Liberty's representation and Williams' naive optimism.

In Williams' formulation, the Jacobins produce either bad farcical comedy or real terrorist tragedy. Williams herself envisions France's tragedy as a Girondist disaster. She sees the latter as a tragedy scripted by Jacobins who force Girondins to perform coerced roles, beginning when the National Convention is surrounded by Jacobin troops and the national “representation” is violated. This is a “prelude of that dark drama of which France has been the desolated scene, and Europe the affrighted spectator” (Letters, 2:1.28). The national “representation” refers to the deputies elected to represent the French people in the National Convention, and its “violation” (a standard Girondist phrase Williams frequently uses) refers not only to the insurrection of 31 May but to the violation of the true revolutionary representation the Girondins had produced. Williams' own representation accords with her Girondist tragedy, a representation entailing the “exhibition of character and action upon the stage; the … performance of a play” (OED, no. 3). As the Jacobins turn the true revolutionary comedy into a real tragedy, Williams additionally suggests that the crisis in representation constitutes a counterrevolutionary misrepresentation—a distortion of the true Revolution and its correspondent reality. Control of the national representation is not only a battle over control of the Revolution's direction, it is a war over whose representation will prevail.

Williams bases her account of the Jacobin tragedy on her personal authority as both spectator and coerced actor—the “witness of the scenes I describe,” who knows “personally all the principal actors.” In her mind, the sad scenes “rise in sad succession like the shades of Banquo's line, and pass along my shuddering recollection” (Letters, 2:1.2-3). She had earlier remembered Louis XVI, on trial for his life, being brought back to the Temple, and the “long page of human history rushed upon the mind—age after age arose to memory, in sad succession, like the line of Banquo; and each seemed disfigured by crimes or darkened by calamity” (1:4.11). Like Wollstonecraft, Williams often turns to Macbeth, with its themes of regicide and betrayal, to present France's tragedy. Likewise, she places herself in the position of Macbeth, who sees Banquo's line, suggesting again a tacit sense of guilt. Like Wollstonecraft, she wishes to blot out the “terrifying picture” and find “‘some sweet oblivious antidote’” that would “drive from my brain the remembrance of these things” (Letters, 2:2.212; see Macbeth 5.3.44). Referring to France, she rearticulates its tragedy in Ross's words for Scotland (Letters, 2:2.65-66; see Macbeth 4.3.165-72). The terrorist Marat “feels like Macbeth, that he has stepped too far in crimes to recede” (1:4.70-1); Hébert and his terrorist “associates” are finally brought to justice, “while the knife of the guillotine, like Macbeth's aerial dagger, hung suspended before their affrighted imagination” (2:2.17, 18). During the king's trial, the Girondists fear a Jacobin massacre of both the royal family and themselves: “Imagination already beheld, like Macbeth, aerial daggers, and anticipated a sort of dark unknown danger, to which it could set no limits” (1:4.14-15). The last allusion unwittingly implicates the Girondins in the royal tragedy, since in the play, the guilty Macbeth is haunted by a vision of the regicidal dagger just before he kills the King (Macbeth 2.1.34-40; for other references to Macbeth, see 1:1.61; 2:4.15).

Dramatic tragedy is the Terror's primary trope. The guillotine concludes the “bloody tragedy”—a “daily spectacle” of victims watched by the assembled “crowd”—a spectacle replacing previous spectacles of innocent entertainment: “Such was the daily spectacle which had succeeded … the itinerant theatres … the dance, the song, the shifting scenes of harmless gaiety, which used to attract the cheerful crowd” (Letters, 2:2.7). The “spectacle” of the guillotine also replaces the “spectacle” of the Festival of Federation as the dominant perspective, in which Paris is “the theatre of crimes” (1:4.212). The surviving victims of the Nantes noyades are brought to Paris “to treat the Parisians with a spectacle, knowing their present taste for bloody sights” (2:3.40). For Williams, the degradation of aesthetic taste is an objective correlative for the betrayal of the Revolution.

But as the Terror finally ends, there is a sense of cyclical return to the comedy that commenced the Revolution. Williams presents the last stage of the Terror as the “last scenes” of the “foul tragedy” she compellingly records, anticipating the time when “the tyrant [Robespierre] grown bolder by success, intoxicated with power, … reached the climax of his crimes, and accelerated the moment of his fall” (Letters, 2:1.255). In her representation of the rise and fall of Robespierre, Robespierre is the dramatic overreacher, the tyrant who causes his own end. Thus she will soon “wind up the singular drama of revolutionary government conformably to the most rigid rules of poetic justice” (2:3.191). Her Letters end with the restoration of order: evil is punished, and the people are again liberated.

The Letters are essentially a three-act play, opening with a comedy and, as we will see, a mythical romance followed by the terrorist tragedy, concluding with the poetic re-establishment of justice.¹⁰ Compelled to present the Revolution as a violated representation—the mixed genres of Jacobin tragedians and comedians—Williams finally regains control of the script, ending with a restoration of the magical possibilities of 1789. It is as if she wishes that the Revolution could begin over in the terms of her original comedy. Williams had concluded volume one by observing that the Revolution was still progressing even though the rest of Europe hoped that the “extraordinary drama” was “winding up” (Letters, 1:4.121).¹¹ Toward the end of volume two, she is ready to “wind up the singular drama of revolutionary government” (2:3.191) and end the Revolution. The Revolution, for her, is not what it became but what it was. By rewriting the Revolution's betrayal in the traditional tropes of tragedy, Williams makes its deviation from her comedic script understandable and even familiar: we have seen these terms before. Similarly, her repeated returns to the genres of comedy and romance suggest that the French tragedy will ultimately be happily resolved.

II

Williams' use of theatrical metaphors coincides with her use of romance (as in a romantic story of adventure) and other aesthetic categories (the sublime and beautiful) to explicate the Revolution. But by continually representing her revolutionary history aesthetically, she calls attention to her Letters as a work of fiction. This is, in fact, a paradox she inscribes in her epistolary history, although it has usually been seen as a contradiction. Indeed, her Letters have often been dismissed as partial (to the Girondins), exaggerated, and overwrought—and they often are. By emphasizing the fictional nature of her Letters, she inadvertently helped discredit them, supplying hostile or skeptical readers with the very terms by which they could be condemned—a romance, a tragedy, a comedy, a fiction. In retrospect, this seems clear enough. In addition, her topics and, for the eighteenth century, the gendered genres that she uses (romance, the epistle) perpetuate the very stereotypes that have made her unfashionable in this century. Although she had previously written on politically safe subjects endorsed by most enlightened liberals (the slave trade, the Spanish exploitation of South America), she probably sensed that the controversial nature of the Revolution might lead to accusations that she had transgressed sexual boundaries and had dirtied herself with masculine, political matters. This, in fact, did happen, but all the criticisms of her style and content miss the radicalness of her response: Williams suggests that her emotional, “feminine” reading of the Revolution is ipso facto superior to intellectual, “masculine” readings. In addition, her reader response to the Revolution is central to her revolutionary romance. Jay Fliegelman notes that, in the eighteenth century, a “new model of representation that defines truth as truthfulness to feelings rather than to facts subordinates history to the word pictures of romance. What happens within the text is judged by what happens within the reader.”¹² Williams continually recurs to this model of representation.

Throughout the Letters, Williams' implicit contention is that her romantic “fiction” is truer than superficial fact—that the French Revolution is so extraordinary and wonderful that only the genres of fiction can convey such an astonishing event—an event defying the conventional modes of historical discourse.

In 1784 Williams had published Peru, A Poem. In the introduction, she stated that she had not attempted “a full, historical narrative of the Peruvian empire” but had instead produced a “romantic History; where the unparalleled sufferings of an innocent and amiable people afford the finest subjects for true pathos.”¹³ Similarly, in the Letters, her strategy is to engage the reader emotionally—to make the reader share her own emotional commitment to the Revolution by describing her feelings of how the Revolution affects her. This is, as I have suggested, an insight she gleaned from Burke's Enquiry. Her history of the Du Fossés illustrates this strategy. She narrates their tribulations, emphasizing how they affected her, and assumes they will produce a similar effect in the English reader, who will also endorse the revolution that saved her friends. In the first series of letters, she periodically alludes to their forthcoming history, promising that she will soon make us “acquainted with incidents as pathetic as romance itself can furnish” (Letters, 1:1.72). When she finally relates the Du Fossés' history (1:1.123-94), it becomes the climax of her allegory of the repressive Old Regime and the glorious French Revolution. She subsequently asks rhetorically if her history has “the air of romance,” if the reader is glad that the “dénouement” is “happy” and that the evil baron dies “exactly in the right place; at the very page one would choose?” (1:1.193).

In A Tour in Switzerland (1798), she refers to her “romantic history” of the Du Fossés.¹⁴ By characterizing her history as a “romance,” Williams does seemingly subvert the accuracy or truth of her narrative by enmeshing it with a word commonly associated with feminine fiction.¹⁵ In Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary, a romance is “[a] lie; a fiction” (Def. no. 2; cf. OED no. 3, no. 5). In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, it “was one of the stock dismissals of incorrect histories to term them ‘romances’ or fictions, rather than histories.”¹⁶ Williams thus provides the terms for a counterrevolutionary reading of her history as a romantic fiction—a lie that openly betrays itself. The skeptical reviewer in the Gentleman's Magazine (January 1791) exploited this apparent contradiction, referring to her “pathetic tale” of the Du Fossés: “The writer herself fears it has the air of romance, and we should perfectly agree with her as she is used to such writing,” adding with sarcastic emphasis, “that every incident is made to tally, did we not know, from undoubted authority that the tale was true.”¹⁷ In the Letters, Williams realizes that her history, which she insists is true, can be dismissed as fiction, so she exploits the contradiction and turns it into a paradox: in the 1790s, France is a marvelous land where miraculous realities occur; consequently, romance is the only genre that can convey accurately the Revolution's electrical excitement and do justice to events that would appear incredible and fanciful in conventional historical discourse. To many readers, this undoubtedly comes across as clever evasion, but it is a paradox that Williams insists is true.

In letter 21 she tells her anonymous and fictional correspondent that she will transcribe a narrative sent by a friend, adding that a novel writer might be tempted to exaggerate and heighten some of the details and circumstances and “almost spin a volume from these materials.” Williams, however, will send the “story exactly” as she received it, since “nothing is so affecting as simplicity, and nothing so forcible as truth.” Insisting that her letters are stranger and truer than fiction, she contrasts the reality of her narrative with the illusion of fiction and hence has it both ways: she uses the genres of fiction to convey her affecting truths. She prefaces the story by admonishing the correspondent and reader to “recollect that you are not reading a tale of fiction; and that in real life incidents are not always placed as they are in novels, so as to produce stage effect” (Letters, 1:2.156-57). But by continually blurring the line between fiction and history, she suggests that history necessarily involves the emplotments of fiction. She herself raises questions about the status of her Letters by continually blurring and transgressing traditional generic boundaries. She seems to be teasingly defensive about how her story will be received, for when she observes “that in real life incidents are not always placed as they are in novels, so as to produce stage effect,” she allusively (or perhaps unwittingly) reminds the reader of her history of the Du Fossés and her rhetorical affirmation that the evil baron dies “exactly in the right place; at the very page” the reader would choose (Letters, 1:1.193; my emphasis). In this reading, Williams subverts the authenticity of her “history” by betraying its fictional nature, or does she suggest that human history necessarily entails a teleologic story line? Even the defensive reminder that she, unlike novel writers, does not manipulate incidents “to produce stage effect” seemingly raises just that possibility in the reader's mind. The reminder, in fact, seems to be a defensive response to Burke's contention that revolutionary writers employ dramatic scenes to produce their false revolutionary dramas: “There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouze the imagination” (Reflections, 156). Williams' depiction of the Festival of Federation as just such a “grand spectacle” seems either to confirm or challenge Burke's formulation. In both The Rights of Men and the Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft and Paine reverse Burke's representation and ascribe it to him, whereas Williams works within the fictive framework they reject, albeit reproduce.

In the narrative that Williams intends to relate “exactly as [she] received it,” she realizes that she implicates herself with a genre associated with imaginative fiction:

In some parts of the narrative you will meet with a little romance; but perhaps you will wonder that you meet with no more; since the scene is not in the cold philosophic climate of England, but in the warm regions of the south of France, where the imagination is elevated, where the passions acquire extraordinary energy, and where the fire of poetry flashed from the harps of the Troubadours amidst the sullen gloom of the Gothic ages.

(Letters, 1:2.157)

She con(text)ualizes her narrative within the genre of romance and the imaginative realm of poetry; her revolutionary romance transcends the cold, intellectual boundaries and “climate” of traditional English historiography. Feeling contextualizes fact.

She continues to insist that only in revolutionary France is romance really true: “… living in France at present appears to me somewhat like living in a region of romance. Events the most astonishing and marvellous are here the occurrences of the day, and every newspaper is filled with articles of intelligence that will form a new era in the history of mankind” (Letters, 1:2.4-5). Even when the Revolution is apparently unraveling, she still believes in a happy, romantic ending, even though the most “ardent” person would have “considered himself as reading the last page of this romance of the republic,” given all that had gone wrong (1:4.79-80). The “romance of the republic” reflexively refers to her romantic Letters, and it is significant that all her concluding epistles that close respective volumes of the Letters end propitiously, predicting regeneration and joy in a mythical future. In this sense, Williams' dramatic comedy and republican romance end happily. At the beginning of volume two, she describes herself returning to France after Robespierre's death and witnessing poetic justice, as guilty Jacobins are punished and innocent victims are liberated: “We seem to live in regions of romance,” thus “returning” to the romantic region and spirit of volume one (Letters, 2:1.178; 1:2.4). In Julia (1790), Williams' heroine had announced that she had “no pleasure in being led into regions of romance,” but the marvelous possibilities of the French Revolution transformed this sentiment.¹⁸

By ultimately envisioning the Revolution as a republican romance, Williams ensured an inevitable, storybook ending. Romance, of course, entails conflict before the happy ending occurs. In Northrop Frye's terms, there is a mythic quest (the Du Fossés' and—by extension—France's search for true love and justice and later the meaning of the “true” Revolution) as well as epic confrontations between heroic characters (Du Fossé and the Girondins) and despotic villains (the baron, the Old Regime, and Jacobin “monsters”). Frye's analysis of comedy also applies to the Du Fossé episode and the first series of Williams' Letters: In comedy “[w]hat normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman; that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal; and near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will.” The uniting of the two lovers corresponds to the crystallization of a new society, “frequently signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual.”¹⁹ Just before she leaves France to return to England, Williams performs the part of Liberty, in a play celebrating the French Revolution, which ends with everyone dancing and singing patriotic revolutionary songs. Appropriately, the play is performed at the Dú Fossé château, “where the gentlemen danced with the peasant girls, and the ladies with the peasants” (Letters, 1:1.203-7). Williams' first series of Letters (1:1.1-223) is a romantic comedy, “an enchanting vision” (207), displaced by the terrorist tragedy of subsequent Letters.

In the final section of the Letters, Williams observes “that no story which has been invented is so pathetic as what has really happened” and applies this “observation … to the period of the [terrorist] revolutionary government”: “the pencil of fiction has no colouring more gloomy than that which truth then presented, and the stories of romance offer no stronger conflicts of the passions, no incidents more affecting, or sorrows more acute, than what has passed, and what has been suffered, during the tyranny of Robespierre” (Letters, 2:4.53). The discrepancy between fact and fiction is both inscribed and written “out” in a Revolution that paradoxically embodies both. As a romantic historian, Williams represents the Revolution in the genres through which she sees it: starting as a romantic comedy, degenerating into a tragedy (with romantic interludes), and ending with a happy, comedic resolution. The Revolution's contradictions are paradoxically played out through the fictive genres that represent them. The Jacobin attempt to rewrite the Revolution results in a mixture of styles and genres that Williams implicitly criticizes as bad art and bad revolution.²⁰ But as the revolutionary comedy is forcibly changed to a Jacobin tragedy, she represents this change in oppositional genres that explain how and why the pristine Revolution degenerated.

It has always been facile to dismiss Williams' Letters in the fictive terms she presents them. But there is a larger sense in which Williams recognized the fictive dimension of history—that history entails a selection of facts telling a story, explaining the events that make up a phenomenon as complicated as the French Revolution. Given the extraordinary nature of a revolution that seemed, at turns, magnificent, terrible, and thus contradictory, there was a tacit (often unwitting) acknowledgment by both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary writers that only the genres of fiction could express and explain a revolution that seemed suprareal and hence unreal. Paine's Rights of Man is, among other things, a disguised drama; Wollstonecraft's French Revolution is, inter alia, her version of Macbeth. While both Paine and Wollstonecraft deny that the Revolution is a theatrical event, the Revolution's theatricality is a documented commonplace in the Revolution's historiography: from the beginning, the Revolution was represented as a dramatic spectacle, with its actors and mise en scène—a representation embraced and endorsed by the revolutionaries themselves.²¹ While the implications are still being discussed and explored, Williams' Letters, in this context, are truer to the Revolution's spirit than many of her canonical contemporaries.

Notes

1. Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies, in The Works of Hannah More, 11 vols. (New York: Harper, 1847), 2:335.

2. Woodward, Une Amie Anglaise, p. 45. My translation.

3. Gary Kelly, “Revolutionary and Romantic Feminism: Women, Writing, and Cultural Revolution,” in Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 119.

4. Leith, Space and Revolution, pp. 36, 43.

5. Rousseau, Letter to M. d' Alembert on the Theatre, p. 126.

6. Ibid., p. 133. For other allusions to Rousseau, see Nicola Watson, “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth and Byron,” The Wordsworth Circle 23 (Winter 1992): 18-23.

7. Williams was often criticized for her Gallicized diction (e.g., “epocha,” “phasis,” “meridianal,” “centrical,” “epuration”). Although she uses the word comedian in its English sense, she sometimes seems to use it in the French sense of comédien—the common word for “actor.”

8. See Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language, pp. 72-73.

9. Apropos of Marx's comments at the beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire, cf. Jean-Paul Marat's remark in July 1792: “How could Liberty ever have established itself among us. At several nearby tragic scenes, the revolution has only been a web of farcical representations.” Cited by Marie-Hélène Huet, “Performing Arts: Theatricality and the Terror,” in Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography, and Art, ed. James A. W. Heffernan (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), p. 137. In the Reflections, Burke sees the members of the National Assembly acting a “farce of deliberation”: “They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience” (p. 161, my emphasis).

10. In her study of the Revolution, Lynn Hunt, using Northrop Frye's vocabulary, found that in “the first months of the Revolution, most rhetoric was unconsciously shaped by … the ‘generic plot’ of comedy,” culminating in the Festival of Federation. In 1792 the dominant discourse shifted to romance—a mythic confrontation between heroes and villains—and subsequently tragedy during the Terror (Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984], pp. 34-38). Williams' Letters roughly correspond to this schema, although she returns to the cyclical, repetitive comedy of 1789.

11. Cf. Susanne Zantop: in the 1790s

    the French Revolution was a fascinating spectacle to the German onlooker. France, or rather Paris, appeared as the stage for scenes of horror or delight, which the German spectators could comment upon, applaud, or boo from what appeared to be a safe distance. The stage effect was underscored by the Revolution's own self-conscious theatricality and by the representation of the Parisian “drama” on German stages and in printed texts. Literary reenactments of the revolution in Germany often took the form of comedy, which distanced the events as it represented them. After 1792, when the Revolution was carried across the border, the German auditorium became, so to speak, center stage, which made detached, amused spectatorship no longer possible, and comedy turned to tragedy.

    (“Crossing the Border: The French Revolution in the German Literary Imagination,” in Representing the French Revolution, ed. James A. W. Heffernan, p. 215)

12. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 60-61.

13. Helen Maria Williams, Peru: A Poem in Six Cantos (London: T. Cadell, 1784), pp. vii-viii.

14. Williams, A Tour in Switzerland, 1:118.

15. See G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 151, 310-11, 316-17.

16. J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 42. For the ideological implications of the distinction between history and romance, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), passim.

17. Woodward, Une Amie Anglaise, p. 208.

18. Helen Maria Williams, Julia, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1790), 1:141.

19. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 163.

20. In The Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft had criticized Burke for introducing and mixing false, artificial poetry and romance into his false, romantic Reflections (Works, 5:29).

21. See, for instance, Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 106; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, pp. 34-38; Huet, “Performing Arts,” in Representing the French Revolution, pp. 135-49; Furniss, Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology, p. 131; Schama, Citizens, pp. 380-83, 535.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973.

Barker-Benefield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Blakemore, Steven. Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1986.

Champion, J. A. I. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Huet, Marie-Hélène. “Performing Arts: Theatricality and the Terror.” In Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography, and Art, edited by James A. W. Heffernan, 135-49. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992.

Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.

Kelly, Gary. “Revolutionary and Romantic Feminism: Women, Writing, and Cultural Revolution.” In Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, edited by Keith Hanley and Raman Selden, 107-30. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Leith, James A. Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in France, 1789-1799. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

More, Hannah. Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies. In The Works of Hannah More, 11 vols. New York: Harper, 1847.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d.' Alembert on the Theatre. Translated by Allan Bloom. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960.

Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Watson, Nicola. “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth and Byron.” The Wordsworth Circle 23 (Winter, 1992): 18-23.

Williams, Helen Maria. A Tour in Switzerland. 2 vols. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798.

———. Julia. 2 vols. London: T. Cadell, 1790.

———. Letters from France. 2 vols. Ed. Janet M. Todd. 1790-96. Reprint. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975.

———. Peru: A Poem in Six Cantos. London: T. Cadell, 1784.

———. Poems. 2 vols. London: T. Cadell, 1786.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Woodward, Lionel D. Une Anglaise Amie de la Révolution Française: Hélène Maria Williams et ses Amis. Paris: H. Champion, 1930.

Zantop, Susanne. “Crossing the Border: The French Revolution in the German Literary Imagination.” In Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography, and Art, edited by James A. W. Heffernan, 213-33. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992.

Abbreviations

Works cited throughout this study are identified by the following short titles in the text and notes:

Enquiry: Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Edited by J. T. Boulton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

The French Revolution: Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has produced in Europe (1794), in Works, 6:1-235.

Letters: Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France (1790-96), 2 vols., edited by Janet M. Todd. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975.

Reflections: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), edited by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1986.

Rights of Men: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in Works, 5:1-78.