"A "Dream" of Murder": "The Fall of Robespierre" and the Tragic Imagination

Abstract

ROBESPIERRE. What! did th'assassin's dagger aim its point Vain, as a dream of murder, at my bosom?--Coleridge & Southey, The Fall of Robespierre i.ii.6-7 (1794) THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A LARGER STUDY OF THE RAPID AND TURBULENT metamorphosis of dramatic imagination during period of French Revolution.* Within that study, this work explores one crucial moment in that transformation: immediate impact of Revolution upon dramatic imagination of British romanticism. Much very useful work has been done to understand that impact. Through work of George Steiner, Ronald Paulson, Mary Jacobus, Jeffrey Cox, Julie Carlson, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Reeve Parker, Marjean Purinton, and William Jewett, for example, we have gained a much clearer sense of broad trajectory and characteristic tenor of British romantics' reactions to Revolutionary experience: their initial enthusiasm for its cause; their sympathetic identification with its participants and their close imaginary participation in its events; their recoiling horror at Revolution's subsequent violence, and manner in which that psychological trauma prompted romantics' characteristic abstraction and historical displacement of Revolutionary themes and concerns. (1) These reactions are expressed, both directly and indirectly, throughout romantic drama: however, they are most powerfully expressed, without doubt, in tragedy, that genre most closely associated with both political ideals and violence of radical Revolution. Indeed, for central years of 1790's, tragedy was inextricably set within implicatory context of Jacobin rhetoric and ideology--and bound up, moreover (as Jacobus has made strikingly clear), with regicide. In consequence, and in a manner matched by no other literary form, tragedy was, for romantics, a genre bound inextricably to revolutionary experience, to degree that romantic writers' post-Revolutionary challenge was no longer to write--like young Schiller--a revolutionary tragedy, but to compose a tragedy that might move beyond, and perhaps redeem, form's own grim, complicit history, liberating it from political violence with which it had been so intimately associated. It is for this reason that we find, in tragedy, most sustained and attenuated expression of that peculiarly romantic displacement of history remarked upon by Jerome McGann: revolutionary experience, as an implicatory context, permeates romantic tragedy, dominating its action and concern to a degree unmatched in other genres, but French Revolutionary experience, in its historical particularity and local immediacy, appears nowhere. In fact, such pressurized displacement is so pronounced in romantic tragedy that it has been described by Terence Hoagwood as the central fact about romantic drama. (2) However, in its investigation of romanticism's engagement with Revolution, modern scholarship has tended to reiterate that act of displacement: for while it has reminded us of locality and contingency of romantics' imaginative responses to Revolution, it has continued, until quite recently, to elide locality and materiality of their Revolutionary experience. Indeed, this tendency was precisely that faulted by David Jordan in his review of Ronald Paulson's otherwise immensely useful Representations of Revolution: although Paulson offers a highly useful description of contemporary aesthetic responses to revolution, he treats revolution itself, Jordan points out, as some vast, abstract, and amorphous upheaval, not a series of discrete events but a phantasmagoria, an undifferentiated nightmare calling forth primal images of sex and generation and death and cruelty. (3) The problem is less pronounced, but no less evident, in more recent work of Jacobus, Cox, Carlson, Hoagwood, and Jewett. There, local negotiation of romantics' responses to Revolution, complexities of those responses' imaginative and textual articulation, and their change and development within Revolution have been more amply explored. …