Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation

Abstract

Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation. By Malcolm Kelsall. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 207. Plates. $55.00.) Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen. Edited by James Gilreath. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Pp. xv, 383. $40.00.) University of Wales English Professor Malcolm Kelsall has contrived to write an aggressively literate analysis of Jefferson's romantic nationalism. His book is not so much engaged the American state of mind as an internationalist consciousness of which Jefferson, he suggests, emphatically partook. Fair warning must be given: the author's Eurocentrism is marked, and he is all over the map and unbounded by time. Therefore, prepare to incorporate Mosaic, Germanic, and Irish equivalents. Expect to encounter Wordsworth, Frankenstein, Bismarck, and William McKinley along Jefferson. Kelsall himself offhandedly warns that his realm is the metaphorical rather than the literal, and that his approach to Jefferson will be topsy turvy (11-12). As a text that explores symbolic history, the interpretation begins and ends foreigners' visits to Monticello. Lafayette's monumental pilgrimage in 1824 exposes the shared passion of two ardent, dreamy creators, a hero and a sage both striving to make their revolutionary principles durable. Through their common identification Jefferson's Declaration-the foundational document of romantic nationalism (25)-the two larger-than-life figures achieve symbiosis by understanding the secular/sacred, private/public motifs embodied in the host's classical villa. Liberals Lafayette and Jefferson want the same thing: to impose a militant ethic (their self-evident truths) on the waking world, to derive hope from an orderly myth of moral progress. But Jefferson, for one, may be too restless to succeed. Just when the author seems to be establishing his premise, he moves the discussion sideways into irony. There is a Miltonic Jefferson, for whom the Satanic pose was not without its attractions: political enemies were doomed to darkness. There is a Janus-faced Jefferson, whose villa alternates between representations of empowered individualism and aristocratic pretense. In the most dramatic two-step of Kelsall's analysis, Ossianic romance gleaned from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia leads to a persuasive statement about Jeffersonian racism: the chosen (white) people of God, in Jefferson's calculus, are bound for a bloody contest the other, because Jefferson sees that Nature effects its transformations by cataclysm, and politics apes Nature. Just as Europe's corrupting influence must be kept at bay, black degeneration (symbolized by belief in the orangoutans' rape of African women) breathes gothic terror into the Virginia idyll. The Jeffersonian mind introduces symbolic order even before political structure is in place. The stories underlying the Great Seal of the United States reveal how Jefferson aspired to universality as much as Franklin, his partner in this enterprise: all he needed was his lightning rod, which materialized once he had textualized a credible sense of American homeland, a national ideal meant to be imitated by future republics elsewhere in the world. This is the vision Jefferson ostensibly imparts to Lafayette and other pilgrims to his mountaintop shrine. Monticello's downstairs design shows Jefferson blending his self-determined role as philosopher-statesman in repose that of the performer displaying his fabricated world, with the desire to entertain and instruct the transient visitor (136). Some historians are bound to find Kelsall's approach meandering, anarchic, or uncomfortably riotous. There are moments when his view of Jefferson resembles a snapshot. But unconventionality is what gives the book its life: where else can one find a man whom scholars have long considered pacifistic, even fainthearted, to have had an imaginative taste for violence (145)? …