Politics and Commercial Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams' Letters From France

Helen Maria Williams has rightfully taken her place in the newly formed canon of British women writers, most notably as a correspondent from revolutionary France. A popular poet and sentimental novelist of the late eighteenth century who used her verse to speak out on the oppressions of war, the slave trade, and colonialism, Williams traveled to France in July 1790 and began a series of letters to an imaginary friend in support of the Revolution. ¹ A dramatic tour of French life and politics, Williams’ Letters From France is a cross section of genres, merging personal correspondence, travel narrative, sentimentalism, and radical politics. ² In volumes one and two (1790 and 1792), the most dramatic and emotional of the Letters, Williams responds to the turmoil in France with the personal excitement of a tourist, detailing the spectacle of the nascent republic and cheering the victory of the revolutionaries in the impassioned style of sentimentalism. ³ These first volumes—as much an account of Williams’ “emotional ecstasies” as of political restructuring—often strike readers as lacking serious critical perspective; and though widely read in her own day, they are seldom included in the 1790–92 British canon of revolutionary debate, usually comprised of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstone-craft. ⁴ Although not a direct reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, they are, however, a thorough critique of Burke’s ideas, especially since Williams invokes Burke’s strongest fear by praising France as an ideal model for England. ⁵ The aim of this essay is not, however, to argue why Williams’ Letters should be in the canon of revolutionary discourse; rather it is to show that Letters demonstrates an intriguing and radical correspondence between revolutionary politics and a culture of commercial sensibility, a correspondence shunned by her fellow revolutionary sympathizers Paine and Wollstonecraft. ⁶

Williams’ sentimentalism draws on an eighteenth-century culture of feminine sensibility sprung from the expansion of consumerism and leisure culture, at the center of which was a burgeoning market for sentimental novels. As G. J. Barker-Benfield explains, women and what were considered “feminine” sensibilities dominated the markets of a rising commercial capitalism, since “home became the primary site for consumption on a broad scale.” ⁷ As prepared foods and other domestic products became available for purchase, middle-class women found more time to decorate and furnish their homes—and more time to read. Novels of sentiment catered to this lucrative female market by featuring deep emotion, melodrama, and sensitive heroes. Indeed, women began reading and writing in greater numbers than ever before, often with radical consequences, since they (and some of their male counterparts) began questioning women’s economic status, their gender roles, and the patriarchal values of society. This sensibility—initiated and sustained by a consumer society—advanced political and economic reform by posing the social affections of sympathy, compassion, benevolence, and pity against competitiveness and selfishness. ⁸

This movement did not, however, eradicate masculinist precepts. A sentimental vision of reform existed concurrently in Britain with a masculine standard of political identity. Even as women experienced a new authority and independence in the eighteenth century, British nationalism found a strong reactionary voice in supposedly male rationalism. As Linda Colley has noted, eighteenth-century Britons regularly defined themselves and their form of government in opposition to what they saw as an effeminate and materialist French culture. Considered emotional, devious, and preoccupied with fashionable consumption of commodities, the French were thought to be governed by a “boudoir politics” infiltrated by feminine influences. The British conversely “conceived of themselves as an essentially ‘masculine’ culture—bluff, forthright, rational, down-to-earth to the extent of being philistine.” ⁹ Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Burke draw on these popular notions of Britain and France, albeit to different ends. While each lays claim to a “natural,” masculine politics, each accuses the opposition of empty theatricalism and deceptive feminine appeals to emotion.

Letters From France diverges from this rhetoric by celebrating revolutionary politics as a commercial and affective-performative enterprise. Williams, like her contemporaries, exploits popular depictions of the French and the British...