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American Literature 73.4 (2001) 695-726



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"Nature's Nation Revisited": Citizenship and the Sublime in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

Matthew Cordova Frankel

[Figures]
Thus, superficial appearances to the contrary, America is not crass, materialistic: it is Nature’s nation, possessing a heart that watches and receives.—Perry Miller, “Nature and the National Ego”

I am but a son of nature, loving what I see & feel, without being able to give a reason, nor caring much whether there be one.—Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1788

In a portrait composed during the first years of the nineteenth century, little-known artist Caleb Boyle chose to depict Thomas Jefferson posing before Virginia’s Natural Bridge (see fig. 1). Boyle’s decision to paint Jefferson in this natural setting makes sense: some fifteen years earlier in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson gave the bridge international prominence, praising it as “the most sublime of Nature’s works.” 1 Comparatively, Boyle’s rendering of the bridge is somewhat dull; still, with almost astonishing clarity, the artist manages to frame what has become one of the more puzzling relationships within Jefferson’s legacy. That Boyle did not sketch Jefferson from life and that he had perhaps never met the man or even visited the site of the bridge only adds intrigue to the composition of the portrait. Jefferson had been elected third president of the United States just one year before and, respectfully, Boyle shows him looking the part of the elder statesman. Dressed formally in long black robe and high-collared shirt, he holds in his right hand what looks to be a hat of distinctive style, while his left hand rests regally on a walking stick. In his eyes, which gaze outward, is the faintest glint of a somewhat [End Page 695] [Begin Page 697] severe salutation. It is as if Jefferson waits there, perched before his favorite wonder of the New World, anxious both to receive and to appraise each of his country’s new citizens. Overall, however, his carriage suggests an air of solicitous welcome.

Yet the Natural Bridge, which Boyle sets over Jefferson’s left shoulder in the horizon, conjures a different Jefferson than the public man with aristocratic poise. In Notes, Jefferson recounts a solitary retreat from official life to the seclusion of Virginia’s vast natural territory. Upon climbing the Bridge’s massive arch and peering down “into the abyss,” he describes a furious sensation that overtakes him by storm: ravaged suddenly by a violent headache, Jefferson is thrown down on all fours, wholly shaken by “the emotions, arising from the sublime” (N, 25). 2 The intimacy and intensity of this moment are lodged in the history of the portrait’s pastoral backdrop—the specter of an ecstatic, disheveled Jefferson lurking behind the subdued manner of his manifest persona. Concisely juxtaposed in Boyle’s portrait, then, are two seemingly distinct but concurrently developing modes of early American subjectivity—the ideal citizen of the newly formed United States and the breathless student of its immense natural environment. Accordingly, the question Boyle puts to his audience is the one readers of Jefferson’s Notes have struggled likewise to answer: What at last can be said about the interplay between the political requirements of American citizenship and the aesthetic demands of the sublime experience? 3

My own reading of Jefferson’s Notes addresses this question squarely. Taking Boyle’s portrait as an overarching model, I examine Jefferson’s sublime experience within a set of interrelated institutional tensions inherited from the country’s founding. Ultimately I hope to demonstrate how the constitutive stages and environmental sources of the sublime experience provided Jefferson with an available cognitive template capable of allaying, if not resolving, anxieties about emergent nationalism, the new contractual citizenship, and the unfolding crisis in political representation. Jefferson’s treatment of the sublime, therefore, rather than competing with the nation’s “‘official’ faith . . . in progress and republican institutions,” as Perry Miller has suggested, in...

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