Feeling Green: Goethe, Melville, and the Color of Democracy

Le tableau que présente la société américaine est, si je puis m’exprimer ainsi, couvert d’une couche démocratique, sous laquelle on voit de temps en temps percer les anciennes couleurs de l’aristocratie.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique

Tocqueville closes the second chapter of Democracy in America with the image of American society as a painting coated with a layer of democracy (une couche démocratique) underneath which one can still perceive the colors of an aristocratic social order. In his translation, Gerald Bevan renders this as “a democratic patina beneath which we see from time to time the former colors of the aristocracy showing through.”¹ In translating couche as “patina,” Bevan proposes a fairly strong reading of the layering through which Tocqueville claims aristocracy reveals itself under democracy. A patina is neither a varnish nor a paint overlaid on a canvas but a coat of bluish-green that forms on the surface of oxidized copper or bronze. In his translation, Bevan gives democracy a specific color with a specific history, and he changes both the aesthetic and political implications of Tocqueville’s visual metaphor. Where Tocqueville’s image hints at the paradox of color’s double meaning as concealment and truth—a thin layer of democracy cannot hide the true colors of aristocracy—Bevan’s patina evokes the complex process through which these two senses of “color” produce and support each other. Bevan’s translation thus suggests how coloring democracy with a green patina can transform it because, as Michael Taussig argues, “color is not secondary to form … it is not an overlay draped like a skin over a shape,” but a primary form in itself.²

If Bevan’s “patina” rather overreads Tocqueville’s couche, his translation is nonetheless quite true to a particular history of democracy, aristocracy, and imperialism that Herman Melville tells through the color green. As Michel Pastoureau argues, green is among the most paradoxical of colors, at once ubiquitous as the color of vegetation and yet, for most of European history, difficult, expensive, and toxic to manufacture.³ It therefore epitomizes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s claim that color in general is “a progressive, augmenting, mutable quality, a quality that admits of alteration even to inversion.”⁴ Mutable to the point of reversal, color has a history, as well as a body, a life, and a capacity for action. For all of these reasons, color helps to tell a history of democracy’s own alterations and inversions, including its fabrication from the materials comprising its purported opposites, such as aristocracy and empire. Bevan’s patina further evokes a particular literary history: it is the very color that Melville chooses in the first book of Pierre to describe the process by which democratic and aristocratic social relations produce and preserve each other. “For,” Melville writes, “the democratic element operates as a subtle acid among us, forever producing new things by corroding the old, as in the south of France, verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by grape-vinegar poured upon copper plates.”⁵ In Melville’s 1852 elaboration of America’s “democratic patina,” green is no simple metaphor for democracy, no figurative layer of paint that can be scraped away to reveal some old aristocratic portrait beneath. Instead, it is a material by-product of the very process out of which democracy manufactures its difference from the stuff of other social relations. As such, green is for Melville—and for Goethe and Taussig—also the color that links revolution to its repetitions and reversals.

The verdigris that Melville and Bevan propose as a by-product of democracy’s corrosive oxidation of the old would be classed, according to Goethe, among the “chemical colours” extracted or manufactured from particular substances. Along with the physiological colors that are properties of the eye and the physical colors that appear through colorless media like glass and water, chemical colors are among the “exhibitions of color” that, Goethe insists, prove insufficient Newton’s priasmatic theory of color. Goethe...