The Bewildering Affect of Representative Democracy: Sheppard Lee's "Confusion of Characters, Propensities, and Associations"

This essay examines how Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee (1836) uses the political affect of "democratic confusion" to detail the potentials and pitfalls of representation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Bird's novel describes the journeys of Sheppard Lee, a man who discovers he can move his consciousness into corpses and reanimate them. Instead of focusing solely on Lee, the novel uses the conceit of metempsychosis to depict Lee's transformation into six other characters, adapting Ancient Greek definitions of "character" that stressed the concept's exemplifying power. Yet with each transformation, Lee experiences bafflement, and these states of confusion provide an analogy to the political representation of a variegated constituency by an official. For Bird, representation depends on what Alexis de Tocqueville called a "confused clamour"; indeed, personifying voters could not occur without it. At the same time, this article charts out Bird's limitations for this vision of a prolific, if complicated, democracy. The novel ultimately contends that representatives could not comprehend voters without this affective state, even as Bird curtails its productive nature along racial lines. By the ending of the novel, private bewilderment moves into the public domain in a scene of mass racial violence that clarifies the tension Bird identifies in democratic confusion.