Death Effects: Revisiting the Conceit of Franklin's Memoir

I think Pennsylvania a good country to dye in, though a very bad one to live in.

—Franklin¹

According to John Adams, Benjamin Franklin died of his own theory. Biographers often quote from the scene in Adams's diary in which he describes the discomfort he felt on sharing a room with Franklin, when Franklin insisted they keep the window open all night.² Franklin believed that fresh air was essential to health and that keeping windows open at night would prevent, rather than cause, colds. The anecdote is used, often enough, to portray a grumpy Adams entangled by Franklin's eccentric genius. What is less often quoted is Adams's last word. On hearing of Franklin's death, Adams concluded that the cold night air had finally killed him, and he made a little-noticed notation in his diary to the effect that Franklin "fell a Sacrifice at last, not to the stone, but to his own Theory; having caught the violent Cold, which finally choaked him, by sitting for some hours at a Window, with the cool Air blowing upon him" (1:3, 419). In fact, Franklin's decline was more gradual than Adams would have it—he spent the last year of his life in bed and up until his final days was apparently at work on his memoirs. In the definitive Genetic Text of what became known as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall note, "The last paragraph, on page 220, is written in such a slanting hand (evidently while Franklin was sitting in bed) that it could even have been penned in early April 1790. Franklin died the evening of April 17, 1790, at age 84."³ If Franklin did not die of his own theory, he did die writing a document that was in many ways a theory of death.

The possibility of an afterlife, figured in comparatively secular terms, was one of Franklin's cherished themes. Franklin relates in the memoirs how he and his friend Osborne had "a serious Agreement, that the one who happen'd first to die, should if possible make a friendly Visit to the other, and acquaint him how he found things in that separate State" (Writings 1245). Osborne never fulfilled his promise, but Franklin was able to imagine a variety of returns for himself in his letters, including the one described in his famous love letter to Madame Helvetius. After she had rejected his marriage proposal in 1778 on the grounds that she must remain faithful to her dead husband, Franklin wrote to her, "I went home, and, believing myself dead, found myself in the Elysian Fields." Franklin then describes how, in the Elysian Fields, he met Madame Helvetius's husband and determined that he was now happily remarried. On discovering this fact, Franklin recounts, "I suddenly decided to leave these ungrateful spirits, to return to the good earth, to see again the sunshine and you. Here I am! Let us revenge ourselves!" (Writings 924–25). Thus, Franklin returns from the hereafter a more faithful lover than Monsieur Helvetius, who is content to remain dead. When Adams sealed his triumphant outrage at Franklin after his death, he composed a dialogue of the dead in which Franklin finds himself ignored through eternity by the likes of Rousseau. ⁴ But here Franklin ultimately manages to trump Adams, for he had envisioned his own eternal life so piquantly in his bagatelles that Adams's wish fulfillment fantasy goes unremembered by history, whereas Franklin's frolic in the Elysian Fields with his beloved Madame Helvetius is the stuff of myth. In this essay, I will explore the ways in which the conceit of the memoir provides Franklin with yet another form of visitation, one in which the word affords access to an instantaneous posthumousness.

It has often been noted that Franklin presents himself as a kind of "representative personality" in his Memoir,⁵ and current scholarship emphasizes the extent to which the Memoir itself is about representation. The interest within colonial studies in the emergence of print culture has...