In
American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once
historical
and mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and
Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in
the
specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative
elements
clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the
Founders
took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics,
race,
and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana
Purchase and
the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the
deep
anxieties about the United States as a slave nation.
Drexler
and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of
the time
is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the
literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in
1800,
the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander
Hamilton, his
machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular
treason
trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of
post-revolutionary
America to suggest that the figure of "Burr" was fundamentally a
displaced
fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose
how the
historical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to
repress the
larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux
of that
repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of
Charles
Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets,
polemics,
tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors
speculate
that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap
in
U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.
