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The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of the Public Sphere
Bryan Waterman
| THE past decade and a half of scholarship on the culture of the early American Republic has included an extraordinary amount of attention to the nature of the public sphere, a fixation that not only illuminates current academic and popular cultures but also was shared by many citizens—particularly political and intellectual leaders—of the new nation and of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.1 This self-consciousness about the dynamics of publicity coexisted with another preoccupation, one mapped exhaustively by critics in the 1960s and 1970s: the discussion in the last decade of the eighteenth century about the formation and fear of political societies, conspiracies, and secret associations.2 The relationship between these preoccupations of eighteenth-century citizens and latter-day historians deserves closer examination. |
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Publicity and secrecy came together in public debates on topics ranging from the organization of the Democratic-Republican societies of the mid-1790s, which challenged the Federalists' equation of the public sphere with government-sanctioned expression, to the notorious Bavarian Illuminati scare, in which some members of the Federalist-Congregationalist clergy attempted to persuade parishioners and politicians that a cabal of European atheists had orchestrated the French Revolution and intended to overthrow religion and government in America as well. In the ensuing debates, Federalists and Jeffersonians maintained different views of the nature and regulation of public expression. Fears generated by secret associations and by anonymous argument in the partisan press led Federalists, in particular, to question not only the conventions of anonymity and disinterestedness that had characterized the republican print sphere of the founding moment but also the right to free public expression, as in the attempt to control dissenting political voices through the vindictive measures of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The narrative of competing partisan conceptions of the new nation's public sphere has been central to new cultural histories of partisan politics that, by looking beyond politicians and preachers to popular associations and newsprint, account for a broader public (or publics) than Habermas or his most influential followers had recognized.3 |
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In early American literary studies, these same topics—the dynamics of the public sphere and supposed threats posed by conspiratorial secret societies—turn up in a range of literary texts from the period but coincide most prominently in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, which have themselves come to occupy a significant place in literary critical narratives of the emergence of an American public.4 Following the important work of old and new political historians, critics of Federal-era American literature have concentrated intently on ways in which political partisanship affected literary publication in the period, as it did most other aspects of American life.5 When critics consider Brown's hints in his debut novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), and in its unfinished sequel that Carwin, the voice-throwing villain who is perhaps ultimately responsible for the novel's sensational scenes of domestic bloodshed, is a proselyte to a secret society that resembles the Illuminati, the typical response is to read the novel as aligned with a Federalist agenda and to posit Brown as a countersubversive.6 Critics differ, however, on whether Brown exemplifies the ideals of a civic humanist public sphere or sees its values—of disembodied authority, for example—as dangerous. |
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