The Traumatic Colonel

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

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