Jefferson not in America: Identity and Liminality in the Early Republic

By Shevaun E. Watson

[1] A movie about Jefferson may be doomed from the start, because, as Gordon Wood notes, “Jefferson scarcely seems to exist as a real historical person. . . . The human Jefferson was essentially a man of the 18th century, a very intelligent and bookish slaveholding southern planter, enlightened and progressive no doubt, but possessing as many weaknesses as strengths, as much folly as wisdom, as much blindness as foresight.” Jefferson in Paris attempts -- and probably fails -- to capture the subtleties and contradictions of Jefferson, the slave-holding aristocrat and the democratic idealist. But what I think is so interesting about the film -- why I think it deserves some attention despite its flaws -- is not what it attempts to tell us about Jefferson in Paris, but what it tries to tell us about early America’s struggle with national identity.

[2] To that end, there are two questions I’d like to consider: 1) Why set a movie about Jefferson in Paris? 2) How is such a movie theoretically and pedagogically useful?

[3] There are several ways one might answer the first question. One way Paris functions in the movie is as Jefferson himself once described it, as “an interesting scene of action.” In other words, revolutionary Paris is a backdrop -- a visual counterpart -- to Jefferson’s democratic musings. He did spend a significant amount of time in Paris, serving as Commissioner and U.S. Minister to the court of Louis XVI 1784-1789, and the film takes this segment of his life as a way to explore the man and the times. Jefferson was engrossed in the unfolding of what he called “the first chapter of the [French] revolution’s history,” and the movie portrays this through voice-overs and cross-cut scenes. By casting the French Revolution through Jefferson’s eyes, Paris simply provides the rhetorical situation for the expression of some of his more idealistic political philosophies. The movie suggests that America is not just a place, but also an idea, a way of being in the world that exists in the hearts and minds of its people.

[4] Another possible reason for setting Jefferson in Paris, rather than Monticello or Philadelphia, is a slightly more cynical version of the first. Jefferson is not shown in America so that all of the maddening paradoxes that characterize him and his legacies remain philosophical and abstract rather than material and real. These French statesmen are not portrayed as real philosophical or political adversaries; rather, they are merely Jefferson’s interlocutors -- unthreateningly prompting his democratic diatribes. In this way, revolutionary Paris is presented as not unlike contemporary America: both sites are distant from the political, social, and economic realities of the early American republic. Ironically, the film suggests, it might be easier to understand -- or just stand -- Jefferson out of context, outside of the America that made him. Revolutionary Paris is a real, historical context certainly, but it exists at such a comfortable distance that contradictions and criticisms do not hit too close to home. Thus, the second way Paris functions as a setting for this movie is as a haven, like the ancient agora where elite men engage in intellectual debates.

[5] A third way to think about the significance of Paris for this particular film is to shift our focus away from Jefferson and toward the other Americans in the movie, the daughters and the slaves he brings with him from Monticello. Once we recast our gaze upon some of the minor characters, it becomes clear that Jefferson and the other Americans negotiate their outsider status in Paris quite differently. Jefferson is a proud American in Paris, a self-proclaimed outsider. While some of his aristocratic chums like to poke fun at his American provincialisms, Jefferson is so often indistinguishable from his European counterparts that he must keep reminding them -- and us -- that he is different. “We do things differently in America” is Jefferson’s constant refrain throughout the film. In other words, though an outsider, Jefferson is quite home in Paris among diplomats, intellectuals, and aristocrats. It is his home-away-from-home. “So ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation,” he writes. “In what country on earth would you rather live? Certainly my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France.” Paris is exciting for Jefferson because in many ways it is so familiar. For the other Americans, however, Paris is a strange place that challenges their values and their sense of themselves as “Americans.” This scene can be understood as an analogy for the Americans’ experience in Paris: just as the American corn cannot be transplanted to France, so the other Americans feel that they, too, are out of their “natural” element. Therefore, Paris also serves a site of liminality where Americans grapple with their sense of individual and national identities.

[6] The term liminality comes from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner. He defines liminality as those moments of abnormality or interruption in people’s lives when their identities are between clear definitions. Turner describes liminality as an “expanded zone” where conventional rules and mores don’t apply, a period of suspension, a space of indeterminacy and ambivalence, an extended moment in which something is always on the edge of being something else. Some scholars in literature and history have utilized the concept of liminality to talk about unique figures such as captives, pilgrims, orphans, children, and court jesters.

[7] Greg Dening, in his introduction to Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, extends the concept of liminality by using it to characterize the general state of relations in early America. He writes: “Early America was a place of thresholds, margins, boundaries. It was a place of ambivalence and unset definition. The search for identity in that place was multivalent and unending. . . . Edginess is what one feels in a liminal state. Edginess is the quintessential feel of early America.” So, in response to my second overarching question of the theoretical and/or pedagogical usefulness of this movie, I want to suggest that Jefferson in Paris can be used to theorize, problematize, and teach that “edginess” of American identities in the early Republic.

[8] Consider three liminal figures, Jefferson’s daughter, Patsy; his slave, James; and his slave and lover, Sally. In the case of Patsy, we see her struggle with her identity as a slave-owning mistress. But perhaps more germane to the thesis here, Patsy flirts with Catholicism as a way to distance herself from a Protestant America caught in moral hypocrisy. In America, Patsy’s role and identity is clear: there she can own slaves and be a Christian unproblematic ally. But the Revolutionary spirit in Paris stirs deep anxieties in Patsy about the moral rectitude of her actions, her beliefs, her father, and her homeland.

[9] Next, James is an interesting example of another liminal figure in this movie. Happily, laws about Africans don’t apply in Paris, so James gets a taste of freedom earning a regular wage as Jefferson’s servant. While this is exhilarating for James, we also see him struggle with a new -- but temporary -- sense of identity as a free man. He begins to drink excessively, and he seems unable to manage his money. James experiences liminality in Paris as being, for a time, both utterly free and ultimately enslaved.

[10] Finally, Paris is a site of liminality for Sally, too -- perhaps most tellingly. In particular, Sally comes to fulfill many new and different social roles during her time in Paris: as Jefferson’s slave, she is always a sort of child in his extended Monticello “family,” but she is also his lover and a mother to his child. By setting the affair between Sally and Jefferson in Paris, the movie distances such illicit behavior from Jefferson’s role in American politics as statesman and eloquent defender of liberty. But Paris, it is suggested, also allows Sally and Jefferson to renegotiate the terms and form of their relationship, thus placing Sally in an “expanded zone” of freedom and a place of indeterminacy and ambivalence.

[11] Even though Paris provides a unique site for Americans to (re)define themselves, they do not leave such conflicts there. They return to America, presumably, with all of that indeterminacy and ambivalence -- all of the “edginess” -- still intact. Therefore, I believe class discussions about early American identity might usefully begin right where Jefferson in Paris leaves off.