5 The Cute and the Cruel

It is a short journey from Wordsworth's London to the bestial space that Burke maps out in his reactionary pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Like the urban mass in The Prelude, the Parisian crowd looms as a monolithic tribal mob with no hierarchical structure, no moral discipline and—what troubles an aesthete like Burke perhaps most—no sense of style or etiquette. The democratic movement, Burke fears, seeks to impose its own organisational disorder and ideological confusion onto the state and to outmode the traditional benchmarks of human subjectivity. Although its main intention is to destabilise the political and economic division between the old aristocratic elite and the rising middle classes, the impact of this egalitarian struggle does not remain confined to the social. Gender distinctions, too, are readily dissolved when women abandon the private sphere of the domestic to engage openly in the public and exclusively male sphere of political debate. ¹ In Burke's view, such political promiscuity also breaks down racial boundaries and relates the revolutionaries to the Native Americans. “It was,” he writes, “a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages, entering into Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves” (67). What started out as a political struggle thus rapidly escalated into a far-reaching biological struggle, in which humanity was divested of those capacities that—at least according to Burke—set it apart from the rest of the animal world. The aristocratic landlords, Burke complains to the addressee of the Reflections, are now “so displumed, degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that we no longer know them…. Physically, they may be the same men; though we are not quite sure of that, on your new philosophic doctrines of personal identity” (225).