Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution

All three responded by "writing out" the crisis - in the simultaneous sense of erasure and exposure - by reconceiving the Revolution through strategies and themes of repetition. Wollstonecraft and Williams explained the Terror as a "counterrevolutionary" return to the past, and both represented it as a repetitive version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. This intertextual revision is also resonant in the works of Thomas Paine. His historical contribution to the crisis was the recreation of himself as the revolutionary writer who had literally authored the American Revolution that, in turn, had "caused" the French Revolution.