[In the following essay, Gold studies the issue of governmental control over private life in Caleb Williams.]

Equality fled and was no more; and love, almighty, perdurable love, came to supply its place.

—William Godwin, Thoughts on Man

The crucial scene in Godwin's Caleb Williams occurs, unfortunately, in a garden:

While I thus proceeded with hasty steps along the most secret paths of the garden, and from time to time gave vent to the tumult of my thoughts in involuntary exclamations, I felt as if my animal system had undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious to a kind of rapture for which I could not account. I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burning with indignation and energy. In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. I cannot better express the then state of my mind, than by saying, I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment.

(pp. 129-30)¹

Caleb is struggling to describe the sensationally eccentric exhilaration which overwhelms him at the moment he becomes convinced that his beloved patron is a hideous criminal; it is the most intense emotion he has ever experienced. Only here, in the midst of a discovery which will impel him into a life of suffering and anguish, does Caleb know the full rush of felt vitality, the exquisite sense of being “perfectly alive.” But in the original 1794 preface to Caleb Williams, Godwin implies that the novel dramatizes the principles of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) by exploring the destructive intrusion of “government” into every aspect of life. If this is so, Caleb's rapture suggests a question: what does it mean to feel so alive when both life and feeling may already be marked by the “spirit and character” of repressive political institutions? The extraordinary coherence of Caleb Williams is in its unfolding of the answer to just this question. Caleb, the narrating protagonist, is bound to his own suffering simply because he cannot see how “government” controls and determines not only his life, but his very sense of life as well.

The garden setting is unfortunate because it seems to announce an overworked and rather transparent symbolism. Caleb's garden looks like just another Garden; his ecstasy in discovering his master's evil secret seems sensational but familiar. The literary hortus symbolicus commonly has only a few variants—Original Sin or Primal Scene, flattering culprit or felix culpa, sex against lex or prudence versus pudens. So although nearly everyone who writes about Caleb Williams believes that Caleb's exultation marks a crucial moment in his history, most critics read that outburst as the usual brief and willfully guilty joy, the sign of a transgressing fall into the knowledge of good and evil, a personal fall in which political influence plays no part. P. N. Furbank, who argued a good case for Godwin's literary merit before many were willing to do so, still sees in Caleb's garden scene the confused outpouring of a “guilty-innocence” that can be “both a good and an evil” as it moves toward forbidden discovery.² Rudolf Storch describes the ecstasy as “the result of the completed projection of guilt” which “conveys the moment of rejection of a revengeful God” and “anticipates the Romantic energy which has been liberated from guilt because it has faced the superego”; nonetheless, Caleb's curiosity “is in fact the Original Sin.”³ For Mitzi Myers, Caleb's tumult is primarily a venting of “guilty knowledge,”⁴ and for Robert Kiely it is curiosity with the power of “physical hunger” bursting in irrational “climax.”⁵ Christopher Small emphasizes the garden lure of “secret, hidden and forbidden knowledge” and sees Caleb in the grip of an infatuated, “highly irrational” rationality which heedlessly exults in intellectual discovery.⁶

In varying degrees each of these interpretations contravenes Godwin's philosophical account of the novel. If Caleb's potentially sinful curiosity, rebellion, or desire for dominion initiates his own tragedy, then human nature rather than institutional tyranny is at fault. Storch measures Godwin's claim that government is the villain of the piece against Caleb's convulsively guilt-ridden personal obsessions and concludes that “Caleb Williams undermines everything that the propagandist had thought up,” arguing that the novel succeeds as powerful fiction but only because Godwin's imagination “had to redress the crudities of his intellect.”⁷ This is a compelling analysis if the mental torments which Caleb eventually suffers originate in his guilty knowledge of his virtuous master's single crime, if those torments are reinforced by his belated, repentant knowledge of his own irrational transgression in uncovering that crime. Caleb himself finally sees his history this way, but Caleb is wrong. Caleb suffers most deeply because of what he does not know; he does not know why he felt so alive back in the garden.

Caleb comes closest to understanding when he continues his reflections on that moment of tempestuous vitality. “I felt, what I had had no previous conception of, that it was possible to love a murderer, and, as I then understood it, the worst of murderers.” Yet Caleb never fully realizes that an emerging, intensely sympathetic love for Falkland generated his sense of elevated spiritual vitality, and he never even begins to understand that his unique sense of being “perfectly alive” is a bitter political delusion precisely because that compassionate, almost religiously humane love is also a politically created delusion. Caleb's exhilaration reflects Godwin's most radical indictment of institutional tyranny; in his most passionate moment Caleb feels sympathetic love in its fullest sense, and for Godwin, all love is the product of repressive social institutions and the enemy of equality, independence, and harmony.

In Political Justice, Godwin argues that social equality is the natural condition of enlightened humanity; he writes in the hope that people may someday realize that “true freedom and perfect equity, like food and air, are pregnant with benefit to every constitution.”⁸ In Thoughts on Man, Godwin identifies love as the inevitable antagonist of “equity” and “independence.” Love, Godwin claims, “cannot exist in its purest form and with a genuine ardour, where the parties are, and are felt by each other to be, on an equality”; love requires and arises from a “mutual deference and submission” enforced by political institutions; the true devise d'amour should be the “apostolic precept, ‘Likewise all of you be subject one to the other.’”⁹ In The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson writes, “We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers.”¹⁰ Godwin believes that we cannot have love without squires and laborers. This belief shapes the whole of Caleb Williams and works as a recurrent motif in Godwin's later novels. It is not the sort of conviction which will endear Godwin to posterity. Whatever we may think of such an aloof and chilling vision, however, that same vision led to the remarkable psychological insights which make Caleb Williams an inexorably coherent and movingly lucid study in repression, passion, terror, and tyranny. The novel chronicles the effects of love as tragedies of political life, and it is probably safe to call the story the best of its kind ever told.

Caleb's history begins when he becomes an orphan at the age of eighteen by the death of his peasant father. While his father's body still lies in the cottage, Caleb, a youth of “no practical acquaintance with men” who “had had no intercourse with the world and its passions” except through “books of narrative and romance,” enters the service of the elegant, jealously honorable, and benevolently cosmopolitan Lord Falkland. Caleb conceives the strongest admiration and “sympathy” for Falkland but soon discovers that some terrible inner pain torments his new benefactor. From Collins, Falkland's old steward, Caleb hears the story of the brutish, physical, and public humiliation inflicted on Lord Falkland by his fanatically envious neighbor, Barnabas Tyrrel, a swaggering hulk of a despotic provincial squire, “insupportably arrogant, tyrannical to his inferiors, and insolent to his equals” (p. 17). Tyrrel had already persecuted to her death his own dependent cousin, Emily Melville, merely because she had conceived a hopeless infatuation for Falkland. Horrified by Emily's death, the society which Tyrrel had once dominated turns away from him and accepts Falkland as its chevalier sans reproche. Tyrrel attempts to reassert his authority by crushing his rival; his public assault on Falkland, as Collins emphasizes to Caleb, could not have been more nicely calculated to sear the sensibilities of a delicate nobleman whose only god is “honour.” The desperate attack takes place at a “rural assembly” from which Tyrrel has been officially barred; he rushes in in a sotted fury:

… he had intoxicated himself with large draughts of brandy. In a moment he was in a part of the room where Mr. Falkland was standing, and with one blow of his muscular arm levelled him with the earth. The blow however was not stunning, and Mr. Falkland rose again immediately. It is obvious to perceive how unequal he must have been to this species of contest. He was scarcely risen, before Mr. Tyrrel repeated his blow. Mr. Falkland was now upon his guard, and did not fall. But the blows of his adversary were redoubled with a rapidity difficult to conceive, and Mr. Falkland was once again brought to the earth. In this situation Mr. Tyrrel kicked his prostrate enemy, and stooped, apparently with the intention of dragging him along the floor.

(pp. 95-96)

Collins's painfully unmodulated account of the incident—“it is obvious to perceive,” “apparently with the intention”—enforces the horror of the story Caleb hears. “To Mr. Falkland,” Collins tells Caleb, “disgrace was worse than death. The slightest breath of dishonour would have stung him to the very soul. What must it have been with this complication of ignominy, base, humiliating, and public?”

Caleb next hears that later this very night someone had stabbed Tyrrel to death, in the dark and from behind. He learns of Falkland's legal vindication from the suspicions that reluctantly but inevitably fell on him, and hears the story of the eventual confession and execution of one Hawkins and his son, two of the many victims of Tyrrel's tyranny. Collins tells Caleb that Falkland has never recovered from the disgrace of his public beating and that Falkland now suffers a doubly acute torment because Tyrrel's death has deprived him forever of the only “satisfaction” recognized by his own cherished code of honor.

Caleb, however, “broods” over this story and gradually finds it “mysterious.” He cannot help thinking, despite all evidence, that Falkland may have been the murderer after all. In Caleb's mind this “may” insensibly becomes a “must”; “I felt myself unable to discover any way in which I could be perfectly and unalterably satisfied of my patron's innocence” (p. 123). Possessed by this conviction and impelled by some “fascinating power,” some “irresistible” desire, Caleb sets himself to watch over his master's every change of mood and turn of mind, consciously playing on Falkland's grief and distraction and using his own status as favored confidential secretary to draw out evidence of what he has already decided is the truth. Caleb finds an aesthetically satisfying opportunity for emotional dissection when Falkland has to preside as magistrate in a case superficially similar to his own supposed crime. Caleb seizes the chance to play Hamlet to his patron's dumb-show Claudius. Falkland does not fail him; as the accused confesses, Lord Falkland staggers to his feet and “with every mark of horror and despair” rushes from the room (p. 129). At the first decent moment Caleb rushes into the garden, with one thought swirling in his mind: “It is out! It is discovered! Guilty upon my soul!”

From this thicket of exclamation marks Caleb's strange garden-exhilaration emerges. He writes, we remember, that “my blood boiled within me”; “I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion”; “In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm”; and then he declares, “I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment.” It is a bizarre emotion, and it does not seem less odd when Caleb adds the comment about loving a murderer.

Godwin, however, has provided a striking elucidation of Caleb's experience in his next novel, St. Leon (1799), the fabulous tale of a sixteenth-century knight who early in his life receives the knowledge of the philosophers' stone and the secret of immortal youth. Late in his well-intentioned but wildly disastrous career, St. Leon, exhausted, embittered, and on the run, reaches a moment of possible fulfillment and peace. He pauses to reflect on the waste and horror of his life and to give thanks that at last he has found the secret of joy. Looking back on his misfortunes, St. Leon says that “we are eternally apt to grow dead and insensible to the thing we have not,” that “half our faculties” can become “palsied” before we realize that “we are not what we were, and what we might be.” Then St. Leon describes the incomparable sensation that accompanies the recovery of one's most essential nature; he does so by using Caleb's words:

But now, that I have drawn the unexpected prize, I grow astonished at my former blindness; I become suddenly sensible of my powers and my worth; the blood that slept in my heart, circulates, and distends every vein; I tread on air; I feel a calm, yet ravishing delight; I know what kind of an endowment life is, to a being in whom sentiment and affection are awakened to their genuine action.

This was the effect of the mutual attachment produced between me and Charles. I looked into him and saw a man; I saw expansive powers of intellect and true sensibility of heart. To be esteemed and loved and protected by such a man; to have him to take one by the hand, to enquire into one's sorrows, to interest himself in one's anxieties, to exult in one's good fortune and one's joys; this and this only deserves the name of existence.¹¹

St. Leon's “calm, yet ravishing delight” is Caleb's “soul-ravishing calm”; as Caleb says, “my blood boiled within me,” St. Leon echoes, “the blood that slept in my heart, circulates, and distends every vein.” St. Leon declares that “this and this only deserves the name of existence,” and Caleb believes that he was “never so perfectly alive as at that moment.” When St. Leon discovers that he can love another man and be loved in return he experiences the vital flow that Caleb felt in the garden and describes the sensation in nearly identical expressions.

There are problems. Caleb is a young man and, I think, an innocent young man. St. Leon is a very old man, and although he has always acted with benevolent intentions he has succeeded primarily in peopling the world with men who wish him dead, and he can hardly be called an innocent. Yet each crisis of exhilaration is a moment of impassioned delusion which leads to a life of suffered persecution. St. Leon attains his moment of felt vitality only by becoming, as he puts it, a loved and loving “younger brother” to his own son, for the “Charles” of St. Leon's “mutual attachment” is St. Leon's long-lost child now grown to manhood, a son who cannot recognize his father in the eternal youth who stands beside him, a son who despises the father he does remember. When St. Leon reflects further on his moment of rapture, he cries, “But I was all a lie; I was no youth; I was no man; I was no member of the great community of my species.” Caleb too will exclaim, “My life was all a lie” (p. 257). And as Falkland, when he finally admits his guilt, will commit himself to guard and pursue Caleb for the rest of his life, Charles will say to St. Leon, “I here bind myself by all that is sacred to pursue you to the death” (SL, p. 474). Both Caleb and St. Leon will end their narratives without realizing that the life which is a lie is entwined inextricably with the love that brings the fullest sense of such life; neither will realize that his own benevolent love ensures his oppression. But Godwin, as we shall see, shows the connections in both cases. The two novels explore different moments in the tragic binding of love and oppression, but the fundamental relation remains constant. And it is clear that Godwin has carefully pointed the context of Caleb's moment of exhilaration through the parallel with St. Leon's rapture. The motive force in each instance is compassionate, exalted love.

Caleb does give abundant indication that in pursuing Lord Falkland's secret he is in fact pursuing an intense and complex love. Caleb writes that even before he knew his patron's history the sudden penetrating sound of Falkland's “supernaturally tremendous” voice demanding, “Who is there?” affected him so strongly that he can say it “thrilled my very vitals” (pp. 7-8). After hearing Collins's narrative Caleb finds “a thousand fresh reasons to admire and love Mr. Falkland” (p. 106). A “magnetical sympathy” grows between them, or so Caleb believes. Even as he presses the emotional probing that so pains and angers Falkland, Caleb declares, “Sir, I could die to serve you! I love you more than I can express” (p. 121). The more deeply he intrudes into Falkland's grief, the more insistently he assumes the language of romance. “I thought with astonishment, even with rapture, of the attention and kindness towards me I discovered in Mr. Falkland, through all the roughness of his manner” (p. 121). Caleb describes intense moments of his pursuit in phrases borrowed from courtship: “we exchanged a silent look by which we told volumes to each other” (p. 126). During the great fire which gives Caleb his chance to break into the mysterious trunk that seems to contain the final evidence of Falkland's guilt, Caleb writes, “I know not what infatuation instantaneously seized me” (p. 132). The trunk itself is the “magazine which inclosed all for which my heart panted.”

All of this may seem obvious enough, but it is easy to avoid the force of such language by arguing that Caleb's narrative is an allegory for intellectual, political rebellion and that “the emotions that fill the novel are those which Godwin himself experienced in writing [Political Justice]”;¹² or by saying that “Caleb's reverence can be analyzed into awe and rebellious hatred.”¹³ Such readings as these, by moving too quickly from passion to politics, overlook the politics of passion unfolded in the story. The intense power and the essentially romantic character of Caleb's attachment to Falkland constitute a crucial aspect of the novel. Godwin indicates the power and character of that attachment early in the narrative, through the story of Emily Melville, the woman who dies for her love of Lord Falkland, for Emily works in the novel as a prophetic emotional “double” for Caleb himself.

Caleb never meets Emily; he reports her story as he has heard it from Collins. But Emily, like Caleb, is an orphan; she is seventeen years old when she meets Falkland, and Caleb is eighteen. Both have their most passionate encounters with Falkland during fires: Caleb when Falkland discovers him about to pry open the mysterious trunk while the manor house burns; Emily when Falkland rescues her from another blazing building. Both are doomed from the moment of those fires: Caleb because Falkland angrily decides to disclose his secret and sets himself forever after to stand guard over the youth; Emily because here she first recognizes and declares the hopeless love for which Tyrrel hounds her to her death. In both scenes Falkland's actions are momentarily identical and are described in similar terms. Seeing the fire that threatened Emily, Falkland “ascended the house in an instant, and presently appeared upon the top of it as if in the midst of the flames” (p. 43). In the fire that proved fateful for Caleb, Falkland “ascended the roof, and was in a moment in every place where his presence was required” (p. 132). In the instant that Falkland appears in Emily's bedroom she experiences an emotional overleaping of time's boundaries, an extension beyond her own world of seclusion and shelter: “In a few short moments she had lived an age in love.” Caleb's determined pursuit of his patron's secret creates a similarly intoxicating effect of worldly knowledge stolen in an impossibly brief period: “It seemed to have all the effect that might have been expected from years of observation and experience” (p. 123).

Perhaps even more remarkably, Emily suffers on her deathbed from hallucinations in which Falkland appears, not as Emily has ever seen him, but just as he is described in his final confrontation with Caleb, many years after Emily's death. Emily has contracted a “distemper” which brings a “high fever.” Just before the end, “Her fever became more violent; her delirium was stronger” (p. 85). Caleb writes that just before his own last meeting with Falkland, “My mind was worked up to a state little short of frenzy. My body was in a burning fever with the agitation of my thoughts. When I laid my hand upon my bosom or my head, it seemed to scorch them with the fervency of its heat” (p. 318). In Emily's delirium, “the figure of Falkland presented itself to her distracted fancy, deformed with wounds and of a deadly paleness” (p. 86). In the last encounter with Caleb, Falkland's deadly paleness recurs; “His visage was colourless; his limbs destitute of motion, almost of life.” Caleb sees that Falkland bears “the appearance of a corpse”; Emily had cried out demanding “that they should restore to her his mangled corpse, that she might embrace him with her dying arms.” Caleb writes that the corpselike Falkland, “to my infinite astonishment—threw himself into my arms!” (p. 324). Caleb feels the last deathly embrace which Emily had deliriously imagined so many years before.¹⁴

The insistent parallels between the two sets of emotionally charged encounters with Falkland suggest that Caleb's involvement with Falkland has the same passionate basis as Emily's involvement. Caleb, however, narrates all the events; we hear the verbal echoes in his voice. So those echoes must indicate not only a structured revelation of meaning, but also something like a psychological identification in Caleb's mind, an identification which leads him to repeat the descriptions he has used in recording Emily's history when he reaches emotionally equivalent moments in his own history. The effect—verbal echoes in moments of heightened emotion—is psychologically consistent with the implicit cause—intense but repressed and thwarted love expressing itself in an unconscious identification. The psychological coherence of the relation between these verbal echoes and the structurally implied cause shows how accurately Godwin uses a rather daring emotional “doubling.”

Caleb's unconscious identification with Emily persists throughout his narrative and helps to explain some of his strongest emotional responses, including his sensational reaction in the garden to the supposed evidence of Falkland's crime. We remember that Caleb becomes convinced of Falkland's guilt just before his moment of exhilaration, when he sees Falkland's confused reaction to another confession of murder. In the original manuscript version of this trial scene Falkland sits as justice of the peace in the case of a “boorish peasant who had brutally killed his mother.”¹⁵ In the revised version the defendant is a peasant with an “ingenuous and benevolent” countenance who had been repeatedly insulted and provoked by “his only enemy,” a nasty country tough. The defendant had consistently disregarded the jeering slights to his honor, refusing to be drawn into a confrontation until the pursuing lout “thought proper to turn his brutality upon the young woman” who was the defendant's “sweetheart.” The young woman was “considerably terrified,” and at last, when every expostulation failed, the defendant challenged his harasser to a boxing match and, probably accidentally, killed him with the first blow (pp. 127-28). The actual parallels with Falkland's crime are quite tenuous. Falkland had not challenged Tyrrel over his persecution of Emily, and Emily was in no sense his “sweetheart.” Falkland let Emily's death pass by unavenged and was moved to retaliation only when his own personal dignity suffered a public affront. Godwin's revised case entirely reverses the order and relative importance of love and honor from Falkland's story and smoothes over the questions of intent and cowardice by presenting a boxer's blow in place of the assassin's knife. But the case represents quite well (perhaps excluding the actual death) what Emily herself would surely have wanted from Falkland as an expression of Falkland's love and championship, and the new case contains just those elements which Caleb wants to see in Falkland's crime. Caleb wants to believe that Falkland's act was a crime of passion in the romantic sense because he wants to be loved in just the same way Emily wanted to be loved. He writes, “I felt, what I had had no previous conception of, that it was possible to love a murderer,” because he reads that murder as a sign of Falkland's capacity for love, the sort of love the peasant had for his sweetheart, the love he wants to believe Falkland may come to feel for him. Rationally he knows that Falkland felt no passion for Emily but the trial details allow him to fantasize an affection which he may inherit.

Many readers have noticed that Caleb, as he records his flight from his patron, rarely alludes to what is certainly Falkland's blackest offense, his willingness to let the innocent Hawkinses be executed for a murder they did not commit. Again, the identification with Emily could reveal the reason. Caleb quickly loses any interest in that cowardly crime because only the murder of Tyrrel permits and actually forwards the passionate illusion.

Another apparently minor textual alteration works to a similar end. The effective “tool” that Tyrrel uses in persecuting Emily, the man he employs as an “odious Solmes” to his own role as James Harlowe, is an uncouth drudge named “Grimes.” In the second edition of the novel, Godwin changed the name of the man hired to dog Caleb's footsteps and carry out his persecution, from “Jones” in the original to “Gines.”¹⁶ Kiely notes that “Godwin refers to Grimes as Tyrrel's ‘instrument,’ his ‘engine,’” and claims a “common eighteenth-century” sexual euphemism which emphasizes the submerged eroticism at work in Emily's persecution.¹⁷ If that is the play, and Kiely's excellent chapter makes a sound case, then the play is even stronger with “Gines,” both in the name itself and in the fact that he too is called an “instrument” and an “engine.” In any event the shift from “Jones” to “Gines” seems to effect yet another pointing of the continuing parallels in the two stories of love and persecution.

Such finely threaded adjustments in tightening the exposition of Caleb's emotional life do not well accord with the usual view that Godwin, cool and thin-blooded insular philosophe, wrought he knew not how in creating the dark, explosively passionate Caleb Williams. (D. Gilbert Dumas, for example, quotes Angus Wilson's reference to Godwin's “schizophrenic tendency” and joins in lamenting the split between Godwin's rationalistic philosophizing and his involuntarily emotional fiction.¹⁸) Godwin apparently discovered possibilities for further tuning the resonances of his novel as he revised and rewrote, but the direction and implicit working of those resonances remains constant. Even Godwin's most often-ridiculed comment about the novel, that he had “amused” himself by tracing certain similarities between his subject and the tale of Bluebeard, begins to make sense if we take seriously the force of Caleb's passion and the parallels with Emily Melville. Storch sees the Bluebeard comment as evidence of the philosopher's overwrought condition during the creative act, arguing that Godwin “must have been in a state of high nervous excitation, for only thus can be explained his associating (a very free association indeed) the tale of Caleb and Falkland with the tale of Bluebeard.”¹⁹ The association need not seem so free. Godwin explains the parallel by saying, “Falkland was my Bluebeard. … Caleb Williams was the wife.”²⁰ Just so; the wife that Emily died for daring to be in her fantasies, the wife in whom the world might officially, disastrously condone the binding, dependent love which both Emily and Caleb feel.

Caleb Williams explores tyranny and love through a story that probes the tyranny of all love, and Godwin has found a structure sufficiently complex to sustain a tragedy in which love, in its most powerful manifestations, transcends heterosexual boundaries. This does not mean that Caleb Williams is “really” a story about sexual passion between men, although any traditional psychoanalytic interpretation, as we shall see, would surely read the novel that way. Neither Caleb Williams nor Godwin's philosophy nor the details of his own life make it clear that Godwin had any special interest in the exclusive sexual attraction of a man to other men. Godwin sees love in all its forms as the product of nomos rather than phusis, so biological sexuality does not assume any independent significance in his work. Godwin's philosophical essays argue that “government” designates its chosen classes as the proper objects of various sorts of love and then instills the emotions which confirm and perpetuate the unequal relations of superior and inferior, protector and protected, venerated and owned.²¹ Love, as Godwin sees it, can be tyranny's greatest weapon, for through love vested inequality can enlist its victims in their own oppression. Both Emily and Caleb are caught in this net. Emily dies of love for one man and from the tyranny of another; Caleb carries on and deepens her tragedy by suffering for his love of a tyrant. So Caleb is a victim rather than a Promethean rebel or an Adamic transgressor when that sense of being perfectly alive wells within him in the garden. That delusive flush of vitality signals his tragedy, but not his willful guilt and not his rebellious confrontation with God or superego or conscience; “Love is too young to know what conscience is.”

By establishing Caleb's emotional identification with Emily, Godwin adds an unorthodox counterpoint to the dominant thematic line of Caleb's relations with Falkland. Godwin plays on our ability to hear Emily's continuing story in the structure and texture of Caleb's history; this allows Godwin to carry his “general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism” to the heart of the traditional domus in an allusive exposition of one of his favorite subjects—the politics of marriage. The sort of love which Emily feels when Falkland rescues her from the burning house runs into the harsh realities of power and jealousy during and immediately after Caleb's fire scene, when Caleb and Falkland become “engaged.” The hellish betrothal that so grossly mocks Caleb's affection occurs just following the conflagration in which Falkland discovers his servant breaking into the mysterious magazine which apparently contained all for which Caleb's heart “panted.” Falkland overcomes his first impulse to shoot Caleb through the head, storms from the room, then sends for the youth. “You must swear, said he. You must attest every sacrament, divine and human, never to disclose what I am now to tell you.—He dictated the oath,” and Caleb repeats it “with an aching heart.” It is a demonic oath of betrothal. With that oath, Falkland tells Caleb, “you have sold yourself,” for the pledge binds the two forever in a union of “jealousy,” “suspicion,” and denied affection (pp. 135-36).

This is the private engagement; the public ceremony follows when Caleb, who tries to escape, comes back to face the astonishing accusation that he has stolen some of Falkland's property. Before his flight, Caleb had been “unaccountably impelled” to leave behind his own personal belongings, removing his trunks to “a small apartment of the most secret nature” which he believes to be known to no other person (p. 155). To prove his innocence at the arranged hearing Caleb directs Falkland's servants to the hiding place to show that he had concealed no stolen goods at his departure. The trunks are brought forward. Two, as usual, show nothing; “in the third were found a watch and several jewels that were immediately known to be the property of Mr. Falkland” (p. 167). Incredulous, Caleb denies the fact, appeals to his “fellow-servants” for an “impartial construction.” For an instant the listeners seem swayed by the ingenuous fervor of his protestations, “but in a moment their eyes were turned upon the property that lay before them, and their countenances changed” (p. 169). In this way Falkland and Caleb are legally “wed,” for Falkland, as a magistrate and a supposed victim of theft, is now officially invested with complete power over Caleb, the sort of monopolistic power that Godwin, in Political Justice, saw unjustly conferred on the husband, the “copy of what monarchs are” in the household. The force and public proof of the union between Caleb and Falkland lies in the mingling of their property in Caleb's trunks, for “property” is the term by which the laws that Godwin detests conceive and consider the individual. In Political Justice, Godwin puts the case this way: “Marriage is law, and the worst of all laws. … Add to this that marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties.”²² Marriage, for Godwin, sanctions the absurd perpetual binding of two individuals considered as comingled property. Falkland acquires the personal oath, the force of public law, and the evidence of mingled property. So “Caleb Williams was the wife” after all, and Godwin did not leave out of his general review of domestic despotism the most domestic despotism of all.

Familiar aspects of the traditional marriage ceremony rather invite such an interpretation as the one suggested in Caleb Williams, as eighteenth-century novelists understood long before Godwin wrote. Moll Flanders marries her “Bath gentleman” very much in Caleb's fashion. The gentleman, Moll writes,

… bade me open a little Walnut-tree box, he had upon the Table, and bring him such a Drawer, which I did, in which Drawer there was a great deal of money in Gold, I believe near 200 Guineas, but I knew not how much: He took the Drawer, and taking my Hand, made me put it in and take a whole handful; I was backward at that, but he held my Hand hard in his Hand, and put it into the Drawer, and made me take out as many Guineas almost as I could well take up at once.

When I had done so, he made me put them into my Lap, and took my little Drawer, and pour'd out all my own Money among his, and bade me get me gone, and carry it all Home into my own Chamber.²³

Line for line no one has ever surpassed Defoe's portrait of the blushing economic bride—“I was backward at that, but he held my Hand hard in his Hand.” Defoe even tips us a wink when he writes about Moll's drawers that is hard to forget when we read about Caleb's trunks. But Godwin, for better or worse, does not play this urbane game; he means to convey the full horror of personal bondage when he shows a sympathetic but impetuously binding love caught in the confounding of affection, property, and honor.

Those accusing “jewels” in Caleb's trunks symbolize the economic genesis and moneyed-class foundation of Falkland's “honour” and “reputation.” They are the hard little gems to which Falkland has devoted his life, into which his soul has crystallized. He has declared as much himself at an earlier trial. “Reputation has been the idol, the jewel of my life,” Falkland has said (p. 102). Caleb will later cry out in prison, “Of what value is a fair fame? It is the jewel of men formed to be amused with baubles” (p. 182). But Falkland has given over himself, as the “jewel” of reputation, to the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, for Falkland's legalistic honor knows character only as a conceded public power and an external possession. Caleb has now unwittingly bound himself, as property owned by his patron, through the transaction that converts love into goods, to lie beside that jewel. As Falkland tells him, “you have sold yourself.” “It is a dear bargain you have made.” It is indeed, for this selling, buying, and mingling constitute in Caleb Williams the legal intercourse of economic wedlock. That intercourse brings the first legal “knowledge” of the commercial marriage mysteries; that to know another and be known by another through and as real goods rather than through the real good of felt equality is to be riven, repressed, and alienated from self and other both, to know the brutal erotics of property. With this knowledge Caleb's con-sciens, his “knowing with,” is born. “Love is too young to know what conscience is / Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?”

Caleb sees the trap too late and reacts ineffectually. Defending himself against the charge of theft, he accuses his master of contriving the evidence. This convinces everyone present, including Valentine Forester, Falkland's stiffly moralistic half-brother, that Caleb is a wretched ingrate as well as a thief. Forester insists that Caleb be jailed and bound over for trial. From this moment Caleb moves in a nightmare of persecution and injustice. We see him shackled in prison, watching innocent men die of grief and disease; we see him escaping and hiding out with robbers, tormented by Falkland's secret even as he is hounded from village to city and back into the country by bounty hunters and hired pursuers, plotted against by the greedy and turned away with contempt by the compassionate. He shows untiring ingenuity in his disguises and hairbreadth evasions, yet at the same time he unwittingly increases his own suffering. He commits foolish acts that leave a clear trail for the hunters, and he senses in himself some destructive “bias of the mind … gratifying itself with images of peril” (p. 266). Throughout the narrative he declares that he was and still is unable to explain his most compelling feelings and impulsive actions. Even before the pursuit begins, Caleb tells Falkland, “I have been hurried along I do not know how. I have always tried to stop myself, but the demon that possessed me was too strong for me” (p. 119). His movements during the fire at the manor house “seemed like a dream”; he writes, “I have always been at a loss to account for my having plunged thus headlong into an act so monstrous” and can only add that there was “something” in his actions of “unexplained and involuntary sympathy” (p. 133). As he flees he continually misconstrues obvious events. Caleb knows that Forester, not Falkland, insisted on bringing him to a public trial; yet when someone posts a bounty for bringing him to court, he assumes that Falkland is the instigator. Eventually he reaches a state in which he interprets the most accidental distresses as if Falkland had somehow contrived them. Remembering a driving hailstorm which caught him on an open heath, Caleb writes, “There was no strict connection between these casual inconveniences, and the persecution under which I laboured. But my distempered thoughts confounded them together” (p. 251). Inexplicable motives drive him to uncover Falkland's secret, distempered thoughts increase his suffering, and irrational acts make him participate in his own pursuit.

The critics who argue that Caleb Williams shows “Godwin's failure to sustain the theoretical framework of Political Justice” have a good case.²⁴ Caleb seems poorly conceived as a struggling victim meant to dramatize the argument that human beings are rational and perfectible. He looks more like a man obsessed, so weak and in need of expiation that his final victory in forcing a public confession from Falkland casts him into utter despair. Even if love is a political imposition the mind itself appears in this novel as essentially irrational, wildly and randomly emotional. Caleb's actions are believable, but are they believable and explicable in Godwin's terms? If we are to take Godwin's comments about the novel seriously we have to ask, is there a realistic and psychologically coherent pattern in Caleb's obscure urges, and does Godwin's philosophy provide a political explanation for that pattern? I think the answer is yes, and I think that Godwin understood the pattern so well that the way Caleb tells his story exactly conforms to the way he acts in that story. This novel is a powerful work of art because we can see the tragic structure of forces developing in Caleb's history, we can watch those forces still working to make the writing itself a part of the tragedy, and we can discover an imaginative but realistic necessity shaping the pattern. A strict psychological analysis can provide some convincing evidence of just how consistently Godwin maintains the pattern both in the telling and in the tale. Once we see the dynamic structure of the narrating consciousness in psychoanalytic terms, it will be possible to decide if Godwin's political aetiology can also account for that pattern.

Caleb tells a story about omnipotent persecution; that story reveals his deep affection for another man and emphasizes the trauma of brutal rejection by that man. Traditional psychoanalytic theory would suggest that Caleb's avowedly “distempered” preoccupation with persecution might indicate a paranoid dissociation issuing from Caleb's attempts to repress the homosexual impulses which became threateningly powerful during his residence at the manor. In the theory of paranoia the initial erotic fantasy is essential: “what lies at the core of the conflict in cases of paranoia among males is a homosexual wishful fantasy of loving a man.”²⁵ Caleb's own repeated assertions that before meeting Falkland he himself “had had no practical acquaintance with men,” that as a youth he had had “considerable aversion to the boisterous gaiety of the village gallants” and had avoided their society, that he had had “no intercourse with the world and its passions” (pp. 5, 4, 106), clearly corroborate the prognosis. In recording a case of paranoia, Freud writes that the patient's “homosexual position” included the typical element that he “had made no friendships and developed no social interests,” that the “development of [the patient's] relations with men” had been “neglected” until the outbreak of the paranoid “delusion” (SF, XVIII, 226). The fact that Caleb always sees Falkland as his omnipotent persecutor, even though Falkland's brother is actually the initial and fiercest avenging fury, again corresponds to the theory: “we know that with the paranoic it is precisely the most loved person of his own sex that becomes his persecutor” (SF, XVIII, 226). Falkland of course is a persecutor, but Caleb provides the most powerful binding energy. “The harshest thing about the prison is that it is made by desire, and that he who assists most in binding the prisoner is perhaps the prisoner himself” (Phaedo, 82e). To put it in a form that is only syntactically tautological, Caleb suffers repression because he is repressed.

According to Freudian theory, the paranoiac's attempt to repress the homosexual attraction takes the form of delusive perceptions which contradict the threatening affect: “the familiar principal forms of paranoia can all be represented as contradictions of the single proposition: ‘I (a man) love him (a man)’” (SF, XII, 63). One of these forms contradicts the subject of the “proposition” by fastening on the belief that “It is not I who love the man—she loves him.” Caleb's “she” is Emily. When he recounts Emily's rescue from the fire he finds an outlet in her story for the “energy of uncontrollable passion” which he felt during his fire scene; he can thus “perceive” and emphasize an attraction he cannot fully admit in himself. The parallel structure of the narrated scenes and the verbal repetitions mark the emotional linking in Caleb's mind. When he describes his last encounter with Falkland the projective identification persists; he connects the scene with Emily's erotic hallucinations of a final encounter, and his repressed desire expresses itself through echoes of Emily's delirious fantasy. There are also contradictions in Emily's story for which the theory might account. Caleb reports at length that Emily is physically unattractive, her person “trivial,” her complexion unappealingly “brunette,” her face “marked with the small pox” (p. 39). Yet when Falkland rescues her, she becomes his “lovely, half-naked burthen” (p. 44). Desire working through projective identification has apparently overridden factual consistency in the linked scene.

The most spectacularly observable delusion in the projective struggles of paranoia contradicts the verb of the threatening proposition: “I do not love him—I hate him.” Again conforming to the “mechanism of symptom-formation in paranoia” which requires that internal feelings “shall be replaced by external perceptions,” the final form is, “I do not love him—I hate him, because he persecutes me” (SF, XII, 63). Caleb experiences the persecution, he senses his own “distempered” and distorting preoccupation with that persecution, and he eventually feels that he hates Falkland. Often he uses phrases to explain the “abhorrence” he comes to feel which suggest projective rather than analytic perception, as when he says, “I now ascribed a character so inhumanly sanguinary to his mind … that henceforth I trampled reverence and the recollection of former esteem under my feet” (p. 274; my emphasis).

Psychoanalysis argues further that paranoid distortions regularly issue in “perceptions” with strong elements of megalomania. The sufferer senses an “indescribable grandeur” and an exalted significance in his torments; eventually he may believe that he is the only object of significant attention and that he is really a martyred “Redeemer” whose death the world demands (SF, XII, 68, 16-21). Caleb describes this perceptual state several times, as when he writes, “I could almost have imagined that I was the sole subject of general attention, and that the whole world was in arms to exterminate me,” or when he reports, “I thought myself allied to the army of martyrs and confessors” (pp. 238, 276).

A third paranoid transformation contradicts the object of the proposition and again maintains the “mechanism” of projected perception: “I do not love him—I love her, because she loves me.” Caleb never meets a woman whom he loves actively and simply but he does meet someone, the elegant Laura Denison, whom he comes to love substantially because she seems to love him. Caleb persistently casts the relation in passive form. “She soon distinguished me by her kindness and friendship”; “she delighted to converse with me”; Caleb becomes the “chosen intimate” in her home (pp. 292, 290; my emphasis). Even given these constructions, though, it is reasonable to wonder about the omnivorous quality of the contradiction-machine Freudian theory sets going. How can we know that Caleb loves Laura by “contradiction” and not simply as any man might love an admiring woman? The answer would be that a displaced or defensive love should show strong traces of the continuing tension between attempted projective resolution and the original underlying desire. Caleb's relation with Laura does show this tension. He needs to be loved by a woman to reinforce the repression of his love for Falkland, but the original attraction is still so strong that he cannot fully accept Laura, or any other woman, as a “beloved.” He expresses the conflict in the perception, “I honoured and esteemed the respectable Laura like a mother,” even though he has to admit that “the difference of our ages was by no means sufficient to authorize the sentiment” (p. 293). The distancing phrase, “like a mother” and that pompous “respectable” could indicate an emotional circumlocution arising from a tension between defense and desire.

Caleb, in fact, seems incapable of mentioning any woman at all without rather awkwardly emphasizing the certain absence of active romantic attraction. At one point he enjoys the company and assistance of a poor middle-aged spinster, Mrs. Marney, but for some reason he priggishly writes that the woman “was already of an age to preclude scandal” (p. 257). Moreover, the most terrifying creature in the whole story is a woman, the “swarthy sybil” Caleb encounters while hiding with a band of robbers. This “infernal Thalestris,” “extraordinary and loathsome” in appearance, whose figure “suggested an idea of unmitigable energy and an appetite gorged in malevolence,” outdoes even Tyrrel in brute physical vengefulness (p. 214). But the hag recalls Tyrrel's oppressive energy, and if Tyrrel and his cohort Grimes brought about Emily's death, this woman and her cohort Gines, “the object of her particular partiality,” are the only persecutors who actually attempt to murder Caleb. This woman attacks Caleb as he sleeps, just after his thoughts have drifted toward “entering once again into the world, and throwing myself within the sphere of [Falkland's] possible vengeance” (p. 230). Caleb dreams that some assassin approaches; he awakes and beholds “the execrable hag before mentioned standing over me with a butcher's cleaver.” So during a long wakeful night Caleb contemplates reentering Falkland's “sphere”; when he falls asleep a demonic denier rises to attack him, and that attacker, Caleb's Tyrrel, appears as a loathly embodiment of the “Amazonian” aggressor, what psychoanalysis might find a complex but predictable horror feminae vision launching a dream assault against the desire to enter Falkland's power. Caleb “awakes” and struggles with the creature; the ferocity of their battle represents the intensity of the conflict raging within Caleb throughout the history. He writes, “at no time had I ever occasion to contend with a more formidable opponent.” Even after Caleb subdues her she says, “You conquer me?—Ha, ha!—Yes, yes! you shall!—I will sit upon you, and press you into hell!”

The struggle continues as the unresolved desire persists throughout Caleb's flight, pulling him back towards Falkland with an insistence he cannot comprehend. Once he nearly stumbles into certain capture because he has neglected to change his disguise before going into a town where that disguise will surely be known. He writes, “Indeed it was a piece of infatuation in me for which I am now unable to account, that … I should have persisted in wearing the same disguise without the smallest alteration” (pp. 252-53). Gines first tracks him down because Caleb has published a flurry of magazine articles which fairly announce their author to anyone who might be on the hunt; they are all based on legends of infamous robbers, and Caleb by this time is himself cried up as the most brazen robber in England. Caleb can only say, “By a fatality for which I did not exactly know how to account, my thoughts frequently led me to the histories of celebrated robbers” (p. 259). Caleb remains his own best pursuer, deepening his suffering through the desire which seeks a resolution that conscience and consciousness forbid.

So Caleb suffers from paranoia. What is more, he suffers by the book, almost as if Godwin had plotted the details of Caleb's early life, of his reactions to Collins's narrative, and of his intercourse with Falkland as a case-history dramatization for some interdisciplinary seminar at the local Psychoanalytic Institute. He suffers deeply and movingly, but with a theoretical nicety observable in his language, his dreams, his relations with woman, in the direction of his irrational urges, in the repeated appearance of linked, overdetermined characters, and in the scenic resonances of his narrative. Psychoanalytic dissection seems to confirm what most critics believe, that despite Godwin's professed intentions, Caleb Williams is really a story of individual obsession which has little to do with institutional injustice or the tyranny of wealth, that the novel “undermines everything that the propagandist had thought up.”

Just the reverse is the case. The Freudian analysis of paranoia describes a sequence of fixation, repressed homosexuality, and delusion and insists that those who suffer from paranoia are endeavouring to “protect themselves” through their delusions from the threat of a “sexualization of their social instincts,” social instincts wounded by a social humiliation (SF, XII, 62). The threatening “sexualization” acts as a pathogenic and regressive force. Godwin, in Caleb Williams and recurrently through the rest of his career, presents all love as a regressive, disruptive, and pathogenic distemper, describing in his essays a sequence of historical fixation and institutional repression which prepares the way for the morbid outbreak of “love.” Such love, Godwin argues, continually threatens to “sexualize” the social instincts, to render them passionate and exclusive, with the disastrous consequences his novels detail. The theory of paranoia can account for the emotional patterning in Caleb Williams because Godwin is exploring a political theory of passion which contains all the dynamic elements described in purely internal terms in the psychoanalytic account. The novel is so insistently emotional and obsessive, and the theory of paranoia can describe its elements so clearly, because Godwin remained scrupulously faithful to his philosophy.

Love, for Godwin, begins with a repression forced on every child, when sanctioned parental domination seconded by authoritarian schooling represses the child's sense of independence and equality. The “affectionate parent,” Godwin writes, has learned to view his child “as a mine of power that is to be unfolded” (TM, pp. 281-82). The parent exercises his “vast power” without regard to the child's reason or sense of independence; the parent “is as a God, a being qualified with supernatural powers,” and the child forcibly learns “to receive everything with unbounded deference, and to place total reliance in the oracle which nature assigned him” (TM, p. 282). The child is told that the protective domination enforced by his parents proceeds from affection and love; as his independence suffers continued repression, he learns irrational deference and the sense of protected dependence and is told that the accompanying feeling is also “love.” “The great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children,” Godwin writes, and “the original feature in this sentiment is the conscious feeling of the protector and the protected” (TM, pp. 274, 275). In school, as Godwin argued in 1783, the same unexplained domination continues; the child's status approximates that of “a slave” as his manly “dignity” is plucked away.²⁶ At home, as a compensation which enforces the repression, the child learns to value the sensation called “love.”

In psychoanalytic theory, “fixation” defines a “failure to progress satisfactorily through the stages of libidinal development.” The concept assumes that the fixated person has a tendency to engage in “outmoded patterns of behaviour or to regress to such patterns under stress,” “to choose compulsively objects on the basis of their resemblance to the one on which he is fixated.”²⁷ Godwin posits a “fixation” in the historical development of human emotional life at the period of feudalism, the period which developed, as an emotional expression of its political principles, the concept of “romantic” or “chivalric” love. This age taught a “love of God and the ladies” which “gave a new face to the whole scheme and arrangements of civil society” (TM, p. 294). This new “scheme,” enforced in emotional life by a peculiar “theory of the sexes,” rests, again, on the propagation of inequality through hierarchical subordination and the exchange of exclusive dependencies. If we examine “that which in all languages is emphatically called love,” Godwin writes, “we shall still find ourselves dogged and attended by inequality” (TM, p. 292). The feudal theory of the sexes, which replaces natural equality with the artificial relation of romantic love, persists as a socioeconomic ideal; this sanctioned ideal continually threatens to render passionate and exclusive the social instincts of rational regard and independent dignity. In Political Justice, Godwin repeatedly argues that “Indeed ‘the age of chivalry is’ not ‘gone’!” His novels explore the compulsive tendency to regress to the outmoded patterns of feudal emotional behavior. In Caleb Williams, Godwin unfolds the consequences of external repression and historical fixation with such imaginative rigor that both narrated history and narrative expression reflect the pattern of conflict, delusion, and distortion which Freudian theory interprets as paranoia. Freud and Godwin are both analyzing the effects of love when it threatens to “sexualize” the social instincts. Freud believes in a psychological analysis of social relations while Godwin believes in a social analysis of psychological relations, but they agree on the dynamic pattern of the phenomena.

Godwin does not ignore the spiritually elevating effects customarily accorded to humane passion. Love, says the converted misanthrope at the end of Cloudesley (1830), is “the true key of the universe,” and with this key “it is a beautiful world.”²⁸ Love, Godwin writes in Thoughts on Man, has become the “poetry of life,” and with it the world wears “all the tints of the rainbow” (TM, p. 296). Godwin himself loved a woman, and near the end of his Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798) he recalls her death as the event which “ravished from me the light of my steps.”²⁹ Godwin's “Letter of Advice to a Young American” (1818) commends the “love of parent and child” as the “highest model” of affection; he also writes that the peculiar excellence of modern poetry is its spirit of “tenderness,” its ability to conjure up some beautiful “fairy vision,” and he claims that this excellence derives from “the times of chivalry.”³⁰

Yet all this wondrous love represses and replaces equality, rationality, and independence, and it enters the mind only as a result of repressive institutions. If the family provides the “great model” for all love, the model persists only in defiance of reason: “No parent ever understood his child, and no child ever understood his parent” (TM, p. 281). The parent, in fact, acts as a political agent for the system of property and ownership. Ironically alluding to a Lockean foundation for parental affection, Godwin writes that the “point and finish to all the interest I take” in my child appears when “the sweat of my brow becomes mingled with the apple I have gathered” (TM, p. 278). Parental love rests on the parent's “vast power” to influence and direct the “mine” he has in his child. The most benevolent intent may not guard against the possessive character of the relationship. In Fleetwood (1805), the hero's grandfather shows every sign of sincere regard for the young Ruffigny, yet he says to him, “My son belongs to me, because I was the occasion of his coming into existence; you belong to me, because you were hungry and I fed you” (my emphasis).³¹ The child cannot see this; he sees only a “vast fund of love, attachment, and sympathy in the parent” but cannot know “the fountain from which it springs, nor the banks that confine it” (TM, p. 283). So the child accepts “the debt he owes to his father” by learning to call confused, passive dependence by its socially exalted name.

The feudal age carried the work of emotional subjugation into the very heart of relations between adult men and women. In themselves, “as they come from the hands of nature,” man and woman “are so much upon a par with each other, as not to afford the best subjects between whom to graft a habit of entire, unalterable affection” (TM, p. 292). But the feudal age, Godwin writes in the “Letter of Advice,” found a way to teach men to “adore” women. The effect was to give a “hue of imagination” to all intercourse, so that “a man was no longer merely a man, nor a woman merely a woman.” Women were subdued as adored, valued, and protected property; men were taught to feel and to offer a sensation “that partook of religious homage and veneration” (TM, p. 294). In this new scheme of society, life “was clothed in resplendent hues, and wore all the tints of the rainbow. Equality fled and was no more; and love, almighty, perdurable love, came to supply its place” (TM, p. 296). Love replaces equality by making emotional life an extension of political values. Romantic love is the mutual chauvinism of the sexes.

As early as Political Justice, Godwin argued against the traditional family structure, against marriage, and against what he saw as the continuing influence of feudal “inventions.” Later Godwin moderated his arguments against marriage, but only for the sake of furthering intermediate goals, never abandoning the underlying principles. And in his fiction he extended the political analysis of passion, presenting love, accumulated wealth, and religion as the three great threats to equity and harmony. St. Leon, endowed with the secret of multiplying gold and the secret of immortal life, thus possesses the wondrous prizes idealized in an economically acquisitive society and in a religion whose supreme promise is perpetual life with Father. St. Leon suffers the torments of hell as he learns the destructive power of possessions and the horror of immortality, but he remains blind to the meaning of love. When he falls in love with his own son, he thinks he knows at last “what kind of an endowment life is.” In the passage that echoes Caleb's garden ecstasy St. Leon cries out, “present me with some inestimable benefit, that my nature fitted me to enjoy, but that my fortune has long denied me to partake, and I instantly rise as from an oppressive lethargy.” Godwin returned ironically to this expression in Thoughts on Man. “But shew me a good thing within my reach; convince me that it is my power to attain it; demonstrate to me that it is fit for me, and I am fit for it; then begins the career of passion” (TM, p. 275). Even when his beloved Charles turns against him and vows to pursue him to the death, St. Leon consoles himself with the loving thought that, although he himself must continue to suffer, Charles will be made happy in his own love for a woman he adores. The woman's name is Pandora.

It may still be possible to argue that Godwin's philosophy rises from the same unconsciously determined sources that shape his fiction, that psychological analysis can explain the essays as well as the art. Presumably, Godwin's well-known habit of surrounding himself with young male admirers could be adduced as biographical evidence. It is true that one of those young men, “a lad named Patrickson,” suffered himself from apparently paranoid delusions. Patrickson wrote to Godwin in July 1814 about his indefatigable “persecutors,” describing mocking whispered conversations carried on outside his window. He also told Godwin that he had become “subject to fits of extreme depression,” and on August tenth young Patrickson shot himself through the head.³² But the disquieting power and the certain coherence of Godwin's strange visions discourages any easy reductions.

Caleb Williams reflects and dramatizes the theory of Godwin's essays with consistency and inventive energy. Caleb is raised by a father whom he honors; as a youth he avoids the society of his equals and develops an attachment to books of “romance”; he goes to live with a wealthy, benevolent patron whom he regards with reverence and affection. It is enough. The institutions of government have already left their mark on his innermost feelings, prepared him for the delusive exhilaration which emerges the moment love wells within him. Godwin later wrote that it was necessary to make Falkland “the tenant of an atmosphere of romance, so that every reader should feel prompted almost to worship him for his high qualities,” so that every reader should appreciate the necessity of the juxtapositions in Caleb's tragic avowal, “Sir, I could die to serve you! I love you more than I can express. I worship you as being of a superior nature,” should see how short a step leads from this deathly, worshipful love, from this regression to the outmoded patterns of romantic behavior, to the delusions which spring from passionate dependence and impassioned conscience. Even as Caleb flees he continues to look for parents and protectors, for someone who can shelter him and accept his loving dependence. He finds such people but never finds out that he is compulsively repeating his own damnation, that he is running through a childhood nightmare of dependency and bondage. Mr. Spurrel, the watchmaker, “appeared to love” Caleb with “parental affection,” but Spurrel hands him over to Gines. Caleb esteems Laura as a “mother” and she accepts him as part of her family; she will say to him, “You are a monster.” He finds Collins again and cries out, “My father! … I am your son!” Collins says, “I consider you as a machine.” Caleb cannot know how truthfully he chooses his words when he speaks of his “parent misfortune”; he cannot know the deeper meaning of his report that Falkland's troubles “took their commencement” when he set about “spending the rest of his days at the residence of his ancestors.”

Perhaps Caleb Williams has been neglected and undervalued because Godwin did so well what he meant to do. He tells about “Things as They Are” in a voice from within, a voice drugged with false values and imposed passions that amplify and perpetuate real terrors. Faithful to his insights, Godwin never permits that voice to speak its own salvation. His philosophy argues that humanity can grow up and shake off the delusions and the bondage; the methods he offers can no longer seem very sophisticated or convincing. The novel is still powerful; it imagines a present world made grotesque by full-grown men who imprison themselves in a child's bad dream. Godwin knew very well what he had done; in 1797 he wrote the following:

The usual mode of treating young persons, will often be found to suggest to children of ardent fancy and inquisitive remark, a question, a sort of floating and undefined reverie, as to whether the whole scene of things played before them be not a delusion, and whether, in spite of contrary appearances, they are not a species of prisoners, upon whom their keepers have formed some malignant design, which has never yet properly been brought to light.³³

Notes

1. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970); further page references in parentheses are to this edition.

2. P. N. Furbank, “Godwin's Novels,” Essays in Criticism, 5 (1955), 217-18.

3. Rudolf Storch, “Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin's Caleb Williams,” ELH, 34 (1967), 195-96.

4. Mitzi Myers, “Godwin's Changing Conception of Caleb Williams,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900], 12 (1972), 608.

5. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 90.

6. Christopher Small, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), p. 88.

7. Storch, pp. 190-91.

8. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influences on General Virtue and Happiness, ed. Raymond A. Preston, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1926), I, 10; bk. 1, ch. 2.

9. William Godwin, Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries (1831; rpt. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), p. 297; further page references in parentheses are to this edition, cited as TM.

10. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 9.

11. William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1972), pp. 447-48; further page references in parentheses are to this edition, cited as SL.

12. Furbank, p. 216.

13. Storch, p. 196.

14. Godwin completely altered the manuscript version of Caleb's last confrontation with Falkland before he published the novel. (McCracken includes the manuscript ending as Appendix I in his edition of Caleb Williams.) The revised version increases the number of verbal allusions to Emily's delirious speech.

15. McCracken, “Note on the Text,” in Caleb Williams, p. xxiv.

16. Ibid., p. xxv.

17. Kiely, p. 88.

18. D. Gilbert Dumas, “Things as They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams,” SEL, 6 (1966), 597.

19. Storch, p. 206.

20. William Godwin, Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling (1832 ed., “Preface,” rpt. in Caleb Williams, ed. McCracken), p. 340.

21. The fullest single essay on this subject is the chapter, “Love and Friendship,” in Thoughts on Man, but elements of the argument appear throughout Godwin's political writings. A detailed discussion of the issue appears on pages 153-58 below.

22. Godwin, Political Justice, II, 272; bk. 8, ch. 6.

23. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. Edward Kelley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 88.

24. Kiely, p. 95.

25. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, gen. ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-64), XII, 62; further page references in parentheses are to this edition, cited as SF.

26. William Godwin, “An Account of the Seminary,” in Four Early Pamphlets, ed. Burton R. Pollin (Gainesville, Fla: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), p. 173.

27. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1972).

28. William Godwin, Cloudesley: A Tale, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830), III, 342.

29. William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. W. Clark Durant (1927; rpt. New York: Gordon Press, 1972), p. 133.

30. William Godwin, “Letter of Advice to a Young American,” in Uncollected Writings by William Godwin, 1785-1822, ed. Jack W. Marken and Burton R. Pollin (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), p. 436.

31. William Godwin, Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling, 2 vols. (New York: I. Riley & Co., 1805), I, 239.

32. C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (1876; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1970), II, 198-200.

33. William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797; rpt. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), p. 105.