In
How Novels Think Nancy Armstrong explores the novel as a distinctively modern genre that is in an important sense always ahead of what authors
are otherwise able to think.
14 Horace Walpole may claim that his “Gothic story” is a throwback to Romance but the correct interpretation is surely Michael
McKeon’s, that the novel genre proceeds dialectically: the Gothic comes into being, because it makes possible thinking different
in kind from that encouraged by the central stream we have come to call “realism.” Romance, in the end, as Walpole himself
insists in his second preface to
Otranto, is part of a synthesis in dialectical opposition to the new kind of novel that was then coming to dominate the market –
the novel of Ian Watt’s “rise.” The burden of this section is to tease out the kind of thinking this new synthesis makes possible,
together with its competing sense of the real.
In Cohen’s linguistic metaphor the recurring elements of a genre are its semantic component, with syntax constraining and
enabling larger possibilities of meaning. The Gothic’s “semantic” element drew the most fire as critics complained of its
formulaic character: hence the satires scoffing at the usual ingredients of castles, distressed heroines, tyrannical aristocrats,
libidinous monks, enraged fathers, missing mothers, ghosts, hobgoblins, bad weather, mouldering manuscripts, banditti, secret
tribunals, torch-lit caves, and so on. Despite the ridicule, the genre survived; and it survived because it was governed by
a syntactic element.
The beginning is an excellent place to begin thinking about what that was. The Castle of Otranto’s core trope is legitimacy, its leading textual or tonal feature, pastiche. The plot concerns an act of usurpation avenged
by the rightful or legitimate heir, a theme played out at the multiple levels of individual, house/castle, and nation, and
opened up by Walpole’s prefaces, which introduce the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution, and generic experimentation. At
each level a peculiarly modern question is urged: given the falling away of the old dispensation that founded legitimacy in
revealed religion and the sanctity of blood, from the individual to the nation ruled by the Divine Right of Kings, where does legitimacy, and
authority, now reside? To put matters another way, Walpole’s theme ushers in the modern condition of the contingent and situational,
where authoritative forms have disappeared, to be replaced by contested abstractions. In Walpole, this contingency is thematized
as generic miscegenation (the questionable marriage of old and new romance), and expressed tonally as pastiche, the consciousness that one is sporting with otherwise serious material.
Revolution revolution
ized Walpole’s generic invention. The significant intervention was Friedrich Schiller’s, who introduced paranoia, and the
Illuminati, into the equation. A translation of the unfinished
Der Geisterseher (1789) was published in London as
The Ghost-Seer in 1795, and quickly imported into America,
15 where it joined a deluge of material
playing off fears that revolution
was the work of an underground sect of radical freemasons, originating in Germany, but fanning out through the civilized
world, including the American seaboard, intent on suborning established authority and ushering in a Jacobinical apocalypse
in which religion
and the family
would be the first to go. Besides the work of Barruel and Robison, German Gothic novels, such as Karl Grosse’s
Horrid Mysteries (1796) and Cajetan Tschink’s
Victim of Magical Delusion (1795), fed the paranoid mood. As Gordon S. Wood notes, given the causal theory of history
prevalent at the time, where a consciously intending agent stood behind every effect, the Abbé Barruel’s “reveries and visions”
16 were rational enough, for those so disposed, even if intellectuals, such as Francis Jeffrey writing in the
Edinburgh Review’s lead article on the topic, thought they “merited contempt.” Marilyn Michaud draws the important conclusion:
The Gothic’s concern with conspiracy and deception, then, is not the result of an irrational or paranoiac frame of mind but
engages directly with what Shelley called the “master theme of the epoch in which we live”: the awful realization that the
actions of liberal, enlightened and well-intentioned individuals could produce such horror, terror and chaos.
17
The Gothic’s deep familiarity with this material is evidenced in, for example, Austen’s lightly ironic version of Wood’s argument
in
Northanger Abbey, where she plays off the ambiguity in “something very shocking” emerging out of London, “author” unknown, to set her heroines
at cross-purposes, one intending the latest Gothic novel, the other imagining a Jacobinical re-run of the Gordon Riots. Retrospectively
explaining the subject matter of
The Borderers, one of the greatest Gothic works of the 1790s, Wordsworth tells us that his experience in Revolutionary France taught him
the “awful truth” that “sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities.”
18 This awful truth informs Wordsworth’s anatomy of evil, as it unfolds through Rivers and his willing victim, the erstwhile
noble Mortimer.
The perversity of good intentions, together with the paranoid mood generated by an age of shape-shifting conspirators, counterfeiters,
and fakes is less important to the Gothic, than a problem that emerges in Jeffrey’s essay on Mounier’s book. As Jeffrey notes,
Mounier is entitled “to be heard upon the causes of the French
Revolution,” having been “an actor” (1). While Jeffrey applauds his contemptuous rebuttal of Barruel and Robison, he argues
that Mounier’s book too narrowly denied influence to pre-Revolutionary philosophy. The problem, for the Gothic, is evident
in Jeffrey’s metaphors. Jeffrey strives towards a theory of historical causation
adequate to the complexity he intuits, but has no language to fall back on, save vague metaphor: we hear of “a revolution
ary spirit fermenting in the minds of the people” (6), of “cataracts” and “fountains” (7), and of germinating seeds and “the
subterraneous windings of the root” (7). Even so, Jeffrey can point to some common wisdom. Everyone will agree that the Revolution
“proceeded from the change that had taken place in the condition and sentiments of the people; from the progress of commercial
opulence; from the diffusion of information, and the prevalence of political discussion” (8). The bourgeois public sphere
was a victim of its own success; the transformations it intended set loose others it did not foresee. News and plenty produced
mayhem; but how?
“Experimental” works in the Gothic genre, then, used the narrative language of the Gothic to think through, and advance, a
theory of historical causation, imagining exactly how evil arises out of the acts of well-intentioned agents (Shelley’s “master
theme”), or how past violence reproduces itself in the present. In this gloomy area of human experience, there are no solutions,
only arrested contradictions, caught in the quick of narrative.
As a case study of “Gothic thinking,” I now want to turn to two writers who conducted a transatlantic conversation on the
topic of Shelley’s “master theme”: William Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown. Godwin’s influence on Brown is well known, and
much explored. Less attention has been paid, however, to Godwin’s returning of the compliment. In his preface to
Mandeville (1817), Godwin notes that an author invariably “takes his hint from some suggestion afforded” by a predecessor; here, from
Charles Brockden Brown, a writer of “distinguished genius,” and author of
Wieland. Both novels are works of history
of a very special kind.
19 The novel has always been in competition with history; as literary historians remind us, the novel emerged out of historical
forms, such as memoirs, confessions, letters, newspaper reports, diaries, and so on. In the post-Revolutionary era, history
moved on to historiography, the self-reflexive question of method. It is with this that
Wieland and
Mandeville compete. The central point of the competition is touched upon by Tilottama Rajan: “The private included not just gender relations
but also – as is clear in [Godwin’s] novel
Mandeville (1817) – the unconscious. For Godwin the unconscious, whose personal and general history were to become a concern for Freud,
is always in some way political, given that the political is
deeply unconscious of itself.”
20 Both novels probed deep in the realm of the private – what Godwin elsewhere called a “praxis upon the nature of man”
21 – in order to produce a clearer picture of the motive forces of modern history
than were afforded by metaphors of ferment, spirit, or streams. Such writing was, in the deepest sense, political.
The similarities between
Wieland and
Mandeville are obvious enough. In his preface to
Edgar Huntly, Brown noted that “puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed”
for “calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader.”
22 Brown modernized the novel by naturalizing his materials; and while this involved eking his terrors out of “Indian hostilities”
and the “Western wilderness” in that novel, his model, generally, was
Caleb Williams, which retained the ideological substance of the Gothic, discarding the architectural shell. Godwin’s key word for this regressive
– imprisoning – mental apparatus was “chivalry.” Falkland’s devotion to it was a reference to Edmund Burke, who in a famous
passage in his
Reflections had identified this feudal hold-over as Europe’s future salvation. Godwin and Brown belonged to that school of Gothic in
which the “haunted castle” had a metaphorical, rather than literal, presence – no less confining for being immaterial, operating
as it does as a kind of “dark necessity.”
23Godwin and Brown were alike, then, in abjuring Gothic props, and turning, instead, to what Margaret Fuller would call “the
twilight recesses of the human heart.”
24 The mystery they were both most engaged by was the genealogy of human evil; of how those who were (as Mandeville says of
himself) “born to love”
25 produced “terror, horror and chaos.” For both it was a genealogy, because the answer could not be found in the individual
soul considered in isolation: the evil was transmitted, rather, in and through the generations. Both books posited an unconscious.
Both depended upon unreliable narrators to open up the meaning of their books; both had narrators who were weirdly alienated
from others, but also from themselves. Both wrote philosophical romance
s.
26 Both had a tendency to allegory. Both were concerned with the abject, with those objects of disgust that were somehow, at
the same time, constitutive of the self. Both took as their principal focus homicidal delusions that settled upon protagonists
who were devoted to the “good.” Finally, there were similarities in plot. Both novels featured a Romantically intense brother/sister
relationship, and in both, the sister’s love for another was threatened by her brother’s “madness”: in
Wieland, a rapprochement between Clara and her lover, Pleyel, is forestalled by Theodore’s murderous rampage against his family,
while in
Mandeville Henrietta’s love for Clifford is made impossible by Clifford
being the object of her brother’s implacable, and finally homicidal, hatred. Two main differences separate the novels:
Mandeville has no counterpart to Carwin, and the first-person narrator is not the sister, but Mandeville himself. But as we shall see,
these differences are not as significant as they might at first appear.
In
Wieland Brown economically sets the scene in the first two chapters, courting allegory through the typicality of the Wielands’ family
history. Brown starts by reprising Harriet Lee’s
Kruitzner in which the younger son of a German noble, from Saxony, is disinherited for marrying a merchant’s daughter, a “revolution
ary act” that epitomizes the thrust of American history.
27 The union produces a son, the father of Theodore and Clara, who is sent to be apprenticed in London. Living an isolated life
of drudgery and poverty, he turns to religion
, his eye accidentally lighting “upon a book written by one of the teachers of the Albigenses.”
28 On account of his “religious tenets,” residence in England “became almost impossible,” hence his relocation to Pennsylvania.
And like the Puritans before him, he believes he has received a divine command to “disseminate the truths of the gospel among
the unbelieving nations” (p. 9) – the American “errand in the wilderness.”
While this is an American self-conception in a nutshell, it is also a sketch of modernity, with its multiple dislocations,
fragmented communities, and disorienting mobility. “His constructions of the [Bible] were hasty, and formed on a narrow scale.
Everything was viewed in a disconnected position” (p. 8). The elder Wieland’s do-it-yourself religion has an American accent:
“He was alternately agitated by fear and by ecstasy” (p. 8). Brown here sums up the high anxiety of American Calvinism, with
its irresolvable tensions between grace and works, election and reprobation, active and passive being. But this was as much
a British as an American problem.
29 A natural upshot of the elder Wieland’s antinomianism is his opposition to public worship: “He allied himself with no sect,
because he perfectly agreed with none. Social worship is that by which they are all distinguished; but this article found
no place in his creed” (p. 11). As the pamphlet exchange between Anna Letitia Barbauld and Gilbert Wakefield illustrates,
this was a transatlantic controversy.
30 For Barbauld, public worship was the glue that bound the community together to produce civil society: without it, we drift
into atomizing, dehumanizing individualism – not to mention dangerous enthusiasm.
31 The transatlantic nature of Wieland’s condition is everywhere present in Brown’s thumbnail sketch, from the reference to
Kruitzner and the Gothic form itself, to the Moravianism of the elder Wieland’s wife: she prayed “after the manner of the
disciples of Zinzendorf,” a transatlantic movement bent on missionary work, with notorious “love-feasts” celebrating Christ’s
“side-hole.”
32As Elliott goes on to argue, Brown’s scene-setting extends to the intellectual systems that predominated in America: Deism
and Calvinism; Enlightenment empiricism and revealed religion; “intellectual liberty
” and “Calvinistic inspiration.” These two “systems of thought” are embodied by Clara and Pleyel on the Enlightenment side,
and by Wieland on the religious one: “But neither Clara nor Brown provides an alternative analysis of Wieland’s derangement
to replace the inadequate theories which the novel debunks.”
33In comparing
Mandeville to
Wieland, the question to ask is: for what, precisely, was
Wieland the source? The answer takes us to Brown’s form and to the indeterminacy Elliott notes, above. The answer is not, itself,
indeterminacy, which is an aspect of Brown’s form earlier derived from Godwin. While Clara’s narrative is not entirely unreliable,
we can take nothing at face value. In this respect her narrative echoes that of Caleb Williams, who is Falkland’s double,
at least to the extent that they share the same deep, intellectual background; both are prisoners, as Hawthorne would put
it, of the social world’s “artificial system.”
34This is therefore Godwin’s most important innovation as a novelist. While there were unreliable first-person narratives before
Godwin, with inset tales further complicating matters – one thinks, principally, of the works of Defoe – there were surprisingly
few. By the 1790s, most narratives followed Richardson, and were epistolary; or they followed Fielding, and were third person.
And what first-person narratives there were, were different from Godwin in that they did not self-consciously feature a world
made strange by the dislocations of modernity, where the old master narratives of order and meaning no longer serve and narrators,
lacking the intellectual wherewithal to parse the mysterious world in which they now find themselves, flounder. Brown’s genius
was to take Godwin’s narrative invention and turn it up a notch through self-reflexive moments – as when Clara confesses “What
but ambiguities, abruptness, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer
of these disasters?” (p. 135) – and through the explicit confrontations between “systems of thought” and mysteries before
which they are inadequate. Brown’s epigraph for
Wieland is pointed:
From Virtue’s blissful paths away
The double-tongued are sure to stray;
Good is a forth-right journey still,
And mazy paths but lead to ill.
In Brown’s fictional world, all tongues are double and all paths mazy, with the blissful path of virtue no more available
to the protagonists than the rationalism advanced by Godwin in Political Justice, and everywhere contravened in his fiction.
Brown assisted Godwin to see the potential in his own method – helping Mary Shelley, into the bargain, in Frankenstein. But this is not all that Godwin got from Brown. Caleb Williams and Falkland are prisoners of the same systems of thought,
an inter-textual world of Romances, chivalric tales, honor-codes, prison-stories, newspapers, and other engines of “opinion”;
as such, Caleb Williams is a synchronic snapshot of things as they were. These materials are sedimented through time as historical products; but
Godwin’s earlier story lacked the means of thinking through the processes of history as they worked through the generations.
This is where Brown had his most significant impact on Godwin.
The key relationship in
Wieland, and the most mysterious, is that between father and son. The “deportment” of the elder Wieland, like his son’s, was “full
of charity and mildness” (p. 12); both father and son take their “own belief of rectitude” as the “foundation” of “happiness”
(p. 12); both believe that commands are laid upon them, supernaturally, which must be obeyed; in both cases, these injunctions
introduce evil into their lives. What connects them? Has the younger Wieland inherited the same diseased faculty that corrupts
sense-impressions, as Clara speculates? Her speculation appears to be advanced in order to fail, conspicuously, as an explanation.
What about the relation, in the elder Wieland’s mysterious death by spontaneous combustion in his home-built temple, between
ambiguous hints of third-party intervention connected to “natural causes” and those connected to supernatural ones? Brown
was playing a serious joke, of a kind common to the Gothic. Just prior to the combustion, the elder Wieland sinks into a deep
reverie in which he seems to communicate with spectral beings: recovering, he complains that “his brain was scorched to cinders”
(p. 13). At a similar moment of crisis, in Coleridge’s
Christabel, Geraldine falls into meditation before exclaiming, as she returns to her seductive task: “‘Off, wandering mother.’”
35 Since the narrator informs us that Christabel’s guardian spirit, who is the soul of her mother, is near, “wandering mother”
is at once literal and figurative: it denotes the rising womb – hysteria – and the presence of a maternal ghost, with possible
causation between the two. The joke arrests the narrative flow, suggesting new avenues of thought. There is, of course, no
possibility of influence between Coleridge and Brown: this is simply how Gothic “grammar” works. Brown’s joke warns us against
taking the suggestion of spontaneous
combustion too seriously. But if it was not spontaneous combustion, then what? Brown offers another Gothic red herring: the
father relates, on his deathbed, that “while engaged in silent orisons, with thoughts full of confusion and anxiety, a faint
gleam suddenly shot athwart the apartment. His fancy immediately pictured to itself, a person bearing a lamp.” Just as he
was about to turn, his right arm “received a blow from a heavy club” (p. 17). During the paranoid 1790s, home-made shrines
to the deity, mysterious lights, and murder added up to the “Illuminati,” as the Uncle seems to suspect, inclined as he is
to believe that “half the truth had been suppressed” (p. 17).
I think Brown intends us to think of the elder Wieland as a burnt-out case; and central to his burn-out is his habit of private
worship, his reversion into Calvinistic high-anxiety, and his detachment from the kinds of civic spaces Barbauld so heartily
recommends. The younger generation fails to learn: “Our education had been modeled by no religious standard. We were left
to the guidance of our own understanding” (p. 20). The asocial nature of American individualism, and the atomistic tendency
of the errand in the wilderness shorn of its congregational context, are surely in Brown’s sights here, as much as the Enlightenment
alternative, with its stress (especially strong in English dissenting culture) on private judgment and strict avoidance of
hand-me-down judgments of the kind that Burke was apt to eulogize. The unmoored mind, falling back on its own highly combustible
resources, quickly flames out.
The rest is evident from Brown’s unfinished sequel,
Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803–5), added, it seems, to tease out the loose ends of
Wieland. Carwin’s
Memoirs are closely modeled on
Caleb Williams, in which a provincial ploughboy of parts is adopted by a gentleman with a secret, the principal difference being that instead
of being a devotee of Burkean chivalry like Falkland, Ludloe is a devotee of Godwin himself. A free-thinker, and member of
the Illuminati, Ludloe appears to suspect Carwin’s wondrous power, a power that can be put to nefarious revolution
ary ends, as anyone familiar with Tschink’s
Victim of Magical Delusion would know. Before Carwin can be initiated into the brotherhood, he must confess all: “This confidence was to be absolutely
limitless: no exceptions were to be admitted, and no reserves to be practiced” on penalty of death (p. 263). This confessional
regime is much as Foucault imagined it. Ludloe is naturally duplicitous: while Godwinian in his devotion to sincerity, rationalism,
and the pre-eminence of the greater good, he is wholly un-Godwinian in his Machiavellianism. Ludloe demands perfect sincerity
on pain of death; but if “my genuine interest” was not promoted by
“veracity,” then “truth was to be sacrificed without scruple.” Carwin hesitates to confess, because he is embarrassed by his
failure hitherto to disclose his biloquial power, given Ludloe’s generosity. Seemingly to entrap him, Ludloe leaves Carwin
alone in his Irish villa, where, like Caleb in
Caleb Williams, Carwin ransacks the very apartment he should not – Ludloe’s library.
Though the Memoirs more or less end there, the backstory is manifest in Wieland not only in Carwin’s furtive, rough-sleeping ways, as he evades the now pursuing Ludloe, but also in Carwin’s behavior: his
self-serving attitude towards truth and moral reasonings, his sporting with ventriloquism, and his compulsive infringements
of the privacy of his victims. Carwin is constantly lurking in shadows, byways, and closets to penetrate the secrets of those
around him. He thereby compulsively revisits Ludloe’s transgression against himself – the application of the confessional
regime – on others, making himself privy to their secrets and probing the rawest nerves, whether Theodore Wieland’s propensity
to seek Calvinistic signs, or Pleyel’s chauvinistic sexual mores. Carwin is, it seems, perfectly unconscious of what he is
doing, his rationalizations of his actions being no more satisfactory an explanation than Clara’s Enlightenment beliefs or
Wieland’s religion. As a large, uncouth figure, always on the outside, who is both pursuing and pursued, he has frequent echoes
in Gothic literature, from the haunting of Frankenstein by his monster, to the raggedy-man glimpsed disappearing through the
woods in the back of Hazel Motes’s mind, in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. As Mary Shelley plays with the creature–creator relation to make Frankenstein and his creature blasphemously trope the
relationship between God and man (viewed through Shelley’s lens, as a bumbling, misogynistic misanthrope who wrongs an ‘inferior’
being), so Ludloe–Carwin echoes Wieland and his self-made deity. The Enlightenment pairing doubles the religious one, with
each undermining the other. Wieland’s deity is, of course, a discursive construction, something made from his particular intellectual
rag-and-bone shop, but so is Ludloe’s Illuminism: both are composites of religious, political, and gendered discourse. This
is where, we are to understand, the political unconscious resides, the forces producing violence from historic projects otherwise
centered on the good and acting as history’s true motive force.
Mandeville is a transparent allegory of the French
Revolution viewed from the perspective of its aftermath, the successful rise and eventual defeat of Napoleon, in a pattern
mirrored in the novel’s 1640–60 timeframe, with the key events falling within the period between Cromwell’s apogee and the
Restoration. Mandeville’s story begins in trauma: as a child his father
and mother are slaughtered by the Irish along with the rest of the Royalist garrison. Mandeville alone survives, having been
smuggled to safety by his Irish nurse. His trauma is repeated when the Presbyterian divine, Hilkiah Bradford, snatches him
from his nurse and surrogate mother, to deliver him to his uncle, Audley, in England, where the latter lives on a desolate
estate, the better to nurse his melancholy after his abusive father has prevented him from marrying his beloved cousin. Without
her, Audley’s acute sensibility turns morbid in a Romantic fashion immediately satirized by T. L. Peacock in
Nightmare Abbey. This barren, Romantic landscape becomes the vale of Mandeville’s soul-making: “All was monotonous, and composed, and eventless
here; all that I remembered there, had been tumultuous, and tragic, and distracting, and wild” (
I: 113). He is haunted by confused memories of torture and murder: “All this of course came mixed up, to my recollection, with
incidents that I had never seen, but which had not failed to be circumstantially related to me” (
I: 114). His mind becomes a medium of recent sectarian “history
,” a tangled composite of firsthand experience and written and verbal accounts, a condition not helped by Hilkiah’s tutelage,
which obsessively dwells on the “diabolical craft” of the Catholics. Mandeville is later sent to school at Winchester with
other Royalist children. The school is divided between Presbyterians, such as Mandeville, who split away from Cromwell when
the latter sided with the Independents, and High Church aristocrats, such as Clifford, Mandeville’s loathed
bête noire. We never get the viewpoint of the “Jacobins” involved in the New Model Army, or behind them, of the Levelers (or Sans Culottes);
we are confined rather to the views of those on the “right,” together with the Royalists who were now in the ascendancy, as
monarchies and established churches revived across Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat.
I asserted earlier that Brown and Godwin wrote a special kind of history – a form of historiography that is self-reflexive
about its method, and addresses historical causation in a manner different from political economy, Scottish “anthropology,”
or conventional history. For both, two questions predominated: how does one generation pass on dysfunction to the next, and
how does evil arise from good? In Godwin’s response to Brown, two answers emerge: trauma and system. Both answers presuppose
an unconscious. The trauma is emblematically represented by division, which becomes a structuring principle of the novel,
which ends with the image of Mandeville’s cloven face, scarred by Clifford’s sword: “The sight of my left eye is gone; the
cheek beneath is severed, with a deep trench between” (
III: 365). Mandeville comments: “The sword of my enemy had given a perpetual grimace, a sort of preternatural and unvarying distorted
smile, or deadly grin, to my countenance … It ate into my soul. Every time my eye accidentally caught my mirror, I saw Clifford,
and the cruel heart of Clifford, branded into me” (
III: 365). The syntax plays with whether Clifford is Mandeville’s double (glimpsed in the mirror) or an
other, “cruel” and opposite. The ambiguity is irresolvable, being part of a larger structure of doubling. If Clifford represents
the idealization of Mandeville’s Royalist side, the embodiment of the aristocratic “honour ethic,” its abject complement is
the aptly named Mallison, the scheming son of Holloway, the family lawyer: “Without being any thing in himself intrinsically
superior to the dirt upon which he trod,” Mallison possessed “that pliancy of disposition” which facilitated a shape-shifting
insincerity (
III: 122). Representing the commercial imperative and naked greed, Holloway and son speak a cynical, self-interested form of
truth: “the civilized world, was a scene of warfare under the mask of civility” (
III: 75). “Honesty was a starving quality, set up by powerful villainy for its own ease and safety. It was in reality an imaginary
existence, like truth, much talked of, never to be found” (
III: 76). Mandeville explains why he was content to rest within their snares by elaborating on his sense of the abject, of how
loathsomeness is constitutive of character: “They were like some loathsome deformity, or envenomed excrescence on the human
body, which the infatuated man to whose lot it has fallen, cherishes with obstinacy, and would rather part with his life than
be delivered from it” (
III: 147). Mallison falls in love with Henrietta, now betrothed to Clifford; and, like Mandeville, he is humiliated by Clifford’s
effortless social superiority, made worse by Clifford’s smiling benevolence. When touching upon his deepest desires and interests,
Mallison is as tongue-tied as Mandeville. However, Mandeville is unable to recognize either of his doubles, the idealization
or its abject counterpart; the kinship among them remains unconscious.
Mandeville’s split self epitomizes the emerging class
divisions of Godwin’s own time. So the question becomes ever more urgent: why is Clifford the object of Mandeville’s corrosive
hatred, rather than Mallison, given that the former is all sunny benevolence and the latter all malice, having spread the
rumors that have destroyed Mandeville’s reputation, well-being, and sanity, as he well knows? Mandeville essays an answer,
which was to inform Melville’s meditation on the maddening effect of the whiteness of the whale on Ahab: “Every thing he did,
I felt as a personal insult; and what most of all stained the point with a deadly venom, was the composure, the frankness,
the innocence, nay, the air of benevolence, and all-beaming kindness and affection, with which every thing was to be done”
(
III: 316).
36 The reason, naturally, goes deeper: Clifford had “arrested
me in my first step on the theatre of life. Perhaps the ruling passion of my soul was ambition, the admiration of my fellow
creatures” (
III: 317). Since
Political Justice Godwin had focused on the “love of distinction” as the factitious source of the false consciousness that bedeviled modern
man’s efforts to realize himself as a rational being who was in command of his own agency.
The key moment in Mandeville lies at the very center of the book when Henrietta anachronistically quotes Shaftesbury’s statement that having one true
friend may cure the disease of “Romantic” melancholia and misanthropy. She does so as the idealized embodiment of landed Tory
values, while nursing Mandeville back to health in the pastoral setting of Beaulieu in the New Forest. Henrietta first talks
pure Shaftesbury: “We are formed for mutual sympathy, and cannot refrain from understanding each other’s joys and sorrows.
By the very constitution of our being we are compelled to delight in society” (II: 140). Then she talks pure Godwin: “Consider, that man is but a machine! He is just what his nature and his circumstances
have made him: he obeys the necessities which he cannot resist” (II: 143). Then she shifts into the New Testament: “If he is unamiable, it is because he has been ‘mocked, and spitefully entreated,
and spit upon’” (II: 143). Henrietta argues that, as even an abject slave may regain his agency (“still there is a point that at his own will
he can reserve” [II: 148]), Mandeville may regain his through the talismanic touch of a true friend, in this case Henrietta herself.
Naturally, Mandeville fails to sustain his agency. Godwin’s novel is a tour de horizon of the manifold reasons for this failure: memories of sectarian and political trauma, present and historical; the sectarian
language of violence and exclusion that rattles in Mandeville’s mind, echoing his tutor, Hilkiah; the cult of Romantic isolation
and misanthropy; the “love of distinction” or class consciousness; the twinned psychological mechanisms of idealization and
abjection. As such, in a schematic yet rich fashion, Godwin provides an anatomy, and genealogy, of the failures of his present,
an analysis that everywhere echoes and extends Brown’s, just as Brown’s had earlier drawn on Godwin.