Allusion and Analogy in the Romance of Caleb Williams

ALLUSION AND ANALOGY IN THE ROMANCE OF CALEB WILLIAMS ERIC ROTHSTEIN Largely because of Godwin's own insistence on ideology, the "message" of Caleb Williams seems curiously detachable from its literary artistry. Critics who have tried to reconcile the two have evoked such dubious genres as the Political Novel and the Psychological Novel, and have claimed that one is the vehicle or the complement of the other in satisfying Godwin's inner conflict between reform and rOmance. Some see a sadomasochistic Gothicism as setting and libretto for the victory of middle-class virtue over its feudal pursuers; some find a profound anatomy of obsession carried on, half intended, beneath the white sheets of Godwin's rationalism; or some discover both, in a muddled way, going on at OnCe. I should like to propose a different approach. I contend that Caleb Williams is very much of a piece, that it is primarily moral, and that its social or psychological interests serve to exemplify or to express moral terms. Furthermore, I maintain that despite his stylistic limitations , Godwin succeeded in writing a skilfully planned and formally satisfying work of art. He did so by contriving an intricate Bildungsroman -or spiritual autobiography-in which Caleb learns about things as they are, within him and outside him, through a flow of actual events and of psychologically symbolic events connected by analogy. This contention implies at least three postulates. The first is that Caleb Williams centres upon individual recognition, not social exposure; the second, that despite Godwin's sporadic determinism, the novel insists On moral action and choice; the third, that we must consider what happens in the novel as Caleb's renderings, not as objective fact. I believe that these postulates are not so precarious as they may seem. As to the first, we should observe that neither Caleb's curiosity nor Falkland's greed for reputation, the two characteristics that are the tinder of the plot, seems to be SOCially determined or even socially encouraged. "I was taught the rudiments of no science, except reading, writing, and arithmetic," Caleb relates in the first chapter. "But I had an inquiSitive mind, and neglected no means of information from conversation or books. My improvement was greater than my condition in life afforded room to Volume xxxvn, Number 1, October, 1967 Caleb Williams: ALLUSION AND ANALOGY 19 expect" (3).' Similarly, Falkland's fatal disposition comes from reading Italian romances, not from the society in which he actually mOves. "Imagination" and "fancy," according to Caleb, encourage in Falkland a "temper perpetually alive to the sentiments of birth and honour," while philosophy, which was presumably what society brought to his education, "purged" his imagination (II). Even the despotism of Barnabas Tyrrel, about which one hears in Chapter III, comes from his having been spoiled as a child, and must therefore have been latent within him. Given that these three men, portrayed in the opening three chapters, are the most important actors in the book, one may well be sceptical about Godwin's indicting society. It seems obvious that, ideologically, social malfeasances are extensions of personal evils. At most, the social stimulus makes individual corruption plausible or feasible in terms of verisimilitude ; or it palliates the faults which it approves. But these are secondary refinements. Evil in Caleb Williams comes from individual human beings, whom society as a whole reRects. Men must change before society can. To throw the moral burden upon individual action forces one to assume that people can make choices and follow them. Godwin at times undeniably claimed to believe that principles of necessity bind each man, and this claim appears to run counter to the moral freedom in Caleb Williams. In temper, it probably does. But Caleb Williams is no more obliged to work in terms of necessity than Rasselas, say, must work in moral terms because its author was a brilliant and insistent moralist. Johnson limited himself formally by writing an apologue about accommodating oneself to the unchangeable. Thus Rasselas turns on matters of attitude rather than of behaviour, of metaphysical rather than of moral recognition. In Caleb Williams, on the other hand, Godwin limited himself formally by setting up as narrator a young...