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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
IT IS NOW WIDELY ACCEPTED THAT BOTH GODWIN'S TREATISE, AN ENQUIRY Concerning Political Justice (1793) and his major work of narrative fiction, Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) are "designed to achieve change and also designed to refute the case for the status quo familiarised, above all, by Burke."(1) Nevertheless, the two books must be designed to fulfill this objective in different ways, if only because the design--the form--of a novel and a treatise are different.
It has been convincingly argued--notably by Gary Kelly, Pamela Clemit and Jon Klancher--that Godwin was alert to the complexity of the relationship between politics and narrative form.(2) The present essay shares that view, while also making a number of further claims. The relationship between politics and narrative is in fact, I shall argue, a principal preoccupation of both Political Justice and Caleb Williams. I shall also argue, however, that Godwin's treatment of' this relationship is as interesting for its uncertainties as for its intelligence, uncertainties which derive in part from the semantic instability of the vocabulary available for its discussion.
To focus a discussion of narrative and politics on "stories and families" is immediately to beg one of the questions it is my purpose to answer. That is, is a family a political institution? The answer to that question will clearly depend on what is meant by the word "family"; and it will also depend, I shah suggest, on what is meant by the word "story." In what follows I shall explore the relationship between stories and families in Caleb Williams and Political Justice by focusing on Godwin's often puzzling use of two groups of words: on the one hand, words used to describe narrative or features of narrative, including "story," "history," "character" and "narrative" itself; on the other hand, words for significant social relationships, including "family," "domestic," "servant" and "master."
These words--the narrative words and the social words--have always been complex. They were especially complex in the period of Godwin's writing life because they were all undergoing semantic transformation. They are of course distinct lexical groups and a change of meaning within one group does not necessarily or immediately entail a shift of meaning in the other. The two groups are nevertheless connected, if only because changes in all these words helped to alter the way in which the distinction between public life and private life was conceived. Private life came to be associated with, on the one hand, the "family" as James Mill defined it in 1829, "the group which consists of father, mother, and children,"(3) and, on the other hand, with a conception of personal identity that was inward in the specific sense of being detached--in a way I shall describe--from any open connection to narrative representation.
It is interesting to watch some of these words at work in specific passages. In the Preface written for the first edition of Caleb Williams in 1794, Godwin tells his readers that
the following narrative is intended to answer a purpose more general and important than immediately appears upon the face of it. The question now afloat in the world respecting THINGS AS THEY ARE, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols, in the warmest terms, the existing constitution of society. It seemed as if something would be gained for the decision of [the] question, if that constitution were faithfully developed in its practical effects. What is now presented to the public, is no refined and abstract speculation; it is a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world. It is but of late that the inestimable importance of political principles has been adequately apprehended. It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth, highly worthy to be communicated, to persons, whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism, by which man becomes the destroyer of man. If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson, without subtracting from the interest and passion by which a performance of this sort ought to be characterised, he will have reasons to congratulate himself upon the vehicle he has chosen.(4)
When Godwin refers to philosophers and says that it is but of late that the importance of political principles has been "adequately apprehended" he is referring mainly to himself and to Political Justice, published the year before the novel in 1793. He is suggesting that the two books are to communicate the same general truth--that the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society--but that they will communicate different aspects of this truth, by different means, to different audiences.
When Godwin came to revise Political Justice for its second--1796--edition, he rewrote its first sentence with a view, it would seem, to emphasizing this complementarity between the treatise and the novel:
The subject proposed to be treated in the following work is concerning that form of public or political society, that system of intercourse and reciprocal action, extending beyond the bounds of a single family, which shall be found most to conduce to the general benefit.(5)
Putting these two passages side by side--one from the Preface to Caleb Williams, the other introducing the 1796 edition of Political Justice--we may notice how the word "story" and the word "family" seem to attract each other, through their use in the similar phrases "a single story" and "a single family." More broadly, we might be tempted to conclude that for Godwin distinct forms of discourse (abstract philosophical speculation on the one hand, narrative fiction on the other) correspond to distinct areas of subject matter (the public world of government on the one hand, the private world of family and domestic life on the other) and to the talents and preoccupations of different kinds of reader (the learned on the one hand, the unlearned but literate on the other).
Furthermore, all these distinctions can seem, to modern readers, strongly gendered: women playing a relatively important part in family life, as characters in novels, and as writers and readers of novels, but a relatively minor part in public life or as the writers, readers or subject matter of philosophical treatises.
There are, however, two difficulties involved in understanding Godwin to mean that his treatise and his novel are complementary in these particular ways. One difficulty has to do with narrative, the other with family.
The truth which both books aim to communicate is to be communicated, in Caleb Williams, by a narrative fiction. But Godwin's Preface betrays an uncertainty about whether he has succeeded in doing this and even whether it can be done. The novel has "a purpose more general ... than immediately appears upon the face of it." Godwin is conscious that there may be some gap between the "general view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism" and the "progressive lie. sequential] nature of a single story"; between the general and the single; between the aim of "teaching a valuable lesson" and the means--the generating of "interest and passion"--by which this is to be done. Godwin is concerned that readers may find it hard to move from descriptions of what a particular set of people did (or, since he is writing fiction, may be imagined to have done) to generalized statements about what people--or particular kinds of people--do (what worried Godwin may have reassured his publisher, Benjamin Crosby, who was prepared to publish the novel but not the Preface in 1794, presumably in the belief that the novel's politics were indeed less dangerously clear than those of the Preface).
The similarity between the phrases "a single story" and "a...
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