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COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
Soon after he sets out on the journey to "reclaim" his daughter Olivia "to virtue," after she has been "undone" by the libertine Squire Thornhill, Dr. Primrose, in Oliver Goldsmith's the Vicar of Wakefield (1766), has a debate with a "person discontented with the present government," a Mr. "Wilkinson" (named for the radical republican John Wilkes).(1) "Liberty, Sir, liberty is the Briton's boast," exclaims Wilkinson, and goes on to express his discontent with the king, whom he claims to "reverence . . . when he does what we would have him," but to ignore when he "goes on as he has done of late." In reply to this assault on his Tory principles, the Vicar delivers Goldsmith's defense of monarchy as the true guardian of British "liberty":
No sir . . . I am for liberty, that attribute of Gods! Glorious liberty! that theme of modern declamation. I would have all men kings. I would be a king myself. We have all naturally an equal right to the throne: we are all originally equal. . . . [But because] it is entailed upon humanity to submit, and some are born to command, and others to obey, the question is, as there must be tyrants, whether it is better to have them in the same house with us, or in the same village, or still farther off, in the metropolis.
Farther off is better, reasons the Vicar, and continues:
The generality of mankind are also of my way of thinking, and have unanimously created one king, whose election at once diminishes the number of tyrants, and puts tyranny at the greatest distance from the greatest number of people I am then for, and would die for, monarchy, sacred monarchy; for if there be any thing sacred amongst men, it must be the anointed sovereign of his people, and every diminution of his power in war, or in peace, is an infringement upon the real liberties of the subject. (98-103)
In this essay, I want to ask what the Vicar's speech in defense of monarchy has to do with his own "house," and why his daughter Olivia leaves it to pursue a different kind of "liberty." As the consummate eighteenth-century patriarch (Goldsmith asserts that his hero "unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth: he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family" [14]), the Vicar "commands" his family as King George commands the nation. But it is clear that the Vicar's Tory principles do not work for his own daughter: although seduced by Squire Thornhill, Olivia leaves her father's house of her own accord, after the Vicar orders her to give over the Squire's attentions to the suit of "Mr. Williams," the stolid if solid farmer (another "husband"-man) that he prefers. What, in short, can Olivia's transgression - the "story of O" of my title - tell us about the weaknesses in the Vicar's political theory, and in his theory, or thoughts, about family life?
The political theory that the Vicar espouses in his debate with Wilkinson, chapter 19 of the novel, corresponds to the one that Goldsmith espoused elsewhere.(2) Goldsmith, as Robert H. Hopkins summarizes, distrusted persons of "aggressive wealth," remained loyal to "the monarchy as a counter to a commercial oligarchy," and believed "in the necessity of a strong middle class."(3) Suspicious of both old and new money if concentrated in the hands of a few, the Vicar fears above all the gross accumulation of wealth that a commercial economy made possible: "An accumulation of wealth . . . must necessarily be the consequence, when as at present more riches flow in from external commerce, than arise from internal industry. . . . For this reason, wealth in all commercial states is found to accumulate, and all such have hitherto in time become aristocratical" (100-101). As the Vicar explains to Wilkinson, such accumulated wealth leads to fierce factionalism among competing oligarchs, who find themselves vying for riches that only they have the resources to contend for, at the expense of the middle (and lower) orders.(4) "The Traveller" (1764) most forcefully describes Goldsmith's antidote to those local tyrants, a strong monarchy:
But when contending chiefs blockade the throne, Contracting regal power to stretch their own, When I behold a factious band agree To call it freedom, when themselves are free; . . . Fear, pity, justice, indignation start, Tear off reserve, and bare my swelling heart; 'Till half a patriot, half a coward grown, I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.
(265-66)
Although Goldsmith's faith in absolute monarchy was beginning to seem as regressive to his contemporaries as it does to us, it is important to see that, in siding with George III, Goldsmith also saw himself siding against the greater powers of his day. Against the new concentrations of wealth and power made possible by a commercial economy, the king, improbably, was the champion of the unrepresented. Thus, although Goldsmith is a conservative in calling for a return to a strong, central monarchy, he does so in order to reform the status quo: as John Bender puts it, for him "reform participates in a large wish for authoritative intervention and supervision."(5)
The Vicar calls his family a "little republic" (33), but "his familial politics appear to derive from similar [monarchial] principles."(6) Like the state, he believes the family requires the principle of "subordination" to preserve order and morality, and subordination is Providentially ordained; the Vicar preaches the principle in his sermon on Providence in chapter 29, and practices - or attempts to practice - it in his own family.(7) Calling his children "the offspring of temperance," he claims that they are "at once well formed and healthy" because "educated without softness" (19), and he "admonishe[s]" his wife "of her duty to me" by prematurely composing an epitaph "in which I extolled her prudence, oeconomy, and obedience till death" and placing it "over the chimney-piece" (22). As this last statement indicates, too, the Vicar thinks that the subordination of women to men is part of the (patriarchal) divine plan: both sons and daughters must submit to his law, but his sons are counseled rather than, like his wife and daughters, commanded to submit to it. That the Vicar believes he has divine sanction for the absolute power he attempts to assume over his family becomes clearest when he declares that, while "the temporal concerns of our family were chiefly committed to my wife's management, as to the spiritual I took them entirely under my own direction" (21). In his little republic ("to which I gave laws" [33], he adds), the patriarchal Vicar obviously sees himself not only as king, but also as God (or at least as God's delegate).
The relation between the Vicar's political theory and his family life shifts from mere analogy to outright identity when the plot of the novel turns to the topic that the Vicar proclaims "was always one of my favourite[s]": marriage (22). By paying his attentions to Olivia, Squire Thornhill provides the focus for that shift. Hopkins has convincingly shown that, by having the Squire end up legally married to Olivia after he has faked (he thinks) a marriage to her, Goldsmith is attacking the Marriage (Hardwicke) Act of 1753. The act (26 Geo. II, c. 33) "required that all marriages ....
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