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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
"It is suffering only that can inspire us with true sympathy." (Fleetwood 45)
"The man who did not know pain would know neither the tenderness of humanity nor the sweetness of commiseration. His heart would be moved by nothing. He would not be sociable; he would be a monster among his kind." (Emile 313-14, 87)
I
WHEN WILLIAM GODWIN'S THIRD MAJOR NOVEL, FLEETWOOD; OR, THE New Man of Feeling, appeared in February 1805, its forty-eight year-old author was still widely known to the British public for a series of works from the 1790s--the influential Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), two very successful novels, Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon (1799), and his notoriously frank Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft's life (1798). The generally unfavorable reception received by this latest publication, however, must have been a considerable disappointment to him. Although the critical estimate of his earlier novels had varied a good deal, largely in accordance with particular critics' political allegiances, most reviews had at least acknowledged these narratives to be powerful and original works.
To be sure, Godwin offered this new fiction as a more modest tale, aiming not so much to astonish its readers as to cause them to reflect upon daily events and everyday life. His preface to Fleetwood insists upon the typicality of its plot, saying that "The following story consists of such adventures, as for the most part have occurred to at least one half of the Englishmen now existing, who are of the same rank of life as my hero.... In this little work the reader will scarcely find any thing to `elevate and surprise.'" Its merit, if it has any, was said by Godwin to lie instead in two features: the vividness with which its largely ordinary events are imagined, and the realistic accuracy with which they are portrayed. (1) Containing nothing like the suspense-driven plot of Caleb Williams or the Gothic machinery of St. Leon, Fleetwood was presented to the reading public as straightforward realistic fiction.
Yet critics, in responding to it, objected to precisely this claim by the author, finding what was typical in the novel not particularly interesting and what was distinctive not particularly believable. Many were visibly offended that Godwin would offer a character like Fleetwood as typical in any sense, and particularly appalled that Godwin could describe his hero as the "new" man of feeling for a new era of British life. Walter Scott's negative assessment in a review he wrote for the April Edinburgh Review conveyed a common judgment. "It can hardly be called a history, which has neither incident nor novelty of remark to recommend it ... all that is remarkable in the tale is the laboured extravagance of sentiment which is attached to these ordinary occurrences. There is no attempt to describe the minuter and finer shades of feeling; none of that high finishing of description, by which the most ordinary incidents are rendered interesting." Scott, like others, saw the depiction of Fleetwood himself as a failure, strained beyond credibility by his extravagant and overwrought emotional sensibility. "It is no doubt true, that a man of sensibility will be deeply affected by what appears trifling to the rest of mankind.... But a man who is transported with rage, with despair, with anger, and all the furious impulses of passion, upon the most common occurrences of life, is not a man of sentiment, but a madman." (2) As many reviews made clear, the objections to Godwin's novel were ultimately moral in nature. Critics did not see Fleetwood as the sort of exemplary hero a novel should properly contain; in particular, his brutal behavior toward his wife struck them as insufficiently motivated, implausible, and, worst of all, destructive of the ethos of sympathy on which the sentimental novel was based. They rejected, or refused even to see, the logic of Godwin's ethical analysis--that the sensibility of a figure like Fleetwood might manifest itself in personally and socially destructive ways, or that an intense sensitivity toward other people might create an antisocial personality. An anonymous reviewer for the Anti-Jacobin Review was most explicit on this point. "By `A Man of Feeling,' is generally understood a man of warm and active benevolence, whose heart is exquisitely sensible to the distresses of every being around him, and whose hand is ever ready, as far as his influence extends, to alleviate or relieve them." This definition, the reviewer explains, was established by Mackenzie's 1771 novel, The Man of Feeling, and "that acceptation has been rendered little less than sacred, by the force of strong association." In Fleetwood, however, "This man of feeling feels but for himself" (Broadview 525). He is, as Scott notes, an egoist, motivated by none of the "aspiration towards promoting the public advantage" that one would expect in a genuine man of feeling. (3) A few critics gave more positive accounts of the text, but even they tended to discount its literary quality. When the novel was republished in 1832 as part of Bentley's Standard Novel Series, a reviewer of the new edition remarked that, "the great merit of Fleetwood, however, is not in the fable, the incidents, or the characters, but in the truth and originality of the observations on men and things with which it abounds" (Broadview 538). This novel, he implies, ought by rights to have been a treatise.
Negative though they may have been, these critics were in certain respects not so very wrong. They recognized in Godwin's novel a rewriting of sentimental fiction that amounted to a fundamental attack upon both the genre itself and its attendant philosophy of sympathy. This doctrine, pre-romantic in origin, but fully embraced by many romantic writers as well, presumes the existence of an innate benevolence in human nature, grounded on an immediate sympathy with others. Literature, it was understood, could serve a vital function in exercising and deepening these natural capacities. On this point about aesthetic reception, however, as on so many other philosophical questions, Godwin was a skeptic. (4) Despite the utopian optimism evident in Political Justice, his fundamental beliefs about what we might expect from human beings had always been more classically liberal than sentimental or romantic, and Fleetwood provides one of his most striking depictions of the reasons for his reservations. Godwin's judgment about the relation between reason and feeling admittedly changed over time, sparked in part by his involvement with Mary Wollstonecraft and his familiarity with her understanding of the importance of sympathy. (5) As Fleetwood demonstrates, though, Godwin was more interested in probing the errancies of feeling in his fiction than in blandly acquiescing in its socializing force.
Taken in the terms that Godwin suggests, that is, as a would-be realistic narrative, Fleetwood is in fact not a very successful text, not something that stands up well against Austen or Scott. But the novel can be read in different terms as well--as Godwin's deepest engagement with romantic thought, for instance, and with the ideas of his philosophical predecessor and rival, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Although Rousseau is referred to explicitly only once within the novel, his presence is pervasive there, visible in Fleetwood's mentor, Ruffigny, in the novel's evocation of the moral and contemplative force of nature, in its critique of Paris and of civilized society generally. More specifically, Fleetwood serves as a detailed response to the system of education laid out in Rousseau's Emile, extending the critical analysis Godwin had begun eight years earlier in The Enquirer. (6) Much as Godwin admired Rousseau and his work, he was deeply critical of the hypocrisy that he saw in the French apostle of social equality and highly suspicious of his claims about the fundamental goodness of human nature. He uses Fleetwood to diagnose in the terms of fiction the potential terror of the system that follows from Emile's premises and, in particular, its reinscription of gender hierarchy. Although Godwin's awareness of this latter issue was doubtless sparked and sharpened by his acquaintance with Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Fleetwood is ultimately even more critical of the misogynist, tendencies of Rousseau's thinking than is Wollstonecraft's treatise. (7)
Where Fleetwood does succeed--and I think it a far more intriguing and significant text than its earlier or more recent critics have assumed--it succeeds on the same terms as most of Godwin's fiction, as political allegory, as a novel of ideas that depends for its success upon the imaginative force with which those ideas have been embedded in a meaningful narrative structure. Reading it allegorically requires attending to two particular features that critics have yet to explore with much care, its structural coherence and the psychological integrity of its main character. These were the two issues, in fact, that perplexed Fleetwood's contemporary readers the most, the interpretive enigmas toward which they directed the bulk of their frustration. The digressions and interpolations that the novel contains puzzled even so astute a craftsman as Scott, who pauses time after time in his review to wonder what this or that section of the narrative adds to the central story. (8) Likewise, Scott and other reviewers found it difficult to perceive any intrinsic connection between Fleetwood's early education and his conduct as an adult.
To be sure, the coherence of Fleetwood can be hard to ascertain, especially when Godwin as an author is so little averse to borrowing a good plot or inserting a good story in the body of a given narrative--more akin in this to his eighteenth-century predecessors than his nineteenth-century successors. Much of the third volume, recounting the disintegration of Fleetwood's marriage, is taken straight from Othello and grafted on to what has thus far seemed a much more prosaic text. In fact, the borrowing is so extensive that Volume 3 has a predictable feel to anyone familiar with Othello, while the one significant alteration, Fleetwood's eventual transformation and reconciliation with his wife, seems implausible in light of the scathing effects of his jealousy on his marital relations. Moreover, Godwin includes lengthy interpolations at several points in the novel. The longest, Ruffigny's autobiography, covers ten chapters and roughly one-sixth of the entire text; the account of Scarborough's family history that occurs...
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