|
COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
LATE IN WILLIAM GODWIN'S ST. LEON: A TALE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (1799), when an alchemist spies on the daughters he earlier abandoned, the scene is linked with the mythos of Jean-Jacques Rousseau--especially with Rousseau's infamous abdication of fatherhood--through St. Leon's chosen disguise, an Armenian caftan. This costume, Rousseau's palliative for urinary pain, is a blatantly gratuitous detail in context, for St. Leon has just used the elixir vitae to transform himself from a wizened Inquisition fugitive into a fresh-faced, unrecognizable youth. (1) Indeed, the puerility of the reminiscence evokes many a forked rationalization from Rousseau's Confessions: though "convulsed" alternately by grief and exultation, weeping over the girls while baffling the eldest with her own childhood memories--"I conjured up past scenes ... I touched all the pulses of her soul--"St. Leon shelves the topic briskly, having "nothing further to relate" about the daughters except their galling equanimity toward his own death, which he successfully faked twelve years earlier (St. Leon 294-97).
This performance is not unique in its allusive caricature; rather, it consolidates earlier tokens of Rousseau, in St. Leon's dual role as domestic truant and "conjuring" confidence-man. His losses, though certainly wrenching, partake of the gothic burlesque and the sentimental pratfall--as when, on being questioned by a stranger about alchemy, St. Leon resists the "vice" of paranoia (another storied feature of Rousseau's later life) by reasoning that the exile "is of all men most liable ... to conjure up for himself the unnatural intercourses and reciprocations of hostility" (251). Like the final frame of a comic strip, the next paragraph shows the Inquisition officers at his door. Thus, the Rousseau associations in this novel--to be pursued again in Fleetwood (1805)--lend an ironized, purblind self-consciousness to the chastening of St. Leon, an effect perhaps transferrable to Godwin's own revolutions in domestic life and social thought. (2) But the resonance of these associations is not merely confessional. Alchemy in St. Leon creates a forum not only for the loaded terms of Rousseau's self-fashioning but also for an ongoing dialogue with Rousseau as educationist and cultural critic. Generally serving the novel's photographic negative of the vir bonus, this dialogue more specifically addresses the sexual politics of male development, from the inside--seeking a rebalance of Rousseauvian psychology, to correct for the false determinism implicit in Emile 0762).
In St. Leon, Godwin attempts to reshape the idealized phases of Emile's later education into a more theoretically truthful picture of development and a more experientially honest picture of male adolescence. The critique is ultimately a recovery effort, bringing a reconstituted Rousseau into romantic discussions of identity formation. What Godwin achieves, I believe, is a phenomenology of developmental transition that originates in the physical currencies of pedagogical transactions, and that from our vantage point can complement the purposefully spare, emblematic backstories of Tintern Abbey (1798) and Frankenstein (1818). Godwin's intervening view of the male lifecourse, far more profuse, textured, and meandering--bringing to bear Rousseau's narrative luxuriance, while debating his theoretical premises--thus enriches our understanding of romantic mythologies of sexuality and subjectivity.
Godwin's critique of Rousseauvian pedagogy begins in his early prospectus An Account of the Seminary ... at Epsom (1783), and continues as a running theme in the essays comprising The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797). (3) His points, though scattershot, can be collated under two key entailments of the alchemy plot in St. Leon. (4) First, the enforced secrecy of alchemy, made much of in the novel, extends Godwin's objection to the neo-hermeticism of Emile. There, the pupil's radical sequestration gives the tutor too much latitude for Godwin's taste, reducing the whole educative project to what he calls "a series of tricks, a puppet-show exhibition, of which the master holds the wires, and the scholar is never to suspect in what manner they are moved" (Enquirer 106)--a situation inimical, in his view, to Rousseau's goal of creating an autonomous citizen. Godwin argues that a student forced to define his own identity against that of a public institution is actually more autonomous than his peer in a school of one, who labors under a "Brobdingnagian persecutor" (61). "All education is despotism," Godwin concedes, yet "[i]n private education there is danger that this superintendence should extend to too many particulars" (60-61). Rousseau's cloistering of Emile breeds an infectious sort of moral doublethink: his own hedge against despotism, Godwin notes, is "the introduction of a fictitious equality ... a system of incessant hypocrisy and lying" (120). Secondly, St. Leon's alchemical rejuvenation speaks to the element of narrative flat Godwin scents in Emile's developmental schema--a kind of magical thinking, in the sanctification of phased progression, that undermines the book's claim for the shaping powers of environment and circumstance. (5) He warns that while "we may find it convenient to distribute the productions of nature into classes, and her operations into epochas," it is more accurate to say that "her progress is silent and imperceptible" (Account 20).
In immediate context, these problematic "epochas" are cited with regard to Emile's late and limited literacy; and the Enquirer elaborates the benefits of early classical study for an analytical, as well as a free-ranging mind. But the actual spread of this second issue--less an interpersonal tyranny than a tyranny of ideas--is much broader. For Godwin, development is much more the pupil's interpretive property than the tutor's. When he does speak of "stages" and "periods," it is with a concerted liberality: while "[b]etween distant periods we may remark the most important differences," nonetheless "the gradations of nature are uninterrupted" (Account 20). In demystifying "The Sources of Genius" in the Enquirer, he assures us that such stages are often defined negatively, retrospectively, and with chagrin: a thinking person "can recollect up to what period he was jejune, and up to what period he was dull.... His life divides itself in his conception into distinct periods, and he has said to himself ten times in its course, From such a time I began to live; the mass of what went before, was too poor to be recollected with complacence" (28). From the other direction, Godwin sees a long trajectory for "juvenile education," as "provid[ing], against the age of five-and-twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn" (78). Most importantly for the present discussion, he describes "puberty"--a term he uses twice--as a complex interiority whose own initiatives the tutor should follow with ambassadorial respect. The young man is gripped by "a consciousness that he is somewhat, he knows not what"--lost in the "shoals and quicksands" of conflicting desires--"surrounded with dangers"--"in want of a pilot"--and yet, at...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
