"Magnetical sympathy": strategies of power and resistance in Godwin's 'Caleb Williams.' - William Godwin

Criticism, Spring, 1995 by Eric Daffron

There is a magnetical virtue in man, but there must be friction and heat, before the virtue will operate.

William Godwin, "Of History and Romance"(1)

When William Godwin sat down to deliberate the "due medium between individuality and concert" in the 1798 edition of an appendix to Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he confronted a conundrum. On the one hand: "In society, no man possessing the genuine marks of a man can stand alone. Our opinions, our tempers and our habits are modified by those of each other. . . . He that would attempt to counteract it . . . will divest himself of the character of a man. . . ."(2) Not only are we "formed" for and "modified" by society, but what makes us truly distinct, what in fact constitutes our "marks" and our "character," is our utter inability to stand apart from the social. On the other hand: "individuality is of the very essence of intellectual excellence. He that resigns himself wholly to sympathy and imitation can possess little of mental strength or accuracy. . . . He lives forgetting and forgot" (PJ II 500). This passage nearly contradicts the preceding one: while the social forms the "marks" of the self, it can simultaneously erase them; though leaving the social negates "character," total resignation to it leads to oblivion.

In a short space, Godwin inscribes a problem inherent in sympathy. While sympathy usefully facilitates the relations of necessarily social individuals, it also has the effect of generating imitations and thereby erasing individual distinction.(3) Moreover, by warning us not to resign ourselves "wholly" to imitation and sympathy, he implies that an indiscernible, perhaps unpredictable margin exists between the two different effects of sympathy. And it is this crux that Godwin persistently encounters not only in this appendix but throughout Political Justice when, for instance, he encourages "the tranquil interchange of sentiments" but condemns conformity of opinion "by the force either of compulsion or sympathy" (PJ I 288-90). The reason why sympathy poses such a problem for Godwin is that he wants to uphold the fact that "Man is a social animal" but to avoid our reduction "to a clockwork uniformity" (PJ II 386-87, 502).

Although such conformity is clearly inimical to the thrust of Political Justice, Godwin nevertheless imagines in Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams alternative, politically subversive uses of imitative sympathy and, moreover, dramatizes the impact that sympathy has on less abstract conceptions of selfhood, like social rank and masculinity. As I contend in section one, imitative sympathy in the novel typically serves the interests of the gentry by unifying the social through sympathy's power to consolidate opinion and by thwarting resistance - even resistance in the form of sympathy. Despite this success of dominant forces, I explain in section two that sympathy can be turned to resistant uses when, for example, Caleb's sympathy with Falkland creates a power relation, overdetermined by Anglo-French radicalism and gentry-crowd relations, which threatens Falkland's political power, social station, and manhood.(4) While Caleb uses sympathy here to subvert Falkland's power, he later sympathetically imitates others in order to fade into the social fabric and thereby to elude the law, as I contend in section three. In both Political Justice and Caleb Williams, Godwin integrates sympathy, the cornerstone of moral philosophy, into a plan for reforming Britain. However, unlike Political Justice, in which he aligns benevolence and imitation with, respectively, a reformed society and a stagnant one, Caleb Williams illustrates that imitative sympathy is a particular strategy with both dominant and resistant tactical uses.

1. Public Opinion and the Theatre of Sympathy

To dramatize the multifarious, at times conflicted effects of sympathy, Godwin chose the highly stratified English rural community for the setting of his novel. Communities like the one in the novel were divided, as E. P. Thompson explains, between the gentry and the crowd, in turn composed of small gentry, peasants, and professionals. To appease the crowd, to ward off riots, and to sustain their hegemony, members of the gentry theatrically displayed their power through, for example, their largesse. In turn, the crowd rewarded those theatrical acts with deference.(5) However, as Godwin's novel reveals, the gentry's hegemony can be sustained through quite a different theatre: the theatre of sympathy which incites public opinion.

This effect of sympathy is illustrated spectacularly during Falkland's trial at the end of Volume I for the murder of Tyrrel. There Falkland recalls that his whole life has been devoted to "acts of justice and philanthropy" and, rather than calling upon witnesses, refers to his "reputation," secured by those acts of charity.(6) After Falkland's acquittal, the entire community confirms his character:

[A] general murmur of applause and involuntary transport burst forth from every one present . . . there was an indescribable something in the very sound that carried it home to the heart. . . . Everyone concurred to assist the general sentiment. It was a sort of sympathetic feeling that took hold upon all ranks and degrees. The multitude received him with huzzas. . . . It seemed as if a public examination upon a criminal charge . . . was converted in the present instance into an occasion of enthusiastic adoration and unexampled honour. (CW 103)