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ROMANTIC TRANSFORMATIONS

She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily

I dipped my oars into the silent lake;

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat

Went heaving through the Water like a swan:

When, from behind that craggy Steep, till then

The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,

As if with voluntary power instinct,

Upreared its head. —I struck, and struck again,

And, growing still in stature, the grim Shape

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion, like a living Thing

Strode after me.

(William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Bk I, II. 373– 85)

In the period dominated by Romanticism, Gothic writing began to move inside, disturbing conventional social limits and notions of interiority and individuality. The internalisation of Gothic forms represents the most significant shift in the genre, the gloom and darkness of sublime landscapes becoming external markers of inner mental and emotional states. Many Gothic elements found their way into the work of writers from Wordsworth to Keats, though the significance and resonance of Gothic devices and themes were undergoing notable transformations. While the standard plots and narrative machinery—as established by Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis—continued to be imitated in many novels and stories well into the nineteenth century, major innovations, or renovations, of the genre drew it closer to aspects of Romanticism.

It is at the level of the individual that Romantic-Gothic writing takes its bearings. The individual in question stands at the edges of society and rarely finds a path back into the social fold. The critical distance taken with regard to social values derives from radical attacks on oppressive systems of monarchical government. Instead, the consciousness, freedom and imagination of the subject is valued.

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Usually male, the individual is outcast, part victim, part villain. Older Gothic figures and devices, overused to the point of cliché, are transformed into signs of aristocratic tyranny, leftovers from an unenlightened world. The disturbing and demonic villain, however, retains a darkly attractive, if ambivalent, allure as a defiant rebel against the constraints of social mores. The sympathies for suffering, doomed individuals find expression in Romantic identifications with Prometheus and Milton’s Satan, regarded as heroes because of their resistance to overpowering tyranny. The villain or outcast, unlike much Radcliffean writing, is not the cause of evil and terror, an object to be execrated so that order can be restored. It is a position which calls for respect and understanding. Real evil is identified among embodiments of tyranny, corruption and prejudice, identified with certain, often aristocratic, figures and, more frequently, with institutions of power manifested in government hierarchies, social norms and religious superstition.

The prevailing narrative forms accord with the focus on Romantic individuals. First-person tales highlight the psychological interest in the dilemmas and suffering that attend social alienation. Subject as they are to imaginations, passions and fears they can neither control nor overcome, the heroes’ imaginative transgressions of conventional values encounter the limits, laws, rules and forces that are not their own. Seekers after knowledge of themselves and metaphysical powers beyond and in deified nature, these individuals can be associated with the way that notions of human identity, mental and natural powers were being transformed and secularised, not only in political theory but also in the scientific disoveries of the time. In political terms, the failure of the French Revolution to realise hopes for human progress and equality contributed to the inward and darkening turn of Romantic speculations. Alienated from society and themselves, Romantic-Gothic heroes undergo the effects of this disillusion, doubting the nature of the powers that consume them, uncertain whether they originate internally or from external forces. Without an adequate social framework to sustain a sense of identity, the wanderer encounters the new form of the Gothic ghost, the double or shadow of himself. An uncanny figure of horror, the double presents a limit that cannot be overcome, the representation of an internal and irreparable division in the individual psyche.

PERSECUTORY ROMANCE

In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), William Godwin describes the feudal system as a Voracious monster’, the remnant of which in the eighteenth century continues to bolster aristocratic power and privilege in the form of a stuffed monster that terrifies humankind into ‘patience and pusillanimity’ (p. 476). A small but important part of the book’s radical and rationalist attack on forms of government riddled with relics of a feudal past in the shape of monarchy, courts and inherited wealth, the metaphor of the monster highlights the barbarity and tyranny of feudal power. The figure of the stuffed

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monster, moreover, stresses both the extinction of feudal economic power and its strange persistence at a superstructural level. As a stuffed monster, aristocratic power is an illusion, a phantom of a barbaric and superstitious past that lingers, forcefully, in the present. The terrors seem at once real and imaginary, strangely effective yet ungrounded and insubstantial. In the reaction to the Revolution in France, the monster had very real effects: laws were passed enabling the suppression of radical texts and the arrest, imprisonment and persecution of

radicals.

In Caleb Williams (1794), written immediately after Political Justice and originally entitled Things as They Are, Godwin detailed the oppressions that existed in the society of the time. Injustice and persecution, very real issues in the novel, are also imaginary in the wider sense implied by the stuffed monster:

they describe the terrifying and superstitious beliefs that irrationally persist and govern ideas about and actions in the world. In the trial scene of Caleb Williams,

where Caleb is falsely accused of stealing from his master, he is called a monster when he rejects the findings of the mock court which condemns and frames him, his disrespect for the law and the title of ‘gentleman’ earning him the appellation and the identity of outcast. The greater monstrosity, the real horror, however, is that presented in the first-person narrative as the recognition of the injustices and crimes that can be committed in the name of the law. The metaphor of the stuffed monster links politics and fiction by associating feudalism and tales of terror

with the persistence of superstitious, barbaric and irrational values. In this respect Caleb Williams criticises the Gothic romance as an oppressive and

conservative form. The novel none the less uses Gothic strategies, not satirically,

but politically to display social and psychological oppression.

The novel assembles various stories in its account of what Political Justice describes as ‘the Gothic and unintelligible burden’ borne by readers of romance and inheritors of feudalism (p. 477). While the first-person narrator, Caleb, an orphan taken in as secretary to squire Falkland, is the central figure later in the novel, his master provides the principal interest at the start. Caleb collects stories of Falkland’s past which testify to his talents, generosity, grace and benevolence, qualities that make him popular in local society, much to the chagrin of another squire, Tyrell, who, brutish, tyrannical, selfish and uncultured, is Falkland’s aristocratic antithesis. Their rivalry culminates in the murder of Tyrell. Tried for the crime, Falkland is acquitted, other victims of Tyrell’s cruelty being blamed and hung.

Caleb, suspicious of his master’s moody behaviour, eventually draws a confession from him. The truth has a price for Caleb has sold himself ‘to gratify a foolishly inquisitive humour’ (p.142). Charged to remain forever in the service of a master who hates him, Caleb is subjected to external forms of discipline and surveillance in the shape of Falkland and the legal and aristocratic code that protects him. This surveillance is also internalised. Tormented by the secret, ‘a source of perpetual melancholy’, Caleb says he has made himself a prisoner of guilt as well as the caprices of his master: ‘the vigilance even of a public and

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systematical despotism is poor, compared with a vigilance which is thus goaded by the most anxious passions of the soul’ (p. 144). Daring neither to flee Falkland’s power nor able to stay under its subjugation, the novel describes Caleb’s sufferings under both forms of vigilance as he tries to escape an unbearable double bind.

The dilemma and self-divisions are intensified by the manner in which external and internal persecutory vigilance is shown to be an effect of Caleb’s identification with Falkland. His crime of spying against Falkland is a crime against his own self, modelled on an idealised version of his master: his guilt is defined in terms of the values he has internalised from this ideal. Attempting to escape the unbearable physical and psychical imprisonment, Caleb enlists the help of Falkland’s brother-in-law, Forrester. Trusting in the latter, Caleb returns to be disbelieved, framed for theft and imprisoned. The prison conditions suffered by Caleb before his trial, echoing the darkness and coldness of Gothic dungeons, foreground the horrors of judicial systems. In distinct contrast is the band of thieves joined by Caleb after his escape. They are modelled on Schiller’s Romantic robbers, ‘thieves without a licence …at open war with another set of men who are thieves according to law’ (p. 224). Rational, democratic and humanitarian principles among thieves reflect critically on wider society’s pretensions to justice.

In one of the reversals that dominate the novel, a member of the band, Gines, becomes the agent of Falkland’s persecution of Caleb, hounding him wherever he goes, no matter what identity he assumes. A decisive turn by Caleb, however, brings the novel to its climax: he decides to challenge Falkland in court and, tortured by guilt and self-loathing, to shatter the codes of secrecy and honour fatally binding his master and himself together. By now the dual relationship of master and servant has a bleaker aspect: Falkland is a broken man, a ghostly remnant of his former self worn down by guilt and publicly admitting his villainy. Ideals are sacrificed, reputations obviously false: in their self-loathing and betrayal, Caleb and his master are again doubles of each other, not ideal images, but inverted mirrors, shadows of suffering and persecution. Once the antithesis of Tyrell, the disclosure of Falkland’s murderous secret makes him the same agent of irrationality and oppression. Caleb, the initiator and victim of the vigilance in his spying on Falkland, casts himself as both victim and villain who, in destroying his previously idealised master, destroys himself: ‘I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate’ (p. 337).

In the original ending of the novel Caleb is again imprisoned and injustice continues. The revised version sees Falkland die and Caleb become the living gravestone of a human being. In both versions, however, there appears no way out of the imprisonment embodied by the first-person narrative itself, for that would be to return to conventional and Gothic narrative frames that are challenged throughout the novel. Falkland is a figure from a Gothic romance, marked by his ideals of chivalry, honour and personal reputation. He speaks ‘the