(De)Radicalism: Rootlessness and the Subversive Power of Money in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon

It is unsurprising that William Godwin, a thinker whose major project was considered by critics to be an upheaval of all inherited tradition, would focus on questions of rootlessness in his first two novels. Both Caleb Williams and St. Leon present heroes who are plagued by the inability to maintain connections with other individuals as a result of past actions and suffer for having negative or unknown reputations. Although the heroes are uprooted from their past through calumny and poor judgment, they attempt to define themselves by present action and good intentions, rather than by the prejudices of the societies that have cast them out. Williams and St. Leon each develop a pattern of thought in which they see themselves both as outsider and member; they at once reject the opinion of society, instead favoring pure reason and an obstinate sense of righteousness, and maintain the importance of living in and supporting that society. Their constant changes of disguise, wandering, concealment, imprisonment, and miscalculated attempts at benevolence all reveal the impossibility of escaping the past. This characterizes a significant problem in Godwin’s attitude toward reform: the necessity of uprooting the past in order to create a rational future contrasts with the impossibility, even undesirability, of being free from history. Although the prejudices of society are the bugbear of Godwinian thought, Godwin’s novels nevertheless lament the individual’s alienation from society as a result of rejecting its constraints. The tension between rational commitment to change and the individual’s need for community undermines Godwin’s confidence in reform. Godwin presents strategies for resolving this tension by exploring outsider communities, such as the romanticized banditti and Jews, which demonstrate alternate modes of social organization that exist in opposition to or disjunction from the larger social body. Godwin defines each of these groups through their relationships to money and exchange, thereby opposing them to the landed gentry’s interest in hereditary property and demonstrating that the deracination of wealth that Godwin’s revolutionary politics entail will lead to a more just society. In order to describe “things as they are,” Godwin states in the preface of Caleb Williams that he wishes to produce a “general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” Falkland, as the main antagonist, represents this mode of despotism as he, an apparently virtuous man, becomes corrupted by cultural norms: in this case, pride of station. Donald Roemer argues that Falkland’s “ruling passion of public honour is a value esteemed in a monarchical society. While this value ideally generates positive qualities proven by Falkland as a paragon of benevolence, it is dangerously founded upon the egoistic desire for esteem. This man of feeling behaves virtuously out of love for his honourable reputation, but he also secretly murders Tyrell to preserve his self-esteem.” The preservation of reputation is, of course, Caleb’s project as well. The claim to reputation, or personal history, parallels claims on property throughout the novel: Tyrell’s reputation remains fixed in the eyes of the public and he will brook no challenges, while Caleb’s past, already unstable because he is an orphan and a servant, is further disrupted and distorted by Falkland’s calumny and Caleb’s own adoption of various disguises. Caleb’s embrace of unstable identity, according to Jacques Khalip, is ultimately empowering: “Indeed, it is by turning the concept of anonymity into a full-scale political theory in Caleb Williams that Godwin makes his mark: narrative uncertainties and character unravelings intimate that subjectivity is politically viable because it is easily substituted, mobile and, betrayable.” A flexible relationship to one’s own character creates “anonymous mobility.” . …