The Columbia History of the British Novel

house scaring its inhabitants with mysterious noises and happenings. But it also suggests that personal experiences have political meanings.

Monimia, Charlotte Smith's romantically named heroine, exists as an orphaned dependent in a great house, nominally cared for by an aunt who actually exploits and envies her. Pretty and good, she early attracts the attention of Orlando Somerive, son of a neighboring family related to the mistress of the house. He sees her from the beginning as victim of «injustice» and 'oppression,' but she has no rebellious spirit and no obvious way of rebelling, since she lacks family and money. Orlando, the younger son of a father with limited income whose elder son has squandered the family's assets, holds a marginally more comfortable position. For years he meets Monimia secretly at the manor house. Then the time comes when, for the good of his family and for the sake of his own independence, he must assume a profession and leave Monimia. Having no particular vocational interest, he gladly accepts the offer of a commission from a man who (unbeknownst to Orlando) wishes to seduce his sister, and soon finds himself in the midst of the American Revolution. Hardships follow, for him and for Monimia, but eventually he returns to England, they marry in poverty, and the discovery of a secreted will brings them prosperity.

Little in this plot suggests political awareness or purpose. But an incidental reference to 'the politics of Rayland Hall' at the end of a passage describing the servants' reactions to the news of Orlando's plans to become a soldier (the butler expects as a result to seduce the maidservant; the housekeeper hopes to find out what Monimia is up to) indicates the prevailing narrative consciousness that happenings in a house resemble those in the larger world. Most consistently emphasized is the powerlessness of poverty. Monimia has been reared to believe that her poverty in effect constitutes a sin. She reacts with wonder and gratitude to Orlando's revelation that the amount of money a person possesses does not determine the degree of his or her human rights. Orlando says that the tyranny of the privileged, resisted, will fall. Monimia's aunt governs her only by 'usurped authority.' Such lessons help Monimia to value herself for the first time (the text says so explicitly). Implicitly, they fortify her when, left alone, she must resist the dangers of country and city.

Meanwhile, Orlando acquires further political wisdom as a soldier, — 266- realizing that he fights for politicians, not for his country, and that the Americans are fighting for values to which the English pay lip service. He sees that governments endeavor to keep their populations in ignorance, which alone creates unquestioning obedience. When he returns to London, to experience firsthand the chicanery of lawyers and to hear about that of doctors, his fight for his rights is informed by the knowledge that his individual plight resembles that of millions. He differentiates himself by his knowledge, his ability to apply it, and his willingness to act on it.

The plot of threatened powerlessness relieved by unexpected wealth duplicates that of countless earlier works. Orlando's political sentiments sound fairly commonplace, and the political comprehension of the novel as a whole hardly goes beyond them. Nonetheless, the implication that conventional romance problems have a place in larger political structures represents an important development in the history of the novel

Tyranny and usurped authority constitute central threats within The Old Manor House and preoccupy many novelists of the period, as one might expect in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions. A Simple Story, for instance, beyond its mild allusions to Catholic politics and to the frivolity and viciousness of fashionable life, manifests little concern with the realm outside the domestic. On the other hand, it concerns itself centrally with issues of authority and power. Instead of the familiar plot of generational conflict over a daughter's marital choice, it converts a lover (an ex-Catholic priest, remember) into a metaphorical father and plays out essentially the same conflict in terms that render it both more ostensibly equal and more intimately painful. Now it becomes clear that the «daughter» can't win: either she destroys her marriage (as Lady Elmwood does) or she submits, in her own view, to becoming a cipher. The second-generation daughter, the real daughter, has learned the lesson of cipherhood. In the context of the period's other novels, this becomes a political plot.

Hermsprong makes explicit the political implications of fatherdaughter relations with the hero's personal defiance of Lord Grondale as tyrant and his insistence that the lord's daughter also resist tyranny on abstract grounds of justice. Hermsprong's antipathy toward him seems to Lord Grondale intensely personal: the nobleman personalizes all resistance. Through Hermsprong's doctrine, the novel insists that such efforts to interpret behavior on the basis of individual feeling -267- themselves amount to political acts. As for the traditional arrangement by which fathers dictate their daughters' marriages, that exemplifies the authoritarianism that threatens the country. The hero passionately articulates his understanding of how personal and political mingle in human experience:

I cannot, I fear, submit to be fettered and cramped throughout the whole circle of thought and action. You [the English] submit to authority with regard to the first, and to fashion with regard to the last. I cannot get rid of the stubborn notion, that to do what we think is right to do is the only good principle of action. You seem to think the only good principle of action is to do as others do.

Fashion and authority constrict equally. To resist both establishes the only moral basis for action, political or personal-and the action of resistance, the novel suggests, is inevitably political.

William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) explores more thoroughly than any other novel of the period the painful intersection of political and personal history. Its interest for many modern readers derives primarily from its psychological clarity, subtlety, and intricacy, but such qualities, from Godwin's stated point of view, serve to emphasize the revolutionary social message he wished to impart. As he says in his preface, he wrote in 'a high state of excitement,' telling himself, 'I will write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before.' He wished to make people understand how tyranny works. In England as it actually exists, the novel maintains, justice does not operate for the poor. Caleb, the protagonist, determines to win justice for himself and fails, not only because of the manifest inequities of the social system but because of the ways in which he has internalized its assumptions.

Godwin announces as his novel's central psychological principle the rather old-fashioned theory of the ruling passion. Curiosity fatally governs Caleb; concern for reputation as disastrously controls his employer, Falkland. The novel's action turns on Caleb's discovery of Falkland's secret: the man with a reputation for impeccable virtue has murdered an enemy and allowed two other men to be executed for his crime. Falkland promises his young secretary a terrible penalty for this knowledge. Although Caleb leaves Falkland's house, he cannot evade his power: the power of the upper class to decide the fates of their inferiors. Wherever -268- Caleb goes, news of his manufactured crime (Falkland accuses him of treacherous theft) follows him, making all communities shun him. When he finally decides to fight back, when he actually appears in a courtroom to testify against Falkland, his persecutor presents himself ravaged by illness and psychic distress. He dies shortly after Caleb's public accusation, and Caleb feels himself a murderer too, destined to desperate unhappiness even after Falkland has expired.

The characteristic that drives Caleb to uncover Falkland's secret manifests itself less as curiosity than as intolerance of ambiguity. After Caleb leaves Falkland's house, curiosity does not reveal itself as a crucial trait, but impatience with ambiguity-a need to clear things up, to make them straightforward-remains. Falkland's compulsion to keep his reputation unstained is, by assertion, rather more consistent than Caleb's curiosity, yet it inadequately elucidates his relentless and ingenious persecution of Caleb.

The effort to interpret that persecution has compelled generations of readers. I argued earlier that new kinds of emotion become the subjects of investigation in novels of the 1790s. The thesis applies to Caleb Williams perhaps more aptly than to any other single work. What makes the novel so curiously absorbing is its ambiguous representation of an intense relationship between two men, an indissoluble tie based on a quasi-paternal-filial connection, a link of love assuming the form of hate, an affiliation finally converted into identification. To call the feeling between Caleb and Falkland love masked as hate clumsily hints at the intricacy of an emotional tie never adequately labeled within the text. Caleb must flee and must not escape. Falkland must pursue as retribution but also as protection (for example, he prevents Caleb's imprisonment and even arranges for him to receive a small financial donation). Caleb cannot Fathom what is going on. His ultimate reliance on legal process constitutes, among other things, a final, unsatisfactory effort at clarification.

The problem of interpretation exists vividly within the text, presenting a challenge to characters as well as readers. In this respect as in others, Caleb Williams resembles other novels of the period. Walsingham, for instance, an epistolary novel with a single point of view, narrates the experience of a man who interprets every occurrence as persecution. If the reader gets the impression that the narrator inadequately understands his own experience, the denouement with its gender conversion dramatically confirms the ubiquitousness of misinterpretation in Wals-269- Wals-'s letters. A Simple Story raises the