The Columbia History of the British Novel

interpretive problem in relation to Miss Milner's premarital behavior. Before Dorriforth meets her, he receives two diametrically opposed accounts of her behavior and character. When she embarks with apparent enthusiasm on a life of frivolity, those around her develop radically different explanatory theories. And Dorriforth/ Elmwood in fact never adequately grasps his fiancée's or his wife's nature.

Caleb Williams makes the problem of interpretation explicitly political, at least in part. The novel obsessively reiterates the difference between laws-both literal legal sanctions and general social rules-for the rich and for the poor. That difference, in practice, depends on interpretation. The same act performed by a rich man and a poor one is understood as having utterly different meanings. The poor have no rights because the law always assumes that truth inheres in the rich. Such assessment on the basis of class manifestly carries social meaning, but even efforts at personal understanding derive from and register in the social order. Thus Caleb, defying ambiguity and announcing to himself his «freedom» as he leaves Falkland behind, perceives that 'every man is fated to be more or less the tyrant or the slave.' He decides that he himself will remain «disengaged» from this corrupt system and will 'never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer'-this at the moment he sets forth on the path that destines him to face precisely that choice of roles in relation to Falkland. He can suffer at his former employer's hands or he can «oppress» by revealing the older man's crime. He has no other choice, and his efforts to explain the operations of the social system so as to avoid its most sinister effects are necessarily doomed to failure.

Nonetheless, Caleb continues his interpretive struggle, which, like his refusal to be tyrant or slave, most often involves an attempt to declare his individuality, his specialness. In prison, for instance, he develops an elaborate mental life, imaginatively placing himself in every conceivable situation and planning the conduct appropriate to every human difficulty. He believes himself uniquely prepared for all experience, triumphantly self- sufficient. This reading of his situation, like his earlier ones, proves insufficient to the actualities that soon assail him. His self-interpretation cannot survive society's pressures.

The conflict between Falkland and his irrational enemy Tyrrel, which ends in Tyrrel's murder, turns in its early stages on questions of interpretation. Tyrrel, predictably, understands interpretation as a kind -270- of fraud. He takes his own view as simple truth. Falkland's effort to convince Tyrrel of his obligation of charity toward his social inferiors meets a significant negative response: 'I always knew you had the wit to make good your own story, and tell a plausible tale. But I will not be come over thus.' Despite his brutality and obtuseness, Tyrrel has perceived an important fact. Individual interpretations-the «stories» or «tales» that people tell-indeed belong to the interplay of power that defines human relations. Substituting physical for mental power and using his social position to maximum advantage, Tyrrel exploits the weapons available to him. But so do Falkland and Caleb.

The particular subtleties of the emotional connections between Falkland and Caleb indeed seem 'particular,' not just the effects of social forces. On the other hand, the structural duplication of the father-son bond in the situation between the two men suggests that the most delicate idiosyncrasies of domestic relations involving inequalities of power inevitably reflect larger social patterns. Dramatizing a prolonged effort at both literal and metaphorical escape, Caleb Williams insists at every level on escape's impossibility.

In its unrelieved pessimism, Godwin's novel shows every avenue of hope systematically blocked, enforcing a fiercely negative view of the human prospect. Although like Godwin's they investigate with more or less consistency the connections between the «private» and the 'public,' the period's other works of fiction characteristically discover a way out of despair in the imagined nature of an energetic individual-a Hermsprong, an Anna St. Ives, even a Sidney. Godwin alone faces the possibility that the idea of individualism is itself a fiction, an interpretation necessary for hope but antithetical to logic.

Action and form

In a preface to the Standard Novels edition of Caleb Williams, Godwin emphasized not only the book's political purpose but its formal intensity. He explained how he plotted backward, beginning with the events of the third volume, 'a series of adventures of flight and pursuit,' then working back to the narrative of secret murder, the second volume's project, and finally telling the story of Falkland's early career, which lends pathos to his later corruption. A rigorous sense of narrative logic governed his planning. In the finished work, the results of that logic help to create both the painful impression of inevitability that governs -271- Caleb's repeated frustration and bafflement and the more generalized impression that hope constitutes only an illusion.

If Godwin shared Mary Hays's project of putting the mind in motion, he pursued this endeavor partly by blocking accustomed paths of thought and feeling. His narrative of composition suggests his recognition that a fiction's shape helps determine its most profound effects. Judging by their novels' evidence, few of his contemporaries shared that recognition; if they did, few could find narrative patterns that would provoke energetic reaction. It is perhaps for this reason-that the new imagining of the novelistic enterprise did not typically include the imagining of new forms-that novels of the 1790s, despite their large ambitions, have not found a wide audience. Often the period's novelists poured their new wine into old bottles.

Formal conventions, in short, lagged behind ideological innovations in the novels of the 1790s. Anna St. Ives and Walsingham, both epistolary in form, thus appear to declare themselves old-fashioned, even as they articulate fresh ideas. Memoirs of Emma Courtney, also loosely epistolary, tells its story in long letters from Emma to her foster son that incorporate shorter letters from the past. The epistolary mode implicitly announces personal relations as the preeminent subject of the novel. For writers who wished to make their readers think about the social implications of personal experience, reliance on fictional correspondence conveyed a contradictory message by allowing readers to relax into familiar and relatively passive ways of reading.

As for third-person narratives, also employed during the period, they most often preserve the loose one- thing-after-another structure made familiar by the picaresque novel. Ellinor and The Old Manor House exemplify the type. They do not lack plot, but events often take place on the page ma0inly for their own sake; the reader is invited to interest herself in the multiplicity of happenings as instances of the infinite possibility of circumstance, not as episodes stimulated by the novelistic pattern of action in itself, however energizing a doctrine the fiction advances.

Only a few 1790s novelists appear to acknowledge a need for fictional form to emphasize ideological meaning. In Hermsprong Bage invents a narrator who himself plays a peripheral part in the novel's happenings. Gregory Glen, an illegitimate child with no clearly defined social place, has the potential to provide an outsider's perspective on conventional structures and thus to insist on social meanings even within a romance plot. His view of the world, as a 'child of nature' in quite a different sense -272- from Hermsprong, might present a slightly skewed counterpart to the hero's and participate in a rich interplay of attitudes. Hermsprong is wealthy and titled; Gregory is poor and lacks even a real last name. How provocative to pursue the conjunctions and disparities of attitude between them! Bage does not, however, pursue anything of the sort. Only intermittently does he give his narrator a distinctive voice and character. For long stretches, Gregory offers no commentary beyond almost sycophantic approval of Hermsprong. At the outset he suggests his own moral and political position, but that position soon disappears from view. The novel hints at but never fully achieves structural innovation.

Godwin and Inchbald, alone among the writers discussed in this chapter, successfully developed-at least in single novels-expressive structures of novelistic action. Many critics have considered the two-part structure of A Simple Story a flaw. It reflects a possible historical disjunction: Inchbald may have written the first section in 1779 and ten years later combined it with a second. Sandford's nature appears to have changed between the two parts, and Catholicism no longer constitutes a plot issue. Yet a profound unity-indeed, the unity of action recommended by Aristotle, who in 1792 had been newly translated and annotated-controls the novel as a whole. In different keys, the two parts tell the same story: of a daughter's longing for and eventual union with a father (or 'father'). Part 1 ends, apparently happily, with the unexpected marriage of Lord Elmwood and Miss Milner. Part 2 undoes the marriage and kills the woman, then tells the story of a well-trained girl's achievement of apparent happiness through a career of flawless compliance. The first part appears to reward a spirited female for her spirit. Its sequel reveals that assertiveness, willed autonomy, and desire for power are unacceptable components of female nature. The combination of reiterated action with divergent implication exerts a powerful effect. The revisionary moral weight of the second section bears heavily on the transgressive imaginings of the first, effecting an uneasy reconciliation by means of the stated «moral» about a proper education, which reinforces retroactively the negative interpretation of Miss Milner's premarital behavior. On the other hand, the daring vision of a young woman in love who yet ventures to claim power also affects one's understanding of its more orthodox aftermath. The shadow of a challenging, inventive mother stands behind the sublimely well-behaved and altogether uninventive daughter, implicitly commenting on the high cost, for a woman, of achieving social approval. Here as in the century's conduct books, a -273- proper education instructs a woman in giving up-giving up her hopes, her