Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

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10.1057/9780230106574 - Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, James P. Carson

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Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters This series presents original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of literary works and public figures in Great Britain, North America, and continental Europe during the nineteenth century. The volumes in Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters evoke the energies, achievements, contributions, cultural traditions, and individuals who reflected and generated them during the Romantic and Victorian period. The topics: critical, textual, and historical scholarship, literary and book history, biography, cultural and comparative studies, critical theory, art, architecture, science, politics, religion, music, language, philosophy, aesthetics, law, publication, translation, domestic and public life, popular culture, and anything that influenced, impinges upon, expresses or contributes to an understanding of the authors, works, and events of the nineteenth century. The authors consist of political figures, artists, scientists, and cultural icons including William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Taylor, and their contemporaries The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD (Indiana University), FEA. She has taught at William and Mary, Temple University, New York University, and is Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle and the author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, and editions, essays, and reviews in journals. She lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory, intellectual history, publishing procedures, and history of science. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Periodicals, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer From Song to Print, by Terence Allan Hoagwood Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson FORTHCOMING TITLES Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, by Shira Wolosky Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust, by Thomas Brennan The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Annette Cozzi John Thelwall and the Wordsworth Circle, by Judith Thompson Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism, by B. Ashton Nichols Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain, by Clare A. Simmons Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, by Gregory Leadbetter Romantic Dharma, by Mark Lussier Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab Jewish Representation in British Literature 1700–1853, by Michael H. Scrivener



Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

J a m e s P. C a r s o n



Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel

POPULISM, GENDER, AND SYMPATHY IN THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

Copyright © James P. Carson, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62110–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carson, James Patrick, 1955– Populism, gender, and sympathy in the romantic novel / James P. Carson. p. cm. — (Nineteenth-century major lives and letters) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–62110–7 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Crowds in literature. 3. Riots in literature. 4. Populism in literature. 5. Women in literature. 6. Disguise in literature. 7. Sympathy in literature. I. Title. PR868.C75C37 2010 8239.709355—dc22

2009032664

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For Deborah



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Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1.

Gothic and Romantic Crowds

25

2.

Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian Women Rioters and the October Days Women’s Dress and “Black Scores”

45 46 56

3.

4.

5.

Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Journal of a West India Proprietor “A Sort of Half-Man”: Disguise, Disgust, and Dismemberment Popular Culture, Slavery, and Social Control Unisonance and the Echo: Popular Disturbances and Theatricality in the Works of Charles Maturin The “Frantic Idea” of Irish Independence: Maturin’s Politics Unsexed Women The Echoes of Incarceration Godwin’s “Metaphysical Dissecting Knife” Moral Anatomy and Agency The Crowd and the Noble Savage in St. Leon Sympathy and the Problem of Essentialist Gender Definition The Angelic Station and the Calvinist Congregation

75 79 89

105 105 119 129 137 138 147 153 161



C on t e n t s

6.

Contents

“A Sigh of Many Hearts”: History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Lodore Aristocrats and the London Crowd in Lodore From Frankenstein to Valperga History and Sensibility Defining Humanity Republicanism and Popular Culture

169 169 173 175 180 186

Conclusion

195

Notes

201

Bibliography

219

Index

237



viii

T

his book grew by extensive research and accumulation of materials over many years, during which time I have incurred many debts to libraries and funding agencies, as well as to teachers, colleagues, and friends. I am grateful to the staff who provided me access to the collections of the Huntington Library, the British Library, the University of Exeter library, and the Olin and Chalmers libraries at Kenyon College. Mr. Richard Ovenden, the Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, has kindly given me permission to quote a passage from the Abinger papers. Part of chapter 6 was originally published in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein. Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth, ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997). I am grateful to the Associated University Presses for permission to republish a revised version of that essay. For financial support at various times I would like to thank the Killam Trusts, as well as the Huntington Library for an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship and a Huntington/British Academy fellowship. I am grateful to Kenyon College for sabbatical leaves and for continuing to attract the students who make Gambier, Ohio, a place to have a rewarding teaching career. Among my mentors, G. A. Starr, Stephen Greenblatt, and Thomas Laqueur have been especially important in shaping my scholarly work. Many colleagues and friends have read parts of the manuscript and provided helpful comments and criticism, as well as encouragement. I would like to thank Jennifer Clarvoe, Syndy Conger, Frances Ferguson, Frederick S. Frank, Ivonne Garcia, George Haggerty, and John Richetti for their comments, conversation, and support. Participants in the faculty work-in-progress reading group (the Kenyon Seminars), when I presented a chapter in 2003 and more generally over the years, have provided advice and the pleasures of intellectual engagement. Jeff Bowman, Bianca Calabresi, Jane Cowles, Laurie Finke, Jerry Harp, Lewis Hyde, Bruce Kinzer, Jesse



Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

Acknow ledgments

Matz, and Linda Metzler deserve particular mention. My colleague Sarah Heidt, who read the entire manuscript, has been the best of readers for urging me to focus my arguments instead of following my inclination to interpret, annotate, and indiscriminately accumulate (in the manner of the crowd). For help in obtaining images, I owe a considerable debt to Eugene Dwyer, Julia Glynn, and Ethan Henderson. It has been a pleasure to work with Lee Norton, Brigitte Shull, and Rachel Tekula, my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, and in the production process with Rohini Krishnan at Newgen Imaging Systems. This book would never have been written without my intellectual and domestic partnership with Deborah Laycock, who has followed the book through all its incarnations, from vague ideas to several complete drafts. With Deborah, I have enjoyed the pleasure that Godwin’s Casimir Fleetwood claims “may . . . be derived from reading with a woman of refined understanding,” and it is to her that this book is dedicated.



x

A CW Fl FN FR G&M HM J L LN M MC MW PJ

S SL TMS V W

Maturin, Charles Robert. The Albigenses, a Romance. Godwin, William. Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Ed. Maurice Hindle. Godwin, William. Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling. The Fortunes of Nigel. Ed. Frank Jordan. Maturin, Charles Robert. Fatal Revenge. Godwin & Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Ralph M. Wardle. Scott, Walter. The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Ed. David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden. Lewis, Matthew. Journal of a West India Proprietor. Ed. Judith Terry. Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Ed. Lisa Vargo. Scott, Walter. The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. Lewis, Matthew. The Monk. Ed. Howard Anderson. Maturin, Charles Robert. The Milesian Chief. Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Ed. Douglas Grant. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Ed. Mark Philp. Vols. 3 and 4 of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin. Maturin, Charles Robert. Sermons. Godwin, William. St. Leon. Ed. Pamela Clemit. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Shelley, Mary W. Valperga. London, 1823. Maturin, Charles Robert. Women; or, Pour et Contre.



A bbr e v i at ions




Figure 1 Giorgio Sommer (1834–1914). Photograph (c. 1875) of the cave called “The Ear of Dionysius” in Syracuse, Sicily (Kenyon College collection).



I n t roduc t ion

2

Pop u l i sm, Ge n de r , a n d S y m pat h y

The ear of Dionysius is no less a monument of the ingenuity and magnificence, than of the cruelty of that tyrant. It is a huge cavern cut out of the hard rock, exactly in the form of the human ear. The perpendicular height of it is about 80 feet, and the length of this enormous ear is not less than 250. The cavern was said to be so contrived, that every sound made in it, was collected and united into one point, as into a focus; this was called the Tympanum; and exactly opposite to it the tyrant had made a small hole, which communicated with a little apartment where he used to conceal himself. He applied his own ear to this hole, and is said to have heard distinctly every word that was spoken in the cavern below. This apartment was no sooner finished, and a proof of it made, than he put to death all the workmen that had been employed in it. He then confined all that he suspected were his enemies; and by overhearing their conversation, judged of their guilt, and condemned and acquitted accordingly. (1: 270–71)

Since Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, much has been written on the techniques of surveillance that were devised in the late eighteenth century; but most of these studies have concentrated on the enhancement of visibility and on metaphors of transparency. Brydone’s fascination with the ear of Dionysius redirects attention specifically to the possibilities of eavesdropping for producing the knowledge that both serves despotic power and facilitates modern psychological influence. Long before Jeremy Bentham imagined the Panopticon that would position the eye of an observer at the focal point of an ideal structure of confinement, the tyrant Dionysius constructed on the model of the human body, magnified to gigantic size, a prison in which voices would be contained, amplified, and brought to a focus at a point to be occupied by none but the king. The tyrant gains knowledge of his subjects’ dispositions by creating a machine for situating inside his own sovereign head, as it were, the voices of those under suspicion. In the sentimental culture of the late eighteenth century, the privileging of the voice as the bearer of truth, in its connection with both consciousness and conscience, may well make the ear of Dionysius an equally important instrument of knowledge and power as the frequently discussed Panopticon. That same culture, moreover, regarded the ruins of classical antiquity and medieval Europe not only as evidence for struggles between



In his widely read travels through Sicily and Malta, first published in 1773, Patrick Brydone describes in detail, even down to measurements in feet, a curious ancient construction at Syracuse:

3

despotism and liberty but also as occasions for aesthetic experience. When Richard Payne Knight visited Syracuse in 1777, he encountered the sublime in the ear of Dionysius: “These tremendous Palaces of Vengeance, on[c]e the Receptacles of crimes and misery . . . the gloomy Caves, where so many Wretches have linger’d away their Lives in horror and despair, now form the most pleasing and romantic retreats” (qtd. in Clarke and Penny 26). The dwarfing of humanity in a tremendous and gloomy cave, itself conceived of as the superhuman sense organ of an inhuman tyrant, creates a present aesthetic experience in the form of the congealed politics of the past. The pleasure in this romantic retreat is complicated by an awareness of suffering under tyranny, even if there is confidence in the progress of liberty. The ear of Dionysius appears in two novels by one of the Romantic writers I discuss in this book. In The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Walter Scott introduces this construction of a classical tyrant through comparison to a female collector of scandal and keeper of love secrets. In a motto that he attributes to a poem (or play?) entitled The Conspiracy, but which he himself probably wrote,” Scott implicitly compares to the tyrant of Syracuse Dame Ursula Suddlechop, who seeks to manage the love-life of the heroine, Margaret Ramsay: I’ve call’d her like the ear of Dionysius; I mean that ear-form’d vault built o’er his dungeon, To catch the groans and discontented murmurs Of his poor bondsmen. (FN 92)1

Toward the end of the novel, Scott marks one more chapter by another epigraph about aural surveillance—this time by the Shakespearean tyrant, Richard III: “I’ll play the eaves-dropper” (367). In this chapter, James I informs his councilors about how, “in imitation of . . . Dionysius,” he has had his workmen “make a lugg up at the state-prison of the Tower . . . where we may sit and privily hear the discourse of such prisoners as are put up there for state offences, and so creep into the very secrets of our enemies” (368–69). In this lugg (Scottish dialect for “ear”), James debases himself by eavesdropping on the conversations of the imprisoned Nigel Olifaunt and his visitors, including Margaret Ramsay, who is disguised as a male page, a dress that she formerly “wore . . . at a Christmas mumming” (332). In The Fortunes of Nigel, then, Scott conjoins aural surveillance on the classical model of the ear of Dionysius with a heroine who unsexes herself through cross-dressing deriving from popular cultural sources. A decade later, in Count Robert of Paris (1831)—a



Introduction


novel in which the hero’s wife, Brenhilda, is one of Scott’s numerous Amazonian women—the commander of the imperial guard at Constantinople, who is planning an insurrection against the Holy Roman Emperor, whispers to his fellow-conspirator: “Stone walls can hear . . . . Dionysius the tyrant, I have read, had an Ear which conveyed to him the secrets spoken within his state-prison at Syracuse” (Scott, Count Robert 180). In this book, I study sentimental phonocentrism, the ideal of wordless communication that one book reviewer termed the “moral telegraph” (Rev. of Melmoth 307, emphasis in the original), and the exploitation for punishment or individuation of the intimate connection between sounds and the conscience or the heart. Romantic authors use similar strategies to come to terms with the mysterious capacity of sympathy and with the crowd: seeking metaphors in scientific discoveries and magical or deceptive practices on the margins of science, or seeking new technological modes of communication or representation. If the telegraph is a symbol for sympathetic communication from heart to heart, the same image will later illustrate for Charles Dickens how the resentments of a violent revolutionary woman are spread “with marvellous quickness, at a distance” when agile men act “as a telegraph between her and the crowd” (233). My book takes its origin from an examination of the male use of female disguise in traditional popular protest. Such disguise was adopted for purposes of anonymity and in order to appeal to the carnivalesque motif of the “world-upside-down.” Men in female dress in popular protest may even have intended to imply that they had been “unmanned” by unjust authorities and were thus in a liminal condition between the sexes until they reclaimed their rights. After discussing the explicit representation of a cross-dressed man in popular protest in Walter Scott’s account of the Porteous Riots in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, I turn to the metaphor of cross-dressing in the use of the female narrative voice by male authors. I examine crowd scenes in novels by other authors as well: Matthew Lewis, Charles Maturin, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley. Owing to an inheritance from the genre of romance, these novelists have frequent recourse to the motif of transvestite disguise, as men dress in women’s clothing and women in men’s in order to evade prohibitions against their romantic attachments. Throughout, I show that these novels are ambivalent or self-contradictory in their support for, or criticism of, traditional gender roles, crowd violence, popular culture, and the reformation or remaking of individuals that depends in part on the inner voice. Ultimately, my attention to narrative voice leads me to consider the



4

5

question of voice itself, in several different contexts: the phonocentrism of sentimental literature in which Romantic fiction participates, the theoretical opposition of speech and writing, the inner voice of conscience, voices from the dead in Gothic fiction, the bourgeois appropriation of the “oral literature” of the folk, modifications of the voice in ventriloquism and the echo, the polyphonic play of voices in the dialogic genre of the novel, the sublime sound of the crowd, and the transformation of the democratic formula vox populi vox dei into a satire on female garrulousness and women’s public speech in vox feminae vox diaboli. In the novels I examine in this book, serious political reflections can be located in what have often been dismissed as cheap narrative effects. In the novels of the period, moreover, surveillance is just as likely to be conducted with the ear as with the eye. For example, at the center of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) the monster spends his days in a low hovel adjacent to the De Laceys’ cottage. Whereas his eye can barely penetrate into the domestic space through an “almost imperceptible chink” (Shelley, Frankenstein 85), the same crevice enables him to hear sufficiently well to acquire literacy and even to experience a simulacrum of sympathy and love for the family to which he, as monstrous spy, can never belong. Denied participation, the monster confuses the hierarchical knowledge of surveillance for the mutual knowledge of sympathy. The former mode of knowing resembles the activities of readers or audience members who view the world as fiction or theater. In The Antiquary (1816), Walter Scott describes at length a secret niche in the ruins of St. Ruth’s Priory that “commanded a full view of the chancel in every direction, and was probably constructed . . . to be a convenient watch-tower from which the superior priest, himself unseen, could watch the behaviour of his monks” (168). While initially designed as a kind of Panopticon, “the prior’s secret seat of observation” serves in 1794 as the site where an army officer and a licensed beggar overhear, in the dark, evidence of the fraud that a Rosicrucian, Herman Dousterswivel, has been perpetrating against the Tory baronet Sir Arthur Wardour (Scott, Antiquary 176). In the French Revolutionary context, the frauds of a German adept go beyond financial chicanery to suggest the politically subversive machinations of the Bavarian illuminati, a secret society thought by conspiracy theorists to have inspired the Jacobins. Political subversion is discovered aurally at a site of Gothic monastic surveillance. While the ear of Dionysius was enough of a curiosity to appeal to the eighteenth-century travel-writer and to provide fruitful analogies for aural surveillance in novels, in certain respects it remains



Introduction


a distinctly ancient construction. Even though he includes auditory surveillance in his model penitentiary house,2 Bentham explicitly warns his critics against specious comparisons between Dionysius’ ear and the Panopticon: “Detection is the object of the first: prevention, that of the latter. In the former case the ruling person is a spy; in the latter he is a monitor. The object of the first was to pry into the secret recesses of the heart; the latter, confining its attention to overt acts, leaves thoughts and fancies to their proper ordinary, the court above” (66). While Bentham has persuaded few modern readers that panopticism eschews spying, and while the Panopticon likewise takes the form of an “artificial body” (84), there are indeed differences between the tyrant’s gigantic ear and the utilitarian’s architectural model. However, the difference resides precisely in Bentham’s unwillingness to leave “the secret recesses of the heart” to the jurisdiction of God—or God’s representative, the ordinary or prison chaplain. The ancient tyrant sought knowledge about his subjects so that he could secure his own rule through condemnations and acquittals, whereas the modern regime seeks knowledge in order to reform and even to construct appropriate subjects. In addition to bringing together voices and accumulating information at a central point, the modern administrator or reformer seeks to install the inner voice of conscience in the individual. The modern regime requires not only a mechanism for collecting all sounds and uniting them at a focus, but also the calculations that will maximize the distribution of a central voice. In the matter of attempting to create a conscience in the members of the Anglo-American crowd, the most important eighteenth-century phenomenon is the rise of Methodism. Elias Canetti notes that, at significant moments in his journals, John Wesley “worked out the numbers of those who were able to hear him.” For Canetti, this impulse to maximize the audience is both a historically specific matter, related to urbanization and opposition to “the limiting ceremoniousness of the official temple,” and evidence for the universal desire of crowds to achieve growth, the desire “to reach all men” (21, 22). The paradox of Methodism, however, is that even though the preaching may take place in the open air, outside confining institutional walls, and even though the ministers may address the lower orders who constitute the early modern crowd, this “popular” preaching aims at reaching discrete individuals and, by an appeal to the conscience, intends ultimately to expropriate and suppress traditional popular culture. Given the tension within Methodism between a broad popular, even democratic, appeal and authoritarian “moral espionage” (E. P. Thompson, Making 351, 46), it is not surprising that a striking



6

Introduction

7

Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front Street, when some noise in that street obscured it. Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty thousand. This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, and to the ancient histories of generals haranguing whole armies, of which I had sometimes doubted. (103)

More obsessed with measurement than even Patrick Brydone, Franklin seeks to test, by direct sensory experience, in typical Enlightenment fashion, both popular newspaper reports and classical historical accounts of audience size. The parallel he draws between modern Methodist audiences and ancient armies suggests that what is at stake, besides mere numbers, is the power of the collective body once its members have been exhorted, inspired, and disciplined by a charismatic leader. Franklin also has in mind the Federalist debate on the proper limits of the state, which for Aristotle ought to be determined by the range of the human voice. Ian Watt cites this Aristotelian precept in the course of arguing that, unlike the classical genres with their oral roots, the modern genre of the novel and “modern urban culture” both depend on print (196). If novel and nation are the products of print capitalism, they are nonetheless haunted by, or seek to incorporate the power of, the oral culture of the crowd. George Whitefield stands within the Autobiography as an oral and religious epitome of Franklin’s written and secular project. Franklin elaborates a project of self-discipline in his Autobiography, while in Poor Richard’s Almanac he appropriates and transforms popular culture, changing the almanac from a form embodying popular attitudes toward time as holiday and the future as the space of astrological prognostication to an instrument of social control inculcating the view that time is money and the future should be the space of rational accumulation. Through a system of moral accounting, the use of a timetable, the self-surveillance of autobiography itself, the presentation of his own life as model for imitation, and “good management”



example of audience calculations should appear in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. On the occasion of a George Whitefield sermon in Philadelphia, Franklin—happily immune to the address to his soul— exhibits a scientific fascination with the range of the human voice:


in general, Franklin seeks to correct the errata in himself and “greatly amend” other human beings (71). Through entrepreneurial and propagandistic use of the press, encouragement of circulating libraries, and advocacy of a network of societies directed centrally and secretly from an elite club behind the scenes, he aims to create a new American nation through the making of improved individuals. Benjamin Franklin provides Max Weber with his central example of the spirit of capitalism—an ascetic ethic in which human beings and human happiness are subordinated to business and the accumulation of wealth. The human being is reduced to the status of a steward of his (or, rarely, her) possessions or to that of “an acquisitive machine” driven by an inner compulsion (Weber 170). According to Weber, the Calvinist ethic attempted to eliminate spontaneous emotions, traditional sports and festivities, and the periodic oscillation between sin and forgiveness, in the process of systematically transforming the human being into the unified, internally consistent entity termed in a “formal psychological sense . . . a personality” (119). Franklin’s experimental calculations for distributing as widely as possible the human voice, or its reproduction in the form of writing, serve the larger goal of installing the inner voice that will transform the crowd—with its traditional festivity, alehouse culture, and indifference to calculable productivity and accumulation—into the disciplined, autonomous individuals who possess a unified personality, with the shape of an autobiography. E. P. Thompson interprets Methodism, in the tradition of Weber’s Calvinism, as a later manifestation of the religious reconstruction of character. Whereas Calvinism helped to create the independent, ascetic entrepreneur of early capitalism, Methodism helped to create the disciplined, sober, and submissive workers of early industrialism. For Thompson, even though it encouraged the rise of some dedicated leaders in working-class organizations, Methodism represents a decline in radical potential from the Protestant sects whose antiauthoritarian ideals fostered egalitarian tendencies at the time of the English Civil War. Thompson suggests, however, that the appeal of Puritanism was, in general, more bourgeois than the plebeian or working-class address of Methodism. If not John Wesley and George Whitefield themselves, certainly their early nineteenth-century heirs “fostered within the Methodist Church those elements most suited to make up the psychic component of the work-discipline of which the manufacturers stood most in need” (Making 355). Thompson maintains that the industrial entrepreneur was entirely conscious of the benefits of remaking human beings so that their work habits would mesh with the methodical regularity of the factory machines. The



8

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installation of a sense of “introspective guilt” through the “[e]ncouragement of espionage into each others’ moral failings” was the violent mechanism of the transforming force of Methodism in its unholy alliance with utilitarianism (40, 352, 365). In Methodism, human energies and emotions are redirected into the service of the Church, where their release is designed as periodic interruption to and compensation for a life of sexual repression, communal deprivation, and highly disciplined labor. The idea of human malleability, however, does not always serve the interests of industry and the social hierarchy. The remaking of human beings through changing their environment and circumstances was a favorite project of Enlightenment liberals and radicals, who imagined utopias in which ignorance, punishment, and oppressive inequality would be eliminated. Just as the novels I discuss in this book emphasize and critique the kind of auditory surveillance embodied in the ear of Dionysius, so too they explore penetration into the human mind, which often takes the form of mysterious voices that mimic the individual conscience. Critics have found a tendency to self-surveillance in Ann Radcliffe’s heroines that extends beyond the boundaries of her novels into the culture at large. Barbara Benedict argues that Emily St. Aubert’s internalization of her dead father in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) “models for the reader an ideal internalization of the all-seeing authority” (177). In an account of the construction of the specifically female and English modern subject through the “promotion of a generalized paranoia” in such terror novels as The Italian (1797), Cannon Schmitt similarly claims “that Radcliffean Gothic contributed to the formation of that subject by encouraging the adoption of habitual internal surveillance in heroines and readers alike” (871, 864). But while Benedict suggests that Du Pont’s hidden presence in the secret passages of the castle of Udolpho, along with other instances of surveillance in Radcliffe, “underscores the function of looking as a form of control” (177), I would point out instead that Du Pont, by echoing the words of Montoni and his impious guests “in a disguised and hollow tone” from inside the walls, undertakes “to try whether [he] could not awaken their consciences” (Radcliffe, Mysteries 460). The mode of control is at least as much oral as visual. Moreover, contrary to Benedict and Schmitt, I argue that, while the novel is indeed implicated in the project of creating the internally monitored subject, it simultaneously provides a critical distance on that larger aim, when terror is exploited not only by the author but also by a character’s performance within the text.



Introduction


Novelists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries typically create characters who are doubles of one another, and establish relationships between characters in which one serves as the other’s conscience or speaks in a supernatural or diabolical inner voice. Ventriloquism, which names the art of placing one’s voice in another figure, becomes in this period a trope for the reduction of human beings to automata and for attempts to dictate behavior, not through external coercion, but through psychological or ideological control. The traditional crowd may be controlled by force and awed by terrible examples, but political thinkers, as well as poets and novelists, increasingly recognize that the dissolution of the crowd into discrete individuals makes possible more finely distributed and more effective modes of control. When conscience becomes a secular instrument, it becomes increasingly subject to manipulation by those who would install it in human beings to make them, among other things, the subordinated parts of an industrial machine. Compared to later social formations, the traditional crowd is unified through shared symbolism and ritual, including that deriving from religious belief and paternalistic relationships. Throughout this book, and especially in my discussion of Walter Scott, the popular symbolism with which I shall be most concerned is that of female dress, as well as the related carnivalesque motif of the world-upsidedown. The problem of social cohesion comes to the fore with the dissolution of the early modern crowd and of what E. P. Thompson has termed its “moral economy”; the weakening of the ties of patronage and deference; the abrogation of or conversion into monetary value of common rights, use rights, and traditional perquisites; the secularization of ruling-class society; and the divorce between elite and popular culture. Face-to-face connections, marked by inequality and hierarchy, yield to the abstract relations of contract mediated by money. “Society was” once, according to Randall McGowen, “knit together by sight and by example,” by “a shared vocabulary of images,” and by “a shared ceremonial life” (“Body” 662, 673, 679). Modern processes of individualization and social reform put discrete individuals who perform abstract calculations in the place of the crowd that interprets visible examples. Once collective values have come to be questioned and shared symbols have ceased to be widely understood, moral and political philosophers and other social thinkers anxiously seek new forces that will cause the aggregate of discrete individuals to cohere. Among the most important sources of social cohesion posited by thinkers from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century are



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self-interest, the moral sense, sympathy, humanitarianism, social habits ingrained through education and ideological control, and money (which, in an appeal to an older order of physiological analogy, is described as circulating through the social body in the way blood does in the individual body). Since the idea of a delicate sensibility is inherently elitist, the kind of humanitarian and sympathetic feelings fostered or imposed from above as “new forms of connectedness” (McGowen, “Powerful” 320–21) prove to be less broadly shared than religious sentiments once were, in a society that had been structured on an acknowledged divine purpose. Eighteenth-century moral philosophers and nineteenth-century social reformers conceive of the power of sympathetic identification as the product of high civilization and thus characteristic of modernity, and more specifically as the possession of those social classes above the brutal mob. When the proponents of self-interest do not supplement this instrument of social cohesion with sympathy or with an “invisible hand” that will providentially turn partial selfishness into the good of the whole, they tend to imagine human beings as highly rational agents occupied with cost-benefit calculations and weighing pleasures to be gained against pains to be avoided. From this conception of human beings as rational agents arise both the idea of proportionality in penal theory—the punishment to fit the crime—and the discipline of scientific economics, following its split from moral philosophy. If the law increasingly addresses itself to such rational agents, and if economics seeks to theorize and predict their behavior, other state apparatuses—the penal system, the schools, the churches—seek instead to manufacture the agents to be thus theorized and addressed. In this book, then, I trace in the Romantic novel the shift from the “moral economy” of the crowd to the moral philosophy that serves to supplement classical political economics. The theater, rituals, and symbols of the crowd, including rituals of inversion and the symbolism of the world-turned-upside-down, are commemorated by middleclass writers, who, at the same time, collaborate in the dispersal of the crowd through the ethical and religious strategies of conscientiousness, self-surveillance, antitheatrical authenticity, and methodical consistency of behavior. Once such strategies of self-command have produced new individualized subjects, moral philosophers and sentimentalists begin to emphasize the softer, “feminine” virtues of humanitarianism and sympathy that will serve to create new sociable aggregates to replace the traditional crowd that has largely disappeared. The moment of transition to a new sociability permits sentimental writers to gain a measure of critical distance on the imposition



Introduction


of self-policing. However, a rigorous examination of the faculty of sympathy, with its dependence on imagination and mental projections, reveals that it cannot be wholly divorced from the spectacle and theater through which an older form of hierarchical power operated. Moreover, if sympathy is a principle of social cohesion, it is also, in the incipient field of crowd psychology, the contagious mechanism of crowd formation. While sentimental novelists criticize self-interested individualism from the perspective of humane sociability, they also encounter the limits and the dangers of sympathy. * *

*

This book is a work of historical literary criticism focusing on Gothic, Jacobin, and historical novels written in English from the time of the French Revolution until the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. I take as my subject matter novels published between 1794 and 1835— works that, in general, fall chronologically between those studied in two recent books on the crowd in literature: Thomas Reinert’s book on Samuel Johnson and John Plotz’s study of public politics from the Romantics to the Victorians. It was at this period in Europe that several mass phenomena first came to be experienced or began to be clearly perceived: mass mobilization in armies and navies that, to some extent, rewarded talent instead of reproducing the social hierarchy; crowd actions that were ideologically motivated rather than ritualistic and conservative; the role of public opinion in sustaining the sociopolitical order; the rise of an extensive reading public; and the discovery of popular culture by elite observers who collected and studied traditional ballads, folk tales, and popular antiquities. Other social and cultural changes accompanied these mass phenomena: the decline of paternalism in relations between masters and servants, the decline of patriarchal control and the growth of affective ties in the family, the rise of feminist ideology, and a substantial growth in the numbers of women authors and readers. At the beginning of this period, Thomas James Mathias emphasizes the parallel between the diffusion of information across the bounds of social rank and the appearance of presumptuous women in the guise of authors: “Our peasantry now read the Rights of Man on mountains, and moors, and by the way side . . . . Our unsexed female writers now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves in the labyrinth of politicks, or turn us wild with Gallick frenzy” (238). Among conservative writers, general anxieties about rapid social change result in hysterical exclamations that sexual distinctions are being effaced and traditional gender roles destabilized. It



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is a truism to claim that the individual self is dissolved or transcended through participation in a crowd. In a parallel way, the gendered self is dissolved or transcended through cross-dressing or through imaginative identification with a person of the opposite sex. In the Romantic period, many British authors, radicals as well as conservatives, compose fictional narratives featuring crowd scenes, “cross-gender narration” (epistolary or first-person narratives from the perspective of a persona of the opposite sex from the author), and incidental cross-dressing. For example, Jane Austen includes one instance of cross-dressing in her works: Lydia and Kitty Bennet, at Colonel Forster’s house in Meryton, “dressed up Chamberlayne in woman’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a lady” (Pride 245). Austen has the silliest of the Bennet daughters indulge in a kind of saturnalia for the amusement of the militia stationed in a Hertfordshire town. Austen’s scene of cross-dressing leads to the compromising of military discipline and, ultimately, of female virtue. Because of the famous passage in Chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey, Austen is known as a defender of the novel. Still, this instance of dangerous cross-dressing in Pride and Prejudice suggests that she shares with other Romantic novelists the fear that a broad appeal to a mass audience cannot be reconciled with the moral authority appropriate to published works of literature. Romantic novelists elaborate on and respond to the moral censure of fiction omnipresent in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reviews, essays, sermons, and conduct manuals. Cross-dressing represents an especially anxiety-producing phenomenon within the larger category of disguise or fiction. As a fictionalizing of the self, crossdressing is subject to the moral condemnation of fiction. Along with the literal crowds in which men protect their anonymity through cross-dressing and women offend against the norms of femininity through violence and through their very participation in the public realm, there are the multitudes of cross-gendered narratives as well as the textual crowds of works that aroused the anxiety of moralists. Swarms of frequently anonymous novels poured from the presses, inundating the shelves of circulating libraries, unmanning men by enervating their minds, and (un)sexing women by arousing erotic desires. (For the most part, unman is the verb for men corresponding to unsex for women.) While the male reader is liable to be unmanned by the sensual pleasures of novels, antifictional discourse is far more obsessed with the problems of young female readers and women authors. Condemning a contemporary “Age of Authors” in 1753, Samuel Johnson finds an



Introduction


“epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper” and laments that “innumerable books and pamphlets . . . have overflowed the nation” (457, 458, 460). In the course of these two phrases about the proliferation of printed material, Johnson affirms what will become conventional crowd concepts and symbols: a plague or epidemic, destructiveness, unfathomable numerousness, a flood. He also suggests that the problem can be explained not by larger social forces beyond individual intention but rather by a conspiracy. Demanding that authors be qualified by traditional learning, except in those rare cases where the “unlettered” come up with useful insights or gain important facts, Johnson ironically praises the “enlightened” times when “every man is qualified to instruct every other man” (459, 457). (Johnson foresees the nightmare of a culture in which everyone has a novel or memoir in him- or herself, and in which the stories of those unable or too busy to write can be narrated by ghost-writers or publicized through reality television.) Like Scott and Maturin after him, Johnson in his personal relations provided generous support and assistance to women writers, even while he anxiously formulated a general critique of female authorship: In former times, the pen, like the sword, was considered as consigned by nature to the hands of men; the ladies contented themselves with private virtues and domestic excellence, and a female writer, like a female warrior, was considered as a kind of excentric being, that deviated, however illustriously, from her due sphere of motion, and was, therefore, rather to be gazed at with wonder, than countenanced by imitation. But as the times past are said to have seen a nation of Amazons, who drew the bow and wielded the battle-axe, formed encampments, and wasted nations; the revolution of years has now produced a generation of Amazons of the pen, who with the spirit of their predecessors have set masculine tyranny at defiance, asserted their claim to the regions of science, and seem resolved to contest the usurpations of virility. (457–58)

The woman-warrior, who has abandoned her proper sphere of domesticity to intrude violently upon male domains, appears here within antinovel discourse, but the figure of the Amazon also embodies more general anxieties in a period that witnessed the rise of mass phenomena in print culture as well as in the society at large. The censure of fiction reveals anxieties not only about gender but also about rebellious crowds and the sources of revolution. Criticism



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of fiction employs the language of the fear of crowds. There is a profusion, flood, or inundation of novels; they pour from the presses; circulating library shelves groan under their weight. A reviewer of Scott’s The Abbot in 1820 refers to “the mob of fictitious productions which over-ran our circulating libraries” in the recent past and to the “undisciplined rabble” of fictions that have been driven from the marketplace by the Waverley Novels (qtd. in Taylor 50). Indeed, reading as such, compared to the slow-paced world of orality, displaces the reader from the “natural” world of individual experience. As John Wilson observed in the early nineteenth century, “reading now subjects the mind, at once, to the action of a crowd of thoughts, which of old could only have been gathered slowly, and separately, during the course of a whole existence” (qtd. in Fielding 100). The mass of publications arouses the anxiety of there being too much print to master. One form such anxiety takes is a conviction of the physical numerousness or biological proliferation of what is deemed culturally or politically insignificant. What Edward Said observes in a different context suggests another connection between crowds and women: “number and generative power . . . are reducible to each other ultimately” (311). Thus, women’s fertility beyond male control would be more than an analogy for the masses who have escaped from their subordination to the patrician elite. Moreover, feminization may be a strategy for dealing with anxiety. When the proliferation of print is attributed to women authors and when the crowd is said to be like a woman, anxious observers are seeking to control powerful new phenomena by rendering them feminine, in the sense of passive or subordinate. Throughout antinovel discourse, numbers are frequently mentioned: there are thousands of novels. Faced with the expansion of publishing and the rapid growth in the supply of novels, Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance has constant recourse to the word swarm: “the swarm of paltry Novels in the letter-writing way” inspired by Richardson; “Every work of merit produced a swarm of imitators”; the Arabian Nights “raised a swarm of imitations” (1: 137; 2: 7, 58). The demand that drives this swarming supply is found in “the Chaos of a circulating Library,” where impressionable subscribers can “read indiscriminately all they contain” (2: 77). One problem with these swarms is that the rubbish overwhelms works of substance and value; indeed, such destruction of value is the problem with all crowds (human as well as textual), which purportedly reduce their members to the lowest common denominator. For the most notable late nineteenth-century practitioner of crowd psychology, Gustave Le Bon, crowd intelligence is neither “a summing-up” nor “an average,”



Introduction


but instead, in a crowd, even men of distinction “can only bring to bear in common . . . those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual” (30, 32).3 The members of a crowd are reduced to the condition of unthinking automata: “by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization” (36). A second related problem with these crowds of books appears in the chaotic state of circulating libraries and the indiscriminate tastes of their subscribers. Crowds by their numbers and the consequent emphasis on quantity do not simply swallow up quality; they are promiscuous and heterogeneous. Here, the antipopulist critique modulates into an aesthetic one. Apart from the excessive quantity of fiction, the novel by its very nature poses a threat to the traditional hierarchy of literary genre. It lays a claim to the reader’s attention unwarranted by classical standards, tradition, or learning. The novel undermines order and aesthetic unity. At the same time as they attempt to include new mass phenomena, Romantic novelists seek to defuse crowds by addressing themselves to the individual reader in his closet or, perhaps, her bedchamber, simultaneously appealing to and constituting the “mass privacy” of their audience.4 Once the traditional figure of the unruly woman is transformed into a violent, shrilly screaming, cannibalistic monster in response to the anxieties aroused by new mass phenomena at the time of the French Revolution, this female fury becomes a significant feature of the nineteenth-century vocabulary for representing crowds. For Le Bon, “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics,” but, since heredity and race dominate his thought, Le Bon goes on to observe that “Latin crowds are the most feminine of all” (44). According to him, its numbers give the crowd a sense of power, and anonymity eliminates all sense of accountability. Still, the loss of individuality in the crowd may permit heroic and even moral action, since, when the instinct of self-preservation has been overcome, a sublime disinterestedness sometimes arises. But, mostly, for Le Bon, the crowd is like a woman, in its tendency to go to extremes: “among the special characteristic of crowds there are several—such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others besides—which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children, for instance” (40). Le Bon believes that “the ER A OF CROWDS” began at the time of the French Revolution (15),5 and I would contend that the hysterical, largely male, discourse in which the figure of the



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violent woman epitomizes and symbolizes the crowd originates in the same period. In this study of gender and populism in Romantic fiction, I consider the early exponents of what would later become systematized in the form of crowd psychology. Terming Psychologie des Foules “deservedly famous,” Sigmund Freud relies on Le Bon when, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he enumerates the characteristics of the crowd: the crowd is fickle, impulsive, conservative, and untroubled by logical contradictions; it “has a sense of omnipotence,” lacks the “critical faculty,” “thinks in images,” and demands immediate fulfillment of what it desires (18: 72, 77–79). For Freud, participation in a crowd produces intensification of emotion and the pleasure of transgressing the limits of individuality, made possible when the elimination of conscience releases unconscious instincts. In this respect, the Roman Saturnalia or modern carnival is analogous to a release from the renunciations imposed by conscience (or the “ego ideal”): “the abrogation of the ideal would necessarily be a magnificent festival for the ego” (18: 131). Freud’s explanation of group ties relies on the concept of the reaction formation through which the jealousy of siblings or schoolmates, when the parent or leader refuses to grant any individual the preeminence that he or she desires, is transformed into an identification among equals: “social feeling is based upon the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification.” In Freud’s account, therefore, the demand for justice and the desire for equality that characterize the crowd—though these ideas are “the root of social conscience”—are less fundamental than the original but unattainable desire that one sibling has for the exclusive possession of a parent’s love (18: 121). In the course of his argument that the characteristics of the group are those of the primal horde of Totem and Taboo, Freud wrestles with the concepts of suggestibility and identification. While there is an undemocratic dimension to Freud’s view that the leader is central to group psychology and that egalitarianism is the product of a reaction formation, suggestibility and identification are crucial concepts for an understanding of the crowd. Just as Enlightenment thinkers explained the communication of sentiments in terms of the telegraph, contagion, alchemy, electricity, or magnetic attraction, Freud analyzes suggestibility and the prestige of a leader as a kind of hypnosis that operates like contagion or “some magnetic magic” (18: 81). Like Adam Smith and others, Freud has recourse to the musical metaphor of harmony when he seeks to explain the supposedly “primitive sympathetic response” or “emotional contagion”: he acknowledges the



Introduction


existence in a crowd of “a compulsion to do the same as the others, to remain in harmony with the many” (18: 84). Freud defines contagious suggestion as “a conviction which is not based upon perception and reasoning but upon an erotic tie” (18: 128), though, as everywhere in Freud’s analysis of group bonds, this erotic impulse is inhibited in its aim and not capable of satisfaction. The compliant lover is to the love object as the member of the crowd is to the leader, the patient to the psychoanalyst, and the hypnotized person to the hypnotist. Since the ties that bind the crowd together result from libido diverted from its aim, there is an opposition between sexual satisfaction and group feeling, such that when “directly sexual impulsions . . . become too strong they disintegrate every group formation.” Indeed, this opposition may help to explain why for an author such as Maturin crowd scenes dominate his novels and tragedies to the exclusion of happily consummated heterosexual relations. In Maturin there are hints “that homosexual love,” as Freud claimed, “is far more compatible with group ties” (18: 141). While for Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers sympathy provides a principle of social cohesion, and imaginative identification serves as a foundation for moral action, the knowledge of others’ intimate feelings may also violate their individual integrity. Freud’s theory of identification helps to account for the ambivalence of the earlier conception of sympathy. For Freud, sympathy is not an irreducible principle but rather a product of identification. His explanation of group ties follows from his insistence on the importance of the leader: “the mutual tie between members of a group is in the nature of an identification . . . based upon an important emotional common quality; and . . . this common quality lies in the nature of the tie with the leader” (18: 108). However, before identification becomes available for the recognition of qualities shared with others who are not objects of the sexual instincts, the roots of identification appear in the “oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such” (18: 105). The retention in the unconscious of the residue of the oral phase means that all identifications are ambivalent. Within imaginative identification, that eighteenth-century foundation for moral action, there is thus an element of aggression. In introjecting into our consciousness the feelings of others, there remain vestiges of the structure in which what is valued is also annihilated. Thus, cannibalism appears as the ultimate horror in the Gothic fiction that forms part of the literature of sensibility, precisely because the oral or cannibalistic phase is the repressed source for the sympathetic



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identifications so pervasive in the sentimental novel. In the limit case of sympathy that I address throughout this book, the problem of ambivalence is especially acute. Is imaginative identification across the boundary of sex difference an act of sympathetic understanding or one of aggressive appropriation and invasive penetration? While I study fiction by Tories as well as radicals, slaveholders as well as abolitionists, the novels of the Romantic period are, on the whole, reformist works. They are obviously critical of continental and discredited “Gothic” modes of maintaining social order: monastic institutions, the power of priests over the individual conscience, judicial and penal torture, the spectacle of punishment, feudal jurisdictions, censorship, and paternal and clerical interference with private correspondence. But these novels are likewise ambivalent toward, if not downright critical of, the new reformist techniques for promoting social order: the penitentiary, especially solitary confinement and the silent system; new policing procedures, especially surveillance; the bureaucratic accumulation and centralization of data on individuals; and scientific and medical violations of humanity in the interests of knowledge. The novel of this period is an ambiguously “popular” form, one that involves the bourgeois appropriation of certain elements of traditional oral culture while simultaneously giving expression to such popular sentiments as the resistance to older forms of gentry oppression and newer forms of control and social engineering. The novel is ambiguously popular because it also partakes in the phenomenon of Enlightenment, a phenomenon that manifests itself, for the most part, in binary opposition to the popular—but only for the most part, since the Enlightenment is no more monolithic than the novel itself. If the Enlightenment appropriates popular culture and thus divorces popular sentiments from their social basis in the plebeian community, it may also unleash the crowd—or so, at least, conservative conspiracy theorists liked to claim. The novel as an ambiguously popular genre can be illuminated by the radical populist perspective of “history from below” as practised by E. P. Thompson and the many historians he influenced. The picture of the early modern crowd that emerges from these studies of criminality, punishment, crowd ritual, and the laboring classes is that of a legitimate, disciplined, and respectable collective body— often including substantial farmers and artisans in addition to the idle boys, apprentices, vagabonds, and “dregs of the people” that elite observers typically imagined they saw in the “mob.” Despite the frequent respectability of crowds, many collective actions reveal a social dimension, pitting the poor against the rich. The early modern crowd



Introduction


typically conceives of its activities less as illegal than as extra-legal, a supplement to the laws rather than an overturning of law and order. Its aims, in many cases, are at least ostensibly the conservative ones of recalling the authorities to their traditional duties. Not only is there a strong element of popular royalism, but in general the alternative values and attitudes of the crowd have sources in traditional practices, paternalistic doctrines, and even legal statutes of the past. The crowd takes up and transforms for its own ends whatever may be readily available—ideologies as well as objects. Riots may be more properly understood as negotiating strategies with limited aims— which were often achieved—than as futile, self-defeating rebellions against order. Crowd solidarity is sometimes sustained by the taking of oaths, and crowd discipline is facilitated by rituals and symbols. While mobs, especially political mobs, are sometimes bribed or bought, it is more common for leaders to be spontaneously elevated from among the crowd. Disguises are adopted for their ritual significance as well as for anonymity. While the early modern British crowd deploys extravagant threats of violence (burning in effigy, incendiary letters) as countertheater against the authorities’ excessive and theatrical displays of force, it typically exhibits a preference for the destruction of property (smashing windows, pulling down houses, burning furniture, machine-breaking) over violence against persons. While the early modern crowd exhibits more discipline than most elite observers thought, there is still a playful, parodic dimension associated with festivity and the carnivalesque. * *

*

The chapters in this book are arranged to highlight relations of literary and personal influence and to show how these authors respond to the popular disturbances of the French Revolution, explain or allude to the symbolism of women’s dress, and develop narrative techniques to deal both with crowds and with the figure of the revolutionary woman. In chapter 1, “Gothic and Romantic Crowds,” which addresses the conventional opposition between Romanticism and the Gothic, I argue that the lack of transcendence that some critics have found in Gothic fiction can be better understood as a striving for a new representational mode capable of accommodating crowds and quantification. I explore the connection between the Romantic condemnation of commercialized mass cultural forms (including the Gothic novel and German tragedies) and the Wordsworthian poetic strategy of singling out and individualizing a common person or



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seemingly trivial object. Instead of creating individuals with whom the reader can sympathize, Gothic novels at times promote divided and multiple identifications, a kind of seeing double that anticipates photographic superimposition or cinematic montage. In chapter 2, “Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian,” I explore the use of female disguise by lowerclass men in traditional rituals and popular protest. Drawing upon the work of Natalie Zemon Davis and other historians, I argue that the phenomenon of carnivalesque cross-dressing does not simply sustain gender and social hierarchy by working as a kind of safety-valve but rather that an alternative and subversive source of authority can be located in the symbolic significance of female disguise. I situate the Porteous Riots, which in Scott’s account are led by “Madge Wildfire,” a man in woman’s clothes, in relation to contemporary accounts of the women’s march to Versailles on October 5–6, 1789, including Scott’s own in The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827). I also discuss the fictionalized and displaced version of the October days in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), in which, rather than a French mob led by cross-dressed men, an English mob gathers to exact popular justice on cross-dressed women. In The Heart of MidLothian (1818), Scott presents two opposing sources of authority: popular authority (embodied in a cross-dressed man), which draws its sustenance from oral culture, traditional ritual, and resistance to the 1707 Act of Union; and the legitimate authority of the Hanoverian monarchy, embodied in the “masculine soul” of Queen Caroline. Just as Scott retreats from a populist account of the Porteous riots, so in other novels, such as The Antiquary or Rob Roy (1817), he draws back from a feminist approval of the figure of the Amazon and of a “masculine” education for women. I continue my examination of crowd scenes in the third chapter, “Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Journal of a West India Proprietor,” by demonstrating, on the one hand, that Lewis’s understanding of slave rebellion in Jamaica was shaped in response to popular disturbances in Europe from the Gordon Riots through the French Revolution. On the other hand, reading back from the posthumously published Journal (1834) of Lewis’s Jamaican visits, I show how sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean slavery were already present in The Monk (1796). The destruction of the Convent of St. Clare in Lewis’s Gothic novel is not a comfortably distanced fantasy but a scene motivated by the fears of the propertied classes, who typically discover in contemporary riots evidence of elite orchestration, the dangerous popular dissemination of Enlightenment ideology,



Introduction


connections between popular festivity and rebellion, and a volatile, superstitious populace. In the course of examining questions of sexual hierarchy and gender instability in the life and works of Lewis, I consider the analogy between women and slaves that has achieved prominence in feminist discourse from the time of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chapter 4, “Unisonance and the Echo: Popular Disturbances and Theatricality in the Works of Charles Maturin,” concerns the Romantic novelist who most insistently conjoins transvestite disguise with the presentation of crowd scenes and the analysis of rebellion. Recent studies of the genre of the national tale and the Romantic construction of national identity have fostered a renewed interest in Maturin. I argue that there is a contradiction between the Irish nationalism of Maturin’s novels and personal letters and the Unionism of his sermons. I explore how for Maturin unity is achieved in the realm of sound. The idea of the group speaking in one voice presents both a possibility and a threat, an ideal foundation for nationalism and a frightening explanation of group psychology. Maturin’s unusual sensitivity to the problem of the crowd intersects with his anxiety about the role of women. Policing women who would assume the authority of teachers or preachers, or the public roles of authors or actors, Maturin expresses confidence that by the early nineteenth century women have arrived at their “proper level,” within motherhood and through a position of usefulness to men. In his exploration of how cross-dressing affects the choice of sexual object, the clergyman and apparent heterosexual Maturin shows more explicit interest in homoeroticism than does the probably homosexual Matthew Lewis. In chapter 5, “Godwin’s ‘Metaphysical Dissecting Knife,’ ” I turn to an author who was viewed by contemporaries, notably William Hazlitt, as a radical rival to the conservative Scott; and one who profoundly influenced his daughter, Mary Shelley. The “metaphysical dissecting knife” is William Godwin’s image for the psychological violence that is inseparable from first-person narration in a society in which sexual and status hierarchies pervert relations of sympathetic mutual knowledge into those of surveillance. The pseudoscience of “moral anatomy” is an early manifestation of what will later come to be called psychoanalysis. At the very origins of psychological fiction, Godwin, like Maturin, condemns the violation of human integrity inseparable from the exploration of motives. While it is generally a term of praise for an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century critic to say that a novelist has penetrated into a character’s heart or dived into a character’s soul, the novelists themselves exhibit a self-critical awareness that such production of the truth of the self has coercive and



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despotic implications. In exploring the sympathetic relations between Godwin and Wollstonecraft, I show that it was not only conservative critics like Richard Polwhele but also Godwin himself who found the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to be an Amazonian, unsexed female. In addition to the discussion of Caleb Williams (1794) and the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), I examine the destruction of Reginald St. Leon’s house and the mob’s murder of his black servant, Hector, in St. Leon (1799). My analysis of this episode shows that the radical Godwin is less of a populist than the Tory Walter Scott or the Established Church cleric Charles Maturin. In the final chapter, “ ‘A Sigh of Many Hearts’: History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Lodore,” I provide a brief account of Shelley’s use of an American setting in Lodore (1835) for a critique of aristocracy and the advocacy of republican austerity and equality. In Lodore, as well as in Frankenstein and Valperga (1823), Mary Shelley engages in dialogue with the works of her parents and her husband. Though not like Frankenstein or The Last Man (1826), a first-person narrative participating in crossgender narration, Valperga is nonetheless a novel in which, according to Claire Clairmont, the central female character, Euthanasia, is Percy Shelley “in female attire” (341). In this chapter, I conclude my examination of sentimentalism by defining Valperga as a historical novel of sensibility—that is, as a novel less concerned with public events than with the more essential emotional responses of historical personages. Shelley establishes a confluence between classical republican discourse, which promotes self-sacrifice in acts of public service, and sentimental ideology, in which self-sacrifice leads to acts of compassion, usually in domestic relations. Both republicanism and sentimentalism are threatened by forces of dehumanization, which operate through the quantification of persons and the disciplining of bodies into useful machines. In opposition to demography and bureaucracy, the traditional popular culture of the crowd displays the faculty of imagination, which, in less superstitious forms, promotes arts, sciences, and human progress. Ultimately, like Maturin, Shelley focuses on the wind-like sound of the crowd, “a sigh of many hearts.” In this study of five Romantic novelists, I show how Walter Scott emphasizes the popular cultural motifs of carnivalesque cross-dressing and the world-upside-down even while he attempts to institute conscience in individualized readers. In his early Gothic novel, Matthew Lewis criticizes the individualizing modes of social control that he himself later deploys when confronted with a potentially rebellious



Introduction


population of slaves. Like Lewis and other Gothic novelists, Charles Maturin critiques both the old regime of physical torture and the new modes of psychological reform, which he suspects may produce automata rather than individual moral agents. Maturin and Godwin both reveal the novel’s complicity in violent psychological methods of diving into individual souls and laying bare individual hearts. Rather than proposing individuation as a solution to mob violence, Godwin draws on an alternative form of collectivity—the Calvinist congregation. Mary Shelley follows Maturin, Godwin, and Percy Shelley in identifying the social and economic forces that are transforming human beings into machines. She follows Godwin and Wollstonecraft in preferring an egalitarian mode of republican citizenship based on radical agrarianism to the classical republican citizen-soldier whose intellectual autonomy depends on the exploitation of those who perform manual labor. Drawing on the doctrines of feminine sensibility, Mary Shelley sketches her ideal for humanity in the overcoming of self through sympathy even while, more clearly than Maturin, she discovers the faculty of imagination in the sound of the crowd. Throughout this book, I attempt to accumulate—in the literature from the period of the consolidation of liberal, bourgeois domination of British culture—evidence for an incipient critique of individualism. Whereas an older critical tradition valued Romanticism for its supposed celebration of the rebellious individual against a stultifying polite society, I emphasize the opposition between disciplinary individuation and the traditional community and preindustrial crowd. I regard the novel as a critical and self-critical instrument, even while it participates in a larger cultural project of reform through an address to the individual reader rather than primarily to a collective audience. Every text is a site of contestation—not only in its reception by readers who are variously situated, but also in its very construction, given the pressures that other texts and other people exert on the author. The novel in the Romantic period is a form individualizing in its address, which exploits popular cultural materials and stretches formal boundaries in an attempt to come to terms with the masses. In this book I elucidate some of the populist tendencies subordinated but nonetheless present in a bourgeois cultural form during the thirty years following the beginning of the French Revolution.



24

G o t h ic a n d Rom a n t ic C row ds

R

eaders tend to associate the Gothic novel with solitude and with investigation of the conscience or the individual psyche. The typical Gothic heroine or hero spends a good deal of her or his time alone in subterranean passages in which candles or lamps are wont to expire; alone in contemplating ruins, sublime scenes, or sylvan landscapes; alone confined in dungeons or convents. Heroines and heroes possess both a susceptibility to feeling and an overactive imagination that lead them, when melancholic, to solitary recitation of verse and, when curious or frightened, to the mistaking of natural phenomena for supernatural interventions. The curious or frightened heroine within the work is a model for the reader who, consuming romances in a private or even furtive manner, identifies with her and thrills at sharing her fears, while the distorted perceptions that result from excessive imagination and delicate sensibility are the object of authorial investigation in the case of heroine and reader alike. However, the melancholy or anxious loneliness of the heroine pales in comparison to the utter isolation of the conscience-ridden villain, who flees from society only to find that nature provides no consolation for him. The villain creates his monsters alone, and he sells his soul in the presence of no human being. The voices he hears and the figures he sees are, likely as not, projections of his own tormented conscience. Why then do I focus on Gothic crowds? As I showed in the introduction, a location that might have seemed to be an image for Romantic solitude—a sublime cave in Sicily—proves to have been an ancient mechanism for the production of knowledge and political control through eavesdropping. Moreover, the society represented in Gothic fiction is much broader



Chapter 1


than the sentimental elite of the heroine and hero, and the social elite of aristocratic villain. For one thing, the Gothic novel is centrally concerned with popular superstitions and traditional oral tales, which the authors appropriate and preserve for a bourgeois reading public, though the idea of bourgeois appropriation discounts the interpenetration of high and popular culture and Gothic novelists’ sometimes populist views. Secondly, the growth of the reading public and the seemingly innumerable low-status literary works designed to satisfy readers’ appetites are themselves conceived of as mass phenomena. Thirdly, while the popular masses are most often present only synecdochically in Gothic fiction—in the figure of the superstitious servant, whose loquaciousness and circumlocutions are the marks of oral narration within the printed text1—there are enough actual crowds that we may number, as Mark Edmundson does, “civil insurrections” among the conventions of “late-eighteenth-century terror Gothic” (8). In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, such representations of rebellious crowds, however much distanced historically and geographically, recall the French Revolution and the British popular disturbances that assumed a more radical political dimension after the fall of the Bastille. The most important Gothic crowds appear in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); crowd scenes are also featured in William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), Maturin’s Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio (1807), and Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823). Moreover, when a historical novelist like Walter Scott focuses on crowd violence in The Heart of MidLothian (1818), he makes the leader of the crowd (George Robertson/ Staunton) a satanic hero-villain. In Harrington (1817), her novel about the Gordon riots of 1780, Maria Edgeworth writes a “history of the power and influence of the imagination,” including the “feminine mobility” of the imaginative faculty and a boy’s nervous fits that might be mistaken for insanity (3: 173, 224).2 While Edgeworth’s use of the word mobility connects the female imagination to the mob and, thus, individual to group psychology, her warning against yielding to extreme states of sensibility derives from Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Gothic traditions remain alive for Charles Dickens when he too portrays the Gordon riots, in Barnaby Rudge (1841), and English mobs and French sans-culottes in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). When Edgar Allan Poe, known primarily for his Gothic tales, composes “The Man of the Crowd” in 1840, his narrator initially observes the “dense and continuous tides of population” in a London thoroughfare from the vantage point of a “large bow window” in a



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coffeehouse (132, 131). As darkness falls, the gaslamps (a new form of urban illumination in the early nineteenth century) create a scene that is at once Gothic and protocinematic: “The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that . . . I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (Poe 135). The crowd scenes that the Gothic writer paints on a large canvas may be conceived of as attempts to contain mass phenomena in the forms of the novel or short story—phenomena that will prove in the twentieth century better suited to the medium of film. One reason for the neglect of the representation of the masses in Gothic fiction is that literary historians, while situating the Gothic novel in relation to Romanticism, have identified imagination, questions of perception, and the alienated figure of the hero-villain as central characteristics of Romantic literature. Even when it has not been reduced to a preromantic phenomenon, a mere “popular” precursor to a great period of lyric verse, the Gothic novel has figured as the bastard relation of Romanticism. In a classic account of this relationship, Robert Hume emphasizes emotional effects, psychological investigation, and moral ambiguity as characteristics of the Gothic novel. In contrast to the social concerns of the realistic novel and neoclassicism, Hume finds in both Gothic and Romantic literature an “absorption with the individual” that leads to a “preoccupation with the mind.” Where Hume thinks the Gothic differs from the Romantic is that the former remains mired in contradiction and moral ambiguity, while the latter emphasizes the faculty of imagination that can enable us “to transcend or transform” the everyday world (289). Literary historians have typically valued Romanticism for the transcendence or dialectical resolution of the contradictions found in the Gothic, even while they regard both the Gothic and Romantic modes as emphasizing subjectivity and psychology rather than a social dimension. In redirecting our attention to crowds, I would suggest that, with respect to social concerns, many Gothic novels are not clearly distinct from historical or realistic novels and that the Gothic novel’s refusal of transcendence permits an ideological critique of individuation and posits a new mode of apperception in a state of distraction. While the rise of individualism has long been the subject of historical and sociological inquiry in criticism of the eighteenth-century novel, historical as opposed to philosophical analyses of Romantic subjectivity are a quite recent scholarly phenomenon. In her persuasive



Gothic a nd Rom a ntic Crow ds


reconsideration of the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic, Andrea Henderson contrasts the psychological depth of the self in canonical Romantic literature to the superficiality of early Gothic characterization. In Henderson’s economic terminology, the deep inner selves of Wordsworthian Romanticism represent a resistance to commodification through an insistence on use value, whereas, in creating their superficial characters, Gothic novelists embrace the fluidity of exchange value. While both Gothic novelists and canonical Romantic authors recognize how new mass phenomena challenge the traditional foundations of identity, they respond differently to that challenge. Drawing significantly on literary criticism of the novel and Romanticism, Dror Wahrman has traced the history of the modern understanding of an essentialized self, possessing psychological depth and interiority. According to Wahrman, this modern self appears in Britain in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when a historical rupture, eventuated by the crisis of the American Revolutionary War, led to the collapse of what he terms the ancien régime of identity. The older eighteenth-century configuration permitted a high degree of play with, and many individual departures from, normative conceptions of gender, race, and class. The boundaries of gender and race seemed permeable, elastic, and easily transgressed or manipulated. In the last two decades of the century, in contrast, identity categories become essentialized, inflexible, and absolute, while transgressions are vehemently denounced or believed to be impossible. Gender play yields to gender panic. Racial fluidity, first environmental then cultural and voluntaristic, yields to rigid categorization. Gender comes to depend immutably on biological sex, degree of civilization on essentialized race, and political behavior on class position. In modernity a surface-depth model of identity replaces the older “configuration as a set of positions within which one identified oneself—a set of coordinates, or a matrix” of social relations (Wahrman 168). Wahrman claims that in the ancien régime there was a “socially turned self” rather than an inwardly directed one, while collective categories took precedence “over the individuals who constituted them” (168, 183). Group identities were more meaningful than individual ones (184). As Wahrman notes, the characteristics of his “new regime of identity”—above all, “the characterization of self in terms of psychological depth” and “the developmental perspective on human growth”—serve to define Romanticism (290). There are significant similarities between the externalized matrix model of Wahrman’s ancien régime of identity and the network model of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s postmodern multitude. Not, of



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course, that the eighteenth century could draw upon the Internet and genetics for structural and organizational paradigms that reject hierarchy, interiority, and unity, while affirming the autonomy and difference of nodes on a distributed network. However, I would suggest that familiarity with these new models makes it possible to understand the premodern self and the early modern crowd in a way unavailable prior to the era of antiglobalization protests. In a new era of individuality and psychological depth, canonical Romanticism sets interiority against the frightening masses, whereas the Gothic novel, closer to mass literature, attempts to represent the crowd even if it cannot restore the primacy of collective categories. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), William Wordsworth analyzes the mass culture that threatens the national tradition of elder writers to which he aims to belong. He describes the depraved literary taste of his day as a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” and explains why “gross and violent stimulants” seem to be increasingly required in order to capture attention and arouse emotions: The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. . . . The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. (William Wordsworth 599)

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth identifies several historical events and social developments that might be characterized as mass phenomena: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent military mobilizations in both France and England; the tedious mechanical occupations characteristic of industrialization; and an increasing rate of urbanization. When he arrives at the overgrown metropolis of London in Book 7 of The Prelude,3 Wordsworth focuses on the qualities of anonymity, theatricality, and ethical and aesthetic confusion. Wordsworth’s main mode of crowd control might be termed the aesthetics of the representative example, where the blaspheming prostitute typifies urban corruption, while the blind beggar typifies the baffling anonymity of London. As in the description of Bartholomew Fair in The Prelude, so in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth is troubled at how the historical development of mass phenomena has been met in the aesthetic realm by the rise of debased mass cultural forms. These forms





themselves mimetically assume some of the characteristics of crowds, since they are the transient, innumerable, and undiscriminating productions of a rapidly expanding print culture: “deluges of idle and extravagant stories” and newspapers that offer a “rapid communication of intelligence” almost on the hour. In his study of how the canonical Romantics defined their works against the abjected, feminized, popular genre of the Gothic, Michael Gamer argues that Gothic writing serves as the site for “perceived shifts from quality to quantity; originality to mass-production; and the text-as-work to the text-ascommodity” (67). I shall initially approach the “frantic” Gothic novels that threaten the subtleties of high literary culture through the Romantic nostalgia and the concept of the individuating imagination in the criticism and poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.4 Crowds in the literature of the Romantic period appear most often in the context of print culture, the military, the festivals of the Roman Catholic religion, and reflections on history or antiquity. Both Romantic poems and Gothic novels frequently affirm popular attitudes even while they usually condemn the actions of crowds. Once mock-heroic ridicule has fallen into disfavor (though revived temporarily in Wordsworth’s depiction of Bartholomew Fair), other methods of literary crowd control assume prominence: sentimental, nostalgic, or imaginative individualization; decorum, or the hierarchical ordering of masses into traditional categories; and disciplinary individuation, which tends to require the invention of new taxonomic orders. Even if Gothic novelists do not celebrate the crowd, and even if they too would like to place it under control, it may be that frantic novels and extravagant tales do not merely conform to a depraved taste but rather strive to depict new phenomena that largely escape the available representational modes. As Nicholas Visser observes, the crowd strains “the descriptive capacity of narrative language” (302). Gothic fiction, in this view, would count as an attempt to accommodate within the novel and the older genre of romance the new phenomena of crowds and quantification. There is something analogous in John Clare’s mode of nature poetry—a mode concerned less with pastoral individuals, than with traditional communities based on the disappearing commons. Aiming to represent things in their multiplicity as well as their particularity, Clare, according to John Barrell, “developed a whole aesthetic of disorder, in which landscape was praised on account of its formlessness, its failure to accommodate itself to correct taste” (152). The new consciousness of a multiplicity of persons and things, in terror fiction as in Clare’s landscape poetry, contravenes normative standards of taste. Far from merely responding to a preexisting “craving,” then,



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the Gothic novel might embody a demand that was not yet recognized as such. The formal deficiencies of the Gothic novel, noted by such critics as Elizabeth Napier, might then be explained by the attempt to go beyond the available technical resources for representation. In this case, the Gothic novel might function like the “decadent” art forms described by Walter Benjamin: One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. (237)

The effects to which the Gothic novel aspires, as has been recognized from its inception, are visceral and physiological—a stimulation of the body that can scarcely be obtained by words on a page. The Gothic novel gestures beyond conventional reading practices to create the effects of terror in the very bodies of its audience. On the contrary, a Romantic poet like Wordsworth, far from hoping to make readers shudder with terror or to make their hair stand on end, aims at sensitizing them to what is so common that it tends to be passed by without notice. The new reading practices promoted by sensationalist fiction embrace distraction while deemphasizing individual discrimination and the production of individual depth through contemplation. In this respect, the Gothic novel is subject to the same antinovel discourse that arose when reading for pleasure began to threaten a “more intensive humanistic practice of reading,” as the rise of the novel set “media culture” in opposition to literary culture (Warner xi, xvi). For Jon Klancher, high culture evokes the discourse of reception by the individual reader, while “Mass-cultural production yields up the harsher vocabulary of ‘consumption,’ ” the economic terminology of “supply and demand among . . . vast, faceless audiences” (Making of Audiences 13). Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge long “to return to the space of ‘reception’ (symbolic exchange) from the historical ground of ‘consumption’ (commodity exchange)” (Klancher, Making of Audiences 143). In the attack in Biographia Literaria (1817) on “the devotees of the circulating libraries,” Coleridge maintains that the consuming of Gothic fiction fails to include aesthetic distance, intellectual labor, or contemplation (1: 48n.). Instead, the





experience is implicated in the world of commercial consumption. Coleridge compares the daydreaming of circulating library subscribers to “conning word by word all the advertisements of the daily advertizer in a public house” (1: 49n.). In this analogy, Coleridge provides an example of an activity without value, exercised on trivial and ephemeral material. However, his imagined setting, a public house, evokes the popular culture of the alehouse. Thus, vestiges of the traditional “folk” survive in the new mass audience that Coleridge condemns. Moreover, the public house—for one, like William Godwin, more sympathetic to working men’s participation in the public sphere— might count as the “unrefined university” of the “ ‘unwashed artificer’ and the sturdy husbandman” (Thoughts on Man 178).5 Coleridge’s offhand reference to the public house thus suggests more than merely a distracting setting for the mass consumption of valueless writing. The public house figures, beyond Coleridge’s intentions, as a space in transition from traditional folk culture to training ground for a politically aware proletariat. Coleridge regards the patrons of circulating libraries as incapable even of producing the materials of their own lazy daydreams; hence, “the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains” (Biographia 1: 48n.). Delirious images, resembling those of film avant la lettre, spread as if by contagion from one brain to the crowd. Andrew McCann’s commentary on this footnote from the Biographia Literaria is indebted to Benjamin’s argument about art’s aspiring to effects that require formal innovation: “Projecting images to the mind of the reader, the mechanics of novel reading are almost cinematic in their spectacularity, and indeed Coleridge’s condemnation of them seems to anticipate new visual technologies that will realize the effects he describes on a genuinely mass level” (132).6 Those effects involve reception in a state of distraction—for example, in an alehouse or a movie theater—rather than intellectual labor in a private library or solitary contemplation amid natural scenes. Rejecting delirium, the crowd, and mass cultural forms, Wordsworth singles out the common individual.7 Coleridge theorizes the Wordsworthian poetic mode when he describes in his letter to Sara Hutchinson of April 4, 1802 (the first version of “Dejection: An Ode”) the sounds of an Aeolian harp—the omnipresent Romantic symbol for the art of poetry. Coleridge makes an oblique approach to his description of Wordsworth’s typical subjects by imagining first



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What tell’st thou now about? ’Tis of the Rushing of an Host in Rout— And many groans for men with smarting Wounds— At once they groan with smart, and shudder with the Cold! ’Tis hush’d! there is a Trance of deepest Silence, Again! but all that Sound, as of a rushing Crowd, And Groans & tremulous Shudderings, all are over— And it has other Sounds, and all less deep, less loud! A Tale of less Affright, And temper’d with Delight, As William’s Self had made the tender Lay— ’Tis of a little Child Upon a heathy Wild, Not far from home—but it has lost it’s way— And now moans low in utter grief & fear— And now screams loud, & hopes to make it’s Mother hear! (Collected Letters 2: 438)

As opposed to more extravagant stories involving “the Rushing of an Host in Rout” or “a rushing Crowd,” Wordsworth would compose “A Tale of less Affright”—not a tale of terror but a “tender Lay” of domestic affections and the subtle griefs and fears of a single lost child. Common life is to be apprehended and represented through the individual rather than through the mass. Tenderness, the sentiment that Wordsworth seeks to convey, would be wholly inadequate to the groans of a defeated army or the horrors of a rioting mob. As Keats puts it in his address to the Muse in “Hyperion: A Fragment” (1820), “thou art weak to sing such tumults dire: / A solitary sorrow best befits / Thy lips, and antheming a lonely grief” (Book 3. 4–6 in Selected Poems). The Romantic imagination is simply more attuned to the individual than the crowd. Deeply felt emotions, like other valuable human qualities, seem incommensurate with the mass phenomena of armies and crowds. In this respect, Wordsworth’s “tender Lay” partly derives from the individualization of suffering required by a sentimentalist such as Laurence Sterne. In A Sentimental Journey (1768), Yorick, fearing imprisonment in the Bastille on account of his lack of a passport,



the sublime, frantic, and agonized sounds of an Aeolian harp on a stormy night. Before turning, that is, to “the tender Lay” composed by “William’s Self,” Coleridge describes the kind of literary work that would respond almost without mediation to the power of a tempest (itself a crowd symbol):

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I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow-creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me— —I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then looked through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture. (97)

Here, a potentially Gothic moment, imprisonment in an institution synonymous with continental despotism, becomes comic on account of the mundane origin of Yorick’s fears—a traveler’s neglecting to obtain a passport. The moment opens out into the large and crowded canvas of a history painting before Yorick contracts the picture into one of greater proximity and immediacy, with a single figure and chiaroscuro effects. Out of many slaves, the sentimentalist selects one captive, because imaginative identification with the feelings of a crowd seems impossible. There is something abstract and general about the millions, whereas the imagination, for Sterne, deals in the sensory. Only when abstraction has yielded to an individual figure in flesh and blood are the emotions are called into play. The painterly mode of landscape appreciation termed the picturesque finds similar difficulties with the representation of crowds. In Observations on the River Wye, William Gilpin, a theorist of the picturesque who influenced both Wordsworth and Austen, describes the scene of a shipwreck on the coast of Wales, where a multitude had gathered “to pillage the wreck” (121).8 In this typical eighteenth-century mode of crowd disturbance, one that stages a confrontation between customary rights of salvage and a redefinition of property crime,9 Gilpin finds an occasion for setting out principles for the visual representation of the masses. For Gilpin, as for Wordsworth after him, the many must be made into a single whole: “The bustle of a croud is not ill-adapted to the pencil: but the management of it requires great artifice. The whole must be massed together, and treated as one body” (122). He draws the generalization that “Composition indeed has never a more difficult work, than when it is engaged in combining a croud” (123), and then concludes by praising William Hogarth’s execution crowd in Plate 11 of Industry and Idleness. Whatever limitations the faculty of imagination has for a sentimentalist like Sterne—a faculty that depends on Lockean mental pictures modeled on neoclassical visual art—even a Romantic like Wordsworth



imagines “the miseries of confinement”:

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is unwilling or unable to expand his imagination to capture crowds or to endow them en masse with emotions, souls, or other admirable human qualities. In relation to the crowd, the Romantic imagination and the sentimental imagination have similar limitations. The world of elder English writers, that of Shakespeare and Milton, was a place—at least in Wordsworth’s nostalgic view—where the rational, perhaps providential, order of individual talent and virtue counted more than mere numbers, where qualitative differences had not yet yielded to mere quantification. For England to regain liberty, nobility, and virtue, the new world of crowds, masses, and military hosts has need of Miltonic discriminations, or of a transformation into the genteel “band of brothers” of Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt (as opposed to undiscriminating revolutionary fraternité). In a sonnet of 1802 Wordsworth expresses his outrage at a world in which demographics, mass mobilization, and random probabilities have become increasingly decisive: “Are souls then nothing? Must at length the die / Be cast by weight of multitudes?” Wordsworth wonders whether individual courage and even national character have ceased to matter in the face of mere numbers of indistinguishable soldiers (or the inanimate weapons by which they are synecdochically represented): “Yields every thing to outnumbering of swords? / Is man as good as man?” In this invective the masses are controlled, or rather denied, when Wordsworth, alluding to Henry V, draws nostalgically upon the England of our elder writers—a world of liberty that he thinks has been lost: “a petty Band / Of gallant hearts to be an enemy’s curse.” The courage of a fraternal band, “noble words / And noble thoughts” (William Wordsworth 273), the hierarchical ranking of souls based on virtue and merit—all have been effaced in a world of chance, weight, measurement, quantification, and excessive (French) populousness. Despite Wordsworth’s objection to deciding battles on the throw of dice, there is a randomness in the sentimental and Romantic imagination as well. What differentiates Sterne’s single captive from the rest of the millions of slaves? An assessment neither of the qualities of his soul nor of his suffering. More surprisingly, according to Wordsworth, the greatest power of imagination resides precisely in randomness, not in the objective perception of greater individual merit but in the subject’s self-affirmation in the act of choosing an individual even though he, she, or it may be indistinguishable from the multitude. Since, for Wordsworth and many of his contemporaries, the imagination is by its nature an individualizing faculty, aesthetic experience demands the focus on an individual, and aesthetic form requires the





creation of unity out of multiplicity. The social order, the work of art, and the human mind itself all select individuals from the mass, either for their inherent superiority or simply because of the need for an ordering principle. In another sonnet, “With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh” (written between 1802 and 1804), the poet recounts how he chooses one “goodly Vessel” from among the rest (William Wordsworth 272). Perhaps alluding again to famous lines by one of our elder writers— “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to [Hecuba], / That he should weep for her” (Shakespeare, Ham. 2.2.559–60)—Wordsworth describes how a kind of love arises out of indifference or a lack of differentiation: “This Ship was nought to me, nor I to her, / Yet I pursued her with a Lover’s look; / This Ship to all the rest did I prefer” (William Wordsworth 272). Responding to the Poems in Two Volumes of 1807, the otherwise appreciative Mrs. Fermor thought that Wordsworth had fallen below himself in this sonnet. Wordsworth defends the sonnet on ships and other of his poems that might be dismissed as trivial in a letter to Mrs. Fermor’s sister, Lady Beaumont, in which he formulates some of the ideas later to appear in the Preface to Poems (1815) and the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.” Wordsworth explains to Lady Beaumont that his poems will not immediately find popular favor in part because of his refusal to gratify the public’s fascination with current events and politics. His poems have nothing to do with election mobs or newspaper subjects—“the rapid communication of intelligence” (William Wordsworth 599) or Coleridge’s “daily advertizer.” Wordsworth dismisses from his “fit audience . . . though few” (Milton, Paradise Lost 7. 31), “what is called the Public,” “this multitude of unhappy, and misguided, and misguiding beings” (Wordsworth, Letters 145, 150). Among his contemporaries, Wordsworth finds an undifferentiated unhappy “multitude,” as well as certain classes who lack the capacity fully to appreciate his poems—a capacity that will be more widely diffused “after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves” (Letters 146). Wordsworth’s claim about his future audience bears some resemblance to Benjamin’s observation that art may seek to create a demand that can only be satisfied later. In a sentiment that he attributes to Coleridge and later repeats in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” Wordsworth remarks “that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen” (150).10 Wordsworth’s letter to Lady Beaumont provides multiple glosses on the idea of individualizing, unifying, or making one out of many.



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In an initial attempt to justify every poem included in Poems (1807), the very poet who rejects the “weight of multitudes” in the military context of “Are souls then nothing?” defends his potentially “trifling” sonnets on the basis of their collective weight: “if individually they want weight, perhaps, as a Body, they may not be so deficient”; the sonnets on liberty “collectively make a Poem on the subject of civil Liberty and national independence” (Letters 147). Wordsworth proposes to make one great poem out of many slight ones. This unifying strategy eventuates in the architectural impulse in Wordsworth11 when he conceives of the diverse productions of his life’s work as a single Gothic cathedral: “his Minor pieces” come to resemble “the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices” (Poems 36). In specifically defending “With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,” Wordsworth quotes a passage from Paradise Lost in which one preeminent heavenly body (Hesperus) is singled out from among the rest to provide (aesthetic) order in an otherwise confused mass of stars, planets, and moons. The principle on which Wordsworth relies is decorum, in which objects find their proper order once the natural superiority of one among them has been recognized: [W]ho is there that has not felt that the mind can have no rest among a multitude of objects, of which it either cannot make one whole, or from which it cannot single out one individual, whereupon may be concentrated the attention divided among or distracted by a multitude? After a certain time we must either select one image or object, which must put out of view the rest wholly, or must subordinate them to itself while it stands forth as a Head. (Wordsworth, Letters 148)

For Wordsworth, aesthetic experience requires that we overcome the tendency of the anarchic crowd to distract our attention; it requires that we select the superior one out of many as a principle of order— potentially political as well as aesthetic. Even in cases where there is no natural superiority in any one object, Wordsworth maintains that it is a fundamental characteristic of the human mind, one that manifests the power of the imagination, to select one out of many: “Hesperus, that led The starry host,” is a poetical object, because the glory of his own Nature gives him the pre-eminence the moment he appears; he calls forth the poetic faculty, receiving its exertions as a tribute; but this Ship in the Sonnet may, in a manner still more appropriate, be said to come upon a mission of the poetic Spirit, because in its own




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In the absence of objective differences among ships, the subject affirms himself through an act of choice or will. The true poet selects one out of many at random, for no reason, in order to assert the might of imagination, the power of the human subject over the barely differentiated world of objects. In the case of barely sufficient distinctions among natural objects, another response besides that of Wordsworth is possible—the response that Jean Baudrillard terms “the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning” (218). If the position of the subject involves the exercise of will, deliberation, choice, and the poetic faculty, the renunciation of these capacities was already available to Wordsworth’s contemporaries—in this case, George “Beau” Brummell (1778– 1840)—through a sovereign delegation of choice: “It is much better to rely on some insignificant or powerful instance than to be dependent on one’s own will or the necessity of choice. Beau Brummell had a servant for that purpose. Before a splendid landscape dotted with beautiful lakes, he turns toward his valet to ask him: ‘Which lake do I prefer?’ ” (Baudrillard 216).12 Beau Brummell refuses the affirmation of subjectivity that Wordsworth makes when a ship comes randomly on “a mission of the poetic Spirit.” Wordsworth’s response when confronted with barely differentiated ships is the elitist one of the solitary poet alienated from the masses—exercising the poetic faculty to make a choice and thus create superiority where none is to be found. Brummell, when confronted with barely differentiated lakes, employs the strategy of the postmodern masses in a media culture in which undecidability “results not from the lack of information but from . . . an excess of information” (210). The world of Wordsworth and Brummell was beginning to be characterized by information overload, in “the rapid communication of intelligence,” in the swarms of novels issuing from the press. Responding to this excess through the mass refusal of subjectivity, even when it takes the form of snobbish, sovereign delegation, would also count as a refusal of Romantic individuality. In Wordsworth’s Preface to Poems (1815), the creative power of the imagination operates first and foremost through the process of making a unity out of a multitude. When Wordsworth seeks to define and illustrate the faculty of imagination, he returns to ships and Paradise Lost. In Milton’s epic simile comparing Satan’s flight to a fleet sailing from the Indian Ocean, Wordsworth is first struck by how “the



appearance and attributes it is barely sufficiently distinguish[ed] to rouse the creative faculty of the human mind. (Wordsworth, Letters 148–49)

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Fleet, an aggregate of many Ships, is represented as one mighty Person” (William Wordsworth 631). Wordsworth aims in the Preface to illustrate how the imagination confers new qualities on an object, abstracts from the object qualities it already possesses, and modifies images in conjunction with each other. Then, Wordsworth turns to the shaping and creative powers of the imagination. Creation preeminently involves unification of numbers and resolving a unity into the multitude of which it is composed. The imagination, for Wordsworth, delights in nothing so much as “consolidating numbers into unity, and dissolving and separating unity into number,— alternations proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers” (633). The poet’s power appears greatest either when he selects one ship out of many at random or when he combines a multitude of undifferentiated ships into the single, sublime Satanic body. Wordsworth identifies the creative powers of the imagination with the almost divine processes of individuation—either in singling out one from many or in creating a unity from a multitude. Two years after Wordsworth located the soul’s supremacy in creative unification, at a time of postwar economic depression, poor harvests, high bread prices, and government suppression of popular protest, William Hazlitt theorized the politics of imagination. In his assessment of Coriolanus—a play by our most invaluable elder writer, first performed in 1607, a year when Levellers and Diggers rose in response to the threat of dearth (Christopher Hill 182)—Hazlitt objects to what he sees as Shakespeare’s disgust for the crowd. He suggests that elitist disgust is inherent in the faculty of imagination, since “The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry,” owing to its failure to present “immediate or distinct images to the mind.” While the faculty of understanding may divide, measure, and consider the interrelations among things, the imagination seeks “to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object” (Hazlitt 4: 214). Whereas Wordsworth justifies his sonnet on ships by maintaining that Hesperus the leader, rather than the starry host, simply is the poetical object; Hazlitt is troubled by the imagination’s tendency to put “the one above the infinite many,” so that the “lion hunting a flock of sheep or a herd of wild asses is a more poetical object than they” (4: 214–15). In showing the flock or herd to be no poetical object, Hazlitt brings out what is suppressed by Wordsworth’s metaphor about the leader among the stars: the fact of predatory power. With the unveiling of power relations, Hazlitt shows that the imagination, even that of Shakespeare, entails a reactionary politics.





“Poetry is right-royal,” therefore, embodying “a very anti-levelling principle.” Imagination is “aristocratical,” whereas the understanding can claim to be “a republican faculty” (4: 214). Hazlitt does not disagree with Sterne and Wordsworth about the apparent necessity for the imagination to seize distinct images and favorite objects through individuation and hierarchy. Nor does he deny that the flock, the herd, the crowd, and the cause of the people seem to be beyond the representational capacity of the imagination. However, Hazlitt does insist that we confront the political consequences of effacing the many from literature or history. “The history of mankind,” as produced by “the logic of the imagination,” in Hazlitt’s metaphor, “is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many” (4: 216). Hazlitt inverts the expected Romantic hierarchy of the imagination over the understanding precisely because he engages in a political analysis of these faculties.13 For the poet who has learned to see in the school of our elder writers, the human mind, when confronted by a multitude, must move beyond division or distraction. But perhaps such acquiescence in what our elder writers have taught can never lead an artist to create “a demand which could be fully satisfied only later” (Benjamin), even if it might permit one to conduct the more limited pedagogy of creating “the taste by which he is to be relished” (Wordsworth). Perhaps the Gothic novel seeks to leave the mind in a state of division or distraction, and never carry it one step further to a point of rest, of concentrated attention. Such a reconception of Gothic fiction might facilitate the recognition of the value of the “frantic novels” that Wordsworth denigrates—if aesthetic value is still the issue. To think beyond the unity composed of many, beyond either the individual of transcendent merit or the one made sovereign in spite of a lack of objective distinction, might leave one with the distracted thought of an ungovernable crowd. A condition of frenzy might result from not taking it as a given that the need to individualize is a “general principle . . . of our intellectual constitution” (Wordsworth, Letters 148). The mind may well be divided when situated between worlds: that of decorous or disciplined ranks and that of sentimental individuals. Perhaps the mind needs to grow new organs, develop a new conceptual capacity, or represent the world in a new art form in order to accommodate the mass phenomena that arise at the turn of the nineteenth century. Apparent conformity to the popular taste may involve a stretching of the resources of the medium. Matthew Lewis’s Timour the Tartar (1811) achieved substantial notoriety by fostering the taste for horses as stage performers (Macdonald, Monk Lewis 177)—a challenge to



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decorum and aesthetic form and a stretching of the limits even of the huge stages of the two London theaters in the early nineteenth century, prompted by an attempt to represent the mass culture of spectacle. To quote Benjamin once again, though he is writing about a later period of mass culture, “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise” (240). The Gothic novel is a form that, in its divided and distracted representation of the crowd, aspires to the condition of film. Novels with a certain claim to popularity written at the time of the French Revolution and the birth of mass politics in Britain emphasize the actions of mobs and the sounds of multitudes, and include such diverse crowd symbols as the wind, volcanoes, earthquakes, rivers, and the tiger. When Matthew Lewis in The Monk creates the most famous scene of crowd violence in Gothic fiction, he is at his most original. The mob destruction of the Convent of St. Clare and the trampling to death of the prioress is an episode not to be found in the literary sources for a Gothic novel infamous for its borrowings (Conger 90–91). In this scene, there is no opposition between realism and conventionally distanced Gothic fantasy. After citing the description of the mob’s murder of the prioress, Robert Kiely remarks, “In a novel in which so much is theatrical and ornamentally grotesque, these scenes of violence possess an energy and realism for which the reader is not fully prepared” (114). When, beneath the burning convent, Lorenzo de Medina discovers pestilential dungeons, and liberates the single emaciated prisoner who has been surrounded by skulls and bones, Lewis has in mind the insignificant number of prisoners (only seven) confined in the Bastille at its fall. Lewis’s move from the undistinguishing crowd to the single captive certainly represents a sentimental individualization of suffering, especially since the prisoner proves to be Lorenzo’s sister and a central character in the novel. Still, Lewis’s allusion to the fall of the Bastille guarantees that the scene remains a kind of history painting, however much it is sentimentalized and Gothicized. In his 1797 review of The Monk, Coleridge condemns Lewis for sadism, probable atheism, a deficient knowledge of human nature, and a kind of narrative leveling or lack of discrimination that defeats probability: “All events are levelled into one common mass” (58). For Coleridge, Lewis sacrifices verisimilitude by refusing to find the superior event or to select one out of many. Almost two decades after his criticism of Lewis’s aesthetic leveling, Coleridge devotes an entire





chapter of Biographia Literaria to an attack on Charles Maturin’s “jacobinical drama” Bertram. Radicalism can be found in an appeal to popular taste, as in the representation of mass phenomena. Maturin quite deliberately situates his work in the tradition of Lewis and of the “stupid German Tragedies” that Wordsworth condemned in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. When Maturin comes to rewrite Lewis’s scene of the Madrid crowd’s fury against papist despotism and corruption, his account is at once more historical and more cinematic. In the case of Melmoth the Wanderer, the scene in which a religious procession is transformed into crowd violence is narrated from the perspective of Alonzo di Monçada, who, like a member of a film audience, is an unseen observer in the dark. After recounting in graphic detail the mangling and trampling of the crowd’s victim, Alonzo describes his own divided experience as observer. He simultaneously identifies with the murderous crowd and with their victim: “I echoed the wild shouts of the multitude with a kind of savage instinct. . . . then I echoed the screams of the thing that seemed no longer to live, but still could scream” (MW 256). Alonzo’s response to crowd violence recapitulates the audience response to supernatural horrors. In his next novel, The Albigenses (1824), Maturin provides the theory of such responses. The reaction of an audience to what seems to be the appearance of a devil involves a mental oscillation between belief and incredulity: “There is a species of horror attached to certain narratives, which, while it repels belief, forces conviction. In such a divided state of mind . . . sat the party for one fearful and silent hour” (A 3: 326). Unlike the sentimentalist Yorick whose sympathies can be aroused only by an individual captive, because such individualization enables him to overcome “a divided state of mind,” Alonzo di Monçada is forced into imaginative identification with the feelings of a crowd. Maturin’s frantic novel, though strongly imagined, does not reveal the strength of the Wordsworthian imagination that selects one out of many. It does not lead the mind to a place of rest in unity or individuality, but instead, with its notoriously fragmented and episodic structure,14 leaves the viewer in a state of distraction and divided identification. Rather than affirming the power of the subject over the object world, the Gothic novelist attempts to represent mass phenomena by converting the observing subject into a victim. Insofar as the subject is no longer capable of making voluntary, rational, or even imaginative choices among a superfluity of persons and objects, the characters in Gothic fiction already inhabit a world of excessive information, like the postmodern inundation by mass media that Baudrillard explores. However, instead of making a sovereign



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refusal of subjectivity, the Gothic novelist remains in contradiction, showing that individuality is unstable and autonomous subjectivity untenable. While a canonical Romantic author like Wordsworth recognizes that individual essences may well be inaccessible, he embraces randomness only to affirm the subject’s power to create individuality in the face of the absence of differentiation. However, he affirms that power at the cost of relinquishing the ability to represent crowds and to accommodate a quantitative dimension in the work of art. Romantic novelists retain from the realistic fiction of Fielding and Smollett the goal of socially comprehensive representation, even though the organizing principle of the extensive vision of a benevolent paternalistic gentleman may no longer be available. In such circumstances, the patrician’s enlightened social criticisms may unleash the fury of an undistinguishing mob, or elite observers may find themselves at the limits of imaginative identification, their senses overwhelmed by the noise of the multitude and their focus split by a multiplicity of incomprehensible objects. It may be that in the Romantic period authors must compromise aesthetic form in exchange for the capacity to represent the crowd. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as I shall show in the next chapter, Walter Scott’s initial attempt to represent the anonymous crowd, followed by an anxious retreat to individualization, entails a violation of aesthetic unity, through a shift in form from realistic novel to pastoral romance (Duncan 146–76). At the same time, Scott’s individualizing of the leader of the Porteous rioters permits an exploration of the symbolic significance of the figure of woman in popular protest.







Popu l a r v e r sus L egi t i m at e Au t hor i t y i n S c o t t ’s T H E H E A R T M I D -L O T H I A N

OF

“I suppose all imaginative people feel more or less of excitation

from a scene of insurrection or tumult or of general expression of national feeling” (Scott, Journal 97). Although Walter Scott wrote these words in 1826 in the context of Scottish protest against the English imposition of changes in banking practices and the issuing of paper currency, the idea that riots and crowds arouse the imagination resonates throughout Scott’s career. In contrast to the Romantic poets and theorists of imagination that I discussed in chapter 1, Scott, as a novelist working in a mode influenced by the Gothic, believes that a novel of large scope may be able to come to terms with the crowd. In his second novel, Guy Mannering (1815), the title character visits Edinburgh in the early 1780s: It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry, and of licence, its variety of lights, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groupes, offers, by night especially, a spectacle, which, though composed of the most vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are combined, a striking and powerful effect upon the imagination. (201)

While the patrician Scott fears servile war, and while he is nostalgic for the social relations of a time prior to urbanization, he still believes



Chapter 2


that there is something in crowds, popular culture, and even popular disturbances that appeals to the imaginations of authors and readers. Like many of Scott’s novels, The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) deals centrally with popular culture and the problematic status of fictions. In this novel, crowds and the Gothic are conjoined in the figure of Robertson/Staunton, who leads a riot in women’s clothes, who speaks in the inflated rhetoric of the Gothic hero/villain, and who ends his career as a gloomy, awe-inspiring, and self-tortured Roman Catholic. In this chapter, I situate the gender liminality of Robertson/Staunton in relation to the early modern crowd and to the authorship of “popular” fictions. The authorship of novels in the early nineteenth century entails an assumption of authority that becomes problematic owing to its associations with both popularity and disguise.

Women Rioters and the October Days In a tradition beginning with Edmund Burke in 1790, passing through late nineteenth-century crowd psychologists, and extending even to twentieth-century historians, there is a similar discursive construction of female participants in popular protest. Lacking the discipline and solidarity of men, unsexed women are driven by envy and hunger to perform the brutal deeds of which they delight so savagely to speak. Whether reveling in the idea of cannibalism, gorging themselves on raw horse meat, biting the amputated limbs of murdered men, or dismembering the victims of their fury, revolutionary women transgress civilized customs and laws. The recurrence of such female figures in the works of Burke, Richard Polwhele, and others might invite the universalizing account offered by psychoanalysis. If such representations do not betray the traces of castration dread, alternatively they might reveal the horror, analyzed by Julia Kristeva, experienced by the subject faced with “the abject or demoniacal potential of the female” (65). Abjection for Kristeva results when the boundaries of identity are disturbed, threatened with ambiguity through “fusion with the mother” (94). The notion of abjection would also help to account for the imagery of cannibalism and the transgression of food taboos, since “Dietary abomination has . . . a parallel—unless it be a foundation—in the abomination provoked by the fertilizable or fertile feminine body” (100). Moreover, a certain kind of authorship grows out of abjection—one that seeks to recover the power of orality within writing (137). To the degree that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels are shaped by the antitheatrical and



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antirhetorical linguistic theory of sentimentalism, they are phonocentric texts that express a suspicion of fiction and of writing itself. In what follows, in addition to exploring crowd violence and crossdressing in popular protest, I shall examine the suspicion of writing in The Heart of Mid-Lothian. In the view of Anne Williams, the kind of writing that grows out of abjection, as conceptualized by Kristeva, is the Male Gothic novel: “Male Gothic conventions imply that the focus of horror is not merely ‘the female’ in general, but more specifically, her most mysterious and powerful manifestation as mother or potential mother” (105–06). The central problem in The Heart of Mid-Lothian is childbirth (the fate of the illegitimate infants of Effie Deans and Madge Wildfire), and the female character most likely to arouse horror, Margaret Murdockson, is defined in her maternal capacity. Indeed, Ian Duncan has argued that The Heart of Mid-Lothian is transformed from documentary history into romance when later episodes in the novel recall the Porteous riots and serve to “enclose the figure of riot within that of maternity,” in part by “defining the mother’s body as the space outside the law” (156, 159). In addition to evoking a popular carnivalesque tradition and a dread of castration, then, the cross-dressed leader of the Porteous riots in Scott’s novel may be a locus for the kind of male anxieties over female power that appear in the political writing of Burke. Female dress in popular ritual sustains contradictory symbolic values—the positively valued, but anxiety-producing, one of fertility and the negative one of castration.1 In her classic account of the significance of female participation and female dress in popular protest, Natalie Zemon Davis focuses on the symbolism of sexual generation and truth-telling, while she admits that the “female” challenge to authority resulting from fertility beyond male control and the saturnalian right to speak truth to power were possible only because of women’s exclusion, in societies dominated by male elites, from political life and from an entitlement to full rationality. Plebeian men traditionally adopted the disguise of female dress in an appeal to the upside-down-world of carnival, because they were denied more overt means of protest, and because few other disguises were as readily available in the households of the poor (Davis 149–50). Malcolm Thomas and Jennifer Grimmett have likewise sought to explain the recurrent male transvestism in popular protest that culminates in “the Rebecca riots, a series of attacks on toll-gates and other targets in west Wales during the years 1838–43” (140). They argue that women’s clothing functioned symbolically to legitimate men’s protests in such women’s



Popul a r it y v ersus Legitim acy in Scott


realms as the domestic economy, since, “As the guardians of the home and family, and of the standards of living necessary to preserve these institutions, women were viewed as the embodiment of justice, humanity and a traditional culture, at risk when social protest occurred” (146). Thus, women’s dress symbolized a traditional and just social order that protesters sought to reestablish. For example, the demoiselles of the Ariège, who struggled to preserve traditional rights of pasturage and gleaning in the French forests near the border with Spain during much of the nineteenth century, disguised themselves with “a white linen-cloth shirt, always left out and giving the impression of a woman’s shirt or gown, some darkening of the face, and often some form of headwear” (Merriman 95). John Merriman explains that the women’s dress adopted by the male demoiselles facilitated anonymity, while it also “expressed, and thereby reinforced the solidarity of the communes involved in the struggle. The disguise, associated with the carnival in peasant communities, was an integral factor in communal behavior related to the community sense of justice and of traditional collective rights” (96). The folklore element in this instance of popular protest involves men’s loss of status upon the violation of their rights—a loss of status signaled by female dress. In a kind of social drama, the “cuckolded” men attempt “to retake possession of the forest, to which is ascribed feminine characteristics, from the ‘outsiders,’ the forest guards and charbonniers who have violated it” (97). Here female dress does not symbolize sexual generation, the meaning that Davis emphasizes. Merriman evokes not traditional fertility rites but rather popular rituals punishing or stigmatizing men who have failed to fulfill the masculine role. The donning of female dress indicates the degraded status of the peasants who are seeking to regain possession of that which confers on them their masculine identity. Such shame punishments were common in the early modern period. Traditional community sanctions against a submissive husband might include a skimmington, in which a man (the target himself or a substitute) holding a spinning wheel or a distaff rode backward on an ass while being beaten by another man dressed as a woman (E. P. Thompson, “Rough Music” 302). In a note on the skimmington that Scott himself appends to the Opus Magnum edition of The Fortunes of Nigel, he compares this superseded popular English custom to a practice of a culture that he regards as primitive, while remarking, as he obsessively does, on a history of women’s assumption of authority over men: “The Skimmington, which in some degree resembled the proceedings of Mumbo Jumbo in an



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African village, has long been discontinued in England, apparently because female rule has become either milder or less frequent than among our ancestors” (Fortunes, ed. Link 457). A better understanding of the significance of female dress in popular protest can be gained by considering the kinds of disturbances in which women took a leading role. In the early modern period, women were particularly prominent participants in food riots, where their frequent display of popular symbols marks them as the bearers of preindustrial values, including those of the “moral economy”—the communal sense of “just” prices and the antagonism toward profiteering middlemen in the marketing of food.2 John Bohstedt speculates that “women may have been somewhat shielded from regular participation in capitalist labour-market exchanges. Perhaps women were more involved in use than exchange, directors of reproduction as well as production, perhaps more immersed in the moral, less in the market economy” (101). Still, women had immediate knowledge of the fluctuation of prices in the marketplace, and they performed the traditional role of protecting their families’ rights as consumers. Women may also have been especially active or especially violent among participants in food riots because of their immunity, relative to men, to military suppression or harsh judicial retaliation. John Stevenson points out that one of the deficiencies of judicial records for determining the composition of crowds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the underrepresentation of women in indictments, and he goes on to suggest that the relative immunity of women may even help to explain why men adopted female disguise in popular protest (14, 102). While the participation of women and children perhaps increased the political costs of suppressing a disturbance by force, such participation may also have compromised the discipline of the crowd. Still, there is much evidence that women initiated and acted as “captains” in food riots, sometimes raising and leading a crowd with the traditional devices of a bell or horn. In the major food riots of 1795, which J. L. and Barbara Hammond termed “the revolt of the housewives,” women in a Liverpool incident were responsible for violence—in particular, oral violence: “they bit the local constable” (Gilmour 231). From their participation in food riots, women were thought to be, in comparison to men, less responsible for their actions and less liable to be punished, less disciplined, and more violent. Women and their clothing in riots during times of shortage may have symbolized the desire for an abundant harvest (perhaps a vestige of attempts magically to influence the harvest). The view that women were especially prominent in defending family interests in bread and butter issues





probably has some truth, though one should not underestimate early modern women’s political consciousness. Even food riots were seldom confined to domestic issues narrowly defined. They were traditionally characterized by leveling rhetoric, which at the time of the French Revolution was transformed into a more articulate political stance, in Britain as well as France. Shortage of provisions was a central cause of French popular disturbances during the revolutionary years. On October 5, 1789, “a food riot of angry market women developed into the great women’s march which, supported by the battalions of the National Guard, brought the King, soon followed by the National Assembly, back in triumph to the capital” (Rudé 100–102). The days of October 5–6, 1789 figure prominently in most contemporary British accounts of the revolutionary events in France, since they provided for conservatives, according to Linda Colley, “a grim demonstration of the dangers that ensued when women were allowed to stray outside their proper sphere” (252). The women’s march and the violence that occurred at Versailles form the occasion for Edmund Burke’s antithesis between the cultivated civilization of the palace and the bacchanalian and female savagery of the hovel: “It was . . . a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages, entering into Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation” (Reflections 159). After the execution of two gentlemen in the king’s body guard, continues Burke, “Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women” (164–65). While antifeminism is evident here, so too is the view that individuals become savages by accumulating in crowds. One of the defining characteristics of the “ideological myth of the crowd,” for Nicholas Visser, is the belief that “the individual is to civilization as the collectivity is to savagery” (303, 300). In the substantial account of the October days in James Dodsley’s Annual Register for 1790 (first published in 1793), written by Burke’s friend Thomas English,3 the crowd that marched to Versailles was motivated by the threat of famine, for which they held the king responsible. The crowd was also the unwitting instrument of the “violent republicans” and “the Orleans cabal,” who sought to bring



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the royal court and the National Assembly from Versailles to Paris, where they would be subject to coercion by the tumultuous populace, who had already come to be known “by the name of the cannibals of Paris” (Annual Register 40, 47, 41). It is apparently the participation of “a great number of men, disguised in women’s clothes” that leads English to refer to the crowd as “this hermaphrodite army” (47). In its repetition of Burke’s opposition between civilization and savagery, the account in the Annual Register has recourse to antifeminist rhetoric: “the capricious rage and eternal clamour of the frantic female bacchanals” (51). The Annual Register’s account of the October days emphasizes the verbal violence of prostitutes, furies, bacchanals, Amazons, and men in women’s clothes, insisting that such bloodthirsty language leads directly to actual murder. Perhaps owing to her use of the Annual Register as a source for An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft also interprets the presence of cross-dressed men as evidence that the procession on October 5 was orchestrated rather than spontaneous, since men would not customarily be walking the streets in women’s clothing.4 By 1794, Wollstonecraft had already published her feminist manifesto, as well as A Vindication of the Rights of Men, her invective against Reflections on the Revolution, in which she had commented on the aristocratic prejudices motivating Burke’s view of the savagery of the marketwomen: “Probably you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education” (5: 30). Nevertheless, in her description of the October days in her 1794 history, Wollstonecraft repeats the Burkean phraseology of “the vilest of women,” who had “the appearance of furies” (6: 207, 197). To a considerable extent, similar representations of the “feminine” crowd cut across lines of partisan and gender politics. Wollstonecraft, however, is careful to distinguish the mob of October 5 from “the honest multitude, who took the Bastille” on July 14, since she believes that the mob that marched on Versailles was instigated by “the despicable duke of Orleans” (6: 197, 198). She thus offers an account that, while it questions the commonplace assumption that popular disturbances led by women are the products of spontaneous emotion, nevertheless relies on the conventional notion of upper-class orchestration to account for crowd actions—at least those she disapproves of. In this sexualized account of the crowd, while her main targets are the agents of repression, Wollstonecraft also finds a connection between unrestrained female sexuality and popular disturbances.





Proofs of a Conspiracy, the influential anti-Illuminati tract of 1797, provides yet another British account of the 1789 October days. Written by John Robison, a Scottish Tory and the professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University, this account provides an even more important analogy for Walter Scott’s treatment of crowds and crossdressing. Besides the shared ideological perspective of Robison and Scott, there was a personal connection between the two men, since in 1800 William Erskine, whom John Gibson Lockhart terms “Scott’s most intimate friend,” married one of Robison’s daughters (Life 6: 363). For Robison, as for Wollstonecraft, the central figure behind the scenes on October 5–6 was the Duke of Orleans. Robison emphasizes Orleans’s position as a leading freemason, since this provides, he believes, crucial evidence that Jacobinism and the French Revolution can be explained by a conspiracy of the Illuminati, a secret society that grew out of the freemasons. Robison attributes Orleans’s deployment “of the great influence of the women in society” to the lessons of Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian Illuminati in 1776 (378–79). Acting on his pseudofeminist beliefs, Orleans bribes prostitutes to seduce soldiers from their duty of guarding the royal family. In Robison’s account, not only nameless whores but also the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt participated in the crowd. Her role epitomizes that of all the whores. She seduces men to revolution in a preparatory maneuver to what Robison regards as the ultimate goal of Jacobinism—the Terror. Women prepare heads to be placed beneath the guillotine: “Mademoiselle Therouane . . . was the most active person of the armed mob from Paris, dressed en Amazonne, with all the elegance of the opera, and turned many young heads that day which were afterwards taken off by the guillotine” (379). (The amazone is the “severely masculine” riding-habit Théroigne adopted to create a “frisson of transgression—the idea of a woman in men’s clothes” [Moore 49, 59].) Orleans’s role in orchestrating the events of the women’s march to Versailles did not end with the bribing of women, for he was seen on the evening of October 5 “conversing in a corner with men disguised in mean dress, and some in womens clothes” (Robison 377). On the next day as well, weighed down with a bag of money, Orleans consulted “with the same persons in womens dress,” before sneaking about “to view the procession of devils and furies” (380, 378). Robison’s account of the march on Versailles features the elite orchestration of crowds, upper-class men disguised as sans-culottes and as women, and immoral women in something resembling men’s clothes who use their charms to corrupt men ideologically. There is an easy slippage from the poissardes of Paris to the enlightened women writers of England. In his anti-Wollstonecraft satire, 10.1057/9780230106574 - Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, James P. Carson


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The Unsex’d Females (1798), Richard Polwhele (later one of Scott’s regular correspondents) attacks an “Amazonian band,” who in this instance are “the female Quixotes of the new philosophy,” those English women writers who have been corrupted by French politics and French fashions (6n.).5 On the authority of Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, which he quotes, Polwhele argues that such women writers would indeed be cannibals if they had the same opportunities as the savage ladies of France: The female advocates of Democracy in this country, though they have had no opportunity of imitating the French ladies, in their atrocious acts of cruelty; have yet assumed a stern serenity in the contemplation of those savage excesses. “To express their abhorrence of royalty, they (the French ladies) threw away the character of their sex, and bit the amputated limbs of their murdered countrymen.—I say this on the authority of a young gentleman who saw it.—I am sorry to add, that the relation, accompanied with looks of horror and disgust, only provoked a contemptuous smile from an illuminated British fair-one.” (9n.–10n.)

The frightening spectacle of dismembered men and the female cannibals who devour or, at least, nibble on them confirms what anxious men, confronted with the contemptuous smiles of philosophical women writers, already know: male authority and its phallic representation, in the form of limbs to be amputated, are under siege. In a novel that emphatically conjoins the crowd and cross-dressing, one important enlightened woman author composed a highly mediated account of the October days. This woman writer, moreover, is the one to whom Scott acknowledges the greatest debt—Maria Edgeworth. In Belinda (1801), “a crowd of town’s people, country people, and haymakers . . . with rakes and pitchforks in their hands” has gathered to duck in a river two cross-dressed women who have met to fight “a female duel” (Edgeworth 2: 47). The fickle crowd is easily distracted from the role of executing popular justice, however, by the demands of loyalism, when an English officer solicits the crowd’s aid in cheering on a herd of pigs whom he is racing against “a flock of turkies,” led by a Frenchman (2: 48). The incident is narrated by Lady Delacour, one of the female duelists, who declares that “An English mob is really a formidable thing” and who is grateful to the English officer for diverting “[t]he whole fury of the mob” (2: 47, 49). Despite its fickleness and formidable “fury,” the crowd is granted a measure of authorial approval, since even Lady Delacour admits that “the untutored sense of propriety amongst these rusticks was . . . shocked at the idea of a duel fought by women in men’s clothes” (2: 47). This incident figures as a displaced account of the October days since 10.1057/9780230106574 - Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, James P. Carson




Edgeworth quotes the most infamous phrase from her countryman Burke’s account of the women’s march to Versailles. However, she uses this phrase, “swinish multitude,” not to refer to a French or even English mob but rather to designate actual pigs. When it is led away by her literal “swinish multitude” (pigs that serve as a metonym for the crowd), Edgeworth’s formidable mob becomes a displaced representation of the Parisian crowd of October 5–6. Through her use of real swine, Edgeworth criticizes Burke’s contemptuous metaphor for the people.6 Her October days in Belinda are an inversion of standard 1790s accounts, preeminently Burke’s. Instead of cross-dressed men leading a revolutionary crowd of female French furies, a conservative and loyalist crowd of English men gathers to execute popular justice on crossdressed women. Edgeworth’s crowd possesses an “untutored sense of propriety,” while in Burke, once the philosophes have foolishly undermined the supports of learning, by their attacks on the nobility and clergy, “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude” (173). Edgeworth aligns herself with the untutored propriety of the crowd against the misapplied learning that led the aristocratic Clarence Hervey, the driver of pigs, to plan “a treatise ‘upon the Propriety and Necessity of Female Duelling’ ” (2: 45). Still, for Edgeworth too, “the age of chivalry is gone” (Burke, Reflections 170). Its passing is bizarrely marked when the chivalric role of defending one’s honor is inappropriately extended to women. Part of the project of Edgeworth’s novel is to banish the feminist Harriot Freke, the novel’s preeminent cross-dresser and “champion for the Rights of Women,” as well as to domesticate Lady Delacour, who suggests “The reformed Amazon” as a title for her own story (2: 179, 227). Thus, if Edgeworth’s October days partly rehabilitate the crowd, the figure of the unsexed woman must nonetheless be cast out or reformed. At the end of his career, in Count Robert of Paris, Scott brings together Polwhele’s attack on women writers and Edgeworth’s treatment of female chivalry when the vain “authoress” Anna Comnena seeks military glory by entering the lists against the Amazonian Brenhilda, Countess of Paris (324). After insisting on his historical accuracy in locating an Amazon among the medieval Franks on the First Crusade, Scott adds: “There is nothing inconsistent in history with the idea of the Countess bearing arms, and longing to distinguish herself by feats of chivalry. That Anna Comnena should have caught the flame, is no way inconsistent with the vainglory which induced her to affect the character of a historian” (360). Even if his female Crusader



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is historically consistent, Scott finds the woman warrior distinctly unnatural. Brenhilda’s violation of the natural or divinely imposed female role appears when the vainglorious “authoress” achieves an unlikely victory in the joust, owing to Brenhilda’s pregnancy, “that primeval curse which was laid upon woman after the fall” (342). For Scott there seems to be a dangerous slippage from “Amazons of the pen” (Samuel Johnson 458) like Anna Comnena to the woman who slays the Scythian Toxartes “with her trenchant sword” (126). Four years earlier, Scott provided his own version of the 1789 October days. In his Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827), the insurrection of October 5–6 was unusual on account of the dominant roles taken by “unsexed” women: The market-women, Dames aux Halles, as they are called, half unsexed by the masculine nature of their employments, and entirely so by the ferocity of their manners, had figured early in the Revolution. With these were allied and associated most of the worthless and barbarous of their own sex, such disgraceful specimens of humanity as serve but to show in what a degraded state it may be found to exist. . . . There were observed amongst them many men disguised as women, and they compelled all the females they met to go along with them. (LN 1: 185–86)

For Scott, the women in the revolutionary crowd have either been “unsexed” by their marketing occupations or paradoxically rendered “worthless” by acquiring a specific market value as prostitutes. To retain both femininity and worth, women must be shielded from the public realm of the marketplace. Indeed, the problems in The Heart of Mid-Lothian come about when Effie Deans leaves the precapitalist stability of the paternal farm to become a shopgirl, who is “drawn into the center of circulation (she travels to the city, works in trade, circulates her own body)” (Henderson 141). Two years earlier in Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), the fishwife Maggie Mucklebackit first appears dressed in a man’s coat that “gave her a masculine air” (88). This “virago” is a member of a class in which the economic power of wives, deriving from their role in the marketplace, makes them heads of the household: “thae that sell the gudes guide the purse—thae that guide the purse rule the house” (Scott, Antiquary 212). In making his virago a fishwife, Scott must have had in mind the poissardes who marched on Versailles. For Scott, the “Amazons” of the October days, motivated by dearth, are compelled to march by cross-dressed men. His crowd thus presents a kind of nightmare of gender instability: unsexed women and transvestite men. Scott notes that the crowd, partly since





it is dominated by women, has immunity from the National Guard, who “refused to act against women, who, they said, were starving” (LN 1: 186). Although the crowd is disorderly, their activities are accompanied, if not disciplined, by “the beating of drums” (1: 189). If these starving women are not quite cannibalistic, they nonetheless, from a British though perhaps not French perspective, break food taboos, when “The horse of a Garde du Corps, which fell into the hands of these female demons, was killed, torn in pieces, and eaten half raw and half roasted” (1: 192). When leading the royal family to Paris, “these bands of murderous bacchantes” are further unsexed by riding on cannons or mounting “the horses of the Gardes du Corps, some in masculine fashion” (1: 195, 199). The French women in Scott’s mob are “blood-thirsty” (1: 197), but they compound their immorality and lack of femininity by their predilection for phallic weaponry and their failure to ride side-saddle. Like Wollstonecraft and Robison before him, Scott accepts the view that the Duke of Orleans instigated a crowd of market-women and prostitutes to rebel against his brother the King. Even though female participation in popular protest becomes comprehensible because of dearth, male compulsion, and upper-class instigation, Scott demonizes the women themselves as unfeminine and immoral in what he takes to be their actual roles as market-women and prostitutes, and, through his classical allusions, in imagined representations of them as woman warriors and Dionysian enthusiasts. Accounts of the October days perpetuate a stereotype of the victims of sexual oppression riding on cannons and arming themselves with swords, pistols, or pens to avenge themselves on men or to attempt, as it were, to eradicate the difference between the sexes. Like other Romantic authors, Walter Scott conjoins scenes of crowd violence and the verbal, physical, and authorial violence of women.

Women’s Dress and “Black Scores” Scott most reveals his interest in the relationship between popular disturbances and the carnivalesque in the episode of the Abbot of Unreason in The Abbot (1820). In this episode, annotated in the Magnum Opus edition by a flurry of historical notes, Scott explores the countertheater of a festive crowd, as the plebeians seek to parody and disrupt the ceremony of installing a new abbot in the Scottish monastery of Saint Mary’s. Scott situates saturnalian cross-dressing, iconoclastic destruction by a tumultuous crowd, and the motifs of the world-upside-down in a novel in which he gives prominence to



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transvestite disguise and its attendant gender confusion. The scene in the Waverley Novels that most disgusted Coleridge is that in which the hero of The Abbot, Roland Graeme, flirts with the heroine’s twin brother, who is disguised in women’s clothes. Coleridge annotates this scene by remarking that Shakespeare, despite his occasionally farcical use of sexual disguise, “would not have made a Male after close examination & excited doubt indistinguishable from a female”; for Coleridge, the improbability of Scott’s scene is “monstrous” (Marginalia 600).7 Roland Graeme’s confusion between the Seyton twins, Catherine and Henry, serves as the main complication in the love-plot of the novel. Wearing female dress, Henry Seyton explains to Graeme, who is flirting with him, that the struggle to restore Mary Stuart to the Scottish throne requires that masculine virtues efface femininity itself as well as the effeminacy involved in being seduced from the Roman Catholic cause: “the times which make men out of women, are least of all fitted for men to become women; yet you yourself are in danger of such a change” (Scott, Abbot 257). In fact, the era of gender confusion, of cross-dressing and crowd violence, that Scott has in mind when writing The Abbot is the age of Marie Antoinette rather than Mary Queen of Scots. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian Scott addresses the question of the political role of women in conjunction with the most notable description in British fiction of a male rioter who dresses as a woman. Depicting the Porteous riots of September 7, 1736, Scott seeks to provide an authoritative narrative of a popular disturbance. In his later history of Scotland for youthful readers, Tales of a Grandfather (1830), Scott cautiously assesses the evidence for the participation in the Porteous mob of women, men disguised as women, and respectable citizens dressed as members of the lower orders, concluding that “Broken and imperfect stories were told of men in the disguise of women and of common artizans, whose manner betrayed a sex and manners different from what their garb announced. Others laughed at these as unauthorized exaggerations” (176).8 Despite this critical assessment, Scott in his earlier historical novel has the smuggler “George Robertson” (who is actually the English gentleman George Staunton in disguise) don Madge Wildfire’s clothes to act as “captain” of the Porteous rioters. As the police officer Gideon Sharpitlaw observes, “there was a sufficient motive for taking this crazy creature’s dress and name, while he was about such a job” (HM 152). The rest of the novel might be read as a gloss on the sufficiency of the motive for this instance of cross-dressing. That is to say, Scott’s





novel is historical not only on account of its narration of a significant event in Scottish history and of the response of the people to that crisis; it is historical as well on account of Scott’s comprehensive analysis of the significance of male cross-dressing in popular protest. Scott proceeds with his analysis primarily by individualizing the figure of George Robertson, thus revealing a man’s complex motivation for adopting the dress of a woman and, in particular, that of Madge Wildfire. This individualization, however, has the effect of undermining the initial account of the Porteous riots as a popular Scottish disturbance, since in Scott’s fiction the riots prove to have been led by an English gentleman for the private ends of taking revenge on John Porteous for his cruelty to Andrew Wilson and of liberating his mistress, Effie Deans, unjustly imprisoned in the Tolbooth on a charge of infanticide.9 Scott’s novel thus draws back from an initial, at least partly sympathetic, account of autonomous popular action. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott aims to strengthen individual conscience, and thus to assist in the contemporary dissolution of the early modern crowd, by making a moral appeal to individual hearts and minds through the private experience of novel-reading. The participation of men disguised in women’s clothing and with blackened faces indicates in part the ritual dimension of the crowd gathered to execute Captain Porteous, who had been found guilty of the murders that took place when the City Guard fired on the Edinburgh crowd in the tumult following the execution, on April 14, 1736, of Andrew Wilson, a smuggler convicted of robbing an exciseman. Like the demoiselles of the Ariège described by John Merriman, the Edinburgh citizens in the Porteous riots could be seen to be attacking outsiders, since they had recourse to popular justice only after the reprieve granted by an English monarch overturned a Scottish judge and jury’s decision that Porteous be hanged. For Scott, who finds in the Porteous riots evidence of continuing resistance to the Act of Union three decades after its passage in 1707, the category of outsider is determined less in terms of the local community than by nationality. The riot in which the Edinburgh Tolbooth is stormed and vengeance exacted upon Porteous constitutes an attack on legitimate government. The disguises, the drum beating the crowd to arms, the nicknames of the principal conspirators, the oaths by which they are held to their purpose, and their admirable discipline are all traditional devices that suggest an alternative, popular source of authority. Ironically, such means of maintaining discipline as mustering to the beat of drums and submitting to the leadership of “captains” derive



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from the procedures of the early Stuart militia or “trained bands” (Shoemaker 289–90). In this instance as in others, popular culture is not pure and autonomous but rather a hybrid construction that includes borrowings from “above.” The military basis of the early modern crowd’s technique of establishing legitimacy and maintaining discipline also exposes the crowd to the charge of levying war upon the king. The crowd’s discipline is thus not only an indication of their restraint and of the perceived legitimacy of their aims but also evidence for the treasonableness of their actions. As Jane Millgate remarks, “Scott’s depiction of the mob at the door of the Tolbooth carries what would have been for his first audience unmistakable overtones of both the French Revolution and contemporary radical disturbances, and it does nothing to diminish the uncomfortable nature of this episode that the mob is shown as acting with discipline and unified purpose” (103).10 Scott’s 1816 reference to the Tolbooth as “a sort of Bastile in the centre of the principal street” (Letters 4: 286) suggests that in his novel he intends an analogy between the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution and the storming of the Tolbooth in the Porteous riots. Scott presents the Porteous rioters as more orderly than Burke’s French mob or than the crowd of the October days that he himself will describe in The Life of Napoleon, but for that very reason they pose an even greater threat to legitimate government. As Scott remarked on the occasion of theatrical riots at Covent Garden in 1809, “I hate mobs of all kinds but I fear disciplined mobs” (Letters 2: 275). What is at stake, as E. P. Thompson suggests in the case of the alarm caused by the discipline of the huge assembly on St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester in 1819, is the “fear evoked by the evidence of the translation of the rabble into a disciplined class” (Making 682). Characterized neither by anarchy nor by aristocratic instigation (at least in Scott’s initial description of the riots), the Edinburgh crowd in The Heart of MidLothian is governed by a well-developed and popularly accepted alternative source of authority. That popular authority is emphasized when communal solidarity leads the inhabitants of Edinburgh to protect the “murderers” of Porteous even when the legitimate authorities offer a £200 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any of the rioters. Scott’s readers would have understood his representation of the Porteous riots in terms of more recent radical disturbances, since the events of 1736 were long preserved in the popular memory of the inhabitants of Edinburgh.11 In the King’s Birthday Riot of June 4–6, 1792, a placard was used to incite the Edinburgh tradesmen to assemble: “we





shall give a general Salute in the way it was given to Capt. Porteous of the town Guard, to Mr Maitland, General Supervisor of the Excise” (qtd. in Logue 136). The King’s Birthday in Scotland provided one of those early modern occasions when the lower orders transformed celebrations organized by the authorities into more unruly forms of festivity. Like public executions, celebrations for the King’s Birthday in Edinburgh frequently resulted in clashes between the City Guard and the disorderly youths and idle apprentices in the crowd (HM 28). According to an unsympathetic early biographer, Porteous gratified his humor on such occasions by physically abusing the crowd: “there is a Multitude from the Country, as well as from the Town, to observe Shews and Solemnities on royal Birth-Days; these People were sure of a Beating from him” (Life and Death 15). From the 1790s on, Scott was a vocal proponent of, and active participant in, the suppression of popular disturbances. On the occasion of the King’s Birthday in 1794, he acted as a special constable in Edinburgh, in order to prevent a repetition of the riots that had occurred two years earlier. For Scott, even the lack of disturbances resulting from increased policing merely provides evidence of a calm before the revolutionary storm. That June 4, 1794 was quieter than “any King’s birthday I can recollect,” writes Scott, “shews that something is brewing among our freinds the democrats” (Letters 1: 31). In February 1797, in the panic over a potential French invasion, the loyalist Scott was instrumental in organizing the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, for which he was “elected quartermaster, secretary, and paymaster” (Edgar Johnson 1: 132). Ultimately, the dragoons were used not against French invaders but rather for domestic policing—for example, when an Edinburgh baker’s shop was attacked in a food riot in 1802. On that occasion, having been struck by a brickbat, Scott rode “to cut down the fellow who had thrown it, but . . . only gave him a stroke with the flat of the sword, for ‘Truth to say it was a dreadful feeling to use violence against a people in real and absolute want of food’ ” (2: 869). Scott fictionalizes this incident in The Antiquary—his novel about the 1790s, which concludes with an invasion scare—when he refers to Jonathan Oldbuck’s opposition to “bringing in the yeomanry at the meal mob” (285). In his position as Sheriff of Selkirkshire, Scott suppressed Luddite agitations among Galashiels weavers, whose activities, given his general susceptibility to credit all reports of radical conspiracy, he saw as part of a “revolutionary” movement (Letters 3: 126, 240). Scott’s enthusiastic suppression of machine-breaking is especially intriguing in the light of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, in which the narrator, in one of the



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rare narrative intrusions in volume 2, expresses nostalgia for the disappearance of knitters, and identifies with them, “if stocking-looms have left such a person in the land” (HM 143). Such nostalgic populist sentiments, though they run counter to Scott’s actions in official life, can be safely expressed in The Heart of Mid-Lothian because the overall individualizing and ethical project of the novel serves to defuse the threat of protest against industrialization. In 1819, in response not to a foreign threat but to agitation for parliamentary reform, Scott helped to raise a company of sharpshooters (Edgar Johnson 1: 693–94). If he had at one time personally declined to cut down a food rioter (thus echoing the sentiments of the national guards whom La Fayette led to Versailles on October 5, 1789), he thought the Manchester troops entirely justified in firing on “banditti” in what was termed—through wild exaggeration, in his view—the “Peterloo massacre” (Letters 5: 485). Of the large number of women present at the reform demonstration in Manchester on August 16, 1819, two were killed, over a hundred were wounded, and over a dozen of these suffered saber cuts (Thomas and Grimmett 101). Connecting an 1820 riot in Glasgow with Peterloo, Scott betrays his increasingly inhumane attitudes toward crowds: “I would have the knaves know by experience that swords have edges” (Letters 6: 177). The same year, when radicals took up the cause of Queen Caroline in George IV’s divorce proceedings, Scott blames the “stupid monster John Bull” for running “bellowing mad” as the crowd in 1780 had with Lord George Gordon; he indulges in a fantasy in which the Queen is the caricature of an Amazonian warrior: “If she had as many followers of high as of low degree (in proportion), and funds to equip them, I should not be surprised to see her fat bottom in a pair of buckskins, and at the head of an army” (6: 310, 235). Scott sometimes expresses contempt for the masses, especially in the context of his fear of electoral reform. Still, despite Scott’s fear of the industrial and urban masses, Georg Lukács is right to emphasize the popular nature of Scott’s art: “Scott’s great artistic aim, in portraying the historical crises of popular life, is to show the human greatness which is liberated in its important representatives” in such periods as that of the French Revolution (51). While Scott characterized his own ideology as aristocratic, he had few illusions about aristocrats and thought that talent could be found in all ranks. In his account of the early military fortunes of the French Revolutionary regime, for example, he faults the émigrés for their mistaken belief that the revolutionary armies had been seriously weakened by the loss of aristocratic officers: “It was yet to be learned how soon such situations





can be filled up, from the zeal and talent always found among the lower classes, when critical circumstances offer a reward to ambition” (LN 1: 290). Paul Keen’s remarks on the intersection of two different historical developments—“the political turmoil of the 1790s and the broader hegemonic shift towards the meritocratic bias of the professional classes”—help to explain the contradictions in Scott’s ideology: even conservative writers who were “stridently opposed to the 1790s campaign for political reform, were none the less part of a more gradual reform movement which simultaneously rejected the political struggle for reform and valorized individual productivity in opposition to the perceived idleness of aristocratic privilege” (10). With Scott, the advocacy of intrinsic worth runs counter to elitist contempt in his conception of the crowd, a conception developed in response to the French Revolution and a related tradition of British radicalism. Although Scott emphasizes the orderliness of the Edinburgh crowd in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, another note enters the narrative when the fire at the Tolbooth gate illuminates “the ferocious faces and wild gestures of the rioters” (HM 55). This aspect of savagery recurs in the figure of the “supposed female” who acts as captain of the crowd and whose features “were disguised apparently with red paint and soot, like an Indian going to battle” (125).12 At moments such as these Scott’s highly disciplined Edinburgh crowd is not very different from the savage procession of Frenchwomen in Burke. The name Wildfire, with its connotations of savagery and drunken passion, is an appropriate one for the leader of a bloody mob. The explicit source for the name diverts the reader, it is true, from the figure of the native American: I am Queen of the Wake, and I’m Lady of May, And I lead the blithe ring around the May-pole to-day: The wild-fire that flashes so fair and so free Was never so bright, or so bonnie as me. (HM 278)

This verse, part of Madge Wildfire’s favorite song, retains the connotations of passion and madness in the name Wildfire, as well as suggesting an alternative source of authority, a “Queen” of the popular festivities associated with parish wakes and May-Day. Scott’s use of the American “savage” as an image for violent vengeance and the absence of human sympathy becomes more complex in the light of the comparison, familiar in Scottish Enlightenment thought, between Amerindian tribal organization and the stage of society represented by the Highland clans.



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The appropriateness of Robertson’s disguise, then, lies partly in the traditional symbolism of women’s clothes and partly in the savage aspect of his blackened and painted face, a savagery associated phylogenetically with a tribal stage of social organization and primitive vengefulness, and ontogenetically, perhaps, with the particular details of Staunton’s inheritance from his mother. Like Matthew Lewis, many of the characters in The Monk, and Ferdinando Falkland in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, George Staunton has West Indian connections. In depicting the dissolute Staunton, Scott may also have thought of Daniel, the brother he had effectively disowned. According to Lockhart, Daniel Scott dishonored himself in Jamaica by his failure to be sufficiently forceful in disciplining slaves: “Being employed in some service against a refractory or insurgent body of negroes, he had exhibited a lamentable deficiency of spirit and conduct” (Life 3: 174). Staunton, who was born to “the heiress of a wealthy planter,” became ungovernable when he spent “his early youth . . . in the society of negro slaves, whose study it was to gratify his every caprice” (HM 314, 315). Because of this unfortunate heritage and lack of discipline, he early develops “the purse-proud insolence of the Creole” and a “taste for low society” (315). Thus, when Robertson/Staunton disguises himself with blackened cork (155) in the low society of the Edinburgh rabble, he plays at rebellion in blackface. As with Staunton’s disguise, a separation of speech or action from the natural sentiments of the heart can occur through religious fanaticism, passion, and madness. A gulf may also open between the inner self and external behavior through the submerging of the individual conscience/consciousness in collective action. Even more clearly than in his fictional representation of the Porteous riots, Scott makes this point in his historical account of the French Revolution, when he engages in crowd psychology: [M]en collected in crowds, and influenced with a sense of wrongs, whether real or imaginary, are acted upon by the enthusiasm of the moment; and are besides in a state of such general and undistinguishing fury, that they adopt, by joining in the clamours and general shouts, deeds of which they hardly witness the import, and which perhaps not one of the assembled multitude out of a thousand would countenance, were that import distinctly felt and known. (LN 2: 292–93)

Scott’s apology for the French people depends on a condemnation of collective action, and on the conviction that individual moral responsibility would be compromised were the early modern crowd





to survive. Since conscience is an individual possession, whose operations are obstructed by the “enthusiasm” and “undistinguishing fury” of crowds, the project of individualization and the crusade for moral reform are one and the same. Still, Scott is apparently fascinated by those whose rebellion is prompted by nothing more than passion. That Robertson/Staunton is driven by passion suggests another reason why his disguise as a woman may be appropriate: women’s passions were reputed to be dominant over reason and conscience. Since he is not ruled by conscience, for him the voice can be readily separated from the heart, as becomes apparent when he accuses Jeanie Deans of letting her sister die, “rather than bestow the breath of your mouth and the sound of your voice to save her” (HM 141)—that is to say, by perjuring herself. This willingness to separate inside from outside reflects on Robertson/Staunton’s disguises and theatricality. The reader is not surprised to learn that Staunton acted on the stage at “Lockington wake,” or that he models his behavior on that of a dramatic character—John Gay’s Macheath (HM 278, 301). In the light of my argument about the significance of cross-dressing and blackface in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the richer allusion is to Gay’s Polly (1729) than to The Beggar’s Opera (1728), since in the Caribbean setting of the later play Macheath disguises himself as a black man and leads a rebellion of pirates and escaped slaves, while Polly Peachum dresses in boys’ clothing and assumes the role of female soldier. Indeed, George Staunton tells Jeanie Deans that his plan, in the event that he escaped hanging for the murder of Porteous, had been to marry Effie Deans and, like Macheath, “go over to the West Indies” (HM 301). Unlike the theatrical Staunton, Jeanie Deans cannot dissimulate: she is “truth itself” (HM 439). For her, the heart and soul, and not mere sound, are conveyed by the voice. It is because the voice comes from the heart that it has the capacity to arouse sympathy in the hearts of others. Hence she explains to Butler the insufficiency of a letter to the Duke of Argyle in obtaining a pardon for Effie Deans: “[B]ut writing winna do it—a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and beseech, as the human voice can do to the human heart. A letter’s like the music that the leddies have for their spinets—naething but black scores, compared to the same tune played or sung. It’s word of mouth maun do’t, or naething, Reuben” (246). The voice works better than writing, since the self is present in the voice, and since feeling is conveyed and pathos created not by words but by tones— the aspect of spoken communication that Julia Kristeva terms the “semiotic” or “poetic.” For Scott, recourse to this poetic dimension



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of language makes Jeanie’s speech as affecting as “the notes of some of her native songs” (338). Though she would not “bestow the breath of her mouth” by perjuring herself in the Edinburgh courtroom, Jeanie’s reliance on the authority of the inner voice and her refusal to allow a separation between her voice and her heart succeed in saving her sister’s life. In her opposition to Staunton’s theatricality and her insistence on linguistic transparency, Jeanie, according to James Kerr, “is the embodiment of anti-fiction” (75). But the novel contradicts this privileging of speech over writing and of principle over policy in several ways.13 Jeanie’s journey is facilitated by the written “pass” she receives from the turnkey and former denizen of the criminal underworld, James Ratcliffe; she finds her way to her kinswoman’s shop in London thanks to a letter of introduction from the landlady of the Seven Stars at York; her access to the Duke of Argyle or at least to his active assistance is made possible by the written notice of the house of Argyle’s indebtedness to the Butler family; her journey requires her to make use of her pen more than ever before in her life; and the Queen grants her suit perhaps for political reasons as much as out of sympathy. That is to say, Jeanie’s principles lead to a happy outcome only by means of the Queen’s policy, and her word of mouth is made possible by and leads to a series of written texts. Moreover, if Scott affects the reader’s heart, as he does in the interviews of Jeanie Deans with Argyle and the Queen, the existence of his own novel contradicts his heroine’s depreciation of black scores. A man’s writing, it seems, can have the same emotional power as the tones of a woman’s voice. The realm of oral communication is aligned with popular ritual: just as Scott retreats from his ambivalent approval of the crowd, so too the emotional appeal of his own writing is a mark of his appropriation of the power of oral culture in the interest of creating a new readership of autonomous individuals. According to Penny Fielding, in the Waverley Novels, “The oral, as the territory of the irrational and the illegitimate, is frequently associated with the dangerously female”; nonetheless, Scott has a “long, complex, and often ambivalent relationship with the oral,” as a realm that is at times devalued and at other times idealized (27). In emphasizing Jeanie Deans’s increasing reliance on writing, Scott reveals the world of face-to-face oral communication—however much it may be ethically superior to writing—to be already an inaccessible ideal. The anonymity that characterizes the crowded metropolis to which Jeanie has traveled suggests that identity can no longer be guaranteed by face-to-face recognition; with increasing urbanization, textual evidence is required.





Scott’s own literary career recapitulates a shift from orality to literacy: from the collecting of oral ballads, to the composition of long poetic romances celebrating Scottish landscapes and liberty, to the socially and ethically dubious activity of novel-writing. In this shift from the living voice to black scores, Scott’s fear that something essentially human has been lost appears in his presentation of authorship as an increasingly mechanical activity. Of course, even the publication of oral ballads entailed an appropriation and transformation, as well as celebration and preservation, of traditional culture. Margaret Hogg, the mother of pastoral poet and Gothic novelist James Hogg, told Scott that he had ruined ballads by printing them: “They were made for singin’ an’ no for readin’; but ye hae broke the charm noo, an’ they’ll never be sung mair” (qtd. in Edgar Johnson 1: 192). In a jesting reference to the profitability of the Waverley Novels, Scott compares his authorship to counterfeiting, a treasonable production of false representations: “I am afraid the people will take me up for coining. Indeed these novels while their attractions last are something like it” (Letters 1: 522). In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the phrase used for the novelist’s art is “the coinage of his brain” (HM 15). Scott later equates “works of fiction” with “Cursed Lies” (Journal 333). One of the main arguments in his “Essay on Romance” (1822) involves the social status of the minstrels who composed metrical romances. Poets probably possessed a high rank in early civilizations, “But . . . when the classes of society come to assume their usual gradation with respect to each other, the rank of professional poets is uniformly found to sink gradually in the scale, along with that of all others whose trade it is to contribute to mere amusement” (Scott, Essays 82). Throughout his career, he tended to depict himself as a kind of authorial machine—an automaton or turnspit.14 Scott is troubled by the lower moral status of anonymous fictionwriting to speaking in one’s own name and from one’s own heart. He reflects on the problem of disguise by establishing a parallel between himself and George Robertson, between a man who attains popular authority by dressing in woman’s clothes and an author who, under the guise of anonymity, appropriates and critiques popular culture by writing (at times) in the first person as a woman.15 On her journey through England, Jeanie Deans finds it necessary to adopt the mode of “literary composition” (HM 250), and Scott includes five of her ill-spelt letters. Here Scott, like Samuel Richardson before him, adopts the female epistolary voice. Jeanie Deans’s letters within the work serve as a tacit acknowledgment of the letter from Helen Goldie, which provided Scott with the story of Helen Walker’s journey to London to obtain a pardon



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for her sister. However, if later (in the 1830 Introduction) Scott explicitly acknowledges the female origin of his novel, he also puts women’s writing in its place, since he surely believed that he had improved on Goldie’s simple and natural narrative.16 No fewer than three times in the fourth volume of the novel, Scott insists that Jeanie Deans is “nae great pen-woman” (352, 433, 452).17 Similarly, the author apologizes for his heroine’s orthography. Her poor spelling is only one sign of the simplicity that—along with good sense, directness, a deference to her father and her social superiors, and the scientific curiosity of a traveler—confers value on her writing. Scott contrasts to Jeanie’s letters those written by the fallen woman—Jeanie’s sister, Effie. The first of these “was miserably ill written and spelled” but nonetheless contained “something to praise as well as much to blame” (HM 392). The letter is marked by simplicity, humility, and self-denial. The orthography of Effie’s second letter, however, requires no apology: “The manuscript was a fair Italian hand, though something stiff and constrained—the spelling and the diction that of a person who had been accustomed to read good composition and mix in good society” (417). Along with correct spelling and polished style, however, have come the loss of simplicity and the potential indeterminacy of interpretation. Even so candid an interpreter as Jeanie recognizes that the social and material advantages of those like her sister must be defended by “the outworks and bulwarks of fiction and falsehood” (422). The letter itself is a confession by Effie that her life has become “a tissue of deceit and lies” (418). In Scott’s contrast between Jeanie’s and Effie’s letters, there is an effort of containment of the female voice in literature.18 In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott approves of female attempts at literary composition only if he can apologize for their literary inadequacies. Once female writing attains stylistic and orthographic equality with the writing of men it has already become morally suspect. It is not simply that Scott is threatened when a woman’s writing approaches his own in polish; rather, he is troubled by the degree to which his own writing is suspect because it participates in artifice and mere amusement. His negative evaluation of Effie’s letter to her sister is not just depreciation of woman’s writing—the moral inadequacy of which becomes evident as soon as stylistic inadequacy has been corrected—but an attempt to eliminate from his own literary endeavors the threats to respectable masculinity. The Heart of Mid-Lothian is a heroine-centered text that critiques women’s writing and associates the male author of fiction with a dangerously feminine sphere.19 As if to confirm the author’s gender trouble, Captain Clutterbuck’s first sight of the veiled figure of





the Author of Waverley, in the Introductory Epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel, makes him think that Spenser’s verses might apply: “Whether she man or woman inly were, / That could not any creature well descry” (FN 5). When Sharpitlaw speaks of George Robertson’s “sufficient motive for taking this crazy creature’s dress and name,” he would seem to refer primarily to the parallel between the conspirator’s insubordination to the state and the madwoman’s insubordination to reason. Like disguise, madness in this novel involves a separation of speech or action from inner intentions or feelings. Madge is surprised that she is able to speak so many good words to Jeanie and so few in the presence of her mother: “it is no that I dinna think on them—and whiles they are just at my tongue’s end, but then comes the Devil, and brushes my lips with his black wing, and lays his broad black loof on my mouth—for a black loof it is, Jeanie—and sweeps away a’ my gude thoughts, and dits up my gude words” (HM 274). The devil is the name for that which intervenes between thought and speech, intention and deed. The blackness of the devil’s wing and hand is the blackness of death, and it loses some of its power in the presence of Jeanie’s pure conscience. It is “naething but black scores” compared to Jeanie’s voice. (The diabolical associations of writing evoke the printer’s devil, blackened with ink.) Like the madwoman’s speech, Scott’s novel-writing is subject to diabolical wandering—subject, as Scott would later put it, to the “dæmon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose” (FN 10). The blackened faces of the disguised rioters participate as well in the blackness of writing. In a phonocentric novel like The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott’s ambivalence toward literature leads him to view writing as itself diabolical. For Scott, conscience or the voice of nature is aligned with proper familial ties. As Freud observes, “what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as a watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice)” (14: 96). Illicit passions, madness, disguise, and riotous insubordination are, on the contrary, opposed equally to conscience and to domesticity. In disguising himself first as Robertson and then as Madge Wildfire, George Staunton denies first his ancestral identity and then his proper sexual identity. Besides the tradition of carnivalesque cross-dressing, there is another level of appropriateness in taking on the clothes of not just any woman but of Madge Wildfire in particular; for, like Madge, Staunton is a “true” child of Margaret Murdockson, who was his wet-nurse. Staunton



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recognizes that he is properly Murdockson’s son, since it was from her breast that he imbibed the “propensity to vices that were strangers in my own family” (HM 297). If woman is a symbol for fertility and nurturing in Scott, that symbolism has been stripped of its usual positive connotations. In Kristeva’s terms, the male subject “abjects” woman, when he comes to regard her as the breeding ground for vice—for illicit sexuality, criminality, riot, and treason. Scott depicts Margaret Murdockson and her insane daughter as a demonic parody of the proper, pious family. Margaret Murdockson is called “mother Blood” (HM 261) by her criminal associates, in reference either to the infants she has brought to the grave or to the thieves she has brought to the gallows. “Moll Blood,” according to Scott’s gloss, is argot for “The Gallows” (189n.). Milk and blood, fertility and mortality, domesticity and witchcraft, meet in the figure of the horrific mother. On her way to England, Jeanie Deans is abducted and brought to a barn where “Mother Blood” is preparing the “family” dinner, “the very picture of Hecate at her infernal rites” (263). Madge’s insanity, itself the product of illicit sexuality and infanticide, points parodically to its antidote—the pious Christian family. The private, domestic sphere is a space of morality, and one more appropriate to women than the public sphere of literature, or, self-evidently, than the criminal subcultures in which public women are apt to find themselves. The sphere of domesticity is the antidote both for Madge’s insanity and for the popular disturbances led by the man who dresses in her clothes. Although Scott believes that conscience and the feelings of natural affection and sympathy are stifled by vice, his novel includes no character in whom feeling has been completely extinguished. Even Margaret Murdockson has feelings of humanity or maternity, though she sees it as a sign of weakness that she cannot bring herself to impeach Robertson, but must attack him instead through Effie Deans: “he was the first bairn I ever nurst—ill I had been—and man can never ken what woman feels for the bairn she has held first to her bosom” (HM 269). In describing the mechanism of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a similarly gender-based limitation of the power of imagination occurred to Adam Smith: “A man may sympathize with a woman in child-bed; though it is impossible that he should conceive himself as suffering her pains in his own proper person and character” (317). (When Erasmus Darwin discusses “incomplete” dreams, those in which we retain some consciousness of our identity, he notes that transgendered imaginative projection is rare: “for a lady seldom dreams, that she is a soldier; nor





a man, that he is brought to bed” [Zoonomia 208].) In Smith’s theory of sympathy, there is always a gap between the emotion felt by the original sufferer and its mimetic reproduction in the compassionate spectator. While these two distinct sentiments “will never be unisons, they may be concords” (TMS 22). When sexual difference makes the distinction between unisons and concords so audible that men cannot choose but hear, they may be led to adopt a vain imitation of female generativity in the couvade. The Oxford English Dictionary provides this definition of couvade: A term applied by some writers to the ‘man-childbed’ attributed to some uncivilized or primitive races, and extended to comprehend a series of customs according to which, on the birth of a child, the father performs acts or simulates states natural or proper to the mother, or abstains for a time from certain foods or actions, as if he were physically affected by the birth.

When the simulated state, the “as if” of imaginative identification, impresses itself so irresistibly, it exposes not only the limits of sympathy but also male anxieties about access to the deepest sources of creativity. This particular limitation of the imagination is crucial, as I shall show in chapter 5, for understanding William Godwin’s epistolary relations with the pregnant Mary Wollstonecraft. The limitations of sympathy, however, manifest themselves in a way even more central to Scott’s purposes as a novelist—in the matter of nationality instead of sex. Placing culture above politics in maintaining that changes in hearts and minds are more important than legislation—such as the Acts of Union between England and Scotland in 1707 or between Britain and Ireland in 1800—Scott seeks to imitate Edgeworth in writing novels that would present the people of one nation “to those of the sister kingdom, in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles” (Scott, Waverley 523). In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, following the moving scenes of a Scottish nobleman’s kind treatment of a country girl, Scott directly addresses his English reader: “Perhaps one ought to be actually a Scotchman to conceive how ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situation, they feel their mutual connexion with each other as natives of the same country” (HM 346). Despite Scott’s speculation that understanding may not cross national boundaries, the English reader is inclined to look favorably on Scottish national prejudice after so moving an instance of it. The power of nation and kindred among



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the Scots appeals to Scott precisely because it reveals the common interests that transcend class boundaries, at the historical moment when class is becoming an ineluctable fact. Scott uses the Scottish example to criticize the more rigid class distinctions south of the border and the English aristocracy’s abdication from its paternalistic responsibilities. George Staunton figures as the paradigmatic English gentleman who fails to conduct himself in accordance with his rank— seducing a servant girl in the family, seducing and then marrying a shop-woman, and associating with low and criminal society out of a spirit of adventure. However, in a move strangely contrary to the sympathy he hopes to create for the Scots, Scott criticizes Staunton for nothing so much as for imaginatively identifying himself with the Scottish people, by becoming “Robertson.” Scott finds masquerading as a Scot even more reprehensible than transvestism. The same transformation of Staunton into Robertson, by which Scott fictionalizes the Porteous riots, makes his novel both less “popular” and less Scottish, for the leader of the disciplined Edinburgh crowd proves to be an English gentleman in drag. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott situates the disguise of a man in woman’s clothing to lead a challenge against legitimate authority in the context of a narrative deeply concerned with the education, morality, and proper authority of women. He addresses the question of female authority most directly through the figure of George II’s queen. If the major representative of “popular” authority in the novel is a man dressed in the clothes of the “Queen of the Wake,” who looks “gawsie and grand . . . like ony queen in the land,” the main representative of “legitimate” authority is Queen Caroline—“an accomplished woman” who “possessed the masculine soul of the other sex” (HM 278, 150, 331). But both types of authority are tainted in this novel by illicit sexuality and disguise. To maintain her power the Queen must disguise her inner feelings under the mask of decorum, whereas Robertson must disguise his external appearance under soot, red paint, and women’s dress. The disguise of female dress for the captain of the Porteous rioters is not a mere historical fact drawn by Scott from the specific source materials on the riots, from his general knowledge about popular disturbances, or through a deliberate analogy to the French Revolutionary crowd. Scott shows how female disguise is one of the signs of the ritual nature of the crowd’s activity. Male cross-dressing signifies popular authority, which, along with the moral economy, smuggling, localism, Jacobitism, dueling, and the hereditable jurisdictions, has given way before the extension of the central government authority in London in





a united Great Britain. The new regime enshrines the principle of individual legal and moral responsibility, and in doing so it weakens most forms of collectivity—not only the crowd but even, in one respect, the countervailing institution of the family. Reuben Butler voices the modern position in arguing that Effie Deans’s guilt is all her own, whereas Jeanie Deans believes that her sister’s stain will “stick to us, and to our bairns, and to their very bairns’ bairns” (HM 106)—that is to say, to the third generation. If Jeanie Deans has the Bible in mind, Scott may also be thinking of the quotation from Exodus 20: 5 in the Preface to the first edition of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto: “I could wish he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this; that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation” (5). That is to say, Jeanie in this instance represents the oral, popular, and Gothic world we have lost. But at the same time as Scott betrays his nostalgia for that world, indulging even in a populist sympathy with the nationalistic feelings of the Edinburgh crowd, he shows how their actions and especially those of their captain are implicated in a savage cycle of vengeance. Because they act in a crowd rather than as morally accountable individuals, the people have authorized actions that conscience would have disallowed. Still, the monarchy has been equally to blame because of its unnecessary exertions of authority and its own susceptibility to revenge. Both popular authority and legitimate authority, tainted as they are by the passions of revenge and lust, ought to yield to the authority of conscience. This moral authority is associated in particular with sincere speech and opposed to disguise and punctilious decorum. The voice of conscience, in any event, cannot be supreme in the world of writing. In the presence of the politician Queen Caroline, Jeanie’s speech must be made decorous, restrained by the Duke of Argyle’s language of gesture—his putting his hand to his cravat as a warning when Jeanie says inappropriate things (HM 328). On the other hand, Argyle, given his protestant and sentimental phonocentrism, refuses to provide Jeanie with a text to memorize, since “that would be like reading a sermon you know, which we good presbyterians think has less unction than when spoken without book” (329). Even though David Deans proudly exclaims in the Edinburgh courtroom that “nae man has putten words into her mouth,” Jeanie Deans is subsequently reduced by analogy to the condition of the Duke of Argyle’s spaniel (210, 339). A man of great power who exercises control over a woman’s language, Argyle is a stand-in for the romance author; even the distribution of rewards to the virtuous (poetic justice in the novel)



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is accomplished “by the rod of the same benevolent enchanter” (380). Though benevolent, the Duke of Argyle is a figure of the author as male ventriloquist, the very position that Scott occupies in the letters of Jeanie and Effie Deans. Moreover, the novelist Scott must address his moral appeal to the people through the medium of writing, thereby affirming two kinds of power he elsewhere denies: the authority of the people and the emotional power of writing or “black scores.” Scott’s Tory paternalism and the authorship of the “Wizard of the North” come together in magic. Six months after the publication of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott compares himself as the laird of Abbotsford to the noble head of his family—Charles, Duke of Buccleuch. The building of Abbotsford, made possible by the sales of the Waverley Novels, makes Scott a patron of Scottish laborers, “accomplishing all my magical transformations by the arms and legs of the . . . genii conjured up to my aid at eighteenpence a day” (Letters 5: 287–88). Scott proceeds, through his narrative, to individualize the anonymous and communal ritual of female disguise. Through this individualizing process Scott works out other meanings of female disguise in their relation to popular, legitimate, and moral authority. However, in the case of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the individualizing process is also a fictionalizing one, itself involved in the problematic of disguise. Although the characters of Robertson, Madge Wildfire, Effie Deans, and Margaret Murdockson are not based on the documentary sources for the Porteous riots, they serve other functions than those of romanticizing or enlivening history, of exploring psychology and the effects of education, and of showing how human beings are shaped, but not wholly determined, by historical circumstances. Through his characters and their relationships, Scott comprehensively analyzes the symbolic significance of a male rioter’s use of female dress. The source of Robertson’s disguise is particularized so that it becomes especially well suited to convey what Scott sees as the role of passion and madness in rebellion. Robertson’s sexual misconduct has been such that his donning of female dress is not wholly without connotations of communal shame-punishment, though here only Robertson himself (and the community of readers) could be aware of this expiatory function of the disguise. At the same time, female dress might be a sign differentiating the “popular” participants from the “legitimate” authorities. Female dress in this case would point toward more positive values than those perceived to be promoted by the state. Central among these values would be fertility, though the women most closely associated with Robertson are sterile and immoral, and though female generativity produces male anxiety. The illicit sexuality of these women and of





Robertson relates his disguise to the petty treason of the wife against the husband’s authority. Explication of the significance of tranvestism in rebellion forms part of Scott’s description of the role of women in his society: their authority, their education, and the constraints on their behavior. Of course, Scott not only describes the role of women but also provides models for what he thinks it ought to be, by prescribing conscience, sympathy, and domesticity. But the patriarchal values that underlie Scott’s moral prescriptions are neither stable nor impregnable, for when, in the letters of Jeanie and Effie Deans, Scott adopts the female voice in order to criticize women’s writing, his own fiction does not emerge unscathed. Scott’s “female impersonation” and his implication within the feminized world of law and commercial publishing disable monological authorship, just as Robertson’s adoption of women’s clothes entails accepting the risk that woman’s will or woman’s liberty may partly escape from male appropriation. While I have concentrated in this chapter on the significance of women’s clothing in popular protest, Scott’s characters in blackface cannot be wholly accounted for by the ready availability of soot for use in disguise. When George Robertson/Staunton blackens his face, there are overtones of the “black scores” of writing, of moral turpitude, and of “going native.” In the next chapter, I shall address in greater detail the connections between gender and race.



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G o t h ic P rope rt i es: M at t h e w L e w is’s T H E M O N K a n d J O U R N A L O F A WE ST I N DI A PROPR I ET OR

T

he analogy between women and slaves has figured in feminist discourse from the early modern period to the present. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, suffering like Matthew Lewis’s Agnes de Medina amidst “the vapours of a dungeon,” fears that resistance may be pointless: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (Wollstonecraft 1: 88).1 Outlining a theory of crowd psychology dependent on the idea of repression, Wollstonecraft draws an analogy to explain why women, subjected to arbitrary force, take their diversions to extremes: “Slaves and mobs have always indulged themselves in the same excesses, when once they broke loose from authority” (5: 152).2 The woman/slave analogy implies that the system of patriarchal power is a vestige of a tyrannical old regime in which dominance depended on physical coercion. The analogy functions rhetorically to endorse reforms that, in relations between the sexes, would include companionate marriage and the egalitarian family. In the context of the persistent analogy between women and slaves, an examination of Matthew Lewis’s relations with his Jamaican slaves will provide a gloss on both sexual hierarchy and elite suppression of popular culture in his early novel, The Monk (1796), even though it was written many years before he himself became a slaveholder. In this chapter I argue that Lewis was conscious of the moral problems both of authorship of a novel of terror about the violent silencing of the female voice, and of authority exerted over men and women who



Chapter 3


are deprived of their liberty and reduced to chattel. At the same time, in The Monk, Lewis is also critical of the reforms that are establishing a new, more humane, hegemonic regime supposedly based on the consent of the governed. Once he has acquired the material interests of a slaveholder, he attempts to implement the same kind of reforms whose limitations he earlier exposed in his Gothic novel. Lewis analyzes and critiques in advance the kind of power that eschews physical coercion in order to rely instead on the psychological means of surveillance and the instituting of conscience. As the writer of a sometimes sadistic Gothic novel and as the owner of nearly six hundred slaves in Jamaica, Lewis would seem to be a prime example of a misogynistic male author and a tyrannical white authority. Yet The Monk provides a critique of the property men have in women, while his Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834; composed 1815–18) poignantly betrays misgivings about the property plantocrats had in slaves. Lewis’s early rebellions against propriety, his habitual self-depreciatory humor, and his literary allusions and plagiarisms serve to call into question the autonomy and propriety of the authorial self. While never a simple apologist for the status quo, Lewis implies by his actions that it ought to be maintained, at the same time as his writing betrays deeply felt sympathies to the contrary. Hence, in his relations with his parents, Lewis repudiates the authorial voice of his mother, whom he loves, in favor of the reputation of his father, from whom he is alienated. Likewise, he states that the abolition of slavery will produce more harm than good, even while he candidly depicts the brutalization suffered by slaves and the humiliation experienced by a “humane” slaveholder. The changes that Lewis institutes on his Jamaican plantations derive, in large part, from the ideas of reformers who sought to eliminate the danger of crowds and to treat criminals by psychological means rather than by corporal punishment and theatrical display. Lewis formed his ideas on preventing rebellion among his slaves in response to English and French events of the late eighteenth century. Edward Long, in his 1774 History of Jamaica (a work Lewis read), compares the management of plantation slaves to the political control of the English mob: “An overseer . . . , like a premier minister, must always expect to meet with a faction, ready to oppose his administration, right or wrong; unless he will give the reins out of his hands, and suffer the mobility to have things their own way” (405). In the previous chapter, I showed how Edmund Burke compared French Revolutionary crowds to “American savages” in ferocity and bloodthirstiness. Burke adopts a second analogy for the French people given their decision to found



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a new constitution on first principles, thereby denying the ancestral traditions of virtue and independence that would have prepared them for liberty. The only way to justify the violence of the revolutionary mobs would be to consider the French people “as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage,” abusing their new and unaccustomed liberty (Burke, Reflections 123). Lewis’s presentation of crowd violence in his 1796 novel is shaped by sometimes racialized attitudes, like those of Long and Burke, toward European mobs or the “swinish multitude.” The strategies devised for preventing European crime and controlling European crowds inspire Lewis’s new techniques of plantation management. Some of these reforms are the institutional ones that were designed to compensate for the loss of face-to-face controls. At the same time, however, Lewis tries to implement a paternalistic system, having recognized, as the slaveholders of the American Old South did and his fellow West Indian planters largely did not, that such a system would be necessary for the continuance of slavery. This contradiction between the establishment of new institutions and nostalgia for seigneurial relationships characterizes many late eighteenthcentury social reformers. The position of Lewis and other Gothic novelists amidst such ideological contradictions may have permitted them to be critical both of the old regime of dungeons, tortures, and religious superstitions, and of the new moral and penal techniques that sought to alter minds and souls. Lewis’s novel presents a critique of the very psychological means that he would afterward, at the time of writing his journal, seem to have accepted. In The Monk, tyrannical parents and prioresses, as well as monastic rapists, are not satisfied with ruling through force and theater: they insist on ventriloquizing consent to their authority. Their power derives less from their high positions in a traditional hierarchy than from their willingness to go underground, by using new techniques of surveillance. Like other sentimental and Gothic novels, The Monk presents surveillance as a diabolical parody of imaginative sympathy, but Lewis goes further and interrogates the very distinction between sympathy and surveillance. His novel, then, serves to discredit in advance the “humanitarian” reforms recounted in his journal. In the very period in which novelists themselves conventionally engage in criticism of fiction, the genre of the novel can provide criticism of both residual and emergent modes of social order. This split between the popular appeal and the critical function of the novel is analogous to another division in Lewis’s novel and career. How does an enlightened member of the English elite, educated at



M a t t h e w L e w i s ’s G o t h i c P r o p e r t i e s


Westminster and Oxford, deal with the superstitions and other manifestations of popular culture enshrined in his famous novel and his later journal? Evidence for the clash between popular culture and enlightened values can be found in the very first chapter of The Monk, a chapter that begins with Antonia’s terror at the crowd assembled to hear Ambrosio preach and that ends with the crowd gathered around a gypsy fortune-teller in the streets. The chapter begins with the fashionable crowd assembled for the officially sanctioned theatricality of an established church and ends with a figure for the popular culture that the Gothic novelist appropriates even though many believe it ought to be officially suppressed. As Leonella Dalfa says, when she and her niece Antonia are prevented by the crowd from entering their lodgings, “If I were King of Spain, every one of [these vagabonds] should be burnt alive, who was found in my dominions after the next three weeks” (M 36). The gypsy’s rhyming prognostications and the song in which she advertises the potions that she sells represent the eruptions of popular culture into Lewis’s text. If the established Roman Catholic Church and fortune-telling are equally superstitious from the perspective of Lewis’s audience of enlightened Protestants, the novel clearly privileges the gypsy and her crowd, since the fortunes she tells accurately predict the fate of Antonia, while enunciating the misogynistic authorial critique of Leonella. In the views of the vulgar comic butt Leonella on the appropriate punishment of gypsies, Lewis parodies an extremist version of the suppression of popular culture. If a garrulous woman is an easy target, so too are the despotic punishments resorted to by Spanish kings. However, the poet John Clare—who sympathizes with outsiders, wanderers, popular culture, and resistance to property boundaries— finds similarly genocidal attitudes to gypsies in an English Justice of the Peace, whom he quotes: “This atrosious tribe of wandering vagabonds ought to be made outlaws in every civilizd kingdom and exterminated from the face of the earth” (69). Moreover, the son of a slaveholder would have known that the punishment of burning alive remained a means of terrorizing rebellious slaves in the British West Indies. In his study of “spectacular violence” in the Romantic period, Ian Haywood raises the possibility that “the mangled slave body functioned as a basic archetype for all situations of extreme cruelty, and in this sense slavery could be an important source for the Gothic novel” (58). Indeed, Lewis insists on a racialized popular culture in the figure of the gypsy fortune-teller when he terms her this “swarthy Prophetess” (M 37). Lewis cannot wholly maintain the position of unthreatened and amused detachment in his presentation



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“A Sort of Half-Man”: Disguise, Disgust, and Dismemberment Just as Gothic novelists conventionally justify supernatural fiction by its tendency to expand the imagination, so the characters within these same novels typically justify disguise by its tendency to permit an increase of knowledge or an amorous evasion of tyrannical authority. Thus, in Lewis’s The Monk, Matilda explains that she has assumed the transvestite disguise of the novice monk Rosario in the service of her platonic love for Ambrosio. Immediately after Ambrosio and Matilda’s love has become physical, Ambrosio grows weary of his mistress, whom he continues to seek out only to satisfy his lust, “But when the moment of passion was over, He quitted her with disgust.” Lewis explains Ambrosio’s “disgust” at the women he has seduced or raped in terms of the conventional difference between male and female reactions to sexual relations: “Possession, which cloys Man, only increases the affection of Woman” (M 235). Lewis’s use of the euphemism “possession” to refer to sexual intercourse creates a false parallel between the sexes; for, in the conventional active-passive sexual roles, men would be cloyed by possessing women, whereas the affection of women would grow after they have been possessed by men. Hence, male disgust would arise when men obtain property in another human being, by possessing what ought not to be owned. The possession of other human beings becomes a pressing ethical problem when, upon the elder Lewis’s death in 1812, the author of The Monk receives the bulk of his inheritance in the form of enslaved men, women, and children. In the context of growing criticism of tyrannical regimes of coercive dominance, the male lover in the patriarchal system, like the slaveowner with despotic authority, knows that his mastery is not voluntarily acknowledged since the wills of women and slaves have been denied. Explaining the tyrannical nature of such authority in the case of gender hierarchy, Wollstonecraft adopts once again the master/slave paradigm: women who are kept in ignorance in order to be more easily governed “may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent” (5: 68). Disgust, then, is produced within a system that operates through the tyrannical domination of others, whose “natural”



of the lower orders. It is in a less confidently ironic voice than usual that he recounts the destruction of the Convent of St. Clare in The Monk and the threats of slave rebellion in the Journal of a West India Proprietor.


rights to autonomy and integrity are being increasingly acknowledged throughout enlightened Europe. Perhaps, however, the disgust of a man arises less because he ought not to possess what he does, than because he discovers that he can never possess what he desires. In analyzing the phenomenon of the disgust of a man for the woman he has possessed, Freud remarks that a man’s “initial overvaluation of her when he is in love gives place to undervaluation after he has possessed her” (11: 186). Lewis and his contemporaries would have understood this process as one in which a woman becomes unfeminine once she has been eroticized both as desiring subject and as object of fulfilled desire. Lewis, however, disrupts gender hierarchy through a curious use of transvestism, by which Matilda in the guise of the boy Rosario is more “feminine” than she becomes once unmasked as female. As Markman Ellis puts it, once she is revealed to be a woman, Matilda “surpasses the sentimental construction of femininity which she obeyed as a man, as if her change was designed to expose the constructedness of gender identity” (87).3 This motif of gender fluidity serves as the hinge between the system of coercive patriarchal power and a new humane regime operating through policing and consent. At the same time as disguise in The Monk upsets traditional gender expectations, it serves as a technology of truth in two ways: first, by permitting the revelation of the desires that have been repressed and the merits that have been obscured by rigid social structures and, secondly, by placing others—especially women and members of the lower orders—under surveillance. Disguise enables both the expression of the true self and the accumulation of biographical knowledge about other individuals that can be used in their subjection. The Marquis de las Cisternas, the hero of Lewis’s subplot, claims a worthy motive when, prior to embarking on the Grand Tour, he disguises his social status instead of his sex: he wishes to be loved for his own essential worth and not for the artificial endowments of rank. Lewis recognizes the contradiction between power conferred by a high position in the social hierarchy and being loved for oneself. For Don Raymond, the path from artifice to essence lies through disguise, just as fiction claims to convey truth. A noble friend has advised him that disguise permits an aristocrat to gain knowledge of the lower orders and thereby enables him to promote a more stable social order through benevolence: [Y]our exalted birth would not permit your mixing with the lower classes of society, which will now be in your power, and from which, in my opinion, you will derive considerable benefit. . . . Examine the



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Lewis here revives the traditional motif of the disguised king, a motif that, according to Linda Colley, “became increasingly common in newspapers and broadsheets from the 1780s onwards” (233). If such stories at this time reveal George III’s unpretentious simplicity, Don Raymond’s attitude toward the lower orders resembles those of late eighteenth-century historians of popular antiquities and of Matthew Lewis himself. One eighteenth-century historian of traditional popular culture observes that “[t]he antiquities of the common people cannot be studied without acquiring some useful knowledge of mankind”—knowledge that may require, according to a later folklorist, the disguising of one’s social status to avoid a patronizing attitude: “Anything in the way of condescension, patronage or implied superiority will be a fatal barrier to success, and any display of wealth in dress or equipage should be avoided” (qtd. in A. W. Smith 241–42). The emphasis in The Monk is less on discovering popular attitudes so that aristocrats or monarchs may become better governors, and more on commemorating popular superstitions and recording the sources of popular disorder in the process of dispelling and suppressing them. In the Journal of a West India Proprietor, Lewis will combine anthropological description with techniques of social control. Whereas Don Raymond’s disguise as a mere private gentleman permits surveillance of the lower orders in the interests of humanitarianism, generally in Lewis’s novel instruments of surveillance are justified by erotic love instead of philanthropy. After Matilda has lost Ambrosio’s affections, he is nonetheless always present to her by means of the intelligence gathered by her “invisible Servants” and her magic mirror (M 270). Matilda achieves a union of souls through a diabolical parody of sympathetic communion with an absent lover. The sentimental striving toward a new form that makes writing and even language disappear in perfect wordless communication might result in an irrational proliferation of images, and, as crowd psychologists insist, “A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself immediately calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first” (Le Bon 45–46). In The Monk, once Matilda puts the magic mirror into Ambrosio’s hands, pornography proves to be the genre of its representations. What Ambrosio sees is the titillating scene of the heroine, Antonia, in her bath. If the novel as a genre is thought to be a mirror of human life and manners, the subgenre



manners and customs of the multitude: Enter into the Cottages; and by observing how the Vassals of Foreigners are treated, learn to diminish the burthens, and augment the comforts of your own. (M 96)


of the Gothic novel is well represented by a magic mirror. Since the mirror serves as a metaphor for the novel, Lewis extends the moral critique of Ambrosio’s voyeurism onto the voyeuristic tendencies of his own narrative. The male fantasies that appear in the magic mirror create a play of reflections designed to exclude proper reflection—that is to say, conscience. Hence, Lewis concludes the scene of Antonia’s bath by observing that Matilda “gave the Monk no time for reflection,” after giving Ambrosio access to the pornographic images that will ultimately lead to the rape/murder of Antonia (M 272). The magic mirror provides only a rapid and stimulating succession of images. That the danger of the diabolical mirror is meant as a trope for the seductions of novel reading would be suggested, for example, by Johann Adam Bergk’s 1799 comparison of indiscriminate reading to watching “events appear and disappear as in a magic mirror,” and by his argument that novels suppress the inner voice—cancelling the power of reflection (qtd. in Woodmansee 215, 205–6).4 Like Bergk, Lewis participates in a tradition of the critique of “popular” culture that extends from eighteenth-century romance to twentieth-first-century digital images, even while he imagines the crowd aesthetics of a new visual technology that promotes reception in a state of distraction. Although the devil’s party in The Monk possesses superior surveillance technology, the tactics of the virtuous characters are not wholly distinct. The Mother St. Ursula, friend and defender of the Prioress’s victim Agnes, obtains much of her information about monastic inhumanity when she is obliged to hide herself in Agnes’s cell, behind a “Curtain which veiled a large Crucifix” (M 353). This female figure of the enlightened reformer and Gothic novelist then tells a tale that “rend[s] the veil from Hypocrisy” (350), at the same time as she herself is implicated in veiling, superstition, and aural surveillance. Thus, like virtually all authorial figures in Gothic fiction, the Mother St. Ursula is morally compromised. She gains her intelligence through what she overhears from a hiding place, and when she delivers her indictment in a popular appeal, she incites a bloody riot, in which the Prioress is trampled to death and in which “popular justice” confounds “the innocent with the guilty” (356-57). The “indignation of the Mob” appears in the sound of voices, “so audibly testified” as almost to drown out the conclusion of the Mother St. Ursula’s tale (355). The fury of the mob appears in its abuse of the Prioress’s corpse, which “became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting” (356). Disgust—the word Lewis uses to describe Ambrosio’s feelings for the women he has possessed when “he rioted in joys” now



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serves to explain what the rioting crowd’s “impotent rage” does to its female victim (67, 356). Lewis draws an analogy between the Monk’s ungoverned passions and those of the crowd. Some years after writing The Monk, in order to dissuade his mother from publishing, Lewis explicitly attacked female authorship: “I hold, that a Woman has no business to be a public character, and that in the proportion that She acquires notoriety, She loses delicacy: I always consider a female Author as a sort of half-Man” (qtd. in Peck 220).5 Willing to go to any length to prevent her from becoming an author, Lewis reproaches his mother with the adultery she had been guilty of more than twenty years earlier: Those who alone know you by report, can only know that you formerly took a step in defiance of the declared principles of society (in taking which step, the more genius that you prove yourself to possess, the less excuseable will they think you) and that now you take another very bold step for any person but especially for a Woman, in declaring yours[elf] a candidate for public applause. (223)

Lewis can be cruel in preserving the paternal name from publicity, but he is cruel not only to his mother but also to himself, since he feels obliged to attack the parent he loves best, in the nominal interest of his father. This 1803 reference to Frances Maria Sewell Lewis’s elopement with her music master, by whom she had a child, has intriguing resonances with Lewis’s earlier novel. This female “candidate for public applause” might at first evoke the dangerous public speaking of the Mother St. Ursula, and this “sort of half-Man” might recall the “manliness” of the fallen woman Matilda (M 231). The story of Lewis’s mother and her music master also appears in displaced form in that of Agnes de Medina, a frail woman with a particular talent for music (130), who deserves sympathy for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Whatever Lewis’s attitude toward female authorship after the turn of the nineteenth century, his early work, including The Monk, reveals a fascination with the female narrative voice. Lewis might appear to present the classic case of an author who, in a sexually violent novel, betrays his gynophobia (by creating such characters as the Prioress) and his misogyny (through his denigration of Leonella’s speech, as well as his sadistic fantasies concerning Antonia’s fate). Here there would seem to be the paradigmatic instance of an author who adopts the female mask only to cancel woman in service of narcissism or homosocial relations.6 Indeed, Lewis’s first major biographer





provides some evidence for the author’s narcissism: “He had almost a passion for mirrors” (Baron-Wilson 1: 332). Lewis’s use of “female impersonation” in “The Effusions of Sensibility”—an adolescent attempt to parody a sentimental novel, which he identified as “the first literary attempt of a Young Lady of tender feelings”—might be situated in relation to the biographical anecdote about Lewis’s childhood transvestism, when he dressed in his mother’s jewels and clothes (2: 241; 1: 12). What his biographer presents as early evidence for Lewis’s aptitude for the theater might also be evidence for his desire to be like a woman. If he may be said to appropriate the “other,” he may also want to lose himself in another. In this view, Lewis’s love of mirrors is not so much evidence for narcissism as for his desire to create a play of reflections that would exclude proper reflection—his own reflection. One of the numerous anecdotes in the nineteenth-century Life of Lewis reveals the desire to efface (or deface) the self that coexists with petty vanity. Mary-Ann Finlason, who sailed to Jamaica with Lewis in 1817,7 gave this example of his conversation: He never represented himself in the best point of view; and, on one occasion, speaking of his own irritability and hastiness of temper, he gave an instance of it by saying, that having had a portrait of himself painted by an eminent artist in London, for a near female relative living abroad, and, in the following year, finding, though considered an excellent likeness, it had not been thought worth the purchase of a frame, he was so angry at seeing the little value set on his present, and the neglect of himself, that he went into the room where the unframed canvass was standing, and, taking a penknife from his pocket, cut out its eyes, and otherwise mutilated the features of his inoffensive secondself. (2: 202)

Lewis represents himself in a poor point of view by describing how he cut out the eyes of an artistic representation of himself from the best point of view (“an excellent likeness”). On his second voyage to the West Indies, Lewis, who knows that practitioners of obeah, if not voodoo, have reason to seek vengeance on him, strangely recollects an episode in which he poked, stabbed, and cut an effigy of himself. A female relative’s failure sufficiently to value Lewis prompts an act of upwardly displaced self-castration performed on a portrait. Just as he finds that a woman relative does not love him for himself, he provides evidence that he does not have power over self-representation with his slaves. On his first visit to Jamaica, “a self-taught genius, a negro Apelles,” drew Lewis’s picture (J 114). While Lewis mocks this



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Afro-Caribbean portrait for the absence of likeness, his slaves, attending to such superficial matters as “a very blue coat with very yellow buttons,” “consider the portrait as a striking resemblance” (115). According to Maureen Harkin, this portrait by the colonized artist “is a perfect instance of what [Homi] Bhabha describes as colonial mimicry’s way of disrupting, in the very moment of staging, colonial authority” (147). This portrait, too, suffered a kind of violence, when Lewis’s enslaved carpenter, John Fuller, “dropped the picture, and fractured the frame glass” (115). When the power of representation or of the gaze belongs to one’s subordinates (even to those reduced to property), there is a challenge to self-mastery and self-possession. Even the despotic power of the slaveowner does not result in absolute control. In the case of the portrait by the eminent London artist, the doubly displaced self-castration (the painting as mimetic equivalent of the self, the eye as symbolic equivalent of the phallus) near the end of Lewis’s life points back to his childhood cross-dressing and adolescent cross-gender narration. Lewis also adopts a female persona incidentally in his best-known work. In The Monk, Agnes de Medina, like the Mother St. Ursula, acts as an authorial figure—both in her facetious supernatural tale of the Bleeding Nun and in the interpolated narrative of her own sufferings. The latter first-person narrative is set off from the text by a title, “Conclusion of the History of Agnes de Medina” (M 402), and can be considered an instance of “female impersonation.” Although he does not distinguish Agnes’s language stylistically or orthographically from male language, in the way Scott distinguishes the letters of Jeanie and Effie Deans from his narrative voice in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Lewis does highlight, in this narrative from a woman’s point of view, specifically female sentiments— preeminently, maternal affection. This narrative in female dress, set off by its title from the novel’s moralizing authorial voice, ignores the truth-telling and fertility that, as Natalie Zemon Davis argues, woman and her clothing signify. Instead, Lewis places maternity under the rubric of mortality. Lewis situates the convergence of authorship and motherhood, authority and essential femaleness, in Agnes’s description of the birth and death of her child: “It came alive into the world; But I knew not how to treat it, or by what means to preserve its existence. . . . The want of proper attendance, my ignorance how to nurse it, the bitter cold of the dungeon, and the unwholesome air which inflated its lungs, terminated my sweet Babe’s short and painful existence” (M 412). This instance of horror would have been brought home to the feelings of Lewis’s readers, arousing both revulsion and pity. The “bitter cold”





and “unwholesome air” of Agnes’s Spanish dungeon recall the fatal horrors of many an English prison. A comparable instance is provided by John Howard’s description of the Bridewell at Folkingham in Lincolnshire: “[Y]ou go down by a trap-door in the floor seven steps into a horrid dungeon (10 feet square, 5½ feet high). . . . Yet a woman with a child at her breast was sent hither for a year and a day: the child died” (329–30). Howard and Lewis make similar points. Lewis creates horror by appealing to our revulsion at the despotic practices of old regime Spain. Howard assumes that his exposure of the vestiges of old regime cruelty in Britain will arouse the revulsion and guilt of his readers, prompting them to reformist action. The Gothic novel was not so safely distanced from the England of the eighteenth-century reader as many critics like to think. Like John Howard (and William Godwin), Lewis questions the smug confidence that Britain possesses the most humane and enlightened judicial, penal, and political systems in the world. In The Monk Lewis attacks the papist old regime in an explicit and partly chauvinist manner, focusing on monastic violence, sexual repression in the form of celibacy, and the inquisition in Spain. Precisely because it is less self-evident, his critique of new techniques of power and social control—surveillance, the strategic use of fiction and disguise to uncover truth, and the ventriloquizing of consent—forms the central object of my analysis in this chapter. While the conditions of Agnes’s dungeon are not unprecedented even in eighteenth-century England, her ignorance of how to nurse her child is unexpected—what one critic terms an “unconvincing ‘failure’ ” (Anne Williams 118). Perhaps this failure can be explained as a lapse in the imaginative sympathy of the male author for the woman he is impersonating. For a moment the dry male breast shows through the weaving of the text. The maternal breast, the traditional symbol for sympathy and human kindness, paradoxically serves here as the locus for a gap in cross-gender identification—marking the limits of male sympathy. Alternatively, Agnes’s ignorance invites speculation on the interdependence of the three natural and defining characteristics of woman in The Monk—frailty, sympathy, and maternal affection— and a recognition of the instability and inadequacy of Lewis’s definitions. That is to say, “the difference of Man and Woman” (M 17) may not be much clearer to Lewis’s reader, in the eighteenth century or now, than it is to the cloistered Ambrosio or the naive Antonia. When Lorenzo de Medina discovers his half-starved sister in the dungeons of the convent, she “appears to him,” in the apt phrase of the critic Gudrun Kauhl, “as the body of an undifferentiated ‘Creature’ that has lost its identity as ‘Woman’ ” (271).



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The failure of sympathy for the woman in whose voice the male author narrates makes ventriloquism an appropriate metaphor for describing Lewis’s narrative technique in the “Conclusion of the History of Agnes de Medina.” Disjunctions between the voice and the will of a speaker reduce the human being to an instrument for the words of another. Ambrosio’s false modesty at the power of his eloquence leads him to claim that he is such an instrument: “The Saint spoke by my mouth” (M 43). Of course, Ambrosio does not really believe that he is a mere instrument inspired from without. His false claim of ventriloquism in the monastery is answered by actual ventriloquism in the convent. The nun Camilla, who acts as keeper to the monastic prisoner, torments Agnes with the doctrine of the mortification of the flesh, “and though uttered by Camilla’s lips, I easily recognised the Domina’s expressions” (414). Such ventriloquism is made possible, in Agnes’s analysis, by the submission of the nuns to the Prioress’s authority. In The Monk authority is exerted through torture and censorship, but also through surveillance and ventriloquism. In each of these techniques of power, the human body becomes an object or instrument, and the individual will is nullified. The ventriloquist’s dummy is a mere property without a will, animated by the words of another. In a signal instance of the operation of such power in The Monk, a woman must either choose to submit to a man “voluntarily” or have her will nullified. In his first attempt to rape Antonia, Ambrosio employs the diabolical Myrtle branch that produces a “death-like slumber” in his victim (278). His second attempt is assisted by a soporific opiate from the convent laboratory, “which brings on the Person who drinks it the exact image of Death” (329). Lewis shows in The Monk how male heterosexual love tends toward the objectification of women and the reification of persons, ending in rape or necrophilia.8 But neither Ambrosio when he uses the opiate on Antonia nor the Prioress when she forces Agnes to drink the same liquor is completely satisfied with the power thereby gained. Both would prefer to have their victims acknowledge the justice or necessity of violation or perpetual imprisonment. For the “lover” and clerical authority, and (as I will show) for the slaveholder, power is not satisfied with the statue or automaton. Its ideal subject is rather the animated statue that speaks in its master’s voice. While male figures for the artist specialize in reducing women to statues, castrating female figures owe their power partly to dismemberment. In the orgasmic ritual by which Matilda raises the demon, she employs various articles unknown to Ambrosio: “But among the





few which He distinguished, He particularly observed three human fingers and an Agnus Dei which She broke in pieces” (M 276). The displaced castration of a man and the dismemberment of the symbolic body of Christ are necessary prerequisites for a woman’s raising of a demon. In this respect, Matilda’s black magic resembles the obeah ceremony imagined by Antoinette in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a ceremony that employs such ingredients as “a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut” (31). Obeah, in Rhys’s account, supplements the explicit imagery of castration (the dismembered hand and decapitated rooster) with the idea of resistance to white hierarchy, revealed in her emphasis on the whiteness of the ceremonial objects. Obeah may lie behind the black magic in The Monk as well, though Lewis emphasizes only castration and sacrilege. Matilda finds that in raising a demon, “instead of selling my soul to a Master, my courage had purchased for myself a Slave,” and when Lucifer promises to be Ambrosio’s “Slave,” he appears, like the gypsy from the novel’s first chapter, with “swarthy darkness spread . . . over his gigantic form” (M 268, 434, 433). If The Monk is a novel in which the male author silences the female voice, it is also one in which Lewis reveals that possession can never be complete and that resistance is only extinguished with life. At the time when public opinion is beginning to be viewed as the basis of authority and a technique of government, Lewis imagines authorities who seek to legitimate their power by extending their government to the mind and by ventriloquizing consent. In tracing “the political shift from absolutism to hegemony,” Terry Eagleton has provided an exemplary account of the relationship between the new regime of public opinion and democratic consent and the new aesthetic demand for originality and inspiration (Ideology 275): What is at stake here is nothing less than the production of a new kind of human subject—one which, like the work of art itself, discovers the law in the depths of its own free identity, rather than in some oppressive external power. The liberated subject is the one who has appropriated the law as the very principle of its own autonomy, broken the forbidding tablets of stone on which that law was originally inscribed in order to rewrite it on the heart of flesh. To consent to the law is thus to consent to one’s own inward being. “The heart,” writes Rousseau in Émile, “only receives laws from itself; by wanting to enchain it one releases it; one only enchains it by leaving it free.” (19)

To use other terms than Eagleton’s, the form of authority belonging to Civil Society—founded on “the capillary and preventive surveillance



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of any potential infractions”—comes to replace the “ ‘mechanical’ and ‘abstract’ form of social cohesion” that was experienced as the “outside coercion” of the State (Moretti, Way of the World 53). I shall now examine how Lewis himself, despite his self-critical awareness in the mid-1790s, was willing to practise surveillance and psychological manipulation to serve his interests as a Jamaica planter beginning in 1816. By confounding the strategies of heroes and villains in his novel, Lewis questions the ethical status of the very techniques that he will present as humanitarian reforms in the Journal of a West India Proprietor.

Popular Culture, Slavery, and Social Control There is a gulf in time, in genre, and in terms of realistic representation between a Gothic novel written by an author who had scarcely attained manhood and a journal begun some twenty years later by a substantial Jamaica proprietor. Still, gender relations, crowd violence, prison conditions, and racialized characters were prominent among the Gothic novelist’s concerns. As D. L. Macdonald claims, “The Gothic imagination itself, with its recurrent fantasies of domination and revolt, was shaped by the debate over slavery and abolition” (“Isle of Devils” 203). Similarly Donna Heiland writes that “the idiom of the gothic and historical accounts of colonial experience are mutually constitutive” (170). Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–85), one of the earliest novels in the Gothic tradition, features both female characters who dress as boys and a slave rebellion in Elizabethan-era Spanish Jamaica. There would be good reason, moreover, for the son of a slaveowner to have been conscious of the West Indies and the problem of slavery in the mid-1790s. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787; William Wilberforce’s motion to abolish the slave trade was defeated in 1791; Henry Dundas’s weak bill providing for the gradual abolition of the trade passed the House of Commons in 1792, before being defeated in the House of Lords; the revolution in Saint Domingue began in 1791, and British troops fought a costly war there beginning in 1793. Even closer to Lewis’s concerns, there was a major rebellion of Jamaican maroons in 1795–96, at the time The Monk was published. Indeed, troubled reflections on the colonial sources of his father’s income and his own future wealth are evident in Lewis’s literary productions of the 1790s. The master/slave paradigm for gender relations becomes even more pertinent when we recall that both Antonia, the victimized heroine of The Monk, and Elvira’s servant, Flora, were born in the Caribbean. At the end of the novel, Flora is rewarded





by Raymond and Lorenzo and thus enabled “to revisit her native land” of Cuba (M 419). Like Lewis’s, part of Lorenzo’s wealth is West Indian, since he owns estates in Hispaniola (94)—a detail that would have reminded Lewis’s readers of the Saint Domingue revolution. If Cuba becomes the realm of reward for a faithful servant like Flora, the fauna of Cuba begin the process of New World vengeance against the old regime hypocrite and Faustian overreacher Ambrosio when he is stung by a serpent identified as a Cientipedoro. In order to provide further information about this serpent, Lewis appends the sole footnote in the first edition of the novel: “The Cientipedoro is supposed to be a Native of Cuba, and to have been brought into Spain from that Island in the Vessel of Columbus” (72, n. 1). The founding voyage of European imperialism unleashes a serpent from an Edenic landscape, bringing about the sexual fall, back in Spain, of one apparently without sin. The sexualized Cientipedoro in The Monk has the same symbolic function as the disease of syphilis does in texts more centrally concerned with Spanish imperialism in the Caribbean. In a history first published in 1793, Bryan Edwards describes the original Amerindian inhabitants of Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico as conspicuous for their “attachment to the sex” and for the centrality of love in their lives: In truth, an excessive sensuality was among the greatest defects in their character: and to this cause alone is imputed, by some writers, the origin of that dreadful disease, with the infliction of which they have almost revenged the calamities brought upon them by the avarice of Europe:—if indeed the venereal contagion was first introduced into Spain from these islands. (1: 76–77)

Since the vengeance of the West Indies on Europe was—or ought to have been—on Lewis’s mind in the mid-1790s, it is not surprising that blacks appear in his early works, as if unconsciously, in the form of jokes and anachronisms. When Don Raymond’s servant Theodore sings a Danish ballad in the convent of St. Clare, one of the nuns reveals her geographical ignorance. Theodore plays upon this ignorance in the following exchange: “Are not the people all blacks in Denmark?” “By no means, reverend Lady; They are of a delicate pea-green with flame-coloured hair and whiskers.” (M 287)

In Lewis’s most successful play, the Gothic drama The Castle Spectre (1798), the medieval villain Earl Osmond has four African servants



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to do his nefarious bidding, even though there were few blacks in England prior to the end of the sixteenth century (Morgan 159). In admitting the justice of the charge of anachronism in making the “servants black,” Lewis remarked, “I by no means repent the introduction of my Africans . . . and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her” (Castle Spectre 223). Perhaps Lewis’s tendency to conjoin black skin with pea-green and blue is not mere playfulness and delight in the absurd. For, like all boys with a public school education, Lewis would have read Caesar’s account of the savage Britons in Book 5 of De Bello Gallico: “All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue colour, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and the upper lip” (111). Already a century before Lewis this passage from Caesar had been used in anti-slavery discourse to position black Africans at a similar stage of development to that in which the Romans found the ancient inhabitants of Britain. To those who claimed that black Africans were barbarous and thus not entitled to good treatment and a Christian education, Morgan Godwyn responded in 1680 with an attack on ethnocentrism: “Cesar’s account of the Ancient Britains, is not such as should make us proud; For he informs us that they were clad with Skins, and did paint their Bodies. . . . He also adds, that Brothers with Brothers, and Parents with their Children, had Wives in common: A greater Barbarity than I have at any time heard of amongst the Negro’s” (34).9 More than amusing jokes, the references to blue English heroines and pea-green Danes (the latter in a novel in which an incestuous monk barbarously rapes his sister) may be guilty, half-conscious recollections that the inhabitants of Britain were once as barbarous as Lewis’s European contemporaries considered Africans to be. Just as Don Raymond in The Monk disguised his rank for the humanitarian purpose of gaining knowledge of the lower orders, so, in the Journal of a West India Proprietor, Lewis acts both as an anthropologist in examining the “manners and customs” of his social inferiors and as a good governor in seeking “to diminish the burthens, and augment the comforts” (M 96) of his black vassals. His analyses in the Journal of the relationship between superstition and rebellion and of the elite orchestration of both popular celebration and crowd violence reveal a conceptual framework similar to that motivating his fictional account of the mob violence directed against the Prioress and the Convent of St. Clare. Again like Don Raymond, Lewis betrays a desire to be loved for himself. Like the monastic despots and lustful





men in The Monk, he would like to be able, while operating within a tyrannical system, to govern by consent instead of force. Lewis’s deployment of festivity and religion in the government of a Jamaican plantation illuminates both his depiction of ungoverned crowds and his aims as a “popular” novelist. While Lewis is often amused by the ignorance and superstition of his slaves, this ironic attitude of superiority is not one that he reserves for social inferiors. Moreover, his amusement, in this case, is combined with a sincere interest in preserving in written form the character and artifacts of a popular culture that is more traditional and oral than his sensationalistic novels and plays but quite consistent with his combination in Tales of Wonder (1801) of “antiquarian interests and literary ambitions in collecting and publishing European ballads and legends” (Needham 104). Thus, Lewis preserves for posterity several of the “Nancy stories” that the slaves narrate. He quotes and explains the songs of the slaves, though he attends to such matters in the interest of management as well as science. Whether or not popular culture is political is more than a theoretical question for Lewis when he visits his Cornwall plantation: “Since I heard the report of a rebellious song issuing from Cornwall, I have listened more attentively to the negro chaunts; but they seem, as far as I can make out, to relate entirely to their own private situation, and to have nothing to do with the negro state in general” (J 142). Lewis disembarked in Jamaica on January 1, 1816, a fortuitous arrival date for observing what the plantation slaves regard “as the festival of the greatest importance.” Lewis describes in detail the New Year’s celebration in the town of Black River, presenting both the “popular” and colonialist aspects of the festivities. The central popular figure is “the John-Canoe”—“a Merry-Andrew dressed in a striped doublet, and bearing upon his head a kind of pasteboard house-boat, filled with puppets, representing, some sailors, others soldiers, others again slaves at work on a plantation, etc.” (J 36). This “house-boat” is a Caribbean adaptation of the unwieldy headdress masks worn by members of many black African nations in their rituals and feasts. The saturnalian feast of the Jonkonnu, moreover, typically involved male cross-dressing. According to Michael Craton, “The topsy-turvy spirit of the [Christmas] season was further conveyed, and perhaps facilitated, by the kind of gender jumbling in Junkanoo that had men comically dressed up as women, if not vice versa (a colonial extension of the curious convention of the male dame in traditional English pantomime)” (“Decoding” 35–36). In Lewis’s account, the presence of the “John-Canoe” is popularly regarded as “absolutely indispensable,” yet “he and his rival,



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John-Crayfish” (J 36, 39), are quite marginal to the “official” celebration. Another rivalry has eclipsed that between these two popular figures, for the processions of the rival factions deriving from the British naval fleets (the “Blues” and the “Reds”) have been funded by a subscription raised among “several gentlemen in the neighbourhood of Black River” (37). Corresponding to the pasteboard houseboat of the Jonkonnu is a less popular symbol unwillingly portrayed by a female slave: Lewis observes the “Blue” mistress of the hotel “dragging along by the hand a strange uncouth kind of a glittering tawdry figure, all feathers, and pitchfork, and painted pasteboard, who moved most reluctantly, and turned out to be no less a personage than Britannia herself” (37–38). The reluctance of this black woman is more significant today than it seems to have been for Lewis, since readers in a postcolonial world may perceive in her unwillingness the resistance of one of Britain’s victims to the ironic obligation of portraying Britannia herself, or even resistance to playing a leading role in the official celebration that has been designed to upstage the popular one. Thus, Elizabeth Bohls finds this representation of Britannia to constitute a site of struggle: “The debased icon refracts imperial power through Afro-Caribbean cultural appropriation” (73). Lewis’s objective description proves shortly to have yielded new techniques for managing his own plantation. It may be that Lewis presents in his journal the co-opting of popular festivity by the dominant planter class as an episode in his own education as a benevolent slaveholder. In this case, one of the purposes of his Journal would be to provide information about popular culture and sentiments, and about his own techniques of management, so that other members of the propertied elite, by vicariously sharing his learning experiences, may be better able to govern their own subordinates. The colonial plantation becomes a testing ground for European ideas, and, conversely, the experimental knowledge gained in the peripheries can be transferred back to the metropolitan center in England. The redirection of popular festivity into official channels, which Lewis observed in Black River, provides a model for his benevolence in granting three new holidays to his slaves: I gave them for play-days Good-Friday, the second Friday in October, and the second Friday in July. . . . The first is to be called “the royal play-day,” in honour of that excellent Princess, the Duchess of York . . . . The ninth being my own birthday, the July play-day is to be called “the massa’s”; and that in October is to be in honour of the piccaninny-mothers, from whom it is to take its name. (118)





The new holidays are evidence of Lewis’s concern to improve the lot of his slaves, but his aim—and in this he resembles most reformers of his day—is not disinterested philanthropy. The new days of festivity are not given to the slaves wholly for their pleasure and relaxation; rather, the holidays are intended to serve the master’s purposes as well. Lewis attempts to promote respect for the mother country, deference toward the plantation owner, and fertility among the slaves. He came to place a premium on the “breeding” of his slaves, because, following the rise in slave prices after the 1770s and following the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, planters needed to take steps to reduce mortality and increase the birth-rate, if the supply of slave labor were to be sufficient and plantations to remain profitable. To the extent that Lewis’s innovations in estate management are prompted by his fears of rebellion, they derive from beliefs about the causes of popular disturbances that he, along with many of his contemporaries, adopted in response to European events of the late eighteenth century. In the eyes of such observers, the energies that inhere in a large assemblage of the lower orders and in their traditional, superstitious festivity present a definite potential for violence. In The Monk mob violence erupts when the Madrid crowd assembles for the annual feast of St. Clare. The incitement that is needed to unleash the bloody mob is provided, albeit unintentionally, by a gentleman, who seeks, through countertheater,10 with the assistance of the Mother St. Ursula, to expose the clerical abuses and superstitions celebrated in the “official” procession. Lorenzo de Medina’s attack on superstition is presented, in fact, as an attack on a kind of slavery. He “only wished for an opportunity to free [his countrymen] from their monkish fetters” (M 345). Lewis’s description of this fictional riot implies an analysis of the causes and progress of crowd violence similar to that in contemporary accounts of English riots.11 When Lewis comes to report on the distinct phenomenon of slave rebellion, he brings to it many of his presuppositions concerning outside agitation, instigation “from above,” and the connection between superstition or festivity and rebellion. His Journal insists on the prominent role that Afro-Caribbean religions and certain Christian religions played in rebellion and other forms of social disorder. Religions that Lewis regards as superstitious or fanatical supposedly foster disorder by their very nature. He accepts reports that “a brown Anabaptist missionary” has promoted a plot among the slaves “in the adjoining parish of St. Elizabeth’s, for giving themselves a grand fête by murdering all the whites in the island” (139, 137). An abortive rebellion of 1815 can be attributed to the “fantastic and



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absurd preaching” of “brown Methodists” (108). Lewis maintains, as did most apologists for slavery, that superstitious religious beliefs are imposed on a passive populace from without and in opposition to their interests. The traditional obeahmen are even more guilty than Methodists of arousing fears, creating psychosomatic disorders, and engaging in personal violence. Lewis invariably connects the Afro-Caribbean magical practices of obeah with crime, poisoning, and rebellion. The bane of his estate is an obeahman named Adam, “a most dangerous fellow, and the terror of all his companions . . . . the mischief which he has already done, by working upon the folly and superstition of his fellows, is incalculable” (92). In Lewis’s description of what he considers the central obeah ceremony of the Myal-dance, the obeahman acts the part, as it were, of the papist clerics in his Gothic novel, producing a simulated death by means of a narcotic. The simulated death serves both to convince the gullible of the obeahman’s powers of resurrecting the dead and to advertise the poisons that he markets. Obeah, moreover, is the most powerful expression of an autonomous black culture and, as such, presents a significant obstacle to the implementation of paternalistic control. Hence, Lewis acts cynically when he decides to have Adam christened, in order to “see what effect ‘white Obeah’ will have in removing the terrors of this professor of the black” (93).12 Early in the Journal, Lewis’s references to the missionary project of providing slaves with a Christian education are jocular. However, after about six weeks on the island, Lewis himself begins to conduct Sunday prayers, though he despairs of his progress because of poor attendance as well as illiteracy and ignorance. His primary object would seem to be that of instituting conscience in his slaves as a means of social control. In an account included in the nineteenthcentury biography of Lewis, a slave named Quawboo, after listening to Lewis’s Bible readings, finds himself torn between God and the devil. Quawboo confesses a theft to his master, after his true “friend and director” persuades him to reveal acts prompted by the voice of his “false friend” (Baron-Wilson 2: 224, 226). Lewis concludes, “I really think the poor fellow’s simple illustration of the voice of conscience striving with temptation, was precisely what he felt, and that the victory which, in this instance, he has gained, will make a lasting impression on his character” (2: 226). Such a change of character is precisely what was sought by the proponents of a new regime of work discipline in England and a more liberal slave regime in the colonies. Some of the humanitarians who





promoted religious instruction for the slaves made their appeals to what the black African character Hassan in Lewis’s Castle Spectre calls “interest, the white man’s God” (Act 4, Scene 1, p. 196). James Ramsay, in a reformist tract of 1784, cites a letter that calls concern for the souls of black slaves “the most probable means of making slaves diligent and faithful; for it would awaken conscience within them, to be a strict overseer, and a severe monitor, whom they could not evade” (ix). The object is to replace the overseer on the plantation or in the factory by the overseer within. Arguing that, in the European context, popular customs and popular disorders were suppressed at the same time that “formal political rights” were expanded, Michael Ignatieff observes that “the extension of popular sovereignty was accompanied by the elaboration of institutions and the deployment of philanthropic strategies designed to implant the inner disciplinarians of guilt and compunction in working-class consciousness” (212–13). However, despite the disciplinary implications of this strategy, the use of Christianity as an instrument for the control of slaves is a more humane policy than the deliberate denial of religious education from an unwillingness to make the effort, a complete disregard for the spiritual condition of degraded laborers, or the belief that a black slave who converted to Christianity would be entitled to freedom from bondage.13 In matters of both religious education and social control, the racist Jamaican planter Edward Long distinguishes between African-born and Creole (or Caribbean-born) slaves. Long sees it as hopeless to attempt to convert native-born Africans to Christianity—in part, because of linguistic difficulties, although Long also suggests, in an argument of amazing hypocrisy, that the scrupulous “planters are averse to exert an authority and constraint over their [slaves’] minds, which might wear the appearance of religious tyranny” (429). The distinction between African and Creole slaves extends to the methods of labor discipline and punishment. Whereas Long regards the whip as essential for controlling Africans, Creole blacks may be accessible to psychological or shame punishments. However, “this mode of governing” requires of an overseer careful observation and the accumulation of biographical knowledge: “it is necessary . . . to study well the temper of every Creole Black under his particular command, to learn somewhat of their private history” (Long 412). Among the native Africans, those known as Coromantins are especially warlike and rebellious, so steps must be taken to prevent them from associating together: “Their houses ought to be intermixed with the rest, and kept divided from one another, by interposing those of the other



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Negroes, who by this means would become continual spies upon their conduct” (475). Although the philanthropic James Ramsay undertakes his work partly as a refutation of Long, the two men agree on the general aim of substituting wherever possible psychological discipline for corporal punishment. Ramsay praises a slave manager who, with great effectiveness, uses rewards instead of punishments. In his particular application of the reward system, an indulgence is withheld from the entire work-gang for the misbehavior of two or three: “This makes them become guardians of each other’s conduct” (101). As Long notes, equitable and benevolent treatment of “those who fill the lowest rank” not only prevents rebellions but also produces subjects who “are themselves the instruments made use of to restrain one another within the bounds of their allotted condition” (504). There is general agreement among the elite, right across the political spectrum, that benevolence can produce, and is wholly consistent with, a system of surveillance of all by all that will be more effective than corporal punishments and theatrical displays of power. In response to the imposition of new surveillance techniques as a means of social control, members of the propertied elite focus increasingly on how their own behavior is controlled through visibility. The most famous example in the Gothic and related fiction of this period is Henry Tilney’s claim in Northanger Abbey that a highly civilized English neighborhood is full of “voluntary spies,” who tend to serve as checks on gentlemen who would murder their wives. For Tilney, the Enlightenment idols of print and progress have resulted in social transparency, a world in which “roads and newspapers lay every thing open” (Austen, Northanger Abbey 203). Likewise, the extensive literature on the management of servants aims to convince the reader that the eyes of servants are more of a check on the master and mistress than the reverse. One may organize servants better through increased supervision, but, so the argument goes, as long as they remain members of one’s family—that is, as long as paternalism operates—the master and mistress will be always under the servants’ eyes. Given the general awareness that surveillance is a reversible technique, it is not surprising that Lewis, who deliberately deploys Christianity to institute the faculty of conscience in his slaves, claims to feel the effects of surveillance in Jamaica. In her examination of “the problem of controlling slaves as a problem of space and surveillance,” Maureen Harkin focuses on Lewis’s “discussion of the inverted panopticon that is life in the West Indies for the European owners” (141, 143). Besides the planter’s exposure to the risk of being poisoned by his slaves, notes Lewis, “he may depend upon every thing done by





him being seen and known. The houses are absolutely transparent; the walls are nothing but windows—and all the doors stand wide open” (J 93–94). There might be several reasons for this new elite consciousness of surveillance. Perhaps the increasing use of surveillance as a technique of power has simply made the propertied classes more aware of its presence in their own lives. Or it may be that the elite know full well that surveillance is primarily directed at social subordinates but, out of self-interest, foster the ideology that new techniques of policing no more discriminate in terms of class or race than does the venerable English judicial system, in which all persons are purportedly equal in the eyes of the law. But it may also be that Matthew Lewis, Henry Tilney, Jane Austen, and others do not write and speak so consciously in the interests of social hierarchy. Their claims to be surrounded by spies or to be living in a transparent society may be a largely unconscious reaction to the guilt of having their social status increasingly sustained by new, strikingly invasive methods of social control. In general, however, Lewis’s attempts to alter behavior by instituting among his slaves a system of moral self-surveillance are outright failures. On his estate on the eastern side of the island, baptism was “in high vogue,” but it primarily serves to facilitate what Lewis regards as the innate African disposition to prevarication: “by enabling them to take an oath upon the Bible to the truth of any lie which it might suit them to tell, they believed that it would give them the power of humbugging the white people” (233). This claim provides an illustration of the thesis that religion, like all ideological productions, constitutes a battleground for competing interests. The attempts by Lewis and by the gentlemen who funded the New Year’s Day procession to redirect popular festivity into official channels are answered when the slaves attempt to use Christianity for subversive ends. Indeed, by the time of Lewis’s visits to Jamaica, certain forms of Christianity rather than obeah were increasingly associated with rebellion. Lewis uses religion as a moral force, as in the case of Quawboo, in the hopes of making “a lasting impression on [the] character.” A variant of this phrase recurs when Lewis explains why he has replaced corporal with psychological punishments on his estates: I am more and more convinced every day, that the best and easiest mode of governing negroes (and governed by some mode or other they must be) is not by the detestable lash, but by confinement, solitary or otherwise; they cannot bear it, and the memory of it seems to make a lasting impression upon their minds; while the lash makes none but upon their skins, and lasts no longer than the mark. (238; emphasis mine)



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The abandonment of corporal punishment in favor of imprisonment, especially solitary confinement, was a favorite project of late eighteenth-century social thinkers. Like them, Lewis believes that confinement will serve to awaken the individual conscience and thereby lead to reformation. In Solitude in Imprisonment, Jonas Hanway, the prolific publicist for social reform, maintained that “Reflection cannot lose all its power; nor can the heart of man be so petrified, but the consideration of his immortal part, under the terrors of solitude will open his mind” (102–3). Later, in 1846, the prison chaplain John Field would argue, on the authority of the seventeenth-century bishop John Tillotson, that, “If God should leave sinners to themselves, and to the lashes of their own conscience, a more severe and terrible torment can hardly be imagined” (qtd. in Evans 326). In reforming the management of his plantations, Lewis retraces the shift in English penal modes from the house of correction, in which habits of labor were instilled and enforced by the whip, to “reformative discipline” in the penitentiary, “designed to reach deeper levels, printing its pattern more indelibly” on the human soul (Evans 57). In the words of another nineteenth-century prison chaplain, John Clay, solitary confinement permits the chaplain to “photograph his thoughts, wishes and opinions on his patient’s mind, and fill his mouth with his own phrases and language” (qtd. in Ignatieff 198). Shortly after Lewis’s death, then, the new technology of photography comes to supply a metaphor for making lasting impressions and for writing indelibly on the minds of laborers and criminals who need to be governed. New technical means are required not only for representing crowds but also for controlling or dispersing them. The Reverend Clay, moreover, conceives the chaplain’s role in terms of the oral technology or trickery of ventriloquism, putting into the “patient’s” mouth the chaplain’s “phrases and language.” The rejection of an older penal and labor regime provides evidence for Lewis’s scientific management tactics as well as his humanitarian sensibility. In the matter of labor discipline, influential ideas and practices were crossing the Atlantic in both directions. The gang labor system of sugar plantations pioneered a mechanization of labor more advanced than any in Europe at the time. Contemporaries recognized that on the plantations a military form of discipline was imposed: “The discipline of a sugar plantation is as exact as that of a regiment: at four o’clock the plantation bell rings to call the slaves into the field” (Ramsay 69). As recent historians and postcolonial theorists have argued, the colonial peripheries influenced, even as they were being controlled by, developments in the metropolitan center. Thus, Mary





Louise Pratt asks, “what were the slave trade and the plantation system if not massive experiments in social engineering and discipline, serial production, the systematization of human life, the standardizing of persons?” (36). The management innovations of Lewis and others in the colonies derive from sources in Enlightenment thought and European military practice, and, in return, influence developments in labor and penal discipline back in Europe. In order to eliminate discretionary corporal punishments, Lewis, like a good follower of the penal reformer Cesare Beccaria, composes a written code of common plantation offences with their fixed “proportionate punishments” (J 250). Like prison reformers and promoters of charitable institutions, Lewis uses written records and a system of inspection in an attempt to prevent his trustees from neglecting their duty or abusing their authority. He tries to give greater integrity to black families, by a rule to prevent sexual exploitation of women by white overseers (146). He establishes, furthermore, a new institution on the estate: a lying-in hospital. Of course, the promotion of fertility and the reduction of infant mortality are very much in the slaveholder’s interest. The new milder regime does not meet with immediate success. The resistance of the slaves includes a refusal by the women “to carry away the trash” of the sugar cane—resistance that Lewis terms a “petticoat rebellion” (87). According to Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern, “Lewis minimizes the real threat of rebellion and resulting economic loss by . . . feminizing it” (77). There is a sharp drop in productivity, and as much as 15 percent of the plantation workforce appears at the hospital, “feigning sickness out of mere idleness” (125). Lewis solves this problem by converting the hospital into a kind of prison and by barring idle slaves from participation in holiday festivities. The new holidays he has established thus serve a further management function: they constitute privileges that can be revoked for penal purposes. Lewis is thus following Ramsay’s proposal of using rewards instead of punishments in slave management. On his second journey to Jamaica, Lewis discovers, or is told, that the lash was resorted to on rare occasions in his absence, “but then this only took place on the commission of absolute crimes, and in cases where its necessity and justice were . . . universally felt, not only by others, but by the sufferers themselves” (214). Even corporal punishments can be justified, then, when the victims themselves acknowledge that the infliction of pain is warranted. Such acknowledgment becomes possible only when a paternalistic (or, later, an electoral) relationship is established between the authorities and their subjects. Such testimonies to the master’s justice are characteristic of the deference of socially subordinate



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classes. However, as E. P. Thompson has observed, one cannot determine to what extent such deference is sincere and to what extent it is adopted cynically as the most effective means of accommodation with an unjust social order (Customs 85). Lewis, however, attempted to institute a new form of governance, in which psychological intervention masks itself as a paternalistic compact of duties and obligations. Psychological punishments work, and physical punishments work psychologically, once subjects have internalized a paternal authority, when they have greater fear of offending the master than of experiencing physical pain. Lewis wishes both to keep human beings in bondage and to rule with their consent. But the probable insincerity of such consent, even in those cases in which it is outwardly granted, suggests again the limitations on the possession of other human beings. Although Lewis may try to be the most humane among slaveholders, and may claim to believe that the British system of slavery is more humane than that of any other nation, this claim ill accords with the stories of overseer and slaveholder cruelty that he candidly relates, especially on his second visit to the island. He tells, for example, of two murders of slaves that go unpunished: one because of a corrupt coroner, the other because the only witnesses are blacks, who “are not allowed to give evidence” (211, 247). In less than six months, on Lewis’s own “well-governed” estates, he discovers two instances of pregnant slaves having been kicked in the womb by white book-keepers (241). Toward the end of the Journal and his life, Lewis expresses the vain wish that slavery had never been, but expresses it only within a larger Burkean argument that local evils may be inextricably linked to a greater good that ought to be maintained (249).14 Like other apologists for slavery, Lewis constantly tells himself that the condition of West Indian slaves is preferable to that of English laborers. He implies that slavery cannot totally dehumanize, for he has such informal relations with his slaves “that our English squires would be mightily astonished at being accosted so familiarly by their farmers” (43). His descriptions of the slaves’ celebrations on his arrival at his estate, and of their sorrow on his departure from Jamaica, recapitulate the innumerable fictional celebrations of the love English servants and dependents bear to their masters, mistresses, and landlords. Lewis should be considered an exponent of what Benedict Anderson calls “tropical Gothic,” in which bourgeois colonizers and representatives of imperial power assume the trappings of aristocrats: “capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag” (151). Like many European aristocrats,





Lewis is overly willing to believe in the sincerity of his slaves’ cynical deference. Moreover, the sociological term “tropical Gothic” conjoins the two extremes of Lewis’s literary production—his youthful Gothic novel and his mature Jamaican Journal—even while it exposes the ideological contradictions in Lewis’s position as a colonial planter. Lewis expresses nostalgia for paternalism and face-to-face controls even while his advocacy of new techniques of scientific management, like those of the English philanthropists studied by Ignatieff, “represented an attack on the traditional social order for resting on a weak state, tolerance of popular disorder, and a tacit acceptance of popular privileges and customs” (211). In terms of sentimental linguistic theory, faceto-face controls operate in the traditional world of speech, whereas the scientific management advocated by philanthropic reformers is part of the new bureaucratic realm of writing. But for all his rationalizations, Lewis cannot rid himself of a feeling of humiliation at being known to govern by force instead of consent. He admits to this feeling when, on mistaking a servant at Savannah la Mar for one belonging to the inn, the young man in question introduces himself: “Massa not know me; me your slave!”—and really the sound made me feel a pang at the heart. The lad appeared all gaiety and good humour, and his whole countenance expressed anxiety to recommend himself to my notice; but the word “slave” seemed to imply, that, although he did feel pleasure then in serving me, if he had detested me he must have served me still. I really felt quite humiliated at the moment, and was tempted to tell him,—“Do not say that again; say that you are my negro, but do not call yourself my slave.” (J 42)

Lewis can be loved for himself only if he denies, masks by another name, the true nature of the unjust social relations in which he is enmeshed. Just as “love” relations may give males property in human flesh and hence create disgust, so the property in human beings conferred by the slave system may produce humiliation. In my discussion of Lewis, I have justified my yoking together of two very different texts—a Gothic novel and a Caribbean diary— partly by pointing to the persistent analogies between women and slaves that appeared in Lewis’s lifetime and that have reappeared in contemporary feminist discourse. I have argued, furthermore, that the problems of social control posed by European crowds from the Gordon Riots of 1780 through the French Revolution seemed, to observers like Lewis, to be spreading to rebellious slaves on West Indian plantations. The strategies devised to prevent popular disturbances



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included not only direct suppression or silencing, but also surveillance, administrative expertise based on the scientific knowledge of popular culture, and psychological manipulation or what I have termed the ventriloquizing of consent. Lewis’s ideological position is contradictory at the time of his Journal, since he wants to be both a paternalistic slaveowner and a humane reformer who governs by consent. Twenty years earlier in The Monk, Lewis’s social criticism was directed against both the residual manifestations of despotic old regime power and the emergent techniques of policing and surveillance that were designed to create more internalized mechanisms of social control. Material self-interest and perhaps a growing literature of reform led Lewis to adopt these very techniques in his management of his Jamaican plantations. The machinery, or the props, of the Gothic novel—the disguises, dungeons, moving statues, secret potions, magic mirrors, mysterious voices, instruments of parental and clerical tyranny—not only belong to the dream world of the unconscious but also to a world in which prisoners still died in ill-ventilated jails and in which new techniques of disciplinary power made properties and machines of women and men. Making properties of others by drawing out their inner feelings or exploring their secret recesses was an object of criticism in the Gothic novel from the outset. In Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, an earlier Matilda chastises her servant for “sifting” the novel’s hero: “Art thou not ashamed, Bianca? said the princess: what right have we to pry into the secrets of this young man’s heart? He seems virtuous and frank, and tells us he is unhappy: are those circumstances that authorize us to make a property of him?” (41). In a later Romantic novel, the concluding sentence describing the strange relationship between Charles Mandeville and Lionel Clifford employs the language of specifically colonial property: “Even as certain tyrannical planters in the West Indies have set a brand with a red-hot iron upon the negroes they have purchased, to denote that they are irremediably a property, so Clifford had set his mark upon me, as a token that I was his for ever” (Godwin, Mandeville 325). While Matthew Lewis is similarly troubled by the lack of authorization for power exercised over either the bodies or the minds of others, he presents no real alternative: neither his own authorship nor imaginative sympathy escapes involvement with either the old regime of monastic despotism and inquisitorial torture or the new regime of surveillance. His failure to provide an alternative to the unjust exercise of power may be a consequence of Lewis’s contradictory position as both nostalgic paternalist exemplar of “tropical Gothic” and





liberal, enlightened proponent of new humane strategies of scientific management. On another level, his failure to provide an alternative may be a personal limitation of an adolescent author, who has a much weaker claim to be writing philosophical fiction than Godwin, Mary Shelley, or even Ann Radcliffe. But Lewis’s failure to provide a pure alternative nonetheless points to philosophical contradictions involving sympathy and authority within sentimental ideology—namely, the inescapable problematic of speech and writing. The authorship of fiction, for Lewis, necessarily entails a kind of disguise, and his novel shows how disguise is contaminated by its association with transvestism, surveillance, or an uncontrollable proliferation of lies. An ethical purpose might seem to justify the narration of a tale of terror, but as with the attack on the Prioress’s tyranny, which is prompted by the Mother St. Ursula’s conscience, individual conscience can threaten the social order. If the author’s conscience cannot justify the Gothic novel, neither can the intention to institute conscience in his audience. Lewis’s attempt to establish the moral authority of conscience in his slave Quawboo—which is shown to be dangerous when other slaves use Christianity for subversive ends— was already, in his youthful Gothic novel, contaminated by its association with diabolical surveillance and despotic ventriloquism. In the next chapter, I shall consider the works of Charles Maturin, who, like Lewis, criticizes the old regime of despotic power (now in the context of Anglo-Irish antipapism) even while he suspects that the new psychological techniques of individuation, though they may dissolve the crowd, will produce automata rather than self-governing individuals.



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Un isona nc e a n d t h e E c ho: Popu l a r Dist u r ba nc es a n d Th e at r ic a l i t y i n t h e Wor k s of C h a r l e s M at u r i n The “Frantic Idea” of Irish Independence: Maturin’s Politics While Charles Robert Maturin significantly influenced Balzac and French realism, as well as André Breton and surrealism, he has had only a minor reputation in English literary history. He is remembered for his Gothic drama Bertram (1816), mainly because Coleridge devotes a chapter to it in Biographia Literaria. When Coleridge arrives at the moment in Maturin’s tragedy—the consummation of the adulterous relationship of Bertram and Imogine—that convinces him that the “shocking spirit of jacobinism” (2: 229) has migrated from politics to morals, he borrows language from Wordsworth’s attack on “sickly and stupid German Tragedies” (William Wordsworth 599) in order to condemn the audience’s “craving . . . for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants” (Coleridge, Biographia 2: 229). Maturin is famous by association as the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde as well as a correspondent of Walter Scott, upon whose generosity with money, literary patronage, and critical advice he came to rely. Finally, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)—a novel in which the Commonwealth and Restoration scenes owe a considerable debt to Scott’s historical fiction—is often viewed as the culminating achievement of the



Chapter 4


Gothic novel in the historical period of its flourishing, a period that began with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764. However, with the rise of studies of the relationship between literature (especially the novel and traditional ballads or songs) and the creation or dissolution of national identity (especially in the Celtic fringes of Britain), other works of this Irish writer are being read and other motifs besides Gothic paraphernalia are beginning to be explored. While Terry Eagleton merely mentions in passing The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief (1812), terming these novels “lurid parodies of Lady Morgan” (Heathcliff 187), Katie Trumpener reverses the traditional view of the indebtedness of the late works of Maturin to the early novels of Scott by claiming instead that the “brilliant” Milesian Chief is “arguably the single most important source for Waverley” (141). Trumpener finds in The Milesian Chief a militant history of colonialism, from the perspective of one who had serious doubts about “the possibility of transcultural unions,” and a work that forms a transition between “the national tale (as a genre centered on an allegorical equation of personal and cultural identity)” and the historical novel (146, 142). In this chapter I situate The Milesian Chief in the context of Maturin’s sermons and his other novels to explore the relationship between political ideology and the choice of genre, the mode of representation, and the use of literary predecessors and traditions. I argue that Maturin is important not only in studying the origins of nationalism but also for examining how the creation of the individual subject provides an inadequate solution to the anxieties aroused by rioting crowds and unruly women. The forces that for Maturin constitute the nation simultaneously disrupt the salutary process of individuation, when the self is subsumed or split by the female figure of Echo. The individualizing address of the novel permits Maturin to express the same Irish nationalist sentiments that he does in his private letters, even while his novels paradoxically show that collective identities are established more through sound than sight, through voices than writing. At the same time, there is an unresolved tension between the novel’s individualizing address and Maturin’s stretching of the novel form to accommodate the crowd, popular culture, and nationalist rebellion. If the echo threatens identities and individual consciousness from one direction, transvestism and unsexed women disrupt stable identity through gender fluidity, the heterosexual norms that anchor family and society through female promiscuity and confused sexuality, and the proper female roles of nursing and early childhood education through women’s individual ambitions for more prominent



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public positions. Ultimately, individualizing mechanisms—whether religious, penal, or psychological—seem to Maturin to produce not conscientious, rational subjects but rather mindless automata. In The Milesian Chief, Maturin creates a fictional Irish rebellion, which postdates Robert Emmet’s insurrection of July 1803, even while he bases much of his description and some of his characters on the far more bloody and widespread rebellion of 1798. The fictional early nineteenth-century rebellion serves as the setting for Maturin’s examination of exploitative and nonnormative sexual relations and for the tragic conclusion of his love plot. Some of the sexual relationships conform to the conventions of the national tale, in which characters allegorically represent cultural identities. Most obviously in The Milesian Chief, Wandesford, an English colonel, who exhibits extreme cruelty in suppressing the rebellion, is guilty of seducing and abandoning an Irish peasant girl. Quite conventionally, the colonized nation is feminized, represented by the woman abandoned to prostitution and starvation, whereas the heartless colonizer is an aristocratic male seducer. For much of the novel, Wandesford is the fiancé of the heroine, his cousin Armida Fitzalban, the daughter of an Italian lady and an English nobleman. Armida’s father, Lord Montclare, has purchased the traditional estate of the O’Morvens, an old Milesian family. (Maturin adopts the view that the original inhabitants of Ireland were Milesians—that is, Phoenicians who had made their way to Ireland from Spain.) However, the main love plot in the novel reverses the conventional sexual designations of colonial relations, as the daughter of the English absentee landlord falls in love with the Irish rebel Connal O’Morven. Since the lovers die, the failure of the relationship between the Irish son and English daughter, in terms of the allegory of the national tale, indicates Maturin’s view of the failure of the Union of 1800. While Maturin apparently endorses Connal O’Morven’s brand of elitist Gaelic nationalism, Connal has been led by his grandfather unwillingly into rebellion. The elder O’Morven has himself been driven mad by listening “to the tales of his bards and the songs of his harpers,” whereupon “he conceived the frantic idea of wresting Ireland from the English hand” (MC 3: 49). Raised by his grandfather and inspired by the bard Cormac, Connal imbibes nationalist illusions. When he matures, he realizes “that it was impossible for Ireland to subsist as an independent country; impossible for her to exist without dependance on the continental powers, or a connexion with England” (3: 52). In these circumstances, Maturin has no doubt



Un isona nce a n d t h e Echo in M at u r in


about which connection is better for Ireland, given the clear moral superiority of Britain to Germany or France. While Maturin is thought to have been “rather inclined to toryism” (Idman 278), and while in his sermons he shares Walter Scott’s anti-Jacobinical views, his ideological position is still more complex than Scott’s. Scott both affirms technological and commercial progress and expresses nostalgia for a feudal past, both condemns radicalism and reveals populist sympathies, both celebrates Great Britain under the Hanoverians and attempts to retrieve and recreate a preUnion Scottish nation. As the Church of Ireland curate of St. Peter’s, Dublin, from 1806 until his death in 1824, Maturin is a member of the Protestant ascendancy and an apologist for the British monarchy. Yet, like Scott, he is at times both a nationalist and a populist—celebrating antiquities, representing crowds as disciplined and autonomous, and portraying the everyday life of the people with more sympathetic interest than elitist condescension. Maturin’s populism, again like Scott’s, often gives way before his ambivalent admiration for tormented, alienated Romantic rebels, bandits, and wanderers—all avatars of Milton’s Satan. So Connal O’Morven stands “amid his desperate band like the great angelic chief among the fallen host of inferior spirits, awed by his strength, dazzled by his brightness, and lost by his example” (MC 2: 202). Both fascinated by the Byronic hero and persuaded that peasants must be motivated, directed, and disciplined by a powerful leader, Maturin insists that only Connal’s presence prevents rebel behavior that is riotous, ferocious, or cowardly. In the case of Maturin’s novels and tragedies, there is some suggestion if not of shocking Jacobinism then of liberal nationalism and Whig sympathies that contradict the Toryism of his sermons. The Tory dimension of his thought is most evident in his sermon “Preached on the Death of Lord Nelson.” Here Maturin surveys the “moral depravity” of Italy, Germany, and France, before asking a rhetorical question more resonant of Wordsworth’s patriotic sonnets than of Irish nationalist opposition to the Union: “Amid this desolating flood, which has swept away almost every vestige of European liberty, wherefore does Great Britain stand, the sole memorial-rock of security and strength?” (S 49, 57–58). Ironically, the attack on German literature in this 1805 sermon resembles Coleridge’s subsequent characterization of Maturin himself, along with the rest of the “breed of Kotzebues,” as perpetrators “of the modern jacobinical drama” (Biographia 2: 212, 221). Exhibiting the national guilt that renders them vulnerable to the doctrines of the French Revolution, the Germans, according to Maturin, are “a people who endeavoured to



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infect our morals through the medium of our literature” (S 51–52). When the reader is exposed to the wickedness of German literature, “the ear grows wearisomely familiar with the unnatural violence of exaggerated sentiment and blasphemous exclamation—and every species of outrageous and impure stimulation that can be applied to the morbid impotence of degraded appetite” (52). In his sermons Maturin demonizes German literature (in the manner of Wordsworth and Coleridge), whereas in his novels and plays he is attracted to Satanic hero-villains. Following the Illuminati controversy, the Irish rebellion of 1798, and the theatrical popularity of Kotzebue, British conservatives began to demonize Germany “as the new evil empire in Europe” (Simpson 89). Maturin contradicts his 1805 conservative rejection of German literature in an 1813 letter to the Tory Scott, when he writes, no doubt with a hint of playful self-depreciation, that in his next romance “I have determined to display all by diabolical resources, out-Herod all the Herods of the German school, and get the possession of the Magic lamp with all its slaves from the Conjurer Lewis himself” (Correspondence 14). Maturin’s inconsistency cannot be attributed simply to the difference between unmarketable sermons and potboiling romances, especially since Maturin typically draws upon his sermons when writing his novels.1 Further contradictions between the sermons and the letters and novels do not suggest that the preaching is characterized by moral sincerity while the novels cynically pander to popular prejudices. Nor is it simply—though there is more truth in this account—that the sermons are official discourse, delivered from within an ideological state apparatus. Still, the difference in genre between sermon and novel invites speculation about why Maturin’s sermons are less marked by Irish nationalism and more by pro-Union sentiments than his novels and private correspondence of the same period. The sermon involves an oral address to a collective body of hearers, which the sermon calls together and constitutes as a congregation. A congregation consists of people who speak and sing together in harmony—as it were, in one voice—in order to praise God. Since the configuration of the pews serves to confirm hierarchy and enforce separation, the congregation is, in the words of Jeremy Bentham in a different context, “a multitude, though not a crowd” (47). However, since the sermon is intended for oral delivery to an audience of all social ranks, the mode of address is common even if dictatorial. In contrast, while the novel draws on popular culture and may seek to represent the crowd, it takes the form of a written address to the individual reader, who often consumes the





work in the silence of his or her closet. The giving over of the reader’s inner voice to the words of a single author serves in part to constitute the reader as an individual. Because the sermon, on the contrary, is addressed orally to a collectivity composed of all social ranks, the illiterate as well as literate, it is a powerful form that holds the potential of transforming the congregation into a crowd. For example, Burke worries that “sermons delivered in all the streets and places of public resort in Paris” during the revolution might spread the same kind of “epidemical fanaticism” as “the Anabaptists of Munster” gave rise to by their leveling doctrines in the sixteenth century (Reflections 262). Because the novel is addressed to literate individuals, whose individualism it helps to create and reinforce, it may be imagined as reaching and serving to constitute an elite. If an Irish nationalist movement could be wholly controlled by a social elite, it might be a political endeavor Maturin could support. However, he regards it as dangerous to make Irish nationalist sentiments available to a broad collective body. Hence, the Unionist and pro-British sentiments of Maturin’s sermons. In a sermon of 1812, Maturin attacks the licentious men who constantly talk of liberty, since he claims to believe that he lives in “the first, the freest, and the greatest country under heaven” (S 298). He dismisses opposition politicians and the prophets of Ireland’s doom: “Listen to such, and you will believe (to borrow their own language) that every thing is in a state of ruin:—our rulers are unskilful, our administration corrupt, our enterprises unsuccessful, . . . and our national character, interests, and very existence, in the last and lowest stage of degradation and decay” (S 304–5). Writing to Scott less than a year later, Maturin himself endorses the language of the prophets of doom whom he earlier dismissed: “while the Country is struggling for Existence, she has little leisure to attend to private complaints—in the Battle for life and death we are now fighting, the Cries of the wounded can neither be heard or pitied” (Correspondence 9). The views of Connal O’Morven in The Milesian Chief are consistent with those in this private letter: “The country is bleeding under ignorance, poverty, and superstition” (MC 2: 41). Earlier, in The Wild Irish Boy, the title character attributes “the increasing magnitude of the evils by which my unhappy country was overborne to the fatal measure of the Union” (Maturin, Wild Irish 3: 138–39). As if the novel had a similar mode of reception to a private letter, the novelist blames the degraded state of the Irish nation on the Union, while the clergyman supports the Union from the pulpit.



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In a sermon delivered in support of a charity school, Maturin argues in favor of Protestant religious instruction in order to foster political quietude and to silence disaffection. He alludes to the rebellion of 1798, an event that the curate Maturin attributes to the deleterious influence of Catholic priests. Only Protestant religious education for the Irish masses can result in security for the elite, who at present must “carve the household meal with the bayonet” (S 242), and only such an education can bring about a real union among the Irish themselves: When they are acquainted with their Bible . . . , then, and not till then, the hearts hardened by misery and inflamed by hatred shall turn to you as the heart of one man. The hands that lately held a knife for your throats, and a torch for your dwellings, shall be lifted up in prayer for you to that God whom they before “ignorantly worshipped” with rites of blood, but whom you have “declared unto them” as the “God who maketh men to be of one mind in a house.” They will abjure their Baal and his bloody priests. (243)

This particular conception of union—many hearts “as the heart of one man,” “men . . . of one mind in a house”—proves to be crucial for Maturin’s conception of the nation and for his exploration of mass psychology. The novelist Maturin, however, suggests other causes for Irish rebellion than ignorant and bloody Roman Catholicism. The uprising depicted in The Milesian Chief is prompted by the nationalist bard who loves liberty rather than by conspiratorial priests. For Maturin, unity has a specifically Irish dimension. In the Dedication to The Milesian Chief, after identifying his own imaginative talent to be that “of painting life in extremes,” Maturin asserts that Ireland is “the only country on earth, where, from the strange existing opposition of religion, politics, and manners, the extremes of refinement and barbarism are united” (MC 1: iv, v). A land of strange oppositions, Ireland provides the opportunity for the uniting of extremes—including ultimately the extremes of the living and the dead. More often than not, Maturin locates Irish extremes in the realm of sounds: storms, the sea, music, and above all the human voice. While the extreme of refinement may appear visually, in showy sights, whatever is common, vulgar, and ultimately national must resonate and echo inside our heads unless, still more distinct from superficial visibility, it is felt in our blood or in the vibration of our nerves. When Lord Montclare takes up residence at the O’Morven castle, as soon as “his superb equipage and retinue entered the walls,” in its theatrical display of excess deriving from exploitation





and usurpation, “a cry, the most bitter that ever pierced the human ear, burst from the crowd below. . . . It was a sound that expressed all the wild feelings of a savage people, mixed with grief, despair, and agonized attachment” (1: 56–57). Sounds here express feelings that belong not to individuals, but to the people and the land. In this case, the wild cry expresses the popular feeling of attachment to the O’Morvens, the Irish Catholic chiefs still popularly regarded as the rightful possessors of the castle. Commenting on this scene, Ina Ferris remarks that “national tales pay as much attention to the ear as to the eye” and, more generally, that “the whole matter of Ireland in the Romantic period was as much a matter of ears as eyes” (Romantic National Tale 62–63). Even though the novel is addressed in writing to the individual, Maturin thematizes sounds and voices that, in uniting extremes, transcend individuality. In Maturin’s phonocentric nationalism, the union of the people, or of the people and the land, is enforced through sounds and voices. The most influential recent account of nationalism at one point posits the idea of unison, of the union of a people through language or sound. Benedict Anderson uses the musical metaphor and the idea of the single voice of the nation in explaining how nations are affirmed if not constructed through such phenomena as the singing of national anthems on commemorative occasions. Individuals who do not know one another find “in this singing an experience of simultaneity. . . . The image: unisonance” (Anderson 145). For the Maturin of the sermons, preaching to Established Church Protestants in Dublin, there is the possibility not of Irish nationalism but of cross-cultural union when the shared feelings of the heart are expressed through the medium of the voice. In his “Sermon Preached on the Sunday after the Death of Princess Charlotte” (the Princess died on Thursday, November 6, 1817), Maturin describes how in his last address he had tried “to echo that voice of grief which was poured from every heart in three mighty nations. Their hearts were as the heart of one man” (S 27).2 A momentary oneness is created through the feeling of “agonized attachment” to a promising and, compared to her rakish spendthrift father (the Prince Regent), innocent member of the royal family. The Church of Ireland minister seeks to echo the universal cry that joins three nations more effectively, if temporarily, than legislation of 1707 and 1800 ever could. However, as I shall show, a danger lingers in that echo. The idea of the echo also serves to explain the permanent popularity of certain kinds of narratives. Maturin begins his sermon “On the Promise of the Life That Now Is” by claiming that the scriptures



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are addressed to the conscience, which he understands to be a faculty beyond the control of the will, consisting of sounds. Thus, whenever the truths of the Bible are heard, “the conscience of man gives an involuntary echo” (S 357). The echo in this case does not result from an inner moral sense, as it would when the ethical faculty within the individual responds to universal moral truths. Instead, the immortal part of the human being answers to the promise of another life. This kind of echo is produced not only by reading the Bible but also by the epics and folktales of ancient and primitive nations and by the fairy tales told to children: The very first sounds almost that attract the ears of childhood are tales of another life—foolishly are they called tales of superstition; for, however disguised by the vulgarity of the narration, and the distortion of fiction, they tell him of those whom he is hastening from the threshold of life to join, the inhabitants of the invisible world, with whom he must soon be, and be for ever. And what an echo does the narrative find in the sensibility even of infancy! (358)

Folktales cannot be dismissed since they derive their power from the audience’s universal and involuntary acknowledgment that there is a life beyond this one, and thus a connection and continuity between the living and the dead: “there is nothing else that binds, by one common chord of the heart, those whom the extremes of life have divided ever so far asunder” (361–62). Maturin has recourse to a musical metaphor, a “chord of the heart,” to describe the reproduction across the extremes of social rank of an identical response to supernatural tales. From the infancy of the human race to the height of civilization, from the childhood to the old age of the individual, fictions that derive their power from the supernatural “keep their strong hold of the human heart, and maintain their popularity; while other writings of every kind, like their authors, pass away and are heard of no more” (359). In their populist dimension, rather than their individualizing address, Maturin’s own novels might find justification in their intimations of another, invisible world. Indeed, Maturin repeats in his 1818 novel, Women; or, Pour et Contre, the phrase “the inhabitants of the invisible world” from his sermon “On the Promise of the Life That Now Is.” In Women, the opera singer and actress Zaira Dalmatiani, abandoned by the man she loves, has been reading the Greek and Roman classics in order to seek justifications for suicide. Maturin describes her reading experience as if it were an epic descent





into the underworld: “she had been grasping at the inhabitants of the invisible world, as they passed in shadowy array before her memory, and bidding them tell their name, as she wrestled with them in darkness” (W 3: 255). Zaira describes in terms similar to these her feelings toward her mysterious mother, a Roman Catholic madwoman. Her mother produces in her “that terrible sensation so common in the imaginations of the Irish, of a being whom we believe not to be alive, yet know not to be dead—who holds a kind of hovering intermediate existence between both worlds” (3: 320–21). Maturin does not mock the vulgar Irish for their superstitions, since such imaginings place the Irish closer to the universal essence of humanity: “the cause of such wild imagery exists in the very nature of the human mind, and its unknown relation to futurity” (3: 321). In his fiction, Maturin borrows from his sermons to insist on the connection between the living and the dead and to provide a theory of the novel’s connections with popular superstition. Insofar as it draws upon sources of power shared by fairy tales and folklore, however, the novel may lose its claim to be an individualizing genre paradigmatic of modernity. Maturin uses the trope of the echo to describe a unity of response to narrative across generations and social ranks, as well as to convey how a sense of loss may be communicated across English, Scottish, and Irish cultures in the formation of a new British identity. This nationalism of echoes could equally well be termed sentimental nationalism. The idea of unison is a sentimental ideal, describing the operation of a sympathy so perfect that there is no gap between the original feeling of the sufferer and the imaginative identification of the spectators. The locus classicus for this account of unisons, even in the midst of an argument for their impossibility, is Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith describes, in a musical metaphor, what the sufferer desires from those who imaginatively put themselves in his place: “To see the emotions of their hearts . . . beat time to his own.” However, since there is always a “secret consciousness that the change of situations . . . is but imaginary,” “the sympathetic sentiment” will always differ in both degree and kind from the “original sorrow.” Nonetheless, argues Smith, continuing the musical metaphor in defining the grounds of social cohesion, there can be “such a correspondence, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required” (TMS 22).3 Maturin subscribes to the sentimental ideal that Smith deems impossible, the kind of communication involving the audibility of throbbing hearts, when one might say, “My heart beats in unison with yours” (MW 198).



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The sentimental voice is both supernaturally powerful and fragile. Terry Castle has shown how Ann Radcliffe’s heroines use the power of imagination to bring the visualized beloved into their presence. For Maturin’s heroine, the power is rather that of vocalization. When the lonely and despairing Armida Fitzalban in The Milesian Chief sighs out his name three times in “the tone of love,” Connal O’Morven “(as if by enchantment) stood before her” (MC 2: 60). However, immediately before exerting her vocal power to bring into reality the object of her affections, Armida’s depression disabled her from singing: “voice is a local quality, of which the slightest accident may divest the possessor” (2: 56). In achieving unity through our affections, our local attachments, the nation depends on slight and fragile c(h)ords, and on the operations of the imagination. In defining early nineteenth-century nationalism as a form of sentimentalism, I am emphasizing the voice of the bard and the sound of his music over the function of the bard and the role of antiquarian research. It is the figure of the bard Cormac that elevates The Milesian Chief to such a prominent place in Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism. In my view, however, the bard should be situated within the sentimental phonocentrism of the supra-individual voice and the echo. As in other accounts of music in sentimental fiction, feeling—in this case, the feeling of despair—is placed above technique when Cormac plays the Irish harp: “The instrument was defective, and the hand of the performer weak with age; but Armida forgot all science while she listened to him, and felt the effect of the scenery united with the sound” (MC 1: 63). In this synaesthetic moment, Armida feels the union between the sound of the harp and the sublime Irish landscape. Maturin emphasizes the union of harp and nation in a subsequent scene, when it is not the blind Cormac who touches the strings but rather the wind, converting the instrument into an Aeolian lyre, as it revives the voices of the dead from the Irish past: “a loud blast of wind swept across the strings, and the sound, deep and mournful, resembled a human groan as it passed along the heath” (2: 100). The nation depends, that is, on communication between the living and the dead or what Maturin calls in Women “grasping at the inhabitants of the invisible world” (W 3: 255). In this respect, Maturin’s sense of the nation recalls Edmund Burke, who views society as a contract between the living and both the dead and the unborn, a contract, in Burke’s words, “connecting the visible and the invisible world” (Reflections 195). Connal O’Morven is connected to Ireland through the natural musical sounds of the land. This musical connection between character and nation has implications for genres and subgenres of fictional





narrative, since the individual love characteristic of the romance must yield to the patriotic love of the national tale. When Connal fears that he must go into exile, even if in the company of his beloved Armida, he betrays what Maturin terms a “mind so national,” as he laments that Ireland’s “misty heath, her bleak shore, the sullen song of her storms, and her caves, and her ocean are in unison with the chords of my soul” (MC 3: 119). All the Irish songs in The Milesian Chief are mournful, partly because of nostalgia for an Irish past that might have served to anchor a national future. However, another reason for the mournfulness of these songs is that grief calls forth our most powerful collective feelings—feelings at the heart of the national sentimental. Music externalizes even individual grief, and makes it available as a source of social cohesion, in concords if not unisons. Connal describes to Armida the untranslatable beauty of a song he has been humming: “it is the cry of a wounded spirit that seeks in music the echo of its own sadness” (1: 183). Music functions for Irish nationalism in the same way as the voice of the Anglo-Irish minister does for British identity on the occasion of Princess Charlotte’s death, attempting to echo the grief of the spirit that has the power to transform many hearts into “the heart of one man” (S 27). Indeed, in Adam Smith’s account, sympathy as such operates through an echo, when a person’s “sympathetic heart seems to re-echo all the sentiments of those with whom he converses” (TMS 24). Yet the national tale foregrounds a contradiction in the form of the novel among quasi-popular materials, the representation of the people (often speaking in one voice), and a tendency toward the one authoritative voice within the reader’s mind, which serves in part to isolate and to constitute him or her as an individual. In Maturin, this contradiction is located in the gap between the voice of the people speaking as one person and the echo in the body and mind of the individual observer. The danger of nationalism is that we may be carried away by unisonance. The concords that would have been sufficient for social cohesion may become unisons once we lose the secret consciousness of the imaginary nature of our integration into the collective heart. With the loss of this secret consciousness comes a threat to the private self. Armida Fitzalban experiences something of this nature when she observes a military engagement: “Suddenly the wild yell of the rebels struck her ear; she echoed it involuntarily with a cry as wild” (MC 4: 91). The high-born heroine, whom Connal had feared to expose to the gaze “of rebel peasantry” (3: 89), has involuntarily become one with them orally. In a confusion of nation as well as social status, the daughter of the English absentee landlord



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echoes either a subverbal cry or the Irish tongue that, having been “proscribed by England,” belongs to beggars, “degraded into the language . . . of the vulgar” (1: 132). The elitist liberal nationalism of Connal O’Morven, if not of Maturin himself, cannot survive the sounds of peasant rebellion. In this book I redirect attention to oral eavesdropping from the focus on visual surveillance fostered by Michel Foucault’s influential analysis of the Panopticon. Similarly, the auditory sublime should be taken into account along with the visual. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes at length how visual sensations can produce sublime effects. However, he then turns to consider the psychological and aesthetic effects of loud sounds, first in nature and then among human multitudes: The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and aweful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the sole strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the croud. (75–76)

Literary historians have long recognized Burke’s conceptualization of the aesthetic categories of the sublime and beautiful as a major influence on Romantic poets and Gothic novelists, though they have not attended sufficiently to sublime sounds. Coleridge is one Romantic writer who focuses on sounds and voices when he addresses the sublime—for example, in “Chamouny; the Hour before Sunrise” (1802). In The Friend, he reflects on how the hills around the Lake of Ratzeburg are too low for sublimity, whereas during a winter thaw, “such were the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice, that they have left a conviction on my mind, that there are Sounds more sublime than any Sight can be, more absolutely suspending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing the mind’s self-consciousness in it’s total attention to the object working upon it” (257). Burke’s psychological exploration of sublime sounds likewise influenced Maturin’s theory of the echo. Maturin follows Burke in showing how the “shouting of multitudes” affects the faculty of the imagination so that an auditor tends involuntarily to echo “the common cry,” even while, as Coleridge adds, self-consciousness is absorbed.





As Maturin takes pains to show in Melmoth the Wanderer, when the people speak in one voice there can always be heard the danger of the echo. When the “ungovernable” Madrid mob riots on the night of the procession of the Inquisitors and the Dominican order, “one spirit . . . seemed to animate the whole multitude. What had been the stifled growl of a few, was now the audible yell of all” (MW 254, 255). In a disciplined and purposeful way, reminiscent of the Porteous rioters in Scott’s Heart of Mid-Lothian, the Madrid “multitude proceeded calmly, and even respectfully” (255), as they sought to injure none but the single object of their vengeance—the parricide, who had first received sanctuary and had then become an official of the Inquisition. Alonzo di Monçada, who watches the scene from a high window, is nonetheless infected by the extreme of barbarism: “I shuddered at . . . the dull and deep whisper among the crowd. I shrieked involuntarily when the first decisive movements began among them; but when at last the human shapeless carrion was dashed against the door, I echoed the wild shout of the multitude, with a kind of savage instinct” (256). Again, the involuntary or instinctual echo erases the boundary between elite observer and savage (even if disciplined) crowd. The source of social cohesion—the act of imaginative identification through which we bring the feelings of others home to ourselves— may become the cause of self-alienation, when the voice inside our heads is no longer the train of thoughts that constitute our selfhood but instead a mere echo of external sounds. The phonic medium of sympathetic identification is the source of humane benevolence, a principle that supplements self-interest. It fosters the union of harp and landscape, the land and the people, for the Irish nationalist. For the Anglo-Irish Unionist, it may also join human beings across linguistic, cultural, and class boundaries. However, the same phonic medium, at least in the novel as the genre of individualism, may extinguish our humanity, as we involuntarily assent to the savagery of crowds and nations, or as we descend into madness. Maturin’s exploration of the phonocentric sources of nationalism underwrites his elitist and individualistic critique of the idea of the people speaking in one voice. As Melmoth tells Stanton, a sane man confined in a madhouse, “A time will come, and soon, when from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbours near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them. . . . All humanity will be extinguished in you” (MW 56). For Maturin, the idea of Irish independence is frantic because of the inhuman dangers of the echo within the phonic.



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One of Maturin’s favorite words is echo. Echo is especially crucial in his works since it embodies a disruption of identity: a voice without a body; a voice that comes from outside the self; in Gayatri Spivak’s words, “a stable-yet-unstable, same-yet-different non-originary voice that remains” (27). Maturin is preeminently a novelist of the voice (as opposed, in part, to writing) and of the echo (a kind of voice, which, in its irreducible secondariness, has some of the characteristics of writing). In striving to represent the masses, Gothic novelists may deploy the oral doubling of the echo, or they may ask the reader to see double as they reach beyond literary form to the not yet available technique of cinematic montage. In her reading of the story of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and of the absence of Echo from psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, Spivak emphasizes Ovid’s phrase vox manet, which is a “peculiar formulation,” since “Received wisdom has it that it is scripta that manent” (26). Normally, the voice is just as transient as the crowd is volatile. Maturin’s works attempt to give permanence though not stability to both voice and crowd. Like the mob in crowd psychology, moreover, Echo in mythology is female. Woman, too, remains highly unstable in Maturin’s novels.

Unsexed Women In the genre of romance, in order to facilitate love relations, both men and women sometimes disguise themselves in the clothes of the opposite sex. In early modern Europe, many believed that the decline of martial qualities, caused in part by the growth of commerce, served to feminize men, while powerful passions, including sexual desire, served to unsex women. The unsexing of women may even give them the martial qualities that increasingly seem lacking in men. In Maturin’s final novel, The Albigenses (1824), one of the heroines, Isabelle de Courtenaye, in order to be close to her mentally disturbed husband, disguises herself as a diseased, one-eyed boy, consistently termed the “ill-favoured page” (A 4: 236), while the other heroine is accused of unsexing herself by employing military tactics in defense of her virginity. When Genevieve, the heroine of the heretical sect, is about to be abducted, she threatens to roll down huge rocks on the men who have pursued her to a mountain peak. A deacon of the Albigenses blames her for her unfeminine behavior: “Art thou unsexed; wilt thou be zealous unto slaying?” Genevieve responds, “Unsexed men make women forget their sex also . . . when the protector turns the oppressor, the unprotected forget aught but their safety” (2: 346). When men fail to fulfill their traditional gender





roles, women legitimately assume the martial role in defense of their honor. Although The Albigenses is a historical novel set in the thirteenth century, the disease of unsexing, spread from one sex to the other, reaches epidemic proportions at the turn of the nineteenth century. Attempting to persuade his readers that proper women’s roles have been definitively established in Protestant Britain in his own time, Maturin fills his novels with ambitious, unsexed, and cross-dressed women who, in violating proper roles, disrupt identity, heteronormativity, the family, and consequently the larger social order. In 1818, Maturin addressed the problem of the unsexed woman in a sermon on the “Necessity of Female Education.” Like other advocates of an education for women superior to the mere ornamental acquirements of music, drawing, and French, Maturin insists that women need to be qualified to teach their young children, since it’s they who are largely responsible for the formative years of male social and political leaders: “The destiny of women in all civilized society is of the utmost importance to man” (S 176). Like David Hume and Percy Shelley, Maturin believes that a mark of the superiority of the modern world to the ancient, and the West to the Orient, is the elevation of women: “Look where you will, from the poles to the tropics, women are savages or slaves, illiterate, despised, half unsexed or half unsouled. Where Christianity is professed, there, and there alone, she is treated with respect, with tenderness, or even with decency” (188). Speaking from the pulpit, Maturin maintains that women, prior to the spread of Christianity, “were slaves or toys, victims of a passion too gross to be named from this place: or, rising above it, they rose into examples of monstrous and exaggerated greatness—fierce and unfeminine—unsexed and unnatural: they were women who could bid their sons go out, and return on their shields” (S 179–80). As the object of an animal passion or as herself “a beast of burthen,” woman in the ancient and non-Western world is reduced to the condition of a slave without a soul; and women in Roman Catholic countries have it scarcely “better than their neighbours of the haram” (181, 183). Before Protestantism emancipated women through education, the only way in which a woman could rise above the role of sexual plaything was through a Spartan suppression of maternal affection, placing militant patriotism above the voice of nature. In a woman, this kind of greatness, according to Maturin, is “monstrous.” He does not advocate republican motherhood, since his ideal woman, sympathetic instead of stoical, will educate Christians rather than primarily citizen-soldiers. The formation of individuals within the sphere of the



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family takes priority for Maturin over the Spartan erasure of individuality in the military phalanx and the state. In his views on women, unlike those on Irish nationalism, Maturin’s sermons and his novels generally coincide. The complacency in the sermons about the superior position of women in nineteenth-century Britain recurs in Melmoth the Wanderer. There, when criticizing the manners of Restoration England, Maturin indicates that by 1820 women have arrived at the appropriate position in society: in the age of Charles II, on the contrary, “females had not then found their proper level in life; they were alternately adored as goddesses, and assailed as prostitutes” (MW 41). (Maturin’s belief that the virgin/ whore dichotomy has disappeared just prior to the Victorian period will surprise many readers.) The “proper level” for women can be reduced, as in the sermons, to a position of usefulness to men. Maturin does not entertain the idea that women’s “proper level” might include writing and public speaking motivated by inspiration, self-assertion, and the desire to instruct. Like Matthew Lewis with his mother, and Scott with Effie Deans, Maturin polices women’s writing. Just as the echo disrupts identity, and transvestism poses the danger of gender fluidity, a usurpation of authority beyond women’s “proper level” threatens the social order by the wrong kind of individualism—female ambition for public prominence. Maturin was obsessed with the question of women’s “proper level” at the time that he delivered his sermon on female education. That same year, 1818, he published his novel with the polemical title of Women; or, Pour et Contre. Here, he creates an intellectually superior female character in Zaira Dalmatiani. Zaira’s intellectual acquirements, however, have come at the cost of the maternal role, the one she most desires to fulfill. In the first of her letters in the novel, Zaira is in despair since her hopes have just been dashed of discovering the whereabouts of the child whom her Italian husband took from her at birth, when Zaira was unconscious from the laudanum given her during labor. To compensate for her frustrated maternal feelings, Zaira sublimates instinctual desires by devoting herself to study, prior to forming what she naively regards as an intellectual friendship with the handsome hero, Charles De Courcy. In De Courcy, a man much younger than she, Zaira seeks a pupil— thus inverting the usual tutorial relationship between the hero and heroine of novels of this period. Perhaps such an inversion becomes possible because of De Courcy’s own sexual ambiguity: “He blushes like a girl, frolics like a boy, talks like a man, and looks like a hero” (W 3: 21–22). In his review of Women, Scott condemned De Courcy




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A motley figure of the Fribble tribe, Which heart can scarce conceive or pen describe, Nor male nor female neither, and yet both Of neuter gender, though of Irish growth. (251) 4

While, in the Romantic novel, a man’s tutorial relationship to a woman serves to elevate her love above mere physical attraction, the reverse does not hold true, for “What man wishes to have his whole intellectual stock supposed to be the borrowed property of a female mind?” (3: 31). When De Courcy breaks his engagement to a modest, selfsacrificing woman in Dublin to run off to Paris with Zaira, he receives a letter of reproof from his guardian and one-time tutor, Everard Asgill. In the Maturin novel with the greatest number of biographical resonances, Asgill is something of a self-portrait, since, like Maturin, he is a Calvinist clergyman who keeps a school in order to prepare students for the university. Asgill advises his ward to break off his relationship with the opera singer, since “a woman, who can give herself up to the public display of her person and talents for bread, who can inhale the coarse and fetid air of a bravoing theatre as her vital breath, has departed from the character of a woman” (W 3: 49–50). Asgill draws upon a tradition of contempt for the common people—the stereotypical stinking breath of the mob—in order to argue that no woman of delicacy could engage in public display on stage. From public display as an actor, it is only a short step to publication, even if, with the individual reader in his or her closet, there is no question of “fetid air.” While, for Asgill, even male authors would have no place in good society, “A woman of literature is infinitely more insupportable than a man; for, to the pride and irritability of an author, is superadded the prescriptive distinction of her sex, that homage with which women in civilized society are intoxicated from their very cradles” (W 3: 53). The custom of gallantry toward women, which might have seemed to raise their status to its “proper level,” only serves to increase, to an intolerable degree, the vanity inherent in authorship, thus requiring that the pen be denied to the female sex. What Maturin regards as the problem of a woman who is so intoxicated as to write and to assume tutorial authority over a man appears in



as “a male coquette,” before applying to Maturin’s “effeminate” hero Charles Churchill’s satirical description of the actor Thady Fitzpatrick:

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a transvestite image from one of De Courcy’s wild dreams: “Zaira’s wearing a clergyman’s gown” (2: 120). While Maturin recalls the scene from Samuel Richardson in which Mr. B. imagines Pamela in “a Gown and Cassock” as the successor to the chaplain at his Lincolnshire estate (71), De Courcy recognizes the scandal that his tutor will subsequently point out in his genteel and sexist critique of authorship: De Courcy has become an “overgrown pupil of a female pedagogue” (3: 54). A woman who inverts the natural hierarchy by exerting authority over a man becomes a nightmarish monster in troubled dreams. Women who preach, write, and otherwise exhibit their intellectual resources may become entirely unsexed. Such women appear from the very beginning of Maturin’s literary career. In his first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin creates in the wife of a usurping Count an ambitious woman whose words and actions recall Lady Macbeth. Orazio di Montorio, who has the legitimate title to the estate, describes how his brother was prompted by his wife to be a man—or more than a man—by depriving him of his wealth and rank. When the usurping Count suffers from guilt, the Countess Zenobia di Montorio mocks her husband: “Are you unmanned by the fears that visit the infant’s sleep?” (FR 118). The new Count is subject to psychological torture, in the form of guilty dreams and through the machinations of his confessor, Father Schemoli, who is really the reputedly dead Count Orazio in disguise. In contrast, Zenobia evades psychological torments through mortification of the flesh. Now a childless woman, since all her children have died, she repudiates maternity and sympathy by mutilating the symbolic incarnation of these capacities in the female body. Zenobia eventually reveals to her husband her effective mode of dealing with guilt: “Look here,” said the Countess, and withdrawing her vest shewed beneath an iron band that encircled her waist, and was closed under her breast by a spring whose point entered it. “Who devised this most horrible penance?” said her husband. “They who could execute it could alone devise it.”—“The infliction is most sharp and agonizing, but the consequences are worse. Remove that dreadful zone, Zenobia; the corrosion of the iron—” “Will produce a cancer, I know it.”— “And the consequence must then be—” “A terrible operation; I have sustained it already. Eight months I wore it on the other side, it terminated as you suggest. I submitted to the operation without discovery and without a groan, and when it was over I removed the sharp point to the other side.” (389)





In linking breast cancer and an unsexed woman, Maturin draws upon Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, in which the cross-dressed Lady Delacour, on the advice of “the man-woman” Harriot Freke (2: 172), challenges her enemy to a duel, only to give herself the wound that she believes has become malignant.5 Maturin’s ambitious Italian woman, who has acquired great influence over her husband “from the superior strength of her character” (FR 386), undergoes a mastectomy in order to transform herself, as it were, into an Amazon— one of the warrior women who reputedly sacrificed one breast for the more effective practice of archery.6 Having no use for the milk of human kindness, the monstrous Zenobia intends to go beyond even the Amazons by doubly unsexing herself. Choosing the name Zenobia because of the Countess’s unfeminine ambitions, Maturin alludes to Zenobia Septima, the princess of Palmyra, whose desire to share imperial power led to Aurelian’s destruction of her city.7 While, or rather because, there is a failure of maternal nurturing in Fatal Revenge, the novel ends with Ippolito and Annibal in the arms of their father, Orazio di Montorio: “With the shriek and grasp of a mother, he held his children to his breast . . . . The sons . . . felt themselves bathed in their father’s blood!” (439). The jealous and vengeful Italian husband becomes maternal. When he bursts a blood vessel, the blood that pours over his sons may reflect their guilt for the murder of their uncle, the usurping Count di Montorio, whom they and Orazio mistakenly believed was their father. Alternatively, it may represent their absolution, as Orazio’s spilled blood indicates that he has taken responsibility for having driven them to commit the crime. However, the blood with which they are anointed at their maternal father’s breast also seems to be a modification of another bodily fluid—milk. In dying for his sons, Orazio performs a bloody and frightening parody of lactation. The usurpation promoted by the unsexed woman, Zenobia, ultimately leads to a man’s transformation into a nursing father.8 Unsexed women precipitate a universalized gender fluidity. In the midst of Maturin’s creation of effeminate or maternal men, his advocacy of female education, and his mockery or condemnation of women who aspire beyond their “proper level” through preaching, writing, acting, or self-mutilation, the figure of the female transvestite appears. And in Maturin’s novels, she appears insistently. Jacqueline Pearson has noted “Maturin’s persistent use of the image of transvestism,” which she believes betrays his anxiety to assert masculine control over the “woman-dominated form” of the novel (640). The transvestite enters Melmoth the Wanderer, however, through Maturin’s



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rewriting of the episode of the female monk from the 1796 novel of his closest male predecessor—Matthew Lewis. In Melmoth, a parricide in the employ of the Spanish Inquisition tells how he became a spy on a young monk forced to take the vows owing to his parents’ fear of a marriage with “a woman of inferior rank” (MW 205). While under the parricide’s surveillance, the monk becomes inseparable from a novice, whom the parricide observes making “a movement I thought rather awkward—it seemed like what I imagined would be the reverence of a female” (205). The parricide informs the monastic Superior of his suspicions, whereupon they enter the cell of the young monk only to find him in the arms of the novice, who proves to be the woman of low rank, whom he has secretly married. While policing sex and social mobility, the parricide exemplifies the perversion of the sentimental virtue of sympathy. Whereas the sentimental reader or the spectator of a sentimental tragedy delights in scenes of distress because they arouse the pangs and tears that are the signs of humane fellow-feeling, the parricide transforms such delight into sadism: “it is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering” (207). For the parricide, the Humean problem of the pleasures of tragedy has its solution in the Enlightenment virtue of scientific curiosity. He takes pleasure in watching at the door of the dungeon where the Superior has imprisoned the monastic lovers: “You will call this cruelty, I call it curiosity,—that curiosity that brings thousands to witness a tragedy, and makes the most delicate female feast on groans and agonies. I had an advantage over them,— the groan, the agony I feasted on, were real” (211). Maturin engages in antinovel discourse by pointing to the cruelty of the observation and experimentation justified by science and by suggesting that constant exposure to scenes of fictional distress leads us to view real life as if it were theater. As we have come to recognize in the age of media simulacra, sensationalized television news has acquired the unreality of feature films and hour-long television dramas, while we experience real events as repetitions of what we have already witnessed in film and on television. In 1820, Maturin already realized that the exercise of the sympathetic imagination through fiction does not necessarily expand our ability to put ourselves in the place of others. Instead, the powerful response to suffering, which serves to affirm one’s humanity and thus produce pleasure, may become an end in itself—to be satisfied, in Maturin’s day, by the swarm of novels groaning on the shelves of circulating libraries. The alimentary metaphor of feasting on agony leads Maturin to discover further evidence refuting the optimistic conception of





human nature. The parricide is the authorial figure who attempts to cut through romance and sentimental idealism to a materialist foundation. Romantic love is a product of the imagination, whereas physical pain is real. As the lovers starve to death, the parricide “heard their groans,—those groans of physical suffering, that laugh to scorn all the sentimental sighs that are exhaled from the hearts of the most intoxicated lovers” (211–12). In the laboratory constituted by the monastic dungeon, under the scientific observation of the parricide, the material reality beneath romance can be uncovered: “It was on the fourth night I heard the shriek of the wretched female,—her lover, in the agony of hunger, had fastened his teeth in her shoulder;—that bosom on which he had so often luxuriated, became a meal to him now” (212–13). The undercutting of sentimentalism takes the same form here as it did with the Countess Zenobia di Montorio in Fatal Revenge. A central physiological sign of femininity, whether of erotic attractiveness or maternal nurturing, is pierced. As the monk turns his lover’s breast into a meal, Maturin exposes the material reality of hunger beneath love and its attendant sexual overvaluation. As if he were a Freudian psychoanalyst or a Godwinian “moral anatomist,” Maturin hints that the original object behind the monk’s erotic investment in the cross-dressed novice is the maternal breast. Under conditions of stress, the initial source of nourishment, transformed romantically into erotic beauty, returns to its original alimentary function. Through his act of cannibalism, the monk regresses to the oral stage—in which, according to Freud, the capacity for identification takes its roots (18: 105). In a final irony and assault on sentimentalism, the cross-dressed female novice, whose sufferings the parricide enjoys, proves to be his only sister. The cross-dressing that Maturin confines to a few pages in Melmoth the Wanderer and The Albigenses extends over virtually the entirety of the narrative in Fatal Revenge and The Milesian Chief. Maturin explores through the female transvestites of these novels issues other than the mockery of sentimentalism. Even while he believes in a natural essence of masculinity and femininity and in a “proper level” for man and woman, he anxiously confronts gender fluidity. Even while his tales of lovers, though they rarely end in happy consummation, seem to confirm the natural necessity of heterosexual desire, Maturin explores homoeroticism through the relationship between a man and a cross-dressed woman. The persistent failed marriages in Maturin’s novels may be explained in terms of “the breakdown of the marriage analogy for Irish colonization” (Hansen 369). However, in the light of Freud’s insistence on the incompatibility of “directly



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sexual impulsions” and “every group formation” (18: 141), a novelist whose works are dominated by crowds may be barred from a conventional denouement involving sexual satisfaction. Not that homoeroticism is absent from Melmoth the Wanderer, where relations between men can be placed on a continuum from excessive fraternal affection, to Maturin’s insistence on the beautiful bodies of young men in pain, to the paranoid bonds of surveillance and persecution that Eve Sedgwick (after Freud) regards as latently homosexual, to clear allusions to sodomy.9 In Fatal Revenge, Rosolia di Valozzi disguises herself as the male servant Cyprian in order to influence the man she secretly loves, Ippolito di Montorio. When Maturin returns five years later to another instance of female cross-dressing that extends across the length of a novel, he emphasizes anxiety over sexual orientation. In The Milesian Chief, there is an incidental example of female cross-dressing when Gabriella Kilcarrick runs off to the rebel camp, in the clothes of a boy, in order to throw herself into the arms of Connal O’Morven. From the evidence of the ballads of the time (explored by Dianne Dugaw), Gabriella seems to have followed the most common pattern of female transvestites—entering a military camp (or embarking onto a ship) in faithful pursuit of a heterosexual lover.10 Maturin, however, treats Gabriella’s actions as those of a whore. After she travels with the rebels as a female soldier, but fails to seduce Connal, Gabriella becomes the mistress of Connal’s loyalist brother, Desmond. Later she discards Desmond for yet another lover as she sinks “to the lowest level of female degradation” (MC 3: 196). Maturin uses Gabriella, then, to illustrate the slippage from unsexing through transvestism to unsexing through female promiscuity. Uncontrolled female desire provides the catalyst in the explosive unsexing reaction. Desmond O’Morven is easier for Gabriella to seduce than his brother, since he needs to prove to himself the heterosexual aim of his desires, given the kind of love he feels for the boy Endymion. Endymion is the victim of inheritance laws: primogeniture and an entail. Born a girl and christened Ines, Endymion is raised as a boy so that substantial Irish estates can remain in the Montclare family rather than reverting to the male line of the O’Morvens. Maturin borrows this plot device from a novel by female predecessor—a novel, moreover, narrated in the epistolary voice of a man. In Mary Robinson’s Walsingham (1797), Lady Frances Aubrey, for the same purposes of inheritance, disguises her daughter, for the entire four-volume novel, as a son named Sir Sidney. In the case of Ines/Endymion, Maturin takes to an extreme the quality that in Lewis’s The Monk marked Antonia





as innocent and Ambrosio as a saint—namely, not knowing “in what consists the difference of Man and Woman” (M 17). Unlike Sir Sidney in Robinson’s novel, Ines Fitzalban fails even to entertain the idea that she is not male. Maturin turns sexual innocence/ignorance into sexual confusion. Desmond O’Morven meets Endymion in a scene from romance, when he saves from drowning a young “lady” who has fallen overboard on the passage from the continent to Ireland. (Similarly, Walsingham Ainsforth saves his cousin Sir Sidney Aubrey by preventing a runaway carriage from plunging down a precipice.) When Desmond subsequently embraces the “lady,” whom he now believes is his male cousin, “he felt a strange sensation: he shuddered: he wished to shrink from Endymion and from himself” (MC 1: 118). He is troubled at feeling wild sensations that he knows he ought not to feel for another man. When Endymion, his face romantically illuminated by lightning, denies “that there can be a crime in my love,” Desmond declares how he is “thus urged to impossible passion, forced thus to tell you that I do love you, with a love passing that of women” (1: 172). Maturin here alludes to the most famous male friendship in the Bible, when David laments over the slain Jonathan: “thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1: 26). Desmond strangely uses the biblically sanctioned language of male friendship to describe a passion that exceeds what men are permitted to feel for one another. Later, when Desmond discovers that Endymion is a woman, he exclaims with relief, “I knew it; I never could be deceived: I knew it from the first I could not be the victim of an impossible passion” (MC 2: 103). However, Desmond did not know it. He protests too much. A crisis of sexuality compromised his secure sense of masculine identity. Moreover, even when he discovers that his “maddening sensations” (1: 169) had been heterosexual all along, there is still the problem of the language of male friendship through which Desmond declares his love, “passing that of women.” Is it that the perfect erotic object is an unsexed woman, who hides her yielding bosom and luxuriant hair under the clothes of a man? Is it that the novelist of the crowd obscurely anticipates the Freudian insight “that homosexual love is far more compatible with group ties” (Freud 18: 141)? Whatever the case, when the two lovers eventually marry, Ines Fitzalban “gave her hand to Desmond, still in her masculine dress” (MC 4: 43). Moreover, when Desmond is distressed, “he was involuntarily soothed” by the sight of Endymion’s beauty “and her air, neither masculine or feminine” (4: 11). When the figure of the female transvestite comes to dominate his novel of the rebellion, Maturin provides an instance



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of the tendency in nineteenth-century “counter-revolutionary discourse” to identify “the overthrow of traditional political authority with the collapse of gender hierarchies” (Deane 118)—or, indeed, with the indeterminacy of sex and gender as such. In Maturin’s novels, cross-dressing is neither mere convention drawn from the genre of romance nor incidental recourse to the motif of the female warrior. Maturin alludes to a Renaissance antitheatrical tradition in which cross-dressing formed part of the moral outrage. However, he then takes antitheatricality in an almost postmodern direction through his exploration of the ethical problem of regarding real life as theater. Maturin writes under the influence of Matthew Lewis and, through the borrowed figure of the female monk, continues Lewis’s engagement with sentimentalism. Echoing as well Lewis’s interest in the failure to distinguish between man and woman, Maturin transforms such ignorance from a sign of sexual purity into an exploration of sexual orientation. He situates female transvestism and the unsexing of women in an extensive discourse, in both his novels and his sermons, about women’s education and proper gender role. While he betrays his indebtedness to such female predecessors as Edgeworth and Robinson, he critiques female authorship. Condemning both ancient classical culture and modern Oriental nations for the debasing of women, the enlightened imperialist Maturin maintains that in nineteenth-century Protestant Europe women have found their “proper level” in the domestic activities of nursing and reforming men. Women who repudiate or fail to fulfill the “natural” maternal role assume in compensation a strength and authority that is inappropriate or yield to an ambition that makes them monstrous, and such monstrosity undermines the techniques of individuation on which a new stable social order depends.

The Echoes of Incarceration Charles Maturin’s ideological position is especially contradictory because of the tension between his sermons, on the one hand, and his novels and personal letters, on the other. An elitist Irish nationalist, Maturin toned down his anti-Union sentiments when addressing his congregation in Dublin. At the same time, since he is an inveterate self-plagiarist, Maturin’s sermons and novels form an intertextual continuum. While drawn to alienated Romantic rebels, Maturin is nonetheless highly aware of crowds. He depicts the multitude with populist sympathy, even while, like other elite observers of his time, he focuses on unrepresentative scenes of violence against persons rather





than less spectacular property damage. It is not only in the case of the Irish rebels in The Milesian Chief that there is the danger of being “torn to pieces alive with the claws of those cannibals” (MC 4: 52). Through his insistence on the sublime sound of the crowd, Maturin shows how elite observers or auditors come to identify involuntarily with the multitude. While the echo threatens the integrity of the individual from one side, transvestism disrupts on another front supposedly stable attributes of the individual—namely, sex and gender. Efforts to promote individual subjectivity appear in the very mode of address of the novel form—interpolating a reader who consumes the work in the privacy of his or her closet. The subsuming power of the multitude, as well as the fluidity of gender designations, may be countered and rectified by uncovering an inner essence of the heart, instituting an intensified policing of the social body, and awakening the conscience in solitude. Policing and solitary confinement provide potential solutions for the problems of crowds and cross-dressing. However, despite his insistence on the threat of the crowd and on the instability of gender identity, Maturin cannot wholly endorse the techniques that might break up the crowd and buttress an individuality in which subjects of both sexes have found their proper level. The problem with these techniques is that they may create not rational individuals but involuntary machines. Maturin finds the antithesis of the undiscriminating crowd not in the self-motivated individual but in the mindless automaton. At the beginning of Maturin’s career, Fatal Revenge traces the transition from physical to psychological punishment, in the opposition between the Countess Zenobia’s spectacular (though admittedly secret) tortures and her husband’s subjection to confession and the torments of solitude. Indeed, the usurping Count of Montorio himself names the only punishment more effectual and severe than his wife’s breast-piercing, carcinogenic iron band: “An hour of solitude” (FR 389). The torments of conscience are more effective than physical restraint and more painful than physical torture. For writers who hold a Lockean model of the mind, conscience awakens in solitude because, in the absence of external stimuli, the ideas retained in the memory dominate consciousness. For such empiricists, however, the sensory deprivation of prolonged solitude results in a diminished state of consciousness or in a dangerous recourse to the association of ideas, a process that can lead to madness. In the course of escaping from monastic confinement, Alonzo di Monçada, in Melmoth the Wanderer, finds that he must spend twenty-four hours in a passage beneath a trap-door. In



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these circumstances, he discovers that the cruelest punishment is that of deprivation of the possibility of action, sociability, and sensory perception: “to forbid all interchange of mutual ideas, or acquirement of new ones to an intellectual being,—to do this, is to invent a torture that might make Phalaris blush for his impotence of cruelty” (MW 203). Despite his place in a tradition of horror fiction that leads him to dwell on cannibalized flesh and burning eyes (if not Phalaris’s signature torture of burning alive in a brazen bull), Maturin is still more interested in the effects of solitary confinement than he is in physical suffering. In criticizing imprisonment in solitude, Maturin traces the continuity from inquisitorial and monastic practices to those in the penitentiaries imagined and established in his own time. It was in 1819, a year before the publication of Melmoth, that “the first penitentiary planned wholly on solitary cells” opened in Philadelphia (Henriques 72–73). As early as Fatal Revenge, Maturin examines the effects of solitary confinement. The paternal despot in the form of the usurping Count attempts to break the will of Annibal di Montorio by imprisoning him in the tower of his castle. While Maturin thus connects the solitary system with the paternal power of the old regime, Annibal contrasts his punishment to the physical tortures that have been met by stoical resistance: Solitary confinement!—may I experience any sufferings but such as those again! any other affliction supplies the power of its own resistance. There have been beings who have sung in the fires, and smiled on the rack; but the nerveless vexation, the squalid lassitude, the helpless vacancy of solitary confinement, when time flows on without mark or measure; when light and darkness are the only distinctions of day and night, instead of employment and repose; when, from the torpor of inexertion, man feels himself growing to, and becoming a part of the still senseless things about him. (FR 137–38)

Precisely what makes penitentiary confinement more effective than physical torment is that, according to Maturin, this punishment eliminates resistance. In solitary imprisonment, the power of conscious resistance is reduced along with consciousness itself, so that the human being becomes scarcely animate, and the temporal realm, in which consciousness normally manifests itself, becomes amorphous. At the very moment when penal reform was being instituted, at the time of the shift from a cruel regime of domination, which was nonetheless comparatively tolerant of popular disturbances, to a supposedly more humane regime premised on consent of the governed, the ambivalent





conservative Maturin enunciates a critique of the new hegemony. Just as Foucauldians would later theorize, Maturin maintains that the new penal regime is more totalizing because it eliminates resistance. However, in one sense, the very fact of Maturin’s early nineteenthcentury critique shows that there was resistance—even from within the elite, not only from those most subjected to the new techniques of policing and punishment.11 As it developed, late eighteenth-century penal reform emphasized successively the principles of hard labor, classification, solitary confinement, and inspection as the means of instituting virtue and reforming character. The flow of time “without mark or measure” does not usually characterize the penitentiary, since the prison forms part of a carceral network designed to promote the time- and work-discipline conducive to industrial productivity. Prison reformers attempted to create a total institution in which the usual treatment of inmates was to “regiment their day to the cadence of the clock” (Ignatieff xiii). When human beings become almost inanimate because of confinement and the lack of voluntary activity, they are regulated by the clock or the bell. In the context of Methodism’s role in helping to create a compliant and disciplined industrial labor force, Maturin sometimes shows how Puritanical Calvinists and Methodists reduce themselves to the condition of machines. In Women; or, Pour et Contre, Maturin’s overly precise Calvinists are mechanistic in possessing the form without the essence of religion. Thus, Mr. Wentworth fails to exhibit the virtue of charity, when he stands mechanically unmoved in the face of a distressed debtor. Showing neither emotion nor physical “symptom of relaxation, no more than a clock shows, when a person is stationed before it anxiously watching the progress of its hands,” Wentworth rejects his debtor’s petition “with a voice such as might be supposed to issue from the lips of an automaton” (W 2: 133–34). Far more significant than this conventional critique of Puritans and Methodists who attend to the letter but not the spirit of the law is Maturin’s discovery of something automatic even for the sincere and charitable Calvinist. Eva Wentworth runs a school for poor orphans in Dublin, where Charles De Courcy observes his fiancée “pointing out lessons, and cutting out work for her little scholars, whose eyes, and fingers, and tongues, moving all in concert with hers, and all directed to her, mingled the singular appearance of eager intelligence with that of automatal mechanism” (1: 248). Like the penitentiary, the charity school, in support of which the curate Maturin delivered more than one sermon, is an institution designed to reproduce the “automatal mechanism” suited to the factory.



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In Maturin, however, most of the reductions of human beings to the condition of machines appear in the Roman Catholic context of the monastery and the Inquisition. Still, Maturin’s critique of monastic imprisonment does not just result from anti-Catholicism and a rejection of the old regime. There is something modern, bureaucratic, and even scientific, in the penal and surveillance techniques of the monastery and Inquisition. What Maturin finds most threatening in the Catholic Church is the omnipresence of its power, its infiltration into the smallest aspects of life, its manifestation as a machine identical with the social order. According to the parricide in Melmoth the Wanderer, mocking Alonzo’s fantasy of escape, the church possesses “a power whose operation is like its motto,—one and indivisible. . . . and you, an insect perched on a wheel of this vast machine, imagined you were able to arrest its progress, while its rotation was hurrying on to crush you to atoms” (MW 220). At the time of the inception of the modern state and its disciplinary techniques, the Roman Catholic Church serves Maturin as a figure for bureaucratic centralization and the subordination of human beings to institutional structures. Maturin is objecting more to emerging modes of power than to pre-Enlightenment abuses. Oneness and indivisibility, which elsewhere offer an ideal of religious and national unity, can also be overwhelming and dehumanizing forces. Indeed, in The Albigenses, the atheistical Bishop of Toulouse contrasts the empire of ancient Rome to the “vast system” of the medieval Roman Catholic Church in terms that imply the modernity of the latter: “That old and mighty Rome, of whom pedants prate, subdued but the meaner part of man—his body; but our Rome enslaves the mind—that mind, which, once enslaved, leaves nothing for opposition or for defeat” (A 3: 203). As in his critique of solitary confinement, Maturin recognizes that the modern shift from power directed toward the body to that directed toward the mind aims at forestalling opposition. His Bishop of Toulouse is a representative of Enlightenment modernity in part because he views people according to what Foucault terms “the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body” (History of Sexuality 139). The Bishop first regards the hero Sir Paladour in terms of his mechanical value in the military ranks, “scanning the young crusader as he would . . . a machine whose momentum he was calculating” (A 1: 57). While the critique of monastic life regulated by the bell appears in both Bertram and Women, Maturin develops this idea most fully in Melmoth the Wanderer. As either a source for, or a reflection





on, the modern penitentiary, the prison of the Inquisition in Maturin employs the silent system, in order to appeal to the prisoner’s conscience. Maturin thus alludes to the major debate in early nineteenthcentury prison reform, which pitted the proponents of separate cells and the chaplain’s “moral science” against the proponents of labor in association with other prisoners under a strictly enforced regime of silence (Evans 4). If the silent system makes conscience audible to the prisoners of the Inquisition in Melmoth the Wanderer, they themselves are subject to total visibility. The monastery too is part of a surveillance regime, in which “restless vigilance” (MW 132) forms an explicit part of a disciplinary system of behavior modification. Again as in the factory, once the horn has been superseded, the bell punctuates temporality and regulates all activity. Everything is habitual, and nothing voluntary. The specific mechanism that the human being becomes, through entire submission to the bell or through solitary confinement, is the clock. A dying monk tells Alonzo what monastic life has made of him: “I am a clock that has struck the same minutes and hours for sixty years” (110). Alonzo has a similar experience when his resistance to the monastic regime results in his confinement in solitude and darkness. He counts off the seconds and minutes in his dungeon: “Then I wished to be the clock, that I might have no feeling, no motive for hurrying on the approach of time. . . . I might have been converted into the idiot, who, as I have read, from the habit of watching a clock, imitated its mechanism so well, that when it was down, he sounded the hour as faithfully as ear could desire” (146–47). In Maturin’s version of the monastery, the remaking of individuals through regularity and labor assumes precedence over the awakening of the conscience in silence and solitude. If the penitentiary after 1818 came to rely on the mechanical and regular labor performed on the treadmill—“a device for equalizing, measuring, regulating and timing the performance of toil” (Evans 297)—so Alonzo finds another mechanical comparison for the monks besides the clock. In their submission to duty in confinement, the monks resemble “horses, employed in a mill” (MW 116). Melmoth the Wanderer is the ideal protagonist for a novel that features omniscience, constant vigilance, and penetrating eyes. His unutterable bargain has gained him supernatural powers of movement and an extended life-span, and has placed a gulf between him and the rest of humanity. He thus occupies a high position in a surveillance regime, “knowing all, and known to none” (MW 397). Separated from humankind, he can view pain and sorrow unmoved, without even the



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parricide’s sadistic pleasure at the theater of suffering. Melmoth is one who can view disasters without identification, and crowds without echoing their wild shouts. Witnessing from a cliff a shipwreck in a storm, Melmoth exhibits “neither sympathy or terror,” while the same event “extorted a cry of horror from the spectators,” who “felt as if they were echoing that of the victims” (66). While, as I have shown, the operations of sympathetic identification and of echoing compromise the integrity of the individual self, the exemption from sympathy and from the irresistible impulse to echo threatens something worse—not the subsuming of the individual by the crowd, but rather the elimination of all fellow-feeling. Better to suffer a separation of the will from the voice, echoing rather than uttering sounds, in disorientation, anxiety, and madness, or in the murmuring crowd, than to suffer the separation from other human beings that Melmoth holds out in exchange. In Melmoth, Maturin creates a character without a heart. Or so the Inquisitors suspect, when they attempt to subdue the Wanderer through Immalee and the child Melmoth fathered. In attacking Melmoth through his domestic affections, the Inquisition operates experimentally on the human heart: “if there be any thing mortal clinging to his heart, we shall wind round the roots of it, and extract it” (MW 524). The science of the human heart is the discipline of Inquisitors and of Romantic novelists. Maturin establishes the connection between the vivisectionist of the human heart and the author of supernatural fiction through the character of Orazio di Montorio in Fatal Revenge. Orazio paradoxically uses superstition as a technique in Enlightenment anthropology or universalizing aesthetics, since superstition provides him with the means of discovering the essence of human nature at all times and in all nations. Orazio outlines in these terms his scientific and aesthetic aim: “my search was after that part of the human character, which is equally visible through all the modifications of society, and the caprices of the individual, which is equally discernible in the savage and in the sage.” A new universalist aesthetics is implicated in inquisitorial practices, since superstition is the cutting tool that enables Orazio to “dissect the most subtle and capillary fibres of the human heart” (FR 416). Even while the Gothic novel justifies itself as fiction designed for moral ends, by using the supernatural or the explained supernatural to awaken the conscience, characters within the work who make the same claims about the uses of superstition are morally compromised. In the Dedication to The Milesian Chief, Maturin contrasts his aims in Fatal Revenge to those in his third novel: “In my first work I attempted to explore the ground forbidden to man; the sources of





visionary terror; the ‘formless and the void:’ in my present I have tried the equally obscure recesses of the human heart” (MC 1: v–vi). The intention claimed by novelists in their prefaces, and the achievement praised by early nineteenth-century book reviewers—that of exploring the “recesses of the human heart”—is rendered morally suspect in the novels themselves. As I argue in the next chapter, the use of the “metaphysical dissecting knife” in the procedure of “moral anatomy” violates the integrity of the individual in the manner of an old regime torturer, or of the modern psychologist who would remake human beings through carceral institutions—or through the individualizing mechanisms of the novel. The supposedly laudable achievement of early psychological fiction critically redounds against the novel itself, in a strange form of antinovel discourse.



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G odw i n’s “M e ta ph y sic a l Dissec t i ng K n i f e”

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illiam Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) tells the story of Ferdinando Falkland’s knife murder of Barnabas Tyrrel. To protect his reputation and hide his guilt, Falkland persecutes his servant Caleb Williams, whose uncontrollable curiosity has led to his discovery of Falkland’s crime. The best commentary on the knives and the watchful, penetrating eyes in this tale was provided by Godwin himself, almost forty years after the first appearance of the novel, in the account of the composition of Caleb Williams that he included in the Preface to the 1832 edition of Fleetwood (a novel first published in 1805). In that Preface, the knife is a metaphor for first-person narration and its capacity to provide psychological insight to facilitate the individualizing of characters. Godwin tells how he began writing Caleb Williams in the third person but then abandoned it, breaking with the “usual way” of narration to penetrate beneath the superficial: I then assumed the first person, making the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive. (CW 351)

Later, Godwin repeats (with a slight difference) the phrase “laying bare” and thereby supplies a second penetrating instrument, analogous



Chapter 5


to the “metaphysical dissecting knife”: in doing research for his novel, Godwin “turned over the pages of a tremendous compilation, entitled ‘God’s Revenge against Murder’, where the beam of the eye of Omniscience was represented as perpetually pursuing the guilty, and laying open his most hidden retreats to the light of day” (352; emphasis mine). This analogy between knife and eye (where the knife is already a metaphor for the first-person pronoun I) illuminates Godwin’s narrative technique, as well as his conception of both authorship and subjectivity. My account of Godwin’s authorship as at once violently intrusive and self-effacing responds to critics who regard Godwin’s anarchism as individualistic and libertarian and to those who claim that the choice of first-person narration indicates Godwin’s “willingness to sacrifice objectivity to subjectivity and political to aesthetic purpose” (Graham 54). Godwin uses the image of the “metaphysical dissecting knife” in order to subject his own authorship to an ethical interrogation. Caleb Williams, which, as David McCracken observes, has been considered “the first psychological novel” (Introduction, Caleb Williams vii), insists on the violence inseparable from psychological investigation. Godwin proposes sympathy as an alternative to the penetrating way of knowing, only to suggest that sympathy, when not an inaccessible ideal, has a tendency to slip into the opposing domain of surveillance.1 In this chapter, then, I argue that the “metaphysical dissecting knife,” which is Godwin’s name for first-person narration, turns back on itself and compromises the integrity of the “I” that speaks. By situating Caleb Williams in relation to the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and St. Leon (1799), I show how Godwin’s first major novel expands on the idea of self-anatomy: the first-person narrative ends with a relinquishing of autobiography; the internal eye (of the imagination) allows one to overcome narrow, selfish views; the impartial spectator eliminates all personal considerations; the self— with its sphere of discretion—forbids invasion by the gaze of others; the originality required of the independent thinker is undercut by intertextuality, the inescapability of prejudice, and Godwin’s theory of property; and the protagonist of the novel adopts numerous disguises, including that of a one-eyed beggar, thus dispersing the self into a series of masks.

Moral Anatomy and Agency In this book, I have argued that the moral condemnation of disguise reflects back on the authorship of late eighteenth- and early



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nineteenth-century fictional works. Few writers have argued more insistently in favor of the duty of sincerity than William Godwin, and few novels have more insistently condemned disguise than Caleb Williams. Godwin, however, is known more as a defender than a critic of fiction. In two documents—a manuscript essay “Of History and Romance” (composed in 1797)2 and the Preface to Cloudesley (1830), which revisits some of the topics of the essay—Godwin privileges fiction over history as a source of knowledge of individual characters. In this preface, Godwin maintains that “We cannot, if we would, refrain from speculating on the motives, and endeavouring to penetrate into the inmost thoughts” of controversial historical figures (Cloudesley vii). Such speculations, however, have produced little positive knowledge, for “man is a more complex machine, than is ‘dreamed of in our philosophy:’ and it is probable that the skill of no moral anatomist has yet been consummate enough fully to solve the obscurities of any one of the great worthies of ancient or modern times” (viii). The phrasing of this claim of human unknowability is highly characteristic of Godwin: the moral anatomist is bizarrely engaged in dissecting a machine, and the complexity of the human mechanism can best be conveyed through a quotation from Hamlet. The phrase “moral anatomist” is also highly characteristic of the Romantic period, as a verbal construction in which the name of a science is modified by moral, where that adjective refers to the sphere of “character or conduct, as distinguished from the intellectual or physical nature of human beings” (OED; emphasis mine). Thus, Charles Maturin writes of “adepts in moral chemistry” (W 3: 286) and of taxonomic nondescripts in the field of “moral botany” (MW 311). Four years after Cloudesley, in her novel Helen, Maria Edgeworth describes the aptly named satirist and male gossip Horace Churchill, who dissects the brains and hearts of his friends with “the probe and the scalpel,” as a “professor of moral, philosophic, and scandalous anatomy” (9: 110). Along with the “moral telegraph,” which, as I showed in the introduction, names the sentimental ideal of wordless communication, these new “moral” sciences are concerned either with individualization or with the attempt to get beyond self through sympathy. But apart from the limits of psychological knowledge, what accounts for the violence and the pseudoscientific status of “moral anatomy”? While anatomy in this period still conventionally means “analysis,” Godwin and his contemporaries by and large do not use the surgical term as a dead metaphor. The idea of anatomy may have gained prestige from one of the most important forerunners of the Enlightenment, Francis Bacon, who claims that the empirical



G o d w i n ’s “ M e t a p h y s i c a l D i s s e c t i n g K n i f e ”


method, as opposed to deductive rationalism, cannot be successful “without a very diligent dissection and anatomy of the world” (370). Indeed, Percy Shelley praises seventeenth-century philosophers including Bacon for having “anatomized the inmost nature of social man” (qtd. in Chandler 188). William Brewer has shown that Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) helped to initiate the Romantic project of mental anatomy (Mental Anatomies 15). Anatomy also figures in the language of commendation employed by early nineteenth-century reviewers of fiction. Alaric Watts, for example, praises Maturin’s “horrible anatomy of the moral frame” (167). But anatomy and dissection, whether physical or moral, are procedures that, on other occasions, Romantic writers condemn. Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796) includes a chapter entitled “A Selfdissection,” in which the heroine’s brother appropriately analyzes his life of dissipation. However, the central obstacle in the love-plot of Burney’s novel is a misogynistic tutor’s bad advice that the hero spy on, test, and (as it were) anatomize the heroine: “observation will enable you to dive into the most secret recesses of her character” (Burney 595). When Keats submits Endymion to Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt for their criticism, he complains that “they appear much disposed to dissect & anatomize, any trip or slip I may have made” (Letters 214). Walter Scott refers to the Edinburgh Review as Francis Jeffrey’s “theatre of Anatomy” (Letters 4: 156). When Coleridge objects to the gratuitous violence of The Monk, he compares Matthew Lewis to an anatomist: “Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher” (Rev. of The Monk 59). In 1810, Wordsworth extends the trope of anatomy into the biographical domain, when he opposes the emotional attachment of the epitaph writer to the scientific objectivity of the psychological analyst: the writer composes an epitaph beside the grave of one he loves; therefore, he “is not an anatomist, who dissects the internal frame of the mind” (Prose Works 57). An 1827 periodical writer uses the same metaphor in arguing for the public right to the biographical knowledge produced by psychological analysis: “If a man lives for the public, . . . when he is dead . . . the public have a right to send him to the general anatomy-house, where he may be dissected for the improvement of the science of human nature” (“Conversations” 402). William Hazlitt in 1823 reflects on the unfortunate construction of human beings, on how we find lasting amusement in treating our acquaintance



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as the objects of knowledge and ridicule: “We regarded them no more in our experiments than ‘mice in an air-pump:’ or like malefactors, they were regularly cut down and given over to the dissecting-knife” (12: 133). For Hazlitt, in our idolatry of truth, we come to treat our friends in the way scientists do lab animals, and surgeons, hanged felons. In Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin suggests that it is “a skilful and profound artist in the school of mental anatomy” who advises the Spanish Inquisition to use Immalee/Isidora’s maternal affection as the rack on which to torture her (MW 529). The pervasive image of anatomy reveals the ambivalence of the Enlightenment, a project in which character analysis participates. There is no chronological break that reveals unqualified Enlightenment praise of anatomy followed by a Romantic suspicion of murderous dissection. Instead, the ethical problem posed by anatomy cuts through individual authors and discrete periods. Given that British Enlightenment thought both theorized sympathy and emphasized sociability, the critique of the dissections performed by pure intellect comes as no surprise. Godwin uses the idea of moral anatomy in a biographical context similar to Wordsworth’s and at times with a force of condemnation similar to Maturin’s. In Mandeville (1817), Godwin indicates that every writer of history or biography unintentionally writes autobiography, betraying “many secrets of [his or her] own heart,” at least “to a penetrating reader” and “a skilful anatomist of the soul” (197). In the same novel, Godwin creates an admirable character in Lord Montagu, an “intellectual anatomist” who “guided his dissecting knife with an unfaltering hand” (Mandeville 300). Similarly, the “moral anatomist” of whom Godwin writes in the 1830 Preface to Cloudesley would no doubt use the “metaphysical dissecting knife” of the Preface to Fleetwood published two years later. Anatomists in Godwin’s works sometimes have connections with despotic power. In a passage added to the 1796 second edition of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Godwin shows how the science of anatomy becomes a means of refining old regime torture: “When Damiens, the maniac, perpetrated his abortive attempt on the life of Louis XV of France, a council of anatomists was summoned, to deliberate how a human being might be destroyed with the longest protracted and most diversified agony” (PJ 4: 15). In the context of the treason trials of 1794, Godwin metaphorically associates the science of anatomy with the judicial rewriting of treason law in an assault on English liberty. Godwin maintains that Chief Justice Eyre “quits the character of a criminal judge and a civil magistrate, and assumes that of a natural philosopher, or experimental anatomist. He is willing to





dissect the persons that shall be brought before him, the better to ascertain the truth or falsehood of his pre-conceived conjectures” (Political Writings 2: 95–96). If physical anatomy is a science that at times serves old regime power in its most despotic manifestations, the new psychological technique of moral anatomy can claim no greater innocence. For Godwin, psychological torture, even in the service of truth or of a judicial analytical technique similar to that of the novelist, is still less defensible than physical torture; shackles on the body are preferable to attempts to enslave the mind. Caleb Williams serves as Godwin’s spokesman for a critique of British complacency for having no Bastille and for having banished the instruments of torture “from their happy shore” (CW 187). However, the English have theorized and implemented new penal techniques directed at the soul— techniques that may be still more cruel. Thus, Godwin indicts John Howard’s scheme of solitary imprisonment as perhaps “the bitterest torment that human ingenuity can inflict” (PJ 3: 404). More explicitly in Godwin than in any other British writer of this period, the abuses of the old regime and the proposals of progressive reformers become subject to the same critique. James Thompson argues that, in the depictions of imprisonment and spying in Caleb Williams, Godwin dramatizes the terror of the new penal and industrial regime, “the coming state of surveillance and discipline” (183–84). Because of the complicity of the dubious science of psychology with the violent processes of individuation and penal reformation, writers like Godwin and Maturin are troubled by the practice of moral anatomy and by the idea of diving into characters’ hearts, even though readers and reviewers typically situate such voyeurism among the pleasures and benefits of fiction. In a society in which a strict hierarchy is founded on the inequality of property, moral anatomy may provide knowledge that facilitates the manipulation of one person by another. At the same time, Godwin’s belief in the inaccessibility of motives suggests that such “schemes of policy” (PJ 3: 161) will not be wholly effective. Godwin suspects that psychology is prescientific or pseudoscientific. His choice of the word adept to describe Caleb Williams as a psychologist suggests that Williams practises alchemy or other hermetic arts rather than modern science. Williams tells how a “constant state of vigilance” served “to render me a competent adept in the different modes in which the human intellect displays its secret workings” (CW 128, 129). In medieval Latin, according to the etymology of adept in the OED, the term “adeptus was used subst[antively] and assumed by alchemists that professed to have attained the great



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secret”3 While the violence inherent in moral anatomy and in the image of the dissecting knife indicates the immorality of uncovering motives, its pseudoscientific status may well concern the impossibility of such discovery. In his double view of moral anatomy, as both unethical and ineffectual, Godwin can be counted among Romantic novelists who present a moral critique of disguise at the same time as they suggest that fiction may be the best we can do. As the moral anatomist of Falkland, Caleb Williams reverses the normal direction of surveillance, turning it against the social hierarchy. But, as with Matthew Lewis’s Jamaican slaves and Henry Tilney’s “neighbourhood of voluntary spies” (Austen, Northanger Abbey 203), Godwin’s delineation of Williams’s irresistible curiosity might derive from the master’s anxiety about prying servants. Reformers in the 1790s suspected that Pitt’s repressive measures included the bribing of servants to spy on their masters and report any seditious conversations.4 In Rob Roy, Walter Scott uses the same anatomy metaphor as Godwin in describing the gossip that Frank Osbaldistone overhears about himself in a chance encounter with his servant Andrew Fairservice: “whoever should happen to hear their character talked over in their own servants’-hall, must prepare to undergo the scalpel of such an anatomist as Mr Fairservice” (169). The instrument that Falkland’s servant uses, in his role as an adept in moral anatomy, is not a scalpel but a “constant state of vigilance.” Godwin’s condemnation of such vigilance in its highest degree, “the eye of Omniscience,” is quite unambiguous, whatever the case with the “metaphysical dissecting knife.” In his 1818 manuscript essay “Of Religion,” Godwin denies that the prospect of a life after death gives Christianity practical value in promoting morality. When we are motivated by the fear of future punishment, “We have a tyrant perpetually controling us with his lash, with this additional horror, that he is acquainted with all our most secret motions, and sits like Jeremy Bentham, perched on the top of his Panopticon to spy into our weaknesses” (Political Writings 7: 65). Despite his admiration for Bentham, Godwin differed from his fellow utilitarian on the possibility of improving human beings by changing their external conduct—for example, by subjecting them to constant surveillance.5 In a revision to the 1798 third edition of Political Justice, Godwin admits that “Punishment undoubtedly may change a man’s behaviour. . . . But it cannot improve his sentiments, or lead him to the form of right proceeding but by the basest and most despicable motives” (PJ 4: 296). In Caleb Williams, Falkland is the most notable practitioner of such hierarchical and punitive surveillance. With the exaggerated pride of





a Gothic villain—or a radical novelist’s tyrannical squire—Falkland claims godlike power in a typical warning to Williams: “You might as well think of escaping from the power of the omnipresent God, as from mine!” (CW 150). Godwin himself advocates a certain form of “general inspection,” but he is consistent in his rejection of the kind of inspection that depends upon hierarchy and that has ultimate recourse to penal coercion. In viewing Godwin’s assumption of authority as self-undermining, I regard the metaphysical dissecting knife less as a tool that penetrates beneath appearances to where the truth lies hidden than as one that destabilizes individual identity. Godwin claims that “Every thing in man may be said to be in a state of flux; he is a Proteus whom we know not how to detain” (PJ 4: 71). There is a tension between this questioning of stable identity and the necessitarian aspects of Godwin’s thought. If an individual is a Proteus for Godwin, he or she is also a machine. Hence, Godwin argues “that the theory of the human mind is properly . . . a system of mechanism” (3: 175). The human mind, moreover, “is an agent, in no other sense than matter is an agent” (3: 368). Godwin shows the consequences of the doctrine of necessity for the penal system by discussing the example of a particular kind of material object and a particular kind of human being: a dagger and an assassin. He compares the dagger unfavorably to a knife, “because the dagger has few or no beneficial uses to weigh against those that are hurtful,” and he believes that assassins are subject to greater moral disapprobation than daggers only because they may contract the habit of killing, whereas their inanimate instruments cannot. But with these reservations, Godwin maintains that “the two cases are exactly parallel. The assassin cannot help the murder he commits any more than the dagger” (3: 368, 369). All human action results from opinion, and our opinions and beliefs are the products of the circumstances in which we are placed rather than of choices that we freely make. In disassembling the system of mechanism that constitutes the human mind, the metaphysical dissecting knife would be penetrating into something that itself resembles a dagger. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the works of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and other Godwinians such as Robert Owen, attitudes toward machines are complex and ambivalent. This ambivalence can be explained by the position of these authors between Enlightenment rationalism and the experience of the Industrial Revolution. While they were heirs to a tradition of philosophical dualism in which the body was regarded as a machine, their innovation was to extend the mechanical model from the body



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to the mind. The attitudes of these thinkers would include the necessitarian view that human beings are machines to the extent that all their beliefs and actions result from environment and circumstances. According to this view, no praise is due or punishment justifiable for the holding of any belief or the commission of any act whatsoever. For politically radical rationalists, while technological advances in an unjust society may lead to the further oppression of the laboring poor, the same mechanical inventions in a more equitable future state will benefit all humankind. Godwin recognizes that, with things as they are, labor-reducing machines create fears of unemployment, “and they may be productive of temporary distress, though they conduce in the sequel to the most important interests of the multitude” (3: 451). The Godwinian “sequel” imagines a world in which labor is equally performed and its produce equally distributed, so that reductions in manual labor free all human beings for pleasurable occupations and intellectual activities. Yet these radical rationalists also believe there is a danger that human beings will be reduced to a mechanical condition because of residual abuses or emergent phenomena: (1) an excessive division of labor; (2) military discipline; (3) deficient education; (4) relations of extreme subordination in an unjust social hierarchy or in the institution of marriage; or (5) the brutalization and deindividualization consequent upon participation in mobs and even in political parties. Moreover, Enlightenment radicals, along with proponents of industrial efficiency, contemplate the remaking of human beings on the model of unerring clockwork machines. For example, in 1769, the liberal but paternalistic pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood wrote to his business partner about the need “to make such Machines of the Men as cannot err” (qtd. in McKendrick 34). Not only individuals but also the factories in which they perform their productive labors and the communities in which they live ought to function like well-oiled mechanisms. Like the factory, so the school. In his representation of the disciplining of the collective body of students at Winchester School in Mandeville, Godwin states that “they are governed . . . much like a machine; the machinist has to touch a spring only, and the whole is obedient” (78). On the one hand, then, Godwin is a necessitarian who considers human beings as machines, albeit with a mechanism so complex that it will always remain undecidable how a given set of circumstances leads to particular beliefs and actions. On the other hand, Godwin and his fellow radicals condemn the brutalization and mechanization of human beings, processes intensified by the techniques of labor





discipline that accompanied industrialization. Godwin’s most extensive treatment of this problem appears in Fleetwood, in the interpolated history of William Ruffigny, who serves as a father-figure for the protagonist, Casimir Fleetwood. As a young orphan in Lyons, Ruffigny had been forced to work in a silk-mill, an occupation that leads him to claim that “A mechanic becomes a sort of machine; his limbs and articulations are converted, as it were, into wood and wires.” As Godwin’s spokesman for the condemnation of child labor and the advocacy of equal opportunities for all children in both education and the experimentation of play, Ruffigny concludes with bitter irony that “It seems necessary that there should be such a class of animated machines in the world” (Fl 110). Ruffigny subsequently compares the silk-mill in Lyons to a prison in Dijon. Long before Foucault, Godwin saw the factory as part of a carceral network extending from school to prison. Still, more than once in a novel in which the most memorable passages concern machines, puppets, and a life-size wax doll that appears to the insane narrator uncannily to move and speak, Godwin describes the rapid operations of the human mind in terms of cogs and wheels (104, 332–33). In Caleb Williams, Falkland’s steward, Collins, serves as Godwin’s necessitarian spokesman. Although Collins believes that Williams has robbed Falkland and then attempted to evade the charge by claiming that Falkland is a murderer, he does not wish to see Williams punished: “I consider you as a machine; you are not constituted, I am afraid, to be greatly useful to your fellow-men: but . . . you are just what circumstances irresistibly compelled you to be” (CW 321). Necessitarianism, combined with the belief in the inscrutability of motives, leads Godwin to a radical rejection of all punishment. Ultimately, his necessitarianism undermines subjectivity and the notion of free agency, reducing the human individual to merely “the vehicle through which certain causes operate” (PJ 3: 168). By implication, Godwin interrogates authorship, reinterpreting the originary agent as a node in an intertextual and epistemic network of shaping forces and influences. Thus, despite Godwin’s condemnation of the mechanization of human beings, his necessitarianism compromises the individualistic component in his thought. In the 1832 Preface to Fleetwood, in addition to describing his narrative mode through the metaphorical dissecting knife, Godwin explains that, in pursuing a course of reading in preparation for writing his novels, he never thought himself “in danger of servilely copying my predecessors. I imagined that I had a vein of thinking that was properly my own, which would always preserve me from



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plagiarism” (CW 351). This confident statement about the existence or value of originality oddly appears in the Preface to a novel closely patterned on Othello. Moreover, this view of literary property is inconsistent with Godwin’s general theory of property. For Godwin, the right to property is almost absolute in relation to the coercive powers of government but virtually nonexistent in the context of the rational calculations of utility. If, in the metaphor of the gold- or silver-mine, the independent thinker possesses wealth in “a vein of thinking that was properly [his] own,” in the matter of literal wealth, “We have in reality nothing that is strictly speaking our own. We have nothing that has not a destination prescribed to it by the immutable voice of reason and justice” (PJ 4: 80). According to Max Weber, the Calvinist notion of the stewardship of worldly goods led to capitalist accumulation by the ascetic entrepreneur. The lapsed Calvinist Godwin retains the idea of stewardship, while he rejects asceticism and condemns accumulation. He believes that one’s life, like one’s property, should be held “as a trust in behalf of mankind” (3: 53). Still, no government can justly force an individual into a particular disposition of his or her private property. In his utopian rejection of revolutionary violence, Godwin maintains that people will be led by the inevitable advance of reason to the recognition that individual accumulation is a political evil and equality of property a social good, but confiscation forms no part of the “genuine progress of political improvement” (4: 354). The only powers that can legitimately control even a capricious disposition of property are general inspection and public opinion. There is certainly a distinction between the property in ideas that Godwin wishes us to possess and the property in goods that reason would deny us. But whether Godwin can be confident that his ideas are properly his own in an intextextual world—“Every thing is connected in the universe” (4: 79)—remains doubtful. People possess, and irrationally accumulate and distribute, the material property that is illegitimate, whereas the conceptual property that is required of a truly independent author, in the end, may be impossible to own.

The Crowd and the Noble Savage in ST. L EON The pseudoscience of moral anatomy is an individualizing mechanism, one that breaks up collectivities through the practice of autobiography and the violence of psychology. In the most important crowd scene in his fiction, Godwin examines popular resistance to the science or pseudoscience practised by an adept, Reginald St. Leon, while he arouses sympathy for the victim, Hector, who suffers in the place of





the crowd’s intended target—the feared and hated scientist. The victim’s subordinate status is marked by occupation (he is a servant), by race (he is of black African descent), and by a mechanical deficiency of voluntary behavior. Although St. Leon’s scientific pursuits do not deserve popular admiration, the radical novelist Godwin, in St. Leon and elsewhere, disapproves of popular disturbances much more decisively than Maturin or Scott. An early nineteenth-century Tory may be to some extent a populist, while a radical Whig like Godwin certainly is not. Although in Political Justice Godwin insists on the value of public opinion and general inspection in small idealized communities, he is driven to embrace individualism by the need to distinguish his utopian reformism from the revolutionary theories that are being put into practice across the Channel. With a view to secret societies, the Jacobin Club in Paris, and perhaps Corresponding Societies at home, Godwin condemns parties and political associations as inappropriate mechanisms for initiating reform.6 He sounds very much like Gustave Le Bon, the reactionary crowd psychologist, in his dismissal of collective wisdom as “the most palpable of all impostures” (PJ 3: 308). Like crowds, all political associations deprive people of their individuality and reduce them to a lowest common denominator. Affiliation with a political party, according to Godwin, “resolves all understandings into one common mass, and subtracts from each the varieties that could alone distinguish him from a brute machine” (4: 144). Since he is confident that truth and reason will readily overcome material interest and ideology, Godwin maintains that political improvement will occur gradually through the operations of public opinion, education, and the raising of consciousness: “there is no need of tumult or violence to effect it”; “we shall have many reforms, but no revolutions” (3: 39; 4: 120). In the course of condemning political associations, Godwin enunciates a theory of popular disorder similar to that of Matthew Lewis, in which popular festivity can easily turn into mob violence, and a perspective on crowd psychology similar to that of Walter Scott, in which collectivities threaten to nullify individual moral restraints. The risk of disorder is present in any large assembly of people who are united by animosity against their oppressors: Nothing is more notorious, than the ease with which the conviviality of a crowded feast, may degenerate into the depredation of a riot. While the sympathy of opinion catches from man to man . . . actions may be determined on, which the solitary reflection of all would have rejected. There is nothing more barbarous, blood-thirsty and unfeeling, than the triumph of a mob. (4: 145)



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Once individuals are freed from the restraint of conscience or “solitary reflection” by their participation in a crowd, where opinion spreads like electricity or sympathetic fire, they will be transformed from rational agents into “the instruments of massacre,” who “glut themselves with barbarity and insult, and utter shouts of horrid joy at the spectacle of their tortures” (3: 467). Godwin’s description of the voice of revolutionary violence, except that it lacks the misogynistic dimension, recalls “the horrid yells” of Edmund Burke’s bloodthirsty French Revolutionary mob of October 5–6, 1789 (Reflections 165). Godwin will use similar terms in 1799 to describe the violent mob in Pisa who watch the burning of St. Leon’s house with “shouts of infernal joy” and the spectators of the auto da fé in Valladolid, who drown out the victims’ shrieks with their “infernal exaltations” (SL 289, 352). Godwin’s attitudes toward crowds and popularity, as well as the narrative technique of his novels, are shaped by a coherence account of truth—the belief that internal consistency provides the best guarantee of truth. His narrators recount circumstantial tales, free from internal contradictions, which, they believe, will irresistibly convince every unprejudiced listener. A corollary of this coherence account is a rejection of intersubjective validation; truths are not guaranteed by popularity: “the voice of the people is not, as has sometimes been ridiculously asserted, ‘the voice of truth and of God’ ” (PJ 4: 81). Still, despite his suspicion of popularity and his rejection of collective action, Godwin’s confidence in progress requires him to posit a unity, beyond the surrender of individual understanding that occurs in the baneful dynamics of the group. While distancing himself from collective action, Godwin imagines that a collective change of consciousness will free the people from the false opinions that keep them in chains. Although Godwin thus rejects “unisonance”7 in epistemology—the whole people speaking in one voice do not necessarily speak the truth—he relies on unanimity in his theory of political reform. As Caleb Williams puts it when he initially recognizes his mental freedom from the power of Falkland, human beings are foolish if they do “not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious” (CW 162). Although there are no major crowd scenes in Caleb Williams, the novel includes a good deal of evidence for Godwin’s attitude toward the “mob.” When Falkland is cleared from the imputation of having murdered Tyrrel, people of all ranks celebrate together, united by “a sort of sympathetic feeling” (CW 107). Just as the “general voice” rises “to hootings, tumult, and a deafening noise of indignation” when Tyrrel appears at the rural assembly after he has caused Emily 10.1057/9780230106574 - Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, James P. Carson




Melville’s death, Godwin focuses on the sound of the crowd when Falkland is greeted by “a general murmur” of congratulations that unite hearts beyond individuality: “there was an indescribable something in the very sound that carried it home to the heart” and exceeded all “merely personal pleasure” (99, 107). In a realistic representation of a common eighteenth-century form of popular adulation, “The multitude received him with huzzas, they took his horses from his carriage, dragged him along in triumph, and attended him many miles on his return to his own habitation” (107). Godwin may have been recalling here how sympathetic crowds on several occasions in the late 1760s unharnessed the horses from John Wilkes’s coach to grant him a mark of popular favor in drawing the carriage themselves (Gilmour 314, 321). In a similar scene, a few months after Caleb Williams was published, when Godwin’s fellow radical Thomas Hardy was acquitted of treason, the jubilant London crowd removed the horses from the carriage of the successful defense attorney Thomas Erskine, whereupon “he was dragged in triumph through the streets” (E. P. Thompson, Making 135). However, the general celebration when Falkland is freed from the humiliation of having to face a criminal trial again serves to show that the voice of the people is not the voice of truth, since Falkland is, of course, guilty. Maintaining that Godwin organizes Caleb Williams around “crowd agitation, community meetings, and individual competition for public esteem,” Nicolle Jordan argues that the novel retreats from populism in this scene: “It is as if Godwin, having introduced the people’s propensity for delusion in the face of dazzling eminence like Falkland’s, cannot recuperate their potential as agents of reform” (246, 265). In the same way, when Caleb Williams brings universal opprobrium upon himself for slandering the popular aristocrat Falkland, the community and Falkland’s faithful dependents fail to perceive the truth. Williams is subject to such hatred that he is in danger of becoming the victim of popular justice. Godwin, moreover, imagines popular justice in the same hysterical way as Lewis, Scott, and Maturin—not ritual, symbolism, and property damage but personal violence, which was, in fact, a rare occurrence in British riots. Williams tells how Falkland’s dependents look at him “as if they could have torn me to pieces” (CW 177). The Godwinian crowd is both violent and deceived, murderously confounding the innocent and the guilty. The Godwinian crowd has another characteristic that marks it as the creation of a typical elite observer: it is incapable of autonomous collective action. Godwin notes that the members of the community fail to rebel against Tyrrel’s tyranny and to banish him from their



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presence for his infamous behavior, simply because the crowd lacks a leader (21, 98). Only the energetic, sublime, Romantic hero Falkland, who already possesses the deference of the common people, can give the crowd direction and resolve. All these characteristics recur in the important crowd scene in St. Leon: the unenlightened crowd shows no concern for truth; it confounds the innocent and the guilty; it practises the most violent form of popular justice in tearing its victim to pieces; and (in the apparent absence of autonomous community) it needs a leader in order to act. After acquiring the secret of the opus magnum, St. Leon moves to Pisa where he devotes his time to both chemistry and magic. Assisting him in these pursuits is Hector, now St. Leon’s servant but formerly the turnkey of the jail in Constance, whom the imprisoned St. Leon tried unsuccessfully to bribe. If this black man’s incorruptibility makes him a kind of noble savage, Godwin’s description of Hector’s particular brand of faithful servitude has other racial overtones: “He was formed to be a pure, passive machine in the hands of his employer, only with this singular difference from the lifeless machine of the engineer or mechanical inventor, that he was susceptible of attachment and affection, as well as of a certain species of contentment and a certain species of goodness and virtue” (SL 259). In the late 1790s the exemplars of revolutionary violence and arson would include not only the Parisian sans-culottes but also the Maroons in Jamaica and the rebellious African and Afro-Caribbean people of Saint Domingue. In the transatlantic context, Godwin thus inverts a racial stereotype when he makes a sympathetic black character the victim of a superstitious white mob. The scene in which St. Leon’s house is burned and Hector murdered begins with Godwin’s observation that the crowd wanted a leader: they “needed only a bold and artful director to urge them to any point of fury and destruction” (SL 281–82). A leader they find in Agostino, who bears a racially motivated grudge against Hector for having shared the affections of Agostino’s mistress, a barmaid. As Scott will later do in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Godwin romanticizes collective action by giving the leader of the crowd a motive of personal revenge deriving in part from a love-triangle. The “infatuated peasants,” who regard St. Leon as a necromancer who bewitches cattle and enchants children, silence St. Leon with “the roaring of tigers, and the shriek of cannibals” when he attempts to make them hear reason (282, 285). But, however overwhelming the sound of the crowd, their tiger-like fury does not make them especially formidable. In the view of St. Leon’s friend, the marchese Filosanto, “They were in reality a mere material machine, led





on without reflection” (285). By the end of the riots, the mechanical crowd will have destroyed the machine-like black servant. The crowd is initially awed by the armed servants who defend St. Leon’s property, but the villagers return the following night to make “a burnt-offering” of the house (288). This metaphorical sacrifice, revealing the primitive nature of the common people’s superstitions, leads the Italian nationalist Filosanto to lose faith in Enlightenment: he comes to believe that the unthinking herd is “destined to be eternally at war with improvement and science” (289–90). The reader’s response must be more ambivalent, since the adept and alchemist who possesses the philosopher’s stone and elixir of life makes a dubious representative of scientific progress. The mob is not wholly mistaken in thinking St. Leon a necromancer. Godwin’s insistence on St. Leon’s guilt makes it doubtful that the alchemist in St. Leon, as Gary Kelly maintains, allegorically represents the 1790s radical who enunciates unpopular political truths and that the Pisan riot against St. Leon directly refers to the 1791 Birmingham riots in which a “Church and King” mob destroyed Joseph Priestley’s library and much of his valuable scientific equipment (Kelly 209, 214).8 Although there is no sharp division between alchemy and science in the early modern period, the hermeticism of alchemy is quite distinct from the public and democratic science espoused by Priestley. Besides, Godwin has scarcely more animus against a politically reactionary mob than he does against any other kind of collective action. There can be no doubt, however, about Godwin’s condemnation of the Pisan crowd when they subject Hector to “every species of mockery and of torture; they killed him joint by joint, and limb by limb” (SL 290). In the major crowd scene in Godwin’s fiction there is considerable sympathy for the victim of what is in part a racist assault, since the leader of the mob, Agostino, was enraged at having “a negro for a rival, whom his pride regarded as belonging to an inferior species of beings” (268). In contrast, St. Leon, Godwin’s spokesman in this regard, finds “something . . . truly tragical” in the murder of “so simple-hearted, so noble a creature” (291). Thus, Godwin accepts the ethnocentric concept of noble savagery and rejects a populist dimension in his perspective on the crowd. The radical reformer Godwin handles crowd scenes with less popular sympathy and less historical accuracy than Maturin or Scott. The Pisan riot in St. Leon exhibits all the characteristics of the elite misinterpretation of and anxiety over popular collective action, except that there are no cross-dressed men or Amazonian women. When such a figure—a woman warrior who avenges her husband by killing three Turks—does appear at the end



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Sympathy and the Problem of Essentialist Gender Definition Women are strikingly underrepresented in Caleb Williams. The only female character whom we see engaged in regular domestic occupations is the “old woman who superintended the household” of the gang of thieves, led by Mr. Raymond, with whom Williams first finds refuge on his escape from jail (227). Although the loathsome hag prepares Williams his first meal in his new abode, she represents a diabolical parody of maternal nurturing: “Not the milk of human kindness, but the feverous blood of savage ferocity seemed to flow from her heart” (222). Godwin takes the phrase “the milk of human kindness” from Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy regretting that her husband possesses too much of this quality ever to achieve his ambitions (381, n. 53), a soliloquy that immediately precedes her prayer that invisible spirits “unsex” her. Williams compares the robber-cook to an Amazon queen—“This infernal Thalestris” (222). The unsexed woman in Caleb Williams—who speaks in what “might have been the voice of a man” and who wrestles with “Amazonian” vigor (222, 240)—threatens Williams with castration, figured here as swallowing up or cannibalism. With a striking resemblance to the French Revolutionary women in the misogynistic tradition initiated by Edmund Burke, the hag in Godwin’s Jacobin novel offers to drink Williams’s blood and eyes him “with a furious glance of canine hunger” (228). During his sojourn with the thieves, Caleb Williams commits heresy against the hag’s creed of robbery, thus leading her into what Godwin would consider the error of using physical force against the power of opinion. Left alone with the old woman, Williams falls asleep and dreams of a male assassin sent by Falkland to murder him: “I heard the steps of the murderer as he cautiously approached. . . . The idea became too terrible; I started, opened my eyes, and beheld the execrable hag before mentioned standing over me with a butcher’s cleaver. I shifted my situation with a speed that seemed too swift for volition, and the blow already aimed at my skull sunk impotent upon the bed” (239–40). Although the cleaver, intended to penetrate to the human brain, falls impotent, it serves as an especially



of the novel, she has a grieving widow’s justification and, therefore, authorial sanction for her assumption of the masculine military role: “The very women displayed an enterprise, that the more vigorous sex have seldom exhibited” (442).


brutal kind of “metaphysical dissecting knife” by giving the reader an opportunity to observe involuntary responses. The butcher’s cleaver uncovers evidence for the moral anatomist, in the metamorphosis of the male assassin of Williams’s dream into the execrable hag of the waking state. Dreams form one of the sites where the gender fluidity of Godwin’s culture most readily manifests itself. That the dread of castration is at the root of Williams’s gynophobia would seem to be confirmed by the disguise he adopts to make his escape from the thieves’ habitation—that of a one-eyed beggar. The sexual metamorphosis occasioned by Williams’s dream (the male assassin who turns into the unfeminine, but female, hag) and Williams’s loss of full male status (through the upward displacement of castration represented by the loss of an eye) are glossed by Godwin himself in the 1832 Preface to Fleetwood. There, Godwin traces a parallel between the tale of Bluebeard and his own novel of 1794: “Falkland was my Bluebeard. . . . Caleb Williams was the wife, who in spite of warning persisted in his attempts to discover the forbidden secret” (CW 353; emphasis mine). While Bluebeard’s wife serves as a byword for curiosity and thus provides an obvious parallel to Williams, Godwin also creates sexual ambiguity by using the masculine possessive pronoun (“his attempts”) and by making Williams female in analogy.9 These instances of gender transformation and sexual ambiguity ultimately point to the problem of essentialist gender definition. Throughout his life, Godwin appears to have held certain qualities to be gender specific. In apparent contradiction to his belief that “THE CHAR ACTERS OF MEN ORIGINATE IN THEIR EXTERNAL CIRCUMSTANCES” (PJ 4: 16), Godwin writes as if gender characteristics were natural or even innate. Yet Godwin, like other members of his and Shelley’s circle, does not propose unadulterated masculinity and pure femininity as human ideals. According to Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798), his first wife gave early evidence of her dissatisfaction with the merely feminine role: “Dolls and the other toys usually appropriated to the amusement of female children, she held in contempt; and felt a much greater propensity to join in the active and hardy sports of her brothers, than to confine herself to those of her own sex” (13). Yet Wollstonecraft’s essential character is compounded of sympathy, intuition, and “maternal qualities” (Godwin, Memoirs 34). Curiously, given Godwin’s condemnation of such fictional Amazons as his robber-woman, he finds in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman a “rigid, and somewhat amazonian temper,” along with “passages of a stern and rugged feature, incompatible with the



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writer’s essential character” (55), which he has already determined to reside in maternal sympathy. It is not only her critics like Richard Polwhele who think Wollstonecraft unsexed; her husband does too. Only Godwin finds her to be Amazonian not for a lack of conventional domestic virtue but for a rationality devoid of feminine sensibility. Whatever the explanation for this inconsistency with the environmental determinism of Political Justice, Godwin presents at the end of his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft and again in Fleetwood an ideal, though momentary, accord between men and women. In the novel, the union of male and female souls is brought about through reading aloud sentiments that are not one’s own. The relinquishing by two people of the train of their own thoughts to the direction of an author permits a kind of union in self-oblivion. In the mid-eighteenth century, Lord Kames, who maintains that “the foundation of personal identity” resides in a lively self-consciousness or continuous perception of self, notes that reading is one means of inducing self-oblivion—in this case, the loss of self-consciousness essential to sleep: “ ’Tis remarkable, that one has scarce any chance to fall asleep, ’till this perception vanish. . . . A fall of water disposes to sleep. It fixes the attention, both by sound and sight, and, without creating much agitation, occupies the mind, so as to make it forget itself. Reading of some books has the same effect” (233). Rather than a cure for insomnia, reading for Godwin is a kind of contagious disease, not just because of a generalized sentimental phonocentrism, but because reading shades into theater. In Political Justice, Godwin explores the paradox that the external impressions that constitute us as individuals—in this case, the books we read—likewise threaten our individuality since they modify by coercion the train of our thoughts: “Every man that reads the composition of another, suffers the succession of his ideas to be in a considerable degree under the direction of his author.” Just prior to this statement about the dangers of reading, Godwin has enunciated a strong version of Rousseauist antitheatricality: “All formal repetition of other men’s ideas seems to be a scheme for imprisoning for so long a time the operations of our own mind” (PJ 3: 452). In his fear that theatrical performance and even reading transform the human being into a ventriloquist’s dummy, Godwin universalizes a criticism that was conventionally directed at women’s reading of novels and plays. Catherine Gallagher argues that the anxiety over the sentimental reader derives from the fear that novels disrupt “the personal identity on which property was founded”: “the novel reader was a body inhabited by many sentiments, but none of them was her own” (279). In a world in which books are proliferating so that there is too great





a multitude for anyone to master, antitheatrical and antifictional discourse extends into the problem of reading as such. This discourse, moreover, seems to invalidate Godwin’s distinction between desirable intellectual property and the obligations of stewardship over material property. Readers experience self-loss in being transformed into musical instruments on which an author plays, yet such self-loss can also entail the transcendence of the gendered self through an accord with a person of the opposite sex. Casimir Fleetwood has such an experience in reading John Fletcher’s Wife for a Month: How exquisite a pleasure may thus be derived from reading with a woman of refined understanding so noble a composition as that which engaged us! . . . we are like instruments tuned to a correspondent pitch, and the accord that is produced is of the most delightful nature! . . . Male and female taste are in some respects of different natures; and no decision upon a work of art can be consummate, till it has been pronounced on by both. (Fl 245–46)

The ideal union of souls has been resolved into separate male and female elements, but ought this significant difference in gendered ways of seeing in matters of taste be extended to other matters of judgment? After all, for a whole eighteenth-century tradition in moral philosophy, the internal sense that perceived beauty was analogous to the moral sense that determined just actions. The question then becomes whether a man who is only masculine or a woman who is only feminine can arrive at a decision about justice. Godwin thought not, at least after the experience of his relationship with Wollstonecraft. In 1792, Wollstonecraft had written of her “wild wish . . . to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour” (5: 126). She felt that men had the privilege of achieving a fully human character that contemporary education denied to women: “Men are not always men in the company of women, nor would women always remember that they are women, if they were allowed to acquire more understanding” (Wollstonecraft 5: 193, n. 3). However, even before he and Wollstonecraft became lovers in 1796, Godwin in Caleb Williams sought to extend imaginatively his faculty for judging, by identifying with, or assuming the sentiments of, a narrator belonging to a lower social class than his own—a narrator whom many years later he was to describe, in analogy, as Falkland’s wife. Jean-Christophe Agnew has observed that at the Stuart court in an earlier period social mobility was coded as



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gender ambiguity (129–30). So, in describing the composition of his first major novel, Godwin, heavily influenced by the drama produced in the reign of the first of England’s Stuart kings, uses gender terms to designate the socially mobile Caleb Williams and to mark the difference in social status between author and narrator. One of Godwin’s biographers finds “something androgynous about him,” and cites as evidence lines from a “Monody on the death of William Godwin” (possibly by Mary Shelley): “Godwin was versatile, he bore combin’d / A woman’s tenderness, a Cato’s mind” (Peter Marshall 405, 408). Unlike the Amazonian hag who wields the butcher’s cleaver, the man who handles the “metaphysical dissecting knife” apparently possessed, along with his Stoicism, “the milk of human kindness.” The first-person narrative technique of Caleb Williams may thus entail not only the invasive and penetrating operations of moral anatomy but also a kind of feminine imaginative identification with a figure whose social status marks him as “female.” The (feminine) capacity of imaginative sympathy may even require the transcendence of the (male) body. Godwin believed that the love between him and Wollstonecraft was especially fostered by his absence from her on a journey in 1796: “Absence bestows a refined and aerial delicacy upon affection, which it with difficulty acquires in any other way. The sentiment produced, seems to resemble the communication of spirits, without the medium, or the impediment, of this earthly frame” (Godwin, Memoirs 100). Body is an encumbrance on feeling or sympathy. Affection in absence takes a man out of his body, through an alchemical process of sublimation (“a refined . . . delicacy”), so that he can commune sympathetically with a woman. Subsequently, in his relationship with Mary Jane Clairmont, Godwin reiterates the tropes of pseudoscience when he attempts playfully to define the relationship between husband and wife. On September 9, 1805, Godwin writes in an attempt to persuade his wife to meet him at Stowmarket the next day, a meeting that he claims would “electrify” him. Since Mary Jane Godwin will not have received his epistolary exhortations until after she has already decided whether or not to go to Stowmarket, Godwin plays with the idea of the mental telegraph in his comments on the previous day’s persuasions when he completes the as-yet-unmailed letter on September 10: “I could not resist the impulse to endeavour to persuade you. Why should there not be an animal magnetism or a magic sympathy between man & wife, superior [to] the common laws of nature, & enabling such persua[sions] to produce their effect?” (Godwin, Correspondence).10





If the letter dated September 1805, among the Abinger manuscripts of Godwin’s letters to his second wife, is Mary Jane’s reply to Godwin’s letter of September 9–10, as it appears to be, then she did not think that mesmeric powers had enabled Godwin successfully to overcome such “common laws of nature” as the difference between the sexes. She writes, “If you could be a woman and a managing woman but for a single day you would understand better what the most affectionate of wives could or could not do” (qtd. in St. Clair 243–44). Already, in Caleb Williams, Godwin conceived of sympathy in terms of the pseudoscience of mesmerism, when Williams claims that “There was a magnetical sympathy between me and my patron” (CW 117).11 That the intimate connection between Williams and Falkland prefigures those between Godwin and his wives suggests once again a sexualized union for his fictional male characters, like that between Bluebeard and his wife. Unlike Mary Jane Clairmont, Wollstonecraft—in something of a rhetorical gesture of remaking Godwin on a new, more tender model—claimed to find in him the capacity to perform, metaphorically, the archetypal act of female sympathy: “It is I who want nursing first, you perceive—are you above the feminine office? I think not, for you are above the affectation of wisdom” (G&M 37). Even if a man’s sympathy can extend to metaphorical lactation, in the “feminine office” of nursing, his imagination cannot convey to him the feelings of carrying, and giving birth to, a child. Still, the couvade, marking a man’s acknowledgment of the generativity he lacks, has largely been ignored on account of the psychoanalytic focus not on men’s but rather women’s lack—the absence of paternal power, an absence symbolized by castration.12 The sympathetic mode, which Godwin and other sentimentalists propose as an alternative to penetration into secret truths, may have limitations deriving from sex differences in experience or biology. When Godwin writes to the pregnant Wollstonecraft, during a subsequent absence from her, the failure of sympathetic communion results from her “condition”: “I remember at every moment all the accidents to which your condition subjects you, & wish I knew of some sympathy that could inform me from moment to moment, how you do, & how you feel” (80). Imagination may enable feeling to overcome absence and distance, but it cannot inform a man of what a woman feels when she is most essentially and biologically “female.” Godwin suggests that there is a bond between a woman and her unborn child that remains forever inaccessible to him as a man. Although no doubt he writes playfully, there is a serious encounter



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with the otherness of female bodies and female experience in his speculation on the relationship between woman and fetus: “Salute William in my name. Perhaps you know how” (102). Compounding the sexual confusion here, Godwin and Wollstonecraft referred to Mary in utero as “William.” If Godwin extends his sympathetic imagination to women, if there is something “feminine” about his very endeavors at sympathy, if taking on the persona of a lower-class male is equivalent to assuming the guise of a woman (Bluebeard’s or Falkland’s wife), there nonetheless remain limits to such sympathetic identification. Of course, men do bring forth metaphorical children. Godwin employs the parental metaphor for authorship in his 1797 collection of essays, The Enquirer. There he commits the children of his mind, in their undeveloped state, to the mercy of the reader: they are still “the hints of enquiry rather than actual enquiries: but hereafter perhaps they may be taken under other men’s protection, and cherished to maturity” (Godwin, Enquirer viii). By admitting that his notional progeny are immature, Godwin avoids authorial vanity. By treating his speculations as common property, he promotes Enlightenment progress. Sending his immature progeny into the world does not amount for Godwin to irresponsible parenting (as it will for the author of Frankenstein), since, until the late 1790s, he held natural ties to be of little moment. Utility takes precedence over parental instincts, just as progress of knowledge is more important than intellectual property. Hazlitt recognized Godwin’s identification with his characters, but he failed to see the disquieting consequences of such sympathy for the exercise of authorship. Just as he used the image of a “trenchant-blade” to describe Godwin’s moral philosophy (Hazlitt 11: 20), he uses the parental metaphor to describe the authorship of Godwin’s novels: “[T]he author has identified himself with his personages. Indeed, he has created them. They are the proper issue of his brain, lawfully begot, not foundlings, not the ‘bastards of his art.’ He is not an indifferent, callous spectator of the scenes which he himself pourtrays, but without seeming to feel them” (11: 25). What would it be like for Godwin to feel the anguish of his proper intellectual issue, who are placed in distressing situations of his own creation? The moral anatomist who feels every incision that he makes with his metaphysical dissecting knife has, no doubt, chosen the wrong profession. Can the “callous spectator,” who views the world as theater, be placed in a stable opposition to the person who identifies and feels? Certainly, Godwin puts much of himself into “the proper issue of his brain”—the character of Williams, for example, is partly





autobiographical. However, Williams is a “competent adept” in moral anatomy, one who potentially makes victims of others through the psychological knowledge obtained through surveillance. Godwin uses the word adept once more in the novel (in the original manuscript ending) to describe Williams. In the final confrontation between Williams and his patron, Falkland refers to his former secretary as “a consummate adept in every species of disguise” (CW 341). It is significant that Godwin should use the same word to refer to proficiency in these two practices: moral anatomy and disguise. It is my contention in this chapter that the novelist practises both metaphysical dissection and disguise, and that since these activities resemble alchemy or entail outright dissimulation they are morally compromised. Williams’s expression of the guilt and anguish of the mimetic artist—“My life was all a lie. I had a counterfeit character to support” (265)—cannot be contained wholly within the novel but instead spills over to contaminate Hazlitt’s account of the happy, antitheatrical conjuncture of identification, creation, and parenting. Similarly, Mary Shelley, in her 1830 review of Cloudesley, brings together the ideas of sympathetic identification and character analysis, in the metaphors of transfusion and dissection. Godwin, she maintains, “transfuses himself into the very souls of his personages; he dives into their secret hearts, and lays bare, even to their anatomy, their workings” (Mary Shelley, Rev. of Cloudesley 203). Whether they present their endeavors as new scientific practices (mesmerism, blood transfusion, moral anatomy), as disguise or theatricality in the service of truth, or as parenting, Romantic novelists cannot wholly dispel their own and their readers’ doubts about the ethical status of their authorial activities. I began this section by showing how the essentialist definition of gender to which Godwin is attracted is undermined by his belief in an imaginative identification that extends electrically or magnetically beyond the boundaries of the individual body. Indeed, the capacity for sympathy or the sociability essential to humanity serves to refute the philosophical treatment of the human being as an individual. Thus, in Caleb Williams, Godwin compares man to a conjoined twin who would be unable to survive surgical separation (CW 313–14). When Godwin returns to the image of conjoined twins to describe the mysterious and indissoluble “antipathies” between Charles Mandeville and Lionel Clifford, he imagines that relationship as a parody of a marriage “made in heaven” and as Mezentius’s torture of chaining “a living body to a dead one” so that the one ultimately partakes in “the putrescence of the other” (Mandeville 140–41).13 Just as sympathy here invalidates individuality and results in torture, so the internal



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The Angelic Station and the Calvinist Congregation Although Godwin would obviously not have approved of assuming the position of an indifferent spectator on the distresses of others, he privileges the role of the impartial spectator in his concept of duty and the principle of general inspection in his legal and penal theory.14 The ideal of impartial justice that Godwin formulated in the early 1790s, which depends on observation of others and oneself from a position above humankind, closely resembles Stoical doctrines. In contrast, Adam Smith is critical of the Stoical ideal of the wise man, who “regards himself in the light in which he imagines the great genius of human nature, and of the world, regards him. He enters, if I may say so, into the sentiments of that divine Being, and considers himself as an atom, a particle, of an immense and infinite system, which must and ought to be disposed of, according to the conveniency of the whole” (TMS 276). The danger that Smith sees in Stoicism is that of identification with the eye of omniscience, a kind of sympathy inappropriate for human capacities. This danger is precisely the one to which Godwin exposes himself in his role as moral anatomist. Godwin’s impartial spectator differs from Smith’s by being less an internally distanced part of the self—“the man within the breast” (130)—than a being of a higher order. For Godwin, “the soundest criterion of virtue is, to put ourselves in the place of an impartial spectator, of an angelic nature, suppose, beholding us from an elevated station, and uninfluenced by our prejudices” (PJ 4: 65). But angels—and here lies the problem Smith and others saw in Stoicism—have neither families nor private affections. In contrast to the main eighteenth-century tradition of British moral philosophy, Godwin in the early 1790s was content to dismiss private affections. Godwin’s meritocratic ideal requires that not only all titles but also all personal relationships be set aside in an impartial evaluation of individual merit. “Father” and “mother” are titles like any other. To clarify his notions of duty and justice, Godwin proposes a case of conscience in which only one person, Fénelon or his valet, could be saved from a fire: “Suppose the valet had been my brother, my father



contradictions in the sympathy of an author for the characters whose suffering he himself imagines lead to a morally dubious authorship. The author who analyzes and tests his or her characters engages in the potentially violent penetrating way of knowing instead of a more benign epistemology.


or my benefactor. . . . Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expense of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my,’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?” (PJ 4: 63; 3: 50). In this, the single most notorious passage in his works, Godwin moves from a dismissal of the ties of blood and gratitude to a denial of property and the self. If, in the case of Laura Denison in Caleb Williams, Godwin considers the love of one’s father as one’s father a superstitious “sort of religious veneration” (CW 304), the improper weighing of the pronoun my is analogous to vulgar magical superstitions. In accordance with his theory of property, in which “We have in reality nothing that is strictly speaking our own” (PJ 4: 80), Godwin drains the possessive pronoun my of most of its proprietary force. The first edition of Political Justice had Godwin resigning to the flames not a valet but a chambermaid, who was his mother or his wife (PJ 3: 50). The relinquishing of ties with one’s mother would probably have been more shocking to his contemporaries, though Mark Philp notes that the change of sex may have politicized this passage since “killing one’s father . . . is the familial form of regicide” (209, n. 22). Allowing his mother to die in order to save Fénelon would also have represented a greater struggle for Godwin personally, who was more affected by his mother’s death than he had been by his father’s. In his letter to Mary Jane Godwin after his mother’s death in 1809, Godwin embraces the kind of religious veneration that he earlier condemned: “While my mother lived, I always felt to a certain degree as if I had somebody who was my superior, and who exercised a mysterious protection over me. I belonged to something—I hung to something—there is nothing that has so much reverence and religion in it as affection to parents” (qtd. in Paul 2: 180). Godwin drew from eighteenth-century British moral philosophy not only the notion of the impartial spectator but also a belief in the necessity of governing the tongue. Shaftesbury, for example, was willing to propose, as the appropriate model for self-government, what in the political sphere would count as unmitigated despotism: “As cruel a court as the Inquisition appears, there must, it seems, be full as formidable a one erected in ourselves, if we would pretend to that uniformity of opinion which is necessary to hold us to one will, and preserve us in the same mind from one day to another” (122).15 For Shaftesbury, the consistency of opinion and will that constitutes individual identity is paradoxically established by a process of self-division. Only the self-criticism inherent in the oral practice of soliloquy—this “business of self-dissection”—qualifies a person to be



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an author (Shaftesbury 105). Similarly, for Godwin, precisely because government has no proper role in regulating the communication of knowledge and opinion, it becomes “doubly incumbent on those who communicate their thoughts to the public, to exercise a rigid censure over themselves” (PJ 3: 469). But such self-censorship, setting “a guard upon the door of our lips” (Godwin, Enquirer 92), is more difficult to justify in Godwin than Shaftesbury given Godwin’s greater insistence upon absolute frankness. Like Shaftesbury, Godwin takes a despised Roman Catholic institution as a metaphor for the kind of self-surveillance or self-overhearing that he advocates. Shaftesbury’s model of the Inquisition is paralleled by Godwin’s use of “auricular confession.” The influence of dissenting Protestantism can be discerned in Godwin’s belief that the cause of virtue would be served if every person introduced into his or her decisions the self-distanciation of autobiography. Godwin’s proposal to substitute autobiography for the confessional recalls the narrative technique of his novels—his decision to make “the hero of my tale his own historian” (CW 351): Did every man impose this law upon himself, he would be obliged to consider before he decided upon the commission of an equivocal action, whether he chose to be his own historian, to be the future narrator of the scene in which he was engaging. It has been justly observed that the popish practice of auricular confession has been attended with some salutary effects. How much better would it be, if, instead of a practice thus ambiguous, and which may be converted into so dangerous an engine of ecclesiastical despotism, every man would make the world his confessional, and the human species the keeper of his conscience? (PJ 3: 136)

This passage reveals successive transformations from Roman Catholicism, to dissenting Protestantism, to Enlightenment secularism—from the obligation to deliver the self in speech to an authority figure in the institution of confession, to the exhaustive recording of the self for oneself in the writing of a spiritual autobiography, and finally to autobiographical revelation to the entire human species through the publicity made possible by print. Godwin’s transformation of the Roman Catholic institution of confession into published autobiography, along with the related technique of first-person narration in the form of fictional autobiography in his major novels, does not provide evidence for anarchistic individualism. Indeed, the model of the dissenting congregation is just as important as Calvinist individualism. Admittedly, like other radical writers in





the Miltonic tradition, Godwin is attracted to the Abdiel figure who stands alone in a world of evil and dissimulation and, at great personal risk, testifies to truths on no other authority than individual reason or conscience. While he, therefore, rejects intersubjective validation as a criterion of truth, Godwin nonetheless values conversation, dialogue, and community in the production of knowledge and the establishment of justice. It is less the private composition than the publication of autobiography that guarantees morality: “How great would be the benefit, if every man were sure of meeting in his neighbour the ingenuous censor? . . . Knowledge . . . depends in a majority of instances, not upon the single efforts of the individual, but upon the consent of other human understandings sanctioning the judgment of our own” (PJ 4: 162). Both knowledge and morality are of social growth, dependent on the censorship and sanction of the members of a community. Godwin’s ideal society is a parish-sized community, governed not by a constitution or general laws but by the ad hoc decisions of rational people who adjudicate cases according to individual circumstances and who have recourse to no power except public opinion to enforce their decisions. This ideal community is an attempt to recover in secular form the collective transcendence of self that Godwin had experienced in the dissenting congregations in which he was deeply invested for the first twenty-five years of his life. As opposed to the crowd or even political associations, the congregation in a meetinghouse is united by a high purpose, and the solemnity of the members appears even in their dress—their Sunday best. In “Of Religion,” the atheist Godwin proposes to replace the worship of God by the admiration of nature and artistic achievements: To me a gallery of admirable paintings is the genuine Temple of God. . . . Let me be surrounded with the landscapes of Claude and the figures of Michael Angelo, and I am then in the proper theatre of admiration and worship. . . . To bring this still nearer to our idea of a temple, let concerts of music be from time to time performed in this gallery; let me witness in it the execution of the finest compositions of Handel. In that case I shall be sure to see assembled, in addition to the works of art that adorn the walls, a number of human beings seated in decent order, dressed with more than their usual attention to neatness and propriety, and with their countenances composed to serenity and happiness. (Political Writings 7: 69)

In Godwin’s ideal community, there is propriety and decent order, quite different from the crowds he would have seen on the London streets or from the violent and “inconsequent” mobs he depicted in



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St. Leon. In Godwin, aesthetic experience has assumed the functions of religion. In the context of a philosophical tradition that regards aesthetics as analogous to ethics, such a congregation, possessing consummate taste, no doubt also possesses a collective moral sense, which enables it to control the behavior of its members. All the ends of punishment, in such an ideal community, “would be answered, by the general inspection that is exercised by the members of a limited circle over the conduct of each other” (PJ 3: 304). All are entitled to “natural independence”—that is, to freedom from the imposition of pain or from coercion to act contrary to their understanding. However, members of a community do not possess “moral independence”; in other words, they are liable to “a censure to be exercised by every individual over the actions of another” (3: 449). Some form of restraint may be necessary in order to protect the community, but punishment would be illegitimate even if it were imposed in order to reform an individual, as Howard and Bentham advocate, let alone if it were imposed from motives of vengeance. In the ideal small community, “every individual would . . . live under the public eye, and the disapprobation of his neighbours, a species of coercion, not derived from the caprice of men, but from the system of the universe, would inevitably oblige him either to reform or to emigrate” (3: 378). What Godwin regards as “the system of the universe” bears a striking resemblance to the organization of the church in Calvin’s Geneva. In order to prevent corruption of the church, Calvin recommends the election of certain incorruptible persons “who should be dispersed and distributed in all the quarters of the city, having oversight of the life and government of each of them; and if they see any vice worthy of note to find fault with in any person, that they communicate about it with some of the ministers, to admonish whoever it is that is at fault and to exhort him in brotherly fashion to amendment.” Calvin adds that also “neighbours or parents . . . would be able to make the remonstrance” (52). As with Godwin, so with Calvin, failure to reform results in excommunication or expulsion from the community. It is as if Godwin thinks this mode of coercion “natural” because he sucked in Calvinistic moral policing with his mother’s milk. Godwin’s concepts of the angelic station that permits impartial judgment and the general inspection that substitutes for penal coercion are themselves the products of prejudice. Godwin’s “metaphysical dissecting knife” is an instrument for providing scientific knowledge about human beings. Employing a penetrating instrument analogous to the omniscient eye, the moral anatomist constitutes the individual as the subject of (auto)biographical knowledge even while he violates something fundamentally





human. In Caleb Williams, through the mode of cross-class narration, which is analogous to cross-gender narration, Godwin interrogates the role of gender in constituting the individual. But Godwin’s analysis of subjectivity does not amount to an individualist ideology. Far from asserting individualism, Godwin shows that once all the circumstances that constitute the individual have been laid bare, human agency proves to be nothing more than a system of mechanism. Owing to his lapsed Calvinist prejudice in favor of the stewardship of goods, Godwin denies the individual control over his or her property and his or her life. Indeed, Godwin rejects the propriety force of possessive pronouns like his, her, and my as an illegitimate form of overvaluation based on a connection with oneself. Godwin thus rejects as a prejudice the private and familial affections that most people regard as constitutive of individual identity. By controlling circumstances and environment, Godwin and other Enlightenment reformers believe, vital machines can be improved and even perfected; thus, “Nothing can be more unreasonable than to argue from men as we now find them, to men as they may hereafter be made” (PJ 3: 269). However, since even an adept in surveillance techniques can never sufficiently escape prepossession or sufficiently control the empire of accident, knowledge of human beings as they are and plans to make a new and more perfect species remain subject to uncertainty. The metaphysical dissecting knife destabilizes identity as much as it uncovers truth. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, who seek to bring about sociopolitical reform by changing individuals through their literary works, Godwin imagines a collective change of consciousness as the foundation for his belief in progress. Prejudice does not only make all historical, biographical, and psychological knowledge contingent but also compromises the independent possession of ideas. Although Godwin stakes a claim to an intellectual vein that is properly his own, he simultaneously fears that books can control the train of one’s thoughts and induce self-oblivion. Still, knowledge and morality are not individual acquisitions but depend on the approval of others. While Godwin rejects crowds, political parties, and clubs as instruments of reform since they compromise individual judgment, he adopts the model of the dissenting congregation for the ideal community since it enables a collective transcendence of self. Although he rejects intersubjective validation as a criterion of truth, he knows that we cannot escape the intersubjective and intertextual situation in which we are all subject to the contagion or electrical sympathy of the opinions held by the people and expressed in the books that crowd around us. According to the crowd psychologist



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Prestige in reality is a sort of domination exercised on our mind by an individual, a work, or an idea. This domination entirely paralyses our critical faculty, and fills our souls with astonishment and respect. The sentiment provoked is inexplicable, like all sentiments, but it would appear to be of the same kind as the fascination to which a magnetised person is subjected. (148)

Godwin is suspicious of the contagion of crowds and the prestige of books; he is nonetheless attracted to a model of sympathy in which the mind is in a state of mesmeric receptivity. During the course of the 1790s, Godwin increasingly abandons the distance of impartiality in favor of sympathetic communion. But this opposition was never wholly stable, since impartiality could be obtained only by means of sympathy—that is, by imaginative projection outside the self. Besides, both impartiality and sympathy are liable to the infection of theatricality. The impartial observer ends up viewing the world as theater; and it is hard to distinguish between adopting another’s perspective in sympathy and assuming another’s voice or clothes in fiction and disguise. In the next chapter, in examining Mary Shelley’s views on republicanism, popular culture, and the crowd, I consider an author who engages in dialogue with Godwin’s fictional and philosophical works and who largely shares his ideological perspective. Mary Shelley, however, treats the crowd with greater sympathy than her father does, as she finds, like Scott and Maturin, a connection between the superstitions of the crowd and the faculty of imagination.



Gustave Le Bon, contagion and prestige are more important than logic and reason as instruments of collective persuasion:




“A Sigh of M a n y H e a r t s”: H istory, Hu m a n i t y, a n d Popu l a r C u lt u r e i n M a ry Sh e l l e y ’s VA L P E R G A a n d L O D O R E Aristocrats and the London Crowd in L ODORE Throughout this book I have examined how anxieties about violent crowds and new mass phenomena are made comprehensible through embodiment in the figures of Amazons, bacchantes, and female furies. The authors who depict such figures often consider female authorship within the larger frame of female education and proper gender roles. At the same time, their novels are marked by gender fluidity in crossdressed characters, the popular cultural symbolism of female dress, and a focus on the gendering (and cross-gendering) of narrative voice. In my final chapter, I shall focus on a woman writer’s views on sensibility, gender roles, and the crowd. When Mary Shelley uses the word unsexed in her final novel Falkner (1837) to describe the dangers of a woman’s education that focuses on masculine studies to the exclusion of needlework and other feminine accomplishments, Graham Allen asserts that “The reference . . . is to Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females,”published forty years earlier (166). While Mary Shelley, especially in her short stories, used the plot device of cross-dressed characters, as well as the technique of narrative cross-dressing,1 I shall focus instead on her republican and feminist ideology and her perspective on the crowd and popular culture.



Chapter 6


In Lodore (1835), which Shelley situates in opposition to historical fiction by calling it “A Tale of the Present Times” (Letters 2: 206), the United States serves as the site for an examination of republicanism. To escape from dishonor after his failure to fight a duel, Henry Fitzhenry, Lord Lodore, with his infant daughter, Ethel, goes into voluntary exile in the wilds of Illinois. Even in the new republic, the aristocratic custom of dueling has not been discontinued, and, before the end of the first volume of the novel, Lodore has been killed in a duel in New York. Prior to that, in Illinois, Lodore fails to adapt himself completely to “republican equality”; even his house is luxurious by American standards, though he attempted to pay “the strictest regard to republican plainness and simplicity” (L 57, 54). For Shelley, the American republic conjoins the modern revolutionary value of equality with the central quality of the ancient republics—austerity. Although many of the major characters in the novel are aristocrats whom Shelley regards with sympathy, she insists that these characters are exceptional rather than representative members of their class. Thus, Lodore’s Spartan education saves him from the “habits of effeminacy” that mark the generally “self-indulged aristocracy” (81). Her use of the words effeminacy and manly is a further indication that Mary Shelley accepts the value of republican austerity and recognizes the corrupting effects of luxury.2 The strategy of mocking aristocrats in general, while singling out a more admirable exception, is one that Shelley had already used three years earlier in her review of Thomas Moore’s biography of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, one of the leaders of the United Irishmen. In Shelley’s view, Fitzgerald formed one of those happy exceptions to the dull uniformity of character and bearing produced by the usual course of aristocratic training, which now and then entitle a lord John or Robert to distinction more honourable than the very usual ones of a name at Newmarket, an affair with an actress, or the éclat attendant upon an action for crim.con. Great original simplicity of thought and feeling appears to have led him, as it has done many others, into admiration of some of the finest specimens of classical republican heroism. (111)

Although she rejects violent rebellion in favor of Godwinian gradual reform, Shelley admires a noble leader of the 1798 Irish rebellion for his resemblance to the patriots of the Roman republic and of the English Commonwealth of the seventeenth century. Lodore is a Godwinian novel, in part for its inheritance of the idea of moral self-anatomy and its examination of how the human mechanism makes it impossible to arrive at a position of angelic rational



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detachment. Just as Godwin himself disseminates and revises the philosophy of Political Justice in his fiction, so Mary Shelley in her philosophical novels engages in dialogue with the works of her parents and husband. In Lodore, both of the major female characters educated by their fathers, Ethel Fitzhenry and Fanny Derham, espouse Godwinian ideas. Ethel maintains with the author of Political Justice that “justice . . . orders that the rich give of his superfluity to the poor” (337). Fanny Derham comes to accept her father’s view that political reform will occur without violence, through independent thought and frank speech: the voice of the people “alone is wanting to make the tyrant quail.” Fanny begins this speech about the power of words to conquer oppression, by observing that her father “taught me to penetrate, to anatomize, to purify my motives” (316). Just as with Caleb Williams, so with Lodore the capacity of penetration into motives is both outside and inside the text, belonging to the author as well as the characters. Thus, one of the reviewers of Lodore, who is impressed with the ability of a woman writer to analyze the motives of male characters, finds in Shelley’s characterization “the anatomy of feelings and of thoughts, which, like nerves and veins, work below the surface” (Rev. of Lodore 534). When Shelley provides a detailed analysis of the workings of the blood in human motivation, she addresses directly Godwin’s ideal of the “impartial spectator, of an angelic nature” (PJ 4: 65). According to Shelley, we cannot hope to attain such impartiality since our nerves are inevitably subject to present impressions: [C]ould we put the impression of the present moment at a distance, which, on the contrary, presses on us with a power as omnipotent over our soul, as a pointed sword piercing the flesh over our life, we might become all that we are not—angels or demigods, or any other being that is not human. As it is, the current of the blood and the texture of the brain are the machinery by which the soul acts, and their mechanism is by no means tractable or easily worked; once put in motion, we can seldom controul their operations. (L 225)

Like Godwin’s, Mary Shelley’s anatomy of human motives culminates in the dissection of a machine that is beyond voluntary control. In Lodore, Fanny Derham’s Godwinian belief “in the mastery of mind” (349) coincides uneasily with the omnipotence of external impressions. In a narrative centrally concerned with female education, Lodore also addresses incidentally the problem of the crowd. After twelve years in Illinois and the death of her father, Ethel Fitzhenry visits



Popul a r Cultur e in M a ry Shelley


London. Mary Shelley takes the epigraph to the last chapter of the first volume from her husband’s “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” the poem of July 1820 in which Percy Shelley describes the metropolis as “that great sea, whose ebb and flow, / At once is deaf and loud.” For Percy Shelley, the crowded city takes aural form: it has a loud voice. However, its own loudness also deafens it, as the mass of humanity paradoxically assumes the condition of sublime nature—indifference to the voice of humanity. In order to explain the phenomenon of sympathy, Shelley has recourse to metaphors drawn from recent scientific discoveries. While elsewhere in Lodore Shelley uses the metaphor of electricity for the mechanism of sympathy (100, 261, 272), here she uses the image of the magnet in her description of the absence of sympathetic bonds. At the same time, she adopts the crowd symbol of the ocean from her husband’s lines and recalls an expression from the works of her mother: “A drop of water in the ocean is no symbol of the situation of an isolated individual thrown upon the stream of metropolitan life; that amalgamates with its kindred element; but the solitary being finds no pole of attraction to cause a union with its fellows, and bastilled by the laws of society, it is condemned to incommunicative solitude” (173). While thinking of the alienation of Ethel Fitzhenry from the multitudes of London, Mary Shelley offers as an alternative the private realm of the family, in the mediated form of writing, by adopting from her mother the use of bastille as a verb. On her visit to Ris r in Norway, Wollstonecraft writes that “To be born here, was to be bastilled by nature—shut out from all that opens the understanding, or enlarges the heart” (6: 295). Wollstonecraft’s transformation of a symbol of old regime despotism into the intellectual and emotional restriction caused by rugged nature is reinscribed socially rather than politically when her daughter uses the verb bastille to describe the solitary confinement produced by manners and social conventions. Godwin’s fourth major novel provides an alternative source for Mary Shelley’s crowd symbol of the ocean. When the eponymous protagonist of Godwin’s Mandeville first arrives at Winchester School, he remarks that he has never before “seen so numerous an assembly” (77). Godwin has recourse to an ocean image to describe the sound of the crowd of schoolboys: “The murmuring labours of the boys, proceeding as it did, from the half-closed lips of one hundred and fifty human creatures, produced a united sound, low, monotonous, indistinct and perpetual, unlike every other sound, but more resembling the rustling of the waves under the dominion of a moderate breeze, than any thing else to which I can compare it” (Mandeville 78). In his



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analysis of crowd symbols, Elias Canetti argues that the sea embodies the desires of the crowd to “remain in existence” and to attain universality (81). On the cusp of the Victorian era, Mary Shelley uses the crowd symbol of the sea, which will become the favorite metaphor for the crowd among Victorian novelists (Lodge 107). The sea, moreover, has “a voice which sounds like a thousand voices,” and gains its power, Canetti suggests, through the coherence of individual waves or individual drops of water: “It entails a yielding to others as though they were oneself, as though there were no strict division between oneself and them” (80). In Lodore, however, there is no transcendence of individuality through participation in the London crowd. Instead, there is the experience of a stranger with no connection to the public. Given the lack of human sympathy and the failure of communication, Ethel views the crowds of London as if life were theater—or, more precisely, as if she were experiencing, avant la lettre, the position of a film spectator: “All the moving crowd of men and women now around her seemed so many automata: she started when she heard them address each other, and express any feeling or intention that distinguished them from the shadows of a phantasmagoria” (173). The machine or automaton has a dual significance. When we dissect human motives with scientific detachment, we are exploring a human mechanism. When we perceive—in the absence of aesthetic distance, in a state of distraction—images of people from whom we are separated by a kind of wall, they seem like automata to us. A mode of representation that I identified, in the first chapter, with the depiction of Gothic crowds, especially in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, has come to be used in a society novel by the author of Frankenstein. While Lodore was written long after Percy Shelley’s death in 1822, it is ideologically consistent with Valperga (1823), which Mary Shelley began researching in 1817 (Allen 64). Although she works in different subgenres of the novel, Shelley remains a Godwinian novelist, criticizing the aristocracy, advocating republicanism, exploring women’s education, and rivaling Maturin in her focus on the crowd.

From F R ANKENSTEIN to VALPERGA To the extent that Mary Shelley’s first two novels are didactic works, they both promote a moral about the superiority of domestic affections to the ambition for glory and fame. However, there is a generic difference between these two works. In the philosophical novel Frankenstein (1818), Shelley seeks to define humanity in a theoretical





way, by examining the nature and education of a fantastic monster and his claims on our sympathies. In her second novel, Valperga, she seeks to define humanity historically, in a study of the influence of passion, imagination, and conscience on fourteenth-century Italians. While there is no rigorous opposition between theoretical and historical modes of definition, the greater length of and the more detailed social fabric presented in Valperga permit Shelley to analyze more explicitly popular culture, crowd psychology, and feminist ideology. While Shelley discusses government in her first novel, especially in the episode in which the monster overhears Felix de Lacey’s lectures from Constantin de Volney’s Ruins of Empires, the opposition between tyranny and republicanism forms the central conflict of her second novel. Shelley’s commitment to Italian unification, liberty, and independence from Austria motivates both a series of historical analogies in Valperga and certain changes for the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. Thus, in the revised text of Shelley’s first novel, Elizabeth Lavenza’s father is transformed from “an Italian gentleman,” about whom we have no further information, into “one of those Italians nursed in the memory of the antique glory of Italy,—one among the schiavi ognor frementi, who exerted himself to obtain the liberty of his country” (Frankenstein 20, 206).3 In Valperga, Shelley writes a historical novel of sensibility—that is to say, a novel in which a temporal succession of feelings takes priority over a chronology of public events—in order to explore political ideals for the self-government and policing of culturally conditioned human agents. Her ideals derive from classical republican thought, from the historical and economic views of J. C. L. de Sismondi, and from the rationalism and sentimentalism of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. After The Last Man (1826) and, of course, Frankenstein, Valperga has received the most attention of any of Mary Shelley’s works, especially in recent years, with no fewer than four editions of the novel appearing between 1996 and 2000.4 Frederick Jones, praising both the “creative force” and “thoroughness of scholarship” it exhibits, called Valperga Shelley’s “best novel” (xxx). Among the most notable essays on the political ideology of Valperga are those by Betty Bennett and Joseph Lew. Bennett has persuasively argued that Valperga reveals Mary Shelley’s commitment to liberal social reforms and, specifically, to the view formulated by Percy Shelley that the opposition between the forces of liberty and despotism (represented in Valperga by the Guelphs and Ghibellines respectively) structures historical progress (“Political Philosophy” 354–71).5 Joseph Lew, on the contrary, finds an opposition between Mary Shelley and male Romantic authors,



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including her husband. He seeks to confirm that she, like Jane Austen, is an exponent of what Anne Mellor terms “female Romantic ideology,” which stresses Enlightenment values, rationality, domesticity, and selfless sympathy for others (Lew 163). For Lew, female Romanticism proves to be a conservative ideology. Characterizing the government of Florence, which Shelley idealizes, as “moderate aristocratic,” Lew asserts that Valperga is marked by a Humean “disdain for and fear of the lower classes” (162).6 In this chapter, I argue that Valperga is a liberal work, that Mary Shelley would have associated early fourteenth-century Florence with republicanism more than aristocracy, and that, while she certainly advocates selfless sympathy, she also at times expresses approval of the people and popular culture. I shall first define Shelley’s mode of historical fiction in Valperga, showing how she values history for its potential to expand the narrow perspective of individuals caught in the present moment and how she places sentiments above political events in her representation of the past. Secondly, I shall show that Shelley, recognizing the threat of dehumanization posed by early nineteenth-century industrial and state institutions, seeks to represent and analyze the fourteenth-century forces that similarly threatened autonomy and humane sentiments, even while she suggests that love and compassion might create superior specimens of humanity. Thirdly, I shall provide evidence that Shelley regarded Florence as a republic, characterized in Godwinian terms, and I shall detail her ambivalent attitudes toward the common people and their culture.

History and Sensibility In 1823 Shelley embodied her liberal and feminist rationalism in what I term a historical novel of sensibility. Her understanding of history derives in part from the classical republican model of masculine virtue, preeminently found in the figure of the autonomous farmer/soldier who possesses a disinterested and extensive view of the public good. In this view, landed property provides the best guarantee of independence. Usury and the dubious maneuvers of financial capitalism are condemned, whereas trade and commerce, though perhaps narrowing the views of their practitioners, benefit the state.7 In classical republican ideology, historical change is partly a process of degeneration, as luxury threatens autonomy, and self-interest displaces public spirit. For British writers, the gap between ancient Romans and modern Italians provided evidence for this process of historical decline. But if self-interest and narrow views could be overcome, such decline might





be forestalled. Shelley celebrates classical learning and the knowledge of history, including that obtained from a historical novel like Valperga, because both enable the transcendence of partisan, provincial, and present-centered views, and thus stave off corruption. Shelley embodies such learning in a female character: Euthanasia dei Adimari, a Guelph republican aristocrat and the heroine of the novel. Euthanasia’s father, Antonio dei Adimari—after retiring from public life to devote himself to study, at the beginning of a great historical period for the revival of learning—is struck with blindness. Euthanasia, however, turns her father’s misfortune to her own advantage, learning Latin in order to assist him in, and thus to share, his studies. Her education preserves her from “that narrow idea of the present times, as if they and the world were the same, which characterizes the unlearned” (V 1: 28). There is an autobiographical dimension here, as Shelley imagines her own father, William Godwin, now less of a public figure than he was in the 1790s, to be disabled, so that she might affirm her filial virtue in caring for him. But, more than a mere autobiographical representation of Godwin in the role of Adimari and herself in Euthanasia’s roles of teacher and nurse, the passage reveals Shelley’s politics and a justification for historical fiction. History, the classics, and foreign travel extend one’s views both temporally and geographically—thus inhibiting the historical movement toward decline. So, when Euthanasia visits the Pantheon in Rome, she becomes a paradigmatic figure of the historical novelist, in her attempt to bring her classical reading to life: “I called on the shadows of the departed to converse with me” (1: 203). Euthanasia’s future fiancé, Castruccio Castracani, begins his education under the tutelage of his father’s friend Francesco de Guinigi, who, living in exile in Este, has given up his military role and, obeying the messianic injunction (Isaiah 2: 4), has “turned his sword to a ploughshare” (V 1: 46).8 An enlightened figure, Guinigi is characterized by “a freedom from prejudice” (1: 65). While Castruccio reveals his narrow views by expressing elitist contempt for the “groveling” minds of peasants, Guinigi conceives of a utopian state, which will refute the mistaken notion “that a peasant’s life is incompatible with intellectual improvement”; “when I would picture happiness upon earth, my imagination conjures up the family of a dweller among the fields, whose property is secure, and whose time is passed between labour and intellectual pleasures” (1: 53). Shelley derives Guinigi’s sentiments from the arguments in favor of equality of property in Book 8 of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). There Godwin argues that, were everyone to contribute to the labor necessary for subsistence, the labor



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of any individual would be light. In that case, “none would be made torpid with fatigue, but all would have leisure to cultivate the kindly and philanthropical affections of the soul, and to let loose his faculties in the search of intellectual improvement” (PJ 3: 430–31). Thus, while Shelley expresses her admiration for republican Rome through the character of Euthanasia, she endorses the Godwinian revision of classical republican ideology through that of Guinigi. In Godwin’s view, neither substantial landed property nor freedom from manual labor is a prerequisite for acquiring extensive views, liberal learning, impartial judgment, and public spirit.9 Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Sismondi, and Mary Shelley are proponents of radical agrarianism: all celebrate independent peasants, who labor on small farms that they either own outright or hold on long and secure leases. Both classical republican ideology and Godwinian political philosophy prior to the mid-1790s posited a stoical model of personality. However, from the time of St. Leon (1799), Godwin paid much greater attention to sensibility and the domestic affections. Both Godwin and Mary Shelley advocate a sentimental hierarchy of communicative modes, in which the languages of tears, the heart, the eyes, and the countenance take priority over speech, which in turn has higher value than writing. This antirhetorical and antitheatrical hierarchy embodies the values of spontaneous expression and unmediated truth. So, in Frankenstein, Robert Walton remarks that even letter writing, which can possess the informality and spontaneity of speech, “is a poor medium for the communication of feeling”; he seeks instead a friend, “whose eyes would reply to mine” (8). Shelley repeats Walton’s sentimental views about the incommunicability of feeling in an 1822 journal entry: “White paper—wilt thou be my confident? . . . But can I express all I feel? . . . Alas! I am alone—no eye answers mine” (Journals 429). Even the cruel and ambitious Ghibelline tyrant of Lucca who hardly counts as a man of feeling has his sentimental moments. At the end of Valperga, Castruccio Castracani visits Euthanasia in prison, where she has been confined for her participation in a conspiracy against him. The glistening eyes of Castruccio and the single tear visible on his cheek prompt a narrative commentary that formalizes sentimental communicative theory: They talk of tears of women; but, when they flow most plenteously, they soften not the heart of man, as one tear from his eyes has power on a woman. Words and looks have been feigned; they say, though I believe them not, that women have feigned tears: but those of a man, which are ever as the last demonstration of a too full heart, force




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Sentimentalism entails a new conception of masculinity, for which Castruccio is ill-suited, given his seduction of Beatrice (a young religious enthusiast from Ferrara) and his refusal to abandon military and political ambition in favor of the domestic pleasures he might have enjoyed with Euthanasia. Here, however, he experiences a moment of regret for having rejected sentimental values. But, as Shelley’s discussion of male tears shows, sentimentalism is also crucially concerned with the relationship between language and truth. Working in the mode of the historical novel of sensibility and stretching the bounds of the novel form, Shelley seeks to solve the main epistemological problem of the early English novel, what Michael McKeon terms “questions of truth” (20). So the prime attraction of male tears resides not in the evidence they supply for the appearance of a new sympathetic and humane masculine character. Rather, male tears are a natural, entirely reliable, and not at all arbitrary sign. Since weeping contravenes traditional masculinity, a man’s tears are viewed as beyond feigning, they provide demonstration of an overflow of feeling, they enforce belief, and they are a “sure indication” of deep passion. A historical novel of sensibility like Valperga turns from public events, which are the objects of interested and partisan misrepresentation, to the supposedly less contested representations of the subjective and emotional responses of historical personages. As such, Valperga seems consistent with Godwin’s theory of fiction, as formulated in his 1797 manuscript essay “Of History and Romance.” Godwin begins by indicating a preference for individual history (i.e., biography) over general history, since the latter, as David McCracken notes, “is usually the pursuit of those who abhor feelings” (“Godwin’s Literary Theory” 122). Godwin then proceeds to claim that fictional biography is superior to documentary biography. Shelley begins her historical novel with a Preface in which she disparages as a “romance” Machiavelli’s Life of Castruccio Castracani, which she claims is the English reader’s major source of knowledge about this tyrant (V 1: iii). Shelley’s disparagement is warranted, since Machiavelli’s Life, written in 1520, has been characterized by Allan Gilbert as “essentially a work of fiction” (533). But more important than any opposition between the genres of romance and historical fiction is that between two radically different conceptions of human beings: either as passive objects of fortune or as subjective interpreters



belief, and communicate to her who causes them that excess of tenderness, that intense depth of passion of which they are themselves the sure indication. (V 3: 250)

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of events. Machiavelli seeks to demonstrate how fortune brings about human greatness. As the dying Castruccio in Machiavelli’s biography says, “Fortune . . . is admitted to be arbiter of all human things” (2: 553). For Shelley, on the contrary, fortune operates in the realm of accident, whereas feelings constitute essences or realities. As Euthanasia learns from her father, “content of mind, love, and benevolent feeling ought to be the elements of our existence; while those accidents of fortune or fame . . . were as the dust of the balance” (V 1: 198–99). Earlier in the same chapter, Euthanasia recounts for Castruccio the past few years of her life: “I have had few hopes, and few fears; but every passing sentiment has been an event; and I have marked the birth of a new idea with the joy that others derive from what they call change and fortune. What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities” (1: 192–93). In her role as narrator of her own individual history, Euthanasia provides a model for the author of the historical novel of sensibility, which should simultaneously limit the power of fortune by reducing external events to accidents and extend the power of sentiment by transforming subjective feelings aroused by actions in the world into internal events. Shelley stages a narration within the novel in order to delineate a subgenre of historical fiction, in which feelings, because they are essential and substantial, count as events. However, Euthanasia’s observation that “every passing sentiment has been an event” provides evidence not only about genre but also for Shelley’s identification with her heroine. After the death of Percy Shelley, and just prior to the publication of Valperga, Mary Shelley wrote to Jane Williams about her loneliness in Italy: “Solitary as I am, I feed & live on imagination only—feelings are my events” (Letters 1: 312). The twenty-five-year-old Shelley, having lost her husband, identifies with her solitary Italian heroine, who, by the age of twenty-two, has suffered the loss of her beloved father, as well as her mother and two brothers. Shelley’s works are not only autobiographical but also highly allusive, drawing particularly on the works of the authors in her own family and circle. Euthanasia’s statement that “every passing sentiment has been an event” would have been encountered by Shelley in her mother’s most famous and least sentimental work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In Wollstonecraft, the statement appears within a description of how female sentimentalism results from women’s having been denied political rights, an exclusion that distracts women from “the interest of the whole community” and “the general good”: “The mighty business of female life is to





please, and restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression, sentiments become events, and reflection deepens what it should, and would have effaced, if the understanding had been allowed to take a wider range” (5: 256). Intertextuality—the problem of where Shelley’s language has already been and the textual locations to which it will subsequently migrate—might introduce a critique of sentimentalism into the very heart of the historical novel of sensibility. In Valperga, the idea that feelings are events initially serves to mark the refusal passively to accept the power of fortune in human life. It delineates a type of history that, while less public, may be more useful and more true than “general” history. But when the idea is taken into Shelley’s letters, the reader might retrospectively discern a note of self-pity in Euthanasia’s admirable attempt to reconcile sentimentalism and the fostering of civic virtue. Moreover, that Shelley, in her letter to Jane Williams, conceives of the situation in which feelings are events as one in which she feeds herself on imagination instead of reality would seem to overturn the philosophical opposition between accident and essence, shadow and substance. If, for Euthanasia, sentiments and thoughts are real and substantial, in Shelley’s letter sentimental events reside merely in the imagination. Then, once a probable source for the idea that feelings are events is discovered in Wollstonecraft, a critique of sentimentalism as an ideology imposed on women by their having been denied more extensive views could be imported into Shelley’s novel. Thus, the idea that feelings are events simultaneously defines the historical novel of sensibility and calls into question the value of sentimentalism. Even while Valperga provides the knowledge that might preserve the reader from “that narrow idea of the present times, as if they and the world were the same” (1: 28), the sentimental aspects of the novel may well be the product of the political oppression that has denied “a wider range” to female understanding.

Defining Humanity The central problem of Valperga—that of providing a historical definition of humanity—leads to innumerable questions and comments about “man,” women, gods, rulers, monsters, machines, and tools in the course of the three volumes of the novel. Castruccio introduces this problem early in the work when he asks his pastoral tutor, Guinigi, the Promethean question: “Is it not fame that makes men gods?” (1: 54). As one might expect from the author of Frankenstein, Shelley’s ultimate answer is “no.” However, in



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Valperga, as opposed to Frankenstein, Shelley clearly distinguishes between Castruccio’s ambition for worldly power and renown and a laudable desire for posthumous fame (1: 161–62). The initial question of what “makes men gods” reverberates through a novel that explores the forces that raise people above or sink them below humanity. For Shelley, a person may become a superior being through education, broad cultural forces, compassion, love, and selfless devotion to a cause or principle. From her father’s lessons in history, the classics, and the poetry of Dante, Euthanasia comes to think that human nature has declined from ancient Roman times and “that no man lived now, who bore affinity to these far shining beacons of the earth” (1: 195). Human nature changes with historical and cultural conditions. Looking back from nineteenth-century Florence to Castruccio’s time, Shelley posits a similar decline to that which Euthanasia believed had occurred since the days of ancient Rome. The architectural monuments of Florence surviving from the fourteenth century, writes Shelley, were “better suited to those warlike and manly times, than to the taste of the present age, when the Italian heaven shines on few who would defend their own home” (2: 124). Shelley’s historical perspective here derives from the classical republican discourse in which luxury corrupts and feminizes a heroic and warlike people. Shelley shares Euthanasia’s view that transcendent heroic virtue is the product not of nature but rather of historical and cultural conditions. While the “Italian heaven” has not changed, human beings have. When Euthanasia heroically and disinterestedly sacrifices her personal love for Castruccio to the principle of liberty, Shelley sketches the character of the tyrant of Lucca in order to show what the ruling passion of ambition has made of him: “neither compassion which makes angels of men, nor love which softens the hearts of the gods themselves, had over him the slightest power” (2: 172). The idol of fame leads Castruccio to reject two emotions—compassion and love—that have the power to raise human beings above themselves. Shelley sets military glory (and Castruccio is too ambitious to be admirably self-denying) in opposition to sympathetic nursing of the sick and wounded. During the siege of Valperga by Castruccio’s troops, Euthanasia is observed “flitting like an angel” as she “mingled with the women who ministered to the wounded” (2: 265). The force of the word angel here is revealed when, in Castruccio’s subsequent siege of Florence, Euthanasia is “lifted . . . above humanity” in her heroic endeavors to alleviate the suffering caused by her former professed lover (3: 179). While classical republican thought leads





to admiration for public spirit in civic duties and to self-sacrifice in military service, sentimentalism privileges self-sacrifice in domestic, compassionate, and charitable acts, such as nursing. Shelley explicitly contrasts Euthanasia and Castruccio in order to show that the sentimental woman succeeds, whereas the ambitious man fails, in the endeavor to become godlike. The rationalist, sentimentalist, and feminist ethic of compassion wins out over the desire for fame through conquest—if not in the fates of the characters (the realm of narrative event), then surely in the feelings of both author and reader (sentiments as events). The superior being is he or she who overcomes self, who gets beyond the bounds of individuality in devotion to others or to a larger cause. If education, favorable political and cultural conditions, compassion, love, and self-devotion can raise human beings to the status of angels or gods, Shelley likewise finds many sources of human degradation and atavism. Party (as opposed to public) spirit, military discipline, and the desire for power (gained through political machinations, finance, or sex) are the forces Shelley discovers in fourteenth-century Italy that are analogous to commercial, industrial, and utilitarian institutions and theories of the early nineteenth century. Shelley shares with civic humanists the view that a liberal education acquired through classical and historical literature and through foreign travel enables one to gain extensive views of the public good. Trade, finance, and partisanship, on the contrary, may result in narrow and self-interested views. Galeazzo Visconti, friend to Castruccio and tyrant of Milan, is led by Ghibelline partisanship to dehumanize others—specifically, to reduce the Guelphs to the status of “vermin” (2: 7). Employing a gambling metaphor in advising Castruccio to attempt the conquest of Florence, Galeazzo claims that “men are both our die and our stake” (2: 11)—mere instruments and counters for tyrants’ play. Castruccio has already become “accustomed . . . to count men as the numerals of a military arithmetic” (1: 245–46). He subordinates human beings to his designs of conquest and control, so that people become body parts to be organized and administered: “he began to count heads to be removed, and hands to be used” (2: 145). Castruccio’s skillful disposition and insistent enumeration of human bodies serve to explain his peacetime administrative interests: he establishes in Lucca “a vigorous system of police” (2: 174).10 Even while Shelley is especially appalled by Castruccio’s frequent recourse to capital punishment and his increasing use of torture, Castruccio’s government represents something new—namely, the disciplinary institutions of punishment, education, and industry that were being



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developed at the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to exert power over the masses by individualizing them. Like sadists and Machiavellian tyrants of earlier times, the new institutions that deploy demographic data and bureaucratic techniques conceptualize humanity in terms of instrumentality and utility. Thus, the various forms of imprisonment and tyranny to which the major female characters in Shelley’s novel are subjected reflect on modern as well as medieval institutions and attitudes. Beatrice is arrested by Dominican inquisitors at various times. When she is abandoned by Castruccio, she embarks on a pilgrimage for Rome only to be abducted and confined for three years in a ruined house on the Campagna di Roma. There, she is starved, tortured, and sexually assaulted by a diabolical and sublime figure and his “carnival of devils” (3: 86), including the infidel priest Battista Tripalda. In an inverted echo of Castruccio’s earlier question, “Is it not fame that makes men gods?” (1: 54), Beatrice asks if “the author and mechanist of these crimes” even belongs to the human race: “he bore a human name; they say his lineage was human; yet could he be a man?” (3: 85). If the word author refers to the intellectual activity of original conception and relates the sublime sadist of Valperga to Victor Frankenstein, the “author” of the creature, mechanist refers to the lower activity of perpetrating crimes with one’s own hands and body.11 In the context of Shelley’s critique of disciplinary and industrial administration, the word mechanist implies that a utilitarian and instrumental view of human beings may lead to manipulating them as if they were machines. The fourteenth-century mechanists of crime or tyranny employ their penetration into human character to obtain the requisite biographical and psychological insights that disciplinary institutions will later compile through bureaucratic means. When Galeazzo Visconti, for his own political ends, seeks to disrupt the proposed marriage between Castruccio and Euthanasia, he at first avoids conversation with the countess, “until, finding out the secret chords of her mind, he might play upon them with a master’s hand” (2: 126). The power-hungry witch of the Apennines, Fior di Mandragola, operates in the same way on Beatrice: “The witch had now tuned her instrument, and she proceeded to play on it with a master’s hand” (3: 133). When, a few pages later, she is taken out to meet the witch, Beatrice moves “her arms like inanimate machines” (3: 148). No doubt, in employing a musical metaphor for treating people as instruments, Shelley has literary precedents in mind—specifically, Hamlet’s attack on Guildenstern: “You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you





would sound me from my lowest note to [the top of] my compass” (Shakespeare, Ham. 3.2.364–67). But, as a historical novelist, Shelley knows that playing on people as if they were instruments or operating them as if they were machines signifies different though sometimes analogous things in different circumstances—in medieval Italy, Shakespearean England, and the industrial revolution. Even though there are no specific references in Valperga to industrial mechanization or the division of labor, Shelley does criticize classical political economy and the idea that rational self-interest provides a key to human behavior. When Euthanasia consents to join a conspiracy to overthrow Castruccio, she objects to the personal immorality of one of her fellow conspirators, Battista Tripalda. Bondelmonti, a Florentine aristocrat, responds that a conspiracy, like other political associations and governmental organizations, requires instruments and not full human beings: “Edged tools are what we want; it matters little the evil name with which they may be branded” (V 3: 199). Another conspirator, Ugo Quartezzani, attempts to answer Euthanasia’s objection in a more relativistic and philosophical way: “a man may be one day wicked, and good the next; for self-interest sways all, and we are virtuous or vicious as we hope for advantage to ourselves. The downfall of Antelminelli [i.e., Castruccio] will raise [Tripalda]; and therefore he is to be trusted” (3: 213–14). But the proponents of self-interest and those who subordinate evil means to good ends prove to be wrong, as Tripalda betrays the conspiracy. The question of means-versus-ends in the Godwinian context opens out into speculation about whether social change should be achieved through revolutionary violence or through discussion, education, and the gradual diffusion of knowledge. The belief in the necessity of violent means derives from the idea that material forces determine human consciousness: that is to say, since class allegiance and political ideology are the products of rational calculations of material self-interest, people cannot be persuaded but must be forced to give up wealth and power. Given Godwin and Shelley’s advocacy of self-devotion and disinterestedness, they prefer that social change be achieved through gradual reform promoted by education and enlightened discussion. For Godwin, lasting political improvements, as well as changes in the distribution of wealth and property, must follow a change in consciousness—a change, as it were, in the ideological superstructure rather than the material base. Rational agency for Godwin and Mary Shelley cannot be reduced to the material calculations of homo economicus, but rather should be expanded to include



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extensive views of the good of the whole society, characteristic of the republican citizen. The Godwinian novel, a form that includes Valperga,12 reinscribes the question of means-versus-ends as the opposition between daggers and tales, edged tools and narratives. Euthanasia disputes with her coconspirator, the “edged tool” Tripalda, over whether Castruccio must merely be overthrown or whether it is necessary that he be put to death. Tripalda’s mode of argumentation is ad feminam derision: “ ‘Women! women!’ said Tripalda, contemptuously. ‘By the body of Bacchus! I wonder what Bondelmonti meant by introducing a woman into the plot. One way or another they have spoiled, or ever will spoil, every design that the wisdom of man has contrived. I say he must die’ ” (3: 209–10). Believing that she can reform Castruccio through love, that she can raise the tyrant’s consciousness, Euthanasia responds by attempting to control the bacchanalian Tripalda by narration. She threatens to tell a tale about him that will “fill mankind with detestation” (3: 212)—the tale that Beatrice has recounted about Tripalda’s participation in the sadistic “carnival of devils” on the Campagna di Roma. Shelley’s opposition between edged tools and tales recalls Hamlet once more, this time through the mediation of Godwin. Anticipating the closet scene with Gertrude, Hamlet seeks self-control: “I will speak [daggers] to her, but use none” (Shakespeare, Ham. 3.2.396). Earlier in the play, the ghost of old Hamlet tells his son: “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul” (1.5.15–16). Anticipating his judicial confrontation with Falkland, Caleb Williams exclaims: “No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale!” (CW 324–25). In the Godwinian novel, then, the dagger or edged tool is a metaphor for revolutionary violence, whereas narrative represents the reformist mode of extensive discussion and uncensored communication. Once more, Euthanasia becomes a figure for the historical novelist, given her plans both to reform Castruccio and to overawe Tripalda through narrative. Tripalda is a monster who must be controlled, whereas Castruccio can be reformed. Castruccio has illegitimately divorced the feeling human being from the rational, Machiavellian ruler. Euthanasia’s sentimental project is to remake the man by healing this split. In response to an earlier plot against him, Castruccio banishes three hundred families from Lucca, the innocent along with the guilty. This act of injustice results from the remorselessness of the “ruler; for he loses even within himself the idea of his own individuality” (V 2: 154). Because “the head of a state is no longer a private man” (2: 158), he cannot forgo punishing his enemies out of sympathy, a quality that





Castruccio regards as weakness. The government of Castruccio, then, along with that of his fellow Ghibillene tyrant Galeazzo Visconti, operates through a double dehumanization, which nonetheless entails a dissymmetrical application of the strategy of individuation. First, the ruler must act with cruel and inhumane policy, while losing the very “idea of his own individuality.” Those subjected to power, on the other hand, are reduced to enumerated parts of human beings and to utilitarian machines, but this second form of dehumanization appears simultaneously with the individuating strategies of efficient administration, discipline, and police.13 In place of politicians who have stripped themselves of their humanity along with their individuality, Shelley would install the humane legislator, whose vision is more extensive and whose feelings are more intense (since his sentiments are themselves events). In opposition to the mechanized but individuated subjects of bureaucratic power, Shelley betrays at least a guarded sympathy for the (admittedly superstitious) crowd and its traditional popular culture.

Republicanism and Popular Culture Mary Shelley would have regarded early fourteenth-century Florence as a republican, not an aristocratic government. Shelley’s conception of late medieval Italian politics derives substantially from one of her sources for contextualizing the life of Castruccio: J. C. L. de Sismondi’s Histoire des republiques italiennes au moyen age (1809–18). Better known today for his writings on political economy than for his histories, Sismondi (1773–1842) began his career as “a fervent disciple of [Adam] Smith” (Mignet 6–7). However, by the time he completed his Italian history, he had begun to express indignation at laissez faire economics: “he boldly declared himself the adversary of the English school, of the Ricardos, of the Maccullochs, of the Says, of all those who see in the mass of men only a machine to create the wealth which will afterwards crush them” (30). Sismondi describes Florence as “the Athens of Italy” for, among other qualities, “the generosity which seemed the national character, whenever it was necessary to protect the oppressed or defend the cause of liberty” (122–23). In virtually every context, he distinguishes Florence from other Italian states: “Florence was the city where the love of liberty was the most general and the most constant in every class; where the cultivation of the understanding was carried farthest; and where enlightenment of mind soonest appeared in the improvement of the laws” (75–76). Sismondi holds the Enlightenment view that the arts



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and sciences arise soonest and flourish best where liberty is fostered and preserved, and he observes that by the thirteenth century “the Florentines became still more attached to the most democratic forms of liberty” (103). Sismondi notes that when Guelph cities (those loyal to the Pope) fell to the armies of the German (Holy Roman) emperor, “the triumph of the aristocracy generally accompanied that of the Ghibeline party” (64). Sismondi’s account of the two parties at the time of Castruccio’s ascendancy to power is essentially the same as that in Valperga: [I]n the fourteenth century, the faction of the Ghibelines had become that of tyranny,—of the Guelphs that of liberty. The former displayed those great military and political talents which personal ambition usually develops. In the second were to be found, almost exclusively, patriotism, and the heroism which sacrifices to it every personal interest. (120)

Shelley not only derives information on Italian politics from Sismondi, but also largely shares his ideological perspective. Sismondi prefers republican Guelphs to despotic Ghibellines, but he views party conflict itself as potentially “fatal to the cause of liberty” (85). Thus, even while history is structured through the opposed ideologies of and conflicts between parties, both Sismondi and Shelley value disinterested, nonpartisan, and extensive views. In drawing on Sismondi, Shelley uses the best history of Italy available to her, which was, moreover, one written by a liberal Enlightenment figure. Sismondi’s influence led Shelley to situate early Renaissance Florence among other notable, if imperfect, sites of freedom, such as democratic Athens, republican Rome, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Holland, Rousseau’s Geneva, and Franklin’s Philadelphia.14 In Valperga republican and popular politics are characterized primarily in the words of those opposed to them. At the beginning of his military career in France, Castruccio serves under an Italian commander named Alberto Scoto—Shelley’s name for the historical figure, Alberto Scotti of Piacenza (Green 45). From Scoto, Castruccio imbibes not only military skill but also the devious politics of Renaissance Italians. In Scoto’s “evil school,” Castruccio learns that a prince should rely on the sword, on gold, and on ideological control, whereas “woe and defeat are to that chief, who reigns only by the choice of the people; a choice more fickle and deceitful than the famed faithlessness of woman” (V 1: 94, 96). The antifeminist excess in this comparison between the fickleness of the people and “the





faithlessness of woman” suggests that Shelley is critical of Scoto’s contempt for democracy and thus, by implication, that she approves of an electoral system with a broadly based franchise. Immediately upon his return to Italy, Castruccio encounters Benedetto Pepi, who detests the republicans of Florence for “asserting the superiority of the vulgar, till every petty artizan of its meanest lane fancies himself as great a prince as the emperor Henry himself” (1: 119). In the course of the novel, Shelley discredits Pepi even more thoroughly than Scoto. Far from idealizing a “moderate aristocratic” state, Shelley appears to believe in a leveling “commonwealth,” such as that which Pepi and Galeazzo Visconti abhor (2: 12), in which commerce produces security if not liberty. Three years later, in The Last Man, Shelley once again celebrates egalitarian republicanism. After the abdication of the last king of England in the year 2073, his son, Adrian, seeks to use “his influence to diminish the power of the aristocracy, to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege, and to introduce a perfect system of republican government” (Last Man 30). The ideal of freedom in Valperga resides neither in peaceful retirement nor in a stable pastoral state. Instead, liberty is a condition of instability, conflict, and energy. Such progressive energies will sometimes require restraint, yet the ideal republic permits neither despotic force nor ideological control. Thus, Shelley adopts the Godwinian solution of self-censorship and mutual surveillance among equals. Godwin proposes a “natural” rather than administrative form of restraint in communities of limited size. As I showed in chapter 5, Godwin argues that no penal system would be necessary, since “every individual would then live under the public eye, and the disapprobation of his neighbours . . . would inevitably oblige him either to reform or to emigrate” (PJ 3: 378). So, Castruccio, prior to his descent into tyranny, is led by his love for Euthanasia to “talk of republics, and the energy and virtue that every citizen acquires, when each acting under the censure of each, yet possesses power” (V 1: 188). The republic for Shelley and her father maintains order by fostering self-discipline and by creating conditions of transparency and visibility in which public opinion can operate “naturally,” with maximum effectiveness. The character who best realizes the ideal of the republican citizen is Euthanasia. Following the deaths of her parents and brothers, Euthanasia finds herself in a state of independence, moderated only by “the rigid censorship of her own reason, and the opinion of her fellow-citizens” (1: 170). Conscience and duty are the other names for this faculty of self-censorship. Throughout the novel, Euthanasia



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engages in self-regulation enforced by a nightly procedure of selfexamination. While there is little evidence of Roman Catholicism in this novel about medieval Italy, apart from the persecution and torture of heretics by Dominican inquisitors, a fundamentally Calvinist internalization of the practice of confession guides the behavior and, indeed, the very thoughts of the ideal republican citizen. Of course, there is a feminist elitism in presenting the liberally educated and nobly born Euthanasia as the ideal republican citizen. (Similarly, in The Last Man, the ideal republican is Adrian, the second Duke of Windsor and only son of the last king of England.) The common people in Valperga lack both Euthanasia’s classical cultivation and capacity for self-regulation, but it would be wrong to characterize Shelley’s attitude toward the lower social orders as disdainful. Early in the novel, Shelley raises the question of the control of the common people through the ideological means their own popular culture makes available and through disciplinary mechanisms of surveillance (as opposed to Godwinian public opinion). Again, Alberto Scoto presents the young Castruccio with political lessons—in this case, explaining the usefulness of minstrels, actors, and other Uomini di Corte: “These latter . . . can penetrate every where, see every thing, hear every thing, and if you acquire but the art of getting their knowledge from them, they become of infinite utility” (V 1: 98).15 Just as Shelley discredits Scoto by emphasizing his antifeminism, so here she criticizes his devious politics, since Machiavelli himself argued that a wise prince “engages the people’s attention with festivals and shows” (1: 84). Machiavelli’s advice, less modern than Scoto’s administrative utilitarianism, derives from the Juvenalian panem et circenses, though Machiavelli here emphasizes circuses rather than bread. In Shelley’s view, if the people lack enlightenment, social order should be fostered through education and not maintained through ideological manipulation and the use of surveillance to obtain bureaucratic information. Even though (owing to her father’s revisions) her novel is subtitled The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, Shelley’s conception of history and historical fiction includes popular culture and mass movements as well as accounts of elites and great men. Failing to understand Shelley’s ideal of socially comprehensive representation and her broad social view of historical causality, Lockhart, in his review of the novel, dismisses the descriptions of popular culture and the accounts of religious heresies as extraneous historical details possessing no aesthetic significance: “we cannot spare four days of the life of Castruccio Castracani to singers and tale-tellers, and so forth, with





whom he and his story have nothing to do” (284). However, Shelley devotes the last three chapters of the novel’s first volume to the May festival at the castle of Valperga not merely because she wishes to display her historical research or to authenticate her late medieval setting, but rather because the early nineteenth-century rediscovery of popular culture and the problem and power of the masses impressed themselves on her consciousness.16 Mary Shelley neither ignores, nor disdains, nor offers unqualified praise for popular culture. She views popular culture as backward and superstitious; it sometimes involves cruel and unjustified shame punishments; it is not a pure and authentic expression of the folk, but may derive from sources in the elite tradition; it sometimes reveals national character, but it may also seem timeless and geographically universal. The second chapter of Valperga describes a theatrical representation of Dante’s Hell, on the bridge of Carraia in Florence. This spectacle, deriving from a work of high culture, has terrific power because it appeals to the superstitions of the people: it is an external embodiment of “what then existed in the imagination of the spectators, endued with the vivid colours of a faith inconceivable in these lethargic days” (V 1: 20). If this initial manifestation of popular culture reveals a historical disjunction in the construction of consciousness or imagination, a later incident betrays the cruelty of the people, both random and ritualized. Common soldiers in the Ghibelline army outside the walls of Florence rape the women of the city who fall into their hands, whereas Florentine men are subjected to a skimmington (a procession exposing such traditional targets of popular ridicule as submissive husbands): “to lead a prisoner naked through the camp, seated on an ass, with his face turned towards the tail, was a common mockery” (3: 176).17 Shelley’s reference to the charivari does not simply evince an interest in popular culture for its own sake, but is integrated into a novel in which popular justice is almost as prominent as despotic and inquisitorial imprisonments and tortures. Shelley believes that certain popular entertainments, particularly nonverbal ones such as juggling and fire-eating, are universal—performed “from the shores of the Ganges to those of the Thames, from the most distant periods, even down to our own times” (1: 269). On the other hand, one may also find evidence for national character in popular culture—for example, the Italian predilection and talent for mime and improvisation. Popular culture presents a contradictory terrain for the historical novelist: now an index to temporal and geographical specificity, now evidence for universal qualities of the common people (from the



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perspective of the elite observer); now authentically “popular,” now something that has trickled down from the culture of the elite; now spontaneous celebration, now violence and humiliation. The first volume of Shelley’s novel ends with the lengthy account of the four-day celebration at Valperga; the second volume begins with Castruccio and Euthanasia’s arrival in Florence, an arrival that coincides with a spontaneous festival. Occasioned by the birth of “five whelps” to one of the lionesses that serve to symbolize and magically protect Florence’s prosperity and strength (2: 2), the festival leads to a debate between the two lovers. To the Ghibelline lord’s mockery of the “childish omens” in which republicans put their faith, the Guelph countess replies with a justification of popular superstition. Euthanasia rejoices to discover such evidence of active imagination: “It is this same imagination more usefully and capaciously employed that makes them decree the building of the most extensive and beautiful building of modern times” (2: 3–4). Euthanasia celebrates the faculty of imagination, even while she recognizes that it may be misdirected—but better misdirected, than inactive or extinct. Public benefits and the fine arts may have the same source as chauvinistic and superstitious faith in omens. Unlike Wordsworth and Hazlitt, who placed the faculty of imagination in the individual rather than the multitude, Mary Shelley finds imagination in the superstitious festivities and beliefs of the people. Even when what is at stake is not popular festivity but rather potentially frightening crowd violence, Shelley accords at least qualified approval to popular sentiments and actions. The inhuman and sublime sadist who imprisons Beatrice in his ruinous house is eventually destroyed by crowd action: “the moment that a leader appeared, the whole peasantry flocked as to a crusade to destroy their oppressor” (3: 88). Shelley’s qualifications in this case are twofold: first, the peasantry behaves not rationally but rather in a kind of knee-jerk response to the direct experience of oppression; secondly, a leader, not himself a peasant, proves to be necessary for the crowd to be incited to act at all.18 On the other hand, Shelley and her readers almost certainly believe that, in this instance of popular violence, justice has been done. The major crowd scene in the novel takes place in Ferrara, where Beatrice is first arrested by the Dominican inquisitors and then subjected to a highly theatrical trial by fire, which itself has been staged so that she will escape uninjured. While ostensibly charged with uttering heretical false prophecies, Beatrice has come to the authorities’ notice, or so the crowd believes, for the political crime of favoring





the restoration of the marquess Obizzo to the lordship of Ferrara. In response to the initial arrest, the crowd seems inclined to attempt a rescue: “The people armed themselves with stones, sticks, knives, and axes” (2: 46). Beatrice’s trial consists of walking blindfolded over white-hot ploughshares placed in furrows in a Ferrara square. Shelley’s description initially reveals disgust with the huge crowd, which she compares to a “timid herd,” and which resembles that in attendance at hangings in London: “their bodies and muscles were in perpetual motion; some foamed at the mouth, and others gazed with outstretched necks, and eyes starting from their sockets” (2: 58). But when Beatrice is brought out, Shelley employs a nature metaphor that suggests a certain respect both for the power of the crowd and for their sympathy with the sufferer, which they restrain only with difficulty: “a sound, as of the hollow north-wind among the mighty trees of a sea-like forest, rose from among them; an awful, deep and nameless breath, a sigh of many hearts” (2: 59). When Beatrice survives her trial unscathed, Shelley (though not without condescension) approves the wild, superstitious joy of the multitude and the threat of violence that causes the inquisitors to slink away and their Gascon troops to retreat. Shelley’s attitude toward the people and their culture is that of an elite, enlightened, and liberal observer. The escalating list of the arms of the crowd, from stones and sticks to knives and axes, perhaps suggests fear, but then their violence is directed against the despotic inquisitors. Shelley cannot approve of superstition, but in a gesture of radical populism she honors the shared human faculty of imagination, which may at times feed superstition.19 Similarly, she is disgusted by the bloodthirsty crowds who flock to public executions, but then, as if after further reflection, she recognizes that the crowd may have been led to such scenes of suffering by curiosity about the liminal space between life and death, by a love of the marvelous, or by an admirable sympathy. What is most striking is that “sigh of many hearts,” the people speaking in one voice—indeed, scarcely speaking. In accord with the sentimental hierarchy of communicative modes, which values the nonverbal above words, the people express themselves immediately, spontaneously, and unanimously. Today, we are aware of the dangers of Enlightenment and Romantic fantasies of the unanimity of the people speaking in one voice, of how such fantasies may coincide with the eradication—often violent—of difference. But for a member of the intellectual elite born more than two hundred years ago, the problem was to extend sympathy and shared humanity into the lowest ranks of society. The problem is that of extending one’s vision, not by



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The human soul disdains all restraint, and ever seeks to mingle with nature itself, or with kindred minds; to hope and fear for oneself alone often narrows the heart and understanding; but if we are animated by these feelings in unison with a multitude, bound by the same desires and the same perils, such participation of triumph or sorrow exalts and beautifies every emotion. (1: 237)

In her historical novel of sensibility, Shelley justifies the reading of history and historical fiction for the criticism it enables of narrow, present-centered views. Valperga represents a new kind of historical novel, one in which sentiments are events. Here, as in Frankenstein, Shelley maintains a sentimental linguistic theory, or sentimental suspicion of rhetorical modes of communication, and of verbal language itself. She exhibits a preference for the immediacy and spontaneity found in the language of the heart, of the countenance, and of tears—especially, the entirely reliable tears that mark the emergence of a man of feeling. While Shelley may be guilty of anachronism in situating the sentimental hero and heroine in late medieval Italy, she does seek to delineate the fourteenth-century forces that might transform people into superior beings or, on the contrary, brutalize them or their victims. But, in examining fourteenth-century dehumanizing forces, Shelley has very much in mind a critique of early nineteenth-century industrial and state institutions that employed surveillance and bureaucratic techniques in order to make human beings into knowable and useful machines. As a student of the French Revolution, Mary Shelley shows a particular interest in the workings of popular justice and the psychology of the crowd. And, while she defines humanity historically, she is also attracted to universality, to a union in solidarity with a multitude of human beings, to whom she feels herself superior, but whom she cannot condemn, not even for their superstitions, not even for their attendance at public displays of despotic force directed against suffering human bodies.



the leisure that property confers, though certainly by knowledge of history and the classics. But our feelings and vision, which are potentially so narrow, can also be extended by love of a kindred spirit or by joining our breaths in the “sigh of many hearts”:




I

n The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), at the moment when a bell tolls to mark the hour of an execution, Mary Shelley interrupts the narrative to formulate a theory about the ears in relation to other sense organs: “The ear is sometimes the parent of a livelier sense than any other of the soul’s apprehensive portals.” Thus, in Italy, when the bells toll forth in unison on Easter Sunday, following a three-day suspension of the sounding of all bells and clocks, “Every Catholic kneels in prayer, and even the unimaginative Protestant feels the influence of a religion, which speaks so audibly.” In England as well, visible funeral pageantry, like “the plumed hearse,” is less effective than “the sad bell that tolls for death” in conveying melancholy to the heart (Mary Shelley, Perkin Warbeck 192). For Mary Shelley, as for other Romantic writers, sound is more intimately connected than sight with the capacity of sympathy and an appeal to the imagination. And the crowd often manifests itself in the realm of sound. Similarly, William Hazlitt’s meditations on time and clocks in “On a Sun-Dial” (1827) eventually lead him to reflections on sound. In a speculation that both Mary Shelley and Charles Maturin would have endorsed, Hazlitt suggests that “Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have . . . been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it” (17: 239). For Hazlitt too, the monastic recluse serves as a metaphor or symbol for the human being reduced to the condition of a machine through discipline, regularity, and sensory deprivation. Recognizing the continuity between the monasticism of the old regime and the bureaucratic innovations of modernity, Romantic novelists suggest that such human mechanisms are created out of the material of the early modern crowd, by and for the industrial mode of production. Plebeian lives have been divorced from the festivity of the marketplace and, increasingly, from the culture of the alehouse.



C onc lusion

196


The great advantage . . . which clocks have over watches and other dumb reckoners of time is, that for the most part they strike the hour—that they are as it were the mouth-pieces of time; that they not only point it to the eye, but impress it on the ear; that they “lend it both an understanding and a tongue.” Time thus speaks to us in an audible and warning voice. Objects of sight are easily distinguished by the sense, and suggest useful reflections to the mind; sounds, from their intermittent nature, and perhaps other causes, appeal more to the imagination, and strike upon the heart. (17: 241)

Hazlitt here places objects of sight largely outside the category of the sublime, in the realm of utility or “useful reflections.” Objects of sight, for Hazlitt, lack the obscurity characteristic of the sublime. As “easily distinguished” objects of sensory perception, visual phenomena appeal to the intellect or understanding. Sounds are more likely to be sublime, since they appeal to the imagination instead of being apprehended by the perceptual apparatus. Through the imagination, sounds strike like a clock upon the heart. Despite Hazlitt’s deemphasis of the sublime potential of objects of sight, this passage on clocks is indebted to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke’s section on “Sound and Loudness” includes among its examples of sublime sounds the shouts of crowds, which confound the imagination of the auditor and thus make it hard for him or her to avoid “joining in the common cry.” The section “Suddenness,” which immediately follows, takes as its central example the “aweful” effect of “the striking of a great clock” (76). Hazlitt is clearly thinking of the next section of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, “Intermitting,” when he attributes the imaginative appeal of sounds to “their intermittent nature.” An intermittent quality affects not only the imagination but also the memory. In “Why Distant Objects Please” (1821), Hazlitt once again contrasts objects of sight to the objects of the other senses: Sounds, smells, and sometimes tastes, are remembered longer than visible objects, and serve, perhaps, better for links in the chain of association. The reason seems to be this: they are in their nature intermittent, and comparatively rare; whereas objects of sight are always before us, and, by their continuous succession, drive one another out. . . . The ear, for example, is oftener courted by silence than noise; and the sounds that break the silence sink deeper and more durably into the mind.



Unlike the sun-dial or the hour-glass, the clock, for Hazlitt, is associated more with sound than sight:

197

The fact that “[t]he eye is always open” (Hazlitt 8: 258) gives it neither greater power nor greater value than the other senses, especially hearing. In Romantic aesthetics, which give priority to imagination over sensory perception and the intellect, sounds operate at a deeper level—at once more intimate (like the connection of the voice to consciousness) and more terrible (like the striking of a great clock on a silent night). Hazlitt’s theory that sounds affect us more profoundly than the objects of sight is a product of the phonocentric culture of sentimentalism that I have examined in this book. While I have not ignored the essentially visual concepts of Enlightenment and surveillance, I have analyzed, at various points, sounds and the voice and the echo. I have shown how a curiously constructed cavern in Sicily gave the tyrant Dionysius surreptitious access to his subjects’ sentiments of loyalty or treachery. I have shown how Benjamin Franklin was fascinated by the distribution of sound through space in calculating the maximum audience who might be reached by the unamplified human voice. Walter Scott is heir to a tradition of unsexed women guilty of oral violence, in the forms of spectacular threats and potential cannibalism. At the same time, the opposition between sounds and objects of sight, for Scott and others, manifests itself in the opposition between speech and writing. For Romantic novelists, moreover, a suspicion of authorship is predicated in part on self-doubt about the legitimacy and consequences of the appropriation of traditional oral culture. By the late eighteenth century, such an oral culture may be preeminently the preserve of women. However, promoted particularly by radical Protestant sects at the time of the English civil war, women’s public speaking, as Lewis and Maturin were well aware, comes to involve nontraditional assertions of authority—in preaching, in dangerous enlightened addresses to crowds, and ultimately in authorship. Women’s association with orality holds both a threat and a nostalgic appeal. If the voice seems to embody selfhood and to form the train of ideas that constitutes our very consciousness, reproductions of the voice strike at the heart of subjectivity. In Maturin, vocal reproductions take the form of the echo. No longer originary, essential, or immediate, the echoed voice results in the self-loss consequent upon absorption in a crowd. For the sentimentalist, another constituent of self and society besides the voice is the capacity for sympathy, which can communicate sentiments magnetically between lovers or contagiously in crowds. While sympathy may enable a partial transcendence of the



Conclusion


gendered self, the faculty of imagination on which sympathy depends has significant limitations: most importantly, imagination tends to single out the individual, while failing to bring the feelings of a multitude home to the self. Sympathy can manifest itself in communication that has no need for writing or even words. Sentimentalists such as Maturin, Mary Shelley, and the later Godwin valorize the languages of the countenance, of the eyes, of tears, and ultimately of the blood, which is transfused from one person into another, carrying feelings in its flow. In sentimental theory, if sympathy is a source of social cohesion, so is the voice. Maturin and Mary Shelley explore the implications for nationalism and populism of the idea of the people speaking in one voice. In rejecting an account of truth as intersubjective validation, Godwin, as I argued, denies that “the voice of the people is . . . ‘the voice of truth and of God’ ” (PJ 4: 81). In the revolutionary year 1848, a satirical writer, mocking the prominence of women in public agitations, gives a new twist to the phrase vox populi vox dei: “London is threatened with an irruption of female Chartists, and every man of experience is naturally alarmed, for he knows that the vox fœminæ is the vox diaboli when it is once set going” (“How to Treat” 3). In this slippage from the godlike people to the diabolic female, the voice remains central to crowds—now because of stereotypical female garrulousness, which operates almost mechanically, once “it is set going.” In the mid-nineteenth-century, in an inheritance from Romantic crowd psychology, the threat to the status quo takes the female and Gothic form of the devil’s voice. In this book I have conjoined the social questions of public roles for women and the new prominence of mass phenomena with certain literary problems: the creation of subjectivity in narrative (firstperson narration, psychological fiction), a critique of authorship that participates in antifictional discourse, and representations of the masses. In one sense, the creation and interpellation of a new kind of subject, one who is both individualized and subjected, offers a solution to the problem of the rebellious crowd. Still, given the quasipopular form of the novel in this period and its commemoration of popular superstitions, there is a tension between the novel as an individualizing genre and as one that is still connected to an older traditional collectivity. I have looked for representations of the masses that are not simply allegorical—as, for example, in Franco Moretti’s interpretation of Frankenstein’s monster, made from the parts of various subaltern men, as an allegory of the proletariat (Signs Taken for



198

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Wonders 82–90). Similarly, I have sought fictional representations of the common people that are not simply synecdochical—like the servant, or the servant’s hand, which, for Bruce Robbins, stands in for all the unrepresented “hands” engaged in labor and manufacture (x). Instead, I have suggested that Gothic novelists, in particular, attempt to represent the crowd quite directly by reaching toward a cinematic form of reception in a state of distraction. Other Romantic novels focus on the sounds of the multitude, unsexed revolutionary women, the significance in popular disturbances of cross-dressed men, and the voice (including the narrative voice, as marked by gender and gender crossings). I began this book with the ear of Dionysius. I shall end with Erasmus Darwin’s mouth. In the final note to The Temple of Nature (1803), Darwin describes how, around 1770, he constructed a wooden mouth with lips of soft leather, and with a valve over the back part of it for nostrils, both which could be quickly opened or closed by the pressure of the fingers, the vocality was given by a silk ribbon about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide stretched between two bits of smooth wood a little hollowed; so that when a gentle current of air from bellows was blown on the edge of the ribbon, it gave an agreeable tone, as it vibrated between the wooden sides, much like a human voice. This head pronounced the p, b, m, and the vowel a, with so great nicety as to deceive all who heard it unseen, when it pronounced the words mama, papa, map, and pam; and had a most plaintive tone, when the lips were gradually closed. (136–37)

This strange invention, which Jenny Uglow calls Darwin’s “talking head” (137), seems entirely characteristic of the late eighteenth century—because of the fascination with the reproduction of the voice, because of the mechanization of the body, and because of the proximity of science and magic. Darwin invents the Enlightenment version of the mythical brass head that Roger Bacon, with diabolical aid, supposedly made to speak. Darwin’s vocal machine is to human speech what the Aeolian harp is to Romantic poetry. Designed to assist in the analysis of articulate sounds, the mechanical head forms part of a project for “the reformation of the alphabet,” an improvement that may help to produce a more accurate language, in which metaphor is no longer necessary except as a poetical ornament. Darwin teaches his mechanical head the infant’s first words—mama and papa—almost as if he sought to create a mechanical family. Still, this mechanized version of domestic relations is not a force for social stability but



Conclusion


rather a technical deception or kind of fiction (“to deceive all who heard it”)—rather like a ventriloquist’s dummy. While Darwin claims that his other occupations prevented him from further developing his mechanical head, he speculates on how one “built in a gigantic form” might influence either a disciplined collectivity or an ungoverned multitude: it “might speak so loud as to command an army or instruct a crowd” (120).



200

Introduction 1. Frank Jordan cites Arthur Murphy’s 1772 tragedy The Grecian Daughter as an analogue or source for Scott (FN 576). A more likely source would be Joseph Addison’s Spectator, No. 439, July 24, 1712, but Scott also owned a copy of Brydone’s Tour Through Sicily and Malta (Alexander, ed., Count Robert of Paris 531). 2. In order partly to ensure silence “a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge. . . . By means of this implement, the slightest whisper of the one might be heard by the other” (Bentham 41). 3. The postmodern transvaluation of the swarm shares little with antinovel discourse. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri establish a historical sequence of the common people in resistance: from a modern army in which the people are imagined as a single body, to a guerrilla army structured “like a pack of wolves,” to the postmodern network that “might be imagined like a swarm of ants or bees—a seemingly amorphous multiplicity that can strike at a single point from all sides” (57). Characterized by a seeming formlessness and spontaneity, the postmodern multitude possesses “swarm intelligence,” a collective and social intelligence, quite opposed to the lowest common denominator (91). 4. Drawing upon Walter Reed’s Exemplary History of the Novel (1981), Cathy N. Davidson uses the phrase “mass privacy” (260). 5. Nicholas Visser argues that Le Bon synthesizes an “amalgam of orthodox views of the crowd into an overarching ‘scientific’ explanation” (294). These orthodox views find their origins at the time of the French Revolution in the work of such authors as Burke, Scott, and John Galt: “English novelists and social thinkers in the aftermath of the French Revolution developed a sustained and surprisingly cohesive ‘theory’ or discourse of the crowd” (293).

Chapter 1: Gothic and Romantic Crowds 1. Deidre Lynch claims that Radcliffe engaged in a project of populist and feminist historical recovery: “In works such as A Sicilian Romance and The Mysteries of Udolpho, servants’ gossip, not written documents, keeps alive the memory of the wrongs done to the narratives’



No t e s

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Notes dispossessed, spectral mothers. Radcliffe thereby makes the truth of the past the charge of the group conventionally associated with illiteracy, superstition, and delusion” (145–46). For a delineation of “the shaky line between the effects of crowds and those of the novel itself,” see Plotz 72. Carol Houlihan Flynn discusses, in addition to Harrington, other fictional representations of the Gordon Riots prior to Dickens—those in George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) and Thomas Gaspey’s The Mystery; or Forty Years Ago (1820). Raymond Williams argues that Wordsworth posits alternative responses to the powerful impact of urban anonymity: “we can retreat, for security, into a deep subjectivity, or we can look around us for social pictures, social signs, social messages, to which . . . we can try to relate as individuals but so as to discover, in some form, community” (295). Frances Ferguson suggests that in Book 7 of The Prelude it is less crowds of bodies than the presence of competing consciousnesses—owing, for example, to the rise of new roles for women—that led to the formation of a Romantic consciousness that found its fullest expression in solitude (114). In claiming that the imagination for Wordsworth and Coleridge is consistent with an individualist ideology, I am emphasizing a different kind of politics from Nigel Leask, who has examined Coleridge’s shift from an egalitarian, republican, civic model of imagination in his early works to an elitist, other-worldly one by the time of the Biographia Literaria. Following Gayatri Spivak, Forest Pyle finds a challenge to the unified subject in Shelley’s “strong” version of imagination “as the proposition of an insistent alterity that works against the ‘principle of Self’ in which it is ‘housed’ ” (ix). For Shelley, “the agency exercised by the imagination is not regarded as a subjective agency: the imagination Shelley refers to in the Defence and elsewhere exceeds the ‘circumference’ of the self or the mind” (Pyle 96). Despite the ideological opposition between Shelley and Coleridge, Pyle finds a similar relation between imagination and subjectivity in both writers: “Coleridge’s theory of the imagination . . . does not presume the unity of either subject or nation; it takes the divisions of both as the starting point of its ideological work. Coherence is not, in other words, a condition of the process but an imaginary outcome” (57). In contrasting Godwin to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who “had become pillars of the established order,” John Middleton Murry comments on Godwin’s attitude toward alehouses: “Such a degree of imaginative sympathy and tolerance towards the labourer was almost unparalleled among his most enlightened contemporaries” (254, 266). In her reading of this Coleridge footnote on mass culture, Karen Swann uses Benjamin’s term “mechanical reproduction”; for Coleridge,



202

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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popular literature “is aligned with the mechanical reproduction of conventions and the proliferation of commodities, and with the falsely or unnaturally inspirational ‘dose’ which circulates a taint of diseased sexuality through a body of increasingly dependent and emasculated consumers, most of whom were of course female to begin with” (413). For Swann, Coleridge and high Romantic culture remain haunted by the addiction, commodification, and feminization against which they define themselves. Nicholas Rennie compares Emile Zola to Wordsworth in their resistance to the mass phenomena that threaten both individuality and narrative unity. Zola seeks to manage the crowd and preserve the integrity of the individual by foregrounding from within a multitude a group of named representative individuals. Zola avoids slipping into fragment and anecdote, the narrative genres that express the dispersal of experience in urban modernity, while he “necessarily compromises the effect of the crowd as an anonymous force” (Rennie 407). The now famous instance of Wordsworth’s individualizing, dehistoricizing, and “romanticizing” of scenes described by Gilpin involves the elimination of the numerous beggars from the scene of Tintern Abbey. Gilpin is struck by how “the whole hamlet” of wretched inhabitants appeared “at the gate” of the ruined abbey to seek alms (50). Indeed, the “growth of marine insurance” contributed support to eighteenth-century legislation against the practice of wrecking, which traditionally met some of the needs of impoverished “coastal dwellers” (Rule 168, 170). For Andrew Franta, Wordsworth’s claim in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” that an original author “has the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” involves a simultaneous assertion of control over and acknowledgment of dependence on the reader, as the “Essay, Supplementary” marks a “move away from the expressivism of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads . . . toward a new recognition of the centrality of the effects that poems have on their readers” (59). Franta connects Wordsworth’s concern for the making of taste to ensure “poetry’s endurance” with “Wordsworth’s increasingly strong tendency to think about his poetry in architectural terms” (70). Austen creates in Lady Maria Bertram a female figure of luxury similar to the Regency dandy. Like Beau Brummell, Lady Bertram rejects interiority and choice, because she lacks access to her own needs and preferences. Thus, when Mrs. Grant invites Fanny Price to dinner at Mansfield parsonage, Lady Bertram wonders if she will be able to do without her niece’s company. Edmund advises his mother to seek Sir Thomas Bertram’s opinion: “So I will, Edmund. I will ask Sir Thomas . . . whether I can do without her” (Mansfield Park 253). A few pages later, when confronted by the choice between two card tables, Lady Bertram again consults her husband: “What shall



Notes

Notes

I do Sir Thomas?—Whist and Speculation; which will amuse me most?” (278). 13. Describing Hazlitt as a skeptic who “seeks no unity, offers no ‘resolution of tensions’ ” and as one who “had the faculty of holding two opposed ideas in his mind at the same time,” David Bromwich discusses at length the chapter on Coriolanus from the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (5, 22, 314–26). Noting that “the visual spectacle and personal vanity of monarchy seemed to [Hazlitt] to play into an inherent weakness in the human imagination,” Kevin Gilmartin insists that, beyond an individualizing imagination, there is “the potential for collective trajectories in Hazlitt’s prose” (45, 52). 14. While concerned with the tension between British Unionism and Irish nationalism, rather than with efforts to represent the crowd, Jim Hansen offers similar reflections on formal problems in Maturin’s novels: “When his texts attempt to work out insoluble social problems at the level of content, they end up falling apart at the level of formal unity” (358).

Chapter 2: Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott’s THE H E A RT OF M ID -L OTHI A N 1. These opposing symbolic values have been explored in the debate between Catherine Gallagher and Neil Hertz over why it is that the figure of a hideous woman should have embodied revolutionary violence in nineteenth-century literary and historical accounts. 2. Mike Hill has criticized E. P. Thompson’s “unsustainable opposition” between the “moral economy” of the crowd and Adam Smith’s political economy. In Hill’s view, Thompson should have taken into account Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to recognize that, “Far from standing outside and thereby in opposition to capitalism, sympathetic experience and (unequal) moral reciprocity is . . . congenial to the early modern market” (760, 756). 3. Burke’s friends Thomas English (c. 1725–98) and Walker King (c. 1755–1827) were the main writers of the historical article in the Annual Register in this period, with King concentrating on parliamentary debates and English on European affairs (McLouglin). 4. Harriet Devine Jump suggests that the Annual Register was Wollstonecraft’s source—specifically for the instigation of the crowd by the Duke of Orleans (112). 5. In 1810, Polwhele sent Scott a copy of The Unsex’d Females, along with his other publications (Grierson, ed., Letters of Scott 2: 422, n. 1). 6. In Ormond, Edgeworth recurs to the same passage in Burke, when she blames an abbé from a noble family for using the term



204

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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la canaille: “ ‘La canaille,’ synonymous with the swinish multitude, an expression of contempt for which the Parisian nobility have since paid terribly dear” (8: 191). Responding to Darsie Latimer’s cross-dressing in Redgauntlet (1824), Maria Edgeworth, despite her own use of female crossdressing in Belinda, expressed disapproval of this aspect of Scott’s “paltry” hero: “Swathed in a long riding skirt: and with a lady’s mask!—Did ever any body but Scott venture to conceive a hero in such a plight” (qtd. in Butler 449–50). In her discussion of transvestism in the Waverley Novels, Judith Wilt maintains that “each gender must journey through the experience of the other, the outlawed, gender, before either one can choose and re-fix the male or female identity appropriate to the new age” (117). While there is substantial evidence in Scott for cross-gendered journeys, the subsequent achievement of fixed identities seems less certain. Wilt regards Scott, on account of his celebrated anonymous authorship, as implicated in the impostures and maskings of his cross-dressed characters (119). Similarly, I argue that Scott’s morally compromised authority, like all patriarchal authority, is less absolute, more subject to negotiation, than has sometimes been claimed. While the smuggler George Robertson, in women’s clothes or otherwise, did not participate in the killing of Porteous, some of the rioters may have been so disguised. One of the witnesses at the trial of William Maclauchlane for participating in the riot claimed that he was knocked down by “one of the mob, in a woman’s dress” (Roughead 84). For Ian Duncan, the shift from the public legal matter of the Porteous riots to the private matter of the infanticide trial entails a turning away from documentary history toward allegorical romance, a turn confirmed in the final volume’s focus on the private estate of Knocktarlitie rather than on the British or Scottish nations. Scott thus contains the threat of popular insurrection “in intelligible and manageable forms” (156). David Hewitt similarly argues that Scott’s “Porteous mob in its orderliness is in some respects closer to rebellion than to mobbing”; for Hewitt, Scott “is engaged simultaneously in elevating the status of the riot from riot to rebellion, and presenting it in a favourable light” by showing how it was “crucial in the formation of [a Scottish nationalist] political consciousness” (304, 305, 308). The popular memory of the justice executed on Porteous extended far beyond Edinburgh. British sailors carried such memory across the Atlantic when in a 1747 anti-impressment riot in Boston the crowd threatened the Massachusetts governor with the fate of Captain John Porteous (Linebaugh and Rediker 215–16). While female disguise was common in European popular protest, A. W. Smith observes that, “in the United States, the natural



Notes

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes disguise for rioters was that of the Indian” (244). While Scott does not refer to American Indians in his description of the female crowd of October 5, he does use this Burkean analogy in describing two deaths that occurred following the fall of the Bastille: “Foulon and Berthier . . . were put to death, with circumstances of cruelty and insult fitting only at the death-stake of a Cherokee encampment; and, in emulation of literal cannibals, there were men, or rather monsters, found, not only to tear asunder the limbs of their victims, but to eat their hearts, and drink their blood” (LN 1: 157). Discussing the conflict between aristocratic and bourgeois values— here, between honor and law—Daniel Cottom offers an excellent account of the phonocentrism of Scott’s novels: “Rather than taming violence, the written word of law is shown to deaden the living voice of honor even as the Phaedrus warned that writing would damage the truth of the dialectic” (145). “Scribbled away lustily. . . . I am become a sort of writing Automaton” (Journal 492); “for if I build I must have money, and I know none will give me any but the booksellers; so I must get into my wheel, like a turnspit” (Letters 3: 30); “I am only the dog who drives the wheel it is they [i.e., his creditors] who must eat & ought to eat the roast meat” (Letters 11: 77). Beth Newman finds in the frame narrative of The Heart of Mid-Lothian evidence for a nineteenth-century scenario in which a man is seduced from his profession into such effeminating activities as novel-reading (526). I would suggest that Scott’s views are shaped less by the doctrines of the separate sexual spheres than by an older civic humanist ideology in which the professions themselves are evidence of effeminacy. For an excellent account of the differences in the role of woman in the aristocratic discourse of civic humanism and the bourgeois doctrine of the separate sexual spheres, see Clery 102–3. Daniel Cottom claims that “the civilizing process demands the . . . feminization of men” (158). Alexander Welsh argues that the historical shifts that Scott traces from honor to credit, status to contract, and family to individual entail “something like a feminization of culture” (219). In her discussion of Scott’s use of his source materials, Mary Lascelles notes that there may be advantages in working on inferior materials: “Mrs. Goldie, though her introductory description suggests literary aspirations, was evidently not a practised narrator, nor (despite her husband’s profession) very clear about legal procedure. So much the better: a great imagination often works more freely on material which has still to be shaped” (95). On the last of these occasions, Reuben Butler’s remark that “his wife was a poor pen-woman” (HM 452) echoes Scott’s assessment of his wife, Charlotte: “she is the worst pen woman I ever saw” (Letters 2: 528).



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18. I am concerned here with how women’s writing figures within the novel, and not with the distinct question of Scott’s mostly supportive and friendly personal relations with such women authors as Anna Seward, Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, and Felicia Hemans, or his generous praise of Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Charlotte Smith. While in The Heart of Mid-Lothian Scott praises Elizabeth Hamilton and quotes four lines from Joanna Baillie (HM 85, 463–64), I would argue that the mock-heroic dismissal of the fictional Miss Martha Buskbody, who could so ably provide a catalogue of women’s apparel—“things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (HM 401)—better represents the attitude toward women’s writing in the novel. In a letter in which he discusses several women writers, Scott says that “Miss Baillie is the only writing lady with whose manners in society I have been very much delighted. But she is simplicity itself & most of them whom I have seen were the very cream of affectation” (Letters 3: 2–3). In her assessment of the intertextual practices of male Romantics, Jacqueline Pearson argues that “Lewis, Scott and others attempt to reestablish masculine authority over the novel by acknowledging their female precursors but also mocking them, marginalizing them, or regendering their structures or images” (637). 19. Ina Ferris’s study of the canonization of the novel shows how Scott’s Waverley Novels came to occupy a space of literary authority and generic prestige opened up when the early nineteenth-century reviews put into their place two kinds of novels written mainly by women: the degenerate “ordinary novel” associated with “female reading,” and the narrow “proper novel” associated with “feminine writing” (Achievement 35, 72). In her discussion of Waverley, Ferris describes how Scott puts “Female rivals . . . out of the way” (121).

Chapter 3: Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis’s THE MONK and JOURNA L OF A WEST I NDI A P ROPRIETOR 1. Jeffrey N. Cox argues that Lewis’s monodrama The Captive (1803), about a woman imprisoned in a madhouse by her husband, is indebted to Wollstonecraft’s posthumously published novel (44). D. L Macdonald speculates that Lewis shared Wollstonecraft’s view of “a parallel between marriage and slavery” (Monk Lewis 13). 2. Cora Kaplan argues that in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft accepts a radical Enlightenment theory of crowd action, in which “mass social violence is seen as the direct result of severe repression” (43–44). 3. Arguing that Matilda “symbolizes the possibility of female autonomy,” William D. Brewer similarly claims that “Matilda’s transgendering”



Notes

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

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10.

serves to “expose the arbitrary and contingent nature of gender identity” (“Transgendering” 193, 204). For two discussions of the ambiguous moral position of the author or artist in The Monk, see Kiely 98–117, and Lydenberg. Laurie Langbauer has sought to explain Lewis’s disapproval of his mother’s authorial endeavors (208). Sonia Hofkosh argues that in response to the precarious position of the author in the literary marketplace male Romantic authors secure their literary property and their status through a fantasy of the self-generated subject. In Hofkosh’s analysis of these letters, the literary ambitions of Lewis’s mother pose the challenge of female generativity to the idea of the self-generated male subject. In an essay on narrative technique in Samuel Richardson, related to this book on the contradictory ideological formation constituted by the Romantic novel, I challenged the dominant view that early male novelists adopt the female voice in first-person or epistolary narratives in a strategy of degrading women to the status of objects of exchange between men, in order to facilitate homosocial relations or to sustain male narcissism (Carson 95–113). Rejecting the traffic-in-women model for narration, enunciated most inf luentially by Nancy K. Miller, I argued that the male author even as a ventriloquist of female characters necessarily engages in dialogue with actual women, particularly those who are readers and writers. For the identification of Lewis’s fellow passenger, whom BaronWilson names only as Miss F ——, see Macdonald, Monk Lewis 56, 194, and 216, n. 33. George Haggerty has argued that the homoerotic desires of early Gothic novelists including Lewis are displaced into other forms of “aberrant” sexuality. In discussing the agricultural products of the West Indies, Bryan Edwards draws on the passage from Caesar in establishing a similar parallel between the Carib natives and the ancient Britons. Of the minor cash-crop of arnatto, Edwards says, “as paint it was used by some tribes of the Indians, in the same manner as woad by the ancient Britons” (2: 366). In A Poem on the African Slave Trade (1792), Mary Birkett uses the British/Roman analogy to explain why the British should civilize black Africans: “For ’tis a duty which we surely owe, / We to the Romans were what to us Afric now” (qtd. in Moira Ferguson 181). Among the characteristics of the early modern crowd, E. P. Thompson believes that three are especially important— anonymity, direct action, and countertheater: “Just as the rulers asserted their hegemony by a studied theatrical style, so the plebs asserted their presence by a theatre of threat and sedition” (Customs 67).



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11. George Rudé observes that the propertied classes in Europe were alarmed by colorful, popular ceremonies: “These fears were not entirely without substance, as ceremonial demonstrations might, either by an act of provocation or an unexpected turn of events, be transformed into more violent forms of action” (239). Ronald Paulson argues that the mob violence in The Monk, for English readers of the 1790s, would have evoked the Gordon riots as well as French revolutionary popular disturbances (218). In James Boaden’s theatrical adaptation of The Monk, the riot, which occurs off-stage, is quelled by the authority of the now-virtuous Ambrosio-figure (renamed Aurelio by Boaden). Aurelio enunciates this moral about the crowd assault on the convent walls, which has been prompted by the Prioress’s cruelty to Agnes: “Though there is virtue in their sympathy, / Yet violence is not the march of justice. / Where there are laws, the laws alone should punish” (Boaden 64). With an anxious glance at the London crowd, inside and outside Drury Lane Theatre, Boaden insists that autonomous popular justice (even when directed against appropriate targets) ought to yield to aristocratic, clerical, and legal authority. 12. Alan Richardson summarizes the tale, included in Benjamin Moseley’s Treatise on Sugar (1799), of an obeahman named “Three fingered JACK, the terror of Jamaica in 1780,” who was finally overcome by another slave, “who believed his conversion to Christianity or ‘white OBI’ rendered him immune to Jack’s sorcery” (9). The more humane Lewis attempts to use Christianity on the obeahman himself, but the repetition of the description of Christianity as “white Obeah” indicates similar attitudes toward the uses of religion in slave society. In his explanation of the difference between the slave regimes of the American South and the British Caribbean, Michael Mullin argues that some of the judicial, medical, and even spiritual functions that the obeahmen served were taken over in the American South by planters who liked to see themselves as fathers to their slaves. Eugene Genovese argues that absentee ownership prevented the effective implementation on the sugar plantations of the paternalism that developed in the Old South following the end of the international slave trade (5–6). 13. Michael Craton finds an opposition between these two attitudes toward religion throughout the entire history of slavery in the British West Indies: “The degree to which black slaves becoming Christian were any less slaves remained a plantocratic debating point as long as slavery lasted, running in delicate counterpoint to the argument . . . that Christianizing one’s slaves might have a useful socializing function” (“Reluctant Creoles” 338). 14. Despite Lewis’s use of a Burkean argument late in life, I would not agree with Daniel P. Watkins’s claim that The Monk is a reactionary work, marked by religious orthodoxy, and “an extremely conservative ideology” (121).



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1. Maturin echoes the sermon on the death of Nelson when, two years later, in the Preface to his first novel, he uses the metaphor of the customs agent to describe a desirable embargo against the importation of German ideas: “Whatever literary articles have been imported in the plague ship of German letters, I heartily wish were pronounced contraband by competent inspectors” (FR vii). In The Milesian Chief Maturin makes unacknowledged use of a passage on the horrors of war from the same sermon (S 66; MC 4: 79). More famously, in the Preface to Melmoth the Wanderer, he indicates that “The hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons” (MW 5). 2. Linda Colley describes how government-subsidized London newspapers presented the national sentiments upon the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte: It seems likely . . . that when the Courier predicted nationwide mourning for Princess Charlotte in 1817—“There is no doubt that on Wednesday next, the day of the funeral, all business will be suspended; and that the empire will afford the awful and appropriate spectacle of a whole people spontaneously engaged in religious exercise and devotion”—it was acting on the instructions of its Treasury paymasters. (221) The echo in Maturin’s sermon of the idea of the whole people engaged in spontaneous mourning suggests again the status of the Church of Ireland as an ideological state apparatus. Adela Pinch connects the mourning for Charlotte’s death with a conception of the nation based on emotion: “Charlotte’s death allowed the English public . . . to take pleasure in being represented to the rest of the world as a nation based on the bonds of feeling rather than on borders” (180). 3. Ina Ferris claims that Smith’s notion of sympathy depends on projection and is more visual, whereas Hume’s notion is based on receptivity and is more auditory. She argues that Hume’s version of sympathy is more influential on the national tale (Romantic National Tale 13, 62). 4. Reprinting Scott’s review of Women, Ioan Williams identifies The Rosciad as the source of the lines Scott quotes (483, n. 15). 5. Maturin admired Edgeworth’s Belinda, since in The Wild Irish Boy two characters allude to Mrs. Freke, and then, in the digression on literary criticism in volume 3, Belinda is singled out as “a work that has never been equalled, and, perhaps, never will be equalled” (2: 232; 3: 167). The criticism of women authors by Everard Asgill in Women needs to be qualified in the light of Maturin’s praise of Edgeworth for having overcome the deficiencies of contemporary English novels. In his most important critical statement on the history of the novel, a long book review of Edgeworth’s Harrington and Ormond, what is



Chapter 4: Unisonance and the Echo: Popular Disturbances and Theatricality in the Works of Charles Maturin

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most striking is Maturin’s particular praise for women novelists. To prove that novels have by 1818 become important to scientists, poets, and moralists, Maturin suggests, “we may advert to the productions of Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. West, Mrs. Opie, Miss Hamilton, Miss Porter, and Miss Edgeworth” (51). Jacqueline Pearson, however, who considers The Wild Irish Boy and Women as Maturin’s “revisions of Belinda,” argues that Maturin masculinizes the novel through “a subversion of a female-dominated form and an attempt to control and suppress the power of the woman writer” (650, 641). In an essay entitled “Female Warriors,” formerly attributed to Oliver Goldsmith, the author describes how “The Amazons of old appeared with the left breast bare, . . . the right breast was destroyed, that it might not impede them in bending the bow or darting the javelin” (318). Maturin no doubt gave the name Zenobia to the ambitious woman in his 1807 novel on account of the publication in late 1805 of Thomas Love Peacock’s Palmyra, and Other Poems. In his novel Women, Maturin quotes the relevant passage from Isaiah 49: 23: “ ‘That kings shall be their nursing fathers, and queens their nursing mothers,’ &c. &c.” (1: 116). In a commentary on Leigh Hunt’s 1812 reaction to Lady Macbeth, Paul Keen describes a similar structure in which the appearance of the unsexed woman leads to the unsexing of men: Confronted by women who go beyond the due limits of their sex—who, in effect, become unsexed—the viewer will feel threatened and will react with immediate prejudice; in going beyond themselves, men are only acting like men, but if women go beyond themselves, then they cease to be women, and if women are no longer women, then men, who ought to be the opposite of women, begin to become unsexed themselves. (173) Margot Gayle Backus believes that the details of Alonzo di Monçada’s description of how he has been persecuted by four monks suggest “that he has been sexually violated and probably gang-raped” (122). Noting that “both polite and popular genres usually present the woman warrior as the daughter of a gentleman or of a rich merchant, and ascribe heroic and romantic motives to her,” Fraser Easton argues that in this case literary evidence provides a poor guide to historical reality. According to Easton, British women warriors are generally plebeian women who “entered military service for employment . . . , to escape patriarchal social relations, and to pursue relationships of various degrees of intimacy with other women” (143). John Bender regards the realist novel, admittedly in the period up to 1779, as embodying and shaping the penitentiary idea rather than as criticizing solitary confinement. For Bender, “a profound affinity exists between the penal law and the traditional canons of consistent representation, which the novel brings to their most detailed realization”; the novelistic conventions of realistic transparency and



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Notes attention to minute particulars participate “in the containment, control, and reformation of social life” (Imagining 73; 257, n. 19).

1. John Bender has explored the violence of realistic narrative in Caleb Williams, whether the instrument it uses “is the anatomical knife in the impartial hands of Reason . . . or the penetrating gaze of clinical inquiry, or the novelistic depiction of consciousness,” at the same time as he has argued that such violence may be inherent in sympathetic identification (“Impersonal Violence” 257). 2. For discussion of this essay, see McCracken, “Godwin’s Literary Theory” 113–33; Kelly 198–99; Peter Marshall, 38; and Klancher, “Godwin and Republican Romance” 145–65. 3. In St. Leon, Godwin uses the word adept in the course of criticizing those who violate the proper bounds of knowledge, since they regard as trivial the study of such human matters as political liberty: “What adept or probationer of the present day would be content to resign the study of God and the profounder secrets of nature, and to bound his ardour to the investigation of his own miserable existence?” (SL 2). Pamela Clemit notes that the original working title of St. Leon was “The Adept” (88, n. 54). In Mandeville, the villainous attorney Holloway “was no mean adept in the art of turning to his purposes the weak sides of human nature” (259). 4. In 1793, Robert Augustus Johnson wrote about the situation in London, where all questioning of the government was regarded as republicanism, where reform had become synonymous with revolution, and where “servants were bribed to report conversations” (Uglow 456). 5. Michael H. Scrivener contrasts the thought of Godwin and Bentham. For an exemplary account of whether or not Godwin should be termed a utilitarian, see Philp. 6. Andrew McCann has examined “Godwin’s simultaneous valorization of public interaction as the basis of rational social and political life, and his fear of it as a domain of mass manipulation” (29). Carl Fisher argues that Godwin is an advocate of the public sphere and the coffeehouse and an opponent of popular culture and the alehouse. 7. I borrow this term from Benedict Anderson, who uses it in his account of the populist character of modern nationalism (145). See chapter 4 above. 8. If there is reason to doubt that the attack on St. Leon’s property in Pisa is a specific allegorical representation of the Birmingham riots that had occurred eight years prior to the publication of St. Leon, Godwin’s description of food riots in Budapest in the final volume of his novel is surely a response to and an analysis of a phenomenon that had been so widespread in 1795–96. While Godwin criticizes



Chapter 5: Godwin’s “Metaphysical Dissecting Knife”

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St. Leon’s activities as a grain merchant, his main target is “the inconsequence incident to the lower orders of mankind,” who, contrary to their own interests, “threatened to destroy the mills, the markets, the places of sale, the means and materials by which their wants were to be supplied” (SL 380). The “inconsequence” of the actions of Godwin’s Budapest crowd resembles the Pisan crowd’s superstitious fears of witchcraft. Godwin’s perspective here is close to that of Adam Smith, who criticizes food rioters for acting out of prejudice and mistaken judgment in attacking middlemen in the grain trade in times of dearth. Smith phrases his argument against the “moral economy” as an Enlightenment critique of popular superstition: “The popular fear of engrossing and forestalling may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicions of witchcraft” (Wealth of Nations 1: 534). Alex Gold, Jr., discusses at length the identification of Williams with Bluebeard’s wife (145). In an essay arguing that Godwin’s analysis of character anticipates the psychoanalytic case history, Dorothea von Mücke examines Caleb’s masochistic position in relation to Falkland. Peter Logan argues that Williams’s narrative derives from hysteria or hypochondria—a nervous condition that entailed the “wholesale transformation of male bodies into female” (210). In this letter to Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, dated at Norwich, on September 9, 1805, and at Stowmarket, on Tuesday, September 10, 1805, I have added in square brackets the word and word ending that are missing in the manuscript because of the seal. Eric Daffron discusses sympathy in relation to mesmerism in Caleb Williams, arguing that sympathy for Godwin creates sociable human beings (and sociability is the essence of humanity) even while it effaces human individuality by prompting imitation. See Sneja Gunew and, also, chapter 2, page 70, above, where I discuss the couvade in considering the problem of the limitations of male sympathy for nursing and pregnant women in Adam Smith and Walter Scott. In Book 8 of the Aeneid, Virgil describes how the tyrant Mezentius “would even couple carcases / With living bodies as a form of torture” (8. 652–53). In another of the many occurrences of this image in fiction of the Romantic period, Zaira Dalmatiani in Charles Maturin’s Women; or, Pour et Contre reflects on the engagement of the lively Charles De Courcy to the prim Methodist Eva Wentworth: “Mezentius, who united a dead body to a living one, was guilty of a less crime, and less cruelty, than he who unites De Courcy to this girl” (W 2: 140). Graham Allen notes that this “classical trope of bondage . . . resonates throughout the literature of the GodwinWollstonecraft-Shelley circle” (174). In an essay arguing that Godwin came to believe that impartiality is beyond normal human capacity and that Caleb Williams’s desire for truth is motivated by a will to power, Gary Handwerk concludes



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that Godwin’s “rationalist ethics both require and are threatened by the identificatory processes that Caleb enacts” (956). Mary Shelley is thinking of the early Stoical Godwin when she has Katherine Gordon speak of her charities: “We are not deities to bestow in impassive benevolence. We give, because we love—and the meshes of that sweet web, which mutual good offices and sympathy weaves, entangle and enthrall me” (Perkin Warbeck 400). 15. See David Marshall’s discussion of authorship, theater, and the self in Shaftesbury (9–70).

Chapter 6: “A Sigh of Many Hearts”: History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Mary Shelley’s VA LPERGA and L ODORE 1. See Markley and Simpkins. In The Last Man, Evadne Zaimi disguises herself as a male soldier to fight for the independence of Greece. In The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, Monina de Faro disguises herself as a boy, Sir William Stanley’s “stripling son,” in order to gain access to him in an attempt to facilitate his escape from the Tower (178). 2. In this respect, Mary Shelley’s republican diction in the mid-1830s is the same as her mother’s in 1790. G. J. Barker-Benfield notes how Mary Wollstonecraft’s use of the word manly throughout A Vindication of the Rights of Men “is the same as the Commonwealthman’s usage, manifest, say, in [James] Burgh’s Political Disquisitions” (106). 3. Shelley uses the same Italian phrase, which means “slaves always trembling with restlessness,” in an 1826 book review (“The English in Italy” 345, n. 10). Arguing against the view that Mary Shelley grew more conservative and conventional after the death of Percy Shelley, Emily Sunstein provides substantial evidence that Mary Shelley “was an ardent partisan of Italian national liberation” (6). 4. See the editions by Crook, Curran, Rajan, and Rossington. 5. In another essay, Bennett argues that in Valperga Mary Shelley, rejecting Machiavelli’s view that a unified, free Italian republic can only be attained by a warrior prince, proposes that political change can be achieved through the universal love that Percy Shelley formulated in Prometheus Unbound (“Machiavelli’s and Mary Shelley’s Castruccio”). Michael Rossington has argued that Valperga, like several poems by Percy Shelley, displays the fragility of the republican ideal (“Future Uncertain”). In contrast to Bennett and others who trace continuities between Valperga and the works and thought of Godwin and Percy Shelley, Jane Blumberg believes that Mary Shelley had greater intellectual if not emotional independence, composing her novels out of “a fundamental intellectual conflict with the men in her life” (6). 6. Anne Mellor argues that Shelley posits an ideal of the bourgeois family, an ideal whose limitations lead her to endorse “a conservative



214

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8.

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vision of gradual evolutionary reform, a position articulated most forcefully during her times by Edmund Burke” (86). In my view, Shelley’s reformism is the product not of Burkean conservativism but of Godwinian radicalism. I am indebted here and throughout my account of classical republican ideology to the work of J. G. A. Pocock. For the opposition between speculative finance and productive trade, see, especially, Pocock 436–37, 445–49, 456. While Euthanasia dei Adimari is Shelley’s fictional creation, the historical figure Castruccio Castracani was born in 1281 and ruled Lucca from 1316 until his death in 1328. The Guinigi were a prominent Lucchese merchant family, who were not exiled from Lucca in 1301, when the White Guelph faction (Shelley’s bianci) was. The White Guelphs, who included Castruccio’s Interminelli (Antelminelli) family, were subsequently aligned with the Ghibellines (Green 20, 41, 86). That is to say, Godwin adumbrates Gramsci’s notion of the “organic” intellectual. Unlike the “professional” intellectual whose independence from manual labor permits a delusory autonomy from class background, the organic intellectual integrates science and work, theory and practice, and serves a directive function for his or her class from within (Gramsci 3–23). I am drawing here upon Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, which has an exemplary locus in the military sphere (Discipline and Punish 168, 171). The “disciplines” operate through the accumulation and recording of data about individuals obtained through policing, surveillance, and other forms of detailed observation. The disciplines answer to a new demand linked to industrialization: “to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 164). In her valuable analysis of Percy Shelley’s revisions to the manuscript of Frankenstein, Mellor disagrees with critics who have argued for Mary Shelley’s anxiety of authorship, by noting that Percy “introduced all the references to Victor Frankenstein as the ‘author’ of the creature” (65). If the word author in the 1818 text of Frankenstein is in Percy Shelley’s hand, the word mechanist from the phrase “the author and mechanist of these crimes” in Valperga likewise has a relevant source in Percy Shelley’s works. In A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821), Percy Shelley establishes an opposition between poets, who employ the faculty of imagination, and “reasoners and mechanists,” who exemplify “the calculating faculty” (Shelley’s Prose 291, 292). Percy Shelley’s targets are utilitarian educators, who assume that reform will arise automatically from an accumulation of information rather than from the creative power to use the wisdom we already possess, and classical political economists, who believe that increasing the wealth of nations is more important than its equitable distribution: “While



Notes

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Notes the mechanist abridges and the political economist combines labor, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend as they have in modern England to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want” (292). I am arguing that Mary Shelley in Valperga shares her husband’s critique of utilitarianism and classical political economy. Pamela Clemit observes that Mary Shelley’s contemporaries situated her within the Godwinian “school.” According to Clemit, Mary Shelley follows Godwin in focusing on the imaginative realization of “theoretical concerns,” while departing from Godwin’s preferred mode of first-person narration in order to experiment “with multiple points of view”—in the case of Valperga, especially the alternative viewpoints of women (7, 179). Foucault situates a “reversal of the political axis of individuation” at the moment when the “disciplines” arise. In the old regime, “individualization is greatest where sovereignty is exercised . . . . In a disciplinary regime, on the other hand, individualization is ‘descending’ ” (Discipline 192–93). Simon Schama has supplied this list of exemplary sites of liberty for the philosophes, except that he does not include the medieval communes of Tuscany (56). Referring to Sismondi as “a son of Geneva,” H. O. Pappé considers the background of Sismondi’s views on liberty: “The modern history of Geneva had indeed been one of successive popular rebellions, with the aim of widening the political rights of the lower orders” (251, 253). Pappé notes, however, that Sismondi “rejected Rousseau’s egalitarian principles” (259). At the end of the first volume, when Euthanasia holds a May festival at Valperga, in order to celebrate peace in Tuscany, Shelley defines the inclusiveness of the term Uomini di Corte: “Then arrived a multitude of Uomini di Corte; story-tellers, improvisatori, musicians, singers, actors, rope-dancers, jugglers and buffoons” (V 1: 256). Further evidence for her interest in the crowd appears in Shelley’s third novel. In The Last Man, Shelley examines the crowd not in relation to popular culture but rather in several different contexts: the panic caused by epidemical disease, the artificial unity of military discipline, and the fanaticism of a religious cult—itself formed through “the contagion of rebellion” (293). Under the conditions of plague, individuals initially prove less important than the species. However, self-interest may destroy even the unity of an army: “Each individual, before a part of a great whole moving only in unison with others, now became resolved into the unit nature had made him, and thought of himself only” (Mary Shelley, Last Man 142). Shelley creates the crowd through protocinematic means when Lionel Verney views through a telescope “a promiscuous concourse” before the gates of Constantinople (143). Once again, she focuses on the sound



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of the crowd: “a hollow murmur, akin to the roaring of the near waves”; “the hollow murmur of the multitude, inspired by one feeling” (125, 216). 17. Shelley returns to the skimmington in The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck: “a poor fellow, a Cornishman, was tied to an ass, his face to the tail, and the beast now proceeding lazily, now driven by sticks . . . made an ill-fashioned mirth for the multitude” (343). See chapter 2, where I discuss Scott’s note on this communal shaming ritual (48–49). 18. Similarly in The Last Man Shelley insists on the need for a leader: “A multitude of men are feeble and inert, without a voice, a leader; give them that, and they regain the strength belonging to their numbers” (140). In The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, the crowd attack on the London warehouses of wealthy Germans involves the knee-jerk response of unemployed “apprentices and journeymen” to the urban juxtaposition of wealth and poverty: “The sight of their prosperity was to the starving Londoners, as the pressed rowel of a spur in a horse’s side; with the usual barbarism of the untaught and rude, they visited on these men the fault of their governors—the discontent augmented till it became loud, furious, and armed” (Shelley, Perkin Warbeck 162–63). In the case of this riot, while they confound the innocent and the guilty, the servants and apprentices need no leader, and they attack property rather than attempting violence against persons. Moreover, Shelley explicitly rejects the idea of conspiratorial elite orchestration, as Henry VII is quite mistaken in attributing the tumult to Yorkist influence. Elsewhere in the novel, Shelley indicates that the vertical relations of traditional paternalism keep the peasants tranquil, while the horizontal class relations of “artificers, such as the miners of Cornwall, who met in numbers” prompted rebellion. When she considers the political grievances of employed artificers rather than the social complaints of idle boys and apprentices, Shelley has in mind the revolts of “modern days” more than those of the late fifteenth century (Perkin Warbeck 306). 19. Shelley and Gramsci express similar attitudes toward popular culture. On the one hand, Gramsci approved of a fundamentally conservative educational system because it “combated folklore” (Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 34). On the other, Gramsci believed that “a molecular diffusion of a new humanism, an intellectual and moral reformation” of the proletariat and peasantry was essential for revolutionary change in fascist Italy (Forgacs 186). Such a cultural reformation must start by drawing upon “popular culture as it is.” The new literature that Gramsci would create must “sink its roots in the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is backward and conventional” (Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 102). While it would be naive to deny the element of elitism in Shelley’s liberalism, there are significant similarities between



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Notes


her project and that of Gramsci, who likewise compared the history of nineteenth-century Italy to the medieval communes of Tuscany. The English Romantic novelist, like the Italian Communist, sought to alter the political order through humanistic reform and an engagement with popular culture.


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abjection, 46–7, 69 Act of Union (1707), 58, 70, 112 Act of Union (1800), 70, 107, 110, 112 adept, 5, 142–3, 147, 151–2, 160, 166, 212n3 Aeolian harp, 32–3, 115, 199 aesthetic form, 16, 31, 35–6, 37, 43, 119, 178 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 156–7 agrarianism, 177 alchemy, 142, 151–2, 157, 160 Allen, Graham, 169, 173, 213n13 Amazons, 4, 14, 21, 23, 51, 53, 54–5, 61, 124, 152–3, 154–5, 169, 211n6 anatomy, 22–3, 126, 135–6, 137–43, 154, 157, 159–60, 170–1 Anderson, Benedict, 101–2, 112, 212n7 Annual Register, 50–1 anonymity, 4, 16, 29, 48, 65 antinovel discourse, 13, 29–30, 31, 82, 125, 136, 155–6 anxiety about female fertility and women’s roles, 12, 22, 47, 50, 53, 70, 121 about fiction and disguise, 13, 66–7 about the power of the masses, 152, 169 about proliferation of books, 15, 155–6 about social change, 12

aristocracy, 61, 71, 101–2, 170, 188 meritocracy, 62, 80, 161–2 Aristotle, 7 Austen, Jane, 34 Mansfield Park, 203–4n12 Northanger Abbey, 13, 97, 143 Pride and Prejudice, 13 authorship, critique of, 22–3, 82, 135–6, 138–9, 142, 160–1 autobiography, 7–8, 141, 147, 163–4 automata, 10, 16, 66, 132, 173 see also machines Backus, Margot Gayle, 211n9 Bacon, Francis, 139–40 Bacon, Roger, 199 Balzac, Honoré de, 105 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 214n2 Baron-Wilson, Margaret, 84, 95 Barrell, John, 30 Baudrillard, Jean, 38, 42 Beccaria, Cesare, 100 Bender, John, 211–12n11, 212n1 Benedict, Barbara M., 9 Benjamin, Walter, 31, 32, 36, 40, 41 Bennett, Betty T., 174, 214n5 Bentham, Jeremy, 2, 6, 109, 143, 165, 201n2 Bergk, Johann Adam, 82 Bhabha, Homi, 85 Blumberg, Jane, 214n5 Boaden, James, 209n11 Bohls, Elizabeth A., 93 Bohstedt, John, 49 Bréton, Andre, 105



I n de x

Index

Brewer, William D., 140, 207–8n3 Bromwich, David, 204n13 Brummell, George Bryan “Beau,” 38 Brydone, Patrick, 2, 7 bureaucracy, 23, 133, 182–3, 186, 193, 195 accumulation of biographical information, 19, 80, 96, 182–3, 186, 189 Burke, Edmund, 47 Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, 117, 196 Reflections on the Revolution, 46, 50, 51, 54, 59, 62, 76–7, 101, 110, 115, 149, 153 Burney, Fanny, 140 Butler, Marilyn, 205n7 Caesar, Julius, 91 Calvin, John, 165 Calvinism, 8, 132, 147, 163 Canetti, Elias, 6, 173 cannibalism, oral violence, 16, 18, 46, 49, 51, 53, 56, 126, 130, 131, 151, 153, 197 carceral network, 132, 146 carnivalesque, 20, 21, 47–8 festivity, 60, 92–4, 100 holidays, 93–4, 100 world-upside-down, 4, 47, 56, 92 see also saturnalia Carson, James P., 208n6 Castle, Terry, 115 castration, 46, 47, 53, 84–5, 87–8, 153–4, 158 Chandler, James, 140 charity schools, 111, 132 Charlotte, Princess of Wales, 112, 210n2 chivalry, dueling, 54, 124, 170 Churchill, Charles, 121–2 circulating libraries, 13, 15, 16, 31–2, 125 Clairmont, Claire, 23 Clare, John, 30, 78 Clarke, Michael, 3

Clemit, Pamela, 212n3, 216n12 Clery, E. J., 206n15 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 166 Biographia Literaria, 31–2, 41–2, 105, 108 “Chamouny; the Hour before Sunrise,” 117 The Friend, 117 Letter to Sara Hutchinson, 32–3 Marginalia, 57 Rev. of The Monk, 41, 140 Colley, Linda, 50, 81, 210n2 colonialism, 63, 85, 89–90, 92–3, 99, 107, 126 Conger, Syndy M., 41 conscience, 10, 17, 25, 63–4, 68, 72, 82, 104, 113, 130, 188 as instrument of individuation or subject-formation, 6, 9, 10, 58, 64, 95–6, 99 “Conversations of Maturin,” 140 Cottom, Daniel, 206n13, n15 couvade, 70, 158 Cox, Jeffrey N., 207n1 Craton, Michael, 92, 209n13 crowd characteristics of, 19–20 confounds innocent and guilty, 82, 150–1 conservatism, 20, 54 discipline, 58–9, 118 dissolution of, 10, 11 elite manipulation of, 51, 52, 151, 217n18 lack of intelligence, 15, 148 lack of moral accountability, 16, 63–4, 148 leader of, 17, 18, 20, 108, 150–1, 191, 217n18 loss of individuality in, 13, 16, 17, 193, 197 military, 33, 35, 99 moral economy of, 10, 49 represented as female, 16–17 ritual, 58



238

violence against property or against persons, 20, 41, 82–3, 129–30, 150–2, 191, 217n18 crowd psychology, 11, 15–16, 17, 63–4, 75, 81, 148, 166–7, 198 crowd symbols, 41 epidemic, 14 sea, 14, 172–3 wind, tempest, 33, 192 Daffron, Eric, 213n11 Darwin, Erasmus Temple of Nature, 199–200 Zoonomia, 69–70 Davidson, Cathy N., 201n4 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 21, 47, 85 Deane, Seamus, 129 despotism, 2–3, 79, 87, 141–2, 162, 183 Dickens, Charles, 4, 26 disguise aristocrat or monarch in disguise, 81 blackening of the face, 62–3, 64, 74 cross-gender, transvestite, 3, 4, 13, 21, 47–9, 51–8, 62, 64, 71–3, 79, 80, 84, 92, 119, 123, 124–5, 205n7, 214n1 one-eyed beggar or boy, 119, 154 in relation to fiction, 13, 73, 104, 138–9, 143, 160 as technology of truth, 80, 160 disgust, 79–80, 82–3, 102, 192 dissection, see anatomy Dugaw, Dianne, 127 Duncan, Ian, 43, 47, 205n9 Eagleton, Terry, 88, 106 ear, 112, 195, 196 Ear of Dionysius, 2–4, 5–6, 25, 197, 199 Easton, Fraser, 211n10 eavesdropping, 2–3, 5, 6, 25, 117 echo, 112–19, 197

239

Edgeworth, Maria, 70, 129, 205n7 Belinda, 21, 53–4, 124 Harrington, 26 Helen, 139 Ormond, 204–5n6 Edinburgh, 45, 59–60 Edmundson, Mark, 26 education, 111 for women, 21, 120, 169 Edwards, Bryan, 90, 208n9 Ellis, Markman, 80 English, Thomas, 50–1 Enlightenment, 7, 62, 100, 125, 133, 139, 141, 144 dangers of, 19, 43 freedom from prejudice, 176 liberty fosters arts and sciences, 186–7 opposed to popular culture and superstition, 19, 78, 152 print and publicity, 97, 163 progress, 97, 159 remaking of human beings, 9, 145 secularism, 163 sociability, 141 universalism, 135 epistolary form, 66–7, 127 Evans, Robin, 99, 134 face-to-face relationships, 10, 65, 77, 102 family, 68–9, 72, 120–1, 161–2, 172 companionate marriage, 75 servants, 97, 101–2, 143 “Female Warriors,” 211n6 feminism, 54 woman/slave analogy, 22, 75, 79, 89, 102 Ferguson, Frances, 202n3 Ferguson, Moira, 208n9 Ferris, Ina, 112, 207n19, 210n3 fiction in relation to disguise, 13, 73, 104, 138–9, 143, 160 Fielding, Henry, 43 Fielding, Penny, 15, 65



Index

Index

Fisher, Carl, 212n6 Flynn, Carol Houlihan, 202n2 Forgacs, David, 217n19 Foucault, Michel, 2, 117, 133, 146, 215n10, 216n13 Franklin, Benjamin, 7–8, 197 Franta, Andrew, 203n10, n11 French Revolution, 16–17, 26, 35, 59, 61–2, 148, 193 fall of Bastille, 41, 59 October days, women’s march to Versailles, 50–6, 61 Freud, Sigmund, 17–18, 68, 80, 126–7, 128 Gallagher, Catherine, 155, 204n1 Gamer, Michael, 30 Gay, John, 64 gender essentialism, 28, 86, 126, 154–5 fluidity, 28, 80, 124, 126, 130, 154, 169 hierarchy, 123 roles, 22, 55, 69, 121 transcendence of, 13, 156, 197–8 unmanning, feminizing, 4, 13, 119, 121–2, 123, 211n8 unsexing, 3, 13, 54, 86, 119–29, 169, 211n8 violating norms of, 80, 122, 123–4 see also sensibility, women Genovese, Eugene D., 209n12 German influence, 108–9 Gilbert, Allan, 178 Gilmartin, Kevin, 204n13 Gilmour, Ian, 49, 150 Gilpin, William, 34, 203n8 Godwin, William, 174, 198 life and opinions: ambivalent criticism of psychology, 22–3, 126, 138, 142–3; the duty of sincerity, 139, 163; general inspection, 144, 161, 165; influence of Calvinism, 147, 163–5; necessitarianism,

144–6; perfectibility, 166; reformism rather than revolution, 147–8, 184–5; relationship with Mary Jane Clairmont, 157–8; relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, 23, 156–7, 158–9; theory of fiction, 139; theory of property, 147, 162, 166, 176–7; views on penal system, 86, 144–6, 165 works: Caleb Williams, 63, 137–62, 166, 171, 185; Cursory Strictures on Lord Chief Justice Eyre, 141–2; The Enquirer, 159, 163; Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 141–67, 171, 176–7, 188, 198; Fleetwood, 146, 155–6; Mandeville, 103, 141, 145, 160, 172, 212n3; Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, 154–5, 157; “Of History and Romance,” 139, 178; “Of Religion,” 143, 164; Preface to Cloudesley, 139, 141; Preface to Fleetwood, 137–8, 141, 146–7, 154, 157, 163; St. Leon, 23, 147–53, 164–5, 177, 212n3, 212–13n8; Thoughts on Man, 32 Godwinian novel, 170–1, 173, 185 Godwyn, Morgan, 91 Gold, Alex, Jr., 213n9 Gothic, 20–1, 105–6 attempts to accommodate crowds, 30, 40–2 critical of old regime and of social reform, 9, 24, 77, 86, 103, 131–3, 142, 183, 195 hero-villain, 25, 26, 27, 46 invalidates distinction between fantasy and realism, 27, 41, 86 justifications of supernatural fiction, 79, 104, 135 machinery, 5, 25, 103 as mass culture, 29



240

Index

Haggerty, George E., 208n8 Hammond, J. L, and Barbara Hammond, 49 Handwerk, Gary, 213–14n14 Hansen, Jim, 126, 204n14 Hanway, Jonas, 99 Hardt, Michael, 28–9, 201n3 Harkin, Maureen, 85, 97 Haywood, Ian, 78 Hazlitt, William “Coriolanus,” in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 39–40, 191 “On a Sun-Dial,” 195–6 “On the Pleasure of Hating,” 140–1 Spirit of the Age, 22, 159 “Why Distant Objects Please,” 196–7 Heiland, Donna, 89 Henderson, Andrea K., 27–8, 55 Henriques, U. R. Q., 131 Hertz, Neil, 204n1 Hewitt, David, 205n10 Hill, Christopher, 39 Hill, Mike, 204n2 history from below, 19 Hofkosh, Sonia, 208n5 Hogarth, William, 34 Hogg, James, 66 Hogg, Margaret, 66 homoeroticism, 18, 22, 126–8 homosocial relations, 83 “How to Treat the Female Chartists,” 198

Howard, John, 86, 142, 165 Hume, David, 120, 125, 175, 210n3 Hume, Robert D., 27 identification, 17, 18 divided, 21, 40, 42–3 see also sympathy Idman, Niilo, 108 Ignatieff, Michael, 96, 99, 102, 132 Illuminati, 5, 52 imagination an aristocratic faculty, 40 connected to popular superstition, 167, 191–2 an individualizing faculty, 20–1, 33, 35–6, 39, 191, 198 limitations of, 34–5, 40, 43, 158, 198 its power in randomness, 35, 38, 39 incest, 91 individualism, 138, 139 critique of, 24, 42–3, 144, 146, 160–1 formation of, 106, 130, 155, 162 personality, 8 psychological depth, 28 subject, 198 industrialism, 8–9, 99, 144–6, 182–4, 192, 195 information overload, 38, 42 see also antinovel discourse; anxiety, about proliferation of books Inquisition, 118, 131, 133–5, 162–3, 189, 191–2 insanity, 68, 118, 130–1 Jacobin, 5, 52, 105, 108, 148 Johnson, Edgar, 60, 61, 66 Johnson, Samuel, 13–14, 55 Jones, Frederick L., 174 Jonkonnu, 92–3 Jordan, Nicolle, 150 Jump, Harriet Devine, 204n4



promotes reception in a state of distraction, 40, 82, 199 refusal of transcendence, 27 servants, 26 Graham, Kenneth W., 138 Gramsci, Antonio, 215n9, 217–18n19 Green, Louis, 187, 215n8 Grimmett, Jennifer, 47–8, 61 Gunew, Sneja, 213n12 gypsies, 78, 88

241

Index

Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 155 Kaplan, Cora, 207n2 Kauhl, Gudrun, 86 Keats, John, 33, 140 Keen, Paul, 62, 211n8 Kelly, Gary, 152, 212n2 Kerr, James, 65 Kiely, Robert, 41, 208n4 Klancher, Jon, 31, 212n2 Knight, Richard Payne, 3 Kristeva, Julia, 46–7, 64, 69 Langbauer, Laurie, 208n5 Lascelles, Mary, 206n16 Le Bon, Gustave, 15–16, 17, 81, 148, 167 Leask, Nigel, 202n4 Lee, Sophia, The Recess, 89 Lew, Joseph W., 174–5 Lewis, Matthew, 148, 150 life: childhood cross-dressing, 84; narcissism, 83–4; owner of slaves in Jamaica, 63, 76, 77, 79; relationship with mother, 83; views on women writers, 83, 121, 197 works: The Castle Spectre, 90–1, 96; Journal of a West India Proprietor, 76, 79, 81, 84–5, 91–104, 143; The Monk, 21–2, 41, 63, 75–92, 94, 95, 103, 125, 127–8, 129; Timour the Tartar, 40 Life and Death of Captain John Porteous, 60 Linebaugh, Peter, 205n11 Locke, John, 34, 130 Lockhart, John Gibson, 52, 63, 189–90 Lodge, David, 173 Logan, Peter Melville, 213n9 Logue, Kenneth J., 60 London, 29, 164, 171–2 compare Edinburgh Long, Edward, 76, 77, 96–7 Luddism, 60–1

Lukács, Georg, 61 Lydenberg, Robin, 208n4 Lynch, Deidre, 201–2n1 Macdonald, D. L., 89, 207n1, 208n7 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 178–9, 189 machines, 10, 23, 133, 134, 139, 144–6, 148, 151–2, 166, 171, 183, 193, 195, 199–200 see also automata Marie Antoinette, 57 Markley, A. A., 214n1 Marshall, David, 214n15 Marshall, Peter, 157, 212n2 maternity, 47, 69–70, 85, 120, 121, 123–4 Mathias, Thomas James, 12 Maturin, Charles Robert, 140, 142, 150, 152, 167, 195, 197, 198 life and opinions: absence of happy marriages in his works, 18, 107, 126–7; Church of Ireland minister, 108, 112, 116, 122; nationalism of novels vs. Unionism of sermons, 108–11, 129; political ideology compared to Scott’s, 108; reliance on Scott’s advice and patronage, 105; views on women writers, 14, 121, 197, 210–11n5 works: The Albigenses, 42, 119–20, 133; Bertram, 105, 133; Fatal Revenge, 123–4, 126, 127, 130, 131, 135; Rev. of Harrington, 210–11n5; Melmoth the Wanderer, 42, 118, 121, 124–7, 130–1, 133–5, 139, 141, 173; The Milesian Chief, 106–17, 127–9, 130, 135–6; Sermons, 108–14, 116, 120–1; The Wild Irish Boy, 106, 110, 210n5; Women, 113–14, 115, 121–3, 132, 133, 139



242

McCann, Andrew, 32, 212n6 McCracken, David, 138, 178, 212n2 McGowen, Randall, 10, 11 McKendrick, Neil, 145 McKeon, Michael, 178 McLoughlin, T. O., 204n3 Mellor, Anne K., 175, 214–15n6, 215n11 Méricourt, Théroigne de, 52 Merriman, John M., 48, 58 Methodism, 6–9, 95, 132 Mignet, Francois-Auguste-MarieAlexis, 186 Miller, Nancy K., 208n6 Millgate, Jane, 59 Milton, John, 36, 37, 38–9, 108, 164 mob, 20, 152 stinking breath of, 122 see also crowd, riots monasticism, 5, 82, 87, 125–6, 130–1, 133–4, 195 Moore, Lucy, 52 moral philosophy, 156, 161–3, 165 means vs. ends, 184–5 Moretti, Franco, 89, 198–9 Morgan, Philip D., 91 Mücke, Dorothea von, 213n9 Mullin, Michael, 209n12 Murry, John Middleton, 202n5 Napier, Elizabeth R., 31 narcissism, 83–4 narration cross-gender, 4, 13, 66–7, 74, 83–4, 85, 87, 127, 166, 169, 199, 208n6 first-person, 22, 66, 137–8, 149, 157, 163 national tale, 106, 107, 112, 116 nationalism, 58, 70–1, 106–12, 114, 115–18 Native Americans, 50, 62–3, 206n12 Needham, Lawrence, 92

243

Negri, Antonio, 28–9, 201n3 Newman, Beth, 206n15 noble savage, 151, 152 novel, 19, 24, 77, 81–2, 106, 109–10, 114, 116, 130, 178 historical fiction, 57–8, 73, 106, 170, 175–6, 179, 184, 189–91, 193 nursing, 158, 181–2 lactation, 68–9, 85–6, 124, 158 male nurse, 124, 158 obeah, 84, 88, 95 oral phase, 18–19, 126 orality, 15, 46, 65–6, 197 Orleans, Philippe Égalité, Duke of, 50, 51, 52, 56 Ovid, 119 Owen, Robert, 144 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), 106 painting history painting, 34, 41 portraits, 84–5 Panopticon, 2, 5, 6, 117, 143 Pappé, H. O., 216n14 paternalism, 71, 73, 77, 95, 97, 100–2, 209n12, 217n18 Paul, C. Kegan, 162 Paulson, Ronald, 209n11 Pearson, Jacqueline, 124, 207n18, 211n5 Peck, Louis F., 83 Penny, Nicholas, 3 Peterloo massacre, 59, 61 Philp, Mark, 162, 212n5 phonocentrism, 2, 4, 47, 68, 72, 112, 115, 155, 197 see also sensibility the picturesque, 34 Pinch, Adela, 210n2 Plotz, John, 12, 202n2 Pocock, J. G. A., 215n7 Poe, Edgar Allan, 26–7



Index

Index

politics partisan, 182, 187 Tory, 108, 148 Unionist, Irish, 110, 118 Whig, 148 Polwhele, Richard, 23, 46, 53, 54, 155, 169 popular culture, 19, 23, 62, 81, 92–4, 189–91, 217–18n19 alehouse culture, 32, 195, 212n6 bourgeois appropriation of, 5, 26, 65, 66, 78, 93, 197 folktales, 113 a hybrid construction, 59, 190–1 oral culture, 65–6 the preserve of women, 65 a site of struggle, 93 populism, 108, 129, 148, 150, 152, 192 pornography, 81–2 Pratt, Mary Louise, 99–100 Priestley, Joseph, 152 prison reform, 99–100, 131–4 prisons, 133–4 Bastille, 33–4, 142 solitary confinement, 98–9, 130–2, 134, 142 prostitution, 52, 55, 127 psychology, 22–3, 142–3 Pyle, Forest, 202n4 quantification, 23, 35, 133, 182–3, 186 see also bureaucracy race, 28, 63, 77–8, 88, 90–1, 148 racism, 96, 151, 152 Radcliffe, Ann, 9, 26, 115 Ramsay, James, 96, 97, 99, 100 rape, 87, 183 reading, 31, 155 rebellion, 22, 64, 76, 89, 94–5, 97–8, 100, 107 Rebellion, Irish (1798), 107, 111, 170 Rediker, Marcus, 205n11

Reeve, Clara, 15 Reflection, see conscience Reid, Thomas, 140 Reinert, Thomas, 12 Rennie, Nicholas, 203n7 republic, 188 classical, 23, 170, 174, 175–7, 181–2 medieval Italian, 186–7 United States of America, 23, 170 Rhys, Jean, 88 Richardson, Alan, 209n12 Richardson, Samuel, 66, 123 riots, 20 connected with festivity, 60, 94, 148 food riots, 49–50, 60, 212–13n8 prompted by religion or superstition, 94 Riots, Gordon, 26, 61 Riots, King’s Birthday, 59–60 Riots, Porteous, 57–60, 62 Riots, Priestley, 152 Robbins, Bruce, 199 Robinson, Mary, Walsingham, 127–8, 129 Robison, John, 52, 53, 56 romance, 4, 25, 30, 72–3, 116, 119, 126, 128 Romantic hero, 108, 151 Romanticism, 24 defined against mass culture, 29–30 female, 175 interiority, 28 Rossington, Michael, 214n5 Rudé, George, 50, 209n11 Rule, John G., 203n9 Said, Edward W., 15 St. Clair, William, 158 saturnalia, 13, 17, 47, 56, 92 see also carnivalesque Schama, Simon, 216n14 Schmitt, Cannon, 9



244

Scott, Walter, 140, 148, 150, 167, 197 life and opinions: fear of electoral reform, 61; on the low status of the novelist, 66–7; patronage of Maturin, 105; personal relations with John Robison, 52; populist sentiments, 61, 108, 152; suppression of popular disturbances, 60–1; views on women writers, 14, 67, 121, 207n18 works: The Abbot, 56–7; The Antiquary, 5, 55, 60; Count Robert of Paris, 3–4, 54–5; Essay on Romance, 66; Fortunes of Nigel, 3, 48–9, 67–8; Guy Mannering, 45; Heart of MidLothian, 21, 43, 46, 47, 55, 57–74, 85, 118, 151; Journal, 45, 66; Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, 55–6, 59, 61–2, 63–4, 206n12; Rob Roy, 143; Tales of a Grandfather, 57; Waverley, 70; Rev. of Women, 121–2 Scrivener, Michael H., 212n5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 127 self-interest, 11, 184 sensibility, sentimentalism delicate, 11, 25 feminine, 11, 155, 179–80 feminization of the male, 178, 206n15 privileging of the voice, 2, 47 promotes self-sacrifice, 23 sentimental hierarchy of communicative modes, 81, 177–8, 192, 198 see also phonocentrism sermons, 108–10, 112, 114 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 162–3 Shakespeare, William, 35, 36, 39, 57, 139, 153, 183–4, 185

245

Shelley, Mary, 157, 159, 167, 198 Falkner, 169 Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, 195, 214n14, 217n18 Frankenstein, 5, 23, 159, 174, 177, 180–1, 192, 198 The Last Man, 188, 189, 216–17n16, 217n18 Lodore, 23, 170–3 Rev. of Cloudesley, 160 Rev. of The Life and Death of Edward Fitzgerald, 170 Valperga, 23, 173–93 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 120, 140, 172, 174–5, 179, 215–16n11 Shoemaker, Robert B., 59 Simpkins, Scott, 214n1 Simpson, David, 109 Sismondi, J. C. L. de, 174, 177, 186–7 skimmington, 48–9, 190, 217n17 slavery, 63, 75–6, 78, 79, 84–5, 88, 89, 94–104 Caribbean plantations, 63, 90, 99 Smith, A. W., 81, 205–6n12 Smith, Adam Theory of Moral Sentiments, 69, 114, 116, 161, 210n3 Wealth of Nations, 213n8 Smollett, Tobias, 43 social cohesion, 10–11, 114, 118 grief as source of, 116 social control, 95–8 labor discipline, 95–8, 99–100, 134, 145–6 military discipline, 99–100, 133 solitude, 25, 172 sounds, 111–12, 117, 151, 172, 192, 195–7 see also voice speech/writing binary opposition, 64–5, 102, 104, 119, 197 Spenser, Edmund, 68 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 119 Sterne, Laurence, 33–4, 35, 40, 42 Stevenson, John, 49



Index

Index

Stoicism, 157, 161, 177, 214n14 sublime, 3, 117, 172, 196 Sunstein, Emily W., 214n3 surveillance, 2, 5, 77, 81, 117, 134–5, 138, 143, 189 of all by all, 97–8, 165, 188 auditory, 9, 82 self-surveillance, 9, 98, 188–9 by servants, 97, 143 Swann, Karen, 202–3n6 swarms, 15, 201n3 sympathy, 69–70, 118 ambivalence of, 18–9, 125 connected with sounds or the voice, 64, 195 dependent on imagination, 11, 198 dependent on theater, 11, 125, 167 not distinct from surveillance, 5, 77, 138 an essential female quality, 154–5, 175 imitations or parodies of, 5, 77, 81 limitations of, 69–70, 86, 114, 158–9, 161 metaphors for sympathy or suggestibility: alchemy, 157; contagion, 11, 17, 18, 166, 197; electricity, 149, 157, 166, 172; magnetism, 172, 197; mesmerism, 17, 157–8, 167; musical, 17–18, 114; physiological, 11; telegraph, 4 prerequisite for impartiality, 167 transcendence of self, 24, 139, 157, 182, 197–8 Taylor, John Tinnon, 15 theater, 64 acting, 64 antitheatricality, 129, 155–6 countertheater, 20, 56, 94, 208n10 theatricality of Roman Catholic ceremony, 78

viewing life as theater, 5, 125, 159, 167, 173 Thomas, Malcolm I., 47–8, 61 Thompson, E. P., 6, 8–9, 10, 19, 48, 59, 101, 150, 208n10 Thompson, James, 142 time-discipline, 7, 132–3 Trumpener, Katie, 106, 115 truth, 64 carnivalesque privilege of truth-telling, 47 coherence account vs. intersubjective validation, 149, 164 disguise as violation of, 65 fiction as a means to, 80, 86, 160 obligation to full and frank disclosure, 139, 163 in opposition to fiction, 65, 66, 67 Uglow, Jenny, 199, 212n4 unison, unisonance, 22, 112, 114, 116, 149, 192–3 utilitarianism, 9, 143, 183 ventriloquism, 10, 73, 87, 88, 99, 155, 200 violence against persons or against property, 20, 41, 82, 129–30, 150–2, 191, 217n18 Virgil, 213n13 Visser, Nicholas, 30, 50, 201n5 visual media technologies as mass phenomenon, 82, 125 camera obscura, 32 film, 41, 42 montage, 119 phantasmagoria, 173 photography, 99 protocinematic imagery, 27, 32, 173, 199, 216n16 voice, 2, 5, 10, 22, 115, 119, 149–50, 192, 197–200



246

comes from the heart, 64 vox populi vox dei, 149, 198 Von Sneidern, Maja-Lisa, 100 Wahrman, Dror, 28 Walpole, Horace, Castle of Otranto, 72, 103, 105 Warner, William B., 31 Watkins, Daniel P., 209n14 Watt, Ian, 7 Watts, Alaric, 140 Weber, Max, 8, 147 Wedgwood, Josiah, 145 Weishaupt, Adam, 52 Welsh, Alexander, 206n15 Wesley, John, 6, 8 Whitefield, George, 7, 8 Wilberforce, William, 89 Wilde, Oscar, 105 Wilkes, John, 150 Williams, Anne, 47 Williams, Ioan, 210n4 Williams, Raymond, 202n3 Wilson, John, 15 Wilt, Judith, 205n7 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 144, 154–5, 174, 177 life and opinions: relationship with William Godwin, 23, 156–7, 158–9; woman/slave analogy, 22, 75, 79

247

works: Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, 51, 52, 56; Letters Written during a Short Residence, 172; Vindication of the Rights of Men, 51; Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 75, 79, 156, 179–80; Wrongs of Woman, 75 women authors, 12, 13–14, 22, 53, 54–5, 121–3, 197 clothing, 47–9, 73 education of, 21, 120, 169 passionate more than rational, 64 private sphere and, 22, 122 unsexed, 3, 12, 13, 23, 54, 55–6, 86, 119–29, 153, 169, 197, 211n8 Woodmansee, Martha, 82 Wordsworth, William, 31–4, 108, 166, 191 “Are Souls Then Nothing,” 35, 37 “Essay upon Epitaphs,” 140 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 29–30, 105 Preface to Poems (1815), 36, 38–9 The Prelude, 29 “With Ships the Sea Was Sprinkled,” 36–8



Index

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the City (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the Object (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ''Literary Lower Empire'' (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Victorian Christmas in Print (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Diasporas: French emigres, British Convicts, and Jews (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

A novel in letters

The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

A novel in letters

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

A novel in letters

Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender. (Dqr Studies in Literature)

Tea and Sympathy

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the City (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romanticism and the Object (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ''Literary Lower Empire'' (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Victorian Christmas in Print (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Diasporas: French emigres, British Convicts, and Jews (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron: Heritage and Legacy (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

A novel in letters

The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

A novel in letters

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

A novel in letters

Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender. (Dqr Studies in Literature)

Tea and Sympathy

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