Miscarriages of Justice and Transactions of Moral Sentiments in Godwin’s Caleb Williams

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which miscarriages of justice urge readers to critique juridical reason on the basis of the transactions of moral sentiments, focusing on William Godwin’s novel, Caleb Williams (1794). Godwin’s work presents the possibility of rectifying the failure of justice with the limited and yet forceful performance of sympathy for Caleb Williams. The novel foregrounds the question of inequity between Caleb and his victimizer, Ferdinando Falkland. In particular, class and economic inequity intensifies the unequal distribution of justice. Narrated in the first person, the novel elaborates upon the contradictions of the law that conspires to shore up the established social order by playing on the limitations of the narrator’s perspective. Seemingly transparent, the first-person narrative serves to reveal the very opacity of legal and ethical judgment. Insofar as the law entails power, the novel reveals the corruptibility of juridical institutions as opposed to justice, which always remains yet to be realized in Jacques Derrida’s sense. Caleb Williams shows the ways in which the law defers political justice and consequently undermines its foundation, even as it circulates the excess of feelings such as resentment, sympathy, frustration, guilt, anxiety, of not only Caleb but also Falkland. Sympathy serves as a useful vehicle for the protagonist to elicit poetic justice from readers, however limited it may be. Bearing witness to the repeated failures of serving justice, readers must rely on their own private judgment and attempt to recuperate justice outside of the text. Nonetheless, the moral value of sympathy is equivocal as Caleb’s sympathy for Falkland accounts for his uncontrollable curiosity about the impenetrableness of the latter’s mind and thus blurs the borderline of criminality. Yet, regardless of his predicament as an object of constant surveillance and social injustices, Caleb proves his moral superiority and consequently asserts his independence though his private judgment not because of his triumph at the court, but by maintaining his capacity of feeling sympathy for his victimizer. Therefore, Godwin’s novel challenges Enlightenment rationalism that precludes moral sentiments, thus highlighting the instability and limitations that both the legal institutions and the narrative technique entail. Godwin demands his readers to maintain a critical distance from the dominant ideology of justice and morality, questioning the violence of legal rhetoric and the autonomy of private judgment that the novel endorses.