Plan de marketing

After narrowly escaping the massacre in Ireland, Mandeville is remanded to the custody of Audley and Hilkiah, and subsequently relocated to an isolated ancestral estate. As the reader shortly discovers, this ―striking scene of desolation‖ is an external projection of Audley‘s self-institutionalization after a failed adolescent romance with his lowborn cousin, Amelia Montfort. The romance is prohibited by Audley‘s father (Charles‘ grandfather), a Commodore and ―naval adventurer‖ whose hyper-masculine disposition and contempt for ―knowledge and refinement‖ renders him both physically and mentally opposed to Audley. ―A son as would be most unwelcome to his father,‖ Audley suffers

from a physical deformity that renders him both ―scarcely equal to the most ordinary corporeal exertions,‖ and ―unequal to contention . . . sinking, as without power of resistance under any thing that presented itself in the form of hostility‖ (25). Audley‘s attempt to marry Amelia is doomed from the outset, culminating in a subterfuge that leads Amelia to marry another and Audley to complete psychic breakdown: ―He remained a statue of despair. . . . In this one event he had lost everything . . . now all things were the same to him. . . . He was the shadow of a man only‖ (39-40).

Audley‘s breakdown functions as a metaphor for a post-revolutionary/post- Napoleonic melancholia92 that reflects Godwin‘s own disappointment in the missed opportunities and unrealized potentials expressed in Political Justice.In Freudian terms, Audley‘s unsuccessful resistance to his father culminates in a ―profoundly painful

dejection‖ leading to the ―cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity‖ and ―an impoverishment of [the] ego on a grand scale‖ that mirrors the destitution of revolutionary potentiality (On Metapsychology 252, 254). In this respect, Amelia not only represents a lost love-object, but also a revolutionary threat to the hereditary institution represented by the dictatorial Commodore. This threat is symbolized both in her status as a ―degraded branch‖ of the family tree and in her unique capacity to break through Audley‘s tendency towards inertia: ―she declaimed earnestly, but sweetly, against the supineness and indolence that she saw growing upon him; she told him, that now was the age at which he ought to shore mind with

observations, and make trial of that activity which talents like his required‖ (75). Amelia serves as the catalyst for a revolutionary possibility within Audley‘s individual history that is eventually thwarted. The subterfuge by which the Commodore arranges Amelia‘s marriage to Lieutenant Thomson during Audley‘s rare excursion to London suggests the capacity for this revolutionary potential to work at cross-purposes: while the event of revolution suggests a de-stabilization of prior institutions, allowing Audley to temporarily

92_{Pfau (2006) reconstructs the Romantic period in terms of a tripartite chronology of ―moods,‖ beginning}

with ―paranoia‖ in the 1790s, passing through a period of ―trauma‖ from 1800-1815, and culminating in the ―melancholy‖ of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era from 1815-1840. Mandeville‘s publication in

1817 suggests that it can be classified as a ―melancholic‖ text, although one situated close enough to the traumatic mood of the previous era to register its effects.

abjure the ―prison-life under his father‘s roof,‖ it does not protect against the emergence of new institutions or the persistence of old institutions in new forms (32). Further, Audley‘s physical description as being born ―too soon‖ echoes Godwin‘s earlier caution with respect to revolutionary ideas in Political Justice. Such ideas, Godwin argues, have to be strategically announced in order to prevent their misuse or misinterpretation within a public sphere given to a ―fallacious uniformity of opinion‖ (2:465).

Godwin presents Audley‘s exhausted resignation not merely as symptomatic of institutions but as institutional in itself, further exemplifying the ways in which his affective dissent from the archē of the Father can become rigidified. Melancholia signifies a kind of resistance to institution through ascetic withdrawal. However, in Audley‘s case, it becomes an alternative form of institution through a mortification of life, which in turn serves as a bulwark against both historical and existential flux.93 As Mandeville observes, Audley ―loves his sadness, for it had become a part of himself,‖ suggesting that his internalization of personal trauma does not have an unsettling effect but rather emphasizes stasis: ―The course of Audley‘s life had been uniform; and this had infused into him a sort of vis inertiae, a disposition opposite to that of ‗such as are given to change‘. . . . In reality he rather vegetated than lived‖ (40-1, 32).

In the wake of losing both Amelia and the potential for individual history that she represents nothing is left but a ―blank,‖ an existence entirely bereft of meaning and purpose: ―the whole world would be a blank to him, where [Amelia] was not present‖ (75). This ―blank‖ exemplifies what Nietzsche identifies with a pessimism in which ―life has grown silent‖ so that ―nothing will grow or prosper any longer‖ (Genealogy of Morals 3.26). As Deleuze points out, Nietzsche‘s diagnosis of this pessimism is

93 _{Rajan (2002) reflects on a similar problem in a discussion of melancholy in relation to Mary Shelley‘s} Mathilda. Here Rajan takes up Kristeva‘s distinction between melancholic withdrawal and abjection as

―survival, whether the expulsion of the other or the abjection oneself as other‖ (230). On the one hand, melancholy is characterized by a ―letting-go of life‖ that, while introjecting and thus refusing to mourn its trauma and re-integrate itself into the social or historical, nevertheless ―withdraws from the activity of abjection,‖ thereby protecting itself ―from any . . . aggression against the other or self-destruction.‖ If melancholy becomes ―nonviolent‖ it loses its ―lifeline to eros‖ or desire (230). This ―protective‖ model of melancholy severed from eros, what Kristeva identifies as depressive ―de-eroticization‖ in which the subject commits suicide ―without the anguish of disintegration‖ applies to Audley, while Mandeville‘s persistent aggression comes closer to abjection. See also Rajan (1994).

connected with a specific moment in the genealogy of morals, namely, the moment after the collapse of the Enlightenment ideals of ―progress, happiness for all and the good of the community; the God-man, the moral man, the truthful man, and the social man.‖ Genealogically, Audley‘s vis inertiae expresses an advanced stage of European nihilism in which ―man‖ finally prefers ―not to will, to fade away passively, rather than be

animated by a will which goes beyond [itself]‖: ―if possible, will and desire are abolished altogether; all that produces affects and ‗blood‘ is avoided; no love, no hate; indifference; no revenge . . . in short, absence of suffering - sufferers and those profoundly depressed will count this as the supreme good‖ (Deleuze, Nietzsche 151-2; Genealogy of Morals

3.17). The philosophical type corresponding to this exhaustion is Schopenhauer‘s ascetic who, after extraordinary personal suffering, ―retire[s] into himself‖ to attain a point of absolute self-denial that would finally raise him ―above all suffering, as if purified and sanctified by it, in an inviolable peace‖ (World as Will and Representation 392-3). The ascetic type is the extremity of a nihilistic instinct that wishes to diminish the flux of the historical for institutional(ized) stasis. Audley represents the way in which even a purely individual history ultimately becomes a form of institution.

Mandeville himself points to certain similarities with Audley: ―in the gravity of our dispositions we considerably resembled each other‖ (53). Like Audley, Mandeville finds his only possibility of social and human connection through a female relative derailed and is preternaturally favourable to misanthropic solitude. Thus, upon arriving at his uncle‘s ancestral mansion, Mandeville observes the ―desolateness of the scene, the wideness of its extent, and even the monotonous uniformity of its character‖ as

―favourable to meditation and endless reverie,‖ complementing his ―habitually visionary‖ tendencies (24-5, 60). However, Mandeville points out that his external resemblance to Audley belies a more important difference: ―there was a difference between me and my Uncle. . . . [H]e desired no novelty, or none of an extrinsic sort, and shrunk from all disturbance . . . not such was the condition of my existence. I hoped for, and I dreamed of, pleasures yet untasted‖ (53). Contrary to Audley‘s desire for immutable stasis through the extinction of the will, Mandeville remains open to the contingency of the encounter that, as Godwin writes in ―Of History and Romance,‖ would ―disturb by exciting . . . the torpid tranquility of [the] soul‖ (454).

Consequently, the ―monotonous uniformity‖ of Mandeville House takes on a different significance whether it is approached from the perspective of Mandeville or of Audley. On the one hand, the desolation of the environment is a projection of the stasis of Audley‘s melancholia and emanates from a perspective of resignation; on the other hand, this same environment for Mandeville provides the occasion and ―source . . . of many cherished and darling sensations,‖ whose intensity accompany his ―meditation and endless reverie‖: ―there was I know not what in the sight of a bare and sullen heath, that afforded me a much more cherished pleasure, than I could ever find in the view of the most exuberant fertility‖ (24-5, 44). This confusion of the landscape with Mandeville‘s traumatic memories manifests itself as a violence of the sensible, a felt difference that gestures to a past that pervades the sensible and lives on in the present.

The difference between Mandeville and Audley is reinforced in the ways they react to their respective traumas and the type of historical memory this reaction signifies. Initially, Mandeville‘s consideration of his sensations as ―cherished and darling‖ seems curious, since the bleakness and ―corruption‖ of the natural environment induces a repetition of the traumatic memory of his parents‘ death:

the scenes which immediately preceded my quitting the shores of Ireland, lived in my mind. I thought of them by day; I dreamed of them by night. No doubt, the silence for the most part pervaded my present residence, contributed to this. All was monotonous, and composed, and eventless here, all that I remembered there, had been tumultuous, and tragic, and distracting, and wild. I saw in my dreams – but indeed my days, particularly that part of them which was passed in wandering alone upon the heath, were occupied to a greater degree in visionary scenes – I saw, I say, in my dreams, whether by night or by day, a perpetual succession of flight, and pursuit, and anguish, and murder. (44)

Although Mandeville claims that he finds little pleasure in the ―richest and most vivid parterre,‖ the memory of the Irish revolt has an exuberance of its own, an affect and effect contrasted with the repetition of the same characterized by Audley‘s reaction to his personal trauma, which renders ―all within him . . . a blank; and he was best pleased, or

rather less chagrined, when all without him was a blank too‖ (39). The repetition Mandeville experiences as a collapse of the past into the present is not an internal and external blanking in which everything is submerged in the same, but is depicted as a proliferation and omnipresence of memories, an an-archicexcess rather than lack of historical consciousness. The chaotic register of the unconscious at this moment paradoxically becomes a structuring possibility for an an-archic epistemology of all

experience that refocuses history according to its antagonisms.

Later in the novel, Mandeville counter-intuitively describes this excess as a ―vital spirit that fed my life and preserved my corporeal frame from putrefying‖ (140). Where Audley‘s melancholia is informed by an internalization and multiplication of pain that weakens him to a ―mere shadow,‖ Mandeville bears a more explosive potential that strongly contrasts with Audley‘s ―unenterprising apathy‖ (64, 43). The an-archic

potential of this ambition is spelled out in Godwin‘s later essay ―On the Rebelliousness of Man,‖ whose thematic resonance with Mandeville suggests that the essay could be read as a later reflection on the novel. Godwin begins the essay with the assumption that ―man is a rational being,‖ but notes that ―our nature, beside this, has another section‖ in which

we resign the scepter of reason . . . and, without authority derived to us from any system of thinking, even without the scheme of gratifying any vehement and uncontrollable passion, we are impelled to do, or at least feel ourselves excited to do, something disordinate and strange. It seems as if we had a spring within us, that found the perpetual restraint of being wise and sober insupportable. . . . A thousand absurdities, wild and extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we are only restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be subjected to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may perhaps be made amenable to the criminal laws of our country. (94)

In line with the principles first put forward in Political Justice, Godwin sees that this rebellious impulse must be restrained through the rational exercise of ―laws of morality‖ rather than institutions. Such laws consist of those ―inexorable rules‖ of convention

through which ―I am rendered familiar with my fellow-creatures, or with society at large.‖

But Godwin‘s concern in the essay is less to discover the means of controlling this rebelliousness so much as to reflect on ―why the bare thought‖ of the desire to do

something ―disordinate and strange‖ takes ―momentary hold of the mind‖ (97). Significantly, Godwin conceives of this an-archical aspect of human existence as

operating ―even without the scheme‖ of the passions, suggesting that rebelliousness is not limited to individual psychology but may be considered ontological, something endemic to human existence as such. As Godwin writes, ―there is a black drop of blood in the heart of every man, in which is contained the fomes peccati,‖ a tinder-box of sin

canonically associated with concupiscence, but principally defined as that which inhibits perfection in mortal existence (100). Rebelliousness is not an external intrusion to the ―harmonious‖ constitution of subjectivity and society expressed in classical anarchism, but is existentially constitutive of human nature. Godwin conceives of the fomes peccati

as the volatile potentiality of a will that both turns away from representation while simultaneously harbouring the capacity to break through the ordered surface of reality at unexpected moments.

Though focusing on its pathological manifestations, Godwin obliquely suggests that rebelliousness might also be an opening towards the ―new‖ by estranging the individual from general historical norms. Godwin identifies three principles that can be said to account for rebelliousness that imply some kind of potential for derailing the normal: the ―love of novelty,‖ the ―love of enterprise and adventure,‖ and the ―love of power,‖ or the impulse that ―instigates a child to destroy his playthings‖ (97-8). Rebelliousness seems to imply a potential for de-familiarization and distinction that accords with Mandeville‘s ambitiousness. Likewise, Godwin‘s description of

rebelliousness strikingly anticipates the Freudian uncanny (Unheimliche) as something paradoxically both foreign and familiar (―The Uncanny‖ 241). For Godwin suggests that one of the main causes that gives birth to the ―feeling of discontent‖ that characterizes rebelliousness is a ―not being at home,‖ where home is defined as ―the place where a man is principally at his ease‖: ―No unwelcome guest can intrude; no harsh sounds can disturb

his contemplations; he is the master‖ (Thoughts on Man 102). Insofar as Godwin sees this loss of mastery as a section of our nature, no such mastery is possible without radically de-naturing humanity itself. Rebelliousness implies an immanent loss of mastery in the home of the self, an unsettling of the domestic already evident in both Caleb Williams

and St. Leon. Mandeville appears to be a direct literary manifestation of this ―not being at home‖ with oneself: his ―soul was chaos,‖ incapable of being domesticated in the manner of Audley, Hilkiah, or as I will discuss in more detail later on, Clifford and Henrietta (Mand. 311).

If Audley represents a thwarted revolutionary potential that has now withdrawn, Mandeville‘s tutor Hilkiah represents an element of ―Sandemanianism‖ that Godwin had rejected in his revisions to Political Justice, an extreme form of Protestantism in which rational dissent has become institutionally dogmatic. ―Imbued with all the prejudices that belong to the most strait-laced of the members of his sacred profession,‖ Hilkiah

represents the world to Mandeville through a particularly religious lens of a classical anarchism that Godwin has already placed in question. Hilkiah‘s social aims are to ―level all distinctions between the rich and the poor, the young and the old, and to introduce a practical equality among the individuals of the human race‖ against the Catholic

―idolatry‖ of the Pope‘s ―despotic authority‖ (21, 46, 50). Hilkiah‘s view reflects not only the austere rationalism of Godwin‘s early works but indicates a more fanatical element within the wider project of European modernity that marks a convergence of the secular sciences with Whig notions of progress that, like Caleb in Godwin‘s first novel, draws upon simplified oppositions between emancipation and oppression, reason and ideology, slavery and individual rights.

Two related tropes emerge within this quintessentially ―modern‖ discourse: 1) a rigorous ideal of self-discipline and self-denial, echoed in Mandeville‘s observation that his tutor ―had all his passions subdued under the control of his understanding,‖ and 2) a fidelity to a Kantian conception of ―duty‖ towards an abstract law of reason, expressed by Hilkiah‘s ―imperious mandates of Go there, or Do this‖ (46, 58). As Kant argues in his

Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, the condition of possibility for moral agency and autonomy is to be found in a formal ―principle of volition,‖ a practical law that must

be purified of empirical considerations if it is to be considered truly universal (13). Any action considered moral must therefore be accomplished ―for the sake of the moral law,‖ and duty is defined as that which acts ―from pure respect‖ or out of ―conformity‖ with this law (Kant 2, 15). Similarly, Hilkiah‘s severity and emphasis on ―humility‖ as ―a cardinal virtue of a Christian, without which it was impossible to enter into the kingdom of God,‖ embodies a fanaticized version of a strategy that would legitimize Mandeville as a modern subject/citizen through an instrumentalized notion of the ―common usefulness of life,‖ which Mandeville, as Caleb eventually does in the revised version of the earlier novel, finds ―hard to flesh and blood‖ (55, 58).

Godwin questions this fanatical discourse through Mandeville‘s internal

resistances to Hilkiah: ―I submitted indeed outwardly . . . but I retained the principle of