Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams Monika Fludernik There is no pleasure more congenial to the human heart, than the approbation and affection of our fellows. I call heaven to witness that I could mount the scaffold, surrounded with an innumerable multitude to applaud my fortitude, and to feel as it were on their own neck the blow that ended me, and count it a festival. But I cannot bear to be surrounded with tokens of abhorrence and scorn. William Godwin, St Leon, chap. 27 In the opening words ofhis narrative, Caleb Williams says that "for several years" his life has been "a theatre of calamity."1 This essay traces the manifestations of the theatrical metaphor in Caleb Williams (1794) and links the staging of Caleb's (and Falkland's) "tragedy" with the spectacle of sympathy that underpins theatrical representation in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas ofthe Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). William Godwin reinterprets the theatrical scenario within an extended conception of sympathy that also helps to explain the psychology of major characters as facets of the workings of mutual attraction, that is, sympathy. Sympathy is figured positively in terms of affection, love, reverence, and admiration and 1 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3. References are to this edition, which is based on the first edition of 1794, but integrates later changes in the second and third editions. Comparison will be made with Things As They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1992), which follows the text of the first edition. This essay is dedicated to Professor Willi Erzgräber on his seventy-fifth birthday. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Number 1, October 2001 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION negatively in terms of infection or contamination. The subject eliciting sympathy may do so either truthfully or deceptively, giving rise to a long discussion about the artfulness and rhetoricity of sympathetic appeal. Sympathy is an ineluctable need for the individual, but sympathetic involvement, besides elevating humanity to a status of semi-divine fellowship, also carries with it the dangers of infection and corruption, of illegitimate attraction and fatal obsession. This essay is a companion piece to my "William Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime,"2 on Godwin's deployment of the Burkean sublime, which bases its analysis on a network of key terms and phrases. In particular, terms associated with sublimity , benevolence, and the divine are contrasted with a set of concepts relating to the infernal, the tyrannical, and the calamitous as undersides of the sublime. From this network of phrases (observable throughout Caleb Williams), a revised understanding of Godwin's views on the sublime becomes possible. I extend the approach in this essay, which discusses a set of related terms, including the stage metaphor, sympathetic affect, theatrical artifice and emotional excess , infection, passion and madness. These terms are linked to those already discussed in connection with the sublime, since Burke's illustrations of a sublime spectacle include the comparison of tragedy in the theatre with the spectacle of an execution, which—according to Burke—foregrounds the powers of "the real sympathy."3 The theatrical scenario of tragedy is thus linked to the sublime4 and is constituted in Burke's concept of the sublime (and in Smith's formulations) by the workings of sympathy. The ambivalences and ambiguities introduced byjoining the sublime with sympathy in the theatrical spectacle can be documented in an inductive analysis of the key terms associated with sympathy, based on an explication du texte. From the network of allusions within the text, I will establish what sympathy means in Caleb Williams, demonstrating that Godwin significantly restructured Smith's schema. Godwin criticism rarely takes the language of the text very seriously. For this reason, it is on the interpretive level of my analysis that I most frequently refer to previous work on Caleb Williams and elaborate on this criticism. 2 Forthcoming in KLH 68:4 (2001). 3 Edmund Burke, A Philosphir.nl Enquiry into the Origin o)'Our ideas of the Sublime and...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".