Sympathy and the Self in William Godwin’s Mandeville (1817)

Abstract

In his Gothic novel Mandeville (1817), the radical political philosopher and author William Godwin presents a complex and compassionate depiction of the imaginative formation of individual selfhood and the way in which the limits of sympathy and the nature of selfhood operate to violently separate the individual from social sympathy. Godwin employs the coercive language of property and wounds to describe his eponymous protagonist’s experience and imaginative conceptualization of sympathy as a violent loss of selfhood; Charles Mandeville thus desires and fears social sympathy, imagining it as a threat against the privacy and integrity of his selfhood. The extreme nature of Mandeville’s desire for and aversion to sympathy demonstrates Godwin’s increasing reluctance to reconcile his interest in a radically private and imaginative selfhood with his theory that the imagination can and should in some way be controlled, expansive, empathetic, and social—in other words, transformed into a sympathetic and socially useful imagination, as described by theorists like Adam Smith and Joanna Baillie. Mandeville further reveals Godwin’s frustration with more optimistic theories of sympathy, depicting a character touched by political, physical, and psychological traumas, unable to solicit sympathy and never freely given sympathy except by manipulators. In Mandeville, Godwin offers a portrait of the conflicting and fundamentally irreconcilable relationship between the imaginative individual and social sympathy, one that both develops his own view of the complex relationship between the individual and community while deconstructing more utopian Romantic visions of the self and sympathy.