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“What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?”: Gothic Self‐Possession, Revenge, and the Doctrine of Necessity in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams

This essay argues that Caleb Williams (1794) continues the critique of liberalism’s insistence on individual rights and autonomous subjectivity that William Godwin launched in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice one year earlier. Throughout the novel, various conflicts are staged around competing individuals’ claims to inalienable rights; however, Godwin shows that these competing claims reproduce the paranoid and vengeful narrative logic of the Gothic. He offers an alternative to this narrative dead end through the Doctrine of Necessity, which views human action as deriving from prior and external causes rather than as the expression of free will. This doctrine allows Godwin to imagine individuals as interdependent links in a virtually endless chain of causes and reactions. Thus, the “unsatisfactory” ending of the novel – which finds Caleb and Falkland no longer concerned with their competing individual claims to life and liberty but instead “penetrated” by remorse and concern for one another – represents a rejection of the narrative appeal of the Gothic and an endorsement of universal vulnerability, rather than universal rights, as an ethical basis for the relationship of self and other.