"The limits of individualism" : family and community in the fiction of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot

This study examines William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Things As They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams; Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, A Fiction; and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Eliot participated in a progressive discursive tradition that began in seventeenth-century debates over political economy, and continues today in debates over modern liberal democracy. While liberal individualism, arising from Hobbes and Locke, has been well explored, another tradition, represented by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, is often ignored in describing contributions to the progressive tradition. These moral philosophers attack the atomistic, egoistic individual of early liberal theory, opposing an intersubjective psychology and benevolent forms of justice to selfish forms of autonomy and rights-based justice, thus providing communitarian accounts of social relations that underwrote both progressive and conservative idologies. Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Eliot borrow from both individualist and communitarian accounts of selfhood and sociality, constructing non-selfish versions of autonomy and benevolent forms of justice in order to counter the selfish individualism of contract and market-relations accounts of sociality. Twentieth-century communitarian, liberal, and feminist debates elucidate their concerns with negating the erosive effects of market relations on community solidarity, while also promoting liberal reform. Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Eliot critique progressive narratives, which typically feature the reward of merit in the form of social and economic advancement, by creating, then frustrating conventional progressive narratives. While Caleb Williams, Mary, A Fiction, and The Mill on the Floss fail to provide alternate progressive narratives, each work gestures towards forms of sociality and justice that serve as models of community based on idealized family relations. Middlemarch constructs a female progressive narrative that rewards moral duty through Dorothea Brooke's happy marriage to a man of no family or fortune. Eliot thus redescribes progress in terms of moral progress, and provides a model for community in an egalitarian marriage characterized by equity, reciprocity, mutual regard, and the recognition of difference as requirements for humane relations.