In Excess — Godwin’s St Leon and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

Abstract

Caleb Williams shifts the focus of the Gothic towards new narratives of power and, in particular, towards an engagement with a modern juridical force that reproduces its authority through the construction of a deeply conflicted, abject juridical subjectivity. This chapter considers Godwin’s StLeon, and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer from the perspective developed in relation to Godwin’s first novel. These texts, I will argue, posit the juridical subject as the guilty subject, revealing the relation between power and desire that prevails within the modern legal economy and that begins in this period to characterise the modern law’s perverse relation to the abject juridical subject. Whereas the protagonists of earlier Gothic fictions were able often to come to terms, albeit ambivalently, with a re-instituted order of power, the outcast villain/victims of Godwin and Maturin could neither fulfil the law’s command nor effectively repudiate it. Indeed, as this chapter will argue, the very terms of the law’s address to the subject appear to be changing. The law’s command is no longer exclusively to ‘Swear!’ (where this command entails a certain renunciation of desire on the part of the subject), but also to ‘Enjoy!’¹ Within an emerging economy that demands over-production and over-consumption — that depends upon unlimited excess — St Leon and Melmoth emerge as subjects condemned to a perpetual, perverse enjoyment.