Comparing Communism In Caleb Williams And The Monk

During the 1790s, the French Revolution transformed Europe into an environment of political turmoil. The destitution and injustice experienced by members of unprivileged classes led to widespread social rebellion. Desperate for a sense of national security, philosophers and politicians introduced enlightenment ideology. Government reform is a central theme to eighteenth century literature; gothic novelists rely on fiction to react to arising political propositions. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) express opposing perspectives regarding social and political revival. The novelists reveal their propositions of anarchy and reform through their representations of the banditti.
In Caleb Williams, Godwin

The old woman demonstrates the government’s inescapable influences; when Williams seeks refuge with bandits who preserve him from the law, he still receives punishments for a crime that he did not purposely commit. The old woman “thought an old and experienced sinner for a raw probationer but an ill exchange” (Godwin 212). By valuing one individual over another, the old woman references anti-revolutionary ideology. Her support of inequality parallels with the government’s uncharitable, revengeful, and hierarchal construction. After Williams dreams of Mr. Falkland’s agent murdering him, he awakens to find the old woman attacking him with “Amazonian” vigor and “uncontrollable insanity” (Godwin 224). Williams relates his anxieties of legal prosecution with the old woman’s attack; both act as a tyrannical force that threatens his freedom. By symbolically displaying the government as the old woman, Godwin exposes the inhumane, overbearing manner in which political institutions infiltrate the lives of

He describes Marguerite as a selfless victim who the banditti subject to tyrannical abuse and control. Marguerite references the trauma that she and her children experience by stating that she “was tempted a thousand times to put an end to [her] existence” but she “trembled to leave [her] dear boys in [her] tyrant’s power” (Lewis 108). Marguerite’s exposure to the criminals’ violence and inability to escape her position leads her to a position of submissive vulnerability. Lewis portrays the victim in an amiable manner to emphasize the criminal nature of the banditti. The banditti’s excessive cruelties suggest a need for government interference; the judicial system needs to punish criminal activity that victimizes citizens. Lewis uses Marguerite to suggest a need for government reform to justly prosecute defiant