Godwin’s Fleetwood, Shame and the Sexuality of Feeling

Abstract

The principal point of this argument is that William Godwin’s Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling should be read as a queer work of fiction not simply because it chronicles a bad marriage and the failure of heterosexual love to fully flourish and solidify normative bonds, but because the three-volume structure of Fleetwood circles back on itself, ouroboros-like, in keeping with the cyclicity of male shame. Just as gender is the result of certain mannerisms and acts of cloaking, shame is another performative forged, as it were, by and through a continuous process of accepting and resisting the social roles assigned to us. An ancillary aim is to trace Godwin’s depiction of shame as a queer kind of affect in Fleetwood to the literature of sensibility in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly the Man of Feeling at his most ashamed state, which this writer exploited for his own literary and cultural objectives. His depiction of shame intersects in remarkable ways with later attempts to assimilate the history of shame into the history of homosexuality.