Abstract

This study aims at exploring William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) as a social and political novel that sheds light on the psychology of the eighteenth-century English individual. It discusses the dangers of injustice and proves that bad laws can be destructive in the sense that they cause people to live unstably as they suffer from psychological disorders, such as paranoia. The study refers to some political and social facts of the eighteenth-century, to contextualize the suffering of the individual. It emphasizes that the manipulation of laws creates an unbalanced social life; and thus, it leads to psychological instability. The study, then, connects Foucault’s ideas of surveillance to reveal how tyranny is evil for both the dominant and the dominated who live miserably. This dichotomy is investigated in the study mainly through the characters of Falkland, the murderer and Caleb Williams, the protagonist who searches for the truth.

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