Abstrakt
It has long been understood that William Godwin's St. Leon (1799) represents immortality and alchemy as the supernatural progenitors of modern scientific inquiry.
The eponymous St. Leon's infinitely long life allows for a sprawling, anticlimactic tale which reveals the inability of lived experience to render life adventurous, and instead approaches adventure-making as risk-taking.
St. Leon associates the affectivity of risk-taking with power and status, and exhibits how what is considered a self-referential activity, such as gambling or capital creation, can produce false objects that indefinitely affect the individual beyond their immediate context.
The use of first-person reflexive narration as well as impersonal universal narration broaches the issue of risk-taking under different conditions. Risk is taken up by the text in two distinct ways: risk as an emotional response and risk as an analytic deliberation.
Moral notions of self-regulation, especially as related to the emotions and passions, conflict with the increased drive in society for power and status, and suggest that risk-taking is antithetical to the moral pursuit. Risk as emotion and risk as deliberation transverse the text's social and psychological spaces, and give way to considerations within and outside of the text on matters of equality, wealth and wellbeing.