Fielding, Sarah | Arlene Fish Wilner (essay date 1995)
Arlene Fish Wilner (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Education and Ideology in Sarah Fielding's The Governess," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 24, 1995, pp. 210–8.
[Below, Wilner argues that Fielding's The Governess is not a subversive text, but is a conservative didactic narrative that leaves unchallenged prevailing bourgeois patriarchal values, and instead presages eighteenth and nineteenth-century idealizations of domestic, middle-class womanhood.
Sarah Fielding, author of nine works of fiction and a translation of Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, has been characterized by several critics in recent years as a proto-feminist. One interpreter of her first novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), points to her "radical questioning of basic values" at mid-century and views that novel as a critique of the "feminine virtues" of innocence, passivity, and privacy, suggesting that Fielding ultimately...
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