SOURCE: Wilputte, Earla A. “Ambiguous Language and Ambiguous Gender: The ‘Bisexual’ Text of Shamela.” The Modern Language Review 89, no. 3 (July 1994): 561-71.

[In the following essay, Wilputte contends that in his novel Fielding uses sexually ambiguous creatures and bisexuality to represent perversions of language.]

An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) is too easily dismissed by scholars as not warranting real critical attention. Fielding's parody of Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is a genuinely comic piece and, as so often happens with comedy, the critics take it apart with reluctance. Fielding's satire exposes Pamela as a prostitute who plays the role of virtuous serving-girl to entrap her booby master into marriage. But the problem in this surface reading of Shamela is that it belies Fielding's more serious purpose.

In Shamela, Fielding proclaims that something has gone wrong with the sociolinguistic use of the moral vocabulary. His focus is on what he perceives as Pamela's abuse of the Christian concept of virtue. His technique in Shamela is to equate shifting sexual identities with shifting meanings of moral terms. He employs feminization, ‘the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued’,¹ to underscore his point that the Christian vocabulary has been perverted and devalued by his contemporary society. Thus, Colley Cibber, Conyers Middleton, John, Lord Hervey, and Richardson's Mr B become feminized, trivialized, and derided. Individually, they are pismires, but, Fielding warns, cumulatively, their effect on society may be dangerous. Likewise, Fielding masculinizes the characters of Shamela and Mrs Jervis to emphasize their morality's degeneration from the standard order. Throughout Shamela, the ambiguous sexual identities are meant to stand for the ambiguous, shifting moral vocabulary that is so easily utilized by society's ‘Thrivers’² to the detriment of society's morality.

In Shamela we encounter a spectrum of what Fielding's eighteenth-century readership would perceive as sexually deviant and biologically questionable characters. Fielding re-forms and contorts his real-life contemporaries and Richardson's fictional characters into these ambiguous creatures. These cumulative figures develop into a synchronic system of signs within Shamela and, as a result, render Fielding's parody more than an inversion of Pamela: an exposure of Richardson's and eighteenth-century society's use of language as unreliable, or, as Fielding personifies and satirizes it, ‘bisexual’.³

Recent criticism of Fielding's works has turned attention to his fictional and dramatic presentations of bisexuals, castrati, homosexuals, and transvestites to demonstrate his satiric intentions. Jill Campbell has noted that

Fielding repeatedly uses the ambiguous gender as well as the foreign birth of the Italian castrato singers so popular in London at this time to represent the decline of the values of native theatre. That signature of Restoration comedy, the fop or beau, marks Fielding's comedies as well, but with a difference: most often, this familiar comic type is reduced by Fielding to its disruptive signification in a system of gender oppositions.⁴

In Shamela, however, Fielding makes many topical allusions to figures of ‘compromised masculinity’ as well as employing numerous characters of ambiguous gender to emphasize that linguistic standards, in addition to ‘traditional political, cultural, or social’ standards, are being contorted and abused (Campbell, p. 63).

Eric Rothenstein's article is still incomparable for its explanation of the frame-work of Shamela and how John, Lord Hervey, Conyers Middleton, and Colley Cibber are representative of ‘the three cultural forms by which eighteenth-century society defined itself and its achievement: the state, the church, and the arts' respectively.⁵ What Rothstein and other critics have not analysed is Fielding's use of the imagery of homosexuality and bisexuality to delimit the untrustworthiness of language as employed by Shamela and the three contemporary ‘cultural forms’. Fielding's goal is to expose these manipulators of language by performing his own adept transformations to concretize their linguistic crime.

In Fielding and the Woman Question, Angela Smallwood effectively demonstrates that Fielding is concerned with ‘gender-dependent concepts like effeminacy in the rhetoric of his novels’ and the ‘immediate social consequences of the gendering of moral conduct’.⁶ This social concern is taken further in Shamela, as Fielding's interests in confusing language and confusing sexual identities merge to represent and animate the social repercussions of conversational, inter-personal relationships that are so linguistically dependent.

In eighteenth-century London, the perversity and shock value of homosexuality were worth exploiting. Homosexuality was regarded both as a dirty joke and as a slur on the commonly accepted image of ‘real’ manhood; it had to be combated by Fielding's audience, who could feel sexually and morally superior to such ambiguous creatures. Fielding recognized the popular advantage of employing homosexuals and bisexuals as moral antitheses to virtue as his society and Richardson seemed to understand it. But Fielding was also aesthetically attracted to the idea of tangibly personifying and representing the paradoxical seductiveness and morally reprehensible employment of titillating, disguised language through ambiguous gender and uncertain sexuality. As Terry Castle and Jill Campbell have indicated in recent studies, he was fascinated with the theatricality, illusion, and spectacle of sexual stage-masquerade that could slip over into real life.

The force of Fielding's ire comes down not on homosexuals or bisexuals but on linguistic analogies to sexual confusions. As Terry Castle has pointed out in her study of The Female Husband, Fielding knew and worked amiably enough with the transvestite, probably bisexual actress Charlotte Charke in his Great Mogul's Company, without any hint of homophobia in his dealings with her.⁷ His professional behaviour, of course, may have belied his personal feelings, but that is not my concern here. What Castle does not mention is that Fielding employed the sexually ambiguous Mrs Charke to impersonate and ridicule on the stage, through cross-dressing, her word-mangling father, Colley Cibber. In his fictional Court of Censors in the The Covent-Garden Journal, Fielding charged Cibber with the murder of the English language. The Mogul's stage portrayal of Cibber as a woman who is supposed to be representative of a man underscores Fielding's later use of ambiguous gender in Shamela to indicate the confusing and unreliable nature of language that is perverted by one speaker to the detriment of its original meaning and the despair of the listener.

The prefatory material introduces the readers to several sexually ambiguous characters: Colley Cibber and Conyers Middleton are metamorphosed into the creature ‘Conny Keyber’ on the title-page; and the dedication ‘To Miss Fanny, & c.’ perpetuates Pope's nicknaming of John, Lord Hervey. Hervey, the antagonistic critic, prolifically bad writer, and fawning politician, was often referred to by Pope in his poetry as ‘Lord Fanny’ and ‘Fannius’. Both titles were allusions to his effeminacy.⁸ Rothstein has pointed out the obscene suggestiveness of both ‘conny’ (pp. 386-87) and ‘fanny’ (pp. 382-83), concluding that Fielding wishes to emphasize the extent to which the arts and politics are prostituted by famous figures such as these men.

Just as these corrupt cultural figures become Fielding's ‘creatures’, so does the medical doctor, John Woodward. He was identified by eighteenth-century sources (including the pseudonymous ‘An Account of the Sickness and Death of Dr. W—DW—RD’) as a man of questionable sexual habits. ‘The ladies’ would be ‘inquisitive of what sex he died’, as ‘from the softness of his voice something may have been suggested to his disadvantage in their esteem’.⁹

Rothstein mentions that in the prefatory material ‘these quiet allusions [help] Fielding establish a connection between the naturalistic and the perverse. He is to make use of the connection in dealing with Shamela's conduct, naturalistic as a corrective to Pamela and morally perverse as its analogue’ (p. 384). I believe, however, that Fielding is going farther than Rothstein suggests. Rather than using the perversity of the homosexual, bisexual, and androgynous figures to be analogous to the moral perversity of Richardson's novel, Fielding makes the sex changes and accumulated references to homosexuality emblematic of the perversion of the contemporary moral vocabulary itself.

The relationship between language and morality is not far-fetched, especially as Fielding sees it. In his Letter xl in his sister's David Simple, he states: ‘There is a strict Analogy between the Taste and Morals of an Age; and Depravity in one always induces Depravity in the other.’¹⁰ For him, the reading public's unquestioning acceptance of Pamela revealed a depravity in both taste and morals. Although Richardson's abuse of the Christian vocabulary through his personification of ‘Virtue’ was probably the most popular and readily identifiable abuse of language, Fielding was also looking towards political and religious figures and their perversion of words.

Mrs Jervis is the first explicitly homosexual character to appear in the text proper. Although Fielding has alluded to and ridiculed famous personages on his title-page and in the prefatory material, Squire Booby's housekeeper is the first fictional character to act a part in the story. Fielding reverses the traits of Richardson's two women, so that the good and gentle protector of Pamela at Bedfordshire is called Jewkes, while the Lincolnshire bawd is renamed Jervis. Carl Wood has pointed out that this is not due to a confusion of the similar names on Fielding's part; rather, it is a deliberate transposition to satirize Richardson's morally ambiguous characters.¹¹ Once Fielding has inverted the names of these two women so that we interpret their actions more critically, we begin to pay more attention to the language in which the characters speak.

The suggested lesbian tendencies of Richardson's Jewkes are given to Fielding's Mrs Jervis. Rather than emphasizing the masculine physical attributes with which Richardson endows Jewkes: ‘a huge hand, […] an arm as thick as [Pamela's] waist, […] her nose […] flat and crooked, and her brows grow[n] down over her eyes; […] [and] a hoarse, man-like voice’,¹²Shamela employs connotative language rather than explicit description to portray the character's and Richardson's perversion.

Lucretia Jervis's Christian name, with its connotations of beauty and virtue violated, already titillates readers with its suggestiveness and irony. Fielding reverses the Roman lady's character from one of celebrated chastity and honour to one of coarse lewdness and lesbianism by assigning the name of ‘Lucretia’, the renowned ‘Good woman’, to Jervis, thus stressing the standards from which morality has fallen. The use of the name is also reminiscent of Fielding's jokes about rape in his early comedies wherein he played upon ‘a presumed disparity between a woman's words and her actual desires’.¹³

Squire Booby's ‘housekeeper’ aspires to be the madam of a brothel, as we are told several times, including Lucretia Jervis's own admission: ‘If I was to keep a House a thousand Years, I would never desire a prettier Wench in it [than Shamela].’¹⁴ Fielding's Jervis takes a ‘Motherly’ interest in Shamela rather than the material one of Richardson's Mrs Jervis for Pamela. Fielding chooses to emphasize the colloquial use of ‘Mother’ for its connotations of bawd, as in Defoe's Mother Midnight in Moll Flanders (1722), Fielding's own Mother Punchbowl in his comedy The Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732), and the real-life keeper of a ‘molly-house’ (a public house which catered to homosexual men), Mother Clap.¹⁵ Jervis intends to benefit materially from the affair she helps to arrange between her charge, Shamela, and her master. Wood states that Fielding's switch of housekeepers' names and his merging the two characters into one brings into question Richardson's Mrs Jervis's role of guardian and her foolish encouragement to Pamela to model her new country outfit for Mr B (p. 268).

In addition to changing the first impression of Pamela's Jervis, Fielding's version not only emphasizes a salacious aspect of Richardson's purportedly ‘moral’ book but also reveals our own taste in reading material:

Come, says she [Jervis], my dear Honey-suckle, I have one Game to play for you; he shall see you in Bed; he shall, my little Rosebud, he shall see those pretty, little, white, round, panting—and offer'd to pull off my Handkerchief.

(p. 22)

Attuned now to Fielding's sexually charged language, terms of endearment such as ‘Honey-suckle’ and ‘Rosebud’ are read metaphorically, with a definite anatomical bias. Although this is probably only a throw-away thrust at Richardson, the questionable relationship between Shamela and Mrs Jervis indicates a perversion of the standard order.

In The Female Husband (1746), Fielding comments that such ‘unnatural lusts’ (which Shamela has rejected apparently only because she has no time for them) are the result of a lack of moral restraint. The pamphlet states: ‘If once our carnal appetites are let loose, without those prudent and secure guides, there is no excess and disorder which they are not liable to commit.’¹⁶ This depiction in homosexuality as the consequence of extreme promiscuity and unbridled passion—an acquired behavioural pattern—also fits in with Fielding's depiction in Shamela of the fall of the moral vocabulary. For an eighteenth-century man such as Fielding, ambiguous language, like ambiguous gender, is an acquired practice based on appetite and the ‘Art of thriving’.

Sexuality, we are told in The Female Husband, must be ‘govern'd and directed by virtue and religion, [to be] productive not only of corporeal delight, but of the most rational felicity’. Heterosexual inclinations are ‘for very wise purposes implanted’ in us ‘for the continuance of the human species’ and to give us physical pleasure and happiness (p. 29). There exists in The Female Husband, though, a narratological tension which draws attention to Fielding's fascination with and revulsion from the lesbian transvestite Mary Hamilton which is analogous to his satirical employment in Shamela of the sexually liminal figures as representations of the corruption of the moral language. Castle observes:

That Fielding was always torn between moral impulses and playful impulses—between a desire for law and a desire for mischief—is certainly not a new idea […]. And likewise, the tension in his fiction between moral vision and amusement at human villainies bespeaks the same conflict. But in The Female Husband this conflict seems particularly acute. Fielding oscillates here between the static moral universe of satire—and its implicit longing for the ‘world turned right side up’—and the fluid realm of stage comedy—with its joyful, potentially anarchical representations of the ‘world turned upside down’.

(p. 617)

Fielding's uneven, chaotic, ‘even crude piece of writing’ that is The Female Husband, concludes Castle, ‘is a textual allegory for [Mary Hamilton's, the female husband's] disarmingly mutable nature’ (pp. 603, 619).

Shamela is a similar ‘textual allegory’. Just as Mary Hamilton's masquerading as a man ‘embodies the displacement of “truth” by ornament, embroidery, design’ (Castle, p. 614), so does Fielding attempt to illustrate in his linguistic satire of Pamela, through the duplicitous sexuality and disguised vocabulary of its characters, that society must pay closer attention to the semantic deceptions surrounding it.

In both Shamela and The Female Husband, Fielding indicates the social significance of moral and prudential guidelines, just as he does in his ‘Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men’ and other works. But the onus of following these guidelines falls upon the good people of society, not the perpetrators of deceit and immorality:

It is not against Force, but Deceit, which I am here seeking for Armour; against those who can injure us only by obtaining our good Opinion. If therefore I can instruct my Reader from what sort of Persons he is to withhold this Opinion, and inform him of all, or at least the principal Arts by which Deceit proceeds to ingratiate itself with us, […] he will be effectually enabled to defeat its Purpose.

(p. 164)

He does not suggest that vicious people will change their habits, but he does feel that it is our responsibility to know that such people exist so that we can avoid being exploited by them. In Shamela, he implicates Richardson's moral taste in writing and the reading public's moral taste in consuming imprudent material such as Pamela. Art, as well as society, wants ‘prudent and secure guides’ which are not to be found in such moral examples as Pamela but, ironically enough, can be found in the burlesque Shamela.

The dual personalities of Conny Keyber, Miss Fanny, Dr Woodward, and Mrs Jervis, representative of all facets of society's cultural life from Poet Laureate, cleric, politician, consulting physician, to fictional creation itself, reveal a strong resemblance to Pope's Sporus, a legitimate target for derision and contempt.

His Wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart!
Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.

(‘An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’, l. 323)¹⁷

Fielding's ‘amphibious’ creatures, who are neither wholly one thing nor the other, are ciphers that cannot easily be read. He differentiates between these beings of ambiguous existence by drawing attention to their particular deviations from the norm. A homosexual, such as Woodward or Jervis, with his or her ‘unnatural lusts’, stands in opposition to the standard order and can be read in contraposition to the way his or her sex is traditionally understood. In this way, Fielding inverts Richardson's Jervis and Jewkes so that we are forced to read the Pamela character conversely to Richardson's original intention. Likewise, Richardson's use of the word ‘virtue’ tends to be, as read by Fielding, a ‘homosexual’ word, as it were, because it does not translate in the context of Pamela as part of the traditional Christian vocabulary; rather, it carries with it connotations of material rather than spiritual value, hence, meaning the exact contrary to the original intent of the word.

A bisexual, who is attracted to both sexes and is therefore pulled in two directions, is both heterosexual and homosexual and cannot be read with confidence. A bisexual, then (such as the creation Conny Keyber or Miss Fanny/Lord Hervey), as an interpreted sign, means two opposite things; it is a polarized cipher which, through its dichotomy of intent, means nothing at all. Attached to these prefatory, ‘amphibious’ figures are the images of political and artistic sycophancy, and the tossing about of the word ‘honour’ as it is so often heard and employed in these realms of society. This ‘bisexual’ word can refer to empty titles of respect (or ironic disrespect), political favours, social status, chastity, or one's good name or word. Consequently, through its over-use and indiscriminate employment, ‘honour’, as Falstaff figured out in his comic catechism, is simply air and an example of idioglossia.

The sexual plurisignation, the doubtful nature of these creatures, and the bisexuality assigned by Fielding manifest themselves as concretizations for what politics, religion, and art are doing to the Christian vocabulary. Once unadulterated, now our ethical language has become more than defiled and prostituted by these forms and abuses: it has become perverted, ambiguous, and finally, meaningless. What Fielding has done here, through his creation of these sexually ambiguous beings, is to anthropomorphize the perversion of the moral vocabulary to reveal its narrative unreliability.

In order for this theory of a ‘bisexual’ text to carry any weight, it must be applicable to the central characters rather than merely the peripheral ones. Shamela herself, though she is the personification of the corrupt state of the moral vocabulary, is not presented blatantly as a bisexual or homosexual character. She does, however, generate the ‘bisexual’ text through her manipulations of the ethical language and her contortions of Christian virtue into mercantile ‘vartue’.

Shamela engenders and presides over the chaos she perpetuates. Fashioning herself as ‘Pamela’, behaving only coyly rather than virtuously, she is a politician who manipulates life and language to serve her own desires. Smallwood has observed that Shamela, contrary to being of ambiguous gender, ‘is a particularly scandalous lower-class parody of [the] middle- and upper-class model of femininity [that is, deriving her ‘standards of conduct from others’ and lacking ‘any moral initiative of her own as a result’]. She has no integrity, no moral centre’ (p. 50). But Shamela does not, as the eighteenth-century woman does, look to others for her moral centre: she is a female politician.

Morris Golden suggests that on one level Mr B. and Pamela are representative of the King and Walpole and the hope for a harmonious ‘union of ruler and chief minister’.¹⁸ Fielding's satirical vision also makes Shamela representative of Walpole, but his heroine is a feminized, devalued presentation of the Prime Minister. Whereas Richardson hopes for a nationally beneficial relationship between king and country, Fielding sees only the meretricious behaviour of a selfish minister who sells the country out from under a foolish ruler. Through Shamela, Fielding stresses Walpole's effeminate characteristics of greed for material goods and luxury, and ambition for greater social status and power, while emphasizing the minister's lack of manly public-spiritedness and generosity.¹⁹

Shamela, a ‘softer Man’ (‘To a Lady’, l. 272), is more dangerous than a socially recognized male because, like Pope's goddess of Dulness, she ‘requires male subordination with her increasingly aggressive demands until she ultimately subsumes and emasculates her male followers’ (Ingrassia, p. 43). This power is revealed in Shamela's progenitive ability (herself an illegitimate child, she has had a ‘small one’ by Parson Williams), while she re-creates herself in the Pamela ‘biography’; her mother, Henrietta Maria Honora, apparently emasculates men with her pugilistic abilities, as she notes, ‘I have sprained my right Hand, with boxing three new made Officers.—Tho' to my Comfort, I beat them all’ (p. 26); Shamela manipulates Squire Booby so adeptly that where he wanted a mistress, he gains a low-class wife; finally, even Parson Tickletext (like most of the reading public) has been seduced and enslaved by Shamela's wiles.

At one point in the novel, Booby exclaims to Shamela, ‘I know not whether you are a Man or a Woman, unless by your swelling Breasts’ (p. 23). Booby is politely referring to the fact that he and Shamela have not had sexual intercourse. Although Fielding is making fun of Richardson's dialogue, the remark also suggests within my context that she may be female only physically: that is, she cannot be read confidently from her appearance.

Surrounded by textual machinery overladen with homosexual and bisexual creatures, Shamela is the radial point from which they originate. She apparently governs and gives rise to the figures encompassing her in the text. She is the matrix of chaos and disorder, social, sexual, and linguistic. She subverts normal power relations by domineering over her Booby husband and swaying parsons such as Tickletext into seeing her as a biblical exemplar of chastity.

She also has the power (as a woman and as a book) to alter perceptions of morality and vocabulary. In this way, although she may not be as sexually ambiguous as those around her, she is the instigator and perpetrator of the unethical, feminized (that is, devalued) language. Shamela always has the word ‘vartue’ on her tongue and observes: ‘O what a charming Word that is, rest his Soul who first invented it’ (p. 33). ‘Virtue’, like ‘honour’, when bandied about without any adherence to or knowledge of the reality for which it stands, becomes a mere sound, an invented sign no one can comprehend. By 1752, Fielding defines both virtue and vice in his ‘Modern Glossary’ in The Covent-Garden Journal merely as ‘Subjects of Discourse’.²⁰

The ramifications of this ‘bisexual’ or ‘amphibious’ language are illustrated in Shamela by Parson Williams's irresponsible ideas. He asserts that belief in God will save man no matter what he does, and he continually invites Shamela to sinful acts that can afterwards ‘be purged away by frequent and sincere Repentance’ (p. 29). Williams merely interprets the language rather than the spirit of religious doctrines to suit his own immediate purpose, and he neither feels nor thinks about any of the Christian tenets beyond what he can acquire for himself through them.

When Shamela decides that she requires a husband for the flesh and a husband for the spirit, Williams syllogistically allots himself the superior role of spiritual spouse who fulfils her ‘spiritual’ need for a good lover. ‘All immaterial Substances […] such as Love, Desire, and so forth, were guided by the Spirit’ (p. 48). This leads to a very physical definition of the word ‘Spirit’, especially as it so closely echoes Swift's description of a religious meeting in which the spirit becomes a tangible, sensual mechanism:

By frequently moving your body up and down, you perceive the vapours to ascend very fast, till you are perfectly dosed and flustered like one who drinks too much in a morning. Meanwhile the preacher is also at work. He begins a loud hum which pierces you quite through; this is immediately returned by the audience, and you find yourself prompted to imitate them by a mere spontaneous impulse, without knowing what you do. The interstitia are duly filled up by the preacher to prevent too long a pause, under which the spirit would soon faint and grow languid.²¹

The description of the physical dexterity of the Enthusiastic congregation, with its connotations of the sin of Onan as each individual excites his spirit, is not unlike Tickletext's masturbatory ‘Emotion’ that is raised upon reading Pamela. The progression from an individual parson to an assembly emphasizes the fact that the deliberate misuse and acceptance of that misuse of the moral vocabulary is beginning to permeate all of society.

Returning to the framework of Shamela, we discover the consequences of a ‘bisexual’ or ambiguous text with its own, unique system of meaning. Tickletext's sexually evocative name denotes his special kind of interaction with his book while it also gives a kind of sexual identity to the book: a thing that can be tickled. His letter to Oliver includes most of the popular sentiments about Pamela; however, Fielding couches them in sexual terms so as to heighten what he feels is the real attraction and the real danger in Richardson's book. The silly parson, innocently or not, is physically affected by his reading of Pamela and exclaims: ‘Oh! I feel an Emotion. […] Methinks I see Pamela at this instant with all the Pride of Ornament cast off’ (p. 11). The reader knows that the good parson is euphemistically referring to his developing erection at the thought of Pamela nude; he is not describing his moral response to the girl's lack of pride.

Fielding humorously illustrates through the well-intentioned Parson Tickletext the relationship among taste, language, and morals, and how each influences the others. Tickletext uses the supposedly moral Pamela as a pornographic work, a stimulus toward masturbation. The Parson's interaction with the book is symbiotic as he is tickled by it so long as he can tickle meanings out of it. His relationship with the text is based on a reciprocity that suggests an absence: the Parson must glean meaning from a work that expresses itself ambiguously.

Through Tickletext, Fielding employs his language in much the same way as Pope does in ‘The Dignity, Use and Abuse of Glass-Bottles’ (1715)²² and as Swift does in his ‘Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ (1704). All three authors satirize the use of the Enthusiastic language to suggest a sexual rather than a spiritual experience. Their point is that when language is misused, a vocabulary of double-entendres and allusions develops which may result in the gradual decline of morals. Conversely, all three authors are delighted with the ambiguity such language may offer when used for fun by responsible, consenting conversationalists. Fielding, however, is concerned not only about the irresponsible employment of words for the purpose of deceiving but about the unintentional misapplication of ethical terms and the consequent propagation of immorality.

In The Covent-Garden Journal, Fielding, in the persona of the Knight Censor of Great Britain, observes with John Locke that certain words have no meaning, for, as they stand for no distinct or tangible thing, men use the sounds ‘yet there are no determin'd Ideas laid up in their Minds, which are to be expressed to others by them’ (i, 153). The Censor points to ‘Divines and moral Writers’ (such as Richardson) as the greatest culprits in precipitating the demise of the vocabulary of ethics because of the right they ‘have assumed to themselves of doing Violence to certain Words, in Favour of their own Hypotheses, and of using them in the Sense often directly contrary to that which Custom (the absolute Lord and Master, according to Horace, of all the Modes of Speech) hath allotted them’ (i, 154).

Fielding believes, as he states in The Female Husband, that sexual attraction, ‘when govern'd and directed by virtue and religion, [is] productive not only of corporeal delight, but of the most rational felicity’ (p. 29). If we apply this concept to reading, conversation, and life, we notice that in order for the exchange to be successful there must be an understandable and commonly accepted system of signifiers and referents. Should one party introduce a polysemantic sign, the result may be delightful due to its surprise factor; however, should a sign be wilfully misused with the intent to deceive, or should it simply be wrongly used, the relationship between consenting reader/listener and writer/speaker becomes skewed, unproductive, and, in a sense, immoral.

Late-twentieth-century readers may find it difficult to applaud Fielding's strategy of introducing mannish women, womanish men, and sexually ambiguous creatures to represent perversions of language. The implication is that such figures are loathsome because the ‘good’ masculine has been ‘contaminated’ by the ‘bad’ feminine. We cannot extricate the linguistic problem from the gender issue and consequently Fielding emerges as both sexist and homophobic; however, his insistence on language's lack of ambiguity is as problematic as his fascination with ambiguous gender. Shamela could not exist as a successful burlesque if it did not joyfully take advantage of the ambiguities and double entendres offered by the English language. In Shamela, as throughout the rest of his works, Fielding betrays an attraction, albeit an attraction paradoxically based on a kind of repulsion, to language and human beings that are not what they seem.

Notes

1. Catherine Ingrassia, ‘Women Writing/Writing Women: Pope, Dulness, and “Feminization” in the Dunciad’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 14 (1990), 40-58 (p. 40).

2. ‘This Art of Thriving […] points out to every Individual his own particular and separate Advantage, to which he is to sacrifice the Interest of all others; which he is to consider as his Summum Bonum, to pursue with his utmost Diligence and Industry, and to acquire by all Means whatever. Now when this noble End is once established, Deceit must immediately suggest itself as the necessary Means […]. And this, if I mistake not, is the very Essence of that excellent Art, called The Art of Politics’ (‘Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men’, Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq. Volume One, ed. by Henry Knight Miller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), pp. 153-78 (pp. 154-55)).

3. Although homosexual and bisexual are not eighteenth-century words, I use them within this study for the sake of clarity and emphasis. My argument is that the moral vocabulary, like these examples of sexual liminality, is pulled in two opposite directions; words either mean their own antithesis or are simply ambiguous. The eighteenth-century reader would employ the more imprecise word sodomite to denote both ‘homosexual’ and ‘bisexual’.

4. ‘“When Men Women Turn”: Gender Reversals in Fielding's Plays’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Routledge, 1987), pp. 62-83 (p. 63).

5. ‘The Framework of Shamela’, ELH, 35 (1968), 381-402 (p. 387).

6. Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700-1750 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 174-75.

7. ‘Matters Not Fit to be Mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband’, ELH, 49 (1982), 602-22.

8. In ‘A Letter to a Noble Lord’ (1733), Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. by Paul Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 220-31, Pope explains the classical allusion: ‘This Fannius was, it seems, extremely fond both of his Poetry and his Person. […] He was moreover of a delicate or effeminate complexion, and constant at the Assemblies and Opera's of those days, where he took it into his head to slander poor Horace […] till it provoked [Horace] at last just to name him, give him a lash, and send him whimpering to the Ladies’ (p. 224). For further references to Lord Hervey as ‘Fanny’ and ‘Fannius’ in Pope's poetry see Satire i. ii … 6; Satire ii. ii. 101; Donne iv. 178; Sober Advice, ll. 2, 92; Epistle to Arbuthnot, l. 149; Dialogue, i. 50, 71; 1740, l. 57; the prose piece The Master Key to Popery (1732).

9. John Arbuthnot, ‘An Account of the Sickness and Death of Dr. W-DW-RD; As Also of What Appeared upon Opening his Body’, in George A. Aitken, The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot (1892; repr. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), pp. 464-70 (p. 468). The phallic suggestiveness of the antiquaries' pillar envy in the crocodile-and-mummy scene in Three Hours after Marriage by John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot is another joke at the expense of Woodward's sexual and virtuosi interests. The double-entendres make Woodward's fascination with the natural seem very unnatural:

   Fossile [Woodward's persona] Ah, Dr. Nautilus, how have I languish'd for your feather of the bird Porphyrion!

   Nautilus But your dart of the Mantichora!

   Fossile Your haft of the antediluvian trowel, unquestionably the tool of one of the Babel masons!

   Nautilus What's that to your fragment of Seth's pillar? (v. 91-96)

   (Burlesque Plays of the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Simon Trussler (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 93-142).

10. Cited in Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams And An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, intr. by Douglas Brooks-Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. x.

11. ‘Shamela's Subtle Satire: Fielding's Characterization of Mrs. Jewkes and Mrs. Jervis’, ELN, 13 (1976), 266-70 (p. 268).

12. Pamela, intr. by William M. Sale, Jr (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 116.

13. Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 89. See, for instance, Fielding's Rape upon Rape (its title modified to the less offensive Coffee-House Politician), The Complete Works of Henry Fielding Esq., ed. by W. E. Henley, 16 vols (London: Heinemann, 1903; repr. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), ix, 157-58.

    Indeed, our Poet, to oblige the age,
    Had brought a dreadful scene upon the stage:
    But I, perceiving what his Muse would drive at,
    Told him the ladies never would connive at,
    A downright actual Rape—unless in private

    (Epilogue)

    and The Lottery, The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, vii, 285: ‘The sparks know a woman's mind before she speaks it. Well, it is certainly a great comfort to a woman, who has done what she should not do, that she did it without her own consent.’

14. Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. by Sheridan Baker (New York: Crowell, 1972), p. 25.

15. Randolph Trumbach, ‘London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1977), 1-33 (p. 16).

16. The Female Husband and Other Writings, ed. by Claude E. Jones, English Reprints Series, 17 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960), p. 29.

17. Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume iv, ed. by John Butt (London: Methuen, 1953), pp. 91-127.

18. ‘Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and Shamela’, ELH, 53 (1986), 311-29 (p. 321).

19. Pope's ‘Epistle ii. To a Lady’, Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume iii, ii, ed. by F. W. Bateson (London: Methuen, 1951), pp. 45-71, is the most famous eighteenth-century example of female ambition for power and pleasure:

    In Men, we various Ruling passions find,
    In Women, two almost divide the kind;
    Those, only fix'd, they first or last obey,
    The Love of Pleasure, and the Love of Sway.

    (l. 207)

    Other references to the desire for status and material possessions as particularly feminine characteristics include Milton's Eve (Paradise Lost, ix. 789-91, 820-21); Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana; Fielding's translation in the Miscellanies (pp. 85-117) of Juvenal's Sixth Satire (ll. 228-45, 442-51); Parnell's ‘Hesiod; or, The Rise of Woman’, Minor Poets of the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Hugh l'Anson Fausset (London: Dent, 1930), pp. 123-29:

    A creature fond and changing, fair and vain,
    The creature woman, rises now to reign, […]

    Men, born to labour, all with pains provide;
    Woman have time, to sacrifice to pride:
    They want the care of man, their want they know,
    And dress to please with heart-alluring show,
    The show prevailing, for the sway contend,
    And make a servant where they meet a friend.

    (ll. 119, 125)

20. The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. by Gerard E. Jensen, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915), i, 157.

21. ‘A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. A Fragment’, in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. by Angus Ross and David Woolley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 126-41 (p. 132).

22. The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Volume i, ed. by Norman Ault (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1936), pp. 201-20.