SOURCE: Frank, Judith. “Literacy, Desire, and the Novel: From Shamela to Joseph Andrews.” The Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 6, no. 2 (fall 1993): 157-74.

[In the following essay, Frank offers a reading of Shamela that departs from earlier analyses about bourgeois politics and literary representation, arguing that the novel is about literacy and desire among the lower classes, a theme that Fielding further develops in Joseph Andrews.]

Like the transition from traditional open-field to capitalist agriculture or the transition from a paternalistic to a contractual model of labor and service, the rise of literacy in England is one of those historical processes whose length and ubiquitousness challenge our claims to a rigorous historical specificity.¹ What the plentiful figures on literacy in the pre-modern period show us is that literacy was always already, seemingly trans-historically, on the rise. These figures bear out what we easily intuit: that literacy was class- and gender-based, the upper classes and men becoming literate first; that those in the city were more apt to be able to read and write than those in the country; and that enough servants could read for them to be a particular source of irritation to those who feared that reading and writing would generate idleness and create desire for upward mobility. It seems safe to say that in early eighteenth-century England some servants, and some women, and some apprentices could read.²

But if it is risky to argue that the period of Pamela and Joseph Andrews (1741-2) was a critical point in the actual numerical increase of lower-class literacy, it should nevertheless be clear enough from the alarm that surrounded the reception of Richardson's Pamela that the rise of the novel gave this problem a particular urgency. As the novel started to become a mass-cultural form, no one text clamored as much as Fielding's Shamela about its power to shape subjectivities and to act as an agent for cultural change. Claiming that Richardson's popular epistolary novel was pornographic in style and ludicrous in its premise that a chambermaid could write compelling standard English, and charging that by rewarding a servant with marriage to her master for withstanding his repeated attempts upon her “virtue,” Pamela would encourage class insubordination, Shamela evoked and worried most immediately about a readership of young people and servants. Current readings of Shamela have tended to focus upon the ways in which Fielding uses the servant community in the Booby household as an allegory for Walpole's administration and coterie, whom the Opposition attacked as uncultured, mercenary, and corrupt,³ and more generally, upon what Michael McKeon calls “the culturally fraught effrontery of the rise of the undeserving,” represented in such diverse figures as Pamela, Colley Cibber, and Conyers Middleton.⁴ These readings argue that Shamela derides not only the politics, but also the language and literature of the emergent bourgeoisie. But by concentrating upon the ideological struggles over culture and literary representation waged by two different sections of the ruling class—the emergent bourgeoisie and the landed gentry—criticism of Shamela has often sidestepped the fact that in Fielding's parody, servants not only function as an allegory of the middle classes, but also stand in for the lower classes, of which they occupied the highest position. As Bruce Robbins has argued, it is through servants that the English novel has tended to represent the vast variety of working people and poor.⁵

In their capacity as what J. Jean Hecht has called “cultural intermediaries” between the elite and the lower classes, as well as between the country and the city, servants in the eighteenth century were an often volatile marker of class instability. Their mobility between classes of people and their access to their masters' and mistresses' lives enabled them to spread throughout the social system everything from clothes to speech, moral values, and political ideas.⁶ Moreover, along with women and apprentices, servants stood at the boundary of the literacy/non-literacy divide, and as such were a particular source of anxiety to the eighteenth-century ruling class, which was acutely aware of the ideology-forming powers of the printed word. Shifting, therefore, the focus of the criticism that has dwelt upon Fielding's attack on Richardson and the challenge to middle-class aesthetic values it entailed, this essay reads a certain trajectory from Shamela to Joseph Andrews in light of the pressures exerted upon them by ambivalence over lower-class literacy. While such ambivalence is not surprising from a writer who both made his living by the spread of literacy and had a strong interest in the preservation of class hierarchy,⁷ its power to shape the deep formal and ideological structures of these texts is greater than one might expect. For the ambivalence over lower-class literacy shapes, among other things, Joseph Andrews's particular kind of realism, its way of thinking sexuality, and its creation of the heroine who is to serve as an alternative to Pamela, Fanny Goodwill.

My first section argues, then, that if Shamela is about bad bourgeois writing, it is also about the lower class's very access to writing. In Shamela lower-class literacy is aggravatedly eroticized and utopian, and it is an important project of the novel to defuse this obsession, to “decathect” literacy.

I. DECATHECTING LITERACY

A theatrical work of Fielding's, The Grub-Street Opera, prepares us for the problem of servant literacy later aggravated in Shamela. At the end of Fielding's play, the servants, who, like those of the Booby household, almost obligatorily represent Walpole and his supporters, quit the service of the Apshinkens, singing comic songs of sharing and community. Robin, the Walpole figure, sings of the dissolution of class hierarchy and private property:

I once as your butler did cheat you,
          For myself I will set up now;
If you come to my house I will treat you
          With of pig of your own sow.(8)

And in a scenario reminiscent of Pamela, Master Owen Apshinken, the son of a gentleman, marries Molly, the daughter of his father's tenant, who celebrates the power of love to transcend class hierarchy:

If I too high aspire,
          Tis love that plumes my wings,
Love makes a clown a squire,
          Would make a squire a king.

The servants in The Grub-Street Opera may represent Walpole's administration, and the tone of the ending may be qualified by irony, but the servants' power to level class distinctions and to imagine alternative communities is clearly celebrated.

And significantly, Fielding's play has a kind of letters fetish, its plot played out through the comedy of errors brought about by the exchange of letters. Throughout the play the servants are haunted by “letters” and “writing”: William says of Robin, “Sure letters run strangely in his head!” while Robin exclaims, “Surprising! Sure some little writing devil lurks in the house.”⁹ It is that little writing devil, and the misunderstandings it occasions, that set in motion the plot culminating in a utopian transcendence of class hierarchy.

If in the theatrical work upward mobility may still be represented as comic and utopian, in Fielding's literary burlesque the servants' aspirations take on a more sinister tone, a tone apparently sinister enough for Hugh Amory, with an attitude characteristic of much criticism of Shamela, to read it as “a lurid tale of carnal freedom, spiritual corruption, and the subversion of all human society.”¹⁰ Accordingly, the first act of Shamela is to defuse the scandal of Pamela's literacy. According to McKeon, so far does Pamela inhabit the liminal status of cultural mediator that she is, in his witty metaphor, “‘beached’ at the top of the hierarchy of domestic service;” the prefatory letters to Pamela have to account for her “polite Education,” explaining it as a result of her living in an “elegant Family.”¹¹ In Shamela [hereafter referred to as S], Pamela's upper-class pretentions and capabilities are “corrected” in a visually immediate way. The first thing we know about Shamela, when she asks her mother to “commodate [her] with a ludgin,”¹² is that she cannot spell. Fielding marks her as a servant through the traditional orthographical markers of semi-literacy, although he drops this quickly, confining his representation of her class status to spicy epithets and saucy snaps of the fingers. What is happening is a fairly crude domestication of Pamela's dangerous capability, though the text slightly disguises the crudity of this operation by implicitly suggesting that Shamela is in fact smarter than Pamela—by presenting her as the ideological construct now known as the smart cookie.

If Fielding takes away Pamela's polite education when he renders her Shamela, one figure in the text takes over Pamela's role of cultural intermediary: Parson Williams. His tone at once intimate and pedantic, Williams functions as Shamela's mentor, giving her his version of “good books,” lecturing her about religious matters, and, most famously, teaching her to “write in the present tense” (S, 313). Shamela echoes what Squire B says about Pamela's writing—“I … am quite overcome with your charming manner of Writing”¹³—when she says of one of Williams' letters, “You find, Mamma, what a charming way he hath of writing” (S, 318). In Shamela, then, what we might call the scandal of Pamela's literacy—her amazing facility with standard English—is transferred onto a clergyman, who takes over Pamela's role of cultural intermediary, and whose literary goes hand in hand with class resentment; Williams contemptuously says of the squire, for example, “… let such wretches know, they cannot hate, detest, and despise us, half so much as we do them” (S, 318). Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that the energetic attack on the clergy in Shamela, manifested most vividly by Parson Williams' disproportionately large role, is an effect of this displacement.

While Parson Williams as a poacher, a rake, and, in the words of Parson Oliver, “a busy fellow, intermeddling with the private affairs of his patron” (S, 338), he also represents an ideal of masculine sexuality. He is the love match of Fielding's Material Girl, the husband who is, in his own words, “the object of your love, and to satisfy your desire” (S, 334). Significantly, it is his very learning that Shamela finds sexually exciting. She writes of one of his letters, “It is, I think the finest I ever received from that charming man, and full of a great deal of learning,” and adds rapturously, “O! What a brave thing it is to be a scholard, and to be able to talk Latin!” (S, 317). Walter J. Ong writes that “the older idea of the grammarian as a totally learned man … is curiously enshrined today in our word ‘glamor,’ a Scottish by-form of ‘grammar,’ meaning originally vast learning, deep or mysterious lore, and thus the power to enchant or cast a spell and hence to ‘charm’ us.”¹⁴ Williams' learning is linked to his sexual glamour in the same way that Booby's vulgarity is linked to his sexual incompetence. Shamela punningly joins the two terms by the word “qualifications” when she says “O what regard men who marry widows should have to the qualifications of their former husbands!” (S, 330). Similarly, describing one of Booby's attempts on Shamela, Mrs. Jervis expresses a delicate disdain for the lack of cultivation he exhibits:

As soon as my master saw her, he immediately threw his arms round her neck, and smothered her with kisses (for indeed he hath but very little to say for himself to a woman). He swore that Pamela was an ugly slut (pardon, dear Madam, the coarseness of the expression) compared to such divine excellence.

(S, 313)

Booby's having “very little to say for himself” combines two kinds of incompetence, his unprepossessing sexual technique mirroring his linguistic vulgarity.

Even though Shamela is explicitly a polemic against upward mobility, then, in Parson Williams upward mobility, through the acquisition of cultural capital, is eroticized. And if he constitutes one direction into which the powerful over-determined literacy of Pamela is diffused, in Joseph Andrews [hereafter referred to as JA] his own learning is further diffused. For one of the novel's main projects is to detach literacy from the eroticism it produces in Shamela, or to decathect literacy. Some minor parallels between them suggest that in some ways Williams functions as a trial run for Joseph Andrews. Booby complains that Williams' family was “raised from the dunghill” by his family (S, 333), and in the mock-lineage given Joseph, the narrator supposes “for Argument's sake” that he “sprung up, according to the modern Phrase, out of a Dunghill.”¹⁵ Williams' “pure round cherry cheeks” recall Joseph's ruddy cheeks: “his Beard was only rough on his Chin and upper Lip; but his Cheeks, in which his Blood glowed, were overspread with a thick Down” (JA, 38). Moreover, Shamela's exclamation “O! what a devilish thing it is, for a woman to be obliged to go to bed to a spindle shanked young squire she doth not like, when there is a jolly parson in the same house she is fond of!” (S, 333) may be compared to the narrator's contrast of Joseph to “the spindle-shanked Beaus and Petit Maitres of the Age” in Joseph Andrews (JA, 194). The erotic appeal given Williams in his merry countenance and thick legs will appear in Joseph, who, unlike Williams, has very modest educational attainments.

Joseph is represented as having a talent for reading and writing, but when Parson Adams asks him “if he did not extremely regret the want of a liberal Education,” he replies,

“he hoped he had profited somewhat better from the Books he had read, than to lament his Condition in this World. That for his part, he was perfectly content with the State to which he was called, that he should endeavor to improve his Talent, which was all required of him, but not repine at his own Lot, nor envy those of his Betters.”

(JA, 24-5)

Joseph's docile lack of desire for upward mobility is manifested in his reading of such “good Books” as the Bible and Whole Duty of Man, books which contrast with the “good books” Williams encourages Shamela to read, such as Whitefield's sermons (S, 311, 327). Moreover, one of the novel's first acts is to deny Joseph “Instruction in Latin … by which means he might be qualified for a higher Station than that of a Footman” (JA, 26). The degree of literacy that Joseph has, then, is immediately domesticated; imagining Latin as the engine of social mobility, the novel concertedly refuses him that mode of literacy that would enable a rise in station.

If Joseph is the character into which Parson Williams' erotic appeal gets translated in Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, “an excellent Scholar … a perfect Master of the Greek and Latin languages” (JA, 22), takes on Williams' classical education. And one of Adams' major formal functions in the novel is to defer the erotic union of Joseph and Fanny, a deferral that makes possible the final establishment of correct identities and class positions.

They … had conceived a very early liking for each other, which had grown to such a degree of Affection, that Mr. Adams had with much ado prevented them from marrying; and persuaded them to wait, ‘till a few Years Service and Thrift had a little improved their Experience, and enabled them to live comfortably together.

(JA, 48)

The guileless Fanny is uncharacteristically coy about mentioning Joseph when she first meets Adams: “‘La! Mr. Adams,’ said she, ‘what is Mr. Joseph to me? I am sure I never had any thing to say to him, but as one Fellow-Servant might to another’” (JA, 144). When, after the lovers' long-deferred reunion, Joseph impulsively asks the parson to marry them, “Adams rebuked him for his Request,” because the banns have not yet been published (JA, 160). Significantly, that reunion occurs under the sign of the destruction of writing: Fanny faints when she recognizes Joseph's voice from another room, at which point “Adams jumped up, flung his Aeschylus into the Fire, and fell a roaring to the People in the House for Help” (JA, 154). Indeed, learned writing is divorced from eroticism in Joseph Andrews to the extent that it becomes its very antithesis. In a trope as natural and familiar to us (and the eighteenth century) as the absent-minded professor, the esoteric pursuits of the hapless scholar are represented as comically irrelevant to real-life matters of love and reunion. There is a sense in which writing is destroyed because the novel wants to privilege the immediacy of the erotic over it. I want to suggest though, the ideological nature of this natural-seeming figure, by emphasizing that the divorce of literacy and eroticism occurs as a solution to a union between them (in Pamela first, then in Parson Williams), a union perceived as a threat to the stability of class hierarchy. That is, the celebration of the erotic reunion between the two servants has as its precondition their disqualification from literacy.

And indeed, the same kind of splitting between literacy and eroticism occurs, even more radically, in the female characters. In Joseph Andrews Shamela is split into two figures: Slipslop, who “professe[s] great regard for … Learning” and is “a mighty Affecter of hard Words” (JA, 25-6), and the new heroine, “poor Fanny,” who takes on the problematic of “modest beauty,”¹⁶ and of whom the very first description says the following:

… poor Fanny could neither write nor read, nor could she be prevailed upon to transmit the Delicacies of her tender and chaste Passion, by the Hands of an Amanuensis.

(JA, 49)

The text insists that Fanny be not only unable to read and write, but unable to profit from writing in any way. It explains Fanny's radical disqualification from literacy as an effect of her feminine modesty: she cannot “be prevailed upon to transmit the Delicacies of her tender and chaste Passion, by the Hands of an Amanuensis.” Writing, in other words, corrupts and renders unchaste female sexual desire: that is why Fanny's “Passion,” as though it were her body being handled, would go by—or perhaps through—the amanuensis's hands rather than hand, in the sense of handwriting. While in the case of the male characters literacy is linked to sexual prowess, in the female characters written representation compromises and contaminates chaste sexuality. As Parson Oliver says of Shamela's authorship of Pamela,

… though we do not imagine her the author of the narrative itself, yet we must suppose the instructions were given by her, as well as the reward, to the composer. Who that is … I shall leave you to guess from that Ciceronian eloquence, with which the work abounds; and that excellent knack of making every character amiable, which he lays his hands on.

(S, 307)

Here the text simultaneously refuses Shamela the ability to write and suggests that she is corrupt because of her association with writing; moreover, it figures the writing of the amanuensis as the eager laying on of hands.

In contrast to Fanny, in whom the absence of the letter is linked with chastity, we have Slipslop, Shamela's other double, in whom an avid semi-literacy is linked with a hideous corporeality and tainted sexuality. Like Shamela, who has made a “slip with Parson Williams” and had a baby, Slipslop “made a small Slip in her Youth, [and] had continued a good Maid ever since.” Now menopausal,

She imagined, that by so long a Self-denial she had not only made amends for the small Slip of her Youth above hinted at: but had likewise laid up a Quantity of Merit to excuse any future Failings. In a word, she resolved to give a loose to her amorous Inclinations, and pay off the Debt of Pleasure which she found she owed herself, as fast as possible.

(JA, 32)

Like Shamela, Slipslop espouses a quantitative approach to virtue: because the value of her virginity is commodified and therefore relative, she does not recognize the irreducibility of the “slip,” which is why she can “continue [] a good Maid” even after ceasing to be a good maid. She is someone who in our own time would be characterized as having a “lifestyle.” Slipslop has “some Respect for Adams; she professed great Regard for his Learning, and would frequently dispute with him on Points of Theology” (JA, 25). She is also the novel's most codified figure of cross-class imitation:

The Lady … desired to know what she meant by that extraordinary degree of Freedom in which she thought proper to indulge her Tongue. “Freedom!” says Slipslop, “I don't know what you call Freedom, Madam; Servants have Tongues as well as their Mistresses.” “Yes, and saucy ones too,” answered the Lady: “but I assure you I shall bear no such Impertinence.” “Impertinence! I don't know that I am impertinent,” says Slipslop.

(JA, 43)

Slipslop echoes her mistress's words while inflecting them with indignation, all the while disavowing any association with or knowledge of rebellion (“I don't know what you call Freedom, Madam”).

In Fanny, then, the absence of writing is linked with chastity, while the figure of Slipslop combines the letter with its concomitant social rebelliousness and sexual promiscuity. These associations suggest that female sexual corruption inheres in the letter, that Shamela and Slipslop's “slip” is literacy itself. As Shamela's mother says to Lucretia Jervis, “I received the favour of your letter, and I find you have not forgot your usual poluteness, which you learned when you was in keeping with a lord” (S, 316). Her malapropism poluteness combines politeness—propriety of writing style—with a pollution linked to the way she got it, by sexual access to the upper classes. One of the projects of Shamela and Joseph Andrews is to defuse the powerful moral charge of the Richardsonian concept of “virtue,” which means female chastity; Shamela's putative chastity is seen to be fake (“vartue”), while in Joseph Andrews the very definition of virtue as chastity is ridiculed by its being upheld by a man. I would suggest that if in Richardson “virtue” expresses itself as chastity, in Joseph Andrews it expresses itself as illiteracy. Lower-class illiteracy, that is, takes on the moral weight of chastity.

In the female servants of Joseph Andrews, then, Fielding decathects literacy by attaching it, in the case of Slipslop, to an ugly and sexually compromised body, while making both Fanny's virtue and her erotic appeal in some sense an effect of her illiteracy. But while the novel dissociates literacy from eroticism, it does not dissociate it from the body altogether; rather, it dissociates it from the erotic body and attaches it to a grotesque one. Slipslop is a vestigial fragment of the burlesque in the novel. In the Preface to Joseph Andrews, Fielding describes the burlesque as “the Exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural, and where our Delight, if we examine it, arises from the surprising Absurdity, as in appropriating the Manners of the highest to the lowest, or e converso. …” (JA, 4). The burlesque is, in other words, an exhibition of cross-class imitation that arouses delight.¹⁷ Calling burlesque writing the equivalent of caricatura in painting, Fielding offers an example of the latter's representational strategy: painting “a Man with a Nose, or any other Feature of a preposterous Size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous Attitude” (JA, 7). Slipslop, with “her Nose … rather too large, and her Eyes too little,” with her pimples, limp, and large breasts (JA, 32), is a programmatic exemplification of the burlesque. Meanwhile, Parson Adams' corporeality is such a major source of burlesque glee in the novel that Fielding feels a need to apologize in the Preface, asking his readers to “excuse me, notwithstanding the low Adventures in which he is engaged” (JA, 11). At the end of the episode in which the poet and the player kidnap Fanny, Adams is represented as having risen

in such a violent Hurry, that he had on neither Breeches nor Stockings … He had on his torn Cassock, and his Great-Coat; so did a small Strip of white, or rather whitish Linen appear below that; to which we may add the several Colours which appeared on his Face, where a long Piss-burnt Beard, served to retain the Liquor of the Stone Pot, and that of a blacker hue which distilled from the Mop.

(JA, 270).

An earlier episode in an inn results in Adams receiving a pan full of hog's blood in the face (JA, 119-20). The pleasure of these scenes comes from the congruence of the scholarly Adams and blood and piss—or the juxtaposition of writing and the burlesque.

While the figure of Slipslop may suggest that corporeality is a way of representing false learning—that is, the deformation of her body functions as a comically physical manifestation of the deformation of language—the figure of Adams suggests that in the logic of Fielding's project a burlesque corporeality goes along with learning in general. The most obvious commonsense effect of rendering literacy burlesque is to show the pressure of the low upon an ideal of classical learning: Slipslop's learning is “exposed” as vulgar and pretentious, while Adams' status as a butt of low jokes underscores the lowness of the world in which a classical ideal is struggling for authority. To say this is to remain within the realm of that Fielding criticism that reads him as satirizing modern bourgeois and Grub-Street aesthetic practices. But this pattern must also be read in the context of the novel's concerted disqualification of its lower-class characters from literacy. One might argue that the classical may have contact with the popular only on the condition that the lower classes not desire access to it; or, conversely, that the lower classes may be rendered illiterate by the novel only in conjunction with the compensatory gesture of making their potential object of desire look ludicrous and unworthy of attainment. My claim is that the figure of Adams—the scholar mired in the world's muck, whose quixotic character makes him both the moral center of the novel and the locus of a particular kind of realism—depends upon the construction of a desire cleansed of literacy, and a literacy cleansed of desire.

II. REPRESENTING FANNY

In Fielding's well-known parody of Aaron Hill's fulsome prefatory material to the second edition of Pamela—a parody that barely had to alter the original—Parson Tickletext exclaims of Richardson's novel, “… If I lay the book down it comes after me … It hath witchcraft in every page of it” (S, 305). Calling the novel a “little, unpretending, mild Triumph of Nature,” as opposed to “the false, empty Pomp of the Poets,”¹⁸ Hill's preface endlessly reiterated Pamela's lack of artifice. And so bewitching is the immediacy of Richardson's prose style to Tickletext that in an erotic haze, he confuses a character with a real person: “Oh! … methinks I see Pamela at this instant, with all the pride of ornament cast off” (S, 305).¹⁹ The decathecting of literacy and desire in the transition from Shamela to Joseph Andrews occurs within a general framework in which reading subjects are figured as desiring subjects. This section elaborates that framework, arguing that Fanny, Fielding's rewriting of Shamela—his non-writing Shamela—stands at the center of Joseph Andrews' anxieties about its own representational practice. In a written work that seeks to divorce writing from eroticism, the figure of Fanny can elicit desire because she is illiterate (for if we were to desire a literate woman, we would experience the indignity of desiring Slipslop). Indeed, it is her very disqualification from being a subject of literacy that makes her delectable as an object of literacy. Under the pressure of that contradiction, the novel constantly worries over her status as a literary image.

While the novel actually describes her body at length, the figure of Fanny often evokes ambivalence about the image, as though the novel hesitated to write her. Mourning the theft of the piece of gold that is Fanny's token of love, for example, Joseph reminds himself, “[B]ut surely, Fanny, I want nothing to remind me of thee. I have thy dear Image in my Heart, and no Villain can ever tear it thence” (JA, 58). Insofar as she is a “dear Image,” Fanny is an image to be sublimated and internalized rather than represented.²⁰ Indeed, at times the novel seems not to want her to be an image at all. One might read that curious problem of the beginning of the novel—the fact that the narrator insists that Joseph has no erotic attachment, only to introduce Fanny belatedly, explaining this contradiction with a facetious comment about the novel's opacity (JA, 48)—as a formal hitch symptomatic of the novel's hesitancy over writing Fanny. That extended deferral of the sight of her body is characteristic of the novel's treatment of her, and so is a self-conscious rhetoric of hesitation. At the end of the novel, describing her undressing for the bridal bed, the narrator exclaims “How, Reader, shall I give thee an adequate Idea of this lovely young Creature!” (JA, 343). This rhetorical exclamation of her hyperbolic beauty, and its conventional claim about the incommensurability between the beauty of her body and the power of words to represent it adequately, may be reanimated in the context of the novel's more general hesitation to describe Fanny.

When Fanny finally does enter the novel, she does so in the dark, in a long scene that plays extensively on the anxieties and comic misunderstandings resulting from her and Adams' mutual lack of recognition. They eventually recognize one another not through sight, but by hearing each other's voices: “Sure I should know that Voice,” Fanny says of Adams, and he replies, “There is something also in your Voice, which persuades me I have heard it before” (JA, 143). Not only is her voice emphasized by the novel, but as that reciprocal recognition suggests, Fanny tends to recognize others by their voices. The reunion scene with Joseph, for example, also occurs within the context of voice, Fanny recognizing him from the song he sings from another room:

Adams had been ruminating all this Time on a Passage in Aeschylus, without attending in the least to the Voice, tho' one of the most melodious that ever was heard; when casting his Eyes on Fanny, he cried out, “Bless us, you look extremely pale.”

(JA, 154)

Jill Campbell has suggested that the novel associates Joseph “with the feminine realm of ghostly presence or voice;”²¹ this passage urges us to read that stress on voice as a phonocentric repudiation of writing. Adams cannot hear the voice because he is, typically, ruminating on writing; Fanny's radical illiteracy, on the other hand, makes her particularly suited to be moved by voices.

The novel's hesitation to describe Fanny and its stress on her association with voice reach their densest interaction at the moment immediately before Fielding first describes Fanny, where he issues the following warning:

… Indeed, Reader, if thou art of an amorous Hue, I advise thee to skip over the next Paragraph; which to render our History perfect, we are obliged to set down, humbly hoping, that we may escape the Fate of Pygmalion: for if it should happen to us or to thee to be struck with this Picture, we should be perhaps in as helpless a Condition as Narcissus; and might say to ourselves, Quod petis est nusquam.

(JA, 152)

While the Pygmalion story is thematically the very opposite of the Narcissus story, Fielding's syntax sets them up as in fact the same myth, or at the very least, logical extensions of one another. He does this with the word “for”: we hope we'll escape the fate of Pygmalion, for that would make us as helpless as Narcissus. The passage's syntactic obscuring of the differences between the two myths is part of its strategy: it tries to lead the reader imperceptibly out of the realm of Pygmalion and into that of Narcissus.

The myths Fielding playfully evokes are both crucially about the desire elicited by representations. Ovid describes Pygmalion's creation of Galathea in the same terms—“So does his art conceal his art”²²—as Aaron Hill describes Richardson's style. Like the prefatory material to Pamela, the Pygmalion story is a celebration of the aliveness of the representation, and the satisfaction of the desire elicited by it. But meanwhile Fielding's preface to his description of Fanny has slid from the story of Pygmalion—the story of the representation-becoming-the-thing-itself—to the story of Narcissus, which is about the impossibility of union, the aggravated and irreducible image-ness of the image. As Ovid says of Narcissus, “He loves an unsubstantial hope and thinks that substance which is only shadow.”²³ This tricky slide from one myth to another also effects the disappearance of the woman's body from the scene—a disappearance enacted not only in the shift from Pygmalion to Narcissus, but also within the Narcissus story itself, which is predicated upon Echo grieving so much her body disappears, leaving her all voice:

… Only her voice and her bones remain: then, only voice … She hides in woods and is seen no more upon the mountain-sides; but all may hear her, for voice, and voice alone, still lives in her.²⁴

One might claim that the passage's climactic shift out of English into Latin is still another way it makes the figure of the woman vanish; for as Ong points out, as a cultural institution Latin entailed a complex masculinist ethos, and the entry of women into the schools in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with its decline.²⁵

While we might, as Fielding certainly did, identify Richardson's writing style with the story of Pygmalion, in this passage the representation of the female body occurs, paradoxically, within a fantasy of its disappearance and its relegation to the ghostly realm of voice. And when the narrator warns us that looking at Fanny we may be prompted to say, like Narcissus, “Quod petis est nusquam”—“What you seek is nowhere”—he is articulating a danger which we may take to be in fact a wish: a wish that the erotic object be in fact nowhere, an “unsubstantial hope, a shadow.” Not only does Joseph Andrews will the lower-class woman to remain within the realm of the aural rather than the literary, but it wishes that the desire elicited by her image could be diffused by calling attention to its ontological status as pure representation. If reading is to generate desire—a phenomenon that much of the novel tries to negate—Fielding emphasizes that such desire cannot be realized, that its object is nowhere. While this is a general lesson about the novel, I would argue that it is most crucially aimed at the lower-class and particularly servant readers whose sexual desire is figured as indistinguishable from their desire for upward mobility.

But I don't want to read Fielding as concerned in any simple way with preserving class privilege and disciplining the poor. For the disciplinary gestures of Joseph Andrews come along with other kinds of gestures that we might call democratizing: not only bringing the classical into contact with the popular, but also imagining the upward mobility of the servant characters. McKeon has suggested that the novel qualifies its own egalitarian ending by making it a function of family romance, the restoration of lost familial relations: therefore, “what ‘happens’ at the end of Joseph Andrews (and Tom Jones) is less a social than an epistemological event; not upward mobility but … the acquisition of knowledge.”²⁶ The potential social instability generated by a rise in station, then, is tempered by the revelation that Joseph was in fact always already gentle. I am suggesting a similar mitigation of the upward mobility fantasy in the novel's decathecting of literacy. By decathecting literacy in the transition from burlesque to novel, Fielding creates an egalitarian fantasy of social mobility while wishing that fantasy inaccessible to those perhaps most eager for it.

Such a double and contradictory move comes not without its affective costs; the intensity of Fielding's ambivalence over lower-class literacy pushes this most genial of novels into a kind of melancholy. The elegiac mode of Fielding's comic novels has been discussed most recently in Jill Campbell's compelling and persuasive article about Joseph Andrews' portrayal of gender, recognition, and mortal loss, “‘The Exact Picture of his Mother’: Recognizing Joseph Andrews.” Campbell argues that Joseph's implication in femininity—embattled chastity, for example, and the “feminine realm of ghostly presence or voice”—links him to what Fielding figures as an essentially feminine “hope for reunion rather than resignation to absence in a world characterized not only by violence and death but by separations and mistakings.” For in Joseph Andrews, she writes,

… [A]n elegiac strain may represent not only mourning for the absence of the dead but some element of mourning for the absence of the living to each other—an absence otherwise accommodated as the comedy of Adams's absentmindedness, for example, or of slapstick confusions, an absence treated largely satirically rather than sentimentally.²⁷

My argument slightly slants Campbell's claims about the ghostly realm of voice and its evocation of mortal loss, by reading it as the realm of the aural, as implicated in literacy. That Fanny is not recognized by Adams, for example, may be read as a function of the novel's reluctance to present her as an image to a desiring reader, and its wish to keep her within the realm of voice. That Fanny and Joseph must be continually separated, and Fanny continually endangered, is partly an effect of a logic in which Adams, as the embodiment of the letter, must keep them apart. The melancholy of Joseph Andrews betrays, I'm suggesting, a certain ideological exertion: the effort it takes to police the boundaries between literacy and desire.

And yet, a utopian undercurrent persists in Joseph Andrews. Adams's triumphant shout of “Hic est quem quaeris, inventus est”—“Here is the one whom you seek; he is found” (JA, 339)—rewrites “What you seek is nowhere” in a masculine key, uniting Latin and the reunion of Joseph and his father. Indeed, the utopian undercurrent persists in the hint of a promise that literacy will be recathected. The figure who lends Adams the money to pay his inn bill and who later reappears at Booby Hall, restoring identities, reuniting families, and enabling marriage to occur, is a pedlar. But Fielding's providential agent gets Book IV off to a disastrous false start, when he reveals information that threatens to prohibit the sexual union of Joseph and Fanny: the fact that they might be brother and sister. One might defamiliarize this conventional swerve on the way to sexual union by suggesting that in this case, its prohibition occurs because the pedlar emanates the promise of reading—functions, as it were, as a magical token of literacy. For as Margaret Spufford has shown, among the goods sold by these peripatetic pedlars were books.²⁸ On the way to its resolution, then, the narrative takes a false step, by moving according to the old logic; but the pedlar may be said to recathect literacy by ultimately facilitating the marriage of Joseph and Fanny. He also saves Parson Adams' son Dicky from drowning—the son who will later regale a gathered audience with his Latin lesson:

’And now, Child, What is the English of Lego?’—to which the Boy, after long puzzling, answered, he could not tell. ‘How,“cries Adams in a Passion,—’What hath the Water washed away your Learning? Why, what is Latin for the English Verb read? Consider before you speak.’—The Child considered some time, and then the Parson cried twice or thrice, ‘Le-, Le-.’—Dick answered, ‘Lego.’—’Very well;—and then, what is the English,’ says the Parson, ‘of the Verb Lego?—’To read,’ cried Dick.—’Very well,’ said the Parson, ‘a good Boy, you can do well, if you will take pains. …’

(JA, 314)

Dicky may be unpromising, or recalcitrant, but Fielding's text stutters and repeats the words—lego, I read—that will, perhaps, guarantee the eight-year-old a better life than service.

Notes

1. On the problem of enclosure see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), and on the problem of shifting relations between masters and servants see Bruce Robbins, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

2. See Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); J. Paul Hunter, “Some Notes on Readers and the Beginnings of the English Novel,” in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987): 259-82; Victor Neuburg, Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (London: Woburn Press, 1971), chapters 1, 4; Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957).

3. See in particular Hugh Amory, “Shamela as Aesopic Satire,” ELH 38 ((June 1971): 239-53; Eric Rothstein, “The Framework of Shamela,” ELH 35 (Sept. 1968): 381; and Ian Watt, “Shamela,” in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1962), 45-51. These readings point toward specific historical referents for the characters, and concern the political conflict between Walpole and the Opposition. One problem with this kind of reading is that the figure of Walpole acquires a truly dream-like overdetermined status—that is, all the characters turn out to be Walpole.

4. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 396. See also Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Richardson's biographers comment irately that Fielding, “as an educated man, disapproved of Richardson's detailed realism and his ‘lowness’ and thus can be regarded as a reactionary classicist who failed to see the freshness of Pamela.” T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 128-9.

5. Robbins, 6. Robbins argues that servants occupy a “sliding, indeterminate ideological position … a position which is both popular and political to the extent that it articulates a variety of ideological aspirations and disturbances that ‘represent’ the people without being exclusive to or defining them” (54). See also John Richetti, “Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, Inc., 1987), 84-98.

6. J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 121, 206-24.

7. Fielding was born to a gentle family; his father—a younger son of a younger son—was a military man, and his mother the daughter of a judge of the Queen's Bench. He was educated at Eton and Leyden; with his mother's death and the diminution of the family property, and his father's remarriage and subsequent large family, he was thrown upon his own resources, and turned to the theater for a living. Six years after the publication of Shamela, he married his late wife's maid. See Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), vol. 1, chapters 1-2.

8. Henry Fielding, The Grub-Street Opera, ed. Edgar V. Roberts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 70-3. The promise of feasting on the pig recalls the swineherd Eumaios's offer to the disguised Odysseus of a fattened pig, which is generally meant for the aristocratic suitors, rather than a young pig, which is food for the servants. Robbins writes of the scene in the Odyssey: “Eumaios' hospitable gesture has an apocalyptic excess. In its generosity it delivers the right to enjoy the fruits of the land to everyone, Odysseus and servingmen alike” (29).

9. Fielding, The Grub-Street Opera, 67, 59.

10. Amory, “Shamela as Aesopic Desire,” 244. They seem to me to be missing something important about the text's affect: it is hard to ignore that Fielding's Lord of Misrule scenario is often rather genial about the incipient class-consciousness of the servants, and contains elements one might call, after Robbins, utopian.

11. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 373, 371; Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 20.

12. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, 308. All further references are cited parenthetically in the text (S).

13. Richardson, Pamela, 83.

14. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 209.

15. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 21. All further references are cited parenthetically in the text (JA).

16. Some verbal echoes: While in Shamela Fielding writes that “the thought is everywhere exactly clothed by the expression; and becomes its dress as roundly and as close as Pamela her country habit” (S, 304), Fanny is dressed “close”: “so plump, that she seemed bursting through her tight Stays, especially in the Part which confined her swelling Breasts” (JA, 152). Fanny's “swelling Breasts” likewise recall Booby's confused exclamation to Shamela—“I know not whether you are a man or a woman, unless by your swelling breasts” (S, 313-14)—which we can in turn refer back to Joseph's dismayed insistence to Lady Booby that he doesn't “know whether any Maid in the House is Man or Woman” (JA, 334), and Adams's vow when he is caught accidentally in bed with Fanny: “As I am a Christian, I know not whether she is a Man or Woman” (JA, 334).

17. In a companion piece to this article, “The Comic Novel and the Poor: Fielding's Preface to Joseph Andrews” (forthcoming, Eighteenth-Century Studies), I discuss the category of the burlesque in relation to the Preface's concern with Fielding's shift from popular—that is, theatrical—entertainment to literary representation. The shift Fielding announces in the Preface, from an aural/visual to a literary mode of artistic production, may be read, I argue, as a manifestation in the realm of the aesthetic of the larger social processes that attempted to exclude the lower classes from forms of collective festivity. Fielding's account of generic transition is accompanied by an anxious reflection on the potential immorality of written representation, and a concomitant meditation on the types of pleasure to be gained from comic writing.

18. Richardson, Pamela, 10.

19. Pierre Bourdieu characterizes this kind of reading as a “popular aesthetic”: “Popular taste … performs a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life … Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation … more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe ‘naively’ in the things represented.” Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 5.

20. One is reminded of Derrida's account of the ideology of “natural writing”: “There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 17. Joseph's song in the reunion scene is also crucially about images: about the “dear Image” of Chloe in his breast, which he alternately defends (“… no Tyrant's hard Power, / Her Image can tear from my Breast”), bemoans (“How can it thy dear Image be, / Which fills thus my Bosom with Woe?”), and repudiates as “Counterfeit” because it brings him grief rather than joy.

21. Jill Campbell, “‘The Exact Picture of His Mother’: Recognizing Joseph Andrews,” ELH 55.3 (Fall 1988): 651.

22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), III, 433.

23. Ovid, III, 417.

24. Ovid, III, 396-400.

25. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 251.

26. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 408.

27. Campbell, “Recognizing Joseph Andrews,” 657, 653.

28. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, Chapter 5. My thanks to Douglas Patey for suggesting that I read Fielding's pedlar in the light of Spufford's account.