Even in the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding's substitution of a man for a woman in Richardson's plot does not function as simply as it might seem to at first glance. The inversion it creates is comic and strikes us as a kind of parodic reduction of Richardson's high drama; but it also confronts us with the question of what has been reduced in the act of substitution—why what is virtue in one sex comes off as triviality in the other. If, as Schilling says, Joseph's assumption of his sister's virtue looks as ridiculous as "dressing a man in woman's clothes," Fielding reminds us of a surprising similarity between virtues and clothing by showing us chastity worn out of fashion, out of character, on the wrong occasion. In the auction scene in The Historical Register Fielding expressed a clearly satiric view on the externality and adventitiousness of virtues by presenting them for sale in the form of clothing and cosmetics, whose prices reflect fashion's whim. In the opening scene of Joseph Andrews, he only raises our awareness that a virtue's value depends on its bearer, implying that Pamela's virtue might itself be "assumed," but not clearly guiding our conclusions about whether virtue should look ridiculous when it appears as cross-dressing.¹

A male Pamela reminds us of assumptions about gender roles by defying them, though we are free to laugh at him or reconsider them. More specifically, he makes visible the conventional analogizing of class and gender structures by standing in different relations to the two. When Fielding replaces Richardson's woman with a man in the position of sexually embattled servant, he not only displaces the defense of chastity from its traditional female preserve but also breaks the correspondence between socioeconomic and sexual disempowerment in Richardson's protagonist. Pamela could become a virtually mythic representative of the culturally disentitled because her age, gender, and class position all coincide in powerlessness; the mythologizing of her powerlessness serves complex ideological functions in Richardson's novel, a vehicle for both progressive and conservative suggestion.² The very associations between class and gender positions employed by critics when they liken Richardson to a woman writer are explored by Fielding when he replays Richardson's scenario in a different key, separating the part of masculinity from the position of social and economic power. The scenes between Lady Booby and Joseph especially foreground the tension between hierarchies of class and of gender in Fielding's narrative, expressed by the mistress Lady Booby as a titillating form of sexual tension:³

"La!" says she, in an affected Surprize, "what am I doing? I have trusted myself with a Man alone, naked in Bed; suppose you should have any wicked Intentions upon my Honour, how should I defend myself? … But then, say you, the World will never know any thing of the Matter, yet would not that be trusting to your Secrecy? Must not my Reputation be then in your power? Would you not then be my Master?" (30)

When Lady Booby voices astonishment at Joseph's reference to his own virtue in the second interview between them—"Your Virtue! Intolerable Confidence! Have you the Assurance to pretend, that when a Lady demeans herself to throw aside the Rules of Decency, … your Virtue should resist her Inclination?"—Joseph's defense oddly aligns his masculinity and his poverty. "'Madam,' said Joseph, 'I can't see why her having no Virtue should be a Reason against my having any. Or why, because I am a Man, or because I am poor, my Virtue must be subservient to her Pleasures"' (41). Pamela must resist the assumption that because she is doubly powerless as a woman and a poor one her virtue should be subservient to her master's pleasures; Joseph must defend his right to control his own virtue against a more complicated pairing of assumptions—his disentitlement as a servant limits his power to act on his own virtue while his sexual entitlement as a man limits the dramatic authority of his desire to do so. Lady Booby had reminded Joseph in their first interview of the greater physical vulnerability of women, even socially superior women, to sexual attack ("how should I defend myself?"), and her outrage at Joseph's resistance when she voluntarily invites sexual advances reflects a sense that the relative invulnerability of male chastity to coercion makes it less valued, less available as a privileged symbol of self-determination—the symbol on which Pamela's story centered.⁴

These early scenes of Joseph Andrews contain some suggestion of an inquiry into the deep cultural assumption (made explicit in Lady Matchless and Vermilia's remarks in Love in Several Masques) that the interior realm of private virtue belongs to woman, and that the greater physical (and social) power of a man makes any claim he might assert to personal or sexual virtue a misplaced pretense. These scenes do not foreclose the possibility that we should take a man's chastity more seriously than we do, or that a masculine version of private virtue might be conceived; but they also include the possibility that a man's claim to private virtue can only be modeled on a woman's and will necessarily involve him in a laughable kind of cross-dressing of identity.⁵ After asserting his right to his own virtue, though poor and a man, Joseph immediately goes on to reject Lady Booby's incredulity about a boy's virtue by declaring that "that Boy is the Brother of Pamela"—his virtue taken from his sister's wardrobe. In the first book of Joseph Andrews Joseph is feminized by his economic vulnerability (the "defenseless" Lady Booby deprives him of his employment, has him stripped of his livery, and denies him the "character" that would have allowed him to find other employment), by his appearance in the conventionally female role of embattled chastity, and by his reliance on his sister's example in conceiving the importance of his own virtue. With Pamela as the immediately proximate representative of femininity, Joseph's connection with female identity in the novel's opening scenes works predominantly to render him ridiculous.

But a connection between Joseph and female identity will prove crucial to the end of the novel as well, when Joseph has left his initial appearance as parodic reduction far behind him. In the scene that provides a comic resolution to the novel's plot, Gammar Andrews reveals the key to Joseph's obscured birth, history, and true family relations: he came into the Andrews family as a sick boy substituted in the cradle by gypsies for a healthy girl. The long-ago exchange of Joseph and Fanny that emerges in Joseph Andrews' recognition scene reasserts as the identifying feature of Joseph's character the substitution of boy for girl that we were aware of in the novel's inaugural joke. Though he is not interested in the exchange of genders involved, Homer Obed Brown comments that this secret event in Joseph's past "might perhaps be allegorized as part of the shifting and substitutional nature of the relationship between Fielding's text and Richardson's,"⁶ and we can give that allegory more specific content when we see it repeat the relation between Joseph and a female character in the novel's opening. It repeats it with a difference, however: the substitution has now come inside Fielding's own narrative, as plot device rather than as an allusive relation to a prior text, and it now places Joseph in a physical space previously occupied by a girl rather than in her feminine role.

The literalizing of the substitution removes it from its earlier parodic purpose and satiric reflection on Joseph's character—although, suggestively, Gammar Andrews implies that the gypsies left Joseph in Fanny's place because he was such "a poor sickly Boy, that did not seem to have an Hour to live" (337). The sickliness that motivated this exchange might be said to feminize Joseph the way his reliance on Pamela's example did. But in an aside, Gammar Andrews at once asserts the identity between the past and present Josephs and marks the change between them: "the poor Infant (which is our Joseph there, as stout as he now stands) lifted up its Eyes upon me so piteously, that to be sure, notwithstanding my Passion, I could not find in my heart to do it any mischief." Though the infant Joseph's self-protection through piteous appeal is reminiscent of Pamela's, the girl with whom he is associated through the exchange in the cradle turns out to hold a relation to the grown Joseph quite different from Pamela's in the novel's first book. At the beginning of the novel, Joseph has replaced a female character to whom he claims a genealogical tie and family resemblance, and with whom he is mimetically identified, modeling himself on her through the notion of moral "example"; the end of the novel reveals that Joseph has occupied the same space as a female character with whom he will eventually be erotically rather than mimetically united.

The ending of the novel cancels its opening's version of Joseph's relation to female identity not only through repetition with a difference but through the details of its plot resolution: the story of the gypsies' exchange is also what establishes that Joseph is not Pamela's brother (or Fanny's, for that matter). As Joseph is released from a genealogical relation to Richardson's heroine by the revelations of the novel's conclusion, so Fielding's work itself has gained a kind of autonomy from its predecessor in the course of the novel, finally insisting that an accurate identification of its main character can only be made within the perimeter of its own narrative.⁷ And still, when the novel comes to providing its own history for the character of Joseph, it concludes by creating an alternative, narrative version of that same fluid relation to feminine identity in which Joseph first appeared—by making Joseph, again, a changeling of gender, though perhaps of another kind.

Before Joseph's history is revealed, a series of what Fielding calls "curious Night-Adventures" occur among those spending the night at Lady Booby's, and provide one last deferral of plot resolution. The content of these adventures prepares us for the importance of gender substitutions in the news that arrives in the morning, confirming that that feature of Joseph's history is not a narrative accident. The adventures occupy all of book 4, chapter 14, and begin with Beau Didapper's plan to impersonate Joseph and to seduce Fanny by taking Joseph's place in her bed. His plan goes awry immediately, however, when he enters Slipslop's bedroom rather than Fanny's; and when Slipslop cries out for help and Adams runs to her rescue, the confusions in identity that create the farcical upheaval of the chapter become confusions specifically of gender identity:

[Adams] made directly to the Bed in the dark, where laying hold of the Beau's Skin (for Slipslop had torn his Shirt almost off) and finding his Skin extremely soft, and hearing him in a low Voice begging Slipslop to let him go, he no longer doubted but this was the young Woman in danger of ravishing, and immediately falling on the Bed, and laying hold on Slipslop's Chin, where he found a rough Beard, his Belief was confirmed; he therefore rescued the Beau. (331-32)

This scene anticipates the interchanging of genders in a bed that will be revealed the next morning as the hidden secret of Joseph's identity; it also recalls the comic recasting of the embattled chastity story of the novel's opening, imagining a man rather than a woman as in need of rescue—but here only as the characters of the drama are misrecognized by Adams. When we place the revelation of the gypsies' replacement of Fanny with Joseph in the context of the night-adventures that precede it, we might broaden the allegory Brown finds in it, and see it as one emblematic moment in a sustained investigation of the "shifting and substitutional nature" of the relationship not only between Fielding's and Richardson's texts but also between the two sexes.

Lady Booby soon arrives on the scene of Adams, Slipslop, and Didapper's struggle and straightens out the story, sending Adams back to his room. But all paths lead to confusion on this night before the novel's plot is resolved, and Adams makes a wrong turn and enters Fanny's room—the room Didapper had been seeking to start with—and sleeps, oblivious, beside her for hours. All paths lead specifically, that is, to gender confusion: when awakened by a surprised Joseph in the morning, Adams protests repeatedly, "I know not whether she is a Man or Woman"; he insists that his male clothes have been "bewitched away too, and Fanny's brought into their place"; and he is only convinced of the truth of the situation when Joseph points out that "the Women's Apartments were on this side Mrs. Slipslop's Room, and the Men's on the other," and that "it was plain he had mistaken, by turning to the right instead of the left" (334-35). Gender structures even the physical space in which these characters reside, and in the comic entr'acte through which they must pass before Joseph's identity is revealed, the possibility of wrong turns in gender identification is underscored with all the literalizing insistence and extremity of farce.

The burlesque treatment of gender inversions and confusions in this scene may remind us of the farcical inversions and slapstick action centering on gender in Fielding's Tom Thumb, Pasquin, or The Author's Farce. Early in the novel, Joseph's assumption of feminine roles potentially grouped him with the effeminate men satirized repeatedly in Fielding's plays, but in this scene he stands notably on the sidelines of theatrical role-confusions—he is even instrumental in sorting out the last of the confusions.⁸ It is Beau Didapper, instead, whose gender is comically compromised in this scene; and in several ways Didapper's character is imported so directly from the comic repertoire of Fielding's theatrical days as to make it appear incongruous in the pages of Joseph Andrews. Not only do Fielding's choice of a name for the beau, his references to him as a Hylas rather than a Hercules (303 and 333), and his description of his physical appearance place him among the sexually ambiguous beaux of Fielding's dramatic satires; but the echoes of Conyers Middleton's dedication of his Life of Cicero in Fielding's description of Didapper's "qualifications" identify him with Lord Hervey in particular, a frequent butt of the political/sexual satire in his plays (312-13, 313 n. 1).

While the world of Fielding's plays was filled with characters that suggested themselves as versions of one or more offstage actors, Beau Didapper, entering the novel quite late, seems oddly anomalous as the one character in Joseph Andrews with a pointed historical referent. His presence reminds us that in the largely political context of Fielding's plays, figures of compromised gender were usually clearly negative ones, implicated in compromises of political, moral, or literary categories as well. Beau Didapper's character also shadows Joseph's own—at least in broad outline. Both of them replay, in different ways, the story of Potiphar's wife: Fielding alerts us to that story as the source of Joseph's name when he begins to call him Joseph rather than Joey (29 and 47),9 but he in fact recalls the biblical story in more detail (the woman's self-serving accusations of rape, the piece of the man's garment left behind serving as evidence) in Didapper's encounter with Slipslop than in Lady Booby's interviews with Joseph. Taking over the allusive context that had provided Joseph's very name, Beau Didapper might seem to present a dark mirror to the character of Joseph, as a satiric doubling of the theme of compromised gender.

To invoke Lord Hervey as the original of Beau Didapper has the effect of making Didapper a kind of self-conscious Cliché of gender problems within the corpus of Fielding's own works, the easily recognizable sign of the negative possibilities of gender compromise; and Fielding's treatment of Didapper identifies him with both the theatrical forms and some of the recurrent satiric subjects of his early writings. Robert Alter notes that some of the Beau's actions "read like comic stage directions translated into the idiom of the novel." He observes that Fielding also "appl[ies] in new ways techniques he had learned in his years of writing for the theater" in the dialogue he writes for Lady Booby: in her defense of her virtue, "Lady Booby's hypocrisy confesses itself with such splendidly lucid theatricality that it is entirely appropriate for Fielding to include actual stage directions, properly italicized."¹⁰ Within the novel, the theatricality of Lady Booby's manner of expression is acknowledged in Joseph's first letter to Pamela: "and she held my Hand, and talked exactly as a Lady does to her Sweetheart in a Stage-Play, which I have seen in Convent-Garden, while she wanted him to be no better than he should be" (31).

The theatrical thus appears within Joseph Andrews not only as a literary mode, but as a characterizing manner of self-expression, and even a style of sexuality for both Lady Booby and her "distant relation," Beau Didapper (303)—one that Joseph recognizes and specifically rejects. The little we learn of Didapper's sexuality establishes its similarity to the purely mimetic and mediated desire, concentrated upon display and "reputation," which Fielding had represented in the beaux and castrato-lovers of his dramatic satires (and which he touches upon in Wilson's story of his life as a London fop, 203-4). In his ironic description of Didapper's "Qualifications" he tells us that he was "no Hater of Women; for he always dangled after them; yet so little subject to Lust, that he had, among those who knew him best, the Character of great Moderation in his Pleasures" (312); and the Beau confirms this character when, after being routed from the wrong bed in his attempt at a sexual adventure, "he was far from being ashamed of his Amour, and rather endeavoured to insinuate that more than was really true had past between him and the fair Slipslop" (336).

Beau Didapper's plan to seduce Fanny, which sets all of the "curious Night-Adventures" in motion, relies on the fact that "he was an excellent Mimick." We have heard something of this earlier when he frightened the members of Adams's household with a display of his wit in announcing his party's arrival at Adams's cottage by "mimicking" with his cane "the rap of a London Footman at the Door" (312)." The role Didapper mimics at Adams's door is one Joseph has actually filled earlier in the novel—we meet him first, in action, as a London footman—and when we see Didapper practice mimicry for the second time, it is Joseph in particular that he impersonates: "he groped out the Bed with difficulty; for there was not a Glimpse of Light, and opening the Curtains, he whispered in Joseph's Voice (for he was an excellent Mimick), 'Fanny, my Angel … "' (330). Through his emphasis on Beau Didapper's reliance on mimicry, especially as focused on Joseph, Fielding suggests one possible relation between the two male figures of compromised gender in this novel: that the Beau is just a poor dramatic impersonation of something more complicated in Joseph's character.

Didapper's doubling of aspects of Joseph's identity may function, then, not to reflect badly on Joseph but to split Fielding's initially ambiguous treatment of him into a pair of linked characters, one clearly satirically conceived and the other positive. Occurring on the brink of the revelation of Joseph's true identity, Beau Didapper's appearance seems to work to free Joseph of some of the dangers or satiric potential of his compromised gender position by embodying them in someone else, locating the negative version of mixed gender identity specifically in someone also implicated in play-acting. Didapper's very anomalousness within the novel provides a measure of how far Fielding has moved, in creating Joseph, from the satiric treatment of the effeminate man in his plays.

Much earlier in the novel, Fielding associated Joseph with another standard satiric figure from his plays: the Italian castrato singers so popular in the London opera at this time. The decision to associate his romantic hero with the figure of the castrato is surely a bold one, and in examining Fielding's treatment of that association we can begin to explore to what end he might create a hero of ambiguous gender to start with—what positive purposes such a design might hope to achieve—and by what means he works, gradually, to disengage his hero from the expected negative burden of such a role.¹²

At the beginning of Joseph Andrews, Abraham Adams first notices Joseph in church, where "his Voice gave him an Opportunity of distinguishing himself by singing Psalms" (22). Later in the novel, Joseph is recognized by the sound of his voice (see, for example, 154 and 295). We are told that Joseph distinguished himself particularly in music while in London, so that "he led the Opinion of all the other Footmen at an Opera, and they never condemned or applauded a single Song contrary to his Approbation or Dislike" (27). Lest the reader forget the focus of Fielding's satiric concern with the opera in his plays, soon after Joseph's success at the opera is reported, Slipslop reminds us of it, sharply responding to Lady Booby's censure of "lewdness" in her house: "'If you will turn away every Footman,' said Slipslop, 'that is a lover of the Sport, you must soon open the Coach-Door yourself, or get a Sett of Mophrodites to wait upon you; and I am sure I hated the Sight of them even singing in an Opera"' (43). But the Joseph she calls "a strong healthy luscious Boy enough" (35) has already been more pointedly associated by the narrator with those "hermaphrodites" she abhors. In summarizing the brief and rather uneventful history of Joseph's life before the action of the novel opens, the narrator explained the vicissitudes of his employment in the Booby household:

the young Andrews was at first employed in what in the Country they call keeping Birds. His Office was to perform the Part the Antients assigned to the God Priapus, which Deity the Moderns call by the Name of Jack-o '-Lent: but his Voice being so extremely musical, that it rather allured the Birds than terrified them, he was soon transplanted from the Fields into the Dog-kennel, where he was placed under the Huntsman, and made what Sportsmen term a Whipper-in. For this Place likewise the Sweetness of his Voice disqualified him: the Dogs preferring the Melody of his chiding to all the alluring Notes of the Huntsman. (21-22)

Fielding refers to the humble task Joseph is given of scaring off birds from the fields as "the Part of Priapus," introducing into the English landscape the image of this ancient figure, a daimon of fertility often represented as a grotesquely misshapen man with a huge and erect phallus, and sometimes represented simply as the phallus itself, "the other human attributes being incidental."¹³ Joseph is found unfit for this part by the sweetness of his voice—like the castrati, he combines an alluringly sweet voice with a disqualification from phallic office.¹⁴

Why would Fielding want to link the man who will gradually emerge as the hero of his novel to the castrati he had so satirized in his plays? In those works the figure of the castrato serves not only as an object of ridicule but as an occasion to defend the very practice of ridicule: Fielding's satire of him involves an account of satire itself, imagined as threatened directly by the castrato's popularity. The allusions to this satiric subject within Joseph Andrews, then, may function not just to adapt the humor of his dramatic satires to the novel form but to reexamine the nature of that humor, and to reflect on his old and new forms. As we saw in Chapter I, Fielding had repeatedly associated the castrati's popularity with a moral decline, making explicit an assumption that moral rigor resides in a specifically phallic authority, and that such rigor is enforced specifically by the instrument of satire. For example, in his epilogue to The Intriguing Chambermaid (1733), he opposes the "soft Italian warblers" who "have no sting" and "no harm within" to satire, which "may wound some pretty thing" and "gives the wounded hearer pain." He concludes the epilogue by expressing sympathy with his female audience's choice of opera over other forms of drama, but his sympathy and approval are only ironic: although he describes the phallic satire that "soft Italian warblers" lack as aggressive and wounding, as a lashing rod, he defends it as a necessary aggression in the service of moral correction, like the disciplines of the schoolmaster and the preacher. In Joseph Andrews Fielding allows himself to explore more openly some of the negative dimensions of phallic satire, the possibility that its aggression is at times primary and the moral purpose of its application not assured. Though Fielding pokes fun at Joseph's compromised gender identity in the passage quoted above by showing his failure in the part of phallic enforcement—his office of chasing the birds off—he also pokes fun at the image of a more adequate masculinity by choosing to imagine it in the figure of the grotesque Priapus, all phallus and no form.

Two books later, Fielding will give more extended and serious treatment to the negative dimensions of conventional masculine identity that Joseph may be created to evade: the Roasting-Squire who bursts upon the scene in book 3, chapter 6, and dominates the chapters that follow provides a dark embodiment of irresponsible satiric impulses allied with the misuse of masculine power. Associated, too, with drama, the Roasting-Squire requires us to understand Joseph Andrews as a complicated reflection not only on Richardson's Pamela but on Fielding's own most popular early works, his dramatic satires. By the time we meet the Roasting-Squire, however, Fielding's characterization of Joseph has evolved to make him a more viable alternative to the portrait of masculinity we find there; and before we turn in Chapter 3 to the problem represented by the Squire, we must trace the way Fielding gradually redefines Joseph's compromised gender. He begins by superimposing the figure of the castrato, familiar from his dramatic satires, onto Joseph, and then separates Joseph in certain ways from that figure to free him from its negative associations—he thus uses the old figure in a new way to explore some of the more positive possibilities represented by the castrato's escape from monolithic phallic identity.

Fielding's description of Joseph's physical appearance early in the novel offers a simple example of his construction of Joseph's gender in equivocal terms, but an example in which we can already see the value given to that equivocation becoming less strictly negative. Indeed, Fielding provides his description of Joseph's appearance when he does so that we may better understand the temptation Joseph is about to present to Lady Booby. Schilling comments that Fielding makes Joseph's assumption of feminine virtue "seem the more outlandish by a glowing description of Joseph's physical beauty," but as Fielding sketches the features of Joseph's body and face for us, we find that his particular form of physical beauty combines the feminine with the masculine.¹⁵ Fielding introduces the special nature of Joseph's attraction by alluding to "the uncommon Variety of Charms, which united in this young Man's Person"; what is uncommon about them is that they bring together, in his person, beauties traditionally granted to each gender. The systematic way in which Fielding surveys the separate features of Joseph's appearance is itself reminiscent of descriptive techniques conventionally applied to women:¹⁶

[Joseph Andrews] was of the highest Degree of middle Stature. His Limbs were put together with great Elegance and no less Strength. His Legs and Thighs were formed in the exactest Proportion. His Shoulders were broad and brawny, but yet his Arms hung so easily, that he had all the Symptoms of Strength without the least clumsiness. His Hair was of a nut-brown Colour, and was displayed in wanton Ringlets down his Back. His Forehead was high, his Eyes dark, and as full of Sweetness as of Fire. His Nose a little inclined to the Roman. His Teeth white and even. His Lips full, red, and soft. 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. His Countenance had a Tenderness joined with a Sensibility inexpressible. (38)

The first sentence of the description establishes a rhythm of assertion followed by qualification which serves to characterize Joseph throughout the passage: his height is of the highest degree—of middle stature. Repeatedly, the syntax of the description creates hinges between assertions and their modification which either pair disparate characteristics, providing a balanced weighting of qualities associated with masculine and feminine beauty ("great Elegance and no less Strength," "as full of Sweetness as of Fire"), or insist on the distinction between a positive masculine characteristic assigned to Joseph and some negative extension of it ("His Shoulders were broad and brawny; but yet his Arms hung so easily, that he had all the Symptoms of Strength without the least clumsiness"). The description of Beau Didapper that Fielding will provide in book 4, chapter 9, not only mockingly echoes Middleton's praise of Hervey, but parallels, in its balanced weighting of qualities, the syntax of this earlier description of Joseph. The "moderation" achieved by the balanced weighting there is handled, however, as Fielding acknowledges, "negatively": "He had lived too much in the World to be bashful, and too much at Court to be proud … No Hater of Women; for he always dangled after them; yet so little subject to Lust, that he had, among those who knew him best, the Character of great Moderation in his Pleasures" (312). While Fielding emphasizes what's lacking from Didapper's body—he is four feet five inches tall, scarce of hair, "thin and pale," with "very narrow Shoulders, and no Calf'—the balance of qualities in Joseph is not achieved negatively, by absence. Though the description of Joseph immediately precedes the interview in which Joseph declares himself "the brother of Pamela," Fielding does not broaden his parody of a "male Pamela" in it by denying him the strength and brawn of a traditionally masculine body.

At the same time, though, Fielding carefully negotiates Joseph's particular relation to expectations about the masculine body. He emphasizes the presence of a "Tenderness" and a "Sensibility" in Joseph's countenance that is "inexpressible"; along with his male massiveness, there is something elusive here that is traditionally associated with female beauty.¹⁷ Even Joseph's beard equivocates: it is rough below, but downy above, in a way that allows the flush of his blood to appear. Finally, if his facial hair presents us visually with some kind of vertical distribution of Joseph's complex sexual identity, Fielding's description of his "Ringlets" complicates Joseph's gender identification in another direction, in the relation between narrative foreground and the background of literary echo, where it again crosses into association with a woman.

The display of Joseph's hair in "wanton Ringlets down his Back" seems an apparently insignificant flourish in the description of his pretty-boy good looks, but the phrase "wanton Ringlets" connects Fielding's description of Joseph's physical appearance to the passage in Paradise Lost that first introduces a structuring principle of gender into the poem's cosmos. Traveling with Satan in his approach to the Garden of Eden, the reader of Paradise Lost first glimpses Adam and Eve when Satan does, in book IV. Milton presents him and us with the "two of far nobler shape erect and tall" among God's new creatures, saying that "the image of their glorious Maker shone" in them both.¹⁸

                          though both
Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem'd;
For contemplation hee and valor form'd,

For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him:
His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar'd
Absolute rule; and Hyacinthine Locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clust'ring, but not beneath his shoulders broad:
Shee as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevell'd, but in wanton ringlets wav'd
IV.295-306)

Though Joseph's hair is just one of a number of features of his appearance that Fielding describes, the passage from Paradise Lost that he recalls by referring to Joseph's "wanton Ringlets" gives hairstyle a singular importance. Milton chooses it, rather than the more obvious differences of bodily parts or shape or size, to represent the difference in identity created by sex in the first man and woman.¹⁹ But not only does Fielding echo Milton's reference to Eve's hair rather than to Adam's; he specifies that Joseph's hair hangs "down his Back," while Milton insists that Adam's "manly" locks hung "not beneath his shoulders broad." Elaborating on his physical emblem of the two sexes' different statuses, Milton glosses its figurative significance with a simile. Eve's hair

             in wanton ringlets wav'd
As the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli'd
Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receiv'd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay.
(IV.306-11)

When, in placing Joseph against the backdrop of this first description of our first parents, Fielding aligns him with Eve, he implicates him, then, not just in feminine appearance but in the feminine position of "subjection" and "submission" which Milton says her curling, pendant locks fittingly picture. The adjective "sweet," repeated twice to characterize Eve in the seventeen-line passage, appears in the description of Joseph's eyes, as the "softness" given to Eve in contrast to Adam appears in Joseph's lips. Suggestively, Milton's account of Adam's and Eve's hair and of the primal nature of "hee" and "shee" ends on a note about female sexuality: the "sweet reluctant amorous delay" afforded by Eve's "coy submission" and "modest pride" brings the passage to a close. While the meanings "undisciplined," "natural," or "profuse" seem denoted by "wanton" in the description of Eve's long hair, as Milton interprets all that that hair represents about female identity, the sexual meaning of "wanton" surfaces as well, and her hair comes to express the need created, even by Eve's gorgeous plenitude and luxuriance, for masculine "sway," a need shaping the sexual relations between the first man and woman.

In its relation to Pamela, Fielding's novel has from the first placed Joseph in a position held earlier by a woman, the position of a young servant defending her chastity; in its relation to the passage from Paradise Lost, the novel again places Joseph in a position held earlier by a woman, linking Joseph to Eve through a phrase that specifically figures both her subjection and her sexuality. The force of this gender-inverting allusion is complex: as it appears in the context of a description of Joseph's attractions, its force would not seem to fall so clearly against Joseph himself as the inversion of Richardson's scenario does. The interpretive tensions created by the crossing of gender categories within the allusion raise questions about the relevance of Milton's Eden to a modern "history" and about the authenticity of Richardson's version of gender difference, as well as about the character of Joseph. The incongruity with which Fielding alludes to Eve's "wanton ringlets" might remind us of the distance between Joseph's world and Adam and Eve's: Joseph exists in a historical world, one where power is structured by changing class distinctions as well as by the gender categories which represent stable, naturalized hierarchies of authority in timeless Eden. Replacing Pamela momentarily with Eve as Joseph's female counterpart, the allusion also historicizes notions of gender, shifting the content of Joseph's feminine sexual role from the eighteenth-century identification of woman with chastity to a more complex picture of feminine sexual luxuriance and compliance—a "modest pride" and "coy submission" that are not without desire.

As Ian Watt has argued, notions of female identity changed dramatically between the appearance of Milton's Eve and Richardson's Pamela. Indeed, following R. P. Utter and G. B. Needham, Watt asserts that the publication of Pamela itself "marks a very notable epiphany in the history of our culture: the emergence of a new, fully developed and immensely influential stereotype of the feminine role," an ideal of womanhood characterized by youth, inexperience, passivity, extreme mental and physical delicacy, and the absence of sexual passion. By conjuring the older tradition represented by Milton, which was "prone to lay more emphasis on the concupiscence of women than of men,"²⁰ Fielding reminds us that Richardson's portrait of female nature is not the only one (as he does also through the characters of Lady Booby and the more appealing Betty, the innkeepers' chambermaid). But his use of Milton within the parody of Richardson, suggesting a competing version of the feminine sexual role, also destabilizes Milton's own mythologized gender oppositions, not only reversing the characteristics assigned by Milton to the two sexes but explaining them in terms of fashion.

If we look back to an earlier passage in Joseph Andrews, we recognize that Joseph's ringlets, unlike Eve's, are not a natural outward expression or emanation of his inner identity. Though Joseph remains uncorrupted by vice while living in London, he is reshaped by fashion, having his hair cut, we are told, "after the newest Fashion" and learning to curl it in curling papers (27). Fashion has shaped the appearance of Fanny's hair too, and has shaped it in a way that makes it actually less like Eve's than Joseph's is. Although "Nature" has given Fanny "extremely lavish" hair, she too has had it cut; and on Sundays she arranges it in curls that, unlike Joseph's, reach only "down her Neck" in what Fielding calls "the modern Fashion" (152). Even the powerful physical attractions of Fielding's romantic hero and heroine are not entirely untouched by artifice, although fielding emphasizes, for example, that in Fanny's skin "a Whiteness appeared which the finest Italian Paint would be unable to reach" and that "she had a natural Gentility, superior to the Acquisition of Art" (152-53).

Fielding concentrates the influence of fashion on his hero and heroine in the treatment of their hair, and the glancing allusion to Paradise Lost in his description of Joseph's hair recalls a context in which a natural difference in hair length is to express the whole order of relations between the sexes. The quiet echo of Milton early in the novel, with the discontinuities between its original and new contexts, suggests a contrast between the constructed nature of gender in Joseph's world and the stable, "natural" hierarchy of gender in Milton's Eden. We will see that this is not an isolated or entirely fragmentary echo: further echoes of Paradise Lost in Joseph Andrews sustain and develop a relation between the two works that provides one form of commentary on the later work's aims. Indeed, in these echoes, the very act of invoking Milton will assume a special force and significance within the novel.

The Eve of "wanton ringlets," despite her distance from Joseph's world, provides a more complex and appealing version of the feminine sexuality with which he is identified than the initial model of Pamela; and the allusion to her within a description of Joseph's physical charms begins the novel's movement beyond a strictly parodic treatment of him. As Joseph advances toward the chapters in which we will meet the Roasting-Squire (and encounter a cluster of Miltonic allusions) he passes through a number of situations that progressively reformulate his relation to the feminized man as a butt for Fielding's satire. In his travels, he will literally pass through a series of inns that house different scenarios from Fielding's satiric repertoire about domestic and sexual relations.

In book 1, Joseph sets out from Lady Booby's house, is severely beaten by highwaymen, and first comes to rest in the outside world (returning, according to his doctor, from the very threshold of death) in a stronghold of "petticoat government." As we have seen, Fielding had satirized the inversion of domestic power relations in a number of plays, including The Tragedy of Tragedies, The Grub-Street Opera, Pasquin, and Eurydice, and the innkeepers at the Dragon establish their familiar roles of browbeaten husband and domineering wife in their first piece of dialogue. "'Well,' says he, 'my Dear, do as you will when you are up, you know I never contradict you.' 'No,' says she, 'if the Devil was to contradict me, I would make the House too hot to hold him"' (56). The name the two innkeepers share expresses the domination of their marriage by the woman: Mr. and Mrs. Tow-wouse are named with a slang word for the female genitals.²¹ While staying in their inn, Joseph is physically weak and vulnerable, penniless, and at the mercy of Mrs. Tow-wouse's notions of charity ("'Common Charity, a F—t!' says she, 'Common Charity teaches us to provide for ourselves, and our Families"'). Going out into the world, the "male Pamela" has turned up in the scene that King Arthur described with his maxim:

                      when by Force
Or Art the Wife her Husband over-reaches
Give him the Peticoat, and her the Breeches.
The Tragedy of Tragedies (I.iii)

And Joseph seems to be aligned within this scene with the ineffective husband, Mr. Tow-wouse, who wishes to do him well but has little will or way.

The next time we see Joseph he is at an inn quite decisively ruled by a husband. In this scene, however, Joseph appears grouped with the tyrannized wife. Again, Joseph is injured and helpless—this time Adams's horse has suddenly knelt, crushing his leg—and has retreated to the woman's realm of the kitchen, where he is tended by the innkeeper's wife (118-19). Her husband chastises her for attending to a mere footman's leg and proposes that Joseph "find a Surgeon to cut it off"; in the brawl that follows, the offended Adams exchanges blows with the host and hostess, while Joseph sits helplessly by, scarce able to "rise from his Chair" (120). Fielding's thrice-repeated emphasis on the hostess's rubbing, "with a warm Hand," of Joseph's leg, the strength of her husband's objection, and his nasty recommendation that the leg be cut off, all hint at a metonymic association of Joseph's leg with his genitals, his injury signifying as a figurative castration that keeps him out of the masculine physical struggle even after the hostess and Slipslop have joined in. Moving between the two inns, each representative of one extreme in domestic arrangements, Joseph passes through identification with several different satiric versions of the feminized man—from the weak-willed husband overreached by his aggressive wife to the dephallicized man adored and attended to by someone else's alienated wife. When we again meet up with Joseph at an inn, he will be more directly implicated in that role of the castrato opera singer recalled by the description of his bird-keeping in 1.2 and distantly evoked in this injury to his leg.

We enter the inn that is the scene of book 2, chapter 12, with Adams and Fanny, and share their surprise at the revelation of Joseph's presence there as well. In this chapter the three characters are reunited on the road for the first time. Both Dick Taylor and Maurice Johnson see this chapter as a crucial turning point in Joseph's development from a parodic to a serious and sympathetic character.²² And yet the chapter does not begin by freeing Joseph from association with satiric figures. The preceding chapter has ended on a note that might prepare us for satiric allusions to opera. Meditating upon the "litigious Temper" in men, Adams rather gratuitously tells a story about two men, contending for the place of clerk, whose fierce competition in the singing of psalms at church eventually breaks forth into fighting (150-51); this story seems less arbitrary if we see it as modeled on one of the standard jokes in send-ups of the Italian opera—the bitter rivalry between the sopranos Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni (which led to their aggressively competitive singing while together on stage and even to an exchange of blows there).²³ Our introduction to Joseph in the chapter that follows recalls his association early in the novel with an even more frequent target in jokes about the Italian opera—for Joseph appears here singing an extended song with "one of the most melodious [voices] that ever was heard."

To be more precise, he doesn't appear here singing the song: if the bird-keeping passage somehow imagined him as deprived of his phallus, disqualified, like the castrato singers, for the part of Priapus by the sweetness of his voice, this chapter momentarily disembodies him altogether, returning him to his friends first only as a voice, overheard singing "from an inner Room." He is recognized by, and overwhelmingly present to, Fanny (who, like an opera fan, swoons) simply through the sound of his voice. Yet although the song he sings tells a story of passionate sexual desire and eventual fulfillment, Joseph's own body has been temporarily removed from that story. Fielding's dramatic satires ridiculed the notion of the castrato celebrities who sought romantic affairs for reputation's sake,24 and the first stage of Joseph's reunion with Fanny acts out the absence of the phallus, and of real sensual contact, from the fashionable appearance of "Intrigues"—here generalized to the absence of the whole body.

The description of Fanny that leads up to it and the content of the song itself pose, in a variety of ways, the question of the place of "images" in the physical experience of sexual desire. Introducing his description of Fanny's physical beauties with a warning to readers of an "amorous Hue," Fielding alludes to the fates of Pygmalion and Narcissus as versions of the frustration he fears for us. The words of Joseph's song, given on the next page, return us to the reflection of Narcissus. The speaker of its pastoral love story first laments that he can't escape the remembrance of Chloe's beauties; then reasons with rapture that he is "thus of Chloe possest," as, "Nor she, nor no Tyrant's hard Power, / Her Image can tear from my Breast"; but next uncovers the limits of this consolation:

But felt not Narcissus more Joy,
With his Eyes he beheld his lov'd Charms?
Yet what he beheld, the fond Boy
More eagerly wish'd in his Arms. (153)

Explaining the frustrations of fixing on the image rather than the substance of the loved one with the example of Narcissus, the speaker implies that there is something self-enclosed or even self-loving about such a fixation; and the insularity of Joseph's performance of the love song, alone in another room, evokes another side of this reflective relation—the self-enclosure of a desire to turn oneself into an image of love, like Wilson writing love-letters to himself to acquire the reputation of intrigues (203).²⁵ Joseph, however, has turned himself not exactly into an image, but into a disembodied voice: Joseph's absent presence when overheard at the inn takes the theatricality of this kind of desire to an odd, even paradoxical, extreme. His offstage performance is at once somehow stagey (the "inner Room" from which he sings might suggest the "inner stage" or "discovery space" of the theater) and decidedly untheatrical; the personal body that is flattened by the theater into an image is here so attenuated that it disappears. The effect of Joseph's song on Fanny recalls both classical allusions used by Fielding in the chapter's opening: its performance turns her momentarily into the Echo figure of Narcissus's story ("'Bless us,' says Adams, 'you look extremely pale.' 'Pale! Mr. Adams,' says she, 'O Jesus!"'), and then into Pygmalion's statue. After her stunned repetition of Adams's last word, Fanny faints, unceremoniously falling "backwards in her Chair." It is only when Joseph enters the room and clasps her in his arms that, like Pygmalion's statue softening and blushing at his touch, she comes (back) to life with "Life and Blood returning into her cheeks" (154-55).²⁶

For Joseph has suddenly appeared in the room—not as insular as he has seemed, he responds to Adams's call for help at Fanny's distress—and now enacts a physical passion so far from mere theatricality that he embraces and kisses Fanny "without considering who were present" as witnesses. Fanny and Joseph meet here in the flesh for the first time in the novel, and one effect of Joseph's disembodiment on the threshold of that meeting is to make his entrance almost an act of materialization, his passion given flesh in this scene, his body conjured more strongly as a physical presence after being pointedly withheld, except as it manifested itself in voice. The scene that Taylor and Johnson identify as a turning point in the presentation of Joseph does, among other things, establish his difference from the castrati with whom he'd been identified—at least with respect to the ironic relation they represent for Fielding between public passion and bodily reality, which this scene confronts by staging and then reversing it. Suggestively, we learn in the following chapter that the next morning Joseph finds "his Leg surprisingly recovered" (161).²⁷

From this point in the novel on, Fielding is increasingly straightforward and firm about Joseph's physical strength and self-possession. He shows him carrying Fanny in his arms, beating a pack of hounds off Adams with his cudgel, drubbing (as Taylor notes) the Roasting-Squire's captain, defeating Beau Didapper's servant in a fistfight, and giving the Beau himself a box on the ear. In the first of these events, when Joseph carries Fanny down a hill in the dark, Fielding uses the occasion explicitly to distinguish Joseph from the beaux whose questionable gender Joseph's role as a male Pamela and his mixed masculine and feminine charms might at first have seemed to mirror. Fielding moralizes,

Learn hence, my fair Countrywomen, to consider your own Weakness, and the many Occasions on which the strength of a Man may be useful to you; and duly weighing this, take care, that you match not yourselves with the spindle-shanked Beaus and Petit Maitres of the Age, who instead of being able like Joseph Andrews, to carry you in lusty Arms through the rugged ways and downhill Steeps of Life, will rather want to support their feeble Limbs with your Strength and Assistance. (194)

Joseph is here actually exhibited as the alternative to the gender role reversals in which he at first seemed to be implicated. Even before Joseph has met up with Fanny at the inn, the novel's "embattled chastity" theme has begun to shift its focus from Joseph to Fanny, a more conventional object of sexual aggression; and once they have been reunited, Joseph not only ceases to appear as a male Pamela, defending his own chastity, but takes up the proudly masculine role of the defender of that of a woman. Is the body that the reunion scene in 2.12 seems dramatically to award Joseph, after all the equivocations and negotiations about Joseph's gender that lead up to it, the simply and conventionally masculine one that the first portion of the novel had denied him? Does Joseph turn out to be "something entirely, almost diametrically different" from what he'd first appeared, as Hunter eloquently argues,28 or does something of his initial appearance remain crucial to what he has to offer as the novel's central character?

The addresses to his reader that Fielding places on either side of Joseph's song and sudden materialization in book 2, chapter 12, suggest that the reunion scene plays out the ambiguities not only within theatrical modes of behavior but within the promise offered by Fielding's new form, the novel. Fielding's comments at both the beginning and the end of the scene tease us about what our relation to the actions and passions of the scene could be: "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." "But, 0 Reader, when this Nightingale, who was no other than Joseph Andrews himself, saw his beloved Fanny in the Situation we have described her, can'st thou conceive the Agitations of his Mind?" (152, 154). Within the scene, Adams's position as an onlooker might allegorize ours. Fielding comments that "Some Philosophers may perhaps doubt, whether he was not the happiest of the three; for the Goodness of his Heart enjoyed the Blessings which were exulting in the Breasts of both the other two, together with his own"; but he then debunks the thought as "Metaphysical Rubbish," and provides a sobering emblem of the reader's fate. Adams has flung the book of Aeschylus he's been studying into the fire when Fanny faints, and "as soon as the first Tumults of Adams's Rapture were over, he cast his Eyes towards the Fire, where k:schylus lay expiring; and immediately rescued the poor Remains, to-wit, the Sheepskin Covering of his dear Friend, which was the Work of his own Hands, and had been his inseparable Companion for upwards of thirty Years" (155).

Adams's relation to "the Work of his own Hands," "his inseparable Companion," suggests the attachments of Pygmalion and of Narcissus as much as Joseph's theatricality might; and the reduction of his book to sheepskin covers pictures a kind of emptying out of the reader's experience in the face of the demands of human events. In some ways, of course, a novel's characters are quite literally disembodied, while the drama functions precisely by giving its characters body. But then, the book Adams was reading was not a novel: it was a copy of the plays of the first tragic dramatist, itself referred to by that dramatist's name. This episode, described by Taylor and Johnson as a turning point in the presentation of Joseph's character—and which we read as a crisis in the depiction of Joseph's gender identity—also plays out with some urgency issues of literary representation and reception, bringing into a kind of associational circulation questions about theater, theatricality, opera, voice, and reading. In the present chapter, while focusing on Fielding's changing treatment of the problem of Joseph's gender, we have repeatedly come across a loose and sometimes mysterious network of connections between definitions of gender, alternative forms of sexual desire, and matters of generic convention and literary echo (as Didapper's inadequate masculinity and suspect forms of desire are linked by Fielding to the theater, as the castrato is placed in opposition to masculinized satire, as Richardson's new novel form and Milton's Christian epic offer competing accounts of female character). In the chapter below, we will focus more directly on a specific example of an interplay between genre, allusion, and contending definitions of gendered identity. Despite its warnings to the reader, the episode in 2.12 at the inn, and Joseph Andrews more generally, do not simply throw textually dependent forms of feeling and identity into the fire.

If Joseph has earlier rejected Lady Booby's theatrical expressions of sexual desire—and if, in the course of 2.12, he is carefully separated from a theatricalized desire centered on images—he nonetheless remains implicated, as Chapter 4 shows, in what we might term echoic emotion, or in desire and feeling that are dependent upon conventionalized acts of voice and upon prior texts. Indeed, before we arrive at Chapter 4, in the first section of Chapter 3 we will study Fielding's suggestion in Joseph Andrews that echo itself evokes the materiality of words, so that the opposition I have been using above between "images" and the physical reality of the body breaks down before the bodylike presence of words. What Fielding seems to highlight about echo in his direct narrative treatment of it in several scenes is the way that echo (unlike Didapper's "mimicry") can become dynamic rather than mechanical as it overlays recollections of multiple prior texts. The specific verbal echoes of Milton in the scenes analyzed in Chapter 3 can only be heard amid the simultaneous redounding of echoes from a variety of prior texts. The multiplicity of the texts recalled seems itself to be essential to the effect Fielding seeks in these scenes.

Notes

¹ Without exploring it at length, Hunter addresses this issue in his discussion of Joseph Andrews, commenting on Joseph's second letter to Pamela: "The burlesque context makes it unlikely that we will be in a mood to notice, but alongside the foolish posturing and mindless canting is a certain amount of solid sense, for beyond the absurd example-mongering and exclamatory effusions about 'fine things' is the point, repeated from chapter 1, about a single standard for both sexes" (Occasional Form, 100).

² At times the convergence of class and gender structures in Pamela allows her resistance to oppression to speak for all those without social authority and power, as when she asserts the equal value of her soul; at times it works to naturalize or rationalize her different forms of powerlessness by explaining them in terms of each other. As Pamela's letters approach the event of her wedding, for example, and the gradual domestication of her spirit, they recur frequently to her fear of the "happy, yet awful moment" of her sexual union with Mr. B. The only explanation she can find for her apprehension about her wedding night has to do with her class identity: "My heart, at times, sinks within me; I know not why, except at my own unworthiness, and because the honour done me is too high for me to support myself under, as I should do. It is an honour … I was not born to.… But I suppose all young maidens are the same, so near so great a change of condition, though they carry it off more discreetly than I" (357; and see 357-72 generally).

Pamela's train of thought overlays her own specific cause to feel "lacking," unworthy, afraid—her social and economic inferiority to her husband—onto the conventional expectation that a woman's sexual desire is necessarily adjoined to dread and awe—presumably, in the face of the phallus. The effect seems to me to be to naturalize her class inferiority as analogous to biological gender identity, and to rationalize conventional constructions of her gender as analogous to lesser possession of wealth and social position. The Cliché of the "blushing bride," then, serves to bring together Pamela's positions as female and as lower-class and to conceive and accept them in terms of each other—just at that point in the novel when it makes its crucial transition toward domesticating its potentially subversive message.

³ Alter describes well the particular erotics of Lady Booby's imagination in this scene as "her eager prurient anticipation of 'submitting' herself to her own footboy, the mistress deliciously mastered by a servant" (73).

⁴ McKeon discusses the different social functions of female and male chastity in eighteenth-century England (The Origins of the English Novel, 148-49 and 156-58); and he discusses chastity in Pamela and Joseph Andrews specifically, 366-68 and 398-400.

⁵ Hunter suggests both possible readings of the seduction scenes, allowing at one point that Joseph's assertion of "individual rights" shows him to be more sensible and dignified than we might have thought, while remarking casually at another that in these scenes "the laughter is altogether at Joseph's expense" (Occasional Form, 100, 95).

⁶ Homer Obed Brown, 202.

⁷ Even Richardson's own two main characters are brought within the perimeter of Fielding's narrative in the final book of the novel and reconstituted as parodic, flat versions of themselves, peripheral now to the main thrust of the action.

⁸ Taylor comments on Fielding's treatment of Joseph in the "night-adventures": "He holds Joseph from participating in the hurly-burly to keep him from being ridiculous, because he wants to maintain Joseph's dignity—Joseph is definitely out of the frame of either the Pamelian burlesque or picaresque high jinks. When Joseph does come into the episode the next morning in Fanny's room where Adams is discovered slumbering peacefully, he is … quite positive and dominating.… it is Joseph who comprehends what has actually happened and how Adams made his mistake" (107-8).

⁹ Both Battestin and Hunter discuss the biblical significance of Joseph's name. See The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art and Occasional Form, especially 103-5.

¹⁰ Alter, 50-51.

¹¹ The thrust of Didapper's crude wit seems to be the incongruity of the practice he mimics at the Adamses' humble and rural door, making the object of any humor attached to its violent noise simply poverty and lack of pretensions. These are objects Fielding has specifically excluded from the force of legitimate ridicule in his preface, but objects of severe and violent ridicule from the Roasting-Squire and his men.…

¹² I am indebted to Hunter for his discerning account of the importance of expectation (and its subversion) in Fielding's unfolding of character (see both "Fielding and the Disappearance of Heroes" and Occasional Form).

¹³ Stapleton, 182-83.

¹⁴ Hunter too, notes the phallic allusion in the reference to Priapus in this passage, but he interprets it as a leering suggestion of Joseph's "sexual potential" and "promising future" as a "sexual object" (Occasional Form, 96-97). If the allusion functions on some level to make this suggestion, on the surface at least its context works to assert Joseph's failure as a sexual object.

¹⁵ As several critics have observed, this combination characterizes Tom Jones's beauty as well, though with a somewhat different emphasis.…

¹⁶ As in the Renaissance rhetorical convention of the blazon, or item-by-item enumeration of a woman's beauties. See Lanham's Handlist of Rhetorical Terms.

¹⁷ Remarking on Fielding's reference to Joseph's "tenderness joined with a sensibility inexpressible," Jean Hagstrum notes that "the parallel portrait of Fanny endows her with a countenance 'in which, though she was extremely bashful, a sensibility appeared almost incredible; and a sweetness, whenever she smiled, beyond either imitation or description' (II. 12)" (179). Thomas E. Maresca, too, notes the shared phrasings in the two descriptions and comments that they make Fanny "the female counterpart of Joseph," though he also argues for important differences between the two characters (200-201). Hagstrum identifies the sensibility Fielding grants to both Joseph and Fanny as feminine, observing that he grants it to Tom Jones as well, and commenting: "once again, as if to avoid the implication of effeminacy that sensibility could obviously carry with it, Fielding insists that Tom also possesses a 'most masculine person and mien.' The whole of Tom Jones illustrates abundantly both the vigorously masculine and the delicately feminine qualities of the hero.… As the ingredient of delicacy became more prominent in love, the drive towards forms of unisexuality also became more prominent. It may be worth considering that in the spirit of so robustly a heterosexual man as Fielding delicate sensibility loomed larger than we have hitherto realized" (179-80).

Hagstrum's brief discussion of Fielding in Sex and Sensibility (178-85) draws attention to aspects of Fielding's work that have not been adequately recognized; and his historical study of changing notions of sex and sensibility in this period provides an illuminating context for our study of the interest in gender in Fielding's work in particular.

¹⁸ All quotations of Paradise Lost will be from the Odyssey Press edition, ed. Hughes; book and line numbers for further citations from the poem will be given parenthetically in the text.

¹⁹ In their notes to this passage of Paradise Lost, editors John Carey and Alastair Fowler cite St. Paul's similar treatment of hair length as an expression of the hierarchic relation of the sexes (I Corinthians 11: 7, 15). But they also comment that "the elaborateness of the present passage lends some support to the theory that Milton had a special interest in hair" (The Poems of John Milton [New York: Longman Group of W. W. Norton, 1968], 631).

²⁰ Watt, Rise of the Novel, 160-63.

²¹ See Eaves and Kimpel, 408-9.

²² Taylor remarks that book 2, chapter 12, "marks the point of change in the appearance of Joseph in the thought and action so that he is treated on more serious levels of meaning, and it initiates a line of action which is to carry him to a dignity and a stature and an elevation of personality far beyond the original limitations imposed by the burlesque mode" (97). See also Johnson, 53-55.

²³ Faustina and Cuzzoni's rivalry was burlesqued, for example, in the struggle between Gay's Polly and Lucy in The Beggar's Opera (1728) and in the farcical competition of the two sopranos in the anonymous The Contretemps; or, Rival Queans (1727). On the satirical referents of the scene between Polly and Lucy (II.xiii), see the notes to The Beggar's Opera, ed. Lewis, 120-21; and Erskine-Hill in Axton and Williams, 157-58.

The burlesque struggle between Fielding's own Glumdalca and Huncamunca in The Tragedy of Tragedies may also glance at operatic rivalries, reduced to the level of personal insult (II.vii). Fielding's footnotes to the scene between them also confirm its parallels to the famous "Altercative Scene between Cleopatra and Octavia" in Dryden's All for Love (Act III). Fielding completes the same collocation of associations in Joseph Andrews when, just on the other side of the reunion scene at the inn, he tells us that Slipslop cast a look at Fanny as she flung herself into the chaise "not unlike that which Cleopatra gives Octavia in the Play" (159).

²⁴ See, for example, Eurydice and The Author's Farce. I take the word "intrigues" from Wilson's description of his desire for the mere reputation of sexual conquest: "Nothing now seemed to remain but an Intrigue, which I was resolved to have immediately; I mean the Reputation of it" (203). The puzzle of a castrato's sexual relations represents for Fielding the wider phenomenon of the beau's desire for the empty appearance of sexual engagement.

²⁵ Several critics have pursued this problem of narcissism in Joseph Andrews—here not done justice—in more depth, and have suggested its relation to other important matters in the novel. Pointing out that Fanny's name in Joseph Andrews strangely repeats Fielding's satiric name for Lord Hervey in the frame materials for Shamela, and that Lord Hervey reappears in Joseph Andrews as Beau Didapper, Hunter interprets the beau's attempts to ravish Fanny as the expression of a confused kind of narcissistic desire: "as he tries to ravish Fanny, [Didapper] confronts for a moment his own self-love.… He sees not the Fanny we have by then come to know, but some idealized vision of himself" (Occasional Form, 106). Hagstrum discusses the meaning of both narcissism and incest in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones; and my awareness of this issue in Joseph Andrews has been informed by a paper presented by William Jewett about the relation between the principle of "exemplarity" and the problem of narcissism in Fielding's implicit critique of Richardson (graduate course presentation at Yale University, 1984).

²⁶ On the awakening of Pygmalion's statue, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.280-95.

Pygmalion's statue would be evoked more easily by Fanny's faint because of the network of references to people turning into statues in Joseph Andrews. Hunter highlights Fielding's description of Lady Boody as a "Statue of Surprize" (Occasional Form, 40) and comments, "The statue becomes an important mark on the Fielding landscape, and the rhetoric of Joseph Andrews often honors it, not only to avert seduction for his characters but to engineer ours" (95).

²⁷ The question of Joseph's injury arises again when the False Promiser offers to lend the travelers a horse and a servant: "a very fierce Dispute ensued, whether Fanny should ride behind Joseph, or behind the Gentleman's Servant; Joseph insisting on it, that he was perfectly recovered, and was as capable of taking care of Fanny, as any other Person could be. But Adams would not agree to it, and declared he would not trust her behind him; for that he was weaker than he imagined himself to be" (174). The dispute concerns how fully recovered Joseph's leg is (Adams has mentioned Joseph's "lame Leg" the page before), but Taylor assumes it has to do with Joseph's sexual self-control. He summarizes: "Adams demands [that Fanny ride] behind the gentleman's servant, since he says that Joseph is not to be trusted, 'being weaker than he imagined himself to be'—Adams has not forgotten Joseph's fiery haste to have the marriage ceremony performed on the spot without benefit of banns" (101). I think that the passage does, in some general way, encourage a confusion between Joseph's leg and his sexual abilities and vulnerabilities, gently extending the kind of metonymic association suggested earlier by his injury.

²⁸ Hunter, "Fielding and the Disappearance of Heroes," 136.

Works Cited

… Alter, Robert. Fielding and the Nature of the Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

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Hunter, J. Paul. "Fielding and the Disappearance of Heros." In The English Hero, 1660-1800, edited with an introduction by Robert Folkenflik, pp. 116-42. Newark: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses, 1982.

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