SOURCE: "Fielding the Anti-Romanticist," in his Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 100-31.

Fielding vs. Richardson

In the context of his earlier work it would appear that when Fielding came to write the first of his novels his intention was to correct the unhealthy tendencies of the Richardsonian novel in the same spirit in which he had earlier corrected the excesses of the pantomimes and operas. Pamela (1740), in one sense, represented the culmination of the forces of bad writing and fraudulent morality that Swift had attacked in A Tale of a Tub and Pope in The Dunciad. Like Swift, Fielding may have seen the new literary forms as dangerous because of their aggressive abandonment of classical models or any formal standards of excellence, their exaltation of the new and disordered, and their effect of raising the ego to an unprecedented prominence.'

Of course the same discrepancy resulted between intended meaning and the meaning communicated by the action itself which Fielding had explored in the hack writing that drew his attention before 1737. Pamela was "the first novel," the final anti-romance, in that it produced an ultimate in formal realism through the immediacy, prolixity, and verisimilitude of the letter form, which expresses the inner workings of a mind and effectively immerses the reader in its simulacrum of the real world. But if Pamela was the prototype of the modern novel as defined by Ortega y Gasset and others, it was also a descendant of the romance and, in a sense, the prototype of the popular or romantic novel of the fleeing heroine, the interrupted seduction, and the happy marriage.² Although the novel's main concern seemed to be with the momentary and ephemeral, Richardson was very much concerned with eternal verities; he had a great moral to convey about virtue and vice, with his subtitle "Virtue Rewarded." This moral imposed certain conditions on the narrative that were not met by Richardson's account of the immediate workings of his heroine's mind. What led contemporaries to attack Pamela was, besides its immense and enviable success, the unstable compound Richardson created by mixing conventions of realism, romance, and morality play.

The romance convention probably caused the most trouble, requiring that the girl and the seducer be united at the end and thus preordaining the nature of virtue's reward. Since Richardson combined the figures of the lover and the ogre (we should also notice traces of fairy-tale romance, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, etc.), Mr. B. became such a monster that Pamela's ultimate acceptance of him seemed hypocritical self-advancement. Moreover, Richardson further tended to subvert his paragon by keeping her in a situation of pursuit and defense—the basic plot of romance—while at the same time granting her pious knowledge of Mr. B.'s nefarious intention and plentiful opportunity to leave his service. At his best Richardson used these contradictions to create a convincing picture of divided minds, both Pamela's and Mr. B.'s, struggling between conscious and unconscious drives—between Pamela's ideal of chastity and her love for Mr. B.; between his notion that a servant girl should be his for the asking and his growing love for Pamela as an ideal woman. At worst the jumbled conventions created the impression of double-dealing on the part of Pamela and her creator.

When Pamela came into Fielding's sights he seems to have sensed—certainly before his contemporaries—the peculiar danger of Richardson's hold over his readers. The effect of Pamela's particularity, piled-up minutiae, repetitions, and prolixity was to draw the reader as close as possible to the heroine's immediate experience and mind, in fact to suck the reader in and immerse him in her experience. "Such a record," A. D. McKillop writes of Pamela's letters, "gives the reader a continuous and cumulative impression of living through the experience, and thus creates a new kind of sympathy with the character whose experiences are being shared."³

Immersion may lead to a sinister titillation in Pamela's erotic scenes, but more serious, it allows the reader to identify himself so much with the character that he tends to lose a sense of relationships, the wholeness of the moral design, and his moral perspective on the character. The reader becomes uncritical, a "friend" of the character, and having accepted Pamela's rationalizations as completely as he would his own, he emerges ready to modify his own conduct accordingly. The situation, as Fielding evidently saw it, was analogous to the blindness inflicted upon people by fashion and the conventions of "greatness" and "great men," all of which hindered not only the judgment of other people's actions but the decisions by which one takes one's own actions. Identification with a character was, of course, a prime ingredient of romance, the same danger that Cervantes perceived in Amadis de Gaula. But Fielding sensed that in this bourgeois story, laid in contemporary England with all the realism that particularity of description and immediacy of the letter form can give, immersion was much stronger than in a chivalric romance laid in the Middle Ages.

Samuel Johnson, writing in 1750 (Rambler, No. 4), also recognized this phenomenon at work, but his solution was more conservative—and perhaps more realistic—than Fielding's. He simply argued that the novelist, recognizing the power he wielded over his reader, must make his protagonist a virtuous man:

if the power of example is so great as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken, that, when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects.

In the right hands, Johnson thought, the novel could be a transcendent force for moral reform; the reader, sympathizing with the good man, would then go out and behave in the same way. But Fielding, seeing more danger than Johnson did in the example of Pamela, believed that with such an instrument in the hands of a bourgeois like Richardson, a man with enormous talent for "writing to the moment" but with a narrow, uncertain, even obtuse morality, the only answer was an alternative form that never for a moment left the reader in doubt about the author's intention as to who was good and who evil.

Seeing Pamela as a moral chaos in which the reader was invited to wallow self-indulgently, Fielding began his alternative, Shamela, by adding the objective commentator that Pamela lacked. Richardson, however good his intentions, could only appear as a sententious editor, a lone voice in an occasional note which was effectually outside the fiction and could be ignored. The reader had only Pamela and himself; almost everything was seen through Pamela's eyes, and she (Fielding believed) carried Richardson and the reader away with her.

Fielding's initial response was the Swiftean solution—letting the Pamelian speaker condemn herself. But even when he has made the dramatic irony unmistakable, if not coarse and obvious, and simplified the action, he surrounds Shamela's letters with commentary, offering viewpoints other than the heroine's which place her actions in clearer perspective. Shamela still uses the farce's approach to parody, surrounding the action with comment and not allowing it to stand by itself, and thus it remains halfway between the plays and Joseph Andrews. In the latter, however, Fielding replaces the directly imitated voices of the heroine and the commentators (Parsons Oliver and Tickletext) with one voice which controls and conveys the whole action.

While Medley was as close as Fielding came in the farces to a normative commentator, in Joseph Andrews the narrator is in temperament close to the persona of the periodicals—like him, an arbiter of morals and manners. He is, to begin with, a creator and/or historian, who sets before the reader an object that can be accepted as objectively true. The effect is evident if we compare the portraits of two ill-favored women:

[Mrs. Jewkes] is a broad, squat pursy, fat thing, quite ugly, if any thing human can be so called; about forty years old. She has a huge hand, and an arm as thick as my waist, I believe. Her nose is flat and crooked, and her brows grow down over her eyes; a dead spiteful, grey, goggling eye, to be sure she has. And her face is flat and broad; and as to colour, looks like as if it had been pickled a month in saltpetre.

[Mrs. Slipslop] was not at this time remarkably handsome, being very short, and rather too corpulent in body, and somewhat red, with the addition of pimples in the face. Her nose was likewise rather too large, and her eyes too little; nor did she resemble a cow so much in her breath as in two brown globes which she carried before her; one of her legs was also a little shorter than the other, which occasioned her to limp as she walked. This fair creature had long cast the eyes of affection on Joseph.⁴

While Richardson undoubtedly intended his portrait of Mrs. Jewkes to arouse our contempt if not ridicule, even drawing upon satiric conventions to do so, he put the description into the mouth of a character, Pamela, and thus made it subjective. When Pamela describes Jewkes, we see a portrait distorted by fear and apprehension. Almost at once, as if to make sure that there is no mistake, Richardson has Pamela add: "This is poor helpless spite in me:—But the picture is too near the truth notwithstanding." Her nightmare fantasies are collected in her portraits of Jewkes and Colbrand ("great staring eyes … a monstrous wide mouth; blubber lips; long yellow teeth, and a hideous grin"), and all the evil she is unwilling to see in her master is transferred to his underlings, as in another instance it is transferred to a bull (who turns out to be a harmless cow). But when Fielding describes Slipslop, we know that, however fantastic, in the context of his fiction she looked that way.

Second, Fielding's commentator is a manipulator. When an appalling event like the abduction of Fanny by the squire's men takes place, the narrator juggles scenes so that the reader does not lose sight of the overall structure of meaning in his concern for Fanny. Instead of closely following her fate in the Richardsonian manner, he switches to "a discourse between the poet and the player; of no other use in this history but to divert the reader" (Bk. III, Chap. 10; 1, 293). The poet and player, sycophants of the squire who wants Fanny, and participants themselves in the abduction, casually discuss drama. This scene is followed by a dialogue between Joseph and Adams concerning Fanny, in which Joseph's anguish is counteracted by Adams' insistence on stoic acceptance. Only then is the reader returned to Fanny herself and her predicament. This diversion and the various parodic devices that follow set off the narrative and the characters from immediate contact with the reader and keep the reader aware of the author's controlling presence and his message. The juxtaposition also dramatizes the total unconcern of the poet and player about Fanny or any moral issue, as well as Fielding's favorite analogy between the shoddiness of art and morals, between the stage and life. The effect of the pause after the abduction is therefore essentially to allow contemplation. Beginning in Joseph Andrews, the important formal elements in Fielding's novels are the scene and the relationship between scene and commentary and between one scene and another.

In the third place, the commentator is an ironist. His ironic mask produces the impression necessary to Fielding's conception of the novel—the impression of neutrality and authority, as opposed to the disreputable, prejudiced, and limited vision of a Pamela. The ironic attitude implies a contrast between a limited and conventional view and a more generous, inclusive one. The effect is very different from Richardson's inclusiveness—gathering a great mass of minutiae and particulars within a narrow compass in order to submerge the reader. Irony holds the reader at some distance from the action; as Rebecca Parkin has noted, it "implies a sophisticated reader and a sophisticated poet, together with an awareness and acceptance, on the part of both, of their sophisticated status."⁵ This is the old poet-audience relationship assumed and fostered by Dryden, Swift, and Pope. With them Fielding accepts the assumption that the air of artifice is compensated for by the sanity of the exposition, the clarity and, in that sense, realism of the picture—the impression that the author is aware of more than one aspect of his subject.

If Richardson's realism is one of plenitude, Fielding's is one of opposite and larger reference; if Richardson achieves verisimilitude by an oppressive intimacy, Fielding does the same by polarizing his views of people, his kinds of people, and their experiences and motives. The analogues he introduces in Joseph Andrews have the effect of suggesting both the complexity and the interrelations of life; ironic similes thus connect Slipslop and a tiger, Adams and Colley Cibber, Lady Booby and Cupid, Joseph and the biblical Joseph. The effect is exactly like that of Fielding's earlier satires, to extend the behavior of a Lady Booby to the outside world of art, politics, religion, and the reader's own behavior. When Fielding wants to show how passion transforms sensible people, he compares it to Rich transforming (in his pantomimes) men into monkeys or wheelbarrows and to Cibber transforming the English language into something new and strange (Bk. I, Chap. 7). The implications involve not only the theatrical quality of Lady Booby's passion but the irrationality that is at the bottom of Rich's and Cibber's behavior.

The "reality" generated by Fielding's irony is a kind of control or discrimination, a depth of understanding—what Ian Watt has called "realism of assessment."⁶ We might distinguish between reality as placement of something in a proper or true relationship to everything else in the world (Fielding's type), and reality as exposition of the authenticity of something (Richardson's). It follows that by reality Fielding means moral or factual truth apprehended by the reader, whereas he sees in Richardson a reality that means the true workings of a character's mind, without any concern for the truth or falseness of apprehension in relation to the external world.

Irony also serves Fielding as a controllable equivalent of Richardson's presentation of the workings of a mind. He puts mock-heroic speeches in his characters' mouths: Lady Booby cries, "Whither doth this violent passion hurry me! What meanness do we submit to from its impulse!" and reveals that she sees herself as a tragedy queen and her lust for Joseph as a grand passion.⁷ But the narrator's ironies, in the manner of Dryden and the mock-heroic poets, also expose Lady Booby's mind. As soon as she is alone,

the little god Cupid, fearing he had not yet done the lady's business, took a fresh arrow with the sharpest point out of his quiver, and shot it directly into her heart: in other and plainer language, the lady's passion got the better of her reason. (Bk. 1, Chap. 7; 1, 45)

This passage tells how Lady Booby would describe her feelings about Joseph (in terms of Cupid and hearts) and what actually happened ("passion got the better of her reason"); the passage not only sets her lust in perspective but also demonstrates her self-delusion, revealing an unhappy, misguided woman who rationalizes her petty affair into a great Didoesque love. Its effect in the larger context of Lady Booby's character is to suggest that her hypocrisy (calling her lust virtue) may be only a means to an end that is beyond her control.

Mrs. Slipslop "at last gave up Joseph and his cause, and with a triumph over her passion highly commendable" went off to get drunk. The author's ironic praise is obvious, but what it says in context is that she felt that she had triumphed and should be commended. Fielding's irony almost consistently, whether in speech or the author's comment, suggests the character's rationalization, just as Pamela's moral interpretations of her actions do (less self-consciously) in the novel he is criticizing. The mock-heroic of Jonathan Wild works in the same way, except that the self-delusion is mixed with aspiration to a false ideal, "greatness." Whether from the character's own lips or from those of the commentator, the irony tends to become an expression of the character's psychology.

Fielding does not call Joseph Andrews a satire; he infrequently refers to the word "satire" and holds firmly to the designation "comic epic in prose." Comedy, of course, still contained the idea of the satiric in the early eighteenth century and, by this time, had better connotations. But Fielding had other reasons as well for using the broader term.

To begin with, he specifically rules out certain kinds of satire he had used in the earlier part of his career as unsuited to the comic epic in prose. By the word "burlesque" he means, first, literary parody: he is not writing a parody of Pamela or of anything else, a strategy he had already handled in Shamela. His second meaning of "burlesque" is the more general one, "the exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural"—a Shamela, a Pistol in The Author's Farce, or a Queen Ignorance in Pasquin. This meaning, the literary equivalent of caricature, applies to a particular kind of satire, travesty or mock-heroic, "appropriating the manners of the highest to the lowest, or e converso." Although Joseph Andrews betrays unmistakable elements of parody and high and low burlesque, they are, as Fielding claims, incidental and decorative rather than essential; they help to determine our attitude toward a character but do not ordinarily alter the character himself and certainly do not caricature him.

Fielding intends to set up not an exaggerated image of what he detests, in the manner of The Dunciad or his own Shamela, but rather an alternative of his own. This is, I think, the basic reason for his avoiding reference to satire. Throughout all three of his major novels he continues to refer to the importance of the new form he has created, but though he connects this form at various times with comedy, epic, and history, he never does with satire. His intention is not finally satiric. Although he may include the idea of satire, he means by "comedy" a more general imitation of reality or what he calls a "just imitation" of nature. Since satire remains an important part of his point of view, however, he wishes to dissociate himself from the particular kind of satire he had written a few years earlier in Pasquin and The Historical Register and more recently in Shamela. In one of the few occurrences of the word "satire," he gives us the Spectator's view that the preference of the general to the particular in subject "distinguishes the satirist from the libeller," and that in Joseph Andrews "we mean not to lash individuals, but all of the like sort" (Bk. III, Chap. 1; 1, 216). This was a conventional definition, but Fielding would have to do some explaining to apply it to some of his earlier satires.

Fielding's analogy between his novel and the works of Hogarth makes his point clear. Hogarth's prints, which had become enormously popular after the publication of A Harlot's Progress in 1732, offered the best example of what Fielding himself wished to do: replace the fantasy of traditional, emblematic, and Augustan satire with a more restrained delineation, closer to experience, and reliant on "character" rather than "caricature," on the variety rather than the exaggeration of expression. Both, moreover, sought a more secure place in the classical hierarchy of genres than satire, the grotesque, or even the comic by itself could command (or, for that matter, than the rootless Richardsonian form could lay claim to). As Hogarth steered a course between the flatulent history painting of his time and the popular forms of satire and burlesque, Fielding sought to establish a genre between the romance he discerned in Richardson's Pamela and the grotesquerie of travesty.

The point that Fielding makes by bracketing Joseph Andrews between romance on one side and burlesque on the other is that he intends to write according to his own definition of realism. Both romance and burlesque are used by Fielding in this connection to show the different ways in which reality may be distorted—to glamorize and to vilify. He equates Pamela with the romances of Jack the Giant Killer and Guy of Warwick as he equates his own early work (though perhaps not so wholeheartedly) with burlesque and caricature. But his claim, like that of Defoe and Richardson, is to seek truth and reality; he says—and this is an important contribution of his preface—that the novel is a search for the real.

Fielding's idea of reality is, of course, quite different from Richardson's, and while he claims to be following a middle way, his realism is largely (like antiromance realism) a contrary to Richardson's. Richardson sees life as a single-minded conflict between two people, one good, the other evil. He is interested only in the sensibility of one woman, alone in a closet with her daydreams and wish fantasies. His setting is usually indoors, in drawing rooms, hallways, and bedrooms—the "close, hot, day-dreamy" world Coleridge noted.⁸ To what he considered the narrow world of Pamela Fielding opposes the wide world of epic with all classes and all manner of locales. His settings are out-of-doors, on roads, in inns, in coaches, on horseback, as well as in the places used by Richardson. Life is not a private relationship between a man and a woman but a journey on which one passes through all kinds of experiences and meets a great variety of people.

The analogy between epic and novel was a conventional one made by critics when attempting to justify the new fiction in terms of classical genres.⁹ In his preface to Joseph Andrews, Fielding claims that to present true reality the novelist must correct his personal bias with reference to the larger view of tradition, developing the novel's affinities with the classical genres and in particular those genres associated with broad scope and objectivity of attitude. His preference for the Odyssey was natural, as he explains in the preface to the second edition of his sister Sarah's novel, David Simple (1744). The Iliad and Odyssey "differ principally in the action, which in the Iliad is entire and uniform; in the Odyssey, is rather a series of actions, all tending to produce one great end." He argues that "those who should object want of unity of action here, may, if they please, or if they dare, fly back with their objection in the face even of the Odyssey itself." He also implies the distinction he feels between this form and satire. The comic epic in prose should not "set before us the odious instead of the amiable." By this he means that the central character should not be subject to attack on any serious grounds; he should be neither a villain like Milton's Satan nor a mock-hero like Shadwell or Cibber. Thus Joseph Andrews would be a comic epic; Jonathan Wild would not.

In Joseph Andrews Fielding inserts the action of the Odyssey or the Aeneid (the uprooting of a protagonist and his attempts to find his way home) in the middle of the seduction scene of the Richardsonian novel. As if to point out that one must break free from that small room and narrow relationship, he allows Joseph to escape and follows his flight. Each of the subsequent actions moves Joseph toward his final goal.

The action of Joseph Andrews, with its movement toward a positive goal and a happy ending, is clearly not satiric, but the picaresque novel, the contemporary equivalent of the Odyssey-type epic, naturally influenced Fielding's conception. By placing the emphasis on the various incarnations of Lady Booby that block or delay the hero's return, without sacrificing the generally epic intention, Fielding renders a greater part of the overall effect satiric. For his alternative to Richardson's novel he turned to the epic, but in practice he drew upon the conventions and techniques, the externalizing and expository forms with which he was most familiar in satire.

Anti-Romance

In Shamela Fielding parodied the formal conventions of the Richardsonian novel in the heroine's letters, in her circumstantial lists of wearing apparel and books, and in her furious scribbling "to the moment": "Odsbobs! I hear him just coming at the door.… Well, he is in bed between us, we both shamming a sleep; he steals his hand into my bosom."¹⁰ Fielding's strategy is to travesty the Richardsonian style, dramatis personae, and, in an abbreviated form, plot, shifting it downward toward cruder and more extreme situations. Shamela is the simplest kind of anti-romance, the "true history" that travesties romance by revealing the real schemer beneath the pious phrases and coyness of Richardson's heroine. Thus Fielding reveals Mrs. Jervis to be a bawd, Parson Williams to be Pamela's lover, and "our old friend Nanny Jewkes" to be a rival for the love of Parson Williams. Mr. B. becomes the Booby he appeared to be in his bungling attempts to seduce Pamela, and Pamela becomes the designing slut that Mr. B. occasionally suspected her of being and that she appeared to be in such slips as when, with her pursuer close upon her, she recalls: "I found his hand in my bosom; and when my fright let me know it, I was ready to die; and I sighed and screamed, and fainted away. And still he had his arms about my neck."¹¹ Fielding simply gives us the true Pamela: "I thought once of making a little Fortune by my Person. I now intend to make a great one by my Vartue" (Letter 10; p. 325).

Shamela is conceived in the tradition of Jonathan Wild and Fielding's early villains, a central symbol of vice. But she is also, like some of them, a surrogate or apprentice, and in this sense Shamela is related to the Don Quixote kind of anti-romance. The hero acts according to a romantic ideal ("greatness") that is external and not entirely appropriate to him. Just as Quixote reads his romances, Shamela reads Whitefield and listens to Parson Williams' sermons advocating faith over works. Fielding's point is not only that these sermons are used as hypocritical masks but that they contain the code of hypocrisy that Shamela is teaching herself to follow. Worst of all, however, are her mother's letters, which continually exhort her to pursue her calculating end and capture Mr. Booby. Like Wild she is shown stretching to reach a mark held up to her by a hard taskmaster; her mother keeps urging her on and she, in her own way, always falls a little short.¹²

Her trouble is that she cannot control her passion for Parson Williams, and in spite of her mother's warnings this leads to her downfall; Mr. Booby catches them in bed together and the whole scheme comes to nothing. The obverse of Wild's failure at personal relationships, Shamela's passion is her tragic flaw. Love as a lack, Fielding seems to say, helps to characterize the bad man and foretell the disintegration of his designs; but love as a positive force, even in so crude a form as Shamela's lust, must destroy hypocrisy and calculation, just as Shaftesbury's ridicule must destroy sham. It is not certain whether Shamela's love affair with Parson Williams is supposed to be more important as an act of hypocrisy or as a sign of her passion that obtrudes to destroy her hypocritical fabrication. What should appear to be vice punished may be interpreted as Shamela's one sincere action discovered. The Shamelian context admittedly warrants a less positive construction; but whatever the emphasis in Shamela, the love-profit contrast is central to Joseph Andrews.

Here Fielding creates an action that is roughly parallel to Pamela's but at a remove. The death of Sir Thomas Booby, like the death of Mr. B.'s mother, sets the plot going, but Lady Booby is not simply a parody of Mr. B. She is a distinct person, a relative of Booby's, just as Joseph is (or rather appears to be) a relative of Pamela's, and the two sets of characters, Fielding's and Richardson's, carry on their own stories in Joseph Andrews. They are connected only by the reader's memory, Joseph's two letters to his sister, and the eventual meeting at Booby Hall. By that time Mr. Booby has married Pamela and Lady Booby has begun her last concentrated effort to corrupt Joseph. The Mr. Booby-Pamela action is not travestied, except perhaps in Pamela's insistent snobbery that is a sequel to her marriage.

As we have seen, Fielding conceives Joseph Andrews less as a parody, like Shamela, than as an alternative.¹³ He starts with Colley Cibber's Apology and Richard-son's Pamela, just as Cervantes started with the romances of chivalry; here, says Fielding, we are shown an "ideal" male and female, models for their respective sexes. But they, like those knights and ladies, are neither real people nor real ideals; Joseph Andrews will show what a true ideal is and what real people are like. This involves, first, an adjustment of values. Self-seeking that uses chastity as a means to an end (Pamela) and vanity that calls unchastity a virtue (Cibber) are offered their opposites, chastity and natural goodness (Joseph and Parson Adams). Second, it involves stripping off what appear to be virtues in most people and revealing the self-interest underneath. The latter, only half of the intention, corresponds to the travesty of Shamela.

In one of the many epic similes attached to Parson Adams, we are told that

he did not more than Mr. Colley Cibber apprehend any such passions as malice and envy to exist in mankind; which was indeed less remarkable in a country parson, than in a gentleman who hath passed his life behind the scenes,—a place which hath been seldom thought the school of innocence, and where a very little observation would have convinced the great Apologist that those passions have a real existence in the human mind. (Bk. 1, Chap. 3; 1, 30)

Adams' inability to detect malice and envy is compared to Cibber's, and the audience notes the irony—that Adams is unable (from simplicity and goodness) to recognize malice when it appears, while Cibber (all too aware of it) is unwilling to admit that it is malice. The parallel continues to be enforced from time to time, as in the chapter heading, "A curious dialogue that passed between Mr. Abraham Adams and Mr. Peter Pounce, better worth reading than all the works of Colley Cibber and many others" (Bk. II, Chap. 13).

In much the same way, Lady Booby and Joseph are contrasted in a crucial scene with the further analogue of Potiphar's wife and the biblical Joseph.¹⁴ Slipslop, whose pretended gentility and literacy recall Pamela's, is contrasted with Adams, whose shabbiness hides his true learning; a high churchman is contrasted with a low, a bad with a good. Whenever Fanny is in trouble at least two people come along, one to react selfishly and one (for either good or bad motives) to save her. When Adams asks a favor of two men, the first is rude, the second kindly.

Thus the novel begins with a discussion of examples (Bk. I, Chap. 1) and a comparison of the examples of worldly wisdom, Pamela and Cibber, and the examples of simple goodness, Joseph and Adams. Once this comparison has been set up, Fielding takes the examples he has presupposed into the world of experience as Richardson and Cibber took theirs. By inference, Pamela and Cibber would have come through far differently. When Joseph maintains his virtue against Lady Booby's advances he is discharged; Pamela, for neither surrendering nor protecting hers, receives her master's hand in marriage. Adams is hardly an example for ambitious young Cibbers to follow: at forty he is still a curate; when he had the influence of his nephew at his disposal he did not know how to use it. We are told from time to time what a different sort would have done in the same circumstances: the men who have captured him and Fanny, thinking them robbers, are so busy arguing among themselves over the reward "that a dexterous nimble thief, had he been in Mr. Adams' situation, would have taken care to have given the justice no trouble that evening." Adams, however, makes no attempt to escape, trusting "rather to his innocence than his heels" (Bk. II, Chap. 10; 1, 165-66).

True virtue is repeatedly rewarded by abuse, blows, or even imprisonment in place of the vicious. Joseph is beaten by robbers and left naked in a ditch and is then subjected to equally brutal treatment at the hands of several decent citizens who pass him in a coach. The progress of Joseph and Adams from London to Booby Hall is one long succession of such violent encounters: Adams is brained with a blood pudding, chased (as a substitute hare) by a pack of hounds, tormented with practical jokes, and dropped into a tub of water. The punishers, it is made abundantly clear, are the Cibbers and Pamelas.

Joseph Andrews is similar to Shamela in that it treats the "romances" of Pamela and Cibber's Apology not as the reading of an isolated Quixote, but as a pernicious ideal to which most people aspire. Fielding has ironically shown that the romance world is the real (in the sense of practical) world. The Quixote parallel, introduced on the title page, is enforced from time to time, as when Adams and his friends have difficulty getting away from an inn where they owe the reckoning: "they had more reason to have mistaken [this inn] for a castle than Don Quixote ever had any of those in which he sojourned, seeing they had met with such difficulty in escaping out of its walls" (Bk. II, Chap. 16; 1, 196-97). The imaginary world of Quixote is quite real here: these innkeepers and clergymen are monsters.

In the romance world characters' virtues are miraculously synchronized with their surroundings, and so Pamela saves her virtue and wins a fortune. Joseph and Adams, put into a real world where Pamela's virtues are as inappropriate as Quixote's delusions about chivalry, are notably unsuccessful. The explanation, Fielding insists, is that Pamela's virtue is feigned for self-interest; this, he implies, accounts for the strange synchronization of her "virtue" and her world. Appear virtuous and act viciously: this is the Pamelian formula for success. Neither vice nor virtue can finally succeed, only pseudo-virtue.

The romance in the old Quixotic sense then is embodied in Joseph and Parson Adams. They have a true ideal that does not agree with the world around them, which behaves according to the code of the Cibbers and Pamelas. The romance values are chastity and charity, Christian virtues, all ironically exposed as inappropriate to eighteenth-century England. In short, Fielding has adopted the interpretation of Don Quixote that attacks the accepted morality and criticizes it by the standard of an absolute. His interpretation of Quixote always carries this emphasis, sensing that in this world Richardson and Cibber, the innkeepers and merchants, express the real and Quixote the romance.

One effect of making both sides of the reality-romance contrast forms that are imitated or codes of conduct is to suggest that the characters act not independently or by storybook conventions but in terms of divergent sets of manners.

The Alternative Hero: Quixote

Although Richardson presents an unromantic, bourgeois milieu, Fielding detects beneath the psychological and sociological realism the old outlines of the romance heroine, knight, and dragon. The heroine, taken at her own and her author's valuation, is much too good, and the villain much too bad; moreover, the subject is the pursual of the angelic by the diabolic (Mr. B. is frequently called Lucifer), the latter extending downward into the sexual and sadistic.

For Fielding, the middle area between the romance and the burlesque is the "ridiculous," still a satiric domain where no man is above censure. "Great vices," Fielding tells us, explaining his meaning, "are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous." This area excludes the noncomic experience—the absolutely good and absolutely evil. Within this middle area, however, are worse kinds of affectation: people who take pride in their real or supposed virtues, their folly being evident to others but unknown to themselves (vanity); and people who, practicing a vice, consciously pretend to virtue (hypocrisy).

Fielding's earlier villains in the farces and Jonathan Wild were, despite their vicious acts and employment of incidental hypocrisy, essentially of the first type. In these characters Fielding avoided the detestable by dealing with those who imitated without attaining it; they differed from the vain mainly in their conscious effort to be "great," but like the vain they were always falling short. Pamela's particular vice, however, leads Fielding in Joseph Andrews to deal with those who pursue selfish ends while affecting virtue. In one key scene he contrasts the robbers who waylaid Joseph with the respectable folk who came upon him in their stagecoach. The robbers simply robbed and beat Joseph, making no excuses for their villainy and taking the risk of hanging; they are contrasted with the fine gentlemen and ladies who are just as ruthless and brutal but in no danger of being called robbers and hanged. The admitted villain is followed by the woman who is appalled at the idea of being asked for a dram but later, when held up by a highwayman, is shown to carry a flask.

Beyond the comedy of hypocrisy is the plain wickedness of the robbers and the malignant, melodramatic evil of the rapist and murderer. The latter appear only occasionally—in the squire who pointlessly kills the little dog of Wilson's daughter, in the man who tries to rape Fanny, or in the squire who torments Adams and attempts to abduct Fanny. Though sometimes appearing as threats, these acts are ordinarily averted. Such true villains, Fielding adds in his preface, recalling the Satanic villain, "never produce the intended evil." The mistreatment of Joseph and Adams, for example, stops after it passes a certain degree of brutality, and the squire himself is ducked; knavery is present in life, incidental to follies, but is carefully placed in relation to the more universal area of the ridiculous. Furthermore, all of the typically satiric situations are resolved happily. Having drawn out the full effect of the satire, Fielding cancels it with a happy ending. One example is the nightmare situation in which Adams finds himself when he saves Fanny from a rapist and is then accused of robbery and attempted murder by the would-be rapist. He is brought before a justice and remanded to prison until the next assizes; having reached its satiric climax, after which only pathos could follow, the scene is suddenly interrupted, someone recognizes Adams, and all is saved, except that in the confusion the real culprit slips away. The ending does not cancel the effect of the scene (it preserves the good without altering the fact of the evil), but it does restrain satire from becoming melodrama.

A more difficult problem for Fielding was how to create a good character. I wish to approach his solution from two directions, both somewhat tentative but, I think, illuminating for the development of satiric conventions into novelistic ones. The first is through the surrogate villains of the early satires, and the second is through one particular form of this villain, Don Quixote.

Following Gay's example, Fielding had begun by dividing evil into the general and the particular. The general was abstract "greatness," pure drive for power; the particular was an ordinary imitator of the general, a Peachum or Lockit, a below-stairs type, and thus a comic reflection of the more serious, but only implied, upper plot. Only occasionally, as in The Modern Husband, was the plot played out on its higher level, and then it failed dismally, perhaps because it had to be taken too seriously. The hero of the early works was all love or feeling, contrasted to the fools who sacrificed their real selves to an imaginary and delusive ideal. Much of the sympathy the reader may have felt for the surrogate villains resulted from the fact that, in terms of the types of affectation listed in the preface to Joseph Andrews, vanity, not hypocrisy, was the predominant vice—a character merely follows fashion, aspires to be something he is not, without any intent to deceive (indeed, quite the opposite). Even the hypocrite Wild, who pretended to be Heartfree's friend while ruining him, was, in terms of the theatrical metaphor, wearing as his mask the "great man's" face.

The hero of Fielding's novel, as a reaction to Pamela the "paragon," has to be complex—in the sense that appearing bad or foolish, he is good or wise, and that he is also a mixture of these qualities. Thus if the bad character was complex in the early works (in the sense of being two things at once), in the later works the complexity is transferred to the good character. The bad character can be said to derive from the Wild who pretends to be Heartfree's best friend while betraying him; but the good derives from the Wild who is striving for an ideal of greatness but is betrayed by his own humanity.

Both hypocrisy and vanity appear on the spectrum of the "ridiculous" in Joseph Andrews, part of that middle area where there are neither paragons nor Satanic villains; the evil characters tend toward the hypocrisy end, and the good, aspirers to inappropriate ideals, tend toward the vanity end. At the outset, Joseph is ridiculous as an imitator of London fashion and, over a more extended period, an imitator of his sister Pamela's ideal of chastity, which is being imparted to him by her letters (cf. Shamela and her mother's letters). The abstraction of chastity is soon dropped, and Joseph's love for Fanny is substituted as his motive for remaining intact. By then Parson Adams, whose vanities are his conviction of his great knowledge of the world, his classical learning, his abilities as a schoolmaster, and his sermons, especially the one on "Vanity," has entered the story. In terms of fashion, Adams, though naturally a good, charitable man, is ridiculous because he conforms to certain doctrines of the Stoics and the Church Fathers, which, whether good or bad in themselves, are at odds with his own natural goodness.

In a very real sense, Fielding approaches Adams, his great comic creation, through ridicule. Arthur Murphy, analyzing the scene in which Adams assures a stranger that he is rich by showing his half-guinea, experienced "an Emotion of Laughter attended in this Instance with a Contempt for Adams's Want of Knowledge of the World."'s We may not agree, but the point, of course, is that Adams' innocence is accompanied by claims that he is knowledgeable. In the scenes after Fanny and Joseph are joined, he is juxtaposed in scene after scene with Joseph, and in each case a judgment has to be made against Adams.

However, if Fielding approached Adams through ridicule, it is important to note the peculiar effect that renders the word inadequate. Fielding's hero, contrasted to Pamela as hypocrite, had to be a representative of feeling over form; contrasted to Pamela as paragon, he had to be a mixed or middling character. Fielding chose a hero who expressed the virtue of feeling so completely that he was somewhat ridiculous on that account; part of the point, of course, was that heroes, in order to escape being paragons, have to be slightly ridiculous. Don Quixote offered Fielding his prototype for the man who reacts to stimuli from his basic good nature, often in complete opposition to custom, convention, and even prudence.

The paradigm Cervantes introduced in Don Quixote is a remarkable satiric device which Fielding was quick to grasp and exploit, presumably as early as 1729, when he wrote the first version of Don Quixote in England. Quixote, as he saw, can offer a satire either on the visionary who wished to change the world, or on the innkeepers who will not be changed, or on both. Quixote is too impractical, too inward; the innkeepers are too practical, too much of the world; since both are excesses, they act as criticisms of each other.

English satirists recognized the usefulness of one or both of these aspects of Quixote as early as the Civil War, when Samuel Butler made a Quixote out of a hypocritical Puritan enthusiast. Fielding explored one aspect when he made his early villians Quixotic—obsessive characters like Politic, Justice Squeezum, Sir Avarice Pedant, Sir Simon Raffler, even Jonathan Wild, pursuing his chimera of "greatness" as Quixote pursued his chimera of chivalry. The second possibility which informs Fielding's novels is to see Quixote as representative of idealism and simplicity, of a dedication to unfashionable and inward ideals that makes him the opposite of all the conformists or pretenders to conventional and fashionable immorality. His idealism, by comparison, makes the crassness of the world stand out in strong satiric relief.

The Quixotic hero is opposed by the officiousness of innkeepers, the crude reality of windmills and sheep, and the cruelty of masters and the officers of the law. Though Cervantes at the time condemns Quixote, there remains something noble about his freeing the prisoners on their way to the galleys—something deeper and more real, as well as more generous, than the officialdom that sent them there. In short, Quixote's madness is socially and prudentially bad, but spiritually good. His motive is always the best, whatever his action. In fact if one were to look for an example of feeling at odds with form, or motive at odds with action (in the opposite sense from Pamela), he could not find a better one than Quixote.

The emphasis of disapproval in a Fielding hero falls more decidedly on the society through which he moves than on the impractical hero himself, but there is just enough of the visionary in him to make us wish for some of the Pamelian prudence that would keep him on his guard, ready for assaults with more than a crabstick or his fists. Adams is given the obsession of charity and Joseph the obsession of chastity. Joseph's is the more Quixotic in its origin, having been learned from his sister Pamela's letters, and also the more easily outgrown. By the time he is reunited with Fanny he has become the passionate lover—an equally Quixotic figure in this economically oriented society. Adams' basic obsession, seemingly natural but perhaps learned from the works of the Church Fathers, is a belief in the tenets of Apostolic Christianity, which, like Quixote's chivalry, no one else believes any more. Adams sees the world differently from most people, acts according to his vision, and sometimes tries to convert the people he meets. He argues the true nature of charity with Barnabas, Trulliber, and Pounce; he argues the necessity of truth-telling with the innkeeper; and he instructs Joseph in what he considers to be Christian submission to providence. Unlike the Swiftean version of Quixote, however, he never imposes physical coercion on those he tries to convert. There is no action and response, only response—from the wicked whom he meets.

As many critics have pointed out, Adams is the first great comic hero of the English novel. He is comic because of the constant jangling of the spiritual and physical in his makeup. He is wholly the parson, and yet he is hindered and jostled (dragged down in the Quixotic sense) by his ragged, unpriestly clothes, his physical grossness and athletic prowess, his bout with Parson Trulliber's pig, and so on. He is comic in the same sense as Dr. Johnson, the great lexicographer and moralist who, aroused in the middle of the night, is always willing to come down and frolic. Adams goes trotting ahead of the coach carrying the rest of his party: "Mrs. Slipslop desired the coachman to overtake him, which he attempted, but in vain; for the faster he drove, the faster ran the parson, often crying out, 'Aye, aye, catch me if you can"' (Bk. II, Chap. 7; 1, 150). It is this Quixotic incongruity that makes him comic and sympathetic, a completely new combination and precisely what Fielding must have been seeking as the center of his comic epic in prose.

The Touchstone Structure

If the general effect of Fielding's comic epic in prose is indeed comic, the detail is drawn from the satiric forms and devices he knew so well. His particular use of scenic juxtaposition consists most often of a profession followed by an action in which the profession is exposed. To show that appearances or professions like Pamela's can be misleading, he fills his novel with situations in which a character speaks in high-flown terms, such as Lady Booby rationalizing her passion for Joseph, or in heroic terms, such as the gentleman discoursing "on courage, and the infamy of not being ready at all times to sacrifice our lives to our Country" (Bk. II, Chap. 9; 1, 158). Shortly thereafter the character's words are belied by his actions: Lady Booby's self-control dissolves and her lecherously leering face appears, or the gentleman runs away at the first sound of a woman's cry of rape. A conventional pose gives way to reveal the real person through his action—whether it be a worse person or occasionally a better. A third element is often present, which makes satiric judgment obligatory—an Adams, a quiet sort who makes no professions, but who rescues the girl who is being attacked or translates the Latin correctly, and thus gives us a norm by which to judge the other performers. With the most important unit of exposition established, Fielding launches into the elaboration of the central part of the novel—the adventures of the road. Throughout this section punishment of the innocent acts as the central structural device, keeping the reader's attention focused on the Trullibers and Tow-wouses, whose unamiable qualities are exposed by contact with Joseph and Adams.

Around the central touchstone of Joseph or Adams flock a series of characters, each classified and judged by his response. While the continental picaresque often employs its protagonist as a touchstone, nowhere does one find the device used so schematically and extensively as in Joseph Andrews. The most famous instance takes place in the scene where Joseph, robbed and left naked in a ditch, is met by the coachload of respectable folk. Here is Joseph, the prototypical touchstone, suffering humanity stripped of everything, but instead of stimulating charity, he reveals various forms of selfishness in the passengers: prurient prudery in the lady; greed in the coachman who wants his fare; in the lawyer, fear that the passengers will be called to account if Joseph dies; and in the old gentleman, fear that the robbers may still be about but eagerness for an opportunity to show off his wit in front of the lady. In this satiric structure the ideal is indicated by the poorest, most un-Pamelian of the group, the postilion who lends Joseph his coat (and is later transported for robbing a hen roost). The whole scene, in typical Augustan fashion, carries overtones of the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), preparing the reader for the long series of similar scenes that follows.

This fan-shaped structure can be discrete, as in the stagecoach episode, or it can spread over several chapters. Joseph continues as a touchstone when he is taken to the Tow-wouses' inn, and reactions follow in quick succession. (1) The doctor, learning that Joseph is not a gentleman, goes home to bed. When he does get to Joseph the next day he reveals his professional incompetence (or his desire to gain credit for healing a hopeless case) by claiming that Joseph is as good as dead. (2) Mr. Tow-wouse shows charity, wishing to send Joseph one of his own shirts. (3) Mrs. Tow-wouse, however, will not let him ("Common charity, a f !"); she is concerned because if Joseph dies they will have to pay for his funeral. (4) The servant girl Betty, another un-Pamelian character, secures Joseph a shirt from one of her lovers. A normative character like the postilion, she is later caught in a compromising situation and punished by her "betters." (5) Mr. Barnabas, the clergyman, though informed that Joseph is dying, spends his time guzzling punch. Chapter Thirteen describes Barnabas' circuitous route to Joseph's room, his haste to be finished and back at the punch bowl ("For no one could squeeze oranges till he came"). The chapter ends with Mrs. Tow-wouse refusing Joseph the tea he desires, and Betty buying him some herself (it should be added, however, that Betty is much attracted physically to Joseph). When Joseph's situation has been thoroughly exploited, Fielding turns to the highwayman who has been taken prisoner (one of those who nearly killed Joseph). The prisoner—or rather his loot—calls forth the constable's dishonesty, the legal arguments of the surgeon and Barnabas, Mrs. Tow-wouse's blame of her husband, and Tow-wouse's fear that he might be held liable.

Each new inn, each new encounter, presents a new "stagecoach" and a new set of characters to be met, tested, and judged. When the story of Leonora jilting Horatio for the richer Bellarmine is told (and it too is made up of such situations), the listeners react automatically:

"Poor woman!" says Mrs. Slipslop; "what a terrible quandary she must be in!" "Not at all," says Miss Grave-airs; "such sluts can never be confounded." "She must have then more than Corinthian assurance," said Mr. Adams; "ay, more than Lais herself." (Bk. 11, Chap. 4; 1, 130)

Every action is capable of revealing its observers—Slipslop's lust, Graveairs' prudery, Adams' moralizing, naívete, and vanity in his classical learning. Some situations catch Adams and even Joseph, but the first purpose of such scenes is to contribute to the gauntlet run by the heroes on their way back to Booby Hall and to pit against these innocents the Cibbers and Pamelas. When Fanny appears before the justice, the whole gamut of reactions is run through:

the justice employed himself in cracking jests on poor Fanny, in which he was seconded by all the company at table. One asked, "Whether she was to be indicted for a highwayman?" Another whispered in her ear, "If she had not provided herself a great belly, he was at her service." A third said, "He warranted she was a relation of Turpin." To which one of the company, a great wit, shaking his head, and then his sides, answered, "He believed she was nearer related to Turpis." (Bk. II, Chap. 11; 1, 168)

With the good Samaritan echoes now building to unmistakable echoes of the trial and punishment of Christ (Adams and Fanny condemned; the real criminal released), Fielding presents the irresponsible justice, the lecher, the vicious-minded, and the great wit revealing themselves as they collect about the helpless innocents. The tricks played on Adams by the squire and his hangers-on, leading to the attempted rape of Fanny, are only the climax of these encounters.

In terms of the profession-performance form, which is central in a work concerned with hypocrisy, the touchstone becomes the second half, the exposing action, with the profession either assumed (these are often pious-seeming folk) or implicit in the pompous terms they use to cover up the brutality of their reactions. These satiric structures do not disappear in the beginning and end of the novel but are subordinated to the story of Lady Booby's passion for Joseph. Yet even here, when all that is necessary is for Lady Booby to corrupt a corruptible lawyer, the reader is treated to a small anatomy of the unethical lawyer in his speeches and plans for thwarting the Joseph-Fanny marriage. Nor is it sufficient for Mr. Booby to rescue Joseph from the court; the reader is also presented with lawyer Scout's deposition, which demonstrates the shiftiness, illiteracy, and legal jargon of the justice who wrote it. The most conventional of all satiric expository forms appears in the narrative of Mr. Wilson, who simply recites a list of the evils of London, ending with his withdrawal to an Eden (or Golden Age) in the country. But here the form has not been absorbed, and the purely satiric piling up of vice upon vice, crowding of incident upon incident, carries an imitative effect that is closer to Richardson than to Fielding.

The profession-performance and touchstone forms, on the other hand, support the initial and sustaining point of the novel about Pamelian appearance and reality. More than satire, these forms represent Fielding's image of the way life operates, and they demonstrate his continuing concern with the meaning of an action. In the Champion (Dec. 11, 1739), he argues that

The only Ways by which we can come to any Knowledge of what passes in the Minds of others, are their Words and Actions; the latter of which, hath by the wiser Part of Mankind been chiefly depended on, as the surer and more infallible guide.¹⁶

Faces, he adds, are no more reliable than words. This discussion, which is used to introduce a hypocrite's letter-to-the-editor, is transformed into the theme of Shamela. Reminiscent of Pamela, Shamela tells us "That to go to church, and to pray, and to sing psalms, and to honour the clergy, and to repent, is true religion; and 'tis not doing good to one another." And in Parson Williams the maxim is "That 'tis not what we do, but what we believe, that must save us."¹⁷ In Joseph Andrews, where Josephs and Shamelas are placed in the same world, the central fact is that actions alone can be relied on as tests of men's character or inner being. In the Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men, published in the Miscellanies of 1743, Fielding goes into more detail on the subject, which clearly interests him more and more. Here he argues in the typically satiric vein that "the actions of men seem to be the justest interpreters of their thoughts, and the truest standards by which we may judge them. By their fruits you shall know them." He then examines the various factors that obscure a proper judgment of actions: "when we take their own words against their actions" and "when we take the colour of a man's actions, not from their own visible tendency, but from his public character: when we believe what others say of him, in opposition to what we see him do" (14, 289-90). The first of these is the subject of Joseph Andrews; the second, anticipating a new phase of Fielding's career, becomes the subject of Tom Jones, where the reputations of Tom and Blifil render judgment difficult.

It is important to see that the touchstone structure is a logical development of the multiple commentators of Fielding's satiric farces. The normative aspect of these commentators led to the Fielding narrator: their apparently different points of view in the farces resolved into a single one that unambiguously explained the action they observed. In the Champion essays, where Fielding again began with a group of commentators, the Vinegar family tended to narrow into one person, the normative speaker, who subsequently became the narrator of Joseph Andrews. But the suggestion of multiple opinions and their reflection back on the commentators remained to some extent throughout the Champion and leads in Joseph Andrews to the multiple reactions to an action that is unambiguous (perhaps made so by the normative narrator) and by which the spectators are judged.

Already the device begins to imply the difficulty of judging an action, but as yet the difficulty lies in the observers, not in the action itself. The device may also, in the generally epistemological context of the anti-Pamela, suggest a range of attitudes rather than a group of different kinds of vice. Finally, as part of an antiromance situation, it brings together a number of people from different professions and social classes and records their reactions to a social situation or crisis, something out of the ordinary routine that will reveal their true selves and (the crucial element) juxtapose the social appearance and the animal reality. In short, it suggests that revelation of character through an action is the point in question rather than the proof of a satiric theorem.

We cannot accept these forms as exactly what Fielding claims them to be or what they may appear to be. They are not in fact honest searches for truth or reality. Even if their extremely schematic anatomy-like structure did not argue against their objectivity, it would be clear that their purpose is a satiric one—to support Fielding's general premise about the relationship between his heroes and Cibberian and Pamelian society. As A. D. McKillop puts it, in Fielding's novels the discrepancy between appearance and reality "is not treated as an ultimate metaphysical problem, as in Don Quixote. Fielding is not trying to present or to pluck out the heart of a mystery; he is continuously corroborating a position which he has made clear from the first."' Nevertheless, Fielding's basic unit became a basic unit¹⁸ of the novel and, in his next novel, outgrew its satiric origin. The sense of a test and a judgment emerges, as does the leisurely pace, which as much as anything creates the mood of the novel as it developed in his hands.

The Debt to Pamela

Joseph Andrews is an anti-Pamela, but in more ways than one it verges on being a pro-Pamela. The most important element of Pamela and, later, Clarissa was the portrait of the individual defending her personal integrity, her very identity against threats from outside. Since Coleridge, however, readers reacting to Richardson's hot, stuffy sickroom tend to forget what a moral intention meant to Richardson, Pope, Bishop Slocock, and other conservative contemporaries who went on record in praise of Pamela. It meant, on the one hand, presenting an ideal of conduct, a Christian passing through trials and tribulations; on the other hand, it meant showing the evil threats to this virtue in their true colors. The most effective method for the latter was, of course, satire.

Mrs. Jewkes and Colbrand, both epitomes of the malevolent guardian, are presented by conventional satiric portraits, emblematic and perhaps derived from the picaresque. They are domesticated in Richardson's novel because they are seen through Pamela's eyes and thus thoroughly assimilated to her psychologically convincing situation. She is satirizing a particular enemy, with only her own fear as motive and with no sense of exposing a general vice. Nevertheless, it is interesting that embedded in such a work should be fragments of the old satiric conventions.

More significant for Fielding is the touchstone form with which Richardson begins his novel—the treatment of a helpless servant girl at the hands of a wicked master, self-seeking servants, and the master's self-satisfied relatives and neighbors. A central character in a difficult situation is reacted to by a series of good and bad people. The vague outlines of this form occasionally emerge in a structure very much like that of Joseph Andrews, as in Parson Williams' letter recounting his failure to secure aid from the neighboring gentry. Lady Jones does not care to make an enemy of B.; Lady Damford puts the responsibility on her husband, who sees nothing wrong with a young gentleman's seducing his waiting-maid ("He hurts no family by this"); Mr. Peters, the minister of the parish, sees ulterior motives in Williams' defense of Pamela, says it is "too common and fashionable a case to be withstood by a private clergyman or two," claims that any action on his part might turn B. against him, and, besides, "'tis what all young gentlemen will do"; even Williams has some doubts, since "the gentleman is dying, whose living Mr. B. has promised me" (1, 168-70).

The novel, however, changes direction when B. arrives at his Lincolnshire estate: the touchstone structure and the anatomy are replaced by the simple battle of wills, a contest between B. and Pamela. The domain of satire, as Frye has pointed out, is the time after the forces of evil have defeated those of good; this precludes any active conflict between good and evil which is not one-sided. If Richardson had included letters from B. as well as from Pamela (as he did with their equivalents in Clarissa), his whole novel might have taken on the form of a battle of wills. The single point of view renders the larger part of the novel the pursuit of an innocent. Richardson is drawing in a vague way on Mrs. Manley's chroniques scandaleuses (even in the sense that he began with a true story); while his form is conventional, however, his conclusion and general effect are not.¹⁹

Once Pamela and B. are married, she again becomes a persecuted maiden and touchstone. This time she runs the gauntlet of the outraged reaction of Lady Davers, the foppish one of her nephew Jackey, and the jealous one of Lady Davers' maid. Pamela's confrontation of Lady Davers is less a conflict between strong-willed characters than the high point in the introduction of the new wife to a satiric portrait gallery of snobbish relatives. First she is the virtuous person tormented by these unfeeling, snobbish boors, and then she is the female satirist goaded into rebuke—the same figure who appeared occasionally in Lincolnshire. In his efforts to make the reader aware of Pamela's biting retorts, Richardson has Jackey point to her satiric strength whenever she completes a sally. Her remarks, however, are too direct, too prolix and realistic, too much a result of her situation to create a genuine feeling of satire.

Thus whenever the possibility of a dramatic conflict is past and the situation becomes relatively static, Richardson slips into popular conventions, which are sometimes satiric, although to him they were probably less specifically satiric than a way to the moral tone of denunciation through ridicule. The greatest force working against any possibility of sustained satire, as well as moral doctrine, is the character of Pamela. In the usual moral work the central character is not so central as she is, so closely felt, so absorbing as far as the reader is concerned. When she describes someone as vicious, he is only vicious through her eyes, to her way of thinking; when she explains one of her own actions, it is only from her point of view. This unreliability of the narrator, of course, notoriously destroys the intended direction of Richardson's structure, which is to contrast Pamela's angelic flight to the evil pursuit of Mr. B. and with the good and bad people who react to her during flight. But it does create, among other things, a new scene based on satiric conventions, in which one character satirizes another without reference to anything outside their own private situation. This is a scene to which we shall return later.

Joseph Andrews is an alternative to Pamela, and yet Fielding places him in a situation roughly parallel to hers. Fielding has taken from Richardson the satiric situation of the innocent pursued and punished by the guilty and turned it into an obviously satiric principle of structure. It is even somewhat unfair of Fielding to contrast Joseph repulsing Lady Booby's advances and being discharged with the consequence of Pamela's less unequivocal repulses; after all, Pamela is threatened and put upon for a long time before she arrives at her happy ending. In a sense Fielding is merely showing that interim period, though extending the scope of Joseph's experience beyond sexual attack. Attacks on Joseph begin with his virtue but go on to more general and physical assaults and finally extend to Adams and even Fanny—to all the good, innocent people. The point is that this is how a virtuous Pamela would be treated in this real world, but it is also very close to the treatment accorded to the actual Pamela during the first and best-known part of Richardson's novel.

The influence is largely formal, since Fielding never dwells on Joseph's or Fanny's feelings; most of the time the reader is not allowed sympathy for the victim (as in Pamela) but indignation at the persecutor. Richardson is not a more important source for the persecuted hero than Cervantes; but from Richardson, the "enemy," Fielding was able to pick up an older strain of the picaresque, in which the low social status of the protagonist contributes to his troubles (not one of Quixote's problems) and in which the servant-master relationship plays some part.²⁰ Joseph, however, like Richardson's second heroine Clarissa, refuses to come to terms with his corrupt society and in this sense derives from the Quixote tradition.

Parson Adams is another of Fielding's original and brilliant contributions to this compromise form. By a weird logic Adams corresponds to Parson Williams, as Joseph and Fanny correspond to Pamela; Fielding gives his hero a clergyman, like Pamela's, to assist him to escape. Adams is as effective in preserving Joseph as Williams was in preserving Pamela (an irony Fielding had already explored in Shamela). By shifting the focus, on the one hand, to the pursuers and, on the other, to the figure of the comic clergyman-helper, Fielding has created a result not too far from Richardson's, yet comic and satiric. He has both the moral truth and the psychological truth Richardson attempted to join. Richardson's mistake may have been attempting both in the same figure, Pamela.

It is from Pamela (novel and character) that Fielding took his immediate inspiration. Looking at Richardson's novel he could see both strains of the potential novel; he could see the one he was interested in, the moral commentary, perverted and ruined, and so he set about correcting it, naturally following to some extent the basic situation of Richardson's novel. He changed the focus from the pursued to the pursuers, particularly in the middle part of his novel, but not so much as to deny the connection with Pamela or the alternative version he was presenting. But like Pamela, Adams and Joseph are positive, fully explored proposals for the good; they have to be, as alternatives to Pamelian virtue. Figures so fully developed were not common in satire prior to this. It is, in fact, in the development of these good characters that Fielding establishes Joseph Andrews as a transition between satire and the novel.

Joseph Andrews is the great watershed of Fielding's career. In all of his work the evil character appears either as the protagonist or as the persecutor of the protagonist: as the spider at the middle of a web dotted with trapped flies or as the cutthroat lying in wait along dark streets for the good man to pass. In Jonathan Wild both situations appear—Wild by himself and Heartfree and his wife being waylaid by Wild. In the satires that can best be called Augustan the evil agent is a larger-than-life symbol of man's perversity attempting to engross, amoeba-like, all that comes within reach. Certain mitigations accompany his portrait, but he remains bad and more or less in the center of the canvas. In Joseph Andrews, however, the evil agent receives much attention and even in the aggregate is still the subject of the satire, but he is no longer in the center, no longer dwelt on so lovingly, and is in fact less interesting than Parson Adams. His pride and swagger have been reduced to hypocrisy, and his exposure is that of a coward who affects bravery or a slut who affects gentility. So long as the character aspired to "greatness," a fashionable ideal, hypocrisy was secondary—one might use it as a way to achieve "greatness." But when Fielding turned from opera heroes and politicians to Pamela, who aspired not to "greatness" directly but disguised this quality by the term "virtue," he became concerned primarily with hypocrisy. Evil is no longer the adhering to a fashionable but wrong standard, but adhering to this standard while making loud protestations of a morally right standard; the character's motive has now become the subject of exposure.

With Pamela goodness became a problem for Fielding. The relative complexity of the evil man is transferred to the good man who is in the center of the narrative. It is altogether possible that Pamela may have made Fielding conclude that a hero could be as interesting as a villain. His moral essays, though assisting him, could not have shown him the way. His reaction against Pamela did show him that if the ordinary evil man is a mixed lot, so is the ordinary good man.

Notes

¹ Cf. Swift's "Dedication to Prince Posterity" in A Tale of a Tub and Fielding's Covent-Garden Journal, No. 40, ed. Jensen, 1, 362.

² See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1956), and Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, Criterion Books, 1960).

³The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1956), p. 57.

⁴Pamela (London, Chapman and Hall, 1902), 1, 141; Joseph Andrews, Bk. I, Chap. 6; 1, 40.

⁵The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 31.

⁶ Watt, Rise of the Novel, p. 288.

⁷ Maynard Mack has pointed out this effect in his introduction to Joseph Andrews (New York, Rinehart, 1948), p. 6.

⁸ Samuel Coleridge, The Complete Works, ed. W. C. T. Shedd (New York, 1853), 4, 380.

⁹ See André Le Breton, Le Roman au XVIII^eme siècle (Paris, n.d.), and Dorothy Frances Dallas, Le Roman Français de 1660 a 1680 (Paris, 1932), Chap. 1.

¹⁰ Letter VI; Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Boston, Riverside Editions, 1961), p. 313.

¹¹Pamela, 1, 72.

¹² The situation is perhaps even more reminiscent of The Beggar's Opera with the Peachum-Polly-Macheath relationship repeated in Mrs. Andrews-Shamela-Parson Williams. Gay offered Fielding a model for the interpretation of the middle-class mind that must have contributed to Fielding's interpretation of Pamela as Shamela. Mrs. Peachum sounds like Mother Andrews when she explains that "the first time a woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice, methinks, for then or never is the time to make her fortune. After that, she hath nothing to do but to guard herself from being found out, and she may do what she pleases" (II.8). Polly herself puts it this way: "A girl who cannot grant some things, and refuse what is most essential, will make but a poor hand of her beauty, and soon be thrown upon the common" (I.7).

¹³ Cf. Martin C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of "Joseph Andrews" (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 8-9.

¹⁴ Another sort of parallel may also be present. Battestin believes that Fielding uses a mock-heroic structure similar to Pope's, but with the Bible instead of the Aeneid as the second term. Abraham Adams and Joseph, he argues, should suggest to us overtones of the biblical Abraham and Joseph (see The Moral Basis, pp. 41, 48).

¹⁵The Gray's-Inn Journal, No. 96, Aug. 17, 1754.

¹⁶Champion, 1, 79.

¹⁷Shamela, p. 319.

¹⁸ "Some Recent Views of Tom Jones," College English, 21 (1959), 19.

¹⁹ This is not to deny anticipations and analogues in France that were strictly amorous. Prevost employs pursued heroines, and Mlle. de Theville is pursued by the wicked comte de Versac in Crebillon fils' Egarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit (1736); the heroine of Duclos' Histoire de Mme. de Lux (1741) is forced to give herself to a blackmailer and is also subsequently drugged and raped. While these carry Pamela's erotic theme, they do not carry the other un-French qualities that distinguish Richardson's novel—its echoes of satiric and picaresque forms.

²⁰ The idea of the servant girl probably came to Richardson from the large conduct book literature of his time, but consciously or not, he has connected his book with the basic servant-master relationship of the early picaresque novels, though characteristically narrowing his focus to only one episode. In the first third of Pamela, during the assaults on her virtue, he constantly refers to the proper relationship between Pamela and B. and B.'s perversion of it. "Well may I forget that I am your servant," Pamela tells B., "when you forget what belongs to a master"; she accuses him of "demeaning" himself "to be so free to a poor servant" (1, 18). "When a master of his honour's degree demeans himself to be so free as that to a poor servant as me, what is the next to be expected?" Pamela talks on and on, referring to "the distance between a master and a servant" (1, 33-34). Pamela of course derives less directly from the Spanish picara like Justina than from Defoe's heroes and heroines whose final goal, however disguised by moral platitudes, is simply survival.