SOURCE: "Sarah Fielding's Self-Destructing Utopia: The Adventures of David Simple," in Living by The Pen: Early British Women Writers, edited by Dale Spender, Teachers College Press, 1992, pp. 65–81.

Utopian Visions and Feminist Theory

… In The Adventures of David Simple (1744 and 1753),¹ Sarah Fielding considers the human need for friendship and criticizes patriarchy for the greed and mistrust fostered by its hierarchies. She finds patriarchal capitalism responsible for the maintenance in society of what she believes are negative feminine virtues: innocence, passivity, and privacy. Further, she presents an alternative system, and is bold in her vision of a utopia that insists on the centrality of what she sees as true feminine values, nurturance, and nonhierarchical sharing. And, finally, she destroys those persons who must fully exhibit the negative feminine virtues, thereby depicting the insidiously oppressive force of such "virtues." In this way, Sarah Fielding examines the historical contradiction present in eighteenth-century ideas about feminine virtue, destroying her utopia through the debilitating underside of the femininity on which it was founded. In so doing, she depicts the need for profound psychological and social change.

In David Simple, Sarah Fielding creates a sustained utopian vision, its destruction acting as a critique of the contradictions inherent in a system that taught females powerlessness as a virtue while depending on feminine nurturance for its existence. In several of her other works, Fielding treats this theme briefly, sometimes, as in The Cry, offering the hope of utopia but stopping short of its realization; other times, as in The Governess, creating a limited utopia that acts as satire on the surrounding patriarchy.

Ann K. Mellor, in an essay on twentieth-century feminist utopias, argues that feminist utopian thinking is inherently revolutionary and "defines the sources and directions of contemporary feminist desire" (1982, p. 243). My exploration of the utopian theme in Sarah Fielding's work was inspired by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg's essay (1982) on utopias as imaged in the writings of Mary Astell, Sarah Scott, and Clara Reeve. In general, the thinking of Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Clara Reeve helps define the sources and directions of eighteenth-century feminist desire. All four of these writers insist on the importance of education and womanly community to the development of the female identity; this is a central focus of eighteenth-century feminist theory.

Patrilineal Inheritance and Woman's Story

A brief outline of the plot of David Simple is in order. Innocent and passive, David Simple is easily banished from his home through the machinations of his brother. After his uncle restores his inheritance, David settles an annuity for life on the brother, and leaves with the intention of searching for a true friend. In his travels, David is everyone's favorite gull, repeatedly demonstrating the aptness of his name through his utter naivete. Eventually, he meets Cynthia, who has been banished from her home for refusing to be a pawn in a money-marriage. The brother and sister, Valentine and Camilla, next come to his attention, when they are about to be evicted from squalid lodgings. Their step-mother, scheming to gain their inheritance, had turned their father against them and sent them away from their home. Valentine and Cynthia marry, as do David and Camilla, and the friends establish a community based in nurturance and nonhierarchical sharing. Babies arrive, and for some years the community lives in peace. But worldly men use their skill at law and finance to take advantage of David and his friends, finally rendering them destitute. Illness comes to them, too, usually as a result of an inability to confront evil: indirectly when poverty makes medical help inaccessible, or directly when a child is abused by neighbors. One by one the members of the community die, until only Cynthia and her niece remain.

This novel uses the character of David Simple to tell woman's story, a story of some of the complex and subtle ways in which women were silenced by eighteenth-century gender ideology. David is womanly in his embodiment of the accepted feminine virtues of innocence, passivity, and privacy; in his demonstrations of nurturance and nonhierarchical sharing; and in his opposition to and retreat from patriarchal values. Fielding's critique of the oppressive world of David Simple centers in the system of patrilineal inheritance and extends to patriarchal capitalism. Eighteenth-century feminine virtues both arose out of and maintained these systems, in which inheritance passed through the male line and where nearly all trades were closed to women. Laboring-class women were sexual prey in trades open to them. Looking toward the marriage market, middle-class parents instilled in their daughters such virtues as ladylike innocence, passivity, privacy, and nurturance. The alternative community in David Simple flourishes through feminine nurturance, but Sarah Fielding demonstrates that feminine innocence, passivity, and privacy also allow the system of patriarchal capitalism to destroy the community.

The system of patrilineal inheritance encourages corruption, as David, Camilla, and Valentine are banished from their homes in schemes to rob them of their patrimony. And the system oppresses insidiously, as Cynthia's parents, concerned for her commodity value, caution her against reading: "She had better mind her Needle-work, and such Things as were useful for Women" (Malcolm Kelsall, 1969, p. 101). Ironically, it is because they have been trained only in skills that are "useful" for women that Cynthia and Camilla can't survive on their own. When Cynthia is alone in the world, she can find work only as a lady's companion, a servile "Toad-eater" (p. 113); even through begging, Camilla is unable to support her ill brother. David consistently shows his nonalignment with these patriarchal values. He shares his money with his brother, with friends, with anyone in need. He helps Cynthia leave her demeaning position and find temporary housing, refusing to be stopped by threats of scandal—by the propriety demanded in a system that sees the single woman as sexually available.² Believing Cynthia to be the author of her own destiny, he offers respectful nurturance.

Finally, David most clearly rejects patriarchal values when he and his friends establish their alternative community. In this utopia, both fortune and work are shared in common. Late in the story, when Cynthia and Valentine must travel to Jamaica, David divides his money with them: "and this was the first time the Word DIVIDED could … have been used, in relating the Transactions of our Society; for SHARING in common, without any Thought of separate Property, had ever been their friendly Practice, from their first Connection" (p. 338). Girls and boys are educated in literacy, the arts, and work. No one person in the community holds authority. The one person the others look to most, however, is Cynthia, whose advanced wisdom is happily acknowledged:

If Cynthia knew her understanding, without being proud of it, Camilla could acknowledge it without Envy, and David was sensible of it without abating one Tittle of his Love for his Wife; or in the Person of his Wife, desiring to pull down Cynthia. And every Advantage or Pleasure arising from any Faculty of the Mind, was as much shared in their Society, as any other Property whatever, (pp. 30–331)

Cynthia, who formerly had to disguise herself with a veil of ladylike passivity and privacy,³ is able to direct her creativity toward entertaining her friends, often through the telling of stories. In this community, women are recognized as speaking and acting subjects.

Sarah Fielding's utopian vision includes consideration of economic class. Cynthia and Camilla are both representatives of Fielding's own station in life, that of the gentlewoman without means of support. In an early recognition of how capitalism divides and harms people, Camilla laments, "If we were to attempt getting our living by any Trade, People in that Station would think we were endeavouring to take Bread out of their mouths" (p. 169). The utopian community extends to include the struggling Farmer Dunster and his family. Friendship is established, and Cynthia teaches the child, Betty Dunster, to read and write; in return, Betty teaches Cynthia's daughter to knit and spin flax. Not surprisingly, the good capitalists, Mr. and Mrs. Orgueil, seek to ruin this friendship and to keep the Dunsters in their social and economic place.

Feminine Virtue As Weakness

Sarah Fielding demonstrates the pervasiveness of eighteenth-century gender ideology by insisting that shelter from a patriarchal world is not, finally, possible. One must act upon that world and to do so takes knowledge and considerable self-assertion. This is supremely difficult, for the world demands of women innocence and self-effacement; in taking on these qualities, women oppress themselves. In David's confrontations with those who wield power, we clearly see the crippling effects of the feminine virtues. In patriarchy, one must always look to the powerful men more advanced on the hierarchy, thereby seeking approval and even self-definition specifically from those to whom one is inferior.

This happens to David in his relationship with the manipulative Mr. Ratcliff. In his innocence, David early mistakes Ratcliff's sociability for friendship. Ratcliff controls the destinies of David and the community, exerting power simply for its own sake. Innocent and passive, David is easily dominated. Ratcliff insists on naming David and Camilla's son "Peter," after himself, and on claiming the child as his godson. Ratcliff demands that the boy be sent away to school, while advising that David's daughter learn needlework. When he sends fine clothing to his godson, he throws in discarded damask sacks to be cut up for nightgowns and coats for the daughters. Proud of his connections to men yet more powerful than himself, Ratcliff promises David that he will find him preferment through a certain Great Man. Late in the novel, when the resources of the community have been entirely lost, David learns that Ratcliff has taken the preferment for himself. Just at this juncture, Ratcliff sends "a handsome Present for his God-son" (p. 384), at the same time writing to demand that Peter be sent to him for his further education. David, stunned by Ratcliff's betrayal of friendship, for once asserts himself, insisting to Camilla that the boy not be "educated under the Tuition of such a Man" (p. 384). As Peter has taken ill, Camilla writes that his sickness will not allow the move. Ratcliff replies in a stinging letter accusing David and Camilla of ingratitude, and disinheriting the boy. This letter arrives one day after Peter has died of smallpox.

How are we to read David's insistence that his son not live with Ratcliff? It is one of the very few instances in the whole work in which David shakes off passivity for a moment of self-assertion, and it comes after a long line of passive acquiescences in Ratcliff's design. Sarah Fielding makes David's first acquiescence so passive as to leave it off the page. In the episode concerning Peter's naming, the sole evidence of personal conviction comes from Camilla:

… Camilla was brought to bed of a boy, and he was christened by the name of Peter, after his God-father; for Camilla, although it would have been her Choice, that her first Son should have borne the Name of her much-loved Husband, would not oppose Mr. Ratcliff's Request, or even mention her own Choice, whilst there was the least Probability, that her Son's Interest might be forwarded by complying with whatever Mr. Ratcliff should in reason desire. (Kelsall, 1969, pp. 317–318)

Camilla's privacy and passivity are such that she is made inarticulate by her recognition of power that is inaccessible to her save through Ratcliff's agency. But David's desires are entirely unspoken, even in his own mind. Sarah Fielding, in an interesting narrative choice, causes the naming of David's first-born son to go by without any note of his thoughts on the matter. She might, for instance, have chosen to make this matter indicative of David's purposeful nonalignment with patriarchal values, which might have been imaged by David's stated preference that his son not be named after him or after any patriarchal figure (such as Ratcliff). This would have been an instance of pacifism, an active refusal to participate in hierarchical systems, the very fabric of which insists on winners and losers and thus promotes violence. Sarah Fielding does provide us with a few demonstrations of David's pacifism; for example, his refusal to play the role of seducer and rapist when he helps Cynthia find lodgings, and his interest in establishing a community based in nonhierarchical sharing. In this novel, Sarah Fielding distinguishes between those behaviors that actively promote peace and health, such as pacifism and nurturance, and those that render good intents ineffective, such as passivity.⁴ The contrast she thus sets up is essential to her critique of eighteenth-century gender ideology in that it demonstrates that the terms of expected female behavior are contradictory, that, for instance, "nurturance" and "passivity" cannot coexist, that real nurturance can only be effected through active self-assertion.

After this initial acquiescence, David endures years of Ratcliff's dominance. Finally, David says "no." But even here, Sarah Fielding points to his passivity. First, David speaks his assertion only to Camilla: "David did not design even to take Notice of Mr. Ratcliff's Letter: it was a Correspondence his Soul abhorred, and which had not subsisted so long, had not the State of Timidity … taken from him the Power of acting what, in his own Judgment, he thought best" (Kelsall, 1969, p. 385). Camilla writes the rejection letter. Second, Sarah Fielding creates a serious illness for Peter, so that neither Camilla nor David has to speak the real reason for their refusal. And finally, the sudden death of Peter means that David's assertion is never tested; in fact, David sees his son's death specifically in terms of release from Ratcliffs domination: "David, in the Joy that his Son had escaped all Possibility of having his young Mind corrupted by being formed under such a Hand, smothered his Grief for his Loss" (p. 390). Death is a certain escape, as it is an ultimate passivity. Peter is sheltered in death as his father was unable to shelter him in life. David's joy in his son's final escape covers the harsh truth, that his own timidity would always render him powerless.

Lawyers, Financiers, and Eighteenth-Century Gender Ideology

In David's relations with Ratcliff, Fielding demonstrates the progressively crippling effects of innocence and passivity. In his confrontations with lawyers and financiers, we see David's nonalignment with the values of patriarchal capitalism. But here, again, he is generally without power to assert his own values. In this novel, people need lawyers specifically for protection of patrilineal inheritance rights. After spending five hundred pounds in litigation, Camilla and Valentine lose their inheritance because of a bad mortgage. And when David's right to his uncle's estate is contested in an unjust and intricate lawsuit, David intuits that he should relinquish his claim. Here, again, it is significant to Sarah Fielding's critique that she shows David following not the path of active refusal but that of passive acquiescence: Ratcliff and other "Men of Prudence and Experience" (Kelsall, 1969, p. 324) coerce him to continue, and he assents. After nine years of litigation, the suit is lost, and payments to lawyers leave the community destitute.

In the gender ideology of eighteenth-century patriarchal capitalism, women are sexual goods, their social, legal, and economic status of commodities rather than free agents. Sarah Fielding shows this through events in the lives of Camilla and Cynthia. Early in the novel, we read of Camilla's desperation when her attempts to raise money for her ill brother are met by demands for sexual favors (pp. 165–167) and of the sexual harassment Cynthia must deal with when traveling alone (pp. 175–184). (See Dale Spender, 1986, p. 187.) Late in the novel, Fielding again reminds us of women's commodity status by creating a scene in which the newly widowed Cynthia is propositioned by a lawyer who uses his access to power to try to buy her sexual services. After Cynthia had trusted the lawyer to manage her finances, he presented her with a bill that (falsely) indicated that she had no money coming to her but instead owed him: "he had the Assurance to tell me … that he had formed that Account with an Intent of getting me into his Power; and that he would never insist on my paying him the Balance, if 1 would comply with his Conditions" (Kelsall, 1969: p. 392). When she refused his conditions, he spread rumors about her. Interestingly, Fielding here indicates the complex nature of gender ideology by implicating a woman—"Mrs. Darkling (the richest Widow in this Place)" (p. 393)—in the silencing of Cynthia's just complaint. When Cynthia turned to Mrs. Darkling for support, she was advised "not to let my Vanity tempt me to expose myself, by telling such an incredible Story to any other" (p. 393). As theorists such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1980, pp. 147–149) and Margaret Homans (1983) have pointed out, middle- and upper-class women often experience a divided consciousness, joined to the dominant culture by their class but excluded by their sex. Fielding represents this divided consciousness in the separate persons of Cynthia, who in her own victimization recognizes woman's powerlessness, and Mrs. Darkling, who must reject a woman's plea in order to protect her (male-identified) position within the dominant group.

Whereas lawyers use their access to knowledge about money to exert power over the less privileged, financiers achieve the same purpose through their access to money itself. Early in the novel, David is shocked to see financiers use "Treachery" to "barter for Interest," and is enraged to learn that "Riches were esteemed Goodness, and Deceit, Low-Cunning, and giving up all things to the love of Gain, were thought Wisdom (Kelsall, 1969, pp. 28–30). Under patriarchal capitalism, values are transposed to commodities, and life becomes a system of debits and gains. David, who simply shares, cannot comprehend this. Very late in the novel, David must turn to a money lender to help his family. The money lender speaks of "Security," "Executions," "Obligations," "Contingencies," and "Substance"; David speaks of "Family," "Enjoyment," and the "Pleasure" of being able to "serve" his "brother" Valentine. Neither understands the other, and at one point, significantly, David says, "You don't talk our Language, Sir" (pp. 368–369). But the money lender has power, and David does not. Money is lent on David's bond for treble the sum. Later, the lender sends a bailiff to claim the family cottage.

Cynthia Survives

In a pattern that is emblematic of their inability to shelter themselves from a patriarchal world, the community is three times forced to give up its home. From an estate, the family moves to a smaller home. From this home, they move to a cottage. Come to possess the cottage, the bailiff in a drunken stupor mistakenly sets fire to it. Losing "their small House, and every Thing in it" (Kelsall, 1969, p. 400), the family is taken in by Farmer Dunster. At the close of the novel, after a long train of corruptions and miseries for which innocent passivity has been no match, everyone in the community has died, save Cynthia and her niece. In a significant act of self-assertion, Cynthia journeys alone to a neighboring town, where she is successful in securing a safe home and sufficient income for both the child and herself. (Surely, however, Sarah Fielding is commenting on woman's powerlessness even here, for Cynthia's success is the success of begging: she visits a family who had once before befriended her and is given promise of help.)

All the friends demonstrate nurturance and harmony, which Sarah Fielding depicts as true feminine grace. All but Cynthia, however, are finally destroyed by an overabundance of other supposedly feminine traits: innocence, self-effacement, and that most "feminine" of all conditions, illness. In their innocence and self-effacement, Camilla and David are repeatedly prevented from turning their good intentions into effective actions. Valentine, a shadow figure who is rarely on-stage, is plagued with recurrent illness and passive melancholy. On illness as concomitant to femininity, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write, "It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters…. To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health …" (1979, pp. 53–54). Janet Todd notes illness as one of the central motifs that mark women in the eighteenth-century novel: "Women fall ill in the eighteenth-century novel alarmingly often…. Sickness is a mark of female debility…. It is also an excuse for inaction" (1980, p. 407). As an excuse for inaction, illness is linked with the feminine "virtue" of passivity. The negative termination of both illness and passivity is death. It is fitting that Cynthia survive. In her energy and wit, she is able to act upon the world.

Disguise and the Feminist Critique

In Sensibility: An Introduction, Janet Todd discusses a group of novels that depict "the man of feeling who has, in an unfeeling world, avoided manly power and assumed the womanly qualities of tenderness and susceptibility" (1986, pp. 88–89). David Simple is the first of these novels, most of which were written in the 1760s and 70s. Other significant novels of male sensibility include The Fool of Quality (1764–1767) by Henry Brooke, The Vicar of Wakefie Id (1766) by Oliver Gold-smith, A Sentimental Journey (1768) by Laurence Sterne, and The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry Mackenzie. In creating the character David Simple, then, Fielding created a model for the man of feeling as feminine, one whose condition in life is very like that of a woman. The narrative of David's life tells woman's story, a story that is varied thematically by the stories of Camilla and Cynthia. In disguising woman's story, Sarah Fielding actually strengthens her critique of eighteenth-century gender ideology. Centering feminine virtues in a male character serves to defamiliarize them, and we can see that innocence and passivity are, in fact, weaknesses.

David's feminist impulse to retreat from patriarchal values comes from the combined force of three womanly characteristics. First, his embodiment of the feminine "virtues" renders him psychologically incapable of confronting the world; second, each time his innocence is lifted and he sees something new of patriarchy, he is horrified; and third, he adheres to what we would term feminist principles—his belief in useful education for both girls and boys, and his commitment to replacing hierarchy with shared wealth, work, and ideas. In addition, Fielding's representation of nurturance in the character of David Simple is pertinent. Today, while nurturance is easily dismissed as a limiting feminine trait, feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan (1982) and Barbara Deming (1984) argue that because females are trained to nurturance, women have needed healing energy to offer a violent world. It is precisely this double focus that Fielding gives to her illustration of nurturance. David is truly nurturing, for example, in the help he originally offers to Camilla and Valentine, and to Cynthia. The energy he gives comes back to him in loving friendship and hope for community. But his passivity debilitates him such that his nurturance eventually becomes little more than good intent—effeminate in the most stereotypic sense of the word.

Sarah Fielding, then, has here created a man who rejects patriarchy, whose central beliefs are feminist, and who, finally, is unable to effect his dreams because he is femininely "virtuous" to an extreme. One disturbing thing Fielding seems to be saying here is that "yes," we women wish men could be more like women, except that in being like a woman, a man is necessarily weak, and finally destroyed. (She does, in her later novels, create masculine men who learn to accept women's values about sex and marriage. Two such are Lord Dorchester in Ophelia and Mr. Bilson in The Countess of Dellwyn, both of whom are taught lessons by the women in their lives. Lord Dorchester in particular remains basically aggressive, and he does not question patriarchal values beyond the sexual double standard.) Sarah Fielding's point with David, the character, and with David Simple, the novel, it seems to me, is to hold the "desirable" feminine virtues up to scrutiny and to demonstrate that these virtues—innocence, passivity, privacy—are crippling weaknesses that prevent the social change that would occur with the flourishing of what are, to her, true feminine virtues: nurturance and nonhierarchical sharing. Given her position in mid-century English society, I should think this radical questioning of basic values—had it gone undisguised—would have been dangerous to Fielding's public image and perhaps frightening to her private idea of herself.⁵ Her original self-effacing attitude, as evidenced in her advertisement to the first edition of David Simple, indicates a timidity of spirit, and even in her later, bolder assertions of self, she is careful to maintain a gentle and light tone.⁷ Although Henry Fielding's preface to the second edition of David Simple praises the work, it also patronizes it. Henry four times refers to "this little Book" and once to "this little Work"; in physical size, Sarah's novel is equivalent to Henry's Joseph Andrews. Further, Henry twice refers to Sarah as a "young Woman," and says that her "Sex and Age entitle her to the gentlest Criticism" (Kelsall, 1969: pp. 5–8). Sarah does not appear to have objected to this patronizing attitude; in her works, she repeatedly expresses her fondness and respect for him.⁷ Further, it does not appear to me that she could turn to other mid-century women writers and find ideas as thoroughly revolutionary as were hers.⁸ I imagine Fielding must have felt quite alone in her vision, and there is nothing in what we know of her life to indicate that declaring herself "different" could have been anything but painful for her.

The protagonist in David Simple looks at his society—specifically at a society centered in patriarchal capitalism—and is saddened; he leaves this society and establishes a new society based on feminist principles; and he and nearly all his society's people are killed off, specifically by manipulations of patriarchal capitalism. To have created that story in the first place has to have hurt. To have created the story with a female protagonist would have been to make obvious, not only to her readers but to herself, as she was writing, that this was woman's story.⁹ For all these reasons, it makes sense to me that the use of a male protagonist in a woman's story would be a helpful disguise, as well as a means of examining ideas which might be too painful if imaged in a female body.

Finally, however one interprets the gender of David Simple, it is clear that Sarah Fielding has written a feminocentric novel—feminine at its core, in the characters of David and his friends, and feminist in its critique.¹⁰ It is exciting to try to think back to the reception of David Simple among the women and men of eighteenth-century London. Thirteen years after David Simple's publication (and four years after its concluding volume was published), The Monthly Review (July 1757), in discussing Sarah Fielding's Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, commented that "It were superfluous to compliment the Author of David Simple upon her merits as a Writer" (Kelsall, 1969, p. xi). Perhaps Fielding's critique of femininity became part of a gradual general questioning of eighteenth-century gender ideology, dramatically demonstrated by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and imaged throughout the century in novels such as The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), in which Frances Sheridan (1772) portrays the devastating effects of a daughter's passive acquiescence to her mother's will; Emmeline (1788), where Charlotte Smith illustrates woman's dependence (and consequent victimization) in marriage; and A Simple Story (1791), in which Elizabeth Inchbald questions how free a woman is to choose her own life.

However, although the woman's story in David Simple is today all the more powerful for its hidden qualities, this is in part because it communicates to us the fear that may have been in Fielding's heart, her own dependency on powerful men, and the weight of an eighteenth-century gender ideology that made it impossible for this intelligent and original thinker to act as her own free agent. We cannot know just how her ideas were received by her contemporaries. On the basis of what very few snippets of eighteenth-century comments we have available to us, it does appear that "no one seems to have noticed" Fielding's dangerous critique (comment by Jane Spencer, personal correspondence, September 1986). However, it is always difficult to gauge the effect of a work of fiction on social change. What is clear about David Simple is that it was both popular fiction and respected literature and that it offered a (disguised) sustained feminist critique, one that looked back to Mary Astell, was contemporary with the Sophia pamphlets, and looked forward to Mary Wollstonecraft.

Beyond the Ending

The utopian community in David Simple tries to exist apart from external oppressions. But the novel shows that retreat has its limits, for no place is free from corruptions in the system of patriarchal capitalism. Further, the novel shows that to the extent that David and his friends embody the feminine virtues of innocence, passivity, and privacy, they are weakened. Because people in the community are not free from this sort of internal oppression, the community is destroyed. Hope resides in the one surviving child, a girl named Camilla, for whom Cynthia may build community anew. But Sarah Fielding's criticism stops just short of fulfilling this hope. We cannot know what will happen in that neighboring town, what sort of patriarchal expectations Cynthia and the child may find in their new home.

Sarah Fielding encourages this uncertainty through both the action of the plot and the texture of her language. In the last pages of the novel, Cynthia makes her successful journey for help, and David faces death with the language of despair. The texture of Fielding's language is richly hopeful as she delineates Cynthia's perceptions after her visit: "Cynthia's Imaginations, on her Journey back, were pleasing beyond Expression. The grateful Veneration which filled her Heart for the Person she had left, was one of those Sensations most capable of giving her Pleasure. The Look of Welcome and the Words of Kindness she had met with, dwelt on her Fancy, and fixed there the most agreeable Pictures" (p. 428).

Fielding's language is very different, however, in recounting David's deathbed remembrances: "I fancied I had some Constancy of Mind, because I could bear my own Sufferings, but found, through the Sufferings of others, I could be weakened like a Child.—All the Books of philosophy I ever read, afforded me no Relief" (p. 432). It is only in facing his own death, with hope for the Christian hereafter, that David finds relief. Such relief, with its notion of justice beyond the grave, provides a mechanism for the maintenance of a hierarchical system in which many people remain powerless and unhappy during the whole of their (earthly) lives. For David, this relief functions, as had his joy in his son's "escape," as balm against the pain of confronting the damage done by weaknesses inherent in his own innocence and passivity.

In her discussion of sickness as a mark of female debility and an excuse for inaction, Janet Todd writes: "The ultimate symbol of female debility is death, and in the eighteenth-century novel women die in droves. Usually it is the good who die…. The saintly death of heroines like Clarissa or Julie is a clean death which neither disfigures nor isolates. It is a slow refining, a gentle easing from life" (Todd, 1980, p. 409). The women, men, and children in David's womanly community have indeed died in droves. In his death, David is very like the heroines Janet Todd describes. The essence of goodness, he experiences death as a saintly and gentle easing towards the hereafter: "These Things did David speak at various Times, and with such Cheerfulness, that Cynthia said, the last Hour she spent with him, in seeing his Hopes and Resignation, was a Scene of real Pleasure" (Kelsall, 1969, p. 432). David dies in peace, and, with the closing of his life, Sarah Fielding closes her novel. Having decided to "draw the Veil" over David, she writes: "But I chuse to think he is escaped from the Possibility of falling into any future Afflictions, and that neither the Malice of his pretended Friends, nor the Sufferings of his real ones, can ever again rend and torment his honest Heart" (p. 432). In this, the last sentence of the book, life on this earth is presented entirely in a language of despair. What, then, is the reader finally left with? The grateful veneration and agreeable pictures filling Cynthia's heart and fancy? Or the afflictions, malice, and sufferings that rend and torment the hearts of the innocents?

Sarah Fielding's ending is ambiguous, its meaning dependent on where the reader places focus—the finality of David's death or the hope for new life in the persons of Cynthia and little Camilla. Throughout the novel, Fielding's pattern has been to depict despair, then hope, then despair again, and so forth, in a rhythmic narrative. One effect that her ambiguous ending has is to continue this sense of ebb and flow beyond the last pages of her book. Sarah Fielding does not provide closure, but rather an opening out, a story without end. In this way, she refuses to place the woman and child: they are neither one thing nor another, neither hope nor despair, but are open to possibility. In Writing Beyond the Ending, Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that it is in closure that "Ideology meets narrative and produces a meaning-laden figure of some sort" (1985, p. 19). Sarah Fielding refuses to give us that one meaning-laden figure; in this refusal she may anticipate those twentieth-century feminist writers who attempt to leave us with "several different figures at that place where text meets values" (p. 19). It is interesting that David Simple ends as it had begun, with someone setting off on a quest, illustrative of the "loopingback motion" (p. 193) that Rachel Blau DuPlessis finds typical of the female quest. The several different figures in the last pages of David Simple may remind us, also, that the narrative line of this story has been multiple and that the quest had been a search for community in which the self finds meaning through relationships. Leslie Rabine, (1985) in Reading the Romantic Heroine, speaking of a feminine interest in "relations as dynamic movement between self and other," ponders how women can "transform the social world so that women's self-definition in relationships rather than in transcendent isolation can become a source of power and fulfillment instead of appearing as a feminine lack, deficiency, or inferiority" (p. 110). Although the friends in David Simple do experience fulfillment as they build their community, the chilling message in this novel is that, within the system of eighteenth-century patriarchal capitalism, women cannot transform the social world, because personality traits are gendered to such an extent that women are made powerless simply by their femininity.

Given Sarah Fielding's emphasis on oppression that controls from within, the primary effect of her ending is to keep attention focused on the difficult questions she raises regarding the likelihood of real social change. Through failure of her utopian community, Fielding speaks to the need for a restructuring of society. She has shown that the feminine "virtues" both have their base in and are necessary to maintain patriarchal capitalism. In her utopian vision, she demonstrates the need for what she sees as true feminine virtues, nurturance, and nonhierarchical sharing. And she repeatedly tells us that ladylike passivity and privacy are deadening weights that block creative responses to real troubles and thereby prevent feminine nurturance from the healing it could otherwise bring to a sick society.

But Sarah Fielding's own need to remain a lady must have made her analysis painful. In a way her ending suggests this difficulty, in what may be its recuperation of the very ideology she critiques. David dies quite peacefully, and neither he nor Cynthia seem aware of the weaknesses by which he dies. Cynthia believes she faces a hopeful future for herself and her niece, in the patriarchal home to which they have been welcomed. Perhaps this indicates a putting aside of dangerous ideas. Sarah Fielding does not again create a revolutionary community in retreat (see Jane Spencer's rousing analysis [1986: p. 94] of the contrast in political attitudes between David Simple and Fielding's later works). Would that she had once again dared to envision such a community, and to envision its triumph: how exhilarated, how celebratory we might feel! However, that she could not envision such triumph speaks eloquently to the weight of internal oppression that features so dramatically in David Simple.

Notes

¹ In this essay, I am considering as one novel Fielding's two separate works The Adventures of David Simple … In the Search of a Real Friend (1744) and The Adventures of David Simple. Volume the Last, in Which His History is concluded (1753). As the title indicates, Volume the Last completes the story begun in the 1744 edition.

² Carolyn Burke makes relevant linguistic connections when she speaks of living "beyond the Name-of-the-Father [and] apart from the categories of the 'proper,' 'property,' and 'propriety'" (1981, p. 299).

³ As a child, Cynthia is constantly harassed by her family for her love of learning, and is consequently forced to disguise her interests. As an adult, she extricates herself from sexual danger by artful use of ladylike disguise (see pp. 101–108 and 179–181).

⁴ Regarding the active force of pacifism, Pam McAllister writes in Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, "The peculiar strength of nonviolence comes from the dual nature of its approach—the offering of respect and concern on the one hand and of defiance and stubborn noncooperation with injustice on the other. Put into the feminist perspective, nonviolence is the margin of our uncompromising rage at the patriarchy's brutal destructiveness with a refusal to adopt its ways…. Together, these seemingly contradictory impulses (to rage against yet refuse to destroy) combine to create a "strength" worthy of nothing less than revolution—true revolution, not just a shuffle of death-wielding power" (1982, iii).

⁵ Editor's note: Heidi Hutner makes a similar point in relation to Aphra Behn: women were not free to criticize but women writers found more subtle means to make their meanings known.

⁶This Excerpt from the Advertisement to David Simple indicates her self-effacing attitude:

The following Moral Romance … is the Work of a Woman, and her first Essay; which … will, it is hoped, be sufficient Apology for the many Inaccuracies [the reader] will find in the Style, and other Faults of the Composition.

Perhaps the best Excuse that can be made for a Woman's venturing to write at all, is that which really produced this Book; Distress in her Circumstances: which she could not so well remove by any other Means in her Power. (1744 edition, iii)

See Carolyn Woodward, 1987, chapter one, for discussion of the gentle and light tone in Fielding's later prefatorial remarks.

⁷ For instance, Jill E. Grey, in her introduction to The Governess, notices the affection Jenny Peace feels for her older brother Harry (1968, 5, pp. 124–28). Martin C. Battestin, "Henry Fielding" (1979, note 22, p. 14), finds complimentary references to Henry in Sarah's remarks before Letters XL–XLIV of her Familiar Letters. Further, he notes the following for allusions to Henry's works: Familiar Letters, I. 285–87; The Cry, I. 16, 169, II. 1, 99, 297, III. 118, 122–24; The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, ii–iii; and The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, I. 6, 53–54, 97, 249n, 258, 282, II. 162.

⁸ For example, the author of the wonderfully forthright "Sophia" pamphlets (1739) insists on the excellence of woman's intellect and argues for reform in education but does not so comprehensively question gender ideology as does Fielding—and yet "Sophia" felt it necessary to publish under a pseudonym. One has to go back to the late seventeenth-century women to find another such disturbing analysis: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), for instance, or Mary Astell's Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700).

⁹ Mary Poovey comments, at the conclusion to her discussion of the art of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen: "The consequences of habitual indirection were undoubtedly serious in personal terms, in political terms, and in terms of the 'unfolding of genius.' … Indirection itself [however] is a symbolic action, and, as such, it creates imaginative freedom where there would otherwise be only inhibition, restraint, and frustration" (1984, pp. 243–244).

¹⁰ Nancy Miller discusses the plethora of male-authored eighteenth-century novels such as Moll Flanders, Pamela, Fanny Hill, and Clarissa, that "predicate the primacy of female experience and thus pose as feminocentric writing" (1980, x) while carrying plots that are "neither female in impulse or origin, nor feminist in spirit" (149). After noting that her study forced her to accept "the givens of literary history and its process of elimination" (155), Miller calls for a "new literary history" in which we will recognize "that in the eighteenth century women writers were not the marginal figures they have become in the annals of literary history" (155).

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