Sarah Fielding (1710-68), like Virginia Woolf two hundred years later, was a popular novelist, a conscious experimenter in the art of fiction, a journalist, a self-taught classicist, and a feminist. Her works reveal two primary concerns; the exploration of one becomes the various assertions of the other. These concerns are "the labyrinths of the mind" and the absolute necessity that women be equal with men in education and in marriage. Sarah Fielding presents and explains these issues in all her works in a great variety of ways. Any woman who insists upon equality for women recognizes the inequalities. Fielding's recognition becomes her work; intrigued by the processes of the human psyche, she realizes that the inequality suffered by women results from deep and elusive feelings in both female and male consciousness and is manifested primarily in language.

From Woolf's musing about "the woman's sentence" to Gilbert and Gubar's recent work, the language problem has fascinated and frustrated women writers and critics. Nancy K. Miller asks, "How is it that women, a statistical majority in our culture, perform as a literary subculture?"¹ Sarah Fielding, a very early representative of that subculture, consciously battles the dragon of her culture as manifested through its language. "But the puzzling mazes into which we shall throw our heroine, are the perverse interpretations made upon her words, the lions, tigers, and giants, from which we endeavour to rescue her, are the spiteful and malicious tongues of her enemies…."² Like Spenser's Una and her own re-creation of that truth (The Cry), Fielding very quickly masters the language, befriends it, and sets it to work with and for her.

Through her particular use of language, experimenting with form and extending the range of content, Fielding explores the lives of women. In each of her works, she addresses the problem of women's parallel reality, that other-world state in which women live, relative in all ways to the real reality, the world of men. Fielding's intent is to help explain the cultural, historical context of women's lives through the descriptions and actions of fiction while also analyzing the ways women's minds work. As she explains in her introduction to The Cry: "we beg to inform our readers, that our intention in the following pages is … to paint the inward mind" (p. 8). Fielding is aware that others have attempted the same task. She gently insists, however, that her efforts go further and that because they do so, she must use methods which may discomfit some, particularly critics. The introduction to The Cry (1754) may be regarded as a kind of credo, in which Fielding announces her intentions as a writer and also reveals that she is aware that her methods may be unorthodox.

Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind is an arduous task; and not withstanding the many skillful and penetrating strokes which are to be found in the best authors, there seem yet to remain some intricate and unopened recesses in the heart of man. In order to dive into those recesses and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, it is necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules, (p. 8)

The recesses of the heart, the labyrinths of the mind, are secrets which require secret, delicate expression. In fact, these truths are so potent that they frequently must be uttered while seeming to remain unsaid, still hidden in the recesses and labyrinths. It is the liminality of women, the suspension of their consciousness between being-object and becoming subject, a psychological basis of their cultural marginality, which constitutes the real subject of Fielding's work. This liminality also provides the structure and methodology for Fielding's work. She knows women speak in a subtext, often placing their real meanings and intentions into a variety of what I call "parenthetical forms," forms not prescribed by the limits of the rules.

Fielding is perhaps the first of British women writers who has consciously "long used a wide range of tactics to obscure but not obliterate their subversive impulses" by "presenting acceptable facades for private and dangerous visions."³ The task Fielding sets for herself is formidable; she wants to write stories about the real lives of women. That reality includes the external context of everyday life, most particularly in Fielding's novels, the problems of achieving equality in education and marriage. And it includes the interior life of women's minds, which she understands requires creating and employing a wide range of tactics. Moreover, her strategies must allow her to present acceptable, marketable fiction while also addressing issues which are, at best, unpopular. Fielding's work in many subgenres of fiction is an effort not only to make money and to exercise her talent and intellect; each subgenre allows her to address those unpopular issues while appearing to be merely working in a somewhat new form. She brilliantly uses the tool of the majority culture against them. Her understanding of the language of fiction (and the language of the society) allows her to write metafiction before Sterne and gothic fiction before Walpole, the first novel in English intended for children, and much more—all as efforts to speak her real truth and to persuade others to believe and follow. Fielding's parenthetical forms exist as two primary categories, each containing several variations. The first category is that of treatment of characters. She creates actual protagonists (female) versus ostensible ones (male), so that unless a reader is particularly alert and interested, the ideas and actions of the female protagonist will not be greatly heeded. A strategy Fielding employs frequently is the splitting and/or doubling of the female protagonist so as to create a "bad" heroine while avoiding censure since there is clearly a "good" female model in the text as well. As Fielding becomes more certain of her craft and of her convictions, she becomes more daring, creating a fully drawn bad heroine and refusing to make absolutely clear that such a wicked woman will certainly be punished. All these characters Fielding employs to subversive ends. She also creates subversion through the structuring of the novels. She uses parallel texts—fairy tales, dream visions, fables—which actually function as subtexts because their intent is subversive, and she, like many eighteenth-century authors, obscures the line between fiction and nonfiction. The result is that the non-sympathetic reader, having been disarmed by a preface, reads in the text proper only what he has been told is there. Many critics highly disapprove of this technique, but she has achieved her intent; though risking critical disapprobation, she effectively obscures her real text from the wrong readers while presenting it clearly to her more important audience: other women and sympathetic men.

Just as the introduction to The Cry announces Fielding's awareness of the need to experiment with forms, her consciousness of employing subversive tactics via structural strategies is unquestionably revealed in a letter from her collaborator Jane Collier to Samuel Richardson. The great novelist and printer had questioned the advisability of leaving implicit the specific punishment received by the brawling little girls in The Governess (1749). Mrs. Collier explains, "As this book is not so much designed as a direction to governesses for their management of their scholars (though many a sly hint for that is to be found, if attended to) as for girls how to behave to each other, and to their teachers, it is, I think, rather better that the girls (her readers) should not know what this punishment was that Mrs. Teachum inflicts…." Collier goes on to say Fielding is opposed to "corporeal severities" but that the work is more effective psychologically if each reader thinks the punishment to be the same she has suffered. Moreover, Fielding is quite aware "elder readers" will be among her audience and will have divided opinions as to the merits of corporal punishment. Mrs. Collier reveals that if the punishment is not explicit, then "all the party of the Thwackums" will be as disposed as the other party to give her the "very chance of a fair reading…."⁴ Fielding uses her knowledge of the human heart and labyrinths of the human mind to produce fiction which operates on several levels, for a wide and varied audience. Her devices of self-in-parenthesis are rich in variety; that they are so confirms my idea that women's language, in all its necessary variety and variation, bears a common feature: an effort to speak one's truth as oneself.

Fielding employs parenthetical forms as subversive strategies from her first novel to her last. Her strategies become increasingly subtle as her convictions become increasingly the content as well as the form of the novels. Analysis of the characters and structuring of the novels reveal a treasure of artful subversions, hidden within parentheses. In the first novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its two sequels, the ostensible protagonist is indicated by the title. The real protagonist of all three volumes is a woman, Cynthia. The ostensible subject of the novel is friendship; the real subject is the necessity for true friendship within marriage and how that is to be achieved. Thus, from the very beginning, Fielding puts her real concern into parenthesis. The energy of this extended work focuses on Cynthia. Indeed, she is the energy, so much so that in Volume the Last Fielding must banish the too-fascinating Cynthia to the West Indies in order to present the grim fable of the naive ostensible hero's fall. At the end of this volume, however, Fielding brings Cynthia home. Her husband and child have died, as have David and his entire family except the eldest child, a daughter whom we are told is just like Cynthia. It is Cynthia who remains at the end, strong, consciously articulate about the real and the ideal, passing her legacy to another woman.

Cynthia had entered the novel in precisely the same way. She speaks for and about the intelligent, intellectual young women of the time:

I cannot say, I ever had any Happiness in my Life; for while I was young, I was bred up with my Father and Mother, who, without designing me any harm, were continually teazing me. I loved Reading, and had a great Desire of attaining Knowledge; but whenever I asked Questions of any kind whatsoever, I was always told, such Things are not proper for Girls of my Age to know: If I was pleased with any Book above the most silly Story or Romance, it was taken from me, for Miss must not enquire too far into things, it would turn her Brain; she had better mind her Needle-work, and such Things as were useful for Women; reading and poring on Books, would never get me a Husband.⁵

This speech is hardly beneath the surface. It is, however, an effective subversive strategy, a parenthetical form, in two ways. First, Cynthia's history is structured as a digression from the "real" story; hence, many readers will pay less attention to its content, hurrying through it in order to get back to David's adventures. This section is not a conventional subplot, so it functions more as a subtext, even though it appears to be on the surface. The second and more complex parenthesis is Fielding's strategy for displaying the unhappy situation of the intellectual woman in her society while using it to utter her important and unpopular convictions. She puts all this into the speech of a young woman cast out by parents and despised by society because of the very views she nonetheless continues to voice. Cynthia lives in the subculture, that other less real reality of women's lives, but because she has a clear self-image, she articulates that reality clearly. Moreover, because she is doubly disenfranchised (not only a woman, but also a "troublesome" one), her speeches can function as subtexts, the contents of which are subversive. Cynthia persistently voices Fielding's views, for example, insisting upon equality for women in marriage and maintaining that equality in education is prerequisite for women to be equal with men in marriage:

I could not help reflecting on the Folly of those Women who prostitute themselves (for I shall always call it Prostitution, for a Woman who has Sense, and has been tolerably educated, to marry a Clown and a Fool), and give up that Enjoyment, which everyone who has taste enough to know how to employ their time, can procure for themselves, tho' they should be obliged to live ever so retired, only to know they have married a Man who has an Estate, for they very often have no more Commend of it, than if they were Perfect Strangers. (2:vi, 205-06)

Fielding repeats this view in each novel, varying not the message but the character who speaks it. Always pronounced by a woman of great understanding and significant formal education, the speaker is sometimes a "good" woman, sometimes one unaccepted by her society. The fact that Fielding makes these women virtually interchangeable but for their places in society indicates that she believes all women can and ought to be properly educated. It also indicates her desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. In The Cry, both the good woman and the fallen one refuse to marry someone who is not proper for them—according to their definitions of propriety. The "good" heroine, Portia, initially refuses Ferdinand's proposal and retires into the country, convinced that she must make good her vow that if she does not "meet with any man that had discernment enough to know, that real well-chosen learning and true understanding must as surely direct the mind to a proper behaviour" she will never marry (pp. 162-63). Cylinda, the fallen woman, also refuses to marry, seeing it as bondage: "I was resolved that I would not for the enjoyment of his company pay such a tax as matrimony" (p. 115). It is significant to note that neither woman is punished for her view; Portia does marry Ferdinand, after reforming his silly sentimentalism, and Cylinda retires with them, devoting herself not only to good works, but also to the study of philosophy.

So intent is Fielding upon presenting her view of education and marriage that she expresses her notions even through the pagan heroine, Octavia, of The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, 1757.⁶

I considered with myself, that my Sentiments of a married State would not suffer me to lead a Life of Deceit or Hypocrisy and therefore, if married at all, it was requisite for my Peace of Mind, that I should be united to a Man who was the Object of my Inclinations, and whose Disposition would make an artful Behaviour on my Part totally needless to obtain good Usage, or to secure his Esteem. I had formed and represented to myself the Character of the Man who would please me best; and resolved that (unless Considerations of State obliged me to be a Sacrifice) I would live single, if I found it impossible to meet with the Counterpart of the Picture which dwelt in my Imagination.

Fielding continues to explore this complex issue in her last novels, employing a variety of parenthetical forms to do so. Charlotte Lucum, the Countess in The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759), is an adultress. She has fallen to such a state, Fielding makes very clear, because of the greed and ambition of her father who has married her off, against her wishes, for the prestige of the count's title. Before being betrayed by her father, Charlotte displays the same integrity as her predecessors in Fielding's works: "Lord Dellwyn was highly disagreeable in her Sight; and she chose rather to submit to any State of Life, than to shine in the highest Sphere on such terms; she called it Prostitution, and heroically defied all such Temptations."⁷ Again, these statements are explicit; however, they are uttered by women who are disenfranchised. That each of these women, despite their social castes and with complete consciousness of how their views will be regarded, continues to speak her truth, constitutes a most clever subversion of the reader. The unsympathetic and nonsympathetic readers will be entertained by the women's plights and/or charmed and gratified by these models of virtue or its obverse, just as the prefaces and introductions have encouraged. The sympathetic readers, on the other hand, will hear repeatedly Fielding's female characters articulating her most cherished idea: the absolute necessity of equality for women in education and marriage.

The second major category of parenthetical forms Fielding employs is the structuring of her novels. Her commitment to the feminist issues of education and marriage while exploring the relationship to them of the "labyrinths of the mind" provided the impetus for her experiments in structuring, just as need had impelled her to write her first novel. By avoiding the trap of becoming a male impersonator as a writer through her creation of Cynthia as the real protagonist of the David Simple volumes,' Fielding initiates her strategies of parentheses. The character and structure strategies often constitute one another, but it is possible to observe how Fielding's formal experiments have subversive intent. Fielding was working during the first great flowering of the English novel; in addition to having the great good sense to recognize and capitalize upon the exuberant development of fiction itself, she was also highly self-conscious, as a woman and as an artist. In 1749, Fielding published The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy,⁸ regarded as the first novel in English intended for children. With this novel, Fielding establishes a system and a pattern variations of which constitute the rest of her corpus. The Governess is an intentional heuristic, a conscious teaching device. The very fact that the work is set in a school and is about education allows Fielding to be subversive. It is a case of forest and trees. Because Fielding understands that children's books will be read by children's parents, she creates characters who appeal not only to children, but to their parents as well. Fielding saw and seized an opportunity to teach adults as well as children; both the parts and the whole of the novel contain wise and effective ideas about the nature of teaching and the use of teaching devices. Very few adults could resist the combined models of Mrs. Teachum and Jenny Peace, her star pupil, and surely most of them would feel a desire to help their children become more like Miss Jenny—by applying those methods Mrs. Teachum, through Jenny, employs. Middle-class adults, with their increasing power to effect change, are being given a delightful model of education for girls, Fielding's absolute prerequisite for a healthy society. Her brilliance goes further: through the interpolations—fairy tales, dream visions, and so forth—Fielding deepens the impact of her message. Each of the tales emphasizes the importance of honest friendships, most particularly within marriage, to the creation and maintenance of a healthy society. Furthermore, the interpolations dramatize the imperative of a good, equal education for girls, demonstrating that honest friendship is impossible without equality of education. In a single text, Fielding manages to present her views implicitly and explicitly, avoiding that monotony which can become polemicizing via the tales, each of which is in miniature an example of a subgenre of fiction. At the same time, Fielding's book does precisely what its content is about: using materials pupils were likely to study at school, the stories become those very materials and serve as the vehicles through which the pupils, and thereby, the readers, are taught.

Many critics regard all Fielding's inset texts as being the same. It is true they all have overt didactic intent. However, some of them have only a thematic connection with the text proper (the tales within The Governess, the story of Isabelle in David Simple), while others have a structural connection. These stories function as subplots. At the same time, however, they are literally subtexts, or more accurately, they are parallel texts which function subtextually, subversively. Fielding employs this device often, but two instances will serve to reveal how she uses this parenthetical form to spring the trap of the traditionally structured novel. The Cylinda subplot parallel text in The Cry is an example of Fielding using a character to create a structure that subverts. Apparently a foil for the good heroine, Portia, Cylinda appears to be the wicked, knowing woman of the world who must surely be punished, just as Portia, the innocent but wise virgin, will be rewarded. The attentive reader, however, will quickly realize the parallels in the characters of the two women. These parallels, already rehearsed above, in turn call attention not to the differences in the characters of the women, but to the differences in their circumstances, which, as Fielding creates their psyches, motivate them to behave differently. Instead of showing a single character driven to immorality by misfortune and then reforming—the traditional treatment—Fielding economically, and more believably, because more realistically, presents us two versions of a single character. Moreover, the older Cylinda is as attractive as Portia; the younger woman (and the reader) is attracted to her at once. Fielding appeals to the good sense of her readers by creating very similar, likable characters. She forces us to be active in choosing to identify with the more proper model. Nor is Portia the least bit vapid. She is as good as she is intelligent, and she also welcomes sex and sensuality as she refuses to marry the wrong person or for the wrong reasons.

In The Countess of Dellwyn Fielding employs the same parenthetical form, but reverses the emphasis. Charlotte Lucum, the adulterous countess, is the protagonist of the novel, one of the first "bad" heroines in our literature to be created by a woman. Charlotte is balanced by the virtuous Mrs. Bilson, whose goodness of heart and sweetness of disposition reform her profligate husband and rescue Cleveland, a young man who is eventually allowed to marry the Bilsons' charming and virtuous daughter. Although this novel concludes with a paean to virtue as embodied in generations of Bilsons, Charlotte is allowed to repent, having learned wisdom through her suffering. (The novel is subtitled A Domestic Tragedy.) In this novel, the story of the virtuous characters parallels the primary text's focus on the fall of the protagonist. That the proper moral model is relegated to the subplot indicates two things: Fielding does insist that virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment, but also, it is clear she wishes her readers to be aware that women are routinely victimized by circumstances over which they have no control and should be shown compassion. Implicit in the novel, then, through its structuring, is Fielding's insistence that women must be allowed to choose the proper man to marry and that they must be properly educated in order to make the right choice. At the same time that she uses traditional fictional forms, she shapes them to her own ends, by making the subplot reflect and challenge the ostensible assumptions purposely set up in the readers' minds by the main plot—a strategy which forces the readers into active moral deliberations. As readers ponder the moral choices of the characters, they are forced to engage as well the issues Fielding presents, issues they might otherwise avoid. Using parenthetical forms that are similar to those in The Governess and which operate in similar ways, Fielding once again not only instructs through delight—she subverts.

Fielding employs a final parenthetical form through which she speaks her truth and forces the reader to participate rather than merely observe. As usual, this form has variations and is rather complex, combining manipulation of structure and reader response. Other great eighteenth-century writers exploited the relationship of fiction and nonfiction. Fielding is not only an early and very self-conscious experimenter in this realm; she also is perhaps more clearly than many experimenting because of her commitment to the political and social statements of her content. One of the variations of this parenthetical form is her use of introductory material. In her typical fashion, while working within the convention of the Preface, she so blurs and obscures the distinctions between it and the fiction following that she invents a kind of metafiction. In Familiar Letters between the Characters of David Simple (1753), Fielding employs the epistolary form of Clarissa to tell stories of "real" incidents in the lives of the characters which they then comment upon via fables either recalled or invented by the correspondents. This structure constitutes a "courtesy book" for women. Such texts proliferated in the eighteenth century; Fielding's is the only one I know of which is a sequel to a novel, though in a different form from the parent text, while prefaced by an explicit intent to be a courtesy book. In this text, the conventions of the novel are sprung by being overtly used to teach, while the conventions of the courtesy books (most of them at mid-century written by men) are transformed into fiction, but rendered highly realistic because the fiction is in the form of correspondence.

The next year, with The Cry, Fielding employs much the same strategy, but makes it more complicated. Her long introduction to the novel and the prologues to each part make explicit the form of the work, explaining that the action of the plot will be interrupted for debate between Portia and the Cry, in an effort to discern "the truth." In the introduction, the authors state: "The motives to action, and the inward turns of mind, seem in our opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves; and much rather would we chuse that our reader should clearly understand what our principal actors think, than what they do" (p. 11). By making their intentions so explicit in the introduction, the authors spring the criticism trap awaiting them—the charge that their characters think (talk) too much and act too little. Moreover, revealing the plan of the form helps set up the sympathetic reading of the two parallel female characters, Portia and Cylinda. Finally, the introduction introduces a fiction which is structured and reads like a play but which also has narratives within it, thus obscuring even more the line between "real" and fictive. I contend that Fielding initiates and refines this strategy as a rhetorical ploy similar in intent to the shrewdness revealed in Collier's letter to Richardson. That is, the nonsympathetic readers will simply read fiction; the open-minded readers will be more alert to the structuring and thereby more receptive to the subversive message within it.

By making fictional characters part of a script, the very formal structure of drama, Fielding attempted to make them more immediate, more real. In her next work, The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, she uses essentially the same parenthetical form, but in reverse, just as she had reversed the emphases of the same strategy between The Cry and The Countess of Dellwyn. Her characters in The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia are actual historical figures; in the work they speak to us with their own voices, yet almost because the women were real but are being made to speak to us out of the past and from Hades, they seem in a sense more fictional than Portia and Cylinda. However, Cleopatra and Octavia are not less real; they are real in a different way, demonstrating Fielding's abilities to manipulate her craft. The brief introduction is consistent with Fielding's prefaces in other works, in that it contains critical comment but also moves to become part of that very fiction it introduces. Thus she plays a game of intrigue with the readers, just as Cleopatra and even Octavia manipulate and fascinate their audience—Antony and the readers. Fielding almost audaciously explains that she is writing fictional autobiography and why, while at the same time, she fictionalizes her own nonfiction statements, thus adroitly drawing the readers even further into the suspension of disbelief that makes fiction work as fiction so that it may indeed instruct through delight. What happens to the readers is precisely what Fielding says she disavows by choosing "real" characters rather than imagined ones. Once again she appeals to the readers' moral, upright selves, while handily involving us in the fiction she has cautioned us to beware. Fielding establishes her customary dialectic between the apparent moral poles in the work; as always, they are women. Her supralevel dialectic, in essence a dialogue between the nonfictive and fictive structures and thus a most subtle parenthetical form, operates between the Preface and the novel itself. She goes further: the third level is the interaction similar to that intended by drama and created much as it is in The Cry. One of the most subversive effects of Fielding's work is that her readers could follow the development of her strategies from novel to novel, as each employs tactics of previous efforts, but always in a more refined and subtle fashion.

Nowhere is this development more evident than in Fielding's final novel, The History of Ophelia (1760).⁹ On the surface, Ophelia is Fielding's attempt at a truly "popular" novel, after all her overt experimentation. She announces in the introduction that what follows is a work, "as well calculated for Instruction and Amusement," persuading her readers she is working squarely in a tradition with which they are most familiar. Again she goes further: "the author of David Simple" explains that she has found in an old bureau a letter which is the present novel. Varying the fiction of the discovered manuscript, she announces that although the work is a letter, she feels it must have been intended for publication. This ploy demonstrates that she appreciates the increased sophistication of the reading public and lures them into playing the game of blurring distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Although we read only one letter, and thereby receive the action ostensibly from only one viewpoint, the heroine is very conscious that she is, after all, writing a letter, to the extent that she breaks her narrative several times to comment on it or to continue the fiction of herself as a character, integrating her narration of her past with her present life as in the end of volume 1, chapter 6: "He then bid me a goodnight, and left me to take some rest, as I shall your ladyship, bidding you adieu for a little time." Chapter 7 then begins, "After a short rest, you are ready to proceed with me on my journey" (p. 15). The single-letter form also allows Fielding to work again with a technique, subgenre, and parenthetical form she had used before, the fictional autobiography. The fiction of the letter found in a bureau also makes it easier for her to continue the strategy of integrating the prefatory material of a work with the work, so the reader is in the fictional world before realizing it.

Ophelia only appears to be a typical popular novel, in part because of the very conventions Fielding seems content to perpetuate; in reality, however, it is the same as all her works, an experiment in the art of fiction which allows her to assert her belief in the necessary equality for women in education and marriage. The effort to create a popular novel was in itself perhaps one of her most subversive acts. One of the causes of Ophelia's popularity with the common reader is that it is very funny. Fielding writes what the audience expects, but makes sly fun of both the content and its readers throughout while at the same time remarking upon injustice, especially that suffered by women and "mad" people. She continues to uphold her political and philosophical views, often humorously, and in the process creates a sustained exercise in Gothic fiction four years before Walpole published The Castle of Otranto. Fielding did achieve her intent; Ophelia was printed several times in her own century in England and on the Continent. Containing language, action, and characters absent on the whole from her other works, partly from her efforts to reach the general public, Ophelia also contains the germ of the Gothic romance. The kidnapping of Ophelia who languishes in a drafty, decaying castle until she manages to escape through the use of her wits and because she is protected by her beauty and virtue initiates a subgenre that remains not only vastly popular, but also quite unchanged from its eighteenth-century beginnings. More importantly, partly through this aspect of her "popular" novel, Fielding continues to address significant issues by exploring the labyrinths of the mind in the content of the novel and also via her unique parenthetical strategies of integrating her introductory material with the novel itself and of creating intriguing models of virtue. Ophelia teaches Dorchester to allow himself to be good. This novel's focus on Dorchester through the lenses of the parenthetical forms may be Fielding's most ambitious subversive act. It certainly is a daring departure for her; she has always chosen to direct her messages primarily to women and essentially to those who are already sympathetic with her views. Dorchester is neither. The parenthetical form of Dorchester's letters within the letter of Ophelia's which is Ophelia, and which are reports of conversations, so that we are several times removed from the action, allows readers simultaneously to see Dorchester from the inside as well as from the outside. This device causes readers, especially men, to identify more closely with Dorchester and to follow him more actively through his development from a cynical seducer to a devoted husband. Fielding insists in this novel that Dorchester must will himself to be good, for his own sake, rather than merely to win Ophelia. Such insistence pushes the tradition of the reformed rake far beyond that of the sentimentalists, appealing to men and women of sense as well as of sensibility. Moreover, by having Ophelia write her letter some time after she and Dorchester have married, Fielding further extends the tradition: we do not often see happy, content, successfully married couples in fiction as we do in this novel.

Fielding's persistent exploration of the labyrinths of the mind in order to support her demand for equality for women caused her to use parenthetical forms which allow her to demonstrate her views. This rhetorically astute combination of appeals increases her chances of being truly heard. Intriguing and impressive to twentieth-century readers, many of her structural devices constitute the creation or early practice of several subgenres of fiction, such as the Gothic, the school tale, and metafiction. Fielding is a conscious feminist whose expressed intent is to improve the lives of women. She knows she must appeal to persons in power (men) and employs all her craft to do so—without alienating them. Hence the need for parenthetical forms. She also knows she must educate women to understand the reality of their place in eighteenth-century society and then encourage them to work for change. The most effective way of doing so is to create positive models, women characters who have avoided or sprung the trap of male overdetermination of their lives. For Sarah Fielding, it was not sufficient merely to represent the plight of women, nor merely to assert that said plight must be cured.

The development of her art as a writer is actually her development as a creator of women characters who embody more and more specifically her own steadily growing and increasingly radical ideas. Fielding was a theorist, critic, philosopher, as well as a mimetic artist; for her it was imperative to analyze that which she represented, and vice versa. She always presents her ideas as a kind of literary Moebius-strip, a double helix of mimesis and analysis. That is why she explicitly states that her intent is to examine and expose the labyrinths of the mind; that is why she does so from a double perspective, her theoretical, critical approach, and her manifestation of that in the fiction itself, all of which constitutes parentheses. The Cry is perhaps the most obvious example of Fielding's unique deployment of characterization and structure, theory and mimesis.

The Cry is about true friendship, but unlike Fielding's first novel with its picaresque, episodic structure and many transparent apologues, this one explores friendship, particularly friendship in marriage, in a much more complex fashion, both in content and in structure. Several couples, some of them treacherous, some of them mediocre, and some of them struggling valiantly to be wise, strong, and good, interact via several subplots. The heroine, Portia, has been reared by her mother to be good, but also has been given a superior education. Cylinda, the apparent "bad" woman, also has a superior education, but she did not have the balance of a mother's wisdom, training her as well in virtue. Each woman encounters several suitors, interacting with the men according to, as Fielding paints it, their respective backgrounds, which means Portia remains virtuous while Cylinda, out of her intellectual beliefs, becomes what society regards as promiscuous. When Portia is an adolescent, she encounters Cylinda, then in her early twenties and going through a recluse period. The two women become friends and Cylinda, who is a most gifted philosopher and teacher, helps Portia in her studies until the younger girl's mother learns of Cylinda's reputation. At the same time, two other young people, Ferdinand and his sister, are cheated out of their inheritance by their brother and the conniving young woman who becomes his wife, because she wants Oliver's money, although she lusts after Ferdinand, who, of course, is in love with Portia. The treacherous couple contrive to make Ferdinand believe the worst of Portia, but he at least determines to "test" her. Portia, oblivious to perfidy, is not however insensitive to being insulted and, despite her love for Ferdinand, refuses to accept him after his treatment of her. Through the efforts of Cylinda, Portia and Ferdinand are reunited and Cylinda rewarded by becoming part of their household. Portia and Cylinda meet in the outer, dramatized structure of the work, bringing together the plot and the subplot of the narrative structure, which unites the abstract—the search for truth in the dramatized sections—and the concrete—the actions which manifest the truth in the narrative sections. This meeting brings resolution to the inner, narrated structure.

Most significant to Fielding's work as an artist and as a feminist is that within that resolution is another, personal one—the completion of the unfinished business of the two women's previous friendship, one which was both a sharing—because of their intellectual interests and abilities—and a discipleship—because of the difference in their ages. With this resolution, Fielding raises and addresses a problem with which twentieth century women have only begun to struggle. Portia's mother took her away from Cylinda because she wished her daughter not to be initiated into the more complete knowledge the older woman held because of her education and experience. But Portia's mother dies. Ultimately Cylinda returns to live from middle age to death in the home of her intellectual daughter. The daughter becomes the mother of the mother. Fielding does posit Portia as the ideal woman. Her strategy of making Cylinda parallel with Portia, though in the subplot, is a brilliant springing of the trap of female enslavement to male ideas of virtue and propriety. Through the structural strategies, we see that Cylinda is not the villainess—she is, rather, the real woman. She is so actual, so realistic, that Fielding must present her in parentheses. The most important and fascinating fact about Cylinda is that she is Portia, and Portia Cylinda, because both of them are Sarah Fielding, a woman who had found her voice, who was compelled to speak herself, but who, in her wisdom, knew she must do so as a ventriloquist.

There is more evidence for Cylinda and Portia constituting one woman and for them to be Sarah herself. The Cry, almost invisibly, is autobiography, for it is Portia's and Cylinda's stories, told by themselves. Within the content of this novel are other similarities between the characters themselves and to their creator. Cylinda and Portia have received almost identical educations; each was reared primarily by a single parent; each prefers the study of philosophy to any other, but study in general to any other labor. Although on the surface their attitudes toward marriage seem different, they are essentially the same: both wish to retain their integrity (pp. 7, 8). Only Portia, because she lived longer with both parents, who had a loving marriage, and because she was reared primarily by her mother, sees that her integrity can be retained in marriage—if it is the proper kind. Cylinda, however, reared only by her father, has had to learn much too late the possibilities for integrity within marriage. Sarah Fielding's mother died when she was seven and a half. Until she lived with her brother Henry and his first wife, whose marriage is renowned for the mutual love of the partners, she had no model for a good marriage. And, being an intellectual like Cylinda, she was certainly capable of imagining a life like hers. Given her writing, it would not be surprising if we were to learn that Sarah wished for an independent income and an independent life, one that might very well include lovers. What is very likely, given Fielding's interest in the mind, is that in order to cope with the split in her own (so forceful is the impact of society even upon those who understand its traps), she created two versions of her self: the self she thought she ought to be—Portia—and the self she sometimes wished she could be—Cylinda.

I have dwelled on this point because we know so little about Sarah Fielding. What we do know about her life has been obscured by those who insist on maintaining that because she was unmarried, she was a bookish, rather unappealing (despite extensive evidence to the contrary) spinster. What we learn about Sarah Fielding from her works reveals a woman who was very real-wise, passionate as well as compassionate, and shrewd. The picture she paints of her women characters who are unmarried or who are perfectly willing never to marry—indeed, who will not marry unless the marriage is one of integrity according to their definitions—springs the ultimate trap. The marriage trap has been ensnaring women for eons; Fielding springs it by revealing it for what it is, especially as opposed to what marriage could and should be, a relationship based on true love: "A sympathetic liking, excited by fancy; directed by judgment; and to which is joyn'd also a most sincere desire of the good and happiness of its object," as she says in The Cry (p. 65). Fielding's women characters indicate that while she was most likely very sorry not to have met a man who could meet her requirements, she was much happier being single, and writing about it. Moreover, through the technique of characterization, especially as it works parenthetically, Fielding not only springs traps; she also teaches her audience and herself that in order to be fully human, a woman must be free.

Notes

¹ Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction" PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 96 (January 1981): 38.

² Sarah Fielding, The Cry, 3 vols. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1754), l:i, 1:8. Further references appear in parentheses in the text.

³ Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: A Study of Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 13.

⁴ Anna Barbauld, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966), 2: 61-65.

⁵ Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London: A. Millar, 1744), 1: ii, 6: 188-89. Further references appear in parentheses in the text.

⁶ Sarah Fielding, The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (London: A. Millar, 1757), 148-49.

⁷ Sarah Fielding, The History of the Countess of Dellwyn: A Domestic Tragedy, 2 vols. (London: A. Miller, 1759), 300.

⁸ Richardson's Familiar Letters was certainly a model. However, Richardson's "courtesy book" is intended only as such; he writes Pamela afterwards, a separate fiction. Only Fielding combines and plays against each other in the same text the fictions of fiction and non-fiction.

⁹ Sarah Fielding, The History of Ophelia, 2 vols. (London: R. Baldwin, 1760). References appear in parentheses in the text.

¹⁰ Certainly this device is present in some French novels, for example, La Vie de Marianne, Histoire au Miss Jenny.

¹¹ Deborah Downs-Miers, "Masking the Face, Unmasking the Mind: The Gothic Masquerade" (Paper presented at Northeast Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, October 1982).