Doody Margaret Anne, and Peter Sabor, eds. Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Eagleton Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Blackwell; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Eaves T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.
Echlin Lady Elizabeth. An Alternative Ending to Richardson's Clarissa. Dimiter Daphinoff, ed. Swiss Studies in English 107. Berne: Francke, 1982. -100-
Fielding Sarah. Remarks on Clarissa. London, 1749. Facsimile ed. Peter Sabor. Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1985.
Flynn Carol Houlihan. Samuel Richardson, a Man of Letters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.
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Fielding and the Novel at Mid-Century
THIS volume, this 'history of the British novel,' represents a collective inquiry into the emergence and evolution of one profoundly influential literary form. Here, I will pursue one aspect of that inquiry by focusing on the achievements of an early practitioner of the form, Henry Fielding. In his own varied literary career as poet, journalist, essayist, playwright, and, of course, novelist, Fielding himself frequently took up the subject of the history of literary forms, lamenting the decline of venerable forms, greeting the arrival of new forms with distrust or distaste, commenting on the cause and consequences of literary empires' rise and fall, and engaging in the practice of both old and new forms with a certain shameless abandon.
Sometimes Fielding presents his views of literary history directly, in expository prose; at other times he communicates those views more subtly or more imaginatively, through networks of allusion, through narrative incidents, or through emblematic scenarios. Were Fielding, for example, to address the subject of this essay-'Fielding and the Novel'-he might compose a prose essay under that title, or he might just as easily create a farcical scene in a play in which a character named Fielding encounters a character named The Novel, and the two of them banter, argue, fall in love, duel, or perhaps dance. Much of the humor of such a scene would derive from the incommensurability of the two characters who thus meet up on stage, one a historical personage with human character and agency, the other a mere generic abstraction; and Fielding's treatments of literary history often raise questions, in partic -102- ular, about how the agency of individual authors interacts with the seemingly inert influence of existing conventions and forms.
In fact, Fieldingdid compose a scene much like the one I have just described. The final act of his 1730 play, The Author's Farce, consists of a 'puppet show' in which live actors play the parts of puppets named for a variety of current entertainments and literary genres: tragedy, comedy, oratory, pantomime, opera-and, notably, the novel. 'Mrs. Novel,' as Fielding calls his human/puppet embodiment of the novel form, not only competes within the puppet show for the love of 'Signior Opera,' but steps outside the puppet show's frame to flirt with a parson who has burst in upon the show to try to close it down. Mrs. Novel thus exchanges words with the representatives of other forms of entertainment in the puppet show, with the author of her play, and with the parson and constable who interrupt it. The confrontations that ensue between different ways of talking-novelistic, tragic, comedic, oratorical, operatic, even (in Monsieur Pantomime's case) nonverbal-as well as between different levels of action (within the play and inside the play-within-the-play) are amusingly absurd.
These confrontations also are suggestive of what I will describe as a characteristic quality of the novels that Fielding began to produce a decade after this play was performed. Although those novels do not present us with personified embodiments of a handful of genres, the way The Author's Farce does, their language characteristically incorporates the voices of any number of genres, juxtaposing the verbal mannerisms and formal features of a variety of discourses, playing upon the gaps and dissonances that appear between them, and often locating a phrase, an event, or a character in several contexts or frames of reference simultaneously. Further, the multiple frames of reference that Fielding's novels stubbornly superimpose are often historically as well as formally disjunctive ones. That is, if his novels may be called, in some significant sense, novels of the 'mid-century,' they define the space they inhabit in the «middle» or midst of history not as a comfortably balanced, central, or intermediate one, but as one that is, jarringly, both early and late.
As a critic has recently observed, the puppet show scene in The Author's Farce provides a graphic emblem not only for the distinctive nature of the prose in Fielding's novels, but for novelistic discourse in general, as it is described by one side in current theoretical debates. The writings of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin emphasize the multi-103- plicity of social dialects within any single language-the separate vocabularies and manners of speech that belong to the members of different professions, age groups, economic classes, sexes, and so on. He characterizes the novel as a genre uniquely capable of encompassing the diversity of speech types and voices (the 'heteroglossia') that other literary genres exclude. In encompassing this linguistic diversity, the novel admits into its pages the fact of social difference-and, therefore, the possibility of social struggle. Furthermore, according to Bakhtin, the novel characteristically emphasizes the variability within a language over time, as well as the diversity of voices within it at any one time. Dramatizing the way that past, present, and imminently future uses of the language coexist, the novel calls attention to the historical nature of social realities and forms, to the gaps and contradictions between past and present beliefs and institutions, and to the incompleteness of historical change itself, which leaves traces of old social realities amid the new. Bakhtin repeatedly refers to Fielding's novels as paradigmatic examples of novelistic discourse, thus described; the chaotic scene of dialogue between wildly diverse-even ontologically dissimilar-characters on the stage of The Author's Farce might seem to him, as to critics influenced by his work, a fitting anticipation of Fielding's later achievements as a novelist.
To other theorists and critics of the novel, however, that scene would not seem to provide an apt representation of novelistic discourse at all-unless, perhaps, the scene were revised to present Mrs. Novel holding forth on the theater's stage alone. In sharp contrast with Bakhtin's description of the novel, some recent accounts have characterized the novel as offering a specialized, insular, and illusorily harmonious discourse-one that carefully excludes some parts of social life from its pages, maintaining the divisions between different «spheres» within society so successfully as to conceal them. In particular, in this view, the genre of the novel functions to maintain the division between private and public spheres of action and experience, taking only the former for its subject matter and disavowing any connection between the realm of the «personal» and that of political or economic life. In doing so, the novel effaces the way that the institutions of personal life, and even ways of talking about personal experience, change over time, emerging from a process of historical struggle between different interest groups.
If Fielding's novels can be invoked as paradigmatic within Bakhtin's theory, they become anomalous in this second account of the nature of -104- the novel. Tom Jones in particular not only acknowledges but insists on the connections between matters of personal and of political importance; and all of Fielding's novels call attention to the ongoing power of history to shape the conventions of personal identity as well as of public life. Thus, Fielding's interest in literary history is part of his more general interest in historical process: in the world of his novels, the individual formulates his identity through social conventions that are as transient, perhaps, as some of the literary conventions Fielding ridicules in his plays. Such possible uses of the novel form, emphasized by Bakhtin's account
