The Columbia History of the British Novel

and particularly vividly realized in Fielding's work, appear in the novels of his contemporaries and successors as well.

Though Fielding does not consistently strive to conceal the conventional nature of social life or the influence of historical change, he often expresses a kind of horrified surprise at the extent to which individual personality may be shaped by these contingencies-what he calls in an early essay the 'Force of Fashion on the Mind.' When Fielding employs the device of the puppet show in The Author's Farce to parody popular entertainments, he refers to the crude puppet shows offered in country towns and at fairs, thus implying that the tastes of the town have sunk to a low level; but the device also resonates more broadly with a suggestion that there is something puppetlike about following the dictates of current fashion (whether a rage for the opera, the pantomime, or, for that matter, the novel). A thematics of puppetry, literally staged in the final act of The Author's Farce, appears as well in Fielding's other plays, in his essays, and in his novels, often serving to express both the comic and the dark possibilities of the control of individual identity from the outside. Fielding repeatedly comes back to the idea that some people might as well be puppets, their movements manipulated by strings and their bodies and minds made of something less animate than flesh and blood. He returns often as well to the scene of the masquerade, a popular entertainment in his time, and more generally to the idea of people wearing masks, whether literal or figurative ones.

A mask may be donned voluntarily, to please or to deceive a viewer, and Fielding frequently employs images of masking to portray the human proclivity to affectation, which he names as the proper target of ridicule in his preface to Joseph Andrews. He also often suggests, however, that masks may come to dominate their wearers, the artificial self they represent overpowering any organic identity that might be pre-105- sumed to lie beneath. Thus Fielding's thematic interests in puppet life and in masks are closely linked, and they are both linked, perhaps less obviously, to his complicated and evolving exploration of the many meanings of 'adoption.' An affected identity might be called an adopted rather than an innate or genuine one; new institutions and beliefs, unlike timeless or natural ones, must be adopted by a culture in the course of history; in a more straightforward sense of the word, Tom Jones is an adoptive rather than a biological son of Allworthy, as Joseph Andrews turns out to be the adopted child of those he had thought were his blood relations. Especially in his earlier writings, Fielding tends to attach a pejorative sense to adoption as it appears in my first two examples: at times he links these senses of adoption to the stricter, familial one to suggest that a person who adopts a character or who lives by adopted beliefs is-like a puppet-not really flesh and blood, and so, in some sense, is not related to other people by blood ties.

Even in his early works, however, this opposition between adoptive and natural identities and relations is not strictly maintained. The Authors' Farce closes with a sequence of increasingly absurd revelations of lost identities and family bonds, including the discovery that one of the puppets on stage is the son of one of the human characters in the play's frame narrative. At times teasingly, at times seriously, Fielding repeatedly suggests that there may be more of a continuum between identity that seems merely artificial, affected, or allegorical (a human being who tries to «name» himself with the affected virtue of piety or wit or generosity; a puppet character named 'Mrs. Novel') and what we ordinarily recognize as an individual human self. Though some of the characters in his novels have at least apparently naturalistic names such as Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or Abraham Adams, and others, like the puppets in The Author's Farce, are named for a quality, an occupation, or an obsession (such as Booby, Allworthy, Thwackum, or Square), these characters interact in the same plane of novelistic reality and may turn out to have closer ties to each other, including blood ones, than might initially appear.

The characters on stage in the final scene of The Author's Farce are presented as puppets, I have suggested, because they are so shaped, controlled, and defined by their particular historical moment; yet, significantly, that same historical moment generates a number of different puppets with their own distinctive ways of talking and moving, rather than manipulating them in unison. For Fielding, historical determin- 106- ism is never singular and monolithic: he is interested in the contradictions, gaps, and disjunctions within a society's system of practices and beliefs at any one time. In The Author's Farce, these disjunctions between different ways of talking and acting are trivial ones, and they appear in the spaces between the characters we see on stage. In the course of Fielding's career as a novelist, he becomes increasingly interested in locating these disjunctions within the individual, so that character itself becomes the meeting place of disparate genres, multiple discourses, incompatible frames of reference. In the works he wrote before becoming a novelist, and to greater or lesser extents in all of his novels as well, Fielding takes a satirist's view of inconsistencies within human identity, treating them as comical or scandalous secrets to be exposed by the keen observer's pen. However, even in his early novel, Joseph Andrews, Fielding begins to express uncertainty or distrust about the satirist's view of identity. In Tom Jones and Amelia, he bodies forth the possibility that it is in fact the tense and often unstable coexistence of disparate discourses or frames of reference within a single self that preserves the possibility of individual character, keeping it alive and dynamic within the grid of history's dictates.

Fielding himself at mid-century presents us with a vivid example of a culture's past, present, and future in collision within the individual soul. Mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland lay uneasily between a long cultural past and that future we now inhabit as our present world. Many recognizably modern institutions developed rapidly in the course of Fielding's lifetime, changing the cultural landscape around him in radical-though frequently preliminary or partial-ways. Often, Fielding joined the chorus of doomsayers who denounced such changes as signaling, if not the end of the world, the end of the social and cultural world as they knew it. Sometimes Fielding showed more pragmatic adaptability, accepting the changes he witnessed or even capitalizing upon them (perhaps with a gesture of knowing irony). Occasionally he even ran forward to carry the banner for new views or institutions, insisting on their promise with real imaginative zeal.

Fielding's relation to Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister of England from 1720 to 1742, illustrates the complexity-perhaps the irresolvable ambiguity-of his attitudes toward the political and economic changes of his time. In Walpole's day, the post of Prime Minister was not an officially designated one; it was Walpole's enemies, complaining -107- of the disproportionate power he wielded at court and in the government, who dubbed him the country's «prime» minister. They saw his influence as dangerously eroding the traditional authority of the king, already significantly curtailed by the 1688 Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Act of Settlement that formalized certain limits on royal power. And Walpole's critics rightly saw his methods of influence as forever altering the nature of English national government: Walpole developed a variety of bureaucratic and administrative means to exert control of a distinctively modern nature, including an effective system of bartering government posts at home and an extensive network of spies or 'secret service men' abroad.

At points in his career, Fielding joined such conservative literary figures as the members of the Scriblerus Club (Swift, Pope, Gay, and others) in attacking Walpole, sometimes making him the target of merry ridicule, sometimes suggesting, more seriously, that Walpole presided over a far-reaching degradation of England's culture. Fielding even donned the pseudonym 'Scriblerus Secundus' for some of his early satiric works to indicate his identification with this group. Scholars have debated, however, whether Fielding adopted a more positive view of Walpole at other times, and whether he may even have accepted secret patronage from him. More important for our purposes is the question of whether Fielding at some moments, or in some respects, entertained enthusiasm for the wide historical changes with which Walpole's regime was associated.

Those changes were as much economic as political. The features of a modern capitalist economy, so familiar to us now, were just being consolidated in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, and they existed alongside surviving values and institutional arrangements from an older economic system. The Bank of England and the maintaining of a substantial national debt, initiated at the end of the seventeenth century, developed so rapidly and so consequentially in the early eighteenth century as to represent what some have called a financial revolution. Others have described the eighteenth century as the period in which a true 'consumer society' was born in England; an unprecedented emphasis on changing fashions and on the exchange and acquisition of consumer goods gave commodities a new role in English culture. Yet these changes were not instantaneous or thoroughgoing. Within specifically literary culture, a strong strain of nostalgic or reactionary sentiment persisted alongside newer views: English literary culture at -108- mid-century had one foot in the Augustan era of the first part of the century, with its neoclassical values and its suspicion of change, and one foot in the «Whig» ethos of the years to come, with its enthusiasm for trade and for the new financial and economic institutions, its acceptance of limitations on royal power, and its support for ministerial means of managing national government. Though some have called Fielding a consistently 'good Whig,' he, too, seems to have his two feet planted in different historical moments, and his work is characteristically divided in mood about the historical changes that surrounded him.