domestic relations which Richardson had so momentously made his own, thus changing places with Richardson, who turned to questions of male virtue in the last novel he wrote. This crisscrossing of characteristic interests, satisfying in the neatness of its apparent reversals, had in fact been prepared for by elements in Fielding's earlier novels. For, despite his avowed and important debts to epic and the concentration on male character in his first three fictional works (reflected in their titles), Fielding from the first presents conventional notions of male heroism as extremely vexed, and he expresses a complex and ambivalent attitude toward emerging ideals of female character as well.
The availability of other selves for «internal» characterization, the legitimacy of satiric attacks on personal character, the viability of epic models of heroism, the authenticity of female claims to special virtue-all of these questions are posed in complicated and dynamic ways in Fielding's novels. His treatment of them evolves within the course of each of his novels, as well as between them. Fielding knew that the reader's experience of a novel itself has a 'history,' unfolding over time, and he capitalizes upon the dynamic nature of that experience, raising expectations only to explode them, moving the reader through different views of an event, a character, or a phrase-sometimes in the developing span of an elaborate plot, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. The highly mobile point of view conjured by Fielding's prose allows for the extraordinary effects of tone that critics have described as his characteristic 'double irony' or 'double reversals.'
Fielding's most masterful achievements of style derive from this capacity of his prose to sustain multiple implications simultaneously, or in quick succession. So however, do the clumsiest, seemingly most -113- incompetent or ill-considered aspects of some of his works. To an unsympathetic reader, Jonathan Wild, Fielding's first novelistic work, may seem merely inconsistent in its use of an ironic persona; the tone of Amelia, his last, has struck some readers as oscillating wildly, bathetically, between earnest feeling and an unintentional atmosphere of burlesque. In these works, however, as in
Toward the close of Jonathan Wild, Mrs. Heartfree has been relating her adventures at some length to a small audience gathered in Heartfree's prison cell, when a 'horrid uproar' alarmed the company and 'put a stop to her narration at present.' The narrator comments, 'It is impossible for me to give the reader a better idea of the noise which now arose than by desiring him to imagine I had the hundred tongues the poet once wished for, and was vociferating from them all at once, by hollowing, scolding, crying, swearing, bellowing, and, in short, by every different articulation which is within the scope of the human organ.' Fielding does not give voice in Jonathan Wild to every different articulation within the scope of the human organ, but he does there unleash a dizzying diversity of forms of expression. The uproar that breaks into Mrs. Heartfree's story dramatizes, within the narrative, a much more constant process of disruption and interruption occurring throughout Jonathan Wild, where it is generally another among the narrator's own 'hundred tongues' that breaks off the prevailing discourse of the moment. The mode of this early work is primarily ironic and satirical, but the targets of its satire are many, and sometimes apparently incompatible with each other; and the ironic persona who delivers the tale suffers strange transformations, sometimes admitting other points of view into his narration in the form of references to the opinions of 'weak men,' sometimes temporarily (as if inadvertently) assuming those alternative views himself.
Fielding builds the satirical fable of Jonathan Wild around the life story of an infamous criminal of that name, convicted and hanged in London in 1725. Wild was not simply a thief: he presided over a substantial and organized gang of thieves, and, with an audacity that seems -114- to have impressed as well as offended his contemporaries, he also garnered reward money by helping victims regain what his own gang members had taken. He exploited the system for capturing thieves as well, informing on members of his gang who challenged his authority in some way. Thus, without carrying out a robbery himself, Wild might profit at several levels from the event. At intervals throughout Jonathan Wild, Fielding links Wild's criminal enterprise to legitimate capitalist entrepreneurship, implicating capitalism in Wild's amoral greed, by emphasizing that it is his employing of other hands to labor for his profit that defines his «greatness» as a man. The insistence with which Fielding uses the term «greatness» and the phrase 'the great man' to refer to Wild calls attention to a political target for his satire as well as an economic one: during his long tenure as prime minister, the many opponents of Sir Robert Walpole sneeringly referred to him as 'the great man.' In 1728, in The Beggar's Opera, John Gay had already made this satiric connection, identifying Jonathan Wild and Robert Walpole as moral if not social equivalents; Fielding deepens the connection, underlining the way that Wild and Walpole have both made their fortunes by presiding over systems, exploiting institutions, and simply, impudently, assuming an authority over others that has no particular source.
These elements of Fielding's satire easily intertwine, as Walpole's forms of governance and the institutions of a developing capitalism constitute important and interrelated features of Fielding's newly modern world. (We might note, for that matter, the peculiar similarity of the service offered by Wild in obtaining information about stolen goods and matching dispossessed owners with missing property and the kind of service conceived of by Fielding in his own innovation, the office of the 'Universal Register.' In Jonathan Wild, a version of that service is treated as the tellingly criminal epitome of modern enterprise.) Fielding extends his satire of things modern in Jonathan Wild into the specifically literary sphere, parodying the popular genres of criminal biography, travel narrative, and epistolary romance at different points in the tale. However, the main literary tradition with which his satire engages is not a modern but an ancient one: the world of epic, with its ideas of honor and glory and its delineation of the character of a hero. Epic references are always near at hand for the narrator of Jonathan Wild, who compares Jonathan Wild to Aeneas and his sidekick to Achates, dwells at a number of points on the nature of heroic greatness, and offers his -115- reader rhetorical flourishes adopted from epic, as when he provides a long epic simile about bulls and cows to describe the cacophonous interruption of Mrs. Heartfree's story. Thus, one of the hundred tongues in which Fielding erupts into speech in that episode, as throughout Jonathan Wild, is a tongue derived from epic. Fielding's epic similes in Jonathan Wild (as in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones) are entertaining because they place such homely references in the high diction and elaborate syntax of epic style, providing a measure of the distance between epic grandeur and the pedestrian modern world. However, Fielding's voicing of epic language in Jonathan Wild does not only serve, in the mode of mock-epic, to express the degeneracy of modern times. Instead, when Fielding violently, anachronistically, yokes together references to distinctively modern phenomena and to famous classical figures or events, he works to unsettle accepted «heroic» values in both, prying each loose from its familiar context by means of the other. Over and over again in Jonathan Wild, Fielding emphasizes the destructiveness of heroes' actions in history, although, speaking within his ironic persona, he pretends to celebrate that destructiveness, praising military heroes' willingness to massacre whole nations for the sake of their honor. The true worth of heroic character is thus drawn into question in Jonathan Wild in two ways: by this appalling praise for the heroic leader's spectacular sacrifice of human lives, and by the equation created between such heroic acts and the ignoble scheming of Jonathan Wild, who, we are told, has modeled himself on the epic and historical heroes he read about in school.
Fielding does not content himself with expressing the bankruptcy of both ancient and modern heroism in Jonathan Wild; he also attempts, at points, to advance an alternative set of values that he can affirm, albeit indirectly and perhaps only partially. He refers to the virtues of good nature, friendliness, generosity, and domestic devotion, although he claims to see them as merely «silly» weaknesses; and he embodies these «weaknesses» in the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Heartfree, whose story begins as a subplot of Wild's adventure but eventually becomes an equally weighty center of interest. Although Wild and the Heartfrees interact within the same space of narrative, they inhabit largely separate frames of reference, belonging to different literary genres and moral universes, so that Fielding's treatments of these characters can interrupt each other but cannot be simultaneously engaged. It is an episode involving Wild that literally interrupts Mrs. Heartfree's narration of her -116- adventures; the chorus of dissimilar voices unleashed at this interruption creates a boundary between Wild's and Mrs. Heartfree's incompatible ways of speaking, enacting and expanding upon the irreconcilable discord we might hear between them.
Throughout Jonathan Wild, Fielding typically marks such borders rather than erasing them or moving smoothly across them: he calls attention to the breaks or ruptures within our ways of constructing social meaning, including the separation we respect implicitly between public and private life. The Heartfrees' virtues are largely those of private life, whereas the various men satirized in the character of Wild aspire to success in the public spheres of politics or finance. Wild's tale too, however, includes events of a personal nature: Fielding interweaves the story of his courtship and unhappy marriage to Laetitia Snap with that of his commercial and quasi-political
