The Columbia History of the British Novel

exploits. Significantly, the moments of greatest instability in the narrator's tone-the moments of wavering between ironic and earnest expression-tend to occur as he moves between his domestic and his public (political, economic, criminal) plots. (In particular, the narrator equivocates throughout Jonathan Wild about whether 'greatness'-that is, amoral, insatiable ambition and greed-tends to thrive or tends to provide its own punishment in this world; and he gives different answers to this question for public and for private life.) A few utopian moments in Jonathan Wild suggest the possibility of healing this public-private division: the 'very grave man' who opposes Wild's authority in Newgate exhorts the debtors to form a true community there, in which public good and private benefit will be identified; and the book's final pages leave us with a vision of an extended Heartfree family living 'all together in one house' as one 'family of love.'

The utopian prospect of unification (of persons and of parts of life) is only glimpsed, however, among the increasing images of fragmentation in the closing chapters of Jonathan Wild, from the dialogue between Jonathan and the ordinary at Newgate, with its ellipses indicating lacunae in the text, to the narrator's closing acknowledgment that he must bring together 'those several features' of Jonathan's character 'which lie scattered up and down in this history.' «History» is more than a merely conventional term in this formulation: in its final pages, The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great reminds us that the various languages it has employed (of epic greatness, of modern political parties, of ancient empires, of capitalist ambi-117- tion, of domestic virtue) all unfold in history and meet confusedly there: Wild shall 'stand unrivalled on the pinnacle of GREATNESS' only 'while greatness consists in power, pride, insolence, and doing mischief to mankind…,' the narrator concludes-letting slip his ironic mask, even as he reveals that it has been constructed out of his historical moment.

In Shamela, the multiple voices in which Fielding speaks-or, I should say, the multiple pens with which Fielding writes-are formalized as belonging to the several correspondents whose letters make up this brief work. Pamela itself includes a few letters from writers other than Pamela, and Richardson would expand the epistolary form in Clarissa to encompass letters from a number of correspondents; but the variety of letter writers in Shamela works directly and explicitly to challenge the authenticity of any one writer's presentation of events. Before we arrive at the text of Shamela's first letter, we are given a mock dedication and two supposed encomiums to the editor of the volume (parodies of Richardson's elaborate self-flattering apparatus in later editions of Pamela), and also a pair of letters between two readers of Pamela-Parson Tickletext, who has been taken in by the seductive power of Pamela's appearance in letters, and Parson Oliver, who disabuses Tickletext of his illusions and offers the letters to follow as the eye-opening authentic original of Pamela's tale. These 'framing materials' in Shamela serve not only to introduce Shamela's letters and the challenge they pose to Pamela's authenticity, but also to establish a multileveled structure of perspectives, like the one set up by the puppet show in The Author's Farce, with similarly peculiar interactions between frame and framed, reader (or editor) and character or text.

The specific content of the framing materials also provides a more implicit critique of the false apparent unity of Pamela's world: in these introductory letters, Fielding rather gracelessly cobbles together ridicule of Richardson's literary success with ridicule of two of his favorite political targets, Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Hervey. The incongruity of the effect is itself significant. Encountering the unexpected figures of the Prime Minister and one of his allies on the threshold of Fielding's parody of a novel, we have to wonder how the world of political conflict is or is not relevant to the apparently self-contained domestic world conjured by Richardson's tale. Fielding makes us feel the division that may be quietly maintained between public and private -118- spheres of life by crossing that division-bringing together the separate languages of each without overcoming the dissonance we are likely to hear between them.

Lord Hervey, satirized under the name of 'Miss Fanny' in the dedication to Shamela, makes a brief appearance in Joseph Andrews as well. There, he provides the satiric original for Beau Didapper, the effeminate man who ineffectively threatens Fanny's virtue in Book 4. Fielding and others had frequently satirized Lord Hervey not only for his political allegiances but for his supposed effeminacy and sexual ambiguity, but such a satirical reference seems out of place in the final book of Joseph Andrews. Fielding in fact addresses the subject of satire at several points in Joseph Andrews, most explicitly in Book 3, chapter 1, where he defends general satire but rejects particular satire-or satire of recognizable individuals-as the equivalent of public executions. Five chapters later, in narrative rather than expository form, he again links verbal satire to physical violence and questions its legitimacy when he describes his main characters' encounter with the Roasting Squire. Intent, we are told, on finding the «ridiculous» in all he meets, the Roasting Squire exploits his social power to abuse and humiliate by any means, indulging in practical jokes that force their victims into ridiculous postures, or that even hurt them physically, rather than serving to expose real hidden weaknesses. The ridiculous is precisely what Fielding named in the preface to Joseph Andrews as the source of his own work's comic elements, though he there confidently asserts that the effect of ridiculousness attaches itself to individuals only because they have assumed affectations of some kind. Laughter, in this view, functions morally, to reveal concealed faults and inconsistencies; but in the course of Joseph Andrews, Fielding questions whether laughter can be an amoral, merely aggressive force as well.

He conveys this questioning largely through a complicated interplay between disparate genres and literary modes-drama, satire, the novel as defined by Richardson, the epic as defined by Milton-in the rhetoric, images, and narrative events of Joseph Andrews. Allusions to Paradise Lost especially enrich the texture of the scenes involving the Roasting Squire (in the 'natural amphitheatre' where Joseph, Fanny, and Adams picnic, and in the tormenting of Adams with a «devil» or firecracker at the Squire's estate). The verbal and narrative recollections of Milton's poem in these scenes quietly advance epic forms of expression as an alternative to satiric ones. Both epic precedents and satiric -119- ones, however, are invoked by Fielding in Joseph Andrews to dislocate Richardson's epistolary novel form-to denaturalize its modes of representation by bringing them up against those of very different literary forms.

The opening gambit in Fielding's response to Richardson in Joseph Andrews has always struck readers as self-evidently comical and debunking: Fielding replaces the serving-maid who so fervently defends her chastity in Pamela with a male servant, who rejects his mistress's advances with equal fervor. The comedy of the scenes between Lady Booby and Joseph, critics have commented, is like the comedy of cross- dressing; Joseph appears in a garment adopted from his sister's wardrobe of virtues, rather than one natural to himself. Fielding does exploit our different expectations about female and male chastity to play these scenes for broad comic effect. Even in the opening scenes of the novel, however, the implications of this comic reversal of roles are ambiguous. Why does what constitutes a virtue in one sex become ridiculous when asserted by the other? Should virtues be like clothing, to be donned only when they are in fashion, becoming to one wearer but absurd on another? As the novel leaves its burlesque relation to Pamela behind, Joseph no longer functions primarily as a figure of absurdity, and even, some have claimed, becomes the hero of the novel. If so, he does so neither by abandoning his initial association with feminine roles nor by proving that all the features of his identity are natural rather than adopted. The description of Joseph's physical appearance, Fielding's comments on his tears at the abduction of Fanny, the story of his replacement of a girl in the cradle as a baby-all continue to link Joseph with feminine postures and roles, but not in ways that Fielding consistently ridicules. One function of this evolving treatment of Joseph's gender identity is to question the value and humanity of the traditional male 'hero'-a term Fielding uses to describe the would-be rapist of Fanny, who embodies such unthinking aggression that his head, Fielding tells us, might as well be made of solid bone.

Joseph's identity is, in a number of ways, characterized by borrowing or adoption: he adopts his sister's model of righteous virtue; his own name turns out, unexpectedly, to be an adoptive one; he even has to borrow the clothing he wears from other people at several points in the novel. Through Joseph, however, Fielding dignifies the idea of adopted identity, rather than making it an emblem (as a purely satirical writer might) of the gap between essential and assumed character. Gammar -120- Gammar tells us that after finding Joseph in the cradle in place of her little girl, she came to love him 'all to nothing as if [he] had been my own girl.' The plot revelations that come at the close of Tom Jones even more emphatically trace a continuum between adoptive and biological relations: the discovery that Tom is in fact Bridget Allworthy's illegitimate son makes good on his long-standing adoptive relation to Allworthy by revealing that Allworthy is his uncle by blood, if not actually his father. Tom's character, like Joseph's, emerges in the course of his novel through a complex interplay between different discourses, but the dynamic tensions within his character might be fruitfully located in competing «texts» from political and social