rather than literary history.
The events of political history intrude directly into the plot of Tom Jones when Tom encounters soldiers on their way to fight against the Jacobite rebellion. The references to this rebellion set the novel's action in 1745, the year the followers of 'Bonnie Prince Charlie,' advancing south from Scotland, sought to reclaim the British monarchy for the Stuart line, dethroned in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Tom expresses Fielding's own sympathies with the existing government of England when he decides to volunteer and join the soldiers in their defense of England's Protestant religion and constitutional liberty. While Fielding made a name for himself writing against the ministry of Robert Walpole early in his career, in the mid -1740s he was one of the staunchest supporters of the new ministry (Henry Pelham's) in print, and published two periodicals and several pamphlets specifically in response to the Jacobite threat. In these polemical writings, he urges his countrymen to join the King's army and take arms against the invading Jacobites; but in Tom Jones, his hero never makes it into battle. Instead, the King's soldiers turn out to be an unruly bunch; Tom soon quarrels with one of them, is injured, and gets left behind; and his pursuit of the troops and of their glorious cause is gradually replaced by a pursuit of Sophia and of love. Although the trajectory toward battle with Jacobite forces is thus never carried out, the invocation of this political context, and then the movement of the plot between Tom's patriotic and his romantic aims, traces a connection between the apparently separate matters of national government and of personal identity and desire.
The political writings of Fielding and other propagandists on both sides of the Jacobite debate often made this connection explicitly, with each side in the conflict warning that the victory of the other would -121- spell catastrophe not only for the rule of the nation but for relationships between the sexes and within the family. Critics of Tom Jones have noted that the «patriarchalist» arguments made in favor of Jacobitism involved analogies between the government of nations and of families, advocating the absolute authority of kings and husbands and fathers to rule over their respective realms. Thus, Squire Western's support for the Jacobite cause accords neatly with the views he expresses about his own right to control his wife's and daughter's lives. This analogizing between national and domestic rule, important to formulations of patriarchalist political philosophy, does not, however, sum up all the claims made by both Jacobite and anti-Jacobite propaganda about the consequences of their conflict for the realm of personal experience. Whig writing against the rebellion (including Fielding's) insisted that a Jacobite victory would usher in not only a different government but different definitions of male and female identity- definitions associated with the earlier era of Stuart rule, and ones that afforded men much less dignity and control.
Among the central motifs of much Whig propaganda, visual as well as verbal, were certain stereotyped images of the typical Jacobite man and woman. The Whig image of the Jacobite man drew on the existing type of the Restoration Cavalier gentleman, and mixed appealing with negative qualities: he might be witty, dashing, gallant, and successful with the ladies, but also too easily swayed by those ladies, weak-willed, and superstitious. Whig polemics invoke a more thoroughly negative image of the Jacobite woman: she must necessarily be headstrong and dominating, and possibly fierce, cruel, and perverse as well. At best, her courage and spirit make her seem a more lively alternative to the timid, gentle, chaste, and compassionate women conjured in Whig propaganda of this period to prove the humanity of their own cause.
Fielding engages this contemporary discourse about masculine and feminine character when he constructs his male and female protagonists, Tom and Sophia, in Tom Jones. He employs the language of this discourse to characterize them, placing them within its insistent oppositions-but, significantly, he invokes terms from the conventional accounts of both Whig and Jacobite men and women to describe them, forcing together the opposed categories of character within their single identities. Tom is both a good, modern, moral hero (even volunteering to fight in the Whig cause) and something of a Cavalier figure (occupied in various love affairs, brave to a fault, and irresistibly dashing); -122- Sophia, we are told at a number of points, is courageous and spirited as well as gentle, compassionate, and, of course, chaste. This has troubled critics of Tom Jones, who have variously identified Tom and Sophia with one or the other side of the Whig-Jacobite conflict: some have argued that, within the political allegory of Tom Jones, Tom should be identified with Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, others that he represents the Whig opposition to that prince's cause. At several points in the novel, Fielding in fact foregrounds an effect of diverse, even opposed frames of reference meeting within the individual characters of his hero and heroine.
In one such scene, Tom decides (like a good Cavalier hero) to challenge Northerton to a duel, but only because (like a good Christian hero) he thinks it would be wrong to sustain malice or unforgivingness toward him over time. In another, Sophia simultaneously shows courage and gentle love when she runs away from her father's home. Though these do not seem necessarily to be mutually exclusive qualities, Fielding highlights a sense of conflict or dissonance between them; he connects both scenes, in fact, to descriptions of cacophonous outbreaks of multiple, dissonant voices something like the one that interrupts Mrs. Heartfree in Jonathan Wild. He also sets both scenes at midnight, as if to suggest that the conflicting discourses or frames of reference that meet within his characters belong to one day-or era-and to the next, and come confusedly into contact at the midpoint between days (as they might, say, at mid-century). 'Twelve Times did the iron Register of Time beat on the sonorous Bell- metal,' Fielding tells us, when Sophia' softly stole down Stairs, and having barred and unlocked one of the House Doors, sallied forth…'; 'The Clock had now struck Twelve… when Jones softly opening his Door, issued forth… '
Fielding portrays the male protagonist of his last novel, Amelia, as perpetually poised between two days, or two cultural eras. For Captain Booth, this suspension of his own identity between two eras is so severe that he is nearly paralyzed, rarely able, literally or figuratively, to «sally» or 'issue forth.' For much of Amelia, Booth is confined to his home to avoid arrest for debt; when he is not there, it is because he has failed to avoid arrest and is even more closely confined in prison. Booth's actions, however, are restricted not only by physical confinement but by a nearly constant sense of internal conflict. The conflicts that stymie Booth's will again and again are generated by his double allegiance to older and to emerging ideas of male character. As a gentleman and -123- especially as a soldier, Booth feels it is his duty to accept challenges to duel, but his Christian conscience recoils at the thought of shedding blood; his Cavalier sense of male honor makes him respond to Miss Mathews's advances in prison (as Tom does to Molly's, to Mrs. Waters's, and to Lady Bellaston's), but his devotion to his wife and to the ideal of a loving marriage renders him nearly senseless with guilt about this affair; his assumptions about a gentleman's proper occupation make it inconceivable to him to look for work beneath a military post, but he is unable to find such a post and cannot support the little family he so loves.
The conflicting frames of reference within which Booth attempts to define himself and to act also shape (and misshape) his efforts to interpret the events around him: Booth is always interpreting others' actions in the wrong contexts, wavering in the general assumptions he brings to social relations, and failing to reconcile his disparate views of the same events. The narrator of Amelia himself partakes of this kind of interpretive confusion and instability. Rather than projecting a single, sustained, omniscient view of the events and characters he describes, this narrator seems to waver, like Booth, between old and new assumptions (particularly about relations between the sexes and between social classes), offering one explanation and then another, in succession, without ever reconciling his inconsistencies. Only Amelia is able to achieve constancy of identity and point of view in this novel; while Booth hangs suspended between present and past models of male character, she seems to have moved forward vigorously into a crucial new model for female identity, that of the idealized wife and mother. However, ambivalences about this role (in particular, uncertainties about whether it complements and supports or competes with and challenges traditional male authority) shadow Fielding's treatment of Amelia, creating problems of tone and linking Amelia to various «doubles» within the novels-women who echo her dignified and appealing qualities in a satiric or burlesque key.
Some of Fielding's most successful early works capitalized upon the comic possibilities of female claims to heroism. In
