Fielding: Trying to stay Far by Being So Close

           I find it extremely interesting that Henry Fielding was so affected by the Pamela Media event that he participated with not one, but two responses to the original virtuous tale of Pamela. As we discussed in class last week, Shamela came in the form of extreme satire and mockery of the original tale. Yet putting all of the humor in the margins, we saw that Fielding was making a serious argument about all of the reasons Pamela was a dangerous tale for society (in terms of both instructing both young men and women), and why the original story was not believable despite Richardson’s claim that it was true. In Joseph Andrews, Fielding takes yet another jab at the story but this time in a more serious way through a spin off telling the story of Pamela’s brother. This spin off is comical yet serious in its story progression; its as though perhaps Fielding wanted to take his own turn experimenting with the new form of the novel, and used the Pamela Media Event’s momentum as a stepping stone for the story he wanted to tell. The interesting part is the way in which he completely distances himself from calling his work a novel.

            Fielding spends an entire five pages in the Preface distancing himself from the new genre of the novel. He uses terms such as “Epic” and “Poetry” to describe his own work, while extensively distinguishing between other genres of Romance, Tragedy, etc as he tries to reach a cohesive definition of the work he presents. In previous classes, we talked about the reasons why an author may or may not want to sell a piece of literature as a novel—it was generally regarded as a piece of lower class fiction for servants. Nonetheless, despite his attempts at distancing himself, the closeness in the genre has resulted in a continuous debate on whether or not Fielding’s work is one of the earliest examples of a novel. In fact, because of the heavy use of satirical elements throughout the work, many scholars debate the influence of satire on the early novel, and whether satire gave rise to the new form as evidenced by its use in Joseph Andrews. The first graduate paper I ever wrote (which was for Dr. Maruca’s eighteenth century course) argued that satire didn’t give rise to the new form of the novel, but rather influenced the new form which evolved with its own centered set of interests. My thesis statement read:

“A close examination of both the historical context of each literary form as well as the literary influence it had on audiences during the 18^th century illustrates that satire did not specifically lead to the formation of a new narrative form. Rather, the rise of the novel was strongly influenced by satire, but ultimately evolved with an initially more centered focus on internal and domestic issues more representative of reality rather than the wide ranges of public issues covered by satire (i.e. religion, politics, etc). Moreover, an analysis of the early novelist Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews exemplifies the influence the famous satirist Jonathon Swift had on his work—and ultimately the influence of satire on rise of the early novel.”

        

         What I found through research was that Jonathon Swift, renowned satirist of the eighteenth century, heavily influenced the works of Henry Fielding in many ways (which I will most fittingly save for class discussion tomorrow so I can explore other aspects here). However, despite how much Fielding attempts to distance himself from the new literary form, and associate himself with the epic and satirical elements found in his text which enable him to argue that it falls under a different genre, I think he finds himself falling into many similarities with Richardson. For example, both Fielding and Richardson use their characters as a gateway to preach their own ideals. We saw this in various instances such as when Pamela describes the ugliness of Mrs. Jewkes, when she describes what her virtue means to her, and when Mr. B preaches about why class won’t matter for a man to marry into the lower ranks to name only a few examples. In Fielding’s work, Adams preaches on and on in various instances about virtuous characteristics—especially in Book II when he discusses charity. It is only the form of the novel that enables these types of long speeches of morality that an author can preach through behind the voice of his characters.

            Another important aspect to note is that while he distances himself in selling the work as a novel, his contemporaries such as Eliza Haywood were specifically enthusiastic about selling their work as a novel as we seen in Love In Excess. The forms of each are similar, with long paragraphs, character interiority, third person narration, etc; yet each author’s identification with genres is interesting. I would certainly like to take this up for discussion in class. How successful was Fielding in distancing himself from the novel genre his book in now generally and most popularly regarded as one of its earliest forms? Did his contemporaries such as Haywood buy his distancing technique? What did it do for audiences? How far from the story of Pamela in term of morality and virtue is Joseph Andrews if we look past the satire?