Eric Rothstein
Fielding’s plays mix realistic portrayal, satiric distortion, and self-conscious theatricality in different proportions. These three elements reassemble in Joseph Andrews—but how, since its preface claims it is a just imitation of nature? Well, consider an eighteenth-century model of scientific realism, which comprehends three aspects of perceiving the real world. First is the factual world itself; second, the factual world as both human limits and partial interests filter it (Bacon’s Idols of the Tribe and of the Cave); and third, the factual world as the tools we use for truth let us understand it—mechanical instruments, but also categories and conceptual patterns (risking Bacon’s Idols of the Marketplace and of the Theater). Accordingly, scientists address the world: they gather projectible particulars, facts that help us model parts of reality and predict their workings. They address human limits and partiality: they value disinterestedness and ways to extend the limits we recognize. And they test instruments and inherited paradigms of knowledge. The instruments of knowledge therefore exist self-reflexively among the heterogeneous inventory of scientific facts.
In Joseph Andrews these usages have analogues, all of them establishing Fielding’s realism—realism, that is, as scientific realists practiced it, not the realism of Gissing, Hemingway, and Rossellini. Fielding’s realistic portrayals bring us the actual world in terms of a hypothesized string of cases, from which we can work by analogy. One checks the accuracy of his hypothesized portrayals by applying criteria of verisimilitude: is this case plausible and projectible? And so with genre: a “just imitation of nature” distinguishes “the comic epic in prose” from romances and burlesques; and for fiction, we measure “justness” by verisimilitude. Once one has the necessary facts, verisimilitude exposes the false pretentions of an imposter to truth, the “Affectation” that Fielding calls “the only Source of the true Ridiculous” (7).1
The satire that he imports from his dramatic practice, aiming at the ridiculous, supports, not counters or thwarts, his realism. Naturally, it often flunks the test of verisimilitude, because it echoes the ridiculous “Affectation” that necessarily flunks such a test. Fielding’s satire exposes our limits and shames our partiality, rebuking the Idols of the Cave and the Tribe. He mocks rigidity in affected, self-interested, and obsessive people, and shows that rigid, obsessive, often arbitrary social systems—those of the law and of rank, for example—hinder allegedly natural values under guise of preserving them. By way of balance to this strain of satire, Fielding also appeals for our agreement about evidence and values through his gentleman’s voice, judicious, without partis pris.2 These means reinforce his readers’ openness to complexity and empiricism.
As to his self-conscious theatricality, the third element Fielding imports from his plays, it displays our tools for truth, the instruments and inherited paradigms of knowledge that let us represent the hypothetically real. Accordingly, Joseph Andrews keeps alluding to books and their devices, including its professed model, Don Quixote, which yields a whole repertory of such devices in aid of restoring an addled protagonist to a sometimes brutal and unjust, but factual reality. What might be antirealistic elements in a late nineteenth-century author, then, here converge in a realism. The skeptical openness that complements a patient, case-oriented empiricism lets us better imagine and appraise everyday life.
Every distinctive element in Joseph Andrews, I suggest, rests on the needs of such complex realism. As a realist, Fielding prompts readers’ openness to the world by forcing their openness in reading his novel: they must assimilate a verisimilar, teeming variety of characters, allusions, tones, shifting points of view, distances from the immediate action, and hermeneutic puzzles. His broad range of evaluative references, offered with a variety of ironic inflections, complicates how we appraise the depicted world, as real, narrow or biased in depiction, or affected by literary convention. We collaborate in Joseph Andrews. We collaborate too because Fielding leaves unresolved a good many interpretive problems in the novel, forcing us to see supposedly simple issues as complex. Narrative elements in Joseph Andrews rarely have univocal meanings, and some stay unresolved. We thereby shuck unthinking, stock responses, even if at last we choose those same responses from among the possibilities. We, autonomously, must decide, or decide not to decide. There’s a parallel here to the radical, momentous shift in ethical ideals, during the eighteenth century, from obedience to autonomy.3 Autonomy in the search for truth marks scientific realism and Fielding’s. “Nullius in verba” (take nobody’s word for it) was the Royal Society’s skeptical motto in the service of experiment. This principle saturates Joseph Andrews.
Nullius in verba: obviously one suspects the words of vain and hypocritical characters, in situations where the vanity and hypocrisy come into play. For the ends of this novel, “nullius in verba” plainly suits what Pamela and Pamela say. In fact, it also fits other fit-all formulas of exemplarity and standard social categories, whether in the main narrative of Joseph Andrews or the interpolated stories. Fielding’s own storytelling exemplar, Cervantes, of course, has similar experimental principles: Don Quixote’s inherited body of older normative tales, knightly romances, fail him by failing to depict contemporary reality.
A first case in point is the treatment of the biblical story of Joseph, to which Joseph Andrews recurs, as his supposed sister Pamela recurs to the Bible. Biblical Joseph is sold into Egypt, traditionally the land of bondage, by merchants who find him in a pit after he has been stripped of the coat his father made for him (Gen. 37). After he rejects his master Potiphar’s wife’s advances, she also strips him of a garment (Gen. 39). This pattern carries over to Joseph Andrews. Gypsies (Egyptians) kidnapped him as a baby. In servitude, he spurns the charms of Lady Booby, his late master’s wife, alleging his virtue and citing his “Name’s-sake” Joseph’s example as well as his sister Pamela’s (47, 58). Later, like biblical Joseph, he lies in a pit (a ditch in Joseph Andrews) after being twice stripped, first of his livery when Lady Booby discharges him, and then of his borrowed clothes.
But the parallels diverge. For biblical Joseph’s distinctive coat of many colors, sign of paternal honors, Joseph Andrews has standard livery. “His” colors belong to the Boobys. Biblical Joseph in Egypt rises as a prophet by glossing symbolic dreams narrated to him. He knows his family. Joseph Andrews never before the end foresees his imminent or eventual future. As to dreams, he sleeps while Wilson mentions a crucial symbol, the strawberry birthmark that would explicate his past. Like biblical Joseph, Joseph Andrews rises socially and rejoins his father, but not because he is “discreet and wise” (Gen. 41:33). He requires errors and coincidences. To cap the reversal, biblical Joseph turns out not even to be our Joseph’s true namesake, just as Pamela is not truly his sister—“the Lord knows whether he was baptized or no, or by what Name,” says Mrs. Andrews (337), who picked “Joseph” for the changeling in her daughter’s cradle. Paralleling Fielding’s hero and biblical Joseph yields no prophetic knowledge, locating a destiny. The likeness is a chimera hatched from ignorance, Joseph’s and ours. It’s as “accurate” as, say, Joseph’s gaining love because a strawberry birthmark lies on his left breast, his heart, for the strawberry is a fruit legendarily governed by Venus—this is Fielding’s sly joke.4 We readers can guess Joseph’s future by glossing symbols, literary devices. But neither Joseph Andrews nor we can do that in real life.
If one hopes to apply the Bible as a large allusive, normative pattern behind Joseph Andrews, it suffers serious deflation. What about concentrated, embedded narratives, the three interpolated stories? Each story is keyed to one of the canonical values that underpin Fielding’s preface about his own “Species of writing”: the Beautiful (false glamour lures Leonora in the first tale to discard solidly British Horatio for flashy, francophoney Bellarmine), the Good (Wilson’s narrative of debauchery, disgrace, and lucky rescue), and the True (Paul fibs strategically to Leonard and his wife). Each might be a normative, exemplary tale, as are Pamela and the biblical story of Joseph. That is, faulty Leonora gets punished, reformed Wilson gets rewarded, and Paul’s deceit is uncovered. Yet each, increasingly in order of the tales, erodes its central value as the tale itself exemplifies it.
Mr. Wilson’s tale, the second, occupies the spatial center of Joseph Andrews (chapters 3–4 of the third of four books). Wilson sweepingly generalizes his own experience of sin, squalor, frivolity, and pain. His first-person account, with confessional penitence as well as inventoried social indictment, provides a brief, bitter counterpart to the scope and discriminated detail for which Adams has just praised Homer (197–99) and that Fielding himself practices in his comic prose epic. Does Wilson’s account also have a moral rationale? If so, why does Wilson gain happiness through happenstance? Having desperately thrown himself “into Fortune’s Lap” (218), Wilson exits debtor’s prison through winning a lottery, having a serendipitous death occur, and a suddenly introduced heiress’s revealing her crush on him. He gains a fortune, all right, and a lady’s “Lap,” by accident. His rescuer Harriet says she loves him for his “Worth” (223). Worth? His tale has shown us none thus far. Providential grace? Neither Wilson nor his rescuer Harriet mentions that. If one thinks that Wilson catalogs the town’s sins to awake our moral vigilance, what does his rewarded appeal to Fortune awake? Shouldn’t a normative ethical tale imply, maybe entail, moral responsibility, agency together with awareness?
After fortune grants Wilson liberty and property, he becomes the virtuous, pastoral Wilson we meet. But so? Both Wilson’s vice and his virtue (his upright dealing as a wine merchant) punish him in the city. In the country, plus ça change. Vice thrives there—venal, brutal, and deluded characters—just as well as virtue. Symptomatic ills still afflict virtuous, rural Wilson. These may be random from below, in the rootless, classless gypsies’ theft of his eldest son, or systemic from above, in the local squirearchy who trample his land and murder his eldest daughter’s dog. Fielding embellishes Joseph Andrews with a handsome formal arrangement to respond to this high/low pairing: another rootless figure, the nomadic peddler, restores the stolen son to Wilson (338), and that same son, together with Adams, kills two of the squire’s dogs (242). Fielding’s readers expect such formal elegance, for his writing never relies on fortune—but where fortune rules, as throughout Wilson’s tale, what warrants useful inferences?
These questions gain force because the pattern of fortune carries forward from this central interpolated tale. Joseph Andrews ends happily through a flurry of coincidences filched from romance, freeing Wilson’s son Joseph from the threats of Bridewell and then bridal ill, incest. Only Fielding’s triumphant impudence carries us aloft to rejoice at such strange dei ex machina. Certainly no one, not even the pious pedagogue Adams, invokes anything metaphysically higher than fortune here. This denouement—is it serendipitous support of primogeniture, lucky Joseph as lucky Wilson’s heir? We learn of Wilson’s own happy fortune after having seen fortune repeatedly succoring Joseph in books 1 and 2—is Wilson his son’s narratological heir? Given these options, how, if at all, does the role of fortune in Wilson’s story clarify the denouement’s ambiguity as literary convention? Does the happy ending, for instance, recall Terentian romance, as in The Conscious Lovers; generic satire, as in another active repertory piece, The Beggar’s Opera; or nose-thumbing escapism, as in The Author’s Farce? In these last two plays, what pleases us deliberately does not convince us. Does the denouement flip the moralism of Pamela, since in Fielding virtue gets rewarded, but not for virtue? Any of these, each with a different “message,” would be plausible for Fielding. What conclusions, if any, given several interpretive models, shall we draw about the benefits of being good?
The other two interpolated tales, like Wilson’s, deal with spousal relations, deceit, financial disparity, and a protagonist’s free choices. The form and problems of each tale differ, however, to suit its focal canonical value, the Beautiful (Leonora’s story) and the True (Leonard and Paul’s). An idiom of art, drawn from Cervantes and Scarron, suffuses Leonora’s tale, with its romance names for English people and its exaggerated love language. The allegedly “saturnine” Horatio, for instance, writes to Leonora about “the extatic Happiness of seeing you” and his “utmost Rapture” (103, 105-6). Its eager teller, an anonymous, otherwise featureless, well-bred lady, pours forth the account, repeating, verbatim, allegedly memorized love letters (105), and, also verbatim, conversations she didn’t hear, so couldn’t memorize.
The dense detail increases one’s sense of her story’s finished self-enclosure, its artiness. So does its arbitrariness. Alone among the interpolated tales, it serves no easily discernable thematic or narrative purpose, even though it repeats motifs, such as that of clothes and social identity, from Joseph’s current plight. The teller too has no discernable motive, except for gossip, by analogy with “the Ladies of the Town” (125). Two points here: first, the lady’s supposedly faithful facts and her cool righteousness make truth and ethics serve romantic “beauty.” As a self-justifying entertainment, the tale does not perform the values it ostensibly preaches. Second, if we blame Leonora’s infatuation with Bellarmine’s fancy foreign dress-up, how can we explain Fielding’s imitating a French (or Spanish) mode of embellishment in presenting the tale? How does the mode of Cervantes and Scarron suit a story that tells us, “Buy British”?
Truth, not Beauty, governs the blunt story of Paul and Leonard, which breaks off without closure. It embarks from a young boy’s school reader and his Latin rote, auguring didactic business. Sure enough, the chapter title promises “an useful Lesson” (315) from this schoolbook. But what lesson? To keep peace between Leonard and his wife, squabbling, cocksure spouses, their penniless guest Paul ostensibly sides with whichever aggrieved spouse is currently confiding in him. When they discern his strategy, their shared wrath at him at least momentarily reconciles them. What then does truth mean for one’s preferred end, be it peace, considerateness, or extrapolative knowledge? Mightn’t Paul’s partially lying, pragmatic self-effacement—he conceals whom he thinks right—ring truer than the wealthy spouses’ literal, polemic truth claims? Does it matter that we never learn Paul’s motives for his acts, perhaps benign deceit or maybe sharp self-interest? Do these questions of truth bear upon Fielding’s fictional truth and his care for his readers’ desires? By this point in Joseph Andrews, what truth means in the main plot is messy, and about to become quickly messier as the young protagonists realize their “true” identities. Hence the story of Paul and Leonard here, but it is calculatedly of no help.
In the interpolated tales, then, Fielding troubles the inherited, transcendent norms of the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. That is, he disturbs how one applies them, as he disturbs the application of the biblical Joseph narration. Never rejecting them, he nonetheless complicates and situates their use, fogging them in practice with various kinds of indecision within the sample world of Joseph Andrews. He counters stock responses to give us multiplicity, as soon as one gets to real life. Predictably, this questioning and testing also keeps recurring in the body of this novel, especially with immanent norms. By “immanent,” I mean those normative, “natural” categories supposedly implicit in reality itself, such as familial classifications and a good many social and biological ones.
Think of “nature” in the incest motif concluding this family-centered novel. Fielding turns the deepest familial taboo into a shell game of identity and belonging. Joseph and Fanny briefly seem to be siblings. They in fact only switch positions in the Andrews family, Fanny moved in, Joseph out. But the switch playfully preserves the sibling incest motif: the gypsies swap baby Joseph for baby Fanny, so that he shows up in her bed—her cradle (337). Particularly among the multiple familial promotions caused by Pamela’s marrying Booby, the incest game stresses how much social artifices riddle the “natural.” That “nature” is axiomatic in Fielding’s background texts—one is Genesis, so zealous for family and tribal lines, and another, Adams’s cherished Aeschylus, where tragedy rises from fractures and negations of family. But when Fielding’s wit infects the “natural” of received history, nature’s laws look like kissing cousins to writer’s license.
Joseph Andrews also toys with male/female boundaries. It starts with the no-double-standard comparison of Joseph and Pamela as guardians of chastity—“Did ever Mortal hear of a Man’s Virtue!” cries the variously heated Lady Booby, avatar of her brother B. in Pamela (41). Fielding ends by teasing these boundaries in Beau Didapper, so androgynous—male and female didappers (small grebes) have nearly identical plumage: “No Hater of Women; for he always dangled [!] after them; yet so little subject to Lust, that he had . . . the Character of great Moderation in his Pleasures” (312; and see 332–33). Between these brackets Fielding musters up marital arrangements that overlap but not repeat. We see gender role reversal, as with the Tow-wouses, and caricature, as with the Trullibers (84–88, 164–65). Wilson finds “none of my own Sex” more capable than Harriet “of making juster Observations upon Life, or of delivering them more agreeably; nor do I believe any one possessed of a faithfuller or braver Friend” (226). Sex distinctions, like those of family, have enough arbitrary admixture that we cannot take them as simple givens. Fielding additionally scrambles into them a strong dose of social class, which the narrator declares arbitrary (156–58). Since this arbitrary system relies on family and gender groupings, its dubiousness dyes them too.
Family, sex, and social class are real-world facts. We use them to cope with the world and to form the world that we and others cope with. In respect to biology and status, they are sufficiently consistent within the world to be useful. Beyond that, they are not. Again, as with biblical Joseph and Platonic ideals, Fielding does not reject these categories; he teases and disenchants them in practice. He thus questions when and how useful they are, empirically, for ethical or metaphysical judgments, or for begetting norms from facts. I would note that he also does not promote these categories. He ignores the traditional paradigm, in which one blames human lapses for seeming damage to some universal ideal, established by God or Nature, an immanent source of order. A weak, secular form of the paradigm does appear in Fielding’s institutional satire: law and medicine remain unshakably honorable, no matter how shysters and quacks disgrace their practice. Their honor can derive from their ideal use, not their metaphysical status. The ideal use of family, gender, and social class, however, differs: given that one cannot trust the empirical results they yield, an ideal use of these categories would have to be tentative and provisional. Significantly, in Joseph Andrews, the most admirable characters, as well as faulty ones, exhibit the shakiness of family, gender, and social class.
In tune with a skeptical, pragmatic logic, no character, however admirable, embodies universal ideals or serves as a paragon to establish reliable, real-world norms. The best candidate to be an exemplar is Adams, for Joseph Andrews never smirches his personal integrity and the soundness of his impulsive actions. (The sturdy Christian, as approved by Fielding, swings the other fist, not turns the other cheek.) Early on Adams errs merely through preoccupation and naïveté, amusing us and endearing himself by personal foibles. By midnovel, though, he slips further, repeatedly permitting his vanity to blemish him as a clerical source of spiritual wisdom. Over and over, vanity confirms his wrong, dogmatic opinions, products of a blinkered mind, not merely of preoccupation and naïveté. He praises ignorance to preserve boys’ innocence (230–31), rebukes grief (264–67), and advocates strict husbandly authority (310–11, 323). As “a great Enemy to the Passions,” he “preache[s] nothing more than the Conquest of them by Reason and Grace” (309). He rejects this-worldly pleasure (330) and accepts witchcraft (334). In one episode, he knowingly omits an inconvenient scriptural verse, and cites the Bible selectively: preaching to Joseph a doctrine of resignation, he invokes his namesake Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but ignores the story of Joseph’s namesake, where Jacob rends his garments and mourns long for his son’s supposed death (308; Gen. 22, 37:34). Adams’s “bitterest Agony” (309) at the supposed death of his own son Jacky—Fielding’s form of “Isaac”—then immediately belies his preachments. At other times his wife and quasi-son Joseph properly correct his foolish “wisdom.” Feet of clay are better than a heart of bronze, no doubt, so that flawed Adams does better than other figures of trust in Joseph Andrews. Still, especially when he struts as an exemplar, he parodies one.
If Adams’s example would inculcate vanity, one source of Fielding’s “ridiculous,” then the example of Joseph’s other beacon, Pamela, could teach the other source, hypocrisy. That is the thrust of Fielding’s mock-exposé burlesque Shamela. Fielding had broader plans in alluding to Pamela in Joseph Andrews, though, where all outside aids to proper assessments—biblical Joseph’s history, classical (Platonic) norms, “natural” categories (family, gender, class), and literary convention—turn out to be unevenly and variably unreliable. So, more elaborately, this logic includes Pamela, a romance that dwells on natural categories. Pamela resembles the story of biblical Joseph as a seemingly exact but actually off-kilter exemplary tale, and it resembles the interpolated tales in its dubious relationship to its professed moral.
What Joseph Andrews does, in my reading of it, Pamela cannot. With its shallow realism and its traditional idea of nature, based on a fixed order, Richardson’s novel typically tells readers what they already (should) know. True, at least before Pamela marries B., it adds to our knowledge by using intimacy to explore psychological processes. Yet even Pamela’s subjectivity is hardly more than son et lumière for a moral fable, by Richardson’s design. His pubescent heroine’s actions are so meagerly her own that her eyewitness account of them follows a fixed genre to match a fixed order, a Cinderella tale. Stylistically it pretends to be as new as its heroine is naive, yet it engages its reader through a once-upon-a-time romance plot, based on desire and aversion, featuring kidnapping, captivity, ogres, distraught virtue, a happy ending, and a thin, conventional sense of personal agency. Indeed, for Richardson Pamela’s banality beneath the personalized surface helps guarantee its teachings.
Whereas Joseph Andrews is self-reflexive about its instruments of truth, its narrators and narrative genres, Pamela disallows questioning its instrument of truth, Pamela herself, a single naive voice and consciousness, with one filter for events. Were Pamela’s subjectivity to indicate her own agency, as in more realistic fiction, readers could move to real-life inferences about systematic bias and motives. For example, her preternatural literacy might hint at a sophistication that she willingly hides from her parents. Frequently in the eighteenth century, “female reading and idleness, sensual pleasure, and secret intimacy” were linked.5 Since such speculation would wreck Pamela as Richardson intended it, we are invited to look for psyche and blocked from really doing so. We have the illusion of intimacy but no real person with whom to be intimate. This failure of mind or nerve from a realist perspective had launched Shamela, which parodies and reveals Pamela’s skittish realism along the lines just suggested.
And Joseph Andrews? Its realism swallows up Richardsonian romance and romance’s counterpart, burlesque, modes that Fielding addresses in his preface. Burlesque appears in Joseph Andrews as almost entirely the characters’ genre. They burlesque themselves through self-interested pretense, Affectation, “the only Source of the true Ridiculous” (7), when they caricature themselves by their single-minded quest for others’ favor, pushed by vanity and hypocrisy. Romance twists in Joseph Andrews, by contrast, come from authorial fiat, so-called Fortune. Why? In Pamela’s romance mode, the heroine steers with ancestral charts through choppy waves to a port of happiness. Until after her marriage, Pamela must in Richardson’s conception stay staunch about an ideal, obedience-based morality, expressed in preestablished codes, biblical or familial. She cleaves to heteronomous behavior, such as also underlies self-burlesque. Fielding is on the other side of the shift in eighteenth-century ethics, mentioned above, from ideals of obedience to an ideal of autonomy. Accordingly, for Pamela’s touted ethics of obedience, Joseph Andrews substitutes an ethics based on questioning codes and categories. Unquestioning romance in Joseph Andrews, as within Wilson’s tale and the novel’s denouement, then yields interpretive indeterminacy or at least question-raising complexity.
Joseph Andrews recycles burlesque and romance, I have argued, as agents of skeptical realism, to depose Baconian Idols. As to what he sees as the closed, desire-based romance of Pamela specifically, Fielding goes further. In two respects he develops and supersedes the limited truths of Pamela. His techniques here go well beyond the simpler reversals that import the biblical Joseph story into Joseph Andrews. First, Fielding’s critique of categories leads him to enlarge on a major point in Pamela, the social leveling by which an ex-schoolmaster’s poor daughter wins a wealthy squire’s hand. As to B., Richardson had hedged Pamela’s social leveling, making it partial and anomalous. In addition, B.’s obsessive fascination raises her above his employees, but her captors, Jewkes and Colbrand. She has an uncertain, liminal status. In Joseph Andrews Fielding expands on liminal status and social leveling. Through most of the novel, Fielding’s unspoiled principals—Adams, Joseph, and Fanny—freely travel as near equals. The men’s uniforms, livery and a cassock, typecast them, but beneath those, their fluid, often concealed identities exemplify the “communitas” that the anthropologist Victor Turner relates to pilgrimage and consequent changes in status.6 Such fluidity enacts an alternative to the rabid hierarchies the travelers encounter.
We have leveling up: by book 4 Joseph’s sudden, seeming promotion to B.’s family via Pamela privileges him to box the ear of the “immensely rich” Didapper, so soundly “that it conveyed him several Paces from where he stood” (320–21). We have lateral leveling, not only through on-the-road communitas but also through other narratives. For instance, the interpolated stories create temporarily classless groups of listeners.7 And we have much, often ominous leveling down, when humans get muddled with other animals. While battling, Adams is soaked with hog’s blood that is mistaken for his (120) and the porcine Trulliber later pushes him into a “Hogs-Stye” (163). The travelers are trapped by bird batters (140), confuse sheep-stealers with murderers (192–95), and battle with dogs who have just ripped apart an anthropomorphized hare (236–44). The roasting squire’s men compare Adams to a badger and a fox; the narrator calls the squire’s huntsmen “Curs” (244–47) and his quack doctor a “mischievous Dog” (249). Adams condemns Wilson’s past profligate life as “below the Life of an Animal” (204–5). The motif recurs with Lady Booby’s social contempt for Adams—“Quelle Bête! Quel Animal” (313)—and the introduction of bird-named Didapper; and thence expands into the denouement, with its extensive familial, social, and personal leveling.
Second, Joseph Andrews sublates a theme in Pamela of liberty and property—the hardheaded realist’s means of secular salvation. Richardson’s heroine gains liberty and then a share in B.’s property by reserving her own primal property, her self and body. Joseph Andrews distributes Pamela’s property, made material and ironic, among the protagonists: her religion in Adams’s bundled, unsalable sermons, her ability to turn love into money in Joseph’s inalienable golden love amulet, and her allures in both Fanny’s chaste body and punning Christian name. (The pun on “fanny” already appears in Shamela’s introductory letters.) Pamela’s private property, made public through her private letters, buys marriage and status; in Joseph Andrews, its public, material form has no exchange value. From that reversal, Fielding’s novel reenacts Pamela’s doubtful status, captivity, and poverty, now multiplied and differentiated, with her supposed brother Joseph, her actual sister Fanny, and Adams, who as father, schoolmaster, and parson absorbs the roles of Pamela’s two good men, Parson Williams and Pamela’s ex-schoolmaster father.
Fielding resolves the plot through another itinerant figure engaged by occupation in property transfer, the peddler whose itinerant common-law wife, at one time a predator herself, sold baby Fanny. In fact, the peddler has long been involved with other people’s buying and selling men and women, since he was a military recruiter who “struck a Bargain” to cohabit with this wife (324). At last the peddler becomes “an Excise-man; a Trust which he discharges with such Justice, that he is greatly beloved in the Neighbourhood” (344). The relatively recent (1732–1733) Excise Bill controversy had centered on liberty and property: “Excise would extinguish the Englishman’s liberty,” the press claimed. “His house would be broken open, his wife and daughters violated; robbed without redress, he would be indistinguishable from a Frenchman.”8 The peddler, who steers righteously within a perilous system, then, is the perfect figure to restore liberty and property.
Liberty and property: in Joseph Andrews the providential claims in Pamela melt into highly temporalized claims on the worldly future, repeatedly and realistically acknowledging the property system. Liberty, the principal characters have or gain; but without exchangeable property, liberty is fragile, illusory. Through their bodily properties, like strength and beauty, the protagonists can act freely only in “low” actions, like brawls, which are as socially egalitarian as their communitas; otherwise they need auxiliaries. True charity sometimes saves them, as when the postilion rescues naked Joseph (53), but more often charity acts through dubious simulacra. Only promissory inferences from his gold piece and white skin get Joseph decent treatment at the Dragon Inn. Borrowing, still further promises in time, redeem his bill and then Adams’s horse (100). Later, a squire who knows Lady Booby releases the travelers from a justice who has never “committed a Gentleman” (149); the hostess’s bad guess that the wealthy, powerful Trulliber is Adams’s blood brother almost redeems the travelers from another inn, though in fact they need the peddler’s intervention (169–70); and the inn host who affords them charity, as victims of a practical joke, argues for material trade over spiritual clothing and feeding (182–84). The pattern continues through books 3 and 4 till the property-shifting denouement. As I have suggested through comparing analogous denouements—Wilson’s, and those of The Conscious Lovers, The Beggar’s Opera, and The Author’s Farce—faith in God’s immanent hand, like “the Apostolic and feudal role of charity[,] is itself demystified in Joseph Andrews.”9 Verbal high jinks show the narrator’s hand as the fictional source of charity, while in the narrative, charity repeatedly slides from apostolic caritas into its modern, material sense, giving and taking money. That is hardheaded, worldly realism.
Fielding’s humor and panache give us enough comfortable distance that we can practice openness and skepticism, following him, without worry about consequences. His variety deprives us from relaxing into formulaic reading, falling back on inversion, deflation, burlesque, or benignly protective imitations of a penumbral Providence. In these ways he elicits from us, apprenticed to him, the practice of skeptical realism—toward the world, our own prejudices, and modes of representation. His skepticism, like scientists’, never becomes corrosive or nihilistic; like scientists, he asks and urges us to consider cases, tacitly, as to what explanatory norms or principles do and don’t hold, which remain projectible, and why. He does not aim for discoveries, as some scientists did, but for more practical taxonomies, as they also did. Because he controls his world by using worn devices that please but should not convince us, he illustrates a real world whose tightly knotted problems and loose, leaky categories escape control, and yet yield knowledge so that we can cope adaptively with the world as we receive it. These, I suggest, are the aims and means of Fielding’s skeptical realism.
Notes
1. Citations from Joseph Andrews, in parenthetical page numbers in the text, come from Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin, the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
2. Steven Shapin has shown how a code of civility, with its gentlemanly, therefore disinterested tone, increased credibility in eighteenth-century scientific discourse. It testified to the writer’s keeping to that code, with principles of integrity and honor. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
3. This point is made and massively documented by J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4. For the strawberry, see Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653; repr., Birmingham: Kynoch Press, n.d.), 247.
5. Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 147.
6. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
7. I owe this point to Jeffrey Williams, “The Narrative Circle: The Interpolated Tales in Joseph Andrews,” Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 473–88.
8. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 251.
9. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 402.