В курсовой работе рассматривается творчество Генри Филдинга и его теория фикции

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL
EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

COURSE PAPER
on theme:
«Henry Fielding’s theory of fiction»

COMPLIED BY: a 2nd year student

of the group ... Zhuraboev Zafar

SUPERVISOR: SULTANOV B.

GULISTAN – 2022

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………...3

CHAPTER 1: THE LIFE AND WORK OF HENRY FIELDING..................7

1.1. Biography of Henry Fielding …………………………………….…………...7

1.2. Fielding’s works and their analysis ………………………………………....10

CHAPTER 2: SOCIAL SATIRE AND THE THEORY OF FICTION

IN THE WORKS OF HENRY FIELDING…………………..31

2.1. Fielding’s Realism, Humour and Satire..................................................31

2.2. Healthy Morality and Philosophy of Life…………………………..………32

2.3. Morality and the Epic Theory in Henry Fielding's novels………………...…34

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….48

THE LIST OF REFERENCES…………………………………………………53

INTRODUCTION

The eighteenth century–“our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century”-is known in the history of English literature particularly for the birth and development of the novel. In this century the novel threw into insignificance all other literary forms and became the dominant form to continue as such for hundreds of years.

The pioneers of the novel were Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The work of this foursome is of monumental significance, particularly because they were not only our first novelists but some of our best. No doubt the seeds of the novel were already there in the English literary soil but they burgeoned only with the arrival of these masters. Addison and Steele (Coverley papers’), Defoe, and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) had already provided the raw material for them to work upon. It is debatable whether Defoe be denied the title of “the father of the English novel”, as many of his stories like Moll Flanders, Roxana, and Robinson Crusoe are very close to being novels, if at all they are considered not to be genuine novels. “Whether Defoe was”, observes David Daiches rightly, “properly a novelist is a matter of definition of terms, but however we define our terms we must concede that there is an important difference between Defoe’s journalistic deadpan and the bold attempt to create a group of people faced with psychological problems[1]” Defoe was a realist in his own right, but his “interest in character was minimal.” Critical opinion, therefore, is not inclined to accept Defoe as the first true English novelist or even as one of the pioneers of the novel.

Henry Fielding’s (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) lasting achievements in prose fiction—in contrast to his passing fame as an essayist, dramatist, and judge—result from his development of critical theory and from his aesthetic success in the novels themselves. In the preface to The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, more commonly known as Joseph Andrews, Fielding establishes a serious critical basis for the novel as a genre and describes in detail the elements of comic realism; in Joseph Andrews and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, popularly known as Tom Jones, he provides full realizations of this theory. These novels define the ground rules of form that would be followed, to varying degrees, by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, and they also speak to countless readers across many generations. Both, in fact, were translated into successful films (Tom Jones, 1963; Joseph Andrews, 1978).

The purpose of the course work is to reveal the peculiarities of the genres of Henry Fielding's works and reflect in them the theory of fiction, as well as truthfulness, comic epic and aesthetic specificity of novels.

Tasks: - to tell about the life and work of Henry Fielding; - to characterize his main works; - to reveal the features and genre specifics of Henry Fielding's novels; - give a description of the main characters; - analyze Fielding's works from the point of view of the theory of fiction, aesthetics and comic epic.

The novelty of the study. In the course work, the works of Henry Fielding are analyzed from different points of view, the features of the genre and the reflection of fiction and truthfulness in them are revealed.

A review of the literature on the topic. The works of Henry Fielding were studied and criticized by literary historians, philosophers, literary critics of Europe in the late XIX – early XX centuries. The life and work of Henry Fielding are reflected in the works of M.C.Battestin, H. Bloom[2]. The Theory of Fiction Henry Fielding, the classical tradition in short stories was considered by M.C.Battestine, M.Johnson, N.A.Maсe, A.Rivero and others[3]. The structural and literary analysis of the writer's works was carried out by A.J.Rottinger, S.Backer, N.Mambrol.[4]

In recent years, Russian scientists M.A.Maslova and others have considered various aspects of genre specificity and characteristics of the characters of Fielding's works. For example,in the article by M.A.Maslova “The theory of "comic epos" of H. Fielding”[5] considers the aesthetic program of the English writer and educator, which is expressed in the introductory chapters of his novels. Attention is paid to the genre specificity of the novels of Fielding and his concept of character. Analyzed the innovative traits of the novels of H. Fielding, his polemics with the existing novel tradition in the context of philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The facts which influenced the literary works of H. Fielding, aesthetic points of view and their expression in the author’s novels «The history of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild», «The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams», «The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling», «Amelia» were examined in the article by O.L.Utkina “English provinces in the Aesthetics of H. Fielding”[6]. The author of the article researched the writer’s humanitarian ideal realized in the provinces and its inhabitants.

Theoretical and methodological basis of the study. The theoretical basis for studying the work of G.Fielding in the university course of the history of foreign literature are the works of A.A.Elistratova, M.G.Sokolyansky[7] and other researchers dealing with the problems of literature of the XVIII century[8].

The methodological basis was the works of Henry Fielding[9], the scientific research of M.S. Battestain, M. Johnson, A.Rivero, who comprehensively and critically examined in their works the art of Fielding's fiction and the character traits of the characters.[10]

Research methods: analysis and synthesis, generalization, comparison.

The practical significance of the course work. We hope that this course work will help students learn the art of Fielding in the course of the history of foreign literature of the 18th century.

The structure of the course work. The course work consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a list of references.

CHAPTER 1: THE LIFE AND WORK OF HENRY FIELDING

1.1. Biography of Henry Fielding

Henry Fielding was born near Glastonbury in southern England, and grew up on his parents’ farm in Dorset. His origins were not opulent, but they were decidedly genteel: his second cousin would become the fourth Earl of Denbigh, his father was a colonel (and later a general) in the army, and his maternal grandfather was a judge of the Queen’s Bench. Henry's first-rate education at Eton College endowed him with a knowledge of classical literature that would influence his conception of the novel.

In 1728, Fielding went to London and, on the advice of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, embarked on a literary career, writing poems and plays that satirized artifice, sham, and political corruption. Later that year, he went on to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, but his classical studies there ended when his father discontinued his allowance. By 1730, he was back in London managing theaters and writing plays, among them the still-famous Tom Thumb. During this time, he led a rakish existence that may inform the biography of the character Wilson in Joseph Andrews; the life of dissipation ended, however, when he eloped in November 1734 with Charlotte Cradock, the woman whose image would inspire the heroines of his later novels.[11]

A supporter of the Opposition party of the day, Fielding continued to satirize the government of de facto Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Walpole struck back, however, with the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, whereby no new plays could be produced until they were licensed by the Lord Chamberlain. The Act made theatrical satire virtually impossible and effectively ended Fielding’s career in the theater, leaving him with a wife, two children, and no income.

Forced to seek another line of work, Fielding studied law in the Middle Temple and completed a six-year course of study in three years. He began practicing law in 1740, working hard but never prospering. Meanwhile, however, there occurred a watershed event both in Fielding’s life and in the history of the novel: the publication in 1740 of Samuel Richardson’s wildly popular and controversial Pamela, the story of a virtuous servant-girl’s resistance to the sexual overtures of her genteel master, who gradually recognizes and rewards her virtue by marrying her. The novel’s sentimentality and (allegedly) hypocritical moral code were spurs to Fielding’s wit, and the struggling barrister accordingly published Shamela, an anonymous parody, in 1741. Not content with this bawdy evisceration, Fielding in 1742 followed Shamela with Joseph Andrews, which begins as a gender-reversed Pamela parody but develops into something much more original, a fully realized novel replete with buoyant comedy and sustained social critique. In 1743, Fielding published his multi-volume Miscellanies, which included the novel Jonathan Wild, a bleak satire on “great men,” the Whig party, and the criminal law system, among other things. Fielding’s own existence at this time remained bleak, as his wife and daughter were dying, he himself was suffering from crippling gout, and his finances were grim. For the next two years, he produced no further writing, either in book form or in periodicals, devoting his time instead to his law practice and his efforts to recuperate his wife's health. These efforts were in vain, and Charlotte died in the resort town of Bath in 1744, leaving Fielding frantic with grief.[12]

He resumed his literary career in 1745, inspired by opposition to the Jacobite Rebellion, in which supporters of the Stuart line pressed the claim of Prince Charles Edward, the descendant of James II. Fielding’s reasons for opposing the Jacobites were twofold, religious as well as political. The English monarch was the Supreme Head of the Church of England, and Charles Edward was a Catholic; his accession would therefore have been awkward for this most statist of churches, and Fielding was a staunch supporter of the Anglican Establishment. Politically, Fielding was a Whig - that is, an advocate of the Hanoverian succession - and now that the detested Walpole had been succeeded by another Whig Prime Minister, Fielding could leave the Opposition and became a defender of the Establishment government. Accordingly, as the editor of a political journal from 1745 to 1746, he denounced the Jacobites and their Tory allies, and even after the defeat of the Jacobites, he continued as an apologist for the government. His reward was to receive appointments as Justice of the Peace for Westminster in 1748 and for the county of Middlesex in 1749. These positions installed him in a courthouse which also served as his residence, in Bow Street, London.

In 1747, Fielding had married Charlotte’s former maid, Mary Daniel, who had been pregnant by him. This move had made him a target of ridicule, but Fielding would later describe his second wife as “a faithful friend, an amiable companion, and a tender nurse.” In 1749, he published Tom Jones, his greatest work, a picaresque novel about a foundling who comes into a fortune. Amelia, which followed in 1751, evinces a dark new sense of human folly. Fielding’s work in Bow Street had put him on intimate terms with social disorder, and the stern remedies for such disorder that he proposed in his capacity as a magistrate - measures that included the workhouse and the gallows - marked a turn from the ethics of broad and cheerful tolerance that imbue Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Fielding was equally stern with himself, however, and in spite of the fact that his work as Justice of the Peace brought him no salary, he stood out among other magistrates of the day in his refusal of all bribes. He also contributed greatly to the suppression of crime in London through his organization of the Bow-Street Runners, a squad of “thief-takers” that has been called London’s first professional police force.

In addition to his social and political vocations, Fielding also supported the literary ambitions of his younger sister, Sarah Fielding. She published a novel in 1744 called The Adventures of David Simple, and followed with an additional text in 1747, Familiar Letters Between The Principal Characters in David Simple. Sarah later wrote a sequel to David Simple in 1753. Henry Fielding wrote the prefaces to these texts. Sarah Fielding also wrote historical biography and children's literature, ultimately publishing ten works, albeit anonymously, as was common with women authors at that time.

It is believed that Sarah was also influential in helping Fielding develop areas of his own writing: in particular, the development and portrayal of his major female characters. There is an expertise in the creation of the roundly moral Mrs. Miller and the forceful Mrs. Western, which likely reveals the influence of a female critic if not a female writer.

Asthma, dropsy, and severe gout compelled Fielding to retire in 1754, and he went abroad to Portugal to convalesce. His Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, published posthumously in 1755, chronicles the slowness of travel, the incompetence of doctors, the abuse of power, and Fielding’s own courage and cheerfulness in encountering these evils. He died in Lisbon in October of 1754.

1.2. Fielding’s works and their analysis

Of the four pioneers of the English novel named above, the first two were considerably superior to the rest. Of the two—Richardson and Fielding-Fielding has been recognized to be the greater. Edmund Gosse in A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1902) characteristically refers to Richardson as “the first great English novelist” and to Fielding as “the greatest of English novelists.” Though it stands to reason if Fielding was the greatest of all English novelists, yet two things cannot be denied-first that he was one of the greatest, and secondly that he was greater than Richardson. Among his contemporaries, no doubt, there raged an interminable debate as to the comparative merits of the two. It is also on record that Richardson enjoyed much the greater popularity and praise in the Continent. Modern critical opinion is, however, in favour of placing Fielding higher—considerably higher-than Richardson in the hierarchy of English novelists. The lachrymosic sentimentalism, prudish morality, and the sprawling epistolary manner Richardson adopted in all his three novels along with his smugness and conspicuous want of the sense of humour and comedy-all go against him today. Fielding’s lively realism, his sunny humour and satire, his insistent sanity and fundamental tolerance of human frailty, his keen eye for the comic, his racy narrative, his giftof plot-construction displayed in Tom Jones if not elsewhere too-all contribute towards his excellence as a novelist. Louis I. Bredvold refers to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding in these words: “From the first appearance of their earliest novels a literary feud has persisted in regard to the relative merits of the novels of Richardson and Fielding. In personality, artistic method and ethical outlook the two men are as far apart as the poles.” This “literary feud” has by now been resolved, and the palm has been awarded to Fielding whose work and contribution to the English novel we are now set to examine.

The historical importance of the preface results from both the seriousness with which it treats the formal qualities of the novel (at the time a fledgling and barely respectable genre) and the precision with which it defines the characteristics of the genre, the “comic epic-poem in prose.” Fielding places Joseph Andrews in particular and the comic novel in general squarely in the tradition of classical literature and coherently argues its differences from the romance and the burlesque. He also provides analogies between the comic novel and the visual arts. Thus Fielding leads the reader to share his conception that the comic novel is an aesthetically valid form with its roots in classical tradition, and a form peculiarly suited to the attitudes and values of its own age.

With his background in theater and journalism, Fielding could move easily through a wide range of forms and rhetorical techniques in his fiction, from direct parody of Samuel Richardson in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, to ironic inversion of the great man’s biography in Jonathan Wild, to adaptation of classical structure (Vergil’s Aeneid, c. 29-19 b.c.) in Amelia. The two major constants in these works are the attempt to define a good, moral life, built on benevolence and honor, and a concern for finding the best way to present that definition to the reader. Thus the moral and the technique can never be separated in Fielding’s works.

Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones bring together these two impulses in Fielding’s most organically structured, brilliantly characterized, and masterfully narrated works. These novels vividly capture the diversity of experience in the physical world and the underlying benevolence of natural order, embodying them in a rich array of the ridiculous in human behavior. Fielding combines a positive assertion of the strength of goodness and benevolence (demonstrated by the structure and plot of the novels) with the sharp thrusts of the satirist’s attack upon the hypocrisy and vanity of individual characters. These elements are held together by the voice of the narrator— witty, urbane, charming—who serves as moral guide through the novels and the world. Thus, beyond the comic merits of each of the individual novels lies a collective sense of universal moral good. The voice of the narrator conveys to the reader the truth of that goodness.

Although the novels were popular in his own day, Fielding’s contemporaries thought of him more as playwright-turned-judge than as novelist. This may have been the result of the low esteem in which the novel as a form was held, as well as of Fielding’s brilliant successes in these other fields. These varied successes have in common a zest for the exploration of the breadth and variety of life—a joy in living—that finds its most articulate and permanent expression in the major novels.

Today Fielding is universally acknowledged as a major figure in the development of the novel, although there is still niggling about whether he or Richardson is the “father” of the British novel. Ian Watt, for example, claims that Richardson’s development of “formal realism” is more significant than Fielding’s comic realism. Other critics, notably Martin Battestin, have demonstrated that Fielding’s broader, more humane moral vision, embodied in classical structure and expressed through a self-conscious narrator, is the germ from which the richness and variety of the British novel grows. This disagreement ultimately comes down to personal taste, and there will always be Richardson and Fielding partisans to keep the controversy alive. There is no argument, however, that of their type—the novel of comic realism—no fiction has yet surpassed Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.

With his background in theater and journalism, Fielding could move easily through a wide range of forms and rhetorical techniques in his fiction, from direct parody of Samuel Richardson in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, to ironic inversion of the great man’s biography in Jonathan Wild, to adaptation of classical structure (Vergil’s Aeneid, c. 29-19 b.c.) in Amelia. The two major constants in these works are the attempt to define a good, moral life, built on benevolence and honor, and a concern for finding the best way to present that definition to the reader. Thus the moral and the technique can never be separated in Fielding’s works.

Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones bring together these two impulses in Fielding’s most organically structured, brilliantly characterized, and masterfully narrated works. These novels vividly capture the diversity of experience in the physical world and the underlying benevolence of natural order, embodying them in a rich array of the ridiculous in human behavior. Fielding combines a positive assertion of the strength of goodness and benevolence (demonstrated by the structure and plot of the novels) with the sharp thrusts of the satirist’s attack upon the hypocrisy and vanity of individual characters. These elements are held together by the voice of the narrator— witty, urbane, charming—who serves as moral guide through the novels and the world. Thus, beyond the comic merits of each of the individual novels lies a collective sense of universal moral good. The voice of the narrator conveys to the reader the truth of that goodness.

Analysis and criticism of Henry Fielding’s fiction have traditionally centered on the moral values in the novels, the aesthetic structure in which they are placed, and the relationship between the two. In this view, Fielding as moralist takes precedence over Fielding as artist, since the aesthetic structure is determined by the moral. Each of the novels is judged by the extent to which it finds the appropriate form for its moral vision. The relative failure of Amelia, for example, may be Fielding’s lack of faith in his own moral vision. The happy ending, promulgated by the deus ex machina of the good magistrate, is hardly consistent with the dire effects of urban moral decay that have been at work upon the Booths throughout the novel. Fielding’s own moral development and changes in outlook also need to be considered in this view. The reader must examine the sources of Fielding’s moral vision in the latitudinarian sermons of the day, as well as the changes in his attitudes as he examined eighteenth century urban life in greater detail, and as he moved in literature from Joseph Andrews to Amelia, and in life from the theater to the bench of justice.

As is clear from the preface to Joseph Andrews, however, Fielding was equally interested in the aesthetics of his fiction. Indeed, each of the novels, even from the first parody, Shamela, conveys not only a moral message but a literary experiment to find the strongest method for expressing that message to the largest reading public. This concern is evident in the basic plot structure, characterization, language, and role of the narrator. Each novel attempts to reach the widest audience possible with its moral thesis. Although each differs in the way in which Fielding attempts this, they all have in common the sense that the how of the story is as important as the what. The novels are experiments in the methods of moral education—for the reader as well as for the characters.

This concern for the best artistic way to teach a moral lesson was hardly new with Fielding. His classical education and interests, as well as the immediate human response gained from theater audiences during his playwriting days, surely led him to see that fiction must delight as well as instruct. Fielding’s novels are both exemplars of this goal (in their emphasis on incidents of plot and broad range of characterization) and serious discussions of the method by which to achieve it (primarily through structure and through narrative commentary).

The direct stimulation for Fielding’s career as novelist was the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a novel that disturbed Fielding both by its artistic ineptitude and by its moral vacuousness. Fielding was as concerned with the public reaction to Pamela as he was with its author’s methods. That the reading public could be so easily misled by Pamela’s morals disturbed Fielding deeply, and the success of that novel led him to ponder what better ways were available for reaching the public with his own moral thesis. His response to Pamela was both moral (he revealed the true state of Pamela/Shamela’s values) and aesthetic (he exposed the artificiality of “writing to the moment”).

Sermons and homilies, while effective in church (and certainly sources of Fielding’s moral philosophy), were not the stuff of prose fiction; neither was the epistolary presentation of “virtue rewarded” of Pamela (nor the “objectively” amoral tone of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, 1722). Fielding sought a literary method for combining moral vision and literary pleasure that would be appropriate to the rapidly urbanizing and secular society of the mid-eighteenth century. To find that method he ranged through direct parody, irony, satire, author-narrator intrusion, and moral exemplum. Even those works, such as Jonathan Wild and Amelia, which are not entirely successful, live because of the vitality of Fielding’s experimental methods. In Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, he found the way to reach his audience most effectively.

Fielding’s informing moral values, embodied in the central characters of the novels ( Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy, Mr. Harrison) can be summarized, as Martin Battestin has ably done, as Charity, Prudence, and Providence. Fielding held an optimistic faith in the perfectibility of humanity and the potential for the betterment of society, based on the essential goodness of human nature. These three values must work together. In the novels, the hero’s worth is determined by the way in which he interacts with other people (charity), within the limits of social institutions designed to provide order (prudence). His reward is a life full of God’s provision (providence). God’s providence has created a world of abundance and plenitude; man’s prudence and charity can guarantee its survival and growth. Both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones learn the proper combination of prudence and charity. They learn to use their innate inclination toward goodness within a social system that ensures order. To succeed, however, they must overcome obstacles provided by the characters who, through vanity and hypocrisy, distort God’s providence. Thus, Fielding’s moral vision, while optimistic, is hardly blind to the realities of the world. Jonathan Wild, with its basic rhetorical distinction between “good” and “great,” and Amelia, with its narrative structured around the ill effects of doing good, most strongly reflect Fielding’s doubts about the practicality of his beliefs.

These ideas can be easily schematized, but the scheme belies the human complexity through which they are expressed in the novels. Tom Jones is no paragon of virtue, but he must learn, at great physical pain and spiritual risk, how to combine charity and prudence. Even Squire Allworthy, as Sheldon Sacks emphasized in Fiction and the Shape of Belief (1964), is a “fallible” paragon. These ideas do not come from a single source, but are derived from a combination of sources, rooted in Fielding’s classical education; the political, religious, and literary movements of his own time; and his own experience as dramatist, journalist, and magistrate.

Fielding’s familiarity with the classics, begun at Eton and continued at the University of Leyden, is revealed in many ways: through language (the use of epic simile and epic conventions in Joseph Andrews), through plot (the symmetry of design in Tom Jones), through theme (the importance of moderation in all the novels), and through structure (the relationship of Amelia to Vergil’s Aeneid). The preface to Joseph Andrews makes explicit how much Fielding saw in common between his own work and classical literature. His belief in the benevolent order of the world, especially illustrated by country living, such as at Squire Allworthy’s estate (Paradise Hall), is deeply rooted in the pastoral tradition of classical literature. These classical elements are combined with the beliefs of the latitudinarian homilists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who stressed the perfectibility of humankind in the world through good deeds (charity) and good heart (benevolence).[13]

While Fielding’s thematic concerns may be rooted in classical and Christian thought, his literary technique has sources that are more complex, deriving from his education, his own experience in the theater, and the influence of Richardson’s Pamela. It is difficult to separate each of these sources, for the novels work them into unified and original statements. Indeed, Joseph Andrews, the novel most closely related to classical sources, is also deeply imbued with the sense of latitudinarian thought in its criticism of the clergy, and satire of Richardson in its plot and moral vision.

The London in which Fielding spent most of his life was a world of literary and political ferment, an age of factionalism in the arts, with the Tory wits ( Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot) allied against Colley Cibber, the poet laureate and self-proclaimed literary spokesman for the British Isles. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) had recently appeared; both were influential in forming Fielding’s literary methods—the first with its emphasis on sharp political satire, the second with the creation of a new literary form, the ballad opera. The ballad opera set new lyrics, expressing contemporary political and social satire, to well-known music. Fielding was to find his greatest theatrical success in this genre and was to carry it over to his fiction, especially Jonathan Wild, with its emphasis on London low life and its excesses of language.

It was a time, also, of great political controversy, with the ongoing conflicts between the Tories and Jacobites about the questions of religion and succession. Prime Minister Walpole’s politics of expediency were a ripe subject for satire. Fielding’s career as journalist began as a direct response to political issues, and significant portions of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, as well as Jonathan Wild, deal with political issues.

These various sources, influences, and beliefs are molded into coherent works of art through Fielding’s narrative technique. It is through the role of the narrator that he most clearly and successfully experiments in the methods of teaching a moral lesson. Starting with the voice of direct literary parody in Shamela and moving through the varied structures and voices of the other novels, Fielding’s art leads in many directions, but it always leads to his ultimate concern for finding the best way to teach the clearest moral lesson. In Tom Jones he finds the most appropriate method to demonstrate that the world is a beautiful place if man will live by charity and prudence.

Shamela

The key to understanding how Shamela expresses Fielding’s concern with both the moral thesis and the aesthetic form of fiction is contained in the introductory letters between Parsons Tickletext and Oliver. Oliver is dismayed at Tickletext’s exuberant praise of Pamela and at the novel’s public reception and popularity. The clergy, in particular, have been citing it as a work worthy to be read with the Scriptures. He contends that the text of Shamela, which he encloses, reveals the “true” story of Pamela’s adventures and puts them in their proper moral perspective. By reading Oliver’s version, Tickletext will correct his own misconceptions; by reading Shamela (under the guidance of the prefatory letters), the public will laugh at Pamela and perceive the perversity of its moral thesis.

Shamela began, of course, simply as a parody of Richardson’s novel, and, in abbreviated form, carries through the narrative of the attempted seduction of the young serving girl by the squire, and her attempts to assert her virtue through chastity or marriage. Fielding makes direct hits at Richardson’s weakest points: His two main targets are the epistolary technique of “writing to the moment” and the moral thesis of “virtue rewarded” by pounds and pence (and marriage).

Fielding parodies the epistolary technique by carrying it to its most illogical extreme: Richardson’s technical failure is not the choice of epistolary form, but his insistence on its adherence to external reality. Shamela writes her letters at the very same moment she is being attacked in bed by Squire Booby. While feigning sleep she writes: “You see I write in the present tense.” The inconsistency of Pamela’s shift from letters to journal form when she is abducted is shown through Fielding’s retention of the letter form throughout the story, no matter what the obstacles for sending and receiving them. He also compounds the criticism of Richardson by including a number of correspondents besides Shamela (her mother, Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews, Mrs. Jewkes, Parson Williams) and including various complications, such as letters within letters within letters.

Fielding retains the essential characters and key scenes from Pamela, such as Mr. B’s hiding in the closet before the attempted seduction, Pamela’s attempted suicide at the pond, and Parson Williams’s interference. For each character and scene Fielding adopts Richardson’s penchant for minute descriptive detail and intense character response to the event; he also parodies the method and seriousness of the original by revealing the motives of the characters.

The revealing of motives is also Fielding’s primary way of attacking the prurience of Richardson’s presentation, as well as the moral thesis behind it. He debunks the punctilio (decorum) of the central character. Shamela’s false modesty (“I thought once of making a little fortune by my person. I now intend to make a great one by my virtue”) mocks Pamela’s pride in her chastity; the main difference between them is Shamela’s recognition and acceptance of the mercenary motives behind her behavior and Pamela’s blindness to her own motivation. Richardson never examines the reliability of Pamela’s motivations, although he describes her thoughts in detail. Fielding allows Shamela to glory in both her ability to dupe the eager Squire Booby and her mercenary motives for doing so. The reader may, as Parson Oliver wants Tickletext to do, easily condemn Shamela for a villain but never for a hypocrite.[14]

Fielding also attacks Richardson’s refusal to describe the sexual attributes of his characters or to admit the intensity of their sexual desires, particularly in the case of Pamela herself. Pamela always hints and suggests—and, Fielding claims, wallows in her suggestiveness. Fielding not only describes the sexual aspects directly, but exaggerates and reduces them to a comic level, hardly to be taken sensually or seriously. Shamela quickly, fully, and ruthlessly annihilates the moral thesis of “virtue rewarded” through this direct exaggeration. Fielding does not, however, in his role as parodist, suggest an alternative to Pamela’s moral thesis; he is content, for the time, with exposing its flaws.

This first foray into fiction served for Fielding as a testing ground for some of the rhetorical techniques he used in later works, especially the emphasis on satiric inversion. These inversions appear in his reversal of sexual roles in Joseph Andrews, the reversal of rhetoric in the “good” and “great” in Jonathan Wild, and the reversal of goodness of motive and evil of effect in Amelia. Fielding’s concern to find a rhetorical method for presenting a moral thesis was confined in Shamela to the limited aims and goals of parody. He had such success with the method (after all, he had his apprenticeship in the satiric comedy of the theater), that he began his next novel on the same model.

“Joseph Andrews” (1742):

It is Fielding’s first novel. It is a classical example of a literary work which started as a parody and ended as an excellent work of art in its own right. The work Fielding intended to parody was Richardson’s first novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded which had taken England by storm in the years following 1740 when it was first published. Richardson‘s smug and prudential morality and his niminy-piminy sentimentalism were Fielding’s target Richardson in his novel had shown how a rustic lady’s maid (Pamela) wins a dissolute noble for her husband by her rather calculated and discreet virtue. In his novel Fielding intended in the beginning to show how Lady Boody (aunt of “Lord B.” in Richardson’s novel) attempts the virginity of Joseph Andrews, described as the virtuous Pamela’s brother but in the end discovered to be different. The whole intention was comic. But after Chapter IX Joseph Andrews seems to break away completely from the original intention. Parson Adams, who has no counterpart in Pamela, runs away with the novel. He, according’to Louis I. Bredvold, “is one of the most living, lovable, comical bundles of wisdom and simplicity in all literature.” In the words of Edmund Gosse, “Parson Abraham Adams, alone, would be a contribution to English letters.” He indeed is the hero of the novel, and not Joseph Andrews. Fielding was aware of giving a new literary form with Joseph Andrews which he called “a comic epic in prose.”

Like Shamela, Joseph Andrews began as a parody of Pamela. In his second novel, Fielding reverses the gender of the central character and traces Joseph’s attempts to retain his chastity and virtue while being pursued by Lady Booby. This method of inversion creates new possibilities, not only for satirizing Richardson’s work, but for commenting on the sexual morality of the time in a more positive way than in Shamela. The most cursory reading reveals how quickly Fielding grew tired of parody and how Joseph Andrews moved beyond its inspiration and its forerunner. Even the choice of direct narration rather than epistolary form indicates Fielding’s unwillingness to tie himself to his model.

Like Shamela, Joseph Andrews began as a parody of Pamela. In his second novel, Fielding reverses the gender of the central character and traces Joseph’s attempts to retain his chastity and virtue while being pursued by Lady Booby. This method of inversion creates new possibilities, not only for satirizing Richardson’s work, but for commenting on the sexual morality of the time in a more positive way than in Shamela. The most cursory reading reveals how quickly Fielding grew tired of parody and how Joseph Andrews moved beyond its inspiration and its forerunner. Even the choice of direct narration rather than epistolary form indicates Fielding’s unwillingness to tie himself to his model.

Most readers agree that the entrance of Parson Adams, Joseph’s guide, companion, and partner in misery, turns the novel from simple parody into complex fiction. Adams takes center stage as both comic butt, preserving Joseph’s role as hero, and moral guide, preserving Joseph’s role as innocent.

Adams’s contribution is also part of Fielding’s conscious search for the best way to convey his moral thesis. The narrative refers continually to sermons, given in the pulpit or being carried by Adams to be published in London. These sermons are generally ineffectual or contradicted by the behavior of the clergy who pronounce them. Just as experience and the moral example of Adams’s life are better teachers for Joseph than sermons—what could be a more effective lesson than the way he is treated by the coach passengers after he is robbed, beaten, and stripped?—so literary example has more power for Fielding and the reader. Adams’s constant companion, his copy of Aeschylus, is further testament to Fielding’s growing faith in his exemplary power of literature as moral guide. In Joseph Andrews, narrative art takes precedence over both parody and sermon.

Fielding’s concern for method as well as meaning is given its most formal discussion in the preface. The historical importance of this document results from both the seriousness with which it treats the formal qualities of the novel and the precision with which it defines the characteristics of the genre, the “comic epic-poem in prose.” The seriousness is established through the careful logic and organization of the argument and through the parallels drawn between the new genre and classical literature (the lost comic epic supposedly written by Homer) and modern painting (Michelangelo da Caravaggio and William Hogarth).

Fielding differentiates the comic epic-poem in prose from contemporary romances such as Pamela. The new form is more extended and comprehensive in action, contains a much larger variety of incidents, and treats a greater variety of characters. Unlike the serious romance, the new form is less solemn in subject matter, treats characters of lower rank, and presents the ludicrous rather than the sublime. The comic, opposed to the burlesque, arises solely from the observation of nature, and has its source in the discovery of the “ridiculous” in human nature. The ridiculous always springs from the affectations of vanity and hypocrisy.

Within the novel itself, the narrator will continue the discussion of literary issues in the introductory chapters to each of the first three of four books: “of writing lives in general,” “of divisions in authors,” and “in praise of biography.” These discussions, although sometimes more facetious than serious, do carry through the direction of the opening sentence of the novel: “Examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.” Additionally, this narrative commentary allows Fielding to assume the role of reader’s companion and guide that he develops more fully in Tom Jones.[15]

While the preface takes its cue from classical tradition, it is misleading to assume that Joseph Andrews is merely an updating of classical technique and ideas. Even more than Shamela, this novel brings together Fielding’s dissatisfaction with Richardson’s moral thesis and his support of latitudinarian attitudes toward benevolence and charity. Here, too, Fielding begins his definition of the “good” man in modern Christian terms. Joseph redefines the place of chastity and honor in male sexuality; Parson Adams exemplifies the benevolence all people should display; Mrs. Towwowse, Trulliber, and Peter Pounce, among others, illustrate the vanity and hypocrisy of the world.

The structure of the novel is episodic, combining the earthly journey and escapades of the hero with suggestions of the Christian pilgrimage in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-1684). Fielding was still experimenting with form and felt at liberty to digress from his structure with interpolated tales or to depend on coincidence to bring the novel to its conclusion. The immediate moral effect sometimes seems more important than the consistency of rhetorical structure. These are, however, minor lapses in Fielding’s progression toward unifying moral thesis and aesthetic structure.

“Jonathan Wild” (1748):

Fielding’s next novel was a loose narrative suggested by the notorious gallows-bird Jonathan Wild who was hanged in 1725. It is a deep, cynical and sarcastic satire on “greatness” in general and the “great” Walpole in particular, as also on the many biographers of the age who indulged in exaggerated eulogy of the persons whose lives they handled. It is so different from Fielding’s subsequent, works, namely, Tom Jones and Amelia, that Austin Dobson suggests that it must have been written earlier than Joseph Andrews even though it was published a year later. Throughout the work Fielding keeps up a sustained ironical pose reminiscent of the favourite method of Swift. Walter Allen observes about Jonathan Wild: “Some pages of Swift apart, it is the grimmest and most brilliant prose satire that We have; and perhaps it is even more effective than Swift’s because it is not the work of a misanthrope.”

In Jonathan Wild, Fielding seems to have abandoned temporarily the progression from the moral statement of parody and sermon to the aesthetic statement of literary example. Jonathan Wild was first published in the year immediately following Joseph Andrews (revised in 1754), and there is evidence to indicate that the work was actually written before Joseph Andrews. This is a reasonable assumption, since Jonathan Wild is more didactic in its method and more negative in its moral vision. It looks back toward Shamela rather than ahead to Tom Jones.

Jonathan Wild is less a novel, even as Fielding discusses the form in the preface to Joseph Andrews, than a polemic. Critic Northrop Frye’s term, “anatomy,” may be the most appropriate label for the work. Like other anatomies—Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)—it emphasizes ideas over narrative. It is more moral fable than novel, and more fiction than historical biography, altering history to fit the moral vision.[16]

More important, it was Fielding’s experiment in moving the moral lesson of the tale away from the narrative (with its emphasis on incident and character) and into the rhetoric of the narrator (with its emphasis on language). Fielding attempted to use language as the primary carrier of his moral thesis. Although this experiment failed— manipulation of language, alone, would not do—it gave him the confidence to develop the role of the narrative voice in its proper perspective in Tom Jones.

In Jonathan Wild, Fielding seems to have abandoned temporarily the progression from the moral statement of parody and sermon to the aesthetic statement of literary example. Jonathan Wild was first published in the year immediately following Joseph Andrews (revised in 1754), and there is evidence to indicate that the work was actually written before Joseph Andrews. This is a reasonable assumption, since Jonathan Wild is more didactic in its method and more negative in its moral vision. It looks back toward Shamela rather than ahead to Tom Jones.

Jonathan Wild is less a novel, even as Fielding discusses the form in the preface to Joseph Andrews, than a polemic. Critic Northrop Frye’s term, “anatomy,” may be the most appropriate label for the work. Like other anatomies—Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759)—it emphasizes ideas over narrative. It is more moral fable than novel, and more fiction than historical biography, altering history to fit the moral vision.[17]

Fielding freely adapted the facts of Wild’s life, which were well known to the general public. He chose those incidents from Wild’s criminal career and punishment that would serve his moral purpose, and he added his own fictional characters, the victims of Wild’s “greatness,” expecially the Heartfrees. Within the structure of the inverted biography of the “great” man, Fielding satirizes the basic concepts of middleclass society. He differentiates between “greatness” and “goodness,” terms often used synonymously in the eighteenth century. The success of the novel depends on the reader’s acceptance and understanding of this rhetorical inversion.

“Goodness,” characterized by the Heartfrees, reiterates the ideals of behavior emphasized in Joseph Andrews: benevolence, honor, honesty, and charity, felt through the heart. “Greatness,” personified in Wild, results in cunning and courage, characteristics of the will. The action of the novel revolves around the ironic reversal of these terms. Although Wild’s actions speak for themselves, the ironic voice of the narrator constantly directs the reader’s response.

Parts of Jonathan Wild are brilliantly satiric, but the work as a whole does not speak to modern readers. Fielding abandoned the anatomy form after this experiment, recognizing that the voice of the narrator alone cannot carry the moral thesis of a novel in a convincing way. In Jonathan Wild, he carried to an extreme the role of the narrator as moral guide that he experimented with in Joseph Andrews. In Tom Jones, he found the precise balance: the moral voice of the narrator controlling the reader’s reaction through language and the literary examples of plot and character.

“Tom Jones” (1749):

Tom Jones, indeed, is Fielding’s magnum opus. It is, according to Hudson, “the greatest novel of the,eighteenth century.” Moody and Lovett observe: “In structure, in richness of characterization, Jn’sanity and wisdom of point of view, Tom Jones stands unrivalled in the history of English fiction.” In Tom Jones Fielding has a very vast canvas on which he paints with appreciable authority a representative cross-section of the society of his age. The swarming multiplicity and variety of characters make one feel that here is “God’s plenty”~the same that Dryden found in Chaucer’s Prologue to his Canterbury Tales. A ve$ remarkable merit of the novel is its excellent structure. Fielding is a master of that architectonic ability which we find so lamentably lacking in the works of most novelists. In Tom Jones, unlike in Joseph Andrews, Fielding does not pay any attention to Richardson and tries to represent his own view of English manners and morals and life in general. What he particularly excels in is his sense of comedy in which he, according to Louis I. Bredvold, can be placed beside Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.[18]

In Tom Jones, Fielding moved beyond the limited aims of each of his previous works into a more comprehensive moral and aesthetic vision. No longer bound by the need to attack Richardson nor the attempt to define a specific fictional form, such as the moral fable or the comic epic-poem in prose, Fielding dramatized the positive values of the good man in a carefully structured narrative held together by the guiding voice of the narrator. This narrator unifies, in a consistent pattern, Fielding’s concern for both the truthfulness of his moral vision and the best way to reach the widest audience.

The structure of Tom Jones, like that of Joseph Andrews, is based on the secularization of the spiritual pilgrimage. Tom must journey from his equivocal position as foundling on the country estate of Squire Allworthy (Paradise Hall) to moral independence in the hellish city of London. He must learn to understand and control his life. When he learns this lesson, he will return to the country to enjoy the plenitude of paradise regained that providence allows him. He must temper his natural, impetuous charity with the prudence that comes from recognition of his own role in the larger social structure. In precise terms, he must learn to control his animal appetites in order to win the love of SophiaWestern and the approval of Allworthy. This lesson is rewarded not only by his gaining these two goals, but by his gaining the knowledge of his parentage and his rightful place in society. He is no longer a “foundling.”

Unlike the episodic journey of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones adapts the classical symmetry of the epic in a more conscious and precise way. The novel is divided into eighteen books. Some of the books, such as 1 and 4, cover long periods of time and are presented in summary form, with the narrator clearly present; others cover only a few days or hours, with the narrator conspicuously absent and the presentation primarily scenic. The length of each book is determined by the importance of the subject, not the length of time covered[19].

The books are arranged in a symmetrical pattern. The first half of the novel takes Tom from his mysterious birth to his adventures in the Inn at Upton; the second half takes him from Upton to London and the discovery of his parentage. Books 1 through 6 are set in Somerset at Squire Allworthy’s estate and culminate with Tom’s affair with Molly. Books 7 through 12 are set on the road to Upton, at the Inn, and on the road from Upton to London; the two central books detail the adventures at the Inn and Tom’s affair with Mrs. Waters. Books 13 through 18 take Tom to London and begin with his affair with Lady Bellaston.

Within this pattern, Fielding demonstrates his moral thesis, the education of a “good man,” in a number of ways: through the narrative (Tom’s behavior continually lowers his moral worth in society); through characters (the contrasting pairs of Tom and Blifil, Allworthy and Western, Square and Thwackum, Molly and Lady Bellaston); and through the voice of the narrator.

Fielding extends the role of the narrator in Tom Jones, as teller of the tale, as moral guide, and as literary commentator and critic. Each of these voices was heard in Joseph Andrews, but here they come together in a unique narrative persona. Adopting the role of the stagecoach traveler, the narrator speaks directly to his fellow passengers, the readers. He is free to digress and comment whenever he feels appropriate, and there is, therefore, no need for the long interpolated tales such as appeared in Joseph Andrews.[20]

To remind his readers that the purpose of fiction is aesthetic as well as moral, the narrator often comments on literary topics: “Of the Serious in Writing, and for What Purpose it is introduced”; “A wonderful long chapter concerning the Marvelous”; “Containing Instructions very necessary to be perused by modern Critics.” Taken together, these passages provide a guide to Fielding’s literary theory as complete as the preface to Joseph Andrews.

Although in Tom Jones Fielding still schematically associates characters with particular moral values, the range of characters is wider than in his previous novels. Even a minor character, such as Black George, has a life beyond his moral purpose as representative of hypocrisy and self-serving.

Most important, Tom Jones demonstrates Fielding’s skill in combining his moral vision with aesthetic form in a way that is most pleasurable to the reader. The reader learns how to live the good Christian life because Tom learns that lesson. Far more effective than parody, sermon, or moral exemplum, the combination of narrative voice and literary example of plot and character is Fielding’s greatest legacy to the novel.

“Amelia” (1751):

Amelia is the last of Fielding’s novels In tone and execution it is markedly different from all the rest. It is the pathetic story of a patient and virtuous wife who suffers much and suffers long. Fielding here works on a much smaller canvas and his vigorous joviality and sense of comedy are conspicuous by their absence. His fast deteriorating health and the maturity of his years seem, at least partly, to be responsible for this cataclysmic change. Amelia is the only full-length female character drawn by Fielding. She is described by Walter Allen as “a character whose quiet radiance illuminates and softens a world of viciousness and deceit. Amelia is the rarest of successful characters in literature, the absolutely good person who is credible.” Amelia is a domestic novel, not “a comic epic in prose” like Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.

CHAPTER 2: SOCIAL SATIRE AND THE THEORY OF FICTION IN THE WORKS OF HENRY FIELDING

2.1. Fielding’s Realism, Humour and Satire

Both in his technique and “the philosophy of life” Fielding set glowing examples for all novelists to follow. Major novelists such as Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith as well as the minor ones like Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth accepted his influence in varying degrees and ways. Even Lessing and Goethe paid Fielding some very glowing tributes. The English novel, in various respects, is considerably indebted to him. Fielding might have been less popular with his contemporaries than Richardson, yet on the development of the English novel he exerted a much greater influence.

Fielding was the pioneer of realism in English fiction. Both Richardson and Fielding were, broadly speaking, realists, and both reacted against the French romance so popular in their age, as also the effete taste of their predecessors like Aphra Behn. Fielding also reacted against Richardson’s sentimentalism as a.falsifying influence on the study of reality. Fielding does not reject sentimentalism altogether-his Amelia is-rich in pathos and sentiment. “His desire”, says Cazamian, “is to give sentiment its right place; but also to integrate it in an organic series of tendencies where each contributes to maintain a mutual balance.”

Fielding is one of the few writers who, despite the wideness of their scope are capable of observing the demands of reality with perpetual ease. He works on a crowded canVas but, as has been said, “all his characters inhabit the same plane of reality.” His novels hold up to view a representative picture of his age. He is as authentic a chronicler of his day as Chaucer was of the later fourteenth century. Fielding’s truth is not the crude and bitter truth of Smollett’s. A. R. Humphreys observes : “Fielding’s is the higher and more philosophical truth which epitomizes the spirit, the ethos, as well as the body, of the time which deals primarily not in externals but in the nature of man and in an intellectual and moral code.”

Fielding is one of the greatest humorists in English literature. The same comic spirit which permeates his plays is also evident in his novels. As he informs us, the author upon whom he modelled himself was Cervantes; it is not surprising, therefore, that comedy should be his method. Fielding’s humour is wide in range. It rises from the coarsest farce to the astonishing heights of the subtlest irony. On one side is his zestful description of various fights and, on the other, the grim irony of Jonathan Wild. Higher! than both is that ineffable, pleasant, and ironic humour that may be found everywhere in Tom Jones but is at its best in Joseph Andrews where it plays like summer lightning around the figure of Parson Adams-an English cousin of Don Quixote. Fielding’s very definition of the novel as “a comic epic in prose” is indicative of the place of humour and comedy in his novels and, later, those of many of his followers. It may be pointed our here that Richardson had no sense of humour; he was an unsmiling moralist and sentimentalist. Comparing the two, Coleridge says : “There is a cheerful, sunshiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere strongly contrasted with the close, hot, tfay-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” Fielding’s humour is sometimes of the satiric kind, but he is never harsh or excessively cynical as Smollett and Swift usually are.

2.2. Healthy Morality and Philosophy of Life

No reason proves so compulsive with Fielding in prompting him to parody Richardson’s Pamela as Richardson’s hoity-toity moralism added to a somewhat mawkish sentimental ism. Fielding must have heartily laughed at Pamela’s self-regarding virtue. In his own novels he appealed to motives higher than prudery and commercialism while dealing with matters moral and ethical. He endeavoured to show the dignity of the natural and inherent human values. Thus Fielding preached a morality of his own which, in the words of David Daiches, is “goodness of heart rather than technical virtue with sins of the flesh regarded much more lightly than sins against generosity of feeling.” Whether a man is virtuous or not is decided, with Fielding, not by his external and self-regarding conduct but by the presence or absence of inner goodness which generally means generosity of feeling. “This,” says Cross, “is a complete repudiation of Richardson, if not of Addison: the point of view has shifted from the objective to the subjective, from doing to being, and the shifting means war against formalism.” Virtue is, according to Fielding, its own reward and vice a punishment in itself. In the dedication to Tom Jones he says: “I have shown that no acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which Js-the sure companion to innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety, which in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.” Even when Fielding insisted that nothing in Tom Jones “can offend even the chastest eye on perusal,” he was charged by many with grossness and ribaldry Richardon says Edmund Gosse, “bitterly resented allthis rude instrusion into his moral garden, and never ceased to regard Fielding with open aversion.” Richardson was really mortified, but, in the words of Oliver Elton, he only “shook his throat like a respectable turkey-cock.”

Fielding was not only a great novelist but a great master of plot-construction also From Chaucer down to the modern times English writers have mostly ignored the architectonic part of their compositions. Fielding came to the novel from the drama, and though his plays are ill-constructed, yet his experience as a dramatist served him in good stead. Tom Jones is, according to Elizabeth Jenkins, an “amazing tour de force of plot-construction.” Coleridge placed it among the three best constructed masterpieces of world literature-the other two being Sophocle’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Fielding defined the novel as “a comic epic in prose.” But, as Oliver Elton points out, in Fielding’s novels there is more of the dramatic than epic quality. The last scenes of his novels, particularly, resemble the last scenes of a well-knit comedy, such as one by Ben Jonson. “Fielding was,” according to Hudson, “much concerned about the structural principles of prose fiction a matter to which neither Defoe nor Richardson had given much attention. To him the novel was quite as much a form of art as the epic or the drama”. Unfortunately, Fielding’s successors did not learn much from his example, and offended in respect of plot-construction as his predecessors-Defoe and Richardson-had done before him.

Fielding is a great master of the art of characterisation also. His characters are very lifelike—excepting few caricatures like Beau Diddaper. They are not only individuals but also representative figures. He himself remarks : “1 describe not men but manners, not an individual but the species.” His broad sweep as a master of character is quite remarkable. A critic avers : “Since Chaucer was alive and hale, no such company of pilgrims—poachers, Molly Seagrims, adventures and Parson Supples-had appeared on the English roads.” Fielding’s broad human sympathy coupled with his keen observation of even the faintest element of hypocrisy in a person is his basic asset as a master of characterisation. He laughs and makes us laugh at many of his characters, but he is never cynical or misanthropic. He is a pleasant satirist, sans malice, sans harshness. He gives no evidence of being angry at the foibles of his characters or of holding a lash in readiness. His comic creations resemble those of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Parson Trulliber and Falstaff, if they were to meet, would have immediately recognised each other!

2.3. Morality and the Epic Theory in Henry Fielding's novels

Since it was Pamela that supplied the initial impetus for the writing of Joseph Andrews, Fielding cannot be considered as having made quite so direct a contribution as Richardson to the rise of the novel, and he is therefore given somewhat less extensive treatment here. His works in any case raise very different problems, since their distinguishing elements have their roots not so much in social change as in the neo-classical literary tradition. This in itself may be regarded as presenting something of a challenge to the basic argument of the present study: if the main features of Tom Jones, for example, were in fact the result of an independent and autonomous development within the Augustan world of letters, and if these features later became typical of the novel in general, it is evident that the crucial importance attributed above to the role of social change in bringing about the rise of the new form could hardly be sustained.

Fielding's celebrated formula of 'the comic epic in prose' undoubtedly lends some authority to the view that, far from being the unique literary expression of modern society, the novel is essentially a continuation of a very old and honoured narrative tradition. This view is certainly widely enough held, albeit in a rather general and unformulated way, to deserve consideration. It is evident that since the epic was the first example of a narrative form on a large scale and of a serious kind, it is reasonable that it should give its name to the general category which contains all such works: and in this sense of the term the novel may be said to be of the epic kind. One can perhaps go further, and, like Hegel, regard the novel as a manifestation of the spirit of epic under the impact of a modern and prosaic concept of reality[21]. Nevertheless, it is surely evident that the actual similarities are of such a theoretical and abstract nature that one cannot make much of them without neglecting most of the specific literary characteristics of the two forms: the epic is, after all, an oral and poetic genre dealing with the public and usually remarkable deeds of historical or legendary persons engaged in a collective rather than an individual enterprise; and none of these things can be said of the novel.

They certainly cannot be said of the novels of Defoe or Richardson; and as it so happens that their occasional remarks about the epic do something to illuminate the social and literary differences between the two genres, their views on the subject will be briefly considered before Fielding's conception of the epic analogy, and the nature of its contribution to his novels are investigated.

Unlike Defoe and Richardson, Fielding was steeped in the classical tradition, and though he was by no means a slavish supporter of the Rules, he felt strongly that the growing anarchy of literary taste called for drastic measures. In the Covent Garden Journal, for example, he proposed that 'No author is to be admitted into the Order of Critics, until he hath read over, and understood, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, in their original Language'. Similar qualifications, he felt, were particularly necessary to preserve the new realm of fiction against what George Eliot once eloquently described as 'the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility'; 'a good share of learning', he suggested in Tom Jones, was an essential prerequisite for those who wished to write 'such histories as these'[22], and such learning was undoubtedly intended to include a knowledge of Latin and Greek.

It is therefore wholly in keeping with his general outlook that in Joseph Andrews (1742), his first work in the novel genre, Fielding should have been at pains to justify his enterprise both to himself and to his literary peers by bringing it into line with the classical critical tradition. Nor could there be much doubt as to what direction such a justification should take. Many previous writers and critics of fiction, notably of the seventeenthcentury French romances, had assumed that any imitation of human life in narrative form ought to be assimilated as far as possible to the rules that had been laid down for the epic by Aristotle and his innumerable interpreters; and Fielding-apparently quite independently -- started from the same point of view[23].

He began his Preface by suggesting, somewhat patronisingly perhaps, that 'As it is possible the mere English reader may have a different idea of romance from the author of these little volumes it may not be improper to premise a few words concerning this kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language'. He then continued:

The Epic, as well as the Drama, is divided into tragedy and comedy. Homer, who was the father of this species of poetry, gave us a pattern of both these, though that of the latter kind is entirely lost; which Aristotle tells us, bore the same relation to comedy which his Iliad bears to tragedy. . . .

And farther, as this poetry may be tragic or comic, I will not scruple to say it may be likewise either in verse or prose; for though it wants one particular, which the critic enumerates in the constituent parts of an epic poem, namely metre; yet, when any kind of writing contains all its other parts, such as fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction, and is deficient in metre only; it seems, I think, reasonable to refer it to the epic; at least as no critic hath thought proper to range it under any other head, or to assign it a particular name to itself.

Fielding's argument here for 'referring' his novel to the epic genre is unimpressive: Joseph Andrews, no doubt, has five out of the six parts under which Aristotle considered epic; but then it is surely impossible to conceive of any narrative whatever which does not in some way contain 'fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction'. The possession of these five elements certainly does nothing to elucidate the distinction which Fielding goes on to make between the prose epic and French romances:

Thus the Telemachus of the archbishop of Cambray appears to me of the epic kind, as well as the Odyssey of Homer; indeed, it is much fairer and more reasonable to give it a name common with that species from which it differs only in a single instance, than to confound it with those which it resembles in no other. Such are those voluminous works, commonly called Romances, namely Clelia, Cleopatra, Astrae, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others, which contain, as I apprehend, very little instruction or entertainment.

Fielding's distinction between Fenelon's Telemachus and the French heroic romances, it will be observed, is entirely based on the introduction of a new factor, 'instruction or entertainment', which is obviously a question of personal value judgements, and therefore very difficult to fit into any general analytic scheme. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Fielding goes on to distinguish his own 'comic epic in prose' from serious epic and its prose analogues he makes no use of this criterion either; instead he applies the Aristotelian distinction between the serious and the comic modes in a way that would actually put all the French romances in the same category as the Odyssey and Telemachus:

Now a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose; differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the one these are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous; it differs in its characters, by introducing persons of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us; lastly, in its sentiments and diction, by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime.

This completes Fielding's critical exposition of the epic analogy in the Preface to Joseph Andrews. It is obvious that the whole operative force of the argument depends on the term comic, and the remainder of the preface, comprising some five-sixths of the total, is engaged in developing his ideas of 'the ludicrous'. This, of course, is inevitably accompanied by the dropping of the epic analogy; for, since Homer's Margites was lost, and the comic epic received but a bare mention in the Poetics, Fielding's attempts to bring his novel into line with classical doctrine could not be supported either by existing literary parallel or theoretical precedent.

Before considering the practical effects of the epic analogy on the novels, it should perhaps be pointed out that what has been reproduced above constitutes almost everything that Fielding said about the comic epic in prose. Joseph Andrews was a hurriedly composed work of somewhat mixed intentions, begun as a parody of Pamela and continued in the spirit of Cervantes; and this perhaps suggests that not too much importance should be attached to its Preface, which does not really adumbrate a whole theory of fiction; it merely, as Fielding himself says, contains 'some few very short hints'. The formula of 'the comic epic poem in prose' is only such a hint; and although Fielding referred to it briefly in his preface to his sister Sarah's David Simple (1744), and subsequently called Tom Jones (1749) a 'heroic, historical, prosaic poem' and a specimen of 'prosai-comi-epic writing'[24], he did not develop or modify his early formula in his later writings; indeed, he paid very little further attention to it.

Since it was a comic variant of epic that Fielding wished to produce he was debarred from imitating two at least of its component parts -- characters and sentiments; heroic persons and sublime thoughts obviously had no place in Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones. Some aspects of epic plot could, however, be adapted to his purpose, and epic diction could be used in burlesque form.

Even as regards plot, it is true, the differences were bound to be more marked than the similarities: comic characters could hardly be allowed to perform heroic acts, and whereas epic plots were based on history or legend, Fielding had to invent his stories. The most that he could do, therefore, was to retain some other general features of the epic plot while altering the content. The best example of this is probably Tom Jones, whose action has epic quality at least in the sense that it presents a sweeping panorama of a whole society, as opposed to Richardson's detailed picture of a very small social group.

But although the magnitude and variety of the structure of Tom Jones fit in very well with the chief connotation of the term 'epic' today, it is, after all, mainly a question of scale, and it cannot be held as evidence of any specific indebtedness on Fielding's part to an epic prototype. There are, however, at least two other more definite ways in which Fielding transposed characteristic features of the epic plot into a comic context: his use of surprise, and his introduction of mock-heroic battles.

It was generally agreed in neo-classical theory that the action of epic was characterised by two elements - verisimilitude and the marvellous: the ways in which these incongruous bedfellows could be happily mated had taxed all the ingenuity of the Renaissance critics, and their somewhat sophistic arguments had later been retailed by many of the French writers of romance. Fielding attacked the problem in the introductory chapter to the eighth book of Tom Jones. He began by excusing the incredible episodes in Homer on the grounds that he 'wrote to heathens, to whom poetical fables were articles of faith'; even so, Fielding could not refrain from wishing that Homer could have known and obeyed Horace's rule prescribing that supernatural agents be introduced 'as little as possible'. In any case, Fielding proceeded, writers of epic and genuine historians were able to introduce unlikely events much more plausibly than novelists, since they recorded 'public transactions' which were already known, whereas 'we who deal in private character . . . have no public notoriety, no concurrent testimony, no records to support and corroborate what we deliver'. He concluded that it 'becomes' the novelist 'to keep within the limits not only of possibility, but of probability too'.

Fielding, then, prescribed a greater emphasis on verisimilitude for the new genre than that current in epic or romance. He qualified this, however, by admitting that since 'the great art of poetry is to mix truth with fiction, in order to join the credible with the surprising', 'complaisance to the scepticism of the reader' should not be taken to a point at which the only characters or incidents permitted are 'trite, common, or vulgar; such as may happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper'.

What Fielding actually means by 'the surprising' is made clear by the context: he is referring primarily to the series of coincidences whereby Tom Jones successively meets the beggar who has picked up Sophia's pocket-book, the Merry Andrew who has seen her pass along the road, and her actual guide for part of the route; more generally, to the way that hero and heroine continually cross each other's path on their journey to London without ever meeting. Fielding valued such devices because they made it possible to weave the whole narrative into a very neat and entertaining formal structure; but although such apposite juxtapositions of persons and events do not violate verisimilitude so obviously as the supernatural interventions that are common in Homer or Virgil, it is surely evident that they nevertheless tend to compromise the narrative's general air of literal authenticity by suggesting the manipulated sequences of literature rather than the ordinary processes of life. Thus even Fielding's relatively inconspicuous concessions to the doctrine of the marvellous tended to confirm, as far as the novel was concerned, the reality of the dilemma of the would-be writer of epic in modern times which Blackwell had stated in his Enquiry: 'The marvellous and wonderful is the nerve of the epic strain: but what marvellous things happen in a well ordered state? We can hardly be surprised.'

Fielding's most obvious imitation of the epic model in the action of his novels - the mock-heroic battles - is also somewhat at variance both with the dictates of formal realism and with the life of his time. Either because the events themselves are inherently improbable - as is the case, for instance, with the fight between Joseph Andrews and the pack of hounds that is pursuing Parson Adams [25] - or because they are narrated in such a way as to deflect our attention from the events themselves to the way that Fielding is handling them and to epic parallels involved. This is actually the case in the episode from Joseph Andrews, and it is even more obviously so in Moll Seagrim's celebrated churchyard battle in Tom Jones[26]. The spectacle of a village mob assaulting a pregnant girl after church service is in itself anything but amusing, and only Fielding's burlesque manner, his 'Homerican style', enables him to maintain the comic note. It is certain that this and some other episodes would be quite unacceptable if Fielding directed our attention wholly to the actions and feelings of the participants; and, even so, it may be doubted whether the Moll Seagrim scene, at least, coming from so humane a man as Fielding, does not give some colour to Richardson's objections to the bellicose influence of epic.

Fielding's Homerican style itself suggests a somewhat ambiguous attitude to the epic model: were it not for the Preface we would surely be justified in taking Joseph Andrews as a parody of epic procedures rather than as the work of a writer who planned to use them as a basis for the new genre: and even if we take account of the Preface, Fielding's novel surely reflects the ambiguous attitude of his age, an age whose characteristic literary emphasis on the mock-heroic reveals how far it was from the epic world it so much admired.

The reasons for this ambivalence, indeed, are evident in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, where Fielding by implication admits that the direct imitation of the epic was in opposition to the imitation of 'nature' when he states that although he has allowed 'parodies or burlesque imitations' in his diction, chiefly for the 'entertainment' of 'the classical reader', he has 'carefully excluded' them from his sentiments and characters because it is his major intention to confine himself 'strictly to nature, from the just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we can convey to the sensible reader'. The difficulty with such a dual attitude, of course, is that, as a good Aristotelian like Fielding must have known, no single component of a literary work can in fact be treated as an independent entity. He argues in Tom Jones, for example, that without 'sundry similes, descriptions, and other kind of poetical embellishments the best narrative of plain matter of fact must overpower every reader'; but when he goes on to inform us that the introduction of the heroine requires 'the utmost solemnity in our power, with an elevation of style, and all other circumstance proper to raise the veneration of our reader', and follows this with a chapter entitled 'A Short Hint of what we can do in the Sublime, and a Description of Miss Sophia Western', which begins: 'Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas' - it is surely evident that Fielding has achieved his 'poetical embellishment' at a very considerable price: Sophia never wholly recovers from so artificial an introduction, or at least never wholly disengages herself from the ironical attitude which it has induced.

A similar diminution of the reader's belief in the authenticity of the character or the action occurs whenever the usual tenor of Fielding's narrative is interrupted by the stylistic devices of epic; this surely underlines the fact that the conventions of formal realism compose an inseparable whole, of which the linguistic one is an integral part; or, as one of his contemporaries, Lord Monboddo, put it, Fielding's abandonment of his 'simple and familiar' style impaired 'the probability of the narrative, which ought to be carefully studied in all imitations of real life and manners'.[27]

Fielding's last novel, Amelia ( 1751), is wholly serious in moral purpose and narrative manner; and its allegiance to the epic model is of a very different kind. There is no reference to the formula of the comic epic in prose, and both mock-heroic incidents and epic diction have been abandoned; in their place, as Fielding announced in the Covent Garden Journal, Virgil's Aeneid 'was the noble model, which I have made use of on this occasion'. Booth also is an unemployed soldier, the episode in Newgate with Miss Matthews refers to the loves of Aeneas and Dido in the cave, and there are some other slight parallels which have been outlined by George Sherburn.[28]

It will be noted that this kind of analogy involves no more than a kind of narrative metaphor which assists the imagination of the writer to find a pattern for his own observation of life without in any way detracting from the novel's appearance of literal veracity: nor does the reader need to know about the analogy to appreciate Amelia, as he does with the burlesque passages in Fielding's earlier novels. For these reasons Amelia may be regarded as the work in which the influence of the epic on Fielding was most fruitful; and it is certainly here that he had his most illustrious successor. When T. S. Eliot, with that leap into hyperbole which seems mandatory whenever the relation of novel and epic is being mooted, writes that James Joyce's use of the epic parallel in Ulysses 'has the importance of a scientific discovery'[29], and claims that 'no one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before', he is surely being distinctly unfair to Fielding's no doubt fragmentary application of a similar idea.

After Amelia, Fielding continued to move away from his earlier literary outlook. He came to see the insufficiency of his early views of affectation as the only source of the ridiculous, and therefore of comedy, and his increasingly serious moral outlook even made him find much to regret in two of his early comic favourites, Aristophanes and Rabelais[30]. At the same time his attitude towards epic changed, a change whose climax comes in the Preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon:

But, in reality, the Odyssey, the Telemachus, and all of that kind, are to the voyage-writing I here intend, what romance is to true history, the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter. I am far from supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other ancient poets and mythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records of antiquity; but it is certain that they have effected it; and for my part I must confess that I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for, though I read these with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction.

The statement must be taken in its context. The Odyssey is obviously an unsatisfactory model for an account of an eighteenthcentury voyage to Lisbon. Still, to couple Telemachus and the Odyssey as romances, represents a total reversal of Fielding's position in Joseph Andrews. The contrast between both of them, on the one hand, and 'true history' on the other is also taken far beyond what was needed for a prefatory explanation of the type of writing which he was proposing to follow; and Fielding comes very close to Defoe's position when he speaks of the way that Homer and the other 'original poets' corrupted historical truth. The reason he gives for their doing so is an interesting one: 'they found the limits of nature too straight for the immensity of their genius, which they had not room to exert without extending fact by fiction: and that especially at a time when the manners of men were too simple to afford that variety which they have since offered in vain to the choice of the meanest writers'.

Fielding, then, eventually came to see his own society as offering sufficient interest and variety to make possible a literary genre exclusively devoted to engaging the reader in a closer scrutiny of 'nature' and of modern 'manners' than had ever been attempted before: and his own literary development was certainly in this direction. Amelia is, as has often been said, much closer to Richardson's close study of domestic life than his previous works; and although Fielding did not live long enough to embody his reorientation in another novel, there seems to be no doubt that he had become conscious of the fact that his earlier applications of the epic analogy had been responsible for his most obvious divergences from the role proper to the faithful historian of the life of his time -- a realisation, incidentally, which is implicit in his ironical defence of the epic diction in Tom Jones which was introduced, he explained, so that it 'might be in no danger of being likened to the labours of [modern] historians'.[31]

At the same time the extent of the influence of the epic analogy on Fielding's earlier novels must not be exaggerated. He called Tom Jones 'A History', and habitually described his role as that of historian or biographer whose function was to give a faithful presentation of the life of his time. Fielding's conception of this role, it is true, was different from that of Defoe or Richardson, but the difference is mainly connected, not with his attempt to imitate epic, but with the general influence of the neo-classical tradition on every aspect of his work. The most specific literary debt manifested in Tom Jones, indeed, is not to epic but to drama: not so much because his main critical source, Aristotle's Poetics, was primarily concerned with drama and gave epic a secondary place, as because Fielding had been a dramatist himself for over a decade before attempting fiction. The remarkable coherence of the plot of Tom Jones surely owes little to the actual example of Homer or Virgil, and little more to Aristotle's insistence that 'in the Epic as in Tragedy, the story should be constructed on dramatic principles'; it is very palpably the product of Fielding's experience as a practising dramatist. It is also highly likely, incidentally, that some of the other features of his novels, such as the coincidences and discoveries which provide surprise at the cost of a certain loss of authenticity, are also a legacy from the drama rather than from the epic; and even the burlesque and mock-heroic elements had appeared long ago in many of his plays, such as Tom Thumb, a Tragedy ( 1730).

Why, then, it may be asked, has the formula of the comic epic in prose so 'obsessed critics of novels', to use George Sherburn's phrase?[32] It no doubt makes an immediate appeal to those who, like Peacock's Dr. Folliott, habitually manifest 'a safe and peculiar inaccessibility to ideas except such as are recommended by an almost artless simplicity or a classical origin'[33]; and this perhaps gives a clue both to the reason why Fielding was led to invent the formula and to why it later flourished.

In 1742 the novel was a form in grave disrepute, and Fielding probably felt that to enlist the prestige of epic might help win for his first essay in the genre a less prejudiced hearing from the literati than might otherwise have been expected. In this Fielding was actually following the example of the French writers of romance a century earlier; they, too, had laid claim to the epic filiation in prefatory asseverations which were not so much accurate analyses of their achievement as attempts to assuage their own anxieties and those of their readers about the uncanonised nature of what was to follow in the text. Nor have such attempts to dissipate the odour of unsanctity in which prose fiction seems destined to have its being ceased even in our day - F. R. Leavis's 'The Novel as Dramatic Poem' would seem to be an analogous attempt to smuggle the novel into the critical Pantheon under the disguise of an ancient and honoured member.

At the same time, however, the fact that the formulae both of Fielding and of Leavis connect the novel with major poetic forms suggests an effort to put the genre into the highest possible literary context. Obviously both the creation and the criticism of the novel cannot but gain from this, and it is indeed likely that the most positive gain which Fielding derived from thinking about his narrative in terms of epic was that it encouraged him to as intense and serious a travail as the loftiest literary forms were presumed to demand.

Apart from this it is likely that the epic influence on Fielding was very slight, mainly retrograde, and of little importance in the later tradition of the novel. To call Fielding, as Ethel Thornbury does in her monograph on the subject, 'the founder of the English Prose epic'[34] is surely to award him a somewhat sterile paternity; Fielding's greatest followers, Smollett, Dickens and Thackeray, do not, for example, imitate the very few specifically epic features in his work. But, as we have seen, the idea of 'the comic epic in prose' is by no means Fielding's major claim on our attention: its main function was to suggest one of the high standards of literary achievement which he wished to keep in mind when he began on his new path in fiction; it was certainly not intended as yet another of the innumerable eighteenth-century 'Receits to make an Epic Poem'; and this is fortunate, for, in literature at least, the nostrum killeth but the nostalgia may give life.

CONCLUSION

The works of G. Fielding are considered the pinnacle of English enlightenment thought. In his novels "The Life Story of the late Jonathan Wild the Great", "The Story of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams", "The Story of Tom Jones, the Foundling", "Amelia", the writer expressed humanistic ideals of goodness and justice in their inextricable connection with the province - an imaginary haven of virtue and happiness. Throughout his work, the heroes of the Filding were kind, prudent people living in the province.

The main factors that influenced the writer's ideas were, firstly, childhood spent in the province, and secondly, the philosophical and religious teachings of the XVII-XVII centuries. Under the influence of various factors, Fielding formed the ideal of a person whose main qualities are kindness and prudence. And although this ideal is practically unattainable, Fielding strives to portray it in his novels. Fielding left a person the opportunity to withdraw from the world of the self-serving and malicious. The province and his family were such a refuge for him. At the same time, if the province acts as an imaginary shelter of virtue, then Fielding saw the family as a society where harmonious relations based on love and kindness are possible.

At the same time, if in the culture of England London was recognized as a cultural and educational center, which was opposed by the rest of the country, and in literature writers evaluated the province relative to the capital, then Fielding's province comes to the fore, where the spirit of "good old England" still lives. Fielding, unlike his compatriots, assessed London from the point of view of a provincial man, denounced the falsity and falsity of the capital. Hence, there is a contrasting image of the world of the province as an imaginary haven of happiness for positive characters and the world of the capital, where falsity, depravity and callousness reign.[35]

The writer's ideas about good and evil were embodied in his understanding of "quixotism". Fielding noticed the dual essence of Don Quixote's human nature. Fielding's merit is that he was the first among his compatriots to creatively perceive Cervantes' Don Quixote, noticed not only the high humanistic beginning of "quixotism", but also, perhaps, following T. Hobbes, its harmful, pernicious side.

Focusing on all the negative qualities of Don Quixote, Fielding created the image of Jonathan Wild, whose selfishness and vanity acquired an extreme degree and turned into misanthropy. That is how the theme of Don Quixote, so common in its various versions, acquired special significance for Fielding, became a discovery in social criticism, in the depiction of human characters and in the assessment of the ethical values of the era.

Through the main characters, Fielding showed the manifestation of "quixotic-evil" and "quixotic-good". To do this, the writer introduces quixotic couples into the plot, building straight lines (Tom Jones - Don Quixote, Patridge - Sancho Pan-sa; Sophia - Don Quixote, Honor - Sancho Panza; Booth - Don Quixote, Jonathan Wild - Don Quixote) and cross parallels (Pastor Adams - Don Quixote - Sancho Panza; Amelia - Sancho Panza - Don Quixote). At the same time, both "quixotic-evil" and "quixotic-good" are endowed with a powerful accusatory power in Fielding. On the one hand, society reveals malice, hypocrisy, deceit when it does not accept Pastor Adams, laughs at his sermons, on the other hand, it reveals greed and self-interest when it takes Jonathan Wild for an equal.[36]

Fielding, as a true educator and heir of latitudinarism, was on the side of "quixotic goodness", which in his aesthetics is presented as a philosophical concept that accommodates enlightenment and Christian ideas. From an educational standpoint, Fielding's "quixoticism" asserted the humanistic idea of man, an optimistic belief in the possibility of personality transformation based on the ideas of reason and justice, and the proclamation of the value of a person outside the class.

The Christian idea of "quixotism" is manifested in the definition of a person's value orientations, in the assertion of the primary role of mercy and kindness. Christianity stands above time, its ideals have an enduring value. Both humanists and enlighteners drew their ideas from the treasury of Christianity and discovered the gap between real reality and the ideals that it preached, which humanists admired and enlighteners tried to educate. True happiness, as Fielding pointed out, lies not in greatness and wealth, but in family, work, caring for loved ones, loved ones.

The province for Fielding is the ideal of "home", to which he calls to strive. He is looking for a sample of such a house in the squires' house. The image of the squire, who in Fielding's novels acts as a bearer of the moral values of the English province. He appears not only as a model, but also as a "norm, an ideal image, a certain way and character of behavior of a person or society, class"[37].

Taking the concept of "norm" as a basis, Fielding in "The Story of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams" draws a generalized portrait of the squires of the middle of the XVIII century. They are depicted as carriers of social evil. Having deprived them of their names, the author showed typical representatives of squires. Using, on the one hand, the technique of contrast between appearance and essence, Fielding discovers the falsity and pretense of the "first" and "second" squires, who had a detrimental effect on people, on the other hand, sarcastically exposes the hostility of the squire as a social type (the "third" squire is a merry fellow).

The reasons for the occurrence of such vices, according to the author, are as follows: firstly, the family upbringing of a gentleman; secondly, the moral norms of secular society, far from humanistic ideas about good and evil; thirdly, the very nature of the squire, which, under the influence of external and internal circumstances, either manifests itself in hypocrisy and lies, or develops criminal tendencies.

In "The Story of Tom Jones, the Foundling" in the images of Allworthy and Western, the ideal of the squire as the keeper of the best traditions of the English province arises. Fielding sought to create a model of the squire in the person of the merciful and kind Allworthy, although this ideal turned out to be quite conditional, since it lacked prudence, namely the ability to objectively evaluate people. As a result, he connived at the malicious people around him (Blifil, Square, Twakom) and caused suffering to innocent Partridge and Tom Jones.

In European ethics, from Socrates and Plato, the tradition of considering prudence (wisdom) (Latin prudential, English prudence) was established as the first among the virtues, G. Fielding in his novels showed that people, using this word, put different meanings into it in accordance with their moral position. However, the writer, without denying the need for educational prudence in the meaning of "foresight, prudence, prudence", as a follower of latitudinarism, considered mercy to be the main virtue. At the same time, Fielding's "prudence" acted as a virtue, "prudence combined with goodness" and approached the concept of "wisdom" - an indispensable condition for achieving happiness.[38]

Squire Western also cannot be called an ideal. Possessing the main quality of a good squire - concern for the preservation of the patriarchal traditions of England, nevertheless, he was so practical and calculating that all other human characteristics, even love for his daughter, receded into the background when it came to profit. All his prudence consisted in prudence and practicality. The dual nature of Squire Western is manifested in the fact that, as in the case of Squire Allworthy, he tried to do something useful, good, but in fact caused suffering to his loved ones.

According to Fielding, if kindness was given to a person by nature, then he acquired prudence through trials. In the novels, Fielding tries, together with his characters, to come to a hero in which all the characteristics embedded in the concept of "mercy", "prudence", "good nature" would be reflected. In part, he had already approached the ideal in the description of Squire Allworthy, but only in the image of Tom Jones did he have the opportunity to comprehensively trace the stages of the formation of the ideal hero, as a kind of social model, a moral norm that must be followed in his behavior.

Thus, the main theme of Henry Fielding's works was the province - an imaginary, desirable haven of virtue and happiness, and the provincial heroes embodied the concept of an ideal that makes the province a contrast to London, a kind of cultural center of England in the middle of the XVIII century.

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41. Swedenberg H.T., The Theory of the Epic in England, 1650-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1944.

42. The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. Osmaston. London, 1920, IV, 171.

43. Ulysses, Order and Myth'. Dial, 1923.

44. Henry Fielding’s Work and Contribution. / URL: https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/henry-fieldings-work-and-contribution

45. Fielding H. The complete works of H. Fielding, esq. With an essay on the life, genious and achievement of the auth., by W. E. Henley. In 16-th vol. - London, Cass, 1967. - Vol. 1. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams / H. Fielding. With reproductions of the original designs by Rooker. - 394 p.; Vol. 2. The history of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild and a journey from this world to the next. With repr. Of the rare designs by Stothard. - 343 p.; Vol. 8. Plays and poems. With repr. Of rare contemporary draw. and orig. designs by E. E. Carlson and E. J. Read. In 5 vols. Vol. 1. 298 p.; Vol. 10. Plays and poems. In 5 vols. Vol. 3. - 351 p.

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[1] Downie J. A. A Political Biography of Henry Fielding. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. P. 269

[2] Battestin, Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge, 1989; Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry Fielding. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

[3] Battestin, Martin C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959; Johnson, Maurice. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961; Mace, Nancy A. Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996; Rivero, Albert J., ed. Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

[4] Andrew John Rottinger, B.A. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: a Structural Analysis. Hamilton, Ontario. 1971. 93 p.; Baker, S. (1959). Henry Fielding's The Female Husband: Fact and Fiction. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 74(3), 213-224; Nasrullah Mambrol. Analysis of Henry Fielding’s Novels . 2019 (1) // https://literariness.org/2019/05/28/analysis-of-henry-fieldings-novels/

[5] Маслова М.А. Теория «комического эпоса» Г.Филдинга. // Вестник Мининского университета 2014 №4. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/teoriya-komicheskogo-eposa-g-fildinga

[6] Уткина О.Л. Английская провинция в эстетике Г.Филдинга. // Вестник ОГУ №16(135).декабрь 2011. С.579-581.

[7] Елистратова, А. А. Английский роман эпохи Просвещения /А.А.Елистратова. - М., 1966. - С. 254-255; Елистратова А.А. Филдинг. Критико-биографический очерк/ А.А.Елистратова. - М.,1954; Соколянский, М.Г. Творчество Г.Филдинга/ М.Г.Соколянский. - Киев, 1975; Соколянский, М.Г. Западноевропейский роман эпохи Просвещения: проблемы типологии/ М.Г.Соколянский. - Киев, Одесса.1983.

[8] Аникин, Г.В., Михальская, Н.П. История английской литературы/ Г.В.Аникин, Н.П.Михальская. - М., 1985; Тураев, С.В. Введение в западноевропейскую литературу XVIII века/ С.В.Тураев.- М., 1962.

[9] Fielding H. The complete works of H. Fielding, esq. With an essay on the life, genious and achievement of the auth., by W. E. Henley. In 16-th vol. - London, Cass, 1967. - Vol. 1.

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams / H. Fielding. With reproductions of the original designs by Rooker. - 394 p.; Vol. 2. The history of the late Mr. Jonathan Wild and a journey from this world to the next. With repr. Of the rare designs by Stothard. - 343 p.; Vol. 8. Plays and poems. With repr. Of rare contemporary draw. and orig. designs by E. E. Carlson and E. J. Read. In 5 vols. Vol. 1. 298 p.; Vol. 10. Plays and poems. In 5 vols. Vol. 3. - 351 p.

[10] Battestin, Martin C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959; Johnson, Maurice. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961; Rivero, Albert J., ed. Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.

[11] Battestin, Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge, 1989.

[12] Елистратова А.А. Филдинг. Критико-биографический очерк/ А.А.Елистратова. - М.,1954

[13] Battestin, Martin C., with Ruthe R. Battestin. Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge, 1989.

[14] Johnson, Maurice. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961

[15] Mace, Nancy A. Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

[16] Johnson, Maurice. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961.

[17] Nasrullah Mambrol. Analysis of Henry Fielding’s Novels . 2019 (1) // https://literariness.org/2019/05/28/analysis-of-henry-fieldings-novels/

[18] Bloom, Harold, ed. Henry’s Fielding’s “Tom Jones.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

[19] Nasrullah Mambrol. Analysis of Henry Fielding’s Novels . 2019 (1) // https://literariness.org/2019/05/28/analysis-of-henry-fieldings-novels/

[20] Johnson, Maurice. Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on “Shamela,” “Joseph Andrews,” “Tom Jones,” and “Amelia.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961.

[21] The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. Osmaston. London, 1920, IV, 171.

[22] Bk. IX, ch. 1.

[23] Arthur L. Cooke, 'Henry Fielding and the Writers of Heroic Romance', PMLA, LXII ( 1947), 984-994.

[24] Bk. IV, ch. 1; Bk. V, ch. 1. It is interesting, incidentally, to observe that these references occur early; after the first six books of Tom Jones Fielding changes over to a more completely dramatic method, as W. L. Cross points out ( History of Henry Fielding, II, 179). Further evidence for believing that Fielding did not take the epic analogy seriously enough to explore the critical issues fully is afforded by the fact that he took no account either of Aristotle's mention of the form of literature which represented men 'as they are in real life' (Poetics, ch. 2), which would presumably be the category into which Amelia at least would fall, or of the contemporary controversy as to whether an 'epic in prose' was not a contradiction in terms (see H. T. Swedenberg , The Theory of the Epic in England, 1650-1800 ( Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1944), pp. 155, 158-159).

[25] Joseph Andrews, Bk. III, ch. 6

[26] Tom Jones, Bk. V, ch. 8

[27] Of the Origin and Progress of Language ( Edinburgh, 1776), III, 296-298

[28] 'Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation', ELH, III ( 1936), 3-4.

[29] 'Ulysses, Order and Myth', Dial, 1923; quoted from Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. O'Connor ( Minneapolis, 1948), p. 123

[30] See Covent Garden Journal, Nos. 10 and 55 ( 1752).

[31] Bk. IV, ch. 1. On this see Robert M. Wallace, 'Fielding's Knowledge of History and Biography', SP, XLIV ( 1947), 89-107

[32] Fielding Amelia, p. 2.

[33] Carl van Doren, Life of Thomas Love Peacock ( London, 1911), p. 194.

[34] Henry Fielding's Theory of the Comic Prose Epic. Madison, 1931, p. 166.

[35] Роджерс П. Генри Филдинг. Биография; пер. с англ., послесл. и коммент. В. Харитонова. - М.: Радуга, 1984. - 208 с.

[36] Уткина О.Л. Английская провинция в эстетике Г.Филдинга. // Вестник ОГУ №16(135).декабрь 2011. С.579-581.

[37] Герасимов В. М. Сущность и содержание понятия идеал. - М.: МААН, 1998. - 18 с.; Четина Е. М. Евангельские образы, сюжеты, мотивы в художественной культуре. Проблемы интерпретации. - М.: Изд. «Флинта», «Наука», 1998. - 102 с.

[38] Эстетика: Словарь / под общ. ред. А. А. Беляева. - М.: Политиздат, 1989. - 445 с.

THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………

INTRODUCTION The eighteenth century–“our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century”-is known in the history of

Andrews and The History of Tom

In recent years, Russian scientists

Fielding's fiction and the character traits of the characters

CHAPTER 1: THE LIFE AND WORK

Meanwhile, however, there occurred a watershed event both in

Fielding could leave the Opposition and became a defender of the

It is believed that Sarah was also influential in helping

Tom Jones if not elsewhere too-all contribute towards his excellence as a novelist

Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones bring together these two impulses in

The historical importance of the preface results from both the seriousness with which it treats the formal qualities of the novel (at the time a…

The voice of the narrator conveys to the reader the truth of that goodness

The reader must examine the sources of

Pamela/Shamela’s values) and aesthetic (he exposed the artificiality of “writing to the moment”)

Fielding’s doubts about the practicality of his beliefs

Richardson in its plot and moral vision

Shamela The key to understanding how

Parson Williams’s interference

Andrews , the reversal of rhetoric in the “good” and “great” in

Shamela. The most cursory reading reveals how quickly

Fielding’s concern for method as well as meaning is given its most formal discussion in the preface

Here, too, Fielding begins his definition of the “good” man in modern

Joseph Andrews. This is a reasonable assumption, since

Like other anatomies—Sir Thomas

Parts of Jonathan Wild are brilliantly satiric, but the work as a whole does not speak to modern readers

This narrator unifies, in a consistent pattern,

Inn and Tom’s affair with Mrs.

Fielding’s greatest legacy to the novel

CHAPTER 2: SOCIAL SATIRE AND

Fielding is one of the greatest humorists in

Cross, “is a complete repudiation of

Fielding is a great master of the art of characterisation also

Fielding's celebrated formula of 'the comic epic in prose' undoubtedly lends some authority to the view that, far from being the unique literary expression of…

Tom Jones, was an essential prerequisite for those who wished to write 'such histories as these' [1] , and such learning was undoubtedly intended to…

Fielding's argument here for 'referring' his novel to the epic genre is unimpressive:

This completes Fielding's critical exposition of the epic analogy in the

Since it was a comic variant of epic that

Fielding proceeded, writers of epic and genuine historians were able to introduce unlikely events much more plausibly than novelists, since they recorded 'public transactions' which…

Fielding's most obvious imitation of the epic model in the action of his novels - the mock-heroic battles - is also somewhat at variance both…

The difficulty with such a dual attitude, of course, is that, as a good

There is no reference to the formula of the comic epic in prose, and both mock-heroic incidents and epic diction have been abandoned; in their…

But, in reality, the Odyssey, the

Tom Jones which was introduced, he explained, so that it 'might be in no danger of being likened to the labours of [modern] historians'

Why, then, it may be asked, has the formula of the comic epic in prose so 'obsessed critics of novels', to use

To call Fielding, as Ethel Thornbury does in her monograph on the subject, 'the founder of the

Great", "The Story of the Adventures of

Cervantes' Don Quixote, noticed not only the high humanistic beginning of "quixotism", but also, perhaps, following

Christianity stands above time, its ideals have an enduring value

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23.10.2022

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