Fielding's Critique of Absorptive Novel Reading

Fielding's responses to Pamela condense and re-articulate many of the perspectives I have traced in the earlier chapters of this study. He accepts the licentious liberty of readers and their fascination with the print-media culture of his day, at the same time that he endorses the basic coordinates of the antinovel discourse's critique of absorptive reading. However, he finds Pamela to be worse than the disease of novel reading it was meant to cure. By having the reform of the novelistic libertine Mr. B. result from reading Pamela's pathetic and involving letter narratives, Richardson promotes a new species of absorptive novel reading. In contrast, Joseph Andrews offers a cast of characters who have been readers, and who imitate that reading in their everyday lives. Joseph has imbibed the Christian ethics of his mentor, Parson Adams, the London fashions of opera and playhouse (I:v), and the enthusiastic chastity communicated through a reading of his sister Pamela's letters. Joseph's repetition of his sister's defense of her virtue—in spite of their gender differences—provides the book's initial joke at the expense of an overly literal imitative reading. Adams models an endearing but outdated classical and scriptural reading: it is canonical, reverential, repetitive, and overly literal. Along with these two central characters, there are other readers, such as the deluded and selfish novel reader Leonora, the skeptical freethinker Wilson, and so on. When tested by experience, all these variants of imitative reading are found wanting. Thus the textual education provided by the novel Joseph Andrews is finally ironic: it turns out there is no book that can teach virtue by modeling what it is; of course this reflects upon the reading Joseph Andrews invites from its readers.

Building upon the general address and entertainment function of media culture, Fielding's performative entertainment puts a middle term—the author/narrator between the reader and the story told. By incorporating a reflection upon reading into his text, Fielding locates his novel in the new discursive space opened by the Pamela media event: a critical public-sphere debate about what reading is and should be. Instead of an example of proper reading, Joseph Andrews weaves an open matrix of variable reading practices: reading as pleasurable consumption, reading as dialogical conversation, reading as a performative entertainment. In his role as an antiauthoritarian entertainer, Fielding must be distinguished from the narrator's theatrical performance as "author"; Fielding does not function as a spiderlike God, but as a leader of the revels. By developing a distinct new form of English comic novel, written "in the manner of Cervantes," Fielding

promotes his own mode of elevated reading, and thereby prepares for a subsequent institutionalization of "the" novel.

If we are to trace the effects of Fielding's opportunistic intervention within the media culture of his day, we face an obstacle not confronted with Behn, Haywood, Defoe, or Richardson. With Fielding, as with such writers as Shakespeare and Milton, the evident brilliance of his rhetorical mastery gives the impression that he is always in control of the meanings he disseminates. Fielding has won the enthusiastic admiration of critics from the eighteenth century to the present. These critics wish to imagine that he has distilled Pope's rhetorical finesse, Milton's mastery of the classics, and Defoe's story-telling genius into the "perfectly" plotted form of his novels. This critical perspective, according to which Fielding is the first self-consciously literary novel writer in Britain, has the effect of severing Fielding's links to the media culture within which he wrote. I would argue that it is only by conceiving the entertainments that Fielding constructs as opportunistic responses to the Pamela media event that we can come to terms with Fielding's distinct reconfiguration of eighteenth-century novelistic entertainment.

Ronald Paulson applauds Fielding's response to the dangers posed by absorptive reading. In the following passage, Fielding figures as a big-game hunter who uses various narrative techniques to rescue the reader from a dangerous species of reading:

When Pamela came into Fielding's sights, he seems to have sensed-certainly before his contemporaries—the peculiar danger of Richardson's hold over his readers. The effect of Pamela's particularity, piledup minutiae, repetitions, and prolixity was to draw the reader as close as possible to the heroine's immediate experience and mind, in fact to suck the reader in and immerse him in her experience . . . . the reader becomes uncritical, a "friend" of the character, and having accepted Pamela's rationalizations as completely as he would his own, he emerges ready to modify his own conduct accordingly.
[Paulson, Satire and the Novel , 101]

"Seeing Pamela as a moral chaos in which the reader was invited to wallow self-indulgently," Fielding, by Paulson's account, develops a normative commentator, an "arbiter of morals and manners," a "creator and/or historian, who sets before the reader an object that can be accepted as objectively true." In addition, Fielding becomes a manipulator who interrupts even in moments of high emotion (such as after Fanny's abduction). Finally, the narrator is an ironist who creates "the impression of neutrality and authority, as opposed to the disreputable, prejudiced, and limited vision of

Pamela." Fielding's narrative technique offers a more "generous and inclusive" view, which "holds the reader at some distance from the action," so that "the air of artifice is compensated for by the sanity of the exposition, the clarity and, in that sense, realism of the picture" (106–107).

Why does this difference about the effect of two types of novelistic narrative become so tendentiously polarized into sane, generous, and inclusive versus disreputable, prejudiced, and limited? Like Ian Watt, Paulson is here writing within a critical tradition that sees "realism" as the sine qua non of novelistic writing (see chapter 1). But Paulson is also writing against The Rise of the Novel , in which Watt's critical narrative makes Richardson the inventor of "formal realism," and thus the first real novelist in English, while Fielding is stuck in a belated and secondary position, offering comparatively superficial characters and a pallid "realism of assessment." Paulson is just one of many defenders of Fielding to argue that Watt's conceptual categories were rigged against Fielding. In order to break the spell of Watt's critical narrative upon absorbed mid-twentieth-century critical readers, Paulson makes a move that has a long history in the critical reception of Richardson and Fielding: he marks their difference as being analogous to that between a woman and a man (Campbell, Natural Masques , 3–4). Thus, in the passages quoted above, Fielding figures as the masterfully objective masculine author saving the reader from the "moral chaos" of wallowing "self-indulgently" in Richardson's implicitly feminine fiction. Then, by insisting that Fielding's fiction provides an "impression of neutrality and authority" that can "be accepted as objectively true," Paulson makes the case for wresting the prize Watt had awarded to Richardson—namely, realism's grasp of the real—and conferring it upon Fielding. In my own account of this debate, I am seeking to disentangle Paulson's useful insight about the pivotal importance of the issue of absorptive reading from debates about whether it is Fielding or Richardson who has first claim to having fathered "the" English novel. My own study suggests that Fielding's rewriting of Pamela is inscribed in a more general cultural struggle around the terms for licensing entertainment.^[2]

In Natural Masques , Jill Campbell argues that Fielding's response to Pamela arises out of a critique of the effect of entertainment on culture that was already well advanced by 1740. Campbell shows how Fielding's plays

[2] For a fuller discussion of the problematically retroactive use of "realism" in an account of the eighteenth-century novel, see chapter 1; for a discussion of the fruitful effects of even tendentiously staged critical accounts of the difference between Richardson and Fielding, see conclusion.

of the 1730s rotate around a familiar satiric critique: in modern entertainments, luxury, commodification, and foreign fashion menace native English identity and virtue. Xenophobic strife around entertainment becomes entangled with the struggle to prescribe proper gender roles. While some, like Richardson, promote a feminized domestic virtue as an alternative to corrupting foreign amusements, satires upon modern entertainments often target susceptible female consumers as leading the vogue for corrupt foreign imports. Thus, for example, Italian opera is said not only to subordinate moral sense to fantastic spectacle, but also to draw female fans to take celebrity castrati (such as Farinelli) as a fetishized substitute for the "natural" English phallus. Lured by the spectacles of a false masculinity, women wander from their proper roles of lover, wife, and mother (Natural Masques , 35–36). Like opera, novels are castigated as foreign imports that threaten to feminize England. These eighteenth-century episodes of gender trouble suggest "that male and female identity might be in some sense conventional, acquired, or historically determined" (ibid., 12).

By Campbell's account, Joseph Andrews is where Fielding begins to shape a positive "natural" alternative to the early-eighteenth-century entertainments that engage in a disguised play with gender identity, such as the masquerades (of Heidegger), the spectaculars (of John Rich), the Italian opera, and the novels of amorous intrigue (such as those of Haywood). To Fielding, however, these entertainments don't just blur gender identity, they imperil any identity at all. Within a culture mediated by these entertainments, there is, in Campbell's words, "the threat of an exchange or collapse of [the interior and exterior selves] into each other that turns both personal feeling and public action into mere dramatic acting" (27). This perspective helps explain why Fielding responded so urgently to the problem posed by Pamela's presentation of its heroine as virtuous. Richardson's rendering of native English virtue not only echoes the specious self-promotion of all market-based entertainments, it also touts as virtue what Fielding takes to be the most insidious form of "affectation": a performance where the actor doesn't know she is acting, where there is a heroine who sincerely believes her own (false) performance.

Campbell's study helps explain why the extraordinary popularity of Pamela appears to Fielding as the symptom of a "general social disorder" (Battestin, Henry Fielding , 303). His attack in Shamela is targeted less at the anonymous Pamela than at the response of its enthusiastic readers (Paulson, Satire and the Novel ). In Shamela , the Pamela vogue is characterized as "an epidemical frenzy now raging in the town" (278): mysterious and pervasive and spreading, its popularity suggests a collective delu-

sion. How could reading a book cause an "epi-demic," becoming literally spread over the people (from the Greek epi and demos ) ? While the enthusiasm for Pamela rages, it can induce a mad frenzy of imitation. The bad book requires the sort of intervention brought to bear on smallpox through inoculation in the early eighteenth century: exposure of healthy readers to small doses of the disease so as to produce antibodies within them.^[3] Just as Shamela imitates the self-interested amours she finds in "the third volume of the Atalantis " (295), so, in his summary indictment of Pamela , Parson Oliver surmises that readers might imitate the behavior in Pamela : "young gentlemen are here taught . . . to marry their mothers' chambermaids . . . all chambermaids are strictly enjoined to look out after their masters . . . etc." (305). Since ideas such as these could become toxic to readers, publishing Shamela's true letters is prescribed, by Parson Oliver, as "an antidote to this poison" (305).

Framed within a public-sphere exchange between two mature readers, what sort of antidote does Shamela administer to its reader? The bawdiness of Shamela's fictional story motivates Parson Oliver's indignation with the "many lascivious Images in Pamela , very improper to be laid before the youth of either sex" (305). In Shamela , Fielding sets out to counter Pamela's power to absorb the reader into an illusionistic alternative world. Indebted to strategies of Menippean satire perfected by Swift (Paulson, Satire and the Novel , 103), Shamela is a complex and overdetermined text that does several things at the same time. First, as an anti-Pamela , it interrupts the prolix, dreamlike continuity of Pamela with brevity, humor, and a critical reflection upon reading. At the same time, Pamela's high moralizing style is shifted into a vulgar vernacular, and delicate sentiment is reduced to sex. Second, as a super-set of Pamela, Shamela offers a supplement to it—the small added part that completes but also reframes the logic of the whole. After reading this "dangerous supplement" (Derrida, Of Grammatology ), we cannot help but suspect that Pamela's virtue is merely a calculated performance. Third, as a novel of amorous intrigue, Shamela exposes the novel within Pamela . Because Shamela is only fifty pages long and features relatively "flat" characters who use sex, disguise, and intrigue

[3] "In 'Inoculation Against Smallpox' [1718], Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reports a workable method known in the East since ancient times. As wife of the English minister to Constantinople, Lady Mary describes inoculation parties she has witnessed at which a small wound is made in the arm, a few drops of smallpox pus inserted, and a walnut shell tied over the infected area, a procedure that produces a true case of smallpox but one so mild that 98 percent of those inoculated recover" (Trager, People's Chronology ).

to shape the action, it offers a parody of the novels of amorous intrigue. But although Shamela pleases readers in some of the same ways that Haywood's novels do, and thereby exploits their popularity, it is also rigorously anti-absorptive and anti-pornographic. Thus Shamela exposes Pamela as a novel of amorous intrigue in the guise of a conduct book.^[4] Finally, since Shamela displays some of the improving goals of the text it mocks, this travesty of Pamela imitates, however ironically or indirectly, a crucial thread of Richardson's project: while luring its readers into what appears to be a light entertainment, Shamela actually draws them into a more reflective and improving reading. In this way, it offers a first sketch toward the alternative elevated novel reading that Joseph Andrews would later provide.