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VIEWS OF WOMEN IN : RICHARDSON VS. FIELDING

Adrian BRUNELLO¹, Florina-Elena BORŞAN²

1Assist. Prof. PhD, Faculty of Medical Dentistry, “Apollonia” University of Iaşi, Romania 2English Teacher, “Virgil Madgearu” Technological Economic High School, Iaşi, Romania Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract Meanwhile, , Richardson’s The eighteenth-century British literature described contemporary and rival, was also doing a great middle-class life and debated what would later be called deal to raise the ’s reputation, but the bourgeois morality. Its role was somewhat connected to tradition he followed was different. The the greater education of the ordinary woman. As soon as Richardson wrote Pamela the novel became major differences were both technical and moral. The intellectual nourishment. In this period, females were able difference in the two writers’ moral visions is to express their cultural power by means of theatre and obvious in the contrast between Fielding’s comic novel. and satiric realism and Richardson’s creation of Issues of gender were widely debated in the eighteenth- century English society. The period witnessed an upsurge exemplary characters. Richardson hoped to have of argument about women’s roles. The purpose of this a good influence on his readers by depicting article is to compare and contrast two of the most important goodness. His Pamela and Clarissa, though works written in this period: Fielding’s “An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews” and Richardson’s highly individualized and not quite unrealistically “Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded”, focusing perfect, were clearly intended as good examples mainly on the views of the two feminine protagonists. worthy of imitation. For Fielding, exemplary th Keywords: femininity, masculinity, 18 century literature, fiction was out of touch with reality. He Pamela, Shamela deliberately made his Tom Jones lack the proper heroic qualities, arguing that imperfection made 1. OVERVIEW - HENRY FIELDING VS. him human. He warned his readers “not to condemn a character as a bad one, because it is not perfectly a good one. If thou dost delight in Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, had a these models of perfection, there are books now significant effect on the status of the novel. The written to gratify thy taste; but as we have not, story of a young servant who preserves her in the course of our conversation, ever happened virginity despite the repeated attacks from her to meet with any such person, we have not master, Mr B, and marries him when he reforms chosen to introduce any such here.” (Fielding, offers the readers a variety of attractions. There 1992) are the satisfactions of female virtue rewarded In Tom Jones, Fielding distinguishes his own by true love with honour, and lower-class virtue “heroic kind of writing” from and rewarded by true love with honour, and insight romances, insisting on his adherence to the Truth into the mind and heart of an innocent yet feeling of Nature. Like Richardson, who tried to convince heroine. The combination of romantic wish that he was not writing romances but “copying fulfilment and inflexible morality was very Nature”, Fielding stressed the duty of the popular, and changed the concept of the novel. “historian” of private lives to “keep within the With Richardson, fiction became more limits not only of possibility, but of probability respectable. He was following a long tradition of too” (Macsiniuc, 2003). epistolary fiction, much of it written by women, The conception of character in eighteenth and his achievement was based on the traditions century fiction follows two main directions. On established by women writers. the one hand, novelists interested in the

International Journal of Communication Research 323 Adrian BRUNELLO, Florina-Elena BORŞAN re-creation of larger, more comprehensive women novelists of the time, and outside of the pictures of contemporary life would inevitably unlearned Richardson’s range, too. He also choose to explore the surfaces of experience and treated subjects that were now being indecent, would make their characters intelligible in terms and therefore out of bounds for moral and of their “words and actions,” as Fielding put it. modest women writers. On the other hand, To them a character is a certain type of social Richardson’s concentration on female characters, behaviour, more precisely, characters are defined on feeling, and his exemplary morality, meant through a particular interaction between their that he wrote as women were ideally supposed inner, private beliefs and their outward to write. manifestation under the pressure of social In conclusion, the two distinct modes of the demand. As Cornelia Macsiniuc shows, two famous rivals reflect the philosophical divide “characters conceived in this way, with an of the age. They approached reality from two ultimate interest in their social self, in their different angles: “with Richardson, it is the capacity of integrating themselves satisfactorily emotional reality of the characters that counts and in the social pattern, are best illustrated by Henry the focus is on the inner world of feeling; with Fielding’s fiction” (Macsiniuc, 2003). They are, in Fielding, the “reality” becomes panoramic, and Dr. ’s terms, characters of manners, our attention is drawn to the larger pattern of as distinguished from the characters of nature, best relationships that define man in a community, to illustrated by Richardson’s novels. On the other aspects of typical behaviour and to social manners.” hand, this other direction in character delineation entails greater attention to the inner springs of 2. RICHARDSON’S FEMININITY AND action and to the psychological intricacies of the FIELDING’S MASCULINITY IN human personality. QUESTION Richardson and Fielding stood in contrast with regard to yet another aspect: point of view. The popularity of Richardson’s Pamela was Richardson’s alleged ‘femininity’ in Pamela mainly due to the effective technique of revealing may be thrown into question if one thinks of the the story through the letters written by the implications that a woman’s virtue was her protagonist and exchanged by characters. Thus virginity and the reward of staying a virgin was a multiple perspective is offered, and also a marriage. If one takes the next step to feminist greater sense of immediacy. In implications, how can the reader reconcile the and Tom Jones, Henry Fielding deploys a narrative notion of a woman’s virginity as her dowry - in mode in which a “reliable narrator” as the effect, her worth - with any sort of feminist ideal? “dramatized spokesman for the implied author” By the same token, Fielding should not be offers his own perception and understanding of labelled a ‘masculine’ author, if this implies the events and characters, purporting to build chauvinism. For one, while Richardson’s Pamela the readers’ confidence in his own judgements is didactic, Joseph Andrews makes no pretentious and thus to promote a certain vision of life. This moralizing claims. Apparently modelled after kind of novel is linked with the comic mode, , according to Fielding’s title page, since the comic vision in fiction presupposes Joseph Andrews is a sort of travel narrative, precisely such complicity between author and satirizing the preachy quality of Pamela. reader (Macsiniuc, 2003). It can be argued that the two novels cannot be While Fielding’s of compared as easily as attaching ’masculine’ and manners was clearly masculine, Richardson’s ’feminine’ labels to them. Judging from the first was essentially feminine, in half of Joseph Andrews, Fielding is interested not eighteenth century terms. Expounding his theory in punishing or rewarding anyone, but in of the novel as “comic–epic-poem in prose”, exposing the difficulty of making moral decisions. Fielding gave the new form legitimacy by He seems to give female characters the benefit of claiming a place for it within the classical the doubt, allowing them the freedom to be both tradition, which was outside the range of most promiscuous and honest - something Pamela

324 Volume 5 • Issue 4, October / December 2015 • VIEWS OF WOMEN IN 18TH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE: RICHARDSON VS. FIELDING wasn’t allowed to be in Richardson’s novel. Flint’s conclusion that Pamela’s reward is “a However, it may also be argued that the kind of self-annihilation, a willed penetration feminist ideals embedded in Richardson’s into the system that victimized her in the first Pamela extend beyond her virginity. Pamela, place” can be read in connection with at least two despite her low-class standing, understands that interpretations of femininity and the body in her soul not only has worth, but it belongs to her. Pamela (Flint, 1989). Laura Fasick is concerned Pamela contains strands of feminism because her with the relationship between the attempt to character believes in her equality. Juggling with split the female mind and body and authority possibilities and also challenging deep-seated (Fasick, 1992). She argues that Richardson perceptions of Richardson in terms of a constructed Pamela as a virtuous character masculine/feminine divide, Richardson can whose body and soul move as one and that to even be called a ’masculine’ author, though deny the body inevitably diminishes female ‘masculine’ does not necessarily imply authority. One example from the novel cited by ‘chauvinism.’ According to the Oxford English Fasick is when Mr. B refuses to allow Pamela to Dictionary, ‘masculine’ can mean nothing more breastfeed. By asserting domination over her than referring to the male gender. The subject body, Mr. B is attempting to control her. “Whereas matter of Joseph Andrews is a male paragon of Pamela in the first volume has opposed Mr. B’s virtue, and this is an argument in favour of its patriarchal power with a claim for her alleged ’masculinity’. But the OED also defines autonomous worth that relied on the dissolution masculine as “of a woman’s qualities, attributes, of gender and class hierarchies, she now draws or actions: characteristic of or befitting a man.” her authority from him. His stature as a model This part of the definition may be extremely husband proves her excellence as a wife and thus interesting, indeed unsettling. It may imply that her expertise as an advisor in domestic matters”. although these characteristics (some good, some Fasick traces the development of the link between bad) are found in a man, they can be found in body and authority through both Pamela and women as well. Clarissa. She concludes by saying that to “accept a version of the body that strips it of moral 3. PAMELA VS. SHAMELA meaning apparently entails an acceptance of a version of moral presence that upholds patriarchal norms” (Gwilliam, 1991). As a matter of fact, Richardson’s treatment of Tassie Gwilliam reads the relationship femininity is a complex issue, which goes beyond between body and femininity in terms of apparent dichotomy. In “The Anxiety of Affluence: duplicity, which resonates with Flint’s argument Family and Class (Dis)order in Pamela”, Christopher that Pamela both undermines and supports the Flint argues that Richardson is able to both patriarchal order of the novel and with Fasick’s destroy and support the patriarchal order of the idea that the heroine moves from opposing novel. Flint begins this essay by noting that patriarchal power in the first volume towards “Samuel Richardson, and by extension his art, accepting patriarchal norms in the second. perfectly embodied a bourgeois class that was (Gwilliam, 1991). Gwilliam points out that the consolidating its power, challenging aristocratic historical shift of the eighteenth-century from institutions of control, and transforming cultural overt misogyny toward the “Cult of the True as well as economic means of production”. Womanhood” has been linked to “women’s Because of this cultural influence, Richardson presumed loss of productive work to an increase has Pamela learn that her identity is based on in leisure under capitalism, and thus to the new two distinct modes of behaviour: “one teaching status of women as ’consumers rather than the value of bourgeois industry, the other contributors to the household economy’” establishing her aristocratic behaviour” (Flint, (Gwilliam, 1991). Because of this ideological 1989). Having established these two premises, change, the view of women began changing. Flint explores the influence of family and class Women now must embrace this duplicity and on Pamela. behave in such a way as to provoke desire

International Journal of Communication Research 325 Adrian BRUNELLO, Florina-Elena BORŞAN without the (at least apparent) intention of doing Fielding’s heroine Shamela, on the other hand, so. As Gwilliam concludes, “feminine hypocrisy is an artful insolent who uses her “Virtue” to rise and duplicity are convenient fictions potentially in the world. By poking fun at every aspect of covering masculine identification with Richardson’s method and message, Fielding femininity”. (Gwilliam, 1991). The critic exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary mores. concludes that “in Pamela Richarson attempts to The work is more than a simple of legitimize possible means of self-display and Richardson, however, as Fielding lampoons self-exploration for women, while confronting political figures, the clergy, and contemporary the compromise and contortion necessary for writers. living within a system that so strictly controls Fielding takes special care to parody even the and limits women’s possibilities” (Gwilliam, smallest details of Richardson’s work, and the 1991). form of Shamela closely follows that of Pamela. In 1740, three books appeared that particularly The novel is introduced by the “author,” one displeased Fielding. In addition to Richardson’s Conny Keyber (a combination of the names of Pamela, there was An Apology for the Life of Colley the writers Conyers Middleton and , a book full of grammatical mistakes and Cibber), who claims he presents the “authentic misused words, and Conyers Middleton’s Life of Papers” of the heroine of Richardson’s novel. Cicero, which was dedicated to Prime Minister Keyber dedicates his work to “Miss Fanny,” a Robert Walpole’s Privy Seal, Lord Hervey. parody of Middleton’s dedication to the Shamela satirizes all three of these works by supposedly effeminate Lord Hervey. He also imitating their content and style. In early 1741 includes letters to the editor (including one from when Fielding found himself in a “sponging the editor himself) congratulating him on his fine house” because of his debts, he dashed off the work, just as Richardson had appended letters manuscript of Shamela, which he published in praise of his novel to his second edition of anonymously. Fielding thought Pamela a bad Pamela. The novel begins with a letter from the book, crude and pretentious in the writing and gullible Parson Thomas Tickletext, who, pernicious in the mentality it so piously overcome by the loveliness of Pamela, writes to inculcated: that Providence would reward with his friend, Parson J. Oliver, enthusiastically pounds and social position the virtue of shrewdly recommending the novel. Oliver, however, has chaste servant girls by marrying them to their in his possession certain letters that reveal the sexually obsessed masters. Richardson suspected true nature and history of Richardson’s heroine. that Fielding was the author of the parody, and Oliver explains that Pamela’s name is actually never forgave him. His enmity was unremitting Shamela and transmits her authentic toward the man (i.e. Fielding) who produced correspondence. There follows a series of letters what Richardson called “lewd and ungenerous written between the various characters in the engraftment” on his work (Gwilliam, 1991). novel: Shamela; her unwed mother, Henrietta Hailed by Sheridan Barker as the “best parody Maria Honora Andrews; Squire Booby, the in ,” Henry Fielding’s Shamela master of Booby Hall; Booby’s housekeeper and is the best known of a number of novels written Shamela’s confidante, Mrs. Lucretia Jervis; in the that satirized Samuel Richardson’s Booby’s more loyal housekeeper, Mrs. Jewkes; hugely popular 1740 novel, Pamela. Fielding’s and Reverend Arthur Williams. The letters reveal sixty-page book condenses and imitates that Shamela, formerly a servant in Booby’s Richardson’s two-volume epistolary novel, household, becomes his wife by supposedly poking fun at the original work’s narrative resisting his attempts to seduce her and flaunting method and pretence at moralizing. The heroine her “Vartue.” She has done this with the help of of Pamela is a paragon of virtue, a servant girl Mrs. Jervis, who pretends to help Booby to win who resists the sexual advances of her master, Shamela but who actually aids Shamela in her and Richardson’s purpose with the novel was to designs on his worldly goods. In the meantime “cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion Shamela has an affair with Reverend Williams, in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes.” which according to Parson Oliver, is eventually

326 Volume 5 • Issue 4, October / December 2015 • VIEWS OF WOMEN IN 18TH CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE: RICHARDSON VS. FIELDING found out. Events and characters in the novel virtuous will gain her greater rewards in her parallel Pamela, but things are seen in a very situation. She is conniving and clever, although different light, with Parson Williams appearing uneducated and amoral. She does not passively as a scheming rogue, Mr. Booby as a fool, and sit and await life’s whims for her pain and Pamela as a calculating insolent girl. pleasure, but rather seizes her opportunities. It As a parody of Pamela, Shamela aims to may very well be argued that even if she is doing overturn what Fielding considered to be the the wrong thing, at least she is doing something. sententious moralizing of Richardson’s novel. Richardson’s and Fielding’s narrative point of Richardson claims that Pamela is a model of views seem almost as sharply contrasted as their virtue, whose chastity is rewarded, but Fielding heroines’ characters. Richardson is incredibly in his novel equates morality with expediency, optimistic. Although life has forced him to as Shamela behaves as she does in order to secure recognize that negative things do happen, he material comforts for herself. Throughout the insists on finding positive results from them. The novel Shamela uses words such as “feign,” “act,” narrator interprets Pamela’s reserve as and “pretend.” She tempts Booby but pretends epitomizing her great virtue. It is not that she to do so unwittingly, thus retaining her virtuous does not like the man and/or likes someone else, image, resisting him in order to appear virtuous or some other reason; she becomes merely a and lures him into marriage and elevates herself vessel for the narrator’s ideal virtuous woman. socially. Shamela is not the virtuous woman Fielding’s narrator is comic where Richardson’s Richardson supposes but rather a calculating, is grave, insightful while the other is fanciful. conniving creature. While Fielding Fielding’s narrator is the voice of a sceptic, a Richardson’s views on morality and virtue, at the cynic, and a good-natured comic. There are no same time he presents his own moral message pretensions to the character’s actions, and they about hypocrisy and feigned goodness. His are not idealized into something greater than life. criticism of hypocrisy also extends to the clergy This contrast shows the two writers’ opposite (represented by Parson Williams), the gentry (by worldviews. Squire Booby), and the political establishment. Tiffany Potter argues that Fielding’s more The theme of faith versus good works is also relaxed attitude to female sexuality is part of a explored in the character of the parson. Fielding’s complex of ideas she calls ‘Georgian libertinism’ Shamela attacks corruption on many levels, from – a kinder version of the Restoration variety, the perversion of language to the exploitation of encouraging freedom where others are not the nature of decency and uprightness for harmed. As a result of this, he writes favourably political purposes. of women seeking self-determination (Potter, The differences between the two women are 1999). both obvious and deep-seated. Pamela, on the With a rather different emphasis, Jill Campbell one hand, was created as a pinnacle of virtue and has also challenged the Richardson-Fielding steadfastness. It is true that she withstands both polarity, suggesting that we turn from the temptation and difficult circumstances, but she differences between the writers to an analysis of may also be seen as weak and stupid. She does “differences within” them (Campbell, 1995). Her not possess the strength to change her situation, own discussion of the differences within Fielding and so she complains about it instead. Rather draws attention to his interest in the blurring of than even asking for assistance, she assumes that gender distinctions, shown in the cross-gender her tormenter is ‘greater than any constable.’ casting of his plays, his treatment of male When he finally realizes that she will not gratify impersonation in The Female Husband, and his his desires and asks for her hand in marriage, she movement from burlesque “treatment of a consents. woman in the hero’s role in to the Conversely, Shamela presents only a mirage serious development of an ideal of female of virtue. From a distance it seems solid and true, heroism” in . In this last novel she finds a but in reality it is sham. She does not care for her recurrent ambivalence, as Fielding moves virtue, but rather realizes that pretending to be between older codes of masculine honour and

International Journal of Communication Research 327 Adrian BRUNELLO, Florina-Elena BORŞAN new sentimental conceptions of manhood, themselves to be participating in it. Moreover, between allegiance to a new ideal of domestic women writers recognized the arguments about femininity and fear of the independent female the novelty of the new fiction as gendered authority that might issue from it (Campbell, arguments, and responded strategically to this 1995). distinction. Despite the gendered literary histories which seek to marginalize women 4. CONCLUSIONS within the authorized “new species,” women writers are participating in its definition, shaping the practices of reading it produces, and The eighteenth century developed a significant contesting the terms of their own exclusion. interest in defining woman as a special being. Women were not inferior, just different. Because of their dependence on marriage, and the References pressure to attract a husband while living up to newly strict ideas of feminine property, many BOSWELL, J. (1976) Life of Johnson, Oxfrod: Oxford eighteenth century writers were interested in University Press. Natural Masques: Gender and defining types of feminine sexual behaviour. The CAMPBELL, J. (1995) Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels, Stanford CA: coquette, the prude and the modest woman were Stanford University Press. described and compared with one another. FASCIK, L. (1992) Sentiment, Authority, and the Female Richardson and Fielding effectively Body in the Novels of Samuel Richardson, Essays-in- marginalized women’s writing within the new Literature, 19 (2). p. 193-203. tradition each sought to establish. Writing among FIELDING, H. (1992) The History of Tom Jones: A this change in the status of the novel, mid-century Foundling, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited. women writers could not escape questions of FIELDING, H. (1987) Joseph Andrews and Shamela, gender and generic identity. The number of London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. women writing fiction rose dramatically in FLINT, C. (1989) The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and response to the popularity of Richardson and Class (Dis)order in Pamela. SEL: Studies in English Fielding, and much of this new work reveals a Literature 1500-1900, 29 (3). p. 489. self-conscious awareness of the controversy GWILLIAM, T. (1991) Pamela and the Duplicitous Body around the novel, and of its implications for of Femininity. Representations. Spring 34. p. 104-133. MACSINIUC, C. (2003) The English Eighteenth Century. women writers. The Novel in Its Beginnings, Suceava:Editura Universităţii Richardson’s and Fielding’s place in Suceava, p. 82. eighteenth-century women’s fiction is evidence POTTER, T. (1999) Honest Sins: Georgian Libertinism and that women writers at mid-century did register the Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding, Montreal and the controversy around the novel, and felt Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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