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How Allegories Mean in the Novel: from Personification to Impersonation in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

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How Allegories Mean in the Novel: from Personification to Impersonation in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction How Allegories Mean in the Novel: From Personification to Impersonation in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction Janet Min Lee Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Janet Min Lee All rights reserved ABSTRACT How Allegories Mean in the Novel: From Personification to Impersonation in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction Janet Min Lee This dissertation analyzes the legacy of Protestant allegory in eighteenth-century fictions. In doing so, the dissertation shows that personifications and allegorically inflected characters became increasingly opaque and vulnerable to charges of impersonation as the novel developed in the early and middle eighteenth century. I attribute the distortion of allegorical representation to the conflicting yet intermeshed interpretive frameworks that allegory and the novel demand of their readers. For evidence, I primarily analyze John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................. iii INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 1 “ALL THINGS IN PARABLES DESPISE NOT WE”: JOHN BUNYAN’S DISSEMBLING ALLEGORY .................................................................................................................... 26 “FALL[ING] INTO MATTER”: JONATHAN SWIFT’S MATERIALIST ALLEGORY ................ 64 “INDEED I AM PAMELA, HER OWN SELF!”: SAMUEL RICHARDSON’S INSISTENT ALLEGORY .................................................................................................................. 103 “OH! DEAR SIR, SEEM A LITTLE MORE AFFECTED, I BESEECH YOU”: HENRY FIELDING’S FARCICAL ALLEGORY ................................................................................................. 144 CONCLUSION: “I DO NOT LOVE REASONING IN ALLEGORIES” ...................................... 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 202 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Having concluded this dissertation, I have become keenly aware that the writing of idealized figures took the real, physical efforts of mentors, colleagues, family, and friends. First and foremost, I am grateful for the breadth of intellectual possibilities that my advisers – Jenny Davidson, Nicholas Dames, and Nicole Horejsi – have offered me. This dissertation is as much a product of my and your work, intellectual interests, and imaginative thinking. You have taught me to be an adventurous thinker, a clearer writer, and a more generous teacher – and, of equal importance to me, you have allowed me to discover pleasure in all three capacities. I would also like to thank colleagues who have helped me with my dissertation – in various states of disarray, in forums formal and informal. Special thanks to Rashmi Sahni, my remarkable friend and constant interlocutor; to my eighteenth-century peers who have offered useful advice, Joshua Swidzinski, Katie Gemmill, Michael Paulson, and Candace Cunard; and from the placement seminar I would like to thank Audrey Walton and Lucy Sheehan for their thoughtful edits on my writing; Olivia Moy for answering my many questions by text and phone. Academic poets I met young in their and my undergraduate flowering, Owen Boynton and Gillian Osborne – thank you for reading and thinking with me. I would be grossly remiss not to thank teachers who have shaped me intellectually, Erik Gray, Joanna Stalnaker, Patricia Dailey – the traces of your teachings are everywhere present here. I am grateful to Julie Crawford, who taught me in my freshman year of college and my last year of graduate school, and from whom I learned much about reading and teaching. And, because least and last known to me, I am grateful to Jim Adams for commenting on the full draft of the dissertation – your remarks were of immense use to me. I could not have written this without the support of close friends, Carolyn Bancroft, Jesse Chanin, Sage Cole, and Maria Galeano. And last, but not least, a big thanks to my family: the Lees, the Changs, and the Kiels, who have always been ready to lend much needed hands; Vivian and Hedde, for your bibliographical efforts and for your constant love from across the waters; Paul for being my best friend, best editor, and loving partner; Sebby, for gleefully taking my mind off work when I needed it the most; and my mother and my father, for their committed love and devotion that continue to amaze and inspire me. ii DEDICATION To my parents iii INTRODUCTION The early novelists, however, made an extremely significant break with tradition, and named their characters in such a way as to suggest that they were to be regarded as particular individuals in the contemporary social environment. Defoe’s use of proper names is casual and sometimes contradictory; but he very rarely gives names that are conventional or fanciful. -Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel Personality is…rigorously structured in the realistic novel….Indeed, in a literary form remarkable for its variety and its concreteness, it’s perhaps even more remarkable to find that tendency to allegorize the self…The richly detailed textures of characterization in realistic fiction seldom subvert the coherent wholeness of personality…Psychological complexity is tolerated as long as it doesn’t threaten an ideology of the self as a fundamentally intelligible structure unaffected by a history of fragmented, discontinuous desires. - Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax The normative account of the novel is a story of how authors came to provide increasingly realistic descriptions of people and their environment. As characters in novels became psychologically defined and individualized, they also began to shed names that indicate their social, moral, or satirical type. Characters like Virtue and Una gave way to Henry Fielding’s Amelia Booth. Romance types such as Valencourt became more clearly defined (in social and economic status, in religious affiliation, in individualistic and complex relation to bourgeois morality) and transformed into characters like Samuel Richardson’s Robert Lovelace. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, allegorical characters abounded; by the end of the same century, they were nowhere to be found. Ian Watt’s account of the realist novel and its formal 1 techniques remains persuasive in many respects. After all, characters in our twenty- first century novels (be they realist, literary, or genre fictions) for the most part still make use of names of “particular individuals” rather than general types – and the use of individualized names signals that the reader is in store for a story of real people. Leo Bersani’s reading of allegory as the primary mode of nineteenth-century realist characterization is, therefore, deeply polemical. Bersani argues that realism does not increasingly delineate psychological complexity in its characters, but that the realist novel rather enforces the “coherent wholeness of personality” that Bersani thinks of as allegorical.1 Contrary to the story of the novel I told above, Bersani claims that the techniques of formal realism (its naming, the description of psychological complexities) do not abolish allegory from the novel but rather sustain it. Allegory is a useful tool for producing characters that retain a coherent shape and therefore legibility. Even in the works that we consider as the origin of formal realism (Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones), we find the shape and specter of allegorical representation. Within their pages, we find Robinson Crusoe as the allegory of a pilgrim turning to God; Pamela described as the embodiment of Virtue (that is, of course, Richardson’s own moralistic take on his rather protean protagonist); and good nature, though not omniscience, crystallized into Allworthy and religious and philosophical radicalism and hypocrisy present in the shape of Square and Thwakum. Venturing outward from these canonical examples, we see other authors wrestling with allegorical representation well into the 1740s and beyond, such as Sarah Fielding in The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and Eliza Haywood in Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). 1 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 55-6. 2 Following Bersani, my dissertation imagines that novelistic characters retain allegorical shapes; but it takes issue with his description of allegory as the shorthand for coherence. This dissertation redefines and reevaluates allegory in eighteenth- century fiction. Allegory, while a complicated figure with a rich literary history, was beloved in the eighteenth century for its ability to present didactic tableaux or literary embellishment, which we can find, for example, in Alexander Pope’s “Ode for Musick, on St. Cecilia’s Day” (written 1708, published 1713): If in the Breast tumultuous Joys arise, Musick her soft, assuasive Voice applies; Or when the Soul is press’d with Cares Exalts her in enlivening Airs. Warriors she fires with animated Sounds; Pours Balm into the
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