Closure, Justice, and the Eighteenth-Century

THE SENSE OF AMENDING: CLOSURE, JUSTICE, AND THE EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY FICTIONAL SEQUEL A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John C. Traver, B.A., M.A.R. Margaret Anne Doody, Director Graduate Program in English Notre Dame, Indiana July 2007 © Copyright by JOHN C. TRAVER 2007 All rights reserved THE SENSE OF AMENDING: CLOSURE, JUSTICE, AND THE EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY FICTIONAL SEQUEL Abstract by John C. Traver This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century authors, in writing sequels to their own works, raise important questions about narrative closure, ideal justice, and the literary canon. It considers works by both traditionally canonical writers (e.g., Daniel Defoe‟s Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections and Samuel Richardson‟s Pamela II) and less familiar authors (e.g., Sarah Fielding‟s Familiar Letters and Volume the Last and Frances Sheridan‟s Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph). Sequels demand a re-examination of how we theorize novelistic form and closure (as found in such works as Henry James‟s The Art of Fiction and Frank Kermode‟s The Sense of an Ending). Sequels do not conform to classical (i.e., Aristotelian) theories of artistic closure, which treat an artistic production as a complete work composed of “a beginning, a middle, and an end” with a uniform effect on a spectator. Sequel-writers often devote more attention to perspectives that may be excluded from their earlier novels, consequently complicating John C. Traver earlier assessments of a character‟s moral worth or revealing the impermanence of a “happy ending.” Sequels are thus frequently at odds with the dramatic convention of “poetic justice” and often introduce a competing aesthetic, “poetic mercy.” The presence of the sequel calls for a reformulation of the literary canon: without attentiveness to sequels, critics ignore the “story” as many earlier audiences have read it and risk misrepresenting how authors engage with their subject matter. The literary sequel complicates our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel and enables us to engage with questions of justice and literary endings in a different way. To Teresa. ii CONTENTS PREFACE .......................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1: “THERE IS NO HERESY IN TOO MUCH CHARITY”: THE CRUSOE TRILOGY, RELIGIOUS TLERANCE, AND THE LIMITATIONS OF NARRATIVE ......................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The Unending Search for a Middle: The First Volume of Robinson Crusoe .. 7 1.2 European Religious Context and Influences on Farther Adventures .............. 18 1.3 The Farther Adventures: Punishment and Charity ........................................ 27 1.4 Serious Reflections and the Transcendence of Narrative ................................ 41 CHAPTER 2: SECOND TEXTS AND SECOND CHANCES: PAMELA II AND THE FRIGHTFUL ALLURE OF THE DOUBLE-ENTENDRE ................................. 50 2.1 Engraftments ................................................................................................... 53 2.2 Double-entendres ............................................................................................ 62 2.3 The Untimed Test ........................................................................................... 71 2.4 Poetic Mercy ................................................................................................... 81 CHAPTER 3: “TOUCHED BY THE PENCIL, AND DAUBED WITH MUD”: RESISTANCE TOWARD CLOSURE IN SARAH FIELDING'S DAVID SIMPLE TRILOGY .............................................................................................. 91 3.1 Sarah Fielding, Unity of Action, and Theories of Closure ............................. 96 3.2 The Adventures of David Simple, Doubling, and Narrative ........................ 106 3.3 Familiar Letters: Neither Beginnings nor Endings ..................................... 118 3.4 Volume the Last and the Abuse of the Familiar Letter ................................. 132 CHAPTER 4: THE INCONCLUSIVE MEMOIRS OF MISS SIDNEY BIDULPH: PROBLEMS OF POETIC JUSTICE, CLOSURE, AND GENDER .................. 139 4.1 The Drama and Virtue Rewarded ................................................................. 142 4.2 Poetic Justice and Wickedness Punished ...................................................... 148 4.3 Poetic Justice and the Rigidity of Female Partiality ..................................... 152 4.4 Male Partiality and the Reassessment of Judgment ...................................... 162 iii CONCLUSION: IN WHICH SOME THINGS ARE CONCLUDED .......................... 175 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 178 iv PREFACE Where, for the complete expression of one‟s subject, does a particular relation stop?... Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter…. [T]his continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken…. [A] young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency … to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. (Henry James, The Art of the Novel 4) 0.1 Artistic Form, Canons, and Closed Systems In The Art of the Novel, Henry James suggests that the triumph of novelistic form depends upon a lie.1 While real life might offer an inexhaustible series of relations and connections, the artist‟s goal is to cut off connections into more manageable segments. Even though James elsewhere writes that “the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (“The Art of Fiction” 292), a novel must also represent life as it is not. The author must inscribe a circle within which relations “happily appear” to be completely and definitively encapsulated, despite their failure to 1 The Art of the Novel is a collection of Henry James‟s Prefaces written for the New York edition (1905-7) of his collected work. The quotation appears in his “Preface to Roderick Hudson.” v be so in reality. The art of the novel is rooted in the ability to know which relational segments are to be included or excluded from the circle. Why must our metaphor for form be a circle? As James himself contends in “The Art of Fiction” (1888), the novel “must demand that it be perfectly free” from prescriptions (296).2 Nevertheless, the image of the circle itself becomes a devious form of prescription, a kind of “circular” argument. James‟ model for artistic form implicitly excludes those novels which do not easily fit this image of self-containment. Delighting in “a deep-breathing economy and organic form,” James dismisses many long novels as simply “large loose baggy monsters” in his “Preface to The Tragic Muse” (The Art of Fiction 84). Henry‟s formal circle is defined by economy and contraction, not by expansion and growth. One of the foremost challenges to this formal circle is in the literary sequel. As J. Paul Hunter has argued in “Serious Reflections on Farther Adventures” (1997), the “refusal of novels to end … is a regular feature of English texts in the eighteenth century” (279). As Henry James notes, in real life “relations stop nowhere,” and novels do not always “stop,” either. The circle represents not simply the artist‟s attempt to impose form on the chaos of life but the critic‟s attempt to impose form on the chaos of literary texts. If we must imagine a metaphor that can accommodate the presence of the sequel, we must perhaps imagine an infinite line. Or, perhaps in order to describe the relation 2 James does qualify that he believes in one prescription: “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel … is that it be interesting” (296). As my analysis will suggest, even this prescription can be problematic for those authors who try to challenge audiences whose interests lie in the depiction of conflict and violence. vi between an original work and its sequel, we must imagine a series of overlapping circles, a Venn diagram in which each “complete” circle is shown not to be complete after all. The theorizing of the novel has become concerned with the canonization of form. As James remarks in “The Art of Fiction” (1888), the English novel “had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison” (291). Working within this interpretive vacuum, James insists that critics recognize the intentionality behind the artistic product. The formal characteristics of the novel take on an increasing importance in modernism: even the experimentation with form in James Joyce‟s Ulysses still observes the Aristotelian unities of “time” and “place.” Russian formalism and stylistics place greater weight upon structure and form in a manner that encourages treating an artistic production as a single, complete text. As Mikhail Bakhtin complains in “Discourse in the Novel” (1934-35), “A literary work has been conceived by stylistics as if it were a hermetic and

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