Polyphony and the Embedded Letter in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Henry Fielding’s Epistolary Voices: Polyphony and the Embedded Letter in Joseph Andrews , Tom Jones , and Amelia A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of English School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Bridget Brennan Washington, D.C. 2010 Henry Fielding’s Epistolary Voices: Polyphony and the Embedded Letter in Joseph Andrews , Tom Jones , and Amelia Bridget Brennan, Ph.D. Director: Christopher Wheatley, Ph.D. This study explores the polyphonic nature of Henry Fielding’s writing by analyzing the relationship between narrative voice and the embedded letter in his three major novels: Joseph Andrews , Tom Jones , and Amelia . More specifically, it establishes that the voices of the narrators, who have traditionally been considered Fielding’s spokesmen, are not the only authoritative voices present in his works. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories for its discussion of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones , this dissertation demonstrates how the embedded letter, because of its inherent structural independence, not only allows other voices to enter the novels, it also grants these voices an authority equal to the narrator’s. Fielding adopts a radically different narrative persona in his final novel, Amelia , and this change affects his use of the embedded letter. In Amelia , the most overtly polyphonic of the three novels, Fielding replaces the controlling narrator of the previous novels with an inconsistently-drawn figure who offers the reader little commentary or guidance. Consequently, the letter is no longer used as a way to give voice to opposing ideologies without undermining the consistency and authority of the narrator; instead, in the absence of a stable, moral guide, it becomes a forum through which the author’s own voice and ideology enters the text. This study’s exploration of the polyphonic nature of Fielding’s novels brings to light previously unacknowledged complexities in the novels and refutes traditionally held beliefs that Fielding’s works contain only a single narrow and clearly defined fictional universe. This dissertation by Bridget Brennan fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English approved by Christopher Wheatley, Ph.D., as Director, and by Joseph M. Sendry, Ph.D., and Glen Johnson, Ph.D. as Readers. ____________________________________ Christopher Wheatley, Ph.D., Director ____________________________________ Joseph M. Sendry, Ph.D., Reader ____________________________________ Glen Johnson, Ph.D., Reader ii Acknowledgments My thanks go to Dr. Christopher Wheatley for his always prompt and helpful feedback, advice, and encouragement; to Dr. Glen Johnson and Dr. Joseph Sendry for their help and support; to Dave Campbell, my parents, and all my work colleagues for their tireless support and willingness to listen; to Z. and E. for keeping me sane; and finally to Jason, for the endless dissertation discussions, for making me laugh even when I do not want to, and for being my best friend and partner. iii Introduction I cannot offer or hope to make a hero of Harry Fielding. Why hide his faults? Why conceal his weaknesses in a cloud of periphrases [sic]? Why not show him, like him as he is, not robed in a marble toga, and draped and polished in an heroic attitude, but with inked ruffles, and claret stains on his tarnished laced coat, and on his manly face the marks of good fellowship, of illness, of kindness, of care and wine? Stained as you see him, and worn by care and dissipation, that man retains some of the most precious and splendid human qualities and endowments. He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind; he admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no flattery, bears no rancour, disdains all disloyal arts, does his public duty uprightly, is fondly loved by his family, and dies at his work . William Makepeace Thackeray As William Makepeace Thackeray eloquently explains, playwright, journalist, novelist, magistrate, and libertine Henry Fielding was a man of contradictions, a man who in his personal and public lives took on a “host of disguises and transformations,” many of which appeared to be diametrically opposed to one another (Bell 8). One could describe Fielding as a man whose writings demonstrated the value of “the prudential virtues of will-power and rational judgment,” who devoted the later years of his life to tirelessly enforcing the laws of his country though his work as a magistrate, and who fearlessly spoke out against what he believed to be his contemporaries’ shortcomings (Battestin Life 6). However, one could also describe him as a libertine whose lifelong “improvident delight in living, fully and recklessly for the moment” saw him sued for debt numerous times and even confined in a sponging house, and as a man who was perhaps not above accepting bribes from political enemies to suppress his own controversial writings (Battestin, Life 6, 282). It is not only the inconsistencies in Fielding’s personal life that confound those who try to get a firm grasp on exactly who Fielding was and what he believed; his 1 2 political and literary writings and even his own literary aesthetic were also quite complex and sometimes contradictory. He rose to literary prominence because of his uniquely playfully and digressive comic fiction, but by the end of his career, Fielding had completely repudiated “the pleasantries and indirections of mere literature” (Battestin Life 589). At the beginning of his career in 1741, he judged Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela to be so abhorrent both artistically and morally that he was driven to respond to the text with a devastatingly scathing parody in his work Shamela . Yet only seven years later, Fielding was so moved by Richardson’s second novel Clarissa , in which Richardson uses a similar style to that which Fielding criticized in Pamela , that he wrote a letter to Richardson describing the “tumultuous passions” and “raptures of admiration and astonishment” he felt when reading the work, the very same kinds of emotional reactions he so ridiculed readers of Pamela for having (Battestin, Life 443). Given the complexities of Henry Fielding, the man, it is surprising that so many modern literary critics have sought for and “found” in Fielding’s novels a narrative voice that offers readers a defined and unambiguous moral perspective, worldview and clearly delineated literary aesthetic, a fixed set of beliefs which critics have quite easily and confidently categorized as Fielding’s own. In a discussion of Tom Jones in his seminal work, The Rhetoric of Fiction, for example, Wayne C. Booth uses the term “Fielding-as- narrator,” and describes the narrator as “a dramatic version” of Fielding, “an ironic version of the real author” and as “a rich and provocative chorus” whose “wisdom and learning and benevolence [permeates] the world of the book” (216-217). As Ian Bell explains, Booth, in a “search for unity and stability” presents Fielding’s narrator as “a 3 standard of judgment within a novel, and a repository of values, consistent and fully realized,” thereby implying that the novels each contains a “single totalising authorial reading” which is communicated to readers by the narrator (Bell 29, 51). Many, if not most, Fielding scholars have followed in Booth’s footsteps by presenting Fielding’s novels as what Mikhail Bakhtin would call monologic works: works containing “a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness” (Bakhtin, Problems 6). As Ian Bell explains in his description of modern critics’ work on narrative voice in Fielding, influential critics after Booth, such as John Preston and even Wolfgang Iser, even though they complicate Booth’s conception of the reading process by giving readers more interpretive control than Booth does, still present Fielding’s work as having a centralized authoritative voice that determines meaning. In his discussion of Tom Jones , John Preston claims that readers of Fielding’s novels are given some freedom to interpret the text, but his argument, which at first seems to depart from Booth’s vision of all-powerful narrator, “ends up rather tamely, with the incontestable text still seen as the sole repository of authority, supervising and governing its readership” (Bell 32-33). Wolfgang Iser also sees Fielding’s readers as having some interpretive power, particularly during the places in text, which he calls “gaps,” that allow readers to create meaning. However, ultimately Iser too presents the reader as merely a “participant held under strict authorial supervision” (Bell 33). Even Iser, one of the fathers of reader-response criticism, is reluctant to diminish the power Fielding wields over his readers through his narrator. 4 Booth, Iser, and Preston, while highly influential figures in narrative studies, reader-response criticism, and Fielding studies, certainly do not offer the last word on this issue, nor do they, in their desire for fixed meaning and order, represent overall current trends in literary criticism. However, I am using them as a starting point because the ideas of Booth, Iser, and Preston still seem to influence heavily contemporary criticism dealing with Fielding’s narrative voice. Much of Fielding studies has not moved beyond structuralist and early reader-response models of interpretation, particularly when dealing with narrative voice, and has been remarkably resistant to the ideas of critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin,1 who condemn monologic literature and who maintain that inconsistencies and contradictions are actually the hallmarks of superior literature. Even critics writing in the last thirty years, after Bakhtin’s ideas had gained wide acceptance in the larger literary community, tend to continue the vision of Fielding’s works as texts whose central meaning is articulated and embodied by a narrator who represents Fielding’s own morals and values.

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