Page 11 - DENG404_FICTION

Unit 1: Henry Fielding—Joseph Andrews

work that Shamela began, but with its broad range of contemporary reference and its self- Notes
conscious positioning vis-à-vis long-standing literary and moral traditions, Joseph Andrews
clearly considers itself far more than just another send up of the century’s most widely travestied
novel.
Much of the distinctiveness of Fielding’s first novel derives from the author’s background as
a gentleman, a playwright, and a peculiarly eighteenth-century type of Christian. His youth
at Eton College, where he had received a gentleman’s classical education, informed Fielding’s
ambition to elevate the middle-class and vernacular genre of the novel by giving it a classical
pedigree; the Preface to Joseph Andrews, in which Fielding explains in detail his inauguration
of a hybrid genre, the “comic Epic-Poem in Prose,” makes explicit his desire to blend high and
low and is a measure of how seriously he hoped that his work would be taken. By comparison,
Fielding’s earlier literary output had been relatively slapdash; from 1728 to 1737 he had been
a writer of comedies for the London stage, in which capacity he had sought, in the words of
the earlier dramatist John Vanbrugh, “to show People what they should do, by representing
them on the Stage doing what they should not.” A contemporary remarked that these plays
had been written “on tobacco-paper,” and indeed they show signs of haste and of having been
written for money; while Fielding would conceive more loftily of his novels in terms of their
form and pedigree, however, he would remain consistent in his view of literature’s moral
utility as a vehicle of constructive ridicule.

Task Write a note on Joseph Andrews.

Joseph Andrews is a product not only of its author’s career and education but also of its age
in general, which is often called the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment Age. It was a time
of major political and doctrinal compromises, and its religious temper was optimistic and non-
dogmatic. The Christian outlook of Fielding shares in both these attributes: his novels advocate
an easygoing Protestantism in which charitable works are the infallible hallmarks of goodness,
sociability is the wellspring of charitable works, and providence is the reliable guardian of the
virtuous. Fielding’s morality, like that of his up-to-date contemporaries, is at least as much
man-centered as God-centered; the same may be said of his philosophy, for in the early
eighteenth century, faith in God was equally faith in man, as religion was held to be perfectly
compatible with human reason. Thus, Fielding shares with his Parson Adams a confidence,
which borders on the rationalistic, in the ethical value of reason, including and especially that
of the pre-Christian Greek philosophers. In the literary culture of the age at large, the consequences
of such faith in reason were substantial: as one critic has put it, “anything that could not be
explained was undervalued”, and literature accordingly took on an empirical cast. The poets
turned from lyric poetry to versified philosophy, of which Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man is
perhaps the supreme instance, and the increasing interest of writers in what is real and tangible
contributed to the development of a new genre, namely the novel, the special province of
which is the depiction of everyday life. In company with his predecessor Defoe, his contemporary
Richardson, and his successors Sterne and Smollett, Fielding would help to determine the
particular form of the novel in English.
The subject of Joseph Andrews, as of all of Fielding’s novels, is human nature, which he
considered fallible but perfectible. The mode is comical or satirical, and the moral intention
is to puncture the facades whereby people protect themselves from moral opprobrium or from
self-knowledge, as the case may be. The field of reference comprises Homer and Richardson,
Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the Bible, the mediocrity of contemporary writers, the corruption
of contemporary gentry and officials, and many moral and ethical verities of eternal relevance.
As much as Pamela was the first best-selling novel.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 5