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Fiction

Notes I when, having listed a number of popular tales available in cheap pamphlet form, he remarks,
“In all these, Delight is mixed with Instruction, and the Reader is almost as much improved
as entertained.” The target of his irony here is not the classical principle itself but the modern
works that fail to live up to that principle. In outlining his own “utile et dulce” approach to
the novel, Fielding rejects burlesque and caricature because he wants to inspire laughter not
for its own sake but constructively, with humor being the vehicle of moral commentary. His
target, therefore, will not be “what is monstrous and unnatural,” what never really occurs in
life and thus, in being exposed, cannot edify readers; rather, he will “confine himself strictly
to Nature,” exposing “the true Ridiculous” as it exists in everyday life, thereby performing a
corrective function for the morals of the age.
In Fielding’s analysis, the outstanding moral fault of the day — the fault which is consequently
the outstanding preoccupation of Fielding’s writing — is “Affectation,” the “only source of the
true Ridiculous.” Affectation comes in two forms: the Affectation that arises from Vanity and
the Affectation that arises from Hypocrisy. Fielding treats the latter as the more dangerous
flaw, because when hypocrites conceal their true motives and attitudes, they may deceive
other people, sometimes to very serious effect. Fielding seeks to oppose the forces of affectation
by making vain and hypocritical people seem ridiculous, and he executes this project by
employing a kind of humor that encourages solidarity among readers, who are implicitly
assumed to be on Fielding’s side. In inspiring readers to laugh at affected people, Fielding
insinuates that society breaks down into two camps, the affected and the genuine, and his
moralizing humor supplies readers with incentives, mainly a string of jokes and a sense of
moral superiority, to join (or remain on) the side of the genuine. This literary program effectively
exempts readers from Fielding’s criticism, and one may validly object to it on the grounds that
it actually encourages moral complacency on the part of readers, allowing them to feel that
they confirm their own righteousness simply by laughing at others. Ironically, this sort of
moral laziness would itself be a form of affectation.

Fielding soon presents two paragons of hypocrisy in Lady Booby and her servant and imitator
Mrs. Slipslop. Lady Booby dissembles her motives continually, for example in walking out
with Joseph: supposedly, she sees “the Effects which Town-Air hath on the soberest Constitutions,”
so she heads to Hyde Park with her handsome footman, whose arm she will naturally require
as support. More serious is her conduct following the death of her husband. Fielding’s manner
of announcing Sir Thomas’s death is immensely clever: “At this Time, an Accident happened
which put a stop to these agreeable Walks, . . . and this was no other than the death of Sir
Thomas Booby, who departing this Life, left his disconsolate Lady confined to her House.” By
killing off Sir Thomas in a subordinate clause, Fielding insinuates that Sir Thomas’s living or
dying is of merely secondary importance to his own wife, who considers his departure from
this life only in terms of its effects on her, since it compels her to stay indoors for a period
of ritual mourning. Thus, the reader understands “disconsolate” in a sarcastic sense even
before learning that Lady Booby’s visitors consoled the bereaved widow with card games and
before witnessing the ease with which she rebounds and attempts to acquire a new bed-mate.

Self Assessment

State the following sentences are True or False:
1. Joseph Andrews defines his chosen genre the Comic epic or Comic epic-poem in prose.
2. Fielding justify the moral agenda of his novel by observing that “Examples work more
forcibly on the Mind than Precepts”.
3. Fielding treats the latter as the more useful flow.

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