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Unit 2: Joseph Andrews-I: Detailed Study of the Text

Mrs. Slipslop takes after her mistress both in her passion for Joseph and in her attempts to Notes
appear other than she is. In a helpfully literal moment in Chapter III, Fielding shows the
simple and trusting Mr. Adams unable to understand the pretentious Slipslop, that “mighty
Affecter of hard Words”; in a parallel moment in Chapter V, Joseph fails to understand the
sexual suggestions of Lady Booby. Both Mr. Adams and Joseph are too trusting and deferential
to react properly to the tortured relationships between appearance and reality: the learned
Adams recognizes Slipslop’s coinages as solecisms, but his ingenuous respect for her gentility
abashes him into complicity with her pretensions; similarly, Joseph has seen enough of the
world (or at least of London) that the evidences of Lady Booby’s libido are not totally baffling
to him, and yet his reverence for her exalted status causes him to lose the thread: “if it had
not been so great a Lady, I should have thought she had had a mind to me.” Both Lady Booby
and Sliplsop have a mind to him, of course, and Fielding clearly intends their rivalry to be the
source of much humor: the incongruity of so much sexual vigor animating Slipslop’s homely
postmenopausal body is, in Fielding’s view, not only funny in itself but funny in relation to
the passion of Lady Booby.

Notes The fact is that Lady Booby, though possessing so many seeming advantages
(of status, comparative youth, and presumably beauty) over her waiting-gentlewoman,
in fact has no better chance with the footman.

The character of Joseph has been a stumbling-block to many modern readers for whom sexual
purity may not seem intrinsically valuable, and the extent to which Fielding intended even
eighteenth-century readers to take his title character seriously is a matter for debate. The
character of Joseph has a serious precedent in the Book of Genesis, in which his namesake is
sold as a slave to the house of Potiphar and rebuffs heroically the sexual advances of Potiphar’s
wife; Joseph also, however, has a precedent in contemporary English literature, namely Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela Andrews, whom Fielding has made into Joseph’s sister and idol. Fielding
detested Richardson’s novel and its heroine, so that insofar as Joseph functions as a stand-in
for Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding almost certainly intended him and his virtue to be risible.
As Maurice Johnson comments, there is undeniably something absurd about “a squeamish
male Pamela, strong, handsome, and twenty-one,” and yet the actual humor value of Joseph’s
defense of his virtue tends to arise mostly from the miscalculations and psychological turmoil
of Lady Booby and the low comedy of the vulgar Slipslop. As the story moves away from the
voracious London ladies to follow Joseph on his quest for home, Joseph’s virtue will seem less
absurd, in part because Joseph will have less cause to be squeamish. Crucially, however, what
will become apparent is that Joseph’s virtue, unlike that of Lady Booby, is in no way affected:
he is motivated not by a desire to appear virtuous to others but by a determination to remain
loyal to his beloved Fanny Goodwill.

Task Why Joseph fails to understand the Sexual Suggestions of Lady Booby?

2.2 Book I, Chapters VII through XII

Chapter VII
Fielding presents “the different Operations of this Passion of Love in the gentle and cultivated
Mind of the Lady Booby, from those which it effected in the less polished and coarser Disposition
of Mrs. Slipslop.” Lady Booby, ashamed of her passion for Joseph Andrews and detesting

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