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Fiction

Notes 3.1.1 Analysis

The action of Book II starts with Mr. Adams finding himself in what will become a highly
characteristic predicament: he lacks the funds to pay the bill he has racked up at the inn. Mr.
Adams, like Fielding himself at the time of composing the novel, is constantly in debt; fortunately,
however, the same unworldliness that leads to these bouts of insolvency prevents him from
despairing. Instead, he asks trustingly for help, for as he himself would never refuse a request
for financial assistance, he always expects that others will lend him the money he needs. In
this particular instance, the people around him reward his faith: a servant from the coach and
six springs Adams and Joseph from the inn, and later Mrs. Slipslop (albeit with a less than
virtuous motive) releases the parson’s horse and Joseph along with it.
No less characteristic of Adams is his having forgotten his manuscripts at home; as the episode
of his wading needlessly through a stream suggests, Mr. Adams is prone to these errors
because he is both literally and figuratively short-sighted. The detail of his sitting down to
read the works of the classical tragedian Aeschylus gives a clue as to the literary influences
behind Fielding’s characterizing him in this way. Mr. Adams resembles Cervantes’s Don Quixote
in having a vision that is naïve in a peculiarly bookish way: as Homer Goldberg observes,
Adams’s continual horror at the wickedness of others arises not only from his own natural
goodness, which he tends to project onto others, but also from his assumption that “the noble
sentiments of the ancient poets and philosophers . . . delineate human nature as it is, rather
than as it might or ought to be.” Thus, the story moves from examples of Adams’s absent-mindedness
(with respect to money, manuscripts, and moving water) straight to an incident in which a
couple of worldlings display a less exalted side of human nature: while stopping at the next
inn, Adams is shocked to learn that two litigious gentlemen would allow self-interest to guide
their moral judgments of others. Mr. Adams errs in confusing erudition with practical wisdom
and insight into the minds and actions of everyday human beings; this lack of emphasis on
the practical side of things manifests itself in his forgetfulness, his accumulation of debt, and
his idealistic expectation of good faith in others.
The first chapter of Book II, like that of Book I, contains Fielding’s commentary on his procedure
as a novelist; here, he addresses his division of the novel into books and chapters that allow
the reader to pause for reflection. Fielding claims once again to be taking his cues from
classical writers such as Homer, and indeed the use of numbered books is an organizational
technique typical of the epic. Another structural inheritance from the epic, one that Fielding
does not discuss, is the interpolation of digressive tales such as that of Leonora, which begins
in Chapter IV. Readers who are inclined to criticize the weakness of Fielding’s plot structure,
with its many improbable occurrences and flat characters popping in and out, often disapprove
of these digressions as distractions from the main story. Nevertheless, the tales do serve the
main narrative, as the telling of Leonora’s demonstrates: not only does the characterization of
Mr. Adams gather an amusing new wrinkle (as the upright clergyman turns out to be an avid
consumer of gossipy stories), but Leonora’s biography underscores important themes as well.
Some critics have called the digressive tales “negative analogues,” meaning that they express
negatively the positive moral themes of the main story. Thus, while Joseph and Fanny embody
everything that young lovers ought to be and do; Leonora manages to get everything wrong.
The fact that she begins with every earthly advantage makes her folly all the less forgivable:
she is wealthy, attractive, popular, and shrewd; her only weakness is a moral one, as she
brings to her selection of husbands a form of pragmatism that is really just applied selfishness.
This pragmatism misfires when Leonora abandons the man she really loves for a wealthier
man who, as will be seen in the conclusion of her story, is no less self-interested than she is.
For being too clever by half, the novel punishes Leonora, rewarding instead the dogged loyalty
of Joseph and Fanny; the contrast between her sophistication and their straightforwardness
implies that Fielding’s providence favors simplicity, which Fielding considers an attribute of
goodness.

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