Page 43 - DENG404_FICTION

Unit 3: Joseph Andrews-II: Detailed Study of the Text

Adams encounters the epitome of the type of selfish clergyman to whom he has stood in Notes
contrast since his discussion with Barnabas about the doctrines of Methodism. Trulliber would
rather tend his hogs than care for souls (indeed, he is better suited to the former task), and
he treats Adams to some truly wretched hospitality, gorging himself while giving Adams “a
little of the worst Ale.” Eventually the two parsons engage in a debate about the true nature
of Christianity and the relationship between faith and works, and it emerges that Trulliber
believes that his duty as clergyman and a Christian is simply to believe certain religious
tenets, not to conduct himself according to the behaviors enjoined by those tenets. In professing
immaculate Christian principles but abstaining from the performance of charity toward his
fellow-man, Trulliber shows himself to be the quintessential hypocrite, a devotee of self-interest
masquerading as a paragon of virtue. Nor is Trulliber merely a corrupt clergyman; he is also
a bully, a lover of power who is given to brutal intimidation of his wife. His authority within
the parish derives in large part from his ability to lord it over his parishioners, all of whom
“lived in the utmost Fear and Apprehension of him.”
Trulliber’s vices, then, are reprehensible, but what should be noted is that they are, as one may
say, natural — they are extensions of the ordinary human desire to acquire things, such as
money or power, for oneself. With the false-promising Squire the case is different and rather
bizarre: if Trulliber responds too negatively when Adams approaches him for aid, the false-
promising Squire approaches Adams on his own initiative and deceives him with a gratuitous
display of sham generosity. His sadistic foible is to counterfeit that quality of spontaneous
benevolence which is the substance of Adams’s ethics and which Adams so constantly expects
to find in those around him. The false-promising Squire is, then, as exemplary a hypocrite as
Trulliber, though in a stranger way. As Goldberg puts it, he engages in “motiveless mischief”;
his wickedness is unconventional in that it confers no obvious benefit on him, and as a result,
Adams takes a while to recognize and condemn it.
Only after the Host’s lengthy account of the Squire’s past wrongdoing does Adams concede
that “he is indeed a wicked Man,” though even then he protests that the Squire “hath in his
Countenance sufficient Symptoms of . . . that Sweetness of Disposition which furnishes out a
good Christian.” The Host’s rather worldly response, that to take people at face value in this
way is to invite deception, strikes Adams as too cynical, and it is telling that when the Host
invokes his world travels in support of his argument from experience, Adams counters by
invoking his own wide reading. Adams insists that his knowledge of books helps him to see
the world clearly, but when he cites Socrates on behalf of the false-promising Squire it becomes
clear to the reader that Adams’s literacy also has the potential to confirm the parson in his
chosen vision of reality.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
5. Mr. Adams the ......... to serve god and Country.
6. Mr. Adams, Fanny, and their ......... set out for the inn in the middle of the night.

7. Parson Trulliber is a parson only on ......... and a farmer on the other six days of the
week.
We have now reached the midpoint of the novel, and it would appear that, in a sense, Mr.
Adams is incapable of learning: his adventures have not served to make him any more realistic
about the world, and experience washes off him like the pig-slop from Trulliber’s sty. In
another sense, of course, there is nothing that Adams needs to learn, as he already embodies
Fielding’s definition of goodness as active charity. Perhaps, however, Mr. Adams’s goodness

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 37