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Unit 4: Joseph Andrews-III: Detailed Study of the Text

Many readers have considered Fanny a less than satisfactory character; her passivity and Notes
attractiveness to sexual predators may appear to serve the plot rather too conveniently. At
best, her psychology must be said to be uncomplicated. Fielding seems to have designed her
to be a perpetual victim, for she not only outdoes Mr. Adams in naïveté but adds an element
of chronic passivity as well. To the former point, she made herself vulnerable to the first
assault when she accepted a strange man’s offer to accompany her on a country road at night;
it was a rather stunning error that emphasized her compliant nature. She is, as Fielding said
in Book II, Chapter XII, “extremely bashful.” Individual readers may decide whether her
thoroughgoing docility makes Fanny too simply a damsel in distress or whether, on the contrary,
the flatness of her characterization arises realistically from the simplicity that Fielding suggests
is an attribute of true goodness.

Peter Pounce, whose welcoming Adams into his coach leads to a comical exchange between
innocence and hypocrisy, is more sharply characterized, and he provides a vital contrast to
Mr. Adams. Peter has a dilemma: fearing the schemes and envy of others, he feels compelled
to downplay his own fortune; simultaneously, however, he is proud of his success as a part-
time finance capitalist and likes to hear people marvel at how well he has done for himself.
His default pretense, in which he begins the scene, is a show of contentment with his “little”
fortune. As the discussion proceeds, however, Adams’s mention of charity triggers Peter’s
defensive mode, and he begins to rail against charity and wonder aloud where people imagine
he can have gotten all the money they seem to think he has. Adams, characteristically, assumes
that Peter is complaining in good faith and, thinking to commiserate with him, confides that
he never found the reports of the steward’s wealth credible, given that “your Wealth is your
own Acquisition.” The parson has blundered into a sore spot by reminding Peter that his
wealth is new rather than inherited, deriving from business rather than from land, and thereby
not especially prestigious. It only gets worse from there, as Adams sees Peter frown over the
estimate of his fortune at £20,000, construes Peter’s unhappiness as arising from modesty (in
fact, Peter is worth well over £20,000), and assures him that he personally never thought him
worth half that much. The exasperated hypocrite then casts off his pretense of contented
poverty and derides both Mr. Adams and the decadent gentry class, revealing his true nature
in the process. Peter’s attitude to money is dehumanizing: it causes him to be savage toward
the poor and prompts him to speak in such locutions as “how much I am worth,” as if the
value of a man’s life could be measured in monetary units. Mr. Adams, by contrast, shows that
he has no clue of the value of money; it is a form of ignorance that he has displayed on many
previous occasions but perhaps never so appealingly as here. In the presence of his polar
opposite, a hypocritical miser, Adams stands out in his most essential qualities and we are
reminded that, for all its drawbacks, his unworldliness remains a positive value and a moral
touchstone.

4.4 Summary

• Mr. Adams clarifies that Joseph is not his footman but his parishioner, and the Man puts
to Mr. Adams some literary questions designed to verify whether he is a real clergyman
or not.
• The Man, who has introduced himself as Mr. Wilson, was born and educated as a gentleman.
• The story of Mr. Wilson’s reformation after a misspent youth occupies the center of the
novel for good reason.
• Wilson’s journey, like Joseph’s, takes him from town to country, from the life of folly
and vice to the life of chaste love and cheerful industry.

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