Page 68 - DENG404_FICTION

Fiction

Notes get his woman, Mrs. Slipslop’s to lust unsatisfied. . . . It is the fate of Lady Booby to come too
late and misunderstand, Adams to rush to the help of a woman in distress and cause worse
confusion, Fanny to see her virtue in apparent extreme danger. The humor is not mere slapstick,
as it is sometimes elsewhere in the novel; always it is true to character.” One may add that
it is Adams’s fate to endure humiliations: as with his fall into Trulliber’s sty and his run-ins
with hog’s blood and a chamber pot, the parson here endures severe humiliations but, as ever,
he successfully washes off the sordidness of the ordeal. Detected in the beds of two women
who are not his wife, Adams earns the condemnation of Mrs. Slipslop (of all people), who
hypocritically calls him “the wickedest of all Men,” and the laughter of Lady Booby; he even
endures the suspicions of Joseph and Fanny, whose virtue he has cultivated and defended but
who in the harsh light of morning wonder whether he has not finally joined the long line of
Fanny’s would-be debauchers. Through it all Parson Adams remains, in the words of Homer
Goldberg, “transcendentally comic,” though as Goldberg further observes, the scene of Joseph
momentarily sitting in judgment of his mentor and then “mellowing into indulgent superiority”
continues the process of the younger man’s asserting himself against Adams and supplanting
him as protagonist.
Beau Didapper, whose mistaking of Slipslop’s chamber for Fanny’s initiates the hi-jinx, plays
an interesting role in dramatizing the theme of pretense. In his repulsive effeminacy he exemplifies
the vanity of fashionable society, its essential hollowness and enervation: like Bellarmine but
with less success, he attempts to lure a woman with the enticements of wealth and social
elevation. In his physical person he is dandyish and diminutive, so little threatening that
when he attempts to force himself on Fanny she manages, for once, to fight off her attacker
on her own. Her resistance forces him to assign the work of her seduction to a servant — an
abject admission of weakness, not at all the same thing as the Hunter of Men’s sending his
servants to bring Fanny where he himself plans to assault her. Only Didapper’s extreme
conceit allows him to believe that he could successfully impersonate Joseph and seduce Fanny;
to the reader, who appreciates the gulf between Joseph’s masculinity and Didapper’s effeminacy,
the notion is risible. For all the Beau’s ludicrousness and corruption, however, he is consummately
acceptable to polite society. Simon Varey points out the euphemistic delicacy with which
Didapper leaves his servant to “make [Fanny] any offers whatever”; whatever else he is,
Didapper is Lady Booby’s “polite Friend,” an emissary from fashionable or “polite” society.
The comedy of appearance and reality reaches its climax with the revelations of the respective
origins of Joseph and Fanny; not only do the two lovers turn out to be other than they were
thought to be, but in plot terms the main structure is a reversal of perceptions and expectations.
To the former point, it is interesting to re-read the novel in the knowledge of Joseph’s real
parentage: such details as the precise wording of Fielding’s introduction of the hero (“Joseph
Andrews . . . was esteemed to be the only son of Gaffar and Gammer Andrews”) show the
novelist keeping up the fiction but being careful to say nothing he will have to contradict later.
For readers who have some familiarity with romance conventions, of course, Fielding may
effectively have given the game away when Wilson mentions (with Joseph conveniently asleep)
the kidnapping of his eldest son and the son’s convenient identifying birthmark. Other markers
have been present all along; as in fairy tales, a fair complexion is an index of gentility, and
Betty the chamber-maid once argued for Joseph’s high birth on the basis of his white skin. If
Joseph is a gentleman in disguise, then, he has certainly been hiding in plain sight.
With respect to the final movement of the plot, the revelation of Fanny’s having been born to
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews initially makes it seem that, in addition to battling Lady Booby, the

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