Joseph Andrews

موضوع: Joseph Andrews الإثنين يوليو 14, 2008 3:58 pm

[edit] Background
Fielding’s first venture into prose fiction came a year previously with the publication in pamphlet form of Shamela, a travesty of, and direct response to, the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson’s Pamela. Richardson’s epistolary tale of a resolute servant girl, armed only with her ‘virtue’, battling against her master’s attempts at seduction had become an overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message – that a girl’s chastity has eventual value as a commodity – as well as the awkwardness of the epistolary form in dealing with ongoing events, and the triviality of the detail which the form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding’s parody
Richardson would continue to be a target of Fielding’s first novel, but the Pamela phenomenon was just one example of what he saw as a culture of literary abuses in the mid-eighteenth century. Colley Cibber, poet laureate and mock-hero of Pope’s Dunciad, is identified in the first chapter of the novel as another offender against propriety, morality and literary value.
The impetus for the novel, as Fielding claims in the preface, is the establishment of a genre of writing ‘which I do not remember to have been hitherto attempted in our language’, defined as the ‘comic epic-poem in prose’: a work of prose fiction, epic in length and variety of incident and character, in the hypothetical spirit of Homer’s lost (and possibly apocryphal) comic poem. He dissociates his fiction from the scandal-memoir and the contemporary novel. Book III describes the work as biography.
As becomes apparent from the first few chapters of the novel in which Richardson and Cibber are parodied mercilessly, the real germ of Joseph Andrews is Fielding’s objection to the moral and technical limitations of the popular literature of his day. But while Shamela started and finished as a sustained subversion of a rival work, in Joseph Andrews Fielding merely uses the perceived depravation of popular literature as a springboard to conceive more fully his own philosophy of prose fiction.

Plot summary

[edit] Book I
The novel begins with the affable, intrusive narrator outlining the nature of our hero. Joseph Andrews is the brother of Richardson’s Pamela and is of the same rustic parentage and patchy ancestry. At the age of ten years he found himself tending to animals as an apprentice to Sir Thomas Booby. It was in proving his worth as a horseman that he first caught the eye of Sir Thomas’s wife, Lady Booby, who employed him (now seventeen) as her footman.

[edit] Book II
During his stay in the inn, Adams’ hopes for his sermons were mocked in a discussion with a travelling bookseller and another parson. Nevertheless, Adams remains resolved to continue his journey to London until it is revealed that his wife, deciding that he would be more in need of shirts than sermons on his journey, has neglected to pack them. The pair thus decide to return to the parson’s parish: Joseph in search of Fanny, and Adams in search of his sermons.
With Joseph following on horseback, Adams finds himself sharing a stagecoach with an anonymous lady and Madam Slipslop, an admirer of Joseph’s and a servant of Lady Booby. When they pass the house of a teenage girl named Leonora, the anonymous lady is reminded of a story and begins one of the novel’s three interpolated tales, ‘The History of Leonora, or the Unfortunate Jilt’. The story of Leonora continues for a number of chapters, punctuated by the questions and interruptions of the other passengers.
After stopping at an inn, Adams relinquishes his seat to Joseph and, forgetting his horse, embarks ahead on foot. Finding himself some time ahead of his friend, Adams rests by the side of the road where he becomes so engaged in conversation with a fellow traveller that he misses the stagecoach as it passes. As the night falls and Adams and the stranger discourse on courage and duty, a shriek is heard. The stranger, having seconds earlier lauded the virtues of bravery and chivalry, makes his excuses and flees the scene without turning back. Adams, however, rushes to the girl’s aid and after a mock-epic struggle knocks her attacker unconscious. In spite of Adams’ good intentions, he and the girl, who reveals herself to be none other than Fanny Goodwill (in search of Joseph after hearing of his mugging), find themselves accused of assault and robbery.

[edit] Book III
The three depart the inn by night, and it is not long before Fanny needs to rest. With the party silent, they overhear approaching voices agree on ‘the murder of any one they meet’ (III, ii) and flee to a local house. Inviting them in, the owner, Mr Wilson, informs them that the gang of supposed murderers were in fact sheep-stealers, intent more on the killing of livestock than of Adams and his friends. The party being settled, Wilson begins the novel’s most lengthy interpolated tale by recounting his life story; a story which bears a notable resemblance to Fielding’s own young adulthood.

[edit] Book IV
On seeing Joseph arrive back in the parish, a jealous Lady Booby meanders through emotions as diverse as rage, pity, hatred, pride and love. The next morning Joseph and Fanny’s banns are published and the Lady turns her anger onto Parson Adams, who is accommodating Fanny at his house. Finding herself powerless either to stop the marriage or to expel them from the parish, she enlists the help of Lawyer Scout, who brings a spurious charge of larceny against Joseph and Fanny in order to prevent, or at least postpone, the wedding.
Three days later, the Lady’s plans are foiled by the visit of her nephew, Mr Booby, and a surprise guest: Booby has married Pamela, granting Joseph a powerful new ally and brother-in-law. What is more, Booby is an acquaintance of the justice presiding over Joseph and Fanny’s trial, and instead of Bridewell, has them committed to his own custody. Knowing of his sister’s antipathy to the two lovers, Booby offers to reunite Joseph with his sister and take him and Fanny into his own parish and his own family.
In a discourse with Joseph on stoicism and fatalism, Adams instructs his friend to submit to the will of God and control his passions, even in the face of overwhelming tragedy. In the kind of cruel juxtaposition usually reserved for Fielding’s less savoury characters, Adams is informed that his youngest son, Jacky, has drowned. After indulging his grief in a manner contrary to his lecture a few minutes previously, Adams is informed that the report was premature, and that his son had in fact been rescued by the same pedlar that loaned him his last few shillings in Book II.
Lady Booby, in a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the marriage, brings a young beau named Didapper to Adams’ house to seduce Fanny. Didapper is a little too bold in his approach and provokes Joseph into a fight. The Lady and the beau depart in disgust, but the pedlar, having seen the Lady, is compelled to relate a tale. The pedlar had met his wife while in the army, and she died young. While on her death bed, she confessed that she once stole an exquisitely beautiful baby girl from a family named Andrews, and sold her on to Sir Thomas Booby, thus raising the possibility that Fanny may in fact be Joseph’s sister. The company is shocked, but there is general relief that the crime of incest may have been narrowly averted.