Henry and Sarah Fielding on romance and sensibility

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 1998 by Gautier, Gary

One of the remarkable things about the eighteenth-century novel is the manner in which it gradually became less overtly political without ever giving up politics. Such works of the early decades of the century, such as Manley's New Atalantis and Swift's Gulliver's Travels often had a free-standing political content, a political content seated upon a generic platform, to be sure, but detachable nonetheless. This way of interfacing form and content, which indicates not less sophistication but a different range of cultural needs, all but disappeared in the second half of the century, as the novel pivoted toward its watershed "novel of sensibility" form. It was in that liminal period between, say, Gulliver's Travels (1726) on the one hand and The Man of Feeling (1771) or Evelina (1778) on the other, that the stakes of novel writing were perhaps highest. The Augustan form of the genre, with its characteristic way of interfacing form and political content, was no longer on the pulse of the times, and the sensibility form, with its more integrated approach to form and content, had not yet arrived. Everything was negotiable. The genre itself seemed to be east of Milton's Eden, as it were, with all its possibilities spread out before it.

The novel of the 1740s, at the center of that liminal period, is in fact marked by its own characteristic political and formal questions, questions that not only indicate the particular zeitgeist of the decade but also determine, in part, the possible futures of the genre itself. Politically, the conflict between bourgeois and landed ideologies reaches peak visibility in the novels of the 1740s. Before that decade, as Ros Ballaster points out, political conflicts were more often framed by party interests than by ideological convictions per se (Il). After the 1740s, the landed/bourgeois dyad gradually lost its claim on the public imagination. It was certainly passe by the time of Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, wherein it takes all the "filial respect" Harley can muster just to pay attention to his elder aunt's insistent "discourse" upon the relative authority of "money" and "birth" (108). One might indeed turn closer to home and suggest that Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) marks the beginning of the end of the dyad's currency value. Whereas Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) had playfully lingered over the landed versus bourgeois cultural wars, Amelia attempts to face more directly the dynamics of an increasingly urban and capitalist world of social relations. In short, although the issue certainly pans out in both historical directions, the conflict between bourgeois and landed allegiances has a peculiar dominance in driving the political content of the 1740s novel, underpinning works by such authors as Richardson and Cleland as well as the Fieldings.

In terms of form, the interfacing of a separable political content and a chosen narrative form was perhaps less viable in the 1740s than it had been in the heyday of Augustan satire. It was certainly becoming less common practice for novelists. As a more integrated approach to generic form and political content slowly emerged, the category of "romance" was a particularly active ingredient in the process. That there was a noteworthy infusion of "romance" into the novel genre in the wake of Richardson's Pamela (1740) is beyond dispute. But the definition of "romance" and the question of how it was fitted (or refitted) into the novel genre are more open to debate. Renegotiating the relation between generic form and political content in the 1740s novel was largely a matter of how one defined "romance" and incorporated it into the novel genre. The negotiation would not determine whether the genre would be a "conservative" or a "radical" one, but would rather determine the nature of the platform-the epistemological framework for relating genre and politics. The Augustan platform tended to generate meaning (political or otherwise) in relation to objective reference points outside of the narrative itself or in relation to objective contingencies within the narrative.

The sensibility platform, on the other hand, worked through subjective modalities.' Although the shift is clearly toward the epistemological preferences of modernity, whether or not it was a "progressive" move is a vexed question. In one sense the answer is affirmative. Anchoring human values to subjective rather than objective reference points clearly served the emergent (bourgeois) culture's need to weaken the residual (landed) culture's ground of authority. But if this marks the epistemological shift as "progressive," it only does so conditionally. If one views the sensibility platform in its retrospective dimension, looking, for example, toward Augustan narrative structures and landed and aristocratic social structures, it is indeed progressive. But viewed in its prospective dimension, looking toward the 1770s and beyond, it is equally clear that the political value of the sensibility platform is neutral rather than progressive. Novels do not become generically more "liberal," whatever that would mean. Rather, the Gestalt or ideological field is updated, and "conservative," "liberal," and "radical" discourses become generated in a way that allows a more compatible interface with the new platform.