Twin Stars: The Anxiety of Sibling Rivalry between Literary Titans

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2004 by Weidhorn, Manfred

In 1740, Richardson published his first novel, Pamela, about a young servant woman who withstands the sexual advances of her aristocratic master until he agrees to marry her. Despite its moral tone, the book mingles, as one scholar notes, "prudery and prurience, sermon and striptease" in a manner not too distant from pornography (Thomas 177). The book took the reading public by storm. One out of a number of dissidents was Fielding, who rushed into print a bare few months later a short tale, Shamela, which parodied and ridiculed every aspect of Richardson's book (Battestin 151). Fielding thought thatPamela, far from being a moral paragon, was a hypocrite who used sex as a means of social climbing. By temperament, he disliked the maiden purity theme as well as the prescriptive use of the novel form as a vehicle of instruction (Wright 59).

In ridiculing Pamela, Fielding had, after years of writing for the stage, suddenly found his vocation in narrative fiction. Within a year he published his first "serious" novel, Joseph Andrews, which begins an alternative tradition of novel writing (Battestin 151). Fielding's Preface presents his book as a moral and artistic response to Richardson's. It begins by continuing, albeit "allusively" rather than "imitatively" (Battesin 8), the critique begun in Shamela of Richardson's bad morals, bad art, and narrow view of life, but after ten chapters turns to new matters. Except for one slight reference, Richardson made no public response to Shamela or Joseph Andrews, but, nursing his grievance privately, he accused Fielding (in a letter of 1749) of abusing Pamelawith "hints and names taken from the story, with a lewd and ungenerous engraftment" (Thomas 179).

Pamela and Joseph Andrews are interesting and important, though imperfect, books. There now took place an eerie repetition of history. Just as two of the major medieval literary works, Tristan and Parzival, were concluded in the same year, so were the long, supreme masterpieces of these two pioneers, Clanssa and Tom Jones, written and published in 1748 simultaneously. The two works offer a marked moral contrast: in Richardson, the heroine fends off unwanted sexual attention, while in Fielding the heroine actively pursues a hero she knows to be sexually active.

Hard as Fielding had been on Richardson's first novel, he now was just as strikingly laudatory on Clarissa; after all, the new heroine was nothing like Pamela. he sent Richardson an advance copy of Tom Jones and wrote a letter full of praise. Feeling "raptures of admiration and astonishment," he singled out the "true comic force" in the portrayal of the widow Bevis and found the scene after the rape of Clarissa "beyond anything I have ever read" (Watt 211, 235). In a literary journal, he wrote of Richardson's "deep Penetration into Nature," of his "Power to raise and alarm the Passions," which "few Writers, either ancient or modern, have been possessed of. ... Sure this Mr. Richardson is Master of all that Art which Horace compares to witchcraft" (qtd. in McKillop 167).