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“The Grease of God”: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Melvyn New
Melvyn New*
Affiliation:
University of Florida, Gainesville
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Abstract

Recent criticism of the eighteenth-century English novel points to a providential world view as the “proper conceptual context” for these fictions, but it would be an error to see the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett as uniformly or unhesitatingly committed to the providential order. These authors constructed fictions, characters, and structures in response to the historical actuality of the age, in transition from the Christian to the secular world view. It is this transition and its effect on the providential world view that provide the conceptual context for the fiction of this period. Critics, having recognized the novel as the fictional form of a secular age, must also recognize the significance of the romance as that fictional form best depicting the providential order. In eighteenth-century English fiction the romance is gingerly displaced from the theoretical center of narrative by elements of form now identified with the novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 2 , March 1976 , pp. 235 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

*

Versions of this paper were read at Stetson Univ.'s Visiting Scholar's Program in 1974 and at the South Atlantic MLA meeting in 1974 in Washington, D. C.

References

Notes

1 Smollett Tobias, The Adventures of Roderick Random (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1926), ii, 31-32.

2 “Interpositions of Providence and the Design of Fielding's Novels,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 70 (1971), 270; the quoted passage is cited by Williams from Isaac Barrow, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions (1678).

3 E.g., Battestin Martin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), and “ ‘Tom Jones’: The Argument of Design,” in The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa, ed. Henry Knight Miller et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 289–319.

4 Humphry Clinker, ed. André Parreaux (Boston: Houghton, 1968), p. 154. Moreover, this rescue is merely a prelude to a more dramatic providential event: Grieve has rescued the count and countess of Melville and turns out to be Ferdinand count Fathom, “whose adventures were printed many years ago” (p. 155).

5 Within 3 pages of Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777), there occurs: “providence interposed in his behalf; and, by seemingly accidental circumstances, conducted him imperceptibly towards the crisis of his fate”; “I leave it to Providence, who will doubtless, in its own best time and manner, punish the guilty”; “Providence will in its own time vindicate its ways to man” (ed. James Trainer, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, pp. 32–35); these pages are not atypical.

6 Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder, in The Works (New York: Croscup & Sterling, 1902), xvi, 115-65.

7 That “chance” events abound in these fictions does not contravene their providential design. The providential world is a world of accident and chance; Pope's famous couplet excellently delineates the relationship: “All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see.” Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, The Twickenham Ed. of the Poems of Alexander Pope, iii, Pt. i (London: Methuen, 1950), 50; ll. 289-90. Samuel Johnson, whose sense of randomness was intense, nevertheless ends his Rambler essay on “chance” (No. 184) with a firm insistence upon Providence: “In this state of universal uncertainty, where a thousand dangers hover about us, and none can tell whether the good that he persues is not evil in disguise, or whether the next step will lead him to safety or destruction, nothing can afford any rational tranquillity, but the conviction that, however we amuse ourselves with unideal sounds, nothing in reality is governed by chance, but that the universe is under the perpetual superintendence of him who created it; that our being is in the hands of omnipotent goodness, by whom what appears casual to us is directed for ends ultimately kind and merciful; and that nothing can finally hurt him who debars not himself from the divine favour.” The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), iii, 205. Moreover, the distinction made by Cervantes to explain his contrived resolution of the interpolated story of Don Ferdinand and Dorothea—“their strange and wonderful Meeting could not be attributed to Chance, but [to] the peculiar and directing Providence of Heaven” (Don Quixote, trans. Peter Motteux, New York: Modern Library, 1950, p. 316; cf. p. 888)—was made throughout English fiction in the 18th century. The incidents of “chance” in these fictions are consistently operative within the designs of Providence, without the complication of irony; the “rightness of things” is ultimately affirmed.

8 See also Starr G. A., Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), and J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966).

9 Sherbo See Arthur, “The ‘Moral Basis’ of Joseph Andrews,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century English Novel (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 104–19; and John Traugott, “The Professor as Nibelung,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1970), 532-43.

10 Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 304.

11 Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 323–24.

12 Auerbach's failure with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (pp. 525–53) suggests that his critical approach is misleading for much 20th-century fiction as well, and for much the same reason: Auerbach wants fiction to be only one thing (a novel), and when it is something else he is quite unable to respond with his usual perceptiveness.

13 The Inward Turn of Narrative, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), p. 72.

14 The classic study of the process in England is, of course, Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957). English Showalter's The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641-1782 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972) is a brilliant study of the process in France and might serve to balance Watt's emphasis on socioeconomic realism to the exclusion of all other “realities” (see pp. 68, 193, 348, et passim).

15 Scholes Robert and Kellogg Robert, The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 69. Frye's discussion of romance in Anatomy of Criticism is perhaps the single most important factor in the recent revival of critical interest in the genre.

16 The relationship between the Christian world view and the romance has long been noted, most recently by Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romances (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970), pp. 14–46; Eugene Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971); Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 23-54; and Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes' Christian Romance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 29-51.

17 See esp. Joseph Andrews, Bk. iii, Ch. i, and the opening chapters of Bks. ii, iv, viii, and ix of Tom Jones. Fielding, to be sure, often qualifies his enthusiasm for “history,” most particularly in the very important introductory chapter to Bk. viii of Tom Jones.

18 Moll Flanders, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Crowell, 1970), pp. 3, 5. See “the Reader . . . will see Virtue and the Ways of Wisdom, every where applauded, honoured, encouraged, rewarded; Vice and all Kinds of Wickedness attended with Misery, many Kinds of Infelicities, and at last, Sin and Shame going together, the Persons meeting with Reproof and Reproach, and the Crimes with Abhorrence” (Colonel Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970, p. 2).

19 Sterne's Tristram Shandy belongs, of course, in any discussion of the major English fiction of the century, but my own view of Sterne, put forth in different terms elsewhere (Laurence Sterne as Satirist, Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1969), is that he does not share the same interest in displacing satire (i.e., the inverted romance) as do the authors under present consideration.

20 Maximillian Novak's fine essay, “Crime and Punishment in Defoe's Roxana,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 65 (1966), 445-65, began this revaluation, though ultimately he too speaks of Roxana's “truncated ending” (p. 464). Several years later Robert Hume and Ralph E. Jenkins published simultaneous essays in which both attempted to demonstrate the validity of the ending, the former asserting that “the structure of the novel demands that Roxana's past catch up with her and that she be brought to ruin” (“The Conclusion of Defoe's Roxana: Fiasco or Tour de Force?” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3, 1970, 489); and the latter that “the structure of Roxana makes the murder of Susan the climax of the story and the most logical ending” (“The Structure of Roxana,” Studies in the Novel, 2, 1970, 146).

21 Roxana, ed. Jane Jack (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 265.

22 This is, of course, the thrust of Fielding's Examples, cited in n. 6; see the valuable discussion of this and similar works in Williams, pp. 267–70.

23 Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 19.

24 Tom Jones, ed. Sheridan Baker (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 675–76.