Joseph Andrews as Exemplary Gentleman

Abstract

Joseph Andrews as Exemplary Gentleman TREADWELL RUML, II In its representation of an exemplary gentleman, Joseph Andrews demonstrates not only the influence of theories of exemplary historiography in the development of the English novel, but the tensions that complicated mid-eighteenth-century notions of gentility.1 According to eighteenth-century theory, the novel, like traditional exemplary biography , performs an educational function by presenting "valuable Patterns" of conduct to the reader. Fielding makes very clear in Joseph Andrews, however, that readers of fiction and history cannot passively accept the models presented to them, but must learn how to distinguish (even in admirable models) which kinds of conduct deserve imitation and which should be shunned. In part, Fielding's quarrel with Richardson's Pamela is that the epistolary intimacy of the serving girl's narrative disarms the very critical faculties that it is the mission of exemplary literature to sharpen. The ironic historian of Joseph Andrews, on the other hand, constantly draws the reader's attention to the problems of interpretation and judgment that complicate learning in literature and learning in life. This procedure makes Fielding's version of exemplary fiction a particularly apt vehicle for the presentation of models (like that of the "gentleman ") that represent complex and troubling problems of social interpretation and judgment. Joseph Andrews is designed as much to teach its 195 196 / RUMLII readers how to recognize gentility in others as to teach them how to behave genteelly themselves. Here, too, Richardson provided a negative stimulus. Pamela paints Mr. B.'s violence, weakness, and arrogance far more vividly than she can his good qualities, and a reader need not be very cynical to suppose that the reward of her virtue lies less in the quality of his character than in the gentleness of his birth and the extravagance of his wealth. In Joseph Andrews, however, Fielding's hero appears at the outset to lack all of the external trappings of gentility, a circumstance that allows the narrator to pose this complexly ironic question: "Would it not be hard, that a Man who hath no Ancestors should therefore be render'd incapable of acquiring Honour, when we see so many who have no Virtues, enjoying the Honour of their Forefathers?"2 Joseph is restored to the honorable rank of gentleman only after he has demonstrated his "Virtue"—a term which Fielding seeks to restore, from its reduction to chastity in women and to birth and wealth in men, to its proper function as the external sign and the inward spirit of England's social and political elite. Fielding is not arguing for progressive social mobility; his final recourse to a traditional family romance plot (which confirms Joseph's emergence from lower class status through the revelation of his gentle birth) reaffirms the importance of lineage. Fielding seeks rather to resolve the tensions between intrinsic virtue and extrinsic honor, first by seeming to alienate merit from birth and then by reconciling the two in his hero. Like traditional exemplary history, Fielding's new species of writing is designed to teach readers, not how to cross status boundaries, but how to behave properly in the status to which providence has assigned them. Indeed, by focusing his narrative upon the exposition of an exemplary gentleman, Fielding seeks to appropriate for his new species of writing the authority and prestige of gentility.3 In a sense, the discovery of Joseph's parentage, elevating him from footman to gentleman, corresponds to the elevation of his story from satiric mock-biography to comic fiction. Joseph Andrews seems to imply that, while the heroes of fictional private histories may lack the exalted rank of figures in traditional public histories (kings, queens, generals, and the like), they should be members of the gentry, at least, not footmen or serving girls. The term "gentleman," however, was highly unstable in the eighteenth century and could be used in a variety of senses: as a general term of distinction (based on birth) from the commonalty; as the title of someone with the right to bear arms; as the honorific of someone whose income did not derive from physical labor, or whose income depended on land rather than trade; or...