Suspicion and Experience in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple

Abstract

Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel, The Adventures of David Simple: Volume the Last, in which his History is Concluded (1753), seem to conform to the orthodox quixote narratives I have described in the previous chapters. While both novels display sympathy with the content of David Simple’s quixotism—his idealistic quest for a “true friend”—and use this idealism to critique the sordid world that surrounds him, neither seems willing to tolerate the practice of quixotism. These texts, that is, reject the practice of viewing the world through presuppositions and demand that one see, as the authorized alternative to this rejected activity, only what is really before one’s eyes. In particular, these novels demonize “suspicion” by showing that suspicious individuals project their own ill-temper on others and thus “make” plots and dangers where none exist. Against such individuals, who allow their imaginations to shape what they see or how they interpret others, David Simple and Volume the Last marshal the quixote trope, implying that knowledge or understanding is possible only if we can shed our prejudices or hypotheses in order to see others as they really are. But this effort, I argue here, encounters severe problems in the novels, which imply, quite to the contrary, not only that we cannot help but view the world through presuppositions but also that we are better off when we do so. Far from dispelling suspicion as an improper practice of quixotism, David Simple seems, in effect, to educate readers into it.KeywordsTrue FriendOpening PageFuture PleasureAncient AuthorityAmatory FictionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.