Tom Jones and the "Pursuit of True Judgment"

Abstract

If the moral sense in Tom Jones is often felt to be ambiguous, this is perhaps because we do not find it, as we expect, in the action. Take, for instance, Tom's affair with Molly Seagrim. His remorse, prompting him to make amends to her, leads him to find her in bed with Square and then to discover that she had been first seduced by Will Barnes. His generous impulse leads to the knowledge that will release him: ' Jones was become perfectly easy by possession of this secret with regard to Molly (Bk. V, Ch. 6). But this is luck, not morality. His remorse pays dividends, but not because it is remorse. In fact Fielding's plot is amoral, for it centres on Fortune. The moral weight is lifted from the behaviour of the characters, with the unexpected effect at times of sharpening their conscience. At the point when Tom is least to blame he reproaches himself most bitterly. Hearing of his supposed incest he first exclaims against Fortune and then blames himself: ' Fortune will never have done with me till she hath driven me to distraction. But why do I blame Fortune? I am myself the cause of all my misery. All the dreadful mischiefs which have befallen me are the consequences only of my own folly and vice' (Bk. XVIII, Ch. 2). This is absurd. Yet there is a truth in it: he is responsible in an essential way. But this moral discovery cannot be made through the plot as such. It must then, one assumes, be carried by the author's commentary. Thus Ian Watt holds that Fielding's technique was deficient at least in the sense that it was unable to convey this larger moral significance through character and action alone, that Tom Jones ' is only part novel. I This opinion the epic theory of Fielding's own time would have confirmed. Following Aristotle's assertion that the poet is no imitator when he speaks in his own person, le Bossu advises him to find