"Willing Victims"?: Disavowed Consent and Formal Deviance in Fielding's Amelia

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that Henry Fielding's final novel, Amelia (1751), challenges a prevailing model of consent, a model based on presupposing harmony of will. Amelia reveals the degree to which notions of single-minded "formal Persons" are both legal fictions and narratological distortions upon which law and novels in general frequently depend. Sexual encounters retroactively disavowed as non-consensual abound in Amelia. The essay both builds upon and questions previous interpretations of Amelia. Some scholars characterize the novel's domestic sphere as a sanctuary from the danger that proliferates in the public realm; others analyze the novel's sexual episodes separately from non-sexual instances of consent. By contrast, the essay shows that character face and foment risk in both the public and the private spheres, and that the sexual and non-sexual scenes mutually reinforce each other, reiterating the instability and enigmatic nature of volition. Fielding's complex novel encourages skepticism towards treating even verified instances of consent as reliable indicators of the entirety and future direction of an individual's desires and intentions. The novel enacts dynamic flux at two levels—form (the narrative's recurrent genre-shifting between mock epic, so-called "social protest" novel, romance, novel of sensibility, and more) and content (the ever-changing status of consent). Readers are thus compelled to experience continual, sometimes abrupt change in a manner that parallels the characters' own tumult. The novel embodies what it imparts; that is, its disjointed form reflects its understanding of persons as changeable and self-contradictory.