Fielding's "Amelia": Dramatic and Authorial Narration

Fielding's "Amelia": Dramatic and Authorial NarrationAuthor(s): Anthony J. HassallSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 225-233Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345280 .

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Fielding's Amelia: Dramatic and Authorial Narration

ANTHONY J. HASSALL

Discussions of Amelia have customarily begun by comparing it with Tom Jones and by addressing the two major critical issues which the comparison reveals. These are the new approaches to the art of novel-writing which is apparent in the later novel, and the marked falling off in artistic achievement after the triumph of Tom Jones. Strong thematic links remain, Amelia having always been considered a post-marital sequel to Tom Jones;' but there are striking differences in authorial stance and tone which in large part account for the puzzlement of readers who expected Fielding to produce another Tom Jones. They found the droll, ironic detachment of the comic epics lighting up Amelia only intermittently. In its place, for much of the novel, is a sombre social commitment. A new and strident didacti- cism appears alongside the old comic tolerance and threatens to engulf it. Indeed an almost schizophrenic split develops between the artist and the moralist as they alternately assume control of the author.

The traditional, biographical explanation-that Fielding had been changed in some fundamental way by illness and by his experience as a magistrate-does not satisfactorily account for this new kind of writing in what Fielding hoped would be his masterpiece. "When he wrote Amelia," according to Ernest A. Baker, "Fielding's view of life had been, if not enlarged, at any rate deepened and darkened by several years experience of a magistrate's work in London ... he was now a sadder and, as he believed, a wiser man."2 Yet only three years separated the publication of Fielding's last two novels, and when he was commissioned as a justice of the peace Fielding was forty-one years old, hardly an impressionable age, particularly for a man who had never been much burdened with illusions about his fellow-man, who had mixed freely with all classes, and who had been attacked throughout his career for writing of "low" characters and subjects. If further evidence were needed to refute the suggestion that Fielding's vision had

1 See, e.g., Maurice Johnson, Fielding's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961),

p. 156.

2 The History of the English Novel (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), IV, 155. Cf. Aurelien Digeon: "His contact as a magistrate with the daily realities of crime seems, little by little, to have made Fielding under- stand the practical usefulness of that bourgeois morality at which he used to scoff. Rabelais and Aris-

tophanes now seem dangerous; as a judge, charged with the defence of public morality, he would consign their works to the hangman. And thus bit by bit the magistrate in him was killing the artist." The Novels

of Fielding (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1925), P. 221. See also Middleton Murry, Unprofessional Essays (London: Cape, 1956), p. 45.



NOVEL SPRING 1972

darkened before the writing of Amelia, it might be pointed out that quite early in his theatrical career, many years before he became an official custodian of public morality, he had turned from the hilarious and irreverent success of The Author's Farce and The Tragedy of Tragedies to the unpopular moral acerbity of The Modern Husband and The Universal Gallant, a change of direction that bears many similarities to that which produced Amelia after Tom Jones.3 There is no need to suggest that the Fielding of Amelia had "gone soft" from sitting on the bench.4

But Amelia remains different from the comic epics: an unbridgeable gap has opened up between the poles of Fielding's ambiguous vision. In Tom Jones the author's irony had sent a spark of laughter between these poles, creating an arc of light, a comic vision. Amelia, however, is "so naked-so unprotected by the ironic intellect that held Tom Jones in line,"5 that the functional ambiguity of the earlier novel seems to have degenerated into mere uncertainty. The question of what short-circuited the comic arc of Tom Jones, of what exactly Fielding tried to do in Amelia and of what went wrong, has been much discussed during the recent revival in Fielding studies. The most significant pattern to emerge from these studies is the repeated tendency to see the novel as falling between two stools, as failing to harmonize the contrary elements it contains. Thus John S. Coolidge finds two quite different kinds of characterisation existing side by side in uneasy har- mony;6 Andrew Wright sees Amelia as "a deeply flawed conflation of satire and the novel";7 and Cynthia G. Woolf sees a split between contrary concepts of social welfare and private morality.8 Robert Alter, in perhaps the most thorough- going survey yet of the novel's polarities, discusses in addition to those already mentioned the effect of the growing sensibility cult with its antipathy to the generic explicitness of the novel.9 The present article argues that there is another, crucial pair of extremes between which Amelia alternates, and which underlies all the other sets of unreconciled polarities from which the novel suffers. Amelia is tentative and uncertain on the basic structural level of narrative method: it alternates between authorial and dramatic narration, and in such a way that the two methods inhibit one another. Authorial narration is here understood to mean narration which is presented through and coloured by the fictive personality of the "author," who surrounds and surveys all that takes place in the novel and comments freely upon it. Dramatic narration is understood as narration in which no such "author" is overtly present, the characters speaking for themselves. The

3 The similarity has been noticed by George Sherburn in "Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation," ELH, III

(1936), 3, n.3.

4 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 4. Arthur Sherbo also argues that there was no darkening of Fielding's vision between the two novels in his Studies in the Eighteenth Century English Novel (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1969), pp. 85-103.

6 R. Paulson and T. Lockwood, "Introduction" to Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 15.

6 "Fielding and 'Conservation of Character,'" MP, LVII (1960), 245-259. 7 Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), p. 105. 8 "Fielding's Amelia: Private Virtue and Public Good," TSLL, X (1968), 37-55.

9 Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 166-170.

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ANTHONY J. HASSALLINARRATION IN FIELDING

two methods are difficult to combine, because they engage the reader in different degrees of involvement, and create different intensities of fictional illusion. It is argued that the uncertainty shown by Fielding in his attempted combination of dramatic and authorial narration unsettles the reader of Amelia and disrupts his engagement with the novel, and is therefore one of the major factors contributing to the novel's failure to establish a consistent and authentic tone; a tone which might unite the opposing tendencies of the moralist and the comic artist in Field- ing and recreate what Andrew Wright calls the "perilous balance" of Tom Jones.?0

Throughout his literary career Fielding oscillated between writing dramatically and writing authorially. His plays, naturally, were essentially dramatic; but he did include a remarkable amount of authorial material in a number of them, and these were, significantly, the most successful plays with contemporary audiences and remain the most interesting of his plays today." The novels, on which Field- ing's reputation is based, are essentially authorial; though again it is interesting to note that in all of them Fielding included significant passages of dramatic writing in the form of first person narratives. These include the story of Anna Boleyn in A Journey from This World to the Next, Mrs. Heartfree's adventures in Jonathan Wild, Mr. Wilson's history in Joseph Andrews, the accounts of the Man of the Hill and Mrs. Fitzpatrick in Tom Jones, and the histories of Booth, Miss Matthews and Mrs. Bennet in Amelia. Though there have been some ingenious defences of these incorporated narratives in the novels before Amelia, their value has con- sistently been questioned."2 In none of these novels, however, do the narratives constitute a large part of the total pattern. More importantly, in none of them do they interrupt the central, authorial mode of narration to a major extent. At most they offer a temporary respite from the dominant narrative method. There can be no questioning that Jonathan Wild, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones are authorially narrated novels: in each the presence of the author is firmly established in the opening pages, and the author-reader relationship is fully developed before any dramatic episodes are included; so that when they are included they appear only as interludes and do not challenge this relationship.

In Amelia there is no such establishing of a dominant narrative method either in the introductory chapter or in the subsequent narrative. The novel does begin with an introductory chapter, as readers of Fielding's previous novels might have expected, but the author-reader relationship suggested in this chapter is quite different from that posited in the Bill of Fare chapter of Tom Jones, and, as a consequence, the reader is a little uncertain as to what is expected of him. To begin with there is a change in the announced theme: the "Art of Life" replaces "Human Nature"; instruction replaces observation, the operative stance of "men ought. . ." replaces that of "men are .. . /" and the reader is more likely to fancy

1o Op. cit., p. 47. 11 Fielding's authorial plays are discussed in my article, "The Authorial Dimension in the Plays of Henry

Fielding," Komos, I (1967), 4-18. 12 See I. B. Cauthen Jr., "Fielding's Digressions in Joseph Andrews," College English, XVII (1956), 379-382; A.

Digeon, "Fielding a-t-il ecrit le dernier chapitre de 'A Journey from This World into The Next'?" Revue Anglo-Americaine, VIII (1931), 428-430; Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 193-229; and Manuel Schonhorn, "Fielding's Digressive- Parodic Artistry: Tom Jones and The Man of the Hill," TSLL, X (1968), 207-214.

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NOVEL SPRING 1972

himself in church than in an ordinary. One might have expected that the genial host of Tom Jones would increase his attentiveness to compensate for this in- creased toughness of fare, but in fact the opposite occurs. The first direct address to the reader is magisterial: "But here, reader, before we proceed to the trials of these offenders, we shall, after our usual manner, premise some things which it may be necessary for thee to know" (I, ii)."3 The manner here is brusque, not to say peremptory, and this is typical of the attitude to the reader throughout Amelia. The common epithets of Tom Jones, such as "sagacious" and "good- natured" are much less evident, and when they are used it is without the playful irony of the earlier novel. Quite early in Amelia is the phrase "our squeamish reader" (I, iii) which, while it may in a sense continue the gastronomical image, would hardly have occurred to the considerate host of Tom Jones."4

In keeping with this stance he has adopted, the author of Amelia does not establish any intimacy with his reader in this introductory chapter. His tone is im- personal, reflective, general; there is no irony, no playfulness, and no strong feeling to give the reader a sense of the identity of the author and of his personal relationship with him. The carefully worded, judicious generalities might be anonymous, and addressed to the world at large. The reader of Amelia thus begins the narrative without a strong sense of a dominant and pervasive authorial personality bursting irresistibly from behind the scenes and occupying the centre of the stage. Instead the author hovers about uncertainly, now withdrawn dramatically, now squarely in position between work and reader. And the introductory chapter is a good example of this authorial uncertainty. It wavers between a dramatic opening, in medias res, and a fully authorial introduction. The authorial elements add very little to the reader's instruction or edification, yet they stand between the epic announcing of the theme and the beginning of the action.

The authorial uncertainty continues in the chapters which follow. In the first place there are no further introductory chapters, which means that the author is not given a formal part in the structure of the novel; he nevertheless comments freely in the course of the narrative, and this, as Andrew Wright has pointed out, has the effect of intrusiveness.15 The author frequently interrupts both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, but the introductory essays in these novels give him a firm position from which to view the story and to discuss the art of the novel. There is no art of the novel in Amelia, after the tentative first chapter, and so there is no periodic, rhythmical movement between creation and criticism as there is in Tom Jones, and no consequent balance between the demands made on the reader's critical judgment and those made on his imaginative sympathy. In

13 Quotations are from the Henley edition of Fielding's Works (London, 1903). Subsequent references are included in the text.

14 William B. Coley writes of this change in the author-reader relationship: "the deliberate ironic discrepancy between the assumed identities ('author' and 'reader') and their implied 'real' counterparts (Fielding and his audience) is in Amelia considerably reduced. At the expense, it may be presumed, of comic effect."

"The Background of Fielding's Laughter," ELH, XXVI (1959), 250. The range of reader response is fore- shortened along with the comic effect. A congregation, which attends from a sense of duty, may find the sermon dull, but it will hardly, like the customers of an ordinary, challenge the right to censure, to abuse, and to damn their fare without control.

s16 Op. cit., p. 51.

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Amelia the omission of introductory chapters removes the structural basis for the critical, authorial component of the novel, which prevents the balance between criticism and creation being satisfactorily established. As a result the author, when he does appear, moves into and out of the story in what seems an entirely arbitrary manner.

In addition even this haphazard presence of the author is not made familiar and functional in the early part of the novel. After the introductory chapter there are five chapters, very much in the manner of Tom Jones, containing set piece descriptions like the Hogarthian scenes at Newgate, labelled characters like Con- stable Gotobed, and hypocrites like the Stoic Robinson and the thieving Method- ist Cooper, whose behavior contradicts the principles they announce in a manner entirely typical of the characters encountered on the road in Joseph Andrews. The reader observing the type names here, the authorial analysis of motive, the artful juxtaposition of false profession and true behaviour, and the comic detachment from the squalor of the scene presented, might be forgiven for expecting the mixture much as before in Fielding's fiction. But he is disappointed, for just as the authorial narrative is getting into its stride Miss Matthews is brought on the scene, and though she is introduced with some delightful authorial comedy (I, vi), as soon as she begins her history the method of the novel switches from authorial to dramatic, the author withdraws, and does not reappear until the fourth book. The abrupt change of narrative method so early in the novel, and the later rever- sion to authorial narration in Book IV, serve to disrupt the reader's response, because the two methods make quite different demands upon him. In place of the ironic, incisive and witty manner of the first five chapters he finds the pedes- trian flatness of the recounted histories. Neither Booth nor Miss Matthews is particularly witty or intelligent, and with scrupulous verisimilitude the author keeps their styles of narration as commonplace as their minds. This may lead the critic for whom verisimilitude is the highest of virtues to rejoice; but the reader who has consumed some thousands of hours in reading duly and dully verisimilar novels, and who recalls the brilliance of texture of Tom Jones with special af- fection, may be pardoned for not sharing his enthusiasm. Neither is likely to be pleased with the mixing of styles inimical to one another.

The judgment of character, so crucial in Fielding's fictional world, is also con- fused by the changes in narrative method. In the dramatic section the author offers no overt guidance as to how the reader should evaluate the character and reliability of Miss Matthews and, later, Booth. Miss Matthews emerges as a successful dramatic portrayal, but Booth does not. Her story, and her method of telling it, reveal her as a vain and passionate woman, not much troubled by morality, and yet with the intelligence to be perceptively self-critical at times. Booth's character does not take on the same clarity of outline. Before he begins his history he has not been very precisely judged by the author: he is generous and good-natured enough, as his intervention in the street quarrel indicates, but his encounter with Robinson makes us suspect his wit, and the author casts some doubts on his religious scepticism. He is inclined to theorise about human behaviour, and the reader is led to suspect that his theories do not meet with the

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NOVEL SPRING 1972

author's approval. But later, when Booth makes theoretical comments in the course of his dramatically narrated history, the reader is left without any clear indication of the extent to which they are endorsed by the author. We know that the author is at some considerable distance from Miss Matthews, or later, Mrs. Bennet, as they express their opinions, but what are we to make of comments by Booth like these:

"Pardon me, madam," answered Booth; "I hope you do not agree with Mande- vil neither, who hath represented human nature in a picture of the highest deformity. He hath left out of his system the best passion which the mind can possess, and attempts to derive the effects or energies of that passion from the base impulses of pride or fear. Whereas it is as certain that love exists in the mind of man as that its opposite hatred doth; and the same reasons will equally prove the existence of the one as the existence of the other." (III, v)

"I thought so myself," answered Booth; "and yet I know not, on a more strict examination into the matter, why we should be more surprised to see great- ness of mind discover itself in one degree or rank of life than in another. Love, benevolence, or what you will please to call it, may be the reigning passion in a beggar as well as in a prince; and wherever it is, its energies will be the same." (III, vii)

The absence of authorial comment on such statements leaves the reader uneasy. By this point he senses the moral debility which is Booth's basic fault, and which is partly the result and partly the cause of his theory of the dominant passion. The reader is clearly not expected to take the above statements as wholly true, es- pecially the second which smacks more than the first of Booth's suspect theory.

The fine act of judgement necessary to separate the opinions of the character from those of the author at such points in Booth's history cannot properly be made until much later in the novel, when the norms of the author, and the faults of Booth's thinking have both been clarified. Such a suspension of total judgement is not unusual in novel-reading, particularly in the works of novelists like Joyce and Faulkner which employ circular structures capable of yielding up their true perspectives only on a second reading. But Fielding is not exploiting the potential advantages of this form in Amelia: the reader spends a good deal of interpretative energy on Miss Matthews and Mrs. Bennet, only to see them more or less retire from sight once their first person histories have established them as interesting and complex characters.16 Their virtual disappearance also serves to isolate their

16 There is disagreement about the success of the dramatic histories. A. D. McKillop writes: "Professor Gerould rightly remarks that the flashbacks in Amelia tend to make the story prolix and slow." The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956), p. 142. Rebecca West, on the other hand, considers that: "Amelia begins with a tour de force which has never been surpassed." The Court and the Castle (London: Macmillan & Co., 1958), p. 77; an opinion echoed, less extravagantly, by Robert Alter, op. cit., p. 173. In any case it is apparent that Fielding's combination of authorial and dramatic narration is less sophisticated than that of some subsequent novelists. Faulkner, e.g., combines the methods skilfully in the Snopes trilogy, particularly in The Mansion which, like Amelia, begins and ends with authorial narration, and includes three extended dramatic segments from three different characters. Partly because he is concerned with the degree of truth and partiality in any single view of a series of incidents,

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sections of dramatic narration from the rest of the novel. Yet the characters who remain throughout the novel, like Amelia and Colonel James, are presented in a mainly authorial manner, while Booth, as we have seen, is first presented dramatically and then explained authorially, which has the irritating effect of stating in an obvious manner what the reader has previously been largely forced to de- duce for himself.

The history of Mr. Trent, related towards the end of the novel (XI, iii), has all the characteristic authorial qualities that the earlier histories have abandoned. It is concise and shapely where the others are prolix and amorphous. The style is polished and incisive where the others are "natural" and flat in their expression. Both the storytelling and the commentary are self-conscious and deliberately formed, while in the earlier histories the relation is verisimilar and dramatic. Most significant of all, the author continually points the reader's response to him, instead of leaving him to weigh the impartially presented material for himself. Trent and his wife (and the minor characters) are given no chance to plead their causes but are firmly placed by the author, their motives assigned and condemned, with everything of real relevance interpreted and evaluated by him.

Such occasional reversals to the fully authorial manner of the comic epics serve only to emphasize how far the manner employed in most of Amelia has moved away from the authorial towards the dramatic. This is apparent not only in the extensive and strategically placed use of first person histories, but also in what might be called the dramatised commentary which increasingly substitutes for the author's commentary in the latter part of the novel. This dramatised commentary consists of scenes, usually of altercation, between Dr. Harrison, championing the author's point of view, and various other characters representing false views. Though they have a thematic relevance, these scenes are not closely integrated into the narrative. The discussions of duelling (XI, iii) and politics (XI, ii), and the reading of the letter on adultery at the masquerade (X, ii) are typical. Here Har- rison is acting largely as a spokesman for the author, and he is thus significantly different from the paragon figures of the earlier novels, Adams and Allworthy. Adams, like Harrison, continually finds himself in violent opposition to the ene- mies of the author's values, and in these conflicts he customarily acts in a way which asserts the author's values in word and deed. Yet at the same time he is a simpleton, so that while in a fundamental sense he always acts in accordance with the values to be affirmed, the ironic commentary of the author is still necessary to place him, and to place precisely the extent to which he asserts the total judgment of the acthor. Allworthy is more prudent than Adams, but is much less active in the novel and is off-stage a good part of the time. Again his values are essentially those of the author, but he, like Adams, is an inadequate repre- sentative of all that the author wishes to put forward, and so his presence, like that of Adams, has to be complemented by the authorial commentary.

Harrison is conceived rather differently, though he has obvious similarities to the earlier paragons. For one thing he has much of the intelligence and the ironical

Faulkner makes his mixed method seem functional. In Amelia the changes of method never seem more than arbitrary.

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wit of the author in the earlier novels.'7 He is thus much closer to the author than Adams or Allworthy had been in his ability to amuse the reader verbally while instructing him morally. Adams is amusing enough, but it is his antics and mis- fortunes, not his wit and irony, which cause the reader to laugh. Harrison pre- serves his dignity more successfully, and he wins an intellectual respect from the reader that is not accorded to Adams or Allworthy. Though not without flaws,'8 he can usually be trusted to present the author's values with sufficient authority to allow the author to dispense with any supplementary commentary. The result is a series of scenes of considerable dramatic interest, and a new, more dramatic vehicle for the reflections of the author.

As throughout Amelia, however, the old is retained alongside the new. Overt authorial commentary is used persistently, though its quality is very uneven and much of it is markedly inferior to that of the earlier novels. At the beginning, for example, we find the following account of Justice Thrasher: "if he was ignorant of the laws of England, [he] was yet very well versed in the laws of nature. He perfectly well understood that fundamental principle so strongly laid down in the institutes of the learned Rochefoucault, by which the duty of self-love is so strongly enforced, and every man is taught to consider himself as the centre of gravity, and to attract all things thither. To speak the truth plainly, the justice was never indifferent in a cause but when he could get nothing on either side" (I, ii). This witty and circuitous analysis of the motives of the magistrate, poised with comic buoyancy above the evil it describes, is in the best authorial manner of Tom Jones. But the commentary seldom reaches these heights in the pages which follow. More typical is the comment on Amelia's exemplary behaviour as a mother to her children (IV, ii). After a scene which is self-explanatory, and needs no interpretative comment, the reader is exhorted at length to observe the "excellent example which Amelia here gives to all mothers." The comment concludes with the following unlikely account of the results of the heroine's discipline: "In which she had such success, that not the least marks of pride, envy, malice, or spite discovered itself in any of their little words or deeds." Happy Amelia! But the unfortunate reader is merely irritated by this unnecessary and unbelievable idealising of Amelia and her angelic brood.'9 Even this comment is, however, superior to the dull, perfunctory reflections like: "Thus ended this trifling adven- ture, which some readers will, perhaps, be pleased at seeing related at full length. None, I think, can fail drawing one observation from it, namely, how capable the most insignificant accident is of disturbing human happiness, and of producing the most unexpected and dreadful events. A reflection which may serve to many

17 For a discussion of the similarity between Harrison and the author see Sacks, op. cit., p. 146.

18 He is deceived by the father of the young clergyman who accompanies the party to Vauxhall and later dis- putes with Harrsion (see IX, x and the author's comment on this, X, iv). He is also deceived by James which, he confesses, wounds his vanity a little (IX, v). It is significant that both are failures to penetrate consummate hypocrisy.

19 There is ample evidence to suggest that Fielding had serious doubts about the possibility of improving a bad nature by education. The point is discussed fully by George Sherburn in "Fielding's Social Outlook," PQ, XXXV (1956), 1-23. The thoughtful reader cannot avoid making an ironic comparison between the

scepticism evident elsewhere in Fielding, and the naive optimism of the above comment.

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ANTHONY J. HASSALL|NARRATION IN FIELDING

moral and religious uses" (IV, vii). That the man who wrote Shamela could pen the last sentence without a flicker of irony is more profound food for thought than the tired commonplace it announces.

It is clear then that the formal differences between Amelia and Tom Jones are considerable, and are essentially concerned with the substitution of a more dramatic narrative method for the earlier authorial method. Introductory chapters have been omitted, and a personal author-reader relationship has not really been sought: the first quarter of the novel (when the dominant method is to be established) sees the author almost entirely withdrawn behind his characters: the dramatically narrated histories of Booth, Miss Matthews and Mrs. Bennet have been developed and expanded beyond their counterparts in the earlier novels: and the paragon figure has been made more sophisticated to enable much of what would have been commentary to be rendered in dramatic debate. So far so good. But beside this list we must put another, one which shows how tentative and incom- plete Fielding's innovations were. There is one introductory chapter, muted and brief it is true, but still an awkward reminder of what not to expect in the re- mainder of the novel: though the author is mostly absent from the formative first quarter of the novel, he is very much present, in the old way, in the first five chapters, and he reappears, disconcertingly, at the beginning of Book IV: the new, dramatised characterisation of the first person histories is largely isolated from the rest of the novel by the virtual disappearance of Miss Matthews and Mrs. Bennet once their stories have been told: and the dramatised commentary, effec- tive as it may be, has to stand alongside conventional authorial commentary, much of which is, to say the least, uninspired.

Amelia therefore is not a success. But its failure is not due to the ageing of its author, to his disillusioning experience as a magistrate, or to any consequent darkening of his vision of human life. The failure is an artistic one, due to the choice of an unsatisfactory mixture of narrative methods. It is not suggested that the failure is by any means complete: the novel includes some sound dramatic writing (a new, experimental departure for Fielding, strangely at odds with the view of him as old and embittered); and there is also some excellent writing in the manner of the comic epics. But a considerable part of the novel is dramatic only to the point of emasculating the authorial commentary, and authorial only to the point of explaining what has already been revealed dramatically. Fielding seems to have been unable to commit himself wholly either to telling or to showing. The mas- terly authorial artifice of Tom Jones, Fielding's unique contribution to the evolv- ing novel form, is behind him; the wholly dramatic novel is, one suspects, from the evidence of Amelia and the plays, not his metier at all; and the graceful combination of methods of a Jane Austen is beyond him. In Tom Jones it is the fully elaborated authorial dimension which unites and gives perspective to the dispar- ate elements and techniques, and illuminates them all with comic splendour. In Amelia the authorial component is so reduced that it does not function as a unify- ing force, and there is nothing to replace it. Individual scenes, in one or other of the modes, succeed brilliantly. But they do not cohere into a satisfactory total ap- proach by the author either to his reader or to his material.

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Documents

Fielding's "Amelia": Dramatic and Authorial Narration