The Novel's Progress: Faction, Fiction and Fielding

Tumbleson, Raymond D., Studies in the Novel

History is what you remember, destiny what you desire. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England had to conquer its Catholic heritage to reinvent itself as a Protestant nation. The new identity differed from the old in its conception of England's place in the world; no longer in communion with the continent, it was no longer a part of a common Christendom or the multinational, multilingual abortive Plantagenet empire: the petty England that shared even its own islands with several other states and cultures became the Great Britain that projected fleets and finances across the world. "It was Protestantism which gave modern England its sense of manifest destiny," as Jonathan Clark has noted.(1) The "heroic Protestantism,"(2) in Fredric Jameson's phrase, of seventeenth-century Dissent had a historical logic to explain the reformed religion as precOndition of the revolutionary present, but this insurrectionary logic had to be modified to serve the search for stability by the post-Stuart establishment in church and state. The synthesis of Renaissance form and Reformation content exemplified in Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" proved little more capable of surviving the revolutions of the seventeenth century than the High Church ideal of a cohesively authoritarian church and state. To employ Anthony J. Cascardi's terms to differ with his argument, the novel as it evolved in the eighteenth century represents its culture at once as "discursively heterogeneous and internally divided against itself" and in a way as "essentializing" as Renaissance poetics.(3)

This paper argues that Henry Fielding impresses Protestant anti-Papist religious anxieties into the service of a consolidation of sexual, national, and class divisions in Tom Jones and his propaganda during the Jacobite invasion of 1745, but in opposite ways in the two works. That Fielding was politically active as a writer is not something that could escape critical notice. By and large, however, such criticism has failed adequately to integrate the journalist and the novelist.(4) Because "the Richardsonian model" has been perceived as the central wellspring of domestic fiction, and because the mostly-male critic s analyzing Fielding as a political journalist represent a separate critical circle from the mostly-female critics exploring the sexuality of the early English novel, Fielding's interrelation of national and sexual politics has gone largely overlooked.(5) Brian McCrea reduces the violence of True Patriot 3 to "a call for enlightened self-interest," while Thomas R. Cleary acknowledges that the essay is "crude, 'scare' propaganda," but argues that "A vision of London ravaged by highlanders was not utterly mad on November 19, 1745," and that "Fielding was seldom moved to such stridency."(6) Whereas McCrea dissolves Fielding's highly charged particulars into a generalized defense of "'stated rules of Property,'" Cleary recognizes them, but declares them an insignificant aberration.(7) Similarly, Cleary's hypothesis of "a politicizing revision of the central books" of Tom Jones, while in itself plausible, even probable, operates again to deprecate the extent to which the novel is already political and thus receptive to such revision.(8) The topical references to the Jacobite rebellion fit into Tom Jones with minimal disruptiveness because they merely make more explicit a political framework already implicit. A discourse of religiously defined nationalism connects Fielding's "cultural politics" and sexuality.(9)

Fielding relocates Addison's economic anti-Papist rationale in an emotive basis by identifying property with the family and the totemic figure of the upper-class virgin; Tom Jones suggests only to suppress an alternative narrative of Papist menace that appears vividly in True Patriot 3 as the negation of domesticity.(10) The identification of Popery with Celtic primitivism, familiar from seventeenth-century tracts justifying English imperialism in Ireland, recurs in Fielding's treatment of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 in The True Patriot. The first number is divided into two parts, an introduction of the periodical that opens with the stylish flourish that "Fashion is the great Governor of this World," to which a second section adds "Observations on the Present Rebellion."(11) The latter observes that

The Rebellion is at present so seriously the Concern of every sensible Man, who wishes well to the Religion and Liberties of his Country, and the Zeal which all the different Sects of Protestants have discovered on this Occasion, is so hearty and unanimous, that it would be a lost Labour to endeavour at inflaming the Minds of my Countrymen on this Occasion . . . But let us consider of what Persons this rebellious Rabble consists; and we shall find them to be the savage Inhabitants of Wilds and Mountains, who are almost a distinct Body from the rest of their Country. Some Thousands of them are Outlaws, Robbers, and Cut-throats, who live in a constant State of War, or rather Robbery, with the civilized Part of Scotland. The Estates of this Part have been always pillaged by the Thefts of these Ruffians, by whom they are now openly plundered. (p. 113)

As outspokenly confident as any 1660s royal panegyrist, Fielding asserts that his wealthy and imperial England can dismissively characterize dissent on the periphery as "rebellious Rabble." He constructs England as an aristocratic estate to whose august authority "Outlaws, Robbers, and Cut-throats" sneaking about on the outskirts can pose no serious threat. "[T]he civilized Part of Scotland" are "Fellow-Protestants and Fellow-Sufferers with ourselves" (p. 115): Popery is an intrusion from outside of Whig civilization, not a creed but a stigma of savagery. Protestantism requires adhesion to no belief but in the status quo; the second issue asserts that even "Roman Catholics" themselves may be "less bigotted" or enjoy "Possession of Abby Lands, and of Estates in the Funds," and "There is no Man of Sense, Property, Honour, and Humanity, who can possibly hope to see his Religion introduced by a Banditti of Robbers and Cut-throats, who would certainly make his Country a Scene of Blood and Desolation" (pp. 124-25). Catholics must be watched and disarmed, but, so long as they have Sense, which is Property, which is Honour, which is Humanity, extreme measures are unnecessary, since "the Odds are greatly on our Side" (p. 126).

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Publication information: Article title: The Novel's Progress: Faction, Fiction and Fielding. Contributors: Tumbleson, Raymond D. - Author. Journal title: Studies in the Novel. Volume: 27. Issue: 1 Publication date: Spring 1995. Page number: 12+. © 1999 University of North Texas. COPYRIGHT 1995 Gale Group.

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