Reading: 18th C and Narrative Voice
I realized from an early age that rereading meant the book would change. One knew what would happen, so the surprise was gone, but if one could anticipate favorite scenes, savoring set in.
What I had to discover as I got older and started reaching for books of previous centuries, was that surprise was not always about plot. About twenty years ago I’d just finished a protracted stint of 18th C writers, and happened to pick up Pride and Prejudice. Now, I’d been rereading P&P for years. But this time I was able to perceive, however dimly, how exhilarating that novel must have been for contemporary readers, with its new style, new approach to structure and to character.
The same goes for Richardson’s Pamela. Nowadays few read it outside of school, and for the average eighteen year old yawning through an Intro to Lit course, this story of the maid who protects her virtue despite various attempts against it until she is rewarded with love, position, wealth, and respect, seems really silly. One might even wonder why the heck it was so popular a best seller as to propel its author to the front ranks of 1740s fictioneering.
Well, part of the answer lies in the plot-instead of writing about a protagonist in high life, Richardson chose a working girl from a humble background. She’s a housemaid. There were a whole lot of people of ordinary walks of life who really liked this story of a humble girl making good. But for the more sophisticated readers, it’s the narrative voice that was so stunning. The accepted frame of novels had been the narrator writing after the fact, and though there were epistolary novels aplenty, they too largely affected that flat distance. Richardson’s novel engaged successfully with immediacy--Pamela and the rest desperately writing letters within minutes after the exciting events they relate.
Exciting as it was, the novel also opened Richardson up to parody: at one point in Fielding’s Shamela the eponymous heroine notes in one of her desperate letters that there are three people in a bed, and two of them are shamming sleep so they can scribble their latest adventures. It’s not just the unlikelihood of someone busy journalizing her life adventures as they happen (as well as everyone else concerned with those adventures) there is also the matter of the doubtful morality. Especially after reading Misia’s notes about her virginity book, the modern reader might snicker at the obviousness of Pamela preserving her virtue for the highest bidder. She trades that virginity for ring, title, and wealth. Not a bad bargain; even her constantly upheld religious convictions don’t hold up under a close scrutiny.
But it’s not Shamela that I grabbed yesterday, when I was overheated, headachy, inundated with other people’s chores, and in the mood for some rollicking bawd. Fielding actually suppressed Shamela after two quick editions (the second with fast emendations to poke at some political developments of the time) it was Joseph Andrews, the companion volume Fielding wrote, that I looked into. This novel concerns Pamela’s brother, who is a good-looking young man taken in as a footman, and who wishes to preserve his virtue, despite the strenuous efforts of the various women of his acquaintaince, from the lady who employs him down to her own servants, to get him into bed. After a long, extremely funny scene of hinting around, and Joseph being steadfast in his refusal to take the hints, Lady Booby cries out, “Did ever Mortal hear of a Man’s Virtue?”
Fielding goes on to stick his quill into the complacent, civilized, and practiced corruption of the government of the time, the selfish attitudes of people toward those in want, and he makes a lot of really nasty jibes against the actor Colley Cibber, whose recent autobiography had not just dismissed Fielding with one condescending reference, but apparently is most disingenuous in its self-aggrandizement.
I love eighteenth century novels for their bawdy freedom, their slapstick action trading off with wit. Few are written in stylish prose, they are bumpy and jerky in construction as their authors, writing fast, explored the possibilities of narration, plot, character, and voice, but I find them endlessly entertaining, chock-full of real life detail that the more refined writers of the 19th century draw the veil of delicacy over, but which are most enlightening to us. The plots creak with cliché, but everything else can take one by delighted surprise.
What I had to discover as I got older and started reaching for books of previous centuries, was that surprise was not always about plot. About twenty years ago I’d just finished a protracted stint of 18th C writers, and happened to pick up Pride and Prejudice. Now, I’d been rereading P&P for years. But this time I was able to perceive, however dimly, how exhilarating that novel must have been for contemporary readers, with its new style, new approach to structure and to character.
The same goes for Richardson’s Pamela. Nowadays few read it outside of school, and for the average eighteen year old yawning through an Intro to Lit course, this story of the maid who protects her virtue despite various attempts against it until she is rewarded with love, position, wealth, and respect, seems really silly. One might even wonder why the heck it was so popular a best seller as to propel its author to the front ranks of 1740s fictioneering.
Well, part of the answer lies in the plot-instead of writing about a protagonist in high life, Richardson chose a working girl from a humble background. She’s a housemaid. There were a whole lot of people of ordinary walks of life who really liked this story of a humble girl making good. But for the more sophisticated readers, it’s the narrative voice that was so stunning. The accepted frame of novels had been the narrator writing after the fact, and though there were epistolary novels aplenty, they too largely affected that flat distance. Richardson’s novel engaged successfully with immediacy--Pamela and the rest desperately writing letters within minutes after the exciting events they relate.
Exciting as it was, the novel also opened Richardson up to parody: at one point in Fielding’s Shamela the eponymous heroine notes in one of her desperate letters that there are three people in a bed, and two of them are shamming sleep so they can scribble their latest adventures. It’s not just the unlikelihood of someone busy journalizing her life adventures as they happen (as well as everyone else concerned with those adventures) there is also the matter of the doubtful morality. Especially after reading Misia’s notes about her virginity book, the modern reader might snicker at the obviousness of Pamela preserving her virtue for the highest bidder. She trades that virginity for ring, title, and wealth. Not a bad bargain; even her constantly upheld religious convictions don’t hold up under a close scrutiny.
But it’s not Shamela that I grabbed yesterday, when I was overheated, headachy, inundated with other people’s chores, and in the mood for some rollicking bawd. Fielding actually suppressed Shamela after two quick editions (the second with fast emendations to poke at some political developments of the time) it was Joseph Andrews, the companion volume Fielding wrote, that I looked into. This novel concerns Pamela’s brother, who is a good-looking young man taken in as a footman, and who wishes to preserve his virtue, despite the strenuous efforts of the various women of his acquaintaince, from the lady who employs him down to her own servants, to get him into bed. After a long, extremely funny scene of hinting around, and Joseph being steadfast in his refusal to take the hints, Lady Booby cries out, “Did ever Mortal hear of a Man’s Virtue?”
Fielding goes on to stick his quill into the complacent, civilized, and practiced corruption of the government of the time, the selfish attitudes of people toward those in want, and he makes a lot of really nasty jibes against the actor Colley Cibber, whose recent autobiography had not just dismissed Fielding with one condescending reference, but apparently is most disingenuous in its self-aggrandizement.
I love eighteenth century novels for their bawdy freedom, their slapstick action trading off with wit. Few are written in stylish prose, they are bumpy and jerky in construction as their authors, writing fast, explored the possibilities of narration, plot, character, and voice, but I find them endlessly entertaining, chock-full of real life detail that the more refined writers of the 19th century draw the veil of delicacy over, but which are most enlightening to us. The plots creak with cliché, but everything else can take one by delighted surprise.