Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Edited by J. Hawley. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1999) [ISBN 9780140433869].
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Edited by T. Keymer. (Oxford: World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199536986].
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews and Shamela and Related Writings. Edited by H. Goldberg. (New York: Norton, 1987) [ISBN 9780393955552]. Contains selections from writers targeted by Fielding’s satire, some contemporary responses, and a collection of modern critical essays.
Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock. Edited by C. Wall. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 9780333690970]. Contains a broad selection of contemporary texts which supply social, cultural and political backgrounds, together with the two-canto version of The Rape of 1712.
Pope, Alexander Selected Poetry. Edited by P. Rogers. (Oxford: World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199537600].
Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings. Edited by L. Damrosch. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2011)
[ISBN 9780140423501].
Nokes, D. Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Satire. (Brighton: Harvester, 1987) [ISBN 9780710812315].
Pollard, A. Satire. (London: Methuen, 1970) [ISBN 9780416172409].
Baines, P. The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope. (London: Routledge, 2000) [ISBN 9780415202466].
Brown, L. Alexander Pope. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) [ISBN 9780631135036].
Dixon Hunt, J. (ed.) Pope: The Rape of the Lock: a Casebook. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1968) [ISBN 9780333069950].
Erskine-Hill, H. The Life of Alexander Pope. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Critical Biographies, 2012) [ISBN 9780631182634].
Fairer, D. The Poetry of Alexander Pope. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989) [ISBN 9780140771718].
Hammond, B. (ed.) Pope. (Harlow: Longman, 1996) [ISBN 9780582255384].
Knellwolf, C. A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
[ISBN 9780719053337].
Rogers, P. An Introduction to Pope. (London: Methuen, 1975)
[ISBN 9780416784503].
Rogers, P. Essays on Pope. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) [ISBN 9780521026192].
Rousseau, G.S. and P. Rogers (eds.) The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) [ISBN 9780521180856].
Battestin, M.C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews. (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959)
[ISBN 9780819560384].
Mace, N.A. Henry Fielding: Novels and the Classic Tradition. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780874135855].
Nokes, D. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised 1990) [ISBN 9780140772449].
Pagliaro, H. Henry Fielding: A Literary Life. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 9780333633236].
Paulson, R. Fielding: Twentieth Century Views. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962) [ISBN 9780133144925].
Paulson, R. The Life of Henry Fielding. (Oxford: Blackwell Critical Biographies, 2000) [ISBN 9780631191469].
Rawson, C. (ed.) Henry Fielding (1707–1754): Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate: A Double Anniversary Tribute. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780874139310].
Rivero, A.J. (ed.) Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. (New York: Twayne, 1998) [ISBN 9780783800592].
Varey, S. ‘Joseph Andrews’: a Satire of Modern Times. (New York: Twayne, 1990) [ISBN 9780805781373].
Watt, I. The Rise of the Novel. (London: Pimlico, 2000) [ISBN 9780712664271].
Wright, A. Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965) [ISBN 9780520013674].
You may also wish to explore the following websites:
http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~kellerwo/Bibliographies/SwiftandPope.pdf
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/c18/biblio/pope/html (an extensive reading list compiled by Frans De Bruyn)
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_se/personal/pvm/Lock.html (a short article on Pope which has interesting things to say on the use of the couplet and satirical device)
For a broad-based bibliography of eighteenth-century resources, you might like to access the following website:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/index.html
The following chapter has two purposes in view. The first is an exploration of the topic, with a review of some of the definitions and justifications that have been offered in the name of satire. The second is a critical commentary on The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews that is designed, in part, to test some of these general principles.
We have provided a brief catalogue of eighteenth-century pronouncements on the subject of satire by way of establishing a context, and have encouraged you to read other works by the contemporaries of Pope and Fielding. We have also cited some modern observations on satire, and summarised questions that have been asked about the legitimacy and effectiveness of this literary mode.
The second section of the chapter deals with specific matters of authorial ‘attitude’, narrative technique, distinctions of tone and various satiric devices.
We hope that this discussion will help you to see The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews in their literary historical context, and also that it will encourage you to consider the ways in which their ironic commentaries on human frailty allow them to transcend the time and place of their creation.
While the business of satire is central to the two texts cited, it is worth remembering that other subjects for debate might arise in the examination. For our purposes, however, the questions listed at the end of this section have been chosen in order to highlight some of the problems generated by satirical writing, and it might be profitable at this stage to read them through quickly before embarking upon the following discussion.
The writing of satire is not confined to any particular time or literary environment. In tone it can vary from almost prophetic denunciation, through the ribald and grotesque, to the gentlest nudging irony. Furthermore, many texts will contain an element of satire, although we might be chary of denominating the whole work ‘a satire’. Above all, satire is the most protean of topics, constantly shifting its form and techniques. There are satirical novels, poems, plays, prose narratives; hence it is not really, in itself, a ‘genre’. The calibre of its weaponry is multitudinous, so it cannot be limited by being described as a ‘device’. And, as suggested above, its tonal range is considerable. For these reasons of variety, we would recommend the use of the term ‘mode’, if one is needed when discussing satire; a word that, we confess, is marked by its indeterminacy.
Activity
We suggest that you select from your wider reading some examples of the satirical mode that could be set in contrast to or in comparison with The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews. These could come from any source, but this course might include the ebullient sexual innuendo which marks the Wife of Bath’s onslaught on patriarchal tyranny, or the narrator’s sly ironies on a theme of money and class in Austen’s Emma.
Having drawn attention to the ubiquitous nature of the satirical impulse, we now need to identify the particular cultural contexts in which Pope and Fielding were working. The period from 1660 to approximately 1750 was characterised by its satire. It was the world of Dryden, Rochester, Congreve, Swift, Gay and Johnson. And always in the background stand the Roman models of Juvenal and Horace to whom these neo-classical authors pay constant deference: one writing in tones of almost tragic invective, the other adopting an attitude of smiling irony. To use the critical vocabulary current in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, they were perfect examples of ‘railing’ and ‘raillery’.
At the end of the seventeenth century, in his essay A Discourse Concerning Satire (1693), John Dryden had warned satirists against character assassination. The ‘lampoon’, he says, ‘is a dangerous sort of weapon, and for the most part unlawful’. His concern is for ‘the reputation of other men’, and he is also at pains to discriminate between crude abuse and a technique which employs more subtle ironies:
There is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place.
Activity
You should read The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews with these distinctions in mind, assessing the ‘tone’ of the satire, both in terms of differences between the texts, and in terms of contrasting modulations within each work. Is it possible to gauge the type of laughter being invited? How does ridicule affect our perspective of the apparent target?
Half a century after the Discourse, Dryden’s words are echoed by Dr Johnson in his Dictionary where he describes satire as a species of writing:
[…] in which wickedness and folly are censured. Proper satire is distinguished by the generality of the reflections, from a lampoon which is aimed against a particular person; but they are too frequently confounded.
There is clearly some anxiety over the legitimacy of personal vendetta masquerading beneath the cloak of public welfare. Some years earlier, in Dialogue II of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Pope had also felt the need to offer the world a satirist’s manifesto:
Ask you what provocation I have had?
The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad.
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
The Affront is mine, my friend, and should be yours.
A little further on, he describes satire as a ‘sacred weapon’, and in a slightly sanctimonious tone declares:
Rev’rent I touch thee! but with honest zeal,
To rouse the Watchmen of the public weal.
This brief survey has been designed to highlight the eighteenth century’s serious evaluation of the satirist’s art. In the context of mass media, satire can often appear ephemeral and gratuitous, but, even if the public pronouncements of eighteenth-century writers can occasionally sound a little unctuous, the satirists’ commitment to the rehabilitating power of laughter is worthy consideration.
When Pope was approached to write a poem to reconcile two warring Catholic families, he found himself in a position ideally suited to create and sustain that detachment he claimed to be so necessary to satire. Although he was doubtless aware of the characters involved (Arabella Fermour and Lord Petre), he was not intimate with their world of youthful socialites, and so had no personal axe to grind. What he had to hand was a fable of callow indiscretion and foolishness rather than a narrative of vicious or corrupt behaviour. From these ingredients he would construct an intricately wrought fiction, buoyed up by the delicacy of its irony and the richness of its ambiguities.
This is the epitome of Horatian ‘raillery’, and rarely does it strike a discordant note. Only when the submerged image of Belinda’s sexuality moves close to the surface, do we sense a reality that threatens the fragile bounds of ‘fancy’s maze’ (Epistle to Arbuthnot, 340). Yet even the heavily Freudian symbolism of the Cave of Spleen (Canto IV, 49–54) and the overt puns upon ‘dying’/orgasm (Canto V, 78) are happily contained within this miniature universe of Ovidian transformations. Whatever insignificant part Arabella and Lord Petre had to play in history, their alter egos, Belinda and the Baron, are translated to mythic status in Pope’s ‘heroi-comical’ poem. We will return to the subject of Pope’s ‘gentle’ irony and his treatment of his heroine.
Activity
By way of contrast, we recommend that you read one or two of Swift’s burlesque poems on urban nymphs: for instance, ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ or ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’. The corrosive tone of these poems will provide an excellent foil to Pope’s treatment of his own parodic pastoral world in The Rape of the Lock.
Pope’s furore in a teacup is topical, but the personalities are metamorphosed by the satirist’s art into ‘types’. The narrator looks on with wry good humour: he is familiar with the social rituals, but stands apart. Fielding’s position in Joseph Andrews is similar, but there are shifts of emphasis. His narrator, it could be claimed, is a fictional version of himself, and he is at pains in the author’s Preface to disclaim any particularity of target. He has, he says, been careful to ‘obscure’ those models that he has taken from life, and his personal motives are blameless:
And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse anyone.
Later in the novel (Book III, Chapter I) he will affirm this generalising tendency:
To prevent, therefore, any such malicious applications (i.e. the recognising of certain ‘characters’), I declare here, once for all, I describe not men but manners; not an individual but a species.
This seems to be a justified claim, as Fielding’s satirical cameos are aimed at representatives rather than historical figures. Nevertheless, there are exceptions and, even in the first chapter, he happily pillories Colly Cibber by name and sets out to ridicule the novelist Samuel Richardson through his heroine Pamela, as he had already attempted in his parody Shamela.
The exact nature of the relationship between you, the reader, and the teller of Fielding’s tale is worth considering. His early address to ‘my good-natured reader’ is disarming and suggests that cordial relations are being established. He has much to say through his prefatory essays and his commentaries on diverse subjects. In fact, as a ‘character’, we probably know much more about the narrator than any other figure in the novel. It is the discourse of the coffee-house; informed, witty, perhaps even ironic at our expense, but always amiable. He will ‘teach’ us, but always delightfully, and the laughter is, as he says, always a ‘wholesome physic for the mind’ to ‘purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections’.
Activity
Extract material from those sections where the narrator engages in direct discourse with the reader. Make an attempt to ‘characterise’ the way in which he presents himself, and assess the methods he uses to ‘educate’ us in terms of the moral landscapes that he paints.
The activity described above is fairly straightforward: this would be less so were it attempted in The Rape of the Lock. Here, the narrator convinces us of the authority of his opinions, primarily by the masterly control of irony and its capacity to expose the frailties of his ‘actors’. We are at once aware of his controlling intelligence, but also of the absence of any specific personality.
Like Pope, Fielding is dealing with the world of the ridiculous. In Joseph Andrews he does not concern himself with ‘the blackest villainies’, with corruption or human misery, because such distressing topics are too serious to be mocked. However, the vanities and hypocrisies that lead to affectation surely are the legitimate targets of a comic novelist’s irony:
Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous.
(Author’s Preface)
Comedy has always been a little fastidious in dealing with vicious behaviour, preferring to ‘sport with human follies, not with crimes’ (Ben Jonson, Prologue to Everyman in His Humour). Joseph Andrews might be described as a comic novel with a decidedly satirical flavour, and although not a very precise definition, it is intended that it should draw attention to the reconciliatory nature of the humour. Human frailty is ridiculed, but it is a laughter that aims to rehabilitate, even celebrate.
Activity
Study the final chapters of Joseph Andrews, assessing the ways in which various comic scenes drive the narrative towards the conventional closure of comedy’s happy ending.
The Rape of the Lock shares many of these ambitions: it is an amiable and forgiving satire. But it is worth pointing out that satire will often explore darker landscapes, articulating an indignation at varieties of depravity and perversity that lie outside the experience of the two works under consideration. Examples can be had in the four voyages of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, or in the poems of the seventeenth-century satirist, Lord Rochester.
Both authors leave their readers in no doubt as to what to expect. Pope’s ‘sub-title’ is An Heroi-Comical Poem, while Fielding’s ‘Author’s Preface’ gives a lengthy description of what he calls ‘a comic epic poem in prose’. The mock-heroic manner was already well established in the poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, although it was new to the novel. Better still, it was a satirical technique that had a sound classical pedigree. The essence of this device is incongruity: it involves an ironic conjunction of entirely antithetical worlds. Thus, in the title of Pope’s poem, the pattern is established: on the one hand a rape, on the other a lock of hair. It is tempting to suggest that just such a contradictory marriage exists in Joseph Andrews: the given name, after all, has its provenance in a fable of religious analogy (Joseph and Abraham Adams), while the surname burlesques Richardson’s popular heroine Pamela Andrews. In each case the serious and the trivial are yoked together with ironic inappropriateness.
Activity
Read the first sentence of The Rape of the Lock and the first chapter of Joseph Andrews and put them to the test regarding this idea of contrast and incongruity. Even the grammatical structure of Pope’s couplet parodies a convention – the clue to this can be found by reading the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid.
As the reference to the Aeneid suggests, classical epic literature is one of the primary sources of parodic material – although it was by no means limited to works from Greece and Rome.
In Joseph Andrews the texture of epic allusions is much less organised than it is in The Rape of the Lock. It may be that part of Fielding’s intention in coining the phrase ‘comic epic poem in prose’ was to give this new foundling genre a respectable paternity, something he felt it singularly lacked in the hands of Defoe and Richardson. The narrative is punctuated with references to classical culture that provide an ironic foil for the knockabout comedy of Joseph’s and Adams’s odyssey through the inns and bedrooms of eighteenth-century England. From time to time, an heroic echo is developed at greater length, as for instance the ‘epic simile’ applied to the slatternly, sexually rapacious Mrs Slipslop:
As when a hungry tigress, who long has traversed the woods in fruitless search, sees within the reach of her claws a lamb, she prepares to leap on her prey; or as a voracious pike, of immense size, surveys through the liquid element a roach or gudgeon, which cannot escape her jaws, opens them wide to swallow the little fish; so did Mrs. Slipslop prepare to lay her violent amorous hands on poor Joseph…
(I, vi)
In the author’s Preface, Fielding insists that it is not his plan to ‘exhibit monsters’, but his concession to the burlesque will lie in the diction, for, as he says:
many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those parodies or burlesque imitations are chiefly calculated.
Fielding has laid out his stall and targeted his audience.
Activity
Have a look at the ‘surprising and bloody adventures’ of Book III, Chapter ix: especially the closing paragraphs. Put together an analysis of how the mock-heroic appears to be working, and then collect other examples from the narrative that exhibit similar ironic strategies.
Fielding’s reference to ‘battles’ also reminds us that violence is a common ingredient of epic literature. Yet once translated into a comic context, such violence loses its destructive power. In Fielding’s satirical episodes, it takes on an altogether different tenor. In the famous ‘good Samaritan’ incident, Joseph has a gun held to his head with a threat to ‘blow [his] brains to the devil’, he is pistol-whipped, beaten with cudgels, stripped naked and left for dead in a ditch. Yet it is rather like watching a cartoon. We do not fear for Joseph, he being our hero, and the physical effects of his battering quickly fade from sight. The scene is an exemplum, set up to satirise the heartless self-interest among the passengers on the coach, and to recommend, by contrast, the true Christian charity of the poor postillion. Parson Adams is also much associated with an ebullient violence. For a Christian pastor, he is remarkably ready to engage in fist-fights, yet in a paradoxical way his unwillingness to turn the other cheek becomes a sign of approval. Here is a man of spontaneous, sincere feelings who will not compromise in the name of prudence. Furthermore, his battles are usually couched in those mock-heroic or slightly farcical terms that draw the sting of his bruising encounters.
Violence also forms part of the fabric of The Rape of the Lock, as the title might suggest. But in this work it has been even further sublimated into symbolic patterns of engagement. The world of Homeric epic is grandiose, masculine and martial: men, tribes and nations fight for honour and survival, variously aided and frustrated by cohorts of whimsical if not actively malicious deities. In the salons of Whitehall and Hampton Court all has been miniaturised and ‘feminised’. Powerful gods and goddesses have metamorphosed into delicate, beautiful, but largely ineffectual sylphs. The terrifying vistas of the Underworld have diminished to phantasmagoric images of Belinda’s unconscious sexuality (Canto IV). A call to arms is not echoed by the neighing of horses and the screams of dying men, but:
Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack.
(Canto V, 40)
Activity
Preparations for battle and mock conflicts abound. You should collect these episodes and analyse the ways in which Pope exploits the ironic distance that exists between the event and the diction and imagery used to describe it. Remembering what was said about classical literature not being the only source of epic material, read and research Ariel’s address to his troops and the threatened punishments for those derelict in their duty (Canto II, 73–136) – and try to identify the model.
We would like to deal with two episodes: first because they represent conventional motifs from heroic contexts, and second because they raise the question of Pope’s attitude both to his heroine/victim and to the social environment she inhabits.
At the end of Canto I and the beginning of Canto II, we see Belinda preparing to launch herself upon the world. As she sits before the dressing table she ‘arms’ herself for the fight: cosmetics are her weaponry, and men are the ‘enemy’. But already the term ‘enemy’ is loaded with ambiguity, as will be demonstrated later when, in the midst of a symbolic battle, we come upon the Baron, ‘who sought no more than on his foe to die’ (Canto V, 78). A strange ambition for a soldier we might think, until we recall that ‘dying’ is a euphemism for orgasm.
In Belinda’s case, the traditional arming of the hero(ine) is undermined with irony, most of it aimed at the extraordinary vanity of the woman as she worships her own image in the mirror. And this frailty is given an extra complexity by its being linked to an implied moral confusion – note how ‘Bibles’ (ornate and decorative?) are alliteratively tied to ‘billet-doux’ (love-letters). And yet Pope’s irony is never corrosive – it certainly makes no attempt to exploit female cosmetics as a camouflage for inner corruption in the way that Swift does in the poems we cited above. If anything, their application is seen as an art that enhances a very real beauty. A similar duality of response is being encouraged as Canto II opens. The images seem designed to call up memories of Cleopatra as she sailed down the river Cydnus and captured Antony’s heart (see Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.190–204). And yet the scene, again, is fraught with irony. Her self-obsession is being gently mocked by Pope, yet at the same time he is forced to acknowledge the powerful charm of that feminine mystique. Her charm is celebrated in the richness of the poetry: her vanity is ridiculed by some subtle ironic manoeuvring.
Activity
Read this passage carefully and try to ascertain the ways in which Pope manipulates our responses. Pay particular attention to the sensuousness of the imagery associated with Belinda (‘India’s glowing gems’, ivory and tortoiseshell, etc.). What effect does it create?
Our last example is taken from Canto III, 101–124, where Pope paints a luxurious scene of coffee drinking. In the heroic scheme of things we are invited to remember all those sacramental feasts that preceded the impending military onslaught. They were serious rituals of masculine bonding and honourable commitment to the sacrifice to come. Images of this sort hover in the background, while in the foreground the idle rich of London’s polite society engage in a trivial pastime. Every detail highlights an existence of self-indulgence and conspicuous wealth: the expensive coffee, the fine china, the fashionably lacquered Japanese furniture. Pope ironises this somnambulant gathering with a few delicate barbs.
However, as was the case with Belinda’s toilette, there is a richness in his description that prompts a different response. All these finely-wrought artefacts are beautiful, sensuous and enhancing. They are the products of a sophisticated society, and Pope seems concerned that we should be able to enjoy what they offer.
Activity
Read through the poem attempting to identify scenes where you feel that similar ambivalences exist and where it is possible to experience both the satirist’s irony and his willingness to celebrate.
We will close with two statements from academic critics that, in a way, are re-statements of old orthodoxies:
You should test these observations against your experience of reading The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews.
By the end of this chapter and having read both the essential texts and the associated recommended critical reading, you should be able to: