One Great Family: Domestic Relationships in Samuel Richardson's Novels. Simone Höhn

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СКАЧАТЬ recognizable for contemporary southern England – most of the novel is set in London, Bath and their surroundings –, is organized largely according to the logic of allegory. Duplicity and lies exist, of course, but they are inherently knowable. The same is true, I would argue, for her brother’s more complex novels. Henry Fielding plays with the concept of the ‘reporter-narrator’. He repeats, for example, “the Observation of some antient Sage, whose Name I have forgot”, or records details about his hero Joseph’s diet: “He accordingly eat either a Rabbit or a Fowl, I never could with any tolerable Certainty discover which” (Joseph AndrewsFielding, Henry 29, 59). The narrator’s very uncertainty, however, testifies to the knowability of the world depicted. The “Sage’s” teachings could be looked up in another book, if the reader happened to have a better memory than the narrator, and the details of Joseph’s meal might be found out by a more diligent enquirer. Similarly, there is little inherent mystery about characters’ motivations. In many cases, a character’s main traits are given away by their very name, as in the case of Allworthy or Shamela. Such characters have been said to “belong to […] a moment […] that we might call allegorical, a moment, possibly fictitious, when social role and inner persona were indistinguishable” (RosenRosen, David and Aaron Santesso & Santesso 1046). In some cases, of course, Fielding chooses to obscure or hide a character’s motivations – as he does when withholding the knowledge that Bridget Allworthy is in fact Tom Jones’s mother –, but they are comprehensible when outlined by the narrator. Duplicity, hypocrisy and lack of frankness are thus contained within Fielding’s narrative; the narrator is able to state clearly their cause and limits.

      The same is not true for Richardson’s novels. The cause is less that his protagonists have unconscious motivations while Fielding’s have not; rather, it is that there is no agent within the story that can safely set the limits of allowable equivocation and ‘prudent’ scheming. In epistolary fiction – if not “in all writing”, as William WarnerWarner, William Beatty has suggested – “there is nothing within a text to distinguish a true narrative from its false simulation” (Licensing Entertainment 210). In a novel where each event and every thought are filtered through characters driven by half-conscious desires as well as conscious values, the establishment of an absolute ‘truth’ appears oxymoronic. I am not especially concerned with the ‘real reader’ here, who knows that s/he is safely outside the fiction and can choose, for example, to trust the ‘editor’-author’s preferences for certain characters, or to read the novel against the grain by assuming, say, that Pamela is really ShamelaFielding, Henry. Instead, I ask what happens to the fictional reader-characters when they acknowledge that ‘truth’ can look like a masquerade, and vice versa.

      As Richardson’s characters recognise, events are shaped by their telling. Pamela’s ordeal at the hands of Mr. B. becomes a “pretty Novel” (232) with a power of its own – it is through reading her version of events that the would-be seducer decides to marry her. Even then, however, he fails to understand her whole mind – although he recognises her virtue, he is unable to ‘read’ her love (which Pamela, in turn, only recognises once he sends her away). It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the married Pamela finds the need to conceal her jealousy almost unbearable. Her pain, as well as the negative effect her behaviour has on Mr. B., proves that she is not and never has been a “finish’d hypocrite” (Pamela in her Exalted Condition 402). In contrast, the kind of behaviour which EudosiaHaywood, Eliza assumes is presented as praiseworthy and wise in Grandison, where hypocrisy is a less pressing issue. Significantly, however, the woman who practises it – Lady Grandison, the hero’s mother – is dead by the time the narrative starts; her story is told only in retrospect, almost as an exemplum. Indeed, as Margaret DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne has observed, “as soon as [Richardson] examines a situation closely he begins to query abstract theoretical statement” (A Natural Passion 96). Lady Grandison’s behaviour works because she is not really a ‘character’ at all.

      Pamela, the novel which divided the world into “Pamelists and Antipamelists” (qtd. in KeymerKeymer, Tom, Richardson’s Clarissa 23), is an extreme case. As hinted above, hypocrisy is a less problematic issue in Grandison, which does not entail such a direct challenge to hierarchies of class and gender. Even where less is at stake, however, narration remains self-representation; the writer’s essence – her thoughts, words, and actions rendered in detail – inescapably is also ‘performance’. David RosenRosen, David and Aaron Santesso and Aaron Santesso quote the sociologist Erving Goffman to express the complex interplay of “observation, interiority and behavior”: “[As] performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards [by which they are judged], but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized” (1043; first square bracket in the original). The problem of Richardson the novelist – and of his characters – is that virtuous characters should be most concerned with realizing the standards, rather than with performance. However, when the pursuit of moral standards looks identical to the mere “engineering a convincing impression”, how can true virtue be expressed and recognized? Early in Grandison, Harriet’s uncle Selby comments on the heroine’s claim that she has always tried “‘to keep down any foolish pride’”: “Then you own that pride you have?—Another point gained! Conscience, honest conscience, will now-and-then make you women speak out. But now I think of it, here is vanity in the very humility” (1:28). As Mr. Selby makes clear, Harriet’s seeming attempt to control her emotions may be read equally as an expression of true humility or as uncommonly subtle boasting. Sincerity and masquerade, propriety and hypocrisy, threaten to collapse into each other.1

      There is, however, another and even graver danger: that masquerade is only a guise for what is, in fact, one’s reprehensible essence. When Harriet is drawn into a description of masquerades some time after her abduction, she seems at first preoccupied with the folly of the ‘diversion’. Masquerade is likened to “Bedlam” (1:426), and her own “tinsel dress” is “ridiculous”. Ashamed of herself, Harriet considers what her

      good grandfather [would] have thought, could he have seen his Harriet, the girl whose mind he took pains to form and enlarge, mingling in a habit so preposterously rich and gaudy, with a croud of Satyrs, Harlequins, Scaramouches, Fauns, and Dryads; nay, of Witches and Devils; the graver habits striving which should most disgrace the characters they assumed, and every one endeavouring to be thought the direct contrary of what they appeared to be. (1:427)

      At the beginning of Harriet’s account, outside and inside are out of tune; the problem is that the dress belies the well-regulated mind. As she goes on, the correspondence between habit and “habits” becomes increasingly blurred. If “every one” endeavours “to be thought the direct contrary of what they appeared to be”, how comes it that “the Devils, at least”, were not “charming creatures”, as Charlotte Grandison jokingly suggests (1:427)? The reason is that masquerade is not a simple reversal of truth. Rather, it offers scope for a variety of relations between truth and false appearance – for the (in Harriet’s account) grotesque spectacle of an “enlarged mind” in a “tinsel dress” and “graver habits striving to disgrace the characters they assumed”, as well as for appearances that display the mind. Harlequins openly declare their folly, and devils display their want of principles. The fact that their behaviour is so unpredictable only makes it the more sinister: do they endeavour to be thought the contrary of what their character in the real world is, or, rather, of what their masquerade habit would seem to demand? And if they appear “charming”, does this belie the ‘truth’ of their dress or rather confirm them as seductive Satans?

      Masquerade, then, highlights the deceitfulness of appearance even while giving scope to its exploitation. It is the emblem in negative of Harriet’s own behaviour; she strives to attain that absolute frankness which she will not acknowledge to be unattainable. Something of this indeterminacy is shown also in Mr. B.’s flirtation at the masquerade, where both he and the Countess Dowager dangerously play with a variety of relations to ‘truth’. As Pamela angrily notes, they do not act up to their costume; as a Spanish Don, “the dear Gentleman no more kept to СКАЧАТЬ