In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

David Simple and the Attenuation of "Phallic Power"Alexander Pettit This essay examines the male protagonist unmotivated by phallic desire , with particular attention to ways in which he challenges critical assumptions about genre, gender, and the ideology of plot. The works on which I focus are Sarah Fielding's TheAdventures ofDavid Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). My claim is that by refusing to regard plot as a series of enactments of, or responses to, masculine erotic desire, Fielding argues against the rote phallocentrism intrinsic to comedy and the novel generally and to comic closure in the novel specifically. Fielding's position is profoundly feminist, but it is not in the least optimistic . Perhaps intentionally, but in any case meaningfully, Fielding's attempt to scramble the gendered codes of comedy falls apart when the novel's malevolent characters destroy David and co-opt the social and economic benefits characteristic ofcomic closure. Not only is David unable to transcend generic habit, but he and his family are crushed by its parodie recrudescence . Fielding's two works and a few contemporaneous novels that I note in passing suggest that what Patricia Meyer Spacks calls midcentury plots of "phallic power" are susceptible to principled attempts at attenuation but not, perhaps, finally to subversion.1 1 See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 6-7 and 55-84. And see note 7, below. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 170 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION It is by now uncontroversial to regard closure in the novel as an affirmation ofthe fantasies of phallocentric culture. If this supposition is true (and generally it is), then it seems fair to regard deviations from this schema as threats to those fantasies and to the culture that promotes them. Fielding 's "deviation" is her attempt to represent the protagonist as a friend, a husband, and a father rather than a suitor. Fielding values masculinity positively not because her protagonist trips blithely from quest to conquest to conjugation, but because he operates in unsexed environments of social , specifically familial, behaviour. In this way, Fielding complicates the durable comic convention in which terminal marriage validates materially the protagonist's moral progress and signals his worthiness for a life of bourgeois domesticity by declaring him free of the love-seeking complications that have constituted plot. David Simple, as Fielding announces on her title-page, is looking for a "real friend" rather than a wife. And although Fielding declares in Volume the Last that her character's "Search in thatrespect was happily ended,"2the sequel finds Simple strugglingto make sense of a fund of incoherent data about friendship—about life, really— in a way that distinguishes him from comedy's confident initiates into the social mainstream. Disconcertingly, closure in Fielding's novel declares companionate marriage inadequate to the demands of genre—twice. By the end of the 1744 work, Simple has found a wife (and two other friends), but not a solution to the problems of venality and so forth adumbrated in the novel's opening sections. The novel ends as comic novels end, in marriage. But closure here does not do what comic closure generally does: reassert communal order along familiar and desirable erotic and economic lines. For nine years, that is, Fielding invited her readers to regard David Simple as a troubling para-comedy, not, as her brother Henry would have it, as a "comic Epic Poem" confidently rendered in prose.3 Volume the Last completes the process of generic dismantling when it closes with the two central families quashed by their enemies. In neither work is Simple's problem sexual, metonymically or ontologically, as, say, Tom Jones's is. So it cannot be resolved by the generic conventions most basic to eighteenth-century fiction. Rather, the uniformitarian tendencies ofcomedy rout those characters who have been willing but unable to effect comedy's goals. All this suggests a state ofaffairs that a more self-serious critic might call a "generic crisis." The anti-phallic male threatened the novel's narrative stability at a time when the novel was internalizing the formal...

pdf

Share