Fielding's Novel of Atonement: Confessional Form in Amelia

Fielding's Novel of Atonement: Confessional Form in Amelia George E. Haggerty Fielding's last novel has long been read as a complex attempt both to expand the range of his social analysis and to articulate a reading of human experience that places emphasis on the depth of personal emotion.1 Fielding does this by weaving into his narrative elements of his own experience, so that the novel abounds in allusions to his first marriage and other details of his private life. Fielding's cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu asserted to Lady Bute that in Amelia Fielding "has given a true picture of himselfe and his first Wife in the Characters of Mr. and Mrs. Booth ... and I am persuaded several of the Incidents he mentions are real matters of Fact."2 As Morris Golden says, "Amelia constitutes a private retrospection and apologia for Fielding's marriage 1 Recent accounts of Amelia have moved beyond the formal and biographical. See, for instance, Nicholas Hudson, "Signs, Interpretation, and the Collapse ofMeaning in Tom Jones and Amelia," English Studies in Canada 16 (1990), 1-34; Brian McCrea, "Politics and Narrative Technique in Fielding's Amelia," Journal ofNarrative Technique 13 (1983), 131—40; James Thompson, "Patterns of Property and Possession in Fielding's Fiction," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3 (1990), 21-42; Mona Scheuermann, "Man Not Providence: Fielding's Amelia as a Novel of Social Criticism ," Forumfor Modern Language Studies 20 (1984), 106-23; and the important sections on Amelia in Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Camivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 177-252; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture ofMind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 180-96; and John Zomchick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 130-53. 2 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 3:66. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 3, April 1996 384 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and life with Charlotte Cradock."3 It is tempting to accept the suggestion that "Fielding conceived Booth in his own image" and that he wrote Amelia at least in part to atone for the miserable life that he and his adoring Charlotte shared.4 For the novel so abounds in images of confession and in appeals for atonement that, without such clear hints of autobiographical context, one would have to be imagined. Fielding's seeming desire to weave social commentary into a serious analysis of personal relations is evident in his early comedies and in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones as well. Early plays such as Rape Upon Rape (1730) and The Modern Husband (1732) suggest that Fielding understood comedy to include serious social commentary. As Martin C. Battestin notes in his biography of Fielding, "Fielding's new species of comedy differed from what had gone before in two essential respects: its manner was more earnest, its subject more daring."3 Fielding thought of these works as "heroic" comedies, as Battestin points out, and he felt that with them he was breaking new ground as a comic dramatist.6 Both works are intriguing attempts to re-examine the stock situations of Restoration comedy, such as rape, adultery, and libertinism, from the point of view of their social as well as personal consequences. In doing so, they anticipate the concern of Fielding's prose fiction, where no transgression remains unexamined. The Modern Husband, in particular, opens a series of questions that anticipate the serious comedy of Amelia. This play tells the story of a man who conspires in the adultery of his wife so that he may enjoy the financial benefits of her aristocratic paramour's generosity . Battestin puts this succinctly: "In The Modern Husband, though the mutual complicity of Mr. and Mrs. Modern in her lucrative affairs is the shocking focus of Fielding's 'serious' satire, it is her partner in adultery , Lord Richly, who epitomizes this darker theme of the play, a theme Fielding would not fully develop until the last major work of his life, Amelia."1 This theme is the corruption of...