Fielding and the Woman Question (review)

264 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:3 Angela J. Smallwood. Fielding and the Woman Question. Hemel Hempstead : Harvester Wheatsheaf, and New York: St Martin's Press, 1989. ? + 230pp. $61.95. My colleague Richard Rorty recently predicted that, just as deconstructionism revolutionized the professional study of literature during the past decade, so feminism would prevail in the 1990s. As the spate of gender-oriented criticism continues to issue in full flood from academic presses, his is one prophecy about the millennium which it seems rash to dispute; and until now I have found the prospect depressing. Henry Fielding, a favourite writer of mine, has not been treated kindly by critics of this school. Accepting as axiomatic the conventionally proposed polarity between the author of Clarissa and the author of Tom Jones, feminist critics revere Richardson as the androgynous champion of their cause, whereas Fielding they scorn as the benighted exponent of a thoroughly masculine ethos. Not long ago, while reading a passage from Fielding's masterpiece to a class of graduate students, an eminent Richardsonian at an eminent university was so much fretted by the experience she put the novel down; in it, she exclaimed, she heard "the voice of The Oppressor." Accordingly, it was with some misgivings that I picked up Angela J. Smallwood 's book, Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels ofHenry Fielding and Feminist Debate 1700-1750. What I found to my surprise, however, was not only a sympathetic feminist reading of Fielding, but a reading that persuasively alters the customary understanding of Fielding as a moralist while helpfully illuminating new dimensions of his fiction. What distinguishes Smallwood's study from so many recent examples of the "New Historicism" is both the thoroughness and specificity of her primary research and, the contexts of Fielding's thought having been thus established, her ability cogently to define his attitudes on gender-related issues while proposing fresh and coherent interpretations of the four major novels. The range and depth of her research may be gauged from the Appendix ("Documents debating Issues relating to Women, 1680-1760")— a bibliography of some twenty pages which in itself confirms a principal thesis of this study: "that public interest in women's issues existed during Fielding's lifetime to a degree which has not been recognised before." Smallwood, moreover , is not only more widely read in these issues than other feminist critics; she is clinically scrupulous in diagnosing the symptoms and sources of the "patriarchal " assumptions about Fielding which have infected the atmosphere of critical debate and prevented, before now, any very useful work from being done in this vein. In part 1 of her study Smallwood explores "The Groundlessness of Fielding's 'Masculine' Ethos," arguing that his image as the very manliest of men is entirely arbitrary, an image manufactured in the early years of this century by Fielding's editor, W.E. Henley (1903), and his biographer, W.L. Cross (1918), and perpetuated by Ian Watt in The Rise ofthe Novel (1957), still the most influential book REVIEWS 265 on eighteenth-century fiction. By carefully reading not only the novels, but the works that Henley and Cross tend to ignore—the five-act comedies and the journalism , especially The Champion—Smallwood demonstrates that Fielding was very much a part of the tradition of "rationalist-feminist thought" represented by, among others, his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her friend Mary Astell, by Richard Steele, and, perhaps most colourfully, by "Sophia," author of Woman Not Inferior to Man. In part 2 of her book Smallwood proceeds methodically to demonstrate Fielding 's advocacy of reforms affecting the unequal status of women under the law, in matters of sexual morality, in education, in marriage. Indeed, Fielding 's decision to make Amelia the story not of a courtship but of a marriage was sufficiently remarkable that John Cleland in the Monthly Review (December 1751) called it "the boldest stroke that has yet been attempted in this species of writing." Smallwood has excellent observations to make on the ideal of friendship in Fielding's moral system, the basis at once of "the benevolent society" and "the good marriage" (p. 63). On this topic, however—which is central to...