Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays (review)

266 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 2:3 the concept of masculine goodness an essentially female virtue. Two subsequent chapters focus on Tom Jones and Amelia. The first of these (chapter 8) explains the sense in which Fielding similarly offers a radical revaluation of traits conventionally associated with the female character—such as "Modesty," "Fearfulness," "Intellectual and Moral Capacity," and "Obedience." The second (chapter 9) opens by defining the ways in which Fielding succeeds not only in maintaining his reader's sympathy for Sophia, the unconventional heroine of his masterpiece, but in making her the moral centre of the novel. But it is in the concluding section of this chapter that Smallwood's considerable powers as a reader are displayed to advantage: she manages to redeem the insipid character of Amelia while revealing that one of Fielding's strategies in the novel is the continual undermining of conventional assumptions about the weakness of women. In the heroine of his final novel Fielding exalts the effeminate virtue of "tenderness"—a softer version, perhaps, of that hearty "good nature" he earlier had embodied in Parson Adams and Tom Jones—and makes it the essential attribute of goodness in a universal moral system. An example of feminist criticism at its best, Fielding and the Woman Question offers an entirely new perspective on its subject—a perspective from which Fielding appears decidedly more amiable and the works he wrote are seen to be deeper still than we had supposed. This book will be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in Fielding, Richardson, and their times. Finally, considering the disciplined manner in which Smallwood applies her method, this is also a book that will repay the attention of "New Historicists" everywhere. M.C. Battestin University of Virginia Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, eds. Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xvi + 306pp. US$49.50. The tercentenary of Richardson's birth happens to coincide with a virtual eruption ofcritical interest in his fictions, especially Clarissa. As the last essay in this collection makes quite clear, Richardson criticism since the ground-breaking efforts of Alan Dugald McKillop (1956) and Ian Watt (1957) has been steady and voluminous, and is still growing, not unlike a Richardsonian fiction itself. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor have assembled in this opportune gathering of fifteen essays a rich and varied, if uneven, display of approaches and responses that reflects, despite a discernible Anglo-Eastern-American tendency, the present plurality of interest in Richardson's fictions. The best of the essays testify, in one way or another, to Richardson's gift for transforming his own REVIEWS 267 texts and a wide range of others into multivalent fictions which, with enduring power and immediacy, are able to illuminate his culture. No essay emerges as clearly superior to the others and even the most negligible points to something important; most of them are instructive or at least useful. Margaret Anne Doody, who with her previous comprehensive and spirited book on Richardson's fiction and several important recent articles has emerged as perhaps our principal active Richardsonian (her collaborators, with eighteen references to her work listed in the index, would seem to think so), provides a strong philosophical and linguistic basis for approaching his fiction through the theme of reading "character" in relation to personal identity in Sir Charles Grandison. The essay is particularly good on the meanings of "character" and "reserve" in the novel. Doody could go deeper with the "person as mask" motif , and she misses some of the wordplay in "cha-racf-er" (p. 1 17). But this essay and that by Carol Houlihan Flynn penetrate much further into the luminous mysteries of the novel than any but a few recent essays, perhaps in part because Doody and Flynn are returning resolutely to labyrinthine texts about which they have already written well. They know the terrain. For her part, Flynn explores one of the major, and probably intractable, problematics in Richardson's fiction: the "pains" (really the tragedy) of feminine accommodation and compliance— what the eighteenth century called "the arts of pleasing." She misses a chance to encompass in her argument the prettified and mannequinized post-marital Pamela (Pamela...