Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller (review)

REVIEWS 85 scenes of sexual indeterminacy as those most vividly expressive of a lost principle of difference. From his libertine youth in the theatre to his sober latter days on the bench he is in search of it, but all he finds are conundrums, like Charlotte Charke playing the part of her own father Colley Cibber in The Historical Register, or Bosavern Penlez sitting in the ruins of Peter Woods's brothel bedizened with items of female underwear. Battestin scants the analysis of Fielding's reactions to these confusions (especially Penlez) because he wants to defend him from what he regards as ill-founded criticisms of weakness or caprice; in the meantime he is himself in hot pursuit of the proof of primal sin. But every crisis or inconsistency in Fielding's life is marked by blurred difference, from his difficulties with grieving to his trouble in reconciling the theory and practice of the law. Why is it, for example, that he needs so badly to weep like a woman when he wants to be impassive like a man; or why is his advocacy of a merciless system of justice contradicted by so many examples of his pity, especially towards women? The answer to these questions (assuming it could be found) would solve the mystery not of Fielding's sexual relations with his sister, but of his strangely enthusiastic reading of Clarissa, his fascination with the case of Elizabeth Canning, and his growing pessimism, which he tries to appease with reforms of the law that always fail to match his sense of injustice. Some time between 1743, when Fielding published his Senecan essay Of the Remedy ofAffliction, and 1751, when he jettisons the mie of reason in favour of mie by fear, a significant shift in his beliefs occurs which it would have been worthwhile identifying. Its results are to be seen in thefaux-naïveté of his Examples ofthe Interposition ofProvidence (1752), the strangely vehement defence of historical veracity in the Journal ( 1755), and of course in the generic as well as the doctrinal and sexual confusions ofAmelia (1751). Here I think Battestin could have expanded the insights ofTerry Castle, whose Masquerade and Civilization (1986) contains a superb chapter on the oxymoronic instabilities of gender and genre in Amelia, as well as John Bender's pathbreaking discussion of the connections between narrative structure and penology, which likewise concentrates on Fielding's last novel, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987). As it is, they share Pat Rogers's fate, and are never mentioned at all. But their absence is compounded for by a wealth of material which is generously enough arrayed outside the restrictions of Martin Battestin's favourite theory to allow all his readers to interpret Fielding in the way that suits them best. Jonathan Lamb University of Auckland James Kerr. Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ix + 142pp. James Kerr's brief study consists of a general essay on "the historical novel and the production of the past" and three chapters dealing with five Scott novels: Waverley, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Redgauntlet. Neither the underlying subject—Scott's sense of the Scottish past and the fictional strategies by which he expresses and controls his understanding of history—nor the selection of illustrative texts is especially novel, and though the individual analyses offer fresh insights , the reader must first penetrate the densely written and somewhat elliptical opening essay before these become available. The basic position taken in the course of that essay is that "the modal tensions of the Waverley novels can be traced to Scott's conflicted sense of his own historical position" (p. 9), and there is a corresponding emphasis on ideological issues throughout the succeeding chapters. 86 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:1 In the first of these, devoted to Waverley, Kerr argues that Scott's first novel is a "fictive structure which permitted the projection and assimilation of a violent past" (p. 38), and the four other novels under consideration are viewed in the same valid but somewhat limiting terms. The chapter on Old Mortality thus opens with a detailed examination of the framework of...