Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (review)

272 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 Patricia Meyer Spacks. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in EighteenthCentury English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 262pp. US$32.00. This is the best of times and the worst of times for students of the eighteenth-century English novel. The field is wide open; exciting changes are occurring at a great pace; the broadening of the canon has suddenly opened up a plenitude of new possibilities. AU this is exhilarating—but the field now seems huge and chaotic; we can no longer believe the tidy verities of the 1960s; and critics rightly feel queasy about the adequacy of all attempts that have yet been made to remap the territory. Patricia Meyer Spacks's Desire and Truth provides a welcome step in the development of new strategies, new maps, new ways of thinking. The title is a good indicator of her concerns. "Truth" brings up such issues as "verisimilitude" and the moral function of the writer. "Desire" comprises a complex set of wishes and demands that affect the creation, nature, and reception of fiction: what the author wants, what the characters want, what the original audience enjoyed or demanded, what the present-day reader enjoys or demands. Spacks is primarily concerned with the first two elements, and she does not always differentiate as sharply as I would like among the four. However, her emphasis on the dialectic between what is understood as true (real) and what is desired, and how this dialectic shapes the motivations and stories of eighteenth-century novels, gives her a clear and helpful organizing device. This book is an unpretentious and uncontentious survey of the novel from Fielding to Scott. It is highly selective, making no pretence at all to "coverage" in depth. Spacks proceeds in chronological order through eight chapters, offering commentaries on the novels she selects as representative of overall patterns of development. Ungainly as a list is, I shall give it, for in no other way can I convey so clear a sense of the book's contents: The Female Quixote, Fanny Hill, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia, Pamela, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, The Fool of Quality, The Man of Feeling, Evelina, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Romance ofthe Forest, The Italian, Anna St. Ives, Caleb Williams, The Wrongs ofWomen, Zeluco, A Simple Story, Waverley, Sense and Sensibility, The Heart ofMidlothian, Mansfield Park. Surveying these texts, Spacks pays particular attention to the "sexual assumptions" that underlie the plots, both for what they say and for what they imply. "The truth Pamela tells us, complicated and compelling, differs from the truth its author saw in it" (p. 235). The overall pattern she suggests could be reductively summarized by saying that Fielding and Richardson provide a thesis against which Mackenzie and Frances Sheridan offer a "sentimental" antithesis, all of which Austen and Scott attempt to resolve in a "grand synthesis" (p. 238). The virtues of the book, however, do not lie in this sort of general comment. Spacks has kept up with burgeoning criticism and theory, but the strength of this book is its readings of texts. They are ideologically sophisticated readings, but ultimately commonsensical—which I mean as a compliment. Spacks is good on unfamiliar texts: these are surely the best readings to date of The Fool of Quality, Memoirs ofMiss Sidney Bidulph, and John Moore's neglected Zeluco (1789). She is perhaps even better on familiar ones. Her Joseph Andrews is not the usual moral treatise or comic romp, but rather a book whose "prevailing comic narrative tone" masks but does not deny "the vision of an ugly and destructive social universe [that] compels Fielding's imagination " (p. 59). Her Sense and Sensibility is a novel that shows the reader that "only the freedoms of fictionality ensure happy outcomes" (p. 216). Spacks manages, indeed, to maintain a delicate balance: she never forgets the outlook of eighteenth-century author and reader, but her own readings display her admitted preoccupation with "the truth" these fictions "tell us" (p. 4). REVIEWS 273 Chapter 5, devoted to the sentimental novel's "challenge to power," seems to me particularly original and...