The Healthy Henry Fielding

The Healthy Henry Fielding Samuel E. Longmire University of Evansville In theeighteenth century SirJohn Hawkins wrotethatFielding"has done more towards corrupting the rising generation than any writer we know of (95).1 And Samuel Johnson warned Hannah More that Tom Jones was a corrupt book (2: 190). Perhaps remembering this warning, Hannah More later wrote that a young girl may safely read improbable romances in which she finds it impossible to identify with the characters, but that she should avoid a more realistic work like Tom Jones because strong identification with the characters might "convey a contagious sickliness to the mind" and make her disenchanted with the insipidity of common life (2: 82). In the middle of the nineteenth century William Spaldingclaimed that exposure to Fielding , Smollett, and Sterne is like descending "into the galleries of a productive but ill-ventilated mine. Around us clings a foul and heavy air, which youthful travellers in the realm of literature cannot safely breathe" (336). This briefsamplingof the critical hostility toward Fieldingreveals the notion of some readers that his fiction is, metaphorically speaking, like a sickness or an unwholesome corruption. Not surprisingly, then, Fielding's many defenders, after diagnosing his fiction, particularly Tom Jones, pronounced it healthy and wholesome. Coleridge, more than any other critic, established the long-lasting belief that Fielding 's fiction has a healthy quality about it, especially when contrasted with the "sick" tone of Richardson's: "There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson" (Miscellaneous Criticism 302-303). Coleridge believed that Fielding's treatment of sexual behavior could not be harmful to a normal reader because "the gusts of laughter drive away sensuality" (Shakespearean Criticism 2:18). Furthermore, Fielding's adherence to the principle of poetic justice could only have a positive moral effect: "Every indiscretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones ... is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that the reader 's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on the criminal indulgence itself (Miscellaneous Criticism 303). It is astonishing to discover how many critics repeated Coleridge's sentiments. In 1855 Frederick Lawrence announced that the grand characteristic of Joseph Andrews is the "singular healthiness of its tone," and that even its offensive passages are "preferable to the sickly sentiment and trite morality of Richardson" (162). At the beginning of the twentieth century, William E. Henley wrote that "fornication, the sole Unpardonable Sin in English Fiction, is but a detail ... in Joseph 113 114Rocky Mountain Review Andrews; but in Pamela it is the staple of the book .... Now, in Pamela, none is permitted to fornicate; yet the theme of the novel is Fornication. Mr. B. is always hovering round in a most dreadful and indecent state; and Pamela is always praying to be protected from a kind of Walking Phallus .... Which is the more moral writer?" (16: xxxv-xxxvi, n. 30). This belief that Fielding is morally superior to Richardson appears from time to time in other twentieth-century criticism. For example, in 1948 Elizabeth Jenkins repeated the formula when she raised this rhetorical question: "Which ofthem has the healthy attitude to sex?" Her answer, in the form of another question, was not original: "The author who treats of it frankly and openly but without detail or suggestiveness, or the one who through two lengthy novels keeps the reader's imagination in a long, drawn out suspense, culminating in a wedding night and a rape respectively?" (78). In 1968 the cliché was given new life by Robert Alter when he defended Fielding at Richardson's expense. After pointingout that sex was very serious for Richardson, but not for Fielding, Alter observed: "Sex, in the healthier of our novelists, is no longer threatening or Satanic, but the Puritan feeling persists that sex is something portentous, involving man's ultimate moral responsibilities, leading him if not to damnation , then perhaps to his greatest fulfillment" (9). Thus, Alter suggested , the healthy novelist does not take sex too seriously but treats it as though it has little psychological or moral significance. Before examining the limitations ofthis metaphor...