Public Nurturance and Private Civility: The Transposition of Values in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Public Nurturance and Private Civility: The Transposition of Values in Eighteenth-Century Fiction * ELIZABETH KRAFT W hen I am absorbed in reading," declares Georges Poulet, "a second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me. ... At this moment what matters to me is to live, from the inside, in a certain identity with the work and the work alone." To read, he continues, is an activity whereby the reader's consciousness merges with the consciousness of the work into a "common consciousness."1 The mind of the author and the mind of the reader are one. Poulet's understanding of consciousness is broad. It is the consciousness of the work, of the author as he or she was when writing the work, that we experience when we read, not the consciousness of a central character alone. But too often readers, searching for the experience of possession that Poulet describes, have looked for that central character with whom to identify. In the novel in particular, the expectation of a "principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene by virtue of his own importance" is an early one, as Smollett—and the authors of Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Moll Flanders—clearly understood.2 Yet many eighteenth-century novels disappoint the twentieth-century reader in that the consciousnesses of central characters too often remain closed. Henry Fielding's, for example, seems distant, as a few comments from some of his most devoted readers (his twentieth-century editors) 181 182 / KRAFT would indicate. For Louis Kronenberger: "Tom makes a winning hero, but I have never understood how he could be hailed as a 'whole man.' He is hardly, for all his admirable manliness, a man at all. It is true that he is loaded down with experiences; but of a man we ask—in serious fiction — that there be a reaction to experiences, and the trouble with Tom is that, in any adult sense, he fails to react."3 Sheridan Baker likewise finds: "Fielding is somewhat off the twentieth century's beat. In spite of our many comics, we are not really attuned to comedy, especially to Fielding 's amused distancing of life's ups and downs. We are not used to observing life from the outside. We want the inside story, the hidden streams of consciousness."4 Martin Battestin agrees that Fielding's characters , because they exist in a comic environment, are "essentially symbolic figures of two dimensions, marvelously colorful and vivid but a little static and flat."5 Perhaps it is an odd thing to experience from the inside as it were — to experience alone and in silent reading —a work that denies us access to interiority.6 We believe our internal lives are who we are. To allow consciousness of self to be displaced by another's consciousness is simply to reaffirm one's own belief in the centrality of private identity, while to allow consciousness of self to be displaced by one who lacks interiority is to call into question the validity of our criteria of self-definition: our reactions, our feelings, our thoughts. And such a questioning makes the twentieth-century reader profoundly uncomfortable, as the comments of Fielding's editors suggest. What the twentieth-century reader finds most interesting seems to be grounded, Richard Sennett suggests, in the process of psychoanalysis: "Masses of people are concerned," he notes, "with their single lifehistories and particular emotions as never before."7 He calls this concern "an intimate vision of society" and explains: "Intimacy" connotes warmth, trust, and open expression of feeling. But precisely because we have come to expect these psychological benefits throughout the range of our experience, and precisely because so much social life which does have a meaning cannot yield these psychological rewards, the world outside, the impersonal world, seems to fail us, seems to be stale and empty. These expectations are the byproducts of capitalism and secularization, which have transformed the public sphere from a place in which it is possible to experience a social life that is distinct from private life to yet another locus of personal expression. Our intimacy...