Provoking the Ancients: Classical Learning and Imitation in Fielding and Collier

This essay examines two of the more innovative fictions of Sarah Fielding and her collaborator Jane Collier as experiments in a neoclassical mode. Fielding's (and Collier's) The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) dismisses several philosophical schools and mimics the structure of a Greek tragedy as it displays the essential selfishness of romantic love and the fatuous yearnings of audiences who read for it, and Collier's An Essay on The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) imitates the structure and rhetorical strategy of Ovid's Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) as it dissects just how tormenting love, and other kinds of dependency, can be. What these books have in common is their critique of the concept of romance: they want to demystify it as dangerous for women. They do that, in part, more by provoking than by invoking the authority of the classical tradition—using it to diagnose some problems of modern life.