The genius of Cervantes was transfused into the novels of Fielding....
Smollett1

I

1“Instead of looking to the escapades of Tom Jones or Billy Booth," Ronald Paulson tells us, "we turn today to the periodicals, the essays, the legal tracts and reports, and the discursive parts of the novels for Fielding's attitudes and ideas. In these we see the public mask.... But the public mask is only one aspect of Fielding.... Submerged in the public image is the Fielding who creates Lady Booby and Slipslop, Trulliber and Blifil, Adams and Jones...." But although Paulson questions the "Christianizing" of Fielding, he still insists that if "the subject matter of Fielding's best work is not the medicine of Christian morality," it is "the disease for which it may be prescribed."2 And so Paulson in his own way christianizes or at least moralizes Fielding.

2But must the only alternative to a reading that in some way affirms Christian-moral principles be a view of his work as essentially trivial, such as is presented in the Osborne-Richardson movie version of Tom Jones, i.e., as a mere spectacle of the "escapades" of Booth or Jones? I would like to discuss Fielding’s fiction in terms that I hope will suggest a way to see it as significant without having to moralize it, as significant because of the "purely anarchical" elements Aurélien Digeon saw in Jonathan Wild and André Gide saw in Tom Jones.3 The terms I propose for my discussion have been stated most clearly and uncompromisingly in an essay written about thirty years ago by Wayne Burns and entitled The Panzaic Principle. I shall begin with an explanation of its main thesis, followed by two quotations of a rather long passage in which Burns discusses the commentary made on Tom Jones by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, a work that has been extremely influential on the Fielding criticism of the last three decades. According to Burns, in Cervantes' masterpiece Don Quixote’s ideals are defeated in the face of a material reality that the knight does not want to believe exists, a material reality that Sancho, fool though he may be, continuously reminds his master, and us, is there. He knows it is there with his naive materialism that is no more than the prompting of his senses, his appetites, his big belly. And, according to Burns, the workings of nearly all great novels,4 from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary to Mort à crédit, show our own myths, ideals, romantic hopes, and cultural daydreams as unable to banish this material reality which even the senses of a fool like Sancho can know.

3Burns does not claim to have discovered this principle of the novel. He points out that many critics, from Charles Lamb to Friedrich Nietzsche to Joseph Wood Krutch, have acknowledged, generally with regrets, its workings in great novels. In his introduction to Roderick Random, Paul-Gabriel Boucé seems to be acknowledging the principle at work in Smollett’s novel. Adapting a term from Cedric Watts to describe Roderick Random as a "Janiform," or two-faced, novel, Boucé acknowledges the novel’s "careful but conventional show of moral didacticism" but points out that the novel also brings to vivid life a whole world that belies all these conventional morals, as does Roderick himself, with his "toughness, buttressed by patience in adversity but also by that most powerful craving for revenge which pervades the novel, his dashing gusto for life, its hard knocks, bad bruises, but also for its carnal and financial sweets...."5

4What is new about Burns' formulation is his open recognition of the significance of the Panzaic principle. For Burns, the undermining of the ideal and the mythical by the Panzaic—which can never itself become an ideal and remain the panzaic—is the great novel's illuminating and liberating function and, he implies, the real reason it has been read and admired. In effect, Burns's theory would make the eighteenth-century British novel a promulgator of Enlightenment as critique of myth. In order to show the significance of this principle, in opposition to those who would dismiss it "as truistic or inconsequential," Burns takes issue with the view of realism expressed in Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, where Watt argues that the novel's realism is not a matter of the "low," the "carnal," and the "seamy" undermining the viability of all ideals but rather that its realism is a matter of fictional technique, a method of representation.

5To show what is wrong with Watt's revision of the traditional conception of literary realism, Burns examines Watt's commentary on a crucial scene in Tom Jones. Let us look at this scene and the argument that Burns has with Watt about it. After hearing of Allworthy's recovery, Tom takes a walk "in a most delicious Grove" and soliloquizes:

O Sophia, would Heaven give thee to my Arms, how blest would be my Condition! Curst that Fortune which sets a Distance between us. Was I but possessed of thee, one only Suit of Rags thy whole Estate, is there a Man on Earth whom I would envy! How contemptible would the brightest Circassian Beauty, drest in all the Jewels of the Indies, appear to my Eyes! But why do I mention another Woman? Could I think my Eyes capable of looking at any other with Tenderness, these Hands should tear them from my Head. No, my Sophia, if cruel Fortune separates us for ever, my Soul shall doat on thee alone. The chastest Constancy will I ever preserve to thy Image....

6But Molly appears and, "after a Parley," they "retired into the thickest Part of the grove."6 Now Watt makes the following commentary on this scene:

The least convincing aspect of the episode is the diction: the speech habits manifested here obviously bear little relation to those we expect of Tom Jones. But, of course, they are a stylistic necessity for Fielding's immediate purpose—the comic deflation of the heroic and romantic pretensions of the human word by the unheroic and unromantic eloquence of the human deed. Tom Jones is no more than a vehicle for the expression of Fielding's skepticism about lover's vows: and he must be made to speak in terms that parody the high-flown rhetoric of the pastoral romance to give point to the succeeding wayside encounter which belongs to the very different world of the pastourelle. Nor can Fielding pause to detail the psychological processes whereby Tom is metamorphosed from Sophia's romantic lover to Moll’s prompt gallant: to illustrate the commonplace that "actions speak louder than words", the actions must be very silent and they must follow very hard upon very loud words.

7But Burns remarks that

if, as Watt maintains, "Tom Jones is no more than a vehicle for the expression of Fielding's skepticism about lover’s vows," it matters little that his response to the physical Molly gives the lie to his apostrophe to Sophia. Indeed, since Tom is "no more than a vehicle," his response cannot be called a response; it is, according to Watt, a metamorphosis; moreover, this metamorphosis is intended to illustrate... the desexualized commonplace that "actions speak louder than words". And in relating this episode to the structure of the novel Watt (after once again metamorphosing Tom, this time into a "headstrong youth") carries his interpretation to its logical conclusion....

8Watt goes on:

The relation of this episode to the larger structure of the novel is typical. One of Fielding's great organizing themes is the proper place of sex in human life; this encounter neatly illustrates the conflicting tendencies of headstrong youth, and shows that Tom has not yet reached the continence of moral adulthood. The scene, therefore, plays its part in the general moral and intellectual scheme; and it is also significantly connected with the workings of the plot, since Tom’s lapse eventually becomes a factor in his dismissal by Allworthy, and therefore leads to the ordeals which eventually make him a worthier mate for Sophia.

9And Bums comments further on Watt’s reading:

So Watt very neatly structures the sensual and the carnal not only out of this episode but out of the entire novel. But neither the episode nor the novel is quite that neat, even when viewed from Watt's "perspective." For one thing he begins his analysis of the episode at just the point which enables him to gloss over the fact that, just prior to Molly’s appearance, Tom has got himself sexually aroused by thinking lascivious thoughts about his Sophia: "His wanton fancy roamed unbounded over all her beauties, and his lively imagination painted the charming maid in various ravishing forms... His romantic maunderings which immediately follow are therefore piquantly as well as ironically euphemistic in themselves; and in addition they serve to bring the aroused Tom from sexual image to sexual reality, in the person of his Molly. At which point, for him, or for almost anyone except a character as pure as Don Quixote or as cold as Blifil, there can be but one resolution—as the novel indicates. And to structuralize and moralize this scene and the entire novel (the way Watt does when he says that "Tom has not yet reached the continence of moral adulthood," or when he refers to "the ordeals which eventually make him [Tom] a worthier mate for Sophia")—this is to turn the novel into little more than a structurally unified illustration of the conventional morality that Fielding preaches throughout the novel.7

10Beyond merely acknowledging the presence of panzaic reality in that scene, Burns is also insisting on its triumph. Nor is to read the scene the way Burns is reading it to take the novel out of its historical context, for in Fielding's own time many readers were certainly aware of the panzaic implications of Tom Jones, though they may well, like Richardson and Johnson, have deplored them. Sir John Hawkins called Fielding's novel in 1787 "a book seemingly intended to sap the foundations of that morality which it is the duty of parents and all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young people, by teaching that virtue upon principle is imposture, that generous qualities alone constitute true worth, and that a young man may love and be loved, and at the same time associate with the loosest of women."8

11However, the various points of view that criticism of the last three decades has taken on Tom Jones, no matter how fundamentally they seem to be at odds with one another, end up denying the presence, or, at any rate, the significance of what made Richardson, Johnson, or Hawkins so upset. For by far the most part, critics since the time of Watt’s book have as it were been taken in by Fielding's intentions. They insist, for example, that the pattern of moral development that Fielding may well have intended to illustrate in Tom Jones is in fact convincingly there. We can call upon Martin C. Battestin for the most cogent statement of this position. In The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, he argues for reading Fielding's novels in terms of a moral quest:

The wayfaring of Fielding's heroes is purposeful, a moral pilgrimage from the vanity and corruption of the Great City to the relative naturalness and simplicity of the country. In this respect Fielding, despite the hilarity of his comedy and his mock heroics, reminds us more of Bunyan or Fénelon than of Scarron, Le Sage, or Cervantes.9

12There can be no doubt that Battestin's extensive researches have illuminated Fielding's life and times and thereby his intentions. But how those intentions are in fact realized in Fielding's work remains problematic. And this problem is a matter of critical assumptions. For critics who must believe in the triumph of moral intentions in a work in order for it to be a great work, the presence of panzaic reality in Fielding's artistic production, of the material world and material appetites, does not in the end amount to much. Interestingly, this consequence is the same even for critics who reject Watt’s theory of "formal realism" and insist on the triumph of the romance elements in Fielding's fiction, which triumph assures a moral message.10 Indeed, it is possible for Michael McKeon in his The Origins of the English Novel to reconcile both Watt's view and the view that romance is important in Tom Jones. This reconciliation is possible since both views assume that reality is not tied to the low, the carnal, and the seamy, but is essentially a social fabrication and that realism is only technique. But John Bender, in his Imagining the Penitentiary, returns to Watt's line in conceiving of realism as a "convention," as a "device," albeit one developed for social purposes.11 And even Mark Kinkead-Weekes, who points out that he and C. J. Rawson are "lonely figures" in their opposition to Battestin’s reading that Tom is in need of the virtue of prudence,12 nevertheless denies the significance of the panzaic in his assertion that Tom needs to learn to love "more and better."13 In short, they all moralize Fielding, and do not really contradict the position taken by Battestin.

13Reality in novels for these critics is not, so to speak, very real; it is certainly not something to make them weep, as it did Nietzsche when he read Don Quixote. It is not allowed to be a challenge to their own ideals—or to ours. Even Gerald Butler's recent Henry Fielding and Lawrence's "Old Adam” tends to turn Tom into a sort of robust version of Lawrence’s Mellors, that is, into a Lawrentian ideal rather than a Christian or romance hero. Thereby Fielding's novels are not allowed to undercut Butler's Lawrentian hopes and daydreams. And so the critical work on Fielding that begins with the traditional view of realism as the dynamic opposition to idealism, the realism that has been traditionally characterized as belonging to the novel as genre, is in many ways yet to be done.

14Or perhaps a thread needs to be picked up. Battestin remarks that the

failure to recognize the unity of Joseph Andrews may be explained by an apparent blindness to the shaping importance of Fielding’s moral purpose. Aurélien Digeon’s comment is typical: “Joseph Andrews abattait Richardson et la doctrine de la chasteté profitable, mais l’enseignement positif en était presque nul, et le bon Adams ne pouvait guère être proposé en example.”’14

15But the Jamesian or Lubbuckian assumption that novels must have this “unity” becomes a way for us to make our Christianity or our preference for romance or our Lawrentianism triumphant in Fielding’s or perhaps anyone’s novels. Such a requirement of "unity" for the novel could well be opposed.15 It could be argued that just the breaking of "unity" enables a novel to enlighten us, and it may well be that it was the lack of such a theory that made the naive readings of the older critics easy to brush aside. The Panzaic Principle gives us the basis of the theory that we need.

II

16But perhaps a new beginning has been made in the discussion of Fielding's plays in the light of his claim to being "an acknowledged proficient in the Old Comedy." Apparently, the plays can be studied without the assumptions that have been brought by literary critics to the novels.16 But the panzaic voice is most significant where modem criticism seems to have most energetically and persistently worked at denying its significance, in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. In the novels it undercuts an idealism—Fielding’s own—that can be given full play to illustrate and defend itself. Thus in Joseph Andrews the theory of the "comic epic in prose" that Fielding sets out at the beginning of the novel breaks down almost immediately in the novel itself. If Parson Adams is quick to resort to his big fists, or if he likes his drink and his pipe, it does not seem right to say his profession of Christianity is out of vanity or hypocrisy, the two causes from which, according to the theory Fielding offers us, "the Ridiculous" is supposed to spring. It is rather that Christianity itself is quixotic and that he is a "parson-errant," as Homer Goldberg has called him.17 But he is more than a version of Don Quixote; he is also warmhearted and endowed with the appetites of Sancho Panza.18 And so when he hears the report that his little son is drowned, he cannot really be prevented by his own Christian consolations from an outpouring of grief, just as if there were no Providence and no afterlife. The spirit is willing, but Adams is lovable because the flesh is weak. Or rather the flesh is strong and wants what it wants and knows what it knows and cannot be taken in by Christian or any other kind of philosophizing. It is no surprise to hear from his wife that Adams in his youth was "a loving and cherishing Husband" to her in spite of the preachment he has just made to Joseph on loving "with Moderation and Discretion."19

17Nor can the flesh be denied in Fielding's portrayal of Lady Booby. She at first is a simple comic butt. But the realism of her portrayal soon necessitates that to understand her we must go beyond simple moralistic terms.20 Thus, for example, towards the end of the novel Fielding gives us a long explanation of how the anti-sexual and anti-male education of women of her class caused her to be unconscious of her true appetites (299-301). We also have another long passage of psychological and sociological realism that shows why Betty the chambermaid, given her "Good-nature, Generosity, and Compassion," cannot control the "warm Ingredients" of her "Constitution" in "the ticklish Situation of a chamber-maid at an Inn, who is daily liable to the Solicitations of Lovers of all Complexions..(86). And Fielding's sexual realism undercuts his comic theory even in the interpolated story of Leonora, "the unfortunate Jilt," for we are not just seeing the sad consequence of her rejection, out of vanity, of the honest Horatio for the tinselly Bellarmine—not just seeing the moral that the lady who denied the robbed, beaten and naked Joseph entry into the coach, out of her prudery, asserts when she says,'"I never knew any of these forward Sluts to come to any good..."(104). For although Fielding tells us Leonora fell in love with his equipage even before she saw Bellarmine, and enjoys tormenting other women by dancing with him all night, when Bellarmine is wounded she rejects her aunt's prudent advice that she should care for her reputation and goes to tend to him personally. So when Bellarmine jilts her in the end, we have less a warning to a woman to be constant to a dull but honest lover than a realistic portrayal of woman's sexual vulnerability. Interestingly, the one listener to the story who comes constantly to Leonara's defense is Slipslop, and her voice becomes a panzaic commentary when she tells her Lady Booby in a glorious speech that even transcends her malapropisms that any woman might be made happy in spite of all class distinctions by having a man as desirable as Joseph Andrews (298-99).

18What Fielding's novel shows in all these women—Lady Booby, Betty, Leonora, Slipslop—is that in spite of social class or any other difference they are all driven to behave in unhappy ways not ultimately out of vanity or hypocrisy but because of unsatisfied sexual appetite. Conversely, sexual virtue, in so far as it really can exist, is not so much the consequence of living according to some abstract principle as it is the consequence of sexual inclination. This is a truth too painful for Lady Booby to acknowledge: she considers every possible reason for Joseph’s refusal of her, "everything but Dislike of her Person" (279), a motive which has nothing to do with the morality Joseph is supposed to embody. But even with his preference and hopes for Fanny, and in spite of all the sermons of Parson Adams running in his head, Joseph almost is seduced by Lady Booby, as he informs his sister in a letter. "But I am glad she turned me out of her Chamber as she did," he says, referring to her getting so angry with his refusal that she does this. “I had once almost forgotten every word Parson Adams had ever said to me" (46-47). But if circumstances were somewhat different—if he had no hope of Fanny or even if Lady Booby had persisted a bit longer at the crucial moment—he would have had no more virtue than Betty the Chambermaid—or Tom Jones. Quixotic moral ideals do not really triumph over panzaic reality, and the so obviously contrived ending (like the endings Fielding parodied in his plays) makes a joke of the notion that there is a Providential design in the universe, whatever Fielding’s intentions might have been.

19The panzaic, as Burns rightly points out, is not synonymous with "the sexual, or the Dionysian, or the Rabelasian, or the Lawrentian."21 Nevertheless, sex, as Jerry Beasley has demonstrated in his Novels of the 1740s, is central in its opposition to the didacticism of the period,22 though Beasley seems to allow that didacticism has more than a formal or symbolic triumph in the novels. The panzaic opposition to the ideal, from Pamela to Roderick Random, very often takes the specific form of the conflict between sexual reality and sexual morality. And that is an at least central conflict in Tom Jones, where we see Fielding’s own sermonizing certainly breaking down there as well as in Joseph Andrews. For example, Tom is not just reduced to a rutting animal, as Fielding himself tries to imply in his commentary after Tom goes into the woods with Molly (259), nor can the essay on love that Fielding gives us in the introductory chapter to Book VI make distinctions fine enough to account for his behavior or for the sexual reality portrayed throughout the novel, any more than Allworthy’s simple prescriptions can. Fielding wrestles with abstractions to try to account for his hero's feelings and behavior in such moralistic terms. For example, after Tom has been unfairly banished by Allworthy, Fielding writes that "Honour at last, backed by Despair, with Gratitude to his Benefactor, and with real Love to his Mistress, got the better of burning Desire, and he resolved rather to quit Sophia, than to pursue her to her ruin" (212). But then Fielding immediately laughs at this "Honour" (315). In fact, Tom soon repents of his resolution because of his "tender Desire" which he cannot overcome; understanding he cannot do anything practically to realize that desire, he decides to wait "for sonie favourable Accident hereafter" (315). There is simply no way that Fielding can contain Tom in the terms of the moral ideas he is trying to preach.

20Admittedly, the panzaic implications of Tom are complicated by the fact that he is, formally, the hero of the novel and often behaves heroically, in fact like Don Quixote himself. In a formal sense, Partridge obviously plays the role of Sancho, not Tom. And indeed the cowardly and self-interested Partridge is a Sancho Panza to Tom Jones when Tom is playing Don Quixote on the road, for instance, against Tom’s enlistment in the army to fight the Jacobites out of a burst of patriotism or Tom’s refusal, because he is so in love, to eat—which refusal disappears after Partridge urges him to devour his bacon and eggs. But unlike Don Quixote, and like Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews, Tom has fleshly appetites that can be awakened and thereby reveal the inadequacy of his, and Fielding’s own, idealistic professions.

21The promptings of panzaic appetite in Tom are contrasted to Nightingale’s seduction of Nancy, for Nightingale's intention to abandon Nancy actually goes against his own desires. Again, to play the role of seducer, one must be as cold as Blifil or, in a sense, as pure as Don Quixote, pure, that is, of any appetites that could not be easily satisfied by one or a few acts of intercourse. Such "conquest," portrayed in the rakes of Restoration comedy, cornes less out of genuine sexual appetite than out of some role being enacted,23 and Nightingale isn't really up to the role. The promptings of panzaic appetite also explain Tom’s refusai of Arabella Hunt's offer of marriage. Fielding may be trying to show by his refusai that Tom has "grown" into something like what Watt calls the "continence of moral adulthood," but Arabella's offer is not at all the same thing as the other offers he has received from women. It is an offer of marriage, a contractual relationship, not a simple sexual appeal or offer of momentary relief for financial distress. He refuses Arabella's offer because, even if he can imagine it might be for Sophia's good for him to cut himself away from her forever like that, "the Voice of Nature, which cried in his Heart," will not consent to it. He cannot submit his appetite to such a discipline.

22Another critic from before the time of Watt, John Middleton Murry, said that Tom in his tenderness and concern is an "idealist" about women.24 In these terms, if Tom is to "learn" anything, as our moralizing critics demand, he must learn to be less idealistic about them. Freud called this "overestimation of the object" love, and it enhances desire. Tom loves "immoderately." We can understand Freud to mean that the desired human being is the "natural" object of idealization—an idealization that is alienated from human objects in the case of Don Quixote and becomes invested in abstractions instead, even abstractions of women. To evoke Freud again, in his "Contributions to the Psychology or Love": in Tom we see desire for and esteem of the object are not really at odds but unite in one very strong impulse; i.e., he is what Freud would have called a fully potent man. But this potency is not a quality Tom has arrived at: he has always been this way. So when Fielding makes him repent in prison of his past "Folly" (894) or when Fielding contrives the improbability that Tom's sexual behavior might have involved him in incest, or when he has Tom, on being restored to Allworthy's favor, say that what has happened to him was a just "Punishment" (959), Tom is really being belied. The novel’s panzaic vision in fact undercuts the possibility of any such "moral growth" and by implication the whole quixotic endeavor of culture to effect such growth or change in anyone. That is why "fellows like Fielding," as Burns reminds us Ford Maddox Ford remarked, "are dangerous to the body politic and horribly bad constructors of plots."25

23Of course, it is Allworthy who gives voice to the quixotic morality that Fielding preaches. But Allworthy's benevolent ideals make him blind to the machinations of Blifil and others and actually stupid about humans as sexual beings.26 When it comes to making judgments in sexual matters, it is easy to see he compares unfavorably in wisdom to the Gypsy king. And Allworthy is no Tom grown older and wiser. It would be completely inconsistent with Tom’s character for him ever to say, as Allworthy says to Jenny, "How base and mean must that Woman be, how void of that Dignity of Mind, and decent Pride, without which we are not worthy the Name of human Creatures, who can bear to level herself with the lowest Animal, and to sacrifice all that is great and noble in her, all her heavenly Part, to an Appetite which she hath in common with the vilest Branch of the Creation!" (51ff). And when Allworthy speaks of committing Molly, while pregnant, to Bridewell for her sexual behavior, his act is not only illegal, as Battestin points out in his edition of Tom Jones (192n), but cruel and arbitrary. But Allworthy, Fielding tells us, had never indulged himself with "loose pleasures”—again, he is no Tom grown old—and condemns those who did (194). We are also told that he had much sexual "Fire" in his youth and so cannot understand Blifil's coolness towards Sophia, but it is hard to reconcile the notion of an Allworthy full of this "Fire" and an Allworthy who cannot understand how others are unable to control their sexual expression. At any rate, he cannot, like Tom, be called a whole-hearted lover of life: on what he thinks is his deathbed, he delivers the classic speech, complete with allusion to Roman moralists, welcoming the end of life (242-43).

24We might well say that it is not Tom who is a rhetorical device or a "vehicle," as Watt expects us to assume, but Allworthy: a rhetorical device to express a conventional moral judgment against Tom. But Tom as a character survives even Fielding. When he is with his Sophia again in the final pages of the book, while he speaks of his repentance he actually explains and forgives himself and offers Sophia stronger grounds to believe in his future fidelity than any sudden discovery of moral principle. He takes her to the mirror and shows her own beauties. "Can the Man who shall be in Possession of these be inconstant? Impossible!" he tells her (973). And if he also praises the mind that shines through her eyes, he thereby testifies to the fullness of his sexual response to this wonderful woman. In other words, he will be constant to her because she is more desirable to him than any other woman in his world. His virtue is not based on quixotic principle but on panzaic inclination.

III

25The sexuality of women is especially significant in Fielding in working against quixotic ideals. All Sophia’s virtues and "wisdom" (the mind that Tom sees shining through her eyes) derive from her panzaic inclinations. The moment that her feelings for Tom become fully conscious to her reveals their origins. Her father and Parson Supple are discussing at dinner, in her presence and Tom’s presence, who the father might be to Molly's unborn child; her father suspects it is Tom, and then goes on to say it will not damage the opinion Allworthy or anyone else has of him. "Ask Sophy there—You have not the worse Opinion of a young Fellow for getting a Bastard, have you, Girl?" Squire Western says in his habitually coarse way, and then he answers his own question: "No, no, the Women will like un the better for’t." She sees by Tom's blush and quick departure that her father's "Suspicion" is not "groundless". And at that moment, "Her Heart now, at once, discovered the great Secret to her, which it had been so long disclosing little by little.. (189-90). It is noteworthy too that the crude perception of her coarse father is, in her case, exactly right.

26In Sophia's subsequent behavior, she is in no way sexless, passive, or "pure." In her recent study Angel" J. Smallwood argues that readers have "frequently underestimated" Sophia as a character and that she does not really embody conventional "modesty", that she is fearless and resolute, excellent in understanding, and that her love for her father must not be confused with servile obedience,27 a view of Sophia that is not much different from Digeon's.28

27The secret workings of Sophia's panzaic inclinations are wonderfully revealed in the way her muff is employed. The word "muff" has, according to Eric Partridge, meant the female vulva since the late seventeenth century.29 Maurice Johnson in his Fielding’s Art of Fiction devotes eight pages to discussing the muff without doing more than hinting at its sexual implications and treats it as simply a comic device.30 Jones DeRitter sees it as a device to parody a well-known scene in Colley Cibber's The CarelessHusband, undercutting "the tone and logic of sentimentalism with a smutty joke" and goes on to moralize its appearance at Upton, since it "prompts Tom to reconsider his behavior."31 But Sophia's muff can be more than either the occasion for a smutty joke or a plot-device to assure a moral message. Let us look at some of the implications.

28Sophia’s maid reports to her that Tom

came into the room, one Day last week when I was at Work, and there lay your Ladyship’s Muff on a chair, and to be sure he put his Hands into it, that very Muff your Ladyship gave me but yesterday; "La," says I, Mr. Jones, you will stretch my Lady's muff and spoil it, but he still kept his hands in it, and then he kissed it—to be sure, I hardly ever saw such a Kiss in my Life as he gave it".—"I suppose he did not know it was mine," replied Sophia. "Your Ladyship shall hear, Ma’am. He kissed it again and again, and said it was the prettiest Muff in the World. 'La! Sir,' says I, 'you have seen it a hundred times'. 'Yes, Mrs. Honour,' cried he; ‘but who can see anything beautiful in the presence of your Lady but herself... (206)

29Sophia then blushes violently. In the very next chapter, which opens Book V, Fielding gives us a discourse in defense of "low" comedy (210). To see the "low" implications every time that muff subsequently appears in the novel is to see how subtly active is Sophia in pursuit of her erotic fulfillment. Because Tom has kissed it, Sophia takes back her muff she had given to Honour and now wears it constantly (224). And when Tom sees her rescue it from the fire into which her father had flung it, she has won him completely.

Thus, not all the Charms of the Incomparable Sophia; not all the dazzling Brightness, and languishing Softness of her Eyes; the Harmony of her Voice, and of her person; not all her Wit, good Humour, greatness of Mind, or Sweetness of Disposition, had been so able to conquer and enslave the Heart of poor Jones, as this little Incident of the Muff. (226)

30Fielding precedes his discussion of this event with an important comment. "In reality, there are many little Circumstances too often omitted by injudicious Historians, from which Events of the utmost importance arise. The World may indeed be considered as a vast Machine, in which the great Wheels are originally set in Motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest Eyes" (226). What such acute perception reveals here is the secret female activity that cannot be detected by the "normal" vision, by the vision that our culture, and our contemporary criticism, allows us to have. Interestingly, it is her father, in all the crudeness and coarseness that distance him from the ideal represented by his neighbor Allworthy, who cornes closest to understanding how those "Wheels are... set in motion," even though he disregards the appetite of his daughter, just as he throws the muff into the fire. But that appetite cannot be destroyed by being disregarded. When Sophia herself, out of love for her father, and out of vanity at playing a martyr’s role, thinks of marrying Blifil, "Cupid, who lay hid in her Muff, suddenly crept out, and, like Punchinello in a Puppet-shew, kicked all out before him" (360).

31Thus, when she leaves Upton in a passion, she bribes the maid at the inn to slip her muff into Tom’s bed with her name pinned on it. Her father, arriving afterwards and realizing what she has done with her muff, is not far off (except for the denigration implicit in the coarse hunting metaphors) to call Tom the "Dog Fox" and Sophia the "Bitch" (551) who has put down the scent for him to follow (565). Fielding is aware that, by conventional, disapproving standards, Sophia is no "pure" woman; "many Readers", he says, would consider her "a wanton Baggage" (564)—no doubt the reason she must be subtle and invisible in her setting the great wheels in motion. A bit later Fielding writes, "for as to Jones, she had, I am afraid, no great Horror at the Thoughts of being overtaken by him; nay, to confess the Truth, I believe she rather wished than feared it; though I might honestly enough have concealed this Wish from the Reader, as it was one of those secret spontaneous Emotions of the Soul, to which the Reason is often a Stranger" (580).

32True, Allworthy likes Sophia for being attentive to men, for listening to them quietly, and so on; “Indeed," Fielding tells us, echoing Allworthy’s approval, "she always showed the highest Deference to the Understandings of Men; a Quality absolutely essential to the making of a good Wife" (883)—but, in fact, we have never seen her embodying any such feminine ideal by any supposed deference to male understanding dramatized anywhere in the novel, certainly not to the understanding of Tom, who never even thinks of asking her for it. Her inability to marry anyone of whom her father cannot approve is not out of deference to his understanding (which in most things, from his taste in music to how to treat his daughter, is not very impressive). It is simply an acknowledgment of the powerful bond between them, a bond that—practically speaking—cannot be ignored. She knows her own deepest feelings too well to pretend otherwise, feelings for the crude, rugged old male that have nothing to do with his "goodness," or hers, either. And when her father urges her to marry Tom tomorrow, instead of waiting a year for him to prove some kind of abstract constancy to her, she does not in the least resist (974-76): he has only given voice to what she herself wants and that "Custom" forbids her to speak herself.

33Since sex functions in so powerfully panzaic a manner in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, it is to be expected that it would continue to do so in Amelia. In the case of the hero of Fielding's last novel, we are supposed to believe that if Booth were not a religious skeptic and not "over-warm"32 he would not have been seduced by Miss Matthews when he was put in prison early in the book. It is the same kind of moral-structural framework we see in Tom Jones that critics like Watt use to "read" that novel, but it requires just as much of a denial of the characters as human beings in Amelia as it does in the former novel to accept the "reading" it gives us. For the novel has presented Miss Matthews' appeal in such a way that, under the circumstances, it would require that Booth be as cold as Blifil or as pure as Don Quixote to resist her. Indeed, at the end of the novel, Booth discovers that his wife Amelia has known about and long ago completely forgiven him this lapse of marital fidelity, and we can believe, given all the actual circumstances, his response to Miss Matthews was inevitable. And in spite of the presence of the Christian divine Dr. Harrison throughout the book—a mouthpiece for ideals who is as mistaken about Booth as Allworthy was about Tom, and in this case because he listened to gossip—the belief in no proper Christian doctrine would make a warm man’s response to the woman any different in those circumstances.

34It is not any mere doctrine or ideals that will give us "substance" or hold up against the brilliant skepticism with which David Hume treated any invisible "substratum" that was supposed to subsist beneath the flickering of mere phenomena, a skepticism that was deeply disturbing in Fielding's time. But Fielding does show us "substance," even if his morality does not really do so. This "substance" is none other than panzaic reality, and it is there in Amelia herself, in her carnal appetites that are so well satisfied by her husband and which she so well satisfies in him. As this has not, to my knowledge, been much discussed in criticism, I should like to bring my discussion of Fielding's panzaic voice to a close with a few specific references on this point in the novel itself.

35After an argument that Booth has with her about her accepting expensive gifts for her children from the lord that he suspects wants to seduce her, she agrees to accept no more. "Here ended all that is material of their Discourse," says Fielding, "and a little Time afterwards they both fell fast asleep in each other's Arms; from which Time Booth had no more Restlessness, nor any further Perturbation in his Dreams" (236). And when later they have another argument about the lord, after which Booth's fears are allayed, he "caught her in his Arms and tenderly embraced her. After which the Reconciliation soon became complete; and Booth in the Contemplation of his Happiness entirely buried all his jealous Thoughts" (253). Amelia says, when she thinks they may be completely impoverished, that as long as she has "such a Husband to make Life delicious" she can accept being poor. "Am I of a superior Rank of Being to the Wife of an honest Labourer? Am I not Partaker of one common Nature with her?" (527). She is affirming that her flesh—which she has in common with even a laborer's wife—is so satisfied in Booth that other considerations are very secondary to her happiness. It is a speech reminiscent of the great speech mentioned above affirming the sexual basis of women’s happiness that Slipslop makes to Lady Booby. And that happiness, not some abstract "goodness," is what enables this impoverished woman to resist the seductive attempts of the wealthy lord.

36We see the presence of substantial female appetite also in the intellectual Mrs. Bennett, afterwards the wife of the lower class Sergeant Atkinson. Dr. Harrison has teased her about her claims to learning and asserted that her ignorant husband, even if he lacks learning, has understanding; she has become furious, and the Doctor

fearing he had gone too far began to soften Matters, in which Amelia assisted him. By these Means the Storm rising in Mrs. Atkinson before was in some measure laid, at least suspended from bursting at present; but it fell afterwards upon the poor Sergeant’s Head in a Torrent; who had learn'd perhaps one Maxim from his Trade, that a Cannon-Ball always doth Mischief in proportion to the Resistance it meets with; and that nothing so effectually deadens its Force as a Wool-pack. The Sergeant therefore bore all with Patience; and the Idea of a Wool-pack perhaps bringing that of a Featherbed into his Head, he at last not only quieted his Wife; but she cried out with great Sincerity, "Well, my dear, I will say one thing for you, that I believe from my Soul, though you have no Learning, you have the best Understanding of any Man upon Earth; and I must own I think the latter far the more profitable of the two." (428)

37In contrast to this "substantial" feeling is that of the rake like Colonel James or the lord, whose sexual interest cannot be held long by any single person, whose desires are wavering and weak. "Good Heavens!" cries Mrs. Bennet (later Atkinson). "What are these Men! What is this Appetite, which must have Novelty and Resistance for its Provocations; and which is delighted with us no longer than while we may be considered in the Light of Enemies" (303). Furthermore, such men are not steady and loyal in friendship either. Indeed, the psychology that is developed from Hobbes to Hume does well describe them—but not men like Booth or Sergeant Atkinson or women like Amelia or Mrs. Atkinson, not men and women who partake (in spite of class differences) in a strong sexual nature.

38As in Jonathan Wild, "greatness" is exposed as debility. Our "great Men" who control our destinies, as Booth and Amelia realize about the lord, do not seem to care about us. Debilitated in their sexuality, they have no use for other people except to wring out of them whatever moments of pleasure it is possible for them to get, by means of whatever perversions (generally some form of sadistic manipulation of people as things) work for them. And, once again, in spite of Fielding’s intention, what he shows is that the ideals of Christianity are really irrelevant, because our "great Men" are driven by this perverse sexuality and not by mere wrong opinions.

39Admittedly, readers have never regarded Amelia as the success that Tom Jones is. In spite of tentative explanations that Fielding is trying a new kind of realism, more detailed and documentary, like nineteenth-century realism, they miss the laughter. In the stern and sober Dr. Harrison we have come a long way from Parson Adams. At one point in the novel, when the little servant girl has stolen from his household, Booth is furious and tries to track her down in order to have her hanged. And the novel makes no protest or even apology for his feeling or his action. Apparently, the ideal of "justice" that Allworthy embodies has penetrated Booth, as perhaps it had penetrated the life of the magistrate Fielding himself finally became, in a way it never had Tom Jones. We know from Amelia that Fielding had come to honor Aristophanes or Rabelais no longer. Nevertheless, the Panzaic principle provides the way to rescue his novelistic achievement from such idealism by showing us a significance in its vision of what in human reality lies outside idealism and that need not be moral, Christian, romantic, or Lawrentian—a significance that has not been admitted by the literary-critical Don Quixotes of our time.