英美文学选读学习笔记 Henry Fielding

Born of an old aristocratic family, Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was, for a period of time, at the stigious Eton, where he cultivated a wide and genuine taste for the classics. Due to a quarrel with his father, he had to work for a living early in life. He first tried his luck at play writing, and during a span of nine years (1729-37) he turned out 26 plays and became the most successful living playwright of the time. He later came to have his own Little Theatre. His plays were mostly comedies and farces filled with political and social satire, the butt being mainly the government and some government officials, particularly the Prime Minister Walpote. As a playwright, he was applauded by the public but hated by the government. His theatrical career came to an end in 1737 when the political censorship of the Licensing Act went into effect. He then took up law and was admitted to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1740. But his legal profession did not bring him enough income to maintain his family, so he became editor of a paper called The Champion. Later he also undertook the editorship of three other journals: The True Patriot and the Liberty of Our Own Times, The Jacobite's Journal and the Convent-Garden Journal. In 1748 he was appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster and then Middlesex, a position that brought him little income but much renown, for he served as an honest, upright and efficient magistrate. In 1754 he became very ill; he left England for Lisbon, Portugal and died there.

During his career as a dramatist, Fielding had attempted a considerable number of forms of plays: witty comedies of manners or intrigues in the Restoration tradition, farces or ballad operas with political implications, and burlesques and satires that bear heavily upon the status-quo of England. Of all his plays, the best known are The Coffee-House Politician  (1730), The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730), Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737). These successful plays not only contributed to a temporary revival of the English theatre but also were of great help to the playwright in his future literary career as a novelist.

Fielding started to write novels when he was paring himself for the Bar. In 1742 appeared his first novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, which was first intended as a burlesque of the dubious morality and false sentimentality of Richardson's Pamela. In this novel, Joseph, supposedly the young handsome and chaste brother of Richardson's virtuous heroine Pamela, is tempted by his amorous mistress, supposedly aunt of Pamela's husband, Mr. B. Here, instead of being rewarded for his virtue, Joseph is turned out of doors by his mistress. But the burlesque ends here; the book quickly turns into a great novel of the open road, a "comic epic in prose," whose subject is "the true ridiculous" in human nature, as exposed in all its variety as Joseph and the amiable quixotic parson journey homeward through the heart of England. The dominating qualities of the novel are its excellent character-portrayal, timely entrances and exits, robustness of tone and hilarious, hearty humor.

The  year came The History of Jonathan Wild the Great, a satiric biography that harks back to Fielding's early plays. It takes the life of a notorious real-life thief as a theme for demonstrating the petty spanision between a great rogue and a great soldier or a great politician such as Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister. The ironical praises for the very qualities of the unscrupulous self-aggrandizement of Wild point out the way the Prime Minister had achieved his "greatness." The Great Man, properly considered, is no better than a great gangster.

The novel was followed by The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and The History of Amelia (1751). The former is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature and the latter the story of the unfortunate life of an idealized woman, a maudlin picture of the social life at the time.

Fielding was poor himself all his life; that is why he was very sympathetic toward .the poor and unfortunate, and protested strongly against social injustice and political corruption in his Writings. As an educated man, he firmly believed in the educational function of literature. He shared the contemporary view of the English enlighteners that the purpose of the novel was not just to amuse, but to instruct. The object of his novel was to sent a faithful picture of life, "the just copies of human manners," with sound teaching woven into their texture, so as to teach men to know themselves, their proper spheres and appropriate manners.

Fielding has been regarded by some as "Father of the English Novel," for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel. Of all the eighteenth-century novelists he was the first to set out, both in theory and practice, to write specifically a "comic epic in prose," the first to give the modern novel its structure and style. Before him, the relating of a story in a novel was either in the epistolary form (a series of letters), as in Richardson's Pamela, or the picaresque form (adventurous wanderings) through the mouth of the principal character, as in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but Fielding adopted "the third-person narration," in which the author becomes the "all-knowing God." He "thinks the thought" of all his characters, so he is able to sent not on their external behaviors but also the internal workings of their minds. In planning his stories, he tries to retain the grand epical form of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic sentation of common life as it is.

Throughout, the ordinary and usually ridiculous life of the common people, from the middle-class to the under-world, is his major concern.

Fielding's language is easy, unlabored and familiar, but extremely vivid and vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm, and his structure carefully planned towards an inevitable ending. His works are also noted for lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices such as suspense, coincidence and unexpectedness.