ASPECTS OF SfYLE IN THE NOVELS OF HENRY FIELDING Mary Stewart Bock n w o T e p a C f o y t i s Thesis submitted in fulfilment r eof the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy v i n U Department of English University of Cape Town May 1990 n w The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No o T quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgeement of the source. p The thesis is to be used for private study or non- a C commercial research purposes only. f o Published by the Universit y of Cape Town (UCT) in terms y t of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. i s r e v i n U To my mother and father Abstract The prefatory essays in Fielding's two major novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones foreground his interest in the problems and challenges of the writing of fiction. In the narrative he experiments with answers to the questions raised in these discursive sections. Analysis of style in these novels also shows a gradual development from the pervasive and self-reflexive irony and the interplay of stylistic modes that characterise the earlier novel to the more confident and increasingly serious authorial voice of the latter. Both Fielding's theoretical concerns and the development in his narrative style help to situate him in relation to eighteenth-century debates about language and the nature of fiction. This thesis attempts to show that appropriate stylistic analysis can reveal connections between the syntactic patterns in the text and the underlying assumptions and broader concerns of the writer. As the first chapter will indicate, the term 'stylistic analysis' covers widely divergent practices proceeding from equally divergent assumptions about the proper scope of stylistics. My a priori assumption is that the literary text is an instance of discourse, of language in use in a communicative situation. Since no single model of discourse analysis is adequate to describe all aspects of literary style, I have drawn from different analytical approaches to illuminate different aspects of Fielding's prose. For the analysis of the rhetorical and expressive values of his syntax the most productive approach has been the 'functionalist' stylistics of by M.A.K.Halliday, complemented by Roman Jakobson's theory of the poetic function of language. But neither of these approaches is adequate to deal with the specific challenge to the analyst of language in the novel: the diversity of styles and registers that are available to the novelist. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of novelistic style as 'dialogical' or multi-voiced accommodates the diversity in Fielding's prose and affords insights into both the social-ideological resonances and the artistic function of the language of the texts. The focus of the chapters moves from the analysis of the expressive values of specific aspects of Fielding's essay style, namely parallelism and word order in the sentence, patterns of underlying semantic relations and expressions of subjectivity in the discourse, to a consideration of the same aspects in the context of the narrative. The first two chapters deal with issues in stylistics and demonstrate the analytical tools of linguistics in a comparison of passages from Fielding, Addison and Swift, in which the distinctive features of Fielding's prose are highlighted. Chapter 3 introduces the historical perspective, and shows how Fielding's stylistic effects are illuminated in the light of classical and nee-classical conventions of style and language. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 show how developments in the style of the prefatory essays in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones correspond with a change in the hierarchy of styles (voices) in the narrative text and with the development of Fielding's theory of fiction. The final chapter examines his theory of fiction in the context of three other prose works, Jonathan Wild, Shamela and Amelia. i Table of Contents I. THE ANALYSIS OF STYLE: A JUSTIFICATION FOR AN ECLECTIC METHODOLOGY II. FIELDING, ADDISON AND SWIFT: A COMPARISON 51 III. THE ESSAY STYLE - CLASSICAL AND NEG-CLASSICAL INFLUENCES 108 IV. THE DEVELOPMENT IN THE ESSAY STYLE 159 V. 'DIALOGIZED DISCOURSE' IN JOSEPH ANDREWS 200 VI. THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES 268 VII. SYTLE AND FIELDING'S THEORY OF FICTION 314 ii Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to the many people who have assisted me in bringing this study to completion. John Coetzee, my supervisor, has, by his high standards, consistently challenged me to reach beyond the limits I set for myself. His insights and his meticulous criticism of my work have taught me a new awareness of and respect for language. I am grateful, too, to Peter Knox-Shaw for his careful reading and constructive comments on chapters of my thesis during the period that he acted as temporary supervisor. My thanks go especially to Ailsa Stewart Smith, Sally Swartz and Susan Wright, who have read and advised me on different chapters; and to Kay McCormick and Ros Emmanuel, who have assisted me in innumerable ways with their practical and moral support. I should also like to thank Alexandra Germanis, whose expertise has facilitated the final editing and printing of the thesis, and Charmian de la Mare for undertaking the task of typing and correcting the bibliography. Finally I should like to thank my husband and my children for their loving support and their tolerance, over so many years, of their intrusive and demanding fellow-traveller. iii Foreword In the first chapter of Tom Jones, Fielding explains his intention in the novel: to present human nature, truthfully but dressed to advantage for the amusement as well as the edification of his reader. However, he adds, contrary to the expectations of most readers, fed on a diet of popular "Romances, Novels, Plays and Poems", "true Nature is as difficult to be met with in an Author" as any rare culinary delicacy. In characteristic antithetical form he has introduced to the reader two of his major artistic concerns. The writer's success depends in part on his skill in presenting the subject: 'life' in the novel should be made palatable by art. But equally, his obligation to his readers is to represent experience faithfully, to show people as they are in reality, and not as the figments of some romancer's imagination. The importance that he attaches to the truthful representation of the actions and characters of people is correlative with his lifelong concern about the abuse of language by those who exploit it for their own ends, misrepresenting the truth, manipulating others, and, in so doing, contributing to the degeneration of the moral values of society. My aim in this thesis is to show how the analysis of style in two major novels, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, can contribute to a critical appreciation of the expressive and rhetorical values of syntax in Fielding's discursive and narrative prose, and ultimately to a fuller understanding of his theory of fiction. In the last three decades studies in stylistics have broadened their scope from the focus on the syntactic structures in the sentence to the iv consideration of the linguistic features of discourse, and the social, historical and cultural codes that are represented in the language of texts. In this way the concerns of the stylistician have approached more closely those of the literary critic, both having as their goal an interpretive reading of the text. My approach to the analysis of style in Fielding's novels was founded on the 'functionalist' stylistics of M.A.K.Halliday and the poetic theory of Roman Jakobson; the work of both these theorists has been invaluable to my understanding of the semantic and expressive values of syntax. My introduction to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin opened up new perspectives on style in Fielding's novels, since Bakhtin sees stylistic diversity, which is such a conspicuous feature of Fielding's narrative prose, as a con~titutive property of the novel, and his theory of the 'dialogization' of discourse enables insights into both the social-ideological and artistic values of linguistic structures in the text. Fielding, like his contemporary Richardson, believed that he was embarking on a new species of writing, "something hitherto unattempted in our language" (Joseph Andrews, preface). Aspects of his style reflect ways in which he explores the implications of the terms 'truth', 'fiction' and 'history', and grapples with the problems of verbal representation in fictional biography. When the two novels which are the principal focus of this study are set, in my final chapter, in their context of Fielding's other prose fiction works, Jonathan Wild, Shamela and Amelia, developments in his style and narrative technique can be seen in their relation to his evolving theory of fiction. I. THE ANALYSIS OF STYLE: A JUSTIFICATION FOR AN ECLECTIC METHODOLOGY I.1 STYLE IN THE NOVEL Roman Jakobson writes at the end of his seminal essay "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics": Medieval literary theory keenly distinguished two poles of verbal art, labelled ... in Latin ornatus difficilis and ornatus facilis, the latter style being evidently much more difficult to analyze linguistically because in such literary forms verbal devices are unostentatious and language seems a more transparent garment .... "Verseless composition," as Hopkins calls the prosaic variety of verbal art ... presents more entangled problems for poetics, as does any transitional linguistic area. In this case the transition is between strictly poetic and strictly referential language. (1960, 374) A theory of style in the novel must take into account not only the seeming transparency of most narrative style, the absence, frequently, of the more obvious verbal devices of poetry, but also the linguistic resources uniquely available to the novelist. For in addition to the lexical, phonological and syntactic systems of the language, he may draw upon all social and professional registers and all literary genres in the representation of characters, places and events, and for the expression of his own artistic and thematic concerns. Geoffrey Leech and Michael Short point out in their book Style in Fiction that studies of style in the novel have suffered particularly from the lack of a coherent theory adequate to deal with the range and diversity of stylistic effects. The result has often been a fragmented analysis, in which the writer's style has been reduced to a handful of linguistic features (3). As Stanley Fish argues, the interpretive strategies of the reader