ETHICS OF SEX IN THE NOVELS OF HENRY FIELDING

Dr. Utkarsh Tripathi It is too well known that it was the conventional, lowpitched, sickly morality of Richardson which provoked Henry Fielding to attempt his hand at novel writing and heap ridicule on him in his first novel Joseph Andrews, purported to be a burlesque of Richardsons Pamela. Indeed, judged from the modern point of view, Richardson is a tiresome, mawkish sentimentalist. But Henry Fielding, the Hogarth of literature, is in all essentials a typical Englishman, manly English. As Leslie Stephen has written of him: - The big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of roast beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. Richardson wrote for women, Fielding the Bohemian wrote for men. The two writers were antipathetic. Richardson was a super-sentimentalist, Fielding was a realist. His is an athletic and boisterous genius whose works illustrate the general proposition that greatness without goodness is no better than badness, and that our society is not so pretty as rose pink, and we are flesh and blood, not the figures cut in alabastor. Hence, we can err, fall down, and yet are worthy to be called human. Mans worth is to be assessed not by material greatness but by the innate goodness of heart, not by his doing but by his being. True virtue consists in goodness of the heart rather than in good reputation or conventional respectability. It was in this view of supreme virtue that Fieldings moral code differed from Richardsons. Richardsons cultural level was not very high and his narrow notion of virtue provoked several skits. Fieldings purpose was to expose affectation, vanity and hypocrisy. His Janathan Wild, the Great, an ironic biography of notorious bandit, is a satire on the popular ideas of greatness. He shows the greatness of persons who occupy high positions in government, politics and society is in no way different from the greatness of Janathan Wild and his associates. The so-called greatmen profess high ideas but their actions are as cruel, selfish and mean as those of the basest criminals. The severe irony of the book was meant to shock the readers in to an awareness of the great difference between goodness and greatness. In Tom Jones, his master piece, Fielding, again, is at some pains to emphasise his moral purpose which is to recommend goodness and innocence and to laugh mankind out of their follies and vices. He wants to establish that inspite of several sexual irregularities one can retain the goodness of character, for sexual weakness may be a bad conduct, but surely not a bad character. It may blacken the career of a man but does not altogether blur his character as a whole. Character is a very wide term and embraces so many aspects of a mans being. Tom Jones, inspite of his numberless moral lapses has a heart of gold. He is not ideal, but he is human. The highest virtue according to Fielding is goodness of heart. Fielding held that moral philosophy he was preaching was indulgent to the weakness of the flesh. It may also be argued on Fieldings behalf that a novel of epic dimensions which sets out to present the vast and complex sense of humanity at large can not altogether ignore its black spots. Hence, the black spots of the hero are isolated incidents and do not colour the whole book of life. Richardson maliciously denounced Tom Jones as a dissolute book, a profligate performance and Dr. Johnson rebuked Hannah More for having read so vicious a book. Sir John Hawkins declared

that Fielding had done more towards corrupting the rising generation than any writer we know of. It is true that Fielding has his own champions and in their fields as great names as the learned doctor. Amongst his advocates may be counted Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Lord Bulwer Lytton and the latest addition John Middleton Murry. Even so, the immorality of Tom Jones was until recently a common place of literary criticism. Much of this criticism is centred around the conduct of Tom Jones. However, the gravest charge that can be brought against Tom Jones is his incontinence with women-Tom Jones falls four times and each one of these lapses is more serious than the last one. His initial affair with Molly Seagrim is easiest to wink at. In truth so little had she of modesty, that Jones had more regard for her virtue than she herself and, she soon triumphed over all the virtuous resolutions of Jones. In fact it was her design which succeeded. It is obvious that Jones was successfully inveigled by the more experienced Molly Seagrim. But Tom Jones, again falls a prey to the wiles of Molly Seagrim a second time when he meets her accidentally in the wood. Here again, as in the first affair, he is a victim to womanly snares. When Tom meets Mrs. Waters, whom he rescues from the murderous assault of Ensign Northerton, he is evidently more experienced. But Jones cannot resist helping himself to beauty readily offered. Her breasts, which were well-formed and extremely white, attracted the eyes of her deliverer. Even when she is safely lodged at the Upton Inn she does not cease to employ her battery upon him. With such heavy odds against him Tom Jones has really no chance and he falls a willing victim to the clever and vigorous onslaught. The last of Tom Joness falls is the mightiest and the least defensible. In the first two cases he had succumbed to the physical charm of the girls. It is otherwise with lady Bellaston. It is true that he stays with Lady Bellaston from two to six in the morning and is paid, what an uncharitable critic would call wages for his service in the night, fifty pounds. We later learn of the many obligations which Lady Bellaston had heaped upon him. He felt his obligations strongly. He knew the tacit consideration upon which all her favours were conferred ; and as his necessity obliged him to accept them, so his honour, he concluded, forced him to pay the price. It must, in this connection, always be borne in mind that Fielding, at no stage, tries to hold a brief for the conduct of Tom Jones. Nowhere in the story is the slightest attempt made to justify or condone his misdemeanours. He must be punished for his wrong doings and he comes very close to losing Sophia for ever. At the same time we must not lose sight of the many mitigating circumstances. It should, be remembered that in each case it is the woman who takes the initiative and lays the siege. Fielding may be said to have anticipated Bernard Shaw who too believed that much of the hunting was done by the so-called weaker sex and that man was the victim to feminine snares and not the engineer of her degradation. Tom Jones is never the seducer; but always the seduced, never the hunter but always the hunted, never the victor, but always the vanquished. We are convinced that Tom Jones is silly but is not a knave, and the very fullness of his gratitude to Lady Bellaston does much to dispel the sordidness of their relation. Nor should it be forgotten that Fielding does not aim at delineating an ideal young man. He was out and out a realist and in Tom Jones he sought to depict a normally constituted young man, full of animal vitality, reacting in a natural way to the circumstances in which he happened

to be placed. This may not be the way in which young lads ought to behave but, in nine cases out of ten, this is the way in which young lads generally behave. Fielding did not allow the moralist to bury the realist in him. His ethics is all the sounder for being so close to the facts of life. Unlike Richardson who tediously moralizes, and dotes on the sentimental woes and conventional virtues of his heroines, Fielding is direct, vigorous, hilarious and coarse to the point of vulgarity. He is a novelist unashamed. He is full of animal spirits and likes virile men, just as they are, good and bad, but detests shams of every sort. It was in Joseph Andrews that Fielding first tried to ridicule Richardsonian morality, as exhibited in Pamela, to its true character, Pamelas virtue, so vociferously acclaimed by the public, was not a genuine stuff. He had a fling at it in An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. The first ten chapters of Joseph Andrews were a naked and unashamed burlesque of Pamela but Fielding himself was convinced of the genuineness of Josephs conduct. He, therefore, took up this engaging problem in sexual ethics in Tom Jones and tried to expound his own views on human morality. Fieldings ethics of sex seems to be in tune with many theologians that other sins are graver than sexual irregularity. Among those are malice, cruelty, meanness, hypocrisy, treachery etc. Unlike Richardsons rewarding of virtue, in Fieldings art, virtue is its own reward. By laying emphasis on the examination of human motive, Fielding set up a new precedent in the realm of fiction and innovated the method, of psychological analysis which is the predominant feature of modern novel. In other words, he paved the way for the novelists of Freudian School.