JOSEPH ANDREWS. PAMELA. HENRY FIELDING. BACKGROUND JOSEPH ANDREWS. RICHARDSON'S PAMELA AND FIELDING'S JOSEPH ANDREWS.

1. Assignment Topic:
Aleena Farooq.
Roll no. 07.
BS. English.
(4th Semester.)
The Background Of The Novel ‘Joseph Andrews’
TheTHE
Fielding's first venture into prose fiction came a year previously with the
publication in pamphlet form of Shamela, a parody of, and direct response to,
the stylistic failings and moral hypocrisy that Fielding saw in Richardson's
Pamela. Richardson's tale of a unbendable servant girl, armed only with her
'virtue', battling against her master's attempts at seduction had become an
overnight literary sensation in 1741. The implicit moral message – that a girl's
chastity has eventual value as a commodity – as well as the awkwardness of the
form in dealing with ongoing events, and the triviality of the detail which the
form necessitates, were some of the main targets of Fielding's parody.
Henry Fielding published his first full novel in 1742, at a time when he
was nearly penniless and expecting the deaths of his young daughter and
beloved wife. Joseph Andrews was, then, a response to personal and financial
pressures, but it was equally a response to that great literary event of 1740, the
publication of Samuel Richardson’s much-debated and oft-satirized Pamela;
or, Virtue Rewarded. Joseph Andrews in some ways continues the satirical
work that Shamela began, but with its broad range of contemporary reference
and its self-conscious positioning about long-standing literary and moral
traditions, Joseph Andrews clearly considers itself far more than just another
sendup of the century’s most widely mocked novel. Richardson would continue
to be a target of Fielding's first novel, but the Pamela phenomenon was just one
example of what he saw as a culture of literary abuses in the mid-18th century.
The Preface to Joseph Andrews, in which Fielding explains in detail his
inauguration of a hybrid genre, the “comic Epic-Poem in Prose,” makes
obvious his desire to blend high and low and is a measure of how seriously he
hoped that his work would be taken. By comparison, Fielding’s earlier literary
output had been relatively sloppy; from 1728 to 1737 he had been a writer of
comedies for the London stage, in which capacity he had sought, in the words
of the earlier dramatist John Vanbrugh, “to show People what they should do,
by representing them on the Stage doing what they should not.”

2. Joseph Andrews is a product not only of its author’s career and education,
but also of its age in general, which is often called the Age of Reason or the
Enlightenment Age. It was a time of major political and doctrinal
compromises, and its religious temper was optimistic and non-rigid. Thus,
Fielding shares with his Parson Adams a confidence, which borders on the
rationalistic, in the ethical value of reason, including and especially that of the
pre-Christian Greek philosophers. As becomes apparent from the first few
chapters of the novel in which Richardson is parodied mercilessly, the real
germ of Joseph Andrews is Fielding's objection to the moral and technical
limitations of the popular literature of his day. But while Shamela started and
finished as a sustained subversion of a rival work, in Joseph Andrews, Fielding
merely uses the perceived deprivation of popular literature as a springboard to
conceive more fully his own philosophy of prose fiction.
The subject of Joseph Andrews, as of all of Fielding’s novels, is human
nature, which he considered imperfect, but perfectible. The mode is comical or
satirical, and the moral intention is to puncture the disguises whereby people
protect themselves from moral criticism or from self-knowledge, as the case
may be. The field of reference comprises Homer and Richardson, the poorness
of contemporary writers, the corruption of contemporary aristocracy and
officials, and many moral and ethical verities of eternal relevance. As much
as Pamela was the first best-selling novel, Joseph Andrews is the first novel of
the “modern” type, comprehending traces of the theater and of picaresque, of
high culture and of low culture, in a structure both architectural and
deceptively casual.
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