Aspects of style in the novels of Henry Fielding

374 Pages·2016·3.66 MB·English

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