Tom Jones

From Ross Hamilton's Introduction toTom Jones In the plot ofTom Jones, accidents or human failings pull the lives of the individual characters into disorder and then provide the means to restore them to their proper position. Everyone in the novel is subject to randomizing forces at work in the universe, but their basic natures do not change when their fortunes change. Tom's travels through England are a domestic equivalent of the continental journey designed to give a final polish to the education of a young aristocrat, but his experience does not touch his essential qualities. Fielding sees people's lives determined by the manners or speech they adopt, which--inevitably--others will interpret (or misinterpret). Therefore, in order to succeed within this tissue of social interactions, individuals must exercise prudent control over what they say and do. This sounds like a simple principle. However, Fielding uses prudence as both an ideal and a pejorative term. In the 1740s the word was evolving from its original meaning as the supreme rational virtue of the Christian humanist tradition (prudentia) into its near opposite--the worldly wisdom of middle-class morality or even a villainous hypocrisy. Prudence was beginning to signify self-discipline, discretion, and foresight in the service of mercenary gain rather than a means to achieve self-knowledge and virtuous conduct. By deliberately complicating the meaning of this concept through his ambiguous use of it, Fielding points to the difficulty of distinguishing the high ideal of wisdom from mere cunning and deceit. He was not the only author of the period who was preoccupied withprudentia. A direct source of Fielding's concern was the enormous praise and popularity accorded toPamela, the work of his great rival, Samuel Richardson. Richardson's ostentatiously chaste heroine defends herself from rape, turns the rapist into her besotted lover, and ultimately marries into a much higher social class than her own. Fielding mocked Richardson's premise that artful perfection is the secret to earthly reward. He parodied the novel first inShamela, by showing a devious and less than virtuous heroine conniving with her lover to manipulate her aristocratic admirer. Then, inJoseph Andrews, he reversed the sexes, offering Pamela's brother as his hero. Richardson's achievements inPamelaand his masterwork,Clarissa, helped goad Fielding to develop his richly comic analysis of moral behavior inTom Jones. In the novel, the imprudent Tom is matched against his half brother Blifil, who exhibits precocious prudence as a matter of policy. Blifil performs to meet the standards of virtue held by his audience. Since a pretense must work on a specific target in order to succeed, Blifil must understand the person he intends to deceive and adjust his behavior to conform to their point of view. He cannot correct failings in his performance by self-examination any more than he can recalibrate his false premises. Unable to grasp a point of view far outside his own, he completely misunderstands Tom; as a result, although he deceives even the sagacious Squire Allworthy, to Tom his motives are transparent. Richardson shows the "inside" of his heroine's mind in a stream-of-consciousness description of her experience, but Fielding believes introspection cannot tell much about the real source of a person's motives. He prefers to show his characters in action and presents them in ironically matched pairs to accentuate their differences for the reader. The contrasts between Blifil and Tom, Squire Allworthy and Squire Western, or Sophia and her cousin Harriet convey knowledge that is perceptible only when different points of view confront each other. In book VI, the narrator tells the reader that no one can explain the genuine meaning of love to a person incapable of experiencingFielding, Henry is the author of 'Tom Jones', published 2004 under ISBN 9781593080709 and ISBN 1593080700.