Ethical Narrative: A Study Of Henry Fielding's Novels

In the 18th-century Britain, Henry Fielding played an important role by bridging between the preceding and the following literature. The comic epic in prose he initiated inherited and renovated the traditional European romances on one hand, and started the realistic tradition in British literature which shows great concern with social life on the other hand. As a novelist with a special interest in ethical issues, Fielding, in his creative transformation of the traditional literature, represented the ethical reality of British society in a magnificent and accurate way while conveying his own moral ideals artistically. In Henry Fielding's novels, those stories about characters' moral motives, life adventures, and moral consummation reflects Fielding's basic view of ethical issues. It is quite secure to say, the plot and comments which described in those stories is the "narrative ethics" in Fielding's works. This dissertation is aimed at exploration to the ethical ideas embodied in Fielding's three novels—The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, The History of Tom Johns: A Foundling, and Amelia—by means of analysis of the narrative function of the realization of the traditional romance narrative in the author's moral construction, and of investigation into the artistic methods and ideas of the ethical narrative, based on a close reading of the three novels and respect for their own narrative logic. This dissertation is composed of three chapters.ChapterⅠfocuses on the moral characters of heroes in Fielding's novels, makes an effort to illustrate Fielding's creative transformation of romances from a perspective of comparative study based on a detailed analysis of the romance qualities of his novels, and explores Fielding's concepts of human nature and the origin of the moral. Romance narrative, though declining as a literary trend in the 18th century literary context, still held its influence, which is embodied in Fielding's novels in a form of the romanticization of characters in the novels. Approximately when he wrote The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, Fielding began to create many legendary moral heroes. Unlike the heroes in chivalry romances, Fielding replaced the heroes of noble blood with heroes of noble moral, who are not only physically handsome but also morally courageous. This indicates the author's narrative purpose of expressing the moral theme in the form of romance. Meanwhile, Fielding's creative transformation of the romance by substituting moral heroes for chivalrous heroes also demonstrates his concern with human nature. He was quite prudent in dealing with human nature. He believed that human nature is perfect but is in a state where good and evil mix. Even a person of the best nature has "those little blemishes quas humana parum cavit natura," which are just what the protagonist should overcome immediately when he took his adventurous journey. So to speak, Fielding, based on his own view of human nature, designed a set of definite moral codes for the protagonist's moral consummation. But the complexity of this question lies in that, though human beings can overcome their defects by means of moral pursuit, such natural elements as emotion, desire and instinct hidden in human nature will still come in the way of the moral pursuit, and may even conflict with the rational moral codes. In order to solve this problem, Fielding gave vivid description of the issues concerned with moral sensibility which would drive people to do good. Thus he criticized hypocrisy to reveal that man would fall evil once he betrayed the moral sensibility of human nature. The moral considerations in his ethical narrative reflect Fielding's ethical idea with its emphasis on the motive of the moral subject.ChapterⅡfocuses on the love and adventure stories of Fielding's novels and explores the history of moral consummation of the heroes by examining a variety of moral tests they have experienced. The love between the hero and heroine usually works as a basic impetus towards the protagonist's adventures, stories about which are quite eye-catching in Fielding's novels. So to speak, just in order to seek their ideal love the heroes like Joseph Andrews, Tom Johns and William Booth took on their adventurous journey without hesitation. In this sense, love serves as the first ceremony the heroes would go through in their growth. Fielding understood that ideal love should rest upon sense and sensibility, but at the same time, he had a profound insight into human defects and thus followed a realistic spirit of faithfully mirroring human nature in his account of love stories. This leads to a narrative paradigm quite different from that of romances. In Fielding's novels, the heroes, usually handsome and valiant, had to suffer from frustrations in their pursuit of ideal love due to their own weak points in character and to the obstructions from their rivals. The formation of this narrative paradigm, on one hand, is related with Fielding's intention of testing the hero's moral stand by means of love, and, on the other hand, accurately reflects the author's realistic spirit in making a faithful record of life. Compared with the hero, the heroine usually demonstrates a perfect moral image, which serves the salvation of the heroes. So the moral status of both the hero and the heroine is artistically demonstrated. The author's thinking about the moral questions such loyalty, hypocrisy and self-discipline greatly enhances the moral meaning of the love stories. Compared with love the testing field for morality, adventure stories are the main clues of plot in Fielding's novels. To a great extend, adventures form the second ceremony the hero must go through in his moral growth. According to the setup of plot, the adventures of the heroes in Fielding's novels can be categorized into two types: the adventure stories they heard, and the adventures they experienced. The former, usually in a narrative mode of interposing a plot, conveys the author's concern with moral experience. This kind of plot is usually about the life experience of some minor characters of the novel, constituting a kind of definite moral warning against the protagonist. The latter serves as a major test field for the hero's moral consummation, undoubtedly forming the main thread of the adventure stories. When accounting the adventures the hero experienced, Fielding put emphasis on the protagonist's moral growth. In a sense, the author's persistent exploration to moral issues lies in the protagonist's personal adventurous experiences: only when the hero puts himself in an extremely difficult situation of existence can he display the moral splendor through his brave resistance, can his image demonstrate the author's ideal of harmonious life with reason and emotion in balance.ChapterⅢ, having the ethical idea of "virtue deserves reward" embodied in Fielding's novels as its research object, attempts to reveal the auxiliary function of such elements as the protagonist's benevolence, his intimate friends and heroines in the protagonist's moral consummation based on a detailed analysis of these elements. In discussing the images of intimate friends, this dissertation firstly analyzes the multiply role of an intimate friend as an agent of the protagonist's father and an ethical authority, claiming that these friends themselves foreshadow the social recognition of personal virtues in terms of the protagonist's re-identification. This is an embodiment of the ethical idea of "virtue deserves reward" cherished by the protagonist. That is, the hero will eventually return to the centre of the social values with his personal moral recognized by society after a series of moral tests. In this process, Fielding offered descriptions of questions like religious salvation and the moral dilemma relevant to the images of the intimate friends, which demonstrates the author's dialectic understanding of the relationship between religion and morality. In terms of the images of the heroines created by Fielding, they usually rescued the heroes by means of giving possessions away as gift, but also add a practical value to Fielding's ethical idea of "virtue deserves reward." However, just because Fielding held a traditional view of sex that male was superior to female, he inevitably saw heroines as a metaphorical sign of men's possession in his account of the heroines' rescue of the heroes. What deserves further consideration here is that the homogeneity of heroines and possessions clearly reflects Fielding's certain economic considerations when making his moral observations. For him, the hero's moral consummation involves not only a series of tests but also great economic pressure. If the hero's moral pursuit is aimed at material reward, his moral tests would go against certain values of the virtues, and thus making the virtue worldly and utilitarian; if he pursues exclusively the abstract and lofty virtues, his adventures would turn out to be a shortage of practical material reward, which is not inspiring or worth learning from by the popular in the bourgeois society resting on economical individualism. That is, there exists a paradoxical relationship between material desire (pursuit of practical interests) and feelings (instinct of pursuing moral good), which is hard to keep in balance. However, Fielding's dealing with these questions greatly demonstrates his dialectic ethical idea of seeking a balance between the two elements. Besides the intimate friends and heroines, the protagonist's own benevolence also plays an important role in his moral consummation. In Fielding's novels, the protagonists' good deeds and virtues in helping others would, in return, eventually help themselves pull through danger. The protagonists' seeming altruistic deeds, in fact, contain the result of benefiting themselves. In this sense, the protagonists' benevolence is the cause of their reward, and their helping others is essentially helping themselves. This narrative logic is also reflected in Fielding's ethical concept of "virtue deserves reward". In his novels, this ethical concept is embodied as a ethical justice. Based on a careful examination of this question, this chapter believes that there is in his novels a deviation between ethical justice and justice in reality, which fully reflects certain historically transitional features in his ethical ideas.