Representing Reality:
Strategies of Realism in
the Early English Novel
Clinton Bond
Some's fiction and some's not, and you can't be sure. I wanted that
feeling of when you're lying, people think you're telling the truth.'
Ken Kesey
A
lexander Pope read Samuel Richardson's Pamela "with great Approbation and Pleasure," and, according to Dr George Cheyne,
commented that "it will do more good than a great many of the new
sermon^."^ However we read this comment, and I believe there are several layers of irony, Pope enjoyed the book well enough to make sure
his appreciation and his understanding of it as a work of practical morality were forwarded to its author. His linking Pamela to the sermon would
have won Richardson's gratitude, by placing it in that world of homiletic
morality where Richardson consistently believed his works belonged.
That Pamela was a fiction Pope did not doubt, but those features that
make the text a novel for the modem reader apparently made little impression on him. He seems not to have responded to Pamela's originality,
nor did he recognize that the work's subtext attacked the world he had
dedicated his life to defending.
1 Intemiew. Son F r ~ e i s e oErmniwr. Sunday 26 October 1986. p. A29.
2 Quoted in Maynard Mack, Pope: A Life (NewYork: W.W. Notton; New Haven: Yale Univmity
Press. 1985), p. 761; quoted in T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, S m c l Richardson; A
Biography (London: Oxford University Press. 1971). p. 124.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PICTION, Volume6, Number 2, January 1994
122 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
Pope's sort of humanism, descended from the Roman Catholic thinkers
of the sixteenth century, was in decline, and even though Pope would "not
bear any faults to be mentioned in the story" of Pamela,) he was certainly
willing to offer advice about the sequel, advice which Richardson could
not or would not follow. Pope was so insensitive to the nature of the
work that, according to Warburton, he suggested that Richardson turn
the continuation of Pamela into a set of satirical "spy" letters, written
by the nalve sewing girl:
Mr. Pope and I, talking over your work when the two last volumes came out,
agreed, that one excellent subject of Pamela's letters in high life, would have
been to have passed her judgment, on first stepping into it, on every thing she
saw there, just as simple nature (and no one ever touched nature to the quick,
as it were, more certainly and surely than you) dictated. The effect would have
been this, that it would have produced, by good management, a most excellent
and useful satire on all the follies and extravagancies of high life; which to one
of Pamela's low station and good sense would have appeared as absurd and
unaccountable as European polite vices and customs to an Indian. You easily
conceive the effect this must have added to the entertainment of the book; and
for the use, that is incontestable. And what could be more natural than this in
Pamela, going into a new world, where every thing sensibly strikes a stranger.'
As a moral tale, Pope links Pamela to sermons and, as an epistolary
tale, he links it to the Lenres persanes type of satirical commentgenres which, I argue below, were displaced and subverted by the noveL5
Richardson, however, understood that what he had created was something very different and very new and, as we shall see, he sought to
deflect Warbunon's further solicitations when he readied Clarissa for
publication.
As Pope's response to Pamela indicates, eighteenth-century novels
were at first misunderstood; the tasks of the present essay are to explore
the cultural fissures that separated authors and, more particularly, to discover what the unspoken and elusive claims of realistic fictions were.
3 Cheyne, quoted in Eaves and Kimpel, p. 124.
4 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Correspondence of Samuel Richmison. 6 vols (New Yo*: AMS
Press. 1966) 1:134-35.
5 In Nowlr ,$the 1740.~(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982). Jerry C. Beasley remaks
that Pamela, along with other "heroes and heroines of the major novels," bears a "resemblance
to the moralizing spies of M a m a and Montesquieu" which "may well have seemed more than
just casual to the Rrst readers of their stories" (p. 75). 1 believe, however, that A.D. McKillop's
association of Pnmclo with "conduct-books and collections of commonplaces" is much closer
to actuality. See The Early Marterr vf English Pmsc Fiction (Lawrence: University of Kansas
Press, 1956). p. 62.
REALISM I N THE E A R L Y ENLISH N O V E L 123
The novel's claim to be real, eveeperhaps, particularly-while recognized as fiction, lies at the very heart of the genre, and should be seen
less as a bizarre attempt to pass fiction as true than as a characteristic strategy built on the assertion that novels occupy exactly the same
world-ideological and concrete-as their readers. Although they are
preceded by a host of less successful attempts, Pamela and, more certainly, Chrissa stand out as probably the first texts in English which
satisfactorily insert themselves into the world; as Edward Said remarks,
such works insist "not only upon their circumstantial reality but also
upon their status as already fulfilling a function, a reference, or a meaning in the w o ~ l d . "Because
~
they already insist upon their "meaning" or
particular function in the "real" world, it is clearly crucial to both the
development of the genre and its place in the development of eighteenthcentury culture that Richardson's first two novels operate as accomplices
of other attempts to substantiate and revise a social and political world
that had not yet come fully into being. This world, in many ways the
one we call "modern," for the most part still holds ideological sway, but
is beginning to be recognized as a "concept" to be penetrated and revealed as a creation of European humanism. Indeed, so powerful is the
hold of eighteenth-century thought that even today, when "we have become uneasy about our whole way of constituting reality," many writers
simply assume that in some way the Enlightenment represents transparent reality, and not merely the "age of realism.''' Early novels, because
they represented themselves as functioning parts of this world, anchoring themselves in realism, acted not only to refine but also to validate
that connection between humanist ideology and "reality," which began
in the Renaissance.
At the centre of the Richardsonian novel's relationship to the modem
cultural formulation lies the claim that the world presented is the one
6 Edward W. Said. The World, the Text, ood the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard Univenity Press,
1983).
.. o. 44. Said continues. "Cervantes and Cide Hamete come immediatelv to mind. More
immessive is Richardson olavine the role of 'men'editor for Clnrisso. simolv olacinz those
leners on succewre order aRer they haw done uhat they have dam, ananpng lo fill the lexl
wah pnnlcr'r dewces, reader's ads. analync contents, remspectlve m d ~ t u ~ u ncommcnwy.
s,
w
that a collcclmn of leeen grour to nll Ihe uorld and accup) all space, lo k c o m a circumstance
as large and as engmssing as the reader's very understanding."
7 Stephen G~enblatl.Renairsmcc Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakepenre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980). p. 174.
.
7
,
-
.. .
12.1 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N
true reality, a world that has moral meaning precisely because its patterns
can be measured and reproduced as in the laboratory. Yet, at the same
time, the concrete reality presented must be seen as peculiar and unique;
that is, the "facts" of the novel should be specific and particular while
simultaneously contributing to a general and repeatable pattern. On the
general and repeatable, the early novelist seeks to impress a traditional
pattern of morality. Richardson convinced himself that his primary goal
was moral reformation, and he hoped that through Clarissa "the present
age can be awakened and amended."s As I hope to show, however, the
Richardsonian narrative never permits the sort of moral closure he sought,
in part because the general pattern, as it was formulated by Richardson
and other eighteenth-century novelists, is finally always subverted by
the particular-the unique attributes characteristic of the "true History."
I argue that it is the subversion of this mediation between particular
moments and general notions that leads to the novel's "open" narrative
flow, the feeling that the "novelist is drawn toward everything that is
not yet ~ o m p l e t e d .At
' ~ the conclusion of a novel, in spite of the author,
we are left, not with a traditional homiletic pattern, but with something
akin to the "lesson" Dr Johnson sought in biography: "to learn how a
man 'was made happy; not how he lost the favour of his prince, but
how he became discontented with himself.""0 Like Johnson's sort of
biographical narrative, after much turmoil the novel eventually does forge
a stable psychological acceptance of "reality," a psychic construct that
8 Sckcted Lmers ofSmuel Richardson. ed. John Carmll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). p. 142.
9 M.M. Bakhtin. "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel," The
Dialogic Imngimtion, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). p. 27. Cf.
Terry Eagleton, who, referring to the problem of Richardson's fictions, asks "how is a structural
openness, the esantial medium of transformed relations between producers and audiences, to
be reconciled with a necessary doctrinal closure?" The Rope ofClorissn: Writing, Suualiry and
Closs Struggle in S m u e l Richardson (Minneapolis: Univenity of Minnesota Press, 1982). p. 22.
I differ with Eagleton because I believe there is no real doctrinal closvre for the reader, in spite
of all the author's attempts.
10 Quoted in W. lackson Bate. Somuel J o h m n (New York: HarcouR Brace Jovanovich, 1979),
p. 122. 1 disagree with 1. Paul Hunter about the relation of didacticism and moral pattern to
the novel; in his valuable Before Novels (New York: W.W. Norton. 1990) Hunter assem that
"the didacticism of the early novel is central to the wnception of the species. Its origins are
so tied up with needs of wntemporary readers and its early history is so dependent on the
didactic assumptions in popular non-narrative forms that to mis-r
excus-its
characteristic
didacticism is to misapprecia iD features and misdefine i s n m " (p. 226). 1 believe, as I will
suggest more fully below, that Hunter is t w willing to take at face value authorial assertions
of a work's moral end. The novel itself "excuses" or subverts "its characteristic didacticism"
In spite of all his protesmianions to the conway, in Before Novels Hunter seems to search for
a "definition" of novel--albeit an inclusive one. For me the "novel" is far less stable than he
implies.
REALISM IN T H E E A R L Y E N L I S H NOVEL I25
is not merely an accommodation contained in traditional ideas about the
world, but a limited and necessarily personal ordering and mastering.
Consequently, each time a reader seeks traditional patterns of coherence in a novel's action, more particulars intervene, forcing the
acceptance of a character's (or narrator's) ever-changing psychological structuring." This continuous restructuring of moral patterns-the
constant subversion of stable or closed patterns by unstable or unanticipated incidents impossible to fit neatly into current constructionsparallels the novel's restructuring of traditional narrative patterns. Even
though Richardson sought to place his novel within other, older, literary traditions-he speaks of Chrissa as "of the Tragic K i n d and as "the
history (or rather dramatic narrative) of C1arissa"'Lthe actual experience of reading the book, the participation in its bewildering array of
particularities, subverts his theorizing about the moral and formal goals
of the novel.
In Chrissa the language rushes ever onward; the narrative is unquestionably "dramatic," but its world, unlike that of a drama compressed in
time and space, seems sprawling and formless. Richardson uses literary
techniques such as allusion and irony in his work, but they scarcely affect our perception of the narrative and operate essentially to provide his
characters with poses struck only for the moment; they merely elucidate
aspects of personality before the plunge back into the novel's relentlessly
unfolding action. In some respects, of course, we can see that Clarissa
is acting out the story of Job. This realization helps us later to understand some of the moral patterns in Richardson's mind, but we hardly
stop to ponder the significance of the parallel as we read the novel. For
Clarissa, in fact, the Bible only seems to come alive when she rearranges
it in her meditations so that the scriptures more efficaciously reflect her
peculiar case. Even Clarissa sacrifices the general moral pattern to the
particular history, and its concomitant psychological reality.
Because the eighteenth-century novel stands in opposition to the
"purer" artistry of the closed narrative and changes the ways fictions
relate to readers and hence to society, it participates in a particularly
In The Country and the Ciry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Raymond Williams
argues that this internalization d e s the novel a less effective force for change. For example, he
believes that no formal ideological "confrontation"occurs in Clnrisso, a novel which dramatizes
"the long p m s s between economic advantage and other ideas of value," because "theaction
becomes internal, and is experienced and dnunatised as a problem of character" (pp. 6142).
12 Carmll. Selected Lcncrs, p. 99; Samuel Richardson, Postscript to Chissa, or. The Hirtory of o
Young Lady. 4 vols (London: Dent and New York: Dutton, 1932). 4554. References are to this
edition.
126 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
crucial shift in the development of modem culture: the transformation of
those habitual means and techniques for producing and disseminating ideologies that had, previously, largely been the province of political and
ecclesiastical institutions. Novels, to my mind, subvert traditional representations and interpretations, rejecting what Foucault argues was the
essential use of intellect in the sixteenth century: the "function proper
to knowledge is not seeing or demonstrating; it is interpreting."I3 As
Lennard Davis points out, this earlier "attitude toward reality diminishes the value of the literal train of events" because interpretation was
meant to reinforce established institutions. Until the sixteenth century,
discourse had been controlled, but humanism put into motion discourses
which no one fully controlled or understood. Earlier, "Histories, stories, and news accounts ... were important ... only insofar as they clearly
taught lessons and offered interpretations. If they were not new, if they
were not accurate, or even if they were completely fabricated, they could
The closed narrative depends on interpretation
still serve this p~rpose."'~
and, hence, helps empower the institutional desire for social stability.
The novel, on the contrary, is in the beginning at least a destabilizing force, relying first and foremost on the descriptive fact and in this
way contributing to the establishment of a cultural reformulation that
had been long in coming. According to Stephen Greenblatt, in the sixteenth century there was a shift "from the consensusfidelium embodied
in the universal Catholic Church to the absolutist claims of the Book
and the King";'$ but because, in Britain, the seventeenth century graphically and brutally declared the claim of "King" null and void and moved
the "Book" from the absolutist claims of the church to the private, the individual, and the domestic, the shift from Church to King constitutes no
more than a brief, although powerfully evoked, interlude. Only the shift
to subjective representations of the Book created lasting changes. In addition to subverting the traditional structures of absolutism, this move
inward paradoxically validates "the fact" and helps us trace a number
of processes which we recognize as modem. The novel's appropriation
of the fact and the individual's relation to it show how intimately connected it was to these cultural development^.'^ At the same time, the "new
13 Michel Foucault, The Older of Things: An A ~ h o l o l o g yof lhc Human Sciences (New Yak:
Pantheon. 1970). p. 40.
14 Lennard Davis. Factual Ficlions: The Originr of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 82.
15 Greenblatt, p. 157.
16 Foucault has attempted to chan the shifts fmm earlier "mechanisms of power" such as the French
REALISM IN THE EARLY ENLISH N O V E L 127
techniques of a minute parcellization and ordering of time, space and gesture," often remarked by F o u ~ a u l t create
,~
a new sort of openness. For
example, in the developing economic structures of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, specificity reigned supreme; and yet so concrete an
object as a contract, while binding particular individuals, could at the
same time open the worlds of time and space. As Joyce Oldham Appleby remarks, "A single transaction could extend through the space of
the globe and the lapse of a year, yet the connecting links were a letter dispatched, an instruction given, or two human beings engaged in a
few minutes' negotiations."18
The novel at first seems to operate within a precise and traditional set
of contraries, but the very execution of realistic particularity and psychological necessity generates new sets which demand new processes
both for writing and reading these narratives. The early novelist claims
that the work represents a ' k e History," singular and unreproducible,
and yet the action (because the author asserts it is a "moral fiction") demands that it be interpreted as mote than a particular history. As the
novel grows, it changes (even while under the hand of the author) because the open narrative demands new and, in the early days of novelistic
narratives, unanticipated sorts of formulations; new constructs appear because to a certain extent the author--even while striving to impose a
moral pattern-is at the mercy of the forces unleashed: "fervent discussions around the gradually evolving Clarissa or Grandison, anguished
contentions over their desirable destinies, became modes of ever finer
ideological formulation, scrupulous probings of precise meanings. Transforming the production as well as consumption of his works into a social
practice, Richardson half-converts himself from 'author' to the focal
point of his readers' own writings."l9 Early novelists and readers discover that an open narrative continually resists the moral and coherent
pattern, despite the author's attempt at control. The pre-eminence of realistic particularity and psychological realism distinguishes the works
monarchy, which he characterizes as a "discontinuous, rambling, global system with litlle hold
an detail," to those in the eighteenth century when "'economic changes ... made it necessary to
ensure the circulation of effects of power through pmg~ssivelyfiner channels, gaining access
to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions." Michel
Foucault. PowedKnowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New Yo*: Pantheon. 1980). pp. 151-52.
17 Peter Dews. "Power and Subjectivity in Foucault." New Lefr Review I44 (March-April. 1984).
89.
18 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Ernnomic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England,
(Princeton: Princeton University h s s , 1978), p. 206.
19 Eagleton, p. 12.
128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
of Richardson and Defoe from those more traditional fictions derived
from French prose, with their characteristically heavy doses of idealized incident and character; it was the treatment of realistic incident
rather than the moral content which differentiated the early English masters of fiction from their French counterpart^.^ And this "treatment,"
by its own volition, created shifts which changed traditional structures;
as these structures changed, the traditional ideological (and idealized)
messages were invariably subverted.
As the new narrative form began the process of "becoming,"z1 it was
rather roughly stitched together; no one saw the full scope of the enterprise. At those junctures where an author forced traditional patterns of
morality onto the apparent patternlessness of realistic particularity without regard for his characters' developing perceptions, the seams between
general and particular elements became obvious and disruptive. Defoe
and Richardson are the first to produce seamless and realistic narratives,
and even in their works ruptures occasionally occur. Some examples
have been long noted, one celebrated incident occurs during Robinson
Crusoe's musings while he ransacks the wrecked ship:
I discover'd a Locker with Drawers in it, in one of which I found two or three
Razors, and one Pair of large Sizzers, with some ten or a Dozen of good Knives
and Forks; in another I found about Thirty six Pounds value in Money, some
European Coin, some Brasil, some Pieces of Eight, some Gold, some Silver.
I smil'd to my self at the Sight of this Money, 0 Drug! Said I aloud, what art
thou good for, Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground,
one of those Knives is worth all this Heap, I have no Manner of use for thee,
e'en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not
worth saving. However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away, and wrapping
all this in a Piece of Canvas, I began to think of making another Raft.?z
20 As lohn I. Richetti points out, the sam is uue of English scandal novels, which "possess none
of the unity of theme or characterization thaf makes a narrative meaningful to us. There is in
them no attempt to render that sense of a conditioning milieu, that biographical density and
verisimilitude which make charanerization possible and relevant. ... There is ...a deliberate and
awkward artificiality." Populnr Fiction before Richnrdron (Oxford: Clxendon Press. 1969), p.
121.
21 Bakhtin, p. 22.
22 Daniel Defoe. Robinson Cnrsor (London and New York: Oxford University PRss. 1972). p. 57.
Ian Watt believes that the "discontinuities" in Defae's fiction "suongly suggest that [he] did
not plan his novel a coherent whole, but worked piecemeal, very rapidly. and without any
R E A L I S M IN THE E A R L Y ENLISH N O V E L 129
Here we see what happens when the essential struggle towards particularity becomes reversed, however briefly; in these paragraphs, Defoe
permits the general moral platitude to efface Crusoe's habit of specificity. The traditional pattern of homiletic morality is so compelling
for Defoe that the concrete situation is for a moment forgotten or ignored; it occupies such a different mental landscape that it no longer
exists as a part of his visualization of the particular or as a characteristic habit of Crusoe's mind: this money, now abstracted in the moral
imagination, is referred to in conventional terms as lying on the ground,
whereas in the particulars of the story, it is in one of the locker's drawers. The platitude overwhelms the realist's artful habit of particularity;
no matter how precisely the characters' inner shifts may be depicted during the course of the fiction, complete psychological coherence cannot
be expected in early novels.
This passage has been crucial to arguments that Defoe's fictional narratives are intentionally ironic, but such a rupture can be thought of as
intentional irony only by readers who come to it with interpretations
forged by generations of more seamless narrative models. In fact, Defoe's passage represents a backward glance in novelistic discourse; it is
a moment where the novel turns from the open narrative back towards
an earlier form that had privileged textual interpretation in which particularity existed primarily as an opportunity for moral discourse. I do
not wish to imply that the moral appeal of "natural law" did not exist for Defoe, but rather to argue that it was not finally what powered
his narrative^.^) Even though the impulse towards general moral patterns seemed necessary to early novelists as they sought to square the
world of realism with the world of natural moral law, their attempts were
subverted by the methods of realism.
It was Richardson's genius to adapt epistolary techniques to the novel,
subsequent r e v r w n " The R m uf the Novel (Berkeley Un~ven~ly
of Callfornta Rcsr. 1964).
p 99 More pemncntly. ree Rehenr's ~mponanlrccognmon rhar "the vwuus tncons~stenc~es
and contradmons thm several gcncrauons of commentators have found ~n Dcfae's namwes
and tried to resolve by putting him on one side or another ... are Rally ... signs of the process
of confrontation and mediation within the totality of perception and experience which mimetic
fiction by its nature and tendency sets in mmion." Defoc's Narratives: Situations and Snucnrres
(oxford-c~vendonk s s , w s j , p. 11.
23 See far example, Maximillian E. Novak's questionable contention t M all Defoe's "characters
operate in a universe of unchanging natural law." Defne and fhe Nature of Mnn (Oxford: Oxford
University Rcss, 1963), p. 129.
130 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
and this adaptation enabled him to avoid many of the problems of coherency in earlier narratives. In some respects the epistolary novel constitutes the perfect metaphor for this developing form; the exchange of
leners written "to the moment," with its point-counterpoint of ideas,
and its potential for temporal confusion and intellectual contradiction,
alleviates the need for seamless coherency while it emphasizes psychological development and realistic observation. Although the epistolary
form, particularly when different letter writers are involved, creates the
sort of "restless shifting of perspective" that has been associated with
the dialogue and is increasingly recognized as a crucial component of
the novel as a genre," Richardson's use of the form demands that we
attend to what is uppermost in the characters' minds, the physical implements for writing and the physical situations in which they write. The
words themselves become objects to be perused with great care; at the
same time the letters may seem ungraspable since they may be interpreted in ways that emphasize their open-endedness. They are at once
concrete and infinitely changeable: "For writing ... does indeed possess
a body, a thick and violent material being: it is a matter of record and
contract, seal and bond, tangible documentation which may be turned
against its author, cited out of context, deployed as threat, testimony,
blackmail."^ Because they are open to such manipulations, and also because they are simply letters, often written in haste and with little thought
for the morrow, they serve to separate the abstract idea from the deed
described or the act observed: "letters lack the equilibrium of literature.
They embody an emotional situation still in process; they are undetonated, on the brink."x In Clarissa the separation of the narrative into
a group of writers exchanging letters with varying points of view further fragments our ability to grasp conceptually the actual progress of the
narrative, and mirrors the sort of point-counterpoint of opinion which is
characteristic of the novel. This fragmentation of perspective was consciously contrived by Richardson: "In this sort of writing, something,
as I have hinted should be left (to the reader) to make out or debate
24 7he p h m comes fmm Greenblm's discvssion of 'We close equivalent af the verbal level"
in lhomas More's Utopia "to the visval technique of anamorphosis, whose etymology itself
suggests a bad-and-forth movemnt, a consmat fonning and re-forming" (p. 23). Refuring to
the lenws in Clorissa. John Preston points w t Ihat, "in the tern pmpwd by Frank Kermode"
( T kSLNCof on Endins, p. 46), they "arc dcfived of 'plot,' of 'the sense of an ending.' which
will bestow upon the whole duration d meaning." T k Cnated Self: The Reader's Role in
Eighteenth-Century Fiction Gndon: Heinemann. 1970). p. 40.
25 Eagleton. p. 48.
26 Preston, p. 39.
R E A L I S M I N THE E A R L Y ENLISH N O V E L 131
upon. The whole story abounds with situations and circumstances debatable. It is not an unartful management to interest the readers so much
in the story, as to make them differ in opinion as to the capital articles and by leading one, to espouse one, another, another, opinion,
make them all, if not authors, carper^."^' Moreover the very production
of the novels themselves, throughout Richardson's life, involved seemingly endless discussions and obsessive revision: "The literary reception
of his novels, as manuscripts pass from hand to hand and the fluny of
letters increases, becomes an integral moment of their production, a con~ ~ link between
stitutive force rather than retrospective r e s p o n ~ e . "The
a realistic discourse-the novel-and an actual social discourse concerning the unpublished text-its shape, its meaning, its relationship to
reality-involves readers, authors, and characters in an extraordinary cultural matrix that, even after publication, defines the ways that authors,
novels, and readers must interact.
Because these early novels, l i e the developing discourses of history
and newspaper, demand that they be perceived as having real meaning in
the world, they compel us to see the ideological pattern only as it is impressed on the fully realized world of the concrete, not the abstracted and
allegorized world of the intellect. From the very beginning, the realistic novel has sought to secure its place in this particularized world-the
only one we have, it argues. And thus even when acknowledging itself as fiction, it has refused to be designated as fiction: Richardson's
"calculated hesitancy between fact and fiction is more than a generic
muddle; it belongs to a fruitful crisis in the whole problem of literary representation. The term fiction, let alone the contemptible novel,
is ideologically impermissible-not because of some puritan neurosis
about lying, but because it would seem merely to devalue the reality
of the issues at stake."29 The novel came into the world insisting not
only that it was already a part of that world but that the world it presented was already accomplished fact. It finally and firmly helped bind
us to an apparently immutable culture that we have only now begun
to perceive is, at least in part, a chosen fiction, made so to some extent unintentionally by a world powerless to withstand it. This is why
we must attend to the novel's historical and social context, even though
writers such as Jean-Marie Goulemot caution that as "literary historians, we know that the events related in fiction are not proper matter
27 C m l l , Selected Lemrs, p. 296.
28 Eagleton, p. 12.
29 Eagleton, p. 17.
132 EIGHTEBNTH-CENTURY FICTION
for sociological studies. First and foremost a novel yields information
about novels: literary devices and their effects on the reader. To use fiction as a source from which to determine social and historical reality
is risky and often misleading."" Risky and misleading, perhaps, but the
literary historian has to recognize that our belief in "social and historical reality" depends, in part, on what novelists have taught us to see.
For example, how do readers respond when Richardson asks them to
draw precise conclusions about eighteenth-century social concerns, as he
does in his footnote to letter 119 where Lovelace imagines his trial after the fantasy rape of Anna Howe? Richardson observes of Lovelace's
wildly applauded-albeit imaginary-march from Newgate to the courtroom of the Old Bailey: "Within these few years past, a passage has been
made from the prison to the Sessions-house whereby malefactors are carried into court without going through the street. Lovelace's triumph on
their supposed march shows the wisdom of this alteration" (2423n). The
novel claims to be true, and with that claim it turns an ideological construct into apparently unalterable fact. Thus when we are cautioned to
separate "novel" from "society," we must respond that one of the forces
which made our world was the realistic novel; even if we wish to read
Lovelace's fantasy as Goulemot suggests, Richardson's note encourages
us to slide not only to the margins of the text, but also to the margins of
society.
Only when the characters themselves begin to grasp the significance
of the novel's movement are they able to pause and read over the earlier
letters which provide the keys to the novel's action, and finally comprehend their situations. Their comprehension, a necessary step towards the
work's stability, is dependent on the immersion in particularity, not the
withdrawal from it as in traditional interpretive gestures. After the moment of comprehension, a character may choose to withdraw from the
social world, as Clarissa does, but this is a different sort of distancing,
one still subject to the "law" of particularity and dependent on the understanding of characters and readers. So much that is contradictory or new
is revealed before the novel anives at its dhouement that we resist any
design which simplifies the action or the characterizations. Notably, this
resistance occurs in the fwtnotes which Richardson added to later editions of Chrissa to convince us that Lovelace's character is consistently
30 lean-Marie Goulemot, "Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Tmitd des superstitions of AbbC
lean-Baptiste Thiers." trans. Odile Wagner and Arthur Greenspan, in Unouthor*ed S a u l Behavior during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin, special issue of Eighteenth-Century
Life 9, n.8. 3 (May, 1985). 22.
REALISM I N T H E E A R L Y ENLISH NOVEL 133
base. We react to these notes with disbelief, refusing to acknowledge
that the creator of Lovelace understands him any better than we. The evidence is before us; once the author appears to have relinquished his
control, he cannot re-establish it. Richardson's notes on Lovelace simply reinforce our sense of the character's independence fmm authorial
control, and, consequently, from any sort of "objective" contml.3l
Unlike history, then, the eighteenth-century novel represents the world
experienced but not fully conceptualized, a world which because of its dependence upon a subjective grasp of reality is not capable of being wholly
abstracted or moralized. The open narrative refuses to adhere fully to the
patterns of the past, and in the process, begins to adhere to the dimly
apprehendable patterns of the future. In Richardson's work, the events
become internalized and the distance between character and audience is
erased. So his novels create a new social, but not particularly moral, vision, one that in part gmws out of the patterns of Protestantism but which
no longer can be controlled by that ancestry. The Richardsonian character is too fully immersed in particularity, is too fully defined by his or her
words, and no longer necessarily by the ideas which the words traditionally have been taken to mean. Although Richardson would not agree, his
editorial revisions and additions of footnotes argue tellingly that his text
subverts his moral purpose. Finally, in Sir Charles Grandison, he supplants individuality in the characterization of his hem almost entirely by
abstract moral pattern.
The earliest English novels offer a particular, exclusive picture, which
was intended to be a universal one, but the language of realistic fiction undermines obvious universality, forcing the ideal, as it were, out
of the tower and into the streets, where it finds itself embattled by the
world of money and power-the gritty world of economic and sociosexual struggles-far removed from the intangible world of Platonic
abstractions. After Defoe the novel, unlike those genres that seek explanations in the traditional loci of power, excludes the monarchy and
other institutions traditionally associated with power; if they do appear,
31 G.A. Starr m e s that Moll Planden. as well as Defce's olher fictionaI characters, eludes rrecise
definition: readers bemme
ambivalent because lhe characten are ambirrnous: Moll's"re&ions
-~~~
never fully ' ~ back'
c uhatcver she has siud or done: h e process i; always addtavc, ro that
what appear to be clanfyng dcnlals mually lend to m&c her posioon mom arnb~guous."Dcfiw
nnd Caruirrry (Pnnccron. Pnnceton Untvmtty Press. 1971). p 163.
~~
~~~~
134 E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y FICTION
they are subordinated to the character's subjective valuation of themas when Roxana entertains Charles n by dressing and dancing "in the
Habit of a Turkish Princess." Although suitably overwhelmed by the encounter, she quickly subordinates her thoughts of the King to her own
more pressing psychological needs: 'This magnificent Doings equally
both pleas'd and surpriz'd me, and I hardly knew where I was; but especially, that Notion of the King being the Person that danc'd with me,
puff d me up to that Degree, that I not only did not know any-body else,
but indeed, was very far from knowing myself."32
In Clarissa the struggles for power withim the family, as well as the
battles between Clarissa and Lovelace, reveal the worldly struggles of
money and land, class and sex. Richardson's moral point, dependent on
the homiletic patterns of the past, is subverted by the subtle network
of cmshing forces all inscribed on the individual body of C l a r i ~ s a ~ ~
This novel reveals the hidden sources of power in eighteenth-century
society-less graspable than the concept of monarchy and court, church
and bishops, but not less potent. Such delineations are variations of newly
emerging awarenesses which, it seems to me, contribute immeasurably
to the ideologies of Malthus and Gibbon, and in their turn, Danvin and
Mm.
Thus by its very nature, the realistic novel depends on a rendering of
the power structure in society and history; at its inception, however, it
was discerned only as it functioned in more traditional patterns, and in
ways quite similar to modern readings of these texts by literary scholars
who seek to relate them to eighteenth-century ideas of manners and
morality. Such readings have a value, but for most later readers, who
have grown up reading open narratives, Robinson Cmsoe's and Moll
Flanders's spiritual quests are not merely counterpoised but overwhelmed
32 Daniel Defoe. R m m , The Fomuurte Mismss, ed. lane Jack (Lwdon:Oxfad Univenity Res.
I W ) . pp. 173. 177.
33 In Clarima's Ciphers: M m h g and Disnrption in Richwdron'r "Chrisso" (Ithaca: Cwncll
Univenity Press, 1982). Terry Castle writes of %e tyranny of a sexual idedogy that inscribes
the f e d body itself' (p. 25). but this s m far tw limited and limiting. Mom m w poim is
Fouceult's assenion "hat one of the orimordial f m of class mnsdavsoess is t k &&
of rk body. at k w ths was thc c k far thc bovrgcnsx dlmng I
k nghtccnlh century '' Thc
Hmvry oj Sexualtry Volumr I An I n r d u n o n . uans Roben Hurlcy (New York Panthean.
REALISM IN THE EARLY ENLISH NOVEL 135
by their quests for economic control and security-their a~quisitiveness.~
And it seems clear that this "na~ve"response to the text is more in keeping
with the ways realistic novels actually function; as we have seen, in these
first tentative, but successful, renderings of realist fictions, the discrete but
overwhelming array of facts become transmuted into more supple and
complex patterns when placed against the traditional, closed narrative
patterns of the past. The patterns are impressed on the world that the
novel insists it shares with its audience, even though at first these forms
were only dimly discerned in those novels which seemed so particular,
so singular and unreproducible.
The novelist's claim of factuality lies at the heart of the genre's participation in this cultural transformation because it necessarily relies on those
particulars which empower the subjective, thus reducing the claims of
the shared ideal and subverting more general patterns of morality; in literature this includes the subverting of traditional genres such as tragedy,
and the restructuring of those such as spiritual biography which depend
on eschatologies external to the text (even when those patterns may be
traced in the work).)' Because the process of novel reading is more the
"point" than any moral goal, the general audience does not necessarily grasp that peculiar tmth which the author seeks to represent--the
novel's point resists precise location. Thus truth becomes an ideological attitude dependent on individual subjectivity, and traditional morality
finds itself fragmented and dependent on the subjective apprehension of
potentially patternless factuality.
The subversion, then, of interpretation-the traditional reason for reading and writing-is a necessary consequence of knowingly accepting any
fiction as "real" in the senses considered above, of consciously accepting, that is, the false claims of the author for the sake of participating
more fully in the work's particularity. And it is a curious fact that this
strange dialectic-the pretence that fictionality constitutes reality-born
in the minds of these authors, is precisely what realistic fictions demand.
I do not mean to imply that many people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did nM
recognize the strength of economic matives; as Appleby remarks, "Aquisitivcncss, long suffend
as a barely repressible vice, shared in Uu nsperability thal naturalness acquired in sevenfcmthcentury thought. ... English economic cammenlalafors were aniculaling a new social d i t y in
which the self-seeking drive appeared more powerful than instiNtional efforts to mold pcople's
action" (p. 115).
35 G.A. S t m and I. Paul Hunter have convincingly argued lhaf patterns of spirihlal autobiography
do exist in Defoc's fiction. See Stm. Dcfoc andSoidtun1 Avtobiorraohv (Princefon: Primton
Unwerstly Rcrr, 1965). and Hunter. The Relvrlonr Pt$nm (Ballomore Johns Hopkms Untrentl)
hew. 1966) but readers do na see Defac'r novels as essenhdly about splnNal rrgenerahon
136 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Richardson emphasized this point in 1748 when he wrote to William Warburton, who had not tried to maintain the illusion of the work as a true
history in the preface he provided for the first edition of volumes 3 and
4 of Clarissa:
I could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho' I want not the
letters to be thought genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should
not prefatically be owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their
Influence where any of them are aimed to be exemplary; as well as to avoid
hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with,
tho' we know it to be Fi~tion.)~
Richardson makes two distinct points about realistic fictions: they are
read with a "kind of Historical F a i t h even when "we know [them] to be
Fiction"; and, the "Air of Genuineness" should be maintained because
this, he believes, contributes to their exemplary influences. At the same
time he did not expect that his letters would be "thought genuine," but
only that they should not be "owned" as fictions. Richardson's curious
distinction is crucial to understanding the way realistic fictions work: one
recognizes the fictionality, but dares not own it."
Richardson failed to realize, however, that precisely the "Historical
Faith" that he rightly understood to be so necessary to his fictions worked
against those exemplary goals. Far from contributing to our acceptance of
his moral, Clarissa's particularity blurs the effect of these moral lessons.
Once the claim to be "real" has been made and the audience has acquiesced in the deception-as it must and as it desires to do-the novelist's
moral designs (which depend on the willingness to interpret from a restrictive point of view no longer demanded of the audience or provided
by the author) become far less important than the audience's participation in the "true History." Indeed, within a relatively few years, during
which the ideological "lessons" of the novel were fully absorbed, this exact point was articulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who asserted that
when we pretend to read Pilgrim's Progress (or any realistic fiction) as
if it were real, then because we know it to be in actuality, a fiction, the
work's moral designs are subverted:
36 Carroll, Sekcted Laners, p. 85.
37 As Michael MeKeon puts it (although he does not accept it): 'There has been considerable
intenst of late in the way Clarim undencores. and is 'abut,' the subjective powers of language
and the lener form to render meaning radically indeterminate." The Origins of the English Novel.
16GO-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). p. 421.
REALISM IN T H E EARLY ENLISH N O V E L 137
in that admirable allegory, the first Part of Pilgrim's Progress, which delights
every one, the interest is so great that [in] spite of all the writer's attempts
to force the allegoric purpose on the reader's mind by his strange namesOld Stupidity of the Tower of Honesty, etc., etc.-his piety was bafiled by his
genius, and the Bunyan of Pamassus had the better of Bunyan of the conventicle;
and with the same illusion as we read any tale known to be fictitious, as a novel,
we go on with his characters as real persons, who had been nicknamed by their
neighborsJ8
Coleridge recognizes not only that the realistic story known to be fictional demands that its reader treat it and its characters as "real," but also
that the reader simultaneously and without regret discounts the traditional
moral impulse. Here indeed the moral pattern associated by Coleridge
with Protestantism has been almost entirely discarded, because other,
more compelling "illusions" are understood to be at stake. By Coleridge's
time the factors that actually make up the novel's "truth"-moral
or
otherwise-had been assimilated. The means by which Richardson introduces reality diminish our willingness to accept his moral designs.
Warburton-that heavy moralist-naturally recognized the unimportance
of calling Clarissa a "fiction" if one wished to think of it primarily as a
set of moral lessons.
The problems inherent in Richardson's twofold distinction regarding
the nature of realistic fictions point towards a theoretical dilemma recently expressed by Lennard Davis: that "novelists had to claim that
their works were true," because they sought to write works that were
"morally verisimilar," but "factually realistic" works would be morally
improbable. "If actual verisimilitude is then opposed to providence, and
moral verisimilitude is antinovelistic in presenting the world as it should
be and not as it is, then can we not say that the theory of the novel
at this time was a reflexive or double one since it maintained two contradictory imperatives at once?"" In the minds of the writers, however,
as Richardson's letter to Warburton makes clear, there was not so bald
a contradiction; the moral and the realistic had always been split, even
though they were assumed to be interdependent.
Richardson's enterprise was quite different from the foregoing model,
and the author's understanding of it was a good deal more subtle.
38 This passage from Coleridge's Miscellnncous Criticism is quoted in Stephen Knapp, Psrsonifcarion and rhe Sublime: Milton m Cnleridge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). p.
13.
39 Davis. pp. 133. 112.
138 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Richardson believed that the moral was, in some way, a function of history and that God's providence was operative in his world, but he also
knew that such an understanding depended on the individual's moral valuation of factuality; at the same time, he recognized that realism was a
technique that led readers to believe in the story's truth. Richardson did
believe that a realistic fiction could have an exemplary effect. The fact
that a more modem response to these texts, such as Coleridge's, repudiates this belief does not mean that eighteenth-century novelists did not
firmly believe in the connection between, rather than the opposition of,
verisimilitude and morality. For them, the claim to be truthful was a
technique which they fully believed would lead to an appropriate moral
response from the audience. Moreover, even from a more modem point
of view, the immersion of the novel in the realistic does not lead to the
"doubleness" that depends on the contradiction between moral verisimilitude and actual verisimilitude (which is merely a theoretical mirage, one
perpetuated, it is true, by early writers and critics of the novel who did
not fully understand or were unsympathetic to the genre's aims), but instead to the innumerable possibilities which emanate from the necessity
for a subjective ordering of events. Arguing otherwise forces us to discount what I believe is a major effect of novels, the introduction to a
more modem pattern of an individual's psychological comprehension and
struggle for stability. This effect is emphatically not based on traditional
Christian interpretive patterns, although it may be cast in a Christian
light, depending on the character's predilections. The act of reading subverts the dialectic Davis proposes; it is the narrative's "openness" that
powers the fiction.
In other words, only one element of Davis's dialectic-realistic
verisimilitude-is necessary, even when the author seems to privilege the
morally verisimilar, because the character-narrator's view of the world
constantly reinvents, and thereby subverts, the traditional interpretive
gesture. No author was fully aware of the consequences of realism, but
as Richardson saw (and Davis's model does not), the claim to be factual was separate from the drive to be exemplary, although he believed
the two to be complementary: what powered the novel was the open narrative, not the push towards "moral" verisimilitude. In other words, the
crucial "fiction" of the novel is precisely the possibility that the relentless
plot, immersed in seemingly aimless particularity, could lead anywhere,
even to moral conuption, while at the same time the novel promises to
provide a coherent view of the world, even though necessarily a subjective one. Thus, Richardson's novels, to some degree, contain a strategy,
R E A L I S M I N T H E E A R L Y E N L I S H N O V E L 139
a submerged discourse (perhaps not fully grasped by either reader or author), which inevitably finds itself reshaping the world, and this strategy
depends on the work's appearing to be a true history, whether the audience realizes it is a fiction or not. When such works are read as "real"
(even when the reader knows they are not), then they function in a far
more revolutionary way than is possible for a fiction that announces itself
as "art."
L i e most authors, Richardson wrote in the belief his fictions could effect
some change in the world he inhabited; and he understood that, for this,
a realistic style was absolutely necessary. Irony and satire seemed more
useful or acceptable styles to those eighteenth-century authors attached
to or interested in defending the interests of the squirearchy as it then
existed, however much they may have attacked specific instances of the
abuse of power. Their works functioned to chastise the system but not to
transform it. But for those, like Richardson, who participated-whether
consciously or not-in changing the system in truly fundamental ways,
realism was the discourse of necessity.
In the case of Clarissa, the fiction's power was fully established by
the third edition (when Richardson's notes and Lovelace's letter fantasizing his trial for the abduction and rape of Anna Howe first appeared);
Chrissa had become a cultural artifact-Angus Ross calls it "a story that
became a myth to [Richardson's] own age, and remains so yet.""' It was
a realistic text so interwoven with the emerging ideologies of the culture that its characters' fantasies seem as real as the stones of Newgate
and the streets of London. In thus embedding the idea in the concrete
fact, the ideology in the stone, the novel inscribes the lessons of power
on anyone who accepts its world as "real."
It was in the rejection of "artifice," the disdain for traditional rhetoric
and the coupling of reportage to fact, where novelists found the power
to help reshape the ideologies of the time. It is precisely this task of
claiming factuality, of insisting on the "circumstantial reality" of the
fictional text, which substantiates their version of the external world and
largely differentiates the sort of writing we associate with Richardson and
his precursors (such as Bunyan and Defoe) from other sorts of fictions.
40 Introduction to Chrisso. or, The Histoy of n Young Lady (Hmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). p.
18.
140 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
One might advance the axiom that an author of fiction who appears to
disdain literary artifice (however much it may exist in the text) does so,
as Edward Said has said, out of a desire to make the fiction a part of the
world, to demand that the world conform to the fiction, to supplant the
current ideologies apparently in control of that world. Realistic narratives
demand that the exterior world conform to their exclusive vision; they
seek to transform reality by forcing that reality into a fiction where it can
be judged only on the novel's terms. A new conceptualization of culture
is what is at stake in early eighteenth-century novels.
The operation of ideology in the novel is the antithesis of what Greenblatt has discerned in The Faerie Queene: "Spenserean allegory ... opens
up an internal distance within art itself by continually referring the reader
out to a fixed authority beyond the poem. Spenser's art does not lead us
to perceive ideology critically, but rather affirms the existence and inescapable moral power of ideology as that principle of truth towards
which art forever yearns. It is art whose status is questioned in Spenser,
not ideology."" The Richardsonian novel, on the other hand, denies
power to the structures which lie outside its scope; its realism is exclusive and subverts all that is external to it. Spenser's artifice affirms
the power of what lies outside its scope, whereas the demand that a fiction he accepted as real points to the assumed power of the fiction and
implies an entire set of relationships between book and culture, and
an entire set of beliefs about the power of reality. In short, if one accepts the power of the real, one must accept the power of the fictional:
"An art that displays its artfulness, that 'questions its own status,' as
The Faerie Queene surely does, also undermines that status and, at the
same time, 'protect[s] power from ... questi~ning.""~In Clarissa and to
a lesser extent in Pamela, it is precisely the ideology of the world represented by Lovelace, Mr B., and the institution of the landed squirearchy
and aristocracy that is being questioned.
Saint Mary's College of California
41 Greenblau, p. 192.
42 Barbam Leah Harman. review of Stephen Greenblatt. Renaissance Se$Fahioning, diacritics
(Spring, 1984). 59.