Falling Out of Love with Tom Jones

Tom Jones

I didn’t think this would ever happen but I am falling out of love with Tom Jones.

For me, this is momentous. Henry Fielding’s masterpiece is the reason why I chose to make 18th century British literature my graduate school specialty. I figured that any era that produced a work of such comic genius was worth studying.

There are multiple reasons why I have loved Tom Jones. Fielding has a dazzling wit, which sometimes takes the form of elaborate and very sophisticated jokes. I like the meta-narrative aspects of the novel, where the author humorously badgers his readers and critics as he examines the parameters of this exciting new–or “novel”–genre. I was in love with the virtuous Sophia and was prepared to name by daughter after her (but had only sons). Above all, I was drawn to Fielding’s hero, whose warm heart, generous nature, and love of life caused me to forgive him when he strayed after various loose women. I could have quoted the following passage from Jane Austen’s Persuasion in his defense:

She [Anne Elliot] prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.

I admit that it’s somewhat strange to bring in Austen seeing as how she disapproved of Tom Jones, considering it lewd. It’s no accident that she makes the doltish John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey a fan of the book. Thorpe undoubtedly is attracted more by the bawdy humor than the subtle wit, and while my reading of the novel is more sophisticated, I must admit to enjoying its off-color side.

For years I regretted that I didn’t write my dissertation on Fielding. Instead, at the suggestion of my dissertation advisor, I studied one of Fielding’s major rivals and someone who couldn’t stand him. Tobias Smollett, a thin-skinned Scottish surgeon-turned-novelist, has thinly veiled attacks of Fielding in Peregrine Pickle, which may have been fueled by jealousy at Fielding’s success and probably by class resentment as well. Fielding was in the gentry, to which Smollett desperately wanted to belong.

A side note: while Smollett may not have liked Fielding, the two were linked in the public mind. In 1750 the Bishop of London attributed two earthquakes to the licentiousness that he said had been unleashed by Tom Jones and Smollett’s Roderick Random.

Anyway, I wrote my dissertation about the cranky Smollett instead of the (as I saw him at the time) open-hearted Fielding. But as I am currently seeing Fielding, Smollett wasn’t altogether wrong to be irritated. There is a certain sense of class entitlement, sometimes taking the form of a brittle defensiveness, that now rubs me the wrong way. Literary scholar Claude Rawson pointed this out to me when I was in grad school but I didn’t see it then. I do now.

For instance, I thought Fielding’s constant badgering of the reader to be in good-hearted fun. I now see it as driven by a defensive fear over the fact that his prerogatives are being challenged. He is irritated that critics with no class pedigree can take shots at him. The explosion of print and the rapid rise of the mercantile class is changing the world in ways that threaten his privilege.

For an instance of his defensiveness, note the introductory chapter to his final book, in which compares his novel to a stagecoach ride. Perhaps we have had quarrels along the way, he says, but let us put them all aside now that we are ending our journey. Despite his apparent offer of open-hearted reconciliation, however, he concludes the chapter with complaints that people have maligned him and predictions that he will outlive them. This is hardly taking the high road:

And now, my friend, I take this opportunity (as I shall have no other) of heartily wishing thee well. If I have been an entertaining companion to thee, I promise thee it is what I have desired. If in anything I have offended, it was really without any intention. Some things, perhaps, here said, may have hit thee or thy friends; but I do most solemnly declare they were not pointed at thee or them. I question not but thou hast been told, among other stories of me, that thou wast to travel with a very scurrilous fellow; but whoever told thee so did me an injury. No man detests and despises scurrility more than myself; nor hath any man more reason; for none hath ever been treated with more; and what is a very severe fate, I have had some of the abusive writings of those very men fathered upon me, who, in other of their works, have abused me themselves with the utmost virulence.

All these works, however, I am well convinced, will be dead long before this page shall offer itself to thy perusal; for however short the period may be of my own performances, they will most probably outlive their own infirm author, and the weakly productions of his abusive contemporaries.

Tom Jones has an over-the-top happy ending in which two landed families and traditional values are reaffirmed. Fielding gets away with this in the same way that the film The Princess Bride gets away with its own happy ending: an intruding ironic narrator masks the cloying sweetness. I now see the apparent author’s apparent confidence, however, as hiding an underlying panic.

So it is Fielding’s sense of entitlement that has come to bother me. Maybe that’s because, living in a country experiencing rapidly growing income inequality, I am finding myself less sympathetic with those who accuse the 99% of class warfare and small-minded resentment. The accusations ring hollow.

Also, I can’t help but notice that the book is increasingly difficult to teach. In my class we spend three and a half weeks on it, yet it fails to strike deep chords the way that, say, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility do. Students are not impressed with the purity of Sophia, nor do they find funny the sexual innuendo or the old maid jokes. If Tom Jones moved their hearts, the length and the complexity of the sentences wouldn’t matter as much. But they find relatively little payback for all the work they put into it.

I have to admit that I myself am less moved than I once was. So while I still admire Tom Jones, I no longer love it. This coming summer I’ll be rereading Fielding’s Joseph Andrews in search of a substitute. At least it’s a lot shorter.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.