English 211: Fiction
Lecture 2: Early Novels
In your reading, you're skipping from Robinson Crusoe to Dickens. That's a gap of a century. You don't have time to read all of the novels in that century, so this lecture will serve to tell you a bit about what you're missing.
There were dozens of novels written during the 1700s as the form became more popular. The most prominent were written by Samuel Richardson (Pamela, 1740; Clarissa, 1747-8), Henry Fielding (Joseph Andrews, 1742, Tom Jones, 1749), and Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy, 1759). These were followd by numerous Gothic novels, and by the Romantic novels.
Samuel Richardson
In 1740, Samuel Richardson published his first novel, Pamela. It is an epistolary novel (i.e., a novel told in the form of letters from several characters to each other). The main character, Pamela, is a servant whose employer, a squire, makes repeated advances to her. She is so virtuous and resourceful in resisting him that, in the end, he marries her.
Like Defoe, Richardson in his novels gave a realistic portrayal of the contemporary world; he, too, addressed the situations and problems of classes and groups of people not usually portrayed in literature: the poor, servants, and those of the middle class. Richardson differs from Defoe, though, in that his novels support the class system: Pamela does rise to a higher class, but she is one of a very few qualified to do so by her virtues.
Richardson's second novel, Clarissa, is his masterpiece, and the first tragic novel ever written. Clarissa is the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Her family has arranged a marriage for her with a wealthy man of her own class. She can't stand him. She also has an aristocratic suitor, Lovelace (pronounced "loveless"), whom her family doesn't trust. As their pressure on her increases, Lovelace persuades her to run away with him, convincing her of his true love. But he is unscrupulous, and refuses to marry her. When she resists his sexual advances, he imprisons her in a brothel and rapes her. Devastated, she wastes away and dies. Lovelace, overcome by remorse, perishes in a duel with one of her relatives.
In this novel, Richardson introduces several themes that would appear again and again in subsequent novels for the next two centuries. The novel connects the moral conduct of an individual with his social position and religious beliefs. Richardson also created a situation for Clarissa in which there were no good outcomes; thus her personal integrity was pitted against the social norms of two separate social classes. Arnold Kettle, in An Introduction to the English Novel, says of Clarissa, "She, the middle-class girl, timid and virtuous, will not subscribe to one of the first and essential dicta of eighteenth century morality, that a daughter is the property of her parents to be married as they think fit--and profitable...The conflict of Clarissa--the individual heart versus the conventional standards of the property-owning class, is one of the essential, recurring conflicts of the modern novel..."
One other important innovation of Richardson's was the manipulation of point of view. The epistolary form allows him to show the various moral and social issues from a variety of angles, and deepen the characters psychologically.
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding was a contemporary of Richardson's, but didn't share his views. His first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), was in fact a parody of Pamela told from the point of view of Pamela's brother. Fielding's vision was essentially comic, and he stated that he was intentionally recreating the "comic epic" form in prose. In his novel, Fielding deliberately departed from the story to address the reader and discuss the techniques he was using to tell the story.
Fielding's novel Tom Jones (1749) is a comic tour de force, in which the narrator tells us the plot, and then steps aside at various points to discuss the events with the audience; he lets us know the events are fiction, but asserts their ability to present moral truth. According to Kettle, "Tom Jones is a panoramic commentary on England in 1745...Tom and Sophia fight conventional society, embodied in the character of Blifil." Fielding himself said of novelists that "our business is only to record the truth." He argued that "the natural goodness of the heart" is more important than social or religious righteousness.
Laurence Sterne
The novelists who preceded Laurence Sterne believed that the world was on orderly place, and that human nature made sense. Sterne disagreed: Tristram Shandy (1759) is an "anti-novel." Sterne deliberately makes a shambles of conventional chronological plotting: the novel begins several months before Tristram Shandy's birth, and ends four years before it, after meandering through the lives and ruminations of Shandy's relatives.
Sterne also creates a narrator who tells us about the process and frustrations of writing the novel we are reading: "It is not half an hour ago, when (in great hurry and precipitation of a poor devil's writing for daily bread) I threw a fair sheet, which I had just finished, and carefully wrote out, slap into the fire, instead of the foul one."
The reader is brought into the writing process: at one point, the narrator gives us a blank page and orders us to write a description of a character.
In this novel, Sterne applies Locke's concept of the association of ideas:
...ideas that in themselves are not at all of kin, come to be so united in some men's minds that it is very hard to separate them, they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding but its associate appears with it. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxxiii.5)
Thus the narrator uses psychological associations to connect ideas and events, rather than chronological ones. The result is one of the longest, funniest attacks in the history of the novel on what Sterne considered to be a complacent and illusory sense of the order of the world and human nature. Sterne's plan was to satitrize everything: "The plan," he wrote to his publisher, "is a most extensive one,--taking in not only the weak part of the sciences, in which the true point of ridicule lies, but everything else which I find laugh-at-able in my way." Sterne's novel broke all the "rules" of storytelling and created new ones, and allowed future novelists to do the same.
The Gothic Novel and the Romantic Novel
By the late 1700s, Gothic novels had come into vogue and were being published in vast numbers. M. H. Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, defines the Gothic novel as follows:
The Gothic novel, or in an alternate term, "Gothic romance" . . . flourished through the early nineteenth century. Authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels, and made plentiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences; their principal aim was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and a variety of horrors. The term "gothic" has also been extended to denote a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror, represents events which are uncanny, or macabre, or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states. (Eighth Edition, pp. 117-118)
The first gothic novel was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole said his book was an attempt to unite the "imagination and improbability of romance with nature," because in recent fiction, "the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by strict adherence to common life." Apparently, this technique resonated with readers, because the Gothic became one of the most popular forms of the novel. Other important Gothic novels were Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).
The Romantic poets and novelists of the 1800s took Gothic strains and combined them with self-conscious examination of inner motivations and the moral questions of the time, particularly the roles of revolution, science and religion. The most well-known Romantic novel is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).
As we are told in the 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley conceived the novel as the result of an evening of storytelling. She, Byron, Shelley, and various other friends had sat around the fire telling horror stories, and challenged each other to write the most frightening ghost story. Only Mary followed through, after searching for an idea for days. One night she awoke from a nightmare which was the seed for Frankenstein. At the time, she wanted only to write a scary story, which would frighten others as much as her dream had frightened her. What she wrote became much more.
Like the other Romantics, Mary Shelley was fascinated by the relationship between nature and the human imagination. This is apparent in the novel, not only from the descriptions of natural settings and phenomena, but by the way nature reflects and contrasts with the characters' feelings and decisions. After Victor's monster disappears, for example, Victor allows inanimate nature to relieve him of his guilt; but later a bolt of lightning reveals the monster to him. The Alps console him, but they also hide his creature. Terrible deeds are done in the most pastoral settings: both physical and metaphysical nature is violated.
Critics have also pointed out the use of psychological doubling that Shelley uses in Frankenstein. Percy Shelley was exploring the idea of the "epipsyche," or the idealized double. He, Byron, and Mary discussed it at length, and Mary explored it further in her novel. All of the major characters in Frankenstein represent some facet of Frankenstein's personality. The monster is a part of him he has neglected: the innocent who wonders at nature, rather than using it for his own ends. The monster also reflects back at him the destructiveness and evil in his own nature. Other characters reflect or complete Dr. Frankenstein in some way, as well.
The novel is subtitled The Modern Prometheus and is prefaced with an epigraph from John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Adam reproaches God for having abandoned him. In Paradise Lost, Milton shows Satan being cast out of Heaven for daring to challenge God, and then tells the story of Satan's corruption of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The sin which destroys Paradise is pride: Satan's pride, the pride he evokes in Eve, and Adam's pride in choosing Eve over God. Satan's great sin was having the pride to believe he could be greater than God; later, he corrupts Eve by arousing in her the same feelings. He offers her all the knowledge in the universe: why, he argues, should some knowledge be off limits to human beings? Why should God reserve some Knowledge to himself? God, he persuades her, is selfish and insecure, afraid of their power should they have the same knowledge He does. Then they, too, would be gods. Eve is overcome by the temptation and eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Milton has no hesitation in condemning Adam and Eve. Two hundred years later, Mary Shelley is not so definitive. All over Europe, the bounds of human knowledge were expanding at an astonishing rate. One discovery led to 20 others every day. It seemed to many that Nature's secrets would be theirs in no time. In such a situation, where do the boundaries lie between what is God's and what is Man's? Mary Shelley explores that question by imagining that God's greatest secret--the secret of the creation of life--has been uncovered, and showing us what happens to the man who discovers and uses it. As Emily Sunstein points out, "With extraordinary clairvoyance and integrity Mary Shelley recognized that what her father trusted as the promise of humankind--'What the heart of man is able to conceive, the hand of man is strong enough to perform'--was also its gravest threat."
Frankenstein was published in March 1818 and was a bestseller. The original edition of 1,000 copies sold out in 6 weeks; for the next 40 years, 2 editions were printed every year in an attempt to meet the demand. The novel has never been out of print.
The first edition was published anonymously, since prejudices against women were so strong. The reviewers were unanimous in believing the writer to be a man; one reviewer was certain the author was Percy Shelley. Late in 1818, when the third edition was printed, Mary's name was finally included on the title page. The reviewers were astonished (and some horrified) that such a tale could have been written by a woman. Some argued that she hadn't written it at all. But her success was unarguable. In fact, for 25 years (until Percy Shelley's reputation began to ascend, mostly as a result of Mary's publication of his works), Mary Shelley was considered to be a major novelist married to a minor poet.
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
2. Daughter of Earth and Water, Noel B. Gerson
3. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, Emily W. Sunstein
4. An Introduction to the English Novel, Arnold Kettle
5. The English Novel, Lionel Stevenson
6. The History of the English Novel, Ernest A. Baker
7. The English Novel, David Skilton
