University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
2011
Novel spectators: spectatorship in the eighteenthcentury novel
Bridget Draxler
University of Iowa
Copyright 2011 Bridget Draxler
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2480
Recommended Citation
Draxler, Bridget. "Novel spectators: spectatorship in the eighteenth-century novel." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of
Iowa, 2011.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2480.
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Part of the English Language and Literature Commons
NOVEL SPECTATORS:
SPECTATORSHIP IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
by
Bridget Draxler
An Abstract
Of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa.
May 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Judith Pascoe
1
ABSTRACT
Tom Jones is a typical eighteenth-century hero: he is beaten, bullied, seduced,
betrayed, and banished by numerous other characters in the narrative. He performs very
little action himself, and that rather unsuccessfully. In one escapade in Book XIII, the
hero overwhelmed by London society and ignored by his hosts, Fielding writes that “Poor
Jones was rather a Spectator of this elegant scene, than an actor in it” (Tom Jones 451).
Tom Jones is a bystander in his own story.
The same might be said of protagonists like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
Harlowe and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda Portman—protagonists who, like Tom Jones,
tend to observe more than participate in their own narratives. Belinda is remembered
most for having a dry personality, while Clarissa famously spends hundreds of pages
willing herself to die. For modern readers, these characters may seem to lack agency.
Despite their apparent passivity, however, these characters reveal the powerful agency of
spectatorship in eighteenth-century culture.
The spectator figure played a newly dominant role in both the English theater and
English society at large across the eighteenth century. Many writers used theatrical
imagery to justify spectatorship as more than passive observation. Analyzing depictions
of spectatorship in the works of authors ranging from eighteenth-century periodical
writers like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele to aesthetic theorists like Adam Smith,
and from artists like William Hogarth to romantic playwrights like Joanna Baillie, I show
how spectatorship offered a potent form of moral authority more rooted in judgment than
action. Moreover, I argue that engaged spectatorship offered an important theatrical
model for protagonists in the eighteenth-century novel.
2
Early novelists tended to scapegoat the theater in order to advance the novel as a
morally superior genre. Recent critics have shown how novelists used the theater as a
way to critique deception, artificiality, and masquerade, in contrast to novelistic virtues of
sincerity, authenticity, and candor. As a result, studies of the relationship between the
novel and the theater in the eighteenth century have focused almost entirely on issues of
performance: ways that characters, narrators, and authors are literal or figurative “actors.”
My dissertation, in contrast, studies the interrelationship between the eighteenthcentury novel and theater history through the figure of the spectator. Protagonists in the
early novel adopt various qualities of engaged spectators, from common sense to
curiosity, demonstrating ways that good judgment may be more valuable in eighteenthcentury culture than good behavior. In addition, novelists frequently aligned their
definitions of ideal spectatorship with forms of engaged reading, inviting readers to
imitate the participatory spectatorship of their protagonists. Spectatorship became a
source of empowerment for protagonists in the early novel, but more importantly,
spectatorship also became a source of agency for the eighteenth-century reader.
Abstract Approved:
____________________________
Thesis Supervisor
____________________________
Title and Department
____________________________
Date
NOVEL SPECTATORS:
SPECTATORSHIP IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
by
Bridget Draxler
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Doctor of Philosophy in English
in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa
May 2011
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Judith Pascoe
Copyright by
BRIDGET DRAXLER
2011
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
____________________________
PH.D. THESIS
____________________________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Bridget A Draxler
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in English at the May 2011 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
____________________________
Judith Pascoe, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________
Eric Gidal
____________________________
Teresa Mangum
____________________________
Garrett Stewart
____________________________
Jon Winet
To Rich DuRocher
who first sparked my interest in eighteenth-century studies
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to all of my teachers: Karen Cherewatuk, whose passion for life and
literature continues to motivate me; Jonathan Hill, who taught me to love academic research;
Jane Moody, who first introduced me to the magic of Romantic theater; Teresa Mangum,
who inspired me to pursue civic engagement within historical literature; Eric Gidal, whose
thoughtful advice has helped me since the earliest stages of this research; Miriam Gilbert,
who taught me to write about the stage; Garrett Stewart, whose care for language is surpassed
only by his care for students; and Jon Winet, who has been a generous mentor and friend.
Thanks most of all to Judith Pascoe, who has generously, thoughtfully, and encouragingly
guided me through this project: you are my role as a scholar, but more importantly as a
teacher.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
v
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
vi
INTRODUCTION: SPECTATORSHIP IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE
1
CHAPTER
I.
II.
III.
THE COMMON-SENSE SPECTATOR: PUBLIC SPECTATORS
IN SAMUEL RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA
33
THE REPTILE CRITIC: CITIZEN SPECTATORS IN HENRY
FIELDING’S TOM JONES
66
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SPECTATRESS: OBSERVING
SPECTATORS IN MARIA EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA
103
CONCLUSION
162
REFERENCES
164
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.
William Hogarth. The Laughing Audience. (1733).
Figure 2.
William Hogarth. Frontispiece to Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). 73
v
11
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AB:
AF:
B:
C:
ID:
MP:
MS:
NA:
P:
S:
SCG:
TJ:
TT:
William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty
Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce
Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” to the Plays on the Passions
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator
Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones
Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies
vi
1
INTRODUCTION: SPECTATORSHIP IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE
Tom Jones is a typical eighteenth-century hero: he is beaten, bullied, seduced,
betrayed, and banished by numerous other characters in the narrative. He performs very little
action himself, and that rather unsuccessfully. In one escapade in Book XIII, the hero
overwhelmed by London society and ignored by his hosts, Fielding writes that “Poor Jones
was rather a Spectator of this elegant scene, than an actor in it” (Tom Jones 451). Tom Jones
is a bystander in his own story.
The same might be said of any number of eighteenth-century protagonists—
protagonists who tend to observe rather than participate in their own narratives, and who
seem to lack agency as a result. A frequenter of the London theater, Frances Burney’s
Evelina makes “her first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life” in the box rather
than on the stage; over the course of the narrative, the heroine enjoys the indelicate but witty
performances of Congreve’s Love for Love and Samuel Foote’s The Minor and The
Commissionary as part of her education in the judgment of character (Burney 9). Mary
Hays’ Emma Courtney bemoans her role as a spectator, and that “women… must be content
tamely to look on, without taking any part in the great, though often absurd and tragical,
drama of life” (Hays 85).
While some characters lament the confines of spectatorship, novelists often frame
these spectators as gratified and empowered in their role as spectators. Henry Mackenzie’s
Man of Feeling is one of numerous works of sentimental fiction in which the hero
demonstrates virtue in his imaginative sympathy as a spectator of suffering. Rousseau’s Julie
follows the heroine’s move from young love in St. Preux to a wise marriage with M. de
Wolmar, two men who represent contrasting beliefs about spectatorship as a moral model:
2
the first, that “it is folly to try to study the world as a mere spectator…one sees others acting
insofar as one acts oneself,” and the second, more mature argument, that the spectator is a
moral ideal because “the philosopher is too far away; the man of the world too close”
(Rousseau 202, 01). Oswald, the hero of Madame de Stael’s Corinne, grudges sharing the
role of Corinne’s spectator with a wider public: “he was enjoying [Corinne’s] performance in
advance, but he was also jealous in advance, not of any particular man, but of the public who
would be spectators of the talents of the woman he loved” (Stael 122). Ambrosio’s opening
lecture in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk attracts a throng of spectators, among them Ambrosio’s
long-lost sister Antonia, who “gazed upon him eagerly, [and] felt a pleasure fluttering in her
bosom which till then had been unknown to her” (Lewis 48).
The most famous spectator in the novel of the long eighteenth century may also be
Jane Austen’s most nondescript heroine. By watching rather than participating in the private
theatrical of Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park, “Fanny believed herself to derive as much
innocent enjoyment from the Play as any of them”—without taking the blame for their
impropriety (Austen MP 137). For readers in the twenty-first century, characters like Fanny
Price, M. de Wolmar, and Tom Jones may seem more passive than heroic. These gothic
heroines and sentimental heroes often seem disconcertingly submissive to modern audiences,
who prefer their feisty performative counterparts: the Corinnes, the Madame Duvals, and the
Fantominas. Despite their seeming passivity, however, these characters reveal the powerful
agency of eighteenth-century spectators.
These novelists’ representations of spectator figures are framed within larger critical
conversations about spectatorship in eighteenth-century culture. Definitions of the spectator
evolved over the course of the eighteenth century, and the term “spectator” was used as a
3
blanket term that covered everything from literary criticism and public opinion to moral
conscience or a colonial gaze. Three hundred years after the initial publication of Addison
and Steele’s The Spectator, we are hardly closer to having a nuanced understanding of the
term, as The Oxford English Dictionary offers the sparse but vague definition of the spectator
as “one who sees, or looks on at, some scene or occurrence; a beholder, onlooker, observer.”
According to this definition, almost any ocular activity constitutes spectatorship.
For the purposes of this study, I take the spectator to have two important qualities that
differentiate this role from the act of seeing more generally. First, the eighteenth-century
spectator plays a role that is directly taken from the theater, and is therefore charged with the
fraught history of eighteenth-century theater audiences, including their variety, stratification,
and disorderliness, along with their important role as an analogy of the English body politic.1
And second, the eighteenth-century spectator is active, participatory, and engaged, offering
evaluation of a performance that collaboratively and powerfully contributes to its message.
These two criteria narrow this term enough to differentiate engaged spectatorship from acts
of seeing generally, while simultaneously leaving open the wide spectrum of possible ways
the spectator figure pervades eighteenth-century literature and culture.
Before analyzing how the spectator figure evolves in the eighteenth-century novel, I
would like to survey the critical history of spectatorship more widely in eighteenth-century
culture. One of the earliest and most influential examples of spectatorship is Addison and
Steele’s Mr. Spectator. Published between 1711 and 1714, The Spectator guided its readers
in concerns ranging from economics to etiquette and courtship to citizenship. The spectator,
according to Addison and Steele, is defined as “every one that considers the World as a
1
The lights of the eighteenth century theater shined, quite literally, on the spectator, and audiences attended the
theater as much to see as to be seen. See Jane Moody’s Illegitimate Theater in London (2005).
4
Theater, and desires to form a right Judgment of those who are the Actors in it” (S 90). The
spectator, for Addison and Steele, is an anonymous mouthpiece for shared public opinion.
Mr. Spectator achieved his success partly due to his simultaneous position both inside
and outside the culture he critiqued. “I live in the World, rather a Spectator of Mankind, than
as one of the Species,” Mr. Spectator writes (S 81). According to The Spectator,
spectatorship is a powerful social position outside and above society. To justify his power,
Addison and Steele emphasize Mr. Spectator’s requisite anonymity: he is the universal voice
of public opinion, critiquing general folly rather than particular vice.2 The authority of Mr.
Spectator’s judgment is rooted in being rootless. Mr. Spectator is the “invisible man”
persona who homogenizes the voice of culture as no one and everyone, the ultimate insider
and the ultimate outsider, who lives “in the World without having anything to do in it” (S
89). Mr. Spectator transcends (as Addison and Steele claim) particularities of culture to
speak of, by, and for the people. Addison writes, “my Paper has not in it a single Word of
News, a Reflection in Politicks, nor a Stroke of Party” (S 97). Representing neither religion
nor state nor particular socioeconomic interests, Mr. Spectator claims to instead represent a
more universal power: common sense.
Mr. Spectator’s method is to tell stories with “type” characters, who move fluidly
between particular situations and universal maxims. Steele’s introduction of the club in The
Spectator No. 2, for instance, describes Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain
Sentry, and William Honeycomb as type characters with appropriately allegorical names.
2
Before Mr. Spectator, according to Trolander and Tenger, critics tended to be described negatively as overly
critical, pretentious, and vicious. Jonathan Swift, for instance, disparages the critic in his “Digression
Concerning Critics” from A Tale of a Tub (1704): “These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition
of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults.” Addison and Steele recuperated a more
benign conception of engaged spectatorship.
5
Their anecdotes contribute to clear lessons, as explicated by Mr. Spectator. “I shall always
endeavor to make an innocent if not an improving Entertainment,” Mr. Spectator promises
his readers; “I shall endeavor to point out all those Imperfections that are the Blemishes, as
well as those Virtues which are the Embellishments” (S 91).
Mr. Spectator consistently frames his arguments as things that “everyone knows,”
ideas that are universally accessible and widely applicable. Mr. Spectator’s key rhetorical
strategy, then, is the maxim: “A man who publishes his Works in a Volume, has an infinite
Advantage over one who communicates his Writings to the World in loose Tracts and single
Pieces” (S 94), “a Pattern of Female Excellence ought not to be concealed, but should be set
out to the View and Imitation of the World” (S 537), and “A little Wit is equally capable of
exposing a Beauty, and of aggravating a fault” (S 381).3 The maxim articulates a clear, if
reductive, answer to relevant social questions.
Addison and Steele’s belief in a universal definition of goodness and the authority of
common sense created a long legacy in eighteenth-century thought. Margreta de Grazia’s
study of Shakespearean revival, for instance, demonstrates the eighteenth-century obsession
with creating an objective, scholarly, authoritative Shakespeare who would represent the
bourgeois subject. Like Mr. Spectator, Shakespeare came to represent a single, codified,
coherent center of moral and artistic authority, and the spectator’s credence was measured by
his alignment with an imagined, agreed-upon “correct” interpretation of the national icon.
In his 1765 preface to “The Plays of William Shakespeare,” Samuel Johnson agreed
that Shakespeare was a playwright for the universal spectator: “Nothing can please many,
and please long, but just representations of general nature… Shakespeare is above all
3
Sir Andrew Freeport, Mr. Spectator says, also “abounds in several frugal Maxims, among which the greatest
Favourite is, ‘A penny saved is a Penny got’” (S 85).
6
writers… the poet of nature” (Johnson 420-21). Johnson concludes that the role of the critic,
in Shakespeare as in other art, is to compel the reader to form a judgment for himself: “It is
natural to delight more in what we find or make than in what we receive” (Johnson 450).
The ideal spectator, for Johnson, is a translator between great works of art and the general
public.
Following in Mr. Spectator’s footsteps, Johnson also relies on universal maxims and
common sense as grounding the spectator’s incontestable authority. In his 1747 “Drury Lane
Prologue” commissioned by David Garrick, Johnson writes:
Ah! Let not censure term our fate our choice,
The stage but echoes back the public voice.
The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live (Johnson 12).
The spectator, he suggests, holds the real power in the English theater. Johnson echoed this
belief in The Rambler No. 121: “no man of genius can much applaud himself for repeating a
tale with which the audience is already tired” (Johnson 218). Later, in The Idler No. 60, he
questions the value of making spectatorship a universally accessible role: “Criticism is a
study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense… all can be
critics if they will” (Johnson 290). Like Addison and Steele, Johnson frames the spectator as
“the public voice,” and as a figure wielding considerable agency in dramatic and cultural
politics.
More explicitly imitating Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, Eliza Haywood’s The
Female Spectator also frames the spectator as a powerful arbiter of common sense and public
opinion. She describes her readers as spectators, promising, like Addison and Steele, to
retain the anonymity of her performers, who model universal rather than particular vices that
the Female Spectator identifies and interprets: “tho’ I shall bring real facts on the stage, I
7
shall conceal the actors names under such as will be comfortable to their characters; my
intention being only to expose the vice, not the person” (Haywood 1). Using anonymous
anecdotes to make generalized claims about the female experience, Haywood’s Female
Spectator trains readers in the universal values of temperance, good taste, and modesty. Like
her predecessors, Haywood celebrates Enlightenment virtues of universality and autonomous
subjectivity in ways that identify spectatorship as an expression of rationality, virtue, and
adherence to the collective good.
In contemporary criticism on the legacy of Mr. Spectator, Paula Backscheider offers
one of the earliest and most convincing arguments for the simultaneous birth of public
opinion and private identity, as illustrated in the rise of the novel.4 Michael McKeon has also
described Mr. Spectator as exemplifying a conscious shift in cultural authority from private
opinion to Public Opinion. As McKeon points out, the devolution of absolutism replaced one
form of centralized power with another. But assumed consensus legitimates the spectator’s
definition of common sense, and this historical and ideological shift is what makes The
Spectator possible.5 Describing the authoritarian power of public opinion within eighteenthcentury aesthetics, Marc Redfield identifies ways that taste is ambiguously
subjective|personal and objective|universal; to have good taste, he explains, is to match
individual taste to collective taste.6 As these critics point out, there is an internal
contradiction within the Addisonian definition of the spectator: interpretation seems to be
private and subjective but in the end is public and assumedly universal.
4
See Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England
(1993).
5
Aesthetics, according to McKeon, marks the devolution of absolutism from the collective to the individual—
and back to the collective. Absolutism is replaced with perceived universality, and common sense and common
judgment become the new authoritarian power.
6
Redfield 14.
8
Offering a variation on the public spectator manifested in Mr. Spectator, William
Hogarth presents an alternative perspective of the spectator as an English citizen. In his 1753
The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth describes beauty not as universal conformity but as an
“infinite variety of parts” (AB 10). According to Ronald Paulson’s introduction to the text,
Hogarth’s “version of Addisonian aesthetics is the surprising discovery of the utmost variety
within apparent uniformity.”7 “Politically,” Paulson continues, “Hogarth’s aesthetics is
based on the model of the body politic in which the emphasis falls on the many rather than
the one, on the mixture of parts (people, Lords, and Commons) rather than the imposed
unity.”8 This politically charged privileging of English perspectives in Hogarth’s aesthetics
is critical to understanding his definition of the ideal spectator.
Hogarth’s The Laughing Audience (Fig. 1) satirizes a typically stratified London
theater audience. Like many of his caricatures, this print shifts attention from performers to
audiences, augmenting the class divisions of English society and framing spectators as a
motley crew of English citizens.
7
Paulson xxviii.
8
Paulson xlii.
9
Figure 1, William Hogarth, The Laughing Audience (1733).
___________________________________________________________________________
Source: Andrew Edmunds, London
10
Hogarth’s grotesque caricature of the audience depicts three distinct groups of people.
In the top half stand the upper classes in the boxes of the theater. Effeminized by outsized
wigs, bows, and cuffs, the gentlemen fraternize with prostitutes selling fruit. The prostitute
in the middle, reaching over the wall to tug on the sleeve of the gentleman on the left,
emphasizes the intra-class nature of this fraternization, as she transgresses the wall’s
enforced boundary. On the bottom right are the lower class spectators in the pit. The only
spectators who appear to be watching the play, these men and women sneer and laugh
grotesquely, one man weeping with laughter. In the front left sit the musicians, with their
tersely pinched faces, focusing intently on the music. Members of each group resemble one
another and differ starkly from other groups, so that the physical boundaries only reinforce
essential differences. Brightly-lit candles illuminate the scene, spotlighting the spectators.
For Hogarth, the men in the box and the men in the pit are attending the theater for
very different purposes, and the theater provides them with very different pleasures. Though
satirical in nature, Hogarth’s portrait of the laughing audience also captures a sense of pride
in the variety within national identity. By representing a spectrum of spectators, and
satirizing each equally, Hogarth differs from Addison and Steele by implicitly affirming
variety within the collective English citizenry. In The Laughing Audience, Hogarth
demonstrates mixed interest in theater spectators as both an object of his satirical gaze and an
expression of English freedom, individuality, and diversity. Unlike the uniform collectivity
of Mr. Spectator, Hogarth’s spectators affirm a degree of variety within collective identity.
In contemporary criticism, Betsy Bolton writes of eighteenth-century English politics,
“the English show their vaunted freedom nowhere more than in the theatres.”9 Jonathan Bate
9
Bolton 14.
11
and Michael Dobson also discuss the intersection of political and aesthetic freedom in order
to analyze how the adaptation, criticism and bardolatry of Shakespeare contributed to the
establishment of both English drama and English nationalism. The analogy between the
citizen and the spectator made theatergoing a civic duty, and critics like Bolton, Bate, and
Dobson describe a growing analogy between the state and the stage, each championed by the
citizen and the spectator.
Following the twenty-year hiatus of dramatic performance in London during the
English Revolution, attending the theater became an increasingly important expression of
national pride. Dryden, most famously in his 1688 Essay of Dramatic Poesie, argues that
English imaginative freedom in English drama, though disordered, is better than the
fastidious French alternative. The English spectator, as a member of a diverse collective, can
appreciate the parallel sense of freedom and variety within English drama. He writes:
By their servile observations of the unities of time and place, and integrity
of scenes, [the French] have brought upon themselves that dearth of plot and
narrowness of imagination which may be observed in all their plays…
though we are not altogether so punctual as the French in observing the
laws of comedy, yet our errors are so few and little, and those things
wherein we excel them so considerable, that we ought of right to be
preferred before them (Dryden 107).
Dryden admits of a perfection and order in French drama which the English fail to achieve,
but he paints this apparent failure as the merit of English comedy. Strict order is not within
English agenda, for art or government; English audiences, he explains, prefer the variety of
plot and characters, the irregularity sanctioned by an imaginative spirit, and the naturalistic
and realistic tenor within the freer bounds of English comic standards—themes of variety,
serpentine movement, and freedom taken up by Hogarth fifty years later. For Dryden,
12
appreciating freedom in English drama is an expression of the spectator’s devotion to
freedom in English politics.
In the Romantic period, spectatorship became an even more important act of national
devotion. While English politics remained relatively stable during the French Revolution,
the English stage was a site of riots, protests, and uprisings, from the Old Price Riots of 1809
to the famous demands for script revisions, performance repetitions, and actor substitutions
described in Jane Moody’s Illegitimate Theater in London. Gillian Russell’s Theatres of War
also examines the militaristic patriotism of Romantic drama. Recalling a peculiar instance in
which returning soldiers were given free admittance to a panoramic view of the battle of
Waterloo, from which they had only recently arrived, Russell suggests that “in order to
comprehend what they had experienced the ‘actors’ had to become ‘spectators.’”10 “The
worlds of war, civic space, and the theater,” he writes, “are here synthesized, made
inseparable, as are the actions of spectatorship and participation… the audience is the
spectacle… the identities of patriot and theater-goer are one and the same.”11 Russell’s
seminal study articulates the shared identities of citizens and spectators in the spectacle of
English politics and drama.
An avid theatergoer and everyman’s critic, Hazlitt describes himself as a spectator of
both the stage and society, an “invisible observer” of English virtues. Like Hogarth, Hazlitt
disparages “intellectual hermaphroditism,” preferring “variety within civic uniformity”
(Hazlitt 101). Fiercely proud of England’s dramatic literature and political freedom, and
10
Russell 77.
11
Russell 66.
13
convinced that English spectators learn civic duties from tragic drama, Hazlitt believed that
political greatness and artistic greatness both served the public good (Hazlitt 137).
In privileging the act of reading Shakespeare over attending theatrical performances
of his plays, Coleridge, Lamb, and other supporters of closet drama reframed the ideal
English spectator as a reader. Lamb writes in On the Tragedies of Shakespeare that
“speaking… is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or
spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a
character” (Lamb 563).12 Reading dramatic literature allows the spectator more intimate
identification with the character: “while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear” (Lamb
574). Combating a cult of the actor, Lamb cultivated a cult of the spectator rooted in
engaged reading practices that enhance the audience’s agency in literary interpretation.
Hogarth’s appeal to patriotic expression within the spectator’s taste also had
important parallels in the eighteenth-century theater. Plays like Jane Shore and The London
Merchant, which focused on particularly English virtues like mercantilism and fortitude,
delighted London audiences for decades. In Lillo’s nationalist work of merchant propaganda
and domestic tragedy, the main character Barnwell “accepts the ignominious death and
terrible fate of becoming a ‘dreadful Spectacle’ and ‘warning and horror’ of a gaping
crowd”—the very act of viewing his downfall is seen as a financial transaction, where “the
theater spectator can cheaply purchase the wisdom that Barnwell has bought at such a terrible
price.”13 Praising shared political and aesthetic liberty in English drama, the dedication to
12
Lamb adds, referring to John Kemble and Sarah Siddons, that “It is difficult for a frequent play-goer to
disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are
in reality thinking of Mrs. S” (Lamb 561).
13
Mazella 810.
14
The London Merchant argues that “The sentiments and example of Cato, may inspire his
Spectators with a just sense of the value of liberty” (Lillo np).
Significantly, many of these patriotic plays were framed as plays-within-plays,
granting them a highly self-conscious and almost self-satirizing quality. Sheridan’s The
Critic, for instance, includes an elaborate battle between ships at sea for his “Spanish
Armada” scene.14 The climactic finale was a spectacular demonstration of stagecraft and
patriotism, described in the script as “[Flourish of drums, trumpets, canon, etc. Scene
changes to the sea—the fleets engage—the musick plays ‘Britons Strike Home.’--Spanish
fleet destroyed by fireships…]” (Sheridan 98). Sheridan satirizes audiences who require
canons, fireworks, and other special effects to enjoy the theater, appealing to the cultural
elite’s taste for satire, while simultaneously providing these spectacles, in order to appeal to
the masses’ desire for spectacle. Sheridan assures audiences that enjoying this scene, with its
mixed satire and spectacle, is not expression of moral superiority or aesthetic taste—it is an
expression of patriotic fervor. By singing along with ‘Britons Strike Home’ in the closing
sequence, spectators participate in the performance in order to express national pride and
identify collectively as English citizens.
In contrast to both Addison and Steele’s spectator of public opinion and Hogarth’s
citizen spectator, Adam Smith identifies the “impartial spectator” as his moral ideal.
According to his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, moral growth emerges from the
spectator’s ability to simultaneously project oneself and remove oneself from another’s
sufferings. Smith’s moral philosophy is constructed from a theatrical analogy:
The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from consideration of
what he himself would feel, if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation,
14
Dangle mocks the affinity of politics and the English stage, claiming “I hate all politics but theatrical politics.
Where’s the Morning Chronicle?” (Sheridan 1).
15
and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with
his present reason and judgment (MS I.6).
At once in his own mind and imaginatively in the mind of someone else, Smith’s impartial
spectator remains halfway detached as a means to ensure that his sentimental sympathy is
tempered with rational virtue. The moral authority of Smith’s impartial spectator lies in this
impossible ability to be both himself and someone else at the same time. The sympathizing
spectator remains distant, measuring his own moderate sentimental experience against the
emotional over-indulgence of the sufferer. His moral perspective, then, is a product of both
the sufferer’s pain and his own rational detachment.
Smith adds that impartial spectatorship also functions self-reflexively: the spectator
can, and should, observe himself. This impartial spectatorship, too, is rational, detached, and
fragmented. Self-spectatorship works interiorly, as a form of conscience: “the prudent man
is always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator,
and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the man within the breast” (MS V.31,
emphasis mine). The impartial spectator’s judgment is infallible, and Smith directs that
moral sympathy
must be left altogether to the decision of the man within the breast, the
supposed impartial spectator, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. If we
place ourselves completely in his situation, if we really view ourselves with
his eyes, and as he views us, and listen, with diligent and reverential attention,
to what he suggests to us, his voice will never deceive us (MS VI.50).
Self-observation requires imagining the existence of a separate rational perspective, to view
ourselves from outside ourselves with disinterested moral authority, and to be guided by this
imagined spectator.
Like Smith, Joanna Baillie locates moral authority in the theater in the exchange of
sympathy through observation. But unlike Smith’s taxonomical, rational approach to the
16
impartial spectator, who works outside and above the action, Baillie’s spectator is more
boldly in the midst of the action. In her “Introductory Discourse” to the Plays on the
Passions, Baillie describes her ideal spectator as intuitively observant and vitally curious.
Baillie’s spectator is guided by her personal interest, her impression of physical appearances,
and her interpretation of seemingly random details. Even from afar, the curious spectator can
successfully read subtleties of character based on appearance:
For though few at such a spectacle can get near enough to distinguish the
expression of face, or the minuter parts of a criminal’s behavior, yet from a
considerable distance will they eagerly mark whether he steps firmly; whether
the motions of his body denote agitation or calmness (ID 358).
The theater serves as a training-ground for character judgment. Baillie’s curious spectator
prefers proximity to distance, and private performances to public ones: in describing the
spectator’s perspective on the tragic hero, she asks, “If invisible, would we not follow him
into his lonely haunts, into his closet, into the midnight silence of his chamber?” (ID 360).
Even in the very public space of the theater, the curious spectator will be most attracted to
private spaces, private thoughts, and private feelings. Baillie’s spectator intuitively notices
inconsequential details with unforeseen consequences: “the restless eye, the muttering lip, the
half-checked exclamation” (ID 359). She looks for
Some slight circumstance characteristick of a particular turn of a man’s mind,
which at first sight seems but little connected with the great events of his life,
[but which] will often explain some of those events more clearly to our
understanding, than the minute details of ostensible policy (ID 361).
The curious spectator observes minute details with unpredictable consequences, guided by
intuitive judgment and subtle observations.
According to Baillie, “No man wishes to see the Ghost himself, which would
certainly procure him the best information on the subject, but every man wishes to see one
17
who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and wildness of that species of terrour” (ID
359). Disinterested in determining whether or not the ghost is real, Baillie’s curious
spectator instead delights in observing the troubling experience of believing one has seen a
ghost—spectating, in essence, another spectator.
Baillie’s spectator is not detached and distanced, but rather she is uncomfortably
close in her inspection. Identification with the performer is essential for the curious
spectator:
The transactions of men become interesting to us only as we are made
acquainted with the men themselves. Great and bloody battles are to us
battles fought on the moon, if it is not impressed upon our minds, by some
circumstances attending them, that men subject to like weaknesses and
passions with ourselves, were the combatants (ID 361).
In an ideal theater experience, Baillie suggests, the divide between performers and spectators
becomes blurred via identification. Through imaginative projection, spectators become more
honest about our own moral failings: “In examining others we know ourselves” (ID 360). As
these examples of Baillie, Smith, Hogarth, Addison, and other suggest, the spectator figure
played a newly dominant role in both the English theater and English society at large across
the eighteenth century, as a model of morality, citizenship, and public opinion.
So how does this history of spectatorship in English culture contribute to the rise of
the novel? Despite the celebrated prominence of the spectator figure in politics, philosophy,
and art, early novelists tended to scapegoat the theater in order to advance the novel as a
morally superior genre, critiquing theatrical deception, artificiality, and masquerade in
contrast to novelistic virtues of sincerity, authenticity, and candor. In the preface to Moll
Flanders (1722), for instance, Daniel Defoe contrasts his novel with morally dubious works
of dramatic literature:
18
The advocates for the stage have, in all ages, made this the
great argument to persuade people that their plays are useful,
and that they ought to be allowed in the most civilised and in
the most religious government; namely, that they are applied
to virtuous purposes, and that by the most lively representations,
they fail not to recommend virtue and generous principles, and
to discourage and expose all sorts of vice and corruption of
manners; and were it true that they did so, and that they
constantly adhered to that rule, as the test of their acting on
the theatre, much might be said in their favour.
Throughout the infinite variety of this book, this fundamental
is most strictly adhered to… [and] upon this foundation this book is
recommended to the reader (Defoe 5).
Defoe justifies the novel’s moral credibility according to its ability to promote virtue and
prevent vice in the same way that the theater attempts but inevitably fails to do. Both the
theater and Defoe’s novel use “representations” of virtue and the “expos[ure]” of vice as a
means of promoting morality. But Defoe offers the novel as an improvement on the theater,
implying that the theater is unable to adhere to its own ambitions. In contrast, Defoe presents
us with a novel that more “strictly adhere[s]” to poetic justice. Conveniently glossing over
the fact that his heroine is a thief and a prostitute, Defoe holds up his novel as simultaneously
appropriating and correcting the moral system of the theater.
Defoe is not the only eighteenth-century novelist who both relied on and rejected the
theater in order to establish his novel’s moral credence. Austen’s Fanny Price, Richardson’s
Clarissa and Burney’s Evelina all seem to succeed by distancing themselves from more
“theatrical” characters like Maria Bertram, Lovelace, and Madame Duval. Defoe’s definition
of the novel as a corrective for the stage importantly highlights both the incompatibility and
the interconnectedness of these genres.
This eighteenth-century perception of antagonism between stage and page is
maintained (even as it is complicated) by contemporary criticism. As the representative
19
genres for the public and private spheres, drama and novels have been relegated to opposing
camps in the study of eighteenth-century literature: one on the rise, culminating in its rich
Victorian splendor, and the other on the decline, culminating in its spectacular Romantic
embarrassment. These genres have become touchstones for other dialectical descriptions of
eighteenth-century culture, from the empowering subjectivity versus fraught exteriority of
eighteenth-century identity to the rational citizenship versus mob-like revolts of eighteenthcentury politics. This bifurcation is exacerbated by critics like Laura S. Brown, who argues
that virtue and performance are inherently at odds.15
The cultural transition from the stage to the page is frequently read as evidence of a
shift in English culture away from public display, aristocratic excess, and material, exterior
modes of identity toward private reflection, middle-class temperance, and abstract, interior,
individualistic modes of subjectivity. This sweeping description of eighteenth-century
culture is supported by seminal critical theories like Michael McKeon’s study of the
devolution of absolutism.16 The novel’s success, according to these theories, lies in its ability
to differentiate itself from the moral qualms of the theater.
This critical conversation about the relationship between the novel and drama has
been dominated by feminist critics, including Marcie Frank, Lisa Freeman, Catherine CraftFairchild, Emily Allen, and Emily Hodgson Anderson, who have all explored ways in which
15
Margaret Doody also writes about the way critical assumption frames the eighteenth century as host to the
rise of the novel and decline of the theater.
16
McKeon traces this more comprehensive dissemination of authority in The Secret History of Domesticity
(2005). The shift in power from managers to audiences on the stage parallels the shift in power from rulers to
citizens in the state, along with a host of other social, cultural, and literary situations in which authority
devolves and disperses.
20
the novel defines itself both through and against the theater.17 Most notably, Lisa Freeman’s
Character’s Theater (2001) challenges the critical assumption that the novel monopolizes
conceptions of eighteenth-century identity, and that the rise of the novel and the rise of
subjectivity are the coterminous, complementary, and dominant structures of eighteenthcentury mainstream culture. Emily Allen’s Theater Figures (2003) discusses essential
similarities between theatrical femininity (the actress, the whore, the artificial, public, sexual,
inauthentic woman) and novelistic femininity (the domestic wife, the virgin, the natural,
private, moral, authentic woman).
Many female writers in the eighteenth century experimented in both genres, which
partially accounts for this feminist slant in contemporary criticism: Aphra Behn, Eliza
Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, Fanny Burney, and others wrote both plays and novels, often
self-reflexively weighing the cultural value of each genre. Inchbald once famously said,
“[The Novelist] lives in a land of liberty, whilst the Dramatic Writer exists but under a
despotic government” (Inchbald 9). Critics have excitedly explored this trend, considering
ways that female writers experiment with themes of performance in the novel. As Catherine
Craft-Fairchild and Laura Rosenthal point out, masquerade disempowers women as it offers
them agency, partly due to a pervasive analogy between the actress and prostitute.18
17
In addition, Judith Pascoe has demonstrated ways that theatricality is mainstream, not marginal, in Romantic
literature, and is pervasive in other literary genres, including poetry. I share her interest in exploring the
potential to transform traditionally limiting labels into empowering strategies for self-representation, though I
hope to consider the spectator alongside the performer as evading constrictive labels through theatricalized selfrepresentation.
18
Craft-Fairchild’s study of disguise and female identity suggests that masquerade, as a trope in eighteenthcentury women’s fiction, provides an ambiguously liberating source for female expression. Although disguise
can function as a site of freedom, excess, and subversion, it can also offer “apparent freedoms” that are really
“sophisticated forms of [patriarchal] oppression,” leaving women objectified and mute (Craft-Fairchild 3).
Masquerade can disempower women by making them the objects of either predatory or protective gazes, and it
is only when the masquerade is used by the heroine to distance herself—her body from the male gaze, her own
desire from male desire, or her genuine self from representation—that masquerade can produce the “gap
21
In contrast to previous critical studies on performative feminism, I draw from
eighteenth-century theories of spectatorship to investigate the split identity of spectators
rather than performers. By shifting attention from performers to spectators, we can discover
a more nuanced reading of the relationship between the page and stage, suggesting that the
eighteenth-century novel recycles and reworks the theater rather than replacing it.
To illustrate how my method deviates from previous feminist criticism on the stage
and page, I will describe a short scene from Richardson’s Pamela. While this scene seems to
be about performance, I suggest that it can more productively be read as a scene of
spectatorship. Pamela is keeping a secret correspondence with Arthur Williams, who she
hopes will help her to escape Mr. B. Pretending to smell a sunflower, Pamela slyly retrieves
a letter from Williams that is tucked beneath a tile in the garden. Mrs. Jewkes shrewdly
points out that sunflowers have no smell, but distracted by the gardener, she does not suspect
Pamela’s scheme. Describing the scene to her parents, Pamela writes, “Alas! your poor
Daughter will make an Intriguer by-and-by, but I hope an innocent one!” (P 128). A typical
instance of the novel’s mixed reliance on the theater, this passage demonstrates to most
feminist critics that Pamela engages in the role-playing, deception, and intrigue of the actress,
both to her detriment and calculated advantage. This study, however, takes interest in the
way that Pamela steps out of the action to reflect on and evaluate this scene in third person
narration, as a spectator of her own story.
My reading reorients critical conversation on drama and the novel to consider
spectators in addition to performers, and to consider stylistic thematizations of theatrical
tropes. How might Emily Allen’s study of the relationship between drama and the novel
necessary for subjectivity” (Craft-Fairchild 173). While Craft-Fairchild’s study does not consider spectatorship
directly, this theme of distance keys her into important themes for my own research.
22
consider female spectators in addition to female readers, and literary form in addition to
content? How might Ellen Donkin’s fierce activism for female voices behind the stage or
Laura Rosenthal’s renegotiation of female voices on stage be complemented by a study of the
female voices reacting to the stage, either before, during, or after a performance? How might
Lisa Freeman’s approach to negotiating subjectivity between novels and plays be
complicated by reading subjectivity as also negotiated, through various narrative strategies,
between an author and a reader/spectator?
While firmly rooted in feminist criticism of the page and stage, I also participate in
scholarly debates surrounding the figure of the spectator in eighteenth-century philosophy,
popular culture, and politics. This related debate, championed by critics like Frederick
Burwick and Nora Nachumi, highlights the role of interpretation, reflection, observation,
identification, and judgment in forums ranging from sentimentalism to citizenship to theater
criticism: Paul Goring studies the spectator’s sentimental body as an expression of virtue;
Gillian Russell frames the ideal citizen as a spectator; Judith Fisher argues that as public
opinion became the new patron of the theater, audiences demanded new rights as spectators,
building on Robert Hume’s argument that the lack of heroes in Restoration comedy made the
audience responsible for providing a moral compass.
Though these studies of spectatorship vary widely across English culture, the most
engaging analyses consider ways that the spectator’s identity is somehow split. Frederick
Burwick argues that the spectator has a schizophrenic dual-consciousness in which he is both
deceived and self-deceiving, the victim and the accomplice of the author’s illusion. Nora
Nachumi builds on this theme of dual-consciousness to suggest that the spectator is caught
between sympathetic identification and critical detachment. Paul Cannan has explored ways
23
that the inconsistencies in eighteenth-century conceptions of the “critic” leads to a
proliferation of critical identities, from literature to religion. In each of these studies, the
spectator’s success depends upon a careful synthesis of multiple points of view. Unlike the
doubleness that disempowers the performer, the spectator’s dual-consciousness is the basis of
his or her authority.
By carrying this analysis of eighteenth-century spectators into a discussion of the
novel, I uncover ways that novelists innovatively transform the figure of the spectator into a
model for both their protagonists and their readers. The novels in this study set the stage of
the imagination for readers in the same way that dramas do for spectators on the stages of
Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Novelists highlight the self-conscious performance of
spectatorship as a source of agency, identity, or even heroism. Taken up by moral
philosophers and political theorists, the internalized reflection and self-reflexivity of the
spectator figure becomes a key corrective gesture for social and individual progress in the
eighteenth century.
My dissertation studies the interrelationship between the narrative form of the
eighteenth-century novel and the cultural history of the eighteenth-century stage, by focusing
on the figure of the spectator. Protagonists in the early novel adopt the qualities of engaged
spectators, valuing good judgment even more than good action. Using their protagonists as
models of spectatorship for their readers, novelists guided reader response by aligning right
reading with resonant definitions of spectatorship, borrowing from politics, art, and
philosophy.
My three chapters represent three contrasting definitions of the ideal spectator. While
the protagonists in Richardson’s Clarissa, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Edgeworth’s Belinda
24
seem to find the theater to be morally detrimental or threatening, particularly in these
characters’ roles as performers, Clarissa, Tom Jones, and Belinda also appropriate theatrical
models of spectatorship in ways that contribute to their moral growth and authority. I
address three different ways that the spectator figure appears in the novel: in the recourse to
public opinion that is implicated in the epistolary structure of Richardson’s Clarissa; in the
prologue-like direct address of the Introductory Chapters of Fielding’s Tom Jones; and in the
unrealized synthesis of detachment and proximity enacted by the twin heroines of
Edgeworth’s Belinda. Rather than tracing a clear arc, this dissertation examines several
approaches to engaged spectatorship in eighteenth-century culture that subtly shift from
universal to national to individual perspectives. By tracing variations in the legacy of the
spectator in the rise of the novel, I show how spectatorship facilitated a more constructive
alliance between the stage and page.
The rise of the participatory spectator figure in the eighteenth century parallels, in
many ways, the various rise narratives used to describe eighteenth-century culture in
England, with the rises of Protestantism, literacy, the nation-state, separate spheres, and the
middle class. I am interested in the cultural anxieties at stake in the relationship between
these genres, including how performance and spectatorship were gendered in the eighteenth
century, and how religious, political, and economic distinctions are implicated in the tension
between the moral authority of stage and page. But while attuned to the social and cultural
forces at play in these developments, my primary object is to consider the clash of genres
initiated by the novel’s adaptation of theatrical spectators as models of good judgment and
right reading.
25
More than offering a technique of close reading, this methodology allows me to
compare social issues in the theater with formal issues in the novel, so as to understand how
the construction of character and narrative technique in the eighteenth-century novel offers a
literary thematization of the cultural and ethical context of spectatorship in the eighteenthcentury theater. These novelists used stage analogies in various ways to reframe protagonists
and readers as active, participatory, and engaged spectators.
Because these test cases reveal individual manifestations of this trend, they intend to
be more suggestive than comprehensive: key omissions include meta-critics like Pope, Swift
and Dryden, who offer complementary definitions of moral spectatorship; writers like Behn,
Lennox, Milton, Hays, MacKenzie, Burney, and Inchbald, who also explore themes of heroic
spectatorship within their works of fiction; and continental perspectives on spectatorship in
the novel, such as those of Rousseau, Cervantes and Goethe.
This sample, though small, suggests the possibility that eighteenth-century novelists
rely on theatrical structures, language and imagery, particularly concerning themes of
spectatorship, to define the emerging genre of the novel. I focus narrowly on key scenes and
key sentences, exploring how the theme of participatory spectatorship manifests in the
particularities of prose and the nuances of characterization. These close readings, I hope,
gesture toward larger trends in these novels, and invite consideration of the spectator figure
in eighteenth-century texts more widely. However, my goal is more modestly to suggest that
these three writers, Richardson, Fielding, and Edgeworth, model their protagonists on the
engaged spectator figure.
Secondly, I argue that novelists also recycle these spectator figures within their
novels in order to reframe readers as active spectators, allowing writers to guide “right
26
reading” according to the specific style of spectatorship exercised by their protagonists. In
identifying this parallel between spectators and readers, I do not mean to conflate these roles
or to suggest they are indistinguishable. Instead, I want to point out how novelists, in order
to train readers to read, interpret, and evaluate their works according to authorial intention,
systemically compare successful reading with particular forms of spectatorship exercised by
their characters. Because each author values slightly different perspectives in their ideal
readers, each author showcased different models of spectatorship for their readers to follow.
For all of these writers, however, the analogy of spectatorship allowed them to promote
engaged reading practices. Novel reading, they all agree, is no passive sport. Reading the
novel in the “right way,” they suggest, requires readers to perform the part of active
spectators.
In my first chapter, “The Common Sense Critic: Public Spectators in Richardson’s
Clarissa,” I contextualize Richardson’s public spectator within the framework of public
opinion epitomized by Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator. While the self-dividedness of
Richardson’s heroines and texts has been criticized as dangerously performative by recent
critics, I argue that this self-division is an essential feature of the ideal spectator he fashions
within Clarissa. Offering his heroine and text as models of judgment, Richardson
encourages readers to aspire to Clarissa’s tenets of public spectatorship. Richardson exerts
heavy control over the readers’ interpretation through direct appeals to the universal ideal of
common sense.
Richardson’s version of the spectator is tightly controlled and centralized: ultimately,
he suggests that all good spectators will come to the same conclusion—his conclusion.
Albert J. Rivero notes that in his own letters, Richardson consistently “flatters, cajoles, and
27
sometimes bullies his correspondents into reaching ‘correct’ readings.”19 Richardson’s
“mode of literary production,” Thomas Keymer suggests, “was always sociable, if not indeed
collaborative.” 20 However, it was also markedly hierarchical. Angus Ross writes more
skeptically that “Richardson invites collaboration but ultimately demonstrates very firm and
conscious, even dictatorial, adherence to his original purposes.”21
Because Clarissa’s abduction, rape, and death are tainted by performance, and
because Lovelace’s sinister theatrics proved to be more appealing than Richardson intended,
readers have historically failed to neatly subscribe to Richardson’s intended collective
conclusion, often either suspicious of Clarissa’s performativity or taken in by Lovelace’s
performance. Critics like Terry Eagleton tend to identify latent theatrical imagery in
Richardson’s oeuvre as subconscious, repressed, or illicit desire on the part of the
protagonists, or even on the part of the author himself.
In contrast to skeptical readings of performative theatricality in Clarissa, this chapter
examines theatrical tropes within Richardson’s novels and heroines as highly intentional,
carefully crafted moments of spectatorship. While her actions may be questionable,
Clarissa’s judgment is irrevocable; as a spectator, Clarissa represents universality, common
sense, and collective public opinion.
The epistolary style in Richardson’s narrative, I argue, downplays the heroine’s
performance in favor of her critical perspective on this performance: writing a deceptive
letter may seem morally suspect, for example, but her reflective justification for this action
19
Rivero vii. With his Dutch translator Johannes Stinstra, for instance, Richardson “withholds and
manipulates” both biographical and literary information (Sabor 8).
20
Keymer 142.
21
Keymer 16.
28
proves her virtue. Running away with a gentleman may seem incriminating, but Clarissa’s
description of this decision confirms her innocence. Richardson as editor circumscribes the
agency of his protagonist and reader through appeals to common sense, inviting us to join the
collective conclusion, shared by his other narrators, of Clarissa’s perfect virtue.
Richardson’s ideal spectator represents public opinion in the sense that he or she can
be assimilated into a single, agreed-upon interpretation and apply universal principles to
particular situations. However, this ideal of public opinion is always carefully orchestrated
by the author. By conducting four contrasting voices to unify around a shared belief in
Clarissa’s faultlessness, Richardson suggests that common sense is both universally
accessible and universally shared.
My second chapter, “The Reptile Critic: Critical Spectators in Henry Fielding’s Tom
Jones,” explores the ways in which Fielding’s satirical approach to spectatorship in his novel
was shaped by his early career as a playwright. In the aftermath of the 1737 Licensing Act,
Fielding was bullied from the London stage by royal censorship. As a result, Fielding’s ideal
spectator rejects censorious criticism. Instead, the narrator and title character of Tom Jones
reveal the value of delaying judgment in the performance of spectatorship.
Modeling his hero on the English citizen, Fielding paints a portrait of a spectator who
values freedom above strict rules, whether aesthetic or moral. Fielding encourages readers to
be skeptical of certain forms of virtue, and sympathetic to some seeming vices, directing his
readers indirectly through flattery, patriotism, and satire. In celebrating a Hogarthian sense
of freedom and variety, Fielding frames the ideal spectator as an open-minded English
citizen.
29
Tom Jones seems to be damaged by his faulty performances (including fighting,
drinking, and promiscuous behavior); but like Clarissa, Tom Jones’ moral authority is reestablished by his own critical judgment, and by the interfering judgment of the narrator.22
Fielding’s Hamlet scene (which satirizes Partridge’s inability to suspend disbelief, turning
spectatorship into an unwitting performance) captures the more general eighteenth-century
trend of shifting attention to the spectator; the role of Hamlet becomes eclipsed by the role of
his audience. By examining Fielding’s use of direct address in his prologue-like Introductory
Chapters, and the intrusive third-person narration of his description of Tom Jones, this
chapter shows how Fielding’s narrator and title character model citizen spectatorship for the
engaged reader.
More than any other author in my study, Fielding makes direct comparisons between
readers and spectators and provides explicit instruction on how to perform the role of a good
spectator and citizen by reading (and liking) his novel. Fielding invites readers to participate
in this patriotic demonstration by imitating Tom Jones. (That is, imitating his discerning
spectatorship—not necessarily his romps in the bushes).
Fielding’s ideal spectator is an allegory of the Enlightenment subject and the British
citizen, whose morality is grounded more in discernment than action, the observation of
virtue rather than the performance of it. Fielding grants privileged agency to acts of
interpretation, and in a work in which appearances constantly deceive, Fielding celebrates
good judgment as the greatest virtue of his hero and the most important quality of his ideal
22
Unlike Richardson’s epistolary style, Fielding’s third-person narration separates the narrator from the
protagonist, though both still serve as spectators in the narrative.
30
reader. 23 Fielding frames his hero, his narrator, and ultimately his reader as spectator
citizens through his imitation of the theatrical prologue genre in his Introductory Chapters.
My third chapter, “The Philosophical Spectatress: Observing Spectators in
Edgeworth’s Belinda,” studies Edgeworth’s synthesis of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator
and Joanna Baillie’s curious spectator. Edgeworth’s Belinda reveals how the late-eighteenthcentury novel models a form of increasingly fragmented spectatorship, split among various
characters and conflicting points of view. The “right” point of view, for Edgeworth, is an
unrealized synthesis of multiple points of view, a democratization of authority which grants
her reader comparatively substantial agency.
Grounded in Enlightenment conceptions of scientific observation, yet linked
explicitly to theatrical models of spectatorship, Smith and Baillie offered competing versions
of the ideal spectator, alternatives that Edgeworth ultimately presents as complementary
definitions of spectatorship. Rather than privileging either the impartial spectator or the
curious spectator, as modeled by her protagonist Belinda and her would-be protagonist Lady
Delacour, Edgeworth invites readers to fuse these two competing versions of observation.
In granting the reader a more active, subjective role as a spectator of her novel,
Edgeworth eschews the heavy-handed control that Richardson and Fielding sought to have
over their readers’ observations and judgments, and she points to the increasing
fragmentation of the spectator’s authority among multiple distinct yet legitimate points of
view.
Traditional critiques of social mask-wearing and fashionable artifice mark the early
pages of Edgeworth’s novel as anti-theatrical—the author seems to demonize Lady
23
See TJ pp. 93, 109, and 398 for examples. The historical crisis underlying Tom Jones, the Jacobite Rebellion
of 1745, was likewise caught up in a crisis of authority and legitimacy as a farcical backdrop. The problem of
deceiving appearances creates a crisis of paternal authority that permeates the novel.
31
Delacour’s painted face (the “thin veil” that hides her domestic misery), and defend Belinda
against Hervey’s false accusations of her “art and affectation” (B 27). But the protagonist of
Edgeworth’s novel is neither Belinda nor Lady Delacour; the protagonist is the reader who
can imagine an ideal combination of both. While Edgeworth’s novel demonstrates continued
reliance on the theater, the task of interpretation is increasingly displaced from author to
reader.
By the time that Edgeworth’s novel is published, how you read becomes more
important than what you read. Performers are the objects of satire, but spectators are the
agents of satire. The internalization of character, subjectivity, and identity means that
motivation trumps action, and the internal workings of observation become more important
than the external workings of performance.
Spectatorship can be a quiet, reflective, internal act, but as Belinda shows, good
spectatorship is also noisy, projective, and external. The spectator is, as much as the
performer, defined by her split consciousness: she is impartial and curious, rational and
emotional, private and public, solitary and social. The ideal spectator enacts a “reciprocal
exchange between sense [Belinda] and sensibility [Lady Delacour].”24 The self-conscious
figure of the spectator, demonstrating disinterested yet curious judgment, emerges from the
intersection between drama and novel as a valid heroic form in the eighteenth century. It is
not just interiority, but self-conscious reflection, which defines the eighteenth-century
spectator hero.
Like these heroes and heroines, readers are instructed to imitate their curiosity,
common sense, or critical distance. Novelists equip their works with anticipatory antidotes
to dangerous misreading, and the means to correctly read these works, by creating
24
Batchelor 176.
32
protagonists who model simultaneous engagement within the story and reflective distance
outside and above the story. The ideal spectator, in each of these novels, is the reader.
33
CHAPTER I
THE COMMON-SENSE SPECTATOR:
PUBLIC SPECTATORS IN SAMUEL RICHARDSON’S CLARISSA
Many of our students complain that “nothing happens” in eighteenth-century novels,
and Clarissa provides great ammunition for this complaint.25 But for early readers, the
problem of Richardson’s novel was not that it did not have enough going on, but that it had
too much. Sensitive readers have been unsettled by the problematic theatricality of his
novels and heroines since the date of their publication. Critics then and now tend to identify
latent theatrical imagery in his novels as evidence of subconscious, repressed, illicit desire on
the part of the protagonists, or even on the part of the author himself. Such moments are
unguarded revelations of weakness, dangerous harbingers of sin, or worse, authorial
mistakes.
The 1740 publication of Pamela sparked a decade-long controversy surrounding the
title character’s theatricality that produced numerous satires and imitations, all confronting
the question of whether Pamela is the virtuous maiden she purports to be or a scheming
fortune hunter. Anticipating Fielding’s critique of this latent theatricality in Shamela,
Richardson implicitly confesses to the potential theatricality, duplicity, and role-playing in
both Pamela and Pamela.
But while his heroine and his novel are marked throughout by self-division,
Richardson does not conclude (like his satirists) that self-division is morally problematic.26
25
Chastity, of course, is a negative virtue, demonstrated not by action but rather by restraint, which feeds into
this frustration. Lovelace is certainly more active than Clarissa, but even his plotting leaves much of
Richardson’s 1,500-page novel, in the words of Samuel Richardson, more satisfying for the sentiment than the
story.
26
If Richardson trains his readers to be spectators through characterizations of his protagonists, he also conducts
this training within the structural and stylistic framework of his novels. His epistolary structure lends itself
34
“In all your Arts, Shifts, and Stratagems,” Mr. B. notes, “you have had a great Regard to
Truth; and have, in all your little Pieces of Deceit, told very few willful Fibs” (P 233). This
passage explains how Pamela’s seemingly contradictory self-division, as both a participant
and an observer of the narrative, allows her to justify her morally questionable behavior
through her morally sound judgment.
Richardson demonstrates again and again that Pamela’s ability to “step outside
herself” as a spectator is what both guards and demonstrates her virtue. It is not Pamela’s
physical escape but her description of the events in her letters that guards her from violation.
Mr. B tells Pamela, “Those letters were not to your Disadvantage, I’ll assure you; for they
gave me a very high Opinion of your Wit and Innocence” (P 229). Mr. B’s high opinion,
based on her letters, not only guards her from rape but also leads to a socially lucrative offer
of marriage. Continuing to write with her new husband’s support, Pamela celebrates her new
freedom to “write herself” (P 362). Richardson is keen to note that it is not her power over
the plot, but her perspective on the plot, that leads her to this happy ending. The letters allow
Pamela to play a role outside herself, and they are a manifestation of her spectatorship.
Behaving virtuously can be the ploy of the performer, but being virtuous is the territory of
the spectator.
In the final third of the novel, Richardson invites readers to reflect on the narrative,
with Pamela beside us as a gauge of virtue. Post-happily ever after, the novel critically
considers its own conclusion, and the plot gives way almost entirely to didactic moralizing.
Not yet ready to let readers venture into the realm of independent judgment, Richardson
spends another few hundred pages with the newlyweds to make sure that readers are fully
easily to spectatorship, as the entire novel is a record of observations, with everything filtered through the
perspective of one or more characters. Letters both record and propel the plot.
35
prepared to read “right” on their own. Mr. B. parades Pamela around the neighborhood,
inviting visits from Lady Darnford and her daughters, Lady Jones, and Mrs. Peters, and
asking them to observe Pamela, hear her story, and offer their judgments (P 271).27 These
relatively anonymous spectators, participating from outside the circle of the story’s plot,
stand in for the reader, confirming readers who find Pamela worthy and deserving of Mr. B.’s
hand. If any readers continue to doubt the union, they are brought back into the fold as Mrs.
Davers, Mr. B.’s skeptical sister, also learns to forgive Mr. B. and love Pamela through
reading her letters (P 433). Though Pamela continues to doubt her worthiness, insisting on
continuing to call Mr. B. “master,” Richardson demonstrates how Pamela’s letters earn
endorsement from anonymous spectators within the novel, modeling the reaction of his ideal
reader (P 348).
Throughout the novel, Richardson exercises despotic power over his readers. In
assuming the role of editor rather than author of the text, Richardson aggrandizes his own
power as the authoritative interpreter rather than mere creator of the letters. Readers are led
to follow his “intended” point of view, just as Mr. B is finagled into a reformation, after
seeing the narrative from Pamela’s point of view in her letters.
This chapter argues that theatrical tropes within Richardson’s novels and heroines are
highly intentional, carefully crafted moments of spectatorship. Richardson’s definition of
engaged spectatorship was shaped by his cultural moment, and particularly by Addison and
Steele’s The Spectator. For Addison and Steele, the ideal spectator is driven by the allencompassing rationale of common sense. Not surprisingly, perhaps, common sense is the
same virtue that Richardson idealizes in his heroines, enacts in his epistolary style, and
27
These visits are the characters’ only appearance in the novel.
36
demands of his readers. It is no coincidence that Clarissa reads copies of the Tatler and
Spectator during the narrative, which she is happy to find in the library at Mrs. Sinclair’s (C
526).28 The common sense perspective of public opinion, modeled by Mr. Spectator, guides
the letter-writers and better readers throughout Richardson’s epistolary narratives.
Through his use of epistolary narration in Clarissa, Richardson frames Clarissa, Anna
Howe, and Lovelace as complementary spectators of their own story. As players and
observers, each of these characters has a split identity. This dual consciousness, I argue, is
essential to understanding their roles as spectators. Clarissa and Anna succeed where
Lovelace does not, because they voice complementary interpretations of public opinion,
while Lovelace retains a narrowly individualistic perspective. The chapter is organized into
two parts: first, I describe Richardson’s relationship with the eighteenth-century theater; and
second, I offer a close reading of Clarissa, Anna Howe, and Lovelace as active spectators.
Richardson capitalized on ways in which Mr. Spectator is analogous to spectators both in and
of the novel: both are circumscribed by their ability to interpret according to universally
accepted cultural values.
Richardson’s experience with the stage betrays mixed fascination and repulsion.29 In
addition to publishing at least fourteen plays and actively befriending Colley Cibber, David
Garrick, Aaron Hill, and Edward Moore, Richardson called his novels “dramas” in various
personal letters and the postscript to Clarissa (C 1495). Richardson’s works are dotted with
28
The library, which also includes religious devotions and dramatic literature, gives Clarissa “a better opinion
of the people of the house,” which she does not suspect is a brothel (C 525). The library’s religious works
include Stanhope’s Gospels, Sharp’s, Tillotson’s and South’s Sermons, Nelson’s Feasts and Fasts, sacramental
pieces by Dr. Gauden and Innett’s Devotions. The plays include ones by Steele, Rowe, and Shakespeare, along
with Cibber’s The Careless Husband (C 525). Interestingly, Lovelace also references Addison in letters 350
and 463.
29
Numerous stage adaptations of his novels complicate the relationship between these genres further.
37
dramatic unities, dramatic structure, dramatic character types, dramatic irony, dramatic
gesture and dramatic costume; Clarissa opens famously with a list of “dramatis personae” (C
37).
While Richardson tried to paint heroes whose goodness is incontestable, readers often
question the intrinsic virtue of his heroines. In the most famous criticism of Richardson’s
Pamela, Fielding makes the analogy between the heroine and an actress explicit. Fielding’s
“Shamela” pretends, counterfeits, and shams her way into seducing her master with feigned
innocence. Clarissa and its tragic heroine have fared little better with critics and satirists.
Even Richardson himself has been accused of theatricality: Albert J. Rivero calls
Richardson’s statements of purpose (in prefaces, introductions, advertisements, pamphlets
and letters) “public performances.”30 At root, these questions of moral integrity are really
allegations of theatricality: either his heroines are virtuous, authentic, and sincere in their
devotion to chastity, or they merely act virtuous, inauthentically staging a performance of
apparent virtue to manipulate the other characters and the readers. Richardson is either the
complicit orchestrator of their sinister histrionic plots, or he is blissfully unaware of blatant
theatricality in his naïve pursuit of moral perfection.
30
Rivero vii. In contrast, Jocelyn Harris describes author and heroine as combating duplicity: “Like a true
Enlightenment philosopher,” she writes, “[Clarissa] seeks after truth in a deceptive world of theatrical
representations” (Harris 114). Margaret Anne Doody first identified Pamela as comedy and Clarissa as
tragedy. Other critics who laid the groundwork for drama-based readings of Richardson’s work include Mark
Kinkead-Weekes, Ira Koningsberg, Laura Brown, Leo Hughes, J. Paul Hunter, Bernard Kreissman, Arthur
Lindley, William Palmer, John Richetti, and George Sherburn. These readings all focus parallels between
Richardson’s novels and the theater that focus on performance, in some capacity—whether the performance of
stage-like or sensational scenes or the adaptation of theatrical conventions/plots into the epistolary form. Now a
generation ago, these critics established Richardson’s unequivocal debt to the stage, pointing out ways that
costume, artifice, embodiment and sensationalism haunt the moral imperative of his works. By focusing on
spectatorship rather than performance, however, this study reveals how Richardson borrowed from the theater
in ways that contribute to rather than detract from his moral ambitions.
38
We do not need to look far to notice theatrical imagery and techniques within
Richardson’s writing, but we also do not have to assume that the most capable novelist of the
eighteenth-century was naïve in these references. Fielding condescendingly suggests that
Richardson was grossly “imposed [up]on” by Shamela, and critics today tend to agree.
Neither his critics nor his defenders are willing to concede that Richardson was aware of the
degree to which his novels and heroines were linked to the theater, much less that he
deliberately wrote them that way.
Criticism of Richardson (both admiring and disparaging his work) overwhelmingly
suggests that theatricality is incompatible with his moral vision. Jones DeRitter claims that
Richardson’s narrative is a moral improvement on the drama, while Leo Hughes argues that
dramatic conventions debase Richardson’s work.31 J. Paul Hunter describes the eighteenth
century as in retreat from performance, hailing Pamela/Pamela as the paradigm of antitheatrical privacy, while Mark Kinkead-Weekes claims that Richardson’s “deepest moral
convictions run clean counter to the drama that gives his fiction its most vivid life.”32 Ira
Konigsberg describes Richardson’s relationship with the theater as one of fascination and
moral repulsion,33 while John Richetti reads dramatic influence within Richardson’s novels
31
Leo Hughes argues that Richardson uses stage machinery (such as dramatic gesture and costuming) because
he sees tragedy as the best method of exploring the depth and range of human emotion. The theater, for
Hughes, debases Richardson’s novel, as artificial positions demonstrate dramatic weakness.
32
Kinkead-Weekes 453. He identifies ways in which Richardson adopts dramatic techniques within his
epistolary style in order to give a sense of immediacy to his work. Kinkead-Weekes says that Richardson’s
dramatic tendencies are more about “imaginative creation” than staginess, in which meaning is located in a
multiplicity of voices and perspectives (Kinkead-Weekes 395). Using comedy (Anna Howe, Lovelace) to probe
tragedy (Clarissa), Richardson eventually de-dramatizes his heroine at the end of Clarissa.
33
Ira Konigsberg sees dramatization manifesting in Richardson’s sexual ambivalence and moral motivation.
Citing Richardson’s mixed fascination and repulsion with the stage, Konigsberg points out how his novels adapt
plots and characters directly from the stage. In its consideration of seduction, for example, Pamela is a reaction
to Restoration drama that enriches and legitimates these dramatic plots, instigating the shift in popular opinion
from the drama to the novel in the eighteenth century. In other works, Konigsberg emphasizes the visual
39
as revealing the arbitrariness and inessentiality of self-constructed identity.34 Michael
McKeon agrees that theatricality contributes to the disempowerment and delegitimization of
Richardson’s heroines, as Pamela is a “player… unaware that she is performing.”35
These critics function under the assumption that Richardson’s use of the theater is
fundamentally problematic for his moral credence. Rita Goldberg creates a culminating
prognosis of the above critical catalog to describe the early English novel specifically and
eighteenth-century culture more widely: “Truth itself became something absolutely personal,
something to be sought in private and not on the stage of public life.”36 For Richardson,
however, truth is negotiated in public forums, including epistolary exchange, and the theater
can be a site of moral growth in the novel. Critics like Goldberg fail to consider the
possibility that Richardson intentionally integrates theatrical imagery, much less that it is
possible to apply it to virtuous ends. Because Lovelace, the villain of Clarissa, is the most
theatrical character in Richardson’s canon, it is tempting to depict Richardson as an antitheatrical novelist. In reality, however, his works betray a much more sympathetic
perspective on and reliant relationship with the theater. Richardson, like his critics, satirists
and imitators, recognized and acknowledged a degree of theatricality in his heroines. And
importantly, Richardson idealized dramatic qualities within his novels.
imagination in Richardson’s work, marking a shift in the novel from mere “story-telling” to “picture-making,”
and crediting the stage with shaping, via Richardson, the course of the modern English novel.
34
John Richetti defines Richardson’s psychological novel as a combination of drama and prose narrative.
These two genres create a conflict in the modes of self-understanding, between novelistic self-analysis and
dramatic self-characterization. Richardson’s dramatic ties, according to Richetti, lie in his focus on character
via dramatic models of soliloquy and dialog. The epistolary form enacts the arbitrariness and inessentiality of
self-constructed identity, suggesting the inevitability of self-dramatization for both Lovelace and Clarissa.
35
McKeon 563.
36
Goldberg 4.
40
Supporting this conciliatory view in his analysis of Sir Charles Grandison, Rivero
offers a more complex explanation of Richardson’s fraught relationship with the theater, by
implying that spectatorship creates rich meta-narrative moments in the novel. Rivero
confesses that Richardson’s “theatrical framing of narrative, often meant to emphasize moral
instruction, just as often makes that instruction highly problematic.” However, he mentions
that, in these moments, Richardson’s heroines also importantly and reflexively “become
aware of their dual roles as actors and as observers.”37 This dual-consciousness is essential
to Richardson’s definition of the ideal spectator, and the ideal heroine.
By framing his heroines as spectators rather than just performers, Richardson
celebrates reflexive self-consciousness as the crowning glory of his protagonists. While selfdivision is the fundamental flaw of the eighteenth-century actress—whose feigned
performance points to her inherent duplicity—self-division becomes the foundational quality,
the source of moral authority, in fact, for the eighteenth-century spectator. 38 And like Mr.
Spectator, Richardson’s ideal spectator embodies common sense through a universal,
disinterested point of view.
For all his meddling micromanagement of readers, Richardson also expanded the
power of the reader through the figure of the spectator. By creating heroines and texts whose
powers of interpretation surpassed and legitimated their erroneous action, Richardson
celebrated spectatorship as a potent demonstration of moral authority. At the same time, not
wanting to grant his readers too much power over his texts, Richardson carefully prescribed
right reading so that it aligned closely with his own agenda, implicitly encouraging,
37
38
Rivero 219.
Clarissa shows that judgment is the process of becoming a moral subject. This is a highly protestant idea,
rooted in the idea that good works are a product of virtue but are not virtuous themselves.
41
pressuring, and flattering readers to agree with a particular interpretation, or even
commandeering interpretive authority within his own role as “editor.” In the private letters
especially, Rivero notes that Richardson consistently “flatters, cajoles, and sometimes bullies
his correspondents into reaching ‘correct’ readings.”39 These moments of manipulation,
Peter Sabor explains, “show that Richardson could deploy some of the subtle artifices in his
personal letters that animate the letters of his epistolary novels.”40 Richardson had a moral
vision, and, nervous about the potential for misinterpretation, he carefully guided readers to
his desired conclusions.
Richardson shared tenuous relationships with his readers. His “mode of literary
production,” Keymer adds, “was always sociable, if not indeed collaborative.” 41 However, it
was also markedly hierarchical. Tom Keymer notes that Richardson kept a circle of women
around him not as “research subjects,” but as “critics and even contributors” to his work. 42
Contemporary critics tend to celebrate these collaborative impulses as evidence of
Richardson’s democratic approach to knowledge and composition. However, Keymer
suggests that Richardson turned to women because he felt that, based on his experience with
Aaron Hill and Colley Cibber, two men who also happened to be heavily involved in the
theater, men in the literary establishment would interfere too much. Richardson found
women to be more appealing because more supportive contributors.43 Angus Ross writes,
39
Rivero vii. With his Dutch translator Johannes Stinstra, for instance, Richardson “withholds and
manipulates” both biographical and literary information (Sabor 8).
40
Sabor 8.
41
Keymer 142.
42
Keymer 142.
43
Keymer 142.
42
“Richardson invites collaboration but ultimately demonstrates very firm and conscious, even
dictatorial, adherence to his original purposes.”44 In the end, Richardson borrows the figure
of the spectator from the theater as a model for the creation and consumption of the novel,
but he reserves the power of interpretation within a carefully articulated demonstration of
authorial intention.
Richardson’s complicated perspective of the theater sets the stage for a close reading
of his most complexly theatrical heroine. His second novel traces the demise of a rape
victim, but it also traces the rise of a very talented and astute spectator. Like Pamela,
Clarissa’s reputation is tainted by allegations, both inside and outside the text, of her
theatricality. Her family describes her as a “cunning creature,” a “two-faced girl,” a “siren”
(C 195, 203), accusing her of duplicity, disguise, deception, and worst of all, willful
disillusionment. Falling into their critical evaluation, she even self-identifies as a “fallen
Clarissa” (C 1114). Critics agree with the Harlowes surprisingly often, debating whether
Clarissa is a victim in the narrative, or whether she is partly responsible for her own
demise.45 Critics have complained of her highly theatrical death (at best a half-hearted
attempt at recovery and at worst a highly performative suicide), and her exhibitionistic selfedification in the circulation of her letters. Moments of performance again conflate with
moments of manipulation and artificiality.
Clarissa complains that the most oppressive violation she suffers is being forbidden to
interpret her own story: “My brother and sister are continually misrepresenting all I say and
do; and I am deprived of the opportunity of defending myself!” (C 206). Clarissa is
44
Keymer 16.
45
Brissenden brassily suggests that Clarissa “both asks and deserves to be raped” (Brissenden 184).
43
systematically disempowered (especially early in the narrative), by her family and by
Lovelace, as they attempt to force her to be silent and listen—to be a passive spectator to
their wishes.46 However, she reasserts her autonomy in her role as an engaged spectator.
While Clarissa’s hands are tied, the Harlowes know that “There is no standing against [her]
looks and language” (253). Like a spectator, Clarissa’s weapons are her gaze and her words.
The circulation of Clarissa’s letters—the physical manifestation and record of her
spectatorship—is what ultimately undoes the plots of the Harlowes and Lovelace. Using her
letters to reflect on and evaluate the action of the narrative, Clarissa circumvents patriarchal
and sexual oppression, separating the autonomous power of her critical mind from her
helpless body. This self-detachment and self-evaluation is Clarissa’s source of agency: “It is
difficult to go out of ourselves to give a judgment against ourselves,” she writes, “and yet
oftentimes to pass a just judgment, we ought” (CC 1194). As in the case of Pamela,
spectatorship seems to be a sign of Clarissa’s passivity, but in performing the role of an
engaged spectator of her own story, Clarissa attains the authority of a “just,” because selfdivided, system of virtue.47
Like Pamela, Clarissa’s epistolary text and heroine offer less a performance of plot
than a point of view on it.48 Cope notes that “Clarissa adores words like ‘observation’ and
46
See multiple references to the Harlowes’ commanding Clarissa’s passive listening and hearing in Letter 79, in
contrast to her talk-back style of spectatorship. Reading, they say, is preferable to writing in a young lady, “that
by the one, I might be taught my duty: that the other, considering whom I was believed to write to, only
stiffened my will” (C 328).
47
Julie Choi explains how “the civic virtue of republican humanism is espoused already by the new female
models of virtue in Richardson” (Choi 10). This new model of virtue, I argue, is based on the republican
humanism of Mr. Spectator.
48
Lois Bueler frames Clarissa’s story within the Tested Woman Plot, pointing out that the torque of her story
lies in the disjunction between the “test” stage (based on fact, virtue, choice and intention) and the “trial” stage
(based on reputation, truth, judgment and interpretation). Bueler, however, did not go so far as to identify the
link between the importance of judgment and interpretation in Richardson’s novel and the figure of the
spectator. Other critics have compellingly explored Clarissa’s doublings. According to Peter Brooks, Clarissa
44
‘reflection,’ ocular vocabulary drawn from adage-lore with an eye toward making private
affairs look like matters of public speculation.”49 As a spectator to her own performance, or
rather as a performer of spectatorship, Clarissa’s self-divided theatricality becomes her moral
armor.
Clarissa privileges judgment over action, and she frequently justifies her morally
questionable behavior through appeals to her readers’ common sense. The most important
example of this divorce between action and judgment is in the scene of Clarissa’s escape
from Harlowe place: “Who can command or foresee events?” she asks, pointing out that
actions are based on imperfect anticipation of potential consequences (C 105). “To act up to
our best judgments at the time,” she explains, “is all we can do” (C 105). Her own decision
to run away with Lovelace is anticipated, and legitimated, by these remarks. Clarissa is
trapped in a system that likens innocence with ignorance, and, as a virtuous woman, she
cannot fully anticipate the consequences of escape.50 Her decision to run away must be
evaluated not according to the action itself, she explains, but rather according to the limited
information that was available to her judgment at the time. She could not, and should not,
have suspected the enormity of his vice, and because her judgment in hindsight regrets her
action of the moment, her spectatorship trumps, even legitimates, her performance. From the
embodies the double self, recollecting and recollected; Clarissa shows how the act of talking about yourself
trumps the acts of being yourself, the present feeling more important than the past story (Brooks 559). So, the
self-division of the self-spectator is a gap in time rather than a gap in authenticity; unlike the performer whose
performance suggests a duplicity of selves, the spectator is the same self in different times. Brooks suggests
focusing on moments of contact between past and present selves, the bridge or intersection between two
complementary rather than conflicting selves. Because Clarissa never has anything to regret, her past and
present self admit of no gap between them. Her self-division is no contradiction. Instead, her division is of
points of view in time, which only strengthens her anonymous authority.
49
50
Cope 24.
This naïveté of judgment is necessary for her innocence, explains Jones DeRitter, who argues that the only
hope for female virtue, caught between the need for knowledge to safeguard virtue and the need for naïveté to
prove virtue, lies in the transcendence of embodiment through death.
45
beginning, Clarissa separates her flawed performance from her right spectatorship of it, using
common sense to justify her behavior.
When the moment of her escape arrives, she again describes herself as divided
between the morally questionable actions she commits and her morally sound judgment of
those actions:
I ran as fast as he, yet knew not that I ran… my voice, however, contradicting
my action; crying, No, no, no, all the while, straining my neck to look back as
long as the walls of the garden and park were within sight (C 380).
Clarissa’s schizophrenic division between the morally questionable action she is compelled
to perform and the morally astute judgment that abhors such action is what makes her, in the
words of Anna Howe, both a warning and an example for readers (C 577). In this scene, she
looks back both literally and figuratively. In the same way that she strains her neck to see
Harlowe Place, contradictorily crying “no, no, no” as she runs, this letter strains to look back
on this scene and justify her judgment as morally sound despite its incriminating appearance,
with her “voice” again contradicting her “action.” Clarissa is so far removed from herself
that she claims to be unaware of her own actions, as she “knew not” that she ran. This selfdivision, which allows her to frame her performance within its epistolary description and
interpretation, is her key to virtue as a spectator of her own story.
Following the rape, Clarissa again separates herself to preserve her virtue. In this
case, the second key example of Clarissa’s self-division, she separates her soul from her
body, both figuratively in her letters and literally in her death. In her time of madness, she
fantasizes this separation: “Then I laid down my head,/ Down on cold earth, and for a while
was dead;/ And freed my soul to a strange somewhere fled!” (C 893). In this way, she
preserves her mind from moral taint by detaching it, imaginatively and literally, from her
46
body. Lovelace laments that though he conquers her body, he cannot conquer her spirit: he
writes, following the rape, that “her will is unviolated” (C 916). Lovelace’s choice of words
here is significant, stressing the discrepancy between the violation of her body and the
inviolability of her mind. Clarissa, he realizes, “never was subdued” (C 930).51
Clarissa’s literal will, circulated posthumously, is also an unviolated testament to the
survival of her seemingly immortal spirit beyond her physical remains. This will, too, is an
expression of Clarissa’s spectatorship that is detached from her body. Clarissa is convinced
of her success in the afterlife despite her ruin in this world, the voice of the spectator
continuing after the end of her mortal performance. This critical detachment again preserves
her virtue, preserving her inviolate virtue at the expense of her body. As a spectator, Clarissa
lives on, her will “wholly faultless,” her “moral character… untainted,” and the “triumphs of
[her] virtue unsullied” (C 990, 1020).
Clarissa prescribes virtue in judgment as more important than any specific action—
and taking this distinction seriously, Richardson suggests, is essential for accessing a
“correct” interpretation of his novel as his heroine. Clarissa keeps a clandestine
correspondence with Lovelace and a forbidden one with Anna Howe after promising to write
to neither, and she cunningly leaves one set of pen and ink to be discovered and confiscated
by her family in order to evade suspicion for her secret stores, and she advocates a filial duty
that she also transgresses (C 325, 365).52 However, in her own mind, if not the reader’s, she
51
52
“I might break her heart, but not incline her will,” Lovelace adds (C 960).
Richardson’s novel considers the possibility of friction between moral duty and subjectivity, played out in the
tension between Clarissa and the Harlowes. Faced with her family’s insistence that she marry Solmes, Clarissa
is forced to choose between filial duty and personal integrity. By rejecting Solmes, she points to a universal
moral judgment which is above social, political, and even familial particularities.
47
remains uncompromisingly virtuous, because such deceptive acts often contribute to the
preservation of her virtue and the display of her judgment.
Like Mr. Spectator, Clarissa also uses literature, mythology, and allegory to access a
moral standard based on a shared literary culture. “My feet are guilty,” she writes, “but my
heart is free,” referencing her split identity in poetic intertextuality (C 568).53 She also relies
heavily on the generalizing power of maxims and proverbs, and she uses these common
sense phrases to guide her judgment. 54 Cope calls Clarissa “odd if not outright crazy, yet she
is often rattling off sound proverbial advice. Like an ancient lawgiver, she is one part
crackpot, one part community wisdom.”55 This term “community wisdom” is an important
one, which Cope does not fully flesh out. “Virtue is beauty in perfection,” she writes (C
53
Altered from Dryden and Lee, Oedipus: A Tragedy (1517).
54
The concept of universalizing maxims takes root even more strongly in Richardson’s role as an “advisor”:
Kevin L. Cope reports that he “extracted the pithy ‘sentiments’ from his novels and published the results in
anthology form” (Cope 17). Cope defines maxims as ancient bits of wisdom that “usually appear as fragments
in other texts or as excerpts in anthologies,” as “rhetorical brevity meets utopian grandeur (Cope 18, 24).
Richardson “spangles his novels with aphorisms, adages, proverbs, sententiae, saws, nostrums, and witticism,”
offering a “confusing load of often contradictory advice” (Cope 18-19). Cope adds that “Advice-givers reside
throughout Richardson’s fictional world; indeed, all his major dramatis personae affect the character of the
lawgiver.” His texts abound with these “lawgivers,” who are “unemployed persons that make a career out of
grandly delivering rules and suggestions for the betterment of society” (Cope 19). The lawgiver is,
paradoxically, an “eruptive novelty” and a “stable community symbol,” a “paradoxical… cantankerous deity’s
authority [who] personif[ies] consensual social values… [representing] erratic, eccentric, and even exiled…
voices of common wisdom” (Cope 19).
55
Cope 19. Cope contrasts his reading with Watt’s view of the rise of the novel as the rise of an “internalized,
psychologically attuned writing concerned with character development and individual mental processes” (Cope
19). Instead, Cope argues that Clarissa embodies the complexity of the maxim. “Clarissa’s internal life is
articulated not through private psychotherapeutic confessions,” Cope writes, “but through the public
juxtaposition of old adages” (Cope 20). Both Clarissa and Lovelace give “general advice,” him according to a
“rake’s creed” and her according to piety. These maxims, however, offer a troubling authority, as it gives
characters the mere “air” of authority: “there is no disputing with maxims,” Cope explains, “once they’re
uttered, it’s over—no replies allowed” (Cope 20). The Harlowes abuse this finality, as Anthony Harlowe
preaches to Clarissa that “Too ready forgiveness does but encourage offences: that’s your good father’s maxim:
and there would not be so many headstrong daughters as there are, if this maxim were kept in mind” (C 156).
Clearly Richardson privileges some maxims over others. In addition, “rhetorical tensions—contradictions,
antitheses, multiple negations—thrive within maxims” (Cope 25). Maxims, according to Cope, combine
absolutism and relativism. Cope notes that Richardson’s serialized character studies mirror Addison in their
“collections of endless anecdotes and adventures” and their collections, lists, catalogs, inventories, comparisons,
indexes, and anthologies (Cope 28).
48
289). “Poverty is the mother of health,” she later adds, and “better a bare foot than none at
all” (C 263-64). Kate Rumbold notes that “Clarissa handles Shakespeare as a source of
apothegmatic wisdom, the stuff of commonplace books.”56 All her moral and aesthetic
judgments are grounded in community wisdom, and Richardson encourages readers to use
these same maxims to interpret the novel.57
As she rattles off her maxims as a detached spectator of her own narrative, Clarissa
takes on a heroic, and almost allegorical, status. Richardson’s depictions of Clarissa’s
potential pregnancy, the cause of her death, and even the rape itself are hopelessly unclear in
the narrative—for such a voluminous text, one might expect Richardson to narrate the
circumstances surrounding these important events. Clarissa’s death is fitted with the
elaborate garb of tragic costume and Christian symbolism But by keeping these details fuzzy,
Richardson strengthens Clarissa’s position as a symbol of universal goodness.58 When Anna
Howe suggests that there can be no more than one Clarissa in the world, it is not because
Clarissa is unreplicable—it is because she is infinitely replicable. She is every woman and
no woman, less a real woman than an idea of an ideal woman. Like Mr. Spectator, Clarissa
56
Rumbold 4.
57
Within her writing style, even, Clarissa exercises a transparency that signals her universality. Her avoidance
of stylistic flourish, Richardson suggests, confirms her innocence: she subscribes to an ethic of creating an
authentic, spontaneous, unreflective, pure expression of her essential self. Rousseau discusses a similar
phenomenon in his Confession, where he insists that any problem with the text is a product of bad reading, not
bad writing. However, by failing to provide adequate “model” readers who reach the “right” conclusion,
Rousseau is less successful than Richardson in guiding readers to a correct interpretation.
58
Clarissa makes recourse to common sense a number of times in the narrative, describing all of her virtues as
what “any rational person” would know. “Common sense instructs us,” she says, for instance, “that sobriety in a
man is no small point to be secured” (C 181). Clarissa’s pity for Lovelace in his illness, moreover, arises from
her belief that “One cannot, my dear, hate people in danger of death;” what Lovelace takes as proof of her
particular regard for him is in fact evidence of her universal application of pity (C 678).
49
is unfettered by the particularities of experience as a symbol of universalized knowledge and
virtue. 59
In addition to accessing self-division through epistolary narration, as in the escape
scene, and through death, in her inviolate will, Clarissa’s identity as a spectator is also split,
or perhaps shared, with her correspondent. Clarissa’s sometimes necessarily naïve judgment
is complemented by the pragmatism of her alter-ego, Anna Howe. We might even read Anna
as part of one self-divided, self-spectating, single individual of whom Clarissa is the other
half. Clarissa explicitly calls Anna her “dearer Self,” and Anna echoes this attachment,
responding to the news of her friend’s death by saying, “I am not myself!—I never shall
be!... my better half is torn from me” (C 1022, 1403-04). While neither heroine alone models
the ideal spectator, together, I argue, they form a more fully self-conscious, self-aware
individual, split between two bodies, but with “but one mind between” them (C 131).
Anna Howe eagerly volunteers to serve as Clarissa’s spectator in the novel’s opening
letter, remarking that the Harlowe family has become “the subject of public talk” and that she
longs “to have the particulars” from Clarissa (C 39). Later, she more fully explains her self59
Angus Ross adds that Richardson’s novel itself “became a myth to his own age, and remains so yet”—
another link to the novel’s aspirations for universality. Clarissa is, Ross writes, evidence of Richardson’s
“hankering after a paragon” (Ross 19). When Clarissa tells Lovelace that she will wait for him at her “father’s
house,” a religious allegorical offer that she uses to mislead him into returning to Harlowe House, Morden
“cannot believe that my cousin, for such an end only or indeed for any end, according to the character I hear of
her, should stoop to make such an artifice” (C 1288). Clarissa describes her secret correspondence with
Lovelace similarly: “I should abhor these clandestine correspondencies, were they not forced upon me” (C 67).
But this interpretation of Clarissa, Richardson suggests, is an inaccurate one. Initially suspicious, Lovelace
concludes “surely the dear little rogue will not lie,” suggesting that she, like Pamela, can be a rogue without
being guilty of artifice (C 1269). Lovelace’s ambiguous interpretation, Richardson suggests, is closer to truth.
Conscious of her own intrigue, Clarissa excuses her duplicity in this letter—she herself calls it a “stratagem,”
“contrivance,” “deceit,” and “artifice”—as serving a moral function (C 1274). Clarissa calls it a contradictorily
“innocent artifice,” innocent in that “I meant him no hurt, and had a right to the effect I hoped for from it” (C
1274). Lovelace is, Belford mocks, outwitted by piety, while Clarissa’s character, however duplicitous, remains
“consistent with herself” (C 1274). Her intrigue is “only an innocent allegory that might carry instruction and
warning” (C 1297). This letter epitomizes not only Clarissa’s dangerous connections to theatricality and
artifice, but also her moral authority as public spectator. In this letter, Clarissa pursues a universal standard of
virtue through the appropriate means of an allegory—a genre that points to a universal, black-and-white moral
system. However, neither Lovelace nor readers overlook the fact that this allegory is intended to mislead.
50
interested desire to be a spectator of Clarissa’s story, describing the edifying moral value of
observing a dying acquaintance: “we pity the person for what she suffers: and we pity
ourselves for what we must some time hence, in like sort, suffer; and so are doubly affected”
(C 275). Anna Howe serves as the narrative’s “doubly affected” spectator, as both a friend
and a representative of public opinion, both part of Clarissa and importantly separate.
During Clarissa’s confinement, Anna Howe is literally her connection to public
opinion: “All the world, in short,” Anna tells Clarissa, “expect you to have this man. They
think that you left your father’s house for this very purpose. The longer the ceremony is
delayed, the worse appearance it will have in the world’s eye” (C 467). Anna Howe’s
authority as a spectator, in the early pages of the novel, lies in her access to public opinion.
At first, Clarissa is eager to hear about public opinion on her situation, using it as a
gauge for her actions; moreover, she invites Anna’s criticism: “If you observe anything in me
so very faulty,” Clarissa asks Anna, “you will acquaint me with it… how shall so weak and
so young a creature avoid the censure of such, if my friend will not hold a looking-glass
before me and let me see my imperfections? Judge me then, my dear, as an indifferent
person… would do” (C 73, emphasis mine).60 Clarissa looks to Anna for a perspective that is
both grounded in friendship, and also indifferent and detached, similarly to Mr. Spectator.
Later, Clarissa asks her to “Give me, my dearest friend, your opinion,” and “acquaint me
with what you think cool judgment and after-reflection, whatever be the event, will justify”
(C 231).
Importantly, Clarissa asks Anna for the cool judgments of common sense more than
the heated reactions of a friend. Clarissa praises Anna for criticism that is not “envenomed
60
Later she says “I love you the better for the correction you give me, be as severe as you will upon me. Spare
me not, therefore, my dear friend, whenever you think me in the least faulty. I love your agreeable raillery” (C
135).
51
with personality,” and that is instead “founded in good nature, and directed by a right heart”
(C 280). Anna’s is a “free opinion,” objective and unfettered, a guide for Clarissa and a
model for readers (C 283). In asking Anna for advice in this particular way, Clarissa frames
her as a spectator capable of accessing and dispensing common sense advice that is
representative of public opinion, and that is inaccessible to Clarissa alone.
Removed from the narrative as she is, Anna Howe’s authority as a spectator is also
reinforced and legitimated by her literal distance from Clarissa. “’Tis only by way of
caution, and in pursuance of the general observation that a stander-by,” Anna Howe writes,
“is often a better judge of the game than those that play” (C 74). Clarissa relies on Anna for
a point of view that she cannot access—one of Addisonian indifference, common sense, and
public opinion.
At the same time, Anna does not always offer what Clarissa desires. Anna is a more
volatile if more realistic emblem of female virtue and engaged spectatorship. Angus Ross
describes Anna as an example of the “direct expression of defiance by women” in the
novel.61 Anna herself admits that she has “weaker judgment and stronger passions” than
Clarissa (C 239). Even the mild-mannered Clarissa complains that Anna’s skepticism can be
overly scathing: Clarissa writes, “I did not think it necessary, said I to myself, to guard
against a critic when I was writing to so dear a friend” (C 72).62 Faulting Anna for her open
criticism of the Harlowes, Clarissa warns that “ill-will has eyes always open to the faulty
61
62
Ross 20.
Clarissa confesses that “Although at the time it may pain one a little [to be criticized], yet on recollection,
when one feels in the reproof more of the cautioning friend than of the satirizing observer, an ingenious mind
will be all gratitude upon it” (C 176). Clarissa points out that Anna’s spectatorship is both that of the
anonymous observer and the particular friend, and her reproofs rely on this dual point of view.
52
side; as good-will or love is blind even to real imperfections” (C 104).63 If Clarissa is the
self-righteous blind eye, Anna has her “eyes always open,” a quality that Clarissa refuses for
herself even as she relies on it in Anna.
One of Anna’s strengths as a spectator is that she perceives realities that Clarissa’s
idealism cannot see. Anna knows that Clarissa’s “reputation in the eye of the world requires
that no delay be made in this point [i.e. Clarissa’s marriage to Lovelace], when once you are
in his power” (C 355, emphasis mine). In addition, Anna prudently advises her to consider
matters of settlement before pursuing a hasty wedding (C 549). Anna shares this belief with
general public, who are, according to Anna’s investigation, “all of [the] opinion” that
Lovelace can and should atone for his crime by marrying Clarissa (C 1138). She sees what
Clarissa does not want to see, and she has the common sense to encourage Clarissa to temper
her Christian idealism with worldly prudence. While Clarissa’s purity of virtue prevents her
from feeling righteous indignation at her family, from suspecting Lovelace’s most sinister
motives, or from considering marriage as a potential solution, for instance, Anna Howe’s
position as an outsider allows her to express and expect what Clarissa cannot.
Identifying as a spectator rather than performer in the narrative, Anna offers a nononsense approach to Clarissa’s dire situation that prevents her from taking seriously the task
of interceding on her friend’s behalf.64 However, this detachment also allows Anna to learn
from watching Clarissa, applying Clarissa’s example to her own life, as Richardson hopes his
readers will do. In contrast to Clarissa’s conviction that her tale is a tragic one, Anna
63
64
Anna says that “I can do nothing but rave at your stupid persecutors” (C 173).
Anna considers following Clarissa on numerous occasions, but she is alternately convinced that Clarissa’s
danger is not imminent and confined by her mother.
53
identifies Clarissa’s narrative as a living conduct book.65 For spectators of the novel who
subscribe to Anna’s pragmatic approach, “your story,” Anna promises Clarissa, “will afford a
warning, as well as an example”—a claim she repeats throughout the narrative (C 577, 1152,
1315). Like Mr. Spectator, Anna examines vignettes in order to extract generalized moral
lessons, detaching herself from the narrative to treat Clarissa as a character in a conduct
book.
Anna Howe recognizes that Clarissa, as a distributor of moral and aesthetic judgment,
is outside and above humanity—both for the characters in the novel and for its readers.
“Why, my dear,” she writes, “they must look upon you as a prodigy among them: and
prodigies, you know, though they obtain our admiration, never attract our love. The distance
between you and them is immense. Their eyes ache to look up at you” (C 129). Anna,
however, models a more flawed—but more realistic—model of femininity. “Were your
character and my character to be truly drawn,” she adds, “mine would be allowed to be the
most natural” (C 485).66
If Clarissa is the ideal spectator, Anna Howe is the more replicable model of
spectatorship for readers. “Every man, they will say, is not a Lovelace,” she adds, “But then,
neither is every woman a Clarissa” (C 1315). Every women might be, though, an Anna
65
Rita Goldberg writes that “One could regard all of Richardson’s novels as versions of the conduct book: they
were written with the purpose of illustrating virtuous behavior in the various stations of social life” (Goldberg
28).
66
The passage continues, “Shades and lights are equally necessary in a fine picture. Yours would be
surrounded with such a flood of brightness, with such glory, that it would indeed dazzle; but leave one heartless
to imitate it” (C 485). She continues, “I fear you almost as much as I love you” (C 486). “Mr. Lovelace cannot
possibly deserve our admirable friend,” Anna Howe writes, adding significantly, “Nor, indeed, know I the man
who can” (C 582). Clarissa is too dazzling in her virtue. The whores at Mrs. Sinclair’s even feel the penetrative
power of her gaze: “on my ocular notice,” Clarissa notes, “their eyes fell, as I may say, under my eye, as if they
could not stand its examination” (C 531).
54
Howe.67 Brissenden writes that “Clarissa is literally too good for this world” (C 176). But
Anna Howe is not too good for the world, confessing that she is often “too warm” in her
penetrative criticism of vice and folly, which makes her a fit complement for the heroine’s
chilly virtue (C 1133). Anna frequently loses her temper, both with the Harlowes and with
Lovelace (C 1110, 1135). Anna says what Clarissa, in modesty, cannot—that Clarissa “has
great merit, labours under oppression, and is struggling with undeserved calamity” (C 1132).
Readers are not asked to imitate Clarissa’s virtue, but they are asked to imitate
Anna’s interpretation of it. When Anna admires Clarissa’s noble virtue—which she
“regret[s] and applaud[s] at the same time”—and vents “spiteful justice” against her
perpetrators, Richardson invites readers to share both her admiration and her just fury (C
1153, 1151). Anna is a guide for readers, not above but beside them.
Anna’s judgment, even when she disagrees with Clarissa, ultimately serves to
reinforce Clarissa’s single “correct” point of view.68 And in the end, Anna (like readers,
67
68
Anna writes that “I am fitter for this world than you, you for the next than me—that’s the difference” (C 69).
The transmission of universal virtue from Clarissa to reader is also mediated by the only other spectator who
is more anonymous than Anna Howe: John Belford. Belford describes how right spectatorship can lead to
moral reform, generalizing his own experience, asking, “who can write of good persons, and of good subjects,
and be capable of admiring them, and not be made serious for the time, if he write in character?” (C 1058). The
most faceless of Richardson’s four narrators, Belford reports the narrative from the generic perspective of a
reformed rake. Adding one more layer to Richardson’s ideal spectator, Belford models the requisite anonymity
of common sense spectatorship. Belford spends the first half of the narrative exclusively as a spectator, entirely
removed from the narrative as the recipient of Lovelace’s letters. “Thou, Lovelace, hast been long the
entertainer,” he writes in his first letter, which appears one-third of the way into the narrative; “I the
entertained” (C 500). Even when he joins the action, however, his role remains markedly passive—to the point
of regret after Clarissa’s death, in that he did not intervene sooner. While he moves between the particular and
the universal as a model spectator, noting to Lovelace that “Our honour, and honour in the general acceptation
of the word, are two things,” he theorizes without practice (C 500). And yet, Belford is perhaps the most direct
example for Richardson’s readers. Belford is the one who can say what he would do “were I in thy case” with
the distance of an anonymous spectator (C 501). Writing the postscript of the novel in third person strengthens
Belford’s anonymity. Powerless to change the narrative, his role is to model appropriate spectatorship of the
story. In this, he serves Richardson’s purposes well. Critics chastise Belford for his desire to witness Clarissa’s
suffering, his pleasurable affect in her death. Yet self-conscious critics recognize that all readers, in some
capacity, share this desire. Richardson does not condemn Belford’s curiosity; in fact, he uses Belford to
demonstrate the way that good spectatorship can itself lead to moral reform. In the end, Belford’s
55
Richardson hopes) eventually learns to agree with Clarissa. In the novel’s conclusion, Anna
is bequeathed with two important and complementary gifts: Clarissa’s letters and her
portrait—in the same way that readers have been entrusted with Clarissa’s story (C 1417,
1415). Anna interprets the letters as “a proper warning to those who read them, [which will]
teach them to detest men of such profligate characters”—making a change from her earlier
advice to marry, and modeling the goal that Richardson articulated for readers in his preface
(C 1454, 36).
Cured of her earlier belief that a reformed rake might make the best husband, Anna
repents and, at Clarissa’s postmortem request, happily marries the dull but virtuous Hickman.
Anna Howe, whose name is embedded in H(arl)owe and whose access to public opinion
complements her friend’s access to universal principles of virtue, carries the torch of moral
judgment after Clarissa’s death. In addition, Anna receives the reward of marriage many
(presumably naïve) readers had wanted for Clarissa.69 Clarissa makes an excellent tragic
heroine, but Anna “will make an excellent wife”—a more likely life pattern for Richardson’s
readership (C 1475). Anna’s happy ending, the comic realism that so starkly differs from her
friend’s tragic idealism, offers readers a more imitable model of female spectatorship.
Anna Howe is Clarissa’s repressed other half—the half that knows and judges the
world in ways that Clarissa, as the emblem of perfection, cannot. As Clarissa’s open eye,
transformation from a rake to a model citizen is driven entirely by his spectatorship of Clarissa’s virtuous life
and death. See pages 1124, 1130, 1178, 1205-06, 1228, and 1409 for other examples of Belford’s spectatorship.
69
Indeed, Anna’s marriage to Hickman is one that Clarissa herself desired; Anna says “you have told me that he
is your favourite” and that he is “certainly a man more in your taste” (C 207). Anna complains that “Mr.
Hickman treads no crooked paths; but he hobbles most ungracefully in a straight one” (C 514), and she hints
that she would prefer to swap lovers as well: “I believe I now know which of the two men so prudent a person
as you would, at first, have chosen; nor doubt I that you can guess which I would have made choice of, if I
might” (C 515). Richardson complains of readers who sought this ending for Clarissa in his postscript (C 149599).
56
with the ideal spectator literally split between two female bodies, Anna reinforces Clarissa’s
judgment from a point of view more human than divine. Anna’s advice allows Clarissa to
retain her virtuous naïveté while reaping the fruits of her friend’s more worldly knowledge.70
Performing the process of critical judgment through dialogical epistolary exchange, Clarissa
and Anna demonstrate spectatorship as conversational rather than merely reflective—more
like theatrical exchange than like silent reading.71 Anna Howe is, like the reader, Clarissa’s
pupil in the art of spectatorship. If Clarissa’s spectatorship is a paragon of virtue, Anna’s
spectatorship is a model of reading—and at moments, Anna reads Clarissa better than
Clarissa reads herself.
For Richardson, the ideal spectator is not a passive observer. The spectator is like a
voice in the chorus of classical drama, giving meaning and moral credence to a scene by
offering an interpretation that represents the universal values of an outside, anonymous
public.72 The multiple narrators of Clarissa lend Richardson’s second epistolary novel a
heteroglossic quality, as spectatorship in Clarissa is fragmented between multiple points of
70
Lovelace calls her an “unpracticed… novice,” laughing at “Silly little rogues! To walk out into by-paths on
the strength of their own judgements! –when nothing but experience can teach them how to disappoint us” (C
472).
71
Arthur Lindley points out ways in which the exteriorization of identity creates dramatization within the early
novel. Conflicts between good and evil are exteriorized as conflicts between Clarissa and Lovelace; conflicts
between conscience and desire are exteriorized as conflicts between Lovelace and Belford. A self-conscious
performer, Lovelace uses fantasy to prefigure realities, becoming trapped in the process within the imagined
roles he creates for himself. Lovelace “loses his identity by immersing himself in theatrical performances,”
highlighting the contrast between “self-clarifying and self-confusing modes of externalizing identity” (Lindley
202-03). Lindley does not, however, mention the female virtue exteriorized between Clarissa and Anna Howe.
72
Adam Budd explains how Richardson justified Clarissa’s death, despite the outrage of some readers,
according to providential justice rather than poetic justice. As a result, Belford’s reaction to Clarissa’s death,
more so than the death itself, provides readers with the text’s moral exemplum. In Belford, the role of
spectatorship is again celebrated as a moral ideal. Because Belford’s role is similar to Anna’s, and because he
is a more obvious spectator in the story, I will not fully flesh out a reading of his character here, but only point
to the similarities.
57
view. However, these voices are under Richardson’s directorship, and they tend to sing the
same tune.
Even Lovelace, who often gives a very different perspective of a scene than Clarissa,
ultimately supports her perspective, as Richardson systematically embeds Clarissa’s truth
within Lovelace’s obviously illogical ideas. Justifying his cruel test as giving Clarissa an
opportunity to display her virtue, he writes, “How, but for these occasions, could her noble
sentiments, her prudent consideration, her forgiving spirit, her exalted benevolence, and her
equanimity in view of the most shocking prospects… have been manifested?” (C 1309). In
this passage, Lovelace inadvertently enumerates Clarissa’s virtues while revealing his own
vice. Later, Lovelace emphasizes his guilt in a hopeless attempt to clear himself from blame:
“And thus am I blamed for everyone’s faults!” Lovelace complains, betraying the truth of his
guilt almost against his will, “When her brutal father curses her, it is I. I upbraid her with her
severe mother. Her stupid uncle’s implacableness is all mine. Her brother’s virulence, and
her sister’s spite and envy, are entirely owing to me” (C 1291). A careful reader will
recognize that his sarcastic self-accusations are, in fact, true. Richardson’s ideal reader views
Lovelace not as a legitimate alternative point of view, but as an involuntary reinforcement of
Clarissa’s point of view.
So far, we have looked at Clarissa and Anna Howe as positive models of engaged
spectatorship. Lovelace, however, plays a slightly more complicated role in Richardson’s
narrative. In this final close reading of Clarissa, I argue that Lovelace’s failure as a
spectator, lacking common sense and defying the public good, serves to reinforce the point of
view shared by Clarissa, Anna Howe, and, Richardson hopes, the reader.
58
The fact that Richardson as editor can omit letters that are “redundant”—as if
Lovelace’s or Clarissa’s version of a scene are interchangeable—suggests the nearly
superfluous status of Lovelace’s letters in the narrative.73 “To avoid repetition” he writes,
“those passages in his [Lovelace’s] account are only extracted which will serve to embellish
hers; to open his views; or to display the humorous talent he was noted for” (C 411).74 Few
of Lovelace’s letters, presumably, are necessary for readers to glean Richardson’s message,
because they do not offer any real variation.
The characters agree with the editor on this point: Belford tells Clarissa that she will
see “the justice [Lovelace] does to your virtue in every line he writes,” adding that Lovelace
can “best account” for her story and offer her “fuller justice” than anyone as the oft-cited
“author of [Clarissa’s] calamities” (C 1174, 1363, 1301). Clarissa agrees with the editor and
Belford, validating Lovelace’s letters as the authoritative record of her narrative, even above
her own letters: “In order to do my character justice with all my friends and companions,”
Clarissa writes in her will, “I may safely trust my fame to the justice done me by Mr.
Lovelace, in his letters” (C 1418). If even Clarissa has so much faith in Lovelace’s letters,
perhaps Lovelace too is an unwitting member of Richardson’s choir.
73
Later editions blacken Lovelace and whiten Clarissa, expanding Richardson’s interpretive power over
readers. Richardson as editor censors, cuts, summarizes, extracts, glosses, and offers commentary and opinions,
tempering Lovelace’s lewd vocabulary, omitting redundancy by telling Clarissa’s version rather than
Lovelace’s, and cutting Brand’s “overly lengthy” letter.
74
Later, Richardson adds that he has cut out sections of Lovelace’s letters because it is “pretty much to the same
purpose as in hers preceding” (C 447) or has “no great variation from the lady’s account of it” (C 450). He cuts
other letters from Lovelace in which “the substance of what is contained in the last of the lady’s” (C 463) or “its
contents are nearly the same with those in the lady’s text, [so] it is omitted” (C 524). In one of the few
instances where Lovelace’s letter is chosen in lieu of Clarissa’s, Richardson as editor explains “As it was not
probable that the lady could give so particular an account of her own confusion, in the affecting scene she
mentions on the offering himself to her acceptance, the following extracts are made from his of the above date”
(C 492). While most editorial interjections are marked with italics, one rare exception is letters 139 and 140
between Joseph Leman and Lovelace, in which much of the letters is unmarked editorial gloss, with quotation
marks around direct statements. Richardson repeats this technique in Letter 157.1 from Lovelace to Belford (C
534) and letter 195 from Clarissa to Anna (C 620).
59
In an early letter, Clarissa says that Lovelace “was no common observer,” and he had
“a tolerable knack of writing and describing,” which her father admired as evidence of his
“reading, judgment, and taste” (C 47).75 Lovelace politely asks “what a mind must that be,
which though not virtuous itself admires not virtue in another?” (C 143).76 He seems to have
the intellectual potential, at least, to be a good spectator. Soon, however, it becomes apparent
that Lovelace lacks the moral requisite of a good spectator. Clarissa later questions her
earlier admiration, based on public opinion’s mixed reviews of Lovelace, confessing “We
have heard that the man’s head is better than his heart” (C 169). Lovelace describes himself
as a “critic… in women’s dresses,” clarifying that “many a one have I taught to dress, and
helped to undress” (C 399).77 Lovelace’s judgment is aesthetic without being moral: “Mr.
Lovelace has certainly taste; and, as far as I am able to determine, he has judgment in most of
the politer arts” (C 187). But by doing what he likes without fear of rebuke, dismissing both
common sense and public opinion, Lovelace reveals himself to be a poor spectator.
Lovelace’s spectatorship is markedly dissimilar from Mr. Spectator’s. Manipulating
public opinion to serve his own desires, he attempts to persuade Clarissa to wed because
“everybody will applaud an event that everybody expects” (C 492). This casual
misinterpretation of public opinion signals a fundamental flaw in his logic, suggesting that
expectation signals commendation—very different from Anna’s advice to marry. Similarly,
75
Clarissa initially prefers Lovelace partly due to his dissimilarity to the illiterate Solmes. “If I am to be
compelled [to marry],” Clarissa pleads, “let it be in favour of a man that can read and write—that can teach me
something” (C 151). Clarissa frames her dislike of Solmes as public opinion: “Mr. Solmes appears to be (to all
the world indeed) to have a very narrow mind” (C 152).
76
77
Lovelace’s virtuous affair with his Rosebud demonstrates that even his heart is not insensible to virtue.
Anna Howe adds that he is known as “one of the readiest and quickest of writers” (C 74), and she points out
that “a person willing to think favourably of him would hope that a brave, a learned and a diligent man cannot
be naturally a bad man” (C 75).
60
he also willfully misreads universal maxims: “Is not calamity the test of virtue?” he asks (C
519).78 Dismissing Belford’s rational explanation to the contrary, Lovelace is convinced that
Clarissa’s virtue must be tried to be true. His irrational, self-interested, destructive desire to
test Clarissa’s virtue does not suit Richardson’s, or Addison and Steele’s, qualifications for
good spectatorship.
Despite his moral gaffes as a spectator, Lovelace succeeds abominably well in
directing the plot, and particularly in directing the Harlowe family: “I myself the director of
their principal motions,” he brags, “which falling in with the malice of their little hearts, they
took to be all their own” (C 387). Manipulating various “actors” in the scene he covertly
directs, Lovelace exercises formidable power. As an actor himself, he is also dangerously
successful: Clarissa writes, “he is so much of the actor, that he seems able to enter into any
character; and his muscles and features appear intirely under obedience to his wicked will”
(C 1003).79
Angus Ross compares Lovelace with the “autocratic princes of Restoration heroic
tragedy” whose sexual aggression more closely mirrors the rakes of Restoration comedy:
either way, “Lovelace’s fantasy of his own life is often taken from the theater.”80 In his first
letter to Belford, Lovelace says that pursuing Clarissa requires him to practice the art of the
78
Elsewhere he writes “I have read in some place that the woman was made for the man, not the man for the
woman. Virtue then is less to be dispensed with in the woman than in the man” (C 429). Again, this is a willful
misreading of a biblical passage, repeated in his complaint that “women, Jack, have been the occasion of all
manner of mischief from the beginning!”, citing and misinterpreting biblical stories (C 540). Elsewhere, he
references an equally perverted rake’s maxim: “Has it not been a constant maxim with us that the greater the
merit on the woman’s side, the nobler the victory on the man’s?” (C 559). These gendered maxims,
particularizing merit according to sex, function as straw men for Clarissa’s more valid universal maxims,
including her comment that “Pride is an infallible sign of weakness” in both men and women (C 561).
79
As an actor, Lovelace offers to play every “role” in Clarissa’s life, as “father, uncle, brother and as I humbly
hoped, in your own good time, a husband to you, all in one” (C 377). Anna Howe suggests that Clarissa instead
serve as “father, mother, uncle to yourself” (C 588).
80
Ross 20.
61
theater, since “He who seems virtuous does but act a part,/ And shows not his own nature,
but his art” (C 143).81 This performance is taxing to Lovelace, who asks, “was ever hero in
romance (opposing giants and dragons excepted) called upon to harder trials!” (C 146).82
But it is not Lovelace’s link to the theater that is problematic—it is the roles he chooses to
play. While he is an accomplished actor, Lovelace fails repeatedly as a spectator.
Lovelace’s power as director, actor, and author of the narrative is perpetually undercut by his
inability to be a good spectator.
Critics have framed the conflict between Clarissa and Lovelace in various ways, as a
battle of desires and wills, of psyches, of moral, social, or economic systems.83 Oftentimes
the heroine and anti-hero are described as opposites yet complements: “Clarissa and
Lovelace are as completely, and as fatally, dependent on each other as Tristan and Isolde or
Romeo and Juliet,” writes Ian Watt, “the differences between the protagonists represent
larger conflicts of attitude and ethic in their society.”84 In all these cases, however, the
conflict is framed symbolically. They represent a battle of ideas.85
They also, however, represent more explicitly a battle of genres. This binary is one
that both protagonist and antagonist identify. In short, Lovelace interprets the scene as
81
This line is from Sir Robert Howard’s 1664 play The Vestal Virgin, or, The Roman Ladies. A Tragedy.
82
Following Clarissa’s bend for mythology and allegory, he says that Clarissa is “a rape worthy of a Jupiter” (C
165). Lovelace’s complaint here is a misreading of both his own situation and romantic heroism.
83
See Doody, Brissenden, and Watt.
84
Watt 238.
85
Brissenden writes, “It is a struggle between the symbolic and ultimately heroic representations of different
social classes, different moral and intellectual attitudes, different visions of life; a struggle naturally and easily
assumes mythical and ideological proportions” (Brissenden 161). Watt adds that “the relationship between
protagonists embodies a universe of moral and social conflicts of a scale and complexity beyond anything in
previous fiction” (Watt 220). Despite this symbolic value, Watt argues that the conflicts are “so completely
internalized that the conflict expresses itself as a struggle between personalities and even between different
parts of the same personality” (Watt 238).
62
comic, while Clarissa yearns for a tragic conclusion. As Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of
Criticism argues, genre identification and expectation plays a key role in the reader’s
interpretation of character. The allegorical function of each character, therefore, is at stake in
this struggle between comedy and tragedy.86 Their sexual struggle within the narrative’s
diegesis reflects on a larger exegetical struggle over the genre of the narrative they occupy.
And this, I would argue, is the most important symbolic battle that is fought in the novel.
The two characters cannot reconcile partly because unlike Pamela and Mr. B, Clarissa and
Lovelace disagree on the genre of their own story. This fundamental difference encapsulates
many of their ideological differences within a literary context. In addition, it demonstrates
their self-conscious awareness of their own narrative—they realize that they are in a work of
literature, functioning as active spectators of that narrative.
In their struggle, Clarissa and Lovelace grapple for power in terms of both literary
judgment and moral judgment, as readers and spectators. Clarissa says of Lovelace: “We are
both great watchers of each other’s eyes; and indeed seem to be more than half afraid of each
other” (C 460). Perpetually attempting to turn Clarissa’s tragedy into “farce,” Lovelace
pursues delusional comic desires, based on individual desire rather than common sense (C
947). In contrast to Anna Howe’s conduct book model, Lovelace claims to provide women
with an opportunity to learn judgment the hard way: “Why should they be acquainted with a
man of my character, and not be the better and wiser for it?” (C 897). Lovelace’s attempts to
justify his philandering as morally productive, contradicted sharply by the social and moral
degeneration of the ruined women who play a supporting role in his plot, now working as
86
In the characters’ repeated discussion of character, plot and genre, Richardson emphasizes a selfconsciousness of form. Lovelace ruminates on composing The Quarrelsome Lovers (C 571) or The Polite
Lovers (C 693), while Clarissa prefers tragedies for “the sake of the instruction, the warning, and the example
generally given in them” (C 618).
63
prostitutes, highlights Lovelace’s willful failure as a spectator. His utter disdain for logic and
virtue signals that this farcical model of moral education is not one that Richardson supports.
As a spectator, Lovelace is trapped by a model of judgment that is circumscribed by
his own highly individual experience. Clarissa aptly describes Lovelace’s spectating style as
that of a “bold supposer;” she goes on to explain, “as commentators find beauties in an
author which the author perhaps was a stranger too, so he sometimes compliments me in high
strains of gratitude” (C 128). In others words, Lovelace is a spectator who sees things the
author did not intend, who interprets scenes explicitly against authorial intention—qualities
Richardson feared in his own readers.
Readers (beginning with Lady Bradshaigh and certainly not ending with me) have
been guiltily fond of Lovelace. In dismissing Lovelace as a “bold supposer,” Richardson
simultaneously warns his readers against spectatorship that goes against the grain of
collective interpretation, as determined by authorial intention. Lovelace’s letters either
reinforce Clarissa’s status of perfection or serve as obvious foils to the “correct”
interpretation that Richardson prescribes.
Though Lovelace tends to make faulty interpretations of the narrative’s genre,
authorial intention, and his own heroic function, at other moments, he seems to deftly
recognize Clarissa’s virtue, affirming her virtue for readers despite (or even because of) his
own lack of virtue. Clarissa’s virtue is so brilliant, Richardson suggests, that, on occasion,
even a character like Lovelace is forced, sometimes against his will, to see it. “Yet has she
so many excellencies,” writes Lovelace, “that I must love her; and, fool that I am, love her
the more for her despising me” (C 1182). Though Lovelace credits his admiration as foolish,
it is actually one of his few vindicating qualities. Lovelace even learns to view himself more
64
critically from her perspective: “How does she sink me, even in my own eyes!... Yet who but
must admire, who but must adore her?” (C 1183). Richardson can be overbearingly didactic,
but he does deserve credit for pointing out how a variety of perspectives—even including the
unlikely one of an unreformed rake—can all reinforce a single message.
Lovelace’s many successful roles, as playwright, actor, and director of the narrative,
can sometimes eclipse his failure as a spectator, and critics have tended to emphasize these
flashier roles. William Palmer, for instance, points out that Lovelace is both playwright and
actor in the drama of Clarissa, suggesting that even Richardson himself is self-deceptively
dominated by Lovelace’s control. In addition to his roles as actor, playwright, and director,
Lovelace is also “author of [Clarissa’s] calamities,” “author of her fall,” “author of all this
distress,” “author of her ruin,” and “author of all her woes” (C 1061, 1395, 1398, 1400, 1429,
1401, 1115, 1301, 1331). But “all I took a pen to write for,” he laments, “is however
unwritten” by Clarissa (C 1429). “Having her, I shall never want a subject,” Lovelace writes;
“Having lost her, my whole soul is blank… Clarissa has made me eyeless and senseless” (C
1023, 26). As a spectator, Clarissa’s judgment can erase, invalidate, unwrite the work of the
playwright, the actor, the director. Echoing Johnson’s famous mantra that “we that live to
please, must please to live,” Lovelace astutely notes that “She is less in my power, I more in
hers” (C 402).
In the action of the plot, Clarissa is Lovelace’s victim; but in the novel’s selfreflexive conclusion, they reverse roles. Significantly, Clarissa exercises her power with a
silent gaze, which Lovelace describes as “soul-piercing… flashes” that he has experienced a
half-dozen times: “High indignation filled her disdainful eye,” he writes, “eye-beam after
eye-beam flashing at me” (C 827). The seemingly passive spectator, in the end, triumphs
65
over the performer with her silent “eye-beams.” Lovelace despairs that though he conquers
Clarissa’s body, her mind is inviolate; and as a spectator, she punishes him in the worst way:
with her silence.
I cannot bear it! What a dog, what a devil, have I been to so superlative a
goodness! Why does she not inveigh against me? Why does she not execrate
me? Oh the triumphant subduer! Ever above me! And now to leave me so
infinitely below her! (C 1344).
The rape ultimately strips Lovelace of narrative authority, reversing the power dynamics of
the relationship. While Lovelace had fought to make Clarissa his silent spectator, her silent
spectatorship disempowers Lovelace rather than the heroine. Clarissa’s spectatorship erases
Lovelace’s authorship, undercutting his roles as author, actor, playwright and director
through her commanding role as spectator.
Richardson creates self-division in his heroine through his epistolary style, as Clarissa
both performs and observes the storyline. Over the course of the narrative, he suggests that
spectatorship, more than performance, provides her with a source of identity and agency.
Ultimately, each of the letter writers contributes to what Richardson hoped to be a shared
point of view: that Clarissa’s death was her only viable path to virtue. Separating the taint of
the performative body from her virtuous observations, a separation Clarissa pursued
throughout the narrative, death provided Clarissa with an opportunity to posthumously
circulate the letters that manifest her spectatorship. While her sight becomes “dim” in her
final days, her intellects remain “clear” (C 1328, 1336). Like Mr. Spectator, Clarissa is a
disembodied spectator, whose voice represents the infallibility of the collective good.
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CHAPTER II
THE REPTILE CRITIC:
CITIZEN SPECTATORS IN HENRY FIELDING’S TOM JONES
In the preface to Fielding’s 1731 Tom Thumb, first performed at the Haymarket in
London, the author describes the necessity of publishing prefatory material for printed plays:
“A Preface is become almost as necessary to a Play, as a Prologue: It is a Word of Advice to
the Reader, as the other to the Spectator” (TT np). For Fielding, this introductory material is
a way of directly addressing his audience, and guiding spectators’ interpretation of the
performance.
The prologue is also a theatrical technique that Fielding would later use as a novelist.
Fielding’s 1749 Tom Jones includes initial chapters that preface each of his eighteen books.
In one, titled “On Prologues,” Fielding describes the three essential elements of any modern
prologue: “an abuse of the Taste of the Town, a Condemnation of all contemporary Authors,
and, an Elogium on the Performance just about to be represented” (TJ 541). The prologue is
a formulaic, ritualized exchange between playwright and spectator, which he adapts for the
relationship between novelist and reader.
Fielding anticipates that a future historian will discover that “these several initial
Chapters; most of which, like Modern Prologues, may as properly be prefixed to any other
Book in this History” (TJ 541). His prologues are, he suggests, applicable in any order, to
any text. Moreover, he trusts that “the Reader will find sufficient Emolument87 in the one, as
the Spectator hath long found in the other” (TJ 541). The prologue, in Fielding’s novel,
accomplishes the three goals that he satirizes, primarily serving as a way for the author to
train the reader in benevolent spectatorship. While some critics use the prologue as an
87
Balm or salve.
67
opportunity to “try his Faculty of Hissing, and to tune his Cat-call,” the ideal spectators and
readers will use the prologue to access authorial intention and allow it to guide their
interpretation of the work to follow (TJ 541).
The theater, and more particularly, the figure of the spectator, played an important
role in Fielding’s novels. In the following chapter, I show how Fielding adapts the dramatic
prologue within Tom Jones as a way of directing readers to be citizen spectators rather than
reptile critics. First, I will describe Fielding’s history within the eighteenth-century theater,
describing his stage career, his friendship with Hogarth, and the impact of the decisive 1737
Licensing Act on his career. This contextualization explains ways that Fielding’s prologues
frame his audience as both the object of his satire and the source of his nationalist pride.
Then, I will offer a close reading of Tom Jones, arguing that the narrator uses prefatory
material in order to guide readers to perform the role of citizen spectators, as modeled by his
title character.
Fielding’s reputation at the center of the eighteenth-century rise of the novel began
quite unexpectedly at the fringes of the eighteenth-century decline of the drama. Fielding’s
career as a playwright began with triumphant failure, after his 1728 Love in Several Masques
closed after only four nights at Drury Lane. This early disappointment led Fielding to move
to the less prestigious Little Haymarket Theater, and to abandon the five-act comedy in favor
of afterpieces.88 Fielding’s transition to minor theatres from the Royal Theatre proved
88
The afterpiece was a short two or three act play, usually a farce or burlesque, performed after the mainpiece.
Farces are dramatic works that relies on absurdity, physical humor, disguise, and transgression, while the
burlesque is more specifically parodic, an exaggerated mock-tragedy. Both lowbrow genres became
increasingly popular in London’s illegitimate theaters after the passage of the 1737 Licensing Act forbade the
production of legitimate drama (five-act comedies and tragedies) in these unlicensed venues.
68
beneficial, because it allowed him to experiment with his plays in ways that would be
unacceptable at larger locations.
Working in more experimental spaces and genres, Fielding achieved critical success
with his 1730 The Author’s Farce. The Author’s Farce differed starkly from legitimate
comedy, relying heavily on music, slapstick humor, and political satire. Its hero Harry
Luckless, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the recently rejected Fielding, learns from
Witmore that to succeed, he must “write nonsense, write operas, write entertainments, write
Hurlothrumbos, set up an Oratory and preach nonsense, and you may meet with
encouragement enough” (AF 8). Fielding’s nonsensical play, then, satisfies audiences’ tastes
for the ridiculous and for satire of that ridiculousness; it allows them to laugh both at and
with the play.89
The prefatory material of The Author’s Farce is an important guide for understanding
Fielding’s intentions for the play.90 The prologue criticizes passive spectators who praise any
tragedy at Drury Lane in acquiescence to social custom:
Too long the Tragick Muse hath aw’d the stage…
While every Lady cries, and Critick sleeps…
Like the tame Animals designed for show,
You have your cues to clap, as they to bowe?
Taught to commend, your Judgments have no share;
By chance you guess aright, by chance you err (AF ii).
Comparing spectators to tame animals on the stage, blindly following their cues to applaud,
Fielding simultaneously criticizes the quality of tragic drama in London’s theaters and the
audiences that claim to enjoy it. In disparaging this rote theatrical exchange, Fielding invites
89
The politically-driven, meta-theatrical puppet show in the third act appealed to audiences who were
politically and aesthetically liberal, and who were equally dissatisfied with London’s mainstream theaters as
Walpole’s governance.
90
The epilogue for Fielding’s The Author’s Farce is similarly pointed, again lightly mocking his own audience,
offering a meta-narrative recipe for writing an epilogue that includes flattery, smugness, and wit.
69
audiences to perform a more active role as spectators, exercising their judgment to evaluate
the quality of his play. Fielding suggests that audiences will enjoy his play, motivated by
personal judgment rather than public opinion.
The three-act Author’s Farce was performed as a companion piece with Fielding’s
most successful burlesque, Tom Thumb (1730), later revised into the more biting The
Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). As a burlesque, Tragedy of Tragedies relied on the audience’s
intimate familiarity with London’s tragic repertoire. Fielding parodied at least forty-two
individual plays in Tom Thumb, mostly late seventeenth-century rhymed heroic tragedy, and
especially Dryden’s Conquest of Granada.91 Like The Author’s Farce, the prologue to The
Tragedy of Tragedies creates an intimate exchange between the author and spectator that
guides audience interpretation.
In The Tragedy of Tragedies, Fielding directs spectators to be good citizens and
spectators through gentle satire.92 In his prologue, he explains
With Mirth and Laughter to delight the Mind
The modern Tragedy was first design’d:
‘Twas this made farce with tragedy unite,
And taught each scribbler in the town to write.
The glorious heroes who, in former years,
Dissolv’d all Athens and all Rome in tears;
Who to our stage, have been transplanted too;
Whom Shakespear taught to storm, and Lee to woo,
And could to softness, ev’ry heart subdue,
Grub-street has turned to farce—Oh glorious lane!
O, may thy authors never write in vain!
May crowded theaters ne’er give applause
To any other than the Grub-street cause! (TT np).
91
Twelve of the forty-two works that have been identified as direct sources for Tom Thumb were written by
Dryden.
92
Laughing satire refers to the gentle satire of Horace as opposed to the biting satire of Juvenal, a distinction
that was important for early eighteenth-century neoclassical satire.
70
Fielding repeats themes from the prologue to The Author’s Farce, criticizing the quality of
English drama and the acquiescence of English spectators through mock flattery. The astute
spectator, he suggests, will laugh rather than weep at modern tragedy on the English stage.
By insisting that the English have a unique ability to make farce of glorious heroes, and by
using the inclusive first-person plural of “our stage,” he intricately twins aesthetic satire with
national pride.
Fielding’s technique as a dramatist is similar to the way Hogarth uses caricature as a
form of dramatic satire.93 Lifelong friends with shared aesthetic tendencies, Fielding and
Hogarth used dramatic devices to satirize and direct a distinctly English audience. Working
at the periphery of visual art as a caricaturist, similar to Fielding’s unconventional career in
the theater, Hogarth also found freedom to experiment. Paul Edward Collins points out the
serpentine, wanton movements in both craftsmen, arguing that Hogarth’s graphic satire
mirrors Fielding’s prose satire in its tendencies to simultaneously meander through narrative,
caricaturize folly, and embody an English national spirit. Pat Rogers agrees that Fielding’s
frequent apostrophes to Hogarth were evidence of “national pride.”94
The Tragedy of Tragedies is, importantly, the first evidence of Fielding’s long
relationship with fellow political satirist William Hogarth. The frontispiece of The Tragedy
93
Fielding specifies folly, rather than vice, as the object of his satire (TJ 626). Hogarth’s The Analysis of
Beauty (1753), which brought him more recognition in literary circles than the art community, addresses ways
that dramatic visual art can supplement language as a mode of expression. Strolling Actresses Dressing in a
Barn (1738), for instance, published shortly after the 1737 Licensing Act banned strolling theater companies,
captures Hogarth’s ability to create “dramatic disclosure rather than a frozen tableau” (Rogers 31). With a
dozen characters mid-movement and mid-speech, Hogarth’s style is as dramatic as his topic. In this way, the
drawing seems to celebrate the very freedoms it satirizes. Rogers remarks on Fielding’s direct apostrophes to
Hogarth (Rogers 27). Like other eighteenth-century writers, Fielding makes his apostrophes to Hogarth in a
scene “where a striking tableau occurs, full of dramatic surprise” (TJ 34). Hogarth’s function in these narrative
apostrophes, then, is distinctly dramatic—both writers use dramatic techniques within other artistic genres.
94
Rogers 32.
71
Figure 2, William Hogarth, “frontispiece” (1731).
______________________________________________
Source: Henry Fielding, Tragedy of Tragedies (1731).
72
of Tragedies, Fielding’s only printed play to include a frontispiece, was designed by Hogarth,
with an image of Queen Dollalolla, Princess Huncamunca, and Tom Thumb in conversation
(Fig. 2).
For Fielding, as for Hogarth, variety within the English body politic was both an
object of satire and a source of patriotic fervor, an incongruous theme championed by
Garrick and Sheridan in the 1750s and 1760s. In works like A Peep Behind the Curtain and
The Critic, both revivals of Lord Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, Garrick and Sheridan
provide audiences with satire and spectacle while mocking audience desire for these lowbrow
genres. In this way, they cannily appeal to the rabble in the pit and the culturally elite in the
boxes, varied spectators caricaturized in Hogarth’s The Laughing Audience. Like these
playwrights, Fielding satisfies audiences’ desire for low comedy while simultaneously
mocking it, demonstrating awareness of different classes of spectators in the theater, and
readers in his novel. And like Hogarth, Fielding’s satire functions at the intersection of
citizenship, theatricality, and spectatorship.
Tempering criticism of individual type characters with nationalist pride of
Englishness in general, Fielding and Hogarth both created laughing satire that was
immensely popular with English audiences. The camaraderie Fielding creates with his
audiences, especially through the direct address of prefatory material in works like The
Author’s Farce and The Tragedy of Tragedies, allows him to satirize and caricaturize his
audience while creating ironic patriotic pride in spite of, or even because of, these follies.
Fielding’s career took another important turn after the explicit political satire of The
Grub Street Opera (1731), which criticized both Walpole and the royal family, was
73
withdrawn before its opening performance at the Haymarket.95 Fielding’s success in the
theater had emboldened him to write more venomous satire, which proved lethal to his stage
career. In 1737, parliament passed a Licensing Act that limited the performance of theater in
London to the two royal patent theaters (Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the primary objects
of his satire) and required that the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays (a position
supported by the Walpole government) pre-censor all plays performed in London. Fielding’s
politically-charged dramas have long been credited as the primary motive for and victim of
this law.96
While the Licensing Act effectively ended his career in the theater, it did not truncate
Fielding’s use of theatrical devices in his literature. Fielding’s relationship with his
spectators and readers is colored by the history of the Licensing Act’s pointed censorship,
and his distaste for censorious criticism contributed to his description of the “reptile critic” in
Tom Jones. Fielding describes the reptile critic as, like the new Examiner of Plays, having a
“hungry appetite for Censure,” a tendency to “grosly misunderstand and misrepresent,” and a
propensity to “condemn without mercy” (TJ 541, 337, 366). The reptile critic is “hasty to
condemn,” a mark of his “presumptuous Absurdity” (TJ 337). The reptile critic delights only
in models of perfection, and is eager to “condemn a Character as a bad one, because it is not
perfectly a good one” (TJ 338). The reptile critic is an “abject Slave” and an “odious
95
This print-only play, intended for reading rather than performance, includes mock-critical footnotes that also
anticipate the narrator of Tom Jones.
96
Numerous critics have commented on the role of the 1737 Licensing Act in Fielding’s career. Hunter writes,
“From 1731 to 1737 Fielding continued to write facetious, political, quasi-Augustan plays creating modern hero
after modern hero—corrupt lawyers and judges, quack doctors, hack artists, ‘modern’ husbands, and politicians
in all walks of life” (Hunter 133). L.W. Conolly suggests that the systematic censorship of the Examiner of
Plays demonstrated general belief in the cultural authority of drama, justifying precensorship as socially
beneficial or even necessary to national wellbeing. Thomas Keymer’s revisionist reading persuasively warns
against reading Fielding’s drama as narrow “opposition propaganda” as a result of the Licensing Act, but in this
essay, my argument hinges on the more generally political rather than explicitly partisan nature of his literature
and literary career.
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Vermin,” a “Slanderer,” a “Monster,” and likely a failed lawyer attempting to exercise
judicial capacity “on the Benches at the Playhouse” (TJ 366).
Fielding’s attack on reptile critics is a way of indirectly shepherding his readers.
Dobranski notes that “Fielding aims almost all of the novel’s direct addresses at the ‘fanciful
reading habits of dilettante readers’” (TJ 646). He anticipates and repudiates readers’
potential misinterpretations by introducing then undercutting “willful interpretations” of the
novel. For Fielding, the reptile critic embodies everything distasteful about censorship:
venomous criticism, preemptive rejection, and uninformed condemnation. The narrator’s
eighteen Introductory Chapters, like prologues at the theater, spitefully condemn the
censorious disapproval of the reptile critic, and direct readers to interpretations sanctioned by
authorial intention.
At the same time, Fielding’s skepticism about the censorious critic does not prevent
him from making the spectator his hero. In fact, Fielding’s Tom Jones describes its title
character as an alternative to the reptile critic, who vaunts English freedom in his more
benevolent approach to spectatorship. Fielding describes Tom Jones as a pitiful performer
who he is ashamed to bring on stage, and he repeatedly suggests that “Poor Jones was rather
a Spectator of this elegant Scene, than an Actor in it” (TJ 451). However, over the course of
the narrative, spectatorship becomes the way that Tom Jones demonstrates his virtue—it is in
demonstrating good judgment, rather than performing good actions, that he redeems himself
both to other characters and to readers.
William Park points out this split in Fielding’s description of spectator figures, noting
the stark contrast in the way he compares the “sagacious, discerning, curious, learned, good,
good-natured, and worthy readers with the modern critics, the pitiful critics, the reptile
75
critics.”97 For Fielding, the reptile critic is the absolute villain; he is driven by hypocrisy and
he is utterly un-English. However, at the same time, Fielding’s ideal protagonist is also a
spectator, an emblem of the free British citizen.98
Critics agree that Fielding chose to write novels largely because he could no longer
write plays, and that his novels have important roots in the English stage.99 What critics have
failed to note, however, is the way that Fielding’s novels rely on a particular subgenre of the
stage, namely the prologue. In this chapter, I argue that Fielding’s narrator uses the theatrical
prologue within his novel to directly address the reader, training readers to follow the title
character of Tom Jones, and to perform the role of citizen spectators.
In the following pages, I will give a brief literary history of eighteenth-century
prologues, followed by a survey of scholarly debate on the role of judgment in Fielding’s
pedagogical imperative for his hero and his readers. Finally, I will discuss ways that both
Tom Jones and the narrator guide readers in the art of spectatorship.
The prologue is a rare moment on the stage of direct address to the spectator, and
eighteenth-century playwrights used this device to instruct audiences on how to interpret
their plays.100 This ancillary matter, as Fielding satirized in his prologues to The Author’s
97
Park 239-40.
98
For a collection of Fielding’s own criticism in The Champion, The Covent Garden Journal, The Jacobite’s
Journal, and various prefaces and letters, see Ioan Williams’ The Criticism of Henry Fielding (1984).
Williams’ text includes significant criticism both about the theater and located within prefaces.
99
The ties between Fielding’s work as a dramatist and a novelist are strong. Richard Bevis writes that “One of
the most venerable clichés in critical discussions of Fielding’s fiction has been the novelist’s ‘theatricality,’”
and he describes Fielding as “the Author who keeps one eye on his audience as he stages his performance.”
(Bevis 55, 64)
100
Addison believed that epilogues are “thematically and structurally divorced from their plays,” but as I
demonstrate below, Fielding treated the prologue as an essential feature that guides audience interpretation of
the mainpiece, a technique he used in both his plays and his fiction (Solomon 159). To read more about ways
that the relationship between the prologue and the mainpiece evolved over the course of the eighteenth century,
76
Farce and The Tragedy of Tragedies, tended to equate the spectator’s sympathetic reception
to the play with their patriotic fervor. In their introduction to Prologues, epilogues, curtainraisers, and afterpieces: the rest of the eighteenth-century London stage, editors Dennis J.
Ennis and Judith Bailey Slagle argue that these peripheral pieces reveal “the eighteenthcentury stage at its most responsive to the political, social and cultural forces that were so
responsible for the tenor of the drama in that age.”101 Citing the “Defense of the Epilogue” in
Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, Ennis and Slagle point out how ancillary matter in the
eighteenth-century theater were self-declared “vehicles for current, and always variable,
social, and political statements,” connecting the mainpiece to current events of national
interest.102
In addition, prologues were a space for authors to self-consciously reflect as critics of
their own art, as “author-critics.”103 Ironically, despite Fielding’s repeated disparagement of
Dryden, he borrows as he satirizes the earlier author’s technique of directing audience
see Andrew Warner Ade’s “The significance of the prologue from ancient to modern drama in France and
England” (2001).
101
Ennis and Slagle 13.
102
Ennis and Slagle 20.
103
Dryden (along with Jonson) is the topic of Paul D. Cannan’s chapter on authors as critics and prefatory
criticism. A “poet-critic,” Dryden used the preface as a way to oscillate from his role as an author to one as a
critic. Cannan notes that “Dryden scholars, content with his status as the ‘father of English criticism,’ have
made little attempt to investigate how Dryden grappled with the problems posed by the simultaneously
emerging discourses of authorship and criticism” and that these scholars “typically create a portrait of Dryden
as a writer who effortlessly (if not naturally) synthesized the roles of poet and critic” (Cannan 20). Importantly,
Cannan points out that much of the “author-critic’s” work takes place in prefatory matter, where Dryden
exhibited a “self-centered, defensive, and garrulous authorial voice” and where he idealized a critic who served
as protector and defender of his work, to “redeem” and “shield” the author (Cannan 35, 39). The critic plays a
defensive rather than offensive role, Dryden describes in Of Dramatic Poesy, and a good critic not only aligns
with the author’s point of view but also actively promotes appreciation for the author’s work. Heavily satirized,
Dryden’s prefatory material inspired Swift’s observation that “the World would have never suspected him to be
so great a Critic, if he had not assured them so frequently in his Prefaces” (Swift qtd. by Cannan 38), and
Buckingham’s satirical caricature of Dryden as Bayes in The Rehearsal. However, Fielding’s technique as a
writer-critic, as I show below, bears significant similarities to Dryden’s method, using prefatory material to
anticipate complaints and instruct spectators in uncovering (and agreeing with) authorial intention—a parallel
that Cannan overlooks in his otherwise comprehensive reading of Dryden’s critical style and influence.
77
interpretation through the prologue. Paul D. Cannan describes Dryden’s innovative use of
prefatory devices to construct his identity as an author-critic, taking ownership of the text’s
meaning and claiming interpretive authority through introductory material.104 Within these
prologues and prefaces, Dryden suggests that only authors are capable of offering productive
critical acumen; Cannan explains; “before [the] performance, [Dryden’s] play has already
been subjected to the author’s critical scrutiny and the anticipated objections of critics in the
audience.”105 The audience uses the prologue to uncover the authorial intention, which
ideally guides their interpretation. The prologues, in summary, are where nationalistic
agendas linking political and aesthetic freedom shine most strongly, and where the author
himself could both directly address spectators and model forms of ideal spectatorship.106
By the mid eighteenth century, prologues tended to more explicitly elicit nationalist
agendas, ensuring a positive audience reception by prescribing the qualities of properly
patriotic spectatorship. Eliza Haywood boldly silenced critics in her dedication to The Fair
Captive, which advises critics to practice the same charitable form of spectatorship that
Fielding would prescribe three decades later: “The Criticks… forget that, not to ridicule, but
to improve the Judgment, and correct the Errors they discover, is the Business of their
104
Cannan 33.
105
Cannan 38.
106
Dryden famously exploited the potential for directing the audience in his epilogue to Tyrannick Love in
1669. Nell Gwyn’s performance of the ancillary material “entranced” Charles II into whisking her to his bed
that very night (Solomon 155). As a space where the speaker is both the character and the actor, a self-reflexive
moment in the performance, the prologue and epilogue can function as “a framing device [that] suggest that the
speaker could simultaneously perform and reflect on her character” (Solomon 156). Ennis and Slagle agree that
the prologue is a moment of “theatrical heteroglossia” in which both the actor and the character deliver the
message (Ennis and Slagle 22). Solomon cites Jeremy Collier’s complaint about the way actors “remove from
Fiction into Life… [and] converse with the Boxes, and Pit, and address directly to the Audience” (Collier qtd.
by Solomon 158). Cannan notes that Aphra Behn’s prefatory writing was influenced by Dryden’s; however, her
prologues are provocatively sexual, as she winks at her “Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-candied Reader. (Behn
qtd. by Cannan 49-50).
78
Profession,” anticipating Fielding’s reptile critic in her complaints of spectators’ “venom of
malice” (Haywood vi). Haywood’s prologue opens with a description of the “Party-Feuds
[that] have rent both State and Stage” in England; admiring her play, she suggests, is an
opportunity for patriotic cross-partisan agreement (Haywood xiii).
This patriotic rhetoric, which Haywood uses to keep audiences in line with authorial
intention, emerges again and again in early- to mid-eighteenth-century dramatic prologues.
In one of the eighteenth century’s most famous prologues, the introduction to Addison’s
Cato, Alexander Pope asks spectators to focus on the patriotic emotional experience rather
than on the ambiguous partisan symbolism in the play’s exploration of national identity:107
Britons attend: Be worth like this approv’d,
And show, you have the virtue to be moved…
Our scene precariously subsists too long
On French translation,108 and Italian song.
Dare to have sense your selves; assert the stage,
Be justly warm’d with your own native rage.
Such plays alone should please a British ear,
As Cato’s self had not disdain’d to hear (Pope 37-38, 41-46).
Pope urges audiences to partake in the hero’s “sense of patriotic responsibility as correlative
to aesthetic judgment,” a quality which he describes as distinctively British.109 Pope’s
107
Silva 104. Silva argues that Cato’s success rests on its bipartisan potential to be appropriated by either Whig
or Tory politics. Either way, Silva sees this strategy as granting Addison “a degree of control over the reception
of his text” (Silva 99). Like many authors, Addison exploited patriotism as a tool to manipulate readers’
response. Silva also identifies ways that political identity can influence taste: citing Dryden, he argues that
there are “political and ideological issues that override the literary and the dramatic—issues that accord value to
national tastes and culture” (Silva 108). Ennis and Slagle also cite prologues as a space for authors to complain
about spectators who don’t have “English taste.” Disliking opera, for instance, was a common expression of
English patriotism in the eighteenth-century theater (one that Fielding himself evoked repeatedly in his
literature). Critics like Dennis, Pope, and Dryden “shame the British for not being sufficiently British” in
appreciating the freedom of morals and aesthetics in British literature as expressions of political freedoms in
British politics. The prologue, Silva argues, is the direction for a play rather than a mere subsidiary; a prologue
can make “explicit a cultural-political program which the play itself barely manages to illustrate” (Silva 111).
108
Translated for the English stage the same year that Fielding published Tom Jones, Cenia was rejected by
David Garrick due to its French origins, both politically and aesthetically.
109
Silva 107.
79
prologue is typical in its appeal to national virtues, national identity, citizenship, and
patriotism. In addition, it also importantly links political freedom to aesthetic freedom,
another typical move in eighteenth-century prologues.110 The rigidity of Frenchified politics
correlates to the rigidity of the Frenchified neoclassical unities; in both cases, English
freedom is privileged as politically and aesthetically superior.
Fielding’s own prologues were “practice for the development of a narrative voice,” a
narrative voice which would prescribe the same appreciation for literary freedom as the ideal
spectator’s expression of patriotism.111 And like Ennis and Slagle point out, Fielding’s
theatrical career was built on the afterpieces, not the mainpieces—an apt parallel to his
novels, whose “ancillary material” often explicitly articulates Fielding’s prerogative.
Especially in the prologue-like Introductory Chapters to Tom Jones, Fielding uses the
rhetoric of patriotism and freedom to direct his readers to, like audiences of the eighteenthcentury stage, perform the role of citizen spectators.
Like the English playwright, Fielding’s narrator (first categorized a “dramatized
narrator” by Wayne Booth) directs audience interpretation through first-person addresses that
preface the texts themselves. Fielding suggests, within these novelized versions of the
prologue, that appreciating his text and his hero is an expression of the spectator’s patriotism
and his loyalty to freedom, civic virtue, and good will. Like Dryden and Hogarth, Fielding’s
literature celebrates aesthetic freedom as a mark of England’s political freedom; like
110
See Dryden’s 1688 “Essay of Dramatic Poesie,” described in the Introduction, for a fuller description of the
parallel between political and aesthetic freedom in English government and art.
111
Fisher 127. Fisher adds that Fielding may have liked afterpieces and epilogues because “it gave him a
chance to get the final word” (Fisher 127). For more information on prologues as not only “texts to be heard”
but also “texts to be read,” see Amy Scott-Douglass’s “Aphra Behn’s Covent Garden Drollery: The First
History of Women in Restoration Theatre” (2009).
80
Haywood and Pope, Fielding makes patriotic pleas to direct audience reception in the
“prologues” of his narratives.
Recent critics agree that Fielding’s primary prerogative in Tom Jones is to prescribe
judgment training for his hero and his readers. Betty Rizzo writes that “Tom Jones is a
pedagogical course of instruction in the ways of the world and of the necessity of learning
them so as not to make similar misjudgments.”112 Malinda Snow argues that Tom Jones is
not a novel about learning to behave well—“Tom Jones is indeed a novel about learning to
judge well.”113 David Paxman writes that, in lieu of moral instruction, “what Tom Jones
offers instead is an aesthetic contemplation of the moral order—quite different from a
demonstration of the need for virtue.”114 Scott Black describes “a withholding of judgment”
in the narrative that “allows one to appreciate the complexity of motives and frees the novel
from serving conventional morality.”115 For each of these critics, Tom Jones is less about
instructing readers in moral behavior than in moral judgment—learning the role of the
spectator rather than the performer.
Often, critics frame Fielding’s training in moral judgment within the context of the
theater. Hilary Teynor writes that “the profusion of people with mistaken identities on the
road and at the inns further creates opportunities for Tom”—and the reader, other critics
would suggest—“to develop his judgment.”116 Robert L. Chibka notes that Fielding is often
accused of being too exterior, dwelling on performances, surfaces and appearances rather
112
Rizzo 122.
113
Snow 37.
114
Paxman 114.
115
Black 534.
116
Teynor 9.
81
than interior depth. Indeed, the public forums of the theater, particularly “with readers cast
as playgoers,” was something of a pet metaphor for Fielding, a way of expressing his belief
that the exteriority of performance is our only basis of judgment in modern life.117 However,
it is significant that Fielding frames his readers as playgoers rather than as stars of the stage.
Privileging moral judgment over moral behavior is also important to the way that
Fielding defines citizenship: “Fielding finds a hero more to his own temperamental needs and
the needs of his contemporaries starved for a hero yet skeptical of claims of superhuman
perfection.”118 As Christine van Boheemen writes, Fielding’s recourse to the drama is tied
up with his promotion of an English nationalist agenda.119 J. Paul Hunter described
Fielding’s formal style as “specifically English,” suggesting a link between Fielding’s
patriotism and style that he describes as “rough-hewn” in contrast to classical precision.120
Hunter writes, “The models Tom echoes thus suggest ideals of classical antiquity and the
Christian ideal, but the version he achieves is modern, mortal, thoroughly English, and
specifically eighteenth century.”121 Fielding’s goal of training his hero and readers in good
judgment assumes a fluid correlation between good judgment and English citizenship.
While scholars agree that good judgment and citizenship are both important themes
for Fielding, none of these critics has identified the ways in which Fielding appropriates the
117
Chibka 89.
118
Hunter 141. Hunter adds, “Fielding is the artist of the possible, and his contemporaries would hardly want a
greater hero, nor could they imagine a grander one” (Hunter 142).
119
Boheemen 50.
120
Carl Fisher also describes Fielding’s style as having a “rough edge,” similar to Dryden’s description of
English moral and aesthetic freedom (Fisher 119).
121
Hunter 140. Hunter also admits, in a later essay, that Tom Jones is a “most unlikely representative of
contemporary British heroism,” but by “invoking the subjective memories of both author and reader,” he gives
“allusive, symbolic, mythological, and historical depth to his hero’s character” that gives him heroic status as an
ideal English citizen (Hunter 323-25).
82
patriotic prologue specifically within his Introductory Chapters, or how this device equates
citizenship and judgment with spectatorship. Building on previous scholarship, but with new
attention to the prologue and the spectator figure, I argue that Fielding trains readers in the
art of spectatorship according to English standards of taste. Fielding’s politically-charged
descriptions of the critic align proper spectatorship with good citizenship, and the wanderings
of his hero and his narrator train his readers in the art of citizen spectatorship. He is less
interested in usurping the dictatorial reptile critic than in educating him in the ways of proper
spectatorship.122 Connecting Fielding to contemporaries like Dryden and Hogarth who also
linked English political and aesthetic freedoms, I argue that Fielding uses peripheral texts
similarly to the way in which he used dramatic prologues in order to train readers as citizen
spectators.
In order to paint a portrait of the ideal English spectator, Fielding particularizes and
individualizes the spectator figure more sharply than does Richardson.123 For both writers,
though, the theater provides a model figure of spectatorship. Though Fielding published Tom
Jones just one year after Richardson’s Clarissa, the two writers moved in different social
122
Hunter argues that “Henry Fielding, like his sister Sarah, was much more willing than his great rival
Richardson to halve authority with his readers (and his great accomplishment lies in empowering the reader
beyond traditional categories)” (Hunter 334). At the same time, Carl Fisher suggests that Fielding “disdains
[audience] inattention or inappropriate reactions,” passing blame for commercial failures onto his “fickle and
ridiculous” audience (Fisher 120, 123). While I partially agree with Fisher to argue that Fielding still
circumscribes his readers quite strongly by implying that misreading, condemning, or failing to appreciate his
hero is paramount to an act of anti-patriotism, I agree with Hunter that Fielding’s method of training his readers
in the art of spectatorship asks them to perform more active roles in interpreting the narrative.
123
John Richetti argues that the Man of the Hill episode functions to warn readers against overgeneralizing, the
flaw, perhaps, of Richardson’s spectator. Campbell argues persuasively that Fielding’s novel is markedly
historical, noticeably bound in a particular time and place through its allusion to contemporary literature and
politics, parallels between characters and contemporary figures, and exploration of timely cultural issues.
Sophia, she writes, mistaken by an innkeeper for Jacobite rebel Jenny Cameron, is “neither a purely private and
ahistorical creation, nor a strictly Whig construction of feminine character, but a highly individual paragon of
‘femininity’ as construed, simultaneously, within residual and newly dominant political cultures” (Campbell
170). In lieu of universal ideals, Fielding’s spectator is bound within distinctively English ideals, his point of
view not anonymous but English—open-minded, spirited, and privileging freedom above all else.
83
circles in the theater: Richardson befriended Colley Cibber, David Garrick, Aaron Hill, and
Edward Moore off-stage, while Fielding picked fights with Johnson and the Lord
Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays backstage.124 As a result, the two writers also idealized
different forms of spectatorship: Richardson modeled his protagonists on Addison and Steele,
while Fielding disparaged the abovementioned critics and censors within his satirical novel.
Fielding admonishes the “Reptile of a Critic,” like Walpole’s Examiner of Plays, for
censoring art in a way that contradicts the virtues of English freedom (TJ 337, 366). In
contrast with the Walpolian reptile critic, Fielding’s ideal spectator shares similarities with
the ideal spectator of Dryden, Hogarth, Haywood, and Pope. Willing to defer judgment and
tolerate moral and aesthetic freedoms, Fielding’s ideal spectator (modeled by his narrator and
his title character) values such freedoms as an expression of national identity.
Fielding’s ideal spectator is a model of the Enlightenment subject and the British
citizen; his morality is grounded more in discernment than in action, the observation of virtue
rather than the performance of it. Fielding grants agency to readers and characters who
actively engage in the task of careful interpretation, and in a work in which appearances
constantly deceive, Fielding celebrates good judgment as the greatest virtue of his hero and
the most important quality of his ideal reader. 125 In the following pages, transitioning to a
close reading of spectatorship in Fielding’s novel, I will outline how Fielding’s narrator
trains both his hero and his readers as spectator citizens.
124
For more information on Fielding’s vexed relationship with Johnson, see Robert Etheridge Moore’s “Dr.
Johnson of Fielding and Richardson” (1951).
125
See pp. 93, 109 and 398 for examples. The historical crisis underlying Tom Jones, the Jacobite Rebellion of
1745, was likewise caught up in a crisis of authority and legitimacy as a farcical backdrop. The problem of
deceiving appearances creates a crisis of paternal authority that permeates the novel.
84
While his intentions are consistently virtuous, Tom repeatedly fails to act consistently
with these intentions. And it is this moral complexity—rather than mere immorality—which
was censured by his most vehement contemporary critics. Richardson condemned Fielding’s
attempt “to whiten a vicious Character, and to make Morality bend to his Practices.”126 A
contemporary letter to the editor accused Fielding of making the same mistake as Jones, of
failing to follow through on good intentions: “A worthy Design he hath had: Pray Heaven it
be found as well executed as formed!”127 Samuel Johnson perhaps most famously censored
Tom Jones for the vice of its otherwise sympathetic title character, preaching that “Vice, for
Vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust.”128 However, Fielding argues that
Johnson’s narrow aesthetics, like the French neoclassical unities, are too strict to be
stalwartly English.
If Richardson hints at Clarissa’s problematic performativity, Fielding announces Tom
Jones’ at full volume. Throughout the text, Fielding spotlights Tom’s vices, which are
heightened by “the disadvantageous Light in which they appeared” (TJ 78). The hero’s
introduction to the scene lacks “a Flourish of Drums and Trumpets, [which] rouse a Martial
Spirit in the Audience,” setting the stage for his repeatedly disappointing performances (TJ
100). At best, Tom Jones is a farcical buffoon; at worst, he plays the part of a bygone
Restoration-era “profligate and libertine” (TJ 126).129 The theatrical metaphors that Fielding
126
See Richardson’s “A Very Bad Tendency” in Tom Jones: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Sheridan Baker.
Second edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995 (657).
127
Orbilius. “An Examen of The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling” in Tom Jones: A Norton Critical Edition
(659).
128
129
Johnson, Samuel. Excerpts from The Rambler in Tom Jones: A Norton Critical Edition (666).
Tiffany Potter more benignly compares Tom to the Restoration rake by calling him a “cheerful sinner” and a
“good-natured Georgian libertine” (Potter preface). Potter implicitly draws parallels between Tom Jones’ links
to the theater and his links to English identity.
85
uses to describe Tom Jones emphasize his failure as a performer. Blifil describes Tom’s
bastardly birth as a “tragical Spectacle,” the settings of his various escapades are framed as
“scenes,” and Tom is ever “acting” a “part” in a tragic charade (TJ 166; 342, 167, 451; 507).
From the opening scenes of the novel, Fielding uses theatrical language to set the stage for
Tom’s distress:
We are obliged to bring our Heroe on the Stage in a much more
disadvantageous Manner than we could wish; and to declare honestly, even at
his first Appearance, that it was the universal Opinion of all Mr. Allworthy’s
Family, that he was certainly born to be hanged (TJ 78).
Unlike Richardson, Fielding does not want his reader to instantly agree with this “universal
Opinion.” Instead, Fielding uses theatrical metaphors to show readers that first impressions,
appearances, and public opinion inevitably lead to gross misinterpretations.
But like Richardson, Fielding also uses theatrical imagery to explore a new form of
heroism in the novel. “Tom is not a military hero,” remarks J. Paul Hunter; “Neither is he a
national leader… [Fielding] makes Tom the new man of mid-century English society, a
citizen.”130 Building on Hunter’s identification of Tom Jones as a citizen, I argue that despite
his various moral shortcomings and blunders, Tom Jones is heroic in his role as a spectator.
130
Hunter 139. Many other critics make similar arguments. Robert Folkenflik argues, in his discussion of
eighteenth-century heroism, that “the critique of heroism, strenuously mounted during this period, may be as
important as heroism itself, and at certain times more important” (Folkenflik 15). Peter Hughes writes that
“Honor, the cultural and ethical principle of monarchy, was throughout this period opposed and finally
overthrown by the republican principle of virtue. That, as we shall see, is precisely what happened in the
transformation of the heroic. Tragedy, epic, the heroic epistle—all literary modes based upon the principle of
honor—are subverted and displaced by satire, history, and the novel (first composed of familiar letters)—all
literary modes based upon the principle of virtue” (Hughes 169). Robert Folkenflik describes the inactive
heroism of the eighteenth century as a process of domestication: “This major transformation… from public to
private… leads to an emphasis on psychology over behavior and on interiors over exteriors” (Folkenflik 18).
Hughes agrees, adding “The external and physical world of heroism—battles, walls, Parthians—is
overwhelmed by the internal and psychic world of desire” (Hughes 173). James William Johnson argues that
“military leadership, aristocratic superiority, and heroism” were increasingly replaced by “judicial and civic
aspects of heroism” (Johnson 31). “The whole history of the novel, from Richardson to Fielding to Jane
Austen,” writes Morse, “is based on the idea that if you want virtue you should look to the lowly, whether
without fortune, feminine, illegitimate or actually servants—these are the only people you can hope to rely on”
(Morse 23).
86
To condemn Tom Jones’ immoral behavior as unheroic to measure Tom Jones against the
wrong standard; in a novel about learning the art of patient judgment, we should evaluate
Tom’s role as a spectator rather than a performer. Tom drinks, fights, and steals, but he is an
ideal Englishman as a forgiving spectator. Tom’s sexual indulgences, like his love of beef
and ale, are brushed aside as common vices, perhaps even virtues, of a good Englishman.131
Tom’s heroism is rooted in his successful observation of goodness, and Fielding suggests that
recognizing goodness is more important than performing it.132
Tom’s relationship with Sophia emphasizes his position as a spectator. Sophia tells
Tom that “when I see you merit my Confidence, you will obtain it” (TJ 635). Unfortunately,
Tom and Sophia both know that he has done little to merit any such confidence. Instead,
Tom offers his abilities as a spectator as proof of his constancy:
‘Don’t believe me upon my Word; I have a better Security, a Pledge for my
Constancy, which it is impossible to see and to doubt… I will show you, my
charming Angel,’ cried Jones, seizing her Hand, and carrying her to the Glass.
‘There, behold it there in that lovely Figure, in that Face, that Shape, those
Eyes, that Mind which shines through those eyes: Can the Man who shall be
in possession of these be inconstant? Impossible!’ (TJ 635).
Tom insists that his apprehension of Sophia’s beauty, goodness, and virtue merit his
possession of them, and, in a circular argument, that his possession will allow him to merit
that possession.133 Tom Jones’s heroism, like that of the reformed rake of the previous
131
Other critics have suggested that Tom’s apparent vices are simultaneously his virtues, including Regina
Janes, who argues that violence and sex are not “real” crimes according to Fielding, both of which can be either
virtues or vices depending on context and motivation (TJ 172, 174). While Fielding’s laxity regarding sexual
misconduct is often contrasted with Richardson’s piety, Robert Etheridge Moore quips that “The only
difference in this respect between Pamela and Tom Jones is that she manages to wiggle out of bed at the last
moment, after Richardson has devoted many pages to describing the encounter, while Fielding merely draws the
curtains and leaps ahead to other concerns” (Moore 169-70).
132
133
William Ray describes “observation” as a form of cultural authority (Ray 44-52).
Sophia’s name, which means wisdom, suggests that she is less a realistic human model of virtue for readers
than a symbolic virtue we should, like Tom, learn to appreciate. For a fuller discussion of Sophia and the
context of wisdom as a female figure, see J. Paul Hunter’s “Rethinking Form in Tom Jones” (2009).
87
generation’s stage, lies not in his performance of virtue but in his eventual recognition of it.
Fielding’s narrator seems to agree with Tom Jones’s self-evaluation, promising readers that
Whatever in the Nature of Jones had a Tendency to Vice, has been corrected
by continual Conversation with this good Man [Allworthy], and by his Union
with the lovely and virtuous Sophia. He hath also, by Reflexion on his past
Follies, acquired a Discretion and Prudence very uncommon in one of his
lively Parts (TJ 641).134
By observing virtue in other characters, Tom Jones achieves his own particular definition of
goodness.
Fielding suggests that Englishmen have imperfections—imperfections that require the
English citizen to fall short of moral and aesthetic standards of perfection. Paul Kelleher
argues that “the celebrated architecture of Fielding’s novel not only accommodates the
seemingly unruly forces of lust, but also rearticulates this passion as constitutive of moral
feeling and social order.”135 Seen in this light, “Tom’s sexual excess may be the root, rather
than just the regrettable by-product, of his generous behavior toward one and all.”136 Tiffany
Potter even more boldly suggests that Fielding’s moralizing “requires wildness and
subversion in order for the individual to be truly good.”137
134
Prudence “evokes two clusters of meaning. One cluster includes reflection, an awareness of likely
consequences of a given action, judiciousness, and wisdom that accrues as great thoughts are applied to
experience. The other connotes caution in exposing oneself to the malice of others” (Paxman 116). “Prudence
provides the social dimension to goodness, a necessary condition of virtue in a community that cannot know
directly the heart of its members” (Paxman 202). Pat Rogers disagrees that Tom’s primary quality is prudence,
instead arguing that “prudence and discretion are not quite synonyms, and discretion may be the more
appropriate concept” (Rogers 1).” The legal “Age of Discretion” at this time was 14-21, and Rogers argues that
Jones has a “sagacity which shines through his indiscretions” (Rogers 9).
135
Kelleher 165. Like Tom’s evaluation of Black George, the feeling behind the behavior is more morally
constitutive than the behavior itself. Male lust is not only rehabilitated and legitimated, Kelleher argues, but
also vindicated as a source of “moral judgment and ethical conduct,” infusing “law with spirit and duty with
blood” (Kelleher 165). Tom’s lust is a masculine version of the sentimental ideal, based on “the principles of
sociability and ‘good nature’” within “sexually saturated virtue” (Kelleher 165).
136
137
Kelleher 165.
Potter 121. The libertine, Potter explains, uses “masquerade and disguise” as “tools of… liberty,” again
gesturing toward a relationship between theatricality and English virtues of freedom. Potter further argues that
88
Fielding agrees with Dryden’s premise of English roughness as an unlikely virtue,
arguing that in the novel, “Heroes, notwithstanding the high Ideas, which by the Means of
Flatterers they may entertain of themselves, or the World may conceive of them, have
certainly more of Mortal than Divine about them” (TJ 327). Fielding is committed to a sense
of realism that demands flaws in the name of plausibility.138 In contrast to the reptile critic, a
benevolent spectator will recognize that,
if there be enough of Goodness in a Character to engage the Admiration and
Affection of a well-disposed mind, though there should appear some of those
little Blemishes… they will raise our Compassion rather than our Abhorrence.
Indeed, nothing can be of more moral Use than the Imperfections which are
seen in Examples of this Kind” (TJ 339).
In England, happily, neither men nor genres are unpolluted. Virtue and vice, he writes, can
coexist in the same character in life, and so should they in literature. This moral complexity,
Fielding insists, is not the same as moral license. But the freedoms Tom takes, and the
freedoms he allows others as a sympathetic spectator, make him a good citizen. In contrast
to Richardson, Fielding seeks a protagonist whose moral value is grounded in his moral
complexity rather than moral exemplarity, largely because he pursues distinctively English
freedom above universal moral perfection.
Tom does not leap from the womb an ideal spectator. In fact, Tom begins the
narrative as an object of judgment—Thwackum and Square disparage him, Sophie is
disappointed in him, and Allworthy disowns him. He is even critiqued by the voice of public
Tom Jones combines qualities of the Restoration rake and the sentimental hero within Fielding’s idealization of
a “good-natured Georgian libertine.”
138
Fielding also adds that “if the ancient Opinion, that Men might live very comfortably on Virtue only, be, as
the modern wise Men just above-mentioned pretend to have discovered, a notorious Error; no less false is, I
apprehend, that Position of some Writers of Romance, that a Man can live altogether on Love” (TJ 459). He
also adds that poetic conventions like the unity of time, place and action are unnecessary because they have no
foundation in nature (TJ 137).
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opinion itself: “Tom Jones,” Fielding narrates, in his introduction of the hero, “was
universally disliked” (TJ 79).139 Malinda Snow argues that, especially in the novel’s
introduction, “Fielding presents Tom not so much as a judge but as an object of judgment,
both by other characters and by the reader.”140
However, Fielding reveals that these judgments of Tom tell us more about the
speakers than Tom himself. The condemnations of Blifil, Square and Thwackum serve only
to vilify them, not Jones. Fielding is training the reader, before he makes his own judgment
of Jones, in thinking carefully about the potential consequences of hasty criticism.141 Other
more sympathetic characters also serve as foils for Tom Jones’ spectatorship. Partridge’s
defective criticism, particularly in the Hamlet scene, offers one such example. His flawed
spectatorship becomes a parodied performance, as his violent tremblings and knocking knees
betray his real fear of the ghost to a ready audience “who were more attentive to what he said
than to any Thing that passed on the Stage” (TJ 557). Kate Rumbold notes that he responds
to Shakespeare’s lines directly “as if he were on stage himself.”142 “No, no, Sir,” he insists
139
Positive and negative judgments alike disempower Tom Jones, as Tom tells Allworthy that he shuns even
sympathetic observation: “O my dear Uncle! This Goodness, this Tenderness, overpowers, unmans, destroys
me” (TJ 625).
140
Snow 48.
141
Chibka argues that Fielding’s novel includes a “leitmotif of false knowledge” (Chibka 110). Models of bad
reading and bad spectatorship, Thwackum, Square and Blifil, along with Allworthy and sometimes Tom Jones
himself, reveal a “propensity to think they know things they don’t—to know, putting it another way, false
things—lands them in frequent in never irreparable trouble” (Chibka 109). Fielding’s novel hopes to train
readers to avoid similar hubris, by revealing even seemingly sensible assumptions as mistakes, such as
Bridget’s feelings for Tom. “Our pride and gullibility,” Chibka continues, “often put us in tandem with
characters whose mortification by their own pride and gullibility we are regaled to see” (Chibka 110).
142
Rumbold 6. Rumbold compellingly suggests that “Laughable as he is, this heartfelt response apparently
does greater credit to Garrick and Shakespeare than to the tittering audience, immune to the play after a
thousand such polite evenings” (Rumbold 6). In simultaneously satirizing Partridge’s naïveté and the “jaded
audience’s immunity,” Fielding both laughs at Partridge and reprimands us for laughing at him.
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weakly, “Ghosts don’t appear in such Dresses as that” (TJ 554). Partridge is everything the
hearty English spectator should not be.
Allworthy, too, provides a counterpoint to Tom’s good judgment, confirming
Malinda Snow’s argument that “a good man is not necessarily a good judge.”143 Despite his
virtue, Allworthy grossly misjudges Blifil, Tom Jones, Bridget, Jenny, and Partridge. His
poor judgment leads to the suffering of the innocent and the reward of wickedness, and
despite having “an agreeable Person, a sound Constitution, a solid Understanding, and a
benevolent Heart,” his misjudgment unravels his moral goodness (TJ 27). Poor judgment
turns justice into injustice, benevolence into malevolence, and righteousness into moral
chaos. Allworthy’s misapprehension of character makes him a vehicle of moral disorder, and
another foil to Tom Jones’ spectatorship. By cataloguing various misjudgments of Tom
Jones early on in the narrative, including Allworthy’s, Fielding primes readers to withhold
judgment until they can gather more information about his character.
For Fielding, spectatorship is an expression of virtue, patriotism, and goodheartedness: as Snow writes, “What is at stake is who has the right to look and be looked
upon, to see and be seen, to be a viewer.”144 Fielding shows Tom Jones’ transformation from
unlikely hero to model citizen as a growth of his abilities as a spectator. When Tom is
forgiven and readmitted into his rightful place in society at the conclusion of the novel, it is
his merciful judgment of Blifil, his respectful judgment of Allworthy, his forgiving judgment
of Seagrim, his devotional judgment of Sophie, and his critical judgment of himself that
reveal his heroic character. It is Tom’s judgment of other characters, rather than their
143
Snow 44.
144
De Bolla 16.
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judgment of him, that determines his value as a hero. Similarly, it is readers’ judgment of
Tom Jones that can make them heroic or villainous spectators.
Even Tom Jones’s observation of folly in himself contributes to his authority as a
spectator. When Tom insists that “I have not been punished more than I deserved,” such
self-criticism disempowers any other character from passing judgment on him—and, more
likely than not, inspires readers to hope that these characters will give Tom the same merciful
judgment that he so often gave to them. Peter Carlton writes that “Tom disarms criticism by
becoming his own harshest judge.”145 The potency of observation as authority becomes
explicit in these final pages. Like Fielding’s ideal reader, Tom Jones is more critical of
himself than of others, his earlier forgivingness making him more forgivable.
Through Tom Jones, Fielding teaches readers to not be misled by appearances. Tom
Jones’s tragedy is that he “has disguised his goodness as effectively as Blifil has hidden his
wickedness.”146 Fielding laments over the climactic “Torments for poor Jones,” which are
compared to the point “when a Tragic Writer hath brought [his characters] to the highest
pitch of human misery;” Fielding regrets, here, “this Rogue, whom we have unfortunately
made our Heroe” (TJ 569-70). This constant allusion to the theater emphasizes how Tom’s
good nature proves to be useless without the external appearance of virtue. “It is not enough
that your Designs, nay that your Actions, are intrinsically good,” the narrator instructs
ironically; “you must take Care they shall appear so” (TJ 93).
In a novel that instructs readers in the art of spectatorship, learning how to avoid
misjudgment and misleading appearances is seminal. Michael Hall writes that “Fielding
145
Carlton 403.
146
Hall 104.
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frequently warns us not to judge too hastily on the basis of mere appearances,” as the
appearance of Bridget’s innocence, Mrs. Waters’ identity, Tom’s wickedness and Blifil’s
virtue are all revealed to be misleading.147 Both characters and readers are deceived by these
appearances—and these misapprehensions lead both characters and readers to condemn Tom
Jones unfairly. If readers are good spectators, Fielding implies, they will wait to judge, and
they will like Tom Jones.
Learning to like Tom Jones despite his appearances requires sympathetic
spectatorship rather than reptile criticism. Christine van Boheemen writes that “Tom’s
violation of the law of property, his poaching, his transgression against the commandment of
chastity, the sale of his Bible, his emotional turmoil at Allworthy’s illness are understood by
characters in the fiction as signs of a deep, ‘original flaw’ of character.”148 However,
Fielding reveals this critical assessment as a misreading of Tom Jones. Fielding warns
readers “not too hastily to condemn any of this Incidents in this our History… because thou
dost not immediately conceive in what Manner such Incident may conduce to that Design”
(TJ 337). Good readers will, following Tom Jones’ model of spectatorship, offer benevolent
judgment.
By suggesting that “A single bad act no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a
single bad Part on the Stage,” Fielding recognizes the value of treating Tom’s moral
ambiguity with a degree of reserve and compassion (TJ 213). By reimagining Tom Jones as
a critic and divorcing his profligate behavior from his heroic spectatorship, we can
147
Hall 103, Janes 165.
148
Boheemen 56.
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simultaneously reconcile his character with the novel’s didactic purpose and justify his
character as a heroic model for readers.
Fielding’s narrator reminds us to interpret (and imitate) his title character as an ideal
citizen and an ideal spectator. Fielding’s narrator, even more than his hero, explicitly trains
readers to be both skeptical of appearances and sympathetic to vices with virtuous
motivations—the two qualities that Fielding describes as essential for the English
spectator.149
Fielding invites us to read the aesthetic “wanderings” of his narrator with the same
open-mindedness that we read the moral “wanderings” of Tom Jones. Snow writes,
“Fielding certainly invites the reader of Tom Jones to consider the nature of good judgment.
It is also true, however, that the novel’s narrator leads the reader to make faulty judgment.”150
Regina Janes describes the narrator as an “unreliable, error-prone… wandering narratorerrant,” who is (like Tom Jones) good but flawed.151 Like Dryden, the narrator privileges
English freedoms above artificial standards. Janes appropriately describes the narrator’s
approach as “resistance training,”152 and Stephen B. Dobranski argues that the narrator
149
Moreover, the narrator’s point of view is further fragmented, as “the self-conscious and intrusive narrator,”
in the words of Scott Black, “allows Fielding to orchestrate a variety of points of view, perspectives, and voices
into a flexible style that participates in a spirited conversation with those echoing accents” (Black, describing
Charles Knight’s reading of Tom Jones, 534). Dobranski comments on the variety of points of view within
Fielding’s imagined audience, which he attempts to allocate into lower and upper classes (Dobranski 647).
Boheemen writes that “The problem of consciousness (its awareness of doubleness), or the problem of human
limitations, is resolved through the implicit recognition of a split in man. Man himself, to come to terms with
the problems of awareness raised by consciousness, constitutes himself as a hybrid being, split into spirit and
flesh, body and soul, or reason and instinct” (Boheemen 74). Fielding shows how this doubleness can be either
hypocritical (manipulatively performing something other than what you are) or moral (objectively observing
and evaluating oneself). Like Richardson, Fielding points to doubleness as both the virtue of the spectator and
the vice of the performer. Fielding splits Tom’s moral license from the narrator’s aesthetic license, while
arguing that both are demonstrative of English freedom.
150
Snow 37.
151
Janes 166.
152
Janes 169.
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announces the omissions he makes as a way to “rig Jones’s narrative.”153 The narrator’s
aesthetic liberties are as troubling as Tom Jones’ moral liberties, but both serve to train
readers in a form of spectatorship that is sympathetically and stalwartly English in its
promotion of freedom. In addition, by intentionally misleading readers, the narrator offers
readers a crash course in how and why to withhold judgment. Like many of Tom’s “errors,”
the narrator’s “misleading” meanderings are potentially malicious actions that can be
justified by their benevolent intentions.154
Like a prologue in the theater, the narrator’s Introductory Chapters frame the
narrative with instructional materials for spectators. And like other eighteenth-century
prologues, this discourse uses nationalistic rhetoric to guide its audience. Fielding’s eighteen
Introductory Chapters, directly addressing readers as critics, may seem far removed from the
action. However, his frequent address to the critic/reader emphasizes the spectator’s cultural
authority, encouraging readers to see spectatorship as heroic within Fielding’s novel.
Fielding’s rants against the reptile critic, often dismissed as tangential to the plot of Tom
153
Dobranski 633. Dobranski’s article argues that Fielding exercises significant authorial control over readers
through the narrator’s egregious omissions. Although readers are invited to contribute imaginative emotional
involvement in these moments of omission, they create the effect of a “wise and genial” narrator who is actually
exquisitely manipulative. Dobranski cites Iser’s previous study on the way Fielding “prestructures” reader
responses to show how explicitly suppressing information functions as a way to suppress readerly authority.
“With each conspicuous omission in Tom Jones, Fielding reminds readers that he can determine everything we
read—and everything we don’t” (Dobranski 638). A second read, he reminds us, reveals that seemingly
inconsequential omissions are actually suppressing important information. As Dobranski writes, the narrator
leads us to overestimate our perceptiveness and retroactively realize our mistakes. John Richetti goes so far as
to suggest that Blifil is the character who most resembles Fielding’s narrator, as both withhold information and
disguise their motives.
154
For more information about Fielding’s narrator as a voice of community rather than a voice of omniscience,
see Brian McCrea’s “Fielding’s ‘Omniscient’ Narrator: Romances, Newspapers, and the Voice of True History”
(2008). While McCrea insists that the narrator is not omniscient because he does not tell readers everything we
need to know, he does not fully account for the possibility that the narrator knows all but simply chooses not to
tell. McCrea is right, however, in suggesting that the “magical move” in Fielding’s novel is his use of “a firstperson narrator who seems a third” which “create the impression that they speak for all Englishmen” (McCrea
313). Though less connected to ideas of theatricality, John Richetti’s The English Novel in History, 1700-1780
smartly analyzes Fielding’s sense of community within his narration and explores his desire for a learned
audience adept in political and literary allusion.
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Jones, are more productively understood by reading Tom Jones as Fielding’s alternative to
the reptile critic. By reading Tom Jones as the narrator’s model of ideal spectatorship, this
study connects the prefatory chapters to the plot, and Tom’s moral wandering to the stylistic
narrative wandering.
More often than not, these Introductory Chapters warn readers against being critics
like Square, Thwackum, or Blifil. While Fielding mocks various forms of vanity and
pleasures of the flesh, his novel most consistently critiques hypocrisy—the vice of the reptile
critic. Fielding flags the cultural authority of the critic in frequent addresses about (and
sometimes to) the reading “critic” of his novel, and his descriptions of the critic bite with a
viciousness not unlike that which he accuses such critics of venomously discharging. If Tom
Jones models what the ideal spectator and English citizen should be, the Introductory
Chapters warn us about what the ideal spectator and English citizen should not be.
Fielding’s most famous novelistic “prologue” takes place in Book VII, where the
narrator uses an extended metaphor to link the world and the stage. As Stephen B. Dobranski
points out, Fielding uses “a theatrical metaphor to restrict readers’ participation” in this
scene, anticipating and repudiating a variety of potential audience reactions, reminding us
that “the author provides the conditions for—and tries to establish the parameters of—the
role that readers can play.”155
In this passage, the narrator idiosyncratically reads the audience, rather than the
actors, as the key players in the drama of life. “The World hath been often compared to the
Theatre,” writes the narrator, “and many grave Writers, as well as the Poets, have considered
human Life as a great Drama” (TJ 210). However, he adds that “None, as I remember, have
at all considered the Audience at this great Drama” (TJ 211). Fielding immediately shifts
155
Dobranski 648, 51.
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readers’ attention from performers to spectators, explicitly articulating spectatorship as a
gauge of citizenship and goodness for both his hero and his readers.
As the narrator imagines readers’ potential responses to the gamekeeper stealing
Jones’ money, he writes that
Those who sat in the World’s upper Gallery, treated the Incident, I am well
convinced with their usual Vociferation… The Pit, as usual, was no doubt
divided… As for the Boxes, they behaved with their accustomed Politeness.
Most of them were attending to something else (TJ 212).
In the same way that Hogarth does in Laughing Audience, Fielding implies that the
audience’s reaction to the stage is indicative of their class and location in the theater (Fig. 1).
If you condemn Black George, he implies, you reveal yourself as occupying the cheap seats
in life, as being poor, probably illiterate, and eager to condemn; if you choose to not care
about the gamekeeper, you reveal yourself as a shallow socialite, less eager to see than be
seen. Connecting the diagetical action with a metaphorical audience in these prefatory
chapters, and comparing readers with theater spectators, Fielding invites his audience to
reflect on their own assumptions and judgments, and to repress hasty condemnations.
In contrast, affirming the spectators who observe the performance from “behind the
scenes” of the great drama of life, Fielding’s narrator implies that a backstage point of view
will give a fuller context, and a more sympathetic observation. Fielding offers a model of
this backstage interpretation of Black George—one given by his very own citizen spectator,
Tom Jones.
In contrast to venomous critics who are eager to condemn, Tom Jones considers the
theft from a more sympathetic point of view: “what a Temptation to a Man who hath tasted
such bitter Distress, it must be to have a Sum in his Possession, which must put him and his
Family beyond any future Possibility of suffering the like” (TJ 632). Tom Jones reframes the
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crime as a virtue rather than a vice, committed by the gamekeeper with the intent to protect
his family from suffering. To properly evaluate virtue and vice, Fielding suggests, we must
contextualize the situation locally, rather than use a universal measure of virtue as is
advocated in Richardson’s novels. What seems like a vice is actually Black George’s
virtue—stealing from Tom is a demonstration of his desire to provide for his family. A
spectator who recognizes this motive, by seeing the situation from behind the scenes and
contextualizing his action more fully, Fielding suggests, is the ideal citizen spectator and his
ideal reader.
Examining the context of the crime, Fielding suggests, may prevent readers’ overly
hasty condemnation according to overly simplistic rules of morality. Tom’s response here is
heroic for its humanity. His own moral fallibilities, it seems, have softened his judgment of
others—and we as readers should remember our own moral fallibilities, Fielding reminds us
over and over, before we string up Tom. In short, Tom’s unrelenting sympathy for
“seemingly” unsympathetic characters models the way Fielding wants us to read Tom. Tom
Jones’s good judgment, penetrative gaze, and right opinions model critical discernment for
Fielding’s readers, encouraging delay as a means to make more reflexive, sympathetic,
context-driven moral judgments.
In contrast, savage critics in the theater, like the spectators who would condemn
Black George for stealing money from Tom, reveal their own malice rather than Black
George’s. To sneer at someone else’s vice is to call attention to your own. Fielding
literalizes the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, by using Tom to show how the
rogue spectator sees nothing but vice in others while the virtuous spectator recognizes their
goodness. Critics who condemn deserve condemnation, and critics who show mercy earn
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theirs in turn. The narrator’s Introductory Chapters create a site of authorial control, by
reminding readers that their judgment of the novel reflects less on the novel’s virtues than
their own.156 To dislike Tom Jones is hasty, unforgiving, and maybe even unpatriotic. If
Tom Jones fails to satisfy, it is the reader, not the book, who is defective.
As Fielding’s chapter on the world and the stage concludes, the narrator’s comic
treatment of the theater audience evolves into a more pointed instruction for his ideal reader:
Now we, who are admitted behind the Scenes of this great Theater of Nature,
(and no Author ought to write any Thing besides Dictionaries157 and Spelling
Books who hath not this Privilege) can censure the Action, without conceiving
any absolute Detestation of the Person, whom perhaps Nature may not have
designed to act an ill Part in all her Dramas: For in this Instance, Life most
exactly resembles the Stage, since it is often the same Person who represents
the Villain and the Heroe; and he who engages your Admiration To-day, will
probably attract your contempt To-morrow…
Upon the whole, then, the Man of Candour and of true Understanding is never
hasty to condemn. He can censure an Imperfection, or even a Vice, without
Rage against the guilty Party. In a Word, they are the same Folly, the same
Childishness, the same Ill-breeding, and the same Ill-nature, which raise all
the Clamours and Uproars both in Life and on the Stage. The worst of Men
generally have the Words Rogue and Villain most in their Mouths, as the
lowest of all Wretches are the aptest to cry out low in the Pit (TJ 212-13).
Fielding praises the critic who, by refusing to be misled by appearances, recognizes moral
complexity and suspends judgment when necessary. Lynch writes that for Fielding,
“Wisdom comes from an ability to suspend judgment.”158 Lynch adds, “Fielding directly
connects our moral sense response with our critical response to the text. He implies that illnatured critics suffer from an impaired moral sense and that their impairments prevent them
156
Chibka remarks that “Fielding often suggests that readers look within ourselves: if we locate qualities like
Love or Compassion, we’ll believe his good-natured characters; if we find only a stew of selfish, dirty waste,
we’ll know why we cannot” (Chibka 104).
157
A charming hint to Johnson that he should forbear hastily condemning Tom Jones’ vice, and an ironic
premonition considering Johnson’s eventual condemnation of the novel.
158
Lynch 609.
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from seeing the design of his novel.”159 Liking Fielding’s hero and novel, he implies, reveals
a reader’s virtue as a citizen and a spectator.
The authority of the spectator, then, is shared not only between Tom Jones and the
narrator, but also with the reader. While he encourages the suspension of judgment, Fielding
does not let his readers passively stand by: “for thou art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine
that we intend, when we began this great Work, to leave thy Sagacity nothing to do; or that,
without sometimes exercising this Talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our Pages with
any Pleasure or Profit to thyself” (TJ 397). Fielding calls readers to exercise “sagacity” and
“talent” for the sake of “pleasure or profit,” and he invites them to play an active role as
participatory spectators.
J. Paul Hunter describes Fielding’s desire to “embrace a variety of roles and
interactions and come from various places, classes, and legal statuses.”160 Fielding’s vision
of the novel form is similarly varied, as he describes Tom Jones as a “heroic-comic epic in
prose.”161 For Fielding, the complexity of the novel as a genre signals a need for complexity
in readers’ interpretation of its moral message. To hope for generic or moral clarity, he
explains, is optimistic but simply not realistic: “There are a set of religious, or rather moral
writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this
world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one
objection, namely, that it is not true” (TJ 459). Fielding returns to this idea of literature with
159
Lynch 612.
160
Hunter 333.
161
For the definitive reading of Fielding’s style, see Jill Campbell’s “Fielding’s Style” (2005). Campbell argues
that Fielding’s distinctively personal, various, and meandering technique, though dismissed by stylothetes like
D.A. Miller and curmudgeons like authors of style manuals, is his greatest achievement as a writer. Fielding’s
narrator, in his cozy familiarity, expansive and heavily punctuated sentences, and vague abstractions gives his
novels a “dramatic” quality. His unusual punctuation, for instance, articulates Fielding’s words aurally in a
particular way, functioning as a physical, sensory, embodiment of style that connects the reader to the writer.
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one-dimensional genres and morals, pointing out the ease of interpreting such literature.
“Had we been of the tragic complexion,” he explains, “the reader must allow that we were
very nearly arrived… what remains to be completed is a murder or two and a few moral
sentences” (TJ 569) But, Fielding implies, his novel is not tragedy—and nor is it history,
comedy, epic, or realism. So, the reader cannot anticipate either the action or the lesson.
By resisting alignment with any single genre, Fielding implicitly forces readers to
expect the unexpected, and to postpone judgment until he or she has collected more
information and evidence. If goodness can be at odds with virtue and actions at odds with
intentions, readers must wait to evaluate the “rogue we have unfortunately made our hero”
(TJ 570). In unsettling genre expectations, Fielding forces the reader to postpone
judgment—which is his primary lesson for moral spectatorship.
In forcing the reader to postpone judgment, by unsettling our genre expectations,
Fielding gives readers the satisfaction of the spectator’s authority while heavy-handedly
dictating the qualifications for that authority. In the Introductory Chapters, Fielding’s
narrator repeatedly criticizes spectators who are eager to disapprove, who condemn based on
appearances, and who admonish without compassion. Although Fielding criticized
Richardson’s moralizing tone, Fielding grants his audience little more agency than his rival,
only offering his readers the option to choose between predetermined correct and incorrect
interpretations. As Stephen B. Dobranski suggests, Fielding invites readers to exercise
“discovery,” a term which simultaneously “implies the need of an active, discerning audience
but also indicates a preexisting meaning that will restrict readers’ interpretations.”162
162
Dobranski 639. In describing the plot between Lady Bellaston and Fellamar, for instance, Dobranski writes
that “The pair’s plot is so horrible that it cannot be discussed openly, and readers are momentarily left to
speculate what such ‘violent Methods’ might entail. But here again our imagination is not given free rein;
Fielding alerts us at the start of the chapter that the following pages contain ‘a very black Design against
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However, he adds that “even those places where Fielding’s narrator directly asks readers to
fill in the narrative gaps paradoxically restrict readers’ participation.”163 By inviting the
reader to make judgments in heavily overdetermined situations, Fielding leads audiences to
conformity through seeming autonomy, to consensus through seeming variety (TJ 92).
In his previous life as a playwright, Fielding’s most intimate relationship with his
audience takes place in the peripheral material: the footnotes, the prefaces, and especially the
prologues.164 Bevis explains the now-standard reading of Fielding’s shift from the theater to
the novel: “When Walpole’s Licensing Act forced Fielding to shift his ground, he took over
the essence of this dramatic style as a narrative technique, adapted to the needs and purposes
of prose fiction.”165 In his novels, Fielding recycled many of these earlier techniques, using
peripheral material like the Introductory Chapters to guide readers in becoming ideal English
spectators. Like Pope and Dryden, Fielding used ancillary material to nudge readers to
sympathize with his text.
Like his narrator and his hero, Fielding is “an admirable critic of his own art.”166 And
it is the prologue, Fielding suggests, that trains us to interpret the mainpiece as successful
spectators and citizens. Fielding’s reader learns how to practice charitable spectatorship in a
narrative that demands “our most supple and open-minded reading,” despite the fact (or
Sophia,’ and he later explicitly identifies what Bellaston in this scene never says” (Dobranski 641). For
Dobranski, omission creates nominal interpretive freedom for readers.
163
Dobranski 665. For more on “ironic invitations” for readers’ participation, see Wayne C. Booth’s The
Rhetoric of Fiction (1983), p. 170.
164
Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies includes a mock-editor that transitions from Fielding’s work in the theater
to the narrator of his novel. Like Richardson, the status of the spectator as a figure outside and above the
narrative suggests a centralization of authority.
165
Bevis 63.
166
Moore 173.
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maybe because of the fact) that the reader is misled as much as he is guided by both the
narrator and the hero. 167
167
Chibka 110.
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CHAPTER III
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SPECTATRESS:
OBSERVING SPECTATORS IN MARIA EDGEWORTH’S BELINDA
Maria Edgeworth’s earliest education included key eighteenth-century studies of
sentimental spectatorship. One of the first theories of spectatorship that she encountered was
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.168 A near contemporary with her father, Adam
Smith was idolized by Richard Edgeworth, especially during Maria’s childhood, when he
was connected to the Lunar Society of Birmingham.169 Reverently attached to her father,
Maria Edgeworth’s admiration for the one grew out of her admiration for the other.170
“Identifying herself intellectually with her father,” Butler writes, “Maria Edgeworth… speaks
in fiction with the voice of the Lunar Society and Adam Smith.”171 A practical scientist
himself, Richard Edgeworth inspired his daughter with the same optimism in empirical
philosophy that distinguishes Smith’s model of the impartial sentimental spectator. Maria
Edgeworth first read Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1783 and even recommended it
168
Her earliest writing included imitations of Addison and Steele, as her father instructed her to write stories
“about the length of a Spectator” (Butler 146).
169
The Lunar Society’s “moral and social philosophy originated not on the Continent, but in the Scottish circle
of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson” (Butler 59). From this society, Richard Edgeworth gained a “belief in the
democracy of knowledge, [which] affected the education of his own children” (Hollingworth 32). Hollingworth
describes this democratization as a mixed reverence for both academic and practical education within Richard
Edgeworth’s pedagogical theories—a both/and approach that was later adopted by his daughter on a larger
scale. As James Chandler notes, the Lunar Society made no distinction between artistic and scientific
experimentation (lecture July 7, 2009). Other key figures included Matthew Bolton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas
Day, Joseph Priestly and Anna Seward.
170
Victorians tended to view her father as an alter ego or split personality (Butler 6), and Marilyn Butler
explains that after years of being ignored by her father, “mechanics and literature were the interests which drew
them together” (Butler 58). Butler’s still-paramount biography calls the daughter Maria, and “Edgeworth”
refers to her father in her own biography—a move that parallels Maria’s own designation of herself as little “i”
and her father as big “I” in her letters, and that echoes the fact that Maria co-wrote an autobiography for her
father’s life, but not of her own life. The author herself writes that “it was to please my father I first exerted
myself to write, to please him I continued” (Butler 289).
171
Butler 398.
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to her sister Fanny.172 From Smith, Edgeworth first admired the spectator whose
observations were rooted in scientific impartiality.
In addition to Smith’s treatise on the impartial spectator, Edgeworth was also
intimately acquainted with Joanna Baillie’s theories of a more curious spectator. Baillie
wrote a series of Plays on the Passions, whose “Introductory Discourse” outlines a system of
spectatorship that contrasts with Smith’s, and suggests that imaginative sympathy arises from
interested rather than disinterested, literary rather than scientific, intuitive rather than
objective observations. Though Edgeworth’s personal acquaintance with Baillie was closer
than with Smith, less is known about their relationship. Baillie was one of the few London
literary figures who defended Richard Edgeworth against critical unpopularity, and this
intervention won her Edgeworth’s regard.173 The two remained lifelong friends, exchanging
letters and visits for upwards of four decades. From Baillie, Edgeworth learned to admire a
spectator whose observations were rooted in intuitive curiosity.
Given these close personal and intellectual connections to Smith and Baillie, it is not
surprising to see Edgeworth take up the theme of spectatorship in her first major adult novel,
Belinda, which was published in 1801. While the novel includes numerous subplots, the
main action traces two female spectators in their moral development. The first is Belinda, a
young virgin who is thrust on the marriage market, and who resists attempts to put her on
public display. Instead of parading herself, she carefully observes the characters around her
in order to make a good match. The second is Lady Delacour, an aging society woman, and
Belinda’s benefactress, whose friendship with her young ward inspires her to reform. As
172
173
Butler 150.
Joanna Baillie in an 1813 letter to Walter Scott wrote that “I have taken a goodwill to him in spite of
fashion” (Butler 230).
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both learn to adopt positions as spectators, both earn versions of domestic bliss in the novel’s
conclusion. The novel’s key scenes pivot on the ability of these two heroines to perform
good spectatorship, from the opening masquerade ball to the concluding tableau vivant.
Throughout the novel, Edgeworth uses theatrical scenes and tropes in order to investigate the
qualities of proper spectatorship.
Containing both one of the greatest actresses and one of the dullest heroines of the
English novel, Edgeworth’s Belinda reveals the eighteenth-century novel’s continued
fascination with, and repulsion by, the stage.174 Belinda, the title character, models the
Smithian impartial spectator, while her mentor Lady Delacour models the Baillian curious
spectator. This chapter argues that Edgeworth’s ideal spectator is a synthesis of these two
versions of the spectator.
Janet Egleson Dunleavy describes Belinda and Lady Delacour’s competing claims on
the reader as an unresolved “bitonality.”175 With the tone (and the sympathy) of Belinda split
between these two heroines, the novel’s moral authority is also split between their two points
of view. 176 Lady Delacour and Belinda rehearse the tension between Adam Smith’s
174
Edgeworth herself loved plays, and wrote several, including Double Disguise, Old Poz, Whim for Whim,
Angelina, and Comic Dramas. None, however, were performed outside of the home. Sheridan’s famous 1799
rejection of Whim for Whim, on proprietary rather than aesthetic grounds, marked the end of Maria’s dreams of
the stage, and she adapted the play into a story for publication in 1801, the same year she published Belinda
(Butler 164-65). Despite this rejection, however, he suggested that she try to write for the stage again after
reading Belinda (Butler 314).
175
The term was coined by Robert B. Heilman. Jeffrey Cass notes a similar “cultural hybridity,” in his words
(Cass 62), and Teresa Michals suggests that Edgeworth’s “double” identity is rooted in her baffling and
contradictory endorsement of both liberal and conservative agendas (Michals 1). Michal’s essay explains how
Edgeworth uses an individualizing form (the novel) to promote socializing virtues (as individual characters
represent groups or types).
176
This bitonality manifests between the narrator and the editor in Castle Rackrent, which is the text Dunleavy
focuses on in her reading. Like Lady Delacour, Thady is the “bystander” who “dominates the book,” and like
Belinda, the editor applies faceless moral commentary (Butler 306).
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scientifically-driven impartial spectator and Joanna Baillie’s intuition-based curious
spectator.
Edgeworth’s biography is a compelling synthesis of split identities, as she was a
member of the wealthy landowning class but a woman, a Protestant with overt Catholic
sympathies, an Englishwoman to the Irish but an Irishwoman to the English. In constant flux
as both an insider and an outsider, Edgeworth prided herself as an astute observer of these
different groups. Because “to observe” can mean both to passively, objectively notice and to
more actively, subjectively comment, the term “observation” nicely captures the inherent
contradiction in synthesizing these two heroines’ opposing performances of spectatorship.
For Edgeworth, the novel itself is (like the ideal spectator) an astute observation of the world,
an observation grounded in both impartial and curious spectatorship.
Before diving into the novel, we need to contextualize the two versions of
spectatorship that Edgeworth’s heroines enact. The one is from a philosopher, a champion of
Enlightenment rationality who was a member of Edgeworth’s father’s generation.177 The
other is from an artist, a champion of Romantic sensibility who was a woman, a peer, and a
personal friend to Edgeworth. Both theorists link virtuous spectatorship to the theater, and
both identify moral expression in the imaginative exchange of sympathy through observation.
But like Edgeworth’s heroines, one spectator is almost too far from the stage, and the other is
almost too close. Edgeworth’s negotiation between these two heroines enacts a larger
negotiation between two systems of spectatorship that typify moral thought in the late
eighteenth century.
177
Marilyn Butler writes that Edgeworth “has the intellectual stamp of a generation, or half a generation, earlier
than that of her own early adulthood” (Butler 66). She grew up reading Burke, Kames, and Reynolds.
107
Fraser Easton has studied Smith and Edgeworth in regards to material happiness,
focusing on Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Edgeworth’s Irish tales.178 However, no critical
studies have considered the moral rather than economic common ground between the two
writers, even though Edgeworth references The Theory of Moral Sentiments but never
mentions The Wealth of Nations in Belinda.179 Recovering attention to Edgeworth’s use of
Smith’s spectator is essential to understanding the novel’s moral perspective, as its title
heroine shares many features of Smith’s spectator.
According to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, moral growth emerges from the
ability to simultaneously project oneself and remove oneself from another’s sufferings.
The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from consideration of
what he himself would feel, if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation,
and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with
his present reason and judgment (MS I.6).
At once both in his own mind and imaginatively in the body of someone else, Smith’s
impartial spectator remains halfway detached as a means to ensure that his sentimental
sympathy is grounded in rational virtue. The distinctive feature of Smith’s spectator is his
178
Butler agrees that Smith shaped Edgeworth’s views on Ireland, and Glenthorn’s agent M’Leod, in Ennui, is
also a student of Smith (Butler 91, 368). We see the influence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in her Irish
tales as well; Gerry H. Brookes writes that “Edgeworth constructs her narrative in such a way that the reader is
made to laugh at and also to pity the Irish characters from a felt position of superiority” (Brookes 597). “The
reader is made to think that, in such circumstances, he would know better” (Brookes 599). In Belinda,
Edgeworth is similarly condescending to Mr. Vincent and Juba; readers are expected to “know better” than to
fall into traps of gambling and superstition as her Creole characters do. Teresa Michals also references
economic links between Smith and Edgeworth, particularly concerning how the marketplace “required one to
constantly evaluate others in order to determine one’s own value”—a process that actually echoes his Theory of
Moral Sentiments quite nicely (Michals 16).
179
Easton argues that both Smith and Edgeworth framed Irish happiness and national value in terms of material
happiness. See his “Cosmopolitical economy: Exchangeable value and national development in Adam Smith
and Marie Edgeworth” (2003). According to Smith, economic exchange figures as the mark of modern society;
Edgeworth more ambivalently suggests that a political economy functions as an economic good at the expense
of cultural hegemony. If Smith champions exchange, Edgeworth champions management. Edgeworth’s great
break from Smith’s economic theory is to argue that the commercialization of Ireland requires the preservation
of Irish culture and values.
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unwavering commitment to Enlightenment rationality within his imaginative sympathy: he is
a “cool and impartial spectator” (MS I.45).
According to Smith, the spectator is directed by “fellow-feeling;” the spectator
mirrors the sentiments of the performer:
Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally
concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in
the breast of every attentive spectator. Our joy for the deliverance of those
heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us, is as sincere as our grief for the
distress, and our fellow-feeling with their misery is not more real, than that
with their happiness (MS I.3).
This mirroring is necessarily imprecise, however. Smith prescribes that the spectator’s
emotions should be slightly different and lesser than that of the suffering body. The
spectator’s emotion should create a kind of musical harmony with the performer’s:
“compassion can never be exactly the same with the original sorrow… Though they will
never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required” (MS I.21).
The sympathizing spectator remains distant, tempering his own emotions against the
emotional over-indulgence of the sufferer. His sentimental response, then, is a product of
both the sufferer’s pain and his own rational detachment.
Smith suggests that literary sympathy has distinct criteria, but that it inspires
sympathetic feelings that are no less potent than those from real life. In fact, sympathy for
bodily pain becomes numb over time, in a way that theatrical suffering does not: “One who
has been witness to a dozen dissections, and as many amputations, sees, ever after, all
operations of this kind with great indifference, and often with perfect insensibility. Though
we have read, or seen represented, more than five hundred tragedies, we shall seldom feel so
entire an abatement of our sensibility to the objects which they represent to us” (MS I.33).
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Literary—and particularly theatrical—suffering is actually more sympathetic than most reallife situations. Fiction, then, is Smith’s ideal space for impartial spectatorship.
But despite these differences, on the stage and in real life, spectatorship becomes a
benevolent end in itself for Smith in either space. Spectators lessen suffering just by
sympathizing: “The sympathy of the spectator… saves him from that shame, that
consciousness, that his misery is felt by himself only, which is of all sentiments the most
insupportable” (MS I.76). Sympathy is not a conduit to motivate activism that would relieve
suffering; Smith’s conservative ideology frames sympathy as a sufficient and ample ethical
response to pain.
Later in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith discusses how impartial spectatorship
also functions self-reflexively, demanding that we also view ourselves. This spectatorship,
too, is rational, detached, and fragmented. Self-spectatorship works interiorly, as a form of
conscience: “the prudent man is always both supported and rewarded by the entire
approbation of the impartial spectator, and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the
man within the breast” (MS V.31). The impartial spectator’s judgment is infallible, and
Smith directs that sympathies
must be left altogether to the decision of the man within the breast, the
supposed impartial spectator, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. If we
place ourselves completely in his situation, if we really view ourselves with
his eyes, and as he views us, and listen, with diligent and reverential attention,
to what he suggests to us, his voice will never deceive us (MS VI.50).
Self-observation requires imagining a separate rational perspective, and viewing ourselves
from outside ourselves. Even in self-judgment, the gap between spectator and performer is
essential for forming disinterested moral authority.
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Like Smith, Baillie identifies moral expression in the exchange of sympathy through
observation. In her Introductory Discourse to the Plays on the Passions, published in 1798,
three years before Edgeworth’s Belinda, Joanna Baillie describes her ideal spectator as
curious. Like Smith, Baillie identifies moral expression in the exchange of sympathy
through observation. But unlike Smith’s taxonomical, rational approach to the impartial
spectator, who works far from the stage, outside and above the action, Baillie’s spectator is in
the midst of the action, guided by her curiosity, her personal interest, her impression of
physical appearances, and her interpretation of seemingly random details.
Baillie frames curiosity as a natural, and benign, impulse: “From that strong
sympathy which most creatures, but the human above all, feel for others of their kind,
nothing has become so much an object of man’s curiosity as man himself” (ID 357).180
Curiosity, rather than its typical status as a female vice, is framed here as a benevolent virtue.
Baillie’s spectator reads character from external appearances, and Baillie affirms this
judgment as valid:
I will readily allow that the dress and manners of men, rather than their
characters and dispositions are the subjects of our common conversation, and
seem chiefly to occupy the multitude. But let it be remembered that it is much
easier to express our observations upon these (ID 357).
Baillie suggests that by observing these exterior qualities that we can, in fact, glimpse into
people’s character. Even from afar, the curious spectator can successfully read subtleties of
character based on details of movement:
For though few at such a spectacle can get near enough to distinguish the
expression of face, or the minuter parts of a criminal’s behavior, yet from a
considerable distance will they eagerly mark whether he steps firmly; whether
the motions of his body denote agitation or calmness (ID 358).
180
For further reading on curiosity more generally, see Barbara Benedict’s Curiosity: A Cultural History of
Early Modern Inquiry (2001). Benedict’s study includes attention to scientific study and gender, both important
themes for Baillie. Curiously, Benedict does not include Baillie in her study.
111
The theater serves as a training-ground for evaluating other people based on their
appearances. Using subtle emotional tremors to gauge internal turmoil, the spectator reads
internal emotions from external cues.
Like Smith’s impartial spectator, Baillie’s spectator holds a morally privileged
position in the theater:
A man of this contemplative character partakes, in some degree, of the
entertainment of the Gods, who were supposed to look down upon this world
and the inhabitants of it, as we do upon a theatrical exhibition; and if he is of a
benevolent disposition, a good man struggling with, and triumphing over
adversity, will be to him, also, the most delightful spectacle (ID 360).
But Baillie prefers heroes, and spectators, who are more men than gods—and more like
women than men.181 She prefers proximity to distance, and private performances to public
ones: “If invisible, would we not follow him into his lonely haunts, into his closet, into the
midnight silence of his chamber?” (ID 360). In her propinquity, Baillie’s spectator is more
of a peeping Tom than a Smithian surgeon.
The curious spectator follows a hero from the stage of life into his “secret closet” to
watch his private emotions. Even in the very public space of the theater, the curious
spectator will be most attracted to private spaces, private thoughts, and private feelings.
Baillie’s spectator notices seemingly inconsequential details with unforeseen consequences:
“the restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked exclamation” (ID 359). She looks for
Some slight circumstance characteristick of a particular turn of a man’s mind,
which at first sight seems but little connected with the great events of his life,
[but which] will often explain some of those events more clearly to our
understanding, than the minute details of ostensible policy. A judicious
selection of those circumstances which characterize the spirit of an associated
mob… will oftentimes convey to our minds a clearer idea of why certain laws
181
Though her Plays on the Passions include only one female title character, her heroes tend to be domestic,
emotional, feminized protagonists.
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and privileges were agreed to, than a methodical explanation of their causes
(ID 361).
The curious spectator is not methodical like Smith’s. She observes minute details with
unpredictable consequences, guided by intuitive judgment and subtle observations.
According to Baillie, “No man wishes to see the Ghost himself, which would
certainly procure him the best information on the subject, but every man wishes to see one
who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and wildness of that species of terrour” (ID
359). It is less the supernatural spectacle than the human emotion that is interesting to
Baillie’s spectator; it is less absolute truth than personal perception that guides her curiosity.
Disinterested in determining whether or not the ghost is real, Baillie’s curious spectator
instead delights in observing the troubling spectacle of a person who believes that he has
seen a ghost.
The curious spectator is also a good reader, and she measures literary interest from
seeing common men in uncommon situations:
To this sympathetic propensity of our minds, so exercised, the genuine and
pure comick of every composition, whether drama, fable, story, or satire is
addressed. If man is an object of so much attention to man, engaged in the
ordinary occurrences of life, how much more does he excite his curiosity and
interest when placed in extraordinary situations of difficulty and distress? (ID
358).
Like Smith, Baillie sees literature as a ripe site of sympathetic response due to its ability to
paint extraordinary situations. Though man in ordinary life is a natural object of curiosity, he
becomes even more so when placed in extreme circumstances. For Baillie, the purpose of
literature is to give readers an opportunity to meditate on their emotional responses in a way
that promotes their moral reform: “The chief object should be to delineate the progress of the
higher passions in the human breast… tragedy, written upon this plan, is fitted to produce
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stronger moral effect than upon any other” (ID 369). Baillie’s spectator uses her knowledge
of genre and literary conventions in order to evaluate real-life situations, and vice versa.
Literature functions as a gauge, a model, and a measure of real moral dilemmas, and real life
is the basis of any successful literary venture. Like Smith, Baillie suggests that learning to be
a good reader and learning to be a sympathetic spectator are complementary tasks.
Baillie’s spectator isn’t detached and distanced, but uncomfortably close in her
inspection. She resists rigid moral systems and perfect moral exemplars, looking instead for
the imperfections, weaknesses, and passions that allow spectators to relate to heroes on stage:
They appear to us from this view like distant mountains, whose dark outlines
we trace in the clear horizon, but the varieties of whose roughened sides,
shaded with heath and brushwood, and seamed with many a cleft, we perceive
not… To Tragedy it belongs to lead them forward to our nearer regard… It is
for her to present to us the great and magnanimous hero, who appears to our
distant view as a superior being, as a God, softened down with those smaller
frailties and imperfections that enable us to glory in, and claim kindred to his
virtues (ID 365).
By seeing a hero up close, we see his imperfections and frailties in softer light. Rational
detachment and moral superiority serve no function for Baillie; the curious spectator, unlike
the impartial spectator, appreciates literature for making great things seem familiar rather
than for making great things seem great. Proper sympathy requires both domestic familiarity
and personal frailties in the object of sympathy:
The transactions of men become interesting to us only as we are made
acquainted with the men themselves. Great and bloody battles are to us
battles fought on the moon, if it is not impressed upon our minds, by some
circumstances attending them, that men subject to like weaknesses and
passions with ourselves, were the combatants (ID 361).
Unlike Smith, Baillie sees small men rather than great men as the proper subjects of tragedy:
“A king driven from his throne, will not move our sympathy so strongly, as a private man
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torn from the bosom of his family” (ID 367). For Baillie, imaginative sympathy in the
theater and real life are measured by the same criteria.
The purpose of a sympathetic imagination is not to identify with and therefore
alleviate suffering, as in Smith’s model, but rather to use our natural curiosity about others in
order to pursue our own self-understanding: “The Drama improves us by the knowledge we
acquire of our own minds, from the natural desire we have to look into the thoughts, and
observe the behavior of others” (ID 368). Curiosity is an especially active and animated
dimension of spectatorship. Rather than looking at ourselves through the detached,
disinterested, unbiased eyes of the impartial spectator, as in Smith’s model, we look at others
and ourselves through our own eyes, embracing the way that our personal preferences,
failings, and limitations shape our observations. Though neither Smith nor Baillie is
interventionist, focusing instead on the self-knowledge accessible via sentimental
spectatorship, Smith asks spectators to view themselves through the eyes of others, while
Baillie asks spectators to view others in order to better know themselves.
In a good theater experience, Baillie suggests, the divide between performers and
spectators becomes blurred via identification. Through imaginative projection, readers
become more honest about their own moral failings: “In examining others we know
ourselves” (ID 360). Baillie’s model offered a powerful revision of Adam Smith’s theories
of spectatorship, and Edgeworth’s heroines enact the transition from the rationality of
Enlightenment spectatorship to the potent irrationality of Romantic spectatorship.
Belinda reads Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments halfway through the novel, but she
rehearses its lessons throughout. Coolly impartial and objective, like Smith’s spectator,
Belinda combines sentimental sympathy with the formulaic rationality of enlightened
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sensibility. Her catchphrases include “why should you take it for granted” and “let us try the
experiment,” and Clarence Hervey fears her “proficiency in scientific coquetry” (B 123,
15).182 A scientifically-minded sympathizer, Edgeworth’s impartial spectator derives her
moral authority from a rational, disinterested, detached position outside and above the
performance.183
Belinda may seem as stiff as Fanny Price is spineless to modern readers. “She had in
general,” the narrator confesses disappointedly in the opening chapter, “acted but as a puppet
in the hands of others” (B 10). Her performance in the novel, or lack thereof, suggests a
fundamental lack: “The inquisitive dowager, whose curiosity was put upon a new scent,
immediately fastened her eyes upon Belinda’s face; but from that she could make out
nothing. Was it because she had not the best eyes, or because there was nothing to be seen?”
(B 355). Readers, more often than not, have assumed the latter. Even Edgeworth writes that
“our heroine was not one of those daring spirits, who are ambitious of acting for themselves”
(B 143). And this reticence to perform is the common complaint regarding her weakness as a
character.
However, eighteenth-century readers would more easily recognize Belinda’s moral
power, for while she does not act for herself, she thinks for herself. Dr. X teasingly jests,
“my dear Miss Portman, you will put a stop to a number of charming stories by this prudence
of yours—a romance called the Mysterious Boudoir, of nine volumes at least, might be
182
A scientific spectator, Belinda uses clues to discover that Freke has been tricking Juba into believing she is a
ghost: “Upon examining the room in which the negro used to sleep at Harrowgate, the strong smell of
phosphorous was perceived, and part of the paper was burnt on the very spot where he had always seen the
figure, so that he was now perfectly convinced that this trick had been purposely played to frighten him” (B
222). Belinda’s spectatorship here is Sherlock Holmes-style scientific inquiry.
183
Clarence Hervey says “there’s a kind of electricity about that girl” (B 24), and Marriott suggests that her
verbal alchemy is like “the power of magic” (B 131). She promises Dr. D to give “positive proofs” of her
claims, and though he hesitates in politeness to accept “external evidence of a lady’s truth,” he agrees to witness
her “demonstration” (B 132). Throughout the novel, Belinda is described through other scientific metaphors.
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written on this subject, if you would only condescend to act like almost all other heroines,
that is to say, without common sense” (B 132-33). Belinda’s common sense, even if it makes
her plain, and the novel brief, nonetheless makes the heroine powerful and respected.
Throughout the novel, Belinda’s prudish spectatorship grants her a privileged position as the
novel’s moral touchstone.184
Belinda is the moral guide not only for readers, but also for most other characters in
the novel. Mrs. Delacour instructs “Let us leave her [Virginia] to Miss Portman; she has
more presence of mind than any of us” (B 465). M. le Comte adds, “Well, take me where
you please, my dear Belinda! And introduce me where you please; I depend on your taste and
judgment in all things” (B 168). Lady Delacour is practically forced to see things Belinda’s
way, as the young heroine directs her chaperone to “Hear me, lady Delacour—you must
allow me to judge, for you know that you are not in a condition to judge for yourself” (B
130). Later, Lady Delacour comes to embrace Belinda’s dictatorial censorship, suggesting
that she “enjoy the office of censor of Lady Delacour” as her full-time employment.185 Later,
184
Belinda says that “children… are often excellent, because unprejudiced, judges of character” (B 171). And
in fact, Belinda’s moral system is grounded in the experimental pedagogy of Edgeworth’s Practical Education
and its application in the Percival family. Belinda’s link to the Percivals captures the childlike quality of her
style of scientific observation. Describing their family portrait, Belinda highlights the grounded, natural,
domestic ideals that undergird the Percivals’ happiness: “How much more interesting this picture is to us, from
our knowing that it is not a fancy-piece; that the happiness is real, not imaginary; that this is the natural
expression of affection in the countenance of the mother; and that these children, who crowd round her, are
what they seem to be, the pride and pleasure of her life!” (B 236). Their educational system, based on scientific
inquiry and experiment, and painted in their “healthy, rosy, intelligent faces,” satisfies Belinda perfectly (B 98).
Upon Hervey’s introduction to the Percival household, he finds the children studying fish in a class globe,
trying to determine if they can hear (B 99). This experiment regarding hearing fish was first conducted by the
Lunar Society, where Richard Edgeworth was originally introduced to Adam Smith. Later, the children also
experiment with sulphers and discuss whales.
185
Belinda, for example, instructs the servants on what to do when Lady Delacour has been in a carriage
accident; despite the fact that her benefactress is in convulsions, Belinda gives all her directions in a “calm
voice” (B 127).
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when Lady Delacour is led astray by superstitious visions and religious readings, it is Belinda
who talks “sense” into her benefactress.186
Most of all, Clarence Hervey comes to rely on Belinda’s dryly moral point of view:
He endeavored to dissipate his thoughts by new scenes and employments, but
all his ideas involuntarily centered in Belinda. If he saw new characters, he
compared them with hers, or considered how far she would approve or
condemn them. The books that he read were perused with a constant
reference to what she would think or feel; and during his whole journey he
never beheld any beautiful prospect, without wishing that it could at the same
instant be seen by Belinda (B 396).
Hervey is almost incapable of functioning, whether meeting people, viewing landscapes, or
reading books, without Belinda’s guidance. Hervey’s opinion of Belinda first becomes
favorable when he realizes that “she judges and acts for herself” (B 110). He tells her, “I
never saw any of your sex, who appeared to me to have so much prudence, and so little art”
(B 194). His attachment to Belinda is based on the same qualities that annoy so many
readers—but the same qualities that liken Belinda to Smith as an impartial spectator.
Belinda does not begin the narrative with perfect moral sensibility. However, though
some heroines develop over the course of a novel, Belinda’s early exposure to the chameleon
Clarence Hervey and the performative Lady Delacour prevents the luxury of a leisurely
bildungsroman. As Lady Anne Percival says,
Miss Portman is in a dangerous situation—but some young people learn
prudence by being placed in dangerous situations, as some young horses…
learn to be sure footed, by being left to pick their own way on bad roads (B
108).
As a result of these early “bad roads,” Belinda’s perfect moral sensibility kicks in near the
end of the novel’s first chapter, when she discovers a fully-formed, “newly acquired moral
sense” which dictates her infallibly rational moral judgments, nearly uninterrupted, for the
186
These superstitions will be discussed more fully in the following section on Lady Delacour.
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remainder of the novel. Edgeworth writes, “A short time after her arrival at Lady Delacour’s,
Belinda began to see through the thin veil, with which politeness covers domestic misery” (B
10). A dozen pages into the novel, Belinda Portman masters the art of Smith’s impartial
spectator.
By only page fifteen, that “newly acquired moral sense was so much shocked, that
she actually wrote a full statement of her observations, and her scruples, to her Aunt
Stanhope” (B 15). (The proper rational critic always takes notes). She continues to inspect
the Delacour house closely: “At a distance, lady Delacour had appeared to Miss Portman as
the happiest person in the world; upon a nearer view, she discovered that her ladyship was
one of the most miserable of human beings” (B 69). As if using a microscope, Belinda
examines her subjects with the mixed physical closeness and emotional distance of scientific
observation.187
The flaw of Belinda’s immediate and perfect judgment is twofold: first, Belinda is not
interesting to readers; and second, she lacks more mature, experiential forms of critical
knowledge. The potency of Belinda’s moral authority is based on her achieving knowledge
without experience, but this is also her weakness. Described throughout the novel as “coolly
observant,” Belinda is dryly if not perfectly didactic.
But as we will see, this early transformation and dry character is fundamental to
Belinda’s role as a spectator in the narrative, and her role as the novel’s title character. Like
Smith’s impartial spectator, her moral authority must come implicitly and inherently from
within to be credible. Belinda finds her direction from internal, rather than external,
187
James Chandler describes the tenets of the Lunar Society’s empiricism as comparative observation,
associational knowledge, and cause and effect experimentation, all of which Belinda practices. Comparative
and causal analysis enable discovery—and in literature, they enable discovery of character (lecture July 7,
2009).
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resources, so it would make sense that her character lacks nothing and does not change.
Innocent virtue like Belinda’s is, and must be, innate rather than learned.
Belinda’s key scene of spectatorship occurs early in the novel, at a masquerade.
While critics have noted that this moment is unusual because Belinda is performing, she is
actually more of a spectator than a performer, a detail which makes this scene more
reconcilable with her behavior in the rest of the novel. Belinda reverses conventional gender
designations to suggest that men are performers and women are spectators: “Men have it in
their power to assume the appearance of every thing that is amiable and estimable, and
women have scarcely any opportunities of detecting the counterfeit” (B 240). Belinda,
however, has the necessary tools to analyze Hervey’s performance.
One of the last masquerade scenes in the English novel, Belinda first dons the
costume of the comic muse.188 Jealous of Belinda’s beauty, Lady Delacour decides at the
last minute that the two will switch, and Belinda trades her comic costume for a tragic one.
This costume switch proves significant. Mistaking Belinda for Lady Delacour at the
masquerade, Clarence Hervey inadvertently tells Belinda what he really thinks of her—
which, Belinda discovers, is not much.189
Rather than passively listening, Belinda actually imitates Lady Delacour’s voice to
encourage the men to continue talking about her. “‘Far be it from her to laugh at those follies
which she must forever deplore!’ said Belinda, in a feigned voice. ‘What miseries spring
from these ill-suited marriages! The victims are sacrificed, before they have sense enough to
188
189
See Terry Castle’s “The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative” (1984).
Hervey calls Belinda “an errant flirt of Mrs. Stanhope’s training” (B 24), and he laughs as one of his friends,
Sir Philip Baddely, remarks that “when I was at Bath, she was hawked about every where… Belinda Portman,
and her accomplishments, I’ll swear, were as well advertized, as Packwood’s razor strops” (B 25). The men
assume that she is an actress and a flirt, a commodity on display.
120
avoid their fate’” (B 24). Belinda succeeds in making Hervey believe she is Lady Delacour,
as if she is speaking in third person to refer to her own marriage. Belinda uses performance
here as a means to facilitate spectatorship, and it is the spectatorship more than the
performance that matters for the plot.
Unmasked at the masquerade, after silently observing Hervey accuse her of “art and
affectation,” Belinda’s “face was, during the first instant, pale; the next moment, crimsoned
over with a burning blush” (B 27). The line between spectatorship and performance wears
thin, as she observes the men talking about her and is unmasked after the fact in front of a
dumbfounded Clarence Hervey. Belinda is caught performing illicit spectatorship.
In this scene and elsewhere, Belinda tends to rely heavily on sight, following Smith’s
description of the impartial spectator. In the early pages, “She became wonderfully clear
sighted to all the improprieties of her ladyship’s conduct” (B 15, emphasis mine). As the
narrator says, “It is sometimes safer for young people to see, than to hear of certain
characters” (B 69, emphasis mine). Growing to like Clarence Hervey, Belinda finds that his
“character appeared in a new light—she [Belinda] was proud of her own judgment, in having
discerned his merit” (B 116, emphasis mine). Later, rationally doubting his affections,
“Belinda ventured to take her eyes for an instant from the picture, to see whether Clarence
Hervey looked like the most inconstant man on earth. He was intently gazing upon her” (B
191, emphasis mine). Belinda’s judgment, then, is grounded in her visual perception, and her
moral superiority is frequently described as her ability to “see” better than other characters.
Belinda’s judgment is also grounded in empirical evidence. 190 Her impartial
spectatorship is taxonomically precise:
190
Using comparison and investigation to determine her future course, Belinda learns that “Everybody must
ultimately judge of what makes them happy, from the comparison of their own feelings in different situations.
121
Lady Delacour’s history, and the manner in which it was related, excited in
Belinda’s mind astonishment—pity—admiration—and contempt.
Astonishment at her inconsistency—pity for her misfortunes—admiration of
her talents—and contempt for her conduct (B 69).
Like Smith’s impartial spectator, Belinda is impeccably accurate at matching Lady
Delacour’s behaviors with a specific emotional response, categorizing her reactions
according to their proper sympathetic response. In addition, she can also turn her impartial
spectatorship on herself, and “she examined herself with firm impartiality” (B 138).191 While
she learns no new moral lessons, the ones she has are periodically reaffirmed by reflection,
experimentation, and systematic categorization. Belinda sees as she expects, for instance,
that
Good may be drawn from evil. Mrs. Freke’s conversation, though at the time
it confounded Belinda, roused her, upon reflexion, to examine by her reason
the habits and principles which guided her conduct. She had a general feeling
that they were right and necessary; but now, with the assistance of lady Anne
and Mr. Percival, she established in her own understanding the exact
boundaries between right and wrong. She felt a species of satisfaction and
security, from seeing the demonstration of those axioms of morality, in which
she had previous acquiesced. Reasoning gradually became as agreeable to her
as wit; nor was her taste for wit diminished, it was only refined by this
process. She now compared and judged of the value of the different species
of this brilliant talent (B 232).
Belinda’s moral taste is acquired carefully, thoughtfully, and reflectively, and it is described
as a process of refinement. Seeing vice confirms her previously-determined notions of
virtue. She grows increasingly confident in “her own understanding [of] the exact
Belinda was convinced by this comparison, that domestic life was that which could alone make her really and
permanently happy” (B 217).
191
Whether this impartiality is achieved or not is ambiguous; she justifies her emotional response to Hervey’s
criticism and misjudgments of her as proper pride and female delicacy rather than affection. Edgeworth hints
that however well-intentioned, Belinda’s impartiality may not be quite as unbiased as she thinks. Her reaction
to the lock of hair makes this slight bias in his favor explicit to her, and she reins in her feelings accordingly to
“command my affections” (B 139).
122
boundaries between right and wrong.” 192 In claiming to intuit these “exact” boundaries,
confirming and reinforcing them through investigative evidence, she optimistically suggests
that proper spectatorship can move humanity toward moral perfection.193
Belinda’s courtship with Mr. Vincent gives her an opportunity to test and experiment
her system. Mr. Vincent’s moral and rational principles gradually convince Belinda, in the
manner of Eleanor Dashwood, to accept his offer of marriage out of sober esteem for his
character. But always open-minded to new information, Belinda instantly changes her mind
when she learns that he is a closet gambler. At the same time, collecting clues that clear
Clarence Hervey’s reputation from allegations of a closeted mistress, Belinda again redirects
her affections according to rational judgments of her own careful observations. Belinda’s
heart and hand always follow her head. Throughout this experimental courtship, “Belinda’s
presence of mind,” Edgeworth writes, “never forsook her” (B 131).
As critics have pointed out, fickle though she may be, Belinda’s fully-formed moral
judgment prevents her from making any real mistakes. In fact, Belinda does not do much of
anything—her primary role in the narrative is to observe and direct the action of others. And
when she is not observing and reflecting on the mistakes of others (and having her own moral
maxims reinforced), she is reading a book.
Belinda’s spectatorship is grounded in right reading, and her method of observation is
applied to both situations. In the novel’s opening paragraphs, its first description of Belinda
192
Even when she is confused by irrational impulses, she always finds her way back to this impartial point of
view: “I have said that my affections are entirely at my own command. Then why do I feel this alarm at the
discovery of Mr. Vincent’s views? Why do I compare him with the one whom I thought I had forgotten? And
yet, how are we to judge of character? How can we form any estimate of what is amiable, of what will make us
happy or miserable, but by comparison? Am I to blame for perceiving superiority? Am I to blame if one
person be more agreeable, or seem to be more agreeable, than another? Am I to blame if I cannot love Mr.
Vincent?” (B 238).
193
Smith, too, suggested the potential for perfectibility in the impartial spectator.
123
explains that “she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and
integrity” (B 7). In contrast to heroines in novels whose quixotic reading practices
compromise their prudence, this introduction suggests that Belinda’s reading promotes her
prudence. This moral distinction is partly based on what she reads. Rather than romances
and novels, Belinda reads nonfiction works that reflect on the nature of morality, including
Moore’s Travels and La Bruyére (B 228). But this moral distinction is also based on how she
reads. Questioned by Harriet Freke, Belinda coolly replies “I read that I may think for
myself” (B 227). For Belinda, reading gives her the prudence and judgment that facilitates
her spectatorship, and her observations of the world, in turn, make her a better reader.
Despite her right reading and impartial observations, Belinda’s judgment suffers from
omissions created by her disproportionate rationality.194 Most importantly, as a virgin,
Belinda must be a stand-alone critic, and she does not have access to experiential
knowledge.195 “I am unpracticed,” she tells Lady Delacour, “in the ways of the world” (B
83). Her blushes, which Mrs. Freke labels “silence that speaks,” ambiguously speak both for
and against her (B 229).196 She resists any impulse that appears to be driven by anything but
reason, and this skewed point of view marks her as naïve. The heroine appears to have
spotless moral integrity, but Richard comments that “although Belinda is very upset by the
possibility that Vincent gambles, she never expresses concern that her fiancé’s wealth is built
194
Or, as her aunt Stanhope suggests, “you do not want sense, Belinda—you perfectly understand me—and
consequently, your errours I must impute to the defect of your heart, and not of your judgment” (B 85).
195
One seeming exception to this rule is when Belinda says, “Now I can judge from my own experience, and I
am convinced that the life of a fine lady would never make me happy” (B 126). However, despite the fact that
she claims to learn from her experience, it is her observation of fine ladies and not her experience in being a
fine lady that convinces her she would not like it.
196
Mr. Vincent: “Miss Portman’s blushes speak for her.” Mrs. Freke: “Against her. Women blush because they
understand.” Mr. Percival: “And you would have them understand without blushing?” (B 229). See other
instances of Belinda blushing on pages 27, 35, 239, and 255.
124
on slave labor.”197 Throughout the novel, Belinda’s narrow reading, her narrow point of
view, prevents her from more comprehensive forms of knowledge and judgment that she
could gain by experience.
Most of all, Belinda struggles with her judgment of character: Hervey’s “manner
toward her was so variable and inconsistent, that she knew not how to interpret its language”
(B 15). “You stare” Lady Delacour tells her, but “you cannot enter into my feelings” (B 65).
Incapable of much emotional complexity in herself, she fails to suspect or recognize it in
others. She is stumped most often by Lady Delacour:
Through the mask of paint which she [lady Delacour] wore, no change of
colour could be visible; and as Belinda did not see the expression of her
ladyship’s eyes, she could not in the least judge of what was passing in her
mind (B 202).
Belinda is stupefied by her mistress, because Lady Delacour contradicts her own rational
system in every possible way. When Lady Delacour asks, “Do you act from your aunt
Stanhope’s advice, or entirely from your own judgment and knowledge of my character?”
Belinda replies, more hesitatingly than with her other moral judgments, “From my own
judgment and knowledge of your character, in which I hope—I am not—I cannot be
mistaken.” (B 203). She is confident in her judgment of goodness, but she hesitates in her
assessment of character. Belinda “never conceived the possibility of [Lady Delacour] being
actuated by the passion of jealousy—by the jealousy of power—a species of jealousy which
she had never felt, and could not comprehend” (B 203, emphasis mine). She cannot suspect
deception in others, because she herself is “incapable of deceit” (B 206). Belinda’s fatal flaw
is that she cannot understand what she does not feel.
197
Richard 205.
125
For Belinda, idle curiosity is a distraction from sober rationality. Suspicious of
Marriott’s power over Lady Delacour, “curiosity [was] painted in Belinda’s countenance” (B
22). However, Belinda does nothing to act on this curiosity—according to her empirical
method, non-scientific curiosity is an impulse to be resisted. Lady Delacour calls her a
“simpleton, to know so little of the nature of curiosity” (B 17). However, it is not that
Belinda is not curious, emotional, or even romantic, but that she consciously or
unconsciously suppresses these impulses. When Hervey drops a lock of Virginia’s hair, for
instance,
Belinda, though she cast but one involuntary, hasty glance at it, was struck
with the beauty of its colour, and its uncommon length… She was sensible
that the sight of a lock of hair, however long, or however beautiful, in the
hands of any man but Clarence Hervey, could not possibly have excited any
emotion in her mind (B 139).
Belinda feels curiosity without understanding or acting on it. Instead, she falls back on her
habit of rational observation: “Notwithstanding the lock of beautiful hair, she could not
entirely divest herself of the idea that she was beloved, when she observed the extreme
eagerness with which Clarence Hervey watched all her motions” (B 144). Her
observations—her empirical observations, based on impartial and detached reason—always
stifle more complicated emotions.
In many ways, Belinda’s empirical observations are reflective of Edgeworth herself.
This interest in scientific observation emerges in Belinda not only in the novel’s title
character, but also in the novel’s style. By examining biographical parallels between
Edgeworth and Belinda, we will discover how Edgeworth’s narrative style is also indebted to
Smith’s impartial spectator.
126
Edgeworth identified herself as a “philosophical spectatress” with a “spirit of
observation.”198 Like Belinda, Edgeworth read more non-fiction than fiction, and she was
reticent about the novel form.199 Rather than keeping a journal, Edgeworth kept notebooks
filled with lists of scientific facts.200 Like Belinda, Edgeworth herself was soft-spoken,
rational, and manically devoted to domestic ideals. Edgeworth’s commitment to empirical
observation and her interest in nonfiction writing, both gained partly from her early education
on Smith, contributed to the way she propels the novel form toward nineteenth-century
realism.201
Marilyn Butler describes how Edgeworth’s role as a teacher of her many younger
siblings developed the author’s interest in empirical methods, techniques that would later
shape her writing. It taught her to value precision and objectivity, and trained her to a habit
of observation and note-taking that extended into other spheres, including the sphere of
storywriting (B 65).
Self-styled as odd, timid, and bookish as a young woman, Edgeworth was a
wallflower in the Edgeworth family. Marilyn Butler describes her two motives for writing as
198
Butler 225, excerpted from an 1811 letter from Edgeworth to Etienne Dumont.
199
In a 1783 letter to her sister Fanny, Edgeworth writes “though I am as fond of Novels as you can be I am
afraid that they act on the constitution of the mind as Drams do on that of the body” (Butler 73). Mitzi Myers
writes that Edgeworth’s writing style was “thoroughly rational and realistic” (Myers 101).
200
201
Butler 239.
Favoring exact details and truth to life, Edgeworth distanced her novel from earlier novels that were more
closely related to the romance. For other accounts of Edgeworth’s role in the development of realism, see
Marilyn Butler, Ina Ferris, Catherine Gallagher, Mitzi Myers, and Katie Trumpener. For a contrasting account
of Edgeworth’s quirky mix of verisimilar didacticism and romantic plot twists, see Michael Gamer’s essay on
Edgeworth and “The Romance of Real Life” (2001), a genre he uses to title his essay that mediates between
history and fiction. Like the spectator who occupies multiple points of view, the romance of real life are both
probable and improbable at once, and rather than strike a balance, they “occupy both poles simultaneously”
(Gamer 238). According to Gamer, Edgeworth champions anecdote as an alternative to history or romance that
is more suited to the modern age. His definition of anecdote has close ties with Baillie’s approach to the
experience of the theater, as he describes anecdote as “receiv[ing] instruction from the domestic lives of
imperfect or ordinary people” (Gamer 245).
127
“first, her wide-ranging, scientific, essentially factual education, and secondly an emotional
dependence on her family that led her to produce work that was particularly likely to be well
received by them.”202 This twin pull, split between a proudly scientific rationality and a
more yearning desire to please, echoes strongly in Belinda.
Like Smith’s impartial spectator, the content, characterizations, and style of
Edgeworth’s writings are largely influenced by “observation from life.”203 One reader
suggested that “the interest of Maria Edgeworth’s novels lies in the author’s talent as an
exact observer of manners and motives,” praising her “peculiar perfection of observation and
discrimination.”204 According to Butler,
In her attitude to the observation of character, as in so many of her attitudes,
Maria goes back to the decade in which her father reached intellectual
maturity, the 1770s: in particular she shares with many English graphic artists
of that era a lucid, scientific attitude to objective reality.205
In many ways, Edgeworth herself follows the tenets of Smith’s impartial spectator. An
illness, which led to temporary blindness, made Edgeworth’s appreciation of vision more
acute.206 Refusing the proposals of Edelcrantz, she mirrors Belinda’s hesitance in accepting
Clarence Hervey, writing that “I have seen but very little of him, and have not had time to
have formed any judgment.”207 For both Belinda and Edgeworth, vision qualifies empirical
knowledge.
202
Butler 152.
203
Butler 255.
204
Butler 261 and Col. Matthew Stewart qtd. by Butler 261.
205
Butler 266.
206
Following a painful disorder of the eyes in 1781, in which Edgeworth was expected to go blind, she
recovered and was taken with her father to live together as a family on their Irish estate. Butler credits this
growing affection for his homeland of Ireland (and his daughter) to a sense of duty inspired by Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations (Butler 76).
128
Like Belinda, Edgeworth enjoyed high society (especially in Paris), but she preferred
domestic solitude. Edgeworth preferred reading to traveling in society altogether, content to
read about the world second-hand rather than experience it.208 Just as Belinda’s morals are
more reinforced than developed (“tested,” to continue the scientific metaphor), Edgeworth
writes of her visit to Edinburgh that “her journey had also made surprisingly little difference
to her ideas. The visit to Edinburgh confirmed intellectual ties that had existed since her
father fell under the influence of the Lunar circle and read Adam Smith.”209 As with Belinda,
Edgeworth’s early education, and her early reading of Smith, would continue to shape her
moral judgment despite her introduction to high society.
Edgeworth’s power of observation was remarked on by several of her acquaintances.
Col. Matthew Stewart, for instance, describes her penetrative observations after only a brief
acquaintance:
Her peculiar perfection of observation & discrimination lead to this manner of
acquiring her materials & the materials themselves seem to me strongly
indicative that they have been so collected… Striking traits of character,
remarkable instances of address which have attracted her attention in society
instances in which she has detected the true concealed motives of words &
actions & so forth—have been committed to paper or treasured up in her
memory… This power of observation however admirable may be the degree
in which she possesses it & avails herself of it in her writings is not the way in
which a power can be acquired of giving a sustained & decided impression of
unity to fictitious characters.210
207
Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Ruxton, 1 Dec. 1802 (Butler 192, emphasis mine). This passage is almost the
exact wording that Belinda tells Lady Delacour in the final pages of the novel: “I hope you will remember, dear
Lady Delacour, that there is nothing in which novelists are so apt to err, as in hurrying things toward the
conclusion. In not allowing time enough for that change of feeling, which change of situation cannot instantly
produce” (B 477).
208
Belanger comments that Edgeworth’s Irish tales suggest that “the detached, rational observer can represent
the Irish better than they can represent themselves” (Belanger 247).
209
Butler 199, emphasis mine. See examples above of Belinda’s moral system reinforced rather than changed
by her encounter with Harriet Freke.
210
Col. Stewart to Mrs. Stark, 15 July 1834 (Butler 261).
129
Like Belinda, Edgeworth’s mode of observation was empirical, and she preferred scientists to
poets.211 Edgeworth’s abilities as an exact observer of manners and morals is, as for Belinda,
both her strength and her weakness. At her best moments, this empirical quality grants her
writing a quality of realism. At worst, this commitment to truthfulness is what causes critics
to complain of a dry didacticism in her writing. However, committed to scientific
observation, Edgeworth intended to write more like a natural philosopher than a novelist.
As a writer of observations, Edgeworth was astute, discriminative, and literal. Her
narrative style adopts Smith’s prescription for moral judgment into stylistic literary terms.
Committed to “exact and literal notions of truth” and “precise definitions,” Edgeworth
rejected metaphors and similes as unscientific and inexact literary devices. 212 Applying the
maxims of the impartial spectator to her stylistic approach, Edgeworth’s writing resists
flourish and fancy. Throughout her career, Edgeworth’s strength as a writer lay is her
detailed observations and scientific empiricism within literary description.
Edgeworth holds up Belinda as the novel’s guide, and her stylistic approach to the
novel mirrors Belinda’s impartial spectatorship within the form of the novel. However dull
her performance in the novel, and however dull Edgeworth’s novel is as a result, impartial
spectatorship directs the reader’s point of view, both in the novel’s content and form. We see
the other characters through Belinda’s eyes, and Edgeworth consciously grants her this
privileged position as the moral compass for the novel.213 When we see Lady Delacour’s
diseased breast, when we see Clarence Hervey’s questionable performances, and when we
211
Butler 444.
212
Butler 268.
213
“If Lady Delacour, with all the advantages of wealth, rank, wit, and beauty, has not been able to make herself
happy in this life of fashionable dissipation,” Belinda says to herself, studying human nature through the lens of
the empirical method, “why should I follow the same course, and expect to be more fortunate?” (B 70).
130
see the Percivals’ idyllic domestic bliss, we see all these things through the rational eyes of
Belinda, and through the objective writing of Edgeworth. Moreover, Edgeworth invites
readers to read Belinda in the way that Belinda reads others: through a detached, logical,
impartial point of view. To read Belinda impartially is to read her in her best light, and to
read her as she reads others.
Belinda is a textbook example of the impartial spectator. Directed by objective
reason and scientific inquiry, she seems infallible. But Edgeworth does not suggest that
Belinda’s moral authority suffices alone. Nor does she limit herself stylistically to scientific
observation and dry impartiality. And this, of course, is where Lady Delacour steps in. The
novel’s point of view, then, like Edgeworth herself, is split between the detached, rational,
decontextualizing spectatorship of Belinda and the experiential, intuitive, contextualizing
spectatorship of Lady Delacour. As the friendship develops between these two women, the
novel gestures toward the potential for a synthesis of these two methods of spectatorship.
Lady Delacour’s role as a retired actress turned spectator makes her uniquely
qualified to model Baillie’s version of a subjective, curious, perceptive, close, and intuitive
spectator. 214 If Edgeworth encourages us to read Belinda with the same detached rationality
with which this young heroine views others, she likewise encourages us to read Lady
Delacour with the same fascinated curiosity with which this more experienced heroine sees
the world.215 And if we mirror Belinda’s virtue, following Smith’s system, we identify with
Lady Delacour’s flaws, following Baillie’s.
214
215
Lady Delacour says “it is too late for me to think of being a heroine” (B 176).
“You have all done what is prudent and proper,” Lady Delacour says; “But I must beg you to recollect that I
am neither a child nor a fool; that I am come to years of discretion” (B 178). Lady Delacour frames her
discretion, gained through experience, as qualifying her to counter an apparently more prudent or proper course
of action in choosing a surgeon for her operation.
131
Edgeworth’s later life and works are marked by her relationship with Baillie, and
Belinda is possibly the earliest example of this influence. The most successful female
novelist and the most successful female playwright of their generation, long-lived women
who were born just five years apart and died within two years of each other, Edgeworth and
Baillie had much in common. 216 One unrecognized similarity between the two is a morally
complex conception of curious female spectatorship. Celebrating rather than chastising
“feminine” qualities of curiosity, superficial judgment, and emotional illogicality as
potentially morally and critically superior to a more rational, Smithian system of judgment,
these women radically redefined both spectatorship and femininity at the close of the
eighteenth century. 217 Although their personal acquaintance did not begin until a decade
after Belinda and the first edition to Plays on the Passions were published, Edgeworth’s
characterization of Lady Delacour suggests that she read and liberally borrowed from
Baillie’s curious spectator while writing Belinda. Smith was a figure of her past, and Baillie
216
Baillie lived from 1762-1851; Edgeworth from 1767-1849. Their relationship was more personal than the
one between Edgeworth and Smith. Belinda was written at a transitional moment in Edgeworth’s life, when she
was moving out from under her father’s reading recommendations and forming relationships with literary
women, which would shape her later career. Edgeworth and Baillie exchanged letters from 1813 until at least
1848, and visited one another on a number of occasions. In addition to a personal friendship, the two
collaborated professionally as well: Edgeworth contributed to a collected edition of poetry edited by Baillie.
Describing Baillie in a letter from 1822 to her stepmother, Edgeworth writes that she is “the most amiable
literary woman I ever beheld.” While most collections of Edgeworth’s letters include her numerous references
to Baillie, none include their personal exchange, and no sustained critical exploration has studied their
relationship. (There are about 2,000 surviving letters of Edgeworth’s, plus about that many from members of
her family, so it is perhaps not surprising that the letters between Edgeworth and Baillie have been overlooked;
Butler 4.) Nearly two dozen letters from Edgeworth to Baillie survive, and they remain unpublished and
unstudied at the London Royal Academy of Surgeons. The only female dramatist and critic in the theater to
rival Baillie at this time was Mrs. Inchbald. Despite Edgeworth’s adoration for her A Simple Story (which made
her like Belinda less in contrast), Mrs. Inchbald admired Edgeworth less: chastising Edgeworth’s use of the
term “spittle,” Inchbald wrote that it was a word she “ought not to have known how to spell” (Butler 297).
Despite this critique, however, Inchbald did praise Edgeworth’s privileging of “nature” over “stage effect” in
her writing—an interesting compliment from a woman who made her career in the theater (Butler 310).
217
Lady Delacour’s femininity can be contrasted with Deborah Weiss’ argument that Belinda is the most truly
masculine character in Edgeworth’s novel. The rational versus emotional approaches to spectatorship are
gendered, though in a less reductive way than Weiss suggests.
132
was a figure of her future; Belinda marks a transition point both in Edgeworth’s biography
and in her writing style that can be traced to Smith and Baillie.
Lady Delacour is the more performative of the two heroines—to a fault. Belinda
laments that “she seemed like a spoiled actress off the stage, over stimulated by applause,
and exhausted by the exertions of supporting a fictitious character” (B 10).218 Lady
Delacour’s curiosity seems to be a typical female vice that arises from her lavish
performances in the theater of London society. But by the time we meet Lady Delacour, she
has retired from her role as a performer to become a spectator. As a spectator, though, her
active curiosity is just as sharp.
Lord Delacour advises his wife early on to be less of a curious spectator, and readers
would agree with his critique: “It would be as well… if your ladyship would attend more to
your own conduct, and less to others!” (B 12).219 However, she continues to reveal the
potential role of experience, emotion, and curiosity—things she learned from the stage—in
good critical judgment.220 “Curiosity,” she says, “is as ardent as love, and has as good a
claim to compassion” (B 471). She adds, “luckily my address is equal to my curiosity, and
that is saying a great deal” (B 142). Her charming address eventually makes readers value
her curiosity. Though she is less strictly virtuous than Belinda, her Baillian curiosity makes
her more human.221
218
Lady Delacour says, “I must quit the stage,” not fully realizing that she has already done so (B 64).
219
Lady Anne Percival describes curiosity as an idle disease, which connects curiosity to Lady Delacour and
her diseased breast (B 211).
220
Smith was not insensitive to the role that emotion played in the impartial spectator; however, he privileged
the faculty of reason above emotion, as a guide to emotional response. For Baillie, however, emotion subsists
without reason in the curious spectator.
221
As Baillie says, the proper subjects for tragic sympathy are not great men high above us, in talents, strength,
or virtue, but those whose visible flaws incite our identification and thus our sympathy.
133
Lady Delacour’s method of spectatorship is very unlike that of Smith and Belinda:
“Lady Delacour was governed by pride, by sentiment, by whim, by enthusiasm, by passion—
by any thing but reason” (B 271).222 Making no claims to impartiality, she explicitly
acknowledges her own bias: “the more lady Delacour considered her daughter as a part of
herself,” for example, “the more she was inclined to be pleased with her” (B 175).
Her contrast with Belinda is clear, and this contrast leads to quarrels between the
characters about the role of reason versus emotion in proper critical judgment. Frustrated
with Belinda’s rejection of Clarence Hervey in favor of a more “rational” choice in Mr.
Vincent, Lady Delacour exasperatedly complains, “So, they have made a complete
philosopher of you at Oakly-park! You are perfect in the first lesson—not to admire. And is
the torch of Cupid to be extinguished on the alter of Reason?” (B 279). She laments that
Belinda’s “love for Hervey has been smothered by cold philosophy—but I cannot yet think it
possible, that it is utterly extinguished” (B 331). If Belinda finds guidance in innocent
reason, Lady Delacour finds it in experiential intuition. As Clarence Hervey says,
My friend Dr. X--, said he, divides mankind into three classes. Those who
learn from the experience of others. They are happy men. Those who learn
from their own experiences. They are wise men. And, lastly, those who learn
neither from their own nor from other people’s experience. They are fools.
This class is by far the largest. I am content, continued Clarence, to be in the
middle class (B 276).
Lady Delacour, like Hervey, learns from her own experience—and she too is wise as a result.
Belinda is the novel’s only character in the first category. Ultimately, Edgeworth does not
determine whether Lady Delacour’s judgment is superior or inferior to Belinda’s. Instead,
222
Later, the narrator remarks that “Lady Delacour was a woman who never listened to reason; or who listened
to it only that she might parry it by wit” (B 122). She goes into company to “stifle reflection” (B 65), and
Edgeworth comments that “it was in vain to reason with lady Delacour” (B 130). When Belinda suggests that
Lady Delacour should use facts to evaluate opinions that differ from our own, she retorts that “it is so difficult
to get at facts, even about the merest trifles” (B 172). Lady Delacour is much more interested in these “merest
trifles” than the facts, and she doubts rational explanation. “Do not reason with me,” she insists (B 177).
Similar claims about her intentional irrationality dot the narrative.
134
she suggests that the two characters, like the two theorists, offer distinct yet complementary
perspectives—both of which are necessary for ideal spectatorship and right reading.
As a spectator, Lady Delacour still performs.223 The narrator describes the
penetrative spectatorship of “the piercing glance of lady Delacour’s black eyes—a glance,
which neither guilt nor innocence could withstand” (B 185). Her gaze is penetrative,
performative, arresting, seductive, and powerful.224 Katherine Montwieler explores the
uncomfortable parallel between sensibility (the authentic body) and masquerade (the artificial
body) in Lady Delacour.225 Lady Delacour trips along this line between affect and
affectation, and she revels in the inevitable blurring between virtue and its mere
performance.226
Lady Delacour unfortunately affects vice more than virtue, but her affectation of vice
seems the best proof of her virtue. “Why will you delight in making yourself appear worse
than you are, my dear lady Delacour?” Belinda asks. “Because I hate to be like other
people,” Lady Delacour replies, “who delight in making themselves appear better than what
223
Lady Delacour writes, of her former life, that “I performed, and with success” (B 53). But she explains that
fashionable life soon grows weary, as the delight of the theater and the opera wear off: “Soon, very soon we go
out to see people, not things. Then we grow tired of seeing people—and then we go out, merely because we
can’t stay at home” (B 62).
224
Montwieler says Lady Delacour is a “diva” (Montwieler 348), and that she reveals the performative
constructedness of femininity. Egenolf and MacFadyen make similar arguments.
225
226
Montwieler 350.
In Lady Delacour’s pivotal dual scene, which takes place before the narrative begins, she remarks that the
rapturous mob was more enraged by her deviant gender performance than the mortal danger she was inflicting
on herself and others: “I am convinced that they would not have been half so much scandalized if we had boxed
in petticoats” (B 58). The critique here is less of Lady Delacour’s performance than of society’s ironic
endorsement of these gender expectations. Edgeworth suggests that this irrational tide of public opinion has
made Lady Delacour what she is. “An English mob,” she notes, “is really a formidable thing” (B 58).
Edgeworth satirizes gender expectation that privileges the appearance of feminine virtue over the actual
attainment of that virtue, and like Wollstonecraft, her critique is not of performance itself but of the moral
implications of privileging appearances over actuality. In this performance, Lady Delacour is exposed as
rebelling against societal gender norms, at the same time that she is implicitly constrained by these norms.
135
they are” (B 121).227 Lady Delacour is a victim of society’s skeptical stance toward the
distinction between affect and affectation—but Edgeworth suggests that these seeming
contradictions are also challenged and reconciled in Lady Delacour.
Like Baillie’s curious spectator, Lady Delacour is adept at noticing slight
circumstances, understanding that external appearances and public performances can
oftentimes reveal key information to internal characteristics and private dispositions. She has
an astute eye, but her experienced intuition is more a second sight than Belinda’s empirical
approach. In addition, her judgment of others aids and is aided by her own self-judgment,
and in her powerful sense of identification with others, she blurs the line between
performance and spectatorship.
Discovering her character to be mere spectacle, her marriage to be mere masquerade,
and her life to be on a tragic course, Lady Delacour repents her years as an actress on the
busy stage of life, and the novel traces her struggle with remorse over her performative past,
a struggle that culminates in an apparent domestic reformation. But just as Edgeworth’s
novel reappropriates rather than rejects the theater, Lady Delacour redirects rather than
227
A slave to the talk of the town that she simultaneously despises, “Lady Delacour has sensibility enough,”
says an indignant Mrs. Margaret Delacour, her aunt-in-law; “when sensibility is the fashion” (B 103). In the
character of Lady Delacour, Edgeworth plays on the “fatal synonymy” of sentiment and fashion: “Edgeworth’s
novel reveals the extent to which sensibility had become estranged from the bourgeois moral values with which
it had traditionally been aligned… [Lady Delacour’s] disease is the very product of a pathological sensibility
that assumes the body speaks truth about inner character” (Batchelor 157). However, Edgeworth’s criticism is
mixed with a more complex confidence in the moral potential of this system (Batchelor 154). According to
Batchelor, Belinda is a “systematic appropriation and dismantling of the conventional tropes of sensibility in a
bid to rewrite the sentimental novel from within” (Batchelor 155). Lady Delacour provides her with an
“insider” position, but one whose affectation contributes to her affect, whose performance serves her virtue.
Edgeworth holds an ambiguous place in sentimental fiction, because she is writing at the transitional moment
between Enlightenment thinkers like Smith and Romantic thinkers like Baillie. If Lady Delacour illustrates the
limits of sentimentalism, of which Smith would certainly disapprove, she also demonstrates the unique potential
for observation accessible only at these limits. While Lady Delacour should, by all rules of convention, be the
novel’s primary object of satire, as a washed-up, aristocrat plagued by her own artificiality, Lady Delacour is
actually a powerful model of spectatorship, and uncomfortably charming. As Katherine Montwieler notes,
Lady Delacour makes us ask “If healthy femininity is a performance, then how can we tell the heroines from
those women who are more subtle Frekes?” (Montwieler 361).
136
rejects her theatrical persona. Her years as an actress have equipped her to make astute
judgments that even the infallible Belinda misses, particularly in regards to the “chameleon
character” Clarence Hervey (B 14).
Lady Delacour has weaknesses as a spectator—particularly concerning her
spectatorship of supposedly supernatural beings. The same tendencies that make her a good
judge of character also make her susceptible to irrational fears.228 Subject to superstitious
fright, Lady Delacour relies excessively on intuition, in the same way that Belinda depends to
much on rational judgment.
In describing her mistaken judgment of Belinda, Lady Delacour insists, with
theatrical flair, that “I cannot see it [her unjust behavior to Belinda] in too strong a light,” as
if to literally spotlight her own failings as a performer (B 265). As a woman of the world, as
actresses were assumed to be, she is subject to penetration: from the gun that injures her
breast to the scandalous rumors about Colonel Lawless that injure her reputation and her
conscience. But this penetration also works to her advantage, granting her a kind of
privileged access to the judgment of character. Like Belinda, her weaknesses are also her
strengths.229 Lady Delacour’s transition from an actress to a spectator legitimates her
228
Edgeworth writes, “During the solitude of her illness, her ladyship had first begun to think seriously on
religious subjects, and the early impressions that had been made on her mind in her childhood, by a
methodistical mother, recurred. Her understanding, weakened perhaps by disease, and never accustomed to
reason, was incapable of distinguishing between truth and errour; and her temper, naturally enthusiastic, hurried
her from one extreme to the other—from thoughtless skepticism to visionary credulity” (B 270). Moreover, her
jealousy of Belinda is rooted in a Baillian attention to minute details: “The moment Lady Delacour’s mind
turned to suspicion, her ingenuity rapidly supplied her with circumstances and arguments to confirm and justify
her doubts” (B 181).
229
Although she has earned wisdom through experience, Lady Delacour hopes that her daughter will inherit her
wisdom without paying the same price: “Do not judge always of the kindness people feel for you, child, by their
looks; and remember that it is possible a person might have felt more than you could guess by their looks…
Upon my word, you are a nice observer. Such nice observers are sometimes dangerous to have near one” (B
289). She continues, “You look all simplicity, my dear! I see you have no vulgar school-girl curiosity. You
will have all your mother’s strength of mind; may you never have any of her faults, or any of her misfortunes!”
(B 298). Lady Delacour reaps the fruits of her experience, but she regrets the means by which she gained it.
137
authoritative position, but she does not reject performance completely—in fact, she draws on
her experience as an actress in forming her critical judgments as a spectator.
Lady Delacour is a more outspoken spectator than Belinda: impressed by Clarence
Hervey, for instance, “Lady Delacour loudly applauded, and Belinda silently approved” (B
113). In the end, she outsmarts Belinda’s impartiality, and her emotionally astute judgment
succeeds where Belinda’s rationally astute judgment fails.230 Lady Delacour’s curious
spectatorship makes her a successful judge of character, a skill that is inaccessible to
Belinda’s system. Her acting may serve as a warning, but her spectatorship serves as an
example.
Lady Delacour’s growth as a spectator is slower and more transformative than
Belinda’s. The first feelings of remorse, and the first moments of transition from actress to
spectator, begin with her tragic friendship with Harriet Freke. Strung along on Freke’s
freakish escapades, Lady Delacour’s performance begins to unravel: “I acted my part so well,
or so ill” (B 48). The better her acting, the worse her consequences. She also takes on a
more spectatorial role in this friendship, and Lady Delacour describes Freke as the object of
her spectatorship:
There was a wild oddity in her countenance which made one stare at her, and
she was delighted to be stared at—especially by me—so we were mutually
agreeable to each other—I as starer, and she as staree (B 43).
230
As if speaking of Smith rather than Hervey, Lady Delacour brags about outsmarting men of genius: “’Tis the
easiest thing in the world to catch hold of a man of genius—you have nothing to do but to appeal from his
senses to his imagination; and then he sees with the eyes of his imagination, and hears with the ears of his
imagination” (B 64).
138
This is the first time, presumably, that she has had a friend outlandish enough to warrant
being the spectator rather than the performer.231 As Lady Delacour starts to lose control of
her identity under Freke’s command, her spectatorship takes on qualities of a domestic
retreat. In the same moment that Belinda learns of Hervey’s true feelings, Lady Delacour
learns of Harriet Freke’s false friendship; they both become wiser spectators after their
performance at the masquerade.
In contrast to Belinda’s strictly rational observations of Lady Delacour, Lady
Delacour’s evaluation of Belinda is based on close, careful spectatorship. She tells Belinda,
“I may trust you—for though a niece of Mrs. Stanhope’s, I have seen this day, and have seen
with surprise, symptoms of artless feeling about you” (B 33). In diagnosing these symptoms
as evidence of a pure heart, Lady Delacour reveals her astute ability to judge character based
on external appearances and trifling occurrences.
Later, when Lady Delacour and Belinda see Virginia’s portrait, Rochfort teases “Ay,
there’s one picture that’s worth all the rest, ‘pon honour! and we’ll leave it to your ladyship’s
and Miss Portman’s taste and judgment to find it out” (B 189). The parallel structure
suggests that Lady Delacour will wield the taste while Belinda offers judgment, but in fact
Lady Delacour astutely observes both the portrait and Belinda’s reaction to it. As Rochfort
whispers to a friend that the portrait is of Hervey’s mistress, “her ladyship leant her ear to
this whisper, which was sufficiently audible, [and] she fixed a seemingly careless, but most
observing, inquisitive eye upon poor Belinda. ‘She loves Clarence Hervey,’… thought lady
Delacour” (B 191).
231
Lady Delacour explains, speaking of herself in third person like the papers, that “Lady Delacour’s sprightly
elegance was but pale—not to say faded pink, compared with the scarlet of Mrs. Freke’s dashing audacity” (B
43).
139
Like Baillie’s curious spectator, Lady Delacour looks for muttering lips and halfchecked exclamations. This revelation in the art gallery about the true state of Belinda’s
affections is entirely intuitive, and readers are given no concrete reasons for her suspicions.
Like Baillie’s spectator, she reads others in relationship to herself, drawing on her experience
as a former actress to uncover the masquerades of other characters.
Her own attraction for Clarence Hervey, for example, is what first makes her doubt
Belinda’s supposed indifference to him. She confesses this method of self-comparison and
intuition directly: “We are so apt to judge from our own feelings… I have caught you—the
blush belongs then to Clarence Hervey” (B 188). Relying on her own feelings to judge
Belinda’s Lady Delacour trusts Belinda’s blush as proof of her affection for Hervey, even
when her young wards words and even thoughts deny it. Just as Baillie’s curious spectator
knows that “in examining others we know ourselves,” Lady Delacour agrees that in
examining ourselves we may come to know others, rephrasing Baillie in her claim that “One
is apt to judge of others by one’s self” (B 273).
Lady Delacour’s spectatorship of Clarence Hervey is similarly intuitive, and based on
her own subjective experience. Unlike Belinda, Lady Delacour has unwavering confidence
in “our hero” (B 157). “Perhaps you don’t think that he has any principles,” she tells Belinda
and the skeptical reader, “but there you are wrong; I do assure you, he has sound principles—
of taste” (B 19). For Lady Delacour, sound principles and taste, moral authority and fashion,
sincerity and eloquence are not mutually exclusive categories. While readers’ opinions of
Hervey are as hesitant as Belinda’s, the critically astute Lady Delacour never falters in her
faith.
140
Because readers’ interpretations seem to be more closely guided by Belinda, it would
seem that Lady Delacour is out of place in a domestic novel, and that she plays a merely
supportive role to the heroine. While Belinda begins the narrative as the ideal spectator in
the position of moral authority, however, this position slowly begins to unravel.232 After
carefully watching Belinda and Hervey both together then separately over time in her home,
like Baillie’s invisible spy, Lady Delacour can claim insider knowledge of the novel’s hero
and heroine, having privileged access to their “secret closets” and secret thoughts. Lady
Delacour knows that Hervey loves and deserves her young ward, and “if you would only
open your eyes,” she tells Belinda, she would see the same thing. She knows Hervey is a
“good actor” in both senses of the term—as a talented but also virtuous performer (B 349).
Lady Delacour’s observations reveal Baillie’s curious spectator as sometimes besting Smith’s
impartial spectator.
Even when Lady Delacour cannot explain Hervey’s actions, concerning the Virginia
St. Pierre scandal in particular, she trusts in her high opinion of his character. “The man
loves you,” Lady Delacour insists. “Some entanglement, some punctilio, some doubt, some
delicacy, some folly, prevents him from being just at this moment where, I confess, he ought
to be—at your feet” (B 273). While she claims to need no excuse, she is confidence that he
has one. Lady Delacour goes so far as to blatantly refuse tangible evidence that would clear
his reputation, confident enough in his character to need no explanation:
232
In the social scene rather than the domestic space, the roles reverse, and Lady Delacour now acts as
Belinda’s judge: “What is the meaning of all this? You’d better trust me; for I know as much of men and
manners, as your aunt Stanhope at least; and in one word, you have nothing to fear from me, and every thing to
hope from yourself; if you will only dry up your tears, keep on your mask, and take my advice” (B 28).
In this scene, as Jennie Batchelor writes, “Lady Delacour points out that Belinda’s painful recognition of
Hervey’s true feelings toward her offers a valuable lesson, by demonstrating to her young companion that life
itself is a masquerade (Batchelor 163). And it is in Belinda’s best interest at that moment to keep on her mask.
Lady Delacour is transitioning from actress to critic, but she loses none of her theatricality. However
suspiciously performative in her spectatorship, she gives good advice.
141
Clarence Hervey loves you. Never was I so fully convinced of it, as this day.
Why had not we that letter of his sooner? That will explain all to us—but I
ask for no explanation; I ask for no letter, to confirm my opinion, my
conviction—that he loves you: on this point I cannot be mistaken (B 352).
While Belinda is fickle and doubtful, Lady Delacour is steadfast in her faith in Clarence
Hervey, based entirely on her decidedly interested, rather than disinterested, judgment.233
While Belinda hunts for clues, Lady Delacour refuses empirical evidence of his innocence,
trusting entirely to her intuition.234
When Clarence arrives, he clears up the mystery—but no one except Lady Delacour
is persuaded by the method by which Hervey is justified. Instead of using scientific
experiment and logical reasoning to prove her point of view, Lady Delacour relies on her
knowledge of how heroes and heroines are “supposed” to act, using small clues and literary
conventions to justify her beliefs.235
Convinced that Hervey would blush at a poem about betrayal if he were guilty of the
crime, Lady Delacour uses it to test him. As he read,
Lady Delacour paused, and fixed her eyes upon Clarence Hervey. He, with all
the appearance of conscious innocence, received the book, without hesitation,
from her hands, and read aloud the lines, to which she pointed… Mr. Hervey
read these lines with so much unaffected, unembarrassed energy, that Lady
233
This Baillian interested judgment turns up in several places in Lady Delacour’s speech. For example, she
says “we think that a dual concerning ourselves must be more extraordinary than any other,” suggesting the role
that proximity plays in sympathy (B 52). “It is the curiosity of a friend,” she says, by way of self-justification,
“not of an impertinent busy-body” (B 194). Partiality, she suggests, legitimates curiosity.
234
This intuition is, moreover, decidedly partial: “I never give my vote without my interest, nor my interest
without my vote… Some circumstances have lately come to my knowledge, which throw some doubts upon his
honour and integrity—doubts, which I firmly believe, he will clear up to my satisfaction at least as soon as I see
him, or as soon as it is in his power; with this conviction, and believing as I do, that no man upon earth is so
well suited to my friend, pardon me, Mr. Vincent, if my wishes differ from yours: though my sincerity may give
you present, it may save you from future, pain” (B 336-37). In contrast to Smith, hers is decidedly interested
judgment.
235
Lady Delacour says, thinking of Lawless before fighting her own dual, “I had my presentiments, and my
confused notions of poetic justice” (B 56). This poetic justice, it seems, causes her to expect her own life to be
lost in the dual in recompense for Lawless’s death.
142
Delacour could not help casting a triumphant look at Belinda, which said, or
seemed to say—‘You see, I was right in my opinion of Clarence!’ (B 351).
Though she cannot give concrete reasons or excuses for the rumors, she refuses to consider
tangible evidence and remains steadfast in her original, intuitive, favorable reading of his
character. His unaffected reading of the poem suffices to confirm her expectation. Literary
conventions and poetic justice guide Lady Delacour’s impressions: “Life is a tragicomedy!”
she says, and “it is a true representation of what passes in the world” (B 57).236
In the passages described above, Lady Delacour’s good opinion of Hervey is based on
two key criteria: first, his “sound principles of taste,” and second, his ability to read a poem
without blushing (B 19). But, despite her unconventional interpretive approach, Lady
Delacour is right.237 Despite circumstances that would seem suspicious if viewed rationally
or disinterestedly, Virginia St. Pierre is neither his mistress nor the object of his affections.
Just as Lady Delacour was right to trust in Belinda’s secret attachment to Hervey, she is also
right to trust in Hervey’s secret attachment to Belinda. She knows the state of their hearts
before they know it themselves, because her years as an actress have made her a good judge
of character.
When Belinda announces her engagement to Mr. Vincent, Lady Delacour is the only
one to criticize her: “Believe me, Belinda, you are deceiving yourself; you are not in love
with Mr. Vincent” (B 360). She can recognize deception, even self-deception, where Belinda
cannot. When Belinda explains how she can love Mr. Vincent without being in love with
him, and find esteem more valuable than passion, Lady Delacour retorts violently, “I never
236
237
Elsewhere, she compares her life to a drama, a history of war, and a novel (B 63).
Marjorie Lightfoot points out that “it is not Belinda who brings the farcical situation to a happy, semirational
conclusion in which the right individuals are united. Nor is it the highly rational Dr. X—or the highly moral
Percivals. It is well-meaning, morally equivocal Lady Delacour, who rashly applies common sense to assist her
friends and is helped absurdly by chance to resolve their problems” (B 121).
143
wish to be as cool as you are, Belinda!” (B 361). And she is not; “I am absolutely overcome
with heat,” she tells Belinda, “and with curiosity” (B 194). This heated, curious temperament
serves her unexpectedly well as a spectator.
Lady Delacour’s suspicion of Mr. Vincent is based on a similarly small and
seemingly inconsequential circumstance, that of his admiration of Mrs. Luttridge, Lady
Delacour’s arch-nemesis.238 However, this “slight circumstance,” which at first seems but
“little connected,” later explains the “great events” of his life more clearly, just as Baillie
prescribed.239 When his gambling debt at Mrs. Luttridge’s EO table is revealed, Lady
Delacour is the only one who is unsurprised.240
Long before the scandal is revealed, Lady Delacour had raised her suspicions: “I
shrewdly suspect, that he likes the lady’s EO table better than the lady” (B 346). Lord
Delacour later confirms her suspicions:
Lady Delacour has, for a woman, an uncommon share of penetration, and can
put things together in a wonderful way… Mr. Vincent was a constant visitor at
Mrs. Luttridge’s, whilst at Harrowgate, and used to play high (though
unknown to the Percivals, of course) at billiards (B 419).
Lady Delacour’s husband qualifies his praise for his wife by suggesting her penetrative
observation is uncommon “for a woman.” However, he importantly highlights the
238
She also gets clues about Mr. Vincent through her servant Marriott, who flirts with sir Philip Baddely’s
gentleman to get bits and pieces of information that have been “suspected… reported or whispered” (B 259-60).
This closet technique is not quite what Baillie had in mind, but it fits the paradigm for curious spectatorship.
239
At the conclusion of the novel, Lady Delacour underscores the role of slight happenstance in the plot: “we
might have been all making one another unhappy at this moment,” she says, “if it had not been for Mr.
Vincent’s great dog Juba, Miss Annabella Luttridge’s billet-doux, Sir Philip Baddely’s insolence, my Lord
Delacour’s belief in a quack balsam, and Captain Sunderland’s humanity” (B 474).
240
It should be noted, that like Lady Delacour, Clarence Hervey’s penetration into character also comes from
personal experience—wisdom gained from his own mistakes rather than the mistakes of others. In identifying
the cheat in Mrs. Luttridge’s EO table, which helps him to save Mr. Vincent from infamy, Hervey relies on his
own knowledge of how the game works. His sympathy for Mr. Vincent, it seems, is also partly based on his
own earlier propensity for betting, though over games of skill rather than chance (including playing chess,
walking, swimming, pig-driving, wine tasting, and successfully passing as a Frenchwoman in a hoop-skirt).
144
“wonderful” nature of this intuitive assembly, which suggests that her judgment is more
likely to be rooted in serendipitous happenstance than cold reason. Curiosity, in this case,
contributes to her sagacity.
Critics have struggled with what to make of Lady Delacour’s apparent domestic
reformation at the novel’s conclusion. The narrator promises “She had no secret to keep—no
part to act; her reconciliation with her husband and with his friends restored her mind to ease
and self complacency” (B 316). In a footnote, Edgeworth adds that “We spare the public the
journal of Lady Delacour’s recovery. After what has already been said, the intelligent reader
will suppose it to be gradual, but effectual” (B 316). But any astute reader, of course, will be
suspicious of such unbridled confidence in Lady Delacour’s sincerity. Even Lady Boucher
notices “you look just the same, and speak just in the same sort of way: I see no alteration I
confess.” Instead of offering evidence of her transformation, Lady Delacour simply asks,
“And what alteration, my good Lady Boucher, did you expect to see?” (B 353).
Lady Delacour is ambiguous about whether her domestic transformation is just
another act: “If I survive this business, it is my firm intention to appear in a new character, or
rather to assert my real character” (B 292). She also curiously comments, “Observe, my lord,
I am won not tamed! A tame Lady Delacour would be a sorry animal, not worth looking at.
Were she ever to become domesticated, she would fare the worse” (B 314). Even in the final
tableau vivant, she insists “What signifies being happy, unless we appear so?” (B 478). Such
passages do not suggest that an antitheatrical, domestic reformation is a realistic possibility
for Lady Delacour.
However, her transformation seems less awkward or artificial when framed as a
transition from actress to spectator rather than merely from socialite to domestic. She is a
145
failed performer turned successful critic, and for Lady Delacour, both roles are intensely
theatrical.
Like Belinda, Lady Delacour draws parallels between reading and spectatorship.
Lady Delacour’s judgments of character are repeatedly rooted in literary convention. Since
the moment she discovered that Vincent’s knowledge of English literature was inferior to
Hervey’s, for example, her mind was made up that Vincent was undeserving of Belinda. Mr.
Vincent “was not perfectly sure of his own critical judgment and his knowledge of English
literature was not as extensive as Clarence Hervey’s; a circumstance, which Lady Delacour
had discovered one morning” (B 347). Just as romance convention dominates her
interpretation of Belinda and Hervey, literary prowess undergirds her prejudice against
Vincent.
The importance of right reading in her assessments of Belinda, Hervey and Vincent is
no accident. Like Belinda, Lady Delacour’s spectatorship is linked to her abilities as a
reader. But Lady Delacour reads very different texts, and in very different ways. To begin
with, Lady Delacour does not read for moral maxims: “I never read or listened to a moral at
the end of a story in my life—manners for me, and morals for those that like them” (B 35).241
But this is not to say that she does not read with purpose. For Lady Delacour, reading is
more of a puzzle, one that requires active engagement from the reader. “I absolutely can
read, Clarence,” she says, “and spell, and put together” (B 192). For Lady Delacour, reading
involves a process of analyzing and synthesizing subtle details to find hidden meanings, as
Baillie had prescribed. Like Belinda, Lady Delacour’s astute spectatorship is linked to astute
241
Belinda’s Aunt Stanhope agrees, telling her niece that “I do not mean to trouble you with stale wise sayings,
which young people hate, nor musty morality, which is seldom fit for use in the world, or which smells to much
of books to be brought into good company” (B 199).
146
reading—but she models a kind of spectatorship, and a kind of reading, that differs starkly
from Belinda’s.
Lady Delacour uses formulaic genre expectations, for example, to guide her
interpretation of Belinda’s feelings. In fact, she almost seems aware that she is a character in
a novel: “if you would only open your eyes, which heroines make it a principle never to do—
or else there would be an end of the novel—if you would only open your eyes, you would see
that this man is in love with you” (B 83). She seems to recognize, as if she is outside the
novel, that Belinda cannot see Hervey’s love because it would prematurely end the narrative.
Lady Delacour’s witty, self-conscious analysis of Belinda as a novel heroine suggests
that she relies on her eyes much as Belinda relies on hers, but Lady Delacour’s ways of
looking are vastly different. Her experience allows her to see a bigger picture. Marjorie
Lightfoot notes that “Edgeworth’s characters use various genres as artistic metaphors for life
in order to glamorize their existence and define their own roles”—and none more so than
Lady Delacour.242
Lady Delacour’s self-consciousness about being in a novel suggests that Edgeworth
grants her a privileged position like Belinda, not in terms of moral judgment but in terms of
literary judgment. For example, Lady Delacour preaches to Belinda about the “false taste” of
including unnecessary peripheral characters when she visits the Percivals. Edgeworth pokes
fun at herself in this passage, as Lady Delacour again seems to step outside the narrative to
comment on the plot: “Why then did you bring in her ladyship [Anne Percival] and her
children? To gain time? Bad policy! Never whilst you live, when you have a story to tell,
242
Lightfoot 124. Like Clarissa, the tension between characters manifests in debates over what genre their
story ought to be. Lightfoot identifies Lady Delacour’s role as both the agent and object of satire in the novel,
and she says that “few women in English literature can compare with this manipulating, articulate coquette,
villain and goddess of machination” (Lightfoot 129).
147
bring in a parcel of people who have nothing to do with the beginning, the middle, or the end
of it. How could I suspect you of such false taste?” (B 195). If Belinda directs the way
readers make moral judgments in Edgeworth’s novel, Lady Delacour directs how they make
literary judgments.
In connection to her liberal application of genre expectation in the narrative, Lady
Delacour also relies heavily on literary allusion. As Macfadyen points out, Lady Delacour
makes literary allusions at eight times the rate of any other character.243 Understanding these
allusions becomes essential for properly interpreting both Lady Delacour and Edgeworth’s
narrative. Comparing herself to the Princess Scheherazade in her opening confessional, she
brings the theme of powerful spectatorship to the forefront. Urging Belinda to give Hervey a
lock of hair for his flattery, she says, “come, a second rape of the lock, Belinda” (B 76).
Comparing the scene to Pope’s poem, she playfully suggests that Belinda would be a prude
to refuse the request, and that literary convention insists that she acquiesce. Lady Delacour
uses literary allusion as a way to exhibit her literary prowess but also to explore how
intertextuality invites active spectatorship.
Lady Delacour is a slightly irresponsible but intuitively astute literary critic. Literary
allusion gives her the power to critique not only literary genres, but also social systems,
gender expectations, and political philosophy. The ability to make and understand these
allusions, Edgeworth suggests, demonstrates good reading. For Lady Delacour, using
allusion turns reading into a powerful and active social tool.244 As a reader, and as a
243
MacFadyen 425. Other allusions in Edgeworth’s novel that relate to spectatorship include Sheridan’s A
School for Scandal, whose heroine (like Belinda) inadvertently eavesdrops, Blue Beard, a fairy tale about
female curiosity, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, a parody of inactive sentimental spectatorship, Rousseau’s
Emile, which prescribes acquiescent observation for female education, and references to notable eighteenthcentury critical spectators, including Johnson and Dryden.
148
spectator, Lady Delacour follows Baillie’s prescription for active, intuitive, and curious
spectatorship.
Lady Delacour’s literary prowess parallels Edgeworth herself in unexpected ways.
Lady Delacour has the peculiar talent of knowing “how to make a good story of a bad one,”
just as Edgeworth prided herself on the ability to make a moral story out of a novel (B 88).245
Edgeworth was similarly prone to allusion, in her personal letters, her published work, and
her social life.246 Marjorie Lightfoot notes that “Edgeworth provides literary criticism
indirectly through allusions,” just like Lady Delacour.247 Allusion is to Lady Delacour what
anecdote is to Belinda, the one driven by literary examples and the other driven by examples
from nonfiction sources.
Other parallels between the author and Lady Delacour suggest that Edgeworth’s
writing style has the same bitonality as her split protagonists: along with Belinda’s rational,
pedagogical style, she also practices Lady Delacour’s “eloquence of virtue” (B 178). John
Gibson Lockhart famously described Edgeworth as “a little, dark, bearded, sharp, withered,
244
Jennie Batchelor writes, “Not only is her speech liberally interspersed with literary quotations, but Lady
Delacour also expresses her personal narrative through a variety of literary modes which indicate how she
dramatizes her life in an attempt to hide from society’s watchful eye beneath the mask of fashionable levity”
(Batchelor 161). In many ways, then, allusion is a mask, which she uses to avoid the spectatorship of others by
deflecting attention elsewhere. Lady Delacour’s “literary self-fashioning [via allusion] is complemented by her
literal self-fashioning through costume and cosmetics” (Batchelor 161). For Lady Delacour, reading is less
about self-reflection and more about self-fashioning.
245
Susan C. Greenfield remarks that in the final tableau scene, “character [Lady Delacour] and author
[Edgeworth] merge in a play on performance implying that perhaps neither of them trusts the final ‘pretty’
picture” (Greenfield 224). Lady Delacour speaks for Edgeworth as she says, “if you be disappointed, lay the
blame not to me, but to your own imagination” (B 464).
246
In addition to Baillie and Smith, Edgeworth knew and wrote about other theatrical figures of her day,
including Sarah Siddons, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Hannah More, and Harriet and Sophia Lee. Her letters
allude to these figures in a similar style to Lady Delacour’s intertextual references. Janet Egleson Dunleavy
writes that Edgeworth knew that “ironic purpose is best served not when art imitates life but when art imitates
art” (Dunleavy 59). Edgeworth artfully employs allusion “to reinforce theme, tone, description, and character
development and to establish setting—a fictional fashionable world synthesized in part from literary
antecedents, in part from observations of real life” (Dunleavy 59).
247
Lightfoot 127.
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active, laughing, talking, impudent, fearless, outspoken, honest, whiggish, unchristian, goodtempered, kindly ultra-Irish body. I like her one day, and damn her to perdition the next” (B
3). Like Lady Delacour, Edgeworth was sharp, withered, impudent, and mouthy. Other
contemporaries made more direct comparisons between Edgeworth and her risqué heroine.
For example, Edgeworth’s contemporary George Ticknot writes,
What has struck me most today in Miss Edgeworth herself, is her uncommon
quickness of perception, her fertility of allusion, and the great resources of
fact which I can call nothing else but extraordinary vivacity. She certainly
talks quite as well as Lady Delacour.248
As Edgeworth aged, she became a vivacious socialite; she grew more charming in society as
her “talent for anecdote and mimicry” and her “vast, unusually solid reading” gave her
increasing confidence in her wit. In fact, acquaintances complained that the once shy young
girl grew into a woman who would not stop talking. Thomas Moore in particular complained
of her “over-activity of the tongue.”249 In creating Lady Delacour, Edgeworth
simultaneously unleashed a sense of curious, confident observation within her writing style.
Butler suggests that near the end of her career, Edgeworth formulated an aesthetic
approach that considered “two intellectual approaches to reality: the scientific or exact, and
the literary or intuitive.”250 However, evidence in her letters suggests that Edgeworth
oscillated between these two poles much earlier in her career, and that she did not necessarily
privilege the impartial style over the curious.251 Edgeworth’s social and familial popularity
248
Qtd. by Butler 416.
249
Recorded in his diary, 29 April 1831, qtd. by Butler 417.
250
Butler 269.
251
Klaus Lubbers discusses Edgeworth’s mix of historical and literary approaches to fiction, and Michael
Gamer argues that Edgeworth achieves “aesthetic coherence” despite the fact that her “factual rational tales
partake of fantasy and romance” (Gamer 251). Like Gamer and Lubbers, I see a bipolar quality in Edgeworth’s
style.
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rested on her talent for anecdote and her vast, solid reading—two skills that parallel her
infamous Lady Delacour.252 While Butler suggests that she “preferred scientists to poets,”
Edgeworth was extremely well-read, and her allusive wit demonstrates she had as much of
Lady Delacour as Belinda about her.253
Like Lady Delacour, Edgeworth was famous for her skills of mimicry. Instead of
performing the roles of Queen Elizabeth or the comic muse like Lady Delacour, however,
Edgeworth “liked to entertain the family circle by mimicking the brogue and strange
opinions of Edgeworth’s Steward.”254 Characters in her novels were often based on
acquaintances in real life, and she used this playful imitation, a literary version of gossip, to
entertain her family and friends. With so many in-jokes and literary allusions, Edgeworth
writes with decidedly interested, rather than merely disinterested, style.255
Edgeworth could also make much of seemingly inconsequential detail with this form
of storytelling. Butler describes her letters as noticeably speculative,
compared with the strongly practical, utilitarian bent of everything on which
[Richard] Edgeworth spent his time, many of Maria’s best letters have almost
no content at all. In the absence of much news, she concocted entertainment
out of mere wisps of material.256
252
Butler 416.
253
Butler 444. In addition to her many allusions to literary figures, usually spoken by Lady Delacour,
Edgeworth also includes references to Jean Antoine, the scientist abbé Nollet who first discovered osmosis,
Thomas Bewick, author of History of Birds, and Esculapius, the Greek demi-god of medicine.
254
The “written version of this dramatic monologue” evolved into Castle Rackrent, her most popular story for
adults (Butler 174).
255
Butler writes, “However important books might be as suppliers of incidental material, friends and friends’
ideas always mattered more” (Butler 245).
256
Butler 204.
151
Like Lady Delacour, Edgeworth herself was drawn to “anecdotes, character-sketching, and
mannerisms of speech” in her writing.257 If Belinda is a roughly autobiographical portrait of
the qualities that made the younger Edgeworth anxious, then Lady Delacour is a roughly
autobiographical portrait of the qualities that made Edgeworth more confident with age.258
According to Smith and Belinda, the ideal spectator is, like the novel, both entranced
by the theater and safely distanced from it—dependant on the stage but importantly removed.
With Lady Delacour, however, the spectator’s judgment emerges from within the theater, and
this distinction is significant. Lady Delacour is a spectator whose authority is not rooted in
her distance from the stage. Compared to earlier in the eighteenth century, the theater is less
illegitimate, or the novel is less anxious about this illegitimacy. Lady Delacour reveals
Edgeworth’s radical affirmation of more participatory, and performative, form of
spectatorship. Edgeworth suggests that some of the most powerful acts of spectatorship
emerge from their proximity to performance. As Baillie and Lady Delacour show,
performance and spectatorship are not mutually exclusive categories.
In many ways, the lines between the two heroines are blurred more than contrasted,
and the more time they spend together, the more similar they become. Just as Belinda
betrays a sense of curiosity, and feels an intuitive attachment to Hervey (which she
appropriately represses), Lady Delacour betrays more rational qualities of Smith’s impartial
spectator (which she appropriately ignores).259 It is not that Lady Delacour is without
257
Butler 240.
258
Butler also points out that Lady Delacour is loosely based on an acquaintance of Edgeworth’s father, an actor
named Deleval (Butler 29). I do not mean to discredit this reading, but only to complicate it.
259
The differences between the two heroines are less a matter of how they feel and think than how they value
these feelings and thoughts. While Lady Delacour does not like to admit that Vincent has outshone Hervey, for
example, she says, “I am not so partial to my knight, as to compare him, in personal accomplishments, with
your hero. I acknowledge also, that there is something vastly prepossessing in the frankness of his manners; he
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reason—she simply chooses not to agree with this rational interpretation. Once in a while,
though, she uses Belinda’s own comparative logic against her: “never before did I hear a
woman talk of liking a lover, because she was accustomed to him… at this rate, my dear, I do
not doubt, but you might become accustomed to Caliban” (B 339).260 In a way, their
relationship evolves into a wonderful yin/yang style exchange. Edgeworth’s real lesson in
spectatorship lies in the exchange of these differences between the heroines, rather than the
differences themselves. Belinda’s rational reason serves Lady Delacour, and Lady
Delacour’s experiential wisdom serves Belinda. The focus of the novel is on the relationship
between these women rather than the virtues or qualities either one individually, and
Edgeworth advocates a synthesis of their approaches to spectatorship rather than a Smithian
or Baillian system alone.
Both Smith and Baillie describe spectators whose insights derive from a split
consciousness: both projecting and removing, both watching and being watched, both close
and distant, both self and other. Edgeworth takes this paradigm of the spectator’s inherently
split consciousness one step further, by splitting the spectator’s authority between two
distinct positions, two different characters. The ideal spectator, then, sees from the points of
view of both Belinda and Lady Delacour.
Edgeworth further affirms her two heroines by contrasting them with extreme
versions of impartial and curious spectators. As caricatures of Smith’s and Baillie’s
spectators, Virginia St. Pierre and Harriet Freke model radical manifestations of both
has behaved admirably well, about this abominable letter; but, what is better than all in a lady’s eyes, he is
eperdument amoureux” (B 338). She acknowledges that when compared side by side, she must rationally
confess that Vincent has virtues.
260
At the same time, Belinda confesses that “Perhaps the appearance of virtue might, on many occasions,
succeed, as well as reality.” Lady Delacour replies, “Yes, if the man be as good an actor as Mr. Hervey” (B
349).
153
systems. On a spectrum of spectatorship, Virginia St. Pierre and Harriet Freke occupy
opposite ends. More so than Belinda, Virginia is paralyzingly distant in her impartiality.
More so than Lady Delacour, Freke is dangerously whimsical in her curiosity. These two
characters mark the limits of spectatorship in either direction, and they implicitly reveal the
novel’s heroines as comparatively moderate.
A “simple, unsuspicious girl,” Rachel is too full of sensibility and natural feeling to
suspect any ill in anyone (B 368). This sensibility, however, does not translate into sense.
Unlike Belinda, who is also distant from society, Rachel finds no moral value in this
distance. She sees the world from outside and above, as Smith directs, but she is so far
removed as to lack necessary discretion. As a spectator, her extreme impartiality actually
clouds her ability to judge well.
Mrs. Smith comments disapprovingly that Rachel can read but not write, and she
rightly suggests that this restricted literacy is worse than none at all. She reads too much, and
too impartially. As Rachel becomes consumed with romance novels and romance ideals, this
voracious, ill-judged reading becomes morally threatening. Indiscriminately consuming
fanciful books, Rachel becomes a poor spectator in her reading. The efforts of Mrs. Ormond
are insufficient to enlighten the young girl’s mind, and Edgeworth writes,
The solitude, in which she lived, added to the difficulty of the task; without
companions to interest her social affections, without real objects to occupy her
senses and understanding, Virginia’s mind was either perfectly indolent, or
exalted by romantic views and visionary ideas of happiness. As she had never
seen any thing of society, all her notions were drawn from books (B 379-80).
Rachel takes Smithian detachment and impartiality too far. So far, in fact, that the narrator
writes that “she might, to an indifferent spectator, have appeared stupid and insensible” (B
154
412). Her own extreme impartiality finally makes her unsympathetic to an impartial
spectator, and Edgeworth points out the irony by referencing Smith.
In contrast, or perhaps in parallel, Harriet Freke models an intemperate version of
Baillie’s curious spectator. Freke is the one character who is more performative, more
curious, and even more bold than Lady Delacour. While Virginia is likened to a fictional
heroine, which detaches her from contemporary society, Freke is likened to a living woman,
Mary Wollstonecraft, which attaches her even more uncomfortably close to that same lived
reality. 261 Using the insider information about Lady Delacour’s personal life against her,
Freke’s curiosity makes her cruel. Freke takes pleasure in watching Lady Delacour’s “fear of
goblins” take root in her mind, just as Baillie had suggested that a man likes to see someone
who thinks he has seen a ghost (B 49).
When the report arrives that Lawless is killed in a dual with Lord Delacour, Lady
Delacour panics with a fear that “I had the blood of a fellow creature to answer for” (B 50).
Having orchestrated the entire scene, including the dual, Freke cruelly enjoys watching the
tragedy unfold. “She expected to see me show sorrow in public,” Lady Delacour recalls, but
her pride overcame her suffering in society (B 52). Although Lawless haunts Lady Delacour
like a “spectre of dismay,” this figurative haunting is nothing compared to what awaits her (B
52).
Freke returns to Lady Delacour’s story as a ghost. This passage is one of
Edgeworth’s most explicit references to Baillie, as Freke longs to witness Lady Delacour’s
agitation and wildness of terror. Convinced by the “vision” that haunts her that she will die
261
Links between Freke and Wollstonecraft have been studied extensively by various critics, but I tend to agree
with Deborah Weiss’s reading of Freke as a twice-removed caricature of a caricature of Wollstonecraft—that is,
a critique of those who criticized the feminist writer, who had died of complications in childbirth just a few
years before the publication of Belinda (Weiss 446).
155
that night, Lady Delacour bids farewell to her friends and family, fearing what punishment
awaits her in the afterlife for her unatoned crimes. Three times, she tells Belinda, she has
been visited by the ghost of Colonel Lawless. “This is a warning to me,” she prophecies, “to
prepare for death” (B 308). Caught in a spring-trap by the gardener, however, the “ghost” is
revealed to be none other than Harriet Freke.
Freke was a late addition to Belinda’s novel, and her wild cross-dressing antics were
originally ascribed to Lady Delacour. At her father’s recommendation, Edgeworth added the
character of Harriet Freke to carry the most odious qualities of Baillian curiosity. As a
spectator, it is not only her directing role but also her overt pleasure in watching others suffer
that makes Harriet Freke’s curiosity so cruel. Adopting a directing role that is as much
performance as it is spectatorship, and exaggerating Baillie’s tenets of watching closeted
suffering for pleasure, she reveals the sadistic tendency at the extreme of curious
spectatorship.
Like Virginia’s detached spectatorship, Freke’s spectatorship is likened to poor
reading. Intending to free Belinda from the Percivals, she is horrified to discover that
“Belinda was alone, and reading, when Mrs. Freke dashed into the room” (B 225). After
failing to manipulate Belinda with flattery, Freke turns to her books. “You read I see!” she
says to Belinda,
I did not know you were a reading girl. So did I once! But I never read now.
Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can’t
think for themselves—but when one has made up one’s opinions, there is no
use in reading… You, who can think for yourself, should never read (B 227).
Freke incorrectly interprets her refusal to read as a strength of mind. “Smith’s Theory of
Moral Sentiments—milk and water! … Poor thing!” she laughs, “Who bored you with this
task?” (B 228). Rejecting the rational growth of knowledge through reading in favor of
156
reductive and violent maxims, Freke reveals the danger of intuitive curiosity that is
untempered by reason. It is no coincidence that the novel’s two failed spectators are also
failed as readers.
In the end, Edgeworth does not determine whether Belinda or Lady Delacour is the
better spectator. Edgeworth’s ideal spectator is her reader, who combines the rationality of
the one with the intuition of the other.
Lady Delacour reads the way Edgeworth wants her audience to read: as highly
discerning, literate, cultured readers. Baillie’s theory of the curious spectator not only
applies to the moral behavior of Lady Delacour and the writing style of Edgeworth, but also
to the reader’s task. By using so many allusions, Edgeworth relies on the reader to construct
the meaning of the narrative. Like Lady Delacour, readers apply genre expectations to
interpret character.262 If we pay attention to inconsequential details, as Baillie prescribes, we
may just predict a major occurrence or two ourselves. Lady Delacour’s reference to
Amazons at the opening of her own story, for example, prefigures her later plans for a
mastectomy—a detail that a perceptively curious reader might notice (B 34). Likewise, the
narrator’s introduction of Mr. Vincent will prick the ears of astute readers as well: “to deal
fairly with our readers, we must not omit to mention a certain Mr. Vincent” (B 217). The
issue of “dealing fairly,” used here only as a metaphorical turn of phrase, will return with a
gusto when he is revealed as a gambler—a consequence that only a reader like Lady
Delacour could predict.
262
Referring to the juxtaposition of alternate genres, particularly material art genres, in the novel, Egenolf
writes that “the shift in [genre] designation indicates a shift in the way the subject is read, a shift in the reader’s
expectations, and in the moral evaluation of the text or subject” (Egenolf 325). Egenolf suggests that these
syntheses of genre create a synthesis of fiction and nonfiction within Edgeworth’s work.
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And from Belinda, readers are intended to learn patience, observation, and rationality.
In some ways, our reading mirrors Belinda’s quite closely, since many scenes are filtered for
us indirectly through her perspective.263 But in other ways, we can also imitate her technique
rather than mirror her judgments. If we are impartial enough to read the narrative from our
own detached position, to keep our eyes open, and to stay cool and rational, we too may have
our virtues reinforced with Edgeworth’s fiction. In fact, Edgeworth suggests that her novel
must reinforce familiar experiences in order to be effective:
Those who unfortunately have never enjoyed domestic happiness, such as we
have just described, will perhaps suppose the picture to be visionary and
romantic; there are others—it is hoped many others—who will feel that it is
drawn from truth and real life (B 216).
Virtuous readers, Edgeworth suggests, will recognize the objective accuracy in her writing.
Like Belinda, readers can draw on lessons that other people, like Lady Delacour, learn the
hard way to safe guard our own virtue. We can be a part of Hervey’s happy category of
people who learn from the experiences of others, rather than the wise category of people that
learn from our own mistakes.
In the novel’s final scene, with its curious tableau vivant spread before readers’ eyes,
the reader is most explicitly invited to participate in the novel as an active spectator.
Douthwaite notes, “As if to underline the artificiality of this denouement, Edgeworth lends
her narrative voice to the notoriously theatrical Lady Delacour who lists the surprising
coincidences that led to this point and then stages a final tableau vivant of domestic
263
One critical absence in the novel is that Belinda sees the breast, while we as readers don’t. Her privileged
access here, as elsewhere, guides our response. When Lady Delacour confided in Belinda, “baring one half of
her bosom, se revealed a hideous spectacle,” we are given no description of the malady, here or elsewhere.
Instead, we only see Belinda’s reaction to the disease. The image is “indelibly impressed upon her
imagination,” and the “face and form of Lady Delacour… seemed to haunt her” (B 33). Belinda’s reaction to
Lady Delacour’s disease—a mix of pity, horror, and disbelief—guides our responses, too.
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contentment.”264 The tableau functions to impress upon the spectator the “full significance of
the stage-spectacle.”265 Lady Delacour “steps forward with a final injunction to the
reader/observer that stresses the ‘logic of reception’ characteristic of sentimental fiction.”266
Lady Delacour, recites, in rhyme, “Our tale contains a moral, and no doubt,/ You all have wit
enough to find it out” (B 478). After observing two competing modes of spectatorship,
neither of which suffices alone, the reader is charged with a fit task in Lady Delacour’s
closing couplet. Critics struggle over how to read this cryptic conclusion. Why would
Edgeworth promise us a “moral tale” rather than a “novel” in the introduction, only to fail to
tell us what that moral is at the end?267 But if Edgeworth trains readers to be impartial and
curious spectators, then this ambiguous conclusion that asks the reader to supply the moral is
perhaps the only appropriate way to end the novel.268
In taking on the role of a director (with Belinda’s quiet assistance, urging her not to
rush things), Lady Delacour’s role as a director is, not surprisingly, no less performative than
her role as spectator. Mitzi Myers writes,
264
Douthwaite 47.
265
Douthwaite 47.
266
Douthwaite 48.
267
Edgeworth’s advertisement claims that “the following work is offered to the public as a Moral Tale—the
author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel” (B 3). In contrast to critical assumption, this curious turn of
phrase suggests that Edgeworth does not deny that her work is a novel, only that she does not want to openly
admit that it is.
268
With this conclusion, she curtails the moral authority of the novel itself. But this gap is also the point:
Edgeworth’s novel is split between two competing heroines because the spectator’s consciousness is always
inherently split. This split—which allows spectators to synthesize multiple points of view—is what gives her
spectators moral authority. “At the same time as Edgeworth’s texts make claims for themselves as authoritative
sources of factual information,” writes Belanger, “they also function to caution readers about taking such
seemingly authoritative representations on faith” (Belanger 113-14). As Mitzi Myers points out, Lady Delacour
suggests here that “only a rash critic would dare serve up just one [moral]” (Myers “My Art” 112). Deborah
Weiss adds that “the meaning of the story will emerge through the kind of careful analysis, use of good
judgment, and intelligent consideration that Belinda has developed and demonstrated over three volumes”
(Weiss 461).
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Saving the day with inspired detective work and storytelling skills, Lady
Delacour (The Scheherazade—Blue Beard’s wife doubling for the author)
delivers Clarence and Virginia from their gendered entrapments: her
dazzlingly orchestrated denouement metafictionally reveals cultural norms as,
well, fictions, useful social glue, perhaps, but always open to renegotiation.269
As both Lady Delacour and Belinda take on more of an authorial role here, directing and
editing the action of the final scene, the task of spectatorship is conspicuously left to the
reader. The characters call attention to their roles as characters in fiction, self-consciously
debating how much information to share with their readers. Belinda suggests drawing out
the conclusion with substantial detail, reminding us that “there is nothing in which novelists
are so apt to err, as in hurrying things toward the conclusion. In not allowing time enough for
that change of feeling, which change of situation cannot instantly produce” (B 477). Lady
Delacour, however, suggests that “something must be left to the imagination” (B 477). The
two heroines compromise again, by agreeing to share that the happy couples were united, but
in mentioning but not describing the “wedding dresses, or a procession to church” (B 477).
The reader must translate this textual description into visual imagery through
imaginative spectatorship. We imagine Captain Sunderland kneeling to Virginia, in romantic
raptures; we imagine Lord Delacour embracing his wife, and holding his daughter’s hand;
and we imagine Hervey kissing Belinda’s hand. Something about Belinda’s body language
motivates Lady Delacour to insist that she comply: “Nay, miss Portman,” she says, “it is the
rule of the stage” (B 478). We are not told if she draws her hand away, or if she blushes, or
if she hesitates to stand with her newly betrothed; the reader must imagine what nonverbal
cue inspires Lady Delacour’s response.270
269
270
Myers 112.
For further reading on the tableaux vivant in nineteenth-century literature, see Martin Meisel, Realizations:
Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983).
160
By blurring the lines between the stage and page, the novel asks readers to think selfconsciously about the productive exchange between literature and reality. Lady Delacour
ironically insists that “nothing is more unlike a novel than real life,” before delving into her
life’s story, which is heavily mediated by literary references and expectations (B 36).
Edgeworth uses complex “transfers between texts and between lived and literary experience”
to comment on both.271 Readers discover the central role (their own role), of giving value,
meaning, and moral purpose to literary texts, dramatic performances, and fictional characters.
The power of interpretation, more than the power of creation, becomes Edgeworth’s—and
perhaps the eighteenth century’s—most potent form of moral authority.
Maria Edgeworth does not bequeath a moral code to her audience in Belinda.
Instead, she bequeaths to her reader the critical judgment needed to evaluate and synthesize
her characters’ points of view within their own lives, as impartial, curious, and maybe even
heroic, spectators.272 Edgeworth’s spectator is not just a spectator of moral judgment, then,
but also an interpreter of its literary representation.
Edgeworth’s reader, like the novel’s heroines, must be split, simultaneously engaging
in two interpretive modes, with the knowledge that each allows access to certain possibilities
271
272
Myers 140.
Critics have identified the readers’ interpretational task in her Irish works, arguing that “both Edgeworth and
her reviewers attempted to produce the kinds of readers who could be equipped through reading to ‘judge for
themselves’ the increasing range and diversity of texts on Ireland… [they] attempted to educate their readers
about what and how they should read” (Belanger 106). But this training in independent judgment frames more
than just her Irish tales; Edgeworth’s earlier works, particularly Belinda, also posits the reader as gaining less of
a clear moral representation and more of an ability to interpret moral representations. Belanger points out that
Edgeworth’s critics evaluated her Irish works based on vraisemblance rather than truth claims, “enabling their
readers to judge what was truly Irish… through formal categories of textual judgment, shifting the focus from
questions of accuracy to the evaluation of plausibility and realism” (Belanger 108). “Edgeworth’s protagonists
are equipped to ‘read’ critically through experience, against which they can judge the truthfulness of various
representations of Ireland, and of Irish representations of themselves” (Belanger 113). “In the imaginative
identification between reader and focalizer made possible by Edgeworth’s text [Castle Rackrent], readers have
access to the sort of experience necessary to get at the truth, thus making ‘judgment for oneself’ in actual
experience analogous to critical reading of texts” (Belanger 113).
161
while cutting off others. The stakes here are political as well as literary: as Mitzi Myers
writes, “her interplay of transparency and theatricality interrogates issues of gender and
representation substantive not only to the development of the period’s fictions but to its
cultural politics as well.”273 Like Inchbald, Austen, and Burney, Edgeworth appropriates
theatrical spectatorship within the novel. But more so than her contemporaries, Edgeworth
considers the fragmentation of this critical apparatus, and she links it to major philosophical,
literary, and historical issues of her day.
I have hoped to demonstrate two things in this chapter: first, that Edgeworth’s novel
relies on the theater as an extended metaphor of observation, and holds up spectators as more
powerful than performers; and second, that Edgeworth oscillates (like her heroines) between
two forms of ideal spectatorship: Adam Smith’s impartial spectator and Joanna Baillie’s
curious spectator, both of which are better in moderate rather than extreme versions.
Belinda’s ideal spectator occupies multiple sites on a spectrum rather than a single, isolated
position. Edgeworth suggests that goodness may wear many masks, and may occupy many
seats, in the theater of English society.
273
Myers 110.
162
CONCLUSION
Spectatorship played an important role in eighteenth-century culture and the early
novel. By examining spectators like Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, and Belinda Portman,
this dissertation identifies ways that spectatorship grants these characters agency. In
addition, it simultaneously points to the growing moral authority of a reader who is asked to
admire, then imitate, and finally surpass the spectatorship of the novel’s protagonist. In the
early novel, both characters and readers perform the role of the engaged spectator.
Because this project is more suggestive than comprehensive, examining only three
instances of spectatorship as a trope in the eighteenth-century novel, I would like to conclude
with a brief discussion of the limits and further possibilities of this research. While
Richardson, Fielding, and Edgeworth model important yet distinct ways that the novel
appropriates historically-situated ideas of spectatorship, these cases alone are not enough to
prove a larger, more pervasive trend within the eighteenth-century novel more generally. By
foregrounding the role of spectatorship in the narration and characterization of these works, I
hope to implicate and invite consideration of spectatorship in a wider range of contemporary
works, including Frances Burney’s Evelina, Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, Madame de
Stael’s Corinne, Jean Jacques Rousseu’s Julie, or the New Heloise, Matthew Lewis’ The
Monk, Henry MacKenzie’s A Man of Feeling, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among
others.
I have attempted here to suggest that these authors, with very different formal and
ethical motives, emphasize the reader’s judgment as a necessary part of the novel’s didactic
ambitions. I have not intended, however, to conflate reading with spectatorship in
eighteenth-century culture. The relationship between these two roles is more intricately
163
woven, as novelists use the spectator as a metaphor to prescribe a specific form of active, and
interactive, reading. It is the metaphor of spectator figures, more so than actual theater
audiences, that permeates these novels. It is the animating dimension of spectatorship, the
performance of spectatorship, that became an important basis for characters in and readers of
the eighteenth-century novel. Again and again, these novelists turn to the theater (and
aesthetic theory more widely) for a figure of spectatorship that parallels their ideal readership
in its participatory, engaged, and interactive nature.
Like Hogarth’s Laughing Audience (Fig. 1), a work of art whose success is measured
by whether the viewer himself becomes a laughing audience, these novels succeed if the
reader imitates the protagonists’ style of spectatorship. The ideal reader is aware of this
mirroring, and of his role in uncovering, or even creating, the text’s meaning. As a metaphor
of right reading and active judgment, spectatorship reveals the surprising agency of
characters who may seem to be submissively observant, and it reminds readers that they, too,
perform a critical role in the novel as engaged spectators.
164
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