A Book Report on The Cambridge Companion to the eighteenth century Novel by John Richetti
Yang Yizhuo 1101212856
The Cambridge Companion is a collection of essays contributed by different writers, therefore in order to avoid creating confusion I will in this book report mainly extract the ideas expressed in the book without constantly mentioning the specific works or writers.
1. The term “novel”
Eighteenth century witnessed the advent of the novel and is regarded as the formative period of novel, but the meaning of term “novel” in eighteenth century was by no means the same one that modern readers refer to. “Novel” is just one of the terms concerning prose narratives, other terms being “romance”, “history”, “true history”, and “secret history”. The term “novel” gained its clear sense in the end of eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Now it has broadened its meaning to encompass long fiction, history or other narrative form. Traditional narrative forms, such as romance, are more fictional and mysterious than real. Because of the influence of Enlightenment thought, the desire for reality drove the readers to seek for a literary form that depicts common people and ordinary life that they were familiar with. So we see truth claims at the beginning of Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe. A great many people even believe the events or places appeared in novels were real. We may hear of that some readers even went so far as to find the places depicted in the Gulliver’s Travels.
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2. The novel and social history
Novel in the eighteenth century was not only poplar among the newly rising middle class, but also among the working class, especially the young. Even those who received little formal education could read novels because novels are accessible to common people. People read them for pleasure and the young often appealed to novel for solution when were faced with difficulties, especially when they were in difficulties in love or marriage. But some argued that novels could be misleading and provide the young with false expectation for life. Some poor girls might hope to be Pamela by their virtue, and poor boys might be under the illusion that they could establish their own world like Robinson. “To readers like Pope or Johnson, novels were — quite apart from whatever values they represented or espoused — trash reading.” (P25) And towards the end of the eighteenth century, Romanticism was on the way to rebel the “low” form of literature.
I think novel in the eighteenth century is somewhat like the TV series in contemporary age. Some TV series is, as it were, a vivid description of the our real life and some young people tend to believe it, either envisioning the beautiful picture of their future life or holding a pessimistic view towards life.
3. Defoe as an innovator of fictional form
Many critics believe that novel was not a new form in the eighteenth century, and Don Quixote which was written in the late sixteenth century is often considered as the early model of novel. This novel is a rejection of medieval chivalric romance and makes its way to realistic narrative form. But Defoe certainly discovered a new way of writing and he was consciously aware that he was writing something new. Thus Defoe and Richardson were often labeled as the founder of the English novel. His novels were based on the real historical background. Many policies and social events mentioned in his novels were real and the social changes, such as the failure of organized religion and the decline of morality in economic life, exerted influence not only on the people then but on the heroes and heroines in his novels. Defoe made it clear that his novels are true record of real life and real persons who tells their story in the first-person perspective. Realism is the salient features of his fiction.
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4. Gulliver’s Travels
Swift was, in many ways, different from Defoe. Swift did not seek for reality and his career was mainly based on his satirical style of writing. “He distrusted virtually everything represented in the early novels.” (P73) Consequently, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe became the object of his satire. I still remember Prof. Han said at the beginning of this semester that it is unfair to make a comparison between Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, so here I just list one argument in this article. “Crusoe is an image of reconstituted self that Swift so distrusted.” (P77) Therefore, Gulliver, another representative of the middle-class figure, resents not only the modern civilization but his own family and life. From the two heroes’ different ending — one is happy and the other miserable — we can perceive the different attitudes of the two authors towards civilization and the modern commercial life.
5. Samuel Richardson
When we read Pamela, we have the feeling that it is rather easy to read because of the simple language. This is due to the narrator Pamela is a servant girl for sure but there is still another reason for its simple style. Richardson wrote novels by accident. He was once asked by bookseller to write a small book of letters which should be accessible to country readers. In writing the letters, Richardson employed fictional characters and wrote them largely based on the real life, thus he gradually discovered his new style of writing. Therefore Pamela is his first attempt to write novel.
“Richardson is a pioneer in modern fiction in finding ways of giving an impression that a character is developing and changing from within.” (P103) In many episodes, the writer invites us to see the depth of Pamela’s inner world, including her fear, love and sexual anxiety, that is to say he deliberately explored the psychological depth of the characters. The book also raises a great question of sexual relationship in the eighteenth century. The word “Friend” is constantly mentioned by Mr. B, but do readers really see their friendship based on equality? They are apparently not equal, and Pamela is in many aspects inferior to Mr. B. “Like all Enlightenment works, it is in itself a body of controversies. The controversies are never-ending.” (P104) Prof. Han once put up a question why Richardson did not end the novel at the moment the two married. This article offers one answer that ideal marriage does not completely solve the problem. “The novel is open-ended, deliberately open-ended. It runs right past the normal ending, the Cinderella ending, the marriage of hero and heroine, and on into their early married life.” (P105) It seems that Richardson was not prepared to solve the problem, but as it ends with Pamela expecting a baby, the readers may cherish a hope for the future.
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6. Henry Fielding
Just as Swift to Defoe, Fielding held a strong hostility to Richardson. Fielding’s “anti-Pamelaic parody is a continuous thread” (P136).
Not only in Shamela, but also in his other works such as Joseph Andrews, the readers can see the parody.
In fact, his writing style was “closely tied to tradition that we sometimes call Augustan. Augustan literature is a style of English literature mainly featured an explosion in satire. Both Swift and Fielding wrote in this style and they appreciated each other. Both of them held strong antipathy for the claimed reality in novel. In reading Tom Jones, we cannot fail to notice that Fielding as the author often appears in the novel and deliberately shows the author’s arrangement of the plots. The authorial figures sometimes comment on the story and its writing, thus helping to remind the readers that the novel is an artistic creation or artistic reality not the real reality. “The style…helped to turn Fielding into the principal inventor of the English comic novel and an early practitioner of the kind of fiction that is concerned self-consciously and on a substantial scale, with its own writing.” (P122)
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From the four distinguished the writers mentioned above, we see their different views on novel writing (though some of them shared similarities).
They all contributed in their own way to the formative period of novel.
