Narrative Strategies in the 18th century Novel
The second course discusses the narrative techniques used in various types of the 18th
century novel (the confessional, autobiographical one and the memoir convention, the comic
heroic, Bildungsroman, picaresque, epistolary ones), as well as in related genres, such as the
satirical or false travelogue (Swift's Gulliver's Travels). It also focusses on the language,
character, point of view pertaining to each of the novels approached.
The proper creators of the British classical novel as we understand it today were
Defoe, Richardson, Fielding. They belonged to the middle class and wrote of its interests and
problems. At the same time, there was a direct interaction between author and his readers;
this is visible in the direct forms of address, rhetorical questions and generally in the constant
presence of the authors' assumptions on the reactions of their readers.
Daniel Defoe created a more complex sort of novel. In his work, the internal quest is
doubled by an external quest, and the reader is invited to share in the hero's dreams, visions and
disillusions. His previous journalistic experience influenced both his style and choice of
characters. Defoe's language is sim 555f53f ple, plain, and expressive, also owing to the precision
required by journalistic writing, authenticity being a demand. Despite the popularity of some
of his other writings, such as Moll Flanders (a low-born heroine's progress towards middleclass
respectability), undoubtedly the work by which posterity remembers Daniel Defoe
remains Robinson Crusoe (1719). As to its narrative strategies, it can be interpreted as the
synthesis of two existing traditions: the picaresque novel and the personal journal/memoir
(confessional autobiography). The first presents the adventures of one individual in his journey
towards maturity and respectability. The second narrates the psychological processes that shape
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the life of its heroes, having a subjective, introspective character. This feature could also be
linked to a general tendency of Puritanism, self-examination/scrutiny as well as the habit of
interpreting
everyday reality in order to reveal the intentions of
Robinson Crusoe is regarded not only as a classic travel and adventure story, but also
as the prototype of the novel, because of its emphasis on the daily, external and internal
activities of ordinary people, using the formal realism technique. It was inspired by the real
story of the survival of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who had been shipwrecked for a number of
years on a desert island. It is presented as a story told by an old man about his adventurous life:
his experiences on several sea voyages, his adventures as a slave with the Moors, as a planter in
Brazil, as a castaway on a desert island, and finally his rescue by a ship and return to
civilization. His help and servant is a native he names Friday, and his other companion is a
parrot. Defoe's book was rooted in the rise of the modern capitalist society. This odyssey of a
middle class individual became a myth of bourgeois society. It offers the reader a small
version of the larger processes that were reshaping the face of the world everywhere in the 18th
century: the Western spirit colonizing the world, dominating nature, 'civilizing' both the
wilderness and its inhabitants.
The novel can also be read as a metaphor of colonialism, the relationship between
Robinson and Friday appearing as the archetype of colonial relations. Crusoe treats other
human beings as commodities; when he meets them, they are transformed into his servants or
slaves. He doesn't ask Friday his name, he gives him one. The novel points to the mercantile
mentality of the expanding British empire, to the assumed superiority of civilized man and to
the nature of the Savage (consider issues such as British/imperial versus marginal, civilized
versus barbarian, colour, race).
Robinson's experiences describe the internal journey of a Protestant individual, as in
Defoe's vision, the western entrepreneurial spirit is connected to religion. Defoe, a born
Puritan, also lived in a sphere of utilitarian action. Yet, the other side of individualism is
solitude ( consider Robinson's "inner isolation").
Henry Fielding constructs the action in his novel Tom Jones on a larger scale,
combining various literary techniques. Tom Jones appears as a comedy of manners, a
picaresque narrative written in the third person as well as a Bildungsroman. It follows Tom's
evolution from an unruly youth to a mature nature and his reunion with Sophia. The
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Bildungsroman is a literary genre that started in Germany, and is, in many respects, equivalent
to a fictional autobiography. We consider to be Bildungsromans all the novels that deal with the
development of a young man (or in some cases a young woman). According to the definitions
of Webster's Dictionary, a Bildungsroman is "a novel dealing with the education and
development of its protagonist. There are variations within the genre, and one or more elements
may be left out of a particular novel, which makes it that novels such as Joyce's Ulysses,
Dickens's David Copperfield or Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre can be included in the category.
Fielding also used a serious amount of organization, so that his novels are well
constructed and symmetrical. There is a system of polar symmetries in the strucure of the
characters: Tom (positive) versus Blifil (cunning, scheming, hypocritical). Fielding describes
types, therefore the names are mostly allegorical (Tom Jones - a common name), Allworthy
(All-Worthy), Sophia (Wisdom). From a narratological point of view, the author is omniscient
(he knows everything about the characters, is everywhere, in possession of truth). He is a
parental authority that guides the readers, using a "bill-of-fare to the feast" (the metaphor of
literature as food to be consumed). The novel has a meta-textual quality (is self-reflexive),
being framed by introductory chapters to its books. Fielding is the first author to consciously
talk about the new genre, about the way to write a novel, being aware of his double position as
theorist and writer.
He considers himself to be the founder of a new province of writing, pleading for
realism, truth, a new ethos (the bourgeois taste), emancipated from the old type of romance
(medieval, imaginary styles). The new kind of literature, called "a comic epic poem in prose"
should have balance, dynamism, usefulness - it is therefore a shift from the aristocratic
kind of writing to the democratic one.
S. Richardson is the creator of epistolary novels, which are novels created through
the interplay of letters, and represent a popular genre in Augustan England. Art in his opinion,
as well as in Fielding's, was made to instruct, to offer a model to be imitated, to educate while
amusing. Through his first person narratives, the author pries inside his characters'
consciousness. Richardson shows a close attention to the various pressures that society and
morality placed on women, and the effects of these pressures on their psyches (through his
depiction of characters such as Clarissa and Pamela). An epistolary novel is written as a series
of documents, usually letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings can also be used. An
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aspect of the epistolary novel is that it allows the writer a realist approach to several points of
view, while avoiding the use of the omniscient narrator. Pamela, published in 1740, tells the
story of a virtuous servant who resists the advances of her master. In the end, conquered by her
purity, the master marries her. The readers were sympathetic of Pamela's honour being
threatened, and satisfied to see her virtue rewarded in the end. The novel appears therefore as a
moralistic story. Pamela's innocence may appear self-conscious and premeditated, which
represents the consequence of the hard, calculating and almost cynical view of virtue and vice
that is visible throughout the book. She does not rebel against the system, but joins it, and
through this, Richardson can be said to have been able to both destroy and support the
patriarchal order of the novel: he destroyed it in having his feminine character resist the
persecution of her (male) aristocratic oppressor, but he upheld it in having her marry him- a
convenient form of happy ending.
The same tension between individualism and the values of a patriarchal family are
explored on a more tragic tone in Richardson's other novel, Clarissa. Clarissa Harlowe, the
heroine of the novel, is a virtuous and intelligent young woman of an upper middle class family,
who, after the death of her grandfather, has become the heiress of his estate. Interestingly, in
Richardson's world, property offers no power for Clarissa. Significantly she gives control of
her fortune to her father, thus continuing in the position of economic and familial subordination
to him. Robert Lovelace is an attractive, witty, if morally dubious aristocrat, courting Arabella,
Clarissa's sister. Clarissa's family try to make Clarissa marry a man of their choice, whom she
detests. Scared at the prospect, she runs away to London under the 'protection' of Lovelace,
who is in fact planning to simply add her to the list of his conquests. She resists his advances,
and in time, Lovelace becomes more and more impressed by her virtue and her personality. In
an access of passion he rapes her, she manages to escape him but remains ill and eventually
dies, but she does so in full consciousness of her virtue, and hoping for a better lot in the
afterlife. Lovelace will die too, in a duel with Clarissa's cousin and in the end the girl's family
realize the misfortune their decisions have caused their daughter.
As in his other work, in Clarissa, Richardson sets to work an ethic based primarily on reason.
Pamela is a calculated virtuous woman, yet Clarissa's case is more complicated. In Clarissa,
Richardson preserved the basis on which the moral code of his heroine was constructed, yet he
presented it in a more sympathetic manner. Morality is assessed rationally, and Clarissa
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opposes cold reason to the passion that Lovelace displays. At the same time, Clarissa and
Lovelace are not just opposed individuals; they each represent a class, a moral code, and a way
of life. We are again confronted with the contrast between the bourgeois middle class virtuous
woman and the promiscuous wealthy aristocrat that Pamela had dealt with. From this
perspective, Clarissa is about the tension between the middle class and the aristocracy; this
tension is visible at many levels, but Richardson also constructs it as a complex struggle
between two individuals who each try to attract the other into their own culture. A feminist
reading of the novel would emphasize the double pressure exerted on Clarissa as woman in 18th
century England: that of her family and that of Lovelace, both imposing their wills and trying to
use her to their ends. However, Richardson rejected the path of female emancipation or active
feminism. Clarissa's plight is connected to her own progress into the depths of the conventional
female role of victim. She does not try to free herself from her fate, but succumbs to it step by
step; from eloping, to being raped, to dying, Clarissa emerges as a powerful stereotype, that of
the suffering virtuous virgin. A very schematic construction of womanhood follows: into black
and white. On the other hand, however there are many ways in which Richardson validates the
individualism of his heroine. Indeed, the novel can be read as an epic of resistance to the
reduction of women to objects or instruments by a patriarchal society. Even if at an external
level she is a victim, at a psychological level every act of oppression against Clarissa makes her
stronger in her own beliefs. As pointed out earlier, when she dies, she dies certain of her virtue
and of her rightfulness, so that from this perspective even her death represents a triumph over
her enemies. The story of her sufferings, carefully analyzed and described by Richardson,
anticipates the writing of such modernist masters as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Although the epistolary novel as a genre failed to develop in English literature in the centuries
to come, it is considered to have anticipated and laid the grounds for the stream of
consciousness technique and the interior monologue.
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) is not a novel proper; it is a satire with a
direct address to his contemporary England. Although it is full of allusions to contemporary
historical events, it is as valid today because its objects are man's moral nature and the
defective political, economic and social institutions. Swift adopts the form of the imaginary,
fantastic voyage, in a parody of traditional travel literature. It looks like Robinson Crusoe but it
is not similar to it. It has as objective the creation of a fictional world that seems real. The
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moment Gulliver is shipwrecked in Lilliput we realize, from the description of the little
inhabitants of the country, that it is not a realist fictional work, but a fantasy.
Gulliver goes on four voyages, all of which end disastrously and which allow for Swift to
satirize four aspects of the British society of the time. In the first part of Gulliver's Travels,
Swift satirizes the court of George I. His primary satirical device here is allegory- the
Lilliputian government leaders stand for Whig leaders in the tumultuous years between 1708
and 1726.
In Part II, a voyage to Brobdingnag, the country of the giants, it is Gulliver who
represents the English attitudes which Swift wishes to criticize, when confronted with the good
giants that stand for the ideal of the enlightened monarchy. From the attitudes and practices of
the Lilliputians Swift makes his readers realize in how many ways these doll-like creatures are
small. Their physical dimensions are symbolic by their meanness, pettiness and narrowmindedness.
In this small world Gulliver is the giant. The perspective changes dramatically in
the second voyage when Swift's character is shipwrecked on the Brobdingnag shore. Not
only does he become Lilliputian compared to the king of Brobdingnag, but also he is petty,
mean and shallow in comparison. The giants' monstrous appearance is in fact a hint at their
broadness of mind and their goodness, as Swift transposes literally the qualities of the spirit.
When he appeared in the land of Lilliput, in many ways Gulliver was disgusting,
repulsive and grotesque. Yet finally it was the delicate, tiny Lilliputians, who proved to truly be
grotesque. As far as the Brobdingnagians are concerned, physically they are just as repulsive to
Gulliver as he was to the inhabitants of Lilliput. Yet it is the giants compared to Gulliver who
are refined, sophisticated and generous. Their big bodies hide big hearts and wide horizons. In
his creation of the two parallel worlds of Lilliput and of Brobdingnag, Swift accomplishes two
things. The Lilliputians are literally small; they are also figuratively small (small-minded and
narrow of spirit). Outwardly they may seem attractive, yet their 'smallness' makes them
repulsive to the spirit. The inhabitants of Brobdingnag are literally and figuratively big (large in
their sympathies, big-hearted, open-minded).
In Part III, the inhabitants of the island of Laputa are allegories for certain members of
the Royal Society, whom Swift was attacking satirically, thus criticizing the exaggerations that
the fascination for science could attract. This third part of Gulliver's adventures is therefore
constructed as an attack against the extremes of theoretical and speculative reasoning, which
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Swift criticizes because he believes that such excessive interest in science can lead those
involved in it to lose touch with reality. The Laputans and Projectors are isolated scientists, cut
off from the world because they are so concerned with abstract matters and with their individual
abstract preoccupations.
In Part IV, the allegories are not so clear-cut; the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms are both
exaggerated representations. Both represent two opposite tendencies that naturally live side by
side in the human spirit, namely instinct and reason, a contrast dear to the hearts of the
Augustans. If a healthy mix of instinct and reason is human, pushing to the extreme in one or
the other direction may have monstrous results. Swift presents us with the fruits of such an
experiment: the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of a humanity ruled by instinct only are just
as repulsive as the Houyhnhnms, who are intelligent horses, embodiment of a cold humanity,
ruled by reason only. At the same time, this part is also a satire directed against mankind and
against its extremes. Owing to their great stores of reason, the Houyhnhnms have done away
with flaws such as lying, corruption, infidelity, from their world. In certain ways theirs is an
ideal world. Yet such a society which is governed entirely by reason appears under Swift's pen
as less attractive, less desirable, less human, because it lacks any human warmth, any human
feeling of love, affection, devotion, generosity. As an interesting comment on such a society
governed by cold reason only, Swift dwells on the fact that to the Houyhnhnms even life itself
seems less precious, as both birth and death are natural things, inevitable, common and
therefore indifferent to everyone. Due to his mix of reason and feeling, Gulliver sees himself as
neither a Yahoo nor a Houyhnhnm. Caught between these two contrasting worlds, Swift's
character - an embodiment of common humanity - finds it impossible to identify with either of
them.
Although it is written in the first person, and the reader has access to the realities
described in the text only by means of the consciousness of the main character - Gulliver -
the book lacks the internal coherence of a novel. There is no unifying plot, and no unifying
personality. Indeed, Gulliver, although the main character, is not a hero, but a persona. In
literature, a persona is a mask, a device used by the writer to express his own opinions in a text.
It is not a true character, but rather a particular point of view from which to write. Gulliver
lacks a coherent psychology, we do not follow his development, there is no element of growth
as a result of his explorations, as he merely represents the means by which Swift constructs his
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satire. If we were to compare him with Robinson Crusoe, for instance, it becomes obvious the
extent to which in this novel its author, Daniel Defoe, dealt with the inner workings of his
hero's mind, the transformations his personality underwent as a result of his adventures, while
Gulliver merely describes and comments on the realities he encounters. Swift's work may be
interpreted as a human allegory, even a dystopia. It is a philosophical meditation, showing in
an ironic tone the errors, frailties, vanities, absurdities that human beings may be prone to. This
is realized in Swift's style, which is very characteristic of his age: clear, pointed, precise. In the
neoclassical tradition, there are no rhetorical flowerings, no repetitions or studied effects.
Homework
1. Read D.Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and explain why it is generally taken as a
paradigm of colonial relations.
2. Read H. Fielding's Tom Jones and focuss on the various literary techniques
employed. What is the function of his introductory chapters? Dicuss the allegorical
character/structure in Tom Jones.
3. Why are Richardson's novels viewed as an early exploration of the heroine's
psychology?
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