Fielding belonged to the rural gentry and laid claim to aristocratic
forebears. He worked his influential connections hard, yet
his was a very independent and democratic life. He fought
for values, which he felt were being threatened on several
fronts. The threats came by government policies and were sustained
by influence rather than merit. He was against the new financial
networks, which were dependent on credit. Speculation and
the taste for ‘luxury’ bothered him. New ways of
thinking and ideas which undercut old religious and social
models fascinated him.
He
wrote fast, but never used language casually. He saw the
abuse of words as symptomatic of the abuses of his time.
He never plucked ideas out of the void. His originality
consisted in adapting contemporary developments and past
models to create new forms. As a satirist, his tone was
more genial. In plays as well as novels, he developed the
use of humor, derived from medieval medicine and modified
in Elizabethan drama. He modified it into a fully fleshed
allegorical mode, reflecting complicated social relationships
through a mosaic of exaggerated characteristics.
He
never lost touch with humanity. This can be learnt from
his heroes, Moliere, Cervantes, and Swift. Episodes from
the Bible and the classics, in particular the Iliad and
the Odyssey, glint behind his plots. His comic drama recalled
Plautus and it’s most bizarre and politically pointed
to Aristophanes. The strangeness and the force of Jonathan
Wild or of A Journey from This World to the Next were derived
partly from the Greek author Lucian. His irony and his flashing,
life-loving humor make him accessible, and his experimental
shifts between realism and expressionism were in tune with
modern practice.
He
claimed that his novels were true ‘Histories’
in comparison to earlier romances and they represented the
contemporary society. Fielding performed and directed too.
His ironic control implied the force of the possibility
of wild, surreal flights of energy under restraint of dangerous
passions and anarchic conflicts
|
