Introduction
In the three years between 1746 and 1749, Fielding was working on his masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones. It is great book in itself and a microcosim of the later hundred years in prose fiction. Today it is impossible to underrate it, but the literary conteries of the time looked on it coldly.
They were devoted to Richardson's sensibility cult, and were unnoved by Fiedling's harder brilliance and more masculine vigour.
An Ample Panorama of Epic Dimensions
Tom Jones may claim to be the first novel written to a theory. It was epical in structure or rather an alternation of epic and dramatic, the narrative complication itself so as to bring various conflicting interests and rival intrigues to a close encounter, and then, by means of a sudeen disclosure, unraveling the complications. In other words, Tom has a series of involved adventurrs, which are shaped towards their climax at the hands of a dramatist.
Of one may say, as did Dryden of Chaucer's Canterbury Takes 'here is God's plenty'. The decription Fielding applied to Joseph Andrews, 'a comic epic poem in prose, is still more applicable here; the scale is larger and the representation of the spirit of the land and age an ampler panorama. Fielding was guided, in the art of his fiction, by certain critical preconceptions, recognizing himself as the founder of a new province of writing'; he claimed the liberaty "to make what laws I please therein". The new province is not that of the prose tale as such, of course, but that of the prose take so intelligently organized that everything, contributes to a pattern and the whole life is intellectually disposed and clarified. Its laws include the discipline of relevance and proportion; they prescribe human nature in its life-like normality to be the subject matter, and they demand of the author the four-fold equipment of genious' (the combination of invention and judgement), knowledge (of history and liberature), wide social experience, and generous sympathies.
The novel has epic dimensions. It was been pointed out by Aurelien Digeon, that a work is epical ifit expresses, "at a given moment, the soul of a generation, in,all its fullness and all its depth, perhaps in all the dimness of its hidden dream". A work becomes an epic "when it is a complete expression of a collective life, a fragment of the legend of the conturies." If was look at Tom Jones from this point of view, the novel definitely
produces the impression of an epic. Tom Jones gives a picture of all England. It is a "picture of England at a moment when, suspended between her great past and her prodigious future, she was most limpidly herself.... Tom Jones is the England of the time", as Digeon so aptly sums up. In Tom Jones, we have a more complete picture of English society than we have in Joseph Andrews or in Amelia
0 Comments