Twin Stars: The Anxiety of Sibling Rivalry between Literary Titans

There the resemblances end. The two men were the proponents of radically different visions of life and the inventors of radically different ways of writing. Richardson, a printer by trade and thoroughly middle class in origins and mentality, was puritanical, pessimistic, humorless, moralizing, didactic, vain, and insecure. Fielding, aristocratic and classically educated, was worldly, tolerant, self assured, and witty. Richardson's notion of virtue is mechanical and (in Clarissa) otherworldly, while Fielding's is flexible, mingling earthiness with open-mindedness, and seeing people, whether good or bad, as complex (McKillop 127). Richardson wrote epistolary novels that probed the consciousness of his heroines in a confined domestic sphere, while Fielding wrote, with detachment, of adventure on the open road, involving all classes, all sorts of people and locales, and varied experiences. The narrator is non-existent in the one and omnipresent and all important in the other. For Richardson, character is central and individualized, an approach that results in psychological development and emotional intensity; for Fielding, plot is central, scenes are brief, and character is generalized. Richardson's identification with the emotions of the main character and with the details of the vulnerable feminine sensibility contrasts with Fielding's comic distance, hyperbole, and masculine extroverted robustness. Richardson overwhelms the reader with details; Fielding preaches and practices selectivity and succinctness. Naturally the two men could not understand each other any more than could Voltaire and Rousseau. But they were, in Fielding's pithy words (which apply to all these twin stars), "Rivals for that Coy Mistress Fame" (Thomas 275).

In 1740, Richardson published his first novel, Pamela, about a young servant woman who withstands the sexual advances of her aristocratic master until he agrees to marry her. Despite its moral tone, the book mingles, as one scholar notes, "prudery and prurience, sermon and striptease" in a manner not too distant from pornography (Thomas 177). The book took the reading public by storm. One out of a number of dissidents was Fielding, who rushed into print a bare few months later a short tale, Shamela, which parodied and ridiculed every aspect of Richardson's book (Battestin 151). Fielding thought thatPamela, far from being a moral paragon, was a hypocrite who used sex as a means of social climbing. By temperament, he disliked the maiden purity theme as well as the prescriptive use of the novel form as a vehicle of instruction (Wright 59).

In ridiculing Pamela, Fielding had, after years of writing for the stage, suddenly found his vocation in narrative fiction. Within a year he published his first "serious" novel, Joseph Andrews, which begins an alternative tradition of novel writing (Battestin 151). Fielding's Preface presents his book as a moral and artistic response to Richardson's. It begins by continuing, albeit "allusively" rather than "imitatively" (Battesin 8), the critique begun in Shamela of Richardson's bad morals, bad art, and narrow view of life, but after ten chapters turns to new matters. Except for one slight reference, Richardson made no public response to Shamela or Joseph Andrews, but, nursing his grievance privately, he accused Fielding (in a letter of 1749) of abusing Pamelawith "hints and names taken from the story, with a lewd and ungenerous engraftment" (Thomas 179).