Much more is at stake at the masquerade than the danger that libertines can commit crimes anonymously. The trope that everyone “‘wears a Habit which speaks him the Reverse of what he is’” comes closer to the threat that is constituted by the masquerade (Universal Spectator, qtd. in CastleCastle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization 5). If the quintessential costume represents “an inversion of one’s nature” (5), it simultaneously rejects and exposes the roles assumed by respectable people in everyday life. The uncertain relation between ‘truth’ and ‘deceit’, the imperceptible transition from ‘masquerade’ to hypocrisy to virtue, can be illustrated with another episode from Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (110–15; vol. III, bk. XIII). The virtuous Eudosia suffers the neglect and contempt of her husband Severus, whose disrespect for her goes so far that he introduces his mistress into the household, and “tho’ Eudosia kept her Place at the Head of the Table, yet nothing was served up to it but what was ordered by Laconia” (111). Instead of quarrelling with her husband, however, Eudosia makes a friend of Laconia until she can think of a plan to get rid of her. Finally, she feigns a dangerous illness and tricks Severus into reading her supposed last will – which is that he should marry his mistress. Severus is reclaimed by his wife’s generosity, and Laconia is sent away.
EudosiaHaywood, Eliza’s story is one of several illustrations of exemplary wives who manage to reclaim unworthy husbands through patience and virtue. However, in contrast to many other depictions of long-suffering wives, her behaviour is described as active scheming, rather than simple patience. Indeed, Haywood feels called on to stress this point for her readers:
Some Women will look on this tame enduring in EudosiaHaywood, Eliza as wholly unworthy of a Wife, and too great an Encouragement for other guilty Husbands to treat their Wives in the same Manner; but this Pattern of Prudence and Good-nature knew very well the Temper of the Person she had to deal with, and that nothing was to be gain’d by the Pursuit of any rough Measures. (111)
EudosiaHaywood, Eliza complies with the common advice to wives to return patience for abuse, but the equation ‘good wife = reclaimed husband’ is questioned through the imagined reader response. The familiar story of the virtuous wife, it is suggested, is liable to misreading; by implication, the example of goodness may well fail in reality as it sometimes does in fiction. Pamela, after all, attempts a similar strategy when she suspects her husband of adultery, but the situation initially gets only worse. Mr. B. senses that something is wrong and is almost estranged from her; the two are reconciled when Pamela finally admits to her suspicions (cf. DoodyDoody, Margaret Anne, A Natural Passion 92–6). If Eudosia is, nevertheless, justified in her behaviour, it is because she knows “very well the Temper of the Person she had to deal with”. She is not, that is, simply following the script every wife ought to follow. Rather than keeping to the code of conduct books, she follows her own “Schemes”, tailored to an individual husband (112).
At the same time, however, HaywoodHaywood, Eliza does not allow her reader to perceive Eudosia’s behaviour as a mere masquerade. Eudosia is a “Pattern of Prudence and Good-nature” (the latter point is proven when she begs her husband to provide for his mistress before sending her away). Her scheme, then, of conquering through a display of generosity, is natural to her. Moreover, she “still retained the most tender Affection for her Husband” (112) despite his cruelty. Her love further naturalises her patience, elevating it from a simple ploy to noble loyalty. This insistence on the wife’s love appears to be a universal element of the trope of the neglected wife. It appears, for example, in Sarah Fielding’s novel David SimpleFielding, Sarah, correspondent of Richardson. Early in the story, the eponymous hero boards with different people in order to “seek out one capable of being a real Friend” (27). The wife of one of his landlords proceeds to tell him the details of her married life and the abuse her husband heaps on her. Yet she concludes her story with the following words:
Thus even my Tenderness for him is turn’d against me, and I can do nothing that he does not dislike; yet my Fondness still continues for him, and there are no pains I would not take, if he would return it; but he imputes it to a Warmth in my Inclination, which Accident might as well have given to another Man. (56)
Like EudosiaHaywood, Eliza, this virtuous wife continues to feel affection for her tormentor. Yet although the narrative asks us to take her words at face value, tensions are perceptible between her laying open, however hesitantly, her husband’s faults, and her assertion that she still loves him. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the problem raised by the last part of the sentence quoted: what does the wife’s obligatory love stem from? If it is ‘natural’, might there be some justice in the husband’s assertion that she would have felt it for any other man? And if it is the effect of a conscious effort to control her emotions, can it still be ‘true’? These are the questions which torment Lovelace, and which he uses to justify his repeated ‘trials’ of Clarissa’s love and virtue.
Sarah FieldingFielding, Sarah, correspondent of Richardson’s narrative, in contrast, does not problematize this uncertainty. Her world, although recognizable for contemporary southern England – most of the novel is set in London, Bath and their surroundings –, is organized largely according to the logic of allegory. Duplicity and lies exist, of course, but they are inherently knowable. The same is true, I would argue, for her brother’s more complex novels. Henry Fielding plays with the concept of the ‘reporter-narrator’. He repeats, for example, “the Observation of some antient Sage, whose Name I have forgot”, or records details about his hero Joseph’s diet: “He accordingly eat either a Rabbit or a Fowl, I never could with any tolerable Certainty discover which” (Joseph AndrewsFielding, Henry 29, 59). The narrator’s very uncertainty, however, testifies to the knowability of the world depicted. The “Sage’s” teachings could be looked up in another book, if the reader happened to have a better memory than the narrator, and the details of Joseph’s meal might be found out by a more diligent enquirer. Similarly, there is little inherent mystery about characters’ motivations. In many cases, a character’s main traits are given away by their very name, as in the case of Allworthy or Shamela. Such characters have been said to “belong to […] a moment […] that we might call allegorical, a moment, possibly fictitious, when social role and inner persona were indistinguishable” (RosenRosen, David and Aaron Santesso & Santesso 1046). In some cases, of course, Fielding chooses to obscure or hide a character’s motivations – as he does when withholding the knowledge that Bridget Allworthy is in fact Tom Jones’s mother –, but they are comprehensible when outlined by the narrator. Duplicity, hypocrisy and lack of frankness are thus contained within Fielding’s narrative; the narrator is able to state clearly their cause and limits.
The same is not true for Richardson’s novels. The cause is less that his protagonists have unconscious motivations while Fielding’s have not; rather, it is that there is no agent within the story that can safely set the limits of allowable equivocation and ‘prudent’ scheming. In epistolary fiction – if not “in all writing”, as William WarnerWarner, William Beatty has suggested – “there is nothing within a text to distinguish a true narrative from its false simulation” (Licensing Entertainment 210). In a novel where each event and every thought are filtered through characters driven by half-conscious desires as well as conscious values, the establishment of an absolute ‘truth’ appears oxymoronic. I am not especially concerned with the ‘real reader’ here, who knows that s/he is safely outside the fiction and can choose, for example, to trust the ‘editor’-author’s preferences for certain characters, or to read the novel against the grain by assuming, say, that Pamela is really ShamelaFielding, Henry. Instead, I ask what happens to the fictional reader-characters when they acknowledge that ‘truth’ can look like a masquerade, and vice versa.
As Richardson’s characters recognise, events are shaped by their telling. Pamela’s ordeal at the hands of Mr. B. becomes a “pretty Novel” (232) with a power of its own – it is through reading her version of events that the would-be seducer decides to marry her. Even then, however, he fails to understand her whole mind – although he recognises her virtue, he is unable to ‘read’ her love (which Pamela, in turn, only recognises once he sends her away). It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the married Pamela finds the need to conceal her jealousy almost unbearable. Her pain, as well as the negative effect