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The performative dimension of Fielding's fiction has often frustrated the attempts of critics to read the machinery of his plot through the lens of rationalist Enlightenment philosophy. Rather than a deity or benevolent magistrate, Fielding's narrator has seemed more like a trickster or charlatan manipulating a narrative full of spectacular coincidences and implausibilities. Historians of science, however, have shown that performances with spectacular machines played a key role in establishing the epistemological authority of empirical science in the eighteenth century. Like Fielding, moreover, eighteenth-century natural philosophers were accused of being charlatans staging magic shows. To distinguish themselves from their rivals, therefore, philosophers had to perform “boundary-work” in which they contrasted the enlightened knowledge produced by their performances with the vulgar superstition they claimed was perpetuated by magic shows. Fielding performs the same boundary-work in Tom Jones, carefully contrasting the enlightened “poetic Faith” solicited by the rationalized clockwork of his plot with the superstition incited by the baroque machinery of spectacular narratives that he represents as barbarous, foreign, and antiquated. But he also follows other Augustan authors in acknowledging that the entertainments popular in the culture of spectacle had distinctly modern, domestic origins and that the residual “superstition” they cultivated was really the commodity fetishism integral to a new capitalist system of production. Fielding's goal in Tom Jones was thus not to eliminate manipulative spectacle from modern narrative but to harness it by directing it toward the higher purpose of producing philosophical knowledge.
The performative dimension of Fielding's fiction has often frustrated the attempts of critics to read the machinery of his plot through the lens of rationalist Enlightenment philosophy. Rather than a deity or benevolent magistrate, Fielding's narrator has seemed more like a trickster or charlatan manipulating a narrative full of spectacular coincidences and implausibilities. Historians of science, however, have shown that performances with spectacular machines played a key role in establishing the epistemological authority of empirical science in the eighteenth century. Like Fielding, moreover, eighteenth-century natural philosophers were accused of being charlatans staging magic shows. To distinguish themselves from their rivals, therefore, philosophers had to perform “boundary-work” in which they contrasted the enlightened knowledge produced by their performances with the vulgar superstition they claimed was perpetuated by magic shows. Fielding performs the same boundary-work in Tom Jones, carefully contrasting the enlightened “poetic Faith” solicited by the rationalized clockwork of his plot with the superstition incited by the baroque machinery of spectacular narratives that he represents as barbarous, foreign, and antiquated. But he also follows other Augustan authors in acknowledging that the entertainments popular in the culture of spectacle had distinctly modern, domestic origins and that the residual “superstition” they cultivated was really the commodity fetishism integral to a new capitalist system of production. Fielding's goal in Tom Jones was thus not to eliminate manipulative spectacle from modern narrative but to harness it by directing it toward the higher purpose of producing philosophical knowledge.
The privileging of aesthetic over material value in the nineteenth-century English novel is reiterated in the marital choice offered the hero when he is positioned between a rich woman and a poor one. Through the contrast between these two female figures, the novels invoke the dilemma that, Adam Smith argued, troubled individuals in an increasingly commercial culture: the choice between wealth and virtue. The rich woman or heiress embodies the concerns about wealth lurking at the heart of narratives that apparently celebrate the overcoming of such material interests. Read against the backdrop of nineteenth-century political economy and anthropology, she reflects the novel's engagement with England's economic development over the long nineteenth century. She also reveals the irresolvable tension inherent in the cultural project, which begins in the middle of the eighteenth century, of disentangling the discourse of political economy from that of literature.
Literary scholars often take at face value Henry Fielding’s most overt rejections of Bernard Mandeville, a writer he associated with egoism and who argued that self-interest is at the core of all virtuous action. Yet Fielding’s rejections are not decisive, tending instead towards ad hominem attacks, insubstantial objections, and unexpected accommodations of egoist arguments. Throughout his corpus, Fielding exhibits a creeping Mandevilleanism: egoist thought frequently gets uncredited airing in his works. Fielding’s debt to egoism is clearest in his attempts to define “good nature,” his highest term of approbation, which appears throughout his writings. Like Mandeville, Fielding understood that self-interest motivates virtuous action. The two writers diverged on whether the social goods of self-motivated action should be recognized, ultimately, as virtuous deeds. For Mandeville, self-interest cancels out the virtue of the act; for Fielding, a mislaid emphasis on motivation fails to account for the disposition of the actor, the consequent good produced, and the socially cohesive nature of mutual empathy.
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