Eighteenth-Century Novel

Mid-term quiz

[Please note that there are several correct answers for these questions; the following are given as examples of the kind of answers that would count.]

Identify the following quotations, where they’re from and their significance to their text.

(a) "The Perturbation of my Mind, during this fifteen or sixteen Months Interval, was very great; I slept unquiet, dream’d always frightful Dreams, and often started out of my Sleep in the Night: In the Day great Troubles overwhelm’d my Mind, and in the Night I dream’d often of killing the Savages, and of the Reasons why I might justify the doing of it."

    Answer: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. Example of "narration by anxiety," attempt to represent interiority in terms other than Providential / Protestant ones.

(b) "I immediately run up into my Room, and stript, and washed, and drest my self as well as I could, and put on my prettiest round-ear’d Cap, and pulled down my Stays, to shew as much as I could of my Bosom (for Parson Williams says, that is the most beautiful part of a Woman) and then practised over all my Airs before the Glass, and then I sat down and read a Chapter in the Whole Duty of Man."

    Answer: Fielding, Shamela. Parody of Pamela's motives; here Shamela actually does what Mr. B accused Pamela of doing, switching costume to recapture his attention. Also adds body to text, keeps reader's focus on Sham's body (breasts) and on her vanity, as well as her conniving machinations.

(c) "And, indeed, I am glad that I have fallen upon this Method of making a Journal of all that passes in these first stages of my Happiness; because it will sink the Impression still deeper; and I shall have recourse to my Papers for my better Regulation, as often as I shall mistrust my Memory."

    Answer: Richardson, Pamela. Not just a conduct book, but a conduct book on how to use conduct books. Suggesting to reader how to use Pamela; example of Richardson's attempt to control interpretation.

(d) "I have been in all my Circumstances a Memento to those who are touch’d with the general Plague of Mankind, whence, for ought I know, one half of their Miseries flow; I mean, that of not being satisfy’d with the Station where in God and Nature has plac’d them."

    Answer: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. Use of moral lessons to organize story. Offers a rationale (besides simple pleasure) for the book. Does he mean it? Or is it a standard device to excuse the frivolous entertainment of an adventure story? The book can't seem to decide, perhaps an example of the rampant experimention of Defoe, who seems more concerned with variations than with conclusions.

(e) "He himself was too much susceptible of the power of Love, not to have Compassion for those that suffered by it, and had too great a share of good Sense not to know that, that Passion is not to be circumscribed; and being not only, not subservient, but absolute Controller of the Will,, it would be meer Madness, as well as ill Nature, to say a person was blame-worthy for what was unavoidable."    

    Answer: Haywood, Love in Excess. Example of the book's main epistemological claim: if you've been there, you'll understand. A sly way to make the reader validate the text, and a kind of blackmail: if you're not of the emotional aristocracy (and who'd admit to being simple?), the book's beyond you. Also offers alibi for pleasure, which controls will and removes responsibility--perhaps excuse for the pleasures of novels.

(f) "I know not what I shall do! For now he will see all my private Thoughts of him, and all the Secrets of my Heart. What a careless Creature I am!"

    Answer: Richardson, Pamela. Pamela announces the mechanism of the text, a way to narrate private thoughts as a way to change the terms of narrative. By reading these Mr. B is convinced of Pamela's virtue and by accepting those terms offers a model of reformed aristocracy. The novel performs within itself what it hopes the reader will do with it--and in this way models the kind of social change it hopes to effect, once based on a discourse of interiority and virtue, to replace the one that Mr. B starts the novel with.