Vol. 25 No. 1 1958 - page 148

148
PARTISAN REVIEW
to whether novelists like Defoe and Richardson (or Dreiser and Hardy)
"wrote well."
The eighteenth century novel, emerging as the voice of a subcul–
ture, is frequently given to the accumulation of moments of experi–
ence. The hunger for typical incident, the sheer delight in massed
representation is something that the modem critic, trained according
to the recipes of the "art novel," finds difficult to appreciate. Contem–
porary readers, however, cared less about Moll Flanders's moral judg–
ments than about what was happening to her; they admired her ca–
pacity for bouncing back and getting on; and this response, while it can
be taken as a sign of the lapse or decline of values attendent on the
rise of the commercial middle class, also reflects something else: a re–
ordering of moral needs in an era of increasing secularization. When
Virginia Woolf praised Moll as a generous and candid rogue who an–
ticipated certain attitudes of feminism, she was guilty of romantic exag–
geration; but she was closer to the spirit of the book than is Mr. Mark
Schorer when he writes that it is "our classic revelation of the mer–
cantile mind."
Mr. Watt is at his best in a long section on Richardson. He ranges
with great assurance among such related topics as the new role of
women and the crisis of marriage in eighteenth century England, both
of which gave a sudden touch of peril and excitement to the fates
oE
the Pamelas and Clarissas; the little-noticed humor which winds its
way through Richardson's novels; the curious transition in his mind
from the gnawing introspectiveness of Puritanism to an obsession with
sexual maneuver and conquest; the feminization of sensibility which led
Richardson to an endless fondling of domestic detail and then, as a
sort of distorted reflection of this, to a monstrous magnification of pri–
vate relationships; the interplay of class values and sexual impulses;
and the way in which conscious purposes become inseparable from un–
conscious motifs. What emerges is a novel with three levels of action.
The central one is a sustained and serious Christian morality; above
it spires a closely related drama of the growth of a self that has been
tested in worldly martyrdom and humiliation as a preparation for union
with the bridegroom Christ; and below there lurks a turbid fantasy of
ravishment, assault and savored masochism. All of this Mr. Watt pre–
sents with such richness and
eclat
that one is bewildered at remember–
ing F. R. Leavis's dictum that "it's no use pretending Richardson can
ever
be
made a current classic again."
As
with Richardson, the central problem in reading Defoe is
to
determine the relation between the plenitude of presented matter and
3...,138,139,140,141,142,143,144,145,146,147 149,150,151,152,153,154,155,156,157,158,...162
Powered by FlippingBook