Posted by Sterling on 15/9/2009, 21:46:56, in reply to "The Vicar of Wakefield"
98.71.97.211
The writer of the Wikipedia entry on TVOW has what I think is an interesting insight. He (or she) claims that the novel radically shifts tone after the abduction in Chapter 17. The previous chapters are genial and humorous. Following Chapter 17, the book turns into melodrama with calamity after calamity piling up on the poor vicar. If this is satire of Tom Jones, Pamela, Smolett, or any other contemporary literary artist or genre, it is satire of the most biting sort. There is scarcely a jot of humor in the second half of the book. Indeed, the sufferings of the Vicar are compared to those of Job.
Goldsmith certainly knew how to be genuinely funny. "She Stoops to Conquer" remains a moderately amusing play after well over 200 years. There is real pain in the second half of TVOW, despite the artificially comic ending with everyone married and all the loose ends tied up.
The Wikipedia writer raises the question of whether it is a sentimental novel or a satire of a sentimental novel. The problem with even considering this question is understanding exactly what constitutes a sentimental novel. Is it Pamela or Sentimental Journey? If the former, parodies by Fielding and others were old hat a quarter of a century before TVOW was published. If the latter, Sterne's novel is already so humorous that it would be difficult to satirize. It's easy to satirize works that take themselves very seriously (Richardson), but much harder to satirize works that are already funny (Fielding or Sterne).
--Previous Message--
: Since our schedule has been a bit scrambled, I've lost
: track of who has read this and who may still be
: planning to, but it seems that most have finished it
: (some many weeks ago), so I'll go ahead and post my
: thoughts.
:
: I enjoyed the novel. It was brisk (at the cost of some
: needed character development that we would have seen
: in later and larger novels), humorous, and delivered
: its moral with a light hand.
:
: Scenes like that of the vicar enjoying his ale or wine
: while watching the young folks dancing remind me how
: much more welcoming the fun-loving 18th century would
: have been to me than the prudish 19th century (or the
: prudish 21st century).
:
: What interests me most about the novel, however, is
: how much of it may have been literary satire.
:
: There is obvious satire of the church, where its
: scholars seem to be mostly absorbed in the dispute
: over whether widowed clergy may remarry (when has the
: subject of its clergy's sex lives ever NOT been
: Christianity's chief source of internal debate?).
: There is also some social satire about class
: differences and the superficiality of social
: superiority, as well as the very direct call for
: prison reform.
:
: But to what extent are the plot elements a satire of
: popular literary works of the recent past? Is the
: picaresque there in imitation or ridicule of works
: like Tom Jones? Is the female abduction there to poke
: fun at Pamela? Goldsmith was a professional writer
: whose background, from what I read in the
: introduction, would lead him to think more along
: literary than moral lines. It's hard to judge this
: from a remove of more than two centuries. His
: readership would have been much more familiar with the
: mass of contemporary works and would have more easily
: seen where Goldsmith's intent was to parody a cliche.
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