Amelia [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONFielding's last novel, Amelia (1751), is the story of a marriage under stress. In his earlier and better-known novels the youthful heroes, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, by overcoming the obstacles that chance or malice have thrown in their way, eventually win a paradisal happiness in marriage to the beautiful and virtuous, if somewhat impersonal, heroines, Fanny Goodwin and Sophia Western. Fielding's famous control of narrative voice and of structure gave to both those novels a confidence of tone and an assured outcome; we track the downward course of the hero's misfortunes knowing that by the end the curve of comedy will bring him irresistibly back up again. Amelia begins where the earlier novels left off; paradise is not about to be regained but to be lost. Fielding retained few of the features of the immensely successful formula o(Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) - the journey motif and the extensiveness of the epic form; a comic vision and mock-heroic irony that sprang from Fielding's own playful sensibility;Jonsonian 'humours' characters that might have walked off the stage; and plots so carefully timed that they seem to tick like clocks. Instead, he darkened the atmosphere to fit the more sombre subject and loosened the structure to accord with the uncertain outcome of the tale.Like most threatened relationships, the union of William and Amelia Booth is menaced both from without and from within. The internal weakness lies entirely with the husband, whose genuine love for his admirable and charming wife is matched by his impulsive nature, by his naiveté and occasional vanity, and above all by his dangerous and ill-formed ideas about the motives of human behaviour. The character of Amelia is based on Fielding's