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The Columbia History of the British NovelFielding repeatedly comes back to the idea that some people might as well be puppets, their movements manipulated by strings and their bodies and minds made of something less animate than flesh and blood. He returns often as well to the scene of the masquerade, a popular entertainment in his time, and more generally to the idea of people wearing masks, whether literal or figurative ones. A mask may be donned voluntarily, to please or to deceive a viewer, and Fielding frequently employs images of masking to portray the human proclivity to affectation, which he names as the proper target of ridicule in his preface to Joseph Andrews. He also often suggests, however, that masks may come to dominate their wearers, the artificial self they represent overpowering any organic identity that might be pre-105- sumed to lie beneath. Thus Fielding's thematic interests in puppet life and in masks are closely linked, and they are both linked, perhaps less obviously, to his complicated and evolving exploration of the many meanings of "adoption." An affected identity might be called an adopted rather than an innate or genuine one; new institutions and beliefs, unlike timeless or natural ones, must be adopted by a culture in the course of history; in a more straightforward sense of the word, Tom Jones is an adoptive rather than a biological son of Allworthy, as Joseph Andrews turns out to be the adopted child of those he had thought were his blood relations ...» |
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