A Film Canon

Amelia replaces the picaresque realism perfected by Tom Jones with a blueprint for a new, syncretic social realism; a fusion of prose fiction with liberal journalism, parliamentary discursion and legal testimony. At its strongest, this translates Fielding's preoccupation with class mobility into the limited physical mobility of the debtor, as the various constrictions placed upon protagonist Booth meld into a single, twilit antechamber, and his wife Amelia's virtue is condensed to that of an exemplary porter. Similarly, Fielding structures the narrative around a series of losses - of property, virginity, beauty - sets it in motion with a disruptive chain of class signifiers - an equipage, new horses - and, most ingeniously, deflects its central preoccupation - jealousy - from an economic to romantic register, as well as identifying that deflection as the central role of taste, decorum and judgment. Unfortunately, this is paired with a sentimental humorlessness that reduces every character to a cipher - especially Amelia, whose complete self-denial makes her an uneasy fit with a medium predicated on individual autonomy - and approaches the smug moralism and florid, verbose discursion that were so memorably satirised in Shamela, as evinced in the subsumption of 'sensibility' into the more traditionally Christian conceptions of charity, grace and forgiveness. That said, this Christian framework opens up the real possibilities of atheism and materialism, just as the figure of Dr. Murphy - a sustained embodiment of pedantic classicism, incredulity at women's education, and belief in heightened state intervention in religious matters - functions as a kind of limit to Fielding's authorial voice, and possibly motivates his increasing tendency to break off didactics just before they peak.