David Simple and the Attenuation of “Phallic Power”
Alexander Pettit, University of North Texas
Volume 11, no. 2, January 1999
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
This essay examines the male protagonist unmotivated by phallic desire, with particular attention to ways in which he challenges critical assumptions about genre, gender, and the ideology of plot. The works on which I focus are Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). My claim is that by refusing to regard plot as a series of enactments of, or responses to, masculine erotic desire, Fielding argues against the rote phallocentrism intrinsic to comedy and the novel generally and to comic closure in the novel specifically. … Fielding’s position is profoundly feminist, but it is not in the least optimistic.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sarah Fielding” include:
Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple
by BRYAN MANGANO (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PETTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple
by JAMES KIM (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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