| This dissertation investigates literary representations of master-servant and guardian-ward pairs in Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722), Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), and Eliza Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings (1744). These two sets of relationships complicate our understanding of the workings of authority in eighteenth-century British families. Servant and ward figures, which include orphans, bastards, and foundlings, occupy a place outside of the order of lineage and pedigree, yet inside the household family. I analyze the ways in which authors assert literary authority as they address the contingency of paternalistic authority structures in fiction and drama. The household and lineage family structures are heuristic devices that capture both the marginal and transitional ontological status of servants and wards, and expose the gaps between social station and moral worth. Authors project the ambiguities of the transition from child to adult, from subordinate to familial sovereign, on servants and wards, who are proximal to, yet detached from, concrete domestic spaces and blood ties.; Each of these works features a different mode of engagement with the literary past given roughly the same set of sociological facts. Steele and Fielding rely on the classical models of Roman comedy and epic, and Smollett and Haywood employ the more flexible post-classical models of the picaresque and the romance. As the chapters progress the forms of authority present in the works' paternalistic relationships become more various, but also more dispersed, attenuated, and problematic. The dissertation is arranged such that as the disparity between birth and moral worth in the text's authority figure becomes greater with each chapter, and servants and wards have greater apparent birth-worth disparity (even if it ultimately or supposedly harmonized), so that there is an increasingly deeper questioning of the roots of authority and autonomy. The non-chronological order of my chapters suggests that this questioning did not become deeper as time went on, but depended on how much the author was invested in exploring generic traditions and the foundations of social structures. |
