Honest Sins: Georgian Libertinism and The Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding by Tiffany Potter

ESC 27, 2001 between subjectivity and exposing “truth.” The final chapter, on Baconian science as a mode of discovering the secret truths of nature, neatly rounds out the “narrative of epistemic change” that Hanson has to tell. The unlikely hero of that narrative turns out to be Francis Bacon, himself a torturer and dissim­ ulator. Not that Hanson presents him in an heroic light. It is rather that he found a way, at least in his philosophical writings, to move beyond the subjectivity impasse registered in different ways in the book by turning the process of investigation away from other minds to “nature,” which, while marked metaphor­ ically as a “subject,” is not actually one. Hence the search to probe nature’s secrets does not present the problems evinced in torture or the analogous though less intrusively inquisitorial practices as they are so sharply delineated in Hanson’s analysis of Shakespearean dram a or Jonsonian authorship. ANTHONY B. DAWSON / University of British Columbia Tiffany Potter. Honest Sins: Georgian Libertinism and The Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. 203. $55 cloth. For Tiffany Potter, Henry Fielding’s reputation in the eigh­ teenth century was that of a libertine, not of a moralist; he would not subordinate artistic individualism to social conven­ tion. Conflating vice and virtue to effect honest social represen­ tation, he wrote throughout his career texts that, if ostensibly moral, promote libertinism, since he was intent on recording and developing this alternative code. He displaced “hegemonic social discourses” with a “cultural” discourse based on new standards of sexual conduct. An aristocratic code, libertinism shaped the power of privileged individuals. Before 1700, it was conceived in Hobbesian terms; after, it was tempered by sentimentalism. Flaunting privilege to defy the hierarchy that ensured their su­ periority, libertines internalized social difference and enjoyed degrading religion. They relied on traditional gender construc­ tions to subvert them: upholding taboos, they deconstructed them to proclaim agency. Their times, blind to this “conser­ vative subversion,” saw it as radical. Since libertines intensi­ 358 REVIEWS fied seduction’s pleasures by giving women roles, libertinism ’s exclusivity involved females: men and women both reified the status quo to assert individualism rather than to reform social order. Such rank-based thinking did not make female libertines proto-feminists. Georgian libertines relished superiority, their inferiors in­ creasingly conforming to the passive, asexual norms of conduct books. Opposing calls for reform that decried disguise, libertin­ ism caused women of rank to see that masquerades freed them from socially constrained identities. By cultivating masquerades and disguise, libertinism encouraged adherents to “behave out­ rageously” and to defy the tenets of “good society” in an “atmo­ sphere of carnival” that did not erode “normative rules.” Since libertinism defies convention with dionysian freedom, Potter claims that Fielding upholds the “tradition of libertinism” by making it “a viable moral, philosophical, and social alternative within the existing social organization of the Georgian period.” To resist “socially imposed morals,” his plays forgive the licen­ tious and impetuous, never the hypocritical. Virtuous female characters are less concerned with virginity than with intelligent decisions about their sexuality. Characters who value “[pjublic moralism” lack the standing to enact individual desires and au­ tonomous knowledge. His plays satirize priests since he opposes unthinking acceptance of the church’s role. His dram a embod­ ies the “forward-looking aspects” of libertinism and makes men and women moral and sexual equals; “following the doctrines natural to humanity” is more integral than the “artificial moral­ ity” of an “imperfect society.” Fielding’s “libertine frustration” with “pseudo-moralism” impels characterization in Shamela; while Shamela is satirized for being an “old-style” libertine who exploits avarice and lust rather than sexual desire, libertinism gains her authoritative self-representation. As narrative libertinism directs readers, so she subverts popular morality. Joseph Andrews favours Par­ son Adams less than Lady Booby; he lacks self-determination because he never challenges hegemonic assumptions or evalu­ ates beliefs “contravened by actuality,” but her libertinism chal­ lenges society. Tom Jones fuses libertinism and moralism in a single character; Jones is “the archetypal Georgian libertine.” Fulfilling “naturalistic desires” with “sexual enthusiasm,” he 359 ESC 27, 2001 “negates” the...

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