At the end of the first published book, a new relation is formed, demonstrating that the ideal friendship completes happily with all the friends beginning their new life as relatives.
Family becomes the central issue in Fielding’s following sequence— The Adventures of David Simple: Volume the Last— which inscribes both happiness and depression with paradoxical tones. A family should be “intimate domestic groups made up of people related to one another by bounds of blood, sexual mating or legal tie,” a requirement much deeper than being friends (Rapoport and Rapoport 475). Thus, David has to manipulate marriages in order to gather these people forever,
Apart from the solitary “house” he shared with his brother that used to be a “home”
before the deaths of his parents, David’s new “home” is constructed by various good friends who are willing to marry one another and live together; all of them believe the new home will work properly forever, insisting on their love to each other and confirm the possibility of a utopian household. Nevertheless, they cannot maintain the happiness they enjoyed during the time while they were friends rather than family. The ideal utopia reaches its highpoint at the end of the third volume, the final one of the original novel. In Volume the Last which was published nine years later, the unhappy downturn sets in. To be more precise, the downturn does not emerge until the friends attempt to shift their friendship into kinship by marriage and living together. Modifying the initially asserted ideal friendly, David brings his true friends from the fantastic utopia to the cruel reality; and none of them can get rid of
the realism. Ironically, the wish to forsake their friendship by remodeling that into a closer relationship— marriage— results into their consequent impotent miseries. In his article,
“David Simple and the Attenuation of ‘Phallic Power, ” Alexander Pettit regards their
marriage as a comic conclusion which serves to solve the problem in 1744, but then “Fielding invited her readers to regard David Simple as a troubling para-comedy” nine years afterwards (170). Marriage should not be, and is not, the solution.
As a wise bond between friendship and family, the interlude presents many interesting problems during the progress to a lovely family. Different from the proposed “Moral Romance” in the beginning, the sequel novel is more like a nineteenth-century realistic novel that examines the cruelty in society as well as poverty. Written nine years after the first published novel, Fielding begins her sequel with a brief introduction of the characters’ lives and then dramatically jumps to display the practical shortage of the David family. The tone in narration varies a lot between the two publications; it conveys earnest seriousness in telling the melancholy experiences of characters in the first novel, whereas it uses ironic mocking in expressing the fall of the family in Volume the Last. Even though Volume the Last consists of deaths and sickness, the narrator keeps on making fun of the characters, especially Mrs.
Orgueil. She is the one who enjoys mimicking the sadness, once she even makes a vivid imitation and imagination of the death of her husband when he was sick (392).39 The paragraph is considered as the comic episode in David Simple broadly; her “emotional outpourings are wholly sham” (Terry 231). Knowing that the past utopian happiness would never return to the final volume anymore, the readers laugh with pathetic sympathy at both the David family as well as those who make fun of themselves.
In Volume the Last, David successfully makes his friends into family members, nearly
39 The chapter is a ridicule, in which Mrs. Orgueil mimics the death of her husband and writes pathetic letters corresponding to the death. The most irony lies at the end, Mrs. Orgueil feels quite disappointed without any real death of people around her so she can only practice her solemn on the death of a dog and lamented for it “in full as pathetic Terms as she had before done the imagined Death of her Husband (394).
the best group in human relationships. There is a paradoxical adjustment in David’s
adventure: it begins with the searching of friendship but is aimed at family kinship as soon as friendship is firmly composed. The suspicious change shows the innate need of a “home”
for David; a house capable of keeping all the benevolent people together is not enough: he needs a family. As the advanced version of friendship, a pleasant home is the eventual demand for David. David composes a family that bears a close resemblance to an ideal family as he wished. In a well-developed family structure, it takes three generations— the parents, the couple, and their children— to live in the same house. A perfect family should be a group of people that can share everything with each other and always be sensitive to the others’ need. The David family almost meets all the stipulations of a standard perfect family;
the only blemish is that their family members are always obedient and voiceless. People always agree with suggestions made by David and Cynthia, which is very unlikely to happen in realistic families.
Compared to the other families in the novel, David’s is certainly the most complete one because they have quite a few children to bring the possible future. The surviving little Camilla is the very proof to their future; while family members die out, there is still a hopeful offspring to accomplish the dream of all these friends. Both Mrs. Orgueil and Mr. Ratcliff desire to teach the children of David the immoral worldly tricks. When Mrs. Orgueil invites little Camilla to the birthday party of Henrietta, she is thinking about “teach[ing] the Children to be as artful and hypocritical as [Mrs. Orgue il] herself” and makes the good-natured girl to behave like her (382). Being the new generation in family, children symbolize the
forthcoming prospect for these adults and bring the hope of maintaining a typical family.
Besides marriage and children, siblinghood is another key element in the family
contribution. All the characters in novel think highly of siblinghood, taking very good care of their brothers and sisters. The relationship between Camilla and Valentine even becomes incest gossip among their relatives when the two young people were holding very close
association to each other (146). Moreover, the relationship between David and Daniel as well as that between Isabelle and Stainville are very intimate in mutual interactions.
To illustrate the implicit motif of family, Fielding collects a lot of folk tales to demonstrate the importance of a good family, with all the misfortunes derived from problematic families. In the suggested title of a very early chapter, “In which is seen the terrible Consequences that attend Envy and Selfishness,” Fielding begins the family stories (9). The first family declared unhappy is exactly that of David’s. Daniel, the selfish brother, aims to “throw his Brother out of his Share of his Father’s Patrimony, and engross it wholly to himself” (9). Various immoral incidents happen after the ungenerous intention, so does the decision for David to share all the money he had with his friends. To pay for friendship with money, David regards it as a great deal for him to realize his ultimate goal of having a family. In the stories of Cynthia and Camilla, money is of the same importance.
Their family relationship is not directly ruined by money, as David’s is, but money is a repeatedly appearing token in their storytelling. Cynthia finds that she “was excluded from having any share in [her] Father’s Fortune” when the will is opened (101). The solitary woman begins her trip abroad with empty pockets after the death of her father. The rich family of Camilla and Valentine does not go bankrupt until Livia become their stepmother.
The young wife “never thought anything extravagant enough,” and her most delight is “every thing that was to spend the most Money” (129). The wastefulness drives them out because she wants to be the only one spending all the fortune. As the stereotype of “bad” families, these instances about money conflict with David’s ideal one.
These problematic families illuminate the importance of an ideal family. In the novel, David Simple is not the only one who yearns for admirable family relationship, so are the other story-telling characters. Because of their flawed families, each of them demands a revised home in which jealousy and hatred no longer exist. As the plot unfolds, all of these characters demand to relocate themselves, both physically and mentally. With the help of
friends and friendship, the protagonists are able to reconstruct their own improved family easily. The Dunster family, which lives near the David’s as farmers, is also a stereotype that resembles benevolence among each family member though they live in poverty. Even Mr.
Ratcliff, the one who takes David’s land, commits the crime for his family, satisfying the luxurious need of his wife. Even though people hold unlike opinions on happiness, a happy family with satisfied members is pursued passionately by each of the family leaders.
Family is similar to the inborn umbilical cord that fastens people tightly. The natural force is so strong that hardly anyone can ge t rid of it. There are always protagonists who try their very best to get rid of their home because of some unbearable reasons; however, the escape is always futile, and the harder they try to forget it, the more impossible for them to start new lives. All of the characters catch the disease that cannot be properly healed with medicine. It is homesickness, an illness that can be redefined in The Adventures of David Simple. Composed of two key words— home and sickness— the word “homesickness”
brings about various meanings. Common expression on the word is that people feels homesick in occasions of one is unhappy about leaving one’s family, and missing one’s family very much. However, a more precise understanding of the word is, one does not get homesick until one leaves the family out of the sickness to his family. A difference between the two explanations is that in the latter definition, people leave their home on purpose.
People intentionally leave home because they are tired of their family and eager to experience something new outside; in a word, the sickness of home expels people out of their families.
Only after years of traveling would the concept of family remind people of the inborn
connection with home, as well as the invisible connection between individuals and family; so there comes the homesickness. The family members of David experience the process of being sick of home and being homesick before their union with David. Cynthia is sick of her sisters who always make fun of her and her reading, while Camilla and Valentine are tired of their parents, father and step- mother, who never listen to their explanations. After
determining to leave their home, these young adults can only visit other relatives in the hope of having a new home there in homesickness. The attempt to go “away from a bad home and towards the hope of a good one ” is realized, at least for the characters, through the comic marriage (Pettit 176).
The story-telling process promotes characters in clarifying their sickness and
homesickness of family; after the friendly sharing and listening, characters exchange their depressed pasts and happily receive amicable comfort. Readers may find a coincidence in all the spoken stories, or personal experience, with sadness and miseries placed as the main plot to illustrate the ambiguous “homesickness” among characters.
Sarah Fielding declares her intention to write a “Moral Romance” on the front page of her novel, telling her readers that the novel consists of various moral lessons and it is no doubt an educational reading. The novel is plotted in everyday London and focused on the everyday experience shared among people of eighteenth-century England in order to
encourage readers to recognize the novel as relevant to their surroundings. The tragic sadness is inevitable in moral lessons, because it is uneasy to teach an ethical lesson without contrasting the bad from the good. The novel would not be moral and educational if each of the characters were to be kind and lovely, and allowed to enjoy their happiness forever. As a result, all the pathetic stories told by characters make sense in fitting into the frame of Moral Romance. Abundant educational messages are there in the previous volumes, but not so much in the last one. Volume the Last is more like a contrasting situation to the ideal utopia in which readers are all of a sudden dragged. In the real world, there is no one willing to listen to others’ misfortunes as David does in early volumes, and no one pays attention to the frustrated experiences of the David family. Besides, none of the people around them pity the family, let alone help them. As long as these benevolent people have gathered together, they can only practice their kindness among each other. The sudden end with David dying of a serious illness shows the mocking of innocent benevolence, and
indicates death as the only way out.
In the educational story of Miss Nanny Johnson, readers are admonished to love sincerely. Once David’s fiancée, Miss Nanny Johnson follows the advice of her father to abandon David, and marries a rich elder man (33). As a novel emphasizing moral teaching, the vainglorious young woman is doomed for misfortune; she dies in sadness three days after her husband’s. Because of her father and her vanity, the woman makes a wrong decision on her marriage in wondering between true love and illusory fortune. There is a two- fold moral lesson in the story. First, it tells daughters not to marry because of the advice of greedy fathers; second, it asks people not to marry for money and vanity. If you do, only miserable death awaits you. In the following story, Fielding shows David meeting Camilla, and makes two virtuous people marry, as a clear contrast to the case of Miss Nanny Johnson. Virtue and family, the two significant factors in females, declare their moral lesson in the story.
Another sorrowful story about woman in David Simple is that of Isabelle, and she is the only teller of a long story not joining the family. She cannot marry her lover, Dumont, merely because the jealous sister- in- law is secretly in love with him, too (200). Even her only brother, Stainville, is unable to help her but mistakenly kills Dumont out of jealousy after hearing the scandal. This story about family and love may not happen to all the readers, yet it is realistic to some extent. In order to help maintain the family of her brother, Isabelle forsakes her only lover. Jealousy and blindness of other people ruin her happiness; the most tragic plot lies in that even though she is always virtuous and benevolent, she is the only survivor to suffer all the misfortunes brought upon her by the people she is devoted to. She gives up Dumont to maintain the happiness between her brother and sister- in- law, but they died one after another and leave her overwhelming loneliness and grief. At the end, she has been deprived of both her brother and her lover and travels around in solitude.
The two examples are only part of the moral lessons exemplified by Sarah Fielding.
All the illustrated stories are closely related to family and moral, the interior story of David
and his friendly family included, in order to give an excellent lesson on rightness. In conclusion, money and jealousy are always important in unhappy families. Only a family that consists of only good members, like that of David, is free from the immoral accusation.
These stories about families make the building of an ideal family reasonable and trustworthy.
After all, no one would like to lead a calamitous life as those of Isabelle or Miss Nanny Johnson. Though a well-developed family is established, the ideal community breaks up at end of novel. Fielding finishes her novel with an ambiguous ending to conclude her utopia.
Readers are no longer certain about the possibility of a utopian community after David finishes gathering both friends and relatives.