EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 3, April 2005 A Partridge in the Family Tree: Fixity, Mobility, and Community in Tom Jones Hilary Teynor The title page of Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) immediately alerts the reader to the protag- onist's dubious lineage: who are the foundling's father and mother? Consider, for example, Tom's immediate familial and pseudo-familial connections: he has a biological father in the clergyman's son Summer and a mother in Bridget Allworthy, an adoptive father in Squire All- worthy, an initially resistant father-in-law in Squire Western, and in loco parentis schoolmasters in Thwackum and Square. Benjamin Partridge and Jenny Jones count as putative parents of Tom Jones, with Blifil as both his half-brother and foster brother. Sophia Western, on the other hand, has substitute mothers in her aunt Mrs Western and Lady Bellaston because of her own mother's absence. Later in the novel, thematically important issues of paternity arise with Nightin- gale, who is a son and a father-to-be, and his uncle, who acts as a quasi-father. The narrative also includes Tom and Partridge's response to a Hamlet performance, a play that turns on father-son and fraternal relationships. Such tangled relationships that expose the conflicts of heredity and contractual obligations are not merely curiosities of 350 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 1 For an elaboration of these categories, see Ferdinand T?nnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (1887; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For an appraisal of T?nnies's place in sociology, see Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). According to Nisbet, "What T?nnies thus does is to take community from the status of dependent variable that it had in the writings of the economists and classical individualists in general and give it independent, even causal status. This is the essence of T?nnies's typological use of community. It is an essence that extended itself into the works of Durkheim, whose criticism of T?nnies and reversal of terminology cannot conceal the cognate relation that lies between his 'mechanical' and 'organic' types of solidarity and T?nnies's concepts. The same typological essence is to be seen in Simmel, for whom 'metropolis' becomes the encapsulating term of modernism" (78). Joan Aldous reproduces Durkheim's review of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, along with T?nnies's response, in "An Exchange between Durkheim and T?nnies on the Nature of Social Relations, with an Introduction by Joan Aldous," American Journal of Sociology 77:6 (May 1972), 1191–1200. See also Werner Cahnman, Weber and Toennies: Comparative Sociology in Historical Perspective (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995). For a convenient digest of Weber's far-reaching thought, see Max Weber: Sociological Writings, ed. Wolf Heydebrand (New York: Continuum, 1994). 2 T?nnies insisted that these categories always coexisted in some measure. See "My Relationship to Sociology," in Ferdinand Toennies: On Sociology: Pure, Applied, and Empirical. Selected Writings, ed. Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 10. On the city/country dichotomy, see Martin Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 91. 3 Although sociological theory has obviously broadened its scope since T?nnies, recent sociologists, as well as historians of the British family, rely explicitly and implicitly on the novelistic design, but rather are key to understanding how the novel offers a critique of existing social structures. This article focuses on the relationship between Partridge and Tom in order to demonstrate how the category of "father" is figured through the analogical structure of master and servant. To investigate this analogy, I posit Ferdinand T?nnies's categories of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (civil society) as forms of association that illuminate the ways in which Fielding's society manifested coexisting features of the traditional and the modern. These terms, as I use them in this article, exist in three forms: 1) as ideal types for definitional purposes; 2) as repositories of norms to which people might appeal; and 3) as empirical labels useful for describing sociological formations within societies, which are always hybrids of the two categories.1 Gemeinschaft, with its ties based on shared space, consanguinity, fellow- feeling, and custom, suggests a specific location, often rural, in which relationships work. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, describes relation- ships based on reason and utility, and tends to appear in urban settings.2 Because these categories invite consideration of the play between the hereditary and the contractual, and questioning of the foundation of those very terms, they hold interpretive power for analysing Fielding's conceptions of familial structures.3 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 351 theories put forward in his study. Most notably, in The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), Lawrence Stone discusses T?nnies's categories directly as a way of interpreting his own theories of social change (660). Naomi Tadmor's even more recent study, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), compares the lineage family with the household family (with the household including servants), and her terms implicitly recall the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction: "the contractual, instrumental, occupa- tional nature of the household-family relationships should not be taken to mean that ties of blood and marriage were of little significance" (29). Alan Macfarlane refers to T?nnies not only in his review of Stone's book but also in his Origins of English Individualism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), where he acknowledges T?nnies as a "major thinker" (8). 4 For Turner, the feature of the rite of passage called communitas is a liminal, temporary location of possibility for empathy and equality, which applies to Tom Jones because Tom and Partridge become "liminal personae," who, Turner would assert, "are necessarily ambiguous since ... these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial." The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 95. Although Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas arise in relation to the pilgrimage, I apply them to a primarily secular version of a rite of passage, referring both to states of being and sociotemporal locations. Wolfram Schmidgen uses Turner's notion of liminality to describe the social position of the bastard. Schmidgen, "Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel," ELH 69:1 (2002), 140. 5 See Ronald Paulson, "The Pilgrimage and the Family: Structures in the Novels of Fielding and Smollett," Tobias Smollett: Bicentennial Studies Presented to Louis M. Knapp, ed. George Rousseau and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 57–58. Paulson informs us that the partridge is "a bird noted for hatching other birds' eggs" (73). Although Paulson cites T.H. White's The Bestiary (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1960) in his footnote for this information, we might refer to the Bible as well: "As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool" (Jeremiah 17:11). This verse not only suggests the issue of false fatherhood, but also the false ownership of wealth, two issues that are united in Tom Jones. Blifil's envy of Tom leads him to withhold the foundling's birth secret, afraid that Tom could displace him as inheritor of the Allworthy estate. Notwithstanding the legal In the transitional zone of the road, we continually see the points of contact and transformation between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which are modified once communal relationships move beyond more or less fixed geographic spaces. Because T?nnies's terms describe social structures rather than individual actions, I draw on Victor Turner's anthropological work on rites of passage in order to describe the respective processes of maturation and regression in Jones and Partridge as they hold ambiguous social status on the journey.4 The instances of literal and figurative dislocation in Tom Jones, then, function as spaces of possibility in two distinct ways: for Tom, the journey is a rite of passage that ultimately educates him for his role as Allworthy's successor; and for Partridge, the journey is imbued with a sense of unfolding opportunities and nostalgia for his previous situation in life.5 352 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION problems surrounding Tom's inheritance as a bastard—Homer O. Brown discusses this in "Tom Jones: The 'Bastard' of History," Boundary 2 7:2 (Winter 1979)—at the end of the novel, Methodist convert Blifil is shown to be the false and foolish owner of riches that leave him in "the midst of his days." The previous verse in Jeremiah, "I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings" (Jeremiah 17:10), is relevant to the trials of Jones and Partridge on the road, and their consequent rewards. 6 Concerning Gemeinschaft exclusively, T?nnies argues that "The aggregate of determinate will which governs a community, and which is as natural as language itself and contains a multitude of understandings regulated by its norms, I shall call concord or family spirit (the term concordia implies a heartfelt sense of integration and unanimity). Mutual understanding and concord are one and the same thing: namely the will of the community in its most basic forms. Understanding operates in the relations between individuals, concord is the strength and character of the whole" (Community and Civil Society, 34). Furthermore, T?nnies analyses Henry Sumner Maine's famous catch-phrase in Ancient Law, "from status to contract," in order to suggest that "Control under family law is essentially the control of the whole over its parts. It is the control of one part of the family over other parts, e.g. of the father and master of the household over sons and servants, but only because that one part is the visible embodiment of the invisible whole ... . In Society, by contrast, control, like property, belongs a priori to the individual person" (Community and Civil Society, 193). See Maine, Ancient Law, intro. Dante Scala (1866; reprint, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 170. 7 P.S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). See C. M. Gray's review of Atiyah's book in Yale Law Journal 90 (November 1980), 216–31. For two shorter reviews, see C. Turpin, Cambridge Law Journal 39 (November 1980), 396–97 and C. Fried, Harvard Law Review 93 (June 1980), 1858–68. 8 Historian Bridget Hill suggests a "paternalism-to-contract" development in master-servant relations over the course of the century in Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 6. For some excellent discussions of Fielding's servant characters informed by E.P. Thompson's theories of the rise of the working class, see John Considering Tom and Partridge specifically as temporary masters and servants exposes the clash in the law between individual volition and freedom in the "lower orders" and paternalistic authority. Insofar as T?nnies's categories rely on concepts of the will to describe com- munity ties, they are germane to current debates about the persist- ence of traditional modes of association in eighteenth-century legal contracts.6 T?nnies's psychological apparatus of volition in his cate- gories facilitates discussion about the tension between pre-existing moral obligations and rational choices in eighteenth-century law that P.S. Atiyah so cogently details in The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract .7 Atiyah reveals a conservative tendency in eighteenth-century law that arises throughout Tom Jones, especially in Tom and Partridge's relationship—the idea that one's actions and identity are determined by one's status, and that any agreements or contracts are merely evi- dentiary to the expected fulfilment of the pre-existing obligation. The master-servant element to Tom and Partridge's relationship reveals a particularly problematic subsumption of one's will to another's in the form of paternalism.8 Because neither Partridge nor Tom has real A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 353 Richetti, "Class Struggle without Class: Novelists and Magistrates," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32:3 (1991), 203–18, and Richetti, "Representing an Underclass: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett," The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Routledge, 1987), 84–98. 9 Brown, 225. 10 Atiyah discusses James II's exclusion in terms of the traditional definition of contract: "the oath is the monarch's acknowledgement that there are indeed duties binding upon him which arise out of the relationship. It is evidence of those duties, if it does not create them" (38). paternal authority, both must rely on a once-removed approximation of it during their journey, which inevitably reveals problems in the conception of custom, status, and paternal authority as natural and therefore normative. Partridge and Tom's relationship opens the fullest, most nuanced understanding of family in Tom Jones. This article considers Tom and Partridge as household members without a house, as masters and servants without written contracts, in order to expand on Homer O. Brown's observation that "misrepresentation and misattribution operate as narrative cause in Tom Jones."9 The confusion surrounding paternity in this pair causes us to question not only, as Brown suggests, larger genealogical narratives in history, but also the very meaning of familial metaphors. The complexities of the household—a hybrid entity that includes non-kinship members—complicate these meta- phors of cultural inheritance. Furthermore, Fielding's abiding con- cern with the Stuart succession suggests a political context behind the biological father-son relationships, where one also notices that the Old and Young Pretenders are household members without proper houses and wanderers much like Tom and Partridge. Partridge fre- quently expresses his affinity with the Pretenders in his Jacobite support for James II's hereditary claims to the throne. Recall, more- over, that The Man of the Hill fought for Charles II's bastard son the Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic James II, thus alluding to problems of paternity with the claimants to the throne and suggesting that the ambiguity of contract between Tom and Partridge operates on the level of the British Constitution.10 The seemingly fixed roles of Allworthy's community give it the appearance of a large extended family emanating from the epicentre of Paradise Hall, a family from which Partridge and Tom are expelled. Partridge's nostalgic longing for this community—for father-figure 354 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, ed. Fredson Bowers, intro. Martin Battestin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 515. References are to this edition. Partridge's use of the word "Gentleman" in his signature suggests that his justification is based on a mastery of both written and spoken language. Fielding is perhaps evoking the works of Nathan Bailey, author of An Universal Etymological Dictionary, whose entry on "gentleman" denounces the very looseness of Partridge's usage of the term: "A Person of good or honourable Extraction. 'Jack will never make a Gentleman.' This Proverb teaches, that every one will not make a Gentleman, that is vulgarly called so, now a-days; there is more than the bare Name required, to the making him what he ought to be by Birth, Honour, and Merit ... for put him into what Circumstances you please, he will discover himself at one Time or other in Point of Behaviour, to be of a mean Extract, Awkward, Ungenteel and Ungenerous" (1721; reprint, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), Aaa4v. In Henry Fielding and the Language of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), Glenn W. Hatfield discusses Fielding's own preoccupation with the misuse of words. Drawing parallels with John Locke's discussion of the abuse of words in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Hatfield identifies the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the act of naming or labelling. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), book 3, esp. chap. 9, "Of the Imperfection of Words," and chap. 10, "Of the Abuse of Words" (475–508). Allworthy—compels him to employ particularly self-serving and non- familial strategies to inhabit his "natural" role within it. During the pivotal episode at the Upton inn, a location that blurs status distinctions in its mix of patrons, a sergeant staying there asks Partridge, "whither he and his Master were travelling." Partridge replies, "None of your Magisters ... I am no Man's Servant, I assure you; for tho' I have had Misfortunes in the World, I write Gentleman after my Name; and as poor and simple as I may appear now, have taught Grammar School in my Time. Sed hei mihi non sum quod fui" (But woe to me! I am not what I was).11 Partridge earlier insists on accompanying Tom as his servant throughout his journey, so that this emphatic denial of Tom's authority appears as tergiversation from his previous pledge of service. Given that Magister was a common title for a schoolmaster, Partridge also appears to deny his intellectual inferior- ity to Tom as well. Throughout the second half of the book, Partridge vacillates between such expressions of devotion and denial in his association with Tom, depending on the situation and the audience— as I have suggested, such confusion is symptomatic of a larger opposi- tional play between many types of fixity and mobility in Tom Jones. For Partridge, the secular calling of country schoolmaster is en- dowed with an a priori set of expectations and duties. In his wandering state, however—an extended threshold period—roles are flexible when they are not solidified in the context of a community with its own matrix of obligations. Tom, alternatively, is bred a gentleman aware of his bastardy, and thus starts the novel from a secure yet A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 355 12 According to T?nnies, "Status does not simply presuppose the existence of individuals, but exists in them and together with them" (Community and Civil Society, 204). For a different, though complementary, view of status, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 2:932. mixed status position. Upon his expulsion from Paradise Hall, part of Tom's quest is to find a place for himself, so he thus improvises differ- ent models of deference and authority. During Tom and Partridge's journey, their relationship modulates between various roles in an extended familial structure: at the same time that Partridge is the putative father of Tom's past and a proxy for Allworthy's fatherly care, Tom is master over the schoolmaster-cum-servant and a proxy for Allworthy's masterly authority. Tom and Partridge are significant as characters outside of these familial structures as well, where the mobility and ambiguity of these structures are mirrored by a like trans- formation in character and society in the course of their journey. This transition could be said to dramatize the potential for social change even as traditional roles persist. The Latin quotation tacked onto Partridge's denial of Tom's authority at the Upton inn—"But alas! I am not what I was"—reminds the reader that he held a former career as schoolmaster in Allworthy's community. He even had Jenny Jones as his own servant, his accused paramour, and his superior in her understanding of Latin. Yet this career has crumbled, and a succession of odd jobs has taken its place. When he appears, for the first time after Allworthy's banishment, for instance, he is a soi-disant barber and surgeon, and later we learn that he also tailors clothing. Partridge and Tom experience a horizontal mode of association when they first meet: Tom has just been hit on the head with a bottle in a fight with Ensign Northerton over the reputation of his absent love Sophia, and Partridge tends his wounds. Tom's initial reaction to Partridge is not based on any kind of status- based judgment, and he is delighted with the man's sense of humour and eccentricities (415).12 During Partridge's over-extended, inverted rite of passage, in which he is thrown into the world after a miserable marriage and brief career, he seems not to have ever lived up to his supposed calling; in other words, he repeatedly fails to perform the actions that would reaffirm his a priori notions of himself. In Partridge's mind, his school- master position is just that: a state of being that "was," according to his Latin tag. The very name "schoolmaster" implies knowledge and control over subject matter and impressionable young minds, yet 356 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13 John Allen Stevenson discusses the contexts of Jacobitism in the Hamlet scene later in the novel and calls attention to such absent presences, specifically concerning Partridge's super- stition. Stevenson, "Fielding's Mousetrap: Hamlet, Partridge, and the '45," Studies in English Literature 37:3 (1997), 553–71. In the course of his argument about the image of the ghost in Hamlet holding political significance for Partridge's character, Stevenson interestingly refers to Partridge as Jones's "servant" and "friend," an instance of relatively common seman- tic ambivalence towards Partridge's character (564; 567). See also Paulson, who refers to Partridge as a "scheming servant" as well (73). The narrator of Tom Jones concedes a good deal of authority to the reader in deciding how to categorize Partridge. When Tom comes to blows with the proprietors of the Upton inn after their assaults on the honour of "Mrs. Waters," the narrator describes Partridge's rescue thus: "seeing the Danger which threatened his Master, or Companion, (which you chuse to call him) prevented so sad a Catastrophe" (502). Later, the narrator echoes Partridge's own language: Partridge calls Tom his friend, and the narrator applies the same language to Partridge. In that very episode at the inn, however, the narrator unambiguously states, after Tom has discovered the muff, "it will be necessary to recur what had there happened since Partridge had first left it on his Master's Summons" (548). 14 See Stevenson's discussion of Fielding's portrayal of Jacobitism in "Tom Jones and the Stuarts" ELH 61:3 (1994), 571–95. Partridge never quite manages to demonstrate that he is master over his subject or anything else. Although Partridge's service to Tom appears to be one of these odd jobs, a gesellschaftlich way of simply making money, the surrogate father relationships introduce a gemeinschaftlich form of association as well. Partridge steps into the void of Tom's unknown parentage— yet, as the novel keeps insisting, "father," like "gentleman," is only a label. Tom considers the former schoolmaster to be his absent father for most of his life, without ever even seeing him.13 But these absent presences stand as metaphors for evacuated status roles as well as a reminder of the need for surrogates or proxies when biological rela- tionships fail to materialize. Tom's uncertain assumption of masterly responsibilities over Partridge, for example, fills the void that Allworthy has left as paternalist in Partridge's life, calling into ques- tion the foundation of obligations within the original Gemeinschaft. Partridge's claim that he is "not what he was" links his ontological dislocation with his geographical dislocation from the school near Allworthy's land. More urgent perhaps than Partridge's regressive nostalgia for Allworthy is the notion that his character stands also as a symbol of the crisis of authority brought about by the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745.14 Because Partridge's Jacobitism is an integral part of his character as Fielding imagines him, and one that addresses issues of the family and traditional systems of power, his symbolic function seems even more plausible. Because the monarch was viewed as a A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 357 15 See Fielding, Tom Jones, 647, for this claim. For a discussion of Jacobite ideologies, see Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 16 Battestin interprets Fielding's analogy between gypsies and Jacobites as: "Fielding develops an ironic parable of government designed to expose the Jacobite ideal of civil happiness under an absolute monarchy as nothing more than an alluring, if dangerous, fantasy" (Tom Jones, 666n2). Turner discusses such gypsy groups as outsiders in "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 233. Partridge the wanderer is in danger of his liminality shifting into such a permanent state of outsiderhood. 17 According to Turner, communitas "liberates the individual from the obligatory everyday constraints of status and role, defines him as an integral human being with the capacity for free choice, and ... presents for him a living model of human brotherhood and sisterhood" (Dramas, 207). This feeling of brotherhood is precisely what Benedict Anderson claims as a primary component of his "imagined communities": "regardless of the actual equality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship." Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7. I would argue that the problems with the Stuart patriarch of the nation, Jacobites, Partridge included, justified their position by claiming that the right of succession is analogous to the right of primogeniture practised by most English landowners.15 Both systems of inheritance are based on hereditary relations; but just as the monarch was a father to his people, he was also bound to serve them, and any anti-Jacobite would argue that James II was a bad father and a bad servant to the nation because he apparently failed to uphold his monarchical oath. Throughout Tom Jones Fielding ques- tions certain tradition-based societies—the "gypsies" included—to suggest the poverty of purely customary modes of association.16 Although Jacobites and gypsies are groups with a strong Gemeinschaft in their commitment to custom, and a sense of honour-based shame that Fielding finds lacking in English society, they are liminal and associated with foreignness: the gypsies trace their roots to Egypt, and the Jacobites are aligned with Roman Catholicism. The importance of religion in Tom Jones is evident, but despite Paradise Hall's name and the abiding concern with providence in the novel, Tom's bildung is primarily a wordly, secular one. The taverns, inns, and stretches of road allow Tom locations of possibility to ex- plore different modes of association from those determined by his gentleman-bastard status at Allworthy's. The profusion of people with mistaken identities on the road and at the inns further creates oppor- tunities for Tom to develop his judgment. The occasional esprit de corps that arises between Tom and Partridge dramatizes the blurring of status boundaries and resembles Turner's sense of communitas in their sometimes horizontally defined relationship.17 In Tom's process of 358 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION succession and national identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hinge more on familial and specifically paternal associations. On a related note, his argument that "all communities are imagined" pertains to Partridge's memories of his life in Allworthy's Gemeinschaft insofar as they are a construction of his mind. However, T?nnies's definition of community—which features the integral and acknowledged component of social structure—is apposite for my purposes because Partridge longs for a community founded on hierarchy. 18 See Brown for a thorough discussion of Tom's parentage and legitimacy. 19 See J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 75. 20 See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985) for a wide-ranging and penetrating study of such economies, especially among women. Bruce Robbins also devotes a chapter, "Surveillance and the Family," to gossip in The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 103–12. maturation in the journey to London and back to Paradise Hall, he lives the life of the outsider that Partridge has been living for years. Turner's communitas offers only part of an explanation, however, of what happens between Partridge and Tom, because in the eighteenth century even brothers were members of a family hierarchy. Partridge freely accompanies Tom on the journey, but the relationship is con- tinuously charged with the suggestion of Tom's greater inherent worth. Partridge's main reason for accompanying Tom is old- fashioned fidelity and obligation to him as a proxy for Allworthy, which ultimately turns out to be the right guess given Tom's consan- guinity with the patriarch.18 Because of this frequent suggestion that Tom somehow represents Allworthy, the road trip suggests a point of contact between the group will in Gemeinschaft and the individual will in Gesellschaft. One such example of this process occurs as a con- sequence of Partridge's accidental misuse of the power of informa- tion, which creates failures of understanding between the men and brings the hierarchical aspects of their relationship into focus. Partridge's freedom with Tom's personal matters at once attenuates their bonds of friendship and prevents his fulfilment of servant duties. In the traditional master-servant relationship, for example, discre- tion is one of the master's unspoken expectations; according to J. Jean Hecht, "the master might expect fidelity and attachment from his domestics no less than other members of his family. They were supposed to guard his secrets, defend his good name against calumny and harsh criticism, and in general make his interests their own."19 Although a character such as Jenny Jones is aware of the repercussions of gossip, Partridge lacks the information to understand fully its economies, even though he himself is a victim of gossip in the Allworthy expulsion.20 When Partridge encounters Sophia's maid A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 359 21 The corrupt aristocrat Lord Fellamar delivers a duel challenge to Squire Western in London through a messenger. When Western fails to accept the invitation (instead preferring old- fashioned fisticuffs), the messenger replies, "I see, Sir, you are below my Notice, and I shall inform his Lordship you are below his.—I am sorry I have dirtied my Fingers with you" (837). Shortly thereafter, Mr Fitzpatrick demands satisfaction from Tom for his misidentification of Tom as his wife's paramour at the Upton inn (872). Neither of these men, however, upholds a true sense of honour, pointing to Fielding's disdain for the practice of duelling. Honour Blackmore at the Upton inn, then, without even knowing her he immediately lets slip that Tom is "in Bed with a Wench" (543). Partridge's gesture contains no malice, certainly; this incident is more a reflection of Partridge's natural loquacity than a desire to gain con- trol over his "master," whose virility he wishes to emulate. Partridge has little idea that this seemingly inconsequential slip will lead to Sophia's fury at Tom for his infidelity to her. Thus Partridge neglects the duty of secrecy that is expected of servants in the nuclear family and in the household family; yet his situation at an inn, a mix of commercial and domestic space, suggests the ambiguity of his obligations to Tom. Although Tom has no authority to scold Partridge for his "infidel- ity," when he is unfaithful himself, he still assumes the betrayed master/father position. Tom's response to Partridge's slip is to beat him like a servant instead of talking to him, but then he turns the scorn upon himself as he realizes the excess of his gesture. Curiously, neither consequences nor intentions determine Tom's punishment— instead, Partridge's temporary servant status has allowed this instance of domination. If Partridge is a servant, he has ignored his duty, but if he is a friend, he has simply been careless. Regardless of how they might interpret the situation, neither Tom nor any self-respecting gentleman would resort to beating his friend for such an indiscretion, however harmful. Had Tom and Partridge not been friends, in this age of "honour," one would request a duel from a social equal for an egregious offence.21 Tom looks upon Partridge as his inferior and is therefore licensed to assert this authority with demeaning blows. In the book, other instances of Tom's physical aggression reflect his spirited temperament, but Tom's outburst here has a different context because of Partridge's pledges of service. Whether Tom has officially agreed that Partridge is his servant or not, he often treats him like one. The wide-reaching ramifications of such a seemingly inconse- quential mistake furthermore suggest that during the journey, the anonymity of characters such as Honour Blackmore and Sophia Western places them at the mercy of those who can adapt to various modes of association. For as much nostalgia as Partridge has for 360 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 22 Nancy Mace, Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 92. Allworthy, he knows how to enjoy the playful ambiguity of the road and inn. But what is playful to a middle-aged man could have serious consequences for wandering women: Partridge persuades the Upton inn landlady that Sophia and Honour are "A Couple of Bath Trulls" when they arrive, the usual suspicion about unaccompanied ladies in Fielding's time (542–43). This blurring of social status can translate differently for women, and the mistress and maid are trading one form of domination (paternalism and patriarchy) for another (sexual vulnerability on the road). The status ambiguities also, oddly enough, reaffirm Honour's lower essential worth. Because Sophia and Honour have an established mistress-maid relationship before they set out on their journey, the social structures of the Western household are more clearly preserved during it—Honour is always deferential to Sophia, who maintains a mistress's decorum. The journey is nonetheless a rite of passage for Sophia, and clearly so—she ventures out on the road under the im- minent threat of danger from highwaymen in order to pursue the object of her love. Sophia's position on the threshold is evident when Honour uses the confusion at the inn to assert her own importance over other servants, and ultimately to betray her mistress for Lady Bellaston in London. Instead of using a self-serving means to return to the original household from which she is banished like Partridge, Honour progresses from effusive loyalty towards Sophia to a debased gesellschaftlich instrumentality. If the clash of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft creates places for communitas to emerge, however fleeting, it more often blurs role distinctions enough to create an array of social inversions and reposi- tionings. Just as Tom "masters" his pseudo-father, he also assumes the schoolmaster's role, much to Partridge's displeasure. And, as much as Partridge displays his great learning, on at least two occasions he exhibits his ignorance of Latin beyond a schoolboy's grammar. As Nancy Mace notes, "Partridge reveals the problems that occur when those with a superficial classical education attempt to use it exten- sively."22 In a conversation with Tom after leaving the Upton inn, he cannot translate the Horace that Tom quotes, referring to him as a A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 361 23 This recalls Black George's fraud concerning the banknotes that Allworthy gave to Tom, discussed in Martin A. Kayman, "The 'New Sort of Specialty' and the 'New Province of Writing': Bank Notes, Fiction and the Law in Tom Jones," ELH 68 (2001), 633–53. 24 See Mace for an excellent discussion of Partridge's scraps of Latin, 92–95. See also Battestin's note on the sources of Partridge's Latin tags in Tom Jones, 419. "hard Author," yet he becomes highly offended when Tom notices his ineptitude (629). This happens again after the discovery of Sophia's banknote in the hands of the illiterate beggar on the road. Ironically in this case, Partridge exposes his own Latin illiteracy when Tom tries to discuss some points of criminal law with him. Again, Partridge be- comes irritated at the evidence that he is not a master of his subject, and, furthermore, that Tom could easily step into his vocation with more expertise. This affair of the bank bill also exposes some of the motives behind Partridge's behaviour with Jones, because the dis- covery of his ignorance is a result of arguing over whether to spend some of Sophia's money.23 Hence Partridge's behaviour seems to stem from a mixture of fidelity (group will) and self-interest (individual will), but it continually makes him appear servile. Partridge calls Tom "Domine" after Tom toasts him as "Doctissime Tonsorum" (most learned of barbers); "domine" means "master" and encompasses such courtesy titles as "lord" or "sir" (417). The OED also cites the definition of "domine" as "schoolmaster," which acknow- ledges the particularly pedagogical inversion. Such ambiguous phrases lead the reader to wonder why Partridge later so emphatically insists to the group of servants in the inn, where the puppet show is held, that he is not Tom's servant, but a friend, companion, and gentleman on par with him. This self-justification reflects the prob- lems he faces during his peregrinations, especially since his threshold position leads to regression rather than growth (643).24 In this one episode, he boasts of the wealth of his "master," questions Tom's sanity out loud, and covertly schemes to bring Tom back to Allworthy for "the highest Rewards" (645). These seemingly contradictory ex- pressions towards Tom occur after the episode in which the figure of the puppet suggests Partridge's own manipulations of his situation with Tom. As the puppet show erupts into chaos, however, so do Partridge's plans dissolve, and he more closely resembles a servant, the Merry Andrew, who is caught having sex with the maid shortly before Partridge tries to proposition one of the gypsy women. In Partridge's pursuit of Allworthy's former social structure, with nostalgia reminiscent of Jacobitism, the absent presences of 362 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 25 See Hecht, Hill; and Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000). 26 Atiyah, 141. Kayman cites part of this passage (653n44). 27 This predicament suggests Partridge's partial affinity with the tricky servant (servus callidus) type character of New Comedy. Allworthy's community explain the persistence of implicit status rela- tions between the two, specifically concerning Tom's choice to beat Partridge as a servant. As we question each party's motivation for his association with the other, we notice that what should be explicit between a master and a servant remains implicit between the two, thus mimicking "natural" father-son relationships. This service rela- tionship elaborates on the problems that Hecht and others find with the presence of analogical familial structures in employment rela- tionships.25 Although servants and masters did, as a rule, create written service agreements, good for one year, Atiyah's account of the state of contract in general highlights the tug between tradition and modernity in the law: On the one hand, there were these newer notions about the inherently binding nature of promises, but at the same time there were still the traditional ideas in which promises were neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the creations of obligations. In this older scheme, duties rose out of relationships or transactions; even where the relationship or transaction was a consensual one, such as a simple sale, the obligations that arose out of the transaction were, in a sense, the consequence of the law, not simply the parties' intentions.26 To return to T?nnies's terms, the "modern" contract is a gesellschaftlich form of association built on rational agreements between individuals, suggesting a social structure not based on the familial, organic ties of Gemeinschaft and of Atiyah's explanation of the traditional contract. Recalling the psychological aspects of T?nnies's categories, Partridge displays a flickering volition, asserting himself as an individual only to desire subsumption into the Allworthean will that Tom represents. Partridge therefore applies a gesellschaftlich strategy to set up a scheme to return to Gemeinschaft. Such a strategy introduces a differ- ent structure from Allworthy's and distances him from his school- master's role by making it seem less like a "natural" emanation of his being. In other words, he needs to work and scheme to be his "true self."27 The moment when Partridge nearly forces his service upon Tom demonstrates the tension between the two parties' senses of obli- gation and calls into question any existence of concord between them. A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 363 28 See Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), in which she maintains that Partridge "exists in the novel within a kind of perpetual ghosting hour—with himself as chief ghost" (176). 29 The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, ed. E.G. Withycombe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), 22. 30 We might also consider Tom himself as a "son of sorrow" to Partridge and Jenny Jones because of their unhappy expulsion from Allworthy's community, but also because he is born close to the death of his father Summer. 31 The Jacobite's Journal and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 331–33. At first, Partridge suggests that by "attending" Tom on his "Expedi- tion," he can let Tom supposedly redress the wrongs that he inadver- tently caused by being born: Partridge's banishment, the loss of his job, and his general social decline (425). Partridge is effective in applying guilt to coerce Tom into assuming the role of the master, and Tom's obliging nature prevents him from casting off the man he thought to be his father. No doubt Tom also retains some residual sense of filial duty to the man—the spectral father of his youth— having been conditioned by the belief throughout his nonage.28 Although Tom lacks the financial and paternal power of the tradi- tional master, Partridge's pledge of fidelity to him places them in an unusual role reversal: suddenly the older man takes on something of a surrogate child role in his position as servant. This reversal is rein- forced by the etymology of Partridge's first name, Benjamin, which refers to the youngest son of Jacob, who "was originally named Benoni, 'son of my sorrow,' by his dying mother, but his father later names him Benjamin, 'son of the right hand.'"29 The story in Genesis 35:18 behind the name underscores Fielding's irony in his presen- tation of Partridge's character, since the right hand is traditionally associated with prosperity and adroitness, the very meaning of which points to the right hand. Partridge is the "son of sorrow" for most of the narrative, and Tom's ascendancy as the patriarch of Paradise Hall signals a figurative and felicitous renaming process for Partridge as he is reincorporated into the community.30 The obvious reference to Jacob as a father furthermore reminds us that Jacobus is Latin for James, hence the word "Jacobite" to describe his followers. This suggests Partridge's loyalty to the deposed king on the level of etymology as well as character and calls to mind Fielding's discussion in The Jacobite's Journal (9 July 1748) of the Hebrew etymol- ogy of Jacob as "supplanter." For Fielding, would-be supplanters of the Hanoverian succession were politically dangerous: "the Character of Supplanting is the true Mark of the Jacobite."31 Earlier in the Journal, 364 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 32 The Jacobite's Journal and Related Writings, 194. 33 Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 163. See also Laslett, The World We Have Lost—Further Explored (London: Routledge, 1983), for development of the idea of "life-cycle service," which indicates that being a servant was, for most Early Modern English youth, a temporary period of employment before settling down and creating their own domestic spheres. Robbins discusses this as a trope in literature with reference to Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800. See Robbins, 150–51. 34 See Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. "The Single Justice: Varieties of Paternalism," 173–208, for a detailed account of the men who, for the most part, settled disputes between masters and servants, thus giving this aspect of the law a decidedly local and traditional flavour. The Justices were Fielding's "Genealogy of a Jacobite" (12 March 1748) provides a scan- dalous family tree for one of Partridge's political ilk. This parody of the genealogies in Genesis claims that "Priest-craft begot Lineal Succession, Lineal Succession begot Indelible Character, Indelible Character begot Blind Obedience, Blind Obedience begot False Worship," and so on down to the individual Jacobite.32 The etymology of Jacob and the perverse genealogy suggest, then, the condition of replacement and displacement at the heart of Partridge's character—a son who inherits a legacy of illegitimacy. Partridge's significance as a son, or childlike character, suggests both the demographic profile and cultural representation of eighteenth- century servants. Peter Laslett argues that servants in eighteenth- century England "were certainly in some senses children in that era" since a "fair proportion of them [were] in their early teens and a half or more under 21. They were in some way treated like children by their masters and mistresses, even when they were rather older, because [one] had to be married in that society to be accepted as fully grown up."33 Partridge's character helps to clarify Laslett's discussion of service as a part of the life-cycle by figuring this kind of employment as part of the rite of passage. Although Partridge should have passed out of this stage by the time Tom meets him on the road, the temporariness of his service shares an affinity with the predominantly adolescent and temporary social institution of domestic service. Tom and Partridge thus become surrogate fathers and surrogate sons, according to the situation, alternately creating horizontal forms of association and exposing the problems of traditional modes of deference and authority, modes that were often highly localized. Many cases tried by the Justices of the Peace, who dealt with master- servant complaints, describe situations in which one side of the em- ployment contract was broken.34 Because of Justices' administration A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 365 also usually masters themselves, which added an extra layer of complexity to interpreting the law. Fielding, as a Justice, was intimately aware of these complexities. 35 Hill, 102. See The Covent Garden Journal, no. 64 (30 September 1752), for Fielding's argument against giving "unjust Characters" to servants. The Covent Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). Although Fielding's own legal reforms did not focus on master-servant law and involved London primarily, he was concerned with justice for the lower orders. The Bow Street Runners and the Universal Register Office reflected the necessity of gesellschaftlich associations in the often anonymous and more fluid urban world. Fielding suggested that employers represent their servants' skills and moral virtues justly in the recommendations, or "characters," that the workers would take to the next place of employment. These recommendations took the place of reputations cultivated under the watch of tightly knit communities and were frequently drawn inaccurately. 36 See Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1991). "Sometimes, with a character like Partridge, Fielding surrenders a little further than usual to the unpredictable variousness of human nature: thus, in Tom Jones, II, iii, Partridge is a good-natured, convivial man who is then suddenly glimpsed as hating Jenny Jones 'with no small inveteracy'; in VIII,vi and vii, we see his real generosity and loyalty to Tom, and then learn that it is also self-interested; and elsewhere again we know him as a pedantic incompetent grammarian, as an amiable compulsive liar, and many other things" (Rawson, 63–64). On the legal category of servant, see John Zom- chick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Christopher Tomlins, "Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History," International Labor and Working-Class History 47 (Spring 1995), 56–90; and Douglas Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare: Masters, Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England," International Labor and Working- Class History 53 (Spring 1998), 27–49. of the law, and the ad hoc character of the majority of the sessions, rural master-servant relationships were, for the most part, still firmly rooted in the paternalistic Gemeinschaft of the country squirearchy. These relationships form the basis of the customary contracts that Atiyah describes. In Fielding's time, even the law would not erase the advantage of the employer over the servant. Bridget Hill explains that the breach of contract in the master-servant agreement was a criminal offence for the servant but only a civil offence for the master; the servant could be jailed for not following orders, but a master would only have to pay a small fine for ignoring his obligations.35 Partridge's and Tom's characters were drawn at a moment in history when traditional and modern forms of association overlapped in new ways, many of which, as I have shown, were based on analogues to the family and clash most noticeably in the servant role.36 The family as an ideal form proves to be an inadequate basis for a code of obligations between master and servant precisely because it is a fluid structure in practice. The master-servant relationship, then, as defined by the law, contends with the local character of rural magistracies, who face the dilemma of upholding the abstract ideals of justice while they 366 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 37 For a discussion of the problems created when custom-based practices face off with written laws, see E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975). See Meldrum on casual service in the metropolis, which included arrangements that were temporary and usually arranged orally (31–32). encounter individuals on the local level representing different status groups with traditional rights and privileges.37 Although Partridge figures his earlier position of schoolmaster as a high calling, it is essentially a service position in Allworthy's Gemein- schaft. He was not within the walls of the household but was still within Allworthy's sphere of influence. His projection of a servile persona with Tom therefore appears as a permutation of a previous role: "Though the Pride of Partridge did not submit to acknowledge himself a Servant, yet he condescended in most Particulars to imitate the Manners of that Rank" (643). In the Upton inn, Partridge gravitates towards the company of the servants, and he performs the physical labour of carrying Tom's belongings, securing lodging, and other similar functions. Instead of proving his worth through honourable actions, he contentedly basks in the aura of his master as a proxy for Allworthy—Tom's supposed wealth dazzles Partridge so much that he wants to associate himself with it in some way. His servile behaviour is thus an example of the social structure in transition, but also the persistence of custom and ingrained habit. Partridge believes so much in Allworthy's power within his commun- ity that he plans to use his name like an amulet or magic charm to further a scheme of legal transgression. At the Upton inn, Partridge suggests that he and Tom steal some horses, claiming that this mark of distinction befits such a gentleman as Tom and, by extension, himself: Now as the Honesty of Partridge was equal to his Understanding, and both dealt only in small Matters, he would never have attempted a Roguery of this Kind, had he not imagined it altogether safe; for he was one of those who have more Consideration of the Gallows than in the Fitness of Things; but, in Reality, he thought that he might have committed this Felony without any Danger: For, be- sides that he doubted not but the Name of Mr. Allworthy would sufficiently quiet the Landlord. (547) The narrator's irony here reminds the reader that Partridge does not actively pursue virtue, even for all of his sententious phrases; the A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 367 38 This phrase is associated with the philosopher Square—see, for example, Fielding, Tom Jones, 132. On the use of this phrase, J. Paul Hunter writes, "It may now seem unlikely— except to students of the rhetoric of modern ideological controversy—that anyone seriously used, and tirelessly repeated, catch phrases like 'the eternal fitness of things' and 'the unalterable rule of right'; but the ethical and theological controversies of the 1730s and 40s are full of them. Even in that context [Thomas] Chubb's stylistic habits stood out, and he became especially associated with the phrases Fielding bestows on Square." Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 125. Hunter also draws a parallel between Chubb and Stephen Duck as self-made men, with no formal education, and discusses their reliance on patronage. Battestin also weighs in on this phrase: "The inadequacy of Square's speculative Shaftesburianism is clearly demonstrated by its inability to account for the reality of unmerited suffering (the occasion of Tom's broken arm) or to provide a reliable moral imperative (the encounter in Molly Seagrim's closet). In Square's eventual acceptance of Christian revelation we may witness the ultimate insufficiency of a philosophy founded solely upon the cant concepts of 'the natural beauty of virtue' and the 'eternal fitness of things'" (Moral Basis, 13). explanation of Partridge's gaffes as emanating from his small- mindedness marks the difference between his intrinsic worth and that of Tom, who forbids him to steal the horses. With especial irony, Partridge tries to use the name of a Justice of the Peace to allow him to commit a felony. Although his nostalgia for Allworthy's Gemeinschaft cannot justify the crime, Partridge views this in terms of protection and care from his proxy paternalist master. For all the loyalty he displays to Allworthy, Partridge's desire for instant gratification and recognition runs counter to the status and tradition-based community to which he desires to return. The narrator's comment that Partridge has "more concern for the Gallows" than for the "Fitness of Things" suggests that he cares less for intrinsic worth than the ultimate outcome of a situation; the reward or punishment is more important than the status of the deed itself.38 Such emphasis on self-preservation over forms of tradition suggests Gesellschaft. This category, T?nnies would argue, can be useful in defining relationships through reason, but Partridge's reasoning turns Tom into an object. To reach his outcome of restoration, he proceeds (before being thwarted by Tom) in a manner antithetical to Allworthy's fundamental values. Although Allworthy is not infallible in his judgments, he certainly does not countenance thievery. For example, Allworthy seeks to punish George Seagrim to the fullest extent of the law for his banknote theft and even admonishes Tom for wanting to forgive George too easily: "Such mistaken Mercy is not only Weakness, but borders on Injustice, and is very pernicious to Society, as it encourages Vice" (969). Partridge therefore understands neither his function in relation to Allworthy's Gemeinschaft nor its fundamental values. 368 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 39 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin Battestin, intro. Fredson Bowers (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 148. 40 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 285. 41 See Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). This category of service encompassed rural workers, who were not strictly confined to the domestic realm. 42 According to Maaja Stewart, Fielding "represents the poor through characters like Jenny, Partridge, and Black George, who try to act as autonomous individuals rather than as depen- dents within a traditional social system. In small ways and large, the ideology of their culture However, that Partridge even considers this action as a possibility reflects on the abuse of the law that its local character encouraged. Recall in Joseph Andrews, for instance, when Parson Adams is appre- hended with Fanny and brought before a Justice of the Peace, who has no qualms about sending the Parson to await trial in jail for "several Months."39 He is released only when a squire present by chance vouches for him. In a similar example in Joseph Andrews, Lady Booby tries to prevent Joseph's right of settlement as a servant work- ing in her parish with the help of her lawyer, Scout; he reassures Lady Booby, "The Laws of this Land are not so vulgar, to permit a mean Fellow to contend with one of your Ladyship's Fortune. We have one sure Card, which is to carry him before Justice Frolick, who upon hearing your Ladyship's Name, will commit him without any farther Questions."40 Lady Booby's country seat creates a striking contrast with Allworthy's, as the residents obey her out of fear rather than a sense of fellow feeling. Her wealth allows her an uneasy position as a matriarch; she is completely self-consumed, and her calculative and rational will is at work rather than an essential concord within her household and community. Within Allworthy's household, his dependents demonstrate both types of association, as the gesellschaftlich rational will leads them to jockey for position among other dependents in the gemeinschaftlich household family. In part, this is because none of them aside from Blifil—as far as we know—is his blood relation, and they have to work to insert themselves into a suitably familial role. We may read Tom and Partridge's association after the pattern of Allworthy and Black George's. Like Partridge, Black George is at once part of Allworthy's extended household family and residing outside of Paradise Hall, so he is more precisely a servant in husbandry rather than a domestic servant.41 We observe George's own conflicts between loyalty to Allworthy, and young Tom as his substitute, and downright selfish means of propagating his own domestic realm.42 A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 369 supports their assumption of freedom whereas the practical realities do not." "Ingratitude in Tom Jones," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89:4 (1990), 516. My interpretation, inflected by T?nnies's theories of community and civil society, demonstrates that Partridge, in particular, wants to be independent so that he can return to a state of dependence. If we move more closely to Paradise Hall itself, Tom's relationship with Thwackum and Square sets up our expectations for his later bond with Partridge in a sense somewhat different from Black George's but still hinging on the tension between dependence and self-interest. Thwackum and Square are incompetent pedagogues, but Tom's good nature and native wit trump their love of system and jargon. Their incessant platitudes resemble Partridge's Latin tags but serve a far more pernicious agenda of elevating Blifil over Tom and ingratiating themselves with the younger man. Square's "Eternal Fitness of Things" suggests the height of Gemeinschaft as an ideal type. When Tom catches Square in a compromising position with Molly Seagrim, however, Square finesses his philosophical position in order to rationalize his philandering. He argues that "Fitness is governed by the Nature of Things, and not by Customs, Forms, or municipal Laws. Nothing is, in- deed, unfit which is not unnatural," thus disregarding the customary and seemingly "natural," sanctioned communal associations that he subverts in his affair with Molly (232). Thwackum, on the other hand, under the guise of gemeinschaftlich religion (the ultimate submission to a greater will) actually perverts the utility of Gesellschaft by replacing individual rational will with brute force. As Allworthy's supposed agents, Thwackum and Square do not live up to their roles as edu- cators because their minds are so limited, but they are much more malicious and ruthless than Partridge ever is. Their rhetoric of God and Nature cloaks them safely in normative and universal terms even as Thwackum applies harsher punishment to Tom than to Blifil and Square propounds a relativistic moral code to justify his own desires. When Partridge does finally meet with Allworthy again in London, however, the encounter does not fulfil the former schoolmaster's expectations. Just as Partridge never doubts that Tom is Allworthy's son, Allworthy never doubts that Partridge is Tom's real father. Allworthy reacts to Partridge in London with a kind of opprobrious perplexity because, from all appearances, Partridge is Tom's servant. Partridge replies, "I can't say, Sir, ... that I am regularly a Servant, but I live with him, an't please your Honour, at present. Non sum qualis eram" (I am not what I was) (935). Once again, Partridge suggests that he has undergone an ontological shift, or has been forced into one, 370 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 43 In an article responding to Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Richetti notes, "Individualistic identity is still very much involved in communal relationships and social traditions. In such arrangements, public and private intertwine, and public life is sustained by private affiliations and alliances that to modern eyes look scandalous or corrupt." Richetti, "The Public Sphere and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Social Criticism and Narrative Enactment," Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (November 1992), 117. 44 Atiyah, 215. 45 John Loftis compares the structure of this conversation to a trial, which brings to mind the earlier trial that Partridge undergoes to suggest that Fielding mistrusts pure circumstantial evidence. "Trials and the Shaping of Identity in Tom Jones," Studies in the Novel 34:1 (2002), 13–14. more precisely, in which he cannot pursue the mode of being that is most natural to him. The almost subconscious emergence of his Latin tags suggests his "natural" role emerging, his sense that he is closer to his proper social and linguistic context. His quotation, taken from Horace's Odes IV.i.3, reinforces his position as an older man looking back on cherished memories, but this reference also suggests the upcoming revelation of Tom's parentage, the more profound ontological shift of the two. Even as he listens to Partridge's narrative of his adventures, Allworthy has a difficult time believing what is beyond his own juris- diction—or, more specifically, he refuses at first to accept evidence that would overturn his previous decision concerning the former schoolmaster. Allworthy, in his role of Justice of the Peace, thus exemplifies the mixed character of social roles in the overlap of the national and the local. He resolves the disputes of people whom he considers part of his extended family but also functions as the inter- preter and enforcer of the laws of his country.43 Atiyah explains this generalizing tendency beginning to emerge in the eighteenth century: "As the law moved increasingly to a recognition of the generally bind- ing nature of promises and contracts, it became possible to generalize. Law now began to be about promises, wills, intentions, contracts; and not about particular relationships and particular transactions."44 In the context of Allworthy's magistracy, in which his particular relationship to his jurisdiction takes precedence over general rules, the conflation of familial and legal roles requires special facility in mediating between the two modes of association. Pulled away from the location of his own Gemeinschaft, he is disoriented by Partridge's claims. After Partridge recounts his string of misfortunes, Allworthy responds, "What am I to think of this Matter? ... For what Purpose should you so strongly deny a Fact, which I think that it would be rather your Interest to own?" (938).45 This statement points to A PARTRIDGE IN THE FAMILY TREE 371 46 Schmidgen, 150. Locke's claim in the Second Treatise of Government that property rights arise from labour invested suggests that Tom's reward of the Allworthy estate is based on de- servedness. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). It is uncertain, though doubtful, whether Partridge himself owns property at the end of the novel. Locke's famous phrase "the Turfs my Servant has cut" as he enumerates the criteria for property ownership draws attention to the persistence of patriarchal thinking even in a text devoted to arguing for possessive individualism (Second Treatise of Government, 289). This same dynamic seems to be at work with Partridge's ending of comedic renewal even as he accepts a living from the new patriarch. For a broader argument about Locke's importance for studying representations of the eighteenth-century family, see Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40–50. Partridge's interest in returning to the patriarch of his community rather than claiming his rights as a parent. Considering the impor- tance of legitimacy to the inheritance of property in the society, it is no surprise that Justice Allworthy uses words such as "Interest" and "own" to discuss familial relationships. After all, Justices dealt with many such aspects of family law. This unmediated encounter between Partridge and Allworthy does not secure Partridge's happy ending, however. The scepticism with which Allworthy meets him—he hardly welcomes the former schoolmaster with open arms—is an anticlimactic reunion. The structure is only recuperated for Partridge when the good Hanoverian Tom steps into the patriarch role. As Wolfram Schmidgen observes, "Tom's accession to Paradise Hall vindicates the dis- placement of genealogical by possessive rights."46 Partridge, of course, participates in a final replacement of his old life with a new, more hopeful one. His narrative trajectory in Tom Jones ends in the following way: "Jones hath settled 50l. a Year on him; and he hath again set up a School, in which he meets with much better Encour- agement than formerly; and there is now a Treaty of Marriage on Foot, between him and Miss Molly Seagrim, which through the Media- tion of Sophia, is likely to take Effect" (980–81). Although Molly might not be the first woman one would think of for Partridge's bride, his analogy with Square as a pedagogue suggests an easy substitution. Tom's possible father ends up marrying the possible mother of the younger man's children. Although Tom's paternity is disproven earlier in the book, this coupling emphasizes for a final time the complicated family relationships throughout the novel. My reading of Tom Jones, then, suggests some new ways to consider the relationship between subjectivity and authority within heter- ogeneous eighteenth-century households and communities (and their margins), where creating concord without blood ties in a primarily 372 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 47 For a different line of argument on authority, see Eric Rothstein, "Virtues of Authority in Tom Jones," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 28:2 (1987), 99–126. 48 I am grateful to Eric Rothstein, Howard Weinbrot, Steven Belletto, Sharon Twigg, and David Lacroix for their comments on drafts of this article. functional relationship involves making the master's interest one's own for personal gain.47 Admittedly, I have focused primarily on father-son relationships and their analogues, but this mode of analysis could open up a deeper understanding of maternal analogues as well. This is especially important, since eighteenth-century women's legal and social identities, not to mention their individual volition, were often subsumed under those of their husbands. This article has, I hope, illuminated the familial structures in Tom Jones as bases for moral choices and actions, in addition to political legitimacy. As Fielding's novel is but one of many novels that interrogate such famil- ial structures, the framework that I have outlined offers ways to examine the tension between tradition and modernity that particu- larly characterized social relations in eighteenth-century fiction.48 University of Wisconsin—Madison