The Quixotism of Joseph Andrews
When the influence of Don Quixote is assessed in the narrators from the English 18th century, Henry Fielding, and especially his novel Joseph Andrews, are traditionally considered as the most direct hier of Cervantes´s legacy in the English language.
To carry this analysis out, I will take as a point of departure the conflict between life and literature that characterizes the work written by Cervantes. The nobleman Don Quixote takes a direct projection of the literature on his life, but this is done in an inadequate way. His obssession with books makes him a fool and his conflict of the perspective of the world of should be and how it really is gives the character the appearance of a navie human being. These two aspects which appear in the same character in Don Quixote are split by Henry Fielding in both Joseph, the young hero of the novel, and the priest Adams, his companion of adventures.
Fielding presents a character, Joseph, who, as Don Quixote, takes a literary work, the letters of his sister Pamela as a model of behaviour and mimics it literal and scrupulously. However, the application Joseph makes of the ideals of Pamela is in a very different experience from the narrated on in Pamela, as Don Quixote´s attempts of applying the knights´ideals result in a very different story from books of chivalry. The literal application of the literary models on the new reality is a source of rdiculous situations.
The character of Adams is the "quixotesco" figure par excellence of the whole work written by Fielding. Adams, as Don Quixote, perceives the world and lives in it through the literature and, in the same manner it happens in Don Quixote, the world shows that his values and learning from the books are not effective on it.
Therefore, the two main characters described in Henry Fielding´s novel constitute one of the "ecos cervantinos," which appear constantly in Joseph Andrews.
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Pedro Javier PARDO GARCÍA, La tradición cervantina en la novela inglesa del siglo
XVIII (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1997) y «Formas de imitación
(tel Quijote en la novela iglesa del siglo xvill: Joseph Andrews y Tristram Shandy»,
Anales Cervantinos, XXXIII, (1995-97), 133-164.
