culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

CULTURAL TYPES AND THEIR DISCOURSE IN
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS
necessary so as to ensure social organization and order, that social equality is
impracticable and illogical, or that the law of property necessarily excludes
equality. The cult for individual property thus becomes the very source of
inequality. The eighteenth century is, on the whole, characterized by a strong
belief in the moral right to possess property. (Hazard 1965: 192 – 195) Morally
decayed, indulging in a state of dignified poverty, fighting to keep his ancestral
rights, rejecting the new ideas of the Enlightenment, holding tight to his
conservative ideas, the eighteenth-century nobleman lives in a world of stability
and tradition, despising all novelty and insisting on the supremacy of hereditary
values.
The critical discourse of the Enlightenment advances two contrasting
images based on a counter-model to the typical portrait of the nobleman. The
Enlightened man, a new character, is the embodiment of the new spirit, whether
of noble origin or not. At the opposite pole, there is the nobleman in debt, sinful,
depraved, a negative representative of the old order. It is in this stance that the
English literary discourse of the eighteenth century depicts the nobleman. In the
critical discourse of the Enlightenment one can identify the image of the idle
nobleman, who is useless for his country, haughty, and coward-like. The
nobleman starts to be dominated and superseded culturally, economically,
morally, and, therefore, ideologically discredited.
On the whole, the discourse advanced by the nobles even in the eighteenth
century is a discourse of authority, power and superiority from multiple
perspectives: from a historic perspective, they bring the argument of ancestral
rights and duties, of what is ‘noble’ on earth; from a biological point of view,
they take pride in the hereditary transmission of genes and in the purity of their
dignified blood, their ‘natural’ gift; from a military viewpoint, they are entitled
to have a coat of arms; from an economic perspective, they are the holders of
lands and the ones benefiting from agriculture; they also possess judicial power
and they are politically influential as MPs.
We will try to analyze the literary representations of this cultural type in
some of the eighteenth-century narratives, aiming at revealing their cultural role
in the community and their importance within it. Obviously, the gallery of
portraits includes country or town gentlemen, very rich or poor, male or female,
young or old representatives of the English nobility.
The two country squires in Tom Jones, Allworthy and Western are
clashing examples of the English rural gentry of the eighteenth century.
Allworthy is a balanced, reasonable, dependable man, fond of doing justice and
helping those in need; Western is garrulous, noisy, oftentimes even vulgar, overpassionate
and very rash, ‘hunting’ everything in the world as if it were some
game in his beloved hunting activities. A man “of no great observation” (1985:
220), Western is brutal, blunt and rather traditional, while his sister is open,
conceited, having acquired an unconventional way of thinking associated with
the Court and with the new fashion of the cities. The squire accepts no
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