Jonathan Wild: Spinoza, the Foil, and the Jacobites

Abstract:This essay argues from the nature of Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild as a miscellaneous linguistic salmagundi to a proposition that it is held together by a leitmotif of equally miscellaneous and perplexing opposites, which Fielding refers to as foils: the good-natured Heartfree being a foil to the villainous and hypocritical Wild. Fielding's usual ethical positives are foiled not only by Wild, but also by the strangely metaleptic "Good-natured Hole" in Laetitia's "Handkerchief," which exposes her bosom. Mrs. Heartfree's appeal to divine "PROVIDENCE" is foiled by the insertion of a phrase and an episode derived from the subversive philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which gives notice of a contrary attitude to cause and effect. Anti-Walpole satirical innuendoes are accompanied by another set of winks and nudges which develop a previously unnoticed anti-Jacobite subtext with which Walpole would have been in full agreement.