The Political and Social Significance of the Life and Teachings of Jesus

Heartfree's incompatible ways of speaking, enacting and expanding upon the irreconcilable discord we might hear between them. Throughout Jonathan Wild, Fielding typically marks such borders rather than erasing them or moving smoothly across them: he calls attention to the breaks or ruptures within our ways of constructing social meaning, including the separation we respect implicitly between public and private life. The Heartfrees' virtues are largely those of private life, whereas the various men satirized in the character of Wild aspire to success in the public spheres of politics or finance. Wild's tale too, however, includes events of a personal nature: Fielding interweaves the story of his courtship and unhappy marriage to Laetitia Snap with that of his commercial and quasi-political exploits. Significantly, the moments of greatest instability in the narrator's tone-the moments of wavering between ironic and earnest expression-tend to occur as he moves between his domestic and his public (political, economic, ...»