ABSTRACT
Joseph's cry, interrupting Adams's long exposition of the comforts of philosophy and Christian submission, at once acknowledges the integrity of Adams's arguments and asserts their irrelevance to the feeling they claim to address - Joseph's present grief at Fanny's abduction by the servants of the Roasting-Squire. The two men have been left together at the inn, tied 'back to back' to a bedpost by Fanny's abductors, and the dialogue between them that constitutes book 3, chapter 11, of Joseph Andrews might be said to bring back to back separate human 'truths' of reason and of feeling - to place them in a forced conjunction, but looking off in diverse directions rather than confronting each other face to face. The scene provides an emblem for a quality that a number of critics have admired in Fielding's fiction, his willingness to sustain 'unresolved dualities' or to 'wrestle central contradictions . . . only to a standoff'; Joseph's exclamation, with its twinned acceptance and rejection of offered principles, seems to me the characterizing cry of Joseph Andrews.2
