Tame Bear. Images of the Soldier in the Early English Novel

摘要

This essay studies the representation of soldiers in eighteenth-century Englishnovels. The emergence of the standing army (formally begun in 1670) and the creation of a new military profession in British society challenged older concepts of masculine identity and power. The challenges that the professionalization of the soldier posed were the source of anxiety and concern in the novelists of the early to mid eighteenth century, and these anxieties were in turn manifested in the representation of the soldier and the army in general in the novel These challenges to traditional masculine identity and power take the form of a series of dialectics within which soldiers are placed--dialectics of class, politics, sexuality, and military spectacle. The essay includes analysis of six novels of the period: Colonel Jack (1722) by Daniel Defoe; Gullivers Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift; Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding; Tristram Shandy (1760) by Laurence Sterne; and Humphry Clinker (1771) by Tobias Smolleff. Each author varies somewhat in his handling of the soldier within these dialectics, but the dominant characteristic of the representation of the standing army in these novels is that of ambivalence, or 'double discourse;' like a bear at a bear-baiting, the professional soldier is a source of conflicting emotions: admiration and fear, sympathy and scorn.