The bourgeois novel richardson ( 1689 - 1762)

THE BOURGEOIS NOVEL

RICHARDSON ( 1689 - 1762)

Works: he wrote ' Pamela or Virtue Rewarded' and 'Clarissa Harlowe'.

There is a psychological analysis of his characters, that by him became from flat characters round ones for their capacity of 'development' and they are above all young and charming women.

The position of women in the eighteenth century was very weak in their families, in fact they couldn't make decisions about their life but they had to obey their fathers.

Characters: his characters are neither heroic ones, as in the old romances, nor picaresque ones, as in Defoe. Richardson , in fact, is the first writer to put, at the centre of his works, the new middle-class people, with their problems and desires.

Richardson's novels are epistolary, in fact they are made up of letters. The advantages of this kind of novel is that it's easier to describe psychological situations and to talk about deep feelings, but there are some disadvantages, because there are usually a lot of repetitions and for these reasons the novels are very long and the narration is slow. The fashion for letter-writing of that period was later followed by other foreign writers such as Rousseau, Goethe and Foscolo.

The plot of his novels is not very eventful but organized in such a way as to create suspence and expectations. The novels are no longer based on a sequence of picturesque and fantastic episodes, as in Defoe, but on a single story, made up of everyday events and complex emotional situations, which often become a pretext to analyse the flow of feelings and passions. As regards the setting of his novels, it's circumscribed but very detailed both in space and in time.

Realism: there is plenty of realism in each novel, but, unlike Defoe, it is used mainly in the treatment of characters and in the minute recording of their mental processes and feelings.