SOURCE: "The Meaning of a Male Parmela," in her Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels, Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 67-89.

In this chapter from her book Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels, Campbell argues that Joseph Andrews not only compels us to examine assumptions about gender roles but also demonstrates the potential of the novel as a new genre to offer new modes of characterization.

Even in the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding's substitution of a man for a woman in Richardson's plot does not function as simply as it might seem to at first glance. The inversion it creates is comic and strikes us as a kind of parodic reduction of Richardson's high drama; but it also confronts us with the question of what has been reduced in the act of substitution—why what is virtue in one...