H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 0 2our sense of his virtue. Virtue is not supposed to be self- regarding.
So the plot has to go to work on his behalf. Fielding allows Tom
Jones to achieve happiness, while warning us that such felicitous
outcomes are untypical of real life. There is, he remarks in the
course of the novel, a worthy moral doctrine that the good will
receive their reward in this world – a doctrine, he adds, which has
only one defect, namely that it is not true.
In a similar way, the depraved and black- hearted are usually
worsted by the end of the story. Their schemes are foiled, their
fortunes are snatched from their hairy paws, and they are packed
off to prison or married off to monsters. The poor are filled with
good things, while the rich are sent empty away. Yet in real life, so
it is discreetly hinted, the villains would probably have ended up as
judges and cabinet ministers. There is a similar sense of irony at the
end of some of Shakespeare’s comedies, which make us wryly
aware that this is probably not how things would have panned out
in reality. A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes with the ‘right’
couples being married off to each other, but not before the play has
called into question the whole idea of rightness when it comes to
sexual attraction. Instead, it demonstrates how anyone can desire
anyone else – how there is an anarchic quality about desire which
is a threat to an orderly plot. The queen of the fairies even falls in
love with a donkey, which is not the only time that a royal
personage has done so. In The Tempest, Prospero can be reconciled
with his enemies only by deploying magical devices. Charlotte
Brontë’s novel Villette supplies us with alternative endings, one
comic and one tragic. ‘Here’s your happy ending if you insist on
one,’ it seems to murmur to the reader, ‘but don’t imagine that it’s
necessarily the truth of the matter.’