Novel of the Middle Class

The Classical Age was of a relatively less pure quality than was that of the preceding ages. It was because the society was in a kind of flux. The ruling class was, no doubt, still built upon an aristocratic frame and the prestige of high birth or position was not abolished. Yet by the end of the seventeenth century, the upper middle class was more and more mingling with the nobility, or rising in position in the state. The influences of the middle order of the society were everyday become more active.

As the middle class was slowly emerging, the novelists based their plots on and took their characters from this big segment of society. Legouis and Cazamian describe this new trend in these words: “Henceforth, England will gradually and dimly tend to reconstruct the unity of its conscious self round the sentimental, sensitive, and moral suggestions which come to it from these men, middle class or mediocre by birth, with whom deep spiritual inclinations have suffered less change than with their predecessors through and artificial and acquired culture.” (3)

Return of the Picaresque Novel

The picturesque style of novel began in the 16th century as a counterbalance to the chivalric romance. The Picaresque novels generally feature protagonists from the lower classes, but also draw on characters from various social classes. The primary character is usually duplicitous, both a dupe and a charlatan. The story involves panoramic scenes, and usually had different types of discourse, from philosophical reflection to parodying other traditional forms like the romance or poetry

In America, Henry Hugh Brackenridge (1748-1816), wrote the picaresque novel Modern Chivalry, the first novel portraying frontier life in the United States after the Revolutionary War. In England, perhaps the 18th century novel that most directly parallels Don Quixote is Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. The protagonist, Arabella reads like Don Quixote does, and tries to fashion her life after him. Yet, she is not as fulfilled as Don Quixote is with his role models because her characters are more inert than Quixote’s. He can fashion himself after glorious knights. She struggles to define herself by female characters whose primary goal in life is to preserve their virtue.

Gothic Novel

Another form of the novel that developed in the 18th century was the Gothic fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery, superstition, hidden corruption, conspiracies and terror. This form which appealed to man’s fascination for the dark or the mysterious became at once popular. It was called gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from the rough and primitive grandeur of medieval buildings and ruins. Such novels were expected to be dark and tempestuous and full of ghosts, madness, outrage, superstition, and revenge. The gothic form of writing fiction adhered to several conventions like castles for dilapidated abbeys, having dark battlements, mysterious subterranean vaults and secret passages, trap doors and hidden panels. The novels peopled by dark crazy monks, valiant knights, insane people, valets with murderous errands, haunted minds masked by apparently normal outward lives, and beautiful damsels in distress. The gothic novel also had an underlying theme of homosexuality.