Margaret Doody says that tropes of fiction are something like “narrative symbols that move us through a novel’s story”.  She suggests that these tropes are neither limited to a specific time period, nor (necessarily) consciously employed by the author, but are rather devices employed at times by all true authors of the novel.  Taking up discovered identity as one of these tropes, this discussion examines Joseph Andrews in light of Fielding’s comic response to other early novels.  Attempting the spirit of Doody’s analyses, I will examine the types which are the models for three main characters in three novels from different countries and time periods in light of discovered identity in Joseph Andrews.
In the subtitle for Joseph Andrews, Fielding states that his novel is “written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.”  Fielding says of Parson Adams’s character in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, “It is the most glaring in the whole [novel], so I conceive it is not found in any book now extant”.  The type from which Fielding conceived Adams is not too difficult to establish: the parson is a literary transformation of Spain’s Don Quixote into the English countryside.  In many passages of Joseph Andrews, Adams embodies the rueful-countenanced knight.  To cite a few, Adams dotes on his scorched Aeschylus like Quixote on his burned Amadis of Gaul and books of chivalry; both forget such trifles as the payment for an inn-room; and, when reality catches up to them, they can only assume that some sort of deviltry or witchcraft has knocked their perception awry.
In Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter, Ronald Paulson finds that most eighteenth-century literature, including Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, took the novel to be a dialogue which addressed a new type of humor: “faced with the polarization of ideal and real, imagination and empiricism … there [was] nothing to do but [replace] satire with an incongruity that came to be the distinguishing feature of comedy”.  By depicting both sides of reality, that is, fact and fancy, as at the same time ridiculous and worthy of imitation, Cervantes seemed to have discovered a peculiar type of comic genre that was ridiculous and virtuous.  Fielding discovers that the virtuous ideals of Parson Adams and moralists in general need in some way to be balanced humorously with the down-to-earth Mrs. Adams and other practical characters.
Another rather obvious type with which Joseph Andrews works is the style of Samuel Richardson’s novel, Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded.  Fielding calls affectation of virtue a prime source of the ridiculous (Preface, 11), and he thought Pamela portrays and awards affected virtue.  The main character of Fielding’s novel derides Pamela’s affected virtue.  He discovers true moral identity by discovering a model of real virtue, Pamela Andrews’s brother, Joseph.  In Genesis, Chapter 39, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce her servant, Joseph.  In Pamela, Lord B____ attempts to seduce his servant, Pamela Andrews.  In Joseph Andrews, one Lady Booby, the cousin to Pamela’s Lord B____, attempts to seduce her servant, Joseph Andrews.  Like the Biblical Joseph, Fielding’s Joseph rejects Booby’s advances, apparently for no other reason than simple love of virtuous chastity.  Yet, Fielding comically reveals that Joseph’s true virtue stems no more from love of chastity than from his sensual desire for another woman: the beautiful, voluptuous, and quite busty Fanny Goodwill.
