Tom's innocence

This could be considered one of the major Themes of the novel as to the narrative mainly revolves around his protagonists. While Tom may be considered disreputable - he never lays siege to a woman. It is always the women who beleaguer him. Tom's trouble is that he cannot find it in his heart to repulse them: and this because he is fundamentally an idealist about women. He discovers generosity in the woman's overtures, to which if he does not respond he is self-condemned as ungenerous. This does not fit at all with conventional motions of the virtue of chastity, but it is not incongruous with a delicate and sensitive humanity.

He is really an innocent, soul where Joseph Andrews, another of Fielding's characters was only abstractly innocent. Even though he loses some of his boyish ****, he never loses his innocence. Where Molly Seagrim is concerned he entirely fails to see that she is inveigling him. He was incapable of realizing that Molly was a young woman, determined to reduce him. And when he does possess her his reaction is that of a naturally generous soul to generosity. Fielding himself describes Tom as one of those who can never receive any kind of satisfaction from another, without loving the creature to whom that satisfaction is owing and without making its well- being in some sort, necessary to their own ease.

When he meets Mrs. Waters, he is evidently more experienced: he does not delude himself with the motion that he is the aggressor. He is very much aware that the lady is offering herself to him. She too knows very well that the sight of her bosom has lighted a small flame in him and she leaves no stone unturned in fanning this flame. She deliberately refused Tom's offer of his overcoat, when he walked before her to the Upton inn. She also seized every opportunity she could to make him look pack at her. She completed her conquest of him by carelessly letting the handkerchief drop from her neck and unmasking the royal battery. The healthy bodied on really had not much change. Nor, was Mas Waters at all deeply perturbed when she discovered, that Tom's heart was already engaged. Mrs. Waters is shown as good-natured and generous and Tom quite likes Mas Waters, and so do we.

Tom is always grateful to his partners: to Molly and Mrs. Walkers for their physical kindness, and to Lady Bellaston for another sort of generosity. So, Tom is very definitely not one who is susceptible to appetite alone. He has many other emotions too. He is rather a backward lower; it is being desired that makes him desire. And it is characteristic of him that out of a kind of chivalry, he is unjust, to himself when, at the end he reproaches himself to Sophia.

The reproachment is unfair to himself. If there was grossness, which is also disputable, the sexes had fairly shared it in Tom's affairs.

But it was Tom's habit always to take the blame upon himself in everything, and above all where women were concerned good nature is better than goodness - there is not, in all English, fiction, a hero as natural and endearing as Tom Jones - al few heroines more spirited, more feminine and more delightful than Sophia.

It is Tom's quaint innocence that puts him in sticky situations rather than deliberate villainy and lustfulness.

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