SOURCE: “Fictions of Passion: The Case of Pope,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 20, edited by Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock, Colleagues Press, 1990, pp. 43-53.

In the following essay, Spacks elucidates the function of the “ruling passion” theory in the Epistles to Several Persons by positing it as a corollary of fictional reality.

Discussing “the Necessity of human Actions,” Captain William Booth, protagonist of Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751), denies that men function “under any blind Impulse or Direction of Fate,” but insists “that every Man acted merely from the Force of that Passion which was uppermost in his Mind, and could do no otherwise.”¹ His commitment to this point of view signals his moral error. Although he recurs to his hypothesis throughout the novel in order to elucidate the behavior of those around him, his ultimate conversion to orthodox Christianity as a result of reading Isaac Barrow's works...