Throughout Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, the protagonist ventures from his home to learn what makes for a happy life. Rasselas asks several cross-cultural questions that could be considered common to human experience regardless of location. People are constrained in various ways with different life choices. It could have been anywhere instead of Abyssinia, but Johnson chose to set it there to remove it from the reader’s everyday reality.
There are a series of oppositions- Happy Valley and the outside world is discussed in Chapters 1-14, 14-49. Some never leave Happy Valley; they take the easy choice and never go through the tunnel or have the life they are expected. Johnson is talking about the people who want to go beyond that and crawl through the tunnel.
Throughout Chapters 1 to 47 (and at the end of 48), the choices of life and eternity are discussed. All the chapters show different kinds of lives as possible ways of being in this world. The characters all go their own ways in the end, but they decide that one can live his or her own life through finding happiness. Everyone chooses something different. There is no guaranteed happiness, but the only one that you can hope for is in Heaven. They do not overtly discuss God in the text, but their belief in the afterlife is underlying. The notion of God being around us showed there was a feeling of spirituality.
In the end, Rasselas has a satisfactory ending, because the characters come to an understanding that one must find his or her own happiness. Why is Johnson on this course? He is tweaking our expectations of the novel and critiquing things that he finds to be “wrong” with the novel as a whole. Although the characters do not find the exact “definition of happiness” per say, they are left satisfied with the explanation of working to be happy and looking forward to the afterlife. It is as best as they can achieve on Earth.
On an interesting side note, the structure of Rasselas bears similiarities with that of Voltaire’s novella Candide, or Optimism. Both texts have a young man exploring to find the meaning of a concept (Candide- optimism, Rasselas- happiness). Each end with the characters left a bit more cynical and wiser from the experience, and they decide to make the best of all worlds while they can. However, the main difference is that Candide is more satirical in tone, and Rasselas is more serious and deeper in terms of philosophy.
November 19, 2009 at 12:14 am |
Good insights. I like the way you outline the chapters. I find it somewhat comical how you expect this big adventure and that they might actually find happiness somewhere along their travels, but that in the end they realize that happiness comes from within and that the characters themselves must do what they can create their own happiness. The adventure that is promoted in the in the text really isn’t necessary for this realization to take place.