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Licensing Entertainment William B. Warner Chapter 5: The Pamela Media Event An entire historical
tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular
event into an ideal continuity—as a teleological movement or a natural
process. “Effective” history, however, deals with events in terms
of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations.
An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a
battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation
of power, the appropriating of a vocabulary turned against those who
had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows
lax, the entry of a masked “other.” --Foucault, “Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History” (1977, 154) If
from a later historical vantage point we can see that it is in 1740
that the novel in If
we are to grasp the anonymous publication of Pamela as the
entrance of a masked “other” into the media culture masquerade in
1740, we need to understand how one book triggers a “media event”
with long term consequences for novel reading in Britain. An event
often acquires an enigmatic character from its decisive evanescence:
because it appears to have decided the direction of later events,
it compels attention; but, because it leaves only traces (tracks,
memories, or writing) that are partial, that is, both fragmentary
and biased, it eludes comprehension and invites a rich elaboration.
In Chapter 1 we offered a genealogical study of the rise of the novel
narrative so as to challenge just the sort of naturalizing continuity
produced by the historiography Foucault decries.
Over the course of the unfolding of the rise of the novel thesis,
novels are given a plurality of purposes: improving morals, catalyzing
national identity, representing social or psychological reality, becoming
part of “the great tradition.” These prescriptions for the novel have the character
of “fantasy” as fantasy works with “memory” to restore the original
essence of the novel: they elaborate, in a progressive movement toward
the present, an idealized cultural icon. Freud describes the complex
undecidable interplay of fantasy and memory, fiction and reality in
the (re-) constitution of a prior event. (Warner, 1986, 47-55) Here
I am suggesting an analogy between what motivates the compulsive return
to the primal scenes in dreams and therapy—the unconscious memory
of a personal trauma—and the compulsion of literary and cultural history
to return to a scene which is partly memory and partly fantasy. When
reading for entertainment within print media culture is experienced
as wounding trauma to humanistic reading practices, that trauma is
overwritten by a romance of origins (of the novel), wherein it is
told that Richardson and Fielding, as the true fathers of the novel
in English, performed heroic exploits of aesthetic originality. (Campbell,
2-3; H. Brown, 1996) But fantasy does not have a “free hand” to work
any way it might wish; in this instance, as in the primal scenes Freud
theorizes, it works, I submit, upon the memory traces of an actual
event, one that has a rigid, contingent character.
It is this event, the Pamela media event, that is the
focus of this and the next chapter.
[1]
On
Dec. 13, 1740, Cave, the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine,
proclaims the success of Pamela: it was “judged in Town as
great a sign of want of curiosity not to have read PAMELA, as not
to have seen the French and Italian dancers.”(Eaves & Kimpel,
124) With these words, an important organ of the print media diagnoses
a certain lack in the consumer of leisure entertainments: if you have
not read Pamela you are without a “curiosity” that only the
reading of Pamela will repair. Because Cave was a friend of
Richardson, there is an element of hype, and contrived promotion,
at the beginning of the Pamela media event. But the extraordinary
popularity of Pamela involves more than a transient shift in taste,
a mere “vogue”; it is a media event that helps to inaugurate a shift
in media practices. But, what is a media event? First, such an event
is not precipitated by some prior historical event (like a battle,
a trial or a coronation) which then becomes grist for representations
in the media. Instead it begins with a media production—in this case,
the publication of Pamela. Secondly, the atavistic interest
in the media event, as demonstrated by purchases and enthusiastic
critical response, feeds upon itself, producing a sense that this
media event has become an ambient, all pervasive phenomenon, which
properly compels the attention and opinions of those with a modicum
of “curiosity.” Finally, this media event triggers repetitions and
simulations, and becomes the focus of critical commentary and interpretation. For
a broad spectrum of twentieth-century cultural critics (from Adorno
to Baudrilliard), the media event, in the sense I am using it, has
been seen as a calculated means for the culture industry to raise
revenues, replace reality with fantasy, and take consumers from nature
into a simulated postmodern world, where all is only representation.
For scholars with more sympathy for the forms of popular consumption,
the media event is neither unreal nor cynically contrived. A type of event rather than a simulation of
one, the media event invites interpretation on two registers: as a
symptom of changes working within the avid consumers of the event,
and as carrying genuine effects into culture.
[2]
What gives the Pamela media event its force and
lasting effects? It is fueled by the struggle around licensing reading
pleasure I’ve described above: Behn’s successful introduction of the
novel of amorous intrigue on the British print market; Manley and
Haywood’s formulation of fiction within an emerging media culture;
and the scandal caused by novel reading for entertainment. The particular
order of my consideration of novel writing and the cultural resistance
to novels may have obscured the most striking feature of the interaction
between novel reading and the anti-novel discourse: a certain impasse
results from their increasingly symbiotic relationship. While the
increased currency of novels within print media culture intensifies
the anti-novel discourse, the novels of Manley and Haywood are not
overwhelmed by that discourse; neither does the success of Manley's
and Haywood’s novels prevail over the anti-novel discourse. Instead,
Manley and Haywood exploit the anti-novel discourse by incorporating
it into the New Atalantis and Love in Excess. Conversely,
when in Roxana Defoe attempts to short-circuit the allure of
the novels of amorous intrigue, or when Aubin develops strategies
to elevate and reform novel reading, they necessarily repeat elements
of the novels they condemn. In other words, over the first decades
of the century, novel and anti-novel, novels and the anti-novel discourse
flourish along side one another. But
the Pamela media event breaks through this impasse, and brings
a decisive change to the culture strife around absorptive novel reading.
I
have divided my consideration of the Pamela media event into
two chapters. This chapter,
Chapter 5, surveys three related elements of Richardson’s attempts
to reform novel reading: his early promotion of the novels of Penelope
Aubin as an alternative to the novels of amorous intrigue, his composition
of Pamela as an allegory of the reformed novel reader, and
his efforts to foreclose the misreadings of Pamela he anticipates,
especially among those addicted to novel reading.
This chapter then describes the diverse responses to Pamela,
responses which make it the focus of a media event:
enthusiastic promotion and antagonistic critique, parodies,
sequels, and debates about, for example, whether Pamela allows
readers to see too much. It is in response to this evidence of the dangerous
autonomy of readers that Richardson begins to position himself as
an author. Chapter 6 describes
Fielding’s complex critique of contemporary entertainment—from the
spectacles of the theater of his day to the absorptive reading Richardson’s
Pamela invites. With
his parody Shamela, and his alternative to Pamela in
Joseph Andrews, Fielding offers a fundamentally different pathway
for licensing entertainment. The
difficulty of controlling how readers read and use texts within the
open system of media culture in the 1740s encourages Richardson and
Fielding to develop the concept of the novel author as proprietor
of the book. By the end of the decade the cultural practices
called "reading novels" had been re-mapped. The ethical
program, mimetic coherence and aesthetic ambition claimed by Richardson
and Fielding for their novels were "countersigned" by many
of their early readers, as well as many early critics after 1750,
like Samuel Johnson in his Rambler #4 essay.
This positive reception of their novels functioned as a "contingent
decision" in favor of their novels, and against the novels of
Behn, Manley, and Haywood. Like the "decision" in a legal
proceeding or sporting event, this decision establishes a hierarchical
relation of one term or agent over another; the decision is "contingent"
because it did not have to happen the way it did. Thus, the Pamela
media event wins, in the words from Foucault I have used as an epigraph,
“the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power,
the appropriating of a vocabulary turned against those who had once
used it.” The Open System of Media Culture; or, Devising Originals
to Copy Terry
Eagleton has usefully suggested that Richardson’s novels “are not
mere images of conflicts fought out on another terrain, representations
of a history which happens elsewhere… but instruments which help to
constitute social interests rather than lenses which reflect them.”(4)
Richardson’s strategy for entering the market for novels, and
giving them the power to do things in culture, develops out of his
understanding of the workings of media culture.
The print market where Pamela appears may best be described
as an “open” system. By this
I do not mean that it is random or chaotic, nor that it is free of
constraints. But neither is it a self-regulating totality that sustains
some essential character through the sort of homeostasis proper, for
example, to many biological systems. The print market is a system
of production and consumption where no one can control or guarantee
the meanings that sweep through its texts. It is open to seismic shifts
and dislocations. Lacking centralized
censorship or certification, the market is influenced by any who can
get their writing printed. Here
there are no commonly recognized standards, and remarkably few limits
as to what can be said or written.
During the eighteenth century, the libel of political writers
and the pornography of Cleland and Sade demonstrate by testing some
of those limits. The very openness that allows the novels of Behn,
Manley and Haywood to proliferate within the print market is exploited
by the reformers of the novel—like Defoe, Aubin, Richardson and Fielding—who
wrote in their wake.
[3]
In
entering media culture Richardson seems to have learned from, and
emulated the strategies of, those precursors like Defoe, Aubin and
Hogarth who sought to turn modern fiction to ethical ends.
Because the printing activity on this market is sustained by
the profits it produces, success produces its own imperatives. The
market orients reformers of the novel toward the novels of Behn, Manley
and Haywood, which offered the dominant prior instance of the sort
of popularity and atavistic pleasure that reformers of the novel hoped
to mobilize for different ends. If the popular success of novels by
Behn, Manley and Haywood had defined "the novel" as a racy,
immoral story of love, Defoe, Aubin, Richardson and Fielding re-articulate
the novel to produce new effects on readers. The title, preface and most obvious traits of
a novel like Roxana make its proximity to the novels of amorous
intrigue very explicit. In
their prefaces too, Defoe and Aubin offer their novels as an improving
alternative to less ethical entertainments.
By contrast, the exchange between Richardson's and Fielding's
novels of the 1740s and the novels of amorous intrigue they sought
to supplant is obscure and vexed. Neither Richardson nor Fielding
offers his writing as another narrative practice to be consumed along
side the novels of Behn, Manley and Haywood-- like different columns
on a Chinese menu. Nor do either believe that the earlier, wayward
novelistic writing can be subsumed dialectically into their own practice. Instead, by claiming to inaugurate an entirely
"new" species of writing, Richardson asserts the fundamental
difference of his project from his antagonists-- the (notorious trio
of) Behn, Manley and Haywood-- who continue to circulate in the market
as threatening rivals.
[4]
If Behn's and Haywood's novels flourish, then
they will drain Richardson's project of its cultural efficacy. This
antagonism is most difficult to define because it is an unstable non-relation
between two terms which Richardson has every interest in obscuring.
It only becomes graspable from a later analytical perspective. Against the practice of traditional literary history,
which uses the principle of resemblance to designate the precursor
texts and authors Richardson might have known and imitated, I find
two broad ways in which Richardson rearticulates the print culture
he inhabits.
[5]
First, through his antagonism to the novels
of amorous intrigue, which he claims never to have read, but whose
influence upon readers he decries, those novels enter his texts. This
is less a conscious or unconscious influence than an influenza to
which he seeks an antidote. Secondly, in shaping his intervention, Richardson
repeats some of the strategies of those who preceded him in opposing
absorptive novel reading, and developed alternative narrative entertainments
with which to improve readers. Like both Defoe and Hogarth, Richardson
exploits the allure of the amorous intrigue he would restrain. Like Defoe, Richardson will use the naturalistic
situations, ordinary speech, and ethical teleology of spiritual autobiography
to establish the moral seriousness of his stories. Like Hogarth, Richardson rejects fashionable
entertainments as a treacherous model for imitation, yet weaves novelistic
plotting into his own text. In
Hogarth’s Progress Pieces, plays, novels and prints shape the action
because Hogarth’s characters imitate what they consume.
Moll Hackabout, the protagonist of the Harlot’s Progress
(1732), begins her decline into the streets, when she imitates the
protagonists of novels by having an affair (plate 2), and accommodates
herself to a life of crime by placing a print of the highwayman MacHeath
next to her bed (plate 3). In the playful amorous erotic prints Before
and After (1736), the heroine’s succumbing to her admirer suggests
that the influence of the volume of “Novels” and the poems of Rochester
have prevailed over the other book on her night stand, “The Practice
of Piety.” In his prints of
the 1730s and 1740s, Hogarth sustains an ambiguity as to whether the
many sorts of imitation he represents should be understood as prudential
warnings to the unwary, or as the intertexts through which readers
of greater discrimination may savor the fate of entangled protagonists.
[6]
Because Richardson follows Penelope Aubin (1685-1731)
in using the positive example to reshape the novel into a vehicle
for moral improvement, Aubin’s
novels function as Richardson’s point of entrance into media culture
of novelistic entertainments. While
Aubin’s use of characters as moral examples appears to be indebted
to seventeenth-century French heroic romance, her strategy for improving
novels also arises from a consensus within the anti-novel discourse.
In worrying about the power of novels to induce imitation in
their readers, Defoe, Hogarth, Aubin and Richardson echo the paradox
formulated by The Whole Duty of Woman, Or, an infallible Guide
to the Fair Sex (1740). In the section “The Duty of Virgins” there are
strictures against the
reading romances, which seems now to be thought the peculiar and only
becoming Study of young Ladies… it is feared they often leave ill
impressions behind them. These
amorous passions, which it is their design to paint to the utmost
life, are apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary readers, and
by an unhappy inversion a copy shall produce an original. Like Defoe before
and Richardson after her, Aubin accepts the inevitability of reading
to divert and amuse. (See above, Chapter 4, 10)
But to forestall the romances’ “insinuating” of “amorous passions”
into its readers, to prevent the “unhappy inversion” by which “a copy
shall produce an original,” Aubin produces exemplary
originals for her readers to copy.
This use of the exemplary character differentiates her novels
from Defoe's, and affiliates her novels with Pamela. Both Aubin
and Richardson aim to take the imitation-inducing powers ascribed
to absorptive reading within the anti-novel discourse and harness
them to the cause of virtue. After the double success of Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe and Haywood’s Love in Excess in 1719,
Penelope Aubin published seven novels between 1721 and 1728, which
turn away from the brisk contemporaneity and explicit sexuality of
the novels of amorous intrigue, and return to the style and content
of exalted virtue of the heroic romances of LaCalprenède and Scudéry.
(Richetti, 218-229.) This return to romance lifts her characters
out of the ego-centered plots of media culture, and gives a nostalgic
“retro” feel to her novels. Several motifs of her first novel, The
Life of Madam de Beaumount, a French Lady (1721), suggest its
indebtedness to heroic romance: the plot is replete with patiently
endured trials and miraculous escapes told through a complex narrative
scheme, which features an anthology of embedded narratives.
Belinda, the central heroine, has a magically radiant virtue
that the hero, Mr. Luelling, need only see and hear in order to love.
When a rival, the noble Mr. Hide, also falls in love with Belinda,
and she refuses him, the speech Mr. Hide delivers at his “summer house”
articulates one of the touchstones of romance—that one can die of
love: "Madam, … fear nothing from me, Virtue and Honor are as
dear to me as you; since you cannot be mine, I ask no more, but that
you'll stay and see me die, and not detest my memory, since vice has
no share in my soul." (68) Three of the programmatic elements of Aubin’s novels,
when taken together, give them a distinctly English, bourgeois, Protestant
cast. First, her narratives
are guided by a particularly insistent doctrine of providential rewards,
whereby “strange” and wonderful “accidents” guarantee final happiness
to the virtuous. Secondly, Aubin
purifies her heroines of the sort of erotic desire so explicitly present
in Behn, Manley and Haywood. Finally, Aubin’s novels make the heroine’s
literal physical virginity the indispensable criterion of virtue.
When Belinda is rescued from her outlaw captives, and returned home,
her husband Mr. Luelling asks the crucial question in an agony of
suspense: "Alas! my Belinda, may I hope that I shall sleep again
within those Arms? Has no vile ravisher usurped my right, and forced
you to his hated Bed?… tho I believe your mind still pure, and that
your soul loathed, and abhorred the damning thought; yet forgive me,
if I tremble at the dreadful idea of so cursed an act, and long to
know the truth."(128) Belinda delivers her self-vindication with
an indignation worthy of Clarissa.
[7]
In 1739, the same year Richardson is writing the Familiar
Letters and Pamela, Richardson wrote the anonymous preface
to a posthumous collection of Aubin’s seven novels, A Collection
of Entertaining Histories and Novels.
[8]
As a printer who had only written conduct books,
and who did not as yet consider himself a writer of stories, it seems
entirely appropriate that Richardson would join his close associates
in the book trade, Arthur Bettesworth, Thomas Longman, and Charles
Rivington (the latter one of the booksellers for Pamela and
the Familiar Letters), by actively supporting this new collection.(Zach,
274; E&K, 43, 90) The Preface that Richardson drafts does not
only index those traits common to Aubin and Richardson—“purity of
style and manners,” providential punishments and rewards, and a mixing
of diverting incident with improving “reflections.” It also indicates,
as Zach notes, how Richardson’s Preface modulates from being a critical
introduction to the sort of novel Aubin has written to a proleptic
account of the novels Richardson would write.
The preface also evidences an antagonism to Aubin’s rival female
novelists—most especially Eliza Haywood—whom Richardson obliquely
critiques but refuses to name. By their practice of “this species of writing,”
these unnamed novel writers have brought a “disreputation (sic) on
the very name” “Novel.” “Like the fallen angels, having lost their
own innocence, [they] seem, as one would think by their writings,
to make it their study to corrupt the minds of others, and render
them as depraved, as miserable, and as lost as themselves.”
By casting the female novelists as “fallen angels,” Richardson
confers insidious Satanic powers of influence upon them. Richardson’s
antagonism to the novels of amorous intrigue expresses itself in the
decision to disassociate his own writing from the very term “novel.” In this Richardson deviates from his praise
for Aubin’s “good novel(s)” in the 1739 preface; the term “novel”
is still used by the editor of the Weekly Miscellany, William
Webster, to describe Pamela in the weeks before its publication;
it is later applied to Pamela
and Clarissa by two sympathetic critical allies, William Warburton
(in his preface to the 2nd (1748) installment to Clarissa
(1st edition, volumes 3-4) and Edward Young (in his 1761
Conjectures). Little wonder that readers throughout the 1740s
will assume, against the claim that it is an utterly “new species
of writing,” that Pamela is, after all, a type of novel. Perhaps
nothing contributed more to triggering the Pamela media event
than Richardson’s provocative claim, submitted within the ongoing
cultural strife around novel reading, that however much Pamela
might resemble a novel, it is not one, and further, that it’s reading
will promote (rather than corrupt) the virtue of the reader. Pamela: An Allegory of Novel Reading Pamela recounts how a young girl imbued with
prudential paternal warnings and innocent of novel reading nonetheless
finds herself within a novel. When
her young master indulges in novelistic assumptions about their common
situation, and pressures her to yield to his desires, she refuses
to play the novelistic role of seduced victim. The heroine only escapes
her captivity within the novel by deflecting the action through a
new kind of writing—the letters with which the heroine records her
trials. By educating her antagonist
Mr. B. into being the right sort of reader of her narrative of their
common situation, Pamela casts Mr. B as a reformed novel reader. Through
her subordination of Mr. B’s novelistic scheming to her own ends,
Pamela, like Richardson, becomes the author of a new species of morally
elevated entertainment. In
order to prevent the insidious circulation of novels, Richardson must
teach readers how to read. It is therefore appropriate that Pamela
begins with parental alarm, and an injunction to vigilant reading. Pamela’s parents feel the peril of Mr. B’s attentions
to their daughter, as reported in the novel’s first letter, and respond
with a letter fraught with suspicion: “I hope the good 'Squire has
no Design; but when he has given you so much Money, and speaks so
kindly to you, and praises your coming on; and Oh! that fatal Word,
that he would be kind to you, if you would do as you
should do, almost kills us with Fears.”(27)
The hermeneutic of suspicion introduced here is directed not
only at the squire’s behavior and words, but her own: “you seem so
full of Joy at his Goodness, so taken with his kind Expressions… we
fear—you should be too grateful,—and reward him with that Jewel, your Virtue, which no
Riches, nor Favour, nor any thing in this Life, can make up to you.”(27) With these words Pamela receives the parental
Law of her social identity: virginity is to be the sine qua non of her being their “dutiful daughter” (the words with
which she signs her letters); otherwise, they suggest, you are dead
to us. The letter ends with the practical “charge” that she “stand
upon [her] Guard” and “if you find the least Attempt made upon your
Virtue, be sure you leave every thing behind you, and come away to
us.” These parental admonitions
puncture Pamela’s initial pleasure in her master’s gifts and attention.
Her response reports the change wrought in her: “…your Letter
has fill'd me with much Trouble. For it has made my Heart, which was
overflowing with Gratitude for my young Master’s Goodness, suspicious
and fearful.”(28) Although Pamela’s parents’ reading lesson is cast
within the severe terms of the prudential guide tradition, the content
of its warning is consistent with the injunction given her by Mr.
B’s blunt sister, Lady Davers: “[you are] a very pretty wench [so]…take
care to keep the fellows at a distance.” The advice of both parties
warns against that action—seduction of the beautiful and unwary—so
common in the novels of amorous intrigue. What
is the effect of these warnings? Pamela’s suspicions, once they take
root, are like the conscious blush of modest virtue: they imply a
knowledge of the immodest facts she hopes to ward off. Pamela’s reading
lesson is also ours: from here on we as readers must read through
Pamela, her language and avowals.
We must wonder what Pamela knows and wants. Why is she so willing
to stay after his first attacks so as to finish Mr. B’s “waistcoat?”
Why is she so angry at Mr. B’s proposal of Parson Williams as a match?
(86, 129-134) These episodes invite readers to suspect that Pamela
harbors an unconscious love for Mr. B. While intended to protect Pamela
from the wrong sorts of novelistic desire and knowledge, Pamela’s
reading lesson vitiates the original innocence the story postulates
for her. Richardson’s
antagonism to novels is expressed in the assumption, woven through
the early pages of Pamela, that Pamela’s sexual innocence and
her innocence of novel reading are of a piece.
However, Pamela is said to be “a great reader” (26, 37), and
her behavior suggests that she has learned practical lessons from
novelistic fictions: she learns of virtuous resistance in the story
of Lucretia (40-42); of great men stooping below their rank in marriage
(49); “that many a Man has been asham'd at a Repulse, that never would,
had they succeeded” (50); and, of the captain who escapes from his
pursuers by throwing clothes in the water (149). In short, Pamela has absorbed a good deal of
novelistic wisdom about gender strife and the way resistance increases
desire. Pamela’s
first person narrative does not allow us to understand what provokes
Mr. B’s sudden attempts on Pamela. (Roussel, 73-75)
One may speculate that the spark came from the suspicions of
himself he reads in Pamela’s correspondence.
Described by the editor as a “Gentleman of Pleasure and Intrigue,”
(89) B is told of Pamela’s “virtue” and “innocence,”
but develops his own suspicions about his servant. When his housekeeper Mrs. Jervis uses these
words to describe Pamela, he speculates on her true nature and motives:
“Innocent! again; and virtuous, I warrant! Well, Mrs. Jervis, you abound with your Epithets;
but ‘tis my Opinion, she is an artful young Baggage; and had I a young
handsome Butler or Steward, she’d soon make her Market of one of them,
if she thought it worth while to snap at him for a Husband.” (39)
Like the libertines in the novels of amorous intrigue, B assumes
that everyone maximizes advantage and pleasure at the expense of others.
He sets about composing an action—her seduction—that will cast her
as the victim in a novel. When he counters her resistance by saying
“we shall make out between us, before we have done, a pretty story
in romance,” (42) there is more than jocular irony in this retort.
These words offer a quite explicit statement of his
intention to compose an action—her seduction—that will make Pamela
a victim in a novel of his own design.
B even interprets Pamela’s resistance to his advances through
the prism of novelistic fiction. Thus,
in his letter to Goodman Andrews, Mr. B attributes Pamela’s sudden
removal from Bedfordshire not to his plotting but to her novel reading:
“the Girl’s Head’s turn'd by Romances…And she assumes such Airs…and
believ'd every body had a Design upon her.”(90) With
the summerhouse assault, B attempts to take compositional control
of the action. He deploys all the machinery used by the libertines
in novels to bend the action to their will: forged letters, disguise,
unprincipled servants, sudden nighttime assaults, the lure of love
and the promise of money. Following the rhythm of an agon,
B’s assaults and Pamela’s resistance increase in intensity:
from the initial Bedfordshire attacks, to the kiss B wins from Pamela
while disguised in her country dress, to the first bedroom assault,
to Pamela’s abduction and captivity at Licolnshire, to the articles
offering her the position as a “vile kept mistress,” to B’s second
nighttime attack disguised as Nan. Pamela’s resistance produces the
melodramatic scenes that have their antecedents in the novels of amorous
intrigue. Pamela’s tenacious
refusals, grounded in her observance of her father’s law against self-enjoyment,
block narrative closure. In order to counter B’s designs, Pamela not only has
recourse to the counter-plots of the type used or threatened in novels
of amorous intrigue: her secret correspondence with Chaplain Williams,
her failed escape attempt, and feigning suicide. But, more crucially,
Pamela develops an alternative interpretation and narrative: her being
woven into the plot of B’s novel is presented, through recourse to
Biblical typology, as a captivity that tests faith and virtue.(Burnham,
1996) She incorporates this
narrative interpretation into the letter journal she keeps after her
abduction. The very aspect of B’s Lincolnshire estate bespeaks its
proto-gothic peril to the heroine: “this handsome, large, old, and
lonely Mansion, that looks made for Solitude and Mischief, as I thought,
by its Appearance, with all its brown nodding horrors of lofty Elms
and Pines about it;...”(102) In this place, Pamela finds herself transported
still deeper into the labyrinth of a novel of amorous intrigue.
Thus she is carried from the civility of the motherly and practical
Mrs. Jervis, to the arbitrary brutality of the bawdy Jewkes; from community support to the isolation of captivity;
from everyday reality to a sexualized fantasy; from the normal to
the exaggerated; from outer to inner; from the social to the psychological.
At Lincolnshire, things become eroticized, menacing,
fanciful and extreme. Because
Pamela is increasingly confused by herself and her world, the reliability
of her narrative at Lincolnshire becomes compromised. In one episode,
which describes her failure to take advantage of a fine opportunity
for escape, Pamela’s antagonists take the form of two bulls. Her narrative describes an odd metamorphosis:
O how terrible every thing appears to me! I had got twice
as far again, as I was before, out of the Back-door; and I looked,
and saw the Bull, as I thought, between me and the Door; and another
Bull coming towards me the other way: Well, thought I, here is double
Witchcraft, to be sure! Here is the Spirit of my Master in one Bull;
and Mrs. Jewkes’s in the other; and now I am gone,
to be sure! O help! cry'd I, like a Fool, and run back to the Door,
as swift as if I flew. When I had got the Door in my Hand, I ventur'd
to look back, to see if these supposed Bulls were coming; and I saw
they were only two poor Cows, a grazing in distant Places, that my
Fears had made all this Rout about. (137)
When “two poor Cows”
appear as bulls—emblems of erotic aggression—then Pamela’s own fearful
fantasy of sexual danger lends support to B’s plot and takes her deeper
into the novel she strives to escape. How
are Pamela and B to escape the novel that programs the terms of their
exchanges? After B’s arrives
at Licolnshire, a perverse chiasmic pattern overtakes the relations
between B and Pamela: every time one allows themself to become vulnerable
to the other, the other draws back. In these nuanced, but emotionally
fraught exchanges, often celebrated within the critical tradition
for their insight into the psychology of love, one sees not only how,
in Pamela’s words, “love borders so much upon hate,”(59) but also
that the social problem confronting the would-be lovers has a generic
ground. How can B and Pamela
break out of a compulsive repetition of the scenarios scripted by
the novels of amorous intrigue, with their zero-sum game of the battle
of the sexes, with every representation under suspicion of being nothing
more than a ploy motivated by self-interest? We can grasp the staying
power of the novelistic codes that structure their exchanges, by examining
the impasse that has developed after B’s final physical assault on
Pamela, when the young couple converse by the Lincolnshire pond, and
begin to modulate their relationship toward the mutuality of an equal
love. (184-186) In
this scene their different relation to a scenario of novelistic seduction
makes each unwilling to trust the other. We might schematize things
this way. Pamela’s defensive posture, what one might call
her vigilant modesty, leads her to suspect every favorable gesture
as concealing dangerous new ruses. Thus B’s expressions of love may
conceal “criminal” desires and evidence an attempt to “melt” her with
“kindness” (186). In a complementary
fashion, the libertine autonomy and class independence that had justified
B in composing a novelistic plot to undo Pamela now becomes articulated
as a jealous indignation that Pamela’s counterplots led her to solicit
the aid of Chaplain Williams.(186)
Wavering between asserting his authority as author of a novelistic
scenario, and collaborating with Pamela in another kind of plot, B
feels an increase in his passion for Pamela, and an intensification
of the enigma Pamela has become to him. Her beautiful surfaces might, paradoxically,
conceal dangerous tricks: “See, said he, and took the Glass with one
Hand, and turn'd me round with the other, What a Shape! what a Neck!
what a Hand! and what Bloom in that lovely Face! -- But who can describe
the Tricks and Artifices, that lie lurking in her little, plotting,
guileful Heart!” (162) The
solution to this impasse is not available from within the terms of
the novels of amorous intrigue. From
within that genre, Pamela’s performances, and the tension between
her claim to simplicity and her more ambiguously desiring behavior,
continue to produce doubts about her both within and outside the novel
(in Lady Davers, and as we shall see below, in Fielding, Haywood,
and the anti-pamelists). The solution to the enigma that Pamela has become
depends on Pamela’s withdrawal from B's presence, and his reading
of her letters. This displacement
of attention entails a sublimation of B’s archaic desire to
possess her body into the pleasure of reading her letters;
such a displacement can usher in the change that Nancy Armstrong places
at the center of her influential reading of Pamela: B learns
to love Pamela not as an “object of desire” but for her “female sensibility.”
(Armstrong, 117) The success of this sublimation and displacement
of the object of desire depends upon the “realist effect” produced
by the detouring of Pamela’s correspondence away from its intended
destination, her parents, to B. When
read by B, Pamela’s journal letter to her parents produces the “truth
effect” for B of knowing what is inside the envelope, Pamela’s clothes,
and all the disguises of the social: the letter of the heart.
But her letters can only deliver their message of authentic
rather than performed virtue if they are overheard, or intercepted,
on their way to the parental super-ego. It is this detouring of the
letter/novel that enables a new kind of (non-) novel reading, whose
purpose is not merely to entertain, but to repeat a self-evident virtue. Within
this reform of reading, B’s absorptive pleasure depends upon his experiencing
P’s journal as a kind of novel: “I long to the see the Particulars
of your Plot, and your Disappointment, where your Papers leave off.
For you have so beautiful a manner, that it is partly that, and partly
my Love for you, that has made me desirous of reading all you write;…”(201)
B’s ethical reform does not pivot upon reading Pamela’s writing—after
all, he has been reading her letters secretly from the beginning.
Nor does it merely depend upon a renunciation of his desire
for her body in favor of an enlightened passion for Pamela’s mind.
Instead, B’s reform pivots upon his turning away from the Hobbesean
war of all against all implicit in the novels of amorous intrigue,
and his enthusiastic embrace of P’s journal as a new type of fiction.
Through his avid absorption in Pamela’s narrative, and his
counter-signing of its truth and value, B figures the reformed novel
reader outside the text who accepts Pamela as an elevated and
improving anti-novel. Because
it teaches him to love her "with a purer Flame than ever I know
in my whole Life!” (228), her journal becomes his bedside “Entertainment”
(254), and incites the curiosity
of unreformed readers like Lady Davers (374).
However turning Pamela’s letters into entertainment for B and
others also menaces their "truth effect."
If this detoured correspondence became an established communication
circuit, it would mean Pamela could, as she warns in handing over
a packet of letters, “neither write so free, nor with any Face, what
must be for your Perusal.”(208) To
avoid the reality of virtue being contaminated by the rhetorically
motivated performance of virtue written directly for
B, Pamela must assume, or pretend to believe, that each packet of
letters or journal entries she gives him is to be the last he will
read. Pamela in disguise; or, the novel of amorous intrigue
appears beneath its overwriting Pamela’s intertexts—the conduct book guide tradition and the
novel of amorous intrigue—lead to two utterly unacceptable directions
for the action. The novels of amorous intrigue suggest the first bad
result—Pamela seduced into an affair with Mr. B. At the same time,
the conduct book Richardson interrupts writing in order to compose
Pamela—the Familiar Letters—suggests a result that is
no less unacceptable to successful narrative closure: Pamela sees
the threat of Mr. B’s schemes and returns to her father’s house.
[9]
Such a result would obey the literal injunction
of letter 2 of Pamela, as well as the advice tendered by a
father in letter 138 of the Familiar Letters, and immediately
followed in letter 139 with his dutiful daughter’s announcement that
she’s returning home as instructed.(
) In order to achieve a rewriting of both novels
of amorous intrigue and conduct discourse, within the new hybrid text
of Pamela, narrative action must steer its characters between
the Scylla of virtuous withdrawal, and the Charybdis of compliant
seduction. What
takes Pamela and Mr. B past the danger of an early short circuit of
their story? Nothing within
the text appears more crucial than the disguise scene, where Pamela,
the woman who claims not to have read novels, acts like a heroine
from one by appearing incognito in her country dress.
Here is the first episode of the novel in which Pamela becomes
ambiguously complicit with the codes of love and disguise and manipulation
fundamental to the novels of amorous intrigue. Up to that scene, Pamela’s story could have
ended in virtuous withdrawal, but after that scene, where B wins a
kiss from Pamela, B’s desire is triggered and he develops the Lincolnshire
plot. But beyond its effect upon B, the scene offers a performance
in excess of Pamela’s intended meaning. This
disguise scene suggests how Richardson seeks to overwrite the novels
of Behn, Manley and Haywood. From the vantage point of his conscious
project to elevate novel reading, such an overwriting means writing
above and beyond them, toward higher cultural purposes. But overwriting
the earlier novel involves a paradoxical double relation: the earlier
novel becomes both an intertextual support and that which is to be
superceded, that which is repeated as well as revised, invoked as
it is effaced. Thus the elevation of novel reading is founded in an
antagonistic, but never acknowledged intertextual exchange with the
earlier novel. This concept of overwriting offers the possibility
of reading against the grain of earlier literary histories. To
interpret the unacknowledged exchanges working between a text like
Pamela and the network of entertainments within which it circulates,
one must reverse the procedures of the sort of literary history that
goes back to earlier non-canonical texts to find the "sources"
for canonical texts. Thus I am not reading the novels of Behn, Manley
and Haywood, or Penelope Aubin, Elizabeth Rowe and Jane Barker, in
hopes of finding the closest possible resemblance to the stories,
characters, or ethos of Richardson's novel.
[10]
Such an assemblage of single sources, supposed
to operate as influences upon the author of the privileged text, fails
to develop a general profile of those antithetical novels circulating
as media culture for readers before 1740. Nor will I be focusing on
the intertextual networks of explicit allusion subservient to the
conscious intentions of the author evident, for example, when Fielding
announces on the title page to Joseph Andrews that the "history"
is written in "the manner of Cervantes." To
read the general cultural antagonism between Richardson and the novelists
he hopes to displace, one might more fruitfully begin with the rather
perverse question, "where does one find a character who could not be more different than Pamela?" Although there are
many plausible candidates, my choice is the erotically inventive central
character of Eliza Haywood's Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze
(1725). By reading a scene of Richardson's novel alongside
Eliza Haywood’s novel, one can suggest an alternative to conventional
studies of the "influence" of one text or writer upon the
"author" of another. Richardson does not have to have read,
let alone allude to, Haywood in order to have his text receive the
shaping force of the "influenza" of her popularity. I
will summarize Fantomina’s story. Fascinated with the erotic freedom
of prostitutes at the theater, Fantomina changes her upper class dress
for the garb of these ladies. When she is approached by the charming
Beauplasir, one who has long admired her, but always been in awe of
her reputation, she decides to follow the dictates of her own passion
and indulge his solicitations. Through a gradually escalating series
of half-steps she loses her virtue and finds herself entangled in
a secret affair with him. When his desire for her begins to languish
she contrives an original solution: by changing her dress, hair color,
accent, and manner, she transforms herself into a series of erotic
objects to engage Beauplaisir's fascination: Celia, the "rude"
"country lass" who serves as the maid in his guest house
in Bath; Mrs. Bloomer, the charming widow in distress, who begs his
assistance on the road back to London from Bath, and finally, that
upper-class enchantress called Incognita, who carries him through
an erotic encounter in her London apartments, while staying masked
and anonymous. This chain of Fantomina’s performances is brought to
an abrupt and punitive close with the sudden return of Fantomina's
mother, and the discovery that the heroine is pregnant. If,
as I am suggesting, Pamela incorporates and displaces many
of the narrative and thematic elements we find in Fantomina,
near the end of Pamela's tenure as a servant in Mr. B's estate at
Bedfordshire, there is a scene that provides one of Richardson’s strongest
grafts to the novels of amorous intrigue. This disguise scene is at
once similar to and the opposite of Haywood's novel.
In preparation for her return to her father's modest home,
Pamela has "tricked" herself out in "homespun"
country clothes. This metamorphosis from the silks she had been wearing
is so striking that the housekeeper doesn't recognize Pamela when
she appears in her new outfit. Mrs. Jervis prevails upon Pamela to
be introduced anonymously to Mr. B, who calculatedly (Pamela thinks)
uses the chance to kiss her. Pamela narrates: "He came up to
me, and took me by the Hand, and said, Whose pretty Maiden are you?----
I dare say you are Pamela's Sister, you are so like her. So
neat, so clean, so pretty! ...I would not be so free with your Sister, you may believe; but I must kiss
you."(61) This provokes
Pamela's emphatic assertion of her true identity. After her escape
she is called back to receive Mr. B's accusation that she had changed
her clothes by design: since he had recently resolved to give Pamela
no more "notice," now "you must disguise yourself,
to attract me." She offers this defense: "I have put on
no Disguise. ... I have been in Disguise indeed ever since my good
Lady, your Mother, took me from my poor Parents."(62) After Pamela leaves the room, a servant overhears
Mr. B say, "By G__ I will have her!"(64) As noted early, this scene has decisive consequences:
after the disguise scene, B becomes the active promoter of the novelistic
coordinates of the action.
[11]
Pamela
redirects the resources for fantasy and pleasure working in a novel
like Fantomina. In both stories the heroine's disguise functions
the same way: to stimulate a male desire that is in danger of fading,
and to carry the narrative forward to a new phase.
Both a transformation of life, and a romantic plasticity of
the self, is initiated by the heroine's artistry in changing her dress.
By putting this empowering fantasy into practice, Fantomina
can control the desire that would control her: by appearing as a succession
of beautiful women, Fantomina fulfills an impossible male demand for
variety; by tricking the male gaze that would fix her, she cures that
gaze of its tendency to rove; by taking control of the whole mis en
scene of the courtship scenario, Fantomina directs the spectacle of
courtship that would subject her. In all these ways, Fantomina achieves
a temporary reprieve from the courtship system as described by Paula
Backsheider: a discursive system that positions women as subject to
judgment, always in danger of becoming grotesque, threatened with
the loss of love (1993, 140-145).
But the critique of courtship in Haywood's Fantomina
encounters its limit when Fantomina investigates her pregnancy and
closes down the spaces for erotic play by imposing harsh measures--
a secret lying in, and retirement to a convent. Earlier
in this study, I have noted the instrumental advantages that accrue
to Sylvia and Roxana as a result of their recourse to disguise. Most crucially, it enables them to move through
the social as a masquerade, maximizing their pleasure and freedom,
and temporarily eluding legal or moral constraints. Behn and Defoe
also make metamorphosis effected through disguise fascinating in itself,
a species of feminine magic. Today’s women’s magazines continue to
underwrite the magic of the “makeover.”
By adding exercise, diet and plastic surgery to the age-old
resources of clothes and cosmetics, these magazines offer a medico-scientific
support to the notion that the most ordinary girl could be a Cinderella.
By contrast with Roxana and Fantomina, Richardson incorporates
an explicit critique of disguise within Pamela. Thus, Pamela represents the heroine’s
makeover as a complex double movement: a descent in class signifies
an elevation in virtue. However,
from the moment Pamela tries out her outfit in her bedroom, her pleasure
in her new appearance is presented in a risky and morally equivocal
light: looking in "the Glass, as proud as any thing...I never
lik'd myself so well in my Life." Pamela's conduct book self
assessment of her impending social decline--"O the Pleasure of
descending with Ease, Innocence and Resignation!" (60)-- is qualified
by the way the scene echoes the narcissism of Eve's look in the pool
in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Belinda's "rites of pride"
before her mirror in Pope’s Rape of the Lock. Pamela's complicity
in acquiescing to the masquerade staged by Mrs. Jervis-- Pamela admits
"it looks too free in me, and to him" -- means Pamela must
submit to the kiss which she does not consciously seek. But what starts
out as the naive frolics of the teenage heroine turns, through the
intensity of B's desire, into the violence of his accusations. Instead of reading Pamela’s change of clothes
as a sign of virtuous resignation,
B reads it as evidence of intriguing designs upon him. Pamela's
defensive insistence that her new dress is her truest clothing, while
her recent dress was a kind of disguise, does not ensure that her
clothes can be read as reliable signs. Instead, her clothes and manner,
just like her letter writing, appear as instruments for dressing across
and between classes, and therefore carry an uncontrollable plurality
of meanings. How
does Pamela find herself in the ethically risky position of masquerading
as her self? In order for Pamela
to function as an alternative to novels, Richardson seeks to produce
the absorption ascribed to novels. To absorb his readers, Richardson
has his heroine emulate the disguised heroines of the novels by performing
her virtue before unreformed “readers” like her master. Pamela and
Richardson, as composers of textual meaning, therefore must pull off
the kind of performance for which Pamela’s disguised appearance in
her country dress offers more than an instance; her disguise in fact
epitomizes the fundamental communicative posture of Richardson’s text.
In this scene, the novels of amorous intrigue take on a life of their
own in the text of Pamela, suggesting that they have not been fully assimilated
to the elevated novel, but instead are incorporated so they circulate
like parasitical foreign bodies within Pamela. Richardson’s "new species of writing"
becomes their host. A
certain errancy of communication is programmed into the disguise scene
the moment Pamela allows herself to be introduced by Mrs. Jervis to
Mr. B as someone other than herself.
Pamela’s performance, by manipulating her appearance, produces
an effect of disguise, and questions about the deeper meaning of this
arresting spectacle. Thus the tendentious surmises that B directs
at Pamela: “I was resolved never to honour your Unworthiness, said
he, with so much Notice again; and so you must disguise yourself,
to attract me, and yet pretend, like an Hypocrite as you are---”(62).
By interpreting Pamela’s dress as a contrived disguise, he
plots her into his novel. But
his response results from at least two general aspects of her aestheticized
self-presentation. Because of the way a performance seems to be furnished
for the spectator’s gaze, it mobilizes the sense of being personally
addressed. Because of the way disguise foregrounds the
difference between what someone appears to be and is, it stirs spectator
curiosity to know the face behind the mask.
This curiosity may issue in fascination, anger, or desire—and
Pamela’s disguise provokes all three in B.
B’s responses suggest that a disguised performance incites
a wish to understand why the performer has chosen this particular
performance out of all that might have been performed, to fathom the
truth supposed to subsist behind disguise. In
developing a justification for her performance, Pamela finds herself
caught up in an uncontrollable interplay between a performance space
of surface appearances which bear a plurality of possible meanings,
and an inner space for the articulation of intended meanings claimed
to be both temporally and ethically prior to the spaces of reception.
The “disguise scene” suggests the impossibility of securing
that interior place of original intention—her self—as radically prior
to, and unaffected by the plural social contexts for performance.
In both letter writing and performance, meaning cannot be controlled
from the position of the performer or letter writer.
The wavering of meaning does not merely result from the vagaries
of human psychology or the plurality of interests that could be ascribed
to a reader. Both of these could be seen as extrinsic to an original
intended meaning. Richardson’s
letter novel and performances are not put at risk of misreading by
something that comes along after
writing and publication. Rather, there is something in the very structure
of both the system of early modern entertainment wherein the letter-novel
Pamela is composed and circulates, and the space that opens
around Pamela’s performance of her virtue, that produces meanings
that disrupt claims to an interior univocal meaning. In both letter
writing and in performance, a slippage not only can but necessarily
will open between the initial mark or performance and its cultural
articulation and social reception. The
detours of communications complicate that aspect of the disguise scene
that offers the straightest line to the ethical conduct-book agenda
of Richardson's novel—Pamela’s presentation of self. When Pamela says,
"O Sir, said I, I am Pamela,
indeed I am: Indeed I am Pamela, her own self!"(61), the very
repetition of the first person pronoun, the double chiasmic assertion,
the intensifiers "indeed, indeed," the emphasis and overemphasis
of this circular enunciation of identity betrays the difficulty of
stabilizing identity. The precariousness
of this incipient self, and the virtue ascribed to it, result from
the fundamental features of the communication system within which
both character and author function.
Richardson’s program for elevating novel reading is founded
upon an instrumental subordination of envelope to letter, form to
content, mask or surface to deep self. This program is committed to an idealization
of the signified as the true meaning inside (the inmost recesses of
the heart). Such a program
depends upon a refusal to recognize that any communication that happens--whether
“true” or “false,” “deep” or “shallow,” authorized or perverse, conscious
or unconscious--is an effect of the whole communication system, with
its series of differential relays. And
because each relay modifies the sites and context of reading, it modifies
the message sent along its network. There is no way to separate the
initial mark, with its promise of identity and semantic closure, from
its relation to something non-semantic, the place(s) of its marking,
as well as its relation to a series of other marks which can never
be totalized or brought to a final destination.
[12]
For this reason there is no way to limit the
plural and unexpected reserves of the media culture system for producing
and disseminating meaning. Precisely because it is set going by someone
who strives so hard to get his message to its proper destination,
the Pamela media event is an especially rich matrix for reading
the perversely plural effects of communication. It
should be apparent that the three distinct forms of communication
I have been discussing share a common dynamic.
In order to be read properly, Pamela’s letters, her disguise,
and Richardson’s letter novel all must risk misreading.
Thus only by being read by the skeptical eye of Mr. B, can
Pamela’s detoured correspondence produce its truth effect; to become the heroine of an anti-novel, Pamela
must represent her virtue as if in disguise; to write an alternative
to novels, Richardson must write the story of virtue’s reward so it
reads like a novel. In sum, to change novel reading, Pamela
must travel the discourse network and reading practices of the media
culture of the early novel of amorous intrigue (of seriality, entertainment,
and absorptive reading), but for this very reason, the letter novel
may receive a kind of textual interference from the novels of amorous
intrigue and lose its way. Then Pamela’s account of the rewards
of virtue may be read with the same skepticism B directs at her in
the disguise scene.
[13]
Promoting Pamela By
interpreting Pamela as the first literary novel, twentieth-century
critics downplay the significance of
Richardson’s consultation with his readers, the Pamela
ad campaign, and Richardson’s didacticism.
These are the acts not of an author, or novelist, but of a
print media worker attempting to intervene in media culture, and change
novel consumption practices. To
do this, first Richardson had to gauge the response of ethically trusted
readers; next, he had to persuade readers to take Pamela as
something essentially different from the novels they knew; finally
he had to persuade readers that reading Pamela is good for
them. But in order to lure
readers into this reformed reading, all must be pulled off with a
calculated indirection. To
reform novel reading Richardson engages what Madeleine Kahn calls
“narrative transvestism,” hiding himself behind an alluring story
of a sexually embattled fifteen-year-old girl. Because he never claimed
to be anything so exalted as an author, and instead assumed the disguise
of an anonymous editor, Richardson can recede from view, and offer
readers a narrative in the letters of another. The indirectness of Richardson’s engagement
of his reader is a correlative of the immediacy promised for Pamela’s
letters; the alluring beauties of the latter can screen the shy awkwardness
of the former. Richardson is
even coy about coming out as the writer of Pamela to his friend
and literary advisor, Aaron Hill.
A month after its publication and apparent success, Richardson
sends a copy of the novel to Aaron Hill and his two daughters.
On December 17th, 1740 Aaron Hill sends Richardson
a letter of lavish praise: “Who could have dreamt, he should find,
under the modest Disguise of a novel, all the soul of religion, good-breeding,
discretion, good-nature, wit, fancy,… of the wonderful author of Pamela,
--Pray, Who is he, Dear Sir? and where, and how, has he been able
to hide, hitherto, such an encircling and all-mastering Spirit?” (Eaves
and Kimpel, 119-120) After
the success of Pamela is evident, after posting the anonymously
published Pamela to an esteemed friend, Richardson finds himself
addressed as the disguised author of a book that appears in the “modest
disguise of a novel.” Only then can he emerge from behind what he
calls the “umbrage of editor” to offer a retroactive explanation for
his project. Hill’s
letter prods Richardson into his clearest statement of the circumstances
surrounding the origins of Pamela. (Eaves and Kimpel, 119-121)
Richardson first describes how he received the kernel of a story.
Twenty-five years earlier a gentleman had told Richardson something
he had heard while traveling: it was the history of a “girl” who “engaged
the attention of her lady’s son, a young gentlemen of free principles,
who, on her lady’s death, attempted…to seduce her. That she had recourse
to many innocent stratagems to escape the snares laid for her virtue…at
last, her noble resistance, watchfulness, and excellent qualities,
subdued him, and he thought fit to make her his wife.”(Letters, 40)
This is the “foundation in truth” of the title page.
Richardson then incorporates elements of that story in two
letters of the Familiar Letters, the hybrid conduct book/writing
manual he was then writing, “as cautions to young folks circumstanced
as Pamela was” [letters 138 and 139 of the Familiar Letters].
Finally he begins to enlarge the story because of its potential to
reroute the reading practices of young people: I
thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably
to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of
writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading
different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing
the improbable and marvelous, with which novels generally abound,
might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue. I therefore
gave way to enlargement: and so Pamela became as you see her. (Jan-Feb.,
1741, Letters, 41; emphasis mine) The terms used by
Richardson to dismiss romances and novels--“pomp and parade,” “improbable
and marvelous”--are imprecise critical clichés.
But they do suggest that producing a “new species of writing”
to promote the cause of virtue pivots upon a shift in style—from decadent
ornamentation to “an easy and natural manner,” from aristocratic ostentation
to “simplicity.” Richardson will reform the novel by redressing it.
The sartorial metaphor latent in this passage suggests the antagonistic
proximity to novels Richardson’s explicit statement denies. The experimental
posture that Richardson assumes in introducing Pamela onto
the print market in 1740 is expressed through reiterated use of the
verb “might” to describe the positive effects sought in publishing
Pamela: introducing a new species of writing; turning young
people toward a new course of reading; promoting religion and virtue.
Yet the success of this ambitious project is hostage to the
effects it has on actual empirical acts of reception.
If the project is to succeed, Richardson must win novel readers
over to his own novel-substitute. Because its manifold similarity to the novels of amorous
intrigue, the text of Pamela
must ward off the sort of novelistic reading it might inadvertently
court. In order to prevent
his readers from doing to Pamela what B does to its heroine—reading
within the codes of the novels of amorous intrigue—Richardson not
only represents the genesis of its own proper reader, the reformed
Mr. B, but also envelopes his text in a title-page, preface and two
letters that function as a guide to reading. When anti-pamelists confer a hostile reading
upon Pamela after publication, Richardson insists upon the
priority of his original message, and tries to describe these readings
as coming along later, and befalling his text with arbitrary violence.
Richardson’s deflection of these readings resembles Pamela’s
characterization of B’s response to her country dress: as perversely
opposed to an original guiding intention.
However, Richardson’s own “reader’s guide” suggests that these
misreadings are not belated in their arrival, but anticipated all
along. Novelistic misreadings are programmed into Pamela
from its inception. It is as
if the disease of misreading Pamela is inscribed in the text,
so as to stimulate within the empirical reader of the text antidotes
against the general contagion of novelistic reading. The
reader's guide to Pamela was
a source of embarrassment to Richardson’s eighteenth-century allies
and the focus of derision for the anti-pamelists: one suspects that
it is simply skipped by most modern readers of Pamela.
However, what I’m calling the “reader’s guide” is of considerable
interest for the way it anticipates a distinctly modern discourse
of advertising, product promotion, and cultural improvement. Unlike many other early novelists (Haywood and
Aubin, for example), Richardson does not use dedications to seek the
“protection” of recognized cultural authorities, but instead accepts
the rigorous independence the market imposes upon authors. However, though he eschews traditional rituals
of authorial self-abasement, his
prefatory materials leave themselves open to Fielding’s mockery of
them as transparent self-flattery. (See below, Chapter 6) Nonetheless, this reader’s guide also demonstrates
Richardson’s shrewd grasp of the market system of media culture he
is attempting to redirect. Richardson
develops a new kind of promotional discourse in order to transmit
a text stripped of any pre-given generic identity from the (hidden)
author to an anonymous general readership. So as to cut through the
clutter of numberless alternative forms of reading entertainment,
and catch the interest of potential readers, the reader’s guide offers
a fleeting profile of the heroine and her story. But to anticipate
and foreclose the misreadings Pamela may provoke in unwary
readers, and distinguish his product from competing entertainments,
Richardson promises that his (non-) novel will improve the reader.
In order to prepare readers to read in the right way, Richardson’s
reader’s guide makes three broad claims about the text it introduces:
it warranties its beneficial effect upon readers; it promotes the
special efficacy of the letter form; and stipulates a simple reader
for Pamela. Each claim
suggests the lines of resistance Richardson expects to encounter in
rewiring media culture. The
first claim is about effect on readers: readers are assured that this
is not, and should not be read as, a type of novel.
The onrush of media culture entertainments of dubious moral
value requires that there be filtering.
[14]
The title page of Pamela performs the function
of the ratings system used in film distribution in our own day: in
advance of first audience encounter it promises that something is
absent from the text being purveyed.
Just as the modern movie goer is assured by the “G-rating”
affixed to a film that there will be no nudity, violence or four letter
words, the title page of Pamela assures us it “is intirely
divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces calculated
for amusement only, tend to inflame
the Minds they should instruct.”
This claim is supported by the two anonymous prefatory letters apparently
written by Jean Baptiste de Freval, a French translator living in
London, and the Reverend William
Webster, vicar of Thundridge and Ware.
[15]
Freval mobilizes English nationalism in offering
Pamela as an “Example of Purity to the Writers of a neighbouring
Nation [i.e. France] …which has so long passed current among us in
Pieces abounding with all the Levities of its volatile Inhabitants.”
Webster lauds Pamela’s entrance into a “World, which is but
too much, as well as too early debauched by pernicious Novels.
I know nothing Entertaining of that Kind that one might venture to
recommend to the Perusal (much less the Imitation) of the Youth of
either Sex: All that I have hitherto read, tends only to corrupt their
Principles, mislead their Judgments, and initiate them into Gallantry
and loose Pleasures.” (8) Pamela passes through the critical
mediation of these testimonials to its reader. Having
asserted Pamela’s distance from novels, the reader’s guide
supports the reader’s moral vigilance by offering coming attractions. Webster’s letter offers a summary of Pamela,
first by describing the entertainment he experienced by identifying
with the heroine in her “Sufferings,” “Schemes of Escape,” “little
Machinations and Contrivances,” etc., and then by underwriting the
morality in the piece by explaining how, over the course of her many
trials, Pamela’s virtue prevails. But how do these letters gain the
authority to act as censors for the potential readers of this text?
Since title page, preface and the two letters are all anonymous,
the acceptance of these prefatory judgments cannot be guaranteed by
the reputation of a recognizable critic. Instead the prefatory material
persuades through other means: testimonials, an appeal to the presumptive
traits of the general reader, and disguise.
First, each element of the reader’s guide performs a testimonial.
An anonymous reader has read the text and testifies to its
virtuous properties and effects, addresses the editor of Pamela
with pious wonder, and advocates
its speedy publication with a tone of earnest enthusiasm. Secondly,
the reader’s guide appeals to the presumed responses of general readers. Thus, for example, the Editor ends his Preface
by stating this principle: “he
can Appeal from his own
Passions (which have been uncommonly moved
in perusing these engaging Scenes) to the Passions of Every one who shall read them with the least Attention.”
(3) In considering the popularity
of Manley and Haywood we developed the concept of the general reader
of media culture—the open set of all who might respond to a book's
solicitation of the most common passions (e.g. love, fear, and the
pursuit of self-interest). But
Richardson can only generalize from his own response to “Every one”
who reads these letters “with the least Attention” by making the “bold
stroke” of assuming “the umbrage of the editor’s character
to screen myself behind.”(Letter to Aaron Hill, cited above) Then, shaded by the disguise of editor, Richardson
baldly asserts an objectivity he cannot legitimately claim: “because an Editor may reasonably supposed to judge with an Impartiality which is rarely
to be met with in an Author
towards his own Works.” (3) Publishing himself in disguise, apparently
editing the letters he authors, Richardson’s promotion of Pamela
passes itself off as the enthusiasm of an indifferent reader. The
reader’s guide’s second major claim about Pamela is focused
upon its letter form. Because
this story is told in a series of familiar letters written by the
virtuous and innocent protagonist to her parents, this text eludes
the fanciful and shifty tendency of media culture. By casting his
narrative as an edited collection of real letters, Richardson deflects
the accusation of trivial fictionality, and the critical worry about
repeating overworn generic conventions, what Freval calls “the romantic
Flights of unnatural Fancy.” (4).
At the same time the reader’s guide makes two claims for this
narrative in letters: that they have their source in actual life (it
has a “foundation in truth”); and that its technique of writing to
the moment produces an illusion of immediacy that is exciting and
vivid, when compared to retrospective narrative.
The writers of the reader’s guide claim that there are three
reasons that Pamela’s technique of "writing to the moment"
allows a more powerful mimesis of the mind of the writing subject.
First it depends on the moral character of the writer whose
thoughts are reflected in her style of “Simplicity,” “Propriety” and
“Clearness”; secondly, the temporal proximity to events allows reality
itself to use Pamela as its amanuensis (“the Letters being written
under the immediate Impression of every Circumstance which occasioned
them”); and finally, they are addressed to parents who may justifiably
expect the most absolute openness, “those who had a Right to know
the fair Writer’s most secret Thoughts.”(Freval, 4) What Richardson will later call “writing to
the moment” offers a technical rationale for claiming for his novels
a transparency unprecedented in media culture.
When they are later inserted into various aesthetic defenses
of the novel as a form of literature, these two claims about the letter
novel—facticity and immediacy—will be taken up by critics to bolster
Richardson’s claim to having invented a new kind of realism.
In this way Pamela’s letters are given a certain anti-generic,
anti-aesthetic self-evidence. Of course, the “found document” topos
was one of the most familiar devices of print culture.
“Familiar Letters” is the term in large cap positioned
half way down the title page of both of Richardson’s sibling projects
of the year 1740-1741: Pamela and the letter-writing guide. On the novel’s title page, “Familiar Letters”
appears after the novel’s title, so as to designate the form that
circulates between a “damsel” and her parents. In the letter writing
guide, “familiar letters” specifies the particular type of letter
writing the text will teach its reader.
In both cases the familiar letter becomes the royal road to
good conduct. Richardson’s recourse to the letter form in Pamela
evidences his effort to eschew the precariously public character of
novels written for the general reader. The familiar letter, as a letter
between familiars who know and trust each other, offers Richardson
a tactical and nostalgic temporal regression in media: from the mechanical,
automated, general address to a public linked through print, to the
idiosyncratic, personally crafted one-to-one communication of a manuscript
letter. Richardson’s use of
the familiar letter engages a rhetoric of radical sincerity—transparent
communication from heart to heart, with nothing held in reserve, nothing
disguised. By looping the reader into a familiar, intimate
reading and writing, Richardson offers a counter thrust to the masked
and rhetorical use of language by the novels of amorous intrigue. Those novels cut themselves off from ordinary
familiar ties so as to draw their readers into an erotic reading practice. Richardson hopes to counteract the insidious
mimicry of print, its ability to imitate every form of writing and
address. Ironically however, Richardson’s letter novels don’t end
print mimicry but instead draw a space represented as domestic, familiar, and private into the public sphere of print. Richardson’s
third claim is that the reader must read in a certain way. In order
to grasp the innocence and virtue of Pamela, you the reader must become
naïve and innocent in your reading. The reader’s guide establishes
a crucial reciprocity between Pamela’s character as simple and virtuous
and reader’s simple and virtuous reading.
William Webster’s letter mandates a trustful reading of a young
girl who, unlike the teenagers of our own day, is ready to show her
parents exactly what she experiences and feels: “She pours out all
her Soul in [her letters] before her Parents without Disguise; so
that one may judge of, nay, almost see, the inmost Recesses of her
Mind” (7) This we must take on faith—that Pamela is abundantly generous
in pouring out her soul; that what she pours is utterly devoid of
disguise; and that her stream of words takes us not part way but all
the way into the “inmost Recesses” of her mind.
After narrating the happy consequence of Pamela’s resistance
to B, his reform and their marriage, Webster defines what makes her
moral victory so remarkable. His commentary clears Pamela of any of the dubious tendencies and mixed motive I suggested
in reading the disguise scene: ….And all
this without ever having entertain'd the least previous Design or
Thought for that Purpose: No Art used to inflame him, no Coquetry
practised to tempt or intice him, and no Prudery or Affectation to
tamper with his Passions; but, on the contrary, artless and unpracticed
in the Wiles of the World, all her Endeavors, and even all her Wishes,
tended only to render herself as un-amiable as she could in his Eyes.
(7) Here is an exaggeration characteristic of the
reader’s guide. Surely a good
deal within the disguise scene and novel, from the country dress scene
to her strenuous self defense, evidences a wish to look amiable in
B's eyes. But to heighten her virtuous renunciation of
any “liberty and ambition,” and dispel the possibility that she simply
doesn’t care for B, Webster insists that Pamela does not feel unattracted
to “his Person,” but in fact “seems rather prepossess'd in his Favour,
and admires his Excellencies.” Webster
articulates a familiar paradox: “The more she resisted, the more she
charm'd; and the very Means she used to guard her Virtue, the more
indanger'd it, by inflaming his Passions: Till... the Besieged not
only obtain'd a glorious Victory over the Besieger, but took him Prisoner.”
This passage brings us to the crux of a problem: the reader
of Pamela and other novels, knowing the effect of Pamela’s
virtuous resistance—that it increases desire in B and enables her
to win him in marriage—is enjoined to read with the ignorance and
innocence not in fact found in Pamela, or its eponymous heroine,
but attributed to it and her by the reader’s guide. Otherwise the
happy reward of virtue could be vitiated, retroactively. In order to simplify reading, so that it supports the
construction of an innocent and virtuous heroine and text, both Richardson
and Pamela must refuse what might be called the eye and ear of social
judgment—that performative dynamic resulting from the fact that it
is others and not ourselves who judge the moral tendencies of our
actions and writings. In order to screen out social judgment, both
Richardson’s reader’s guide to Pamela, and the reformed B within
the text, engage in a promotion and praise that modulates into self-promotion
and self-praise. They drown
out others voices not after but before they speak. This discourages others from reading Pamela
as a performance with a contestable variety of meanings. A counter perspective comes from the Pamela
media event: it reinscribes Pamela within a contentious public
sphere, where what a text means will be the negotiated outcome of
sustained critical scrutiny by sophisticated adult readers.
[16]
Anti-Pamela Richardson’s carefully orchestrated promotional campaign
is striking for two reasons: its success in anticipating the future
misreadings of Pamela and its failure to protect the novel
from these misreadings. My
reading demonstrates the many ways Pamela is engaged with the
terms of the anti-novel discourse. With Pamela, Richardson
hopes to transcend the debased and compromised terrain of media culture
entertainments. When, on a date before January 6, 1741, Dr. Benjamin
Slocock of St. Saviour’s Southwark, weighs in to recommend Pamela
from the pulpit, and some compare the “simplicity” of the novel to
that of the Bible (Eaves & Kimpel, 121), Richardson’s project
to reform reading receives unprecedented support. But by raising the
stakes of Pamela’s popularity, such support also helps incite
the anti-pamelist reaction. Three anonymous responses to Pamela
are published between April and June 1741: Fielding’s Shamela,
Pamela Censured, and Haywood’s Anti-Pamela. All three of these texts situate Pamela
by using the terms of the debate about novel reading, and all three
betray anxiety about the effects of absorption in novel reading. The
extent of the Pamela media event—with the varying revisions,
extensions and adaptations of Pamela—is documented by McKillop,
Sale, Eaves and Kimpel, Kreissman’s Pamela-Shamela, and (most
recently) James Turner and Richard Gooding. As an appendix to this
book I have offered a selected list of the
books and performances published in the wake of the popularity
of Pamela. Here I will attend to the Pamela media
event as it becomes a point of convergence within the debate about
novel reading, and rearticulates the struggle around licensing entertainment.
Pamela
Censured and Shamela
target the reader’s guide for its blatant self-promotion. The Censurer
of Pamela Censured: a Letter to the Editor insists on addressing
Richardson as a “half-editor half author”(9) and reproaches him for
his “vanity”(12) in publishing so many self-praises at the front of
his own book. Fielding’s rejoinder in the frontmatter to Pamela
is more indirect. In place of the letters from Freval and Webster,
Shamela has two brief letters. The first, entitled “The Editor
to Himself,” predicts extravagant success, and overwhelms the author’s
putative modesty with these words: “…out with [Shamela], without
fear or favor, dedication and all; believe me, it will go through
many editions, be translated into all languages, read in all nations
and ages,..."(275) It is signed “Sincerely your Well-wisher, YOURSELF.”
The second, slightly longer letter is signed “John Puff, Esq.”
Fielding’s parodies of the reader’s guide, while staying close to
language found in Richardson’s letters, capture the smug and vacuous
expansiveness of modern advertisement. The blunt and lively brevity of Fielding’s two
letters invites us to see the prolixity of Richardson’s promotional
letters as an index of a somber self-inflation. Fielding and the Censurer reject the claims with
which the “reader’s guide” has sought to prescribe a certain way of
reading Pamela. They
insist that a text cannot designate its own genre, or mandate the
effects its reading will incite. Both
Parson Oliver in Shamela and the Censurer of Pamela Censured
treat Pamela like another novel on the market, and both deplore
the effects it will have on susceptible young readers. The Censurer
rejects the idea that Pamela’s concern with virtue is unheralded,
by pointing to the new translation of a French novel La Paysanne
Parvenue (a feminizing of Marivaux’s Le Paysan Parenu,
by the Chevalier de Mouhy). The
censurer also refuses to give the narrative form of Pamela—as
“a series of letters”—any special claims to truth. Thus he translates
the lofty claim that this “series of letters” composes a “narrative”
with its “foundation in truth and nature” in the following way: Pamela
is “but a romance formed in manner of a literary correspondence, founded
on a tale which the author had heard, and modelled into its present
shape.”(7) Fielding
shows two ways in which the epistemological claims Richardson makes
for his so-called collection of letters is undermined by what one
might call the duplicitous plasticity of print media.
Within Shamela Fielding explains the publication of
Pamela by having Mr. Booby commission Shamela’s story (as “Pamela”)
to be written by a Parson who, as Shamela explains to her mother,
“can make my husband, and me, and Parson Williams, to be all great
people, for he can make black white, it seems.”(303) Fielding then
circulates the letter novel “Pamela” within the correspondence between
the Pamela enthusiast Parson Tickletext and the rational skeptic
Parson Oliver. When the latter provides Parson Tickletext with the
true story and actual correspondence of Shamela (rather than “Pamela”)
the meaning of Pamela’s letters is transformed.
Fielding’s subversive displacements of Pamela are possible
because of a trait inherent in all writing, one that is still more
the case when manuscript writing is abstracted into print: there is
nothing within a text to distinguish a true narrative from its false
simulation. This not only means that anyone who “buys” a
narrative or its truth, had best beware.
It also means that there’s nothing to stop critics from doing
what Fielding and Haywood and the Censurer do to Pamela in
the spring of 1741: treat it as a novel.
[17]
In
Chapters 3 and 4 I argued that the anti-novel discourse is haunted
by the specter of the erotically aroused (usually female) body, absorbed
in novel reading. By writing
Pamela in a protracted series of letters, almost all written
from the point of view of the heroine, and depicting extreme states
of anxiety, fear, and struggle, Richardson strives to produce the
hyper-absorption of his reader. In order to prevent his own reading from resembling
novel-reading, the reader’s guide prescribes a virtuous and naïve
reader for Pamela. Against
this prescription the anti-pamelists assert a broad range of possible
readers, each assuming a different disposition toward the text. Some
are described as young, absorbed, susceptible, and liable to imitative
acting out of the text. Others are described as safely past their “grand
climacteric.” Some are worldly,
sophisticated readers able to comprehend double entendres and savor
the pornographic tendency of certain scenes.
All these readers are in need of the wariness the anti-pamelists
would teach. By
making the question of how Pamela is read an issue the anti-pamelists
inscribe the question of novel reading within a public sphere exchange. We have noted how Fielding inserts a debate
about the pleasures and dangers of reading Pamela within a
correspondence between two mature, public-spirited parsons. Pamela
Censured is prefaced with a dedication to the Reverand Slocock,
urging him to withdraw the encomium to Pamela he has offered
from the pulpit. The pamphlet proper is written in the form of
a public exhortation, addressed to the “Editor of Pamela,”
so that the editor will remove the offending passages of an otherwise
laudable performance. After making censures on the prefatory materials,
and offering his own third-person summary of Pamela’s story, the Censurer
devotes the bulk of the pamphlet to citations of the “inflaming” passages
of Pamela, interlaced with critical commentary deploring their
effect on unwary readers. This narrative form seeks to shatter Pamela’s
power to absorb its reader; yet, in its public-spirited alarm, it
also extends the erotic potential of reading Pamela. In
“Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s
Pamela,” James Turner shows how it comes about that in the
Pamela wars, the stark oppositions of the antagonists bleed
into one another. Those within Richardson’s “discursive circle” use
a language of reformed sensation that implies the very erotic imagination
they strive to censor; the anti-pamelists reject the character of
an inner Pamela so as to embrace a theory of reading that “pornographizes”
those scenes “that for Pamela herself provoke terror rather than erotic
reverie.”(78) Turner argues that by moving inexorably toward visualizing
Pamela’s body, both pamelists and anti-pamelists assume the automatic
responses of readers. At the same time, the general impulse to visualize
Pamela takes Pamela into paintings and illustrations, stage
productions and opera. Turner’s subtle essay suggests that neither
Pamela’s promoters nor its antagonists can so easily elude
the tug of its absorptive and absorbing scenarios. This insight confirms
what our reading above suggests: in claiming that readers respond
to Pamela as if it were a novel, the anti-pamelists imitate
the terms and scenerios of Pamela and its prefatory material.
Like B, every reader faces the critical problem of assessing
Pamela’s performance, for example by discriminating a virtuous girl
from a scheming girl who would “snap at a husband,” the text of Pamela
from a mere novel. By staging the solution to this question around
a morally polarized interplay between inner and outer, soul and body,
spiritual sensibility and erotic arousal, Pamela gives the
question of the body—is it innocent? is it lubricious?--allegorical
force. The Reader Who Saw Too Much: Visualizing Pamela’s Etc. Turner concludes by attributing the emergence of the
body within the Pamela media event to the general nature of
fiction when he asks rhetorically, “Can the process of reading fiction
ever escape the endless circle of enclosing and displaying, divesting
and investing, an imaginary body?”
But rather than making the visualization of the body a universal
trait of fiction, I would suggest that the insistence of this body
within the Pamela media event has a specific historical reference.
The body of that precocious reader Pamela, trapped within the
novel B is trying to write, is a descendent of the body that Manley
exposes to seduction in the Duke’s library (in the New Atalantis)
and the body Haywood places at stream side, reading alone but observed
by her lover in Love in Excess. Within each novel, these bodies figure the contested
body, that of the absorbed novel reader, outside the text.(See above,
Chapter 3 and 4) Though Richardson
seeks to remove his text and its readers from a bad novelistic absorption,
his own hyper-absorptive strategies intensify the questions raised
by the absorbed novel-reading body: from what do readers get pleasure?
what do they see when they read? what are the ethical effects of this
pleasure? Because reading may be surmised to be somewhat different
in each reader, and because it leaves no traces, these questions become
a nexus of interminable cultural strife. We
can get a grasp of how Pamela reconfigures these questions
by following the critical exchanges around one passage of Pamela—the
scene where Pamela catches her dress in the door while fleeing B,
then falls down unconscious in a “fit” of “terror.” In this early
scene, B is still very far from having learned to look for Pamela’s
truth within the folds of her letters. Instead he’s looking at the
surface of her body. This passage condenses many of the pivotal elements
of Pamela: B’s compositional designs and sexual assault, Pamela’s
sturdy resistance, as well as a mise
en scene of the visualization which Pamela obliges the
reader attempt, but also seeks to restrain. He by Force kissed my Neck and Lips; and said, Who ever
blamed Lucretia, but the
Ravisher only? and I am content to take
all the Blame upon me; as I have already borne too great a Share for
what I have deserv'd. May I, said I, Lucretia
like, justify myself with my Death, if I am used barbarously? O my
good Girl! said he, tauntingly, you are well read, I see; and we shall
make out between us, before we have done, a pretty Story in Romance,
I warrant ye! He then put his Hand in my Bosom, and the Indignation
gave me double Strength, and I got loose from him, by a sudden Spring,
and ran out of the Room; and the next Chamber being open, I made shift
to get into it, and threw-to the Door, and the Key being on the Inside,
it locked; but he follow'd me so close, he got hold of my Gown, and
tore a Piece off, which hung without the Door. I just remember I got into the Room; for I knew nothing
further of the Matter till afterwards; for I fell into a Fit with
my Fright and Terror, and there I lay, till he, as I suppose, looking through the Keyhole, spy'd me lying all along
upon the Floor, stretch'd out at my Length; and then he call'd Mrs.
Jervis to me, who, by his Assistance, bursting
open the Door, he went away, seeing me coming to myself; and bid her
say nothing of the Matter, if she was wise. Poor Mrs. Jervis
thought it was worse,…(42, emphasis mine) This passage records
a tear in the narrative. Within the continuous first-person narrative
of what Pamela has seen or heard, she falls into a “fit” of “fright
and terror.” But, despite the absence of the consciousness
who narrates, the narrative goes on.
To fill in the gap in her knowledge, Pamela allows herself
to “suppose” that B looks at her through the door that has locked
by itself behind the fleeing Pamela. This voyeurism is an expression
of both B’s desire and his restraint.
This scene’s contentious conversation, and its literally rendered
physical struggle around Pamela’s body (“He then put his Hand in my
Bosom”) does not, after her fit, issue in B’s rape of Pamela.
B does not simply force the door and have his way with her
(as Lovelace eventually would with Clarissa).
Instead he calls Mrs. Jervis. And even later on, at Lincolnshire,
when he has the bawdy Mrs. Jewkes to urge him on, and Pamela is passed
out naked in bed, he does not gratify his lust.
There is, as many critics have pointed out, an important reticence
about B’s desire. He desires more than sex, that more-than-sex
the plot will figure as reading Pamela’s letter journal. So, through the tear in the narrative, we glimpse
… a structure of looking: in
an oddly suspended narrative tableau, B accepts a position behind
the door, and looks through the key hole at the prone body of Pamela. That this scene is based upon nothing more than
Pamela’s surmise makes it a condensation point of her desire too. Through this gap in the narrative of Pamela,
the reader, like B, is surmised to be looking.
In
the critical reception of Pamela, contending visualizations
of the text articulate themselves around this passage. In Pamela
Censured this scene is quoted at length and draws the strongest
condemnation of Richardson. Here, the Censurer insists, Richardson is surely
allowing the reader to see too much. The passage is introduced with
a heavy irony: “And here the Author …contrives to give us an idea
of Pamela’s hidden beauties, and very decently to spread her upon
the floor, for all who will peep through the door to surfeit on the
sight” (28) After a full quotation of the text, the censurer poses
invidious questions, details what he supposes every reader of this
scene must be able to see, and then makes surmises about its effect
upon different readers. Was not the Squire very modest to withdraw? For she lay
in such a pretty posture that Mrs. Jervis thought it was worse, and
Mrs. Jervis was a woman of discernment; … The young lady by thus discovering
a few latent charms, as the snowy complexion of her limbs, and the
beautiful symmetry and proportion which a girl of about fifteen or
sixteen must be supposed to show by tumbling backwards, after being
put in a flurry by her lover, and agitated to a great degree, takes
her smelling bottle, has her laces cut, and all the pretty little
necessary things that the most luscious and warm description can paint,
or the fondest imagination conceive. How artfully has the author introduced
an image which no youth can read without emotion! The idea of peeping
through a keyhole to see a fine woman extended on the floor, in a
posture that must naturally excite passions of desire, may indeed
be read by one in his grand climacteric without ever wishing to see
one in the same situation, but the editor of Pamela directs
himself to the youth of both sexes; therefore all the instruction
they can possibly receive from this passage, is, first, to the young
men that the more they endeavor to find out the hidden beauties of
their mistresses, the more they must approve them; and for that Purpose
all they have to do, is, to move them by some amorous dalliance to
give them a transient view of the pleasure they are afterwards to
reap from the beloved object. And secondly, to the young ladies that
whatever beauties they discover to their lovers, provided they grant
not the last favor, they only ensure their admirers the more; and
by a glimpse of happiness captivate their suitor the better. (31-32)
How
does the writer of Pamela Censured support the claim that this
scene has “introduced an image which no youth can read without emotion?”
Pamela Censured exposes the latent eroticism of Richardson’s
scene by translating it into the language and situations of the novels
of amorous intrigue. Now Pamela’s strenuous defense of her virtue
is simply another episode in a sportive battle of the sexes. Pamela is a designing heroine who displays her
charms as weapons during the stage business of an erotic frolic while
“put in a flurry by her lover,” and “tumbling backward.” What she discovers to the censurer—“the snowy
complexion of her limbs,” and their “beautiful symmetry and proportion”—is
cast in the trite descriptive terminology of love novels. The censurer does not believe that putting the
spectacle of the fallen Pamela before the eye of mature readers would lead to them to wish to
experience such a sight for themselves. However, he reproves the editor
of Pamela for opening such a scene before the “youth of both
sexes.” Here there’s a reiteration of the central warning of the anti-novel
discourse: novels will incite a bad emulation by their readers. This
scene, it is supposed, not only creates a lascivious desire for a
“transient view” of “hidden beauties,” but it teaches young men and
women to manipulate this viewing to their own advantage.
[18]
I
can develop an analytic perspective on the censures of reader visualization
in Pamela by taking account of how Jean Marie Goulemot places
a visualization of the aroused body at the center of eighteenth-century
pornography. In Ces livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main,
(Those Books that One Can Only Read with One Hand), Goulemot
reads Marivaux’s Le Paysan Parvenu and Diderot’s Jacques La Fataliste and develops the
thesis that the pornographic novel orchestrates a scene with certain
elements: the body ready for
arousal; the gradual display of that body (often in fetishized parts);
the voyeur in the text (sometimes the agent of sexual attack, or often
another person who is shocked or pleased with the sexual act—and participating
somehow). Thus the “key element of the erotic novel: the making of
pictures, organized in order to solicit the gaze, a call to the reader
that he should take up the proper distance from the narrative in order
to see, to admire, and to examine.” (48-49) In contrast to the libertine novel, which develops
the art of persuasion to overcome resistance, the erotic novel finds
bodies ready for sex, resistance trivial, obstacles easily overcome.
(50) If
we use Goulemot’s template for pornography and apply it to the erotic
texts we have read (from Behn to Richardson), we can see how the Censurer’s
pamphlet intervenes to articulate a relation between Pamela
and earlier novels. In Love
Letters, the New Atalantis, and Love in Excess,
there are elaborately staged scenes of sexual arousal that are clearly
pornographic for the way they construct voyeuristic pleasure for an
absorbed reader. In the scenes of sexual attack in Pamela we
find several elements of the theatrical sex scenes in Behn, Manley
and Haywood—sexual aggression, a literal depiction of bodies, and
a hectic intensification of the narrative prose. However, in the place
of the aroused erotic subject, the body ready for sex, there is Pamela
resisting her would-be seducer, and pushed, through the violence of
B’s assault, into unconsciousness.
For Richardson, Pamela’s “fit” of unconsciousness offers evidence
of her virtuous resistance to the climactic novelistic sex scene B
would put her in. But for the Censurer, Pamela’s being “out cold” invites the reader
to imitate B in luxuriously gazing at Pamela’s body, thereby implicating
Richardson in staging a pornographic scene to arouse the reader. On
May 28, 1741, slightly over a month after the publication of Pamela
Censured, John Kelly published his sequel to Richardson’s novel,
entitled Pamela’s Conduct in High Life.
In the Preface, Kelly responds to the Censurer so as do “damage
control” on Pamela’s behalf.
Kelly attempts to impose limits upon the Censurer’s pornographic
elaboration of Pamela. The supposed editor of Pamela’s papers
in Kelly’s sequel, one “B.W.,” demonstrates that the perverse and
lascivious author of Pamela Censured has seen more “ideas”
than the text contains. Following
the procedure of the pamphlet, BW quotes the same Pamela passage
the Censurer has quoted, and asks rhetorically, what is there in this
passage to “kindle desire” or allow us to suppose that Pamela fell
into an “indecent posture”? “Well, but the warmth of imagination in
this virtuous Censurer supplies the rest.” So BW accuses the Censurer
of giving “an idea of Pamela’s hidden beauties, and would have you
imagine she lies in the most immodest posture.” Thus it is the Censurer,
not the editor/ author who endeavors “to impress [upon] the minds
of youth that read his Defense of Modesty and Virtue, Images that
may enflame.” Is
there any particular posture described? Oh, but the Censurer lays
her in one which may enflame, you must imagine as lusciously as he
does; if the Letter has not discovered enough, the pious Censurer
lends a hand, and endeavors to surfeit your sight by lifting the covering
which was left by the editor, and with the hand of a boisterous ravisher
takes the opportunity of Pamela’s being in a swoon to----But I am
writing to a lady, and shall leave his gross ideas to such as delight
to regale their sensuality on the most luscious and enflaming Images.
(Kelly, xv) Kelly’s restoration
of the veil of modesty torn from Pamela by this “boisterous ravisher”
has a contradictory double-edge. By
contesting the textual accuracy of the Censurer’s visualization of
the scene, Kelly attributes its prurient tendency to the
Censurer. But Kelly’s censoring
interruption—“But I am writing to a lady”—reiterates a cliché of erotic
discourse. By refusing to repeat
the words with which the Censurer reports what may be supposed to
be seen after Pamela’s fall, Kelly produces an elision in his own
text at the place of pornographic elaboration he refuses to cite.
In other words he marks the interdicted spot of the censurer’s
text, and his own text, with an implicit “etc.”
Etc. was the eighteenth-century slang for women’s genitals
and is used by Fielding this way in Shamela. Despite
the contrast between the Censurer’s exuberant and unseemly visualizations
and Kelly’s modest textual exactitude, both justify their revision
of Pamela’s narrative by defining a normative response for Pamela’s
reader. This is the game that has been played around
popular media culture ever since. However, there are factors outside
the text of Pamela that prevent this tear from any definitive
suturing. What fragments this text is the contested plurality
of programs for reading unleashed by the Pamela media event.
The intensity of the strife around this scene from Pamela
is symptomatic of the negotiation of terms for a casting out of a
bad erotic writing, as pornography, and a concomitant elevation of
novel reading. While Pamela
Censured returns Pamela
to the discursive terms and readerly expectations associated with
the erotic novels of Behn, Manley and Haywood, Kelly asserts the ethical
restraint about visualization concomitant with Richardson’s project.
In
offering his “antidote” to what is called the “epidemical frenzy”
of Pamela's popularity, Fielding’s Shamela forecloses
precisely the sort of visualization by the reader that the Censurer
elaborates and condemns. In spite of the blunt sexuality of the action,
and its bawdy use of innuendo, Shamela eschews any visualization
of sex. In its place, readers
hear the worldly voice of the scheming Shamela.
Instead of gratifying the curiosity of a reader who is absorbed
and isolated, Fielding brings Pamela into a public discursive space
where she can be exposed as a sham.
The Pamela media event draws the eighteenth century’s
most prolific writer of novels—Eliza Haywood—back into novel writing
after a hiatus of nearly a dozen years: on June 20, 1741 she publishes
anonymously the Anti-Pamela; or Feigned Innocence detected; in
a SERIES of Syrena’s Adventures. In this text, Haywood ingeniously
rewrites her own early novels of amorous intrigue so as to critique
Pamela. Like Fielding’s
Shamela, the Anti-Pamela suggests that the latent sexuality
of Pamela mandates that it be read as a novel; and like Fielding,
Haywood shows that women as well as men may ensnare and seduce, and
that modest femininity can be a canny performance. Haywood’s “detection”
of “feigned innocence” pivots
upon exhausting seriality: of the compulsive sexual appetite that
impels Syrena into a succession of intrigues; of the consumption of
the novels of amorous intrigue she herself had perfected; of the Pamela
rip-offs to which Haywood here contributes; of the dubious entertainments
with which she describes her own youth in a passage from the Female
Spectator: “My Life, for some years, was a continued round of
what I then called Pleasure, and my whole time engrossed by a hurry
of promiscuous diversions.” (1745, Vol. 1, 2) This muti-faceted critique
of seriality prepares Haywood for the reform that enables her turn
to domestic fiction in the 1750s. In
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1747), the first indigenous
British pornography, John Cleland negotiates a distinct course through
the issues activated by the Pamela media event. While Cleland
accepts the fundamental goal of pornography—to arouse the reader—his
text, like Richardson’s, carries its own improving agenda.
In an introduction to an edition of Cleland’s novel, Peter
Sabor argues that the Memoirs develops an elaborately euphemistic
language to render its erotic scenes in to order eschew the crude
language of earlier French pornography (like the School of Venus).(xvii-xvii) So as to provide a framework for its gallery
of erotic scenes, Cleland plots Fanny through an action that offers
an optimistic revision of Defoe’s Roxana.(1724) and Hogarth’s
Harlot's Progress (1732). When
the success of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure precipitates
the arrest of Cleland and his publisher Ralph Griffiths, Cleland (as
if following the advice from Pamela Censured that Richardson
refused) expurgates the explicitly sexual scenes, cutting the text
by a third. Then the novel
can circulate as the single volume Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1750)
upon the market for the improving novels. (Sabor, ix-x) The consolidation of the morally improving novel
after 1740 is reciprocally complicit with the condensation of the
debased category for fiction called “pornography.” In this way the
cultural terrain that the novels of Behn, Manley and Haywood had worked—including
idealistic love, licentious sex, and much in between—is subdivided
between the elevated novel and pornography.
[19]
Catching young and airy minds In
a letter to his doctor, George Cheyne, written after the onslaught
of the anti-pamelists, Richardson offers his most precise statement
of the risks and rewards of writing Pamela as a lively story
with a fair share of amorous intrigue. Cheyne has been advising Richardson
on his own sequel to Pamela, urging him to “avoid fondling—and
gallantry, tender expressions… especially in the sex (i.e. women).”(Letters,
46) But if Richardson is to
elevate novel reading, he knows he must offer young readers attractive
substitutes for the novels they now consume. Richardson’s letter sketches the formula for
his own elevation of novel reading.
First, in what he represents he aims neither too high nor too
low: “And the principal complaints against me by many, and not libertines
neither, are, that I am too grave, too much of a methodist, and make
Pamela too pious.” “In my scheme I have generally taken human nature
as it is; for it is to no purpose to suppose it angelic, or to endeavor
to make it so.”(Letters, 46-51; August 81, 1741) Secondly, Richardson’s
writing will engage the curiosity about sex that passionate young
readers are determined to gratify: “There is a time of life, in which
the passions will predominate; and ladies, any more than men, will
not be kept in ignorance; and if we can properly mingle instruction
with entertainment, so as to make the latter seemingly the view, while
the former is really the end, I imagine it will be doing a great deal.” However, an entertaining gratification of curiosity
entails a degree of literal depiction that may open Richardson’s text
to perverse debasement. “There is no writing on these subjects to
please such a gentleman as that in the Tatler, who could find
sex in a laced shoe, when there was none in the foot, that was to
wear it.” Then, Richardson mocks the sort of licentious reading—a
perverse fascination for looking under skirts—all too evident in Pamela
Censured. “And what would such a one have said to pass now through
Covent-Garden, under twenty hoop-petticoats, hanging over his head
at the habit shops?”(47) Just
as perversion involves a deflection of the sexual act (Laplanche &
Pontalis, 306), so Richardson must expose his text to perverse readers
and risk a general deflection of his meaning, in order to reach his
target audience. To reach young readers, who “will not be kept in ignorance,”
Pamela must risk allowing
readers to see or hear too much. Thus,
for example, some readers may hear double entendres where the author
assures us none were intended. Thus the author of Pamela Censured
finds one passage particularly indecent:
After
some little tart repartees and sallies aiming at wit, the author seems
to indulge his genius with all the rapture of lascivious ingenuity:
‘I
wish, said he, (I’m almost ashamed to write it, impudent Gentleman
as he is!) I wish, I had thee as QUICK ANOTHER WAY, as thou art in
thy repartees.--- And he laughed, and I snatched my hands from him,
and tripped away as fast I could....’ Here
virtue is encouraged with a vengeance and the most obscene idea expressed
by a double entendre, which falls little short of the coarsest ribaldry;
yet Pamela is designed to mend the Taste and manners of the
Times, and instruct and encourage youth in virtue; ... The Censurer’s rebuke
to the editor of Pamela ignores the signs of Richardson’s own
unease with the freedom of B’s words: Pamela’s modest parenthetically
expressed shame about transcribing B’s repartee, “(I’m almost ashamed
to write it, impudent Gentleman as he is!).”
Richardson was stung enough by this censure to remove this
jest from his final edition of Pamela.(Eaves and Kimpel, 129)
But surgery on this passage does not control other double meanings.
The long defense of Pamela against its critics appended
by Richardson to the prefatory material in the 2nd edition
(February 14, 1741), composed mostly from excerpts of letters from
Aaron Hill, responds to the letter of an anonymous critic of Pamela’s
double entendres with an appalled determination to ignore its criticism:
“[this is] too dirty for the rest of his Letter.... In the occasions
he is pleased to discover for jokes, I either find not, that he has
any signification at all, or such vulgar, course-tasted allusions
to loose low-life Idioms, that not to understand what he means, is
both the cleanliest [sic], and prudentest [sic] way of confuting him.”(16)
If Richardson can win readers willing “not to understand”
the licentious meanings that may proliferate within the text, or at least pretend they don’t understand,
then he can use scenes of kissing and erotic touching to promote moral
improvement. Thus in reply
to Cheyne’s cautions, he writes, “To say, that these tender scenes
(between Mr. B and Pamela) should be supposed rather than described,
is not answering my design, when the instruction lies in them, and
when I would insinuate to my younger readers, that even their tenderest
loves should be governed by motives of gratitude for laudable obligations;
and I have been told I am in danger of leaving nature, and being too
refined for practice on some of these occasions. But I hope not!”(49)
By having Pamela use sex as the reward for a virtuous sentimental
commerce, Richardson can “insinuate” an upward displacement in the
amorous practice of his young readers.
Only through the literal depiction of his scenes of love, can
Richardson provide substitute gratifications for the young reader,
and so catch his prey: I
am endeavoring to write a story, which shall catch young and airy
minds, and when passions run high in them, to show how they may be
directed to laudable meanings and purposes, in order to decry such
novels and romances, as have a tendency to inflame and corrupt: and
if I were to be too spiritual, I doubt I should catch none but grandmothers,
for the granddaughters would put my girl indeed in better company,
such as that of the graver writers, and there they would leave her;
but would still pursue those stories, that pleased their imaginations
without informing their judgments. Having a print market
professional’s sure grasp of the ultimate power of the reader—to be
bored and put a book aside; knowing that the the natural proclivities
of readers are as different as the bodies of grandmothers and granddaughters;
and designating his target audience—“young and airy minds”—Richardson
plots his seduction of the reader.
By introducing his “girl” Pamela/Pamela at the most
opportune moment, “when passions run high in them,” and by decrying
novels so as to depreciate their value to readers, Richardson attempts
to redirect the passions of his readers “to laudable meanings and
purposes.” This deflection of passions is at the center
of his project to reform reading and license entertainment. The potential efficacy of such a project—applauded
as we have seen by the pamelists, and rejected by the anti-pamelists—results
from the same factor that renders it uncertain, the ultimate freedom
of readers. Exercising a freedom conferred by the market, readers
(may) choose their own improvement.
[20]
How
does the Pamela media event affect the cultural location of
novels, and what sorts of critical practices can, after this media
event, proliferate around them? The very ambition of Richardson’s
project to reshape novel reading raises the stakes around novel reading,
and this, as we have seen, becomes a provocation to those who refuse
his “scheme” for reforming novel reading. The success of Pamela as a “new species”
of elevated novel reading, and the intensity of the counter-offensive
of the anti-pamelists, not only precipitated a debate about what reading
for pleasure should be. This
debate also meant that the contending readers of the Pamela
media event, in order to support or deflate Pamela’s pretensions,
start reading Pamela in ways that are important to the long
term institutionalization of novel reading.
To state the case most schematically, here readers start engaging
in the sort of sympathetic identification with and critical
judgment of fictional character that will lie at the center of novel
reading from Richardson, Fielding and Burney through Jane Austen,
George Eliot and Henry James. Here
are some of the interrelated elements of this new practice of reading.
Pamela’s readers “read through” the words and ideas of the
novel’s eponymous heroine in order to assess her character in view
of discovering whether “Pamela” is what the text’s subtitle declares—a
personification of virtue—or its reverse, a mere sham. By conferring
on a character in a novel some of the free-standing qualities of a
real person, and insisting that judgments of literary character reflect
as much light on those who judge as on the judged, both sides in the
Pamela wars confer an unprecedented moral seriousness upon
the evaluation of fictional characters. The strife around Pamela
draws readers into particular practices of detailed reading: selecting
what to read so as to emphasize one thing instead of another; being
provoked by incomplete descriptions; filling out the picture to one’s
own taste; using one’s imagination to read between the lines;
discerning the supposedly “real” intention of the author; and,
finally, distinguishing “the proper” from the “improper” in a text,
in order to judge whether a text is “readable” or “unreadable.”
All these practices of reading may produce a more or less “qualified”
reading, which in turn becomes an index of a reader’s position in
the social hierarchy. By identifying the lives of characters with
their own lives and by indulging a sympathetic confusion of the imaginary
and the real, readers relocate the distinction fiction/reality from
an opposition between novel and the world to one within a new species
of elevated novel. Habermas suggests that this kind of reading helps
constitute a critical public sphere of private subjects. (50)
[21]
Anti-Theatrical
Theater that Absorbs The Pamela media event evidences a mutation in
the print media culture. By embracing the basic thesis of the anti-novel
discourse—that novels can induce a dangerously automatic imitation
in its reader—Richardson incorporates that imitative tendency into
Pamela’s invitation to the reader to take its heroine as an
example. In this way, Richardson develops the claim that reading Pamela will make a
reader virtuous. Such a claim
is endorsed in 1751 when Johnson’s introduces Richardson to the readers
of the Rambler as the writer who “has taught the passions to
move at the command of virtue” (Johnson, Rambler head note
to Richardson’s No. 97, Feb. 19, 1751) We have seen that the anti-pamelists refute
this claim by directing many themes of the anti-novel discourse against
Pamela. However, in order to marshal their arguments, the anti-Pamelists
follow Richardson in assuming that there is an opposition between
good and bad reading, true and false imitation, fact and fiction;
like him, they assume that these distinctions can be negotiated within
an interpretation of an anonymously authored love story. In doing
so they implicitly concede a new ethical potential for novel reading.
By
publishing the anti-novel Pamela Richardson had not intended to confer a new legitimacy on novels. When he interrupted
his composition of a conduct book (the Familiar Letters) in
order to write a novel in letters, Richardson thought he was inscribing
novels within conduct discourse. This, we have seen, is the central
theme of the “reader’s guide” within which he wrapped his collection
of Pamela’s letters. Readers
since the eighteenth century have remarked, and sometimes complained,
that the last third of Pamela deflects the narrative of the
protagonist’s adventures into a guide on how to conduct oneself as
a virtuous wife. This withdrawal from novelistic action is entirely
consistent with Richardson’s design on his readers. Pamela was to have exhausted the desire
to read any other novel. But
instead of ending the popularity of novels, Pamela helped to
enlarge the repertoire of novelistic entertainments. To understand
this reversal of Richardson’s intended effects, one needs the grasp
how the market of media culture entertainments expands to assimilate
Pamela. Paradoxically,
the very features of the system of media culture that allow Pamela
to become a publishing phenomenon also limit Richardson’s control
over a text no longer precisely “his.” Above I characterized print
media culture as an open system: here entertainment circulates on
a market for culture that is non-hierarchical, swept by whim and fashion,
and sanctioning whatever succeeds. Richardson’s carefully guarded
anonymity in publishing Pamela should be understood as the
most powerful way to exploit the tendencies of this system.
By suppressing his own authorial role, Richardson can act through
his text, as if by remote control, to elevate novel reading. (Warner,
1979, Chapter 5) As an anonymous
text, belonging to no one, and written about nobody in particular
(Gallagher, 1994), Pamela can
exploit media culture as an open system, where the general reader
engages texts for diverse reasons. In
order to reform novel reading, Pamela must avoid the delusive
absorption attributed to novels over the course of the eighteenth
century, and to Pamela itself by critics like Fielding and
the author of Pamela Censured. Derived from the Old French absorber and Latin absorbere “to suck away,” “to absorb” not only means “to take (something)
in through pores or interstices,” but also “to occupy the full attention,
interest, or time of.” As a synonym of “monopolize, consume, engross,
preoccupy,” this second meaning of “to absorb” shares with these verbs
the idea of having “exclusive possession or control of.” (OED) This notion of the totality of absorption is
also active in Physics, where it means “to retain (radiation or sound,
for example) wholly, without reflection or transmission.” It is the idea of the completeness of absorption of the reader in the text—where the ideas
of the novel enter the reader’s brain without dilution, deflection
or mediation—that provides the novel’s potential for corruption. Within
the anti-novel discourse, a reader who consumes a novel can be absorbed
by that novel. If, for example,
he or she acts out the manners and action of the characters, there
is an “unhappy inversion”: that which the reader seeks to absorb absorbs
the reader and that which is consumed consumes the consumer. Addictive
reading of novels could then produce an epidemic of the sort of “emulous
desire” of which Charlotte Lennox’s romance reader in The Female
Quixote (Arabella) must be cured. (366) But the novel’s absorptive
power over the reader also gives the novel the potential to turn readers
toward virtue. The
critical work of Michael Fried on French eighteenth-century painting
and David Marshall on Shaftesbury, Defoe and Rousseau suggests that
Richardson’s development of an elevated novel lies right at the center
of the century’s attempt to represent honest feeling honestly. What
must be avoided at all costs—what Fried finds in the Rococo,
Marshall locates in Shaftesbury’s critique of the printed book’s
address to its reader, and Richardson decries in the novels and romances—is
a coy and self-conscious theatricality that panders to the gaze of
the beholder. To avoid this theatricality, Pamela deploys
the three salient strategies Fried ascribes to absorptive painting.
First, Chardin and Greuze imbue their paintings with an aura of innocence
by depicting the simple souls of the bourgeois home in states of absorption:
reading, drawing, building a card castle, etc. Similarly, Richardson
seeks to charm his reader with the innocence of everyday activity
by representing Pamela absorbed in writing to her parents, arranging
her bundles of clothes, or chatting with other servants. Secondly,
in the moments of crisis when Pamela defends her body against assault,
melodramatic scenes of “virtue in distress” have the dramatic unity,
intensity and intelligibility that Fried demonstrates to be central
to Diderot’s program for an anti-theatrical “narrowing, heightening
and abstracting” of the beholding itself. (104) And thirdly, by avoiding a theatrical self-conscious
address to the reader, Richardson’s letter novels promote what Fried
finds in these paintings: the “supreme fiction” of the beholder’s
absence. This fiction helps achieve a realist effect of immediacy
and un-selfconsciousness, precisely the qualities Diderot praised
with such extravagance in his Eloge à Richardson (check 1762). In
a cogent revision and extension, David Marshall points out that this
anti-theatrical strategy requires another kind of theater. Marshall
shows that Shaftesbury, in order to avoid the false theatricality
of books, with the “coquetry of authors” in their direct “I-you” address
to their reader, devises new forms of textual theater. Marshall’s
formulation of this paradox offers a suggestive gloss on Richardson’s
strategy for curing the bad absorption and false theatricality of
novels: “Paradoxically, writing must turn to theater through the dialogue
or present itself in the guise of a private text in order to deny
its position before its audience of readers;… Theatricality—the intolerable
position of appearing as a spectacle before spectators—calls for the
instatement of theater: the protective play of masks and screens that
would deny the view of the spectators it positions and poses for.”(66-67) In Pamela, authentic self-presentation
depends upon masks and screens to project a new personae. Anonymous
publication allows Richardson to publish his narrative in the form
of naïve familiar letters by throwing his voice into the mouth of
a young girl. However,
there are built-in liabilities to a strategy of theatrical indirection. When Pamela becomes famous, whether as an object
of emulation or as a scandalously false model, her sheer notoriety
makes it increasingly difficult to prevent her from becoming a spectacle
before spectators. “Pamela”
becomes the focal point of the theatrical effect produced by the media
event that precipitates her celebrity. Acts of reference, citation
and cooptation confer an involuntary greatness upon this modest young
servant. Then, when the anti-pamelists insist upon Pamela’s performative
ruses—her cunning seduction of the unwary Mr. B within the narrative
or the disingenuous motives of Pamela’s real writer—there is
no author there to protect her. The
threat this poses to the proper reception of Pamela mandates
Richardson’s belated appearance as author. Richardson’s Belated Appearance as Author While
the texts of the anti-pamelists disturb the progress of Pamela
to its reader, a much greater threat to the novel comes from those
on the print market who would honor her with that highest form of
flattery, imitation in the form of a sequel. In a letter to his brother-in-law
James Leake, Richardson gives an account of his struggle to protect
Pamela by preventing the appearance of the first of these sequels,
Pamela’s Conduct in High Life, published by one bookseller
Richard Chandler, and written by his “bookseller’s hackney” John Kelly.
[22]
Richardson’s struggle with Chandler and Kelly
to shape the public life of Pamela highlights a crucial feature of
media culture. Because of the
abstract uniformity of the print medium, media culture commodities
don’t come stamped with the unique character of an authored work.
Instead they betray a dangerous plasticity. Through a sequel, Richardson’s story could be
“ravished out of his hands” and continued by another; or, his own
sequel might by promiscuously merging with the writing of an uninvited
collaborator (Kelly); or, the copyright of a sequel could become the
possession of a bookseller not of his own choosing (Chandler).
His own Pamela might, through the “bookseller’s interest
and arts” be bound with the false and debased sequel. Finally, Richardson
fears that there is no way to stop these debased imitations from multiplying
indefinitely, with “still more and more volumes intended possible
by them, so long as the town would receive them.”(44) “Pamela” might
acquire all of the monstrous staying power of the undead. In all these
ways Pamela may be given a new shape and meaning retroactively,
through the afterlives given her by an irresponsible crowd of imitators.
The response of the “Highlife Men”—as Richardson terms
Chandler, Kelly and their partners—suggests that the media
culture of which Pamela is a part is an unenclosed common,
where all may graze at will. On
this aggressively competitive terrain, property in a hit like Pamela
appears transitory and provisional. Richardson had actually encouraged
unauthorized sequels in two ways: through anonymous publication, and
“through the heroine’s promising future.”
As a seasoned print media insider, Richardson should not have
been surprised that others would contrive to continue a story he had
begun. The lucrative advantages of serial publication had been demonstrated
in the previous sixty years with the multiple installments of Love
Letters, the New Atalantis and Love in Excess.(See
above, Chapter 2 and 3) When Robinson Crusoe was a runaway
best seller in 1719, Defoe followed with the Farther Adventures
of Robinson Crusoe (1919), and the Serious Reflections.(1720) The recent revival of films and television series
like Star Trek and Star Wars suggest a law at work in
media culture since the early modern period: not simply that proven
hits spawn imitators, but that they will come back to life. The “Highlife Men” justify their sequel by claiming
the freedom of entrepreneurs to meet the desires of a consuming public.
Thus Chandler accuses Richardson of being like “the dog in the manger
[who] would neither eat myself nor let them eat.” Selfish as a dog
with a bone, Richardson would not only deny his professional colleagues
a piece of the action, he would frustrate the understandable curiosity
of an enthusiastic public. When Richardson hears that Pamela’s Conduct
in High Life is nearing publication he includes a denunciation
of it in his May 7, 1741 advertisement for the fourth edition of Pamela. This first appearance of Richardson as “author”
comes as a belated reaction to protect Pamela from debasement:
“the author thinks it necessary to declare” that the sequel does not
have his “consent,” and reflects no knowledge of Pamela beyond what
can be read in Pamela. Finally, he is himself “actually continuing
the work himself.” (Eaves and Kimpel, 135) Pamela has taken on a life of its own. Nothing can give Richardson proprietary control
over the sequels to Pamela. Indeed, without centralized censorship
and licensing, or the trademark and copyright protection contemporary
law now extends to characters like Mickey Mouse, there is nothing
that guarantees the right Richardson is here trying to claim: to “end
his own work when and how he pleased.” Every text is open to an “engrafting”
that taps into the body of the original in a fashion that Richardson
declares “scandalous.” So in order to protect Pamela’s future,
Richardson finds he has little choice but to enter the market to condemn
Pamela’s Conduct in High Life in several critical reviews.(E&K,
137-138) But more crucially, he promises his own authentic
sequel to meet the demand for a continuation of Pamela’s story. Richardson is reluctant to continue, in part
because he is harassed by other work, and because “second parts are
generally received with prejudice, and it was treating the public
too much like a bookseller to pursue a success till they tired out
the buyers.”(Letters, 44) But
he must override this principled posture toward the reading public
when he sees from samples of Pamela’s Conduct in High Life
that “all my characters were likely to be debased, and my whole purpose
inverted,” that “all readers were not judges.” So Richardson reverses
course and publishes his own sequel: or, Pamela in her Exalted
Condition. Richardson
can only defend this commodity adrift on the open market by presenting
himself as its author. To foreclose adversarial readings and patent
ripoffs, it is necessary that there appear a responsible sponsoring
subject who may speak for the work.
But how can Richardson assert his possession of an anonymous
text, without compromising the considerable advantages of anonymous
publication? Authorial appropriation comes as a re-appropriation of
that which is asserted to be, after its errant and vagabond circulation,
always already the author’s own. Richardson’s (re-) possession of
Pamela takes different forms.
After publishing Pamela in her Exalted Condition, as
volume 3 and 4 of Pamela: Virtue Rewarded, Richardson appends
a note that asserts his authority on the grounds of his physical possession
of documents: he warns readers against counterfeit versions of Pamela’s
story, insists that Pamela is not a “fiction” with “imaginary”
“characters,” and announces that all papers are “in one hand only,”
as the “assignment of Samuel Richardson, editor of 4 vols. of Pamela:
Virtue Rewarded.” When the leading Dublin bookseller, George Faulkner,
corrupts one of Richardson’s workers to get early access to the copy
for Pamela in her Exalted Condition, Richardson takes steps
to protect another kind of property in his work—its profits. (This
is a rehearsal of his later, more fully conceptualized and sustained
defense of Sir Charles Grandison. See Conclusion). Pamela in her Exalted Condition exposes a central
tension within Richardson’s novelistic projects: he everywhere manifests
a primary ambivalence about providing entertainment to his readers.
Pamela was contrived to achieve a careful balance between cultivating
“the Principles of VIRTUE and RELIGION…at the same time that it agreeably
entertains, by a Variety of curious
and affecting INCIDENTS.” (Title page) The
first sentence of the Editor’s Preface emphasizes this double agenda:
“to Divert and Entertain, and at
the same time to Instruct, and Improve the Minds of the YOUTH
of both Sexes.”(my emphasis) Perhaps
motivated by the criticisms of Pamela that surface in the Pamela
media event, or perhaps reflecting his own reticence about novel writing,
Richardson abandons this delicate balancing act by purging his sequel
of the conflict and suspense central to Pamela. By
providing two more volumes of narrative centered on Pamela’s exemplary
conduct in high life, Richardson intentionally changes the ratio of
entertainment and instruction. This is managed by cutting away all
of the adventure and intrigue that had linked Pamela to the
novels of amorous intrigue: “But I hate so much the French marvellous and
all unnatural machinery, and have so often been disgusted with that
sort of management, that I am contended to give up my profit, if I
can but instruct. I am very sensible that there cannot, naturally,
be the room for plots,
stratagems and intrigue in the present volumes as in the first.”(Letters,
53) Richardson’s caricature of French fiction is used to justify abandoning
the effort to “divert” his reader.
His defense of writing a natural and probable account of Pamela’s
life as Mrs. B anticipates nineteenth-century programs for “slice
of life” realism. However, Richardson’s attack on the sources
of interest in his own fiction makes him a dour spoilsport at his
own entertainment. Richardson uses the very absence of incidents in
his sequel to announce his shift in priorities to Dr. Cheyne: “...you’ll
observe that instruction is my main end(53)… For I always had it in
view, I have the vanity to repeat, to make the story rather useful
than diverting; and if I
could perform it in such a manner as should entertain, it was all
I aimed at. The cause of Virtue and Religion, was what I wished principally
to serve.”(54)
Here Richardson offers the rationale for the gesture he will
repeat in the last volume of Clarissa as well as in the program
of Sir Charles Grandison: a vengeful return of the super-ego,
expressed through the withering repetition of
didacticism. Unleashing
this didacticism, usually at the end of his novels, allows Richardson
to attack the sources of enjoyment within his own fiction.
[1]
The
interplay I here postulate between the memory of a “real” event
and the retroactive work of “fantasy” allows me to distinguish my
approach from other approaches to the where, when and how of the
novel’s rise. If traditional accounts of the novel’s rise are too
quick to commit themselves to re-membering particular acts of authorial
creation (by, for example, Defoe and Richardson), then two recent
revisions of that story, by Homer Brown (1997) and Clifford Siskin
(1997), exaggerate the autonomous authority, and interpretative
voluntarism, of acts of retroactive fantasy.
Elsewhere in this study I have sought to incorporate Brown’s
account of the crucial role in the constitution of the eighteenth-century
novel of Walter Scott’s editing projects of the second decade of
the nineteenth century. Siskin uses the increase in the reading and
writing of novels in the last decade of the eighteenth century to
argue not an eighteenth-century but “Romantic rise of the novel.”
For Siskin, the novel, as the comfortable form of writing we take
it to be, depends upon a global shift from eighteenth-century anxieties
about imitation (evident in my accounts of the anti-novel discourse)
to nineteenth-century accounts of the subject’s development into
an impossibly deep object of apprehension. While Siskin underestimates
the way Richardson previews a deep subjectivity, given other articulations,
in late years, by Rousseau, Goethe, and the English Romantics, both
Brown and Siskin underestimate the decisive influence of the debate
about novel reading effected by Richardson's and Fielding’s novelistic
productions in the 1740s. This
chapter seeks to demonstrate precisely what was decisive about what
I am calling the Pamela media event.
[2]
For a
contrast between the former and latter approaches to culture, expressed
most recently in the work of Mark Crispin Miller and Andrew Ross,
see my argument for giving both perspectives weight, in Warner,
1990a, 742, footnote no. 3. For
a wide ranging historical critique of the modern American marketing
of the “pseudo event,” see Daniel Boorstin (1961).
[3]
I’ve
adopted the term “open system” from computer terminology, where
it designates software and hardware platforms that allow other venders
to develop compatible products without licensing that platform.
[4]
Behn’s
novels are frequently reprinted in the first half of the eighteenth
century. Thus, for example, Mary Ann O’Donnell lists these editions
for Love Letters: 1708: 3rd edition; 1712: 4th
ed.; 1718: 5th ed.; 1735: 6th ed.; 1736: Serialized
in Oxford Journal; 1759: 7th ed.; 1765: 8th ed.
Haywood publishes a four-volume octavo collection of her novels
in 1725, which is reprinted in 1742.
[5]
McKillop’s
discussion of Pamela,
in Richardson: Printer and Novelist, is still the most subtle
and thoroughgoing of the treatments of the many possible precursors
of Pamela.
[6]
Hogarth
shares many of the goals and practices of the early novelists like
Defoe, Aubin, Richardson and Fielding: a shrewd analysis of his
potential audience, the invention of new hybrid forms (like the
Progress Pieces), and a sustained commitment to elevating the ethical
and aesthetic register of the print media culture. Ronald Paulson
has demonstrated some of the two way influences between Hogarth’s
projects and those of Richardson and Fielding. See Paulson, 1991,
1992, 1993, and 1996.
[7]
In the
stilted syntax and diction of Clarissa’s high style she shows her
descent from Aubin and the French heroic romance. Two of Aubin’s
projects of the 1720s suggest the way Aubin’s elevation of novel
writing pivots upon finding moral examples for youth.
Aubin writes the preface to an expensive folio volume-- a
hybrid between a conduct book and an emblem book—entitled “Moral
Virtue Delineated, in One Hundred and Three short Lectures,
both in French and English, on the most important Points of Morality.
Each Lecture exemplified with a Copper Plate, done by the Famous
Monsieur Daret, Engraver to the late French King. The Design of
the said Plates being taken from the celebrated Gallery of Zeno
at Athens, Founder of the Stoic Philosophy. The Whole recommended
for the Instruction of Youth, especially those of the Highest Quality.”
Secondly, Aubin publishes a loose translation of a set of
novels by the French author Robert Challes: “The Illustrious
French Lovers; Being the True Histories of the Amours of several
French Persons of Quality. In which are contained a great number
of excellent examples, and rare and uncommon accidents; showing
the polite breeding and gallantry of the gentlemen and ladies of
the French nation. Written originally in French, and translated
into English by Mrs. P. Aubin.” (1727).
[8]
In “Mrs.
Aubin and Richardson’s Earliest Literary Manifesto,” Wolfgang Zach
makes the case for attribution of the anonymous Preface to Richardson
by noting the striking similarities both in style and content between
the Preface to the collection and Richardson’s subsequent defenses
of his novels. Zach also notes that we know Richardson wrote anonymous
prefaces for booksellers, and that some of the publishers of the
collection were close associates of Richardson. This Preface offers
important evidence of the close affiliation between women writers
Richetti calls “pious polemicists” and Richardson. Todd (1989) and
Spencer (88) note this affiliation as well as Zach’s attribution.
[9]
According
to Eaves and Kimpel, Richardson starts the Familiar Letters
in September or October of 1739, and interrupts them to write Pamela
between November 10 to Jan. 10,
1939/40. (88-90) Presumably the Preface to Aubin’s Collected
Novels dates from earlier in 1739 or even 1738.
[10]
This
kind of strategy is pursued most convincingly for Richardson's Pamela
in chapters devoted to literary and cultural backgrounds of the
novel in McKillop (1936) and Doody (1974).
[11]
Throughout
this discussion, I am indebted to Gwilliams’ argument that a recourse
to disguise is a necessary element of Pamela and its reception.
See Gwilliam, 31-36.
[12]
See Gasche,
217-223; In The Post Card, Jacques Derrida shows how the
bi-part structure of the letter and envelope suggests what unsettles
the communication ideal that the postal code attempts to institutionalize. Because of the numberless ways in which letters
fail to arrive at their destination--from errors in address to the
death of the addressee, from sloppy handwriting to the ineptitude
of the carrier--any letter could end up in the “dead letter office.” Because the possibility of errancy is built
into the postal system, Derrida argues that this system exposes
a necessary gap between an initial inscription of meaning and its
final reading by the addressee. In composing an emission, the writer
aspires to send the full meaning written into the letter to the
addressee, so that it will be read properly, the way it was intended.
But because its full meaning is never received as intended, because
an excess of meanings crowd into every inscribed mark, because every
re-location of a sign produces a certain minimal dis-location of
meaning, the ideal of communicative transparency is shadowed by
opacity, ambiguity, and deviation.
Derrida formulates these insights into a “postal principle”
said to subtend all communication: “the letter never arrives at
its proper destination.” [13] It will be useful to suggest how my reading of Pamela differs from Nancy Armstrong’s. A short summary of Armstrong’s thesis suggests why she does not view Richardson’s novel as a site of dubious performance and ambiguous communication. For Armstrong the invention of the “domestic woman” within the languages of the fiction and conduct books of the eighteenth century split the social world into masculine and feminine spheres of poetry and prose, politics and home, outside and inside, public and personal, state and family. This change focused desire and value so that the person’s worth was internalized and psychologized. The invention of the modern subject gradually achieved cultural and social hegemony, and in doing so occulted the political power that subject expressed. Armstrong places Pamela at the beginning of this momentous reconfiguration of subjectivity and politics. In the disguise scene I have just considered, Armstrong finds that “Richardson creates a distinction between the Pamela Mr. B desires and the female who exists prior to becoming this object of desire.” (116) “As it provides occasion for [Pamela] to resist Mr. B’s attempts to possess her body, seduction becomes the means to dislocate female identity from the body and to define it as a metaphysical object.” (116-117) The central turn of the plot—the displacement of B’s desire from Pamela’s body to her letters—defines her deep subjectivity as the locus of B’s desire, while conferring upon a woman’s writing the “power to reform the male of the dominant class.”(120) I find two fundamental problems with this reading. First, Armstrong fails to see the way the performative underpinnings of Pamela’s virtue, and B’s reform, put in question the resolution of the mind/body dualism. Armstrong’s reading stays close to the unctuous terms B uses to celebrate his reform. “Sir, said Mr. Brooks, …You have a most accomplished Lady, I do assure you, as well in her Behaviour and Wit, as in her Person, call her what you please.” “Why, my dear Friend, …I must tell you, That her Person made me her Lover; but her Mind made her my Wife.” (389-390). By accepting the terms of B’s reform, Armstrong countersigns the opposition between body and mind that Pamela’s own performance has put in play, and Armstrong underestimates the extent to which B’s act of reading and acceptance of Pamela’s performance is itself a kind of writing. In challenging Armstrong, Tassie Gwilliam has argued that the “presumably beneficial change, and Armstrong’s depiction of it, depend on the same metaphors—the body as surface and the soul or metaphysical self as depths--…that are used elsewhere to posit a disfiguring fault in the female subject. In fact, the finding of value in 'inner' qualities does not transform existing ideologies of femininity as much as it reinscribes them.”(17) Gwilliam suggests how the body in Richardson and elsewhere continues to circulate as divided and complex. Similarly, in “Novel Panic,” James Turner has argued that Pamela, against its avowed program, provokes strenuous efforts (in criticism, opera and painting) to visualize and embody Pamela’s body. (1995) In short, Armstrong’s reading of Pamela, like other “rise of the novel” readings of the text, by crediting the idea that this sort of novel invents a new kind of subjectivity, thereby also extends too much credit to the claims made by Mr. B (and Richardson) for Pamela’s interiority, her virtue, and for the novelty of her novelistic narrative. Secondly, in a reading deeply
indebted to Foucault’s account of the working of the panopticon
in Discipline and Punish, Armstrong’s argues that Pamela’s
domestic subjectivity evolves out of surveillance—both by others
and by one’s self—that becomes internalized in Pamela’s writing,
especially after her abduction to the Licolnshire estate. Armstrong’s
grand narrative of the middle-class invention of the domestic woman
orients every aspect of the novel toward the “big” and abstract
question of power. An evaluative and analytical hierarchy at work
in Armstrong’s text abstracts and simplifies the operation of letters,
performance and desire so as to subordinate them to power, the political,
and class struggle. This hierarchy justifies postulating a transparent
instrumental relationship between text, author, and potential readers.
The invention of the desirable domestic self—as a “metaphysical
object” that appears to go beyond the political—becomes Pamela’s
fictive task, Richardson’s authorial strategy, and their decisive
contribution to the transformation of culture. This critical narrative
has the effect of making the culture and its texts a homogenized
and totalized space, a perfectly efficient medium of communication,
where the idea of the domestic woman, once produced, circulates
freely and without significant resistance. The effective transparency
of communication claimed by Armstrong for Pamela corresponds
much more to what Richardson dreamed for his novel, than to what
he in fact effected. Because of the way Armstrong’s reading spatializes
the temporality of Pamela’s narrative, she cannot take account of
the way Richardson’s novel is like both Pamela’s letters and performances:
they are communication acts that can misfire, or fail to arrive
at their proper destination. For a fuller discussion of these issues,
see “Social Power, Foucault, and Literary History,” Warner, 1991.
[14]
Congress
recently passed a communications deregulation law that would require
a “V-Chip” be put in every TV set sold in the future. This would enable parents to filter out offerings
with high levels of violence. The
networks are displeased with two aspects of this legislation: it
requires a ratings system to determine which programming would be
excluded by the “V-Chip” and it limits the potential audience and
ad revenues for shows screened out by the “V-Chip.”
However, one unintended effect of such a rating and screening
system will be to offer legal and ethical “cover” for the development
of still more violent shows for TV. Ratings systems are an outgrowth
of the impulse to screen out the increasingly powerful and pervasive
systems of media culture. Richardson’s “rating” of Pamela is an
early step toward our modern ratings systems.
[15]
The letter
that Eaves and Kimpel attribute to Webster was first published in
his Weekly Miscellany on October 11, 1740, 26 days before
Pamela’s publication. In Webster’s magazine it is attributed
to an anonymous friend of Richardson, written in response to an
advance reading of the manuscript. Scholars like Sale (1969, 15) have discounted
the possibility that Richardson himself might have written or heavily
revised the letter, before it appeared in Webster’s magazine, though
this seems a distinct possibility to me. [16] In my book Reading Clarissa, I attribute the struggle of interpretations among readers of Clarissa to two different factors: the constitutive openness to interpretation of all texts (this is the Nietzschean, deconstructive horizon of that study), and the form and moral rhetoric of Richardson’s practice: serial publication; an effacement of the author disguised as editor, who can try to control reader response indirectly; the author’s winning of reader identification by the impersonating of characters (Warner, 1979, 130-131); and finally, subject matter like love and sex that encourages reader identification. (Warner, 1979, 125-142) Most of these factors are also at work in Pamela’s publication and reception. In Licensing Entertainment, I am suggesting another source of hermeneutic openness: what precedes Richardson’s writing—the "discourse network" of media culture with its novels of amorous intrigue—also authorizes Pamela’s skeptical reading and rewriting by others.
[17]
For a
full discussion of this debate within early print culture, and the
problem it produced for readers of stories claimed to be true because
they are based upon found documents, see McKeon, 1987.
In an essay on McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel,
I suggest an “ineluctable gap that opens beneath the quest for truth
in narrative: once it has been transported from the place or time
of its production, no text, whatever its aspirations to facticity
and truth, can bear a mark in its own language that can truly verify
its relation to something outside itself.” (Warner, 1989, 67).
[18]
In her
very interesting reading of this passage from Pamela Censured,
Tassie Gwilliam looks through the key hole of the opening in Pamela’s
narrative and locates the scandal of gender performativity. By her argument, B is here more than a voyeur;
he identifies with Pamela as a spectacle, making her (duplicitous)
femininity a pathway to masculine self knowledge. This act of identification
acquires synechdotal force by the way it repeats the fundamental
terms of Richardson’s narrative transvestism:
"The excitement generated by this scene comes from the
representation of Pamela seeing herself as a man would see her through
the keyhole, itself perhaps the fantasy of a man imagining himself
as a woman being watched by a man.”(41) Gwilliam’s reading shows
why the assertion of Pamela’s inner nature or identity is menaced
by the very system of disguise that is supposed, through a moment
of unveiling, to discover the true body or self beneath. Both Gwilliam
and Kahn (in Narrative Transvestism) interpret Richardson’s
recourse to writing as a woman as making the mystery of ungraspable
femininity a means of stabilizing Richardson’s own (finally ungraspable)
masculinity. But often in
Gwilliam and Kahn the anxiety surrounding confusions of gender identity
is supposed rather than demonstrated. I am struck by the ease with
which writers from Behn through Fielding stage disguised reversals
of gender. There is much to suggest that eighteenth-century writers,
whether they were male or female, did not find gender boundaries
as fixed or fraught as later critics have; nor do eighteenth-century
writers ground personal identity in sexual practice as insistently
as we do after Freud. This
is one of the salient themes of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality
(Volume I). Jill Campbell,
in her discussion of the theoretic work of Joan Scott and Judith
Butler, offers useful cautions on the necessary anachronism of using
gender as an analytical category for reading eighteenth-century
texts. (Natural Masques, 4-8) Here I will be focusing on gender identity as
only one of several terms that is threatened with confusion by the
practice of absorptive novel reading.
[19]
I follow
Goulemot in using the word pornography, though the term is anachronistic.
See Introduction to Hunt (1993). Goulemot suggests 1650-1750
as the period in France when censorship gave pornography a distinct
generic identity.(10-13) Although press regulation is more relaxed in
Britain, toleration of pornography was not.
In defending the expurgated edition of Cleland’s two-volume
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure ( 1749), published in one
volume as the Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1750), its publisher
Ralph Griffiths reviews it in these terms: “it does not appear to
us that this performance…has anything in it more offensive to decensy
of sentiment and expression than our own novels and books of entertainment
have:…The news-papers inform us, that the celebrated history of
Tom Jones has been suppressed in France as an immoral work.”
(Monthly Review, March 1750, Foxon, 57-58)
[20]
Richardson’s
problems adjusting the moral rhetoric of his use of sex in his novels
continues with Clarissa. One of his most proprietous correspondents,
Lady Echlin, complains that “the best instruction you can give,
blended with love intrigues, will never answer your good intention.”(Corr.V,54;
Sept. 2, 1755) For a fuller discussion of the problem of shaping
the experience of readers, see Warner, 1979, 137ff.
[21]
Of course,
critical debates about character precede the Pamela media
event. For example, after
Lafayette’s publication of La Princess de Cleves (1678),
debates swirled around the Princess’s shocking disclosure to her
husband of her love for the Duke de Nemours. However,
the novels of Richardson in England and Rousseau in France triggered
a type of identification that gave debates about the true nature
of a fictional character a new level of importance.
See Darnton for an account of the way Rousseau stimulates
the desire to confess the inmost feelings of identification that
the novels have triggered in readers. "A young woman wrote
that she could identify with Rousseau's characters, unlike those
in all the other novels she had read, because they did not occupy
a specific social station but rather represented a general way of
thinking and feeling, one that everyone could apply to their own
lives and thus become more virtuous."(247) For some of the
formulations of this paragraph, I’m indebted to a paper written
in my seminar at SUNY Buffalo by Kim Sungho.
[22]
Carroll,
42-45; this story is recounted by Sale, 26-29; Eaves and Kimpel,
135-139. |