I’ve often witnessed people throw their hands up in horror when I’ve casually mentioned that over the course of this semester I’ve read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela for the literary seminar I signed up for. Admittedly, before I started reading it, my apprehensions before reading it had been slowly but steadily building. I expected it to be the most insipid story ever written, describing the hysterical fears of a girl that’s virtuous to the point of being kinky. And somehow that’s a pretty apt description of Richardson’s novel. And somehow not quite. What’s certain, though, is that I’ve got a problem with it.
First, Pamela’s oh-so-perfect, downright sickening
virtue sets your teeth on edge. Second, she gives you pretty nasty pangs of Fremdschämen when she throws herself at just
about everybody’s feet, regardless of who they are and what they do. Third, you
cannot help writhing in mental pain and shame at her eagerness to forgive every
Tom, Dick or Harry for whatever they’ve done. Repeatedly professing her own
unworthiness, being all too ready to take the blame for other people’s
failures, and starting to pray in the most absurd situations, Pamela manages to
throw her readers repeatedly into unspeakable agonies. Plus, her endless avowals
of having no will divergent from that of her master and husband-to-be Mr B.,
and that the praises showered on her are mere reports of what other people
said, are bound to make you retch. Indeed, from an educated person’s perspective
in the 21st century, her unwavering saintliness and her self-effacing
submission are enough to drive you up the wall.
Apparently, Fielding
was thinking so too – even back then. His contemporary parody Shamela captures the retching aspect brilliantly. Condemning
Pamela as a self-serving hypocrite and plotter that draws her master in, he
echoed many contemporary readers’ feelings and responded in the spirit of the
18th-century Pamelists vs. Anti-Pamelists division. And to be honest, I laughed my head off at his
trenchant reading of Richardson’s novel, which the Pamelists saw as a model of
chastity and virtue. But I guess Pamela would have been too dumb to devise a scheme
as cunning as he proposes. He is certainly right in saying that Richardson
overdid it; but seeing as how Pamela
was meant as a conduct book for young women, you can’t really wonder that
things got out of hand. Richardson went OTT with his sermonising on honesty and
chastity, yet with the best of intentions. And Fielding’s questioning the
reliability of an autodiegetic narrator recounting the wonderfully blameless part
she acted in the whole affair is exactly to the point, a valid piece of
criticism on the form of the epistolary novel. My main problem isn’t the
unreliability of the form, though, but rather the picture of women Richardson
draws.
Because when you look at Pamela from a feminist perspective, you’ll go nuts. Pamela is humility
personified, and that’s hardly something any woman in her right mind should
identify with. If you want to get something out of the book and not fling it
into the corner in frustration, you have to supress your inner feminist. Hard
as it is, you have to try and look at it from a purely cultural perspective. Just
remember we’re talking 1740. 1740! That’s not exactly the time of unequal
marriages like the one between Pamela and Mr B. Marrying somebody just a little
below your social status was bad enough and exposed you to snide remarks; but
marrying your servant was an outrage.
It’s not for nothing that Mr B. struggles violently when he becomes aware of whom
he has favoured with his affection. That’s why he tries to frighten her into
becoming his mistress rather than his wife – because for 18th-century
standards, stooping so low as to marry your servant is nothing short of a disgrace.
For a long time, unequal matches were a big issue. Consider
Lizzy Bennet who was considered an upstart when she married Mr Darcy – but then she was a gentlewoman
and a member of the landed gentry, and hardly comparable to Pamela. Consider Jane Eyre,
a governess who married her master. This was a problem as well, although this
was a) more than 100 years after Pamela;
b) a governess held a more elevated rank than a common maidservant; c) unlike
Mr B., Rochester lived very secluded because of his mad first wife and didn’t
care about society’s opinion about who he was married to; and d) Charlotte Brontë kindly
endowed Jane Eyre with an inheritance that decreased the gap between her and Mr
Rochester and allowed her to utter her famous “Reader, I
married him”.
Pamela, on
the other hand, has nothing like that to offer. She faces abject poverty, and she
tries to make up for her want of dowry with a self-depreciating amount of devotion
and submission towards her husband. She is a servant elevated to the rank of a
lady, and do what she might, she’ll always be the gracious receiver of her
master’s condescending bounties. Being mere sexual prey for him at first, what
is she supposed to do other than pray if she is but too painfully aware that
there’s nobody to step in for her? Her master is after all her master, who has pretty
much everyone at his service, and the strict codes of behaviour don’t allow her
to defend herself properly.
And still
you want to slap her at times, I know. You want to give her a good shake and scream,
“Where’s your dignity? Where’s your self-respect? You spineless hypocrite!” So
do I. I suppose the problems we readers of Pamela
have is that we measure the novel against standards that are too modern. It
takes a lot of time, countless blushes on Pamela’s account, and many fraught nerves
to consider her circumstances thoroughly before you might take a chance on not
totally condemning Richardson’s effort to educate and instruct his female
readers.
For this
and more pictures by Joseph Highmore visit
If you are a puritan christian it is really quite good, though still unrealistic.
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