bibliographing

Why do I hate Pamela so much? It’s because she has such a one-track mind. Virtue only means one thing: keeping your legs closed until you’re married. That might sound crude, but it doesn’t sound any less crude drawn out over 500 pages of romantic fluff, really. And virtue is Pamela’s only value.

But the value Pamela places on herself is supposed to be one of her most important qualities. She is a poor servant girl who refuses to submit to her nasty master. She bucks the feudal code and believes she has self-worth even though she is lower class. Let me quote at length from Margaret A. Doody’s introduction to my Penguin Classics edition:

Mr B. is both promulgator and victim of a code which deliberately sets up not just a double but a triple standard. Men of all classes are expected to take casual sexual pleasure—though it’s better for poor men not to roam too much. Middle- and upper-class young ladies have chastity most explicitly demanded of them (for worldly reasons of family and descent) but lower-class girls are not supposed to set any such value on themselves—they are there for sexual convenience. So thoroughly has gentle society accepted this notion that a lower-class girl who makes any fuss about yielding her virginity must be guilty of hypocrisy—after all, one knows what they are all like, really. Richardson was horrified at being taken for a leveller, but this pernicious code he attacks unsparingly, and the extirpation of it demands new assumptions about class, property, authority and identity.

Pamela rebels against this code, but she has no illusions about her social condition as one of the ‘poor people’. She knows that marriage cannot be expected as the logical outcome or possible result of her resistance. It is the reader who sees that marriage is the only right end to the story, the only sexual relationship which allows of equality and integrity, acknowledges Pamela’s value as a person, not a thing.

This is, I think, not supposed to be controversial, and yet I have an impossible time buying into it. Pamela doesn’t value herself at all; she only values her “virtue.” She is worthless, only her virginity is important. When she rejects Mr. B’s advances, it’s not because she doesn’t want to be raped—it’s because she doesn’t want to be ruined. It’s not about her own desires, her own personal space, her own individuality. It’s only about virginity, virtue, chastity. If she is ruined, she is ruined—soiled, worthless, unable to ever recover. And it’s not like Pamela is even willing to credit herself with anything she does that might actually be good; that is all Christ.

But she mostly isn’t all that good. She’s vain and silly, she’s not actually willing to stand up to Mr B. about anything but her virginity—why in the hell does she finish embroidering his waistcoat if she wants to go home so badly?

To Mr. Williams:

‘Were my life in question, instead of my virtue, I would not wish to involve any body in the least difficulty for so worthless a poor creature. But, O sir! my soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess, though in quality I am but upon a foot with the meanest slave.

‘Save thou, my innocence, good Heaven! and happy shall I be, although an early death were to be my lot; since that would put an end to all my troubles.’

She could hardly make it more clear. (And this also gets back to Richardson and his levelling. I don’t see how he can deny it, as there’s language like this all over, especially after Mr. B proposes.) Pamela’s life is worthless, only her virginity is important, she would rather die than be ruined.

Her good, poor, honest parents feel the same way. When her father shows up at Mr. B’s, after God knows how long letting her stay there kidnapped, the first thing he says is: “‘I will ask you sir,’ said he, ‘but one question till then, that I may know how to look upon her when I see her? Is she honest? Is she virtuous?’”

And how should he look upon her if she’s not? “‘But you say I shall see my child! And I shall see her honest! If not, poor as I am, I would not own her!’”

I can’t get around it: Pamela’s father is utterly reprehensible. He well knows that if Pamela isn’t “honest” it’s because she’s been violently forced to sleep with someone who is imprisoning her against her will, but he would disown his own daughter all the same. No, these people are not virtuous.

And to get back for a moment to the very end of the passage I quoted from the introduction—do other readers really see marriage as “the only right end to the story”? Marriage to the man who has kidnapped Pamela, kept her locked away, and abused her physically, sexually, and emotionally? I go for a lot of bad-boy romances; I liked Rochester, I liked Heathcliff (um, sort of). But the way Mr. B is able to take advantage as the head of his servants, the justice of the peace, the owner and mortgagor of all the surrounding villages, to commit grave, grave crimes against what should be a free woman, I just could not handle. If Pamela would truly rather die than be ruined, she should have done her utmost to fight off Mr. B and Mrs. Jewkes violently; she would have been well justified in killing them for the way they’ve violated her rights. And I’m supposed to view marriage as the “right end”?

Further, that marriage is supposed to be “the only sexual relationship which allows of equality and integrity, [and] acknowledges Pamela’s value as a person, not a thing.” You mean the marriage where Pamela continues to call Mr. B “master”? Or perhaps the marriage where he harangues her on how to behave and scolds her harshly for what only an egomaniac would consider offenses? The marriage where Mr. B constantly accuses Pamela of maybe, just maybe being interested in other men? Or where he gives “awful lectures”—oh, I mean “agreeable injunctions” and “indispensable rules for my future conduct”? No, it must be the one where he belittles her in front of his friends, saying,

‘Pamela, in the time of her confinement, as she thought it, one Sunday was importuned by Mrs Jewkes, whom she considered as her gaoler, and whom she thought employed in a design against her honour, to sing a psalm.

“As she thought it”; “whom she considered as her gaoler”; “whom she thought employed.” Yeah, right.

I don’t expect an eighteenth century marriage to be one of equals, but I won’t listen to Pamela describe herself as “a poor bit of painted dirt” and pretend that she values even herself as a person, not a thing. And remember, girls, Pamela was “published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes.”