might have served as well’.21 The particular personality traits that Leed highlights in Sidney’s Pamela and Richardson’s – their independence and spirit, their sense of their own worth, and their willingness to assert their rights – make somewhat stronger claims as strategic parallels, but more especially as this congruence is asserted against the grain of Sidney’s aristocratic sympathies. This is the context in which Beer argues that Pamela’s name ‘sets up disturbances in the hierarchies represented in the older text: hierarchies of class and of language, of social and material power’.22 Such ‘disturbances’ do not have to be superintended by Richardson – the name is enough to stir
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things up – but the name also has the power, in Murray L. Brown’s words, to place the heroine in ‘grave rhetorical danger’.23
Brown draws attention to the kind of problems that arise when the
‘Arcadian precursor threatens to manifest mimetically’.24 The episode on which he focuses is the angling scene (also discussed here in the Introduction), where Pamela, imprisoned by Mr B and under the supervision of the wicked and unwomanly Mrs Jewkes, is invited to fish in the carp pond. It is a scene also analyzed by Margaret Doody in terms of its emblematic qualities, though Doody simply notes that Sidney’s Pamela also goes fishing, discussing the Sidnean example of
‘the erotic meaning of the angling theme, popular in seventeenth-century poetry’, in the context of ‘several traditional meanings with which Richardson plays’.25 Brown goes further, arguing that
‘Richardson casts Pamela in the role – in the very activity – of her namesake in Sidney’s Arcadia. He constructs this analogue and then pointedly makes his heroine oblivious to it’, in order to insulate her from the erotic meaning.26
The danger that Brown argues Richardson is seeking to deflect has certainly been realized in criticism of Pamela from its first publication.
As one early commentator aptly puts it: ‘Some look upon this young Virgin as an Exemplar for Ladies to follow … Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Act of bringing a Man to her Lure’.27
In Sidney’s Arcadia, the metaphor informing the fishing motif is made explicit, though significantly the erotic meaning is provided by Pyrocles, disguised as the Amazon Zelmane, and not by the princesses, who are conceivably as oblivious to it as Brown argues Richardson’s Pamela is. In Arcadia, angling is Zelmane’s idea, one of several excur-sions undertaken with the intention of escaping the claustrophobic frustrations of Basilius’s lodge and of showing off the princesses Pamela and Philoclea to Musidorus. In Richardson’s Pamela, angling is Mrs Jewkes’s idea, but Pamela seizes the opportunity to compare her own plight to that of the hooked carp: ‘“O Mrs Jewkes! I was thinking this poor carp was the unhappy Pamela. I was comparing myself to my naughty master. As we deceived and hooked the poor carp, so was I betrayed by false baits; and when you said, play it, play it, it went to my heart, to think I should sport with the destruction of the fish I had betrayed”.’ (p. 168)
It is not entirely clear whether Pamela is here attempting, as Browne suggests, to placate Mrs Jewkes’s suspicions, whether she is simply devising an excuse to stop fishing so that she can further her escape
124 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre plans, or whether she is genuinely pained by the comparison, ‘which just then came into [her] head’, between her own situation, ‘betrayed by false baits’, and the hooked carp. But whatever is the case, she cannot retain her ‘rhetorical innocence’, as Brown puts it, if she is conscious of the traditional meaning of the angling metaphor expounded in Zelmane’s reading of the princesses beguiling ‘silly fishes’ and
‘hearts of princes’ ( NA, p. 152) – and which is perilously close to the surface in Mrs Jewkes’s cry of ‘ play it, play it’. Brown argues that Pamela
‘does not see the potential for ironic comment, and the Arcadian reading remains outside her experience’ – as it would not have done, he suggests, had she found a poem such as Donne’s ‘The baite’ among her mistress’s books or were she mindful of the exploits of her literary namesake.28 Pamela herself worries that she is venturing on dubious moral ground by the deceptions in which she engages in order to preserve her horde of letters and plot her escape, though she is ‘not a little proud of herself’ for her deception of Mrs Jewkes in the garden. But were she to be engaged in this clandestine correspondence (with a cler-gyman who is rapidly developing a personal rather than purely charitable interest in her welfare) while at the same time covering her tracks by means of a fable of betrayed innocence that she knows is capable of a quite different interpretation, one that would cast her as the angler dangling false baits, then her innocence, both moral and rhetorical, would be pretty well shattered.
Devices and desires
The trope is a dangerous ploy for Pamela, but not simply because of its rhetorical instability. In the earlier examples we discussed in the Introduction, the angling metaphor does not so much express a particular individual’s personal response to experience as participate in a public discourse, the forms of which already have an agreed cultural authority. But Pamela is not simply ‘applying a topic’29 but is speaking for herself, and the trope raises troubling questions about how hard her ‘working mind’ might be working, and working with secret intent.
In particular, it is troubling because of what it implies about the sophistication of the heroine’s reflective consciousness – a sophistication that includes a capacity for deliberation and the calculation of affect that Richardson seems to find thoroughly undesirable, at least in a fictional heroine whose artlessness is her only guarantee of her moral purity. Betty Rizzo has observed how, despite a wealth of evidence in earlier fiction that women are adept at devising stratagems to further
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their own interests, ‘one finds that, gradually, decent eighteenth-century women … become incapable of contriving plots or counter-plots even when their preservation is at stake and even when they are victims of other ingenious plotters. Others less virtuous or Providence itself must intervene to save them’.30 While even in earlier fiction, plotting women, and particularly the decent ones, have not often been adept at devising successful stratagems to further their own interests, they have at least been allowed the ingenuity to try to extricate themselves without automatically compromising their moral character. But by the eighteenth century the bar has been raised much higher, particularly for a character such as Pamela, for whom virtue is now a provisional, moment-by-moment affair, no longer unequivocally and permanently manifest in distinctions of birth, person, and address, but subject to continual testing and verification. And it is certainly the case in Richardson’s fiction that the heroine is immediately in danger of losing her footing on the moral high ground should she take any step to help herself.
In the margins of Lady Bradshaigh’s copy of Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, for example, there is a curiously testy exchange between Lady Bradshaigh and Richardson that highlights the constraints under which the novelistic heroine must operate, at least until the novel developed techniques for portraying the illusion of an unmediated, transparent consciousness that could offset the epis-temological uncertainties of character both inferred from and revealed through motive. Lady Bradshaigh had extensively annotated her copy of Clarissa; Richardson in turn had annotated her annotations, and, in Volume V, chapter iv, he takes exception to what seems an innocent enough remark. In the left-hand margin of the verso, Lady Bradshaigh questions the wisdom of Clarissa’s attempt, having escaped the dubious ‘protection’ of the rake, Lovelace, and taken refuge at Mrs Moore’s lodging house, to flee the house once Lovelace discovers her there, suggesting that it would have been safer for her to stay put: ‘This was a poor device’, Lady Bradshaigh observes, ‘for she must think he wou’d have follow’d her, and perhaps have forced her i
nto a coach & carry’d her where he had a mind’.31 Richardson immediately leaps to Clarissa’s defence, one word in Lady Bradshaigh’s commentary apparently provoking his ire:32
Device, does your Ladiship call it? Cl[arissa] was above all Devices!
– In such a distressed Situation, and with a vile Fellow, who had
126 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre convinced her of his Vileness, she had nothing in her Head or Heart but once more to get from him. She might be in hope to raise the Country upon him, as she once threaten’d. Such a lovely young Creature, pursued by so rakish a young Fellow, **** **Ever cast into the Protection of a sensible man, would not have been imposed upon so easily as the two foolish women were, whose Curiosity and Inquisitiveness was more than their Fellow-feeling for one of their own Sex; who was only running away from a handsome Rake, no hated Character with women in general, as Lovelace had often experienced: Device! I don’t love your Ladiship just here! Poor Clarissa! To be classed with a Lovelace as if – But no more – 33
Janine Barchas, in her edition of Lady Bradshaigh’s annotated Clarissa, suggests that Richardson fixes on the word ‘device’ because Clarissa herself uses the word on the next page to refer to Lovelace’s ‘plots and stratagems’.34 But this unfortunate coincidence hardly seems to warrant Richardson’s outburst, since all Lady Bradshaigh is attributing to Clarissa is foresight and planning, albeit, in her opinion, misdirected.35 And even if Clarissa’s use of a ‘device’ should class her with a Lovelace, there is an obvious defence – the one that Lady Bradshaigh herself makes when Clarissa later resorts, if not to a device, at least to some equally problematical strategic equivocation. In order to rid herself of Lovelace’s attentions when she is dying, she misleads him into thinking that she is seeking a reconciliation with her father by describing her spiritual preparations for death as ‘setting out with all diligence for [her] father’s house’, a step that she fears ‘is not strictly right, if allegory and metaphor be not allowable to one in her circumstances’.36 Lady Bradshaigh does not quarrel with Lovelace’s construal of the ‘father’s house’ metaphor as a wilful deception as duplicitous as his own, but insists in extenuation: ‘Their motives how different!’37
The question of motivation, however, provides a compelling reason for an embargo on any ‘device’ that implies a heroine’s words and actions might not be entirely transparent, and with good reason Richardson’s preferred mode of protecting his heroines, both from villains and from motive-mongering readers, is to wrap them up in innocence – however ineffectual it might prove. This is Clarissa’s defence against Lovelace, and she directly opposes it to his devices. When he catches up with her at Mrs Moore’s, she tells him, ‘I will, now that I have escaped from you, and that I am out of the reach of your mysterious devices, wrap myself up in my own innocence’, emphasizing her
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point (and the pathetic in effectuality of such a defence) by ‘passionately fold[ing] her arms about herself’ as she speaks (underscored by Richardson in Lady Bradshaigh’s copy of the novel, and highlighted in the margin by a wavy line).38
It is a defence that Richardson’s Pamela also seems to be adopting in her angling fable, waiting for someone else to save her in the moral she draws – ‘O that some good merciful person would procure me my liberty in like manner; for I cannot but think my danger equal!’
(p. 168) – though given that she is in the midst of steps taken to procure her own liberty, by means of actions she herself variously describes as a ‘plot’ and a ‘trick’ and a ‘contrivance’ (that is, the horse-bean planting to provide an excuse for digging in the garden to deposit her letters to Parson Williams), she is still on highly dangerous ground.39 And while she claims the moral she derives from fishing just comes into her head, the appeal for a protector to save her might be interpreted as a ruse to throw Mrs Jewkes off the scent. A gallant saviour is, moreover, highly unlikely to materialize (the only candidate at hand, Mr Williams, not even having the wherewithal to organize a horse). Sidney’s abducted and imprisoned princesses might lament the inadequacies of their father, Basilius, who proves himself handier with a shovel than a sword, ensconcing his army in trenches around Amphialus’s castle rather than risking open assault, but he is able to summon a respectable cohort of potential saviours to engage in single combat on the princesses’ behalf. But Richardson’s Pamela has no champions by right of her birth and station – as Sir Simon Darnford crudely puts it, Mr B ‘hurts no family by this’ (p. 172) – and her actions in defence of her honour are unprotected by appropriate precedents and consequently open to misinterpretation. The womanly virtue of patient waiting, with fingers kept busy and mind distracted by exquisite embroidery, makes sense for Sidney’s Pamela, but if Richardson’s Pamela simply waits, the question inevitably arises: for what?
The dressing of self
Such questions arise, William B. Warner argues, because of suspicions about Pamela’s motives and desires that are prompted by the ‘reading lesson’ she receives from her parents and Lady Davers: they make her suspicious of what Mr B’s actions mean, and those 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’, making us in turn suspicious of her. Why does she stay to finish
128 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre embroidering Mr B’s waistcoat? Why does she get angry when Mr B
proposes Parson Williams as a suitable match? There are good reasons for Pamela acting as she does, but, for Warner, they are not good enough once Pamela’s innocence has been compromised, so that ‘these episodes invite readers to suspect that Pamela harbors an unconscious love for Mr. B’.40
Warner’s argument is concerned with the way in which Pamela attempts to ‘overwrite’ the amatory novel of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century: Richardson creates, Warner argues, an ‘inter-textual exchange’ in which ‘the earlier novel becomes both an inter-textual support and that which is to be superseded, that which is repeated as well as revised, invoked as it is effaced’.41 His argument does not assume that Richardson has read these earlier novels or is explicitly alluding to them, but rather contends that the novels of amorous intrigue provide readers with a way of reading Pamela that is necessarily invoked by Richardson’s attempt to revise such reading practices. Thus a crucial scene in the novel, somewhat pre-emptively described by Warner as ‘the disguise scene’, in which Pamela appears
‘incognito in her country dress’, can be read as ‘at once similar to and the opposite of parallel scenes’ in Haywood’s novel, Fantomina, where the heroine ‘by changing her dress, hair color, accent, and manner …
transforms herself into a series of erotic objects’ to revive her lover’s flagging interest.42
It is a provocative, often mischievous analysis that argues, with considerable élan, from effect to cause – from Mr B’s professed failure to recognize Pamela in her country clothes to its antecedent in disguise, from the renewed vigour of Mr B’s slap and tickle to an initiating, if unrecognized, desire to inflame. Warner’s identification of a congruity of means (change of dress) and end (re-kindling desire) between Pamela’s re-apparelling in country dress and Fantomina’s serial masquerade as ‘rude’ ‘country lass’,
‘charming widow in distress’, and ‘upper-class enchantress’43 manages to sidestep Lady Bradshaigh’s cautionary disclaimer (‘Their motives how different!’) by an appeal to unconscious desire on Pamela’s part, and in the process he manages also to lend authority to the suspicions of generations of readers, regardless of their familiarity with novels of amorous intrigue. But Warner’s argument is itself an instance of precisely the problem, apparently undiminished over the centuries, that the heroine faces: the ease with which anything might be construed as encouragement when it is in their sexual character that women are primarily understood
– as Mary Wollestonecraft was later
to put it, ‘considering females rather as women than human creatures’.44
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In Sidney’s Arcadia, Philoclea’s fear that, however inadvertently, she had encouraged Pyrocles by her ‘ill governed’ behaviour and her ‘ill hid’ affection for a person she had thought was a woman demonstrates how loosely encouragement could be defined and how severely condemned. Any change in behaviour can apparently be interpreted as an expression of interest – Cavendish’s Miseria betrays an unconscious attraction by, among things, protecting her skin from the sun – but in Pamela even the heroine’s distress can be considered provocative, and when she falls to her knees and prays, Mr B is ‘moved’, but to something other than pure benevolence. It is not surprising, then, that her comely country clothes should re-galvanize Mr B’s energies, though the assumption that, whatever she does, it must be being done in her sexual character as a woman is not a supposition that anyone other than Mr B might be expected, as a matter of course, to share.
There is an illuminating parallel in Sidney’s Arcadia, where the princess Pamela, forced to suffer the indignity of being placed, along with Basilius’s cattle, in the care of the oafish Dametas, demonstrates her resignation to her father’s will by dressing in ‘shepherdish apparel’
( NA, p. 145). Pyrocles, in his disguise as an Amazon, is quickly learning that ‘it was against my womanhood to be forward in my own wishes’
( NA, p. 145), and he recounts how Pamela shows her submission to her father’s wishes:
The fair Pamela, whose noble heart I find doth greatly disdain that the trust of her virtue is reposed in such a lout’s hands as Dametas, had yet, to show an obedience, taken on shepherdish apparel, which was but of russet-cloth cut after their fashion, with a straight body, open breasted, the nether part full of pleats, with long and wide sleeves: but believe me she did apparel her apparel, and with the preciousness of her body made it most sumptuous. Her hair at the full length wound about with gold lace, only by the comparison to show how far her hair doth excel in colour: betwixt her breasts, which sweetly rase up like two fair mountainets in the pleasantest vale of Tempe, there hung a very rich diamond set but in a black horn; the word I have since read is this: ‘Yet still myself’. ( NA, pp. 145–6) True beauty, we have long been told, does not need adornment, and Pamela’s is in fact shown to advantage by her rustic apparel – as is Philoclea’s near-naked charm in her nymph-like attire, ‘so apparelled as did show she kept best store of her beauty to herself’ ( NA, p. 146). So we should not be surprised that when Pamela kits herself out in
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