Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  130 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre country garb in preparation for her return to her humble origins, she never looked more beautiful – and knows it:

  when I had dined, up stairs I went, and locked myself into my little room. There I tricked myself up as well as I could in my new garb, and put on my round-eared ordinary cap; but with a green knot, however, and my home-spun gown and petticoat, and plain leather shoes; but yet they are what they call Spanish leather. A plain muslin tucker I put on, and my black silk necklace, instead of the French necklace my lady gave me; and put the earrings out of my ears, and when I was quite equipped, I took my straw hat in my hand, with its two green strings, and looked about me in the glass, as proud as any thing. To say truth, I never liked myself so well in my life.

  O the pleasure of descending with ease, innocence, and resignation! Indeed there is nothing like it! An humble mind, I plainly see, cannot meet with any very shocking disappointment, let fortune’s wheel turn round as it will.

  So I went down to look for Mrs Jervis, to see how she liked me. …

  I told her, I had no clothes suitable to my condition, when I returned to my father’s; and so it was better to begin here, as I was soon to go away, that all my fellow-servants might see I knew how to suit myself to the state I was returning to. (pp. 87–8) Like Sidney’s Pamela, Richardson’s Pamela also demonstrates virtuous resignation by adopting the clothes appropriate to the condition in which she has been placed (or is about to be placed),45 and like Sidney’s Pamela also, Richardson’s Pamela asserts her identity despite the change of appearance, the device on the princess’s necklace reading ‘Yet still myself’ echoing in Pamela’s protest to a rampaging Mr B (who affects not to know her in her change of clothes), ‘I am Pamela.

  Indeed I am Pamela, her own self!’ (p. 89).46

  The rustic dress adopted as a sign of virtuous submission and the reassertion of identity despite the change of clothes make this one of the stronger parallels between Arcadia and Pamela – though the differences are as significant as the similarities. Even in her rustic dress, Sidney’s Pamela is never in danger of being mistaken for anyone else, and she is far from delighted by her humble home. But the crucial difference is that, when she first adopts the ‘shepherdish apparel’, there are no suitors on hand to admire, and to take personally, the display of her even more obvious charms. Given that Richardson’s Pamela has

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  been hard pressed to keep her admirer at a respectable distance, she might be criticized for having adopted a ‘poor device’, but she insists that she has nothing in her head but consciousness of being able to

  ‘descend with ease’, and she has done nothing to invite suspicion that she intends the effect that her changed appearance has caused other than to admit that, in her humble clothes, she never liked herself better. She need not, perhaps, have exhibited them before Mrs Jervis (though it is an effective means of demonstrating that Pamela is both comfortable without her finery and serious about her intention to leave), but it is at Mrs Jervis’s insistence that Pamela is introduced to Mr B (‘“I tell you”, said she, “you shall come in”’ [p. 89]), and she is under her orders not to reveal her identity, which Pamela obeys only under protest.

  When we look at exactly what Pamela has done to earn these suspicions, her culpability, on the surface at least, seems to lie in knowing her simple country clothes become her. ‘Her pleasure in her new appearance is presented in a risky and morally equivocal light’, Warner argues, her pride as she gazes at herself in the mirror echoing the narcissism of Milton’s Eve and the vanity of Pope’s Belinda.47

  Were she, of course, not to acknowledge how well she looked, she would also be open to criticism when she later confronted Mr B –

  criticism that she could not possibly have been oblivious to the effect it would have on him. And she needs to like herself even better in her country clothes in order to demonstrate that she has not been spoiled by luxury. But while the pleasure that Pamela takes in her appearance is, as Tassie Gwilliam argues, ‘clearly superfluous’ to her reasons for shedding her mistress’s clothes,48 it is not ‘morally equivocal’ except as it implies an undue consciousness of the claims of self. Beauty in a virtuous woman is invariably portrayed as unselfconscious – though without it being entirely clear whether such unselfconsciousness is inherently virtuous or whether simply expedient since it circumvents the question of what use a woman might be making of her beauty. But even unselfconsciousness does not mean that the virtuous woman need be blind to her beauty or negligent of it. Sidney’s Pamela, even in captivity, takes pains to keep up appearances, ‘for well one might perceive she had not rejected the counsel of a glass, and that her hands had pleased themselves in paying the tribute of undeceiving skill to so high perfections of nature’ ( NA, p. 484). Like Warner apparently, Cecropia suspects that this attention to ‘the dainty dressing of her self’ (p. 484) betrays amorous susceptibilities – ‘thinking … that beauty carefully set forth would soon

  132 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre prove a sign of an unrefusing harbour’ (p. 484) – though the princess Pamela grandly dismisses beauty’s consequence as ‘a thing which not only beasts have, but even stones and trees’ (p. 485).

  Unconscious love

  At the bottom of these suspicions about the real meaning of Pamela’s behaviour is the unconscious love that she is said to harbour for Mr B, deduced from her admiration of Mr B’s person, her failure to leave his household when there was apparently opportunity to do so, her

  ‘flaunting’ of her presence in her country clothes, and her inability to respond with appropriately eternal repugnance when Mr B attempts to rape her.49 Yet unconscious love is not only common among earlier romance heroines, but is also usually their most effective defence against the kind of imputations that are directed at Pamela.

  Unconscious love protects them, for example, from the imputation of design: if they are in love without knowing it, they can hardly be accused of manipulating a situation to their advantage, since their advantage, to their minds, lies elsewhere. If they are in love without knowing it, they are also relieved of the responsibility of choice, since love has taken them unawares. And if they are in love without knowing it, they preserve the purity of the passion, since unconscious love escapes the taint of self-interest, and, more importantly, the stigma of desire. And in Pamela’s case unconscious love is called upon to perform this customary function, shielding her from suspicion of behaviour calculated to attract Mr B’s interest, while at the same time protecting her from the suspicion that she allows material advantage to guide her heart. Loving unawares, however, while sanctioned by the convention of romantic love as a force independent of human will and beyond rational understanding, is potentially detrimental to a woman’s virtue when naturalized in a fashion that supports psychological realism. If Pamela is in love without knowing it, what else does she not know – or not want to know – about the impulses that drive her?

  In Sidney’s Arcadia, as we have already discussed, the device of being in love without knowing it is unusually transparent in its insistence on disinterestedness in the developing attachment between Philoclea and Pyrocles in his Amazonian disguise. Philoclea could hardly be expected to know she is in love with Pyrocles since he has so successfully disguised himself as a woman that Philoclea’s father, Basilius, is also smitten, and while her more canny mother, Gynecia, recognizes and

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  succumbs to Pyrocles’s charms for what they are – those of an emi-nently desirable young man – the impeccably innocent Philoclea is simply baffled by emotions she cannot understand, surrendering in the end to a passion that ‘while she might prevent it, she did not feel it; now she felt it when it was past preventing’ ( NA, p. 240).

  But what is particularly interesting about the representation of Philoclea’s love in Arcadia, and particularly instructive in r
elation to the problems of interpretation Pamela encounters, both within the novel and without, is the painstaking analysis of a love that develops independently of any volition on the woman’s part. The notion of unconscious love seldom bears close analysis because of the inevitable question of a trigger, which the semantics of ‘falling’ in love does not entirely overcome. But in this instance, Sidney is able to construct an almost mechanical procedure that transports Philoclea from curiosity, through friendly interest, to admiration, imitation, and finally love. However contrived the circumstances, there is a logic of sorts to Philoclea’s ignorance of her own feelings – though the ingenuity of Sidney’s account reminds us that this is a phenomenon that normally resists rational explanation. But, in theory anyway, Sidney is able to portray an unconscious love that develops independently of desire. Such a notion is, however, much more difficult to support when the hero and heroine are not incontrovertibly ‘made for each other’, and when the hero’s moral character does not proclaim him incontrovertibly worthy of the esteem that might inspire love. In Sidney’s aristocratic dreamworld, equality of rank, beauty, and goodness guarantees the ‘rightness’ of the union, and the lovers, in finding their way around the obstacles that beset them, fulfill the destiny implicit in their mirrored perfections. In Richardson’s Pamela, however, the rightness of the union has to be confirmed in defiance of the disparity in rank, and in defiance of behaviour on Mr B’s part that is hardly conducive to gratitude or esteem.

  Richardson’s Pamela in fact uses the disparity in rank to defend herself against the imputation that she had been in love with Mr B

  rather longer than she cares to admit, though her defence does not exclude a prior unconscious love. After Lady Davers has been reconciled to her brother’s marriage, she begins to interrogate Pamela as to precisely when she dates her love for Mr B:

  ‘… I believe [says Lady Davers after reading Pamela’s letters], if the truth were known, you loved the wretch not a little… ’. ‘While my trials lasted, madam’, answered I, ‘I had not a thought of any thing, but to preserve my innocence; I did not, I could not, think of love’.

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  ‘But tell me truly’, said she, ‘did you not love him all the time?’

  ‘I had always, madam’, answered I, ‘a great reverence for my master, and thought highly of all his good actions; and, though I abhorred his attempts upon me, yet I could not hate him; and always wished him well; but I did not know, it was love. Indeed, I had not the presumption’. (pp. 471–2)50

  ‘Prettily said’, Lady Davers observes, but as Mr B has earlier commented,

  ‘for equivocation … no Jesuit ever went beyond’ Pamela (p. 270). As we have already seen, the prohibition on loving first had come to be widely understood as a matter of policy or custom rather than virtue, and there are strong pragmatic reasons for Pamela to deny prior love51 – though prudence would also dictate that the possibility of her having loved Mr B all the time should not be made to seem entirely ludicrous. ‘Did you not love him all the time?’ in fact raises the crucial issue in the debate that accompanied the publication of Pamela, a debate that can be reduced to a question of timing: when does Pamela fall in love with Mr B (or, for the more virulent ‘Anti-Pamelists’, when does she conceive a passion for him or his fortune)? The question of timing is, as we have seen, one that previous romance writers have addressed, or circumvented, with sometimes stunning resourcefulness, but it has seldom before been quite so vital to the heroine’s moral well-being. Fictional heroines have in the past fallen in love above their station; fictional heroines have also in the past fallen in love with men who have offered them violence. But Pamela is unusual, if not unique, not so much in falling in love above her station, and with a man who has offered her violence, but rather in having to rely entirely upon her own word for the purity of her motives in doing so.

  Pamela’s defence against Lady Davers’s probing and cajoling amounts simply to the (quite reasonable) insistence that, while under siege from Mr B, love was the last thing on her mind. The real problem, however, is not that her ‘great reverence’ for her master, despite his abhorrent attempts on her, might have supported an unconscious love, but that his flattering attentions (and even, conceivably, his unwelcome attentions), together with his fine person, might also support an unconscious desire. And it is unconscious desire, rather than unconscious love, that provokes suspicion of Pamela’s intentions, since unconscious desire provides an unconscious motive.

  Writing to her parents, Pamela stakes her virtue on blameless ignorance and, more crucially, no prospects:

  ‘I must own to you, that I shall never be able to think of any body in the world but him! Presumption! you will say; and so it is: but

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  love, I imagine, is not a voluntary thing – Love, did I say! But come, I hope not: at least it is not, I hope, gone so far, as to make me very uneasy: for I know not how it came, nor when it began; but it has crept, crept, like a thief, upon me; and before I knew what was the matter, it looked like love.’ (p. 283)

  Pamela makes it very clear that, if this is love, she expects nothing to come of it. What Sidney refers to as ‘love’s harbinger, wishing’ (p. 239), has played no part, she insists, in the development of her affection, and, by inference, has played no part in her behaviour: her heart might have betrayed her by letting love slip in without consultation, but,

  ‘wicked thing that it is, it has deceived nobody else’ (p. 285).

  Unconscious love untainted by desire thus performs an important function in Pamela: it provides Mr B with the reassurance of a preference that defies self-interest: Pamela’s love will allow her to think of no one else, but it will lead to nothing but a desultory disquiet. This is precisely what Mr B needs to know – that he is preferred above all men, and preferred only for his innate worth – and Pamela’s letters provide her with the opportunity for the kind of indirection in speaking her mind on the subject of love that earlier romance heroines pursue by rather more oblique means – by addressing the object of their affections when he is comatose, for example, or by sending a message through another.

  (Weamys’s Helena, for example, pleads for Amphialus’s love over his unconscious body, and later asks Philoclea to order him to love her, Helena, as punishment for offences against Philoclea.) In Pamela’s case, what might seem like a licence to reinterpret past behaviour as evidence of the heroine’s desire is in fact an assertion of a love that has no end in view – though only if we can believe that Pamela writes only for her parents. As Warner rightly points out, ‘to avoid the reality of virtue being contaminated by the rhetorically motivated performance of virtue written directly for Mr. 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’.52 From this point of view, it is significant that Pamela thinks twice about her admission of unconscious love, recording in her journal the memorandum to reconsider whether this ‘confession of … weakness’ should be torn out of her writing or not shown to her parents once she gets home (p. 284). This may be an effective ploy, on Richardson’s part, to emphasize the intended audience, but it is made at the expense of Pamela’s candour, emphasizing also the thin line that she must tread between prudence and calculation.

  The thinness of this line is most clearly apparent in the defining crisis of Pamela’s and Mr B’s relationship, which occurs, not when he

  136 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre attempts to rape her or when he frees her and then asks her to return, but when he asks her to tell him what to do – in effect asking her to come half way. The scene in question begins with Mr B praising Pamela’s uncommon discernment, and swearing that he cannot live without her – a phrase midway through its romantic evolution, no longer presaging a lover sighing his way into oblivion, nor in its current apotheosis, understood as just so many words, but here
meaning, more ominously, that he will have her. But unable to persuade Pamela to be his mistress, and unable to bear the thought of marriage, even if it were with someone of superior degree, let alone with someone the world would judge so far beneath him, yet unable also to give Pamela up, he enlists her as his adviser. ‘What can I do?’ he asks – again and again:

  ‘tell me … what you think I ought to do, and what you would have me do’; ‘Speak out … and tell me, what you think I ought to do’; ‘But tell me still more explicitly, what you would advise me to do in the case’

  (pp. 251–2). From his persistence in pursuing a candid response, it is clear that Mr B knows what he is asking Pamela to do: to declare her hand before he has unconditionally offered his. And it is also clear that Pamela understands what she has to do, especially in the face of his condescension, which requires all of her ‘poor discretion, to ward off the blow’ to her ‘most guarded thoughts’ (p. 252). Like Sidney’s Pamela she insists on the decorum of class hierarchy (though, of course, the relative ranking is inverted, and the servant must remind the master of the dignity he is abandoning); like Sidney’s Pamela also, she is hardest beset by gratitude (there are no bears at large, but, as with Musidorus, the woman is pursued at some expense of caste). But Pamela’s predicament is not going to be solved by the reassertion of the natural order, and her response is to retreat behind the very real disparity in rank (‘were I the first lady in the land … I could tell you’ [p. 252]) and to say what the policing of her desires has, throughout her ordeal, enabled her to say: ‘I know not the man breathing I would wish to marry’ (p. 228, our emphasis); ‘ I never yet saw the man to whom I wished to be married’