(p. 254, our emphasis); ‘I have not the least shadow of a wish or thought in favour of any man living’ (p. 254, our emphasis).
‘Love, true love, is my only motive’
‘What is a wish’, Pamela later observes, ‘but the acknowledged want of power, and a demonstration of one’s poverty in everything but will’
(p. 368). Good girls do not wish for anything: their wills are not their own, and their choices are determined for them – as Pamela reminds
Poor in Everything But Will 137
Mr Williams, ‘while I have a father and mother, I am not my own mistress’ (p. 186). But as Mrs Jewkes sceptically retorts, ‘Such art, such caution, such cunning, for thy years’ (p.186), and it is true that prudence as much as goodness dictates that Pamela refrain from entertaining the possibility of a future with anyone, but more especially Mr B.
‘O sir … what do you bid me look up to?’ (p. 277), she shrewdly inter-jects when he talks of what he might be able to bring himself to do should she prove worthy. Consequently, until she is safe from misinterpretation, and in particular from the looseness with which ‘consent’
can be construed, Pamela’s wishes stay resolutely focused on the one thing for which she has a right to ask: to go home. Whenever she is backed into a corner, she falls back on this plea, because, until she returns after he has finally taken her at her word and allowed her to return home, Mr B has never made an unconditional offer – which alone would constitute a contract that he ought to honour.53 Thanks to the gypsy’s sham-marriage warning, Pamela does not have to presume on her equity in the relationship by openly questioning the nature of the commitment he offers; the need to protect herself from the possibility of another plot allows her to avoid appearing to claim a consideration she does not know she has earned. But a lady of Mr B’s rank would not be satisfied without a firm pledge of his intentions, and he would not be bound by a declaration that did not extend into the future: ‘ at present I am sincere in what I say’ (p. 253, our emphasis),
‘Cannot you take me as I am at present? I have told you that I am now sincere and undesigning, whatever I may be hereafter’ (p. 256, our emphasis).
When Pamela receives the gypsy’s warning, she fears that she has already gone too far, having ‘as good as confessed’ that she loved him (p. 262). Mr B’s subsequent anger suggests that he agrees: having declared (albeit still conditionally) that ‘ if my mind hold … I will endeavour to defy the world’ (p.276, our emphasis), he is infuriated with Pamela’s obduracy when, mindful of the threat of a sham marriage, she again retreats behind the disparity in rank and asks to be returned home, dismissing marriage as too good for her and beneath him. Having seen her come so far, he is incensed when it appears that daintiness – a too nice respect for the protocols of virtue – rather than candour prevails.
Pamela puzzles over why a rash half-word should turn kindness to hatred: ‘Sure I did not say so much!’ (p. 277); ‘I thought I did not say so much!’ (p. 278); ‘But did I say so much?’ (p. 278); ‘Surely I did not say so much, that he should be so very angry’ (p. 280). We have all done
138 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre it – said the rash half-word, or persisted a fraction too long with an argument that evades the truth, or made ungenerous return for a con-cession magnanimously bestowed. But while this ‘perverse chiasmic pattern’ of approach and withdrawal, as Warner describes it, with its
‘nuanced but emotionally fraught exchanges’, has long been praised for its ‘insight into the psychology of love’, it is not really a love problem that is being worked out in these scenes.54 Basically it is a question of trust: Pamela’s honour resides in her chastity, which she must guard at all cost, but her caution actually increases her danger, since it means not trusting Mr B, whatever his assurances, thereby impugning his honour, and, as he sees it, forfeiting the safety that his
‘word’ would have ensured. As Mr B puts it, ‘your doubts will only beget cause of doubts’ (p. 257). To the extent that love is implicated in this strategic manoeuvring, it resides in his insistence on ‘a fervent and unquestionable love’, where there is not ‘the least shadow of reserve’
(p. 307), though such a love also serves much more pragmatic concerns, given the loss of face that Mr B has suffered, and will continue to suffer in loving beneath his station: ‘In the choice I have made, it is impossible I should have any view to my interest. Love, true love, is my only motive’ (p. 307).
The disparity in rank is a common enough obstacle to love in romance, but the reality of that disparity is seldom a social problem that has to be lived with. Pamela’s matchless beauty and immaculate virtue may, like her romance predecessors’, testify to an innate gentility, but it is a gentility that will not be realized, as in earlier romances, in her pedigree. In Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), for example, when Dorastus, a prince, falls in love with a shepherdess, Fawnia, it is the occasion of euphuistic sentiment in both parties as they debate the wisdom of an unequal match: Dorastus tries to talk himself out of a shameful passion, yet wonders ‘how a countrey maide could affoord such courtly behaviour’; Fawnia is conscious that since ‘he is a Prince, respecting his honor’, it were far better ‘to dye with griefe, than to live with shame’, and far ‘seemlier … to whistle as a shepheard, than to sigh as a lover’.55 They are the same issues that trouble Pamela and Mr B, but they are always hypothetical rather than real, since the reader knows that Fawnia is indeed a princess, and the evidence is always at hand to prove it.
Commenting on the ‘Pamelist’ (as opposed to ‘Anti-Pamelist’) sequels to and adaptations of Richardson’s novel, Richard Gooding observes that in these works, where ‘the romance conventions of hidden birth and natural hierarchy’ are reinstated, ‘one never senses … that a servant
Poor in Everything But Will 139
might find herself irreconcilably at odds with the demands of her position’.56 The kind of trials to which Mr B subjects Pamela – and his apparent insensitivity to the suffering he causes – bears certain similarities to the traditional romance motif identified by Winfried Schleiner as
‘female patience willfully tested’, often taking the form of ‘patient Griselda’ stories, where the disparity in rank licenses an arbitrary trial of obedience to the husband’s or lover’s will,57 but in Pamela the trial for much of the time focuses on Pamela’s resistance to Mr B’s will, and she insists (as the patient Griselda typically does not) that her ‘ soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess’ (p. 197). Yet, even if virtue is the only true nobility (p. 83), the reality of domestic service means that to reject her master’s advances she must challenge his authority in drawing the line between appropriate and inappropriate behests. And even obedience to legitimate commands comes charged with erotic potential. When he insists that she wait on him after proving herself too refractory to share his table, her exemplary response, ‘Sir … I think it an honour to be allowed to wait upon you’ (p. 223), even as she is so cowed she can barely stand upright, acquires overtones of a salacious abjection that Mr B clearly relishes, ordering ‘saucy-face’ to pour him another glass, and complaining, ‘I suppose I shall have some of your tears in my wine’ (p. 225).
Mr B’s need to establish that Pamela will not take ‘insolent advantage’ of his passion for her (p. 245) can only be satisfied by a compliance with every legitimate demand and a willingness to oblige in cases where his rights extend only to asking. But as Pamela well knows, a willingness to oblige on small matters can be construed as ‘indirect consent’ (p. 174) to the larger ‘vile’ design. Mr B’s concerns are understandable, given the risk he perceives in loving below his rank, but the disparity in rank gives an ugly edge to the submissive female will imaged in Wroth’s ‘sweet Corne’ bending ‘humbly that way … it is blowne’ ( U, I: 422). In Wroth’s image, however, the woman is in no danger, as Pamela is, of being ‘torn up by the roots’ if she resist the tempest (p. 467), and when the master tells his serv
ant, ‘when you are so good as to bend like the slender reed, to the hurricane, rather than, like the sturdy oak, to resist it, you will always stand firm in my kind opinion; while a contrary conduct would uproot you, with all your excellencies, from my soul’ (p. 462), the cruder implications of the metaphor, and of the gender roles embodied, are in danger of manifesting themselves in a literal threat.
Much of the rhetorical force of Richardson’s novel derives from the fact that Pamela is no run-of-the-mill fictional heroine precisely
140 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre because of the commonplace nature of her domestic circumstances as a young maidservant fending off the unwelcome attentions of her master. Yet Pamela hardly takes a step that has not been taken before her by romance heroines of more immaculate pedigree but no less immaculate virtue, and within the accustomed scenario of love overcoming all obstacles the problems she faces are different only to the extent that they are embodied within a single action, and a single male. But there is another dimension to her trials that requires modifications to the customary tactics of the fictional heroine if she is to accommodate her virtue to what Raymond Williams describes as
‘the standards which govern human behaviour in … real situations.’58
Opening up the heroine’s mind opens her also to a kind of scrutiny that imposes even greater constraints, and the next chapter explores in more detail the signs of strain that emerge when the conventions of romantic love are transported from the rarefied world of romance into the more mundane practical realities of domestic life.
6
Turret Love and Cottage Hate:
Coming Down to Earth in
Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote
Richardson’s continuation of Pamela in Pamela 2 and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote may seem an odd pairing – one so sober and earnest, the other so mischievous – but they are both explicitly addressing the question that Pamela herself asks in Pamela 2: ‘what is the instruction, that can be gathered’ from romance ‘for the conduct of common life?’ ( P2, IV: 425). Lennox’s novel, in which a young woman almost destroys herself by believing rather too literally in the romances on which her imagination has fed, reminds us that the question is itself symptomatic of the disease it addresses, since it assumes that fiction does, and even should, provide models for life that readers can imitate. The dangers that novels might represent for young, and particularly for female, readers were perceived with an escalating anxiety in the eighteenth century, due in part to the fact that the format in which much fiction was now published – in volumes small enough to be carried around and read in private, and cheap enough to be pur-chased from a personal allowance – meant that it was much more difficult to control what was being read.1 The realism of novelistic techniques also fostered a literalism in reading strategies, on the part of both the novel’s critics and its supposed victims, that was extrapolated beyond the novel to fiction in general and romance in particular.
Lennox’s novel, in the very act of ridiculing Arabella’s application of romance precepts to the conduct of common life, highlights the absurdity of, not so much the romances with which Arabella is infatuated, as a reading practice that admits of the possibility of such naive identification ever taking place. Pamela 2, in contrast, offers rather more instruction for the conduct of common life than is compatible with narrative interest, though, in taking Pamela and Mr B from the realms of romance into the domestic reality of marriage, Richardson’s 141
142 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre novel also reinforces Arabella’s understanding of how little of a story remains once a woman ‘condescends to reward [her suitor] with her Hand; and all her Adventures are at an End for the future’ ( FQ, p. 138).
Consigning herself to the protection of a responsible male, she shelters herself from adventures that expose her to the hazards of chance.
Instruction for the conduct of common life
In Markham’s English Arcadia, Melidora, daughter of Musidorus and Pamela, is intent on keeping Diatassan at arm’s length, not allowing him to tag along while she prepares for the next day’s hunt because, as she says, ‘the turret loue is the cottage hate’ (Markham, I: 97). She is affirming, perhaps, no more than the commonplace that familiarity breeds contempt. But it is also true that love – or more particularly romantic love – is a good deal easier to sustain in the turret than in the cottage, where the practical realities of lived experience can have difficulty accommodating the aspirations of romance. In Pamela 2, Richardson’s sequel to his first novel, marriage is described as coming as a nasty shock to young women courted in the turret, where they are encouraged to think themselves ‘ above the gentlemen’, addressed with
‘reverence and respect’, and accorded the status of ‘angel among men’
(IV: 445). The married state, in contrast, ‘is a kind of state of humiliation for a young lady’ (IV: 446), since she must then consent to be subordinate to her husband, with no will of her own. Richardson’s heroine, the ‘low-born cottager’ raised by marriage to a more exalted condition, is somewhat better prepared by her humble upbringing for the deference and obedience that a husband might demand, and she concedes that it was ‘no small motive’ for Mr B that he could expect from her ‘more humility, more submission, than he thought he had reason to flatter himself would be paid him by a lady equally born and educated’ (P2, III: 73). But in this novel, the ‘low-born cottager’ is also expected to provide a more down-to-earth perspective on genteel society, and Lady Davers, for one, looks forward to a healthy dose of that ‘truth and nature … which we are generally so much lifted above by our conditions, that we hardly know what they are’ (III: 38–9).
That the result is more conduct book than narrative should hardly come as a surprise, given that, as Eaves and Kimpel argue, ‘there was nothing which could happen’ in the sequel without undermining the basic premise of the first novel – that Pamela’s indubitable virtue has been rewarded by her marriage to Mr B.2 The exact nature of that reward might profitably be clarified (and Mrs Barbauld’s shrewd obser-
Turret Love and Cottage Hate 143
vation that Richardson’s sequel is ‘less a continuation than the author’s defence of himself’ suggests one way of approaching such a clarification3), but Richardson’s Preface to the sequel (published as Volumes III and IV of Pamela) promises nothing out of the ordinary except ‘rules, equally new and practicable, inculcated, throughout the whole, for the general conduct of life’ (III: vii). Richardson’s Preface also advertises his reluctance even to publish the sequel, though he forgoes the opportunity to explain the role of other unauthorized sequels in provoking him into print (the Preface not being, perhaps, the safest place for the ostensible editor of Pamela’s letters to argue right of ownership of letters that the ending of prior editions of the first novel suggest do not exist4). His intention of providing ‘Instruction in a genteel and usual Married Life’, while not satisfying the appetite for narrative of some of the readers who corresponded with him,5 at least appeals to his heroine’s literary taste. Asked whether she was conver-sant with much in the way of novels, plays, and romances, Pamela acknowledges that ‘there were very few novels and romances that my lady would permit me to read; and those I did, gave me no great pleasure’ (IV: 424). Her objections are similar to those voiced by Richardson in his Preface, where he recommends his book as avoiding precisely those ‘romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery’ (III: vi) that Pamela objects to in novels and romance: either they dealt so much in the marvellous and improbable, or were so unnaturally inflaming to the passions, and so full of love and intrigue, that hardly any of them but seemed calculated to fire the imagination, rather than to inform the judgment. Tilts and tourna-ments, breaking of spears in honour of a mistress, swimming over rivers, engaging with monsters, rambling in search of adventures, making unnatural difficulties, in order to shew the knight-errant’s prowess in overcoming
them, is all that is required to constitute the hero in such pieces. And what principally distinguishes the character of the heroine, is, when she is taught to consider her father’s house as an enchanted castle, and her lover as the hero who is to dissolve the charm, and to set her at liberty from one confinement, in order to put her into another, and, too probably, a worse: to instruct her how to climb walls, drop from windows, leap precipices, and do twenty other extravagant things, in order to shew the mad strength of a passion she ought to be ashamed of; to make parents and guardians pass for tyrants, and the voice of reason to be drowned in that of indiscreet love, which exalts the other sex, and debases her
144 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre own. And what is the instruction, that can be gathered from such pieces, for the conduct of common life?(IV: 424–5).6
The rhetorical force of the concluding question is not lost on Pamela’s own audience – one member of which (a Miss Stapylton) has already been taking instruction in ‘indiscreet love’ – though the question also appears to endorse a level of literalism in reading practices from which Pamela’s own story is not safe. That Pamela was not designed as an incitement to maids to aspire to marriage with their masters apparently needed reaffirming in Pamela 2, where Mr B makes clear that the conditions attaching to such an elevation must exclude all but his own dear Pamela.7 But the practice of reading novels for instruction in the conduct of common life, while not new, was certainly complicated by an ease of transference from fiction to reality that, as Samuel Johnson acknowledged, made the new species of writing potentially more of a social danger than the old. Like Lady Davers, Johnson could applaud in writing such as Pamela’s the wholesome corrective of ‘truth and nature’:
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