Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

26 Brown, p. 142. We might ask why Richardson should court this danger in the first place by allowing his heroine to go fishing – why he did not simply have her engage in some other, less allusive, pastoral activity – though Brown argues the danger is inherent in the title, Pamela.

  27 Peter Shaw, The Reflector (London: Printed for T. Longman, 1750), p. 14, quoted in Ivor Indyk, ‘Interpretative Relevance, and Richardson’s Pamela’, Southern Review 16 (1983): 32.

  28 Brown, p. 142.

  29 Lois E. Bueler comments that the ‘concept of literature’ had changed by the eighteenth century, so that ‘instead of applying the topics and practicing the authoritative forms of the culture at large, the expressive text “consecrates the writer”, claiming to express individual experience, sanctify individual sensibility, and glorify the private voice’ ( The Tested Woman Plot: Women’s Choices, Men’s Judgments, and the Shaping of Stories [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001], p. 144). Our point is that a more highly developed interiority does not necessarily improve the female character’s lot.

  30 Betty Rizzo, ‘Renegotiating the Gothic’, in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula Backscheider (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 65.

  31 Janine Barchas, The Annotations in Lady Bradshaigh’s Copy of Clarissa (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1998), p. 85.

  32 His rejoinder follows hard on Lady Bradshaigh’s note, continuing down the left-hand margin, across the bottom of the page onto the facing page and along its right-hand margin, until he finally seems done, leaving off with ‘But no more – ’. Apparently, though, he could not contain himself and over the next five pages he continues to make his point by heavily marking up the text, underscoring words and whole sentences, adding vertical lines (both straight and wavy) and brackets in the margin, and occasionally resorting to the pictorial attention-seeking aid, the pointing hand (☞). (In Barchas’s edition four asterisks indicate an illegible word and double asterisks a ‘highly speculative reading’. Other editorial marks have been omitted.) 33 Barchas, pp. 85–6.

  34 Barchas, p. 9.

  35 In the eighteenth century ‘device’ did not as a matter of course include the sense of underhandedness. Johnson’s Dictionary lists four meanings: a contrivance or stratagem; a design, scheme, project, or speculation; an emblem on a shield; and invention or genius. Another sense of the word, referring to a mechanical contraption, was also common. It is perhaps significant, though, that the word was seldom used to refer to a design implemented by

  Notes 219

  a woman. In the 77 novels collected in the Chadwyck-Healey eighteenth-century fiction database, there are 58 ‘devices’, about half of them stratagems (rather than insignia or mechanical contrivances) and all except three are devised by men. Of these three, one belongs to Mrs Pickle (devised to keep her sister-in-law, Mrs Grizzle, out of her hair), one is imputed, unfairly, to Clarissa by her family, and one, tellingly, is of Mrs Cole’s devising for replicating virginity in Fanny Hill.

  36 Richardson, Clarissa, pp. 1233, 1265.

  37 Barchas, p. 98.

  38 Barchas, p. 87.

  39 Although modern critics tend to attack Pamela for not trying hard enough to extricate herself from Mr B’s clutches, Richardson’s early commentators, as Ivor Indyk points out, thought that she was already doing too much: Richardson’s early commentators object as much to Pamela’s active role in the novel as they do to the fact that this activity is rewarded by social elevation. The objection applies to all aspects of her activity – her letter-writing, her piety, her knowledge of sexual implication, her use of cloth-ing, her aggression and her submission, her verbal strength, her physical weakness. It also applies to the activity of thought, Pamela’s incessant reviewing of motive and consequence. These attributes, and thought in particular, evidently complicate Pamela’s presumed role as modest Virgin, chaste Bride and obliging Wife. (Indyk, p. 32.)

  40 William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684– 1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 187.

  41 Warner, pp. xv, 193.

  42 Warner, pp. 193, 194. The discussion of Pamela is part of a larger study of the early novel in relation to the print-media culture that, Warner insists, needs to be read in its entirety in order to grasp its ‘complex interplay’

  (p. xv).

  43 Warner, p. 194. Warner deliberately chooses for comparison ‘a character who could not be more different from Pamela’ (p. 194), but it is not only character that, in some respects at least, could not be more different.

  44 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 7.

  45 As Bueler points out in The Tested Woman Plot, Pamela’s satisfaction with her humble dress can be seen to partake in the long-standing tradition of the tested woman: ‘Like Griselda’s, part of Pamela’s test involves responding to status-signifying changes of dress with humility and grace’ (p. 157).

  46 It is sometimes argued that Mr B does not in fact recognize Pamela, which may well be true when he first glimpses her with her back towards him in the room he is about to enter. But once the action becomes close-up and personal, it is hard to take seriously Mr B’s professed ignorance of her true identity, though it is possible that the romance convention of total anonymity in disguise is allowed to confuse the issue.

  47 Warner, p. 196.

  48 Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 33.

  220 Notes

  49 Thomas Keymer, in his Introduction to his and Alice Wakely’s Oxford edition of Pamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), argues, for example, that ‘the failure of Pamela to obey her parents’ urgent advice to

  ‘flee this evil Great House and Man’ at the very beginning of the novel is not just a convenient plot device (without which there would be no story) but also ‘introduces psychological complications – a vivid sense of competing duties and desires which the heroine herself seems the last to spot’. Keymer argues that Richardson actually cultivates these ‘irruptions of mixed motive’, and that ‘the notorious obsession with the waistcoat, and Pamela’s anxiety

  … about Mr B.’s mishap while fording a stream (“What is the Matter, with all his ill Usage of me, that I cannot hate him?”), are among the indicators of divided consciousness that gave Richardson his early reputation for representing, as never before, “the inmost Recesses of [the] Mind”’ (p. xv). But while ‘divided consciousness’ and ‘secret impulses’ (p. xvi) may make better sense to the modern reader than Sidney’s explanation of Philoclea’s feelings for Zelmane, both can be seen as mechanisms for naturalizing the convention that love develops independently of human volition.

  50 As a comparison of the first edition and the final revised edition of Pamela suggests, Richardson seems to have been aware that this crucial issue needed bolstering. At the risk, perhaps, of bringing suspicions of Pamela’s credibility to the reader’s attention, he has added Lady Davers’s assurance to Pamela that she can afford to be perfectly candid, and removes (as elsewhere) the reference to Mr B’s ‘naughty’ actions, which could be miscon-strued as trivializing his offence. In the first edition, the corresponding passage reads as follows:

  I believe, if the Truth was known, you lov’d the Wretch not a little. While my Trials lasted, Madam, said I, I had not a Thought of any thing, but to preserve my Innocence; much less of Love.

  But tell me truly, said she, Did you not love him all the time? I had always, Madam, answer’d I, a great Reverence for my Master, and thought all his good Actions doubly good; and for his naughty ones, tho’

  I abhorr’d his Attempts upon me, yet I could not hate him; and always wish’d him well; but I did not know that it was Love. Indeed I had not the Presumption!’

  Sweet Girl! said she; that’s prettily said. ( Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, p. 452)

  51 Ch
apter 4 outlines a range of prudential reasons for a woman not to be seen to love first, but of particular interest in the context of the parallel Warner draws between Fantomina and Pamela is the advantage that Fantomina identifies in her series of disguises. The woman who is seen to love prior to an unequivocal commitment on the man’s part risks the ignominy of her affections being publicly slighted, and, quite apart from the objective of keeping Beauplaisir’s flame alive, Fantomina foresees that, should he prove false, she will ‘hear no Whispers’, ‘the odious Word Forsaken’ will never wound her ears, and it will not be in the power of her ‘Undoer himself’ to triumph over her (Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias [Peterborough: Broadview, 2004], p. 49). Not

  Notes 221

  everything the heroine does is solely in her sexual character; sometimes the

  ‘human creature’ has an agenda as well.

  52 Warner, p. 192.

  53 In Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Laura Gowing notes that ‘Vows of marriage had to be spoken in the present tense and unconditionally; promises in the future tense represented no more than an intention, and additions like “if my friends consent” made a contract conditional’ (p. 144).

  54 Warner, p. 190.

  55 Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, in The Descent of Euphues: Three Elizabethan Romance Stories, ed. James Winny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 97–101. Richardson certainly knew Dorastus and Fawnia by name. In Clarissa, the rake, Lovelace, blames this story for the threat of fire that in the middle of the night persuades Clarissa to unbolt, unbar, and unlock her door, defending himself against the suspicion that the fire was staged in order, as Clarissa puts it, to frighten her

  ‘almost naked into his arms’ (754), by insisting that the fire was real: ‘all owing to the carelessness of Mrs Sinclair’s cook-maid, who, having sat up to read the simple history of Dorastus and Faunia, when she should have been in bed, set fire to an old pair of calico window-curtains (723). The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia was the running title of Greene’s Pandosto and was frequently known by this name in reprintings and broadside redactions.

  56 Richard Gooding, ‘ Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7.2 (1995): 120, 121–2.

  57 Winfried Schleiner, ‘Rank and Marriage: A Study of the Motif of “Woman Willfully Tested”’, Comparative Literature Studies 9 (1972): 365. A number of critics have argued that the Griselda motif seems to inform Richardson’s depiction of his heroine’s trials. See, for example, Bueler, p. 157; James R. Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (1949; rpt. NY: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1966), p. 109; Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 11; Barbara Belyea, ‘Romance and Richardson’s Pamela’, English Studies in Canada 10.4 (1984): 409.

  58 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 113.

  Chapter 6

  Turret Love and Cottage Hate: Coming Down to

  Earth in Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote

  1 In the Introduction to The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Taylor point out that by the late seventeenth century ‘a broad-sheet ballad could be bought for 1d, while 24-page chapbooks might cost up to 6d’, and while books were ‘substantially more expensive … ranging from a few shillings to several guineas’, their availability in ‘part-issues, cheaper “reprint” series and a flourishing second-hand market did assist many modest buyers’ (8).

  2 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, p. 149.

  3 Barbauld, I: lxxvii.

  222 Notes

  4 As Florian Stuber points out, ‘the first four editions of Pamela (November 1740, February 1741, March 1741 and May 1741) close with the words,

  “Here end the Letters of Pamela.” Only in the fifth edition (September 1741) is the sentence emended to, “Here end, at present, the Letters of Pamela”’ (‘ Pamela II: “ Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”’, in New Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero [London: Macmillan, 1996], p. 54).

  5 Richardson, Selected Letters, p. 53. In the same letter (to Stephen Duck), Richardson refers to the well-intentioned advice of an ‘excellent Physician’

  who ‘was so good as to give me a Plan to break Legs and Arms and to fire Mansion Houses to create Distresses’ (p. 52), but maintains he is prepared to forgo profits for instruction, conscious ‘that there cannot, naturally, be the room for Plots, Stratagem and Intrigue in the present Volumes as in the first’ (p. 53). (See also note 29 below.)

  6 The reference to the romance heroine’s facility in dropping from windows has disappeared (among many other things) from the Everyman edition, which was based on Charles Cooke’s 1811 abridgement – perhaps because it reflects poorly on Pamela, who window-drops herself when she is escaping from Lady Davers.

  7 The conditions cover four pages (P2, III: 330–3). Elizabeth Inchbald makes an interesting observation in her Preface to The Maid of the Mill, in the collection The British Theatre, regarding the ‘equalizing’ tendencies of Pamela (on which The Maid is, somewhat circuitously, based). She suggests that although the novel, like the play, ‘most laudably, teaches man to marry where his heart is fixed, it unfortunately encourages woman to fix hers, where ambition alone may direct her choice; or where, sometimes, her hopes ought never to aspire’. Even so, she observes, Pamela’s marriage was

  ‘the delight of every reader, at the time that book was first published, and for some years after – but when admiration began to abate, ridicule was substituted in its stead; and a marriage for love, contracted by a man of quality, with his inferior in birth and fortune, was, with poor Pamela’s preferment, held in the highest contempt’ (Preface to The Maid of the Mill, in The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays, … with Biographical and Critical Remarks by Mrs. Inchbald, 25 vols [London: 1808], XVII: 4–5).

  8 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 4 (31 March 1750), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 16 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–90), III: 19.

  9 Johnson, III: 21.

  10 Johnson, III: 21.

  11 McKeon, p. 52.

  12 For a comprehensive account of the perceived dangers of fiction in this period, see Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750– 1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  13 ‘M. d. L., Chirugien’, quoted in a review of De l’Homme, et de la Femme in The Monthly Review (July 1773), for example, warns that ‘[a] young girl, instead of running about and playing, reads, perpetually reads; and at 20, becomes full of vapours, instead of being qualified for the duties of a good wife, or nurse’ (p. 543). In the dramatic interlude, Half an Hour after Supper, Mr Sturdy is more worried about the disruption to his household, com-

  Notes 223

  plaining to his sister Tabitha: ‘It’s enough to provoke a saint to see how these cursed novels interrupt the whole order of one’s house! I can neither go to dinner, supper, or to bed, if you happen to be in a d—d “interesting crisis”, as you call it’ ([London: 1789], p. 8).

  14 In ‘On Novel Writing’, for example, Henry Mackenzie (in The Lounger 20, 18 June 1785) criticizes novels that deliver their imaginative pleasures without any corresponding ‘labour of thought’ (p. 77). Other common complaints were that the habit of reading novels ‘breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge; withdraws the attention from nature, and truth; and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and too often with criminal propensities’ (James Beattie, ‘On Fable and Romance’, in Dissertations Moral and Critical [London: 1783], p. 574).

  15 Oliver Goldsmith, for example, advised his brother against allowing his son to risk the disaffection that ficti
on encourages: ‘Above all things, let him never touch a romance or novel: those paint beauty in colours more charming than nature; and describe happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss. They teach the youthful mind to sigh after beauty and happiness which never existed; to despise the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more than she ever gave’ (Letter to his brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, February 1759, in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham, 4 vols [London: John Murray, 1854], IV: 418).

  16 According to the writer known as ‘the Sylph’, novels ‘sap the very foundations of virtue’ by liberating the passions. Even fiction that professes to imitate life was thought liable to ‘generate and promote a corruption of manners’, for, ‘under the pretence of following nature’, such novels ‘take off that curb from the passions, which reason and religion would impose’

  ( Sylph 5 [6 October 1795], p. 35). Less sweepingly, Mackenzie locates the

  ‘principal danger of novels, as forming a mistaken and pernicious system of morality’ in the ‘rivalship of virtues and duties’: ‘The duty to parents is contrasted with the ties of friendship and of love; the virtues of justice, of prudence, of economy, are put in competition with the exertions of generosity, of benevolence, and of compassion’ (79).

  17 While fiction was sometimes criticized for cultivating an artificially refined and mawkish sensibility, there were also complaints that it redirected tender feelings away from real afflictions and concentrated them instead on the more elegant distresses of its imaginary heroes and heroines. ‘The Sylph’

  claims, for example, to ‘have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread’ (36–37). In Half an Hour after Supper, Mr Sturdy also takes exception to his wife’s defence of fiction on the grounds that her daughters have been taught ‘taste – and sentiment and sensibilities’ (8). Sturdy retorts:

  ‘Sensibility!’ for what? – to blubber and roar over distresses that never existed, and steel your hearts against that which surrounds us. Could I collect more than a crown amongst ye all the other day, for poor Bob Martin, his distressed wife, and seven children, all ill at once, and not a shilling to buy them necessaries? – because, truly, their distress wasn’t elegant’ (p. 8).