Pamela and It Worked Out

          We ended last week’s class discussion talking about the ways in which Richardson describes physical beauty versus ugly forms. I am still thinking about this discussion and I want to expand on it a bit as it continues to manifest in the second half of the book. For the most part, everyone notably good like Pamela was described as beautiful; those blatantly bad were described as particularly unattractive ugly. Richardson never really goes into detail when he describes beauty; Pamela’s beauty is stressed, for example, in the letters back and forth to her parents (in fact her father even warns her not to let men’s compliments on her beauty get to her head) but what her beauty actually looked like is never really discussed. In start contrast, the ugly are described vividly as we have seen in Pamela’s description of Mrs. Jewkes. It’s as if Richardson is warning his readers that if they are not moral and virtuous people, their wrong doing will manifest itself physically; and if they are virtuous, like Pamela, they will attain indescribable beauty.

While this last assumption may be a bit of a stretch, my thoughts were further reinforced when Richardson reinforced these ideals of virtuous physical manifestations. For example, when he describes Lady Davers in Vol II he notes, “In the Character of Lady Davers, let the Proud and the Highborn see the Deformity of unreasonable Passion, and how weak and ridiculous such Persons must appear, who suffer themselves, as is usually the Case…” (456). Accordingly, he uses visuals of physical deformations to describe her passions. While we aren’t entirely sure if she is physically ugly, and perhaps it is her treatment towards Pamela and her general attitude which manifests deformity is being described, Richardson nonetheless gives this and many other examples of the ways poor character is associated with physical appearance. No one wants to be ugly.

            On a different note, class difference plays a very important role in the way the tale unfolds. Pamela is, in part, an exceptional tale because she is a servant who remains virtuous despite the temptations of wealth offered to her by Mr. B as well as the vulnerabilities she endures being away from home. While we have speculated whether or not Richardson cheats a little with making Pamela technically the daughter of middle class parents, I believe Richardson still follows through with the fact that she is a servant when the action unfolds—and, in any case her parents were experiencing difficult financial burdens.

Towards the end of the tale, Richardson places a very revealing conversation between Mr. B and his sister Lady Davers on class relations and marriages, and the reasons why his marriage with Pamela was able to work at all without affecting his status as an aristocrat. In this conversation, Lady Davers is angry of Mr. B’s choice to marry a servant from the lower class, and asks him what the difference would have been if she had married one of her father’s grooms. After asking her to put her pride aside, he says, “The Difference is, a Man ennobles the Woman he takes, be she who she will; and adopts her into his own Rank, be it what it will; But a Woman, tho’s ever so nobly born, debases herself by a mean Marriage, and Descends from her own Rank, to his she stoops to” (422). To Mr. B, and as perhaps a general reflection of the way double standards worked during Richardson’s time, a man can’t generally go lower in class ranks, whereas an aristocratic woman can descend in nobility by marrying someone in lower ranks. He continues to note that the reason is because the man is the head of the household. He asks rhetorically, “But, when a Lady descends to marry a Groom, is not that Groom her head, as her husband? For what Lady of Quality ought to respect another, who has made so sordid a Choice, and set a Groom above her? (422). Accordingly, Mr. B pleas to his sister that he is not making any risky rank choices in terms of his social status by marrying Pamela, because it is the man who determines his wife’s rank regardless of where in echelon she starts off. This likely served many advent lower class readers who took this text to be a true account as moral compass towards a hopeful destiny.

I look forward to further exploring these class issues in our next meeting on Thursday. I wonder how people of different classes received the text. While we know that the tale created a media event, and did have some backlash, I wonder how long it remained influential on its own for and whether or not it was acclaim was affected by the later parodies?