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?

A Novel of Letters

A striking aspect of the novel Pamela is the form it takes as a series of letters written to her parents describing the various circumstances she finds herself in in which she supposedly has no control. Thus far, we have discussed the form of the novel as a venue which can expose the interior of characters through the scenarios they are put in. In Hayood’s Love In Excess, we were able to understand the motives behind the main characters. Melliora struggled between preserving her virtue despite the countless advances of Count, and Alyvosa was always enraged with jealousy; in the midst of all of these unfolding events, the omniscient narrator walked us through the emotions and motives. Last weeks, Robinson Crusoe, we went further deep into the interior of a single character’s narration through his struggles on the island. He told us his thoughts at every moment of recollection. This week, we have a combination of the letters in Haywood’s novel and the interiority of Crusoe’s first person narration in the letters written by Pamela that tell the story. Drawing such connections on what we have read so far, it is important to explore the epistolary form and why Richardson would choose to use it for the majority of the story’s narration.

Last week, Cooper discussed Pamela in his presentation of Ian Watt’s argument on the teleological rise of the novel. Richardson’s audience was increasingly comprised of lower class women who had time to read, and his own concerns included moral construction and matrimonial affairs. As the title, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, indicates, the novel is about a virtue that is rewarded—thus instructing the lower class on how to remain virtuous and maintain their sexual agency regardless of circumstance. Here, Richardson shows how a lower class woman, a servant, whom were typically not virtuous or considered women of high moral regard, upholds her morality and in the end lives happily ever after. Back to why Richardson chose the novel form, the genre enables him to demonstrate the interiority of her feelings as she dodges each sexual advance by Mr. B and finds herself in different scenario. The epistolary form especially enables the interiority as they are written from her perspective; the interiority of her thoughts are reinforced especially when she is held at Mr. B’s country house (Lincolnshire Estate) and continues to write even though she is unsure that her parents will ever receive the letters. Since she is so uncertain, at that point she is keeping a sort of journal (she titles it that at the beginning of Vol II).

Just like Melliora who maintained her virtue and Count’s advances, and in the end was rewarded with a marriage to the charismatic nobleman, Pamela, too, has resisted the advances of Mr. B and we see at the end of this first part she is on her way to marrying him. The main difference is that Melliora wasn’t of a lower status as Pamela was a servant. Accordingly, Richardson writes this tale to show that regardless of status, a woman should maintain her virtue and will get rewarded accordingly.  

Liking and Loving

In Eliza Haywood’s Love In Excess, I was particularly interested with the contrast she makes between loving and liking early on in Part the Third. Despite his murder of Alovysa, and his self exile, Count cannot help but dwell over his love for Melliora. To that extent, Haywood nearly implicates that he is experiencing true love for Melliora, a love which will never die regardless of circumstance.

The theme of true love is recurrent throughout the tale, but perhaps most prominently expressed by the narrator (or Haywood, again are they the same?) on pages 164 and 165 as it navigates through the differences in liking an individual and loving them as Count does with Melliora. Here, a major difference between liking and loving is the ability or not to move onto something else when the lovers are posed with difficulty. She notes that lovers who to move on with other distractions when “inconvenience” gets into their relationship are not really lovers. She notes, “Such a sort of passion may be properly called liking, but falls widely short of love,” and continues to describe love as something that “…survives in absence, and disappointments, it endures, unchilled the wintry blasts of cold indifference and neglect, and continues its blaze, even in a storm of hatred and ingratitude, and reason, pride, or a just sensibility of conscious worth, in vain oppose it” (165). Count was instantly distracted from his marriage to Alovysa upon meeting Melliora, and was unable to rid himself of his love for her despite all of the obstacles that came before their marriage to one another. Count’s difference in feeling is that between liking and loving someone, and the narrator suggests the bland indifference in settling for the former.

As the tale unfolds, it may be implicated that such a love is worth pursuit. After all, “Love creates intolerable torments! unspeakable joys! raises us to highest heaven of happiness, or sinks us to the lowest hell of misery” (165). In the end, Count ends up with Melliora, despite the struggles it took to reach that point. The feelings of joy and compassion still outweighed the difficulties in pursuit of her, and perhaps this can be taken as a larger theme Haywood was trying to push forward regarding marriages in the eighteenth century. During the time when love was largely based on preserving wealth, most marriages were hardly based on love as much as they were based on land ownership and aristocratic lineage. In Part the First, Count marries Alovysa in order to preserve wealth and status—characteristics traditionally encouraged by the culture at the time when choosing a suitable wife. Yet, his marriage fails miserably as the feelings of his unhappiness with her overtake him, and the more Alovysa pressures him to love her (i.e. standing in the way of his letters to Amena) the more he grows indifferent of her. This relationship is contrasted with his love for and happiness in pursuit of Melliora. He follows his feelings, marries the one he loves, and we are presumed to believe that they end up happy. Accordingly, Haywood is perhaps encouraging marriages based on true love and compassion in a spouse rather than one based solely on practical choices for status and wealth.  

Oroonoko in the Form

      Revisiting Oronooko at this point in my graduate career is fascinating because of the insight I have accumulated through the course of my studies. Aspects I had overlooked before are the very items that elucidate attention as I try to sort through the short but heavily dense tale. Here, I shall pay particular attention to the form of the tale and what it elucidates.

     Behn opens up the tale by insisting that everything that follows in the tale is an account of events she was an eye witness to. She says, “I do not pretend, in giving you the History of this Royal Slave, to entertain my Reader with the Adventures of a feign’d Hero, … there being enough of Reality to support it,…without the Addition of Invention” and continues, “I was my self an Eye-Witness to a great part, of what will find here set down” (8). While I have previously explored the credibility she establishes for herself as a female writer in these lines, especially during a time predominated by male play writers and poets, something new strikes me through this introduction. It employs much of the same rhetoric later used in the openings of countless travel narratives generated during the Transatlantic literary boom, when Western writers traveled to Eastern areas and recollected their experiences for English audiences. Here, I am thinking about the works of, for example, Jonathon Lloyd Stevens in Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837). In a way, Oronooko contains many features of early travel narratives in that Behn (or the narrator, are they the same person?) travels to Surinam and does give details on how its natives live. Of course, it digresses from a travel narrative in its fictitious tale and plot that aren’t typical to that kind of writing. In any case, I wonder what the influence and relationship between Oronooko’s opening and travel narratives were. Was Behn mimicking even earlier travel writings (which were extremely few and far in between) that came before her, or was her introduction so influential that later travelers employed her rhetoric of credibility to tell their own tales?

     The question on the influence of Oronooko and travel narratives becomes complicated when examining the genre of the tale itself. Is it a novel? I would be cautious when using that term to label it under a genre. It is written and paragraphed in prose, but as the opening illustrates, it contains other types of writing structured into one piece of literature. As the narrator indicates that it is her personal account, it also flows as a recollection—almost as if it was a formal diary entry (of course without the formal greetings and signatures found in epistolary forms), which was also a very popular type of writing at the time. Another interesting thing to note is the narrator’s consciousness of her reader to read between the lines of her tale. For example when talking about the Captain’s initial fooling of the Royal slave with good treatment she says, “Some have commended this Act, as brave, in the Captain; but I will spare my sense of it, and it leave it to my Reader, to judge as he pleases” (31) using third person to address the reader formally. In other instances she uses first person, saying for example, “I ought to tell you” (36) to address her reader. While both ways she is conscious of an audience to whom which she writes for, the shift in narrative point is interesting.

     Although I am sad to miss class discussion which may further highlight these points, I have asked a friend to take notes which I will catch up with, and I look forward to reconvening with the class next week.