Pamela Read online

  His revisions were by no means all in the cause of refinement Mrs Jewkes’s crude sexy joke about Pamela’s not wanting to marry a clergyman is an addition, and there are other extra touches of description: her neigh of laughter, her ‘ugly horse-lip’. Mrs Jewkes was evidently in some sense one of Richardson’s favourite characters. Her rewritten appearances in the second volume give her heightened comic importance; at Pamela’s wedding-party, Mrs Jewkes ‘waddled to us with two bottles of Rhenish, (what she herself dearly loves)’.

  All these comic characters are communicated to us through Pamela; it is, after all, her language which gives us the description of Mrs Jewkes’s horse-lip, of her waddling and neighing. Pamela has to convey the other characters’ essence so it is felt in what they say or do. Pamela’s own language fits in with theirs and is in contrast to it. When she is talking to or of Mr B. her language is sometimes much more elevated than his, but it is often strikingly colloquial (‘Hay, you know, closet for that, Mrs Jervis!’), blunt in contrast with his uneasy pretensions. She always has a greater range of ‘fictional dialects’ than any other character in the novel. Richardson never wished to relinquish any of Pamela’s various dialects, though he toned down some in places so as not to overshadow others too much. He wants to maintain the common style, the self-dramatization, the bounce, and the vigorous if limited sense of humour which are all aspects of his character. We cannot get away from her fascinating and irritating lowness:

  I have read of a good bishop, that was to be burnt for his religion ; and he tried how he could bear it, by putting his fingers into the lighted candle: so It’other day tried, when Rachel’s back was turned, if I could not scour a pewter plate she had begun. I see I could do it by degrees; it only blistered my hand in two places.

  All the matter is, if I could get plain-work enough, I need not spoil my fingers. But if I can’t, I will make my hands as red as a blood-pudding, and as hard as a beechen trencher, but I will accommodate them to my condition.

  Several fictional dialects are blended together here: one is derived from Protestant martyrology, another from the practical language of the kitchen. The latter is then touched with the language of beauty-care, and this in turn is overthrown by the vigorous image of ‘blood-pudding’, in a sentence that begins with the language of the cot, rather than of the kitchen of the Great House, and ends with two high, abstract words that are still in keeping with the general tone.

  Someone who can scour pewter may be a servant; someone who can speak of making her hands as red as a blood–pudding and as hard as a beechen trencher is certainly of the servant class. This is no fine lady masquerading as a country maid. Pamela’s voice is insistent, unignorable, like a physical presence. The letters embody her and she them – that this is more than a metaphor can be felt in the scene where Mr B. reaches into her bodice to grab her manuscripts. The letters are physical objects within the story. This is a very physical book. We can believe it is really about sex and sexuality, not because we are told so but because we can feel this is in the narrative, with its forceful earthiness. The imagery throughout is of plain physical objects, appealing to the senses: ‘earth’, ‘wool’, ‘beans’, ‘sunflower’, ‘shoes’, ‘cow’, ‘wine’, ‘cake’, ‘grass’, ‘brick’, ‘pond’. These things all belong to Pamela’s world, her frame of reference. Pamela is, I believe, the first important heroine in English fiction who works for a living, and could earn a living by the work of her hands. She thinks like a servant, because she is one. We see this in the very first letter, where real regrets for the loss of the dead lady are mixed with worries about the security of her job and a lively interest in the four guineas paid as honest wages and sent home, carefully if cynically wrapped up. No other heroine has burst upon the world with such an inelegant concern over a few coins.

  Pamela is not daintily free of her social position – it has conditioned the way she thinks, speaks and acts. Pamela is an individual in particular social and historical circumstances of which she is less conscious than the (absent) author. The novel as a genre has always accommodated this vision of unimportant people in history; in reading novels we hear the news about people who are not kings and queens and great chiefs, who have never been heard of before. Lazarillo and Don Quixote and Gil Bias and Pamela and Tom Jones are not legendary, and not leaders; they do not control their society but are trying to make their way in it. But, as Ronald Paulson has pointed out, the early novel, embarrassed by classical tradition, could deal with unimportant characters from the low to middle classes only by treating them satirically. Richardson’s Pamela gives us an unsatiric view of a lower-class person. Defoe’s characters offer the only precedent in English fiction, but Moll and Roxana have a raffishness, a sort of gallows-foot dash, in their outlaw position as thieves and whores. Richardson’s character is an honest and well-meaning person from a fairly stable background and she wants, like most of us, to live an honest life within her own social world. When this seems impossible she is heroic enough to choose an unsuccessful position as the alternative to doing wrong and losing her own identity. She is as heroic as Maggie Tulliver in her moral choices (though better treated in the end) but the heroism is indivisible from her whole personality, and she is a teenaged servant girl.

  It is sometimes difficult for the twentieth-century reader to understand what Richardson’s contemporaries would have grasped immediately – the full meaning of Pamela’s social position, which might well be compared to that of a black servant girl in the American South in the earlier part of our own century. Her use of language indicates her background, origin and status – and these make her, in Mr B.’s world, an inferior, commonly thought of almost as another species of being. Readers who have pointed out that Pamela is in love with Mr B. from the outset have always been partly right – but she does have real reason to fear him, and genuinely rebels when he tries to make an unchristian and perverse use of their feelings for each other. Mr B. himself is not individually guilty, for he has been conditioned by the assumptions of his own class. Sir Simon Darnford says

  ‘Why, what is all this, my dear, but that our neighbour has a mind to his mother’s waiting-maid!… I don’t see any great injury will be done her. He hurts no family by this.’

  Mr B. is both promulgator and victim of a code which deliberately sets up not just a double but a triple standard. Men of all classes are expected to take casual sexual pleasure – though it’s better for poor men not to roam too much. Middle- and upper–class young ladies have chastity most explicitly demanded of them (for worldly reasons of family and descent) but lower-class girls are not supposed to set any such value on themselves – they are there for sexual convenience. So thoroughly has gentle society accepted this notion that a lower–class girl who makes any fuss about yielding her virginity must be guilty of hypocrisy — after all, one knows what they are all like, really. Richardson was horrified at being taken for a leveller, but this pernicious code he attacks unsparingly, and the extirpation of it demands new assumptions about class, property, authority and identity.

  Pamela rebels against this code, but she has no illusions about her social condition as one of the ‘poor people’. She knows that marriage cannot be expected as the logical outcome or possible result of her resistance. It is the reader who sees that marriage is the only right end to the story, the only sexual relationship which allows of equality and integrity, acknowledges Pamela’s value as a person, not a thing.

  The story is of course a highly charged love story with a happy ending. But Mr B. is not a dashing hero like Mr Rochester (though the resemblance between their two novels has been seen since one of the first reviews of Jane Eyre). The narrative permits us to see Mr B. through Pamela’s eyes, so in the context of the novel he is subordinate to her, and the authority of masculinity and class is overthrown here too. We know more about him than she does; we don’t see the awe-ful person she sees. He is the ruler of her small world, but the reader realizes that this fox-hunting young country squir
e would be considered something of a bumpkin himself at St James’s; going to court is a big occasion for him, and he wants to show Pamela his get-up – no lord or earl would behave in this naïve small-beer manner. We see that Mr B. is rebelling against his mother’s influence over him, and trying to fit in with the conventions of his peer–group in becoming a swaggering seducer, an abductor. He tries on a great many roles before us and Pamela; he is alternatively aristocratic, friendly, magisterial, blustering. We can see the weaknesses in this unromantic hero–villain as he sulks and shows off. But Pamela too has a (feminine) power of analysis, and she writes down what she thinks, learning more about him as she goes on. She captures Mr B. in words, even more thoroughly than he captures her in his Lincolnshire house– this is a shock to him, as if a specimen of rock should turn and analyse the geologist. Mr B. is not the master as long as Pamela can think and write, and yet it is to that thinking self that he is attracted. In trying on his little rape–scenarios he makes an absurd error, sinning against his own feelings as much as hers; he wants love, but finds that difficult to acknowledge. He feels threatened by a woman unless he can control her and make the sexual relationship undangerous to himself (and hence, unreal).

  Both characters are youthful, in a state of flux and experiment. Neither is yet fully formed. Traditionally the novel delights in adolescents, in portraying the processes in which the formless becomes formed. A novelist may desire to promote a standard of maturity which replaces youthful flounderings, but the novel itself, as a genre, is always trying to subvert this by suggesting irreplaceable values in adolescent perceptions and confusions. There is a continual sense that the younger generation can change, redeem, or find freedom from the limitations and errors of the past. The novel is the genre of historical hope. Richardson, in portraying his young characters, daringly embraces the undefined and chaotic. His novels as works of art have their own form, but he wants it to seem that the work grows into its own natural shape without artificial control. He loves the formless, the radiant zigzag becoming. The reader of Pamela is immersed in the destructive element –thoughts, wishes, sudden perceptions, vanishings – all a flow without apparent direction. Everything is changeable. The world Richardson makes us see is a world being made, and being made by perceivers. It is not an accident but a necessary coincidence of history that Richardson arose out of the culture which produced Locke, Berkeley and Hume. The action of Pamela is always internal: everything that happens is mediated through the narrator’s consciousness.

  That consciousness is not itself a literary consciousness. Pamela is a kind of reverse of Don Quixote. Don Quixote makes all his experience a reflection of the literature he has read. Pamela finds what she has read totally inadequate to what she is experiencing. Some of her fictional dialects develop from works she has read, but they are too far away from her situation and too limited to be truly satisfactory. We have seen her picking on an incident in the life of a martyr as a model, and we smile at the distance between the two and the unconscious arrogance of the borrowing. Again, she lights on the fable of the ant and grasshopper as an exemplar. But she is not a martyred bishop, or a grasshopper, and her own intense and unique life keeps spilling over and out of any ready–made literary frame. She has to create a language of her own that will make sense of her life. A motif of suspense underneath the story, like a base line below the melody, is Pamela’s search for and creation of a language. In the first letter, she and her parents are evidently almost on a level, almost at one (though the reader sees more than the Andrews who play Watson to our Holmes throughout). We soon realize that Pamela is growing beyond her parents, as she experiences feelings and perceptions which they could not imagine, and with these acquires a language which becomes her own major dialect, which has room for subtlety and paradox, for complexity, and for perplexities that cannot be answered by any simple facts or maxims: ‘Is it not strange that love borders so much upon hatred?’

  Pamela’s achievement is related to her creative labour of memory. All that stands between random discrete ‘moments’ and chaos is the capacity of the mind to remember, sometimes even against the will, and in the process individual consciousness gains its unique form. Pamela writing her letters, and even perforce collecting them about her person like a walking anthology of herself, achieves a portable creation of memory, an imitation of the universal work which finds identity in memory. The novel as a genre has always been deeply concerned with the activity and proclivities of remembering. The memory does not readily cast aside what is trivial or embarrassing or distracting – it is not hierarchical; it holds the commonplace madeleine in deeper reverence than Venice. What Pamela has to remember inevitably grows, becomes larger and more complex, like the book itself as we read it. The pages we have turned are the memory, and like the heroine we can turn back and refer to particular moments which might not have been fully understood when the experience was happening. When Mr B. wants to censor and suppress Pamela’s papers, he is trying, like the dictator of a conquered land, to render her a region without a history, without a memory, and hence without an identity save that which he chooses to give her.

  The emphasis on memory suits the story’s pattern – which, after all the talk about absconding authors, we must acknowledge Richardson did give it – a pattern of repetition and variation. Mr B.’s attempt on Pamela when she is with the cooperative Mrs Jewkes is a variation on his earlier attempt when Pamela was with the decent Mrs Jervis. Pamela is imprisoned – escapes – is imprisoned again. There is a heartbeat rhythm of constriction–release–constriction.

  Within the story there are countering elements – support for the status quo, jokes against the heroine – which seek to subvert that story: ‘Don’t stand dilly–dallying, sir. She cannot exclaim worse than she has done…’. All the criticisms ever made of the heroine have been made first within the novel itself. Mrs Jewkes stands in for the baser side of the reader, the aspect of ourselves which wants a quick consummation and can feel some contempt for the egotism of an unimportant servant girl: ‘so much pining and whining for nothing at all’. When Mrs Jewkes voices such feelings for us we see what they imply.

  The novel is large enough to permit a variety of counter–responses within itself. It parodies the Romance, and also allows us to see that the Romance proper offers a critique of this tale of prosaic people in the flat eastern counties of England. The story is both a universal human action, dealing with matters as serious as the perversion of sex into power, and the human need for freedom – and equally and at the same time the story of two countrified young people, bumptious, ignorant, egotistical. Pamela is not the heroine of Romance, all beautiful and good; she has very human limitations and natural, unglamorous qualities. Richardson goes out of his way to achieve mixed effects, puzzling readers who would like literature to be clear, who can accept a chaste Marina but not a chaste servant maid who is capable of some self–pity, self–dramatization and self–love. The scene in which Pamela, dressed in her new country garb, looks at herself in the glass has been seized upon as exhibiting the character’s vanity, and hence her determination to ensnare Mr B. with her beauty. The scene is more subtle than that. Of course, looking in the mirror is not exactly a sin in a sixteen–year–old girl. But Pamela is not gazing for idle pleasure, but in order to confirm a decision. In choosing to go away, to lose job and prospects and income and to tumble down a narrow social ladder, she requires the reassurance of seeing that she is still herself. Richardson knows perfectly well that the circumstance includes some degree of self–dramatization and ‘vanity’; really, he is making us ask, perhaps uncomfortably, whether these qualities can always be simply classified as ‘bad’. Pamela’s comparison of herself with the bishop (see p. 109) is self–dramatizing and conceited though there is real heroism in her disproportionate reaction. Pamela responds to the best of her ability to a difficult situation, but her responses, from moment to moment, are off–balance, absurd, comic – though not entirely comic – to the observ
er. Within the novel Pamela is called ‘a comical girl’, and so she is. The novel suggests that all of us, even in our most serious trials and decisions, have an element of absurdity. Richardson refuses to allow us to put good and bad qualities in separate piles. Here also there is a questioning of hierarchies and established orders of things. We might all want to agree that whereas rebellion against unjust power, perseverance, honesty, integrity are good, qualities like self–pity, self–dramatization and vanity are bad — but does any human being attain the first category of qualities without some mixture of the second? Richardson is in effect asking whether we haven’t found it far too easy to lump a great many necessary psychological energies under easy pejorative labels.

  Pamela is good, but she is funny. She is funny and brave in her imprisonment – not in the tower of Romance, but in a stolid old-fashioned manor house among farms. Her jailor is not the black-a-vised ruffian or monstrous harem–guard of more exotic fiction, but fat talkative Mrs Jewkes who prides herself on her notable store of home remedies. Pamela spills out her angry feelings about Mrs Jewkes in a highly comic descriptive passage. The description of the ‘broad, squat, pursy fat thing’ is, as Pamela admits, ‘poor and helpless spite’. But impotent and undignified expressions of wrath – like the childhood gesture of sticking one’s tongue out behind a teacher’s back – are not psychologically useless. It is important to Pamela to be able to let herself know she isn’t giving in, so what is foolish has a real value.