‘forbids women to make a declaration of their thoughts’ (p. 37), and that teaches them ‘to deny what most they covet, and to seem angry when they are best pleased’ (pp. 113–4). However much men may scoff at a modesty that conforms to decorum rather than inclination, it is nevertheless a custom that bows to the male prerogative. When D’Elmont, for example, finds his sleep rudely disturbed by a woman who is about ‘to make him a present of her heart’, he churlishly retorts that ‘I can esteem the love of a woman, only when ‘tis granted, and think it little worth acceptance, proffered’ (p. 249). There may be an element of payback involved here (at least on Haywood’s part), since the importunate maid is in fact none other than D’Elmont’s beloved Melliora, whose sleep he has in the past had no compunction about rudely disturbing – so much so that at one point she begins to think
‘she should lye in quiet no where’ (p. 144). But the assumption that it is not a woman’s role to be proactive in affairs of the heart – not her role to offer love, or ‘make a present of her heart’, but simply to grant (or not grant) the petition of the soliciting male – becomes, in these terms, a matter of sexual politics rather than sexual difference. What is
‘natural’, D’Elmont elsewhere argues, is for men to grow backward when women grow forward, but they are driven as much by the logic of the chase as by gender ideology. As he informs another importunate woman who thinks she deserves ‘a thousand fine things in return’ for offering her love:
All naturally fly, what does pursue
‘Tis fit men should be coy, when women woe. (p. 126)
116 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre When it is the politics, rather than the nature, of being female that is it stake, then all sorts of strategic initiatives are licensed, but only, it seems, in the interests of establishing whether the chase is on, since it still matters that a woman not appear as if she is trying too hard –
and preferably not appear as if she is trying at all.37 Melliora may retain only a technical innocence, and even that thanks largely to an amazing sequence of interruptions to D’Elmont’s nightly forays. But she retains her virtue by dint of doing nothing on her own initiative to win him – a proviso that applies also to Violetta, Ansellina, and Camilla, all of whom take measures to discover whether their passion is reciprocated, but do nothing to entice or encourage.
The secret intentions that are the corollary of a custom that dictates that women disguise their desires imply an active intellect that creates as many problems as it solves. It is much safer for a woman not to love at all until she is assured of a love to reciprocate, though there are dangers, too, in seeming impregnable to love’s darts. But once the belief becomes widespread that it is only custom that teaches women to deny what they most desire, it is a short (albeit falsely syllogistic) step to the assumption that what women most desire is that which they deny – an assumption that gives an even more dangerous edge to the ‘No’ that is ‘no negative in a woman’s mouth’ ( NA, p. 533).
When silence is assumed to be more politic than virtuous, moreover, it becomes even more difficult to protect a heroine from the suspicion of secret intentions since she can neither speak nor effectually deny desire. In histories of the novel, the development of the modern concept of character – and, indeed, of the fictional ‘character’ as a vehicle of a unique and inherently interesting subjectivity – is seen as one of the defining features of the ‘new species of fiction’, and often, implicitly, as an improvement on earlier narrative techniques. But there were also drawbacks to the portrayal of these unique individual selves, especially when they engaged in a sexual dynamic predicated on a desire that the woman is not prepared to voice.
5
Poor in Everything But Will:
Richardson’s Pamela
Writing to Sophia Westcomb in 1746, Samuel Richardson observed that ‘the Pen is almost the only Means a very modest and diffident Lady (who in Company will not attempt to glare) has to shew herself, and that she has a Mind. … By this means she can assert and vindicate her Claim to Sense and Meaning’.1 The heroine of Richardson’s Pamela, a young maidservant whose letters detailing her ordeals at the hands of her rapacious master constitute the substance of the novel, is able not only ‘to shew herself, and that she has a Mind’, but also to show herself through her mind, exercising a level of control over her experience that amounts to a surrogate agency – no substitute, to be sure, for the power to act on an autonomous will, but sufficient, it proves, for a servant to keep what is rightfully hers (including, though not confined to, her virginity) until she chooses, on proper terms, to surrender it.
From the time it was first published, Richardson’s novel was celebrated for its probing of the ‘inmost Recesses’ of Pamela’s mind,2 but the letters also allow Richardson’s heroine to assert a proprietary interest beyond her body and to contest the space of representation.
The collection of Familiar Letters out of which Pamela grew was initially intended by the booksellers who recommended the project to Richardson as ‘a little Volume of Letters, in a common Style, on such Subjects as might be of Use to those Country Readers who were unable to indite for themselves.’ Richardson extended the project to include instruction on ‘how they should think & act in common Cases, as well as indite’, and Pamela evolved from two of those letters instructing girls in service on how to deal with ‘Snares that might be laid against their Virtue’.3 But the power of inditing, or putting familiar concerns into words, is perhaps the greatest service that either Familiar Letters or Pamela performs for the common reader, though 117
118 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre the ensuing controversy over the authority of those words divided readers into Pamelist supporters who embraced her saintly self-representation and anti-Pamelist detractors who detected more in her version of events than makes the page. In subsequent revisions to almost every page of the novel – in nine editions over 20 years –
Richardson attempted to bolster Pamela’s authority by distancing her voice from the ‘common Style’, removing colloquialisms, formalizing the dialogue and setting it off with quotation marks, in general pol-ishing her style and making her seem more genteel (as well as better able to defend herself against resisting readers because ‘pre-emptively’ armed against their criticisms by Richardson’s emendations and additions). The two most widely available editions of Pamela today – the Oxford and the Penguin – embrace the first edition of 1740 and the last revised edition of 1801 respectively. The first edition, with all its textual crudities and ‘low’ expression, reminds us, as John Mullan argues, just how ‘unprecedented’ Richardson’s book was understood to be by his contemporaries,4 even if subsequent revisions possibly take us, as T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel argue, further and further away from ‘the Pamela whom Richardson actually imagined’ to ‘the Pamela he thought he should have imagined.’5 For the purposes of the present study, the Pamela that Richardson might have thought he should have imagined is the more interesting case, at least to the extent that the revisions highlight the difficulty of negotiating constraints on female behaviour – though the final revised edition used here does help disguise another dimension to the gap between self and representation that Sidney’s Pamela never has to negotiate.6
Richardson’s Pamela and Sidney’s Arcadia
The question of whether Richardson had read Sidney’s Arcadia and was consciously or unconsciously alluding to it in Pamela is difficult to ignore, given the texts on which we have chosen to focus this discussion of designing women, though this is not a study of influence but rather of the tensions between social and narrative conventions that underlie representations of female desire across a broad range of texts.
Many of these conventions – such as the prohibition on a woman loving first, which can be understood as a strategic manoeuvre addressing both social and narratological concerns – have become so deeply embedded in narrative practice that they have been absorbed i
nto the mythology of love and naturalized in fiction as experiential truths even
Poor in Everything But Will 119
when no longer officially supported by gender ideology. (There are very few fictional heroines even today, for example, who can love first, and let it be known, and still retain their dignity.) The persistence of conventions is arguably all the more telling where the question of literary influence is not an issue, but, in the case of Pamela, by rehearsing the arguments about Richardson’s connection to Sidney we can better understand how, and why, the crucial question of Pamela’s ‘knowingness’ – of whether she has an ‘open, frank, and generous’ mind or is a
‘subtle, artful little gypsey’ (p. 63) – has been invested with such significance and has been so difficult to resolve.
For most critics, the extent of Richardson’s indebtedness to Sidney warrants no more than a cursory glance, since it seems simply a curiosity that Richardson’s heroine – a humble serving maid who is subjected to the importunate attentions of her master, caressed, kissed, molested, imprisoned, and finally wedded – should bear the same name as Sidney’s princess. Richardson might have read Arcadia, and taken his heroine’s name from it, but nothing more. He might not have read it,7
but used allusions that were part of common currency.8 Or Richardson might not only have read Sidney’s Arcadia but also have absorbed it so thoroughly that it insinuates itself, bidden or unbidden, into the very texture of his narrative, resulting in what have variously been described as parallels, allusions, analogues, congruities, correspondences, and accords. At one sceptical extreme, Walter Allen is not even prepared to attribute Pamela’s name to Sidney;9 at the other extreme (though no one is prepared to tie Pamela too tightly to Sidney) Jacob Leed has compiled an extensive account of allusions to Arcadia, chiefly for the purpose of drawing attention to those characteristics of Richardson’s humble heroine that she shares with her aristocratic precursor,10 while Gillian Beer has adopted a somewhat more guarded approach to Richardson’s ‘rethinking the after-world of Sidney’s Arcadia’.11
Given that by the end of the eighteenth century Mrs Barbauld could confidently assert that Sidney’s Arcadia ‘is a book that all have heard of, that some few possess, but that nobody reads’,12 the question of Richardson’s familiarity with the primary text is clearly not settled by his choice of his heroine’s name – even though the name, as Beer points out, was ‘apparently invented by Philip Sidney himself’, and common ‘as an ordinary Christian name … only after the appearance of Richardson’s Pamela’.13 The name is, moreover, in some respects a curiously unfortunate choice for this 16-year-old heroine of low birth who manages to outwit and out-manoeuvre the designs of a master
120 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre who has anything but marriage in mind, since the name evokes not simply an Arcadian princess renowned for her beauty, virtue, and spirit, but also Alexander Pope’s ‘designing arriviste’,14 who acquires coach, robes, jewels, and ‘to complete her bliss, a fool for mate’.15
Similarly unfortunate for a heroine who is accused of harbouring romantic fantasies is the association with Biddy Tipkins in Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband, who is bewitched by romantic names and by the precocious exploits of a Pamela and her Musidorus, who provide a precedent for under-age adventures.16
Whether or not Richardson meant anything by his heroine’s name, by the time he turned to the continuation of the story in Pamela 2, Pamela herself is certainly conscious of the literary burden she is made to bear, and the number of allusions to Arcadia, after the silence of the earlier volumes, suggests that Richardson might have been making a particular effort to suggest that he knew what he was getting into when he named his heroine. There are good reasons, of course, for the earlier silence, since Pamela cannot safely invite comparison – or even be conscious of the pertinence of a comparison – between herself and Sidney’s princess while she is under suspicion of manufacturing a
‘pretty story for a romance’ (p. 63) and of nurturing aspirations above her station (points we will return to later). But there are also dangers in appearing to affect ignorance of a comparison that a serving-maid might deem personally flattering, and by the masquerade in Pamela 2, Pamela’s namesake in Arcadia earns a matter-of-fact acknowledgement from Richardson’s heroine: when the ‘presbyterian parson’ warns her to ‘look after [her] Musidorus’, she concludes that ‘it must be somebody who knew my name to be Pamela’.17
In Pamela 2, however, there are also other, more troubling, references that suggest that Sidney’s princess is proving more than just an interesting parallel to ‘the humble cottager’ ( P2, III: 72). Sir Jacob Swynford highlights one, probably unintended, nuance: ‘Pamela’ is not, in fact, a ‘Christian’ name, deriving, if not from a ‘heathen’ text, as John Milton would have it, at least from a fictional world that is not overtly Christian.18 Sir Jacob thinks it ‘A queer sort of name! I’ve heard of it somewhere! – Is it a Christian or a Pagan name? – Linsey-wolsey – half one, half t’other – like thy girl’, he taunts Mr B ( P2, III: 319). But more worrying still is the relationship of the name ‘Pamela’
with the kind of amorous intrigue associated with romance fiction that prompts Miss Stapylton, one of a number of errant neighbouring Misses whom Pamela is enlisted to tame, to style herself ‘Philoclea’ in a letter that makes ‘indiscreet advances’ to a gentleman considered
Poor in Everything But Will 121
unworthy of her ( P2, IV: 403). Richardson might have meant nothing by Pamela’s name – or nothing more than a cocky assertion of his heroine’s true nobility – but in Pamela 2 he seems to think it wiser not to ignore other meanings that can be read into it. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but as Sir Simon Darnford observes, some names are capable of ‘double-damasking’ the rose, implying immodest associations that will bring a blush to a delicate woman’s cheek – and
‘Pamela’, he decides, will serve such a purpose well enough: I love, I own it, to make a pretty woman blush; it is double-damasking a fine rose, as it were; and till I saw your – [Do, let me call her some free name or other! I always loved to be free with pretty women! – Till I saw your – Methinks I like her Arcadian name, though I’m so old a swain, as not to merit any thing but rebuke at her hands – Well then, till I saw your] – Pamela – I thought all ladies, in their hearts, loved a little squib of that kind. For why should they not, when it adds so much grace to their features, and improves their native charms? ( P2, III: 143).
‘Free’ name or not, the irony for Pamela is that devoted swains in the Arcadian mould have been in short supply, and her own courtship has only emphasized the disparity in rank that her name might be seen implicitly to dissolve. Writing to Miss Darnford, she asks her to describe the experience of ‘polite courtship’:
For, alas! your poor friend knows nothing of this. All her courtship was sometimes a hasty snatch of the hand, a black and blue gripe of the arm, and, Whither now? – Come to me, when I bid you! – And saucy-face, and creature, and such like, on his part – with fear and trembling on mine; and – I will, I will! – Good sir, have mercy!
At other times a scream, and nobody to hear or mind me; and with uplifted hands, bent knees, and tearful eyes – For God’s sake, pity your poor servant!
This … was the hard treatment that attended my courtship – Pray, then, let me know how gentlemen court their equals in degree; how they look when they address you, with their knees bent, sighing, supplicating, and all that, as Sir Simon says, with the words slave, servant, admirer, continually at their tongues’ ends. ( P2, III: 162–3) Pamela is astute enough to recognize that, obsequious or tyrannical, the language of courtship means the same, the ‘plain English’ of even
122 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre the ‘politest address’ translating as ‘I am now, dear madam, your humble servant: Pray be so good as to let me be your master’ ( P2, III: 163). The ‘ married state’, Pam
ela observes elsewhere, ‘is a kind of state of humiliation for a lady’ ( P2, IV: 446), so that the lowborn cottager may in fact be better equipped for married life – particularly with a husband mindful of his prerogatives – and Richardson is unusually candid on the advantages to a husband in marrying a servant who already knows her place.19 But the low-born heroine suffers other, potentially more dangerous, hazards than a rough courtship – hazards that her name only exacerbates.
Betrayed by false baits
If, as Beer argues, Pamela’s name is meant to be allusive,20 the consciously rhetorical purpose that such an allusion implies needs to go unrecognized by Pamela herself. The novel consists of a series of letters ostensibly written by a young maidservant to her parents about her valiant attempts to resist her master’s attempts on her virtue, and any pronounced literariness implying a referentiality to art rather than life will threaten the text’s status as a supposedly authentic record of the maidservant’s trials. That is, the more Richardson’s Pamela resembles a story that has been told before, the less credible it will appear as the unique record of this particular individual’s experience. In terms of plot and subject-matter, Pamela does not, in fact, much resemble Sidney’s Arcadia. There are some interesting parallels, once we look for them, between Richardson’s and Sidney’s account of a virtuous young woman who ‘is persecuted, abducted and imprisoned’ and who ‘emerges from oppression to be rewarded with happiness and to live as a paragon for her sex’. But, as Leed continues, we do not have to look specifically to Sidney’s Pamela to find such parallels: ‘many other romance heroines …
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