by Steven Moore
Haywood smoothly meshes several genres together in this short novel: the Oriental tale, which was a popular veil to hide behind for anti-Walpole authors, who were legion;171 the mock-pedantic critifiction; the supernatural tale; the 17th-century heroic romance (each new major character recites his or her “history” in the old manner); political allegory; and amatory fiction of the sort Haywood wrote at the beginning of her career. Liberated by the fairytale setting, Haywood goes to extremes that would have been unacceptable in her more realistic novels, politically and sexually. She all but calls for the abolition of monarchy via a republican named Alhauzuza, who grants Eovaai political asylum for a while and argues politics with her, undoing the damage Ochihatou had done earlier by seducing her with the luxuries of absolute monarchy. The novel is more sexually daring than Haywood’s earlier bodice-rippers: the 15-year-old not only fends off several rape attempts (though not very hard on one occasion), but is challenged by Ochihatou to contrive “some new method of heightening the raptures of enjoyment, outdo all I have ever found in the warmest and most artful of your sex, be more than ever woman was, and force me in unexperienced ecstasies . . .” (122). To avoid that homework assignment, the teenager plays a bedtrick on him with the help of an older woman named Atamadoul, who has always lusted after Ochihatou—he turned her into a monkey and chained her to a wall in punishment for an earlier bedtrick—and while those two go at it in the dark, Eovaai watches via her night-vision spyglass: “She no sooner looked through it than, instead of the smiling loves [cupids] she expected to have seen, she beheld two frightful and misshapen specters hovering over the heads of Ochihatou and Atamadoul and pouring upon them phials of sulfurous fire, while a thousand other no less dreadful to sight stood round the couch, and with obscene and antic postures animated their polluted joys” (135). And if that weren’t enough, Ochihatou later talks the teen into stripping naked with him, in which state she spends several pages resisting his embraces, rousing the translator to add a tongue-in-cheek footnote regarding Ochihatou’s erection: “The commentator observes that either Ijaveo must be a very warm climate, or Ochihatou of an uncommon constitution to retain the fury of his amorous desires, considering the position he was in” (151n1). Frustrated by the nude teenager’s resistance, Ochihatou then ties her by her hair to a tree’s branch and prepares to whip her when her husband-to-be happens by and rescues her, though he takes his sweet time before giving her a cloak. Later, hoping he’ll propose, Eovaai admits she’s glad he saw her naked: “the eyes with which he had regarded her . . . at the time of his delivering her from the rage of Ochihatou . . . made her think it not impossible he might have found something in her worthy of the most violent passion” (157–58). He does indeed, and they marry shortly after. Haywood could never have gotten away with such things in her earlier novels.
Though primarily a political allegory attacking Walpole’s domestic and foreign politicies, Eovaai is also a cautionary tale for young women, though a contradictory one. (All of Eovaai’s problems stem from exhibiting intellectual curiosity, usually a positive virtue.) As the young princess learns to negotiate with the adult world after the death of her protective father, she is flanked by the contrasting examples of Yximilla, a princess who resists sexual temptation better than Eovaai does, and Atamadoul, who succumbs and is turned into an animal as a result. Politically, she is flanked by the despotic monarchy of Hypotofa and the republic of Oozoff. The fairytale ending indicates Eeovaii has found a satisfactory middle ground between sexual and political extremes. Similarly, Haywood found a satisfying middle ground between the male learned novel and the female amatory romance, one that would allow her to express intelligent political views while indulging in sexual fantasy, which makes The Adventures of Eovaai the most interesting English novel of the 1730s.
Allegory is also at work in one of the most popular novels of the 18th century, The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca (1737) attributed to the Catholic priest and scholar Simon Berington (1680–1755). The most impressive feature of this utopian novel is its elaborate structure: at the core of the novel is the confession of an Italian physician made in 1721 to officers of the Inquisition, but it begins with a preface by the English publisher who explains how he acquired the manuscript and had it translated. (He also adds some explanatory footnotes to Gaudentio’s confession.) This is followed by a report from the inquisitor who first became suspicious of Gaudentio, arrested him, and ordered him to dictate this confession. (Other inquisitors occasionally interrupt Gaudentio to grill him on certain points, especially regarding his religious beliefs.) The confession was then passed along to a Venetian librarian named Rhedi for verification of Gaudentio’s unbelievable story about a paradisaical kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa; Rhedi added loads of learned commentary to the confession (which allows Berington, himself a librarian, to show off his extensive erudition), and then made a copy for the English publisher. As a result, the novel is a cross between a court transcript and a variorum scholarly edition, a polyphonic text featuring a half-dozen speakers and commentators in which the author metafictionally critiques his own novel.
It’s about a 19-year-old Italian who has some swashbuckling adventures (pirate attack, rescue by a Persian woman, sold into slavery in Egypt) before he is taken in 1688 to the country of Mezzorania, a virtuous, communistic paradise of the sun-worshiping descendants of an early Egyptian tribe. As in most utopian novels, we are given extensive lectures on their culture and customs, all of which seem more sensible than Europe’s; for example, the educated young Mezzoranian ladies are amazed to hear that their European counterparts “have nothing else to mind or think of but visits and dresses,” and “judged them to be no more than beautiful brutes” (373), expanding that to include both sexes, “esteeming those no better than brutes and barbarians who are not constantly employed improving their natural talents in some art or science” (381). Gaudentio experiences some cognitive dissonance as he realizes these “heathens” are more virtuous, more “Christian” than his coreligionists back home, though he has to chose his words carefully when explaining this to the Inquisition. Nonetheless, the Catholic author seems to have intended this as a rebuke to Catholics rather than an acknowledgment that nonbelievers could possess an equally valid system of morality. Little actually happens to Gaudentio himself beyond eventually marrying a local girl and starting a family. (The publisher explains that some pages are missing from the manuscript; apparently Berington didn’t want to detail his protagonist’s married life.) But after their deaths, and despite loving the place, Gaudentio decides to return home in 1712. En route, he has some further adventures coincidentally involving the exact same people he swashbuckled with 25 years earlier. Satisfied by his confession, and threatening to send some Catholic missionaries to Mezzorania, the Inquisition releases him.
Gaudentio’s adventures to and from Mezzorania—which take up more pages than his actual stay there—are the stuff of popular fiction, and his description of utopia seems to be indebted to Campanella’s City of the Sun and Veiras’s History of the Sevarambians.172 The most original feature, after its elaborate structure, is Gaudentio’s encounter with a wild man living near Mezzorania who turns out to be an Englishman, specifically a vicious caricature of a deist, which, for people like Berington, meant an immoral atheist. With this reprobate representing one extreme, and the virtuous but heathen Mezzoranians the other extreme (a pure, primitive form of Christianity), Berington offers a parable of the uncertain place of the English Catholic during the wilderness years between 1688, when the Catholic James II was dethroned, and 1712, two years after the return to power of the Tory government, which made life easier for English Catholics. Nicholas Hudson is wrong to call the wild-man deist “reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe,” but he is right that “Gaudentio di Lucca bears many marks of crypto-Jacobite fiction” and “displays themes close to the heart of Jacobite lore: exile, disinheritance, and a hatred of that ugliest manifestation of eighteenth-century mercantilism, slavery” (585–
86). This hidden agenda seems to have gone unnoticed by the general reading public, who made the novel a best-seller: some 20 editions were published in England and America between 1737 and 1850, along with translations into French, German, and Dutch. But its popularity is nothing compared to a novel published three years later.
In the conventional history of the English novel, 1740 is Year Zero, for that’s the year a 51-year-old printer named Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) published a game-changing novel about a 15-year-old girl entitled Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. That used to be considered the “first” English novel, but in these more enlightened times, its 1740 publication date is used as a B.C./A.D. demarcation to indicate the sea change that occurred in British fiction after it appeared. Pamela not only introduced a new degree of realism and a new class of heroine, but it was longer than any novel published since the 1690s, and sanctioned even longer ones, by Richardson as well as by others. Novels began appearing more rapidly after 1740 as well; specialists in the field don’t hesitate to dismiss most of them as “trash” or “worthless,” but the worthwhile ones – the classics as well as the engaging oddities – owe something to Pamela’s popularity, which encouraged talented writers who might have disregarded the genre to embrace it as warmly as some readers wanted to embrace Pamela herself.
Pamela is an incongruous mix of several genres: old-fashioned romance (Richardson took the name Pamela from Sidney’s Arcadia); the newer, racier amatory fiction of the 1720s (he typeset a new edition of Haywood’s novels, which he loathed, and apparently wrote the preface to Aubin’s collected fiction, which he admired); conduct and letter-writing manuals; and Christian propaganda (parables, martyrdoms, conversion stories). As a result, Pamela is both idealistic and realistic, a fairy tale set in the real world. From the older romance tradition, stretching back to Chariton’s 1st-century Callirhoe, Richardson took the concept of an exceptionally beautiful maiden who undergoes a number of troubles and attempts upon her virginity until she marries a handsome aristocrat. From the newer genre, he borrowed all the usual tropes—near-rape, abduction, disguises, evil assistants—but set them not in sinful Italy or imaginary Ijaveo but in east-central England, where a 15-year-old servant named Pamela Andrews has caught the lustful eye of 24-year-old William Brandon, who has just inherited his mother’s estate in Bedfordshire. (He’s called Mr. B., but his full name can be inferred from various references.) Like Galliard in Davys’s Accomplished Rake, he was spoiled by his mother and became a libertine, fathering a child while still in college, killing a man in Italy, and tumbling any number of strumpets before he set his sights on young Pamela. (It’s implied he’s had his eye on her ever since she came to work for his family at age 11.) To his, and everyone else’s surprise, this lower-class girl resists his attempts to seduce her; after a year of failed seductions and growing frustration, he abducts her and imprisons her in his house in Lincolnshire, where he again attempts to rape her (disguised as a drunk maid!) with the assistance of Pamela’s jailer, Mrs. Jewkes, and with the threat of turning her over to his monstrous Swiss henchman Colbrand if she continues to resist.173 After Pamela repulses him again—the sissy always faints during these attempts, and unlike Davys’s Galliard, Brandon is enough of a gentleman to abstain from taking advantage—he realizes he’s in love with her, and after she turns down a lucrative offer to become his mistress, he proposes marriage. Pamela admits to herself that she’s in love with the monster who for over a year has sexually harassed her, kidnapped her, repeatedly attempted to rape her, and loaded her with vicious insults (“slut,” “idiot”) every step of the way—and accepts his proposal.
Most earlier romances and amatory novels would wrap things up with a quick wedding, but Richardson goes on for another 250 pages on their wedding plans, the wedding itself, Pamela’s quick conversion from a spirited girl to a Stepford wife, and the challenges Brandon faces breaking the news to his relatives and friends. (The equivalent today would be a trust-fund playboy marrying his underage, illegal-immigrant maid.) Just when the reader is tempted to throw the novel at the wall, Lady Davers storms in for an electrifying, 20-page scene, but other than that, the second half of Pamela is insufferable, sticky with sentimentality and cloyingly Christian, as though Richardson intended Pamela’s epistles to supplement Paul’s in the New Testament. (The 500-page sequel Richardson published in 1741 continues in that stupefying vein, which is why even Richardson specialists avoid it.)
In the spirit of the conduct-book genre—things like Richard Allestree’s popular Whole Duty of Man (1658) and Fénelon’s Telemachus, both mentioned in Pamela—Richardson dramatizes the ideal conduct of an unmarried girl (the first half of the novel) and of a married woman (second half), going so far as to include an itemized list of rules for dutiful wives. And to align a woman’s duty to her husband with that to her god, Richardson makes a religious parable of the whole thing via numerous parallels between Pamela’s tribulations and those of the ancient Jews: during her imprisonment, she composes a song based on Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon . . .”) equating her situation with that of the exiled Jews, and compares herself to “the old murmuring Israelites” during their 40 years in the wilderness after leaving Egypt. It is on the 40th night of Pamela’s “bondage” (as she calls it) that Brandon attempts the final rape, the turning point in their relationship that allows Pamela to enter the promised land of matrimony.
Richardson wanted to convert the cheap thrills of amatory fiction into Sunday-school lessons for Christian girls, and to do so made some questionable artistic choices, ones that he continued to struggle with after Pamela’s publication as he made hundreds and hundreds of revisions for later editions.174 I’ll leave Pamela’s decision to marry her abusive master to those more familiar with the psychology of masochistic women and the Stockholm syndrome, and attribute Brandon’s decision to marry her to Pamela’s bewitching allure. Neither decision is very believable, but as I said, Pamela is closer to fairy tale and parable than to realism, for all its realistic touches. What’s more interesting is Richardson’s struggle with form. He chose the epistolary genre because he had been asked by a publisher to compile a collection of sample letters for the undereducated, and while composing examples a maid might use to write to her father for advice on sexual harassment, he became inspired and dashed off the two-volume, 500-page novel in two months, without thinking the whole thing through.175 The epistolary mode worked fine for the first 90 pages: Pamela’s letters home are numbered, and include four responses from her father (his dutiful Christian wife remains silent), but then Richardson ran into a problem. He needed to convey certain information and couldn’t figure out how to do it within the epistolary framework, so he simply breaks through the frame and states, “Here it is necessary to observe . . .” (92) and spends 7 pages explaining matters before turning the narrative back over to Pamela, who writes one more numbered letter when she realizes that, imprisoned in Lincolnshire by this point, she has no means to post mail. So she begins keeping a journal, dated by days of the week rather than numbered. “O what inventions will necessity be the parent of!” Pamela exclaims (122), and Richardson’s invention was an inspired one. Pamela goes from writing a letter or two a month (during the first 90 pages, which covers about a year) to writing daily, even hourly, which takes unprecedented advantage of the immediacy of the epistolary mode. She sometimes halts when she hears someone approaching on the stairs, and in one case—after Pamela has married, to the outrage of Brandon’s bitchy older sister, Lady Davers—she transcribes events in real time: “a messenger came up, just as I was dressed, to tell her [Mrs. Jewkes] she must come down immediately. I see at the window that visitors are come, for there is a chariot and six horses, the company gone out of it, and three footmen on horseback, and I think the chariot has coronets. Who can it be, I wonder? But here I will stop, for I suppose I shall soon know” (380). Now of course it’s ludicrous to imagine someone scribbling like this while looking out the window, but again, realism isn’t the point:
Pamela is closer to Cinderella than to Vertue Rewarded, the realistic Irish novel we looked at earlier about a woman who likewise holds out for a wedding ring. The point is that Pamela has become a novelist, and her writing self has overtaken her acting self. By the time she reaches her wedding day, she confesses, “I have got such a knack of writing that, when I am by myself, I cannot sit without a pen in my hand” (342).
Not only are there more references to the act of writing in Pamela than in any other novel of the period, but Pamela’s letters, her papers (as she calls them), quickly become part of the story. Early on, when Brandon learns Pamela is writing home to complain about him, he begins intercepting her letters; initially outraged that a mere servant would criticize her employer to her parents, he grows impressed at the sensibility behind those letters, and begins expanding his interest in her body to her mind. After he kidnaps her, he demands to see what else she’s written, and sends to her father to retrieve other portions she smuggled out, like a fan who wants to read everything by his favorite writer. She continues writing, knowing from that point on that he will probably read what she writes, which he does; near the end, after Pamela has been accepted by Lady Davers and the local gentry, they too want to read her papers. In an almost literal sense, they are the first readers of Pamela, Miss Pamela Andrews’s “little history of myself” (200).