by Steven Moore
Although the word “metafiction” didn’t exist in 1740, that’s precisely what Richardson was writing. Near the beginning, Brandon warns Pamela (through his housekeeper) to “not write the affairs of my family purely for an exercise to her pen and her invention” (29), but this is what Pamela became for Richardson. (He was asked to write a guide-book, not a novel.) If we assume Pamela is novelizing her life rather than making a verbatim report—which her self-dramatizing use of biblical imagery, metaphors of witchcraft and sorcery, and her numerous violations of point of view encourage us to do (reconstructing dialogue during scenes at which she was not present, for example)—then that would account for remarks like Brandon’s boast “we shall make out between us, before we have done, a pretty story in romance” (32) and his accusation to her father that “I never knew so much romantic invention as she is mistress of. In short, the girl’s head’s turned by romances” (93), implying that’s how her letters should be read. Brandon parodies the diction of 17th-century heroic romance when he tells Mrs. Jewkes he should turn Pamela “loose to her evil destiny, and echo to the woods and groves her piteous lamentations for the loss of her fantastical innocence, which the romantic idiot makes such a work about” (163). “But this, to be sure, is horrid romancing!” (179) Pamela complains of one plot twist in her life story, and after Brandon has read the first part of her captivity narrative, he realizes he’s the villain in Pamela’s work and taunts her further: “And as I have furnished you with the subject, I have a title to see the fruits of your pen. Besides, said he, there is such a pretty air of romance, as you relate them, in your plots, and my plots, that I shall be better directed in what manner to wind up the catastrophe of the pretty novel” (232). This character in a novel realizes he’s become a character in a novel.
On the one hand, these remarks (and there are plenty more) are obviously Richardson’s self-congratulatory pats on the back, registering his growing confidence as he scribbled away that he was writing something that would delight readers. The op.cited Eaves and Kimpel note “that a love of having his characters praised [by other characters within his novels] was one of Richardson’s besetting faults throughout his career. Several indirectly self-laudatory passages, where characters remark on Pamela’s charming way of writing, are omitted” in later editions (82), but enough remain to indicate what kind of praise he anticipated.176 On the other hand, these metafictional asides should put us on guard: though Richardson presumably intended Pamela to be a reliable narrator, we must remember we see things only from her point of view—a lower-class, conservative, often childish, fanatically Christian one—and that, along with her self-dramatizing tendencies, a certain self-consciousness creeps into her writing once she realizes others beside her father and mother will be reading her mail.
But what’s more intriguing than this metafictional self-reflexiveness is Richardson’s bold collation of Pamela’s body of work with her physical body. In the early part of the novel, whenever Pamela needs to conceal her writing, she slips it “into my bosom,” often enough that her letters become perfumed with her skin; during her captivity, she sews her papers “in my undercoat [petticoat] about my hips” (227). A few pages later, Brandon asks to see her “saucy journal” and, when he correctly guesses she has it on her person, he threatens, “I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela” to get at it (235), with the same fervor he earlier tried to strip Pamela to get at her. “But maybe, said he, they are tied about your knees with your garters, and stooped,” like a libertine about to open the closed knees of a virgin. Pamela stops him and agrees to yield up her letters with all the shame and dejection of a woman forced to give up her virginity. Going to her room, she realizes “I must undress me in a manner to untack them,” reinforcing the suggestion that, by reading her intimate correspondence, we (like Mr. B.) are sexually violating her, or at least indulging in voyeurism. (There are numerous mentions of Pamela’s unmentionables: silk stockings, stays, garters, and other intimate garments rarely detailed in novels before this.) When the virgin offers Brandon her packet of papers, she begs him “to return them without breaking the seal,” but the rake “broke the seal instantly and opened them” (239), taking her literary hymen in lieu of the physical one she has withheld. Later, after Pamela decides the man who put her through this humiliating experience will make a good husband, she flirtatiously offers to show Brandon a letter written to her parents; responding in kind, he “set me on his knee while he read it,” and kisses her afterward (281), turning reading into sexual foreplay. Her body of work shifted his attention from her body to her mind, but here he enjoys both simultaneously—as does the reader: as we hold Pamela in our hands, it’s as though we hold Pamela herself: “spanning my waist with his hands, [Brandon] said, What a sweet shape is here!” (374), praising the form of both Pamela and Pamela. No wonder some early critics called it pornographic.
Like Pamela, Pamela is by turns titillating and tedious, saucy and saccharine, admirably virtuous and revoltingly religiose. It’s a remarkable expansion of the epistolary mode, adding intimacy to its immediacy, but the plot is preposterous. “Richardson was evidently conscious of the gap between the servant girl and libertine of the beginning and the fine lady and gentleman of the end, and tried to bridge it,” Eaves and Kimpel write. “The gap proved unbridgeable; the plot of the novel forced Richardson to assume that a virtuous and intelligent girl can be made permanently blissful by marrying a man who has kidnapped her and tried hard to rape her” (85). The plot forced Richardson from romance to parable, bypassing realism: it’s ludicrous that a servant-girl who grew up milking cows would possess such “fantastical” notions of virtue, which Richardson acknowledges by way of the reactions of other characters: a sympathetic friend near the beginning admits if she were being pressured for sex as Pamela is, “I hope I should act as you do. But I know nobody else that would” (41). Brandon dismisses her ideas of reputation and honor as “antiquated topics” (66), and Mrs. Jewkes is completely baffled by Pamela’s highfalutin moral stance. Indeed, most of the time Pamela sounds more like the delicate, vaporish heroine of a 17th-century romance than a real servant in 18th-century England, few of whom shared Pamela’s notions of virtue—most were resigned to the fact they were considered the sexual property of their masters—and even fewer of whom shared her talent for writing.177 During the last quarter of the novel Richardson works overtime to create some sympathy for Brandon and credible motivation for his earlier actions, and while he succeeds for some readers, he fails for others.178 Pamela and Brandon represent Christian ideals—chastity, forgiveness, and humility in her case; repentance, responsibility, and charity in his—not actual Christians living in Bedfordshire. Pamela is a Christian parable in the tradition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian porn in the tradition of Aubin’s Count de Vinevil, and a didactic fable in the tradition of Aesop’s, which Pamela frequently cites, and neither parable, porn, nor fable is expected to be very realistic. McKeon calls Pamela “an antiromance,” which is valid in the sense that, as Richardson writes in his preface to the sequel, it “avoid[s] all romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery” (vii), but that term is better suited to the far greater novel Richardson would write later in the 1740s.
This incongruous, preposterous mix of romance and sermon made Pamela an instant success with the same kind of readers who would make The Bridges of Madison County a best-seller 250 years later, but the same mix made it an instant target of satire for more discerning readers. First to market was Henry Fielding (1707–54), who in April 1741 published An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, a bawdy parody. Parson Oliver is outraged to learn from his fellow parson Thomas Tickletext not only that he loves Pamela (and fantasizes at night about Pamela naked) but that the prurient, socially subversive text is being recommended by some preachers from the pulpit (which indeed was the case). So Oliver sends Tickletext a packet of letters exposing the true “Pamela”: her real name was Shamela, she was no virgin, and she played Brandon (her
e called Booby) like a fish on a line in order to marry him for his money. The letters follow the plot of Pamela closely, though the editor resorts to the missing-manuscript ploy to avoid the cloying sequence of Pamela’s engagement and wedding. Fielding gets dirty with Richardson’s down-to-earth diction (before it was cleaned up for later editions) and apes his occasional use of the present tense. Like any burlesque, Shamela offers a number of cheap laughs, and like Swift, Fielding uses fiction as a vehicle for some sharp political commentary. But the naughty novelette is noteworthy as Fielding’s first attempt at fiction: he had written two dozen plays before this—one of which, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), was published in a mock-scholarly format edited by “H. Scriblerus Secundus”—but since 1737 he had limited himself to journalism and studying for the bar. Pamela inspired him to take up fiction, and after dashing off this farce, he settled down to write a more ambitious novel parodying Richardson’s best-seller.
While he worked on that, Eliza Haywood, always quick to jump on a literary bandwagon, published in June 1741 her Anti-Pamela; or, Feigned Innocence Detected, “an antidote,” as its modern editor calls it, “to Pamela’s representation of virtue, chastity, and sexual deferral.”179 A hybrid of epistolary and expository prose, it concerns a girl of Pamela’s age named Syrena Tricksy whose talk of virtue and fainting fits are not sincere, as in Pamela’s case, but calculated scams, as Pamela’s worst critics charged. Raised by her opportunistic mother to believe “that a woman who had beauty to attract the men, and cunning to manage them afterwards, was secure of making her fortune” (215), Syrena spends four years trying to land a wealthy husband, but undoes herself each time by acting stupid and/or by fooling around behind his back. Haywood doesn’t parody Richardson’s plot as Fielding did; instead, she makes subtle allusions to certain plot-points and key words in Pamela to paint a much more realistic picture of the effect pretty young girls have on men. Richardson wrote Pamela as a cautionary fable for young girls to keep their legs crossed and their hands folded in prayer, while Haywood wrote Anti-Pamela “as a necessary caution to all young gentlemen” (per the title page); she has no sympathy for her pretty airhead, and not trusting the tale to speak for itself, she inserts several didactic asides to make sure we’re getting the message. Exposed at the end, scheming Syrena is sent to a relative in Wales, the ends of the earth for a London girl.
Not exactly a prostitute like Moll Flanders, nor a successful adventuress like Roxana, Syrena Tricksy is merely a lower-class gold-digger looking for a sugar-daddy. (Nowadays she’d become a stripper: she already has the name.) The sordid novel is remarkably realistic—Syrena has an abortion and deals with STDs—especially so regarding the female sex-drive, which most earlier novelists (and later Victorians) pretended was nonexistent. Syrena enjoys casual sex, thinks nothing of picking up a guy for a few hours of afternoon delight, and is unashamed of her “amorous constitution” (215), which, Haywood admits with worldly resignation, “more or less is inherent to all animated beings, and for that reason called the most natural” (186). It’s hard to argue with her caustic timeline of male desire:
there is indeed a kind of boyish love which begins about sixteen or seventeen, and lasts till twenty or something longer, but then it wears off, and they commonly despise the object afterwards, and wonder at themselves for having found anything in her to admire—from twenty to thirty they ramble from one to another, liking every new face, and fixing on none—after thirty, they grow more settled and wary, and if they love at all, it is commonly lasting; but a passion commenced between forty and fifty is hardly to be worn off—’tis certainly strange but true of that sex that amorous desires grow stronger as the power of gratifying them grows weaker, and an old lover is the most doting, fond fool on earth, especially if his mistress be very young. (169–70).
Anti-Pamela is much more realistic than Pamela is, both in domestic and amatory matters. Her lovers are faceless and mostly nameless, and Syrena’s few flights of romantic diction (in which she sounds like Pamela, but which she picked up from plays) sound silly in contrast to the deliberately flat prose Haywood uses. When Anti-Pamela was rendered into French in 1743, its translator praised Haywood for succeeding “where Richardson fails: she creates a fully developed female character who is not a personification of virtues that women might hope to possess, but rather a persuasive representation of an individual endowed with vicious qualities that some women do possess.”180 Anti-Pamela is not a greater novel than Pamela by any measure, but it is more deserving to be called a breakthrough in realism than Richardson’s fable.
Fielding returned in February 1742 with what is by almost any measure a greater novel than Pamela, namely The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, an exuberant work that marks the British novel’s Wizard of Oz transition from black and white to color. After dashing off Shamela, Fielding had evidently given some thought to the current state of English fiction—so poorly represented by the sensational success of Pamela—and found it wanting a comic novel “in the manner of Cervantes,” as its title page goes on to promise. In his historically important preface to Joseph Andrews, and in the first chapter of book 3, Fielding dismisses “those voluminous works commonly called romances, namely Clelia, Cleopatra, Astræa, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others which contain, as I apprehend, very little instruction or entertainment”; nor does he care for “the modern novel and Atalantis writers” (3.1), by which he means amatory fictionists as well as those like Manley who wrote scandal-novels. Instead, he prefers the continental comic tradition of Cervantes, Scarron, Lesage, and Marivaux; he allows that English literature boasts some admirable narrative poems in this manner (Hudibras, The Dunciad), but no novels, which is why he decided to attempt “this kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto in our language” (preface).181 But Fielding goes back beyond Cervantes to the very beginning of literature: he not only argues that Homer’s epics differ from novels only on the minor point of meter—that is, the Iliad is essentially a war novel, the Odyssey an adventure novel—but that Homer was also the progenitor of the comic novel in his lost Margites, an epic poem about a dunce.182 Fielding ignores the national, foundational purpose of later epics like the Aeneid (the origin of Romans) and Paradise Lost (the origin of Puritans) and focuses on their style and content, thereby coining his famous definition of his sort of novel as “a comic epic poem in prose,” which takes as its theme not the wrath of Achilles but the ridiculousness of Britons.
Joseph Andrews begins as another parody of Pamela by switching sexes: while Pamela Andrews is fighting off the advances of her employer Mr. Booby (as Fielding called him in Shamela), her older brother Joseph fights off those of Booby’s aunt, whose husband has just died. (As Joseph himself points out, he is named after the biblical prude who similarly turned down Potiphar’s wife.) After the “luscious” footman repels her advances with the same pious appeals to virtue that Joseph’s sister had made—which the narrator dismisses as “nothing but a rhapsody of nonsense” (1.13)—Lady Booby throws him out of her London house, at which point he decides to trek back to the village near her country home in Somerset. Here the novel changes direction, for Fielding realized the ongoing threat to virginity that sustains the narrative of Pamela couldn’t be maintained in Joseph’s case. Theologically, male chastity is as important as female, but in the real world it isn’t taken as seriously, and it certainly doesn’t carry the same erotic charge (and real-life consequences) as the loss of female virginity. So in chapter 11, Fielding switches gears and introduces “several new matters not expected,” as its chapter title informs us. It is at this point that Fielding’s novel progresses from Richardsonian parody to Cervantine comedy. The dramatic tension maintained by ongoing threats to virginity is transferred from Joseph to his girlfriend back home, the buxom Fanny Goodwill.183 Henceforth, attempts on her virginity, not Joseph’s, will goose the narrative along, for not only does Joseph want to marry her as quickly as
possible, but nearly every man who beholds her tries to rape her. In fact, we first meet her in the flesh (after being told about her) in the middle of an attempted rape (2.9), and thereafter it becomes a race to see who will enjoy her first, Joseph or his lusty rivals. Fielding may have scorned amatory romances like Haywood’s, but he took full advantage of this well-trod trope.
Fanny is rescued from this initial assault by the true protagonist of Joseph Andrews, her and Joseph’s pastor Abraham Adams. He’s the Don Quixote of the novel, a naïve, absent-minded bookworm who rates reading over experience. “Knowledge of men is only to be learnt from books,” he tells Joseph, and he boasts to a traveler that he knows the world better than he, for he has read about it “in books, the only way of traveling by which any knowledge is to be acquired” (2.16, 17). With his nose always up his Aeschylus (until he accidentally throws the Greek volume into a fire), Parson Adams’s reverence for books reaches a comic apotheosis near the end when his eight-year-old son is reading a story aloud from a book: “ ‘But good as this lady was, she was still a woman, that is to say, an angel and not an angel—’ ‘You must mistake, child,’ cries the parson, ‘for you read nonsense.’ ‘It is so in the book,’ answered the son. Mr. Adams was then silenced by authority, and Dick proceeded” (4.10). As a curate, Adams’s chief authority of course is the Bible, and Fielding—like Cervantes before him—undermines its authority by making its chief spokesman and defender a learned fool “as entirely ignorant of the ways of this world as an infant just entered into it can possibly be” (1.3). Fielding apologizes at the end of his preface for “the low adventures” he puts his clergyman through, pleading “no other office could have given him so many opportunities of displaying his worthy inclinations.” Christian ideals are sorely lacking in Fielding’s England, exposing most of its population as rank hypocrites, but at the same time those ideals are revealed to be naively contrary to human nature and ridiculously irrelevant to everyday life: “Adams bid his wife prepare some food for their dinner; she said truly she could not, she had something else to do. Adams rebuked her for disputing his commands, and quoted many texts of scripture to prove that the husband is the head of the wife, and she is to submit and obey. The wife answered, ‘It was blasphemy to talk scripture out of church; that such things were very proper to be said in the pulpit, but that it was profane to talk them in common discourse’ ” (4.11).184 This is another instance of British hypocrisy (Mrs. Adams considers herself a good Christian), and another swipe at Pamela’s brainless piety (she becomes exactly the kind of doormat wife recommended in Adams’s scriptural citations), but it is primarily another example of the disconnect between Adams’s book-learning and the actual “ways of the world.”